October 20, 2017 Emma Sky - British 'Mother of Daesh' Wants To Reoccupy Iraq While the Iraqi government forces sweep Kirkuk clean of the Kurdish occupation, one writer strongly pushed pro-Kurdish/anti-Iranian views. Three pieces by Emma Sky appeared in three prestigious imperial outlets within just four days. They are noticeable for the slander and lies. Obviously they are part of a well prepared lobbying campaign. The author is not an neutral observer or academic specialist. Emma Sky is the person most responsible for messing up Kirkuk. She is also a 'Mother of ISIS'. On October 16 Emma Sky published in Foreign Affairs: Mission Still Not Accomplished in Iraq - Why the United States Should Not Leave. On October 18 she plants the same notion in The Atlantic: America Has Become Dispensable in Iraq. The subtitle reveals what it is really about: The conflict in Kirkuk offers further evidence of Iran’s steady rise. Sky pushes hard to implant a sectarian, anti-Iran meme. Consider this howler: Once more, Iran is playing the key role, helping to broker a deal between the PUK and the Iraqi government and guiding the Shia militias supporting the Iraqis. What nationality please to the "Shia militia" in Iraq have? Are they from Mars? When ISIS rose in 2014 U.S. President Obama held back support for the Iraqi government to get rid of the just reelected Prime Minister Maliki: The reason, the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki. Iran with its Revolutionary Guards jumped in and hastily trained and equipped volunteers into Popular Mobilization Units. These groups managed to stop ISIS from taking Baghdad. The PMU are under the exclusive command of the Iraqi government. They are official Iraqi government forces, not exclusively Shia and no longer accompanied by Iranian advisors. No Iranian troops or advisers were involved in the liberation of Kirkuk. Sky's claim is all wrong. Sky has a hobby horse: A compromise of some sort could be reached on confederation for Kurdistan and a special status for Kirkuk. On October 19 Emma Sky appears in The Guardian: Iraq’s Kurds have overplayed their hand. Now both sides must talk. Within that piece she claims: When the Iraqi security forces fled in the face of Isis in 2014 it was the Kurds, with support from the US-led coalition, who fought back and pushed them out of Kirkuk. That was definitely not the case. ISIS never touched Kirkuk. Indeed the piece Emma Sky links to as reference never says so. It mentions that Iraqi army deserters were fleeing from ISIS in Mosul towards Kirkuk. In June 2014 the Kurdish Peshmerga invaded Kirkuk, threw out disoriented Iraqi government forces and occupied the city. This was at the very same time as ISIS took Mosul. ISIS and Peshmerga fighters delineated their borders and had their checkpoints only a few meters apart. Video showed them inviting each other for dinner. Sky's core point in the piece is that the Kurds, for their falsely claimed "rescue" of Kirkuk from ISIS, now deserve some part of it: It is time to revisit the idea of a special status for Kirkuk, with power-sharing between the different communities A "special status" for Kirkuk is not reasonable. It is a normal Iraqi city and, like many others, has a religiously and ethnic diverse population. That Sky tries to justify a special status for Kurds in Kirkuk with a fight against ISIS that never happened demonstrates how dishonest the claim is. The "special status" idea for Kirkuk came up in 2003 when an ignorant British governor of Kirkuk, imposed by the U.S./UK occupation, was lost in internecine claims to the oil rich province between Kurdish expansionists and local Arabs. That governor was one Emma Sky. Like other imperial freaks Sky later found a warm place at Yale. An extensive discussion of Emma Sky's prior misdeeds in Iraq was published in June 2016 by Maniza Naqvi. The author summarized: Emma Sky—the woman who assisted in the unraveling of Iraq and the region, who became the right hand of General Odierno in Iraq—and the architect of the ‘Sunni Awakening'---is perhaps, the Mother of Daesh, the word for terror in Iraq and Syria and the entire region or as the West calls it, ISIS. The piece follows Sky's way as imperial overlord throughout the U.S. occupation. It quotes from her questioning in front of the the British Iraq Inquiry Committee. The transcripts reflect how completely unprepared the U.S. and its British stooges were when they arrogantly imposed themselves onto the country. Emma Sky first messed up Kirkuk. She later worked for the U.S. top commanders in the country and was instrumental in creating the ISIS predecessor "Sunni Awakening". She had a main role in imposing it onto the Iraqi government. Sky was parachuted into Iraq only days after the U.S. and UK invaded. By mere chance she was set up as the occupation governor of Kirkuk. She had no prior knowledge of the city, the country, or its issues and zero experience on the ground. She was 36 years old and single. In Kirkuk she fell for the siren songs of the Iraqi exiles mafia and Kurdish separatists. She, like the rest of the occupation force, ruled by looting Iraqi money. From her testimony to the Inquiry Committee: MS EMMA SKY: We had done all this stuff. We had promised people all of these things. You know, construction was going on and we were bankrupt. Then we would go down to Baghdad. We would try to raid the banks which had Ba'ath funds. So there was always money and then we kept spending because we thought we had more. Then we would run out and we would have to go back and get more. The situation in Kirkuk, which the Iraqi government just rescued from the Kurdish annexation attempt, is rooted in Sky's misdeeds. It was Emma Sky who stoked the flames in Kirkuk for the political purpose of the occupiers: [T]he Arab-Kurdish disputes are being played up, because ganging up on the Kurds would bring the Sunnis and the Shias together, or so think the likes of Maliki, Mutlag and [Emma] Sky. She accepted Kurdish claims of a "right" to Kirkuk and pushed that claim as "special status" Article 140 into the U.S. written Iraqi constitution: MS EMMA SKY: We tried very hard -- this was by August 2003 -- to get Kirkuk recognised with special status, that it was something different, because what was driving the insecurity was the final status of Kirkuk. Should it be part of Kurdistan or should it be part of the centre? What we tried to do right from the beginning is to say, "Look, this place is different. It has always been different. Could we have special status?" When the Brits finally gave up and left Iraq, Emma Sky was hired as 'political advisor' to the U.S. overlords General Petraeus and then General Odierno: Everywhere he went, every meeting he went to I went with him. ... My reporting line was purely to the General. All I had to look at was the General. She was part of the small inner circle that initiated the "surge" and the relabeling of al-Qaeda insurgents into the "Sunni Awakening". While the cadre of al-Qaeda leaders (later the elite of the Islamic State) were groomed in U.S. prisons in Iraq, its past and future fighters were trained as "Sunni Awakening" by U.S. special forces. From Sky's testimony: So the [Iraqi] government is much, much more nervous of these people who one day are Al Qaeda and the next day take off the patch, put on another patch and say, "Now we are Sa'hwa, Sons of Iraq". So we worked very hard to get the government to come with us and meet these guys and get a sense of who they are. Sa'hwa then spread from Abu Ghraib into Amriya, so right into Baghdad, and we then started going round to other areas and working with the local community and said, "Look, don't you want to set up a Sa'hwa too?" In 2015 Sky wrote a snobbish piece in The Atlantic, 'Iraq Is Finished', where she handed out guilty verdicts for the rise of the Islamic State against everyone - except of course to herself. But it was she, personally, who helped to get al-Qaeda fighters under U.S. control and trained. She had a defining role in it. As Maniza Naqvi concludes: Draw a straight line from the bodies washing up on beaches in Turkey and Greece—the baby Aylan, his tiny body lying face down—a direct connection between drowned babies, whole families tragedies and the US military enterprise in Iraq and Syria and all who were and are involved with it and morphing it to more monstrous waves—draw a straight line from the likes of Emma Sky to Daesh known as ISIS. Someone coughed up a quite decent sum of money to have Emmy Sky write three current piece to be launched in three well-known outlets within just four days. Someone who wants the Kurds to take Kirkuk's oil, the U.S. to reoccupy Iraq and to strangulate Iran. Who could have an interest in doing so? Emma Sky is corrupt imperial scum. I recommend to read Naqvi's whole piece on her and especially the inquiry protocols attached to it. Posted by b on October 20, 2017 at 19:43 UTC | Permalink Comments