The Air War Against ISIL Sunday August 28th, 2016 at 8:05 AM
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Attrition: The Air War Against ISIL
August 28, 2016: The American led air campaign in Iraq and Syria is now two years old. In those two years there have been nearly 15,000 air strikes, with 75 percent of them carried out by American aircraft. So far 60 percent of the air strikes have been against targets in Iraq. The main objective of the air campaign was to cripple and then destroy ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). About a third of the airstrikes were against non-ISIL targets and most of the attacks on ISIL hit buildings (especially warehouses full of weapons and supplies), parking lots (for military and civilian vehicles used by ISIL) and fortifications. Since the air campaign began ISIL has lost half the territory it controlled and over 40 percent of its personnel strength.
Things got a lot worse for ISIL in early 2016 because the American led air campaign has become much more effective. While the number of warplanes used over Syria and Iraq has not changed much since the bombing campaign began in 2014 the ROE (Rules of Engagement) has. Thus the number of weapons “released” has gone way up. There were 269 weapons used in August 2014 and this rose to 1,888 in December 2014 then to 2,823 in July 2015. By the end of 2015 it was over 3,000 a month and headed for 4,000. The increased weapons count correlated with the growth in ISIL deserters and civilians who escaped ISIL territory reporting higher casualties from air strikes. The U.S. gradually loosened up its ROE in 2015 and accelerated this after October when Russian warplanes began operating in Syria. The Russians had a much less strict ROE and their air attacks were doing far more damage to ISIL and other rebel groups despite the heavy use of human shields by ISIL. All this led to more dead civilians but the amount of damage done to ISIL increased so much that in the last year ISIL manpower in Iraq and Syria has declined about 20 percent.
Sufficient data was obtained from people (ISIL deserters and civilians fleeing ISIL territory) and electronic and photo surveillance to come up with accurate date on ISIL personnel losses. This U.S. intelligence believes that since September 2015 ISIL appears to have lost 25,000 fighters in combat (mainly in Syria, Iraq and Libya). Thus about 45,000 ISIL fighters have died since 2013. It’s believed that ISIL currently has only about 20,000 fighters available, mostly in Syria and Iraq. There are a few thousand more in northern Libya, eastern Afghanistan and Egypt. In all five countries ISIL is under heavy attack.
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August 28, 2016, 8:41 AM (IDT)
Four rockets were launched at the southeastern Turkish airport of Diyarbakir Saturday night, causing no casualties or disruptions. The attack, apparently by the Turkish Kurdish insurgent PKK, came four days after Turkey’s military incursion into Syria which drove ISIS back from the border town of Jarablus but was also aimed at evicting Syrian Kurdish fighters from the border regions with Washington's assent.. The Syrian Kurdish YPG militia has been striking back. In the ensuing clashes, one Turkish soldier was killed and three wounded when an YPG rocket hit their tank and Turkish F-16 jets bombed a YPG position and also hit six Islamic State targets.
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The Middle East’s Good Old Days by Jack Caravelli
After nearly eight years in office, most observers would conclude that President Barack Obama has done little to advance, and may well have undermined, American interests in the Middle East. While he would tout the Iran nuclear deal as perhaps his greatest foreign policy achievement, a debatable proposition in itself, the region is embroiled in a series of crises the current administration seems unable to address or understand.
In their masterful new book, Ray Takeyh and Steve Simon contend that in the not too distant past the United States was far more successful in the region. As they write, “by the time the Cold War ended the United States did achieve its core objective—the exhaustion of a rival superpower, establishment of a robust system of air and naval bases, preservation of a steady supply of oil, and emergence of a secure Israel.”
In making their case, the authors rely on ample research and their own considerable expertise, as both have served at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The book’s ten chapters cover events in the Middle East from the end of World War II through the 1991 end of the Cold War. Readers are taken through the early days of the Palestinian problem, the Six Day War, the Iran-Iraq War, and the first Gulf war. American political maneuvering, backed by military power, combined to produce outcomes favorable to U.S. interests.
Their analysis is persuasive but still subject to challenge. As the authors acknowledge, the ten examples they address—albeit significant—are but a subset of the much broader and decades-long story of the Middle East’s political and security struggles. Would a broader or different sample have rendered the same conclusions? The authors are silent on this but readers can reach their own conclusions. This is at most a quibble with an otherwise first-rate book.
Given past successes and current policy chaos, the conclusions Takeyh and Simon draw are insightful. Nonetheless, in looking across recent events in the Middle East, they take what to some must seem like the politically incorrect position that it is those in power in the Middle East who bear the heaviest and most direct responsibility for the current state of affairs. “Whatever miscalculations America may have made, the principal cause of the region’s disorders are its leaders and the choices and decisions that they have made.”
There is no lack of evidence to support that judgment, but readers also may easily conclude that the region’s current state of disarray is in no small measure a product of eight years of Washington’s indifference and skewed priorities that are wholly at odds with the nuance and past successes the authors write about so cogently.
The post The Middle East’s Good Old Days appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.
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Turkey sent tanks across the border to help Syrian rebels drive the Islamic State group out of the border town of Jarablus last week.
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