MESOP Top of the Agenda : SINJAR / ANALYSIS by New York Times & Financial Times

Iraqi Kurdish retook Mount Sinjar (Al Jazeera) from ISIS on Thursday after eight thousand peshmerga fighters launched a ground offense backed by U.S.-led coalition air strikes, Kurdish leaders reported. The move frees hundreds (NYT) of Yazidis, a religious minority, who had been stranded on the mountain since ISIS took it in August, according to Kurdish leaders. Thursday’s gains mark the biggest victory against ISIS to date, and Kurdish leader Masrour Barzani said roughly one hundred ISIS fighters had been killed.   Analysis :

“The Kurdish command knows that a lot remains to be done, and that the going will be tough. The ring of steel around the mountain may have been breached, but much of it is still there. Sinjar the town, further south, is on a vulnerable area of terrain along the Syrian border. That will be the next target. But the militants remain entrenched in Mosul and Tal Afar to the east and Syria to the west, exposing the Kurds’ flanks,” writes the BBC’s Jim Muir.

“Trust may be the region’s scarcest commodity. The Arab leaders, for example, still think the Islamic State can be contained, but they aren’t persuaded that the same could be said of Iran if it came in from the cold. So even if the Islamic State is squelched, the Arab world and Iran are likely to remain deeply divided over the distribution of power in the region, and prone to seeking proxies who would threaten peace,” writes Vali Nasr in the New York Times.

“Isis is the latest fad among Islamic militants. Its commitment to jihadi Islam, its brutal methods and the prospect of building a new kind of state are exciting to some and have fuelled its popularity. Its current status is comparable to that of al-Qaeda after the attacks of September 11 2001, when copy cat jihadis and militant groups everywhere clamoured to demonstrate a special relationship with the newly notorious terrorist group,” writes Ahmed Rashid in the Financial Times.