Tuesday - June 10, 2014

DEFEAT In Iraq

[ DEBKA Files, today ] Al Qaeda in Iraq (ISIS: Islamist State of Iraq and Syria), captured the northern Iraqi oil city of Mosul, capital of Nineveh Province, Tuesday, June 10, after the Iraqi military defenders caved in and fled. Mosul is Iraq’s third largest city after Baghdad and Basra with a population of around two million.

Ministers in Nuri al-Maliki’s government have sent> desperate appeals to the Obama administration for help to save Baghdad and Iraq from doom.

debkafile’s military sources report that the Iraqi army’s command facilities and bases in Mosul are ablaze and many bodies of Iraqi soldiers are lying in the town’s streets. Convoys of fleeing troops were ambushed by the invaders and destroyed.
The fall of Mosul with heavy casualties is the worst disaster suffered by the Iraqi army in its feeble attempts to fend off the deep inroads Al Qaeda has been making in the country for more than a year. ISIS now controls two major Iraqi cities, after capturing Fallujah earlier this year, has overrun parts of Ramadi and Tikrit, as well as eastern provinces bordering on Iran, Diyala province and parts of the town Baquba, where just Tuesday, 20 people were killed in two explosions.

Unknown number of casualties ... assume thousands. You don’t destroy “convoys” without a whole lot of bloodshed. Plus civilians. And any AQ fighters killed by accident.

[ PJ Tattler, today ] Iraq’s second-largest city fell to jihadists, a danger that had been building up but appeared to be low on Washington’s priority list.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, formerly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, “infiltrated the old-city quarter of Meidan and have established a bridgehead close to the Old Bridge over the Tigris River that bisects the city into two halves,” according to the newspaper Azzaman.

“Government troops lack the necessary air support to take out the militants. Their assaults have failed so far to halt the push by ISIS… The districts and towns nearby report large-scale exodus, with thousands of displaced Mosul residents arriving in Zammar and the Kurdish city of Dahouk.”

Azzaman reports that Kurdish militias — the peshmerga — are on “high alert” to take a stand against the terrorists.

On Monday, Nineveh Governor Atheel al-Nujaifi made a televised plea to Mosul’s residents, calling on them to “stand firm in their areas and to defend them against the strangers,” according to the BBC.
...
Fallujah fell to al-Qaeda forces in January, sparking swift criticism on the Hill of the administration’s strategy in Iraq and subsequent pullout map in Afghanistan.

“Look, we’re following very closely reports of significant ISIL attacks, particularly in the city of Mosul. The security situation is, quite frankly, there still in flux. And the Iraqi security forces have undertaken operations to fight back against this; they remain ongoing. Obviously, I can’t go into all of the on-the-ground specifics,” Harf said Monday.

“We have worked with the Iraqis quite a bit to build their capacity and their capability to fight this threat,” she added. “ISIL has recently launched attacks on Anbar University in Ramadi, on the PUK in other places.

[ Hot Air, today ] Mosul falls to al-Qaeda as US-trained security forces flee
And not just Mosul, according to some reports, but the entire northern province of Nineveh has now fallen into al-Qaeda’s control.  Parliamentarians from the region want a declaration of emergency and immediate government intervention, but the forces that had been in Mosul have fled — some of which abandoned their uniforms as well as their posts as the ISIS forces swarmed into the city

Insurgents seized control early Tuesday of most of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the provincial government headquarters, offering a powerful demonstration of the mounting threat posed by extremists to Iraq’s teetering stability.

Fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda offshoot, overran the entire western bank of the city overnight after Iraqi soldiers and police apparently fled their posts, in some instances discarding their uniforms as they sought to escape the advance of the militants.

Iraq’s speaker of parliament, Osama Nujaifi, said the city that ranks as the capital of northern Iraq is now entirely in insurgent hands.

“When the battle got tough in the city of Mosul, the troops dropped their weapons and abandoned their posts, making it an easy prey for the terrorists,” he told a televised news conference in Baghdad.
...
Iraqi Parliament speaker Usama al-Nujaifi said the terrorists are now setting their sight on Salahuddin, a province just north of Baghdad.

“They have already seized the Shergat air base in Salahuddin”, Nujaifi said, adding that terrorists laid their hands on weapon depots, heavy equipment and army helicopters from abandoned army bases in Mosul.
[Saving Baghdad ...] This will be almost impossible to do, and entirely impossible to do quickly. We pulled out all of our forces three years ago when the Obama administration failed to negotiate for a residual force for this exact scenario. In order to land an effective fighting force to defend Baghdad and retake Mosul, we would need to commit tens of thousands of troops and a large amount of materiel in a big hurry. Logistically speaking, that would be a feat worthy of George S. Patton and the Battle of the Bulge in order for us to get to Baghdad before ISIS does, especially with Iraqi security forces collapsing.

Politically speaking, it’s a dead letter. Obama just coughed up five prizes to the Taliban in his haste to get the US out of Afghanistan. Does Iraq really expect Obama to restart the Iraq War all over again after spending his entire national political career speaking out against it? Agreement or no, Obama almost certainly won’t send combat troops into Iraq, even if it’s to fight al-Qaeda, and very certainly not before the midterm elections.

The White House poo-pooed this AQ surge Monday , saying that reports were vastly overrated. At this point, the Iraq story is starting to hit US TV news. The battle for Mosul took about 5 days.

Pulling total defeat from the closed jaws of absolute victory. That’s Change you can Believe in.

more at BBC, et al
more at Washington Post, et al
more at the NY Times, et al
and of course, Atlas Shrugs



Oh ... and a little By The Way ... when those chickenshit Iraqi forces shit themselves and ran from battle, they left thousands of tons of arms behind. Brand new, supplied by the USA. From helmets to rifles to ammo to artillery to trucks to tanks. Enough to equip an army, for real. Now in the hands of AQ.

[ The New York Times, today ] The insurgent fighters who routed the Iraqi army out of Mosul on Tuesday did not just capture much of Iraq’s second-largest city. They also gained a windfall of arms, munitions and equipment abandoned by the soldiers as they fled — arms that were supplied by the United States and intended to give the troops an edge over the insurgents.

The problem is not a new one, but it looms larger now that the United States is shifting its counterterrorism strategy away from using American armed forces directly, and toward relying on allied or indigenous troops and security forces supplied and trained by the United States. President Obama proposed last week that a $5 billion fund be set up to finance such efforts.
...
But those proxy forces do not always prove equal to the task, and when they buckle, the United States finds itself having unwittingly armed its enemies — a problem the Obama administration has been trying to avoid in Syria by carefully limiting its aid to the opposition there. The militants who swept into control of Mosul on Tuesday are believed to be connected to the main Islamist militant group fighting in Syria.

Of course they are. What a wonderful coincidence for AQ that they’ve got their top 5 leaders back, to go along with a lifetime’s worth of new weapons, and who knows how much captured intel.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/10/2014 at 04:40 PM   
Filed Under: • Iraq • War On Terror •  
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