{"id":274832,"date":"2016-10-23T07:27:35","date_gmt":"2016-10-23T06:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-aleppo-mosul-riddle\/"},"modified":"2016-10-23T07:27:35","modified_gmt":"2016-10-23T06:27:35","slug":"the-aleppo-mosul-riddle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-aleppo-mosul-riddle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Aleppo \/ Mosul Riddle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Photo<\/p>\n

Photo by US Army | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There\u2019s no question Baghdad needs to take back Mosul from ISIS\/ISIL\/Daesh. It could not do it before. In theory, the time is now.<\/p>\n

The real question is the conflicting motivations of the large \u201cwho\u2019s who\u201d doing it; the Iraqi Army\u2019s 9th<\/sup> Division; the Kurdish Peshmerga, under the baton of wily, corrupt opportunist Barzani; Sunni tribal lords; tens of thousands of Shi\u2019ite militias from southern Iraq; operational \u201csupport\u201d from US Special Forces; \u201ctargeted\u201d bombing by the US Air Force; and lurking in the background, Turkish Special Forces and air power.<\/p>\n

Now that\u2019s a certified recipe for trouble.<\/p>\n

Much like Aleppo, Mosul is \u2013 literally \u2013 the stuff of legend<\/a>. The successor of ancient Nineveh, settled 8000 years ago; former capital of the Assyrian Empire under Sennacherib<\/a>\u00a0in the 7th<\/sup> century B.C.; conquered by Babylon in the 6th<\/sup> century B.C.; a thousand years later, annexed to the Muslim empire and ruled by the Umayyads and the Abbasids; the key hub, from the 11th<\/sup> to the 12th<\/sup> century, of the Atabegs medieval state; a key Ottoman hub in a 16th<\/sup> century post-Silk Road spanning the Indian Ocean all the way to the Persian Gulf, the Tigris valley, Aleppo and Tripoli in the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

After WWI, everyone craved Mosul \u2013 from Turkey to France. But it was the Brits who managed to dupe France into letting Mosul be annexed to the British Empire\u2019s brand new colony: Iraq. Then came the long Arab nationalist Ba\u2019ath party…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo by US Army | CC BY 2.0 There\u2019s no question Baghdad needs to take back Mosul from ISIS\/ISIL\/Daesh. It could not do it before. In theory, the time is now. The real question is the conflicting motivations of the large \u201cwho\u2019s who\u201d doing it; the Iraqi Army\u2019s 9th Division; the Kurdish Peshmerga, under the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-274832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}