Iraq & Syrian Civil Wars - Page 248

An SAS team used the AW50 to blast a lorry ­taking Islamic State killers towards an undefended Iraqi village.

It is the first report of British ground troops in action in the region and comes after Prime Minister David Cameron said there would be no UK “boots on the ground” in a combat role.

Two SAS troopers spotted the Islamic State convoy from a hillside ­observation point in northern Iraq.

The elite troops feared the fighters were planning to target vulnerable civilians in a nearby village. They tried to call in an airstrike but no jets were in the area.

Instead, the SAS pair blasted the lead vehicle with a single round from their AW50 rifle fitted with a silencer.

The weapon fires the same huge bullet as a heavy machine gun and can cut a man in half from more than a mile away.

The first shot hit the truck’s engine and split it in two.

The confused IS thugs jumped down from the open-top vehicle and radioed for another so that they could continue their advance.

When the insurgents climbed into the second lorry, the SAS team fired a second shot, destroying that too.

The fanatics then realised they were under attack and fled in their remaining ­vehicles.

Iraqi officials in eastern Diyala province say the death toll in a triple suicide bombing has jumped to 58 people, including members of the Kurdish security forces and civilians.

Bashir al-Dalawi, a member of the Qara Tappah municipal council, where the attacks took place, said that the bombs detonated near a government building, leading to the higher death toll. He says at least 107 people were wounded in the attack.

Hospital officials confirmed the death toll, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief journalists.

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In the Anbar attack, Brig.-Gen. Ahmed al-Dulaimi was killed while travelling in a convoy north of the provincial capital Ramadi through an area cleared by Iraqi security forces a day earlier, according to Anbar Coun. Faleh al-Issawi. It was not immediately clear if others were killed or wounded.

ISIS and allied Sunni militants seized the Anbar city of Fallujah, parts of Ramadi and large rural areas of Anbar early this year. The loss of Fallujah — where American troops engaged in some of the heaviest fighting of the eight-year U.S. intervention in the country — foreshadowed the later loss of second city Mosul and much of the north.

Iraq's Interior Ministry confirmed al-Dulaimi's death, calling him a "hero who set a good example for self-sacrifice." It praised his role in reorganizing the provincial police force and leading major fighting that caused heavy casualties among the militants.

BAGHDAD / NINA / Official sources said on Sunday that the Prime Minister, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Haider Abadi, dismissed / 150 / officers of high-ranks in the second step by Al-Abadi after the resolving of the Office of the Commander in Chief of the Armed forces.

According to sources, who preferred not to be named, said that the officers who were dismissed including Lt. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Lt Gen. Mohammed al-Askari, spokesman for the Ministry of Defense and the Deputy Chairman of the Intelligence Service Zuhair al-Gharbaoui and other military leaders. .

Those sources indicated that most of the leaders who were responsible for the fall of the provinces of Nineveh, Salahuddin and parts of Kirkuk under the IS control and their entry without fighting, have been dismissed in this action.

Ramadi / NINA / A source security in Anbar announced on Saturday the Liberation of / Towi/ area north of Ramadi from the IS control.

The source told the reporter of the National Iraqi News Agency / Nina / that army troops with the support of the tribes launched an expanded attack on / Towi/ area , 20 north of Ramadi to regain control from the IS organization.

The source added that the army and with the support of the tribes succeeded in liberating the region and expel the IS elements from it, and many of the terrorists were killed during the liberation operation, indicating that the army aircrafts directed during the attack airstrikes accurately on the strongholds of the IS organization. / End

Washington: Not long after American forces defeated the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussain in 2003, caravans of trucks began to arrive at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on a regular basis, unloading an unusual cargo — pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 (Dh367) bills. The cash, withdrawn from Iraqi government accounts held in the United States, was loaded onto Air Force C-17 transport planes bound for Baghdad, where the Bush administration hoped it would provide a quick financial infusion for Iraq’s new government and the country’s battered economy.

Over the next year and a half, $12 billion to $14 billion was sent to Iraq in the airlift, and an additional $5 billion was sent by electronic transfer. Exactly what happened to that money after it arrived in Baghdad became one of the many unanswered questions from the chaotic days of the American occupation, when billions were flowing into the country from the United States and corruption was rampant.

Finding the answer became first the job and then the obsession of Stuart W. Bowen Jr, a friend from Texas of President George W. Bush who in 2004 was appointed to serve as a special inspector general to investigate corruption and waste in Iraq. Before his office was finally shut down last year, Bowen believed he might have succeeded — but only partly — in that mission.

Much of the money was probably used by the Iraqi government in some way, he concluded. But for years Bowen could not account for billions more until his investigators finally had a breakthrough, discovering that $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion had been stolen and moved to a bunker in rural Lebanon for safe keeping.

“I don’t know how the money got to Lebanon,” Bowen said. “If I knew that, we would have made more progress on the case.”

Bowen kept the discovery and his investigation of the cash-filled bunker in Lebanon, which his office code-named Brick Tracker, secret. He has never publicly discussed it until now, and his frustration that neither he nor his investigators can fully account for the missing money was evident in a series of interviews.

“Billions of dollars have been taken out of Iraq over the last ten years illegally,” he said. “In this investigation, we thought we were on the track for some of that lost money. It’s disappointing to me personally that we were unable to close this case, for reasons beyond our control.”

CLEVELAND, Ohio-- In his interview on "60 Minutes" President Obama admitted U.S. intelligence underestimated ISIS. According to a decorated former CIA Middle East case officer, Robert Baer, the Obama administration is still getting bad intel, and its ISIS strategy is tied to U.S. elections.

Obama told "60 Minutes" host Steve Kroft that James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that "they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria." In previous interviews Obama had dismissed ISIS as a Junior Varsity level terror group. In 2012 CIA Director John Brennan said the possibility of ISIS trying to establish a caliphate was "absurd".

In recent interviews Robert Baer claimed the U.S. is still not getting good Syria/Iraq intelligence and the Obama administration's airstrikes strategy is geared towards midterm and 2016 elections.

Baer received the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal in 1998 and is now an author and expert intelligence analyst for several news organizations. Baer has said he spoke recently to the four major Sunni tribes and that all of them think new Iraq Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is as bad if not worse than Nori al-Maliki.

The Obama administration has been touting al-Abadi as a reformer who will promote Sunni inclusion, but Baer contends the Obama administration has only been listening to and getting information from old guard Sunnis in Baghdad who are out of the loop with Sunni tribes in the Anbar and Shi provences.

In an interview with author and former AP bureau chief, Ximena Ortiz, Baer claims the administration is not talking to Sunnis who actually hold sway in the territory now under siege. "In Washington there's a policy right now not to talk with any of these people, they want to freeze them out. Anyone who's talking about partition, changing the Iraqi constitution, don't talk to them. so what you're seeing is we're ignoring 20 million people between Aleppo and Mosul."

Baer believes the Obama administration's airstrike strategy will fail and that their real strategy is to just get past upcoming elections. " I don't think the smart people think they're going to bomb their way out of anything. But they think they're going to be able to get to the November election. They keep their fingers crossed it's not not going to completely blow up before 2016."
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Baer feels the only workable solution is the partition of Iraq and Syria. Joe Biden suggested the same end result a few months ago. Which is why you're likely to see Biden standing outside the newly locked White House front door, knocking to get in.

Many people who have followed ISIS's advances across Iraq this summer might well come to the conclusion that the Sunni jihadist group is unstoppable.

Its gruesome tactics, as well as images of the black ISIS flag being waved in numerous Iraqi cities and towns, have dominated the media and pressed governments around the world to try to formulate a forceful response.

But a number of Middle East analysts say that despite its incendiary rhetoric and a widespread perception that its ranks are swelling, ISIS has far more enemies than allies and is unlikely to expand its reach.

"They are not invincible," says Kamran Bokhari, vice-president of Middle Eastern and South Asian affairs for the Texas-based geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor.

Wayne White, who worked for several decades as an Iraq analyst for the U.S. government, says that the language used by Western governments and media to characterize ISIS has "distorted" the extent of the threat and "allowed public pressure to rise for radical solutions."
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"I'm not saying it isn't dangerous — we all know its character and fanaticism. That's plain to see. But it feeds on weakness," says White, who is now a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C.

While its territorial gains are not insignificant, he says the areas ISIS has "gobbled up" are regions where it "found weakness." In other words, places where it was able to collaborate with local groups, "or places where Shia or Kurdish forces wouldn't really fight for those areas."

In fact, ISIS may have already reached "the extent of their growth, in terms of territory," says Clinton Watts, a former U.S. soldier and counterterrorism agent and now a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

"They can't push into the Shia areas in Iraq. They've pushed toward the Kurds, and that's when U.S. airstrikes started."

One of the reasons ISIS seems so fearsome is that the group has been very adept at "psychological operations," says Bokhari.

The group has been especially savvy in leveraging social media, which it has used to spread its message, publicize its triumphs and recruit fighters from the region and around the world.
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"ISIS as a group is very small, but it's the alliances that they make that make them seem bigger," says Bokhari.

Among ISIS's few allies are about 5,000 members of the Baath party who were loyalists of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, says Bokhari. The two groups are united in their aim of rolling back the Shia dominance of Iraqi politics, which has been exacerbated by outgoing Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who systematically alienated Sunni groups during his time in office.

But Bokhari says that the Baathists "are not committed ideologically and might be willing to throw [ISIS] under the bus" if a new government led by Haider al-Abadi is seen as more inclusive.

White says establishing an Iraqi parliament that is more representative of the different sects and ethnic groups in the country may be the single-most effective way of defusing ISIS.