ISIS has booby trapped Mosul Dam could unleash 18ft high wall of water on Mosul

[tinydancer]

It appears the victory dance celebrating the capture of the Mosul Dam is premature. Fierce fighting is still being reported but I believe that the booby trapping of the dam is the shit Iraqis better be worried about.

Apparently ISIS has some whiz kid bomb makers in their ranks according to this General.

"“The Islamic State clearly have highly sophisticated bomb experts in their ranks,” said Gen Kawani. “Two of their car bombs were detonated by mobile phones.”

ISIS booby traps Mosul Dam, which could unleash 18-metre-high wall of water on Iraq’s second largest city

The American-backed offensive to recapture Iraq’s biggest dam stalled Monday, as fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham rigged part of the area with booby traps and remotely triggered bombs.

Whilst a series of air strikes by American F-18 fighter jets reportedly sent most of the jihadists fleeing from the central parts of Mosul dam, a network of landmines and planted explosives they left behind impeded Kurdish ground forces from recapturing the strategically vital terrain.

more at link:

ISIS booby traps Mosul Dam, which could unleash 18-metre-high wall of water on Iraq’s second largest city | National Post

 

[Moonglow]

The quality of the workmanship on the structural strength of the dam is very dangerous also. They throw bags of concrete by the base to shore up crumbling dam walls...

 

[waltky]

Air attack to lead Iraqi Push to Retake Mosul...

US Airstrikes to Set Conditions for Iraqi Push to Retake Mosul
Mar 28, 2016 | U.S. warplanes carried out airstrikes around Mosul on Monday in the intensifying effort to set conditions for retaking the ISIS stronghold in northwestern Iraq as part of the overall effort to defeat the terror group that has cost at least $6.5 billion, the U.S. military said.

Attack and fighter aircraft carried out four strikes near Mosul, hitting a headquarters and a tactical unit, destroying an assembly area and suppressing a mortar unit of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, according to a statement from Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve. Six other strikes were conducted in Iraq, including one near Sinjar west of Mosul that hit an ISIS tactical unit and destroyed a heavy machine gun position, the task force said. U.S. and coalition manned aircraft and drones also conducted four strikes in Syria.

The latest strikes marked the third consecutive day of air operations in which the U.S. and the coalition carried out a total of 10 strikes in Syria and 51 in Iraq, including 12 around Mosul against the militant group Since air operations began on Aug. 8, 2014, the U.S. and the coalition through the end of February had conducted a total of 10,962 strikes, including 7,336 in Iraq and 3,626 in Syria, according to the task force. The total cost of the military operation through February was $6.5 billion, or about $11.4 million daily. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford have highlighted the campaigns to retake Mosul and Raqqa, the self-proclaimed ISIS capital in northeastern Syria as key to the ultimate defeat of the insurgency.

Last Friday, Carter and Dunford said they were pressing President Barack Obama to approve sending more troops to Iraq in the effort to accelerate the campaign following the March 22 Brussels attacks claimed by ISIS that killed at least 35 and wounded more than 270. An American airman and his family were among those injured in the bombings. Dunford said that the campaign against ISIS was "gathering momentum" while critics of the strategy, which relies on U.S. support for local forces on the ground, said that the Brussels attacks showed that the ISIS threat had spread beyond Iraq and Syria. Defense Department, State Department and White House officials have stated that the campaign against ISIS has made steady progress in the past year, noting that ISIS has lost about 40 percent of the territory it once held since the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2014.

The first major setback for ISIS came in January 2015 when Kurdish forces pushed ISIS fighters out of the town of Kobane on the Turkish border in Syria. In March, Iraqi Security Forces, after several failed attempts, finally took Tikrit, hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein. In June, Syrian Kurds took the town of Tal Abyad controlling a supply route between Raqqa and Mosul. In November, Iraqi Kurds backed by U.S. airstrikes retook Sinjar in northwestern and in December, ISIS suffered its biggest defeat in Iraq thus far with the fall of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, to Iraqi forces.

US Airstrikes to Set Conditions for Iraqi Push to Retake Mosul | Military.com

See also:

In Syria, Militias Armed by the Pentagon Fight Those Armed by the CIA
Mar 28, 2016 -- Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war.

The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed. In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east. "Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it," Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq, said in an interview.

Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and on March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud. The attacks by one U.S.-backed group against another come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time. "It is an enormous challenge," said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as "a fairly new phenomenon." "It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield," he said.

The area in northern Syria around Aleppo, the country's second-largest city, features not only a war between the Assad government and its opponents, but also periodic battles against Islamic State militants, who control much of eastern Syria and also some territory to the northwest of the city, and long-standing tensions among the ethnic groups that inhabit the area, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.

'Multi-Sided War'

 

[TheOldSchool]

Waltky you're onto a great idea! Let's resurrect old threads from terrified republicans that had the most dire predictions of ISIS's capabilities, and who should be embarrassed that their predictions were so terribly wrong!

 

[Moonglow]

Waltky you're onto a great idea! Let's resurrect old threads from terrified republicans that had the most dire predictions of ISIS's capabilities, and who should be embarrassed that their predictions were so terribly wrong!

I was wondering, where are the boobies?

 

[waltky]

Yea, dat's right - blab to ISIS how weak the dam is...

Iraqis kept in the dark about Mosul Dam emergency plans
30 Mar 2016 - Despite intense U.S. pressure to act to keep Iraq's largest dam from collapsing, Baghdad has done little to prepare Iraqis for the possibility of a burst that could unleash a flood reaching the capital and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite intense U.S. pressure to act to keep Iraq's largest dam from collapsing, Baghdad has done little to prepare Iraqis for the possibility of a burst that could unleash a flood reaching the capital and killing hundreds of thousands of people. The government signed a US$296-million contract with Italy's Trevi Group last month to reinforce northern Iraq's fragile Mosul Dam, but it has not announced any specific plans to try to rescue people in the event of a breach or instructed them in detail how to react safely. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's most significant public statement on the dam, which was not widely distributed, advised millions of people living in the path of a potential flood that they should move to higher ground, but provided few specifics.

U.S. officials have said Washington feels Baghdad has failed to take the threat seriously enough. A U.S. government briefing paper released in late February said the 500,000 to 1.47 million Iraqis living in the highest-risk areas along the Tigris River "probably would not survive" the impact of a flood's impact unless they evacuated. Swept hundreds of miles along in the waters would be unexploded ordnance, chemicals, bodies and buildings.

A senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) said the most lives could be saved by advising people in advance of what to do in the event of a breach of the structure, once known as Saddam Dam and opened in the mid 1980s. "You want to make sure when you have a major hazard risk that the population that is going to be potentially affected is aware of that, that they know what to do about it when it happens, and they understand how they're going to be alerted to it," the official said. Instead, Iraqi authorities have downplayed the threat. The water minister estimated last month there was only a one in 1,000 chance of failure, a "risk level present in all the world's dams".

On Jan. 21, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Abadi in Davos, Switzerland, and handed him a confidential note from President Barack Obama pleading for urgent action. The president's personal intervention indicated how the dam's fragility has moved to the forefront of U.S. concerns over Iraq, reflecting fears its failure would also undermine U.S. efforts to stabilise Abadi's government and complicate the war against Islamic State. Iraqi forces launched a new offensive last week in Makhmour, 60 km (40 miles) south of Mosul, as the beginning of a broader campaign to clear areas around the city but so far progress has been slow.

LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARE

 

[waltky]

When the levee breaks...

Iraq's Mosul Dam could collapse at any minute 'killing 1.5 million people'
Saturday 7th January, 2017 - Huge Saddam Hussein-era dam near Isis territory is unstable, experts warn, with even a partial breach capable of causing flooding as far away as Baghdad

Engineers and other experts have warned that the collapse of an eight mile (13 kilometre) long dam on the Tigris River in northern Iraq is just a “matter of time”, triggering an environmental disaster which could leave 1.5 million people dead and millions more as far away as Baghdad without food or electricity. The Mosul Dam, 40 miles (60 kilometres) away from the Isis-controlled city of the same name, holds 11.1 billion cubic metres of water, and has been plagued by problems since its construction in the 1980s thanks to the fact it was built on soluble ground. It has required constant maintenance to fill the cavities that form underneath the concrete to stop it collapsing ever since.

The view from a helicopter as it flies above the dam in Mosul, Iraq​

A 2006 US Army Corps engineering report found the “Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world” - but the situation has become more precarious since Isis took control of the area in 2014, including, briefly, the dam itself. Many of the 1,500 workers stationed there fled, and the extremists damaged much of their equipment. “It is just a matter of time. It will be worse than throwing a nuclear bomb on Iraq,” Professor Nadhir al-Ansari of the Environmental Engineering Department at Lulea University in Sweden, who inspected the initial construction, told Al-Jazeera. A 2015 study from the European Commission's Science Centre found that even a partial breach of 26 per cent would unleash a flood of catastrophic proportions.

A wave of water up to 100 feet (30 metres) high would engulf Mosul in two hours, taking with it people, unexploded bombs, buildings and cars, as well as toxic substances from oil refineries and human waste. The surrounding flood plains are already home to more than one million people living in tents after being displaced by fighting who would struggle to find protection from the water. Within four days, both the EU and US experts predict, a wave between six - 36 feet (two - eight metres) high would reach Baghdad, 250 miles (400 kilometres) away. The UN predicted last year that in any flooding scenario, up to four million people will be left homeless, and aid will take up to two weeks to reach those in need if airports, electricity grids and roads are knocked out. Iraq’s oil refineries and up to two thirds of its wheat fields would also be affected.

A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter stands guard near the Mosul Dam​

New £234 million ($300 million) World Bank funded repairs are being carried out by an Italian engineering company, but the fragile security situation in the area is making completion of the work difficult. Kurdish and Italian soldiers remain on constant guard for extremist attacks. In October, an Isis convoy armed with explosives tried to approach the dam but were killed by Kurdish missiles before they reached it. A better and more permanent solution would be to build a second dam - but the political and military instability and lack of funds mean this option is highly unlikely. Iraqi officials have tried to downplay scientists’ and the international community's fears of an imminent disaster, but Professor Ansari remains sceptical the problem will be solved in time. “I am convinced the dam could fail tomorrow,” he said.

Iraq's Mosul Dam could collapse at any minute 'killing 1.5 million people' - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk