organization:iraqi intelligence

Iraqi officials : IS chemical attacks kill child, wound 600 - Business Insider
▻http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-iraqi-officials-is-chemical-attacks-kill-child-wound-600-2016-3?

U.S. and Iraqi officials said U.S. special forces captured the head of the IS unit trying to develop chemical weapons in a raid last month in northern Iraq.

The U.S.-led coalition said the chemicals IS has so far used include chlorine and a low-grade sulfur mustard which is not very potent. “It’s a legitimate threat. It’s not a high threat. We’re not, frankly, losing too much sleep over it,” U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren told reporters Friday.

Experts also say the extremist group appears incapable of launching a large-scale chemical weapons’ attack, which requires not only expertise, but also the proper equipment, materials and a supply-chain to produce enough of the chemical agent to pose a significant threat.

The coalition began targeting IS’ chemical weapons infrastructure with airstrikes and special operations raids two months ago, Iraqi intelligence officials and a Western security official in Baghdad told the AP.

Airstrikes are targeting laboratories and equipment, and further special forces raids targeting chemical weapons experts are planned, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.

The extremist group is believed to have set up a special unit for chemical weapons research made up of Iraqi scientists who worked on weapons programs under Saddam Hussein as well as foreign experts.

The group is believed to have created limited amounts of mustard gas. Tests confirmed mustard gas was used in a town in Syria when IS was launching attacks there in August 2015. There have been other unverified reports of IS using chemical agents on battlefields in Syria and Iraq.

Bon à savoir : il y a chimique (qui franchit la ligne rouge) et chimique (qui n’empêche pas de dormir).
#We're_not_losing_too_much_sleep_over_it

Some New Revelations About The Capture of Turkish Diplomats in Mosul
▻http://www.abbaskadhim.com/?p=316

A recording was recently released shows parts of a hearing conducted by an Iraqi parliamentary committee, chaired by Iraqi MP Hakim Al-Zamily, to investigate the fall of Mosul. The witness is the director of Iraqi Intelligence Office in Mosul, who served for four years in the city until June 10, 2014, when the Mosul was taken by ISIL. His testimony, which is based on his personal observations and the gathered intelligence by his office, may shed some light on the circumstances of this unusual case of diplomatic security failure.

[…]

“In the last five years, setting aside the [Iraqi] state, Turkey invited all Sunni tribes in Mosul to Turkey. Turkey hosted them. They came in, stayed, ate, and made plans. On 11 June 2014, then all gave allegiance to Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.”

Indeed, we do not need to speculate about the negative Turkish role in Iraq when we can take it clearly articulated from the horse’s mouth. In the same statement to the Turkish Parliament Mr. Öztürk Yılmaz said the following:

“On the one hand we say about our relations with Baghdad: ‘We support the territorial integrity of [Iraq], we support its independence.’ But we are doing all kinds of things that would violate the independence and territorial integrity. Is this something that defines our neighborhood policy?”

Iraqi Intelligence Warned France of ISIS Attack Day Before Paris Assault - World News - Israel News - Haaretz Israeli News Source
▻http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.686257

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.686259!/image/1438208339.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_474/1438208339.jpg

The dispatch said the Iraqis had no specific details on when or where the attack would take place, and a senior French security official told the AP that French intelligence gets this kind of communication “all the time” and “every day.”

However, six senior Iraqi officials corroborated the information in the dispatch, a copy of which was obtained by the AP, and four of these intelligence officials said they also warned France specifically of a potential attack. Two officials told the AP that France was warned beforehand of details that French authorities have yet to make public.

Among them: that the Paris attacks appear to have been planned in Raqqa, Syria — the Islamic State’s de-facto capital — where the attackers were trained specifically for this operation and with the intention of sending them to France.

The officials also said a sleeper cell in France then met with the attackers after their training and helped them to execute the plan.

There were 24 people involved in the operation, they said: 19 attackers and five others in charge of logistics and planning.

The officials all spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility on Saturday for the gun and bomb attacks on a stadium, a concert hall and Paris cafes that also wounded 350 people, 99 of them seriously. Seven of the attackers blew themselves up. Police have been searching intensively for accomplices.

Iraq’s Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, also told journalists in Vienna on Sunday that Iraqi intelligence agencies had obtained information that some countries would be targeted, including France, the United States and Iran, and had shared the intelligence with those countries.

ISIS Leader Takes Steps to Ensure Group’s Survival - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/21/world/middleeast/isis-strategies-include-lines-of-succession-and-deadly-ring-tones.html

WASHINGTON — The Islamic State’s reclusive leader has empowered his inner circle of deputies as well as regional commanders in Syria and Iraq with wide-ranging authority, a plan to ensure that if he or other top figures are killed, the organization will quickly adapt and continue fighting, American and Iraqi intelligence officials say.

Pourquoi l’Iran ne peut faire confiance à la « #communauté_internationale »
▻https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/15/irans-refusal-allow-notice-inspections-legit-u-s-history-iraq

Moreover, the U.S. made extensive use of UNSCOM to target Iraq for bombing campaigns. According to Ritter, toward the beginning of the UNSCOM process CIA agents who were part of the inspection team used GPS to record the precise location of sites used for Iraqi military manufacturing — sites that soon afterwards were struck by U.S. cruise missiles. And as the Washington Post reported and the U.S. Air Force later confirmed, the U.S. used UNSCOM’s data to choose targets for Operation Desert Fox, including many that had nothing to do with Iraq’s purported WMD programs. (In retrospect, what’s remarkable about the history of UNSCOM isn’t Iraq’s real but largely minor obstruction, but its extensive cooperation. Ritter remembers inspections when he was “looking through a logbook dealing with presidential security, such as how they arranged convoys” and at Iraqi intelligence headquarters “examining the darkest secrets of how they recruited agents and how they paid them.”)

Si les Américains disent qu’Assad est allié à ISIS, c’est certainement vrai. Après tout, ce sont les mêmes qui savaient déjà que Saddam Hussein était allié à Al Qaeda… (tu ne vois pas comme un schéma récurrent, là… ?)

Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations
▻http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegations

Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations were made by U.S. Government officials who claimed that a highly secretive relationship existed between former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the radical Islamist militant organization Al-Qaeda from 1992 to 2003, specifically through a series of meetings reportedly involving the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS).[1] In the lead up to the Iraq War, U.S. President George W. Bush alleged that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and militant group al-Qaeda might conspire to launch terrorist attacks on the United States,[2] basing the administration’s rationale for war, in part, on this allegation and others. The consensus of intelligence experts has been that these contacts never led to an operational relationship, and that consensus is backed up by reports from the independent 9/11 Commission and by declassified Defense Department reports[3] as well as by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, whose 2006 report of Phase II of its investigation into prewar intelligence reports concluded that there was no evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.[4] Critics of the Bush Administration have said Bush was intentionally building a case for war with Iraq without regard to factual evidence. On April 29, 2007, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said on 60 Minutes, “We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al-Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America, period.”[5]

Israel suspected of seeking to ‘steal’ ancient Iraqi manuscripts transferred to U.S.
►http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/06/04/218618.html

The manuscripts are part of the Jewish archive that was found in the basement of the Iraqi intelligence building following the 2003 American invasion.

The archive was reportedly transferred to the United States for “maintenance purposes” provided that it would be returned to the Iraqi government by mid-2006. The archive, however, has not yet been transferred back to the Iraqi Archeology and Heritage Association.

Iraqi media reports suggest that Israel was behind the stalling of the
delivery of the archives and that the Jewish state was planning to obtain the historic manuscripts from its ally the United States. Arab League Deputy Secretary General Ahmed ben Helli has confirmed attempts by Israel to steal ancient Iraqi archives.