An image grab taken from a propaganda video uploaded on June 11, 2014 allegedly shows ISIS militants at an undisclosed location in Iraq’s Nineveh province. AFP/ISIS
By Sameer N, Yacoub and Adam Shcreck, AP - June 12, 2014 – http://tinyurl.com/p754ytb
BAGHDAD (AP) — Islamic militants who seized cities and towns vowed Thursday to march on Baghdad to settle old scores, joined by Saddam Hussein-era loyalists and other disaffected Sunnis capitalizing on the government’s political paralysis over the biggest threat to Iraq’s stability since the U.S. withdrawal.
Trumpeting their victory, the militants also declared they would impose Shariah law in Mosul and other areas they have captured.
In northern Iraq, Kurdish security forces moved to fill the power vacuum — taking over an air base and other posts abandoned by the military in the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk. The move further raised concern the country could end up partitioned into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish zones.
Three planeloads of Americans were being evacuated from a major Iraqi air base in Sunni territory north of Baghdad, U.S. officials said, and Germany urged its citizens to immediately leave parts of Iraq, including Baghdad.
President Barack Obama said Iraq will need more help from the United States, but he did not specify what it would be willing to provide. Senior U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter by name said Washington is considering whether to conduct drone missions in Iraq.
The U.N. Security Council met on the crisis, underscoring the growing international alarm over the stunning advances by fighters from the militant group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, the council president, said the U.N. envoy in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, told members by videoconference that “there is no immediate danger of the violence spreading to Baghdad” — that the city “is well protected and the government is in control.”
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had asked parliament to declare a state of emergency that would give him and his Shiite-led government increased powers to run the country, but the lawmakers failed to assemble a quorum.
The Islamic State, whose Sunni fighters have captured large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, aims to create an Islamic emirate spanning both sides of the border. It has pushed deep into parts of Iraq’s Sunni heartland once controlled by U.S. forces because police and military forces melted away after relatively brief clashes, including in Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul.
Skirmishes continued in several areas. Two communities near Tikirt — the key oil refining center of Beiji and the city of Samarra, home to a prominent Shiite shrine — remained in government hands, according to Iraqi intelligence officials. The price of oil jumped to above $106 a barrel as the insurgency raised the risk of disruptions to supplies.
In its statement, the Islamic State declared it would start implementing its strict version of Shariah law in Mosul and other regions it had overrun. It said women should stay in their homes for modesty reasons, warned it would cut off the hands of thieves, and told residents to attend daily prayers. It said Sunnis in the military and police should abandon their posts and “repent” or else “face only death.”
The Islamic State’s spokesman vowed to take the fight into Baghdad. In a sign of the group’s confidence, he even boasted that its fighters will take the southern Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, which hold two of the holiest shrines for Shiite Muslims.
“We will march toward Baghdad because we have an account to settle there,” he said in an audio recording posted on militant websites commonly used by the group. The statement could not be independently verified.
Baghdad does not appear to be in imminent danger of a similar assault, although Sunni insurgents have stepped up car bombings and suicide attacks in the capital recently.
While ISIl ( aka ISIS, see story below) fighters gained the most attention in this week’s swift advances, it was increasingly clear that other Sunnis were joining the uprising.
Several militant groups posted photos on social media purporting to show Iraqi military hardware captured by their own fighters, suggesting a broader-based rebellion like that in neighboring Syria.
In Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, overrun by militants Wednesday, witnesses said fighters raised posters of the late dictator and Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his former deputy who escaped the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and eluded security forces ever since.
Fighters loyal to his Naqshabandi Army as well as former members of Saddam’s Baath Party were the main militant force in Tikrit on Thursday, said a resident who identified himself by his nickname, Abu Mohammed, out of concern for his safety. He said about 300 soldiers surrendered near the governor’s office — a spectacle captured in multiple amateur videos posted online.
Lawmaker Hakim al-Zamili as well as two senior intelligence officials, who were not authorized to talk to the press, confirmed the involvement of al-Douri’s group and other former Baathists and Saddam-era military commanders. That could escalate the militants’ campaign to establish an al-Qaida-like enclave into a wider Sunni uprising and lead to breaking up the country along ethnic and sectarian lines.
Feisal Istrabadi, a former Iraqi ambassador to the U.N., said the rapid fall of Mosul and Tikrit required trust from the local population — something ISIL or al-Douri wouldn’t necessarily have on their own.
“Ordinary citizens feel disenfranchised and have no stake in the state anymore,” he said. “This is an alliance of convenience where multiple disaffected groups have come to defeat … a common foe. ”
With its large Shiite population, Baghdad would be a far harder target for the militants. So far, they have stuck to the Sunni heartland and former Sunni insurgent strongholds where people are already alienated by al-Maliki’s government over allegations of discrimination and mistreatment. The militants also would likely meet far stronger resistance, not only from government forces but by Shiite militias.
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Asaib Ahl al-Haq Shiite militia vowed to defend Shiite holy sites, raising the specter of street clashes and sectarian killings.
Baghdad authorities tightened security and residents stocked up on essentials.
“Everybody I know is worried for the safety of his family as the militants are advancing to Baghdad,” said Hazim Hussein, a Shiite shopowner and father of three.
Another Baghdad merchant, Mohammed Abdul-Rahim, a Sunni, lamented that the “future of this country looks more dim than any time in modern Iraqi history.”
Hundreds of young men crowded in front of the main army recruiting center in Baghdad on Thursday after authorities urged Iraqis to help battle the insurgents.
Security officials said the Islamic State fighters managed to take control of two weapons depots holding 400,000 items, including AK-47 rifles, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades, artillery shells and mortars. A quarter of the stockpiles were sent to Syria, they said.
The advances by the Sunni militants are a heavy defeat for al-Maliki. His Shiite-dominated political bloc came first in April parliamentary elections — the first since the U.S. military withdrawal in 2011 — but failed to gain a majority, forcing him to try to build a governing coalition.
“We do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Iraq or Syria, for that matter,” Obama said in Washington.
Al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders have pleaded with the Obama administration for more than a year for additional help to combat the growing insurgency.
Britain and France said it was up to Iraqi authorities to deal with terrorism and worsening security, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the rapid advances by the militants proved the invasion of Iraq 11 years ago had been a fiasco.
“What is happening in Iraq is an illustration of the total failure of the adventure undertaken primarily by the U.S. and Britain and which they have let slip completely out of control,” Lavrov was quoted by Russian state news agencies as saying.
In Shiite powerhouse Iran, President Hassan Rouhani blasted the Islamic State as “barbaric.” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif offered support in a phone call with his Iraqi counterpart, Iranian TV reported. Iran has halted flights to Baghdad because of security concerns and has intensified security on its borders.
The U.N. Security Council urged a national dialogue including all political and religious groups in Iraq but took no action after discussing the crisis and hearing a closed briefing from Mladenov, the U.N. envoy.
Diplomatic efforts were underway to free 80 Turkish citizens held by militants in Mosul, an official in the Turkish prime minister’s office said. The captives include 49 people seized in the Turkish consulate Wednesday, said an official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Kurdish fighters from the ethnic group’s autonomous enclave in the north showed signs of taking a greater role in fighting back against the ISIL. Their role is a potential point of friction because both Sunni and Shiite Arabs are wary of Kurdish claims on territory.
Kurdish security forces known as peshmerga took over an air base and other posts abandoned by Iraqi forces in Kirkuk, Brig. Halogard Hikmat, a senior peshmerga official told The Associated Press. He denied reports the whole city was under peshmerga control.
Schreck reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Paris, Aya Batrawy in Dubai, Desmond Butler in Istanbul, Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Bassem Mroue in Beirut and Edith M. Lederer at the U.N. contributed to this report.
An image taken from an ISIS propaganda video purports to show militants driving near the central Iraqi city of Tikrit.
So What is ISIS?
By Mark Corcoran and Freya Petersen, ABCObnline – June 13, 2014 – http://tinyurl.com/ml3pgut
The Sunni Islamist militant group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), is considered so extreme, it has been disavowed by its original sponsor, Al Qaeda.
The jihadist group has mounted hundreds of attacks in Syria since the start of the civil war in 2011.
But the ambitions of ISIS stretch far beyond deposing president Bashar al-Assad. The ultimate objective is the establishment of an extremist Islamic caliphate across the region, incorporating Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Other Islamist rebels have accused ISIS of being “worse than the Assad regime”.
In 2013, German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that the group had kidnapped hundreds of people, including activists, politicians, Christian priests and several foreign journalists, adding that “anyone who opposes the ISIS fighters, or who is simply considered an unbeliever, disappears”.
Der Spiegel cited an engineer who fled Syria after threats he said he received from the group as saying: “We call them the Army of Masks, because their men rarely show their faces. They dress in black, with their faces covered.”
Human rights abuses and ISIS’s vision of creating an Islamic extremist state led to tensions with other Syrian rebel groups that soon escalated into open warfare.
ISIS suffered setbacks after clashes with more moderate anti-government militias, but still controls an arc of territory across the north-east of Syria, stretching from the Turkish border across to the frontier with Iraq.
The Syrian enclave, based around the northern city of Raqqa, provided the jumping off point for attacks into western Iraq.
In January 2014, ISIS captured the city of Fallujah and large tracts of the surrounding Anbar province.
Coming home – from Iraq to Syria and back again
This latest campaign represents a kind of homecoming for the group that can trace its origins to the anarchy of the Iraq conflict.
ISIS is led by a veteran Iraqi militant, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who formed the Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq in 2010.
As the uprising against Syria’s president escalated into civil war in 2011, Baghdadi sent trusted aid Abu Mohammad al-Golani across the border to establish another Al Qaeda affiliate, the Jabhat al-Nusra Front, recruiting members from rival militant groups.
But as the popularity and influence of al-Golani’s al-Nusra Front grew, Bagdhadi demanded the Syrian group merge back under his command. Al-Golani refused and the two sides clashed. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri sided with the Syrian faction.
Undeterred, ISIS quickly expanded operations into Syria in 2012-13. Fighting not only Assad’s army but other anti-government militia groups, ISIS soon developed a reputation for extreme brutality.
Despite presenting itself as a paragon of strict Islamic virtue, the bulk of ISIS’s financing, experts say, comes from illegal black market activities in Iraq, including robbery, arms trafficking, kidnapping and extortion, and even drug smuggling.
In 2013, when Mosul was still nominally under the control of Iraq’s government, ISIS was netting upwards of $8 million a month by extorting taxes from local businesses, according to the US-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Mosul over the next weeks. If they’re pushed out in the next day or two, then that has much less strategic significance than if they’re able to actually hold it.
ISIS finances may soon be significantly bolstered, as the militants now occupy territory surrounding Iraq’s largest oil refinery at Baiji, which is capable of producing 300,000 barrels a day.
But it is the ability of the militants to capture Iraq’s second city of 2 million people that has taken many Iraq-watchers by surprise.
Douglas Ollivant, a former US army officer and adviser on Iraq to both presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama, told the ABC that the critical question now is how long the militants can hold Mosul.
“It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Mosul over the next weeks,” he said.
“If they’re pushed out in the next day or two, then that has much less strategic significance than if they’re able to actually hold it.”
ISIS fighting force numbers unclear
ISIS has a reputation as a tough, experienced guerrilla force, but the group’s exact combat strength remains unclear.
Video released by the militants show convoys of fast-moving, lightly armed fighters in pickup trucks, reminiscent of the Taliban when they swept to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.
“We don’t know how many jihadists are coming into ISIS from outside of country,” Mr Ollivant said.
“We don’t know how many of the former insurgent groups have essentially joined ISIS, either formally or as their auxiliaries.
“But if they have the combat power to push into Mosul, I think they have more strength than most outside analysts thought they had.”
The ranks of ISIS have reportedly been bolstered by thousands of foreign fighters
The group claims to have recruited militants from across the Middle East, Europe, the UK , the US and south-east Asia, although it is impossible to confirm exactly how many are now in Iraq.
A handout picture released by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior on January 29, 2014 purportedly showing ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
International terrorist with $10m price on his head
In October 2011 Washington declared ISIS supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. a leader of a terrorist organisation, offering a $10m bounty on his head.
The group has been similarly proscribed by the United Nations Security Council and the governments of Canada and New Zealand.
In December 2013, the Australian Government declared ISIS to be “one of the world’s deadliest and most active terrorist organisations”.
The Government said the militant group “conducts daily, often indiscriminate attacks” and “targets crowds and public gatherings during holidays and religious festivals to maximize casualties and publicity”.
ISIS replaced Al Qaeda in Iraq on Canberra’s terrorism list to reflect “the expansion of its operating area to include both Iraq and Syria”.
The December 2013 listing cited an estimated strength of around 2,500 mostly young Sunnis in Iraq, with the ranks bolstered by “a prison break at Abu Ghraib in July 2013 that freed hundreds of ISIL (ISIS) members, many of whom are still at large”.
The Australian Government estimated ISIS had another 5,000 fighters, including foreigners, in Syria, although “due to ISIL’s Iraqi origins, a large number of its Syria-based senior operatives and leadership are Iraqi nationals”.