Claims of “victories” in Salaheddin Province, particularly surrounding the city of Samarra, have been pushed by Iraqi officials as an effort to suggest al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has been stalled in its advance.
Yet reports that the nation’s largest oil refinery, the Baiji facility, has fallen today to AQI undercuts those claims. Baiji is just outside of Samarra, and the town is now fully under AQI control.
Interestingly, the refinery hasn’t shut down, but is reportedly still operational and being run on orders from AQI, giving them a huge refining capacity for their growing Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Indeed, while the Maliki government tries to portray its defenses as strengthening, it seems that it is only the Shi’ite militias raised in a call to arms by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani that are doing much in the way of defending the towns north of Baghdad, and the chances of a quick reversal of AQI’s gains seems unlikely.
Just a question here, is this new Al Qaeda group, who are going through Iraq overthrowing the elected Government of Iraq any different from the group that did the SAME thing in Ukraine over a year ago?
Other than the US backed the Ukrainian version!
Doing my reading on the developing Iraqi crisis, it seems that ISIS/AQI/what have you was largely a spark for a much broader, grassroots Sunni revolt. Many are the same groups that rose in 2006-2007, but were turned off by the extremism of al-Qaeda, and often went on the US payroll as part of the so-called "awakening". However, the crude sectarianism of the Maliki government has raised tensions, and ISIS provided an organized core around which they have mobilized in numbers much greater than those of ISIS. The question then emerges, will ISIS remain in charge? Will other groups with their own agendas take control of this rising? Will srategies of "divide and conquer" which were successfully used in the US "surge" work again?
Maliki is going down. He appeared with Putin and the BRIC nations to join their economic/defense bloc for Eurasia. He was making nice with Russia and CHina and now he is going bye bye.
Maliki was courting the Russia and China in joining their new security coop. I think that is why this is happening.
I still think this is another regime change operation orchestrated from Riyadh with DC approval.
Everyone seems to throw the fact that the US backed Shia death squads down the memory hole. http://rt.com/usa/steele-iraqi-death-squads-527/
Rather than the US involve itself in Iraq, it should use what money it can print to build refineries to produce oil from coal and gas at home. This will reduce its foreign deficit, reduce the supply of money to al Qaeda and other enemies, and reduce the cost of oil to about $50 per barrel. Of course this last means that it'll never happen; the oil lobby and its OPEC and Green allies will see to that. Green you ask? To produce oil from coal (but not from gas, since it contains more hydrogen) uses about 50% of the coal to make the hydrogen and produce the electricity and process heat needed; an oil refinery would use about a quarter of the petroleum being refined for this purpose. In reality in the US, the electricity would come from the grid and the hydrogen from steam reforming of gas.