Battling Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham

"Coalition partners carried out four airstrikes on Fallujah on Sunday. They struck a large ISIL unit and destroyed five bulldozers and one truck which were being used for the construction of berms and other obstacles."
U.S. Central Command, Doha, Qatar

Aviators of Marine Attack Squadron 23—the "Ace of Spades"—based out of Cherry Point, North Carolina maneuver their AV-8B Harriers for an aerial refueling mission high above Iraq's Al Anbar Province. (Ed Darack)

What irony, the very oil-rich nation that has lavishly funded the Islamist jihad movement out of which the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham morphed, has generously permitted the United States to use its territory as a base from which to launch air strikes against ISIS. The very nation that funds and directs Al-Jazeera to report on and just incidentally steer public opinion on activities within the Middle East with their Sunni emphasis is a partner with the U.S. against fundamentalist Islam.

Qatar famously along with Turkey a sister-Sunni state with a cozily admiring relationship toward the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and even the Shiite Hezbollah, because its mandate too is the final destruction of the State of Israel, is aiding the U.S. by providing its geography in the efforts to wipe out the advance of ISIS in Syria and Iraq; both, incidentally, Shiite-governed countries.

But are Turkey and Qatar providing much in the way of actual military advantages to the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State? Well, not so much, since both have supported and supplied the militias of the Islamic State, a matter that is somehow overlooked in the general confusion of the ongoing melee. Where CENTCOM gravely announces that it has managed to strike out bulldozers and a truck.

Quite an achievement in stalling the advance of an unstoppable menace of murdering psychopaths whose atrocity-filled curriculum vitae has horrified and terrorized all those in the path of their advance. From mass slaughters to the rounding up of women and girls for auctioning off to the ISIS warriors for whom Islam has always guaranteed such choice results of raids against unbelievers whose lives are forfeit in any event, as insults to Islam.

Coalition warplanes exult that they have bombed in and around Baghdad, Ramadi, Hit, Irbil, Kirkuk and Mosul, along with a dam at Haditha ans Sinjar mountain, all representing cities and towns fallen to ISIS's advance. In the past few months 783 coalition airstrikes have been engaged. "We do not focus on a geographic area but where we need to be. Wherever ISIL is gravitating and we can find targets, we will engage them", explained a CENTCOM spokesman.

ISIS/ISIL is known to be in possession of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS), leaving the coalition warplanes to the caution of flight above 6,000 metres, where the weapons, capable of shooting down helicopters and low-flying attack aircraft, cannot reach. That they are in possession of such advanced munitions is explained of course by the fact that U.S.-supplied arms fell into their hands when Iraqi and Syrian military abandoned them in their zeal to flee.

Fallujah is now seen as critical as the first major city taken by ISIS. If they were now to lose it, this would represent a critical embarrassment. They are now edging closer to the capture of the prison town of Abu Ghraib, and from there, attacking Baghdad, the caliphate's prize. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda-inspired jihadis were mobilized into action when the first battle for Fallujah took place a decade ago with 600 left dead, and the target for revenge became American military personnel.

When the current American administration saw fit to leave Iraq in the hands of a Shiite president who assured them that he was prepared to share government with the Iraqi Sunnis and Kurds, then accused the Sunni Vice-President of Iraq, Tariq Al-Hashimi in 2011 of terrorism and the courts sentenced him to death by hanging in absentia, Nouri al Maliki also dismissed his Sunni military commanders, sidelining Iraq's Sunnis and setting the stage for the backlash that followed.

With a new, supposedly conciliatory president replacing al Maliki, should the U.S. coalition succeed in preventing ISIS from capturing Baghdad and committing Iraq to its humanism-strangling ideology, what will have been solved if and when on the departure once again of the U.S.-led protective military coalition Iraq's government, aided and abetted by Iran, once again oppresses the resentful Iraqi Sunnis?

Western democracies, responding to the gruesome atrocities that seem never-ending in the Middle East, committed by non-governmental militias of fanatical Islamists and government militaries alike, seek to prevent bloodshed and aid the sects to see reason and abandon the raw passion of vengeance, ending up being involved in a historical pathology of hatred. 

One that can only be solved by the very groups that have no intention of doing so, preferring to slaughter one another.