Threat to stop refugee control

ISLAMIC State (IS) is facing military defeat in one of its last strongholds in Mosul as the military coalition, led by the Iraqi government, announces its assault on the western part of the city following its successful defeat of the Islamists in eastern Mosul.

“We announce the start of a new phase in the operation. We are coming to Nineveh to liberate the western side of Mosul,” Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi said on Sunday.

The media reported that Iraqi forces had seized 17 villages from IS as they advanced from several directions towards Mosul airport the same day.

Analysts say it is only a matter of time before the coalition retakes all of Mosul, despite predicting that the final fight will be bloody and difficult as IS puts up fierce resistance, including booby-trapping buildings, launching repeated suicide attacks and embedding among the city’s civilian population, including reports of some residents being used as human shields.

But many questions have been raised as to what the situation on the ground in Mosul will be once IS is defeated. Of even more importance will be the fate of the approximately 750 000 civilians still trapped in west Mosul.

“We are racing against the clock to prepare emergency sites south of Mosul to receive displaced families,” said Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq.

The coalition fighting for Mosul includes Kurdish Pershmerga and Turkomen soldiers – supported by Turkish military advisers, Shia militias and police federal units fighting as part of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMU), and the 15th and 16th division of the Iraqi army supported by the Iraqi air force.

US, British, Canadian and French advisers on the ground are advising the coalition which is also supported by airstrikes carried out by the respective air forces of the adviser group.

The coalition is a volatile mixture, including several countries with competing geopolitical interests and ideologies – reflected in their respective support of various proxy militias, and Sunni and Shia Iraqi soldiers and militia members with a bloody history of sectarian divide.

“Should the Islamic State lose its entire territorial base and revert to its pre-2014 status as an insurgent movement, the consequences would be profound, though much would in fact depend on the circumstances of its downfall, and particularly on the identity of those who deprived it of its status as a state,” argues Mark Heller from Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies (INSS) in a piece about the situation in Syria and Iraq following the defeat of IS.

As long as a sense of Sunni grievance and deprivation persists and IS continues to embody the cause of Sunni deprivations against the Iranian-backed Shia majority in Iraq, and the Iranian and Shia-backed Allawite minority in Syria, IS will continue to enjoy significant support from Sunni constituencies irrespective of its depraved cruelty.

Secondly, Heller points out that despite IS alienating almost everybody, the continued support of foreign actors in the fight against the extremists can’t be taken for granted.

The Gulf monarchies still see Iran as the greater geostrategic threat and are preoccupied with the containment of Iran’s influence in Syria and Iraq (and Yemen), an objective that would hardly be realised by crushing IS.

The Turks, meanwhile, are more concerned with crushing Kurdish aspirations. To that end they are trying to contain Kurdish power in Iraq and Syria which constitutes a major force against IS in those areas.

For the Russians, shoring up Syrian President Bashar al-Asad’s regime is the end game.

This is so even if that comes at the expense of fighting rebel groups that themselves are fighting IS.

Heller further explains that even if IS is completely destroyed in Iraq and Syria, this does not mean the jihadists will be replaced with stable, centralised and authoritative governments.

Both Syria and Iraq bear the scars of high numbers of casualties, brutal conflict and both have heterogeneous populations which will struggle to reconcile or accommodate each other peacefully, irrespective of any imaginable political scenario.

Finally, once IS is defeated militarily, this doesn’t equate with their physical disappearance from the Middle East.

There are strong possibilities that the organisation could regroup and extend its influence to other regions including Libya and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – ultimately supported there and elsewhere by followers who subscribe to its ideology. – ANA

AMEXICAN minister has said his government would stop its US-backed border controls at the southern border if US President Donald Trump follows through on his border tax promise.

Trump’s plan to impose heavy border taxes on Mexico could see the suspension of a security programme with Washington at Mexico’s southern border, which stops immigrants and refugees fleeing conflicts in Central America from coming into Mexico as they try to seek asylum in the US.

“There is so much at stake for the interest of the US as a country,” Mexico’s Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo told the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail in an interview on Saturday.

Mexico has been accused of doing the US’s “dirty work” when it comes to combatting war and immigration in return for cash.

The minister warned that Trump’s rhetoric against his country and its people could see the Mexican government less willing to “keep on co-operating in things that are at the heart of (US) national security issues”.

“You cannot ask me to (accept poor) conditions in terms of trade and then request my help to manage migration issues from other nations or the prosecution of criminal activities and narcotics,” he added.

For the past three years Mexico has virtually locked its southern border as part of Programa Frontera Sur initiated by President Barack Obama in order to stop the flow of refugees from Central America.

Washington gave Mexico US$86 million (R1.1 billion) in equipment and training in 2014 in order to set up border controls along its 4 828km southern border and crack down on immigrant flows from countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Mexico detained 330 000 Central Americans in the last two years.

In recent years Mexico has also become a hotspot for refugees fleeing conflicts in Africa and the Middle East who are wishing to go to the the US. Last year, at least 7 500 people from Africa came into Mexico according to government figures.

As part of the security co-operation between the US and Mexico, US agents are stationed in detention centres across Mexico in order to vet refugees from Muslim-majority countries who are applying for asylum in the US.

However, it is not clear whether threats to suspend the programme would materialise in the event of a Trump border tax, which his administration suggested would pay for his wall with Mexico.

One of the main promises of Trump’s presidential campaign was building a wall along the border with Mexico in order to stop the flow of what Trump calls criminals, drug dealers and rapists from entering the US. But, in fact, over the past few years more Mexicans have been leaving the US than coming in, according to official statements.

Humberto Roque Villanueva, deputy secretary of Population, Migration and Religious Affairs at the Mexican Secretariat of the Interior, told Mexico’s La Jornada that while his government has been accused of doing “the dirty work” of the US, the country would not abandon border controls at the southern border over Trump’s hostile policies for “legal, human and crime-prevention reasons”.