Quicksilver War by Harris William;

Author:Harris, William;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Map 4: The Kurds in Syria and Iraq, 2014–2017

A brief crisis of survival ensued for the KRG in early August 2014, when ISIS attacked the Yazidi town of Sinjar, seized the Mosul dam, and pushed towards Irbil. The Peshmerga, untested in battle for a decade and sporting obsolete equipment from the 1980s and earlier, fell back precipitously. With ISIS threatening Irbil with American arms and massacring defenceless Yazidis, the USA had no choice but to intervene with its air power, something it had avoided as long as the crisis was restricted to Syria. US aerial bombing enabled the Peshmerga to stabilize the Irbil front beyond the KRG border and to recover the Mosul dam, while US and Iraqi helicopters and Peshmerga, PKK, and YPG ground forces facilitated evacuation of about 50,000 Yazidis from the Sinjar hills.6

Thereafter, covered by a US-led coalition in the air, the KRG Peshmerga could consolidate its long front across northern Iraq and make offensive moves in the Kirkuk, Irbil, and Sinjar sectors. In late 2014, the Peshmerga numbered at least 100,000 soldiers.7 At this stage they emerged as more capable than the Iraqi army and more congenial partners to the international coalition against ISIS than the Iranian-manipulated Shi’a Arab PMF, which were almost all Baghdad could immediately field. With the Iraqi government depending on the Shi’a militias simply to hold ISIS short of Baghdad into 2015 and losing al-Anbar provincial capital Ramadi to ISIS in May 2015, the Peshmerga stood out for the time being as lead ground force against ISIS in Iraq.

Equipment, training, and organizational deficiencies, however, continued to handicap the KRG forces. Western countries and the Turks helped to a limited degree with equipment and training, although the former seemed to feel that calling in air strikes compensated for ground-force vulnerabilities such as limited firepower and night-vision problems. As for organization, chains of command were complicated and cross-cutting. The main body of Peshmerga answered to both the KRG Ministry of Peshmerga and to one or other of the two main political parties: the KDP and the PUK. The parties retained their influence with the units that had been their respective paramilitaries through the half-century of Kurdish armed struggles in Iraq since the 1960s. Otherwise, the elite gendarmerie force known as the Zerevani Peshmerga came under the KRG Interior Ministry. Party connections undermined military cohesion and still carried the potential for disruption.

Regardless of such problems, the ISIS incorporation of central Iraq into its ‘caliphate’ temporarily humbled a demoralized Iraqi government in its relations with the KRG. Prime Minister Maliki, whose Shi’a favouritism alienated Iraqi Sunni Arabs and gave ISIS a popular base up to the western outskirts of the capital, resigned in September 2014. The new prime minister, Haydar al-Abadi, found himself boxed in by Iranian-aligned warlords, corrupt bureaucratic fiefdoms, and the populist movement of Muqtada al-Sadr. Meantime, after Kurdish expulsion of ISIS from Sinjar in November 2015, the KRG front against ISIS encompassed a large part of northern Iraq beyond KRG boundaries. These lands

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.