lol, 40mm grenades! I know about the "bigger lie, the bigger audience" philosophy, but accept my advice and keep your lies to your fool audience in west.
oh yesss i pity those iraqis who got their head literally BLOWN OFF , they must be very very gratefullol, 40mm grenades! I know about the "bigger lie, the bigger audience" philosophy, but accept my advice and keep your lies to your fool audience in west.
Iraqi people know very well who is telling the truth.
Iraqis mourning in the funeral of Gen Suleimani, chanting death to America:
Yeah, I will tell Iraqis their eyes were wrong, your media are right!oh yesss i pity those iraqis who got their head literally BLOWN OFF , they must be very very grateful
Iraqi Protesters Are Being Killed By “Less Lethal” Tear-Gas Rounds
November 12, 2019
By Nick Waters
العربية
This report contains extremely graphic imagery, including injuries and fatalities.
Multiple protesters in Iraq have been killed after being struck by 40mm “less lethal” rounds.
Over the last few weeks, Iraq has experienced significant unrest after protesters took to the streets, protesting the lack of jobs, poor public services and widespread corruption. Scores of protesters have been killed after bloody crackdowns in which live rounds have been used extensively against protesters. Some of the footage filmed by these protesters appear to show unarmed protest participants being targeted.
However, protesters have not only been killed by the extensive use of live rounds, but also by the deployment of “less-lethal” weapons, in this case 40mm tear-gas rounds. Although the intended effect of these tear-gas grenades is to dispense an irritating agent, mostly CS, they have also been fired directly at protesters, resulting in horrific injuries and often death. In short, these “less lethal” rounds have become a way for the security forces to apply lethal force without having to resort to live rounds.
Deployment & Effect
Images and videos filmed by protesters have shown multiple cases where protesters have been hit by 40mm “less lethal” rounds. Due to the kinetic energy these round possess, they can penetrate flesh and bone with relative ease. While this may result in severe and potentially life-threatening injuries if impact is made on the body, if one of these rounds hits a person’s head, the risk of death appears to be particularly high.
The video below shows a person who appears to have been hit by one of these munitions.
The damage caused by these munitions is clearly evident in videos from the protests, however the full scale of the carnage is more clearly visible in what appear to be images of CT scans of those hit by 40mm grenades.
Images of what appear to be CT scans of those injured by 40mm grenades. Note the dates, highlighted in red, and the name of the hospital below: the Neurosurgical Hospital, Baghdad. Source 1 and source 2.
These munitions appear to have been used extensively against protesters, especially when security services are not using live rounds. The National reported that eight protesters were killed in this way on one day when protests resumed on 25 October, 2019 after a short break. Amnesty International conducted its own in depth investigation and identified multiple munitions types, as well as confirming that many of the videos and images showing this event originate from around Tahrir Square. Images such as the one below help to illustrate how many of these munitions have been used against protests.
A protest display comprised mostly of 40mm grenade shell-casings, apparently in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square.
Types Of Munition
Multiple kinds of “less lethal’ 40mm grenades appear to have been used, including CS (better known as tear gas), smoke, and sound and flash. Several examples are listed below, including those manufactured by Sloboda Čačak, a Serbian firm, and what Amnesty International and Adam Rawnsley identified as M651 tear gas and M713 smoke grenades manufactured by the Defense Industries Organization (DIO) of Iran.
Left: Sloboda Čačak CS M99, Right: 40mm reportedly extracted from protester
Left: Sloboda Čačak S&F (Sound & Flash) M01 Right: 40mm grenade reportedly picked up by protester
Example of 40mm CS grenade that Amnesty International and Adam Rawnsley have identified as being grenades manufactured by the Defense Industries Organization (DIO) of Iran.
Conclusion
As Amnesty International has noted, the 40mm grenades being used in Iraq are far heavier than the 37mm grenades used by many other security forces, and have clearly resulted in serious injuries and fatalities. Considering the scale of use of these 40mm “less lethal” grenades by the Iraqi security services, it is unsurprising that so many protesters have been killed or seriously wounded by the munitions described.
The use of “less lethal” 40mm CS munitions have previously caused controversy — for example their use by the Isreali Defence Force. In that case, munitions were fired directly at protesters, resulting in several deaths and injuries, including the fatal shooting of Bassem Abu Rahmeh. Since this criticism, the IDF appears to have enforced restrictions on the use of this kind of munition, resulting in a reduction of serious injuries. It remains to be seen whether Iraq will restrict the use of these “less lethal” munitions, or continue using them in a manner that kills and wounds many protest participants.
go ahead
please give a link below
Another Israeli sympathizer/zionist living under the guise of academia in the USA..... this is why the U.S.'s foreign policy is in shambles, all the zionists have penetrated the gov, strategic think tanks and academic circles. They need to be purged for the state to get healthy again.Calm down: Killing Qassem Soleimani made us safer
Elizabeth Tsurkov
January 3, 2020Getty Images
On Thursday night, in an act of escalation against Iran, U.S. drones struck a convoy of high-ranking Iranian and Iraqi commanders, killing Qassem Soleimani, the head of the foreign operations’ branch of Iran’s powerful and ideologically committed armed force. The strike represented an unprecedented act of aggression on the part of the U.S., at the behest of President Trump.
President Trump’s political rivals in the Democratic Party as well as many in the foreign policy punditry class have spent the 12 hours since the news broke predicting the worst, with “World War III” being thrown around on Twitter and on news talkshows.
They are unnecessarily alarmist. Soleimani’s assassination signals that the United States, under the leadership of Donald Trump, can no longer be counted on to play the role it has for decades of the responsible actor seeking to deescalate tensions. But rather than increasing the likelihood of a counterattack, this move counterintuitively decreases the threat of an all-out war.
Soleimani’s importance in projecting Iranian hard power and political influence across the Middle East cannot be understated. He oversaw the establishment, training, funding, command and control of (mostly Shia) militias across the Middle East; he also oversaw assassinations of Iranian regime opponents and attacks targeting civilians (many of them Jewish) in Europe and Latin America, as well as support to groups established independently of Iran, such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the occupied Palestinian territories. He also served as a trusted advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, and is the third most important Iranian regime official, after the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and the Commander of the IRGC, Hossein Salami.
Over the past decade, Soleimani, who was previously a figure largely known only to officials and intelligence services, gradually took on a more public role, with an Instagram account dedicated to his images gaining tens of thousands of followers before it was banned in 2019. At the same time, Iran and its non-state partners like Lebanese Hezbollah began admitting more openly their deployment overseas to fight against Syria’s rebellious towns and ISIS.
Soleimani’s increasing visibility in recent years, including the movement in a convoy with several high-ranking officials on the night of his death, indicates Iran’s growing confidence and belief that the United States and Israel would not dare target them.
This confidence stemmed in part from the Obama administration’s policy toward Iran, a policy that prioritized reaching an agreement to significantly delay Iran’s ability to assemble a nuclear weapon. To avoid derailing the negotiations over the deal, the Obama administration chose to ignore Iran’s regional subversion, its human rights abuses at home and abroad (by its proxies and Iranian forces), and its ballistic missile program.
In this way, President Obama was carrying out what had been U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran for a generation. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran enjoyed the position of being the rogue actor in its relations with the West, establishing militias responsible for kidnapping and killing Westerners, running assassination squads in European cities and covertly working to develop the capability to assemble nuclear weapons.
The West played the role of the responsible actor, largely relying on traditional tools of diplomacy, sanctions and negotiations. When U.S. personnel were killed by militias established by the Qods Force, the U.S. retaliated against those militias alone, if at all.
Trump adopted a different, albeit highly incoherent policy, toward Iran. Under President Trump, the U.S. simultaneously pulled out of the Iran nuclear accord, which successfully delayed Iran’s nuclear program; imposed crushing sanctions on Iran, causing significant suffering to the Iranian people; and employed sympathetic rhetoric toward the Iranian people and incredibly hostile language toward the Iranian regime. But the U.S. also expressed interest in direct negotiations with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and decided to withdraw from north east Syria, potentially handing over the region to Iranian-backed militias stationed in eastern Syria — only later to backtrack on that withdrawal.
This inconsistent policy and lack of clearly defined and realistic goals, coupled with decisions not to back its allies at crucial moments, have led leaders in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular to stop counting on the United States or clearly align with it.
And in response to this fickleness and the increased sanctions, Iran’s attacks against the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East gradually became more brazen, particularly in the Gulf. Those attacks, including a highly destructive drone and missile strike on two oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia in September 2019, were met without any or with a limited response from the U.S, — until Thursday night.
Soleimani’s assassination signals that President Trump has decided to abandon not only the Iran deal but the U.S.’s position as the de-escalator of tensions.
And yet, this move may ironically reestablish U.S. deterrence and decrease Iranian adventurism in the region. Because the truth is, despite its fiery rhetoric, Iran’s leadership knows that a significant escalation on its part, could be met with an even more deadly and “irrational” U.S. response — something it can ill afford.
Instead of an all-out war, Iran will likely seek a way to avenge Soleimani’s killing in a manner than won’t escalate tensions further and trigger a war, which Iranian leaders, for all their bluster, surely know they will lose. It is exactly due to Iran’s relative weakness that it relies on non-conventional tools such as creating and supporting non-state armed partners across the region.
Still, while U.S. willingness to escalate will likely temper Iran’s response, the overall risk of war is still significantly higher today than it was when the U.S. remained committed to the nuclear accord. While both sides wish to avoid an all-out war, potential operational errors could lead to a spiral of escalation. Such an operational error could occur when Iran retaliates against U.S.-related targets for Soleimani’s assassination. In some kinds of attacks, like car bombs and rocket strikes, the perpetrators have only a limited ability to calibrate the number of people killed, and a large number of U.S. citizens killed may prompt the Trump administration to escalate even further.
Miscalculations among policy-makers on both sides could also result in further escalations; the Trump Administration could overestimate the fragility of the Iranian regime, incorrectly estimating that with just a little bit more pressure, the regime will fall. And combative rhetoric about regime change and the latest U.S. military escalation could spur Tehran to overreact if the regime comes to believe that its survival is at stake.
The tragedy of the U.S.-Iranian escalation is that those likely to pay the heaviest price are civilians across the region, in particular in Iraq and Syria — those who have already suffered the most due to Iranian expansionism led by Soleimani (as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq).
If the U.S. wishes to claim the moral high ground in this brewing power competition, it should do everything in its power to shield the region’s civilians from further mayhem and destruction.
Elizabeth Tsurkov is a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute focusing on the Levant. Follow her on Twitter @Elizrael.
to be purged so that Iran can freely move its arms and materials across the ME and be the ultimate regional power in ME, seems like straight from a irani kid wet dream
Calm down: Killing Qassem Soleimani made us safer
Elizabeth Tsurkov
January 3, 2020Getty Images
On Thursday night, in an act of escalation against Iran, U.S. drones struck a convoy of high-ranking Iranian and Iraqi commanders, killing Qassem Soleimani, the head of the foreign operations’ branch of Iran’s powerful and ideologically committed armed force. The strike represented an unprecedented act of aggression on the part of the U.S., at the behest of President Trump.
President Trump’s political rivals in the Democratic Party as well as many in the foreign policy punditry class have spent the 12 hours since the news broke predicting the worst, with “World War III” being thrown around on Twitter and on news talkshows.
They are unnecessarily alarmist. Soleimani’s assassination signals that the United States, under the leadership of Donald Trump, can no longer be counted on to play the role it has for decades of the responsible actor seeking to deescalate tensions. But rather than increasing the likelihood of a counterattack, this move counterintuitively decreases the threat of an all-out war.
Soleimani’s importance in projecting Iranian hard power and political influence across the Middle East cannot be understated. He oversaw the establishment, training, funding, command and control of (mostly Shia) militias across the Middle East; he also oversaw assassinations of Iranian regime opponents and attacks targeting civilians (many of them Jewish) in Europe and Latin America, as well as support to groups established independently of Iran, such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the occupied Palestinian territories. He also served as a trusted advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, and is the third most important Iranian regime official, after the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and the Commander of the IRGC, Hossein Salami.
Over the past decade, Soleimani, who was previously a figure largely known only to officials and intelligence services, gradually took on a more public role, with an Instagram account dedicated to his images gaining tens of thousands of followers before it was banned in 2019. At the same time, Iran and its non-state partners like Lebanese Hezbollah began admitting more openly their deployment overseas to fight against Syria’s rebellious towns and ISIS.
Soleimani’s increasing visibility in recent years, including the movement in a convoy with several high-ranking officials on the night of his death, indicates Iran’s growing confidence and belief that the United States and Israel would not dare target them.
This confidence stemmed in part from the Obama administration’s policy toward Iran, a policy that prioritized reaching an agreement to significantly delay Iran’s ability to assemble a nuclear weapon. To avoid derailing the negotiations over the deal, the Obama administration chose to ignore Iran’s regional subversion, its human rights abuses at home and abroad (by its proxies and Iranian forces), and its ballistic missile program.
In this way, President Obama was carrying out what had been U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran for a generation. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran enjoyed the position of being the rogue actor in its relations with the West, establishing militias responsible for kidnapping and killing Westerners, running assassination squads in European cities and covertly working to develop the capability to assemble nuclear weapons.
The West played the role of the responsible actor, largely relying on traditional tools of diplomacy, sanctions and negotiations. When U.S. personnel were killed by militias established by the Qods Force, the U.S. retaliated against those militias alone, if at all.
Trump adopted a different, albeit highly incoherent policy, toward Iran. Under President Trump, the U.S. simultaneously pulled out of the Iran nuclear accord, which successfully delayed Iran’s nuclear program; imposed crushing sanctions on Iran, causing significant suffering to the Iranian people; and employed sympathetic rhetoric toward the Iranian people and incredibly hostile language toward the Iranian regime. But the U.S. also expressed interest in direct negotiations with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and decided to withdraw from north east Syria, potentially handing over the region to Iranian-backed militias stationed in eastern Syria — only later to backtrack on that withdrawal.
This inconsistent policy and lack of clearly defined and realistic goals, coupled with decisions not to back its allies at crucial moments, have led leaders in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular to stop counting on the United States or clearly align with it.
And in response to this fickleness and the increased sanctions, Iran’s attacks against the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East gradually became more brazen, particularly in the Gulf. Those attacks, including a highly destructive drone and missile strike on two oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia in September 2019, were met without any or with a limited response from the U.S, — until Thursday night.
Soleimani’s assassination signals that President Trump has decided to abandon not only the Iran deal but the U.S.’s position as the de-escalator of tensions.
And yet, this move may ironically reestablish U.S. deterrence and decrease Iranian adventurism in the region. Because the truth is, despite its fiery rhetoric, Iran’s leadership knows that a significant escalation on its part, could be met with an even more deadly and “irrational” U.S. response — something it can ill afford.
Instead of an all-out war, Iran will likely seek a way to avenge Soleimani’s killing in a manner than won’t escalate tensions further and trigger a war, which Iranian leaders, for all their bluster, surely know they will lose. It is exactly due to Iran’s relative weakness that it relies on non-conventional tools such as creating and supporting non-state armed partners across the region.
Still, while U.S. willingness to escalate will likely temper Iran’s response, the overall risk of war is still significantly higher today than it was when the U.S. remained committed to the nuclear accord. While both sides wish to avoid an all-out war, potential operational errors could lead to a spiral of escalation. Such an operational error could occur when Iran retaliates against U.S.-related targets for Soleimani’s assassination. In some kinds of attacks, like car bombs and rocket strikes, the perpetrators have only a limited ability to calibrate the number of people killed, and a large number of U.S. citizens killed may prompt the Trump administration to escalate even further.
Miscalculations among policy-makers on both sides could also result in further escalations; the Trump Administration could overestimate the fragility of the Iranian regime, incorrectly estimating that with just a little bit more pressure, the regime will fall. And combative rhetoric about regime change and the latest U.S. military escalation could spur Tehran to overreact if the regime comes to believe that its survival is at stake.
The tragedy of the U.S.-Iranian escalation is that those likely to pay the heaviest price are civilians across the region, in particular in Iraq and Syria — those who have already suffered the most due to Iranian expansionism led by Soleimani (as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq).
If the U.S. wishes to claim the moral high ground in this brewing power competition, it should do everything in its power to shield the region’s civilians from further mayhem and destruction.
Elizabeth Tsurkov is a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute focusing on the Levant. Follow her on Twitter @Elizrael.
had iran not being such a hostile uncivilized nation by occupying US embassy in tehran the story will be different
for occupying embassy and exporting dangerous "revolution" and killing innocent civillians and many more
