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Showing posts with the label Iraqi insurgency

Why The Kurds Initially Failed Against ISIS In Iraq ( Copy Right @ The Business Insider, Author- Jeremy Bender)

Kurdish Peshmerga ( Image credits- Wikimedia commons/ Author-Boris Niehaus) The Kurdish Peshmerga have enjoyed a reputation as the strongest and fiercest fighting force within Iraq. However, the recent advances by ISIS against Kurdish positions has highlighted some of the key areas in which the Peshmerga have been lacking. Chiefly, the Peshmerga suffer from a lack of soldiers with clear battlefield experience who are able to respond to a variety of military situations. Instead, the explosive growth of the economy in Iraqi Kurdistan drew many former veterans into other lines of work. "Many of the pesh merga's battle-hardened veterans quit to take advantage of new opportunities amid a wave of economic development," Azam Ahmed of  The New York Times reports .  " Training became an afterthought, and there was little incentive to unify pesh merga units that remained mostly divided along political party lines." Related to the lack of military vete

ISIS Is Gaining Territory, But The Kurds Still Have Iraq's Most Experienced And Motivated Army ( Copy Right @ The Business Insider)

US Army in Iraq ( Image credits-Wikimedia Commons/United States DOD) Over the past two weeks, the militant group ISIS has launched an almost unchallenged blitz across northern and central Iraq. Iraqi Army units vastly outnumber the jihadists and are far better armed than them - but for the most part Iraq's uniformed military melted away after putting up only minimal resistance. But ISIS fighters stopped when they reached the borders of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. They were facing an opponent that wasn't going to back off from a fight: the Kurdish Peshmerga, Iraqi  Kurdistan's own highly trained and battle-hardened paramilitary force. The Peshmerga, whose name translates as "those who face death," number anywhere from  35,000 to 190,000  fighters, are unlikely to retreat before an ISIS assault - especially if they are defending what they see as their homeland. The Peshmerga was first officially organized into a  nationalist fighting force  in 1943, al

The Back-Room Deal That Explains The Chaos In Iraq ( Copy Right @ The Business Insider)

Iraqi insurgents ( Image credits-Wikimedia commons/Author) In late 2010, Iraq was mired in a political stalemate after ambiguous parliamentary elections left the country without a government for ten months. At the same time, the U.S. was negotiating with the country's leadership to figure out the levels and legal status of U.S. troops that would remain in Iraq after combat operations ended the next year. These twin impasses were solved through a behind-the-scenes deal brokered by the head of Iran's covert foreign operations that was readily accepted by the U.S. The agreement, which the New Yorker's Dexter Filkins  described in detail  in a September 2013 piece in the magazine, left Nouri al-Maliki, a pro-Iranian Shi'ite with despotic and sectarian tendencies, in charge of the country. It deepened Iran's meddling with the fragile politics of its western neighbor, and sent Iraq on the path to state failure. As Filkins explained, Qassem Suleimani, the head