​The next few hours are a revelation. The mall is a huge futuristic monolith standing amid the sort of small ramshackle shops and stalls found in any Middle Eastern city. We park in a multi-storey car park filled with smart four-wheel drives and shiny new sedans.

A quick security check and we enter a world far removed from the conventional image of Iraq - a world whose promoters invite you to "make yourself happy", where "shopping shouldn't be seen as a task or chore, but rather an experience to be enjoyed".

Inside, the mall is as light, bright and spacious as any in the West. Its four floors are packed with up-market shops and boutiques. There is a Mango fashion store, Sony and Samsung outlets, a cosmetics shop selling Lancome and Max Factor, various pizza and American-style fast food joints, even an Italian ice-cream parlour.

​But more surprising than the shops are the people. They are pouring in, many hundreds of them - men and women, young and old, parents with small children and babies in pushchairs. One young woman tells me that the mall has usurped Basra's tired old funfair.

Heavily redacted trove details death of detainees and draft letter requesting interrogators be protected from prosecution.

The CIA on Tuesday released dozens of documents detailing its torture and rendition program under the Bush administration, from the horrific treatment of detainees to the agency's 2002 plan to ask the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) not to prosecute interrogators.

The heavily redacted trove of more than 50 documents was published in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year, which sought records referenced in the U.S. Senate's damning report on the CIA's program—commonly referred to as the torture report—released in December 2014.

"These newly declassified records add new detail to the public record of the CIA's torture program and underscore the cruelty of the methods the agency used in its secret, overseas black sites," Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said Tuesday. "It bears emphasis that these records document grave crimes for which no senior official has been held accountable."

A Shia fighter shot dead 17 civilians who were fleeing the Islamic State (IS)-held city of Fallujah, according to Iraqi authorities in Baghdad.

A federal investigation committee formed by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said the civilians were illegally slain in the Sijar area earlier this month. A Shia militia fighter was arrested and charged with terrorism.

Salama al-Khafaji, a member of the federal panel, told Middle East Eye that the 17 dead were among 20 people trying to reach a crossing point in Sijar.

"A fighter from Hashd [Arabic name for Shia-dominated militias fighting near Fallujah] blocked their way and shot them. He surprised them and shot dead 17. The rest fled and survived."

NEAR FALLUJAH — Twenty-three days after the Iraqi security forces started a major operation aiming to retake besieged Fallujah, the forces are still fighting to control the first neighborhood of the Anbar city.

Much of the murkiness surrounding the battle to expel ISIS from Fallujah, which lies 64 kilometers to the west of Baghdad and has long been a cynosure of the Sunni insurgency, has to do with who, exactly, is doing the fighting. And that’s a question that touches on Iraq’s ever-parlous sectarianism.

The United States insists that Shia militias, many of whom are avowedly Islamist and fighting for their own version of holy war, must not enter Fallujah and should instead confine their activities to the outskirts or suburbs of the city. The Pentagon has been providing air cover only on the south and western fronts where professional counterterrorism forces, the Iraqi army units, Sunni tribal forces and local police have operated. The northern front, where the militias and Iraq’s Federal Police are located, have seen no U.S. air strikes.

Perhaps for that reason, the south has seen more progress. Al-Shuhada, a neighborhood at the southern doorstep of Fallujah, is still contested with fierce clashes between Iraqi Security Forces and ISIS jihadists. Although earlier statements by Iraqi commanders were claiming they have completely controlled al-Shuhada neighborhood, Sabah Numan, spokesperson of elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), told The Daily Beast, “We are currently in the first al-Shuhada neighborhood and we have been able to liberate 90 percent of it.”

The number of displaced people from areas controlled by Daesh in Iraq has increased to 3.6 million over the past two years, the Iraqi Minister of Immigration and Displacement Jassim Mohammed said on Monday.

The minister pointed out in a statement that 600,000 displaced people have returned to their original home areas during the past two years.

Chairman of the Parliament Committee on Displacement and Migration Raed Duhluki warned on Monday of a humanitarian catastrophe potentially facing those displaced due to a lack of funding from the government.

The official called on the Iraqi government, the international community and human rights organizations to form government and political delegations in order to bring the necessary funds from donor countries to provide aid to displaced Iraqis.

Iraq said on Monday it had made arrests as it investigates allegations that Shiite militiamen helping the army retake Fallujah had executed dozens of Sunni Muslim men fleeing the city held by Islamic State.

Iraqi authorities "are following up on the violations and a number of arrests have been made," government spokesman Saad al-Hadithi said after a regional governor said 49 Sunni men had been executed after surrendering to a Shiite faction.

Sohaib al-Rawi, governor of Anbar province where Fallujah is located, said on Sunday that 643 men had gone missing between June 3 and June 5, and "all the surviving detainees were subjected to severe and collective torture by various means."

The participation of militias in the battle of Fallujah, just west of Baghdad, alongside the Iraqi army had already raised fears of sectarian killings.

​It is said that the siege of the city of Fallujah, which is situated nearly 60 kilometres from Baghdad, has been ongoing for the past two years. We are also being told that those who enter the city are allowed to do so for good reason as part of the effort to save it from the terrorist organisation known as Daesh.

​There is also the argument that bombing the city, and its destruction, as well as the expulsion of its women and children, is all meant to liberate the residents from the siege, hunger and illness.

These lies deserve to be buried alongside the others that are being created by Iraqi politicians and fed to us through the media. Such rhetoric resembles that employed by Zionists who claim that by taking over Palestinian lands they hope to create institutions from which Palestinians can benefit.

The truth is that Fallujah has been and always will be a thorn in the side of the Iraqi government. The siege is not the result of today’s events or those of the past two years, and the “news” of its “liberation” has been witnessed time and time again. In fact, Fallujah’s residents have been dedicated to liberating the city from worthless politicians, who have not been able to deceive the local people.

​BAGHDAD — In the days before his death last month, Col. Ihab Hashem al-Araji confided that his battle against the Islamic State too often felt like a suicide mission, despite the more than $1.6 billion in U.S. arms and training that have flowed to the Iraqi army over the past two years.

He had even begun taking a white funeral shroud to the battlefield with him.

To support his forces advancing on enemy-held Fallujah, Araji had requested a U.S.-supplied M1 Abrams tank but said he was asked to pay $2,000 in bribes to secure it. Instead, he was given a run-down Russian one, which arrived without a driver trained to use it.

“It was useless,’’ one of his men, Lt. Nassir Hamza, recalled.

​Those concerned over what IS’s distorted vision of Islam could evolve into if the group formed a real state, perhaps need look no further than Iran
​
When people think about what horrifies them the most about the self-styled Islamic State (IS), surely a misnomer to end all misnomers, they usually point to its brutal violence, torture and sexual crimes, and how IS distorts the religion of Islam into something that is beyond all recognition to any normal Muslim.

But what frightens people more is what IS’s distortion of Islam would look like if it succeeded and actually became a state.

Allow me, then, to provide you with portents of the future if we fail to stop IS and the symptoms that created IS. If you want an inkling of what a "Caliphate" ruled by IS might look like, then look no further than Iran.

On small video screens inside their cockpits, the U.S. pilots spotted their target, an Islamic State checkpoint just south of the Iraqi city of Mosul.

In grainy black and white, they could see the enemy manning the barricades and a guard shack. As they prepared to launch their attack, the pilots noticed a potential complication: Two cars approached the checkpoint and stopped. The drivers appeared to be talking with Islamic State fighters.

Other cars moved through the checkpoint, but these two vehicles remained on the side of the road. Five minutes passed. Then 10. Nearly 40 minutes had gone by, and the two vehicles still had not moved.

Running low on fuel and time, the pilots concluded that the people in the cars were allied with the militants and asked for permission to strike. After a brief discussion with their headquarters in Qatar, they got their reply: “You’re cleared to execute.”