As of today, entities, political parties, and people may start campaigning for the referendum that is set to take place on September 25.
There have been large rallies in support of holding the referendum in Europe, including an August 26 rally in Cologne, Germany, that attracted an estimated 20,000 attendees including Kurds in diaspora and others.
The parties issued a statement after the meeting in Pirmam Parish, Erbil, in which they announced September 25, 2017 as the date for holding the referendum on independence of Kurdistan from Iraq which should run in the Kurdistan Region as well as the mainly Kurdish areas which still lay under the administrative authority of Baghdad.
Kurdish Forces Commander on Gwer frontline Qadr Qadr has revealed that ISIS militants are surrendering to Kurdish forces on a regular basis, since the routes between territories in Iraq and Syria have been blocked.
Spørgsmålet er, hvad gør Peshmergaerne ved ISIS-folkene? Efter min mening kan de for eksempel sætte dem i krigsfangelejre og overlade dem til Yazidierne.
The region’s minister for natural resources, Ashti Hawrami, said that to avoid detection oil was often funneled through Israel, transferred directly between ships off the coast of Malta, and decoy ships used to make it harder for Baghdad to track.
Kurdistan says it had been forced to bypass Baghdad and begin exporting oil directly because the latter refused to respect budgets in 2014 and 2015. The current and former Iraqi central governments have both said the Kurds have failed to respect deals to transfer agreed volumes of oil to Baghdad.
Kurdistan is entitled to 17 percent of Iraqi’s overall budget, and argued it needed stable revenues to pay its bills, support over a million of refugees fleeing the war in Syria and Iraq finance its Peshmerga army fighting against Islamist militants.
Kurdistan is exporting over 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil – or every seventh barrel of OPEC’s second largest exporter – and believes that Baghdad has now accepted, at least in part, direct Kurdish exports going to as many as 10 countries.
“Effectively, we have been financially discriminated against for a long time. By early 2014, when we did not receive the budget, we decided we need to start thinking about independent oil sales,” Hawrami told Reuters.
De kurdiske Peshmergaer er nogle af de eneste, der har kunnet beskytte dele af Irak imod ISIS, men på trods af det har Baghdadregeringen gjort, hvad de kunne for at kvæle kurderne økonomisk. Samtidig har Hussein Obama forhindret kurderne i at sælge deres olie på det amerikanske marked.
On Thursday October 22nd, Kurdish Peshmerga forces carried out a rescue mission on an IS prison compound in Hawija, southern Kirkuk, freeing 69 prisoners who were facing “imminent mass execution”, US officials confirmed.
One US service member was killed and four Peshmerga injured. 6 IS insurgents were captured during the operation with 20 others killed.
In the absence of such a step, two million people, who have found refuge there, are expected to set off for Europe in the near future, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in Erbil, in northwestern Iraq, on Wednesday. The minister told MTI over the phone that he would submit the proposal at the next meeting of EU foreign ministers and internal ministers in Luxembourg on October 8.
Blood samples from the Kurdish peshmerga fighters sent to a Baghdad lab revealed traces of the toxic gas, the spokesman, Jabar Yawar told The Associated Press.
In March, Kurdish authorities in Iraq said they had evidence that the militant IS group used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon against its fighters.
The Pentagon’s hopes of recapturing the city by spring 2015 have been dashed by the military failures of the Iraqi Army further south, leaving the peshmerga to defend a 600-mile long frontline almost encircling Mosul, fending off constant Islamic State assaults with insufficient supplies of ammunition and modern weapons.
In part one of a three-part series, VICE News embeds with Kurdish peshmerga fighters defending the hills above the Islamic State-held city of Sinjar.
The proposed legislation by Republican congressmen Ed Royce of California, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Eliot Engel of New York, calls on Washington to tender Iraqi Kurds as a “reliable and stable partner of the United States.”
So far, Washington has refused to directly arm the Kurds, instead sending weapons through the central government in Baghdad, resulting in continuous complaints by Kurdish officials of delays and non-delivery.
According to the text of the legislation, the aim of the bill is “to authorize the direct provision of defense articles, defense services and related training to the Kurdistan Regional Government.”
The most striking feature of the bill, which is similar to the failed H.R.5747 proposal introduced last year, is its recognition of “Iraqi Kurds” as a partner of the US.
This is something that Kurdish officials have been demanding, with the aim of turning political relations with Washington into an institutional one. It is their way of trying to mitigate the risks of what the Kurds call “American betrayal” of their national movement in the past.
“Our critical partner in the fight against ISIL is in great need of heavy weapons and armored vehicles,” the proposed bill says. “We haven’t gotten Iraqi Kurdish ‘Peshmerga’ forces what they need. Even so, they have proven to be the most effective ground force currently fighting ISIL,” Royce was quoted as saying by the website of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Through the NPU and with consulting and training provided by SOLI, Christians in the Nineveh Plain are raising an army to defend their lands and fight against ISIS.
In December, 2014 SOLI CEO Matthew VanDyke, a veteran of the 2011 Libyan Revolution, brought a US Army veteran who served in Afghanistan (who is choosing to remain anonymous for his security) with him to Iraq to open a covert training facility north of Mosul, where SOLI began training 25 NPU soldiers. After assessing their abilities and finding the Christians of the Nineveh Plain to be exceptional candidates for further training, and having great confidence in the emerging leadership of the NPU with whom SOLI worked closely, a US Marine was brought to the covert facility later that month, followed soon after by two more US Army veterans.
In January, SOLI and the NPU received permission from the Peshmerga and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to train a much larger force, a battalion of Christian NPU soldiers. This official authorization allowed SOLI and the NPU to move the training from the covert facility north of Mosul to an official military base, the Manila Training Center, near Chamchamal, Iraq.
Westerners join Iraqi Christian militia to fight Islamic State.
Islamisk Stat har bortført mindst 90 assyriske kristne i Syrien, rapporterer observatørgruppe ifølge Reuters.
ERBIL-Hewlêr, Kurdistan region ‘Iraq’,— A Kurdish teenager taken captive by ISIS has described being forced into sexual slavery by the Islamist terrorists along with 40 other women, some as young as 12.
Islamic State fighters are killing and enslaving members of Iraq’s ancient religious minorities, including Assyrian Christians and the Yazidi Kurds.
The 17-year-old Yazidi, who is still in captivity, said her torturers were “people without a heart” who “do not even spare the women with small children”.
She claimed the women in her group of captives – all Yazidis – were being sexually abused on a daily basis, while being held in a building with barred windows and guarded by armed men.
“I beg you not to publish my name because I’m so ashamed of what they are doing to me,” she told Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper in an exclusive report.
“There’s a part of me that just wants to die. But there is another part of me that still hopes that I will be saved and that I will be able to embrace my parents once again.”
The paper was given a mobile number for the girl by her parents, who are in a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The distraught teenager added: “To hurt us even more, they told us to describe in detail to our parents what they are doing. They laugh at us because they think they are invincible.
“They consider themselves are supermen. But they are people without a heart. Our torturers do not even spare the women who have small children with them.
“Nor do they spare the girls – some of our group are not even 13 years old. Some of them will no longer say a word.”
The girl was captured by ISIS in August as they attacked the town of Sinjar, forcing many Yazidi families to flee into the adjacent mountain range and face starvation and death by dehydration rather capture or execution by the fanatics.
Though most of those there ultimately escaped, many were captured by the group, which has been accused of committing ethnic cleansing in Iraq on a historic scale.
ISIS has also been forcibly converting Yazidis, whose faith dates back 4,000 years, to Islam.
The girl, whom the paper gave the pseudonym Mayat, said she wished she was dead.
“They treat us as if we are their slaves. The men hit us and threaten us when we try to resist. Often I wish that they would beat me so severely that I would die,” she said.
“If one day this torture ever ends, my life will always be marked by what I have suffered in these weeks. Even if I survive, I don’t know how I’m going to cancel from my mind this horror.
“We’ve asked our jailers to shoot us dead, to kill us, but we are too valuable for them.
“They keep telling us that we are unbelievers because we are non-Muslims and that we are their property, like war booty. They say we are like goats bought at a market.”
Mayat is being held in a village south of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, which fell to ISIS shortly after they pushed into Iraq.
She said she had hoped the Peshmerga Kurdish forces, which have been fighting ISIS with assistance from American airstrikes, would rescue her.
She said: “I want them to hurry up and drive them all out, because I don’t know how much longer I can stand this. They’ve already killed my body. Now they’re killing my mind.”
After more than 3,000 women were abducted into slavery by ISIS in just two weeks, human rights campaigners Amnesty international told The Daily Mirror: “The victims are of all ages.
“It seems they took away entire families, all those who did not manage to flee.”
Last month two UN officials issued a joint statement on the “barbaric acts” of sexual violence committed by ISIS fighters.
“We condemn, in the strongest terms, the explicit targeting of women and children and the barbaric acts the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ has perpetrated on minorities in areas under its control, and we remind all armed groups that acts of sexual violence are grave human rights violations that can be considered as war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Nickolay Mladenov, special representative of the UN secretary-general for Iraq and Zainab Hawa Bangura, special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, said.
The statement, reported by Newsweek, cited evidence of “savage rapes” being used as weapons of war against women and teenage boys and girls belonging to the Yazidi, Christian, Turkomen and Shabak minority groups in Iraq.
Academic and Middle East expert Haleh Esfandiari has said ISIS allow their followers to rape captured girls and women as a “reward”.
“ISIS has received considerable world attention for its savage beheadings, executions of captured soldiers and men in conquered towns and villages, violence against Christians and Shiites,t and the destruction of non-Sunni shrines and places of worship,” she blogged for the Wall Street Journal.
“But its barbarity against women has been treated as a side issue. Arab and Muslim governments, vocal on the threat ISIS poses to regional stability, have been virtually silent on ISIS’s systemic degradation, abuse, and humiliation of women.
“To the men of ISIS, women are an inferior race, to be enjoyed for sex and be discarded, or to be sold off as slaves.”
Amnesty International spokeswoman Donatella Rovera, who is in Iraq, told Huffington Post UK that, though the charity had not verified any cases of women suffering sexual abuse at the hands of ISIS, she said there was evidence that captured women were under “strong pressure to convert to Islam and strong pressure to marry (ISIS) fighters”.
Fra ekurd.net
For at citere Winston Churchill angående vore politikere:
“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”
He will be denied martyrdom.
Men han har en klar ide om, hvor ondskaben befinder sig:
Hodja
husmanden
Jernhesten
nicolaisennels
trumfes
Hodjanernes Blog 