Category Archives: Iraq

U.S. and allies conduct 24 air strikes against ISIS targets in Iraq

Reuters reports: The US and its allies conducted 24 air strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq on Thursday, the US military said on Friday.

It said in a statement the strikes targeted Isis positions in seven areas. Four strikes near the city of Ramadi, the centre of which fell to Iraqi forces this week, hit a large tactical unit and destroyed a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device facility, five militant fighting positions and two heavy machine guns.

Near Tal Afar, 11 strikes destroyed nine bunkers, five culverts and four bridges used by the militants. Near Mosul, three strikes struck a tactical unit and destroyed two heavy machine guns, six fighting positions, a weapons cache and a trench.

In Ramadi, terrified families waved white flags as they emerged from homes reduced to rubble. Government troops were still battling Isis fighters holed up on Friday, five days after the army recaptured the city centre. [Continue reading…]

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Months of fighting leaves 80% of Ramadi in ruins

Al Jazeera reports: Months of fighting and the recent pitched battle to take Iraq’s Ramadi from ISIL have levelled most of the key city as officials warned it was too soon for civilians to return after it was recaptured.

Local official Eid Amash said 80 percent of Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, has been destroyed in the battles between Iraq’s army – backed by US air strikes – and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group.

Amash, spokesman of Anbar’s provincial council, told Kurdish media network Rudaw that some districts of Ramadi were yet to be cleared of ISIL fighters. [Continue reading…]

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Middle East still rocking from First World War pacts made 100 years ago

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Ian Black writes: In an idle moment between cocktail parties in the Arab capital where they served, a British and French diplomat were chatting recently about their respective countries’ legacies in the Middle East: why not commemorate them with a new rock band? And they could call it Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration.

It was just a joke. These first world war agreements cooked up in London and Paris in the dying days of the Ottoman empire paved the way for new Arab nation states, the creation of Israel and the continuing plight of the Palestinians. And if their memory has faded in the west as their centenaries approach, they are still widely blamed for the problems of the region at an unusually violent and troubled time.

“This is history that the Arab peoples will never forget because they see it as directly relevant to problems they face today,” argues Oxford University’s Eugene Rogan, author of several influential works on modern Middle Eastern history.

In 2014, when Islamic State fighters broke through the desert border between Iraq and Syria – flying black flags on their captured US-made Humvees – and announced the creation of a transnational caliphate, they triumphantly pronounced the death of Sykes-Picot. That gave a half-forgotten and much-misrepresented colonial-era deal a starring role in their propaganda war – and a new lease of life on Twitter. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS leaders fall, ISIS remains

Kyle Orton writes: Last night, Steve Warren, the American colonel who is the spokesman for the international campaign against the Islamic State (IS), the U.S.-led Operation INHERENT RESOLVE, announced that between December 7 and December 27, ten IS “leaders” had been killed. Col. Warren adumbrated the positions of the IS leaders, allowing the conclusion that five had been part of IS’s external operations wing, which conducts international terrorism, and five were part of IS’s internal operations, i.e. part of the military operations and security infrastructure that helps IS maintain and expand its statelet in Syria and Iraq. Col. Warren presented this as an important blow to IS that had assisted in the recent loss of territorial losses for IS. There is reason for scepticism on these points. [Continue reading…]

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How Iraqis learned to fear and hate Americans in Ramadi eleven years ago

The Economist reported on December 29, 2004: There is only one traffic law in Ramadi these days: when Americans approach, Iraqis scatter. Horns blaring, brakes screaming, the midday traffic skids to the side of the road as a line of Humvee jeeps ferrying American marines rolls the wrong way up the main street. Every vehicle, that is, except one beat-up old taxi. Its elderly driver, flapping his outstretched hand, seems, amazingly, to be trying to turn the convoy back. Gun turrets swivel and lock on to him, as a hefty marine sergeant leaps into the road, levels an assault rifle at his turbanned head, and screams: “Back this bitch up, motherfucker!”

The old man should have read the bilingual notices that American soldiers tack to their rear bumpers in Iraq: “Keep 50m or deadly force will be applied”. In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching within 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: “If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,” says a bullish lieutenant. “It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.”

And not all of them were in cars. Since discovering that roadside bombs, known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), can be triggered by mobile telephones, marines say they shoot at any Iraqi they see handling a phone near a bomb-blast. Bystanders to an insurgent ambush are also liable to be killed. Sometimes, the marines say they hide near the body of a dead insurgent and kill whoever comes to collect it. According to the marine lieutenant: “It gets to a point where you can’t wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody…It gets to a point where you don’t mind the bad stuff you do.”

Since September 1st, when the battalion’s 800 men were deployed to Ramadi, they have killed 400-500 people, according to one of their senior officers. A more precise estimate is impossible, because the marines rarely see their attackers. When fired upon, they retaliate by blitzing whichever buildings they think the fire is coming from: charred shells now line Ramadi’s main streets. “Sometimes it works in the insurgents’ favour,” admits Rick Sims, a chief warrant officer. “Because by the time we’ve shot up the neighbourhood, then the guys have torn up a few houses, they’re four blocks away, and we just end up pissing off the locals.” [Continue reading…]

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A century after Sykes-Picot

Eugene Rogan writes: The British wartime alliance with the sharif of Mecca would be concluded after months of increasingly anxious negotiations, with both sides driven by wartime fears. Sharif Hussein had reason to believe the Young Turks sought his overthrow. Moreover, to realize his ambitious goal of carving an independent Arab kingdom from Ottoman domains, he needed Great Power support. The British feared their recent string of defeats to the Ottomans would encourage colonial Muslims to rebel against the Entente Powers. War planners in Cairo and Whitehall hoped that an alliance with the custodian of Islam’s holiest shrines would neutralize the appeal of the Ottoman sultan-caliph’s jihad at a moment when Britain’s military credibility was at its lowest point since the start of the war.

On the eve of the Arab Revolt, the Anglo-Hashemite alliance offered far less than both sides originally believed they were securing on first entering into negotiations. The British were not the invincible power they had appeared to be in early 1915 when first setting off to conquer Constantinople. The Germans had inflicted terrible casualties on the British on the western front, and even the Ottomans had dealt them humiliating defeats. Sharif Hussein and his sons had every reason to question their choice of ally.

Yet the Hashemites were in no position to bargain. All through their correspondence with Sir Henry McMahon, the high commissioner in Egypt, Sharif Hussein and his sons had presented themselves as leaders of a pan-Arab movement. By May 1916 it was apparent that there would be no broader revolt in Syria and Iraq. The most the sharifs could do was challenge Ottoman rule in the Hijaz. Success depended on their ability to mobilize the notoriously undisciplined Bedouin to their cause.

Arguably, the alliance survived because the Hashemites and the British needed each other more in the summer of 1916 than ever. Sharif Hussein had strained relations with the Young Turks to the breaking point; he knew they would seize the first opportunity to dismiss—even murder—him and his sons. The British needed the sharif’s religious authority to undermine the Ottoman jihad, which officials in Cairo and Whitehall feared recent Turkish victories had strengthened. Whatever the results of a Hashemite-led revolt, the movement would at least weaken the Ottoman war effort and force the Turks to divert troops and resources to restore order in the Hijaz and possibly in other Arab provinces. For their own reasons, both the British and the Hashemites were in a hurry to launch the revolt. [Continue reading…]

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Terror: After Paris, Tunisia and California, can we stop it spreading?

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Jason Burke writes: On a bleak day in November, Annelise Augustyns led her two children to the playground near their home in Brussels. Just over a week before, Islamist militants had killed 130 people and injured many more in a series of attacks in Paris. The Belgian capital had been under unprecedented lockdown for three days amid fears of a new attack there. Several of the Paris attackers had been traced to the Brussels neighbourhood of Molenbeek, a few miles from Augustyns’ apartment. They included at least one man who was now on the run.

To protect the population, the Belgian government had shut schools, cancelled sporting events and deployed soldiers on the streets. If the scenes were reminiscent of earlier conflicts, the enemy now was very different: a hybrid terrorist and insurgent entity in the Middle East calling itself the Islamic State.

Augustyns, a local government administrator, glanced at the armoured vehicle posted outside the entrance of the Gare du Midi. “We are worried of course,” she told me. “But what to do? We have to get on with our lives.”

Her words summed up the feelings of many across Europe that week, and indeed across much of the world last year. If 2014 was a year that set a grisly new record in the number of casualties inflicted by terrorist attacks – 33,000 people were killed, almost double the year before – then 2015 appears to have been worse. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS leader challenges U.S. and allies in appeal to followers

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The Wall Street Journal reports: The leader of Islamic State challenged the U.S. and its European and Arab allies to confront his extremist group on the ground in Iraq and Syria, while telling his followers to persevere despite major recent battlefields setbacks, according to a purported audio message released on Saturday.

“Here are the Christian Crusaders and the nations of disbelief and their group with them, and behind them the Jews. They do not dare to come here on the ground to fight a small group of mujahedeen,” said Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the audio message, transcribed and translated by the U.S.-based monitoring agency Site Intelligence Group.

“They do not dare to come, because their hearts are full of fear from the mujahedeen,” he added in what is believed to be his first message since May.

In the audio message, Mr. Baghdadi consoled his followers for what he described as recent hardships and tragedies but promised them they would come out stronger and victorious if they persevered. He reminded them of the early trials of the group when it was formed in 2006 as an offshoot of al Qaeda, known as Islamic State of Iraq, only to be weakened by the U.S. and its local Iraqi allies. The group then made a major comeback starting in 2013 when it split from al Qaeda and captured large swaths of Iraq and Syria the following year.

“So the hardship must become more and the tragedies greater so that hypocrisy escapes and belief becomes stronger, and so that victory is laid down,” he said.

“So be steadfast O mujahedeen. In front of you are one of the two good things: either victory or martyrdom,” he added.

Mr. Baghdadi said the fact that major world powers have decided to destroy the group was proof Islamic State was on the righteous path. He accused the West and its allies of waging war against Islam by targeting his group and chastised Muslims everywhere for not realizing this and rising up to defend their faith.

“We are putting you all on alert everywhere and specifically the sons of the Land of the Two Holy Mosques,” he said, referring to Saudi Arabia. “Mobilize, whether you are light or heavy, old and young.”

He rebuked Saudi Arabia’s ruling family for announcing a coalition to fight Islamic State instead of defending Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS puts up heavy fight to slow Iraqi troop advance on Ramadi

The Associated Press reports: Islamic State fighters are putting up a tough fight in the militant-held city of Ramadi, slowing down the advance of Iraqi forces, a senior Iraqi commander said Sunday.

Iraq launched the long-awaited operation to retake the Anbar provincial capital, which was captured by IS militants in May, but after an initial push across the Euphrates River, their progress stalled.

Gen. Ismail al-Mahlawi, head of the Anbar military operations, told The Associated Press that the advance was hampered by suicide bombers, snipers and booby traps. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi forces to retake Mosul from ISIS after Ramadi secured, says PM

Reuters reports: Iraq’s armed forces will move to retake the major northern city of Mosul from Islamic State once they capture the western city of Ramadi, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Friday.

Capturing Mosul would deprive the militant group of its biggest population center in both Iraq and Syria, effectively abolishing the state structure of IS in Iraq, depriving it of a major source of funding and dealing a blow to its influence.

The capture of Ramadi would give the army a major psychological boost in its move toward Mosul. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS and the war in Iraq

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Those who brand others as heretics are not generally amenable to the proposition that the heretic deserves a fair hearing. Which is to say: the very idea of a heresy is that it represents a form of belief that must be dealt with by suppression rather than analysis.

Kyle Orton, a young Middle East analyst from England, has just been granted the opportunity to propagate an unthinkable heresy on the op-ed pages of the New York Times: he asserts that ISIS did not come into existence as a result of the war in Iraq but instead that its emergence can be traced to a process of Islamization in Iraq that began in the 1980s.

A kneejerk response comes from Glenn Greenwald:


As someone who so often likes to deploy a lazy guilt-by-association line of attack, Greenwald dismisses the article by branding it as having come from a neocon think tank — that being the Henry Jackson Society — along with an implicit rebuke directed at the New York Times.

Sal Rotman makes an appropriate response:


Indeed, but for Greenwald to make such a critique, he’d probably have to know much more about Iraq’s recent history than he does — so he opts for the easy route of denunciation by branding. Call someone a neocon and it goes without saying — supposedly — than anything they say can be dismissed.

The question as to whether Orton is a neocon (even if one accepts the label being applied to his employer), seems somewhat trivial — unless one is convinced that a neocon is someone whose every utterance is false. Which is to say: unless one views a neocon as a kind of heretic.

The only serious question is whether Orton’s historical analysis is sound — a judgement that many of us are not in a position to make. What many of us can do, however, is assess the coherence of the argument, its plausibility and the extent to which it rings true.

Interestingly, although Greenwald thinks Orton is exonerating the war in Iraq, he apparently missed the fact that Orton views the trend of Islamization in the 1990s as having occured while “Iraqis fell back on their faith for solace under the harsh international sanctions.”

One might argue, therefore, that ISIS was just as much a product of the 1991 Gulf War as it was the 2003 Iraq War — but not wholly a product of either.

Orton writes:

It’s true that disbanding the Iraqi Army after 2003 put professional soldiers at the service of the Sunni insurgency. It’s also true that Al Qaeda in Iraq — the small, foreign-led nucleus of what became the Islamic State — used poorly run American prisons like Camp Bucca to recruit former regime elements. But the significant fact is that those who assumed leadership roles in the Islamic State’s military council had been radicalized earlier, under Mr. Hussein’s regime.

There was never any “Baathist coup” of former regime elements inside the Islamic State, as some analysts assume, because these men had long since abandoned Baathism. They joined Al Qaeda in Iraq early after the invasion as an act of ideological conviction, and when Al Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership was nearly destroyed in 2008-10, these officers were the last men standing precisely because of their superior counterintelligence and security skills.

It was these Salafized former military intelligence officers — led by Samir al-Khlifawi, also known as Haji Bakr, who had joined the group in 2003 and rose to be the so-called caliph’s deputy, until he was killed in 2014 — who planned the Islamic State’s dramatic expansion into Syria. There, they set up a Saddam Hussein-style authoritarian regime that was the launchpad for the jihadists’ invasion of Iraq in 2014.

From a cursory look at his earlier blog posts, it appears Orton’s analysis is based in part on the research findings of Samuel Helfont, whose PhD dissertation on religion and politics in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was itself based on newly-released records from the Iraqi state and Baath Party. That sounds like a stronger foundation for a thesis than would be provided, for instance, by an individual like “curveball.” It’s certainly worth more careful consideration than for it to simply be dismissed with a tweet.

For those still concerned about which political litmus tests Orton might pass or fail, I would point out that the route he followed in order to recently get hired by the Henry Jackson Society did not seem to be distinctly ideological.

On the “about” page on his blog, Orton writes:

After a misbegotten degree in zoology (biology), I completed a social science Masters in Humanitarian Studies at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine that comprised elements of geopolitics, history, and practical skills in running a humanitarian program, the logical end-point of which would be work with a non-governmental organisation.

I have travelled quite widely, especially in Eastern Europe having been to all of the old Soviet satellite States except Romania, and in the Balkans — Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. I have also been to Turkey and Israel, took part in a voluntary course (teaching) in Kenya, and worked in Lebanon for my Masters on the healthcare system for the Syrian refugees.

Having long been interested in the Arab world, and especially in ways that it might be reformed, I was very interested when the rebellions came to that region at the end of 2010, and followed the course of this “Arab Spring” from its inception. The carnage in Syria and its obvious importance for that whole region have made the subject my primary focus.

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Iraq’s battle for Ramadi isn’t just about defeating ISIS

By Balsam Mustafa, University of Birmingham and Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

After days of mounting expectation, the Iraqi government finally announced a serious offensive to retake the city of Ramadi, the capital of western Iraq’s Anbar Province, from Islamic State (IS).

This is far from the first announcement of the imminent recapture of Ramadi, occupied by IS since May 2015 after months of attacks. However, the Iraqi military and allied militias have been foiled before by IS’s tactics of improvised explosive devices, bomb-laden trucks, and booby traps, as well as the destruction of all major bridges into the city.

This has only raised the stakes for the reclaiming of Ramadi. Strategically, it is the “vein of Baghdad”, which is just over 100km to the east, and is close to the holy city of Karbala to the south and to the borders of Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan. IS could use this position both to claim its ascendancy in Iraq – Ramadi is the capital of Anbar, the country’s largest province – and to maintain a route to Raqqa, its central position in Syria.

The loss of Ramadi further challenged the Iraqi Government’s already shaky authority. Thousands of Iraqi families were displaced, and many of them are still trapped on Bzeibiz Bridge. Amid fears that IS-linked men are among the homeless, officials have restricted access to the capital.

So the Iraqi joint military operations command declared its plans to retake the city – but only now has it begun to act on them.

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Iraqi troops expected to drive ISIS from Ramadi in days

Reuters reports: Iraq’s army chief was quoted on Wednesday as saying he needed only days to drive Islamic State from Ramadi, the city whose fall in May exposed the weakness of the Baghdad government and dampened hopes of restoring control in the north and west.

Iraqi troops began advancing on Tuesday in an offensive complicated by rivalries and suspicions harbored by local Sunni tribes and by Shi’ite militia backed by Iran. U.S. officials, concerned also by militant operations over the border in Syria, have expressed frustration at delays in seizing back the city.

“In the coming days will be announced the good news of the complete liberation of Ramadi,” Iraqia TV cited army chief of staff Lt. General Othman al-Ghanemi as saying.

Government troops are now concentrating on the last district held by the militants in the center of Ramadi, a Sunni Muslim city on the river Euphrates some 100 km (60 miles) west of Baghdad and capital of Anbar province. [Continue reading…]

Residents of Ramadi welcoming Iraqi troops:

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What would Clausewitz recommend we do about ISIS?

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Mark Perry recently posed this theoretical question to a number of military strategists and found a broad consensus: Oddly, those most familiar with Clausewitz’s thinking issue nearly identical responses to this question. “Clausewitz would start by asking us what it is that we want to accomplish,” the Rand Corporation’s David Johnson, a retired U.S. Army Colonel says. Johnson, who has read On War “from cover to cover numerous times” notes that, for Clausewitz, finding answers to fundamental questions is the key to shaping a military strategy. “You have to understand the war you’re in, and I would bet that, with ISIS, Clausewitz would say that we haven’t done that. We’re too enthralled with trying to figure out who ISIS is  — instead of focusing on what they do. In truth, I don’t think it’s much of a mystery. If you go to Istanbul and look south the Caliphate is right there. You can point to it. It’s a state that views us as an enemy. What’s the mystery?”

[Historian and Clausewitz scholar Christopher] Bassford agrees. “I think the first thing ‘Chuck’ Clausewitz would do is wonder why the U.S. government, and the West in general, is reluctant to acknowledge ISIS as a ‘state,’” he wrote to me in an email. “ISIS controls territory, has a capital city in Raqaa, and for the most part practices a fundamentally conventional, though particularly vicious, kind of warfare. It uses terrorism, but it’s not just a terrorist group. And I also think Clausewitz would wonder why the French say they’re surprised to find themselves ‘at war’ after the Paris attack. They have been bombing ISIS for months.” While Clausewitz’s ideas are not restricted to state-on-state warfare, Bassford argues that we should accept that, for practical purposes, ISIS is a state. Indeed, in a strategy he calls “Let-the-Wookiee-Win,” we should do what we can to make ISIS more state-like. “After all, we know how to destroy states  —  we’re very good at it,” he argues.

One of the things that [U.S. Naval War College professor Donald] Stoker, Bassford, Johnson and many in the military find compelling about Clausewitz is that he views war as a subject that can be studied, understood and that, like engineering (say) or architecture, or any other discipline, improved on. It is possible to get good at killing, and if you’re better at it than your enemy  — if you break your enemy’s will to resist (as he would say)  —  you’ll win. On War provides a slew of these undiluted but axiomatic understandings. Though Clausewitz was a civilized man who recognized war’s horrors, he issued these axioms with a stern warning: “Kind-hearted people might think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed,” he writes, “and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a most dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst . . . This is how the matter must be seen. It would be futile  —  even wrong  —  to try and shut one’s eyes to what war really is from sheer distress at its brutality.”

It is this unblinking ability to call war what it is that has given Clausewitz such a dedicated following that large numbers of military officers have worked to grasp his thinking, and vocabulary. “Clausewitz says that the purpose of war is to achieve a particular political end,” Stoker says. “He argues that the best route to doing this is to attack the enemy’s center of gravity, the center of his strength. That might seem obvious now, but many of the most important parts of our current military thinking were first identified by him.”

Of course much of what Clausewitz tapped into in On War was a reflection of what professional soldiers already knew, and know. Thus, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman issued his famously Clausewitzian statement on war without, apparently, ever having read him. “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it,” he said. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” Sherman’s unflinching calculus (that true humanity consists in waging war unrelentingly, so as to end it sooner) is, in many ways, a perfect distillation of the U.S. military’s traditional mistrust of the narrative propounded by counterinsurgency advocates that the “center of gravity in a counterinsurgency is the protection of the population that hosts it.” That might have been true in western Iraq, but few would argue that it’s the case with ISIS  —  particularly after the attacks in Paris. “The Germans and Japanese were held in a vice grip by their leaders in World War Two,” Christopher Bassford says, “but that didn’t stop us from burning down their cities. If it’s safer to be with ISIS than against it, ISIS will retain its hold on the population it now controls.”

In fact, Bassford’s views reflect a growing consensus inside the U.S. military’s upper echelons that a cruel war against ISIS now, no matter how distasteful, will save the lives of many decent people  —  including many Americans  — later. [Continue reading…]

“I think in Syria the primary focus now must be destroying ISIS,” says Bernie Sanders.

Donald Trump promises that if he becomes president, he will “bomb the hell out of ISIS.”

There’s no shortage of tough talk among those who want to become commander-in-chief.

But how would these words be translated into action when it comes to the major population centers under ISIS’s control?

Does destroying ISIS in Mosul, for instance, mean destroying a city in which more than a million Iraqi civilians still live?

Clearly, if the remedy for dealing with ISIS ends up being more destructive than ISIS itself, it is no remedy at all.

Moreover, as much as it is true that ISIS needs to be recognized as a state, it is also more than a state. It has a physical base in the territory under its control, but its ideological base is globally dispersed.

For ISIS followers, already convinced that the world stands in violent opposition to Islam, the destruction of their embryonic state is less likely to represent defeat than have the opposite effect by empowering a death-defying passion for revenge.

The flaws in what is physically manifest can easily be forgotten if through its destruction, ISIS as a state is then reinvigorated as an inspiring legend.

Bombs can destroy buildings and kill people, but they don’t destroy ideas.

As American presidential candidates currently vie with each other in a contest over who can make the most compelling expression of their desire to crush ISIS, they are, as much as anything else, articulating a view of America’s rightful dominance in the world. In the eyes of ISIS fighters and their supporters, they themselves are thus made the underdog in a contest between right and might.

In reality, it is ISIS which is the oppressive force which must be toppled from below rather than above.

ISIS can only be destroyed by those who will directly benefit from its elimination.

If liberation from ISIS only brings renewed subjugation from Damascus and Baghdad, then those who might take up this fight are being told what they must fight against without being offered any real reward.

Clausewitz’s answer to the question, what do we do about ISIS?, might be less blunt than the military analysts are assuming. Indeed, he may well have said it’s the wrong question.

Without changing the basic conditions that facilitated ISIS’s emergence, it’s destruction is likely to be impossible.

ISIS is the beneficiary of the status quo which is sustained above all by the Assad regime, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia — a coalition of armies, air forces, and militias that in spite of their declared opposition to ISIS, have actually done little to inhibit its growth.

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Iraqi forces storm downtown Ramadi in bid to oust ISIS occupiers

The Washington Post reports: Iraqi forces began an attack on downtown Ramadi on Tuesday, in what they hope will mark a final push to wrest control of the western city from Islamic State militants.

The offensive began at around 10 a.m., with Iraqi counterterrorism troops crossing the Euphrates River to storm the Bakir neighborhood and advancing on the city’s main government compound, the Iraqi military said in a statement. Iraqi commanders said they were encountering limited resistance.

Ramadi has been under the control of the extremists since May, when it fell despite an ongoing U.S.-led air campaign in support of Iraqi troops. Backed by intensified airstrikes, Iraqi forces have encircled the city in recent weeks in an offensive that is seen as a key test of their ability to recapture urban areas from the Islamic State.

Much of the city’s center remains in the hands of the extremists, with booby traps and remaining civilians likely to hamper progress. Iraqi commanders, however, have said they believe they can completely retake it by the end of the year. [Continue reading…]

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Hassan Aboud: Profile of a Syrian ISIS commander

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C.J. Chivers writes: Mr. Aboud, in his mid-30s, is an exile from Sarmin, where he had lived most of his adult life. Past associates refer to him as either an ISIS wali or emir, titles conveying authority or military power that the Islamic State bestows on governors and its middle rank.

They note that he did not simply drift to ISIS; he has had a relationship with the original underground Sunni insurgents in Iraq’s Anbar Province, part of the crucible where ISIS formed, reaching back more than a decade.

Mr. Aboud and one of his brothers fought American forces there in 2004 and 2005, several townspeople said. Some suggested that the pair returned to Syria as a sleeper cell tied to Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and after his death in 2006 eventually became ISIS.

In the nearly year and a half since Mr. Aboud publicly joined the Islamic State, taking with him most of his fighters and many powerful weapons, he has been credited with, or blamed for, a sprawling mix of battlefield action and crime. Those who know him contend he led the capture of Palmyra, the town and ancient heritage site that ISIS defiled.

For all of Mr. Aboud’s activity, however, his story suggests limits to advancement within the group, which analysts say to a large degree remains led by Iraqis, including many connected to the dismantled Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.

Hassan al-Dugheim, a rebel cleric who said he had observed Mr. Aboud since 2011, said his tactical skill and ruthlessness were beyond question. He bluntly added, however, that he considered Mr. Aboud stupid, and that the Islamic State had found in him a man who could be flattered, bought, then used.

“Syrians are for fighting,” he said, and those who had joined ISIS recently faced a glass ceiling inside. “They are like animals to be ridden, like a horse or a mule.” [Continue reading…]

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