#iraq-2003-invasion

#iraq-2003-invasion

I have just instructed the military to expand the existing security buffer zone further. We are determined to change the situation in the north fundamentally.

For us who lived under the siege of the Iranian-backed militias, this looks completely different, so our happiness for the death of Khamenei was immense. Western audiences and policy makers naturally take greater interest in Western victims and the threats Iran poses to the West. However, the imbalance of power between Iran and the West means that Iran has caused relatively limited harm to Western interests since its 1979 revolution.

Both the CIA and MI6 had amassed troves of deep intelligence about the impending war and were issuing dire notices to their allies about the inevitability of an invasion by Putin. Those warnings were all but ignored in key European capitals. Why? In large part because US and British intelligence were considered untrustworthy after the extraordinary intelligence debacle in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Houthis, a Zaydi Shiite Islamist rebel group, which the U.S. has designated as a foreign terrorist organization, are among Iran's most powerful and resilient allies. They are a key part of the so-called Axis of Resistance, an informal Iran-led military coalition in the Middle East. During his speech, al-Houthi suggested that the Houthis were ready to lend military support to Iran: 'We are fully prepared for any necessary developments,' he said.

We are on the trigger finger. After 22 years in the movement, we have never been this busy. The American-Israeli effort to bring down the Iranian regime is not likely to succeed without the help of PJAK and other Kurdish armed groups.

The deployments could help provide Trump with additional options as he weighs expanding US operations, with the Iran war well into its third week, Reuters reported on Thursday, at the same time further entrenching the US in a foreign war, the like of which he had repeatedly promised never to do.

A missile struck a helipad inside the US Embassy in Baghdad, two security officials told the Associated Press news agency. The projectile landed within the embassy's boundaries after the Green Zone, the heavily fortified district in central Baghdad that houses Iraqi government institutions and foreign embassies, added the security officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorised to speak with the press.

Within hours of the United States-Israeli attacks on Iran, US assets in Iraq's Kurdistan region came under retaliatory attacks from Tehran-backed groups, dragging the country into the conflict that has since expanded across the Middle East and beyond. Since then, US assets located in Iraq have come under multiple attacks from pro-Iran groups and Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC).

A US military refueling aircraft crashed in western Iraq on Thursday, in an incident US Central Command said involved another aircraft but was not the result of hostile or friendly fire. The United States has surged a large number of aircraft into the Middle East to take part in operations against Iran.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously predicted the conflict would last "six days, six weeks-I doubt six months." It lasted eight years, injured nearly 40,000 Americans, killed 4,500, and drained what Brown University's Costs of War project calculates as nearly $2 trillion in direct spending-with veterans' medical and disability payments projected to add $1 trillion more over 40 years.

On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit, stood before a banner reading Mission Accomplished, and declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But the mission had not been accomplished. The war would continue for another eight years, cost nearly 4,500 American lives, and reshape the Middle East in ways no one in that administration anticipated or fully acknowledged.

The ground war began in Iraq last night as British and American marines stormed beaches on the Gulf coast in an assault on the south-eastern city of Basra, while explosions lit up Baghdad under a heavy bombardment by cruise missiles. The first British fatalities came shortly afterwards when a US helicopter crashed in Kuwait, killing all on board. Suzanne Goldenberg's front-page report from Baghdad revealed that only two hours after the decapitation effort, Saddam Hussein himself had made a defiant appearance on television.

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE - Iran is experiencing its most consequential period of internal in years. Nationwide demonstrations driven by economic collapse, social grievance, and political frustration have been met with force, mass arrests, and near-total information control. The scale and coordination of the response suggest a regime that feels threatened but not unmoored, confident in its ability to absorb pressure while preventing fragmentation.

Kataib Hezbollah is one of the largest groups within the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), founded in 2014 to stop lightning advances by ISIL (ISIS) at the time. In a phone call with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani on Sunday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged Baghdad to keep a distance from Iran. Rubio said, Iraq can fully realise its potential as a force for stability, prosperity and security in the Middle East