Iraqi attack helicopters have launched an attack against a convoy of fuel tankers in the Syrian border city of Bukamal today, destroying the tankers and killing at least eight people.
Bukamal is held by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and was the site of a major, multi-day battle between AQI and fellow al-Qaeda faction Jabhat al-Nusra earlier this month. The oil rich city, on the Iraq border, is seen as especially valuable for jihadist rebels.
Iraq’s Interior Ministry is claiming the fuel tankers were bound for Anbar Province, which AQI continues to hold much of, and was going to be used to re-supply fighters there.
The takeover of Bukamal has effectively given AQI a supply line corridor from the Aleppo Province, in northern Syria, to Anbar cities just a stone’s throw from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The Iraqi military has been fighting them in the Anbar Province for months, but this is the first time they have launched a cross-border attack into Syria, reflecting the increasingly regional nature of the war.
Good if Iraq helps Assad against foreign SA funded foreign invaders of Syria.
Iraq, Iran and every other nations whom their geography is close to Syria need to fight these Saudis paid mercenaries, the Saudi kingdom simply lying, so is with Turkish government, they are up to their neck and still involved in Syria and Iraq supporting these jihadist and all other kind of terrorists.
Good if Iraq helps Assad against foreign SA funded foreign invaders of Syria. All ME countries should unite against western neo colonist aggression robbing them from their natural resources.
During WW1, two european diplomats named Sykes and Picot drew an imaginary line in a desert to divide the spoils of the conquered Ottoman Empire between France and England. France wanted Syria, England wanted Iraq, and thus there was a need for a new imaginary line dividing the new.
Today, if Al-Qaeda fighters on are the Syrian side of that line, they are considered freedom fighters, and its US policy to give them aid, as long as it can be classified as 'non-lethal', US allies already give them lethal aid, and many in the US want the US to start giving them lethal arms and ammunition.
If that same Al-Qaeda fighter takes a few steps to the east and crosses the imaginary line drawn by Sykes and Picot, they are instantly transformed into evil terrorists fighting our loyal American allies/puppets in Baghdad, and its now critical US policy to supply more arms and ammunition to the Maliki regime to kill them.
The Merchants of Death must be ecstatic, as we seem to be funding and arming both sides in this war.