The crossfire between the US and Tehran against pro- and anti-Iranian militias on Iraqi soil threatens to escalate into open conflict, fueled by the rising casualties among regular Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers

…Washington and Israel accuse [Popular Mobilization Forces] of being proxies for Iran. The site attacked on Wednesday houses barracks for regular soldiers, but it is a base shared with PMF units…

“Until now, they hadn’t attacked Iraqi soldiers…”

The ruling Shia coalition government finds it difficult to disarm the militias, as requested by U.S. President Donald Trump, especially in the context of a regional war where taking sides against Iran would mean aligning with the “Zionist enemy” [referring to Israel].

…“The U.S. A-10 is using bases in Jordan; Arab countries are already joining the war,”…

After decades of joint training exercises between U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers, including with the PMF fighters who battled ISIS, resentment toward the U.S. is growing. “We’ve been allies for so long, but the only one they provide air cover for is Israel,”…

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    It’s weird to me as well. A base understanding of their history shows that while they’ve been having a really bad time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, for most of history they’ve been one of the major cultural, financial, and generally civilizational hubs of the Eastern Hemisphere. Discounting them is like discounting China or India.

    A common claim is that they’ve been at war with each other for thousands of years. This is really funny coming from Europeans and their descendants, considering we were the savage backwater hell bent on killing the shit out of every neighbor we saw and also them for the entire middle ages, meanwhile they spent the period with some armed conflict against each other, but far more focused on peaceful trading.

    • anon6789@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      It doesn’t feel like much effort is made to help us understand them. All their accomplishments in science, math, and medicine barely get mentioned at least when I was in school. We got Mesopotamia, and that was about it. I don’t think we even covered what actual countries this is today.

      As you said, the only real news I ever hear about is of conflicts, not the reasons for them, just that they’re going on. Europe and America have screwed around with them ever since oil was found, so no wonder why there is so much instability.