ISIS – IRAQ - KURDISTAN : NEWS THREAD

[Anthea]

Yes, of course. We were told that as martyrs we would have 72 eternal virgins in heaven and we can save dozens of our close relatives from hell too.

So, IS promises its' recruits 72 virgin angels and you are saying this is not "anti-Islamic propaganda" as some people may otherwise claim?

We were promised women in heaven and on earth too based on IS jihadist teaching of the verses of some Suras of the holy book of Quran and hadiths by prophet Muhammad, all of which were explained through the Tafsir (explanation) by Islamic scholars like Ibn Majah, Bukhari and Ibn Kathir. We were told all non-Muslim women prisoners will be our wives and God wills it.Yes, of course. We were told that as martyrs we would have 72 eternal virgins in heaven and we can save dozens of our close relatives from hell too.

So, IS promises its' recruits 72 virgin angels and you are saying this is not "anti-Islamic propaganda" as some people may otherwise claim?

We were promised women in heaven and on earth too based on IS jihadist teaching of the verses of some Suras of the holy book of Quran and hadiths by prophet Muhammad, all of which were explained through the Tafsir (explanation) by Islamic scholars like Ibn Majah, Bukhari and Ibn Kathir. We were told all non-Muslim women prisoners will be our wives and God wills it.

I have the answer - the way to defeat the Islamic State

Every time an I.S. fighter gets killed cut his penis off

Better still have a woman cut their penises off and throw them to the pigs

It will save the lives of many innocent people and save a fortune in bombs

[Anthea]

Rudaw

Kurdish Tribe Fights IS Alone in Disputed Area
By Nawzad Mahmoud

A Kurdish tribe in the Hamrin region south of Kirkuk has been holding off the Islamic State (IS) for six months without any support from Peshmerga, the tribe's chief said, but is at risk of losing the territory to extremists.

When IS arrived in the Hamrin region, which extends through multiple provinces and lies near the border of the Kurdistan Region, Sheikh Abdulsamad Salar and his tribe had few options. The tribal leader had to decide whether to flee to the Peshmarga controlled areas, join IS or form a militia from his young tribesmen to fend off IS fighters trying to enter their villages.

Salar chose the latter. "It was not easy to defend the area with a few young men with light weapons, but surrendering to IS wasn’t an option for us," Salar told Rudaw.

The Kurdish Sheikh claims his tribesmen "have killed 55 IS fighters since the arrival of the fighters in the region. The Arab tribal leaders support IS. I have only 400 armed men. I have been able to protect four Kurdish villages in the Hamrin so far, but if we are to continue this fight, we will need Peshmarga support."

It’s unlikely that Peshmerga will enter the area that Salar’s tribal fighters are protecting any time soon. It is near the Jalawla and Saadiya frontlines, which the Peshmarga troops withdrew from after losing battles to IS last month.

IS has blown up at least 60 houses of Kurds in the area, said Salar, leader of the Kurdish Zargushi tribe.

"My tribe, if we receive help, will control Hamrin mountain and hand it to the Peshmarga forces," Salar said.

Control of this region, a stronghold of extremist groups who operate freely in the area, has been difficult since 2003.

Hamrin region is a disputed area home to about 22,000 Kurdish, Arab (both Shiite and Sunni) Iraqis. Approximately 4,500 of the residents belong to the Kurdish Zargushi tribe, but the Arab Bani Waleed tribe is the most notable among them. Karwi, Rabeea, and Khawalid are also sizable Arab tribes in the region.

Since IS began its advance on the area, relations between the tribes have deteriorated, Salar said.

Salar said of the Arab tribes, "There is no doubt that all of them must either be with IS or leave the area."

However, Sheikh Abu Irfan, a Khawalid tribal leader who escaped to Peshmarga controlled areas with a number of families in his tribe, said, "We are totally against IS and do not accept their rule. That is why the tribal leaders all left Saadiya and fled to Kulajo. We did not fight IS in our city because we had no support. Army and police had left the area. The government did not help us. We did not have necessary weapons. That is why we decided to leave to Kurdistan."

Regarding his relations with Peshmarga forces, Abu Irfan said, "We have an excellent relationship with Peshmarga troops. We have particularly good relations with the political party leaders in Khanaqin," he said, in reference to the largely Kurdish town in Diyala province.

However, he maintained, "Peshmarga did not come to Saadiya to help us; they came to Jalawla and then left."

Mohammed Haji Fayaq, deputy commander of the Peshmarga forces in nearby Garmyan, confirmed that the Kurdish forces haven’t provided any assistance to the Kurdish Zargushi tribe and commended Salar and his men for their bravery in fighting IS alone.

"We’ll help when needed, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to give them weapons," he said.

http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/200920141

[Anthea]

Baghdad rally held against US ‘occupiers’



Thousands of Iraqis gathered in central Baghdad on Saturday (September 20) to protest against American intervention.

Demonstrators waved Iraqi flags and held up pictures of leading Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who says the country should not cooperate with what he calls US “occupiers”.

Washington launched air strikes in Iraq in August to combat Islamic State militants – who seized large swathes of territory in the north of the country, and also in neighbouring Syria, over the summer.

The anti-US rally in Baghdad came a day after the United Nations held a meeting on Iraq.

Washington, which has been working to build an international coalition aimed at defeating the Islamic State group, says more than 40 countries have offered assistance.

Iran has so far rejected requests from the US to hold bilateral talks on fighting the militants.

Meanwhile, France has become the first country to join the US in air strikes.

The French airforce launched its first strikes on Islamic State targets in Iraq on Friday (19 September), less than 24 hours after the intervention was authorised by President François Hollande.

http://www.euronews.com/2014/09/20/iraq ... occupiers/

Ungrateful b**tards - America should help the Kurds and leave the Sunnis and Shiite to kill each other

[Anthea]

Bloomberg

Iraq's Only Honest Broker: Obama

In addressing the threat posed by Islamic State, President Barack Obama has repeatedly emphasized that there is no American military solution to the crisis in Iraq and noted that only a more inclusive Iraqi government can hold the country together. So far, however, Obama has been far more specific about the military campaign in Iraq than the diplomatic mission. That needs to change.

Iraq’s long history of violent sectarianism prevents Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds from initiating or sustaining talks. But each group accepts the U.S. as a neutral arbiter. That's why the Obama administration should push for the creation of an Iraq reconciliation commission, which would mediate between all groups, but especially between Iraq's discontented Sunni leaders and the central government in Baghdad. In the absence of such an institution and dialogue, Iraq's sectarian divisions will continue to invite extremism that threatens the entire Middle East.

There is a promising precedent for such a commission. Beginning in 2007 and 2008, the U.S. military established less formal reconciliation mechanisms to mediate between Sunni tribal sheikhs and Baghdad. Sunni leaders who agreed to partner with U.S. forces against al-Qaeda in Iraq -- the same group that would later become Islamic State -- were promised federal salaries for their tribal militias, and increased government services and largesse for their provinces. To ensure those promises were kept, the U.S. military brought Sunni sheikhs to the capital on a regular basis to meet with senior Iraqi officials and high-ranking U.S. military officers and diplomats. Absent this kind of engaged U.S. diplomacy (and arm-twisting), Iraq’s various ethnic factions would have been rendered mute by their mutual distrust, unable to make necessary compromises.

But this informal reconciliation process collapsed after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011. U.S. diplomats in Baghdad lacked the security forces to travel freely to Anbar and other far-flung provinces, and they were discouraged from doing so by then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who viewed the Sunni tribes as a long-term threat to his rule. As Maliki reneged on promises to pay salaries to the Sunni militias and purged Sunni officers from the Iraq security forces, the relationships that U.S. officials had nurtured with Sunni tribes withered.

Eventually a new generation of tribal leaders assumed power in Iraq's Sunni heartland. Disillusioned and furious with Maliki, they found common cause with the brutal Sunni extremists of Islamic State.

The Obama administration has already taken important steps to chip away at the unnatural alliance between Sunni tribes and the much more extreme Islamic State. Senior administration officials can take credit, for instance, for working behind the scenes to help oust the divisive Maliki. They have also publicly supported the establishment of “national guard” units in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces. These forces will replace Shia-dominated units of the Iraqi army and incorporate local militias such as the Kurdish Peshmerga and Sunni Sons of Iraq.

But Iraq won't be stable until the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations all have assurances that the central government will listen to them. An Iraq reconciliation commission, backed by the U.S. and preferably operating under the auspices of the United Nations, would provide precisely such assurances. It is in the U.S.'s interests, and certainly within its means, to create such an institution. The Obama administration must now decide if it has the will.

To contact the senior editor responsible for Bloomberg View's editorials: David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2 ... oker-obama

[Anthea]

The National

Iraq’s Islamist Kurds under fire from both sides of the war
By Hugh Naylor email: hnaylor@thenational.ae

Islamist politicians in Iraqi Kurdistan say they are under fire from both sides as the region fights off an offensive by ISIL militants.

Navigating Islamist politics in Kurdistan has always been a struggle, but Soran Omar and his fellow Islamists in the region’s parliament say it has become even harder since the radical Sunni group overran vast tracts of Iraq in June.

Local media, rivals from secular-nationalist parties and ordinary citizens accuse them of being terrorist sympathisers and insufficiently pro-Kurdish.

Yet, in July, Kurdish-speaking members of ISIL threatened to behead Mr Omar for being a moderate who participates in democratic politics.

“They said that when they capture Kurdistan, I will be the first person they would behead here,” said Mr Omar, whose Komal party holds six seats in the Iraqi Kurdistan parliament. He recorded the ISIL threats, which were made on Skype.

“We are being threatened by Da’ash [ISIL] and slandered by the media for not condemning Da’ash. We’re being attacked by all sides.”

In an interview last week, he repeatedly condemned ISIL as “fake Muslims” and accused them of “using religion to justify a violent political agenda”.

Politics in the autonomous Kurdish region have long been controlled by the two main secular-nationalist parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which run powerful, oil-funded patronage networks.

Mr Omar’s small and conservative party and two other religious parties managed to win just 17 of the 111 parliamentary seats in elections last year.

The political scene is dominated by nationalist issues — mainly an ethnic-based struggle for independence from Arab rule in Baghdad. But the Islamist parties have built a support base campaigning against corruption and for a greater role for Islam in public life in a predominantly Muslim society that observers say has become more religiously observant.

They also have renounced the violent agenda that their Islamist predecessors espoused during the 1990s civil war in Kurdistan. That war largely pit the KDP against the PUK, but the fighting also included members of the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, a group that sought to build religious schools as well as its own police and hospitals at the time. Its influence has steadily declined.

Ansar Al Islam, a Kurdish Salafi group that was founded in 2001, carried out a number of attacks against US soldiers after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The US classifies it as a terrorist group and some of the organisation’s members have joined ISIL.

But Kurdistan’s Islamist parties say they prefer multiparty politics and peacefully rooting out corruption to violence, and they have become increasingly influential in regional councils, such as Sulaimaniyah, in part by running a number of charity organisations.

Although stopping short of calling for a hardline enforcement of Sharia, they advocate a socially conservative agenda that includes covering women.

The Islamist parties even decided to quit the opposition and join the government after last year’s polls, in part to demonstrate their national bona fides. They say they will withdraw from the government if no progress is made in political reform and reducing corruption, although no deadline has been given.

But criticism of their religious agenda has mounted after an ISIL assault last month that threatened to overrun Iraqi Kurdistan and stirred up nationalist passions. This despite what Mr Omar and other Islamist legislators say has been repeated criticism on their part of ISIL, which has committed mass executions and attempted genocides against non-Sunni groups. But that has not satisfied their critics.

“People and media are saying these people are like ISIL and that they want to take us back to the Middle Ages,” said Ali Mahmoud, a leftist political activist and critic of Kurdistan’s Islamist parties.

“The problem with the Islamist parties is that they haven’t condemned ISIL and they haven’t been supporting the peshmerga in the fight to defend Kurdistan from ISIL,” he added, referring to the Kurdish defence forces.

Asked about the Islamist parties’ public criticism of ISIL, he said that did not go far enough.

The drumming-up of anti-Islamist sentiment by political observers is also seen as a ploy to distract from the embarrassing retreat of the peshmerga forces, which are controlled by the two main political parties, during the ISIL attack last month.

The attack exposed serious deficiencies in the once-vaunted peshmerga defences. Foreign intervention, including airstrikes by the United States, helped enable the Kurds to stop ISIL from taking their capital, Erbil.

“I think what we are seeing is something similar to the rest of the region, where moderate Islamist parties are lumped in with radicals. It’s a fairly standard political strategy,” said Steven Cook, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“In the Kurds’ case, it is likely intended to distract attention from the rather inadequate performance of the peshmerga against ISIL. I understand that there is a lot of anger directed at [Kurdistan’s president, Massoud] Barzani and the two main parties over the inability of the peshmerga to actually fight ISIL.”

Abu-Baker Abdullah believes this explains the criticism of his Islamist-leaning Kurdistan Islamic Union, or Yekgirtu Party. Yekgirtu holds 10 of the Islamist parties’ 17 parliament seats and advocates for an independent Kurdistan.

Editorials in Kurdish media regularly compare his moderate Islamist party “to Al Qaeda or ISIL” and television talk-show panellists “say we do nothing to support the peshmerga against ISIL”, Mr Abdullah said.

His party decided to send its parliamentarians’ personal bodyguards to fight with peshmerga on the front lines, and its humanitarian work includes helping the scores of displaced Iraqis in Kurdistan because of ISIL. His group has repeatedly denounced ISIL, he said.

His and other Islamist parties are also prohibited by the ruling two political parties from fielding their own peshmerga forces, he added. The two parties outrightly control the government, its resources and the KRG in general.

“We know we are being attacked in the media and in public circles because of campaigns against us by our political rivals, but what can we do in this system? It’s entirely controlled by the KDP and PUK,” he said.

Denise Natali, an expert on Kurdish politics and senior research fellow at the US-based National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies, agreed that Islamist parties face an uphill battle to gain influence in local politics.

That is partly due to the fact that the KDP and PUK factions can buy far more loyalty by outspending rivals using expansive patronage networks that are financed by their near-exclusive control over the area’s oil production. These networks influence everything from access to government jobs to university admissions.

“It’s a highly controlled, centralised region where money and power are controlled by the two political parties, and an Islamic party, with or without the ISIL incursion, cannot compete in it,” said Ms Natali.

For Mr Omar, these obstacles are worrying. Younger Kurds are becoming more religious and, he said, need a viable representation in local politics, or else they could turn elsewhere for representation.

That may help explain why hundreds of Kurds from the area are believed to have joined ranks with ISIL — the same Kurds who Mr Omar suspects called him on Skype in July and threatened to behead him.

“We are moderates and we believe in democracy, but some of the Kurds who joined ISIL are also blocked by a political system here that is controlled by the PUK and KDP,” he said.

http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle- ... of-the-war

[Anthea]

New York Times

Suspicions Run Deep in Iraq That C.I.A. and the Islamic State Are United
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

The United States has conducted an escalating campaign of deadly airstrikes against the extremists of the Islamic State for more than a month. But that appears to have done little to tamp down the conspiracy theories still circulating from the streets of Baghdad to the highest levels of Iraqi government that the C.I.A. is secretly behind the same extremists that it is now attacking.

“We know about who made Daesh,” said Bahaa al-Araji, a deputy prime minister, using an Arabic shorthand for the Islamic State on Saturday at a demonstration called by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to warn against the possible deployment of American ground troops. Mr. Sadr publicly blamed the C.I.A. for creating the Islamic State in a speech last week, and interviews suggested that most of the few thousand people at the demonstration, including dozens of members of Parliament, subscribed to the same theory. (Mr. Sadr is considered close to Iran, and the theory is popular there as well.)

When an American journalist asked Mr. Araji to clarify if he blamed the C.I.A. for the Islamic State, he retreated: “I don’t know. I am one of the poor people,” he said, speaking fluent English and quickly stepping back toward the open door of a chauffeur-driven SUV. “But we fear very much. Thank you!”

The prevalence of the theory in the streets underscored the deep suspicions of the American military’s return to Iraq more than a decade after its invasion, in 2003. The casual endorsement by a senior official, though, was also a pointed reminder that the new Iraqi government may be an awkward partner for the American-led campaign to drive out the extremists.

The Islamic State, also known by the acronym ISIS, has conquered many of the predominantly Sunni Muslim provinces in Iraq’s northeast, aided by the alienation of many residents to the Shiite-dominated government of the former prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. President Obama has insisted repeatedly that American military action against the Islamic State depended on the installation of a more inclusive government in Baghdad, but he moved ahead before it was complete.

The Parliament has not yet confirmed nominees for the crucial posts of interior or defense minister, in part because of discord between Sunni and Shiite factions, and the Iraqi news media has reported that it may be more than a month before the posts are filled.

The demonstration on Saturday was the latest in a series of signals from Shiite leaders or militias, especially those considered close to Iran, warning the United States not to put its soldiers back on the ground. Mr. Obama has pledged not to send combat troops, but he seems to have convinced few Iraqis. “We don’t trust him,” said Raad Hatem, 40.

Haidar al-Assadi, 40, agreed. “The Islamic State is a clear creation of the United States, and the United States is trying to intervene again using the excuse of the Islamic State,” he said.

Shiite militias and volunteers, he said, were already answering the call from religious leaders to defend Iraq from the Islamic State without American help. “This is how we do it,” he said, adding that the same forces would keep American troops out. “The main reason Obama is saying he will not invade again is because he knows the Islamic resistance” of the Shiite militias “and he does not want to lose a single soldier.”

The leader of the Islamic State, for his part, declared on Saturday that he defied the world to stop him.

“The conspiracies of Jews, Christians, Shiites and all the tyrannical regimes in the Muslim countries have been powerless to make the Islamic State deviate from its path,” the leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared in an audio recording released over the Internet, using derogatory terms from early Islamic history to refer to Christians and Shiites.

“The entire world saw the powerlessness of America and its allies before a group of believers,” he said. “People now realize that victory is from God, and it shall not be aborted by armies and their arsenals.”

Many at the rally in Baghdad said they welcomed airstrikes against Mr. Baghdadi’s Islamic State but not American ground forces, the position that Mr. Sadr has taken. Many of the 30 lawmakers backed by Mr. Sadr — out of a Parliament of 328 seats — attended the rally.

Mr. Sadr’s supporters opposed Mr. Maliki, the former prime minister, and many at the rally were quick to criticize the former government for mistakes like failing to build a more dependable army. “We had a good army, so where is this army now?” asked Waleed al-Hasnawi, 35. “Maliki gave them everything, but they just left the battlefield.”

But few if any blamed Mr. Maliki for alienating Sunnis, as American officials assert, by permitting sectarian abuses under the Shiite-dominated security forces.

Omar al-Jabouri, 31, a Sunni Muslim from a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad who attended the rally and said he volunteers with a Shiite brigade, argued that Mr. Maliki had alienated most Iraqis, regardless of their sect.

“He did not just exclude and marginalize the Sunni people; he ignored the Shiite people, too,” Mr. Jabouri said. “He gave special help to his family, his friends, people close to him. He did not really help the Shiite people, as many people think.”

But the Islamic State was a different story, Mr. Jabouri said. “It is obvious to everyone that the Islamic State is a creation of the United States and Israel.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/world ... share&_r=0

[Anthea]

Bloomberg

Tombs Bombed as Islamic State Declares War on Ancient Iraq
By Caroline Alexander and Zaid Sabah

The remains of Iraq’s ancient cultures, which survived pillaging by colonial powers, invasions and wars, are at risk of being obliterated by Islamic State militants.

The Sunni insurgents’ rampage across northern Iraq has included massacres of Shiite Muslims and other minorities. They are also destroying shrines, tombs, statues and monuments they deem idolatrous or un-Islamic, demolishing what’s left of some of the world’s oldest civilizations, according to Qais Hussein Rashid, director general of Iraq’s museums.

The looting and destruction is “worse than what happened after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and the most serious since 1845 when Iraqi antiquities were discovered” by a British-funded expedition, Rashid said by phone from Baghdad. “We’re not able to protect these sites. The priority is to protect innocent civilians.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who this month rallied regional leaders behind American military operations to counter Islamic State, is scheduled to attend a meeting in New York to discuss the threat to the country’s heritage.

More than 4,000 archaeological sites in areas the group controls in Iraq are at risk, including UNESCO World Heritage monuments at Hatra and Ashur, where remains date back 5,000 years. The Assyrian-empire city of Nimrod, whose palaces and temples were protected by colossal stone statues of winged bulls and lions with human faces, stood just to the south of Mosul, which the Sunni group seized in June. More than 600 items of gold, jewelry and precious stones found there in the late 1980s are commonly referred to as Iraq’s crown jewels.

Tikrit Castle

The militants of the al-Qaeda breakaway group have taken their war on Iraq’s rich history further south. Last week, they bombed a fortified site in Tikrit linked to 12th-century wars against Christian armies.

“We had only excavated one percent of it,” Rashid said of the ruins in Tikrit, birthplace of Salahddin Ayubi, the Muslim conquerer of Jerusalem also known as Saladin, and former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “It’s a huge loss.”

In Mosul, a shrine and pilgrimage site said to house the remains of the prophet Jonah, swallowed by a whale in Biblical and Koranic stories, was blown to dust in July, Abdulameer al-Hamdani, an Iraqi archaeologist, said.

“This wave of destruction in the north is unprecedented,” al-Hamdani, who served as an inspector of antiquities in southern Iraq until 2010, said by telephone.

Peacock Angel

Statues dedicated to renowned musicians and poets, including one to poet Abu Tammam who died in Mosul in 845 A.D., have been targeted. So have Christian churches and temples of the Yezidis, a minority that worships a chief deity known as the Peacock Angel and who were driven from their homes near Mosul by Islamic State.

The group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, has declared a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq he controls. Followers believe they are returning to the religious way of life practiced during the lifetimes of Prophet Muhammad and the early caliphs. The group’s cultural vandalism is an echo of that of the Taliban, which blew up two giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley in 2001, and Ansar al-Dine which destroyed Sufi-Muslim shrines in Timbuktu in 2012.

After seizing Mosul, Islamic State outlined strict rules on clothing and behavior, and declared a war on the worship of false idols.

Nimrod Executions

“After Friday prayers, they decide what needs to be destroyed and they go out and do it,” al-Hamdani said, citing accounts from colleagues in the region, and government and media reports. “Nobody can check the situation because it’s too dangerous.”

Executions are being staged at Nimrod, and the museum in Mosul has become an Islamic State command center, Rashid said.

What it’s not obliterating, Islamic State is hoping to sell. “This is a golden time for looters in the whole region, because of the chaos,” said al-Hamdani.

In the aftermath of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, about 150,000 items of historical value were stolen, most of which were recovered. Iraq has sent a list of antiquities to border checkpoints and asked Interpol to help monitor known black-market centers.

“We hope the anti-Islamic State coalition will speed things up so we can save what we can,” said Rashid. “Our Iraqi heritage is on the brink.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Caroline Alexander in London at calexander1@bloomberg.net; Zaid Sabah in Washington at zalhamid@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaa Shahine at asalha@bloomberg.net Mark Williams, Ben Holland

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-2 ... -past.html

[Anthea]

The Nrw Yorker

The Fight of Their Lives
By Dexter Filkins

The White House wants the Kurds to help save Iraq from ISIS. The Kurds may be more interested in breaking away.


Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish regional government. In July, he told the Kurdish parliament, “The time has come to decide our fate, and we should not wait for other people to decide it for us.”

On the evening of August 8th, Najat Ali Saleh, a former commander of the Kurdish army, was summoned to a meeting with Masoud Barzani, the President of the semiautonomous Kurdish region that occupies the northern part of Iraq. Barzani, a longtime guerrilla fighter, was alarmed.

Twenty-four hours before, fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) had made a huge incursion into the Kurds’ territory. They had overrun Kurdish forces in the western Iraqi towns of Sinjar and Makhmour, and had surged as far as Gwer, fifteen miles from the capital city of Erbil.

At the Mosul Dam, on the Tigris River, they had seized the controls, giving them the ability to inundate Baghdad with fifteen feet of water. The Kurdish army is known throughout the region for its ferocity—its fighters are called peshmerga, or “those who face death”—and the defeat had been a humiliation.

“We were totally unprepared for what happened,” Saleh told me. Kurdish leaders were so incensed that they relieved five commanders of their posts and detained them for interrogation. “It would have been better for them if they had fought to the death,” he said.

Extremely Interesting Long Article Well Worth Reading:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/ ... ight-lives

[Anthea]

White House Video

The President Meets with Prime Minister Al-Abadi of Iraq

phpBB [video]

[Anthea]

Reuters

Netherlands to send F-16s to fight Islamic State in Iraq

The Dutch government said on Wednesday it would deploy six F-16 fighter jets, which could be operational in a week, to support the U.S.-led strikes against Islamic State insurgents in Iraq.

The Netherlands, a member of NATO and a close U.S. ally, will target the ultra-radical Islamist militants in Iraq and provide training and advice to Iraqi and Kurdish regional military forces for a period of up to one year, Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher told journalists.

"We regard IS as a grave threat, not just for the region it is destabilising, not just for the (non-Muslim) minorities who are being put through the most terrible torment, but for the whole world," Asscher said, announcing the deployment of a maximum of 380 personnel to the region.

He said the Iraqi government's request for support gave the Netherlands adequate legal justification to take part in the military intervention.

There was no such clear justification in the case of Syria, but he said the Netherlands "understood" the new U.S.-led bombing campaign against IS and associated militants in the country neighbouring Iraq.

Defence Minister Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said the training personnel deployed to the region would not play a role in front-line conflict and would be stationed in as safe an environment as possible.

Although the Dutch mission will initially be in Iraqi air space, it could be broadened to include Syria, she said.

"We are not ruling out taking part in Syria, but for now we are limiting participation to Iraq and we will follow international developments," said Hennis-Plasschaert.

The decision was announced after a special cabinet meeting had been called by the government of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who was expected to detail the plan at the U.N. Security Council in New York later on Wednesday.

The United States on Tuesday launched air strikes against militant targets in Syria for the first time after weeks of operations against Islamic State strongholds in Iraq.

The Netherlands was not among nations approached by U.S. President Barack Obama at a NATO meeting in Wales earlier this month, when he was building a coalition of allies against the offshoot of al Qaeda.

Dutch military participation will also have to be approved by the 150-seat parliament, but a majority was expected to support the proposal put forward by the coalition government.

The Netherlands has 61 operational F-16s, which have been deployed in recent NATO operations and most recently took part in combat operations in Afghanistan.

(Reporting by Anthony Deutsch and Thomas Escritt, editing by Mark Heinrich; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/ ... SC20140924

[Anthea]

Who’s really dropping the bombs on Islamic State?
By Michael Corones

The beheading of French tourist Herve Gourdel by an Algerian group prompted France to consider an expanded role in the anti-Islamic State air strikes that began this week.

The Arab League, the European Union and NATO all back action against the group, and the U.S.-led coalition boasts over 50 member states, but who is really doing the heavy lifting?

As this Reuters map shows, a couple of the usual suspects — the U.S. and France — carried out Tuesday’s initial attacks. But in an expression of just how broadly dislike for the Islamic State extends, they were joined or supported by a number of Sunni-majority countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Even with Australia, England and Turkey on the cusp of involvement, the difference between the articulated coalition and those actually participating is sizable.



http://blogs.reuters.com/data-dive/2014 ... mic-state/

[Anthea]

Reuters

Wary of air strikes, Islamic State insurgents change tactics
By Raheem Salman and Yara Bayoumy

Islamic State militants are changing tactics in the face of U.S. air strikes in northern Iraq, ditching conspicuous convoys in favor of motorcycles and planting their black flags on civilian homes, tribal sources and eyewitnesses say.

They reported fewer militant checkpoints to weed out "apostates" and less cell phone use since the air strikes intensified and more U.S. allies pledged to join the campaign that began in August, saying the militants had also split up to limit casualties.

A tribal sheikh from a village south of Kirkuk said Islamic State elements "abandoned one of their biggest headquarters in the village" when they heard the air strike campaign was likely to target their area.

"They took all their furniture, vehicles and weapons. Then they planted roadside bombs and destroyed the headquarters," said the tribal sheikh who declined to be named.

"They don't move in military convoys like before. Instead they use motorcycles, bicycles, and if necessary, they use camouflaged cars," he said.

The militants have also taken to erecting their notorious black flag on the rooftops of several mostly empty residential houses and buildings, to create confusion about their actual presence.

Civilian casualties are a major concern as U.S. war planes venture deeper into the Tigris River valley and to Iraq's western desert in the name of breaking Islamic State's grip on mostly Sunni parts of Iraq -- nearly one-third of the country. France has also taken part in the air campaign.

Tribal and local intelligence sources said an air strike on Thursday near Bashir town, 20 km (12 miles) south of Kirkuk, had killed two local senior Islamic State leaders while they were receiving a group of militants from Syria and Mosul. Ongoing fighting makes it impossible to verify the reports.

EXECUTING PEOPLE LIKE DRINKING WATER

A U.S.-led coalition has started bombing the militants in Syria as well, fearing the Sunni extremist group could threaten national security from a caliphate they have declared in territory seized there and through the border into Iraq.

Arab allies have joined in and this week Denmark and Britain both pledged fighter jets to Iraq but not Syria.

In another village near Haweeja in northern Iraq, a source said the militants had ditched the use of long convoys of conspicuous vehicles with mounted machine guns and also noted their new preference for motor-bikes.

Islamic State fighters, who have controlled much of Syria's eastern oil and agricultural provinces for more than a year, swept through mainly Sunni Muslim regions of north Iraq in mid-June, seizing cities including Mosul and Tikrit and halting less than 100 miles (160 km) from the capital Baghdad.

But their recent moves suggest they are worried about the air strikes, which are backed on the ground by a largely hapless Iraqi army but a more formidable Kurdish peshmerga force.

"They were executing people like drinking water ... Now the air strikes are very active and have decreased the (militants') ability," Sheikh Anwar al-Assy al-Obeidi, the head of his tribe in Kirkuk and across Iraq, told Reuters.

"Wherever they hide, people want to get rid of them because they're afraid their houses will be struck," said Obeidi, who fled to Kurdistan this summer after Islamic State blew up his home.

SHUTTING CELLPHONES, SWITCHING CARS

The insurgents have gone underground in their main Syrian stronghold since U.S. President Barack Obama authorized U.S. air strikes on the group in Syria - which began earlier this week.

They have disappeared from streets, redeployed weapons and fighters, and cut down their media exposure, residents said.

The air strikes have by no means crippled them. Their fighters edged towards a strategic town on northern Syria's border with Turkey on Friday, battling Kurdish forces, while air strikes hit their oilfields and bases in Syria's east.

In the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala, an eyewitness said the air strikes had forced the militants to cut back the number of checkpoints which inspected identity cards, looking for those they considered "apostates": Shi'ites, policemen, soldiers.

"They have also increased the number of headquarters, instead of two, they now have 20, with only 3-4 people in each one of them," said the eyewitness.

An eyewitness in Jalawla town in Diyala also said the militants had decreased their presence on the frontline, no longer confronting army troops with large numbers.

In Tikrit, police colonel Hassan al-Jabouri said the militants had withdrawn their checkpoints from main thoroughfares in the city, retreating to side streets.

"They have also switched cars between the areas they control and our intelligence indicates that they have all changed their cell phones. These are always shut and the batteries are removed unless they need to use them," Jabouri told Reuters.

In perhaps the most obvious indication the militants are wary of the strikes, they have taken to digging and hiding in trenches -- just big enough for two people -- in residents' backyards.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/ ... N020140926

[Anthea]

Rudaw

ISIS Taunts West in Frontline Exchange

At a bridge near Kirkuk, where Kurdish and ISIS fighters are dug in just meters apart, Rudaw's Hunar Ahmed this week managed to prompt some reaction from the jihadist fighters on the frontline.

phpBB [video]

Link to Comments:

http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/270920141

[Anthea]

Can Iraq Be Saved?

Using the Sykes–Picot agreement to explain the Middle East falsely extrapolates from a single moment.

This misuse of history will lead to poor policy.

Policymakers, journalists and pundits have struggled to understand the seizure of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) on 10 June 2014, the group’s drive south towards Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of its advance. The way in which this fast-moving crisis is perceived will determine the response of leaders in Iraq, the wider Middle East and across the international system. It will not only shape the initial military response to ISIS but, much more importantly, the formulation of longer-term policies that aim to tackle the underlying causes of the group’s rise and its seizure of territory in both Iraq and Syria.

A common, if surprising, explanation of ISIS’s stunning military success involves reaching back to the Sykes–Picot agreement, a secret bargain negotiated by British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot in May 1916. Across the Arab Middle East, the story of the agreement has become a narrative depicting the perfidious influence of British and French colonial power during and after the First World War. Within the Arab political discourse, ‘Sykes–Picot’ refers to both the conquest of the Middle East by Britain during the war and the covert attempts to retain control over Arab lands in the aftermath of the conflict through the division of the region into separate states. Soon after seizing Mosul, ISIS posted photographs of its fighters demolishing barriers marking the dividing line between Syria and Iraq. Their declaration that they were ‘smashing the Sykes–Picot border’ was made in an attempt to rally wider Arab support for their movement by claiming that they were overturning a historic injustice.1

Given the infamy of the Sykes–Picot agreement, it was no surprise that Lebanese Druze politician Walid Jumblatt declared its demise in June, going so far as to present Hassan Nasrallah, his colleague and the leader of Hizbullah, with a book that explained the genesis of the deal.2 But it is alarming that both academics and senior statesmen have also used the Sykes–Picot narrative in their accounts of the crisis in Syria and Iraq.3 The portrayal of the agreement as a catalyst for a century of Middle Eastern history is empirically and analytically unsustainable. It extrapolates from a brief moment in time, employing a snapshot that does not represent the wider socio-political dynamics that unfolded across the region during and after the First World War. This misuse of history may well lead to weak policy prescriptions.

As outlined in the book that Jumblatt gave to Nasrallah, Sykes and Georges-Picot did indeed reach a secret agreement that would allow the French and the British to divide the Middle East into separate areas of influence in the aftermath of the war.4 This was at the high point of Anglo-French imperial ambition, and of their optimism about how the conflict would end. However, the confidence that underpinned the deal was questioned at the time, with the head of British military intelligence likening its creators to ‘hunters who divided up the skin of the bear before they had killed it’.5

The suppositions on which the agreement rested quickly came under siege from events both on the ground and within the international system. The British government radically changed its policy towards the Middle East twice, first in 1917 and again in 1918.6 Faced with the Russian Revolution and America’s entry into the war, Sykes himself declared that ‘imperialism, annexation, military triumph, prestige, White man’s burdens, have been expunged from the popular political vocabulary, consequently Protectorates, spheres of interest or influence, annexations, bases, etc. have to be consigned to the Diplomatic lumber-room.’7

The post-war settlements that created the majority of states in the Middle East had little connection with the Sykes–Picot agreement. Instead, they were hammered out at a series of multilateral peace conferences and meetings produced by a region and an international order that had been transformed by the war. This shift resulted from an upsurge in Arab nationalism, the emergence of a coherent Turkish state from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, the US entry into the conflict, the Russian Revolution and the subsequent dramatic reduction in French and British state power.

The misleading use of the Sykes–Picot agreement to explain the rise of ISIS highlights the inherent dangers of employing historical analogies in analyses of contemporary events.8 The use of the Sykes–Picot narrative may lend commentators a veneer of historical learning, but it also encourages them to see the current crisis in a specific and inaccurate way. Such attempts to understand the politics of the modern Middle East naturally lead to a static view of the societies in the region over the last century. Firstly, they condemn the states that came into being after the First World War as false creations, produced by exogenous machinations that were bound to fail. The policy prescriptions that originate from such an approach are clear: these false states have gained no loyalty from their populations and are thus the source of the problem; they should be replaced with smaller, more coherent units that can gain the allegiance of their citizens. Even a cursory examination of a world map should problematise such an argument. Most of the states that form the international system resulted from imperial conquest and a subsequent struggle for self-determination. Against this background, the post-colonial origins of a state do not in any way nullify its ability to function once the metropole has been driven out.

The second analytical outcome of the Sykes–Picot narrative is, if anything, even more damaging. In negating the validity, legitimacy and influence of Middle Eastern states, it seeks an alternative organising dynamic or principle, primarily the religious identity of the populations that reside in these states. By identifying faith as the key factor in the Middle East, an unchanging ‘essence’ that traces back centuries, proponents of the Sykes–Picot narrative are guilty of ‘primordialisation’. This analysis refuses to register the almost continual transformation that the region has undergone since 1916, and leads to the claim that sub-state communities there are for the most part geographically homogenous, mutually hostile and trapped in artificial, minority-dominated states. It also promotes the view that the civil wars in Iraq and Syria have been unavoidable tragedies stemming from a regional politics that has always been animated by deeply held communal antipathies.9 The narrative therefore allows religion rather than the state to become the focus of analysis and hence policy formation. Today’s Middle East can then be compared to the ‘30 years’ religious war of 17th-century Europe’, and the current crisis explained by ‘rivalries among tribes and religious sects’.10

A sustained and detailed examination of Middle Eastern states, specifically Iraq and Syria, shows that their evolution has been much more complex than the Sykes–Picot narrative would suggest, and that societal attitudes towards the state have developed through several stages. Political identities in the region have been transformed; religion is certainly a major theme, but it has merged with a vibrant nationalism that is tied to, and delineated by, the geographical boundaries of states.

The Iraqi state after regime change

When the Sykes–Picot narrative is applied to Iraq, it leads to a very rigid analysis of the country’s problems and hence to a set of misguided policy prescriptions for their resolution. Instead of blaming the exogenous creation of the state and the dominance of pre-state religious identities, such prescriptions should focus on the ways in which Iraq has been weakened since the regime change of 2003, and on methods for reforming the Iraqi state that could sustain the country in the future.

A comparative study of modern states suggests that their sustainability rests not on their indigenous or exogenous creation, but on their ability to fulfil three functions. The first of these concerns the state’s capacity to wield coercion and control the activities of its subjects. Externally, this involves a state’s power to defend its own borders, deploying its armed forces to deter other states from encroaching on, or seizing, its territory. In the post-1945 world, in which the United Nations and international law guarantee de jure, if not de facto, recognition of already demarcated borders, it has become more important for a state to use coercion to control its population, and to maintain a monopoly on the collective employment of violence within its own territory.

The second pillar of a state’s sustainability is its infrastructural power, which is determined by the delivery of government services and rule-making authority through a set of institutions that radiate out from the capital to the population as a whole.11 Measuring coercive and institutional capacity is fairly straightforward, as this is reflected in the degree to which the country experiences violence that is not instigated by the state, and the government’s ability to provide the population with services such as law enforcement, electricity and running water.

However, it is harder to gauge the final pillar of a state’s sustainability: its ideological power, or ability to be perceived as legitimate by the population. To some extent, such legitimacy can also be linked to the capacity to deliver services. As citizens’ day-to-day lives become more dependent on state institutions, they come to see its presence within society as necessary. One aspect of this process involves enrolling students in state schools, where they may be subjected to government propaganda. Another is the prevalence of television sets, which can be used as a medium for promoting state legitimacy.12

This legitimacy is closely linked to the state’s ability to harness, sustain or create a unitary nationalism within its own borders, one that ties the population together and to the ruling elite. In ways that are comparable to the use of schools and television, a state’s existence can be naturalised or ‘flagged’ in the everyday lives of citizens through its institutional presence or references to it in the media.13 Finally, stressing the ideological power at the centre of both state legitimacy and nationalism focuses attention on the state’s role in producing and manipulating ‘a set of foundational myths that define and institutionalize a particular nationalist imaginary’.14

Baghdad’s failure to repel the advance of ISIS is best understood by examining the ways in which the governments that have ruled Iraq since 2003 have systematically undermined each pillar of the state’s sustainability.

The crisis of the Iraqi state was obviously caused, in the first instance, by the collapse of the Iraqi military. The Second Division of the Iraqi army was the first to capitulate during the ISIS offensive in Mosul. The First Division had already lost two brigades as it attempted to counter the group’s pre-Mosul offensive in Fallujah and Ramadi in December 2013. It subsequently lost two more brigades in June and July. Two of the Third Division’s battalions fled the ISIS advance; half of the Fourth Division disappeared, and is believed to have been massacred by the group.15

The reasons for the speedy collapse of the Iraqi army go to the heart of the problems faced by the state as a whole. Firstly, the armed forces have been impaired by widespread corruption in Iraq. Junior officers complain that defence officials demand bribes of $3,000 for a place at the Officer Training Academy, and the price of promotion to general is as high as $30,000. Repaying the costs of gaining promotion leads to the existence of ‘ghost payrolls’ – which supply the names of fictitious soldiers to the Ministry of Defence and have defrauded it of an estimated 25% of its annual wage budget – and the embezzlement of funds earmarked for soldiers’ food and fuel.16 Reports suggest that soldiers in Mosul had to buy their own supplies from local markets and cook the food themselves.17 This level of corruption would have been obvious to front-line soldiers, undermining their ability to fight effectively while sapping their morale and willingness to defend the state.

Beyond corruption, the coherence of the Iraqi army was broken by the direct interference of Nuri al-Maliki during his tenure as prime minister. After his appointment in 2006, Maliki worked successfully to coup-proof the military, tying senior commanders and paramilitary units to him personally and thereby subverting the formal chain of command. The new Iraqi military was built with such haste that the institutionalisation of its political oversight has been fragile. With his own political vulnerability in mind, Maliki exploited this and used the Office of the Prime Minister to cement his grip on the army, special forces and the intelligence services.

Maliki secured control of the Iraqi security forces by creating two extra-constitutional organisations. The first, the Office of the Commander in Chief, was originally envisaged by US advisers as a coordinating forum that the prime minister would chair. But Maliki, quickly realising its potential importance, increased its staff, influence and reach. He moved the organisation into the Office of the Prime Minister and appointed a close ally to run it.18 The Office of the Commander in Chief then began to directly issue orders to battalion leaders, thus circumventing and, in effect, destroying the army’s chain of command.19 The office was also directly involved in the appointment and promotion of senior army staff.20

The second extra-constitutional innovation Maliki deployed to control the security forces entailed the proliferation of Provincial Command Centres. After the adoption of the Baghdad Security Plan in February 2007, the Baghdad Operations Command was created to coordinate all Iraqi forces in the city, including both the police and the military.21 Provincial Command Centres were then set up in unstable areas across south and central Iraq. The facilities brought together the command and control of the police and the army under one general in each province. These generals were chosen and directed from a Baghdad office under Maliki’s control. Thus, the Provincial Command Centres bypassed the Ministry of Defence’s command and control of the army, and gave Maliki the power to appoint and direct the most important leaders in strategically sensitive areas of the country. Unsurprisingly, the generals appointed to run the centres were politically or personally aligned with the prime minister.

The politicisation of the higher reaches of the armed forces had negative effects that were clearly visible during the collapse of the Second Division in Mosul. On 7 June 2014, Lieutenant-General Ali Ghaidan and Lieutenant-General Abboud Qanbar flew into the city to personally oversee the fight against ISIS.22 As the commander of Iraqi ground forces and the commander of joint operations respectively, they had benefited from their close relationship with Maliki. However, as ISIS advanced on the main army base in Mosul, Ghaidan and Qanbar quickly left the city, fleeing to Irbil and then flying back to Baghdad. Reports that they had made their escape disguised as civilians began to circulate soon after, further undermining the rank and file’s commitment to defending the city.

The seizure of Mosul by ISIS exposed the fact that the Iraqi army had been weakened. Meanwhile, the other two pillars of state sustainability have also been continually undermined over the last six years, if not more. The damage that corruption has inflicted on Iraqi institutions has been partly due to the muhasasa system, which has required that the governments of national unity formed in 2005, 2006 and 2010 fulfil sectarian quotas. Cabinet posts, along with the positions of prime minister and president, are allocated in line with a sectarian formula that also takes into account the number of seats that each party wins in elections. The payrolls and budgets of ministries have become the private fiefdoms of the parties to which they are awarded, fostering personal and political corruption, as well as an incoherent approach to governance.

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2013, a survey of 177 countries and territories, ranked Iraq in 171st place.23 The World Bank produced comparable figures for its Worldwide Governance Indicators, allocating Iraq just five points out of a maximum of 100 due to the failings of the country’s anti-corruption institutions.24 Graft of this level directly hinders the state’s reconstruction efforts and capacity to deliver services. Judge Rahim al-Ugaili, the most senior government figure responsible for tackling corruption during 2008–11, identified Baghdad’s contracting process as ‘the father of all corruption issues in Iraq’.25 Contracts have often been awarded to companies run by, or very close to, senior Iraqi politicians. These firms are typically given large cash payments up front, and complaints about their work are ignored due to the protection they receive from patrons in government.

The result of this corruption is abysmal government services, despite the fact that Iraq is an oil-rich country. In 2011 the UN estimated that only 26% of the population was covered by the public-sewerage network. This left 83% of the country’s wastewater untreated. Although two-thirds of Iraqi households rely on the public water supply for their drinking water, surveys conducted in 2012 suggested that as much as 25% of them received only two hours of water per day. Overall, UN figures suggest that 7.6 million people, or around one-quarter of the population, lack access to safe drinking water.26

Electricity has become the main touchstone for Iraqis who seek to judge the capacity of their state and its cause. In August 2011, with temperatures reaching 50°C, Minister of Electricity Ra’ad Shalal al-Ani was forced to resign when it emerged that he had signed contracts for developing Iraq’s electricity industry worth $1.7 billion with two suspect companies from Canada and Germany.27 Nationwide surveys carried out by the Iraqi Knowledge Network in the same year found that the average household received just 7.6 hours of electricity from the national grid each day, with 79% of those surveyed rating electricity delivery as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’.28

The weakness of power infrastructure has meant that the state has had a minimal institutional presence within Iraqi society, a situation that is widely blamed on corruption. This has led to deep alienation from the state and the widespread perception that it is being run in accordance with the narrow interests of a kleptocracy.

The final pillar of state sustainability, its ideological power, is also absent in Iraq. Opinion polls taken in the years following the regime change of 2003 showed that the Iraqi population had a strong commitment to a unified state and was bound to it by a vibrant nationalism. Surveys carried out in February and May 2004 revealed support for a strong, centralised state with Baghdad as its capital. The Iraqi Centre for Research and Strategic Studies found that 64.7% of Iraqis favoured ‘a politically centralised, unitary state as opposed to a federation’, with 67% saying that they wanted both fiscal and administrative centralisation.

Oxford Research International polls carried out in February, March and June of that year had broadly similar results. In response to the question ‘which structure should Iraq have in the future?’, 79% of respondents chose ‘one unified Iraq with a central government in Baghdad’. Although responses differed according to the ethnic and regional backgrounds of those surveyed, only 12% of Kurds and 3.8% of all Iraqis called for the country to be broken up into separate states.29

But, after the Governing Council was created in 2003, Iraqi politics was organised around the muhasasa system and most parties began to strengthen the support they received by appealing to religious and ethnic identities within their constituencies. As Iraq descended into civil war, the rhetoric used to justify the rise in civilian deaths, population transfers and mass-casualty attacks was infused with sectarian language.30 By 2006, the conflict was framed in aggressively divisive sectarian terms. This language is still used, to varying degrees, by the majority of Iraq’s ruling elite. As a result, the population has been politically mobilised, and Iraqi governments chosen and the civil war understood, using ideologies that deliberately undermine unitary nationalism in favour of sub-state identities. This is not a return to the supposedly dominant religious allegiances that, according to those who favour the Sykes–Picot narrative, have always animated Iraqi politics. Instead, it is the deliberate development or reinvention of sectarian identities by a ruling elite that judges this the best method for rallying an alienated electorate.

Against this background, ISIS’s seizure of Mosul in June and its swift advance across a wide swathe of Iraqi territory was not caused by a century-old legacy of Anglo-French colonialism. It was the direct result of the contemporary flaws within the political system set up after the regime change of 2003.

Reforming the Iraqi state

The first step in dealing with ISIS will clearly have to involve its military defeat. Nevertheless, the long-term stabilisation of Iraq will require the resolution of the political problems that created the space in which the group has thrived. Although its forerunner, al-Qaeda in Iraq, was defeated militarily by the application of US-led counter-insurgency tactics from 2007 onwards, the ‘surge’ did not tackle the underlying political dynamics that caused the Iraqi civil war, allowing ISIS to rebuild, expand its area of operations and go on to become more powerful than its predecessor.

The replacement of Maliki with new prime minister Haider al-Abadi has the potential to spur much-needed reform of the Iraqi state. However, Abadi will be required to do much more than create another government of national unity that includes a greater number of Sunni politicians. He will need to break with the approach to governing Iraq that has prevailed since 2006, if not earlier, and his first task will be to repair the damage that Maliki inflicted on the state during his eight years in office. This will certainly involve removing the ‘Maliki politburo’, his set of powerful advisers, and the Malikiyoun, his followers who have been placed in influential positions throughout Iraqi institutions.31

But to blame the rise of ISIS solely on mistakes made during Maliki’s tenure would be to severely underestimate the size of the problem that Iraq faces. The corruption eroding the Iraqi state from within is an integral part of a muhasasa system that has, in effect, privatised the Iraqi state. The system has allowed the Iraqi political elite to strip state assets for personal gain and to fund the parties they represent. It has also led to a violent and divisive language becoming the main currency of Iraqi politics. The growth of both sectarianism and corruption are the responsibility of this elite, which has maintained its power since 2003. In order to neutralise the threat from ISIS, stabilise Iraq and create a sustainable future for the country, Abadi will not only have to reform the state but persuade the elite to change. This will require them to work towards unifying a society that they played a central role in dividing, and to exchange their corrupt, secretive approach to governance for a style of leadership that is open and accountable. As a central member of that group, Abadi must recognise the difficulty of the task that he has taken on, and the obstacles that stand in his way.

Link to Notes:

http://www.iiss.org/en/publications/sur ... dodge-d058

[Anthea]

Mail Online

Female Top Gun leads UK's first Iraq combat mission: As Britain goes to war for first time in six years, two Tornado jets make sortie over jihadi territory... but drop no bombs
By Mark Nicol

Unnamed officer flew from RAF base in Cyprus on the highly dangerous sortie over IS-held territory in Northern Iraq
The sortie, lasting several hours, was the first mission for the RAF’s Operation Shader against IS militants
Pair of Tornado GR4 jets flew in support of Iraqi troops engaging IS terrorists in trench warfare below
But defence sources conceded last night that neither of the Tornados engaged the enemy
Both jets returned to RAF Akrotiri with their full payloads of rockets and ammunition intact
Americans continued their heavy bombardment of key IS strongholds around the city of Raqqa, in Northern Syria
It is believed British hostages Alan Henning and John Cantlie are being held there under threat of decapitation

A female fighter pilot yesterday led Britain’s first combat mission against Islamic State – as the RAF launched two waves of attack against the deadly terrorists.

The unnamed officer piloted one of two heavily-armed jets that flew from a top-security RAF base in Cyprus on the dangerous sortie over IS-held territory in Northern Iraq, before returning safely to complete her 2,000-mile round trip.

The sortie, lasting several hours, was the first mission for the RAF’s Operation Shader against IS militants. And last night two more Tornado GR4 aircraft took off from the Cyprus base, bound for Northern Iraq.





The first day of ‘Gulf War Three’, the first British combat missions over Iraq for six years, involved Tornados bristling with sophisticated weaponry flying in support of Iraqi troops engaging IS terrorists in trench warfare below.

Defence sources conceded last night that neither of the Tornados in the first wave engaged the enemy and both jets returned to RAF Akrotiri with their full payloads of rockets and ammunition intact – highlighting growing concern over whether Britain is pulling its weight in the coalition arrayed against IS.

The Americans by contrast, yesterday continued their heavy bombardment of key IS strongholds around the city of Raqqa, in Northern Syria, where it is believed British hostages Alan Henning and John Cantlie are being held under threat of decapitation.

The Mail on Sunday was invited to witness the first Tornados taking off, as Britain finally joined the international coalition taking offensive action against IS, which has taken control of vast areas of Northern Iraq and Syria.

The mission remained the subject of secrecy last night as defence sources refused to disclose whether the RAF pilots had flown in support of Iraqi or Kurdish fighters and whether the mission had been a success. The first mission was described as a ‘routine operational sortie’ with air crews using new rules of engagement approved by Parliament on Friday for the first time.

A defence source said: ‘The mission involved responding to a changing situation on the ground, with moving targets rather than static positions being on the agenda.

‘The aircraft were equipped with weapon systems reflecting the operational requirements but on this occasion no rockets were fired.

‘The two Tornados then flew back to RAF Akrotiri and the crews went through their routine debriefing process.

‘It is likely that further missions will take place in the days ahead.’

The MoS understands that yesterday’s first mission was conducted by No 2 Squadron RAF and followed a request for air support received on Friday evening – only a few hours after MPs voted by an overwhelming majority of 524 votes to 43 to endorse attacks on the militants in Iraq.

The requirements of the specific mission were then pieced together overnight and into yesterday morning, with officers from the RAF’s 140 Expeditionary Air Wing (EAW), which deployed to Cyprus last month, liaising with staff at Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) back in Britain.

Then, at about 9.30am and in humid conditions at the base on Cyprus’s southern coast, the chosen pilots and navigators emerged from a hangar and walked casually towards their aircraft.

They spent almost an hour inspecting every inch of the Tornados, checking for any fault which could compromise their safety. Then the crews climbed two-by-two inside their aircraft, strapped themselves and lowered the canopies.

Until yesterday, their missions, though vital, had been benign. This was the first time they could have been called upon to extinguish human life.

At around 10.30am, the Tornados rolled onto the runway and, with a deafening howl of their Rolls-Royce engines, sped across the tarmac and ascended rapidly into the overcast Eastern Mediterranean skies.

They were followed minutes later by a huge RAF Voyager refuelling aircraft, used to top up aviation gas supplies for the round trip to Northern Iraq. As a diplomatic courtesy to countries who do not wish to publicise their role in the coalition against IS, defence sources declined to disclose the flight path taken by the aircraft as they flew to and from the battlefield. The pilots were guided over IS-held territory by American flight planners.

The involvement of a woman RAF pilot comes after female pilot Major Mariam Al Mansouri of the UAE was revealed to have flown an F-16 jet in bombing raids against IS positions in Syria last week.

Yesterday, the US and other coalition countries again conducted air strikes against known IS targets inside the enemy’s heartland of Syria. Defence experts have argued that the only way to defeat IS is to target them where they are strongest but British forces remain restricted in where they may launch attacks against the jihadis. It was with great relief to all 2,500 military and civilian personnel stationed at RAF Akrotiri that the first pair of jets touched down safely at around 3.30pm local time yesterday.

Shortly afterwards, defence sources confirmed that neither aircraft undertook offensive action and that – despite media attention – the mission had been restricted to reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering.

An MoD spokesman said: ‘Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 aircraft have been flying intelligence gathering missions over Iraq for a number of weeks. Today, following the parliamentary approval given yesterday, in company with other aircraft from the international coalition, two Tornados conducted armed reconnaissance operations over areas of Iraq where the terrorists threaten the civilian population.

‘Although on this occasion no targets were identified as requiring immediate air attack by our aircraft, the intelligence gathered by the Tornados’ highly sophisticated surveillance equipment will be invaluable in developing the best possible understanding of ISIL’s disposition and help acquire potential targets for future operations.

‘Furthermore, we know that the very presence of coalition air power has a significant impact on ISIL’s efforts to attack the Iraqi people.

‘With no effective defence against air strikes, and knowing the precision with which coalition aircraft can hit them, the terrorists are forced to be much more cautious, keeping their forces dispersed and movement inhibited.

‘They also know that should they concentrate to deliver an attack against Iraqi or Kurdish troops, aircraft are likely to arrive overhead very soon afterwards.’

News of the Tornados’ first sorties came as the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that US air strikes in Raqqa killed 23 IS terrorists yesterday.

There was fierce fighting between Kurdish militia and the IS fanatics for the town of Kobani on the Syria-Turkey border, which has been besieged for the last ten days.

Most of the local population – numbering about 150,000 people – have poured into Turkey as the IS fighters battle for control of the strategically important area.

Dozens of IS extremists continued to shell the town yesterday.

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