ISIS – IRAQ - KURDISTAN : NEWS THREAD

[Anthea]

US jets strike near Iraq's largest dam

Up to 15 Islamic State fighters killed in air strikes near Mosul Dam, amid reports of "massacre" in Sinjar area.

US aircraft have launched air strikes near Iraq's largest dam, killing up to 15 fighters from the Islamic State group, Al Jazeera's correspondent reported.

Several air strikes hit Iraq’s north on Saturday, including in the besieged Sinjar Mountains, where fresh reports emerged of a "massacre" against residents belonging to the Yazidi religious minority.

There were suggestions that the attack near the Mosul Dam was the beginning of a US military operation to help the Kurdish forces, Peshmerga, retake it from from the self-declared jihadists, who captured it earlier this month and thereby gained control over the water and electricity supply in the north of the country.

"We understand from our Peshmerga sources on the ground that they are also trying to push in. As the US bombs these positions, the Kurdish forces are trying to retake territory lost to the Islamic State," Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Irbil, the capital of Kurdish regional government said.

The Islamic State, an al-Qaeda splinter group, has in the recent months seized swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate.

Its swift push to the borders of Iraq's autonomous ethnic Kurdish region and towards Baghdad prompted President Barack Obama to authorise air strikes on the group's strongholds earlier this month. Since then, US military aircraft have carried out several bombings and air-dropped food and water to help tens of thousands of civilians fleeing the fighters' advance.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeas ... 69151.html

Al Jazeera live blog:

http://live.aljazeera.com/Event/Iraq_2

[Anthea]

Reuters

Iraqi Sunnis say could join new government, fight Islamic State
By Raheem Salman and Michael Georgy

Tribal leaders and clerics from Iraq's Sunni heartland offered their conditional backing on Friday for a new government that hopes to contain sectarian bloodshed and an offensive by Islamic State militants that threatens to tear the country apart.

One of the most influential tribal leaders said he was willing to work with Shi'ite prime minister-designate Haider al-Abadi provided a new administration respected the rights of the Sunni Muslim minority that dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Ali Hatem Suleiman left open a possibility that Sunnis would take up arms against the Islamic State fighters in the same way as he and others joined U.S. and Shi'ite-led government forces to thwart an al Qaeda insurgency in Iraq between 2006 and 2009.

Yet amid the signs that political accords were possible in the fractious nation, some 80 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority were "massacred" by Islamic State insurgents, a Yazidi lawmaker and two Kurdish officials said on Friday.

Abadi faces the daunting task of pacifying Iraq and particularly the vast desert province of Anbar. It forms much of the border with Syria, where the Islamist fighters also control swathes of territory.

Sunni alienation under outgoing Shi'ite premier Nuri al-Maliki goaded some in Anbar to join an Islamic State revolt that is now drawing the United States and European allies back into varying degrees of military involvement in Iraq to contain what they see as a militant threat that goes well beyond its borders.

The United Nations Security Council blacklisted the Islamic State spokesman and five other militants on Friday and threatened sanctions against those backing the insurgents, giving U.N. experts 90 days to report on who those people are.

Iraq has been plunged into its worst violence since the peak of a sectarian civil war in 2006-2007, with Sunni fighters led by the Islamic State overrunning large parts of the west and north, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee for their lives and threatening ethnic Kurds in their autonomous province.

Winning over Sunnis will be vital to any efforts to contain the violence marked by daily kidnappings, execution-style killings and bombings.

Taha Mohammed al-Hamdoon, spokesman for the tribal and clerical leaders, told Reuters that Sunni representatives in Anbar and other provinces had drawn up a list of demands.

This would be delivered to Abadi, a member of the same Shi'ite Islamist party but with a less confrontational reputation than Maliki, who announced on Thursday he would stand down.

Hamdoon called for the government and Shi'ite militia forces to suspend hostilities in Anbar to allow space for talks.

"It is not possible for any negotiations to be held under barrel bombs and indiscriminate bombing," Hamdoon said in a telephone interview with Reuters. "Let the bombing stop and withdraw and curtail the (Shi'ite) militias until there is a solution for the wise men in these areas."

HISTORIC RESPONSIBILITY

Iraq's most influential Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said the handover of power offered a rare opportunity to resolve the crisis.

He told feuding politicians to live up to their "historic responsibility" by cooperating with Abadi as he tries to form a new government and overcome divisions among the Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that deepened under Maliki.

Sistani, a reclusive octogenarian whose authority few Iraqi politicians would dare openly challenge, also had pointed comments for the military, which offered no serious resistance when the Islamic State staged its lightning offensive in June.

"We stress the necessity that the Iraqi flag is the banner they hoist over their troops and units, and avoid using any pictures or other symbols,” Sistani said, in a call for the armed forces to set aside sectarian differences.

Maliki ended eight years in power that began under U.S. occupation and endorsed Abadi in a televised late-night speech during which he stood next to his successor.

The appointment of Abadi has drawn widespread support within Iraq but also from the United States and regional Shi'ite power Iran - two countries that have been at odds for decades.

"The regional and international welcome is a rare positive opportunity ... to solve all (Iraq's) problems, especially political and security ones,” Sistani said in comments that were relayed by his spokesman after weekly Friday prayers in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala, south of Baghdad.

ARMS FOR THE KURDS

After its capture of the northern metropolis of Mosul in June, a swift push by the Islamic State to the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan alarmed Baghdad and last week drew the first U.S. air strikes on Iraq since the withdrawal of American troops in 2011.

In Brussels, European Union foreign ministers decided that individual member states were free to send weapons to the Kurds, provided they had the consent of Iraqi national authorities.

Meeting in emergency session, the EU said it would also look at how to prevent the Islamic State, which has overrun some oilfields in Syria and Iraq, benefiting from oil sales.

Several European governments, including France, Britain, Germany, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, have said they will send arms to the Kurds or are considering doing so.

Sweden and Austria were among those that will not, but the 28-nation bloc avoided a repetition of last year's internal dispute over arming the Syrian rebels.

Canada is sending two military transport planes to deliver weapons to the Kurds. "Canada will not stand idly by while the Islamic State continues its murder of innocent civilians and religious minorities," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said.

In Geneva, the United Nations said around 80,000 people had fled to the relative safety of Dohuk province on the Turkish and Syrian borders, part of the 1.2 million Iraqis who have been displaced inside the country this year.

Dan McNorton of the UNHCR refugee agency said their plight was severe. "People are exhausted, people are very thirsty, these are searing temperatures," he told a news briefing.

Several thousand remained on the barren tops of the Mount Sinjar range, where members of the Yazidi religious minority fled the militants, who consider them "devil worshippers".

On Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama said the Islamists' siege of Mount Sinjar had been broken and he did not expect the United States to stage an evacuation or continue air drops.

However, McNorton said help was still needed. "That situation remains very dramatic for those people, regardless of how many people are on the mountain. It is of critical importance to ensure that they get the assistance and support that they need from the international community," he said.

The killings of Yazidis on Friday took place in a village in the north, three officials said.

"They arrived in vehicles and they started their killing this afternoon," senior Kurdish official Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters. "We believe it's because of their creed: convert or be killed."

Yazidi parliamentarian Mahama Khalil said he had spoken with villagers who said the killings took place during a one-hour period. A resident of a nearby village said an Islamic State fighter from the same area gave him details of the bloodshed.

"He told me that the Islamic State had spent five days trying to persuade villagers to convert to Islam and that a long lecture was delivered about the subject today," said the villager. "He then said the men were gathered and shot dead. The women and girls were probably taken to Tal Afar because that is where the foreign fighters are."

U.S. Central Command said U.S. drone aircraft had struck two Islamic State vehicles near a village where Peshmerga forces reported that militants were attacking civilians. It was not immediately clear whether the United States was responding to the same incident cited by Kurdish officials.

The Islamic State has also seized large parts of Syria as it tries to build a caliphate across borders drawn by European imperialists a century ago. The leader of the Shi'ite Lebanese group Hezbollah said the Sunni militants could widen their threat to include Jordan and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf states, as well as the region's varied communities.

(Additional reporting by Sarah Young in London, Tom Perry in Beirut, Adrian Croft in Brussels, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; Writing by David Stamp; Editing by Alastair Macdonald, Philippa Fletcher, Toni Reinhold)

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/08/1 ... Z620140816

[Anthea]

BBC News Middle East

Kurd forces 'advance' on Mosul dam

Kurdish sources say their forces "are advancing" in an offensive to retake Mosul dam from the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group.

A joint operation involving both Kurdish forces and US air strikes has been under way since 05:00 local time (03:00 GMT), the sources said.

The strategic dam, which supplies water and electricity to northern Iraq, was seized by the militants on 7 August.

IS has seized a swathe of territory in Iraq and Syria, displacing millions.

The reported US strikes followed nine conducted on Saturday against IS targets near the dam and the city of Irbil.

Altogether 14 vehicles manned by IS militants were hit, including armour left behind by the US forces when they left Iraq three years ago, but later seized by the militants.

The BBC's Jim Muir in Irbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, says there is a hope that the militants may be induced to leave the dam by the threat of extreme force.

The dam is seen as a vital target, not least because a breach of it could cause a disaster, sending a 20m high wall of water into the city of Mosul and on towards Baghdad, our correspondent adds.

IS 'beheadings'

Meanwhile UK Prime Minister David Cameron, writing in the UK's Sunday Telegraph newspaper, said a "firm security response" was needed to deal with IS, involving "aid, diplomacy and our military prowess".

The UK, Germany and other countries are currently delivering humanitarian aid for refugees in the north.

The offensive at the dam comes amid reports of massacres by IS militants.

At least 80 members of the Yazidi religious minority, who are ethnic Kurds, are believed to have been killed for refusing to convert to Islam in the village of Kawju. Women and children in the same village were reportedly abducted.

A Yazidi refugee from a different village, Moujamma Jazira, told AFP news agency that people there had also been massacred, after trying in vain to fight back.

Dakhil Atto Solo said that 300 men had been executed in his village. The report could not be verified independently.

IS is also accused of killing 700 tribesmen opposing them in Syria's Deir Ezzor province, over a two-week period.

"Reliable sources" reported that many of the tribesmen had been beheaded, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

In Western cities on Saturday, demonstrators marched in support of Iraq's minorities - Yazidis, Christians and others.

IS first emerged in Syria, fighting President Bashar al-Assad during the ongoing civil war there, but it has since overrun parts of northern Iraq, basing itself in the city of Mosul.

Pursuing an extreme form of Sunni Islam, it has persecuted non-Muslims and Shia Muslims, whom it regards as heretics.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28825029

[Anthea]

Guardian

Iraq voices anger as US air force defends Irbil – but not Baghdad

Resentment grows in capital over perceived American preference to fight for Kurds rather than ousted Maliki

Iraq's political class has watched with fear and envy in the last fortnight as American jets have slowed the Islamic State extremist group's advance towards the Kurdish stronghold of Irbil.

At the same time, the group, formerly known as Isis, has been trying to encircle Baghdad – untroubled by air strikes. Its manoeuvres near the national capital in recent days have consolidated gains it has made in the last two tumultuous months and made the very existence of Iraq in its current borders ever more precarious.

With a new central government only three weeks from being sworn in, Iraqi leaders are imploring the US to honour what they perceived to be an implicit deal to protect Baghdad once an inclusive leadership was installed.

Officials say that support for only one side will guarantee the end of Iraq, allowing the Isis insurgents menacing the capital to whittle away what is left of state control and terrorise large numbers of people into fleeing.

The officials, led at first by ousted leader Nouri al-Maliki, had said that only US air power could put a halt to Isis's momentum. Iraq's military had refused to fight the jihadists, surrendering large parts of the country as they advanced into Mosul and Tikrit, and towards Kirkuk.

Ever since, they have been unable to reclaim lost ground and are struggling to defend oil and energy sites that are essential to Iraq's viability. What remains of the Iraqi military is operating without US air cover. Kurdish forces, on the other hand, have taken comfort from air strikes that beat back Isis less than 30 miles to the south-west of Irbil.

On Thursday, the jihadists staged a series of attacks in an area 40 miles south of Baghdad labelled nine years ago by the US military as the "triangle of death". Iraqi military officials say that area is next to impossible to defend without strategic weapons, or US air support.

Iraq's small, American-trained air force has been busy in the skies over the country, but is unable to turn the tide against Isis. "We are hitting them 24 hours a day in Tel Keyf, Khazir, Shalalat and in Mosul," said pilot Raad Faqe, a Kurd.

"I have bombed Mosul myself. We do a lot of bombing but our weapons are not good. Our best weapon is the Hellfire [missile]. The problem with Hellfire, it does not cause major damage, but it is good in terms of hitting the target. I fly a Cessna Caravan 202 which is designed for transport purposes but we have converted it into a bomber."

Faqe confirmed that Iranian air force pilots were active above the skies of Iraq. "I have seen with my own eyes that the Iranians have brought Sukhoi planes," he said. "Everything in that unit is Iranian including the pilot and the mechanics. They are in Rasheed base, a huge base in south of Baghdad … the Iranians make barrel bombs and then use Antonov and Huey planes to drop them in Sunni areas. Some Iranian pilots have been shot down.

"When we go to bomb a place, the ground troops don't accompany us. We bomb a place and kill a few, then Isis disperses, but they regroup later."

The pilot said that five helicopters had been brought down by the militants, while another seven planes were put to the torch on an airfield in Tikrit.

As the war of attrition with Isis steadily tips in the militants' favour, resentment is growing among influential Iraqis. "The American policy is shameful," said Hassan al-Fayath, the dean of al-Nahrain University in Baghdad. "The Americans always say they are the leaders in fighting terrorism but they didn't lift a finger when Isis was taking parts of Iraq. The only time the Americans got involved was when they found it started threatening their interests by getting closer to the oil fields and to Irbil.

"Isis succeeded in securing Iraqi oil and now they have the resources to recruit more fighters and buy weapons. Why did everyone let them go that far and not intervene earlier?"

Asked whether US jets will return to the skies over Baghdad, he said: "Obama will launch more strikes to save the oil and his Kurdish friends."

Issan al-Shimary, a political analyst, said: "America said it won't intervene unless the Iraqis manage to find a new prime minister and now this has happened. This will put more international pressure on Obama to be more involved in Iraq.

"I believe the American air strikes didn't happen because they already knew … that Maliki was leaving. Now we hear about more American involvement through logistical help, weapon supplies and even sending troops to the western deserts. This has all happened as a result of the Iraqi policy changing.

"American intervention is a must. It's the most powerful country and they have the power to defeat Isis. I'm optimistic. I believe that Iraq will be a bridge to build communication between the US and Iran. It's something both parties want to do."

Not all are convinced of the merits of more US jets, though. Saleh al-Obeidi, a spokesman for influential Shia cleric Moqtadr al-Sadr, said: "Moqtadr approves [of] the US involvement in Iraq only if it is within the framework of an international rescue. But he doesn't want a new American footprint in Iraq."

Additional reporting by Mais al-Bayaa

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/a ... rds-maliki

[Anthea]

WHY should America help the Iraqi government - when it is the Iraqi government in Baghdad that has alienated the Sunnis of Iraq to such an extent that they have had no real interest in fighting against their Sunni brothers in the Islamic State

WHO should America bomb? Should they bomb the Sunni Islamic State (that now includes large numbers of Iraqi Sunnis) surrounding Baghdad? Should it bomb Baghdad - remove the government and allow the Sunnis a turn at forming a more inclusive government themselves?

???

Read my post:

Why Sunnis HATE Baghdad : WELCOME Islamic State

You will understand why the Americans should not bomb the Sunnis to defend the Shiite/Shia of Baghdad

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15442

However - the Kurds had no part in the suppression of the Sunnis and do not deserve to be dragged into what is in effect a Sunni/Shiite war - that is why Kurds and NOT the Baghdad government deserve International support

The Islamic State have attacked the Yazidis because they are an easy target

Those attacks are strategically designed to install fear into the general population - so as to discourage people from remaining in their villages to fight

Frightened people are much more likely to run leaving their empty towns and villages to the Islamic State - and enabling IS to claim yet another victory

Conclusion:

If the Sunnis had the representation that they should have been allowed within the Baghdad government - then they themselves might well have had the largest block within the government - and along with it the legal right to a Sunni PM and a chance for that PM to form the next government

If someone has a dog and keeps kicking it - one day that dog will turn round and bite - the Shiite kicked the Sunni for years and now it has turned against them - the Islamic State have given the Sunni some very sharp teeth

[Anthea]

The coming disintegration of Iraq

Inside the legacy of Nouri al-Maliki
By Joel Rayburn

Army Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University, is a historian who served as an adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. He is the author of “Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance.” The views he expresses here are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Defense.

Nouri al-Maliki may have agreed to step down as prime minister of Iraq on Thursday, but the damage he has wrought will define his country for decades to come. The stunning collapse of the Iraqi state in its vast northern and western provinces may be Maliki’s most significant legacy. After nine decades as the capital of a unitary, centralized state, Baghdad no longer rules Kurdistan, nor Fallujah, nor Mosul, and might never rule them again.

To his likely successor, Haider al-Abadi, Maliki will bequeath an Iraqi state that has reverted to the authoritarian muscle memory it developed under Saddam Hussein. But it will be a state that effectively controls not much more than half the territory Hussein did. As Maliki and his loyalists succeeded in consolidating control of the government and pushing rivals out of power, they drove the constituencies of those they excluded — especially Sunni Arabs and Kurds — into political opposition or armed insurrection. Their drive for power alienated Iraqis across all communities from the central state whose wards and clients they had once been, leaving almost no provincial population trustful of the central government. Maliki has held sway in Baghdad, but whole swaths of Iraq have fallen out of his control: The tighter he grasped the state, the more the country slipped through his fingers.

The current crisis in Iraq goes far beyond the question of who will lead the next government in Baghdad. Iraqis have entered into a civil war whose logical conclusion is the breakup of the country. What we are witnessing in Iraq today is the beginning of a process that could become at least as destructive and bloody as the breakup of Yugoslavia. The longer it is allowed to unfold, the less likely it will be stopped, and the more likely it will spill over on a large scale to destabilize the surrounding region.

It is tempting to conclude that the U.S.-led regime change of 2003 inevitably led to sectarian violence and politics in Iraq by opening up the country’s preexisting fractures. But the deep sectarianism of the past decade was neither foreordained to follow Hussein’s fall nor completely natural in Iraqi society. It was instead a calculated objective of the powerful, mainly expatriate parties that arrived in Baghdad after April 2003, bringing with them sectarian agendas that had been decades in the making. These groups, which included Maliki and the Dawa party , as well as almost all of Iraq’s major Islamist and ethnic parties, have had independent but complementary interests in polarizing the country, turning a mixed-sect, multiethnic nation into one of homogeneous ethnic and sectarian political constituencies. The result has been a devastating civil war, and an Iraq more thoroughly sorted by sect and ethnicity than ever before.

As Iraq’s major parties have carved the nation into political empires, they have in many regions allowed the state to recede from the streets, creating power and security vacuums that militant and criminal groups have been quick to fill. The creeping takeover of Sunni neighborhoods by Islamic State fighters and their fellow travelers has been well documented, but in other areas Shiite Islamist militants have roamed freely for years, with the state absent or complicit. Away from the Islamic State’s atrocities in the far north, Shiite militant groups trained by Iran to fight U.S. troops until 2011 now seem poised to insulate Baghdad and the Shiite south from the Islamic State threat. They eventually may evict Sunnis from the region around Baghdad in the name of counterterrorism, with the assistance of the Iranian regime and Lebanese Hezbollah, and with the political blessing of the Shiite Islamist political parties that on Monday nominated Abadi as their premier.

For years now, some outsiders and some Iraqi factions have called for the partition of the country as a matter of policy — a solution to the intractable political disputes. Perhaps the best-known instance was in 2006, when then-Sen. Joe Biden and Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations called for the division of the country into three autonomous regions, based on sect, with a central government that would “control border defense, foreign affairs and oil revenues.” Invoking the example of Bosnia, Biden and Gelb offered their plan as a way to keep the country intact and prevent sectarian warfare from escalating.

But as we are likely to find out in the coming years, there is no way for Iraq to be divided into three homelands for Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis without experiencing exactly the massive human misery that Biden, Gelb and others hoped partition might forestall. No clean ethno-sectarian lines already exist in Iraq, meaning that the boundaries of the various statelets would have to be fought over. The populations of northern and central Iraq in particular are so intertwined that separating people into sectarian enclaves would immediately prompt violent sectarian cleansing on a scale sure to exceed that of Yugoslavia. At least a quarter of a million non-Sunnis would probably be forced to leave Sunni-majority territories, while more than half a million Sunnis would probably be expelled from the greater Baghdad region, with those Sunni Baghdadis that remain herded into ghettos in and around the city.

There would also be millions of Iraqis caught in limbo. What would become, for example, of the large minority population that is not Sunni, Shiite or Kurd? And what would become of Iraq’s more than 1 million Turkmen? What would become of the millions of Iraqis in intermarried families of Shiite and Sunni or Arab and Kurd? The fragmenting of the country into sectarian cantons would leave these millions with no clear place to go.

Nor is it likely that the fragmentation of Iraq, once begun, would stop at just three sections. The country would be far more likely to split effectively into four pieces or more. The Sunnis of Anbar and Mosul, who have a long-standing rivalry, would be unlikely to consent to living together in one Sunnistan, where one region might be dominated by the other. They would be more likely to live in competing Tigris and Euphrates regions or statelets. Nor is it clear that, once unmoored from Baghdad, the major Kurdish parties would live together in one region where one party could rule the others. Lastly, the shrunken Shiite-majority section would be a rump Iraq stretching from Samarra to the Persian Gulf, rich in oil but certain to fall into the Iranian regime’s orbit for the foreseeable future.

Nor would the creation of these sections be the end of the matter, as then-Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak, a Sunni, warned in a 2011 CNN interview: “Dividing the country isn’t going to be smooth, because dividing the country is going to be a war before that and a war after that.” The new states or quasi-states of the former Iraq would surely enter into a long series of wars that none would be strong enough to decisively win, with a death toll unlikely to be less than the roughly quarter-million killed in the Yugoslav wars and a total displacement of perhaps one-quarter of Iraq’s population.

If Iraq fragments in this manner, either formally or de facto, there will be no way to preserve a meaningful central structure in which the different sectarian enclaves together defend the country’s borders and share natural resources. In the north in particular, Sunni Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds are more likely to war over the oil-rich disputed territories, while the governments in Baghdad and Irbil will never share oil revenue with Sunni provinces that are at war with the Shiites and Kurds. And since there are no bodies of water or mountain ranges separating Iraq from its western and southern neighbors, these conflicts will not be physically contained as the Balkan wars were. They are sure to spill over, eventually drawing in every neighbor even more deeply than they are already.

Iraq’s prospects for political stability are dim, and the country faces fundamental questions that Maliki’s impending departure will do little to solve. Reintegrating the Sunni community and provinces back into the Iraqi state would be the necessary starting point for leaders who wish to preserve their country. But the political environment that Maliki will leave behind is largely devoid of the trust necessary for partnerships and power-sharing. One reason Maliki and his allies have mightily resisted leaving power is that after eight years of rough rule, no member of his group can be fully assured that a successor party will leave them to live in peace. Similarly, what Kurdish leader believes that Sunni Arabs, if ever back in power, would not immediately attempt to push the Kurds back into the mountains and crush Kurdish nationalism? And after a decade of attempting to make Sunnis a permanent minority underclass, what Shiite supremacist does not fear what Sunnis would do if they ever regained control of Baghdad?

The enduring dilemmas that have dogged modern Iraq — the relationship between the people and the state, the relationship between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq, the relationship between Sunnis and Shiites, the relationship between Baghdad and its 18 provinces — remain unsettled. It would take a leader or movement of extraordinary vision to settle them peacefully, and no such visionary is on the horizon. It is Iraq’s strongmen, sectarians and Islamist resistance who control the path to conflict resolution. The longer they hold sway, the smaller the chance that Iraq will hold together.

It is not too late for Iraq. But soon, it will be. The civil war of the past decade has been many things: a struggle between terrorists and the state, between religious extremes, between Maliki loyalists and their rivals, between regional proxies, between sects and ethnicities that have not relearned how to coexist. But it has most essentially been a war on Iraqi society itself, slowly draining the lifeblood of one of the world’s oldest countries, which after five millennia has begun to expire before our eyes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... story.html

[Anthea]

BBC News Middle East

Kurdish forces 'retake Mosul dam' from IS militants

Kurdish forces in northern Iraq have taken control of Iraq's largest dam after its capture by Islamic State (IS) militants, Kurdish officials say.

Kurdish ground forces supported by US air strikes launched the operation to take Mosul dam on Sunday morning.

The strategically important dam, which supplies water and electricity to northern Iraq, was seized by IS militants on 7 August.

IS has seized a swathe of territory in recent months in Iraq and Syria.

The US said it destroyed or damaged 19 vehicles belonging to IS militants as well as a checkpoint in strikes round the dam on Sunday.

Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd who until last month was Iraq's foreign minister, told the BBC that Peshmerga troops encountered "fierce resistance" in the battle for the dam.

He said the next objective was to clear IS fighters from the Nineveh plain "to ensure the return of minorities".

Thousands of Christians and Yazidis have fled their homes there in the face of the IS advance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28826349

[Anthea]

Daily Mail

Britain is dragged deeper into the Iraq conflict: 150 more special forces are on the way as minister says the mission will take MONTHS

Defence Secretary says mission has escalated beyond a humanitarian one
Prime Minister warns the situation may require military action
British military planes flying deeper into Iraq to capture surveillance footage
Footage of jihadists used to help Kurdish and Iraqi forces on the ground
Soldiers from Yorkshire Regiment in the Kurdish region last week
At least 1,000 Royal Marines to be deployed to Jordan in exercise with US
Kurdish and US forces set to take back strategically important Mosul Dam
New deployment of 150 special forces troops likely to begin later this week

By David Williams and Jack Doyle

Britain was dragged deeper into the Iraq crisis last night as it emerged another 150 special forces troops are being deployed.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said the mission had escalated beyond a humanitarian one and could last for months.

British forces are now helping Iraq to ‘combat’ the rise of Islamic State and its extreme form of terrorism, he said. And in his most uncompromising intervention to date, Prime Minister David Cameron warned that the situation may now require ‘military action to go after the terrorists’.

Mr Cameron spoke amid a series of dramatic developments on the ground that will fuel concerns about mission creep and prompt fresh demands for the recall of Parliament:

British military planes are flying deeper into Iraq to capture surveillance footage of jihadist fighters which is being used to help Kurdish and Iraqi forces on the ground.

Regular soldiers from the Yorkshire Regiment were in the Kurdish region last week – despite Downing Street’s assurances there would be no ‘boots on the ground’.

At least 1,000 Royal Marines are being deployed to Jordan in a long-planned joint military exercise with the US.

Kurdish and US forces made a major advance against IS – and are poised to take back the strategically important Mosul Dam.

The new deployment of 150 special forces troops is likely to begin later this week. It will include signals specialists and electronics experts with equipment capable of intercepting voice transmissions at a distance of more than 150 miles.

There will also be men from a new SBS unit which will be used to monitor sensitive areas of the Jordanian border.

Earlier, Mr Cameron said Britain should use its military prowess to stop Islamists creating ‘a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean’. He said the UK was ‘in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology’.

The Prime Minister added: ‘If we do not act to stem the onslaught of this exceptionally dangerous terrorist movement, it will only grow stronger until it can target us on the streets of Britain.’

Until now, Britain has limited its role to aid drops, surveillance and transporting supplies to Kurdish forces. But Mr Cameron, writing in a Sunday newspaper, said: ‘True security will only be achieved if we use all our resources – aid, diplomacy, our military prowess – to help bring about a more stable world.’

He added: ‘We need a firm security response, whether that is military action to go after the terrorists, international co-operation on intelligence and counter-terrorism or uncompromising action against terrorists at home.’

While saying he did not back full-scale military involvement and ‘sending armies to fight or occupy’, Mr Cameron left open the possibility of Britain taking on a more direct role in supporting Iraqi and Kurdish troops on the ground.

Speaking on a visit to the RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus, Mr Fallon said: ‘This is not simply a humanitarian mission. We and other countries in Europe are determined to do what we can to help the government of Iraq combat this new and very extreme form of terrorism.’

Mr Fallon revealed that troops from 2nd Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment flew in as part of preparations for a helicopter mission to save stranded members of the Yazidi group on a mountainside. They were on the ground for 24 hours before flying back to Cyprus after the operation was called off.

Addressing airmen and soldiers at the base, Mr Fallon said: ‘This mission isn’t over. The humanitarian needs are there…There may well now be in the next few weeks and months other ways that we may need to help save life, protect people. We are going to need all of you again and the surveillance you are able to give us.’

In recent weeks IS fighters have seized vast swathes of land in Syria and Iraq, advancing towards Baghdad and prompting US air strikes.

Yesterday, US warplanes helped by Kurdish forces were on the brink of recapturing the Mosul Dam, which supplies water and electricity to northern Iraq, amid ‘fierce resistance’ from Islamists. It was reported yesterday that another 300 Yazidi men from the Sinjar mountain area are among their victims, with some beheaded in front of their own families.

British military planes are filming surveillance footage on jihadist fighters which is passed to the US and used to help Kurdish and Iraqi forces. The UK has more than 100 members of the SAS, SBS, Reconnaissance Regiment and signals specialists in Baghdad and around Irbil.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... onths.html

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The Guardian

US sanctions senior Isis member as Iraq bombing campaign intensifies
Spencer Ackerman in New York

The US State Department banned a senior member of the Islamic State (Isis) on Monday as the United States sharply intensified its new bombing campaign in Iraq.

The designation came as US fighter jets, bombers and drones on Monday launched 15 strikes against Isis positions around one of Iraq’s most important pieces of infrastructure, a third day of support for a difficult effort by Iraqi forces to retake the Mosul Dam that has doubled the lethal US strike total.

Now banned from any financial dealings in the United States or with people in the United States is the group’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, a Syrian whose given name is Taha Sobhi Falaha. Also banned was Said Arif, an Algerian member of the rival Nusra Front who escaped house arrest in France and was linked to a plot to bomb the Eiffel Tower.

The designations, which followed sanctions by the United Nations security council on the two Isis and Nusra members and four others, do not explicitly authorize military targeting of the banned Isis members. But they come as the US military sharply stepped up its air attacks on Isis positions by a critical dam, a departure by degree from the previous rounds of US air strikes.

The US continued to provide air cover for a third day for a force of Kurdish fighters and Iraqi security forces as they attempted to wrest the Mosul Dam away from Isis. Fighting was said to proceed along a 30-mile front, and both sides traded competing claims on Monday of control of the dam.

The US Central Command announced that a mix of manned and unmanned warplanes on Monday destroyed “nine [Isis] fighting positions”, a checkpoint, an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a truck, an “emplacement belt” for homemade bombs, and at least seven Isis vehicles.

Damage to the Mosul Dam could result in massive flooding across central Iraq and down to Baghdad. Like the previous waves of air strikes launched by the US over the past 10 days, President Barack Obama, in a letter to Congress on Sunday, justified air strikes supporting the recapture of the dam on protection of US personnel, as the hundreds of special-operations “advisers” and diplomats would be potentially imperiled by the flooding.

But last week’s strikes were aimed at breaking Isis’s siege of Yazidi and other civilians atop Mount Sinjar and preventing Isis from entering Iraqi Kurdistan. By expanding the map of US airstrikes into Nineveh Province, traditionally under the control of Baghdad, Obama moved the US closer into outright war against the Islamist army that has overrun significant parts of Iraq and Syria.

The numbers indicate the extent of the shift in approach. Over the past 10 days, US warplanes have launched 68 airstrikes. Central Command said on Monday that 35 of them have come “in support of Iraqi forces near the Mosul Dam” – meaning that just over half the total strikes have come since Saturday night.

The State Department denied that striking Isis at the Mosul Dam represented mission creep.

“Anything that threatens our people or facilities is fair game under the guidelines the president announced,” said spokeswoman Marie Harf.

Those attacks, authorized by Obama on Friday, according to the White House letter, follow a decision by Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki not to contest the elevation of his replacement, the US-backed Haider al-Abadi. For two months, Obama indicated that US military support to Baghdad would increase once Maliki, whose thorough alienation of Iraqi Sunnis contributed to Isis’s rise, was out of the picture. Many Arab Iraqis had questioned Obama’s decision to attack Isis on behalf of Iraq’s ethnic minorities and not to protect their own interests.

Obama said in his letter to Congress that the strikes on Isis at the dam would be “limited in their scope and duration”.

The State Department described Adnani, the Isis spokesman, as among “the first foreign fighters to oppose Coalition forces in Iraq.” It said Arif had fled house arrest in France last year to join an Isis rival in Syria, the al-Qaida-aligned Nusra Front, after Arif had been convicted of involvement in a 2006 plot to assault French malls, police stations and the Eiffel Tower.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/a ... am-strikes

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PUK Media

Terrorist cell arrested in Baghdad

Baghdad Operations Command announced on Monday, August 18th, the arrest of a terrorist cell carried out several criminal operations against innocent people in Baghdad.

A spokesman for Baghdad operation command Brigadier General Saaid Maan in a statement said that Federal police in coordination with intelligence federal police arrested a terrorist cell for its involvement in several criminal operations against civilians in Al- Sadr, Karada, Al- Shaeb, and Baghdad Al- Jdidah.

http://www.pukmedia.com/EN/EN_Direje.aspx?Jimare=21199

[Anthea]

Reuters

Iraq crisis: Islamic State's message to America - 'We will drown you all in blood'

The Islamic State militant group that has seized large parts of Iraq and drawn the first American air strikes since the end of the occupation in 2011 has warned the United States it will attack Americans "in any place" if the raids hit its militants.
Lizzie Dearden

A video, which shows a photograph of an American who was beheaded during the U.S. occupation of Iraq and victims of snipers, featured a statement which said in English "we will drown all of you in blood".

U.S. airstrikes in northern Iraq have helped Kurdish fighters take back some territory captured by Islamic State militants, who have threatened to march on Baghdad.

The latest advance by the Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot, sent tens of thousands of members of the Yazidi ethnic minority and Christians fleeing for their lives and alarmed the Baghdad government and its Western allies.

Unlike al-Qaeda, Islamic State has so far focused on seizing land in Iraq and Syria for its self-proclaimed caliphate, not spectacular attacks on Western targets.

U.S. President Barack Obama said at a news conference on Monday that the Islamic State posed a threat to Iraq and the entire region.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... WX20140819

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Reuters

Islamic State fighters halt Iraqi offensive to recapture Saddam's home town
By Ahmed Rasheed and Michael Georgy

Iraqi forces halted a short-lived offensive on Tuesday to recapture Tikrit, home town of executed dictator Saddam Hussein, due to fierce resistance from Islamic state fighters who have also threatened to attack Americans "in any place".

In Geneva, the United Nations refugee agency announced a major aid operation to get supplies to more than half a million people displaced by fighting in northern Iraq.

Buoyed by an operation to recapture a strategic dam from the jihadists after two months of setbacks, Iraqi army units backed by Shi'ite militias launched their offensive shortly after dawn on Tikrit, a city 130 km (80 miles) north of Baghdad which is a stronghold of the Sunni Muslim minority.

But officers in the Iraqi forces' operations room said by mid afternoon that the advance had stopped.

South of Tikrit, the government side came under heavy machinegun and mortar fire from the militants, a group of Arab and foreign fighters hardened by battle both in Iraq and over the border in Syria's civil war, the officers told Reuters.

To the west, landmines and snipers frustrated efforts to get closer to the city center in the latest in a series of attempts to drive out the militants. Residents of central Tikrit said by telephone that Islamic State fighters were firmly in control of their positions and patrolling the main streets.

Sunni Muslim fighters led by the Islamic State swept through much of northern and western Iraq in June, capturing the Sunni cities of Tikrit and Mosul as well as the Mosul dam, a fragile structure which controls water and power supplies to millions of people down the Tigris river valley.

However, on Monday fighters from Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region said they had regained control of the hydro electric dam with the help of U.S. air strikes. U.S. President Barack Obama also announced that the dam had been retaken.

The Islamic State has concentrated on taking territory for its self-proclaimed caliphate both in Syria, where it is also fighting the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, and in Iraq. Unlike al Qaeda, the movement from which it split, it has so far steered clear of attacking Western targets in or outside the region.

However, a video posted on the Internet warned Americans, in English, that "we will drown all of you in blood" if U.S. air strikes hit Islamic State fighters. The video also showed a photograph of an American who was beheaded during the U.S. occupation of Iraq that followed Saddam's overthrow in 2003.

MAJOR AID PUSH

The UNHCR refugee agency said a four-day airlift of tents and other goods would begin on Wednesday to Arbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region, from the Jordanian port of Aqaba. This would be followed by road convoys from Turkey and Jordan and sea shipments from Dubai via Iran over the next 10 days, UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said.

"This is a very, very significant aid push and certainly one of the largest I can recall in quite a while," he told a news briefing in Geneva. "This is a major humanitarian crisis and disaster. It continues to affect many people."

Coinciding with the Kurdish advances, Damascus government forces have stepped up air strikes on Islamic State positions in and around the city of Raqqa – its stronghold in eastern Syria.

Analysts believe Assad - who is firmly in control in the capital more than three years into the civil war - is seizing the moment to show his potential value to Western states that backed the uprising against him but are now increasingly concerned by the Islamic State threat.

"The Syrians are meeting the Americans, or the West, halfway in the question of fighting terrorism, and are presenting themselves as a partner in combating terrorism,” said Salem Zahran, a Lebanese journalist with close ties to the Syrian government.

The Islamic State added new fighters in Syria at a record rate in July, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict. About 6,300 men – 80 percent of them Syrian and the rest foreigners – joined last month, Rami Abdelrahman, founder of the Observatory, told Reuters.

TRYING TO TURN THE TIDE

Iraqi government forces put up little serious resistance when Islamic State staged their June offensive, while Kurdish fighters also suffered setbacks until Obama ordered the U.S. air strikes earlier this month.

Obama said he acted to protect Americans and prevent a genocide in a conflict that has forced hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to flee their homes, including from the Yazidi and Christian religious minorities.

The stalled Tikrit offensive marked a setback in Baghdad's attempts to turn the tide after the Kurds said they had taken the dam, easing fears that the militants could cut off electricity and water supplies, or even breach the structure, causing huge loss of life and damage down the Tigris.

The Islamic State's successes since June have alarmed governments both in the West and in the region.

Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in the country, said on Tuesday that the Islamic State and al Qaeda were "enemy number one of Islam" and not in any way part of the faith.

Efforts are underway in Baghdad to form a new government that will unite the majority Shi'ites with the Sunnis and Kurds in halting the Islamic State insurgency that threatened to tear the country apart.

(Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Tom Perry in Beirut; Writing by David Stamp; Editing by Anna Willard and Giles Elgood)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/ ... JL20140819

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Bloomberg

Kurd Government Strapped as Baghdad Cut Share in Budget
By Willem Marx and Mahmoud Habboush

The Kurdish Regional government hasn’t been getting its share of Iraq’s federal budget for six months, straining the autonomous administration’s finances as it tries to confront Islamist rebels rampaging through the country, Iraq Kurd Economy Minister Rebaz Mohammed said.

KRG has been grappling with inflows of refugees fleeing towns in northern Iraq that have fallen to Islamic State militants since June. The region’s finances have come under more pressure as it increases spending on its peshmerga fighters, who have been battling to stop the Sunni Islamist insurgents from taking over more cities.

Kurdistan’s share of the federal budget “has been cut,” Mohammed said in an interview with Bloomberg News yesterday. “That’s why we are facing our biggest ever financial crisis.”

Peshmerga and Iraqi forces, backed by U.S. air strikes, fought back this week after Islamic State fighters forced the Kurds to retreat as they swept toward Erbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. The Kurdish and Iraqi forces seized control of Iraq’s largest dam yesterday and are trying to retake more territory after the Islamists seized weapons and infrastructure they’re using to enforce a self-declared caliphate, or a state based on Islamic law.

While the Kurdish region’s share of the annual federal budget is normally 1.2 trillion Iraqi dinars ($1 billion), its government spent $70 million to fund Peshmerga operations and $40 million on refugees over the past month, Mohammed said.

“We have our own income,” he said. It comes “from customs, from taxes, from bureaucratic fees, part of it is from selling oil.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Willem Marx in Erbil at wmarx1@bloomberg.net; Mahmoud Habboush in Abu Dhabi at mhabboush@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaa Shahine at asalha@bloomberg.net Michael Winfrey, Kevin Costelloe

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-1 ... udget.html

[Anthea]

LiveLeak

Iraqi kurd fighters cannot remember any wars quite like one against IS

[b]Middle East Online[/b]
By Serene ASSIR – BAQUFA, Iraq

Jihadists targeting minorities are "worse than Saddam", a Kurdish commander says, standing near a sand barrier at a front line in north Iraq, the militants' black flag fluttering in the distance.The desert area was until recently under control of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, which launched a renewed push in Iraq's north earlier this month, taking ground from Kurdish forces, attacking minority groups and forcing tens of thousands of people to flee.

IS is "worse than Saddam. They use terror and chaos to force the population to flee. Then they take over," says Major General Abdulrahman Kawiri, an officer in the Kurdish peshmerga forces, puffing on a cigarette as the sun slips below the horizon.It is an emotive assertion for a member of Iraq's Kurdish community, which was targeted in a genocidal campaign in the 1980s by executed dictator Saddam Hussein's regime that killed tens of thousands of people.

Kawiri's deputy, Major General Sardar Kamal, says the Kurds' experience under Saddam is part of the reason they are so keen to join the fight against IS."We don't want history to repeat itself," says Kamal, as his men pitch tents and get ready to spend the night guarding their freshly recaptured ground, just a few dozen metres (yards) from the nearest IS position.In the distance, columns of smoke rise from the sites of American air strikes carried out in support of the Kurdish and federal security forces fighting IS.

Kawiri says the strikes have been "very, very helpful". His forces also have strong Kurdish nationalist sentiment on their side. "We are fighting a war in self-defence, and we believe in our cause," he says. - 'I had to do something' - Kamal says he has been fighting with the peshmerga since he was 16 years old. "I can't remember how many battles I've fought," he laughs, while fighters unload watermelons, ice blocks and crates of water bottles from pickup trucks bringing supplies.

The peshmerga's long experience with guerrilla war against Saddam's regime has helped the Kurds turn the tide after losing large swathes of territory to the IS in recent weeks, he says.The peshmerga's worst defeat
was the IS capture of the Mosul Dam, the country's largest, nearly a fortnight ago, but peshmerga and Iraqi security forces retook it on Sunday.Deployed just a few dozen kilometres (miles) from the dam, Kamal says he cannot remember any wars quite like this one.

IS "had the element of surprise to begin with, but now we know their tactics," says Kamal, while other peshmerga gather to listen in."They send fighters with explosives strapped around them into areas and start blowing things up. They attack the civilians -- men, women and children-- and terrorise the rest into flight. Within a short space of time, they take over," he says.

While older peshmerga fighters have a wealth of combat experience, others are facing battle for the first time.
Aram Hikmet, a slight 19-year-old carrying a large machinegun, wasn't born when Saddam's forces carried out their heaviest crackdowns on the Kurds."Iheard of the Yazidi and Christian women and children being killed," he says, referring to minorities targeted by IS. "I couldn't take it. I had to join the fight."

Another fighter, Jassem Yahya, says he came out of retirement. "I spent eight years in the Iraqi army, fighting the Iraq-Iran war" that ended in 1988, he says. "I am a good fighter," he adds. IS "was attacking ferociously. I had to do something."

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4d5_1408453085

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BBC News Middle East

Islamist militants 'kill reporter James Foley on video'

The Islamic State militant group has released a video online purporting to show the beheading of a US journalist.

The victim was identified by the militants as James Foley, a freelancer who was seized in Syria in late 2012.

The militants said it was in revenge for recent US air strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq.

The video has not been independently verified, but the White House said if it was genuine, the US would be "appalled by the brutal murder".

Foley's family wrote on Facebook: "We know that many of you are looking for confirmation or answers. Please be patient until we all have more information, and keep the Foleys in your thoughts and prayers."

Foley has reported extensively across the Middle East, working for America's Global Post and other media outlets including the French news agency AFP.
'Second prisoner'

In the video titled A Message to America, a man who appears to be James Foley is dressed in orange kneeling in desert-like terrain beside an armed man dressed in black.

The militant, who speaks with a British accent and identifies himself as an IS member, says the journalist's death is the direct result of US bombing of IS targets in Iraq.

The US has recently carried out a number of air strikes against IS militants, who have swept through large swathes of north-western Iraq.

In a statement, the Global Post ask for "prayers for Jim and his family", adding that it was waiting for the video to be verified.

US officials confirmed that they had seen the video.

White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said: "If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist and we express our deepest condolences to his family and friends."

The footage claimed to have been released by the IS also shows another prisoner identified by the militants as an American reporter.

IS supporters have recently threatened to attack American citizens, saying: "We will drown all of you in blood."

The militant group has been accused of massacring hundreds of people in areas under their control in Iraq and also in eastern Syria.

The violence has displaced an estimated 1.2 million people in Iraq.

Pursuing an extreme form of Sunni Islam, IS has persecuted non-Muslims such as Yazidis and Christians, as well as Shia Muslims, whom it regards as heretics.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28862268