Category Archives: Defense Department

Spies: Obama’s brass pressured us to downplay ISIS threat

The Daily Beast reports: Senior military and intelligence officials have inappropriately pressured U.S. terrorism analysts to alter their assessments about the strength of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, three sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. Analysts have been pushed to portray the group as weaker than the analysts believe it actually is, according to these sources, and to paint an overly rosy picture about how well the U.S.-led effort to defeat the group is going.

Reports that have been deemed too pessimistic about the efficacy of the American-led campaign, or that have questioned whether a U.S.-trained Iraqi military can ultimately defeat ISIS, have been sent back down through the chain of command or haven’t been shared with senior policymakers, several analysts alleged.

In other instances, authors of such reports said they understood that their conclusions should fall within a certain spectrum. As a result, they self-censored their own views, they said, because they felt pressure to not reach conclusions far outside what those above them apparently believed.

“The phrase I use is the politicization of the intelligence community,” retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast when describing what he sees as a concerted push in government over the past several months to find information that tells a preferred story about efforts to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups, including al Qaeda. “That’s here. And it’s dangerous,” Flynn said. [Continue reading…]

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Second commander of Syrian rebels assassinated in two weeks

McClatchy reports: A key commander of the U.S.-supported Syrian rebel forces was assassinated in a car bomb attack in southern Turkey Wednesday, a sign that the war raging next door is spilling across the border again.

The target of the attack was Col. Jemil Radoon, a defected Syrian Army officer who lives in the ancient city of Antakya. Turkish officials said he had just turned on the ignition of his black Hyundai hatchback when a bomb exploded. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Turkish government officials blamed the Assad regime in Syria and said it was part of a campaign to assassinate rebel officers. Other defected officers are also targeted, a security official said, citing field intelligence. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military officials suspected of covering up the lack of progress in the war against ISIS

The New York Times reports: The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating allegations that military officials have skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress, according to several officials familiar with the inquiry.

The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said.

Fuller details of the claims were not available, including when the assessments were said to have been altered and who at Central Command, or Centcom, the analyst said was responsible. The officials, speaking only on the condition of anonymity about classified matters, said that the recently opened investigation focused on whether military officials had changed the conclusions of draft intelligence assessments during a review process and then passed them on. [Continue reading…]

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Only three of 116 Guantánamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces

The Guardian reports: Only three of the 116 men still detained at Guantánamo Bay were apprehended by US forces, a Guardian review of military documents has uncovered.

The foundations of the guilt of the remaining 113, whom US politicians often refer to as the “worst of the worst” terrorists, involves a degree of faith in the Pakistani and Afghan spies, warlords and security services who initially captured 98 of the remaining Guantánamo population.

According to an analysis of long-neglected US military capture information, 68 of the residual Guantánamo detainees were captured by Pakistani security forces or apparent informants. Another 30 were sent to the notorious wartime facility by forces from Afghanistan – mostly warlords and affiliates of early US efforts to topple the Taliban after 9/11. [Continue reading…]

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U.S., Turkey aim to create buffer zone on Syrian border. Nobody knows how

The Washington Post reports: Mohamed Jlelati is not sure whether a de facto “safe zone” along the Turkey-Syria border will include his home town. But he is preparing for it anyway.

Jlelati is a member of the Syrian opposition’s local government in Aleppo, about 40 miles from the Turkish border. And he has plans for his city.

“If people have water and electricity, they will feel stable,” he said, sketching out Aleppo’s water and power grids on a piece of paper. “Then you can provide food. And then start cleaning up the rubble.”

U.S. and Turkish officials last month announced a landmark deal to fight the Islamic State, the militant group that has seized large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.

The agreement allows the United States to launch aircraft from inside Turkey for swifter strikes against militants. It also envisions an area along the border that is free of extremists and protected by U.S. air power. Turkey hopes the zone will be a haven for the millions of Syrians who have fled across the border into its territory.

But while news of the deal has spurred hope among Syrians, neither the United States nor Turkey has offered details on how such a zone would be established and enforced. In the past two weeks, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, have launched attacks in the area where the United States and Turkey hope to establish the zone. Analysts say that any plans for a buffer zone will fail unless there is a will to organize, administer and police the region.

“I don’t think we will see anything approaching what even resembles a safe zone” in Syria, said Yezid Sayigh, a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

“If you’re going to have significant numbers of people sheltering in the zone, you’ll need various things — like electricity, fuel, water tanks, piping, clinics,” Sayigh said. But instead of planning for large humanitarian or reconstruction operations, Turkey and the United States are “mostly trying to do PR” for an unworkable plan, he said. [Continue reading…]

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William Astore: Time to hold military boots to the fire

On July 24th, highlighting the first Turkish air strikes against the Islamic State and news of an agreement to let the U.S. Air Force use two Turkish air bases against that movement, the New York Times reported that unnamed “American officials welcomed the [Turkish] decision… calling it a ‘game changer.’” And they weren’t wrong. Almost immediately, the game changed. Turkish President Recep Erdogan promptly sent planes hurtling off not against Islamic State militants but the PKK, that country’s Kurdish rebels with whom his government had previously had a tenuous ceasefire. In the process, he created a whole new set of problems for Washington, including making life more difficult for Kurdish rebel troops in Syria connected to the PKK that the Obama administration was backing in the fight against the Islamic State. Erdogan’s acts also ensured that chaos and conflict would spread to new areas of the Middle East. So game-changer indeed!

The question is: Why does Washington do it time after time? Why has just about every militarized move made in the region been quite so hapless and clueless since the initial invasion of Iraq? If such actions didn’t involve lives (and deaths) and one of the grimmer Islamic extremist movements on the planet, much of this would qualify as theater of the absurd or a comedy of errors. Take the so-called New Syrian Forces. That’s the moniker the Obama administration gave the thousands of “moderate” Syrian fighters it wanted to train and equip to take on the Islamic State (but not the Assad regime) at a cost of $500 million. In other words, Washington was determined to have its own fighting force of non-extreme Syrians with their distinctly Syrian boots on the ground in that chaotic war zone, even if they were American-supplied. What could possibly go wrong? 

So the vetting and training commenced. Many months later, in the fashion of an elephant delivering a mouse, having thoroughly investigated thousands of applicants for their moderateness, the Pentagon finally produced “Division 30,” a fully vetted, fully trained first unit of, depending on what account you read, 54 or possibly 60 Syrian fighters. The cost of those few men has been estimated, per fighter, in the millions of dollars (and another 100 are now in the process of being trained). The U.S. military then deposited that tiny unit in Syria where its two leaders were promptly kidnapped by the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, which then attacked the group killing at least one of its members, capturing others, wounding a number, and sending the rest into flight. (Some of them, it seems, have never shown up again.) And here’s the truly bizarre part: according to the New York Times, that attack by an al-Qaeda-linked group the U.S. has denounced and bombed in the past took American officials — who seem to have expected the Front to embrace its force — “by surprise and amounted to a significant intelligence failure.” The real question, of course, is why anyone in the Pentagon or elsewhere in official Washington should have expected any other response from a hostile force which had already taken on CIA-trained Syrians.

The U.S. remains the greatest military power on the planet, but what does that even mean, given the last nearly 14 years of woeful performance, mishaps, defeats, disappointments, and endless war? Honestly, does the U.S. high command really have a thing to teach the rest of us, based on this sorry record? It’s a question raised by TomDispatch regular and former Air Force Academy instructor William Astore. He considers just what America’s future commanders are being taught in the country’s three elite military academies and wonders what a crew that has taken no responsibility for years of disaster in conflict after conflict has to offer anyone and why they are generally held in such high regard in this country. Tom Engelhardt

Seventy years of military mediocrity
The shared failings of America’s military academies and senior officers
By William J. Astore

Thomas Jefferson Hall, West Point’s library and learning center, prominently features two quotations for cadets to mull over. In the first, Jefferson writes George Washington in 1788: “The power of making war often prevents it, and in our case would give efficacy to our desire of peace.” In the second, Jefferson writes Thomas Leiper in 1815: “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”

Two centuries ago, Jefferson’s points were plain and clear, and they remain so today: while this country desired peace, it had to be prepared to wage war; and yet the more it avoided resorting to raw military power, the more it would prosper.

Have America’s military officers and politicians learned these lessons? Obviously not. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. unquestionably ranks number one on this planet in its preparations for waging war — we got that message loud and clear — but we’re also number one in using that power aggressively around the globe, weakening our nation in the process, just as Jefferson warned.

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The Pentagon ignores Obama’s order to release Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

Clive Stafford Smith writes: Recent history demonstrates that if President Barack Obama, arguably the most powerful person on planet Earth, wants to prioritize almost anything – from pardoning 46 convicted drug felons to bombing a foreign country without the consent of Congress – little can stand in his way. Why, then, is Shaker Aamer not home in London with his wife and four children?

Aamer is the last British resident to be detained without trial in Guantánamo Bay and he has never been charged with a single offense. In 2007, he was cleared for release by the Bush Administration; in 2009, six US intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that Shaker should be released. In January 2015, British Prime Minster David Cameron personally raised Shaker’s plight with President Obama, who promised that he would “prioritize” the case.

On Thursday, we came a little closer to understanding the reason that Aamer’s youngest child, Faris – who was born on Valentine’s Day 2002, the day that Aamer was rendered to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay – has never even met his father. The Guardian revealed that “the Pentagon [is] blocking Guantánamo deals to return Shaker Aamer and other cleared detainees.” President Obama, it seems, has personally ordered Aamer’s release, and his subordinates have ignored and thwarted his order. [Continue reading…]

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War in space may be closer than ever

Scientific American reports: The world’s most worrisome military flashpoint is arguably not in the Strait of Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Iran, Israel, Kashmir or Ukraine. In fact, it cannot be located on any map of Earth, even though it is very easy to find. To see it, just look up into a clear sky, to the no-man’s-land of Earth orbit, where a conflict is unfolding that is an arms race in all but name.

The emptiness of outer space might be the last place you’d expect militaries to vie over contested territory, except that outer space isn’t so empty anymore. About 1,300 active satellites wreathe the globe in a crowded nest of orbits, providing worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting and planetary surveillance. For militaries that rely on some of those satellites for modern warfare, space has become the ultimate high ground, with the U.S. as the undisputed king of the hill. Now, as China and Russia aggressively seek to challenge U.S. superiority in space with ambitious military space programs of their own, the power struggle risks sparking a conflict that could cripple the entire planet’s space-based infrastructure. And though it might begin in space, such a conflict could easily ignite full-blown war on Earth.

The long-simmering tensions are now approaching a boiling point due to several events, including recent and ongoing tests of possible anti-satellite weapons by China and Russia, as well as last month’s failure of tension-easing talks at the United Nations. [Continue reading…]

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Chelsea Manning ‘could face indefinite solitary confinement’

BBC News reports: US Army whistleblower Pte Chelsea Manning may face solitary confinement for allegedly violating prison rules by having a copy of Vanity Fair and expired toothpaste, her lawyers say.

The transgender soldier is due to face a closed hearing on Tuesday to determine her fate, they add.

The military has not yet commented.

The soldier, formerly known as Bradley Manning, was convicted in 2013 for leaking thousands of secret US files to the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

She is currently serving a 35-year jail sentence at a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Manning’s lawyers revealed the possible disciplinary action on Wednesday.

“Frankly it looks to me like harassment,” one of her lawyers, Nancy Hollander, told the Associated Press news agency.

She said the ex-intelligence analyst has been accused of possession of prohibited property while in military prison, including books and magazines.

A Vanity Fair issue with transgender Caitlyn Jenner (formerly known as Bruce) on the cover and Malala Yousafzai’s memoir were among the items allegedly discovered in her prison cell.

Misuse of medicine – namely an expired tube of toothpaste, sweeping food onto the floor and disrespect – were some of the other charges cited. [Continue reading…]

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The Pentagon’s dangerous views on the wartime press

In an editorial, the New York Times says: The Defense Department earlier this summer released a comprehensive manual outlining its interpretation of the law of war. The 1,176-page document, the first of its kind, includes guidelines on the treatment of journalists covering armed conflicts that would make their work more dangerous, cumbersome and subject to censorship. Those should be repealed immediately.

Journalists, the manual says, are generally regarded as civilians, but may in some instances be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” a legal term that applies to fighters that are afforded fewer protections than the declared combatants in a war. In some instances, the document says, “the relaying of information (such as providing information of immediate use in combat operations) could constitute taking a direct part in hostilities.”

The manual warns that “Reporting on military operations can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying,” so it calls on journalists to “act openly and with the permission of relevant authorities.” It says that governments “may need to censor journalists’ work or take other security measures so that journalists do not reveal sensitive information to the enemy.”

Allowing this document to stand as guidance for commanders, government lawyers and officials of other nations would do severe damage to press freedoms. Authoritarian leaders around the world could point to it to show that their despotic treatment of journalists — including Americans — is broadly in line with the standards set by the United States government.

One senior Pentagon official, who was asked to explain when a journalist might be deemed an “unprivileged belligerent,” pointed to the assassination of the Afghan military commander Ahmad Shah Massoud in September 2001. That example is preposterous because Mr. Massoud was killed by assassins who posed as television journalists and hid explosives in a camera. They were not, in fact, journalists.

The manual’s argument that some reporting activities could be construed as taking part in hostilities is ludicrous. That vaguely-worded standard could be abused by military officers to censor or even target journalists. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. shelves its $500M Syrian rebel army — sees Syrian Kurds as a more reliable fighting partner

The Daily Beast reports: The Obama administration is still publicly counting on a $500 million rebel army to beat ISIS in Syria. But privately, the Pentagon brass long ago moved past its own proxy force, The Daily Beast has learned. They’ve found another group to fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State instead.

In recent weeks, the handful of fighters in the administration-backed rebel army — the so-called “New Syrian Force” — have been killed, kidnapped, or fallen off the proverbial radar. But the Pentagon maintained a brave face, even after these 54 fighters (out of what was supposed to be a total of 15,000) were decimated by Islamist attacks. “We continue to see volunteers want to be a part of this program,” Air Force Colonel Pat Ryder, a Defense Department spokesman, told reporters Friday.

It’s a public stance that has left many in the administration and in the defense establishment scratching their heads.

“I don’t understand why we are still training, other than to inoculate criticism. … [The administration] cannot admit it is a complete disaster,” said one senior defense adviser familiar with the U.S. approach. Even after the U.S.-trained fighters vanished, “there was no receptivity to new ideas.”

But what Ryder didn’t say is that, in the eyes of the administration, a better force had emerged — already trained, competent, organized — that posed little risk of abandoning the fight or worse yet, switching sides. They are the Syrian Kurdish militia — the Popular Protection Units or YPG, by their Kurdish initials. And they have successfully wrestled Syrian territory out of ISIS’s hands.

“We knew it would be a challenge but we didn’t expect them to confront the fight they did,” said a second senior defense official, referring to the New Syrian Force. On the other hand, “the YPG is the most effective fighting force in Syria.”

According to one group, the YPG has so far reclaimed at least 11 villages from ISIS, including in the Syrian city of Kobani, one of the biggest victories in the year-long campaign. And in June, the YPG regained control of the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad, cutting off a key ISIS conduit to weapons and supplies. Like the New Syrian Force, the YPG can call in coalition airstrikes as needed.

Along with hoping nascent Arab fighters can take on ISIS, the U.S. is now keen to work alongside as many as 50,000 proven Kurdish fighters. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey is waging a two-front war. Some worry it’s only making things worse

The New York Times reports: The Turkish deal with the United States sets up an “ISIS-free” bombardment zone along a 60-mile strip of the border region [of Syria] that features another exclusion: At Turkey’s request, it is also explicitly a zone free of the Kurdish militia, even though the Kurds had begun advancing toward the area to start battling the Islamic State there.

Despite cooperating with American forces for months, the Syrian Kurds are now starting to worry that their success might not outweigh Turkey’s importance to the United States.

“There is only one group that has consistently and effectively battled ISIS in Syria, and that is the Y.P.G.,” said Redur Khalil, a spokesman for the militia who says it has grown to include 35,000 soldiers, about 11 years after its start as a self-defense force in a single town. “Opening another front in the region — as Turkey has by attacking the P.K.K. — will make the forces fighting ISIS weaker,” Mr. Khalil said. “Which in turn makes ISIS stronger.”

Cale Salih, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of numerous articles on Kurdish affairs, summed up the unease over the deal with Turkey this way: “If it comes at the price of the relationship with one of the few effective partners on the ground in Syria, it doesn’t seem to make sense.” [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Turkey’s decision to move against the Kurds is likely to do more to destabilize the region, some analysts say.

The police dragnet has fostered resentment against authorities in places such as Suruc, where Kurdish families have relatives living on both sides of the border. The United States has looked the other way as Turkey has hit the PKK in Iraq. The U.S. silence on the Turkish operations may hurt its burgeoning alliance with the YPG, whose fighters have proved to be the most effective ground force battling the Islamic State.

“It’s not smart for Turkey to do this,” Aaron Stein, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, said of Turkey’s twin military campaigns.

“Opening a two-front air war against insurgents you can’t defeat by air power alone is not smart strategically,” he said. Indeed, the U.S. military says it has launched more than 5,600 strikes on the Islamic State since last August, but the raids have not dislodged the group from its major strongholds. [Continue reading…]

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The Pentagon is keeping half of Gitmo locked up — against the White House’s wishes

The Daily Beast reports: The White House wants to quickly cut the number of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. One man is standing in the way: President Obama’s Defense Secretary, Ash Carter.

Carter and the White House are increasingly at odds about how to whittle down the number of detainees held in Guantánamo Bay, hampering the administration’s push to close the detention center by the end of its term.

The White House believes that Carter is unwilling to be accountable for the transfer of Guantánamo detainees and their conduct post-release, even to the point of defying the president’s policy on the detention facility, a White House source told The Daily Beast. [Continue reading…]

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Expanding U.S. role in Iraq strains awkward alliance with Iran

The Washington Post reports: The expanding U.S. military campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq relies in part on an uneasy, arms-length partnership with Shiite militias backed by Iran — organizations that were once relentlessly effective killers of U.S. troops.

Now, as the campaign enters its second year, there are signs that this awkward alliance may be fraying: militia threats of renewed attacks on U.S. personnel, a greater U.S. effort to bolster Sunni forces that are traditional adversaries of Iran and accusations that the U.S. air campaign has at times targeted Shiite forces.

The shared desire to defeat the Islamic State appears to be enough so far to keep the militias and the Americans working in common cause. But officials and experts said both sides know that their broader regional objectives are in conflict. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-backed Syrian rebels refuse to fight ​Nusra Front after kidnappings

The Guardian reports: A group of Syrian rebels that includes fighters trained by the United States have declared their refusal to fight al-Qaida’s affiliate in the country, the Nusra Front, following a series of kidnappings by the militant group.

A source in Division 30, which has endured a campaign of kidnappings by the Nusra Front, said they also oppose the American airstrikes carried out in the last few days against the al-Qaida-linked fighters.

The statements complicate the American strategy in Syria, which has suffered a string of setbacks and delays, deploying just over 50 fighters dedicated to fighting the terror group Islamic State in the year since its programme to train and equip rebels began. [Continue reading…]

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In further blow to training program, U.S.-backed rebels abducted in Syria

The Washington Post reports: The debut of a new U.S.-trained force in Syria suffered another setback on Tuesday when five American-backed rebels were apparently abducted by al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the latest of several attacks on that group in the past week.

A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss events in Syria, said it appeared that five Syrian fighters allied with the United States had been taken prisoner in the past few days by another armed group, probably Jabhat al-Nusra. Military officials said the Syrians appeared to have been abducted after they set out from their compound near the Syrian town of Azaz.

But with no U.S. troops on the ground to track the situation more closely, the official cautioned that the details of what took place remained murky. “It is a dynamic situation on the ground there,” he said.

News of the abduction comes several days after the leader of Division 30, the Syrian opposition unit from which the United States has pulled cadets for its new training program, and other members of his unit were captured by the Islamist group. At the time, U.S. officials stressed that none of those abducted had gone through recent training in Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Syria Qaeda captures five more U.S.-trained rebels: Monitor

AFP reports: Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate captured at least five more US-trained rebel fighters in overnight raids on a village in northwestern Syria, a monitoring group said on August 4.

“Between Monday and Tuesday, Al-Nusra Front seized at least five rebels from Division 30 in the village of Qah, near the Turkish border,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The jihadists already captured at least eight rebels from the same US-backed unit last week, the Observatory reported. [Continue reading…]

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Feared Shiite militias battle ISIS in Iraq

Der Spiegel reports: A man lifts his camera and stretches. For a moment he is no longer protected by the wall — but it’s one moment too long. A bullet strikes him in the side and passes through his chest. Hussein Fadhil Hassan, 22, the cameraman for the Shiite militia League of the Righteous, is killed immediately, hit by a sniper with the Islamic State (IS), somewhere in the ruins on the southern edge of the city of Baiji in Iraq. The bullet is fired from a distance of more than 100 meters (330 feet).

At the same time his commander, Rasan, is getting ready to head for the front line in this offensive against IS, which the Shiite militia has been fighting here for the last day and a half. Rasan is wearing a blood-spattered T-shirt and has a bandage over his ear, after being grazed by shrapnel a short time earlier. When the commander and his men leave their command post in an abandoned house, they don’t know that their cameraman, who was with the unit for three years, has just been killed — and that he will not be the unit’s only casualty on this day.
There is a huge, detailed map of the city of Baiji lying in the command post. Colored crosses mark the positions of IS and the League of the Righteous, or Asaib Ahl al-Haq in Arabic. Their fighters have advanced a few blocks from the south since the previous day, along a two-kilometer line. The Hezbollah Brigades aligned with them — not to be confused with Hezbollah in Lebanon — have advanced from the north. Iraqi Army units are not involved in the fighting.

Ever since the army was repeatedly overrun by the jihadists in their lightning advances early last year, this war has been waged primarily by the Shiite militias, which were for the most part established after the US invasion in 2003 and are primarily funded by Iran. So it is unclear who is in command of this war. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who is pushing for American air support, which the militias oppose, because they fought against US troops for years and view them as their enemy? Or Hadi al-Ameri, the Iraqi commander, appointed by no one, of the umbrella organization of about 40 militia groups? Or Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who is bringing arms and military assistance into the country and poses for photographers on Iraq’s battlefields like a victorious military leader? [Continue reading…]

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