ISIS nearly eradicated in Iraq: The Iraqi government announced on Wednesday that it had driven ISIS forces from the town of Hawija, in the north of the country.
As the map shows, Hawija was the last ISIS stronghold in Iraq, other than a small band along the Euphrates River between the Syrian border and town of Ana. Meanwhile, in Syria, operations continue against ISIS forces around Deir al-Zour. Clearly, ISIS’s days as a “state” with territory are numbered.
Sadly, I do not expect ISIS to go away. Rather, I predict it will evolve into something that looks more like al-Qaeda, claiming responsibility for terrorist attacks around the world, some which it actually committed, and others, like the tragic shooting in Las Vegas last weekend, which it apparently had nothing to do with.
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Kurdistan: Baghdad strikes back. As I reported previously, Iraq’s Kurdish Autonomous Region held a referendum last week and chose to secede from Iraq by a mind-boggling 92% of the vote. The referendum is non-binding; most pundits consider it merely an instrument to give the Kurds leverage in negotiating their eventual departure.
Nevertheless, the Iraqi government has now struck back. Last Friday it announced that it was lowering the ban hammer on international flights to the Kurdish region.
The Kurds voted for secession because they thought the central government persecutes them. So the government responded by proving them right.
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Michael Isenberg writes about the Muslim world, medieval and modern. His forthcoming novel, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092. It depicts the war for the Muslim soul between those who seek to enforce shari’a strictly, persecute Jews and Christians, and stamp out "un-Islamic" science, and those who wink at a few sins, tolerate their non-Muslim neighbors, and write books about science instead of burning them.
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