US warned Iraq about Islamic State threat, Iraq ignored warnings

Testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee revealed that the United States knew that the Islamic State was advancing on Iraqi territory from Syria, and tried to warn the Iraqi government of the growing threat, but the Iraqis refused to listen and take appropriate defensive measures.

The Miami Herald reports two high-ranking State and Defense Department officials made the testimony. They were the State Department's Brett McGurk, the deputy assistant secretary for Iraq and Iran, and the Defense Department's Elissa Slotkin, who was formerly the Iraq director on the National Security Council.

McGurk testified that on June 7, he warned the Iraqi government that IS was shifting a large amount of forces from Syria into Iraq. He also said he had urged the Iraqi government to deploy the Kurdish peshmerga militia to Mosul to slow the advance of IS, but the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki refused to take such measures.

The Iraqi government promised to send 9 brigades of troops to Mosul, but by the time they would have been mobilized, it would have been too late. The recent history of the city of Mosul shows that this has indeed been the case.

While McGurk said they warned the Iraqi government, he also admitted he was surprised with the abysmal performance of the U.S.-trained Iraqi military. He also said he was shocked at the size and complexity of the IS operations in Iraq.

Slotkin testified that IS is a new breed of terror organization that is increasingly well-funded. She also said that its large, dedicated, and experienced force of fighters posed a large threat to Iraq, while the fact that some of these fighters possess Western passports makes them a larger global terror threat than many other radical Islamist groups, such as Boko Haram, or al Shabaab.