1. As Baghdad's grip fails, Iraq is a 'nightmare,' Kurd warns

   Dallas Morning News ‎- 11 hours ago

   A woman gathers bread in a displacement camp for Iraqis caught up in the fighting around the city of Mosul. Islamic State fighters took control of ...

   As Baghdad’s grip fails, Iraq is a 'nightmare,' Kurd warns

   5

   4

   0

   24

   Spencer Platt/Getty Images

   A woman gathers bread in a displacement camp for Iraqis caught up in the fighting around the city of Mosul. Islamic State fighters took control of the city on June 10.

   1

   of

   2

   FROM WIRE REPORTS

   Published: 24 June 2014 11:00 PM

   Updated: 24 June 2014 11:34 PM

   IRBIL, Iraq — Iraq’s crisis has gone from bad to worse in two weeks of fighting in which Sunni Muslims have asserted control over a growing area, including at least two towns that lie on a supply route linking Baghdad with the mostly Shiite south, Kurdish officials said Tuesday.
   The fall of towns in an area that U.S. troops knew as the “triangle of death” because of its propensity for violence provided an ominous signal that the main insurgent group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and its Sunni allies are working to encircle Baghdad, the Kurdish officials said.
   “The picture is no longer scary,” said Shafin Dizayee, the spokesman for the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in Irbil. “It has become close to a nightmare scenario.”
   Secretary of State John Kerry met with the president of Iraq’s Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, and urged him not to seek his own state and instead to help form a multisectarian government in Baghdad.
   “We are facing a new reality and a new Iraq,” Barzani told Kerry.
   Another Kurdish official, Jabbar Yawar, the spokesman for the Kurdish peshmerga militia, said Islamic State fighters apparently had seized control of the towns of Iskandariya and Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, and were reported in some instances to be just 6 miles from Baghdad.
   “This area controls access to southern Iraq, and it appears as if they might try to push into Baghdad or even south toward the city of Hilla,” he said.
   Southern Iraq is mostly Shiite, and it supports the embattled government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki. Thousands of young men from the south have flocked to Baghdad to bolster the flagging army. Many observers have assumed that the flow of southern militiamen would help stem an advance by Islamic State fighters that has captured much of northern and central Iraq in the weeks since the city of Mosul fell under their control June 10.
   But the loss of the southern approaches to the capital would change that calculus and add to the sense that Baghdad was being isolated. On Sunday, Iraqi soldiers lost control of the last major crossing point to Syria, and on Monday gunmen allied with the Islamic State took control of Tirbil, Iraq’s only land crossing to Jordan. Anbar province, west of Baghdad, has been largely under the sway of the Islamic State since last year, and the group is now contesting government forces in Diyala and Salahuddin provinces, to the capital’s north and east.
   As one town after another has fallen, the Iraqi government has insisted that most of the lost territory remains in government hands. But officials of the Kurdistan Regional Government provide a different view. Their assessment of what’s taking place in Iraq also matches that of a U.S. defense official, who said the Islamic State and its allies were consolidating control of the Euphrates River valley in apparent preparation for attacks on Baghdad.
   The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iraqi security forces were struggling to establish a defensive line centered on Samarra, a city that controls the northern approaches to Baghdad. In a separate briefing, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Islamic State fighters were also menacing the Iraqi air base at Balad, the country’s largest military installation.
   Meanwhile, Syrian government aircraft bombed Sunni militant targets inside Iraq on Tuesday, further broadening the Middle Eastern crisis a day after Israeli warplanes and rockets struck targets inside Syria.
   Iraqi news media reported that at least 20 people were killed and 93 injured in the strike by Syrian jets in the Iraqi border town of Qaim, now controlled by the Islamic States. Western officials confirmed the attack.
   On Monday, Israeli warplanes and rockets struck nine targets, including what the Israel Defense Forces said was a Syrian military command headquarters, in retaliation for a missile attack from Syria on Sunday that killed one Israeli and wounded another in the Golan Heights.
   The only good news for the al-Maliki government, the Kurdish officials said, appeared to come from Beiji, where, the Kurds said, government troops remain in control of at least part of Iraq’s largest oil refinery. A government pullout from the refinery, which some news outlets reported Tuesday, would be an economic disaster for the government and a boon for the Islamic State. The facility produces 60 percent of Iraq’s gasoline.
   So far, Islamic State fighters and their allies have mostly avoided direct confrontation with the Kurds’ peshmerga militia, which has a reputation for military effectiveness. The peshmerga also has largely avoided direct confrontations with the Sunni insurgents, refusing to assist Iraq’s army beyond establishing a security line outside Kurdish territory, which stretches from the northern borders with Syria and Turkey south to the Iranian border. That Kurdish arc has remained more or less peaceful since the rebellion began.
   The peshmerga also quickly occupied areas of the split Arab-Kurdish city of Kirkuk in the wake of the army’s retreat. The Kurdish government has long coveted Kirkuk for its symbolism as an ancient Kurdish city and its rich oilfields.
   The Kurds’ expansion has put them in a position to demand more autonomy in political talks over Iraq’s future. But it might also complicate the effort to cobble together a new Iraqi government, particularly one that does not include al-Maliki, long accused of autocratic tendencies by Iraqi politicians.
   U.S. officials have made clear privately that they would support the selection of a new prime minister if al-Maliki’s rivals would unite behind an alternative. But it is uncertain whether Sunni and Kurdish political parties can find enough common ground in forming a new government now that the Kurdish militia has taken control of Kirkuk.
   “Ousting Maliki will require the cooperation of all the other blocs,” said Ramzy Mardini, an expert on Iraq and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based independent research organization.
   “But Iraq isn’t a place where collective interests reign over parochial ones,” Mardini said. “The crisis is creating new facts on the ground and will likely affect how the next government is formed.”
   McClatchy Newspapers,
   end quote from:
    
   As Baghdad's grip fails, Iraq is a 'nightmare,' Kurd warns