Tag Archives: Iraq

Kerry says ISIS pushed back in Iraq and Syria, but a threat in Libya

 

ROME (Reuters) – An international coalition is pushing back Islamic State militants in their Syrian and Iraqi strongholds, but the group is threatening Libya and could seize the nation’s oil wealth, U.S Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday.

Officials from 23 countries met in Rome to review the fight against Islamic State militants, who have created a self-proclaimed Caliphate across swathes of Syria and Iraq, and are spreading into other countries, notably Libya.

While Western officials worry about the growing threat posed by Islamic State in the former Italian colony, there was no suggestion that foreign powers were preparing to launch a major military offensive against them there for now.

Islamic State forces have attacked Libya’s oil infrastructure and established a foothold in the city of Sirte, exploiting a power vacuum in the North African country where two rival governments have been battling for supremacy.

“That country has resources. The last thing in the world you want is a false caliphate with access to billions of dollars of oil revenue,” Kerry said.

Under a U.N.-backed plan for a political transition, Libya’s two warring administrations are expected to form a unity government, but a month after the deal was agreed in Morocco, its implementation has been dogged by in-fighting.

Kerry said the two sides were “on the brink of getting a government of national unity”. Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said once it was in place, many countries would be prepared to respond to any request for help with security.

However, Kerry said the United States was opposed to deploying any of its ground forces into Libya and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius dismissed media speculation that Paris was poised to intervene in the oil-rich country.

“That is totally inexact,” he told reporters in Rome.

The United States is leading two different coalitions carrying out air strikes in Iraq and Syria that have targeted Islamic State, but the jihadist group has been left largely left untouched in Libya.

“We are still not at the victory that we want to achieve, and will achieve, in either Syria or Iraq and we have seen Daesh playing a game of metastasizing out to other countries, particularly Libya,” Kerry said, using a pejorative Arabic term for Islamic State.

INTERRUPTING ISLAMIC STATE

Defense ministers from the anti-IS group are due to meet in Brussels next week to discuss further options, while Kerry said he expected further consultations with allies at a security conference in Munich, Germany later this month.

While the Islamic State remained undefeated, it had suffered many setbacks, Kerry said, losing 40 percent of the territory it once controlled in Iraq and 20 percent of its lands in Iraq.

“Our advances .. are undeniable. We have launched nearly 10,000 air strikes, we have interrupted their finance mechanisms, they have had to cut the salaries of their fighters, we have interrupted their capacity to get revenues,” Kerry said.

The one-day Rome meeting took place as talks have begun in Geneva to try to end the five-year-old Syrian civil war, which has killed at least 250,000 people, driven more than 10 million from their homes and drawn in the United States and Russia on opposite sides.

While Washington has long said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has lost the legitimacy to lead, it has made clear that its first priority is to try to rein in Islamic State group.

“If you want to beat Daesh quickly, then get a negotiated deal to end the Syria war,” Kerry said.

Tuesday’s meeting also covered stabilizing areas such as the Iraqi city of Tikrit, which has been wrested from the group, as well as broader efforts to undercut its finances, stem the flow of foreign fighters and counter its messaging, officials said.

(Additional Reporting by John Irish in Geneva; Writing by Crispian Balmer and Arshad Mohammed; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Pentagon to hike spending request to fund fight versus Islamic State

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s administration will seek a significant increase in funding for the fight against Islamic State as part of its 2017 defense budget request, U.S. officials say, in another possible sign of U.S. efforts to intensify the campaign.

The fiscal year 2017 Pentagon budget will call for more than $7 billion for the fight against Islamic State, a roughly 35 percent increase compared with the previous year’s request to Congress, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter is due to disclose his spending priorities for the $583 billion 2017 defense budget on Tuesday in an address to the Economic Club of Washington. The White House plans to release Obama’s full budget proposal for fiscal 2017, which begins Oct. 1, on Feb. 9.

Carter in his speech is expected to cite his intent to increase the administration’s request for funds to battle Islamic State, officials say, although it was unclear how much detail he would offer.

He was also expected to touch on other budget priorities, including plans to increase spending to reassure European allies following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, and the need for the United States to maintain its military edge over China and Russia.

Carter’s budget will underscore the need for Washington to fund a new Air Force bomber awarded last year to Northrop Grumman Corp, a replacement for the Ohio-class submarines that carry nuclear weapons, and to start replacing a fleet of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to a source briefed on the plans.

The proposed budget will also seek to boost spending for several key priorities, including increased cybersecurity, electronic warfare and increased security for crucial U.S. satellites, the source said.

Lockheed Martin Corp, maker of the F-35 fighter jet, Boeing Co and other big weapons makers are anxiously awaiting details about the budget and how it will affect their programs.

Senior defense officials have said that $15 billion in cuts required under a two-year budget agreement with Congress last year would largely come from procurement accounts since personnel costs and operations costs were harder to cut.

One official noted that spending on the Islamic State fight was expected to be drawn from the roughly $59 billion Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO, a separate budget that supplements the larger, $524 billion base budget for fiscal year 2017.

Still, key details on the more than $7 billion request were unclear, including whether the funding applied to operations outside Iraq and Syria.

The disclosure about plans for an increased spending request to combat Islamic State came as the Obama administration seeks to intensify its campaign, looking to capitalize on recent battlefield gains against the militants in Iraq.

Carter has called a meeting later this month in Brussels with defense ministers from all 26 military members of the anti-Islamic State coalition, as well as Iraq. He is asking them to come prepared to discuss further contributions to the fight.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Andrea Shalal; Editing by James Dalgleish)

U.S. weighs options to speed Iraq’s fight to retake Mosul

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is willing to deploy Apache attack helicopters and advisers to help Iraq retake the city of Mosul from Islamic State as it considers options to speed up the campaign against the militant group, a top U.S. general said on Monday.

U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, have said they want to accelerate the campaign against Islamic State militants, and have called on allies to increase their military contributions to efforts to destroy the group in Iraq and Syria.

U.S. Army Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, the head of the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said he is looking to retake Mosul as quickly as possible, but did not say whether he agreed with Iraqi estimates that it could be wrested from Islamic State control by the end of this year.

“I don’t want to put a date out there,” MacFarland said. “I would like to get this wrapped up as fast as I possibly can.”

Past steps to speed up the campaign have included the deployment of dozens of U.S. special operations forces in northern Syria, and an elite targeting force to work with Iraqi forces to go after Islamic State targets.

It could also include deployment of more military and police trainers, including from the United States. MacFarland said the U.S.-led coalition has trained more than 17,500 Iraqi soldiers, and about 2,000 police, with another 3,000 soldiers and police in training now.

MacFarland said the proposals he is drawing up do not necessarily require the commitment of more U.S. troops, who have largely stayed away from the front lines of combat. Instead, coalition partners could contribute troops, he said.

“As we extend operations across Iraq and into Syria … there is a good potential that we’ll need additional capabilities, additional forces to provide those capabilities and we’re looking at the right mix,” MacFarland said.

The United States is also ready to send Apache attack helicopters and deploy advisers to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces retake Mosul if requested, MacFarland said. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in December that the United States was ready to send the advisers and helicopters if requested by Iraq to help in the fight to retake Ramadi, but Iraqi officials did not ask for the extra help.

Iraqi forces retook Ramadi, a provincial capital just a short drive west of Baghdad, late last year.

“We can’t inflict help on somebody, they have to ask for it, they have to want it, and we’re here to provide it as required,” MacFarland said. “Everything that the secretary said is really still on the table.”

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Coalition now training brigades that will fight ISIS in Mosul, spokesman says

The United States-led coalition against the Islamic State is currently helping the Iraqi Security Forces put together the force that will try to retake the city of Mosul, a spokesman said Friday.

Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, made the announcement while addressing a news briefing in Washington. He was speaking via video link from Baghdad.

Warren told reporters it would still be “many months” before the Iraqi Security Forces began their campaign to recapture Mosul, which the Islamic State has occupied since June 2014.

“Right now our focus is ‘Let’s start training some brigades. Let’s start building some combat power. Let’s continue to train some police and start building up some combat power,’” he said.

Mosul is the capital of Nineveh province in northern Iraq and is one of the nation’s largest cities.

Warren told reporters the coalition still needs to assemble approximately 10 brigades, consisting of some 2,000 to 3,000 people in all, and wanted to first place them through additional training.

A basic training process takes eight weeks, Warren told reporters, with supplemental options for people like medics or snipers. But the number of troops that can be trained at once has varied.

“Over the last month or so, we’ve gotten about 900 police officers and roughly two brigades through training,” Warren told reporters. “This was the most graduates that we’ve had in a month. There’s been weeks or months where it’s been significantly less.”

He said the coalition has trained about 20,000 members of the Iraqi Security Forces, including police and tribal fighters. But he said even the ones who helped secure a key victory at Ramadi, a city that had been under Islamic State control, should receive additional training before Mosul.

“We believe that all of the forces that we’ve already trained and run through Ramadi are certainly capable of moving to Mosul, but we have made a decision that we want to run them through another cycle of training,” Warren told reporters. “Are they trained? Yes. Could they go to Mosul now? Yes. But we would prefer to give them additional training before they go.”

Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, was captured by the Islamic State last year.

Iraqi officials announced that the military had raised the nation’s flag over a key government complex in Ramadi late in December, and forces have been working to secure outlying parts of the city ever since. On Friday, Warren told reporters that those efforts were continuing.

Warren also told reporters the coalition launched 676 airstrikes against the Islamic State in January, 522 of them in Iraq and 154 in Syria. Most of them were concentrated near Ramadi, Mosul and Raqqa, the Syrian city which the Islamic State considers its capital.

Frustrated with Germany’s asylum red tape, some Iraqis return home

BERLIN (Reuters) – The first thing that Leith Khdeir Abbas, a 27-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker who arrived in Germany four months ago, plans to do after he makes the return journey on Wednesday is to kneel down and kiss the soil that he calls home.

“I fled to Germany to build my future. But I realized I can’t build it on fake promises,” he said at Berlin’s Tegel airport where he and some 50 similarly disenchanted young Iraqi men were about to board an Iraqi Airways plane to Erbil in northern Iraq.

A growing number of Iraqi refugees in Germany are choosing to return to their war-torn country, frustrated with a slow asylum process in a country overwhelmed by the influx of 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, most still living in shelters.

“I feel homesick and humiliated,” said Abbas, waving his arms in frustration as he recalled the poor conditions at a Berlin shelter with unhygienic toilets and bland food.

The trip to Germany from his home city of Baghdad cost him $4,000, including a fee for smugglers who put him on a boat from Turkey to Greece, where he and hundreds of asylum seekers embarked on a weeks-long trek to Germany via the Balkans and Austria.

German Interior Ministry data show that the number of Iraqis choosing to return home began rising in September, when 61 left, up from about 10 in each of the first seven months of the year. In December the number of Iraqi returnees topped 200.

That is still a fraction of the almost 30,000 who applied for asylum in Germany last year, accounting for the fifth largest group after Syrians, Albanians, Kosovars and Afghans.

But the trend highlights the harsh reality for asylum seekers fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. They come to Germany dreaming of a better future only to find out that a host country known for its efficient bureaucracy and wealth is struggling to accommodate a large number of newcomers.

“It is sad to see so many young men going back to a war zone,” said Andesha Karim, an Iraqi Airways representative at Tegel. The airline operates three weekly flights to Iraq from Berlin, Duesseldorf and Frankfurt.

“EUROPE IS NOT NICE”

The reasons for returning seem to have more to do with down-and-out conditions in Germany rather than the improving situation on the ground in Iraq, where government forces have made advances against Islamic State.

Both Erbil – in northern Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region – and Baghdad are outside the territory under Islamic State control and have not seen heavy conflict, although militant bomb attacks occur regularly in the Iraqi capital.

“Europe is not nice. They gave me no residency permit, no money. I will return to Kurdistan, to Iraq. I could join the Peshmerga and fight Daesh,” said Hassan, 19, an Iraqi Kurd, referring to Western-backed militiamen fighting Islamic State.

Most of the young men waiting to board the five-hour, $280 a seat flight to Erbil were traveling on one-way travel documents issued by the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin.

Many had either lost their passports or destroyed them at the German-Austrian border, hoping this would make it harder to deport them if their asylum applications were rejected.

The embassy has since the end of October issued 1,400 such documents, an almost tenfold rise from the 150 issued in the first 10 months of last year, the German Foreign Ministry said.

Iraqi embassy officials could not be reached for comment.

Those who cannot pay for the journey back can apply for financial assistance from the International Organization for Migration.

Not everyone is keen to give up on Germany. Abdallah al-Alagi, another Iraqi, came to Tegel to bid farewell to his friend Abbas, and still hopes to be granted asylum soon.

“I am staying. If there is no progress with my application I will leave for another European country. I don’t have to stay in Germany,” he said.

Abbas tried to hold back tears as he bid farewell to al-Alagi and walked to the check-in desk. “Tell Mom to send me nice food,” al-Alagi shouted, bringing a smile to Abbas’s face.

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Noah Barkin/Mark Heinrich)

Syrian al Qaeda affiliate ‘much more dangerous’ than ISIS, new report says

While the United States continues its military campaign against the Islamic State, a new report charges that a different terrorist organization poses a greater long-term threat to the country.

Jabhat al Nusra, a Syrian al Qaeda affiliate, “is much more dangerous to the U.S. than the ISIS model in the long run,” according to a report released Friday by the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute.

“Any strategy that leaves Jabhat al Nusra in place will fail to secure the American homeland,” the report cautions.

The report offers a scathing critique of the United States’ anti-terrorism efforts in Iraq and Syria, saying the military campaign “largely ignores” Jabhat al Nusra, a group that “will almost certainly cause the current strategy in Syria to fail.”

It also argues the challenges facing the United States have been oversimplified, and warns a “collapse of world order” could allow the Islamic State and al Qaeda to grow stronger.

The report’s authors argue the United States must choose a new strategy, writing “passivity abroad will facilitate the continued collapse of the international order, including the global economy on which American prosperity and the American way of life depend.”

According to the report, Jabhat al Nusra differs from the Islamic State in its ideologies and practices. While the Islamic States seizing cities and imposes its will on civilians, brutally mistreating anyone who dissents, Jabhat al Nusra has taken a friendlier approach. It has aligned with several groups that oppose Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, a key point of contention in the nation’s ongoing civil war, and provided those groups with “advanced military capabilities.”

In doing so, the report says Jabhat al Nusra “has established an expansive network of partnerships with local opposition groups that have grown either dependent on or fiercely loyal to the organization.” The institutes charge the front has become so engaged with the opposition, it’s now “poised to benefit the most” from the downfall of the Islamic State and Assad’s removal.

“The likeliest outcome of the current strategy in Syria, if it succeeds, is the de facto establishment and ultimate declaration of a Jabhat al Nusra emirate in Syria that has the backing of a wide range of non-al Qaeda fighting forces and population groups,” the report states. Such an emirate would be a key component of al Qaeda’s global terror network, providing manpower and resources to other affiliates while “exporting violence into the heart of the West.”

The report calls al Qaeda and the Islamic State “existential threats” to Europe and the United States, and concludes that while the groups don’t currently have the ability to topple the West, they — along with broader turmoil in the world — threaten the way of life in those nations.

The report argues there are several public misconceptions about national security in the United States, namely that the Islamic State is the nation’s only enemy. The situation is far more complex, the report argues, and stretches far beyond the borders of the Middle East.

Groups such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are benefitting from events such as North Korea’s nuclear testing, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis, the report’s authors wrote, calling them “symptoms of a collapsing world order” that exacerbate the threat.

Conflicting policies of Iran, Russia and China have also helped fuel the collapse, the report says.

“The collapse of world order creates the vacuums that allow … organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS to amass resources to plan and conduct attacks on scales that could overwhelm any defenses the United States might raise,” the report states. “Even a marginal increase in such attacks could provoke Western societies to impose severe controls on the freedoms and civil liberties of their populations that would damage the very ideals that must most be defended.”

Leading Iraqi Shi’ite says Islamic State is shrugging off U.S. air strikes

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Flush with cash and weapons, Islamic State is attracting huge numbers of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria and withstanding U.S.-led air strikes that are failing to hit the right targets, a powerful Iraqi Shi’ite paramilitary leader told Reuters in an interview.

Hadi al-Amiri also said Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was alive and in Iraq, despite reports that he had been wounded.

“Many of its leadership have been killed but one should know that Daesh (IS) is still strong,” said Amiri, leader of the Badr Organization whose armed wing has been fighting alongside Iraqi security forces to recapture territory seized by IS.

“Their attacks are still daring and swift and their morale is high. They still have money and weapons.”

Amiri delivered a damning assessment of the air strikes that the United States and its allies have been conducting against Islamic State for almost 18 months.

He said these had failed to dislodge IS because they failed to target its vital structure. Diplomats say the United States has been held back partly by the difficulty of avoiding civilian casualties.

“Today Daesh is a state, it has command centers, their locations are known, their logistics are known,” Amiri said. “Its leadership is known, its military convoys are known, its training camps are known. Until now we have not seen effective air strikes.”

He said the ultra-hardline insurgents had secured sophisticated U.S.-made anti-tank weapons including TOW missiles through Gulf Arab states. And he ridiculed the idea that Western powers could ensure arms only reached moderate rebel groups.

“They (rebels) did not capture these missiles, they were supplied by America, Saudi Arabia and Gulf states under the pretext of arming the moderate opposition in Syria. Who is the moderate opposition? Ahrar al-Sham? Jaish al-Islam? Nusra or Daesh?” he asked, reeling off the names of competing Islamist factions.

“All of them are terrorists,” he said. “Any moderate factions in Syria are weak. Even if they are supplied with weapons, Daesh seizes them.”

Military aid from states including Saudi Arabia has been supplied to Syrian rebels fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army in western Syria, and some of these groups have received military training from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The training has included how to use TOW missiles, supplied via Turkey and Jordan.

GOVERNMENT FIGHTBACK

Shi’ite paramilitaries like Amiri’s have played a vital role in helping Iraqi security forces recover lost territory from IS, which seized a string of major cities in 2014. When the militants declared that year that they had established an Islamic caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria, he left a senior government post and rushed to the frontlines.

Since then, the government forces and their paramilitary allies have regained control of key cities — Tikrit, Ramadi and Baiji — with the support of the U.S.-led air strikes.

But he said there were more obstacles ahead before they could launch a battle to recapture Mosul, the country’s second city and the biggest under Islamic State control. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and his predecessor have long pledged to “liberate” Mosul but their plans have been repeatedly delayed.

“There are preparatory operations to retake Mosul but other operations have a priority. We want to go to Mosul with the reassurance that Baghdad is safe and all the provinces in the north and the south are safe. This is the main reason that delayed us advancing toward Mosul,” Amiri said.

“We have a decision not to enter the city of Mosul. We will surround it from outside and leave its people and its tribes to take part while we conduct the siege.”

SECTARIAN SPLIT

Amiri said Sunni-Shi’ite tensions galvanized by the war in Iraq and neighboring Syria were swelling the ranks of Islamic State.

The bombing of a Shi’ite shrine housing the tombs of two imams in the Iraqi city of Samarra in 2006 was the trigger for the worst sectarian carnage to engulf Iraq in the past decade, and now the Syria conflict has splintered the Middle East along the faultline dividing the two main denominations of Islam.

Syria has become a battlefield in a proxy war between President Bashar al-Assad’s main ally, Shi’ite Iran, backed by Russia, and his Sunni enemies in Turkey and Gulf Arab states, supported by the West.

“There is no terrorist organization with the ability to recruit and organize youths like Daesh does. We should know our enemy accurately and precisely to be able to defeat them,” Amiri said.

“Daesh has no problem recruiting. Foreign fighters are still flocking in huge numbers to Iraq and Syria via Turkey,” he added. He accused Saudi Arabia of being the breeding ground of the ultra-hardline Wahhabi ideology embraced by IS and other al Qaeda-affiliated groups.

“Where does this fundamentalist, extremist Islamist ideology, come from? Where was it nurtured? Its origin is Saudi Arabia,” he said, adding “we need to combat this (Daesh) ideology before we dry out its funding.”

Amiri’s Badr fighters fought on Iran’s side in the 1980-88 war against Iraq’s Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein. The militia came to dominate much of southern Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam, and during the sectarian fighting that followed.

“I fought Saddam Hussein for more than 20 years. If I knew the alternative to Saddam was al Qaeda, Nusra or Daesh, I would have fought with Saddam against them,” he said.

“Saddam executed more than 16 family members … but there is nothing worse than these extremist groups. They are a real danger to the whole world.”

(Writing by Samia Nakhoul and Stephen Kalin; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Americans missing in Baghdad kidnapped by Iran-backed militia

WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Three U.S. citizens who disappeared last week in Baghdad were kidnapped and are being held by an Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia, two Iraqi intelligence and two U.S. government sources said on Tuesday.

Unknown gunmen seized the three on Friday from a private residence in the southeastern Dora district of Baghdad, Iraqi officials say. They are the first Americans to be abducted in Iraq since the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011.

The U.S. sources said Washington had no reason to believe Tehran was involved in the kidnapping and did not believe the trio were being held in Iran, which borders Iraq.

“They were abducted because they are Americans, not for personal or financial reasons,” one of the Iraqi sources in Baghdad said.

The three men are employed by a small company that is doing work for General Dynamics Corp, under a larger contract with the U.S. Army, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Iraqi government has struggled to rein in the Shi’ite militias, many of which fought the U.S. military following the 2003 invasion and have previously been accused of killing and abducting American nationals.

Baghdad-based analyst Hisham al-Hashemi, who advises the government, said the kidnappings were meant to embarrass and weaken Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is trying to balance his country’s relations with rival powers Iran and the United States.

“The militias are resentful of the success of the army in Ramadi which was achieved with the support of the U.S.-led coalition and without their involvement,” he said.

SECTARIAN TENSIONS

Shi’ite militias were kept out of the battle against Islamic State in Ramadi for fear of aggravating sectarian tensions among the Sunni population in the western city.

Baghdad touted the military’s advance there last month, with backing from coalition airstrikes, as evidence of a resurgent army after it collapsed in 2014.

The State Department said on Sunday it was working with Iraqi authorities to locate Americans reported missing, without confirming they had been kidnapped.

Asked about the kidnapping at the daily U.S. State Department news briefing on Tuesday, spokesman John Kirby said: “The picture is becoming a little bit more clear in terms of what might have happened.” He provided no details.

Kirby declined to say whether Secretary of State John Kerry had contacted Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif about the kidnapping.

Hostility between Tehran and Washington has eased in recent months with the lifting of crippling economic sanctions against Iran in return for compliance with a deal to curb its nuclear ambitions and a recent prisoner swap.

However, the United States imposed sanctions on 11 companies and individuals on Sunday for supplying Iran’s ballistic missile program.

(Additional reporting by Mohammed Zargham in Washington and Maher Chmaytelli in Baghdad; Writing by Stephen Kalin; Editing by Gareth Jones)

UN report details horrors affecting Iraqi civilians

The ongoing violence in Iraq killed nearly 4,000 civilians in just six months last year and thousands more are being held as slaves, according to a new report from the United Nations.

The report, a project of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, was released Tuesday and shines a light on the extent of the toll that the Islamic State’s presence in Iraq is taking on the nation’s civilian population.

“The violence suffered by civilians in Iraq remains staggering,” the report reads. “The so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ (ISIL) continues to commit systematic and widespread violence and abuses of international human rights law and humanitarian law. These acts may, in some instances, amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide.”

The report indicates at least 3,855 civilians were killed between May 1 and October 31 of last year, pushing the total number of civilian deaths in the country since the start of 2014 to 18,802.

“Even the obscene casualty figures fail to accurately reflect exactly how terribly civilians are suffering in Iraq. The figures capture those who were killed or maimed by overt violence, but countless others have died from the lack of access to basic food, water or medical care,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a statement.

The report indicates at least 7,056 civilians were wounded in Iraq during the six-month window last year. In total, there have been at least 36,245 civilians wounded since the beginning of 2014.

Some 3.2 million people have been displaced within Iraq over the past two years, the UN report found.

The report documents reasons they may be fleeing their homes, including the Islamic State’s gruesome execution techniques.

It cites many reports of public beheadings and several instances in which civilians were thrown from rooftops, as well as one incident in which militants forced nine people to lay down in a Mosul street and then ran them over with a bulldozer in front of a crowd of onlookers.

Some civilians who weren’t killed or injured are being sold into slavery, the report found.

The agencies behind the report wrote they believe the Islamic State currently holds roughly 3,500 people in slavery, many of whom are women the terrorist group is holding as sex slaves.

The Islamic State is also abducting children and training them to become soldiers, according to the report, and captured between 800 and 900 children in one single incident in Mosul.

But Iraqi civilians are facing threats to their safety from other organizations, the UN reported.

The report documents a series of acts allegedly carried out by pro-government forces, including abductions, illegal killings and evictions of people who were trying to escape violence. The acts may represent a violation of international humanitarian law, the UN agencies said in the report.

“This report lays bare the enduring suffering of civilians in Iraq and starkly illustrates what Iraqi refugees are attempting to escape when they flee to Europe and other regions. This is the horror they face in their homelands,” Hussein said in a statement.

Special anti-ISIS targeting force ‘now in place’ in Iraq, U.S. says

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A new U.S. force of special operations troops has arrived in Iraq and is preparing to work with Iraqi forces to go after Islamic State targets, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday.

Carter disclosed the deployment in a broad speech to U.S. soldiers that sought to underscore American efforts to accelerate the campaign against Islamic State, both in Iraq and Syria.

“The specialized expeditionary targeting force I announced in December is now in place and is preparing to work with the Iraqis to begin going after ISIL’s fighters and commanders,” Carter said at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

While the force was expected to number only about 200, its deployment marks the latest expansion of U.S. military pressure on Islamic State. It also exposes American forces to greater risk, something President Barack Obama has done only sparingly.

The force is separate from another deployment last year of up to 50 U.S. special operations troops in Syria to coordinate on the ground with U.S.-backed rebels fighting in a civil war raging since 2011.

Carter said that smaller group of forces had already established contact with rebels, as well as new targets for airstrikes and “strikes of all kinds.”

“These operators have helped focus the efforts of the local, capable forces against key ISIL vulnerabilities, including their lines of communication,” Carter said.

Republicans have sought to portray U.S. President Barack Obama’s strategy to defeat Islamic State as flawed and insufficient, as the militants plot or inspire attacks far beyond their self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Obama, in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, warned against overstating the fight against Islamic State militants, but said his administration is focused on destroying the extremist group.

Carter’s speech emphasized advances by Iraqi forces — including retaking control of the city of Ramadi — and by U.S.-backed rebels in Syria.

“President Obama is committed to doing what it takes – as opportunities arise, as we see what works, and as the enemy adapts – until ISIL is delivered a lasting defeat,” he said.

Carter was addressing soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, 1,800 of whom will deploy to Iraq in the coming months, largely to train local forces.

Carter also flagged a meeting next week in Paris with defense ministers from six nations — France, Britain, Australia, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Alan Crosby)