So Canada wants to stop its small contribution to bombing missions against the Islamic State, formerly known by the acronym ISIS, in Syria. Sorties by the six Canadian jet fighters represented only 3 to 4 percent of total coalition sorties. Instead of this token symbolic gesture, the Canadian government now wants to increase its humanitarian efforts in the region and its training and arming of Iraqi ground forces. Meanwhile, coalition forces and the Russians continue to bomb the hell out of the country, either against ISIS or (in the case of the Russians) insurgent ground forces fighting the Assad regime. The bombings to date have even included hospitals and other civilian targets, either on purpose or by accident. The theme seems to be that either one will save the Syrians or level what is left of that country’s infrastructure to do so — while killing and starving civilians who have not fled Syria like the hundreds of thousands of refugees before them.
The ruthless Russians are supporting Assad against insurgent forces, while the western-organized coalition supports the ground war against ISIS and the insurgent forces’ struggle against Assad. Talk about a crazy helter-skelter mix of military and political strategies. The campaign against ISIS forces in Iraq is not much better. Canada has been primarily providing military assistance to the Kurdish forces, recognizing that the Kurds really want to take advantage of the situation to move eventually toward an independent Kurdish territory.
Iraq is still divided along sectarian lines. Shia militias are battling ISIS, but have also massacred Sunni civilians. Iraq witnessed a sharp increase in civilian deaths following the fall of large swaths of territory to ISIS in the summer of 2014. Now despite a string of recent battlefield losses for ISIS, civilians in Iraq continue to die in the thousands at a “staggering” rate, according to a United Nations report released in January 2016. In addition, Kurdish Peshmerga forces, or in some cases Yezidi militias and Kurdish armed groups from Syria and Turkey, are operating in co-ordination with the Peshmerga. They reportedly have forced tens of thousands of Arab civilians to flee their homes. There are now talks of war crimes being committed by all sides.
President Obama’s late-coming promise to confront ISIS reflects U.S. reluctance to commit troops to foreign wars unless Americans, or American interests, are directly threatened. Much of this reluctance is also due to the tragic experiences of decade-long American military efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As in Canada, after its involvement in Afghanistan, there isn’t much desire to once again become embroiled in either Iraq or Syria with boots on the ground. In the end, I really believe that all these Iraqi and Syrian factions are going to have to decide their own futures, regardless of outside incursions and the humanitarian, political, economic and military consequences for the Middle East.
FROLITICKS 
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