The Kurdistan region enjoys autonomy in Iraq, and that has meant running its own airports; borders; maintaining its own Peshmerga security forces; and exporting oil through its own economic management.
Baghdad now wants to use the referendum as an excuse to roll that back.
With the war on the Islamic State seemingly close to an end, Baghdad wants to punish the Kurdish region for seeking independence.
BackChannels has turned up the following themes related to the Kurdish struggle for independence:
Iranian resistance expressed in Iraq via Iran aligned and backed Shiite militia.
Persistence of the Kurdish PKK and a perhaps too robust relationship with a persistently feudal and political absolute, criminal, and totalitarian Russia.
Inability, so far, to attenuate the power of chiefs and produce a disciplined and power balancing democracy.
Reference – Iraq: Iran Aligned Shiite Militia
Note, please, the date year associated with reference. Whether 2015, earlier, or later, BackChannels’ Kurdish source has cited Iraq’s Iranian-aligned Shiite militia as posting a persistent challenge to the defense of the Kurd’s ancestral land.
Washington’s response to the Islamic State’s (IS) advance, however, has been disgraceful: The United States is now acting as the air force, the armory, and the diplomatic cover for Iraqi militias that are committing some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These are “allies” that are actually beholden to our strategic foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and which often resort to the same vile tactics as the Islamic State itself.
. . . from the KRG perspective, two Shia militia forces—Asaib Ahl Haq and the Badr militias—are uncontrollable.
Both these militias are backed by Iran, and the their military operations are effectively overseen by Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Qods Force, which serves as the external arm of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).
Hashd al-Shaabi is the defender of “Iraqi sovereignty and its unity,” he declared, and it will not fight any other group except ISIS.
Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militia forces have clashed several times in Kirkuk’s southern ethnically-mixed city of Khurmatu in recent months. Several people from both sides were killed in the confrontations.
A century after the breakdown of the Ottoman boundaries, Iraq remains a forced union of peoples whose national aspirations and sense of identity have been suppressed. Members of my family spent decades in exile from successive Iraqi governments that, since the turn of the 20th century, butchered generations of Kurdish men, women and children who struggled to find their place in this artificial state.
Thus there has always been a lingering, unresolved question of identity for the Kurds of Iraq. That identity will finally achieve resolution when the people of Iraqi Kurdistan vote in the referendum. This expression of popular will should not only close a long chapter of grief but also bring new certainty and stability to an increasingly volatile region plagued by sectarian conflict and bloodshed.
Of special concern was the possibility that Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq could seek to gain political advantage by challenging Kurdish control in the oil-rich, ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk and other disputed territories also claimed by the central government in Baghdad.
John Hannah relays a chilling list of actions taken or threatened by Iraq and Turkey in their pique with the Kurdish referendum. He goes on to note the following and then pleads for Washington’s regaining its own initiative in moral courage in partnering with the Kurds and forestalling the escalation of force applied in keeping them captive to forces clearly out of step with Washington’s moral and political missions:
I was taken aback by the intense frustration and anger directed at a critical wartime ally and longtime, loyal U.S. partner whose history of oppression and even genocide at the hands of other nations leaves it with — if nothing else — an almost unimpeachable moral case for self-determination.
ISIL — the “Islamists” — have been long “played” by Moscow and Tehran as a goad to the west and a useful foil in their feudal struggle to sustain the medieval political absolutism that in turn supports their respective dictatorships.
President Trump’s bearing down on ISIS threatens to remove that plaything from the Moscow-Tehran (old “Red-Green Alliance”) toy box. Under pressure, and as much may have taken place in St. Petersburg earlier today, ISIS has now to displace and redistribute its criminal program.
The kind of manipulation involved between Moscow and an assortment of terrorist organizations may often be indirect. As the editor of Back-Channels, I believe that the al-Qaeda presence in Syria was “incubated” of de-emphasized in Syria’s combat planning, so as to shape and “frame” the look of the developing civil war. That’s what the piece is about, and there’s more online to support it.
Regarding the St. Petersburg train bombing — today’s event — there are some tweets now crediting ISIS with the attack.
The prompt: the suggestion that ISIS was finished in Iraq.
There may be more signs likes this one, however — http://www.iraqinews.com/iraq-war/islamic-state-kills-imam-mosque-western-mosul/ — that ISIS, ever murderous and disinterested in the fates of the living, has grown desperate in Iraq and gone in for “motivating” resistance by summarily killing those unwilling to cooperate in their own suicides.
Reliant on the open source, BackChannels has been finding it difficult to obtain data regarding the ISIS presence in Mosul and elsewhere in the combined Syrian-Iraq Theater of War. This may be the closest one may get with today’s field reporting:
Some posters on Isis forums linked the explosions to Russia’s backing of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who is fighting Isis as well as other groups in the Syrian civil war.
The group hasn’t yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but often takes as long as a day to do so. If it does claim responsibility for the incident – which it has done with attacks that officials have later said it had no role in – it would be far from the first time it has done so, after it said it had inspired attempted attacks in Chechnya and Russia earlier this year.
The 18 to 20 million people who live in 2700 shanty towns and illegal dwellings, particularly around major capitals, the rampant phenomenon of trafficking of young women and girls to other countries, the rising number of women who post ads on the walls to sell their infants, and the 30 per cent of the population who according to the admissions of the regime’s officials are starving, are but a few examples indicating how the Iranian people’s lives have been destroyed under the repressive rule of the Velayat-e Faqih, Khamenei.
Such devastation coupled with incessant executions and daily arrests of some two to three thousand people comprise the security the mullahs claim they have provided for the people of Iran by engaging in the slaughter of the people of Syria, Iraq and other countries in the region.
The last piece posted in October 2015, and it may need an update. However: having incubated ISIS to blackmail and goad the west, Putin has now the option of demonstrating “revived” Russian military prowess by eating ISIS alive but not too much at a time. Khamenei-favoring Shiite militia in Iraq, long hosting Revolutionary Guard advisors, have also their convenient foil.
As regards Europe, Moscow-(Tehran) favors resurgent nationalism — le Pen or Orban (and Jobbik), which is exactly what terrorism compels or encourages in the states it targets.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of narcissism / malignant narcissism (and cowardice and — what sets off the narcissism — “narcissistic mortification”) that would build such a theater of politics and war as Syria-Iraq and a troubled Europe, but go back to the Cold War, which was supposed to have ended 25 years ago, and drag forward the Soviet / KGB Era methods in manipulating whole “chess boards” — both sides of any conflict to advantage.
Then look again at Moscow.
How has Moscow played both sides of a conflict?
There’s a related history lesson in this gem of a BBC video interview:
Soviet secret services have been described by GRU defectors Viktor Suvorov and Stanislav Lunev as “the primary instructors of terrorists worldwide.”[4][5][6] According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky once said: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”[7] He also claimed that “Airplane hijacking is my own invention” and that in 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the KGB-financed PLO.[7]
Lt. General Pacepa described operation “SIG” (“Zionist Governments”) that was devised in 1972 to turn the Arab world against Israel and the United States. According to Pacepa, the following organizations received assistance from the KGB and other Eastern Bloc intelligence services: PLO, National Liberation Army of Bolivia (created in 1964 with help from Ernesto Che Guevara), the National Liberation Army of Colombia (created in 1965 with help from Cuba), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969, and the Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia in 1975.[8]
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/30/opinions/russia-soviet-fighters-istanbul-bombing-bergen/ – 7/1/2016 – Note: ISIS has also served Moscow as a target to which to channel its own Islamists. In effect, ISIS by existing in numbers in Syria provides a “KZ” or “kill zone” in which to concentrate fighters for later warfare. HOW such fighters may then come to launch actions against NATO members forms a question beyond the means of this blog to address.
*
The last word on this post goes to Stratfor’s Scott Stewart:
In an earlier column, I briefly addressed the similarities between the utopian ideology of the Islamic State and that of the global communist movement. I have also compared the counterinsurgency efforts used against the two movements in the past. But as I was writing about the structure of the Islamic State last week, I encountered more and more parallels to the global Marxist movement.
BackChannels places conflicts involving Iraq in the post-Cold War framework and suggests that military engagements were part of “containment” and the “building down” of Soviet alliances that remained in character authoritarian and openly supportive of terrorism.
Basically, Russia then and Russia today criminally manipulates foreign political constituencies to suit its own kleptocratic appetites. Hussein (and Gaddafi) were part of that enterprise, and perhaps as God willed it, both are gone (and thank God).
Yesterday’s BBC report on the Chilcot report keeps itself narrowed on the image of Iraq as an oasis of stability, however miserable, under the rule of a strongman, and the report itself reasserts at face value the idea that “regime change” in Iraq linked to direct threats posed by WMDs, which imbroglio BackChannels would shove into a bin labeled “Potential Convenient Pretexts” (sorry the same don’t really work out) and the more general “Global War on Terror,” which period of observation appears to start on September 11, 2001:
10. After the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November, the US Administration urned its attention to regime change in Iraq as part of the second phase of what it called the Global War on Terror.
It is unfortunate that governments most devoted to “classical liberalism” and democracy should feel the need to resort to manipulating their “masses” (instead of free constituencies) because they have failed to publically educate the same in the longer-lived themes of geopolitics and history — or worse, lost that battle to the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left that relies on short memories to promote their own ultimately authoritarian, fascist, and totalitarian outlooks.
I don’t know what BackChannels is going to do when the 25th Year Anniversary of the Dissolving of The Soviet passes on December 26, 2016, but as that day is still coming up, it’s going to harp on it with the hope that other “English” and Europeans and others less free or more so catch a glimpse of Putin’s Excellent World (PEW), the world from which it has emerged, and the malignantly narcissistic worldview it continues to promote or install wherever it may.
We, including Muslims, have before us the archaic manifestation of a legacy in religion owned by about 1.6 billion souls. Some, and for reasons ranging from how they were raised to the possession of the adolescent messianic narcissism known to dictators, would place themselves somewhere beneath the Muslim Botherhood (intentional) umbrella.
Wouldn’t the moderate and peaceful, truly peaceful, want the hotheads and the improvident to get up and go where they might be seen and subjected to the horrors of their own dreams?
As I have argued elsewhere (any may feel welcome to ask), the incubating of the al-Qaeda types, including ISIS, in Syria appears to have been designed as political theater — a theater of the very real — to both blackmail and goad the west into concessions before the Assad regime. It was a good KGB-style plan, and, please note, Russia got to channel the worst of its own Chechnya rebels to the fighting (and it slipped in a few spies as well); however, update: NATO may sting post-Soviet neo-feudal Russia and its alignments (Damascus, Tehran) with its own wasps.
While ISIS has been growing or distilling out of other populations those most prone to join the fight as 7th Century barbarians in Syria, the greater world has been witness to the we’re-not-those-Muslims Muslim repudiation of the al-Qaeda types, the common use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist” and such to separate the same from the greater Ummah going forward, and, of late, the appearance reform-minded discussions (e.g., New Age Islam) and organizations (e.g., Muslim Reform Movement). Expect traction to take some time.
There are other facets . . . like that of getting the Iraqi military to hold itself together against not only ISIS, from whom it has been wresting territory this past month, but also from Khamenei’s aggression through Iraq’s more “fiery” Shiite militia, long infested with Revolutionary Guard officers.
Archaic | Feudal-Toward-Modern Main Body | Cultural Avant Garde –>
Quite possibly for the public accustomed to ironic simplifications, what Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran have developed in Syria looks a little like the mirror image of CIA’s support for the Taliban in association with Zia Haq’s own conservative Islamism pitched against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In today’s Syrian Tragedy, it’s Moscow, essentially, that appears to manipulate the Sunni-aligned jihadists munching away on the landscape (and enriching itself with oil sales by way of whoever hands over the cash for it).
Be that as it may, it’s looking like the west has been neither blackmailed nor goaded by “Assad vs The Terrorists” has instead absorbed the fallout in finger-wagging (for not intervening) and refugee migration, and may well stick Moscow (Damascus and Tehran) with “The Terrorists”. It may be toward that purpose that the Russian military has strengthened it presence in Syria.
The inspiration for the response: claim that ISIS had been strengthened under the Obama Administration in relation to the Administration weak response to terrorism.
BackChannels counterpoint: the strategy to move the medieval world (and the representatives of political absolute power) toward the modern one (and distributed, checked, and representative power) has a slow track, and in relation to the Islamic Small Wars involves making the feudal world sufficiently visible for fighting. IF that idea works, THEN the post-Soviet axis (Moscow-Damascus-Tehran) has done a right thing for the wrong reasons: intending to get at the west, it has helped produce an enemy in space that can be addressed with conventional forces from every side opposed to it.
Syria seems a much more confused battlespace with a Soviet / Post-Soviet backbone supporting feudal absolute power. Russia has returned to support of a Christian church — so it can’t be about “godless communism” — but retains strong alignment with the regime in Iran and the ophthalmologist in the middle. It looks to me like the Sunni-side Arab Emirates post by Hasan Hasan favors Sunni expansion (duh smile emoticon ) with murderous ISIS as its edge, not an evil entity worthy of destruction by both Shiites and Sunnis.
Sigh.
From the western perspective, medievalism is on full display, and, post-Enlightenment, battle is not reason and winning or losing in the same says nothing about metaphysics. Modern Obama has invoked the term “dumb war” for staying out of the Islamic partisan wars of the middle east. Having been right to do so, he’s narrowed the American scope to fighting “The Real Terrorists” (as opposed to Assad’s version of “The Terrorists”) and has had U.S. military campaigning against “ISIL” assets and leadership.
The conversation starter — a question: “Afghanistan II?”
Nope — not Afghanistan Two or too.
The prompt for the conversation came from this report on Russian battlefield losses in the Syrian Theater:
Nearly two weeks after the Russian intervention began in Syria, one could say it has not got off to a good start. Last week, the Syrian regime launched its first ground offensive against the rebels under Russian air support.
The assault, in Hama’s northern countryside, failed spectacularly – rebels affiliated to the Free Syrian Army destroyed at least 18 tanks and held their ground.
Considering the source and the role played by partisan opinion and reporting around the Syrian Tragedy, the report of so many tanks destroyed may do with buttressing. Here it is:
The U.S.-made BGM-71 TOW missiles were delivered under a two-year-old covert program coordinated between the United States and its allies to help vetted Free Syrian Army groups in their fight against President Bashar al-Assad. Now that Russia has entered the war in support of Assad, they are taking on a greater significance than was originally intended.
“We get what we ask for in a very short time,” one commander, Ahmad al-Saud, said in an interview. He added that in just two days his group, Division 13, had destroyed seven armored vehicles and tanks with seven TOWs: “Seven out of seven.”
In childhood, the kid with the chessboard chooses his opponent. Why not in adulthood? And what if you could not only control you opponent but make the same another rival’s opponent . . . how cool would that be?
That would be so far beyond cool as to have arrived at deliciously evil.
Bashar al-Assad’s best defense, for the realpolitik theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists” becomes for the general opposition, including NATO opposition to the tyrant’s rule, “Assad or The Terrorists” (mirroring slogan: “Assad, Or We Burn The Country”).
Related to the previous, ISIS becomes the primary military war-on-terror focus for the west, which comes with diplomatic, human, and financial costs to the west.
Incubated by its own enemy, the Assad regime and its backers, ISIS has been positioned in time and space to destroy the revolution once pressed by the Free Syrian Army and serve as a foil to the combined forces of Assad, Khamenei, and Putin, all of whom today may at will attack the same even if preferring other non-ISIS (and still noncombatant) targets.
In ISIS, Khamenei (he may thank Assad and Putin) has chosen a familiar Sunni opposition for Iran’s purchase in Iraq’s Shiite militia community. Once again, Iranian Revolutionary Guard get to get their boots into battle with their old Baathist foes, now serving as generals in Baghdadi’s cause.
Related Teasers, Links, and Reference
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949, has 28 members devoted to the idea of collective security. Prediction: By the time President Obama leaves office in 2017, the NATO pledge of mutual defense in response to aggression will have been exposed as worthless. Objectively the alliance will have ceased to exist. The culprits? Vladimir Putin—and Barack Obama.
The long-term aim would be to defeat or demoralise the non-Isil opposition, so that Isil became the regime’s only enemy. That would force the West to back President Bashar al-Assad against it. “They want to clean the country of non-Isil rebels, and then the US will work with them as Isil will be the only enemy,” the Damascus source said.
Russia bombed Syria for a third day on Friday, mainly hitting areas held by rival insurgent groups rather than the Islamic State fighters it said it was targeting and drawing an increasingly angry response from the West.
The U.S.-led coalition that is waging its own air war against Islamic State called on the Russians to halt strikes on targets other than Islamic State.
Next came Russia’s move on Syria. The weapons that Russia is sending there are not an attempt to settle the conflict. They are there to protect the Assad regime, which is its cause. Moreover, ISIL does not have warplanes: Russia’s air defense missiles are in Syria for a different purpose.
This became clear on Wednesday, when America was given less than an hour’s warning that the Kremlin was imposing, in effect, a no-fly zone in Syria. With this the Russians not only mounted a direct challenge to American authority. They also ripped up the rulebook of military diplomacy. America was aghast, but had no response.
The Ba’ath regime was strongly anti-American, so it’s not surprising that–despite the unfortunate fate of the Iraqi Communist Party–it was primarily a client of the Soviet Union (not the US), and this relationship continued up until the moment when the Soviet Union collapsed.
That Baathists helped ISIS, before the declaration of the ‘Caliphate,’ to rush into Iraq last year, and assist in the battles for key nodes in Iraq, is indisputable. Even in the Second Battle of Tikrit, just fought in the past few weeks, Baathists were a prominent component of ISIS forces. The very fact that Saddam Hussein’s al-Tikriti tribe was tossed out of their tribal domain certainly bore the hallmarks of the ultimate revenge against the Baathist core.
Moscow’s action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russia’s actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points.
Testimony from gendarmerie officers in court documents reviewed by Reuters allege that rocket parts, ammunition and semi-finished mortar shells were carried in trucks accompanied by state intelligence agency (MIT) officials more than a year ago to parts of Syria under Islamist control.
Four trucks were searched in the southern province of Adana in raids by police and gendarmerie, one in November 2013 and the three others in January 2014, on the orders of prosecutors acting on tip-offs that they were carrying weapons, according to testimony from the prosecutors, who now themselves face trial.
While the first truck was seized, the three others were allowed to continue their journey after MIT officials accompanying the cargo threatened police and physically resisted the search, according to the testimony and prosecutor’s report.
