News & Events
QUOTE: Iraq Counts on Magic Wands to Stop ISIS
By Jacob Siegel, May 18, 2015
THE DAILY BEAST: The U.S. is now training the Iraqi army as it did for almost a decade while the U.S. military occupied Iraq. Yet despite the previous years of training and $25 billion spent on the effort, Iraq’s military collapsed in the face of ISIS’s initial onslaught last year. Zaid Al-Ali wrote of the Iraqi military’s performance in Tikrit, as witnessed by a resident of the city who saw it captured by ISIS: “a contingent of just thirty militants in seven vehicles had seized control in the time it took him to have his nap. Iraq’s security forces, on which 100 billion dollars of Iraq’s money had been spent between 2006 to 2014, had simply melted away.”