The Common Ills: Victory?

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Victory?

RT examines the victory Hayder al-Abadi's claiming:

The war against Islamic State turned into a massive human tragedy for the Iraqi people. According to official estimates from the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, more than 29,000 civilians were killed between January 2014 and November 2017. Iraq Body Count Project (IBC), an internet based activist group recording civilian deaths in Iraq, put the death toll resulting from IS atrocities and various combat operations over the same period at 66,737.
IS terrorists were responsible for mass murders, torture, rape and even what has been described by the UN as the genocide of some Iraqi minorities. Iraqi forces repeatedly discovered mass graves containing the remains of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of people, in territories once controlled by terrorists.

The decimation of the Iraqi Yazidi minority, considered “devil-worshippers” by the extremists, is a noted example of the terrorists’ savagery. On August 3 2014, IS took control of the city of Sinjar in northern Iraq, a major hub for the Yazidis, who numbered fewer than one million.

After slaughtering thousands of predominantly fighting-aged men, the Islamists enslaved between 4,000-10,000 people, mostly women and children. In August 2017, the UN commission on Syria called on the international community to recognize the crimes committed by IS against the Yazidis as “genocide.”

However, the terrorists were not the only ones responsible for civilian casualties in this brutal, bloody conflict. The US-led coalition and Iraqi forces have also been repeatedly accused of indiscriminate tactics that has led to a significant number of civilian casualties.

In November, the UN said US-led coalition airstrikes were the reasons for more than one in four civilian deaths during the battle for Mosul. At least 2,521 civilians were killed and 1,673 wounded as the US-led coalition spearheaded the operation to recapture Mosul, a campaign that lasted for over nine months between 2016 and 2017, the UN report said. The UN added that these figures should be considered as an “absolute minimum,” implying that the death toll from coalition actions could be even higher.
International human rights NGOs have also criticized the strategy of the US coalition in Mosul. In late November, Amnesty International (AI) released a report, which stated that at least 5,805 civilians were killed by “relentless unlawful attacks by Iraqi government forces and members of the US-led coalition.” A September report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) pointed out that “the high civilian death toll raises concerns that military forces of the US-led coalition failed to take necessary precautions to avoid and minimize civilian casualties, a requirement under international humanitarian law.”

The excessive use of firepower was the “key element of the victory” of Iraqi forces backed by the US-led coalition in the war against Islamic State, Fawaz Hilmi, a military and security researcher, told RT, and that such tactics led to the deaths of many civilians caught in the fighting. He added that the success of the Iraqi army was to a large extent a result of the “overkill” tactics used by the US-led coalition as well as the Iraqi Air Force and the Iraqi Army.

That's victory?

And there's so much more.

‏Verified account @abdullahawez

All the 5 Kurdish lists in the Iraqi parliament have issued a united statement condemning PM Abadi for not naming Peshmerga in his 'victory speech', they say they were 'shocked' that Abadi named all the different forces except for Peshmerga which is part of Iraq's defence system.

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Hayder's done his best to destroy relations with the Kurds.

And the press notes this.

What the press doesn't bother to cover?

He's harmed relations with Sunnis as well.

Anbar Province is not celebrating Hayder.

They're not embracing him.

Iraq is more torn apart today than it was in 2014.

And things were bad in 2014.

Really bad.

But all that 'victory' has done is make things even worse.

A reality the western press refuses to deal with.

The following community sites -- plus Jody Watley -- updated: