Thursday, October 16, 2014

If you thought the money was well spent


Just consider the resulting "professional" Iraqi Army response when US aircover is diverted to another target.
With the U.S. seemingly focused on helping Kurdish militias fight off an Islamic State advance at Kobani on the Turkey-Syria border, Islamist militants this week have seized one key military base in Iraq’s Anbar province and have laid siege to another, with no major increase in U.S. air support for the beleaguered Iraqi security forces.

Reports from Kobani indicate that intense U.S. airstrikes there have driven back Islamic State fighters, while in Anbar the militants’ advance has been unrelenting. On Tuesday, the Islamic State captured heavy artillery and an unknown number of weapons including machine guns and ammunition when it overran an Iraqi base outside the city of Hit. Now the group has surrounded the Ain Asad air base, northwest of Hit, the country’s third largest military facility.

Yet the number of U.S. strikes in Anbar over the past week has plummeted compared with the previous week and have been far fewer than those launched near Kobani, a Kurdish city whose strategic importance is in dispute but where the fighting can be viewed easily from hillsides inside Turkey.

The U.S. Central Command has announced just five airstrikes in Anbar in the past week, compared with 16 last week, while the number of air assaults near Kobani in the same period totals 70 – 39 of them in the last two days.

Iraqi troops at the Ain Asad base in Anbar say they are desperate for U.S. air support.

“It’s not possible to get in any supplies by land,” explained a member of Iraq’s security forces inside the base reached by phone. Speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter, he said the base is surrounded, and while the Iraqi military has delivered some supplies by air, the forces holed up there are not hopeful.

“Forces in the base are almost collapsed psychologically and scared,” he said. “I cannot say for how long we can hold the base.”

What his men need now, he said, is air cover.

“If air cover is provided,” he said, “we will attack the militants in the nearby villages and stop their advance.”
DAESH has achieved total air superiority over the Iraqi army without having a single airplane. And all that equipment and years of training for the Iraqis pays off, for DAESH.

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