Operation Featherweight: Week 2, Day 6.

Five days after the start of the operation to liberate Mosul Dam the US  is continuing to carry out air-strikes against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) positions in and around the dam. The US has not yet confirmed these air-strikes let alone provided information about the number of strikes and what they have targeted. However it is believed that in the past 24 hours there have been roughly 12 strikes against ISIL artillery and mortar positions which have been shelling Kurdish Peshmerga forces who are attempting to hold the dam.

On Tuesday (19/8/14) Iraqi forces launched an operation to liberate the city of Tikrit from ISIL. In this effort the Iraqi military received absolutely no air-support from the US leaving them with little protection from ISIL artillery, mortar, heavy machine gun and sniper fire. This combined with ISIL's usual tactic of heavily mining the area around their positions meaning that the Iraqi advance was quickly ground to a halt and the operation was abandoned on Tuesday afternoon less 12 hours after it began.

If you needed further evidence of the difference that US air-power can make on the battlefield it was provided by ISIL themselves. On Tuesday evening they decided to execute James Foley a US photo-journalist who has been held hostage in the ISIL stronghold of Raqqa in eastern Syria. The video of this beheading which has been widely circulated online was entitled "A Message to America" and made it quite clear that Foley was being executed in response to US air-strikes. It went on to threaten that another US journalist - Steven Sotloff - who is also being held hostage would also be executed unless the US immediately stops its air-strikes.

This is quite clearly a sign that US air-strikes are hurting ISIL and hurting them badly. The purpose of the execution video was firstly to intimidate US President Obama into stopping the air-strikes because Obama has certainly got a reputation for being easily scared off. In the second instance it was intended to intimidate western journalists into not travelling to Iraq to cover the conflict. After all it seems very clear that Obama only took any action against ISIL when pressure from journalists left him with no other option.

In this first objective ISIL are likely to have taken encouragement from the statement given by Obama today in response to the execution. In this response Obama seemed weak once again reprising his role as the "Consoler in Chief" talking at length about Foley's work, his family and how everybody really misses him. Obama then sort of drifted into theology claiming that ISIL do not represent Muslims (a fact that Muslims are already well aware of) and that no god would stand for what they did to Foley and what they do every day. Obama did eventually come close to something approaching tough talk when he declared ISIL to be a cancer that needed to be cut out. However he did not explain how America was going to remove that cancer or if it even intended to do so.

Hopefully the US Navy's response to the execution of Foley will be more robust then Obama's speech. After all as Israel recently demonstrated through the use of the Hannibal Protocol in circumstances such as these you need to send a stronger message then words alone can deliver.


19:15 on 20/8/14 (UK date).