The Caliphate Grows, as Does the Case Against Kiev in the Downing of MH17

Islamic State was on the march over the weekend. The jihadis routed the vaunted pesh merga in three Iraqi cities north of Mosul: Zumar, Wana and Sinjar. Tim Arango reports from Baghdad in "Sunni Extremists in Iraq Seize 3 Towns From Kurds and Threaten Major Dam" that

In a statement, ISIS boasted of conquering “more important areas which were controlled by the pesh merga and the secular militias.” With the new territory, which the group described as “the border triangle of Iraq, Syria and Turkey,” ISIS strengthened its hold on territory that traverses the frontiers of Iraq and Syria, giving it an even greater ability to move fighters and weapons between the front lines of the civil wars in both countries. 

According to security officials and residents in the area, the Kurdish forces were routed from Zumar, a town on the road from the Syrian border that also sits on oil fields, and then Sinjar. Sinjar, an isolated city in northwestern Iraq, has been home to a sizable community of Yazidis, Kurdish speakers who ascribe to a religion that combines elements of Islam and ancient Persian religions and who are considered apostates by Muslim extremists. 

Later on Sunday, the militants captured Wana, a strategic town near the Tigris River — putting them within striking distance of the Mosul Dam, the country’s largest and an important supplier of electricity and water. The dam is on the Tigris River about 30 miles northwest of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which fell to ISIS on June 10. 

Yazidi residents of Sinjar, who were reached by phone, were terrified. They told of kidnappings and executions of members of their sect. One resident, Sami Hassan, said he was at work at a hospital on Sunday when an injured ISIS fighter arrived and demanded to know the sect to which Mr. Hassan belonged.

Mr. Hassan said he had escaped from a window while being shot at. 

Another local, Khudhur Rasho, said he had seen two Yazidi men executed and the members of 10 families, their hands bound behind their back, being led away by militants. 

A State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said Sunday that ISIS posed “a dire threat to all Iraqis, the entire region and the international community” and that the United States would continue to seek ways to support the Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish pesh merga. 

The seizing of the three towns in a triangle that stretches north and west from Mosul to the borders of Syria and Turkey allowed the extremists to expand their territory, but the capture of the Mosul Dam would be a bigger prize, and could give the militants the ability to unleash a deadly flood on large populations.

Also over the weekend, Islamic State, operating with Nusra and Free Syrian Army fighters, took the Lebanese border town of Arsal. Hwaida Saad reports in "Fighters From Syria Kill 10 Lebanese Soldiers in Battle Over Border Town" that

Islamist fighters from Syria killed 10 Lebanese soldiers and appeared to have captured more than a dozen others in an armed offensive that left them in a tense battle for control of a Lebanese border town, Lebanon’s army chief said Sunday. 

The new toll was reported one day after fighters from Syria — who included members of rebel brigades, an affiliate of Al Qaeda and the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — carried out a series of attacks on army checkpoints that left them largely in control of the town of Arsal. 

The two-day clash was the most recent spillover into Lebanon from the civil war in neighboring Syria. The two countries share a complex web of political and sectarian ties that have made the violence in Syria resonate in its smaller neighbor, where street clashes, car bombs and political deadlock related to the war in Syria have been common.

Residents, aid workers and Syrian rebels reached in Arsal on Sunday said that insurgents had seized the town but that it was surrounded by the Lebanese Army, which was shelling it.

The weekend gains by Islamic State represent acute problems for U.S. policy in the region. First, while publicly opposed to IS, as the Jan Psaki quote in the Arango story makes clear, the United States has actual done nothing to stem the caliphate's growth. In fact, overwhelming, the Obama administration's reaction to the Salafis military advance on June 10, which led to the capture of Mosul, has been to blame Iraq's Shiite prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. Now that IS has turned its aggression on the Kurds, trusted American allies, and the Kurds are crying out for military assistance, it is going to be interesting to see how the U.S. manages its allegiance to both the House of Saud, the main benefactor of Islamic State, and Kurdistan, where the United States is expanding a drone facility at Erbil.

Patrick Cockburn, who has a new book out on Islamic State, had a piece over the weekend on the Counterpunch web site that is quite bullish on the prospects of continued success for the caliphate. He sees IS as shrewd and disciplined, consolidating its territorial gains while always on the look-out to pluck low-hanging fruit. Cockburn does not have many good things to say about the Shia leadership of Iraq. He predicts a jihadi encirclement and prolonged siege of Baghdad. Things are going to go from bad to worse.

The attack on Lebanon, no favorite of the U.S. because of Hezbollah, represents trouble for Obama due to the presence of Free Syrian Army fighters among the jihadis. The FSA, presumably, remains the United States principal Syrian ally in the battle against the Assad government. Getting the FSA weapons, training and hundreds of millions of dollars is going to be difficult if it is operating in open alliance with, as State Department spokeswoman Psaki says, “a dire threat to all Iraqis, the entire region and the international community.”

So the difficulties mount for Team Obama. The presidential recount that Kerry negotiated in Afghanistan is tottering. Carlotta Gall reports in "Disputes Threaten to Derail Audit of Afghanistan Vote" that an argument between the Adbullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani camps as to what counts as an invalidated ballot brought the recount to a halt over the weekend, necessitating direct intervention by the U.S. State Departmant. The Abdullah camp revealed tape of a telephone conversation which seems to show that there was a criminal conspiracy by the Karzai government and international community to swing the runoff to Ghani:

Also on Sunday, Mr. Abdullah’s campaign manager released an audiotape on which he said Vice President Karim Khalili could be heard directing his followers to support Mr. Ghani in the runoff. An aide to Mr. Khalili has denounced the tape as fake, according to the independent television news channel Tolo TV. 

In the tape the speaker, who sounded like Mr. Khalili but had not been independently verified as such, said that the international community, the election commission and the president all supported Mr. Ghani for president. He even suggested that Afghanistan’s allies would tolerate the use of any means to achieve such a result. 

“Our international friends have promised us that by using any means and using any opportunity, the election outcome must turn in favor of this team, even if these opportunities, even if these means are against electoral mechanisms,” the voice said.

Mr. Abdullah’s campaign manager, Baryalai Arsalai, said the tape proved that the election fraud had been planned to return a victory for Mr. Ghani. 

“This evidence was released today to inform our countrymen that our president, other government elders and the so-called election commission are instruments,” Mr. Arsalai said. The election was a public process, he said, calling it the right of the Afghan people, not the president or the commission chief. “We have a responsibility to let people know that their rights are being violated,” he said.  

Mr. Arsalai vouched for the tape’s authenticity and said details proving that would be released later.

Afghanistan is not going to make it. Thus, with Lebanese territory now under jihadi control and the Taliban soon to be back in power, the caliphate rises, from the Mediterranean to the Durand Line.

Before signing off for the day, it is worth mentioning that the U.S. control of the MH17 narrative is slipping fast. Two good articles over the weekend -- Mike Whitney's "The Unanswered Questions of MH17" and Robert Parry's "Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts" -- marshal the evidence and clarify the events since July 17, and everything points to the Kiev junta. The arguments that Whitney and Parry present are compelling. There is even a possibility that their line of thinking will find its way to the mainstream.