Iraq paramilitary chief: Baghdad asked for Russian help because US coalition not serious about fighting Islamic State

The chief's remarks were met with a sharp retort from an American spokesman, who cited the amount of money the US had spent to train and arm Iraq forces to fight Islamic State during the past year. This ignored the chief's key argument. From the AFP report that cited the remarks:

They [IS - Daesh] are currently recruiting fighters from 108 countries in the world and all of them are going through Turkey, with the [US] coalition's knowledge.  

We told America, "If you are serious about fighting Daesh, you have to stop those arrivals, which are wreaking carnage and destruction on Syria and Iraq."

Yes. What use is it to spend billions to train and equip fighters when one of your allies leaves the door wide open for the enemy?  This is expecting the Iraqis to empty the ocean with a sieve.

It's as nutty as the U.S. asking Russian help to fight Islamic State in Iraq but telling them not to fight Islamic State in Syria.

The problem for the United States: people in that part of the world don't interpret the contradictory actions as nuts. They peg them as a deliberate strategy to destroy their countries and give victory to Islamic State mercenaries and their backers -- Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Who just so happen to be part of the very ill-defined U.S. coalition to fight Islamic State.

To give an analogy for the American readers at Yahoo News, which carried the AFP report: imagine waves of troops from the Axis Powers in World War II constantly coming across the U.S. southern border -- troops endlessly equipped through a rat line that ran from say, Brazil up to Texas.

It's only a rough analogy because the USA wasn't a weak state facing very powerful states when it went into the second world war. But in essence that's what Syria is going through. That's what Iraq is going through. That's also what Afghanistan is going through.   

And it's all being done through proxy -- the hiring and equipping of mercenary armies -- so the predatory states don't have to answer to the United Nations or anyone else about staging invasions to conquer countries.    

In the face of this kind of onslaught, "train and equip" doesn't work out to a viable defense.

Also, for the benefit of those Americans whose reaction to the chief's criticism was to call Iraqi troops cowards for running from Islamic State:  the chief, Hadi al-Ameri, is one of the top leaders of Iraq's Popular Mobilisation paramilitary organization.

Ameri is a key MP in the Badr movement, a Tehran-backed Shiite party which also has a powerful military wing.

So they're not part of the Iraqi military, and I doubt they run from Islamic State or anyone else.

For readers who are just learning that both Baghdad's government and the American one asked Russia for help in fighting Islamic State in Iraq, much information about the Syria-Iraqi conflicts with Islamic State has been suppressed for many months -- even years, in the case of Russia's assistance to Syria. But during the past couple weeks, some people have become downright chatterboxes.

Just yesterday the White House leaked that it had been using the CIA to support various "moderate rebel" groups to fight in Syria. While this had been an open secret for many months, it was the first time the U.S. acknowledged the covert CIA help and named specific groups it was supporting.

And Yossef Bodansky's exhaustively detailed September 25 report, Memo to the West: Moscow’s increasing role in Syria and against the jihadist threat since 2012, reveals the true history of Russia's involvement in Syria's war against the terror armies and in related situations. Usually his analyses are behind a paywall but he shared the report with the public.   

Much in the history would be a complete surprise to the vast majority of Americans. For example, Seffy mentioned almost in passing that Russia intervention, which the Obama Administration requested, helped prevent the fall of Baghdad to Islamic State.

(I would bet that by now everybody who is anybody in the global 'intelligence community' has read the report from this highly respected intelligence analyst.)

So it's 9/11 all over again: Americans are again having to learn the hard way what's actually going on in the world that's of life-or-death importance to them. And it's going to keep being 9/11 all over again, until our government changes its ways and its choice of allies.

I will close with more grim observations from al-Ameri:

"There are some who try to contain Daesh but not really eliminate them and prevent those fighters from returning to Europe, which is where they came from. This lack of seriousness of the international coalition made us change tack. Russia is moving in a very serious way against Daesh."

... Ameri said IS's ability to recruit internationally was unprecedented in the history of terrorism

That, from a man who looks battle-hardened to me. 

Hadi al-Ameri