Some have suffered worse losses. On the third floor of the shopping mall in Irbil down a dark corridor sits Aida Hanna Noeh, 43, and her blind husband Khader Azou Abada, who was too ill to be taken out of Qaraqosh by Aida, with their three children, in the final hours before it was captured by IS fighters. The family stayed in their house for many days, and then IS told them to assemble with others who had failed to escape to be taken by mini-buses to Irbil. As they entered the buses, the jihadis stripped them of any remaining money, jewellery or documents. Aida was holding her three-and-a-half-month old baby daughter, Christina, when the little girl was seized by a burly IS fighter who took her away. When Aida ran after him he told the mother to get back on the bus or he would kill her. She has not seen her daughter since.
It is not the savage violence of IS only that has led Father Yako to believe that Christians have no future in Iraq. He points also to the failure of both the Iraqi government and the KRG to defend them against the jihadis. Christians in Iraq have traditionally been heavily concentrated in Baghdad, Mosul and the Nineveh Plain surrounding Mosul. But on 10 June some 1,300 IS fighters defeated at least 20,000 Iraqi army soldiers and federal police and captured Mosul. The army generals fled in a helicopter. In mid-July Christians in the city were given a choice by IS of either converting to Islam, paying a special tax, leaving or being executed. Almost all Christians fled the city.
Kurdish Peshmerga moved into Qaraqosh and other towns and villages in the Nineveh Plain.
They swore to defend their inhabitants, many of whom stayed because they were reassured by these pledges. Father Yako recalls that "before Qaraqosh was taken by Daesh there were many slogans by the KRG saying they would fight as hard for Qaraqosh as they would for Irbil. But when the town was attacked, there was nobody to support us." He says that Christian society in Iraq is still shocked by the way in which the Iraqi and Kurdish governments failed to defend them.
Johanna Towaya, formerly a large farmer and community leader in Qaraqosh, makes a similar point. He says that up to midnight on 6 August the Peshmerga commanders were assuring the Syriac Catholic bishop in charge of the town that they would defend it, but hours later they fled. Previously, they had refused to let the Christians arm themselves on the grounds that it was unnecessary. Ibrahim Shaaba, another resident of the town, said that he saw the IS force that entered Qaraqosh early in the morning of 7 August and it was modest in size, consisting of only 10 vehicles filled with fighters.
At first, IS behaved with some moderation towards the 150 Christian families who, for one reason or another, could not escape. But this restraint did not last; looting and destruction became pervasive. Mr Towaya says that the IS authorities in Mosul started "giving documents to anybody getting married in Mosul to enable them to go to Qaraqosh to take furniture [from abandoned Christian homes]."
As so many had fled, there are few who can give an account of how IS behaved in their newly captured Christian town. But one woman, Fida Boutros Matti, got to know all too well what IS was like when she and her husband had to pretend to convert to Islam in order to save their lives and those of their children, before finally escaping. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday in a house in Irbil, where they are now living, she explained how she and her husband Adel and their young daughter Nevin and two younger sons, Ninos and Iwan, twice tried to flee but were stopped by IS fighters.
"They took our money, documents and mobile phones and sent us home," she says. "After 13 days they knocked on our door and the men were separated from the women. Thirty women were taken with their children to one house and told they must convert to Islam, pay a tax or be killed. We told them that since they had taken all our money, we could not pay them." Four days later, some fighters burst into the house saying they would kill the women and the children if they did not convert.
Soon afterwards, Mrs Matti was taken to Mosul in a car with three other women and a guard who, she recalls, threw a grenade into a house on the way to frighten them. In Mosul they were taken first to al-Kindi prison, formerly an army camp, but did not enter it and then their guard got a phone call to bring them to a house in the Habba district of the city.
In the house, she and the three other Christian women were put in one room, next to another in which there were 30 Yazidi girls between 10 and 18 who were being repeatedly raped by the guards. Mrs Matti says that "the Yazidi girls were so young that I worried about Nevin and told the guards that she was eight years old though she is really 10".
They told her that her husband, Adel, had converted to Islam. She asked to speak to him on the phone, saying she would do whatever he did. They spoke, and agreed that they had no choice but to convert if they wanted to survive.
When they appeared before an Islamic court in Mosul to register their conversion, their three children were given new, Islamic names: Aisha, Abdel-Rahman and Mohammed. They went to live in a house in a Sunni Muslim district and from there - here the husband and wife are circumspect about what exactly happened - they secured a phone and contacted relatives in Irbil. They said that they needed to take one of their children for medical treatment in Irbil, and, once there, they had a pre-arranged meeting with a driver who took them by a roundabout route through Kirkuk to the protection of the KRG.
The trauma of the last six months has been overwhelming for the remaining Christians in Iraq. The Chaldean Archbishop of Irbil, Bashar Warda, heads an episcopal commission to help displaced Christians whom he says number 125,000, or half the total remaining Christian population. Unlike other displaced people in Iraq, the Christians are mostly cared for by the churches. He says that there will always be a few Christians remaining in Iraq, but overall "they have lost their trust in the land. Some 80 or 90 are leaving every day for Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan." Others would go if they had money and visas.
Mounting persecution since 2003 and now the final calamity of IS taking Mosul and the Nineveh Plain has convinced many that they can no longer stay. The archbishop suspects that, even if IS is driven back and Christians can return to their homes, half of them will only stay long enough to sell their property. Almost exactly a hundred years after the Armenian Christians in Turkey were slaughtered or driven into exile, the end has come for the Christian community of Iraq. "Have no doubt," concludes Archbishop Warda, "that here is massacre, here is a tragedy."
Thursday, 4 December 2014
IRAN JOINS THE ‘GREAT SATAN’S’ WAR ON ISIS
The United States says Iranian F-4 Phantoms have carried out bombing raids against Isis north-east of Baghdad, a claim that appears to be confirmed by film of the aircraft taken from the ground.
Iran, however, denies that any of its planes are carrying out combat missions in Iraq. The raids are said to have taken place in Diyala province on the border with Iran, where there has been heavy fighting for months between Isis fighters, Shia militias and Kurdish Peshmerga. Isis has recently been driven out of the towns of Jalawla and Saadiyah.
An Iraqi security expert, Hisham al-Hashimi, told a news agency that 10 days ago: "Iranian planes hit some targets in Diyala. Of course, the government denies it because they have no radars." Film appears to show an F-4 in action, a type of aircraft only used by Iran and Turkey.
It is not clear why Iran should have used its air force for the first time in Iraq, though it has been giving heavy publicity to the role of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, in inspiring and organising Shia militias.
Having long remained in the shadows, Mr Soleimani began to allow himself to be photographed and filmed in company with militia commanders. The militias are the main fighting force of the Baghdad government whose 350,000-strong army disintegrated when attacked by Isis in northern and western Iraq over the last six months.
The US and Iran were quick to deny that they are co-ordinating military action against Isis, though they are pursuing parallel policies in seeking to defend the governments in Baghdad and Irbil. The Pentagon spokesma
n Rear Admiral John Kirby told a news briefing on Tuesday that the United States was not co-ordinating its military activities with Iran, and added that it was up to the Iraqis to manage Iraqi air space.
"It's the Iraqi air space and [Iraq's] to deconflict. We are not co-ordinating with nor are we deconflicting with Iranian military," Admiral Kirby said. However, it is likely that, if Iranian aircraft were in action, Iran would have told Baghdad what they were doing and the Iraqi military would have passed this on to the Americans.
John Kerry would not confirm that Iran had launched the strikes, saying it was "up to them or up to the Iraqis to do that, if indeed it took place". He said that if Iran did decide to launch strikes against Isis then the "net effect is positive".
US-Iranian policy in Iraq has been a mixture of open confrontation and covert cooperation since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, whom both governments opposed in 2003. Today, they both want to stop and, if possible, eliminate Isis and at the same time expand their own influence.
The recently displaced Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki remained in power for eight years because he was able to win the support of Washington and Tehran despite the extreme incompetence and corruption of his government. The US and Iran both eased the process of forcing him to leave office though he remains a force. He recently made a trip to Iran, where was received at the highest level.
The Iranian denial that its planes had conducted air raids was categorical as it was its rebuttal of any suggestion that it is co-operating with the US in Iraq. "Iran has never been involved in any air strikes against Daesh [Isis] targets in Iraq. Any co-operation in such strikes with America is also out of the question for Iran," a senior official said.
The Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, in Brussels for a meeting of the US-led coalition against Isis, said he was not aware of any Iranian air strikes. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, said the US-led coalition had inflicted serious damage on Isis, carrying out around 1,000 air strikes so far in Iraq and Syria, but the fight against the militants could last years.
Both Washington and Tehran were horrified when the Iraqi government suffered a complete defeat at Mosul on 10 June when attacked by much smaller Isis forces.
The US had spent years training the Iraqi army only to see it dissolve without fighting. Mr Maliki was increasingly seen as being under Iran's influence, but it was a severe blow to Iran to watch the Shia-dominated government in Iraq collapse as the Sunni Arabs revolted. This brought America back as an important player in Iraq whose aid was once more badly needed by Baghdad and Irbil.
The Baghdad government now rules a Shia rump state that does little without conferring with Iran. When Isis attacked the Iraqi Kurds on 1 August and defeated the Peshmerga, so threatening Irbil, the US stepped in with air strikes and Iran sent advisers and artillery, say Kurdish sources.
The knowledge that at the end of the day the US and Iran will step in to prevent an Isis victory has done much to restore Iraqi army and Kurdish morale that had been undermined by Isis's terror tactics and surprise assaults.
Sunday, 28 December 2014
THE WEST NEEDS MORE THAN A WHITE KNIGHT
There is a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in which Alice meets the White Knight who is wearing full armour and riding a horse off which he keeps falling. Alice expresses curiosity about why he has placed spiked metal anklets on his horse's legs just above the hoofs. "To guard against the bites of sharks," he explains, and proudly shows her other ingenious devices attached to himself and his horse.
Alice notices that the knight has a mouse trap fastened to his saddle. "I was wondering what the mouse trap was for," says Alice. "It isn't very likely there would be any mice on the horse's back." "Not very likely, perhaps," says the Knight, "but if they do come, I don't choose to have them running all about." It's as well "to be provided for everything", adds the Knight. As he explains his plans for countering these supposed dangers, he continues to tumble off his horse.
The White Knight's approach to military procurement is very similar to that of the American and British military establishments. They drain their budgets to purchase vastly expensive equipment to meet threats that may never exist, much like the sharks and mice that menace Alice's acquaintance. Thus the Pentagon spends $400 billion (£257 billion) on developing the F-35 fighter (Britain is buying planes at a cost of £100m each) to gain air superiority over Russia and China in the event of a war with either power. Meanwhile, equipment needed to fight real wars is neglected, even though no answer has been found to old-fashioned weapons such as IEDs that caused two thirds of the US-led coalition's casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A strange aspect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that there has been so little criticism of the failure of expensively equipped Western armies to defeat lightly armed and self-trained insurgents. This is in sharp contrast to the aftermath of the US Army's failure to win the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. The question is of more than historic interest because the US, UK and other allies are re-entering the wars in Iraq and Syria where they are seeking to "degrade and ultimately destroy" IS.
Perhaps the military are not being blamed for lack of success in Iraq and Afghanistan because the failure there is seen as political, rather than military. There is some truth in this, but it is also true that army commanders have been agile in avoiding responsibility for what went wrong. A senior US diplomat asked me in exasperation in Baghdad five or six years ago: "Whatever happened to the healthy belief the American public had after Vietnam that our generals seldom tell the truth?" Iraq this year has seen a more grotesque and wide-ranging failure than the inability to cope with IEDs. The Iraqi Army was created and trained by the US at great expense, but this summer it was defeated by a far smaller and less well-armed force of insurgents led by IS. It was one of the most shameful routs in history, as Iraqi Army commanders abandoned their men, jumped into helicopters and fled. The new Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, admits that 50,000 "ghost soldiers" in the Iraqi Army had never existed and their salaries fraudulently diverted into their officers' pockets.
The Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police Service, some 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police, had been built by the US at a cost of $26 billion since 2003, according to the recent report of the US Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction. It is a fascinating document that demands answers to many questions, such as how did $9.4 billion get spent on training, staffing and supplying the Iraqi police, though this force is notorious for its corruption and incompetence. Another $3.4 billion went on supplying the Iraqi Army with tanks, aircraft, boats, armoured personnel carriers and other equipment, much of which was later captured by IS. Curiously, IS was immediately able to find crews for the tanks and artillerymen for the guns without any lengthy and expensive training programmes.
The 3,000 American soldiers President Obama has sent back into Iraq are to start training the remaining 26 brigades of the Iraqi Army all over again, without anybody asking what went wrong between 2003 and 2014. Why is it that IS recruits can fight effectively after two weeks' military training and two weeks' religious instruction, but the Iraqi Army cannot? Maybe the very fact of being foreign-trained delegitimises them in their own eyes and that of their people.
Renewed foreign military intervention in Iraq and Syria is primarily in the form of air strikes of which there have been more than 1,000 since bombing started in Iraq on 8 August. What is striking about these figures is that there have been so few compared to the 48,224 air strikes during the 43 days of bombing against Saddam Hussein's army in 1991. A reason for this is that IS is a guerrilla force that can be dispersed, so only about 10 per cent of missions flown actually lead to air strikes against targets on the ground.
Only against the IS forces besieging the Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobani in northern Syria is the US Air Force able to inflict heavy casualties. It is not clear why IS continues with a battle where it is most vulnerable to air power, but the probabl
e reason is that it wants to prove it can win another divinely inspired victory, despite heavy air attacks.
In more than 10 years of war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, it is the insurgents and not those in charge of Western military policy and procurement who have developed the most effective cocktail of military tactics and methods of attack suited to local circumstances. These include various types of IEDs supplemented by booby traps that make those few areas reconquered from IS dangerous for soldiers and uninhabitable for civilians.
IS has turned suicide bombing by individuals or by vehicles packed with explosives into an integral part of their fighting repertoire, enabling them to make devastating use of untrained but fanatical foreign volunteers. IS deploys well-trained snipers and mortar teams, but its most effective weapon is spreading terror by publicising its atrocities through the internet.
Gruesome though these tactics are, they are much more effective than anything developed by Western armies in these same conflicts. Worse, Western training encourages an appetite on the part of its allies for helicopters, tanks and artillery that only have limited success in Iraqi conditions, although bombing does have an impact in preventing IS using a good road system for attacks by several hundred fighters in convoys of pick-up trucks and captured Humvees.
While IS may be suffering more casualties, it is in a position to recruit tens of thousands fighters from the population of at least five or six million that it controls. Six months after the Islamic State (IS) was declared, it has not grown smaller. As with the White Knight, the US and its allies are not undertaking the measures necessary to fight their real enemy.
FROM HOPE TO HORROR (2015)
ISIS on-line
Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East Page 28
