“Almost unanimously Iraqis tell me that America will initially win the military war but will face a fierce resistance for establishing peace. The exiled opposition, with its varying agenda, will pull Iraq further apart.”
I fear to download the weekend’s e-mail, this having signed on to enough lists to receive from the vending and politics communities about 5-MB of email per day.
That’s a lot of slush.
Then too, the world has a lot of absolutely senseless problems driven more by vainglorious egos — so I harp: malignant narcissism — and the mafia societies they create through, in, and around themselves, than any other cause for bellicose behavior.
The Emergency session of the Parliament that was supposed to be held today to declare State of Emergency was canceled due to not having enough MPs in the building!!
From the Vietnam Era’s evening newscasts from the killing fields of that war to this: having enough of a social network to be directed to a URL, one, however, that may raise more questions than can or will be answered: where was the above clip made? What happened to the children the soldier was carrying? What happened to military personnel assembled at that location? How many were killed in that battle? How many are missing in action today? What was gained? What was kept? What was lost?
This blog has a correspondent in Iraq, and with a little bit of difficulty in the language, this, nonetheless, is what he has had to say about Mosul recently:
. . . unfortunately I’m not sure about what happened to those kids but many of those who ran away got killed by those terrorists, but mainly the people of Mosul are happy and they are celebrating in the entry of ISIS and consider it a liberation, and the ISIS are really good with them now and I guess it will last untill the Iraqi and Kurdish armies try to enter the city and go deep , then they will kill many of those who welcomed them and film them to say that the Iraqis and Kurds killed them
It appears that the Sunni-Shiite division that runs through Iraqi society plus the exigencies of war half a million of Mosul’s residents to flee and left the remainder in place to be pleasant, genuinely so or not.
The paragraph’s a little garbled at the end but I’m not going to mess with it.
. . . . cause they are against them and most of them are Sunnis along to Christians and other minorities (since it’s a Sunni province) , and they hate them but Mosul is known in Iraq as a real hater for the Shiites (my mother studied at the University of Mosul and she saw that even though it was over 25 years ago and now they hate the Shiites more than ever… and let’s say that 1 million are just staying cause they are scares of running and think they are safe cause they are sunnis then that leaves us more half million aiding and supporting them and the Iraqi army had to keep its presence as minimum due to the hate of Mosul’s people against them, and the continues attacks by the people of Mosul more like the attacks that the IDF often have in the West Bank..
My distillation: Mosul is predominantly Sunni and by that along partially aligned against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s perceived Shiite-friendlier government. As happens often in politics, it may not be true, but if it’s believed, it’s treated as true. Those politics play in the field to leave state forces exposed to Sunni extremists, i.e., not engaged positively with state forces.
The soldiers who ditched their uniforms are mostly cops from the city (sunnis) and they are 52,000 And the army had to ran away cause their leaders (the Sunnis that were put cause the Governor of Mosul asked to since he didn’t want a Shiite or Kurdish general in the city) Then the soldiers had to leave their spots and far more they didn’t even have ammunition and they fought in the road to secure the people of Mosul who ran away
If for western readers the image of the state’s resistance in flight has made out Iraqi military and paramilitary forces a paper tiger, the reality relayed to me would seem to describe a very practical decision process predicated on 1) Sunni identification with Sunni force come to town 2) an ambivalent military not completely welcomed in Mosul and running low on ammo.
Time to skedaddle.
Recorded today, June 11, 2014, probably by Sunni bystander today: Round Street, Tikrit, Iraq. About that provenance, my correspondent says, ” . . . and at the end he said “exclusively for the Iraqi great revolution” which is a Sunni Iraqi term not ISIS way.”
We’re going to see a lot of this.
This one: yesterday, driving around:
My source: “They meant liberated by the ISIS and the police vehicles moving in the streets are in the hands of ISIS.”
While the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left continues to decry the Bush Era invasion of Iraq (and many Muslims continue to blame America for the widespread death and displacement brought about through sectarian warfare and vendetta), the most brutal and horrifying of al-Qaeda affiliates — actually, these so exceed limits that al-Qaeda has officially distanced itself from them — the ISIS has stormed through Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city.
From a CNN video clip: “Planes and command positions, all of them have fallen in addition to weapons caches. In addition, prisons were stormed and criminals have been set free. What happened is a catastrophe by any measure.”
I have for some years now been sitting on journalism’s “second row seat to history”, specifically, in front of a computer monitor attached to a computer with a broadband connection to the Internet. It has been and remains a global virtual trip.
I’ve made some friends.
My weirdest introduction to what this baby (of a setup) can do: watching television with a family in Madrid via Skype with their laptop turned to their screen. It was like sitting on their sofa with them.
Later: one of the Anonymous clique got a live camera on to the streets of Egypt’s counterrevolution. It was like being taken on a walk, but the communication was one way — remote camera to my eyes.
Oh what we can now see on the World Wide Web!
What we’re seeing in Mosul is a disaster.
The worst of the worst, so lacking in their own containment and so cruel that even the fascists of al-Qaeda want nothing to do with them, have gained martial control of a major oil producing state, a state so riven with internal divisions and cowed by decades if not centuries — or centuries and decades — of authoritarian brutality that even while outnumbering ISIS invaders 15:1 its defenders chose to dematerialize by shedding their uniforms in their flight.
On one hand, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani continues to engage the international community in a diplomatic process over Tehran’s nuclear program. He has achieved many successes in a charm offensive designed to rebrand his country as a reasonable and more moderate international player.
Simultaneously, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and its overseas special operation unit, the Quds Force, are strengthening, financing, and arming terrorist organizations all over the Middle East.
Iran, at a glance, has been sewing conflict around the middle east, building its own energy industry, establishing itself as a nuclear power — well, no one has yet stalled that ambition or dampened the regime’s enthusiasm for achieving it — and it illustrates its efforts in blood, or else why release Hezbollah to defend and sustain the brutality of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad? Against that sweeping influence in regional payola and arms shipments, Israel’s recent interdiction of arms intended for Gaza provides but a glimpse of Ayatollah Khamenei’s greater ambitions as the middle east’s greatest Lord of War.
At 21:15 local time Iraq, on December 26, 2013, Camp Liberty was targeted by dozens of missiles of different types. In the early hours 3 members of the Iranian resistance were slain and more than 50 were reported injured, some in critical condition.
This is the fourth missile attack on Iranian dissidents in Camp Liberty (Iraq) in 2013, while the Iraqi government has not yet delivered the bodies of those massacred during the September 1, 2013 attack on Camp Ashraf, to Liberty residents for burial.
While American President Barrak Obama gives diplomacy and peace a chance over Iran’s developing nuclear weapons building potential, Ayatollah Khamenei’s efforts to produce influence and obtain it throughout the region has been also developing unobstructed. With that in mind, Israel’s interception of a lone arms shipment doubtless intended to arm Hamas for the destruction of the Jewish-majority state represents but a small interruption in the Ayatollah’s efforts to turn a large wheel, a wheel that, in fact, has turned.
Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said he died along with six others when a fighter from the rival Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group blew himself up at an Ahrar al-Sham post in al-Halq.
“Two simultaneous raids hit Neshabieh first. People were pulling the bodies of a women and her two children from one house when the planes came back and hit the crowed, killing another nine,” activist Abu Sakr told Reuters from the area.
The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, made it clear from the beginning that Washington wants peace negotiations to be primarily about “transition” and the end of the government of President Bashar Al Assad.
But, since Assad’s army controls most population centres and main roads in Syria, this radical change in the balance of power will not happen until the rebels stop losing and start winning on the battlefield.
Cockburn’s use of quotation marks in this next paragraph echoes what I have stumbled upon in relation to the Free Syria Media / Army / National Coalition:
The “moderate” opposition — support for which was reportedly discussed at a two-day meeting in Washington of Western and Arab intelligence chiefs this month — is supposedly going to overwhelm the radicals and fight the government all at the same time. But repackaging some rebel warlords as moderates, simply because they are backed by the West and its regional allies, will be largely a PR ploy and unconvincing to Syrians.
February 23, 2014: China and Russia surprised everyone yesterday and went along with a UN resolution calling for the Syrian government and the rebels to provide access for humanitarian aid throughout Syria. To make this happen the UN had to, at Russian and Chinese request, take out clauses calling for war crimes, largely committed by the government, to be punished.
To get humanitarian aid to Syrians, it appears one must tacitly approve the tactics applied by dictators to their deeply subjugated constituents.
The “Killathon” article goes on to make quite a few useful observations, but this one spells the humanity of the regimes with a stake in Assad’s political survival:
Quds has been busy in Syria for over two years. Rebels accuse Iran of helping the government of adopt savage new tactics in the fighting around Damascus and elsewhere. These new methods involved mass killings of civilians, especially military age men, during daytime raids into pro-rebel villages . . . Now the rebels are facing “special troops” trained and advised by the Iranians. Rebels have seen Iranian transport aircraft landing at airports all over the country to deliver weapons, equipment and ammunition. These aircraft come in via Iraq, which refuses to do anything to stop them.
Iran’s latest forward operating base: Iraq!
That’s really not surprising.
Iranians Dial Up Presence in Syria – WSJ.com – 9/16/2013: “The busloads of Shiite militiamen from Iraq, Syria and other Arab states have been arriving at the Iranian base in recent weeks, under cover of darkness, for instruction in urban warfare and the teachings of Iran’s clerics, according to Iranian military figures and residents in the area.”
I’ve no idea who’s “winning” in Syria, but I’m pretty sure Syrians are losing.
*
From the Reuter’s piece cited: “Each ship switched off its satellite signals just before the delivery date in Syria, then reappeared on satellite tracking shortly after.”
Now that’s mafia style.
*
Referring to the likes of Mr. Jaber, the ministry official said, “Even if you want the Statue of Liberty, there are those who can bring it for you at the right price.”
The “Mr. Jaber” appears to be the brother of the other cited, Mohammed, not Ayman.
Odd note: I have heard of “suitcases full of money” traveling around the middle east, but the WSJ piece would be the first in which I’ve seen mention of the same so specifically: “Almost every month, he flies to Baghdad with suitcases filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash on behalf of the government, he said—showing a slip for a recent million-dollar deposit in an Iraqi bank. Wire transfers aren’t an option because of sanctions.”
Militants accidentally set off their own car bomb Monday at a training camp in the countryside north of Baghdad, leaving 21 dead and resulting in two dozen arrests, Iraqi officials said.
To even comment on the Islamic Small Wars anywhere would seem to require great aptitude for quadratic equations: extremists x moderates / Sunni vs Shiite / KSA vs Iran / USA vs (for now) Russia.
Make it stop!
No wonder Buddha laughs.
The headline snapshot tells the story: “ISIL” and others are doing their now familiar thing while their opposition struggles to contain their energies and deconstruct their motivations.
Not that the headlines say that.
🙂
However, one sees the meting of death associated with ISIL aggression and terrorism and the response in a) boosted contractor presence and deliveries of war fighting machinery and materiel all around, and b) appeals for chit-chat and threats against clerics that incite anti-government violence. That “b” part may prove the more powerful route in that the fighting and its apparent penalties simply fail to quell surface religious and underlying psychological (narcissistic) motivations for violence as a means of assertion and channel to power over others.
The “God Mob” is never about God: it’s about itself and its own capture by a seemingly inescapable script — and one guaranteed to destroy its cast of players by hoisting them high on their own hubris.
I wonder if that might not turn out like Eve’s death, where God had promised her she would die if she ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, while the snake, contradicting God but animated by God as well, assures her she will not die. Indeed, with the bite of the apple, our blithe and oblivious Eve disappear, as good as dead, but then becomes the woman human we know as aware, self-aware, possessed of conscience, and seductive, God bless her, which well He has.
To ask a man to disbelieve, modify, or reconsider tenets of faith that a) either excuse evil that for various reasons he may naturally wish to do, or b) actually motivate that evil, is like asking the sleeper to wake from his nightmare, or, here reverting to the account of the emerging consciousness of humanity, to wake up from oblivion, come down from his dream, and experience with great empathy a more common — yet also more noble — human condition.
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