This week two incidents in Iraq have powerfully demonstrated the changing character of warfare and the continuing futility of the wars now being fought. On Sunday, two members of a US Marine Corps special forces unit were killed in the southern Makhmur Mountains in Iraq. They were in a joint operation with Iraqi special forces against ISIS paramilitaries to drive them out of a complex of tunnels in the mountains.
Some hint of the difficulty of the continuing fight against ISIS is given by a news story in Marine Times: “The fighting was so intense and the region so remote it took coalition forces six hours to recover the bodies of the two Marines.” So much for Donald Trump’s claim that ISIS has been defeated.
Three days later a barrage of eighteen unguided 107-millimetre Katyusha rockets was fired at Camp Taji, a large Iraqi military training base north of Baghdad. One British and two US soldiers were killed, and a dozen people reported wounded. At the time of writing those responsible for the attack have not been identified but Washington sources suspect an Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi’a militia group called Kata-ib Hezbollah. If that is substantiated Trump may well order retaliation, not least to divert attention from his own domestic problems with Covid-19.
