Stay updated with breaking news from Training iraqis. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Kadhimi arrested the iranian backed militia men who had killed one of his friends, an iraqi intellectual who had done courageous writing about iran s attempts to influence iran. he had been assassinated and kadhimi sent his forces into the center in the east of baghdad, and arrested him, took to justice, that took a lot of guts and something i admired. the final thing briefly that i saw is that the very small numbers of american forces that are still there under 2,500, not doing combat missions now, training iraqis, providing intelligence support, make a big difference. kadhimi, the leaders come at end of the month, he s going to ask for continued support. the iraqis out there doing the fighting really would like to have americans alongside to help ....
The opposing force. and yet they failed to fight. matthew van dikes, an american who just returned from training iraqis to confront iraqis in iraq. he is not part of the u.s. military. he has no military training. he is a volunteer and working with iraqi christians in an area northeast of mosul. matthew joins us right now. why are you doing this? i decided to see what i could do after the deaths of my friends. you knew foley. yes. i carry his picture in my wallet. i share the goal. let me ask but this. this statement by our secretary of defense. did the forces in the field. the regular army iraq doesn t want to fight. that s correct. morale is extremely low. really the only forces doing ....
How many tens of billions of dollars in we waste training iraqis and the president is saying those were the ones who weren t fighting. they were never fighting. back to the map, we are talking about the 7 checkpoints the half way point between iraq and ramadi that they took. over night basically. 150 miles to the capital where massages its. he has released theory and tell against his own people. what in the world is going to happen when isis has half of iraq over laughing overlapping with syria. what happens when those people meet in the middle? what will that look like? one other thing. people say we should just get out of it. it is not our fight, the u.s. should not be involved. if we don t get involved over is there in controlling, once they have locked caliphate and a secure place they will attack us over here so we will be attacked over here or fighting over it ....
Terms of the raid and the capture of umm sayyaf and of course the kill of her husband. elizabeth. all right, thank you very much. leeland. for perspective, we turn to john hanna senior counselor for defense democracies, former national security adviser to former vice president dick cheney. it sounds an awful lot like boots on the ground something the president said wasn t going to happen. it does lee lan, it looks like a shift in the u.s. approach. so far, we know special forces are in iraq. special forces have been training iraqis. they ve been calling in some air strikes. but to have them in this kind of highly risky combat role. i think the only other place we ve seen it inside of syria is when there s an attempt to free a u.s. hostage. attempted rescue of james foley, very different than doing some kind of snatch and grab operation. the other question i had was thank god everything went well here. all the americans returned safely. you could have ended up in a ....
the idea is to have more disciplined, better officers. i think they do have a little bit better in both those categories. the problem in the battle for tikrit is that it reveals the fundamental conflicts and contradictions in the u.s. strategy. tikrit is a sunni place. it s saddam hussein s hometown for goodness sakes. it s been retaken largely with shiite militia men. the problem is that that creates resentments, rivalries that will last well after the battle is over. the battle isn t going all that quickly quickly. but i think that s the underlying issue that we should think about. somehow the u.s. has got to train both the iraqi military largely shia and sunni militias who can play a role in the fight. they haven t really so far in tikrit. willie, training iraqis is tough. i mean we have mcarthur i shall return. you know they have is that a ....