Tag Archives: Torture

Turkish PM calls Rohingya killings in Myanmar ‘genocide’

Rohingya refugee children play at the Shamlapur refugee camp near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh December 20, 2017. REUTERS/Marko Djurica

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh (Reuters) – Turkey’s prime minister on Wednesday dubbed the killing of minority Muslim Rohingyas in Myanmar by its security forces “genocide” and urged the international community to ensure their safety back home.

Binali Yildirim met several Rohingyas in two refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar in neighboring Bangladesh.

Almost 870,000 Rohingya fled there, about 660,000 of whom arrived after Aug. 25, when Rohingya militants attacked security posts and the Myanmar army launched a counter-offensive.

“The Myanmar military has been trying to uproot Rohingya Muslim community from their homeland and for that they persecuted them, set fire to their homes, villages, raped and abused women and killed them,” Yildirim told reporters from Cox’s Bazar, before flying back to Turkey.

“It’s one kind of a genocide,” he said.

“The international community should also work together to ensure their safe and dignified return to their homeland,” Yildirim, who was accompanied by Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali, said.

Surveys of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh by aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres have shown at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed in Rakhine state in the month after violence flared up on Aug. 25, MSF said last week.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein has called the violence “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and said he would not be surprised if a court eventually ruled that genocide had taken place.

Yildirim inaugurated a medical camp at Balukhali, sponsored by Turkey, and handed over two ambulances to Cox’s Bazar district administration. He also distributed food to Rohingya refugees at Kutupalong makeshift camp.

He urged the international community to enhance support for Rohingyas in Bangladesh and help find a political solution to this humanitarian crisis.

U.N. investigators have heard Rohingya testimony of a “consistent, methodical pattern of killings, torture, rape and arson”.

The United Nations defines genocide as acts meant to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. Such a designation is rare under international law, but has been used in contexts including Bosnia, Sudan and an Islamic State campaign against the Yazidi communities in Iraq and Syria.

Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s less than two-year old civilian government has faced heavy international criticism for its response to the crisis, though it has no control over the generals it has to share power with under Myanmar’s transition after decades of military rule.

Yildirim’s trip follows Turkish first lady Emine Erdogan’s visit in September to the Rohingya camp, when she said the crack down in Myanmar’s Rakhine state was “tantamount to genocide” and a solution to the Rohingya crisis lies in Myanmar alone.

(Reporting by Mohammad Nurul Islam; Editing by Malini Menon and Richard Balmforth)

Victims of Mexico military abuses shudder at new security law

Activists hold a protest against a law that militarises crime fighting in the country outside the Senate in Mexico City, Mexico December 14, 2017. Placards read, "No to the Militarisation in the Country". Picture taken December 14, 2017.

By Lizbeth Diaz

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Human rights activist Juan Carlos Soni fears a new security law passed by Mexico’s Congress on Friday could mean his death after he suffered beatings, electrocution and abduction at the hands of the armed forces four years ago.

Bucking widespread protests from rights groups, Congress approved the Law of Internal Security, which will formally regulate the deployment of the military in Mexico more than a decade after the government dispatched it to fight drug cartels.

Proponents of the law argue it is needed to delimit the armed forces’ role in combating crime, while critics fear it will enshrine their purview, encouraging greater impunity and abuses in a country where justice is often notoriously weak.

Multiple human rights groups and international organizations, including the United Nations, attacked the bill, mindful of the dozens of reported cases of abuses by members of the military in Mexico over the past 11 years.

Soni, 46, a teacher from the central state of San Luis Potosi, whose case was documented by Mexico’s national human rights commission, related how in 2013 he was detained, blindfolded and tortured by marines after being warned by them to stop looking into alleged rights abuses.

While being held in a cellar, Soni said, he was made to leave fingerprints on guns and bags of marijuana and cocaine.

He was then arrested on charges of carrying an illegal weapon and drug possession, and spent 16 months in prison until he was released with the aid of U.N. representatives in Mexico.

“If they give them that power and send out the Navy again, I’m going to seek political asylum in another country,” Soni told Reuters shortly before the law passed Congress. “Much though I love my country, if I stay, they’ll kill me.”

The Navy subsequently acknowledged participating in abuses against Soni, but he said he has yet to receive any restitution.

The Navy did not immediately reply to request for comment.

“THE JOB WE WERE ASKED TO DO”

Well over 100,000 people have been killed in turf wars between the gangs and clashes with security force since former President Felipe Calderon first sent in the military to combat drug gangs shortly after taking office in December 2006.

Reports of abuse gradually crept up as the battle with the cartels intensified, and tens of thousands of people have gone missing or disappeared in the tumult.

Many of the most damaging scandals, from extra-judicial killings of suspected gang members to questions over the army’s failure to stop the disappearance of 43 students near a base in 2014, have come under President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Opponents of the military deployment say it has undermined trust in one of the most respected institutions in Mexico, as exposure to sickening violence and organized crime corroded the Army and the Navy just as it had the police.

“We don’t want to be on the streets, but this is the job we were asked to do,” said a soldier who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Noting that personnel were often separated from their families for long periods, the soldier said the task of attempting to keep order was made harder by the lack of regulations governing how the military should proceed.

“It should be the police who are doing this, but they don’t have the necessary training,” he said.

Under Calderon and Pena Nieto, the armed forces played a major role in capturing or killing most of the top capos in Mexico. But they have not managed to pacify the country.

October was the most violent month on record since the government began keeping regular monthly tallies 20 years ago.

Relatives of the victims of abuses believe the new law will only give the military more cover to do what it wants.

“The Law of Internal Security won’t just protect them, it offers them more faculties to carry out human rights violations masquerading as security operations,” said Grace Mahogany Fernandez, whose brother was kidnapped and disappeared by the armed forces in December 2008 in the northern state of Coahuila.

(Editing by Dave Graham and Leslie Adler)

Canadian pastor escaped execution due to foreign citizenship

Pastor Hyeon Soo Lim speaks at the Light Presbyterian Church in Mississauga.

TORONTO (Reuters) – A Canadian pastor whom North Korea released this month after two years of imprisonment escaped execution and torture during his captivity because of his nationality, he told CBC News in his first interview since his return.

Hyeon Soo Lim, the pastor from Toronto, said in an interview broadcast on Saturday that he was never harmed and that he would not hesitate to go back to North Korea if the country allowed him. A transcript of the interview was posted on the Canadian public broadcaster’s website.

“If I’m just Korean, maybe they kill me,” Lim said. “I’m Canadian so they cannot, because they cannot kill the foreigners.”

Lim, formerly the senior pastor at one of Canada’s largest churches, had disappeared on a mission to North Korea in early 2015. He was sentenced to hard labor for life in December 2015 on charges of attempting to overthrow the Pyongyang regime.

He said North Korea treated him well despite forcing him to dig holes and break coal by hand all day in a labor camp.

Lim told CBC News that he was “coached and coerced” into confessing that he traveled under the guise of humanitarian work as part of a “subversive plot” to overthrow the government and set up a religious state.

North Korea let him go on humanitarian grounds. The announcement came during heightened tensions between Washington and Pyongyang, although authorities have not said there was any connection between his release and efforts to defuse the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program.

Lim said he felt no anger at the Kim Jong Un regime for sentencing him to prison.

“No, I thanked North Korea,” he said. “I forgive them.”

 

(Reporting by Denny Thomas; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

 

South Sudan forces killed 114 civilians around Yei in six months: U.N.

FILE PHOTO: A soldier walks past women carrying their belongings near Bentiu, northern South Sudan, February 11, 2017. REUTERS/Siegfried Modola /File Photo

By Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – South Sudanese pro-government forces killed at least 114 civilians in and around Yei town between July 2016 and January 2017, as well as committing uncounted rapes, looting and torture, the U.N. human rights office said on Friday.

“Attacks were committed with an alarming degree of brutality and, like elsewhere in the country, appeared to have an ethnic dimension,” a report on the U.N. investigation said.

“These cases included attacks on funerals and indiscriminate shelling of civilians; cases of sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls, including those fleeing fighting; often committed in front of the victims’ families.”

Fighting flared when the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), loyal to President Salva Kiir, pursued his rival and former deputy Riek Machar and a small band of followers as they fled from the capital Juba, southwest through Yei and into neighboring Congo.

The pursuit of Machar ushered in a particularly violent period in South Sudan’s Equatorias region, with multiple localized conflicts, particularly in Yei, the report said.

“In view of the restrictions of access faced by (the U.N.), the number of documented cases may only be a fraction of those actually committed. Some of the human rights violations and abuses committed in and around Yei may amount to war crimes and/or crimes against humanity and warrant further investigation.”

South Sudan army spokesperson Col. Santo Domic Chol told Reuters on Friday that the report was “baseless”.

“This is not the first time the U.N. has accused the SPLA and tried to portray us as enemies of the people,” he said.

“The SPLA is one of the biggest military institutions in the country and it accommodates people from different background and the whole SPLA cannot go out and rape citizens… so it has to be specific that we have seen two or three SPLA soldiers in such location committing such crimes,” he said.

Domic said President Kiir had given orders to all SPLA commanders in Yei to punish soldiers who commit gender-based violence.

South Sudan has been in chaos since Kiir and Machar’s rivalry first sparked a conflict in December 2013, with U.N. investigators finding gang rape on an “epic” scale, ethnic cleansing and, most recently, famine.

But Yei, a traditionally ethnically diverse area, had been largely peaceful, the report said.

The town had an estimated population of 300,000 before the crisis began in July 2016, but 60-70 percent of the population had fled by September.

Civilians from Yei and other areas poured into Uganda, with 320,000 arriving as refugees by the end of 2016, 80 per cent of them women and children. About 180,000 more were registered in Uganda by the first week of February 2017.

Many people were trapped by the fighting, and others were attacked on the road as they tried to escape, but the SPLA helped ethnic Dinka civilians – the same ethnicity of President Kiir – to move to the capital, providing them with the use of military and civilian vehicles for transport.

Citing data from South Sudan’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, the report said 46,000 Dinka civilians, mainly from Yei town, had been registered in Juba by the end of 2016.

Violence has continued in the area, with rebel forces attacking Yei and killing at least four government soldiers earlier this week.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Toby Chopra)

U.N. finds torture widespread in Afghanistan

Afghan National Police (ANP) officers march at a training centre near the German Bundeswehr army camp in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan

By Josh Smith

KABUL (Reuters) – Torture and mistreatment of detainees by Afghan security forces is as widespread as ever, according to a U.N. report released on Monday, despite promises by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and new laws enacted by the government.

At least 39 percent of the conflict-related detainees interviewed by U.N. investigators “gave credible and reliable accounts” of being tortured or experiencing other mistreatment at the hands of Afghan police, intelligence, or military personnel while in custody.

That compares with 35 percent of interviewees who reported such ill treatment in the last U.N. report, released in 2015.

In response to allegations in the past, the Afghan government has acknowledged that some problems could be caused by individuals but not as any national policy.

“The government of Afghanistan is committed to eliminating torture and ill-treatment,” the government said in a statement.

The U.N. report comes as senior Afghan officials prepare to appear before the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva this week to face a review of Afghanistan’s record of implementing anti-torture laws.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague is conducting a separate review of torture in Afghanistan.

“Notwithstanding the government’s efforts to implement its national plan … the present report documents continued and consistent reports of torture and ill-treatment of conflict-related detainees, mainly during interrogation, and highlights a lack of accountability for such acts,” U.N. officials concluded.

Over the past two years, investigators interviewed 469 detainees in 62 detention centers across Afghanistan.

The report’s authors noted an alarming 14-percent spike in reports of torture by Afghan National Police, at 45 percent of those interviewed.

More than a quarter of the 77 detainees who reported being tortured by the police were boys under the age of 18, according to the United Nations.

A force known as the Afghan Local Police severely beat almost 60 percent of their detainees, according to the interviews carried out by U.N. investigators.

Nearly 30 percent of interviewees held by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, said they had faced torture or mistreatment.

Afghan National Army soldiers were also accused of mistreating some detainees, but the prisoners held by the army usually fall in categories less vulnerable to torture, the United Nations noted.

The majority of detainees who were tortured said it was to elicit a confession, and the ill treatment stopped once they signed a written confession, which in many cases, they could not read.

“Torture does not enhance security,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a statement. “Confessions produced as a result of torture are totally unreliable. People will say anything to stop the pain.”

Among the methods described in the report were severe beatings to the body and soles of the feet with sticks, plastic pipes or cables, electric shocks, including to the genitals, prolonged suspension by the arms, and suffocation.

(Writing by Josh Smith; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Turkmenistan’s president must renounce torture:

President of Turkmenistan Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov walks past an honour guard before a ceremony to welcome Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the capital Ashgabat, Turkmenistan,

GENEVA (Reuters) – Turkmenistan must renounce torture, a U.N. body said on Wednesday, accusing the country of systematic abuse, including rape and beating in jail, and political disappearances.

“The Committee (against Torture) is seriously concerned at consistent allegations of widespread torture and ill-treatment, including severe beatings, of persons deprived of their liberty, especially at the moment of apprehension and during pretrial detention, mainly in order to extract confessions,” it said.

The body called on President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov to make “a public statement affirming unambiguously that torture will not be tolerated”, adding that nobody had been prosecuted for torture, despite widely publicized cases.

Turkmenistan’s Foreign Ministry and its diplomats in Geneva could not be reached for comment.

Earlier on Wednesday, the ministry said the government was working closely with international human rights bodies and was improving its legal framework, including the prison system.

Turkmenistan reportedly holds 90 people in long-term detention, amounting to enforced disappearance, the panel of 10 independent rights experts said. They were particularly concerned about the whereabouts of people convicted in relation to an assassination attempt on a former president in 2002.

A former foreign minister, Boris Shikhmuradov, and a former ambassador, Batyr Berdiev, disappeared in 2002, committee member Felice Gaer told a news conference and there had been no information about what happened to them.

Turkmenistan has failed to investigate the abduction of Atymurad Annamuradov, who was beaten to death in retaliation for the work of his brother, Chary Annamuradov, a journalist. Three other brothers also died in suspicious circumstances, the committee said.

Many prisoners had reportedly died because of conditions at Ovadan-Depe jail, and inmates with infectious diseases were held with healthy prisoners, only getting hospitalized “when they are close to death or through bribing the relevant officials”, the committee said.

Political prisoners were detained in psychiatric hospitals, and there were reports of abuse including sexual violence and rape by prison staff, resulting in several suicides, it said.

Turkmenistan does not allow independent organizations such as the Red Cross to monitor detention facilities, nor does it allow U.N. rights experts to investigate in the country.

The Foreign Ministry said diplomats from Europe, the United States, the OSCE and the United Nations visited a juvenile correctional facility on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Tom Miles, Stephanie Nebehay and Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Beaten and bruised, detainee recounts Islamic State torture

Aiden Jassim's children sit next to their uncle Abdul Ilah Jassim during an interview with Reuters in Fadiliyah, Iraq,

By John Davison

FADILIYA, Iraq (Reuters) – Abdel Razzaq Jalal paused, visibly traumatized, as he told how Islamic State militants tortured him in a Mosul prison to force him to say he was a spy. “I never confessed. I knew the punishment would be death,” he said.

The ultra-hardline group arrested the 39-year-old in his village near Mosul in northern Iraq earlier this year, accusing him of spying for Kurdish forces.

After six nights and seven days of beatings, abuse and death threats, he says the militants let him go, after an Islamic State judge ruled there was not enough evidence to sentence him.

Jalal was lucky to escape with his life. Islamic State has executed scores of people it accused of spying in Mosul in recent weeks alone, as U.S.-backed Iraqi forces push further into its city stronghold.

He knew it could have been worse. The fate of several fellow villagers from Fadiliya, a few miles northeast of Mosul, and of many others arrested elsewhere during Islamic State’s more than two-year rule, remains unknown.

While the physical scars faded – Jalal showed months-old pictures on his phone of bruises and cuts all over his body – the ordeal remains etched in his memory.

“They hung me upside down from my feet and beat me for two hours. That was on the first night,” Jalal said.

“They used cables, wooden sticks, and one of them – there were three or four – pistol-whipped me repeatedly on my head.”

The militants, all from Mosul’s surrounding areas, tried to make him confess to spying for Kurdish peshmerga forces who had been fighting against Islamic State, he said.

When he refused, they stepped up the abuse and threats.

“The second day, they lay me flat on my stomach with my hands tied behind my back. One man stood on my legs, another on my head, and they began raising my arms. I thought my chest was going to break.”

Before he was tried, the militants put him into an orange jumpsuit – the clothing in which Islamic State often kills its victims – and told him he would be sentenced to death by decapitation.

Two of his more than 40 cell mates were killed that way, he said, after they confessed under duress to directing air strikes against Islamic State fighters. Reuters was not able to independently verify his account.

STILL MISSING

Jalal said he did not know why he was arrested. He was a local member of a Kurdish political party, he said, but denied spying.

“They had every detail on me and my family. It must have been from informers – locals – in the village,” he said quietly.

Jalal had been terrified of rearrest. Upon returning to Fadiliya after his incarceration, he told villagers he was well treated, in case Islamic State’s spies reported back to them.

A small number of Islamic State sympathizers or supporters in Fadiliya have been rounded up by Kurdish security forces since the peshmerga recaptured it in late October, local officials say.

“If I found another informer, I’d turn him in – even if it were my own brother,” Jalal said.

For him, the ordeal is over, but others in Fadiliya suspect their relatives are still suffering a similar fate, or worse.

Abdel Ilah Jassem’s 25-year-old brother Iden was arrested at an Islamic State checkpoint just outside the village more than two years ago. He has not heard from him since.

“I went to a Daesh (Islamic State) police station. They said Iden had been killed, but didn’t provide me with proof – no body, not even a paper saying he was executed,” said Jassem, 45, who lost his other brother in 1988 in the Iran-Iraq war.

“I’m sure he’s still alive,” he said, referring to Iden. “Every day I ask people in the area if they’ve heard anything new. So far, there’s nothing.”

(Editing by Dominic Evans and Giles Elgood)

Under siege in Mosul, Islamic State turns to executions and paranoia

Iraqi special forces soldiers sit on top of an armoured vehicle next to a flag of Imam Hussein in Bartella, east of Mosul, Iraq

By Samia Nakhoul and Michael Georgy

ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – A few weeks ago, a person inside Mosul began to send text messages to Iraqi military intelligence in Baghdad.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, “has become intemperate,” said the early November message, written by an informant inside the city who has contact with the group but is not a member of it.

“He has cut down on his movements and neglects his appearance,” the message read. “He lives underground and has tunnels that stretch to different areas. He doesn’t sleep without his suicide bomber vest so he can set it off if he’s captured.”

The text message, which Reuters has seen, was one of many describing what was happening inside Islamic State as Iraqi, Kurdish and American troops began their campaign to retake the group’s northern Iraqi stronghold of Mosul.

The texts, along with interviews with senior Kurdish officials and recently captured Islamic State fighters, offer an unusually detailed picture of the extremist group and its leader’s state of mind as they make what may be their last stand in Iraq. The messages describe a group and its leader that remain lethal, but that are also seized by growing suspicion and paranoia.

Defectors or informants were being regularly executed, the person texted. Baghdadi, who declared himself the caliph of a huge swathe of Iraq and Syria two years ago, had become especially suspicious of people close to him. “Sometimes he used to joke around,” one text said. “But now he no longer does.”

While Reuters has verified the identity of the informant who has been texting Iraqi military intelligence, the news agency couldn’t independently confirm the information in the messages. But the picture that emerges fits with intelligence cited by two Kurdish officials – Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Security Council,  and Lahur Talabany, who is chief of counter-terrorism and director of the KRG intelligence agency.

Talabany and other intelligence chiefs said the military coalition is making slow but steady progress against Islamic State. The coalition has formidable assets inside Mosul, they said, including trained informers and residents who provide more basic surveillance by texting or phoning from the city’s outskirts. Some of the informants have families in Kurdistan whom the KRG pays.

The Kurds believe that the military assault on Mosul, which began on October 17, is fueling Islamic State’s sense of fear and mistrust. In the short term, they said, the group’s obsession with rooting out anyone who might betray it may help rally fighters to defend Mosul. But the obsession also means the group has turned inwards right as it faces the most serious threat to its existence in Iraq since seizing around a third of the country’s territory in the summer of 2014.

The number of executions is a clear sign Islamic State is beginning to hurt, said Karim Sinjari, interior minister and acting defense minister with the KRG, which controls the Kurdish area in northern Iraq.

As well, he said, many of the group’s local Iraqi fighters lack the “strong belief in martyrdom that the jihadis have.”

“Most of the die-hard Islamists who are fighting to the death are foreign fighters, but their numbers at the frontline are less than before because they are getting killed in battle and in suicide attacks,” he said.

Barzani said the growing paranoia has pushed Baghdadi and his top lieutenants to move around a lot, further hurting the group’s ability to defend the city. Baghdadi, Barzani said, “is using all the different tactics to hide and protect himself: changing positions, using different ways of traveling, living in different locations, using different communications.”

If the military coalition does push Islamic State from Mosul, the Kurdish officials said, the group is likely to flee to Syria, from where it will pose a nagging threat to Iraq through regular suicide attacks and other guerilla tactics.

Iraqi soldiers pose with the Islamic State flag along a street of the town of al-Shura, which was recaptured from Islamic State

Iraqi soldiers pose with the Islamic State flag along a street of the town of al-Shura, which was recaptured from Islamic State (IS), south of Mosul, Iraq October 30, 2016. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra/File Photo

DANGERS OF A SIM CARD

Islamic State has always been paranoid. Its rule in Syria and Iraq has relied in large part on a vast intelligence network that uses everyone from children to battle-hardened former Baathists to spy on both subjects and its own officials. [Link to: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/mideast-crisis-iraq-islamicstate/]

That paranoia appears to have reached new levels as Islamic State’s enemies advance. Suspicion grew in the weeks before government troops began to encircle Mosul in mid October.

Early last month, Islamic State leaders uncovered an internal plot against Baghdadi, according to Mosul residents and Iraqi security officials. Hatched by a leading Islamic State commander, the plot was foiled when an Islamic State security official found a telephone SIM card that contained the names of the plotters and showed their links to U.S. and Kurdish intelligence officers.

Retribution was brutal. Islamic State killed 58 suspected plotters by placing them in cages and drowning them, according to residents and Iraqi officials.

Since then, Islamic State has executed another 42 people from local tribes, Iraqi intelligence officers said. Those people were also caught with SIM cards.

Possession of SIMs or any form of electronic communication now amounts to an automatic death sentence, according to residents in Islamic State areas. The group has set up checkpoints where its militants search people, and regularly mount raids on areas hit by U.S. air strikes because Islamic State officials assume locals have helped to identify targets.

The informant texting from Mosul is aware of the dangers. “I am talking to you from the rooftop,” began one recent message. “The planes are in the skies. Before I go back down I will delete the messages and hide the SIM card.”

“THE CUBS OF THE CALIPHATE”

Islamic State relies on a network of child informers, the so called ashbal al khilafa or “cubs of the caliphate.”

“These young boys eavesdrop and find out information from other kids about their fathers, brothers, and their activities”, said Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraq government adviser and Islamic State expert. “In every street there are one or two ashbal al khilafa who spy on the adults.”

The huge network of informants also hurts Islamic State, according to Lahur Talabany, chief of counter-terrorism for the KRG.  Overwhelmed by information, the group is devoting a lot of its energy to its own people rather than its enemies. That fuels further paranoia.

“There are regular (internal) plots against Baghdadi” Talabany told Reuters. “We see incidents like that on a weekly basis, and they take out their own guys.”

Until a few months ago, Talabany said, he had a mole inside Baghdadi’s inner circle: an Islamic State commander who had once belonged to al-Qaeda.

“He was a Kurd born in Hawija”, the Kurdish spy chief said, declining to name the man. “He was one of my detainees. I released him a year before Daesh (Islamic State) arrived.”

After Islamic State seized Mosul, the commander-turned-agent infiltrated the group and was made a military officer. From that position, he began feeding the Kurds “valuable daily information.”

The agent told Talabany that Baghdadi consulted closely with top aides, including Saudis who he said were experts on Sharia law. Saudi Arabia has said that there are Saudi nationals in Islamic State.

“He told me Baghdadi has got charisma, and has connections, but that he is a front. And that the committees around him take the main decisions, even on the military side,” Talabany said.

The agent told Talabany he had met Baghdadi a few times and was plotting to kill the Islamic State leader. But before the commander could act, Islamic State discovered he was working as an agent. A few months ago, Talabany said, Islamic State publicly executed him.

CUTTING THROATS

The group’s brutal methods were recounted in a rare interview with two captured Islamic State fighters last week. Reuters met the fighters at a Kurdish counter-terrorism compound in the town of Sulaimaniya. A Kurdish intelligence official and an interrogator sat in on the interviews but did not interfere.

Ali Kahtan, 21, was captured after he killed five Kurdish fighters at a police station seized by Islamic State in the northern town of Hawija.

Kahtan’s path to militancy began at the age of 13, he said. He became a member of al Qaeda and then joined Islamic State when a friend took him for religious lessons and military training at a Hawija mosque. The training, he said, involved learning how to use a machine gun and pistol. Trainees were also shown how to cut someone’s throat with the bayonet from an AK-47.

Kahtan said that a year ago, a local emir ordered him to cut the throats of five Kurdish fighters. The emir stood over him while he did it, he said.

“One after the other with a knife, a Kalashnikov blade, I did it. Really, I felt nothing.” Afterwards, he said, he returned home. “I cleaned up and sat down to have dinner with my parents.”

Kahtan said Islamic State fighters no longer talk about taking over Baghdad, but focus solely on Mosul, and how to recruit more fighters to protect it.

A second detainee, Bakr Salah Bakr, 21, who was caught as he prepared to carry out a suicide attack in Kurdistan, said Islamic State initially tried to recruit him through Facebook to join the fight in Mosul. They are desperate for Iraqi fighters, he indicated, because the influx of foreign fighters dried up after Turkey slowly closed its borders a year ago.

Civilians return to their village after it was liberated from Islamic State militants, south of Mosul, Iraq

Civilians return to their village after it was liberated from Islamic State militants, south of Mosul, Iraq October 21, 2016. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudaini/File Photo

THE BATTLE

Iraqi intelligence officials say they believe Baghdadi is not in Mosul but in al-Ba’aj district, a bedouin town on the edge of Nineveh province, which borders Syria. Ba’aj has a population of about 20,000 and is dominated by extremists loyal to Islamic State.

The area is heavily fortified, with long tunnels that were built after the fall of Saddam when the town became a staging post for smuggling weapons and volunteers from Syria into Iraq.

Even if Mosul and Baghdadi fall, said Kurdish counter-terrorism chief Talabany, Islamic State is likely to persist. “They will go back to more asymmetric warfare, and we will be seeing suicide attacks inside KRG, inside Iraqi cities and elsewhere.”

Security chief Barzani agreed. “The fight against IS is going to be a long fight,” he said. “Not only militarily, but also economically, ideologically.”

Barzani, who is the son of veteran Kurdish leader and KRG President Masoud Barzani, estimated there are around 10,000 Islamic State suicide bombers in Iraq and Syria. He said Islamic State had prepared waves of fighters it was now deploying to defend Mosul.

“You see the first group come to the frontline and they know they’re going to be killed by the planes overhead, but they still come. And then the second group come to the same place where the others were hit,” he said. “They see the limbs and the bodies all over and they know they will die, but they still do it. They see victory in dying for their own cause.”

(Edited by Simon Robinson)

Crucifixions and vice patrols show Islamic State maintains Mosul grip

Little girl carrying bottled water in Iraqi village

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Islamic State militants fighting to hold on to their Mosul stronghold have displayed the crucified bodies of five people they said gave information to “the enemy”, and are back on the city streets policing the length of men’s beards, residents say

The five bodies were put on display at a road junction, a clear message to the city’s remaining 1.5 million residents that the ultra-hardline Islamists are still in charge, despite losing territory to the east of the city.

Thousands of Islamic State fighters have run Mosul, the largest city under their control in Iraq and neighboring Syria, since they conquered large parts of northern Iraq in 2014.

They are now battling a 100,000-strong coalition including Iraqi troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga and mainly Shi’ite paramilitary groups, which has almost surrounded the city and has broken into eastern neighborhoods.

Residents contacted by telephone late on Tuesday said many parts of the city were calmer than they had been for days, allowing people to venture out to seek food, even in areas which have seen heavy fighting over the last week.

“I went out in my car for the first time since the start of the clashes in the eastern districts,” said one Mosul resident. “I saw some of the Hisba elements of Daesh (Islamic State) checking people’s beards and clothes and looking for smokers”.

Islamic State’s Hisba force is a morality police unit which imposes the Sunni jihadists’ interpretation of Islamic behavior. It forbids smoking, says women should be veiled and wear gloves, and bans men from Western-style dress including jeans and logos.

Hisba units patrol the city in specially marked vehicles.

“It looks like they want to prove their presence after they disappeared for the last 10 days, especially on the eastern bank,” the resident said.

Mosul is divided into two halves by the Tigris river running through its center. The eastern half, where elite Iraqi troops have broken through Islamic State defenses, has a more mixed population than the western, overwhelmingly Sunni Arab side, where Islamic State fighters are believed to be strongest.

CRUCIFIED CORPSES

The militants are putting up a fierce defense after their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, told them in a speech last week to remain loyal to their commanders and not to retreat in the “total war” with their enemies.

Iraqi military officials say they have sources inside the city, helping them identify Islamic State positions for targeting by the U.S.-led air coalition supporting the campaign, which is also backed by U.S. troops on the ground.

The gruesome public display of the bodies in east Mosul appeared to be a warning against other potential informers.

“I saw five corpses of young men which had been crucified at a road junction in east Mosul,” not far from districts which had seen heavy fighting, said another resident.

“The Daesh people hung the bodies out and said that these were agents passing news to the infidel forces and apostates,” he said referring to the Western allies backing the campaign and the Shi’ite-led government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

In another sign of a clampdown on contact with the outside world, one retired policeman said Islamic State officials were trying to inspect SIM cards to check on all communications.

“I went to get my pension as usual, but the man at the office refused to give it to me unless I handed over my SIM card,” the 65-year-old man, who gave his name as Abu Ali, said. “These are the instructions from Daesh,” the man told him.

Many residents close to the fighting have said the scale of the clashes has been terrifying, with the sound of gunfire, mortar bombardments and air strikes echoing through the streets.

In the Zuhour district, still controlled by Islamic State on Mosul’s eastern bank, witnesses said that cars carrying mortars roamed the streets on Tuesday, but were not seen being fired – unlike in the previous two days.

The relative quiet may reflect a reduction in fighting since Iraq’s special forces first broke into eastern Mosul a week ago. They faced fierce resistance, and have not sought to any major advance since then.

One witness said traffic had almost returned to normal in most parts of eastern Mosul and markets were operating, albeit not as busy as before the start of military operations.

(Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Islamic State brutality comes to light after military advance

Clothes of prisoners who were detained by Islamic State militants are seen in Hammam al-Ali, south of Mosul, during an operation to attack Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq

By Stephen Kalin

HAMMAM AL-ALIL, Iraq (Reuters) – From behind the curtains of his bedroom window, 29-year-old Riyad Ahmed would peer out at Islamic State fighters dragging civilians into a makeshift jail across the street and then sending them in the middle of the night to be executed.

The former English teacher from the town of Hammam al-Alil,  south of the jihadists’ Mosul stronghold, recalls hearing victims’ cries of agony as he hid with dozens of neighbors in the shadow of one of the group’s detention centers.

“The devil himself would be astounded by Daesh’s methods of torture. It is beyond the imagination,” said Ahmed, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

Iraq’s army and federal police, participating in a U.S.-backed offensive launched last month to recapture the largest population center under the jihadists’ control, retook this area over the weekend.

As the forces advance, details of Islamic State’s brutality and growing desperation, which have trickled out of its self-proclaimed caliphate over the past two years, are being reinforced by first-hand accounts of residents.

Standing on the road between his house and the jail on Monday, Ahmed told Reuters that no part of Hammam al-Alil had been spared from the ultra-hardline Sunni Islamists’ violence.

In his street alone, he said six people he knew had been executed, including his father and a family of three that lived next door.

Aid organizations, local officials and Mosul residents have cited reports that Islamic State executed dozens of people in Hammam al-Alil and barracks nearby over the course of a week, on suspicion of planning rebellions in and around Mosul to aid the advancing troops.

Abdul Rahman al-Waggaa, a member of the Nineveh provincial council, told Reuters last month that most of the victims were former police and army members.

Islamic State had used the town’s agricultural college as “a killing field” for hundreds of people in the days before the Iraqi government advance, Ahmed said.

“They would torture them inside and then take them out of the neighborhood and either shoot them or slit their throats.”

Police backed up his accounts, but the road to the college was still lined with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on Monday, preventing Reuters from visiting.

The military says its forces at the complex have discovered the decapitated corpses of at least 100 civilians.

HIDING

The jail opposite Ahmed’s house was once the home of an army officer who fled Islamic State’s blitz across a third of Iraq’s territory in 2014. Its walls are covered in soot from a fire apparently set by fleeing fighters, but metal cages only slightly larger than an adult male are still intact.

Ahmed, who learned English when U.S. forces occupied Iraq for nine years after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, was delighted to speak to a foreign reporter after two years during which he feared he would be killed for using English.

“We have been living in hell, like zombies,” he said.

Residents still in Hammam al-Alil on Monday told how they packed into homes with nearly 100 other people each for days to avoid being forced to flee to Mosul as Islamic State retreated.

“They didn’t know we were here. We didn’t make a sound. No lights, no sound, no speaking at all,” said Ahmed.

His family had stored food to avoid going outside but everyone lost weight, he said. Using the bathroom was a challenge.

As the town’s remaining residents emerged from their homes on Monday, neighbors greeted each other for the first time in many days.

An army lieutenant, back in Hammam al-Alil after taking refuge on a mountain for more than a week following the escalation of executions of security personnel, said he witnessed Islamic State kill people in a nearby field.

Thousands of civilians, including many from villages further south who had been forced to serve as human shields for the jihadists, escaped to government camps over the weekend while others were forced deeper into Islamic State-held territory.

“If the forces had come just a few days later, we would be in Mosul now. Daesh wanted to take us,” said Ahmed.

Others were not so lucky.

Tariq, an engineering student, said he had barricaded himself inside his home with dozens of neighbors for four days before Islamic State fled, refusing fighters’ demands to leave with them.

At one point, he said, the fighters had donned army fatigues and managed to trick a few families into believing they were arriving Iraqi forces. When the civilians went out to greet them, Tariq said, they were executed.

“Even a one-year-old baby, they put a bullet in his head.”

(Editing by Dominic Evans and Angus MacSwan)