2020 A year of Brinkmanship. By Tim Brian Tufuga

By the end of 2019, the US 82nd Airbourne were being mobilised and were heading to Iraq in what appears to be US-Iran Brinkmanship.

The thirteenth anniversary of the execution of the Bathist Sunni Leader of Iraq was commemorated with the attack on the US Embassy by a predominantly a Sunni motley crew of Protestors. The attack was a culmination of weeks of domestic protestations against a Shia dominated Iraqi Government which has illustrated the power vacuum within the Sunni dominated regions within Iraq Governorates forcing many disaffected unemployed and disaffected Iraqi citizens to march en masse to the Iraqi capital City to stage protests and civil unrest.
(Biography.com)

The world had long forgotten the regime change and the commemoration of the execution of the former Sunni Strongman and the skewiff Sectarian power shift from the 36% Sunni Iraqi population from the 60% or so Shia Iraqi population. The Bathist Regime was Sunni and were obviously politically unpopular in Shia dominated Governorate regions of Iraq. (NYTimes)

When the Sunni Bathist regime was overthrown during Operation Iraqi freedom, the regime that replaced the Sunni was naturally a Iraqi Shia regime, which then dominated the Central Government, and were merely the puppetry from the Shia theocracy of Iran. With the present economic woes suffered mostly by the disaffected and disenfranchised Sunni Iraqi population punished and excluded by the present regime, the domestic woes spilt over into violent street protest, culminating in the US Embassy incursion, followed by the assassination of the Iranian Quds Special Forces Commander, (Shia Commander if you will), you have yourself a cassus belli for Iranian retaliatory missile strikes against American troops embedded in Iraq.

The likelihood of a Shia world confrontation seems very likely but unlike Op. Iraqi Freedom, the terms of engagement will be very different.


(Wikipedia.com)


Iran has a formidable military presence, their terrain is very rugged similar to the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan and are not flat and expansive as Iraq or Southern Afghanistan, so the field of combat will be very difficult to fight, so the aerial bombardments will be almost ineffectual. Ground mobilisation will have to be very significant to make inroads within the rugged terrain and will be an arduous task for even the most hardiest of Armies, including a Superpower like America.

The Shia world, unlike the Sunni who would include the Al Qaeda Network and the Islamic State, are less expansive than the AQ and the IS Sunni Terrorist Organisations, but, they are not less formidable, the Hezbollah, is the most notorious of the Shia Terrorist organisation which are highly active in their Israeli incursions and terrorism activities.

(Reddit.com)

Like the AQ and the IS, the Hezbollah network is global and will engage the West in equal vigour as the AQ and the IS of the Sunni world. In this context, the Iranian conflict will most likely signal an additional dimension in the global jihad between the Judeo-Christian, Judaism and the Secularist West, engaged in a Jihad against the combined Sunni and Shia Muslim world. The conflict will be through proxies, ie Hezbollah, and the conflict nature will be asymmetrical violence in non-combat zones in soft targets, like churches, education institutions, shopping centres, public transport hubs and in the heart of communities in non-combat zones. An ominous warning for all since the war zone is not in Iran or even in Iraq it will be at a church a Walmart, a local supermarket, a train station or a shopping Mall, the war zone will be within your own community.

Tim B Tufuga