WH Admits Need To ‘Adapt Our Strategy’ Against IS, Contradicts Previous Admin Statements, Washington Free Beacon via You Tube, May 27, 2015
(“It’s more complicated than that.” Wash, rinse and repeat– DM)
Posted tagged ‘Airstrikes’
WH Admits Need To ‘Adapt Our Strategy’ Against IS, Contradicts Previous Admin Statements
May 27, 2015Ash Carter: Iraqis Need to Be The Ones Fighting Islamic State But Don’t Have The Will to Do So
May 24, 2015(We can give them equipment and training. But how can we give them time — and training requires time as well as motivation on the part of the trainees — when the Islamic State gives them neither? — DM)
Why Obama has come to regret underestimating the Islamic State
May 24, 2015Why Obama has come to regret underestimating the Islamic State, The Telegraph, Richard Spencer, May 23, 2015
Displaced Sunni people, who fled the violence in the city of Ramadi, arrive at the outskirts of Baghdad Photo: STRINGER/IRAQ
Its strategy is essentially Maoist – the comparison has not been enough made, but now that Isil has declared itself an agent of Cultural Revolution, with its destruction of history, perhaps it will be more. Like Mao’s revolutionaries, it conquers the countryside before storming the towns.
Even now, the fact that much of its territory is rural or even desert is seen as a weakness. But it is beginning to “pick off” major towns and cities with impunity. In fact, where society is fractured, like Syria and Iraq, the “sea of revolution” panics the citizenry, making it feel “surrounded” by unseen and incomprehensible agents of doom.
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Have any words come back to haunt President Obama so much as his description of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant last team as a “JV” – junior varsity – team of terrorists?
This wasn’t al-Qaeda in its 9/11 pomp, he said; just because a university second team wore Manchester United jerseys didn’t make them David Beckham.
How times change. As of this weekend, the JV team is doing a lot better than Manchester United. With its capture of Palmyra, it controls half of Syria.
Its defeat in Kobane – a town of which few non-Kurds had heard – was cheered by the world; its victory in Ramadi last Sunday gives it control of virtually all of Iraq’s largest province, one which reaches to the edge of Baghdad.
Calling itself a state, one analyst wrote, no longer looks like an exaggeration.
Senior US officials seem to agree. “Isil as an organization is better in every respect than its predecessor of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. It’s better manned, it’s better resourced, they have better fighters, they’re more experienced,” one said at a briefing to explain the loss of Ramadi. “We’ve never seen something like this.”
How did Isil manage to inflict such a humiliation on the world’s most powerful country? As with many great shock-and-awe military advances over the years, it is easier to explain in hindsight than it apparently was to prevent.
Ever since Isil emerged in its current form in 2013, military and and political analysts have been saying that its success is due to its grasp of both tactics and strategy.
Its strategy is essentially Maoist – the comparison has not been enough made, but now that Isil has declared itself an agent of Cultural Revolution, with its destruction of history, perhaps it will be more. Like Mao’s revolutionaries, it conquers the countryside before storming the towns.
Even now, the fact that much of its territory is rural or even desert is seen as a weakness. But it is beginning to “pick off” major towns and cities with impunity. In fact, where society is fractured, like Syria and Iraq, the “sea of revolution” panics the citizenry, making it feel “surrounded” by unseen and incomprehensible agents of doom.
Like Mao, Isil uses propaganda – its famed dominance of social media – to terrorise its targets mentally. Senior Iraqi policemen have recounted being sent images via their mobile phones of their decapitated fellow officers. This has a chastening effect on the fight-or-flight reflex.
It then uses actual terror to further instil chaos. Isil’s main targets have been ground down by years of car bombs and “random” attacks. It seems extraordinary, but one of the reasons given by Mosul residents for preferring Isil rule is that there are no longer so many terrorist attacks: not surprising, since the “terrorists” are in control.
Only once your enemy is weak, divided, and demoralised, do you strike.
You then do so with an awesome show of force – one which can mislead as to the actual numbers involved.
The final assault on central Ramadi, which had been fought over for almost 18 months, began with an estimated 30 car bombs. Ten were said to be individually of an equivalent size to the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, which killed 168 people.
There is nothing new in saying that both Syrian and Iraqi governments have contributed greatly to the rise of Isil by failing to offer the Sunni populations of their countries a reason to support them.
Some say that focusing on the failings and injustices of these regimes ignores the fact that militant Islamism, like Maoism, is a superficially attractive, even romantic idea to many, whether oppressed or not, and that its notions must be fought and defeated intellectually and emotionally.
That is true. But relying on Islamic extremism to burn itself out, or for its followers to be eventually persuaded of the errors of their ways, is no answer. Like financial markets, the world can stay irrational for longer than the rest of us can stay politically and militarily solvent.
Rather, the West and those it supports have to show they can exert force against force, and then create a better world, one which all Iraqis and Syrians, especially Sunnis, are prepared to fight for.
In March, an uneasy coalition of Shia militias, Iraqi soldiers, and US jets took back the town of Tikrit from Isil. It remains a wasteland, whose inhabitants have yet to return, ruled over by gunmen rather than by the rule of law.
That is not an attractive symbol, for Iraqi Sunnis, of what victory against Isil looks like. If the war against Isil is to be won, the first step is to make clear to Iraqis and Syrians alike what victory looks like, and why it will be better for them.
Strategic Failures, the US and the Fall of Ramadi
May 21, 2015Strategic Failures, the US and the Fall of Ramadi, Clarion Project, Ryan Mauro, May 21, 2015
Islamic State fighters celebrate their take over of Ramadi with a victory ‘parade.’ (Photo: Islamic State social media)
The U.S. must correct its strategy by sidelining Iranian-backed militias and terrorists, leveraging influence with the Iraqi government and significantly increasing assistance to the Anbar tribes, Kurds, Iraqi government and to the persecuted Christian minority that is forming its own self-defense force.
Recent history has shown that the Iraqi government will choose the U.S. over Iran if compelled.
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The Islamic State (ISIS) has captured Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, reportedly “terrifying” Iraqi officials who now foresee a “tsunami of international terror.” It is an important achievement for the terrorist group aimed at pre-empting a potential Sunni tribal uprising.
The Sunni tribes in Anbar Province were critical to the success of the 2007 “surge” that ousted the Islamic State’s predecessor, Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The deterioration in the relationship between these tribes and the central Iraqi government was likewise critical to the terrorists’ comeback in Iraq.
The Islamic State remembered these lessons and acted quickly as the Iraqi government began training tribal fighters and the U.S. defense budget allotted $179 million to Kurdish and Sunni tribal forces. The U.S. forgot these lessons and has long rejected Sunni and Kurdish pleas for direct aid to fight the Islamic State.
The Obama Administration is now planning to change course and directly arm and train the Iraqi Sunni tribes after the fall of Ramadi. The White House previously chose to work only through the central Iraqi government that has given the Kurds and Sunnis inadequate support.
A delegation of 11 Sunni tribal leaders, including Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, the President of the Anbar Awakening Council, flew to the U.S. on January 18 to plead for direct assistance. Former President George W. Bush called Abu Risha and listened to his complaints for 20 minutes and offered to help. Administration officials were less willing. One tribal official said, “I wouldn’t call it the ‘cold shoulder,’ but it certainly was a cool one.”
The Obama Administration told them that it would only work through the elected central government. Its viewpoint was that working with forces outside the government’s authority undermines the Iraqi leadership and threatens the country’s unity.
That standpoint ignores what was learned after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Nothing threatens Iraq’s unity and the government’s authority more than instability. Direct U.S. aid to the Sunni tribes helped save Iraq from disintegration into sectarian enclaves ruled by terrorists and militias.
The Islamic State struck Ramadi during a sandstorm that delayed American air support. Former U.S. Central Command advisor Ali Khedery says that a Kurdish member of parliament informed him that 6,000 Iraqi Security Forces fled when faced with a mere 150 Islamic State fighters. About 500 Iraqi security personnel and civilians died in two days. The Iraqi officials spoke straight forwardly and admitted that the current strategy is failing.
The Pentagon says it has finished training about 7,000 Iraqi Security Forces and another 3-4,000 are in the process of training, but training won’t solve the problem of collapsing Iraqi forces. The U.S. trained the Iraqis from 2003 until the withdrawal in 2011. The strategy of waiting for the Iraqi security forces to become strong enough to stabilize the country is the same strategy that failed before the surge.
Iraqi personnel flee because they don’t want to die for a lost cause or to fight for a replacement worse than the Islamic State.
The Iraqi Security Forces face a fundamental disadvantage when battling the Islamic State: They want to live and their enemies want to die. This disadvantage is further compounded by a lack of confidence. If given the choice to die fighting in a losing battle or to flee and perhaps regroup later with better chances of victory, they will choose the latter.
An Anbar official placed the blame on the Iraqi government, telling CNN, “If 10% of the government’s promises had been implemented, Ramadi would still in our hands and the Islamic State wouldn’t dare to be anywhere near the city.”
Iraqi Sunnis are faced with a terrible choice. The Iranian-backed Shiite militias are often nicknamed “Shiite ISIS” because their crimes are comparable to ISIS but are less known by the West because they aren’t broadcasted. However, the Anbar Provincial Council is officially welcoming them now out of desperation and perhaps an awareness that their opposition will be ignored anyway.
The Shiite militias should be expected to mistreat the local Sunnis the second after the Islamic State is expelled or even during the fighting. Tribal support is far from unanimous. The son of the largest tribe’s leader is in the U.S. asking for support right now and bluntly warned that sending the Shiite militias into Anbar Province “will cause a civil war.”
The New York Times has noticed the change in American attitude towards the Shiite militias. Pentagon spokesperson Col. Steve Warren said, “As long as they’re controlled by the central Iraqi government, there’s a place for them.” Yet, only two months ago, Central Command Commander General Austin said, “I will not—and I hope we will never—coordinate or cooperate with Shiite militias.”
The U.S. must correct its strategy by sidelining Iranian-backed militias and terrorists, leveraging influence with the Iraqi government and significantly increasing assistance to the Anbar tribes, Kurds, Iraqi government and to the persecuted Christian minority that is forming its own self-defense force.
Recent history has shown that the Iraqi government will choose the U.S. over Iran if compelled.
In March, the U.S. withheld support to Iraqi forces fighting the Islamic State in Tikrit because of the involvement of Iranian-backed militias and the Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Iranian proxies stalled and could move no further, displaying the value of U.S. air support. The Iraqis chose America and the Iranians were removed from the battle. U.S. aid delivered the victory that the Iranians could not.
The Iraqis had been asking for U.S. for more help including possibly advisors on the ground since October 2013. By March 2014, the Iraqis were asking for airstrikes on the Islamic State. The Islamic State blitz into Iraq began in June.
The Iraqi ambassador complained that the U.S. had denied requests for help including Apache helicopter sales, thereby putting Iraq “in an uncomfortable position in seeking support from whoever is available on the ground.” He emphasized that the “U.S. is our strategic partner of choice.”
Iran opposed the return of U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq as advisors. The Iranian-backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr threatened to attack the advisors and two other Iranian-backed militias alsoforcefully opposed U.S. involvement. The Iraqi government went ahead anyway.
Even now, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is in Russia and talking to China and Iran about delivering arms that the U.S. refuses to provide.
The U.S. needs to give the Iraqi government a clear choice: Iran or us.
The Iraqi government should be put on notice. If it is willing to restrain the Shiite militias and work with us to disband them, then we will provide all necessary aid. We will help negotiate with the Sunni tribes so their local forces operate within a national framework.
If the Iraqi government chooses Iran, then we will cut our aid and redirect it towards our Sunni, Kurdish and Christian partners while maintaining contact with friendly Shiites. We will not act as the air force for Iranian proxies. If necessary, we will talk about a role for the forthcoming Arab force led by Egypt to replace yours.
It is positive news that the Obama Administration is reversing its stance and will directly help the Sunni tribes, but the anti- Islamic State strategy requires an anti-Iran strategy.
Raid on Iran
April 28, 2015Raid on Iran, Jerusalem Post, Harry Moskoff, April 28, 2015
The only question now is: when could an attack on Iran be carried out? At this point, Israel can’t afford NOT to make a strike, as the policy of the current nuclear negotiations with Iran has changed from prevention, to containment. Indeed, all have come to agree that if the military option isn’t utilized by either the US or Israel, a nuclear Iran is simply a fait accompli.
If a preventative strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is going to happen, it must be both before the P5+1 negotiating deadline of June 30th, and before the Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles are delivered and setup on Iranian soil. Indeed, if and when that eventuality comes into play, Israel may be forced to destroy that weapons convoy on route to Iran. I’m pretty sure this threat has already been issued.
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As a rule, I don’t usually get involved in war scenarios, but after seeing the Israeli Air Force (IAF) jets put on their brilliant display this week for Israel Independence Day, I was inspired. I was thinking: what if they just continued flying southwest? There’s an important point that I want to make here.
Sooner rather than later, Israel will be forced to make that raid. You know the one. It’s the BIG one. It will make the 1981 precision strike on Iraqi’s Osirak reactor, otherwise known as Operation Raid on the Sun, look like a walk in the park. Back then (just like now), when some argued that the attack would alienate both the United States and Europe, Ariel Sharon allegedly quipped “If I have a choice of being popular and dead or unpopular and alive, I choose being alive and unpopular.” Prime Minister Begin ultimately agreed and the rest of the cabinet fell in behind him. The only question now is: when could an attack on Iran be carried out? At this point, Israel can’t afford NOT to make a strike, as the policy of the current nuclear negotiations with Iran has changed from prevention, to containment. Indeed, all have come to agree that if the military option isn’t utilized by either the US or Israel, a nuclear Iran is simply a fait accompli.
If a preventative strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is going to happen, it must be both before the P5+1 negotiating deadline of June 30th, and before the Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles are delivered and setup on Iranian soil. Indeed, if and when that eventuality comes into play, Israel may be forced to destroy that weapons convoy on route to Iran. I’m pretty sure this threat has already been issued. Effectively, we’re looking at a window of opportunity of a little over 2 months to initiate an attack that could take many hours, if not days to carry out, with hundreds or even thousands of missile strikes per day. Simply put, if there is no attack now, Israel must prepare for the day after – a new, grim reality in the Middle East.
However, here’s an interesting point. If the arms shipment isn’t destroyed, there may be another answer to the S-300. Israel’s Defense Ministry sent a Letter of Request to Congress in 2003 asking for authorization to purchase “up to” 75 brand new, top of the line jet fighters that have significant new counter-missile capabilities. In 2010, it signed a deal with the US-based Lockheed-Martin aeronautical company for 19 F-35As, with the first few aircraft set to arrive in late 2016. The total cost of that deal was $2.75 billion, a spokesman for Lockheed-Martin said, out of which $475 million was for non-recurrent costs for the incorporation of upgraded Israeli technology. It’s interesting to note that the approximate cost of the aircrafts was (a staggering) $120 million. Each! These are stealth fighters with highly advanced radar, which will see its targets before it is seen. Armed with the intelligence of where the surface to air missile systems are located, the IAF will then take the necessary measures to first avoid the S-300 systems, then destroy them. What other choice is there – finding the Ark of the Covenant and using that, as in biblical times? True, the planes are insanely expensive, but obviously quite necessary!
On April 15 at Yad Vashem, and echoing his recent, now-famous address to Congress, PM Netanyahu said: “Even if we are forced to stand alone against Iran, we will not fear…” Well folks, I dare say that we have reached that point. Everyone knows by now that where the negotiations are concerned, the US no longer considers use of force in the cards, and quite the contrary, President Obama has indicated that even sanctions have become negotiable. People here in Israel feel that the State Dept. may even act AGAINST Israel if it unilaterally attempts a pre-emptive attack. Besides the obvious existential threat to Israel, one of the other problems is that Iran seeks to “dominate the region” (Netanyahu’s words), and impose a Khomeini-style revolution in the Middle East. We now see clearly that they are doing just that in places like Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and even here in Gaza. Whether Israel sees a right-wing government emerge in the coming weeks, or even a broad-based coalition with the Left, all agree at the end of the day that it’s just a matter of time before Iran breaches their side of an already bad deal, and action will need to be taken, whether backed by the US or not.
What most Israeli’s don’t realize is that once a breach in the agreement is discovered (publicly), there is simply no way the US will neutralize Iranian capabilities with a military strike. Obama won’t do it, and the reason why he won’t do it is because he is not prepared to cast and label Iran as an Enemy of the State. To him, those days are over and it doesn’t lie in synch with his doctrine. In fact, the US President apparently vetoed a potential Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities back in 2012. Is it so hard to see why? Back door negotiations were going on even then between the US and Iran, as Hillary Clinton recently admitted herself. It is crystal clear that the White House CAN forcibly bring the Iranian nuclear program to a halt, it simply chooses not to do so. Will this change after, let’s say – an Iranian nuclear test? Perhaps, but unlikely.
As such, practically speaking, can Israel attack Iran with any real success? Is it worth it? The following are some salient points to consider.
We know that Saudi Arabia has already given tacit permission for Israel to use its airspace to reach the Iranian military targets because as a Sunni Muslim state, they are considered as ‘infidels’ to Iran, who are Shiite Muslims. In fact, they have more to worry about than Israel does, and as a result of the framework agreement that was signed in Vienna, they are demanding the same rights to nuclear capabilities that Iran is apparently going to get. Credible sources state that Pakistan is now prepared to ship a nuclear package to the Saudis. As for Iran, it already has the ballistic missile capability that could hit Saudi Arabia with a warhead at the push of a button. And they know it. So does Jordan.
The truth is that Israel has sufficient nuclear and conventional power to destroy the Islamic Republic in one day in the event of any war. In this case though, we’re talking about a surprise attack (more or less). As mentioned above, Israel is believed to have a fully prepared plan to launch a strike, which by necessity, would likely involve some 80 planes, and perhaps up to several hundred aircraft according to some military experts. In reality, this has been in the planning for over 10 years. Israel possesses the advanced midair refueling capabilities required for carrying out sorties over multiple Iranian targets situated between 1,500 and 2,000 km away from home. Possible targets could include uranium-enrichment sites at Natanz and Qom, the uranium-conversion plant at Isfahan, and a heavy water reactor in Arak suspected of being used to pursue a plutonium-based nuclear arms program, as well as additional facilities. The mission would require the use of powerful, penetrating warheads, otherwise known as bunker-buster bombs, as well as possible repeated strikes to ensure success. According to a Newsweek article from September of last year, the US Congress signed and transferred 55 such bombs to Israel. Further, the attack would likely be coordinated with the assistance of Israeli intelligence satellites that could provide real time detailed images from the battle arena, as well as Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft. It could also involve the use of a fleet of giant Heron 2 drones, which are the size of 737 commercial airliners. The UAVs form the first line of defense against an expected Iranian counterstrike, involving the launch of long-range Shihab 3 missiles, or worse. These drones can reportedly reach Iran and hover over missile launch sites. Israel’s Arrow missile defense shield would undoubtedly also come into play to intercept missiles heading into Israeli airspace.
In terms of other forms of weaponeering capabilities, Israel maintains (at least) two elite special forces units dedicated to assisting with air strikes, one dedicated to laser target designation (Sayeret Shaldag/Unit 5101) and one to real time bomb damage assessment (Unit 5707). These units are extremely well-trained and could potentially be infiltrated to the target zone prior to attack. While it would be both difficult and risky to deploy these units inside Iran, they would be very useful in aiding the strike package, particularly in bad weather.
Obviously, such a strike would touch off conflict with Iran’s proxy in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, which is armed with thousands of rockets, as well as Hamas in Gaza, and possibly with Syria. The resulting chain of events could easily lead to a major regional war and long-term instability, so much so that some senior Israeli defense figures have reportedly been rejecting the idea of attacking Iran for years. Assuming that a military strike is issued in the near future, Israel cannot hope to destroy Iran’s entire nuclear infrastructure, as facilities are distributed across the country and there are simply too many sites to plan to attack them all. To have a reasonable chance of success, both in the mission and in the ultimate goal of rendering Iran’s nuclear program impotent, the target set must be narrowed to concentrate on the critical nodes in Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, which seems to be growing by the day!
The main focus of an imminent strike must be to target the Natanz facility first. Natanz is by far both the most difficult and most important target to destroy. The main enrichment facility apparently has two large (25,000-32,000 m2) halls located 8 to 23m underground and protected by multiple layers of concrete. The combination of large size and target hardening mean that only a very robust strike could hope to destroy or at least render unusable the centrifuges within. In order to ensure penetration of a target with these high levels of hardening, one technique is to use the bunker busters targeted on the same aimpoint but separated slightly in release time to ‘burrow’ into the target. What happens essentially, is that one bomb hits the crater made by the previous weapon, a technique contemplated by the U.S. Air Force in the first Gulf War. This takes advantage of the extremely high accuracy of bombs in combination with a penetrating warhead. The IAF appears to have purchased these with this technique in mind. In fact, Gen. Eitan Ben-Eliyahu, former commander of the IAF (and a participant in the Osirak strike), commented on this method of attacking hardened facilities in Jane’s Defense Weekly: “Even if one bomb would not suffice to penetrate, we could guide other bombs directly to the hole created by the previous ones and eventually destroy any target.”
Has the point been made yet? This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg on Israel’s military capability, and there is no doubt that the IAF can pull off an attack and get the job done. And let’s not forget about our Dolphins (nuclear subs) in the Gulf. The factor that complicates matters so much is that, unlike in 1981 where the mission was so secret that the pilots themselves only learned of their target the day before, the US government must be notified before an attack of this magnitude.
On that note, the Obama administration has been exerting great pressure in the back halls for some time now in order to convince (even by means of veiled threats to withhold their veto power in the UN), their Israeli counterparts to refrain from issuing an attack order on Iran. The only problem is that if Israel chooses again to wait it out and not attack, the world is bound to lie in dread of a new, powerful Iranian nuclear regime – to shake under their threat, similar to the way the world was just 70 years ago regarding the appeasement of Germany. Saudi Arabia will then look to the US for advice, and to provide an umbrella defense mechanism. Needless to say, a third world war might just emerge (heaven forbid). This scenario is actually already depicted in the Zohar, the Midrash and other traditional Jewish texts in reference to the future world war of ‘Gog and Magog.’ Let’s pray it doesn’t come to that! In our lifetimes, or our offspring.
What bothers me the most right now though, is that even as the West is negotiating with a fanatical, expansionist Islamic regime in those posh Viennese boardrooms, the people on Tehran’s streets are chanting: “Death to the US; death to Israel” (in that order). The recent military parade echoed the same rhetoric. HELLO…… isn’t someone paying attention over there? This is the reason why Israel shouldn’t just flex its military muscles for display to the Mullahs. It must attack. And it must attack now. This is precisely what the IDF was created for! Ben Gurion knew it. Menachem Begin knew it, and now Netanyahu knows it too. At this juncture in time, Iran cannot be trusted, and we know this to be an undeniable and unfortunately, well proven fact. Especially since, as of last week, the world discovered that Iran’s intent to destroy Israel is “non-negotiable.” I believe that the citizens living in Israel (like myself) should, and will, accept the inevitable consequences that come with protecting our beautiful country.
A raid on Iran? My point here is: The best defense is a good offense.
The U.S. Is Providing Air Cover for Ethnic Cleansing in Iraq
March 29, 2015The U.S. Is Providing Air Cover for Ethnic Cleansing in Iraq, Foreign Policy Magazine, ,
(Don’t worry! Be Happy! Obama is in charge so everything will come up roses for sure.
Just ask Obama, the all-wise, all-knowing. He will set it right, as soon as Iran uses the nukes she deserves. — DM)
American warplanes have begun bombing the Islamic State-held Iraqi city of Tikrit in order to bail out the embattled, stalled ground campaign launched by Baghdad and Tehran two weeks ago. This operation, billed as “revenge” for the Islamic State (IS) massacre of 1,700 Shiite soldiers at Camp Speicher last June, was launched without any consultation with Washington and was meant to be over by now, three weeks after much triumphalism by the Iraqi government about how swiftly the terrorist redoubt in Saddam Hussein’s hometown was going to be retaken.
U.S. officials have variously estimated that either 23,000 or 30,000 “pro-government” forces were marshaled for the job, of which only slender minority were actual Iraqi soldiers. The rest consisted of a consortium of Shiite militia groups operating under the banner of Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Population Mobilization Units (PMU), which was assembled in answer to afatwah issued by Iraq’s revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani in June 2014 following ISIS’s blitzkrieg through northern Iraq. To give you a sense of the force disparity, the PMUs are said to command 120,000 fighters, whereas the Iraqi Army has only got 48,000 troops.
Against this impressive array of paramilitaries, a mere 400 to 1,000 IS fighters have managed to hold their ground in Tikrit, driving major combat operations to a halt. This is because the Islamic State is resorting to exactly the kinds of lethal insurgency tactics which al Qaeda in Iraq (its earlier incarnation) used against the more professional and better-equipped U.S. forces. BuzzFeed’s Mike Giglio has ably documented the extent to which IS has relied upon improvised explosive devices, and just how sophisticated these have been. Even skilled explosive ordnance disposal teams — many guided by Iranian specialists — are being ripped apart by what one termed the “hidden enemy” in Tikrit.
Because IS controls hundreds of square miles of terrain in Iraq, it has an unknown number of bomb manufacturing plants, and because it knows the terrain so well, it’s been able to booby-trap houses and roads. Even Shiite prayer beads left lying on the ground are thought to be rigged to explosives. One Kurdish official told Giglio that the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters alone have “defused or detonated more than 6,000 IEDs along their 650-mile front with ISIS since the war began in August.”
The toll this has taken on the militias is extraordinary. Cemetery workers in Najaf told the Washington Post that as many as 60 corpses are arriving per day. Former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Derek Harvey tweeted last week that an Iraqi Shiite source told him the number of militia war dead from the Tikrit offensive so far may be as high as 6,000. So the militias’ triumphalism, much of it no doubt manufactured by Iran’s propaganda machine, proved to be misplaced. Jeffrey White, another former DIA analyst now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes “there’s a failure of will on the part of the militias and government forces. They just didn’t have the sufficient desire and determination to take the fight forward given the casualties they’ve been sustaining.”
So now, the same Iraqi government which earlier dismissed the need for U.S. airpower had to put in an eleventh-hour request for it, lest an easy victory descend into embarrassing folly. But the past few months ought to have shown that even indirectly relying on Iranian agents to conduct a credible ground war against Sunni extremists was always a lousy idea for three reasons: those agents hate the United States and have threatened to attack its interest in Iraq; they’re guilty of IS-style atrocities themselves; and they’re lousy at fighting an entrenched jihadist insurgency.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey told Congress on March 3: “What we are watching carefully is whether the militias — they call themselves the popular mobilization forces — whether when they recapture lost territory, whether they engage in acts of retribution and ethnic cleansing.” He needn’t watch any longer. They are engaging in exactly that.
The crimes of war
On March 10, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a comprehensive study of human rights violations committed by both IS and pro-Iraqi forces. The Islamic State, OHCHR concluded, has likely committed genocide against the Yazidis, a ethno-religious minority in Iraq, in a catalogue of war crimes and crimes against humanity that include gang-rape and sexual slavery. But OHCHR’s language is equally unambiguous in condemning the other side on the battlefield: “Throughout the summer of 2014,” the report noted, “[PMUs], other volunteers and [Shiite] militia moved from their southern heartlands towards [Islamic State]-controlled areas in central and northern Iraq. While their military campaign against the group gained ground, the militias seem to operate with total impunity, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.” [Italics added.]
Sunni villages in Amerli and Suleiman Bek, in the Salah ad-Din province, have been looted or destroyed by militiamen operating on the specious assumption that all inhabitants once ruled by IS must be IS sympathizers or collaborators. Human Rights Watch has also lately discovered that the “liberation” of Amerli last October — another PMU/Iranian-led endeavor, only this one abetted by U.S. airstrikes in the early stages — was characterized by wide-scale abuses including the looting and burning of homes and business of Sunni residents of villages surrounding Amerli. The apparent aim was ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch concluded, from witness accounts, that “building destruction in at least 47 predominantly Sunni villages was methodical and driven by revenge and intended to alter the demographic composition of Iraq’s traditionally diverse provinces of Salah al-Din and Kirkuk.”
Sunnis weren’t the only demographic subjected to collective punishment. A 21-year-old Shiite Turkmen from the Yengija village was “burned with cigarettes and tied to a ceiling fan” by militants of Saraya Tala’a al-Khorasani, another Iran-backed militia. He told Human Rights Watch: “They kept saying, ‘You are ISIS,’ and I kept denying it. They were beating me randomly on my face, head, shoulders using water pipes and the butts of their weapons…. They went to have lunch and then came back and beat us for an hour and half. Later that night they asked me if I was Shia or Sunni. I told them I was Shia Turkoman and they ordered me to prove it by praying the Shia way…. They kept me for nine days.”
This account tracks with a mountain of social media-propagated video and photographic evidence showing that Iraq’s Shiite militias are behaving rather like the Islamic State — beheading and torturing people they assail as quislings, and then exhibiting these atrocities as a means of recruitment. More worrying, a six-month investigation by ABC News has found that U.S.-trained Iraqi Security Force personnel are also guilty of anti-Sunni pogroms, with officers from Iraq’s Special Forces shown in one video accusing an unarmed teenaged boy of being a shooter (a charge the boy denies) before opening fire on him.
Looking the other way
The Obama administration’s counterterrorism-driven policy for the Middle East, and a quietly pursued diplomatic reconciliation with Iran, has resulted in America’s diminishment of grave war crimes committed by Iran’s clients and proxies, and the problem is hardly just confined to Iraq. In Syria, for instance, the National Defense Force, a conglomerate of militias trained and equipped by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC) — a U.S.-designated terrorist entity — has been accused by the Syrian Network for Human Rights and the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights, of “[burning] at least 81 people to death, including 46 civilians; 18 children, 7 women, and 35 of the armed opposition fighters,” along with other pro-Assad forces. The State Department has offered condolences to Iran’s President Hasan Rouhani on the death of his mother; to date, it has not said a word about the immolation of these Syrians at the hands of a Quds Force-built guerrilla army.
All of which raises the question: Does the United States have a “common interest,” as Secretary of State John Kerry phrased it, with a regime in Tehran whose proxies are currently burning people alive in their houses, playing soccer with severed human heads, and ethnically cleansing and razing whole villages to the ground?
It really ought to surprise no one in the U.S. government that what amounts to an Iranian occupation of the Levant and Mesopotamia would lead to an increase in jihadist bloodletting. Dempsey has less of an excuse than most. A four-star general, he formerly commanded the First Armored Division in Baghdad, which in 2004 was the unit redirected, as it was about to go home, to fight the Shiite militias who had taken over Karbala and other southern cities, so he would have seen the precursor to the PMUs in action. Yet somehow managed to brief legislators that the Islamic Republic’s role in Iraq might yet prove “positive” — provided, that is, it didn’t lead to an uptick in sectarianism. This is like arguing that death wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t result in being dead. It did not take much, however, for the scales to fall from Dempsey’s eyes. He took a helicopter tour of Baghdad last week and noticedthe “plethora of flags, only one of which happens to be the Iraqi flag,” The rest, he told reporters to evident dismay, belonged to Shiite militias. (He might have also added that posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are now omnipresent in the Iraqi capital where ones of Saddam Hussein used to be.)
Everyone from Gen. David Petraeus to Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani is acknowledging the obvious: that Shiite militias pose more of a long-term threat to the stability of Iraq than does the Islamic State. Even Ayatollah Sistani has made noises lately about the rampant abuses committed by the “volunteers” he assembled through a religious edict.
While it is true that most Iraqis do not wish to live in a state of vassalage to Iran, it also true that most of the “units” in the PMUs are well-known subsidiaries of the Quds Force. “The indoctrination they’ve been getting is anti-American, Khomeinist ideology,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militias and author of a comprehensive survey of them put out by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Sectarianism has been promoted whether we like it or not.”
According to Chris Harmer, a former U.S. Naval officer and now an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, there really is no dressing up who the supposed “good guys” in Iraq now are. “They killed hundreds of Americans during the war,” Harmer said. “These are not ‘affiliated’ organizations — they are same guys, the same organizations. And can you find me anybody stupid enough to say that what Iran wants is a stable, unified, secular, non-sectarian Iraq?”
The enemies of our enemy are our enemy
Indeed, quite apart from having American blood on their hands and American interests furthest from their mind, Shiite militias — following Tehran’s favorite playbook — have also taken to conspiratorially blaming the United States for inventing and militarily supporting the Islamic State, while decrying any American anti-IS involvement in Iraq. Take, for instance, the Badr Corps, headed by Hadi al-Amiri, the commander of Hashd al-Shaabi, and a man infamous for “using a power drill to pierce the skulls of his adversaries,” or so the State Department found in a 2009 cable to Washington, which also alleged that al-Amiri “may have personally ordered attacks on up to 2,000 Sunnis.” (Despite this grim record, al-Amiri was invited to the Obama White House in 2011 when he was Iraq’s transportation minister.)
Lately al-Amiri taken to both boasting that Stuart Jones, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, personally offered him close air support, whilereprehending those Iraqis who “kiss the hands of the Americans and get nothing in return.” But when it comes to Tehran, he’s full of praise for the “unconditional” support his country has received. Now al-Amiri has found a more modest tongue. He told the Guardian’s Martin Chulov on March 26: “We did not ask for [U.S. airstrikes on Tikrit] and we have no direct contact with the Americans. From what I understand, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi made the request. However, we respect his decision.”
Kataeb Hezbollah may be the only Iraqi Shiite militia in Iraq to be designated a terrorist entity by the United States, but that hasn’t stopped it from driving around in Abrams tanks, Humvees, armored personnel carriers, MRAPs, and toting M4 and M16 rifles — all the accidental largesse of Uncle Sam, which has sent $1 billion in military equipment to Baghdad, but has no oversight as to which actors, foreign or domestic, ultimately receive what. An abundance of U.S. weapons hasn’t dissuaded Kataeb Hezbollah from openly inciting violence against the American-led coalition to destroy the Islamic State.
“Recently we had them accusing the United States of supplying [IS] via helicopters,” said Smyth. “Kataeb Hezbollah then came out with a bullshit article claiming that they shot down a British cargo plane carrying arms to [IS]. They also said they were going to move antiaircraft missile batteries in Anbar and north of Baghdad to counter U.S. airdrops to [IS]. Whenever they sense too much of a U.S. influence in Iraq, they start to threaten American soldiers.” Kataeb Hezbollah, it bears mentioning, is headed by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iranian spy who is widely believed to have planned the bombings of both the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in the 1980s. There’s even a photograph of him holding up a Kuwaiti newspaper fingering him for this act of international terrorism. Kataeb Hezbollah has also been caught on video playing bongos with severed human heads.
Another prominent Shiite militia is Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, which in 2007 set an ambush which killed 5 U.S. servicemen in Karbala. It, too, now also happily motors around Iraq in U.S. armored vehicles, some of them thought to have been stolen from the U.S. consulate in Basra. One unnamed U.S. official told Al Jazeera that Asaib was most recently responsible for burning down homes in Albu Ajil, a village near Tikrit in retaliation for massacres carried out by the Islamic State. It has also been implicated in the abduction and murder of Sheik Qassem Sweidan al-Janabi, one of the Sunni tribal leaders who worked cheek-by-jowl with U.S. forces in fighting al Qaeda in Iraq during the so-called Awakening period.
Remarkably, the demagogic Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, once the bane of U.S. forces in Baghdad, condemned al-Janabi’s murder — in language more severe than anything contrived by the U.S. State Department’s Marie Harf or Jennifer Psaki. “Did not I tell you that Iraq will suffer from the brazen militias?” al-Sadr was quoted as saying. “Did I tell you that the army must handle the reins?” Al-Sadr demanded that Shiite head-loppers be punished and actually backed up his rhetoric with action, suspending the participation of his own al-Salam Brigades and al-Yaom ak-Mawood military in ongoing operations. (He unsuspended these militias a week ago to help with the battle in Tikrit, but so far, because of the frozen nature of the ground campaign, none of the Sadrists have seen any real action.)
Assad’s friends in Iraq want to kill Americans
The Basij-ization of Iraq of was both inevitable, given the defunct and corrupted state of the U.S.-trained military, and Iran’s outsize influence in Baghdad even before ISIS conquered a third of the country. “When the Iraqi Army was destroyed last July, this was a gift to Iran to build up these militias,” Gen. Najim Jibouri, the former mayor and police chief of Tal Afar, a crucial Iraqi border town now held by the Islamic State, said in a recent interview. “A few days ago, Khaled al-Obaidi, Iraq’s minister of defense, went to Tikrit, but the militias wouldn’t allow him to enter. He had to stay in Samarra.”
All of which makes risible U.S. officials’ continued emphasis that there is no direct American coordination with Iran or its proxies. Gen. James Terry, the U.S. commander of the coalition, claims that the “ongoing Iraqi and coalition air strikes are setting the conditions for offensive action to be conducted by Iraqi forces currently surrounding Tikrit. Iraqi security forces supported by the coalition will continue to gain territory.”
One of the authors personally witnessed in Baghdad how the IRGC targets make their way into the U.S. targeting queue. Shiite militia commanders pass Quds Force-selected targets to Badr-affiliated Iraqi Security Force commanders on the ground (many of whom are, in fact, agents of the militias), who then pass them on as legitimate targets to Iraq’s Defense Ministry representatives in the Joint Operations Centers where U.S. advisors then put those targets into a queue for aerial sorties. This is the pattern of target development that U.S. forces tried to stop during the American occupation of Iraq — when there was actually a military strategy for countering Iranian influence in the country.
But this nefarious chain of putting intelligence into action — and making the United States do the dirty work — has been resurrected. Soleimani knows it, al-Muhandis knows it, al-Amiri and his Badr agents in the Iraq Security Forces know it — so, too, should the Pentagon, whatever claims to the contrary it puts out. Iranian intelligence operatives are now America’s eyes on the ground.
What does this mean for Tikrit? The Islamic State will no doubt be flushed from the city or bombed to death eventually, but it will be a tactical loss for IS, not a strategic one. They’ll still have Mosul and most of Anbar province. The Institute for the Study of War’s Chris Harmer notes that this will have a direct bearing on bigger fights ahead. “These militiamen will say, ‘This is how badly we got beat up in Tikrit, who wants to volunteer to storm that castle in Mosul?’”
Even if Iran’s proxies do end up massing on Mosul, they’ll remain the ultimate occupying force in post-Islamic State Tikrit. The Washington Post’s Loveday Morris tweeted on March 26 that Kataeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq have now “suspended” their operations in the city, no doubt out of a desire to not appear to be coordinating with the hated United States. But once the Pentagon declares victory, the militias will no doubt try to hijack it and move right in to serve as the occupying force in Tikrit.
Despite reports on Thursday that three Shiite militias were “withdrawing” from operations in objection to U.S. airstrikes, now the news has come that they’ve called off their boycott, largely owing to another edict by Ayatollah Sistani. Even an alleged accidental hit by U.S. warplanes on Asaib Ahl al-Haq barely raised that militia’s pique, according to the New York Times. A Badr Corps representative also told the newspaper, “We haven’t retreated from our positions near Tikrit.” Still, others have indicated that they’re not going to let a good turn go unpunished and intend to strike at American soldiers in Iraq.
Akram al-Kabi, the leader of the Al Nujabaa Brigade, which has also fought with the Assad regime in Syria, has said: “We are staying in Tikrit, we are not leaving and we are going to target the American led coalition in Tikrit and their creation, ISIS.” Today, one of al-Kabi’s spokesmen reiterated thatthreat. Al-Kabi was once a deputy in Asaib Ahl al-Haq and was associatedwith that militia’s attacks against U.S. and British troops in 2008-2011, including an incident in which British contractors were abducted from the Iraqi Finance Ministry and later murdered. CENTCOM commander Gen. Lloyd Austin’s nevertheless briefed the Senate on Thursday with a straight face that “[c]urrently, there are no [Shiite] militia and as reported by the Iraqis today, no [PMU] in that area as well.” This is either propaganda or sheer ignorance about what is transpiring in Austin’s theatre of operations. The Guardian’s Chulov, who just returned from Tikrit, confirmed to one of the authors, in fact, that both al-Amiri and al-Muhandis were indeed in the center of the city on March 26.
Recrimination and resentment by these militias is no light matter. According to Politico, U.S. military planners are now worried that any decision to engage or isolate the Assad regime in Syria will encourage Iran or its cut-outs to attack the some 3,000 U.S. military trainers currently stationed in Iraq. It’s hard to tell where genuine concern bleeds into further excuse-making on the part of an Obama administration that has shown no intention of engaging or isolating the Assad regime, which is responsible for the vast majority of war dead and war crimes in Syria. Regardless, the result is the same: Washington is now behaving as if it needs Tehran’s permission to pursue its own anti-IS strategy, if it can even be called that.
You call this a plan?
“What strategy?” asks Chris Harmer. “We have only consequentially intervened in one part in Syria — Kobani. What’s the plan for countering [the Islamic State] there? Training 5,000 Syrian rebels per year. That is laughable when you consider the 200,000 dead from four years of attritional warfare, the four million refugees, and slow-motion destruction of the country. Five thousand doesn’t even get you into the ballgame. You have to have a significant portion of the population on your side. Moderate Syrians should be on our side. They’re saying the Americans are unreliable, they’re not on our side. This is why the moderate opposition has collapsed and the beneficiaries of that collapse have been al Qaeda, the Islamic State and Assad.”
The loss of confidence in the United States by moderate Sunnis in Syria is mirrored in Iraq. New polling data has confirmed that most Mosulawis, for instance, welcomed IS back into Iraq’s second city not out of ideological sympathy for the terror group, but out of deep-seated political grievances with the Iraqi government. Yet the Obama administration is doing next to nothing to redress these grievances. The Anbar tribal leader Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, whose charismatic brother was notoriously gunned down by al Qaeda just days after meeting with President George W. Bush in Baghdad in 2007, simply could not get a meeting with any significant official in White House during a 10-day tour of Washington last February. Vice President Joe Biden was good enough to drop in on a lesser confab, mainly to smile and pat them on the head and tell them to work constructively with the new government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
“Many of the people in Mosul will stand with [the Islamic State] if Shiite militias invade,” said Gen. Najim Jibouri. “Eighty percent of the population is does not like [IS], but if the militias are involved — 80 percent will stand very strong with [IS]. I told the Americans before, the image now is not like it was in 2003. Now the Sunni people want American forces. They will throw the flowers on them now, because the battle now is not between them and the United States and [IS], it’s between the Sunnis and Iran.” Yet far too many Sunnis still see the United States as aligned with Iran against them, Jibouri said.
Whether or not a nuclear agreement with Iran gets signed in Lausanne this weekend, whether or not Obama inaugurates a perestroika with Tehran as a result, the unshakable truth is that most of Iraq looks in the long term to remain a satrapy of the mullahs. This will only lead to further sectarian violence and civil war. “I met with almost two dozen national leaders in Iraq last week,” Ali Khedery, the longest consecutively serving U.S. diplomat in the Green Zone, told us. “I heard from Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish officials and virtually all of them told me that the real prime minster of the country is Qasem Soleimani and his deputy is Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.”
Iran gathers power in Iraq as US further sidelined
March 18, 2015Iran gathers power in Iraq as US further sidelined, Al-Monitor, Mohammed A. Salih, March 17, 2015
(The Iraqi – Iranian effort to retake Tikrit has been “stalled” for several days. — DM)
SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq — While the United States has invested trillions of dollars and thousands of lives since 2003 to bring Iraq into its orbit, today it is Iran that appears to have achieved that goal, albeit with far less costs in terms of money and lives, observers and analysts of Iraqi affairs agree.
There appears to be no better demonstration of Iran’s success in having firmly established its hegemony across Iraq than in the current operation to retake the Sunni-dominated province of Salahuddin in central Iraq. The operation to push out Islamic State (IS) militants from Tikrit and its surrounding areas in Salahuddin is being carried out by a ragtag force of Shiite Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), the Iraqi army and some local Sunni tribes.
The largest military campaign so far against IS, the Salahuddin operation has been noted for the heavy involvement of Iranian military advisers and the conspicuous absence of the US military. While the United States has in the past aided similar operations by the Iraqi military and PMUs in areas such as Amerli and Baiji, no US warplanes are now dropping bombs in Salahuddin.
“The Iranians have checkmated the Americans, and I think the Americans now understand this,” Hayder al-Khoei, an Iraq expert at the London-based Chatham House, told Al-Monitor. “What’s interesting about the Salahuddin operation is that the Iraqis and the Iranians are proving to Americans: We don’t need your airstrikes.”
When IS swept large parts of northern and central Iraq in June, the jihadist group appeared unstoppable. During a forum last week in Sulaimaniyah, a city in Iraqi Kurdistan, Brett McGurk, US deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, admitted that a few days after IS’ onslaught in mid-June, his government’s assessment was that Baghdad might fall within 72 hours.
“Iran proved, despite its difficult economic conditions, that it is prepared … and stood by us in any way it could to defend our country and our Islam and common beliefs, and by that I don’t mean the Shiite sect but the genuine human values that govern in this region,” said Hussein al-Shahristani, Iraq’s minister of higher education and a powerful Shiite politician, during the forum. “Iraqis will not forget this favor.”
Iraqi leaders say Iran has provided around $10 billion worth of weaponry to their forces. Iranian military advisers have also not been shy to advertise their role in the battle to retake the key city of Tikrit, the hometown of their former No. 1 enemy, former leader Saddam Hussein.
Gen. Qasem Soleimani, head of the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) elite Quds Force, has made no secret of his pivotal role on the front lines of Salahuddin. He is said to have been deeply involved in planning and executing the current battle.
Many of the major Shiite armed groups such as the Badr Brigades, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Hezbollah are known to have been founded, trained and funded by the IRGC. It’s these forces that play the critical role in pushing back IS jihadists, according to media reports.
US military officials have expressed their concerns over Iran’s strong role in Salahuddin, fearing this could further alienate Sunni Arabs and Washington’s efforts to get them onboard to fight against IS. Amid all this, many observers are asking whether the United States was even invited to join the Salahuddin campaign.
“The Iranians and their Iraqi proxies wanted to demonstrate their power and that they can fight in any battlefield, whether it is in the … mixed sectarian areas or in Sunni-only areas such as the Tigris River Valley [in Salahuddin],” Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy specialized in the military affairs of Iraq and Iran, told Al-Monitor.
The US absence in the Salahuddin theater comes despite Washington’s attempts to coordinate the “liberation” of Sunni areas from IS. A date was even announced by Pentagon officials for an operation to retake Mosul from IS. But by conducting the Salahuddin operation, Shiite paramilitary groups and their Iranian backers sent a message of their own.
“[Iran and Shiite forces] are the most significant partners to the Iraqi state. They planned this operation to ensure they would get [to Tikrit] first, before the Americans,” Knights added. “It’s a big propaganda victory for the PMUs.”
Knights said that the operation was initially planned without Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s involvement. Official Iraqi army units were added only later, when Abadi got wind of the planning for the operation. Around 20,000 Shiite forces and 3,000 Iraqi soldiers are taking part in the Salahuddin assault, according to top US Gen. Martin Dempsey.
If the operation succeeds, most of the credit will go to PMU leaders such as Hadi al-Ameri and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Quds Force Cmdr. Soleimani, Knights said.
The emergence of IS appears to have further consolidated Iranian clout in Iraq, as Iran’s generals and sponsored militias have taken the lead in fighting off IS in areas the jihadist group seized from the Iraqi army last summer.
Even though many believe much of the US arms assistance for Iraq ends up in the hands of the pro-Iranian Shiite paramilitary groups, these forces make little secret of their disdain for the United States, often peddling conspiracies that the United States and other countries deliver military aid to IS.
While Iran has jockeyed for influence in Iraq since 2003, the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in late 2011 paved the way for a stronger Iranian role in Iraq. The Syrian crisis next door brought Tehran and Baghdad even closer together as both sides shared an interest in saving President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and preventing the rise of a Sunni-dominated order there.
Now, as Iraq continues to slide even further into Iran’s hemisphere of influence, many in Washington are questioning US arms deliveries to Baghdad. Concerns about military aid to Iraq have been amplified due to gross human rights violations committed by Shiite PMUs and Iraqi troops.
Kenneth Pollack, an expert on Middle East politics and military affairs with the Washington-based Brookings Institution, believes the United States should continue a strong relationship with Baghdad.
“I think the Americans drawing back will be the worst thing to do. That will drive the government in Baghdad even more deeply into the arms of the Iranians,” Pollack told Al-Monitor. “If Iraq is going to move to a place where Iran has less influence, it’s going to take a long time.”
Exclusive: ISIS Gaining Ground in Syria, Despite U.S. Strikes
January 15, 2015Exclusive: ISIS Gaining Ground in Syria, Despite U.S. Strikes, The Daily Beast, January 15, 2015
Hosam Katan/Reuters
American jets are pounding Syria. But ISIS is taking key terrain—and putting more and more people under its black banners.
ISIS continues to gain substantial ground in Syria, despite nearly 800 airstrikes in the American-led campaign to break its grip there.At least one-third of the country’s territory is now under ISIS influence, with recent gains in rural areas that can serve as a conduit to major cities that the so-called Islamic State hopes to eventually claim as part of its caliphate. Meanwhile, the Islamic extremist group does not appear to have suffered any major ground losses since the strikes began. The result is a net ground gain for ISIS, according to information compiled by two groups with on-the-ground sources.In Syria, ISIS “has not any lost any key terrain,” Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War who studies the Syrian conflict, explained to The Daily Beast.Even U.S. military officials privately conceded to The Daily Beast that ISIS has gained ground in some areas, even as the Pentagon claims its seized territory elsewhere, largely around the northern city of Kobani. That’s been the focus of the U.S.-led campaign, and ISIS has not been able to take the town, despite its best efforts.Other than that, they are short on specifics.
Click to Enlarge (Coalition For a Democratic Syria)
“Yes, they have gained some ground. But we have stopped their momentum,” one Pentagon official told The Daily Beast.
A map developed by the Coalition for a Democratic Syria (CDS), a Syrian-American opposition umbrella group, shows that ISIS has nearly doubled the amount of territory it controls since airstrikes began last year.
“Assessing the map, ISIS has almost doubled its territorial control in Syria. But more importantly, the number of people who now live under ISIS control has also increased substantially,” CDS political adviser Mouaz Moustafa said.
With the fall of that much territory into ISIS hands, Syrians who once lived in ungoverned or rebel held areas are now under ISIS’s grip. Of course, in an irregular war like this one, control of people is far more important than control of territory. In that regard, too, things appear to be going in the wrong direction.
In the first two months following American airstrikes, about a million Syrians who had previously lived in areas controlled by moderates now lived in areas controlled by extremist groups al Nusra or ISIS, according to CDS, citing conversations with European diplomats who support the Syrian opposition.
The area of ISIS’s expansion includes large segments of the Homs Desert, which begins far south of the contested northern city of Aleppo. It stretches below the presumed capital of ISIS in Syria, Raqqa, and all the way to the Iraqi border. It is largely rural and not an area that ISIS has had to fight for. Rather the group took control of uncontested parts of the countryside while skirting key regime strongholds in the area, Cafarella said.
But that does not mean that land is not valuable to ISIS. That newly acquired terrain allows ISIS troops to target and threaten more valuable areas, Cafarella said.
Since the U.S. campaign began in August, “there are little buds of ISIS control in eastern Homs, al Qalamoun [which borders northern Lebanon], and southern Damascus that do appear to be growing because of that freedom of operation that can connect those western cells to key ISIS terrains in Raqqa and Deir ez Zour” in northern and eastern Syria.
Moustafa, the CDS political adviser, blamed ISIS territorial gains on a lack of “strategic coordination between coalition strikes and moderate forces inside Syria, meaning that the Free Syrian Army and aligned groups cannot use the strikes to retake territory.” Further, Moustafa told The Daily Beast, coalition strikes have given other extremist groups sympathy for ISIS.
One frustration of the Syrian opposition groups is that the bombing campaign has been focused at the heart of ISIS controlled territory, rather than at the front lines, where ISIS territorial gains could be pushed back.
“The coalition strikes seem similar to drone campaigns in Yemen or Pakistan, targeting only leadership. The front-line strength of ISIS has undoubtedly increased even as some of these targeted strikes take out mid-level individual leaders,” Moustafa said.
As of Sunday, the U.S. and its coalition partners had conducted 790 airstrikes in Syria, according to Pentagon statistics. In all, the U.S. has spent $1.2 billion on its campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
In its public comments, the U.S. military has said repeatedly the effort against ISIS is on the right track. However it often does this by conflating its war in Iraq and Syria. Ask a question about what is happening in Syria, and U.S. officials will stress that ISIS has not gained ground in Iraq. Ask if the U.S. effort is working in Syria, and the military often points to the fact that ISIS has failed to take control of Kobani.
During a Jan. 6 press briefing, for example, when a reporter asked “where ISIS’s relative strength is right now,” Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby replied by talking exclusively about the U.S. effort in Iraq, naming cities were the military believed ISIS’s momentum has been “halted.”
When the reporter pressed for an answer on what was happening in Syria, Kirby struggled, saying, “I couldn’t give you a—a specific point at which, you know, we believe, well geez, we’ve halted their momentum. It—it’s come slowly, in various stages. But I think it’s safe to say that over the last three to four weeks, we—we’ve been confident that that momentum has largely been blunted.”
On Friday, Kirby proclaimed that ISIS had lost 700 square kilometers since the campaign began—over half the size of New York City or about four times the size of the District of Columbia. But the Pentagon spokesman could not say what percentage that area marked of total ISIS-controlled land. Nor could he say if that loss was in Iraq, Syria, or combined in both nations. As Kirby asserted: “I’m frankly not sure how relevant that is. I mean, it’s—they have less ground now than they did before. They’re trying to defend what ground that they have. They’re not going on the offense much, and they’re really trying to preserve their own oxygen.”
Click to Enlarge (Coalition For a Democratic Syria)
The American military has not been able to take full advantage of the difficulties ISIS is facing. A worldwide drop in oil prices threatens the recently declared state’s ability to raise revenue, while declining standards in public services, distribution of aid, and provision of electricity threaten to undercut the group’s support across the territories it controls. ISIS has also not been able to follow through on its military quest to challenge the Iraqi government all the way to Baghdad.
The U.S. military stressed it is waging an “Iraq first” war, that is focused on eliminating ISIS from that country first. There, the U.S. can turn to Iraqi troops on the ground to assess its efforts. But there is no equivalent resource on the ground in Syria. Perhaps because of that, the U.S. military has offered a far more detailed assessment of the air campaign in Iraq than the one in Syria.
The Combined Joint Task Force in charge of the American air campaign refused to answer a Daily Beast query about ISIS gains in Syria, even as it striking targets there. U.S. Central Command replied, “As a matter of policy we do not discuss intelligence issues.”
Information on the maps:
The maps provided by the Coalition for a Democratic Syria show the areas controlled by moderate Syrian rebels, the Syrian regime, ISIS, Syrian al Qaeda affiliate al Nusra, as well as territories contested by these groups. The maps were developed by a field team from the Coalition for a Democratic Syria (CDS), an umbrella group of Syrian American organizations. The maps were sourced through on-the-ground networks including civilian councils, humanitarian organizations, armed actors, and media monitoring of independent Syrian channels.
Iran Is Basically Running The Iraqi Government’s Air War Against ISIS
December 17, 2014Iran Is Basically Running The Iraqi Government’s Air War Against ISIS, Business Insider, Joel Wing, December 16, 2014
Iran Air Force F 4 Phantom II
Tehran is now considered one of the main defenders of the country and Iraqi politicians regularly praise its help and give it cover for its operations. It has also garnered popular support as well amongst some Iraqis.
This will all go a long way to make sure that Iran maintains its power within the country after the war is over.
***********
In November 2014 an Iranian jet was filmed carrying out a bombing mission in Iraq’s Diyala province. Iran was already known to have mobilized its militia allies, sent in advisers and military equipment, and brought in Lebanon’s Hezbollah to help Baghdad.
General Qasim Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, is all over social media with pictures showing him providing leadership to Iraqi forces.
Sending in air support seemed like the next natural step for Iran’s strategy in Iraq.
Iranian planes supported an Iraqi military operation to retake two villages from the Islamic State (ISF) in Diyala. In the middle of November Iraqi Security Forces, militias, and the peshmerga started a campaign to retake Jalawla and Sadiya in northeast Diyala, which was completed on November 23.
During that period Al Jazeera filmed an Iranian F-4 Phantom jet flying over the area. According to an Iranian military expert, Tehran was carrying out air missions there from November 18-23 using F-5 and F-4 jets as well as UAVs.
The planes were said to be flying out of Kermanshah air base in Iran. An Iranian politician was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying that Tehran considered the Sadiya and Jalawla area a buffer zone because it is close to the border, thus explaining Iranian intervention there.
This was the first hard evidence that Iran had committed air assets to the fight in Iraq. But they had been there for some time and still continue to operate.
Iranian air power was supposedly part of a security agreement between Iraq and Iran. After the fall of Mosul Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki allegedly signed a deal with Tehran to provide military assistance to the Iraqi forces, including through air assets.
By the end of June there were the first reports of Iranian drones based out of Baghdad flying over Iraq to collect intelligence. In July several Su-25 fighter-bombers were delivered to Iraq from Russia. But that included planes from Iran as well.
That same month an Iranian Revolutionary Guards pilot named Shojat Almdari was killed in the Samarra area of Salahaddin. He was probably acting as a forward air controller for air strikes there.
Iranians were carrying out many of these missions and flying the Su-25s as well. In November an Iraqi pilot told the Guardian that Iranians were regularly manning Iraqi air force planes and helicopters in combat and supply missions.
He said they were operating out of Rasheed air base in Baghdad. There were more reports of bombing and close air support missions on November 29 and 30 and December 1 and 2 in Iraq. Iranians are supposedly in the air in Salahaddin and flying in support of ongoing ISF and militia operations there.
Finally, Iran is providing training to Iraqi pilots on Su-25s, and MiG-23s and 29s at the Kermanshah air base. The Iraqi Air Force is undermanned and lacks fighter jets and trained pilots. Given that situation and all the other military support Iran has already given it was no surprise that it would send in some of its air power as well to help Baghdad.
Only now is the extent of this support becoming public. But Iran should have been expected this to happen.
Iran has a two-fold strategy in Iraq. First, it wants to provide military assistance to make sure that the Islamic State is turned back and eventually defeated. It also wants to expand its influence within the Iraqi state through the military and bureaucracy.
It is currently achieving both of these goals. Tehran is now considered one of the main defenders of the country and Iraqi politicians regularly praise its help and give it cover for its operations. It has also garnered popular support as well amongst some Iraqis.
This will all go a long way to make sure that Iran maintains its power within the country after the war is over.
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
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