Category Archives: Iraq

When detailing plans to retake Mosul, Pentagon officials forgot the U.S. no longer controls Iraq

Foreign Policy reports: The Pentagon is walking back its public plans to help Iraqi forces seize Mosul from the Islamic State, chastened by a backlash in Baghdad for failing to inform leaders there before releasing details of the springtime offensive.

Angered Iraqi officials said the unusual level of detail released about the Mosul operation — including that it would likely launch in April or May — created the appearance that the U.S. is leading the battle, and not Iraqi forces.

“We need all parties to focus on their part in the eradication and defeat of Daesh,” Iraqi Ambassador to the U.S. Lukman Faily told Foreign Policy on Tuesday. He was referring to the Arabic name for the Islamic State.

Faily also signaled it was a mistake for the Pentagon to have discussed the timing of the offensive with reporters last week at a briefing by a senior U.S. Central Command official who, among other details, estimated up to 25,000 Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers would join the fight. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Nouri al-Maliki — Iraq’s ruler-in-waiting

Foreign Policy reports: Little Venice, a lush residential neighborhood of canals and gardens, lies nestled in the Green Zone, an abrupt departure from the checkpoints, traffic, and blast walls across the rest of the Iraqi capital. Its expansive villas used to belong to Saddam Hussein’s top henchmen; now, they are the homes of Iraq’s new political elite. And in the heart of this neighborhood, just as he did for the eight years when he ruled Iraq, lives Nouri al-Maliki.

Though Maliki was forced out as prime minister in September, he is far from being a political exile. He is one of the country’s three vice presidents, and is still the secretary-general of the Islamic Dawa Party, from which Iraq’s last three prime ministers have hailed. Perhaps most importantly, Maliki — a workaholic known for regularly putting in 16-hour days — has been bolstering his ties to Iran and the powerful Shiite militias that sprang up in reaction to the Islamic State’s torrid expansion across Iraq last year.

The man who was once America’s point man in Iraq blames the United States for abandoning his country in its time of need. In an interview with Foreign Policy, he said that Iraq was “almost under a siege when it came to receiving weapons” during the crucial period last year when the Islamic State was preparing to seize Mosul.

“Our plan was to rely on American weapons, but the American side did not provide the necessary arms,” he said. “It was as if they did not realize the level of the threat that the Iraqi government was facing.”

In the absence of the United States, Maliki argued, Iraq had no choice but to look to Iran for support.

“The Iranian weapons are the ones that enabled the Iraqi forces to fight daesh,” Maliki said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “If weapons were available to us according to the [security] agreement between Iraq and the United States, we would not have needed the Iranian weapons.”

It has long been an article of faith among both loyalists and enemies that Maliki, who often appears on Iraqi television stations, is plotting a political comeback. One Western official told the New York Times that Maliki was “absolutely convinced” he would return to power sometime this year. While he denied earlier this month that he had plans to return to office, he also added then, “If the Iraqi people decide to elect me … I won’t decline.”

The struggle for power between Maliki and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is far more than a personal rivalry. At stake is a debate within the Iraqi Shiite community over how to wield power over the Iraqi state. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

At Kurdish front-line outpost, skepticism abounds about assault on Mosul

McClatchy reports: Major Deliar Shouki, the commander of a string of Kurdish fire bases less than 20 miles from Mosul, admitted he was skeptical when he’d heard the news last week that a U.S. official had told Pentagon reporters that 25,000 Iraqi troops would attack the Islamic State-held city perhaps as soon as April.

“There really is no Iraqi army, so I don’t know where they get the idea that they can train 25,000 soldiers in two months to fight house to house in Mosul,” he said on Friday as he gave a visiting journalist a tour of his men’s positions on the outskirts of the tiny hamlet of Sultan Abdullah, which lies about midway between Mosul and the Kurdish capital of Irbil.

Only a few hundred yards of open ground separates his troops from the Islamic State positions, with Shouki’s men dug in deeply on the tops of hills and the Islamic State fighters occupying the tiny village below. Nearly every night, the area is the scene World War I-style battles as the extremists attempt to storm the Kurdish trenches, only to be thrown back, with heavy casualties.

“It just seems to me like the Iraqi [Arabs] lack a certain morale to be soldiers, and I don’t want to directly accuse them of anything, but every time they fight Daash, they lose ground and equipment that ends up being used against us,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It’s very suspicious and I don’t think they want to fight them.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Is a campaign to oust ISIS from Mosul really just weeks away?

Joel Wing writes: On February 19, the first day of a conference on countering terrorism held by the White House a member of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) briefed reporters on an impending Mosul campaign. The official said that a force of 20,000-25,000 soldiers and peshmerga would retake the city in April or May. This would involve five army brigades, three peshmerga brigades, three reserve army brigades, a counterterrorism brigade, and a unit made up of Mosul locals who would hold the city after it was cleared of insurgents. The eight ISF brigades would all undergo training by the United States. They would face a force of 1,000-2,000 Islamic State fighters in the city. The American announcement came just three days after Prime Minister Haider Abadi gave an interview with the BBC in which he said Mosul would be freed in just a few months with minimal casualties. He went on to criticize the U.S. led coalition for taking so long to get involved in the fight against IS. Other Iraqi leaders have made similar negative comments about the Americans. When the insurgents launched their summer offensive in June the White House made it clear that it would only intervene after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was removed from office. That took several weeks, which proved to be the most critical period during the militant surge, as many believed that Baghdad would be besieged after Mosul and Tikrit fell. That delay made many Iraqis question how much Washington was committed to Iraq. Some even believe that the U.S. backs IS. Those types of comments were the main motivation for going public with the Mosul plan. The White House wanted to let Baghdad know that it was concerned about reversing the insurgency, and had a strategy in place to do it.

The fact that this was a political move and not a real timetable was made apparent quickly after the CENTCOM briefing. First the official said that if the Iraqis needed more time to prepare for the offensive it could be delayed. That was an out because the ISF will not be ready in two to three months. The U.S. is supposed to train roughly 16,000 Iraqi soldiers by April. As of February it had only put 3,400 soldiers through a basic 6-8 week course. Some of this training has been without weapons because Iraq’s notorious red tape has delayed their delivery. An officer in the Iraqi Defense Ministry told Bloomberg that the 8 brigades would not be ready until August. Second, this process will take even longer as 20,000-25,000 soldiers and peshmerga are not enough to assault a city the size of Mosul that has roughly 1-2 million people. In 2004 the U.S. used 10,500 troops to take Fallujah that had a population of approximately 350,000. Some 3,000-4,000 insurgents opposed them. Rather than the 1,000-2,000 IS fighters the CENTCOM briefer claimed are in Mosul Iraqi and Kurdish officials put the figure at more like 10,000. Given the size of the city and the number of insurgents the Americans will need to train roughly 40,000 Iraqis or more to have a credible chance at success. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

In the war against ISIS, Kurds feel they’re doing the dirty work for the West

Mike Giglio reports: The soldier pressed a handkerchief to his face to fight the smell of corpses at his feet. Then he crossed the street, sat on a curb, put his head between his knees, and spit. He lit a cigarette. “I’d rather smell the smoke,” he said, “because the stench is rotten, it’s gross.”

The soldier gazed warily at three young ISIS fighters who lay dead at the foot of a crumbled wall. One was charred from a rocket-propelled grenade. Another had a hole in his head. The jihadis wore thick socks but no shoes, to muffle their steps along the pockmarked streets during the battle that raged there the day before.

The soldier was part of an ethnic Kurdish force called the peshmerga that has spent more than six months battling ISIS in northern Iraq. He and his colleagues won this town south of the Mosul Dam, called Wana, the previous afternoon. They spoke as if they’d been dispatching demons. “They are like animals,” a 30-year-old lieutenant said, “and they don’t have brains to think.”

It was ISIS’s push into Iraq’s Kurdish region that prompted the U.S. to begin airstrikes against the group in August, paving the way for the Obama administration to launch a new war. Two months after taking over the Iraqi city of Mosul, the extremists were threatening genocide against the Yazidi religious minority around Mt. Sinjar and advancing toward the regional capital of Erbil.

The peshmerga have since become the main partner on the ground for the U.S. and its coalition of allies, shouldering the grunt work of combat. More than half of the airstrikes the U.S. has carried out in Iraq, according to the U.S. military command overseeing operations against ISIS, have hit along Kurdish lines. The extent of U.S. cooperation with the Kurds suggests the true percentage is far higher, said Christopher Harmer, an analyst tracking the conflict at the Institute for the Study of War.

Six months into the offensive, soldiers along the peshmerga’s 650-mile front with ISIS show the strain of a grueling war. They fight to protect their land — but also feel they’re doing the dirty work for Western countries that keep far from the smell of death. A major in Sinjar called the peshmerga “the only ones on the front fighting” as soldiers fired over stacks of sandbags; a colonel barricaded across from ISIS in Kirkuk said, “It’s not supposed to be this way.” At a western outpost overlooking ISIS-held Syria, an officer said the Kurds hold the line “for every single country fighting ISIS,” while in Wana, the weary soldiers prepared to clear the three corpses as feral cats began to pick at their flesh. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS in danger of losing its main supply route

The Washington Post reports: For weeks, U.S.-backed forces have been fighting to oust the Islamic State from key areas of northern Iraq in a series of small-scale battles that could have an enormous impact on the group’s “caliphate.”

A major prize in the clashes is a highway that serves as a lifeline for the Islamic State. It runs from the group’s Iraq stronghold in Mosul to its enclaves in northeastern Syria, including its self-styled capital, Raqqa, 300 miles away.

The battles are occurring as Islamic State is causing growing alarm internationally over its brutal actions, which have included the murder of a captured Jordanian pilot and the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians by Libya-based adherents of the extremist group.

In late January, however, Islamic State fighters suffered a setback as Iraqi Kurdish forces seized a stretch of the key highway at the town of Kiske, west of Mosul.

The Islamic State is still using the highway, detouring onto back roads to get around Kiske. But if the Iraqi Kurdish fighters can maintain and expand their hold on the road, the Islamist extremists “will be under a kind of siege in the area. It will be very hard for them” logistically, said Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi researcher who is an expert on the radical group. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Pentagon doubts its own ISIS war plan

Nancy A. Youssef reports: Skepticism about the U.S. and Iraqi military plans for the next phase of the ISIS war begins inside the Pentagon.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. military officials publicly detailed their plans for a spring offensive on ISIS-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, many within the Pentagon privately questioned whether that timetable was plausible. They said that they were dubious that their partners in the Iraqi military — the troops supposed to lead the offensive — would be capable of conducting such a campaign by then.

“I really doubt it is going to happen that soon,” said one military officer who, like several others, served in Iraq between 2003-2011 and spoke on condition of anonymity. “And if it does, it will take months.”

The largely Shiite troops of the Iraqi army are unlikely to risk their lives to win back a Sunni dominated city, several U.S. military officers told The Daily Beast on Friday. Indeed, when ISIS stormed the city last June, Iraqi forces walked away, leading the U.S. and 60 other nations to form a coalition against the terror group.

Even if the Iraqi troops do stand up and fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State, having a Shiite force move in and potentially ravage a major Sunni city in a bid to save it could have adverse affects on the Sunnis in Iraq and broader Sunni Arab world. Sectarian tensions, particularly in Iraq, run that deep.

“I cannot believe that Shiites would fight for Mosul,” one officer who served in the restive Sunni province of Anbar during the Iraq War told The Daily Beast.

So far, there is no evidence of a strong Sunni-majority Iraqi Army brigade, and U.S. Central Command has said it will take at least eight brigades to win back the city. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran’s Shiite militias are running amok in Iraq

Ali Khedery writes: It took the fall of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, for Western elites to finally begin to understand what many of us saw firsthand in the years since 2003:

The Iraqi government is hopelessly sectarian, corrupt, and generally unfit to govern what could be one of the world’s most prosperous nations. Washington’s response to the Islamic State’s (IS) advance, however, has been disgraceful: The United States is now acting as the air force, the armory, and the diplomatic cover for Iraqi militias that are committing some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These are “allies” that are actually beholden to our strategic foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and which often resort to the same vile tactics as the Islamic State itself.

The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was branded the “Republic of Fear” due to its wanton disregard for the sanctity of human life. Saddam’s abuses were legendary: The invasion of Iran in 1980, where his forces employed chemical and biological weapons; the genocide of more than 100,000 Kurds during the Anfal campaign; the invasion of Kuwait in 1990; and 1991’s massacre of Shiites in Karbala are only a few examples of his gruesome handiwork.

Post-2003 Iraq was supposed to be different. Throughout the past decade, however, countless NGOs and international news organizations have borne witness to the accelerating pace of abuses. The Republic of Fear is being reborn. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama counters violent extremists with extremists

Jacob Siegel writes: There’s a gnawing contradiction at the center of a high profile White House summit being held this week dedicated to curbing violent extremism: The U.S. is heading the opposition to extremism at the same moment the country is increasingly allied with violent extremists in the fight against ISIS.

It’s one of a number of inconvenient issues as national and global leaders gather to figure out what to do about the radicals in their midst. Critics, including former administration officials and terrorism experts, are skeptical about the effectiveness of government initiatives. Many question whether the summit amounts to much more than a feel good PR spectacle.

The “Countering Violent Extremism” conference, which began Tuesday and runs through Friday, has drawn elected leaders and lawmakers from around the world, U.S. law enforcement officials, religious leaders, and experts on radical ideologies and their adherents. Participants are supposed to address a broad range of extremist threats, but it’s clear from President Obama’s own remarks that ISIS and the threat from jihadist groups have an outsized presence at the summit.

Few details about the summit’s agenda were released ahead of the event but even before it began there was debate over how extremism would be defined. The White House was accused, variously, of “avoiding the world Muslim” in its discussion of extremist threats and focusing too narrowly on Islamic radicalism at the exclusion of other violent groups. The terms of that debate miss another distinction. As the war against ISIS illustrates, there are extremist groups the government is willing to tolerate, and in some cases work alongside, and others it is not. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why the fight against ISIS is failing

Sarah Leah Whitson writes: Six months and 16,000 airstrikes into the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, with less than 1% of the territory it held in Iraq recovered, an honest accounting leads to only one conclusion: The U.S.-led strategy is failing.

With the effort focused almost exclusively on a military defeat of the armed group, also known as ISIS, neither the Iraqi government nor its anti-ISIS allies – Iran included – have seriously addressed the reforms and accountability for abuses that could earn back the support of Iraq’s Sunni population. The fragmentation of Iraq’s fighting forces into unaccountable sectarian militias responsible for horrific abuses against Iraqi civilians is part of Iraq’s slide into a broken state that no amount of foreign aid and military intervention will be likely to put back together.

Despite the grievances underlying initial Sunni support for ISIS, the anti-ISIS coalition has focused almost exclusively on an airstrikes campaign, with Shi’a militias supported by Iran as the primary boots on the ground.

The stunning takeover by ISIS of a massive swath of Iraqi territory testified to the alienation of Sunni communities. Many Sunnis welcomed ISIS fighters as “liberators” from the sectarian oppression of government forces. But let’s not forget how Iraq got to that point – with the U.S.-led Iraq war that displaced a dictator but resulted in an abusive occupation and destructive civil war, leaving more than a million dead. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS militants ‘burn to death 45 in Iraq’

BBC News: Jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS) have burned to death 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, the local police chief says.

Exactly who these people were and why they were killed is not clear, but Col Qasim al-Obeidi said he believed some were members of the security forces.

IS fighters captured much of the town, near Ain al-Asad air base, last week.

Col Obeidi said a compound that houses the families of security personnel and local officials was now under attack.

He pleaded for help from the government and the international community.

Facebooktwittermail

Can Iraq’s Sunni, Shia and Kurds unite to liberate Mosul?

Jesse Rosenfeld reports: In an inconspicuous flour mill near the front line of Makhmour, southeast of Mosul, a Kurdish commander is in charge of training 350 Sunni fighters from the area. Lining up in formation, the fighters wear balaclavas to hide their features out of fear that jihadists will take revenge on their families if their identity is found out.

Peshmerga Col. “Bab Argin,” who uses a nom-de-guerre because his visits to Baghdad to coordinate with the Iraqi army make him a target, concedes that only 800 Sunni Arab fighters in total are being trained currently for the Mosul fight.

“Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is everyone’s enemy,” says Bab Argin, trying to explain the Sunnis’ interest in fighting alongside Shia-dominated government forces that oppressed them and Kurds who want to separate from Iraq.

Most of the Sunni volunteers are Iraqi army soldiers from the Mosul area who fled the ISIS takeover.

“The high ranking officers moved on and left us soldiers behind,” says “Abu Tariq,” a young recruit donning a balaclava. He says he comes from a village under ISIS control near Mosul. “We had no one to give us orders,” he adds.

Parroting the nationalist slogans of an era before the entrenched sectarian divisions that hardened under the American occupation, Abu Tariq contends that “we are fighting for an equal and united Iraq.”

The volunteers recount a rose-tinted version of recent history, contending that Iraqis and their army were united before ISIS split the country, and that the goal of this war is to rebuild that unity. They turn a blind eye to the reprisals against Sunni Arabs carried out by Iranian-backed Shia militias and actively ignore the American occupation’s legacy of a central government that turned majority rule into majority repression. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why the victory in Kobane matters

Aron Lund writes: It is true that Kobane has been turned into a city of ruins. And enemies of the Islamic State should not get carried away by what happened there, because the success in Kobane will not be easy to repeat elsewhere.

Even though the YPG has proven itself a strong fighting force and a useful on-the-ground partner for the U.S. Air Force, it is at heart an ethnic self-defense militia — not an all-purpose tool for Western intervention in the Syrian war. The YPG’s effectiveness as an offensive force beyond Kobane will be sharply limited by Turkey’s hostility and refusal to provide aid across the border.

In addition, the secular-leftist YPG’s poor relations with most of the surrounding Arab countryside and the Sunni-Islamist mainstream of the Arab opposition make it singularly ill-suited to lead an advance deeper into Syria.

Even as Kurdish refugees are beginning to trickle back into Kobane, there are reports of Arab civilians fleeing the YPG’s advance further south. Many are just trying to get out of the way of the war, but some surely fear that the victorious Kurds will now avenge themselves on Arab villages and families suspected of harboring pro-jihadi sympathies. That’s exactly what is now happening in northern Iraq, where the Islamic State had recruited local Sunni forces in a campaign of genocidal violence against the Yazidi religious minority. Having beaten back the jihadis, some Yazidis are now returning to loot and burn Sunni villages.

The Islamic State is of course exploiting Arab-Kurdish tension around Kobane as well, in the hope of rallying Arab locals to its side. The jihadis are said to have ordered military-age Arab males in the area to stay and help them defend their villages against the YPG, while allowing women and children to flee south to Raqqa. The deeper the YPG pushes into Arab territory, the uglier the ethnic warfare is likely to get.

Well aware of these limitations, the YPG leaders will certainly want to reclaim the rest of the Kurdish territory lost in September. If they succeed, they will perhaps also try to carve out a bit of a buffer zone to further fortify the enclave. But then, they’re in all likelihood just going to dig down and seek to rebuild Kobane. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Might the formation of National Guard lead to the breakup of Iraq?

Al Jazeera reports: Disagreements among political factions are likely to delay – or cancel – plans to form a National Guard, Iraqi lawmakers said. The proposed fighting force was originally suggested by the United States to combat fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in northern and western Iraq, but there have reportedly been disputes over the force’s makeup and its commanders.
[…]
According to analysts, the postponement of the National Guard’s formation could end the thaw between Prime Minister Haider al-Abbadi and Iraq’s Sunnis. It could also undermine national reconciliation efforts between Iraq’s Sunnis, Shia Muslims and Kurds.

“The National Alliance [the Shia bloc in parliament] have [bad] intentions despite the fact that it [National Guard] will be a part of the National Defence System,” Hamid al-Mutlaq, a senior Sunni lawmaker and the deputy of parliament’s security and defence committee, told Al Jazeera.

“There is procrastination and delay when it comes to [discussing] the National Guard law … and this will negatively impact the war against Daesh [ISIL] and the political process,” Mutlaq said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Has ISIS created a state?

Daniel Solomon writes: Earlier this month, following the beheading of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto by Islamic State fighters in Raqqa, Syria, New Yorker writer George Packer noted that the group responsible for Goto’s death appeared “less like a conventional authoritarian or totalitarian state than like a mass death cult.” Packer was grappling with the political meaning of the Islamic State’s mass violence, which has devastated civilian communities across Syria and Iraq since the group joined the Syrian civil war in mid 2013. The group, which has struggled to control its territory since international airstrikes began last September, has used public killings of foreign citizens like Goto to demonstrate its brutal authority to an international audience. It has treated civilians in Syria and Iraq with even greater malice; reports of massacres like the execution of over 500 civilians in Tikrit, Iraq, last June are all too common.

But is the Islamic State closer to a death cult, or to a formal “state,” as its name implies? Two major theories of the state indicate that violence is not abhorrent to—and in fact, may be inherent to—the establishment of a state. For German sociologist Max Weber, among the most widely cited political theorists on this topic, the modern secular state is a political organization that “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” within its borders. That is, the state is concerned with the exercise of power — specifically with the exercise of violent power. In Weberian terms, the state’s monopoly is a constant fixture of its administration’s authority: That administration either successfully secures its power, or it does not. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama seeks Congressional authorization for three-year war against ISIS

The New York Times reports: In formally asking Congress to authorize a three-year military campaign against the Islamic State, President Obama has carefully worded his request to soothe worried Democrats who do not want another big war. At the same time, he is assuring Republican hawks that the American military will do what it takes to defeat the Sunni militant group.

Hence the measure prohibits “enduring offensive ground combat operations.” So, no ground troops to fight the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria or anywhere else?

Maybe not.

“The 10th Mountain Division could get through that loophole,” joked Roger Zakheim, a former general counsel for the House Armed Services Committee’s Republican leadership. But, then, so too could certain parts of the 82nd Airborne.

A ban against “enduring offensive ground combat operations” is simply a ban on a large army of occupation for an extended period of time, like what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is essentially the yardstick that President Obama is using. But there is no prohibition against Special Operations forces conducting counterterrorism strikes inside Iraq or Syria.

Nor is there a prohibition against Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, or JTAC teams, directing combat aircraft and other offensive operations from positions close to the fighting. Or Marines going in to rescue hostages. Or clear out buildings. Or even retaking a town.

In fact, a ban on enduring offensive combat operations does not even bar the Army’s Third Infantry Division from rolling into Iraq on the president’s order, as long as they do not stay long.

Very few people who know Mr. Obama believe that he has any intention of sending an infantry division into Iraq, Syria or anywhere else that the Islamic State may decide to declare a caliphate; the president has said at every opportunity that he will not send in ground combat troops. He agreed only reluctantly to begin airstrikes against the Islamic State in August and has since then said repeatedly that the people of Iraq, Syria and surrounding countries should supply ground forces for action against the militants. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Destroying ISIS is about more than vengeance

Hassan Hassan writes: Less than three weeks before ISIL captured Jordanian pilot Maaz Al Kassasbeh on December 24, Jordan’s King Abdullah described the fight against the extremist group as “our third world war”. He said that Muslim leaders should take ownership of the fight, which requires a pan-regional strategy to counter extremism.

Two months later, Jordan is now finding itself being pushed to the forefront of this “generational fight”, as the king put it then. Since the terror group burnt Al Kassasbeh to death in a cage, the country’s air force has carried out at least 56 sorties, and been joined by F16s of the UAE. Jordan’s fight against ISIL is no longer someone else’s war.

The greatest mistake that Jordan can make is to define its battle against ISIL purely in the language of vengeance. The pain and anger that define the atmosphere in Jordan today might abate in coming weeks, but the country’s commitment to the destruction of ISIL should become part of a long-term strategy. The rise of ISIL was a result of reactionary and inconsistent policies in the first place – something Jordan must avoid if it is to win this war.

Jordan must heed the king’s own advice during his interview with CBS News in December, when he said that ISIL would not go away without a “holistic” strategy that views the group as part of greater challenges facing the region. ISIL, he said, is one face of many extremist groups in the Middle East. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Assad says Syria is informed on anti-ISIS air campaign

BBC News: Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad says his government is receiving messages from the US-led coalition battling the jihadist group, Islamic State.

Mr Assad told the BBC that there had been no direct co-operation since air strikes began in Syria in September.

But third parties – among them Iraq – were conveying “information”.

The US National Security Council has denied co-ordinating with the Syrian government.

Facebooktwittermail