Australian poultry firm Baiada to close Victorian plant

Will Morrow

Australian poultry giant Baiada announced on October 17 that it will end production at its Laverton plant in Melbourne on March 13, destroying more than 100 jobs. Half the workforce is to be laid off two months before the shutdown.

Baiada’s managing director, Simon Camilleri, the multi-millionaire grandson of Celestino Baiada, who founded the company during World War II, declared that “market conditions” meant “we could no longer viably operate the Laverton processing facility.” Baiada will concentrate processing at its three New South Wales plants in Beresfield, Tamworth and Hanwood.

The National Union of Workers (NUW), which covers processing and distribution employees, is collaborating with Baiada to try to ensure an “orderly closure” by suppressing any struggle against the restructuring. Camilleri said Baiada will “work closely” with the union, which was evidently forewarned of the restructure, to supposedly help the workers find other employment.

The NUW announced it would do nothing to oppose the shutdown. Spokesman Alex Snowball said the decision was “absolutely devastating” and “really sad news,” according to an October 25 article by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Snowball promoted Baiada’s worthless pledge to help laid-off workers find new jobs, claiming “there is time to do something to assist these workers.”

In reality, many employees are migrants from Africa and Southeast Asia who speak limited English. A number of them have worked at the factory for decades. They will have difficulty finding any new work under conditions of a wholesale destruction of jobs throughout the auto and other manufacturing industries.

Baiada’s restructure is aimed at boosting profits in response to intense competition, in line with the demands of finance capital for ever-greater exploitation of the working class.

The poultry market, which generates around $7 billion annually, is dominated by the duopoly of Baiada and rival Inghams, who respectively contribute 33 and 40 percent of chicken meat nationally. Their business models are “vertically integrated,” extending from hatcheries all the way to final meat processing and packaging.

Inghams was purchased by private equity firm TPG for $880 million in 2013. Last August, TPG approached investors with plans to list on the Australian stock exchange. Banks and hedge funds behind the float include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Macquarie Bank and UBS. TPG simultaneously announced “Project Accelerate,” a restructuring program to slash the conditions of its more than 9,000 employees in Australia and New Zealand, saving up to $200 million.

Excerpts published by the Australian Financial Review (AFR) on August 29 stated that “under-utilised facilities” would be “rationalised,” and “labour savings” found via “automation of manual processes in primary and further processing plants.” Labour contracts would be re-negotiated with “a rebalancing mix of full-time, part-time and casual employees to increase flexibility.” On June 8, Inghams announced it would shut its plant in Cardiff, New South Wales, wiping out 199 full-time jobs and 160 casual positions.

Explaining its market evaluation for Inghams, Macquarie Bank cited “strong volume growth and benefits from Ingham’s cost cut and efficiency program (Project Accelerate)” as “key drivers.”

Baiada, which, according to its web site, employs 2,200 workers nationally and generated revenue of around $1.5 billion in 2014, has responded with its own restructuring program. The Laverton closure has been planned for months. Last July, Baiada applied for local council approval to develop its Hanwood facility, in order to double production to 2.8 million chickens per week. The company also operates plants at Osborne Park, in Perth, Western Australia, at Mareeba and Ipswich in Queensland, and in Adelaide.

In assisting the restructure, the NUW is continuing its role as a labour police force, tasked with suppressing opposition among workers to conditions of exploitation that recall scenes from Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle.

In 2011, workers at Baiada’s Laverton plant conducted a courageous 13-day strike for improved conditions. More than 40 percent of the 430 workers then employed were casuals or employed indirectly through a maze of subcontractors. Many were international students with limited English, who reported being paid $10 an hour, cash-in-hand. A year earlier, Indian student Sarel Singh was decapitated by a fast-moving poultry line that he was ordered to clean. His co-workers later said they were told to take down Singh’s corpse and restart the line within two hours.

The strikers faced brutal attacks from the company and the state. Police escorted strike-breakers into the plant and assaulted picketers, with one worker hospitalised.

The NUW isolated and wore down the strikers, refusing to mobilise any support from the thousands of meatworkers across Victoria and nationally. Instead, the union organised bogus “community pickets,” involving a handful of union officials and joined by members of a host of pseudo-left parties, including Socialist Alternative, Socialist Alliance and Solidarity.

Within two weeks, the NUW shut down the strike, signing an “in-principle” agreement for a miserly 4 percent wage rise over three years—approximately the level of inflation. The NUW lied by telling workers it won a guarantee that contractors employed for six months would be hired permanently. In fact, the same clause was in the previous agreement and was simply treated as a dead letter. The NUW’s sole concern was to gain access to membership dues from the hundreds of contract workers. The agreement included a new clause giving the union access to contract workers’ contact details, increasing its potential dues base.

One worker still at Laverton told the World Socialist Web Site that after the strike Baiada carried out several waves of layoffs totalling hundreds of job cuts over three years. The sackings have brought the number employed at the plant to just over 100 today. The NUW worked with Baiada to stifle any opposition among workers to the layoffs.

The union relied on the services of the pseudo-left parties, which hailed the betrayal in 2011 as a “victory” and an example of a supposed resurgence of militant trade unionism. Socialist Alternative wrote on July 8, 2015, that the strike showed “the kind of fight that is needed.”

Far from being an aberration, similarly appalling conditions have been documented across Baiada’s operations nationally. Following a “Four Corners” ABC report in 2013, a government report into conditions at Baiada’s three New South Wales plants found thousands of immigrant workers, mainly from Taiwan and Hong Kong, employed through a web of sham contracting arrangements, paid less than the minimum wage and working shifts of up to 19 hours. Workers reported being forced to live in company houses, with rent deducted from their pay by labour hire contractors. One house in Beresfield was being used to accommodate 21 Baiada workers.

To oppose the latest restructuring drive, Baiada workers require new organisations of struggle, including rank-and-file factory committees, entirely independent of the trade unions, to carry forward an industrial and political fight. These committees should appeal for support from other Baiada workers nationally, and from processing workers at Inghams and elsewhere who face similar attacks.

Such a struggle must be based on an understanding of the political forces that workers confront. The demands of the global financial firms underscore that in every industry, workers face not just a single employer, but an entire economic system—capitalism—which is driving to eliminate what little remains of the social gains won by workers in struggle throughout the 20th century.

The defence of the most basic conditions for the working class today requires a political struggle for a workers’ government, which would place the major industrial and financial firms under public ownership, and reorganise economic life on the basis of social need, rather than private profit. We urge workers who agree with the need for such a fight to contact the Socialist Equality Party.

New Zealand pseudo-lefts hold protests to denounce Russia

John Braddock

New Zealand’s three main pseudo-left groups—Socialist Aotearoa (SA), Fightback and the International Socialist Organisation (ISO)—held protests in Auckland and Wellington last Saturday to denounce the actions of Russia in the Syrian city of Aleppo. The rallies, which included representatives from the Unite union, Amnesty International, the Green Party, Peace Action Wellington and several refugee groups, numbered about 40 people in each city.

The protests were organised in conjunction with Syrian Solidarity NZ, a group that is vociferously opposed to the Assad regime and its ally Russia, blaming them—not the United States—for the destruction and carnage in Syria. Syrian Solidarity has repeatedly demanded military intervention by the UN and the US in support of anti-Assad militias.

Syrian Solidarity alleged in a press release that “8 out of 9 civilian deaths have been caused by Russian Bombings.” It claimed that Russia is “clearly in contravention of international law” and demanded an end to Moscow’s support for Assad. The group explicitly condemned a “wave of uncritical anti-Americanism,” adding that the “Syrian cause would have been much better served if the US did not create the perception that they support the popular uprising.”

In fact, the war is a direct product of US interventions in the region, utilising Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias, first in Libya and then in Syria, as proxy forces in wars for regime change. Behind the demonisation of Russia over Aleppo, Washington is preparing a major escalation, not only of the US-led intervention in Syria, but of its reckless confrontation with Russia.

The protests were a calculated attempt by the pseudo-left outfits to whip up support for Washington’s agenda. They were held just two days after NATO defence ministers finalised plans to deploy 4,000 combat troops adjacent to Russia’s border in Eastern Europe, the largest such military escalation since the height of the Cold War.

The Wellington protest was held outside the Russian embassy, echoing a call made by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for demonstrations at the Russian embassy in London. A protest has been organised in London by the ‘Syria Solidarity Campaign’ for next weekend.

The New Zealand protests sought to downplay and deny the crimes of US imperialism. While chanting “Putin, Putin, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” the protests made no mention of the offensive launched a day earlier by US-backed Islamist rebels, including the indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas in government-controlled parts of Aleppo. Nor was there any condemnation of the brutal American onslaught on Mosul, in which US warplanes, rocket launchers and heavy artillery are pounding the Iraqi city of over a million inhabitants.

In Wellington, Fightback member Ian Anderson denounced the “common conspiracy theory” that anti-government rebels “are a US proxy, that CIA money got involved and generated the Syrian revolution.” He asserted “this is crap,” without offering any evidence. “It started with the Arab Spring and with the democratic uprising across the region.” According to Anderson, “the rebels had to defend themselves and then they called for any support they could get.”

The depiction of the anti-Assad forces as a popular “revolution” is entirely false. The so-called Syrian “rebels,” including the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, and the Free Syrian Army, have received billions of dollars in aid and weapons from the US and its allies Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) grew due to the support it received from US allies to wage war against Assad. Washington has exploited the rise of ISIS and its conquest of large parts of Syria and Iraq as a pretext for further intervention in both countries.

The objective of the American ruling elite is to establish permanent control over the entire oil-rich region. In line with the US agenda, the pseudo-lefts are demanding an escalation of imperialist intervention. Anderson endorsed the call for a no-fly zone over Syria, a policy promoted by US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the most bellicose sections of Washington’s foreign policy and military establishment.

Central to this right-wing perspective is the depiction of Russia as “imperialist.” A speaker from the ISO claimed that Assad’s “unrelenting crackdown,” backed by “Russian imperialist forces,” had killed 400,000 people—which is in fact the total killed by all sides in the war. According to the ISO, the blame lies with “Assad, Iran, and Russia.”

In Auckland, Socialist Aotearoa leader Joe Carolan denounced the “Stalinist Left,” declaring: “How dare you talk about bombs being dropped in Mosul, if you don’t come here in solidarity with the Syrian people … You’re not socialists, you’re not left-wing, you’re f….ng Russian imperialists!” The speaker claimed: “I stand with the people in Aleppo just as we did stand with the people of Budapest 60 years ago against Russian tanks.”

The statement is false on all counts. Socialist Aotearoa, which Carolan heads, does not stand with the people of Aleppo but with the proxy forces of US imperialism and its allies. It is also worth noting that the organisations that gave rise to Socialist Aotearoa include the Stalinist Communist Party of NZ (CPNZ), which defended all the crimes of the Soviet regime, including the brutal suppression of the 1956 working class uprising in Hungary.

While declaring they are in favour of “neither Washington nor Moscow,” the pseudo-lefts identify “rising Russian imperialism” as the primary aggressor in Syria. In 2011, SA similarly denounced China as “imperialist” and called for workers to form a bloc with US imperialism against Beijing. This arbitrary and ahistorical designation of Russia and China as “imperialist” serves to cover up US aggression and to facilitate the integration of the pseudo-lefts into its war plans.

While opposing Washington’s war in the Middle East, the WSWS in no way supports the Moscow regime, which has intervened in Syria to try to shore up the Middle Eastern interests of the ultra-rich oligarchs that it represents. Russia’s actions only heighten the danger of war between nuclear armed powers.

The pseudo-left organisations, which speak for affluent sections of the upper middle-class, are meanwhile aligning themselves with their own government in the escalating drive to war. The Guardian newspaper reported last week that New Zealand SAS troops are active in a combat role in Iraq, a war that the National government and “opposition” Labour Party justify on the basis of combating “terrorism.” None of the pseudo-lefts has opposed this military intervention.

India-Pakistan cross-border barrages heighten South Asia’s war crisis

Keith Jones

India and Pakistan have intensified cross-border artillery and gunfire in recent days, causing mounting casualties among soldiers and villagers on both sides and bringing South Asia’s rival nuclear-armed states still closer to all-out war.

Indian authorities said that an Indian soldier and a female civilian were killed yesterday afternoon when Pakistani troops fired waves of mortar shells across the Line of Control (LoC) that separates Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir.

According to Indian sources, the latest deaths bring to seven the number of Indian security personnel killed in Kashmir during the past 10 days. Most of the deaths were due to cross-border firing, but two were the result of confrontations with anti-Indian Islamist insurgents whom New Delhi charges were infiltrating across the LoC under cover of Pakistani artillery barrages.

Several dozen other Indians, most of them civilians, have been injured in the repeated bursts of intense cross-border artillery and machine-gun fire.

The Indian military, meanwhile, is boasting that it has killed and bloodied large numbers of Pakistani security forces.

On Sunday, its Northern Command issued a statement claiming it had inflicted “heavy casualties” the previous evening when it destroyed four Pakistani army posts in the “Keran sector” in Pakistan-held Kashmir in “a massive fire assault.”

The statement said Saturday’s mortar, rocket and machine-gun barrage was in retaliation for Friday’s beheading of an Indian soldier by terrorist infiltrators. India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, the military, and corporate media have been trumpeting lurid descriptions of the alleged beheading in order to further incite animosity toward Pakistan.

Earlier last week, India’s Border Security Forces boasted that they had killed at least 15 Pakistan Rangers in recent days in cross-border firing.

The Pakistani military has denied this claim. But the Dawn, the country’s most influential English-language daily, did carry a report that “at least two people” had been killed Thursday and eleven injured by Indian firing into Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

In a statement issued Friday, Pakistan’s top brass called India’s boasts of “any” fatalities in its ranks “absolutely baseless and untrue.” “India’s claim,” declared the Inter-Services Public Relations bureau, was aimed at hiding its own losses at the Line of Control and diverting “world attention from the Kashmir issue.”

Both sides are lying systematically about the more than 60 separate incidents of sustained cross-border firing in the past month—lying about which side initiated which exchange and lying about their deadly impact.

What is incontrovertible is that the two countries continue to teeter on the precipice of war. India’s BJP government calculates that by increasing pressure on Pakistan it can strengthen its hand with an increasingly diplomatically isolated Islamabad, while exploiting the war crisis to stoke reaction and rally popular support at home.

Indian government and military officials have repeatedly vowed that they are intent on forcing Pakistan to end any and all support to the anti-Indian insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, and that if needed they will order further military strikes inside Pakistan, even if the ultimate result is all-out war.

Late last month the BJP government revealed that Indian Special Forces troops had conducted raids, so-called “surgical strikes,” inside Pakistan inflicting “heavy casualties” on Islamist terrorists and their “protectors.”

For more than four decades, India had not publicly acknowledged carrying out military action inside Pakistan for fear that it would precipitate a dynamic of strikes and counter-strikes that could rapidly result in all-out war. Yet the government, opposition, and corporate media have all celebrated the strikes as the throwing off of India’s purported policy of “strategic restraint” vis a vis Pakistan.

New Delhi has taken several steps in recent days to demonstrate it is actively preparing for war. These include ordering the fast-tracking of the acquisition of munitions, including artillery shells, rockets, and tank ammunition and rifles, so as to ensure that India’s military has sufficient reserves for 40 days of “intense fighting.”

India has also greatly expanded a Navy drill in the Arabian Sea south of Pakistan that is set to begin today and last through November 14. Over 40 warships and submarines, as well as maritime fighter jets and patrol aircraft, are slated to take part in the exercise.

New Delhi is also continuing it campaign of diplomatic pressure on Pakistan. Having rallied other South Asian states to boycott the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) conference that was to be held in Pakistan later this month, New Delhi is now openly exploring the possibility of developing a rival association of regional states from which Islamabad would be excluded.

Last Thursday New Delhi announced that it was expelling a Pakistani diplomat whom it accused of running a spy ring. Islamabad immediately responded by ordering an Indian diplomat out of the country, saying he had violated “the Vienna Convention” on diplomatic relations and “established diplomatic norms.”

The BJP government has been greatly encouraged in its belligerence by the endorsement of its “surgical strikes” by the major powers, especially the US.

For decades Pakistan was Washington’s principal ally in South Asia. But over the past decade the US has forged a “global strategic partnership” with India, with the aim of transforming it into a “frontline” state in its military-strategic offensive against China. Under Modi, India has greatly increased its integration into the US’ anti-China “pivot to Asia,” including throwing open Indian military bases to routine use by US warplanes and battleships for resupply, repair and relaxation. Washington has reciprocated by declaring India a “Major Defense Partner,” giving it access to the most advanced Pentagon weaponry.

Islamabad has repeatedly objected to Washington’s lavishing of strategic favours on New Delhi, warning that they have overturned the balance of power in South Asia and encouraged India to be more aggressive in its dealings with Pakistan. But all to no avail.

Aided and abetted by the media, Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi and his BJP government are also using the war fever they have whipped up against Pakistan and the triumphalism over the “surgical strikes” to drown out, and channel in a reactionary direction, mounting anger over mass joblessness, deprivation and social inequality.

The BJP has served notice it intends to place the “surgical strikes” and its hardline stance against Pakistan at the center of its campaign for the coming state election in the country’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh. It has also intensified its campaign to label critics of the government, even from the right-wing bourgeois opposition parties, as disloyal and “anti-national.”

The BJP’s stance has caused even some supporters of India’s aggressive posture to issue worried warnings.

Bruce Riedel, a longtime CIA operative and former Obama administration adviser was among those in the US military-strategic establishment who rushed to endorse India’s Sept. 29 strikes inside Pakistan. But last week he told the New York Times, “We’re not at the point of no return, but we are in very dangerous waters. When we get to the next terror attack, which is probably only a matter of time, the prime minster has boxed himself in … (H)e can’t … choose to use solely diplomatic alternatives without some loss of face.”

Pakistan meanwhile is beset by crisis. One expression of this is the military establishment’s reaction to a Dawn report that claimed a meeting of top government and military officials had discussed the country’s acute diplomatic isolation and the need, therefore, for it to ratchet back its support for anti-Indian Islamist groups. Not only did the military force the Dawn to retract the story, but it has prevailed on the government to sack the Information Minister and order an inquiry into how the story came to be printed.

Meanwhile, the leader of the country’s third-largest party, Imran Khan, is to launch a mass protest today in Islamabad with the aim of forcing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to agree to an inquiry into his family’s massive offshore investments as revealed in the Panama papers.

Khan, who heads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), has repeatedly accused Sharif of cowardice for supposedly failing to stand up to India. He has also indicated that he would not be averse to the military pushing the Sharif government aside. On Sunday he said Sharif would be responsible if a “third power” steps in as a result of the PTI’s Tuesday “lockdown” of Islamabad.

Sectarian tensions rise in Iraq as Mosul offensive enters third week

Jordan Shilton

Iraqi government troops entered the eastern outskirts of Mosul Monday, as the US-backed offensive launched October 17 to recapture the country’s second largest city from the Islamic State began its third week.

But the advances of Iraqi government soldiers, Peshmerga fighters and Sunni and Shia militias could not conceal the fact that growing sectarian tensions are threatening to vastly intensify the bloody conflict in Iraq and Syria and draw the major powers into a direct military clash.

Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) special forces captured Bazwaya, the last village outside of Mosul, in a dawn raid Monday. Although there were no reports of civilian casualties, the Associated Press noted burning houses and buildings with collapsed roofs in the village, where hundreds of families are believed to be.

Later, it was confirmed that Iraqi troops had entered the Karama neighborhood in Mosul’s east. Another section of the Iraqi army advancing on Mosul from the south remains approximately 10 miles away.

The US-led coalition also reported that it conducted nine air strikes in support of the Iraqi offensive Sunday, including three in Mosul and one near Tal Afar.

On Saturday, the Shia militias organized in the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) announced a major offensive to the west of Mosul with the goal of capturing the ISIS-held town of Tal Afar and cutting off escape routes from Mosul to Syria. Widespread reports have emerged since the beginning of the Mosul offensive that significant numbers of ISIS fighters were retreating via this route to Raqqa, prompting Russian and Syrian officials to accuse the US of having deliberately intended this to occur.

The PMU has promised it will remain outside of Mosul. They were previously accused of committing atrocities against Sunni residents following the capture of Ramadi and Fallujah.

In apparent retaliation for the PMU offensive, five bomb attacks attributed to ISIS took place in several Shia neighborhoods of Baghdad Sunday, killing at least 17 and injuring many more. Further attacks near Baghdad on Monday claimed an additional 16 lives.

The PMU offensive came a day after US-backed Islamist extremists launched a counterattack on Syrian government troops and aligned Shia militias in Aleppo. The indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas by the former al Qaida-affiliated al-Nusra Front, which claimed the lives of dozens over the weekend, did not prevent US media outlets from broadly hailing the mission.

This demonstrates once again the utterly reactionary character of US imperialist policy in the region. Its explicit backing for Islamist extremists in Syria has further inflamed the Shia-Sunni divide in both Iraq and Syria and poses the immediate danger of a further escalation of the conflict in both countries. The bitter sectarian tensions were sharply exacerbated by the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, when Washington ruthlessly exploited Sunni and Shia animosities to install a puppet regime in Baghdad.

The Shia PMU militias, which are nominally under Iraqi government control but receive support from Iran, vowed Saturday to retake what they deemed to be Shia territory in Iraq, before joining the conflict in Syria on the side of the Assad regime. “After clearing all our land from these terrorist gangs, we are fully ready to go to any place that contains a threat to Iraqi national security,” said PMU spokesman Ahmed al-Asadi in Baghdad.

The intervention of the Iranian-backed Shia militias into Syria would cut across Washington’s strategy of bringing about regime change in Damascus, as well as raising the prospect of clashes between the US and its NATO allies on one side and Iran and Russia on the other.

At a meeting of the Russian, Iranian and Syrian foreign ministers in Moscow Friday to discuss the Syrian conflict, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said that his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov had agreed to take measures to prevent ISIS fighters from crossing the border from Iraq. “I’m happy to hear from Mr. Lavrov the confirmation that we’ll prevent ISIL from reaching Raqqa,” he said. Whether or not this meeting discussed the imminent PMU offensive, it is clear that any attempt by Russia or Iran to intervene to cut off the flow of ISIS fighters back into Syria would only further escalate the potential for military clashes with the US.

Turkey reacted with concern to the PMU’s intervention, warning that if the significant Turkmen population in Tal Afar was threatened, it could take military measures to defend them. Turkey has deployed several hundred troops to a military base in Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul, where they have been training Sunni Turkmen militias and lending some military support to the Peshmerga advance on ISIS territory.

As well as opposing the PMU consolidating a Shia-dominated region around Tal Afar, Ankara is also troubled by the increasing influence of Iran. It is already in dispute with the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, which claims that Turkey’s Bashiqa deployment is illegal. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has indicated in a series of belligerent speeches over recent weeks that Turkey is determined to stake a claim to a much greater role in Iraq and throughout the territories of the former Ottoman Empire.

Last Wednesday, US President Barack Obama held an hour-long telephone call with Erdogan to discuss the US-Turkish strategy in Iraq and Syria. He welcomed Turkish involvement in northern Syria, where Turkish forces intervened to prevent the establishment of a Kurdish-controlled region on its border, while both leaders reaffirmed their formal commitment to maintaining Iraq’s borders.

In reality, the various forces currently aligned against ISIS are pursuing conflicting and even mutually antagonistic goals that threaten to tear Iraq apart. There are reports that advancing Iraqi government troops have raised Shia banners and flags in areas they have taken, including the Christian town of Bartilla. “The Iraqi military is blocking our people from getting inside Bartilla,” head of the Christian Bet-Nehrain Democratic Party Romeo Hakari told Voice of America.

Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Nechervan Barzani told an interviewer from German daily Bild on Friday that the conclusion of the Mosul mission would be followed by a renewed push for Kurdish independence. After Mosul’s recapture, he declared, Kurdish officials will meet with “partners in Baghdad and talk about our independence.” “We are not Arabs, we are our own Kurdish nation. At some point there will be a referendum on the independence of Kurdistan,” he added.

The expanding conflict over Mosul has already forced more than 17,000 civilians to flee their homes. The US media and political establishment has sought to prepare public opinion for high civilian casualties by repeating reports that ISIS are using local residents as human shields. The deaths of civilians as a result of US-led air strikes or operations by the Iraqi government forces are largely being buried, including the call by Human Rights Watch for an investigation into an alleged air strike last week that killed between 15 and 20 civilians at a funeral near Kirkuk.

The UN estimates that upwards of 1 million people will be forced to flee, but places in camps, including those not yet constructed, are expected to amount to just 500,000. Aid workers also fear the impact on civilians fleeing with no personal belongings as the cold winter weather sets in.

The deepening sectarian divisions spreading throughout the region since the unleashing of the US-backed Mosul offensive only underscores that none of the powers involved offer a way out of the bloodbath engulfing the population of the Middle East. While chief responsibility for the death and destruction in Iraq and Syria rests with US imperialism, which has been waging virtually uninterrupted wars in the region for a quarter of a century, the attempts by Russia and regional powers like Turkey and Iran to defend their own interests only add fuel to the fire.

Assessing the Determinants of the Imminent Russo-Japanese Territorial Settlement

Shamshad A Khan

Japan and Russia have prepared the grounds to resolve their territorial dispute, which has lingered since the end of World War II, without a peace treaty. President Vladimir Putin will visit Japan on 15 December 2016 for a Russia-Japan summit meeting and the territorial issue will be discussed with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Yamaguchi, Abe’s home constituency.

 

In the past, Japan and Russia have taken various efforts to resolve this issue but no Japanese leader has sounded as confident as Prime Minister Abe regarding the resolution of the dispute. In a recent policy speech, Abe stated that he will “resolve the territorial issue,” conclude a “peace treaty” with Russia and “cultivate the major possibility of Japan-Russia cooperation in areas such as the economy and energy”. It is apparent from Abe’s remarks, during 15 recent meetings between the two leaders at different venues, that the two countries have laid down a broad framework for the resolution and a formal announcement of it is likely to be made after the summit meeting in December. 

 

The upcoming talks are taking place against the background of both countries showing some flexibility on their long-held stance on the contested territory. In 1956, Russia has offered to hand over the two smaller islands, Habomai islets and Shikotan island off-Hokkaido, to Japan while retaining the two bigger islands, Kunashiri and Etorofu. Japan’s political leadership was amenable to accept the Russian offer but following protests by a section of Japan’s domestic constituency, they pressed for the return of the four islands simultaneously. A stalemate continued between the two countries during the Cold War as both stuck to their respective demands. Since the end of the Cold War, the two countries have engaged in several rounds of inconclusive talks. 

 

In September 2016, President Putin and Prime Minister Abe agreed that the resolution should be based on the principle of ‘hiwiwake’, a term for draw in Judo. This was interpreted in Japan as dividing the contested territory into half of the total geographic area since the two islands offered to Japan constitute only 7% of the contested territory. This, however, has not been the Russian understanding. Russia states that it would hand over the two smaller islands to Japan out of ‘goodness of its heart’ but this would be conditional to the conclusion of a peace treaty. 

 

Japan has adopted a ‘two track’ approach to break this stalemate. It agrees to accept the two smaller islands from Russia and to negotiate the remaining two later. This is also an effort by the Japanese leadership to assuage the concern of its domestic constituency, especially the people who were displaced from the four islands after the Russians gained control of the territory following World War II. The displaced population from the Northern Territories (known as Kuriles Island in Russia) has been pushing governments of both countries to address their demand to go back to their “homeland”. Through a resolution, Tokyo would be able to fulfill this demand and also boost Prime Minister Abe’s and the Liberal Democratic Party’s popularity for the next elections. Japanese entrepreneurs, so far unenthusiastic to invest in Russian markets, would be keen to increase their footprints in the Russian market following a resolution.

 

A resolution is also in Russia’s interest. First, a mutually agreed settlement will ease Russian efforts to develop infrastructure on the territories. In the past Japan had objected to a Russian bid to involve South Korean and Chinese companies in the infrastructure projects; Japan argued that the territories were under its sovereignty and forced Russia to reconsider the South Korean and Chinese participation. Second, Russia has been in search of new markets for its liquefied natural gas (LNG) following a fall in demand in the recession-hit Europe. Post-Fukushima, LNG demands have been high in Japan as most of its nuclear reactors remain dormant. Third, Russia is also trying to improve its image following the Ukrainian crisis and the annexation of Crimea. By concluding a peace treaty that includes an exchange of islands, Russia wants to soften its expansionist image and wants to show the world that it is ready to live amicably with its neighbours.

 

The discussion between Japan and Russia, scheduled in December 2016, to resolve the territorial dispute is the not the first and neither will it be the last. However this time the talks are taking place at a time when a consensus has emerged among the Japanese political parties, backed by their domestic constituency, to adopt a ‘two track’ approach to resolve the dispute. This gives Japan the hope that it will get the two islands for sure. Moscow has however expressed a stiff stance on the other two islands and is unlikely to be ready to lose its hold on them. A deal would, however, ease tensions between Japan and Russia and also bring amity and peace in the region. 

Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa Scholarship for Women in Liberia, Nigeria and Ghana 2017 – University of Dundee

Application Deadline: 25th November 2016

Eligible Countries: Liberia, Nigeria or Ghana

To be taken at (country): Scotland, UK

Eligible Fields of Study: All

About Scholarship:The candidate should be aware that this scholarship is the University’s investment in the sustained growth of an individual and the betterment of a community at large. The candidate should indicate how she will use the studying abroad experience and the postgraduate qualification to locally or globally promote holistic transformation, facilitate equal access to opportunities for all, and encourage a peaceful, reconciled and empowered population in her home country.

Type: Taught Year Masters

Eligibility: Criteria for awarding the scholarship is as follows:

• The applicant must be a Liberian, Nigerian, Ghanaian country national citizen
• The applicant must be permanently resident in Liberia, Nigeria or Ghana at the time of application
• The applicant must be female
• Applicants will be selected on the basis of their merit and potential evidenced by their personal statement.

The awards will be given to students who are undertaking a one year taught masters programme at the University of Dundee, in the academic year 2016-17 (January 2017 entry).

Applicants should already have been offered a place at the University of Dundee and should have firmly accepted that offer or be intending to do so. We have a full list of our postgraduate courses, including details of how to apply, online.

Selection Criteria: 

• Preference will be given to a candidate who has shown evidence of upholding the ethos of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa through sustained personal growth, involvement in community development, and a strong commitment to the advancement and education of women and youth in her home country.
• It is recommended that the candidate provide examples or a personal narrative that highlight leadership qualities, personal fortitude, and active participation in developing meaningful opportunities which lead to the social, educational, and/or spiritual advancement of the disadvantaged.
• The successful candidate should be prepared to use the scholarship not only as an educational experience but also as a chance to become immersed in another culture, while fostering understanding of her own country and culture amongst students and the local community of Dundee.
• The applying candidate should address how she hopes to become involved in University or local societies, activities, and/or organisations, and how she will support discourse about issues women face globally.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: up to a total of £20,000 for Tuition and living expenses

Duration of Scholarship: 1 year

How to Apply: Download the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa Scholarship Application Form

1. Complete the application form above
2. To complete the application process you must complete the form and submit all relevant documentation and return by email to Gillian Sharp at the University of Dundee contactus@dundee.ac.uk
3. Please type Leymah Gbowee Scholarship in the subject area of the email.

(Applicants will also be required to provide proof of their African citizenship and permanent residence)

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: University of Dundee and Gbowee Peace Foundation

Discrimination and Condemnation: Australia’s War on Boat People

Binoy Kampmark

The boat, along with other means of travel, are often undertaken as matters of freedom. Movement keeps one alive in times of peace, and in conflict. The Australian government, and those backing its practices, have wished over the years to limit, if not halt such movement altogether.

Since the last decade, extreme measures have been implemented that effectively qualify Australian sovereignty while singling out a particular breed of asylum seeker. The former aspect of that policy was specifically undertaken to excise the entire mainland from being qualified as territorially valid to arrive in.

The entire policy effectively assumed a military character, most conspicuously under the Abbott government’s embrace of a creepily crypto-fascist border protection force, equipped with uniforms and patriotic purpose. Operation Sovereign Borders effectively meant that the refugee and asylum seeker were fair game – not to be processed and settled equitably with a minimum of fuss, but to be repelled, their boats towed back to Indonesia, and people smugglers bribed.

An entire intelligence-security complex has also been created, fed by private contractors and held in place by the promise of a two-year prison sentence for entrusted officials in possession of “protected” information.

Such statements as those made today by Prime Minister Turnbull, announced with note of grave urgency at a press conference, tend to resemble a typical pattern in Australian politics since the Howard years.

The borders, even if supposedly secure, are deemed to be in a permanent state of siege, forever battered by potential invaders keen to swindle Parliament and the Australian people. Yes, boasted the Abbott, and now Turnbull government, the boats laden with desperate human cargo have stopped coming. Yes, all is well on the sea lanes in terms of repelling such unwanted arrivals. But for all of this, the island continent is being assaulted by characters of will, those keen to avail themselves of desperate people and their desire for a secure, safe haven.

The policy has also received international attention from such establishment institutions as The New York Times. “While that arrangement,” went an editorial this month, “largely stopped the flow of boats packed with people that set off from Indonesia weekly, it has landed these refugees – many from Iran, Myanmar, Iraq and Afghanistan – in what amounts to cruel and indefinite detention.”

As the editorial continued to observe, “This policy costs Australian taxpayers a staggering $US419,000 per detainee a year and has made a nation that has historically welcomed immigrants a violator of international law.”

While this obscenity has been powdered and perfumed as humanitarian, designed to halt the spate of drowning cases at sea, the latest announcements have abandoned the stance. “They must know,” claimed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “that the door to Australia is closed to those who seek to come here by boat with a people smuggler.”

Finally, an honest statement twinning two perceived demons in Australian refugee policy: the people smuggler and the asylum seeker, both equivalently horrible to Australian authorities. To that end, not a single asylum seeker arriving by boat will be permitted to settle in Australia. This policy will also affect arrivals from July 2013.

Such a stance of finality seems little different to pervious ones made by Abbott’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd. What is troubling about it is the element of monomania: never will any asylum seeker, who had arrived after a certain date, will be permitted to settle in Australia.

The intention there is to make sure that those designated refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, facilitated by Australia’s draconian offshore regime, will have the doors shut, effectively ensuring a more prolonged, torturous confinement. Absurdly, they will then be permitted to slum away indefinitely in such indigent places as Nauru, with a population hostile to those from the Middle East and Africa.

Turnbull’s stance may also suggest a degree of desperation. Not all has gone swimmingly with the offshore detention complex. The PNG Supreme Court rendered an aspect of the Australian refugee policy redundant in finding that detaining individuals indefinitely on Manus Island breached constitutional rights.

Peter Dutton, the hapless Minister for Immigration, has struggled in managing what can only be described by the border security obsessives as an administrative disaster. Rather than admitting to the realities that searching for refuge over dangerous routes will always find a market, the Australian government persists in a cruel delusion that continues to deny international refugee law while punishing the victims.

Voting Against Peace in Colombia

Mel Gurtov

Those of us who study how to end wars rather than find new ways to prosecute them must be stunned, like many Colombians, by a popular vote there on October 2 that rejected the peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).  No one predicted that after over five decades of fighting and more than 200,000 deaths, a peace agreement that took six years to conclude would be rejected.  It’s a lesson in how the power of emotion—vengefulness, specifically—and narrow self-interest can overcome good sense.  The general perception of observers is that voters who suffered from the civil war wanted to see the FARC rebels punished rather than “rewarded” with the opportunity to reenter civil society and even hold a guaranteed number of seats in the national congress.

Most civil wars end in much the same way as Colombia’s—with one side badly hurting and willing to disarm under a cease-fire, provided the government promises assistance so that the rebellious soldiers can reintegrate in civil society.  Negotiations to reach such an agreement typically are arduous and often seem to be on the brink of failure.  Long-held grievances come to life again and again, and it is a tribute to negotiators that they were able to come to any substantive agreement at all.  So it was with high expectations that an agreement was reached, and the decision of Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, to put it to a popular vote showed his confidence that citizens weary of war would accept it.  Five days after the vote, he was rewarded for his efforts with the Nobel Peace Prize.

That Colombians did not endorse the agreement evidently owes much to the politicians who campaigned for a “no” vote, including former president Àlvaro Uribe, whose father was killed by the FARC.  He argues that the peace agreement is too soft on FARC leaders, allowing them to avoid prison merely by confessing their crimes and promising to make restitution to victims.  According to one observer who opposes the peace accord, “Essentially, FARC members would have received the same legal power to prosecute Colombian government officials and vice versa. The rejected deal would also have shielded an unknown number of FARC guerillas from jail for drug trafficking, recruitment of child soldiers, and other crimes.” The many thousands of people whose families were directly impacted by FARC killings and kidnappings obviously agreed.

The razor-thin “no” vote (50.2 percent to 49.7 percent) also may be attributed to the bizarre fact that only 38 percent of eligible voters voted.  Perhaps this was a Brexit-like situation in which many people stayed away from the polls on the assumption a “yes” vote was fairly certain. But the “no” voters were well entrenched, including not only Uribe’s party but also “the majority of the churches, the ELN [the National Liberation Army, the second-largest guerrilla force], business sectors . . ., and the majority of landowners, who were all against the proposed changes.” The right-wing groups not only considered President Santos’ peace plan soft on FARC; they also objected to his support of gay rights, reforms of land policy, and investment in rural development.

It was under Uribe, not coincidentally, that the US became a major participant in Colombia’s civil war.  Under “Plan Colombia” the US provided the Colombian military with advanced weapons (such as Blackhawk helicopters) and intelligence (under a top-secret multi-billion dollar CIA program) that escalated the violence and decimated the FARC’s ranks.  A FARC leader is quoted as saying that it faced “an international intervention, and it took a toll.”  Civilian deaths and the displacement of about seven million people followed, caused in no small part by officially sanctioned right-wing death squads.

Some US officials believe that intervention “saved” Colombia from endless civil war by forcing FARC to the bargaining table.  That is hardly an argument for peacemaking; the “no” vote was actually a defeat for the US policy of peace through war.  Plan Colombia was to a great extent responsible for destroying, either through deaths or displacements, the lives of roughly 15 percent of the total population.  Now the US supports a negotiated settlement, but still keeps FARC on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations List.  The Santos government and FARC have agreed to continue a cease-fire until December 31.

We may hope the parties will be guided by the need for rehabilitation and reconstruction rather than vengeance—for peace rather than retributive justice.

As President Santos said, “Making peace is much more difficult than making war because you need to change sentiments of people, people who have suffered, to try to persuade them to forgive.”

Nuclear Weapons – The Time for Abolition is Now

Robert F. Dodge

At the United Nations this past week, 123 nations voted to commence negotiations next year on a new treaty to prohibit the possession of nuclear weapons.  Despite President Obama’s own words in his 2009 pledge to seek the security of a world free of nuclear weapons, the U.S. voted “no” and led the opposition to this treaty.

Rather than meet our obligations under international law, the U.S has proposed by stark contrast to begin a new nuclear arms race spending $1 trillion over the next 30 years to “upgrade” every aspect our nuclear weapons programs. A jobs program to end humanity.  Each of the nuclear nations is expected to do the same in rebuilding their weapons programs continuing the arms race for generations to come—or until planetary thermonuclear murder, whichever comes first.

The myth of deterrence is the guise for this effort when in fact deterrence is the principle driver of the arms race. For every additional weapon my adversary has, I need two and so on and so on to our global arsenals of 15,500 weapons.

Fed up with this inaction and doublespeak, the non-nuclear nations of the world have joined the ongoing efforts of the world’s NGO, health and religious communities in demanding an end to the madness. Led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)—a global partnership of 440 partners in 98 countries—along with the International Red Cross, the world’s health associations representing more than 17 million health professionals worldwide, the Catholic Church and World Council of Churches, are all calling for a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.

The effort to ban nuclear weapons has several parallels to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines led by Jody Williams, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. This effort was dismissed and called utopian by most governments and militaries of the world when it was launched by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in 1992; then it succeeded in 1997 through partnerships, public imagination and political pressure resulting in the ultimate political will. The nuclear ban movement has been vigorously fought against by the nuclear nations arrogantly persisting in possessing those horrific weapons and pressuring members of their alliances to hold the line.

Nuclear weapons present the greatest public health and existential threat to our survival every moment of every day.  Yet the United States and world nuclear nations stand in breach of the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which commits these nations to work in good faith to end the arms race and to achieve nuclear disarmament.  Forty-eight years later the efforts of the nuclear nations toward this goal are not evident and the state of the world is as dangerous as it was during the height of the Cold War.

This year’s presidential campaign has once again done little to focus on the dangers of nuclear weapons, looking instead at who has the temperament to have their finger on the button with absolutely no indication of any understanding of the consequences to all of humanity by the use of these weapons even on a very small scale.  In addition to tensions between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine and Syria, there is a real danger of nuclear war in South Asia, which could kill more than two billion people from the use of “just” 100 Hiroshima-size weapons.

Some of rest of the world is finally standing up to this threat to their survival and that of the planet. They are taking matters into their own hands and refusing to be held hostage by the nuclear nations. They will no longer be bullied into sitting back and waiting for the nuclear states to make good on empty promises.

Unfortunately these weapons and control systems are imperfect. During the Cold War there were many instances where the world came perilously close to nuclear war.  It is a matter of sheer luck that this scenario did not come to pass by design or accident.  Our luck will not hold out forever. Luck is not a security policy. From a medical and public health stance, our current evidence-based understanding of what nuclear weapons can actually do means any argument for continued possession of these weapons by anyone in untenable and defies logic. There is absolutely no reasonable or adequate medical response to nuclear war.

As with any public health threat from Zika, to Ebola, Polio, HIV, prevention is the goal. The global threat from nuclear weapons is no different.  The only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is to ban and eliminate them. Our future depends upon this.

President Kennedy speaking on nuclear weapons before the U.N. Security Council in September 1961 said, “The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” Our children’s children will look back and rightly ask why we–the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons–remained on the wrong side of history when it came to abolishing nuclear weapons.

This is What Will Happen to Mosul After ISIS is Evicted

Patrick Cockburn

I visited Mosul on the day it fell to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and a small detachment of US Special Forces on 11 April 2003. As we drove into the city, we passed lines of pick-up trucks piled high with loot returning to the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq. US soldiers at a checkpoint, over which waved the Stars and Stripes, were shooting at a man in the distance who kept bobbing up from behind a wall and waving the Iraqi flag.

If there had ever been any sympathy between liberators and liberated in Mosul, it was disappearing fast. Inside the city, every government building, including the university, was being systematically looted by Kurds and Arabs alike. I saw one man who had stolen an enormous and very ugly red and gold sofa from the governor’s office dragging it slowly down the street. He would push one end of the sofa a few feet forward and then go to the other end and repeat the same process. The mosques were soon calling on the Sunni Arab majority to build barricades to defend their neighbourhoods from marauders.

We parked our vehicle near a medieval quarter of ancient stone buildings while we went to see a Christian ecclesiastic. When we got back, we found that our driver was very frightened and wanted to get out of Mosul as fast as possible. He explained that soon after we left a crowd had gathered, recognised our number plates as Kurdish and debated lynching him and setting fire to his car before being restrained by a local religious leader moments before they took action.

The oil city of Kirkuk was captured at about the same time by the Peshmerga, despite having promised the Americans and Turks that they would do no such thing. Again, there was looting everywhere and I saw two Peshmerga stand in the middle of the road to stop an enormous yellow bulldozer that was being driven off. Instead of slowing down, the driver put his foot on the accelerator so the Peshmerga had to jump aside to avoid being crushed.

Inside the newly established Peshmerga headquarters, I ran into Pavel Talabani, whose father Jalal Talabani headed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party whose militia now held the city. He stressed the temporary nature of the Kurdish occupation of the city. “We came to control the situation,” he said. “We expect to withdraw some of our men in 45 minutes.”

Some Peshmerga, but not all: 13 years later the Kurds still hold Kirkuk, whose population is Kurdish, Arab and Turkoman, and to which the Kurds claim an historic right saying they have only reversed anti-Kurdish ethnic cleansing by Saddam Hussein.

By now the rest of the world has forgotten that there was a time when the Kurds did not hold the city. The Kurdish leaders had understood that the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein had created conditions of unprecedented political fluidity and it was an ideal moment to create facts on the map, which would become permanent whatever the protestations of other players.

The current multi-pronged offensive aimed at taking Mosul is producing a similar situation as different countries, parties and communities vie to fill the vacuum they expect to be created by the fall of Isis, just as in 2003 the vacuum was the result of the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The different segments of the anti-Isis forces potentially involved in seizing Mosul – the Iraqi army, Kurds, Shia and Sunni paramilitaries, Turks – may be temporary allies, but they are also rivals. They all have their own very different and conflicting agendas. Presiding over this ramshackle and disputatious alliance is the US, which is orchestrating the Mosul offensive and without whose air power and Special Forces there would be no attack.

The Shia-dominated Iraqi government needs to take and hold Mosul, Iraq’s main Sunni Arab city, if it is to be convincing as the national government of Iraq. To achieve this, Baghdad’s rule must be acceptable to the Sunni majority in the city in a way that was not true when Isis took it in 2014. It needs to establish its rule while it still has full military and political support from the US.

The Kurds, for their part, want to solidify their control of the so-called “disputed territories” claimed by both the central government and the Kurdish regional authorities. The Kurds opportunistically used the defeat of the Iraqi Army in northern Iraq by Isis two years ago to take these territories inhabited by both Kurds and Arabs, thereby expanding by 40 per cent the area of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). They know that once Isis is defeated, the Kurds will no longer get international and, above all, American backing to hold this expanded version of the KRG.

These problems have only begun to surface because Mosul is still a long way from being besieged or even encircled.

The Shia militia forces are surprisingly calm about being excluded from a military role in the siege. They may calculate that the Iraqi army, if it gets sucked into street fighting, will not be able to take Mosul on its own and will have to look to them for support. The Shia paramilitaries are making up for their lack of participation in the battle for Mosul by sending reinforcements – some 5,000 men, according to reports – to join the Syrian Army in the siege of East Aleppo.

Turkey wants to be a player and, as a great Sunni power, the defender of the Sunnis of Mosul. To this end, it has soldiers based at Bashiqa, north east of Mosul, and claims to be taking part in the attack. But so far at least, Turkish ambitions and rhetoric in Iraq and Syria have exceeded its performance. Both interventions may be designed to impress a domestic audience which is deluged with exaggerated accounts of Turkish achievements in the government-controlled Turkish media.

These participants in the struggle for Mosul may be dividing the tiger’s skin before the tiger is properly dead. Isis showed that it still has sharp claws when it responded to the assault on Mosul with raids on Kirkuk and Rutbah on the main Iraq-Jordan road. It is fighting hard to slow down the anti-Isis advance towards Mosul with a mix of suicide bombers, IEDs, booby-traps, snipers and mortar teams. But it is unclear if it will make a last stand in Mosul where, at the end of the day, it must go down to defeat in the face of superior numbers backed by the massive firepower of the US-led air forces.

The likelihood is that Isis will fight for Mosul, the site of its first great victory, in order to prolong the battle, cause casualties and to let divisions emerge among its enemies. But its strategy over the last 12 months has been not to stage heroic but doomed last stands in any of the cities it has lost in Iraq and Syria.

At Ramadi, Fallujah, Sinjar, Palmyra and Manbij it has staged a fighting withdrawal at the last moment. The same may now happen in Mosul.