Feral Cities and Fanatics

 

Coalition Forces fire a mortar during training in support of Operation Inherent Resolve in Syria, July 23, 2018. (Staff Sgt. Corey Hook/Air Force)

What this article describes is using a stronger, more direct investigation into who is/is not friendly to the USA once a city is taken back. As the article indicates, leaving a vacuum after trashing a Middle Eastern city leaves room for a new set of warlords and gangs and terrorist to settle there. Nothing is resolved or finished and the destruction has to be resumed. How many times has Mosul been rebuilt, historically? Frankly, it has been trashed and rebuilt since Nineveh was founded nearly 3,000 years ago.

After the trashing  and flattening of Mosul, which is still not rebuilt two years later, the assessment on the remains of ISIS is that there are still 15,000 to 20,000 ISers in two population groups somewhere in the desert, away from Mosul.  They are also moving into Afghanistan and getting into fights with the Taliban. They are not gone, just driven out for now.

The term “feral cities” is described thus in the article:  Feral cities are major urban sprawls that lack adequate governance. Warlords, gangs or terror groups occupy a maze of concrete that largely blocks GPS links, radio communications and aircraft sensors. U.S. troops are forced to seek and destroy the enemy in an environment filled with sewage, failing infrastructure and even packs of wild dogs.

It can happen anywhere, including here.  You don’t think so? Then you are ignorant of real history, the Black Panthers and Seven Days of Rage in Los Angeles, and the later riots in 1992 over the beating of Rodney King.

 

From the article:  The campaign in Raqqa, for instance, left “entire city blocks flattened,” according to Amnesty International.  https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/04/29/why-us-troops-flattened-raqqa-and-mosul-and-what-it-means-for-future-fights/

“If you’re talking about Mosul and Raqqa, it sounds like we were using chemotherapy and not a knife,” said Sarah Holewinski, who is on the board at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, while using Spencer’s cancer analogy.

Holewinski, who was in Nineveh Governorate, Iraq, two weeks before the Mosul operation started, said the planning for the mission was “woefully inadequate.”

In the days leading up to the assault, Holewinski said, military planners were still asking: “Would the population stay or go? Would ISIS use them as human shields? Do we understand the infrastructure that’s there?

“Even the integration with the United Nations was a big mess,” she added. – Article.

Would ISIS use the population as human shields? Of course they would. I thought that question was answered some time ago. They care nothing for human lives, or life in general. Fanaticism is an ugly thing, which we’ve seen far too many times in recent history. It is as insidious as a thick fog. We can see it in the ridiculous things that repeatedly get attention in our own media and online, and which make the rest of us wonder what is wrong with those people.

The fact that ISIS has pulled back, regrouped and is in a holding pattern somewhere is just as disturbing as the Taliban’s repeated takeover of Afghanistan.  It isn’t over yet.

Category: Afghanistan, Historical, Iraq, Isis