Target: Baghdad
"Baghdad was always the target. You can rampage in Mosul and take vast swaths of Anbar. The taking of Anbar was just to set up a platform to move on Baghdad."
"ISIS has strategy and it has tactics. The strategy is to take Baghdad. The tactic is to press on the weakest spots."
Toby Dodge, director, Middle East Centre, LSE
ISIS jihadis celebrate their incursions into Baghdad. This is a country that is incapable of even remotely defending itself from violent berserkers for whom glory lies in creating unprecedented bloodbaths, and stark scenes of death-lust in crucifixions and beheadings for maximum terror-effect.
Their reputation preceding them, Mosul was a breeze, left to them courtesy of the Iraqi military who couldn't leave the area fast enough. Ceding to the Islamic State not only vast tracts of Iraqi geography to make for a contiguous caliphate attached to Syria as well, but advanced munitions galore lavished on the Iraqi military by American largess. Not to mention the hundreds of millions left for them in Mosul's banks.
The Islamic State groups have been champing at the bit for months, feinting and positioning themselves to surround Baghdad, the jewel in their crown, once they attain it. While the irregular Shiite militias, encouraged, funded and armed by the Iraqi government set upon Sunni villagers to demonstrate most eloquently in the colour of living blood just who the land belongs to.
What, then, of the military assistance given to the Iraqi military by the Iranian al-Quds Republican Guard whose fighting skills the Republic values so highly? What have they accomplished in whipping the Iraqi forces up to muster? No better luck than the technologically skilled and battlefield-ready Americans who spent billions in treasury and more in lives to do the same?
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| Iraqi forces patrol the town of Jurf al-Sakhar in Babil province after the Iraqi army announced a military operation against Islamic State (IS) militants on Aug. 17, 2014. (Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images) |
A new wave of attacks have been unleashed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham which has easefully overrun vast tracts in western and northern Iraq, with the intention to destabilize and occupy Baghdad. The Shiites who so recently lorded it over the Iraqi Sunnis are getting their comeuppance in spades; the menace that is Sunni jihad on steroids taking up the cudgel and inflicting unimaginably inhumane pain.
Two car bombs simultaneously exploding in a commercial area in the northern Dolaie neighbourhood of Baghdad do far more damage in exploiting the vulnerability and fears of the Baghdad population than the bodies the explosions leave in shreds. Understandably then, residents infuriated by the failure of government forces to protect their neighbourhood demonstrated their gratefulness for the presence of police by casting stones at checkpoints and police cars arriving in response to the blasts.
The police, for their part, responded as defenders of security will do in the Middle East, and swiftly withdrew from the area. Leaving the residents to pick up the body parts and rush the wounded to hospital. Why should Baghdad police behave any more courageously than the Iraqi military, after all? Why should the residents of Baghdad trust in their security forces any more than the Yazidis trust that their lives will be safe once the Islamic State defenders of the faith enter their communities?
Senior Iraqi officials to the rescue. Reassuring residents the capital is well protected, so much so that terrorists will never be enabled to enter and take it. But stop the near-daily attacks? That's another story evidently, one too fraught with uncertainties to relate in a public forum. It can, though, be whispered in the corridors of power. Even as the ISIS terrorists claim to have a foothold within Baghdad. Upheld in large part by the reality of a number of large-scale bombings in the city.
Labels: Iraq, Islamic State, Jihad
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, October 18, 2014
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