We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to: Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com
BREAKING NEWS: IRAQ FRACTURES DEEPEN AS KURDS TAKE AN OIL TOWN— Iraq’s fracturing deepened on Thursday as Kurdish forces poured into the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk after government troops fled. Sunni militants, who seized two other important northern cities this week, moved closer to Baghdad and issued threats about advancing into the heavily Shiite south and destroying the shrines there, the holiest in Shiism. The rapidly unfolding developments came as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s entreaties for emergency powers stalled because of inaction by Parliament, which seemed paralyzed over the worst crisis to confront the country since it was convulsed by sectarian mayhem at the height of the American-led invasion nearly a decade ago. The inability or unwillingness of Mr. Maliki’s armed forces to hold their ground only compounded the crisis. The American government’s apparent rejection of Mr. Maliki’s requests for airstrikes on the Sunni militants reflected a deep reluctance by the Obama administration to re-entangle the U.S. militarily in Iraq…(New York Times, June 12, 2014)
Contents:
Jihadists Put Iraq at Risk of Syria-Style Anarchy: Matthew Fischer, Canada.com, June 11, 2013— The last time I was in Mosul a mortar exploded as I was walking across a U.S. army base with New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks.
Iraq War III Has Now Begun: Michael Knights, Foreign Policy, June 11, 2014— Images emerging from Mosul, Iraq's embattled northern city, present a familiar scene to fans of zombie movies.
While Obama Fiddles: Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2014— The fall of Mosul, Iraq, to al Qaeda terrorists this week is as big in its implications as Russia's annexation of Crimea.
Iraq Veteran: This is Not What My Friends Fought and Died For: John Nagl, Washington Post, June 12, 2014— For a veteran of the fighting there—and proponent of the counterinsurgency strategy that provided a chance for the country to stabilize—watching the recent unraveling of Iraq has been disheartening but not surprising.
The Beginning of a Caliphate: The Spread of ISIS, in Five Maps: Elias Groll, Foreign Policy, June 11, 2014
ISIS Threatens to Invade Jordan, 'Slaughter' King Abdullah: Khaled Abu Toameh, Gatestone Institute, June 12, 2013
Militants Storm Turkish Consulate in Iraqi City, Taking 49 People as Hostages: Ceylan Yeginsu, New York Times, June 11, 2014
Iran Deploys Forces to Fight al Qaeda-Inspired Militants in Iraq: Farnaz Fassihi, Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2014
Iraq Wants America Back to Fight Insurgents With Air Strikes: Eli Lake, Daily Beast, June 11, 2014
JIHADISTS PUT IRAQ AT RISK OF SYRIA-STYLE ANARCHY
Matthew Fischer Canada.com, June 11, 2014
The last time I was in Mosul a mortar exploded as I was walking across a U.S. army base with New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks. Mosul wasn’t safe then. It certainly isn’t safe now, despite having been the intense focus of years of U.S. support that ended when President Barack Obama brought home all American troops from Iraq two years ago. Iraq’s second-largest city was overrun on the weekend by Sunni extremists styling themselves representatives of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. This is a potentially ominous development for Iraq and the region, and ultimately for all of us.
The insurgency has links to al-Qaida, although the groups had a falling out earlier this year because al-Qaida found the ISIL too extreme. Like the parent organization and its late leader, Osama bin Laden, its ambition is to create a caliphate — an Islamic religious empire. These jihadis have already captured a large swath of northeastern Syria and northwestern Iraq and are now marching — more accurately, driving — on Baghdad in the Mad Max-style pickup trucks that they used to storm Mosul. On Wednesday they captured Tikrit, which was Saddam Hussein’s home town and power base, and were reported to be only about 100 kilometres from the capital, Baghdad. They were also moving toward Kirkuk, which has immense oil and gas fields. Meanwhile, what has happened in Mosul has triggered an exodus of half a million refugees, fleeing east into quasi-independent Kurdistan.
Until now the jihadis, a large number of whom are Syrians, have made quick progress. Rather than fight, Iraqi police officers and soldiers have abandoned their posts en masse. But if the black-garbed Islamists close on Baghdad or Kirkuk, that will likely change. Iraq’s Shia majority, whose Iran-backed militias are now likely to grow, will not surrender. Nor will Iraq’s large Kurdish minority, which has a famously tough, formidable army — the pesh merga — and which considers Kirkuk its cultural capital. Sunni insurgents in Iraq gained a lot of experience fighting U.S. forces after ISIL was created in 2004. They are well-armed and well-financed, especially after sacking Mosul’s armouries. Many images have been transmitted of them driving U.S.-supplied Humvees amid persistent Iraqi media reports that they had helped themselves to nearly half a billion dollars from Mosul’s central bank. If so, this would make them the wealthiest terrorist group on the planet.
For all these reasons the potential is very real in Iraq for the kind of mayhem and anarchy that has ripped Syria apart for two years. The rise of these ultra-conservative religious zealots and the convulsions they’re causing in Iraq poses another challenge to Obama and American leadership. One of Obama’s biggest foreign blunders was to draw a line over the use of chemical weapons that he ordered Syria to not cross. When it did the president did nothing, raising hackles in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and made a lot of would-be militants think they had been given a green light to do anything they pleased. Obama probably prolonged Syria’s civil war by not attacking Bashar Assad last year. With Assad unchallenged and making territorial gains, Syria’s jihadis appear to have concluded it is easier to create their cherished caliphate by going through Baghdad rather than Damascus.
Obama has not done any better on most of his other foreign files lately. The president has been flummoxed by Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its machinations in eastern Ukraine, and by Chinese bellicosity in the East China and South China seas. The Obama doctrine, as articulated in a confusing speech that the president gave at West Point last month, was that the U.S. will only use force if it is direct peril. In other words, Washington will sit this one out. And the next one, too….The most recent developments in Iraq present the president with a stark choice. He can give Prime Nouri al-Maliki’s army more and better weapons and equipment and run the risk of having them end up in the hands of bin Laden’s disciples, as has happened in Mosul. Or he can resist this temptation and risk Iraq’s total dismemberment. One of the imponderables is whether the insurgents can hold Mosul. Al-Maliki has made loud noises about a counter-offensive. But the Iraqi leader said the same thing about Fallujah — where the U.S. marines spent so much blood and money — after it fell five months ago. Since then Iraq’s security forces have barely made an effort to make good on al-Maliki’s promise.
What is most likely is that a coalition of Kurdish pesh merga and Iraqi special forces will try to reverse the fundamentalists’ gains. It is even possible that the U.S. will end up having to quietly co-operate with Syria’s Assad, who in turn continues to be beholden to Iran. It must make many who live in the Middle East pine for the less complicated days when Saddam ruled supreme.
Michael Knights
Foreign Policy, June 11, 2014
Images emerging from Mosul, Iraq's embattled northern city, present a familiar scene to fans of zombie movies. Burned-out military vehicles are clustered together on empty streets. At every intersection there is evidence of desperate last stands. Strewn uniforms lay abandoned outside gutted police stations. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled for their lives. Mosul is a ghost town where only looters and stray dogs hazard the streets.
But this isn't a zombie movie. It is Iraq's second-largest city, the thriving political and economic capital of the country's Sunni Arab community. In a matter of days between June 6 and 9, the city of 1.8 million people was overrun by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the al Qaeda affiliate that broke away in April 2013 to fight its own war and which has come perilously close to achieving its dream of a caliphate that reaches from the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon to Iran's Zagros Mountains. The scenes from Mosul are now being replayed in a dozen other northern cities that have fallen to ISIS and other insurgent elements.
How did ISIS achieve this coup? Working from a secure base in Syria's Raqqa province, ISIS seems to have carefully prepared operations in Mosul and a range of other cities as the opener to this year's Ramadan offensive — a twisted annual tradition in Iraq since 2003, timed to coincide with the Islamic holy month that spans the length of July this year. The well-publicized ISIS takeover of Fallujah in January 2014 was opportunism, with the movement exploiting missteps by the Iraqi government to move in. In stark contrast, the Mosul assault appears calculated and deliberate, an attempt to collapse government control in northern Iraq and leave ISIS as the last man standing. So far, ISIS has been successful.
Formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS is an Iraqi-led militant group that draws its suicide operators primarily from international volunteers, its foot soldiers from Iraq and Syria, and its money chiefly from a mix of local organized crime rackets. ISIS has used the Syrian conflict to build its strength and assert its independence from al Qaeda's senior leadership in Pakistan, which disavowed it in February 2014. But the movement's real ambitions rest in Iraq. The majority of ISIS's leadership and rank and file are Iraqi, including its emir, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Control of western Mosul would place ISIS in charge of the political and economic capital of Sunni Iraq, a prize of tremendous propaganda value.
ISIS used battle-hardened fighters from the Syrian and Iraqi theaters to smash their way — in a matter of hours — into Mosul's western neighborhoods from the Jazira, the Syrian-Iraqi desert between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Iraqi government's weak grasp on the Jazira gave the movement the capacity to surge hundreds of fighters from Iraq and Syria into the battle of Mosul. Even so, the ISIS attack force does not appear to have been large, numbering between 400 and 800 fighters by various estimates. Surprise and aggression allowed the movement to crumble the morale of Iraq's paramilitary police and army forces in Mosul in three days of hard fighting.
The 20 government security battalions in Mosul city seemed to dissolve completely on June 8-9, with significant video evidence of wholesale abandonment of positions by troops who ditched their vehicles and posts, took off their uniforms, and deserted. One photo shows a discarded police brigadier-general's uniform. The two main security headquarters in Mosul were both overrun and looted by ISIS, as were the provincial governor's offices. The Mosul branch of Iraq's Central Bank has reportedly been looted and the historic Assyrian church set aflame. The Iraqi army logistics depot was abandoned to ISIS, who are reported to have burned over 200 U.S.-provided Hummers, trucks, and engineering vehicles. Mosul's international airport and military airfield also fell to ISIS, with Iraqi helicopters reported destroyed on the ground and armored vehicles being quickly taken to Syria as war booty.
A desperate race has now commenced for control of Mosul. ISIS has achieved its basic aim of shattering any rival political or military institutions on the predominately Arab side of Mosul west of the Tigris River. Now it will try to rapidly reinforce the city using its open road across the desert to Syria and other Iraqi districts connected via the western desert. With the government's control shaky all the way to Baghdad's northern suburbs, ISIS has a shot at causing so much disruption that Baghdad will not be able muster the forces to retake Mosul for months. The Iraqi government has no choice but to try to liberate Mosul, due to its symbolic and geographic importance. Atheel al-Nujaifi, the Mosul-based governor of Nineveh province, took to the streets on June 9 when he narrowly escaped the ISIS takeover of his offices. Carrying an assault rifle alongside his security detail, he sought to rally Mosul men to form self-defense militias at the neighborhood level. But such militias do not seem to have mobilized. All across northern Iraq, the Sunni citizenry will need to see the government return in force before they risk being pounded by ISIS car bombs, which would be the movement's first recourse if local resistance were to emerge.
With shattered Iraqi military units rallying as far away as Taji, a base on Baghdad's suburbs some 200 miles south of Mosul, the government's counteroffensive could be slow in coming. Baghdad's soldiers now have to fight their way through a belt of lost cities and districts between the capital and Mosul, creating plenty of potential distractions, which will drain strength away from the government riposte. Special forces and air units are reportedly rapidly becoming exhausted as they are shuffled from crisis to crisis. The only military force in Iraq that is not presently overcommitted is the peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government, but relations between Baghdad and the Kurdish region are particularly strained.
Seeking the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, the United States has been forced to walk a fine line with jihadist groups in Syria. ISIS was only confirmed as a U.S.-designated terrorist movement in February 2014. But while there may be a strategic use for hard-line Islamist militants in Syria, in Iraq the issue is simple: ISIS is winning the war and they must be stopped. Washington must act if the United States wants to stop ISIS from becoming the only cohesive military and political force in Iraq's Sunni districts. On June 10, Osama al-Nujaifi, Iraq's parliamentary speaker and most senior Sunni politician, requested greater military support for Mosul under the auspices of the 2011 U.S.-Iraq Strategic Framework Agreement, the treaty that governs relations between the two countries. Behind closed doors, multiple Iraqi government officials relayed to me, the Iraqi government has insistently requested U.S. air strikes on ISIS along the Syrian border and the outskirts of Iraqi cities, which are the launch pads for ISIS takeovers. For the U.S. administration this has been seen as a step too far. Instead, the U.S. government has been engaged in internecine diplomacy — using its good offices to prod Iraq's factions towards a national reconciliation effort that could give Sunni Arabs faith in a nonviolent resolution to their complaints of discrimination by the Shiite government. Reconciliation could also lay the groundwork for Sunni Arab cooperation in stabilizing Mosul and other lost areas, such as Fallujah. This is vital work — but with ISIS forces capturing city after city, Washington has to do more (and quickly) to prevent the loss of government in Iraq. Intensified U.S. on-the-ground mentoring of Iraqi military headquarters and perhaps U.S. air strikes might also be needed to reverse the collapse of Iraq's military.
The Obama administration is determined to honor its campaign pledge to end the wars. To that end, the White House withdrew U.S. combat troops in 2011. However there is an increasingly strong case that Iraq needs new and boosted security assistance, including air strikes and a massively boosted security cooperation initiative to rebuild the shattered army and mentor it in combat. The Middle East could see the collapse of state stability in a cross-sectarian, multiethnic country of 35 million people that borders many of the region's most important states and is the world's fastest-growing oil exporter. Any other country with the same importance and the same grievous challenges would get more U.S. support, but the withdrawal pledge has put Iraq in a special category all on its own. Washington doesn't have the luxury of treating Iraq as a special case anymore. ISIS has moved on since the days of the U.S. occupation and they have a plan. Washington should too.
Daniel Henninger
Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2014
The fall of Mosul, Iraq, to al Qaeda terrorists this week is as big in its implications as Russia's annexation of Crimea. But from the Obama presidency, barely a peep. Barack Obama is fiddling while the world burns. Iraq, Pakistan, Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, Syria. These foreign wildfires, with more surely to come, will burn unabated for two years until the United States has a new president. The one we've got can barely notice or doesn't care.
Last month this is what Barack Obama said to the 1,064 graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy: "Four and a half years later, as you graduate, the landscape has changed. We have removed our troops from Iraq. We are winding down our war in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda's leadership on the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been decimated." That let-the-sunshine-in line must have come back to the cadets, when news came Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban, who operate in that border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, had carried out a deadly assault on the main airport in Karachi, population 9.4 million. To clarify, the five Taliban Mr. Obama exchanged for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl are Afghan Taliban who operate on the other side of the border. Within 24 hours of the Taliban attack in Pakistan, Boko Haram's terrorists in Nigeria kidnapped 20 more girls, adding to the 270 still-missing—"our girls," as they were once known. Then Mosul fell. The al Qaeda affiliate known as ISIS stormed and occupied the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, population 1.8 million and not far from Turkey, Syria and Iran. It took control of the airport, government buildings, and reportedly looted some $430 million from Mosul's banks. ISIS owns Mosul. Iraq's army in tatters, ISIS rolled south Wednesday and took the city of Tikrit. It is plausible that this Islamic wave will next take Samarra and then move on to Baghdad, about 125 miles south of Tikrit. They will surely stop outside Baghdad, but that would be enough. Iraq will be lost.
Now if you want to vent about " George Bush's war," be my guest. But George Bush isn't president anymore. Barack Obama is because he wanted the job and the responsibilities that come with the American presidency. Up to now, burying those responsibilities in the sand has never been in the job description. Mosul's fall matters for what it reveals about a terrorism whose threat Mr. Obama claims he has minimized. For starters, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) isn't a bunch of bug-eyed "Mad Max" guys running around firing Kalashnikovs. ISIS is now a trained and organized army. The seizures of Mosul and Tikrit this week revealed high-level operational skills. ISIS is using vehicles and equipment seized from Iraqi military bases. Normally an army on the move would slow down to establish protective garrisons in towns it takes, but ISIS is doing the opposite, by replenishing itself with fighters from liberated prisons. An astonishing read about this group is on the website of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. It is an analysis of a 400-page report, "al-Naba," published by ISIS in March. This is literally a terrorist organization's annual report for 2013. It even includes "metrics," detailed graphs of its operations in Iraq as well as in Syria.
One might ask: Didn't U.S. intelligence know something like Mosul could happen? They did. The February 2014 "Threat Assessment" by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency virtually predicted it: "AQI/ISIL [aka ISIS] probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria . . . as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah." AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq), the report says, is exploiting the weak security environment "since the departure of U.S. forces at the end of 2011." But to have suggested any mitigating steps to this White House would have been pointless. It won't listen. In March, Gen. James Mattis, then head of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress he recommended the U.S. keep 13,600 support troops in Afghanistan; he was known not to want an announced final withdrawal date. On May 27, President Obama said it would be 9,800 troops—for just one year. Which guarantees that the taking of Mosul will be replayed in Afghanistan.
Let us repeat the most quoted passage in former Defense Secretary Robert Gates's memoir, "Duty." It describes the March 2011 meeting with Mr. Obama about Afghanistan in the situation room. "As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn't trust his commander, can't stand Karzai, doesn't believe in his own strategy and doesn't consider the war to be his," Mr. Gates wrote. "For him, it's all about getting out." The big Obama bet is that Americans' opinion-polled "fatigue" with the world (if not his leadership) frees him to create a progressive domestic legacy. This Friday Mr. Obama is giving a speech to the Sioux Indians in Cannon Ball, N.D., about "jobs and education." Meanwhile, Iraq may be transforming into (a) a second Syria or (b) a restored caliphate. Past some point, the world's wildfires are going to consume the Obama legacy. And leave his successor a nightmare.
IRAQ VETERAN: THIS IS NOT WHAT MY
John Nagl
Washington Post, June 12, 2014
For a veteran of the fighting there—and proponent of the counterinsurgency strategy that provided a chance for the country to stabilize—watching the recent unraveling of Iraq has been disheartening but not surprising. My unit arrived in Anbar province in September of 2003, as the Sunni population there began to support in earnest an insurgency against the American occupation of the country. Young soldiers were killed by snipers and roadside bombs as their officers struggled to understand the political climate in which the fighting was taking place. We left after a hard year that cost the lives of 22 fine young men but accomplished little on the ground. A captain made coffee mugs that proclaimed sourly, “we were winning when I left”.
I returned to a Pentagon that was in denial, but I found a few who believed that a new strategy of building Iraqi forces to take over the fight could eventually succeed. We struggled to provide trainers and equipment and to find ways to partner with our Iraqi comrades but managed to succeed in the nick of time, pulling Iraq into a possible win. That was the surge. Then, by declining to provide a long-term security assistance force to an Iraq not yet able to handle the fight itself, we pulled defeat from the jaws of victory and increased the peril our Iraqi friends would face. By not training and equipping Syrian freedom fighters in the summer of 2012, we provided an opportunity for al-Qaeda to rebuild strength in the region. The renewed Sunni insurgency in Iraq joined with the worst of the anti-Assad forces in Syria present a threat greater than the fragile Iraqi government can handle on its own.
We are reaping the instability and increased threat to U.S. interests that we have sown through the failure of our endgame in Iraq and our indecisiveness in Syria. There is a clear lesson here for those contemplating a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Having given al-Qaeda a new lease on life in the Middle East, will we provide another base where it began, in Afghanistan and Pakistan? This is not the end state my friends fought for and died for.
The Spirit of Mahal Lives On: Smoky Simon, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 27, 2014—For me, at the age of almost 94, this evening presents an outstanding opportunity to express my profound gratitude for the many blessings that have been bestowed upon me along my life’s journey.
Stanley Medicks – The Man Behind the Mahal Memorial: Elana Overs, Jerusalem Post, June 27, 2013—Stanley Medicks, who died in England earlier this month at the age of 82, was a commander in Mahal (Volunteers from Abroad) during the War of Independence and later served as chairman of British and Scandinavian Mahal.
The Next Arab-Israeli War Will Be Fought with Drones: Yochi Dreazen, New Republic, Mar. 26, 2014 —hortly after 7 a.m. on a chilly morning at the Rosh Hanikra military base in northernmost Israel, Lieutenant Colonel Yogev Bar Sheshet was already on his third Diet Coke.
5 Most Innovative Weapons the IDF Has to Offer (That We Can Tell You About): IDF Blog, Apr. 20, 2014 —The IDF is one of the most technologically advanced armies in the world. Check out our five most innovative weapons, (at least the ones that we can tell you about) which help IDF soldiers in the battlefield every day.
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