The war between ISIS and the Iraqi government

Joe Biden says that when deciding whether to vote in favor of invading Iraq in 2002, he took President George W. Bush at his word and was led astray.

“[Bush] looked me in the eye in the Oval Office. He said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program,” Biden told NPR in September, explaining his Senate vote. “He got them in and before you know it, we had ‘shock and awe.’”

The scene looks apocalyptic from space — thick plumes of black and white smoke obscuring the landscape of northern Iraq near Mosul, the central battleground in the war against the Islamic State.

That white plume was captured by NASA satellites on October 22, shortly after ISIS militants set fire to a large sulfur plant in the area. The resulting sulfur-dioxide pollution, which can cause severe respiratory problems and irritate the eyes and throat, has killed two people and sent at least 1,000 others to hospitals. US forces in the region have donned gas masks and other protective gear in response.

In his speech on September 10, President Obama laid out a new strategy for dealing with the terrorist group ISIS (also known as ISIL) in Iraq and Syria. The most notable element of the newly announced plan is expanded military action: The US will conduct a “systematic campaign” of airstrikes against ISIS in both countries.

One problem: The president doesn’t have unlimited power to wage war as he pleases. He needs to have authority from the Constitution, Congress, or both in order for military action to be legal. The Obama administration claims that its actions against ISIS are within the bounds of the law — but the rationale is shaky at best.

But it wasn’t until they encroached into semi-autonomous Kurdish territory and near the Kurdish capital of Erbil — an oil boomtown full of Western companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil — that the Obama administration decided to authorize airstrikes against ISIS.

That rather felicitous timing has already led a few commentators to suggest that the current US intervention is all about oil. That’s probably overstating things — the US intervention seems to have a variety of goals here, like protecting the Kurds more generally and preventing ISIS from massacring Iraq’s Yazidis. But it’d also be wrong to pretend that oil is totally irrelevant to the larger crisis in Iraq.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has released a new propaganda video. It’s got pretty flashy production values, a kind of insane message, and a dig at Obama and American troops. As ridiculous as all that sound, it’s a part of ISIS’ fairly sophisticated social media strategy.

The video is titled “The End of Sykes-Picot,” a reference to the 1916 French-British colonial agreement that led to, among other things, the modern borders of Syria and Iraq. The ISIS video’s major theme is that borders are irrelevant to the group: that these arbitrary lines in the sand wrongly divides Arab Muslims, who ought to live under a Middle East-spanning caliphate.

The Obama administration’s decision to deploy 300 elite ground troops in Iraq really looks like a prelude to a possible US bombing campaign there. For those skeptical of a military intervention in Iraq, including myself, this might seem crazy: most of the arguments for some kind of US involvement have been pretty terrible. Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War was prescient; how could he possibly think going back into Iraq is a good idea?

So I was surprised when I spoke to Douglas Ollivant, the former national security adviser for Iraq under both Bush and Obama and current managing partner at Mantid International, and he offered a clearer rationale for limited airstrikes in Iraq. Strikes, Ollivant argued, could significantly limit the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS)‘s ability to threaten the Iraqi government and civilians. He thinks that this would be helpful enough to merit the risks.

Most everyone was shocked when Iraqi rebels, including the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), routed government forces and swept through northern Iraq in mid-June. But the truth is that the Iraq crisis had been building for some time.

The chart below shows the number of documented civilian deaths from violence per month, as tallied by the non-profit group Iraq Body Count. You’ll notice a huge spike in June 2014, but also that civilian deaths have been rising since early 2013:

There’s an important divide between Arab Sunnis and Shias in Iraq. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a Sunni group, has grown powerful by exploiting Sunni discontent with Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government.

But Iraq wasn’t always this way; this level of violent conflict between Iraqi Sunnis and Shias is a very modern phenomenon. So what happened? Where did this conflict come from?

Perhaps the most important victory so far by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the extremist group tearing through Iraq, was not overwhelming the much larger Iraqi military or even seizing vast areas of northwest Iraq, including the major city of Mosul. It was convincing regular Iraqis that have come under ISIS rule to trust them.

“We have no problems, no blasts, no assassinations. We now feel the freedom. We are now in safe hands,” a 42-year-old car mechanic from Mosul told the Financial Times’ Borzou Daragahi and Erika Solomon of life in ISIS-controlled Mosul. While many residents of this city fled when the extremist group took over, fearing a severe Taliban-style government, things may have actually improved for most people there, and some who fled are returning. “Many of those interviewed said they preferred life now in the besieged city,” the reporters write of their phone interviews with Mosul residents.

On Thursday afternoon, President Obama announced that he would send up to 300 American military advisers to Iraq as part of his larger effort to address the crisis there. The advisers’ goal will be to help the Iraqi army gather and interpret intelligence that will help them fight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which has taken over large parts of the country. While Obama did not explicitly say he was considering air strikes, those military advisers could also potentially be used to lay the groundwork for US airstrikes if Obama decides to launch them in the near future.

Obama’s address laid out the first clear American policy responses to the growing crisis in Iraq. There are five prongs to that response. First, secure the US embassy in Baghdad. Second, devote more surveillance assets — drones, satellites — to Iraq. Third, push for political reform in Iraq, to make the Shia government more accommodating to the Sunni minority from which ISIS draws recruits and supports. Fourth, deploy US military assets to the region in case they’re needed. Fifth, deploy 300 US military advisers to aid the Iraqi army in intelligence gathering.

Rasmussen Reports released a poll today that says a plurality of Americans want to intervene in Iraq’s civil war. You should be skeptical.

According to Rasmussen, 46 percent of American “likely voters” favored American “military airstrikes in Iraq to help its government” fight insurgents. Thirty-two percent opposed the idea, while 22 percent weren’t sure.

Over the weekend, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS for short) released horrifying photos of a massacre of captured Iraqi Army troops. ISIS, a Sunni Muslim extremist group, claims to have slaughtered 1,700 Shia Iraqi soldiers taken prisoner during their rapid march across north-central Iraq. No one has verified the claims about casualties, but the pictures are strong evidence that a massacre happened. Warning that several pictures are posted below, and that some of them are graphic.

This isn’t just ISIS bragging about their murderousness. ISIS has a well-developed social media presence, which they’re using deliberately in this campaign to do two things: intimidate Iraqis who might oppose them and win supporters in their battle with al-Qaeda for influence over the international Islamist extremist movement.

President Obama just wrapped up remarks about the ongoing crisis in Iraq in a speech in the Rose Garden. And he said something really important:

If this is is true, then Obama has ruled out the most likely scenario for military action in Iraq: a short-term drone campaign designed to help the Iraqi military halt ISIS’ momentum. Political reform inside Iraq is really complicated, and would involve serious reform from Nuri al-Maliki’s Shia sectarian government to accommodate Sunni demands. Putting together a credible political reform plan will take a long time, and certainly won’t happen in time for the US to get involved in the immediate fighting.

The crisis in Iraq is tectonically important. Fighting between the Iraqi government and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or, as it’s abbreviated, ISIS) is tearing Iraq apart. The conflict has the potential to transform the politics of the broader Middle East.

It’s also extremely complicated. So we’ve broken down the 11 most important things you need to know to understand the issue, starting from the beginning.

JERUSALEM — 23 years ago, in a long moment of national terror, Israelis strapped on gas masks and fled into bunkers to wait out chemical-weapons tipped SCUD missiles they feared would fly in from Iraq at any moment. Though the worst never came — SCUDs did hit Tel Aviv, but not with chemical weapons — Saddam Hussein was a terrifying and near enough neighbor that Israelis felt an attack could be imminent.

Today, as al-Qaeda-style Islamist terrorists seize Iraq’s northern provinces, as well as the eastern half of Syria, which shares a border with Israel, there is hardly a peep in Israel. The news was not even mentioned on the front page of today’s Ha’aretz newspaper. It instead featured a story on Congressman Eric Cantor’s election defeat and what it meant for Jewish Republicans in the US, which was apparently considered a more relevant question for Israelis than whether a terrorist organization would succeed in taking a neighboring capital.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Iran sent two battalions of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to help the Iraqi government in its battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is hugely important, if not totally surprising given Iran’s intervention in Syria. Iran has the power to crush ISIS in open combat. But Iranian intervention could also make the conflict inside Iraq much worse.

These aren’t just any old Iranian troops. They’re Quds Force, the Guards’ elite special operations group. The Quds Force is one of the most effective military forces in the Middle East, a far cry from the undisciplined and disorganized Iraqi forces that fled from a much smaller ISIS force in Mosul. One former CIA officer called Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today.” Suleimani, the Journal reports, is currently helping the Iraqi government “manage the crisis” in Baghdad.

This is an incredibly striking sentence from The Guardian’s coverage of the militant group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS)‘s takeover of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul:

The Iraqi army outnumbered ISIS by about 40:1 in Mosul. Yet the army still turned tail and ran — ran so fast, in fact, as to leave some of their tanks and helicopters behind.

On Tuesday, a group of Islamic militants that were thrown out of al-Qaeda for being too violent took over Iraq’s second largest city.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (abbreviated as ISIS) kicked the Iraqi Army out of Mosul, a wealthy city in northwestern Iraq. Today, ISIS secured another northern city, Tikrit. It currently controls an area “the size of Belgium,” according to Jason Lyall, a Yale University political scientist who studies insurgencies.