Group items tagged

More than a month after the liberation, there is an undeniably Sunni face to the constellation of armed groups in control of the area, even if Shiite militia commanders still appear to be ultimately calling most of the shots.

A senior security official told CNN the level of the Euphrates River had dropped by 1 meter (more than 3 feet) near Amiriyat al-Falluja.

The United Nations warned Thursday that a lack of funding threatens vital aid operations supporting more than 8 million people affected by the conflict in Iraq.

statement. "Humanitarian partners have been doing everything they can to help. But more than 50% of the operation will be shut down or cut back if money is not received immediately."

Clinton’s position is Netanyahu’s. And that’s important to understand. If you want a United States with no daylight between it and any Israeli government, whatever that government may do, vote for Clinton. If you want someone who believes the Libya intervention was the right thing to do, vote for Clinton. If you think America’s problem is not torture or drones or destabilizing occupations or debt but that we don’t tell the world how great we are enough, then vote for Clinton. If you really long for 2003 again, vote for Clinton.

isn’t it amazing that after the catastrophes of the Bush-Cheney era, both parties could effectively be running neocons for the presidency in 2016! Welcome to Washington – where the past is always present, amnesia is a lubricant, and the leading Democrat is running as a neocon.

IS still controls large swaths of Iraq and neighboring Syria and has declared an Islamic "caliphate" on the territory it holds. The extremist group controls Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, as well as the city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.

But the Americans and Iranians had major differences over how to form a new Iraqi government and deal with Tehran’s support for terrorism.

diplomatic engagement with forcible actions, we could have shaped Iran’s conduc

The chance for a serious dialogue that might actually have led somewhere pretty much ended with ‘axis of evil

That prompted the Iranians to “air the possibility of a direct exchange — MEK leaders for Al Qaeda leaders,

ush administration

shut down the diplomatic channel that month after it linked the terrorist attack in Riyadh to Qaeda leaders in Iran.

Americans could not be trusted

killing more than 20 soldiers and tribesmen, the source added

At least 15 militants were subsequently killed in a gun battle, before Iraqi and US-led air strikes forced the rest of the attackers to retrea

killed another 15 soldiers and tribesmen, the source said

IS leader in charge of setting up car bombs had been killed along with four of his aides

600 and 1,000 IS militants in Ramadi.

strong defensive system in and around the city, including using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to create minefields

And you have UNHCR [the UN refugee agency] telling people how to apply for asylum.”

Many migrants instead tried their luck on the triple razor-wire fence that lines the borders of the Spanish enclave of Melilla, which more than 2,000 migrants and refugees managed to scale in 2014

t was the third boat attempting the crossing in as many days. On Sunday, the Spanish coastguard rescued 51 people making the journey, and on Monday another 47 people.

The numbers arriving on the islands nevertheless remain a far cry far from those in 2006, when more than 31,000 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands. Hundreds of others drowned or died of thirst and exposure while attempting the journey, which can take up to two weeks.

Meanwhile, the bodies of 11 migrants attempting to reach Spain’s Canary Islands by boat were recovered on Tuesday, the latest victims of a perilous migration route that appears to be regaining popularity with sub-Saharan migrants desperate to make it to Europe.

Greece has dispersed more than 2,000 refugees

Greece has dispersed more than 2,000 refugees

EU announced that over 1 million people had now claimed asylum within its borders since the start of the year.

Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis continue to be allowed into Macedonia and the Balkans

on Wednesday 11 people were confirmed to have drowned in the Atlantic Ocean during an attempt to reach Spain’s Canary Islands by boat from west Africa.

which includes asylum seekers from warring countries such as Somalia, as well as peaceful ones like Morocco.

he morning to disperse the camp,

Other observers speculate that those who have been returned to Athens will not remain for long, with many expected to try to reach northern Europe via Bulgaria or Albania instead.

On Sunday, the Spanish coastguard rescued 51 people making the journey, and on Monday another 47 people.

Rough estimates suggest that more than 400 people have arrived in the Spanish archipelago since the start of the year,

when I first asked Ismoil about ISIS after the Paris attacks, he asked me one question back: "Why do you think they did it?" I responded with the only thing I knew: "They hate us."

He said that to resolve the conflicts between extremists in the Middle East and the West, it was important to talk "human to human," but he also made it clear that he empathizes at least somewhat with the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, many of his views would be considered appalling to the vast majority of Americans, but our conversation gave me a window into the worldview of people who think the US is to blame for terrorism.

So, the question should be who is the first to be blamed? Tell both sides of the story.

You don't have to recruit people for ISIS. They're Muslims from all over the world that have seen an injustice after 25 years and want to help their brothers. What you have to understand is the Iraqi people are the most stubborn of the Muslim world. They won't accept occupation or humiliation.

People over in America ask why ISIS did this. [But] people in the Middle East ask, "Why is the US doing this to us?" Put yourself in their shoes—France is dropping bombs for a year in Iraq and [more recently] Syria, destroying everything, women, children, buildings... A bomb doesn't discriminate between ISIS or women and children—it just destroys.

Imagine the Iraq and Syrian people. After a year of bombing, you see your people killed, land destroyed, children scared to do anything more than hide in the corners all day. All this coming from bombs in the sky and you can't stop it. What would you do?

ISIS is not jihadists recruited from all over to fight. They are the Sunni Muslims that have lived through 25 years of wars, torture, and rapes. They are the Iraqi and Syrian people that have suffered from unjust wars started by the US government. And when the US government [mostly pulled out of] Iraq in 2010, the Shia and Maliki government started killing the Sunni day and night under the watch of the Americans.

My religion prohibits attacks on civilians. Unfortunately, many Muslims don't know much about Islam

What about the Planned Parenthood attack?What this man did is worse then what the doctors do. If this is what he's angry at, taking life, he did worse. Islam doesn't believe in abortion—all life is precious....[But] what he did was kill adult people who are grown. How is he trying to solve the issue?

For every action, there's a reaction. If you throw a ball against a wall, it's going to come back at you. If you throw a ball hard, it's going to come back at you hard. This is the problem with all sides in these wars. We hit you, you hit back. We hit you hard, you hit back harder. Back and forth, back and forth. Nobody wins. Both sides end up with death and destruction.

To solve the problem from the root, everyone has to become human. They need to talk, human to human. Let the people decide what they want. Leave them alone. Everyone can come together and say enough is enough. How long are we going to keep this action up? For the rest of our lives?It's the law of the jungle that we're living in right now. We were given more sense than this. We walk on two legs, with our heads high. But right now, we are walking with our heads down. We need to lift our heads up, and use the brains God created for us.

The only thing that keeps us just is Islam. Because in Islam, the peace, the justice, comes from the sky. The one who created earth and man, he knows best.

The Arabs are not radicalizing themselves. Your government action is radicalizing the Arabs

"hate the infidels,"

there are key differences between the House bill and a measure from Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), which has not yet been scheduled for a vote.

House-passed measure received the backing of the U.S. Travel Association, despite initial concerns that Congress would go too far in tightening the waiver program’s security requirements following the Paris terror attacks.

The visa waiver program was launched in the 1980s as a way of boosting business travel and tourism to the United States and hundreds of millions of people have taken advantage of the initiative.

Democrats and Republicans have sparred over stepped-up security proposals made in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. terror attacks.

While an earlier vote to suspend Syrian and Iraqi refugee admissions “showed the country and this body at its worst,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, “Today’s bill makes sensible improvements to the security of the visa waiver program.”

The House and Senate bills would require countries participating in the waiver program to issue passports with embedded chips containing biometric data, report information about stolen passports to Interpol and share information about known or suspected terrorists with the United States.

The House measure also seeks to prevent Syrian and Iraqi nationals, as well as any passport holder of a waiver country who has traveled to Syria, Iraq, Iran or Sudan since March 1, 2011 – the start of the Syrian civil war – from taking advantage of the program. These individuals would instead be required to submit to the traditional visa approval process, which requires an in-person interview at a U.S. embassy or consulate.

The Senate bill would prevent individuals who traveled to Iraq or Syria from using the program for five years. Both bills give the Department of Homeland Security secretary the authority to take countries out of the waiver system.

ISIS had killed or displaced nearly all the inhabitants, most of whom belonged to Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority.

A lone man with a rifle seemed to know where he was going. We hurried to catch up with him.

hat June, ISIS captured Mosul—the second-largest city in the country, eighty miles to the east—yet most residents still felt safe. But when ISIS moved into Sinjar the peshmerga withdrew. Hundreds of civilians were killed.

living in tents with little food or water, waiting for the day when they could return to their

A crowd had assembled around the entrance to the house.

a group of Iraqi police officers appeared. The mayor hailed them.

That night, we camped in the mountains. Early the next morning, as we navigated the ninety-three hairpin turns that led down to the town, it was easy to appreciate Sinjar’s strategic importance:

There were villages out there, too: vague compounds, water tanks, radio towers.

An explosion erupted nearby, and then gunfire. Soldiers grabbed weapons and ran into a dense collection of buildings behind us.

“He still has a gun!” someone yelled. “He’s still alive!” “Get out of there! He might blow himself up!”

“What will you do now?” I asked. Azad looked around. It was getting dark. “Go back up the mountain,” he said. He turned and walked away.

“Still alive.”

No one seemed to hear.

But Iraq’s northern front has remained relatively static. Tens of thousands of Kurdish troops man fixed positions along six hundred miles of trenches connecting Syria to Iran

When I visited the peshmerga unit on the ridge, its operations officer told me that they could easily take the town below, Bashiqa. But Mosul lies only ten miles farther, and there are numerous villages in between.

U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army and eradicated the Baath Party, it became famous for producing skilled insurgents. Iraq’s Prime Minister at the time of the American withdrawal, in 2011

Atheel al-Nujaifi, a former governor of Nineveh Province, which includes Mosul and Sinjar, told me last spring.

A few weeks later, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, emerged for the first time in years and delivered a speech—videotaped and published online—from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri. ISIS had proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate

n, Barzani’s chief of staff. “There is one thing that everybody knows,” he told me.

which have become less advantageous for Iraq as the price of oil has crashed

Lukman Faily, Iraq’s ambassador

Iraqis are willing to do the fighting on the ground

“In some ways, our economic challenges are an opportunity for us to get our house in order,” Mr. Faily said

The Kurdish region, which includes three provinces, received a percentage of Iraq’s national budget until 2014

With its major backer, the United States, now working closely with Iraq, the Kurds are faced with a familiar historical reality: They have few allies.   

But as Van Heuvelen said: “As has happened so many times in U.S. policy in Iraq, the U.S. government has acted as a firefighter rather than a proactive mediator. And the crisis only got the serious attention it deserved after it was too chaotic to solve.”

Asked if Iran had been given a message that US retaliation would not constitute an escalation, Austin said Iran was fully capable of assessing the strike and US activities.

There were no reports of injuries among US personnel after the attack but an American civilian contractor died after suffering a “cardiac episode” while sheltering from the rockets, the Pentagon said.

Iraqi officials said 10 rockets landed at the base but the Pentagon was more guarded, saying there were 10 “impacts”. It said the rockets appeared to have been fired from multiple sites east of the base, which was targeted last year by a ballistic missile attack directly from Iran.

The scope of U.S. intelligence activity in the region has drawn renewed interest in recent days, in the wake of a U.S. raid on Saturday that killed ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The CIA, as well as Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officers, tracked the ISIS chief by interviewing the wife of an al-Baghdadi aide and one of his couriers, and by recruiting local spies along the Syrian-Iraqi border.

“The oil fields are small, we blasted them after Daesh [ISIS] seized them, and they will take years to rebuild,” said one official. So why leave forces there to protect them? “Talking about oil was the only way we could talk the President into keeping any U.S. military force in the area,” the official says. On Friday, after the plan to protect the oilfields was unveiled, Trump tweeted, “Oil is secured.”

U.S. officials are worried that a humanitarian crisis and renewed fighting in the region will invite a resurgence of ISIS, which operates best in chaotic situations. Many captured ISIS fighters remain in Kurdish custody in northern Syria. Trump appeared to dismiss the danger of a renewed terrorist threat Friday, when he tweeted, “ISIS SECURED”. Esper told reporters at NATO that the U.S. mission remains preventing a resurgence of ISIS.

U.S. intelligence officials aren’t the only ones seeing evidence of war crimes. The human rights group Amnesty International reported on Friday that Turkish-backed Syrian forces have committed war crimes, including executions of Kurdish civilians.

“He is irreplaceable and indispensable” to Iran’s military establishment.

The killing of General Suleimani was a major blow for Iran and a major escalation of President Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which began with economic sanctions but has steadily moved into the military arena.

The Americans responded by bombing three sites of the Khataib Hezbollah militia near Qaim in western Iraq and two sites in Syria. Khataib Hezbollah denied involvement in the attack in Kirkuk.

Pro-Iranian militia members then marched on the American Embassy on Tuesday, effectively imprisoning its diplomats inside for more than 24 hours while thousands of militia members thronged outside. They burned the embassy’s reception area, planted militia flags on its roof and scrawled graffiti on its walls.

President Trump said on Tuesday that Iran would “be held fully responsible” for the attack on the embassy, in which protesters set fire to a reception building on the embassy compound, which covers more than 100 acres. He also blamed Tehran for directing the unrest.

General Suleimani led the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, a special forces unit responsible for Iranian operations outside Iran’s borders. He once described himself to a senior Iraqi intelligence official as the “sole authority for Iranian actions in Iraq,” the official later told American officials in Baghdad.In his speech denouncing Mr. Trump, he was even less discreet — and openly mocking.“We are near you, where you can’t even imagine,” he said. “We are ready. We are the man of this arena.”

"If the US leaves, people across the region will think that despite his flowery rhetorical devices, Trump does not really have a strategy for the Middle East and at the end of the day will fold and go home," Gerges said.

Watling questioned what Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran was aiming to achieve. Iran's long-term strategy in Iraq, on the other hand, is paying off.

Much of Iran's power in Iraq comes through militia groups that have roots in the 1980s Iraq-Iran war. Recruiting fighters from Iraq wasn't that difficult. Iraq was a Shia-majority nation led for more than two decades by brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, born a Sunni. Iran, which has long pitched itself as the world's leader of Shia Muslims, took in Shia prisoners of war and refugees, and turned them into soldiers who would go back to Iraq to act in Tehran's interests, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Some became part of what is now known as the Badr Organization, the report said, both a militia group and an anti-US political party in Iraq today.

As Iran made steady headway in the Iraqi government and military, the US' objective in Iraq has changed so many times that it's become muddy and unfocused.

According to Watling, there are now around 113,000 salaried personnel in the powerful Tehran-backed Iraqi militia group. Of those, some 60,000 are actively deployable as fighters, and of those, 36,000 are directed by Iran.

Despite achieving the regime change the US was looking for, with the capture and execution of Saddam, the US left Iraq in 2011 with an unsteady government in place. It had no choice but to send troops back to put out fires with the spread of ISIS. Iran also took part in the fight against ISIS, but it continued with its drive to boost influence in Iraq.

Anti-government protesters galvanized by deep economic grievances that have accumulated over many years have found themselves facing off with Iranian-backed forces.

By allowing private security contractors to “operate with impunity in armed conflicts”, states will be emboldened to circumvent their obligations under humanitarian law,

These pardons violate U.S. obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level.