24th June: First batch of US “Advisors” arrive in Iraq. Most arrive in Baghdad but some have been sent to Kirkuk to try and establish a coordinated intelligence gathering centre in Kirkuk and in Baghdad. The US plans to fly 30-35 reconnaissance missions over Iraq soon. The Iraqi government has agreed to share intelligence with the US.
24th June: Iraqi news sources are reporting on US drones carrying out strikes on Daash positions in Anbar.
25th June: Gunmen have killed three Iranian Security Personnel on patrol along the Iran Iraq border in Kermanshah.
25th June: The Milliyet Turkish Daily states that citizens from the following countries are detected at the Turkish Syrian border: China, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, the United States, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Sudan and Russia
25th June: Iraqi PM Nouri Al Maliki on efforts by the West to supplant him “The call to form a national emergency government is a coup against the constitution and the political process. The dangerous goals of forming a national emergency government are not hidden. It is an attempt by those who are against the constitution to eliminate the young democratic process and steal the votes of the voters.”
25th June: Iran Moves in. According to the New York Times Iran is sending two flights per day of 70 tons each of military supplies. Iran has also set up an intelligence gathering centre and a communications intercepting post in Baghdad. It has also started flying reconnaissance drones over Iraqi airspace.
25th June: Iran has repatriated 88 (some sources claim 130) aircraft, military and transport, that it held for 20 years to Iraq. Qassim Atta the spokesperson of the Iraqi Armed Forces states that these aircraft will now be used to fight Daash.
25th June: Syria carries out airstrikes on rebel positions in Western Iraq. The rebel authorities are reporting civilian casualties. Syria is also reportedly flying drones over Iraqi areas along Syria’s border. The Sunni residents of Western Iraq are protesting these airstrikes.
25th June: Time magazine publishes a piece titled “the End of Iraq.” The future map of Iraq it proposes hands Kirkuk to the Kurds and Baghdad to the Sunnis. The Sunni parts include parts of Syria and the Kurdish future state has both Iraqi and Syrian parts of Kurdistan as one.
25th June: Forty Five Grad and Katyusha rockets are seized west of Basra on the Iraqi Saudi border.
25th June: Iraqi government security forces are digging in around the town of Haditha. The dam and hydro electric power plant there is of strategic importance. The local Al-Jaghafa tribe has pledged support of the government force. The commander of the Iraqi forces in Anbar, Rashid Falih, is confident that his perimeter will hold.
25th June: The US authorities have upped their estimate of Daash fighters in Iraq from 7000 to 10000 and climbing.
25th June: Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, states that he will travel to Kurdistan soon to witness the establishing of an independent Kurdish state.
25th June: The United States authorities are more or less confident that the defence of Baghdad against a Daash led assault will hold.
25th June: The Egyptian government stops broadcasting three Iraqi channels, Baghdadiya , al-Rafedain and al-Hadath, after the Iraqi government requests that they be banned for inciting sectarian conflict in Iraq.
25th June: Jordanian truck drivers returning from western Iraq are reporting the absence of Daash militants. They state that Sunni tribes have rebelled against Maliki’s government. They state that locals are generally happy that the government forces have been routed.
25th June: Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq (AMSI) is calling for the prosecution of Shia Militias involved in the killing of Sunni prisoners in Hilla earlier in the week. Sixty nine detainees were killed.
25th June: Iraqi government reports of violence in Iraq on the 25th of June:
Inter Rebel clashes in Saida in Diyala. Peshmerga forces witnessing the clashes withdrew in order to let rebels better kill each other.
Daash attacks on a Pershmerga base in Baqouba have left 2 Peshmergas dead.
Mortar fire has killed two civilians and injured four in Jalawa, Diyala.
Five Daash fighters killed in Tikrit. They were killed in government air strikes near Spiker base. This base in Tikrit is where government forces had fled and 1500 had been captured by rebels on the 12th of June. 350 SWAT members were chained and paraded, then locked up.
Daash militants have taken 180 civilans hostage from Shiekhan and Kubba villages in Nineveh. They had earlier destroyed two mosques there.
25th June: The brother of Sunni politician Mashaan al-Jobouri has been assassinated in a hotel in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. A silenced pistol was used in his assassination. Mashaan al-Jabouri was in exile in Syria earlier and had fled Iraq in 2006. His TV channel had been critical of the American Forces in 2003 and had been described as inciting sectarian division by the Iraqi government. He later returned to Iraq in 2013 and spoke against Kurdish control of Kirkuk. The Kurds saw this as an effort on his part to curry favor with Maliki.
Further reading:
The following is a revealing debate on Al Jazeera following Saddam’s execution between a Shia Iraqi politician and an Iraqi Sunni politician (Mashaan al Jobouri). The Sunni politician distinguishes between Iraqi Shias and those that are pseudo Iraqi, proxies of Iran and a part of Iran’s “Safavid” project. Transcript of Jobouri’s explanation at the end of the debate after the Shia politician walks out on being called an Iranian dog:
“Well, first, if you please, Mr. Faisal allowed me to explain to the audience…. you were unable to bring one national Shiite guest accepts to show himself in this position.
Clarify for the Iraqis….. these papers issued by the Interior Ministry, this person [Sadeq al-Musawi] who his name is “Tarek” request of Iraqi nationality in 2004, You know that he entered Qatar as Tariq and not on as Sadeq Al Mousawi, his father and mother living in Iran when recalling his friends, he recalls Ibrahim al-Jaafari and says that the has no family in Iraq.
This person is not of an Iraqi citizen, he is part of the Safavid, Iranian project, when I say Shiites I do not mean the sons of Iraq from the Shiites Patriots.”
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=29590
Ramzy Baroud on the geographic breakdown of the Ummah:
The young man was dressed in traditional Afghani Pashtun attire, and accompanied by a friend of his. With palpable nervousness, he asked a question that seemed completely extraneous to my lecture on the use of people history to understand protracted historical phenomena using Palestine as a model.
“Brother, do you believe that there is hope for the Muslim Ummah?” He inquired about the future of a nation in which he believed we both indisputably belonged to, and anxiously awaited as if my answer carried any weight at all, and would put his evident worries at ease.
Reverting to the Ummah – Dissident Voice
B.
Hi mindfriedo,
I have a suggestion/request. When you gather all this information including listening and reading Arabic language sources, your mind must be analyzing and synthesizing conclusions (on a conscious and sub-conscious level). It would be great if you could give your readers a short one or two liner as to where you think this is headed (i.e. your informed opinion) with each SITREP.
Thanks again for a great SITREP and God Bless you.
RT Op-Edge by William Engdahl on the string of coincidences regarding ISIS and strategic goals of the Empire:
For days now, since their dramatic June 10 taking of Mosul, Western mainstream media have been filled with horror stories of the military conquests in Iraq of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, with the curious acronym ISIS.
ISIS, as in the ancient Egyptian cult of the goddess of fertility and magic. The media picture being presented adds up less and less.
Details leaking out suggest that ISIS and the major military ‘surge’ in Iraq – and less so in neighboring Syria – is being shaped and controlled out of Langley, Virginia, and other CIA and Pentagon outposts as the next stage in spreading chaos in the world’s second-largest oil state, Iraq, as well as weakening the recent Syrian stabilization efforts.
ISIS in Iraq stinks of CIA/NATO ‘dirty war’ op – RT Op-Edge
B.
Mindfriedo,
I keep hearing about the Turkish role in Daash, but how does this square with Turkey’s desire to hold on to its Kurds? (Or do the wishes of the Israelis trump all?) And am I wrong in not particularly caring if Jordan falls (except, of course, for the welfare of yet more people over there, about which I do care, a lot? But they’re essentially just another US satrapy, right? And finally, a historical/philosophical question: Sykes-Picot, whether arbitrary or deliberate, certainly was destructive: might a revived Greater Syria not be a totally bad thing? I could see that as an eventual outcome — after all the bloodletting and destruction — especially if KSA really does run out of oil and can no longer control its jihadis and criminals in the same way Ukraine is, i.e., by exporting them. Oh, one last thing: am I totally off-base that once we’re gone, Shi’a and Sunni will eventually be able to work this out on their own? Not instantly, of course, but eventually.
Vladimir Odintsov on the West’s war crimes in the Middle East:
Recent decades will certainly go down in history as the era in which individual nefarious politicians used forceful solutions to further their ambitious plans to “take over the world.” By bringing together a military coalition against Iraq, Libya, Syria, and many other states, the White House seeks to solve global problems through foreign interventions, bringing iniquity by force of arms, massive civilian casualties, and violating universally recognized human rights.
Washington and its henchmen’s calculation that they will get away with all these crimes by virtue of being the “champions of the world” was wrong from the outset, and accountability will come in any case, as the world has changed, and the days of having slaves have sunk into oblivion.
Responsibility for war crimes is unavoidable! – NEO
по русски:
Ответственность за военные преступления неминуема! – НВО
B.
EX Foreign Minister
Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister,
Ah, some of know what happened when he got involved in Kosovo. Maybe the Kurds need to be warned.
Creep is the only word that I can describe him.
(must be a typo but enough to freak this person!) :-)
yours aye
Le Dahu
@ Le Dahu/cardinal points 25 June, 2014 21:58
From Wikipedia (I had no idea this guy co-founded Medecin sans Frontrieres, now we can be sure that this NGO gathers intelligence too):
Bernard Kouchner (born 1 November 1939) is a French politician, and doctor. He is the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Médecins du Monde. From 2007 until 2010 he was the French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in the center-right Fillon government under president Nicolas Sarkozy, although he had been in the past a minister in socialist governments. In 2010, the Jerusalem Post considered Bernard Kouchner the 15th most influential Jewish person in the world.
Yeah I’m sure Kouchner has the Kurds best interests at heart, Really! Just like he had the best interests of the Sunni Syrians when he egged them on into a fratricidal war with all the other Syrians of different faiths. I suppose according to Mr. Kouchner it is in the best interests of Syrians that they to bomb themselves into the medieval age, implement medieval social systems, deny education to all and impose barbaric medieval punishments (i.e. various kinds of dismemberment) instead of the Secular entente of the Assad government that allowed everyone to live at peace with each other and have the right to pursue free higher education.
Kouchner is sooo pure of heart.
@Observer
thank you, I shall add a few lines
@cardinal points
Thank you for correcting me and sorry to frighten you. What a legacy he has, people get worried if two alphabets “ex” are missing from his title. He must have been so, how to put it, “embarrassing” for lack of a better word.
mindfriedo
@Nora
Regarding Turkey and Jordan
Both of them are playing with fire. Turkey is benefitting financially and this has blinded it. Jordanians are probably genuinely sympathetic to the Sunnis across the border. The regime has a mistaken belief that the Jihadis are something it will be able to control. But there has to be something behind this belief. They must be pulling the strings now to be sure that they can manipulate the future. They must have faith in their armed forces, both Jordan and Turkey that any backlash will be contained.
Turkey and the Kurds
Both are playing a momentary game. The Turks till the oil is rolling, let it roll. The Kurds are very patient. They guess they can work with Syria and Iraq now, and grab the Iranian and Turkish parts later.
Jordan:
There is a very good book on the formation of Israel by a French author. An old one but it covers it all. I’ll send you the name once I find it. Read it a while back. It talks about Glubb Pasha and the Arab legion. How back then the British officers refused to lead the legion beyond a point against Israel. Something similar to what happened in Mosul. King Abdullah relies on his Arab legion. He may be a satrap, but he’s still better than the Saud family. Or maybe not having oil has kept him sane.
Sykes-Picot
The result now would not be a greater Syria, but a greater caliphate. A future Sunni state (proper state) surrounded by a thin perimeter of Shias all around does not appear stable at all. Like a ticking bomb for Saudi to keep igniting.
answered your last question in today’s SITREP
Mindfriedo