Italian Defense Minister in Iraq for Mosul Dam Talks

Mosul Dam Talks?  According to the US this dam is in danger of imminent and apocalyptic collapse!

“Italian Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti made an unannounced visit to Iraq on Monday to discuss logistics for deploying 450 troops near the front line with Islamic State to protect workers carrying out repairs to the Mosul dam.”

Unannounced?450 more troops? Because there are already Italian troops stationed at the dam. And the area around the dam is completely militarized.  Both points covered more then once here at the blog.

“Pinotti met in Baghdad with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, according to a statement from his office. She later travelled to Erbil, the Kurdish regional capital 115 km (70 miles) east of Mosul dam, Italian defence forces said.”“Italy has about 750 soldiers in Iraq, mostly training Iraqi army and police in Baghdad and Erbil, ( Maybe "mostly" training whomever, but, many Italian troops are already stationed at the dam, as mentioned)  but the new troops will be deployed not far from Islamic State-held Mosul, (alongside Italian troops already present)  less than 20 km away from the dam, in a potential combat zone.

The Iraqi government signed a $296-million (£205.7 million) contract in February with Italy's Trevi Group to make badly needed upgrades to the 3.6-km-long (2.2-mile) Mosul dam, which has suffered from structural flaws since it was built in the 1980s.A delegation from Trevi visited the dam in March to begin preparing a nearby site to host the engineers and soldiers, which a source said could take up to six months to complete”

  Six months to complete the site to host the engineers and soldiers? That just doesn’t seem right..  The US claims the dam is in imminent danger of collapse. And they’ve claimed it repeatedly. So either the dam is in imminent danger of collapsing or the US is full of hot air ?(being nice) Or something else is afoot? Which is it?

“Islamist insurgents seized the dam in August 2014, leading to fears they might blow it up and unleash a wall of water on Mosul and Baghdad that could kill thousands of civilians. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters recaptured the dam two weeks later with the help of U.S. and Iraqi government forces”

The dam has been in NATO’s hands for nearly two years now- the rubbish about ISIS and the dam is just perception managing spin- disinfo- obfuscation- Mosul Dam safely in NATO’s control since 2014-

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 unless they were evacuated. Iraqi authorities have played down the threat, estimating only a one in 1,000 chance of failure.

Flashback!!!**  Mosul Dam Set to Fail- Intentional Take Down? Disaster Capitalism to the Extreme?.At that time I wrote that no matter how the dam failed,  if it failed it was the fault of the US. Period!