U.S. allies fighting ISIS are to send about 1,500 troops to Iraq to train Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers. ISIS has recently taken over a large territory of Iraq and Syria, despite air raids by the U.S. and Iraq and resistance from the Kurds, who prevented the caliphate from occupying the north of the country. Khoshavi Babakr, a representative of the Kurdish Democratic Party in Russia, says that about 2 million refugees from the Sunni provinces of Iraq were staying in Iraqi Kurdistan, spending the winter in tent camps.

“About a year has passed since the central authorities of Iraq cut financing, under the pretext that Kurdistan had started exporting oil. The UN helps within a certain framework, but it is insufficient. Representatives of the world community make visits, promises, leave, send aid. But the aid is insufficient when it comes to hundreds of thousands, millions of people, and they need feeding every day, supplies of water, electricity,” says Babakr.

In his words, ISIS uses brutal methods to spread its power: public executions for Yazidi non-Muslims, enslaving children and women, selling them at markets. According to human rights organizations, 5,000-8,000 women are sold at markets.

Vadim Makarenko, a historian, politologist, editor-in-chief of kurdistan.ru, believes that the problem would have been a lot less complicated if it were a matter of transforming Iraq into a federal state or partition into the Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni parts. “But the Islamic State proclaiming itself as a caliphate has a goal to subjugate more territories, create some archaic state, maybe not quite modern, but based on modern technologies, in the center of the Middle East, create an imperial structure that should transform the Middle East. In this aspect, ISIS poses a threat far more than Iraq,” Makarenko explains.”

“They had been saying that they had had 20,000-30,000 fighters, until leader of the Iraqi Kurdistan mentioned the figure 200,000. The figure was basically verified by [Chairman] of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Dempsey. How could there be 30,000 when several thousand arrived from Europe, not to mention the colossal demographic potential behind the Sunni Arabs. It is a limitless potential.”

According to Makarenko, Islamic State is a lot more closely connected with the regime of Saddam Hussein and his structures than people believe. In his opinion, it is because the U.S. did not fully destroy Saddam Hussein’s army and the repressive system, so the regime managed to hide and migrate to rich countries.

“Saddam’s regime had colossal resources. When American soldiers were taking the territory of Iraq, they found a house with about a billion dollars in cash, and Saddam Hussein probably left a lot more such caches. Islamic State is not just a terrorist organization, it is Neo-Saddamism, Ba’athist structures with a new ideology of religious fanaticism,” the expert assumes.

Vestnik Kavkaza