© Alaa Al-Marjani / Reuters A view from a window at a hospital damaged by clashes during a battle between Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants in the Wahda district of eastern Mosul, Iraq, January 8, 2017.
A new Human Rights Watch report on the liberation of Mosul alleges disturbing conduct by Iraqi state-sponsored militias, including looting and outright destruction of villages with explosives and heavy machinery.
"Our research demonstrates that Iraqi armed forces that are fighting ISIS [Islamic State, formerly ISIS/ISIL] to retake a couple of villages and a small town near Mosul -
they looted, damaged and destroyed homes. And that was apparently with no military necessity for those demolitions," Ahmed Benchemsi, HRW communications and advocacy director for Middle East & North Africa, told RT.
"[That] means that these acts amount to war crimes," he added, explaining that the story offered up by the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) leaves much to be desired, is inconsistent and does not make sense considering what the PMF said it was trying to achieve.
"The laws of war prohibit attacks on civilian property except when an enemy is using it for military purposes. They also prohibit indiscriminate attacks, including attacks that treat an entire area, such as a village, as a military objective," HRW writes in its
report.
Comment: The debate centered on whether the Obama rule actually protected streams or whether it was an effort to regulate the coal mining industry out of business, thereby throwing a bone to industries that would then be able to pick up the slack such as wind and solar.