The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant Megathread

[mongers]

......
Of course the risk is that they've now got money and arms. They only need to divert a fraction of their foreign supporters back to the rest of the West. The reports that they've sent representatives to various states in North Africa to recruit and perhaps whip up sentiment there is rather worrying.

I always thought the analogy of al-Qaeda to 19th century anarchists was pretty good. If so ISIS seem a little, worryingly Bolshevik to their merely terrorist predecessors.

......

Better than stretching to make an analogy fit, is to describe it for what it is, namely a suicide death cult. 

From my experience of meeting muslim fundamentalists of the vulnerable personality type, I'd say the cult experience, whether it's the recruitment process or isolation/indoctrination, is a better description. 

[Sheilbh]

Better than stretching to make an analogy fit, is to describe it for what it is, namely a suicide death cult. 

There's lots of varieties of suicide death cults

From my experience of meeting muslim fundamentalists of the vulnerable personality type, I'd say the cult experience, whether it's the recruitment process or isolation/indoctrination, is a better description.

Everything I read about jihadi terrorists, especially from the West, just makes me think of the Secret Agent (incidentally an under-rated Robin Williams performance).

[Tonitrus]

We'd be better off if they were a snake cult.

[mongers]

Better than stretching to make an analogy fit, is to describe it for what it is, namely a suicide death cult. 

There's lots of varieties of suicide death cults

From my experience of meeting muslim fundamentalists of the vulnerable personality type, I'd say the cult experience, whether it's the recruitment process or isolation/indoctrination, is a better description.

Everything I read about jihadi terrorists, especially from the West, just makes me think of the Secret Agent (incidentally an under-rated Robin Williams performance).

Oh, thanks for the tip, I should check that out, if only as a quasi-act of remembrance to a great talent. 

[Razgovory]

Obama due to make a statement within the next few minutes on military action in Iraq:

http://www.reuters.com/

He's now said that this is going to take a long time to stop/defeat ISIS. Yep, prepare everyone for a long term campaign which will consist of assisting friendly forces on the ground with supplies, military equipment and air strikes. IMO they need to get very serious with air strikes, but perhaps that needs to wait until there are more ground forces to work with, which means resupplied and re-equipped Kurds and Iraqi forces.

Wasn't it just a three weeks ago Obama wanted Congress to repeal the Authorization to Use Force in Iraq?  I guess his little unicorn world is slowly getting destroyed by reality.

Well, even if Congress and the President do repeal that, they can't plan on when others may make war or other trouble, just because we're not interested anymore. In fact that's probably when others will make trouble because they think there may be no interest/response.

Well, yeah, but that was just three weeks ago, by that time ISIS had already occupied large parts of Iraq. The problem is that the WH seems to be utterly clueless and without anything even remotely resembling a plan or even an objective. Whether it is Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, Israel, Egypt, or Ukraine what each of these have in common is that there is a total incoherence in the WH's approach.

If only there was some special branch of the military that trained foreign soldiers.

[Tonitrus]

We don't have a good track record in training foreign armies.

[Razgovory]

We don't have a good track record in training foreign armies.

Then perhaps we should blame what ever military organization that trains and motivates these people.  I'm not a military man, I wouldn't know where such a command would be, what it's called, or who would staff it.  Perhaps Hans does.

[Tonitrus]

I don't think it ever really works.  Total occupation/control ala Germany/Japan has a better track record.

But alas, we can't justify/pull off those kind of things anymore.

[Hansmeister]

We don't have a good track record in training foreign armies.

Then perhaps we should blame what ever military organization that trains and motivates these people.  I'm not a military man, I wouldn't know where such a command would be, what it's called, or who would staff it.  Perhaps Hans does.

Originally SF was supposed to do that, but they have scaled back their efforts in that realm to do more fun kinetic actions.  When they train foreign troops it is mostly foreign SOF elements.

That is one of the greatest deficits we have in our military because it means that those who do train foreign forces are often shanghaied into these roles and do a relatively poor job at it due to lack of competence or interest in the mission.  That was my experience in Afghanistan when I was an advisor.

The Army is now purging itself of that experience in order to return to a more classic role as they have done after each conflict since Korea. That way they ensure they make the same mistakes next time around. The Army is really run by idiots.

[mongers]

We don't have a good track record in training foreign armies.

Then perhaps we should blame what ever military organization that trains and motivates these people.  I'm not a military man, I wouldn't know where such a command would be, what it's called, or who would staff it.  Perhaps Hans does.

Originally SF was supposed to do that, but they have scaled back their efforts in that realm to do more fun kinetic actions.  When they train foreign troops it is mostly foreign SOF elements.

That is one of the greatest deficits we have in our military because it means that those who do train foreign forces are often shanghaied into these roles and do a relatively poor job at it due to lack of competence or interest in the mission.  That was my experience in Afghanistan when I was an advisor.

The Army is now purging itself of that experience in order to return to a more classic role as they have done after each conflict since Korea. That way they ensure they make the same mistakes next time around. The Army is really run by idiots.

I think that's a little harsh on the Americans, the Iraqis military really self-sabotaged themselves under the incompetent Maliki rule. 

Iraq has apparently bought something like 140 helicopters in recent years, yet just 4 are based at an airbase and are supporting the Kurds in the Sinjar mountains and those have to split their time between COIN and rescue missions.

And in the recent Iraqi 'counter-offensive' against ISIS in north central Iraq, it was supported by just one helicopter.

[CountDeMoney]

Obama wants to use force when the goals are finite, measurable and achievable.  Saving refugees on a mountaintop or preventing the Kurdish seat of government from being overrun fit those specific parameters.  While I felt the same about Syria, he apparently did not consider action there as fitting that definition.

Yep. I disagree with you on Syria but that's it.

The only thing is, the air targets in Syria would've been Assad and (maybe) pro-Assad forces which, if anything, would've moved up the ISIS genesis timetable.  But I saw nothing wrong in punitive strikes for using chemical weapons, say, by blowing up all his shiny, new-and-not-yet-quite-paid-for Russian air defense systems.  You don't get to keep your toys when you don't play fair.

But back to the Kurds and ISIS, a bit from Pollack over at Brookings on his recent blog in dissecting the ISIS offensive in the north--

It's important to begin to understand what happened by recognizing a set of military factors unrelated to Kurdish military effectiveness.

*ISIS once again took its adversary by surprise.  It had been focusing its attacks south toward Baghdad, west to secure Anbar, and east into Diyala.  ISIS had seemed wary of the Kurds, with only some very small skirmishes between them.  The Kurds were not expecting an attack.  So the ISIS assault caught them very much by surprise and surprise is a HUGE advantage in military operations.

*Most of the territory that ISIS overran was not "core" KRG territory.  In a civil war such as that being waged in Iraq (and Syria) today, most militias will fight much harder to defend the lands inhabited by their own people and show much less determination to contest that populated by other groups.  Most of the lands that ISIS took were border regions with mixed populations, and in some areas had no Kurdish population at all.  Although the Yazidis are ethnically Kurds, they are a minority and it would not be surprising if Kurdish fighters were less committed to defending them.   

*Kurdish sources also claim that ISIS had heavier weapons than the Peshmerga in these early battles.  To some extent, this is a function of surprise.  Since June, the Peshmerga have been manning a 650-mile long front and while they do have some heavy weapons (armor, artillery, anti-tank weapons, etc.) they don't have a huge number.  Along most of the frontlines, the Kurds have nothing but light infantry with little more than crew-served weapons (machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars and the like).  If, as the Kurds claim, ISIS hit Kurdish light infantry units with some of the heavy weaponry that they captured from the Iraqi and Syrian armies, that would have been an important imbalance in its favor as well.

The fact that the ISIS offensive appears to have been halted already (at least for the moment) and that Kurdish forces have been able to counterattack and retake Makhmur and Gawar, lends some weight to the notion that these three factors played a significant role in its initial success.  ISIS has lost the element of surprise, the Kurds are now fighting for land they consider their own—including defending their capital—and the Peshmerga have, presumably, deployed some of their own heavy weaponry against the principal ISIS axes of advance.  The fact that the ISIS offensive has been halted for now is consistent with the notion that it was these three factors that brought ISIS its success last week.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/iran-at-saban/posts/2014/08/11-pollack-isis-offensive-against-iraq-kurds

[Hansmeister]

We don't have a good track record in training foreign armies.

Then perhaps we should blame what ever military organization that trains and motivates these people.  I'm not a military man, I wouldn't know where such a command would be, what it's called, or who would staff it.  Perhaps Hans does.

Originally SF was supposed to do that, but they have scaled back their efforts in that realm to do more fun kinetic actions.  When they train foreign troops it is mostly foreign SOF elements.

That is one of the greatest deficits we have in our military because it means that those who do train foreign forces are often shanghaied into these roles and do a relatively poor job at it due to lack of competence or interest in the mission.  That was my experience in Afghanistan when I was an advisor.

The Army is now purging itself of that experience in order to return to a more classic role as they have done after each conflict since Korea. That way they ensure they make the same mistakes next time around. The Army is really run by idiots.

I think that's a little harsh on the Americans, the Iraqis military really self-sabotaged themselves under the incompetent Maliki rule. 

Iraq has apparently bought something like 140 helicopters in recent years, yet just 4 are based at an airbase and are supporting the Kurds in the Sinjar mountains and those have to split their time between COIN and rescue missions.

And in the recent Iraqi 'counter-offensive' against ISIS in north central Iraq, it was supported by just one helicopter.

Oh yes in Iraq after fucking it up for a few years they did fix the training program thanks to Patreus, though Iraq was not self-sustainable at the time we pulled out. They lacked higher-level capabilities that military planners assumed we would provide for several more years until they could sustain themselves, though I'm not confident we would've ever succeeded in that because of our inability to adapt doctrines to non western cultures.

In Afghanistan especially I was frequently frustrated because most senior leaders couldn't grasp that you can't simply translate US doctrine into Dari and then teach it to the Afghans.  I spent several months rewriting US doctrine on the fly while teaching the afghans as I saw what worked and what didn't work. All of that effort was abandoned when I left because my successors didn't care.  Now they contacted me because they hired expensive contractors for over $100,000 per year to teach them what I taught them back then, but they're simply doing a 1 for 1 translation of our doctrine which will never work.

It is those higher skill function where we fail so miserably because most of the senior leaders didn't really care because being an advisor is considered a detriment to promotion.

[citizen k]

Ex-Administration Official Destroys Obama's Argument For Not Helping Syrian Rebels
Michael B Kelley

Fred Hof, a senior U.S. State Department official who works on Syria, arrives at the headquarters of the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow on June 8, 2012.

For the past two years, the main criticism of the Obama administration's policy toward Syria has been that the U.S., "rather than read the signals early on and arm the Syrian opposition when it was making substantial gains, allowed a vacuum to form and then fretted when that vacuum was filled by jihadists."

Obama considers that to be "horsesh*t," saying the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has "always been a fantasy" because the opposition of "former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth" was fighting "a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, [and] a battle-hardened Hezbollah."

A former administration official has subsequently dismantled the president's argument.

Fred Hof, a former special adviser for transition in Syria under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, writes in Politico that the president's characterization ignores "decades of universal conscription and mandatory military service in Syria" by characterizing the armed opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad "as a hopeless collection of former butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers."

Hof notes that the recommendation to arm to the moderate opposition was offered in some form not only by Clinton, "but by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey."

When Obama made a similar "farmers" argument in June, Hof highlighted that the commander in chief "fails to mention the tens of thousands of Syrian Army officers and soldiers who abandoned the Assad regime rather than participate in that regime's campaign of mass homicide."

And here's how Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy detailed issues with Obama's statement, speaking to The Washington Post:

"There are tens of thousands of defectors from the Syrian military, many of whom fled to neighboring countries (some were put into a refugee camp in Turkey), while others stayed to fight as part of the overall FSA," Tabler said. "There was also the Supreme Military Council, the armed affiliate of the Syrian National Coalition, which also included a number of defected commanders. I met a lot of them in southern Turkey over the last few years."

The real problem, Tabler says, was that "as assistance didn't arrive, the defectors became disheartened so not sure where they all are at the moment."

And ISIS took full advantage of that vacuum, as stated by journalist Michael Weiss and Nada Bakos, a former CIA targeting officer in Iraq:

    @nadabakos ISIS was savvy. They let FSA-aligned groups take the lead on anti-regime victories; they started state building and resource
    — Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) August 12, 2014

    @nadabakos preserving early. But competitive strands of support for different FSA factions, coupled with stalemate, made it easy for them
    — Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) August 12, 2014

Hof, along with many current and former officials in the Obama administration, agrees with that assessment.

"Had the requisite assistance started flowing two years ago, both Syria and Iraq would be in better places now," he writes. "Fantasy? Few in the administration — including at very senior levels — think so."

[Admiral Yi]

I don't see how sabotaging Obama ups Hillary's chances in the election.

[Grinning_Colossus]

"Yes, I admit that President Obama made mistakes in foreign policy, but that's just bound to happen when an inexperienced legislator becomes president, Ms. Warren/Mr. Ryan."