US warplanes attacked and virtually destroyed the tiny island of Qanus in the Iraqi Salahuddin Province on Tuesday, with officials bragging that they’d dropped nearly 80,000 pounds of explosives on the island.
US officials presented Qanus Island as a hiding place for ISIS forces, and said that the massive attacks would “bring stability to the region” as well as disrupting ISIS’s ability to hide in vegetation by destroying pretty much all of the vegetation.
The Iraqi military participated in the attack as well, parking what officials termed “water boats” around the Tigris River near the island with an eye for shooting anything on the island that was still alive after the US bombings. Locals reported firing continued late into the day.
There simply must have been casualties, though how many seems to be anyone’s guess. Officials aren’t saying, and it seems to depend largely on how many ISIS were managing to hide on a small, largely inconsequential island in the middle of a river.
That is an island in the main river of a main city. There simply must have been a civilian population.
The notion that ISIS can be permanently eradicated is moonshine and here is why. A basic tenet of ISIS is that all super-rich Arabs and all Arab political leaders are godless and they are probably correct.
Well, that’s 80,000 more pounds of bombs the US taxpayer will have to pay the military-industrial complex to replace.
This sort of thing is what US military officers do when they want to show higher-ups that they’re actually “doing something.” It’s like “free fire zones” in Vietnam – something to motivate the troops, with zero strategic or tactical value.
Of course there’s terrorists there, US bombs fell there, so, therefore……
Funny thing, though, I found the island on Google Earth- pre-bombing- and all I could find were maybe five small shacks and some footpaths. No roads, no facilities, no nothing that one might expect a ‘major transportation hub’ to have during wartime. ISIS must be getting sneaky, tunneling under the Tigris and moving everything underground out of sight. With no major roads in the area, I wonder how all this ‘major transportation’ was taking place. And this on an island some 50 miles away from a Kurdish regional capital (Erbil)! One cannot fail to see- especially you other veterans out there- that this has every hallmark of a 9/11 dog and pony show, and we spent millions for what amounts to a photo op. It’s my guess that when the Iraqis put some boots on the ground they won’t find so much as a 70 year old C-ration can on the site. Essentially we plowed some ground for the locals- nothing more.
Shit, I just bought a timeshare on Qanus. Not getting that security deposit back.