11/06/2015 - The so-called counter-offensive on Ramadi by the Iraqi armed forces, proposes a scenario already seen in Iraq. Isis or not Isis, that an Iraqi province is out of control of central power, since the fall of Saddam onwards, does not seem a novelty. After all, without the grip of the regime that held it together for 25 years, the country would be divided according to the three souls that comprise it: the Sunnis in the center, the Shiites in the South and the Kurds in the north.

In December of 85, at the most difficult time of the Iran-Iraq war, Iranians in full counter-offensive in Iraqi territory enjoyed the support of Southern Shiites. On the outskirts of Basra and on Shatt el Arab, Iraqi TV showed trenches and bodies of Pasdaran Iranians died in piles in assaults on enduro motorcycles against Iraqi 55 T. When the counteroffensive stopped altogether, the world took a breath and watched. As Saddam settled the accounts with the Shiites during and after the war, he comes to himself. They were kisses and hugs ...

In the same years, Iran had refrained from large-scale attacks in northern Iraq, despite the area smelling rebellion in Baghdad. The entry into Iraqi Kurdistan allegedly also generated the uprising of the Iranian Kurds, part of the Kurdish nation straddling four countries, including Syria and Turkey.

Saddam, who had a particular talent in regularizing the accounts, also dedicated himself to the Kurds, despite having been indirectly helpful to the cause of the war against Khomeini.

With the establishment in the '91 of the two no-fly zones after the First Gulf War, the effective control of Baghdad on the national territory was further limited. Above all in the north, where a certain political autonomy between Mosul and Kirkuk was already a fact, although Turkey and Syria were pressing to curb the Kurdish ambitions (Damascus was beating cash for participating in the anti-Saddam coalition).

The long effects of the Second Gulf War have not brought anything new on the qualitative level as well as an appreciable deterioration. The laboratory virus called Isis did nothing but creep into the gaps of power and the mesh of alternating alliances between different tribes, clans and confessions.

For Ramadi it is worth the same. Located on the Euphrates and on the axis Falluja-Abu Grahib (famous for the phosphorus bombs and the prison camps, first Iraqis then the US), it has always been strategic. The only gate to Damascus and Amman through the desert, a hundred years ago was already the scene of battles between Brits and Ottomans; the newly lit outbreak is the third great clash of the last decade after those between insurgents and Americans in the post-Saddam era. Its instability is endemic.

The news of the preparation of a counter-offensive by the Iraqi army makes you smile, not so much on the military level itself already comical, but on the political one.

The same happened Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam and an important crossroads between the capital and the northern oil. The return to government control in April was fictitious. More than a success of the Iraqi US franchise army, it has been a media showcase with much of the effort actually sustained by the Shiite militias of the South, enemies of ISIS Sunnis and especially of the former regime loyalists.

The grudges between former leaders of Bath, Saddam's party-state, many of whom originating from Tikrit, and the Shiite gangs then turned the clash into a settling of scores and local feuds, proving that Iraq as a unitary state exists more. The comic side of the matter is that Saddam's city would officially be liberated from armed soldiers and dressed as those who deposed him.

Now in the Ramadi area, at the base of Taqaddum, we are anxiously awaiting the arrival of 500 American instructors. On paper they would be useful for the selection of targets in air raids. However, it is important not to call them fighters.

Now it is a consolidated trend. Instructors and advisers who work alongside the premises in an escalation without a future. It is very reminiscent of the Vietnam of '62, when the fear of admitting that there was a war made it worse. The aggravating factor of today is that there were no precedents in Indochina. In Iraq, on the other hand, the war has already happened and it has been a catastrophe.

Ramadi or not Ramadi, Isis is not Isis, Iraq is lost. Precisely and paradoxically from the day when Saddam fell.

Giampiero Venturi

(photo: US DoD)