@fbaezer,
They control al Anbar; as i said, thats roughly like controlling the Sonoran desert in southern Arizona. They are under attack in Tikrit. They don't control Iraqi Kurdistan, so what territory do they control, that's worth having?
EDIT: I agree that Iran will intervene if it looks like Iraq will fall to Sunni extremists. I don't see this group actually accomplishing anything, and certainly not setting up their caliphate. From what i've read, they haven't done any sizable recruiting, and certainly not of experienced troops. The effect of fighting them is evolutionary for the Iraqi Shi'ites. There's more than 10,000 million of them in Iraq, ISIS is not going to exterminate them, and the longer the fighting continues, the more experienced and deadly the Iraqi Shi'ítes become. There's almost 70 million Shi'ites in Iran, many of them experienced fighters. If they get drawn in, the idiotic Sunni caliphate would likely be squashed like a bug.
Here's how i've seen this ISIS hooraw. They overran al Anbar, which was not militarily difficult, and which did not yield them much. At that point, if they really wanted to shoot for their Sunni caliphate, they should have immediately driven on Baghdad. But instead, the turned aside and took Tikrit. That is very suggestive to me. That was the home town of Saddam Hussein al Tikriti. Inferentially, that suggests to me that Sunnis who are former Ba'ath Party operatives are high in their leadership echelon. But what have they really accomplished that is substantive? They can take oil fields, and they can take refineries, but who can they sell to, and how would they deliver it? They can't eat it and they can't fire it ouf of their rocket launchers. The Baghdad government could be hurt by this, temporarily--but that's just a cash flow problem. As long as they control the south and Basra, they have product to sell and a means of delivering it to their customers. ISIS doesn't have that. Of course, it all remains to be seen. Overall, i'm not that impressed with what ISIS has accomplished.
“Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqi government in the fight against ISIL. We don't like ISIL, but ISIL is supported by Saudi Arabia, who we do like. We don't like Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but ISIL is also fighting against him. We don't like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government in its fight against ISIL. So some of our friends support our enemies, some enemies are now our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, who we want to lose, but we don't want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win. If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they could be replaced by people we like even less. And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who were not actually there until we went in to drive them out.”
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/theres-no-place-like-home-20140718-zud0i.html#ixzz37yvGOIck
@hingehead,
Boy, when it put like that...but its the truth.
ISIS is going down the road to madness. They've begun to execute people in custody in Mosul and nearby towns, dozens of people, usually for being Shi'ite or Christian. The one thing ISIS doesn't seem to be doing is executing a coherent strategic plan. The government in Baghdad is going to hell in a hand basket, now owuld be the time to attack them. But ISIS is fumble-f*cking around with their fantasy caliphate. Man, that situation is descending into some kind of surreal hell.
@Setanta,
Ablation is now mandatory in the Caliphate, to prevent women from being inmoral.
@fbaezer,
Dang Pablo, I had to look that up and I'm still not sure what you mean.
When ISIS invaded Kurdistan and took Mosul, they decreed that women could not appear in public, that men must wear beards, that no one could smoke tobacco, that christians must pay a special tax, convert ot Islam or die. They did not attempt to enforce those measures at the time. The Kurds, under the principle that politics makes strange bedfellows, accepted ISIS in preference to the Baghdad government, which had been casually abused their civil liberties. As ISIS approached, police killed Kurds in their custody and then ran.
But i suspect that the Kurds are experiencing buyer's remorse. Now ISIS is locking people up, and then killing them. They are killing Shi'ites and christians, and randomly killing others, i suspect just for publicly opposing their policies. I can't say for certain, but i don't think attempting drive sectarian wedges in the Kurdish population is going to work well for them. In the past, sectarian identification was a very distant second to identification as Kurds in that population.
As i noted last night, ISIS does not seem to be pursuing a coherent strategic policy. The Baghdad government was never more ripe for being toppled, and ISIS is rounding Kurds up and killing them, rather than attacking the Baghdad government.
@Setanta,
My reading is that the Kurds are positioning themselves for a homeland, they are fighting ISIL, mostly in defence of the boundaries of the area they think should be there. There was a piece in the Guardian postulating Iraq being split in three.
@hingehead,
That ain't exactly rocket science though--you've got some journalistic dweeb attempting to sound clever by just having read the history and coughed it up anew. When the Osmanli Turks governed the area, they were never so crazy as to attempt to unite those folks. What we call Iraq was three provinces under the Turks, with provincial capitals at Basra, Baghdad and Mosul.
@Setanta,
In defence of the journo (Luke Harding) - he was at Mariam Bek talking to Kurdish fighters.
Here's the story:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/11/kurds-isis-frontier-destiny-beckons
@hingehead,
Here's what one of his respondents told him:
Quote:"When the British set up this country in the 1920s they didn't do a good job," said Colonel Ghaleb Taha Ismail, the chief of police in Kirkuk's Kurdish Rahim Awa neighbourhood. "Before they were three provinces – Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. I think it will be three provinces again. History will go back to its original format."
That is essentially what i pointed out. Perhaps i am expecting too much, but i feel that if someone goes out to report on Iraq, it would help to know this history in advance.
@Setanta,
Quote:That is essentially what i pointed out. Perhaps i am expecting too much, but i feel that if someone goes out to report on Iraq, it would help to know this history in advance.
Then I join you in unreasonableness.
Though I feel a journo doesn't necessarily need to wear history on his sleeve unless she is expressing an opinion as opposed to reporting the 'facts'
History is a fact. I wasn't suggesting that anyone wear anything on their sleeve--what an odd and rather silly turn of phrase to have used. I was suggesting that journalists can profit from thoroughly understanding the background of the people and places about whom and which they intend to report.
@Setanta,
So you think Luke Harding had no idea of the history of the region?
@hingehead,
There's no way of knowing now, is there? In context, the remark does not seem to have been quoted in order to support a point the author was making himself. This is not either secret or arcane information. Arthur Balfour was given the task of carving up the middle east into spheres of influence when he was already past 70, so they gave him a young and energetic assistant--Winston Churchill. Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty when the Royal Navy had switched from coal-fired, reciprocating steam engines to oil-fired steam turbine engines. It came as no surprise to anyone that he arranged for Great Britain to gobble up the major oil-producing regions of the middle east.
Yes, i do wonder just how much of that history--which, as i have said is not either secret nor arcane--the author knew before embarking on the writing of that article. Now i also wonder what inspires your hissy fit over this article.
@Setanta,
Damn you're funny set. If you can see a hissy fit in there I'm impressed.
My 'history on sleeve' comment was because I don't want a repeated essay about the history of a conflict every time a journo, based in a region, writes a story about that conflict. I like that a journo respects his audience enough to know they've read his other pieces and have other sources. He cleverly alluded to the history of the region by reporting what the Kurdish fighter said about it without going on a separate ramble.
There's that fit again. I wasn't calling for the history of the region to be repeated each time it is reported on. However, in an article which purports to predict the break-up of Iraq, the creation of Iraq from three separate, Turkish provinces is germane. You know, a little intelligent, discerning application of knowledge to provide background? Don't get me wrong, i'm not after this reporter or this news rag. They all mostly suck. The brightest and the best apparently didn't know the significance of Kosovo to reactionary, "Greater Serbia" nationalists at the time of the NATO attack on Serbia. This isn't rocket science--i'm just calling for some perspective from people whose conceit is that they inform the world.
@Setanta,
What an awesome argument we're having about nothing.
I don't disagree with you at all - I'm just confused by you
First you said, in response to me saying the report was saying the Kurds saw the conflict as an opportunity to get a homeland:
Quote:That ain't exactly rocket science though--you've got some journalistic dweeb attempting to sound clever by just having read the history and coughed it up anew. When the Osmanli Turks governed the area, they were never so crazy as to attempt to unite those folks. What we call Iraq was three provinces under the Turks, with provincial capitals at Basra, Baghdad and Mosul.
Then when I posted the link to the article
setanta wrote:Quote: "When the British set up this country in the 1920s they didn't do a good job," said Colonel Ghaleb Taha Ismail, the chief of police in Kirkuk's Kurdish Rahim Awa neighbourhood. "Before they were three provinces – Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. I think it will be three provinces again. History will go back to its original format."
That is essentially what i pointed out. Perhaps i am expecting too much, but i feel that if someone goes out to report on Iraq, it would help to know this history in advance.
So I asked
Quote:So you think Luke Harding had no idea of the history of the region?
To which you replied
Quote:There's no way of knowing now, is there?
So you were bagging him for being a dweeb for having read some history, then you were bagging him for not knowing in advance, and then finally saying you had no idea if he knew any history or not.
That's why I'm confused.
