​Drone strikes in Iraq and Syria killed hundreds

​A murderous US ­special forces cell called Talon Anvil massacred hundreds of ­civilians in Iraq and Syria—and top officers systematically ­covered up its crimes.

The cell controlled a fleet of Predator and Reaper drones that bristled with Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs.

A major investigation by the New York Times newspaper says Talon Anvil killed “people who had no role in the conflict—­farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and ­villagers sheltering in buildings”.

A former Air Force intelligence officer said he saw so many civilian deaths as a result of Talon Anvil’s tactics that he eventually grew jaded and accepted them as part of the job.

Elsewhere, Saudi and Iranian experts hold talks in Jordan and Egyptian help with Gaza reconstruction efforts amid dispute over what should be rebuilt first

Five million orphans - equivalent to five percent of all orphans worldwide - are in Iraq, with nearly the same number of young people living in poverty, data published in a new Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights report has revealed.

​According to the report, covered in Asharq al-Awsat, one million children are working as labourers to support their families, including 45,000 who don't have official identification documents as a result of their parents' affiliation with the Islamic State group. 

Around 4.5 million children are in families living below the poverty line with 25 percent of the total population of Iraq living in poverty and an unemployment rate of 14 percent, the commission found.

The number of missing citizens since 2014, the year the Islamic State group launched its offensive in the country, has reached 8,000. The commission said Iraqi authorities have failed to fulfil their duty to those missing to investigate their whereabouts or compensate their families financially.

The Basra explosion caused by a booby-trapped motorcycle was aimed to assassinate an Iraqi investigative officer in charge of the militia's illegal activities in the province.

In an unprecedented event, a terrorist explosion caused by a motorcycle hit the southern city of Basra on Dec. 7.  At least four were killed and four others were wounded. 

Basra has not been targeted by such attacks for years. Therefore, the attack was read as a significant breach to Iraqi security, especially in this area far from the access of the Islamic State.

A day after the explosion, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi travelled to Basra, straight from his trip to Makhmour in northern Iraq that was targeted by IS several times in the past two weeks.
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Kadhimi has pointed to the militias in Basra for the responsibility of the attack, while he was accusing IS for the attack in Makhmour. 

Traces of a kleptocrat from Iraq to Delaware to Miami

​​A few blocks from the water, in the heart of Miami’s glitzy South Beach, is a drugstore not like the others. Tourists buying sunscreen and straw hats from the CVS on Washington Avenue are financing a Middle Eastern kleptocrat.

The plexiglass building housing the roughly 12,000-square-foot pharmacy is worth $18.3 million and, because of favorable rent terms negotiated with CVS, should generate significant profit for its landlord. In 2019, based on Miami property records, local press credited a Virginia-based real estate company, KLNB, with purchasing the building. But the Virginia firm’s inclusion in the property registrar was a diversion. “KLNB is not the owner of this property and had no involvement in the transaction,” a company representative said.
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The actual purchase was made by an anonymous Delaware shell company. Buried in incorporation documents for this Delaware company’s Florida branch is the name of the building’s real owner: Masrour Barzani, the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Officials in Baghdad have accused Tehran of reducing water flows from the Tigris and Euphrates.

​Iraq has completed procedures to sue Iran at the International Court of Justice over Tehran's water policy, an Iraqi official said on Saturday.

Officials in Baghdad have accused Tehran of reducing water flows from the Tigris and Euphrates.

"The ministry of water resources has submitted a letter to the foreign ministry and the cabinet, and completed all technical and legal procedures for the lawsuit," Iraqi Minister of Water Resources Mahdi Rashid al-Hamdani said in an interview with US-funded Al-Hurra TV.

"The decision to take matters further is now up to the foreign ministry and the Iraqi government," Hamdani added.

Almost 20 years ago, Saudi Arabia insisted it wanted no inclusion in America’s war on Iraq, but the military and logistical support it provided to occupational forces evidenced a betrayal of that promise.

Testimonial evidence in intervening years has shown Saudi assistance was instrumental to America’s policy of forcible regime change and crucial to dismantling Iraq -- leaving the country in the state of corruption and chaos that endures until the present day. 

Yet in subsequent years the Saudi’s have largely been absolved of responsibility for their actions in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This is partly due to the historic relationship between the US and Saudis which has seen western media outlets turn a blind eye to their poor human rights records. Perhaps more importantly, the reputation of SA had taken a battering post-9/11 meaning another highly controversial case was necessary to be kept under wraps in order to maintain the kingdom's crumbling credibility.

Collusion between the 2 countries in the months leading up to the invasion saw the Saudis allow America to double the number of US troops in the kingdom. They also permitted the US to station 350 aircraft, with access to 3 different air bases, from which the US launched attacks, intelligence and reconnaissance flights into Iraq. Elite troops were flown into bases in the NW (‘Ar’ar and Tabuk) enabling the US to launch ground attacks into Iraq from Saudi soil.

A former senior Mossad officer reflects on his service at the cutting edge of Israeli regional strategy​

​Eliezer “Geizi” Tsafrir, a long-serving officer of the Mossad, was a key field operator throughout Israel’s first four decades. 

Tsafrir’s career was focused on two areas of primary importance to the young state: 1) The strategy of the periphery, in which the Jewish state sought to break its isolation in the Middle East by developing relations with non-Arab states in the region – Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia, and 2) the strategy of minorities, whereby Israel sought to make common cause with other non-Arab and/or non-Muslim minority communities in the Middle East. 
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Tsafrir’s long and varied career began with 12 years at the General Security Service (GSS), Israel’s internal security structure. Joining the fledgling Mossad in 1962, he went on to serve as the head of the organization’s station in Iraqi Kurdistan, the last station chief in Tehran, and the head of the Mossad station in Beirut in 1983-1984. He then served as an adviser on counter-terrorism to prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, retiring in 1992.

​Qassem Suleimani is the Iranian operative who has been reshaping the Middle East. Now he’s directing Assad’s war in Syria.

​Last February, some of Iran’s most influential leaders gathered at the Amir al-Momenin Mosque, in northeast Tehran, inside a gated community reserved for officers of the Revolutionary Guard. They had come to pay their last respects to a fallen comrade. Hassan Shateri, a veteran of Iran’s covert wars throughout the Middle East and South Asia, was a senior commander in a powerful, élite branch of the Revolutionary Guard called the Quds Force.

The force is the sharp instrument of Iranian foreign policy, roughly analogous to a combined C.I.A. and Special Forces; its name comes from the Persian word for Jerusalem, which its fighters have promised to liberate. Since 1979, its goal has been to subvert Iran’s enemies and extend the country’s influence across the Middle East. Shateri had spent much of his career abroad, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, where the Quds Force helped Shiite militias kill American soldiers.

​Shateri had been killed two days before, on the road that runs between Damascus and Beirut. He had gone to Syria, along with thousands of other members of the Quds Force, to rescue the country’s besieged President, Bashar al-Assad, a crucial ally of Iran. In the past few years, Shateri had worked under an alias as the Quds Force’s chief in Lebanon; there he had helped sustain the armed group Hezbollah, which at the time of the funeral had begun to pour men into Syria to fight for the regime. The circumstances of his death were unclear: one Iranian official said that Shateri had been “directly targeted” by “the Zionist regime,” as Iranians habitually refer to Israel.

​Senior American officials held confidential talks with Iran about Iraq’s future in advance of the United States-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, and secured a promise that the Iranian military would not fire at United States warplanes that strayed into Iranian airspace, according to a new book by a ranking Bush administration official.
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The previously undisclosed meetings, which were held in Geneva with Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations and future foreign minister, continued even after American troops seized Baghdad in April 2003.

“We wanted a commitment that Iran would not fire on U.S. aircraft if they accidentally flew over Iranian territory,” Zalmay Khalilzad, a former ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan and the United Nations, wrote in the “The Envoy,” being published this month by St. Martin’s Press.

“Zarif agreed,” he added. “We also hoped Iran would encourage Iraqi Shiites to participate constructively in establishing a new government in Iraq.” Some prominent Iraqi Shiite leaders who had opposed Hussein had long been supported by Iran, which is the major Shiite power in the region.

There is no need to wait for the result of the investigations committee to guess who was behind the attempted assassination of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi at dawn last Sunday. The Fatah Alliance militias, led by Asa'ib Ahl Al-Haq and Kata'ib Hezbollah, are loyal to Iran and have viewed Al-Kadhimi as their main rival in Iraq. They have threatened him on several occasions and have never hidden the fact that they want to get rid of him, even as they tried to deny that they had orchestrated the attempt to kill him.

Despite relying on a fragile political consensus, with a lack of a parliamentary support base of his own, Al-Kadhimi remains a threat to the aims of the Popular Mobilisation factions, which want to establish a state that represents Iran in government, basically annexes Iraq and is managed by the legal rulings of the Shia scholars of the Wilayat Al-Faqih. The results of the early parliamentary election, supervised by Al-Kadhimi's government, gave the militias more reasons to get rid of him, either by preventing him from returning to lead the government, or even killing him.

However, the pressure exerted by Iran's allies, including the use of popular protests, did not intimidate the Electoral Commission to change the election results after a recount of thousands of ballot boxes. The last attempt in this context was last Friday, when it seemed that there was an effort to drag the government into a street confrontation that would reshuffle the political cards and give some justification for the factions to use force against the state.
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It is not possible to look at the abuses carried out by the militias without viewing them as targeting the state systematically and deliberately. The recent abuses in the village of Nahr Al-Imam, for example, where they massacred local people, ostensibly in "revenge" for killings by Daesh in the neighbouring village of Al-Rashad. Activists were targeted by the militias who reject Iranian intervention in the central and southern cities, or prevented the security services from imposing order. Such abuses are also seen as a means of working to a foreign agenda, the main purpose of which is to keep Iraq weak, divided and run by an illusory government, whose mission is to provide cover for militias that have actual authority on the ground, and take their orders from across the border.