88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Israel supports the creation of a Kurdish state. How does that make you feel?
Hell up in Syria and Iraq
- Thread starter 88m3
- Start date
Israel supports the creation of a Kurdish state. How does that make you feel?
Techniec
Drugs and Kalashnikovs
Kurds will do whats in their best interest
I support the right of self determination and freedom from occupation
Kurds will do whats in their best interest
I support the right of self determination and freedom from occupation
Word. We know Israel is only doing it for 2 things. Access to oil and access to Iran.
ISIS Is Hiring Judges, Doctors And Engineers As Al-Qaeda Prepares For War Against Caliphate
As we reported earlier, in what was perhaps the first official action by the jihadists with the glossy year end brochures, the newly crated ISIS Caliphate which stretches from Syria to Iraq (and which is not longer ISIS, just IS, or Islamic State) made a global call urging the Muslim proletariat to immigrate to the newly created territory in a clear example of what in the US would be called "porous" immigration policy. Judging the by the expansive proposed borders, the terrorist organization, which in the past has received occasional training and support by the US and with a penchant for cannibalism will have a while to wait before its removes all the slack from its incipient economy, more or less like the Fed.
But perhaps more curious is that the leader of the self-proclaimed al-Qaeda spin off nation, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in addition to a broad religious call to arms, so to speak, also beckoned workers with a specific skillset to present themselves for duty: namely those with military, medical and managerial skills were urged to flock to the newly-declared state in an audio recording released Tuesday.
As Al Arabiya reports, the newly named “caliph” said the appeal especially applied to “judges and those who have military and managerial and service skills, and doctors and engineers in all fields.”
It goes without saying that IS is also in need to fighters (not to mention suicide bombers, although compensation arrangements there could be problematic): Baghdadi also addressed the group’s fighters, saying that “your brothers in all the world are waiting” to be rescued by them.
“Terrify the enemies of Allah and seek death in the places where you expect to find it,” he said. “Your brothers, on every piece of this earth, are waiting for you to rescue them.”
“By Allah, we will take revenge, by Allah we will take revenge, even if after a while,” Baghdadi said. “Fighters should “embrace the chance and champion Allah’s religion through jihad,” he added.
Undated file picture claims to show Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Furthermore, since the caliphate is now wealthier than its ideological competitor Al Qaeda ever was, it just may be the case that Europe (and/or the US) may suddenly experience a major skilled worker brain drain as the best doctors, managers and engineers rush to get paid by terrorists, with the occasional virgin thrown in as a Christmas bonus.
Perhaps ironically, the biggest question now is not whether or not IS(IS) will continue its jihad against Baghdad and seek to branch out by, say, crossing the Atlantic - that much is guaranteed - but what happens with the abovementioned Al Qaeda itself, which will hardly stand idly by and watch as it is upstaged by its formerly smaller, and (formerly) far more irrelevant spin off.
According to AFP, the declaration of an Islamic caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria is a direct challenge to Al-Qaeda and could set off a dangerous contest for the leadership of the global jihadist movement, experts say.
Paradoxically, it would be the west that suffers the most:
Desperate to retain its preeminent role, the movement behind September 11 may be driven to carry out fresh attacks on Western targets to prove it remains relevant.
"This competition between jihadists could be very dangerous," said Shashank Joshi of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, warning that Al-Qaeda may look to make a "spectacular" show of force.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) announced on Sunday it was establishing a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria where it has seized control. A form of government last seen under the Ottoman Empire, a caliphate has been a long-held dream of radical jihadists who want to impose their version of Islamic sharia law.
Renaming itself simply the Islamic State (IS), the group also daringly declared its chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as caliph and "leader for Muslims everywhere".
Here is where it gets interesting: Al-Qaeda can hardly ignore what is essentially a declaration of war from an upstart that has scored a string of successes, said Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on radical Islamic movements at the Swedish National Defence College.
"The competition has already started," he said. "Al-Baghdadi already refused to pledge allegiance to (Al-Qaeda leader Ayman) al-Zawahiri and now he can say: 'Look what we have accomplished... You are just somewhere, we don't know where, talking on the Internet.'"
For a new, younger generation of radical Islamic militants, Al-Qaeda with its grey-bearded 63-year-old leader is no longer the draw it was under Osama bin Laden.
Believed to be holed up in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, Zawahiri in their eyes seems to have done little in recent years beyond issuing statements and videos.
Finally, in what could be the coup de grace in its recruitment efforts, the Islamic State is allowing its cannibal terrorists to use FaceBook and Twitter. In other words, the original Al Qaeda will have to blow up some really big and really symbolic buildings to regain its coolness factor from its much younger and much hipper Islamic State terrorist competition.
This is what you get for drawing bullshyt on a map over a cup of coffee
On some real shyt.
How will this affect the price of oil
Cause if these quran-thumpers ain't gonna come up off the black gold, then we gotta drop them thangs.
How will this affect the price of oil
Cause if these quran-thumpers ain't gonna come up off the black gold, then we gotta drop them thangs.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
raq prime minister's air power obsession
There is tragic irony when it comes to understanding the use of air power in quelling rebellions in Iraq.
Last updated: 30 Jun 2014 14:46
Afzal Ashraf
Afzal Ashraf is a Consultant fellow at Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI) and served in the UK Armed Forces. He was involved developing a counterinsurgency strategy and in the Policing and the Justice sector in Iraq.
RSS
The current Iraqi government is under pressure to restore its credibility, writes Ashraf [Reuters]
Having refused the US' suggestion to retain a small cadre of forces in Iraq after the end of its mission in 2010, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's request for US air support on June 18 was met with a similarly negative response. The request betrays the Maliki regime's desperation, not only because of the serious threat it faces from the rebels led by the group now calling itself the Islamic Caliphate (formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) but also because of its belief in the critical role that air power will play in delivering the country from its current ordeal. In fact, the prime minister told the BBC on June 26 that if Iraq had the 36 F-16s it had ordered from the United States, then it would not be in this dire situation.
Maliki is not alone in believing that air power can deliver more than it can and he is certainly not alone in underestimating its potential for political harm to its users. Will he be able to get the balance right between military advantage and political damage in his use of air power? Indeed, will he even be able to make effective use of the delivery of Russian jets that has recently been announced?
There is tragic irony when it comes to understanding the use of air power in quelling rebellions. One of the earliest uses was in Iraq in the air power when the previously Ottoman-controlled region of Mesopotamia came under British control. With millions of square miles of extra territory to control and an army that had suffered the loss of millions in World War I just a few years earlier, the problem was solved with the new concept of air policing. The newly formed Royal Air Force would police the country with ruthless efficiency.
Aerial bombardment
Rebellion would be quashed quickly by aerial bombardment. The process was summed up by a young RAF officer who was to later become the British architect of airpower against civilian targets in Europe, as Air Marshal Arthur Harris: "The Arab and Kurd … now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offered them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."
This terrifying prospect of an aerial attack against which there was little or no defence provided different lessons for both the users of aerial bombardment and their victims. The Germans added a siren to their Junkers 88 dive-bombers when they first used them to flatten the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937. Guernica was not an insurgency but it was what James Corum described as terror bombing of civilians.
The most obvious interim option is to use foreign pilots, possibly Russians. That will present an interesting challenge for the government both internally and internationally. Any grievances against the Baghdad government will multiply if it is believed that foreign pilots caused civilian casualties.
The Allies adopted that policy of terror from the air during World War II against Germany. Even former British Prime Minister Winston Churchilladmitted to "bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror". It was only after the horror of bombing civilians with napalm was graphically illustrated by news reporters in the Vietnam war that Western states actually made serious attempts to avoid civilian casualties.
So it was photo journalism that gave voice to the indignity of aerial warfare. In the age of mass communication, state actors began to respond to this indignity with a desire to seek revenge through some form of reciprocal humiliation and terror. Even when the West made a great effort to avoid civilian casualties in the first Gulf War, the mere sight of US Commander Norman Schwarzkopf gleefully displaying videos of vehicles and buildings being destroyed by laser-guided bombs sent a subliminal message to those with an anti-Western outlook.
Ten years later, al-Qaeda was at the vanguard of a terrorist campaign which celebrated the destruction of buildings and Western military vehicles in a similarly gleeful manner.
It created a genre of Internet videos that promoted otherwise discrete tactical successes in terrorist attacks to break the myth that Western technological superiority in the air offered "no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape".
Drone strikes
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the West has initiated no large-scale aerial bombing campaign. Instead, it has relied on drone strikes using precision weapons against specific counter-terrorism or insurgency targets. Yet opposition against drone strikes is growing despite the relatively low number of civilian victims. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the increased precision and reliability of aerial attack weapons has not been matched by similarly precise and reliable intelligence to identify targets.
Attacking one wedding in the Afpak tribal belt might be a mistake but several weddings indicates that the intelligence used is not just unreliable, but is probably being manipulated by those who wish to harm Western policies. Secondly, drones - unlike manned aircraft - tend to more routinely infringe sovereign airspace and the mere absence of a pilot to strike back at confirms to the targets the indignity of "no opportunity for glory as warriors", in defence.
So while Western states have attempted greatly to reduce the impact of air power on civilians in recent years, civilian opposition to aerial bombardment has increased significantly during the same period. Apart from the physical casualties arising from air power, opposition appears to be motivated also as much by the indignity of invasion, albeit only of airspace, by an alien state.
Non-Western states have not progressed as far along this evolutionary path. Israel bombed Lebanon in August 2006. When challenged by the West on attacking centres of civilian populations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed to the British and US bombing of Dresden, killing tens of thousands, as a precedence for Israel's actions.
The question therefore is: How the far along the evolutionary path of airpower ethics is the Maliki regime? The belief that with F-16s, the Islamic Caliphate-led advance from Mosul southwards would have been halted is somewhat fanciful. To be able to hit a target on a road used by civilian traffic from an F-16 requires precision-guided weapons, advanced training and accurate intelligence.
Judging by the way the Iraqi army was caught off-guard by the rebels, intelligence on the ground was woefully lacking. Judging by the way the army collapsed and failed until almost two weeks later to mount a counter attack, its training was barely adequate. So the F-16s would most probably have been used in the same way that Syria is using its air force; against rebel targets in close proximity to civilians, without much regard for innocent lives.
Lack of empathy
That mindset must surely persist in the Maliki regime, encouraged subliminally in some individuals with a lack of empathy through sectarian hatred and through harboured grievances against the Sunni-dominated Saddam regime. As the Iraqi army begins its pushback and as aircraft are increasingly brought to bear, the response of the rebels would be to seek cover in urban areas. It is almost impossible to attack the rebels in an urban setting without killing innocents. The best way to defeat them would be to employ strategic patience.
But the current Iraqi government is under pressure to restore its credibility by being seen to eliminate the grave threat the current rebellion poses to the state, and patience is therefore unlikely. Perhaps that is something well understood by Iraqi civilians fleeing from cities like Mosul. Some of them feared the expected counterattack by the Iraqi army more than the so-called Islamic Caliphate.
Another possible flaw in the Maliki airpower plan is the likelihood that Iraqi pilots will not be ready to use the new Russian aircraft in time for the promised operations. It can take several weeks to train a pilot on a new aircraft type, and an additional week or so at least, to learn to use its weapons system. Even if the pilot has flown the aircraft type in the past, he will need a week or so to refresh his skills before becoming operational. He will almost certainly need retraining on the weapons system.
The most obvious interim option is to use foreign pilots, possibly Russians. That will present an interesting challenge for the government, both internally and internationally. Any grievances against the Baghdad government will multiply if it is believed that foreign pilots caused civilian casualties. Externally, the situation of about 300 US military advisors on the ground, with possibly Russian or other "unfriendly" pilots in the air, could add an unwelcome complexity to an already difficult political scenario in Washington.
So both the political context and the military circumstances suggest that air power will be used in a way that could lead to civilian casualties. The potential to store up another phase of grievances between the Sunni heartland and Baghdad seems great. Any short-term military success might come at the expense of long-term political damage.
Afzal Ashraf is a Consultant fellow at Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) and served in the UK Armed Forces. He was involved developing a counterinsurgency strategy and in the Policing and the Justice sector in Iraq.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/op...-minister-airpower-ob-201463085426155331.html
There is tragic irony when it comes to understanding the use of air power in quelling rebellions in Iraq.
Last updated: 30 Jun 2014 14:46
Afzal Ashraf
Afzal Ashraf is a Consultant fellow at Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI) and served in the UK Armed Forces. He was involved developing a counterinsurgency strategy and in the Policing and the Justice sector in Iraq.
RSS
The current Iraqi government is under pressure to restore its credibility, writes Ashraf [Reuters]
Having refused the US' suggestion to retain a small cadre of forces in Iraq after the end of its mission in 2010, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's request for US air support on June 18 was met with a similarly negative response. The request betrays the Maliki regime's desperation, not only because of the serious threat it faces from the rebels led by the group now calling itself the Islamic Caliphate (formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) but also because of its belief in the critical role that air power will play in delivering the country from its current ordeal. In fact, the prime minister told the BBC on June 26 that if Iraq had the 36 F-16s it had ordered from the United States, then it would not be in this dire situation.
Maliki is not alone in believing that air power can deliver more than it can and he is certainly not alone in underestimating its potential for political harm to its users. Will he be able to get the balance right between military advantage and political damage in his use of air power? Indeed, will he even be able to make effective use of the delivery of Russian jets that has recently been announced?
There is tragic irony when it comes to understanding the use of air power in quelling rebellions. One of the earliest uses was in Iraq in the air power when the previously Ottoman-controlled region of Mesopotamia came under British control. With millions of square miles of extra territory to control and an army that had suffered the loss of millions in World War I just a few years earlier, the problem was solved with the new concept of air policing. The newly formed Royal Air Force would police the country with ruthless efficiency.
Aerial bombardment
Rebellion would be quashed quickly by aerial bombardment. The process was summed up by a young RAF officer who was to later become the British architect of airpower against civilian targets in Europe, as Air Marshal Arthur Harris: "The Arab and Kurd … now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offered them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."
This terrifying prospect of an aerial attack against which there was little or no defence provided different lessons for both the users of aerial bombardment and their victims. The Germans added a siren to their Junkers 88 dive-bombers when they first used them to flatten the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937. Guernica was not an insurgency but it was what James Corum described as terror bombing of civilians.
The most obvious interim option is to use foreign pilots, possibly Russians. That will present an interesting challenge for the government both internally and internationally. Any grievances against the Baghdad government will multiply if it is believed that foreign pilots caused civilian casualties.
The Allies adopted that policy of terror from the air during World War II against Germany. Even former British Prime Minister Winston Churchilladmitted to "bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror". It was only after the horror of bombing civilians with napalm was graphically illustrated by news reporters in the Vietnam war that Western states actually made serious attempts to avoid civilian casualties.
So it was photo journalism that gave voice to the indignity of aerial warfare. In the age of mass communication, state actors began to respond to this indignity with a desire to seek revenge through some form of reciprocal humiliation and terror. Even when the West made a great effort to avoid civilian casualties in the first Gulf War, the mere sight of US Commander Norman Schwarzkopf gleefully displaying videos of vehicles and buildings being destroyed by laser-guided bombs sent a subliminal message to those with an anti-Western outlook.
Ten years later, al-Qaeda was at the vanguard of a terrorist campaign which celebrated the destruction of buildings and Western military vehicles in a similarly gleeful manner.
It created a genre of Internet videos that promoted otherwise discrete tactical successes in terrorist attacks to break the myth that Western technological superiority in the air offered "no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape".
Drone strikes
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the West has initiated no large-scale aerial bombing campaign. Instead, it has relied on drone strikes using precision weapons against specific counter-terrorism or insurgency targets. Yet opposition against drone strikes is growing despite the relatively low number of civilian victims. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the increased precision and reliability of aerial attack weapons has not been matched by similarly precise and reliable intelligence to identify targets.
Attacking one wedding in the Afpak tribal belt might be a mistake but several weddings indicates that the intelligence used is not just unreliable, but is probably being manipulated by those who wish to harm Western policies. Secondly, drones - unlike manned aircraft - tend to more routinely infringe sovereign airspace and the mere absence of a pilot to strike back at confirms to the targets the indignity of "no opportunity for glory as warriors", in defence.
So while Western states have attempted greatly to reduce the impact of air power on civilians in recent years, civilian opposition to aerial bombardment has increased significantly during the same period. Apart from the physical casualties arising from air power, opposition appears to be motivated also as much by the indignity of invasion, albeit only of airspace, by an alien state.
Non-Western states have not progressed as far along this evolutionary path. Israel bombed Lebanon in August 2006. When challenged by the West on attacking centres of civilian populations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed to the British and US bombing of Dresden, killing tens of thousands, as a precedence for Israel's actions.
The question therefore is: How the far along the evolutionary path of airpower ethics is the Maliki regime? The belief that with F-16s, the Islamic Caliphate-led advance from Mosul southwards would have been halted is somewhat fanciful. To be able to hit a target on a road used by civilian traffic from an F-16 requires precision-guided weapons, advanced training and accurate intelligence.
Judging by the way the Iraqi army was caught off-guard by the rebels, intelligence on the ground was woefully lacking. Judging by the way the army collapsed and failed until almost two weeks later to mount a counter attack, its training was barely adequate. So the F-16s would most probably have been used in the same way that Syria is using its air force; against rebel targets in close proximity to civilians, without much regard for innocent lives.
Lack of empathy
That mindset must surely persist in the Maliki regime, encouraged subliminally in some individuals with a lack of empathy through sectarian hatred and through harboured grievances against the Sunni-dominated Saddam regime. As the Iraqi army begins its pushback and as aircraft are increasingly brought to bear, the response of the rebels would be to seek cover in urban areas. It is almost impossible to attack the rebels in an urban setting without killing innocents. The best way to defeat them would be to employ strategic patience.
But the current Iraqi government is under pressure to restore its credibility by being seen to eliminate the grave threat the current rebellion poses to the state, and patience is therefore unlikely. Perhaps that is something well understood by Iraqi civilians fleeing from cities like Mosul. Some of them feared the expected counterattack by the Iraqi army more than the so-called Islamic Caliphate.
Another possible flaw in the Maliki airpower plan is the likelihood that Iraqi pilots will not be ready to use the new Russian aircraft in time for the promised operations. It can take several weeks to train a pilot on a new aircraft type, and an additional week or so at least, to learn to use its weapons system. Even if the pilot has flown the aircraft type in the past, he will need a week or so to refresh his skills before becoming operational. He will almost certainly need retraining on the weapons system.
The most obvious interim option is to use foreign pilots, possibly Russians. That will present an interesting challenge for the government, both internally and internationally. Any grievances against the Baghdad government will multiply if it is believed that foreign pilots caused civilian casualties. Externally, the situation of about 300 US military advisors on the ground, with possibly Russian or other "unfriendly" pilots in the air, could add an unwelcome complexity to an already difficult political scenario in Washington.
So both the political context and the military circumstances suggest that air power will be used in a way that could lead to civilian casualties. The potential to store up another phase of grievances between the Sunni heartland and Baghdad seems great. Any short-term military success might come at the expense of long-term political damage.
Afzal Ashraf is a Consultant fellow at Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) and served in the UK Armed Forces. He was involved developing a counterinsurgency strategy and in the Policing and the Justice sector in Iraq.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/op...-minister-airpower-ob-201463085426155331.html
newworldafro
DeeperThanRapBiggerThanHH
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Report: Saudi troops deployed to Iraq border
Saudi-owned TV station says 30,000 troops move to border after Iraqis withdraw, while evidence of Iranian aid emerges.
Last updated: 03 Jul 2014 11:12
The Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV station said troops were deployed after Iraqi soldiers withdrew [Reuters]
Saudi Arabia has sent 30,000 soldiers to its border with Iraq after Iraqi soldiers withdrew from the area, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television said on Thursday.
The country aims to guard its 800km border with Iraq, where Islamic State fighters and other Sunni Muslim rebel groups seized towns and cities in a lightning advance last month.
King Abdullah has ordered all necessary measures to protect the kingdom against potential "terrorist threats", state news agency SPA reported on Thursday.
The Dubai-based al-Arabiya said on its website that Saudi troops fanned into the border region after Iraqi government forces abandoned positions, leaving the Saudi frontier unprotected, the Reuters news agency reported.
The satellite channel said it had obtained a video showing about 2,500 Iraqi soldiers in the desert area east of the Iraqi city of Karbala after pulling back from the border.
An officer in the video aired by al-Arabiya said that the soldiers had been ordered to quit their posts without justification.
The authenticity of the recording could not immediately be verified and the Iraqi government denied the reports. Lieutenant General Qassim Atta, an Iraqi army spokesman, said: "This is false news aimed at affecting the morale of our people and the morale of our heroic fighters."
Iranian aid
Iraq is in the midst of a conflict with Sunni fighters in the north and west of the country, and has launched an offensive in Tikrit to recapture territory it lost during a rebel advance in June.
Thousands of soldiers, backed by tanks, artillery and aerial cover, have made limited progress in retaking the city, the AFP news agency reported.
The Iraqi government has asked allies for help in tackling the rebellion, but has received a limited response from the US.
Washington has sent 300 military advisers to Baghdad, falling short of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's request for weapons, including to speed up delivery of F-16 jets due for delivery later this year.
The Iraqis have instead turned to Russia and reportedly, Iran.
Russia sold Iraq a dozen Sukhoi-25 jets.
The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies has said three Sukhoi jets shown landing in Iraq in a video released by the defence ministry were probably from Iran.
Tehran has pledged to aid Iraq against the rebels, who are motivated, in part, by Iran's alleged influence on the Iraqi government.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middl...ps-deployed-iraq-border-2014738164674298.html
Saudi-owned TV station says 30,000 troops move to border after Iraqis withdraw, while evidence of Iranian aid emerges.
Last updated: 03 Jul 2014 11:12
The Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV station said troops were deployed after Iraqi soldiers withdrew [Reuters]
Saudi Arabia has sent 30,000 soldiers to its border with Iraq after Iraqi soldiers withdrew from the area, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television said on Thursday.
The country aims to guard its 800km border with Iraq, where Islamic State fighters and other Sunni Muslim rebel groups seized towns and cities in a lightning advance last month.
King Abdullah has ordered all necessary measures to protect the kingdom against potential "terrorist threats", state news agency SPA reported on Thursday.
The Dubai-based al-Arabiya said on its website that Saudi troops fanned into the border region after Iraqi government forces abandoned positions, leaving the Saudi frontier unprotected, the Reuters news agency reported.
The satellite channel said it had obtained a video showing about 2,500 Iraqi soldiers in the desert area east of the Iraqi city of Karbala after pulling back from the border.
An officer in the video aired by al-Arabiya said that the soldiers had been ordered to quit their posts without justification.
The authenticity of the recording could not immediately be verified and the Iraqi government denied the reports. Lieutenant General Qassim Atta, an Iraqi army spokesman, said: "This is false news aimed at affecting the morale of our people and the morale of our heroic fighters."
Iranian aid
Iraq is in the midst of a conflict with Sunni fighters in the north and west of the country, and has launched an offensive in Tikrit to recapture territory it lost during a rebel advance in June.
Thousands of soldiers, backed by tanks, artillery and aerial cover, have made limited progress in retaking the city, the AFP news agency reported.
The Iraqi government has asked allies for help in tackling the rebellion, but has received a limited response from the US.
Washington has sent 300 military advisers to Baghdad, falling short of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's request for weapons, including to speed up delivery of F-16 jets due for delivery later this year.
The Iraqis have instead turned to Russia and reportedly, Iran.
Russia sold Iraq a dozen Sukhoi-25 jets.
The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies has said three Sukhoi jets shown landing in Iraq in a video released by the defence ministry were probably from Iran.
Tehran has pledged to aid Iraq against the rebels, who are motivated, in part, by Iran's alleged influence on the Iraqi government.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middl...ps-deployed-iraq-border-2014738164674298.html
Jhoon
Spontaneous Mishaps and Hijinks
let me tell you a secret. those lockheed purchases are to protect them when the same animal they raised to lust blood, gets a scent of them. and when that happens , guess who will no longer need oil, let alone oil from that neighborhood.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
things could spiral out of control
25YOUTHS!!
Superstar
Saudi Arabia outsources it's military. Can't be having the rich oil princes fighting in the army haha.
25YOUTHS!!
Superstar
These ISIS nikkas going HAM against Al-Qaeda .
I wonder which side the USA will choose
EDIT: Can't embed the link for some reason
I wonder which side the USA will choose
EDIT: Can't embed the link for some reason