ISIS/ISIL conflict in Syria/Iraq (No OpEd, No Politics)

Miragedriver said:

Iraqi government forces and allied militias fire weaponry from a position in the northern part of Diyala province, bordering Salaheddin province, as they take part in an assault to retake the city of Tikrit from jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group.(...)

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janjak desalin said:

Sometimes you just got'ta "seek out, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, that is".

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Fierce fighting has erupted around the Iraqi city of Tikrit to the north of Baghdad, best known the world over as the home town of Saddam Hussein and regarded to be the spiritual heartland of the Baathist regime. The Iraqi government forces launched an

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from the Islamic State [IS] militants. This hugely important development has three dimensions.

First, of course, if the operations succeed, it will constitute a big blow to the IS. Tikrit is not only a big trophy by itself but the Iraqi government will be carrying the war into the IS’ territory. Most likely, the next target will be Mosul, straddling Iraqi Kurdistan, where the IS’ dramatic surge first appeared last June. It is tempting to surmise that the IS faces a near-term prospect of extinction in military terms.

The second dimension is with regard to the crucial role that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards [IRGC] are reportedly playing in the Tikrit operation under the Iraqi flag. The

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, that the charismatic and legendary commander of the IRGC Gen Qasem Soleimani has been seen in the frontline and is “personally taking part in leading the operation.” There is delightful irony that Soleimani is leading the liberation of the hometown of his old enemy Saddam. That apart, Shi’ite Iran is leading the fight today against a Sunni Islamist enemy who poses existential threat to the Sunni Arab regimes of the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, which has otherwise no love lost for Iran.

Finally, the fighting raging around Tikrit raises a big question: Where on earth is the US-led international coalition hiding? Iran has put the US and its coalition partners to shame by single-handedly taking the war into the IS tent. Iran is relentlessly exposing the IS as a pest that is easily squashed if gone about seriously, than the 10′ tall enemy with mythical prowess that the Western analysts made it out to be.

Meanwhile, the

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, claiming that the US is deliberately steering clear of Tikrit as a matter of policy, since the fighting in Tikrit is spearheaded by the Shi’ite militia and there is a tacit ‘division of labor’ with Iran – a laughable proposition, to say the least.

Tehran alleges, on the other hand, that the US is actually dissimulating when it claims it is fighting the IS, and that in reality Washington has a nuanced approach that anticipates a future role for the IS as an instrument in its regional strategies. The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian literally ridiculed the US claims of fighting the IS, when he

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, “The US has created the anti-ISIL coalition with the participation of 60 countries, but the coalition’s main practical measure is confined to controlling and administering the ISIL.”

Abdollahian disclosed that the US military aircraft are ferrying supplies for the IS in Syria and Iraq by flying great distances. He asked, “How can one make a 900-kilometer mistake in distance?” Good question, indeed.

In Afghanistan too the US intervened militarily in 2001 on the pretext of vanquishing the Taliban, who have in a curious role reversal today become Washington’s key interlocutors — and, maybe, are being groomed to become tomorrow’s catalysts of change in the vast Central Asian steppes still under Russian influence, or China’s restive Xinjiang Autonomous Region which is struggling with Islamist militancy.

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We will never get to know what painful thoughts raced through the soldierly mind of Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he testified before the US senators in Washington on Tuesday, but it certainly wouldn’t have been easy for him to bring himself to compliment Iran’s “most overt conduct… in the form of artillery and other things” in the military operation currently going on to retake the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit from the control of the Islamic State.

For sure, Gen Dempsey knew he was actually complimenting an Iranian general who has been in the American-Israeli ‘hit list’ from time immemorial – Gen Qassem Suleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps [IRGC] of Iran.

To make the point a lit bit clearer still, let me digress for a moment to bring out from my archive a profile of the elusive, charismatic, devastatingly brilliant IRGC general that the New Yorker magazine once had featured in September 2013 in a riveting story entitled “THE SHADOW COMMANDER”. Read it,

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, and you will understand why Gen. Dempsey would have been swallowing hard during his testimony yesterday.

But what option would Gen. Dempsey have been left with but to compliment Tehran and distract attention from the central issue – namely, that Baghdad kept Washington in the dark about the Tikrit operations and simply chose to follow Suleimani’s command? The New York Times has an

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reporting from Baghdad as to what has gone wrong between the Iraqi government and the Americans. As she put it, the Iraqis are frustrated with the “sluggish American pace and pessimistic American estimates of how long it would take to drive the Islamic State from Mosul and the western province of Anbar.” Barnard quotes a close aide to the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi as saying, “The Americans continue procrastinating about the time it will take to liberate the country,” he said in an interview. “Iraq will liberate Mosul and Anbar without them.”

Now, one option open to Washington will be to sit on the fence and hope against hope that the Iraqi-Iranian joint operation would at some point solicit help from the US forces. But that seems increasingly unlikely and the field reports are increasingly concluding that the

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in Tikrit.

A second option for the Americans would have been to plead that this is a Shi’ite operation and the US cannot identify with sectarian conflicts. But then, the latest reports suggest that thousands of Sunni Iraqi fighters have also been participating on the side of the Iraqi government forces and Iran’s IRGC cadres. In short, this is a classic war on terror – pure and simple.

For sure, President Barack Obama has some answering to do. Why has the US-led “international coalition” been twiddling its thumbs and marking time by needlessly exaggerating the potency of the Islamic State fighters? Baghdad and Tehran have exposed the US and its coalition partners – ranging from the Australians to the Gulf Arabs – and shows them in a very poor light as cowardly or dissimulating (or both.) In fact, there is a deafening silence on the part of Saudi Arabia even as its erstwhile progenies are facing massacre.

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– March 4, 2015

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delft said:

Ambassador

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is always interesting. He wrote this on March 3, 2015:

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