Operation Featherweight: Month 7, Week 4, Day 1.

With the US-led coalition of more then 60 nations, including Arab nations continuing to kick its heels and twiddle its thumbs the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has begun to regain the initiative within Iraq.

On Tuesday (17/2/14) ISIL launched a major offensive to capture the towns of Gwer and Makhmour which sit around 45km (27 miles) south-west of the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Arbil along the Zab river. This assault which was launched from several directions was significantly larger then the harrassment type raid that was launched on Gwer back in January and is seen as a full-scale, legitimate attempt to capture the towns which were only liberated from ISIL in late August 2014.

Despite the scale of the assault the coalition seem to have been unable to identify the preparations and intervene with air-strikes until ISIL had moved so close to Kurdish Peshmerga positions that air-strikes were impossible. However the Peshmerga were able to successfully repel the attack and after a 10 hour battle push ISIL back to a distance where the coalition was able to carry out air-strikes. During the course of this battle 1 Peshmerga and at least 35 ISIL fighters were killed.

Reports that the Peshmerga repelled the attack by firing copies of the jobs section of the local newspaper at the enemy cannot be confirmed at this stage.

The attempts to seize Gwer and Makhmour are of course the second such offensive that ISIL have been given the freedom to launch in Iraq in the past week. The first in Anbar province was sadly much more successful succeeding in capturing the town of al-Baghdadi and using it as a spring board to launch attacks against the US Marines stationed at the Ain al-Asad airbase which is 5km (3miles) from al-Baghdadi which itself sits just 190km (114 miles) from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

On Tuesday ISIL celebrated their victory in al-Baghdadi by burning alive 45 Sunni tribesmen that had been allied with the Iraqi government in an effort to save the town from ISIL. This was simply terrorism in its rawest form. In carrying out this gruesome crime ISIL were trying to intimidate the Sunni tribes to break off their alliance with the Iraqi government and surrender to ISIL. The message being quite simply that the coalition is not prepared to fight for Anbar so unless the tribes surrender this is what ISIL will do to them when they over-run the area.

In order to stop ISIL intimidating the Sunni tribes into surrendering and therefore increasing the amount of territory held by ISIL the coalition has no other option then to respond by increasing the number of local troops on the ground and air-strikes carried out in Anbar province. This would send the message that the coalition is not going to abandon Anbar's Sunni tribes to their fate and is instead determined that no more of Iraq will fall to ISIL. I'm still waiting for confirmation of the targets of the 15 air-strikes that the coalition has carried out in the last 24 hours but with such a low volume of strikes I would assume that they've all been carried out against ISIL targets in and around al-Baghdadi.

The US' main response to ISIL's advances in Iraq and their expansion into Libya has been to hold a Summit in Washington to Combat Violent Extremism (CVE). As I am not currently in the grip of some sort of mental breakdown I have been having a hard time getting my head around this Summit. It's core premise seems to be that thousands of people are leaving liberal and wealthy western nations to live under ISIL's oppressive and comparatively impoverished rule because they crave more freedom and economic opportunity.

As with Rihanna mistaking Chris Brown's abuse for love this is the type of fundamental mis-conception of reality that often leads to very serious psychological problems. As a result I am now becoming genuinely worried that US President Barack Obama needs to be sat down with a panel of psychiatrists to assess whether he is psychologically fit to continue in the office of President.

The stark difference between what ISIL are and what Obama would like to believe they are is probably at its most obvious within Egypt. Along with Hamas in Gaza back in 2012 Turkey built a large amount of their foreign policy around the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi would be President of Egypt for certainly the next 10-20 years. So when the Egyptian people kicked Morsi out of office in 2013 Turkey started funding Islamist groups to wage war against the Egyptian state in order to get Morsi back into office and failing that permanently destabilise the nation.

This campaign began by setting fire to the protest camp outside the Rabaa Mosque so Muslim Brotherhood supporters could accuse Egypt of carrying out a massacre with the four fingered protest banners that Turkey had printed in preparation. However when that didn't work the campaign quickly progressed to shooting, bombing and rocket attacks against the Egyptian security forces and now one of the most extreme Islamist groups Ansar Beit al-Maqdis have formally joined ISIL and renamed themselves the Sinai Province.

However within large sections of Egyptian society there are people are disgusted with the Islamists but can't quite ally themselves with the Egyptian government against them because of their own grievances against that government. One of the main grievances has been the Egyptian governments lack of respect for human rights.

As a result the Islamist terror tactic of attacking the Egyptian security forces has been intended to force the security forces to increase their patrols and checkpoints while at the same time making the security force conscripts nervous and therefore more likely to behave aggressively. That way the Islamists can point to the increased security measures that they've caused and try and blame the Egyptian government for being too repressive.

With Obama specifically blaming government repression and human rights abuses for the rise of ISIL I can't help but feel that he was intentionally acting to strengthen ISIL's hand within Egypt by endorsing their accusations just as Egypt was launching attacks againt ISIL in Libya. 

Another major grievance within Egypt has been a lack of economic opportunity for the country's young and highly educated population. Despite the US' attempts to convince us that it was all Rihanna's fault this was the main driving factor behind Egypt and Tunisia's revolutions. At the risk of being too nuanced for the US State Department the best way for Egypt to solve that problem is by increasing political freedom and participation because when people get to choose their governments they rarely choose governments that make them poorer.

In Egypt the main problem in addressing these grievances has been the Islamists. For example there was an entire year of misrule by the Muslim Brotherhood in which they showed absolutely no interest in economic reform but were actually very interested in increasing repression and the denial of human rights. So while making political and economic reforms in Egypt may reduce the level of passive support the Islamists receive from the local population it is certainly not going to stop the Islamists who are funded from abroad and are at war with Egypt because they oppose the very notion of freedom being it personal, political, economic or intellectual.

If I had to dumb it down for certain readers I would say that while political and economic reforms may reduce the number of street protests in Egypt it will certainly do nothing to stop the shootings, bombings, kidnappings and beheading. They require a military solution.

The other central cause of violent extremism according to Obama is the notion that America is at war with Islam. Here I think Obama is simply projecting his hatred of America onto the Islamists because as AG Holder and Al Sharpton assure us at every opportunity the most violent extremists in the World is racist white America.

ISIL on the other hand are very clear in their objective, it's right there in their name - Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. They see it as their duty to establish an Islamic State within the Levant (Sharm in Arabic) region so God will be able to appear atop of a white minaret in order to start the apocalyptic war between Sunnis and Shias. The west and America are hardly mentioned in their ideology at all. So for example when ISIL refer to Egypt as "The nation of the Cross" they are not declaring war on Christianity but attempting to de-legitimise Egypt by questioning its status as a Muslim nation.

The very clear attempts to stir up anti-American hatred amongst the Muslim world recently are coming not from ISIL but from nations with Islamist rulers such as Turkey and Qatar through its state-run Al Jazeera 'news' operation. So for example there was the recent storm over Jeep's Super Bowl commercial which featured a Muslim woman literally just standing there while a song about America being a land for all to share played. This was very clearly an attempt to tackle Islamaphobia by showing that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are just normal people like every other American. However Al Jazeera reported it as; "US Uses Super Bowl to Launch Attack on Islam!"

Then there is the international outcry over the Chapel Hill Shootings which was fuelled by both Al Jazeera and Turkish President/Caliph/Emperor Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Although I genuinely think that it was just a dispute over parking within a couple of hours of the shootings taking place the US police had arrested the suspect and charged him with the most serious crime available. So while he has a right to a fair trial I think all we're really discussing now is the manner in which he will die in prison. As a result I honestly cannot understand what the protesters are demanding.

I also cannot understand why US President Obama chose to add further fuel to the claims of Islamphobia first by commenting on the case at all and then by implying the victims religion may have been a factor.

With it being obvious then that not only are the accusations of the US being at war with Islam are completely baseless and simply made up for propaganda purposes but also that they are being made up not by terrorist groups but by nation states there seems little point in the US altering its behaviour in response. Instead they should be dealt with in the same way that all other diplomatic squabbles between nation states are dealt with.

For example it would be useful to quietly suggest to US news outlets that at a time of war the White House is not concerned by Qatar's efforts to have it's journalists escape prosecution for spreading false news in Egypt. Also the White House prefers the term "ISIL" to "ISIS" because the latter, incorrect term helps to legitimise the group by disguising it's true purpose. The White House would though be very interested in true stories about what a nasty little man Erdogan is.

After all the sight of a President being prepared to stand up for human rights by refusing to interfere in an ongoing legal case is likely to be a big hit in Turkey at the moment.

At 18:05 on 19/2/15 (UK date).

Edited at around 20:00 on 19/2/15 (UK date) to tidy up a bit and add;

Going back to Egypt's fight against ISIL while the CVE Summit was taking place Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry was addressing the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on ISIL's operations.

Initially I gather that Egypt hoped for the UNSC to adopt a Chapter 7 resolution allowing foreign military intervention in Libya to fight ISIL. This would have been extremely awkward because it would have required three of the five permanent members of the UNSC (US, UK, France) to vote to take action to solve a problem they voted to create just 4 years ago. Fortunately a new resolution isn't actually necessary because resolution 2170 (2014) grants Chapter 7 powers to fight ISIL no matter what nation state they are operating in. Also Egypt has permission from the internationally recognised government of Libya to conduct military action within Libya.

One thing that the UNSC will have to address though is the arms embargo that was imposed on Libya in 2011 as part of the campaign to overthrow the Qaddafi government. It has remained in place since then in an effort to stop Libya sliding into chaos. As ISIL are currently exploiting the chaos within Libya I think it is more then fair to say that this arms embargo has failed in its stated purpose.

The reason why the arms embargo has failed is that it has only acted to starve the Libyan government and therefore the Libyan armed forces of weapons and equipment. Everybody else has had no problem obtaining weapons due the the entire Libyan national arsenal being handed out at random during the operation against Qaddafi. There were also numerous reports of weapons being flown in from the Gulf States via Sudan to the Islamist Libya Dawn militia to help them oust the Libyan government from Tripoli back in August 2014.

As a result while it is clear that the arms embargo must remain and be enforced against the militias it needs to be lifted for the Libyan government. Otherwise there is no way that ISIL can be defeated in Libya and no way that an inclusive government can be formed.

Perhaps providing further evidence of his tenuous relationship with reality Obama has also announced that in principle the US has agreed with Turkey to begin arming Sunni-Arab insurgent groups in Syria. According to the rumours the core of this plan involves equipping the insurgents with armed 4x4 vehicles (the so-called "Technicals") and equipment to direct coalition air-strikes. This is exactly the plan that was used to overthrow Qaddafi in Libya. I don't suppose I need to tell you how successful that was in terms of keeping ISIL out of Libya.

So if the panel of psychiatrists clear Obama to continue as President and this continues to be his plan for ISIL then it's clear that the US Congress has no option other then to refuse him an Authority for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and introduce a bill of its own stripping the plan to arm jihadists of all funding.