A JINN INFESTED WORLD: THE DEAD ENCRUST
Unprecedented.
Unprecedented.
The normal rules of war abandoned.
Unprecedented.
Unprecedented.
War crimes.
Beyond measure.
Injured and dying children, their images playing on the smart phones of sympathisers worldwide.
Unprecedented.
Unprecedented.
Children carrying children.
Starving. Dehydrated. Skin burnt from American airstrikes.
This wasn't just the dogs of war.
Islamic State had deliberately set out to provoke the Americans into battle.
They had stated it time and time again in their propaganda.
It was no secret.
Now the greatest jihad spectacle in history played woomph woomph beyond fear beyond reason from devastated ruins, a realm of profound human chaos.
Women carried as many children as they could from the ruins.
Starving men were rounded into groups before being shot.
In the distance, the sound of airstrikes, still.
There was no pretense they weren't killing women, children, entire families.
Weeping distress.
Azmat Khan, journalist with New America, told Democracy Now! as appalling images played in the background: focusing on injured, severely dehydrated starving children crowded into small rooms, of shell shocked women surrounded by their equally shell shocked children, young children carrying babies or sheltering in front of pockmarked walls, the signs of battle everywhere.
American involvement has been quite unprecedented.The US has been in charge of this coalition which has been bombing Mosul.They also have a land component that is involved, working very closely, with Iraqi forces and Peshmerga forces. What you have seen in the last nine months of this campaign has been incredibly close collaboration, a lot of training and working very closely with allied forces in that area. We have heard of some deaths of US servicemen in Iraq as part of this fight. People who have been quite close to areas of the battle.They are not necessarily on the front line. This is where Iraqi forces have sustained huge losses. It is really incredibly unprecedented. Many of them say to me they have never had this level of destruction or this type of fight in the more than 10 years that Iraq has been a hub for this constant violence. So you are seeing a US role in terms of organising, in terms of facilitating these airstrikes, in terms of closely collaborating and coordinating attacks. It is deeply intertwined and what the air force and the military and others who are part of this coalition will tell you is that this is Iraqi-led. While some of these victories are often portrayed as the work of local forces, you can't deny the role that the coalition and its air force, many of which has been B52s and large scale aerial assaults, have played.
America's military, infested with career serving boofheads who lacked the intellectual capacity to read the numerous analyses of IS's intentions and the counter productiveness of bombing civilian populations, had handed Islamic State its greatest propaganda victory in history.
In Australia, the taxpayer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as it had done for the previous 20 years, continued to obsess about the minutiae of climate change bureaucracy and emissions trading propaganda, paint drying, while ignoring the biggest stories of the era.
Tasked with dumbing down the population, it was succeeding admirably.
On all channels sport, bread and circuses, took up more and more programming time.
At the Tables of Knowledge, on a warm winter afternoon, ribald conversation veered from one lad's own escapade to another, debauchery.
"Loose morals," Old Alex said, blinking in the winter sun, for no other reason than that the phrase came into his head.
"Awesome!" came the response from one of the smarter, nicer, more empathetic of the mob.
They both laughed.
He could go on about the collapse of the underclass, but it wasn't that. It was a prolonged adolescence. The days were hard. Home life was hard.
Soon enough, the place would be a mosque. Nothing wrong with an escapade or three, fun, for the sake of it, fiddling, literally, while Rome burned.
Those winter afternoons a distant memory.
Alcohol long banned.
The women in their homes.
While the men marveled about the beauty of God.
Old Alex passed the Muhammadan, an arcane term still used in the rural areas of Nepal and India, out on his morning walk.
"We were just talking, about our wives, how wonderful the God, to make us different," his friend said.
Years before, Old Alex had complimented him on his beard, a sure way to a Muhammadan's heart, and they had been saying good morning ever since.
On this occasion he had two relatives from Pakistan with him, no English.
So his friend translated.
One of them was from Lahore, where he had been in the 1970s, before it was a town full of the roar of cars and motorbikes but a blessed gift, sheltering on the plains before the Himalayas, one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
They talked about the pink mosque, the Badshahi Mosque, known for its rose pink stone, where in the distance you could see the snow tipped mountains; back then known as the largest mosque in the world. There, all those years before, he had watched the men pray in their thousands at the end of Ramadan.
He knows Arabic, his friend informed his visitors, keen to introduce them to a local person.
"No I don't," Old Alex said. "Only a little. InShaAllah."
God willing.
They smiled in recognition at the oft used phrase.
As always, as they parted, his friend invited him to the mosque, which had taken over where the old Anglican church had once been.
As always, he demurred.
"Maybe one day," he said.
Maybe one day there would be no choice.
His friend, an upward wave of the arms, towards the heavens: "The God know everything."
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/in-mosul-iraq-collectively-punishing-is-families-beating-killing-fighters-20170713-gxb0kj.html
Erbil: A number of Iraqi military personnel have been suspended and an investigation launched after Human Rights Watch has condemned videos circulating on social media purportedly showing Iraqi forces killing and beating suspected Islamic State fighters in Mosul.
The videos were posted to Facebook earlier this week, a day after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared "total victory" in Mosul, according to The Associated Press. On Thursday, a spokesman for Iraq's Defence Ministry said he had not seen the videos but that such incidents will not be tolerated.
Earlier Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Iraqi security forces of forcibly relocating at least 170 families of alleged Islamic State members to a closed "rehabilitation camp" as a form of collective punishment.
Abadi announced victory over IS (also ISIS, ISIL) in Mosul on Monday, three years after the militants seized the city and made it the stronghold of a "caliphate" they said would take over the world.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/after-liberation-anxieties-echo-in-the-rubble-of-mosul-20170714-gxb61j.html
Washington: There's a feeling of deja vu. Liberation forces arrive and there's an uneasy sense that they don't know how to handle the prize.
In 2003, an American-led coalition knocked Saddam Hussein from his pedestal in Baghdad. But instead of taking its place as one of the world's leading economies, Iraq descended into sectarianism and corruption, creating a breeding ground for Islamic State, which reached its peak when it captured Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, in 2014.
And now that Iraqi forces, backed by a made-over US-led coalition, have liberated Mosul, reducing the city to a pile of rubble in the process, the challenge is to ensure the cycle of destruction does not repeat itself.
The anxiety of ordinary Iraqis about American intentions was palpable in the streets of Baghdad on the toppling of the regime, 14 years ago.
As it turned out, a botched occupation, political gridlock in Baghdad and industrial-scale corruption resulted in Washington's $US60 billion ($77.5 billion) investment in the new Iraq being frittered away for "few tangible results", in the judgment of the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, who attributed the loss to poor co-ordination with Baghdad, incorrect priorities, badly planned projects, wastefulness, corruption and security challenges.
