Free Republic

The US is reported to have demanded the resignation of Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki as a condition for US military intervention. The Wall Street Journal says the US has signalled its desire for unity government in Iraq without Maliki. Maliki's government has rejected calls for the prime minister to quit. His spokesman, Zuhair al-Nahar, said the west should focus instead on providing immediate military help to the Iraqi government.

President Barack Obama, on Dec. 12, 2011, called Iraq "self-reliant and democratic." He praised that country, calling it a "new Iraq that's determining its own destiny -- a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process." Obama said, "I have no doubt that Iraq can succeed." He campaigned to end the war in Iraq. He did -- at least he ended America's military involvement in the war. He pulled out all the troops, without leaving a residual force behind as we did, for example, in South Korea, where we...

Secretary of State John Kerry “should be on a plane right now for Baghdad,” former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said Tuesday. Crocker served as ambassador to Iraq under President George W. Bush from 2007 until 2009, and ambassador to Afghanistan under President Obama until July 2012. The Obama administration should have had more high-level diplomatic engagement with Iraq, he argued Tuesday, and emphasized the U.S. must now respond with urgency. “We are hard-wired into their political system. We helped create it. We can’t walk away from it,” Crocker said. “I would have preferred since 2011 to see us...

Who Lost Iraq?Posted By Arnold Ahlert On June 13, 2014 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 339 Comments Iraq’s disintegration may be imminent, as the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appears incapable of stopping the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The terrorist offshoot of al Qaeda now has its sights set on the capital city of Baghdad. Adding to the chaos, the city of Kirkuk was overtaken by Kurdish soldiers absent any resistance by government forces. After having ignored the prescient warnings of Iraq’s fragility post-U.S. abandonment, the Obama administration and Democratic Party’s determination...

President Barack Obama spent last weekend on the golf course and on vacation in Palm Springs, California while his National Security team took charge of monitoring the increasing unrest in Iraq, it was revealed on Monday. According to reports filed by journalists on the trip of the president's comings and goings, President Barack Obama spent Saturday afternoon and most of Sunday at exclusive resorts playing golf with White House aides. Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and her team were tasked with coming up with a plan to stop al Qaeda linked terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and the...

The explosion of bloodshed in Iraq has created the temptation for many to revisit their support for or opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and to ascribe blame for the recent surge in violence to their preferred boogieman. Not all have succumbed to the enticing lure of nostalgia. Not even consistent Iraq War and George W. Bush critic Fareed Zakaria allowed himself himself to take a swipe at the former commander-in-chief for looming over the present crisis. Appearing on CNN on Thursday, Zakaria blamed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for undoing what he said was the good accomplished...

Full Title: Al Qaeda-inspired militant group vows to march on Baghdad; President calls escalating violence an ‘emergency situation’//// The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has taken Iraq's second-largest city Mosul and Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in recent days and vowed Thursday to take over the capital. -SNIP- President Obama says additional American assistance is necessary to help the current Iraqi government fight off the threat posed by rampaging Islamic insurgents. The President, speaking at the White House, offered no specifics as hostilities once again heat up in the nation formerly run by dictator Sadaam Hussein. But Obama...

Al Qaeda-inspired militants in Iraq vowed Thursday to march against Baghdad after seizing two key cities in the north of the country this week. A spokesman for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) said in audio posted on militant websites commonly used by the group that the fighters have old scores to settle with Iraq's Shiite-led government. The spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, also threatened that Sunni ISIL fighters would capture the southern Iraqi Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, which hold two of the holiest shrines for Shiite Muslims

Sunni Islamist militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) have rapidly expanded their control of Iraq as a whole. The group is now said to be within range of overtaking Iraq’s biggest oil refinery in the city of Baiji. ... ISIS is an Al Qaeda-offshoot that seeks to create a Sharia law compliant Sunni Islamic caliphate that runs through both Iraq and Syria.

Two and a half years after the last U.S. soldier departed, an al Qaeda offshoot is in control of Mosul and headed for Baghdad—and Iraq’s prime minister is requesting U.S. air strikes. It seems like only yesterday that Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was celebrating as the last American soldiers left Iraq. Now, with an al Qaeda offshoot threatening to take Baghdad, Maliki’s government is quietly asking at least some troops—specifically airmen and drone pilots—to return. While Iraq’s government is not requesting a surge in U.S. ground forces like the one President Bush ordered in 2007, Maliki’s government has been...

Militant Sunni forces are taking territory with lightning speed, moving toward the ultimate goal of establishing a new Islamic Caliphate. Hardened by years of battle in neighboring Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is routing the forces of a modern nation-state and gathering land with the ultimate goal of establishing an alternate form of governance, an Islamic Caliphate. “This is not a terrorism problem anymore,” says Jessica Lewis, an expert on ISIS at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank. “This is an army on the move in Iraq and Syria, and they...

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is preparing contingency plans to evacuate its employees if necessary now that one of the deadliest Islamic militant groups in the region has taken control of large swaths of Iraq, a U.S. official told TheBlaze. The State Department also warned U.S. citizens against traveling to Iraq, following several days of bloody clashes between insurgents with the Al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and Iraqi military forces. ISIL has taken control of Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah and aims to create an Islamic state across the Iraq-Syria border. The U.S. official told TheBlaze that...

And not just Mosul, according to some reports, but the entire northern province of Nineveh has now fallen into al-Qaeda’s control. Parliamentarians from the region want a declaration of emergency and immediate government intervention, but the forces that had been in Mosul have fled — some of which abandoned their uniforms as well as their posts as the ISIS forces swarmed into the city:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Insurgents seized control early Tuesday of most of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the provincial government headquarters, offering a powerful demonstration of the mounting threat posed by extremists...

Adam Banotai was a 21-year-old sergeant and squad leader in the Marine Corps during the 2004 invasion of Falluja, a restive insurgent-held city in Iraq. His unit — which had seven of 17 men wounded by shrapnel or bullets in the first days of the invasion — seized control of the government center early in the campaign. So when Sunni insurgents, some with allegiances to Al Qaeda, retook the city this month and raised their black insurgent flag over buildings where he and his men fought, he was transfixed, disbelieving and appalled.

Iraq: Late reporting indicates that al-Qaida-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters have begun withdrawing from Fallujah to the suburbs. This report has not been confirmed. The government announced that it would not attack Fallujah for now in order to minimize civilian casualties. At least one source in Iraq, however, reported that government forces have low morale because they lack the supplies and equipment to mount an operation that has any prospect of success. Meanwhile in Ramadi, also west of Baghdad, a government and tribal night operation on 6 January failed to oust Islamists from southern Ramadi, according...

Apparently we’re on George W. Bush’s fourth term. And here I’ve been making a fool of myself criticizing some Illinois senator for messing up the country. If only NBC News had told me this piece of breaking news sooner. Introducing a report on Monday’s NBC Nightly News about Al-Qaeda forces seizing control of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, anchor Brian Williams went out of his way to blame the President George W. Bush for the deteriorating security situation: “U.S. fighting forces are gone from Iraq. But as so many predicted when President Bush chose to go to war there after...

The US fought for years to free Anbar province from the grip of al-Qaeda during the Iraq War. Fallujah and Ramadi turned into pitched battlefronts, and later “the surge” convinced local Sunni tribes to join the US effort to dispel AQ from the region. More than two years after the US pulled all of its forces out of Iraq, AQ is back — and Ramadi and Fallujah appear to have fallen once again: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO The city center of Iraq’s Fallujah has fallen completely into the hands of fighters from the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State in Iraq...

Al-Qaeda-Linked Force Captures Fallujah Amid Rise In Violence In Iraq By Liz Sly, January 3 BEIRUT — A rejuvenated al-Qaeda-affiliated force asserted control over the western Iraqi city of Fallujah on Friday, raising its flag over government buildings and declaring an Islamic state in one of the most crucial areas that U.S. troops fought to pacify before withdrawing from Iraq two years ago. The capture of Fallujah came amid an explosion of violence across the western desert province of Anbar in which local tribes, Iraqi security forces and al-Qaeda-affiliated militants have been fighting one another for days in a confusingly...

On December 18, 2011, the last convoy of US soldiers pulled out of Iraq, ending nearly nine years of war that left almost 4,500 American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead. Marking the end of the combat mission in a speech at Fort Bragg (the same location where George W. Bush had declared war in 2003), President Barack Obama emphasized repeatedly that he was fulfilling his 2008 campaign pledge of an Iraq pull-out, while praising the courage of American soldiers and vowing that Iraqi forces were prepared to assume responsibility for their country’s security. “Of course,” he noted,...

A suicide bomber killed at least 21 people Saturday at the funeral of a member of Iraq's Shabak minority in the northern province of Nineveh, security and medical sources said. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, but Sunni Islamist militants have in the past targeted Shabaks, who are predominantly Shi'ite, warning them to leave the area. Iraq's delicate sectarian balance has come under acute strain from the war in neighboring Syria, which has pitted mainly Sunni rebels against a leader backed by Shi'ite Iran.