Asaib Ahl al-Haq Shi'ite militia fighters from the south of Iraq and Kurdish peshmerga forces walk with their weapons as they take control of Sulaiman Pek from the Islamist State militants, in the northwest of Tikrit city September 1, 2014. Reuters/Youssef Boudlal
The Telegraph: US blocks attempts by Arab allies to fly heavy weapons directly to Kurds to fight Islamic State
Middle East allies accuse Barack Obama and David Cameron of failing to show strategic leadership in fight against Islamic State
The United States has blocked attempts by its Middle East allies to fly heavy weapons directly to the Kurds fighting Islamic State jihadists in Iraq, The Telegraph has learnt.
Some of America’s closest allies say President Barack Obama and other Western leaders, including David Cameron, are failing to show strategic leadership over the world’s gravest security crisis for decades.
They now say they are willing to “go it alone” in supplying heavy weapons to the Kurds, even if means defying the Iraqi authorities and their American backers, who demand all weapons be channelled through Baghdad.
WNU Editor: The Kurds have been pleading for heavy weapons since last year .... but the truth is now finally out .... and from America's closest allies in the region. Bottom line .... the U.S. has no plan or strategy to defeat the Islamic State, and the White House will not support those groups (in this case the Kurds) with supplies of needed weapons who have proven (more than once) to be able to combat and to defeat the Islamic State on the ground. It is now easy to predict what will happen next .... our Middle Eastern allies are going to start shipping heavy weapons to the Kurds, they are going to alienate Turkey and Iraq who do not want to see such arms shipments to the Kurds, and the U.S. will be shown to be impotent in influencing any of these actions. In the interim .... as all of these divisions keep dividing the "alliance" .... the Islamic State will continue to consolidate its territories and to gain more recruits.
3 comments:
If they supply the Kurds, they do two things. First, they completely alienate the Erdogan regime in Turkey, and they also basically admit that Iraq needs to be partitioned into Sunni, Shi'a and Kurdish states.
A lot of people believe that the Turks are using the Kurds as cannon fodder, they want them to kill as many ISIS troops as possible and to lose as many Kurdish fighters as possible so that the Kurds don't become a threat to them. Turks HATE the Kurds, and want as many of them to die as possible before Turkey invades to end the ISIS threat once and for all.
Dude turkey supports Isis.
The Arab State, ISIS, Turkey, and Iran are all enemies of the United States and need to be treated as such. This means, at a bare minimum, they are not to be trusted and we should work to minimize all operations with them as soon as possible.
We could have supported the Kurds. A strong and independent Kurdistan in Iraq and in all lands they claim could have acted as a buffer between us and our enemies and may have been a reliable partner for us. Since we did not pursue this course, this cannot be known. By refusing to support the Kurds we did not turn the enemies mentioned above into friends and we've alienated a potential friend. The stupidity of the US government is jaw dropping to say the least.
With that said there's probably very little we could have done to actually the situation here. I would have suggested staying out of this altogether and focused more on domestic issues such as increasing our domestic supply of oil. This way we might not have made new enemies and may not have hardened the positions of current enemies towards us and we might actually have some leverage when it comes to dealing with such people.
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