ISIS – IRAQ - KURDISTAN : NEWS THREAD

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PUK media

People’s Protection Units (YPG) ARRIVES IN Shingal

The People’s Protection Units (YPG) arrived in the district of Shingal at the request of residents there.

The YPG started the fight against insurgents belonging to the so called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

ISIL insurgents attacked Shingal from several directions on the southern border of the district, a source in the area said, adding that the ISIL terrorists arrived in some of the Yezidi villages and residential compounds , as well as entered the center of Shingal.

The Headquarter of 17th Branch of the Kurdistan Democratic Party was occupied by the ISIL terrorists, the source clarified.

The Ministry of Peshmerga in Kurdistan Regional Government announced the start of a military operation to liberate Shingal district from insurgents of the so called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The attack on the ISIL terrorists in Shingal will be from several directions after the arrival of heavy weapons and reinforcements to the Peshmerga forces, the Ministry of Peshmerga said.

Press sources and citizens have reported the fall of Shingal district in the hands of the ISIL terrorists.

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PUK media

Atheel al- Nujaifi urges world states to help Yezidis

Mosul Governor Atheel al-Nujaifi called on the world states to help the Yezidis who are facing hard living conditions after the fall of their areas in the hands of insurgents belonging to the so called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

The biggest humanitarian crisis is happening now in Shingal after the ISIL’s invasion of the Shingal area, al- Nujaifi said.

http://www.pukmedia.com/EN/EN_Direje.aspx?Jimare=21035

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PUK media

Masum and Busztin discuss the situation in Shingal

The President of the Republic Fuad Masum met today with the Deputy Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Iraq (DSRSG), Mr. Gyorgy Busztin and his accompanying delegation.

The President and the visiting delegation discussed crisis situations and their bad effects on the lives of Iraqi families in the areas controlled by terrorist groups.

President Masum said that residents in Shingal and Zhamar, particularly Yezidis and Christians are targeted by terrorists belonging to the so called the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and asked Busztin to inform the United Nations about these developments pointing to the importance of protecting the displaced families and provide them with all their needs by all possible means.

Mr. Gyorgy Busztin, for his part, stressed that the United Nations will send aid and assistance to the displaced families.
Busztin commended the Kurdistan Regional Government for its extraordinary efforts in helping and sheltering victims of terrorism.

http://www.pukmedia.com/EN/EN_Direje.aspx?Jimare=21030

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Extremists Seize 3 More Towns in Iraq After Routing Kurdish Forces

Sunni extremists seized control of three towns in northern Iraq on Sunday after fierce battles with Kurdish security forces, sending thousands of people fleeing to the nearby mountains and threatening the country’s largest dam.

In the darkness of Sunday morning, the Sunni fighters swept in to take one of the towns, Sinjar, and set about their method of conquest, which is as familiar as it is brutal: They destroyed a Shiite shrine, executed resisters, overran local security forces and hoisted the black flag of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, above government buildings.

Hours later, as the militants demanded that the city’s residents swear allegiance to ISIS or be killed, the group’s social media campaign was underway, with photos posted online showing militants patrolling the city’s streets.

The United Nations representative in Baghdad, Nickolay Mladenov, issued a statement on Sunday afternoon, citing reports he had that as many as 200,000 civilians, mostly from the minority Yazidi community, had fled the new fighting.

“A humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in Sinjar,” Mr. Mladenov said.

In the face of stiff resistance from Shiite militias aligned with Iran that have stalled their march on Baghdad, the ISIS fighters who captured Mosul in June pushed north during the weekend. By Sunday afternoon, they were in control of two other towns after fierce battles with Kurdish security forces, known as the pesh merga, who have been increasingly thrust into battle to defend the border of their autonomous region in northern Iraq from encroachments by ISIS.

In a statement, ISIS boasted of conquering “more important areas which were controlled by the pesh merga and the secular militias.” With the new territory, which the group described as “the border triangle of Iraq, Syria and Turkey,” ISIS strengthened its hold on territory that traverses the frontiers of Iraq and Syria, giving it an even greater ability to move fighters and weapons between the front lines of the civil wars in both countries.

According to security officials and residents in the area, the Kurdish forces were routed from Zumar, a town on the road from the Syrian border that also sits on oil fields, and then Sinjar. Sinjar, an isolated city in northwestern Iraq, has been home to a sizable community of Yazidis, Kurdish speakers who ascribe to a religion that combines elements of Islam and ancient Persian religions and who are considered apostates by Muslim extremists.

Later on Sunday, the militants captured Wana, a strategic town near the Tigris River — putting them within striking distance of the Mosul Dam, the country’s largest and an important supplier of electricity and water. The dam is on the Tigris River about 30 miles northwest of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which fell to ISIS on June 10.

Yazidi residents of Sinjar, who were reached by phone, were terrified. They told of kidnappings and executions of members of their sect. One resident, Sami Hassan, said he was at work as a nurse at a hospital on Sunday when an injured ISIS fighter arrived and demanded to know the sect to which Mr. Hassan belonged.

Mr. Hassan said he had escaped from a window while being shot at.

Another local, Khudhur Rasho, said he had seen two Yazidi men executed and the members of 10 families, their hands bound behind their back, being led away by militants.

The seizure of the three towns in a triangle that stretches north and west from Mosul to the borders of Syria and Turkey allowed the extremists to expand their territory, but the capture of the Mosul Dam would be a bigger prize, and could give the militants the ability to unleash a deadly flood on large populations.

On Sunday afternoon, conflicting reports emerged about who was in control of the dam, with some local news media reporting that ISIS had captured it. But Kurdish officials and an official at the Ministry of Water Resources in Baghdad denied those reports.

Keeping the dam, and other important infrastructure of the Iraqi state, out of militant hands has been a priority of the Iraqi government and the American military advisers who recently rushed back to Iraq. The loss of the dam would be a significant blow to efforts to contain the growing crisis.

Seven years ago, a report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a Pentagon watchdog, highlighted structural problems at the dam, and its warnings about safety hinted at the catastrophic possibilities should the dam fall into the hands of ISIS. The report warned that a failure at the dam could send a 65-foot wave across parts of northern Iraq. “The worst-case scenario would be a significant loss of life and property,” the report said.

Militants have also waged a fierce battle for control of Iraq’s second-largest dam, in Haditha, on the Euphrates River in Anbar Province. There, Sunni tribes, along with some Iraqi security forces, have been able to hold off the militants’ advance. But after ISIS took control of Falluja at the end of last year, militants seized the Falluja Dam, opening its gates and flooding farmlands and cutting off the water supply to southern Iraq.

The battles over the weekend deepened the humanitarian crisis in the north, with thousands of residents fleeing the fighting to the Kurdish region, with some Yazidis seeking shelter in the crevices of the barren mountains. The Kurdish regional government is struggling to deal with tens of thousands of refugees who have sought safety there from across Iraq and Syria.

The chaos that has unfolded in Iraq over the past two months has presented the Kurds with perhaps their greatest chance in generations to realize their long-held dream of independence. It has also presented them with acute challenges, which have crystallized over the past week with the upsurge in fighting and suggest that the road to statehood for the Kurds will be long and violent.

The gains over the weekend by ISIS heightened the problems faced by American officials in Washington as they weigh how to respond to the crisis in Iraq. But decisions about a possible broader American military role in Iraq have been largely put off as Iraq’s politicians struggle to form a new government after April’s national elections.

The Kurds, who have been longtime American allies, recently asked for military assistance from the United States to fight ISIS. American officials, determined to keep Iraq together as one country, are reluctant to supply weapons to the Kurds without the approval of the central government in Baghdad. That is unlikely to happen given the worries by Iraq’s Shiite-dominated leadership that the weapons would further embolden the Kurds to form a new state.

Instead, American officials are hoping to see Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite who is struggling to secure a third term, replaced by someone who could persuade Iraq’s three main communities — Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — to form a national unity government. According to Iraq’s constitutional timeline, Iraq’s Shiite parties must choose a nominee for prime minister by Friday. The prime minister would then have 30 days to form a new government.

Omar al-Jawoshy and Falih Hassan contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/world ... .html?_r=0

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Reuters

Islamic State takes over Iraq's biggest dam

Islamic State took over Iraq's biggest dam unopposed by Kurdish fighters, who also lost three towns and an oilfield on Sunday to the Sunni militant group, witnesses said, sharply raising the stakes in its bid to topple the Baghdad government.

Control of the dam could give Islamic State, which has threatened to march on Baghdad, the ability to flood major cities.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... MC20140803

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Reuters UPDATE 8

Islamic State grabs Iraqi dam and oilfield in victory over Kurds

BAGHDAD, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Islamic State fighters seized control of Iraq's biggest dam, an oilfield and three more towns on Sunday after inflicting their first major defeat on Kurdish forces since sweeping across much of northern Iraq in June.

Capture of the electricity-generating Mosul Dam, after an offensive of barely 24 hours, could give the Sunni militants the ability to flood major Iraqi cities or withhold water from farms, raising the stakes in their bid to topple Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government.

"The terrorist gangs of the Islamic State have taken control of Mosul Dam after the withdrawal of Kurdish forces without a fight," said Iraqi state television.

But a Kurdish official in Washington told Reuters the dam was still under the control of Kurdish "peshmerga" troops, although he said towns around the dam had fallen to Islamic State forces.

"The situation has taken a turn for the worse over the weekend," said Karwan Zebari, an official with the Kurdistan Regional Government's office in Washington.

He said peshmerga fighters were preparing for a "major offensive" Sunday night to take back control of towns near the dam...

...But the towns lost on Sunday were in territory the Kurds had held for many years, undermining suggestions that the Islamic State's advance has helped the Kurdish cause....

...Maliki's opponents say the prime minister, a Shi'ite Islamist who is negotiating to try to stay in power for a third term after an inconclusive parliamentary election in April, is to blame for galvanising the insurgency by excluding Sunnis from power. Kurdish leaders have also called for Maliki to step down to create a more inclusive government in Baghdad....

Full update::

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... 6H20140803

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KRG denied that Mosul dam has been taken by ISIS. But it says that villages surrendering it are in Islamist hands and peshmergas are now fitting to regain them. Until now they retook Wane, a town on the road of the dam.

Some YPG or PYD sources states they are in Sinjar city but it is denied by KRG sources. YPG might have reached Mount Sinjar.

ISIS claims they will take more Kurdish places, probably they hope to seize all the Bashur.

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Reuters

Maliki orders air force to help Kurds against the Islamic State

Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered his air force for the first time to back Kurdish forces against Islamic State fighters after the Sunni militants made another dramatic push through the north, state television reported on Monday.

Kurdish peshmerga fighters, who cut their teeth fighting Saddam Hussein's troops, were regarded as one of the few forces capable of standing up to the Sunni insurgents, who faced almost no opposition from Maliki's U.S.-trained army during their lightning advance through the north in June.

Then on Sunday the Islamic State inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Kurds with a rapid advance through three towns to reach the Mosul Dam, acquiring a fifth oil field to fund its operations along the way.

State television and witnesses said the Islamic State had seized Iraq's biggest dam. Kurdish peshmerga officials said they had pushed militants from the dam area and were in control of it. This could not be immediately confirmed.

Despite predictions from Kurdish commanders that their forces would launch a successful counter-offensive, one senior Kurdish official urged the United States to step in and provide weapons "for the sake of fighting terrorism".

Kurdish commanders whose units came under attack from Islamic State fighters told Reuters they faced overwhelming firepower, were taken by surprise and that militants had in many cases started shooting from villages where they had struck up alliances with residents.

The areas that the Kurds lost were not part of their semi-autonomous region, but had been seized in the north after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Maliki has been at odds with the Kurds over budgets, oil and land, and tensions deepened after the Islamic State seized control of large swathes of land in the north and west of OPEC member Iraq.

HOSTILITY

In July, the Kurdish political bloc ended all participation in Iraq's national government in protest over Maliki's accusation that Kurds were allowing terrorists to stay in Arbil, the capital of their semi-autonomous region known as Kurdistan.

Opponents accuse Maliki of being an authoritarian ruler with a sectarian agenda whose alienation of Sunnis fuelled the insurgency. Currently ruling in a caretaker capacity after an inconclusive election in April, he has defied calls by Sunnis, Kurds and even some fellow Shi'ites to step aside to make room for a less polarising figure.

The Kurdish region is pressing the Obama administration for sophisticated weapons its says Kurdish fighters need to push back the Islamic State fighters threatening their region. The requested supplies include tanks, sniper equipment, armoured personnel carriers, artillery and ammunition.

The move is likely to further anger Maliki, who may see it as an attempt to circumvent the Baghdad government in a long-standing drive for independence.

For now, however, Maliki seems to have put aside his hostility with the Kurds to try to prevent further gains by the Islamic State, which has declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria it controls and threatened to march on Baghdad.

"The general commander of the armed forces has ordered the air force command to provide backup for the Kurdish peshmerga forces against the terrorist gangs of the Islamic State," state television quoted Maliki's military spokesman Qassim Atta as saying.

OVERSTRETCHED

The senior Kurdish official said the Kurds had been overstretched because they had to watch over a vast territory. "The Islamic State has also been intimidating people by carrying out beheadings," he said, asking not to be identified.

After thousands of Iraqi soldiers fled their initial advance in June, the group then known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized tanks, armoured personnel carriers, anti-aircraft guns, mortars, artillery and vehicles.

"It is a very dangerous situation for the region. Something needs to be done soon," the senior Kurdish official said.

Despite the odds, Kurdish commanders were talking tough.

One colonel said the Kurdish withdrawal was tactical and forecast that several Kurdish brigades would take back all territory lost on Sunday and even win back Mosul, Iraq's biggest northern city which is firmly in the hands of the Islamic State.

"We will attack them until they are completely destroyed we will never show any mercy," he told Reuters. "We have given them enough chances and we will even take Mosul back. I believe within the next 48-72 hours it will be over."

But commanders who had lost men in battle were not as optimistic. Kurdish peshmerga Brigadier Mashia Ramazan Fattah said the base where he was stationed came under Islamic State mortar fire for 12 straight hours through the night.

He was surprised to find that 500 peshmerga forces were outnumbered by Islamic State fighters who forced them to flee.

Another commander who asked not to be named said the Islamic State took everyone by surprise and had deployed snipers in addition to heavier weapons, and that in many cases the Kurds had simply run out of ammunition.

"We can no longer carry on fighting with just Kalashnikov rifles," he said.

(Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Peter Graff and Philippa Fletcher)

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/08/0 ... 0N20140804

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UN says tens of thousands flee IS assault in Northern Iraq

Aug 4 (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of people have fled an assault by Islamic State on the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq on Sunday and are now surrounded, the United Nations said on Monday.

Islamic State inflicted a severe defeat on Iraq's Kurds on Sunday, when it made a rapid advance through three towns to reach the Mosul Dam, the largest in Iraq and a major source of electricity.

Previously, an estimated 308,000 people lived in the district of Sinjar. As the insurgents advanced, many fled to Sinjar mountain, or Jebel Sinjar, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement.

"The exact number of displaced people on Jebel Sinjar is unknown; however, reports indicate that some 35-50,000 people displaced in nine locations, reportedly surrounded by ISIS (Islamic State) armed elements. There are reports, to be verified, of children already dying for lack of water and other assistance among those trapped," the OCHA statement said.

A further 30,000 people, mainly women and children, have made their way to Dahuk governorate in Kurdistan, with more expected in coming days, OCHA said.

"It is likely that displaced people on Jebel Sinjar are surrounded by ISIS forces. Based on a number of reports from the displaced population, there is an immediate need for water, food, fuel, shelter and health services."

The Iraqi army was assessing the possibility of humanitarian air drops over the mountain, the statement said.

Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered his air force for the first time to back Kurdish forces against Islamic State fighters after the militants made their dramatic push through the north, state television reported on Monday.

The insurgents control the two roads down the Sinjar mountain and are attacking families moving along the roads, which lead to Sinjar town and the Syrian border crossing at Rabya, OCHA said.

It added that it had not independently verified the information but that it was "assessed as fairly reliable and probably true".

The Rabya border crossing itself was contested on Monday, with armed clashes between ISIS insurgents and Kurdish peshmerga fighters, OCHA said. (Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Larry King)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... 8220140804

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Fox News

Islamic State militants fight for Iraq's two biggest dams

Militants from the Islamic State are battling ferociously to control one of Iraq's most vital resources: water.

Fighters with the group launched a three-pronged attack over the weekend in a drive to capture Haditha Dam, in western Iraq, a complex with six power generators located alongside Iraq's second-largest reservoir. At the same time, they are fighting to capture Iraq's largest dam, Mosul Dam, in the north of the country.

Seizing the dams and the large reservoirs they hold would give the militants control over water and electricity that they could use to help build support in the territory they now rule by providing the scarce resources to residents. Or they could sell the resources as a lucrative source of revenue.

They could also use the dams as a weapon of war by flooding terrain downstream to slow Iraq's military or disrupt life. They have done that with a smaller dam they hold closer to Baghdad. But with the larger dams, there are limits on this tactic since it would also flood areas that the insurgents hold.

On Friday, the fighters unleashed a powerful attack from three sides on the town of Haditha in western Anbar province. Suicide attackers tried but failed to detonate an oil tanker and several trucks packed with explosives. The aim was to obliterate the final line of defense between the militants and Haditha Dam on the Euphrates River, Lt. Gen. Rasheed Fleih, the commander of Anbar Operations Command, told The Associated Press.

For a brief moment, it seemed all was lost. The Sunni militants seized the army command headquarters in town, with very little stopping them from reaching the dam. But some local Sunni tribes who oppose the militants and feared for their livelihoods if the dam were captured sent fighters to reinforce the 2,000 soldiers guarding the town, allowing for a narrow victory. At least 35 militants and 10 soldiers were killed in clashes on Friday, Fleih said.

But the militants have been fighting every day since trying to take the town, according to four senior military sources in Anbar province. They spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the media.

Only 10 kilometers (6 miles) remain between the militants and the dam.

The jihadis are also closing in on the Mosul Dam — or Saddam Dam as it was once known — located north of Iraq's second-largest city Mosul, which fell to the militants on June 10. Fighting intensified in the region Sunday after the nearby towns of Zumar and Sinjar fell to the militants.

Kurdish forces, known as peshmerga, have managed to hold the fighters off for now, but the growing strength and savvy of these Islamic militants is raising grave concerns.

The peshmerga are "under a great deal of pressure now" as they defend a 150-kilometer (80-mile) frontline against the Islamic State group along the edges of the Kurdish autonomous zone in the north," Maj. Gen. Jabar Yawer, the official spokesman of the Kurdistan Region Guard Forces, told The Associated Press.

Full Article:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/08/04 ... territory/

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Militants in Iraq 'may use dams as weapons'

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Has the Islamic State actually captured the dams???

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PUK media

KRG Officially Asks US for Military Help: It is ‘Time for Action’

By HEVIDAR AHMED
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has officially asked the United States for armed assistance as it steps up the fight against militant jihadists who have declared their own state in conquered territories in Iraq and Syria.

Falah Mustafa, the KRG foreign minister (head of foreign relations), said that the US missions in Baghdad and Erbil had taken the Kurdish appeal “seriously” and “promised to intently look into the case.”

“We told the US representatives that the time for action has come and that the US should change its Kurdish policy from showing gratitude to showing us direct support,” Mustafa told Rudaw.

His comments came as the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, that have been a bulwark against the IS advancing into Iraq’s Kurdish-populated areas, reported receiving advanced heavy weapons and said they were ready to go on the offensive against the jihadis.

In Washington, the State Department said the US had joint operations centers in Erbil and Baghdad which were helping the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and Kurdish Peshmerga commanders by sharing intelligence information.

IS militants launched a massive attack on Kurdish-controlled areas on Sunday morning, capturing the important oil cities of Shengal and Zumar, 50 kilometers from the Syrian-Kurdish border. Heavy losses were reported on both sides.

Kurdish military officials say the Peshmarga fighters will urgently need heavy weaponry and ammunition in order to go ahead with an offensive against the jihadists.

“We told the Americans that this is a war against terror and we could not possibly go to this war all alone,” Mustafa said.

“Christians and the Yezidis must be protected. We do not wish to face this war alone. The international community must act and the US should take its responsibility. We need advanced weapons and ammunition to fight the terrorists,” he added.

The KRG defense ministry said scores of heavily armed Peshmarga troops were rushed to the frontlines on Sunday and that many more would follow.

“It is a vast area,” said Jabar Yawar, a ministry spokesman. “We need a lot of troops to protect and cover almost 40 kilometers of land.”

Yawar said tanks, mortar launchers and armored vehicles have now been stationed in surrounding areas, awaiting an order from the Kurdish president for an attack he described as imminent and all-encompassing.

Shengal and Zumar fell to the IS just days after KRG President Massoud Barzani visited the frontlines and promised troops they would have advanced weapons.

In a related development, sources told Rudaw that a number of wounded Kurdish Peshmarga fighters ended up in IS captivity, after being handed over by local Arab tribes in the Zumar area.

A Kurdish commander, who wished to remain anonymous, told Rudaw that the Arab tribes in the area had turned against the Peshmarga forces after the attacks.

“We were advised by the local people here that these tribes were collaborating with the ISIS,” he said.

http://rudaw.net/PUKmedia

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Reuters

Iran seeks alternative to Maliki to hold Iraq together: sources

Regional power broker Iran believes Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is no longer able to hold his country together and is looking for an alternative leader to combat a Sunni Islamist insurgency, senior Iranian officials said on Tuesday.

Political deadlock since an inconclusive general election in April has paralyzed efforts to fight back against Islamic State rebels who have captured swathes of northern and western Iraq and Syria and have threatened to march on Baghdad.

One Iranian official, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said Tehran was working with Iraqi factions to seek a replacement for Maliki, but there were few viable alternatives.

"We have reached the conclusion that Maliki cannot preserve the unity of Iraq anymore, but Ayatollah (Ali) Sistani still has hopes," said the Iranian official, referring to Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric.

"Now, Ayatollah Sistani also backs our view on Maliki."

"There are not many candidates who can and have the capability to preserve unity of Iraq. Our ambassador to Iraq has had some meetings in the past days with relevant groups and some of the candidates," the first Iranian official said. Political allies said Maliki, seen as an authoritarian figure whose sectarian agenda has destabilized Iraq, had no intention of stepping aside despite mounting pressure from Sunnis, Kurds, some fellow Shi'ites and now Iran.

Maliki, a relative unknown when he came to office in 2006, has stayed on in a caretaker capacity since the April vote and said he would seek a third term, despite widespread opposition.

An Iraqi minister, speaking on condition of anonymity because of sectarian tensions within the caretaker government, confirmed that there was a marked change in the position of Tehran, the biggest foreign influence in Iraq.

The United States has urged Iraqi politicians to form a more inclusive government that can unify Iraqis and take on the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda spinoff that swept through the north in June, almost unopposed by Maliki's U.S.-trained army.

(Maliki's U.S.-trained army )

The task gained more urgency over the weekend after the group captured three more towns and a fifth oilfield and reached a major dam after routing Kurdish fighters, who were seen as one of the few forces that could stand up to the militants.

CALIPHATE

The Islamic State, which has declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria it controls, poses the biggest threat to Iraq's security since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 in a U.S.-led invasion. A senior Iranian security official said Tehran was far more concerned with stabilizing Iraq than with standing by Maliki, whom it long supported. "With Maliki in power, Iraq will be divided. To fight against the Islamic State, Iraq needs a powerful government and we back this idea. A divided Iraq is a threat to Iran's national security," the second official said.

Political bickering and complex procedures are holding back efforts to form a power-sharing government as the Sunni Islamic State consolidates and fuels sectarian tensions that have returned violence to levels not seen since 2006-2007.

According to the constitution, Iraq's president has until Friday to ask the person nominated by the biggest bloc in parliament to form a government within 30 days.

But a dispute has arisen in the dominant Shi'ite alliance. Maliki insists his State of Law coalition which won 94 seats in the April parliamentary election is the biggest, while others say it should be counted as part of the alliance and therefore is not entitled to nominate a prime minister on its own.

Maliki, whose sectarian policies critics say have pushed some Sunnis including powerful and heavily-armed tribes to support the Islamic State, has shown no sign of readiness to let go of power.

After spending years on the run abroad plotting Saddam's downfall, he was thrust into power with the support of the United States and enjoyed strong backing from former President George W. Bush even as his sectarian agenda grew.

Maliki placed political loyalists in the military and government, sidelining Sunnis.

His core supporters dismissed talk of alternatives.

"Everything that has been said about changing our candidate for the prime minister post is baseless," said Mohammed al-Saihoud, a State of Law MP.

"State of Law is the biggest bloc in parliament and our only candidate is Nouri al-Maliki. It's our constitutional prerogative and we are determined to stick to this right."

Speculation has been rising that the ruling Shi'ite coalition, the National Alliance, would favor a new prime minister to end the political stalemate.

The Iraqi minister said several names have been floated.

National Alliance chief Ibrahim Jaafari, who was Maliki's predecessor, is seen as more moderate. But the trained physician was seen as ineffective against rising sectarian violence when he was in office.

Jaafari spent almost a decade in Iran from 1980 to escape Saddam's crackdown on a clandestine Shi'ite Islamist movement.

Ahmad Chalabi, the secular Shi'ite politician whose false assertions about weapons of mass destruction encouraged the Bush administration to invade Iraq, is another contender, political sources say.

Iraqi officials say behind-the-scenes attempts have been made to give Maliki a face-saving exit. Under the proposal, Vice President Khudhaier al-Khuzaie would become prime minister and Maliki would take his largely honorific job.

Much will depend on whether Maliki's powerful allies in the State of Law bloc, like Transport Minister Hadi al-Amiri, continue to support him in the face of growing opposition.

"Speaking about dissenting from State of Law is baseless. State of Law is still tightly holding together," said Razzaq Muhaibis, an MP who belongs to Amiri's Badr Organisation, once an armed Shi'ite militia.

"We had a meeting today and we decided that we will stick to Nuri al-Maliki as our candidate for the Prime Minister post," Muhaibis said.

Maliki's fate also hinges on whether Deputy Prime Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, who heads a group of independents inside State of Law, is prepared to stick by him.

He and other allies may take their cue from Sistani, the reclusive cleric seen as the voice of reason by millions of Iraqis, who has made it clear that it is time for Maliki to go.

"People like Amiri and Shahristani may decide to listen to the powerful clergy based in the sacred city of Najaf," said the minister. "In that case he (Maliki) is finished."

Under Iraq's governing system in place since the post-Saddam Hussein constitution was adopted in 2005, the prime minister is a member of the Shi'ite majority, the speaker a Sunni and the largely ceremonial president a Kurd.

(Additional reporting by Sami Aboudi in Dubai; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Paul Taylor)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... FP20140805

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The New Yorker

Will the U.S. Help the Kurds Fight ISIS?

The latest string of victories by Islamic militants in Iraq raises an enormous and obvious question: What’s the U.S. doing to help the Kurds?

This week, fighters from Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, captured the town of Sinjar and, the next day, Mosul Dam, the biggest dam on the Tigris River. These victories offer two terrifying prospects, one for humanitarian reasons, the other for strategic reasons.

Sinjar is home to several thousand members of the Yazidi sect, a religious minority with roots in Islam and Zoroastrianism. Islamist extremists, including those who make up the vanguard of ISIS, regard Yazidis as apostates. There is every reason to fear the worst about what the fighters in ISIS will do to the Yazidis. In other towns that ISIS has captured, militants have crucified and beheaded their enemies. Some two hundred thousand people are fleeing Sinjar and Tal Afar, a nearby town. A senior official with the United Nations, which is normally quite restrained in its public pronouncements, said, on Sunday, that “a humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in Sinjar.”

It gets worse. According to Iraqi state television, ISIS militants captured Mosul Dam, which regulates the water flow to Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, and to a string of towns and cities to the south. A hydroelectric plant at the dam provides electricity for much of the same area. If ISIS’s leaders decide to, they could flood cities, towns, and fields along the Tigris as far south as Karbala, south of Baghdad. The men who run ISIS have already demonstrated their capacity for far-out nihilism, so we don’t need to wonder whether they’re capable of deciding to do something like this.

What can be done? For starters, the U.S. can help the one group that is trying hardest to resist ISIS: the Kurds. The Kurds, who occupy a large swath of northeastern Iraq, now stand face to face with ISIS across a six-hundred-mile frontier. The Kurds are among America’s best friends in the Middle East; they are pro-Western, largely secular, and largely democratic. Since 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s latest attempt to launch a genocidal campaign against them was thwarted by the United States, the Kurds have more or less governed themselves. During the American war, from 2003 to 2011, not a single American soldier was killed in the Kurdish region. The Kurds regard themselves as culturally and linguistically apart from the Arabs—Sunni and Shia—who inhabit the rest of Iraq. These days, fewer and fewer Kurds even know how to speak Arabic.

And that’s the problem, at least according to the United States. Since 2003, American policy toward Kurdistan has been “one Iraq.” That is, no matter how friendly the Kurds are, no matter how pro-Western, American policy has been to keep Iraq together. That means: don’t do anything that helps the Kurds too much, lest they break away from Iraq and declare independence, which is most what most Kurds want.

Until recently, this made a certain amount of sense, even if it denied the Kurds their true desires. But, since June, when ISIS militants swept across the Syrian border and captured huge portions of northern and western Iraq, that policy has been more and more difficult to justify. The Kurds now share a huge border with ISIS-controlled territory, and only a few miles of what is left of Iraq. The Kurdish militia, called the peshmerga, fights ISIS every day. Since early this year, the Kurdish regional government, which presides over the area, has been cut off entirely from Iraq’s oil revenue—to which it is entitled by law—by the government in Baghdad. The way that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is dealing with the Kurds is the same way he dealt with the Sunni Arabs—harshly and arbitrarily. Indeed, Maliki’s actions toward the Sunnis precipitated the events that led to the ISIS takeover.

In spite of all this, the Obama Administration seems bent on squeezing the Kurds to remain part of Iraq. According to Reuters, when the Kurds recently asked for military assistance the White House told them to work with the government in Baghdad, which, as the White House well knows, is tantamount to refusing them outright. And American officials have made it difficult for the Kurds to sell their own oil, stating publicly that any company which buys oil exported unilaterally by the Kurds risks incurring legal problems. Oil, for all practical purpose, is the Kurds’ only export, a case that Kurdish officials made again this week.

The militants in ISIS have swept across much of northern and western Iraq, and there is no sign that they have any intention of slowing down. In a surprising—and encouraging—turn, Maliki has apparently ordered the Iraqi Air Force to carry out air strikes to help the Kurds. That said, the Iraqi Army has proved itself utterly ineffectual in combating ISIS. If the U.S. decided to help the Kurds, there would be no guarantee that the Kurds wouldn’t later use those weapons to further their own interests.

But what other choice is there?

If anyone is likely to slow down ISIS, it’s going to be the Kurds—regardless of whatever they’re planning to do later on.

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