Iraq in Crisis- Merged Superthread

[YZT580]

The Iraqi's had quite a bit to do with that....

Then blame the Iraqi but don't point fingers at your predecessor for decisions that were made on your watch.  It wasn't so long ago that he was twisting himself backwards in an effort to pat himself on the back for pulling everyone out.

 

[tomahawk6]

The rescue mission won't be needed.SF have determined that most refugees have gotten out.What is really interesting to me is that Kurdish PKK fighters from Syria are turning the tide against the IS forces in northern Iraq.US air strikes have also contributed to the improved security situation.

 

[CougarKing]

A political crisis averted in Iraq's Shia-dominated government? While the security crisis remains with ISIS still in control of large swathes of the country and besieging the Kurds in the north...

Maliki steps down, easing Iraq’s political crisis

BAGHDAD — Embattled Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki stepped aside Thursday, ending a tense political standoff and clearing the way for a new prime minister tasked with steering the country out of its security crisis.

Maliki appeared on state television flanked by senior members of his party, including rival Haider al-Abadi, who has been appointed to form a new government. Maliki said he would back “brother” Abadi for the sake of Iraq’s unity.

Maliki had provoked a political crisis by refusing to give up his position after eight years in power and ordering security forces into the streets of Baghdad. He had argued that the appointment of Abadi on Monday to form a government was unconstitutional and had launched a legal case against the president over the perceived breach.

(...EDITED)

Washington Post

 

[CougarKing]

More barbarism by ISIS:

Reuters

Islamic State 'massacres' 80 Yazidis in north Iraq: officials
By: Reuters
August 16, 2014 10:30 PM

BAGHDAD - Islamic State insurgents "massacred" some 80 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority in a village in the country's north, a Yazidi lawmaker and two Kurdish officials said on Friday.

"They arrived in vehicles and they started their killing this afternoon," senior Kurdish official Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters. "We believe it's because of their creed: convert or be killed."

A Yazidi lawmaker and another senior Kurdish official also said the killings had taken place and that the women of the village were kidnapped.

A push by Islamic State militants through northern Iraq to the border with the Kurdish region has alarmed the Baghdad government, drawn the first U.S. air strikes since the end of American occupation in 2001 and sent tens of thousands of Yazidis and Christians fleeing for their lives.


(...EDITED)

 

[CougarKing]

"Will this be enough to sufficiently to halt ISIS advances?" is the question that needs to be asked.

Military.com

Airstrikes Hit MRAPs and Humvees Captured by ISIL

Aug 15, 2014 | by Richard Sisk
U.S. warplanes on combat patrols over northern Iraq increasingly are hitting U.S.-made armored vehicles captured by Islamic militants from the fleeing Iraqi army.
In the latest airstrikes Thursday, the U.S. Central Command said that a mix of fighters and armed drones destroyed one of the heavily-armored Mine Resistant-Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles that were a mainstay of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The MRAP was targeted after the warplanes destroyed two other armored vehicles northeast of the Kurdish capital of Irbil that were being used by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to fire on positions held by the Kurdish peshmerga forces, the Central Command said in a statement.

(...EDITED)

 

[CougarKing]

A question that needs to be asked: "Are the Kurds even ready for an offensive, considering they've been losing ground recently to ISIS?"

CBC

Updated: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 17:48:33 GMT | By The Associated Press, cbc.ca

U.S. to expand air strikes to help Kurdish forces retake Mosul Dam

The U.S. is expanding its air campaign in Iraq with attacks aimed at helping Iraqi forces fully regain control of the strategic Mosul dam.

The White House said President Barack Obama notified Congress Sunday that the widened mission would be limited in duration and scope.

The White House says "the mission is consistent with the president's directive that the U.S. military protect U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq, since the failure of the Mosul Dam could threaten the lives of large numbers of civilians and threaten U.S. personnel and facilities — including the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad."

The latest round of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq against the Islamic State extremist group includes the first reported use of land-based bombers in the military campaign.

(...EDITED)

 

[tomahawk6]

The Kurds are excellant fighters and with US air and SF,are already having success.Now if they can keep IS from blowing up the dam...

 

[CougarKing]

And the Kurds score a major victory!

Agence-France-Presse

Kurds retake key Iraq dam, Sunnis hit jihadists
By: Serene Assir, Agence France-Presse
August 18, 2014 3:36 AM

AL-QOSH - Iraqi Kurdish fighters backed by US warplanes retook the country's largest dam from jihadists on Sunday, as Sunni Arab tribesmen and security forces fought the militants west of Baghdad.
The recapture of Mosul dam marks the biggest major prize clawed back from Islamic State (IS) jihadists since they launched their offensive in northern Iraq in early June when they swept Iraqi security forces aside.

IS militants, who have declared a "caliphate" straddling vast areas of Iraq and Syria, also came under air attack in their Syrian stronghold of Raqa on Sunday, a monitoring group said.

Syria's air force carried out 16 raids on the city of Raqa and several more on the town of Tabqa in Raqa province, killing at least 31 jihadists and eight civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Two months of violence have brought Iraq to the brink of breakup, and world powers relieved by the exit of divisive premier Nuri al-Maliki are sending aid to the hundreds of thousands who have fled their homes as well as arms to the Kurdish peshmerga forces.

Buoyed by the air strikes US President Barack Obama ordered last week, Kurdish forces are fighting to win back ground they had lost since the start of August, when the jihadists went back on the offensive north, east and west of the city of Mosul, capturing the dam on August 7.

(...EDITED)

 

[The Bread Guy]

Interesting source of support for airstrikes ....

Pope Francis on Monday endorsed the use of force to stop Islamic militants from attacking religious minorities in Iraq but said the international community — and not just one country — should decide how to intervene.

Francis also said he and his advisers were considering whether he might go to northern Iraq himself to show solidarity with persecuted Christians. But he said he was holding off for now on a decision.

(....)

On Iraq, Francis was asked if he approved of the unilateral U.S. airstrikes on militants of the Islamic State who have captured swaths of northern and western Iraq and northeastern Syria and have forced minority Christians and others to either convert to Islam or flee their homes.

"In these cases, where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor," Francis said. "I underscore the verb 'stop.' I'm not saying 'bomb' or 'make war,' just 'stop.' And the means that can be used to stop them must be evaluated."

But, he said, in history, such "excuses" to stop an unjust aggression have been used by world powers to justify a "war of conquest" in which an entire people have been taken over.

"One nation alone cannot judge how you stop this, how you stop an unjust aggressor," he said, apparently referring to the United States. "After World War II, the idea of the United Nations came about: It's there that you must discuss 'Is there an unjust aggression? It seems so. How should we stop it?' Just this. Nothing more." ....

 

[a_majoor]

So long as the present administration is only willing to use half measures, then the situation with ISIS (ISIL or IS, depending on what source you use) will continue to deteriorate. It is interesting to see who the new regional power players are and the sorts of alignments that are evolving; Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States with the Sunnis, Egypt and Isreal working together to contain Hamas. As their interests align against Iran and the Shia's, things will change in the Middle East in ways we probably won't recognize or like much:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/08/16/the-agony-of-obamas-middle-east-policy/

The Agony of Obama’s Middle East Policy

As Nouri al-Maliki agreed to step aside earlier this week, and even though the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of confidence (“muted enthusiasm”) in his replacement, President Obama’s reluctant re-engagement with Iraq continued. It has been agonizingly painful for the man who made opposition to the war in Iraq the cornerstone of his national political appeal and who trumpeted his withdrawal from Iraq as a mission accomplished to recommit U.S. forces to the country, but President Obama has had little choice.

With Maliki is gone, his choices get harder. The biggest problem is going to involve the fight against ISIS. So far, the administration’s strategy seems to have three main components: bomb ISIS when it goes on the offensive beyond its current holdings, arm the Kurds, and use the carrot of more aid to persuade the Baghdad government to do a somewhat less awful job of running the country—less discrimination against Sunnis, less politicization of the army.

The trouble is that all these strategies so far are half hearted—and hedged about with the typical hesitations, restrictions and cautionary measures that are the hallmark of this president’s foreign policy style. Bomb ISIS—but not too much. Help the Kurds—a little. Those policies are more likely to produce a stalemate than anything else, and at this point, a stalemate is a huge ISIS win. Every day ISIS controls huge chunks of territory is another day that hundreds and thousands of radicalized militants will see the ‘caliph’ as their leader. It is another day of collecting taxes, training fighters, teaching bearers of Western passports to carry the fight back into their home countries and otherwise building the legend of ISIS. It is also another day in which ISIS can go on slaughtering moderate Sunni opponents in Syria.

The core problem with President Obama’s strategy isn’t, in this case, the ‘split the difference’ approach that undermined his administration’s effectiveness in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It’s about substance. The only way to beat ISIS and bring about some kind of stability in the Middle East is to reach out to conservative Sunni forces who favor stability. In Iraq, this would be the tribal leaders and military figures responsible for the Anbar Awakening. In Syria and Lebanon it is a combination of the remnants of the sane wing of the Syrian opposition with the forces who support people like Hariri in Lebanon. Ultimately, it is about working with Saudi Arabia and the UAE to stabilize the Sunni world.

This is probably the safest and the most practical course for American policy, but it’s likely that a solid U.S. commitment to this strategy would alienate Iran. The Obama administration up until now has consistently put the goal of reaching an accommodation with Iran ahead of its relationship with traditional allies in the region. This hasn’t produced a nuclear deal, much less a workable grand geopolitical bargain, but it has allowed negotiations to go forward—albeit at great cost to American influence in the rest of the Middle East.

Now, however, this always difficult balancing act is getting more expensive. Without the serious support of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, ISIS cannot be crushed. But the Sunnis are feeling betrayed at the moment—by the Obama Administration’s record of hot words and cold deeds in Syria, and by its abandonment of the Iraqi Sunnis as part of the cut and run strategy in Obama’s first term.

History has handed President Obama one great opportunity after another, but he keeps throwing them away. Had he worked harder with Iraqi Sunnis early in his administration, his predecessor could have had the blame for the war while President Obama could have reaped the rewards of a stabilizing Iraq. Had he moved hard against Assad early on, Iran would have been under tremendous pressure to reach a compromise with the US—or watch its entire regional position collapse. Even in the last two months, the willingness of the Saudis and Egyptians to work with Israel offered an unprecedented opportunity for a different and much more productive approach to the peace process and to Israel’s relations with the Arab world.

It’s not clear how many more opportunities President Obama will have.

 

[CougarKing]

Seems these air strikes are not merely just "pinpricks" as mentioned earlier in this thread...

Defense News

US, UK Leadership Warn Iraq Mission Won't be Quick; US Escalates Air Offensive
Aug. 18, 2014 - 02:32PM  |  By PAUL McLEARY

(...SNIPPED)

But just 10 days later the White House sent a very different letter to Capitol Hill, in which it informed congressional leadership that the president had ordered the US military to “conduct targeted airstrikes to support operations by Iraqi forces to recapture the Mosul Dam,” which had fallen to the Islamist group about two weeks ago.

From Aug. 8 to 17, 35 of the 68 airstrikes conducted in Iraq were launched “in support of Iraqi forces near the Mosul Dam,” the US Central Command said in an Aug. 18 statement, with most of those coming in the past three days.

The 38 airstrikes over the past three days, including the 35 near Mosul in the fierce fight over the dam, were buttressed early Monday morning by Twitter posts from journalists in the area who reported jets circling overhead during continued fighting between Iraq and Kurdish forces and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

(...SNIPPED)

 

[CougarKing]

ISIL/ISIS demonstrates their barbarism again:

Military.com

ISIL Beheads US Journalist over Iraq Airstrikes

Aug 19, 2014 | by Brendan McGarry
Video surfaced late Tuesday that purportedly shows Islamic militants beheading an American journalist in response to U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq.

James Foley, who once worked for the Defense Department's Stars and Stripes newspaper, among other outlets, was killed by militants affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the al-Qaida inspired Islamic group that controls portions of Iraq and Syria, according to video posted on social-media websites.
The news was later reported by other news and intelligence organizations.

(...EDITED)

 

[OldSolduer]

Ah yes - Vlad and his allies the Poles....

We need to ressurrect old Vlad......and let him loose on the barbarians...... >

 

[CougarKing]

After James Foley was beheaded, it seems another western journalist is in ISIS hands... 

Reuters

Islamic State says beheads U.S. journalist, holds another

By Alexander Dziadosz and Oliver Holmes

BAGHDAD/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Islamic State insurgents released a video on Tuesday purportedly showing the beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley, who had gone missing in Syria nearly two years ago, and images of another U.S. journalist whose life they said depended on U.S. action in Iraq.
The video, titled "A Message To America," was posted on social media websites. It was not immediately possible to verify its authenticity.

(...EDITED)


At the end of the video, words on the side of the screen say "Steven Joel Sotloff" as another prisoner in an orange jumpsuit is shown on screen.
"The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision," the masked man says.

(...EDITED)

 

[Infantryman2b]

Things like this make me sick. Even more so that the killer spoke with a British accent. The fact that they have more people probably means were going to hear of a few more of these. RIP Foley, you didn't deserve that kind of death.

 

[jollyjacktar]

The British estimate that they believe there are at least 500 British nationals amongst the terrorists.  I hope they won't be so bloody stupid to let them back into the country down the road.

 

[CougarKing]

The campaign against ISIS continues:

Military.com

Iraqi Military Clashes With Militants in Tikrit

BAGHDAD — Skirmishes broke out Tuesday between Iraqi security forces and militants on the outskirts of Tikrit, a local official and a resident said, a day after the Iraqi and Kurdish troops backed by U.S. airstrikes dislodged Islamic militants from a strategic dam in the country's north.
The United Nations refugee agency, meanwhile, said it is launching one of its largest aid pushes aimed at helping close to a half million people who have been forced to flee their homes by the violence in Iraq.
The clashes in Tikrit, some 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad, began on the militant-held city's southwestern outskirts when a military convoy was travelling along the main highway that links Baghdad with the northern provinces, they said. The Iraqi military shelled militant positions inside and outside the city.

(...SNIPPED)

Military.com

More US Airstrikes Against ISIL at Mosul Dam

Aug 20, 2014 | by Richard Sisk

U.S. warplanes continued airstrikes against Islamic militants around the Mosul dam following the recapture of the key facility by Kurdish and Iraqi forces, U.S. Central Command said Tuesday.

One airstrike destroyed a checkpoint used by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, CentCom said. A second airstrike against an unspecified target was unsuccessful, CentCom officials said in a statement.

The additional airstrikes were in support of Kurdish and Iraqi forces that were expanding their control of the area following the recapture of the dam on Monday, the Pentagon said.

(...EDITED)

 

[CougarKing]

More boots on the ground? Plus it's been revealed that the US military actually attempted a rescue of the 2 journalists held hostage by ISIS in Syria:

Defense News

US Weighs Sending Up To 300 Troops To Iraq for Security
Aug. 20, 2014 - 08:17PM  |  By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

WASHINGTON — The United States is weighing sending up to 300 troops to Iraq to reinforce security at American diplomatic installations, a senior US official said Wednesday.

“We are considering sending fewer than 300,” the official said, saying it was in response to a State Department request for additional security personnel.

The request comes amid an intensifying US air campaign against Islamist militants in Iraq and follows the murder by Islamic State militants of US journalist James Foley.

IS has threatened to kill a second hostage US journalist, Steven Sotloff, unless US President Barack Obama changes course.

(...EDITED)

Defense News

US Attempted Rescue of American Hostages in Syria
Aug. 20, 2014 - 08:16PM  |  By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

WASHINGTON — US personnel recently tried to rescue American hostages held in Syria by the so-called Islamic State (IS) but failed, the Pentagon and White House said Wednesday, a day after the militants released a video of a US reporter being beheaded.

“The United States attempted a rescue operation recently to free a number of American hostages held in Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (IS),” Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said in a statement.

“This operation involved air and ground components and was focused on a particular captor network within ISIL (IS).

“Unfortunately, the mission was not successful because the hostages were not present at the targeted location.”

(...EDITED)

 

[CougarKing]

Not a good idea allying with a group normally classified as terrorists, IMHO.

:facepalm:

From Reuters via Yahoo Finance

'Terrorists' help U.S. in battle against Islamic State in Iraq

By Isabel Coles
MAKHMUR Iraq (Reuters) - Washington has acquired an unlikely ally in its battle against Islamic State militants in Iraq - a group of fighters it formally classifies as terrorists.

The outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), condemned for its three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state, says it played a decisive role in blunting the militants' sweep through Iraq, which triggered U.S. air strikes to halt their advance.
"This war will continue until we finish off the Islamic State," said Rojhat, a PKK fighter speaking from a hospital bed in Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in Iraq.

The involvement of the PKK has consequences not only for rival Kurdish factions who failed to stop the Islamic State's advance, but also for Turkey and the international community, which is being lobbied by the PKK to drop the terrorist tag.

(...EDITED)

 

[Transporter]

Not a good idea allying with a group normally classified as terrorists, IMHO.

:facepalm:

From Reuters via Yahoo Finance

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.