Category Archives: Iraq

Soleimani: No more selfies

Arash Karami writes: When the fighters of the Islamic State (IS) took over large parts of western Iraq in the summer of 2014, Iran did not hesitate to assist both Iraqi and Kurdish forces in pushing back against the advance of the terrorist group. Iran’s geopolitical decision was also accompanied by what seemed an unofficial media decision: to promote the status of Quds Force Cmdr. Qasem Soleimani in the fight against IS.

Pictures of Soleimani at the front line among Iraqi forces surfaced on social media overnight. The various Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages dedicated to Soleimani had begun to act as his unofficial media arm, and his popularity has soared online. Often he could be seen looking at the camera, making no attempt to conceal that Iran had sent its commander in charge of regional policy to Iraq.

But now it seems that Soleimani has had enough. In an April 11 open letter to an Iranian filmmaker requesting that he cease producing a film about him, Soleimani also denied some of the things said about him on social media and asked officials to control the rumors. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon: ISIS pushed out of 25% of its territory

USA Today: Iraqi forces have pushed the Islamic State out of about 25% of the territory seized during the militants’ lightning advance last year, according to a Pentagon assessment released Monday.

The area represents 5,000 to 6,500 square miles in northern and central Iraq, the assessment said.

The United States has been backing Iraqi forces with daily airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS.

“ISIL is no longer the dominant force in roughly 25 to 30% of the populated areas of Iraqi territory where it once had complete freedom of movement,” the Pentagon said.

The assessment comes as President Obama is to meet Tuesday with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi for his first White House visit as prime minister. Al-Abadi has said Iraq needs more international assistance in his country’s fight against Islamic State militants.

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Four Blackwater guards sentenced in Iraq shootings of 31 unarmed civilians

The Washington Post: A federal judge Monday sentenced a former Blackwater Worldwide security guard to life in prison and three others to 30-year terms for killing 14 unarmed civilians in a Baghdad traffic circle in 2007, an incident that fomented deep resentments about the accountability of American security forces during one of the bloodiest periods of the Iraq war.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the District rejected a claim of innocence by Nicholas A. Slatten, 31, of Sparta, Tenn., who received the life sentence after being convicted of murder in October for firing what prosecutors said were the first shots in the civilian massacre.

The three others — Paul A. Slough, 35, of Keller, Tex.; Evan S. Liberty, 32, of Rochester, N.H.; and Dustin L. Heard, 33, of Maryville, Tenn. — were sentenced to 30 years plus one day after being convicted of multiple counts of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter.

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ISIS has destroyed ancient city of Nimrud

Channel 4 News: On March 6, there were reports that Islamic State fighters had looted Nimrud, in Iraq, in one of their several assaults on some of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural treasures.

In the video uploaded on Saturday, a man said to be an IS militant said: “God has honoured us here in the Islamic State and helped us to destroy anything that used to be worshipped besides God in ancient days. Look at us here, all praise be to God, we are destroying all statues and monuments.”

Standing in front of explosives rigged in front of a stone frieze another man said: “We remove the signs of polytheism and spread monotheism in every single territory we acquire. By God, we will destroy the signs of polytheism and we will destroy the graves and shrines of the rejectionists (Shi’ites) in their homes.

“We will smash the (Christian) crosses and we will demolish the Black House (White House) in the middle of America, the home of infidels.”

This UNESCO video shows Nimrud before its destruction:

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Reuters Iraq bureau chief threatened, denounced over story

Reuters reports: The Baghdad bureau chief for Reuters has left Iraq after he was threatened on Facebook and denounced by a Shi’ite paramilitary group’s satellite news channel in reaction to a Reuters report last week that detailed lynching and looting in the city of Tikrit.

The threats against journalist Ned Parker began on an Iraqi Facebook page run by a group that calls itself “the Hammer” and is believed by an Iraqi security source to be linked to armed Shi’ite groups. The April 5 post and subsequent comments demanded he be expelled from Iraq. One commenter said that killing Parker was “the best way to silence him, not kick him out.”

Three days later, a news show on Al-Ahd, a television station owned by Iranian-backed armed group Asaib Ahl al-Haq, broadcast a segment on Parker that included a photo of him. The segment accused the reporter and Reuters of denigrating Iraq and its government-backed forces, and called on viewers to demand Parker be expelled.

The pressure followed an April 3 report by Parker and two colleagues detailing human rights abuses in Tikrit after government forces and Iranian-backed militias liberated the city from the Islamic State extremist group. Two Reuters journalists in the city witnessed the lynching of an Islamic State fighter by Iraqi federal police. The report also described widespread incidents of looting and arson in the city, which local politicians blamed on Iranian-backed militias. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS strikes Iraqi town, exacting deadly toll

The New York Times reports: Islamic State fighters launched a heavy attack on government-held territory in Anbar Province late on Thursday and on Friday, killing 25 Iraqi police officers and soldiers, and then 15 family members of local police officers, according to Iraqi officials.

The attackers overran large parts of Albu Faraj, a town just north of the provincial capital, Ramadi, less than two days after officials in the province declared that they had begun an offensive against the extremists to the east of the capital, police officials in Ramadi said.

A convoy of police reinforcements sent to Albu Faraj was attacked by a suicide bomber, wounding Maj. Gen. Kadhim al-Duleimi, the Anbar Province police commander, the police officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity as a matter of official policy.

The attack continued into Friday afternoon, they said. Officials were still trying to determine how many of those who had been taken to a hospital in Ramadi from the attack in Albu Faraj had died. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military sidesteps red tape to coordinate with PKK

The Daily Beast reports: On the volatile front lines facing the so-called Islamic State outside the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, American military personnel have been coordinating with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), according to a local commander from the left-wing guerrilla group that is still on the U.S. State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Ageed Kalary commands a unit of about 30 PKK fighters positioned some 500 meters from the front. He claims that he has met with U.S. military personnel accompanying commanders from Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, whose soldiers are known as the Peshmerga, and which has strong, open American support. The last direct encounter, he said, was in December. But the coordination does not have to be face to face.

“The Americans tell us what they need and share information but there is no formal agreement,” he says about the U.S. military’s interaction with a group that earned its “terrorist” label for the tactics it employed in its 29-year armed struggle against Turkish rule. [Continue reading…]

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What really happened in Tikrit after ISIS fled

Al Jazeera reports: Arson and looting incidents in Tikrit after the Iraqi army recaptured the city last week from fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have highlighted the deep divisions between the Sunni tribes that supported ISIL and the Sunni tribes that opposed it, local and federal security officials said.

Those divisions threaten to tear apart the Sunni community in the areas still under ISIL control, Iraqi officials said.

Hundreds of homes and stores were set ablaze after they were looted by unidentified people last week in Tikrit, one of the biggest Iraqi cities dominated by a Sunni Muslim population. It was seized by ISIL last summer.

More than 30,000 Iraqi security troops as well as the Popular Mobilisation forces, a multi-sect force, have since regained control of the city, forcing ISIL fighters to flee after a month-long battle. [Continue reading…]

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Identifying ISIS’s victims

Sheren Khalel and Matthew Vickery report: Last time Tadrian Abdullah was at Merkaz al Medina kebab restaurant in his hometown of Khanaqin, he was promptly asked to leave. The pungent lingering smell of rotten human tissue and blood that still clung to his hair and skin despite hours of scrubbing was too revolting for the owner to stomach.

That day was a particularly bad dig, Abdullah recalls. The images of the partially decomposed bodies he dragged out of the ground, and the accompanying smell of rotting human flesh, continues to haunt him.

Abdullah works for Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal Affairs. Five months ago Abdullah was a desk worker, filing paperwork and faxing documents at the ministry. However, with the sudden advance of the so-called Islamic State around Khanaqin, his job took a drastic turn.

Today he digs up the bodies of the recently executed, the victims of ISIS who have been dumped in mass graves across the region. The most recently discovered are in and around Tikrit, where ISIS recently was defeated. Some 1,700 mostly Shia soldiers captured at the former Camp Speicher military base in June 2014 are believed to have been slaughtered there. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS executes Baathist officers

NOW reports: ISIS has reportedly executed a number of leaders in the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandiyah Order, a Baathist Sufi militant group that helped ISIS sweep through large swathes of Iraqi territory in its summer 2014 offensive.

“A large number of ISIS members carried out the execution of a number of Naqshbandiyah Order commanders and members in eastern Mosul’s Sumer and Al-Nour neighborhoods,” a source in the Ninevah province told Iraq’s Sumaria News on Monday.

“ISIS carried out the executions after the Naqshbandiyah Order tried to plan attacks against the group,” the source added.

The official website of the Naqshbandiyah Order, also known by its acronym JRTN, makes no reference to the alleged executions, with its latest statement on March 26 praising the beginning of the Saudi-led military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen.

However, ISIS’s alleged Mosul executions are not the first instance of infighting between the militant group and its Baathist allies in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq, U.S. are divided on what’s next in battle against ISIS

The Wall Street Journal reports: Neither Iraq’s government nor the militias have released a comprehensive assessment of the casualties they suffered in Tikrit. But U.S. officials say thousands of Iraqis were killed and that the bulk of the suffering could have been avoided had the Iraqis coordinated with the U.S. in advance.

After two weeks of fighting that inflicted heavy casualties on the militias, Baghdad asked the U.S. to launch airstrikes. Iran’s militia allies withdrew partly in anger, and partly at the U.S. insistence that they step aside. But smaller Shiite militias more closely aligned with Baghdad’s government played a central role in seizing central Tikrit.

U.S. military officials recognize that they will have to work with the irregular militia forces, even if they do not want to, military officials in Washington said.

Iraqi militia leaders agree that the confusion of Tikrit should have been avoided.

“The government is trying to avoid the problem that happened in Tikrit,” said Mr. Hussaini. The militias, Sunni tribal fighters and Iraqi military have established a joint operations command so that Iraq’s sundry anti-Islamic State forces can communicate their needs to the U.S. with a unified voice.

Yet Iraqi Shiite militias still appear determined to fight alone without U.S. support. Their focus on Tikrit appears in part to be aimed at securing a morale-boosting victory without the help of foreign airstrikes.

It’s a question of pride that U.S. officials worry is interfering with tactical considerations.

“Of course, everything depends on the nature of the battle,” said Mr. Hussaini. “But the leadership, they prefer the fight to be purely Iraqi because it tastes better, it has a better impact for the future. It’s a national thing for Iraqis.” [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Sunnis forced to abandon homes and identity in battle for survival

The Guardian reports: Last November, with his home in flames and his father missing, 21-year-old Omar Mazen abandoned his home town of Baquba and fled to the Iraqi capital, 60 miles south.

But his home was not the only thing he left behind. He also decided to abandon his name.

The journey was perilous. At every checkpoint, Shia militiamen or Iraqi soldiers read his papers and stared suspiciously at his identifiably Sunni name. “I didn’t want to show them,” he said. “I was terrified every time. So many Sunnis had disappeared at checkpoints and my father was one of them.”

Somehow, he made it through the heart of the fight against Islamic State that was raging all along the highway. But afterwards he faced a constant dilemma of how to stay safe in a city and society in which Sunni Iraqis – the core of the ruling class under Saddam Hussein – were often viewed by the new Shia-led establishment as either enablers or agents of the extremist insurgency.

Mazen decided to change his name to a more neutral Ammar, and seek refuge among the Shias. In February, he went to the residency office and started the process. “They were helpful,” he said of the government officials he dealt with – not an observation often made about Iraq’s turgid bureaucracy. “They said it would take about a month.”

Mazen’s dilemma reflects the latest upheaval in Iraq, as its existential fight against Isis approaches a second year. In the past 10 months, huge numbers of people – perhaps a quarter of the population – have again been displaced, and Iraq’s social fabric, badly frayed through the years of civil war, is once more being tested. [Continue reading…]

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Pope Francis uses Easter message to focus on Kenya, Syria and Iraq

The Guardian reports: Pope Francis used his Easter message on Sunday to pray for the nearly 150 victims of the Kenya university massacre, while also highlighting the suffering of people across the Middle East and elsewhere.

“May constant prayer rise up from all people of goodwill for those who lost their lives – I think in particular of the young people who were killed last Thursday at Garissa University College in Kenya,” the pontiff told crowds of believers cowering under umbrellas amid heavy rain in St Peter’s Square.

The pope’s comments came after Islamist militants stormed the Kenyan university on Thursday, killing 148 people. While the al-Shabaab gunmen initially killed students indiscriminately, survivors said Christians were later identified and shot.

The pope put persecuted Christian minorities and those suffering from conflicts at the centre of his Easter address in Rome, known as the Urbi et Orbi (to the city and the world) address, with particular emphasis on the Middle East.

“We ask for peace, above all, for Syria and Iraq: that the roar of arms may cease and that peaceful relations be restored among the various groups which make up those beloved countries,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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The Iraqi former Baathist army officers at the core of ISIS

The Washington Post reports: When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.

Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading. [Continue reading…]

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Shiite militias are the real winners of the battle of Tikrit

Nancy A. Youssef reports: The self-proclaimed Islamic State’s loss of the Iraqi city of Tikrit this week would not have been possible without thousands of rogue Iraqi Shiite militiamen, U.S. defense officials conceded.

And that could complicate coming battles, officials said.

With the first major victory over ISIS in Iraq, those militias, many of whom are backed by neighboring Iran, will now have a greater say in how aggressively and effectively Iraq goes after the ISIS threat. They could determine which cities to attack, how much to lean on the U.S.-led coalition and when to strike. And such a varied group of fighters will likely have differing opinions from the Iraqi government, the U.S.-led coalition, Iran and even among themselves, about what needs to happen next in the battle against ISIS.

Such growing influence by such varied non-state actors will only complicate future efforts against ISIS in Iraq, defense officials and experts agreed. [Continue reading…]

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After Iraqi forces take Tikrit, a wave of looting and lynching

Reuters reports: On April 1, the city of Tikrit was liberated from the extremist group Islamic State. The Shi’ite-led central government and allied militias, after a month-long battle, had expelled the barbarous Sunni radicals.

Then, some of the liberators took revenge.

Near the charred, bullet-scarred government headquarters, two federal policemen flanked a suspected Islamic State fighter. Urged on by a furious mob, the two officers took out knives and repeatedly stabbed the man in the neck and slit his throat. The killing was witnessed by two Reuters correspondents.

The incident is now under investigation, interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan told Reuters.

Since its recapture two days ago, the Sunni city of Tikrit has been the scene of violence and looting. In addition to the killing of the extremist combatant, Reuters correspondents also saw a convoy of Shi’ite paramilitary fighters – the government’s partners in liberating the city – drag a corpse through the streets behind their car.

Local officials said the mayhem continues. Two security officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Friday that dozens of homes had been torched in the city. They added that they had witnessed the looting of stores by Shi’ite militiamen. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S.-Iran alliance that neither will acknowledge

The New York Times reports: In the battle to retake Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit, from the Islamic State, the United States and Iran have found a template for fighting the Sunni militancy in other parts of Iraq: American airstrikes and Iranian-backed ground assaults, with the Iraqi military serving as the go-between for two global adversaries that do not want to publicly acknowledge that they are working together.

The template, American officials said privately this week, could apply in particular to the looming battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Given that President Obama has ruled out the use of American ground troops in Iraq, and that the Iraqi military remains ill-trained for urban warfare, the fight for Mosul will require some combination of American air power, Iranian-backed Shiite militias, Iraqi military forces and perhaps Kurdish pesh merga fighters.

“You can see where this is going,” a senior Pentagon official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Are the Iraqi forces ready yet? I would say no.” [Continue reading…]

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Iraq and Syria are ‘finishing schools’ for foreign extremists, says UN report

The Associated Press reports: Iraq and Syria have become “international finishing schools” for extremists according to a UN report which says the number of foreign fighters joining terrorist groups has spiked to more than 25,000 from more than 100 countries.

The panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against al-Qaida estimates the number of overseas terrorist fighters worldwide increased by 71% between mid-2014 and March 2015.

It said the scale of the problem had increased over the past three years and the flow of foreign fighters was “higher than it has ever been historically”.

The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has “risen sharply from a few thousand … a decade ago to more than 25,000 today,” the panel said in its report to the UN security council, which was obtained by Associated Press.

The report said just two countries had drawn more than 20,000 foreign fighters: Syria and Iraq. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State group but also the al-Nusra Front.

Looking ahead, the panel said the thousands of foreign fighters who travelled to Syria and Iraq were living and working in “a veritable ‘international finishing school’ for extremists”, as was the case in Afghanistan in the 1990s. [Continue reading…]

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