Iraqi Yazidi MP breaks down in parliament: ISIS is exterminating my people
Category Archives: ISIS
ISIS holds sway for now
The Economist: The key to defeating the Islamic State (IS) could lie in the armed Sunni groups who already oppose it or who might turn against it if the political conditions were right after the formation of a new government in Baghdad. There are a wide variety of such groups, ranging from tribal militias and neo-Baathist remnants of the former regime to Salafi jihadi groups that have a similar ideology to IS but differ with it on tactics or leadership. At the moment IS has the upper hand, and, barring a few recent clashes, the other groups appear to have been largely co‑operating with it since it captured Mosul, in Nineveh province, in June.
Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a plethora of jihadi militias emerged, of which al‑Qaida in Iraq, IS’s precursor, was the most prominent. However, despite sharing a similar religious ideology and an opposition to the US occupation and Shia rule, there were frequent disagreements and even clashes between the various jihadi groups, including squabbles over leadership, money and tactics. At the moment, relations with IS are complex and fluid, with some of the militias co‑operating with it in certain areas and clashing with it elsewhere.
Although other jihadi groups see themselves as fighting to establish an Islamic state, IS claims to be that entity, particularly since its declaration of a caliphate on June 29th and its demand that other groups pledge allegiance to its leader, Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi. This is the issue on which it broke from al‑Qaida central, led by Ayman al‑Zawahiri in Pakistan/Afghanistan. Its relations with other militant groups in Syria is illustrative. Although it has co‑operated with them at times, it has also clashed with them, particularly in the eastern regions where it is strongest and has been consolidating control. It has clashed not only with secular and non‑Salafi militias, such as the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front, but also with fellow Salafi groups. It has even fought with its closest relation, Jabhat al‑Nusra (JN), a group that was formed in 2012 by Syrians who had been fighting in Iraq with IS but who rejected Mr Baghdadi’s demand in April 2013 that all other groups pledge allegiance to IS. One key difference is that JN seems to have a vision of an Islamic government within the Syrian nation state, whereas IS’s vision is transnational. [Continue reading…]
Understanding Syria’s four-front war
Christopher Phillips writes: As the world media has been preoccupied with the Gaza conflict, Syria has just had the bloodiest week of its civil war. Some 1,700 were killed in seven days, with a renewed push from Islamic State (IS) accounting for much of the violence.
Confident after its victories in Iraq and deploying newly looted military hardware, IS’s sudden charge and the reaction to it in Syria and outside, has tilted the conflict on its axis, challenging various assumptions and shifting dynamics. Increasingly, we can talk about a war being fought on four overlapping fronts by four groupings of actors: the Assad government, IS, the mainstream rebels and the Kurds.
The first front is between IS and President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Assad facilitated IS’ rise by cynically releasing jihadists from prison to radicalize the opposition and then deliberately avoiding military confrontation. Its growth has helped him. IS alarmed the West, prompting some to suggest a rapprochement with Damascus is the least bad option; it terrified his own population, reinforcing the government’s message that it was their only defense; and it physically attacked his enemies in the mainstream rebels while avoiding his own troops. Any implicit alliance was shattered this month, however, when IS stormed three separate government targets in Homs, Raqqa and Hassakeh, killing hundreds of government troops, then gruesomely videoing their heads on spikes afterwards.
Such heavy losses have rocked Assad’s domestic supporters, provoking rare outrage and criticism on social media. Most accept the government’s characterization of all the opposition as sectarian jihadists and many, especially Alawis, have sent thousands to die to defeat them.
IS seem the most brutal of all, especially to another core constituent, Syria’s Christians who have been aghast at the recent expulsion of their coreligionists from Mosul. Yet these defeats challenge the government’s ability to actually defend its supporters. [Continue reading…]
Kurds, #ISIS clash near Kurdish regional capital
Reuters reports: Kurdish forces attacked Islamic State fighters near the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil in northern Iraq on Wednesday in a change of tactics supported by the Iraqi central government to try to break the Islamists’ momentum.
The attack 40 km (25 miles) southwest of Arbil came after the Sunni militants inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Kurds on Sunday with a rapid advance through three towns, prompting Iraq’s prime minister to order his air force for the first time to back the Kurdish forces.
“We have changed our tactics from being defensive to being offensive. Now we are clashing with the Islamic State in Makhmur,” said Jabbar Yawar, secretary-general of the ministry in charge of the Kurdish peshmerga fighters.
The location of the clashes puts the Islamic State fighters closer than they have ever been to the Kurdish semi-autonomous region since they swept through northern Iraq almost unopposed in June. [Continue reading…]
“In one day, [#ISIS] killed more than 2,000 Yazidi … and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.’ ”
"In one day, [ISIS] killed more than 2000 Yazidi in Sinjar, and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.’” http://t.co/0qDAmgJeny
— Karim Sadjadpour (@ksadjadpour) August 6, 2014
The Guardian reports: Tens of thousands of members of one of Iraq’s oldest minorities have been stranded on a mountain in the country’s north-west, facing slaughter at the hands of jihadists surrounding them below if they flee, or death by dehydration if they stay.
UN groups say at least 40,000 members of the Yazidi sect, many of them women and children, have taken refuge in nine locations on Mount Sinjar, a craggy mile-high ridge identified in local legend as the final resting place of Noah’s ark.
At least 130,000 more people, many from the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar, have fled to Dohuk, in the Kurdish north, or to Irbil, where regional authorities have been struggling since June to deal with one of the biggest and most rapid refugee movements in decades.
Sinjar itself has been all but emptied of its 300,000 residents since jihadists stormed the city late on Saturday, but an estimated 25,000 people remain. “We are being told to convert, or to lose our heads,” said Khuldoon Atyas, who has stayed behind to guard his family’s crops. “There is no one coming to help.”
Another man, who is hiding in the mountains and identified himself as Nafi’ee, said: “Food is low, ammunition is low and so is water. We have one piece of bread to share between 10 people. We have to walk 2km [1.2 miles] to get water. There were some air strikes yesterday [against the jihadists], but they have made no difference.” [Continue reading…]
George Packer adds: Prince Tahseen Said, “the world leader of the Yazidis,” has issued an appeal to Kurdish, Iraqi, Arab, and European leaders, as well as to Ban Ki-moon and Barack Obama. It reads: “I ask for aid and to lend a hand and help the people of Sinjar areas and its affiliates and villages and complexes which are home to the people of the Yazidi religion. I invite [you] to assume [your] humanitarian and nationalistic responsibilities towards them and help them in their plight and the difficult conditions in which they live today.”
It’s hard to know what, if anything, is left of the humanitarian responsibilities of the international community. The age of intervention is over, killed in large part by the Iraq war. But justifiable skepticism about the use of military force seems also to have killed off the impulse to show solidarity with the helpless victims of atrocities in faraway places. There’s barely any public awareness of the unfolding disaster in northwestern Iraq, let alone a campaign of international support for the Yazidis — or for the Christians who have been driven out of Mosul or the Sunni Arabs who don’t want to live under the tyranny of ISIS. The front-page news continues to be the war in Gaza, a particular Western obsession whether one’s views are pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-peace, or pro-plague-on-both-houses. Nothing that either side has done in that terrible conflict comes close to the routine brutality of ISIS.
Karim couldn’t help expressing bitterness about this. “I don’t see any attention from the rest of the world,” he said. “In one day, they killed more than two thousand Yazidi in Sinjar, and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.’ ”
Yesterday, a senior U.S. official told me that the Obama Administration is contemplating an airlift, coördinated with the United Nations, of humanitarian supplies by C-130 transport planes to the Yazidis hiding in the Sinjar mountains. There are at least twenty thousand and perhaps as many as a hundred thousand of them, including some peshmerga militiamen providing a thin cover of protection. The U.N. has reported that dozens of children have died of thirst in the heat. ISIS controls the entrance to the mountains. Iraqi helicopters have dropped some supplies, including food and water, but the refugees are hard to find and hard to reach.
How the U.S. got mixed up in a fight over Kurdish oil — with a unified Iraq at stake
The Washington Post reports: Sixty miles off the coast of Texas sits a crude-oil tanker fully loaded with years of antagonism between the Kurdish region of Iraq and the central government in Baghdad.
The United Kalavrvta, a tanker the length of three football fields, is carrying about 1 million barrels of crude oil from the Kurdish region of Iraq. It set sail for Galveston, but it never got there.
The central government of Iraq, despite recent military setbacks, dispatched its American lawyers to do battle in the federal court in southern Texas, where a judge ruled that the tanker’s cargo, worth about $100 million, should be seized if it came within Texas state waters.
The core of the dispute: The Iraqi government says that the crude cargo belongs to the Baghdad Ministry of Oil and that it was never the property of the Kurdistan Regional Government. But the Kurds argue that the Texas court doesn’t have jurisdiction, and they filed a motion Monday in the court to lift the restrictions on the oil. Michael Howard, an adviser to the Kurdish minister of natural resources, said in an interview that “it’s a constitutional issue that should be determined in Iraq and shouldn’t be exported to U.S. courts.” [Continue reading…]
#ISIS ‘seize #Iraq’s biggest dam’ in defeat for #Kurdish forces
Reuters reports: Sunni insurgents have reportedly seized control of Iraq’s biggest dam, an oilfield and three more towns after inflicting their first major defeat on Kurdish forces since sweeping across much of northern Iraq in June.
Capture of the electricity-generating Mosul Dam, which was reported by Iraqi state television, could give the forces of the Islamic State (ISIS) the ability to flood Iraqi cities or withhold water from farms, raising the stakes in their bid to topple prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shia-led government.
“The terrorist gangs of the Islamic State have taken control of Mosul dam after the withdrawal of Kurdish forces without a fight,” said Iraqi state television of the claimed 24 hour offensive.
Kurdish officials conceded losses to Isis but denied the dam had been surrendered. A Kurdish official in Washington told Reuters the dam was still under the control of Kurdish “peshmerga” troops, although he said towns around the dam had fallen to Isis. [Continue reading…]
Reuters also reports: A major Kurdish militant group called Monday for all Kurds to rise up against Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) fighters in northern Iraq, after the Sunni militants seized Kurdish territory in a dramatic advance.
“All Kurds in the north, east, south and west must rise up against the attack on Kurds in Sinjar (in northern Iraq),” the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought a 30-year insurgency against Turkey, said in a statement on it website.
Two Christian nuns from Mosul describe being kidnapped by #ISIS
Matthew Barber writes: The two nuns were well-known for their many years of work among Mosul’s needy. Though they were not harmed while being held, their unexplained disappearance was unnerving for the Christian population, and added to the number of factors that terrorized Christians before their final mass departure on Jul. 17.
Sister Miskinta al-Dosaky Myko and her superior, Sister Atur Joseph had initially fled to Kurdistan province when ISIS took over Mosul, as had many other Christians. And as many others had also done, they ventured back into Mosul after ISIS offered pledges of safety to minorities.
On June 27, the two nuns, along with three orphans in their care, drove from Kurdistan Province to Mosul, to check on the orphanage that they were in charge of, and to check on a number of poor families to whom they frequently gave assistance. In their car they carried food and money that they planned to deliver to needy families. The children were brought along to gather their things from the orphanage, as they were going to relocate to Kurdistan.
They were apprehended by ISIS fighters while in one of the neighborhoods where they often distributed food. Two jihadists spoke to them, a Syrian and an Iraqi. The nuns had the impression that the Iraqi was reluctant to give the nuns a hard time, but the Syrian pulled rank somehow and said that they had to come with them, “to answer questions.” He demanded their keys, saying he would drive their car, but the nuns refused, whereupon the jihadists allowed them to drive, and escorted their vehicle with their own vehicles. [Continue reading…]
#UN warns of ‘humanitarian tragedy’ as #ISIS seizes #Iraq’s Sinjar
France24 reports: The capture of the Iraqi town of Sinjar by militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS or ISIL) has displaced up to 200,000 people and created a “humanitarian tragedy”, the UN said on Sunday.
“A humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in Sinjar,” the top UN envoy in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said in a statement after ISIS militants had captured the northern town, which lies near the Syrian border. Thousands of previously displaced families had fled to Sinjar to seek safety.
“The United Nations has grave concerns for the physical safety of these civilians,” the statement said.
It said it was particularly concerned by the fate of civilians who fled into the Jabal Sinjar mountains and could be trapped inside an area completely surrounded by the militants.
“The humanitarian situation of these civilians is reported as dire, and they are in urgent need of basic items including food, water and medicine,” the statement said.
Sinjar had been controlled by Kurdish troops but they withdrew on Sunday, the second consecutive day of losses for the peshmerga fighters, who also lost the town of Zumar and two nearby oilfields to ISIS jihadists on Saturday. [Continue reading…]
Islamic State uses high grade captured weapons to fight Assad troops in Syria
The Telegraph reports: The extremist group Islamic State has launched a series of attacks across Syria, using military equipment seized from Iraq in its biggest concerted challenge yet to Assad regime forces.
Fighters from Islamic State have attacked two major military bases in the north-east of the country and well as regime-held areas near Aleppo.
They seized most of one base before coming under retaliatory aerial bombardment, seizing senior regime officers and in at least one case decapitating him, placing his easily recognisable head on a pole, according to pictures posted to social media.
The attacks mark a significant shift in the Syrian civil war. While the regime and Islamic State have fought in the past, both have until now preferred to focus their energies on the third major force in the civil war, the so-called “moderate rebels” comprising the Free Syrian Army and a variety of Islamist groups.
The attacks also suggest the group has for now abandoned plans to move further into Iraq or attack the capital Baghdad.
The change of tactics by Islamic State follows the gradual weakening of the western-backed rebels, who are squeezed between the jihadists and the regime. They declared war on the Islamic State in January, hoping that tackling the extremists would encourage more military backing from the West and its allies.
That backing never came, and with thousands of opposition fighters dying in the battles between competing rebel forces, the regime has advanced across key battlegrounds in the centre and north of the country, including Aleppo.
Meanwhile, in a series of lightning raids and defections, Islamic State managed to drive out competitors from most of the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, and seized major oilfields from the regime. [Continue reading…]
A nation in peril — Iraq’s struggle to hold together
Reuters reports: Iraq’s latest – and gravest – crisis erupted when mostly Sunni fighters swept through the north last month. Now the jihadist black flag flies over of most of the country’s Sunni Arab territory.
Kurdish forces, exploiting the chance to take another step towards independence, seized the city of Kirkuk and nearby oilfields, leaving the Shi’ite-led government controlling only the capital region and the mainly Shi’ite south.
The government is trying to reverse this de facto, three-way split of the country, but its reliance on Shi’ite militia and volunteers rather than the ineffectual national army has deepened sectarian mistrust without pushing the rebels back.
Across Baghdad a Sunni living in the Shi’ite area of Maalef, cut off from the rest of the city by a checkpoint where non-residents are turned back, said life there had become unbearable for those who do not belong to the majority Shi’ite community.
“The Sunnis all want separation now,” said the 37-year-old electrician, who asked not to be named for his security. “Facts on the ground tell you this will be the final result. On both sides now you have extremists who don’t want to get along”.
Kurdish politician Hoshiyar Zebari, who still staunchly advocates Iraqi unity, described the new geography. “The country is divided literally into three states: the Kurdish state; the black state (under Sunni insurgents) and Baghdad,” he said.[Continue reading…]
Who created the Islamic State?
Why ISIS successes in Iraq will help Assad crush opposition in Aleppo
Noah Bonsey writes: The world’s most feared jihadi group, the Islamic State (ISIS), is parlaying its dramatic gains in Iraq into Syria. Already flush with cash and weapons, ISIS stands to receive another, invaluable windfall in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city prior to the war. Regime forces there are on the verge of encircling opposition militants. Their success in doing so would benefit ISIS as much as it would Bashar al-Assad, throttling the more moderate rebel enemy both share.
ISIS’s recent victory in eastern Deir al-Zour province — where it defeated a rebel alliance including jihadi rival Jabhat al-Nusra, and where it now controls all major oil fields and most population centers — enables the group to turn its attention elsewhere. Having gained resources and freed up manpower, ISIS can move to retake ground lost to rebel factions in and around Aleppo in early 2014.
Rebels there, weakened by that battle and the regime’s simultaneous campaign that exploited it, lack the organization and resources to halt the regime’s progress in severing rebel supply lines. Should ISIS escalate against rebels in the northern countryside, as the regime attempts to besiege their allies inside the city, it could potentially deal a terminal blow to the rebellion in Aleppo. ISIS would likely regain valuable territory along the Turkish border, positioning itself to attack the pragmatic rebel factions that dominate Aleppo’s western countryside and much of Idlib province. [Continue reading…]
ISIS: Global Islamic caliphate or Islamic mini-state in Iraq?
Yezid Sayigh writes: In announcing the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in the areas of Iraq and Syria it controls on June 30 and calling on Muslims everywhere to vow allegiance to its self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) displayed global ambitions. Whether these are real or not, many outsiders assume that its appeal extends far beyond the borders of Iraq. But in fact ISIS is following a well-worn path for taking power and consolidating it in the limited geographical space of a single nation-state where its true social base lies.
This constrains ISIS’s hope of gaining significantly broader strategic depth, and belies its claims of representing a universal Muslim community, let alone of exercising meaningful authority over them. Despite the spectacular drama of its swift advances in Iraq in June, reality is more pragmatic: ISIS advanced in its own “natural” habitat, whose outer boundaries it has already reached. Iraq is where ISIS survived after the defeat of the Sunni insurgency in 2006-2008 and subsequently revived, and where the fate of its Islamic state will be decided.
Two analogies help understand what ISIS can and cannot do, and the limitations of its caliphate. First, the experience of Al-Qaeda, ISIS’s mother organization, in Afghanistan reveals that no matter how powerful a transnational ideology, movements espousing it must still dig deep roots in local society if they are to survive and thrive. Al-Qaeda appealed to alienated Muslim youth worldwide, but in Afghanistan it had to attach itself to an indigenous armed movement, the Taliban, that was completely embedded in local Pashtun society. Consequently, Al-Qaeda was forced out with relative ease by the US invasion in late 2001, but not the Taliban.
Only in Iraq does ISIS resemble the Taliban. In Syria, in contrast, ISIS resembles al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. To be sure, there is considerable cross-border overlap: ISIS can and probably will take root in Syria, much as a sister Taliban emerged in the northern provinces of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. But neither Taliban movement has been unable to extend beyond its local social base into other parts of the two countries, despite the presence of other Islamist and jihadist groups. For ISIS, the implication is that its Iraqi base remains the critical core; if pressed, ISIS will prioritize consolidating it. [Continue reading…]
Inside Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State
The New York Times reports: When his factory was bombed in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, the businessman considered two bleak options: to remain at home and risk dying in the next airstrike or flee like hundreds of thousands of others to a refugee camp in Turkey.
Instead, he took his remaining cash east and moved to a neighboring city, Raqqa, the de facto capital of the world’s fastest growing jihadist force. There he found a degree of order and security absent in other parts of Syria.
“The fighting in Syria will continue, so we have to live our lives,” said the businessman, who gave only a first name, Qadri, as he oversaw a dozen workers in his new children’s clothing factory in Raqqa.
Long before extremists rolled through Iraq and seized a large piece of territory, the group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria took over most of Raqqa Province, home to about a million people, and established a headquarters in its capital. Through strategic management and brute force, the group, which now calls itself simply the Islamic State, has begun imposing its vision of a state that blends its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam with the practicalities of governance.
In time, it has won the surprising respect of some war-weary citizens, like Qadri, who will accept any authority that can restore a semblance of normal life. Rebel-held areas of Aleppo, by comparison, remain racked with food shortages and crime. But there is a darker side to Islamic rule, with public executions and strict social codes that have left many in this once-tolerant community deeply worried about the future.
In Raqqa city, traffic police officers keep intersections clear, crime is rare and tax collectors issue receipts. But statues like the landmark lions in Al Rasheed Park have been destroyed because they were considered blasphemous. Public spaces like Al Amasy Square, where young men and women once hung out and flirted in the evenings, have been walled off with heavy metal fences topped with the black flags of ISIS. People accused of stealing have lost their hands in public amputations.
“What I see in Raqqa proves that the Islamic State has a clear vision to establish a state in the real meaning of the word,” said a retired teacher in the city of Raqqa. “It is not a joke.” [Continue reading…]
Iraqi leader Maliki loses backing of Sistani and Iran for new term
The Wall Street Journal reports: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is losing political support for his bid for a third term from core backers, including the country’s Shiite religious establishment and ally Iran, say Iraqi officials.
The shift, officials said, is prompting members of the premier’s own alliance to reconsider their support and dimming the prospect of his stay in power.
In recent days, high-level delegations of Iranian military officials and diplomats held a flurry of meetings in Baghdad and the Shiite religious capital Najaf, where they were told that Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, has lost the confidence of all but his most loyal inner circle, Iraqi officials with knowledge of the meetings said.
One Iraqi official briefed on the meetings said Iranian representatives signaled during their visit that Tehran has “really started to lean away from Maliki as a candidate.”
Also critically, Mr. Maliki’s bid to stay in office has, say prominent Shiite politicians, run into opposition from Iraq’s top Shiite spiritual authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has become central to the grinding talks between political blocs to form a government. [Continue reading…]
ISIS thwarts Syrian government forces on two fronts
McClatchy reports: Syrian government troops failed on two fronts Monday to reverse gains by fighters loyal to the Islamic State, a sign that the insurgents who’ve captured half of Iraq are capable of battling Syria’s government as well.
Anti-government activists said 14 government troops were killed in battles for two villages outside the east Syrian city of Deir el Zour. The Syrian army fared no better in an attempt to recapture the Shaer gas field near in the ancient city of Palmyra, losing six soldiers and failing to dislodge the Islamic State fighters.
The clash in Deir el Zour was the latest sign that the Islamic State, which had frontally attacked the regime only once before _ in the desert near Homs _ is prepared to fight it as the opportunity arises. A member of the Islamist movement told McClatchy that it intends to remove the regime of President Bashar Assad from Deir el Zour province altogether.
The latest confrontation began Friday when the Islamic State, which now controls more than 35 percent of Syria, ordered the last remnant of U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army troops in the province to leave the towns of Ayyash and Ien Al Bujuma’a. This created a temporary power vacuum that government forces attempted to fill by setting up checkpoints around the towns.
The Islamic State launched an attack Saturday that ended with it seizing the two towns and killing 14 government soldiers and three officers.
Activists said regime troops apparently were trying to advance toward Ayyash in a bid to protect military depots in a neighboring area of Badyat Ayyash, said to contain the third biggest depots for weapons and ammunition in Syria. [Continue reading…]
Iraq’s waterless Christians: The campaign to expel a religion
Bloomberg reports: Qaraqosh is one of the last refuges in northern Iraq for Christians fleeing persecution by the militants of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, who swept into the region in June. A historic Christian city of 50,000 about 19 miles southeast of Mosul, Qaraqosh is under the formidable protection of the well-armed Peshmerga—the Kurdish fighters whose autonomous region disputes the area with both ISIL and the Iraqi central government based in Baghdad. Now, in a further effort to oust Christians from land they have inhabited for two millennia, the Islamic militants have begun turning off a precious utility: water.
Since taking Mosul on June 10, ISIL militants have squeezed Qaraqosh and nearby Christian villages by blocking the pipes that connect the communities with the Tigris river. Without a sufficient number of deep wells to fill the gap, the city must have water trucked in, at huge cost, from Kurdish-controlled areas just 15 miles away. Since ISIL took over key refineries in northern Iraq, the price of fuel has spiked across the region. The parched residents of Qaraqosh must pay about $10 every other day to fill up emergency water tanks, no small sum in this economically depressed part of Iraq. [Continue reading…]