Alan: Smirk and Snarl's war on Iraq was trumpery at the outset and colossal failure at the "end."
A member of Kurdish security forces stands guard as families fleeing violence in the Iraqi city of Mosul wait at a checkpoint in outskirts of Arbil, in Iraq's Kurdistan region, June 10, 2014.
Reuters
Staff writer
Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East. Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.
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The scale of the catastrophe, as troops loyal to Mr. Maliki flood north and troops controlled by the Kurdish Regional Government rush west and south, can't be overstated. Chicago is the United States' third-largest city. Munich is Germany's. Osaka is Japan's.
And unlike the Anbar towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, almost exclusively Sunni Arab and in the heart of what has long been one of Iraq's most restive provinces, Mosul is an ethnically and religiously mixed town of Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, Christians and Muslims. US forces won, lost, and won control again of Fallujah in fierce battles during the early years of the America-led war in Iraq. But a city like Mosul is something else again.
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It's well known that Mosul has been a target for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). The city is the capital of northern Nineveh Province, the western side of which has a roughly 300-mile-long frontier with Syria. During the height of the US war in Iraq, insurgent rat-lines riddled the border, and in the past few years, with what was once Al Qaeda in Iraq merging with Sunni Arab insurgents fighting in the Syrian civil war to become ISIS, the cross-border flow of men and weapons has ramped up again.
Much of Nineveh, like Anbar, is sparsely inhabited desert where the central government's writ is nominal. Smaller cities in the area's east, like Tal Afar, have repeatedly fallen to insurgents over the past decade. But Mosul is a crown jewel, a center of transportation and commerce. Holding it was a government priority. Losing control, if only briefly, is a powerful indication of government failure and something that is likely to spur insurgent recruitment. What must have looked like a hopeless cause to many passive Sunni Arab supporters of the insurgency just started looking a lot more hopeful.
Maliki has responded by declaring a state of emergency, imposing a curfew in Baghdad and other cities, and, in a move that smacks of desperation, issuing calls to arm citizen irregulars to fight the well-organized and armed ISIS military
The rest of the story with video clips:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/0610/Why-Mosul-s-fall-is-a-signature-moment-in-Iraq-video
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/0610/Why-Mosul-s-fall-is-a-signature-moment-in-Iraq-video
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