Iraqi parliament to study final report on Mosul’s fall

An Iraqi parliamentary committee will inspect the final report on Mosul’s military defeat to the Islamic State, or ISIS, militants in June last year to verify the results produced by investigators, officials said Friday. 

Hakim Zamili, head of the security committee of the Iraqi parliament, told reporters a close look at the report was needed “to establish the question of guilt and accountability.” “We want to confirm that the people mentioned in the inquiry are indeed those who should be held accountable for the fall,” Zamili said. 

He said a group of prosecutors and lawmakers were in support of the fact-finding mission on the collapse of Iraq’s second-largest city, some 400km from Baghdad. A parliamentary committee was formed earlier this year to investigate Mosul’s defeat and the retreat of the Iraqi Army from the city in the face of a much smaller force. 

Lawmaker Shaxawan Abdulla, who has been with the committee from the start, told Rudaw on Thursday that the report had been finalized and would be delivered to the parliament on Monday. Shaxawan said a group of lawmakers had accused former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki of neglect in events that led to the fall of Mosul and wanted him questioned by the parliament. 

“But Mr Maliki’s supporters in parliament have firmly opposed the requests to summon him,” Abdulla said. He said the report consisted of 120 pages that addressed the events before the ISIS takeover, including the army’s humiliating failure to defend the city. 

On June 9, 2014, ISIS militants overran the city of Mosul and took control of the population that was then believed to be 2 million people. The city remains the extremists biggest stronghold in Iraq and Syria and has been described by ISIS as the capital of its so-called caliphate. 

Mosul’s exiled governor Asil Nujaifi and the Kurdistan region’s President Masoud Barzani have accused Maliki of neglecting their warnings ahead of the ISIS invasion. There was also criticism of the Baghdad government in Baghdad for continuing to pay monthly wages of civil servants in Mosul despite the ISIS takeover. 

An AFP report in June based on interviews with people from the city showed that 2,070 people had been executed since ISIS occupied Mosul. The city, which has been seen as a bastion of Sunni insurgency since 2004, is also home to nearly 500,000 Kurds. 

By Bzhar Hakim