Operation Featherweight: Day 4.

Yesterday the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was also elected President of Turkey. The reason why Erdogan has sought the largely ceremonial office of President is that he has exceeded his term limit as Prime Minister. However Erdogan has made it clear that he intends to change the national constitution to grant the President more power and possibly even scrap term limits all together. This is intended to ensure that Erdogan can remain in power in Turkey for almost a quarter of a century allowing him to act as a modern King or Emperor of Turkey.

Obviously this development is very bad news for democracy and secularism in Turkey. However it is also very bad news for security and stability across the entire region because Erdogan is very much a loose cannon. For the past three years he has been waging an undeclared war against Turkey's neighbour Syria and two weeks ago he threatened to declare war on Israel by sending Turkish warships to invade Israeli territorial waters. Fortunately Erdogan did eventually step back from that threat against Israel but the early indications are that since winning the Presidency Erdogan may seek to resurrect the plan.

Perhaps emboldened by Erdogan's victory the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) who have been strong Turkish allies in Syria launched fresh advances on Baghdad from Anbar province in the west and Salah ad-Din province in the north. This prompted the Iraqi army in Baghdad to increase security around the capital - particularly in the "Green Zone" - by deploying troops on the streets. As this occurred around the time that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki was giving a speech in which he announced his intention to file a criminal complaint against the Iraqi President Faud Masum this has wrongly been described as a coup attempt by some people. However it is of course impossible for a government to mount a coup against itself.

Al-Malaki's speech did rather serve to highlight Iraq's core political problem at the moment. Despite the nation being under foreign invasion since January 2014 the nation did hold a Parliamentary election in April 2014 which returned al-Malaki's State of Law Party as the largest block. As such Masum was obligated to appoint al-Malaki as Prime Minister. Unfortunately the US have somehow got it into their heads that turning Iraq - the Worlds largest oil exporter - into a client state of Saudi Arabia - the Worlds second largest oil exporter - would be a good idea. As a result they have been putting huge pressure on Masum to violate the national constitution and overthrow al-Malaki disregarding the election result. This has obviously paralysed Iraq's response to the ISIL invasion. Today the State of Law Party have compromised by nominating Haider al-Abadi as a replacement Prime Minister and that nomination has been accepted by Masum. However as al-Abadi is a Shia like al-Malaki we are still waiting to find out if the US will permit him to act as Prime Minister.

While this has been going on the US has been focused on telling us how hugely successful things have been in the northern Nineveh and Abril provinces where it is conducting an extremely limited military operation. 

The first of these somewhat wild claims is that US air-strikes have allowed Kurdish Peshmerga forces to re-take the towns of Makhmour and Gweir. While it is undoubtedly true that Peshmerga forces have re-taken the towns of Makhmour and Gweir and there were two US air-strikes in the province on Friday (8/8/14) the two events seem to be almost entirely unrelated. The US air-strikes occured some 80km (50 miles) to the north-west on Friday and destroyed a single artillery gun, a single mortar position and four vehicles which is hardly overwhelming force. Also it is important to remember that the Peshmerga didn't collapse nor were over-run by ISIL's advance. Instead they tactically withdrew in order to re-organise their forces so they could focus their efforts on counter-attacking specific targets. So while it is unlikely that the US air-strikes hurt the Peshmerga's advance it seems that it was something that was going to happen regardless of what the US did or didn't do.

The US have also been testing the bounds of reality somewhat with their claim that air-strikes helped the Peshmerga to rescue 20,000 people from Sinjar mountain. Again the Peshmerga have been operating to the south of Sinjar mountain and on Saturday (9/8/14) and Sunday (10/8/14) the US carried out air-strikes against 9 ISIL vehicles and a single mortar position. However the 20,000 people were rescued from the north side of the mountain by Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) operating out of Syria. The rescued people are of course now in Syria and trying to make their way back to Iraq. As a result this seems to be more a case of the Kurds acting to protect their own while the US stood around watching.

The worrying development from Sinjar mountain has been the discovery that the estimates of the number of people trapped there have been dramatically too low. It now turns out that there were 60,000 rather then 40,000 trapped meaning that even after this rescue there are still 40,000 trapped. This highlights how woefully insufficient the US' efforts to deliver aid to these people have been. According to latest figures the US has succeeded in delivering 74,000 meals but only 15,000 gallons of much more vital water. So even counting the roughly 30% of those deliveries that have been destroyed on impact and are therefore unusable the US has only delivered only 38% of the most desperately needed supplies leaving 62% (25,000 people) at very real risk of dying of thirst in the coming hours and days.

In terms of US military action in the time since my previous there simply hasn't been any. The US has conducted zero strikes against precisely zero targets.

(Originally Posted on 11/8/14 UK - date).