The Kurds

UN: Foreign Fighters Joining Terror Groups On 'Unprecedented Scale'

A new United Nations report says the world faces a challenge of foreign fighters in terror groups on an "unprecedented scale," with about 15,000 in Syria and Iraq alone. The report by a panel of experts monitoring al-Qaida and the Taliban, obtained Friday by The Associated Press, has been submitted to the U.N. Security Council.

"Numbers since 2010 are now many times the size of the cumulative numbers of foreign terrorist fighters between 1990 and 2010 - and are growing," the report says. The panel was set up to support the council's al-Qaida sanctions committee. The panel says fighters from more than 80 countries working with al-Qaida associates in Syria and Iraq "form the core of a new diaspora that may seed the threat for years to come," and that domestic terrorism could rise as fighters return to their home countries.

The diversity of countries means wider sharing of skills and training on the ground in Syria and Iraq, the report warns. "There are instances of foreign terrorist fighters from France, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland operating together," it says.

Full story at Huffington Post

Must see documentary:

The Strange Irony Hidden Among The Highest Ranks Of ISIS

As the Islamic State group continues to wreak havoc across Syria and Iraq, the group has become synonymous with extreme religious zealotry. Yet the militant group ironically has strong alliances with members of former dictator Saddam Hussein's Baath regime and its highest ranks are filled with former Saddam loyalists. "Baathism is fundamentally a secular, pan-Arab movement, which the pan-Islamist movements have been at odds with for decades. This is not a natural alliance," Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism expert at the New America Foundation, told The WorldPost.

While the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS or ISIL, wants to create a religious regime across national borders, the Baathists want to reassert the power they had before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. But they both claim to champion Sunni interests in opposition to former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's autocratic and sectarian leadership. The pragmatic alliance has been a major force in helping the Islamic State achieve its goals. When the group seized a string of cities in Iraq earlier this year, it was the former generals of Saddam's army who provided much of the military expertise.

The Islamic State's extremism, however, is now causing rifts in the alliance, with Baathist and Islamic State fighters competing for dominance. In July, a group of former Saddam followers released a statement denouncing the persecution of minorities, which served to distance the group from the Islamic State's tactics, analysts told Foreign Policy. And in late August, the news site Niqash reported that Sunni militia and tribal leaders were plotting to wrest control of the city of Fallujah from their Islamic State allies and roll back the group's extremist mandates.

More at The WorldPost

Welcome to Baghdad: How Iraq Used to Be in the 1950s

Fascinating insight in to Iraq in the 1950s. The country is steeped in a rich history and culture. The very beginnings of civilisation started here and where man began cultivating the land and where writing was conceived. It even used to be a tourist hot spot.

The Islamic State (Part 5)

On August 8, nearly three years after the United States pulled out of Iraq, President Barack Obama ordered airstrikes to commence on Islamic State positions in northern Iraq, as the group's fighters advanced towards the Kurdish capital of Erbil.

Other parts at VICE News

Yezidis massacred by ISIS

Reports that Islamic militants have trapped up to 40,000 members of Iraq’s minority communities have spurred the US into considering a military-led humanitarian action.

Most of the trapped people are members of the Yazidi religion, one of Iraq’s oldest minorities. They were forced to flee to Mount Sinjar in the Iraqi north-west region, or face slaughter by an encircling group of Islamic State (Isis) jihadists. The UN has said that roughly 40,000 people – many women and children – have taken refuge in nine locations on the mountain, “a craggy, mile-high ridge identified in local legend as the final resting place of Noah’s ark”.

Gruesome images of brutally slain people have emerged in the past week, as local officials say that at least 500 Yazidis, including 40 children, have been killed, and many more have been threatened with death. Roughly 130,000 residents of the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar have fled to Dohuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan to the north, or to Irbil.

Reports of violence, repression and murder by Isis and other extremist groups have become increasingly prevalent in Iraq. Christians have also been targeted for their faith. The country’s largest Christian city was all but abandoned on Thursday, as Isis advanced through minority communities in the north-west.

The Guardian

Isis orders all women and girls in Mosul to undergo Female genital mutilation

The militant group Islamic State (Isis) has ordered all girls and women in and around Iraq's northern city of Mosul to undergo female genital mutilation, the United Nations says. The "fatwa" issued by the Sunni Muslim fighters would potentially affect 4 million women and girls, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Jacqueline Badcock, told reporters in Geneva by videolink from Irbil.

"This is something very new for Iraq, particularly in this area, and is of grave concern and does need to be addressed," she said. "This is not the will of Iraqi people, or the women of Iraq in these vulnerable areas covered by the terrorists," she added. No one was immediately available for comment from Isis, which has led an offensive through northern and western Iraq.

The Guardian

A line in the sand that caused the Middle East

The Sykes-Picot agreement was an initially informal deal between Britain and France, signed in 1916, which divided up the Middle East during World War One. This agreement has, in many ways, led to much of the trouble in the area today. A look at a line in the sand that threw a region into turmoil for decades

Iraq illegally detains, tortures and rapes thousands of women

Iraqi authorities are detaining thousands of women illegally and subjecting many to torture and ill-treatment, including the threat of sexual abuse, Human Rights Watch said in a report published on Thursday.

Many women were detained for months or even years without charge before seeing a judge, HRW said, and security forces often questioned them about their male relatives' activities rather than crimes in which they themselves were implicated.

In custody, women described being kicked, slapped, hung upside-down and beaten on the soles of their feet, given electric shocks, threatened with sexual assault by security forces during interrogation, and even raped in front of their relatives and children.

"The abuses of women we documented are in many ways at the heart of the current crisis in Iraq," said HRW's deputy Middle East and North Africa director Joe Stork in a statement accompanying the report, titled: "'No One Is Safe': Abuses of Women in Iraq's Criminal Justice System."

"These abuses have caused a deep-seated anger and lack of trust between Iraq's diverse communities and security forces, and all Iraqis are paying the price."

More on Reuters - HRW

Tom Rhodes Interviews Willem Oltmans

Blair's Government Face Crime Probe Over Iraq War Crimes

The British government has insisted it will fight a bid to trigger prosecutions of former ministers and senior military figures over alleged war crimes in Iraq. Two senior ministers in Tony Blair’s government are facing a possible criminal probe over the alleged torture and unlawful killing of hundreds of Iraqis by British soldiers.

A complaint filed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) has accused British forces of abusing and killing detainees in their custody. The shocking dossier says "those who bear the greatest responsibility" for alleged war crimes "include individuals at the highest levels" of the British Army and political system. UK military commanders "knew or should have known" that forces under their control "were committing or about to commit war crimes". The head of the army, General Sir Peter Wall, ex-defence secretary Geoff Hoon, and former defence minister Adam Ingram are among those named in the 250-page dossier, according to the Independent on Sunday. Human rights lawyers have drawn on the cases of more than 400 Iraqis, arguing they represent "thousands of allegations of mistreatment amounting to war crimes of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment". They describe incidents ranging from "hooding" prisoners to burning, electric shocks, threats to kill and "cultural and religious humiliation".

Huffington Post

Bounty Hunters Search for Tony Blair After Latest Sightings of UK's Most Wanted War Criminal

Bush, Gog and Magog

Here's a story we should all be ashamed of missing: George W Bush attempted to sell the invasion of Iraq to Jacques Chirac using biblical prophecy.

In the winter of 2003, when George Bush and Tony Blair were frantically gathering support for their planned invasion, Professor Thomas Römer, an Old Testament expert at the university of Lausanne, was rung up by the Protestant Federation of France. They asked him to supply them with a summary of the legends surrounding Gog and Magog and as the conversation progressed, he realised that this had originally come, from the highest reaches of the French government.

President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. Bush had then said that when he looked at the Middle East, he saw "Gog and Magog at work" and the biblical prophecies unfolding. But who the hell were Gog and Magog? Neither Chirac nor his office had any idea. But they knew Bush was an evangelical Christian, so they asked the French Federation of Protestants, who in turn asked Professor Römer.

He explained that Gog and Magog were, to use theological jargon, crazy talk. They appear twice in the Old Testament, once as a name, and once in a truly strange prophecy in the book of Ezekiel:

And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
Son of man, set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him,
And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal:
And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords:
Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:
Gomer, and all his bands; the house of Togarmah of the north quarters, and all his bands: and many people with thee.

Full article by Andrew Brown on The Guardian

New Scandal inside Abu Ghraib Prison

On Wednesday 24th April, Iraqi activists published on Youtube a video from Abu Ghraib jail, which name was changed to Central Baghdad Prison, featuring guards torturing the prisoners and brutally assaulting them.

The Arab Organization for Human Rights confirmed that they received a distress call from the prisoners of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, after the head of the prison and the guards stormed the prisoners' cells and assaulted them without revealing any reasons behind the storm. The organization, stationed in Britain, added "the violations that reveal a sectarian dimension are continued in the Iraqi prisons." Prisoners staged a sit-in protesting against the inhumane practices and human rights violations committed against them. According to a report issued by the Arab Organisation, the Prisons' Administration used an excessive force

Palestine News Network

Children Horribly Deformed by US Chemical Weapons in Iraq

"In 2012, European researchers visited a scrap metal site in Al Zubayr, an area near Basrah in southern Iraq. A local police officer told them that the site had at one time held military scrap metal from the bloody battles waged during the American invasion. A local guard told the researchers that children had been seen playing on the scrap during that time, and both adults and children had worked disassembling the military leftovers. At one point, the guard said, members of an international organization with equipment and white suits showed up, told guards that the site was very dangerous and "quickly ran off."*
The depleted uranium usage in Iraq left lasting effects, on our own troops and in babies born with horrifying deformities in Fallujah and Basra. Is this the legacy of the war, and should people be paying more attention to these awful consequences?

TYT

Dying US Veteran's Last Letter to Bush and Cheney

The Spies Who Fooled the World

BBC Panorama: On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, Panorama reveals how key aspects of the secret intelligence used to justify the invasion were based on fabrication and lies.

Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres revealed

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

More on The Guardian

Link to video: US special forces veteran links General Petraeus to torture in Iraq

The War You Don't See

A powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war, tracing the history of embedded and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.

A film by John Pilger – More on his website (also online viewing)

Hidden US-Israeli Military Agenda: “Break Syria into Pieces”

The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the U.S. National War Academy.

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.

Syrian Partition.

US bases around Iran.

Global Research

The Unending War

This documentary recounts the story of the veterans who withdrew from the US army after realizing the truth to the made-up excuses of the US for Iraq & Afghanistan wars.