Dan Murphy, CSM: Does Iraq's military have the 'will to fight?' Its sectarian militias certainly do.
With the fall of Ramadi, the 'new' Iraqi Army continues to crumble. In its place sectarian militias are coming to the fore.
How badly is the civil war in Iraq spiraling out of control? Here's a clue: Baghdad's battle to retake Anbar Province is called "Labaik Ya Hussein."
What does that mean? That the fight in Anbar is now nakedly sectarian. "Ya Hussein" is a cry of veneration and mourning for the prophet Muhammad's grandson, known as Imam Hussein to Shiites. And it is being taken by the Sunni Arab majority in Anbar, and others in Iraq, as signaling a role of conquerors, not liberators, for the Shiite militias leading the fight.
The recent fall of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar and just 70 miles west of Baghdad, to the so-called Islamic State has clearly jolted the US government. It also exposed the false claims from Washington and Baghdad that IS Sunni militants were being pushed back in Anbar and elsewhere in Iraq. While Baghdad has complained there was insufficient US air support at Ramadi, the IS army had no air support at all and fielded fewer combatants than the Iraqi soldiers and police trying to defend the city.
WNU Editor: Iraq's Kurdish Leader Barzani has blamed sectarianism for the rise of the Islamic State .... Kurdish Leader Barzani: Iraq's 'Sectarian Army' Led to ISIS Gains (NBC News) .... and considering how the Iraqi government is now responding to recent ISIS gains in Anbar by sending in Shiite militias, he is probably right.
4 comments:
I think it's obvious now that the Federal Iraq experiemnt has failed. I hate to say Joe Bieden was right, but Iraq needs to be divided into at least three states. A Sunni south, a Shi'a east, and a Kurdish North. It can't happen, of course, unless you get ISIS out of the way and a major groundbreaking agreement between the Turks and the Kurds.
I guffawed VP Biden's 3 state solution a few years ago .... yup .... I was wrong. But with the Islamic State on the march (and with their expansionist ideology) .... that is not a realistic solution today.
WNU Editor,
It wasn't Biden's Plan.
It started out in the '80's as the Yonin Plan, the IDF Strategist.
In the early '90's, the Ususal Suspects at AIPAC rewrote it for Bibi's Likkuid.
In the mid '90's it became the cornerstone of the PNAC's Future Defense and American Unipolar World policies.
The "goal" of the Yonin Plan, is to break up Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, ( all Israel's potential regional power rivals) up into ungovernable Bantustans and MicroStates, through the use of war, proxy wars, sanctions, WMD's, false flag attacks, terrorism and NationBreaking.
The Shared Wealth of Iraq, even under Baathist mismanagement let Iraq climb to #47 in GDP. They had energy, industry, education, food, water. The divided wealth of Iraq will see the Kurds get the water, the hydro and a tiny amount oil and gas, the Sunni will get most of the farmland, but no water, and possibly large reserves of oil and gas, while the Shia get some farmland, most of the industry, most of the known oil and gas, but no water.
The Turkomen, the Assyrians and the Yardzi's get nothing, and there are no "natural" borders between the groups anymore. It's a recipie for ensuring that the Kurds, Shia and Sunni will always be in conflict, and that none of the "states", no matter how well managed will ever rise above #100 on the GDP scale.
Why am I not surprised that Biden took that idea from somewhere else. But I do give him credit that he was one of the few to talk about it (during the height of the war) while everyone else (myself included) disagreed with him.
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