Iraq: Kurds, ISIS, Mosul

What's going on in Iraq since the fall of ISIS in Mosul?

ISIS

Via Reuters, ISIS is still hanging around the border of Iraq and Syria. Here's an interesting quote from the article:

An expert close to the Baghdad government told Reuters last week that Iraq may carry out special forces operations against Islamic State militants in Syria.

At this point, a number of foreign armies are in Syria: Iran, Russia, Turkey and the United States. And now Iraq might head on in. President Trump did say recently he wanted to pull out of Syria; however, there is still a lot of occupation going on in that country.

MOSUL

The Atlantic looks at the aftermath of the battle for Mosul via civilian casualties. Here's a quote:

In December 2017, the Associated Press estimated that 9,000 to 11,000 civilians had died in the battle—an estimate nearly 10 times higher than what had been officially reported. At least a third of those deaths, the AP found, came as a result of coalition or Iraqi bombardments. In a separate investigation, NPR reported that the city morgue had recorded the names of 4,865 individuals on death certificates, dating between October 2016 and July 2017, and estimated that more than 5,000 civilians had been killed.

The article appears to put the high number of civilian deaths on two issues.

First, better trained Iraqi forces were more careful about civilian deaths, but their troop levels were hit by heavy casualties. Then those with less training were sent in and they didn't care about civilians as much. What isn't mentioned, and I have to wonder, was there also an issue of Shiite vs. Sunni -- Shiite being the troops and Sunni being the civilians?

Second, Presidents Obama and Trump expanded who could make the call on military strikes.

I do wonder on the other hand: if the fighting was more strategic, how much longer would ISIS have held on to Mosul territory and would we now instead be talking about the mass starvation that took place?

Kurds

It would seem that the Kurds and the Iraqi government are building towards better relations. If one recalls, the Kurds held an independence vote. The Iraqi military (with help from Iran) took back control of Kirkuk from the Kurds. Now we have this via Reuters:

The 2018 budget, passed in parliament earlier this month despite a boycott by Kurdish lawmakers, calls for the 17 percent of total revenue allocated to the Kurds to be cut in line with the region’s share of Iraq’s population, which is disputed.

The New York Times also has an article about this détente. There's this quote:

In an interview outside his home village on Tuesday, Masoud Barzani, the former president of the Iraqi Kurdish region and still a central political figure, struck his own note of conciliation and hailed this week’s agreement as a “breakthrough.”

Why would Iraq allocate revenue to the Kurds after all the issues with the independence vote and Kirkuk? Is this being driven by the United States? Iran? Is the Kurdish political party PUK now in power -- which I suspect is more pro-Iraq/Iran? I'll have to dig into this in the future.