The Tikrit Offensive is Offensive in Iraq
Without sounding like a zealot about the End Times, the Book of Revelation does tell of the final battle involving much of the world in the Middle East area. Doubt it if you will, but what is going on there may be the most humble of beginnings that will only spread and get worse as America does little. Like in Vietnam, there was the "rumor of war" that led to US advisers, which led to small military units, that led to much larger and so on. The ISIS dilemma is only being acerbated by inaction on the part of the West, in effect, allowing it to spread and become more than it should ever become (think Hitler in the 1930s). Sorry, President Obama, you are acting like a pathetic American president frozen in indecisiveness.
The first Iraqi Shiite- Iran offensive to retake Tikrit from the ISIS occupiers is offensive for its ineptness of American trained Iraqi soldiers and their militia. The numbers alone indicate how obscene and offensive this is: The 3000-man Iraqi force, with Iran special forces, amount to near 23,000 men. Tikrit is 87 miles north of Baghdad. When the offensive began, there was no US air support nor Kurd support. The first week was slow but steady progress and opposition was not more than a few hundred! It seems the roadside bombs ISIS left behind provide more resistance than the few ISIS fighters, yet, by the second week, the snail offensive crept to the outskirts of the city and stopped after the Kurds said ISIS had used chlorine gas bombs. At the very most, ISIS fighters are not more than 1000. So, the odds are 23 to 1, and in military circles, those are very good. One would expect a more rapid success. Now the offensive is in the third week and it has stalled. According the Iraqis, the attack was stopped to assess how to conquer the city from the few hundred ISIS diehards in the center protected by 6500 improvised explosive devices. The ISIS fighters are defending in the former Saddam Hussein's palaces. The slowdown is being caused by the IED's and the lack of sappers or engineers to defuse them! ISIS has held Tikrit since 2014 and no doubt was expecting this. What is more amazing is that the Iraqi body count of their losses is amounting to around 60 a day from IED, snipers, and poor training. Iran has supplied advanced missiles, tanks, and artillery since the offensive began on March 1st. The civilians trapped in the city amount to 26,000 out of the original 260,000 before the attack began.
And where is the US in all this? Absent. Iraq has not requested US air support yet, instead relying on Iran for its missiles and artillery from its special forces. Tikrit will fall but each day that it does not, it will make look ISIS better and the Iraqi military worse. If it takes a month to conquer a small city like Tikrit, how in the world will Iraq ever retake Mosul, a city of millions! It probably would never be taken completely.