IDF ground forces attack Gaza amid air, sea and artillery pounding. Half a million Gazans told to leave. Israelis around Gaza sent to shelters
DEBKAfile Special Report July 17, 2014/Israel air, sea and artillery pounded the Gaza Strip Thursday night, July 17, as IDF ground forces embarked on a ground attack, just announced by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. debkafile reports a softening-up operation to prepare for the entry of armored and infantry units. The IDF calls on the half million Gazans of southern towns of Khan Younes and Rafah to leave their homes for their own safety. Palestinians in northern towns reeived the same message. Israelis living close to the Gaza border were advised to stay in bomb shelters.
The IDF spokesman reported that large infantry and armored units are operating across the entire area of the Gaza Strip.
The announcement from Jerusalem said: "The prime minister and defense minister have instructed the IDF to begin a ground operation tonight in order to hit the terror tunnels from Gaza into Israel."
The IDF said: the ground attack has launched a new phase of Operation Protective Edge for striking a significant blow at Hamas in response to 10 days of attacks by land, sea and air and after repeated rejections of offers to de-escalate the situation.
See the earlier debkafile report below:
Hamas tried sending a commando team through a tunnel snaking under the Gaza border for a large-scale terrorist attack or kidnap early Thursday, July 17. As the group of 13-30 started coming to the surface inside Israel opposite the southern Gaza Strip, it ran into heavy IDF fire. Some were killed; the rest turned tail to escape through the tunnel and reach home. Israeli helicopters bombed the tunnel which exploded, and went on to scour the area around the Gaza Strip for more attempted incursions, through the honeycomb of secret tunnels Hamas has sunk for terrorist attacks and kidnaps.
debkafile quotes Israeli and Western military experts as estimating that the prospects of an Israeli ground incursion into the Gaza Strip are now more real than the chances of a ceasefire. There is little substance to the reports that Hamas and Israeli delegations are in Cairo to discuss various drafts of a ceasefire accord.
Our sources stress that the only real talks revolve around an ultimatum Israel has slapped down for Hamas, via the various would-be peacemakers: It has only days to halt its rocket offensive before Israel launches a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
The question being asked now is why, after 10 days of trading Israeli air strikes for Palestinian rocket attacks, the IDF has not destroyed the Hamas war room, the seat of its command and control center for directing the war and launching rockets, instead of striking the vacant homes of Hamas high-ups.
In the absence of a clear battlefield victory, headlines are appearing like this one: "Hamas Has Already Won Its Rocket War With Israel."
Even IDF commanders are noting that the IDF, while hammering the Gaza Strip night after night, has not achieved a single tactical victory. Destroying the Hamas war room would serve this purpose.
debkafile's military and intelligence sources note that finding and destroying underground structures is a daunting challenge, which is why Hamas has sunk its resources for fighting Israel deep below the surface. The war room in particular is a whole town complex, which runs under the surface buildings at the center of Gaza City, including the Shifa Hospital. This labyrinth accommodates top Hamas military personnel, the local social elite made up of Hamas bigwigs, affluent Gazans, foreign citizens and professionals like doctors or engineers.
It has a large and elaborate system of conference rooms, as well as control and command centers, outfitted with air conditioning, its own electricity and communications systems, security, and storerooms for food, drink and medicines to support the hundreds of top personnel operating and sheltering in the facility.
The Hamas underground city can function for weeks without outside help.
The various would-be European peace brokers, including foreign ministers and the Middle East Special Envoy Tony Blair, have been concerned to preserve the Hamas core stronghold, so as to leave the Islamist organization intact at the end of the current round of hostilities as a future negotiating partner and surviving government of the Gaza Strip. Our military sources say that this core stronghold is in fact Hamas’ sunken war room complex.
The Obama administration has been careful to keep its head down and make sure not to be seen or heard until Washington sees where this process is going.
Former Israel Air Force chief, Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, who also led the planning team for a strike on Iran, hinted this week that if the air force and IDF had the capability for destroying the underground nuclear facilities at Fordo, they could also destroy the Hamas underground command center.
When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu saw Wednesday that the cross diplomacy in Cairo had little chance of gong anywhere, he ordered a call-up of 8,000 military reservists in anticipation of the week ahead. The IDF spokesman said: The forces are prepared for ground action. After the Hamas tunnel terror bid was foiled Thursday, a ground operation was seen to be close, as the only effective measure against tunnel warfare.

Reading the Situation in Gaza
By: Eyad Abu Shakra /Asharq AlAwsat
Thursday, 17 Jul, 2014

http://www.aawsat.net/2014/07/article55334356
The Palestinians have faced many tough situations over the years, but in most cases they have succeeded in winning the sympathy of their Arab brothers and most of the international community. They have a just cause, and the injustice done to them since 1948 is unquestionable. Only skeptics with their own personal agenda would ever seek to deny that injustice.
The same thing must also be said about the injustice done to the Jewish people over the centuries. Unfortunately, today we see two wronged peoples, the Palestinians and the Israelis, locked in an existential conflict. This has happened because the moderate and reasonable voices have died down, and the two sides have become obsessed with victory over the other, if not each other’s complete annihilation.
I dare say that the many setbacks that have befallen the Palestinians are a partial excuse for the way they have lost faith in the international community, which the Palestinian people have found to be firmly biased in favor of their adversary. The people of this troubled land have also been let down by a fractured “Arab nation” that is now threatened with total fragmentation.
I do wonder about the excuses the Israelis have to justify their descent from “democracy” to “militarization.” Since the June 1967 war set their de facto borders, they have had a number of military victories that have enabled them to occupy lands far larger than the entity demarcated in 1967.
The Palestinians have long failed to fully grasp the nature of the Zionist movement. This failure has multiplied since the founding of the Jewish state, but this has not been the fault of the Palestinians alone. The entire Arab world was wept away by the euphoria of “Arabism”—though they never quite succeeded in defining it—and so they were chasing after mere illusions and dreams. In their quest for “one Arab nation with an eternal message” stretching “from the Indian Ocean to the Gulf,” the Arabs were willing to sacrifice principal human values: freedom and dignity.
Thus Arabism, particularly in its revolutionary form, has become associated with two negative traits: demagoguery and political opportunism. The revolutionary tyrants in our part of the world successfully used this to put a glossy veneer on their backwardness, tribalism and sectarianism.
As the Palestinians are part of the Arab world, the Palestinian resistance was directly influenced by Arab interests. In spite of the pledge to support the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, in the wake of the 1967 defeat several Arab regimes established their own client organizations under the PLO umbrella. The Palestinians, like many Arabs, were also an active part of the “international liberation movement” against “colonialism” and “imperialism,” towing the line of the Soviet Union and China in the face of the capitalist, imperialist West.
Two influential moments in the Palestinian struggle were the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s second president, and Anwar Sadat’s decision to draw Egypt closer to the US. Other related factors were the competition between the Ba’athists in Baghdad and Damascus, as well as the positions of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and Gaafar Nimeiry’s Sudan, about who was the rightful heir to Nasser’s “Arabist” mantle.
The Palestinian movement was further affected when Sadat, calling himself the “pious president,” began to exploit the forces of political Islam, using them as a weapon in his battle against the remnants of Nasserism and dimming the light of Arabism. The Camp David Accords struck another blow to the Arabist dream, enabling Hamas to rise at the expense of Fatah and the weakened Leftist organizations.
At the time, Israel was not particularly troubled by political Islam. It was fomenting internal battles in the Arab world between Islamists on one side and Arabists and Leftists on the other. The US was also happy to support political Islam—even its jihadist element, as we saw in the Afghanistan War in the 1980s. That is to say, the emergence of Hamas was once seen as a rather positive development by Israeli and American strategic planners, who at that point were in a hurry to settle the Cold War in favor of the West.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact would later become a game changer. The influence of the Left in the Muslim and Arab worlds shrank as a result of the Cold War’s end, and the Arab national identity fell apart in the face of the growing power of political Islam supported by the West. The awakening only came after the Afghan jihadists discovered they had been used as tools in the West’s war of attrition against Soviet communism: as soon as the jihadists were no longer useful, the West’s strategic goal became to put that genie back in its bottle.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, the jihadist response would be worldwide suicide operations, reaching US soil with the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. From that point onwards, the game took a drastic turn. In the Middle East, Israel found itself in the eye of the storm.
At one stage, Israel had faced the threat of the Khomeinist revolution in Iran alongside its Western allies. But, seeing itself as part of the conflict between the US and Iran, Israel started gradually to rethink its regional strategy. Rejecting the “land for peace” principle on which the international Arab–Israeli peace process is based, the Israeli Right wing is today implicitly encouraging an intra-Islamic civil war between Sunnis and Shi’ites in the region. This may best be seen by the West’s furtive support for the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, which is also supported (and armed) by Iran, even though the US was a leading force pushing for the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The Iranian leadership, which is enviably pragmatic, discovered some time ago that there is an important intersection of interests between it and Israel. The Iran–Contra scandal was an early indication of Tehran’s pragmatism, based on the idea that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Today, the intersection of Israeli and Iranian interests manifests itself in the war on “terrorists,” in Tel Aviv’s discourse, and against “takfirists” in the parlance of Iran.
The price Israel is demanding is, quite simply, enough to end any possibility of a viable Palestinian state. This can only be achieved by weakening an already imperiled moderate power in favor of an unacceptable armed Islamist movement. Regionally it requires, if only on a temporary basis, that Iran use its affiliates in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq for the protection of Israel’s borders. In return, Iran is seeking full control of the Arab Mashreq, from the Gulf to the Mediterranean; it is also claiming leadership of the Muslim world on the principle of “the unity of the Umma.”
For the time being, Israel does not seem to be opposed to Iran’s aspirations and actions because it benefits if Tehran succeeds in protecting its borders, and benefits even more if Tehran’s failure intensifies the intra–Islamic civil war. The Gaza tragedy can only be understood from this angle.
 

What is Hamas trying to achieve?
Thursday, 17 July 2014
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim /Al Arabiya

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2014/07/17/What-is-Hamas-trying-to-achieve-.html
To an ignorant observer, the recent escalation between Israel and Gaza might seem like just the latest episode in a human drama that we have become accustomed to in the Holy Land. And, though perhaps not for quite the expected reasons, that observer would probably be right. Israelis would claim that this recent episode ostensibly arose out of the heinous murder of three Jewish teenage boys. On the other hand, Palestinian sources would trace it back even further to similar murders of Palestinian teenage boys, earlier in the year. But ultimately, and without meaning to diminish the human tragedy in any of these singular events, they are not the root causes of what is happening now. Instead, they seem to be just a convenient pretext to deeper local politics. And that is the real tragedy of this latest Gaza story.
Allow me to explain. On my recent trip to Israel, I met both senior Israeli and Palestinian officials including current and former members of their respective cabinets. I learnt from my Palestinian sources that Hamas is essentially bankrupt. They have been unable to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of their staff for a while now, according to my sources. They were heavily reliant on support from Syria, Iran along with the Rafah crossing and hundreds of smuggling tunnels from Egypt to sustain them all of which have diminished recently.
“When the very existence of Hamas hangs by a thread, the reality is that the more severe a reaction we see from Israel, the better the future looks for Hamas”
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
When the Hamas leadership reached their financial limit, the Palestinian Authority agreed to step in and pay all salaries of the civil administrators and social workers in Gaza, my sources said. In exchange, the Palestinian Authority (PA) asked Hamas to make many concessions, including modifying its charter towards a more moderate and functional position. For example, the PA asked Hamas to recognize the State of Israel, according to what I have been told, and also form a unity government with the PA .
The problem with this is that it presents an existential threat to Hamas. Hamas arose as a radical, direct action alternative to the perceived weakness and failures of the Palestinian Authority. It is supposed to be, by definition, the active revolutionary cure to the sclerotic, corrupt and “self-defeatingly” compliant PA. If it is tamed, if it is brought into the fold of conciliatory, moderate politics, it loses its raison d’etre. In other words, Hamas’s real and somewhat justified fear is that if this course of events continues in this manner, it will simply be absorbed into Fatah and will have no further, independent purpose.
Why the rockets?
So where do the rockets fit in? Hamas is therefore playing a cynical game by firing completely useless and militarily insignificant rockets into Israel. The purpose of these wanton attacks, that cannot hope to penetrate Israel’s Iron Dome, cannot reasonably be other than to provoke Israeli retaliation. As we know from history, this will be overwhelming and disproportionate. And this could be just how Hamas wants it.
Their hope is likely to be that this will lead to significant sympathy around the Muslim world, particularly in the month of Ramadan. This will see money pouring into the various global charities of Hamas, from a wide variety of sources. The idea seems to be that this might rescue Hamas financially, and save them from their ideological extinction too. Many observers have now looked at this situation and the question must be asked: what is the purpose of Hamas firing so many rockets into Israel? The perverse reality seems to be that Hamas expects the typical Israeli over reaction, and is baiting for it, with no further strategic aims. And at this very moment, when the very existence of Hamas hangs by a thread, the reality is that the more severe a reaction we see from Israel, the better the future looks for Hamas. Netanyahu, who is regarded as a “very weak” and “a do-nothing” prime minister by many officials I met is more than happy to comply with the unnecessary violence Hamas expects.
And now we come back to our ignorant observer. This seems to be, once again, just another typical episode in the human drama in the Holy Lands. One in which the power interests of some Palestinian leaders, and some Israeli leaders too, play off each other in a casual, monstrous way while a few more hundred Palestinians die. Will we hold these leaders to account this time, or will we divert our attention away, once again, from the morally intractable problems of our Middle East?
 

How will Lebanon treat the man who fired on Israel?
Thursday, 17 July 2014
By: Abdulrahman al-Rashed/Al Arabiya
A man named Hussein Atwi stands accused of launching a rocket from Lebanon towards northern Israel. In Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated al-Jamaa al-Islamiya said Atwi, who is currently under arrest and is being interrogated, is one of its members.
According to the Lebanese government, if he is proven guilty, he will have violated state’s laws and subjected the country to danger and thus deserves to be punished.
Geagea’s objection
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea objected to this. His objection, however, does not aim to defend Atwi. It aims to protest the contradiction in the Lebanese government’s policy.
“Hezbollah has been, and still is, Iran’s most prominent agent”
Abdulrahman al-Rashed
Geagea told Future News television: “I support detaining Hussein Atwi who launched a missile from the South [Lebanon towards Israel.] However, what if during the interrogation, he says: ‘I fired one rocket against Israel and got arrested, but why didn’t you arrest he who fired thousands of rockets against Israel. Are they Lebanese and I am not?’ And what if he asks: ‘I fired one rocket against Israel and got arrested. Why don’t you arrest Lebanese groups fighting in Syria and firing thousands of rockets against the Syrian people upon Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah’s acknowledgment?’ What would they say to him?”
This is the new situation in brief; the borders with Syria are open while those with Israel are closed. Hezbollah did not launch rockets towards Israel and send drones in order to protect Lebanon, or the “Syrian” Shebaa territories. Also, it certainly did not do so out of its desire to liberate Palestine. Hezbollah acted as such in order to implement Iran’s policy and it thus worked within the scope of Iran’s agenda in the Arab region.
Committed to Iran
Since Hezbollah is committed to the orders of its Iranian sponsor, it has sent thousands of Lebanese youths to fight in Syria. Hezbollah’s militias support Assad’s forces by attacking border areas on the Lebanese side. As a result, most Lebanese borders fall under the control of Syrian armed groups that oppose Assad - groups that threaten Lebanon with guerrilla wars. It will not be possible to halt or limit the fighting because, unlike what used to happen when clashes erupted with Israel, there is no phone number you can call to reach an agreement with these groups, some of which are affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Hezbollah opened up Lebanon to danger over the course of 30 years. It caused Lebanon’s destruction by triggering wars with Israel - wars that served the Syrian and Iranian regimes. For ten years, Hezbollah took Lebanon hostage for a Syrian border land occupied since the 1960s - the Shebaa Farms. But nowadays, Hezbollah no longer brings up this Israel-controlled countryside area in its statements and rhetoric.
The urgent Lebanese ordeal is more dangerous than all the crises the country has faced since the civil war ended, because it drags the Syrian war into Lebanon. This is in addition to Assad’s act of pushing one million Syrians to flee to Lebanon in order to export the crisis to neighboring countries. Armed Syrian extremist groups besiege Lebanese borders while the militias of the extremist Hezbollah party fight in Syria. One cannot come up with a convincing answer to respond to Atwi if he objects to the double standards where one man is arrested because he fired one rocket while no one obstructs the path of the thousands of men involved in the fighting in Syria.
The crisis of the war on Gaza renews questions about empty slogans. Hezbollah has been, and still is, Iran’s most prominent agent. Its main task was to confront Israel and keep the Palestinian cause alive, regardless of the consequences and under any justifications. But then, developments occurred and friends turned into enemies. Those who used to cheer for Hezbollah and pray for it, turned against it and now consider it an enemy that is no less evil than Israel. How can a man make a U-turn on his stances and justify his contradictions? Those who design slogans and formulate speeches usually know that people’s memories are very short. Syria’s events are the worst in terms of crimes, violations, the number of victims, its continuity and the sheer scale of the tragedy. Despite that, there are still people who forget all about it and, instead of sympathizing with this reality, sympathize with another, completely contradictory reality.


Saving Iraqi Turkmens Is a Win-Win-Win
Michael Knights/Washington Institute
July 16, 2014

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/saving-iraqi-turkmens-is-a-win-win-win
A U.S.-backed effort to save besieged Iraqi Turkmens in the Tuz Khormatu district could bring Baghdad, the Kurds, and Turkey into a joint fight against the ongoing jihadist offensive.
In the battle for Iraq, the Islamic State (IS) continues to hold the initiative in its quest to establish a caliphate within the territory it controls in Iraq and Syria. In response, Baghdad and its allies need to quickly break the group's momentum and deflate its image -- and they can do so with a significant victory that involves as many allies as possible, demonstrating that the entire region is bandwagoning against the IS.
U.S. military intervention in Iraq's security crisis could be drawing closer as politicians in Baghdad tentatively move toward a more inclusive government under a new prime minister, and as U.S. assessment teams report back their initial findings on the status of Iraq's security forces. The next stage for U.S. planners may be to help Iraqi authorities craft a political-military campaign that can get the security forces back on their feet and win undecided Sunni tribes and militants over to the government's side in the fight against the IS, which until recently called itself the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Turning the tide arguably depends on two factors:
Winning a clear victory. The shattered Iraqi security forces need an iconic victory, perhaps small in scale but well publicized. The military task should be relatively modest in order to maximize the chances of success, restore confidence to the security forces, and burst the bubble of ISIS/IS invincibility.
Bolstering national and international consensus. Ideally, the Iraqi security forces and their international partners will focus their early efforts on a battlefield away from the chaotic sectarian strife of Baghdad and its suburbs. Namely, a battlefield where the interests of the various coalition elements -- Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, U.S., Turkish, and Iranian -- are in broad alignment.
Relieving the desperate suffering of besieged Turkmen villages in Tuz Khormatu district -- an enclave roughly halfway between Baghdad and Mosul -- would appear to tick all of the above boxes (see map).
IRAQI TURKMEN ENCLAVE UNDER SIEGE, JULY 2014: Green areas represent federal government-held areas; black areas are insurgent-controlled areas; yellow areas are peshmerga-held. The blue area is the Turkmen enclave at Amerli. Baghdad lies 100 miles to the south, Tikrit 60 miles to the west, and Kirkuk 40 miles to the north. Click on map for larger view.
THE SIEGE
Northern Iraq's Turkmens are a Turkic-ethnicity, Turkish-speaking minority that includes Shiites and Sunnis alike. Shiite Turkmens, who comprise most of the large Shiite communities in the Sunni-majority north, have long been intensely targeted by ISIS/IS and its predecessors (al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq). In mid-June, the group brutally drove over forty thousand of them from the Turkmen center of Tal Afar, west of Mosul. Days later, it massacred forty civilians in Bashir, a Turkmen town near Kirkuk, prompting Kurdish peshmerga fighters to move beyond their purely defensive positions in Kurdish areas to assist Turkmen militias.
A similar scene is now unfolding fifteen miles south of the Kurdish-held city of Tuz Khormatu, where the Islamic State is besieging a pocket of around twelve thousand Shiite Turkmen civilians in the Amerli subdistrict. The group has already captured outlying Turkmen villages such as Bastamil, Barochali, and Qara Naz, driving local families into the subdistrict center at Amerli. This center was the scene of a massive al-Qaeda truck bombing on July 7, 2007, that killed 159 civilians and wounded over 350. Now it is being defended by around 400 local Turkmen armed volunteers. The Iraqi army has attempted to fight its way up the Udaim River Valley to make contact with the pocket, but its advance stalled twenty miles south at Udaim Dam. Meanwhile, the Iraqi air force is flying ammunition, vital medical supplies, and even baby formula into the pocket using unarmored helicopters, which are exposed to IS heavy machine gun and sniper fire. Almost a month into the siege, Turkmen residents of Amerli claim that 175 people have died, and there is widespread fear of a sectarian massacre if the defense fails, since they have no open line of retreat.
A FAVORABLE BATTLEGROUND
Supporting the Shiite Turkmens of Amerli could be the iconic fight that Iraq needs at this moment. The Shiite-led federal government is desperate to prevent another sectarian cleansing episode such as the one suffered at Tal Afar, which was too remote to save. In contrast, Amerli could be relieved if the Iraqi army receives timely support. Iran has ties to the Shiite communities around Amerli and could be counted on not to interfere with such an effort. Indeed, Tehran is already pressuring the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) to fight the IS more broadly, and an operation to relieve Amerli would fit into this effort. Further support would likely come from Turkey, which has gone to great lengths to support this particular Turkmen community in the past, flying air ambulances into Amerli following the 2007 bombing and evacuating the wounded to Turkey.
PUK fighters in the Tuz Khormatu area are likewise slowly being drawn into the local fight. When peshmerga prevented an IS car bombing against Shiite Turkmens in Tuz Khormatu city on June 19, the group responded by shelling and assaulting the nearby peshmerga checkpoint for four hours. The PUK has also facilitated the insertion of Turkmen militias into the Amerli pocket and blocked the path of IS oil-smuggling trucks in the area. Thirty miles to the southeast, an IS suicide bomber from Kazakhstan detonated a suicide vest at a peshmerga checkpoint on July 14, killing two fighters and injuring five -- one of the group's several recent attacks on the Kurds in the Hamrin Mountains region.
Some local Sunni insurgents could also be expected to stand aside or launch their own anti-IS operations in conjunction with a coalition effort to relieve Amerli. In the adjacent town of Suleiman Beg, the neo-Baathist militant group Jaish al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandia (JRTN) has launched at least four attempted uprisings since January 2013, only to see IS fighters stride in and take over after the most recent uprising succeeded in June. The two groups are now fighting a low-level war for control across the Hamrin Mountains region; this week alone, twelve JRTN fighters were found executed by the IS at Saadiyah, sixty miles southeast of Amerli. Moreover, before ISIS/IS ramped up its presence in the Amerli area in the past year, local Turkmens had good community relations with the Sunni Arabs at Suleiman Beg.
IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. POLICY
As illustrated above, saving the Amerli pocket could strike an iconic blow at the Islamic State and draw together a rare community of interest between Baghdad, the Kurds, Turkey, Iran, and Washington. With the new Joint Operations Center established in the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, the United States is well positioned to provide planning, coordination, logistical help, and airstrikes in support of any joint operation in the area. The U.S. military and PUK forces remain on very good terms, and U.S. personnel have extensive in-house experience working with local tribes and community leaders in Amerli, Suleiman Beg, and Tuz Khormatu city. The soldiers and civilians involved in past joint activities are only a phone call away, and some have already signaled their willingness to help old contacts in Amerli.
In short, many of the most promising arenas for U.S. intervention can be found in vital northern and western Iraqi battlegrounds away from Baghdad. If Washington's conditions for military intervention are met, a coalition effort to relieve the Turkmens at Amerli would be a good place to start. Such an operation would ideally be one of a number of linked battles that also fit the criteria of being achievable and in the interests of multiple factions -- hopefully building outward from the Tuz Khormatu, Kirkuk, and Lake Hamrin areas as Sunni militants looked to the example of Amerli and overthrew the IS presence in their own communities.
Operationally speaking, the United States is capable of resupplying the Amerli pocket with humanitarian and military supplies by air, effectively using night operations and airdrops in ways that Iraqi forces cannot. It could also evacuate the worst casualties and most helpless civilians. And a modicum of air support from the drones that already fly over Iraq would greatly improve the morale and survival chances of fighters in Amerli, as well as any Iraqi and Kurdish forces that push forward to relieve them. In addition, such strikes would be a timely reminder to allies and adversaries of the ongoing potency of U.S. airpower, and President Obama's willingness to use it when conditions are right.
*Michael Knights is a Boston-based Lafer Fellow with The Washington Institute.