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U.S.-Led Coalition Troops Seen Near Front Line In New Iraq Offensive

U.S.-Led Coalition Troops Seen Near Front Line In New Iraq Offensive

By Isabel Coles

HASSAN SHAMI, Iraq (Reuters) – Servicemen from the U.S.-led coalition were seen near the front line of a new offensive in northern Iraq launched on Sunday by Kurdish peshmerga forces that aims to retake a handful of villages from Islamic State east of their Mosul stronghold.

A Reuters correspondent saw the soldiers loading armored vehicles outside the village of Hassan Shami, a few miles east of the frontline. They told people present not to take photographs.

They spoke in English but their nationality was not clear. Reuters had earlier reported that they were American but this could not be confirmed officially.

Commenting on the ground deployment of coalition soldiers seen near the battle front, Baghdad-based spokesman for then coalition, U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, said: “U.S. and coalition forces are conducting advise and assist operations to help Kurdish Peshmerga forces”.

He said he could not confirm which country those seen by Reuters were from.

“They may be Americans, they may be Canadians or from other nationalities,” he said, when told that some forces were reported to be wearing maple leaf patches, the emblem of Canada.

The sighting of the servicemen near the frontline is a measure of the U.S.-led coalition’s deepening involvement on the ground in Iraq as the war against Islamic State approaches its third year.

Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the early hours of Sunday launched an attack to dislodge Islamic State fighters from villages located about 20 km (13 miles) east of Mosul on the road to the regional capital, Erbil.

Fighting appeared heavy. Pick up trucks raced back from the frontline with wounded people in the back, and two of the U.S.-led coalition servicemen helped haul one man onto a stretcher.

Gunfire and airstrikes could be heard at a distance, while Apache helicopters flew overhead. One of the villages, Mufti, was captured by mid-day, the Kurdistan Region Security Council said in a statement.

Mosul, with a pre-war population of about 2 million, is the largest city under control of the militants in both Iraq and Syria. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the end of last year expressed hope that the “final victory” in the war on Islamic State would come in 2016 with the capture of Mosul.

About 5,500 Peshmergas are taking part in Sunday’s operation, said the Kurdish Region Security council.

“This is one of the many shaping operations expected to increase pressure on ISIL in and around Mosul in preparation for an eventual assault on the city,” the council said.

The Peshmerga have driven the militants back in northern Iraq last year with the help of airstrikes from a U.S.-led coalition, and are positioned around Mosul in an arc running from northwest of the city to southeast.

The Iraqi army is also keeping up the pressure on Islamic State in their stronghold of Falluja, 50 kilometers (32 miles) west of Baghdad, in central Iraq.

Backed by Shi’ite militias on the ground and airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition, the army is about to complete the encirclement of the city in an operation that started on May 23, state TV said Sunday citing military statements.

Counter-terrorism forces specialized in urban warfare have taken up positions around Falluja and should begin advancing in inside the city when the encirclement is complete, the TV said.
Reporting by Isabel Coles, Writing by Maher Chmaytelli, Editing by Angus MacSwan

Photo: Kurdish Peshmerga forces keep watch in a village east of Mosul, Iraq, May 29, 2016.  REUTERS/Azad Lashkari

Ukraine’s Europe-Leaning Leaders Prepare To Form Coalition After Vote

Ukraine’s Europe-Leaning Leaders Prepare To Form Coalition After Vote

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

KIEV, Ukraine — Political leaders who won strong voter endorsement for their pledges of reform and closer ties with Western Europe began work Monday on forming a parliamentary coalition to deliver on those promises. Russian officials grudgingly said they would accept the results of Sunday’s elections for Ukraine’s Supreme Council that will give a trio of pro-Europe parties a majority and the power to steer their troubled nation into the West’s democratic fold.

With most of the vote counted late Monday, political movements headed by President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, and a new alliance of young activists had at least 54 percent of the vote locked up for their expected coalition.

Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose Fatherland Party placed sixth with 5.7 percent, has also promised to join forces with the Europe-leaning leaders.

Even as it demonstrated Ukrainians’ commitment to fight the endemic corruption that has placed their country on par with Nigeria, the decisive pro-Europe vote also was likely to further agitate Russian President Vladimir Putin and his proxies in eastern Ukraine who have been rebelling against governance from Kiev.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the vote could help focus Ukrainian leaders on “the real problems” they face instead of “swinging to the East or West,” according to an interview carried by Russia’s LifeNews television. Russia is pleased that Ukraine now has a government “that’s not fighting itself” and can concentrate on restoring unity to the country, Lavrov said.

Lavrov’s deputy, Grigory Karasin, was less sanguine on the election outcome.

“We are waiting for the official results while there is rather contradictory data,” Karasin told the Interfax news agency. “But it is already clear that, despite the rude and dirty campaigning, the elections took place.”

Separatist gunmen backed by Russia control significant areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. They blocked voting in their territory on Sunday, as did the new Russian government in Crimea, the military stronghold seized and annexed by Moscow this year. That has served to further diminish the voice that pro-Russia eastern politicians had in Ukraine’s political affairs before the ouster in February of Kremlin-allied President Viktor Yanukovich.

Poroshenko praised Ukrainians for their endorsement of his reform course and the country’s goal to eventually secure membership in the European Union.

“For the first time in the history of Ukraine, the ruling parties gained more than 50 percent of votes. It is impressive,” he said in a statement posted on the presidential website. “It is a vote of trust the Ukrainian people gave to the political parties to immediately begin the process of reforms.”

Poroshenko Bloc leader Yuriy Lutsenko told journalists that the faction was already in talks with the parties sharing the president’s priorities of restoring peace in the embattled eastern regions and cleaning up the country’s finances and reputation.

The tumultuous events of the last 11 months left Yanukovich’s Party of Regions in disarray. Some politicians of the former ruling party ran under a new pro-Russia alliance called the Opposition Bloc, which won about 10 percent of Sunday’s vote. But the Communist Party, their allies in the quest to retain and even strengthen economic and political collaboration with Russia, failed to get enough votes in the balloting for party slates and, for the first time in modern Ukrainian history, will not be represented in the legislature.

The Kiev government’s inability to open polling places for at least 4 million registered voters was among the failings of balloting carried out amid civil war and economic disaster, according to election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But the observers said the vote was overall fair and legitimate.

Political analysts say they recognize the risk of a unified turn westward further antagonizing the Kremlin, which has insisted on Eastern Europe remaining in Moscow’s political orbit. But they insist that the course toward Western Europe is Ukraine’s to define, not Russia’s, and that Putin will have to come to some accommodation with Kiev to provide for Russians in Crimea and Ukraine’s east.

“I don’t see how relations between our states can be worse when we are already at war,” said historian and Ukraine Voters Committee Chairman Oleksiy Koshel.

He said Moscow’s plan to build a bridge from mainland Russia to the Crimean peninsula across the tempestuous Kerch Strait to create a supply line would be expensive, time-consuming and unreliable. Pragmatism, Koshel said, will compel Putin to agree to scrap the bridge project in exchange for Ukraine supplying electricity, drinking water and heating fuel to a Crimea region at least nominally within the Ukrainian state.

That would be a face-saving way of providing for the largely Russian community in Crimea and sparing Moscow billions in investment that would only add to Russia’s economic woes amid Western sanctions and falling oil prices, Koshel said.

Russian provocations in the east have decreased since a European-brokered Sept. 5 cease-fire, but they have not ended, and a swift surge in shelling of government positions on the eastern front was noted immediately after the elections, said Col. Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

AFP Photo/Genya Savilov

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Obama Admits U.S. Underestimated IS, As Air Strikes Intensify

Obama Admits U.S. Underestimated IS, As Air Strikes Intensify

Damascus (AFP) — President Barack Obama admitted Sunday that the United States underestimated the threat posed by Islamic State fighters in Syria, as U.S.-led coalition warplanes pounded the oil sites that fund the jihadist group.

Late Sunday coalition planes hit the entrance to the country’s main gas plant, in an apparent warning to Islamic State militants to abandon the premises under their control, a monitor said.

“The international coalition has for the first time struck the entrance and prayer area of the Coneco gas plant. It is under IS control, and is the largest in Syria,” said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Up until Sunday, the strikes had targeted mainly jihadist bases and makeshift oil refineries used by the militants, in a bid to weaken one of their main sources of financing.

Speaking to CBS News, Obama said that former Al-Qaeda fighters driven from Iraq by U.S. and local forces had been able to gather in Syria to form the newly dangerous Islamic State group.

“I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said, referring to his director of national intelligence.

Asked whether Washington had also overestimated the ability or will of Iraq’s U.S.-trained military to fight the jihadists on its own, Obama said: “That’s true. That’s absolutely true.”

U.S.-led coalition planes pounded oil sites in Syria Sunday that fund the IS group, as Syria’s Al-Qaeda branch warned that people in Europe and America would pay the price.

The United States, along with coalition partners Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, targeted four modular refineries and an IS command and control post, all north of Raqa in Syria, U.S. Central Command said.

“Initial indications are that they (the strikes) were successful,” it said.

In his first speech since air raids were launched on Syria, the head of the Al-Qaeda affiliate there, Al-Nusra Front, warned of reprisals.

“Your leaders will not pay the price for the war alone, you will pay the higher price,” Abu Mohammad al-Jolani said in an Internet audio message, addressing “people of America and Europe”.

Failure to stop these air strikes “will transfer the battle to your very homes”, he said.

Washington has said it would press on with “near continuous” strikes, and the latest raids were part of intensifying efforts to disrupt the group’s lucrative oil-pumping and smuggling operations.

The jihadists control a swathe of territory straddling northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria, home to most of Syria’s main oilfields, and their oil infrastructure is the main target of the air strikes.

Experts say the jihadists were earning as much as $3 million (2.4 million euros) daily from oil before the coalition began launching strikes on Syria, building on the air war under way against IS in Iraq since August 8.

Sunday’s strikes hit close to the Turkish frontier, near Tal Abyad, said the Syrian rights observatory, destroying “at least three makeshift refineries under IS control”.

Coalition warplanes also hit the jihadist heartland province of Raqa early Sunday and the raids destroyed a plastics factory outside Raqa city, killing one civilian, the Britain-based Observatory said.

The Pentagon said U.S.-led air strikes in Iraq near insurgent-held Fallujah on Sunday destroyed two IS checkpoints.

– British fighter jets ready –

In western Iraq, pro-government forces backed by warplanes repelled an IS attack on the strategic town of Amriyat al-Fallujah, security sources said.

“Warplanes eventually engaged the insurgents and killed 15 of them,” local police chief Aref al-Janabi said, without identifying the aircraft.

The town “has strategic importance. It is a main logistics road for the army and it is the link between Anbar and Karbala”, a Shiite holy city south of Baghdad, Janabi said.

Several European governments have approved plans to join the air campaign in Iraq, including most recently Britain, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday Ankara “cannot stay” out of the fight.

British warplanes flew their first combat mission over Iraq on Saturday but returned to base in Cyprus with their bombs after no targets were identified.

European governments have resisted joining the air campaign in Syria for fear of becoming embroiled in that country’s more than three-year-old civil war, forcing Washington to rely on Arab allies.

– Al-Nusra threat –

At least 57 Al-Nusra fighters have been killed in the air campaign, the Observatory said.

Washington has made a distinction between the wider Al-Nusra Front and a cell of foreign fighters dubbed the Khorasan Group that it says was plotting attacks against the United States.

Muhsin al-Fadhli, a long-standing Al-Qaeda operative and alleged Khorasan leader, was reportedly among those killed.

The allies had “committed a horrible act that is going to put them on the list of jihadist targets throughout the world,” Al-Nusra spokesman Abu Firas al-Suri warned in an online video message on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Kurdish fighters from northern Iraq have begun training in Germany on handling weaponry supplied by Berlin to support the battle against IS.

AFP Photo/Senior Airman Matthew Bruch

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U.S. Can’t Confirm Death Of Khorasan Group Leader: Rice

U.S. Can’t Confirm Death Of Khorasan Group Leader: Rice

Washington (AFP) — U.S. airstrikes in Syria have had an “important impact,” U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice said Wednesday, but it is unclear if they have killed the head of the Khorasan group, an Al-Qaeda offshoot.

The strikes by U.S. warplanes and cruise missiles targeted the Islamic State movement as well as the little-known Khorasan group, which Washington said has said was plotting attacks against U.S. targets.

“We think the strikes had an impact, important impact,” Rice told NBC news, 36 hours after Washington expanded its bombing campaign from Iraq to Syria, backed by allies in the region.

“Obviously, this won’t be the last of our efforts. But this was a first wave.”

She added: “We feel very good about our success. We’ll continue to take a look and we’ll be doing more.”

Rice said the United States at this point is unable to confirm that the airstrikes succeeded in killing Khorasan’s alleged leader, long-standing Qaeda operative Muhsin al-Fadhli.

“We can’t confirm that at this stage. We’ve seen reports on social media to that effect. We will continue to look for signs as to whether or not that’s, in fact, the case,” Rice told NBC.

The coalition aims to destroy the Islamic State group, which controls a swath of territory in Iraq and Syria, has murdered two U.S. journalists and a British aid worker and is locked in a brutal war with Iraqi and Kurdish authorities.

AFP Photo/Wang Zhao

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