The brutality, the cruelty and contempt for any laws of war are shocking.

But that should not come as a surprise.

Photographer Ali Arkady’s photos and video documenting torture of civilians by coalition-supported Iraqi forces in Mosul are evidence of what many have warned about for more than a decade.

“It is validating my worst fears and worst expectations,” Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa director, said in an interview with the Star.

“We have continually investigated and documented abuses by Iraqi government security forces, which includes not just central security forces but special units … the militias that have a sectarian affiliation, but are now formally part of the Iraqi government military forces.”

As recently as last June, there were reports of abuse as Iraqi government forces and militias moved to liberate Fallujah and Tikrit from Daesh; harrowing allegations of suspects or civilians finally free of the terrorist group’s rule, only to be terrorized by their liberators.

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For its report, “Punished for Daesh’s Crimes,” Amnesty International conducted more than 470 interviews and concluded that Popular Mobilization Units, which are mostly Shiite paramilitary, and government forces committed war crimes through torture, arbitrary detention, the recruitment of child soldiers, forcibly “disappearing” suspects and executing thousands of civilians.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi vowed to investigate.

But then, silence. As Iraqi and coalition forces faced their greatest challenge yet in taking back Mosul, the country’s second-largest city and the place where the so-called Islamic State was first declared, the warnings continued. “The lack of response raises concerns about whether the government is actually investigating these abuses, and increases the concern that future violations will be committed with impunity,” HRW’s senior Iraq researcher Belkis Wille wrote as the Mosul mission loomed.

There is deep and specific history to Iraq’s sectarian tensions, which stretch back to the Ottoman era but became especially acute under the Sunni-dominated rule of Saddam Hussein, when the country’s Shiite majority — nearly two-thirds of the population — endured systemic persecution. In unseating Saddam and imposing democracy in his wake, the U.S.-led coalition unleashed sectarian rivalries that rage to this day.

Arkady, who first began following a team of Emergency Response Division special forces during last summer’s battle to liberate Fallujah, thought he had found the antidote — a post-sectarian unit that proudly proclaimed it would rise above the abuse documented by HRW, Amnesty and others.

But during subsequent embeds with the ERD from October to December last year, his first impressions crumbled as he witnessed — and photographed — a litany of abuse that amounts to war crimes as defined under the Geneva Conventions.

Col. Jay Janzen, a senior spokesperson for the Canadian military, says Canada’s troops who arrived in Iraq in 2014 have had no direct involvement with the ERD, focusing on working with the Kurdish peshmerga, and more recently other Iraqi security forces.

This is not the first time Canada has been presented with evidence of abuse and torture by a battlefield ally. During its long engagement in Afghanistan, Canada was accused of being complicit in torture for handing over hundreds of detainees to Afghan authorities, where they allegedly were abused.

Janzen says Canadian soldiers serving in Iraq are under orders to report any evidence or allegations of sexual abuse, torture and inhumane treatment and breaches of human rights law. “As you would expect with a conflict of this magnitude and this severity, there have been reports coming into the coalition from time to time about atrocities on the battlefield,” said Janzen.

Most of those reports involve abuse by the Daesh extremists, but, Janzen said, there have been a “couple” of what he called third-party allegations of “mistreatment of people on the battlefield” reported to Canadians.

“Sometimes these things are difficult to chase down and sometimes it amounts to hearsay or third-hand information and sometimes the reports, we can’t come to any kind of conclusion.

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“Obviously, one of the first things that we look at when we get this information is—does it involve our troops or does it involve the troops that we’re partnered with? To date, we’ve got no evidence that would clearly suggest that troops we are partnered with are involved in atrocities,” Janzen said.

Last year’s HRW annual report included allegations of “apparently unlawful” demolitions of buildings, homes, even entire villages, in areas that had been liberated from Daesh and were now under control of peshmerga forces. The report suggests that in some areas, Arab homes were deliberately targeted by peshmerga troops while Kurdish homes were left intact.

The report also notes that none of the countries that back the Kurdish Regional Government and support it with military aid, including Canada, voiced concern about the demolitions.

Such abuses breed anger, resentment and suspicion of government forces, which ultimately benefits Daesh.

“When Iraqi security forces act in a way that is sadistic, that is brutal, that is unlawful,” says Whitson, “that undermines the fundamental bulwark on which the Iraqi government’s authority and credibility rests.”

When the coalition overseeing the multinational military effort was asked about what Arkady witnessed and documented, a spokesperson wrote that allegations concerning the conduct of Iraqi security forces would be forwarded to the Iraqi government.

“Any violation of the law of armed conflict would be unacceptable and should be investigated in a transparent manner,” U.S. army Col. Joe Scrocca told the Star in a statement. “Those deemed responsible are held accountable in accordance with due process and Iraqi law.”

Al-Abadi has “zero tolerance” for any “improper” action by government forces and would “thoroughly” investigate any allegations, Scrocca said.

But Wille, of Human Rights Watch, has little faith in such promises of investigations, saying that the Iraqis — and allies such as Canada and the U.S. — need to ensure such probes happen and the findings are acted on.

“To date I have never seen any kind of transparency reporting on investigations, I have almost never seen results coming from these investigations,” Wille said in an interview.

“When faced with such clear and uncontradictable evidence, the coalition can’t simply be complacent again by allowing the prime minister to say simply, ‘Yah, we’ll investigate.’ There really needs to be a sustained push on the side of coalition to get these forces immediately removed from the field, and then subsequent investigations and punishment where wrongdoing is found. They can’t allow the prime minister’s word on this to be enough.”

For many, the most dangerous phase lies ahead, that without the unifying force of fighting a common enemy, elements of Iraqi society will once again turn on each other.

Moqtada al-Sadr — a prominent leader in the sectarian bloodletting that followed Saddam’s fall — is urging all sides to guard against post-Mosul “genocide.”

“I’m afraid that the defeat of Daesh is only the start of a new phase,” he told correspondent Jonathan Steele, writing for Middle East Eye, in a March interview.

There is a warning from another surprising quarter — Paul Wolfowitz, who was the No. 2 in the U.S. defence department when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. The fear is Iraq could splinter apart after the fall of Mosul, he said in an April interview with the Global Politico podcast. “I’m much more fearful that it will descend into chaotic violence. And I think probably the key to avoiding that is … some significant degree of local autonomy and local security, so that Sunnis don’t have to fear (Shiites) and Kurds don’t have to fear Arabs.”

How will the U.S. react, Wolfowitz asked: “If we walk away, as we walked away five years ago, six years ago, the results will be much worse than if we stay there to insert, leverage and support.”

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