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Isis will be defeated in Iraq within weeks, according to the country's prime minister,Haider al-Abadi.

Insisting they would definitely be driven from the country, MrAbadimade the comments as his country'sarmed forcescontinue their campaign to retake the northern city ofMosulfrom the terrorist group.

The city is Isis last remaining stronghold in the country.

However, Mr Abadi admitted the group, which is also known as Daesh, will continue to maintain strongholds in Syria.

At the moment we are at a very important juncture where Daesh is on the retreat, he told Fox News. We in Iraq have been killing Daesh, removing them from our land. We are killing their aim so that recruits are minimal at the moment.

In Iraq the defeat is sure, its definite. Well finish the job in a very short time its within reachwithin the next few weeks.We are defeating them militarilywe need the efforts of others to flush them out in Syria and other places.

The Iraqi army has been engaged in a bloody battle with the jihadist group in Mosulafterlaunching a new offensive on the city late last year.

After months of heavy fighting, around 400,000 civilians are estimated to be trapped in the city, with food, clean water and electricity all in scarce supply.

Isis retains control of around 40 per cent of the western part of Mosul, and the remaining 2,000 or so militants in the city are continuing tofiercely fightto defend their positions.

Mr Abadisaidlast weeks terrorist attack in Westminster was a result of Isis trying to maintain its reputation as it faces defeat in Iraq.

Five people were killed when Khalid Masood drove a car into crowds on Westminster Bridge and then stabbed a policeman in Parliament.

Isis claimed responsibility for the attack but experts said the group frequently claims to have been behind incidents in which it actually had little involvement.

Syrian refugee recalls ISIS horrors

They are trying to attract more recruits by doing these criminal acts, Mr Abadi said. Its like somebody who is dying and is just trying to flex his muscle at the last moment.The only way forward is to kill their home - just to finish them. Then they will not have any hope to commit such criminal acts.

Mr Abadi also suggested Donald Trump is more determined than Barack Obama to defeat Isis.

President Obama didnt want to get involved in the first place, he said. He just wanted to just forget Iraq.

Coming back to Iraq was sort of imposed on him because of Daesh and what they had done by crossing the Syrian-Iraqi border, occupying about 40 per cent of Iraqi land and slaughtering people. So there was a lot of pressure on President Obama to come to the help of Iraq.

In contrast, he said MrTrump's Administration understood that Iraq is an ally and we should keep on working with Iraq to support Iraq to stand against terrorism.

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Isis will be defeated in Iraq 'within weeks', says country's Prime Minister - The Independent

Forbes

A New Mechanism for Syria. But what about Iraq? Forbes Since their rise as a major terrorist group in the Syria and Iraq conflicts, Daesh has perpetrated some of the worst atrocities and war crimes that we have witnessed in years. It has become clear that the atrocities committed by Daesh against religious ...

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A New Mechanism for Syria. But what about Iraq? - Forbes

Details are emerging about US-led coalition airstrikes that are believed to have killed over 200 people in a single day in Iraq. The US-led coalition has admitted launching airstrikes on March 17 targeting a crowded neighborhood in Mosul. They are among the deadliest US airstrikes in the region since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. According to some reports, one of these strikes destroyed houses where hundreds of people were taking refuge amid the city's heavy fighting. Up to 80 civilians, including women and children, may have died in one house's basement alone. This bombing is just one of an onslaught of US-led coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria that has killed as many as 1,000 civilians in March alone, according to the journalistic project Airwars. For more, we speak with Chris Woods, founder of Airwars, a nonprofit group that monitors civilian deaths from international airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

Please check back later for full transcript.

Read more:
More Than 1000 Civilians Killed by US-Led Airstrikes in Iraq and Syria as Trump Expands War on Terror - Truth-Out

After all, Donald Rumsfeld was right.In Iraq, there were known knowns and known unknowns.But the hardest of all for Iraqis to deal with are the unknown unknowns: the things they dont know, either because, frankly, no one has cared to look or because the facts have been actively hidden.

The United States is still investigating an air raid in Mosul last week that killed over 200 civilians. The facts have yet to be established, but that air strike, while the US has admitted responsibility, is very different from the air strikes that started the US invasion of Iraq 14 years ago last week.

Today, the US and Iraq are partners in the war against ISIL, and the devastation that the US wrought in Iraq has been forgotten at least officially by the Iraqi government.

But for Iraqis there are still so many unknowns. So many things that happened during the war that are simply off-limits to them.

Where to start? How about with the most startling fact: that, today, more than a decade later, no one knows the number of Iraqis who died during the war.

Of course, every one of those killed has been mourned many times over by their families, friends and communities. But in terms of overall figures, none exist. Was it 650,000, as The Lancet put it in 2006? Or was it over 1 million Iraqis, as the NGO Physicians for Social Responsibility put it 10 years later?

We dont know, not because of any oversight, but because of a specific decision by the US in every recent war Iraq in 1991, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 not to count civilian deaths.

As early as April 2, 2003 just 14 days into the war The New York Times reported that no one in the US military was counting the dead. "It is not," wrote the paper, "a statistic that interests [US officials]. They count destroyed tanks and artillery pieces and missile launchers. They do not count people."

Such disregard for the lives of ordinary Iraqis lives that the US had ostensibly gone into Iraq to liberate from Saddam Husseins rule was merely the beginning.

Later cases, such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005, when US soldiers killed 24 unarmed Iraqis, or the gang-rape of 14-year-old Abeer Al Janabi and murder of her entire family in Mahmudiyah in 2006, only perpetuated a belief that US soldiers were acting with impunity.

Both of those crimes finally came to court, after painstaking journalistic investigation and tireless efforts by family members. They exposed more about the conduct of the war than about one specific crime.

The killings at Haditha were not "remarkable", an official US report said. Iraqi civilians being killed was the "cost of doing business", according to a US commander in Iraq.

Nor was such a reprehensible attitude confined to the lower rungs of the US military. When the horrors of Abu Ghraib were finally exposed, they showed entire parts of the military were complicit in the dehumanisation of the very people they should have been protecting. After all these years, can we be sure those were the only cases?

Those were merely the "active" suffering caused to Iraqis. In Fallujah, scene of a long-running insurgency against US soldiers, researchers are still seeking to pinpoint the exact cause of dramatic increases in rates of cancers and birth defects after 2003.

Elsewhere, there are questions of air pollution and environmental contamination. The US military simply set fire to huge quantities of military waste including batteries, explosives and human waste in open-air pits in the middle of populated cities. Since 2003, 85,000 American Iraq war veterans have been diagnosed with respiratory diseases and cancers after returning from Iraq. How many thousands of Iraqis also suffered the effects of these burn pits? We may never know. No one, either in the US or Iraqi governments, seems interested in finding out. Some will point to ISIL or militias in Iraq that have committed horrific crimes and ask, "What about them?". But crimes by one group do not negate crimes by another. And the US is a state, bound by laws, that argued the Iraq invasion was both necessary and would be beneficial for Iraq.

Certainly, once the ISIL threat is over, a complete accounting of its crimes must take place, including the failures of the Iraqi government that allowed ISIL to remain and expand.

For Iraqis today, though, there are still no answers for the majority of what happened in the fog of war and the fire of its aftermath.In some ways, the true cost cannot ever be known. The psychological trauma of an entire population is immense. Like the vastness of space, it is impossible to conceptualise.

We can only imagine it individually: the fear of air strikes and the chaos of darkness and roaming militias. The tragedy of losing a wife or daughter. The bewilderment of seeing a father or son handcuffed and taken away by soldiers speaking a foreign language.

The immense scars of the 2003 invasion will be with Iraqis for many years to come.

These scars defy accounting. But others do not. The reality of what happened in Iraq is unknown, but not unknowable. Yet 14 years on, no one, neither the US military nor the government in Baghdad, wants to know.

falyafai@thenational.ae

On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai

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Fourteen years after Iraq, we still don't know the truth of what happened - The National

There is a scratchy patch of land south of Mosul that is dotted with dozens of burnt-out oil tanks and bits of scorched grass.

The men from so-called Islamic State used this spot to refine petrol in what was a great do-it-yourself fuel distillery.

But they also had another purpose for this place - mass murder.

Some 200 metres off the main track, there is a cavernous hole in the earth that locals call "the Khasfa" - a circular sinkhole carved from porous rock with water flowing through the bottom.

IS turned the crater's rim into an execution site and threw their victims down the hole - and these acts of depravity were committed so frequently that the Khasfa is almost certainly the biggest mass grave in Iraq.

It is for that reason that Fawaz Abdelabbas, the deputy head of the International Commission for Missing Persons in Iraq, is determined to survey the site as quickly as possible - and we found him and other members of his Baghdad-based delegation on a dirt track some 300 odd metres from the hole.

"This is the way," said the urbane director. "Now we try to find to get to the sinkhole. Murphy, what do you think?"

But there was a serious problem - IS has saturated this wasteland with land-mines.

:: Traumatised children of Mosul

Sky News understands that five people had lost their lives trying to get there, including Kurdish journalist Shifa Gardi, who trod on an explosive device four weeks ago.

Unsurprisingly then, Mr Abdelabbas's mission was about to come grinding to a halt.

He said: "We agreed with the Iraqi government that they would have the forces to support us with a de-mining team because we are told the route (to the hole) is full with mines and. let's discuss the matter with the police chief."

But the district police chief was shuffling uncomfortably from side-to-side. He did not have a de-mining team.

The delegation was stuck.

"Is it frustrating?" I asked the commission's deputy head. "Of course," he replied. "But this is the reality of Iraq."

We put a drone in the air and flew it over the hole, although high winds made it difficult to control.

Nonetheless, we saw that IS had tried to fill it in with earth - a giant construction project, recently confirmed by satellite photographs.

Still, one section has begun to slip and we noticed what looked like several vehicles lying at the bottom.

:: The battle for Mosul: A timeline

That came as little surprise to Mohamed Abdelkarim, who is head of a nearby village.

He regularly witnessed prisoners crammed in trucks and buses being taken to the hole. Other witnesses report seeing vehicles (and their passengers) being physically pushed into the Khasfa.

"How many bodies are in there?" I asked him.

"We think 6,000, maybe more," said the village chief. "The population of Mosul is 3 million, plus other villages and towns in Salahaddin Province. Any public servants, policemen, military officers, doctors, scientists (were thrown in the hole)."

Getting to the hole and investigating Islamic State's crimes will be a colossal task - a job that will stretch the capabilities of this fragile, war-weary nation.

But Mr Abdelabbas says it is essential. "We want to exhume the bodies and begin the process of identification and we will do it according to international standards," he told me confidently.

"Returning the remains to grieving families will help them deal with the past but it will also demonstrate that the (Iraqi) government actually cares and respects them.

"This is about reconciliation."

:: Watch a special programme, The Battle For Mosul, at 7pm on Monday on Sky News.

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IS turn Mosul sinkhole into 'biggest mass grave' in Iraq - Sky News