These sectarian dangers emerged starkly in the announcement of a major victory for the Iraqi regime against ISIS in the predominantly Sunni Euphrates river town of Jurf al-Sakhar, just 20 miles north of the Shia holy city of Karbala.
The Washington Post reported that the force that drove ISIS out of the town was composed of about 10,000 Shiite militiamen and was led by Hadi al-Amiri, the leader of the Badr Brigade, whose forces were involved in the death squad killings of Sunnis during the sectarian bloodbath that erupted under the US occupation. Photographs posted online showed Amiri consulting on the battlefield with Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's Quds Force.
To conquer the town, the Shia militias drove out all 80,000 of its inhabitants. Air strikes and artillery fire demolished virtually every building. The militias took the position that anyone remaining in the town was an ISIS combatant.
"We considered every family that stayed Al Qaeda or Daesh [ISIS]," Hassan Shakir Oda, a member of the provincial council and the Badr Brigade, told the Post. "If anyone against Daesh had stayed, Daesh would have killed them."
The town, according to the report, was left "deserted and uninhabitable," the result of a deliberate act of "ethnic cleansing" aimed at driving Sunnis out of areas near Shia population centers. Given the nature of such operations, which the Badr Brigade's leadership indicated it intends to extend into Anbar, the attempt to mobilize Sunni tribes to fight for the US and the Iraqi government will likely prove difficult.
There are reportedly sharp differences within the Obama administration over how to conduct US operations across the border in Syria, where the military intervention has been confined to air strikes conducted largely around the Kurdish city of Kobani on the Turkish border.
Dempsey acknowledged that the proposal to vet and train thousands of "moderate" Syrian rebels -- for which the US Congress appropriated $500 million before going on recess in August -- has not even begun to be implemented. None of the forces currently operating in Syria, which are predominantly Sunni Islamist militias, are considered reliable.
Defense Secretary Hagel confirmed press reports that he had sent a memo, described as highly critical of the US policy on Syria, to National Security Adviser Susan Rice. It reportedly criticized US policy for failing to clarify how Washington will deal with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, against which the US was on the brink of going to war a year ago on the manufactured pretext that Assad's forces had used chemical weapons.
In the present intervention, American officials have stressed that they are concentrating on an "Iraq first" policy. The Obama administration has further announced that any Syrian forces trained by the Pentagon would be prepared to defend areas under their control from ISIS and, presumably, Syrian government troops, rather than go on the offensive.
However, powerful sections of the US ruling establishment, as well as Washington's main regional allies in the war -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies (the same regimes that provided arms and funding for ISIS and other Islamist militias) -- are pressing for the war to be more immediately directed at regime-change in Damascus.
Speaking in Paris Friday after a meeting with President Francois Hollande, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan criticized the US intervention for concentrating overwhelmingly on the fighting in Kobani on the Turkish border. Erdogan's regime is more opposed to the Kurds establishing an autonomous zone there than it is to the ISIS presence. "Why Kobani and not otherwise towns like Idlib, Hama or Homs?" he asked, suggesting that the war should be redirected against the Assad regime.
Hagel also announced at the Pentagon press conference that the 1st Infantry Division's headquarters battalion was arriving in Baghdad on Friday. Some 500 troops are being deployed to provide command-and-control for the growing number of US soldiers being sent into the new Middle East war. The infrastructure is being put in place for a far wider, and far bloodier, intervention.
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