US troops occupying Mosul, Iraq, in 2008 (Pic: US military)
The United States and Russia backed brutal assaults on major cities
this week. Both are designed to boost their control in a strategically
and economically crucial part of the world—regardless of the cost in
civilian lives.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and police, supported by Iraqi
Kurdish units and sectarian militia, have begun an assault on Mosul in
northern Iraq.
The offensive was prepared by wave after wave of bombing. US,
British, French, Jordanian and Australian jets and helicopters are
providing air support to the Iraqi regime and its allies.
Mosul was overrun by Isis in 2014 in what was described as a “total collapse” of Iraqi government security troops.
The forces that now claim to be liberating Mosul are the same ones that
smashed Iraqi society and killed hundreds of thousands of people after the 2003 US-led invasion.
Boris Johnson (Pic: Foreign ministry of the Netherlands)
No fly zone is no solution
Britain is to impose sanctions on Syria, foreign secretary Boris Johnson announced this week.
He and other MPs have also mooted a no-fly zone over Aleppo.
They want to use the horror of Aleppo to overturn opposition to intervention by floating what sound like softer options.
But a no fly zone means sending fighters to shoot down planes. That means bombing air defences—often in built up areas.
Sanctions punish ordinary people hardest.
Ex US secretary of state Madeleine Albright famously said in 1996
that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from sanctions against
Saddam Hussein were “worth it”.
Johnson and his chums are no more concerned about Syrian deaths today.
Many of them are backing or taking part in the bloody Saudi Arabian war in Yemen (see below).
Isis’s rule has been appalling, but civilians are now terrified of the air and artillery assaults and the gun battles in the streets.
There will be precious little “freedom” for many when the sectarian Iraqi militias arrive.
There are some reports that Isis will withdraw from the city and seek to fight a guerrilla war.
Assault
But lieutenant-general Stephen Townsend, commander of the US-led
coalition, said the assault could last weeks and “possibly longer”.
British, US, French, Italian, German and Australian “special forces”
and “trainers” are on the ground to advise and support local forces in
battle and to direct artillery salvos.
Mosul is a major city.
Lise Grande, the United Nations (UN) humanitarian coordinator for
Iraq, warned last weekend that she could see “a worst-case scenario” in
which “one million civilians may be
forced to flee their homes”.
The UN said families are at “extreme risk” of being caught in
crossfire, tens of thousands may end up besieged or held as human
shields and thousands could be forcibly expelled.
Meanwhile
Russian attacks on
Aleppo in Syria continue.
Every day civilians are murdered by raids from the air and the
assaults of the Syrian army.
Humanitarian aid agencies have been unable
to get into eastern Aleppo since the siege resumed on 4 September.
In three large districts, markets have run out of flour completely.
Pumping stations have been damaged by bombing. Most of the
city—including parts of the government-held west—has no running water.
Neither the US nor Russia has anything to offer the suffering people of the Middle East. Only a renewal of the
revolutionary wave of 2011 can provide a way out.
US commander in chief Barack Obama (Pic: Flickr/DVIDSHUB)
Obama has a ‘blueprint for war’ in Somalia
US president Barack Obama’s administration has intensified a
clandestine war in Somalia, east Africa, during the last year according
to a report in the New York Times newspaper.
It says the US is using special operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors and
African allies in an escalating campaign.
“Hundreds of American troops now rotate through makeshift bases in
Somalia, the largest military presence since the United States pulled
out of the country after the ‘
Black Hawk down’
battle of 1993,” said the report. It called the campaign “a blueprint
for warfare that president Obama has embraced and will pass along to
his successor”.
Somalia’s proximity to crucial
shipping lanes means that the US has tried for decades to influence it, including backing an
Ethiopian invasion in 2006.
Its intervention now is about preventing raw materials and strategic
territory coming under the influence of China—not about helping ordinary
people.
US cruise missiles fired at Yemen
US Navy ships launched Tomahawk cruise missiles against targets on
the coast of Yemen on Thursday of last week. It is a major escalation of
the US support for the
Saudi Arabian assault on the country.
The US says that the missiles were fired as a defensive measure after
attacks on its ships. But both the Houthi rebel movement that controls
Yemen’s capital Sanaa and the army that backs them angrily denied firing
on US vessels.
The cruise missile attacks came a few days after the US was supposed
to be concerned about the murderous scale of civilian casualties that
have resulted from
Saudi bombing.
One
recent airstrike on a packed funeral hall killed over 140 civilians and wounded hundreds more.
Kurt Eichenwald
Liz Sly 
