Daesh executes 70 members of Sunni tribe in Iraq

According to local sheikhs, the latest incident saw ISIS executing tribesmen who had family members fighting alongside the Iraqi military in the area around the Anbar capital of Ramadi, which is under ISIS control and being contested by Iraqi forces.

The United States and its allies trained Iraqi forces to fight a counterinsurgency, Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesperson in Baghdad, said, but ISIS has “defended Ramadi nearly in an early 20th-century style, with belts of defenses”, a more conventional tactic than Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition had anticipated.

A week ago, a statement by the Iraqi Joint Operations Command said the new agreement aimed at “assisting and participating in collecting information about Daesh (IS group) and its associates”.

“This is not the first attack on the Albu Nimr, since they have been actively opposed to ISIL [Daesh]”, it said in an e-mail to AFP.

The Al Bu Nimr tribe’s alliance with coalition forces goes back to the US occupation, when it assisted in the 2006 and 2007 “Sunni Awakening”, an effort by the USA military to turn moderate Sunnis in Anbar province against militants with al-Qaida in Iraq.

The Iraqi military says it has entered the Anbar province capital of Ramadi from the west and is attempting to advance on the center of the city.

Possibly as many as 300 of the tribe’s members were killed around a year ago, when anti-Daesh forces were still holding out in a few parts of Ramadi, which is the Albu Nimr’s main hub.

They no longer receive direct support from the U.S., whose assistance is channelled through the Shiite-dominated federal government.