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Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 19-118-Caliphate-vs-Regular Armies-17

Shia militias are essentially the sole force standing between ISIS and Baghdad.Power in Baghdad today is effectively held by a gathering of Shia militias.

It is the Iranian ‘Revolutionary Guard’ and not the Saudis, who are providing muscle and inspiration to the embattled Shia-dominated Iraqi army, to fight the challenge posed by the extremist and indeed barbaric Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL).

Worse still, Saudi Arabia has got itself involved in a ‘no-win’ situation by seeking to impose a government of its choice, through relentless aerial bombing on the neighbouring, economically backward Yemen

An Iranian stealth takeover of Iraq is currently under way. Tehran's actions in Iraq lay bare the nature of Iranian regional strategy.

Former US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker who said: "Iraqis have a strong military tradition. They've got good soldiers. They need good leadership […] The Iraqi military is not rotten to the core. It was rotten at the top."

On one side are the Kurds, an ethnic group which missed out on a homeland when the Ottoman Empire was divided up at the end of the first world war. On the other is Isis, a marauding force of global jihadists, who have claimed a homeland from the ruins of the once feared police states of Iraq and Syria. Isis’s rampage across both countries has exposed the fragility of totalitarian rulers and their subservience to the region’s titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

From Washington, it looks like a moderates-versus-extremists or stability-versus-terrorism issue, but closer inspection reveals a complex picture of a Middle East divided along sectarian lines.

Success against ISIS requires a team of teams Gen. Stanley McChrystal (ret.)If the U.S. wants to achieve its strategic goals in the region, it must understand why the conflicts are happening, even if they aren’t about the West, to better draft a policy response, advises Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he has written extensively about the Sunni-Shia divide.

Avoid Arab-Iran Enmity and Facilitate Peace Ever since its massive oil wealth started becoming an important and sometimes decisive factor in regional or global power equations, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has enjoyed global attention. Muslims worldwide looked at the kingdom’s ruler as the ‘custodian’ of the two holiest mosques in Islam—the Al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina, where millions of pilgrims congregate annually. Using its vast financial resources, Saudi Arabia also became the epicentre of conservative ‘Wahhabi’ Islam worldwide. It wielded enormous and almost unquestioned clout across its entire Arab neighbourhood. The US ensured and virtually guaranteed the kingdom’s security. The past year has witnessed serious erosion in the desert kingdom’s fortunes and influence. The dramatic reduction in global oil prices has almost halved its revenues. The US has replaced Saudi Arabia as the largest oil producer in the world. Washington is no longer heavily dependent on Saudi energy resources. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab partners now see the US making peace and reconciliation with Iran—the kingdom’s arch regional adversary and the most powerful source of inspiration for Shias (considered heretic) worldwide. Iran, in turn, has emerged as a regional power directly challenging vital Saudi interests, particularly in Iraq and Syria.It is the Iranian ‘Revolutionary Guard’ and not the Saudis, who are providing muscle and inspiration to the embattled Shia-dominated Iraqi army, to fight the challenge posed by the extremist and indeed barbaric Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL). It is again Iran that is

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frustrating Saudi ambitions in neighbouring Syria. Worse still, Saudi Arabia has got itself involved in a ‘no-win’ situation by seeking to impose a government of its choice, through relentless aerial bombing on the neighbouring, economically backward Yemen. The kingdom is also faced with a religious and ideological challenge to its Wahhabi practices, by ISIL, which unlike the Saudis is violently intolerant of Shia practices. Shia mosques in Saudi Arabia have been attacked and dozens of worshippers killed. Obviously rattled by these developments, investigations by Saudi security agencies have led to the arrests and detention of 431 Arab and African residents and Saudi nationals, for alleged attempts to launch suicide bombings, across the kingdom.Politics, it is said, makes strange bedfellows. The two nations most shaken and alarmed by the US, Russia, China, UK, France and Germany concluding an agreement to end economic sanctions on Iran, in return for curbs on its nuclear programme, are Saudi Arabia and Israel. While the Saudis have been subtle about their reservations on the US-Iran nuclear deal, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has gone virtually ballistic in his position and is headed for a showdown with the Obama administration. These two strange bedfellows will spare no effort to scuttle the nuclear deal in the US Congress. In a larger perspective, one is seeing the emergence of close but clandestine Saudi-Israeli strategic partnership to counter both Iran and ISIL.India has to take due note of these developments and respond deftly. There are an estimated 1.8 million Indians living in Saudi Arabia, who remit back around $8.5 billion annually. Saudi Arabia is the largest source of our oil imports. The desert kingdom has also been forthcoming in addressing issues of concern on terrorism, ever since the visit of the former ruler King Abdullah to India, even going to the extent of deporting terrorism suspects. While the US will remain a major partner of Saudi Arabia on security issues, Riyadh will look for new regional and global partners. India needs to carefully look at enhancing maritime cooperation with Saudi Arabia and its GCC partners. India has, in recent days, been a venue for facilitating Israeli-Saudi contacts for mutual understanding. While we should avoid getting drawn into the vortex of sectarian (Shia-Sunni) and civilisational (Arab-Persian) rivalries in our western neighbourhood, we can facilitate efforts for reconciliation and peace, when required.

Dispatch from Iraq: the Stealth Iranian Takeover Becomes Clearby Jonathan SpyerPJ MediaJuly 31, 2015Originally published under the title, "On the Ground in Iraq, the Stealth Iranian Takeover Becomes Clear."

In late June, I traveled to Iraq with the purpose of investigating the role being played by the Iranian-supported Shia militias in that country. Close observation of the militias, their activities, and their links to Tehran is invaluable in understanding what is likely to happen in the Middle East following the conclusion of the nuclear agreement between the P5 + 1 powers and Tehran.An Iranian stealth takeover of Iraq is currently under way. Tehran's actions in Iraq lay bare the nature of Iranian regional strategy. They show that Iran has no peers at present in the promotion of a very 21st century way of war, which combines the recruitment and manipulation of sectarian loyalties; the establishment and patient sponsoring of political and paramilitary front groups; and the engagement of these groups in irregular and clandestine warfare, all in tune with an Iran-led agenda. With the conclusion of the nuclear deal, and thanks to the cash about to flow into Iranian coffers, the stage is now set for an exponential increase in the scale and effect of these activities across the region.

So what is going on in Iraq, and what may be learned from it?Power in Baghdad today is effectively held by a gathering of Shia militias known as the Hashed al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization). This initiative brings together tens of armed groups, including some very small and newly formed ones. However, its main components ought to

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be familiar to Americans who remember the Iraqi Shia insurgency against the U.S. in the middle of the last decade. They are: the Badr Organization, the Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Kataeb Hizballah, and the Sarayat al-Salam (which is the new name for the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr). All of these are militias of long-standing. All of them are openly pro-Iranian in nature. All of them have their own well-documented links to the Iranian government and to the Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Hashed al-Shaabi was founded on June 15, 2014, following a fatwa by venerated Iraqi Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani a day earlier. Sistani called for a limited jihad at a time when the forces of ISIS were juggernauting toward Baghdad. The militias came together, under the auspices of Quds Force kingpin Qassem Suleimani and his Iraqi right-hand man Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Because of the parlous performance of the Iraqi Army, the Shia militias have become in effect the sole force standing between ISIS and the Iraqi capital.Therein lies the source of their strength. Political power grows, as another master strategist of irregular warfare taught, from the barrel of a gun. In the case of Iraq, no instrument exists in the hands of the elected government to oppose the will of the militias. The militias, meanwhile, in their political iteration, are also part of the government.In the course of my visit, I travelled deep into Anbar Province with fighters of the Kataeb Hizballah, reaching just eight miles from Ramadi City. I also went to Baiji, the key front to the capital's north, accompanying fighters from the Badr Corps.In all areas, I observed close cooperation between the militias, the army, and the federal police. The latter are essentially under the control of the militias. Mohammed Ghabban, of Badr, is the interior minister. The Interior Ministry controls the police. Badr's leader, Hadi al-Ameri, serves as the transport minister.In theory, the Hashd al-Shaabi committee answers to Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi. In practice, no one views the committee as playing anything other than a liaison role. The real decision-making structure for the militias' alliance goes through Abu Mahdi al Muhandis and Hadi al-Ameri, to Qassem Suleimani, and directly on to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.No one in Iraq imagines that any of these men are taking orders from Abadi, who has no armed force of his own, whose political party (Dawa) remains dominated by former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his associates, and whose government is dependent on the military protection of the Shia militias and their political support. When I interviewed al-Muhandis in Baiji, he was quite open regarding the source of the militias' strength: "We rely on capacity and capabilities provided by the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (right) with Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani The genius of the Iranian method is that it is not possible to locate a precise point where the Iranian influence ends and the "government" begins. Everything is entwined. This pro-Iranian military and political activity depends at ground level on the successful employment and manipulation of religious fervor. This is what makes the Hashed fighters able to stand against the

rival jihadis of ISIS. Says Major General Juma'a Enad, operational commander in Salah al-Din Province: "The Hashed strong point is the spiritual side, the jihad fatwa. Like ISIS."So this is Tehran's formula. The possession of a powerful state body (the IRGC's Quds Force) whose sole raison d'etre is the creation and sponsorship of local political-military organizations to serve the Iranian interest. The existence of a population in a given country available for indoctrination and mobilization. The creation of proxy bodies and the subsequent shepherding of them to both political and military influence, with each element

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complementing the other. And finally, the reaping of the benefit of all this in terms of power and influence.This formula has at the present time brought Iran domination of Lebanon and large parts of Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Current events in Iraq form a perfect study of the application of this method, and the results it can bring. Is Iran likely to change this winning formula as a result of the sudden provision of increased monies resulting from the nuclear deal? This is certainly the hope of the authors of the agreement. It is hard to see on what it is based.The deal itself proves that Iran can continue to push down this road while paying only a minor price, so why change? Expect further manifestations of the Tehran formula in the Middle East in the period ahead. Jonathan Spyer, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is director of the Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs and author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict (Continuum, 2011).

The ISIL Takfiri terrorists currently control shrinking swathes of Syria and Iraq. They have threatened all communities, including Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Ezadi Kurds and others, as they continue their atrocities in Iraq. Senior Iraqi officials have blamed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and some Persian Gulf Arab states for the growing terrorism in their country. The ISIL has links with Saudi intelligence and is believed to be indirectly supported by the Israeli regime.

Iran-Backed Iraqi Militias Recruit Teens to Fight ISIS, Jeopardizing U.S. Aid to Baghdad by TheTower.org Staff | 07.29.15 8:07 pmIraqi Shiite militias, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a number of which are backed by Iran, are recruiting and training teens as young as 15 to fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Associated Press (AP) reported Tuesday.Hundreds of students have gone through training at the dozens of such summer camps in Baghdad, Basra and other cities run by the Popular Mobilization Forces, the government-sanctioned umbrella group of mostly Shiite militias. The camps were created after the country’s top Shiite cleric issued an edict calling on students as young as middle-school age to use their school vacations to prepare for battle if they are needed. It is impossible to say how many went on to fight IS, since those who do so go independently. But this summer, The Associated Press saw over a dozen armed boys on the front line in western Anbar province, including some as young as 10. The PMF says the training is just a precaution and that it does not deploy minors in combat, and the government says any underage fighters are isolated cases who slipped through on their own. The AP points out that the recruitment of children could violate the 2008 Child Soldiers Prevention Act, which prohibits the United States from providing certain forms of military aid to countries that recruit individuals under the age of 18 to fight. While the PMF are not directly controlled by the Iraqi government, they “[receive] weapons and funding from the Iraqi government and [are] trained by the Iraqi military, which receives its training from the U.S.” When contacted by the AP, the American embassy in Baghdad expressed concern about practice but gave no indication that it would do anything to address the situation. C: as I told so many times in Islam there are other is no number to the age to have become a man, facial air, puberty and knowledgeable of the Quran etc, are some of the criteria.

In I Saw the U.S. Hand Iraq Over to the Iranians. Is the Whole Region Next?, which was published in the February 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Michael Pregent noted that the PMF are often composed of militia members who once targeted American forces. The American acquiescence to their presence has been taken as approval by Iran to strengthen its hold on Iraq. Indeed, Iran appears to believe that the U.S. is essentially standing behind them

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on the ISIS issue. This, in turn, is seen as a tacit endorsement of Iranian influence in Iraq. In fact, recent statements from key U.S. officials on Iran’s ostensibly constructive role in the fight against ISIS have been interpreted as a green light for Iran to increase its sphere of influence in Iraq.As a result, what was once rumored to be true is now out in the open: Shia militias are commanded by the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards-Quds Force. Shia militias that once targeted and killed U.S. and other coalition members now populate the ranks of Iraq’s paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units. Shia militias and their Iranian handlers are operating with impunity for the first time; not only against ISIS, but also against their Sunni enemies in general. As a result, Iran and its proxies now believe that the U.S. views them as a necessary evil on the battlefield and legitimate partners in the Iraqi government.

The United States has effectively enabled an Iranian takeover of Iraq. I know, because I was there and saw it with my own eyes. This has given Iran and its Shia proxies enormous influence over Iraqi politics. Recent statements from Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, for example, promise a more inclusive government, endorsing more Sunni involvement in government ministries and Iraqi security forces. To accomplish this, however, al-Abadi must get the approval of the Shia political parties, which means he needs to get the approval of Iran. In effect, then, Iran now has veto power over Iraqi government policies

8 Jul, The US has only trained about 60 Syrian opposition fighters to battle the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), far below expectations, Defence Secretary Ash Carter has told Congress, citing rigorous vetting of recruits. The programme, which launched in May in Jordan and Turkey, was designed to train as many as 5,400 fighters a year and seen as a test of President Barack Obama's strategy of engaging local partners to combat ISIL fighters. Carter's acknowledgement on Tuesday of the low number of recruits will give ammunition to critics who say Obama's strategy is too limited to have any influence on Syria's conflict.

Uproar in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has relieved Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the  Al Qods Brigades chief and supreme commander of Iranian Middle East forces, of his Syria command after a series of war debacles. There is strong evidence that the high Iranian command in charge of the Syrian and Lebanese arenas are stuck.(C; so what is the intent? Expending the Shia Crescent spheres of influence, get a foothold, port on the Mediterranean Sea?

Have a strong Nuc negotiation position etc..)

See also my: Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2014 Part 4-1-Iraq-22 ; US strategy on Iraq 'not yet complete' – Obama, The US does not yet have a "complete strategy" for helping Iraq regain territory from Islamic State (IS), President Barack Obama has said. Many Iraqis say recent efforts by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to overhaul the officer corps aren’t enough to overcome deep-rooted leadership problems and plummeting troop morale, especially as Islamic State presses its advance in Iraq and forces are stretched thin across battlefields.

“It’s a common thing for us to see our commanders abandoning us,” said Sgt. Adwani. “As a soldier,”

Mr. Mohamad recalled, “seeing your commander run away is like being shot in the head.”

When Islamic State made its latest push into Ramadi, “the Americans overestimated the abilities and capabilities of the Iraqi army,” said Qasem al-Fahdawi

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“The best solution for the Iraqi army is to dissolve it and build it back from the ground up,” said Mr. Fahdawi, the minister.

Iraq’s army lost four out of 14 divisions when they abandoned the force during the Islamic State onslaught that began with the seizure of Mosul last year. A fifth unit of federal police also collapsed. The extremist group went on to capture about a third of Iraqi territory.

The irony here is that, for all the attempts Iran made to infiltrate Iraq — successfully in some cases — most Iraqi Shi’ites resented them or soon came to due to the Iranian leadership’s arrogance and its deaf ear to Iraqi nationalism.

Restoring the Iraqi army's pride and fighting spiritIraq's army can make a comeback with a well-chosen chief of staff and a focus on leadership, discipline and training. 08 Jul 2015 The urgent need to rebuild the Iraqi army received prominent coverage when the US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter recently briefed the House Armed Services Committee on US strategy in the war against the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Carter stressed that "ISIL's lasting defeat still requires local forces to fight and prevail on the ground." The US-led military training programme is up and running in Iraq. Already five new Iraqi army brigades and a special forces unit, the 11th Reconnaissance Battalion has recently graduated, and their training and field exercises was overseen by American, Spanish, Portuguese, Australian, New Zealander and Italian trainers. These under-strength brigades mostly have fewer than 1,500 troops each, a third of the optimal strength of an Iraqi brigade. Nevertheless the units serve as a cadre on which to build full-strength units, with the troops trained to instruct future recruits. Four more new Iraqi army brigades and two Peshmerga regional guard brigades are planned, and another seven Iraqi army brigades have been reconstituted from the salvaged remnants of the units destroyed in the summer of 2014.

Reforming military leadership Forming new units and rebuilding damaged units will not be enough to bring the Iraqi army back from the dead. Iraq must also fix its senior command appointments so that Baghdad regains the ability to centrally control the planning and execution of military operations. At present the Iraqi military is like an inverted pyramid with too many three-star generals commanding overlapping military regions and commands. Conflicting orders are often given regarding the movement of forces, creating gaps where outgoing forces have left before relieving forces arrived. This is how the collapses at Mosul and Ramadi began. The Iraqi military needs to rotate the pyramid of command so that a proactive chief of staff sits on top of a unified command structure and issues clear orders. In this context the June 30 announcement of the retirement of Iraqi army chief of staff General Babaker Zebari is a major opportunity. Maintained in the role as the Kurdish representative under an ethno-sectarian quota system, Zebari served with great dedication as the Iraqi army's senior general since 2003, but there have always been drawbacks in the arrangement.

A brave Peshmerga commander, Zebari did not rise through the ranks of the Iraqi military or attend staff college. He had no reputation with the commanders of the main combat arms of the Iraqi army, the infantry and armoured forces. Though there are moves to replace Zebari with another Kurdish general, Iraqi air force commander General Anwar Hamad Amin, it is arguably vital that the Iraqi army is led by one of its own officers if it is to stand a chance of regaining its pride and fighting spirit. As in the old days of the Iraqi army, the chief of staff should have a small high-powered circle of deputies: one for operations, logistics, training, administration and intelligence. Finally, the new chief of staff needs to be empowered by

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Iraq's prime minister, preferably by naming the general the deputy commander of the Iraqi army.

Discipline to end corruption Undisciplined organisation has made the Iraqi army weak and brittle. Corrupt officers take payments from soldiers who never turn up for duty, the so-called "ghost Jundi". Units are critically undermanned and the remaining overstrained soldiers become exhausted. The removal of a large portion of the current officer class is a difficult thing to achieve under the best of circumstances, let alone midway through a desperate war. The US-led coalition periodically managed major leadership turnovers in Iraqi units: in 2006-2007, 35 or the top 39 commanders of battalion-level and above were removed from the two federal police divisions.

No senior generals have yet been punished for the disasters at Mosul or Ramadi...

The same kind of massed rotation could be undertaken today if new units are sent to the front line, allowing degraded units with ineffective leadership to be taken out of the line for retraining and leadership reshuffles. A final kind of indiscipline is the failure of military commanders to lead their troops during battlefield crises. One factor in such disasters is the poor choice of command appointments. The acting commander of the Anbar Operations Centre when Ramadi fell in April 2015 was the same officer who abandoned his division in Kirkuk 10 months beforehand, creating a panic that led his division to collapse without even being attacked by ISIL. The government has failed to punish commanders for such failures. No senior generals have yet been punished for the disasters at Mosul or Ramadi, and the Iraqi government has issued blanket amnesties for junior officers who failed their troops. No one is seeking a return to the draconian punishments of Saddam Hussein's days, but there needs to be some visible sanction for officers who withdraw without orders and without just cause. One of the first actions of a new empowered Iraqi army chief of staff should be to re-enact the military code of justice.

Leadership, discipline and training Iraq's new brigades are undermanned because only 9,000 of 24,000 recruits have been mustered. The army suffers from corrupt administration and logistics, plus it is less glamorous than the al-Hashd al-Shaabi, the Popular Mobilisation Units. If Iraqi army recruitment is to rise it will take concerted effort by Iraqi political and religious leaders. Military reforms must be supported by fatwas from the Shia religious leadership to draw recruits into the regular military and to demobilise the Hashd al-Sha'abi into the army. Iraq has a proven track record of raising elite units by running competitive selection processes with high "wash-out" (failure) rates. This is how the revered Golden Division was formed. Tough training will again become possible if enough recruits are available. The Iraqi military can make a comeback if Iraq empowers a well-chosen chief of staff and then focuses on leadership, discipline and training. US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter misspoke when he said that Iraqis lack "the will to fight". A more accurate description was given by former US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker who said: "Iraqis have a strong military tradition. They've got good soldiers. They need good leadership […] The Iraqi military is not rotten to the core. It was rotten at the top." Michael Knights is the Lafer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

C: Still rumored but no confirmation seen as of 2 Aug, Khamenei sacks Qassem Soleimani from command of the Syrian war Single source so far, DEBKAfile Special Report June 24, 2015, Uproar in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has relieved Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the  Al Qods Brigades chief and supreme commander of

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Iranian Middle East forces, of his Syria command after a series of war debacles. He was left in charge of Iran’s military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon. This is revealed by DEBKAfile’s exclusive Iranian and intelligence sources. Since Soleimani last visited Damascus on June 2, in the aftershock of the historic town of Palmyra’s fall to the Islamic State, the situation of President Bashar Assad and his army has gone from bad to worse. The Iranian general’s bravado in stating then that “In the next few days the world will be pleasantly surprised from what we (the IRGC) working with Syrian military commanders are preparing,” turned out to be empty rhetoric. The thousands of Iranian troops needed to rescue the Assad regime from more routs never materialized. Since then, the Syrian forces have been driven out of more places. Hizballah is not only stymied in its attempts to dislodge Syrian rebel advances in the strategic Qalamoun Mountains, it has failed to prevent the war spilling over into Lebanon. There is strong evidence that the high Iranian command in charge of the Syrian and Lebanese arenas are stuck.These reverses have occurred, our military sources report, owing to Tehran’s failure to foresee five developments:1.  The launching of a combined effort by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE – among the wealthiest nations in the world – in support of rebel groups fighting Bashar Assad. Their massive injections of military assistance, weapons and financial resources have thrown Iran’s limitation into bold relief.2.  The ineptitude of the Shiite militias mustered by Soleimani in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight Iran’s wars in Syria and Iraq. None of those imported troops met the combat standards required in those arenas and become liabilities rather than assets.3.  Those shortcomings forced Tehran to admit that it had come up short of military manpower to deploy in four ongoing warfronts: Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq.  Soleimani took flak for the over-ambitious plans he authored which pulled Iran into military commitments that overtaxed its resources and did not take into account the messy political and military consequences which followed.  Above all, he miscalculated the numbers of fighting strength needed on the ground for winning battles in those wars.4. In the final reckoning, Iran funds has been drained of the strategic reserves that should have been set aside for the contingency of a potential  ISIS encroachment of its territory.

June 3, Success against ISIS requires a team of teams1 By Gen. Stanley McChrystal (ret.) Published June 03, 2015 Although tiny compared to the Mongol hordes, operating with apparent orchestrated synergy, ISIS is seemingly everywhere.  Deft battlefield advances interwoven with terrorist strikes create a frightening kinetic reality that flies and multiplies across 21st century connectivity to assault our senses and undermine our confidence.  Like savvy investors, ISIS uses speed and digital leverage to geometrically increase their perceived power. And in war, perception is reality. We—the U.S. government, international community, and forces on the ground—have all the tools and resources required to defeat ISIS and any of its future manifestations. What we don’t have is an organized, unified approach and structure to harness our collective will, resources, personnel, equipment, intelligence, policy, and diplomatic efforts to defeat them. Success demands connecting an ever-dispersed and intricate organization into a Team of Teams. In our fight against al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004, we found our elite team—with world-class technology, training, and intelligence—was losing to a comparatively ragtag group. We pulled all the traditional levers—more personnel, raids, and intelligence—to no avail. The ringing in our ears was too frequent, too disorienting. Faced with a 21st century threat, we faced the hard realization that being a great team was not enough.  We learned through painful trial and error the necessity

1 http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/06/03/success-against-isis-requires-team-teams.html

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of transforming into a system that mirrored the speed and interconnectedness of the distributed networks we were facing. We—the U.S. government, international community, and forces on the ground—have all the tools and resources required to defeat ISIS and any of its future manifestations.  What we don’t have is an organized, unified approach and structure to harness our collective will, resources, personnel, equipment, intelligence, policy, and diplomatic efforts to defeat them. Success demands connecting an ever-dispersed and intricate organization into a Team of Teams. This will require a fundamental shift in the way we organize ourselves; the traditional command and control structures of large organizations like the government, military, or corporations were developed to provide order and efficiency at scale. But this comes at cost of speed and decentralized decision-making.  Even in a hierarchical command of teams, decisions tend to be made at higher levels. A Team of Teams approach to create networked structures spreads valuable contextual information and empowers individuals closest to the problem to react in real time. At its core, it makes us adaptable.   In Iraq, we were driven to connect across boundaries in completely new ways, break silos to solve problems, and execute faster than we ever thought possible. This didn’t happen overnight; it took us the better part of five years to transform the way our organization operated. Defeating ISIS necessitates a new operating model, but also to recognize that ISIS isn’t a singular challenge, but rather the byproduct of a new order defined by complexity. It is essential to imbue our organizations with adaptability; the challenges will continue to mutate, and we need to adapt alongside. There can’t be a temporary taskforce or unit to defeat ISIS that is dismantled when the mission is complete. The new mission needs to foster a Team of Teams, otherwise we’ll find ourselves knocked to our knees time and again. Stanley McChrystal retired from the U.S. Army as a four-star general after more than thirty-four years of service.

Iran’s Nukes are Iraq’s Moment of TruthMichael Rubin | 06.28.2015 - Iranian influence in Iraq has grown greatly since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Shortly after I returned to Iraq in July 2003, I had driven with Iraqi friends down to see the marshes which Saddam Hussein had ordered drained in order to try to extinguish the Marsh Arabs’ thousands-year way of life. On our way back, we stopped at a roadside fruit and drink stand on the outskirts of Kut. Peeking out from behind a bunch of bananas was a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s revolutionary leader. A month later, I stopped unannounced at a tribal leader’s house in al-Amara. When I had scheduled a visit with him through local Coalition Provisional Authority officials a week before, he was obsequious to the Americans; when I came back unannounced, there in his reception room where he had served us tea a week before was a huge portrait of Khomeini. Then, of course, there was the time in Baghdad when I was visiting an Iraqi politician. It was getting late and so I took his offer to sleep on a couch in his living room rather than traverse Baghdad after curfew. On the other couch when I woke up? An Iranian official, who had even more reason to avoid getting caught by the American army breaking curfew. And then, there was the time when I was exploring Basra in December 2003. I stayed at a local hotel, and was wandering along the trash-strewn local canals which decades before had made Basra the “Venice of the Gulf.” Sharing the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) office was Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s chief terrorist proxy.The irony here is that, for all the attempts Iran made to infiltrate Iraq — successfully in some cases — most Iraqi Shi’ites resented them or soon came to due to the Iranian leadership’s arrogance and its deaf ear to Iraqi nationalism. The bulk of the Iraqi Army at the front lines during the Iran-Iraq War were Shi‘ite conscripts who fought honorably to defend Iraq; they neither defected to Iran out of sectarian loyalty nor were they in position to question the justice of a war which Saddam Hussein started. On January 6, Iraqi Shi‘ites

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alongside Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Sunnis commemorate Iraqi Army Day, celebrating the institution, not the previous regime that often abused it. Within hours after the war began, Iran violated an agreement struck between its UN ambassador (now Foreign Minister and chief negotiator) Mohammad Javad Zarif and American diplomats Ryan Crocker and Zalmay Khalilzad and inserted a number of proxies and its own men into Iraq. One of their missions was to seize personnel records in the Defense Ministry and then proceed to hunt down and kill any veteran pilot from the Iraq-Iran War on the assumption that they had bombed Iran. The Iranian Red Crescent participated in this assassination wave, providing yet one more reason why the Iranian government and its NGOs should not be taken at their word.Ever since President Barack Obama ordered a complete withdrawal from Iraq in order to fulfill a 2007 campaign pledge, Iranian influence has grown in Iraq. The reason for this has less to do with the hearts of Iraqis than their minds: Because they could no longer balance American and Iranian influence and demands in order to preserve their independent space, they needed to make greater accommodation to Tehran. It’s one thing to push back on over-the-top Iranian demands when several thousand American troops are garrisoned around the country. It is quite another to tell Qods Force leader Qassem Soleimani to shove his demands where the sun don’t shine when he has the wherewithal to kill anyone who stands in his way and every Iraqi regardless of sect or ethnicity knows that the United States really does not have their back. Hence, Iraq allowed some Iranian overflights to support and supply Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria (the same regime to which Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry now appear prepared to accommodate). And Iraqis also traveled to Syria to support the Assad regime against Jabhat al-Nusra and/or the Islamic State (again, which the United States now appears to be doing, having demanded that ‘moderate’ Syrians whom U.S. forces train not target Assad). More recently, Americans have criticized the role that Iranian-backed militias play in the Iraqi security forces. This concern is certainly warranted, although every time a politician, journalist, or think-tank analyst recommends arming Sunni tribes directly, they simply drive the Iraqi public away from moderates like Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who has been solicitous of American interests and concerns, and into the hands of harder-line pro-Iranian politicians.

So what can Iraq do to signal that it is not simply an Iranian proxy like so many of its critics say? Taking a public stance against the Iranian nuclear program would be a good first step. Under no circumstances, can the Iranian nuclear program be an Iraqi interest. Forget the Washington talking points: Everyone in the Persian Gulf, Arabs and Persians alike, know that the deal currently being finalized secures a path to an Iranian nuclear breakout. They also have a far more realistic assessment of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) than the Obama administration. Not only is it unlikely that the IRGC will abide by any agreement, but it is also likely that if Iran does acquire a nuclear capability, it will find itself so overconfident behind its own nuclear deterrence that it will further erode Iraqi sovereignty.Iran may not like Iraq siding, in this instance, with almost every member of the Gulf Cooperation Council but Oman (which feigns neutrality), but certainly it must expect that any Iraqi government — even one which reflects the Shi‘ite majority of Iraq — will stand up for Iraqi national interests and oppose Iran’s nuclear ambitions with the same cautionary statements heard from Saudi, Emirati, and Kuwaiti diplomats and officials.

Ascendant Kurds emerge from Syrian civil war as major power player Early in Syria’s civil war, before the emergence of the Islamic State, the battle lines seemed clear. A local opposition was challenging an entrenched regime for the keys to Damascus. It soon became obvious, however, that neither side could win by themselves, and both dragged in allies whose ensuing battle for a broader supremacy has torn the country apart.

Cees: Intel to Rent Page 10 of 13 15/04/2023

By Capt (Ret) C de Waart, feel free to share: in Confidence

The ramifications have been profound. At stake now, more than four years into the war, is far more than who gets to control Syria. The war is unlocking a regional order established almost a century ago. And two prominent forces, neither of them state actors, have emerged as power players. On one side are the Kurds, an ethnic group which missed out on a homeland when the Ottoman Empire was divided up at the end of the first world war. On the other is Isis, a marauding force of global jihadists, who have claimed a homeland from the ruins of the once feared police states of Iraq and Syria. Isis’s rampage across both countries has exposed the fragility of totalitarian rulers and their subservience to the region’s titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia.Other stakeholders, such as Turkey and the US – notional partners who had until now preferred to push their agendas via proxies – have been drawn in ever deeper, but for different and often contradictory reasons.The result has been a bewildering array of shifting alliances and priorities, none of which have helped ensure that the post-Ottoman states of Iraq, Syria, and even Lebanon, remain viable.For Ankara, the main foe has been the Kurds, who have fought an insurrection across Turkey’s south-east for the past 40 years. For the US and its allies in Riyadh and the Gulf, Isis is the enemy, whereas the Kurds have been their main ally - the only viable ground force in northern Syria and northern Iraq, where the battle against Isis rages.Turkey’s decision to directly join the fray was made against the backdrop of a suicide bombing last week which killed 32 people – many of the Kurds – in its southern city of Suruc, and was blamed on Isis. But another – and perhaps more compelling – reason, was an attack by the Kurdish militia, the PKK several days later, which killed two Turkish policemen. PKK officials have blamed Turkey for staging the Suruc attack and claimed the killing was their retaliation.Ankara has since insisted that the PKK represents a greater threat to its sovereignty than Isis even as it reversed policy and allowed the US to start using its Incirlik air base for air strikes against Isis inside Syria. It had resisted such a move for the past three years insisting first on a safe haven being established inside northern Syria, which would ostensibly protect Syrian civilians who have fled the chaos, as well as opposition fighters. The US, fearing it would be drawn into an attritional campaign that added to its existing load in Iraq, had refused.Now though, with some kind of safe haven seemingly on the table, it is the Kurds, not Isis, who control much of the north. The YPG-Syrian Kurds allied to the PKK in Turkey have influence from just north-east of Aleppo to the Iraqi border. They also control Irfin in north-western Syria. Isis controls the area between the Kurds – and it is here that the Turks want to enforce a safe haven, one effect of which would be to deny the Kurds in the north-east to link up with the north-west.

Proposed safe zone Source: ISW, NYT, Washington Post “The Turks’ move last week is not about Isis,” said one senior Kurdish official in Irbil. “It’s about us.” As Syria has crumbled, Syria’s Kurds have quietly built an arc of influence that Turkey believes advances the broader Kurdish project of an eventual sovereign state carved from north-eastern Syria, south-eastern Turkey, parts of western Iran and what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. This has raised an unprecedented alarm in Ankara, which wants nothing less than an emboldened and spreading Kurdish enclave just across its border, which could link up with the semi-autonomous Kurdish north of Iraq. Turkey’s fear over the Kurds has led it to ignore its anger at what it sees as US prevarication in moving against Bashar al-Assad. It has done little to convince Washington, however, that it is serious about tackling Isis.Turkey’s approach to the group had until recently been to contain rather than confront. And,

Cees: Intel to Rent Page 11 of 13 15/04/2023

By Capt (Ret) C de Waart, feel free to share: in Confidence

since the jihadist group gathered momentum, the US has been pressuring Turkey to seal its borders and to stop interactions with Isis officials, such as buying smuggled oil, which keep the terror organisation’s economy rumbling. Throughout the past four years, all stakeholders in the Syrian war, then the war against Isis in Iraq and Syria, have been trying to avoid one outcome – a breakdown of unitary borders that had bound together the centre of the region for much of the past century.A de facto partition already exists in Iraq, where the Kurds of the north and the Sunnis of Anbar are drifting ever further from central government control. Now, with Syria’s Kurds ascendant, hopes that the country as it is now may again be controlled from Damascus are also falling. All those involved are framing suggested responses to the chaos through their own interests, which rarely align even with allies and don’t amount to a strategy to stop the crumbling order. Isis, meanwhile, continues to build the semblance of a state from the chaos it has been largely responsible for causing. Even without being officially redrawn, the Middle East map is now very different.

The key to understanding conflicts in the Middle East Regional conflicts more about Shia-Sunni power struggle than about the U.S. or Israel The blowback from those comments was fast and sharp. Speaking from Ethiopia, Obama called Huckabee’s position “ridiculous if it weren’t so sad.” Hillary Clinton denounced the Holocaust comparison, calling his statements “over the line” and asking “every person of good faith and concern about the necessity to keep our political dialogue on the facts and within suitable boundaries.” Even fellow Republican Jeb Bush came out in opposition, calling his language “just wrong. This is not the way we’re going to win elections.”But Huckabee’s comments and most debate about the Iran nuclear deal and U.S. foreign policy fails to uncover a flawed understanding of the Middle East. Most of the U.S. narrative boils down to “us versus them” — “us” being the United States and Israel and the West in general and “them” being a vaguely defined brand of Islamic radicalism determined to destroy Israel and Western values of democracy and freedom.“You really don’t have a secular definition of citizenship but rather people identify as sectarian communities, and power is divided accordingly,” says , a former senior foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration.

Vali Nasr Dean, Johns Hopkins Univ. International Studies From Washington, it looks like a moderates-versus-extremists or stability-versus-terrorism issue, but closer inspection reveals a complex picture of a Middle East divided along sectarian lines. This is where the negative reaction to the Iran deal and the general narrative about the region separates from the situation on the ground. Much of the conflict raging in the region involves an internal battle in Islam, pitting Sunnis against Shias. “You really don’t have a secular definition of citizenship but rather people identify as sectarian communities, and power is divided accordingly,” says Vali Nasr, a former senior foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration.Iraq offers an example of how this plays out and why it’s important to understand the motives behind groups rising up against each other. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, the belief was that Iraqis were united in their desire for democracy. However, democracy in Iraq was not advantageous to the Sunnis, in power under Saddam Hussein despite their fewer numbers. Democracy meant they would lose power to the majority Shias. So Iraq ended up in a sectarian civil war instead of the pursuit of democracy.U.S. policy in the region is operating in the context of conflict between the two major sects in the region — Shia and Sunni — for control and influence.

Cees: Intel to Rent Page 12 of 13 15/04/2023

By Capt (Ret) C de Waart, feel free to share: in Confidence

If the U.S. wants to achieve its strategic goals in the region, it must understand why the conflicts are happening, even if they aren’t about the West, to better draft a policy response, advises Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he has written extensively about the Sunni-Shia divide.He offers the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq (ISIL) and the Levant as

an example, with U.S. and Iran joining forces because ISIL is a strongly anti-Shia, anti-Iran group that emerged as a powerful force in the Sunni-dominated regions of Syria and Iraq and threatened both U.S. and Iranian interests. He said that if Washington doesn’t understand what drives ISIL, the U.S. cannot effectively defeat the group.While the theological divide between Shias and Sunnis has existed for more than a millennium, today’s fight is all about politics — who is the top dog, who gets the power, who gets the oil revenue.

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