Category Archives: Iraq

Haunted by the smell of apples: 28 years on, Kurds weep over Halabja massacre

By Bahar Baser, Coventry University

Kurdish history is full of oppression, suffering and tragedies. But the gas attack at Halabja, 28 years ago this week, must surely be the most egregious.

In 1988, during the closing days of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein’s army attacked the Kurdish province near the Iranian border with chemical gas, including mustard gas, sarin, cyanide and tabun. Survivors from Halabja say the gas smelled sweet like apples and instantly killed people who were exposed.

These attacks were part of a larger genocidal campaign mainly against the Kurdish people. Called al-Anfal, it cost 50,000 to 100,000 lives and destroyed 4,000 villages between February and September 1988. Al-Anfal referenced the eighth “sura” of the Koran, “The Spoils of War”, which described the campaign of extermination of non-believers by Muslim troops in 624CE under Ali Hassan al-Majid.

In Halabja, nearly 5,000 civilians were killed on the spot. A further 10,000 were left with serious injuries that affect their lives to this day. It was reported that more than 75% of the victims were women, the elderly and children. The attacks completely destroyed residential areas. Many of those who fled were never to return.

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American-born ISIS recruit says he ‘didn’t really support their ideology’ and decided to escape

The Washington Post reports: The 26-year-old Virginia man who was taken into custody in Iraq after he purportedly deserted the Islamic State told a Kurdish TV station Thursday that he decided to escape after he grew dissatisfied during intensive religious training in Mosul.

Mohamad Khweis told Kurdistan 24 that his life under the Islamic State in Mosul was a “very strict” regimen of prayer, eating and eight hours of daily instruction in religion and sharia law, and he soon came to realize, “I didn’t really support their ideology.”

Khweis said he stayed only about a month, then reached out to someone who could help him get back near Turkey, and he planned eventually to return to America.

“It was pretty hard to live in Mosul,” he said. “It’s not like the Western countries, you know, it’s very strict. There’s no smoking. I found it hard for everyone there.” [Continue reading…]

Watch Mohamad Khweis speaking on Kurdistan 24 (17-minute interview in English).

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‘In Iraq I would have died quickly. Here I feel I am dying, but very slowly’

Millennial refugees describe their lives to The Guardian, first, Akeel, 28, from Baghdad, who is now in Calais, France: I have been in the camp for six months now. It feels like such a long time. I get embarrassed when I speak to people who aren’t in my position. They probably just see me as a refugee and look at me with sympathy. If we had met in Baghdad I might have seemed quite cool.

I had a good life there. My life was probably very similar to that of anyone else my age. I wasn’t always living in a tent on my own, eating food from tins. I had such good friends. I really miss laughing with them. I adored my family, I still do. All my relationships are carried out on my phone now. I am on it all the time. It’s the only way to have any kind of life outside of this place.

I used to be a teacher. I taught maths and English. I wanted to be headmaster one day and run teaching camps for disadvantaged children in Iraq but who knows what I will do now, if anything. It’s hard being young in the camp – I mean, it’s hard being any age. It is just so, so boring. I feel like my 20s are going before my eyes. I feel 50, not 28.

I used to look at life with excitement, and wonder what would happen in the future – that’s what it’s like when you’re young. You have so many possibilities. I wanted to do a lot of good in my country. Now I feel like I am just a lot of needs: someone who needs a home, who needs food and on and on. Not someone who can do something for other people. That is the worst part of it.

I try to keep up the things I like. I love football. I try to play here and sometimes we watch matches on our phones. But we are all now thinking constantly about what life will be for us.

In Iraq I would have died quickly. Here I feel like I am just dying, but very slowly. [Continue reading…]

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Kurds hope to establish a federal region in northern Syria

The New York Times reports: Syrian Kurdish parties are working on a plan to declare a federal region across much of northern Syria, several of their representatives said on Wednesday. They said their aim was to formalize the semiautonomous zone they have established during five years of war and to create a model for decentralized government throughout the country.

If they move ahead with the plan, they will be dipping a toe into the roiling waters of debate over two proposals to redraw the Middle East, each with major implications for Syria and its neighbors.

One is the longstanding aspiration of Kurds across the region to a state of their own or, failing that, greater autonomy in the countries where they are concentrated: Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, all of which view such prospects with varying degrees of horror.

The other is the idea of settling the Syrian civil war by carving up the country, whether into rump states or, more likely, into some kind of federal system. The proposal for a federal system has lately been floated by former Obama administration officials and publicly considered by Secretary of State John Kerry, but rejected not only by the Syrian government but by much of the opposition as well. [Continue reading…]

Middle East Eye reports: Syrian Kurds have declared a “Federation of Northern Syria” that unites three Kurdish majority areas into one entity, an announcement swiftly denounced by the Syrian government, opposistion and regional powers.

According to Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) official Idris Nassan, the plan will involve “areas of democratic self-administration” under the federal banner, encompassing all ethnic and religious groups living in the area.

Two officials at talks involving Kurdish, Arab, and other parties in the town of Rmeilan told the AFP news agency that delegates had agreed a “federal system” unifying the three mainly Kurdish cantons in northern Syria.

According to the pro-Kurdish Firat News Agency (ANF), the “Rojava and Northern Syria Unied Democratic System Document Text” was approved after a vote from 200 delegates, which included Arab, Kurdish, Armenian, Turkmen, Chechen, Syriac and other ethnic groups.

The boundaries of the federalised region have yet to be established, according to a delegate to the talks on Twitter. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS lost 22% of territory in Iraq and Syria over last 14 months

BBC News reports: A new analysis suggests so-called Islamic State (IS) militants have lost 22% of the territory they held in Syria and Iraq over the past 14 months.

The data was compiled by research company IHS.

It also estimates that IS has lost 40% of its revenue – much of it from oil – after losing control of much of the Turkish-Syrian border.

Security sources have told BBC Newsnight that the flow of UK jihadists going to fight in Syria is also down. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS chemical attack in Iraq wounds 600, kills child

The Associated Press reports: The Islamic State launched two chemical attacks this week near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, killing a toddler, wounding some 600 people and causing hundreds more to flee, Iraqi officials said Saturday.

Security and hospital officials say the latest attack took place early Saturday in the small town of Taza, which was also struck by a barrage of rockets carrying chemicals three days earlier.

Sameer Wais, whose 3-year-old daughter Fatima was killed in the attack, is a member of a Shiite militia fighting ISIS in the province of Kirkuk. He said he was on duty at the frontline when the attack occurred early in the morning, quickly ran home and said he could still smell the chemicals in the rocket.

“We took her to the clinic and they said that she needed to go to a hospital in Kirkuk. And that’s what we did, we brought her here to the hospital in Kirkuk,” he said.

Wais said his daughter appeared to be doing better the next day so they took her home. “But by midnight she started to get worse. Her face puffed up and her eyes bulged. Then she turned black and pieces of her skin started to come off,” he said.

By the next morning, Fatima had died, Wais said. [Continue reading…]

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Rivalries stall push to retake Mosul

The Wall Street Journal reports: Defense Secretary Ash Carter said last week that the Syrian town of Shaddadi had been cleared of militants, cutting off an important supply line between Mosul and Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria. Mr. McGurk [President Obama’s envoy on the fight against ISIS] described Shaddadi’s liberation and a similar victory in the Iraqi city of Sinjar as the beginning of an effort to isolate Mosul.

Over the weekend, Iraq’s military airdropped leaflets over the occupied city addressed to “the patient sons of Mosul.” “Your security forces settled the fight in Ramadi in Iraq’s favor,” it read. “Now they are readying for the biggest battle…be ready.”

But Iran, through the Shiite militias it supports, is insisting on a role in Mosul after being sidelined in recently liberated Ramadi, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials. Iraq’s Sunni groups and the U.S. fear militia participation will fan sectarian tensions and expand Iran’s already sizable influence in Iraq.

Kurdish officials insist their forces should have a role in the fight to recapture Mosul, as well. But Baghdad worries the Kurds will use the fight to take territory that helps strengthen their case for an autonomous Kurdish homeland.

The jockeying among Iraq’s splintered groups, and the foreign powers that back them, have repeatedly pushed back the timetable to retake Mosul. As a result, some Iraqi and U.S. officials are now predicting the offensive won’t even begin this year. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq is broke — add that to its list of worries

The Washington Post reports: Some Iraqi officials refer to it as “the gap,” and it is becoming as pressing a concern as the fight against the Islamic State.

Each month, Iraq’s government pays out nearly $4 billion in salaries and pensions to the military and a bloated array of public-sector workers. But with more than 90 percent of government revenue coming from oil, it is bringing in only about half that as crude prices plunge.

The United States is stepping in to try to make sure the country can continue military spending while it seeks international loans and embarks on an austerity plan. Still, some Iraqi officials and analysts say the government might struggle later this year to pay the 7 million people on the public payroll, which could trigger mass unrest.

With oil prices hovering around $30 a barrel, the entire region is being forced to cut budgets, reduce state handouts and make other painful adjustments. But for Iraq, the decline comes in the midst of an already destabilizing war. There are bills for reconstructing flattened cities and assistance for 3.3 million Iraqis who have been internally displaced over the past two years, with more expected to come. [Continue reading…]

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Former Petraeus adviser, Lt Col David Kilcullen: ‘No ISIS if we didn’t invade Iraq’

In a review of Kilcullen’s new book, Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror, David Gardner writes: “The greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia” is how David Kilcullen describes George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. If anyone thinks that is a throwaway line they should read on. For it comes from one of the architects of the 2007-08 “surge” into Iraq that sought to restore security to a society the US-led occupation broke, and to create space to rebuild a state it destroyed.

Kilcullen was a young lieutenant colonel in the Australian army who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, a scholar steeped in counter-insurgency theory, “watching closely and keeping notes as this enormous slow-motion train wreck took place”. In 2007 he was seconded to US forces as chief adviser to General David Petraeus, commander of the surge. This strategy combined a big influx of American troops with co-opted Sunni tribal fighters to defeat al-Qaeda. The jihadis, later to transmute into the far greater threat of Isis, had virtually no presence in Iraq prior to the invasion — but used it to turn the country into a charnel house and trigger the region-wide war between Sunni and Shia Islam that has now ripped Syria apart.

Put simply, Kilcullen argues we should never have gone into Iraq, with the job still unfinished in Afghanistan after 9/11. But the US and its allies were morally and legally obliged afterwards to try to “halt the carnage and restore some normality”. Like many soldiers, Kilcullen does not do gore. So when he mentions, in the sparest of prose given the depravity of the sectarian bloodletting, the “commercial kidnapping gangs auctioning off terrified children for slaughter, in a makeshift night market that operated under lights near the soccer stadium”, it is a kick in the stomach.

The surge sharply reduced the violence. But the US, now under President Barack Obama, had exhausted its attention span. Meanwhile, Iraqi leaders twisted by sectarianism would not use the space this success created for reconciliation.

Mr Obama, to be fair, was elected on a pledge to extract Americans from Middle East wars. Yet in Kilcullen’s judgment, he left Iraq irresponsibly early. He failed to register how Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Islamist premier and joint protégé of the US and Iran, was stampeding Iraq’s Sunni minority into jihadi arms by his sectarian power grab. With al-Qaeda wounded by its “near death experience” with the surge, few noticed its rebirth in the ashes of Syria. Recklessness in Iraq was followed by fecklessness in Syria — “passivity in the face of catastrophe” that spells strategic disaster for the US and the west. [Continue reading…]

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Decoding the changing nature of ISIS’s insurgency

ISIS-instructor-bw

Hassan Hassan writes: The war against ISIL is changing, and how its opponents adapt will be a key test of the group’s ability to achieve its goals.

A string of attacks and counter-attacks over the course of this year so far signal a major shift in the way the group is conducting its military operations, leaning back on insurgency tactics it used when US troops were still present in Iraq.

The change comes amid widespread perception in western capitals that the group is now on the back foot. But it also follows a variety of crises – financial and political – that may cause deeper western involvement in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts.

Last Sunday, the group launched an assault inside the city of Abu Ghraib, 15 kilometres from Baghdad International Airport. More than 50 people were killed and the attack was repelled. In the process, the militants reportedly controlled the grain silo in Khan Dhari and took with them a dozen lorries full of badly needed grain into besieged Fallujah, which is around 30 kilometres away. [Continue reading…]

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As airstrikes ease, Syrian revolution continues

The New York Times reports: Street protests erupted across insurgent-held areas of Syria on Friday, as demonstrators took advantage of the relative lull in airstrikes during a partial truce, coming out in the largest numbers seen in years to declare that even after five punishing years of war they still wanted political change.

Under the slogan “The Revolution Continues,” demonstrators waved the green, white and black pre-Baathist flag adopted during the early, largely peaceful stages of the revolt, before the proliferation of armed Islamist factions with black jihadist banners.

It was impossible to gauge what percentage of Syrians the demonstrators represented, out of the millions living in insurgent-held areas or, for that matter, in government-held areas or living as refugees abroad. But many protesters, reached by telephone and text message, said they aimed to show that they were determined to resume demonstrations asking for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad as soon as there was even a partial respite from airstrikes by the government and its Russian allies.

The protests were all the more surprising in that the insurgency is on the back foot militarily, squeezed between pro-government forces and those of the extremist group Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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If the Kurds go broke, it’s lights out for Obama’s war on ISIS

John Hannah writes: Here’s a worrying bit of news: America’s best ally in the war against the Islamic State, Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), is nearly broke. That’s a major problem, especially as the U.S.-led coalition gears up for its most difficult battle yet: the effort to liberate Mosul, the heart of the Islamic State’s power in Iraq. With the Kurds slated to play an essential role in that potentially decisive military campaign, now is the time for their capabilities to be reaching their zenith. Instead, they’re under growing threat of catastrophic collapse.

A near-perfect storm of crises has been draining KRG finances. First, there’s the burden of the war. For over 18 months, Kurdish forces have been pushing IS back across a 600-mile front. There’s also the KRG’s chronic dispute with the central government in Baghdad that has denied the region its share of Iraq’s national budget for the better part of two years. That’s billions upon billions of dollars in foregone revenue.

Further exacerbating the situation has been a massive influx of refugees and displaced persons, an estimated 1.8 million men, women, and children, fleeing the Islamic State’s hordes for the relative safety of Kurdistan. That tidal wave of humanity has increased the region’s population by an astounding 30 percent, straining its infrastructure and social services to the breaking point (just think about that: in the United States, that’s the equivalent of trying to take in over 90 million people overnight). Finally, like oil producers everywhere, what earnings the KRG receives from its own energy exports have been decimated by the collapse in world prices.

This can’t end well. The warning signs are everywhere. Up to 70 percent of Kurdistan’s workforce is on the KRG’s payroll. Most have not been paid for months. When back wages finally come through, it’s often at a fraction of what’s owed. Going forward, officials have dangled the threat of draconian salary cuts. Labor strikes are breaking out, involving teachers, medical workers, and even elements of the police. Political tensions are escalating. The broader economy is grinding to a halt. Construction of schools, hospitals, roads, and other critical infrastructure, is stalled. Tourism has dried up. Property values have plummeted. Consumer spending is collapsing.

Even more worrisome is the impact on Kurdistan’s oil sector, overwhelmingly the KRG’s primary source of revenue. The small international firms responsible for most of the region’s exports have received only sporadic payments. Absent these funds, the companies largely lack the necessary cash flow to invest in further developing existing fields. And without sufficient capital expenditures, production at these fields could actually begin to decline. New exploration, meanwhile, is at a virtual standstill, with the region’s rig count down by more than 90 percent, reaching levels not seen since the first production contracts were signed more than a decade ago. [Continue reading…]

Foreign Policy reports: Iraqi Kurds’ dreams of energy-financed political independence are taking a beating — and not just because of low oil prices.

Since the middle of February, Iraqi Kurdistan’s tenuous export link to the outside world has been totally shut down. As recently as January, the Kurds were exporting 600,000 barrels a day in exchange for desperately needed revenue. But the mysterious closure of the pipeline that connects Kurdish refineries to the Turkish coast has brought that number to essentially zero.

Kurdish officials say they don’t know for sure why the pipeline has been shut down; theories range from a terrorist bombing to simple sabotage to a precautionary shutdown by Turkish authorities carrying out big military operations in the area.

What’s crystal clear is that a region dependent on oil export revenues — one that was already struggling mightily to make ends meet during its costly war against the Islamic State — now has its back to the wall. The Kurdish region earned about $630 million a month from direct oil sales in 2015, which still fell short of the $850 million or so it needed every month to pay its soldiers and civil servants, as well as foreign oil companies for the crude they’ve pumped. The two-week pipeline closure has now cost Erbil an additional $200 million — and the Kurdish losses will continue to grow until it comes back online. [Continue reading…]

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Most of the refugees stuck in Greece are now women and children

The Washington Post reports: In a cold drizzle, Aziza Hussein, a 30-year-old Syrian widow traveling with her four children, stood amid a surge of migrants trapped at the northern Greek border. Her way forward blocked by armed Macedonian troops, police dogs and a razor-wire fence, she stood in the middle of the chaotic scrum of refugees, clutching her 5-year-old son.

“What are we going to do?” she said, shielding her eyes with a trembling hand as she cried.

In recent days, European nations have moved more aggressively than ever to shut down the route used by more than a million migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and beyond. Yet even as they do, the region is confronting a new kind of migrant flow — waves of women and children.

Last year, most of the asylum seekers fleeing to Europe were men, many of them young and single. But in the past several weeks, the balance has shifted, with women and their children, as well as unaccompanied minors, now accounting for roughly 57 percent of asylum seekers. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq issues warning of ‘catastrophic’ Mosul dam collapse

Mosul_Dam

Middle East Eye reports: Authorities in Iraq have issued a contingency plan for the possible collapse of the Mosul dam amid fears that the lives of almost 1.5 million people along the Tigris river could be at risk from catastrophic flooding.

The statement is the first public acknowledgment by the Iraqi government of the danger posed by the dam, which is in a poor state of repair after years of neglect and its brief capture by Islamic State (IS) fighters in 2014.

The government earlier this month awarded a contract to Italian engineering firm TREVI to undertake emergency repairs on the 3.4km dam, which is the fourth largest in the Middle East and lies 40km north of Mosul, Iraq’s second city which is currently controlled by IS.

Many other Iraqi cities including Baghdad, the capital, Shirqat, Baiji, Tikrit, Samarra, Balad and Dujail could be flooded if the dam breaks down, Iraqi and US officials warned.

“The collapse of the dam is very unlikely, especially with the technical and administrative precautions taken by the authorities, but the serious consequences if it did happen necessitate the alert,” Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s office said in a statement on Sunday.

“We have developed a package of precautionary recommendations, in order to avoid any potential risk, God forbid. They [the recommendations] have to be taken into consideration by all people.”

The US embassy in Baghdad on Sunday also issued an alert to US citizens warning them of the dangers of a possible collapse. [Continue reading…]

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Berlin’s museum tours in Arabic forge a bridge to refugees

Ishtar_Gate_at_Berlin_Museum

The New York Times reports: The Pergamon Museum is home to the famous Ishtar Gate, a monument of blue and white tile decorated with golden lions and daisies that was once the entrance to ancient Babylon. When Kamal Alramadhani, a 25-year-old Iraqi economics student, saw it for the first time this month, “I got goose bumps,” he said, pointing to his arm.

“It’s from Iraq,” he added quietly, through an Arabic translator. “My country.” A native of Mosul, Mr. Alramadhani studied economics at the University of Baghdad and came to Germany in October, part of a wave of asylum seekers that is stirring opposition here but also leading the government to look for ways to help the migrants adjust.

That afternoon, Mr. Alramadhani and about 30 others — some of them teenagers who had walked much of the way from Syria — were visiting the museum for the first time, on a free Arabic-language tour. It is part of a new and growing state-financed program to introduce the refugees to Germany’s cultural heritage — even, of course, when some of that heritage comes from the Middle East.

The visits can be fraught. “Sometimes people say: ‘The Germans have all our heritage! They stole it!’” said Zoya Masoud, 27, who led the Arabic-language tour that afternoon at the Museum of Islamic Art, which is part of the Pergamon Museum and filled with treasures from empires past. Often, the visitors say the art is probably better off in Berlin because so much in Syria has been destroyed by the war and the Islamic State, Ms. Masoud said.

Other times, the tours bring up raw memories for visitors who have arrived in the last three months. At a painted marble wall niche from a house in Damascus that dates to the 15th and 16th century and was inhabited by Samaritans, a Christian minority, “some people want to cry,” Ms. Masoud said. “When they see the colors and the shapes, they get chills.”

Ms. Masoud is not a refugee — she grew up in Damascus, a child of Syrian and Lebanese parents, and moved to Europe to study in 2010, before Syria fell into civil war. She is one of 19 guides — 18 from Syria and one from Iraq — who are part of a program, called Multaka, or “meeting point” in Arabic, which began in December and is aimed at training refugees to become museum guides. [Continue reading…]

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Moktada al-Sadr reemerges at the center of Iraqi politics

The New York Times reports: Once an open client of Iran, Mr. Sadr has in recent years gone his own way, and is widely seen these days as an Iraq-first advocate of cross-sectarian unity. His militia, reconstituted after the extremists of the Islamic State captured Mosul in the summer of 2014, was renamed the Peace Brigades.

Today, as he seeks to redefine himself once again, Mr. Sadr, now 42, has positioned himself as a backer of Mr. Abadi, who is seen as increasingly weak in the face of the growing influence of Iran. Tehran supports Mr. Abadi’s political rivals, who command militias.

“Abadi, as a person, is kindhearted,” said Saad Thamer, 37, a supporter of Mr. Sadr’s who attended the rally. “But he is very weak.”

The militias have become exceedingly popular among the Shiite public, challenging Mr. Abadi’s authority, because they are seen as the protectors of the Shiite majority against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State.

It has also been a challenge to Mr. Sadr, who has lost of some of his support at the grass-roots level as young men flock to other militias seen as more powerful. His embrace of the Iraqi state has also sometimes worked against him by contradicting his image as a populist figure.

“From an anti-establishment young leader, he compromised his stance by working more with the Iraqi political establishment, which cost him a loss of some popularity among his followers,” said Maria Fantappie, the Iraq analyst for the International Crisis Group.

Iraq is a place where everyone has his enemies, and Mr. Sadr has his share. One of his chief critics is former Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who once counted on Mr. Sadr’s support to secure a second term after national elections in 2010. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS attacks spike in Syria with help from Russian air cover, report says

The Washington Post reports: The Islamic State has been taking advantage of Russian airstrikes in Syria, using the newfound air cover to maneuver and reposition fighters, according to a report released by IHS Janes’ Terrorism and Insurgency Center on Wednesday.

Despite losing ground in Iraq and being targeted by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria, the extremist group managed to carry out 935 attacks between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31 2015. Russian warplanes began flying their first sorties in the country during the last week of September. According to the report, the spike in attacks equates to a five percent increase from the prior quarter.

Despite the increase in attacks, the average fatalities per attack–approximately–three remained consistent with the past year. Additionally, the Islamic State’s attacks also “continued to track above the average recorded over the preceding 12 months.” Number of attacks, however, does not equate to the group’s ability to hold territory. The extremist group has lost ground in both northern Syria and Iraq, though it has retained the ability to mount effective counter-attacks and raids in both areas. [Continue reading…]

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