Iraq's Paranoia

"While flying in support of Operation Impact, a CC-130 Hercules was denied onward movement to Erbil, Iraq, by authorities at Baghdad International Airport, due to an issue with customs documentation with respect to its cargo."
"No equipment or cargo was confiscated by Iraqi authorities."
Evan Koronewski, spokesman, Department of National Defense

"The inspection committee in Baghdad International Airport has found a huge number of rifles equipped with silencers, as well as light and mid-sized weapons."
"The U.S. ambassador to Baghdad has tried to send the weapons to the Iraqi Kurdistan region, and the government should investigate this and arrest the perpetrators."
Hakem al-Zameli, head, Iraqi Parliament Security and Defence Commission 

File shot of a CC 130 J - Hercules. Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal

With the removal of Saddam Hussein by U.S.-led forces, the minority Sunnis no longer held power in Iraq, unleashing a storm of reprisals back and forth with Shiite militias surging through Sunni neighbourhoods at night to slaughter the residents, and Sunni militias taking their turn at mass murder in Shiite neighbourhoods. The tyrant's brutal repressive hand removed under an occupying force meaning to usher in an era of national cooperation, only the Kurds in their corner of Iraq remained civil and capable of administering their area capably and without violence.

Hopes for eventual sovereignty going beyond the autonomy they enjoyed in Kurdistan buoyed the hopes of the Kurds, who remain the largest ethnic group anywhere denied the recognition of a homeland of their own, in their ancient heritage in the geography encompassing portions of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran where arbitrary colonial-era borders separated them and gave possession to others, denying the Kurds their own country.

Iraq is now effectively divided and likely for good, into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish portions. The last few years, however, has seen a full third of the country conquered and occupied by a Sunni terrorist group that has wreaked havoc there and in Syria. The Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq has been resisting and fighting the Islamic State jihadis with a greater degree of success than the Iraqi military, even with the considerable fighting strength that Hezbollah and Iranian-organized Shiite militias have afforded it.

Both the Iraqi military and the Peshmerga have gained back some ground with the assistance of the U.S.-led airstrike coalition, of which Canada is a part. But paranoia finds its home in the Middle East where sectarian-led violence is never far from erupting with catastrophic results in wasted human lives. Conspiracy theories figure large in the Middle East with Iraqi lawmakers and military commanders believing the U.S. and its allies arm Islamic State for their own nefarious purposes.

So Iraqi officials seized a Canadian Forces Hercules transport aircraft for four days, that was carrying supplies into Kurdistan. The Iraqi regime which continually calls upon the United States to help maintain it in power, insists on authorizing such ventures. They live in fear of the Kurds asserting themselves as a sovereign nation, even while the regime itself cannot maintain sovereignty over huge areas of the country taken by ISIL.

A Swedish aircraft had also been seized, and it was ferrying 92 guns, including silencers; sent back to its Turkish base. The Canadian plane held eight weapons equipped with silencers at a time when Iraq's government insists it must strictly control types and amounts of weapons moved to Kurdish forces. The Kurdish forces, in other words, are expected to accomplish what the Iraqi military can not, and with inferior weaponry.

And this sums up the rewards to be had in the West acceding to the plaintively beseeching Middle East which is incapable of protecting itself from the malevolence of the terrorists their shared religion breeds through tribal and sectarian hatreds, but which never tires of asking other nations to continue to make sacrifices on their behalf. If the threats could be kept localized, shrugging responses would suffice, but the ferocity of violent Islamism has a penchant to prowl internationally.