The Relentless War on Iraq

For months, a war has been unfolding across Iraq with little of the fanfare that once accompanied American military campaigns in the region. There are no embedded journalists photographing convoys rolling through the desert, no prime-time presidential addresses. Instead, American warplanes and drones have been systematically dismantling the infrastructure of the Popular Mobilization Forces. American forces have carried out repeated airstrikes on P.M.F. headquarters in Baghdad, Mosul, and Anbar Province, assassinating senior commanders and reducing fortified compounds to rubble. The targets have included logistics networks, weapons depots, and command-and-control nodes that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spent the better part of a decade constructing. General Michael Kurilla, Admiral Cooper’s predecessor at CENTCOM, had for years warned that Tehran was systematically […]