Tag: iraq

Dick Cheney’s Legacy Is One of Brutal Carnage

On March 15, 2006, the United States was nearly three years into its second Iraq war. After over a decade of brutal sanctions and continuous bombing, in spring 2003, the US had launched a full-scale invasion of the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation. The invasion was a flagrant violation of international law. After toppling Iraq’s Ba’athist government, a former on-again, off-again ally of Washington, the United States and its allies began a protracted military occupation of Iraq. The neocolonial affair was particularly brutal. Such is the nature of seeking to impose your presence by military force on a people who do not wish it and are willing to use force to oppose it.

That day, March 15, soldiers approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, an Iraqi farmer . Allegedly they were looking for an individual believed to be responsible for the deaths of two US soldiers and a facilitator for al-Qaeda recruitment in Iraq. In the version told by US troops, someone from the house fired on the approaching soldiers, prompting a twenty-five-minute confrontation. Eventually the soldiers entered the house, killing all of the residents.

This included not just Al-Majma’ee, but his wife; his three children, Hawra’a, Aisha, and Husam, who were between the ages of five months and five years old; his seventy-four-year-old mother, Turkiya Majeed Ali; and two nieces, Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf, who were five and three years old. An autopsy performed on the deceased “revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.” After slaughtering the family execution style, US soldiers called in an air strike, destroying the house. The presumed reason for the bombardment was to cover up evidence of the extrajudicial killings.

Keep reading

State Department Says US Is Not Withdrawing from Iraq

A US State Department spokesperson told Shafaq News on Wednesday that the US is not withdrawing from Iraq but shifting its military role to a “bilateral relationship” under a deal that will end the mission of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition in the country.

The official made the comment in response to Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani saying that Baghdad will only disarm the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a group of mostly Shia militias, including some that are aligned with Iran, once the US-led coalition leaves Iraq.

The Trump administration has been demanding that Iraq disarm the PMF, which was formed in 2014 to fight ISIS and is considered part of Iraq’s security forces. The State Department official speaking to Shafaq said Iraq must dismantle the “Iran-backed militias” and accused the groups of engaging in “violent and destabilizing activities in Iraq.”

“Their actions drain the country’s resources and act against its national interests,” the spokesperson said. Referring to the US plans for its military presence in Iraq, the spokesperson said, “This is not a withdrawal. It is a shift toward a more traditional bilateral relationship in the areas of security and diplomacy.”

Last year, the US and Iraq signed a deal that would end the mission of the US-led coalition in Iraq by September 2026, but at the time of the signing, the Biden administration said that the US was “not withdrawing from Iraq.”

The US has recently withdrawn some military personnel from the country, but the War Department has said fewer than 2,000 US troops will remain. The US is keeping troops at the Ain al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq, at the Erbil Air Base in Iraqi Kurdistan, and a small number of advisors will remain in Baghdad.

Keep reading

Ex-ISIS Envoy Who Killed Americans In Iraq To Be Hosted At White House This Month

President Donald Trump is set to host Syria’s self-appointed interim leader later this month for talks in Washington, marking the first ever visit by a Syrian head of state to the US capitol. Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who once fought alongside foreign fighters while killing American soldiers in Iraq, will enjoy his red carpet reception in Washington on November 10.

This will also mark the first time a former ISIS member will be hosted in the Oval Office, an absurdity which would have been hard to believe a mere decade ago. But the US-Saudi-Israel axis reached its regime change goal in Damascus, which overthrew the secular Arab nationalist leader Bashar al-Assad, which resulted in the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) taking over.

The HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who was even earlier this year still on the US terrorism list, quickly reverted to his birth name of Ahmed al-Sharaa. The US had promptly removed the $10 million bounty on his head just before President Trump met with him in Riyadh last May.

“President Ahmed al-Sharaa will be at the White House at the start of November,” Syria’s foreign minister said in speech in Bahrain. “Of course, this is a historic visit. It is the first visit by a Syrian president to the White House in more than 80 years.”

“There will be many issues on the table, starting with the lifting of sanctions and opening of a new chapter between the United States and Syria. We want to establish a very strong partnership between the two countries.”

One area of proposed cooperation is in fighting terrorism, ironically enough, and the US and Syria under Jolani are expected to sign an agreement joining a US-led international coalition against ISIS during the visit, which is somewhat laughable given ISIS patches have recently been seen among HTS ranks.

Keep reading

Pentagon Confirms US Troops Will Stay in Iraq After Drawdown

The US Department of War has confirmed that US troops will remain in Iraq indefinitely under a deal signed with the Iraqi government last year that called for an end to the US-led anti-ISIS mission in the country.

According to Stars & Stripes, a senior Pentagon official has said that the US is slightly reducing its troop presence, bringing the total number of US military personnel from 2,500 to under 2,000. The majority of the remaining troops will be based in Erbil in the northern Kurdistan region.

The War Department official said that US troops were in the process of leaving the Al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq. The US will be keeping some military personnel in Baghdad who will be tasked with “bilateral security cooperation.”

While the US is keeping troops in Iraq, the official claimed that the drawdown was ending the “forever war” in the country. “First, we’re ending the forever war in Iraq,” the official said.

“Second, we’re shifting the burden of responsibility for combating ISIS in Iraq, from US and coalition forces to our Iraqi partners. We’ve trained them for a decade and they have the capability to counter ISIS and they have the will. And third, high credit to the Iraqis themselves,” the official added.

The Pentagon is also consolidating its presence in neighboring Syria, where it plans to reduce troop numbers to under 1,000. It has closed some bases in northeastern Syria, handing them over to the US-backed Kurdish-led SDF. The majority of the US troops in Syria are expected to be based at al-Tanf Garrison in the south, which is situated where the borders of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan converge.

Keep reading

Tulsi Gabbard Reveals Deep State Operative James Clapper’s Russia Hoax Wasn’t His First Intel Scam — He “Manufactured” the WMD Lie That Led to the Iraq War

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accused former Obama DNI James Clapper of being a serial political manipulator, exposing that the Russia Collusion Hoax wasn’t his first rodeo in deception.

Gabbard unloaded on disgraced former DNI James Clapper during her appearance on the Pod Force One podcast with Miranda Devine of the New York Post.

Gabbard is accusing the longtime Deep State operator of not one, but TWO of the most catastrophic intelligence failures in modern American history, the phony Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) narrative that dragged the U.S. into a forever war in Iraq, AND the sham “Russia Collusion” hoax used to undermine President Donald Trump.

The “Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) narrative” refers to the false claims made by the U.S. government primarily under President George W. Bush and his administration that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq possessed active WMD programs, including chemical, biological, and potentially nuclear weapons.

Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were central in pushing the WMD case.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell famously presented the WMD case before the United Nations in February 2003, using satellite photos and intercepts that later turned out to be deeply flawed or outright false.

At the time, Clapper was the Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), responsible for analyzing satellite imagery and other geospatial intelligence. The NGA’s assessments of potential Iraqi WMD sites contributed to the overall intelligence community’s conclusion that Iraq had such weapons.

Clapper later conceded that the intelligence community’s assessment was wrong, describing it as building “a house of cards” based on faulty assumptions that ultimately led to the conclusion that WMD were present when they weren’t. 

“My fingerprints are on the infamous national intelligence assessment of October 2002,” he said during a 2018 event promoting his book Facts and Fears at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium.

“[The intelligence community] built a case in our own minds, a house of cards it turned out that led us to the conclusion with pretty high confidence that they were there, and it turns out they weren’t,” he added.

“It represented closure for the country and closure for the intelligence community and certainly personal closure. It was certainly a profound event, and I will never forget it,” he said.

Keep reading

Muslim Migrants Found NOT GUILTY of Attempted “Honor Killing” Despite Being Caught on Tape Violently Assaulting Daughter Allegedly For Not Wanting to Marry Older Muslim Man

A stunning verdict was reached earlier this week in the case of two Muslim immigrants living in Washington State who stood accused of one of the most unimaginable crimes.

As Fox 13 reported, both the mother and father were found not guilty on Thursday of attempting an “honor killing” of their 17-year-old daughter. Back in October, they were accused of trying to murder their daughter after she refused to go to their native Iraq and marry an older man.

A jury in Lacey, Washington found 44-year-old Ihsan Ali, the victim’s dad, not guilty of second-degree attempted murder and first-degree assault. Instead, they found him guilty of second-degree and fourth-degree assault and unlawful imprisonment.

The victim’s mom, 40-year-old Zahraa Ali, was found guilty of violating a protective order but acquitted of second-degree attempted murder, second-degree assault, and second-degree burglary.

Keep reading

Low IQ Jasmine Crockett Says USAID Is Vital To Fund Sesame Street In Iraq… Or Something

Idiocracy-a-like Democrat Jasmine Crockett argued during a hearing that USAID, the slush fund decimated by DOGE, is desperately needed in order to fund US propaganda in places like Iraq to ensure Islamists there don’t become radicalised against America.

Yes, really.

Crockett claimed that past programs including a version of Sesame Street that was made for Iraq are vital to national security, suggesting “This is so that there is not this warped thought process about the Western world.”

What in God’s name is she on about?

Keep reading

Drone Attack Shuts Down Oil Field Run by US Company in Iraqi Kurdistan

A drone attack in Iraqi Kurdistan on Tuesday suspended operations at an oil field operated by a US company, marking the latest in a series of attacks in the region.

HKN Energy, the US firm operating the Sarsang oil field, reported an explosion at 7:00 am local time, followed by a fire. “Operations at the affected facility have been suspended until the site is secured,” the company said.

Workers at the oil field told Rudaw that it was targeted by a drone, and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) denounced the attack as “an act of terrorism against the Kurdistan Region’s vital economic infrastructure.” The US Embassy in Iraq also denounced the attack.

A day earlier, two drones targeted a different oil field in the area, and another was intercepted at the Erbil airport, which houses US troops. The airport has come under attack several times in recent weeks, and so far, there have been no casualties.

No group has taken responsibility for the spate of drone attacks. The KRG has blamed the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a coalition of Iraqi Shia militias that are part of the Iraqi government’s security forces, but Baghdad has denied the accusation.

PMF-affiliated militias have been responsible for previous drone and rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria, including the more than 100 attacks that occurred in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, as groups were targeting the US over its support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. The attacks were claimed by a PMF-affiliated group that calls itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

Those attacks culminated in the January 2024 attack on Tower 22, a secretive US base in Jordan near the Syrian border, which killed three US Army Reserve soldiers and wounded dozens of National Guard members. The US launched major airstrikes against the PMF in response, killing 40 people, and assassinated a high-level commander in Kataib Hezbollah, one of the main Iran-aligned militias.

Keep reading

The Day I Found Out The Gulf War Was Fake

The morning after the 2020 election was stolen was a seminal moment in my life. I remember it very clearly — the emotions, the feeling of betrayal, the determination to fix my country’s problems.

However, last night I listened to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Scott Horton, a journalist who conducted a deep dive into the reasons for the recent decade’s forever wars.

Something changed inside me after listening last night.

I separated from the United States Air Force in 1994, after graduating from USAFA, and flying special operations helicopters.

The Gulf War was my era, my colleagues, my generation. It defined who we were as a military force.

Last night, I learned the entire justification for The Gulf War was fake.

I remember thinking back then that something was off about George H. W. Bush’s — “This will not stand…” — but I put it aside, and loved my country, trusted its leaders.

I knew personally many of the heroes of that war. Many of them died.

The honor, courage and sacrifice they exuded will not be matched.

Keep reading

FOIA Crack Opens: ‘Mosul Orb’ UFO Video Finally Goes Public

A four-second clip of the ‘Mosul Orb’ Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) has finally surfaced after investigative journalist Dustin Slaughter won a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and its National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC).

In 2023, journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp released a still image from the four-second video, showing the UAP above the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in 2016, reportedly from a CIA spy plane.

The video was filmed at 9:47 am Coordinated Universal Time on 16 April 2016, according to its timestamp.

During an appearance on Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp’s WEAPONIZED podcast, Slaughter said his 2023 FOIA filing hadn’t singled out the Mosul Orb; instead, he’d submitted a broad request for any UAP-related videos.

After what he described as stonewalling by the USAF and NASIC, Slaughter and his legal team filed suit in 2024.

The footage captures a mysterious sphere gliding right-to-left above Mosul’s rooftops. 

Keep reading