Concluding an official visit to Iraq, Agnes Callamard, the U.N.'s special investigator on extra-judicial executions, stressed to the Iraqi officials on "the importance of translating the military defeat over ISIS into victories for accountability and over impunity." ISIS is another acronym for IS.
Callamard told reporters in Baghdad that Iraq's new "transition phase" presents "both opportunities and challenges" and that the government should "respond effectively and impartially to allegations of violations in order to build and strengthen confidence."
The Iraqi government has previously acknowledged some of the allegations, but insisted that these were "individual acts" and promised to investigate them and punish the perpetrators. No outcomes have been published by the government on these investigations.
Callamard discussed with officials from the government and Shiite-dominated paramilitary troops known as Popular Mobilization Forces, "six or seven large scale allegations," including disappearances around Fallujah west of Baghdad and the killing of some prisoners before the June 2014 IS onslaught. She didn't divulge more details on other allegations, expecting to receive the results within "a week or two."
She said that "investigations have already taken place, but the problem is that there is not transparent reporting on the outcomes of those investigations."
When not targeting the Sunnis, Iraq's prime minister Hayder al-Abadi is going after the Kurds. Sigmar Gabriel was supposed to visit Baghdad and then the KRG capital of Erbil; however, the Foreign Minister of Germany canceled his visit. Why? KURDISTAN 24 notes it's because "Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi blocked the move. According to Der Spiegel, Abadi 'vehemently opposed' Gabriel’s plan to visit the Kurdistan Region after planning to meet with officials in Baghdad first." RUDAW adds:
According to the German magazine, the chief diplomat wanted to first visit Baghdad and then head north to Erbil to meet with Kurdish authorities. Abadi strongly opposed this plan, instead giving a green for Gabriel to visit just Baghdad.
The dispute was not resolved even after Chancellor Angela Merkel picked up the phone to talk with Abadi. Gabriel subsequently cancelled the visit.
The US government does and says nothing.
If Donald Trump isn't an idiot when it comes to the issues of the Kurds, he certainly enjoys appearing to be one.
At a State Dept press briefing earlier this week (see Tuesday's snapshot), the US denied any responsibility or need to broker a peace between Baghdad and Erbil. As the US walks away, could others act as intermediaries? Zheger Hassan (Canada's THE GLOBE & MAIL) observes:
The political and military crisis in
Iraq raises two important questions: First, what accounts for the
deterioration in relations between the Kurds and Baghdad? After all, the
Kurds have played an important role in Baghdad and until recently they
and the Iraqi army were jointly fighting the Islamic State (IS). Second,
could Canada mediate the conflict?
The
crisis is rooted in long-standing quarrelling over Iraqi Kurdistan's
demands for increased autonomy and Baghdad's willful disregard for
Iraq's constitution vis-à-vis the Kurds. The immediate spark for the
conflict was Iraqi Kurdistan's independence referendum,
which garnered more than 92-per-cent support. Although that referendum
asked voters whether they wanted an independent state, independence was
not the real objective.
Prior to the
vote, Masoud Barzani, then president of Iraqi Kurdistan, declared that
the "referendum is not for defining borders or imposing a fait accompli.
We want a dialogue with Baghdad to resolve the problems, and the
dialogue can last one or two years." Mr. Barzani believed that the
referendum would furnish the Kurds with leverage in extracting political
and economic concessions from Baghdad.
Wow. If you've read the Middle Eastern press, you've had it presented to you as it is above.
If you've read the US press, especially THE NEW YORK TIMES, you've repeatedly read a distortion of what took place and why.
Peter W. Galbraith has an important piece for THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS entitled "Why the Kurds are paying for Trump's gift to Iran." From the essay, we'll note this:
The Trump administration, which had been careful to keep the PMF out of ISIS-held Mosul, did nothing to stop these two Iranian-backed terrorists from using American weapons to attack an American ally. But for the action of US soldiers in the area, they would almost certainly have killed another American citizen. After the PMF takeover of Kirkuk, the Pentagon attempted ineffectually to hide its embarrassment by calling the Kurdish-Iraqi fighting a “misunderstanding.” The administration’s complaisant attitude to the Iranian-led action was even more puzzling since it followed Donald Trump’s decision three days earlier to decertify the Iran nuclear deal—justified as a response to Iran’s malign activities in the region, including in Iraq.
Pique toward the Kurds partially explains the administration’s indifference. In February, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s president, Masoud Barzani, wrote a letter to President Trump announcing his intention to hold an independence referendum and explaining the reasons for it. On June 7, the KRG set the date for vote as September 25. The only US reaction came from a State Department spokesman who said the timing was inopportune and mischaracterized the vote as non-binding. (The referendum was binding on the KRG but, as Barzani explained, the Kurds would allow up to two years for negotiations with Baghdad on the divorce before actually declaring independence.)
The Kurds were then caught by surprise when, just two weeks before the vote, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the special presidential envoy to Iraq, Brett McGurk, launched a full-scale diplomatic effort to get the Kurds to postpone it. Even that initiative was bungled: a US-sponsored UN Security Council statement directly contradicted private promises made to the Kurds. It was also too late.
Along with former foreign ministers from France and Croatia, I traveled to polling places in various parts of Kurdistan on referendum day. The enthusiasm was palpable. Women came to vote dressed as if they were going to a wedding and many brought their children—usually dressed in traditional Kurdish clothes and carrying Kurdistan flags—so that the children could later say that they were there when their country was born. More than one voter told me that their people had waited for this moment for a century, recalling Sykes-Picot, the Anglo-French secret agreement of 1916 that carved up the region and ultimately led to the Kurds’ involuntary inclusion in the new state of Iraq . There is no doubt that the referendum, which took place without a single violent incident, reflected the long-held desire of almost every Iraqi Kurd for independence. In an election with a strong 72 percent turnout, the people of Kurdistan voted by 93 percent for independence.
Even had he wanted to, it would have been impossible for Masoud Barzani to cancel the referendum days before it took place. But Barzani had no desire to cancel the vote. Already, after ISIS had conquered Mosul and most Iraq’s Sunni areas in June 2014, he was on the verge of declaring independence. As he told me at the time, “Iraq no longer exists. We have a thousand-kilometer border with Daesh [the Islamic State] and thirty kilometers with Iraq.”
When US Secretary of State John Kerry visited in Erbil in July 2014, he asked Barzani to postpone the referendum until the defeat of ISIS. Barzani agreed. Having done as they were asked in 2014, the Kurdish leaders felt that the Americans should respect their decision to go ahead now that ISIS was largely defeated. But Tillerson and McGurk had a new request—to postpone until after the Iraqi parliamentary elections scheduled for the spring of 2018.
The American motives were transparent. The US strategy in Iraq is built around Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. US diplomats see Abadi as a moderate who reversed the sectarian policies of his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Today, Maliki is blamed for so alienating the Sunnis that he had made possible the rise of ISIS in western Iraq. What is forgotten is that Maliki, too, was once our man in Baghdad, in effect handpicked to be prime minister by Bush’s ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.
In order for Abadi to prevail against his more extreme Shiite rivals, US diplomats calculated he needed the votes of the Kurdish parliamentarians who hold about a fifth of the seats in the Iraqi parliament. The Kurds, however, were never persuaded that Abadi was much different from his predecessor; indeed, he is a member of the same Shiite religious party that is headed by Maliki. Moreover, Abadi failed to restore Kurdistan’s constitutionally-mandated share of the Iraqi budget, which Maliki had cut. He also successfully blocked the US from supplying the peshmerga with sophisticated weapons like the Abrams tank, even when the Kurds were the only ground force stopping ISIS from taking the entire north of Iraq. To explain why he could not accept the American request to postpone, Barzani told me: “Iraq is not what was on offer in 2003. Iraq is a theocratic, autocratic state. The intention is clear. The faces are different [from Saddam’s time] but the goal is the same. As long as we wait, they get stronger and we get weaker.”
It's an important essay.
And Donald Trump is failing in Iraq.
Let's be very clear on that. He is a failure.
Didn't have to be that way.
I didn't vote for him. I don't like him.
But I was not part of the lunatic 'resistance' screaming outrage over every Tweet and other bit of nonsense. I was waiting to see any results from his programs.
We're about fifty days away from a year of him being president.
He has been a failure on Iraq.
We have given him time to implement new methods, strategies, what have you.
He criticized Barack Obama on Iraq (as did we). But he has nothing to offer that is at all different. Nothing to offer that is at all helpful.
Were this three months in, making the call would be rash. But he's about fifty days shy of a year as president and people are being persecuted in Iraq, people are the victims of War Crimes in Iraq and he's done nothing to address those issues.
Bully Boy Bush started the war, Barack Obama owned it by refusing to keep his 2008 campaign promise (Samantha Power just knew fiddling here and there on Iraq would fix it -- that wasn't the promise, the promise was US troops leaving) and now Donald Trump owns it.
This isn't about partisan politics -- it's about an ongoing illegal war and the thugs the US government keeps installing as prime minister who do evil things to the Iraqi people which the US government denies and pretends not to see.
Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "The Pardon That Wasn't" went up earlier today.
The following community sites -- plus BLACK AGENDA REPORT -- updated:
