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Kurd fighters in Iraq briefly block roads to Mosul
12 Oct 2017

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Kurdish Peshmerga forces blocked roads from the Iraqi Kurdish region to the country's second city Mosul for several hours in response to Iraqi troop movements, a senior Kurdish military official said.

"The two main roads connecting Erbil and Dohuk to Mosul were cut off on Thursday with sand embankments as a precautionary measure after we detected an increase in deployments and movements of Iraqi forces near the front line with the Peshmerga," the official told AFP news agency.

Hours later, the barriers were removed and "the situation returned to normal," he said.

The move came after Kurdish authorities said late on Wednesday they feared Iraqi government forces and allied paramilitary units were preparing to launch an assault on the autonomous northern region.

"We're receiving dangerous messages that the Hashed al-Shaabi [paramilitary forces] and federal police are preparing a major attack from the southwest of Kirkuk and north of Mosul against Kurdistan," the Kurdistan Regional Government's Security Council said.

OPINION: Why is Israel supporting Kurdish secession from Iraq?

The warning came amid escalating tensions between Iraq's Kurds and central authorities in the wake of last month's Kurdish independence referendum.

In the oil-rich region of Kirkuk, which is disputed between the Kurds and Baghdad, a local commander said there were no immediate signs of movement.

"We have seen no unacceptable movement on the part of Iraqi forces," said Wasta Rasul, the commander of Peshmerga forces in southern Kirkuk.

Rasul said the Peshmerga were in meetings with the US-led coalition that has intervened in Syria and Iraq against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and that "its aircraft are monitoring the situation carefully".

The coalition has worked with the Peshmerga, as well as pro-government forces, in the battle to remove ISIL from areas it seized in Iraq in mid-2014.

"Some ISIL terrorists have been allowed to enter Kirkuk," Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Wednesday. "We ask the Kurdistan region and we ask Kirkuk - which is under the federal authority - to send officials to Kirkuk to get these terrorists and investigate them."

Security sources said Iraq's elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) and Rapid Response Force had deployed more troops near Rashad, a village 65km south of Kirkuk, near Peshmerga positions.

READ MORE: Iraqi Kurds overwhelmingly back split from Baghdad

The spokesman for Iraq's Joint Operations Command refused to confirm or deny any preparations for an offensive.

"What I can say is that our forces in Hawija have accomplished their duty and have started to clear the region of explosives and restore the law in order to allow people to go home," said Brigadier-General Yahiya Rassul.

Iraqi forces last week retook control of Hawija, one of ISIL's last enclaves in the country, which is close to Kurdish majority areas.

Baghdad and Erbil have been locked in a standoff since voters in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region overwhelmingly opted two weeks ago for independence in a referendum the central government called illegal.

Iraq has cut the Kurdish region off from the outside world by severing air links, while neighbouring Turkey and Iran have threatened to close their borders and block oil exports.

Turkey will gradually close border gates with northern Iraq in coordination with the central Iraqi government and Iran in response to the independence referendum, Ibrahim Kalin, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman, said on Thursday.

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SampanViking said:

I hate to nitpik T&E, but your opening statements seem to refer to Iran,

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Dizasta1 said:

A ridiculously clumsy move, yet even a 5 year old could've predicted what Trump would do to Iran. For Trump is 1000% pro-Israel, therefore has woefully incapable of holding a "balanced," "reasonable" and logical approach when it comes to Iran. Hysterically, typical of Trump. Not surprised and most certainly not impressed.

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while the article you have posted seems to deal with ongoing events in Iraq.

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Jura said:

The Questions Raised By Trump’s Iran Deal Decision according to DefenseOne 2:02 PM ET

source:

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President Donald Trump angrily accused Iran of violating the landmark 2015 international nuclear accord, blaming the Iranians for a litany of sinister behavior and hitting their main military wing with anti-terror penalties. But Trump, breaking his campaign pledge to rip up the agreement, did not pull the U.S. out or re-impose nuclear sanctions.

He still might, he was quick to add. For now, he's tossing the issue to Congress and the other nations in the accord, telling lawmakers to toughen the law that governs U.S. participation and calling on the other parties to fix a series of deficiencies. Those include the scheduled expiration of key restrictions under "sunset provisions" that begin to kick in in 2025, as well as the omission of provisions on ballistic missile testing and terrorism.

Without the fixes, Trump warned, he would likely pull the U.S. out of the deal -- which he has called the worst in U.S. history -- and slap previously lifted U.S. sanctions back into place. That would probably be a fatal blow for the pact between Iran and world powers.

"Our participation can be canceled by me, as president, at any time," Trump declared Friday in a carefully delivered speech read from a teleprompter in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House. He added later, speaking of Congress, "They may come back with something that's very satisfactory to me, and if they don't, within a very short period of time, I'll terminate the deal."

Under U.S. law, Trump faces a Sunday deadline to certify to Congress whether Iran is complying with the accord. That notification must take place every 90 days, a timetable that Trump detests. Since taking office, he has twice reluctantly certified that Iran is fulfilling its commitments.

On Friday, he said he would not do so again.

Trump alone cannot actually terminate the accord, which lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for concessions regarding its nuclear program. But withdrawing the U.S. would render the deal virtually meaningless.

That would be risky, though, and could badly damage U.S. credibility in future international negotiations. The accord was struck after 18 months of negotiations between the Obama administration, Iran, Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the European Union and then endorsed by a unanimous vote in the U.N. Security Council.

Trump's main national security aides have all argued for staying in the deal. So have key allies in Europe who are leery of altering an accord that they believe has prevented Iran from assembling an arsenal of atomic weapons.

Overseas reaction to Friday's speech was swift.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his country would continue to stick to the nuclear deal and that the U.S. was isolating itself, "more lonely than ever," by condemning the accord.

Indeed, the leaders of Britain, Germany and France urged Trump in a joint statement not to do anything rash.

"We encourage the U.S. administration and Congress to consider the implications to the security of the U.S. and its allies before taking any steps that might undermine the (deal), such as re-imposing sanctions on Iran lifted under the agreement," they said. Still, they added, "independent of the (deal) we need to make sure that our collective wider concerns are being addressed."

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump and said the U.S. president had created an opportunity to "fix this bad deal" and roll back Iran's aggression. Netanyahu has long warned that the accord failed to address Iran's support for militant groups who act against Israel.

Trump opened his speech by reciting a long list of grievances with Iran dating back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and American hostages in Tehran. He then noted terrorist attacks against Americans and American allies committed by Iranian proxies, such as Hezbollah, and Iran's ongoing ballistic missile tests.

"We cannot and will not make this certification" that Iran is complying with the accord, he said. "We will not continue down a path whose predictable conclusion is more violence, more terror and the very real threat of Iran's nuclear breakout."

But "decertifying" the deal stops well short of pulling out and simply moves the issues over to Congress. Lawmakers now have 60 days to decide whether to put the accord's previous sanctions back into place, modify them or do nothing.

Republicans face a heavy lift in rallying GOP lawmakers and Democrats behind legislation that would make the accord more stringent and please Trump. Some GOP senators, like Marco Rubio of Florida, question whether the pact can be fixed.

Further complicating matters, a GOP lawmaker who will be at the center of what's sure to be a stormy debate is Bob Corker of Tennessee, who recently compared Trump's White House to "an adult day care center" and said the president could be setting the U.S. on a path toward World War III.

Ahead of Trump's speech, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the administration wants lawmakers to come up with legislation that would automatically re-impose sanctions that were lifted under the deal, should Iran cross any one of numerous nuclear and non-nuclear "trigger points."

Those would include illicit atomic work or ballistic missile testing; support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and other groups that destabilize the region, or human rights abuses and cyber warfare, Tillerson said.

Also Friday, Trump said he was hitting Iran's Revolutionary Guard with sanctions for supporting terrorism. But the U.S. is not adding the Guard to the formal U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. That step would force the U.S. to take even further steps against the Guard that Tillerson says could be problematic.

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Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Friday urged Iraqi and Kurdish peshmerga forces to focus on defeating the Islamic State group and not fight each other, as tensions spiked in the disputed region around Kirkuk.

“Everybody stay focused on defeating ISIS,” Mattis said. “We can’t turn on each other right now. We don’t want this to go to a shooting situation.”

Speaking to reporters as he flew back to Washington from a three-day trip to Florida, Mattis said the U.S. is trying to calm the already fractious relations between the two sides and figure out a way ahead.

Kurdish forces had taken positions southwest of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, but later withdrew. Iraqi government troops also have been moving around the area.

Tensions between the two sides have been escalating since the Kurds voted for independence from Iraq in a non-binding referendum last month. The Peshmerga took control of Kirkuk when Iraqi defenses crumbled in the face of the advancing Islamic State group in 2014. Baghdad is demanding the Kurds return the city, which falls outside the autonomous Kurdish zone, to federal authority.

The roiling conflict grew in recent days with the movement of forces on both sides, raising U.S. concerns that as the fight with ISIS begins to wind down, the long-simmering sectarian violence between Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites will once again erupt.

So far, Mattis said, there has been no actual fighting between the Iraqi troops and the peshmerga around Kirkuk. He said U.S. forces that are embedded with the Iraqi and Kurdish units are working to “make certain they keep any potential for conflict off the table.”

He added, “We’re trying to tone everything down, and let’s figure out how we go forward without losing our sight on the enemy.”

He said U.S. leaders are working with both sides to find a diplomatic compromise.

“We’ve got to find a way to move forward,” Mattis said. “Geography is not going to change. They’re going to be alongside each other, no matter what.”

In comments to Pentagon reporters later Friday, Mattis said the U.S. has been watching for the problem. “Obviously, once ISIS is down and out we don’t want another terrorist group to rise up and also some of the old conditions or tensions now come back to the forefront.”

Also, he added: “We don’t want to take our eye off the ball with ISIS this close to being crushed. So, we are working, trying to be a contributor to solving this.”

Mattis was in southern Florida visiting several of his top military commanders, including Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, including the war in Iraq. He also met with Gen. Tony Thomas, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, and Adm. Kurt Tidd, head of U.S. Southern Command.

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Egyptian Navy has acquired the Pohang class corvette Shbab Misr (former

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Jinju PCC-763).

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Iraqi forces said Monday they seized a military base, an oil field and other key infrastructure from Kurdish soldiers near the northern city of Kirkuk, as the two U.S. allies face off over territory and oil in the wake of the Kurdish region’s independence vote last month.

Clashes broke out despite an order from Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi for his troops to avoid violence. Iraqi forces advanced into the contested province with the goal of returning to positions they held before 2014, when they fled in the face of an Islamic State push. The positions had since been taken over by Kurdish troops.

Cars packed roads out of Kirkuk on Monday as residents rushed to leave.

As well as highlighting the deep rifts in Iraq, the confrontation has also exposed splits among the Kurds themselves. Kurdish factions were divided on whether to allow in Iraqi troops or stand their ground, with some Kurdish fighters, known as peshmerga, ordered to give up their posts.

The conflict between Kurdistan and the Iraqi government over land and oil is decades old, but a Kurdish referendum for independence last month inflamed the tensions. The Iraqi government, the United States, Turkey and Iran all opposed the vote. For Baghdad, it added urgency to a need to reassert its claims to the province, which has around 10 percent of the country’s oil reserves.

Kurdish forces took full control of the ethnically and religiously mixed city of Kirkuk in 2014 after the Iraqi military fled from large swaths of northern Iraq in the face of an Islamic State push. The Kurds also seized oil fields formerly run by Baghdad that pump hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day.

The skirmish between forces that fought together to oust Islamic State militants from their stronghold of Mosul in a brutal operation presented a major distraction for Iraqi forces, which had begun mobilizing westward for operations against the group in the last pockets it controls near the Syrian border.

Lt. Gen. Abdul Ghani al-Asadi, commander of Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces, said his units were in control of the K-1 military base outside Kirkuk on Monday, the Baba Gurgur oil field and the airport.

Iraqi forces also said they took key road junctions, police stations and military positions.

Some elements of Kurdistan’s Patriotic Union Party, or PUK, whose forces dominate in the area, agreed to withdraw in coordination with Baghdad. But the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, opposed a deal.

The general command of Kurdistan’s peshmerga slammed PUK officials for a “major historic betrayal of Kurdistan” by handing over positions, and the militia vowed to fight.

The KDP-affiliated Kurdistan Region Security Council said it destroyed five U.S.-supplied Humvees used in the advance by Iraq’s popular mobilization units, an umbrella group containing Iranian-backed militias that fight as part of Iraq’s security forces.

A video shared online showed six bodies of what appeared to be Kurdish peshmerga soldiers lying by a roadside near Iraqi vehicles. One wore the uniform of a lieutenant colonel.

“This is the result of disobedience of Masoud Barzani,” said the Iraqi fighter who was filming, referring to the leader of Iraqi Kurdistan and the KDP.

The flare-up presents an awkward dilemma for the United States.

Washington has trained and equipped the advancing Iraqi troops and the peshmerga Kurdish forces on the other side. The Iraqi side is also backed up by Shiite militia forces close to Iran — at a time when the Trump administration has intensified its rhetoric about trying to curb Iranian influence in the region, including increasing sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps last week.

Kurdistan’s security council put out panicked public statements last week as Iraqi forces massed on the edges of the province.

“It’s comical, really,” said a Kurdish official with the KDP, talking about U.S. silence given the presence of Iran-supported militias in the advance.

“If you want to push back Iranian influence, don’t stay quiet,” the official said. “In the Middle East, silence is taken as a sign of weakness.”

But the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said in a statement that it supports “the peaceful reassertion of federal authority, consistent with the Iraqi constitution, in all disputed areas.”

It called for all parties to “immediately cease military action and restore calm.”

“We are very concerned by reports of violence in Kirkuk and deplore any loss of life,” it added.

The constitution mandated that federal forces should secure disputed territories during the transition period until a referendum could be held on the status of Kirkuk. That was slated to take place in 2007 after a “normalization” process to reverse demographic changes made by former dictator Saddam Hussein, who attempted to assert influence by moving in Arab residents. However, the vote was never held.

“My duty is to work in accordance with the constitution to serve the citizens and protect the unity of the country, which was in danger of partition due to the insistence on holding the referendum,” the prime minister, al-Abadi, said in a statement on Monday.

As Kurdish authorities warned they were about to come under attack last week, Abadi tried to defuse tension, taking to Twitter to assure that Iraqi forces “cannot and will not attack our citizens.”

Iraqi commanders initially dismissed troop movements as routine deployments aimed at securing nearby Hawija, recently recaptured from Islamic State militants.

But Shiite militia leaders close to Iran said they were there to move into the province and presented a list of demands to peshmerga commanders. They said they had set a 48-hour deadline for Kurdish forces to withdraw.

After the deadline expired, Abadi accused the Kurds of deploying militiamen from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a faction that has waged battles for autonomy in Turkey’s Kurdish region for decades.

Abadi said it amounted to a “declaration of war,” but PKK fighters have been present in the city for several years.

Still in the hands of Kurds on Monday was the Bai Hassan oil field, which is under the control of the KDP and has a capacity of around 200,000 barrels of crude a day. Kurdistan’s regional government is heavily reliant on the field for its energy needs.

“The orders are to surround K-1 and oil fields and stop and call on the Kurdish forces to retreat,” said a counterterrorism officer who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic as the operation was launched. “There are strict orders to avoid violence.”

But militia commanders took a more combative tone.

Anyone who fights Iraqi forces is “the same as ISIS,” said Karim al-Nuri, a spokesman for Iraq’s mobilization units, referring to the Islamic State. Iraqi state television said that counterterrorism forces, the 9th Division of the Iraqi army and federal police forces had taken “large areas” of the province without a fight. It said popular mobilization units took positions “outside Kirkuk.”

PUK officials on Sunday said that they had made an offer to Baghdad to agree to allow central government troops from the Presidential Guard, who are ethnically Kurdish, into the Kirkuk region. The KDP said it had not agreed to the deal, and hours later a large contingent of Iraqi forces, including counterterrorism troops, police and militiamen advanced.

“We salute and appreciate the courageous position of the peshmerga fighters who refused to fight their brothers in the Iraqi forces,” Qais al-Khazali, leader of the Asaib Ahl al-Haq Shiite militia, backed by Iran, said on Twitter.

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Jura said:

"The flare-up presents an awkward dilemma for the United States.

Washington has trained and equipped the advancing Iraqi troops and the peshmerga Kurdish forces on the other side. The Iraqi side is also backed up by Shiite militia forces close to Iran — at a time when the Trump administration has intensified its rhetoric about trying to curb Iranian influence in the region, including increasing sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps last week."
etc.:
Iraqis seize military base, oil field from Kurdish forces near contested Kirkuk
October 16

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The U.S. may consider halting its massive train-and-equip program for Iraqi forces if the Iraqi military continues its offensive against Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq, a defense official said Monday.

Over the weekend U.S.-equipped Iraqi forces entered Kirkuk, an oil-rich, Kurdish-controlled city, in response to the Kurdish region’s independence vote on Sept. 25. Several exchanges of gunfire were reported Monday as Iraqi forces took over Kurdish-controlled buildings and facilities in Kirkuk.

The U.S.-led task force in command of operations in Iraq and Syria issued a statement Monday that urged all sides to avoid escalations, but downplayed the movement of Iraqi military vehicles into Kirkuk as “coordinated movements, not attacks,” and called the predawn gunfire “a misunderstanding and not deliberate.”

The Iraqi Embassy in Washington also issued a statement saying Baghdad’s deployment of federal security forces in Kirkuk “is a legal and constitutional measure taken in coordination with the local security forces.”

Baghdad said it is “avoiding any clashes in restoring federal authority and strives to prevent the outbreak of violence” and warned of “ill-intentions by party militias outside the Kirkuk security structure.”

Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Rob Manning said no U.S. forces were involved in the operation in Kirkuk, however U.S. advisers were “in the vicinity,” as they have been for months, to assist Iraq’s fight against the Islamic State.

Manning said U.S. commanders in Iraq are working with both Iraqi and Kurdish forces to try to get to return to a dialogue. However if Iraqi forces do not cease the offensive, one possibility could be ceasing the equipment and training support the U.S. has provided.

“I’m not going to speculate on that, but I’ll tell you we’re looking at all options,” Manning said.

There are currently more than 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, including U.S. forces who are advising and assisting the Iraqi military’s forward-deployed operational units. Those U.S. forces, along with U.S. air support and intelligence, was key to the defeat of the Islamic State in Mosul earlier this year.

U.S. arms sales to Iraq top $26 billion since Sept. 11, 2001 through 2015, according to data compiled by the Security Assistance Monitor, a program of the Center for International Policy. Some $4.8 billion was announced in 2016 and 2017.

U.S. Sen. John McCain warned of “severe consequences” if U.S.-supplied military equipment that was intended to fight the Islamic State is misused by the Iraqi military in clashes between Iraqi forces and the Kurdish Peshmerga in northern Iraq.

“The United States provided equipment and training to the Government of Iraq to fight ISIS and secure itself from external threats—not to attack elements of one of its own regional governments, which is a longstanding and valuable partner of the United States,” McCain, R-Ariz., and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said in a statement.

“Make no mistake, there will be severe consequences if we continue to see American equipment misused in this way.”

McCain was “especially concerned” by reports that Iranian and Iranian-backed militias are part of the assault.

There have been unconfirmed rumors and media reports that Iranian forces are using M1 Abrams tanks the U.S. supplied to Baghdad against Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Kirkuk.

Col. Ryan Dillon, spokesperson for the U.S.-led task force, said the U.S. military “can only provide equipment to vetted groups” that have adhered to various human rights principles and standards. But, he said: “There have been questions about how non-vetted groups” have obtained U.S. military hardware.

The Iraqi government had 140 U.S. M1 Abrams tanks before ISIS took most of northern Iraq in 2014. It is unclear how many of those tanks were captured by ISIS and other forces. A January 2015 video showed an M1 Abrams tank in Iraq flying the Hezbollah flag. Iraqi officials said the tank was part of an Iraqi military convoy that was flying the flag in solidarity with Shiite militia.

A lot of U.S. military equipment ended up in the hands of various groups after ISIS took over large swaths of territory in Iraq, Dillon said. Dillon said he couldn’t speak for the Iraqi government about whether they had given U.S. military hardware to Iranian-backed militias.

Rachel Stohl, of the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, said there is a calculated risk when the U.S. supplies arms to an ally in a counterterrorism fight.

“It’s such a complicated situation. Because when you give weapons to a country or group, you can’t control how they chose to use to use them. We may have given weapons for a [counter-terror] fight, but if there is another armed conflict, they will likely use them in those conditions,” Stohl said.

“Though there are end-use agreements, the consequences for violating them would be future-oriented – in the future we wouldn’t sell them something,” she said.

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