Have we underestimated ISIS?
In many ways Iraq reminds me of Yugoslavia. Both countries were created after the First World War from a collection of ill-fitting provinces filled with religious and ethnic tension. Both needed a ruthless strongman to keep a lid on these tensions and when those strongmen left the scene, be it Tito or Saddam Hussein, those tensions […]Ron Mark writes for the New Zealand Herald:
In many ways Iraq reminds me of Yugoslavia. Both countries were created after the First World War from a collection of ill-fitting provinces filled with religious and ethnic tension. Both needed a ruthless strongman to keep a lid on these tensions and when those strongmen left the scene, be it Tito or Saddam Hussein, those tensions boiled over.
While I have called the current Iraqi army cowards, I have not used that word to describe the Shiite Militias, Shia Popular Mobilisation Units and the Kurdish Peshmerga. All of whom show fight. Most chillingly of all, so does Sunni ISIS. On the Paul Henry show, our Prime Minister inelegantly tried to explain these complexities: "Two options available to [al] Abadi the Prime Minister. One is to solely use Iraqi forces and the second is to use Shia militia who are well trained but not necessarily sort of under his control but not completely. He has decided to use the Shia militia so that is quite a high step obviously backed up by the Iraqi forces, so on the back of all that, the probability of them retaking Ramadi will be quite high I would have thought."
