Refugees from northern Iraq’s Nineveh province said in interviews this week they regret returning home, as their villages still have no basic services six years after an invasion by the Islamic State terror group forced them to flee the area.
WASHINGTON, DC — Some factions of a Baghdad-sanctioned organization of mainly Iranian-backed Shiite militias are engaging in egregious violations such as torture, extrajudicial detentions, rape, extortion, and kidnappings in northern Iraq’s Nineveh province, where persecuted religious minorities like Christians are struggling to recover from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) atrocities, top U.S. officials said this week.
Arab leaders in northern Iraq’s Sunni-majority Nineveh province have called on the international community to keep Iran-allied Shiite fighters, such as members of the Baghdad-sanctioned Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), out of the provincial capital of Mosul and its surrounding areas.
U.S.-backed Iraqi troops and their allies expect to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) in Mosul, the jihadist group’s last major enclave in Iraq, within no more than a month.
One of the Islamic State’s most prominent decapitators, allegedly responsible for beheading more than 100 people, has been stabbed to death in the outskirts of northern Iraq’s city of Mosul, reports Iraqi News, citing the Arabic-language al-Sumaria News.
The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group the United States and other NATO allies designated a terrorist organization, claims its fighters will only leave Sinjar, Iraq, once it goes back to the control of the Yazidis, a minority group that calls the area its home.
Some members of the Iraqi Christian minority community are seeking to establish an autonomous territory in their historical homeland in northern Iraq’s Nineveh Plain region after the city of Mosul is liberated from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and the jihadist group is defeated, reports Al-Monitor.
Authorities from the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq have reportedly forced about 250 displaced Sunni Arab families to leave Kirkuk after Sunni sleeper cells were accused of helping Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) jihadists carry out an attack in the Kurdish-controlled city.
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have closed in to within five miles of Mosul, the Islamic State’s capital in Iraq, despite fierce ISIS counterattacks.
Iraqi security forces backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and in collaboration with Kurdish Peshmerga troops and a Christian militia have besieged the Iraqi Christian town of Qaraqosh as part of the offensive to liberate the nearby city of Mosul from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), reports CNN.
Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) jihadists are “dead set” on using chemical weapons and are likely to try to use them in an attack as U.S.-backed Iraqi troops advance on Mosul, which is considered the terrorist group’s last major stronghold in Iraq, warned the Pentagon.
The prime minister of Iraq, while addressing world leaders at the United Nations Assembly’s annual general debate, suggested that the U.S.-backed Iraqi military will liberate Iraq from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) “by the end of the year.”
Yazidis have honored an American volunteer teacher’s dying wishes to be buried in the Yazidi holy site of Sheikh Sharafaddin Shrine located in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region, reports Rudaw.
