Winter is Coming for Syria and Iraq Refugees
Winter is coming amidst a humanitarian crisis due to conflict in Iraq and Syria. The UN refugee agency has said that a lack of funding and a rise in internal displacement could leave up to...
By: TheLipTV
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Winter is Coming for Syria and Iraq Refugees - Video
John Ismay was in the business of tracking explosives and bombs in surge-era Iraq. His first week there introduced him to an open secret: Coalition forces routinely found chemical weapons, and within a month, a soldier in his unit suffered a mustard blister on his leg the size of his hand.
I was amazed I was never told about M-110 rounds before I got there, Ismay says, referring to the chemical artillery rounds manufactured to produce a toxic effect on personnel and to contaminate habitable areas. I never heard about guys who got hit by mustard and sarin.
As a U.S. Navy explosive ordnance disposal officer, Ismay spent a lot of time thinking about the improvised explosives killing coalition troops. He put in long hours at operations centers, studying reports and looking for patterns set by insurgent bomb-makers to help soldiers find IEDs with their eyes and not their bodies. Chemical weapons like nerve agents and mustard were an afterthought when improvised explosives were the number-one killer of troops in Iraq. Yet at the same time, Iraqi and American soldiers recovered thousands of chemical munitions mostly in secret for three years before Ismay deployed to Iraq, leaving his troops and countless others to a grim lottery of sorting through damaged shells that might have led to paralysis by sharing the same air.
The landmark two-year New York Times investigation on the Iraq Wars secret chemical weapons casualties sits at the intersection of multiple daunting obstacles for journalists: military leaders who suppressed information from the public, injured war veterans who are skeptical of reporters, and dense webs of technical details in need of expert analysis. At the center was a team of three veteransIsmay, New York Times correspondent C.J. Chivers, and videographer Mac Bishopwhose own services played a considerable part in reporting one of the biggest untold stories of the Iraq War.
What they uncovered was astonishing: U.S. and Iraqi forces had secretly recovered about 5,000 chemical weapons during the eight-year war, with the first report documenting 17 American and seven Iraqi soldiers injured by mustard and nerve agentsincluding the only documented battlefield exposures to a nerve agent in U.S. military history. The Pentagon, later prompted by the story, revealed the number wounded as higher than 600. High-ranking officials reportedly engaged in subterfuge to downplay and conceal the danger to U.S. troops, and official recognition is nearly nonexistent. Purple Hearts awarded by Army Secretary Pete Geren were rescinded in one case due to convoluted rules of what defines enemy action with chemical weapons. Lifelong medical care will likely be necessary for the troops exposed, but that will be difficult in the Veterans Affairs system, which requires documentation to treat and compensate service-related injuries. In most cases for troops wounded by chemical weapons in Iraq, that documentation was aggressively avoided.
As Ismay finished his service commitment with the Navy in 2010, he read a New York Times piece detailing the complex origins of weapons found inside a Taliban gun locker. He then began corresponding with C.J. Chivers, the papers longtime conflict and arms reporter who wrote the piece. Ismay calls him Chris, but for seven years ending in 1994, he was Captain Chivers, a Marine infantry officer who served in the Gulf War.
Ismay couldnt satisfy what he calls a morbid curiosity about the origins of the chemical weapons found in Iraq. His research stalled due to lack of evidence and Pentagon documentation, and he put his work in a drawer until Chivers came to him on the same subject. Chivers was following murmurs that chemical weapons designed by the West in the 1940s and used in the Iran-Iraq War were the same munitions that Americans and Iraqis were pulling out of weapons caches IED emplacements as recent as 2011.
This was basically an arms trade story, Chivers says. Initially, Pentagon officials were tin-eared to their requests on the types of chemical weapons injuring U.S. soldiers and Iraqis, and no one would go on record.
As the number of victims grew, as the number of collected munitions hit four figures, we realized we had a different story, Chivers says. It was no longer about the weapons. It was now about the men wounded by them. All they had to do was listen to their stories.
Of all the occupations wary of outsiders, combat troopsmen and women in an insular, competitive, and poorly understood culturemight be the most guarded. Its an undeniable hurdle confronting any journalist who must use veterans as sources and guides through complex stories.
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How Three Veterans Uncovered the Iraq War's Biggest Untold Story
Published November 15, 2014
Nov. 13, 2014: Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey listens on Capitol Hill in Washington(AP)
BAGHDAD America's top military leader arrived Saturday to Iraq, state television reported, his first visit to the country since a U.S.-led coalition began a campaign of airstrikes targeting the extremist Islamic State group.
The visit by Army Gen. Marin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not previously announced. It came just two days after he told Congress that the United States would consider dispatching a modest number of American forces to fight with Iraqi troops as they engage in more complex missions in the campaign against the Islamic State group, which controls about a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
The Iraqi military and security forces, trained by the U.S. at the cost of billions of dollars, melted away in the face of the Islamic State group's stunning offensive this summer, when they captured most of northern and western Iraq, including the country's second-largest city, Mosul.
Dempsey said Thursday that Iraqi forces were doing a better job now, although an effort to move into Mosul or to restore the border with Syria would require more complex operations.
"I'm not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by U.S. forces, but we're certainly considering it," he told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee.
He added that the U.S. has a modest force in Iraq now, and "any expansion of that, I think, would be equally modest. I just don't foresee a circumstance when it would be in our interest to take this fight on ourselves with a large military contingent."
Dempsey's visit comes just one day after Iraqi forces drove Islamic State militants out of a strategic oil refinery town north of Baghdad, scoring their biggest battlefield victory yet.
The recapture of Beiji is the latest in a series of setbacks for the jihadi group, which has lost hundreds of fighters to U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, particularly amid the group's stalled advance on the Syrian town of Kobani. On Friday, activists there reported significant progress by Kurdish fighters defending the town.
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Top US general makes unannounced visit to Iraq
Baghdad America's top military leader arrived in Iraq on Saturday,statetelevision reported, making his first visit to the country since a U.S.-led coalition began a campaign of airstrikes targeting the extremistIslamicStategroup.
The visit by Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not previously announced. It came just two days after he told Congress that the UnitedStateswould consider dispatching a modest number of American forces to fight with Iraqi troops against theIslamicStategroup, which controls about a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
On Saturday, Islamic State militants withdrew from the perimeter ofIraq's biggest oil refinery after months fending off government troops seeking to retake the strategic complex, said an army officer andAl-Hadathtelevision station.
The officer, speaking to Reuters from theBaijirefinery, said the Sunni insurgents removed roadside bombs they had planted and fled.Al-Hadathsaid security forces had entered the compound.
This summer, Iraqi military and security forces, trained by the U.S. at the cost of billions of dollars, melted away in the face of the extremist group's stunning offensive, when it captured most of northern and western Iraq, including the country's second-largest city Mosul.
Dempsey said Thursday that Iraqi forces were doing a better job now, although an effort to move into Mosul or to restore the border with Syria would require more complex operations.
He also told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee that America has a modest force in Iraq now, and that "any expansion of that, I think, would be equally modest."
"I just don't foresee a circumstance when it would be in our interest to take this fight on ourselves with a large military contingent," he said.
Dempsey's visit comes just one day after Iraqi forces droveIslamicStatemilitants out of a strategic oil refinery town north of Baghdad, scoring their biggest battlefield victory yet.
The recapture of Beiji is the latest in a series of setbacks for the jihadi group, which has lost hundreds of fighters to U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, particularly in the group's stalled advance on the Syrian town of Kobani. On Friday, activists there reported significant progress by Kurdish fighters defending the town.
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ISIS withdraws from Baiji oil refinery, chairman of Joint Chiefs visits Iraq
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