A 17-month U.S. effort to retrain and reunify Iraq's regular army has failed to create a large number of effective Iraqi combat units or limit the power of sectarian militias, according to current and former U.S. military and civilian officials.

Concern about the shortcomings of the American attempt to strengthen the Iraqi military comes as Iraqi government forces and Shi’ite militias have launched an offensive to retake the city of Falluja from the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). Aid groups fear the campaign could spark a humanitarian catastrophe, as an estimated 50,000 Sunni civilians remain trapped in the besieged town.

The continued weakness of regular Iraqi army units and reliance on Shi’ite militias, current and former U.S. military officials said, could impede Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s broader effort to defeat ISIS and win the long-term support of Iraqi Sunnis. The sectarian divide between the majority Shi'ite and minority Sunni communities threatens to split the country for good.

Critics agree that there have been some military successes, citing the continued victories of American-trained Iraqi Special Forces, who have been fighting ISIS for two years. But the presence of 4,000 American troops has failed to change the underlying Iraqi political dynamics that fuel the rise and growing power of sectarian militias.

Retired U.S. Lieutenant General Mick Bednarek, who commanded the U.S. military training effort in Iraq from 2013 to 2015, said the Iraqi army has not improved dramatically in the past eight months. He blamed a variety of problems, from a lack of Iraqis wanting to join the military to the resistance of some lower-level Iraqi officers to sending units to American training.

“The Iraqi military’s capacity hasn’t improved that much—part of that is the continuing challenge of recruitment and retention,” said Bednarek. “Our (officers) train who shows up, and the issue is we are not sure who is going to show up.”

Two senior U.S. military officers and Bednarek said that with few exceptions, the most effective and only truly non-sectarian Iraqi government fighting force is the Iraqi Special Forces, sometimes called the Counter-Terrorism Service. American officials expressed worry that the Special Forces units may burn out after nearly two years of continuous combat.

MILITIA INFLUENCE

Across Iraq, regular Iraqi army units have largely watched from the sidelines as Iraqi Special Forces and Shi'ite militias have reclaimed land from ISIS, current and former U.S. military officials said. Militias have repeatedly taken advantage of the power vacuums that have emerged after Islamic State defeats.

The Iraqi military operations command of Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, is dominated by a Shi'ite militia leader, Abu Mehdi Mohandis, according to a current U.S. military officer, an Iraqi security official and three Iraqi officials who monitor the province.

Mohandis serves as the chief state administrator for Shi’ite paramilitary forces. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned him in 2009 for allegedly attacking U.S. forces in Iraq. He was also convicted in absentia by Kuwaiti courts for the 1983 bombings of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait.

The Fifth Iraqi Army Division in eastern Diyala province is considered to be under the command of the Badr group, a powerful Shi’ite militia and political party with strong ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to four current and former U.S. military officers.

In Baghdad, U.S. military officers estimate that 10 percent to 20 percent of the 300 officers who run the Iraqi military's Operations Command have an affinity or association with either the Badr militia or the Shi’ite religious leader Muqtada al Sadr.

And after Iraqi Special Forces, aided by U.S. air strikes, captured a strategic oil refinery in the town of Baiji in October, Shi’ite militias looted all of its salvageable equipment, according to a senior U.S. military official and three Iraqi government officials.

Over the past year, U.S. military officers have struggled to ensure that militias do not seize American weaponry delivered to the main Iraqi army supply depot in Taji and to a brigade in the Saqlawiya region.

“We would transfer arms to units in those areas—and either because of corrupt commanders or outright robbery—they would end up in the hands of the militia groups,” said one U.S. officer. The officer noted, however, that controls have been tightened and the number of cases was small. "You can't eliminate it entirely. It's just not realistic."

Iraqi government and senior paramilitary leaders said the reports of poor training and Shi'ite militia dominance in the military are false. They said the militias follow the orders of the prime minister and his military commanders.

Iraqi defense ministry spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool called the militias “an official body connected with the office of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces." He said they take their orders only from government officials and "have a great role in supporting the army forces and the federal police.”

Mohammed Bayati, a former human rights minister and senior Badr group leader, now commands forces in northern Salahuddin Province. He said the Shi’ite paramilitaries fall under the army, police and regular military chain-of-command. Bayati told Reuters that any reports of militias operating on their own were false.

“Yesterday, I was in the Salahuddin Operations Command,” he said. "All orders are coming from the police and army leadership." The Shi'ite militias "are supporting the army and police.”

The spokesman for the government umbrella body that oversees the militias, Ahmed Al-Asadi, said the Shi'ite forces did not loot the Baiji refinery. "I deny totally such allegations," he said. Islamic State, he said, stole and destroyed equipment.

The office of Prime Minister Abadi and the Iraqi Embassy in Washington didn't respond to requests for comment.

AMERICAN CONCERNS

But current and former U.S. military officials and local Sunni leaders say the militias continue to take advantage of the vacuums that emerge in predominantly Sunni areas after ISIS forces are defeated. A lack of strong regular army units allows the militias to remain the dominant players.

Norman Ricklefs, a former U.S. government adviser to the Iraqi interior and defense ministries, said the state has still not filled the void in most areas retaken from ISIS. He said militias are the most powerful they have been since Iraqi government forces defeated them in a series of battles across Iraq in 2008. Ricklefs regularly visits Iraq and maintains ties with the Iraqi security apparatus and Shi’ite and Sunni politicians.

“In the cities the militias occupy—Samarra and Tikrit and significant parts of eastern Baghdad—they are the most powerful force,” Ricklefs said. "For the first time since 2008, the government has lost control of large parts of cities" to Shi’ite militias.

One senior U.S military official said the setbacks call into question the Obama administration's overall strategy in Iraq. He said any military training effort would fail until the U.S. put more pressure on Iraq's Shi'ite and Sunni political leaders to strike a genuine power-sharing agreement.

"We need to accelerate the reconciliation piece to make Sunnis feel they are part of the government,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “Are we really in any way focused on that?"

Obama administration officials said the U.S. strategy is succeeding and Iraqi forces have steadily grown stronger with American support.

U.S. advisers have helped train existing units and set up two new Iraqi divisions, according to American and Iraqi officials. They achieved this despite struggling with shortfalls in Iraqi funding to hire new soldiers and a shortage of Iraqi Shi’ite volunteers.

But there has been little improvement in overall Iraqi army combat readiness, according to a U.S. civilian official, one ex-official, a former general and three current senior U.S. military officers.

Last October, American military officials estimated that only five Iraqi army divisions were ready for battle and put their combat readiness at only 60 to 65 percent. Today, those figures have increased only marginally, the officials said.

'LION'S SHARE' OF PROGRESS

The U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Colonel Chris Garver, said that despite the difficulties, U.S. forces have seen Iraqi army units improve after training. He also cited advances by army brigades in areas around Falluja as signs of success.

But Garver acknowledged that the lion’s share of military offensives has been spearheaded by the Special Forces, and that two years of battle are taking a toll on Iraq’s elite soldiers.

“The Government of Iraq has relied heavily on the Iraqi special operations forces, and the potential for these forces being depleted into combat ineffectiveness is a real concern,” he said.

Garver said the regular Iraqi army continues to struggle with increasing its ranks. “Recruiting and funding have both been well-documented challenges for the GOI," or Government of Iraq. "These are areas the GOI must address.”

Brigadier Rasool, the Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman, rejected any suggestion that the regular Iraqi army was not an equal partner to the Iraqi Special Forces.

“We have troops who were able to retake land from Daesh,” Rasool said, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “After the fall of Mosul, the Ministry of Defense’s joint command has resupplied and retrained the Iraqi security forces.”

The current and former U.S. officials contended that the Falluja offensive is again exposing the weakness of regular army units.

"The regular army does not seem to have been rebuilt," Ricklefs said, "and it’s a real pity.”

(Newsweek)

Watch out.

There are a few words no one likes to hear in economics, but the most feared one might just be "recession."

Just because it is worrying, however, doesn't stop people from saying it.

And after Friday's economic data misses from both the Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs report and the ISM's nonmanufacturing Purchasing Manager's Index, which measures the health of the services economy, there are a few voices that have uttered this feared term.

Barclays' economists brought up worries of a possible recessionafter the jobs report number.

"Since 1960, when payroll growth has dipped persistently below its recovery-period average, the US economy has more often than not found itself in an NBER-defined recession 9 to 18 months in the future," said Barclays.

"Hence, that payroll growth has fallen below the current expansion average in three of the past four months signals to us that risks of a near- to medium-term recession have risen."

JP Morgan's proprietary model that gauges the risk of a recession starting over the next 12 months also hit its highest mark since the financial crisis on Friday. Most of this was on the back of lackluster economic data.

"With the rally in risk markets over the last month, our models based on financial market pricing now see a recession risk moderately below our model based on macroeconomic data," wrote JP Morgan economist Jesse Edgerton.

"Since last week, we have seen disappointments in the Dallas Fed measures of manufacturing and nonmanufacturing sentiment, the ISM nonmanufacturing index, and the Conference Board measure of consumer confidence."

Edgerton also followed that up by highlighting, as we have before, the decline in profit margins. Typically, when profits margins begin to decline that is an indication that a recession is not too far away.

Some have speculated that the margin compression will not lead to a recession because it is similar to the oil-led margin drop in the late 1980s. In that case, as oil prices improved (like they are now) margins recovered and the US avoided the recession.

Edgerton noted, however, that there is one difference that makes this more like a typical profit decline, thus heralding the start of recession. Here's Edgerton:

But we see less impetus for a 1980s-style rebound in other industries. In particular, the dollar was likely a key contributor to the rebound (Figure 3). It is true that the real dollar rose sharply through early 1985, contributing to the initial margin squeeze. But then the real dollar fell 28% by 1988, driving double-digit growth in real exports that contributed more than 1%-pt to GDP growth and presumably boosted profits, margins, capex, and hiring. At the moment, with the global economy struggling to grow above trend and the Fed debating more hikes in response to a tightening US labor market, we see little reason to expect another historic dollar depreciation.

Let's be clear, a few data points do not equal a recession. The average rate of hiring is still fairly healthy and some downturn in the headline number was expected. Consumer spending is still high and forecasts for GDP growth remain strong.

That doesn't mean that Friday's numbers aren't worrying — they are — but perhaps the "recession" whispers will stay just whispers for now.

(businessinsider.com)

Op-Ed by Afraa Dagher

No reasonable person would deny the de facto role of the US in supporting the terrorists gangs in Syria. Since the very beginning of this proxy war against Syria, they were the crystallization of the West’s plan to achieve the destruction of Syria and its army, which, in turn, also helps the Zionist-Israeli plan regarding a new Middle East and a greater “Israel.”

The US depended on its regional allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey to destroy Syria by funding, training, smuggling of every kind of armed terrorist to the country.

The opposition recently revealed that a secret document has been signed between themselves and Qatar. In 2012, to get support, in exchange of overthrow president Assad, the Saudi kingdom funded the extremist Islamist terrorists in order to turn over power in Syria to those extremists!

Why doesn’t the US and Israel want Assad in as head of the Syrian government? Why do they prefer a caliphate and “moderate rebels”?

First, it should be remembered that these “rebels” vowed to destroy Syria and reduce the number of Syrian Soldiers.

Second, they never made any demands regarding the Israeli-occupied territories.

These terrorists would give more territory to Turkey.

They would allow the Qatari gas line to cross the Syrian lands!

And what did they achieve from their vows to the US?

Nothing but more sabotage of Syria and its people! Not only that, but they are now running private businesses under international protection due to their classification as a moderate opposition!

These businesses often manage the transfer of refugees from Turkey to Europe on board rickety boats, essentially human trafficking, but when the transit across the sea results in death, they blame the Syrian government. This is in addition to the trade in human organs back and forth between the terrorists, Turkey, and Israel! We should also mention the theft of Syrian archeology and the transfer of it to the West. Also, the drug smuggling operations and the smuggling of terrorists.

Lastly, we can’t forget how this war and the Western sanctions has destroyed the value of our currency too.

However, that was never a concern for the US!

Still, after more than five years of war against Syria, the West and its proxies have not achieved one goal. There is no transitional government. There is no division of Syrian land.

It was depressed for the US, the failure of its regional allies and local clients in changing the government, break the Syrian Army and divide the Syrian land!

For this reason, it is the time for the U.S. to run its media campaign, claiming that the US, alongside with its local allies, are liberating Raqqa, a Syrian province, which has fallen into the hands of ISIS. Of course, this city was conquered “rebels” earlier in this war but the “rebels,” for some reason the U.S. has never explained, simply gave it to ISIS.

The US jets, tanks and commandos have supported the same terrorist groups under the name of the Free Syrian Army as well as what they call the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF. But even to attach the label “Syrian” to any of these groups is disingenuous. There is nothing Syrian about them. The SDF is just another Free Syrian Army as it includes Canadians, Africans and Kurds, the latter being either extremists themselves or fighting for a separate state. I would ask, “Why has the YPG never coordinated with the Syrian Army, since the military represents the whole of Syria and not merely one race, sect, or group?”

In Western media, the purpose of supporting these groups was to defeat ISIS but what about the real purpose?

It is to gain political victories in the Geneva talks, to support the federalization of Syria, and to support the case of separation and to divide the people and the country!

How could anyone believe that the ones who invaded Syria on board enemy tanks would be the ones to liberate our land?

Any group that joined American troops in the north of Syria should never be trusted. This brings to our memory the traitors and idiots in Iraq who actually welcomed the U.S. “liberation.” Indeed, the plan of the United States is to give entire areas of Syria to racial groups, sects, or religious affiliations so that it can break a unified country currently in opposition to its agenda and subsequently gain greater influence of all the resulting “autonomous” regions.

Thus, to thwart this evil plan, we trust that the Syrian Arab Army and the Hezbollah resistance movement backed by their allies, are the only ones who could liberate this land. And the real Syrians who believe in the unity of Syria, whatever their race, sect, or ethnicity are the only ones who have the right to make decisions about Syria.

At the time the US and its agents use their money, which is tainted by Syrian blood, to divide Syria and impose the federalization on this country, for the advantage of a Zio-US project, the Syrian people, with their blessed army, have been paying in blood for the sovereignty and unity of their homeland.

Afraa Dagher is a political analyst currently residing in Syria. She has made numerous media appearances commenting on the current state of affairs inside Syria as well as the nature of the current crisis. She has appeared on RT, PRESS TV, and is a regular guest on Activist Post writer Brandon Turbeville’s Truth on the Tracks radio program. Her website iswww.SyrianaAfrona.wordpress.com.

By Justin Gardner

In April, we learned once again how subservient the U.S. is to the interests of Saudi Arabia when Obama poured his efforts into blocking a bill that would have allowed Saudi Arabia’s government to be held accountable for any role it played in the 9/11 attacks.

The drama centers on “the 28 pages” of a congressional investigative report into 9/11—which are still being kept from the public—that details the extent of foreign government support for Al-Qaeda. The pages could expose Saudi financial and logistical connections with the 9/11 hijackers.

The Wahhabist regime quickly responded by threatening to crash the dollar by liquidating their U.S. assets. Lawmakers quickly acquiesced with a last-minute amendment to the bill that allows for the U.S. attorney general and secretary of state to stop any pending legislation against the Saudis.

Families of 9/11 victims and all those who question the official 9/11 narrative were left stunned by this capitulation. A brutal Middle Eastern dictatorship obviously has much more influence over our government than the citizens. Saudi Arabia has great potential to hold the U.S. economy and government hostage through its purchase of Treasury holdings, but how did this special arrangement come to be?

Bloomberg has, for the first time ever, uncovered the amount of Saudi Arabia’s holdings, and the secret deal began 41 years ago to hide the kingdom’s influence over U.S. government actions.

The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.

It took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, [former Deputy Treasury Secretary] Parsky said. But at the end of months of negotiations, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret,” according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database.

Parsky was there during the Saudi talks that took place in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in July 1974. He was assistant to Secretary William Simon, who was tasked by President Nixon to save America’s economy by making a deal with the kingdom and its newfound petrodollar wealth. The OPEC oil embargo, put in place in response to aiding Israel’s Yom Kippur war, was wreaking havoc on U.S. inflation and the stock market.

Simon, a former Wall St. bond trader and director of the Treasuries desk at Salomon Brothers, helped hatch a plan to finance America’s growing deficit. He “understood the appeal of U.S. government debt and how to sell the Saudis on the idea that America was the safest place to park their petrodollars.”

Saudi Arabia’s wealth was lusted after by several Western countries and Japan, but the U.S. managed to get the golden egg. However, King Faisal was worried that their money would be spent by the U.S. to further aid Israel’s military conquests, thus jeopardizing the kingdom’s rule.

By Claire Bernish

A child is killed in Yemen every four hours — but partly because 60 percent of those deaths in 2014, alone, were at the hands of the U.S.-supported, Saudi-led coalition, it has now been blacklisted by the United Nations.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon explained the constant bombardment of the country had taken a “devastating toll” on its civilian population — particularly on children who are maimed and killed by the hundreds, if not thousands.

In a statement after the release of the Annual Report on children in armed conflict, Ban noted a six-fold increase in the number of children killed in Yemen since 2014.

“Emerging and escalating crisis had a horrific impact on boys and girls,” the statement also noted. “Grave violations against children increased dramatically as a result of the escalating conflict.”

In support of the current, disputed Yemeni government — and to push back Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and their allies — Saudi Arabia launched its intensive military campaign in early 2015. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar have since joined that coalition, which the U.S., though ostensibly not directly involved in fighting, supports through intelligence and other means — largely in the form of bombs.

But U.S. support comes with a heavy price — and has come under intense criticism from lawmakers — particularly after news in September the Saudi coalitionbombed a Yemeni wedding, killing 135 innocent people. Suspicion the coalition could be committing war crimes and the thousands of civilian deaths could theoretically be backed by its new spot on a U.N. blacklist.

“As I read the conflict in Yemen,” said Sen. Christopher S. Murphy at a Congressional hearing earlier in 2016, “I have a hard time figuring out what the U.S. national security interests are.”

He added that “the result of the coalition campaign has been to kill a lot of civilians, has been to sow the seed of humanitarian crisis, and to create space for these groups — these are very extremists groups that we claim to be our priority in the region — to grow.”

Scrutiny over U.S. involvement in Yemen should now intensify with the blacklisting of the coalition. If, as Murphy suggested, no actual, valid defense of U.S. national security stands as reason for its support of the blacklisted coalition, perhaps no further assistance should be provided.

In an email to Foreign Policy in March, Sen. Patrick Leahy — who authored legislation barring the U.S. from providing security assistance to countries responsible for gross human rights abuses — raised similar concerns.

“The humanitarian crisis in Yemen has received too little attention, and it directly, or indirectly, implicates us. The reports of civilian casualties from Saudi air attacks in densely populated areas compel us to ask if these operations, supported by the United States, violate” the aforementioned law. Indeed, he continued, “there is the real possibility that [the air campaign] is making a bad situation worse.”

Ban also blacklisted Houthi rebel groups for the same civilian injuries and killings as the coalition.

“In Yemen, owing to the very large number of violations attributed to the two parties, the Houthis/Ansar Allah and the Saudi Arabia-led coalition are listed for killing and maiming and attacks on schools and hospitals,” the statement continued.

“In several situations of conflict, aerial operations contributed to creating complex environments in which large numbers of children were killed and maimed,” explained Leila Zerrougui, U.N. special representative for children in armed conflict. “State-allied armed groups and militia have also increasingly been used to fight in support of Government forces, in some cases recruiting and using children.”

Ban urged all U.N. member nations to adhere to international law by protecting civilians wherever armed conflict continues, adding, “It is unacceptable that the failure to do so has resulted in numerous violations of children’s rights.”

Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.