UTTERLY SURREAL

East Coast of Australia, Littoral Zone

It was utterly surreal.

But no one knew.

The news bulletins did not lead with it. There was no discussion at the Tables of Knowledge. The endless talk fests of modern society did not debate it. The politicians did not strut their stuff, crowing about military victories.

There was no pride in defense of the homeland. 

We discussed the war, if at all, as if it was some arcane version of Pokemon being conducted on the other side of the world, obscure, of having no significance to our lives.

Mosul was falling.

The place where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared a caliphate three years before and unleashed a campaign of terror which would profoundly alter the world was now in ruins.

The Coalition, of which Australia was the second greatest contributor, had pulverised the ancient town, which encompassed the Assyrian city of Nineveh, referred to in the Bible as "the great city".

The Great City had been pummeled into dust by The Great Satan.

The vision of destroyed, traumatised families, dead bodies in the street, wounded or dead children, the infidel Americans in the city, their gunships overhead, was fueling jihad sentiment around the world.

It was as if deliberate, in the double, triple, quadruple blinds of Western artifice, as if some secret entity was pulling the levers, deliberately stoking violence, deliberately propelling the end of what had become known as Western civilisation, that now rotting ruin.

"My five children are dead. There is but one God, Allah."

The woman stumbled across the front line. Not into the hands of safety. Into the hands of the murderers of her children.

The highly traumatised population, devastated by the bombing, fled through snipers, past the smell of rotting mujahideen, past whole families rotting in the rubble, the largest, most shocking cases of urban warfare in history.

And the Australian news bulletins led on education reform, football scandals, yet more programs to cut waste, the latest bureaucratic minutiae on the development of emissions trading schemes, yet more legislation abrogating freedoms they purported to protect, celebrity gossip. And the latest in a long running secular witch hunt, the charging of Cardinal George Pell with sexual abuse allegations dating from 1978.

Where the truth lay in some accused fumble in a school gym 40 years ago only God knew.

But the hounds had been unleashed.

The stench of death hung over Mosul and no one cared, all the alleged social justice warriors too concerned with their waste disposal units to care about flyblown bodies on the others side of the world.

We were there, Australian politicians had assured the public, to stamp out terrorism at its roots.

Decades of failure in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of dead, the millions of lives altered or destroyed, the galvinisation of jihad movements around the globe, none of it mattered in the altered universe that was Australian public life.

Australia was actively supporting the Shia dominated Iraq Army, fermenting sectarian violence against the Sunnis, creating the perfect breeding grounds for Islamic State 2.0.

And nobody cared.

They would come to care. 

But would never understand why their world had just been mugged.


THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/mosul-mosque-where-isis-declared-caliphate-has-been-recaptured




Martin Chulov

Iraqi forces claim to have recaptured the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul – where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself leader of Islamic State three years ago.

The seizure marks a highly symbolic moment in the war, placing government troops in the heart of the Old City – the last redoubt of Isis in Mosul – and probably within a fortnight of recapturing all of Mosul.

Baghdadi declared a caliphate from the mosque three years ago to the day – 29 June 2014 – at the height of the group’s power.

Isis last week toppled the Hadba minaret adjoining the mosque, causing extensive damage to the surrounding compound. The fight for the terror group’s last redoubt was grinding and savage, with Iraqi troops reporting house-to-house fighting with a battle-hardened enemy, which refused to surrender.

Iraqi special forces entered the compound and took control of the surrounding streets on Thursday afternoon, following a dawn push into the area, said Lt Gen Abdul Wahab al-Saadi.

Earlier, the special forces Maj Gen Sami al-Aridi warned that the site would need to be cleared by engineering teams as Isis fighters were likely to have rigged it with explosives.

Five Isis militants were killed on Wednesday while trying to swim across the Tigris river from the west to the east of the city, armed with explosives. The densely packed Old City is thought to still house up to 100 well armed extremists, as well as tens of thousands of civilians, who have been gradually streaming out of ravaged buildings to safety over the past week.

After months of fighting, the Isis hold in Mosul has shrunk to less than 0.8 square miles of territory, but the advances have come at considerable cost.

“There are hundreds of bodies under the rubble,” said special forces Maj Dhia Thamir, deployed inside the Old City.

THREE YEARS AGO:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10948480/Islamic-State-leader-Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi-addresses-Muslims-in-Mosul.html

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, emerged from the shadows to lead Friday prayers at Mosul’s Great Mosque, calling on the world’s Muslims to “obey” him as the head of the caliphate declared by the Sunni jihadist group.


The notoriously secretive jihadi, who has never before been seen in public, chose the first Friday prayer service of Ramadan to make an audacious display of power in the city that the Sunni Islamists have now controlled for three weeks.


Speaking from the balcony in his new incarnation as self-anointed “Caliph Ibrahim”, Baghdadi announced himself as “the leader who presides over you”, urging Muslims to join him and "make jihad" for the sake of Allah.


Under his direction, the Islamic world would be returned to “dignity, might, rights and leadership”, he said.


“I am the wali (leader) who presides over you, though I am not the best of you, so if you see that I am right, assist me,” he said, dressed in a black turban and robe reminiscent of the last caliphs to rule from Baghdad.

“If you see that I am wrong, advise me and put me on the right track, and obey me as long as I obey God in you.”

Al-Baghdadi hailed the jihadi “victory” which he said had restored the caliphate after centuries.

“God gave your mujahedeen brothers victory after long years of jihad and patience... so they declared the caliphate and placed the caliph in charge,” he said.

“This is a duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries.”

UTTERLY SURREAL

East Coast of Australia, Littoral Zone

It was utterly surreal.

But no one knew.

The news bulletins did not lead with it. There was no discussion at the Tables of Knowledge. The endless talk fests of modern society did not debate it. The politicians did not strut their stuff, crowing about military victories.

There was no pride in defense of the homeland. 

We discussed the war, if at all, as if it was some arcane version of Pokemon being conducted on the other side of the world, obscure, of having no significance to our lives.

Mosul was falling.

The place where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared a caliphate three years before and unleashed a campaign of terror which would profoundly alter the world was now in ruins.

The Coalition, of which Australia was the second greatest contributor, had pulverised the ancient town, which encompassed the Assyrian city of Nineveh, referred to in the Bible as "the great city".

The Great City had been pummeled into dust by The Great Satan.

The vision of destroyed, traumatised families, dead bodies in the street, wounded or dead children, the infidel Americans in the city, their gunships overhead, was fueling jihad sentiment around the world.

It was as if deliberate, in the double, triple, quadruple blinds of Western artifice, as if some secret entity was pulling the levers, deliberately stoking violence, deliberately propelling the end of what had become known as Western civilisation, that now rotting ruin.

"My five children are dead. There is but one God, Allah."

The woman stumbled across the front line. Not into the hands of safety. Into the hands of the murderers of her children.

The highly traumatised population, devastated by the bombing, fled through snipers, past the smell of rotting mujahideen, past whole families rotting in the rubble, the largest, most shocking cases of urban warfare in history.

And the Australian news bulletins led on education reform, football scandals, yet more programs to cut waste, the latest bureaucratic minutiae on the development of emissions trading schemes, yet more legislation abrogating freedoms they purported to protect, celebrity gossip. And the latest in a long running secular witch hunt, the charging of Cardinal George Pell with sexual abuse allegations dating from 1978.

Where the truth lay in some accused fumble in a school gym 40 years ago only God knew.

But the hounds had been unleashed.

The stench of death hung over Mosul and no one cared, all the alleged social justice warriors too concerned with their waste disposal units to care about flyblown bodies on the others side of the world.

We were there, Australian politicians had assured the public, to stamp out terrorism at its roots.

Decades of failure in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of dead, the millions of lives altered or destroyed, the galvinisation of jihad movements around the globe, none of it mattered in the altered universe that was Australian public life.

Australia was actively supporting the Shia dominated Iraq Army, fermenting sectarian violence against the Sunnis, creating the perfect breeding grounds for Islamic State 2.0.

And nobody cared.

They would come to care. 

But would never understand why their world had just been mugged.

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/mosul-mosque-where-isis-declared-caliphate-has-been-recaptured




Martin Chulov

Iraqi forces claim to have recaptured the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul – where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself leader of Islamic State three years ago.

The seizure marks a highly symbolic moment in the war, placing government troops in the heart of the Old City – the last redoubt of Isis in Mosul – and probably within a fortnight of recapturing all of Mosul.

Baghdadi declared a caliphate from the mosque three years ago to the day – 29 June 2014 – at the height of the group’s power.

Isis last week toppled the Hadba minaret adjoining the mosque, causing extensive damage to the surrounding compound. The fight for the terror group’s last redoubt was grinding and savage, with Iraqi troops reporting house-to-house fighting with a battle-hardened enemy, which refused to surrender.

Iraqi special forces entered the compound and took control of the surrounding streets on Thursday afternoon, following a dawn push into the area, said Lt Gen Abdul Wahab al-Saadi.

Earlier, the special forces Maj Gen Sami al-Aridi warned that the site would need to be cleared by engineering teams as Isis fighters were likely to have rigged it with explosives.

Five Isis militants were killed on Wednesday while trying to swim across the Tigris river from the west to the east of the city, armed with explosives. The densely packed Old City is thought to still house up to 100 well armed extremists, as well as tens of thousands of civilians, who have been gradually streaming out of ravaged buildings to safety over the past week.

After months of fighting, the Isis hold in Mosul has shrunk to less than 0.8 square miles of territory, but the advances have come at considerable cost.

“There are hundreds of bodies under the rubble,” said special forces Maj Dhia Thamir, deployed inside the Old City.

THREE YEARS AGO:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10948480/Islamic-State-leader-Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi-addresses-Muslims-in-Mosul.html

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, emerged from the shadows to lead Friday prayers at Mosul’s Great Mosque, calling on the world’s Muslims to “obey” him as the head of the caliphate declared by the Sunni jihadist group.


The notoriously secretive jihadi, who has never before been seen in public, chose the first Friday prayer service of Ramadan to make an audacious display of power in the city that the Sunni Islamists have now controlled for three weeks.


Speaking from the balcony in his new incarnation as self-anointed “Caliph Ibrahim”, Baghdadi announced himself as “the leader who presides over you”, urging Muslims to join him and "make jihad" for the sake of Allah.


Under his direction, the Islamic world would be returned to “dignity, might, rights and leadership”, he said.


“I am the wali (leader) who presides over you, though I am not the best of you, so if you see that I am right, assist me,” he said, dressed in a black turban and robe reminiscent of the last caliphs to rule from Baghdad.

“If you see that I am wrong, advise me and put me on the right track, and obey me as long as I obey God in you.”

Al-Baghdadi hailed the jihadi “victory” which he said had restored the caliphate after centuries.

“God gave your mujahedeen brothers victory after long years of jihad and patience... so they declared the caliphate and placed the caliph in charge,” he said.

“This is a duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries.”

RED ALERT 2017

Almost six minutes pass in the video focusing first on death and loss, and then on the sweetness and transitory nature of life: a grave is filled in with dirt; a young man gazes up at the heavens in the midst of Raqqa's rubble; an old man pulls a battered bicycle out of the ruins of a house; gold coins are counted and spin into eternity; a blacksmith labors wearily at his task; another man treads a path through fallen, sere leaves; a father gazes at his newborn baby; you see images of innocent children, of smiles and of flowers, of gold and of trees. You see normal streets and then those same streets that have been reduced to rubble.
This is Raqqa and it is in a way about the ongoing Coalition air campaign against ISIS. But the commentary is about much more than that. The commentator notes that those who have chosen the path of Jihad in the Path of God have made a better choice than the things of this world, of al-Dunya. You then hear the voice of a dead man, of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, just as you see an ISIS fighter on a sand berm shot and falling slowly to his death. Al-Zarqawi notes that there is in life, in the end, nothing for the Muslim but jihad and worship of their Lord. Focus, instead of this passing world, on the eternal, on al-Akhira, rather than this life.
From Islamic State's Raqqa Elegy shows both Weakness and Power by Alberto Fernandez.

The discourse was all about White Privilege. They shivered in defeat. The mujaheddin sacrificed their souls to Allah. The Australian Prime Minister couldn't decide whether he wanted to be Mussolini or General Mao. Mosul was falling, the rapture was spreading, the project of the West was failing everywhere. As Western politicians trumpeted victory over terror, defeat was everywhere, in the soldiers on corners, in the increasingly proscribed lives of the populace, in the deadening of discourse into ritual, the lockout laws shutting down nightclubs and the sacrifice of traditional culture, whether or not you approved of the boozy, friendly, unsophisticated rabble or not, that was beside the point. Everything was sacrificed in the name of diversity, and each move, each shutting down, made the advent of the sharia easier.

What are we defending? 

A West which bombed and killed innocence with zero regard for the sovereignty of nations. 

A West which treated its own citizens as charlatans, and jailed them at will. 

A country which fined people for having too much mud on the mud flaps of  their vehicles.

Which achieved perfection when everyone was dependent on the state.

Where traditional tolerance was now a sin against God. Changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. 

Old Alex interviewed an Iraqi expert from Human Rights Watch. We have never seen people so traumatised, she said. They have experienced three years of Islamic State rule. Their families have died in the air strikes, their homes destroyed. They have lost everything. 

The mujaheddin were fighting to the last drop of blood. Their sacrifice they hoped, or knew, would shelter, shatter, into the spiritual realm. The despised West was dying. They succeeded where all else thought they were failing. In the noble pursuit of truth. In the noble pursuit fo God's blessing. In rubble no Westerner could understand. Everything was comfort, even sacrifice, here at the end of days. 

The Aztecs had sacrificed the slaves, cutting out their hearts in ritual, there on the high reaches of the Pyramid of the Sun, summoning the gods.

Old Alex had climbed it as a boy, their pain a muffled, distant echo across two thousand years, across the flat plains, in high heat and low dudgeon. Now, ensconced, trapped on the other side of the world, trapped in suburban walls, there was no way to comprehend the disintegration of the West and the suffering of those who sacrificed themselves in the fight. They had no choice. They knew they were to die. That they were sacrificing their souls to Allah, high on amphetamines as they fought their final battles, that was all they knew as sheets of pain consumed them into the rapture.

Terrified populations. 

All that was accessible, filtered though a heavily manipulated media full of wall to wall propaganda, was the same muffled, distant echo of pain and spiritual compromise and and deaths which splashed through the heavens.

Words fail.

They know not what they do.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.thestar.com.my/news/world/2017/06/28/iraqi-military-says-it-has-retaken-two-mosul-neighbourhoods-from-islamic-state/#u8Gmr8OXsTquqxqO.99

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq's military pushed deeper into Mosul's Old City on Wednesday, taking two more districts from Islamic State and bringing it closer to total control of the city.

The army's 16th infantry division captured Hadarat al-Saada and al-Ahmadiyya, the military said in a statement. The areas are northwest of the historic Grand al-Nuri Mosque which the militants destroyed last week.

Islamic State still controls the mosque's grounds and about half of the territory in the Old City, its last redoubt in Mosul.

"Fifty percent of this area has been liberated, al-Mashada and al-Ahmadiyya and al-Saada," Major General Jabbar al-Darraji told Iraqi state television.

"Our troops are now moving towards Farouq Street," he said, referring to the Old City's main north-south thoroughfare.

Federal police and elite units of the Counter-Terrorism Service have also been fighting inside the district's maze of narrow alleyways since the battle began 10 days ago.

A U.S.-led international coalition is providing air and ground support in the eight-month-old offensive.

Authorities expect the battle to end in the coming days, though the advance remains arduous.

MEDIEVAL CITY

Federal policemen walked through piles of rubble amid wrecked houses on Wednesday to reach the frontline, southwest of al-Nuri mosque. A Reuters correspondent said they exchanged mortars and sniper fire with militants.

The Old City's stone buildings date mostly from the medieval period. They include market stalls, a few mosques and churches, and small houses built and rebuilt on top of each other over the ages.

The minaret of the Ziwani mosque, which is cleared of militants, has been partially destroyed, and the cross had been removed from the bell tower of Shamoon al-Safa church, a Reuters correspondent said.

The military estimates up to 350 militants are dug in among civilians in wrecked houses and crumbling infrastructure. They are trying to slow the advance of Iraqi forces by laying booby traps and using suicide bombers and snipers.

Five IS fighters tried to flee across the Tigris River to the eastern side of Mosul but were killed by security forces, the military said on Wednesday.

THE KILLERS IN HIGH PLACES

East Coast, Australia, dawn.

The perimeter had been established. whirring sound, a weapon, sheaves of weapons, they did not know, throbbed in a space between the real and the unreal. Old Alex  kept up the mundane issues, repeating time and again: "Surveillance is harassment. I have been very very badly harassed."

They only acted when the gods were roiled.

The gods were roiled.

Mosul was falling.

The mujaheddin lay dead in their hundreds, thousands.

More than 800,000 people had fled.

Every last one of them would despise the Americans for the rest of time.

Already, the bodies were beginning to rot amongst the chaos of the bombing.

Once again, the West would claim victory over a ruin.

He had written the previous year, in similar circumstances, cold, restless, frustrated, lonely at heart, driven to distraction by the surveillance:

There were many divines about in that strange, compelling,
confounding time.

The truth is, the people abide my kind, but no one loves us. There
is awe, but no affection. We grow used to the turned shoulder, the
retreating back, the bright conversation that sputters to a murmur
when we enter a room, the sigh of relief when we leave it. I have
never become used to it: the awe the common men have for my
kind. I suppose it is because I feel no more than a common man
myself. Even less, perhaps. No more than a tool in the hand of an
unseen craftsman, something to be used as needed and then cast
casually aside. They do not understand that I am given only to see
those matters that roil the heavens.19

It was only on rare occasions he met a kindred spirit.

"You have on old soul," an acquaintance had said to him in Bangkok
several years before. "You meet them sometimes..."

Much, as always, was left unsaid.

The big boys were in town, with their military mindsets and orders from on high. Once again they spoke of heart attacks, an old CIA trick, for they could simulate a heart attack and leave no trace.

Never doubt: they want to kill you.

Democracy was nothing of the kind.

Freedom of expression had been lost long ago.

Others were for caution. We learn more than we lose. But that's what they did, killed people, blew things up. It was their solution to everything. For decades, destroying the remnant images of democracy as a force for good, they had terrorised people across the globe, attempting to expand power so ineptly that in the end they destroyed it.

In the whispering trees that were the outside, a woman finally rested. She had been fretting for months about her husband's cancer, her emotional distress far greater than his physical pain.

They were sweeping now, those weapons from another place, curling up, a clutter of flying knifes, sheaves, forming into swarms as they flew upwards. Trans-dimensional. The perimeter impregnable.

The gods were roiled. And there would be no peace.

THE BIGGER STORY:



http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/iraq-isil-suicide-bombers-blocked-mosul-170626082142053.html

Fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched a string of counterattacks in western Mosul, setting off clashes that continued overnight, Iraqi officials said on Monday.

An unknown number of suicide bombers and gunmen targeted the Hay al-Tanak and Yarmuk neighbourhoods, and set fire to houses and cars in Tanak, military officials told news agencies.

The area had been declared free of ISIL in May.

Several people are reported to have died in the attacks, which sowed panic among residents who had returned to the area, and prompted hundreds of families to flee overnight.

Staff Lieutenant General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a top commander in the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), which sent forces to fight the ISIL gunmen, said the attackers had infiltrated the area by blending in with returning displaced civilians.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4638610/Labor-senator-says-Islam-gathering-Aussie-gets.html#ixzz4l721YiXs

A Labor senator who fled Iran as a boy has described the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan as something that is 'as Aussie as it gets'.

Sam Dastyari made the comments on the steps of Lakemba Mosque in western Sydney's Islamic heartland to commemorate the Eid festival in front of hundreds of Muslims.

'Eid Mubarak. How Aussie is this?' he said to cheers in the presence of New South Wales Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

'The steps of Lakemba Mosque on a Sunday morning. As Aussie as it gets.

'Celebrating Eid amongst politicians from both Labor and Liberal.'

Mr Yemini, a former Israeli soldier, said it was disturbing for any politician to describe the end of Ramadan as something quintessentially Australian.

'Lakemba mosque is probably as far from as Aussie as it gets,' he said.

'This is the same Lakemba Mosque, in 2012 I believe, which issued a fatwa against Christmas.

'As Aussie as it gets, eh, mate?' 

However Senator Dastyari, who was born in Iran and moved to Australia as a boy in 1988, said he was a proud supporter of multiculturalism.

'What I want to say is this: there are those out there, and we know who they are, that try and denigrate multicultural Australia, that try and denigrate our communities and I just want to say one thing today: 'Our love and our unity will always defeat their hate and their division,' he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/kurds-see-historic-chance-advance-cause-ruins-islamic-state?CMP=share_btn_fb

As what remains of Islamic State crumbles, the would-be victors have started circling. In Mosul, Iraqi forces have begun preparing for peace in the city where the now-encircled marauders took root three years ago. Across the border in Raqqa, with five of its neighbourhoods under their control, Kurdish forces are contemplating what comes next for them and their cause.


Analysis Ever-closer ties between US and Kurds stoke Turkish border tensions
Following Turkish airstrikes last week, US armoured vehicles have been deployed as a buffer between Kurdish and Turkish forces

Day-after scenarios are rapidly being plotted by every group that has played a role in Iraq and Syria over many years of war and loss. Russia, the US and Iran are jostling for advantage across the swath of both countries held by the capitulating group. The prize is far more than who gets to claim the inevitable military victory over Isis. At stake, for all sides, is the future make-up of the region and a chance to shape it in their likeness.

The wish list of outcomes is broad and divergent. For Russia, there is the chance to establish a presence in the centre of the region, with political muscle and enhanced gas and oil interests. For Iran, a consolidated and potentially decisive role in both countries. And for the US – in the absence of a broader strategy – the chance to spoil its rivals’ plans.

Amid the great power struggles, others too have sensed opportunity in chaos. The Kurds of Iraq and Syria have made little attempt to hide the fact that the post-Isis vacuum marks a rare, potentially historic, moment.

In Iraq, the president of the largely autonomous Kurdish north, Massoud Barzani, has called a referendum on independence to be held on 25 September. In Syria, Kurdish forces raised by the US, and sent to oust Isis from one of its last two citadels, believe that their role can be parlayed into broader autonomy.

Across a dizzying battlefield that has devolved into a series of concurrent conflicts within the one war, Kurdish forces backed by the US are making steady gains in Raqqa. In Iraq, in the early phases of the fight for Mosul, the peshmerga played an important part in securing the city’s northern and eastern approaches.

The role they played in Iraq and continue to play in Syria is seen by both Kurdish factions as offering significant leverage in any negotiations. The view elsewhere is very different. Iraq and Turkey have said they would not support a break-up of Iraq, symbolic or otherwise, and have shown little enthusiasm for more than the current arrangements, which allow – begrudgingly in Baghdad’s case – the Kurds to sell oil taken from fields in northern Iraq through a pipeline they have built to Turkey.

The US has refused to support talk of Kurdish independence since the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, wedding itself to the position that a united Iraq best serves its disparate peoples. Overriding the view are the explicit fears of regional allies that a break-up of Iraq along ethnic lines would directly threaten their own borders.

“That position won’t change,” said a senior US official. “It is not the time to be redrawing state boundaries, especially in Iraq and Syria. Such talk can only be advanced by broad regional consensus. And we are nowhere near that yet.”

Turkey, which has forged close economic ties with Iraqi Kurdistan as a means of maintaining the status quo, has been even more vehemently opposed to US backing for Kurdish groups in Syria, pointing to their ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, with whom Ankara has fought a deadly four-decade insurgency inside its borders.

In the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Erbil, the security chancellor of the region, Masrour Barzani, says Turkey has nothing to fear from the poll. “The referendum will shape the bilateral relationship between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq,” he said. “We do not intend to change borders of neighbouring states. It simply formalises a delineated border between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq.

QUOTE:

Anthem

Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Yeah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free

Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That's how the light gets in

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me

Ring the…

THERE ARE SOME GOOD PEOPLE

Lightning Ridge

Fires were burning in the oil fields. Rats were scrabbling in the walls. Trust no one had been a cross to hang around his neck. He approached infinity and they cried out loud. It made a difference to, "we almost died laughing". There were hysterical tomes, shrieks of indignation, God botherers who sought redemption, to transcend the discomfort of their own routines, but he could see inside their false beliefs, their doubts. When the spirits retreated back from whence they came, when God didn't infest their every waking moment, when the ordinary really did become the ordinary, then those who sought to pursue him could only scuttle for cover.

Their seaweed dreams floated through the suburb like short circuiting electric currents, going nowhere. A woman had stopped fantasising about her wedding, and thoughts she would wish no one else to know, what it would be like on the wedding night. She had gone, he presumed, to set up her own home. A devotee of Alcoholics Anonymous stopped trying to convert everyone he met, and had ruthfully come to admit his own disillusionment. People were people wherever they went. A labourer tossed and turned over his frustration with shifts. Everyone was becoming poorer. No one dreamed of empire. Even in these marooned places, remote from the currents of history, psychological disturbance was becoming common place. He heard them marching to war, although no war had been declared. He heard the analysts continue to fret over the best course of action; marooned, too, in their own inaction.

They had entered frightening times.

The government's response had been to crack down even further, to quell all dissent. To turn the society into a desert, in the name of fairness. Diversity became the mantra. Uniformity became the solution. Day by day the disconnect became greater.

He waited for the next attack; the attack that would change Australia forever. 

The government had taken full advantage of the climate of fear it had done so much to create.

A terrorist attack anywhere in the world was an excuse for the Australian government to abrogate yet more freedoms, introduce yet more surveillance, fund the unsupervised if not out of control national security agencies yet more hundreds of millions of dollars. To taunt their critics ever further. To crush anyone who disagreed with the national narrative.

Bollards had been erected through the centres of Sydney and Melbourne.

The government had ramped up its rhetoric to ever greater heights; and proudly announced it had introduced more than 60 pieces of counter terror legislation. More, in fact, than any other Western country. This remote island nation where the on-field deaths were negligible. 

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Did no one teach them that? 

Did no one dare speak the truth to these people?

The Australian Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull had now been the man responsible for dropping more than 1300 bombs on Iraq.

It was a fair guesstimate to say that each of those bombs probably killed 10 Muslims.

Australia had followed America into the Vietnam War, based on false evidence concocted by the CIA. It had followed America into Iraq, based on false evidence concocted by the CIA. It had been party to secret imbroglios around the globe, cooked up by unsupervised agencies who lied to their political leaders, to the public, even to their own staff.

It had been a deadly concert.

And now, the internal brew was even more toxic. A bureaucratic and judicial apparatus which had implemented Cultural Marxism with billions of dollars of funds ripped off an unsuspecting, uneducated public. The National Broadband Network was just the most high profile heists of recent times, $61 billion ripped off the public in order to force, by legislation, millions of Australians onto an inferior broadband network. Deny them the internet. Deny them the most educative and potentially liberating technology in human history. Deny them the capacity to run their own lives. And whatever you do, don't tell them the truth about what you're doing.

Why the infestation of regulation. Why the phony wars, when there was no threat to the homeland. Why the flooding of the country with immigrants. Why the phony propaganda campaign, backed by billions in public funding, on refugees. Why the government's propaganda arm, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, trumpeted every minutiae of the climate change debate while ignoring the very real stories of the people's welfare. Why identity politics, playing on a dizzying range of victims,  from transgender activists to Muslim refugees, predominated any stories on the multiple issues afflicting ordinary working people. Why someone who got up and went off to a job each day was denigrated. Why someone who tried to establish a business found themselves facing one government erected barrier after another. 

Why their voices had been excised from the public debate.

Old Alex gazed out across a whipping wind and a falling sky, the ghosts of Aboriginal warriors long lost playing still in the shadows of that sacred lake; and a frigid cold settled across what had once been a remote, working class suburb. 

One of the latest emblems of authority, a highly decorated startlingly new Audi police car, bristling with antennas, radars and scanners, drove by.

He turned to try and grasp something, as those he was with reminisced in celebratory, affectionate detail the sins of their youth. 

EXTRACT:

One of the remarkable aspects of ASIO's files is how little we know about ASIO's proactive operations. While the purpose of personal files and subject files is to gather useful information about security targets, the actual operations conducted from time to time that involved these targets remain a mystery. Its unraveling awaits a historian with tenacity and a great deal of time. We know these files are highly sensitive because of the extent of deletions.

From Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files.


THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/kurds-see-historic-chance-advance-cause-ruins-islamic-state?CMP=share_btn_fb

As what remains of Islamic State crumbles, the would-be victors have started circling. In Mosul, Iraqi forces have begun preparing for peace in the city where the now-encircled marauders took root three years ago. Across the border in Raqqa, with five of its neighbourhoods under their control, Kurdish forces are contemplating what comes next for them and their cause.

Analysis Ever-closer ties between US and Kurds stoke Turkish border tensions
Following Turkish airstrikes last week, US armoured vehicles have been deployed as a buffer between Kurdish and Turkish forces

Day-after scenarios are rapidly being plotted by every group that has played a role in Iraq and Syria over many years of war and loss. Russia, the US and Iran are jostling for advantage across the swath of both countries held by the capitulating group. The prize is far more than who gets to claim the inevitable military victory over Isis. At stake, for all sides, is the future make-up of the region and a chance to shape it in their likeness.

The wish list of outcomes is broad and divergent. For Russia, there is the chance to establish a presence in the centre of the region, with political muscle and enhanced gas and oil interests. For Iran, a consolidated and potentially decisive role in both countries. And for the US – in the absence of a broader strategy – the chance to spoil its rivals’ plans.

Amid the great power struggles, others too have sensed opportunity in chaos. The Kurds of Iraq and Syria have made little attempt to hide the fact that the post-Isis vacuum marks a rare, potentially historic, moment.

In Iraq, the president of the largely autonomous Kurdish north, Massoud Barzani, has called a referendum on independence to be held on 25 September. In Syria, Kurdish forces raised by the US, and sent to oust Isis from one of its last two citadels, believe that their role can be parlayed into broader autonomy.

Across a dizzying battlefield that has devolved into a series of concurrent conflicts within the one war, Kurdish forces backed by the US are making steady gains in Raqqa. In Iraq, in the early phases of the fight for Mosul, the peshmerga played an important part in securing the city’s northern and eastern approaches.

SCALING THE PEAKS OF INCOMPETENCE

East Coast of Australia.

The ground had been well prepared.
A cold sun setting behind a line of suburban houses,
Cars cruising slowly by, in a new era of uber-surveillance.
What, indeed, was worth saving?
Old Alex listened, tried to concentrate on the moment sufficiently to relax, laugh, enjoy the present company, while his head streamed through a setting sun and the warnings came thick and fast.
"We live in the best country in the world, you wouldn't want to be over there with all that's going on."
On the whole Australians, as their own fortunes contracted year by year, as once rich lives were hollowed out, still believed it.

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster and its possible effects, because it causes people to have a bias to believe that things will always function the way things normally function. This may result in situations where people fail to adequately prepare and, on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations.
The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since one has never personally experienced a disaster, one never will. It can result in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. They also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation. Normalcy bias is essentially a "desire for the status quo."

Old Alex looked across the ruins and kept his mouth shut.
The social engineers had set out to change the society, and had achieved their aims. It had been a long time in the making, but it was the speed of it, the remarkable speed of it over the past five years, which struck him the most.
The society was devolving as those long ago Marxist lecturers had dreamed.
There was no precise tipping point, not when perceived from the midst of it.
But social historians of the future, if there were any left to care, would look back at the early millennial period as the point when it all changed. When theory won out over fact.
When the wishes and dreams of the proletariat, to be proud of their work, their families, their friends, the lives they built for themselves, were all banished; became nothing but a whimsical, curious footnote.
Identity politics, the endless cheering of minorities, the crushing of dissent, the rise of Repressive Tolerance, the screaming barrenness of diversity, for those who preached diversity the most tolerated it least, all of it had come to pass.
The Cultural Marxists who had been spewing out of the universities since the 1970s now held all the positions of power within the judiciary and the bureaucracy. were the puppet masters of dangling politicians whose only function was to manufacture consent.
The Useful Fools had proved very useful indeed.
The traditional culture had been quashed.
Repressive Tolerance reigned supreme.
Heavily manipulated media and the Theatre of the Absurd he had inflicted on those who breached every boundary of decency, of respect, of privacy, turned the stomachs of those he had set out to deliberately annoy; the Watchers on the Watch who had so fervently wished him dead.
They exposed themselves.
Let them hang themselves.
While Old Alex kept up the same refrain: you've all been conned.
All the theories of the dominance of minorities had come true; and the media poured forth endless stories on vulnerability and oppression and the brutality of the ruling class. The vulnerable had become the sole source of news. Achievement was dominance, not to be admired.
A successful business, a small enterprise, an entrepreneurial achievement, a happy marriage, none of it was to be respected any more.
The government's propaganda arm, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, pumped out their Flat Earth News on a daily basis, having gained a stranglehold across multiple "platforms", radio, television, internet.
Their propaganda, their lies about what constituted social justice, mopped up and distorted the country's perception of itself.
Their news was no news at all.
The anti-capitalist pro-Marxist "intellectuals" infesting the highest reaches of the bureaucracy, clutching their Walmart degrees to their pretensions, convinced they were the intellectual superiors of the labouring class, now held the pulleys of power.
On the streets, Old Alex looked up to see yet another candy coloured police car drive by, bristling with all their latest technologies.
The helpers had become the enforcers.
The once comparatively benign keepers of social order now cruised the car parks of hotels checking registration plates, or timing how long people had been inside. Conversation repeatedly turned to the excessive zealotry of enforcement, compliance officers, inane, insane regulation.
There was a move to inspect and licence the kitchens of the grey-haired women who, only rarely now, sold for charity scones and cakes, pickles and preserves, everybody's grandmother. 
It now took six months of bureaucratic process to get a licence to light a wood fire.
The country's community gathering places, pubs, were being eliminated.
Step by terrible step, a culture destroyed.
A stroke of a pen, the excessive policing of ever lower alcohol levels in the blood, had destroyed the traditional watering holes, leaving the bare remnants, aging diehards, in increasingly empty beer gardens.
They had been places, held in much affection, where men, for it had been a largely male culture, exchange everything from commercial confidences to ribald tales, and established friendships.
For unlike women, men build their friends through what they do, working, fishing, drinking, watching sport.
Once those activities stop, the friendships fall away rapidly.
The social engineers had been perfectly happy to eliminate these bonds, these potential points of opposition to their own enlightened theories of a perfect society.
Justice was no justice at all.
Within a generation they would be all closed down, replaced with mosques or schools or government centres.
One thing could be guaranteed: there would not be one whisper of academic discourse. These scrabbling, funny, friendly places were being banished into a disappearing history which, having not been either recorded or written down, whose oral history had been devalued, whose significance, the ordinary struggles of ordinary people, were ignored by multiple layers of government, would promptly vanish.
The people paid for their own demise.
Strangling taxes, strangling regulation, why the government was so systematically, and so effectively destroying the culture of the country, could not be understood without reference to the theories behind it.
He had, at university in the 1970s, imbibed the same books as the Cultural Marxists now in control.
His philosophy lecturer would, year after year, demand essays on Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectics of Sex, a desconstruction of the family and of masculinity, and Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man, a treatise on the dehumanising effects of capitalism.
They were two of the bibles of the era.
But Old Alex, fortunately enough, known as he was for lugging piles of books around the university and spending far too much time at the bar, was more entranced by lyricism than deconstruction, and took it all with a grain of salt.
He wrote the essays and struggled across the line.
Fortunately, the philosophy of the Philosophy Department was that everything was valid; or he might never have got through.
Now, half a century later, the theories of those largely impenetrable tomes were playing out not on the campuses, but in the society at large.
Obsessed, possessed, by a creative impulse, the obtuse, heartless language of the texts had driven him to distraction through delinquent nights.
It had been the beginning of the deliberately obscurantist language of the academy which was to become an essential part of the elitism of postmodernism and cultural theory, the difficulty and lack of opaqueness of the discourse convincing generations of public servants spewing out of the universities of their own cleverness. They knew, having imbibed at the soda pop fountain of higher education, that the so-called working class were unfit to decide their own destiny, nowhere near intelligent enough to understand that they were being oppressed through the social norms of masculinity, family, work.
Now they were all trapped in an engineered future, living in the consequences of all those theories which had once seemed so exciting, so confronting.
It had all come to pass.
Step by terrible step.

EXCERPT

LEGACY OF ASHES: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA
TIM WEINER

The CIA's biggest gun running mission was it's global pipeline to the mujahideen, the holy warriors of Afghanistan, were fighting the 110000-man Soviet Army of occupation. It began under Jimmy Carter in January 1980. Because it was Carter's idea, Casey did not embrace it wholeheartedly - not at first. But soon he saw the opportunity at hand.

"I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with his wonderful order: go kill Soviet soldiers," said Howard Hart, who arrived as the chief in Pakistan in 1981. "Imagine! I loved it." It was a noble goal. But the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan. No one believed that the Afghans could actually win.

From the start, the Saudis matched the CIA support for the rebels, dollar for dollar. The Chinese kicked in millions of dollars' worth of weapons, as did the Egyptians and British. The CIA coordinated the shipments. Hart handed them over to Pakistani intelligence. The Pakistani skimmed off a large share before delivering them to the exiled political leaders of the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, east of the Khyber Pass, and the rebel leaders cached their own share before the weapons ever got to Afghanistan.

"We didn't try to tell the Afghan Rebels how to fight the war," John McMahon said. "But when we saw some of the Soviet successes against some of the mujahideen, I became convinced that all the arms that we had provided will not ending up in Afghan shooters hands." So he went to Pakistani convened a meeting of the seven leaders of the Afghan rebel groups, who ranged from Parisian exiles wearing soft loafers too rough-hewn mountain men. "I told them I was concerned that they were siphoning off the arms and either caching them for a later day or, I said, 'God forbid, you selling them.' And they laughed. And they said, 'You're absolutely right! We're caching some arms. Because someday the United States will not be here, and we'll be left on her own to carry on our struggle.'"

The Pakistani intelligence chiefs who told out the CIA's guns and money favoured the Afghan factions who proved themselves most capable in battle. Those factions also happened to be the most committed Islamists. No one dreamed that the holy warriors could ever turn their jihad against the United States.

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/22/rival-groups-vie-for-supremacy-as-fight-against-isis-reaches-tipping-point?CMP=share_btn_fb




Iraqi forces have advanced to the base of the toppled minaret of Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, hours after it was destroyed by Islamic State militants, as the bitter eight-month battle to recapture the city reached a tipping point.

The destruction of the mosque marked a pivotal moment in the war against Isis, which declared its now withered caliphate from there three years ago. The terror group’s wanton act of sabotage was widely seen as a harbinger of its imminent defeat.

Across northern Iraq, only a portion of Mosul’s old city and a small adjoining neighbourhood remain under Isis control. The nearby towns of Tel Afar and Hweija, both of which are surrounded, make up the remainder of the group’s territory, a mere sliver of the lands over which it had lorded at the height of its power in mid-2014.

As its fortunes have turned, the group’s remaining members have fled Iraq for the deserts of Syria. So rapid has been their capitulation that plans are now being drafted for a decisive battle later this year, somewhere between the Syrian and Jordanian borders, areas far from those that Isis had coveted.

Lined up in pursuit are a range of players who had have staked claims throughout the fight with Isis, as well as parallel regional conflicts, and have waited for the time to consolidate. As the organisation crumbles, all sides have now started competing for an edge, who gets to define what emerges from the collapse of Isis is a prize bigger than winning the war itself.

Russia, Iran and the US are scrambling for supremacy, eschewing the brinkmanship that has peppered the war for direct clashes unprecedented in the region over recent decades.

The bewildering movements of five state militaries – Syria, Iraq, Iran, Russia and the US – as well as their various proxies seems likely to increase the number of collisions.

Each side faces a series of calculations that have little to do with how to defeat what remains of Isis, or to deal with the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are fleeing the latest fighting - the death throes of Mosul and Raqqa – and the looming campaign in Deir ez-Zorand Mayedin, where Isis looks set to make its last stand.

The human toll of the war for Mosul continued to emerge from the ruins of the city on Thursday, as Iraqi troops escorted haggard families from narrow lanes near the ruined mosque.


More than 860,000 people have now fled the city since the war to recapture it began on 17 October last year. Thousands of residents have returned to the now liberated east, but an estimated 100,000 more are thought to remain in Mosul’s old city, where vengeful, cornered members of Isis have been using residents as human shields.

“Three more weeks and we’re done with them,” said an Iraqi special operations officer, speaking by phone on Thursday. “We will push them into the Tigris river.”

Earlier in the week, hundreds of civilians streamed past destroyed buildings and into Iraqi controlled territory, their clothes tattered and bodies covered in dust. Mothers clutched malnourished infants across their chests while men carried the elderly on their backs. Some were dragged on makeshift stretchers and others hauled on carts. One after another they collapsed in exhaustion and relief when they reached safety behind Iraqi lines.

IF NOT NOW WHEN

Lightning Ridge

Those thousands of years, the annual migration. Breaching. The fabulous architects of song travelling up and down the coast. He could hear them still. 

And in this suburban place, he heard the Watchers on the Watch, the endless changing shifts of those on surveillance contracts, discussing a book he had once written, The Architect of Dreams, long lost. It must have ended up with Special Branch. For who else would know. Most of the players of the time, his friends, the people who he thought were everything, were dead now. Ian Farr. Russel Keifel. Lyn Hapgood. John Bygate. Shrouded in the dead as we were shrouded in the living.

Records, they want to destroy the records, one of the Watchers shrieked. If anyone knew. But someone did know. And when one knew, they all knew.

Old Alex was reading Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA. Seven decades scaling the heights of incompetence, coups, murders, manipulation, illegality, thousands, into the millions of lives lost. Sending their own agents to certain death. Sending those naive or desperate enough to cooperate across enemy lines, to certain death.

Now the enemy was everywhere; and they, the enemy within, were as much to blame for the collapse of democracy worldwide as anybody else. Their nefarious schemes, their slipshod work, their laziness, bigotry, simple minded prejudice. Boof-headedness. Oh how they loved to jeer. 

Here in the far reaches of consciousness aka Australia, the malfeasance, the personnel, sometimes kindly, mostly characterised by venal disregard. They tried all their old tricks. Heart attack. Heart attack. Poison Pill. They're coming for you. 

Every dirty, shoddy little scheme. They wanted the world to think, he's gone mad.

And the minute he says he's the sanest of the lot, we've got him.

The brutally infested elites manufactured consent in the broader, deliberately dumbed down broader population, while in his heart Old Alex manufactured kindly father-figures he could talk to, discuss the issues of the day, have a laugh.

The surveillance teams watched. They dreamed of sex. They vented their frustration on friends, colleagues, enemies alike. They were bored. They had never read a book in their lives. They had no concept of what they were watching.

In the wider realm, away from the bureaucratic little grubs who had been so determined to crush him, out there on the wide plains, the savanna grasslands, across the world where evil stalked, here, where evil stalked just as diabolically. 

At the event in the Sydney Town Hall, he saw the succubus which had seized hold of the former Prime Minister John Howard, highly intelligent, utterly malignant, the cold, one-eyed cold. It looked at him, startled someone recognised it, guilty almost, ashamed. This was their journey, their spiritual death, to serve only the dark lords.

Where the Jesuits and the Jihadis met.

The ABC poured forth its anodyne government propaganda, usually involving some minute bureaucratic progression in the endless debate over climate change, a distraction which had served to mop up the natural social justice instincts of the populace for more than 20 years while achieving precisely nothing but ever spreading bureaucratic over-reach, a tamed, distracted, sublimated population.

It was the manipulation, the deliberate creation of widespread ignorance, which incensed Old Alex as much as anything. You had a most precious resource. And you spat on it, ground it into the ground with thug-boot stiletto heels. You treated with contempt your fellow man, your fellow sufferers. You destroyed their potential with every waking breath, an act as despicable as murder. 

And every day, in every way, the country veered closer to a totalitarian state.

A democracy in name only. The manufacture of consent. It had all come to pass.

Australia had become a communist country. The Franklin School had wrought their theories, here on the edge of the great seas spreading down to the Antarctic.

"The world is so beautiful," Buddha is reported to have said on his death bed.

Myth would have it.

"We were there," his disciples said, laughing, even here, even now, more than 2500 years later. Even in this appalling, diabolical situation. 

Where humanity had embraced the dark lords. Where the poison was spreading through the veins of the society. Where he was forced to defend himself against the muggles, the mundanes. And to hide in the ordinary from their tedious, charlatan experts. 

Day followed day. They lived now, all of them, in the consequence not the act. They reaped what they sowed. Their path was crooked. They could barely see. The blizzard ate away at flesh.

At the local garage, the woman who ran the business with her husband and with whom he was on friendly terms, was clearly distressed, almost in tears, as she recounted how she had just had to find $16,000 to feed the tax office.

He told her of one of the latest grants from the Australian Research Council, of how an academic who had edited a book on dating had just been granted $940,000 by the Research Council to research whether or not "time really exists." 


And another Sydney University academic who had been given almost $1 million to another Sydney academic to study “the humanity of man and animal in ancient Greece’’.
It was an abuse of the citizenry beyond measure.

They ripped the money off the working poor and gave it to the elites.

Without conscience. 

Without even the courtesy of returning the calls from the journalist who had done the story.

On the radio they talked of low emission targets, of the coming Armageddon they had seized upon with their bureaucratic mindsets. And lied and lied and lied to the taxpayer. 

As if there was no bigger story afoot. Here between the ice ages. The epochs. 


THE BIGGER STORY:




http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/iconic-grand-al-nuri-mosque-iraq-mosul-blown-170621193402284.html

The landmark Grand al-Nuri Mosque of Mosul and its leaning minaret have been blown up, with the Iraqi army blaming ISIL for its destruction and the armed group accusing a US-led coalition air raid.

In recent days Iraqi forces have pushed deeper into the last remaining areas held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in the centre of Iraq's second-largest city.

"Our forces were advancing toward their targets deep in the Old City and when they got to within 50 metres of the Nuri mosque, Daesh committed another historical crime by blowing up the Nuri mosque," Staff Lieutenant General Abdulamir Yarallah, the overall commander of the Mosul offensive, said in a statement late Wednesday.

In a statement on its Amaq website, ISIL blamed US aircraft for destroying the mosque.

The US military denied the allegation. "We did not strike in that area," coalition spokesman US Air Force Colonel John Dorrian told Reuters news agency by phone.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39339373

The Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul has been destroyed during fighting between government forces and the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).

The Iraqi military said militants had blown up the mosque and the leaning al-Hadba minaret, one of the most famous landmarks in the Old City, as troops advanced on it.

But IS accused the US-led coalition of destroying the mosque, which was also of great symbolic importance to both sides of the conflict.

It is where IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made a rare public appearance in early July 2014 and gave a speech proclaiming the creation of a new "caliphate", only weeks after his fighters seized control of the city.

The Great Mosque was named after Nur al-Din Mahmoud Zangi, a Turkic ruler of Mosul and Aleppo who ordered its construction in 1172, two years before his death.

Nur al-Din is famous for mobilising and unifying Muslim forces to wage jihad, or war in the path of God, against the Christian Crusaders.

During his 28-year rule, Nur al-Din captured Damascus and laid the foundations for the success of Saladin, who served as his commander in Egypt before founding the Ayyubid dynasty and retaking Jerusalem in 1187.

Nur al-Din is also revered by jihadists for his efforts to make Sunni Muslim orthodoxy prevail over Shiism.

Despite its connection to such an illustrious figure, all that remained from the original mosque was the leaning minaret, some columns and the mihrab, a niche indicating the direction of Mecca.

On 4 July, Baghdadi delivered a Friday sermon from the pulpit at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri - his first public appearance in many years.

Dressed in a black robe and black turban - a signal that he claims to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad's Quraysh tribe, a crucial qualification for the office - Baghdadi said he had reluctantly accepted the title of "commander of the faithful".

"God, the Great and Almighty, has bestowed upon your mujahideen brothers the grace of victory and conquest, and has enabled them to do that after long years of waging jihad, showing patience, and fierce fighting against the enemies of God," he added. "They have hurried to declare the caliphate and empower an imam. This is the duty imposed on the Muslims."

Echoing the inaugural address by the first caliph, his namesake Abu Bakr, Baghdadi stressed that he was "not the best among you", adding: "If you see that I am right, help me. However, if you see that I am wrong, advise and guide me."

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Half the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle To think well of themselves. T.S. Eliot.