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Isis kills hundreds of Iraqi Sunnis from Albu Nimr tribe in Anbar province Isis kills hundreds of Iraqi Sunnis from Albu Nimr tribe in Anbar province
(about 3 hours later)
Islamic State (Isis) militants killed at least 220 Iraqis in retaliation against a tribe’s opposition to their takeover of territory west of Baghdad, security sources and witnesses said. The bodies of more than 150 men killed by Islamic state (Isis) militants were recovered from a ditch in the city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, on Thursday in the latest of a series of mass executions of tribal figures who oppose the group.
Two mass graves were discovered on Thursday containing some of the 300 members of the Sunni Muslim Albu Nimr tribe who Isis seized this week. The captives, men aged between 18 and 55, had been shot at close range, witnesses said. Iraqi officials said the men had been captured in the town of Heet, west of Ramadi, over the last week. All were members of the Sunni Albu Nimr tribe, which had faced off against Isis and had played a prominent role in fighting al-Qaida and its offshoots in Anbar province since 2007.
The bodies of more than 70 Albu Nimr men were dumped near the town of Hit in the Sunni heartland Anbar province, according to witnesses who said most of the victims were members of the police or an anti-Isis militia called Sahwa (Awakening). At least 60 more tribal members were killed in Heet earlier this week, in an execution videotaped and uploaded to the internet by the executioners.
“Early this morning we found those corpses and we were told by some Isis militants that ‘those people are from Sahwa, who fought your brothers the Islamic State, and this is the punishment of anybody fighting them’,” a witness said. Mass killings have become synonymous with the jihadists’ rampage through western Iraq and eastern Syria, in which large numbers of captured soldiers and civilians on both sides of the border have been murdered and their bodies gruesomely displayed.
The insurgents had ordered men from the tribe to leave their villages and go to Hit, 80 miles west of Baghdad, promising them “safe passage”, tribal leaders said. They were then seized and shot. Human Rights Watch reported that up to 600 prisoners, all Shia, were executed when the group overran Iraq’s second city, Mosul, in June. The Shias were separated from Sunni prisoners and a small number of Christians, all of whom were spared. The NGO said it had spoken to 15 Shia prisoners who survived the massacre and said that those killed had been forced to kneel next to a ravine before being shot.
A mass grave near the city of Ramadi, also in Anbar province, contained 150 members of the same tribe, security officials said. Since then up to 800 captured Syrian troops have been murdered after their bases were overrun in eastern Syria. And at least 1,000 Iraqi troops – all Shia – remain missing after they were captured in Tikrit.
The Awakening militia was established with the encouragement of the United States to fight al-Qaida during the US “surge” offensive of 2006-2007. Interior ministry intelligence chief General Ali al-Saede said Isis felt gravely threatened by a tribal revolt, which is seen as perhaps the only way to force it from large parts of the country it has conquered.
Washington, which no longer has ground forces in Iraq but is providing air support for Iraqi forces, hopes the government can rebuild the shaky alliance with Sunni tribes, particularly in Anbar, which is now mostly under the control of Isis, a group that follows an ultra-hardline version of Sunni Islam. “They are trying to consolidate in the desert areas and in Falluja and Ramadi,” he said in an interview. “They know that the tribes are allying with us and that will be their downfall.”
But Sunni tribal leaders complain that Shia prime minister Haider al-Abadi has failed to deliver on promises of weapons to counter Isis’s machine guns, sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and tanks. Iraqi officials are trying to raise a national guard that would be led by Sunni tribal leaders and partnered with the beleaguered national army. However, tribal leaders say they have yet to be formally approached about the idea and that their fight against Isis is largely piecemeal. “Nobody has talked to me about a new awakening, of forming a national guard,” said Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, the leader of a tribal revolt in Anbar in 2007 that forced an earlier incarnation of Isis to leave the province.
Sheikh Naeem al-Ga’oud, one of the leaders of the Albu Nimir tribe, said: “The Americans are all talk and no action.“ “If they did, they would know that we need a lot more than we have now to fight them properly.”
Isis was on the march in Anbar this year even before it seized much of northern Iraq in June. As the government and fighters from the autonomous Kurdish region have begun to recapture territory in the north, Isis has pressed its advances in Anbar, coming ever closer to Baghdad. More than four months into the insurgency that has seen large parts of Iraq fall out of government hands, much of Anbar remains dominated by Isis. Falluja and Ramadi, the two largest cities in the province, are mostly in insurgent hands, as are towns and villages in the desert that sprawls to the Syrian border.
In the north, government forces said they were closing in on the city of Baiji from two sides on Thursday in an attempt to break Isis’s siege of Iraq’s biggest refinery. Heet was one of the last towns to fall to the group. A large Iraqi military base near the town was abandoned as the jihadists advanced, yielding a haul of US-supplied advanced weapons, such as seven M-1 Abrams tanks, which have now become targets of US air force jets.
A member of the Iraqi security forces said they might enter the city in the next few hours but he acknowledged that roadside bombs and landmines were slowing the advance. Meanwhile, in north-eastern Syria around 100 Kurdish peshmerga have assembled near Kobani, on the border with Turkey, to reinforce Kurdish fighters who have been battling Isis for more than a month. Kobani, which is known as Ain al-Arab in Arabic, has been a key battleground in Syria’s civil war.
“Now we are close to the checkpoint of southern Baiji, which means less than 500 metres from the town,” he said, requesting anonymity. US-led air strikes have regularly beaten back Isis, but it still controls at least half the town – the third largest urban centre for Syrian Kurds. The fall of Kobani would be a huge boost for Isis and a serious blow for the Kurds, the US and its allies, who have focused much of their air campaign on saving it.
“We haven’t seen strong resistance by [Isis] but we are stopping every kilometre to defuse landmines.”
His account could not be independently confirmed.
Isis fighters seized Baiji and surrounded the sprawling refinery in June during a lightning offensive through northern Iraq.
The group also controls a swath of territory in neighbouring Syria and has proclaimed a caliphate straddling both countries.
Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters entered the Syrian town of Kobani on Thursday to help efforts to push back Isis militants who have besieged the town for the last 40 days.