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سيف الله
04-07-2017, 07:22 PM
Salaam

Analysis on the situation in Mosul

Mosul's civilian deaths: How the US destroyed Iraq

Successive US administrations have and always will be oblivious to the effect that they have had in Iraq.


In October 2016, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) strategists and commanders were fully aware of the sheer number of Iraqi armed forces that were moving in to encircle Mosul.

The operation to retake Iraq's second-largest city was officially launched last October, and in January its eastern half was declared "fully liberated". Mosul is ISIL's last major urban stronghold in Iraq.

ISIL has known for some time that its control over Mosul was coming to an end. The armed group knew that they could not match the Iraqi army and security forces' superior numbers, equipment and international support.

As the battle unfolded over the coming months, and as ISIL predictably continued to lose territory, many wonder what the armed group was actually fighting for.

A partial answer was delivered on March 17, 2017, when a coalition air strike levelled a residential area in western Mosul, killing as many as 200 civilians in the process. US forces said that they have opened an investigation, while Iraqi commanders responded bluntly that they had called in the strike to eliminate snipers who had taken positions on rooftops.

Iraqi and American commanders have suggested that the incident was the result of a carefully laid trap. According to that narrative, ISIL had deliberately been concentrating civilians together in particular buildings in the hope that they would be attacked by coalition aircraft. The immediate effect would be a pause in the bombing campaign. The long-term effect, however, was to cause for the conspiracy wheel to continue spinning.

And so it has, with great ferocity. Despite a relatively balanced government response and parliamentary debate, various media outlets have been carrying suggestions that the true death toll was much higher, and that the coalition's strategy from the start was - and had always been - to punish Iraq's Sunnis.

The rumour mill has even claimed that Iraqi and US forces took greater care to avoid civilian casualties in eastern Mosul, where there is a much larger concentration of Kurds, whereas western Mosul's larger population of Sunni Arabs were deliberately targeted.

There have been some calls to compensate relatives of those who died on March 17, 2017, but while the Coalition has not pronounced itself on that particular issue, there can be no compensation for what has happened. The Coalition has stated that its "goal is and has always been zero civilian casualties" and that "ISIS will continue to cause massive human suffering".

But that statement in and of itself barely conceals a massive contradiction, which is, and always has been, at the heart of US policy in Iraq. The US and others have long maintained that ISIL deliberately puts civilians at risk. As early as December 2015, former US President Barack Obama said that ISIL fighters "hide behind civilians, using defenceless men, women and children as human shields".

That being the case, the US had every reason to expect that its decision to destroy entire buildings to eliminate small numbers of snipers would result in massive civilian casualties. The Coalition's carefully constructed strategy was bound to lead to the current outcome.

The US' sanctimonious self-image does not fit well with its own sordid history of involvement in Iraq. The US has become so involved in Iraq's modern history that its footprint can be found everywhere. ISIL may be an outgrowth of radical ideology that was born elsewhere, but it was the United States which supported late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and which imposed a deadly embargo throughout the 1990s, turning Iraq into fertile ground for those same ideas to grow.

Iraqi security forces have systematically tortured and abused detainees, for which they are rightly condemned. But the United States firmly encouraged the practice in the post-2003 era, by allowing its own forces to torture detainees of its own.

Tellingly, however, in recent years, US officials have simply shrugged when asked to pressure Iraqi officials to engage in prison reform, attributing the problem to cultural values, oblivious to its own role in perpetuating this inhuman practice.

Iraqis will continue to die in Mosul, and those who can, will flee. Where will they go? Thousands are being left to their own devices, carrying whatever they can through the rain and the mud, in the hope that they can find some type of shelter in the wilderness.

A more humane approach to the conflict would have involved a far more robust effort to assist the displaced and the country's liberated areas. And a more intelligent approach to Iraqi and regional security would have translated into serious effort to establish some form of rule of law in the country.

But that was always beyond the US' capacity to imagine and deliver. Successive US administrations have and always will be oblivious to the effect that they have had in Iraq. Neither investigations nor compensation will solve the problem.

In the end, as with the rest of Iraq, western Mosul will be liberated from ISIL and will also recover from decades of war, bombings, occupation and corruption.

The US could make it easier for Iraq and for itself, but will almost certainly choose not to bother itself with the details.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/04/destroyed-iraq-mosul-civilian-deaths-170405072214906.html
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سيف الله
04-07-2017, 07:24 PM
Salaam

Another update

Inside IS Filmmaker Jürgen Todenhöfer Returns to Mosul

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aaj
04-07-2017, 08:31 PM
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Since October 2016, the city of Mosul, Iraq has been besieged by bullets, blasts and shells on a daily basis. Hospitals in the city have been unable to cope with the number of children, women and men who have been seriously injured.

The fighting in Mosul began six months ago and has intensified in recent weeks. Along with more than 9,000 people leaving the city every day in search of safety, hospitals are over-capacity with trauma victims coming in by ambulance.

Life is preparing to launch a project that will offer Primary Health Clinics (PHCs) in Mosul City and bring needed health care to this area. Will you help make this work possible by offering your support?

Please go to www.lifeusa.org now to make your gift online.

With your help today, Life can relieve the intense suffering in Mosul by providing primary care doctors in each PHC, as well as vital supplies, medication and food packages
.
With every day that passes, the situation in Mosul is getting worse. We need your help right away to assist as many injured and displaced people as we possibly can.

Please respond now by making your online gift.
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سيف الله
05-02-2017, 07:38 PM
Salaam

Another update

Mosul Op: 8,000 Iraq troops killed as Daesh make propaganda gains

A major international news outlet has confirmed a story broken by MEMO two months ago, revealing that Iraqi combat fatalities over the past six months in fighting against Daesh militants in Mosul has exceeded 8,000 men.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera, which has an extensive network of correspondents in Iraq, including those actively covering the operation to uproot Daesh from Mosul, reported over the weekend that an Iraqi security source had confirmed that around 8,000 Iraqi soldiers and police forces had been killed in the fight against the militant group.

According to Al Jazeera, the number of fatalities are due to the fierce defence being put up by Daesh fighters who, according to Iraqi sources, do not number more than 1,000 men focused in the remaining parts of western Mosul still under their control.

These combat deaths also do not include the fatalities suffered by Shia jihadists fighting under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), a state-sanctioned but Iran-backed paramilitary organisation said to be an Iraqi version of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Catastrophic losses

MEMO had already broken the news that Iraqi forces had suffered fatalities of 7,000 men by February, and this was a combined figure that accounted for deaths from the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga militias, police units and Shia jihadists.

At the outset of the operation to recapture Mosul from Daesh extremists on 17 October, the combined Iraqi force arrayed against the militants stood at approximately 100,000 men. Meanwhile, US estimates for Daesh fighters in and around Iraq’s second city predicted a force not exceeding 6,000 men.

Aside from the fatalities, Amaq Agency, Daesh’s media arm, has claimed that the group has inflicted hundreds of vehicle losses against the Iraqi military, including disabling a number of advanced US-made M1 Abrams main battle tanks.

Despite being outnumbered by a ratio of almost 16:1, Daesh have made use of innovative tactics to act as a force multiplier. Examples include allowing Iraqi units to advance into neighbourhoods before striking them in unsecured flanks and rear areas by making use of tunnels, using heavily armoured vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) and making extensive use of snipers and booby traps.

Although there are no reported figures on the number of wounded Iraqi troops, they are likely to number in the thousands due to the enclosed spaces imposed upon government forces and their allies by fighting in built-up areas and slow vehicle movement due to roads heavily cratered by shelling and airstrikes.

It is therefore quite possible that Daesh has inflicted catastrophic losses of at least 15 per cent total casualties.

Mosul ‘wiped out’

In what has been seen as sectarian revenge attacks for Daesh militancy and losses inflicted against Iraqi forces, troops loyal to the government have been consistently filmed and exposed for having committed numerous violations and atrocities against the civilian population in and around Mosul.

Earlier this week, a commander in Iraq’s Federal Police was filmed telling wounded soldiers that he and his men had avenged their extensive losses by “wiping out” entire neighbourhoods of Mosul.

The officer, who has been identified as Lieutenant-General Shakir Jawdat, told his wounded men how he had avenged them, using examples of other decimated Sunni Arab towns and cities:

See how Fallujah became nothing but a story? How Tikrit, Baiji, Jurf Al-Sakhar and the Jazira, all of them became an example…We avenged you 100 per cent, by Allah we wiped out the entire district using artillery and missiles.

Iraq’s Federal Police are primarily staffed by Shia jihadists from the Badr Organisation, which is a group that was founded in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Badr controls the interior ministry, and have placed militants in not only the ranks of the police, but also the military and the PMF, making them one of the most pervasive and powerful jihadist organisations in Iraq.

Children targeted

Jawdat’s admissions are not the first of their kind, and there has been a steady stream of evidence indicating that abuses have been perpetrated by the government and its allies who are supposed to be spearheading efforts to liberate civilians from Daesh’s extremist excesses.

Days after the operation began and Amnesty International warned of risk of mass human rights violations due to the involvement of Iran-backed Shia jihadists, MEMO again broke the harrowing story last year of children being beaten with hammers by troops loyal to Baghdad, as others were bundled into the back of a pickup truck, threatened with guns and insulted with sectarian slurs.

These shocking images were almost immediately followed in October by other suspected Shia militants beating a child as they interrogated him because they did not like his answers. A month later, soldiers who appeared to be wearing insignia badges for the Iraqi Special Forces, filmed themselves crushing a Sunni child under a tank.

While a number of these abuses have also been reported by international human rights organisations including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, there have been no formal investigations launched by the Iraqi government. Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi instead accused Amnesty of publishing “false information” that was endangering lives.

Daesh political victory?

In the absence of any inquiries into these abuses and others that have been perpetrated since the war against Daesh was launched in 2014, a lack of accountability and a trail of devastated Sunni cities may lead to Daesh gaining a political victory once the battle for Mosul is concluded, even if it fails militarily.

Mamoon Alabbasi, a London-based Iraqi journalist who has covered government and militia human rights abuses, told MEMO that, by doing little apart from condemning these abuses, the Iraqi government risked a continuation of the sectarian violence in Iraq.

Alabbasi said:

Many Iraqis are not judging such despicable acts by their severity, but rather by who is carrying them out. Thus the same violations, whether carried out by the so-called Islamic State [Daesh] or by the militias are judged differently. This kind of attitude allows the vicious circle of sectarian violence to continue.

These thoughts were echoed by members of the Iraqi opposition in exile.

“The government cannot on the one hand claim to be liberating the Iraqi people while at the same time slaughtering Sunni Arabs,” Ahmed Almahmoud, an analyst with the London-based Foreign Relations Bureau – Iraq (FRB) said.

Almahmoud added: “If the Green Zone regime can do nothing to stop these Iranian proxy Shia militias, then Daesh will simply say that they were right about Baghdad’s anti-Sunni sectarianism, handing the extremists a political victory.”

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20...paganda-gains/
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