Kenneth M. Pollack, Brookings, August 11, 2014
Without a doubt, one of the biggest and most disturbing surprises of the past week was the seeming ease with which ISIS fighters defeated Kurdish Peshmerga forces, seizing several towns in northern Iraq, the Mosul Dam, and even threatening to advance on Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). All of this has conveyed an impression of Kurdish weakness very much contrary to the accepted wisdom that the Peshmerga were more than capable of defending their lands. […read more]