Let me give a little history lesson.
Most of this stuff, prior to WWI, had been owned by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans made the mistake of backing the Great Powers, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, etc, against the Allies, France, U.S., Britain, etc.
The Ottomans had been pretty broken up over the whole thing. Seriously broken up.
So at the end of the War, the Allies broke up the Ottomans. Totally. And created a bunch of "countries" what were just fucking lines on paper. And most of those lines were drawn by none other than Winston Churchill, who was the British Foreign Secretary at the time.
There's a bit of an otherwise straight border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq which dips upwards, giving a bit more completely empty desert to Saudi Arabia and a bit less to Iraq. (At the time, the oil issue was little known.) No fucking reason in the world for it. People call this "Churchill's Burp" because they say he drew the line in after lunch and burped while he was drawing the line.
Most of the lines make no sense. They had nothing to do with terrain and nothing to do with indigenous inhabitants. It's one of the reasons that the MidEast has been a continuous battle zone ever since. That and the fact that it's been a battle zone for its entire history. Which is just about all there is of history.
Take the Kurds. ("Please!" Just joking.) Here's a pretty homogenous group that has fairly defined borders if you ask them. Nobody asked them. They got broken up into three different countries. None of which liked Kurds. And they'd been battling for survival ever since.
Iran and Iraq are, basically, Persia. There's some counter arguments but they're weak. At the very least, if you're going to make an "Iraq" it should go all the way to the Zagros Mountains. But, really, Iran and Iraq could be one really mongo country. (As they are today.) Breaking them up was basically so that a particular Arab clan which had helped out the Brits could have "Babylonia." (Churchill was a romantic. Romantic Babylon and all that. I've been all across Iraq. Ain't romantic.) And to cut down on the power of the Persians.
In time it led to the Iran-Iraq War which left over a million dead on one of Churchill's little lines.
The First Gulf War happened on another.
Most of northern Saudi Arabia was inhabited by Shia. Who were under Sunni control and never really liked it.
And the family that Churchill liked so much?
The only one left in power of the Hashemites was Hussein, Jr. Who was barely holding on. The Sauds had killed the last Hashemite in Saudi Arabia and Saddam's predecessor killed the one in Iraq.
All I was suggesting was that we get the lines to look a bit more like the people involved.
Hey, they'd lasted a hundred years. That's a long time for a border to last in the Middle East.
Assuming everyone won their battles, we ended up hashing out some new lines. Until something could be worked out with the various "Fars" city states (the guys running bits and pieces of Iran), the line of demarcation for "Babylonia" would be to the Zagros. Both sides of the Shat Al Arab. Border with Jordan stayed more or less the same. In the north, the Kurds got all of their previous Iraqi territory. They were in de facto control of all their "Turkish" territory and "Iranian" territory anyway. They even were in control of a good bit of "Syrian" territory.
Assuming Mullah Hamadi and his goons could be kicked out of power, most of the Sunni who were willing to leave would go to Jordan along with not only everything they could carry but a bit of a goodwill offering. And some who weren't willing to leave.
There were three or four guys in charge in Syria. None of them were fucking with Iraq at the moment and most were Shia. (One was a Ba'athist Alawite fuck, which was the group in power before the Plague.) That area of "diplomacy" would have to wait.
This sort of negotiation should have taken months. How long did it take?
Three hours. And that was with a break for lunch.
(The mullah at the LOG base actually could answer a direct question when four angry people were staring at him over satellite video. He's actually a great guy and much better at MidEast normal negotiations than I could ever be. Hell, he's got a fucking Nobel Prize. I don't.)
It wouldn't be fast. Things were going to have to be "consolidated." Both the Iraqi colonel and the Kurd guy realized there was going to need to be an OpPlan.
I left them to it. They were using one of my commo vans. The other was in use cutting "Divisions" and keeping an ear out for The World. Nothing on redeployment or even evac. I went and checked on the wounded. They were way more upbeat than they should have been. There was the Nepo missing a chunk of his skull. He'd held out to be operated on. He thought it was great. The Kurd surgeons had put in a chunk of metal so "Now my head is even harder, sahib!"
Burns, shrapnel. Most of the guys who weren't sedated were in great spirits. "We really kicked ass, didn't we, sir!" This from a guy waving the stump of an arm.
There were a couple that just weren't going to make it. They were out in a bliss of morphine. One of them was less out, sort of one long quiet moan. Unconscious and still moaning.
Yeah, son, we really kicked ass.
Centurions one and all.
Chapter Nineteen
There Was an Issue
The guys were resting up after their travails. I was getting some rest, starting to pine for Shadi and considering the beauty of Kurdish women, but mostly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
We could get out via the local airports. It would be "logistically difficult" given that most of the airbases that the U.S. depended upon for "global dominance" weren't available. But you can refuel a C-17 in-flight. Hell, there were planes that could fly in non-stop from Britain, which had some functioning airports. There was fuel here. Irbil was well on the way to becoming the best place to land between Britain and India.
The other shoe dropped.
I got called to come over to the commo van. Everybody was "taking a break" from cutting the next episode. They'd been tossed out. The BC was on the video conferenced in with the brigade commander and a couple of other people I didn't know. One of them was a suit. Another was a lieutenant general, Air Force no less.
Uh, oh.
The good news.
C-17s configured for medical evac were on the way. Ask the Kurds if they have any casualties that would respond better to top-flight treatment. Everybody's coming to Walter Reed.
Thank fucking God. I'll get right on that, sir. What about . . . ?
There was an issue.
We'd finally picked sides in Turkey. The side we'd picked had, according to them, most of the territory that used to be Turkey. And it was kinda, sorta, stabilized. (Yeah. Right. More on that later.) They had Ankara, the Turkish capital. They had most of the Anatolian Plain. (Arguable as we'll see.) They were leaving the Kurds alone. The Kurds had their area stabilized and that was good enough for now. (And they're going to keep it, suckers.)
They were mostly Turkish military which meant secular. They wanted to restore freedom and democracy and all good things to Turkey.
But there was an "issue."
A fundamentalist group had some territory. Notably, they had most of the territory around Istanbul and the Bosporus. The big problem being Istanbul.
History again.
Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. Hell, I think there's a name before Byzantium.