https://lecourrierdumaghrebetdelorient. ... -lhorreur/
--translation--
The vast majority of the media, at least European and American, have accustomed their public to cover with much complacency the wars carried out by the West in the Middle East or Africa.
This was the case in Iraq, in 1991, then in 2003; The same was true in Libya in 2011; In Mali, since 2012; And this was also true of the Battle of Mosul in 2016 and 2017.
Very few "war reporters" dared to denounce the events that occurred in Mosul after the assault of the Iraqi armed forces and Shiite militias on the city, supported by the aviation of the member states of the coalition led By Washington and by the special units deployed on the ground by several of these countries.
Very few of them, mainly because the majority of correspondents and special envoys wrote their "reports" or spoke in newspapers-spoken from Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, without ever venturing to In Mosul itself, one of the most dangerous theaters of war of the moment. They were thus ignorant of the reality, contenting themselves with passing on the "information" communicated to them by the press service of the armed forces against the Islamic State. At best some of them ventured into the villages freed from the plain of Nineveh, surprised to discover so many ruins, but satisfied to be able to show themselves as a "field of war" in front of the camera.
As for those who made their way to the field of battle, they hesitated to describe what they saw there, sweetening their words at best, so as not to appear too contrary to the sacrosanct doxa dominant Which formats the speech of all journalists concerned not to put their careers at risk. This is how the mainstream press now works: it must be said just like everyone else, for fear of being right alone, which only brings about the ostracism and the banning of the system.
Thus, few "correspondents" and "special envoys" warned those who listened to them against the obvious risks of the massacre that was being prepared; Too busy praising the effectiveness of the coalition strikes and singing the victory of the international community and the Iraqi army over the Islamic state without asking the right questions without seeing what was actually happening.
Today, however, it is no longer possible to hide the horror and the feathers are necessarily untied, all together and too late; The evil is done, and the press has not yet fulfilled its democratic mission which is to inform and alert public opinion.
While the eastern third of Mosul, mostly inhabited by a Kurdish and especially Arab Shiite population, has been more or less spared, most of the city has disappeared, populated by mostly Sunni families, completely shaved under bombs Of the coalition aircraft.
I had seen the ruins of Sirte, in Libya, destroyed by the bombing of NATO; I witnessed the bombing of Homs and Aleppo as an embedded reporter with the rebel brigades of the Free Syrian Army and Jabhet al-Nosra. But I had never seen anything like the ruins of Mosul where Even the reinforced concrete skeleton of the most modern buildings has sometimes not resisted the extreme violence of armaments used to defeat the fighters of the Islamic State.
In the face of this spectacle of total destruction, the question that immediately came to my mind was: " But where are the 250,000 men, women and children who had not evacuated Mosul-West?" "
And this, less because they were forced by the IE to serve as "human shields" (the myths of war propaganda have always been hard skinned) and because they feared reprisals from the Shiites of Baghdad The Iraqi army is made up of more than 90% of Shiites), as these Sunni families had, in 2014, welcomed the liberating jihadists when their 800 fighters drove out the 65,000 soldiers of the Iraqi army from Mosul.
Where have they gone, all these people ?!
Under the rubble!
This month of July 2017 is particularly scorching in Iraq, and the unsustainable putrid odor that floats over the gravas answers the question without any ambiguity.
As for the wandering dogs, who scrape here and there among the debris of the dwellings and tear from the bowels of the battlefield scraps of flesh, they confirm the answer, if need be. Just as the clouds of black flies leave no doubt about the presence of the corpses and make it possible to locate them easily.
Sometimes, at the turn of a crater, we see a leg or an arm emerge, gray by the cement dust which has covered everything and on which the sun is reflected to produce a blinding, almost immaculate whiteness. Bodies of bodies that the incessant rotations of the Iraqi army's bulldozers fail to make all disappear, these titanic machines that crush the remains under their enormous wheels and flatten them with their large heavy shovel.
No, nothing does: the dead call their presence.
It is also for the army, which has now been joined by the militias, to rake the last pockets of resistance.
Not all jihadists were killed. Every day, they emerge from the long and numerous tunnels they have dug under the city. How many are they still in this vast subsoil? None of the officers I encountered advances to quantifying what remains of the forces of the Sunni enemy.
But the Shiites no longer make the slightest quarter; And the uncertified rumor that the Iraqi General Staff has given orders not to make a prisoner any more and to finish very quickly with everything that still lives in Mosul. This is also why bulldozers are so active; To fill with heavy shovelfuls of bursting concrete blocks the accesses of those tunnels from which death still springs daily; To bury alive those who hide there.
Show no mercy ! And so much the worse for civilians; They are in any case Sunnis ... It is probably the explanation of the corpses that one sees floating on the Tigris, every day, and that come to run aground on the banks of pebbles, where they blacken and swell in the sun, Like skins ... Some have their hands tied behind their backs.
It stinks so much that you can not stay long in Mosul-West without being nauseated; And returned to the hotel in Erbil after a three hour drive, the smell had so permeated my clothes that people asked me about what was going on there ...
The victors do not show any sympathy for the Sunnis, and acts of revenge are no longer counted, as was the case in Tikrit and Fallujah, two precedents that should have led the coalition of Washington to put sufficient pressure on Baghdad To avoid horror. But probably, the coalition being now busy in Raqqa, Syria, the humanitarian issue was the least of its concerns.
It is thus that in Iraq the end of three years of war, in the intoxication of the blood, is celebrated, which the heat and the stench excite even more than victory, enraged soldiers become as fools. Henceforth, religious antagonism, which has never ceased to exacerbate itself since 2003, can no longer be disguised: loudspeakers fixed on armored cars of the army broadcast songs to the glory of Imam Hossein, figure Emblematic of Shi'ism, while soldiers track down the last survivors, backed up by swarms of helicopters that constantly fly over the ruins and fire their deadly missiles at the slightest movement. And it is not the officer in charge of the press who will turn the tables, even repeating to anyone who wants to hear him and smile on his lips: " There are no Shiites or Sunnis, right here ! We are all Iraqis! "
As in Sirte or Aleppo, the number of civilian victims of this battle is unlikely to be known.
One last thing, finally, to return for a moment to the profession of "war reporter" ... It would be dishonest to pretend to ignore that the Russian press, for its part, is not so quick to seize the terrible exactions Committed in Mosul to denounce the Washington coalition struggling with the Islamic state as the Western press did without any nuance of events in Aleppo where the Russians were fighting al-Qaeda (Jabhet al-Nosra).
The fact deserves to be pinned as Moscow prepares to support the offensive of Bashar al-Assad's army against the last stronghold of the al-Nosra Front in Syria: Idlib, where more than one million Civilians are trapped.
