Iraq’s fractured army has begun to regroup and stage modest, localized attacks on the Islamic State militants who routed them last spring and summer, but they are unlikely to be ready to launch a major counteroffensive for many months, senior U.S. military officials say.
“We’ve seen them start to act like an army,” one official said Thursday in a lengthy exchange with a group of Washington reporters who were invited to U.S. Central Command headquarters for the command’s most extensive briefings on operations in Iraq and Syria.
The Iraqi security forces, trained for years by the U.S. prior to its departure from Iraq in 2011, have suffered sectarian divisions, a breakdown in leadership and a loss of confidence. To compound the problem, they surrendered tanks, armored personnel carriers and other U.S.-supplied equipment several months ago when IS fighters overtook Mosul.
Are they talking about an broad-based Army of Iraq or Shiite volunteers in uniform?
[blockquote]The Iraqi government is blamed by U.S. officials for having sown the sectarian seeds of this year’s collapse in much of northern and western Iraq. Yet Baghdad is the key to President Barack Obama’s approach to rolling back IS gains in Iraq.[/blockquote]
If Baghdad really is “the key to President Barack Obama’s approach to rolling back IS gains in Iraq”, he has a strange way of showing it.
President Obama’s desertion of IRAQ’s government and his demand that IRAQ depose their elected leader at a critical time when their country was sustaining a ferocious surprise attack, (when they and family members were being beheaded. raped and etc.) by the Sunni Islamist State of ISIS, hardly gives the impression that he gives a damn about Baghdad, IRAQ or the majority of Shiites who live there, or the Christians and other minorities who are persecuted because they will not convert to ISIS Sunni version of the Muslim religion.
I hope and pray that the people of IRAQ will rebound from this and find the courage and support to defeat ISIS without the help of “no boots on the ground” Obama.