STORM FRONT

Where it all began. Where the bombs rained down. Where soldiers danced in the street. Estimates put a figure on the deaths of their comrades at 40%. The Iraqi Army refused to release the actual numbers.

Nor did anyone know how many mujaheddin lay rotting under the rubble. 

At the gates of hell. 

Or paradise. 

The fearful harvest. 

The perfidy of the West.

The complicity of this remote outpost, Australia. Where a cold sun stirred through a lifeless heart, and the machines of antiquity lay to be discovered, in this forsaken place. 

The gods who had wreaked havoc down through history, breeding and feeding off the livestock, as they regarded the human vessels who carried that commodity they needed to build their strength, souls, even here, as they trampled across the ancient, sacred grounds.

In the compounding, confounding heavens, where they prayed to the dark lords in their millions, blessed be the waves of unfathomable power, and then the messengers here on Earth, hiding in the ordinary, waiting for the confluence in history which would change everything, and prevent the darkness staining across the worlds.

In the infinity that was the universe, species had escaped their fleshly frames before. But then what happened? 

At the Tables of Knowledge they talked of football and the routines of work, survival and the rising cost of everything, of a new found maturity or exploits at the local massage parlour. 

Everything was wrong, in this fragile circumstance.

Old Alex, afflicted with the flu, settled even more firmly inside, away from the howling dogs and the changing shifts and the reprogrammed AIs, when kindness vanished and the military stepped in. Where there should have been heart there was connivance and cunning.

Body bag. Found on a tip. Arsenic. The policeman was at it again. Bullet.

He dreamed infested, cocky dreams, possessed his wife.

There was a new boss in the mix. He did not trust.

On the other side of the world lay the real story.

All they got, here in this cold season on the south coast of Australia, was heavily manipulated media; and an appalling government which believed if you controlled the message you controlled the populace. They had no idea. 

America crowed victory, as their proxies, the Iraqi Army, killed and tortured and laughed, an insult to their own dead, an insult to the martyrs. 

While a heavily distorted message victor's message seeped through the Western media apparatus incensed the Muslim minority; and the peasantry, whose taxes had paid for the charade, their incomes falling year on year, switched off. 

They felt no compassion for any of the dead. They did not know their names. They did not know their motives. They truly did not care.

As the stench of their rotting bodies made passers by gag. 

As the traumatised civilians continued to grieve, and the families of the thousands of Iraqi soldiers continued to grieve, and the families of the Islamic State soldiers, those who survived, continued to grieve.

America, whose disastrous interference in Iraq had led to this historic point, boasted of victory.

Success. Just as their actions splashed the tentacles of jihad around the globe.

Instilling, for generations, a deep hatred against The Great Satan. Against the West. And against democracy. And fermenting jihad around the globe. 

No words could survive, suffice. 

A wall of ghosts crept out from the epicenter, a twisting cruelty, a wave of heightened suffering which had awakened all the worst gods, a thrumming terror which would wipe clean the hearts and allegiances of the pygmies across which it swept, and torment the just.  

A sound that could be heard around the world. 

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/afp/2017/07/iraq-conflict-mosul-city.html

Mosul's population, which has fallen from a peak of around two million, now comprises mostly Sunni Arabs, and after Saddam Hussein was defeated the jihadist group Al-Qaeda took root there.

On June 10, 2014, fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized the city, and on June 29, ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed an Islamic "caliphate" that included Mosul, the Syrian city of Raqa and large patches of territory in Iraq and Syria.

He named it the Islamic State, and made his first public appearance on July 5 at Mosul's famed Great Mosque of al-Nuri.

IS militants turned the city into an urban model for their state, setting school programmes, operating hours for shops and dress codes. The sale of alcohol and cigarettes was forbidden.

http://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/iraqi-militarys-victory-over-militants-in-mosul-a-key-win-for-obama-strategy/news-story/c20bc1124db5a5e8d7b14ac09e0ad1ac

Obama ordered air strikes and pursued a strategy — known in the Pentagon as “by, with and through” — to train local forces.

In the summer of 2015, coalition advisers started instructing Iraqis on conventional warfare — fighting in small units, setting up defenses, how to breech minefields and so on.

By the end of that year, the Iraqis began striking back at IS, including with the recapture of Ramadi.

As of this month, the coalition had trained about 106,000 Iraqi security forces, including 40,000 Iraqi troops, 15,000 police, 6,000 border guards, 21,000 Kurdish peshmerga, 14,000 from the elite Counter Terrorism Service and another 9,500 “tribal mobilization forces.” The toll has been brutal, with thousands of Iraqi forces killed. But since anti-IS operations began in Iraq and Syria in 2014, only 11 US troops have been killed.

The US military is trying a similar strategy with Afghan security forces in their fight against a resurgent Taliban.

 The strategy of supporting a proxy army will become increasingly important as the United States shies away from full-on deployments.

For John Spencer, a scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point, the fight for Mosul has been “the biggest modern case study foreshadowing what (urban) war is going to be like in the future.” “It’s kind of the ultimate end of that scale where you build an army, a police force, and a counterterrorism force that are capable of fighting, and you send only a few hundred troops and air support to help,” he said.

The United States is employing the same tactic in Syria, where commandos have trained a Kurdish-Arab alliance called the Syrian Democratic Forces to tackle IS.

Pentagon chief Jim Mattis calls it the “era of frequent skirmishing,” when local forces will be key in repelling non-state groups such as IS.

“We will do it by, with and through other nations,” he said in a recent interview with CBS News.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/mosul-is-in-ruins-but-it-is-the-idea-of-iraq-itself-that-needs-to-be-rebuilt-20170710-gx8b0v.html

Mosul is a pile of rubble. Until you stand in what's left of the western part of the city – a city which, in part, dates back to the 12th century – it's hard to appreciate just how shattered it has been by car bombs, air strikes and gunfire.

So when Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ventures into these streets to claim victory from Islamic State, he is standing on the bones of his people and the ashes of part of his country's history.

In 2014, IS was welcomed by many people in the Sunni-dominated north because of the appalling treatment they had suffered at the hands of the corrupt, Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.