On Sunday night, a full house turned up at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan for the premiere of “House Two,” an investigative documentary more than decade in the making that makes troubling allegations regarding the Marine Corps’ handling of one of the most brutal war crimes cases of the Iraq War. It also raises questions about the involvement of the current Secretary of Defense in a serious miscarriage of justice.

When filmmaker Michael Epstein originally set out to make a 40-minute documentary about the trial of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, one of the Marines implicated in the 2005 slayings of 24 Iraqi civilians in the city of Haditha, “Jim Mattis was the last man on Earth I wanted to malign or take on,” he told Task & Purpose.

The film tells a dramatically different story than the version presented by the media when Haditha was dominating headlines around the world. And it could prove problematic for the Marine Corps. It comes at a particularly delicate time for Mattis, a beloved military leader and once a favorite of President Donald Trump, who wasreportedly overruled by the President on the appropriate response to chemical weapons gas attacks in Syria, along with other policy issues.

​The film’s argument relies in part on the testimony of special agents Mike Maloney and Tom Brady, both former Marines, who had helmed the Haditha investigation for the Naval Criminal Investigative Services and were responsible for providing the forensic evidence the Marine Corps needed to successfully prosecute the case.

The institutionalisation of the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU), which played a prominent role in the fight against the so-called Islamic State (IS) has not been without controversy in Iraq.  

The organisation's further induction in March to the Iraqi military forces granting them equal rights to other security forces, has failed to quell the debate around core issues within and outside the organisation. 

In November 2016, The Iraqi parliament passed a bill recognising the official role of the PMU - an umbrella organisation dominated by Shia paramilitary groups - as a government entity operating alongside the military. 

The PMU rose in 2014, after it was formed to fight IS, and has since had long-standing interactions and overlap with the Iraqi state in the framework of the anti-terrorism campaign.

From Corbyn’s rise to Brexit and the collapse of trust in Westminster, this is Britain’s Vietnam: a conflict without end

​"You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end,” wrote Tim O’Brien in his novel about Vietnam, The Things They Carried. “Not then, not ever. In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unravelling the deeper meaning.”

For all the ways in which US politics remain unpredictable, the presence of the Vietnam war as an episodic inflection point remains constant. Only last week, after Donald Trump declared a ban on some transgender people serving in the military, it was pointed out that he avoided serving in Vietnam thanks to five deferments, the last for “bone spurs in his heels”. (When asked which heel a few years ago he couldn’t remember.) More than 40 years after the fall of Saigon, it continues to influence how Americans view politics at home.

​What has been true for Vietnam and America has become the case for Britain and Iraq. It is 15 years this month since Britain and the US invaded Iraq. The most important consequences of that war are, of course, in the place where it was fought, where it has left an estimated million people dead, destabilised a region, and spawned far more jihadist terror, including Isis, than it could ever have thwarted.
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The invasion’s legality and validity have been debated constantly, not least on these pages. But the legacy it bequeathed our political culture is less often acknowledged, even as it remains deep and enduring.

No Results From Promised Investigations

(Erbil) – An incident on March 29, 2018, in which government workers removed about 80 bodies from a damaged house, raised suspicions of a cover-up of killings of possible Islamic State (also known as ISIS) suspects, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch observed the episode. Days later, the house had been burned. 

Iraqi authorities at the site said they were the remains of ISIS suspects. Heath Ministry and Interior Intelligence Ministry officials at the site said they were not permitted to share information about where the bodies were taken. There has been no indication that the deaths are being investigated. 

“Given the serious abuses in the final weeks of the battle against ISIS in Mosul’s Old City, this site and the bodies should have been preserved as potential evidence for forensic investigators,” said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi promised to investigate these possible war crimes, but with no tangible results almost a year later, the actions of his own officials at this site speak louder than words.”
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Iraqi forces retook Mosul’s Old City from ISIS in July 2017. Human Rights Watch documented Iraqi forces rounding up ISIS suspects, torturing and then executing them that month near that site. Some of these forces were from an Iraqi army division trained by the United States government. During the same period, four videos on Facebook allegedly filmed in west Mosul also appear to show Iraqi soldiers and federal police beating and extrajudicially killing detainees.

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 18 2018 (IPS) - With upcoming elections in May, the Iraqi government is urging Internally Displaced People (IDPs) to return home. After the defeat of ISIS in December 2017, an increase in security and number of returnees to their region of origin is expected; however, many IDPs see no way to leave the camps just yet.

While two million people have returned to their homes, three million people farther remain displaced. The eruption of ISIS in January 2014 and the following years of violence have led to a humanitarian disaster; on top of that, the number of IDPs displaced between 2006 and 2007 is still at approximately one million.

Nearly 9 million Iraqis require humanitarian assistance of which 5 million are in critical need of safe drinking water, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). A drastic reduction in armed conflict is anticipated for this year, however, the complex pattern of second displacements may continue to occur even though Iraq expects an increase in returns, according to UNICEF’s Humanitarian Action for Children Report.
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“There is an impetus for people to return to their area of origin ahead of elections in May,” Melany Markham, media coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told IPS. The May elections were originally scheduled for September 2017, but were delayed by six months due to the Iraqi civil war.

​Over 80% of the infrastructure of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, was destroyed during battles to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) in 2016.  Many schools in the city were on the front line, suffering huge damage as a result of the heavy fighting between the Iraqi government forces and IS.

According to the Iraqi Minister of Education Mohammad Iqbal, 260 schools were destroyed in Ramadi. It is estimated that it will cost half a billion US dollars to rebuild them.

A few schools in Ramadi survived or suffered minor damage. One of them is al Alm al Munir School in Zankoura town, northwest of Ramadi. It is the only school in the town.  After recapturing Zankoura from IS, the state-sponsored Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella force of mainly Shi’i militias backed by Iran,  along with tribal militias, destroyed the school with explosives after they had looted its furniture.

Destruction and looting of homes and government buildings in the province has become a weapon of revenge for some state-sponsored armed groups, including Iran-backed units within PMF, and other tribal factions. Human Rights Watch reported that fighters from Shi’i PMF units, including Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al Haq, and Badr Organisation, deliberately destroyed several hundred civilian and government buildings and looted properties after recapturing the areas controlled by IS.

Iraq’s General Customs Authority yesterday said there was an agreement between the government and Saudi Arabia to reduce tariffs on Saudi goods entering Iraq.

In a statement, the authority confirmed that “the custom duties are fulfilled in compliance with the provisions of the Tariff Law No. 22 of 2010 on all goods and all products,” adding that “there is no discrimination in treatment.”

The Iraqi authority’s statement came in response to the head of the Iran’s Industry and Trade Authority Rida Al-Harashi’s remarks to the Iranian media last Monday, in which he said that Iran “is losing its economic position in Baghdad and that Saudi Arabia was replacing it after an agreement was reached between the two sides to reduce tariffs on Saudi goods.”
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On 1 April, the Central Bank of Iraq announced a new system aimed at enhancing trade cooperation with Saudi Arabia.

Iraq criticized President Donald Trump's decision Friday to target Syrian government facilities suspected to be involved in the production of chemical weapons, saying such missile strikes undermined the wider effort to combat terrorism in both neighboring Arab states.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari spoke on the phone Sunday with acting U.S. Secretary of State John Sullivan, discussing the trilateral U.S., French and U.K. missile attack on Syria, which Iraq considers an ally in the fight against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). Jaafari emphasized "the necessity to prioritize finding a political solution and that the Syrian people alone should determine their own fate," according to a statement by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry.

Jaafari condemned the production and use of chemical weapons, but warned that "any escalation in Syria will negatively affect the security and stability of the region as a whole, and will give terrorism an opportunity to regain its activity after the defeat it met in Iraq and its retreat in Syria. The risk of terrorism today threatens all countries of the world."

​Washington and Baghdad became allies after the U.S. invaded in 2003and overthrew the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, charging him with producing chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. Those accusations later turned out to be false, but the U.S. installed a friendly, majority-Shiite Muslim government as it faced an increasingly deadly insurgency from Sunni Muslim groups, including Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which later merged into the Islamic State of Iraq.

BAGHDAD — Amid Iraqi calls to reinforce the rule of law and strengthen Iraqi state institutions, the Ministry of Justice announced March 28 a new initiative for “arbitration” among tribes, allowing a team of tribal elders to intervene as arbitrators in resolving all possible disputes and conflicts between Iraqi tribes.
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According to a statement by the Ministry of Justice, this team of 47 tribal leaders will be called “al-Awaref,” selected by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior in virtue of a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Justice and to be charged with several tasks, most notably reducing the expansion of tribal conflicts and focusing on “bringing about community peace” in Iraqi provinces.

The 47 arbitrators will work voluntarily and receive no salaries from the Iraqi state. In addition to undergoing a background check by the Ministry of the Interior, their names were presented to tribal leaders for approval.

A March 28 statement issued by the Ministry of Justice noted that the ministry “has adopted a team of well-known tribal arbitrators to resolve disputes,” describing them as “a safety valve for the community, which will have a major role in strengthening security and establishing community peace in all provinces of the country.”