Iraq forces move to recapture Ramadi
Ex-PH2 sends us a link to Reuters which reports that Iraqi forces have begun an assault on the city of Ramadi in an attempt to drive out ISIS from the city that Iraq lost to them a few months ago – you remember, I’m sure, that then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marty Dempsey said that Ramadi wasn’t all that important. Well, it seems that perception has changed.
The offensive to capture the city center started at dawn, said [spokesman Sabah al-Numani]. Military units crossed the Euphrates river into the central districts using a bridge that was destroyed by the militants and fixed by army engineers, and another floating bridge set up to bring in more forces, he said.”Crossing the river was the main difficulty,” he said. “We’re facing sniper fire and suicide bombers who are trying to slow our advance, we’re dealing with them with air force support.”
If the attack to capture Ramadi succeeds, it will be the second major city after Tikrit to be retaken from Islamic State in Iraq.
Yeah, it’s a little harder to take those cities back than it is to defend them properly in the first place.
According to the article, the US has warned Iraq to avoid using Iranian forces in the assault to avoid Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian violence. That makes no sense to me. Any kind of violence that results in the deaths of ISIS forces is good, sectarian or otherwise. That’s why we won’t be successful anytime soon in Iraq and Syria – the touchy-feely way of fighting a war isn’t conducive to victory over in that region of the world. The Iranians aren’t hindered by their rules of engagement and they’d be as ruthless as the ISIS fighters.
Category: Terror War
The politics being forced down the throats of the Iraqis don’t make sense to me… but then, I remember the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran… and what it took to end it.
Is this the “Looming Assault” from October?
http://news.yahoo.com/iraqi-forces-ramadi-offensive-near-153851319.html
I don’t disagree that this is a stupid way to fight a war, but it’s the only way that will work.
These politics aren’t being forced down the Iraqi’s throats, they are Iraqi politics. It won’t make sense until you accept that it is the latest battle in the 1500 year old Islamic Civil War.
Remember, Iraq isn’t a nation the way we think of a nation. It is more of a loose federation of tribes with a weak and corrupt central government. The tribes are in two large groups, Sunni and Shia. Iran is Shia, and worse yet, not even Arab (they are Persian).
The Iraqi Army is predominantly Shia, as is most of the country. ISIS, of course, is Sunni, as is most of Ramadi. The Shia Army would be glad to kill ISIS but since the people of Ramadi sort of hate Shia, the Army generally does not give a crap about saving them from ISIS- they sort of see it as Karma (or they would if they weren’t Muslim and thought that believing in Karma was a sin).
So, if the Shia led Army went in, they might defeat ISIS but they would have to be very careful not to kill civilians or destroy infrastructure because the Sunnis in Ramadi would turn their support back to ISIS, and the city would just turn back to hell. The only worse idea would be to bring in Iranian forces because they are both Shia and not Arab but Persian.
If you read the story, it is really Sunni militias that are going in, no the actual Iraqi army.
Remember, it is my brother over my cousin, my cousin over my neighbor, my neighbor over foreigners.
‘it is the latest battle in the 1500 year old Islamic Civil War’ – good point.
Is it safe to assume, then, that even if this is ever resolved in the slightest way, it will erupt again in the future? If you take into account the very long history of the Babylonian-then-Persian empires, going back to the 4th or 5th millenium BC, it seems that there is not and never has been an end to what is going on now. The only differences are the names and the reasons.
There is archaeological evidence in southwestern Syria of the base of a fortress of some kind, a huge rectangle with four round towers each measuring almost 50 feet in diameter, dating back over 15,000 years into the past. It just seems to me that the history of the area is so deep in the past, we’ll never see an end to this kind of conflict.
Fighting and dead seem to be the only two states of being this area of the world knows.
My theory is that we have to let them have the World War I experience that the West did.
The closest thing was the Iran-Iraq War, but if you look closely it was localized and there were roughly a million casualties. This sounds callous, but it was basically two dictators playing at war in order to keep patriotic or nationalist fervor going.
I really think we should contain them and let them fight.
Too many of our guys bled in that city. The locals didn’t hold it when it was their turn. Fuck them!
I’m a foreign policy, terrorism, and Islam expert. If we want to drive ISIS out of Ramadi, we should just start with more requests through UBER.
sincerely
John “Faker 6” Giduck