Terry Wolff oversaw training of Iraqi forces for deadly siege of Mosul and coalition fighting dirty war in Syria
President Joe Biden’s new appointee as arms czar for Ukraine, Terry Wolff, has a lot of blood on his hands.
The three-star general’s new job is to coordinate arms shipments to Ukraine that are designed to bog down the Russians, including a new $800 million weapons package that President Biden authorized last Thursday.
Military volunteers loading magazines with ammunition in February at a weapons storage facility in Fastiv, Ukraine. [Source: nytimes.com]
Terry Wolff, second from the right, with Martin Dempsey, left, and Steven Townsend, the current AFRICOM commander, as they fly over Afghanistan in a C-130 in February 2012. [Source: defense.gov]
This was part of Operation Noble Anvil, whose goal was to empower the Kosovar Albanians at the expense of the Serbs—who were led by a socialist, Slobodan Milošević, intent on keeping the Yugoslav Federation together—and establish a giant U.S. military base at Camp Bondsteel. At least 500 civilians were killed in bombing attacks and 480 schools and 33 hospitals destroyed.[1]
Aftermath of Operation Noble Anvil in Kosovo. [Source: rferl.org]
“Relentless and Unlawful Attacks”
In the siege of Mosul that Wolff helped prepare Iraq troops for, residents were subjected to “relentless and unlawful attacks” according to Amnesty International.
The U.S.-backed proxy forces had become enmeshed in a sectarian war between Shia and Sunni triggered by the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.[2]
Thousands of civilians were killed, including more than 400 from rocket-assisted munitions and the use of powerful explosive weapons by the U.S. led coalition which caused blast-related injuries.[3]
The New York Times described a “panorama of destruction in the neighborhood of Judida so vast one resident compared the destruction to that of Hiroshima, Japan [after the dropping of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II]. There was a charred arm, wrapped in a piece of red fabric poking from the rubble, rescue workers in red jumpsuits who came wore face masks to avoid the stench, some with rifles slung over their shoulders, searching the wreckage for bodies.”[4]
Terry Wolff, left, with his boss Brett McGurk, far right, and Najim Jabouri, the Iraqi commander who led Iraqi forces during the Battle of Mosul. Jabouri was chosen for the position not because of his military expertise but because of his close ties to U.S. officials. [Source: twitter.com]Iraqi troops, whose training Wolff had overseen, walk through ruins of Mosul after 2016-17 battle. [Source: armyupress.army.mil]
Angry man points to ruins in Fallujah resulting from the deadly U.S. siege. Terry Wolff though presented Fallujah as a model for the “liberation of Mosul.” Who knows what this man has in store for Ukraine and Russia—the same devastation probably. [Source: bbc.com]
Wolff had direct personal experience with the slaughter as a key army commander in the 2003-2007 Al-Anbar campaign, which relied heavily on urban warfare to pacifiy the Sunni-dominated province in which Fallujah was located.
General Terry Wolff in Iraq in 2010. [Source: stripes.com]
Only 14% of Iraqis wanted the winner, Nouri al-Maliki, to remain in power—though al-Maliki’s opponent in the election, Ayad Allawi, was a CIA-connected thug who personally executed Saddamist POWs before he had been appointed interim prime minister in 2004.[6]
Nouri al-Maliki, right, embraces Ayad Allawi. Wolff heralded an election where Iraqis had to choose between two awful candidates—a Shia Saddam versus a CIA thug who had murdered prisoners of war with his own hands. [Source: wsj.com]
Wolff’s Hands Will Get Even Bloodier
Wolff’s hands will get even bloodier as he oversees the massive arms pipeline to Ukraine that is reminiscent of the Contra supply line in the 1980s, Croat arms pipeline in the 1990s, and Operation Timber Sycamore in Syria that Wolff may have been involved with.
One of the featured weapons is the Phoenix Ghost drone—developed by California-based AEVEX Aerospace—which is comparable to the Switchblade drone that crashes into a target and explodes on impact.[7]
Under the new shipments, five new Ukrainian artillery battalions will be outfitted with 18 rapid-fire guns and nearly 37,000 rounds of ammunition to fight the Russians in Donbas.
Ukrainian soldier with U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missile. [Source: bbc.com]
Wolff’s appointment unfortunately signifies that this latter demand will not be met, and that more blood will be spilled—following a pattern from Wolff’s own career.
See David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). ↑
Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019), 181. ↑
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