How US and Britain Were Warned of Isis Advance in Iraq but 'Turned a Deaf Ear

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/32135-how-us-and-britain-were-warned-of-isis-advance-in-iraq-but-turned-a-deaf-ear

Five months ago, a Kurdish intelligence "asset" walked into a base and said he had information to hand over. The capture by jihadists the month before of two Sunni cities in western Iraq was just the beginning, he said.

There would soon be a major onslaught on Sunni territories.

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis), a renegade offshoot of al-Qaeda, was about to take its well-known cooperation with leftovers of the regime of Saddam Hussein, and his former deputy Izzat al-Douri, to a new level.

His handlers knew their source of old, and he had always proved reliable, officials told The Telegraph. So they listened carefully as he said a formal alliance was about to be signed that would lead to the takeover of Mosul, the biggest city north of Baghdad, home to two million people.

Parts of the city were already a no-go zone due to the terrorist presence. Westerners were advised not to enter the city due to the risk of attack or kidnap. Isis was partly funded by extorting a tax from local businesses.

But the group was too small to carry out its plans on its own. These involved an ambitious sweep through northern Iraq, to take on Baghdad itself.

[pampango]

1. Not too surprising that Kurds wanted more direct Western involvement in the fight in Iraq.

Their claims about the intelligence they provided the West are partly an attempt to increase the pressure to provide more support now. ... It's the lack of resolve in the West that is the most important thing.

"I have completely lost hope in America after listening to President Barack Obama," Mr Talabani said. "I blame him personally for what has happened in Syria, in the Middle East, in Iraq at the moment. I have no hope any more. "... when we asked for American weapons to help us, they refused."

"The British should still somehow support the Iraqi army, and what's left of Iraq."

"Both the Americans and the British had options to upgrade their presence on the ground many months before this happened but seem not to have acted on that," said Michael Stephens, an analyst with the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank close to Whitehall. "That meant the assets that should have been available to us weren't really when this kicked off."

I suppose the Kurds frustration with the refusal of the US or the UK to "upgrade their presence on the ground" but most of us think that doing so would not solve the problems in Iraq and Syria.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. If anyone's wondering, that was written in June 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10918607/How-US-and-Britain-were-warned-of-Isis-advance-in-Iraq-but-turned-a-deaf-ear.html

'Reader Supported News' has played it's old trick of copying articles from long ago and making it hard to know when they're from, but still labelling them as 'news'. "Reader-Curated Archive" would be a more accurate name.

ISIS haven't reached Baghdad yet, and al-Maliki no longer leads the Iraqi government/