Taking back ISIS-held towns for the Iraqi military has become a much bigger long-term problem than anyone expected. It’s not just the fighting that’s the problem, it’s the brutality that comes afterward.
A Shi’ite dominated military, backed by Shi’ite militias, chased ISIS out of a Sunni town, and atrocities are soon to follow. Sunnis are rounded up on flimsy pretexts by the winning troops, tortured and sometimes killed.
Publicly, the US has tried to downplay this, but officials are conceding that privately the Pentagon has repeatedly warned Iraqi leaders about atrocities.
Iraq claims they’re investigating reports of atrocities carried out by the Shi’ite militias, but those investigations never go anywhere. It’s not just the militias, either, with Iraqi troops getting involved oftentimes.
With the US couching their entire Iraq strategy on religious unity, an admittedly unrealistic plan in the first place, regular sectarian massacres are really leaving that plan in tatters. Iraqi Sunnis may not like living under ISIS control, but they may look fondly back on that if living under Shi’ite occupation is too brutal.
The US had, after all, already claimed “victory” in Iraq before, only to see the increasingly violent crackdowns on Sunnis by the Maliki government give ISIS an opening to make huge gains. Any new military gains, then, are likely to similarly be temporary with the purges that follow.
Which begs the question, would the Iraq government be committing such war crimes without the advise and consent of USA? Enough said
That chapter wasn't in my copy of the Army Training Field Manual (FM 27-10)…but then my copy was a lot older – and I see that it hasn't been updated since 1976. Maybe it's one of those "need to know" versions.
Grand scheme of things
Such a cruel, inhuman and satanic bunch of barbarians, all because of a great greed caused by great wealth.
And by all that’s true and just, let not the self-righteous activists among us fool anyone into thinking that our equally satanic Empire with it’s ten years of satanic occupation was the root cause of it. For in the beginning, by intelligent design, the vast majority of humanity was created to be self-absorbed and lovers of self to the extent that an ingrate illusion has them fooled into thinking they deserve to be rich, causing society to have a take all you can take morality. For this world has but one purpose, to reach the ultimate conclusion of greed, where upon all things will turn toward the good.
The US instigated the sectarian violence in Iraq as part of Negroponte's "El Salvador option." Look up James Steele. I also recall seeing reports of Iraqis admitting to being paid by the CIA to set off bombs. There were rumors the bombing of the Golden Dome in 2006 was actually one of those incitements.
The US policy in Iraq since 1991 has been to break the Arab consensus there. Now they complain about the bitterness of the fruit they planted and nourished.
The US cavalierly shattered the regime and State and even society in Iraq. Pre American invasion, Iraq, while no paradise, did NOT suffer from endless sectarian violence. But it sure does now…
The cycle of Sunni revolt and Sh'ite counterattack, with the Kurds playing both sides against the middle, will continue now until someone is able, as Saddam was, to unite the entire country, even if only by authoritarian methods, or until the country splits up into at least three parts, de facto if not de jure.