UTTERLY SURREAL

East Coast of Australia, Littoral Zone

It was utterly surreal.

But no one knew.

The news bulletins did not lead with it. There was no discussion at the Tables of Knowledge. The endless talk fests of modern society did not debate it. The politicians did not strut their stuff, crowing about military victories.

There was no pride in defense of the homeland. 

We discussed the war, if at all, as if it was some arcane version of Pokemon being conducted on the other side of the world, obscure, of having no significance to our lives.

Mosul was falling.

The place where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared a caliphate three years before and unleashed a campaign of terror which would profoundly alter the world was now in ruins.

The Coalition, of which Australia was the second greatest contributor, had pulverised the ancient town, which encompassed the Assyrian city of Nineveh, referred to in the Bible as "the great city".

The Great City had been pummeled into dust by The Great Satan.

The vision of destroyed, traumatised families, dead bodies in the street, wounded or dead children, the infidel Americans in the city, their gunships overhead, was fueling jihad sentiment around the world.

It was as if deliberate, in the double, triple, quadruple blinds of Western artifice, as if some secret entity was pulling the levers, deliberately stoking violence, deliberately propelling the end of what had become known as Western civilisation, that now rotting ruin.

"My five children are dead. There is but one God, Allah."

The woman stumbled across the front line. Not into the hands of safety. Into the hands of the murderers of her children.

The highly traumatised population, devastated by the bombing, fled through snipers, past the smell of rotting mujahideen, past whole families rotting in the rubble, the largest, most shocking cases of urban warfare in history.

And the Australian news bulletins led on education reform, football scandals, yet more programs to cut waste, the latest bureaucratic minutiae on the development of emissions trading schemes, yet more legislation abrogating freedoms they purported to protect, celebrity gossip. And the latest in a long running secular witch hunt, the charging of Cardinal George Pell with sexual abuse allegations dating from 1978.

Where the truth lay in some accused fumble in a school gym 40 years ago only God knew.

But the hounds had been unleashed.

The stench of death hung over Mosul and no one cared, all the alleged social justice warriors too concerned with their waste disposal units to care about flyblown bodies on the others side of the world.

We were there, Australian politicians had assured the public, to stamp out terrorism at its roots.

Decades of failure in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of dead, the millions of lives altered or destroyed, the galvinisation of jihad movements around the globe, none of it mattered in the altered universe that was Australian public life.

Australia was actively supporting the Shia dominated Iraq Army, fermenting sectarian violence against the Sunnis, creating the perfect breeding grounds for Islamic State 2.0.

And nobody cared.

They would come to care. 

But would never understand why their world had just been mugged.


THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/mosul-mosque-where-isis-declared-caliphate-has-been-recaptured




Martin Chulov

Iraqi forces claim to have recaptured the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul – where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself leader of Islamic State three years ago.

The seizure marks a highly symbolic moment in the war, placing government troops in the heart of the Old City – the last redoubt of Isis in Mosul – and probably within a fortnight of recapturing all of Mosul.

Baghdadi declared a caliphate from the mosque three years ago to the day – 29 June 2014 – at the height of the group’s power.

Isis last week toppled the Hadba minaret adjoining the mosque, causing extensive damage to the surrounding compound. The fight for the terror group’s last redoubt was grinding and savage, with Iraqi troops reporting house-to-house fighting with a battle-hardened enemy, which refused to surrender.

Iraqi special forces entered the compound and took control of the surrounding streets on Thursday afternoon, following a dawn push into the area, said Lt Gen Abdul Wahab al-Saadi.

Earlier, the special forces Maj Gen Sami al-Aridi warned that the site would need to be cleared by engineering teams as Isis fighters were likely to have rigged it with explosives.

Five Isis militants were killed on Wednesday while trying to swim across the Tigris river from the west to the east of the city, armed with explosives. The densely packed Old City is thought to still house up to 100 well armed extremists, as well as tens of thousands of civilians, who have been gradually streaming out of ravaged buildings to safety over the past week.

After months of fighting, the Isis hold in Mosul has shrunk to less than 0.8 square miles of territory, but the advances have come at considerable cost.

“There are hundreds of bodies under the rubble,” said special forces Maj Dhia Thamir, deployed inside the Old City.

THREE YEARS AGO:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10948480/Islamic-State-leader-Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi-addresses-Muslims-in-Mosul.html

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, emerged from the shadows to lead Friday prayers at Mosul’s Great Mosque, calling on the world’s Muslims to “obey” him as the head of the caliphate declared by the Sunni jihadist group.


The notoriously secretive jihadi, who has never before been seen in public, chose the first Friday prayer service of Ramadan to make an audacious display of power in the city that the Sunni Islamists have now controlled for three weeks.


Speaking from the balcony in his new incarnation as self-anointed “Caliph Ibrahim”, Baghdadi announced himself as “the leader who presides over you”, urging Muslims to join him and "make jihad" for the sake of Allah.


Under his direction, the Islamic world would be returned to “dignity, might, rights and leadership”, he said.


“I am the wali (leader) who presides over you, though I am not the best of you, so if you see that I am right, assist me,” he said, dressed in a black turban and robe reminiscent of the last caliphs to rule from Baghdad.

“If you see that I am wrong, advise me and put me on the right track, and obey me as long as I obey God in you.”

Al-Baghdadi hailed the jihadi “victory” which he said had restored the caliphate after centuries.

“God gave your mujahedeen brothers victory after long years of jihad and patience... so they declared the caliphate and placed the caliph in charge,” he said.

“This is a duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries.”

UTTERLY SURREAL

East Coast of Australia, Littoral Zone

It was utterly surreal.

But no one knew.

The news bulletins did not lead with it. There was no discussion at the Tables of Knowledge. The endless talk fests of modern society did not debate it. The politicians did not strut their stuff, crowing about military victories.

There was no pride in defense of the homeland. 

We discussed the war, if at all, as if it was some arcane version of Pokemon being conducted on the other side of the world, obscure, of having no significance to our lives.

Mosul was falling.

The place where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared a caliphate three years before and unleashed a campaign of terror which would profoundly alter the world was now in ruins.

The Coalition, of which Australia was the second greatest contributor, had pulverised the ancient town, which encompassed the Assyrian city of Nineveh, referred to in the Bible as "the great city".

The Great City had been pummeled into dust by The Great Satan.

The vision of destroyed, traumatised families, dead bodies in the street, wounded or dead children, the infidel Americans in the city, their gunships overhead, was fueling jihad sentiment around the world.

It was as if deliberate, in the double, triple, quadruple blinds of Western artifice, as if some secret entity was pulling the levers, deliberately stoking violence, deliberately propelling the end of what had become known as Western civilisation, that now rotting ruin.

"My five children are dead. There is but one God, Allah."

The woman stumbled across the front line. Not into the hands of safety. Into the hands of the murderers of her children.

The highly traumatised population, devastated by the bombing, fled through snipers, past the smell of rotting mujahideen, past whole families rotting in the rubble, the largest, most shocking cases of urban warfare in history.

And the Australian news bulletins led on education reform, football scandals, yet more programs to cut waste, the latest bureaucratic minutiae on the development of emissions trading schemes, yet more legislation abrogating freedoms they purported to protect, celebrity gossip. And the latest in a long running secular witch hunt, the charging of Cardinal George Pell with sexual abuse allegations dating from 1978.

Where the truth lay in some accused fumble in a school gym 40 years ago only God knew.

But the hounds had been unleashed.

The stench of death hung over Mosul and no one cared, all the alleged social justice warriors too concerned with their waste disposal units to care about flyblown bodies on the others side of the world.

We were there, Australian politicians had assured the public, to stamp out terrorism at its roots.

Decades of failure in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of dead, the millions of lives altered or destroyed, the galvinisation of jihad movements around the globe, none of it mattered in the altered universe that was Australian public life.

Australia was actively supporting the Shia dominated Iraq Army, fermenting sectarian violence against the Sunnis, creating the perfect breeding grounds for Islamic State 2.0.

And nobody cared.

They would come to care. 

But would never understand why their world had just been mugged.


THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/mosul-mosque-where-isis-declared-caliphate-has-been-recaptured




Martin Chulov

Iraqi forces claim to have recaptured the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul – where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself leader of Islamic State three years ago.

The seizure marks a highly symbolic moment in the war, placing government troops in the heart of the Old City – the last redoubt of Isis in Mosul – and probably within a fortnight of recapturing all of Mosul.

Baghdadi declared a caliphate from the mosque three years ago to the day – 29 June 2014 – at the height of the group’s power.

Isis last week toppled the Hadba minaret adjoining the mosque, causing extensive damage to the surrounding compound. The fight for the terror group’s last redoubt was grinding and savage, with Iraqi troops reporting house-to-house fighting with a battle-hardened enemy, which refused to surrender.

Iraqi special forces entered the compound and took control of the surrounding streets on Thursday afternoon, following a dawn push into the area, said Lt Gen Abdul Wahab al-Saadi.

Earlier, the special forces Maj Gen Sami al-Aridi warned that the site would need to be cleared by engineering teams as Isis fighters were likely to have rigged it with explosives.

Five Isis militants were killed on Wednesday while trying to swim across the Tigris river from the west to the east of the city, armed with explosives. The densely packed Old City is thought to still house up to 100 well armed extremists, as well as tens of thousands of civilians, who have been gradually streaming out of ravaged buildings to safety over the past week.

After months of fighting, the Isis hold in Mosul has shrunk to less than 0.8 square miles of territory, but the advances have come at considerable cost.

“There are hundreds of bodies under the rubble,” said special forces Maj Dhia Thamir, deployed inside the Old City.

THREE YEARS AGO:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10948480/Islamic-State-leader-Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi-addresses-Muslims-in-Mosul.html

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, emerged from the shadows to lead Friday prayers at Mosul’s Great Mosque, calling on the world’s Muslims to “obey” him as the head of the caliphate declared by the Sunni jihadist group.


The notoriously secretive jihadi, who has never before been seen in public, chose the first Friday prayer service of Ramadan to make an audacious display of power in the city that the Sunni Islamists have now controlled for three weeks.


Speaking from the balcony in his new incarnation as self-anointed “Caliph Ibrahim”, Baghdadi announced himself as “the leader who presides over you”, urging Muslims to join him and "make jihad" for the sake of Allah.


Under his direction, the Islamic world would be returned to “dignity, might, rights and leadership”, he said.


“I am the wali (leader) who presides over you, though I am not the best of you, so if you see that I am right, assist me,” he said, dressed in a black turban and robe reminiscent of the last caliphs to rule from Baghdad.

“If you see that I am wrong, advise me and put me on the right track, and obey me as long as I obey God in you.”

Al-Baghdadi hailed the jihadi “victory” which he said had restored the caliphate after centuries.

“God gave your mujahedeen brothers victory after long years of jihad and patience... so they declared the caliphate and placed the caliph in charge,” he said.

“This is a duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries.”

RED ALERT 2017

Almost six minutes pass in the video focusing first on death and loss, and then on the sweetness and transitory nature of life: a grave is filled in with dirt; a young man gazes up at the heavens in the midst of Raqqa's rubble; an old man pulls a battered bicycle out of the ruins of a house; gold coins are counted and spin into eternity; a blacksmith labors wearily at his task; another man treads a path through fallen, sere leaves; a father gazes at his newborn baby; you see images of innocent children, of smiles and of flowers, of gold and of trees. You see normal streets and then those same streets that have been reduced to rubble.
This is Raqqa and it is in a way about the ongoing Coalition air campaign against ISIS. But the commentary is about much more than that. The commentator notes that those who have chosen the path of Jihad in the Path of God have made a better choice than the things of this world, of al-Dunya. You then hear the voice of a dead man, of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, just as you see an ISIS fighter on a sand berm shot and falling slowly to his death. Al-Zarqawi notes that there is in life, in the end, nothing for the Muslim but jihad and worship of their Lord. Focus, instead of this passing world, on the eternal, on al-Akhira, rather than this life.
From Islamic State's Raqqa Elegy shows both Weakness and Power by Alberto Fernandez.

The discourse was all about White Privilege. They shivered in defeat. The mujaheddin sacrificed their souls to Allah. The Australian Prime Minister couldn't decide whether he wanted to be Mussolini or General Mao. Mosul was falling, the rapture was spreading, the project of the West was failing everywhere. As Western politicians trumpeted victory over terror, defeat was everywhere, in the soldiers on corners, in the increasingly proscribed lives of the populace, in the deadening of discourse into ritual, the lockout laws shutting down nightclubs and the sacrifice of traditional culture, whether or not you approved of the boozy, friendly, unsophisticated rabble or not, that was beside the point. Everything was sacrificed in the name of diversity, and each move, each shutting down, made the advent of the sharia easier.

What are we defending? 

A West which bombed and killed innocence with zero regard for the sovereignty of nations. 

A West which treated its own citizens as charlatans, and jailed them at will. 

A country which fined people for having too much mud on the mud flaps of  their vehicles.

Which achieved perfection when everyone was dependent on the state.

Where traditional tolerance was now a sin against God. Changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. 

Old Alex interviewed an Iraqi expert from Human Rights Watch. We have never seen people so traumatised, she said. They have experienced three years of Islamic State rule. Their families have died in the air strikes, their homes destroyed. They have lost everything. 

The mujaheddin were fighting to the last drop of blood. Their sacrifice they hoped, or knew, would shelter, shatter, into the spiritual realm. The despised West was dying. They succeeded where all else thought they were failing. In the noble pursuit of truth. In the noble pursuit fo God's blessing. In rubble no Westerner could understand. Everything was comfort, even sacrifice, here at the end of days. 

The Aztecs had sacrificed the slaves, cutting out their hearts in ritual, there on the high reaches of the Pyramid of the Sun, summoning the gods.

Old Alex had climbed it as a boy, their pain a muffled, distant echo across two thousand years, across the flat plains, in high heat and low dudgeon. Now, ensconced, trapped on the other side of the world, trapped in suburban walls, there was no way to comprehend the disintegration of the West and the suffering of those who sacrificed themselves in the fight. They had no choice. They knew they were to die. That they were sacrificing their souls to Allah, high on amphetamines as they fought their final battles, that was all they knew as sheets of pain consumed them into the rapture.

Terrified populations. 

All that was accessible, filtered though a heavily manipulated media full of wall to wall propaganda, was the same muffled, distant echo of pain and spiritual compromise and and deaths which splashed through the heavens.

Words fail.

They know not what they do.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.thestar.com.my/news/world/2017/06/28/iraqi-military-says-it-has-retaken-two-mosul-neighbourhoods-from-islamic-state/#u8Gmr8OXsTquqxqO.99

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq's military pushed deeper into Mosul's Old City on Wednesday, taking two more districts from Islamic State and bringing it closer to total control of the city.

The army's 16th infantry division captured Hadarat al-Saada and al-Ahmadiyya, the military said in a statement. The areas are northwest of the historic Grand al-Nuri Mosque which the militants destroyed last week.

Islamic State still controls the mosque's grounds and about half of the territory in the Old City, its last redoubt in Mosul.

"Fifty percent of this area has been liberated, al-Mashada and al-Ahmadiyya and al-Saada," Major General Jabbar al-Darraji told Iraqi state television.

"Our troops are now moving towards Farouq Street," he said, referring to the Old City's main north-south thoroughfare.

Federal police and elite units of the Counter-Terrorism Service have also been fighting inside the district's maze of narrow alleyways since the battle began 10 days ago.

A U.S.-led international coalition is providing air and ground support in the eight-month-old offensive.

Authorities expect the battle to end in the coming days, though the advance remains arduous.

MEDIEVAL CITY

Federal policemen walked through piles of rubble amid wrecked houses on Wednesday to reach the frontline, southwest of al-Nuri mosque. A Reuters correspondent said they exchanged mortars and sniper fire with militants.

The Old City's stone buildings date mostly from the medieval period. They include market stalls, a few mosques and churches, and small houses built and rebuilt on top of each other over the ages.

The minaret of the Ziwani mosque, which is cleared of militants, has been partially destroyed, and the cross had been removed from the bell tower of Shamoon al-Safa church, a Reuters correspondent said.

The military estimates up to 350 militants are dug in among civilians in wrecked houses and crumbling infrastructure. They are trying to slow the advance of Iraqi forces by laying booby traps and using suicide bombers and snipers.

Five IS fighters tried to flee across the Tigris River to the eastern side of Mosul but were killed by security forces, the military said on Wednesday.

RED ALERT 2017

Almost six minutes pass in the video focusing first on death and loss, and then on the sweetness and transitory nature of life: a grave is filled in with dirt; a young man gazes up at the heavens in the midst of Raqqa's rubble; an old man pulls a battered bicycle out of the ruins of a house; gold coins are counted and spin into eternity; a blacksmith labors wearily at his task; another man treads a path through fallen, sere leaves; a father gazes at his newborn baby; you see images of innocent children, of smiles and of flowers, of gold and of trees. You see normal streets and then those same streets that have been reduced to rubble.
This is Raqqa and it is in a way about the ongoing Coalition air campaign against ISIS. But the commentary is about much more than that. The commentator notes that those who have chosen the path of Jihad in the Path of God have made a better choice than the things of this world, of al-Dunya. You then hear the voice of a dead man, of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, just as you see an ISIS fighter on a sand berm shot and falling slowly to his death. Al-Zarqawi notes that there is in life, in the end, nothing for the Muslim but jihad and worship of their Lord. Focus, instead of this passing world, on the eternal, on al-Akhira, rather than this life.
From Islamic State's Raqqa Elegy shows both Weakness and Power by Alberto Fernandez.

The discourse was all about White Privilege. They shivered in defeat. The mujaheddin sacrificed their souls to Allah. The Australian Prime Minister couldn't decide whether he wanted to be Mussolini or General Mao. Mosul was falling, the rapture was spreading, the project of the West was failing everywhere. As Western politicians trumpeted victory over terror, defeat was everywhere, in the soldiers on corners, in the increasingly proscribed lives of the populace, in the deadening of discourse into ritual, the lockout laws shutting down nightclubs and the sacrifice of traditional culture, whether or not you approved of the boozy, friendly, unsophisticated rabble or not, that was beside the point. Everything was sacrificed in the name of diversity, and each move, each shutting down, made the advent of the sharia easier.

What are we defending? 

A West which bombed and killed innocence with zero regard for the sovereignty of nations. 

A West which treated its own citizens as charlatans, and jailed them at will. 

A country which fined people for having too much mud on the mud flaps of  their vehicles.

Which achieved perfection when everyone was dependent on the state.

Where traditional tolerance was now a sin against God. Changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. 

Old Alex interviewed an Iraqi expert from Human Rights Watch. We have never seen people so traumatised, she said. They have experienced three years of Islamic State rule. Their families have died in the air strikes, their homes destroyed. They have lost everything. 

The mujaheddin were fighting to the last drop of blood. Their sacrifice they hoped, or knew, would shelter, shatter, into the spiritual realm. The despised West was dying. They succeeded where all else thought they were failing. In the noble pursuit of truth. In the noble pursuit fo God's blessing. In rubble no Westerner could understand. Everything was comfort, even sacrifice, here at the end of days. 

The Aztecs had sacrificed the slaves, cutting out their hearts in ritual, there on the high reaches of the Pyramid of the Sun, summoning the gods.

Old Alex had climbed it as a boy, their pain a muffled, distant echo across two thousand years, across the flat plains, in high heat and low dudgeon. Now, ensconced, trapped on the other side of the world, trapped in suburban walls, there was no way to comprehend the disintegration of the West and the suffering of those who sacrificed themselves in the fight. They had no choice. They knew they were to die. That they were sacrificing their souls to Allah, high on amphetamines as they fought their final battles, that was all they knew as sheets of pain consumed them into the rapture.

Terrified populations. 

All that was accessible, filtered though a heavily manipulated media full of wall to wall propaganda, was the same muffled, distant echo of pain and spiritual compromise and and deaths which splashed through the heavens.

Words fail.

They know not what they do.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.thestar.com.my/news/world/2017/06/28/iraqi-military-says-it-has-retaken-two-mosul-neighbourhoods-from-islamic-state/#u8Gmr8OXsTquqxqO.99

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq's military pushed deeper into Mosul's Old City on Wednesday, taking two more districts from Islamic State and bringing it closer to total control of the city.

The army's 16th infantry division captured Hadarat al-Saada and al-Ahmadiyya, the military said in a statement. The areas are northwest of the historic Grand al-Nuri Mosque which the militants destroyed last week.

Islamic State still controls the mosque's grounds and about half of the territory in the Old City, its last redoubt in Mosul.

"Fifty percent of this area has been liberated, al-Mashada and al-Ahmadiyya and al-Saada," Major General Jabbar al-Darraji told Iraqi state television.

"Our troops are now moving towards Farouq Street," he said, referring to the Old City's main north-south thoroughfare.

Federal police and elite units of the Counter-Terrorism Service have also been fighting inside the district's maze of narrow alleyways since the battle began 10 days ago.

A U.S.-led international coalition is providing air and ground support in the eight-month-old offensive.

Authorities expect the battle to end in the coming days, though the advance remains arduous.

MEDIEVAL CITY

Federal policemen walked through piles of rubble amid wrecked houses on Wednesday to reach the frontline, southwest of al-Nuri mosque. A Reuters correspondent said they exchanged mortars and sniper fire with militants.

The Old City's stone buildings date mostly from the medieval period. They include market stalls, a few mosques and churches, and small houses built and rebuilt on top of each other over the ages.

The minaret of the Ziwani mosque, which is cleared of militants, has been partially destroyed, and the cross had been removed from the bell tower of Shamoon al-Safa church, a Reuters correspondent said.

The military estimates up to 350 militants are dug in among civilians in wrecked houses and crumbling infrastructure. They are trying to slow the advance of Iraqi forces by laying booby traps and using suicide bombers and snipers.

Five IS fighters tried to flee across the Tigris River to the eastern side of Mosul but were killed by security forces, the military said on Wednesday.

THE KILLERS IN HIGH PLACES

East Coast, Australia, dawn.

The perimeter had been established. whirring sound, a weapon, sheaves of weapons, they did not know, throbbed in a space between the real and the unreal. Old Alex  kept up the mundane issues, repeating time and again: "Surveillance is harassment. I have been very very badly harassed."

They only acted when the gods were roiled.

The gods were roiled.

Mosul was falling.

The mujaheddin lay dead in their hundreds, thousands.

More than 800,000 people had fled.

Every last one of them would despise the Americans for the rest of time.

Already, the bodies were beginning to rot amongst the chaos of the bombing.

Once again, the West would claim victory over a ruin.

He had written the previous year, in similar circumstances, cold, restless, frustrated, lonely at heart, driven to distraction by the surveillance:

There were many divines about in that strange, compelling,
confounding time.

The truth is, the people abide my kind, but no one loves us. There
is awe, but no affection. We grow used to the turned shoulder, the
retreating back, the bright conversation that sputters to a murmur
when we enter a room, the sigh of relief when we leave it. I have
never become used to it: the awe the common men have for my
kind. I suppose it is because I feel no more than a common man
myself. Even less, perhaps. No more than a tool in the hand of an
unseen craftsman, something to be used as needed and then cast
casually aside. They do not understand that I am given only to see
those matters that roil the heavens.19

It was only on rare occasions he met a kindred spirit.

"You have on old soul," an acquaintance had said to him in Bangkok
several years before. "You meet them sometimes..."

Much, as always, was left unsaid.

The big boys were in town, with their military mindsets and orders from on high. Once again they spoke of heart attacks, an old CIA trick, for they could simulate a heart attack and leave no trace.

Never doubt: they want to kill you.

Democracy was nothing of the kind.

Freedom of expression had been lost long ago.

Others were for caution. We learn more than we lose. But that's what they did, killed people, blew things up. It was their solution to everything. For decades, destroying the remnant images of democracy as a force for good, they had terrorised people across the globe, attempting to expand power so ineptly that in the end they destroyed it.

In the whispering trees that were the outside, a woman finally rested. She had been fretting for months about her husband's cancer, her emotional distress far greater than his physical pain.

They were sweeping now, those weapons from another place, curling up, a clutter of flying knifes, sheaves, forming into swarms as they flew upwards. Trans-dimensional. The perimeter impregnable.

The gods were roiled. And there would be no peace.

THE BIGGER STORY:



http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/iraq-isil-suicide-bombers-blocked-mosul-170626082142053.html

Fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched a string of counterattacks in western Mosul, setting off clashes that continued overnight, Iraqi officials said on Monday.

An unknown number of suicide bombers and gunmen targeted the Hay al-Tanak and Yarmuk neighbourhoods, and set fire to houses and cars in Tanak, military officials told news agencies.

The area had been declared free of ISIL in May.

Several people are reported to have died in the attacks, which sowed panic among residents who had returned to the area, and prompted hundreds of families to flee overnight.

Staff Lieutenant General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a top commander in the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), which sent forces to fight the ISIL gunmen, said the attackers had infiltrated the area by blending in with returning displaced civilians.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4638610/Labor-senator-says-Islam-gathering-Aussie-gets.html#ixzz4l721YiXs

A Labor senator who fled Iran as a boy has described the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan as something that is 'as Aussie as it gets'.

Sam Dastyari made the comments on the steps of Lakemba Mosque in western Sydney's Islamic heartland to commemorate the Eid festival in front of hundreds of Muslims.

'Eid Mubarak. How Aussie is this?' he said to cheers in the presence of New South Wales Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

'The steps of Lakemba Mosque on a Sunday morning. As Aussie as it gets.

'Celebrating Eid amongst politicians from both Labor and Liberal.'

Mr Yemini, a former Israeli soldier, said it was disturbing for any politician to describe the end of Ramadan as something quintessentially Australian.

'Lakemba mosque is probably as far from as Aussie as it gets,' he said.

'This is the same Lakemba Mosque, in 2012 I believe, which issued a fatwa against Christmas.

'As Aussie as it gets, eh, mate?' 

However Senator Dastyari, who was born in Iran and moved to Australia as a boy in 1988, said he was a proud supporter of multiculturalism.

'What I want to say is this: there are those out there, and we know who they are, that try and denigrate multicultural Australia, that try and denigrate our communities and I just want to say one thing today: 'Our love and our unity will always defeat their hate and their division,' he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/kurds-see-historic-chance-advance-cause-ruins-islamic-state?CMP=share_btn_fb

As what remains of Islamic State crumbles, the would-be victors have started circling. In Mosul, Iraqi forces have begun preparing for peace in the city where the now-encircled marauders took root three years ago. Across the border in Raqqa, with five of its neighbourhoods under their control, Kurdish forces are contemplating what comes next for them and their cause.


Analysis Ever-closer ties between US and Kurds stoke Turkish border tensions
Following Turkish airstrikes last week, US armoured vehicles have been deployed as a buffer between Kurdish and Turkish forces

Day-after scenarios are rapidly being plotted by every group that has played a role in Iraq and Syria over many years of war and loss. Russia, the US and Iran are jostling for advantage across the swath of both countries held by the capitulating group. The prize is far more than who gets to claim the inevitable military victory over Isis. At stake, for all sides, is the future make-up of the region and a chance to shape it in their likeness.

The wish list of outcomes is broad and divergent. For Russia, there is the chance to establish a presence in the centre of the region, with political muscle and enhanced gas and oil interests. For Iran, a consolidated and potentially decisive role in both countries. And for the US – in the absence of a broader strategy – the chance to spoil its rivals’ plans.

Amid the great power struggles, others too have sensed opportunity in chaos. The Kurds of Iraq and Syria have made little attempt to hide the fact that the post-Isis vacuum marks a rare, potentially historic, moment.

In Iraq, the president of the largely autonomous Kurdish north, Massoud Barzani, has called a referendum on independence to be held on 25 September. In Syria, Kurdish forces raised by the US, and sent to oust Isis from one of its last two citadels, believe that their role can be parlayed into broader autonomy.

Across a dizzying battlefield that has devolved into a series of concurrent conflicts within the one war, Kurdish forces backed by the US are making steady gains in Raqqa. In Iraq, in the early phases of the fight for Mosul, the peshmerga played an important part in securing the city’s northern and eastern approaches.

The role they played in Iraq and continue to play in Syria is seen by both Kurdish factions as offering significant leverage in any negotiations. The view elsewhere is very different. Iraq and Turkey have said they would not support a break-up of Iraq, symbolic or otherwise, and have shown little enthusiasm for more than the current arrangements, which allow – begrudgingly in Baghdad’s case – the Kurds to sell oil taken from fields in northern Iraq through a pipeline they have built to Turkey.

The US has refused to support talk of Kurdish independence since the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, wedding itself to the position that a united Iraq best serves its disparate peoples. Overriding the view are the explicit fears of regional allies that a break-up of Iraq along ethnic lines would directly threaten their own borders.

“That position won’t change,” said a senior US official. “It is not the time to be redrawing state boundaries, especially in Iraq and Syria. Such talk can only be advanced by broad regional consensus. And we are nowhere near that yet.”

Turkey, which has forged close economic ties with Iraqi Kurdistan as a means of maintaining the status quo, has been even more vehemently opposed to US backing for Kurdish groups in Syria, pointing to their ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, with whom Ankara has fought a deadly four-decade insurgency inside its borders.

In the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Erbil, the security chancellor of the region, Masrour Barzani, says Turkey has nothing to fear from the poll. “The referendum will shape the bilateral relationship between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq,” he said. “We do not intend to change borders of neighbouring states. It simply formalises a delineated border between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq.

QUOTE:

Anthem

Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Yeah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free

Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That's how the light gets in

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me

Ring the…

THE KILLERS IN HIGH PLACES

East Coast, Australia, dawn.

The perimeter had been established. whirring sound, a weapon, sheaves of weapons, they did not know, throbbed in a space between the real and the unreal. Old Alex  kept up the mundane issues, repeating time and again: "Surveillance is harassment. I have been very very badly harassed."

They only acted when the gods were roiled.

The gods were roiled.

Mosul was falling.

The mujaheddin lay dead in their hundreds, thousands.

More than 800,000 people had fled.

Every last one of them would despise the Americans for the rest of time.

Already, the bodies were beginning to rot amongst the chaos of the bombing.

Once again, the West would claim victory over a ruin.

He had written the previous year, in similar circumstances, cold, restless, frustrated, lonely at heart, driven to distraction by the surveillance:

There were many divines about in that strange, compelling,
confounding time.

The truth is, the people abide my kind, but no one loves us. There
is awe, but no affection. We grow used to the turned shoulder, the
retreating back, the bright conversation that sputters to a murmur
when we enter a room, the sigh of relief when we leave it. I have
never become used to it: the awe the common men have for my
kind. I suppose it is because I feel no more than a common man
myself. Even less, perhaps. No more than a tool in the hand of an
unseen craftsman, something to be used as needed and then cast
casually aside. They do not understand that I am given only to see
those matters that roil the heavens.19

It was only on rare occasions he met a kindred spirit.

"You have on old soul," an acquaintance had said to him in Bangkok
several years before. "You meet them sometimes..."

Much, as always, was left unsaid.

The big boys were in town, with their military mindsets and orders from on high. Once again they spoke of heart attacks, an old CIA trick, for they could simulate a heart attack and leave no trace.

Never doubt: they want to kill you.

Democracy was nothing of the kind.

Freedom of expression had been lost long ago.

Others were for caution. We learn more than we lose. But that's what they did, killed people, blew things up. It was their solution to everything. For decades, destroying the remnant images of democracy as a force for good, they had terrorised people across the globe, attempting to expand power so ineptly that in the end they destroyed it.

In the whispering trees that were the outside, a woman finally rested. She had been fretting for months about her husband's cancer, her emotional distress far greater than his physical pain.

They were sweeping now, those weapons from another place, curling up, a clutter of flying knifes, sheaves, forming into swarms as they flew upwards. Trans-dimensional. The perimeter impregnable.

The gods were roiled. And there would be no peace.

THE BIGGER STORY:



http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/06/iraq-isil-suicide-bombers-blocked-mosul-170626082142053.html

Fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched a string of counterattacks in western Mosul, setting off clashes that continued overnight, Iraqi officials said on Monday.

An unknown number of suicide bombers and gunmen targeted the Hay al-Tanak and Yarmuk neighbourhoods, and set fire to houses and cars in Tanak, military officials told news agencies.

The area had been declared free of ISIL in May.

Several people are reported to have died in the attacks, which sowed panic among residents who had returned to the area, and prompted hundreds of families to flee overnight.

Staff Lieutenant General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a top commander in the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), which sent forces to fight the ISIL gunmen, said the attackers had infiltrated the area by blending in with returning displaced civilians.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4638610/Labor-senator-says-Islam-gathering-Aussie-gets.html#ixzz4l721YiXs

A Labor senator who fled Iran as a boy has described the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan as something that is 'as Aussie as it gets'.

Sam Dastyari made the comments on the steps of Lakemba Mosque in western Sydney's Islamic heartland to commemorate the Eid festival in front of hundreds of Muslims.

'Eid Mubarak. How Aussie is this?' he said to cheers in the presence of New South Wales Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

'The steps of Lakemba Mosque on a Sunday morning. As Aussie as it gets.

'Celebrating Eid amongst politicians from both Labor and Liberal.'

Mr Yemini, a former Israeli soldier, said it was disturbing for any politician to describe the end of Ramadan as something quintessentially Australian.

'Lakemba mosque is probably as far from as Aussie as it gets,' he said.

'This is the same Lakemba Mosque, in 2012 I believe, which issued a fatwa against Christmas.

'As Aussie as it gets, eh, mate?' 

However Senator Dastyari, who was born in Iran and moved to Australia as a boy in 1988, said he was a proud supporter of multiculturalism.

'What I want to say is this: there are those out there, and we know who they are, that try and denigrate multicultural Australia, that try and denigrate our communities and I just want to say one thing today: 'Our love and our unity will always defeat their hate and their division,' he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/kurds-see-historic-chance-advance-cause-ruins-islamic-state?CMP=share_btn_fb

As what remains of Islamic State crumbles, the would-be victors have started circling. In Mosul, Iraqi forces have begun preparing for peace in the city where the now-encircled marauders took root three years ago. Across the border in Raqqa, with five of its neighbourhoods under their control, Kurdish forces are contemplating what comes next for them and their cause.


Analysis Ever-closer ties between US and Kurds stoke Turkish border tensions
Following Turkish airstrikes last week, US armoured vehicles have been deployed as a buffer between Kurdish and Turkish forces

Day-after scenarios are rapidly being plotted by every group that has played a role in Iraq and Syria over many years of war and loss. Russia, the US and Iran are jostling for advantage across the swath of both countries held by the capitulating group. The prize is far more than who gets to claim the inevitable military victory over Isis. At stake, for all sides, is the future make-up of the region and a chance to shape it in their likeness.

The wish list of outcomes is broad and divergent. For Russia, there is the chance to establish a presence in the centre of the region, with political muscle and enhanced gas and oil interests. For Iran, a consolidated and potentially decisive role in both countries. And for the US – in the absence of a broader strategy – the chance to spoil its rivals’ plans.

Amid the great power struggles, others too have sensed opportunity in chaos. The Kurds of Iraq and Syria have made little attempt to hide the fact that the post-Isis vacuum marks a rare, potentially historic, moment.

In Iraq, the president of the largely autonomous Kurdish north, Massoud Barzani, has called a referendum on independence to be held on 25 September. In Syria, Kurdish forces raised by the US, and sent to oust Isis from one of its last two citadels, believe that their role can be parlayed into broader autonomy.

Across a dizzying battlefield that has devolved into a series of concurrent conflicts within the one war, Kurdish forces backed by the US are making steady gains in Raqqa. In Iraq, in the early phases of the fight for Mosul, the peshmerga played an important part in securing the city’s northern and eastern approaches.

The role they played in Iraq and continue to play in Syria is seen by both Kurdish factions as offering significant leverage in any negotiations. The view elsewhere is very different. Iraq and Turkey have said they would not support a break-up of Iraq, symbolic or otherwise, and have shown little enthusiasm for more than the current arrangements, which allow – begrudgingly in Baghdad’s case – the Kurds to sell oil taken from fields in northern Iraq through a pipeline they have built to Turkey.

The US has refused to support talk of Kurdish independence since the invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, wedding itself to the position that a united Iraq best serves its disparate peoples. Overriding the view are the explicit fears of regional allies that a break-up of Iraq along ethnic lines would directly threaten their own borders.

“That position won’t change,” said a senior US official. “It is not the time to be redrawing state boundaries, especially in Iraq and Syria. Such talk can only be advanced by broad regional consensus. And we are nowhere near that yet.”

Turkey, which has forged close economic ties with Iraqi Kurdistan as a means of maintaining the status quo, has been even more vehemently opposed to US backing for Kurdish groups in Syria, pointing to their ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, with whom Ankara has fought a deadly four-decade insurgency inside its borders.

In the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Erbil, the security chancellor of the region, Masrour Barzani, says Turkey has nothing to fear from the poll. “The referendum will shape the bilateral relationship between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq,” he said. “We do not intend to change borders of neighbouring states. It simply formalises a delineated border between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq.

QUOTE:

Anthem

Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Yeah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free

Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything)
That's how the light gets in

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me

Ring the…

THERE ARE SOME GOOD PEOPLE

Lightning Ridge

Fires were burning in the oil fields. Rats were scrabbling in the walls. Trust no one had been a cross to hang around his neck. He approached infinity and they cried out loud. It made a difference to, "we almost died laughing". There were hysterical tomes, shrieks of indignation, God botherers who sought redemption, to transcend the discomfort of their own routines, but he could see inside their false beliefs, their doubts. When the spirits retreated back from whence they came, when God didn't infest their every waking moment, when the ordinary really did become the ordinary, then those who sought to pursue him could only scuttle for cover.

Their seaweed dreams floated through the suburb like short circuiting electric currents, going nowhere. A woman had stopped fantasising about her wedding, and thoughts she would wish no one else to know, what it would be like on the wedding night. She had gone, he presumed, to set up her own home. A devotee of Alcoholics Anonymous stopped trying to convert everyone he met, and had ruthfully come to admit his own disillusionment. People were people wherever they went. A labourer tossed and turned over his frustration with shifts. Everyone was becoming poorer. No one dreamed of empire. Even in these marooned places, remote from the currents of history, psychological disturbance was becoming common place. He heard them marching to war, although no war had been declared. He heard the analysts continue to fret over the best course of action; marooned, too, in their own inaction.

They had entered frightening times.

The government's response had been to crack down even further, to quell all dissent. To turn the society into a desert, in the name of fairness. Diversity became the mantra. Uniformity became the solution. Day by day the disconnect became greater.

He waited for the next attack; the attack that would change Australia forever. 

The government had taken full advantage of the climate of fear it had done so much to create.

A terrorist attack anywhere in the world was an excuse for the Australian government to abrogate yet more freedoms, introduce yet more surveillance, fund the unsupervised if not out of control national security agencies yet more hundreds of millions of dollars. To taunt their critics ever further. To crush anyone who disagreed with the national narrative.

Bollards had been erected through the centres of Sydney and Melbourne.

The government had ramped up its rhetoric to ever greater heights; and proudly announced it had introduced more than 60 pieces of counter terror legislation. More, in fact, than any other Western country. This remote island nation where the on-field deaths were negligible. 

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Did no one teach them that? 

Did no one dare speak the truth to these people?

The Australian Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull had now been the man responsible for dropping more than 1300 bombs on Iraq.

It was a fair guesstimate to say that each of those bombs probably killed 10 Muslims.

Australia had followed America into the Vietnam War, based on false evidence concocted by the CIA. It had followed America into Iraq, based on false evidence concocted by the CIA. It had been party to secret imbroglios around the globe, cooked up by unsupervised agencies who lied to their political leaders, to the public, even to their own staff.

It had been a deadly concert.

And now, the internal brew was even more toxic. A bureaucratic and judicial apparatus which had implemented Cultural Marxism with billions of dollars of funds ripped off an unsuspecting, uneducated public. The National Broadband Network was just the most high profile heists of recent times, $61 billion ripped off the public in order to force, by legislation, millions of Australians onto an inferior broadband network. Deny them the internet. Deny them the most educative and potentially liberating technology in human history. Deny them the capacity to run their own lives. And whatever you do, don't tell them the truth about what you're doing.

Why the infestation of regulation. Why the phony wars, when there was no threat to the homeland. Why the flooding of the country with immigrants. Why the phony propaganda campaign, backed by billions in public funding, on refugees. Why the government's propaganda arm, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, trumpeted every minutiae of the climate change debate while ignoring the very real stories of the people's welfare. Why identity politics, playing on a dizzying range of victims,  from transgender activists to Muslim refugees, predominated any stories on the multiple issues afflicting ordinary working people. Why someone who got up and went off to a job each day was denigrated. Why someone who tried to establish a business found themselves facing one government erected barrier after another. 

Why their voices had been excised from the public debate.

Old Alex gazed out across a whipping wind and a falling sky, the ghosts of Aboriginal warriors long lost playing still in the shadows of that sacred lake; and a frigid cold settled across what had once been a remote, working class suburb. 

One of the latest emblems of authority, a highly decorated startlingly new Audi police car, bristling with antennas, radars and scanners, drove by.

He turned to try and grasp something, as those he was with reminisced in celebratory, affectionate detail the sins of their youth. 

EXTRACT:

One of the remarkable aspects of ASIO's files is how little we know about ASIO's proactive operations. While the purpose of personal files and subject files is to gather useful information about security targets, the actual operations conducted from time to time that involved these targets remain a mystery. Its unraveling awaits a historian with tenacity and a great deal of time. We know these files are highly sensitive because of the extent of deletions.

From Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files.


THE BIGGER STORY:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/kurds-see-historic-chance-advance-cause-ruins-islamic-state?CMP=share_btn_fb

As what remains of Islamic State crumbles, the would-be victors have started circling. In Mosul, Iraqi forces have begun preparing for peace in the city where the now-encircled marauders took root three years ago. Across the border in Raqqa, with five of its neighbourhoods under their control, Kurdish forces are contemplating what comes next for them and their cause.

Analysis Ever-closer ties between US and Kurds stoke Turkish border tensions
Following Turkish airstrikes last week, US armoured vehicles have been deployed as a buffer between Kurdish and Turkish forces

Day-after scenarios are rapidly being plotted by every group that has played a role in Iraq and Syria over many years of war and loss. Russia, the US and Iran are jostling for advantage across the swath of both countries held by the capitulating group. The prize is far more than who gets to claim the inevitable military victory over Isis. At stake, for all sides, is the future make-up of the region and a chance to shape it in their likeness.

The wish list of outcomes is broad and divergent. For Russia, there is the chance to establish a presence in the centre of the region, with political muscle and enhanced gas and oil interests. For Iran, a consolidated and potentially decisive role in both countries. And for the US – in the absence of a broader strategy – the chance to spoil its rivals’ plans.

Amid the great power struggles, others too have sensed opportunity in chaos. The Kurds of Iraq and Syria have made little attempt to hide the fact that the post-Isis vacuum marks a rare, potentially historic, moment.

In Iraq, the president of the largely autonomous Kurdish north, Massoud Barzani, has called a referendum on independence to be held on 25 September. In Syria, Kurdish forces raised by the US, and sent to oust Isis from one of its last two citadels, believe that their role can be parlayed into broader autonomy.

Across a dizzying battlefield that has devolved into a series of concurrent conflicts within the one war, Kurdish forces backed by the US are making steady gains in Raqqa. In Iraq, in the early phases of the fight for Mosul, the peshmerga played an important part in securing the city’s northern and eastern approaches.