2014 in Iraq

They can't stop people from coming back but they could arrest them for any crimes they might have committed. Again it's a bit tough if you went out to fight for rebels we were supposed to be supporting. For reference:

March 2013: Cameron and Hollande fail to convince EU to arm rebels

March 2013: Syria: David Cameron backs down from saying he wants to arm rebels

June 2013: David Cameron Says UK Will Work With Syria Rebels, Despite 'Deeply Unsavoury' Elements, But Parliament Will Get Vote On Arming Them

July 2013: UK PM Cameron pledges not to arm 'bad guys' in Syria

Assad changing his strategy?

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Raids by Syrian warplanes killed at least 25 people, most of them civilians crowding into a bakery, in the northeastern Syrian province of Raqqa on Saturday as government forces continued air attacks on territory controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the extremist Sunni militant group.

The Syrian government has increased airstrikes on the group in recent months after it took over government military outposts in Raqqa in a series of newly assertive attacks.

Government critics, and increasingly some supporters, complain that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces allowed the foreign-led ISIS to gain strength and establish its proto-state over the past year, focusing the army’s attacks more on Syrian-led militant groups whose main aim is to oust the president. ISIS has a broader goal, to remake the Middle East and establish an Islamic caliphate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/world/middleeast/syria.html?_r=0

Heard some analyst on BBC this morning saying that Lebanese Hezbollah is now trying to spin their troops involvement in Syria on behalf of one of their patrons, Assad, as actually being intended to keep Isis from going to Beirut. Lebanese are not happy that Isis beheaded both Suni and Shia Lebanese soldiers and are holding 19 more. Lebanon PM says he is trying to get Qatar to help free them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-george-w-bush-was-right-about-iraq-pullout/2014/09/08/6ddd91b2-374e-11e4-bdfb-de4104544a37_story.html

torture supporter and former Bush administration employee who wrote speeches for Rumsfeld knows that if Obama had simply forced Maliki and Iraqi government to keep 24,000 or so US troops there, Iraq would be perfect now

can we just airdrop about 24,000 pro-bush chicken hawks in raqqa?

remarkably durable, that joke

on the still top secret pages from the 9-11 report:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/twenty-eight-pages

new mixtape dropping soon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td9SyiIRHWs

http://www.thenation.com/article/181601/whos-paying-pro-war-pundits

But what you won’t learn from media coverage of ISIS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world. Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.

still don't know what i think the US's role should be here, but this kind of thing is always worth keeping in mind.

Trailer needs a final jump-out-and-go-boo moment.

i don't really understand why they are marketing themselves as evil. shouldn't they be the good guys in their minds, avenging injustices and serving allah?

☮

dexter filkins gave a possible explanation to my question in the new yorker:

It’s hard to watch the video of Steven Sotloff’s last moments and not conclude something similar: the ostensible objective of securing an Islamic state is nowhere near as important as killing people. For the guys who signed up for ISIS—including, especially, the masked man with the English accent who wielded the knife—killing is the real point of being there. Last month, when ISIS forces overran a Syrian Army base in the city of Raqqa, they beheaded dozens of soldiers and displayed their trophies on bloody spikes. “Here are heads that have ripened, that were ready for the plucking,” an ISIS fighter said in narration. Two soldiers were crucified. This sounds less like a battle than like some kind of macabre party.

i don't know if or to what extent this matters. i guess i am just questioning the extent to which radical Islam is at the root of this or if they are just thugs/assholes and no amount of de-radicalization could read them.

*reach them.

violence + mayhem only code as evil to yr western liberal colonized mind, treesh

But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.
still don't know what i think the US's role should be here, but this kind of thing is always worth keeping in mind.

― Treeship, Wednesday, September 17, 2014 1:17 PM

similar to u.s. prison industry. why decriminalize drugs when there so many jobs and so much money tied to locking people up

The more outlandishly barbaric ISIS is, the stronger the call in the west for action. Would have to assume that they think US intervention will consolidate their support base with Sunni ppl. They're not mugs - they know that the videos of beheadings are going to have the opposite effect to the professed desire to warn the US / UK off. They may rethink that when the bombs start falling in earnest.

in some ways they're very sophisticated but like all geopolitical actors they probably mischaracterize/misunderstand the US/UK based on their own personal views of how humans react/behave -- just like the US is constantly surprised when Middle East actors don't act in accordance w/ our own view of rationality.

yeah this is just provocation. their thinking is the wider the conflict, the more support for them will grow/solidify as they become the main oppositional player against the west. the cynical calculus of warfare...

xp

Mordy otm!

man the trailer

http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/iron-man-3-poster-ben-kingsley.jpg

i was thinking the same thing---- CONSPIRACY!!!

it's like you wish you at least had the dignity of being embroiled in don delillo-wave geopolitics but it's like fucking ben elton wrote this

you mean isis vids are psy-ops productions to convince u.s. public they need another war? sounds far-fetched

things like this are why a professional standing army are bad

bring back the draft etc.

FWIW I'm not convinced of the "they want us to come back and fight another war" theory. Us leaving Iraq was pretty much the best thing that ever happened to them AFAICT.

Plus the timing of the beheading videos wouldn't make sense -- they held these guys for a couple years and only beheaded them after we started airstrikes.

I could def be convinced otherwise though.

they = ISIS tbc

so Martin Dempsey doesn't rule out ground troops

Obama still does, though, which is kind of a difficult position to take since I don't think anyone believed IS will be stopped with airstrikes alone

ISIS can only operate as long as the rest of the Sunni population isn't actively united against them. The rest of the Sunni population may not be motivated to mobilise to counter them at the moment but I'm pretty sure they don't want to be governed by 22-year-old Turkish remedials with a penchant for lopping off people's noggins in the grand scheme of things. Get the US back, get a united Sunni front going to oppose them and you have more chance of delaying the day they turn on you.

The Sunnis were more united by the Maliki govt than they were by our presence. I don't buy it. Not to mention the obvious downsides for them of bringing us back, i.e. having to fight a superior army instead of waltzing into under-defended towns and plundering them.

the sunnis being allied w/ isis is what allowed the initial isis successes at the turn of the year, but it's always been uneasy. yr post-iraq war "third generation" jihadis are well aware of the benefits of focusing on "the far enemy" & I suspect they may have some concerns given the track record jihadis have fighting against secular middle eastern govts/"the near enemy"

welp

Less than two months to go before it is 2015 in Iraq.

M:A-2

gulf war 3: saddam's revenge

McCain is itchin'

Gulf War 3D: Sharknado

Wednesday 31 May: 150 killed
Mosul: 56 executed; 60 found in mass grave; 16 killed by government airstrikes and shelling; 13 family members by coalition airstrike; 3 by gunfire.
Qandil mountains: 2 by Turkish airstrikes.

MAY TOTAL: 1,871 civilians killed.

https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2016/

2016 was a very bad year in Iraq.

may total this year...

The annual total for civilian deaths in Iraq in 2016 was 16,393, which is within a broad range encompassing 2015 (17,578) and 2014 (20,218). These past three years are very much higher than the years 2010-2012, the least violent period since the invasion, when the annual numbers ranged from 4,167 to 4,622, and are also substantially higher than 2013 (9,852) which saw the beginning of the change from the pre-2013 levels to current levels.