Kurdish and government forces have retaken the Mosul Dam, or so they claim.
What I am hearing (from my sources at the dam, of course) is that the Peshmerga hold the eastern side of the dam and IS is still dug in on the western side. Amazing if someone manages to keep control of the dam without damaging it. I mean you don’t carry out modern warfare around a dam, which is such a fragile thing.
I don’t think either side actually wants to destroy it, I think the issue is control – and later blackmail possibly.
I also think this is another go at Afghan Northern Alliance strategy. The Americans will be the Peshmerga air-force and they are the boots on the ground which go in for the clean-up and occupation.
Well let’s hope ‘clean up’ won’t carry the usual meaning of ‘treating the population like the enemy’, which is what alienated the Sunni from the largely Shia ‘Army’ supposedly providing security in Mosul in the first place.
I am thinking no way that the Peshmerga will enter Sunni territory. This "alliance’ will only work for the Christian and Yazidi areas.
There is only one way to “re-capture” Anbar Province and other Sunni areas. That is by a revival of the Awakening Councils. That is, the Sunni tribes are offered money and a decent and fair Federal status within a greater Iraq. Then they will turn against IS just like they did Al-Queda. But there has to be something in it for them. At the moment they see the Iraqi government (read Shia parties and militias) as a much greater threat.
But the politics of this turnaround are quite elusive at the moment.
It would seem that the peshmerga and the ISOF joined forces to retake Mosul Dam, while the IS went irregular by planting huge quantities of IEDs and disappearing into the night. A co-ordinated counterattack on Tikrit by the ISF and Shi’a militias, on the other hand, was another expensive disaster with heavy losses. In Syria it’s been reported that the IS have shot down two MiG-23s and are preparing for a night time assault on Tabqa airbase.
Yes. The Awakening lot got royally screwed by Malaki and won’t be easy to win back. ISIS is extremely rich and who knows what the Saudi money is being spent on. Not supporting Iranian backed Shia dominated ‘Iraq’, that’s for sure.
Well, they cannot be expected to stand in the face of co-ordinated shouts of ‘boo’ without US air support flattening the town in order to save it first.
Who trained these clowns again?
Apparently you don’t get a lot for $25 billion nowadays.
A country that won’t defend itself isn’t worth saving.
Except plenty of Iraqis are willing to defend themselves. You don’t seem to realize that virtually everybody hates ISIS-the Americans, the Russians, the Turks, the Kurds, the Iranians, the Shias, the Syrians, and even Al-Qaeda.
And check this out:
ISIS Recruited 6,300 New Fighters in July
Folks are flocking to the latest Jihad zone. How else to take a number and join the queue to end up with the virgins who await.
What Iraqi’s might these be? Kurds are Kurds fighting for their own interests. The Sunni, who you omit to mention, range from sullenly hostile to actively hostile.
The Shia? It was the Shia dominated army whose behaviour bolstered support for Isis in the first place. And it is the Shia militia’s who the Sunni fear most.
And it is the Shia dominated ‘army’ that after all those years, and all those billions ran screaming at the first sign of trouble, gifting their arsenal to ISIS.
Hell, even the ARVN managed more of a showing.
And it doesn’t matter a jot who hates Isis. What matters is who is fighting them. And that boils down in troop form to the Kurds, who are not fighting for Iraq and the Shia - who when they can take a break from the slow ethnic cleansing of Baghdad - are about as much use as a chocolate fire-guard.
A $25 billion fire-guard admittedly.
Don’t forget Syria. The Islamic Front and the Syrian Army have both been fighting the Islamic State. I’m not quite sure how, but ISIS is fighting on four fronts, the Kurds in the North of Iraq, the Shia militias and what’s left of the ISF in the rest of Iraq, the Islamic Front around Aleppo and the remaining Assad loyalists in their part of Syria. And the only area they aren’t decisively winning is against the Kurds. No doubt those thousands of new fighters will help with the burden. Nothing succeeds like success.
Not to the point of raising his voice or anything, of course.
The crux of the matter at the moment is the negotiations going on in Baghdad between the opponents of IS (including the US and the Saudis) and the Sunni Dulaimi tribe. These are the folks who will make or break IS. This is the key tribe which was paid and armed by the US years back and routed Al Qaeda. They are asking for money, arms, and an almost independent state of Anbar.
Most Sunnis that have affiliated themselves with ISIS have done so out of convenience-it is unlikely they will stay loyal to such a brutal and harsh a regime as ISIS. Furthermore there are plenty of loyalist Sunnis.
On the contrary, unlike the ARVN’s utter collapse, Baghdad is still in the hands of the government, while the Iraqi military has begun to fight back with American support. Also you seem to be under the impression that the Kurds, Shias, and Sunnis are all monolithic blocs without any sub-factions with varying degrees of willingness to work together with other ethnicities.
Other armies have suffered equally terrible initial defeats historically-witness the Soviet army’s abysmal performance against the Finns only to become an army that would utterly smash the German Reich in but a few years. One of the biggest factors in the Iraqi military’s ineffectiveness-the Maliki government-has been removed.
Also judging from your earlier post, you seem to be under the impression that our support for moderate Syrian rebel groups such as the FSA led to the rise of the ISIS, when on the contrary it was Assad who deliberately encouraged ISIS to counter the other Syrian rebels. Indeed if the US had intervened decisively in Syria, with massive aid in the rebellion’s early stages and supporting airstrikes in a no-fly zone, ISIS would have been nipped in the bud.
The impression I’m getting from your posts is that you seem smugly self-satisfied with ISIS as an utterly invincible godlike force with which virtually all other Iraqi factions are utterly impotent to deal with.
Reported for the offensive personal attack it is.
I’ve been given worse before outside of the BBQ Pit. Also you didn’t respond to the rest of my post.
This discussion will move forward more smoothly if you do not try to make personal observations against other posters.
Knock it off.
And claiming that your post is not up to Pit standards is hardly a valid defense in GD.
That said,
If you consider “smugly self-satisfied” to be a direct, personal insult, you might find Great Debates too rough for your participation.
[ /Moderating ]
Quit the bickering guys… or I’ll send a drone.
What I find offensive is the accusation of being a terrorist sympathiser inherent in ‘being smugly self-satisfied’ with how ‘awesome’ i perceive ISIS to be. I would have thought that was pretty obvious.
and I won’t ‘debate’ with people who throw such offensive accusations around, with apparent impunity.
Recent developments:
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The Kurds have now got to Jalawla, which fell to the IS just after the air strikes started, and have it invested.
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The IS, however, are still advancing west north of Aleppo, I read an article claiming they want a stretch of sparsely populated Turkish border to import foreign fighters, but they probably want to cut off Aleppo from Turkey preparatory to an assault.
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Tabqa airbase, which was being used by the Syrian government to launch air strikes and was Assad’s only remaining territory in Raqqa province, has now fallen to the IS. The Syrians had a thousand men along with tanks and artillery and some squadrons of fighters for air support, all within several square miles of fortified positions, but IS still, eventually, took the whole thing. A major strategic victory for IS, although they admit to rather more than a hundred dead on their side. IS, as usual, have been posting photos on the internet of their booty, which includes at least several seemingly intact fighters, racks of missiles and a load of man-portable air defences, heat-seeking surface-to-air rockets.
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the al-Nursa front, al-Qaeda’s official franchise in Syria, are reported to have seized a border crossing with Israel. The IDF are reported to have opened fire on Assad’s forces after some Syrian mortar shells went astray and landed in Israel.