Mediaboss Marketing

Sunni Arab militants from the al Qaeda splinter group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL), have gained control of vast tracts of land along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, and are pushing south toward Baghdad. Its all part of a wider aim to establish an Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq andeventuallyfarther away in Asia and Africa. Over the centuries, however, the region once known as the radle of civilization has seen significant changes. A seventh-century split within Islam itself between Sunni and Shiite would only grow wider as the centuries wore on and the region known as Iraq was traded between great powers.

Early Caliphates - The idea of a Sunni-dominated Islamic caliphate harkens back centuries to two empires: the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. A caliphate is an Islamic state led by a religious and political leader known as a caliph. Sunnis believe their leaders should be elected from among the political successors of the Prophet Muhammad, the nonhereditary elite known as caliphs. The Shiites, however, believe their leaders should come from the direct family line of Muhammad. That schism remains to this day and is a defining element of the sectarian violence in Iraq.

The Ottoman Empire - At the height of its expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman Empirewhose leadership was Sunni and based in what is now Turkeycovered vast tracts of land in southern Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The empire allowed for multiple languages and religions and divided the area that is now Iraq into three provinces. The Kurds settled in Mosul, the Shiites in Basra, and the Sunnis in Baghdad. Like the British who followed them, the Ottomans sought to maintain the lands that would come to be known as Iraq as a predominantly Sunni-controlled region.

World War I Aftermath - World War I saw the end of several imperial powers, including the Ottoman Empire. The newly formed League of Nations, tasked with maintaining world peace, carved up the former Ottoman Empire and unified the three provinces under British rule, essentially demarcating the modern boundaries of Iraq. Displeased with this plan, the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds united for the first time to revolt against British colonial occupation, but they were unsuccessful in gaining full independence until 1932. In the decades that followed, Sunnis held political prominence through the monarchy and political leadership positions, including Saddam Husseins presidency beginning in 1979 SOURCE: INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR

Toppling of Saddam Hussein - In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq and toppled the decades-long regime of Saddam Hussein. The violent insurgency that followed resulted in more than 4,000 U.S. deaths and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties. By 2006 the insurgency appeared to have devolved into a civil war between Sunni and Shiite factions. That same year, the election of a new prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who is Shiite, led to an unusual period of Shiite political dominance in Iraq and to claims of disenfranchisement by Sunnis, one key factor in the violent opposition to his leadership today. The year 2006 also witnessed the birth of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) as both a Sunni group (a renaming of al Qaeda in Iraq, and a precursor to ISIS) and as an Islamist-declared state in western Iraq. SOURCE: INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR

The Rise of ISIS - Earlier this year, an al Qaeda splinter group based in Syria swept into Iraq with the aim of establishing an Islamic state in both countries, whichif successfulwould effectively erase the borders imposed by the West in the wake of WWI. In recent weeks, this Sunni Arab militia, called ISIS, has seized significant resources and conducted mass executions in its dramatic push toward Baghdad. While they have faced little opposition in the Sunni-dominated northwest, the encroachment of ISIS into Shiite-dominated southern territories is expected to result in significant bloodshed. JUAN JOS VALDS, LAUREN E. JAMES, AND EVE CONANT, NG STAFF. SOURCE:INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR

The State premieres on Wednesday 23rd of August at 8.30pm on National Geographic.

See the article here:
Iraq: 1200 Years of Turbulent History in Five Maps - National Geographic Australia

External Affairs

People celebrate after Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over the militants in the de facto Iraqi capital of their self-declared caliphate in Mosul, Iraq, July 11, 2017. However, there was no information of the missing Indian nationals from the liberated city. Credit: Reuters/Stringer

New Delhi:Syrias ambassador to India Riad Kamel Abbas today said his country has no information about the 39 Indians who went missing in Iraq in 2014.

He, however, said Syria is keen to send them home if they are found in its territory.

Abbas said an Indian delegation has made several trips to Syria and Iraq in the past to seek information about them and the chief of the Intelligence Department of Syria has also visited New Delhi in this regard.

The Indian delegation went to Syria many times and the chief of Syrian intelligence agency came to Delhi for it, the envoy said.

We are very keen to bring them (missing Indians) home if they are in our territory, but there is no official confirmation about it, he added.

Early this month, Iraqi forces freed Mosul from the ISIS, a development that gave a ray of hope to the families of 39 Indians.

However, there was no information on the missing Indian nationals from the liberated city.

See original here:
Syria Has No Information on 39 Missing Indians in Iraq, Says Ambassador - The Wire

WATCH LIVE

An armored personnel carrier used in the Iraq War in 2003 is the first artifact to be installed at the National Museum of the United States Army. (Published Monday, July 31, 2017)

An armored personnel carrier used in the Iraq War in 2003 is the first artifact to be installed at the National Museum of the United States Army.

Its so big and so heavy, crews needed to place it in its permanent display location before building the museum's walls around it.

The Army is the only military service without a national museum.

"This museum will give the American people a look at their history through the eyes of the men and women who have served this country selflessly since the 1600s," Chairman of the Board of the Army Historical Foundation Gen. Gordon Sullivan said.

The museum is scheduled to open to the public in late 2019 in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

It will include never-before-seen artifacts, a Memorial Garden, an amphitheater and an Army trail.

Published at 8:21 PM EDT on Jul 31, 2017 | Updated at 9:46 PM EDT on Jul 31, 2017

More here:
US Army Museum to Be Built Around Huge Armored Vehicle From ... - NBC4 Washington

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Thousands of children have been separated from their parents in the nine-month battle for Mosul and the preceding years of Islamic State rule in northern Iraq - some found wandering alone and afraid among the rubble, others joining the refugee exodus from the pulverized city.

In some cases their parents have been killed. Families have been split up as they fled street fighting, air strikes or Islamic State repression. Many are traumatized from the horrors they have endured.

Protecting the youngsters and reuniting them with their families is an urgent task for humanitarian organizations.

"These children are extremely vulnerable," said Mariyampillai Mariyaselvam, a child protection specialist with UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund). "Most have gone through a very painful history."

Nine-year-old Meriam had left her family one day last October to visit her grandmother in west Mosul, then under Islamic State rule. The government offensive to recapture the city began, so she stayedthere.

Her father Hassan told Reuters he had been a policeman but quit when the radical Islamists seized Mosul in 2014, fearing he would be targeted. He, his second wife, along with Meriam and her three half-siblings moved from dwelling to dwelling.

"We were living in many different places, moving around. Meriam stayed with her grandmother but when the bridges were shut down, I could not cross the river to see her," he said, speaking in the abandoned, half-built house in east Mosul where the family is now squatting.

They eventually fled to the Hassan Sham displaced persons camp but Meriam was trapped in the west.

After government forces retook the neighborhood in June, she and her grandmother made it to the Khazer camp. Her father asked UNICEF for help and they managed to track down his daughter. They were reunited in Hassan Sham later that month.

"I was hearing bombing and killing every day. I did not believe they would find her," he said.

Life is still hard for the family. They left the camp to return to the city with their few possessions, but the house owner wants to evict them. Hassan makes ends meet by finding day jobs. But at least they are together, he said, cuddling his daughter as he spoke.

Meriam, a bright-eyed girl with a shy smile, said she would like to go to school.

"I have never been to school. I would like to have books, a backpack, and to learn letters. That is my dream," she said.

UNICEF says children in shock had been found in debris or hidden in tunnels in Mosul. Some had lost their families while fleeing to safety but sometimes parents had been forced to abandon children or give them away. Many children were forced to fight or carry out violent acts, it said in a statement. They were also vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

UNICEF's Mariyaselvam, speaking to Reuters in Erbil, said the number of children coming out of Mosul had increased in the past few months as the battle reached its climax.

He explained the distinction between separated children, who are split from their legal guardians but are with friends or relatives, and unaccompanied children, who are alone and without care or guardians.

It was difficult to give an accurate number but child protection agencies have recorded more than 3,000 separated and over 800 unaccompanied children, he said. The latter are the priority.

The task of rescuing and identifying them begins in the field, with relief agency teams placed in strategic locations where people are fleeing. Registration points are set up. Mobile child protection teams also visit households. Then UNICEF and its local partners begin tracing the legal guardians or relatives.

"Our primary focus is care and protection for them. We try to make sure that they are provided immediate care," he said.

In camps, they are usually placed with people on a temporary basis. If parents or other relatives cannot be identified, a legal process begins to put them in care homes with government permission. If all efforts fail, there is a foster program.

From the start, the children need specialized services such as psychological counseling. Some need mental health care. But the Iraqi government lacks sufficient resources or infrastructure to handle the challenge, Mariyaselvam said.

Mosul, which served as the capital of Islamic State's self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria for three years, provided a particular set of problems. UNICEF and the government followed cases to ensure children weresafe from abuse and exploitation once they were back in the community.

"The situation we are seeing is that some children are not being accepted by the community because of their affiliation," he said, referring to the children of Islamic State fighters and supporters.

Some youngsters were roaming the city streets and some were being used as child labor, he said. Families who had lost their homes or fled could sometimes simply not cope.

"It is going to require a lot of time and a lot of resources and specialized services for them to rebuild their lives, including sending them back to school," Mariyaselvam said.

And with the war still going on as Islamic State retreats and a government offensive to recapture the IS-held town of Tal Afar expected soon, a new wave of lost children is anticipated.

Reporting by Angus MacSwan; Editing by Dale Hudson

Read this article:
Lost children are legacy of battle for Iraq's Mosul - Reuters

Editors Note: This piece originally appeared on Markaz.

Now that Mosul is back under coalition control, policymakers from D.C. to Baghdad must focus anew on building a lasting and durable peace in Iraq.

Fortunately, in the decade since the issue of post-conflict stability last took center stage, researchers have learned a great deal about why and how peace endures. As with any literature, the debates are not fully settled. But we nonetheless have a much clearer understanding of why some civil wars yield to lasting peace, while others beget further violence.

So what are the keys to a stable, post-conflict Iraq? Three findings in particular stand out.

Win Big

As study after study has shown, whether civil war recurs depends in part on how the war initially ends. Did the fighting stop after a clear victory for one side? Or did the guns instead fall silent because a peace deal was signed after a partial victory or stalemate?

Ironically, the surer path to peace is not actually a peace deal. Its victory. As Anke Collier and her colleague Richard Caplan have most recently shown, peace deals are far more likely to yield to further fighting down the road than military victories. In ceasefires and negotiated settlements both parties live to fight another day, but in a military victory only one does. As a result, of the 205 post-conflict cases that Collier and Caplan looked at, fighting typically resumed within 10 years in fewer than 25 percent of the cases ended by military victories, but in roughly 50 percent of those ended in peace deals.

For Iraq, the clear takeaway is thus to pursue a full military victory. For the country to enjoy a stable, long-term peace, the Iraqi coalition cannot just regain all Islamic State territory: its forces must destroy the Islamic State as an insurgent group too.

Yet if history is any guide, that task will be easier said than done. The graph below shows battle deaths from 2004 to 2013 between the Iraqi government and the Islamic State and its predecessor, al-Qaida in Iraq:

Note that even in 2012, when the conflict was at its ebb, the Islamic States insurgency still claimed the lives of 500 militants and soldiers.

For stable peace to take root, the Iraqi coalition will thus have its hands full. It cannot merely push the Islamic State out of its remaining territoryit will also have to prevent the Islamic State from reverting to its pre-war insurgency too.

Beware Spoilers

Peace is difficult enough to sustain when there are only two parties. Add in more rebel groups, however, and it gets even harder.

Think of it as the conflict version of having too many cooks in the kitchen. The more rebels there are, the more difficult it is to get them all to agree on what the recipe for peace should be. Even worse, the more rebels there are, the more likely at least one will have incentive to play the spoilertypically by targeting civilians as a way of eroding popular support for political compromise.

Think of it as the conflict version of having too many cooks in the kitchen.

Two of the best new studies on post-conflict stabilization, by Sean Ziegler and by Peter Rudloff and Michael Findley, show that the effects of rebel competition are especially pernicious. When rebel groups split and compete with one another, they dont just make it harder to end civil warsthey make it harder to keep the peace for years after the war finally ends. In one model, in fact, peace was over 50 percent more likely to break over 10 years when there had been multiple rebel groups than when there had only been one.

For Iraq, the implication is straightforward: The coalition should do all it can to avoid either splintering the Islamic State or giving rise to competing Sunni insurgents. Rather than trying to weaken the Islamic State by fracturing itwhich Kathleen Cunningham has shown is a common tacticthe coalition should instead seek to keep the Islamic State unified.

Fortunately, this may actually prove feasible. Based on data from the Global Terrorism Dataset, Figure 2 below shows the number of distinct Sunni organizations in Iraq that carried out a significant attack in Iraq (i.e., one with 5 or more fatalities) in a given year:

As the figure illustrates, the Islamic State and its predecessor group, al-Qaida in Iraq, have proven remarkably adept at either coopting or driving out Sunni rivals. They did this first following the Iraqi insurgency of the mid-2000s, and then again soon after declaring a caliphate.

Although the resilience of the Islamic State will make full victory difficult, the fact that it has edged out its rivals is a boon. The Iraq coalition should now ensure that as they defeat the Islamic State, those prior networks dont splinter off or re-emerge.

Be Inclusive

Not all peace deals are alike. Some are much more prone to fall apart than others. As Charles Calla professor at American University and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookingsexplains in his recent book, the peace deals that survive tend to share one thing in common: Theyre inclusive. By contrast, peace settlements that exclude or marginalize opposition groups tend to break down.

Calls work echoes other prior findings. In an early work on the issue, for instance, Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie looked at 38 civil wars that ended with peace agreements, and found that those with power-sharing institutions were much more likely to last. The more a rebel movement is incorporated into the political process, it turns out, the less incentive it will have to take up arms down the road.

Arguably the most compelling recent work on post-conflict stabilization builds on that logic. In Why Bad Governance Leads to Repeat Civil War, Barbara Walter looked at the effect of state institutions during civil wars on post-war violence. Does better, more inclusive governance lead to more lasting post-conflict peace? What Walter found was that while democracy itself is not associated with lower risk of recurring violence, aspects of it are. More specifically, countries with a commitment to rule of law and high political participation are significantly less likely to see armed conflict return. As Walter discovered, its not elections per se that appear to matter, but instead popular trust that the political process is in fact open.

For Iraq, the research has important implications. The government of Prime Minister Al-Abadi must seek out greater Sunni representation. Fortunately, Abadi has already made efforts to reverse the sectarian excesses of his predecessor, Nouri Al-Maliki, who unwisely consolidated power among Shiite elites. Yet as the Islamic State retreats and the Iraqi army extends further into Sunni strongholds, Abadi will have to do more than simply outperform Al-Maliki: He will have to find a way to bring as many Sunnis as possible back into the political process.

None of these tasks will be easy. Yet if Abadi and other Iraqi leaders want a stable future, the path forward is clear: Dismantle the Islamic States capacity and reach, and bring Iraqi Sunnis back into the fold before new spoilers emerge.

Anything less, and Iraqs longstanding violence will almost certainly continue apace.

Follow this link:
Evidence-Based Keys to a Stable Post-Caliphate Iraq - Lawfare (blog)