When a budding artist has a burning desire to create a vignette, they donât let the lack of building materials stop them.
This was exactly what happened to me when I started to make miniatures.
I used any resources I could scrounge: aluminum foil, paper clips, plastic rods, foam board, coffee for weathering; anything that held possibilities.
Born in Karbala, about 100km from Baghdad, I spent my childhood with my mother and aunt.
My father had been imprisoned as a dissident by the Saddam Hussein regime, so I retreated to my love for art and reading for solace.
As the tales I read seemingly came to life, I envisioned each scene in my head as it unfolded.
I bought my first computer when I was sixteen and began my search for 3D software.
When I started making miniatures, I knew nothing about them. I was searching the web for resources and stumbled upon the word âminiaturesâ and got surprised to discover how many miniature makers were out there.
I started looking for tutorials and posted the results of my work on Facebook.
My work attracted many people from around the world and in a very short time I got more than 2,000 friends and followers.
When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War. But the media wouldnât run the picture.
The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldierâs hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest.The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes.
On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name. Heâd fought in Saddam Husseinâs army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans. Or he might have been an unlucky young man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad.
Jarecke took the picture just before a ceasefire officially ended Operation Desert Stormâthe U.S.-led military action that drove Saddam Hussein and his troops out of Kuwait, which they had annexed and occupied the previous August. The image and its anonymous subject might have come to symbolize the Gulf War. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices.
Itâs hard to calculate the consequences of a photographâs absence. But sanitized images of warfare, The Atlanticâs Conor Friedersdorf argues, make it âeasier ⌠to accept bloodless languageâ such as 1991 references to âsurgical strikesâ or modern-day terminology like âkinetic warfare.â
The Vietnam War was notable for its catalog of chilling and iconic war photography; Some images, like Ron Haeberleâs pictures of the My Lai massacre, were initially kept from the public. But other violent imagesâNick Utâs scene of child napalm victims and Eddie Adamsâs photo of a Vietcong manâs executionâwon Pulitzer Prizes and had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the war.
Not every gruesome photo reveals an important truth about conflict and combat. Last month, The New York Times decidedâfor valid ethical reasonsâto remove images of dead passengers from an online story about Flight MH-17 in Ukraine and replace them with photos of mechanical wreckage. Sometimes though, omitting an image means shielding the public from the messy, imprecise consequences of a warâmaking the coverage incomplete, and even deceptive.
In the case of the charred Iraqi soldier, the hypnotizing and awful photograph ran against the popular myth of the Gulf War as a âvideo-game warââa conflict made humane through precision bombing and night-vision equipment. By deciding not to publish it, TIME magazine and the Associated Press denied the public the opportunity to confront this unknown enemy and consider his excruciating final moments.
The image was not entirely lost. The Observer in the United Kingdom and LibÊration in France both published it after the American media refused. Many months later, the photo also appeared in American Photo, where it stoked some controversy, but came too late to have a significant impact.
All of this surprised the photographer, who had assumed the media would be only too happy to challenge the popular narrative of a clean, uncomplicated war. âWhen you have an image that disproves that myth,â he says today, âthen you think itâs going to be widely published.â
âHe was fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned up,â Jarecke says of the man he photographed. âHe was trying to get out of that truck.â
âLet me say up front that I donât like the press,â one Air Force officer declared, starting a January 1991 press briefing on a blunt note. The militaryâs bitterness toward the media was in no small part a legacy of the Vietnam coverage decades before. By the time the Gulf War started, the Pentagon had developed access policies that drew on press restrictions used in the U.S. wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s.
Under this so-called âpoolâ system, the military grouped print, TV, and radio reporters together with cameramen and photojournalists and sent these small teams on orchestrated press junkets, supervised by Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) who kept a close watch on their charges.
By the time Operation Desert Storm began in mid-January 1991, Kenneth Jarecke had decided he no longer wanted to be a combat photographerâa profession, he says, that âdominates your life.â But after Saddam Husseinâs invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Jarecke developed a low opinion of the photojournalism coming out of Desert Shield, the pre-war operation to build up troops and equipment in the Gulf. âIt was one picture after another of a sunset with camels and a tank,â he says. War was approaching and Jarecke says he saw a clear need for a different kind of coverage. He felt he could fill that void.
After the U.N.âs January 15, 1991 deadline for Iraqâs withdrawal from Kuwait came and went, Jarecke, now certain he should go, convinced TIMEmagazine to send him to Saudi Arabia. He packed up his cameras and shipped out from Andrews Air Force Base on January 17âthe first day of the aerial bombing campaign against Iraq.
Out in the field with the troops, Jarecke recalls, âanybody could challenge you,â however absurdly and without reason. He remembers straying 30 feet away from his PAO and having a soldier bark at him, âWhat are you doing?â Jarecke retorted, âWhat do you mean what am I doing?â
Recounting the scene two decades later, Jarecke still sounds exasperated. âSome first lieutenant telling me, you know, where Iâm gonna stand. In the middle of the desert.â
As the war picked up in early February, PAOs accompanied Jarecke and several other journalists as they attached to the Army XVIII Airborne Corps and spent two weeks at the Saudi-Iraqi border doing next to nothing. That didnât mean nothing was happeningâjust that they lacked access to the action.
During the same period, military photojournalist Lee Corkran was embedding with the U.S. Air Forceâs 614th Tactical Fighter Squadron in Doha, Qatar, and capturing their aerial bombing campaigns. He was there to take pictures for the Pentagon to use as it saw fitânot primarily for media use. In his images, pilots look over their shoulders to check on other planes.
Bombs hang off the jetsâ wings, their sharp-edged darkness contrasting with the soft colors of the clouds and desert below. In the distance, the curvature of the earth is visible. On missions, Corkranâs plane would often flip upside down at high speed as the pilots dodged missiles, leaving silvery streaks in the sky. Gravitational forces multiplied the weight of his camerasâso much so that if he had ever needed to eject from the plane, his equipment could have snapped his neck. This was the air war that comprised most of the combat mission in the Gulf that winter.
The scenes Corkran witnessed werenât just off-limits to Jarecke; they were also invisible to viewers in the United States, despite the rise of 24-hour reporting during the conflict. Gulf War television coverage, as Ken Burns wrote at the time, felt cinematic and often sensational, with âdistracting theatricsâ and âpounding new theme music,â as if âthe war itself might be a wholly owned subsidiary of television.â
Some of the most widely seen images of the air war were shot not by photographers, but rather by unmanned cameras attached to planes and laser-guided bombs. Grainy shots and video footage of the roofs of targeted buildings, moments before impact, became a visual signature of a war that was deeply associated with phrases like âsmart bombsâ and âsurgical strike.â
The images were taken at an altitude that erased the human presence on the ground. They were black-and-white shots, some with bluish or greenish casts. One from February 1991, published in the photo book In The Eye of Desert Storm by the now-defunct Sygma photo agency, showed a bridge that was being used as an Iraqi supply route. In another, black plumes of smoke from French bombs blanketed an Iraqi Republican Guard base like ink blots. None of them looked especially violent.
The hardware-focused coverage of the war removed the empathy that Jarecke says is crucial in photography, particularly photography thatâs meant to document death and violence. âA photographer without empathy,â he remarks, âis just taking up space that could be better used.â
The burned-out truck, surrounded by corpses, on the âHighway of Deathâ
In late February, during the warâs final hours, Jarecke and the rest of his press pool drove across the desert, each of them taking turns behind the wheel. They had been awake for several days straight. âWe had no idea where we were. We were in a convoy,â Jarecke recalls. He dozed off.
When he woke up, they had parked and the sun was about to rise. It was almost 6 oâclock in the morning. The group received word that a ceasefire was a few hours away, and Jarecke remembers another member of his pool cajoling the press officer into abandoning the convoy and heading toward Kuwait City.      Â
The group figured they were in southern Iraq, somewhere in the desert about 70 miles away from Kuwait City. They began driving toward Kuwait, hitting Highway 8 and stopping to take pictures and record video footage. They came upon a jarring scene: burned-out Iraqi military convoys and incinerated corpses. Jarecke sat in the truck, alone with Patrick Hermanson, a public affairs officer. He moved to get out of the vehicle with his cameras.
Hermanson found the idea of photographing the scene distasteful. When I asked him about the conversation, he recalled asking Jarecke, âWhat do you need to take a picture of that for?â Implicit in his question was a judgment: There was something dishonorable about photographing the dead.
âIâm not interested in it either,â Jarecke recalls replying. He told the officer that he didnât want his mother to see his name next to photographs of corpses. âBut if I donât take pictures like these, people like my mom will think war is what they see in movies.â As Hermanson remembers, Jarecke added, âItâs what I came here to do. Itâs what I have to do.â
âHe let me go,â Jarecke recounts. âHe didnât try to stop me. He could have stopped me because it was technically not allowed under the rules of the pool. But he didnât stop me and I walked over there.â
More than two decades later, Hermanson notes that Jareckeâs resulting picture was âpretty special.â He doesnât need to see the photograph to resurrect the scene in his mind. âItâs seared into my memory,â he says, âas if it happened yesterday.â
The incinerated man stared back at Jarecke through the cameraâs viewfinder, his blackened arm reaching over the edge of the truckâs windshield. Jarecke recalls that he could âsee clearly how precious life was to this guy, because he was fighting for it. He was fighting to save his life to the very end, till he was completely burned up. He was trying to get out of that truck.â
He wrote later that year in American Photo magazine that he âwasnât thinking at all about what was there; if I had thought about how horrific the guy looked I wouldnât have been able to make the picture.â Instead, he maintained his emotional remove by attending to the more prosaic and technical elements of photography.
He kept himself steady; he concentrated on the focus. The sun shone in through the rear of the destroyed truck and backlit his subject. Another burned body lay directly in front of the vehicle, blocking a close-up shot, so Jarecke used the full 200mm zoom lens on his Canon EOS-1.
In his other shots of the same scene, it is apparent that the soldier could never have survived, even if he had pulled himself up out of the driverâs seat and through the window. The desert sand around the truck is scorched. Bodies are piled behind the vehicle, indistinguishable from one another. A lone, burned man lies face down in front of the truck, everything incinerated except the soles of his bare feet. In another photograph, a man lies spread-eagle on the sand, his body burned to the point of disintegration, but his face mostly intact and oddly serene. A dress shoe lies next to his body.
The group continued on across the desert, passing through more stretches of highway littered with the same fire-ravaged bodies and vehicles. Jarecke and his pool were possibly the first members of the Western media to come across these scenes, which appeared along what eventually became known as the Highway of Death, sometimes referred to as the Road to Hell.
The retreating Iraqi soldiers had been trapped. They were frozen in a traffic jam, blocked off by the Americans, by Mutla Ridge, by a minefield. Some fled on foot; the rest were strafed by American planes that swooped overhead, passing again and again to destroy all the vehicles. Milk vans, fire trucks, limousines, and one bulldozer appeared in the wreckage alongside armored cars and trucks, and T-55 and T-72 tanks. Most vehicles held fully loaded, but rusting, Kalashnikov variants.
According to descriptions from reporters like The New York TimesâR.W. Apple and theObserverâs Colin Smith, amid the plastic mines, grenades, ammunition, and gas masks, a quadruple-barreled anti-aircraft gun stood crewless and still pointing skyward. Personal items, like a photograph of a childâs birthday party and broken crayons, littered the ground beside weapons and body parts. The body count never seems to have been determined, although the BBC puts it in the âthousands.â
âIn one truck,â wrote Colin Smith in a March 3 dispatch for the Observer, âthe radio had been knocked out of the dashboard but was still wired up and faintly picking up some plaintive Arabic air which sounded so utterly forlorn I thought at first it must be a cry for help.â
Iraqi prisoners of war, captured by the U.S. military on their way to Baghdad
Following the February 28 ceasefire that ended Desert Storm, Jareckeâs film roll with the image of the incinerated soldier reached the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the military coordinated and corralled the press, and where pool editors received and filed stories and photographs.
At that point, with the operation over, the photograph would not have needed to pass through a security screening, says Maryanne Golon, who was the on-site photo editor for TIME in Saudi Arabia and is now director of photography for TheWashington Post. Despite the obviously shocking content, she tells me she reacted like an editor in work mode. She selected it, without debate or controversy among the pool editors, to be scanned and transmitted. The image made its way back to the editorsâ offices in New York City.
Jarecke also made his way from Saudi Arabia to New York. Passing through Heathrow Airport on a layover, he bought a copy of the March 3 edition of the Observer. He opened it to find his photograph on page 9, printed at the top across eight columns under the heading, âThe real face of war.â
That weekend in March, when the Observerâs editors made the final decision to print the image, every magazine in North America made the opposite choice. Jareckeâs photograph did not even appear on the desks of most U.S. newspaper editors (the exception being The New YorkTimes, which had a photo wire service subscription but nonetheless declined to publish the image).
The photograph was entirely absent from American media until far past the time when it was relevant to ground reporting from Iraq and Kuwait. Golon says she wasnât surprised by this, even though sheâd chosen to transmit it to the American press. âI didnât think there was any chance theyâd publish it,â she says.
Apart from the Observer, the only major news outlet to run the Iraqi soldierâs photograph at the time was the Parisian news daily LibĂŠration,which ran it on March 4. Both newspapers refrained from putting the image on the front page, though they ran it prominently inside.
But Aidan Sullivan, the pictures editor for the British Sunday Times, told the British Journal of Photography on March 14 that he had opted instead for a wide shot of the carnage: a desert highway littered with rubble. He challenged the Observer: âWe would have thought our readers could work out that a lot of people had died in those vehicles. Do you have to show it to them?â
âThere were 1,400 [Iraqi soldiers] in that convoy, and every picture transmitted until that one came, two days after the event, was of debris, bits of equipment,â Tony McGrath, the Observerâs pictures editor, was quoted as saying in the same article. âNo human involvement in it at all; it could have been a scrapyard. That was some dreadful censorship.â
The media took it upon themselves to âdo what the military censorship did not do,â says Robert Pledge, the head of the Contact Press Images photojournalism agency that has represented Jarecke since the 1980s. The night they received the image,
Pledge tells me, editors at the Associated Pressâ New York City offices pulled the photo entirely from the wire service, keeping it off the desks of virtually all of Americaâs newspaper editors. It is unknown precisely how, why, or by whom the APâs decision was handed down.
Vincent Alabiso, who at the time was the executive photo editor for the AP, later distanced himself from the wire serviceâs decision. In 2003, he admitted to American Journalism Review that the photograph ought to have gone out on the wire and argued that such a photo would today.
Yet the APâs reaction was repeated at TIME and LIFE. Both magazines briefly considered the photo, unofficially referred to as âCrispy,â for publication. The photo departments even drew up layout plans. TIME, which had sent Jarecke to the Gulf in the first place, planned for the image to accompany a story about the Highway of Death.
âWe fought like crazy to get our editors to let us publish that picture,â former photo director Michele Stephenson tells me. As she recalls, Henry Muller, the managing editor, told her, âTIME is a family magazine.â And the image was, when it came down to it, just too disturbing for the outlet to publish. It was, to her recollection, the only instance during the Gulf War where the photo department fought but failed to get an image into print.
James Gaines, the managing editor of LIFE, took responsibility for the ultimate decision not to run Jareckeâs image in his own magazineâs pages, despite photo director Peter Howeâs push to give it a double-page spread.
âWe thought that this was the stuff of nightmares,â Gaines told Ian Buchanan of the British Journal of Photography in March 1991. âWe have a fairly substantial number of children who read LIFE magazine,â he added. Even so, the photograph was published later that month in one of LIFEâs special issues devoted to the Gulf Warânot typical reading material for the elementary-school set.
Stella Kramer, who worked as a freelance photo editor for LIFE on four special-edition issues on the Gulf War, tells me that the decision to not publish Jareckeâs photo was less about protecting readers than preserving the dominant narrative of the good, clean war. Flipping through 23-year-old issues, Kramer expresses clear distaste at the editorial quality of what she helped to create. The magazines âwere very sanitized,â she says.
âSo, thatâs why these issues are all basically just propaganda.â She points out the picture on the cover of the February 25Â issue: a young blond boy dwarfed by the American flag heâs holding. âAs far as Americans were concerned,â she remarks, ânobody ever died.â
âIf pictures tell stories,â Lee Corkran tells me, âthe story should have a point. So if the point is the utter annihilation of people who were in retreat and all the charred bodies … if thatâs your point, then thatâs true. And so be it. I mean, war is ugly.
Itâs hideous.â To Corkran, who was awarded the Bronze Star for his Gulf War combat photography, pictures like Jareckeâs tell important stories about the effects of American and allied airpower. Even Patrick Hermanson, the public affairs officer who originally protested the idea of taking pictures of the scene, now says the media should not have censored the photo.
The U.S. military has now abandoned the pool system it used in 1990 and 1991, and the Internet has changed the way photos reach the public. Even if the AP did refuse to send out a photo, online outlets would certainly run it, and no managing editor would be able to prevent it from being shared across various social platforms, or being the subject of extensive op-ed and blog commentary.
If anything, todayâs controversies often center on the vast abundance of disturbing photographs, and the difficulty of putting them in a meaningful context.
Some have argued that showing bloodshed and trauma repeatedly and sensationally can dull emotional understanding. But never showing these images in the first place guarantees that such an understanding will never develop.
âTry to imagine, if only for a moment, what your intellectual, political, and ethical world would be like if you had never seen a photograph,â author Susie Linfield asks in The Cruel Radiance, her book on photography and political violence.
Photos like Jareckeâs not only show that bombs drop on real people; they also make the public feel accountable. As David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2003, war photography has âan ability not just to offend the viewer, but to implicate him or her as well.â
As an angry 28-year-old Jarecke wrote in American Photo in 1991: âIf weâre big enough to fight a war, we should be big enough to look at it.â
Iraqâs prime minister reveals extent of equipment loss when Isis overran the army last year in the countryâs second-largest city
Iraqi security forces lost 2,300 Humvee armoured vehicles when the Islamic State jihadist group overran the northern city of Mosul, the prime minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday.
âIn the collapse of Mosul, we lost a lot of weapons,â Abadi said in an interview with Iraqiya state TV. âWe lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone.â
While the exact price of the vehicles varies depending on how they are armoured and equipped, it is clearly a hugely expensive loss that has boosted Isisâs capabilities.
Last year, the US State Department approved a possible sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees with increased armour, machine-guns, grenade launchers, other gear and support, which was estimated to cost $579 million.
Clashes began in Mosul, Iraqâs second city, late on June 9, 2014, and Iraqi forces lost it the following day to Isis, which spearheaded an offensive that overran much of the countryâs Sunni Arab heartland.
The militants gained ample arms, ammunition and other equipment when multiple Iraqi divisions fell apart in the countryâs north, abandoning gear and shedding uniforms in their haste to flee.
Isis has used captured Humvees, which were provided to Iraq by the United States, in subsequent fighting, rigging some with explosives for suicide bombings.
Iraqi security forces backed by Shiite militias have regained significant ground from Isis in Diyala and Salaheddin provinces north of Baghdad.
But that momentum was slashed in mid-May when Isis overran Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, west of Baghdad, where Iraqi forces had held out against militants for more than a year.
Mizanur Rahman defended murders of 12 people at Charlie Hebdo offices
Hate cleric said: âInsulting IslamâŚthey canât expect a different result’
Rahman also praised Al Qaeda and said âBritain is the enemy of IslamâÂ
Experts have warned the sermon could incite further terror killings
He is currently on bail after he was arrested on suspicion of terror offences last year
A British hate preacher backed the Paris massacres just hours after the bloody events unfolded and told his followers âBritain is the enemy of Islamâ.
Cleric Mizanur Rahman, of Palmers Green, north London, defended the brutal murder of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices, saying âinsulting IslamâŚthey canât expect a different result.â
Experts have warned the sermon, which backed the jihadists who killed 17 people over three days in the French capital, could incite further killings.
Speaking to an audience in London which was streamed online to thousands of his followers, Rahman praised Al Qaeda and said âBritain is the enemy of Islam.â
Sam Westrop, director of counter-extremism group Stand for Peace told the Sunday Mirror: âHis kind of rhetoric is not an echo of Islamist terror and extremism â it is a driving force behind it.
âIt is truly reprehensible for him to speak like this, especially so soon after Paris.â
His speech on Friday night came to light after reporters from the Sunday Mirror gained access to an online live stream – they then notified the Metropolitan Police.
The newspaper reported that in the video Rahman claimed France was carrying out ‘ethnic cleansing’, and told his followers what happened in France was ‘war.’
He said: ‘These cartoons is part of their own war, is part of the psychological warfare…you know what happens when you insult Mohammed.’
Rahman, who also goes by the name of Abu Baraa, is currently on police bail after he and others were arrested last year on suspicion of terror offences.
Rahman, was jailed for six years in 2007 after calling for British soldiers to be brought back from Iraq in bodybags.
He manages the Siddeeq Academy in Tower Hamlets, an Islamic tuition centre in East London.
In May last year Rahman was investigated by police after a video showed him praising the Boko Haram militants who kidnapped more than 300 Nigerian schoolgirls.
He said at the time: âPeople want to make it out as though history began on the day these girls were taken from – sorry I should say these women – were taken from this high school in Nigeria.
âThey didnât do to these girls what the Nigerian government had been doing to the Muslims all these years.
âThey didnât rape anybody. They didnât torture. They didnât murder any of these girls.â
On another occasion a court heard he told a crowd of around 300 people near the Danish Embassy in central London that British and American troops should return in body bags.
The Old Bailey saw film of Rahman in which he said: ‘We want to see them coming home in body bags.
‘We want to see their blood running in the streets of Baghdad.’
He added: ‘We want to see the Mujahideen shoot down their planes the way we shoot down birds, we want to see their tanks burn in the way we burn their flags.’
Rahman also had placards calling for the annihilation and beheading of those who insulted Islam.
JALAWLA, Iraq (Reuters) – The blood of two militants killed during Islamic State’s rout in the Iraqi town of Jalawla has yet to be washed away, but a turf war is already brewing between Kurdish and Shi’ite forces that jointly drove the insurgents out.
The recapture of disputed territory and towns such as Jalawla is reopening rivalries over the boundary between areas of Kurdish control and those administered by the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government.
Local Sunni Arabs displaced in the fighting have little choice but to align themselves with one side or the other.
Not long after Islamic State began its offensive across Iraq this summer, Kurdish commanders in the eastern province of Diyala invited the head of the largest Sunni Arab tribe in Jalawla to discuss jointly resisting the insurgents.
“We sat with them here in this very building,” said Brigadier General Barzan Ali Shawas, describing the meeting with Sheikh Faisal al-Karwi in a Kurdish peshmerga barracks on the banks of the Diyala river, lined with date palms.
“We said: What do you want? True, you are Arabs and we are Kurds, but the unity of Iraq is in our interest.” The sheikh had replied he would consider the Kurds’ offer to set up a unit for local Sunnis under peshmerga command, but he never came back with an answer.
Since that June day, Jalawla changed hands several times, until the peshmerga and Shi’ite militia drove the militants out on Nov. 23. According to Shawas, they agreed before the offensive that the Shi’ite militia would withdraw as soon as it was over and hand full control to the Kurds, but that has yet to happen.
Jalawla, which lies about 150 km (90 miles) northeast of Baghdad, is overwhelmingly Arab and was under the central government’s jurisdiction until Islamic State overran it. However, the Kurds say it was theirs until the 1970s, when Saddam Hussein brought in Sheikh Faisal’s Karwiya tribe to “Arabise” the area.
Now it is deserted except for stray animals, Shi’ite militiamen and peshmerga, marking their territory with flags and graffiti. The atmosphere is tense.
“Jalawla is Kurdistani,” is spray-painted on the front of a bakery. Fridges dragged into the road as barricades are beginning to rust.
Shi’ite fighters drive a pick-up truck with a picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the bonnet. One gets out and approaches the Kurds, finger on the trigger of his rifle, to ask if they have permission to be there from the head of the Shi’ite Khorasani Brigades militia.
“If they retain a fanatic stance about the areas they have taken, there’s no way we will allow them,” said Jawad al-Hosnawi, the Khorasani Brigades’ field commander.
Iraqi Kurds have controlled an autonomous region since the early 1990s and their fighters moved into other disputed areas this year to combat Islamic State.
But Hosnawi rejects any further Kurdish ambitions. “Our problem is if they want to separate from Iraq or form an ethnic state – no way,” he said.
RESIDENTS FEAR MILITIAS
Cats pick through uncollected rubbish in Jalawla and a cow strolls down the street, oblivious to the danger of thousands of mines planted by the militants. A burst of gunfire and the occasional thud of an explosion can be heard.
Shawas promised civilians would be allowed to return, except those who sided with Islamic State, once a bomb disposal team finishes its work, and water and electricity are restored.
Hosnawi said the Kurds were bulldozing Sunni homes to discourage them from coming back.
Many Jalawla residents are camping a few kilometers away on a football pitch, its perimeter fence draped with laundry. They celebrated the news that Islamic State had been forced from Jalawla and the adjacent town of Saadiya.
Most said they had fled not the militants, but air strikes targeting them. Now they fear the Shi’ite forces, who have killed Sunnis and destroyed their homes in other towns they recaptured from Islamic States.
“We want to go back but the militias will slaughter us,” said a 40-year-old farmer from Saadiya who was too afraid to give his name. “We ask the peshmerga to annex Jalawla and Saadiya to the (Kurdistan) region so we can live in peace.”
To slow enemy advances, Islamic State blew up bridges across the milky waters of the Diyala river, into which some militants flung themselves to escape when the game was up.
The blood of two insurgents who did not get away stains the entrance to a shop that used to sell roofing. Its shutters are down now and daubed with Shi’ite slogans.
Sheikh Faisal confirmed rejecting the Kurdsâ proposal, and says his tribe had fought the peshmerga to prevent them taking over a base abandoned by the Iraqi army.
“They won’t let Arabs return, mostly the Karwiya. They want to take Jalawla. It’s an Arab area,” he said by telephone from the nearby town of Baquba.
He denies collaborating with Islamic State, as the Kurds allege, and says the militants blew up his house in Jalawla because he refused to join them.
Unlike the displaced residents, Sheikh Faisal’s nephew Zumhar Jamal al-Karwi said Jalawla should remain under the Baghdad government, not the Kurds.
“We won’t accept Jalawla remaining in Kurdish clutches. If they cling to it by force, it will be retaken by force,” Zumhar said. “We are prepared to fight against the Kurds alongside the militias unless the peshmerga leave Jalawla.”
Iraqi security officials have reported that the bodies of 150 members of an Iraqi Sunni tribe fighting the Islamic State (Isis) alongside the military have been found in a mass grave in Iraq’s restive Anbar province.
Anbar provincial chairman Sabah Karhout said the Sunni tribesmen, allied with the government and members of the security forces, were captured when jihadists conquered the town of Hit, which is 140km (85 miles) west of the capital, Baghdad.
Earlier in October, Iraqi troops helped by Sunni fighters from the Albu Nimir tribe were forced out from the town, Anbar’s fifth-largest city, after heavy clashes with IS.
The Obama administration and Iraq have teamed up with some Sunni tribesmen to fight against IS in the hope of rekindling the same Sunni uprising that shattered an al-Qaida-linked group at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil strife between 2005 and 2007.
At the time, the US military recruited and paid Sunni tribes to lead the struggle against the jihadists. But the Shi’ite-dominated government of former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki fuelled sectarianism and disenfranchised the Sunni community from power, driving them to support IS in the first instance.
The US believe Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s newly formed government can be more inclusive of Sunni Muslims and Kurds, helping the American-led coalition to stop IS.
A US marine has been killed in Baghdad, during the ongoing military offensive against Isis militants in Iraq, marking the first US casualty during the battle against the militants.
The US Department of Defense said Marine Lance Corporal Sean P Neal, 19, died of a “non-combat” injury.
Authorities have not revealed exact details of his death, as it is currently under investigation.
Neal, a mortarman, was one of the 1,600-strong US troops engaged in Operation Inherent Resolve, the codename for the military campaign against Isis Islamists in Iraq and Syria.
He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force â Crisis Response â Central Command.
Neal is said to be the first member of US personnel to die in Iraq since US troops pulled out from the strife-torn country three years ago.
However, US naval forces had earlier acknowledged that a marine had gone missing on 3 October.
Neal joined the Marine Corps in July 2013 and was promoted to lance corporal 1 September.
ISIS unleashed a wave of car bombings in Baghdad this week, killing approximately 150 people in the Iraqi capital. The terrorist organization is currently besieging the town of Fallujah, which is only about 25 miles from Baghdad.
For Baghdad’s civilians, though, these bombings are in some ways just a continuation of the more than decade of terror that the city has endured. To put these latest attacks in context, the map below, which was created by The Guardian using Wikileaks’ Iraq War Logs data, shows fatal car bombings in Baghdad that were recorded by the US-led forces in Iraq between 2004 and 2009.
This map is a sea of red dots, each of which represents a fatal attack. But the true extent of the bombings is much worse: the map likely only shows a small fraction of the attacks from that period, because that many were not officially tallied. The real total is almost certainly much, much higher. But even seeing the number of attacks recorded here shows how devastating this war has been to Baghdad’s civilians, who must now face even more attacks.
General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN on October 15 that he is “confident” that the US can assist the Iraqi military to keep Baghdad from falling to ISIS. But the bombings are a reminder that ISIS does not have to take over Baghdad to inflict horrifying damage on the civilians who live there.
When the Free Syrian Army pushed Assadâs soldiers out of a town south of Damascus, the last thing they expected to find was a Russian spy post, a few miles from the Golan Heights.
Syrian rebels have overtaken a joint Russian-Syrian secret facility that they claim was a covert intelligence collection base.
Opposition fighters say the post was used to snoop in on the communications of opposition groups — and perhaps even the nearby Israelis.
Free Syrian Army officials, U.S. officials, and independent experts told The Daily Beast that the evidence of Russian involvement in the facility, just a few miles from Syriaâs border with Israel, if verified, would show a level of Russian involvement in the Syrian civil war that was not previously known.
Free Syrian Army officials posted several videos on YouTube showing both the outside and the inside of the facility, which the FSA captured over the weekend during a battle near Al Harah, south of Damascus, next to the Golan Heights.
The videos and accompanying photos show insignias representing a branch of Syrian intelligence and the Russian Osnaz GRU radio electronic intelligence agency.
The FSA found photos and lists of senior Russian intelligence and military officials who visited the facility, pictures of Russian personnel running the base, and maps showing the location of Israeli military units.
Israeli news reports earlier this year said the Russian government had upgraded an advanced surveillance and intelligence gathering station in that area which could snoop on Israel, large parts of Jordan, and western Iraq, potentially to warn Iran in advance of an Israeli strike. Initial reports said documents from the facility suggested the Russian equipment was used to spy on Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
U.S. defense officials told The Daily Beast the photos of the Russian
insignia first shared on blogs were legitimate. But that evidence, at the same time, may not necessarily mean the facility captured by the opposition was controlled by Russiaâs military; it could just mean that Russians were working there, as advisors or partners to Syrian troops.
Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russiaâs military and intelligence services at New York University said the term âOsnazâ on the insignia just meant a special unit of any kind. âItâs the kind of unit that the Russians would have had there because Syria is not the easiest area to operate in, they are an element of the radio-technical intelligence boys who do this.â
Firas Al Hawrani, the official spokesman for the FSA in southern Syria, told The Daily Beast Monday that FSA forces had seen about 15 Russian personnel operating in the Al Harah area before the FSA took the facility, but they left before the area fell out of regime control.
âThe Russians who were at the Al Harah mountain, the regime took them to Damascus by plane two weeks ago,â he said.
Galeotti said these Russian advisers would specifically be working on intercepting radio communications of opposition figures.
âThey would be running an operation for detailed radio technical intelligence, we are not talking about intercepting telemetry and aircraft,â he said.
âThis is for eavesdropping on rebel radio communications. Cell communications are easier identified through other means. And this is also for identifying the presence of these units, which leads directly into targeting.â
Russia has been one of Syriaâs most important allies for years. The port of Tartus is Russiaâs only naval base on the Mediterranean, for example. And since the civil war in the country broke out in 2011, Russia has provided the country with advisers and billions of dollarsâ worth of heavy military equipment.
Galeotti said Syriaâs security services are good as âtraditional secret police skills,â such as interrogation and bugging telephones. The facility taken over by the Syrian opposition, however, suggests the Russians gave the regime âa whole new capability,â Galeotti said. âA lot of the Syrians are very clumsy. Some of the more precise attacks in the last year have suggested a new sophistication.â
The facility taken over by the Syrian opposition suggests the Russians gave the regime a whole new capability. A lot of the Syrians are very clumsy. Some of the more precise attacks in the last year have suggested a new sophistication.
Sen. John McCain told The Daily Beast Monday that the apparent Russian involvement in the base, which was also reportedly tasked with collecting signals intelligence and communications of rebel groups, showed of the depth of Moscowâs collusion with Damascus in the Syrian civil war.
âIf what theyâve recovered is true and I have no reason to believe itâs not, it really is very indicative of the significant involvement of Russia in this conflict,â he said. âIt shows significant coordination, establishment of a facility they could use for coordination and intelligence capabilities including intercepts. Itâs a pretty sophisticated operation there that theyâve uncovered.â
Meanwhile, in Northern Syria, ISIS continued a major assault on the city of Kobani near the Turkish border as Kurdish and tribal forces tried to repel them.
Dr. Najmaldin Karim, the governor of Kirkuk, was in Washington last week asking U.S. officials to expand the airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria and to increase aid to the Kurdish forces in both countries.
Not only is ISIS advancing in Northern Syria, they are digging in their positions in several Iraqi cities, including Mosul and Ramadi, Karim told The Daily Beast in an interview.
Gen. John Allen, whom President Obama appointed to coordinate the international coalition against ISIS, said in Baghdad that the drive to free key cities like Mosul may take as long as a year.
âA lot of the front lines are basically frozen,â said Karim. âThe worst thing would be for the United States, the region, and for Iraq, would be if the situation stays like this and festers. These guys have been there since June. If it goes further, it becomes a way of life. It will become like Somalia.â
Militants from the Sunni extremist group are now moving freely in Abu Ghraib, only around 40 km (24 miles) from the Iraqi capital, forcing Iraqi forces to remain inside the 10th Division base, the report said.
âWe know they have captured substantial numbers of 155 mm howitzers,â  a diplomat in Irbil told McClatchy. âThese have a range of about (20 miles) and if they are able to hold territory in Abu Ghraib then the concern they can shell and ultimately close [Baghdad Airport] becomes a grave concern.â
Prothero reports that the loss of Abu Ghraib “would severely limit the Iraqi governmentâs ability to send reinforcements to a small number of bases in Anbar that remain in government control.”
And that appears to be the case.
âDaash (Islamic State) is openly operating inside Abu Ghraib,â an Iraqi soldier told McClatchy. âI was at the 10th Division base there two days ago, and the soldiers cannot leave or patrol. âDaash controls the streets.â
Militants from the group formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) held rallies in Abu Ghraib city earlier this year, but this is the first report claiming the group is in control of yet another city in the Anbar province.
âThe ISIS offensive for Anbar is closely linked to the ISIS campaign for the Baghdad Belts,â according to a report from the Institute for the Study of War. âISIS attacks northwest of Baghdad appear to offset from ISIS attacks southwest of Baghdad.â
While ISIS worked to make gains in the Anbar province over the past few weeks, the militant group also increased the number of attacks on the capital in September.
Many of the attacks were suicide bombings but at least two attacks used indirect fire, according to reports from local media.
If the reports are true, they could indicate that the militants are able to attack Baghdad from afar, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
ISISAn American-made M198 155mm howitzer towed by an Oshkosh MTVR vehicle in Raqaa, Syria, after being commandeered by ISIS from Iraqi forces.
Meanwhile, ISIS continued their advance in Anbar. On Saturday the group seized Kubaisa, another town near the provinceâs capital. Fighters reportedly disguised themselves as residents from the nearby town Hit which ISIS captured two days ago.
Controlling Kubaisa will give militants room to launch attacks near the Haditha Dam, the second-largest generator of hydroelectricity in Iraqâs power system.
The Iraqi army is now defending the dam and certain other areas in Anbar that the militants have not seized. However, according to the ISW, if militants manage to consolidate land in Anbar, they will be ready to move on to Baghdad.
âIf ISIS can consolidate its core strength in Anbar, then its reinforcements that are currently augmenting attacks in this zone will likely shift to reinforce the northern and southern Baghdad Belts,â the report said. âAnd prepare to attack the capital.â
Kurdish troops have launched three separate offensives on Isis (now known as the Islamic State) positions in Northern Iraq, according to senior military officers.
The attacks took place before dawn north of Iraq’s second city Mosul, south of oil town Kirkuk and on a town situated on the Syrian border.
A Kurdish source confirmed that troops had entered the town of Rabia after capturing the villages of As-Saudiyah and Mahmudiyah.
“Ground troops are now fighting in the centre of Rabia,” the senior source in the Kurdish Peshmerga, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.
He revealed that Peshmerga forces, with artillery and air support, had launched an attack on Zumar, a city 40 miles northwest of Mosul and near Iraq’s largest reservoir, which IS captured in June following a large-scale offensive.
To the south of Kirkuk, Kurdish forces recaptured villages in close proximity to the town of Daquq, which has also been under the control of IS since June, and were now attempting to reclaim the village of Al-Wahda.
“They have liberated the villages of Saad and Khaled. The Peshmerga have taken full control of the area, following fierce fighting,” Kurdish General Westa Rasul said.
Isis (now known as the Islamic State) are now less than 10km (6.3 miles) from Baghdad as clashes with the Iraqi army continue, according to the vicar of the only Anglican church in Iraq.
Fighting with the terror group is taking place on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital with Iraqi forces attempting to halt their advance on the city.
Conflicting reports have emerged of the proximity of the radical Islamist group to Iraq’s economic and political centre.Â
Fighting has taken place in the key strategic town of Amariya al-Falluja, 40km (25 miles) west of Baghdad but Canon Andrew White, the vicar of Iraq’s only Anglican church, has claimed that the militants are now less than 10km (6.3 miles) from the capital.
“The Islamic State are on the verge of entering Baghdad. The Islamic State are now within 10km of entering Baghdad. Over a 1,000 Iraqi troops were killed by them yesterday, things are so bad.
“As I said all the military air strikes are doing nothing. If we ever needed your prayer it is now,” he said.
“President Obama is saying that he overestimated the ability of the Iraqi Army. It is so clear they have no ability. A hard thing to say but it’s true.”
An organisation supporting the work of White, the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East, has claimed that the group are even closer to Baghdad – less than 2km away.
“The Islamic State are now less than 2km away from entering Baghdad. They said it could never happen and now it almost has. Obama says he overestimated what the Iraqi Army could do. Well you only need to be hear [sic] a very short while to know they can do very very little,” the statement read.
The IS advance on the city comes despite the US-led coalition’s air strike campaign on the group’s positions across Iraq, most recently in Anbar province 80km from Baghdad.Â
US President Barack Obama has conceded that American intelligence did not take the growing threat from the group seriously enough.
“Well I think, our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said in a televised interview.
The United States has conducted over 200 air strikes on the group’s positions in Iraq since August 2014, while Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain and Qatar have joined or supported the strikes in Syria.
Over 120 people were reportedly killed during fighting in a Middle Eastern capital on Friday, but it wasn’t Baghdad or Damascus. With a Shi’ite rebel movement marching on Sa’ana, Yemen now seems like it’s primed to be the next country in the region to stare down the prospect of violent collapse.
Yemen has always been one of the region’s most problematic states. Home to over 25 million people, it’s one of the poorest countries in the Arab League and has one of the world’s highest number of firearms per capita. It’s home to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, widely believed to be the jihadist organization’s most dangerous franchise.
The country’s riven with complex regional, tribal, and sectarian dynamics that push back against any formal centralized authority â particularly in the three years since long-serving dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced from power during the Arab Spring.
But Yemen’s slow-burning crisis might have just entered its acute phase. Houthi rebels, members of a Shi’ite insurgency that fought six wars with the predominantly Sunni government between 2004 and 2010, are now marching on Sa’ana, Yemen’s ancient capital city.
AP Photo/Hani MohammedA policeman with his cloth-covered weapon stands guard in a street in Sanaa, Yemen on Feb. 23, 2014.
The Houthis’ rebellion began as a local phenomenon, an uprising among a religious minority on the country’s distant geographical and social fringes, and aimed more at protecting local and traditional authority than at overthrowing the government in Sa’ana.
But within Yemen’s vacuum â a potential powder keg that involves a major Al Qaeda affiliate and a populous and strategically located country that sits along a major oil corridor â the Houthis built themselves into a force with several tens of thousands of fighters reportedly at the ready.
After Saleh’s resignation, the group continued fighting the government, and actually pushed its front-line closer to the capital.
But it recently entered into negotiations with the Yemen’s fledgling transitional government under UN mediation, with an aim towards creating “a new government of technocrats, a reduction in fuel prices and giving Houthis more political representation,”
Al Jazeera correspondent Hashem Ahelbarra wrote on the news organization’s website. “In exchange, the Houthis would have had to pull out of Sanaa and put an end to their civil disobedience campaign.”
The mediation failed. Ahelbarra said the country is “just a few hours from plunging into a civil war as the capital city is divided along sectarian lines, with one half run by Sunnis and the other by Houthis.”
Yemen’s crisis is the result of long-simmering political dysfunction, a heavily armed population, and a broader history of tension between the country’s hinterlands and center â inflamed through poverty, population growth, sectarianism, and general lawlessness.
This slow-building vacuum isn’t quite as easy to grasp as the rapid disintegration of Iraq, a country that America invaded and occupied over the past decade, or Syria, whose civil war has been one of the most important stories on earth for the past three years.
But the Yemen’s crisis could prove to be every bit as troublesome. Another large and important Middle Eastern state with an Al Qaeda franchise might be about to descend into violent chaos.
On September 18, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) launched a complex attack likely targeting the Adala Prison in Baghdadâs Kadhmiyah neighborhood in northern Baghdad.
According to the Baghdad Operations Command, the attack was intended to break into the prison but was foiled. ISIS also launched another attack in Baghdadâs Iskan neighborhood that likely targeted the offices of the Iraqi Shiâa political group and militia, the Badr Organization.
The Attack
ISISâs attack included mortar rounds, Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs), and Suicide Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (SVBIEDs). The mortars were likely launched from the areas of the northern Baghdad belt including Taji. Fourteen mortar rounds reportedly targeted the Adala prison and in the vicinity of Kadhmiyah, and other mortar rounds fell in the Greaat area in northern Baghdad which is adjacent to Kadhmiyah.
An SVBIED also targeted the prison, resulting in the death of three people and injury of 10. Two attackers who had intended to attack the prison while wearing an explosive vest (SVEST) were arrested. Another VBIED exploded in a restaurant area in Kadhmiyah that resulted in the death of four people and the injury of 11 people. Iraqi police also defused yet another VBIED that was also found in Kadhmiyah. As a result of these attacks, security forces raised alert levels in Kadhmiyah.
Security Forces also ordered commercial shops to be closed in the predominantly Iraqi Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah. Adhamiyah lies just across the Aaima bridge from Kadhmiyah. Elsewhere in Baghdad, a VBIED detonated in the Iskan area in western Baghdad. The VBIED targeted the office of the Badr Organization, a Shiâa militia organization that has taken a leading role in directing Iraqi Shiâa militia operations to counter ISIS.
Implications
This attack is very significant. It is the first infantry-like, complex, and penetrating attack in Baghdad city by ISIS since the fall of Mosul in June of this year. ISIS likely carried out the attack to release some of the pressure it is facing as a result of the recent U.S. air campaign targeting its positions.
The attack also signifies that, despite the heightened defenses of Baghdad in the aftermath of the fall of Mosul, ISIS is still able to carry out attacks in an area where it is unlikely to have active sleeper cells given Kadhmiyahâs predominantly Iraqi Shiâa demographic. The mortars were likely launched from Taji due to ISISâs historical presence in the area and its ongoing activities there.
The attacks will not likely divert great deal of resources of the ISF and Iraqi Shiâa militias into other areas. The government will want to maintain a strong defense of Baghdad by preserving the same posture. More likely, however, the attacks will trigger increased activities of Iraqi Shiâa militia in Baghdad in order to target ISIS sleeper cells and predominantly Iraqi Sunni areas including Adhamiyah.
BAGHDAD (AP) â The extremist-held Iraqi city of Mosul is set to usher in a new school year. But unlike years past, there will be no art or music. Classes about history, literature and Christianity have been “permanently annulled.”
The Islamic State group has declared patriotic songs blasphemous and ordered that certain pictures be torn out of textbooks.
But instead of compliance, Iraq’s second largest city has â at least so far â responded to the Sunni militants’ demands with silence. Although the extremists stipulated that the school year would begin Sept. 9, pupils have uniformly not shown up for class, according to residents who spoke anonymously because of safety concerns. They said families were keeping their children home out of mixed feelings of fear, resistance and uncertainty.
“What’s important to us now is that the children continue receiving knowledge correctly, even if they lose a whole academic year and an official certification,” a Mosul resident who identified himself as Abu Hassan told The Associated Press, giving only his nickname for fear of reprisals. He and his wife have opted for home schooling, picking up the required readings at the local market.
The fall of Mosul on June 10 was a turning point in Iraq’s war against the jihadi group that calls itself the Islamic State. The U.S.-trained Iraqi military, harassed for months by small-scale attacks, buckled almost instantly when militants advanced on the city. Commanders disappeared. Pleas for more ammunition went unanswered. In some cases, soldiers stripped off their uniforms and ran.
The city would come to represent the expanding power and influence of the extremist group, which was born in Iraq but spread to Syria, where it grew exponentially in the chaos of the country’s civil war. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s reclusive leader, made his first video appearance in Mosul in July to announce his vision for a self-styled caliphate â an Islamic state â of which he would be the caliph, or leader.
Part of the Islamic State group’s core strategy is to establish administration over lands that it controls to project an image of itself as a ruler and not just a fighting force. In parts of Syria under its control, the group now administers courts, fixes roads and even polices traffic. It recently imposed a curriculum in schools in its Syrian stronghold, Raqqa, scrapping subjects such as philosophy and chemistry, and fine-tuning the sciences to fit with its ideology.
In Mosul, schools have been presented with a new set of rules, advertised in a two-page bulletin posted on mosques, in markets and on electricity poles. The statement, dated Sept. 5, cheered “good news of the establishment of the Islamic State Education Diwan by the caliph who seeks to eliminate ignorance, to spread religious sciences and to fight the decayed curriculum.”
The new Mosul curriculum, allegedly issued by al-Baghdadi himself, stresses that any reference to the republics of Iraq or Syria must be replaced with “Islamic State.” Pictures that violate its ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam will be ripped out of books. Anthems and lyrics that encourage love of country are now viewed as a show of “polytheism and blasphemy,” and are strictly banned.
The new curriculum even went so far as to explicitly ban Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution â although it was not previously taught in Iraqi schools.
Abu Hassan and his fellow residents acknowledge the risks involved in keeping the children at home, but say that protecting their minds is equally important. “They will brainwash them and contaminate their thoughts,” he said.
This past weekend, some families said that a new statement from the Islamic State group began circulating through the city, demanding that students show up for class on Tuesday. Others said they never received the notice.
A fighter, third from right, with the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) distributes copies of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, to local residents in central northern city of Mosul, 225 miles (360 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, June 22, 2014.
Since the earliest days of the militant onslaught on Mosul, some residents who have remained have welcomed the insurgents wholeheartedly, while others have risked death to protect their city and assert their defiance. In July, militants threatened to blow up its most prominent landmark, the 840-year old Crooked Minaret that leans like Italy’s Tower of Pisa.
Residents sat on the ground and linked arms to form a human chain, protecting the ancient structure from sharing the fate of more than half a dozen mosques and shrines flattened by the militants who declared them dens of apostasy.
Even as foreign intervention, led by U.S. airstrikes, begins to take form and make headway, the group’s tight grip on Mosul appears, for now, unrelenting, with many of the militants burying themselves in heavily populated city centers.
It was unclear whether teachers and school administrators have also stayed home rather than show up for work.
In the Sept. 5 statement posted across Mosul, the “caliph,” al- Baghdadi, calls upon professionals in Iraq and abroad “to teach and serve the Muslims in order to improve the people of the Islamic state in the fields of all religious and other sciences.”
Gender-segregated schools are not new to Iraq, which legally prohibits co-ed classes beyond age 12, with some segregating from a much younger age. However, in Mosul, the new guidelines declared that teachers must also be segregated, with men teaching at boys’ schools, and women teaching girls.
The Education Ministry in Baghdad says it has virtually no contact with Mosul and other towns and cities in nearly one-third of the country ruled to some degree by the Islamic State group. “The situation in Mosul is so difficult because it is far too dangerous for us to know exactly what is happening,” said Salama al-Hassan, a spokeswoman for ministry.
Students also face hardships elsewhere across Iraq amid growing pressure to cater to more than 1.8 million people people displaced by the militants’ advance. Nationwide, the school year has been delayed by a month, because many schools have been converted into makeshift shelters for displaced people from regions seized by the Islamic State group. In Baghdad alone, 76 schools are occupied by displaced Iraqis, al-Hassan said.
“All of this has a serious impact on the psychology of the students,” she added. “We want to approach this subject in a way that boosts the confidence and spirit of the students and helps them to understand what is happening in the country without instilling them with fear.”
For residents in Mosul and other areas now ruled by the militant group, fear is unavoidable.
The education statement put out by the militants in Mosul ends with a chilling reminder of its willingness to use brutal force. “This announcement is binding,” it concludes. “Anyone who acts against it will face punishment.”
The U.S. military has hit an Islamic State target southwest of Baghdad, according to U.S. Central Command.
This marks an expansion of the Obama administration’s campaign against ISIS, who has wielded their influence across Iraq and Syria.
So what is it that makes this airstrike different?
It marks the first time the United States is going on the offensive. In other attacks the US was protecting its interests and helping refugees.
But now, it’s not about defense any longer. The goal now clearly is to aid Iraqi forces in wiping out ISIS wherever and whenever it can. In this particular case, southwest of Baghdad, the AP says Iraqi forces asked for help. The US answered, and it marks a major turning point in this new battle against ISIS.
It comes after the militant group reportedly killed British aid worker David Haines, along with two American journalists. They did so by video message.
“The air strike southwest of Baghdad was the first strike taken as part of our expanded efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions to hit (Islamic State) targets as Iraqi forces go on offense,” Central Command said in a statement.
The United States is stepping up its military response to the hardline group, which has beheaded several Western hostages and seeks to expand the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq.
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