http://pando.com/2014/06/16/the-war-...qaeda-i-s-i-s/As the Scriptures remind us, “Do not believe the hype.” The hype of the moment is ISIS, the Sunni militia that just drove the so-called Iraqi Army out of Mosul, Tikrit, and other Iraqi cities.
This is one of those dramatic military reverses that mean a lot less than meets the eye. The “Iraqi Army” routed by ISIS wasn’t really a national army, and ISIS isn’t really a dominant military force. It was able to occupy those cities because they were vacuums, abandoned by a weak, sectarian force. Moving into vacuums like this is what ISIS is good at. And that’s the only thing ISIS is good at.
ISIS is a sectarian Sunni militia—that’s all. A big one, as militias go, with something like 10,000 fighters. Most of them are Iraqi, a few are Syrian, and a few hundred are those famous “European jihadis” who draw press attention out of all relation to their negligible combat value. The real strength of ISIS comes from its Chechen fighters, up to a thousand of them. A thousand Chechens is a serious force, and a terrifying one if they’re bearing down on your neighborhood. Chechens are the scariest fighters, pound-for-pound, in the world.
But we’re still talking about a conventional military force smaller than a division. That’s a real but very limited amount of combat power. What this means is that, no matter how many scare headlines you read, ISIS will never take Baghdad, let alone Shia cities to the south like Karbala. It won’t be able to dent the Kurds’ territory to the north, either. All it can do—all it has been doing, by moving into Sunni cities like Mosul and Tikrit—is to complete the par ion of Iraq begun by our dear ex-president Bush in 2003. By crushing Saddam’s Sunni-led Iraq, the Americans made par ion inevitable. In fact, Iraq has been par ioned ever since the invasion; it’s just been par ioned badly, into two parts instead of the natural three: the Kurdish north, and the remainder occupied by a weak sectarian Shia force going by the name of “The Iraqi Army.” The center of the country, the so-called “Sunni Triangle,” had no share in this par ion and was under the inept, weak rule of the Shia army.
By occupying the Sunni cities, ISIS has simply made a more rational par ion, adding a third part, putting the Sunni Triangle back under Sunni rule. The Shia troops who fled as soon as they heard that the ISIS was on the way seem to have anticipated that the Sunni would claim their own territory someday. That’s why they fled without giving even a pretense of battle.
So, Iraq is now par ioned on more natural, sensible lines, thanks to ISIS. It’s going to be a messy transition, as Iraqi transitions tend to be, with mass executions of collaborators like those already happening in Mosul and Tikrit.
But in the long run, ISIS has simply swept into a power vacuum, like it’s done from the start.
sameIt started with a small group of Sunni militants who agreed, around the turn of the Millenium, to overthrow the monarchy in Jordan. You may remember a shadowy Scarlet Pimpernel figure called “Al Zarqawi,” who was built up into the Mister Big of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq by US public-relations mouthpieces. He was called “Al Zarqawi” because he came from the town of Zarqa, a town in Jordan founded by Chechen refugees who gave the peaceful Arabs an infusion of Chechen ferocity.
Zarqawi’s group didn’t do very well in Jordan. Jordan’s Bedouin security guys don’t play around, as the PLO found out in what came to be known as Black September.
By 2002, Zarqawi was in bad shape, on the run with a bullet in his leg. Things were looking bleak for Sunni Islamists all over the Middle East…until the Spring of 2003, when a couple of guys named Bush and Cheney gave them new life by invading Iraq, crushing Saddam’s Sunni-dominated Iraqi state, and pushing millions of Iraqi Sunni into armed insurgency.
Within a few months, insurgent groups formed in every Sunni neighborhood in Iraq. That’s how insurgencies begin, with the strongest, most charismatic guys in the neighborhood (let’s face it, Sunni insurgencies are male-dominated, and I’m not going to go bother with de-gendered pronouns here) rounding up their cousins, choosing a pious, identifiably Sunni name, and planning a first strike.
Interesting but I can't put much faith in the authors analysis. Sounds like he might be the Wild Cobra of military expertise...
Brecher analyzes military strategy, tactics, and contexts of ongoing and past conflicts. While Brecher lacks military experience or formal training in war, he has credited himself as self-educated out of a personal, lifelong obsession with warfare. He has also described himself as a fat slob who spends approximately eight hours a day on the internet searching for war news. Brecher describes himself as a "war nerd".
Last edited by SnakeBoy; 06-20-2014 at 01:29 PM.
guess the saudies would rather pay isis to do its fighting then paying overpaid coalition to go fight their dirty fights
it's a discussion board. thanks for discussing.
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