The victories against IS in early 2015 have proven ephemeral — or have been nullified by IS gains elsewhere. On Sunday, CIA director John Brennan said on Face the Nation, “I don’t see this being resolved anytime soon.” Assad’s vaunted offensives of February 2015 have fallen short as the regime faced stiff resistance from a wide variety of opposition fighters, including elements from IS. The failure was alarming in part because the campaign was designed and aided by both Hezbollah and the Iranians, two seemingly ascendant Shia powers.
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Just a few months ago, analysts and policy-makers were certain that the defeat of Islamic State (IS) forces was simply a matter of time.
Coalition airstrikes would degrade the group’s capabilities and eventually allow Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga — though discredited by their poor military showing in mid-2014 — to push back the extremists. And indeed, IS fighters were ejected from Tikrit in March 2015 by the Iraqi army and thousands of motivated fighters from Shia militias. In Kobani in northern Syria, IS fighters were defeated by Syrian Kurdish fighters. Elsewhere in the country, the regime of Bashar al-Assad was going on the offensive with help from Hezbollah and advisers from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
The Islamic State, however, rose like a phoenix from the ashes of every setback. And today, the situation is not so rosy.
The victories against IS in early 2015 have proven ephemeral — or have been nullified by IS gains elsewhere. On Sunday, CIA director John Brennan said on Face the Nation, “I don’t see this being resolved anytime soon.” Assad’s vaunted offensives of February 2015 have fallen short as the regime faced stiff resistance from a wide variety of opposition fighters, including elements from IS. The failure was alarming in part because the campaign was designed and aided by both Hezbollah and the Iranians, two seemingly ascendant Shia powers.
The Syrian regime’s resources are stretched thin and the rate of desertion among its military is increasing; in short, it is running out of manpower to face the myriad opposition factions in set-piece battles. The Alawites, the sectarian community that dominates the top echelons of the regime, are circling the wagons and building popular militia forces to defend their own turf rather than seeking to re-conquer lost territory — IS now reportedly controls half of Syria — in the eastern and southern parts of the country. The appearance of IS fighters in Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Damascus, along with the fall of Tadmor — the modern city on the site of Palymra — merely intensifies the sense of doom and gloom in Damascus.
The situation in Iraq is just as complicated, something that the Obama administration appears either oblivious to or reluctant to acknowledge. Much of the US strategy continues to hinge on what is increasingly a mirage: a unified, albeit federal, Iraq under the control of Baghdad. Meanwhile, the resilience of IS is greatly enhanced by the ability of its military forces to innovate and adapt faster on the ground than its lackluster opponents.
In light of the constant aerial strikes by the US and its allies, IS has dispersed and made its forces more mobile, no longer presenting dense concentrations of fighting men as it did when it seized Mosul in mid-2014. Instead, when IS seized Ramadi in May 2015, it made use of inclement weather and sent several small units from different directions simultaneously into the city aided by suicide bombers. Moreover, the fact that the group faced ill-equipped and poorly motivated Sunni fighters in and around Ramadi did not do anything for Baghdad’s standing with the country’s already alienated Sunni community, which had pleaded for arms while caught between the unfathomable brutality of IS and revengeful Shia militias.
Many Sunnis are now angling for their own “super-region,” one that would have considerable independence from Baghdad. The problem? In order to have it, the Sunnis would need to first defeat IS. Currently, they’re unable to do so because they lack the resources; despite all the talk from Baghdad and Washington about arming Sunni tribes, Baghdad is not actually keen to do so.
And besides, the Sunnis seem relatively ambivalent about defeating IS. They took an unequivocal stance between late 2006 and 2009, when they joined with the Americans and the Iraqi government to deal the Islamist militants what was then seen as a decisive blow. Now, however, despite Sunnis’ resentment and fear of IS, the Islamists’ existence is seen as a kind of insurance policy against Shia revanchism should Baghdad succeed in retaking the three Sunni provinces of Anbar, Salahuddin, and Ninevah.
The “victory” of the Iraqi government in Tikrit was more propaganda than reality; a few hundred IS fighters managed to inflict considerable damage on the Shia militias that had been mobilized to fight alongside the Iraqi army, then withdrew because they were outnumbered and wished to avoid being surrounded. The IS forces in Tikrit simply felt that they had done enough damage; there was no need to waste further assets in an untenable situation.
Militarily, the Iraqi Shia militias are better motivated and more dedicated than the regular army. Anecdotal information out of Baghdad suggests that Iraqi Shias are wondering whether the government should invest more effort building these forces into an effective and more organized parallel army. Even that parallel army, however, might be reluctant to commit to any significant long-term offensive to reclaim provinces full of “ungrateful” Sunnis.
But the Shia are willing to die to defend what they have, and there is increased sentiment among the Shia in central Iraq and Baghdad, along with the southern part of the country, that they would be better off without the Sunnis. There also exists the belief that the Kurds have more or less opted out of the Iraqi state despite the fact that they maintain a presence within the government in Baghdad. The Shia would seemingly not be sorry to see them exit the government in a deal that would settle as best as possible divisions of resources and territory. However, whether the Kurds would take the plunge and opt for de jure rather than de facto independence is a question that is subject to regional realities — How would Ankara and Tehran react? — rather than merely a matter of a deal between Baghdad and Erbil.
The Islamic State will continue to be a profound geopolitical problem for the region and the international community, and a long battle lies ahead. Syria and Iraq are more or less shattered states; it is unlikely that they will be put back together in their previous shapes. If Assad survives 2015, it will be as head of a rump state of Alawites and other minorities protected by Hezbollah, Iran, and Alawite militias. Shia Iraq will survive, and will possibly dissociate itself from the nettlesome Sunni regions. The Kurds will go their own way step by step. The international community is currently at a loss for how to stem the flow of foreign fighters to the IS battlefields — and even more serious is the growing sympathy and admiration for the group in various parts of the world among disgruntled and alienated youth.
If the US is serious about defeating IS, it needs to take on a larger share of the fight on the ground. This means more troops embedded with regular Iraqi forces in order to bring about better command, control, and coordination. It also means advisors who can continue to train these forces so that they improve over time. If this is not done, the regular Iraqi military will continue to be nothing more than an auxiliary to the more motivated — and pro-Iranian — Shia militias. Currently, militia commanders are giving orders to the regular military; that cannot be good for morale.
If the world is not serious about taking on and defeating IS, we can expect the group to continue to consolidate itself and expand its territory opportunistically. IS does have problems with consolidating its authority over the areas it rules; while it has to fight to maintain its ideological raison d’etre, it also has to provide services for the people over which it holds sway. While the two are not mutually exclusive, doing both becomes a resource and personnel enterprise that the militants may not be able to sustain. Given its own internal ideological and expansionist dynamics, the group’s future hinges on continuing to fight.
This month, the Islamic State celebrates the first anniversary of its self-declared caliphate. The group has little reason to fear it will be the last.
Which way will Obama go now? Will he be another Johnson or a Bush? All signs, alas, point to the former. Thus it is particularly appropriate that to show progress (what used to be known as “light at the end of the tunnel”) the administration is now resorting to the discredited body counts of Vietnam days.
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The Obama White House’s mental synapses must be short-circuiting right now. If the president were a robot (rather than just being a bit robotic), he would by now be repeating over and over: “Does not compute! Does not compute!” Neither of his basic operating assumptions about the anti-ISIS campaign are coming true; in fact, both are being refuted by reality in ways that suggest a fundamental flaw in the underlying mental software.
Assumption No. 1 was that a US air campaign could degrade ISIS and allow its defeat by US allies on the ground. There is no question that the US air campaign has taken a toll. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken just bragged that 10,000 ISIS fighters have been killed since the start of bombing in August. Yet this is hard to square, as Bill Roggio notes at Long War Journal, with previous CIA estimates that ISIS only had 20,000 to 30,000 fighters. If Blinken’s number is right, ISIS should have lost one-half to one-third of its fighters, yet somehow during that time it has actually gained ground in both Iraq and Syria — oh, and estimates of its overall strength have not varied.
This means that either previous CIA estimates were gross underestimates (Roggio believes ISIS had at least 50,000 fighters to begin with) or that it has managed to replenish its losses—or both. Either way, what we are seeing now is what President Lyndon Johnson and Gen. William Westmoreland discovered for themselves in Vietnam: namely that it’s impossible to win a war of attrition against a foe that has a lot more will to fight and suffer losses than you do.
Assumption No. 2 can be summed up as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In both Syria and Iraq, the Obama administration calculated that Iran was the enemy of ISIS — after all, the Iranian regime is Shiite and ISIS is a Sunni organization. Thus the administration has tacitly embraced Iran’s allies — Iraqi Shiite militias and the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad — as the lesser evil in the expectation that they would do for us the dirty work of stopping ISIS. It’s a little hard to square this naïve assumption with the latest news, aptly summed up in a New York Times headline: “Assad’s Forces May Be Aiding ISIS Surge.” There are credible reports that Assad’s air force is making bombing runs in support of an ISIS offensive to capture Aleppo, a major city, from other rebel groups.
Why would Assad do this? Because he wants to reduce the battle in Syria to himself vs. ISIS on the assumption that with such an extremist foe, the rest of the world will be compelled to back him. By contrast, the more moderate rebel forces are viewed as a greater threat to his regime because they are capable of winning greater external backing. Iran is also relatively satisfied to have ISIS in control of Sunni areas in both Syria and Iraq because this gives Tehran the excuse it needs to consolidate its control over Alawite and Shiite areas — and Iran knows that it can’t rule over Sunni areas anyway.
There is nothing particularly novel about this development. There is a long history of reports suggesting deals between Assad and ISIS which range from a non-aggression pact to an agreement to cooperate in selling oil which has been captured by ISIS, while in Iraq it has long been obvious that Iranian militias are more interested in protecting Baghdad and the Shiite south than they are in pushing ISIS out of Mosul or Ramadi. The administration has just chosen to look the other way both in Syria and in Iraq rather than take on board facts that are at odds with its fundamental assumptions.
The Obama administration is now at a turning point in Iraq. It is roughly at the same place where the US was in Vietnam in 1967 and Iraq in 2006. In all those cases, the falsity of the assumptions under which we had been fighting had been revealed. The question was whether the president would execute a change of strategy. LBJ did not really do that, beyond his ineffectual bombing pauses and refusal to provide 200,000 more reinforcements to Gen. Westmoreland. It was left to Nixon and Gen. Creighton Abrams to transform the US war effort. By contrast, in Iraq in 2007 George W. Bush did execute a transformation of his strategy that rescued a floundering war effort.
Which way will Obama go now? Will he be another Johnson or a Bush? All signs, alas, point to the former. Thus it is particularly appropriate that to show progress (what used to be known as “light at the end of the tunnel”) the administration is now resorting to the discredited body counts of Vietnam days.
In Yesterday’s article titled “Arabian Pensinsula Violence Escalates After Second IS Bombing in Saudi Arabia,” we stated that our sources in the region have been reporting back that movement appears to be underway towards targeting westerners – mainly Americans. Specifically, we’ve been informed that the Qods Force may have directed Hezbollah, Kitaib Hezbollah (KH) and the Houthis to begin making plans for conducting William Buckley-style abductions Americans in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Furthermore, reporting from various media outlets have already begun covering the Americans taken hostage by the Houthis and a Hezbollah plot disrupted in Cyprus. None of these are a “coincidence.” Its all by design and timed with the nuclear weapons negotiations. Why do this if the Obama administration is prepared to give them everything without having to sacrifice anything on their end? It all comes down to the fact that the Iranian regime views the US government is weak – and they will be able to be much more “assertive” by escalating their belligerence. Thus far the Obama administration has done nothing to prove otherwise.
The Middle East roach infestation has originated from Iran – so who will turn on the light to make them scatter?
Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/cartoons
We’ve been warning about the Qods Force working to expand their influence in Yemen and model the Houthis after Lebanese Hezbollah. In “Iranian Regime Consolidates Yemeni Gains, Begins Work on Forming Houthi Intel Proxy” we laid out how such work has already been underway. Furthermore, a consistent theme we’ve been touching on in our Arabian Peninsula reporting has been how intelligence collection against US State Department (DoS) personnel and American citizens in the country had dramatically increased with the influx of Hezbollah and Iranian military personnel into the country – so none of this is “new,” although the Obama administration would like to make you think it is, and that the Qods Force doesn’t exercise any control over the Houthis. The inconvenient truth is that they do, and the man calling the shots in the country is Qods Force External Operations Division (Department 400) BG Aboldreza Shahlai.
Check out the following links for additional info on the Qods Force/Houthi/Hezbollah targeting of Americans in Yemen and the greater Arabian Peninsula:
GCC SOF Teams Alerted For Deployment, AQAP Gains Strength and Iran Preps For Attacks Against Saudi Arabia http://isisstudygroup.com/?p=6056
Regarding BG Aboldreza Shahlai, we first introduced him to our readers in our 04 APR 15 article titled, “AQAP and Qods Force Make Their Moves in Yemen as Saudis Struggle to Maintain Coalition.” At the time our sources inside the country had came across information on the presence of a senior Qods Force External Operations Division official had set up shop in the Sadah-area and tasked with overseeing overall operations in the country. We followed this up with an article a month later (“Failed State: Saudi Coaltion Increases Ground Presence as Iran Begins Targeting the Kingdom, US”) revealing his identity. Most westerners have never heard of the guy, but Iranian expats opposed to the regime know all about him. Shahlai was the architect of the Qods Force’s lethal aid program to Shia proxy forces in Iraq during OIF and was also one of the primary planners for the 2007 attack on the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center (PJCC) that killed five US Servicemen. Known as “Suleimani’s Fist,” he holds considerable influence in the Qods Force commander’s inner-circle for advocating “outside the box” solutions to problems – most of which call for directly targeting America and Israel abroad. He was also the mastermind of the plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US in New York City that involved his contacts within the Mexican drug cartel known as Los Zetas. His family member Mansur Arbabsiar was the lead-facilitator for the operation. Perhaps more important is Shahlai’s close ties to Abdul Malik al-Houthi and establishment of alternate weapons smuggling routes coming from Africa.
Asaib al-Haq leader Qais al-Khazali worked closely with BG Shahlai during OIF and was a participant in the 2007 attack on the PJCC – he’s now on the front-lines fighting the Islamic State (IS) in Northern Iraq
Source: voanews.com
BG Shahlai’s Yemen assignment is a good indicator that the Iranian regime intends to carry out a campaign targeting American, Israeli and to lesser extent Saudi nationals. With this and Shahlai’s relationship with the Houthis in mind, nobody should be in the least bit surprised that four of our fellow Americans are being held hostage in Yemen. The Houthis have already proven to be very efficient proxies for the Iranians inside Yemen. That said, we will likely see them conducting more operations increasing in complexity and scale within the next 6-9 months across the border into Saudi Arabia itself. They’re already conducting rocket attacks against Saudi border towns and outposts.
Abdul Malik al-Houthi: Close personal friend to BG Shahlai
Source: al-Arabiya
Its the same situation in Iraq, where we’ve heard from our Baghdad-based contacts reports of an attack being planned by Kataib Hezbollah (KH) targeting the US Embassy. Again, this should surprise no one with the high concentration of Qods Force personnel and proxy forces present inside the country and the capital in particular. We’ve also heard that KH has sympathizers within the Iraqi Security Force (ISF) ranks who are being tapped to assist in the attack. There’s also a considerable anti-air threat in and around BIAP these days coming from both IS and KH fighters. Fortunately, the American forces on the ground are already well aware of this – whether DoS or the Obama administration actually takes the threat serious is another matter entirely.
ISOF troopers don’t even try to hide their support of the IRGC-Qods Force Ramazan Corps anymore – a huge red flag for any US military personnel being deployed to Iraq these days
Source: The ISIS Study Group
Now why would KH need MANPADs since IS has no Air Force? Perhaps the Qods Force supplied them to KH in order to target someone else?
Source: The ISIS Study Group
Unfortunately these operations aren’t limited to just the Middle East. Security forces in Cyprus recently arrested a man reportedly involved in a line of Hezbollah operations targeting Israeli interests in Europe. When the Cypriot police arrested him, they also confiscated close to two tons of “suspicious materials” in his basement. Although no additional details on the materials has been made public as of this writing, our source informed us that the materials are for producing explosives (ammonium nitrate was the he saw mentioned). The guy they detained was born in Lebanon but had a Canadian passport, which tends to fit the profile of the kind of personnel Hezbollah’s special operations wing and the Qods Force prefers to recruit into their ranks.
Qods Force and Hezbollah operations have spiked considerably since 2009 with attacks being executed in places like Bulgaria, India and Thailand along with the disrupted plot that was planned for New York City mentioned earlier. Of these, the NYC and Burgas, Bulgaria plots had the direct involvement of BG Shahlai. The telltale signs are how both plots called for using some of his preferred methods of using third parties to do the dirty work and targeting westerners in areas not known for Iranian activity. In fact, the attack in Burgas also involved a Lebanese Arab in possession of Canadian travel documents. The bombings in New Delhi and Bangkok utilized personnel from the IRGC-Qods Force Department 5000 – which is the equivalent to the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Group in that both units are geographically aligned to the Asia/Pacific region.
The 2012 Bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria
Source: Reuters
Bibi Netanyahu was absolutely right to visit America and appear before Congress to air his concerns about the Iranian threat. The events that have occurred over the last few months have added strength to his concerns. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been downplaying the Iranian threat and the American mainstream media let them get away with it by not holding their feet to the same fire that they did to the Bush administration. Sure, a few American media outlets have finally begun asking some national security questions of substance, but far too many seem to be concerned with covering Bruce Jenner’s hormone therapy and President Obama’s March Madness brackets than they are about things that will have a profound impact on our way of life a lot sooner than people think.
The American media needs to start asking the Obama administration, “why are we seeing such a surge in external operations by the IRGC-Qods Force and their proxies if the current engagement strategy with the Iranian regime is “working,” as they claim?” Indeed members of our staff have worked the Iranian problem-set for some time, but it doesn’t require a whole lot in the way of burning calories to connect the dots between this surge in external operations and the ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Had the media truly cared to search for the truth instead of protect an administration they’ve compromised their journalistic integrity for, they would’ve already put out several articles and investigative specials on the subject. If they want to save face and salvage what’s left of their credibility, then we recommend they do some digging on the current threat to the US Embassy in Baghdad coming from KH and their ISF supporters based in the Green Zone. We can assure you that DoS is fully aware of the threat coming from Shia militias that are now being painted to the American people as “the good guys.”
They should also start peppering John Kirby and Marie Harf about the recent counter-terror raid in Cyprus and hammer them about whether the administration ever thought about demanding that the Iranian regime release our citizens in Yemen and US Marine veteran Amir Hekmati during these nuclear weapon talks. We assess that the Qods Force and their proxies are going to continue escalating their actions against our people and our allies for as long as they think they can get away with it. Don’t buy into the Administration’s talk that the regime can’t “control” the Qods Force, because if they say that they’re either lying, extremely ignorant or both. How so? The IRGC as a whole is made up only the most loyal followers of Ayatollah Khameini’s militant ideology. The IRGC-Qods Force are the “most loyal” of those serving in the IRGC – with GEN Suleimani answering only to Khameini. More importantly, the Shia proxy forces won’t take action against the US and its allies unless given authorization to do so by their Qods Force handlers. Make no mistake, this is only the beginning. There will be more attacks coming down the pipe from these guys. Our current national security strategy and foreign policy has set our country on a collision course – is anybody truly paying attention? More importantly, is this administration willing to sacrifice American lives for the appearance of obtaining “peace” with an Iranian regime that has no interest in pursuing normal relations? Something to think about.
Amir Hekmati: Prisoner of Iran
Source: The ISIS Study Group
If you want to know what the Iranian regime is all about, then check out our Inside Iran’s Middle East series:
The report also quoted Syrian opposition sources as saying that Hezbollah and Iranian military experts have left Assad’s war room in Damascus, along with Russian experts.
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Asharq Al-Awsat says Moscow has pulled military experts from Assad’s war room in Damascus, evacuated non-essential personnel and stopped declaring there is no alternative to Assad.
Russia is pulling away from its relationship with embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad and withdrawing key personnel from Damascus, the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported Sunday, citing senior Gulf and Western officials.
“The Kremlin has begun to turn away from the regime,” the newspaper said.
The report also quoted Syrian opposition sources as saying that Hezbollah and Iranian military experts have left Assad’s war room in Damascus, along with Russian experts.
There have been increasing signs in recent days that the Assad regime is disintegrating, four years into the civil war that has engulfed Syria. Last week, the Syrian president lost control of another province, which comes on the heels of previous reports that Islamic State already controls more than 50% of the country.
According to the same Gulf and Western sources, the change in the Russian position takes place against the backdrop of negotiations between the Gulf states and Moscow, a Russian response to economic sanctions imposed on it due to the war in Ukraine.
Syrian opposition sources told Asharq that Russia has evacuated 100 of its senior officials and their families from Syria via the airport in Latakia. They said that those leaving include experts who worked in the war room in Damascus, along with the Iranian experts and Hezbollah officials. According to the report, they have not been replaced.
Putin and Assad. Allies no more. (Photos: EPA and AFP)
On Thursday, Russia confirmed that an Ilyushin II-76 aircraft took 66 Syrian nationals from Latakia to Moscow airport, as well as a number of citizens from other countries, and at the same time delivered humanitarian aid to the war-torn country. Russia has remained silent on removal of the military experts.
According to Asharq al-Awsat, Russia has in the last three months also cut down the number of employees at its embassy in Damascus, leaving only essential staff. Opposition forces have also claimed that Russia has not been abiding by the maintenance contracts with Syria for the Sukhoi aircraft, leading to a rare visit to Tehran last month by Syrian Defense Minister Fahd Jassem al-Freij, who was forced to ask Iran to intervene with Russia on this matter.
The newspaper, which is notably supportive of the Saudi regime, also quoted an apparently surprising response by the head of the Russian delegation at a meeting last month, when asked by the Western Europe security chiefs for Moscow’s perspective on Syria’s future.
“What matters to Russia is maintaining its strategic interests and ensuring the future of the minorities, the unity of Syria and the struggle against extremists,” the delegation chief said. Western diplomatic sources at the meeting said the unprecedented statement brings to an ends years of the Russian official line that there is no alternative to Assad.
The rebels draw closer to Latakia (Photo: Reuters)
At the same time, there have been growing Arab media reports of a more serious dialogue than ever before between Russia and the United States on an agreement regarding the crisis in Syria. The Lebanese newspaper Al-Nahar quoted diplomatic sources in Geneva on Sunday as saying that the two sides are seeking an arrangement that will take into account the interests of regional and international parties, in particular Turkey, Iran and the Gulf states.
On Thursday, senior diplomatic sources told Al-Hayat that there has been a noticeable change in the Russian position toward Syria that Moscow is for the first time willing to discuss with the Americans the exact details of a transition period for the country, and even raise the names of individual military and political officials to oversee it.
Another sign of Assad’s difficulties comes from the Turkish news agency Anatolia, which cited opposition sources as saying that after four years of war, the regime controls less than 8% percent of the country’s oil and gas fields, while Islamic State controls more than 80% percent.
Hizballah’s General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah frequently brags that his 80,000 missiles can reach any point in Israel. He may have to compromise on this. His masters in Tehran are casting about urgently for ways to save the Assad regime in Damascus and halt the Islamic State’s’ inexorable advance on Baghdad and the Shiite shrine city of Karbala. According to DEBKAfile’s Gulf sources, Iran is eyeing the re-allocation of the roughly 1,000 long-range rockets in Hizballah’s store for warding off these calamities.
Some would be fired from their pads in Lebanon, exposing that country to retaliation, after Beirut rebuffed Hizballah’s demand for the Lebanese army to join in the fight for Assad.
Iran has not so far approved the plan. But if it does go through, Iranian spy drones operating over the war zones would feed with targeting data on ISIS and rebel positions and movements to the Hizballah rocket crews manning the mobile batteries of Fajr-5s – range 400-600 km; Zelzal-2s – range 500 km; Fateh-110s -range 800 km; and Shaheen 2s – 800-900 km.
Discussions in Tehran on this option took on new urgency Thursday, May 28, when White House spokesman Josh Earnest declared that the United States “would not be responsible for securing the security situation in Iraq. Our strategy is to support the Iraqi security forces… back them on the battlefield with coalition military air power as they take the fight to ISIS in their own country,” he said.
Tehran took this as confirmation that the US was quitting the war on the Islamic State in Iraq although the Obama administration’s decision was coupled with a free hand for the Baghdad government to do whatever it must to deal with the peril, including calling on external forces for assistance in defending the country.
In the Iraqi arena, Iran has thrown into the fray surrogate Shiite militias grouped under “The Popular Mobilization Committee.” It is led by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who turns out to be an Iranian, not an Iraqi, and working under cover as the deputy of the Al Qods Brigades Commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
This grouping is too shady for President Barack Obama to accept as worthy of US air support. Therefore, the entire anti-ISIS campaign has been dumped in Iran’s lap. Loath to expose its own air force planes to the danger of being shot down over Iraq, Iran is looking at the option of filling the gap with heavy missiles.
In the Syrian arena, Tehran is under extreme pressure:
1. The Assad regime can’t last much longer under fierce battering from the rebel Nusra Front, freshly armed and funded with massive assistance from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. To disguise this group’s affiliation with al Qaeda, the Saudis have set up a new outfit called “The Muslim Army of Conquest.” In a few days it was joined by 3,000 Nusra adherents.
2. The Syrian army has lost heart under this assault and many of its units are fleeing the battlefield rather than fighting, with the result that Bashar Assad is losing one piece of territory after another in all his war sectors. Soon, he will be left without enough troops for defending Damascus.
3. Although Hizballah’s leaders proclaim their determination to fight for Assad in every part of Syria, the fact is that the Shiite group is too stretched to support a wide-ranging conflict in Syria and defend its own home base in Lebanon at one and the same time.
4. Tehran is also considering rushing through a defense pact with Damascus to enable Assad to call on Iranian troops to come over and rescue him.
5. Saudi Arabia has singled out leaders of top Hizballah leaders for sanctions. This week, Riyadh impounded the assets and accounts of Khalil Harb and Muhammad Qabalan in Gulf banks. This act was taken in Tehran as a major provocation.
The names don’t mean much outside a small circle in the region. However, Harb is Hizballah’s supreme chief of staff whose military standing is comparable to that of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Gen. Ali Jaafary, while Qabalan is the organization’s senior intelligence and operations officer and responsible for orchestrating Hizballah’s terrorist hits outside Lebanon.
The Iranians are not about to let this affront go by without payback, which could come in the form of missile attacks by Hizballah on Saudi-backed groups in Syria.
Just a week after losing the big Palmyra air base to the Islamic State – and with it large stocks of ammo and military equipment – Syrian military and air units Wednesday, May 27, began pulling out of the big air base at Deir ez-Zour. This was Bashar Assad’s last military stronghold in eastern Syria and the last air facility for enabling fighter-bombers to strike ISIS forces in northeastern Syria and the western Iraqi province of Anbar.
His surrender of the Deir ez-Zour base is evidence that the Syrian president has run out of fighting strength for defending both his front lines and his air bases. He is also too tied down to be able to transfer reinforcements from front to front. He is therefore pulling in the remnants of his army from across the country for the defense of the capital, Damascus.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the Islamic State now has in its sights the Syrian army’s biggest air facility, T4 Airbase, which is located on the fast highway linking Homs with Damascus 140 km away.
It is home base for the bulk of the air force’s fighters and bombers. In its hangars are an estimated 32 MiG-25 fighters, as well as smaller numbers of MiG-25PDS interceptors, designed for combat with the Israeli air force, MiG-25RBT bombers-cum-surveillance planes; MiG-25PU trainers, which are routinely used to strike rebel forces in crowded built-up areas, and advanced MiG-29SM fighter jets.
Stationed there too are 20 advanced Su-24M2 bombers, the strategic backbone of the Syrian air force.
T4 Airbase also holds the largest Syrian stocks of guided bombs, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles.
In the last few hours, air crews have been frantically removing these warplanes from T4 and distributing them among smaller bases in central Syria, at the cost of their operational effectiveness.
In the space of a week, therefore, Bashar Assad has lost three of his major air bases, including Palmyra, where Iranian and Russian air freights had been landing regularly with fresh supplies of ordnance and spare parts for his army.
Our military experts say that this bonanza frees ISIS to cut off the eastern, northern and central regions from the capital, and deprive the Syrian and Hizballah units battling for control of the Qalamoun Mts of air support against rebel and Islamist forces.
If they manage to take T4 as well, the Islamists will be able to prevent US jets from taking off for strikes against them in Syria, or bombing the their forces which have seized long stretches of the fast highway from Homs to Damascus.
Iranian troops in fight to evict ISIS from Baiji refinery
Hassan Nasrallah Saturday, May 23, called his Lebanese Shiite Hizballah movement to the flag, because “we are faced with an existential crisis” from the rising belligerence of the Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant. His deputy, Sheik Naim Qssem, sounded even more desperate: “The Middle East is at the risk of partition” in a war with no end in sight, he said. “Solutions for Syria are suspended. We must now see what happens in Iraq.”
The price Iran’s Lebanese proxy has paid for fighting alongside Bashar Assad’s army for four years is cruel: some 1,000 dead and many times that number of wounded. Its leaders now understood that their sacrifice was in vain. ISIS has brought the Syrian civil war to a new dead end.
This week, a 15-year old boy was eulogized by Hizballah’s leaders for performing his “jihadist duty” in Syria.
Clearly, for their last throw in Syria, the group, having run out of adult combatants, is calling up young boys to reinforce the 7,000 fighting there.
The Syrian president Bashar Assad is in no better shape. He too has run dangerously short of fresh fighting manpower. Even his own Alawite community has let him down. Scarcely one-tenth of the 1.8 million Alawites have remained in Syria. Their birthrate is low, and those who stayed behind are hiding their young sons to keep them from being sent to the front lines.
Assad also failed to enlist the Syrian Druze minority to fight for his regime, just as Hizballah’s Nasrallah was rebuffed when he sought to mobilize the Lebanese army to their cause. This has left Hizballah and the Syrian ruler alone in the battlefield with dwindling strength against two rival foes: ISIS and the radical Syrian opposition coalition calling itself Jaish al-Fatah – the Army of Conquest – which is spearheaded by Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and backed to topple Assad by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
Nasrallah tried to paint a brave picture of full mobilization to expand the war to all parts of Syria. However, Sunday, May 24, a key adviser to Assad admitted that his regime and its allies were being forced to regroup.
Their forces were withdrawing from the effort to shift the Islamists from the land they have conquered – about three-quarters of Syrian territory – and concentrating on defending the cities, Damascus, Homs and Latakia, home to the bulk of the population, as well as the strategic Damascus highway to the coast and Beirut. Hizballah needed to build up the Lebanese border againest hostile access.
But Syrian cities, the Lebanese border and the highway are still under threat – from Syrian rebel forces.
The Iraqi army, for its part, has been virtually wiped out, along with the many billions of dollars the US spent on training and weapons. There is no longer any military force in Iraq, whether Sunni or Shiite, able to take on ISIS and loosen its grip on the central and western regions.
The Kurdish peshmerga army, to whom President Barack refused to provide armaments for combating the Islamists, has run out of steam. An new offensive would expose the two main towns of the semi-autonomous Kurdish Republic – the capital Irbil and the oil city of Kirkuk – to the depredations of the Islamist belligerents.
A quick scan of Shiite resources reveals that in the space between the Jordan River and the Euphrates and Tigris, Iran commands the only force still intact in Iraq – namely, the Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani Shiite militias, who are trained and armed by the Revolutionary Guards.
This last remaining fighting force faces its acid test in the battle ongoing to recover Baiji, Iraq’s main oil refinery town. For the first time, Iranian troops are fighting in Iraq, not just their surrogates, but in the Baiji campaign they have made little headway in three weeks of combat. All they have managed to do is break through to the 100 Iraqi troops stranded in the town, but ISIS fighting strength is still not dislodged from the refinery.
The Obama administration can no longer pretend that the pro-Iranian Shiite militias are the panacea for the ISIS peril. Like Assad, Tehran too is being forced to regroup. It is abandoning the effort to uproot the Islamists from central and western Iraq and mustering all its Shiite military assets, such as the Badr Brigade, to defend the Shiite south – the shrine towns of Najef and Karbala, Babil (ancient Babylon) and Qadisiya – as well as planting an obstacle in the path of the Islamists to Iraq’s biggest oil fields and only port of Basra.
The Shiite militias flown in by Tehran from Pakistan and Afghanistan have demonstrated in Syria and Iraq alike that they are neither capable nor willing to jump into any battlefields.
The upshot of this cursory scan is that not a single competent army capable of launching all-out war on ISIS is to be found in the Middle East heartland – in the space between the 1,000km long Jordan and the Euphrates and Tigris to the east, or between Ramadi and the Saudi capital of Riyadh to the south.
By Sunday, May 24, this perception had seeped through to the West. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, remarked: “What apparently happened was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight.” The former British army chief Lord Dannatt was more down to earth. Since the coalition air force campaign had failed to stop ISIS’s advance, he said “it was time to think the previously unthinkable” and send 5,000 ground troops to fight the Islamists in Syria and Iraq.
The next day, Monday, Tehran pointed the finger of blame for the latest debacles in Iraq at Washington. Al Qods Brigades chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani was quoted by the English language Revolutionary Guards mouthpiece Javan as commenting: “The US didn’t do a damn thing to stop the extremists’ advance on Ramadi.”
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