From Muhammad to ISIS:Iraq's full story (1 Viewer)

[tom22406]

Another question(s) I had was why don't we(the US)support the Kurds independence more from all this mess?

They seem to be the moderate ones and actually have been fighting the fight against ISIS about as good as anyone has from that region.

And what if Saddam was still in power,how different would things look today?

 

[tom22406]

I found this while searching around about my first question and it seems to make a lot of sense as to why not.

Echoing other answers, the US does provide significant support to the Kurdish resistance in both Iraq and Syria. However, they certainly do not provide as much support as the various Kurdish parties mentioned in the question would like.

The main reason for this is that the US does not want to undermine the central government in the countries in which there are significant numbers of Kurds. For example, in Iraq, the US did not provide significant amount of weapons and assistance to the Kurds initially because they did not want to undermine the role of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military. The idea being that by providing the Kurds with those resources, the US was indirectly supporting a seperatist movement and tacitly endorsing the establishment of a Kurdish nation. However, the US has since reversed course given the failings of the central Iraqi government and used airstrikes and technical assistance to help Kurds beat back ISIS.

Similarly, in Syria, while they actually want to undermine the central government there, it is actually more to do with preventing Kurds from using US support to undermine the central government in Turkey, which has been fighting a Kurdish seperatist movement for decades. The Kurdish population in Syria is concentrated near the Syria-Turkey border and by helping the Kurdish population there in the way they would like, then the US runs the risk of getting Turkey offside and again, seeming to tacitly support calls for an independent Kurdistan.

So the US does support Kurdish resistance in a number of ways, but probably not as significant as the Kurds would like, simply because they do not believe it is worth the risk of strengthening Kurdish seperatists movements in Iraq and Turkey.

 

[EYLive]

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

Another question(s) I had was why don't we(the US)support the Kurds independence more from all this mess?

They seem to be the moderate ones and actually have been fighting the fight against ISIS about as good as anyone has from that region.

And what if Saddam was still in power,how different would things look today?

People don't understand typically that eastern Turkey is a sort of imperial occupation left over from the Ottomans. It was the "American plan" post WW1 to turn over a good chunk of historical Armenia to the Armenian people as a fully viable, largish Christian state, instead what we see today is the rump state which is wedged beneath Georgia.

If that had happened though Kurdistan might have taken up the other southern half of that portion of eastern Turkey. Like Armenia without that sizeable portion of its uplands Kurdistan could never emerge s a viable nation state. Meanwhile the Sunnis and Christians in Kurdistan were piled in by the Brits to ensure a roughly mixed and sizeable ethnic counterbalance to the Shiite majority.

Turkey will never release these portions of the last vestige of their empire and they have since spent a lot of time end effort building up the ethnic Turk presence there. And the US will not stand in the way of its only ally in the mideast outside of Israel.

 

[tom22406]

Another question(s) I had was why don't we(the US)support the Kurds independence more from all this mess?

They seem to be the moderate ones and actually have been fighting the fight against ISIS about as good as anyone has from that region.

And what if Saddam was still in power,how different would things look today?

People don't understand typically that eastern Turkey is a sort of imperial occupation left over from the Ottomans. It was the "American plan" post WW1 to turn over a good chunk of historical Armenia to the Armenian people as a fully viable, largish Christian state, instead what we see today is the rump state which is wedged beneath Georgia.

If that had happened though Kurdistan might have taken up the other southern half of that portion of eastern Turkey. Like Armenia without that sizeable portion of its uplands Kurdistan could never emerge s a viable nation state. Meanwhile the Sunnis and Christians in Kurdistan were piled in by the Brits to ensure a roughly mixed and sizeable ethnic counterbalance to the Shiite majority.

Turkey will never release these portions of the last vestige of their empire and they have since spent a lot of time end effort building up the ethnic Turk presence there. And the US will not stand in the way of its only ally in the mideast outside of Israel.

Good info Saints

 

[tdoss]

I found this to be an interesting read on ISIS:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

This is one of the oddest things in Islam to me:

- The Black Stone.

This is the Black Stone - in diagram.

Here is how it looks up close.

Another shot - worshipers get up close and kiss and rub it. This is actually a requirement of being muslim, one of the 5 pillars, as it is part of making the hajj pilgrimage.

Here is what's in it - basically fragments of a meteorite which fell a long time ago.

Here's the explanation from wiki:

The Black Stone was held in reverence well before the preaching of Islam by Muhammad. By the time of Muhammad, it was already associated with the Kaaba, a pre-Islamic shrine, that was a sacred sanctuary and a site of pilgrimage of Nabateans who visited the shrine once a year to perform their pilgrimage. The Kaaba held 360 idols of the Meccan gods.[9] The Semitic cultures of the Middle East had a tradition of using unusual stones to mark places of worship, a phenomenon which is reflected in the Hebrew Bible as well as the Qur'an,[10] although bowing to or kissing such sacred objects is repeatedly described in the Tanakh as idolatrous[11] and was the subject of prophetic rebuke.[12][13][14][15][16][17] Some writers remark on the apparent similarity of the Black Stone and its frame to the external female genitalia,[18][19] and ascribe this to its earlier association with fertility rites of Arabia.[20][21]

A "red stone" was associated with the deity of the south Arabian city of Ghaiman, and there was a "white stone" in the Kaaba of al-Abalat (near the city of Tabala, south of Mecca). Worship at that time period was often associated with stone reverence, mountains, special rock formations, or distinctive trees.[22] The Kaaba marked the location where the sacred world intersected with the profane, and the embedded Black Stone was a further symbol of this as an object as a link between heaven and earth.[23]

Muhammad is credited with setting the Black Stone in the current place in the wall of the Kaaba. A story found in Ibn Ishaq's Sirah Rasul Allah tells how the clans of Mecca renovated the Kaaba following a major fire which had partly destroyed the structure. The Black Stone had been temporarily removed to facilitate the rebuilding work. The clans could not agree on which one of them should have the honour of setting the Black Stone back in its place.[24]

They decided to wait for the next man to come through the gate and ask him to make the decision. That individual happened to be the 35-year-old Muhammad, five years before his prophethood. He asked the elders of the clans to bring him a cloth and put the Black Stone in its centre. Each of the clan leaders held the corners of the cloth and carried the Black Stone to the right spot. Then, Muhammad himself set the stone in place, satisfying the honour of all of the clans.[24]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stone

ReligionThe extent of Nabataean trade resulted in cross-cultural influences that reached as far as the Red Sea coast of southern Arabia. The gods worshipped at Petra were notably Dushara and al-‘Uzzá. The Nabataeans used to represent their gods as featureless pillars or blocks. Their most common monuments to the gods, commonly known as "god blocks", involved cutting away the whole top of a hill or cliff face so as to leave only a block behind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataeans

Al-Uzza - Goddess of the Moon and Protection.Al-Uzzá ("the mighty one") is a Goddess of the Moon and Protection. She forms a Trinity of Goddesses with al-Lat and Manat. The temple and statue dedicated to her at Nakhla were destroyed by Khalid ibn al Walid. A stone cube was held sacred to her and was a place of pilgrimage.

http://www.thewhitegoddess.co.uk/divinity_of_the_day/arabian/al-uzza.asp

The Quraysh were wont to circumambulate the Ka‘bah and say,

By al-Lāt and al-‘Uzzá, And al-Manāt, the third idol besides. Verily they are al-gharānīq Whose intercession is to be sought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-%E2%80%98Uzz%C3%A1

The Quraysh of course were Mohammed's own tribe.

- I realize that all major religions have in some way perhaps been grafted upon older pagan traditions, but this particular seems like basically an outright continuation of an older pagan ritual, a Nabataean cult relating to a moon goddess.

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

This part is so weird it's almost bizarre, especially since the similarities can only be accidental or coincidental over the course of 1500 years. The three goddesses of the Quraysh were: al-Lat, al-Uzzah, and Manawat. Welll...

Sometimes Allat was equated with Aphrodite, Urania/Venus and Caelestis as well. Al Uzza was also linked to the Egyptian goddess, Isis. Representations of Isis-Al Uzza are thought to be carved on the Treasury in Petra.

http://nabataea.net/gods.html

The phonetic similarity of Allah <> Allat, and Isis <> Uzza, seem too close.

Al Uzza and Allat had very similar baetyls, and were probably two names for the same goddess. Inscriptions bearing their names are not found in the same area. In one area the goddess is known as Al Uzza and in other areas as Allat. Eventually Allat may have taken supremacy as the name of this goddess.

I have no idea how deep the Isis end of time mythology runs but it would not surprise me if it ran that crazy, that deep.

Even at the founding of Islam, an image of Allat, along with one of Al-'Uzza, were to be found at Mecca. Some historians claim that respect, if not approval, of this ancient goddess was shown by Mohammed himself, and by other early followers of the Muslim prophet.

- That last part is the foundation of the term "Satanic Verses" which of course is what got a fatwah put on Salman Rushdie's head. This might explain how muslims came to worship at (possibly) a pagan shrine.

 

[SaintsInDome2006]

From the original post:

Two things were especially shocking about ISIS’s advance into Iraq....Second, the fact that in city after city ISIS attacked, the Iraqi military would flee the scene. This was partially because they were horrified of ISIS and partially because, as mentioned above, the Sunni members of the army weren’t that into fighting against a Sunni group to defend a government they hated. So western Iraq was folding quickly to ISIS, and by June 9th, they had captured Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city.

This is what TE Lawrence said. Gertrude Bell is a name that should be known to those interested in how we got here:

The Ottomans had managed Arabia through a decentralized system of provinces called valyets, run by governors they appointed. Tribal, sectarian and territorial conflicts made it a constantly turbulent place, despite the hammer of Ottoman rule. Under a more centralized system the place would have been ungovernable. But the Turks never entertained the Western idea of nation building, it was as much as they could do to keep even a semblance of order.

..Lawrence had committed himself to the princes of the Hashemite tribe, notably Feisal, with whom he had fought against the Turks, and promised Damascus to them. But unknown to Lawrence, a secret deal had been cut with the French, who wanted control of the eastern Mediterranean and were to get Damascus while Britain would fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire by re-drawing the map of Arabia.

...

On August 23, 1921, at a ceremony in central Baghdad, Feisal was installed as the monarch of Iraq, even though he had no tribal roots in the country to assist his legitimacy. “We’ve got our king crowned,” wrote Bell with relief. And she made a claim about this election that would be echoed decades later by Saddam Hussein, that Feisal had been endorsed by 96 percent of the people, even though he was the only candidate and the majority of the population was illiterate.

...In reality, the Iraqi borders had been arbitrarily drawn and disregarded 2,000 years of tribal, sectarian, and nomadic occupation. The Persian frontier was the only firmly delineated border, asserted by mountains. Beyond Baghdad the line drawn between Syria, now the property of France, and Iraq was more cartography than anthropology. Nothing had cooled the innate hostilities of the Shia, in the south, who (in a reversal of the current travesty in Baghdad) were virtually unrepresented in Bell’s new assembly, and the Sunnis to the north, as well as the Kurds, the Armenians and the Turks, each with their own turf. Lawrence, in fact, had protested that the inclusion of the Kurds was a mistake. And the desert border in the south was, in Bell’s own words, “as yet undefined.”

The reason for this was Ibn Saud. Bell wrote in a letter to her father, “I’ve been laying out on the map what I think should be our desert boundaries.” Eventually that line was settled by the Saudis, whose Wahhabi warriors were the most formidable force in the desert and who foresaw what many other Arabs at the time did: Iraq was a Western construct that defied thousands of years of history, with an alien, puppet king who would not long survive and internal forces that were centrifugal rather than coherent.

...King Feisal, who had been ailing for some time, died in Switzerland in 1933, at the age of 48, to be succeeded by his son Prince Ghazi. The monarchy was brought down by a pro-British military coup in 1938, a regime that would ultimately mutate into that of Saddam Hussein’s in 1979.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/17/gertrude-of-arabia-the-woman-who-invented-iraq.html

>>> Meanwhile this is the map recommended by T. E. Lawrence (aka "Lawrence of Arabia") for the partitioning of Arabia. Here's what appears to be the older version by Lawrence. The pink area would have been the new Iraq, and the problem there would have been that it would have been Shiite, which the Sauds would not permit and apparently still won't.

This would have also left the Kurds to their own devices in the north.

You can see the slice carved up in eastern Turkey / northern Syria for the Aremenians. When the Turks caught wind of that they slaughtered them in the genocide. That was in the context of the good chunk of territory that had been dedicated to them in the north of Turkey by the Treaty of Sevres.

In both plans the northern border of Iraq was further to the south and the Kurds would essentially have been left to their own devices. Essentially carving out Syria and Jordan led to the massive problems we have today. Oddly enough it was the French who drove this carve-out all along and ironically enough today it is teh French who have born the brunt of Isis' fury outside the Levante.

 

[tom22406]

Another good read IMO

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/isis-in-america/418857/