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The Islamic state

In The NYT Iran Dominates in Iraq After U.S. ‘Handed the Country Over’
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Iran’s influence in Iraq is not just ascendant, but diverse, projecting into military, political, economic and cultural affairs.

At some border posts in the south, Iraqi sovereignty is an afterthought. Busloads of young militia recruits cross into Iran without so much as a document check. They receive military training and are then flown to Syria, where they fight under the command of Iranian officers in defense of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

Passing in the other direction, truck drivers pump Iranian products — food, household goods, illicit drugs — into what has become a vital and captive market.

Iran tips the scales to its favor in every area of commerce. In the city of Najaf, it even picks up the trash, after the provincial council there awarded a municipal contract to a private Iranian company. One member of the council, Zuhair al-Jibouri, resorted to a now-common Iraqi aphorism: “We import apples from Iran so we can give them away to Iranian pilgrims.”

Politically, Iran has a large number of allies in Iraq’s Parliament who can help secure its goals. And its influence over the choice of interior minister, through a militia and political group the Iranians built up in the 1980s to oppose Mr. Hussein, has given it substantial control over that ministry and the federal police.

Perhaps most crucial, Parliament passed a law last year that effectively made the constellation of Shiite militias a permanent fixture of Iraq’s security forces. This ensures Iraqi funding for the groups while effectively maintaining Iran’s control over some of the most powerful units.
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And this is a country the young Islamic Republic fought a brutal WWI like war with a few decades ago. Long article details how Iran's influence is pervasive across a spectrum of activities. It's similar to what they did in Lebanon. It's much like what they are doing in Syria with commerce often being as important more cliched revolutionary activities. Points out Iran's heavy hand does cause a good deal of resentment. US influence has increased during the war with IS but not as much as Iran's. Baghdad plays a game of balancing these two competitors to maintain some autonomy.
 
On Niqash.org Iraq After The Islamic State: No Unity On The Sunni Side Of The Street
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It is quite possible that the current crisis between the various Gulf Arab nations is also having an impact. The Sunni Muslim political parties are often supported by one or other of the Gulf states, whose populations are Sunni Muslim majority. The current problems between those states and Qatar may well be causing a rift in Iraq’s Sunni parties too.

For instance, the alliance led by Salim al-Jibouri has a good relationship with the Qataris and the pleasant relationship between al-Jibouri and Iraq’s Shiite Muslim parties can be seen as a reflection of the better relationship that Sunni-led Qatar has with Shiite-led Iran. Iraq’s Shiite Muslim parties did not complain about the first conference organized in Baghdad.

Meanwhile the other Sunni Muslim group, led by senior Sunni politician, Osama al-Nujaifi, working together with the likes of businessman Khamis al-Khanjar, is closer to Saudi Arabia and the other emirates arrayed against Qatar. Shiite Muslim parties have said they are opposed to that group of Sunni politicians, including the controversial individuals like al-Issawi and al-Khanjar – this is why the second conference is being held in Iraqi Kurdistan.

All told though, the reasons behind the divisions in Iraqi Sunni politics start to look meaningless compared to the massive destruction that locals in places like Mosul and Salahaddin have seen. Millions are displaced and billions worth of damage has been done. The country’s Sunni Muslims need their politicians united, if they are to help their constituents. Given the inability of the politicians to even organise one meeting to talk about potential unity, the outlook is grim.
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As in Syria foreign backers divide an already fragmented Sunni Arab population. The al-Nujaifi's are also close to Turkey.
 
On Musings On Iraq Post Mosul Liberation Day 6 Jul 16 2017
Heavy clashes continued in the Old City of west Mosul, but with little to no coverage within Iraq. The Golden Division’s General Abdul Wahab al-Saadi repeated the government’s story that the Iraqi forces (ISF) were simply hunting down sleeper cells in the district. The Iraq News Center however reported heavy fighting was going on in Qalahat and Shahwan, which are two neighborhoods along the Tigris River. The Islamic State fighters are hiding in basements and tunnels in the Old City. In one of those twenty IS women were captured with different nationalities. Five of them were suicide bombers. The continued combat in the city is barely being mentioned in the Iraqi media. Instead most of Iraq is just hearing of arrests and occasional shootings of insurgents trying to escape. That’s due to two issues. First, the ISF has barred reporters from west Mosul. Second, almost all Iraqi media outlets just repeat government statements and do not do original reporting.
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Still ongoing.
 
On TNI I Interviewed the War-Weary Residents of Mosul. The Fight for the City Is Far from Over.
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One elderly camp resident (who wouldn’t give her name because she was still afraid that ISIS might find her) told me there was a commonly held belief that those who didn’t like ISIS left right away, while those that stayed behind did so because they supported ISIS. “I was able to leave,” she explained. “They could have left as well. Why do you think they stayed behind?” A man who lived several blocks over, however, had a different view.

“Many people who escaped had money or cars or knew people outside who could help them. But many did not,” he explained. “Why accuse them of helping ISIS just because they weren’t able to leave?” These diverging views expose some of the dangers looming for post-ISIS Mosul—even aside from how the city is governed.

“Many of the people in this camp who fled Mosul say they know who supported ISIS and who didn’t” in the areas where they lived, Akrey explained. “When they get back I am afraid many will carry out revenge attacks” against their neighbors in vigilante, extrajudicial ways. Shia firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said he has similar fears.
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IS was undoubtedly well rooted in and especially around Mosul. IS often splits tribes on class and generational lines. IS offered a dole of bread and cultivated its base amongst the poor and its Salafi ways attracted some. Rural folk from around Mosul were reported to have flowed into the city after IS took it. That's where IS regrew its support after defeat in 08. This class/rural-urban tension was also evident in civil war Aleppo. It's an old pattern; when the revolutionary Baath came to Mosul it was also from the Rif around it.

As in the snip above the poor also lacked the resources to leave and had to make tough choices. Young men will have opportunistically collaborated with the city's new main employer just as folk in France pragmatically collaborated with the Nazis. A lot of people will be compromised by this. As in post-Nazi France innocent people and relatives will also be falsely accused and targeted.

This also isn't France but a rough country of hard people where internecine retribution is common. With tribal folk in Iraq there's an obligation to avenge injuries that can only be headed off by paying blood money. The Americans were busily doing that after the last round. I assume the Iraqis are now though its not been reported.

After the initial recapture of cities it's really been this background violence of traumatised Sunni division and distrust that has more characterised post-IS Iraq in areas like al Anbar than sectarian trouble which you do see in mixed, Badr ruled Diyala if on a smaller scale than in the far bloodier first stage of the civil war.
 
On Defense One How Can Iraq Rebuild?
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What worries British investors is that their potential business partners in Iraq have yet to provide sufficiently detailed proposals to convince them that they will make money. Ambiguous business proposals, investors fear, will allow money to be siphoned off to local officials. “The legal paperwork must be protected. We need to know who we are doing business with,” Raed Hanna, director of Mutual Finance, which supports investment projects in Iraq, explained to me.

One inconvenient, generally accepted truth, is that doing business in post-conflict territories and emerging markets necessitates some measure of corruption. Privately, business owners acknowledge that it simply is not possible to do business in Iraq without paying bribes. The country remains vulnerable to clientelism, in part because of the public sector’s dominance of the Iraqi business environment. The result is that political power often rests with whoever can provide his supporters with lucrative government contracts. All this contributed to Iraq coming in at 166 out of 176 countries in Transparency International’s 2016 corruption index.

While it’s relatively easy for large companies in the oil and gas sector to factor the cost of corruption into their investments, the costs for investors in small-and-medium-sized businesses can be crippling. The costs of obtaining all the necessary permissions to set up the business may outweigh any potential profits, especially if a local official has a client who is a potential competitor. Yet manufacturing and medium-sized enterprises are the ones that have the capacity to deliver employment to liberated areas.
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Like a lot of petro-states representatives of voters are essentially bought with oil revenues that they then redistribute to consolidate there position. Rather than paying taxes and demanding the state serve them the basic political transaction runs in the other direction. That model's at the root of a lot of corruption but hard to escape. This piece compares Iraqi reconstruction to the Marshall Plan but it's probably inevitable the $100 billion post-IS reconstruction effort will be an Ali Baba boondoggle.
 
On Rudaw US officials, SDF report continued progress against ISIS in Raqqa
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have continued to progress deeper into ISIS-held parts of Raqqa city, where the UN believes around 40,000 people remain.

“We knew going in that Raqqa was going to be very hard,” US Pentagon Spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters on Tuesday. “There is not a consistent degree of progress in any military campaign, it’s a stop and go effort by its very nature.”

Davis was responding to questions about a slow-down in SDF’s progress ISIS’ de facto capital and last major urban stronghold in Iraq and Syria.
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All these outlets have their biases. Rudaw is KDP state press but that's also CENTCOM talking and later than Col. Dillion whose also quoted here. CENTCOM is also known to be prone to optimistic porkies on op progress. Sometimes the situation on the ground just isn't very clear and next steps are being disputed. A pause would not really be big news. Sources making a big noise about that is odd.

Davis was also saying they are taking a lot of casualties. It's to be expected. The Iraqis admit to losing a thousand guys taking Mosul and far more were injured. Raqqa is much smaller but the defensive force is maybe half the size of that in Mosul and it's been densely sown with IEDs in places. Medical facilities were often swamped with casualties and here they seem far more limited. Losses are to be expected if they're not simply flattening the place with air strikes and artillery. There's civilians they should try to avoid killing. ISW in general is reporting slowing progress in Raqqa due to the assault encountering dense defences. There are also clear problems with holding forces. The SDF has really limited reserves of veteran PKK cadres who can take urban ground. It appears they're conscripting ever Kurdish lad they can lay hands on just like when Manbij was ongoing. A Turkish attack in their rear can't be ruled out. In these circumstances pausing would often make military sense as Davis suggests above. The Iraqis with a massively bigger better equipped and trained assault force did that more than once in Mosul. So did the R+6 in East Aleppo. IS is a very dangerous and far from passive enemy in this sort of fight. They'd be wise to take their time.
 
On Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi blog Islamic State Treatise: Ruling of Shari'a on the Shi'a Sects
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The central argument of this treatise, which going by some of the remarks in the conclusion appears to have been aimed at clarifying some doubts within the ranks of some younger members of IS about the status of the Shi'a and related sects in Islamic law (Shari'a), stipulates that the Shi'a, Alawites, Ismailis and Druze are not 'original kuffar' (i.e. original disbelievers in Islam like Jews and Christians), but are rather apostates: that is, people who have abandoned Islam. Note that the treatise makes an exception for Druze who do not claim to be Muslims, as many of them do not identify themselves as a sect of Islam, while others among them do. If there is no claimed affiliation with Islam, one cannot be an apostate.

The stipulation of apostasy for the Shi'a and related/derived sects goes against an arguably intuitive stream of thought that might posit that with the passing of generations from the time of their ancestors' original apostasy from Islam, today's Shi'a are simply original disbelievers like the Jews and Christians, since they were not born into Islam. The conception of Shi'a as apostates is notably consistent with the line in the 'Islam 101' pamphlet issued by IS and published online by its 'al-Himma Library', called 'This is our 'Aqeeda and This is our Manhaj', which explicitly classifies the Shi'a as an apostate sect among the Muslims.

Since apostasy is regarded as worse than original kufr (disbelief), then fighting apostasy and its adherents in their various forms is accorded priority. An illustration of this line of thinking comes in an extended quotation in this treatise from Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi's speech "Have you heard of the Rafidites?" Zarqawi, speaking during the time of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, invoked a supposed precedent from the time of the Crusades to justify the idea of waging war on the Shi'a. Just as Salah al-Din did not retake Jerusalem from the Crusaders until after the end of the Shi'i Fatimid dynasty in Egypt, so today's jihadists will not defeat the Crusaders of this era until they destroy the Shi'a first. Zarqawi's view of history is simplistic, to say the least, but the reasoning is clear.
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Of course apostasy is punishable by death.
 
On Musings On Iraq Post Mosul Liberation Day 8 Jul 18 2017
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Now that the Mosul campaign is officially ended, even though clashes continue in the city, a calculation can be made for casualties. Based upon daily media stories, U.N. and human rights groups’ reports, and the Airwars site (although not all air strikes on that site were used) 14,582 deaths were recorded and 20,609 wounded just inside Mosul. Those figures should be considered a minimum for several reasons. The biggest is because the Iraqi government does not report ISF losses. There were many news reports that just gave deaths and not the wounded. Those problems are the reason why the fatalities and injured are so close when the latter should be 2-4 times higher. Civilians were by far the biggest victims of the fighting with 13,106 dead and 15,923 injured, 82% of total casualties. Air strikes did take a heavy toll, with 4,911 killed, and 3,705 wounded, but were just 24% of the total. IS executed another 3,018 civilians, 20% of all the deaths.

Reported Battle Of Mosul Casualties (Only for the city)
14,582 Killed (14 Hashd, 1,462 ISF, 13,106 Civilians)
20,609 Wounded (1 Coalition Soldier, 16 Hashd, 4,669 ISF, 15,923 Civilians)

3,018 Executed by Islamic State
4,911 Civilians Killed by Coalition/Iraqi Air Strikes/Artillery
3,705 Civilians Wounded by Coalition/Iraqi Air Strikes/Artillery

These figures are collated from reading 45+ papers a day and recording all casualty numbers, along with human rights reports, U.S.-led Coalition releases, papers by the United Nations, and the Airwars site.

The real number of casualties from the fighting in Mosul is much higher. First, the Iraqi government does not report casualties amongst the Iraqi forces. Second, only air strikes rated as Fair to High quality from Airwars were recorded. Third, the United Nations released several reports that just had figures for the Mosul operation overall, not breaking down which towns or cities they came from. Those were not included, although many of them likely occurred in Mosul.
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Just for scale the battle of Aleppo lasted four years and recorded 31K dead in the whole provence, by some counts 76% of the dead were civilians.

These figures are also probably low but Mosul was clearly a far more intense battle and perhaps more appalling in some ways. Prosecuted to rescue a trapped civilian population that too often became collateral damage. They endured the additional risk of large punitive massacres by the defenders. IS executed more civilians here than AQ murdered at 9-11. And a residual IS presence probably will remain in the area planning a return as they did before. It can't even be said to have been mercifully short but a continuation of a much smaller battle in 08 that proved inconclusive.
 
On Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi's blog The Myth of ISIS's Strategic Brilliance
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It's important to be realistic about the challenges posed by ISIS as its statehood project collapses. The whole saga of its rise and fall can be invoked as propaganda points both for and against the organization, much depending on a person's own biases and sympathies. For the critics looking at ISIS from an Islamist and jihadist perspective, the experience shows the folly of ISIS's own hastiness, hubris, and extremism. They will likely note Adnani's appeal to God in an April 2014 recording that if his group were a state of "Khawarij"—referring to an early group in Islamic history and now a common term for extremists—then the state's back should be broken and its leaders killed (indeed, many of the leaders have been killed). For the supporters and those sympathetic to ISIS, the experience will be put down to tribulations from God and the like, echoing the group's current propaganda line.

But it's a mistake to impute strategic brilliance to ISIS rather than acknowledging that it is an entity run by humans capable of grave errors. Otherwise, we risk becoming inadvertent propagandists for the group.
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Makes a strong argument that IS fucks up and then spins an unfortunate situation as well they can. Actually like a lot of other human entities.
 
teqniq said:
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I can't help but find that all a bit Daily Mail outrage. Beheadings? Torture? Homophobic murder? Terrible.

But DRUG ABUSE! Honestly, is there nothing these beasts won't do.

(Not that all that paraphernalia is evidence of fuck all drug abuse anyway, all those have legitimate medical usage.)
 
LynnDoyleCooper said:
I can't help but find that all a bit Daily Mail outrage. Beheadings? Torture? Homophobic murder? Terrible.

But DRUG ABUSE! Honestly, is there nothing these beasts won't do.

(Not that all that paraphernalia is evidence of fuck all drug abuse anyway, all those have legitimate medical usage.)
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No need to overreact and get all hysterical. I have heard of ISIS abusing drugs on and of for the last few years, everything from prescription drugs to speed. Is it any surprise, whether you need to come down from all the stress of being in a brutal, psychopathic, totalitarian organisation or to pep yourself up for battle or to commit a massacre, that many ISIS members abuse drugs?

I use drugs myself but I am not going to deny that some people use drugs as a means to lower their moral inhibitions to commit acts they otherwise wouldn't do. Why should ISIS be the exception?

Also, ISIS executed people for smoking tobacco and drinking, so highlighting their hypocrisy regarding their own drug use is more than fair game in my opinion.
 
mather said:
No need to overreact and get all hysterical. I have heard of ISIS abusing drugs on and of for the last few years, everything from prescription drugs to speed. Is it any surprise, whether you need to come down from all the stress of being in a brutal, psychopathic, totalitarian organisation or to pep yourself up for battle or to commit a massacre, that many ISIS members abuse drugs?

I use drugs myself but I am not going to deny that some people use drugs as a means to lower their moral inhibitions to commit acts they otherwise wouldn't do. Why should ISIS be the exception?

Also, ISIS executed people for smoking tobacco and drinking, so highlighting their hypocrisy regarding their own drug use is more than fair game in my opinion.
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Yeah, wasn't commenting on the posting of the link. Just struck me as a funny issue and very BBC/outraged of Tunbridge Wells. Funny peculiar, not funny haha.
 
Ordnance expended by one A-10 on a six month det.

DFShI_OV0AALNIb.jpg


Bulldog One. You are Weapons Free.
 
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