The more people feel they can flee, the fewer people stay to fight ISIS
Some Iraqi soldiers are abandoning their posts and joining a wave of civilian migrants headed to Europe, raising new doubts about the cohesion of the country’s Western-backed security forces in the fight against Islamic State militants.
Interviews with migrants and an analysis of social media activity show scores of fighters from the national army, police and special forces as well as Shi’ite militias and Kurdish peshmerga have left in recent months or plan to go soon.
They join more than 50,000 civilians who have left Iraq in the past three months, according to the United Nations, part of an even larger exodus from neighboring Syria and other conflict zones across the Middle East.
The inability of Iraq to retain its soldiers threatens to further erode morale in a military that has partially collapsed twice in the past year in the face of the Islamic State militant group.
It could also undermine the efforts of a U.S.-led coalition that has spent billions of dollars training and equipping Iraqi forces to take on the militants.
A spokesman for the Iraqi defense ministry said the military was not concerned about the migration of soldiers, which he put in the “tens” out of a security force estimated to number in the tens of thousands.
“The armed forces are performing their duties. There is no reason to be worried,” said General Tahsin Ibrahim Sadiq.
But Saed Kakaei, adviser to the minister of peshmerga forces in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region, said while he could not provide a specific figure for how many peshmerga forces had left, the numbers were “concerning”.
The soldiers’ departure highlights a pervasive sense of hopelessness among many Iraqis more than a year after Islamic State seized a third of their country’s territory, threatened to overrun…
So tolerating the refugees is even handing Islamic State a victory, and killing back the few decent Iraqis who stayed to fight because they had what it took to fight for freedom and protect their own.
As K-selection approaches, I find myself becoming much more quality conscious and intolerant. As I look at these refugees I see cowards who can’t fight for their own freedom. As if that is not enough, they carry the attitude of the bully wherever they go, expecting those in front of them to just give them whatever they want.
Clearly it can’t end well for any place they land.
Apocalypse cometh™
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]