These have no idea what it is that’s coming for them:
The newly elected parliament convened with 255 out of 328 elected officials attending, which was enough for a legal quorum, the speaker said. But when many failed to return after the break, there were not enough members to continue.
CNN: Iraqi parliament delays first session as ISIS continues deadly march – 7/1/2014
Ditto.
” . . . and the chant becomes a dance . . . .”
From the related article: “They get about a week to 10 days of training, Nasir said.”
CNN: With little training but full of conviction, Iraq’s Shiites answer the call to arms – 6/30/2014.
The picture gets worse.
He talks at length about all of the Western-made equipment ISIS has captured during its various routs of the Iraqi army. “Look how much money America spends on fighting Islam, and it ends up going to us,” he crows. “Message to the people of the West: just keep giving and we will keep taking.”
Vox. ISIS mocks Obama in Michael Bay-style propaganda video – 7/1/2014. Vox has imported the video to its page, so, to my friends around the world, if you want to see an ISIS representative in a ball cap and speaking American English, click through to it.
As ISIS has picked up “assets” in American machinery and weaponry, also Iraqi military uniforms, I was curious about the suggestion that the same were on the road to Damascus.
Is there an ISIS armored column gunning for Bashar al-Assad and his government?
Will U.S. arms shipments to “moderate” Syrian forces arrive in time to kill or capture that column and retake ownership of The Revolution?
Related: The American Conservative. “The Folly of Arming the Syrian Opposition.” 6/30/2014.
Related: Mail Online. “Does ISIS have a Scud missile? Islamic militants parade huge long-distance weapon in capital of newly-declared caliphate.” 7/1/2014: “‘Dawla Islamiyya (The Islamic State) has SCUD missile in #Raqqa. [God willing] its heading towards #Israel for a spectacular Eid ul fitr,’ an ISIS suspporter calling himself Ansar Udeen said on Twitter.”
About a week ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi noted, “The upcoming battles will reveal the extent of ISIS’ maturity. Most probably, it will stop at the maximum extent in the south like it now with the North’s Kurds and it will rest a little benefiting from international incompetence” (Al-Aribya, June 24, 2014).
How else could resistance to the developing and expanding conflict be characterized?
The Iraqi Parliament, so it appears, can’t keep itself seated for even one day.
The call-up of tens of thousands of young men from Iraq’s south, Shiites, for the most part, appear to be getting a pep talk, a helmet, a firearm, and a ride toward wherever the action is, pretty much just enough to get themselves killed.
I would like to be more optimistic, of course, but the good spirit of going off to war, the preparations with uniforms, steel, and gun oil, play to vanity more than the necessities of what has to be just the ugliest and most heartbreaking business on earth. For certain, I would not want to be an American military adviser handed recruits with two weeks (or much less) of “boot camp” behind them for a day’s work in an active field populated by so deeply a delusional and treacherous enemy, but perhaps that kind of challenge is what combat pay is all about.
From Sunday’s Guardian, this quote tells of a theme I’ve encountered elsewhere:
“We have Da’ash on one side,” said Abu Mustafa, a Baquba resident, using the colloquial word for Isis. “And we have Asa’ib ahl al-Haq on the other. I don’t know who to be more scared of.”
Even if held together for a time by Saddam Hussein’s power to manipulate his constituence and keep it roiled in fear, Iraq has been long divided by the Sunni-Shiite schism, and on that matter, never mind American secular ideals and military intervention, it has been laid open to Iranian and Saudi influence and related jockeying and meddling. Into that rift has roared ISIS with inhuman and frankly incontinent bloodletting and cruelty, and the state is on the edge — beyond it, possibly — of reverting to the language and terms of the war with which it’s familiar, a reenactment in reality of the obsessive bidding for succession that attended the death of Muhammad, who having left advice about how to do everything else appears to have left out the matter of continuing his enterprise beyond his final breath.
In Wikipedese:
The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which led to the Battle of Siffin. The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia%E2%80%93Sunni_relations
Related. AP – Epoch Times. “Islamic State Declaration Could Lead to Sunni-Shia Schism” – 6/30/2014.
Although the headline sensationalizes the potential for an all-out Sunni-Shiite showdown, even in the field and among fellow Islamists, opinion of ISIS may run low. From the same article:
“The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state but they don’t have the elements for it,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.”
Cannot or should not?
We may be certain of “should not”.
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