Tag Archives: Iraq

Border attack feeds Tunisia fears of Libya jihadist spillover

TUNIS/ALGIERS (Reuters) – The signal to attack came from the mosque, sending dozens of Islamist fighters storming through the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdan to hit army and police posts in street battles that lit the dawn sky with tracer bullets.

Militants used a megaphone to chant “God is Great,” and reassure residents they were Islamic State, there to save the town near the Libyan border from the “tyrant” army. Most were Tunisians themselves, with local accents, and even some familiar faces, officials and witnesses to Monday’s attack said.

Hours later, 36 militants were dead, along with 12 soldiers and seven civilians, in an assault authorities described as an attempt by Islamic State to carve out terrain in Tunisia.

Whether Islamic State aimed to hold territory as they have in Iraq, Syria and Libya, or intended only to dent Tunisia’s already battered security, is unclear and the group has yet to officially claim the attack.

But as fuller details of the Ben Guerdan fighting emerge, the incident highlights the risk Tunisia faces from home-grown jihadists drawn to Iraq, Syria and Libya, and who have threatened to bring their war back home.

Despite Tunisian forces’ preparations to confront returning fighters, and their defeat of militants in Ben Guerdan, Monday’s assault shows how the country is vulnerable to violence spilling over from Libya as Islamic State expands there.

Authorities are still investigating the Ben Guerdan attack. But most of the militants appear to have been already in the town, with a few brought in from Libya. Arms caches were deposited around the city before the assault.

“Most of them were from Ben Guerdan, we know their faces. They knew where to find the house of the counter-terrorist police chief,” one witness, Sabri Ben Saleh, told Reuters. “They were driving round in a car filled with weapons, my neighbors said they knew some of them.”

Troops have killed 14 more militants around Ben Guerdan since Monday. Others have been arrested and more weapons seized.

ISLAMIC STATE

Officials say they are still determining if the militants had been in Libya before or had returned from fighting with Islamic State overseas. But that such a large number of militants and arms were in Tunisia is no surprise.

After its revolt in 2011 to topple Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia has struggled with growing Islamic militancy.

More than 3,000 Tunisians have left to fight with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, according to government estimates. Tunisian security sources say many are with Islamic State in Libya.

Gunmen trained in Libya were blamed for attacks on tourists at the Bardo Museum in Tunis a year ago and at a beach hotel in Sousse in June.

Tunisians also play a major role in Islamic State in Libya where they run training camps, according to Tunisian security sources.

But the scale of Monday’s attack was unprecedented. The militants were well-organized, handing out weapons to their fighters from a vehicle moving through the city, with knowledge of the town and its military barracks.

“We came across a group of terrorists with their Kalashnikovs, and they told us: ‘Don’t worry we are not here to target you. We are the Islamic State and we are here for the tyrants in the army,'” said Hassein Taba, a local resident.

The attack tests Tunisia at a difficult time. After Islamic State violence last year, the tourism industry that represents 7 percent of the economy is struggling to tempt visitors to return.

With its new constitution, free elections and secular history, Tunisia is a target for jihadists looking to upset a young democracy just five years after the overthrow of dictator Ben Ali.

“The battle of Ben Guerdane in Tunisia, 20 miles from the Libyan border … is proof enough that the Islamic State has cells far and wide,” said Geoff Porter, at North Africa Risk Consulting. “But what these cells can reliably do … and how they are directed by Islamic State leadership in Sirte, let alone in Iraq and Syria, is not known.”

AIR STRIKES

Islamic State has grown in Libya over the past year and half, coopting local fighters, battling with rivals and taking over the town of Sirte, now its main base.

That has worried Tunisian authorities, who have built a border trench and tightened controls along nearly 200-km (125 miles) of the frontier with Libya.

Western military experts are training Tunisians to protect a porous border where smuggling has been a long tradition. Ben Guerdan is well-known as a smuggling town.

“There are still some blind spots in intelligence, but they are advancing with the cooperation of neighboring countries and with the West,” said Ali Zarmdini, a Tunisian military analyst.

But Tunisia’s North African neighbors worry about the spill over impact of any further Western air strikes and military action against Islamic State in Libya.

After a U.S. air strike killed 40 mostly Tunisian militants in the Libyan town of Sabratha last month, Tunisian forces went on alert for any cross-border incursions.

Just days before the Ben Guerdan attack, Tunisian troops killed five militants who tried to cross from Libya.

But the fact that even after that setback, militants mustered a force of 50 fighters to strike the town shows the group’s ability to keep testing the Tunisian military.

(Writing by Patrick Markey; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Turkish warplanes strike northern Iraq after Ankara bombing kills 37

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish warplanes struck against Kurdish militant camps in northern Iraq on Monday after 37 people were killed in an Ankara car bombing that security officials said involved a female fighter of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Sunday’s attack, tearing through a crowded transport hub a few hundred yards from the Justice and Interior Ministries, was the second such strike at the administrative heart of the Turkish capital in under a month.

Security officials told Reuters a female member of the outlawed PKK, which has fought a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey’s southeast, was one of two suspected perpetrators. A police source said her severed hand had been found 300 meters from the blast site.

Evidence had been obtained that suggested she was born in 1992, was from the eastern city of Kars near the Armenian border, and had joined the militant group in 2013, they said.

Violence has spiraled in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast since a 2-1/2 year ceasefire with the PKK collapsed in July. The militants have so far largely focused their strikes on security forces in southeastern towns, many of which have been under curfew.

But attacks in Ankara and in Istanbul over the last year, and the activity of Islamic State as well as Kurdish fighters, have raised concerns among NATO allies who see Turkey’s stability as vital to containing violence in neighboring Syria and Iraq. President Tayyip Erdogan is also eager to dispel any notion he is struggling to maintain security.

“With the power of our state and wisdom of our people, we will dig up the roots of this terror network which targets our unity and peace,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Twitter.

The Turkish military said 11 warplanes carried out air strikes on 18 targets in northern Iraq early on Monday, including ammunition depots and shelters. The PKK has its bases in the mountains of northern Iraq, controlling operations across the frontier in Turkey.

A round-the-clock curfew was declared in three southeastern towns in order to conduct operations against Kurdish militants, local officials said. Many locals fled the towns in anticipation of the operations.

Victims of Sunday’s attack included the father of Umut Bulut, a footballer who plays for Turkey and Galatasaray, the Istanbul club said on its website.

WAR IN SYRIA

Turkey’s government sees the unrest in its southeast as closely tied to the war in Syria, where a Kurdish militia has seized territory along the Turkish border as it battles Islamic State militants and rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

Ankara fears those gains are stoking Kurdish separatist ambitions at home and says Syrian Kurdish fighters share deep ideological and operational ties with the PKK.

They also complicate relations with the United States which, while deeming the PKK to be a terrorist group, sees the Syrian Kurds as an important ally in battling Islamic State. Such is the complexity and sensitivity of alliances in the region.

The explosives were the same kind as those used in the Feb. 17 attack that killed 29 people, mostly soldiers, and the bomb had been packed with pellets and nails to cause maximum injury and damage, the source told Reuters.

The attack is the third in five months to hit Ankara, a government town dominated by ministries, parliament, embassies and the sprawling armed forces headquarters compounds. More than 100 people were killed in a double suicide bombing in October that has been blamed on Islamic State.

Turkey is part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The militant group has been blamed for at least four bomb attacks on Turkey since June 2015, including the killing of 10 German tourists in Istanbul in January. Local jihadist groups and leftist radicals have also staged attacks.

There was little immediate reaction in financial markets, with the lira only slightly weaker against the dollar. But analysts said the deteriorating security situation was a concern for a country heavily dependent on tourism.

“It is clear that Turkey’s political risk profile is rising gradually and the country is not yet safe for long-term investors,” Atilla Yesilada of Istanbul-based consultancy Global Source Partners said in a note to clients.

The German foreign ministry issued a travel warning for Turkey of potential terrorist attacks.

In its armed campaign, the PKK has historically struck directly at the security forces and says it does not target civilians. A direct claim of responsibility for Sunday’s bombing would indicate a major tactical shift.

The Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) claimed responsibility for the February bombing. TAK says it has split from the PKK, although experts who study Kurdish militants say the two are affiliated.

(Additional reporting by Asli Kandemir in Istanbul; Writing by Daren Butler and David Dolan; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Ralph Boulton)

U.S. warns Mosul dam collapse would be catastrophic

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United States and Iraq on Wednesday hosted a meeting of senior diplomats and U.N. officials to discuss the possible collapse of the Mosul hydro-electric dam, which U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said would create a catastrophe of “epic proportions.”

Mosul dam has sustained structural flaws since its construction in the 1980s. If it collapsed, a wall of water would flood the heavily populated Tigris River valley.

Wednesday’s meeting at the United Nations included Power and her Iraqi counterpart, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, experts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, officials from the U.N. Development Program and Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and other senior diplomats.

“The briefings on the Mosul dam today were chilling,” Power said in a statement issued by the U.S. mission to the United Nations. “While important steps have been taken to address a potential breach, the dam could still fail.”

“In the event of a breach, there is the potential in some places for a flood wave up to 15 yards high that could sweep up everything in its path, including people, cars, unexploded ordnance, waste and other hazardous material, further endangering massive population centers,” she said.

Power said all U.N. member states should be prepared to help prevent what would be “a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions.”

Approximately 500,000 to 1.47 million Iraqis live in the flood path, the U.S. statement said.

Iraq has signed a contract with Italy’s Trevi Group worth $296 million to reinforce and maintain the Mosul dam for 18 months.

Italy has said it planned to send 450 troops to protect the site of the dam, which is 2.2 miles long and close to territory held by Islamic State militants.

Islamic State militants seized the dam in August 2014, raising fears they might blow it up. It was taken two weeks later by Iraqi government forces backed by U.S.-led coalition air strikes.

The Iraqi government has said it is taking precautions against the dam’s collapse, while seeking to play down the risk.

(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

Yazidi teenager escaped Islamic State, appeals for help for sex slaves

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – It was a “black morning” two years ago when Islamic State militants seized the Yazidi town of Sinjar in northwest Iraq, abducting thousands of civilians including a 15-year-old girl and 27 members of her family.

The teenager, Nihad Barakat Shamo Alawsi, was taken to Syria and then to the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul in northern Iraq, she told an event in London on Wednesday.

“They raped us, they killed our men, they took our babies away from us,” Alawsi, now 17, said at the event organized by the UK-based AMAR Foundation, a charity that provides education and healthcare in the Middle East.

“The worst thing was the torture in Mosul. We were beaten and raped continuously for two weeks,” she said, speaking through an interpreter. “Girls were taken from their families and raped constantly and then they were handed out to “emirs.””

The Sunni militants captured around 5,000 Yazidi men and women in summer 2014. Some 2,000 have managed to escape or have been smuggled out of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria, activists say.

Islamic State considers the Yazidis to be devil-worshippers. The ancient Yazidi faith blends elements of Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam.

The United Nations says Islamic State still holds an estimated 3,500 people captive in Iraq, the majority of them women and girls from the Yazidi community.

Alawsi said a man who took her as a slave died a few weeks later, and she was sold to another man who already had a wife and another Yazidi sex-slave. He beat and raped her and a month later she became pregnant.

“I thought the child I was carrying was a member of Daesh and would become a Daesh criminal when he grew up,” Alawsi said quietly, using a pejorative Arabic name for Islamic State.

Alawsi gave birth to a baby boy, but three months later she managed to escape after the baby’s father decided to marry her to his cousin.

“I managed to make a phone call to my family with someone’s help, and I managed to escape, but I had to leave the baby behind,” she said.

Most of the Yazidi population, numbering around half a million, are displaced in camps in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan.

Alawsi now lives in one of the camps with her mother, father and siblings, and works with AMAR, volunteering to come to London to speak of her people’s plight. Two of her brothers and two sisters are still held by Islamic State.

“It’s not a life, we are not living a life until the rest of our people are released by Daesh,” Alawsi said.

“I beg you to help my people, to save them from Daesh, and to free especially the sex slaves, the young girls and children that have been taken.”

(Reporting by Magdalena Mis, editing by Tim Pearce)

Islamic State used ‘poisonous substances’ in village shelling, officials say

KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters) – More than 40 people suffered partial choking and skin irritation in northern Iraq when Islamic State fired mortar shells and Katyusha rockets filled with “poisonous substances” into their village late on Tuesday, local officials said.

None of the casualties died but five of them remain in hospital, said health officials in Taza, a mainly Shi’ite Turkmen village 12 miles south of the oil city of Kirkuk, in a region under Kurdish control.

“There were poisonous substances in these shells. We don’t know what,” Kirkuk province governor Najmuddin Kareem told reporters on a visit to the village on Wednesday.

A total of 24 shells and rockets were fired into Taza from the nearby Bashir area, said Wasta Rasul, a commander of the Kurdish peshmerga forces in the region.

The attack came as CNN reported that U.S. aircraft had begun targeting Islamic State’s chemical weapons sites near Mosul in Iraq, in an initial round of air strikes aimed at diminishing the militant group’s ability to use mustard agent.

An Islamic State detainee provided vital information that allowed the U.S. military to conduct the strikes, CNN said.

The ultra-hardline Sunni Muslim group seized large swathes of territory in northern and western Iraq in 2014.”Daesh wants to scare off the population,” said Kareem, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

“They want to show they have chemical weapons just like the previous regime,” he said, referring to the chemical bombing of the Kurdish village of Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1988, which left thousands of people dead.

(Reporting by Mustafa Mahmoud and Isabel Coles; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Dominic Evans and Gareth Jones)

WFP warns of serious food shortages in besieged Fallujah

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Humanitarian disaster is looming in the western Iraq city of Fallujah, an Islamic State stronghold under siege by security forces, where tens of thousands of people face food shortages, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday.

There is no flour, rice, sugar or oil available in Fallujah and the prices of the little food that is left have risen sharply, the agency quoted Fallujah residents as telling it.

Fuel and cooking oil are no longer available and the price of a kilo of flour leaped to $20 in January, up more than 800 percent from December, the WFP said.

The Iraqi army, police and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias – backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition – imposed a near total siege late last year on Fallujah, located 30 miles west of Baghdad in the Euphrates river valley.

“The humanitarian situation in Fallujah is dire and residents need immediate assistance,” WFP spokeswoman Marwa Awad told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We are aware that no food is going into the city and that militant groups are controlling the remaining food supplies.”

It has been too dangerous for the WFP to reach the area since September, when it delivered a one-month supply of food to 400 families in Garma, 6 miles from Fallujah, she said.

“We are deeply concerned about the worsening humanitarian situation inside Fallujah where many people require immediate food assistance,” Awad said. “We are ready to help but we are on standby until … the authorities give the green light to go in.”

Of the estimated 30,000 – 60,000 residents of Fallujah, a “significant number” are surviving on potatoes and other local food, after moving towards rural areas on the outskirts of the city, Awad said by phone from Iraq.

“We call on all parties to allow access to prevent a humanitarian disaster,” she said. “Sadly, everyone is focused on Syria and Yemen and the international community is no longer prioritizing Iraq, that’s the problem.”

In January, 32 people were reported to have died from starvation in Syria in areas that had been under siege for months.

Fallujah, a long-time bastion of Sunni Muslim jihadists, was the first Iraqi city to fall to Islamic State, in January 2014, six months before the group swept through large parts of northern and western Iraq and neighboring Syria.

(Reporting by Magdalena Mis, editing by Tim Pearce.)

Spanish officials seize 20K military uniforms from alleged ISIS suppliers

Police in Spain have neutralized a “very active and effective business network” that allegedly supplied a variety of materials to terrorist groups, the country’s interior ministry said Thursday.

A counterterrorism investigation last month led to the arrest of seven people who are accused of providing “logistical and financial support” to the Islamic State and the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, the ministry announced in a news release. Authorities also confiscated about 20,000 uniforms and other accessories that could have been used “to equip an army that would be perfectly prepared for combat” out of three shipping containers in Valencia and Algeciras.

The ministry said the containers were tied to the business network, and had been labeled as carrying “second-hand clothes” so as not to arouse suspicion from customs officials. However, authorities discovered bundles of uniforms hidden among other clothing inside the containers.

The now-neutralized network helped provide a constant supply of weapons, military equipment and other technological supplies to areas controlled by the Islamic State, the ministry said.

U.N. team calls destruction in Iraq’s Ramadi ‘staggering’

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Destruction in Ramadi is “staggering” and worse than anywhere else in Iraq, a U.N. team concluded this week after making the first assessment visit to the city since its recapture from Islamic State.

It said the main hospital and train station had both been destroyed, along with thousands of other buildings. Local officials told the UN team 64 bridges and much of the electricity grid had been ruined.

Iraqi forces declared victory over the jihadist group in Ramadi in December and has since cleared most of the western Iraqi city. Islamic State fighters still hold pockets in the northern and eastern outskirts.

Its recovery boosted Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in his campaign to oust the militants from their northern stronghold of Mosul later this year.

But more than six months of fighting shattered most infrastructure and leveled many homes in Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital where around half a million people once lived.

The fighting saw Islamic State bomb attacks and devastating U.S.-led coalition air strikes.

“The destruction the team has found in Ramadi is worse than any other part of Iraq. It is staggering,” said Lise Grande, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in Iraq.

The two-day assessment found that nearly every building had been damaged or destroyed in frontline areas. In other districts, one in three or four buildings were damaged, it said.

U.N. analysis of satellite imagery last month showed nearly 5,700 buildings in Ramadi and its outskirts had been damaged since mid-2014, with almost 2,000 completely destroyed.

Grande said it was too early to say how much time and money it would take to rebuild.

The cash-strapped government in Baghdad is appealing to international donors to help the city, the largest retaken from Islamic State. It must first clear bombs planted by the militants in streets and buildings – an effort which also requires funding it lacks.

The assessment team said the greatest concentration of such explosives was reported in south-central Ramadi.

The United Nations is working with local authorities on plans to rebuild health, water and energy infrastructure.

The U.N. team said a water plant in central Ramadi could probably be repaired quickly.

It said it had identified four potential relocation sites for returning civilians. Iraq’s central government has yet to give the all-clear for the return of residents.

(Reporting by Stephen Kalin; editing by Andrew Roche)

White House hesitant to call Islamic State’s actions genocide

The White House does not believe the Islamic State’s actions against Christians in the Middle East have risen to the level of genocide, a spokesman told reporters in Washington this week.

Speaking at a press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the administration was “concerned by the way that ISIL attempts to target religious minorities” — including Christians — in Iraq and Syria. But when a reporter asked the spokesman if the White House was prepared to call the situation genocide, he declined to give the acts that distinction.

“My understanding is, the use of that word involves a very specific legal determination that has at this point not been reached,” Earnest told reporters, according to a transcript published on the White House website. “But we have been quite candid and direct about how ISIL’s tactics are worthy of the kind of international, robust response that the international community is leading. And those tactics include a willingness to target religious minorities, including Christians.”

ISIL is an acronym for the Islamic State, which controls large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria and has been accused of widespread atrocities and human rights abuses in those areas.

The European Parliament and Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe have recently adopted resolutions that accuse the organization’s operatives of committing genocide, which is outlawed under a 1948 United Nations treaty that defines the crime as certain acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

Those actions include murdering or inflicting serious harm upon a group’s members.

According to ADF International, there are now 1.8 million fewer Christians living in Iraq and Syria than there were a few years ago. The religious freedom advocacy group places the current population at 775,000, down from 2.65 million, and says Yazidis have nearly been wiped out.

The European Parliament’s resolution, adopted last month, accuses the Islamic State of “committing genocide against Christians and Yazidis, and other religious and ethnic minorities, who do not agree with” the group’s radical interpretation of Islam. It states the Islamic State has slaughtered, beaten, extorted, enslaved and forcibly converted many minorities, and its operatives have also vandalized cemeteries, monuments, churches and other places of worship.

The resolution called for the United Nations Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court, which would formally investigate the genocide allegations. The court would also prosecute and try the accused, and impose punishments upon a guilty verdict.

ADF International has issued a similar call for action.

The United States has also been asked to characterize the Islamic State’s actions as genocide.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent commission that makes recommendations to politicians, in December asked the government to designate Christians and four other groups as victims of Islamic State genocide in Iraq and Syria. So far, though, the White House has yet to place the label on the Middle East situation.

“In that region of the world, Christians are a religious minority, and we certainly have been concerned,” Earnest said during the press briefing on Monday. “That’s one of the many reasons we’re concerned with ISIL and their tactics, which is that it’s an affront to our values as a country to see people attacked, singled out or slaughtered based on their religious beliefs.”

The Omnibus spending bill approved by Congress in mid-December includes a provision that says the Secretary of State, John Kerry, must submit an evaluation on the Islamic State’s attacks on Christians and other people of faith in the Middle East to lawmakers within 90 days. That evaluation must include if the situation “constitutes mass atrocities or genocide,” the bill states.

The deadline for that report falls in mid-March.

U.S. forces capture Islamic State operative in Iraq: NYT

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. Special Operations Forces captured a significant Islamic State operative in Iraq, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, the first suspected raid by a new force sent in recent weeks to target the jihadist group’s fighters and leaders.

The newspaper said the unidentified detainee was being interrogated by U.S. officials in a temporary facility in the Kurdish city of Erbil, but the defense officials it cited provided few other details. (http://nyti.ms/1LwtTTz)

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on details of the force’s missions but said any detention would be “short term and coordinated with Iraqi authorities.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he would not comment because of “operational security reasons.”

Carter reiterated that if detentions took place they would be for “a very short time.”

“Anything having to do with Iraq would be in partnership with the Iraqi government,” he told reporters at the annual RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco.

Iraqi and Kurdish military spokesmen declined immediate comment.

(Reporting by Iraq newsroom; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in San Francisco; Writing by Stephen Kalin; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Lisa Shumaker)