Iraq update - 10/04/2014

Islamic State reportedly on Baghdad’s outskirts after week of victories

An Iraqi Shiite militiamen stands alert after clashes with militants from the Islamic State group, near Qara Tappa, about 75 miles northeast of Baghdad in Iraq's Diyala province, Oct. 2, 2014. (AP Photo/Jaber al-Helo)

McClatchy,

4 October, 2014

IRBIL, IRAQ — Islamic State militants have taken control of key cities in Iraq’s western province of Anbar and have begun to besiege one of the country’s largest military bases in a weeklong offensive that’s brought them within artillery range of Baghdad.

The Islamic State and its tribal allies have dominated Anbar since a surprise offensive last December, but this week’s push was particularly worrisome, because for the first time this year Islamist insurgents were reported to have become a major presence in Abu Ghraib, the last Anbar town on the outskirts of the capital.

“Daash is openly operating inside Abu Ghraib,” according to an Iraqi soldier, who used a common Arabic term for the Islamic State. “I was at the 10th Division base there two days ago, and the soldiers cannot leave or patrol,” he said, asking that he be identified only as Hossam because Iraqi soldiers are barred from speaking with foreign reporters. “Daash controls the streets.”

Hundreds of miles to the west, Islamic State forces continued their push into the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane, where it appeared unlikely that Turkey would intervene to stop the advance. Kurdish officials from the town said the Turkish government had yet to respond to their pleas for weapons, and reports from the Turkish-Syrian border said there was no evidence Turkey was preparing to take action.

Hossam, whom a McClatchy special correspondent interviewed in Baghdad, said he’d had a difficult time leaving Abu Ghraib for Baghdad to mark the Eid al Adha holiday Saturday. “I had to use a fake ID card that said I was Sunni,” he said, reflecting the concern among Shiite Muslim Iraqi soldiers about the Islamic State’s execution of Shiites it’s captured. “Daash controls the entire area except the army bases and prisons. They’re just a few (miles) from Baghdad.”

His account was backed by Hamad Hussein, a resident of the Saadan section of Abu Ghraib, who said the Islamic State had taken control of virtually all the southern sections of the area, including the villages of Saadan, al Nuaymiya and Kan Tari.

A diplomat in Irbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region, said an Islamic State presence in Abu Ghraib would put Baghdad International Airport within artillery range of the militants.

“We know they have captured substantial numbers of 155 mm howitzers,” said the diplomat, whose country is participating in the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition. The diplomat spoke only on the condition of anonymity, lacking permission to brief the news media. “These have a range of about (20 miles) and if they are able to hold territory in Abu Ghraib then the concern they can shell and ultimately close BIAP becomes a grave concern.”

The airport is a key lifeline for Western embassies and holds a joint operations center staffed by U.S. military advisers.

Anbar is a predominantly Sunni Muslim province that remains deeply suspicious of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, and the Islamic State has pressed to expand its control there since last winter’s initial offensive. In the past week, the militants have scored a string of other victories in the province.

Islamic State militants seized control of most of Hit, a key pipeline town north of the provincial capital of Ramadi, on Thursday and were pressing an assault on Ramadi itself, according to Iraqi news accounts. At least 74 soldiers were killed and dozens were missing after the militants overran Hit, state news media reported late Thursday.

Islamic State militants also captured an entire regiment of Iraqi tanks, the reports said, though it was unclear how many vehicles that represented. In a Western military, regiments generally have 38 to 55 tanks, but Iraqi regiments have long been undermanned due to corruption and problems with maintenance.

The advance on Hit may have been in preparation for an assault on the Asad air base nearby, Iraq’s largest military facility and the main base for American troops in Anbar during the U.S.-led occupation. Reports indicated the base had come under harassing attacks.

Islamic State militants also have besieged a military base that belongs to the 30th Mechanized Brigade at Albu Aytha, north of Ramadi. The outcome of the battle was unclear, with some reports saying the assault had trapped 300 to 600 soldiers, while government media reported that the base had withstood a major attack.

Two smaller outposts in Anbar have been overrun in a similar fashion in the last two weeks, and residents of Fallujah, which fell to the Islamic State last winter, have reported seeing militants parading hundreds of captured soldiers through that city’s streets as recently as last weekend.

Although the fate of those prisoners remains unknown, the Islamic State typically conducts mass executions of Iraqi army prisoners, particularly if the captured men are Shiites, whom the group considers apostates. The group has repeatedly released mass execution videos a few days or weeks after such events.

The biggest concern for Western military advisers was the report that Islamic State militants were moving freely in Abu Ghraib, which controls the western approaches to Baghdad from Anbar, Jordan and Syria. Its loss would severely limit the Iraqi government’s ability to send reinforcements to a small number of bases in Anbar that remain in government control, including at Ramadi and Haditha as well as Asad air base, which lies north of Ramadi.

Already, Islamic State forces’ influence stretches from Fallujah through Abu Ghraib to Yusufiya, Baghdad’s westernmost suburb. So far, the highway that links those locations remains in government hands, as does the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners in the early years of the Iraq War. But while the government has dispatched more soldiers to reinforce its hold on the highway, the Islamic State’s control of the surrounding areas makes the government’s hold appear tenuous.

“If the Iraqis are unable to regain control of this area, this has the makings of a disaster,” said the Irbil-based coalition diplomat.

What Civilian Casualties? To 

Barack Obama, Women And 

Children In Syria And Iraq 

Are A Subhuman Species

Zero Hedge,

3 October, 2014

While one can't help but snicker when the administration of a Nobel Peace Prize winner has launched at least 7 offensive wars, mosty against Muslim countries with virtually none obtaining prior approval from Congress, until now Obama at least showed the sense to realize that maintaining proper "made for propaganda media" optics matters, even if his underlying actions were the very definition of hypocrisy. And then something snapped. As reported by Yahoo News, the White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.

Now, we showed last weekend that Syrian "rebels", those people the US is supposedly helping, are furious at US bombing of their own people, but we wonder just how they will feel when they realize that according to the most powerful representative of the "free world" they are actually, well, subhuman and not worthy of the same civil rights as people in every other part of the globe (bombed by US drones).

According to Yahoo News, a White House statement confirmed the looser policy came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria's Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.

it has a "looser policy standards" when it comes to preventing  civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes in U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq. 

came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria's Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.

And if being equated with monkeys wasn't enough of an insult, the US also used its masterpiece fabrication, the "Khorasans" as the justification to do to Syrians what last year's false flag war campaign accused Syria's Assad of doing.

So this is what the US government is not telling you:

The village has been described by Syrian rebel commanders as a reported stronghold of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front where U.S officials believed members of the so-called Khorasan group were plotting attacks against international aircraft.

But at a briefing for members and staffers of the House Foreign Affairs Committee late last week, Syrian rebel commanders described women and children being hauled from the rubble after an errant cruise missile destroyed a home for displaced civilians. Images of badly injured children also appeared on YouTube, helping to fuel anti-U.S. protests in a number of Syrian villages last week.

“They were carrying bodies out of the rubble. … I saw seven or eight ambulances coming out of there,” said Abu Abdo Salabman, a political member of one of the Free Syria Army factions, who attended the briefing for Foreign Affairs Committee members and staff. “We believe this was a big mistake.”

And this is what US "assistance" looks like:

But the bottom line is this: Caitlin Hayden, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said that a much-publicized White House policy that President Obama announced last year barring U.S. drone strikes unless there is a “near certainty” there will be no civilian casualties — "the highest standard we can meet," he said at the time — does not cover the current U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

The “near certainty” standard was intended to apply “only when we take direct action ‘outside areas of active hostilities,’ as we noted at the time,” Hayden said in an email. “That description — outside areas of active hostilities — simply does not fit what we are seeing on the ground in Iraq and Syria right now.”

Hayden added that U.S. military operations against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) in Syria, "like all U.S. military operations, are being conducted consistently with the laws of armed conflict, proportionality and distinction."

The laws of armed conflict prohibit the deliberate targeting of civilian areas and require armed forces to take precautions to prevent inadvertent civilian deaths as much as possible.

But one former Obama administration official said the new White House statement raises questions about how the U.S. intends to proceed in the conflict in Syria and Iraq, and under what legal authorities.

Wait, someone actually wondered under what legal authority the Obama administration is killing innocent people? How dare they: don't they know Obama has a Nobel peace prize, so none of his actions are subject to any scrutiny: surely the president himself is his own best moral censor.

But putting the bullshit aside, the bottom line here is quite simple: in order to help Qatar traverse Syria with its own Gazprom-bypassing natgas pipeline to Europe, and wipe out the same ISIS it created, and which has caused so many headaches for the Saudis, which in exchange for getting the US to bomb ISIS agreed to dump crude, split up OPEC once again, send the price of oil plunging and cause a Russian budget crisis... Obama not only has zero qualms to kill innocent women and children, but in doing so he has made it clear that Iraq and Syria's woman and children are not even worth of being called human.

In fact, as one other charismatic dictator several decades ago claimed, they are "subhuman" and thus exempt from any innocent civilian deaths policy.