As of now, Israel is safe.Paul wrote:Israel is looking to me more and more like the doomed kingdom of vijaynagar, powerful and seemingly indestructible but doomed to failure once the islamic states got their ducks in a row.
Joe Biden spoke for this exact trifurcation prior to the 2008 election. He was widely considered the "most knowledgeable" in US circles on the subject of West Asia and Afghanistan.Paul wrote:Looking at the Ralph peters map of the ME, does it not appear that the west knew that Iraq was going to trifurcate into three states as early as the eve of invasion of Iraq. So their predictions are on the dot here. At the very least it is clear that there are thinkers among the neo con thinkers who are as sharp as any in the world.
The US Secretary of State John Kerry sounded upbeat after a 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at the end of which he said: “That was good.” But if Mr Kerry is optimistic about the situation then he is about the only person in Baghdad feeling that way as news comes of fresh rebel victories and of sectarian massacres. Iraq is beginning to resemble India at the time of partition in 1947 when massacres propelled demographic change.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) has swept through the giant, overwhelmingly Sunni province of Anbar west of Baghdad without meeting much resistance. The Iraqi army abandoned the border with Jordan where Sunni tribes took over the Turaibal border crossing on the highway built by Saddam Hussein as a crucial supply route during the Iran-Iraq war. Tribes are negotiating to hand over Turaibal to Isis which captured the two main border crossings to Syria over the weekend. A tribal leader said he was mediating with Isis in a “bid to spare blood and make things safer for the employees of the crossing. We are receiving positive messages from the militants.”
The Jordanian army says its troops have been put in a state of alert in recent days along the 112-mile border with Iraq, to ward off “any potential or perceived security threats” in this scantily inhabited desert area. The Iraqi army spokesman said that troops have redeployed from towns and cities in Anbar for “tactical reasons”.
President Obama and Mr Kerry have called for a genuinely inclusive government with Sunni leaders as well as Shia and Kurds getting a share in power. They have implied that Mr Maliki cannot stay in power if such a government is to be created, but it may already be too late for a power-sharing solution since the Sunni have already displaced the government as the main authority in provinces where they are the majority. The Sunni politicians who met Mr Kerry, the parliament’s Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, have little authority in their own community. Events have passed them by and a bigger role for Sunni politicians like them is unlikely to break the momentum of the revolt.
Iraqi officials say Mr Maliki asked the US to launch air strikes against Isis positions in Iraq and Syria, targeting training camps and convoys. Mr Kerry replied that care had to be taken to avoid civilian casualties. Mr Obama earlier said Mr Maliki and the Iraqi leadership face a test as to whether “they are able to set aside their suspicions, their sectarian preferences for the good of the whole”.
Hopes of a power-sharing government seem out-of-date as Isis closes in on the capital and has made it clear that it does not want to talk to Shia but to kill them or drive them out of Iraq. Isis regards Shia as apostates or heretics who have betrayed the faith and deserve death. Where Shia cannot defend themselves they have fled, in places such as Tal Afar, with a population of 300,000 Shia Turkoman, west of Mosul where fighting is still going on. Isis is primarily an anti-Shia movement in Iraq and Syria, its violent sectarianism so extreme that it was one of the reasons why it was criticised by al-Qa’ida. There are reports the few Shia who lived in Mosul and stayed have been given 24 hours to convert to Sunni Islam or die.
John Kerry met Nouri al-Maliki yesterday; he is said to have asked the US for air strikes on Isis in Iraq and Syria John Kerry met Nouri al-Maliki yesterday; he is said to have asked the US for air strikes on Isis in Iraq and Syria (AP)
Iraq has gone a long way down the road towards a Sunni-Shia sectarian civil war over the last two weeks. In Salahuddin province insurgent fighters helped by local Sunni have advanced to drive out thousands of Shia Turkomans from three villages. “You cannot imagine what happened, only if you saw it could you believe it,” Hassan Ali, a 52-year-old farmer, told AP as he sat in the al-Zahra Shia mosque, which is used to distribute aid in Kirkuk 50 miles to the north. He said: “They hit us with mortars, and the families fled, and they kept hitting us. It was completely sectarian: the Shia out.”
The attacks took place on 16 June in the neighbouring villages of Chardaghli, Brawchi and Karanaz, as well as in a fourth village, Beshir, some 30 miles to the north, refugees told the agency. The aim seems to be to create Shia-free zones in which Isis can establish its fundamentalist Sunni caliphate. Between 15 and 35 villagers were killed and the bodies dumped on the roadside for collection. “They called and said, ‘Send somebody to collect your dogs’,” a policeman from the village said. Survivors say Shia mosques were blown up, their houses burnt and their sheep stolen.
Unlike other massacres of Shia by Isis this one is well-authenticated. The Shia villagers say their Sunni neighbours took part in the attack. The inhabitants of Sunni villages nearby have already fled because they expect revenge attacks by the Shia.
THERE you go! Proof that ISIS is Pakistan Army. The pattern of sexual preferences is unmistakeable.and their sheep stolen
This is the best outcome that will help India in the long term.ramana wrote:Looks like Sunni Iraq and Shia Iraq is on its way along with Kurdistan Autonomous Region to assuage Turkish sensitivity.
Turkish demo(Dumus)graphics are changing at fast pace. Kurds will be majority community there in next few decades. And USA has resumed full military aid to Egypt (to contain the expansion of Sunni Caliphate of ISIS)ramana wrote:Looks like Sunni Iraq and Shia Iraq is on its way along with Kurdistan Autonomous Region to assuage Turkish sensitivity.
Saudi King Abdullah will visit Egypt on Friday for the first time since the 2011 uprising, in a show of support for newly-elected President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Egyptian officials said Thursday.
The officials said el-Sissi will receive the ailing monarch upon his arrival from Morocco, where he spent time for medical rehabilitation. The visit will be Abdullah's first since the 2011 ouster of Hosni Mubarak, a close ally of both Saudi Arabia and the United States. Saudi Arabia and Egypt have both declared the Muslim Brotherhood, from which Morsi hails, a terrorist organization.The first world leader to congratulate el-Sissi after winning last month's election was King Abdullah, who has been on the throne for nearly a decade and is almost 90. The monarch declared that the turmoil sparked by the Arab Spring should now come to a close."The brotherly Egyptian people have suffered during the past period of chaos. The short-sighted called it 'creative chaos,'" the king said in a letter published by the Saudi state news agency.He called for a donors conference to help Egypt "get out of the tunnel," referring to its wrecked economy.
The US Secretary of State John Kerry sounded upbeat after a 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at the end of which he said: “That was good.” But if Mr Kerry is optimistic about the situation then he is about the only person in Baghdad feeling that way as news comes of fresh rebel victories and of sectarian massacres. Iraq is beginning to resemble India at the time of partition in 1947 when massacres propelled demographic change.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) has swept through the giant, overwhelmingly Sunni province of Anbar west of Baghdad without meeting much resistance. The Iraqi army abandoned the border with Jordan where Sunni tribes took over the Turaibal border crossing on the highway built by Saddam Hussein as a crucial supply route during the Iran-Iraq war. Tribes are negotiating to hand over Turaibal to Isis which captured the two main border crossings to Syria over the weekend. A tribal leader said he was mediating with Isis in a “bid to spare blood and make things safer for the employees of the crossing. We are receiving positive messages from the militants.”
The Jordanian army says its troops have been put in a state of alert in recent days along the 112-mile border with Iraq, to ward off “any potential or perceived security threats” in this scantily inhabited desert area. The Iraqi army spokesman said that troops have redeployed from towns and cities in Anbar for “tactical reasons”.
President Obama and Mr Kerry have called for a genuinely inclusive government with Sunni leaders as well as Shia and Kurds getting a share in power. They have implied that Mr Maliki cannot stay in power if such a government is to be created, but it may already be too late for a power-sharing solution since the Sunni have already displaced the government as the main authority in provinces where they are the majority. The Sunni politicians who met Mr Kerry, the parliament’s Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi and Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, have little authority in their own community. Events have passed them by and a bigger role for Sunni politicians like them is unlikely to break the momentum of the revolt.
Iraqi officials say Mr Maliki asked the US to launch air strikes against Isis positions in Iraq and Syria, targeting training camps and convoys. Mr Kerry replied that care had to be taken to avoid civilian casualties. Mr Obama earlier said Mr Maliki and the Iraqi leadership face a test as to whether “they are able to set aside their suspicions, their sectarian preferences for the good of the whole”.
Hopes of a power-sharing government seem out-of-date as Isis closes in on the capital and has made it clear that it does not want to talk to Shia but to kill them or drive them out of Iraq. Isis regards Shia as apostates or heretics who have betrayed the faith and deserve death. Where Shia cannot defend themselves they have fled, in places such as Tal Afar, with a population of 300,000 Shia Turkoman, west of Mosul where fighting is still going on. Isis is primarily an anti-Shia movement in Iraq and Syria, its violent sectarianism so extreme that it was one of the reasons why it was criticised by al-Qa’ida. There are reports the few Shia who lived in Mosul and stayed have been given 24 hours to convert to Sunni Islam or die.
John Kerry met Nouri al-Maliki yesterday; he is said to have asked the US for air strikes on Isis in Iraq and Syria John Kerry met Nouri al-Maliki yesterday; he is said to have asked the US for air strikes on Isis in Iraq and Syria (AP)
Iraq has gone a long way down the road towards a Sunni-Shia sectarian civil war over the last two weeks. In Salahuddin province insurgent fighters helped by local Sunni have advanced to drive out thousands of Shia Turkomans from three villages. “You cannot imagine what happened, only if you saw it could you believe it,” Hassan Ali, a 52-year-old farmer, told AP as he sat in the al-Zahra Shia mosque, which is used to distribute aid in Kirkuk 50 miles to the north. He said: “They hit us with mortars, and the families fled, and they kept hitting us. It was completely sectarian: the Shia out.”
The attacks took place on 16 June in the neighbouring villages of Chardaghli, Brawchi and Karanaz, as well as in a fourth village, Beshir, some 30 miles to the north, refugees told the agency. The aim seems to be to create Shia-free zones in which Isis can establish its fundamentalist Sunni caliphate. Between 15 and 35 villagers were killed and the bodies dumped on the roadside for collection. “They called and said, ‘Send somebody to collect your dogs’,” a policeman from the village said. Survivors say Shia mosques were blown up, their houses burnt and their sheep stolen.
Unlike other massacres of Shia by Isis this one is well-authenticated. The Shia villagers say their Sunni neighbours took part in the attack. The inhabitants of Sunni villages nearby have already fled because they expect revenge attacks by the Shia.
The militant group Baghdadi inherited had in place a sophisticated bureaucracy that was almost obsessive about record-keeping. Its middle-managers detailed, for example, the number of wives and children each fighter had, to gauge compensation rates upon death or capture, and listed expenditures in neat Excel spreadsheets that noted payments to an “assassination platoon” and “Al Mustafa Explosives Company.” Income from the Sunni Muslim militants’ looting of Shiite Muslim-owned property was recorded as “spoils.”
.Insurgent records suggest that the United States will find it difficult to rout an organization whose structure and attention to detail allowed it to prosper even during the toughest U.S. counterterrorism efforts of the last decade. U.S. officials believed, incorrectly, that the group had been vanquished
The documents also challenge popular narratives about the group, including that Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries were key contributors to the birth of ISIS _ a claim that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki recently repeated. In fact, the intercepted documents show, outside donations amounted to only a tiny fraction _ no more than 5 percent _ of the group’s operating budgets from 2005 until 2010, when Baghdadi took over after the deaths of two superiors.
Another widely held belief that’s refuted by the financial records is that Iraqi recruits flocked to the Islamic State for higher wages and steady jobs because they couldn’t make ends meet in Iraq’s war-ravaged economy. In the years for which financial records are available, the average Islamic State foot soldier earned a base salary of just $41 a month, far lower than blue-collar Iraq jobs such as a bricklayer making $150 a month, according to Johnston’s comparisons.
The low pay is even more striking against the background of the risk these new members incurred. In Anbar in 2005 and 2006, Islamic State fighters were 47 times more likely to die than the general population of men ages 18 to 48, according to the RAND analysis. The conclusions echo what counterterrorism experts have long suspected: that members are so ideologically driven that economic incentives to stop the flow of fighters aren’t likely to have much impact.
On Monday, a spokesman for Iraq's counterterrorism service told CNN that two senior ISIS figures -- an Algerian militant named Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hafsa, the self-styled governor of Tikrit -- were killed late Monday in airstrikes in Tikrit, the hometown of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
The spokesman, Sabah Al-Nouman, offered no evidence of the deaths.
CNN cannot independently confirm any of the claims.
(bigger image in the article linked above)It is unclear for now what the catalyst for the $1.70 spike in oil prices is but WTI just touched $107.50 in a hurry. It appears a combination of a WSJ story reporting the Obama administration has quietly cleared the way for the first exports of unrefined American oil in four decades, allowing energy companies to chip away at the long-standing ban on selling U.S. crude overseas (which could theoretically enable them to buy crude -bid price up- and sell for higher prices abroad as we show below);
His plastic surgeon. A bit too much if I may say soWho listens to JoKerry now?
I think the govt should give them passports and tickets to Eyerak. Plus a few AK-47s and AK-56s captured from Pakis/Khalistanis.Fearing for their fellow community members and the Indians that are trapped in the violence-affected region, the All India Shia Hussaini Fund, based in Lucknow, has requested fellow Shia members to sign up and go to Iraq to secure their release. Syed Hasan Mehdi, the secretary of the organisation, tells Rediff.com Vicky Nanjappa how the ISIS is a blemish on Islam and will soon be targeting Kashmir. He also informs that 5,000 Shias and 162 Hindus have signed up for the rescue mission and are ready to lay down their lives.
Versova is originally a small fishing village of the Kolis, situated to the north of the old Mumbai city.The original name of the village is "Vesave", which derives from the Marathi word for "rest" (as in resting place). In 1694, a fleet of Arabs from Muscat landed in Versova and massacred every person they could find in the village. The village is mentioned in the writings of Gemelli Careri in 1695.
The only way to become a Muslim is to recite the Kalima, "La Ilaah'aa Il' Alla'h, Muhammad al rasollullah", which a Shi'a would have already done. So, there is no more room for conversion. That's why Sunnis resort to 'final solution' in these matters. The 24-hour deadline, if at all given, is a ruse to justify whatever action they would take (or have already taken) by putting the blame squarely on the victims for refusing to convert.Singha wrote:>> There are reports the few Shia who lived in Mosul and stayed have been given 24 hours to convert to Sunni Islam or die.
who does one convert between these camps...is there a quran certified procedure or just killing a few shia is enough as a initiation rite?
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is ready to concede, at least temporarily, the loss of much of Iraq to Sunni insurgents and is instead deploying the military’s best-trained and equipped troops to defend Baghdad, Iraqi officials said Tuesday.
Shiite militias responding to a call to arms by Iraq’s top cleric are also focused on protecting the capital and Shiite shrines, while Kurdish fighters have grabbed a long-coveted oil-rich city outside their self-ruled territory, ostensibly to defend it from the al-Qaida breakaway group.
With Iraq’s bitterly divided sects focused on self-interests, the situation on the ground is increasingly looking like the fractured state the Americans have hoped to avoid.
“We are facing a new reality and a new Iraq,” the top Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday in Irbil, capital of the self-ruled Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
Two weeks after a series of disastrous battlefield setbacks in the north and west, al-Maliki is struggling to devise an effective strategy to repel the relentless advances by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a well-trained and mobile force thought to have some 10,000 fighters inside Iraq. The response by government forces has so far been far short of a counteroffensive, restricted mostly to areas where Shiites are in danger of falling prey to the Sunni extremists or around a major Shiite shrine north of Baghdad.
These weaknesses were highlighted when the government tried but failed to retake Tal Afar, a mixed Shiite-Sunni city of around 200,000 that sits strategically near the Syrian border. The government claimed it had retaken parts of the city but the area remains under the control of the militants after a battle in which some 30 volunteers and troops were killed.
Government forces backed by helicopter gunships have also fought for a week to defend Iraq’s largest oil refinery in Beiji, north of Baghdad, where a top military official said Tuesday that Sunni militants were regrouping for another push to capture the sprawling facility.
In the face of militant advances that have virtually erased Iraq’s western border with Syria and captured territory on the frontier with Jordan, al-Maliki’s focus has been the defense of Baghdad, a majority Shiite city of 7 million fraught with growing tension. The city’s Shiites fear they could be massacred and the revered al-Kazimiyah shrine destroyed if Islamic State fighters capture Baghdad. Sunni residents also fear the extremists, as well as Shiite militiamen in the city, who they worry could turn against them.
The militants have vowed to march to Baghdad and the holy Shiite cities of Najaf and Karbala, a threat that prompted the nation’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to issue an urgent call to arms that has resonated with young Shiite men.
The military’s best-trained and equipped forces have been deployed to bolster Baghdad’s defenses, aided by U.S. intelligence on the militants’ movements, according to the Iraqi officials, who are close to al-Maliki’s inner circle and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss such sensitive issues.
The number of troops normally deployed in Baghdad has doubled, they said, but declined to give a figure. Significant numbers are defending the Green Zone, the sprawling area on the west bank of the Tigris River that is home to al-Maliki’s office, as well as the U.S. Embassy.
“Al-Maliki is tense. He is up working until 4 a.m. every day. He angrily ordered staff at his office to stop watching TV news channels hostile to his government,” one of the officials said.
The struggle has prompted the Obama administration to send hundreds of troops back into Iraq, nearly three years after the American military withdrew.
The Pentagon said Tuesday that nearly half of the roughly 300 U.S. advisers and special operations forces are now on the ground in Baghdad, where they have begun to assess the Iraqi forces and the fight against Sunni militants. Another four teams of special forces will arrive in days, bringing the total to nearly 200.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, also said the U.S. is conducting up to 35 surveillance missions daily over Iraq to provide intelligence as Iraqi troops battle the aggressive and fast-moving insurgency. About 90 of the U.S. troops are setting up a joint operations center in Baghdad.
Iraqi officials said the U.S. advisers were expected to focus on the better units the Americans had closely worked with before pulling out.
Iraq’s best-trained and equipped force is a 10,000-strong outfit once nicknamed the “dirty division” that fought alongside the Americans for years against Sunni extremists and Shiite militiamen. Now it is stretched thin, with many of its men deployed in Anbar province in a monthslong standoff with Sunni militants who have since January controlled a city 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Baghdad.
The focus on Baghdad, rather than recapturing the vast Sunni areas to the west and north, has been subtly conveyed to the media in daily briefings by chief military spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi. He has in recent days shifted from boilerplate assurances that the military is on the offensive to something less confident.
“Withdrawals from anywhere to another location does not mean defeat or that we permanently left an area,” he said Monday. “It is a battlefield, and the fight includes going forward and backward and regrouping.”
The Iraqi military, rife with corruption and torn by conflicting loyalties, lacks adequate air cover for its ground troops and armor, with the nation’s infant air force operating two Cessna aircraft capable of firing U.S.-made Hellfire missiles. That leaves the army air wing of helicopter gunships stretched and overworked.
While Iraq’s security forces number a whopping 1.1 million, with 700,000 in the police and the rest in the army, corruption, desertion and sectarian divisions have been a major problem. With a monthly salary of $700 for newly enlisted men, the forces have attracted many young Iraqis who would otherwise be unemployed. Once in, some bribe commanders so they can stay home and take a second job, lamented the officials.
Al-Maliki’s effort to bolster the defense of the capital coincides with Iraq’s worst crisis since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. forces, with the nation facing a serious danger of splitting up into warring Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves.
The declaration by Barzani, the Kurdish leader, of a “new Iraq,” was a thinly veiled reference to the newly won Kurdish control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds have long sought to incorporate into their self-rule region.
Control of Kirkuk and Kurdish pockets in Diyala province and elsewhere have been at the heart of tension between the Kurdish region and the Baghdad government, and the Kurds are unlikely to want to give up that territory, regardless of the status of the fighting.
Al-Maliki, who has no military background but gets the final say on major battlefield decisions, has looked to hundreds of thousands of Shiite volunteers who joined the security forces as the best hope to repel the Islamic State’s offensive.
While giving the conflict a sectarian slant — the overwhelming majority are Shiites — the volunteers have also been a logistical headache as the army tries to clothe, feed and arm them. Furthermore, their inexperience means they will not be combat ready for weeks, even months.
Still, some were sent straight to battle, with disastrous consequences.
New details about the fight for Tal Afar — the first attempt to retake a major city from the insurgents — underscore the challenges facing the Iraqi security forces.
Dozens of young volunteers disembarked last week at an airstrip near the isolated northern city and headed straight to battle, led by an army unit. The volunteers and the accompanying troops initially staved off advances by the militants, but were soon beaten back, according to military officials.
They took refuge in the airstrip, but the militants shelled the facility so heavily the army unit pulled out, leaving 150 panicking volunteers to fend for themselves, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
The ill-fated expedition — at least 30 volunteers and troops were killed and the rest of the recruits remain stranded at the airstrip — does not bode well for al-Maliki’s declared plan to make them the backbone of Iraq’s future army.
So 11 years after Dubya declared Mission Accomplished, and the US taxpayer poured $2B a month into the Global Offensive Against Terror (GOAT) to train the Forces of Freedom against the Al Qaeda,krishnan wrote:their troops look very well eqped too, almost like professional army
