TheThe Wars In Iraq And Syria Have Merged Into A Single Conflict

Wednesday, June 11, 2014
By Paul Martin

Armin Rosen
BusinessInsider.com
Jun. 11, 2014

After this week, it no longer makes sense to think of the civil conflicts in Iraq and Syria as separate events. They are now a single war, both in their operational details and in the broader forces driving both conflicts.

An Al Qaeda offshoot’s major offensive this week shows that the battle lines, and the motives of the various sides in the Iraq and Syria upheavals, have effectively merged — this is one conflict, engulfing the oil-producing heart of the Arab Middle East.

This week, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) seized control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and a major infrastructural hub. Mosul is home to the country’s most important dam, and is close to Iraq’s northern oil fields. ISIS has also launched offensives against Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, and Samarra, which is the site of a major Shi’ite shrine. The group nearly has Baghdad encircled.

ISIS began as Al Qaeda’s Iraq franchise, which was all but defeated after the U.S. “surge” late last decade. But the U.S. pullout from Iraq in 2010, followed by the chaos in neighboring Syria offered the organization a power vacuum that it could easily exploit. The Syrian safe-haven also gave Al Qaeda in Iraq a newfound sense of purpose. The Sunni terrorist group declared that it was waging jihad against both Iraq’s Shi’ite leadership and the Alawite government of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.

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