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A Year After Its Bloody Offensive, Iraqis and Syrians Take Stock of Islamic State

Though the so-called Islamic State may be pushed back in Iraq, no one knows what will happen in Syria.
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One year after the so-called Islamic State's lightning advance across northwestern Iraq, the extremist group maintains wide control over many Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria. As a fuller picture of the group's detailed and meticulously planned military network has emerged in recent months — alongside documentation of its atrocities and likely genocide crimes — experts are predicting a protracted and bloody fight to dismantle the so-called caliphate it rules over in both countries.

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On June 10 of 2014, Iraqi security forces hastily retreated from Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, and Iraq's second largest city. Images of the troops fleeing, having left behind an arsenal of US armaments, foretold for the events of the coming months, when the group would cement their control over the northwest, murder and kidnap thousands, and displace hundreds of thousands, while leaving Iraq's Shia-led government sputtering to respond.

It's now clear the genesis of the Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, was well planned, and involved former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party — many of whom hailed from Tikrit, a city that IS captured shortly after Mosul. The militant group's public face, however, has been a dubious form of radical Sunni Islam, one that it has used to justify murder and enslavement, and which has been widely rebuked by global Sunni leaders.

In Nineveh province, IS was especially brutal towards religious minorities, including Christians and the Shabak. But it was the plight of the Yazidis — at least hundreds of whom were killed by IS as they captured thousands of women and girls — that finally drew the US into battle against the extremist group.

Soon after kidnapping several thousand Yazidi girls and women, reports began to emerge of them being sold as slaves. Human rights groups and the UN soon confirmed those accounts, as did IS itself, which on several occasions has printed justifications for its enslavement of Yazidi females.

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Zainab Bangura, the UN's special representative on sexual violence in conflict, told VICE News on Monday that the crimes of IS, which she has spent much of the last year tracking, are "impossible to take in."

"We know that sexual violence is as old as war itself," said Bangura. "But this is the first I've seen where (IS) actually have a manual to select women and who to treat as slaves."

In March, the UN's human rights office found that IS likely committed genocide against the Yazidis.

"ISIL systematically separated the men from the women and young children; the men were subsequently taken away to nearby ditches and summarily executed," wrote the office. Of the women and girls it captured, "ISIL members numbered them or recorded names on lists, and inspected them to evaluate their beauty." The women and girls, some as young as nine, were sold among fighters, and raped repeatedly. Many, said Bangura, committed suicide while in captivity. Even when IS exchanged Yazidis for cash with middlemen for their families, which it did for more than 200 Yazidis in early April, it went through the theater of a religious court. The court vetted their sale as property, ensuring they were considered slaves up until the last moment, which is a pathology that Bangura noted.

"In all the conflicts we've investigated, there's a strong sense of denial and silence — no one wants to talk about how many people were raped and people hide incidents of rape," added Bangura. "But here you are monitoring a group that posts on social media what it is doing."

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Related: Despite Islamic State Threat, Pilgrimages to Holy Shrines in Iraq Continue

One year after the fall of Mosul, IS still rules the city. After last month's capturing of the provincial capital of Anbar, Ramadi, the group continues to menace Baghdad, which is less than 70 miles away. On Friday, the group reportedly executed 34 people just north of Ramadi.

Experts say despite IS's competence on the battlefield, the Iraqi government, Shia militias and whatever combination of Iranian and American-led forces — be they Revolutionary Guard or US warplanes — will staunch the group's expansion in Iraq, which has up till now largely taken place in Sunni areas. There is no consensus on what would emerge should IS be defeated and forced underground in Iraq — particularly if the group still maintains control over border regions in Syria. Mutual distrust between the country's Sunni and Shia communities will linger with or without IS, say observers.

"ISIS can be pushed back by Iraq, but its future in Syria seems unlikely to diminish in the near to mid-term," Hassan Abbas, professor of Security Studies at National Defense University, told VICE News.

The UN, whose humanitarian programs in Iraq are teetering on insolvency, estimates 2.3 million Iraqis are living in IS controlled areas, and a further 3 million have been displaced by fighting. A larger population, some 4.4 million people now require food aid in order to survive.

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In early April, Iraqi security forces, buttressed by Iranian backed Shia militias and advisers from Tehran, along with American-led air support, took back Tikrit. The battle was protracted and signaled the tacit alliance between Iran and the US in the fight against IS. It also conveyed the reality that Baghdad cannot retake the rest of Iraq without the Shia militias, which have been cited for their own atrocities, and are seen by many Sunnis as a tool of division, and of Iran. This week, Shia militias were again instrumental in retaking Baiji, home to one of Iraq's largest oil refineries.

The militias are also being employed to recapture Ramadi, after local tribes — who said Baghdad didn't properly arm them — and Iraqi security forces were unable to stem IS infiltration of the city. In recent weeks, IS has sponsored public pronouncements by Sunni tribesmen of allegiance to the group — a move that could further cement their support, willing or not, in Anbar.

"I think in the medium term, looking out 2-5 years, the likelihood is that ISIL will be rolled back in Iraq, and that will mean very much campaigns similar to those in Tikrit," Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan and expert on the region, told VICE News. "The campaign in Tikrit was not pretty — most of the Sunni population has fled, the city was reduced to rubble, and the population isn't returning because they are afraid of the militias."

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The situation in Syria, says Cole, is much less clear. In Idlib province, a coalition of non-IS rebels, including al Qaeda affiliate al Nusrah Front, has coalesced and dealt the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad successive blows. In the desert, IS has captured the ancient city of Palmyra, and thereby cut off Assad's remaining troops to the east, towards the Iraqi border. Analysts including Cole believe the Syrian government, possibly urged on by its Iranian backers, is admitting through its retreat that it must concentrate its resources in Damascus and along coastal areas, where a majority of the country's population still lives.

The war in "Syria could go on a long time," said Cole.

In Iraq, the battle against IS, added Cole, has cemented Kurdistan as a separate entity, which he believes will declare independence. After IS's initial gains in Nineveh, Kurdish forces, following in the path of coalition bombs, have pushed the militants out of much of the Sinjar region. Sinjar was until last year the traditional home of the Yazidis, who have since largely fled to Kurdish controlled areas, where their plight during last summer has been documented.

The US air campaign in both countries, meanwhile, is only the latest iteration of its now 14 year "war on terror," which included the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — a move that the American political establishment has now slowly renounced amidst the current fighting. After more than 4,400 coalition airstrikes in both countries, the US and its allies have, after much hesitation, admitted to the killing of only two children.

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Watch the VICE News documentary The Islamic State here: 

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In a microcosm of the confused narratives in Syria, those deaths resulted from an airstrike on al Nusrah, a group that is currently fighting the Islamic State. Both groups are fighting the Assad regime, which the US says must go to ensure peace. Further complicating matters, the State Department last week, in messages posted on the Facebook and Twitter pages for its shuttered embassy in Damascus, alleged that Assad was abetting IS' offensives in Idlib via his own air campaign.

Human rights groups, first responders and local activists have confirmed to VICE News that the death toll from coalition strikes is much higher than what the US has confirmed. The rise of IS and subsequent coalition bombings, they say, have also alienated local residents, who were holding out for strikes against Assad, and not his enemies.

As of Monday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said it had counted at least 148 civilian deaths from coalition airstrikes.

American obfuscation of the civilian toll, and its unwillingness to use data from monitoring organizations that it cites to document the crimes of the Assad regime have left human rights workers frustrated.

"Identical evidence used to show Assad's bombings was deemed credible many times," Jennifer, told VICE News. "There is a lack of transparency in how CENTCOM is carrying out its investigations. They are not talking to human rights organizations. It is not sufficient anymore to drop several thousand bombs then say there are not credible reports of civilian deaths."

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One such strike, on the night of April 30 in the Syrian town of Bir Mahalli, reportedly claimed the lives of more than 50 civilians, according to several monitors and opposition groups. Reached for comment shortly after the alleged incident, a spokesperson for US Central Command confirmed airstrikes targeting IS in the vicinity of the town, but denied civilians had been killed, citing information from Kurdish forces who said there were none in the area. On Monday, CENTCOM told VICE News that four investigations into civilian casualties, only one of them in Syria, are ongoing. It would not share details of those inquiries.

On Monday, President Obama said there was still no "complete strategy" to dismantle IS, a fault he lay at the feet of the Iraqi government. On the other side of the border, the US has supported rebels to fight IS, with few results.

"The Obama air component to this anti-ISIL campaign is, practically speaking, and was from the very beginning, aimed at containment," said Cole.

Meanwhile, the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq, many of them travelling to join IS, remains a major concern of those in the West. In May, the UN Security Council reported that more than 25,000 "foreign terrorist fighters" from more than 100 countries, are currently involved in conflict, mostly in the two countries.

"ISIS is gaining every day that it keeps control of territory in Iraq," said Abbas. Even if defeated, he added, "The new cadre of radical enthusiasts that the group has recruited and inspired will continue to haunt the region for a while."

Related: Syrian Rebels Behead Captured Islamic State Fighters