Iraq in Crisis- Merged Superthread

[tomahawk6]

By all accounts he has either been seriously wounded or killed,along with alot of IS leaders.The air campaign is making life hard for the islamists.

 

[CougarKing]

Back to "shock and awe" on a greater scale?

Reuters

Hagel says air war against Islamic State will intensify
WASHINGTON Thu Nov 13, 2014 10:47am EST

(Reuters) - Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said on Thursday the U.S.-led air war against Islamic State militants will intensify in the future as Iraqi ground forces improve and become more effective.

Defending the U.S. strategy during a House of Representatives hearing, Hagel said, "As Iraqi forces build strength, the tempo and intensity of our coalition's air campaign will accelerate in tandem."

 

[Kilo_302]

Interesting analysis from a retired US Army Lt General. We need to have more debates like this before we do things like get involved with fighting ISIS.

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/12/why_we_lost_retired_us_general

 

[CougarKing]

"Can the US and other allied advisers actually train that many, and train them effectively, before ISIS starts advancing again? is the question that needs to be asked.

Is anyone here aware of the rate at which Afghan troops for the ANA were trained by NATO/ISAF?

Reuters

Iraq needs 80,000 good troops to retake lost territory: U.S. general
WASHINGTON Thu Nov 13, 2014 1:08pm EST

(Reuters) - Iraq will need about 80,000 effective military troops to retake the terrain it lost to Islamic State militants and restore its border with Syria, the top U.S. general said on Thursday.

"We're going to need about 80,000 competent Iraqi security forces to recapture territory lost, and eventually the city of Mosul, to restore the border," Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, told a congressional hearing.

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[a_majoor]

I'm of two minds about this.

On one hand, I am aware of the general consensus that it takes decades to build an effective, competent and professional military force. For the most part that is true, but I think this really speaks more of the building and staffing of the "institutional" army, the logistical and professional training and evaluation backbone that allows the military to have institutional memory, pass on lessons learned, develop new doctrine and TTP's and raise the next generation of service members. This is pretty hard to do (one only has to look at the "Institutional Army" in Canada to see issues), and also very hard to sustain (look up Jerry Pournelle's "Iron Law of Bureaucracy" to see where the danger lies).

OTOH, large and effective field armies have been raised and marched into battle in remarkably short periods of time throughout history (examples can be found as far back as ancient Greece), and we have done the same during the Great War and WWII. I don't know if the circumstances in Iraq would allow for this, since I think one of the important ingredients to successfully raise a field force like this needs to be cultural (think of the Levée en masse in the French Revolution; it required a sense of national identity and an adherence to the ideals of the Revolution against a seemingly existential threat, otherwise few would have flocked to the colours).

If enough Iraqis feel an adherence to the idea of "Iraq", then perhaps this may be possible. However, few of the people there see themselves as "Iraqi's". The Kurds are building their own force, and the tribal militias in Anabar represent another sort of Levée en masse, so any attempt to oust ISIS by a unitary of Federal Iraqi force will be problematic at best. Even if the Iraqi's "win", will the Kurds and tribal groups in Anabar submit to some form of Federal authority?

 

[CougarKing]

The Iraqi military finally getting their act together with this victory?

Associated Press

Iraqi forces score major victory over IS, drive militants out of key oil refinery town
By Hamza Hendawi And John Heilprin, The Associated Press

BAGHDAD - Iraqi forces drove Islamic State militants out of a strategic oil refinery town north of Baghdad on Friday, scoring their biggest battlefield victory since they melted away in the face of the terror group's stunning summer offensive that captured much of northern and western Iraq.

The recapture of Beiji is the latest in a series of setbacks for the jihadi group, which has lost hundreds of fighters to airstrikes by a U.S.-led coalition in a stalled advance on the Syrian town of Kobani. On Friday, activists there reported significant progress by Kurdish fighters defending the town.

Iraqi security officials said government forces backed by allied militiamen took control of Beiji and also lifted a monthslong Islamic State siege on its refinery — Iraq's largest. However, two military officials reached by telephone in Beiji late Friday said there was still some fighting going on at the refinery, but reinforcements had been sent in and Iraqi forces were poised to retake it.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[CougarKing]

The French launching more strikes against ISIS:

Reuters

France says jets strike IS targets to break Kirkuk frontline
Wed Nov 19, 2014 10:48am EST

PARIS (Reuters) - France said on Wednesday that Rafale jets had struck Islamic State targets alongside coalition planes near the northern Iraq city of Kirkuk to help breach the group's frontlines, and was sending six fighter jets to Jordan to ramp up its strikes.

Two Dassault-built Rafale fighters, both armed with four missiles, targeted trenches used by Islamic State to besiege the oil city at around 0330 GMT (10:30 p.m. ET), the ministry said in a statement.

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[CougarKing]

Good.

Reuters


Senior Islamic State figure killed in Mosul: sources

They said Radwan Taleb al-Hamdouni, who they described as the radical militant group's leader in Mosul, was killed with his driver when their car was hit in a western district of the city on Wednesday afternoon.

 

[tomahawk6]

Jihad John must be the luckiest tango this side of paradise.NATO is targeting him and he still is beheading people.

 

[a_majoor]

More surprises popping up from the past:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/middleeast/thousands-of-iraq-chemical-weapons-destroyed-in-open-air-watchdog-says-.html?mabReward=RI%3A7&action=click&contentCollection=Energy%20%26%20Environment%20&region=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=article&_r=0

Thousands of Iraq Chemical Weapons Destroyed in Open Air, Watchdog Says
By C. J. CHIVERSNOV. 22, 2014

The United States recovered thousands of old chemical weapons in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 and destroyed almost all of them in secret and via open-air detonation, according to a written summary of its activities prepared by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international body that monitors implementation of the global chemical weapons treaty.

The 30-page summary, prepared after quietly held meetings between the organization’s technical staff and American officials in Washington in 2009, was provided to The New York Times by the Pentagon on Friday.

It included a table disclosing limited details on 95 separate recoveries and destructions of chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, for a total of 4,530 munitions from May 2004 through February 2009 — a period of often intense fighting in Iraq.

The United States later recovered more Iraqi chemical weapons, pushing its tally to 4,996 by early 2011, according to redacted intelligence documents obtained by The Times via the Freedom of Information Act.

The weapons destroyed through early 2009, the newly released report said, included some that contained chemical agents, others that were corroded and degraded, and some that appeared to have been previously demilitarized but that the United States destroyed “to err on the side of safety and security.”

Its authors noted that none of the weapons had been recently manufactured. All were legacy items from Iraq’s chemical weapons program in the 1980s and early 1990s. That program had been rushed into production during the Iran-Iraq War and then destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War and the period of United Nations inspections that followed.

“All munitions found were left over from pre-1991 Iraqi program,” the report said.

The report by the organization, which has its headquarters in The Hague and is often referred to as an international watchdog on chemical weapons and treaty compliance, was a result of an unusual moment in the American occupation.

In early 2009, at American prodding, Iraq’s fledgling government joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty that has largely banned chemical weapons worldwide. With that, Iraq assumed obligations to declare and ultimately destroy under the organization’s supervision any chemical weapons remaining from Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Until that point, American forces had been quietly finding and destroying old chemical weapons in the country; at times, the weapons were being used by militants in improvised bombs.

As American forces took possession of the weapons, the United States government had kept the bulk of these activities and their complications secret, including chemical wounds, especially from sulfur mustard blister agent, sustained by American troops.

Once Iraq joined the convention, however, the United States shifted its stance and proposed a more thorough disclosure. It invited the organization’s specialists to review, in private, records of the military’s activities.

The report, prepared by the organization’s Technical Secretariat, recounted elements of that review, which was held in summer 2009.

Its authors appeared to choose words carefully, relating information and positions that the American government had shared with them without passing judgment on their contents.

The report explicitly noted that in many cases the American records were scarce, and that “this activity was not a verification measure” and “was not conducted in accordance with rules contained in the Verification Annex” — the part of the treaty that delineates procedures for destroying chemical weapons and confirming compliance.

The report’s purpose, the authors noted, was “to allow the U.S. to provide assurance that it acted in the spirit of the Convention.”

A spokesman for the organization, reached late Friday, said he had not seen the document.

The Pentagon’s release of the report was a partial departure from its nearly decade-long posture of secrecy.

In 2004, Charles A. Duelfer, who led the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. after the American-led invasion, published a lengthy compendium on the state of Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, which included sections describing the American recovery and destruction of a small number of chemical warheads and shells that year. An early 2005 addendum updated the information.

The United States then fell nearly silent as troops encountered more chemical shells, publicly releasing only snippets in 2006. By then, the number of encounters with chemical weapons in improvised bombs had increased. Soon more troops were wounded by them, as secrecy prevailed.

The Technical Secretariat noted, for instance, that even when the United States sent a letter in 2006 to The Hague disclosing that it had encountered chemical munitions and expected to encounter more, it guarded the details and asserted that “efforts to recover and destroy chemical munitions remained an extremely sensitive matter.”

The contents of the newly released report suggest that there were limits to American information-sharing in 2009, even with the watchdogs.

Almost no reference is made to people wounded while handling the chemical weapons. And the list of incidents is not complete; it is missing, for instance, the September 2006 recovery of a repurposed mustard shell from an improvised bomb that wounded two Navy ordnance disposal techs — Chief Petty Officer Ted Pickett and Petty Officer Third Class Jeremiah Foxwell.

Further, the United States declined to share precise locations for the recoveries of chemical munitions. “U.S. representatives indicated that the exact locations are considered sensitive,” the report said.

Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation analyst at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, upon reviewing the newly released document on Friday, also said that what the report described of American actions appeared to be unsafe to American troops and Iraqis alike.

“The thing I take away from this is, ‘God, they blew all of this up in open pits?’ ” he said. “There is a reason that is arguably incompatible with our treaty obligations. There is no universe where this is a safe and ecologically appropriate way to dispose of chemical weapons.”

The Pentagon has said the exigencies of war required that the weapons be destroyed hastily and in the open.

Mr. Lewis said he understood that troops who assumed disposal missions, typically while on missions to counter improvised bombs, lacked the equipment and time to handle chemical weapons more deliberately and with less risk. He suggested the Pentagon had failed them by being unprepared and careless.

“When you step back to look at the broader responsibilities we have as a country, we rolled into Iraq, we had no plan, we were not very focused, and so we stumbled onto this stuff,” he said. “I am totally sympathetic to the guys on the ground who had to deal with this, but I just can’t get away from the fiasco that put them in this situation in the first place.”

The released documents also included six pages on a similar visit by the organization’s technical staff to England, where they reviewed records provided by the British government of a far smaller set of destructions disclosed by British forces — 21 Borak rockets containing sarin nerve agent in early 2006.

The British government, in contrast to the United States government, had in 2010 publicly released details of the Borak destructions after Iran complained to the watchdog group of the “clear violation of the United States and the United Kingdom obligations under the Convention.”

I hope that they finally are able to account for everything (or at least a very large fraction), otherwise, this stuff will continue to turn up, and increasingly in the hands of IS** and their friends.

 

[CougarKing]

Notable update at the Iran super thread:

Iranian F4 Phantom jets join air strikes against ISIS targets in Iraq

 

[CougarKing]

Anyone else see updates on Baghdadi's whereabouts?

ISIS leader's wife, son have been detained in Lebanon

Lebanese officials say authorities have detained a wife and son of the Islamic State’s leader.

The two were detained 10 days ago using fake identification cards.

Both officials refused to give any details about the woman who is believed to be one of the wives of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group's reclusive leader.

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More at: Fox News

 

[CougarKing]

US military "advisors" reportedly clash with ISIS fighters for the first time in Iraq:

Source: Opposing Views

U.S. Ground Troops Clash With ISIS Fighters In Iraq For The First Time

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"American ground troops in Iraq have reportedly, for the first time, clashed with fighters from the Islamic State as the militants attempted to overrun an Iraqi military base. The Daily Mail reports members of the Islamic State, the group commonly referred to as ISIS, attacked Ein al-Asad airbase in the early hours of Sunday morning where more than 100 U.S. troops are stationed in support of the base’s Iraqi troops."

(...SNIPPED)

 

[CougarKing]

Military.com

ISIS Fires Mortars Near Marines Deployed to Train Iraq Forces

Jan 05, 2015 | by Richard Sisk
Marines at a forward training base for the Iraqi security forces in western Anbar province have come under "regular" but spotty indirect fire in recent weeks from ISIS, mostly from mortars, the Pentagon said Monday.
"It's fair to say the al-Asad command has come under regular fire" but "the fire has been completely ineffective. These are purely nuisance attacks," Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said of the sprawling outpost of the Iraqi army at the former al-Asad airbase west of Baghdad.
U.S. troops, who have been barred from ground combat by President Obama, have not returned fire and left the Iraqi national security forces to deal with the indirect fire threat from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

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[CougarKing]

The battle for Iraq continues:

Reuters

Islamic State kills 24 Kurds in surprise attack in North Iraq
Reuters

ARBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - Islamic State militants have killed at least 24 members of the Kurdish security forces in a surprise attack in northern Iraq, Kurdish officials said, in one of the deadliest single battles for the Kurds since last summer.

Three Kurdish officers reported continued clashes with Islamic State on Sunday, one day after the deaths, near Gwer, a town some 40km (25 miles) southwest of the autonomous Kurdish region's capital Arbil.
Kurdish-controlled Gwer is likely to be a launch-pad for any future attempt by Iraqi and Kurdish forces to retake Mosul, the biggest city in northern Iraq which Islamic State seized last June.

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Al Jazeera

Iraqi army readies for assault on Mosul

The Iraqi government is preparing an offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group in the country's second biggest city, Mosul.

The Iraqi army and Sunni tribal fighters are expected to take on ISIL in the coming days, with the US-led coalition providing them with air support. Osama al-Nujaifi, Iraqi vice president, and Khaled al-Obeidi, defence minister, who are both from Mosul, have been visiting Erbil to gain the support of the Kurdish Peshmerga forces for the planned offensive in Mosul.

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[CougarKing]

The battle lines drawn back to Fallujah again...

Military.com

ISIS Maintains Control Over Fallujah Despite US Airstrikes

Associated Press | Jan 18, 2015 | by Vivian Salama
BAGHDAD — Nearly every night for a year, mortar and sniper fire from Islamic State group militants has pinned down outgunned Iraqi troops on the edge of Fallujah.

The city, the first to fall to the Sunni extremists a year ago this month, exemplifies the lack of progress in Iraq's war against the Islamic State group, which holds a third of the country. U.S.-led airstrikes and Iranian aid have helped Iraqi troops, militiamen and Kurdish fighters take back bits around Islamic State-held territory, but recapturing it all remains far out of reach.

"We are constantly on alert and don't sleep very much," said Saad al-Sudani, an Iraqi soldier among the beleaguered troops outside of Fallujah. "We are waiting for any kind of support."

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[tomahawk6]

Canadian SF took it to ISIS after coming under fire.

http://news.yahoo.com/canada-special-forces-clash-iraq-195504092.html

Ottawa (AFP) - Canadian special forces exchanged gunfire with Islamic State fighters in Iraq in recent days, in the first confirmed ground battle between Western troops and IS, a senior officer said Monday.

The Canadians came under mortar and machine gun fire while training Iraqi troops near front lines and shot back in what Canadian special forces commander Brigadier General Michael Rouleau described as self-defense, killing the IS fighters.

 

[cryco]

fear the snipers!

 

[a_majoor]

A German reporter "embedded" with ISIS describes his time with them. Obviously their morale is quite high at this point, so messaging and bombing is having only a limited effect:

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/01/18/german-embed-reporter-isis-plans-on-killing-hundreds-of-millions-in-religious-cleansing/

Jurgen Todenhofer, the first Western reporter to embed with Islamic State fighters and not be killed in the process, spoke to Al Jazeera about his time with the terror group.

Todenhofer lived side by side with the jihadist fighters for ten days in the Islamic State-stronghold city of Mosul, Iraq. He was accompanied only by his son, who served as his cameraman.

“I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam,” but “I didn’t see any mercy in their behavior,” explained Todenhofer. He added, “Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.”

The German reporter then elaborated on how shocked he was about how “willing to kill” the ISIS fighters are. He said that they were ready to commit genocide. “They were talking about [killing] hundreds of millions. They were enthusiastic about it, and I just cannot understand that,” said Todenhofer

He warned that the Islamic State “is much stronger than we think,” and that their recruiting has brought motivated jihadis from across the globe. “Each day, hundreds of new enthusiastic fighters are arriving,” explained Todenhofer. “There is an incredible enthusiasm that I have never seen in any other war zones I have been to.”

The journalist asserted that the U.S.-led bombing campaign was not going to stop the Islamic State and its continuing jihad. He told Al Jazeera that he believed the terror group would only be stopped if fellow Sunni Iraqis would rise up against them.

Follow Jordan on Twitter @JordanSchachtel

 

[tomahawk6]

If you are seeking paradise,then you wouldnt fear death.One would welcome it.