MESOP MOSUL : Top of the Agenda – international voices sampler

Iraqi Militants Press Beyond Mosul

Sunni insurgents who captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, extended their control southward on Wednesday to an area that includes the country’s largest oil refinery at Baiji. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari called the offensive by ISIS, a breakaway al-Qaeda group, a “mortal threat,” and said Iraqi security forces would work with Kurdish Peshmerga forces (Reuters) to wrest back control. The Iraqi army’s retreat from Mosul left insurgents with a windfall of arms, munitions, and equipment supplied by the United States, while highlighting the toll of endemic desertion: Prior to the Mosul assault, the army was losing some three hundred soldiers a day (NYT). Half a million residents of Mosul have been displaced or fled from their homes, the International Organization for Migration said Wednesday (AFP).

Analysis

“While other Syrian rebel groups were focused primarily on fighting forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, ISIS invested as much energy in establishing the ‘state’ referenced by its name. It quickly asserted control over the province of Raqqah and late last year declared the city of Raqqah the capital of its state. Moderate rebel groups complain that ISIS’s rise has been aided by the relative disinterest shown by Syrian government forces in the areas under the group’s control, which are rarely subjected to airstrikes and bombardment. That has helped the group set up its own version of a government. It runs courts, schools and services, flying its ubiquitous black-and-white flag over every facility it controls. In Raqqah, it recently launched a consumer protection authority to uphold food standards,” writes Liz Sly in the Washington Post.

“The Shi’a-Sunni sectarian divide has become the reflexive shorthand for explaining events in the Middle East. Commentary surrounding Iraq’s recent national election is representative. Even as experienced a reporter as the New Yorker‘s Dexter Filkins concluded that Iraq’s internal slaughter continues because Sunni and Shi’a ‘[have] never really learned how to live with each other.’ Yet, this narrative of Middle Eastern politics distorts the reality that state collapse produces sectarianism—not the other way around,” writes James Fromson in the National Interest.

“Washington should provide the military support that Mr. Maliki desires—drone strikes, weapons, reconnaissance assets, targeting assistance, improved and expanded training for his forces, even manned airstrikes. But only if he and Iraq’s leading politicians agree to settle the deep sectarian conflicts that have brought the country to its present plight. Iraq’s growing crisis is not due to the civil war in Syria or the infiltration of terrorist fighters from abroad. It is rather the fear that Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites have of each other. Each community feels that the others seek to oppress, if not massacre, it and will do so if given half a chance. They also fear a central government with unrestrained power, controlled by one of those communities—in other words, what the Maliki government has become,” writes Keneth M. Pollack in the Wall Street Journal.