Al-Kurdi
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Iraq's war against IS terrorism | Updates and Discussions
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Ceylal
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At least they hit something! Even John Kerry is applauding the IRAF and space force...! Good going Iran.
PeaceGen
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They can do ther show, they are the show of middle east. Cheap shits, the propaganda did failed. I hope that a lot of kurdish fighter are killed. You give your hand they take your arm. They can burn in the hell!
The kurds outside Turkiye are really savage people. Even the pkk in Turkey are seeing the help of Turkish state and they are shuttiing up. But these goat fakerzz can turn in to ashes.
Stop talking shit about the Kurds. They have moderate values and have shown considerable restraint and patience in their struggle for a homeland of their own. The Turks on the other hand, have demonized the Kurds every chance they get. Shame on you Turks.
Well, the muslims invited the west to a fight in their homelands. We had no choice but to give them those battles. This can be used to teach muslims the futility of trying to rule by violence and oppression. If we keep our resolve, as the muslims will force us to, then I'm convinced we will be successful in making fundamentalist muslims patient political players rather than the violent oppressors they are today. But this may be a decades or even centuries long battle, given how stubborn and spiritually misguided the extremist muslims are.
Solomon2
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December 2, 2014 7:37 pm
The Arab spring idealist who died for Isis
Borzou Daragahi
Egyptian’s radicalisation a story of despair, say friends
©FT montage
Ahmed al-Darawy was a pro-democracy activist who ran for parliament, but became disillusioned after Egypt's 2013 military coup. He died fighting for Isis
He had held on for months. But when the Islamists and leftists, who had united in the 2011 revolution he had championed, began fighting each other on the streets of Cairo in late 2012, something inside him snapped.
Ahmed al-Darawy, a one-time police officer turned revolutionary, had been a mainstay of Egypt’s uprising in Tahrir Square.
“He told me, ‘That’s it! That’s the beginning of the end’,” recalls his brother, Haytham, younger by two years. “He told me, ‘Did you see what happened? The revolution is coming to an end, and the counter-revolution will rise. There is blood now between them, they will never reunite. And this means they are both going to be wiped out.’”
Once gregarious and outspoken, he became reclusive, shying away from public life. After the July 2013 coup d’état felled the country’s Islamist president Mohamed Morsi and led to the installation of a military-backed regime, Darawy left the country, telling relatives he was seeking medical care.
The call came on May 29, 2014. Darawy, a 38-year-old father of three, had died on the battlefields of Iraq, the man said. The one-time democracy activist, who had run for the Egyptian parliament in 2012 as an independent, had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaeda offshoot known as Isis, and died in battle.
“The Darawy matter actually horrifies me,” says Yasser al-Hawary, 36, a liberal Egyptian activist. “He adopted the same demands and ideas as all of us and he was just like anybody else. This means other people, that don’t show violence , could join Isis as well.”
Darawy’s path from non-violent democracy activist to fighter for a group so extreme it has been disowned by al-Qaeda reflects the unsettling course of the Arab revolts of 2011. A heady season of hope and optimism that stirred longings for democracy and citizenship rights also unleashed demons many observers did not expect: political repression, internecine and sectarian fighting, and chaos in what had been authoritarian societies.
With the possible exception of Tunisia, all the nations that have risen up are now mired in intensified repression or armed conflict. A moment of hope that the Arab world was emerging from authoritarianism has been eclipsed by Isis and its efforts to draw men and women like Darawy into its orbit.
“This story is very important,” says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics and the author of a book on jihadis. “Not only does it tell us about Egypt’s past, present and future, but also it tells us how the great aspirations and hopes of the so-called Arab spring have turned into despair, and how some of these men have turned to jihadism.”
Darawy belies the stereotype of jihadis as misfits. He was born to university educated parents in 1976, and grew up in Cairo’s upscale Maadi suburb. Those who knew him and his family describe them as well-to-do. Darawy’s sister studied at the expensive American University of Cairo. Darawy received a prestigious spot to study law enforcement at the police academy.
”We were not just middle-class, we are a rich family,” says Haytham, who now lives in the Gulf.
After years as a cop, Darawy became disillusioned with the police, under the interior ministry, known for its brutality and corruption. “He saw what the regime was doing,” says Mr Hawary.
He left the police to join Etisalat, the country’s UAE-operated mobile phone carrier, as a marketing manager setting up sponsorship arrangements with local sports clubs for the company. His brother says Darawy and his wife earned the equivalent of $7,000 a month in a country where monthly income averages $500.
Activists recall meeting him first in late 2010, at the offices of the Socialist Renewal Current, among the liberal and leftist groups that spearheaded the drive into the streets the following January. “He was very expressive and outspoken and was very balanced in his ideas,” says Mr Hawary. “He was in harmony with us.”
He became a leading figure in the tent community that sprang up on Tahrir Square in the days before longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February 2011.
“He had indescribable hope and energy,” says his brother. “I once told him, ‘Ahmed, I think your activism is affecting your work and your home.’ So he told me something very important; that the future of the country is being formed now, we are making history.”
But Darawy was no starry-eyed idealist dreaming of transformation. Not only had he been a police officer but he had worked in the private sector and was by the time of the revolution a parent. He knew how institutions operated and understood the slow pace of reform, so when he came forward to call for reform of the interior ministry, his proposal was full of concrete steps to improve an organisation whose abuses lay at the heart of the 2011 rebellion.
He urged a reduction in work hours, paperwork and administrative tasks to encourage the police to provide proper security, as well as salary reforms and training programmes to reduce brutality. “He wanted police resources to be focused on the security of the citizen,” says his brother.
He told friends he was even willing to take a salary cut to rejoin the police if it would help bring about change. But despite pitching his reform package to a succession of interim governments, including that of Mr Morsi, his ideas were never embraced. “All his efforts failed,” says Mohamed Qassas, a fellow activist. “His reforms were mentioned in the media but never got anywhere.”
As Egypt’s transition moved toward electoral politics, Darawy made a spirited parliamentary run for a seat in his home district, declining an offer to run on the Muslim Brotherhood list and instead winning the backing of the leftist Revolution Continues coalition as well as the Salafist Nour party.
Provisional figures compiled by campaign volunteers showed that he and another candidate had received the most votes and were headed for a run-off, but the election committee declared that Mostafa Bakri, a pro-regime journalist, had won outright.
“There was no evidence but there were suspicions that the election was forged against him,” says Mr Hawary. “Of course he was angry and sad. Most of the revolutionary youth ran for this election and almost none of us made it.”
Presidential elections, too, proved frustrating. Darawy was among those who supported Abdul-Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the ex-Muslim Brotherhood leader who had reinvented himself as a liberal embracing the spirit of the Tahrir revolution. But the candidate lost in the first round of voting.
©Reuters
Though described by some as a moderate Islamist , Darawy maintained friendships with fellow revolutionaries including leftists and liberals.
The end of that solidarity between Islamists and secular revolutionaries marked the beginning of Darawy’s transformation. The violent December 2012 confrontations at the Ittihadiya presidential palace, in which liberal and leftist activists clashed with Morsi supporters, marked the first time the two cornerstones of the Tahrir uprising fought each other. Such confrontations between Islamists and their opponents also undermined the Syrian uprising against Bashar al-Assad, turned Libya’s factions against each other and marred Tunisia’s transition.
“The unity of the masses, the unity of the poor, the middle class, the professionals and the human rights activists was one of the main features of the revolutions,” says Mr Gerges. “But beyond the unity against dictators there was no unity of purpose, no vision and no blueprint of the future. The idea was that the revolution was going to take care of itself, which is a very silly thing.”
Darawy was ill-prepared for the blow. To him, the revolution was quickly careening toward disaster. To associates, he appeared to side with the Islamists, accusing the secular activists of instigating the Ittihadiya violence. Facing a choice between his liberal ideas and Islamist identity, he chose the latter.
After the clashes, Darawy drifted away from Egyptian politics and became more and more obsessed with the unfolding tragedy in Syria, where the Assad government had turned a peaceful uprising into a civil war pitting a regime dominated by members of his heterodox Shia sect against an armed Sunni rebellion drawing fighters from as far away as North America.
“He was always talking about the Arab revolutions, about Syria and how we must rescue the people there,” said Mohamed Abbas, an Islamist-leaning fellow activist now working at a think-tank in the Gulf. “He was in deep grief that the revolutions ended up this way.”
Across the Arab world television broadcasts of cheering pro-democracy protesters waving flags gave way to images of Syrian children killed by the Assad regime’s barrel bombs. Mr Abbas says he fears the dreary course of the Arab revolutions has discredited a budding belief in the democratic process among Arab youth.
“They try out new methods to force the world to hear their voice and to change the [political] reality they reject by their own hands,” he says.
Darawy is thought to have joined protests in favour of Mr Morsi in the summer of 2013, as an outpouring of anger against the Islamist government began to swell. Army officer Abdel Fattah al-Sisi overthrew Mr Morsi in a popularly backed July 2013 coup. The crushing of Morsi supporters weeks later in a violent crackdown at Rabaa Adawiya Square has become a rallying cry for Islamist-leaning youth.
While both hardcore Islamists in the Arab world and disaffected Muslims in the west have made the journey to Isis, very few of those who took part in the uprisings in Tahrir Square or along Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis have ended up joining the group.
Darawy disappeared shortly after the violence at Rabaa Adawiya Square. During one conversation with Mr Abbas around that time he spoke emotionally about the failures of the Arab uprisings. “He was very sad and angry,” says Mr Abbas. “He was always using the language of complete despair. ‘We’re going down the toilet,’ he would say.”
At some point in the autumn of 2013 he was dismissed from his job. A telephone number his brother managed to locate for him has never worked. “Even his wife, her information about him was very poor,” his brother recalls. “She would go for a long time not able to communicate with him.”
Then suddenly, in February, Darawy contacted his younger brother via the internet. “He said take care of mum and dad; we wore them out when we were children,” recalls his brother. “And it didn’t occur to me that he was saying goodbye.” It was the last time the two men communicated.
Haytham, who has been struggling to reconstruct the last few months of his brother’s life, says he believes he first joined the jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, before becoming an Isis commander once it began to dominate the Syrian rebellion in late 2013. He has yet to locate his brother’s body or discover the exact circumstances of his death. One Syrian rebel leader alleges Darawy died at the hands of Iraqi forces in Tikrit.
An Isis supporter claims he died in a suicide operation, while another says he was leader of a unit of Egyptian jihadis fighting in Syria’s northeast. Months after his family learned of his death, pictures of him holding an assault rifle began appearing on the internet. The story of Darawy’s path from police officer to revolutionary to Isis fighter has, for some, become a cautionary tale of infiltration of the security forces as well as a way to paint the Arab uprisings as a cover for extremist Islam.
Such caricatures do not adequately describe Isis recruits such as Darawy. “People are joining Isis simply because there is no other game in town and until very recently it has been very successful,” says James Dorsey, a writer and researcher who has written about Nidhal Selmi, a Tunisian footballer who died as an Isis fighter. “You have people who join who don’t share in great detail its ideology but see very little alternative to effecting change and therefore see it as a vehicle.”
In depth
Egypt under Sisi
After the army’s ousting of the country’s first elected leader, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi, its former chief has inherited a divided country
In interviews with those who knew him, the word used repeatedly to explain Darawy’s transformation is “despair” over the course of events in the Arab world. “We had huge ambitions,” says Mr Qassas, pondering his coffee at a café in central Cairo. “Everybody had visions of change and transformation and democracy and citizenship rights. When none of these ambitions was realised the disappointment was as high as the ambition.”
The same despair has driven some of the revolutionaries in Egypt into exile or depression, self-destruction and suicide, including Zainab al-Mahdi, a well-regarded activist who hanged herself in her Cairo flat in November. The loosely organised, spontaneous uprisings that felled longtime dictatorships ill-prepared their partisans for the long, fierce battles needed to bring about fundamental social change.
“Historically, what’s happening is very normal; the upheavals, the tensions and the counter-revolution,” says Mr Gerges. “What’s happening in Egypt and the Arab world is not unique. It is the aftershock of the social earthquake. It could take many years for things to calm down and subside.”
Haytham has taken custody of his brother’s children, moving them to the Gulf.
“My feelings towards Ahmed will never be altered. I have been proud of him since I was a kid. He is my big brother,” he says. “I will never question why he did this or that. God bless him and reward him for his actions during his life. I will never be ashamed, and I will always be proud of him.”
The Arab spring idealist who died for Isis
Borzou Daragahi
Egyptian’s radicalisation a story of despair, say friends
Ahmed al-Darawy was a pro-democracy activist who ran for parliament, but became disillusioned after Egypt's 2013 military coup. He died fighting for Isis
He had held on for months. But when the Islamists and leftists, who had united in the 2011 revolution he had championed, began fighting each other on the streets of Cairo in late 2012, something inside him snapped.
Ahmed al-Darawy, a one-time police officer turned revolutionary, had been a mainstay of Egypt’s uprising in Tahrir Square.
“He told me, ‘That’s it! That’s the beginning of the end’,” recalls his brother, Haytham, younger by two years. “He told me, ‘Did you see what happened? The revolution is coming to an end, and the counter-revolution will rise. There is blood now between them, they will never reunite. And this means they are both going to be wiped out.’”
Once gregarious and outspoken, he became reclusive, shying away from public life. After the July 2013 coup d’état felled the country’s Islamist president Mohamed Morsi and led to the installation of a military-backed regime, Darawy left the country, telling relatives he was seeking medical care.
The call came on May 29, 2014. Darawy, a 38-year-old father of three, had died on the battlefields of Iraq, the man said. The one-time democracy activist, who had run for the Egyptian parliament in 2012 as an independent, had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaeda offshoot known as Isis, and died in battle.
“The Darawy matter actually horrifies me,” says Yasser al-Hawary, 36, a liberal Egyptian activist. “He adopted the same demands and ideas as all of us and he was just like anybody else. This means other people, that don’t show violence , could join Isis as well.”
Darawy’s path from non-violent democracy activist to fighter for a group so extreme it has been disowned by al-Qaeda reflects the unsettling course of the Arab revolts of 2011. A heady season of hope and optimism that stirred longings for democracy and citizenship rights also unleashed demons many observers did not expect: political repression, internecine and sectarian fighting, and chaos in what had been authoritarian societies.
With the possible exception of Tunisia, all the nations that have risen up are now mired in intensified repression or armed conflict. A moment of hope that the Arab world was emerging from authoritarianism has been eclipsed by Isis and its efforts to draw men and women like Darawy into its orbit.
“This story is very important,” says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics and the author of a book on jihadis. “Not only does it tell us about Egypt’s past, present and future, but also it tells us how the great aspirations and hopes of the so-called Arab spring have turned into despair, and how some of these men have turned to jihadism.”
Darawy belies the stereotype of jihadis as misfits. He was born to university educated parents in 1976, and grew up in Cairo’s upscale Maadi suburb. Those who knew him and his family describe them as well-to-do. Darawy’s sister studied at the expensive American University of Cairo. Darawy received a prestigious spot to study law enforcement at the police academy.
”We were not just middle-class, we are a rich family,” says Haytham, who now lives in the Gulf.
After years as a cop, Darawy became disillusioned with the police, under the interior ministry, known for its brutality and corruption. “He saw what the regime was doing,” says Mr Hawary.
He left the police to join Etisalat, the country’s UAE-operated mobile phone carrier, as a marketing manager setting up sponsorship arrangements with local sports clubs for the company. His brother says Darawy and his wife earned the equivalent of $7,000 a month in a country where monthly income averages $500.
Activists recall meeting him first in late 2010, at the offices of the Socialist Renewal Current, among the liberal and leftist groups that spearheaded the drive into the streets the following January. “He was very expressive and outspoken and was very balanced in his ideas,” says Mr Hawary. “He was in harmony with us.”
He became a leading figure in the tent community that sprang up on Tahrir Square in the days before longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February 2011.
“He had indescribable hope and energy,” says his brother. “I once told him, ‘Ahmed, I think your activism is affecting your work and your home.’ So he told me something very important; that the future of the country is being formed now, we are making history.”
But Darawy was no starry-eyed idealist dreaming of transformation. Not only had he been a police officer but he had worked in the private sector and was by the time of the revolution a parent. He knew how institutions operated and understood the slow pace of reform, so when he came forward to call for reform of the interior ministry, his proposal was full of concrete steps to improve an organisation whose abuses lay at the heart of the 2011 rebellion.
He urged a reduction in work hours, paperwork and administrative tasks to encourage the police to provide proper security, as well as salary reforms and training programmes to reduce brutality. “He wanted police resources to be focused on the security of the citizen,” says his brother.
He told friends he was even willing to take a salary cut to rejoin the police if it would help bring about change. But despite pitching his reform package to a succession of interim governments, including that of Mr Morsi, his ideas were never embraced. “All his efforts failed,” says Mohamed Qassas, a fellow activist. “His reforms were mentioned in the media but never got anywhere.”
As Egypt’s transition moved toward electoral politics, Darawy made a spirited parliamentary run for a seat in his home district, declining an offer to run on the Muslim Brotherhood list and instead winning the backing of the leftist Revolution Continues coalition as well as the Salafist Nour party.
Provisional figures compiled by campaign volunteers showed that he and another candidate had received the most votes and were headed for a run-off, but the election committee declared that Mostafa Bakri, a pro-regime journalist, had won outright.
“There was no evidence but there were suspicions that the election was forged against him,” says Mr Hawary. “Of course he was angry and sad. Most of the revolutionary youth ran for this election and almost none of us made it.”
Presidential elections, too, proved frustrating. Darawy was among those who supported Abdul-Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the ex-Muslim Brotherhood leader who had reinvented himself as a liberal embracing the spirit of the Tahrir revolution. But the candidate lost in the first round of voting.
Though described by some as a moderate Islamist , Darawy maintained friendships with fellow revolutionaries including leftists and liberals.
The end of that solidarity between Islamists and secular revolutionaries marked the beginning of Darawy’s transformation. The violent December 2012 confrontations at the Ittihadiya presidential palace, in which liberal and leftist activists clashed with Morsi supporters, marked the first time the two cornerstones of the Tahrir uprising fought each other. Such confrontations between Islamists and their opponents also undermined the Syrian uprising against Bashar al-Assad, turned Libya’s factions against each other and marred Tunisia’s transition.
“The unity of the masses, the unity of the poor, the middle class, the professionals and the human rights activists was one of the main features of the revolutions,” says Mr Gerges. “But beyond the unity against dictators there was no unity of purpose, no vision and no blueprint of the future. The idea was that the revolution was going to take care of itself, which is a very silly thing.”
Darawy was ill-prepared for the blow. To him, the revolution was quickly careening toward disaster. To associates, he appeared to side with the Islamists, accusing the secular activists of instigating the Ittihadiya violence. Facing a choice between his liberal ideas and Islamist identity, he chose the latter.
After the clashes, Darawy drifted away from Egyptian politics and became more and more obsessed with the unfolding tragedy in Syria, where the Assad government had turned a peaceful uprising into a civil war pitting a regime dominated by members of his heterodox Shia sect against an armed Sunni rebellion drawing fighters from as far away as North America.
“He was always talking about the Arab revolutions, about Syria and how we must rescue the people there,” said Mohamed Abbas, an Islamist-leaning fellow activist now working at a think-tank in the Gulf. “He was in deep grief that the revolutions ended up this way.”
Across the Arab world television broadcasts of cheering pro-democracy protesters waving flags gave way to images of Syrian children killed by the Assad regime’s barrel bombs. Mr Abbas says he fears the dreary course of the Arab revolutions has discredited a budding belief in the democratic process among Arab youth.
“They try out new methods to force the world to hear their voice and to change the [political] reality they reject by their own hands,” he says.
Darawy is thought to have joined protests in favour of Mr Morsi in the summer of 2013, as an outpouring of anger against the Islamist government began to swell. Army officer Abdel Fattah al-Sisi overthrew Mr Morsi in a popularly backed July 2013 coup. The crushing of Morsi supporters weeks later in a violent crackdown at Rabaa Adawiya Square has become a rallying cry for Islamist-leaning youth.
While both hardcore Islamists in the Arab world and disaffected Muslims in the west have made the journey to Isis, very few of those who took part in the uprisings in Tahrir Square or along Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis have ended up joining the group.
Darawy disappeared shortly after the violence at Rabaa Adawiya Square. During one conversation with Mr Abbas around that time he spoke emotionally about the failures of the Arab uprisings. “He was very sad and angry,” says Mr Abbas. “He was always using the language of complete despair. ‘We’re going down the toilet,’ he would say.”
At some point in the autumn of 2013 he was dismissed from his job. A telephone number his brother managed to locate for him has never worked. “Even his wife, her information about him was very poor,” his brother recalls. “She would go for a long time not able to communicate with him.”
Then suddenly, in February, Darawy contacted his younger brother via the internet. “He said take care of mum and dad; we wore them out when we were children,” recalls his brother. “And it didn’t occur to me that he was saying goodbye.” It was the last time the two men communicated.
Haytham, who has been struggling to reconstruct the last few months of his brother’s life, says he believes he first joined the jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, before becoming an Isis commander once it began to dominate the Syrian rebellion in late 2013. He has yet to locate his brother’s body or discover the exact circumstances of his death. One Syrian rebel leader alleges Darawy died at the hands of Iraqi forces in Tikrit.
An Isis supporter claims he died in a suicide operation, while another says he was leader of a unit of Egyptian jihadis fighting in Syria’s northeast. Months after his family learned of his death, pictures of him holding an assault rifle began appearing on the internet. The story of Darawy’s path from police officer to revolutionary to Isis fighter has, for some, become a cautionary tale of infiltration of the security forces as well as a way to paint the Arab uprisings as a cover for extremist Islam.
Such caricatures do not adequately describe Isis recruits such as Darawy. “People are joining Isis simply because there is no other game in town and until very recently it has been very successful,” says James Dorsey, a writer and researcher who has written about Nidhal Selmi, a Tunisian footballer who died as an Isis fighter. “You have people who join who don’t share in great detail its ideology but see very little alternative to effecting change and therefore see it as a vehicle.”
In depth
Egypt under Sisi
After the army’s ousting of the country’s first elected leader, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi, its former chief has inherited a divided country
In interviews with those who knew him, the word used repeatedly to explain Darawy’s transformation is “despair” over the course of events in the Arab world. “We had huge ambitions,” says Mr Qassas, pondering his coffee at a café in central Cairo. “Everybody had visions of change and transformation and democracy and citizenship rights. When none of these ambitions was realised the disappointment was as high as the ambition.”
The same despair has driven some of the revolutionaries in Egypt into exile or depression, self-destruction and suicide, including Zainab al-Mahdi, a well-regarded activist who hanged herself in her Cairo flat in November. The loosely organised, spontaneous uprisings that felled longtime dictatorships ill-prepared their partisans for the long, fierce battles needed to bring about fundamental social change.
“Historically, what’s happening is very normal; the upheavals, the tensions and the counter-revolution,” says Mr Gerges. “What’s happening in Egypt and the Arab world is not unique. It is the aftershock of the social earthquake. It could take many years for things to calm down and subside.”
Haytham has taken custody of his brother’s children, moving them to the Gulf.
“My feelings towards Ahmed will never be altered. I have been proud of him since I was a kid. He is my big brother,” he says. “I will never question why he did this or that. God bless him and reward him for his actions during his life. I will never be ashamed, and I will always be proud of him.”
Alshawi1234
FULL MEMBER
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Awesome footage, French airstrikes target IS positions in Bashiqa, Nineveh plains.
In other news, Iraqi forces and volunteers liberated the areas of Tel Aldhahab and Sayid Gharib near Balad. Clashes continue around Ishaqi and Aziz Balad in Sallahidden province. Clashes have so far killed over 160 members of ISIL in the operations around Balad, mostly through airstrikes. 30 security forces and volunteers casualties.
A-10 thunderbolt strikes IS in Rawa Anbar, just another day in the Islamic state. Airstrikes, lack of food, services and jobs in the Islamic state have become a new reality. Prices of propane cylinders for cooking have risen from $5 to $70 dollars. Kerosine fuel used for heaters has risen to $250 per barrel after it was provided for free by the government rations. All hail the "Islamic state".
Close air support for volunteer forces battling IS.
Abu mahdi al Mohandes, Hadi Al Amiri, Qasim sulaymani, IS worst nightmare.
Promo video of volunteer forces during the liberation of a town.
The unfortunate decision of choosing the wrong side, Population of Sunni towns which joined IS fear being permanently displaced after housing IS Militants in their homes and joining them in their operation. They were so sure of themselves that they revealed their identies and names. Well it must suck for them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/w...manent-displacement-from-iraqi-town.html?_r=0
In other news, Iraqi forces and volunteers liberated the areas of Tel Aldhahab and Sayid Gharib near Balad. Clashes continue around Ishaqi and Aziz Balad in Sallahidden province. Clashes have so far killed over 160 members of ISIL in the operations around Balad, mostly through airstrikes. 30 security forces and volunteers casualties.
A-10 thunderbolt strikes IS in Rawa Anbar, just another day in the Islamic state. Airstrikes, lack of food, services and jobs in the Islamic state have become a new reality. Prices of propane cylinders for cooking have risen from $5 to $70 dollars. Kerosine fuel used for heaters has risen to $250 per barrel after it was provided for free by the government rations. All hail the "Islamic state".
Close air support for volunteer forces battling IS.
Abu mahdi al Mohandes, Hadi Al Amiri, Qasim sulaymani, IS worst nightmare.
Promo video of volunteer forces during the liberation of a town.
The unfortunate decision of choosing the wrong side, Population of Sunni towns which joined IS fear being permanently displaced after housing IS Militants in their homes and joining them in their operation. They were so sure of themselves that they revealed their identies and names. Well it must suck for them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/w...manent-displacement-from-iraqi-town.html?_r=0
Alshawi1234
FULL MEMBER
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- Nov 28, 2012
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Shiite Militias Win Bloody Battles in Iraq, Show No Mercy
Shiite militias helped win some of Iraq's recent victories against Islamic State. But human-rights officials and others worry that the militias might be growing out of control. Photo: Matt Bradley/The Wall Street Journal
By
Matt Bradley and
Ghassan Adnan
Updated Dec. 5, 2014 1:35 p.m. ET
JURF AL-SAKHER, Iraq—In a makeshift barracks about 40 miles south of Baghdad, Ahmed al-Zamili flipped through pictures on his mobile phone: an Islamic State fighter’s corpse hanging from a crude noose, a dead man on the ground clutching an AK-47 and a kneeling, blindfolded man uttering a confession.
Mr. Zamili says the men were captured when his militia of more than 650 Shiite fighters, known as Al Qara’a Regiment, drove Islamic State out of Jurf al-Sakher in late October. After briefly interrogating the enemy soldiers, Mr. Zamili ordered their executions, he says.
“We see them, we attack them, we get the weapons from them, we talk to them, we get their confessions, and then we kill them,” says Mr. Zamili, 35 years old, who ran five restaurants before forming Al Qara’a in June. “Of course, this is much better than the army strategy.”
Shiite militias like Al Qara’a have emerged as the most effective fighting force against Islamic State in Iraq, helping the battered army break a two-month siege and humanitarian crisis in Amerli in August and recapture the strategically important oil-refinery town of Beiji in mid-November.
Iraq’s new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, estimates that more than a million Shiite fighters are trying to fill the void left by failures of the U.S.-trained Iraqi military, which largely fled when Islamic State captured a large stretch of northern and western Iraq in June.
The Shiite militias, many of them formed in response to a fatwa calling for jihad against Islamic State, are likely to be essential even as the U.S. continues airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and sends as many as 1,500 additional troops to advise Iraq’s undermanned military.
ENLARGE
Al Qara’a, led by Ahmed al-Zamili, has played a major role in recent victories over Islamic State militants in Iraq. Matt Bradley/The Wall Street Journal
Shiite militia leaders say their recent successes reflect their holy warrior zeal, superior training compared with Iraqi government troops, less corruption in the ranks and freedom from the legal, bureaucratic and human-rights restrictions on regular Iraqi forces. But some Sunni politicians, tribal leaders and human-rights advocates are worried that the take-no-prisoners tactics of many militia groups are turning them into a mirror image of the Sunni jihadists fighting on behalf of Islamic State.
Militia groups have been accused of a plethora of human-rights violations, including mass shootings of prisoners and Sunni civilians and the forced displacement of Sunni families on a scale approaching ethnic cleansing.
Shiite fighters boast about executing enemy soldiers after they surrender. In Jurf al-Sakher, some Al Qara’a members hurried out of a meeting with a reporter for The Wall Street Journal to deliver the severed head of an Islamic State fighter to relatives of a slain militia member before his funeral ended.
Each battlefield victory also wins Shiite militia groups more political power, which could deepen sectarian tensions across the Middle East and make it harder to hold Iraq together even if Islamic State is driven out. Some politicians in Baghdad already refer to the militia groups as a “Shiite Islamic State.”
In official Iraqi media, militias are celebrated as heroes, and their leaders make televised victory speeches next to Iraqi army generals. One of the deputies to Hadi al-Ameri, leader of the Iranian-backed Badr Corps, recently was elected Iraq’s interior minister. He oversees police and a government office responsible for monitoring militia groups.
ENLARGE
Iraq’s most prominent Shiite militias attacked U.S. troops during nearly nine years of war that ended in December 2011. The Hezbollah Brigades, which joined forces with Al Qara’a in Jurf al-Sakher, are listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
Many of the groups are outraged by President Barack Obama ’s move last month toexpand the U.S. fight against Islamic State militants, claiming it is the guise for a renewed foreign occupation of Iraq. Congress hasn’t voted on Mr. Obama’s request for $5.6 billion in funding.
While the U.S. doesn’t offer direct financial support to Shiite fighters in Iraq, some human-rights advocates claim that a burst of new spending would trickle down to militia groups. “Who is that money and training going to go to if the army has almost completely collapsed?” says Erin Evers, the Iraq researcher at Human Rights Watch in New York. “The U.S. is basically paving the way for these guys to take over the country even more than they already have.”
U.S. military officials are concerned about “anything that could fuel the sectarian conflict,” one of them says. “The behavior of these groups and how they interact with the Sunnis is vital to the political atmosphere.”
Some of the concerns echo those expressed after Iran recently launched airstrikesagainst Islamic State forces along its border with Iraq. American officials welcome Iran’s help but are worried that its leaders are more interested in fueling sectarian tensions than helping to stabilize Iraq.
For now, the Shiite militias are an unavoidable fact of life given the weaknesses of Iraq’s military. U.S. military officials are aware that government forces in Iraq have been “quite reliant” on the militia groups, one official says.
ENLARGE
Iraqi security forces and Shiite militia members fire at Islamic State positions during an operation outside Amerli. Associated Press
“We are aware” of the human-rights allegations and have “communicated our concerns to the Iraqi government about that,” a Pentagon official adds. “This is really an issue for the Iraqi government to work out since they are the ones that are coordinating with Iran on the use of Shiite militia.”
Mr. Abadi, Iraq’s prime minister, has pledged to clean up the military and rein in abuses that could make Shiite militias a liability to his government. Still, their recent battlefield tactics make some Pentagon officials wary about plans to eventually fold Shiite militias and Sunni tribal fighters into a National Guard-style corps that would answer to local Iraqi officials. Legislation needed to create the corps is gridlocked in Iraq’s parliament.
Other U.S. military officials say it is even more important to win the support of Sunni tribes seen as crucial to defeating Islamic State forces in the region. “The focus right now has to be on the Sunnis,” a Pentagon official says.
Some Iraqi government officials see no need for major changes. Gen. Saad Maan Ibrahim, spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, which manages the defense of Iraq’s capital, says police have investigated and arrested a number of militia members who were accused of abuses. Such crimes are isolated, he says.
“It’s very clear that the circumstances of the battlefield are unconventional,” adds Ghassan al-Hussaini, an adviser to Mr. Abadi, Iraq’s prime minister. “Those who keep criticizing the fighters in the battlefield are sitting in their air-conditioned offices without knowing what a battlefield even looks like.”
Mr. Zamili, the leader of Al Qara’a who keeps gruesome photos of enemy Islamic State fighters on his phone, was born in Nasiriyah, a large city in the Shiite heartland of Iraq about 225 miles southeast of Baghdad. Under Saddam Hussein ’s regime, allusions to religious differences were scrubbed from public life, so the young Mr. Zamili was thrilled to embrace his Shiite identity after being sent by his parents to live with cousins in Beirut.
He was particularly stirred by the rousing televised speeches of Hassan Nassrallah, the militant leader whose Iran-backed Hezbollah group provided the ideological blueprint for Shiite militant groups throughout the region.
ENLARGE
After Al Qara’a drove Islamic State out of Jurf al-Sakher in late October, soldiers painted the militia’s name on this armored vehicle. Matt Bradley/The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Nassrallah linked resistance against Israel and Sunni Arab despots to the struggles of early Shiites such as Imam Hussein, whose young nephew Qassim begged his family for the privilege of martyrdom in battle. “I started telling myself that I’m no better than Qassim and that I would do the same: sacrifice myself for the sake of God and religion,” Mr. Zamili recalls.
With the help of his cousins, who worked for Hezbollah’s Al Manar television station, Mr. Zamili attended a Hezbollah training camp in the mountains outside Beirut, where he learned to fire pistols, mortars and artillery. He returned to Iraq in 1999 and was dreading the indignity of compulsory conscription into Iraq’s Sunni-led army when the U.S. toppled Mr. Hussein in 2003.
Mr. Zamili says he formed his first militia group in 2006 to help fend off death squads and suicide bombers who wanted to rid his Sunni-dominated neighborhood in Baghdad, called Adhamiyah, of Shiites. The unnamed militia had about 100 members, including friends who trained with him in Lebanon.
From 2006 to 2009, Mr. Zamili and his militia fought alongside Qais al-Khazali, a Shiite militia leader who split from powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army to form a group called Asaib Ahl Al Haq, or League of the Righteous.
Mr. Zamili says his fighters helped support an untrained and incompetent Iraqi police force. “Whenever there was an operation against terrorists, they would give us police uniforms and guns and we would do the operation,” he says. He denies participating in Asaib Ahl Al Haq’s attacks on U.S. troops.
After the “surge” of U.S. troops largely subdued al Qaeda in Iraq, Mr. Zamili went back to running his restaurants in Adhamiyah. When civil war broke out in Syria, he rallied his friends again. He says Asaib Ahl Al Haq sent them to Iran for training—and then to Damascus to fight.
Islamic State’s invasion of Iraq last summer left the militants within striking distance of Kerbala, the holy city where Shiites say Imam Hussein was murdered by Sunni extremists more than 1,300 years ago. The invasion was a dream come true for Mr. Zamili. He says it has set the scene for a sectarian rematch that heralds the resurrection of the Hidden Imam, a messiah-like figure who will usher in Al Qara’a, or judgment day.
“As long as the fight is against the Shiite sect, it was our wish that they would come to Iraq and we would fight them in our own country,” Mr. Zamili says. He flew back to Baghdad, sold two homes in Nasiriyah and began spending his own money to feed the militia’s fighting force. He has spent 200 million Iraqi dinars ($166,000) so far, he says.
Al Qara’a, loosely translated as the Judgment Day Regiment, got its weapons from the Iraqi prime minister’s office and retreating Islamic State fighters, Mr. Zamili says. Some details of his account couldn’t be independently confirmed, but a representative of the Iraqi office in charge of monitoring militia groups says it is aware of his training and ties to Shiite militants.
Mr. Zamili’s militia is officially registered with the local Babil Operations Command, which reports to Iraq’s defense ministry and the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric. He has helped raise money for the militias and win them political cover to join the fight.
Ayatollah Sistani’s representative in Babil province, Sheik Mahmood al-Khafaji, says the militias have the support of all Iraqi patriots.
In the October battle to recapture Jurf al-Sakher from Islamic State, Al Qara’a tore up farmland and razed palm orchards so that the militia’s vehicles could avoid mine-laden roads. In contrast, Iraqi government soldiers had to wait for permission from Baghdad to destroy farms and suffered dozens of casualties while fighting on the booby-trapped pavement, Mr. Zamili says.
Gen. Maan says Shiite militias and government troops largely follow the same rules of engagement, but many Shiite fighters disagree. “We do things the government can’t,” says Hussein Kareem al-Shemari, an Al Qara’a commander. Most Iraqi soldiers are poorly trained, fight only for a paycheck and sometimes bribe superiors to move them farther from the fighting, he says.
Some Iraqi troops showed up with just one extra magazine for their rifles and retreated at the first sign of enemy resistance, say Al Qara’a fighters. Militia members slept in front of Iraqi military tanks and armored vehicles during one night of the battle so retreating government soldiers couldn’t drive their equipment away from the front lines.
Al Qara’a prefers to execute captured Islamic State militants because they often go free if handed over to the Iraqi military or police, according to Messrs. Shemari and Zamili. They say some soldiers take bribes from Islamic State.
Senior Iraqi and American generals agree that corruption is a major problem for Iraq’s military. They blame graft within the ranks for the Iraqi military’s sudden collapse amid Islamic State’s initial advance in June.
Mr. Zamili says he is aware of the human-rights conventions of war but thinks they are absurd considering the abuses committed by Islamic State. “You’re on a battlefield, and there is a terrorist pointing a weapon at you and trying to kill you,” he says. “Do you let him kill you, or do you kill him?”
Emboldened by the victory in Jurf al-Sakher, Mr. Zamili now is trying to decide whether to join the battle against Islamic State militants in Samarra, a city between Baghdad and Tikrit, or even farther away. Just like his Sunni enemies, the Shiite militia leader and his men vow to fight to the end.
“I see myself as an Islamic Shiite fighter—part of the resistance until the end of my life,” Mr. Zamili says.
—Dion Nissenbaum and Julian E. Barnes contributed to this article.
Write to Matt Bradley at matt.bradley@wsj.com
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Rivalries resurface in Iraqi town recaptured from Islamic State
BY ISABEL COLES
JALAWLA, Iraq Mon Dec 8, 2014 6:30am EST
BY ISABEL COLES
JALAWLA, Iraq Mon Dec 8, 2014 6:30am EST
1 OF 2. Members of the Kurdish security forces take part in an intensive security deployment after clashes with Islamic State militants in Jalawla, Diyala province November 23, 2014.
CREDIT: REUTERS/STRINGER
(Reuters) - The blood of two militants killed during Islamic State's rout in the Iraqi town of Jalawla has yet to be washed away, but a turf war is already brewing between Kurdish and Shi'ite forces that jointly drove the insurgents out.
The recapture of disputed territory and towns such as Jalawla is reopening rivalries over the boundary between areas of Kurdish control and those administered by the Shi'ite-led Baghdad government.
Local Sunni Arabs displaced in the fighting have little choice but to align themselves with one side or the other.
Not long after Islamic State began its offensive across Iraq this summer, Kurdish commanders in the eastern province of Diyala invited the head of the largest Sunni Arab tribe in Jalawla to discuss jointly resisting the insurgents.
"We sat with them here in this very building," said Brigadier General Barzan Ali Shawas, describing the meeting with Sheikh Faisal al-Karwi in a Kurdish peshmerga barracks on the banks of the Diyala river, lined with date palms.
"We said: What do you want? True, you are Arabs and we are Kurds, but the unity of Iraq is in our interest." The sheikh had replied he would consider the Kurds' offer to set up a unit for local Sunnis under peshmerga command, but he never came back with an answer.
Since that June day, Jalawla changed hands several times, until the peshmerga and Shi'ite militia drove the militants out on Nov. 23. According to Shawas, they agreed before the offensive that the Shi'ite militia would withdraw as soon as it was over and hand full control to the Kurds, but that has yet to happen.
Jalawla, which lies about 150 km (90 miles) northeast of Baghdad, is overwhelmingly Arab and was under the central government's jurisdiction until Islamic State overran it. However, the Kurds say it was theirs until the 1970s, when Saddam Hussein brought in Sheikh Faisal's Karwiya tribe to "Arabise" the area.
Now it is deserted except for stray animals, Shi'ite militiamen and peshmerga, marking their territory with flags and graffiti. The atmosphere is tense.
"Jalawla is Kurdistani," is spray-painted on the front of a bakery. Fridges dragged into the road as barricades are beginning to rust.
Shi'ite fighters drive a pick-up truck with a picture of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the bonnet. One gets out and approaches the Kurds, finger on the trigger of his rifle, to ask if they have permission to be there from the head of the Shi'ite Khorasani Brigades militia.
"If they retain a fanatic stance about the areas they have taken, there's no way we will allow them," said Jawad al-Hosnawi, the Khorasani Brigades' field commander.
Iraqi Kurds have controlled an autonomous region since the early 1990s and their fighters moved into other disputed areas this year to combat Islamic State.
But Hosnawi rejects any further Kurdish ambitions. "Our problem is if they want to separate from Iraq or form an ethnic state - no way," he said.
RESIDENTS FEAR MILITIAS
Cats pick through uncollected rubbish in Jalawla and a cow strolls down the street, oblivious to the danger of thousands of mines planted by the militants. A burst of gunfire and the occasional thud of an explosion can be heard.
Shawas promised civilians would be allowed to return, except those who sided with Islamic State, once a bomb disposal team finishes its work, and water and electricity are restored.
Hosnawi said the Kurds were bulldozing Sunni homes to discourage them from coming back.
Many Jalawla residents are camping a few kilometers away on a football pitch, its perimeter fence draped with laundry. They celebrated the news that Islamic State had been forced from Jalawla and the adjacent town of Saadiya.
Most said they had fled not the militants, but air strikes targeting them. Now they fear the Shi'ite forces, who have killed Sunnis and destroyed their homes in other towns they recaptured from Islamic States.
"We want to go back but the militias will slaughter us," said a 40-year-old farmer from Saadiya who was too afraid to give his name. "We ask the peshmerga to annex Jalawla and Saadiya to the (Kurdistan) region so we can live in peace."
To slow enemy advances, Islamic State blew up bridges across the milky waters of the Diyala river, into which some militants flung themselves to escape when the game was up.
The blood of two insurgents who did not get away stains the entrance to a shop that used to sell roofing. Its shutters are down now and daubed with Shi'ite slogans.
Sheikh Faisal confirmed rejecting the Kurds’ proposal, and says his tribe had fought the peshmerga to prevent them taking over a base abandoned by the Iraqi army.
"They won't let Arabs return, mostly the Karwiya. They want to take Jalawla. It's an Arab area," he said by telephone from the nearby town of Baquba.
He denies collaborating with Islamic State, as the Kurds allege, and says the militants blew up his house in Jalawla because he refused to join them.
Unlike the displaced residents, Sheikh Faisal's nephew Zumhar Jamal al-Karwi said Jalawla should remain under the Baghdad government, not the Kurds.
"We won't accept Jalawla remaining in Kurdish clutches. If they cling to it by force, it will be retaken by force," Zumhar said. "We are prepared to fight against the Kurds alongside the militias unless the peshmerga leave Jalawla."
(editing by David Stamp)
Mahmoud_EGY
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you want to share your border with IS better ?
Turks probably see YPG as a greater threat and that IS would be easier to mainuplate and contain.
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Their fight shouldn't finish. They can continue to kill each other forever.
xenon54 out
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Till the last man.
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