Ferocity of Kirkuk attack points to tough fight for Mosul

The scale of the operation - the largest of several by Islamic State to divert an advance on their stronghold in Mosul - shows how tough the battle for Mosul may become and points to a continued ability of the militant group to undermine security across the country even if its northern bastion falls.

Accounts gathered by Reuters from residents, police, security and intelligence officials suggest it was carried out by forces that were highly trained, well-prepared and - alarmingly for the government - supported from inside Kirkuk.

“What was surprising is it was done so easily,” said Ranj Talabani, a senior Kurdish intelligence official.

Like the Islamic State attacks on Paris last year, the operation appeared aimed at spreading chaos and fear rather than seizing territory. Although the heaviest fighting was over by Friday night, clashes continued for two days and officials are still searching for Islamic State units in the city.

The blackened and bullet-ridden facade of two hotels near Kirkuk’s governorate building, one of the targets of the attack, are a clear sign of its ferocity. The smell of smoke and cordite still linger.

Kirkuk, 100 km (60 miles) southeast of Mosul, is close to oilfields which hold much of Iraq’s vast crude reserves. It also lies near northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, and has been controlled by Kurdish forces since the Iraqi army retreated from advancing Islamic State forces in 2014.

The attack took place four days after the launch of an offensive against Islamic State in Mosul by Kurdish peshmerga, Iraqi soldiers and a U.S.-led international coalition.

The fighters appeared well-trained for urban combat, a sign that the battle for Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, could be drawn-out and bloody, according to Iraqi security officials.

The hardest thing to do it to get people to change their religion.

Our fight is in essence getting Muslims to forsake Islam. We may try to induce them to forsake Sunni for Shia or vice versa. As if the US would be a qualified inducer for such a shift. Never happen.

And we would be trying in either case to get them to “convert” to democracy a la Iraq 2003. This is a system of government they do not value, have no experience with, and it is apostasy to them.

This is a silly pursuit. Good, bad, or indifferent, these folks bow down 5 times a day to their insect-god. They are 1000 times more involved in their religion than we are our whatever ours is/are and ours isn’t looking like it is doing all that well since it is losing ally after ally, much of it loves or likes or admires Israel, their sworn enemy, and theirs, however primitive we may think it is, is in the midst of apparently conquering Europe and eroding virtually every cultural icon or model or ideal we apparently embrace. I guess we could do it in 2 generations by helping to induce mass slaughter in that part of the world, but they do not need us to get that part going.

This is never going to happen. This is why GWBush’s Iraq experiment was doomed to failure. We do not offer that art of the world anything THAT THEY VALUE or CAN BE MADE TO VALUE. Except by killing them, and then they probably will not value it so much.

I see no clean end of this turd to pick up. Our involvement in that part of the world is functionless unless the idea is to leave a trail of corpses and rubbled cities.

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