Humiliation at Rout Hits Iraqi Military Hard
06.19.2014 at 12:33pm
Humiliation at Rout Hits Iraqi Military Hard by Hamza Hendawi and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Associated Press
The Iraqi soldiers tell of how they can hardly live with the shame of their rout under the onslaught of the Islamic militants. Their commanders disappeared. Pleas for more ammunition went unanswered. Troops ran from post to post only to find them already taken by gunmen, forcing them to flee…
Iraq's military has been deeply shaken by their collapse in the face of fighters led by the al-Qaida breakaway group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who in the course of just over a week overran Mosul then stormed toward Baghdad, seizing town after town, several cities and army base after army base over a large swath of territory…
The conspiracy theories about the Kurds are hardly surprising since Mosul and Kirkuk were designated as being in the Kurdish autonomous region in the Transitional Admin. Law of 2004 (Paragraph-53) and grandfathered into the permanent constitution via Article 138. Here are additionsl thoughts if anyone is interested.
http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2014/06/letter-102-to-friends-and-familiares.html
We should be working with Iran on this one. To me, Iran has become a bogey-straw-man. My sense has been that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are driven more by the policies and politics of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. (Frankly, those latter ‘nations’ spook me a lot more than Iran.)