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| Iraq | |
| After Hawijah raid IS leaders "all went missing" | |
| 2015-10-23 | |
"The Daesh [Islamic State] leaders in Hawijah all went missing after the raid. Their offices are closed and nobody knows where they went," the resident said, asking not to be identified by name. Daesh [Islamic State] is the Arabic name for Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... Another resident of the area said, "The group's top Hawijah leader was detained and another big shot too. A number of them were killed and several of the people held in that prison were freed." Colonel Steve Warren, the coalition front man in Iraq, said U.S. pressure has "begun to sow a bit of paranoia inside the organization." "We've killed 70 of their mid- and high-level leaders since May, that's an average of one every two days, so we are putting pressure on their leadership. And we've seen that this creates a level of paranoia that causes them to re-evaluate their own security, that causes them to interrogate their own people," he said. - U.S. ties to Kurds - Kurdish peshmerga forces control Kirkuk and have long worked closely with the US-led coalition. Iraqi security and allied paramilitary forces have in recent days been closing in on Hawijah from the south and west. The city lies about 240 kilometers (150 miles) north of Baghdad. Kurdish peshmerga forces, backed by U.S.-led coalition air strikes, have also in recent weeks moved several kilometers closer to Hawijah, pushing down from the north and east | |
| Posted by:trailing wife |