Kurds reportedly receiving ISIS truce offers
Kurds reportedly receiving ISIS truce offers
Local tribal and village chiefs have reportedly relayed ceasefire requests from ISIS.
NOW.
April 8, 2015
BEIRUT – Kurdish Peshmerga forces advancing against ISIS in northern Iraq have reportedly received localized truce offers from elements of the militant organization.
Kurdish Rudaw news agency reported that ISIS has been dispatching messages via local tribal and village leaders “appealing for a ceasefire.”
“ISIS has requested the Peshmerga to halt their attacks and reach a kind of ceasefire with them,” a Peshmerga official told the outlet in an article published Tuesday.
However, the unnamed military commander added that “we don’t take such demands seriously. We have experience with them.”
As-Sharq al-Awsat also published a report on the truce offers, citing well-informed sources as saying that ISIS has been relaying messages in the Kirkuk province requesting ceasefires.
The Peshmerga’s Kirkuk commander, Mohammed Haj Mahmood, told the Saudi-owned daily that “everything that is happening in that respect is local.”
“In certain cases, some Arab tribes—for their own interests—try to bring about cease fires, but these attempts are minor.”
The Peshmerga commander explained that “the residents of some villages, in order not to be damaged by the fighting, ask Peshmerga and ISIS forces to stop exchanging fire.”
Meanwhile, Kirkuk police chief Sarhad Qadir said that while ISIS as an overall organization “has not called for a truce so far,” members of the group have dispatched messages regarding surrendering themselves to Kurdish authorities.
“They have sent us messages via a number of channels offering to hand themselves over to Peshmerga and other security forces in exchange for their pardon,” he told As-Sharq al-Awsat.
“However, the decision [to grant a] pardon is not easy, especially with regard to criminals who took part in fighting and whose hands are stained with the blood of citizens, Peshmerga forces, the army and the other security forces.”
The reported truce offers come amid growing military setbacks for ISIS, which lost control of Tikrit last week while Peshmerga forces in recent months have regained almost all the territory ISIS seized in its summer 2014 offensive into Kurdish regions of Iraq.
The latest edition of ISIS’s English-language Dabiq magazine issued last week broached the concept of establishing truces with the Islamist organization’s enemies.
An article published under John Cantlie’s byline, who is currently held hostage by ISIS, argues that the US and its allies would have to contemplate a truce since “there is no military only solution to the Islamic State.”
“At some stage the only option that can prevail for America and the West is a sensible one” of a truce, the article added.
London-based journalist Harvey Morris wrote an analysis on the Dabiq artice, noting that that “if not an oblique signal of the group’s present relative weakness… [it] might be an effort to drive a wedge between those who support and oppose further Western involvement in the anti-ISIS campaign.”
“In any event, the truce idea — floated in IS’s main English-language propaganda vehicle — must have the group’s approval,” he added in article published last week by Time magazine.
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https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/NewsReports/565094-kurds-reportedly-receiving-isis-truce-offers
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