Fighting a terrorist organization like a traditional army?
That will work out swell. It’s like fighting a smoke cloud with a baseball bat and finding that the room still smells afterwards.
“Fighting a terrorist organization like a traditional army?”
That’s going to be the initial thrust at first, but antiterror ops will follow, most likely.
From what I understand, ISIS/Daesh in Iraq is mostly the leftover from the Iraqi National Guard of Hussein’s day; they’re not really insurgents. The new Iraqi army is doing what I was expecting us to do in 2003: clearing out all the homes, seizing all the weapons, shooting anyone who resists. The problem with Daesh is that most of the new Iraqi army in the North was Sunni, so there’d be Sunni governing/patroling Sunni, but when Daesh looked like they were forming a new government, the Sunnis had no loyalty. The new Iraqi army is mostly Shiite, with Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni tribal militias supporting them.
The truth is, though, I expect this to be to the ISIS war what the Battle of the Bulge was to WWII: a long-drawn-out struggle with several apparent reversals. But the good news is that it will probably draw almost all of the ISIS firepower away from Kurdish / Assyrian lands. The more this battle draws out, the more isolated ISIS will be.