Tag Archives: Baghdad

Britain, Foreign Affairs, Government, Iran, Iraq, Islamic State, Middle East, Politics, United Nations, United States

The Iranian foe has suddenly become a crucial ally…

IRAN

Not since the Shah was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini’s hardline Islamic theocracy in 1979 has a British prime minister met with an Iranian leader.

Truly, this week was an historic encounter as David Cameron made entreaties to the enemy and met Hassan Rouhani at the UN General Assembly in New York.

This, it should be remembered, is a country that has sponsored terrorism against the West on myriad occasions, has frequently declared that Israel should be wiped from the map , and was infamously labelled – along with Iraq under Saddam Hussein and North Korea – a member of the ‘Axis of Evil’ by George W Bush. Its nuclear ambitions so terrify Western leaders that they have imposed sanctions that have devastated Iran’s oil exports and revenues.

But times change, and now the West needs Iran, regarding it as a potential ally in the fight against Islamic State (IS).

Iran has reached out, too. Ever since Rouhani replaced his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in August 2013, he has been trying to bring Iran back in from the cold.

Ahmadinejad’s bellicose anti-Western rhetoric during the eight years of his rule ensured the country’s deepening isolation on the international stage.

And while Rouhani may be a plausible figure, the regime’s religious hardliners are still uniformly grim, imposing their moral puritanism on a young, vibrant and educated population which, behind the scenes, enjoys partying, illicit drinking and casual sex.

Last year Iran executed 624 people for various offences, some of them publicly strangled as they were hoisted aloft by large mechanical cranes. Torture is commonplace and stoning seen as just punishment.

Yet Cameron was clearly in the mood for conciliation and his diplomatic offensive throws up a number of questions. Why would Iran want to help the West in its fight against IS? And what kind of concessions would the Iranians demand in return for discreetly siding with the coalition of Western and Arab countries now launching air strikes on IS’s headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa?

There is no doubt that Iran wants to see the back of IS. Its Shia-led regime considers Iraq and Syria as allies – both are also governed by Shia Muslims. The brutal butchers of IS are all extreme Sunni Muslims, deadly rivals of the Shia, and Iran rightly believes them to be a dangerously destabilising force in the Middle East.

Officially Iran is not part of the efforts to degrade and destroy IS – America is still seen as the great evil by its hardliners and theocrats who will not countenance US troops back in Iraq.

Covertly, however, the country’s head of ‘subversive warfare’ – the 56-year-old General Qassem Suleimani, supremo of the elite Iranian Quds force – is already working alongside his US counterpart General Michael Bednarek in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are also hidden among the sizeable Shia militias defending the holiest Shia shrines in Iraq such as Karbala and Najaf, while Iran has warned IS to stay away from its borders.

To consider whether Iran can help defeat IS, we have to examine the force they would be taking on.

Obama has made an analogy between IS and an insufferable disease that is spreading like a plaque. By 2010, Western and Iraqi special forces had eliminated all but 10 per cent of Al-Qaeda in Iraq as a result of capturing or assassinating their operatives.

But that 10 per cent metastasised into IS under their ruthless leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who decided to exploit the civil war in Syria as a source of recruitment, funding and territory. Two thirds of its 30,000-strong army now lurks there.

Intelligence agencies have largely failed to detect how this army organised from its Syria base a systematic assassination campaign of Iraqi army and police chiefs, or a series of spectacular prison breaks, including one at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail where Iraqi prisoners were tortured by their Western captors.

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Few noticed how in January IS fought off an Iraqi army force of several divisions trying to recapture the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Long before they captured Mosul last month, IS was raking in some £5million a month through nightly extortion in this huge city.

The IS leadership consists of hardened Al-Qaeda veterans, but the tactical sophistication derives from a group of former generals who served under Saddam Hussein.

They have used Iraq’s modern road network to bring to bear their core spearhead of about 3,000 men, who soften up targets with vehicle-borne suicide bombers wiping out command and control centres. Social media bring fear and terror to a Shia-dominated Iraqi national army, whose corrupt officers have stolen their soldiers’ pay.

Soldiers then become demoralised that simply flee or desert, or are murdered. IS are also formidable in defence. They blow up bridges and unleash controlled floods to hamper counter-attacking forces, while using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to defend approaches in the way regular armies would use mines.

Worse still, IS anticipates their enemies. They knew Obama’s air-strikes on Raqqa were coming, and will have moved their command and control centres to outlying regions and villages. They thwart the West’s recruitment of moderate Sunni rebels. IS’s online multilingual magazine Dabiq (The Ark) suggests neutralising any attempts to turn the local Sunni tribes against them by co-opting them into their own administration – and it’s a tactic that has worked effectively.

Syria’s President Assad – with his sponsor Iran’s tacit approval – was notified in advance of the air strikes, and warned that his entire air defence system would be obliterated if he objected. But why should Assad object anyway, if his most deadly opponents are being eliminated?

Yet, as previous recent conflicts have shown, air strikes alone will not be enough. Ground troops will have to be involved. Which is why Obama, who can at least rely on the help of Kurdish Pesmerga forces and durable elements of the Iraqi army, is now pumping £300million into a new force of ‘moderate’ secular-minded Syrian tribes, 5,000 of whom will be rapidly trained in Saudi Arabia?

This throws up its own problems. The moderates have been fighting against IS alongside another extremist group Jabhat al-Nusra – which was itself targeted by US airstrikes this week because of fears they were accessories to planned terrorist attacks.

Throw in the Iranians, and the confusion over loyalties becomes even greater. Many of the Sunni moderates Obama is trying to woo consider Iran’s Shia regime a greater enemy than IS. This means it would be impossible for Iranian troops to engage overtly in Iraq or Syria – it would incite fury among the Sunni in those countries.

Cameron’s talks with Rouhani have been tantamount to a negotiator’s minefield. Cameron will want him to stop backing Assad but Rouhani will never concede to giving up on such a long-standing Shia ally.

Rouhani will want to persuade the West to relax sanctions in return for help against IS. Any movement, though, to accommodate Iran’s nuclear programme could infuriate Israel. And Israel, if provoked, could destroy the West/Arab coalition.

But despite the enormous geopolitical difficulties and complexities, Cameron is right to engage with Rouhani.

We cannot be in any doubt. IS presents an existential threat to the entire region and must be tackled and beaten. And Iran is such a major player that it is far better to try to enlist its help and keep its president onside than to continue to treat it as a pariah.

See also:

Supplementary

MD Twitter timeline – entries made 25 Sept 2014:

. For the first time the U.S. has used its precision based F-22 Raptor Stealth Fighter.

. The F-22 contains over 30 radar receivers which are able to warn of threats from 250 miles away.

. The armaments of the F-22 are stored internally. This provides its stealth capability, and helps greatly with its aerodynamics.

. The F-22 is armed with JDAM (The Joint Direct Attack Munition). This is a GPS guidance system with a range of up to *___ * miles.

. The F-22’s radar changes frequency more than 1,000 times per second. This confuses enemy tracking systems.

. Khorasan, a little-known Al-Qaeda affiliate, have become a prime target for U.S. air strikes in northern Syria.

. Other U.S. aircraft used in attacking ISIL positions include its B-1 bombers, F-15E attack warplanes, F-16 fighters, F/A-18 Super Hornets and two types of drone aircraft.

. The U.S. has also fired Tomahawk cruise missiles from destroyers in the Red Sea and the northern Persian Gulf. The ships involved are the USS Arleigh Burke and the USS Philippine.

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Britain, Foreign Affairs, Iraq, Middle East, Politics, Society, Syria, United States

The dismal choices faced in Iraq: averting the worst scenario must be viewed as a priority…

IRAQ

Intro: Iraq is in a quagmire. The options are dismal, but the West cannot reverse the course of events in Iraq by intervening

The West will take some comfort, as well as to most Iraqis that Iraq’s ramshackle armed forces appear to have stalled the advances towards the capital by Sunni jihadists. The fall of Baghdad to the fighters of ISIS would undoubtedly lead to the termination and dissolution of Iraq as a formal state, as well as providing the jihadists and their putative caliphate with a real capital – forcing millions of Iraqi Shia to flee from their homes. It is inconceivable to believe or imagine the Middle East absorbing the shock.

Such an apocalypse has been averted, for now at least, and the Middle East and the wider world will gasp deep breaths of relief. However, even if the makeshift Iraqi forces succeed in containing the ISIS fighters (some 60 miles north of Baghdad) the long term prognosis for the country and for the region remains desperately worrying.

ISIS is in control of much of north and north-west Iraq. Whilst the insurgents may possibly cede the odd frontline town back to Iraqi forces, it will still be in possession of a de facto state composed of large, continuous chunks of Iraq and Syria. The boundaries that the British and French imposed on the Middle East following the end of the First World War seem soon to vanish, with the dismal fate that both will become failed states, much in the same way that Somalia became on the Horn of Africa. The emergence of such vacuums on the map of the world will be hugely destabilising – drawing in and expelling a range of volatile forces and consequences that will be very difficult to deal with.

The frontiers of Iraq and Syria were drawn arbitrarily to reflect the temporary interests of British and French colonists. It is quite possible, of course, with events unfolding as they are that both countries were only ever going to be viable under despotic rulers, in which case nothing can be done to prevent them from dissolving in the long term, or stop their embittered and hopelessly alienated Sunnis from creating their own entity out of the debris.

One major and worrying problem is that these countries are unravelling in a completely uncontrolled fashion. Another concern is that the heavily armed insurgents of ISIS have no intention of confining themselves to a medium-sized state based in north-west Iraq and the north-eastern parts of Syria. These extremists are religious imperialists, and their hardened and fierce ideology teaches them that they must expand or die. They will soon turn elsewhere if they are forced to consolidate control over their existing territories. The ethnically and politically fractured kingdom of Jordon surfaces as an obvious candidate for their malevolent attention.

The West, starting with the United States, cannot even hope to reverse the course of events in Iraq by intervening on the ground. President Barack Obama was right to rule out any ground incursion by US troops going back into the country.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the US takes up an observer’s seat as the region descends into ever greater chaos and disorder. Washington should encourage the tentative rapprochement between Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia), both of which are starting to see just how dangerous the Sunni-Shia power struggle is becoming to each of them. The sectarian divisions and widening conflagration could easily have a tendency to draw in others by default if no attempt is made to harness relations between other countries in the region.

Western countries could also afford to be more generous in helping to address the humanitarian aspects of the latest crisis. The UK, for example, has offered an additional £3m to help tens of thousands of fleeing refugees that have been displaced as a direct result of the advances made by ISIS. Most of these refugees are now camping in Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq. Such a meagre sum, given the plight of many desperate people, is hardly an adequate gesture.

A fortuitous outlook might suggest that the Sunnis in Syria and Iraq turn against their self-styled deliverers at some future point. If that is the hope, then it is vital that the Shia-dominated regime in Baghdad is persuaded to keep the door open to talks about some kind of federal option for the Sunnis, and for the Kurds. True, it may be late in the day for Iraq to even try the federalist option, but just possibly that might be the only option remaining in salvaging some kind of gossamer-thin state from the current mess. The options available are far and few between, none of which look particularly good. Despair cannot be allowed to prevail and is not the answer.

 

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Britain, Iraq, Middle East, Military, Society, United States

Iraq and the tinderbox of the Middle East: America weighs up its options…

IRAQ

Intro: Learning the lessons of recent conflicts in the region should provide us with a guide concerning the current situation in Iraq

The paradox of the US and UK cosying up to Iran in light of the chaos in Iraq reconciles well with the age-old adage of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ – an example that demonstrates in comfortable fashion just what is implied by this historical idiom. And, yet, the crisis in the region leaves the US and UK with little choice.

Over the last ten days images of ISIS fighters massacring Shi’ite captives, brought to us most graphically through the medium of social media, are brutally barbaric and shocking – but, that has been their intention all along; horror is, after all, a weapon of war. It is being used by ISIS in ways that is totally depraved and inhumane of reasoned thinking.

We should be in no doubt. There will be more such images as the insurgents intensify their activities. And with that will come increasing calls for the UK to accept its responsibility for Iraq’s grim predicament and to help to do something to alleviate it.

We should not be misunderstood, either, when it is asserted that the UK is, in some measure, culpable in bringing about the grisly events that are being played out in Iraq. That can hardly be denied. There are, of course, other factors which have played their part, most notably the wave of sectarian conflict that has swept across the Middle East as part of the Arab Spring and revolution. Ultimately, though, in supporting the 2003 military invasion, Britain helped to light the fuse.

Pressure for the UK to re-engage militarily in Iraq must, however, be firmly resisted. There is no public or political appetite for an intervention again at this level on this occasion. Two things have emerged that should be crystal clear, and learning the lessons of recent conflicts in the region should provide us with a guide concerning the current situation in Iraq.

The first is that, like all modern warfare, aerial superiority is the key to victory. This was demonstrated through the use of UK/US air support in the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, and, as it happens, in the way the absence of this support for rebels in Syria has allowed president Bashar al-Assad to continue his onslaught and by surviving as the country’s brutal dictator.

But the second is that air supremacy on its own cannot conclusively defeat an insurgency. Boots on the ground are required – although, crucially, those boots do not need to be US or UK boots. Arguably, those boots can be Iraqi boots. Once the Baghdad military forces regroup following the recent embarrassing defections that ceded so much ground and territory to ISIS, Iraq’s own security personnel should be in a position to claim back much of the lost ground.

For the Iraqi government to regain control, it does look as if US air support will be needed. But such assistance carries significant risks.

With Sunni-Shia tensions already high in the region, how would others in close proximity to events in Iraq react to the US effectively becoming an instrument of Shia might and strength? Middle East conflagrations do have a habit of converging, no more so than in the tinderbox that is Lebanon. US air strikes in Iraq would not auger well for those neighbouring countries that have allegiances with each other.

President Barack Obama continues to weigh up his options. Mr Obama has already approved 300 extra troops to secure the US embassy and Baghdad airport, and calls are mounting in America – notably in Republican quarters – for a more strategic military deployment to help repel the rebels and by restoring order.

In all likelihood the US President will win domestic support for drone strikes. Given what has gone in recent conflicts an air of caution seems certain to be placed over the use of direct air strikes. The use of drones carries risks, too, as innocents caught up in the crossfire, for example, will always consider defecting to the other side for protection. On a calculation of minimising collateral damage to achieve its objectives the use of aerial drones is an option America has at its disposal.

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