Category Archives: Syria

In Aleppo, we are running out of coffins

Osama Abo El Ezz writes: Last week, Syrian or Russian jets bombed Al Quds hospital, in the eastern part of the divided city of Aleppo. At least 50 people lost their lives, and some 80 more were injured.

Among those killed in the attack was my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Muhammad Wassim Mo’az, a kind man who cared deeply for his patients and his community. He slept in the hospital in case there was an emergency and he had to rush to treat babies and children. He was the last pediatrician in Aleppo.

Another friend, Dr. Mohammed Ahmad, was also killed in the airstrikes. Dr. Ahmad was beloved by colleagues and Aleppo residents. He used to volunteer with children, teaching them how to prevent dental disease during wartime. He was one of the 10 dentists remaining in eastern Aleppo.

Dr. Wassim and Dr. Ahmad join hundreds of my Syrian colleagues who have been killed during the last five years of civil war. Physicians for Human Rights has counted at least 730 murdered medical professionals. Deliberate attacks on hospitals and medical workers have become the norm. Just one day after the bombing of Al Quds hospital, a primary care center that treated more than 2,000 people a month was destroyed by another airstrike. In the last week, schools, clinics and mosques have been deliberately bombed, too.

As one of the few remaining doctors in Syria, I have watched the “cessation of hostilities” that was agreed on in February crumble. Imperfect though it was, it offered Syrian civilians a brief respite from five years of violence. People had begun to recover during the truce, to get their lives back. But we are now seeing a level of destruction that will leave an already battered city in ruins. [Continue reading…]

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Partial truce in Syria is said to extend to Aleppo

The New York Times reports: A new partial truce in the Syrian civil war has been extended to the divided city of Aleppo, officials from the United States, Russia and Syria said Wednesday after days of diplomacy by American and Russian envoys to halt catastrophic fighting there.

But the details and duration of the partial truce — and whether it imposed new conditions on the Syrian government, insurgents or their international backers — remained murky.

The parties that negotiated it did not even agree on the precise timing. The State Department said the truce had begun at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, and Syrian state television said it would take effect at 1 a.m. on Thursday.

Nor did their statements clarify the main disagreement between the United States, which backs some insurgents, and Russia, the most powerful ally of the Syrian government, over which rebel groups are fair game for government and Russian airstrikes. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda prepares to establish its first sovereign state in northern Syria

Charles Lister writes: Al Qaeda has big ambitions in Syria. For the past three years, an unprecedented number of veteran figures belonging to the group have arrived in the country, in what can only be described as the covert revitalization of al Qaeda’s central leadership on Europe’s doorstep. Now the jihadi group’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front — having spent nearly five years slowly building deep roots in the country — is laying the groundwork for al Qaeda’s first sovereign state.

The Islamic State and al Qaeda use different tactics in Syria, but their ultimate objective there is the same: the creation of an Islamic emirate. Whereas the Islamic State has imposed unilateral control over populations and rapidly proclaimed independence, al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate has moved much more deliberately, seeking to build influence in the areas they hope to rule. This is a long-game strategy that the terrorist group began adopting in the late 2000s, first in Yemen, in 2011, and then in Mali, in 2012.

But the Nusra Front in Syria has proved the first potentially successful test case. After years of painstaking work to increase its sway in northern Syria, Nusra Front recently launched consultations within its own ranks and among some sympathetic opposition groups about proclaiming an emirate. Given the stakes involved, al Qaeda has recently transferred a number of highly influential jihadi figures from its central leadership circles into Syria. Their mission is to assuage the concerns expressed by other Syrian Islamist movements and those members of Nusra Front who, for now, oppose the idea of an independent emirate.

The presence of a militarily powerful and socially accepted al Qaeda emirate in northwestern Syria, led by several dozen veteran al Qaeda figures and heavily manned by local Syrian fighters, could have significant consequences for the Syrian crisis and for international security.

The formalization of Nusra Front’s power in northern Syria would harden the group’s stance toward Syria’s moderate opposition. Proclaiming an emirate would require the group to assert overwhelming control — including the imposition of a strict interpretation of sharia — in the territories over which it would be asserting sovereignty. In all likelihood, incidents of capital punishment would dramatically increase, civilian freedoms would be restricted, and Nusra Front’s tolerance of nonreligious, nationalist, and civil opposition bodies would decline.

The international implications of an emirate proclamation would be even more significant. The combination of an al Qaeda emirate and a revitalized al Qaeda central leadership in northern Syria would represent a confidence boost for the jihadi organization’s global brand. Al Qaeda would present itself as the smart, methodical, and persistent jihadi movement that, in contrast to the Islamic State, had adopted a strategy more aligned with everyday Sunni Muslims. Eventually, the decision would be made to initiate the plotting of foreign attacks, using Syria’s proximity to Europe and al Qaeda’s regional network to pose a far more urgent threat than the group ever posed in Yemen and Afghanistan. Should the Islamic State continue to suffer losses to its territorial claims in Iraq and Syria, we might also see some defections to the emboldened al Qaeda affiliate next door.

How close is al Qaeda to proclaiming a Syrian emirate? Nusra Front seems to have slowed its emirate plans, at least temporarily, during Syria’s recent cessation of hostilities. That had allowed Syrian Islamist opposition groups to express their hostility to the group’s emirate plans. Some even raised the idea that Nusra Front should break its ties to al Qaeda in order to further integrate into the mainstream “revolutionary opposition.”

“For a short time, some consultation began outside of al-Nusra, but the response was very negative,” one well-connected Syrian Islamist said. “Syrians do not want an emirate.” [Continue reading…]

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Poverty driving Syrian men and boys into the arms of ISIS

The Guardian reports: Poverty, desperation and the desire for revenge are the key factors pushing young Syrians to join Isis and other extremist groups – and are more significant than ideological or religious motivation, according to research by a peace-building group.

Adolescent boys and young men between the ages of 12 and 24 were found to be most at risk, along with children and young adults not in education, internally displaced people and refugees without supportive family structures.

Interviews with more than 300 young Syrians – in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey – point to factors of both vulnerability and resilience to recruitment by Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate), which are both proscribed as terrorist organisations by the UN.

“Radicalisation is not an explanation for joining a violent extremist group per se,” said the study by International Alert (pdf). “For many young Syrians, belief in extreme ideologies appears to be, at most, a secondary factor in the initial decision to join an extremist group. Religion is providing a moral medium for coping and justification for fighting, rather than a basis for rigid and extreme ideologies.” [Continue reading…]

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Another Aleppo hospital is hit, this time on government-held side

The New York Times reports: Insurgent shelling hit a maternity hospital in the government-held section of the Syrian city of Aleppo on Tuesday, according to state media and footage from the scene, underscoring what rights groups are calling a growing disregard for the rules of war.

It was the sixth assault on a medical facility in the divided city in less than a week and the first to have caused casualties on the government-controlled side. At least three women were reported killed and 17 people wounded, including children.

On Wednesday, warplanes destroyed a pediatric hospital and a clinic on the rebel-held side of the city, leaving dozens of people dead, including medical workers, women and children.

That attack, believed to have been carried out by the Syrian government despite its denials, came as intensifying airstrikes and rebel shelling shattered what remained of a fragile truce that had prevailed for a few months. The violence of the past week has plunged Aleppo back into all-out war, killing scores of people, mainly civilians.

The strikes on hospitals and clinics have incited a new wave of outrage from international humanitarian organizations, which called for an end to the attacks and emphasized that, if deliberate, they constitute war crimes. The United Nations Security Council condemned the attacks in a resolution on Tuesday that passed unanimously. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS files reveal Assad’s deals with militants

Sky News reports: Islamic State and the Assad regime in Syria have been colluding with each other in deals on the battleground, Sky News can reveal.

Our exclusive investigation into leaked secret IS files suggests one piece of co-operation was over the ancient city of Palmyra.

The files also show that the militant group has been training foreign fighters to attack Western targets for much longer than security services had suspected.

The revelations underscore fears in the United States that a network of sleeper cells is spread across Europe, avoiding detection, and is planning further Paris- and Brussels-style assaults.

IS defectors, meanwhile, have told Sky News that Palmyra was handed back to government forces by Islamic State as part of a series of cooperation agreements going back years.

New letters obtained by Sky News, in addition to the massive haul of 22,000 files handed over last month, appear to confirm this. [Continue reading…]

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Third U.S. combat death comes as American troops edge closer to the front lines in Iraq

The Washington Post reports: At the base of a rocky ridge rising from the surrounding farmland, the barrels of American artillery poke out from under camouflage covers, their sights trained on Islamic State-held positions.

Less than 10 miles from the front lines in the push toward the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the U.S. outpost, known as Firebase Bell, is manned by about 200 Marines.

“Having them here has raised the morale of our fighters,” said Lt. Col. Helan Mahmood, the head of a commando regiment in the Iraqi army, as his truck bumped along the dirt track that divides his base from the American encampment, ringed by razor wire and berms.

“If there’s any movement from the enemy, they bomb immediately,” he said.

The new firebase is part of a creeping U.S. buildup in Iraq since troops first returned to the country with a contingent of 275 advisers, described at the time by the Pentagon as a temporary measure to help get “eyes on the ground.”

Now, nearly two years later, the official troop count has mushroomed to 4,087, not including those on temporary rotations, a number that has not been disclosed. [Continue reading…]

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How the curse of Sykes-Picot still haunts the Middle East

Robin Wright writes: In the Middle East, few men are pilloried these days as much as Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes, a British diplomat, travelled the same turf as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), served in the Boer War, inherited a baronetcy, and won a Conservative seat in Parliament. He died young, at thirty-nine, during the 1919 flu epidemic. Picot was a French lawyer and diplomat who led a long but obscure life, mainly in backwater posts, until his death, in 1950. But the two men live on in the secret agreement they were assigned to draft, during the First World War, to divide the Ottoman Empire’s vast land mass into British and French spheres of influence. The Sykes-Picot Agreement launched a nine-year process — and other deals, declarations, and treaties — that created the modern Middle East states out of the Ottoman carcass. The new borders ultimately bore little resemblance to the original Sykes-Picot map, but their map is still viewed as the root cause of much that has happened ever since.

“Hundreds of thousands have been killed because of Sykes-Picot and all the problems it created,” Nawzad Hadi Mawlood, the Governor of Iraq’s Erbil Province, told me when I saw him this spring. “It changed the course of history — and nature.”

May 16th will mark the agreement’s hundredth anniversary, amid questions over whether its borders can survive the region’s current furies. “The system in place for the past one hundred years has collapsed,” Barham Salih, a former deputy prime minister of Iraq, declared at the Sulaimani Forum, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in March. “It’s not clear what new system will take its place.”

The colonial carve-up was always vulnerable. Its map ignored local identities and political preferences. Borders were determined with a ruler — arbitrarily. At a briefing for Britain’s Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, in 1915, Sykes famously explained, “I should like to draw a line from the ‘E’ in Acre to the last ‘K’ in Kirkuk.” He slid his finger across a map, spread out on a table at No. 10 Downing Street, from what is today a city on Israel’s Mediterranean coast to the northern mountains of Iraq.

“Sykes-Picot was a mistake, for sure,” Zikri Mosa, an adviser to Kurdistan’s President Masoud Barzani, told me. “It was like a forced marriage. It was doomed from the start. It was immoral, because it decided people’s future without asking them.” [Continue reading…]

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As bombs fall, Aleppo asks: ‘Where are the Americans?’

The Telegraph reports: Recovering in Turkey after a deadly air strike on a hospital in Aleppo, all that Abu Abdu Tebyiah could think about was the six children he had been forced to leave behind.

Mr Tebyiah was critically injured when the Syrian regime dropped three bombs on al-Quds hospital next to his house in the east of the city last Thursday.

He was one of a lucky few allowed over the border to receive treatment for his broken ribs and pelvis, wounds that would probably have killed him otherwise. But the 49-year-old shop owner was taken away so quickly that he had little chance to tell his rescuers that his children were waiting for him at home.

“They are too young to be on their own,” Mr Tebyiah told the Telegraph. “The government is using barrel bombs on our neighbourhood again, so I stopped them going to school. They are now in great danger.”

Mr Tebyiah said the only way to bring his children to Turkey, which closed its border to fleeing Syrians earlier this year, was to pay smugglers $500 for each child – money he did not have.

“I have to find a solution as soon as possible,” he said. “Or I don’t want to think what will happen.”

Fighting has intensified in Syria’s second city this week, claiming over 250 lives and ending in all but name a much-vaunted ceasefire agreed in February.

Now the opposition-controlled eastern side of Aleppo is braced for an offensive by Bashar al-Assad’s regime and his Russian and Iranian allies. If Assad succeeds in recapturing the whole of the city, it could change the course of the war.

As the regime’s bombs dropped on their houses, hospitals and schools, residents wondered where their supposed protectors, the Americans, were.

Many had been optimistic that the ceasefire, brokered by the United States and Russia, was the ray of hope that Aleppo needed after enduring four years of killing since Syria’s war came to the city in 2012. [Continue reading…]

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Barack Obama’s role in bringing peace to Syria

In an editorial, The Observer says: Just when it seemed it could not get any worse, it did. Syria’s partial “cessation of hostilities”, on which shaky hopes of peace rest, rapidly unravelled last week. Amid a suddenly mounting toll of dead and injured came reports of renewed atrocities. In Aleppo, a hospital was bombed, killing up to 27 people, including doctors and children. The attack by Bashar al-Assad’s air force fitted an established, pre-ceasefire pattern of deliberately targeting civilians in hospitals, schools and markets. What has changed now is that this murderous regime, buoyed by Russian support and reinvigorated by the ceasefire, barely bothers to deny it.

Aleppo’s plight captured attention, not least because senior UN officials used it to dramatise their pleas to the US and others to rescue the peace talks in Switzerland, described as all but dead. “The violence is soaring back to the levels prior to the cessation of hostilities. There are deeply disturbing reports of military build-ups indicating a lethal escalation,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN’s human rights chief. “The Geneva talks were the only game in town. If they are abandoned, I dread to think how much more horror we will see in Syria.”

Less fully reported was the plight of starving Syrians marooned and besieged elsewhere in the country. “Deliberately deprived of food and medicine, many face the most appalling conditions. We must all be ashamed that this is happening on our watch,” said Stephen O’Brien, head of UN relief operations, pointing to the dire situation in Homs, Idlib, Latakia and rural Damascus. Thanks partly to the ceasefire, 3.7 million people received food aid in March, he said. Cross-border convoys so far this year reached nearly twice as many people as in the same period in 2015.

This limited progress is now at risk from renewed fighting, with Assad’s forces, in particular, again obstructing aid convoys. “Last week, on the convoy to Rastan, the Syrian authorities removed medicines from supplies and scissors and anaesthetic medicines from midwifery kits. This inhumane practice directly leads to unnecessary suffering and loss of life,” O’Brien reported. Denial of medical supplies in time of war is a gross breach of humanitarian law, yet it is happening again. There can be no excuse. It is wholly monstrous. An accounting must be made. And, one day, the perpetrators will pay for their crimes.

Or so we say. Sadly, the unpalatable reality is that such vows and declarations, whether issued by UN officials, relief agencies, government ministers, MPs or newspaper editorials, will be contemptuously ignored, as they have been for the past five years, until the principal external actors in this tragedy stop playing power games and start taking responsibility. Foremost among them are Russia and Iran, Assad’s main backers. [Continue reading…]

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Aleppo braces for ‘war of all wars’ as regime prepares to retake key Syrian city

The Telegraph reports: Aleppo saw one of its bloodiest days since the ceasefire began on Friday, as government forces laid the groundwork for a “war of all wars” to retake Syria’s second city.

The carnage of the last few days has propelled Aleppo – bitterly contested since 2012 and considered the jewel of Syria – once again to the main battlefield in the civil war.

The Syrian regime pounded rebel areas in the city with air raids, including on another medical clinic, while opposition fighters hit government-held neighbourhoods with rocket and artillery fire.

Friday prayers were cancelled across Aleppo for only the second time during the five-year war, so worried were residents that they would be targeted if they gathered in groups.

With more than 100 killed in the past 48 hours, an average of one Syrian was dying every 25 minutes. [Continue reading…]

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On the ground in Syria: Bloodshed, misery and hope

The New York Times reports: On the edge of Aleppo’s ancient citadel, Zahra and her family squatted in a once-grand apartment, now facing rebel lines. Plastic sheets covered its tall windows to shield the space from a sniper’s view; shelling boomed in the distance.

Zahra, 25, who gave just one name, flicked between two photos on her phone. The first showed her husband, a Syrian Army soldier and the father of her unborn child. “Seven months,” she said, touching her belly.

In the second, her husband was splayed on the ground, blood trickling from his nose. Two other fallen soldiers lay beside him. He died two weeks ago.

“May the men who did this also die,” she said with quiet determination.

Four years of war has hardened hearts in Aleppo, a divided city and, for the past week, the scene of merciless fighting.

A fragile truce, brokered by the United States and Russia, has crumbled in Syria, leading to the worst violence in months. Russian fighter jets roar through the sky, pounding targets in rebel-held areas. The rebels send barrages of mortar rounds and homemade missiles that land in crowded neighborhoods. The war has stoked sectarian tensions and become a proxy battle for regional and global interests. [Continue reading…]

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Syria truce comes into effect but Aleppo excluded

Al Jazeera reports: The Syrian government has called local truces near Damascus and in the northern province of Latakia but has excluded the main battlefield in Aleppo.

A new “regime of calm” began at 1am on Saturday and is scheduled to last one day in the capital’s eastern Ghouta suburb and three days in the northern countryside of the coastal province of Latakia, the army said in a statement.

The truces seemed to be holding as of Saturday morning, but air strikes resumed in Aleppo, hitting at least two areas.

By excluding Aleppo, scene of the worst recent violence, the narrow truces were unlikely to resurrect a ceasefire and peace talks that have collapsed this week.

The surge in fighting in the city – home to more than two million people – showed “monstrous disregard” for civilian lives, the United Nations said. [Continue reading…]

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Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan: The world’s most-needed hospitals are under attack

The Washington Post reports: The al-Quds hospital in Aleppo targeted in Wednesday night’s attacks was one of 150 hospitals supported by Doctors Without Borders in Syria. The organization directly runs six in the country, but provides funding and medical supplies to other medical facilities.

The international charity group, also referred to as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in French, said the medical facility was directly hit and reduced to “rubble.” The organization has condemned the overnight attack, which also claimed the life of one of the area’s last pediatricians.

“Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage?” said Muskilda Zancada, the MSF head in Syria, in an online statement.

The United Nations estimates that at least half of Syria’s hospitals have been destroyed, and the spark of attacks on hospitals is an especially disturbing trend. In armed conflict, hospitals are protected by international law. Yet the facilities supported and run by the Nobel Prize-winning organization have frequently come under attack. And it’s not only medical structures. The group said five rescue workers from the Syrian Civil Defense organization have also been killed. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s peace talks begin to look like a cover for more war

The Guardian reports: Bombs hitting hospitals, doctors and rescue workers killed, civilians starving, scores of dead and injured every day – the raw, bleeding statistics of Syria’s unending war are making a nonsense of an already fragile truce and destroying the slim hopes that peace talks can even carry on.

Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria, is a consummate diplomat, but this week he has struggled to mask a sense of rising panic – appealing to the US and Russia to come together to stave off what his humanitarian coordinator warned on Thursday would be a new “catastrophe” if violence did not stop.

De Mistura reported privately to the UN security council on Wednesday on the latest “proximity” talks in Geneva, where he met the two Syrian sides separately. Opposition negotiators walked out last week, insisting they could not stay in the Palais des Nations while their people were suffering on the ground.

“How can you have substantial talks when you have only news about bombing and shelling?” De Mistura asked journalists afterwards. “Barely alive” was his blunt characterisation of the truce. And diplomats said he spoke far more forcefully on the video link to New York. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Looking out from the Syrian capital these days, one can understand why President Bashar Assad would be in no hurry to make concessions at peace talks in Geneva, let alone consider stepping down as the opposition demands.

In Damascus, it is easy to forget the war. The airstrikes, the ruins and starvation, sometimes only few miles away, seem distant and unseen. Since a partial cease-fire went into effect at the end of February, the mortar shells from opposition-held suburbs have all but stopped. On Saturday, the Interior Ministry said a number of mortar shells fell in two Damascus neighborhoods, including one several hundred meters from the Russian embassy. There were no reported injuries.

With the road to the loyalist coast and most of central Syria completely cleared of insurgents, Assad has guaranteed the survival of a rump state that he could rule over should the war continue for a long time. Even if Assad’s forces have little chance of regaining large parts of the country in the near term, Russia’s military intervention changed the conflict’s course in their favor and has boosted their confidence. [Continue reading…]

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Syria war: UN aid chief laments ‘massive suffering’

Al Jazeera reports: The United Nation’s aid chief has issued a strongly worded appeal to world powers to revive a shattered ceasefire in Syria and put an end to the “massive human suffering” that has left millions of people facing desolation, death and starvation.

Stephen O’Brien told the UN Security Council on Thursday that it must not squander what he saw as an opportunity for peace in recently stalled talks in Geneva, and again called for unimpeded access to get aid to people trapped by renewed and fierce fighting in the country.

“We must all be ashamed this is happening on our watch,” Stephen O’Brien told the Security Council during a meeting on the humanitarian crisis caused by the five-year war.

While the number of humanitarian convoys crossing borders and fighting lines has increased, O’Brien said “current levels of access still leave civilians starving and without medical care.

“Deliberately deprived of food and medicine, many face the most appalling conditions of desolation, hunger and starvation.” [Continue reading…]

Haid N Haid interviewed by BBC World discusses the situation in Aleppo, the systematic targeting of civilian facilities such as hospitals, schools etc by the Assad regime and Russian forces. He also talks about the Russian withdrawal, the besieged areas and air dropping aid.

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U.S. special ops kill 40 ISIS operatives responsible for attacks from Paris to Egypt

The Daily Beast reports: As the self-proclaimed Islamic State trumpets its global terrorist campaign, U.S. special operations forces have quietly killed more than three dozen key ISIS operatives blamed for plotting deadly attacks in Europe and beyond.

Defense officials tell The Daily Beast that U.S. special operators have killed 40 “external operations leaders, planners, and facilitators” blamed for instigating, plotting, or funding ISIS’s attacks from Brussels and Paris to Egypt and Africa.

That’s less than half the overall number of ISIS targets that special operators have taken off the battlefield, one official explained, including top leaders like purported ISIS second-in-command Haji Imam, killed in March.

The previously unpublished number provides a rare glimpse into the U.S. counterterrorist mission that is woven into overall coalition efforts to defeat ISIS, and which is credited with crippling ISIS efforts to recruit foreign fighters and carry out more plots like the deadly assault on Paris that killed 130 last fall. [Continue reading…]

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With Iraq mired in turmoil, some call for partition

The New York Times reports: With tens of thousands of protesters marching in the streets of Baghdad to demand changes in government, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, appeared before Parliament this week hoping to speed the process by introducing a slate of new ministers. He was greeted by lawmakers who tossed water bottles at him, banged on tables and chanted for his ouster.

“This session is illegal!” one of them shouted.

Leaving his squabbling opponents behind, Mr. Abadi moved to another meeting room, where supportive lawmakers declared a quorum and approved several new ministers — technocrats, not party apparatchiks — as a step to end sectarian politics and the corruption and patronage that support it.

But, like so much else in the Iraqi government, the effort fell short, with only a handful of new ministers installed and several major ministries, including oil, foreign and finance, remaining in limbo. A new session of Parliament on Thursday was canceled.

Almost two years after the Islamic State swept through northern Iraq, forcing the Obama administration to re-engage in a conflict it had celebrated as complete, Iraq’s political system is barely functioning, as the chaotic scenes in Parliament this week demonstrated. [Continue reading…]

Kevin Knodell writes: Iraqi security forces backed by the U.S.-led international coalition have launched a campaign to dislodge Islamic State militants from Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

It’s an ambitious operation involving multiple factions — and one that could determine the country’s fate as it struggles to eject ISIS and hold itself together amid sectarian bickering.

For even as the anti-ISIS coalition wages this decisive battle, Kurdish troops are clashing with Shia militiamen in the town of Tuz Khurmatu, near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Fighting erupted on the night of April 23 after Shia militiamen allegedly threw a grenade into the house of a Peshmerga commander in the town. Several Peshmerga and Shia fighters have died in the ensuing clashes.

Leaders from the two sides worked out a truce, but the peace is fragile. Such internal fighting is becoming a nearly monthly occurrence as the two groups in the town — ostensibly allies in the battle against Islamic State — fail to find common ground aside from their mutual enemy.

It’s a sobering reminder that even if the alliance manages to dislodge the Islamic State from Mosul, Iraq will continue to suffer sectarian violence. [Continue reading…]

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