June 01, 2015

Still Winning in Iraq

By Dafna Rand

Two months ago, my colleague and I published a Foreign Affairs piece warning about the political challenges that lay ahead in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, where the government and its security forces, with U.S. and international support, were seeking to rout the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as ISIS). We made three main points.

First, the Iraqi government could not simply conduct a repeat play of the Sunni Awakening, particularly because the Sons of Iraq and other Sunni leaders who had joined with the U.S. military to fight al Qaeda in the 2006–07 period have since lost their local credibility.

Read the full article in Foreign Affairs.

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