Sadrs Peace Brigades prepares for Mosul offensive

longknife · May 18, 2016

What the regular Iraqi military is incapable of doing. And, what weaponry the militia has probably was stolen from government forces or bought from them. We sure left behind a stable government, didn't we?

The participation of the Shia militias in Iraqi military operations feeds the Islamic States propaganda and aids its recruiting. The Islamic State tells Sunnis that the Iraqi government is a pawn of the Iranians. The presence of organized Iranian-backed Shia militias in military operations in Sunni areas supports the Islamic States narrative.

Full story @ http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/05/sadrs-peace-brigades-prepares-for-mosul-offensive.php

Oxymoron · May 18, 2016

longknife said: ↑

What the regular Iraqi military is incapable of doing. And, what weaponry the militia has probably was stolen from government forces – or bought from them. We sure left behind a stable government, didn't we?

The participation of the Shia militias in Iraqi military operations feeds the Islamic State’s propaganda and aids its recruiting. The Islamic State tells Sunnis that the Iraqi government is a pawn of the Iranians. The presence of organized Iranian-backed Shia militias in military operations in Sunni areas supports the Islamic State’s narrative.

Full story @ http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2016/05/sadrs-peace-brigades-prepares-for-mosul-offensive.php
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Dumb ass Ignorant Neocons, ARGGGGGGG

waltky · Aug 13, 2016

Iraqis gettin' out while the gettin's good...

UN: 100,000 displaced as Iraqi forces poise for Mosul battle
August 12, 2016 The U.N. refugee agency says more than 100,000 people have been displaced as Iraqi forces clear territory ahead of the critical battle for Islamic State-held Mosul a dire statistic raising concerns that a million more could be displaced from in and around Iraq's second-largest city as the operation moves forward.

Iraq's leaders have repeatedly promised that Mosul which has been in the hands of IS militants for more than two years now will be retaken this year, though U.S. officials have said that timeline is unrealistic. About 43,000 people have been displaced from the Mosul area since March and 66,600 people from the nearby Shirgat area since June, according to UNHCR statements this week. Clearing operations in Shirgat, south of Mosul, are seeking to cut supply lines used by the Islamic State group to move fighters, equipment and provisions in and out of the Mosul area. Iraqi forces are also slowly clearing villages south of Mosul under close air support from the U.S.-led coalition. "Some days we receive 500, other days we receive 1,000 (displaced) people," said Brigadier Mahdi Younis, with Iraq's Kurdish peshmerga forces. "With every small movement of the Iraqi army, there are 1,000 more displaced." Stationed at a base in Makhmour, some 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the front lines, his men screen displaced civilians as they escape IS-held territory.

From the nearby front line near the liberated Qaraya air base, smoke billowed on the horizon from fires lit by IS fighters in an attempt to obstruct airstrikes. Outside Younis' air-conditioned office at the base, a handful of families from villages near Mosul waited at a checkpoint to be driven to a nearby camp. Some had walked for hours to reach safety, other walked for days. The Dibaga camp for the displaced, within Iraq's Kurdish region south of Mosul, is already overflowing from the influx, and thousands more have been left without shelter. Families huddling in the shade near a school playground said they arrived with nothing except what they could carry. Thousands have been forced to sleep out in the open for weeks before they are allocated a tent on the camp's edges. Without enough blankets and mattresses, many said they have resorted to sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes. In the western Anbar province, where Iraqi forces cleared cities and towns of IS earlier this year, more than a million people remain displaced, most of them unable to return home.

Overall in Iraq, more than 3.3 million people have been forced from their homes since IS first began growing in strength in early 2014, according to the United Nations. "We're not just focusing on the military dimension of the Mosul campaign," Brett McGurk, the U.S. representative to the anti-Islamic State coalition, told reporters in Baghdad on Thursday. More than a dozen nations pledged more than $590 million in humanitarian aid money for Iraq at an international pledging conference in Washington last month. But the U.N. says it still has less than half of the funds needed to prepare for the Mosul operation. The United States alone has spent more than $8.4 billion in the military campaign against the Islamic State group. As of June 21, the total humanitarian contribution to Iraq from the U.S. was $798 million since the 2014 fiscal year. Iraq's displaced are facing some of the same troubles that those who fled the civil war in neighboring Syria, where IS also controls large patches of territory, have struggled with.

Nearly 5 million Syrians have been registered with the U.N. as refugees that is, displaced beyond Syria's borders in what is the largest refugee population today. The U.N. refugee agency says a further 6.5 million are displaced inside the country. Also, some 600,000 Syrians are trapped under siege, needing urgent access to food and medical supplies, the U.N. says. A further 250,000 are trapped by government forces in the Syrian city of Aleppo. In June, when Iraqi forces were retaking the Iraqi city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, tens of thousands were left stranded in the Anbar desert in the summer heat, without shelter and with little water or food. "We had some real problems in Fallujah and we want to make sure some of those problems are not repeated in Mosul," McGurk said. "Mosul will be the biggest challenge." The humanitarian dimension of the operation "will be extremely difficult, it will not be perfect," he added.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/un-100000-displaced-iraqi-forces-poise-mosul-battle
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U.S. Commander in Iraq: Some Say the Military Campaign Against ISIS 'Is Moving Too Fast'
August 11, 2016 | "You don't hear the word 'stalemate' anymore," in connection with the fighting in Iraq and Syria, Lt.-Gen. Sean MacFarland, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, told reporters on Wednesday.

"That's because over the past year, with our partners, we were able to seize the initiative. We now talk about maintaining the momentum of the campaign in both Iraq and Syria. In other words, we spend more time thinking about what we will do to the enemy than we spend thinking about what the enemy might do to us. "But even success can beget problems, and we've heard concern from quarters that the military campaign is moving too fast. Well, from my perspective, that is not a bad problem to have."

A reporter asked MacFarland, Who is saying the campaign is moving too fast? "I'll tell you, it tends to come from some of the humanitarian folks who are trying to make sure that they have all of the humanitarian assistance lined up for internally displaced personnel, IDPs, as we call them. They're trying to make sure that there is no humanitarian crisis as a result of our successes."

ISIS has destroyed and booby-trapped some of the cities it once held as coalition forces pushed them out. Mosul, which the enemy still holds, and which the U.S. intends to liberate, has a population of around a million people. "We want to conduct the campaign to liberate Mosul in a way that leaves the city largely intact and its people in good health," MacFarland said.

He told reporters that the recent progress against Daesh in Iraq and Syria has been "remarkable," with the enemy now "in retreat on all fronts." "Yes, we modified the type and level of support we (the U.S.) provided over the course of the past year, but we have not fundamentally altered the paradigm of train and equip, advise and assist."

To prove his point, MacFarland gave numbers:
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longknife · Aug 13, 2016

The Iraqi government is so splintered that it has no control over its territory Sadr's militia is far better organized and will clearly take control of territory the government is unable to.

waltky · Aug 15, 2016

Peshmerga begin advance toward Mosul...

Peshmerga launch operation to clear villages east of Mosul
Monday 15th August, 2016 - Iraqi Kurdish forces say they have retaken five villages east of the Islamic State-held city of Mosul

Iraqi Kurdish forces say they have retaken five villages east of the Islamic State-held city of Mosul in an operation launched early Sunday. U.S.-backed Kurdish forces known as peshmerga aim to "clear several more villages" in "one of many shaping operations" that will increase pressure on the extremist group, the Kurdish region's Security Council said in a statement. Peshmerga Brig. Gen. Dedewan Khurshid Tofiq described the operation outside Mosul as "ongoing." Rudaw, a local television network, showed footage of smoke rising from a village in the distance as armored vehicles pushed across a field.

The council's statement said the area cleared is about 50 square kilometers (20 square miles). It said the U.S.-led coalition is supporting the operation with airstrikes, one of which destroyed a car bomb. Iraq's Health Ministry meanwhile said a fire which swept through the maternity ward of a hospital in Baghdad last week was a "crime" and not an accident, without providing further details. The blaze in the capital's Yarmouk hospital killed 13 people, according to the ministry's statement.

Also on Sunday, Iraqi President Fuad Masoum approved the death sentences of 36 men sentenced to hang over the June 2014 massacre of hundreds of military recruits based near the central city of Tikrit. The Islamic State group massacred the soldiers and buried them in mass graves during its lightning advance across Iraq that summer. Iraqi forces have made steady progress against the extremists in recent months, and Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, is the group's last remaining urban stronghold in the country.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_IRAQ?SITE=KTVB&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
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Kurdish forces launch fresh thrust to retake Mosul from Islamic State
14 Aug 2016: Kurdish Peshmerga forces launched a fresh attack on Islamic State (IS) forces early on Sunday as part of a campaign to capture Mosul, the militants' de facto capital in Iraq, Kurdish officials said.

The advance began after heavy shelling and air strikes by a United States-led coalition against IS forces, a Reuters correspondent reported from Wardak, 30 km (19 miles) southeast of Mosul. The militants fought back, firing mortars at the advancing troops and detonating at least two car bombs. A Peshmerga commander said a dozen villages had been taken from the ultra-hardline Sunni militants as Kurdish forces headed towards Gwer, the target of the operation, 40 km (25 miles) southeast of Mosul. Repairing a bridge that the militants destroyed in Gwer would allow the Peshmerga to open a new front around Mosul. The bridge crosses the Grand Zab river that flows into the Tigris. IS said in a statement on its Amaq news service that two car bombs driven by suicide fighters were detonated in one of the villages to block advancing Kurdish forces, causing casualties among the Peshmerga.

Authorities in autonomous Kurdistan gave no toll for the fighting, other than confirming the death of a Kurdish TV cameraman and the injury of another journalist. Clouds of black smoke rose from the scene of fighting and dozens of civilians fled in the direction of Peshmerga lines, brandishing white flags. The Iraqi army and the Peshmerga forces of the Kurdish self-rule region are gradually taking up positions around Mosul, 400 km (250 miles) north of the capital Baghdad. It was from Mosul's Grand Mosque in 2014 that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a "caliphate" spanning regions of Iraq and Syria.

BIGGEST CITY IN ISLAMIC STATE HANDS

Mosul is the largest urban centre under the militants' control, and had a pre-war population of nearly 2 million. Its fall would mark the effective defeat of Islamic State in Iraq, according to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who has said he aims to retake the city this year. The Iraqi army is trying to close in from the south. In July it captured the Qayyara airfield, 60 km (35 miles) south of Mosul, which is to serve as the main staging post for the anticipated offensive. The Peshmerga operation on Sunday was "one of many shaping operations that will also increase pressure on ISIL in and around Mosul," said an official from the Kurdistan Regional Security Council, using another acronym to refer to IS.

"Noose tightening around #ISIL terrorists: #Peshmerga advancing east of #Mosul, #ISF shoring up south near #Qayyara,"tweeted Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting the militant group. Preparations for the offensive on Mosul are "approaching the final phase," McGurk told reporters during a visit to Baghdad on Thursday. He said the planning included considerations for humanitarian aid to uprooted civilians. Once the fighting intensifies around Mosul, up to one million people could be driven from their homes in northern Iraq, posing "a massive humanitarian problem", the International Committee of the Red Cross forecast last month.More than 3.4 million people have already been forced by conflict to leave their homes across Iraq, taking refuge in areas under control of the government or in the Kurdish region.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/kurdish-forces-in-fresh-p/3042150.html
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longknife · Aug 16, 2016

Well, it seems the Iraqi government Obama left stable and free has to turn to militias and tribal forces to do what it can't.

waltky · Aug 17, 2016

Kurds advance on Mosul...

Iraqi Kurdish Troops Take More Ground East of ISIS-Held Mosul
Aug 16, 2016 A small unit of Kurdish peshmerga forces huddled in an abandoned home on the edge of Qarqashah, one of a dozen villages east of the Iraqi city of Mosul that the peshmerga captured from the Islamic State group this week. The advance aims to lay the groundwork for the battle for Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, which has been held by IS militants for more than two years.

Like almost all of the villages retaken this week, Qarqashah is small and was almost entirely empty of civilians. This allowed the U.S.-led coalition to clear territory using air strikes, rather than relying on ground troops to engage in street-to-street battles. But peshmerga military leaders said their forces still took significant casualties. In Qarqashah village alone, peshmerga commanders estimated they lost 10 men. Even after the operation was declared complete on Monday, fighting was ongoing. Maj. Gen. Hama Rasheed sat on a plastic chair inside the simple home his men were using as a base. Outside, his fighters exchanged fire with IS militants holed up in a neighboring village.

Fields of dead grass burned from IS-launched mortar rounds. Kurdish and coalition forces stationed atop a nearby hill responded with volleys of artillery fire onto the IS fighters below. "The main aim of the operation was to open a strategic road to the Christian areas of the Nineveh plain," said Brig. Gen. Dedewan Khurshid Tofiq, one of the peshmerga commanders overseeing the operation. The Nineveh plain stretches north and east of Mosul. Tofiq added that a bridge, taken on Monday and leading to southeastern Mosul, could facilitate a troop buildup along an eastern Mosul front once it is repaired. The operation, which lasted just under 48 hours, is expected to be one of many operations aimed at encircling Mosul, the last major IS urban stronghold in Iraq.

Civilians flee villages outside Mosul the day after Iraqi Kurdish forces launch an operation east of the Islamic State-held city in Iraq

The long battle for Mosul is continuing amid violence in much of the rest of the country. At least 15 people have been killed since Monday in a series of separate attacks across Iraq. The deadliest attack occurred on Monday near the town of Rutba in the western province of Anbar, where militants fired mortar rounds on army troops, killing an officer, seven soldiers and a civilian, the Joint Military Operation Command said in a statement. Two attacks struck the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, on Tuesday. In the capital's southern Dora neighborhood, drive-by shooters killed a Justice Ministry employee, police said. In the southwestern neighborhood of Amil, a bomb ripped through a commercial area, killing three civilians and wounding seven others, according to police.

Another bomb struck a patrol of anti-IS Sunni tribal fighters in Madain, about 14 miles (20 kilometers) southeast of Baghdad, killing two fighters and wounding five others, police said. Medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release the information. The Islamic State group captured large areas of northern and western Iraq in a 2014 shock offensive. It is estimated that IS-held territory in the country has now shrunk by two thirds, following an Iraqi campaign backed by the U.S.-led coalition. The fighting has displaced millions of civilians. Along berms marking the peshmerga's new front line with IS, convoys of hundreds of civilians fleeing villages outside Mosul drove through the fine desert sand in the intense summer heat.

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waltky · Sep 24, 2016

Smoke gets in yer eyes...

Iraq Oil Fires could Jeopardize Mosul Mission
Sep 24, 2016 | A fire at one of Iraq's oil fields could hinder military and humanitarian efforts, as operations to recapture the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul get underway.

Black smoke continues to billow into the air from the Qayara oil field, damaged by IS militants last month as they fled the town, creating health risks for civilians and troops amassing there. The fires are also clogging up the skies in the area, where critically important airstrikes and aerial reconnaissance missions are taking place almost daily. Located on the west bank of the Tigris River, about 40 miles south of Mosul, Qayara has since become an important staging ground for military and humanitarian efforts ahead of the Mosul operation since it was recaptured by Iraqi forces last month. "Stabilizing Qayara can't wait -- it has to happen now," Lise Grande, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, told The Associated Press. "Everything for the Mosul operation hinges on Qayara," she said. "It's the staging ground for military forces and it's where 350,000 of the 1 million people who are expected to flee (Mosul) will either find shelter or pass through."

This satellite image shows oil fields burning in the Qayara oil field on Aug. 26, south of Mosul, Iraq, on the west bank of the Tigris River

There are slow-going Iraqi efforts to contain the fires, but nearly a month after the town was recaptured from the militants, smoke and toxic fumes continue to pollute the air in and around Qayara. The Iraqi Oil Ministry spokesman, Assem Jihad, said Wednesday that IS militants set fire to 11 oil wells in Qayara to derail security forces and wreak havoc in the area as they fled. He said fires at nine of the wells have been extinguished, but two continue to burn powerfully. "It does cause some problems. It certainly doesn't stop anything," Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition in Baghdad, said. "The Iraqis have asked for coalition help to determine what can be done to put those fires out. We'll do what we can to support them."

The images of smoke and flames from the oil wells are reminiscent of the oil fires in Kuwait after the Iraqi military reportedly set fire to hundreds of wells when Saddam Hussein invaded the neighboring Persian Gulf nation in the early 1990s. "In putting out the fires in Kuwait, the firefighters used water pipes and pumped the water from the Persian Gulf to spray at the base of the fires," said Kourosh Kian, an expert in petroleum drilling and reservoir engineering. Kian, a system engineer at GE Aviation, said the simplest method to extinguish these types of fires is to inject water under high pressure at the base of the fire. Since Qayara is on the Tigris River, there would be no problem with the water supply, he said.

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waltky · Sep 30, 2016

Got enough troops for Mosul battle...

Pentagon: No More US Troops Needed for Mosul Battle
Sep 29, 2016 | The U.S. support mission for the battle of Mosul is not likely to require additional troops beyond the 600 just authorized by President Barack Obama, a military spokesman in Baghdad said Thursday.

The military can't guarantee how the offensive will develop, "but I can tell you we believe we have all the forces we need to help the Iraqis liberate Mosul," Air Force Col. John Dorrian, spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, said in a video briefing to the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced Wednesday that 600 more troops would be sent to Iraq to provide logistics and maintenance support, as well as the training and enabling function, for the Iraqi Security Forces now massing at the Qayyarah West airfield about 40 miles southeast of Mosul. The 600 service members will bring the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq to slightly more than 5,000.

Soldiers with 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), move toward an objective while searching for detonation cord after an IED detonated in Iskandariyah, Iraq.

In his briefing, Dorrian said the U.S. is stepping up air and artillery strikes in the "shaping operations" to prepare for the attack on Mosul, a city of two million before the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, swept into Iraq in 2014 against little resistance by the Iraqi army. He said that U.S. and coalition airstrikes in the last 30 days have killed 18 ISIS leaders -- 13 of them in Mosul. "By taking these individuals off the battlefield, it creates some really disruptive effects to enemy command and control" for the coming battle, Dorrian said. The airstrikes have largely stopped the group from attempting to bring in reinforcements by convoy, but some fighters are still able to trickle into Mosul individually or in small groups, he said. ISIS is estimated to have 3,000 to 4,500 fighters in Mosul, Dorrian said.

Iraqi Security Forces will have eight to 12 brigades, or up to 30,000 troops, for the offensive, plus Kurdish Peshmerga forces arrayed to the east, north and west of the city, Dorrian said. The offensive is expected to come up the Tigris River Valley from the south. A major concern for the U.S. is how the Iraqis will handle what is expected to be a massive flow of Mosul residents -- known as internally displaced persons -- fleeing the city once the attack begins. In the retaking of Fallujah in Anbar province earlier this year, human rights groups and the United Nations charged that Shia Popular Mobilization Units, allied with Iraqi Security Forces, committed atrocities in the "vetting" of refugees to weed out ISIS fighters.

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longknife · Oct 18, 2016

What They Aren't Telling You About the Move to Retake Mosul, Iraq

In a nutshell, with US backing, they plan to let the IS fighters free passage to go to Syrian to find the Saddam regime.

The source also seemed to suggest the air assistance the U.S. would provide to the Iraqi offensive would be a sham, as the coalition would only strike detached, vacated, or uninhabited buildings. According to the source, Washington’s strategy in moving these ISIS fighters is due to an attempt to counter Russia’s advancements in Syria.

God, how low can Obozo sink? He'll do anything to save what he thinks is his legacy. And, if elected, Shrillary will only continue this farce.

More – much more - @ http://theantimedia.org/iraqi-isis-offensive/

waltky · Nov 4, 2016

Gettin' out while they can...

Mass exodus as ISIS fighters, families flee Mosul for Raqqa
November 03, 2016 – As bullets fly in Mosul, the rural roads leading west are choked with traffic – much of which is believed to be ISIS fighters fleeing to the terrorist army’s Syrian stronghold some 275 miles away in Raqqa.

On a late morning this week, FoxNews.com observed through binoculars and from atop Shengal Mountain, also known as Sinjar, hundreds of cars crawling along dusty roads linking Iraq and Syria. To Kurdish military intelligence officials, the cause of the congestion was clear. "I haven't seen anything like this. They are running away massively," a Kurdish military intelligence source told FoxNews.com, even as he spoke by phone to an ISIS informant traversing the distant road. "Ten minutes ago, the airstrikes hit a bomb factory in Bulayj," the official repeated. "ISIS fighters came to Bulayj and arrested all the tribal sheiks and accused them of spying. Families are both willingly and being forced to go to Raqqa."

The convoys are safe from coalition attack - if they may be carrying civilians or children.

ISIS loyalists and victims alike appear to be using every means possible to flee, making the trip in pickup trucks, tractor-trailers and small vehicles. When the exodus was still a trickle earlier in the week, ISIS sought to hide the escape route by burning tires along the roadside. But as FoxNews.com watched, only the dust from dirt roads provided scant cover in the distance as the convoys chugged westward. The terror army’s escape now depends on a different sort of cover. "ISIS often has many different things they do to block vision,” another Peshmerga officer said. “But even so, we can't attack them [when they are] loading cars with kids and women. How could we attack kids? They have no part in this fight."

A dusty road on the Iraq-Syria border.

Similarly, the U.S.-led coalition won't unleash airpower with civilians in harm’s way, giving ISIS -- and likely its leadership -- free passage to its Syrian base. "ISIS is moving more and more of its families to Raqqa, they are kicking civilians out of their homes and occupying them," one source connected to Iraqi Forces intelligence explained. "Then, only the men return to Mosul to keep fighting." According to multiple insiders familiar with the Mosul-to-Raqqa route and ISIS tactics, the group takes abandoned roads and moves through friendly, Sunni-populated villages that provide not only cover, but potential safe haven.

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Heavy Fighting in Mosul as IS Hits Tank During Iraqi Assault
NOV. 4, 2016 — Heavy fighting erupted in the eastern neighborhoods of Mosul on Friday as Iraqi special forces launched an assault deeper into the urban areas of the city and Islamic State militants fired back, striking and disabling an Abrams tank with a rocket.

IS hit the tank with a rocket fired from a nearby building, sending its crew fleeing from the smoking vehicle, seemingly unharmed. The fighting has been the most intense urban combat in Mosul since the Iraqi offensive began over two weeks ago to drive IS from the city, Iraq's second-largest. The early morning advance began with artillery and mortar strikes on the Aden, Tahrir, and Quds districts, just west of special forces' footholds in the Gogjali and Karama neighborhoods, Lt. Col. Muhanad al-Timimi told The Associated Press. Both sides opened up with small arms and mortar fire after an artillery barrage by the special forces, ahead of their advance. A bulldozer and another car later emerged from IS-held territory, presumably packed with explosives and preparing for suicide attacks.

The Islamic State group is fighting to hold Mosul as Iraqi forces and allied Kurdish troops squeeze in from all directions with U.S.-led coalition support, mostly from airstrikes and reconnaissance. On Tuesday, Iraqi troops entered the city limits for the first time in more than two years — soldiers had withdrawn from Mosul in the face of IS militants' 2014 blitz that seized large swaths of territory in Iraq and neighboring Syria. Now the Iraqi forces are gearing up for urban warfare expected to take weeks, if not months, as they work their way neighborhood by neighborhood, going through a warren of dense buildings prone to booby traps and ambushes.

More than 1 million civilians are stuck in the city, complicating the military's efforts to advance without harming innocents. IS militants have driven thousands of them deeper into the city's built-up areas, presumably for use as human shields, while hundreds of others have fled in the past days toward government-controlled territory despite the uncertainty of resettlement in displacement camps. Mosul is the last major IS stronghold in Iraq, and expelling the militant group from it would be a major blow to the survival of its self-declared "caliphate" that stretches into Syria. When IS seized Mosul and other territory in 2014, the much larger Iraqi military had been neglected and demoralized by corruption.

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waltky · Jan 7, 2017

Iraqi gov't. diverting U.S. weapons to Shiite militias for war crimes...

Amnesty International report: Shiite militias using U.S. weapons for war crimes
Jan. 5, 2017 -- Human rights group Amnesty International says Shiite militias are committing war crimes using U.S. weapons provided by the Iraqi government in the fight against the Islamic State.

Issued Thursday, the Amnesty report highlights a central fear that the Iraqi government is essentially deputizing the militias in the fight against the Islamic State. Members of the militias were responsible for thousands of deaths in the years-long insurgency that came after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Amnesty International said it has evidence the militias, known as al-Hashd al-Shaabi, have been given everything from tanks and combat vehicles to grenade launchers and a large number of small arms. Amnesty said those weapons, manufactured in the United States and elsewhere and originally given to the Iraqi government, are now being used by the militias to carry out extrajudicial killings and revenge attacks against civilians under the guise of working with the Iraqi army to retake Mosul, the last major city controlled by the Islamic State. "International arms suppliers, including the U.S.A., European countries, Russia and Iran, must wake up to the fact that all arms transfers to Iraq carry a real risk of ending up in the hands of militia groups with long histories of human rights violations," said Patrick Wilcken, an Amnesty researcher.

Iraqi government officials and a spokesman for the militias denied the report, saying the two groups have abided by international law and proven reliable partners in the fight against the Islamic State. "Whatever is circulated across malicious media about violations is untrue," militia spokesman Ahmed al-Assadi said during a press conference. "The priority for al-Hashd al-Shaabi is to protect civilians, and we shall chase [the Islamic State] to the last spot of Mosul and based on directives from the supreme commander of the armed forces."

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-N...s-for-war-crimes/2891483635276/?spt=sec&or=tn
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Sadrs Peace Brigades prepares for Mosul offensive