Thread: Al-Qaeda-linked force captures Fallujah amid rise in violence in Iraq - Barry's BoyZ

Al-Qaeda-linked force captures Fallujah amid rise in violence in Iraq

By Liz Sly, Published: 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 chaotic three-way war.
Elsewhere in the province, local tribal militias claimed they were gaining ground against the al-Qaeda militants who surged into urban areas from their desert strongholds this week after clashes erupted between local residents and the Iraqi security forces.
In Fallujah, where Marines fought the bloodiest battle of the Iraq war in 2004, the militants appeared to have the upper hand, underscoring the extent to which the Iraqi security forces have struggled to sustain the gains made by U.S. troops before they withdrew in December 2011.
The upheaval also affirmed the soaring capabilities of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the rebranded version of the al-Qaeda in Iraq organization that was formed a decade ago to confront U.S. troops and expanded into Syria last year while escalating its activities in Iraq. Roughly a third of the 4,486 U.S. troops killed in Iraq died in Anbar trying to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq, nearly 100 of them in the November 2004 battle for control of Fallujah, the site of America’s bloodiest confrontation since the Vietnam War.
Events Friday suggested the fight may have been in vain.
“At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah,” said a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety. “The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.”
At Friday prayers , held outdoors and attended by thousands of people, a masked ISIS fighter took the podium and addressed the crowd, declaring the establishment of an “Islamic emirate” in Fallujah and promising to help residents fight the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Iranian allies.
“We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want to take any of your possessions,” the man told the crowd, according to the journalist, who attended the prayers. “We want you to reopen the schools and institutions and return to your normal lives.”
The extent of the militants’ control over the city was unclear, however. Some local tribes were challenging their presence, and there were scattered firefights, according to another Fallujah resident who also did not want to be named because he is afraid. The Iraqi army fired shells into Fallujah from bases outside the city, killing at least 17 people, and most residents spent the day hiding indoors, he said.
In the provincial capital, Ramadi, tribal fighters have succeeded in ejecting al-Qaeda loyalists, according to Ahmed Abu Risha, a tribal leader who fought alongside U.S. troops against al-Qaeda in Iraq following the “surge” of U.S. troops in 2007.
The tribesmen are cooperating with Iraqi police, Abu Risha said, and are receiving weapons and support from the Iraqi army. Among those killed in the fighting was Abu Abdul Rahman al-Baghdadi, the emir, or leader, of ISIS in Ramadi.
“All the tribes of Anbar are fighting against al-Qaeda,” he said. “We are happy this fight is taking place. We will confront them face to face, and we will win this battle.”
But it was unclear whether all the tribal fighters battling the al-Qaeda-affiliated militants were doing so in alliance with the Iraqi government. The current violence evolved from a year-long, largely peaceful Sunni revolt against Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government that drew inspiration from the Arab Spring demonstrations elsewhere in the region. But it was rooted in the sectarian disputes left unresolved when U.S. troops withdrew and inflamed by the escalating conflict in neighboring Syria.
Those disputes include the exclusion of Sunnis from important decision-making positions in government and abuses committed against Sunnis in Iraq’s notoriously inequitable judicial system.
When Maliki dispatched the Iraqi army to quell a protest in Ramadi this week, local tribes fought back. Maliki ordered the troops to withdraw, creating an opportunity for al-Qaeda fighters to surge into towns from their desert strongholds and triggering battles across the province.
Though some tribes have turned against the al-Qaeda-affiliated militants, others have not, said Kirk Sowell, a political risk analyst based in the Jordanian capital, Amman, who edits the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics.
“Basically, no one is in control,” he said. “The situation was really horrible anyway, and the operation against Ramadi made it worse.”
A group representing the tribal fighters, calling itself the Military Council of the Anbar Rebels, posted a video on YouTube in which masked men declared their opposition to Maliki’s government but made no mention of al-Qaeda. The fighters called on local members of the Iraqi security forces to desert, hand over their weapons “and remember always that they are the sons of Iraq, not slaves of Maliki.”
Whether or how the Iraqi security forces will be able to regain the initiative is unclear. ISIS fighters have steadily asserted their control over the province’s desert regions for months, buoyed by their consolidation of control over territory just across the border in Syria. They are more disciplined and better armed than the tribal fighters drawn into the fray over the past week, and the Iraqi security forces lack the equipment and technology that enabled U.S. troops to suppress the al-Qaeda challenge.
In the past year, al-Qaeda has bounced back, launching a vicious campaign of bombings that killed more than 8,000 people in 2013, according to the United Nations. Sectarian tensions between Iraq’s Sunnis and the Shiite-led government have been further inflamed by the war in Syria, where the majority Sunni population has been engaged in a nearly three-year-old struggle to dislodge President Bashar al-Assad, a member of the Shiite Alawite minority.
Al-Qaeda’s ascendant influence in Syria has given the militants control over the desert territories spanning both sides of the *Iraqi-Syrian border, enabling them to readily transfer weapons and fighters between the arenas.
In Syria on Friday, there were demonstrations in several rebel-held towns against ISIS’s presence, and in at least one town ISIS fighters opened fire on protesters, echoing the suppression of anti-government demonstrations by Syria’s government in the early days of the revolt. Clashes also erupted between the al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters and Islamist fighters from the newly formed Islamist Front in the rebel-held north, in a sign of growing tensions between Syrians and foreign-influenced extremists.
Most residents of Fallujah do not support the al-Qaeda fighters, the journalist there said, but they also lack the means to oppose them, and they also oppose the Iraqi government.
“It is sad, because we are going back to the days of the past,” he said. “Everyone is remembering the battles of 2004 when the Marines came in, and now we are revisiting history.”
Ahmed Ramadan and Loveday Morris in Beirut and Ben Van Heuvelen in New York contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...df2_print.html

Al-Qaeda Captures Fallujah...

Iraqi Army Battles for Control...

January 10, 2014 By Ron Paul

The ‘Liberation’ Neocons Would Rather Forget

Remember Fallujah? Shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military fired on unarmed protestors, killing as many as 20 and wounding dozens. In retaliation, local Iraqis attacked a convoy of US military contractors, killing four. The US then launched a full attack on Fallujah to regain control, which left perhaps 700 Iraqis dead and the city virtually destroyed.
According to press reports last weekend, Fallujah is now under the control of al-Qaeda affiliates. The Anbar province, where Fallujah is located, is under siege by al-Qaeda. During the 2007 “surge,” more than 1,000 US troops were killed “pacifying” the Anbar province. Although al-Qaeda was not in Iraq before the US invasion, it is now conducting its own surge in Anbar.
For Iraq, the US “liberation” is proving far worse than the authoritarianism of Saddam Hussein, and it keeps getting worse. Last year was Iraq’s deadliest in five years. In 2013, fighting and bomb blasts claimed the lives of 7,818 civilians and 1,050 members of the security forces. In December alone nearly a thousand people were killed.
I remember sitting through many hearings in the House International Relations Committee praising the “surge,” which we were told secured a US victory in Iraq. They also praised the so-called “Awakening,” which was really an agreement by insurgents to stop fighting in exchange for US dollars. I always wondered what would happen when those dollars stopped coming.
Where are the surge and awakening cheerleaders now?
One of them, Richard Perle, was interviewed last year on NPR and asked whether the Iraq invasion that he pushed was worth it. He replied:

I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn’t have done that.

Many of us were saying all along that we shouldn’t have done that – before we did it. Unfortunately the Bush Administration took the advice of the neocons pushing for war and promising it would be a “cakewalk.” We continue to see the results of that terrible mistake, and it is only getting worse.
Last month the US shipped nearly a hundred air-to-ground missiles to the Iraqi air force to help combat the surging al-Qaeda. Ironically, the same al-Qaeda groups the US is helping the Iraqis combat are benefiting from the US covert and overt war to overthrow Assad next door in Syria. Why can’t the US government learn from its mistakes?
The neocons may be on the run from their earlier positions on Iraq, but that does not mean they have given up. They were the ones pushing for an attack on Syria this summer. Thankfully they were not successful. They are now making every effort to derail President Obama’s efforts to negotiate with the Iranians. Just last week William Kristol urged Israel to attack Iran with the hope we would then get involved. Neoconservative Senators from both parties recently introduced the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013, which would also bring us back on war-footing with Iran.
Next time the neocons tell us we must attack, just think “Iraq.”
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Tagged as: foreign entanglements, foreign policy, government interventionism, iraq, military interventionism, noninterventionism, ron paul, the constitution, war in Iraq

About Ron Paul

Ron Paul is a former 12-term congressman and presidential candidate. Dr. Paul is the grandfather of the Tea Party and a leader of the Liberty Movement as a whole. Dr. Paul's commentary is reprinted with permission from the Free Foundation.

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