Just wonderful - now they can hold the entire area hostage

Bad news from the New York Times:

Rebels Capture Iraq’s Largest Dam
Sunni militants captured the Mosul dam, the largest in Iraq, on Thursday as their advances in the country’s north created an onslaught of refugees and set off fearful rumors in Erbil, the Kurdish regional capital.

Residents near the dam and officials in the region confirmed that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, held the dam, a potentially catastrophic development for Iraq’s civilian population.

The dam, which sits on the Tigris River and is about 30 miles northwest of the city of Mosul, provides electricity to Mosul and controls the water supply for a large amount of territory. A report published in 2007 by the United States government, which had been involved with work on the dam, warned that should it fail, a 65-foot wave of water could be unleashed across areas of northern Iraq.

Atheel al-Nujaifi, the governor of Nineveh Province, whose capital is Mosul, said in a telephone interview from northern Iraq, where he has fled, that ISIS had secured the dam after what he called an “organized retreat” of Kurdish security forces, known as pesh merga.

And the Kurds have asked the USA and the United Nations for help and we sit on our thumbs. These people could be loyal allies and we are hanging them out to dry.

What is going on in Washington? Something in the water? A stunning failure of academia? My vote is for the latter - the toxin is accumulated as it reaches the higher and higher strata to where those at the top are utterly unable to function in normal society.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on August 7, 2014 4:48 PM.

Our administrative elite - Seattle City Light was the previous entry in this blog.

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