Thursday, December 10, 2015

Somebody, please draw that diagram

Iraq is having it bad lately. The House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a unanimous bipartisan bill that would authorize the government to directly arm and train Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq bypassing Baghdad. Now Turkey ruled out pulling its troops out of northern Iraq. And what are the Turkish troops are doing in northern Iraq? They are there to... Well, to arm and train Kurdish peshmerga.

Now, Turkey and Iraq has diametrically opposed positions towards the regime of Bashar Assad and the rebels fighting him in Syria. Also, add to this the tremendous enthusiasm that sheikh Abulteen (mr. Putin) commands among the Iraqi Shia and the fact that Turkey and Russia are at loggerheads over the Russian jet downed by Turkey, and a major Kurdish-Turkish-Yankee conspiracy against the Shia dominated government in Baghdad is all too obvious (sarcasm intended).

However, you can't start drawing the next one of the infamous "Who is who in the Middle East" diagrams before you take into account that the US has just offered to provide more support for the Iraqi government offensive against the ISIS in Ramadi. The diagram also should account for a couple of more facts such as the support and air cover the US provides to the peshmerga's Syrian Kurdish cousins who are at the same time bombed by the same Turkey.

I would like to go on and on. However, for one I believe you already got enough material to start designing the diagram. Two, from our perspective the most interesting potentiality here is that the latest moves by Turkey and Kurdish supporters in America have a decent chance to push the Iraqi government over the edge as well as to freak the Shia militias out.

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