The United States can help, but there is no way any American politician is sending back thousands of troops: They didn’t compel or convince Maliki to adopt a smart policy before, and they wouldn’t be able to do so now.īut this could be yet another sign of a breakdown in the entire Middle East. The countries in the region have to form indigenous alliances to stave off these radical threats. A strange alliance among all three may come to life to beat back this equally strange insurgency. Iran, which has emerged as Maliki’s main ally, has no interest in seeing Sunnis - much less millenarian Sunnis - regain power in Baghdad. Under international law, that amounts to an attack on Turkey, and it’s unlikely that the Turks will simply shrug. While stomping through Mosul, some of their militiamen stormed the Turkish consulate and kidnapped Turkish diplomats. One hope for Iraq is that ISIS might have gone one rampage too far. The threat from ISIS - and it’s now a dire threat - might move some factions to strengthen the nation’s leader, or it might move more to abandon all confidence in Maliki and turn to someone else. He’s spending much of his time these days trying to form coalitions with other, smaller parties, in order to stay in power. His party won a plurality of votes in the recent election, but not enough to declare victory. Meanwhile, Maliki has his own political problems. In any case, unless Maliki can rally a counteroffensive, the northern half of Iraq seems to have been ceded to Islamists. (Its triumphs so far have been, by and large, uncontested.) Still, no one claims much confidence in this prediction. Given the ongoing fighting in Syria, ISIS might not want to waste its soldiers and ammunition on a protracted battle in Iraq. officials are optimistic that he’ll succeed. Maliki has rallied his remaining troops to Taji, just north of Baghdad, to prevent or deter an assault on the capital.
These jihadists are very competent fighters, though some of them have returned to Syria to resupply their comrades fighting there.
They’re well trained and equipped, but feel no allegiance to Maliki’s government or desire to risk their lives for the sake of its survival. His troops in Nineveh province simply folded when they came under attack. And that’s why he’s now facing a monumental, even terrifying armed insurgency. Maliki had, and has, no interest in conciliatory politics on a national level. As Clausewitz famously wrote, is “politics by other means,” and that in post-Hussein Iraq this meant setting up structures of local government that included (or co-opted) all factions and tribes willing to reconcile with the new order. The idea was not to make the people of Mosul love America, but rather to make them feel invested in the future of the new Iraq.
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Using funds pilfered from Saddam Hussein’s coffers, they vetted candidates for a citywide election (selecting leaders from all factions and tribes), started up newspapers and TV stations, co-ordinated fuel shipments from Turkey, and reopened businesses, communication lines and the university. David Petraeus, then the three-star general who commanded the 101st Airborne Division, applied his theory of counterinsurgency to all of Nineveh province, of which Mosul was the capital. The fall of Mosul is particularly poignant because that was the city where peace and prosperity seemed most likely in the early days of the American occupation. But JRTN’s leaders have accepted the risk for now to advance their own goal of overthrowing Maliki.
That is a risky move for a group like JRTN, which shares neither the millenarian goals nor the extremely violent tactics of ISIS. ISIS, an offshoot of Zarqawi’s organization, is following the same handbook, picking up support from one of northern Iraq’s leading Sunni militias, Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqah al-Naqshbandia, or JRTN. Between 20, jihadists who called themselves Al-Qaeda in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, took control of Anbar province by playing on the population’s fear of the anti-Sunni ethnic-cleansing campaigns launched by Maliki’s army. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.