ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Donald Trump just said something that he was not supposed to say, and it is something that Barack Obama will never admit. Originally appeared at endoftheamericandream During an appearance on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily” on Tuesday morning, Trump stated that the Turkish government “looks like they’re on the side of ISIS more or less based on the oil”. This makes Trump the first presidential candidate to tell the truth about this to the American people. By now, just about everyone knows that ISIS is using Turkey as a home base , and I have previously written about how Turkey is “training ISIS militants, funneling weapons to them, buying their oil, and tending to their wounded in Turkish hospitals”. But a major U.S. politician, especially one running for the White House, could get into really hot water for saying these kinds of things about our NATO ally. You see, the truth is that the American people are not supposed to know that Turkey is actually on the same side as ISIS and has...

According to the President of Iraqi Kurdistan Masoud Barzani, the anti-IS coalition forces will need 3 months to get Mosul under their control. The military situation in and around the city of Mosul is unfolding quite differently than that of the other major militant stronghold – Aleppo (READ MORE: THE STRONGHOLD OF ALEPPO ). Mosul is the second largest city in Iraq, after Baghdad. It is a city of 1.5 million people (according to UN estimates). It is a city where Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, Yezidis, Armenians, Assyrians, Turkmens, and even some followers of Christianity have coexisted for a very long time. Mosul is also the informal political and economic capital of Sunni Iraq. An ethnically multifaceted city, it has the highest percentage of Christians of all the Iraqi cities. Fig.1 Ethnographic Map of Mosul City. Map source: @peshmerga_46/Twitter Economically, Mosul is a sufficiently large center of oil production. Before the Russian operation to target and destroy the oil car...