- As US ignores evidence of atrocities by blacklisted Iraqi military unit
World leaders, businesses, investors, scientists and development charities have joined in urging Donald Trump not to withdraw the US from the Paris climate change agreement.
The US president is due to announce his decision at 15.00 ET on Thursday and is expected to pull the world’s largest economy, and second greatest polluter, from the global accord agreed unanimously by almost 200 nations in 2015.
The agreement to fight global warming is based on voluntary pledges to cut greenhouse emissions but Trump has argued this could damage the US economy. However, a huge range of US business leaders argue the opposite, saying that the fast growing green economy is an opportunity for the US.
Twenty-five leading companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Levi Strauss and Unilever, are running an advert in the US media on Thursday, urging Trump not to abandon the Paris deal. They say the accord’s “stable and practical framework” creates jobs and is good for business.
Over 1,000 other US companies and investors, including DuPont, eBay and Nike, have also backed the Paris deal, saying: “Failure to build a low-carbon economy puts American prosperity at risk.” Tesla boss Elon Musk said he had urged Trump to back Paris and would resign from two presidential advisory bodies he serves on.
World leaders also stated their commitment to the Paris deal, with China’s premier Li Keqiang saying on Thursday that fighting climate change is a “global consensus” and an “international responsibility”. The EU and China have forged a new alliance on climate change, stating on Wednesday that the Paris deal had their “highest political commitment”.
Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, tweeted at Trump on Thursday, asking him: “Please don’t change the (political) climate for the worse.” Trump was isolated on the climate issue at a recent G7 summit in Italy.
Malcolm Turnbull, prime minister of Australia, which has in the past opposed climate action, said the country would remain steadfast in its support for the Paris agreement. Russia has also said that it attaches “great significance” to the Paris deal. On Tuesday, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned if Trump withdraws from the Paris deal, there could be negative economic, security and societal consequences for the US.
Trump’s own secretary of state Rex Tillerson has said the US should remain in the Paris accord, as has the man who replaced him as CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil. Another key Trump adviser, Gary Cohn, director of the White House National Economic Council, noted recently the large rise in renewable energy in the US: “If you think about how much solar and how much wind power we’ve created in the US, we can be a manufacturing powerhouse and still be environmentally friendly.”
Trump himself once backed climate action, signing a 2009 letter to President Barack Obama that stated: “Please allow us, the USA, to serve in modeling the change necessary to protect humanity and our planet.”
Development NGOs warned that a US withdrawal from the Paris agreement would harm those in poor countries who had contributed least to the problem.
In the meantime, the U.S. military continues to work with a blacklisted Iraqi special forces unit despite overwhelming evidence that its officers have engaged in human rights abuses for at least two years.
In hours of footage captured by Iraqi photojournalist Ali Arkady, licensed by ABC News and broadcast on World News Tonight with David Muir and Nightline last week, officers of an elite Iraqi unit called the Emergency Response Division (E.R.D.) are shown directing the torture and execution of civilians in Mosul late last year. A U.S. military spokesman said that while an investigation of new evidence of atrocities committed by the E.R.D. is warranted, there is no legal reason the U.S. cannot continue to work with the unit.
The unit had already been blacklisted in March 2015 under the Leahy Act, which requires foreign military units to be banned from receiving U.S. military aid if there is “credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.” Top American commanders, however, have continued to praise the successes of the E.R.D. and boast of a “fruitful partnership” between the U.S. military and the unit, including coordinating airstrikes on ISIS.
“The photos are sickening. They clearly depict war crimes,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who authored the federal law 20 years ago, said in a statement to ABC News. “That they were brazenly lauded by the unit’s leader suggests that they were far from aberrations. It is my understanding that the United States no longer supports the Iraqi unit involved, but we should insist that the individuals responsible, and particularly the leaders, be prosecuted and appropriately punished. The fact that U.S. military personnel praised the Iraqi unit’s cooperation is deeply disturbing and requires further investigation by the Pentagon.”
A spokesperson for the U.S.-led Operation Inherent Resolve in Baghdad said officials were not previously aware of the atrocities documented by Arkady, and the U.S. military has since contacted Iraqi officials to discuss the incidents exposed by ABC News. The spokesperson also defended, however, the U.S. military’s legal right to work with a unit deemed essential to the campaign to liberate Mosul.
“The Emergency Response Division was disqualified from receiving U.S. equipment and training in March 2015,” U.S. Army Col. Joe Scrocca, a spokesperson for the coalition, told ABC News. “Leahy vetting does not prevent the U.S. from working with the E.R.D., as we do with other elements of the Iraqi Security Forces, to help ensure a coordinated effort among different elements of the ISF in the fight to defeat ISIS in Mosul.”
A top adviser to Sen. Leahy, however, disagreed, questioning whether the military is adhering to the spirit of the law, given the credible evidence of human rights violations committed by E.R.D. soldiers.
“If we are providing advice or coordinating airstrikes, clearly we are assisting the actions of that unit,” Tim Rieser, senior foreign policy aide to Leahy, told ABC News on Tuesday. “One of Senator Leahy’s purposes in writing the law was to prevent the U.S. from being associated with or implicated in the actions of those who the law is intended to address.”
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East executive director at Human Rights Watch, who has worked in Iraq since 1991, agrees.
“The U.S. government is playing a clunky shell game, pretending to move its assistance away from abusive Iraqi units like the E.R.D., while still working with them, training them and coordinating with them,” Whitson said. “The bottom line is that the U.S. is dangerously close to complicity in the disgusting torture and violence these forces are perpetrating on Iraqi citizens, and in reality, ensuring that the fight in Iraq will not be ending any time soon.”
At a Pentagon press briefing in January, U.S. Army Col. Brett Sylvia, then the commander of Task Force Strike in Baghdad, told reporters that American officers had recently advised the E.R.D. and called them “a very effective fighting force.”
This month, even as officers at Operation Inherent Resolve were responding to questions raised by ABC News in its investigation of Arkady’s footage, a top U.S. commander in Iraq tweeted praise for the Emergency Response Division.
“Watch the #Iraqi ERD send a message to #ISIS on #saturdaymorning in Western #Mosul,” tweeted U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Martin on May 13, with a link to a battlefield video on the E.R.D.’s official Facebook page showing the Iraqi troops in combat.
Despite the ban, the E.R.D. was also included in the latest request to Congress for millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars for the Iraq Train and Equip Fund in March. Scrocca claims that request was merely designed “to keep options open in the event E.R.D. … overcame Leahy vetting issues.”
“Requesting funding for such a unit, when there’s been no action to hold people accountable, sends the wrong message,” Rieser countered.
Guardian with additional report from Abc
