Supplying the Syrian rebels with arms won't work

It's large on paper, but hugely ineffective, as the debacle at Mosul showed. It is conducting some successful combat operations in conjunction with the Iraqi Kurds in the northeast between Baghdad and Kirkuk. (The success might be mostly due to the Kurds.) Several towns have been retaken from ISIS control. Most Iraqi forces seem to be guarding Baghdad and not doing a very good job as ISIS has advanced to the city's western outskirts threatening the main airport. That alarmed the United States so much that it's moved Apache attack helicopters there. (The pilots and ground crews apparently wear flip-flops, since there aren't supposed to be any boots on the ground.) The Iraqis wouldn't be relevant to relieving Kobane, since that town is in Syria hundreds of miles away.

Their Revolutionary Guards Corps has more than a thousand ground troops in Iraq, mostly guarding Shi'ite holy places and advising the Iraqi military. And unlike the Americans, the Iranian advisors actually accompany Iraqis on missions and are there alongside them under fire. My belief is that Iranian Revolutionary Guard aircraft are flying in Iraq with hastily-applied Iraqi markings and that many ostensibly Iraqi airstrikes are actually being flown by Iranian pilots. But again. this isn't really applicable to Kobane.

 

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All very good questions, our friends here have singled out Turkey as a convenient scape goat for all the problems in the region. If finger pointing is your game, it's a target rich environment. No one in the region is without blame. Every entity in the region has ulterior motives, even the sainted Kurds. There are factional issues even within the Kurdish forces.

Ganging up on Turkey for not blindly marching into a war after authorizing war is just stupid. It's the same kind of reasoning the American Republican Party used against the Obama administration after the attacks on an American diplomatic mission which resulted in the killing of Americans including the ambassador.

In order to effectively move the Turkish army across the border and into combat, as I have said many times before in this thread, one needs a plan - an order of battle. That doesn't exist. While Turkey is a NATO member and can work well with NATO forces, Kurdish forces, the forces in Kobani, the forces Turkey will be fighting with in Kobani, have no such experiences and abilities. Turkish forces need to be able to communicate and work together on the battle field with the Turks in order to minimize friendly fire deaths and maximize their fighting effectiveness. A few days isn't enough time. Hell the US cannot effectively use its preeminent air power effectively in Kobani because it lacks intelligence. An errant bomb could accidentally destroy thousands of Kurds, so they don't drop bombs and as a result some ISIS members get to live and kill again.

 

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True - and in the case of Kobani, the fucking Turks are sitting doing nothing, probably because Erdogan intends to establish formal relations with ISIS.

Poor Turkey, being pilloried for not doing the right thing.

The OOB in this case consists of about one regiment, and is not a plan, but a description of the organisation and composition of a force. Any commander at all knows his OOB. Period. I thought you had some kind of voluminous knowledge about military organisation and movement?

As far as the town of Kobani goes, securing the perimeter requires precious little planning and the simplest of possible deployments: here, make a perimeter around this place. If the Turkish Army is so incompetent as to be unable to do even that (despite apparently being able to "work well with NATO forces") then I suppose they do have a great deal to fear from ISIS, which perhaps is why they're moving towards formal recognition. Which, facetiousness aside, is probably intimately connected to their failure to act.

 

The kurds want their own land.

 

Iraq should be there helping if the Turks don't want to help.

 

Iraq should be fighting ISIS in order to recover its territory regardless of what the Turks do or do not do. Turkey's involvement is complicated by regional politics. Kurds and the Turks have traditionally been at odds with each other and only recently have relations improved somewhat. Turkey no longer opposes an independent Kurdish state.

Iran doesn't want Turkish intervention in Syria as Iran supports the Assad regime and Turkey doesn't. The region is really pretty ugly...a lot of problems and not many solutions. At some point, the Iraqis need to stand up for themselves and defend their country.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/10/09/381628/iran-warns-turkey-over-syria-intervention/

 

The problem is that even if the Iraqi military was combat-effective, it's concentrated in the vicinity of Baghdad, at the southeast corner of ISIS controlled territory. Kobane is in Syria, near the northwest corner of ISIS territory. So if Iraqi ground troops were going to relieve Kobane, they would have to fight their way for hundreds of miles through the entire length of the 'Islamic State' first.

 

I have to agree, the Iraqi army is basically done. I thought it would be kind of a fiasco in Afghanistan, but I seem to recall being a little more hopeful for Iraq. I didn't think they could possibly fold so fast.

 

Well that is a bit of revisionism. You were arguing not long ago that Afghanistan wouldn't fall apart if US forces withdrew.

 

I'm not sure if the Iraqi army is totally hopeless.

According to reports I've read , former PM Maliki and his Shi'ite clique packed the upper levels of the army officer corps with cronies and political allies, apparently hoping to ensure the army's loyalty to him. When Mosul came under attack by a relatively small ISIS force that was probably only intended as a raiding party, the first people to flee were the garrison's top commanders. When enlisted men and junior officers stopped getting realistic orders and heard instead that their superiors had already run away, the whole thing quickly fell apart. Everone started ripping off their uniforms and trying to get out of town.

Give the Iraqi enlisted men better and more professional officers, and they will probably perform better.

And there's something else.

In a way, what remains of the Iraqi army is really the Iraqi Shi'ite army. And the territory that's still under Baghdad's control is pretty much the Shi'ite populated parts of the country. So the army is going to be defending its own turf, so to speak, and will be getting lots more support from the local residents. A lot of that support will come from Iranian-backed irregular Shi'ite Islamist militias, so it's probably Tehran that's going to pick up the pieces in southern Iraq. But having said that, radical Sunni Islamist ISIS might have a lot more difficulty expanding there.

Finally, there's ISIS' short-sighted savagery, its refusal to take prisoners. That makes it less likely that anyone will consider surrendering to them, since that basically means death, and more likely that ISIS' opponents will resist as long as they can.

 

No but Iraqi forces aren't doing much by sitting around Baghdad saying they need to protect it.

 

Actually, exactly the reverse: I argued that Afghanistan was going to go into the tank very shortly after the US left.

Give your head a shake before making claims next time.

/sigh

 

LOL, Unfortunately for you there is a written record.

 

I agree. I think the whole thing is just going to end up semi-tribal, with clans controlling their own areas.

 

So why don't you back up your words instead of making crap up?

Good luck with that.

 

Hey joe, how's that search going in the written record? Were you able to find a way to spin my position in the opposite direction? I'd like to see you swing that one. Bonne chance, mon ami.

Edit: Here, let me help you with that. Here's the thread you were looking for, found, and are now pretending you didn't find.

Next time, don't push your luck. Mmkay, joe?

 

LOL, now where in there does it say anything about the Afghan government collapsing after a US withdrawal?

You and I had some long conversations on the issue. When I get some time I'll look them up for you.

You should take your own advice.