As Iraq continues its months-long invasion of Mosul, a growing number of civilians are fleeing out of the city, with 14,000 estimated to have left in the last week, mostly on foot, walking toward the refugee camps set up further to the south.
Iraq has long insinuated that the refugees would include a lot of ISIS members, a narrative that they established in no small part because it would justify the summary detentions of a lot of the detainees as “suspects.” Intelligence officials familiar with the situation say it is happening, to some extent.
“The fighters don’t come out,” one of the officials told Reuters, saying that the people that are trying to slip out played less public, and non-combatant roles with ISIS. This leaves open the question of whether the intelligence pointing to them having ISIS ties is good or not.
Iraq is heavily reliant on paid “sources” from Mosul for such information, and a lot of times in the past this has led the sources to coming up with lists of names that make those writing the checks happy, and less worried with fact-checking.
We should be skeptical of every story discussing ISIS in general – there is a mounting pile of evidence that this cartoonish but deadly evil force has always been a US and Saudi, and supported operation, using US weapons and intel, etc. But, also in the Mosul story, we should be skeptical because of what happened in Fallujah over a period of a decade plus. Much of the conflict in Iraq became about Sunni minority vs. Shia majority, and the US ended up siding with the Shia. As a result, the original Sunni residents of Fallujah got disappeared. Ethnic cleansing was the ultimate result there. The original Sunnis dead and gone.
http://www.pbs.org/video/2365860371/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/fallujah-the-hidden-massacre/
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/12/investigation_did_trumps_defense_secretary_nominee