Yms8F7S'%;~O4nsmN7L-fRTl7~)( @w2i8u8?dS~Q(Y(e2w!BZLfT$L:amcoy1|N?K'%od2Ahr ^$Q)|zM(KBC}f / <94_9FtQ&GaA?jkbLcx>wsvnv^}>7aRivk{(b:eEF7Fio#K6B rJFGtdD![|>ytQt]D5TfEZkArC}RjmF>::O@o~i3(<0eS
Originally posted here:
Jared Kushner mocked for wearing flak jacket and blazer in Iraq - New York Daily News
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the terror organization carried out the mass killing in the the al-Mayadin desert near the strategic city of Deir Ezzor on Wednesday morning, it said, adding that its activists were "able to monitor" the incident.
The London-based monitoring group called it "the largest execution operation carried out by the Islamic State organization in 2017."
The report said the people were between ages 18 and 25 and were "killed by sharp tools." It added that it is unknown whether the victims were Syrian government forces, allied militia or rebel factions.
The report came as ISIS killed at least 22 people in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, also on Wednesday.
ISIS gunmen indiscriminately opened fire on police and civilians in the central Iraqi city before they blew themselves up, police officials told CNN. At least 31 other people were wounded in the attack.
Several ISIS suicide bombers dressed in military uniforms attacked police checkpoints and police patrols in a busy commercial street in the city, police officials said.
ISIS claimed responsibility in a statement released on Twitter and tweeted by several ISIS supporters.
Tikrit, the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, was recaptured by Iraqi troops from ISIS in March 2015.
The jihadist group, which controlled swathes of Syria and Iraq since a blitzkrieg across the two countries in 2014, has steadily been losing ground thanks to concerted efforts by troops, and militia in both countries.
Nearly three years since the group's elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a self-styled Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS is reeling from losses across its so-called "caliphate."
Over the last six months, ISIS has seen its finances slashed, media operations crippled and several high-ranking leaders killed or captured.
It is fast losing its grip on Mosul, its biggest hub in Iraq, and its de-facto capital in Syria -- Raqqa -- is all but surrounded.
In Iraq, government troops, supported by Shia and Kurdish militia, have been making good progress in liberating Mosul from ISIS, which it has held since 2014.
And in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces -- an alliance of Kurds and Arab tribes -- are approaching the outskirts of Raqqa.
CNN's Natalie Gallon and Tim Lister contributed to this report.
View post:
ISIS kills 33 execution-style in Syria; 22 people in Iraq attack - CNN
HIGHLIGHTS:
76,175 Refugee Children are aged 3-17years. Of these, 55,380 are 6-17 years. 29,712 are so far enrolled in formal education and 1,292 in informal education.
55,380 Syrian school aged refugee children (6-17 years) are residing in Iraq, 98% in the KRI. 31,714 are spread into urban, peri-urban and rural communities, while 23,666 are in camps across the KRI. Of these 29,172 children enrolled in formal both in primary and secondary education as of January 2017 in camps and noncamp settings across the Iraq.
NEEDS ANALYSIS:
The ongoing financial crisis of the KRI Government has limited the assistance that the Ministry of Education (KRI) can provide to refugee students in Iraq.
One of the main barriers for refugee education is that despite the increases in enrolment rates of Syrian refugee children, the number of teachers has reportedly not increased. Many existing schools are unable to establish multiple shifts and do not have the capacity to absorb more students. Additional barriers include financial situation of Syrian refugee families, the language of instruction, and lack of textbooks. Limited engagement of youth, majority of them are out of school or unemployed, there are limited vocational training options particularly for girls.
As per recent study conducted by UNHRC, 28% of the Refugee children remain out of school, %51% of these are boys. Factors such as child labour, child marriages, being over age among others are contributing to out of school children.
See more here:
Iraq: 3RP Monthly Update - January 2017: Education - Iraq | ReliefWeb - ReliefWeb
By Phil Stewart | QAYYARA WEST AIRFIELD, Iraq
QAYYARA WEST AIRFIELD, Iraq President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner traveled with the top U.S. general to an Iraqi base 10 miles (16 km) from Mosul on Tuesday, and voiced hope the city's eventual recapture from Islamic State would be "a victory for the world".
Kushner was on the second day of a trip to Iraq as the guest of Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff. The visit to the Hammam al-Alil base allowed them to get an operational briefing from Iraqi and U.S. commanders.
The trip has demonstrated the far-reaching portfolio of Kushner, 36, who is part of Trump's innermost circle and who has been given a wide range of domestic and foreign policy responsibilities, including working on a Middle East peace deal. His views on Iraq could shape Trump's own opinions.
It comes as Trump is examining ways to accelerate a U.S.-led coalition campaign that U.S. and Iraqi officials say has so far been largely successful in uprooting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
Mosul is by far the biggest city ever to have been held by Islamic State, and winning it back would largely destroy the Iraqi part of the group's "caliphate", proclaimed from a Mosul mosque in 2014.
Although Trump campaigned on defeating Islamic State, he has not yet announced any major changes to war strategy. The Mosul battle, the biggest in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, has been under way since October, with 100,000 Iraqi troops, Kurdish fighters and Shi'ite militiamen seeking to drive out the militants with the support of U.S.-led air strikes.
Speaking after lengthy battlefield reports from two Iraqi generals, Kushner sounded upbeat about the campaign and said the partnership between U.S. and Iraqi troops was "very impressive". He also expressed hope that partnership would be enduring, signaling White House interest in longer-term U.S. military assistance.
"I hope the victory that you have in Mosul in the near future will not just be a victory for the American and Iraqi troops but it will be a victory for the world," Kushner said.
ISLAMIC STATE CALLS TRUMP "IDIOT"
On Tuesday, Islamic State issued its first official remarks referring to Trump since he assumed the U.S. presidency in January, describing him as an "idiot".
"You (the U.S.) are bankrupt and the signs of your demise are evident to every eye," spokesman Abi al-Hassan al-Muhajer said in a recording released on the messaging network Telegram.
"...There is no more evidence than (that) you being run by an idiot who does not know what Syria or Iraq or Islam is."
Kushner's trip is his first to Iraq and the visit to Hamman al-Alil, where U.S. advisors and artillery are positioned to assist the battle in Mosul, was also the closest Dunford has gotten to Mosul since the campaign began.
Iraqi security forces are engaged in fierce, house-to-house fighting in Mosul. Nearly 290,000 people have fled the city to escape the fighting, according to the United Nations, and it has had a heavy toll on civilians trapped in the city.
The advance has been slowed since March 17, when scores of people sheltering from air strikes were killed in a blast. The United States has acknowledged it may have had some kind of role in the incident but also said Islamic State may be to blame. A U.S. investigation is ongoing.
Dunford assured the Iraqi generals of continued U.S. support despite the civilian deaths.
Although the loss of Mosul would deal a major defeat to Islamic State, U.S. and Iraqi officials are preparing for smaller battles even after the city is recaptured and expect the group to go underground to fight as a traditional insurgency.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; editing by Peter Graff)
WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that his administration is working on changes to Dodd-Frank banking regulations that will make it easier for banks to loan money.
WASHINGTON President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress lurched between repealing Obamacare or rewriting the U.S. tax code as their top priority, with House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan on Tuesday dampening White House hopes for a quick vote on healthcare legislation.
NEW YORK A U.S. judge said he will inquire further into whether former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey can represent a Turkish gold trader charged with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran.
More:
In Iraq, Trump's son-in-law Kushner goes to base 10 miles from Mosul - Reuters
Fourteen years ago this week, President George W. Bush addressed the American people from the Oval Office as the first U.S. bombs were being dropped on Baghdad in Operation Iraqi Freedom. U.S. forces, Bush declared, were leading the civilized world against a dictator in Saddam Hussein who committed so many human rights violations and crimes against his own people that he was a direct threat to human decency.
In the words of the president, "American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." The United States of America, the greatest country on earth, would bring the Iraqi people the freedom that all men and women are preordained for.
As we've learned over the intervening years, the invasion of Iraq, while well-intentioned, did not turn out as anticipated.
Although Hussein was deposed in less than a month, the picture of a clean, easy and historical achievement predicted by neoconservatives proved to be a grossly incompetent assessment that strained America's armed forces and cost thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. Iraq today is more volatile and dangerous than in 2003, and Iran has increased its influence in the country and throughout the region.
The problem, of course, wasn't that the war was simply mismanaged; it was that the invasion shouldn't have happened in the first place. The tactics were wrong, the strategy was wrong, and the idea that the United States could simply overthrow a regime and replace it with a Western-style parliamentary democracy with relative ease was so devoid of history that one wonders who would conjure up the thought.
By the time President Obama pulled out all U.S. combat troops from Iraq in December 2011, the U.S. nation-building project was for all intents and purposes an unmitigated failure.
The problem wasn't that U.S. troops couldn't perform at a stellar level. Far from it; the men and women who volunteered to serve their country did everything that policymakers in Washington ordered them to do, at a considerable cost to their own lives and their mental health.
More than 4,800 U.S. soldiers gave their lives to a mission that was strategically doomed to fail from the start. Twenty-something from the heartland were all of a sudden thrust into a highly charged environment and asked to build schools, pave roads, teach Iraq's warring communities to stop shooting at each other; help manufacture an accountable, transparent and corruption-free government; and protect Iraqis from pervasive sectarian violence, some of which was enabled by their own government.
U.S. soldiers were ordered to act as social engineers and guidance counselors, hoping that just enough poking, prodding and pleading would guide Iraq's political leaders toward the right path.
This is not to suggest that there weren't accomplishments for the United States in Iraq there were plenty at the tactical level. Al Qaeda was swept from Fallujah in the most intense urban warfare that the U.S. Marine Corps experienced since the Vietnam War. The infusion of 20,000 additional U.S. troops during the 2007-2008 surge helped temporarily decrease sectarian violence in Baghdad.
These tactical achievements deserve recognition, for they were only made possible due to the dedication and sacrifice of the corporals, sergeants and captains on the ground.
Unfortunately, all the tactical victories in the world could not and did not persuade Iraq's political leaders to act responsibility and govern for the good of all Iraqis rather than for their own parochial and sectarian interests.
The zero-sum mentality of Iraqi politics persists to this day.
To many national-security hawks in Washington, both inside the U.S. government and in the think-tank universe, Americans have overlearned the legacy of Iraq. Yet the entire Iraq imbroglio was such a blunder and such a disaster to regional stability that it would be foolish for policymakers to discard the hard-learned lessons of that conflict.
History need not repeat itself.
The Iraq experiment was more than just an unfortunate chapter in American history. In fact, we ask for a repetition of the Iraq experiment if we take the hawks' advice going down the road yet again where regime change and democratic promotion at the point of a gun is viewed as a plausible policy option for the United States.
Our elites fail to understand how the unwise Iraq invasion worsened America's national security interests in the Middle East.
The lessons from this well-intentioned but misguided operation are numerous and applicable to this day. We dismiss them at our own peril: Blind hubris should never be substituted for clear-eyed analysis in our foreign policy deliberations.Understanding the proper use and limitations of military power would enhance our security and save us perhaps trillions of dollars.
War planning must constantly face rigorous questioning; policymakers must always think three steps ahead; assumptions must be challenged at every turn; and regime change, a failed and costly pursuit, should be avoided unless absolutely necessary and authorized by Congress.
Fourteen years after Bush declared a fight for freedom, democracy and humanity against a blood-curdling dictator, the legacy of Iraq still hovers over Washington like a dark storm cloud.
And hover it should. It is a clear example of noble intentions getting mugged by reality, and how dangerous it can be to let spreading democracy guide our foreign policy rather than a sober analysis of America's vital national security interests.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow atDefense Prioritiesand a Middle East and foreign policy analyst at Wikistrat. He has written for The National Interest, Rare Politics and The American Conservative. Follow him on Twitter@dandepetris.
The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.
See the original post here:
14 years later, have we really learned from Iraq? - The Hill (blog)