#iraq-war-legacy

#iraq-war-legacy

Australia's economic insulation is no longer guaranteed by geography, as geopolitical unrest in the Middle East can swiftly impact its economy through international energy markets.

Increasingly we are seeing less indicators of large-scale organized, complex threats or attacks, and instead [have seen] efforts focused on individuals either who have been radicalized by Islamist propaganda and may not have ever had contact with ISIS or al-Qaida, for example; and others who have had contact, of which we are able to have more indications of.

The Israeli military has said four soldiers were killed in combat in southern Lebanon, where its forces are clashing with Hezbollah fighters after launching a ground invasion of the country.

The war has also been launched with magnificently poor planning, as the United States seems shocked by and unprepared for how Iran uses every means at its disposal to restrict shipping in the strait of Hormuz.

The deployment of the USS George H.W. Bush, along with its supporting warships, is expected to take several weeks before arriving in the Middle East, potentially increasing the total number of carriers to three.

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.

Numbering between 30 and 40 million worldwide, most live amid the peaks and valleys straddling the borders of Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. The Kurds link their history to that of the Medes, an ancient Middle Eastern people. They were left stateless a century ago when the borders of the modern Middle East emerged from the collapsing Ottoman empire.

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).

By backing al-Maliki, Washington paved the way for the chaos and instability it sought to avert. During his first two terms, al-Maliki established a governance template that deliberately dismantled the post-2003 settlement's vision of inclusive politics. He pursued policies of deliberate exclusion of the Sunni population on the political and social levels under the guise of de-Baathification. While originally intended to remove Saddam Hussein's loyalists, the process was weaponised by al-Maliki as a sectarian tool.