Posted on 06/12/2014 11:11:00 AM PDT by Mount Athos
Iraq was on the brink of disintegration Thursday as al-Qaeda-inspired fighters swept through northern Iraq toward Baghdad and Kurdish soldiers seized the city of Kirkuk without a fight.
Lawmakers gathered at the Iraqi parliament to discuss the declaration of a state of emergency, a day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki assured Iraqis that the insurgents’ gains were temporary and would soon be reversed by the Iraqi army.
But after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) captured fresh territory and set its sights on Baghdad, Iraq seemed to be fast slipping out of government control.
Iraqi state television claimed that government forces recaptured the north-central city of Tikrit on Thursday, a day after ISIS said it seized the home town of former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. The group, an al-Qaeda offshoot, asserted, however, that it has completely surrounded the city of Samarra, south of Tikrit and just 70 miles north of Baghdad, leaving the situation on the ground unclear.
The semiautonomous Kurdish government said its pesh merga forces took control of the Kurdish city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, after Iraqi security forces there fled rather than fight. The capture of Kirkuk follows the seizure by the (ISIS) on Monday of the important northern city of Mosul, putting northern Iraq beyond the central government’s authority.
In the north, Kurdish forces are in full control of Iraq’s oil-rich city of Kirkuk after the federal army abandoned its bases there, a Kurdish military spokesman said Thursday.
“The whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of pesh merga,” said Jabbar Yawar. “No Iraqi army remains in Kirkuk now.”
The stunning speed with which the rout has unfolded in northern Iraq has raised deep doubts about the capacity of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Time to bring Baghdad Bob out of retirement?
IIRC, the Kurds are NOT bad guys. I stand to be corrected.
So, are the Kurds and the ISIS allies in this insurrection against the existing (and supposedly democratically-elected) government in Baghdad?
If not, is this going to be a three-handed war?
And where does Iran fit into this equation?
This offensive is being funded by Saudi Arabia. Soon Iran will intervene with “volunteers to protect sacred shrines” . Otherwise they will will have a hostile Sunni nation directly on their borders.
This offensive is being funded by Saudi Arabia. Soon Iran will intervene with “volunteers to protect sacred shrines” . Otherwise they will will have a hostile Sunni nation directly on their borders.
Has BO “started a dialog” with the insurgents?
Iraq was once the buffer between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. We are now watching that buffer collapse. Won’t be long before they go after one another.
The Saud’s just bought themselves a whole slew of new tanks not long ago. German, IIRC.
Oh God. The Iraqi Army fled...
This really getting bad.
“IIRC, the Kurds are NOT bad guys. I stand to be corrected.”
Kurds are ok. Think they are more communist than islamist.
Hey, Biden was right after all. The Sunnis will have the middle, Iran is going to take the south and Biden’s 3 state solution becomes a reality.
Only problem with that is The Shia in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Lebanon, which outnumber the Sunnis by a wide margin, just might become the Caliphate the Ayatollahs have been talking about.
And they want nukes...........
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3166855/posts
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3166867/posts
Send in the GI Joe’s against these COBRA wanna-bees
This disintegration is just like what happened in the last days of the Vietnam war, caused by DemonCraps, just as the Vietnam defeat was.
All of this was predicted by Dick Cheney as a reason to stop at Kuwait and not invade Iraq...when he worked for George H.W. Bush.
Obama is thinking about the Bright Side , oil prices will go up
“....has raised deep doubts about the capacity of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces.”
.
By now there should be certainty that U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces are useless.
Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein put up a better defense against armor, artillery and aerial attack from US forces than they did against AQ that have none of them.
But Jay Carney's only been gone a couple of days.
no. another article said they shot at one another. Kurds seen the city as their ancient capital. They are opportunists.
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