#amerli

By Tirana Hassan, Foreign Policy, April 1, 2015

In October, I met dozens of families huddled in the hillsides around Amerli, a town of some 26,000 people 110 miles north of Baghdad. They had sought shelter there, helplessly watching as their homes burned and exploded in the weeks and months after government-backed Shiite militias took control of their villages, after expelling fighters from the Islamic State.

What they told me bears striking--and disturbing--similarity to what is happening in Tikrit right now, as Iraqi security forces and Shiite militias attempt to retake the city from the Islamic State with the support of U.S. airstrikes. Iraqi forces and militia fighters captured almost the entire city by Wednesday night, as Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived to cheer the conquest and Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi hailed the “magnificent victory” there.

While we don’t know exactly how events in Tikrit will play out, we do know how the operation last summer ended in Amerli, which had been under siege for three months. In that battle, Iraqi authorities, along with U.S. and coalition forces, turned a blind eye to the abusive conduct of Shiite militias after the Islamic State abandoned the area. The apparent indifference of the United States and coalition forces paved the way for a wave of destruction, as the militias targeted Sunni Arabs and other minorities in the surrounding area.

Our research on the operations around Amerli revealed how the operation to clear and secure a 300-mile area around the town quickly morphed into a campaign of revenge attacks. Pro-government militias and volunteer fighters, along with Iraqi security forces, purposefully burned Sunni villages to the ground, destroyed homes with explosives, and looted entire villages, leaving them virtually uninhabitable.

Under the guise of fighting the Islamic State, the marauding militiamen waged their own sectarian war with complete impunity. While Amerli is a Shiite Turkoman village, the majority of the surrounding villages were home to Sunni Arabs and several mixed Arab and Turkoman communities that the militias accuse of being Islamic State collaborators and sympathizers. The families from these surrounding villages told me that the militias drove them from their homes--and in the days after my visit, reports continued to flow in from desperate families describing how militiamen took away their brothers and sons and destroyed more of their homes. These were families caught between the horrors of the Islamic State and the vengeance of out-of-control Shiite militias.

An analysis of satellite imagery of over 300 square miles of land surrounding Amerli found that 30 out of 35 villages in the area showed indications of arson and purposeful building demolition, after these forces cleared out the Islamic State fighters. In one of the worst examples, 95 percent of the town of Hufriyah, 11 miles from Amerli, showed signs of destruction. All of the destruction took place while the town was under militia control.

In the last week, I have been struck with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, as once again my phone rings and my inbox fills up with reports of more abuses. Only the location has changed--this time, they are from Tikrit. I read frantic emails filled with the names of Sunni family members taken away by militias who act as judge and jury, accusing Sunni men of being Islamic State sympathizers. Within the first week of the Tikrit operation, residents told me militias attacked and destroyed their homes and orchards on the eastern outskirts of the city. A satellite image of the area from the same period showed large clouds of smoke rising from the burning farmlands.

Until recently, the offensive to take Tikrit back from the Islamic State was being led by the militias and the pro-government Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Committees), with the support of Iranian military commanders. After the offensive stalled, U.S. and coalition warplanes on March 25 started striking Islamic State positions in and around Tikrit at the request of the Iraqi government.

The U.S. strikes to push back the Islamic State are intended to make way for Iraqi troops--and likely the militias who fight alongside them. Gen. Lloyd Austin, head of U.S. Central Command, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the militias are “not a part of the clearing operation,” despite tens of thousands of militias still operating on the front lines. The question now is: Will the aftermath of Tikrit look like the aftermath of Amerli?

The thirst for revenge in Tikrit, unfortunately, runs deep. Last July, Islamic State fighters massacred more than 1,000 captured Iraqi soldiers when they took control of the city, marching them from the nearby Speicher military base to their deaths in Tikrit city. According to the Iraqi government, the soldiers were mostly Shiites, many of them relatively new recruits. With images of the massacre still fresh in people’s minds, the potential for the militias and Iraqi government forces to settle the score and engage in revenge killings is high. Hadi al-Amiri, the commander of one of the largest militia groups, the Badr Corps, which is participating in the current offensive, even referred to the Tikrit operations as “the battle for the revenge of Speicher.”

The Iraqi government has taken no concrete steps to hold accountable security forces or militia leaders who allow their fighters to run amok and commit war crimes. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has voiced his concern about the conduct of the militias. He has called for investigations, and for those committing abuses to be held responsible. However, the reality of Iraq’s deeply divided political landscape means that Abadi is not in control of the dozens of different militias that make up the backbone of the fight against the Islamic State. After more than a decade of operating with complete impunity, they have become a law unto themselves.

The potential for vengeance in Tikrit is not news to any of the parties involved in fighting the Islamic State in Iraq. The facts on the ground are that coalition members supporting the Iraqi security forces are most likely taking part in operations with a strong contingent of militias, and they risk complicity in war crimes by engaging alongside forces that commit serious abuses.

The question is whether anything will be done to stop this. The time to answer that question and take action is now.

By Greg Jaffe, Washington Post, September 5, 2014

AMERLI, Iraq--For weeks, Iraqi Kurdish fighters had joined an unusual alliance to free this dusty highway town besieged by Islamic State fighters. Shiite militias, Iranian trainers and U.S. military pilots had all contributed, finally wresting the city from the Sunni extremists and saving the 15,000 residents from starvation or brutal slayings.

But on Friday, as the Kurdish pesh merga fighters approached the city to greet the residents they helped save, they were treated less like liberators and more like intruders. “Pesh merga forces are not allowed to enter this city!” yelled a Shiite militiaman with Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi group. He waved his rifle at them and the pesh merga retreated.

“We fought for three months here, and now we have to fight these bastards,” said one of the pesh merga, who regard this area as part of their territory. “If this continues, we’ll have another war.”

The Obama administration’s strategy in Iraq is predicated on the country’s competing militia groups, as well as its battered army, setting aside their differences over territory, ethnicity and religion to form a grand coalition to battle the radical Sunni members of Islamic State. The aftermath of the fighting in Amerli shows how quickly this hodgepodge of militia forces can turn on each other as they fight for influence and the spoils of battle.

The road to Amerli also offers a glimpse of how the last few months of fighting have destroyed virtually every vestige of the Iraqi state in the north. After being turned away from Amerli, the pesh merga fighters returned to their base, just three miles away, passing through a half-dozen other Shiite militia checkpoints. Some belonged to the Badr Brigades, others to Saraya al-Salam and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. All were vying for influence in the area. Each flew their own militia flag; the Iraqi flag was nowhere to be seen.

The fractured landscape offered one sign after another of how difficult it would be for northern Iraq to return to the multiethnic, religiously mixed society it had once been.

On the side of the road near Amerli, lined up in a row, were the bodies of about a dozen Shiite men killed in June during the first wave of assaults by Islamic State insurgents in the area. The extremists killed hundreds of Shiites and members of ethnic minorities during their sweep through northern and western Iraq. Thousands more residents fled.

With the Islamic State fighters gone, it was finally safe for the local residents to exhume the mass graves. Friends and family members bent over the corpses searching for something--an identification card, a cellphone or a scrap of familiar clothing--that might identify their loved ones.

Ibrahim Kalif spotted what looked like a familiar T-shirt of his friend, a truck driver who regularly hauled bags of cement down the highway toward Baghdad. “I have seen him wearing these clothes,” Kalif said. “I’m sure it is him.”

A second mass grave, consisting of about 24 more bodies, was uncovered nearby, said a member of parliament from the area. Like Kalif’s friend, most of the dead were truck drivers, who were stopped by Islamic State fighters and killed.

On this day, Kalif was more interested in grieving for his lost friend than revenge. “We just want to live in peace,” he said, covering his nose with his sleeve to ward off the stomach-wrenching smell.

A few hundred yards away was the Sunni village of Suleiman Beg, once home to about 10,000 people and now completely abandoned. A handful of Shiite militia fighters ducked into the homes that had not been reduced to rubble in the fighting, looking for televisions, bicycles or jewelry they could steal. The pesh merga fighters posed for pictures in front of the building where the Islamic State fighters beheaded those accused of being spies or criminals. An unexploded artillery shell lay nose-down in what had been a carefully tended garden.

No one had any idea what would happen to the empty city. The pesh merga and Shiite militia fighters agreed that Sunni Arabs couldn’t be trusted to return. “If they come back, they will just plant bombs on the road,” said Capt. Wushar Harki, a pesh merga officer. “I would say that 90 percent of them are terrorists.”

The U.S. government has largely looked at the Kurds, who live in a semi-autonomous zone in northern Iraq, as a stabilizing force in the region. But the months of fighting are wearing on the pesh merga troops, who have begun to view everyone with distrust. The pesh merga forces--which are divided into two groups that report to the two major Kurdish parties--even suspect each other. Around Amerli, the pesh merga fighters complain that the best weapons from the U.S. government and Iran are going to Kurdish fighters associated with their rival party.

“We have not seen a single American bullet,” said Maj. Ahmed Mahmoud, the pesh merga commander near Amerli and Suleiman Beg.

The Sunnis and Shiites, meanwhile, say the Kurds are using the chaos to grab territory well beyond the Kurdistan region’s traditional borders with an eye to independence.

Amerli had seemed to represent the possibility of an alliance of different ethnic groups and formal militaries to defeat the extremists. The city is inhabited by thousands of Iraqi Turkmens, most of them Shiites who are of Turkic heritage, rather than Arab, like the majority of Iraqis.

The partnership between Iraqi troops, Shiite militias and Kurdish fighters--supported by U.S. airstrikes and NATO humanitarian air drops--would prove short lived.

UNICEF took part in UN inter-agency mission to Amerli

A team of UNICEF technical officers, including health, water, sanitation and hygiene, protection and emergency experts, were on an inter-agency assessment mission today to the town of Amerli in the Salah Al-Din Governorate, northern Iraq.   This was the first UN humanitarian mission to the area since the two-month-long siege was lifted on Sunday morning.

UNICEF estimates 3,000 children have been…

By Azam Ahmed, NY Times, Sept. 2, 2014

AMERLI, Iraq--The children lined the unkempt boulevard in this northern Iraqi town on Tuesday to welcome some of the men who had saved them from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Convoy after convoy of armed men raced past, blaring victory music from loudspeakers and bristling with weaponry. They waved as the young residents clapped and chanted religious slogans, celebrating the men who had broken the militants’ chokehold on Amerli and allowed in the first shipments of food and water in nearly three months.

It took an odd coalition of Iraqi and Iranian militias backed by American air support to drive off the ISIS fighters. But for long weeks before, the minority Shiite Turkmens who live here held the line, waging a desperate campaign for survival as they took up arms to protect the estimated 15,000 residents.

Amid daily shelling and at least four major assaults by ISIS, the people subsisted on onion soup and dry bread. Children joined the front lines during the day because there were not enough men for two shifts. Without gas, families cooked on open fires fueled by sheep dung.

The siege of Amerli is thought to be the first time a town has managed to keep the militants at bay since the group, which now calls itself the Islamic State, began its march through wide areas of Iraq. By Monday, aid from the United Nations had begun reaching the starving residents.

“The families in this village are so brave,” said Abu Abdullah, the commander of the Kataib Hezbollah militia that aided the residents. “There was no water, no electricity, no food and no milk for children, but they stood and fought ISIS.”

On Tuesday, the colorful flags of at least four militias competed for prominence on the streets and buildings of Amerli. Along with the banner of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi group unrelated to the better-known Lebanese Hezbollah, were those of the Badr Brigades, Saraya al-Salam and Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

The fact that American air power had helped was not as celebrated. Some of the militiamen had fought the Americans after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Mr. Abdullah spoke for many when he said, “We do not like the Americans, and we didn’t need their airstrikes.”

In a video released Tuesday, the killer of Steven J. Sotloff, an American journalist, made an apparent reference to the United States’ strikes near Amerli.

In Amerli, Mr. Abdullah said his men had arrived on Iraqi military helicopters about two weeks into the siege. They carried aid and weaponry, but also specialized skills. Among them were experts in communications, operations and explosives.

Mr. Abdullah said his forces had joined those inside Amerli to help beat back the ISIS militants. He refused to say how many of his fighters had assisted, to offer operational details or to expound on why his men had come at all. He said only that his troops were willing to take on the mission.

By the time the militias began arriving, ISIS had surrounded the town entirely. To the west, they were two kilometers away; to the east, just 500 meters. Residents had dug giant trenches in the mud around Amerli. Some had planted improvised explosive devices in the earth surrounding the town, hoping to keep ISIS out.

They had been planning for a long time. The day Mosul fell, tribal leaders in Amerli called a meeting in the town mosque to discuss their options, sure that the militants would eventually reach them, according to one of the leaders, Sheikh Shahab Ahmed Barash.

The men swore an oath on the Quran to protect the town. They would not flee as others had. The leaders began to divide the town into areas, typically by landmarks. One leader had the cemetery. Another had the tower.

ISIS made four major assaults on the town, sometimes with more than 100 men at a time and the benefit of armored vehicles.

But the biggest fight the residents of Amerli faced was against hunger, as the militants’ cordon kept supplies from entering.

During a series of interviews with commanders, several struggled to remember exact dates that major attacks had occurred. Ibrahim Hamid Ali, an elder in Amerli, believes the first assault began shortly after 6 p.m. on July 17, when the militants stormed the perimeter the residents had set up.

“We were told not to leave our positions,” said Mr. Barash, who controls an area in Amerli where about 200 families live. “If they broke through, then we would decide what to do.”

Mr. Barash and others said the fight lasted until dawn, when the Iraqi Air Force began to hit the areas under the militants’ control. The ISIS fighters slowly retreated, having been unable to breach the town, despite trying from multiple fronts.

For the next several weeks, Mr. Barash said, the militants studied the habits of the fighters for Amerli. They knew the town required boys to aid in the defense, but only during the day, when the youths could see the enemy.

On what residents believe was Aug. 5, the ISIS fighters struck at 4:30 a.m., just as Amerli’s defenders were switching to the day shift. The militants drove armored vehicles up to the mud berms, seizing a few houses on the edge of the city, according to Mr. Barash and Mr. Ali.

The account was substantiated by video footage from ISIS fighters who later abandoned those homes, leaving a flash drive that the Amerli fighters recovered.

The defenders of Amerli began fighting along the edge of the town. Members of Kataib Hezbollah fired mortars on the militants from inside the town. While ISIS had armored vehicles, so did some of the defenders, including members of the Iraqi military who had fled earlier but brought their Humvees with them and decided to aid Amerli.

The Iraqi Air Force at one point accidentally struck an area with Amerli fighters, residents said, wounding nine people. Eventually, after coordination with forces on the ground, they corrected and began striking areas farther from the town, residents said. By sunset, the militants began to retreat.

As they surveyed the area afterward, Mr. Barash encountered several bodies of ISIS fighters that the militants had not claimed. Standing over one, Mr. Barash heard a phone ring from inside the insurgent’s pocket. He grabbed the phone and spoke: “Come and take your body.”

But an old man answered, weeping. He told Mr. Barash that ISIS had taken his son from him when they swept through his village. The militants had given him a choice: He could give them his daughter or one of his sons.

Crying on the phone, the old man said his son was a teenager, not even old enough for facial hair, and never learned how to fight.

By Tim Arango, NY Times, Aug. 31, 2014

BAGHDAD--A coalition of Shiite militias, regular Iraqi Army units and Kurdish forces, backed by American air power, on Sunday broke a long siege of Amerli, a town in northern Iraq that for weeks had been surrounded by Sunni extremists who threatened to slaughter thousands of Shiite residents.

The American airstrikes on positions held by fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, near Amerli, about 105 miles north of Baghdad, were carried out Saturday night in conjunction with airdrops of supplies to the town’s thousands of besieged residents. The American operation was supporting a ground offensive led by Shiite militia fighters, many of whom once fought fierce battles against American soldiers.

Security officials said on Sunday that Amerli, a cluster of villages whose population is dominated by Shiite Turkmen who are considered infidels by the ISIS, was not fully liberated but that the combined forces had cleared several villages from the militants. Fierce fighting in the area was continuing Sunday afternoon.

The operation around Amerli is the latest expansion of American military operations in Iraq in recent weeks. First, the American military sent warplanes and drones to destroy millions of dollars of American equipment that had been abandoned on the battlefield by the Iraqi Army and seized by ISIS. Now, the United States has provided air support for several Iranian-backed Shiite militias that are leading the fight against ISIS in Ameril with the help of Kurdish pesh merga forces and Iraqi Army units.

Both the United States and Iran, while not coordinating operations in Iraq, are nevertheless on the same side in the conflict against ISIS. The United States, though, has been reluctant to pursue military operations with Iraq’s Shiite militias. The militias have taken on a primary role in providing security in Baghdad and responding to the advances of ISIS; the Iraqi Army, which had been financed and trained by the United States, has proved largely ineffective.

The Obama administration has tried to avoid being seen as taking sides in Iraq’s sectarian war, because the militias are especially feared by Iraq’s Sunni population. The reality on the ground, however--the growing brutality of ISIS, the humanitarian crisis and the threat of a slaughter in Amerli--appeared to override those concerns.

The nature of the two sides in this war has become increasingly evident as the conflict has evolved. The Sunni extremists of ISIS have been rampaging through Iraq, beheading some of those it captures, carrying out large-scale massacres of Shiites and expelling hundreds of thousands of residents. The Shiite militias, which have in the past been responsible for abuses against Sunni civilians, are largely protecting their own communities and have proved essential to the defense of Baghdad.

Among the militias fighting for Amerli are Asaib Ahl al-Haq, perhaps the most experienced group, as well as Badr Corps, which is led by Hadi al-Ameri, the transportation minister, and a militia linked to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who was one of the United States’ most implacable foes during the long American occupation. All those groups are supported by Iran.

Many officials on Sunday said it was Asaib, a militia that was a particularly fierce enemy of the United States as it was winding down its military role in Iraq in 2011, that has taken on the most prominent role in the fighting for Amerli, in Salahuddin Province.

“I would like to thank the jihadists from Asaib Ahl al-Haq, as they are sacrificing their lives to save Amerli,” said Mahdi Taqi, a member of the regional council in Salahuddin Province.

Mr. Taqi said that Amerli, whose residents chose to defend their city against ISIS rather than flee as residents of other communities did in the face of the onslaught, had been partly liberated from the east side.

Other fighters were advancing toward Amerli from the north.

On Saturday night, the Pentagon said that American planes had carried out airstrikes on several ISIS positions, destroying three Humvees, one armed vehicle, a tank and an ISIS checkpoint. In addition, American aircraft, along with aircraft from France, Australia and Britain, dropped humanitarian aid into Amerli. Two American airplanes, the Pentagon said, dropped 10,500 gallons of water and about 7,000 packages of field rations.

When President Obama first authorized American airstrikes in Iraq several weeks ago, the justification was to protect American civilians in Erbil, the Kurdish capital, which was being threatened by ISIS fighters, and to support humanitarian aid drops on Mount Sinjar, where thousands of Yazidis, members of an ancient sect, had sought refuge from the advancing militants.

The Times Jerome Starkey, in Suleimaniyah

The first bullet missed. Private Qassim Hussein Ali saw it fly past his face as he sat in the back of a pick-up truck hurtling towards the front line.

The second hit his right hand as he reached for his Kalashnikov.

The third round hit his throat and tore down his neck, lodging between his fourth and fifth ribs and scorching his windpipe on the way.

It was just after midday on Sunday as Kurdish peshmerga, with whom Private Ali is engaged, Iraqi forces and Shia militias broke a two-month siege on Amerli, a mostly Turkmen town in northern Iraq.