A senior State Department official, briefing the reporters traveling with Kerry via a background conference call conducted from Iraq, described al-Maliki, a Shiite, and other senior figures in the Iraqi government – regardless of religious affiliation – as deeply unnerved by the ISIS offensive.
“They’re also very fearful of their situation,” the official said. “A lot of people they’ve known, on the Sunni and the Shia side, over the last ten days have been killed … Prominent leaders, their houses are gone … And the limitations of the Iraqi security forces is [sic] very apparent … They’re very limited in the air. They have two Cessna planes that can fire Hellfire missiles. That’s it, and they can’t be everywhere at once. They have a limited number of helicopters. So their ability to respond to events when they are getting frantic calls from people who might be stranded or might be – it definitely takes a toll.”
Even on the American side, officials displayed a degree of uncertainty as to conceptualize the enemy fighters. Where senior aides traveling with Kerry on this trip had previously termed ISIS “a highly capable and sophisticated terrorist organization [that] is also essentially a criminal syndicate,” the official briefing reporters from Baghdad, betraying the benefit of a more informed, ground-level view of the crisis, pointedly instructed reporters to take a different view.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member