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| Iraq |
| Rebels repairing Mosul dam, Kurds in rush to arms |
| 2014-08-10 |
| [Dhaka Tribune] Islamic State murderous Moslems who seized Iraq's biggest dam in an offensive that has caused international consternation have brought in engineers for repairs, witnesses said on Saturday, as nervous Kurds stocked up on arms to defend their enclave nearby. The jihadi Islamists have captured wide swathes of northern Iraq since June, executing non-Sunni Moslem captives, displacing tens of thousands of people and drawing the first US air strikes in the region since Washington withdrew troops in 2011. After routing Kurdish forces this week, Islamic State bully boyz are just 30 minutes' drive from Arbil, the Kurdish regional capital which up to now has been spared the sectarian bloodshed that has scarred other parts of Iraq for a decade. Employees of foreign oil firms in Arbil were flying out. Kurds were snapping up AK-47 assault rifles in arms markets for fear of imminent attack, although these had been ineffective against the superior firepower of the Islamic State fighters. Given the Islamic State threat, a source in the Kurdistan Regional Government said it had received extra supplies of heavy weaponry from the Baghdad federal government "and other governments" in the past few days, but declined to elaborate. An engineer at djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... dam told Rooters that Islamic State fighters had brought in engineers to repair an emergency power line to the city, Iraq's biggest in the north, that had been cut off four days ago, causing power outages and water shortages. "They are gathering people to work at the dam," he said. A dam administrator said that bully boyz were putting up the trademark Islamic State black flags and patrolling with flatbed trucks mounted with machineguns to protect the facility they seized from Kurdish forces earlier this week. The Islamic State, comprised mainly of Arabs and imported muscle who want to reshape the map of the Middle East, pose the biggest threat to Iraq, a major oil exporter, since Saddam Hussein was toppled by a US-led invasion in 2003. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 I have read elsewhere that the dam in question needs constant / daily maintenance to keep from collapsing. "Repairs" have been ongoing since the dam was first constructed. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2014-08-10 14:44 |
| #2 If all you have is an AK and a pistol, guys with heavy machine guns are a bit on the difficult side to take out. And yes, the Kurds don't have much other than small arms in those areas. They've been requesting (but the Maliki govt in Baghdad has refused for years) HMG, mortar ammo, RPGs, because other than their heavy arms & ammo reserved for defense of their home area, they simply don't have the capacity for offensive military action outside their home area. And all these ISIS actions have been where the Kurds stepped in to secure outside areas where the Iraqi Shia army abandoned their posts and ran away. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2014-08-10 13:27 |
| #1 although these had been ineffective against the superior firepower of the Islamic State fighters. Wassamater, everyone forget how to make IEDs? Can't find any RPGs? Or is ISIS firepower 'superior' to what the US deployed? [snort] |
| Posted by: Bobby 2014-08-10 10:22 |