Islamic State Crisis Megathread (ISIS/ISIL/IS)

[Gauthier]

Why can't they just use a speculum?

That would be too simple.

It also provides lubrication for the explosive material.

[Blakk Metal]

That would be too simple.

It also provides lubrication for the explosive material.

In order to engage in sodomy (the actual legal term) you'd need lube anyway.

[Germanic Templars]

So I got some news about US airstrikes in Iraq.

So far, we destroyed enemy artillery against Kurdish forces.

News source: DFA

http://www.funker530.com/us-fa-18-airst ... s-targets/

http://www.funker530.com/u-s-fa-18-jets ... airstrike/

[Lexicor]

So I got some news about US airstrikes in Iraq.

So far, we destroyed enemy artillery against Kurdish forces.

News source: DFA

http://www.funker530.com/us-fa-18-airst ... s-targets/

http://www.funker530.com/u-s-fa-18-jets ... airstrike/

I really hope America does not cause another interventionist cluster fuck in the Middle East/

[Herskerstad]

That would be too simple.

It also provides lubrication for the explosive material.

Well, we keep hearing some people say that Jihad is an internal struggle. Perhaps anal jihad is a way to re-enforce this literally.

[Germanic Templars]

So I got some news about US airstrikes in Iraq.

So far, we destroyed enemy artillery against Kurdish forces.

News source: DFA

http://www.funker530.com/us-fa-18-airst ... s-targets/

http://www.funker530.com/u-s-fa-18-jets ... airstrike/

I really hope America does not cause another interventionist cluster fuck in the Middle East/

Don't worry, it is only going to be air support, nothing else. Besides, we still got some Iraqi forces as well as the Kurds on the ground taking the fight to the radical bastards.

[Vamtrl]

The Kurds should send ISIS a gift basket, they gave them the opportunity to capture territory and come out with good PR by saving those minorities from the mountain.

[Roski]

Are the Kurds benefitting because of ISIS?

[Washington Resistance Army]

Are the Kurds benefitting because of ISIS?

In a way, they've taken some disputed land they've long viewed as theirs.

[Roski]

Are the Kurds benefitting because of ISIS?

In a way, they've taken some disputed land they've long viewed as theirs.

May have to rethink my whole view of ISIS then...

[Organized States]

Are the Kurds benefitting because of ISIS?

Arguably yes. The Peshmerga and US are defending a large group of religious minorities, that probably would have been massacred if they weren't holding the line, giving them quite good PR.

[The Latin Commonwealth]

In a way, they've taken some disputed land they've long viewed as theirs.

May have to rethink my whole view of ISIS then...

Why,are you Kurd? ( I'm not against them,just curious )

[Washington Resistance Army]

Does anyone know if the US is arming Peshmerga? It seems like we should be, at least they'll stand up and fight ISIS unlike the incompetent as fuck Iraqi army.

[Organized States]

Does anyone know if the US is arming Peshmerga? It seems like we should be, at least they'll stand up and fight ISIS unlike the incompetent as fuck Iraqi army.

We did. The Special Forces were working with the Peshmerga quite often in the Iraq War. They welcomed the US as Liberators, in fact.

[Vamtrl]

In a way, they've taken some disputed land they've long viewed as theirs.

May have to rethink my whole view of ISIS then...

Someone in another forum summed up IS pretty goddamn well in two posts:

MIDDLE EAST SECTARIAN BLOODBATH - GAME RESET EDITION: PART 1

Two months ago, Iraqi Sunni militants led by the then Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) seized the second-largest city in the country, Mosul, and turned much of the order of the region upside down. Things have been rather...dynamic since then with a lot of expectations and lazy narratives shattered along the way. Much like a football game that is tied just after halftime, records, stats and starting rosters don't matter anymore. The only things that are important are relative strength and position.

So let's take a tour of what is actually going on.

The Region Formerly Known as Syria
Approximate Areas of Control (live updates)

The Syrian Civil War has been burning since the Arab Spring protests in March 2011 against Bashir Assad. It has been blazing since around the start of 2012. This is one of the most brutal and destructive civil wars in history. Out of a prewar population of 21 million, ~ 250,000 and counting are dead, 3 million have fled the country, and another ~ 5 million Syrians are internally displaced. Chemical weapons have been used by the government on the civilian population of sub-districts of the capital Damascus. Most prewar state institutions and much of the national infrastructure have been thoroughly destroyed. The Syrian fossil fuel industry no longer exists. The largest commercial center, Aleppo, has been reduced to a Stalingrad hellscape. Overall, national GDP is estimated to have fallen by at least half.

This is an incredible socioeconomic collapse. There is no prospect whatsoever of prewar Syria being restored.

Beyond this destructiveness, the Syrian Civil War is notable for its incredible complexity, extreme levels of sectarian violence (Syria is majority Sunni Arab, the governing class and many of its shock troops are minority Alawite), and the very large number of Islamic extremists fighting in it. In terms of complexity Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at Brookings' Doha Center, summarized it well here:

Should that happen, it would be extraordinarily surprising if yet another new front failed to open in the Syrian conflict -- that of rebels versus Jabhat al-Nusra [Salafi jihad, al-Qaeda origin group]. If things weren't complicated enough today, with at least eight distinct conflict fronts active across the country -- (1) opposition vs. regime, (2) opposition vs. Islamic State, (3) opposition vs. Hezbollah, (4) Islamic State vs. regime, (5) Islamic State vs. Kurds, (6) Nusra vs. Islamic State, (7) Nusra vs. regime, (8) eastern tribes vs. Islamic State -- the addition of a ninth in the shape of Nusra vs. the opposition would make finding a solution to the conflict an almost insurmountable challenge.

Unfortunately however, if it hasn't already begun, this looks almost inevitable.

You can add to that how al-Nursa Front and Islamic State also fight Hezbollah on general principle wherever they find them, as well as countless permutations of local truces, alliances, infighting and blood feuds.

The fighting forces in this mess most notably include several tens of thousands of Sunni jihadists. An exact census is impossible. The major organized groups of these are Islamic State (discussed in depth below), Jabhat al-Nursa (the "official" al-Qaeda force, larger than original global al-Qaeda), Ahrar ash-Sham (Salafi jihadist component of Islamic Front), and, "only" seeking a local hardline sharia law Sunni state, Jaysh al-Islam and Suqour al-Sham (also components of Islamic Front).

All of these guys are bad, martyrdom-inclined dudes who will commit genocide on Bashir Assad's Alawites given the opportunity. This is why the West does not give aid to Islamic Front. With what is left of his prewar military, Bashir Assad has no realistic prospect of putting this many fanatics down, in addition to all the other stripes of rebel he is dealing with. Notably as a result of three years of fighting and combat expertise brought over from Iraq, these jihadis are quite tough and competent fighters.

-

Despite this ridiculously large genocidal jihadist threat, Bashir Assad was having a good year up until the summer. He indisputably was getting the upper hand on the rebels at large and even looking to recapture Aleppo. He did still have the largest, most organized fighting force in Syria. He had weathered an international storm over chemical weapons attacks. He also won a totally free and fair election, truly. Islamic State was on bad terms with most of the other rebels, killing them for him, and had slunk off to Iraq after pissing off too many of them. It also was widely reputed to sell him oil and notorious in rebel circles for not bothering to fight regime troops too much.

Then Islamic State took over Mosul and obtained several brigades worth of US heavy weaponry and infantry equipment, as well as tremendous recruiting cachet.

Then they declared the Syrian-Iraqi border to be void. And then they decided to purge Assad from East Syria. Equipped with heavy artillery, body armor and night vision goggles, they promptly destroyed four bases including a natural gas field and stripped them of even more heavy weaponry. They also beheaded all the Syrian Army troops they caught alive. They have another three pockets in mind for imminent destruction.

As if that wasn't bad enough, al-Nursa Front, Islamic Front and other rebels decided to launch a major push in Damascus. They broke a longstanding siege on the neighborhood of Maliha, starting with this guy (yes, that is a BMP filled with HE...):

[IMG]
[IMG]

And then went through the crater in Assad's lines that tends to result from tac nukes. Another wave of this offensive is currently moving on Damascus Airport.

So this war won't be ending in a glorious regime victory anytime soon. Most likely it continues for years and hundreds of thousands more people die. No one is going to intervene in Syria.

Iraq the Dream

This will be brief because it is thoroughly irrelevant. Iraq the Dream was supposed to be a pluralistic democracy that would be relatively peaceful, friendly to global business and become the new Saudi Arabia with its vast underutilized oil reserves. The below graph is what was seriously proposed would occur, forestalling Peak Oil for many years and driving global prices through the floor:

[IMG]

Iraq the Dream is dead. To the extent this was ever realistic, it was killed for good over the New Year's holiday at the start of 2014 when the Shi'a Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki decided to deal with peaceful Occupy/Tahrir-style Sunni protest camps with tanks. He did this partly because he was mad that ISIS decapitated one of his divisional command staffs with a suicide attack, and partly because he didn't like Sunni dissent. In any case, he forgot that you can't treat peaceful protesters like that when they have stuff at home that looks like this:

[IMG]

This had another, ultimately fateful consequence besides the insurgency rearming. In the insuring Sunni revolt, ISIS came back from Syria and openly (as had still been waging a terror and anti-Humvee campaign, recorded in loving detail) established itself in al-Anbar Province. Maliki sent two line divisions into Anbar to reassert government control over Fallujah and Ramadi. This engagement did not go as planned.

There is no way whatsoever to put this Sealed Evil in a Can back to sleep. At the very, very minimum, Iraq will have an extremely serious sectarian terrorist problem for a very long time. Oil production is sub 3-million bpd and that's where it's going to stay as long as some of the major expansion pipelines were supposed to run through Anbar and Syria, oil executives are worried about their people being beheaded, and the government is pouring all of its disposable cash into weapons. It's over, it's not happening. What we are talking about prospectively is something else.

Next: Iraq the Reality and what kind of animal Islamic State has become.

MIDDLE EAST SECTARIAN BLOODBATH - GAME RESET EDITION: PART 2
So if Iraq the Dream is dead, what is left?

Iraq the Reality

As the Wiki says, "neutrality disputed." I would characterize everything between Tikrit and Samarra as contested, at best. And the Kurdish claims of positions that are at or behind the Tigris are fiction.

One result of the prolonged fighting in Anbar Province from January through June, 2014 was that then-ISIS and like-minded groups got the sense that the Iraqi Army in aggregate wasn't very good. The Iraqi Army in aggregate also developed an unhealthy fear of ISIS and well-documented desertion issues. Meanwhile, increased sectarian antagonism had rendered Mosul and most other Sunni areas disgruntled at best to the ISF.

Then, in what in retrospect was a fairly important moment in world history, ISF managed to capture ISIS' top courier, break him, and use the intelligence to kill ISIS' military commander in Iraq. They also seized intelligence that once cracked would allow for ISIS to be largely rolled up as a guerrilla force. In response, ISIS and its fellow travelers immediately launched an offensive that had most likely been planned for Ramadan. Use it or lose it. ISF in Northern Iraq was - inexplicably - caught completely by surprise and collapsed in one of the most lopsided routs in military history.

The damage of this was incredible. At least four IA divisions ceased to exist outright, with several others combat ineffective. Worse, the rapid rout allowed for Sunni militants, particularly ISIS, to capture intact the entire logistical support of the Nineveh and Saladin (Tikrit area) Province commands as well as discarded rifles, body armor and night vision equipment. These were some of the best equipped divisions in the world and their TO&E vanished whole. ISIS in particular gained hundreds of vehicles, heavy artillery, body armor and the fully stocked second-largest ammo dump in Iraq, as well as legions of new recruits from Mosul and Tikrit. Thousands of ISF personnel, government workers and pro-government "collaborators" who did not run fast enough were either killed outright or executed by ISIS and Saddamist death squads.

This collapse also had logistical consequences for Iraq. Among the areas overrun were the main north-south highway from Turkey to Baghdad and the Baiji oil refinery. Baiji is not an export facility. It made almost all of Iraq's fuel and also hosted a power plant that supplied a significant amount of Iraq's electricity. ISF has repeatedly tried to hold onto Baiji with commando forces and airstrikes, but these mostly just damage the facility. Their main counteroffensive north towards Tikrit stopped there and was defeated.

In the midst of this, the Iraqi Kurds seized Kirkuk and its surrounding oil fields as those ISF units also disintegrated with ISIS and the peshmerga squabbling over spoils. Since then, the now-Islamic State launched a mop-up offensive targeting the well-reputed but under-supplied Kurdish peshmerga to expel them from Nineveh Province entirely and take Mosul Dam; this has succeeded. ISF is irrelevant to this dispute.

Iraq's current situation is dire. Violence has returned to the levels seen during the worst of the 2006-07 sectarian civil war. Multiple bombings per day are common in Baghdad. Sunni militants are continuously degrading ISF forces to the south and west of Baghdad, destroying legacy US equipment and trained personnel, and hoping to effectively encircle the capital. In aggregate, they are gaining and ISF is losing. The ISF equipment loss rate in particular is totally unsustainable.

The economy is a complete mess with millions of people outside the control of the nominal central government, inflation running rampant from fuel, food and goods shortages in Baghdad, crime out of control outside of IS areas as police and soldiers are retasked, and economic investment derailed in favor of desperately buying aircraft and MLRS from Russia. There is no prospect of restoring access to Turkey, or even a proposal of how to do so.

ISF is largely dependent on Shi'a milita for numbers and, in some cases, fighting prowess. These militia run the spectrum from untrained volunteers that IS usually kills by the score to veteran fighters from Syria with Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisers (these tend to commit violence against Sunni civilians). The small Iraqi Air Force is almost certainly manned by Iranians. A US assessment of ISF concluded that only half of its surviving formations were capable of being effective with US assistance; ISF in general was considered severely compromised by infiltrators from both Iran and Sunni extremists.

And there are two other problems. One is political - Nouri al-Maliki is determined to hang onto power and thanks to the command structure of the Army (it reports to him and the ISOF special forces report directly to his office), probably can short of a coup. The other is infrastructure - Mosul Dam is unstable and could destroy Mosul, Samarra and Baghdad (US estimate: 500,000 fatalities) if Islamic State either can't maintain it, can't make arrangements with other factions with necessary equipment to do so, or decides to go scorched earth if somehow forced to retreat.

ISF casualties (and thus, total body count) are severely understated as ISF refuses to report KIA and many militia aren't counted at all. ISF KIA are only identifiable when killed in bombing attacks that go to the general morgue. Anbar in general is a black hole with ISF not reporting casualties, the Sunni coalition not reporting casualties for OpSec reasons, and it being dramatically too dangerous for independent media.

So that's Iraq. Best case scenario (baring someone shooting Maliki)...status quo. Worst case...Syria, with bonus dam collapse. The current dynamics do not in any way lead to IS being defeated or general national order being restored. Something major needs to change; occasional US airstrikes won't do anything. There are many tens of thousands of armed Sunni who survived fighting the US on the ground as well as air-to-ground; they can take it.

Islamic State - A "Better" Class of Jihadist

Islamic State needs special focus as, while they are far from the only Sunni force in the increasingly merged Iranian-Sunni war in Syria and Iraq, they are biggest, most heavily armed, and a key dynamic. Everyone either works with them or is fighting them. Sometimes both. There is no resolution to this war that does not involve dealing with them, one way or another.

Much of the below material also applies to Nursa and the other hardened jihadists in Syria to varying degrees. Nursa is the closest connected and a potential cross-recruiting base for Islamic State as both are explicit Salafi jihadist and so gets some ink here.

-


ISIS is a successor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s old bunch. This lineage as an infamous terrorist force informed most of the conversation about ISIS – “al-Qaeda linked,” “al-Qaeda splinter group,” “al-Qaeda offshoot,” a threat to send back trained jihadists to attack the West. In addition to this narrative, there were a number of pieces along the lines of this one by The War Nerd recounting ISIS frequent organizational misfires as an Islamist Sunni militia that tends to piss off everyone around it, then get stomped and reincarnate.

Well it’s not 2005 anymore and most of this narrative is completely inapplicable. It’s also inapplicable to the other “al-Qaeda linked” group in Syria, al-Nursa Front. There is no al-Qaeda in 2014, neither ISIS nor Nursa generated in Afghanistan “training camps” and these group’s style of jihad bears no resemblance to what was around at the start of the War on Terror. These are sophisticated military organizations, not collections of a few chiefs and a bunch of none-too-bright Indians. They are also phenomenally more dangerous than anything we seriously ascribed to al-Qaeda proper (I’m not counting garage nukes or other such stupidity) and in a sense represent the final evolution and failure of the War on Terror.

One of the most remarkable things about ISIS, now simply calling itself the Islamic State (because there is no other legitimate Islamic state, they say) and Nursa is that they are not remotely shy about what they do. You can follow them readily on mainstream social media (no dark web necessary here). They make videos of attacks, run their own press and aren’t afraid to reveal quite a bit about how they operate. This apparently is tolerated by the US (which can shut any and all of these accounts down) for intelligence purposes. I think this is a mistake, as what we’ve seen since June is not something you build intelligence on to drone strike. I’ve followed this closely since it began and the rest of this piece covers facets that IS and Nursa have revealed that show how serious they are.

So what breed of cat is this?

Size – These are the largest jihadist entities to ever exist in the field. Nursa is estimated to have ~ 8,000 fighters, while Islamic State is now believed to be closer to 20,000 of varying degrees. IS was thought much smaller, 3,000-10,000, but this clearly was not right. Either they have close to 20,000 or they are as superhuman as ISF thinks they are. These headcounts is exclusive of sometimes-allied or potential recruiting base Islamist militias in Syria (nastier parts of Islamic Front, hundreds of local anti-Assad groups) and Iraq (countless local extremists, anti-Maliki groups and tribal Sunni groups). With ongoing success and active recruiting efforts, let’s just call it 30,000.

These are not offshoots or elements of al-Qaeda. Nursa, now apparently the smaller of the two and more fragmented by virtue of being in West Syria, is roughly twice the size of the entire nominal membership of al-Qaeda at the time of the 2001. And they’re all in one country working on a military project, rather than allegedly scattered around the world with some “training.” When you start counting Islamic Front and fellow traveler groups that will handily join Islamic State or Nursa elements on an operation (i.e. more than enough to get designated “terrorist” by the US), there are considerably more extremist fighters in what used to be Syria and Iraq than there are active Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

This bulk means that traditional anti-terrorist strategies are just pinpricks.


Territorial Control – This is so obvious it gets overlooked, but most extremist groups spend most of their time hiding. This is because the world is carved up into countries that are not generally run by people who like the local extremists and Antarctica is a bit cold for these guy’s tastes.

The situation in what used to be Syria and Iraq now is far more severe than anything we were worried about in Afghanistan. Syria has no central legal authority; if Assad’s Mukhabarat want to arrest Nursa fighters, they had better bring tanks. Islamic State now governs an area larger than many European countries. They aren’t guests of the Taliban. They are the Taliban, albeit with far less tolerance for other armed groups that are not completely loyal to them.

Importantly, this is no accident. Islamic State wants to expand and govern territory; they call themselves a Caliphate for more than just branding reasons. This is totally different than al-Qaeda, which never had a particularly well defined geographic goal and whose largest operations not only had nothing realistic to do with territory but were counterproductive.


Jihadi-Directed Attack Munitions (JDAM) – Islamic State in particular puts a tremendous amount of thought into how it uses suicide bombers and car bombs. This can best be seen last week (8/6/14) when Shi’a areas of Baghdad were hit by 6 simultaneous planted car bombs. At the same time, five armored suicide truck bombs with multi-ton yields were being used in Northern Iraq and Syria by IS. A peshmerga base east of Mosul got two, while strongpoints of Assad’s Brigade 93 base got three, both as parts of larger assault operations. These targets were thoroughly destroyed.

Pictured: Two of the Brigade 93 armored bombs.

[IMG]

[IMG]

Nursa likes this tactic as well. They had the above BMP bomb, and they've done that before. Pretty horrifying if you're at the target without a legitimate AT weapon. They were also responsible for this infamous attack involving a converted semi:



IS has also used tanker trucks against military positions and infrastructure targets.

What is significant here is that this sort of use shows a great deal of calculation. If any of these weapons was detonated in a bazaar in Baghdad’s Sadr City, there would be hundreds of fatalities and worldwide headlines. IS can obviously do that, as seen by the repeated Baghdad car bomb waves set off at will. They also did this to a Yazidi town in 2007 in their past incarnation as Islamic State of Iraq. But the targets are tactical instead. Destroy a command post. Break the lines. Destroy infrastructure.

It is worth mentioning here that Brigade 93, with 300-500 SAA troops in the middle of IS territory and a large armor and ammo depot, has far more long term value than slaughtering poor civilians in Baghdad. These guys know exactly what they’re doing.

Extremely Tight OpSec – While Islamic State issues regular news and has a reputation as a chatterbox, they are capable of imposing control on their communications. Troop movements never leak on Twitter. Communication blackouts – up to and including taking down local cell networks - have been used preceding assaults and when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi visited Mosul. The usual pattern for a major IS assault is that they will not announce it until it has been underway and looks promising, then will not officially announce victory until it has been over for a few hours and they’re sure they won, then will not release imagery for several hours or days depending on how valuable the information is. So when you see them looting an ammo dump, they’ve already cleaned it out.

When they announce they are coming, it is purely as intimidation value against an opponent who they feel can do very little or nothing about it. They know how to walk this line between PR and harming themselves. I would expect them to be much more careful if they believed that the US was planning mass airstrikes. They just flat out don’t fear Iraqi or Syrian intelligence or the respective air forces.


Professional Operations – This is the big one, and the big change from retrospective analyses like that of War Nerd. Islamic State is a disciplined, well-experienced, well-led, thoroughly respectable combined arms army. Any other interpretation is fiction. To wit:

-- They are capable of enforcing force-wide discipline edicts, such as no harmful stray communications (notably something ISF cannot do) or no wearing masks in Syria for non-tactical reasons. This also includes sharia-based bans on most of the random thuggery normally seen with irregular forces. They don’t suffer from divided loyalties or moles (again, something ISF cannot say).

-- The above includes discipline in operations. Offense and defense are planned with objectives and enemy composition in mind, operational progression is pre-planned, and roles are followed strictly. There are dedicated indirect fire, suicide (bomb and infantry), line infantry, antitank and antiaircraft units.

Brigade 93 appears to have been the following: Establish perimeter, probing attacks and harassing bombardment, heavy bombardment, perimeter breach with armored JDAM, immediate all-out assault led by expendable troops (essentially martyr by assault squad) with line infantry and armor right behind, mop up, document. This is not a militia. This is nothing resembling a terrorist group.

-- There are dedicated specialists inside IS handling media communications, intel and counter-intel, commando operations (demolition, assassination) and terrorism. The entity as a whole can follow a strategic plan despite being spread across hundreds of miles.

-- Operationally adaptive and aggressive, but not stupid. Most analysts now believe that the assault on Mosul was launched when it was because ISIS operations were potentially compromised with the killing of their military commander and the capture of his trove of USB sticks. ISIS moved it up rather than scrubbing it or risking that it would be found out. Once that succeeded beyond any rational expectation, they rapidly exploited it. They notably have not beaten their head against heavily-defended Samarra, similar Assad positions (the latter until they had a plan for taking them) or Baghdad (which they mostly terrorize). They probed the peshmerga around Mosul sufficiently to determine they weren’t that good or well-supplied, then attacked with a goal of clearing all of Northwest Iraq. When the peshmerga counterattacked, they immediately adapted to fighting east of Mosul and drove that back as well. That operation has expanded as peshmerga supply and command & control issues become apparent. This is classic exploitation.

They also are capable of conducting night operations and will do so for both the same reason the US does (humans can’t fight well at 3 AM) and to neutralize air support that they know can’t fight at night. They don’t fear ineffective air or missile strikes and recognize what are effective and what are not.

-- They readily integrate useful captured weaponry into their forces and adapt accordingly. Brigade 93 was shelled with Grad rocket launchers freshly captured from Regiment 121. They use armor ranging from Humvees to T-72 tanks. They transferred most of the heavy artillery they got in Mosul to the Syrian front because Assad has less effective tactical air than Maliki does, while spamming US-made mortars in Iraq. Notably, they don’t bother with equipment they can’t maintain or operate – aircraft, M1A1 tanks.

-- They seem to be the only fighting force in Iraq with a functional logistical train or recruit training program.

Source: http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/ ... 21/page-33

[Krontzaika]

..And the gas prices keep on rising!

[Washington Resistance Army]

Does anyone know if the US is arming Peshmerga? It seems like we should be, at least they'll stand up and fight ISIS unlike the incompetent as fuck Iraqi army.

We did. The Special Forces were working with the Peshmerga quite often in the Iraq War. They welcomed the US as Liberators, in fact.

I was aware of that, but I meant more recently. I myself still believed Kurdistan should have been given independence when we occupied Iraq, they would have been an even better ally.

[Roski]

May have to rethink my whole view of ISIS then...

Why,are you Kurd? ( I'm not against them,just curious )

No, but I support Kurdish independence.

[Organized States]

We did. The Special Forces were working with the Peshmerga quite often in the Iraq War. They welcomed the US as Liberators, in fact.

I was aware of that, but I meant more recently. I myself still believed Kurdistan should have been given independence when we occupied Iraq, they would have been an even better ally.

I'm not aware of any attempts to arm them at the moment, but I know that they are in possession of old M16A1s and A2s from 2012.

[Bazrasha]

Are the Kurds benefitting because of ISIS?

Yes. They've been able to gain control of disputed land claims are are working out and could posibly be holding an independence referendum in September. This arguably the biggest advance in Kurdish Self determination since the establishment of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991. Of course it also comes with combat and fighting against a large force so it's kind of a double edged sword.

[Roski]

Are the Kurds benefitting because of ISIS?

Yes. They've been able to gain control of disputed land claims are are working out and could posibly be holding an independence referendum in September. This arguably the biggest advance in Kurdish Self determination since the establishment of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991. Of course it also comes with combat and fighting against a large force so it's kind of a double edged sword.

ISIS is not attacking them though, is that correct? If it is, we could finall see the end of some middle eastern violence.

[Upper America]

..And the gas prices keep on rising!

That won't happen.

[Organized States]

Yes. They've been able to gain control of disputed land claims are are working out and could posibly be holding an independence referendum in September. This arguably the biggest advance in Kurdish Self determination since the establishment of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991. Of course it also comes with combat and fighting against a large force so it's kind of a double edged sword.

ISIS is not attacking them though, is that correct? If it is, we could finall see the end of some middle eastern violence.

No, ISIS is attacking Kurdish communities at the moment, along with Christian and other Minority sects which have fled to Kurdistan.

[Bazrasha]

Yes. They've been able to gain control of disputed land claims are are working out and could posibly be holding an independence referendum in September. This arguably the biggest advance in Kurdish Self determination since the establishment of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991. Of course it also comes with combat and fighting against a large force so it's kind of a double edged sword.

ISIS is not attacking them though, is that correct? If it is, we could finall see the end of some middle eastern violence.

They've had skirmishes here and there normally with the Peshmerga deal heavy losses to IS forces buts it's only a matter of time and IS forces currently are operating in disputed territories claimed by Iraqi Kurdistan so they will have to go in and clear out the IS forced from there.

[Roski]

ISIS is not attacking them though, is that correct? If it is, we could finall see the end of some middle eastern violence.

No, ISIS is attacking Kurdish communities at the moment, along with Christian and other Minority sects which have fled to Kurdistan.

Nevermind.
I thought ISIS could see the light!