... The elimination of its leader will pose difficulties to its operations in Syria and Iraq, where they were already significantly weakened, but does not necessarily limit the capabilities of other members or affiliated cells. The territorial control of ISIS had already been severely limited in Syria and Iraq before al-Baghdadi’s killing and the threat had diminished as a consequence of the end of the territorial caliphate. The threat of ISIS, however, is not only limited to its territorial control, but even more so to its ideological component, which ...
... fighting a major terrorist threat on their mainland, along with Kurds of course. But at the same time the ongoing distraction and chaos in Iraq in the past 4 years, gave the KRG a better experience in self-rule away from Baghdad. The expansion of ISIS have literally cut Iraq into two halves, an Arabic half, and a Kurdish one. Geographically speaking, this offered the Iraqi Kurds a further momentum of a de-facto independence. Barzani have been watching the continuous and recent defeats of ISIS, the terrorist group which ...
... real objective was regime change in the service of democratic nation-building. After the rebels murdered Qaddafi, Libya, like Iraq earlier, became a paradise for tribal fighters and jihadists, and there ensued a significant flow of migrants to Europe. ... ... of the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast), the largest conventional bomb in the US arsenal, on ISIS fighters in Afghanistan on April 14. Facing what Mattis has called a “clear and present danger” from North Korea, Trump’s ...
... Anbar province in Iraq when it did, where they entered an alliance of convenience with many of the Sunnis they had formerly fought in the region, and alliance against their mutual enemy: Maliki’s anti-Sunni government. Using Anbar as a base within Iraq, ISIS was able to advance and take large amounts of Iraqi territory, much of which it still holds today. Thus, it was Maliki’s absolute refusal to compromise with and accommodate Iraqis Sunnis and others that created the current crisis with ISIS....
... attacking Muslim Bosnians in the Balkans; in the last decade, the villains were the imperialist Americans in Iraq and their allies in the “apostate” Shiite regimes there. The two big culminations of these efforts in Iraq were in 2006, when Iraq nearly erupted into full-scale civil war, and in 2014, when ISIS nearly marched on Baghdad after taking much of the country from Maliki’s sectarian Shiite regime. Now, for the past few years, the big magnet for idealistic Muslims willing to use violence in the form of jihad has been the Assad regime: though ...
... so many other conflicts that it has metastasized into one big megaconflict. Syria’s neighbors, as I predicted in the fall of 2013, are also suffering from an increasingly destabilizing burden as a result of the conflict—none more so than Iraq as ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda and proceeded to shock the world with its march from Syria into Iraq in 2014—and the more than four million registered refugees it has produced.
UNHCR
Still, as mentioned, even before the chemical weapons attacks,...
... if Maliki would not give U.S. troops immunity. So the right decision had been made, but the Bush Administration deserved some credit as well for agreeing to the initial timetable to which Obama stuck. And, as will be discussed below, he handled the ISIS in Iraq debacle in a way that very much aided Iraq’s long-term interests.
Grade: A+
Obama withdrew from Iraq and was ahead of the curve compared to many in realizing American troops could not bring about the politics necessary to stabilize Iraq,...
... many situations, and Maliki was certainly no puppet and never acted like one. And now, the man who has done more than any single person in the past several years to further fragment Iraq, drive Iraqi Sunnis into the arms of ISIS, facilitate the rise of ISIS in Iraq, and who offered no prospect for an Iraq inclusive of Sunnis and Kurds, has stepped aside. At least now, there is a chance of moving forward politically, even in the midst of awful violence engulfing even some the most previously peaceful parts of ...
... military spending.
One reason to be optimistic about addressing the IS problem is that there is a 'coaltion of the unwilling' which is nonetheless appearing more assertive than its more 'willing' counterpart back to 2003 in Iraq. No wonder since the threat for other states in the region is formidable. On the other side, the new Iraqi government shall be one of the major pieces of the puzzle since it has to become a better alternative for Iraqi Sunnites. Concentrating power ...
Dr. Glen Segell
(Fellow – The Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies,University of Haifa, Israel)
The Southern flank of Europe is the Mediterranean Sea. It is a small sea and many countries rely on the freedom of both sea and air traffic for their economy. On the one hand there was optimism that the Arab Spring would bring greater freedom for the individual in countries on the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. There was further optimism that the North African countries of Tunisia...
