... groundwork on which to foster more cooperative regional engagement in the Middle East, also by convincing the US to return to a more stable and predictable foreign policy towards the region.
On October 26, 2019, the Iraqi-born leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed during a U.S. raid. What do you make of his death and what consequences could that have for ISIS and international terrorism as a whole?
Andrey Kortunov, Michel Duclos:
Helping Iran to Make the Right Choice
The killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is definitely a further blow to ISIS as it eliminated its operational leader. However, the reality of the ISIS threat, and perhaps more so than other groups such as Al-Qaida, is that ISIS ...
... 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 ... ... that is a small minority in Syria) Bashar al-Assad and is controlled mainly by Alawate Shiites. It is backed by Shiite Persian Iranians and the Arab Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Sunni Muslims, in general, do not like Shiites, and that is an understatement; ...
... naval blockades, no-fly-zones, and the U.S. specifically partnering with its allies Iraq and (NATO member) Turkey to use drones, reconnaissance flights, and other high-tech... ... absence of action, into the fray came Islamist extremist jihadists—including ISIS—even more murderous than Assad’s thugs. Suddenly, the moderate homegrown... ... other Shiites were coming to the aid of Assad’s Shiite Alawite-led regime: the Iranian government was sending some of its elite military units and leaders, while Lebanese...
... stay and train/support Iraqi forces when Maliki would not grant them immunity. Nothing to complain about here, and I agree that a residual force would have been better but that is 100% on Maliki not granting immunity and having already committed to his Iranian allies that he would see our troops out in 2011. We will come to ISIS (and Obama’s mild military reengagement in Iraq) and Syria as separate issues.
Israeli/Palestinian Peace
Here, one may be tempted to make more of the efforts of the Obama Administration than they actually represent, but at the same time we should not minimize them.
To be sure, Obama has ...
... into ISIS’s fold. In addition, helping Maliki would basically further all the political trends in Iraq that had allowed ISIS to gain so much in power there in the first place, further fragmenting an already disintegrating nation and creating more problems for the U.S., the region, and the world. U.S. support would also strengthen an Iraqi government that was in line with Iran in many ways and had resisted accommodating the U.S. government when it came to a whole array of issues. Helping Maliki’s ...
