Why US Must Save Lives of Iraqi Christians and Other Minorities
“This is a strategic development, not a tactical development, because this is a group that has lots of money and lots of arms and an image of success they are trading on right now,” former U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross recently told Defense One. “Ultimately what they want to do is show how they are able to take us on. And so we will be drawn into this more and more inevitably because we will have to interrupt their ability to plan and operate lest they become a threat to us.”
The agenda of ISIS is to create a caliphate in the Middle East and beyond. The group has already established control of an adjoining territory comprising much of north-western Iraq and eastern Syria, declaring it a caliphate. Jordan, Lebanon and other nations might be its targets in the near future, causing a strategic havoc for the United States.
ISIS, a Sunni group that was earlier known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, has recruited thousands of fighters having European and U.S. passports, as well as people from the Arab world and the Caucasus. And it initially raised money through rich people in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are all U.S. allies, as Daily Beast journalist Josh Rogin recently wrote.
“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” Rogin quoted Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, as saying. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”
It’s not difficult to foresee foreign ISIS fighters returning “home” and threatening the security of some Western nations, including the U.S., from within.
Moreover, ISIS is eyeing a region that is vital to global energy resources.
More than any other foreign power, the United States knows that the Iraqi government and its military do not have the capability to defeat ISIS. Iraq is afflicted with political divisions and crisis along with social divisions along religious and ethnic lines.
When ISIS first captured the city of Fallujah in the Iraqi province of Al Anbar, about 40 miles west of Baghdad, earlier this year, Washington chose to ignore the threat or was oblivious.
“We had a real opportunity when Fallujah fell,” former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey recently said. “We didn’t know how bad the Iraqi army really was, but we knew they weren’t very good. The administration had the warning and it didn’t act and that is really a tragedy.”
President Obama perhaps has two worries about another long-term involvement in Iraq. One, the possibility of the United States weakening the integrity of Iraq by giving weapons to the Kurdish army, which is seeking independence from Iraq. This is especially a concern because the break-up of the Shia-majority nation can be an advantage to Iran, one of the major enemies of America. Two, a weakened ISIS could mean strengthening of the regime of Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad, who is also from a Shiite sect.
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