generalspeaking

Islam's Divine Pursuit of Conquest : Take Your Pick, Shiite or Sunni

"Still under ISIL control are the cities of Tal Afar, an hour west of Mosul by car or tank, Al Qaim, which is to the south of Tal Afar, and Hawija, where the jihadis, totally surrounded and 100 kilometres from the front lines, somehow manage to hang on."
"Yet these are surely the last gasps of ISIL in Iraq. After an unbelievably cruel three-year run, it is finished as a fighting force there."
"The problem for  Washington as well as for the Sunni-dominated Arab countries grouped around Iraq is not much different than it was when marines with whom I was embedded closed in on Baghdad during the Second Gulf War in 2003. There, beside a highway on the eastern outskirts of the capital, [was] a group of smiling, immaculately groomed Shia clerics eager to greet the marines and let them know they had patiently outlasted Saddam Hussein."
Matthew Fisher, Journalist, Postmedia

Members of the Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) take a selfie in front of the ruins of Grand al-Nuri Mosque in the Old City, July 20, 2017. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

First Iraq, then Syria, and throw in Yemen for good measure. Lebanon was long ago lost to Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran's proxy militia that effectively took over that bifurcated country as its own. Iran has achieved one of its major goals. To become the effective dominant force in the Middle East. Sunni Islam may vastly outnumber their Shiite counterpart in population numbers and governed states, but it seems they are political naifs compared to the conniving ayatollahs whose command of the art of intrigue has gained them the upper hand.

Islamic State terrorists who meted out barbaric medieval torture and murders of the utmost atrocity, delighting in the horror they invoked in the delicate-minded humanist West, hugely augmenting their reputation for brutality and in the process gaining greater numbers eager to follow-the-leader whose ambition had established a caliphate, a shining hill of commanding presence in the name of pure Islam based on the most fundamentalist of Sharia law interpretations, met their match when the Iran-linked Shiite militias began throwing the ISIL members they caught over cliffs.

The ruined Grand al-Nuri Mosque is seen in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq, taken on July 20

In the annals of summary dispatch this was as gruesomely efficient and briefly agonizing a manner of destroying one's enemies as any, a spur-of-the-moment, hugely satisfying exercise for Shiites eager to demonstrate their own mettle as warriors of Islam. And while Iraq smothers itself with satisfied gratification that it has succeeded in (almost) wrenching Mosul back from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, it is not Iraq that benefits to the greatest degree, but Iran.

The former Sunni-Iraq-majority population of Mosul will now see itself being replaced and outnumbered by Shiites determined to take possession of Iraq's second-largest city; that is, what is left of it. It has become, like Aleppo and parts of  Damascus, a pitiable ruin. Ancient cities that withstood other, earlier invasions and battles did not in the past, face the sheer destructive power of the bombing events visited upon them in this era of human development featuring civilization's advancement.

When the government of Iraq proudly announced the liberation of Mosul and the destruction of Islamic State, Syria fell next in line for the attainment of geographic strategic advantage. The possession of Raqqa is next on the agenda. Despite the presence of U.S. troops and American air strikes meant to aid in destroying Islamic State, they have been outfoxed, with Tehran leisurely approaching the realization of its ambitions of a Shiite corridor of power from Iran Across Iraq and Syria.

Russian backing for Bashar Assad's Alawite Shiites has contributed nicely to Iran's plans, just as Hezbollah has itself has been more than willing to deliver Lebanon to the control of the Republic of Iran. The hundreds of ISIL fighters remaining in Mosul, still prepared to fight to the end, will find their end there, thanks to airstrikes finding their target. Those ISIL fighters not yet prepared to die as martyrs have taken to disguising themselves as women, applying makeup, wearing women's robes, only their facial hair betraying their identities.

So much for Washington's investment in Iraq in both treasury and manpower sacrificed to remove one tyrant, and eventually see the installation of a malign Shiite power with Iran's Grand Ayatollah pulling all the strings after leaving the Obama administration with the misconceived impression that it had hobbled Iran's nuclear ambitions. As in all agreements with Iran, its surreptitious plans for advanced ICBMs and nuclear warheads have simply gone underground in undisclosed areas as sacred as ancient mosques.

The expenditure of $1-trillion U.S. and the deaths of 4,200 American military personnel all in a good cause, as far as the Islamic Republic of Iran in its revolutionary zeal to alter the status of the Middle East power platform and eventual outreach to the world at large is concerned, leaving it as the major beneficiary, its subtle and brilliant manoeuvring of the American political and military zeal in protecting the world order in its democratic image trumped handily.

But while American naivete has helped Iran to launch and complete its mission of control and conquest to elevate Shia Islam, the simmering resentment of the Sunni power elite has also been launched. This volatile region of the world for which mayhem and murder on a grand scale reflects its tribal, ethnic, clan and sectarian dystopia, has drawn into its circle the ambitions, oblivious to consequences, of the United States and Russia.

Should a standoff between all those powers suddenly erupt, the explosive results will roil the world in an immense series of cataclysmic paroxysms. Who better to take advantage of the chaos to follow than an resurgent Islamic State owing nothing to any ideology save its very own Islamofascism, and whose fervent admirers in Europe and North America are only too eager to join, abroad or in situ.

From Mosul to a site near you. Wait for it.

A member of Iraqi security forces holds an Islamic State flag on top of a building destroyed from clashes in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq July 10, 2017. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

Labels: Conflict, Iran, Iraq, Islamic State, Russia, Shiite, Sunni, Syria, Terrorism, United States

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 25, 2017