Isis is turning on its own You’ve got the wrong man, says ‘smuggler’
Junior leaders and wounded killed as Islamist terror group is forced on to the back foot.
Islamic State militants are murdering their own men in Iraq and Syria as they face up to massive losses of territory and a surge in desertions, the United States-led coalition against Isis says.
The jihadists are said to be killing their own wounded in their stronghold of Fallujah as they struggle to treat mounting casualties from an Iraqi army advance.
The once-feared group had been plunged into ‘‘internal chaos’’ after losing nearly half of its territory in Iraq and a tenth of what it had in Syria, Colonel Chris Garver, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, claimed yesterday. Paranoia and mistrust had led to ‘‘mass executions’’ across Isis’s so-called caliphate.
Using the Arabic acronym for the group, he said: ‘‘We are seeing cases of senior Daesh leaders executing more junior Daesh leaders. There are widely circulated and credible reports of these mass executions in Iraq and Syria. These reports are increasing in both frequency and scope and scale.’’
In the past six months, Isis has lost control of Hit, Rutbah and Ramadi in Iraq, as well as the strategic Tishreen dam and the stronghold of al-Shadadi in Syria. More than 25,000 Isis fighters have been killed in the process. It has also suffered mass desertions and a 90 per cent drop in foreign recruitment.
Isis has killed at least 464 of its own fighters in the past two years, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Their crimes included desertion, spying, fleeing front lines and creating internal strife.
In Fallujah, struggling amid shortages of medical supplies and doctors, Isis fighters were ‘‘killing those wounded in the field to avoid them falling to Iraqi forces’’, said one resident.
Commanders of the Popular Mobilisation Force, a Shia militia fighting Isis in the north of the city, confirmed the reports. They said Isis had killed several men with lethal injections. Medical sources told Iraq News that at least eight wounded fighters had been ‘‘terminated’’ using toxic potassium chloride.
Isis has lost 500 men, or at least [Islamic State fighters] have been breaking into some houses and forcing people to give up their blood at gunpoint. half its fighting force in Fallujah, since tens of thousands of Iraq soldiers launched the offensive on May 22.
The desperate jihadists have resorted to ever more gruesome ways to survive. ‘‘They have been breaking into some houses and forcing people to give up their blood at gunpoint,’’ said Abu Mariam, a father of two.
Meanwhile, US-backed Syrian fighters, aided by relentless American air strikes over the past week, have surrounded a key city held by Isis in northwestern Syria, blocking escape routes and the militants’ access to their headquarters in Raqqa.
US President Barack Obama’s chief liaison to the anti-Isis coalition, Brett McGurk, said the operation to surround the city of Manbij, which sits astride the only remaining access road to Turkey, had been ‘‘one of the most complex military manoeuvres we’ve seen in some time’’.
With Isis fighters’ pay being cut in half, and its territory shrinking, McGurk said morale was plummeting. ‘‘They have not had a successful offensive operation, particularly in Iraq, in over a year.’’
In Libya, pro-government forces fighting to dislodge Isis from its key bastion of Sirte seized the city’s port yesterday.
A spokesman, Brigadier General Mohammed al-Ghasri, said the group’s top leaders had fled to the open desert south of the city but a ‘‘strong majority’’ were cornered inside the city centre. An Eritrean man accused of being a people smuggling kingpin, who was detained by Sudanese police last month and then extradited to Italy, says he is the victim of mistaken identity, in a potential embarrassment for Italian and British law enforcement.
Italian and British police claimed on Thursday to have brought to Rome a notorious 35-year-old people smuggler named Medhanie Mered, who once boasted of smuggling at least 13,000 people to Europe.
But on the first day of pre-trial proceedings in Rome yesterday, the suspect in custody said he was in fact Medhanie Berhe, a 29-year-old refugee unconnected to people smuggling, and stressed his innocence.
According to his lawyer, Berhe admitted that he had made two phone calls in recent months to smugglers in Libya, but only to reach relatives being smuggled by those men. Members of the Eritrean diaspora are often forced to be in regular contact with Libyabased smugglers in order to pay the ransoms of their relatives.
To prove his innocence, Berhe gave the passwords and user names of his social media accounts to Italian prosecutors, his lawyer, Michele Calantropo, said.
‘‘My client said he is innocent. There are no elements that [suggest] he is lying. And I firmly believe in his innocence. We’ll try to get him out from jail as soon we can.’’
Berhe’s identity documents were allegedly taken by Sudanese authorities, but his family has supplied school and medical certificates that confirm his name and likeness.
The disclosure risks becoming a major embarrassment for both Italian and British police, who had both confidently announced that they had tracked down Mered at a safe house in Khartoum and then had him extradited to Europe.
Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) had hailed the capture of ‘‘one of the world’s most wanted people smugglers’’.
But yesterday the NCA went to ground, declining to respond to questions about how the arrest had turned into a case of allegedly mistaken identity.
The NCA would not answer concerns raised by Berhe’s friends and family, as well as Mered’s former victims, that they had arrested the wrong person.
It also refused to say what proof it had of the suspect’s identity, beyond the word of the Sudanese government, whose president is wanted for war crimes.
A spokesperson simply said that ‘‘we are confident in our intelligence’’.
Prosecutors in Palermo, where the Italian investigation is based, have been more forthcoming. They said they would investigate concerns over the alleged mistaken identity.