Iraqi and Kurdish officials have met to plan the long-delayed Battle of Mosul, an effort to push ISIS out of the city they have been using as their base of operations in Iraq.

According to a report from the Kurdish Rudaw news agency, the meetings have included Kurdistan regional president Masoud Barzani, Iraqi President Fuad Masoum, and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, along with Mosul’s governor-in-exile Naufal Hamadi and Kurdish military officials.

“Upon the request of Naufal Hamadi, a delegation from the Nineveh provincial council visited the Kurdistan region for a meeting between Barzani and the new Mosul governor. [Barzani] expressed his fully support to the new Mosul governor and military plans to liberate Mosul,” announced Saido Shingali, an official from the Nineveh provincial council.

According to Shingali, Barzani told the Council, “Mosul is the second largest city in Iraq and has a long border with Kurdistan. We will coordinate with you and help you as much as we can.”

Iraqi and Kurdish officials are supposed to be setting a “zero hour” for the beginning of the Mosul campaign, although they have not announced a timeframe yet. There was much talk about a joint U.S.-Iraqi push to retake Mosul last summer, but it never happened. It is interesting that the Rudaw report does not mention any consultation with U.S. officials or military commanders.

On Tuesday, Kurdistan-based BasNews quoted a Shiite militia commander, Kareem al-Nouri, calling for cooperation between his group and the Kurdish Peshmerga to liberate Mosul. He was dismissive of the Iraqi National Guard, claiming the Shiite and Kurdish militias were the only effective fighting forces in the region.

Nouri accused the United States of delaying operations in Anbar province because “Washington wants the glory of liberating Anbar alone,” although he also conceded that the large number of civilians trapped in ISIS-held areas made military operations “more complicated.”

Another complication in Mosul is the return of hundreds of pilgrims from the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. As the Associated Press reported on Thursday, the Islamic State seized the deeds to their homes before allowing them to leave, as insurance they would return to the captive city.

However, nearly 600 elderly pilgrims have been blocked from returning by Iraqi and Kurdish authorities, and left “squatting at a dusty, fly-infested mosque” for the past week, “with little food or medicine, and mounting fears for the fate of their families in Mosul and for their homes if they don’t return.” People below the age of 60 were not allowed to leave ISIS-held territory by the government in Baghdad.

The AP report says that no clear reason for their detention was given to the returning pilgrims, but some of them believe they were prevented from returning to Mosul because a military operation to retake the city is imminent.

They described their treatment by the Iraqi government as “inhumane,” while expressing weary acceptance of the ISIS presence in Mosul. “If we don’t bother them, they don’t bother us,” one pilgrim said.

breitbart.com

The recent announcement of the successful test-firing of a new long-range Iranian missile represents a challenge to the US by the Islamic Republic, which has found Washington willing to “bend over backwards” to justify Tehran’s loose interpretation of restrictions on its nuclear program, a senior Israeli arms control expert warns.

Dr. Emily Landau, head of the Arms Control and Regional Security Program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, spoke out on Wednesday after Iran tested its Imad surface-to-surface missile, which has a reported range of 1,700 kilometers, a warhead weighing 750 kilograms, and an accuracy range of 500 kilometers.

On Sunday, Iran announced the successful test of the domestically made Imad missile.

“This is Iran’s first long-range missile that can be guided and controlled until hitting the target,” Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan was quoted as saying, according to an AFP report.

Landau said the Imad “is a leap in terms of its precision, and it is capable of carrying a nuclear payload.

“Iran is testing the waters in order to establish and ensure rules of the game for its future activities – like inspections at its military facilities, and its presence in Syria,” she said. It has found a compliant US, willing to accept its interpretations, she argued.

“The Imad missile test has immediate and very significant implications, as a test case for implementation of the recently concluded Iran nuclear deal,” Landau said. “It goes directly to problematic ambiguity and confusion that has been built into the nuclear deal.”

Specifically, the test exposes the problematic relationship between the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action and United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorses the Iran deal, but is not identical to it.

Under the UN resolution, “Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology, until the date eight years after the JCPOA Adoption Day or until the date on which the IAEA submits a report confirming the Broader Conclusion, whichever is earlier,” Landau said.

“In order to justify the test, Iran is focusing on the words ‘designed to be capable,’ claiming that the missile is designed for defensive needs, and that Iran has no nuclear intentions.

The US administration doesn’t seem to be buying that nuance, but the Obama administration is nevertheless trying to mitigate the dangerous implications of the Iranian test by insisting that there is a clear distinction between the JCPOA and UNSC resolutions,” she added.

By differentiating between the two, Washington “is hinging its lack of political will to confront Iran by saying that while Iran might be violating UN commitments – and it has done so often in the past – it is upholding the nuclear arrangements. So what do we learn? That UNSC resolutions don’t really matter, nor does Iran’s clear record of violating these resolutions, including on a crucial issue such as the delivery system for a nuclear weapon,” Landau said.

“Moreover, the messiness of the situation whereby the JCPOA and UNSC Resolution 2231 – which is supposed to endorse the deal – are not in sync on such a crucial issue is puzzling to say the least. The lack of compatibility is opening the way for Iran’s dangerous interpretations,” the defense analyst cautioned.

“So what we are seeing is Iran taking immediate steps to test its interpretations, to see what will be acceptable, just as we saw in August-September with regard to inspections at the military facility Parchin. Unfortunately, what Iran is seeing is that not only is the US not challenging Iran on its interpretations, but the Obama administration is actually bending over backwards in order to provide explanations that justify these interpretations. We are thus already learning a lot about the degree of political will that we can expect from the P5+1 [nations] as far as ensuring that Iran meets its commitments according to the JCPOA. What we see is anything but encouraging.

This pattern is likely to continue with other aspects of Iran’s program – wherever room for interpretation has been built into the deal,” she added.

jpost.com

apa.az

This is the shocking moment ISIS fighters training a six-year-old jihadi shoot at him with an AK47 while he crawls under barbed wire.

Footage believed to have been taken in Iraq or Syria shows the tiny child crawling through the dust under the sharp wire before a bullet kicks up the dust inches in front of him.

The terrified youngster cries out but carries on scrambling along the ground as a second gunshot kicks up the dust around him. 

Iraqi forces battled the Islamic State jihadist group on separate fronts Thursday, ramping up operations to retake Baiji and Ramadi, two of the conflict’s worst flashpoints.

The Baiji area has seen almost uninterrupted fighting since IS swept across Iraq last year, but top officers said Thursday that the Baiji refinery, the country’s largest, was almost secure.

There were contradictory statements from the armed forces and the allied paramilitary Popular Mobilisation (Hashed al-Shaabi) on whether or not the refinery had been fully retaken.

Senior commanders said it had been “completely cleared” but the Joint Operations Command said late Wednesday that the sprawling complex had not yet been extensively swept by Iraqi forces.

The refinery itself, which once produced 300,000 barrels per day of refined products — meeting half of Iraq’s needs, is said to have been damaged beyond repair and no longer of huge strategic interest.

Russia’s defence ministry said that its forces in Syria had set up a “hotline” with Israel’s military to avoid clashes in the sky over the war-torn country.

“Mutual information-sharing on the actions of aircraft has been established through a hotline between the Russian aviation command centre at the Hmeimim air base and a command post of the Israeli air force,” ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency, adding that the two sides were undergoing training on how to cooperate.

Cuban security forces reportedly arrived recently in Syria to assist the regime of President Bashar Assad against rebels in his country’s four-year-long civil war.

Special forces and paramilitary troops from Cuba are currently present in Syria, a US official told Fox News on Wednesday, citing information from intelligence reports.

The security forces may have undergone training in Russia and could have arrived in Syria on Russian planes, he added.

Cuba and Russia maintain close ties that date back to the Cold War.

Russia stepped up its involvement in the Syrian civil war when it began carrying out air strikes two weeks ago to bolster Assad in the face of the widespread insurgency across the country.

Russia claims that it is targeting Islamic State insurgents, but the United States, which is also conducting an air campaign in Syria, has said that Moscow’s campaign has mainly targeted other insurgent groups, including those that have fought Islamic State. Russia has denied the allegation.

Syria’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that Europe was trying to misrepresent the Russian intervention, which it said had “demonstrated the credibility and determination of the Russian and Syrian leadership to combat terrorism.”

A ministry source quoted by state media said the Russian campaign came in response to a formal Syrian request – unlike air strikes carried out by the US-led coalition – “and these joint efforts will find the appropriate circumstances to launch the political path to solve the crisis in Syria.”

The Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad (Tomorrow) is reporting that the commander of the Jerusalem Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards has been spotted near Latakia, urging on a volunteer militia of Alawite Shiites.

The report comes as AP says it was told by a senior Western official that 1500 Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) troops have assembled in Syria for the campaign to link Hama and Latakia to the northern metropolis of Aleppo.  A wave of Shiite Hizbullah fighters from Lebanon has also gone to the front just north of Hama.

Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s special operations forces, appears to have been urging on an Alawite militia, which may be preparing to join a Syrian Arab Army attack on Jisr al-Shughour.  This town in the Ghab valley lies between Latakia and Idlib city, the capital of the province of the same name.

The Army of Conquest, a coalition of hard line Salafis that includes al-Qaeda in Syria, took Jisr al-Shughour recently, from which it can menace the Alawites of Latakia to the west.  Jisr al-Shughour had some 44,000 residents before 2011, most of them conservative Sunnis.  Many of them fled the town while it was under the control of the Syrian Arab Army.

Qatar-backed London daily, Al-Arabi al-Jadid , also alleged Iranian troops in Syria, though it says many of them are actually Afghans living in eastern Iran, having been displaced by the Afghanistan wars.  At one point there were two million Afghan refugees and guest workers in Iran, most of them Tajiks or Hazaras. The paper says that as of last summer some 400 Iranian fighters had been killed in Syria.

The recent advances of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) and allies in Idlib province just east of the port of Latakia alarmed Iran and Russia and led to the current round of fighting.  The Syrian Arab Army, the Russian Air Force, Hizbullah and a demi-brigade of the IRGC are attempting to clear rebels from the areas north of Hama and extending up to Jisr al-Shaghour, as a way a recovering territory the regime lost to the rebels last spring and through this summer.

truthdig.com

“The rapprochment of positions on key elements of the future document has been recognised”, reads a report of the Russian Ministry of Defense at the end of the third round of videoconference talks. “The succession of the next steps by the parties – states the note – has been agreed. The discussion was held, as the preceding ones, in a professional manner and in a constructive atmosphere”.

The US Pentagon, quoted by the BBC, confirmed “progress” in the talks with Russia on security in Syrian skies.

“The parties are finalising the text of the agreement” writes the British broadcasting company, quoting US sources.

The two powers are therefore aiming to prevent accidental attacks between the two air-forces: a possibility Russians and Americans fear after the red flag jets and the stars and stripes ones made “visual contact” 15-30 kilometers away; episodes which have been characterised as dangerous.

Last Saturday – said the spokesperson for the Us armed forces, Steve Warren – two American planes and two Russian ones “entered the same battle zone”. The Russian ministry of Defense admitted that Saturday a Russian jet Su-30 Sm got close to an American one at a distance of 2-3 kilometers, but assured it had done so not “to scare anybody” but to identify the other plane which had been signalled to the pilot by his flight instruments and anyway, stressed the Russians “this was not the first episode of this kind”. Better to clarify things then also after recent vioations of the Turkish air-space by Russia denounced both by NATO and Ankara.

Tensions between Moscow and Washington have not abated.

On September 30, Putin sent fighter jets to Syria to hit Isis and other terrorist groups but the West is accusing the Kremlin of intervening militarily to lend a hand to Assad and of targeting the Syrian opposition supported by the US, also killing civilians.

To complicate matters, Washington has said no to a Russian proposal to hold a summit in Moscow on the Syrian situation and also refused to receive “in Washington a high delegation headed by Russian Premier Dmitri Medvedev”, thundered Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Lavrov also lambasted the US refusal to support a Security Council resolution to denounce as a terrorist attack yesterday’s attack against the Russian embassy in Damascus where two mortars fell inside the Russian diplomatic representation while hundreds of Assad supporters demonstrated in favour of Moscow’s raids.

No one was killed but according to media reports some people were injured