There's a slow-motion crisis brewing in Iraq — one dramatized by recent events that, over the long term, could make any victory over ISIS illusory.

On January 11, ISIS carried out two suicide bombings in Muqdadiya, a town in Iraq's Diyala province, killing at least 26 people. Retaliation was swift — but it wasn't directed against ISIS.

The targets, instead, were Diyala's Sunni residents. The Shia militias that control much of the province went on what analyst Joel Wing called a "rampage": They killed at least 12 people and demolished, per Wing, "7 mosques, 7 houses, and 36 shops."

"I know the militiaman [name withheld] and others who roam our streets. They are from the area," Abbas, a Sunni resident of Muqdadiya, told Human Rights Watch. "ISIS may have been behind the café bombing, but the attacks on Sunni houses, mosques, and people in our area was the League of the Righteous [militia]."

ISTANBUL, Turkey — Al Gharra is a mud-brick village built on hard, flat Syrian desert and populated by the descendants of Bedouin. It is a desolate place. Everything is dun colored: the bare, single-story houses and the stony desert they stand on. There is not much farming — it is too dry — just a few patches of cotton and tobacco.

Before the war, villagers got a little money from the government to look after the national park on Mount Abdul-Aziz, a barren rock that rises 3,000 feet behind the village and stretches miles into the distance. Mount Abdul-Aziz is named after a lieutenant of the 12th-Century Muslim warrior Saladin, who built a fort to dominate the plain below. There is a military base there today too, which changes hands according to the fortunes of Syria’s civil war. In 2011, the regime of Bashar al-Assad held the base; next it was the rebels of the Free Syrian Army; then the so-called “Islamic State” (IS); and finally the Kurds, who advanced and took the mountain last May under the cover of American warplanes.

Abdul-Aziz al Hassan is from al Gharra, his first name the same as the mountain’s. He left the village while the Islamic State was in charge, but it is because of a bomb from an American plane that he cannot go back. What happened to his family is the story of just one bomb of the 35,000 dropped so far during 10,000 missions flown in the US-led air war against the Islamic State.

"The only thing that matters to me is my family's security."Abdul-Aziz al HassanAl Hassan is in his 20s, small, soft-spoken, with chestnut-brown skin. He said the war did not affect al Gharra much back when the regime or the Free Syrian Army occupied the mountain’s military base. But he remembers the day that the Islamic State came. “I was sitting in front of the house when a jeep passed by and stopped at the shrine to Saladin’s commander,” he said. “They gathered all of the people. One said: ‘We are the Islamic State. We are here to create an emirate based on Sharia [Islamic law].’” From that day, they decreed, men had to be in the mosque, the women at home. If a woman wanted to go to the market, she had to walk with a husband, brother or son. No one outside the family could see women uncovered, even at home. “It wasn’t as if we didn’t know what Islam was. But they didn’t even like the way we prayed. Everything we did was wrong in their eyes.”

When I wrote my column on the looting of Baiji refinery, I was careful to mention only what I can refer to other observers, whether written or verbal. I did not mention a lot of what I was told or thought may be happening for the lack of corroboration.

People called me on reading my column to confirm they even have photographs of the looted materials being sold in certain locations in Baghdad. But they asked me not to publish anything in case it can be traced back to them. I was hoping the Ministry of Oil’s spokesman would come out to rubbish my claims and declare that the Ministry is intent on safeguarding the refinery and its materials, and considering options to repair the plant or some of its production lines.

None of that happened and the Ministry’s silence gradually convinced me to think of a more sinister scenario. Either the Ministry is too weak to stand up to the militias or it has deliberately ignored the looting to make any future repair impractical.
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My fears are now confirmed. The Iraq Oil Report (IOR) published a long and detailed article on January 28 under the title “Once fixable Baiji refinery plundered beyond repair”.

Militias in Iraq
There were no armed militias in Iraq before 2003 invasion - except for the Kurdish guerrilla fighters locally called Peshmerga. The first armed militia to officially enter Iraq after the invasion was a small armed group led by Ahmed Chalabi which was meant to protect him.

Chalabi, a controversial Iraqi millionaire who was exiled by Saddam, was directly supported by the United States government. Soon after the invasion, Iran-backed militia Badr Brigades entered into Iraq coming from Iran - where it was trained & equipped since the early 1980s.

Ironically, Chalabi’s militia was disbanded soon after US troops setup and controlled the heavily protected Green Zone which housed Iraqi governments thereafter. In the meanwhile, Shia militias increased in numbers infiltrating Iraqi Security Forces and senior positions in different Ministries of the Iraqi government.

One of the first militias to be formed locally was Mahdi Army militia led by young Muqtada al-Sadr. His militia posed a challenge to Coalition Forces between 2004-2010. Even though Sadr re-structured his militias after 2010, it is still poses a threat to US and foreign personnel in Iraq.

Officially, there are now 3,650 U.S. troops fighting ISIS in Iraq. The real number of Americans involved in the war is closer to 6,000.

In the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, there are two ways to count the number of U.S. boots on the ground. There’s the one that officials admit to. Then there’s the ground truth.
Officially, there are now 3,650 U.S. troops in Iraq, there primarily to help train the Iraqi national army.

But in reality, there are already about 4,450 U.S. troops in Iraq, plus another nearly 7,000 contractors supporting the American government’s operations. That includes almost 1,100 U.S. citizens working as military contractors, according to the latest Defense Department statistics.

In other words, the total number of forces that Pentagon and Obama administration officials frequently cite in public are wrong. They’re short thousands of contractors—and about 800 troops. These forces are often assigned to specialized units or tasked with supporting troops on the frontline.

Sunnis Targeted in Muqdadiya after ISIS Attack
(Beirut) – Members of Shia militias, who the Iraqi government has included among its state forces, abducted and killed scores of Sunni residents in a central Iraq town and demolished Sunni homes, stores, and mosques following January 11, 2016 bombings claimed by the extremist group Islamic State, also known as ISIS. None of those responsible have been brought to justice.

Two consecutive bombings at a café in the town of Muqdadiya, in Diyala province, some 130 kilometers north of Baghdad, on January 11, killed at least 26 people, many of them Sunnis, according to a teacher who lives near the café.

​ISIS claimed the attacks, saying it had targeted local Shia militias, collectively known as Popular Mobilization Forces, which are formally under the command of the prime minister. Members of two of the dominant militias in Muqdadiya, the Badr Brigades and the League of Righteous forces, responded by attacking Sunnis as well as their homes and mosques, killing at least a dozen people and perhaps many more, according to local residents.

“Again civilians are paying the price for Iraq’s failure to rein in the out-of-control militias,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Countries thatsupport Iraqi security forces and the Popular Mobilization Forces should insist that Baghdad bring an end to this deadly abuse.”

For people living in the ancient city of Babylon, Marduk was their patron god, and thus it is not a surprise that Babylonian astronomers took an interest in tracking the comings and goings of the planet Jupiter, which they regarded as a celestial manifestation of Marduk.

​What is perhaps more surprising is the sophistication with which they tracked the planet, judging from inscriptions on a small clay tablet dating to between 350 B.C. and 50 B.C. The tablet, a couple of inches wide and a couple of inches tall, reveals that the Babylonian astronomers employed a sort of precalculus in describing Jupiter’s motion across the night sky relative to the distant background stars. Until now, credit for this kind of mathematical technique had gone to Europeans who lived some 15 centuries later.
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“That is a truly astonishing find,” said Mathieu Ossendrijver, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, who describes his archaeological astronomy discovery in an article on Thursday in the journal Science.
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“It’s a figure that describes a graph of velocity against time,” he said. “That is a highly modern concept.”