Middle East Conflict Between Sunnis And Shiites Makes ISIS Defeat More Difficult
The conflict between Shiite (Shia) and Sunni Muslims throughout the Middle East map is usually the driving force of what complicates every effort made by Western countries to engage.
Last week, Reuters was one of the sources to provide an update on the status the U.S.-led coalition forces — which includes Shiite militias — to battle the Islamic State in Iraq, and their Middle Eastern strongholds. The report included the insight of those in the intelligence department who have said that Islamic State could make gains even as they’re being defeated.
The report says ISIS could still cause a lot of damage by hitting soft targets, planting dirty bombs, and triggering lone wolves throughout the world.
Some intelligence officials are also saying that because the U.S.-led coalition forces have collaborated with Shiite and Kurdish groups, that Sunnis will be further motivated by the fall of the Islamic State to stage more attacks.
In short, the suggestion by military leaders is that defeating ISIS could backfire.
It also points to a quote by Seth Jones who is an analyst with RAND on potential guerrilla warfare.
“It looks like the areas that the Islamic State has lost, they are generally abandoning, and that would mean preparing to fight another day.”
This view isn’t new as it already happened toward the end of the Bush administration, as U.S. forces were hampered down with precision guerrilla strikes.
On the same day as the press briefing, during the international round up hour of The Diane Rehm Show, a caller named Jerrod talked about the Syrian conflict where he said that lately, U.S. forces have provided more support to the Kurds and Shiite militias to handle most of the conflicts on the ground, sending the wrong message to the Sunni groups.
Reported presence in Falluja of Shiite militiamen raises concerns within American military: https://t.co/T45bPA8SQt pic.twitter.com/jRD4TRAB94
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) June 23, 2016
To this, a journalist for al-Monitor responded.
“Yeah. I mean, you sound like a lot of the Syrians opposition that I talk to and that are on Twitter and saying the same thing. You know, why doesn’t the U.S. support a moderate Sunni force. And, you know, of course the U.S. does in Syria, the Free Syrian Army. But they found, I think, the Kurds more effective fighters and been able to take territory more.”
Further on in the discussion, it was mentioned that Assad stirs up the conflict again and again by going in and killing more people, much as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki tried to do with a peaceful protester after the U.S. left Iraq, and he began to purge the Iraqi army of Sunnis.
But the Reuters article also points to this.
“Sunnis in Iraq no longer view the ISIL radicals as liberators, and the Shiite role in the fighting is less important than it was a year ago, officials in Baghdad told Reuters. As a result, they said, the Iraqi army has gained Sunni acceptance and is seen less as a Shiite-led sectarian force than it was under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.”
In an article published on Inquisitr about the difficulties of the battle in Fallujah, where Shiite militia were said to not be a part of the campaign for fear that they would fan the flames of sectarianism.
Many sources, along with the Reuters article, have reported that a Shiite militia has executed 100 Sunni fighters outside of Fallujah, saying that they were ISIS fighters. This became an issue, especially since the same Inquisitr article points to one case, where a Shiite militia group was making propaganda videos saying that all Sunnis in Fallujah were actually terrorists, motivating the Shiite groups to kill them when they caught them, as there were no innocent civilians there.
[Image by Hadi Mizban/AP Photo]
