Manoj Ambat's Blog dealing with Defence, Foreign Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Politics

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

Let’s hope that President Obama does not bomb ISIS inside Syria—unless, maybe, the airstrikes are coordinated with some other country’s troops on the ground. That’s what happened in northern Iraq last week, when U.S. airstrikes paved the way for a mix of Iraqi special forces, Shiite militias, and Kurdish peshmerga fighters to push ISIS away from the Mosul Dam. But that’s not likely to happen in Syria. It’s not likely to happen for two reasons, both lamentable. First, there are no ground forces inside Syria that can both repel ISIS and serve as palatable American allies. Second, the Obama administration and the neighboring Middle Eastern countries appear to have no strategy of what an intervention in Syria might look like or of what Syrian politics should look like in its aftermath. That is a particular shame, since the United States and just about every country in the region could form a very potent alliance against ISIS. They all hate and fear the al-Qaida offshoot that cal