Too vicious and brutal for them!

The UN Security Council has condemned attacks by Islamist militants in two major Iraqi cities, Mosul and Tikrit.

It said the humanitarian situation around Mosul, where up to 500,000 people have fled, was "dire and is worsening by the moment".

Government forces have stalled the militants' advance near Samarra, a city just 110km (68 miles) north of Baghdad.

The US says it is considering further assistance to Iraq in fighting the militants, without giving details.

The insurgents, from an al-Qaeda offshoot called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), and other Sunni Muslim militants have been consolidating positions in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, which they took on Wednesday, after capturing Mosul, Iraq's second city.


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27806094

Interesting cat- son of a african slave and the crown prince of the House of Saud.

Middle East analyst Juan Cole has a long charge sheet including: the Bush administration, Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi army, and Nouri al-Maliki. But he says the roots of the problem go right back to the "shameful European imperial scramble for the Middle East during and after WWI".

He writes:

Integrating Mosul into British Iraq, over which London placed Faisal b. Hussein as imported king after the French unceremoniously ushered him from Damascus, allowed the British to depend on the old Ottoman Sunni elite, including former Ottoman officers trained in what is now Turkey. This strategy marginalized the Shia south, full of poor peasants and small towns, which, if they gave the British trouble, were simply bombed by the RAF. (Iraq under British rule was intensively aerially bombed for a decade and RAF officers were so embarrassed by these proceedings that they worried about the British public finding out.)


To rule fractious Syria, the French (1920-1943) appealed to religious minorities such as the Alawites and Christians to divide and rule; Alawite peasants were willing to join the colonial military as proud Damascene Sunni families largely were not, but when the age of military dictatorships overtook the postcolonial Middle east, the Alawites were in a good position to take over Syria, which they definitively did in 1970 ...

Nouri al-Maliki can only get Iraq back by allying with nationalist Sunnis in the north. Otherwise, for him simply brutally to occupy the city with Shiite troops and artillery and aerial bombing will make him look like his neighbor, Bashar al-Assad.

see 7.26pm AEST : http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/12/crisis-in-iraq-insurgents-take-major-cities-live-blog#block-53997030e4b00360d270f2df

Our three trillion dollars spent during ten years of occupation has clearly just made things worse for everyone involved. We ignored the hard-gained, long-standing rules of international conduct established after the end of WWII, we invaded and made war on the people of a nation which had not attacked us first. Now we are beginning to pay the price for that "exceptionalism" and arrogance.

The events in Iraq are a result of the actions carried out by the US and the UK, and the situation has spiraled out of control, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told journalists.

“This is an illustration of the complete failure of the adventure that was started by the US and the UK and has now spiraled out of control completely. We express our solidarity with the Iraqi authorities, the Iraqi people who should restore peace and security in their country, but the actions of our Western partners raise a lot of questions,” Lavrov said.

Lavrov noted that 11 years ago the US president announced the victory of democracy in Iraq, and that “the situation has deteriorated in geometrical progression.”

“The unity of Iraq has been called into question. The rampant terrorism is taking place due to the fact that the occupation troops didn’t pay any attention to the interior political processes, didn’t help the national dialogue, and only pursued their own interests,” Lavrov said.

Here's my answer: if you want boots on the ground, go ask Halliburton, GW Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Rummy , etc to provide with their own families/oil tycoons.

No more blood for oil, especially if it's poor kids and not the richies' kids.

The US and allies wont let Baghdad fall or the oil fields taken.

Tough stuff. I feel for the citizens that just want to go about their daily lives.