# Pan-Islamic merged mega thread



## McG

> *In the Middle East, an ancient war is new again*
> Michael Petrou
> MACLEAN’S
> 03 January 2014
> 
> Of the various slurs and insults that opposing sides in Syria’s civil war fling at each other, there are some so archaic, they seem not to belong in a modern conflict. Among them is the Arabic and Persian term Majous, used by Sunni Muslim rebels against supporters of President Bashar al-Assad. Those familiar with the Christmas story might recognize its similarity to magi, as in the three wise men who came from the East with gifts for the baby Jesus.
> 
> The term originally referred to followers of Zoroastrianism, a now all-but-vanished religion that predates Islam. Rebels employ it today to deny the shared Islamic faith of their adversaries. Assad’s family and many of his supporters are Alawite Muslims, followers of an offshoot of Shia Islam. “It means they’re not Muslims, because they’re still these weirdo Zoroastrians,” says Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “And they’re not even Arabs. They’re crypto-Iranians.”
> 
> It is language that speaks to the deepening sectarian fault lines running through Syria and, increasingly, throughout the Islamic Middle East. In Iraq, for example, al-Qaeda leaders boasting about prison breaks near Baghdad last summer said they had damaged the country’s “Safavid” government. The Safavids were a Persian dynasty that brought Shia Islam to what is now Iraq some 400 years ago.
> 
> 
> 
> Divisions between the Sunni and Shia interpretations of Islam are almost as old as the faith itself. But what’s happening now is a particularly bitter and often violent clash, and one that is intensified by a geopolitical power struggle between the two dominant nations in the region, Shia-ruled Iran and Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, each acting as standard-bearers for Islam’s two major sects. Some have likened the struggle to a Middle Eastern version of the Cold War, with Iran and Saudi Arabia playing the roles of America and the Soviet Union, and other states in the region lining up behind them.
> 
> For the Sunni-ruled countries of the Arabian Peninsula, any sign that Iran is becoming stronger—by improving its nuclear capabilities, or even by moving toward normalizing its relations with Washington—stokes anxiety. They fear Iran itself, and the possibility that a more powerful Iran might embolden and stir up dissent among their own Shia populations. Repercussions of the struggle within Islam are not limited to the Muslim world, either. America and Israel, motivated by their own standoff with Iran, side with the Sunni camp. Russia, seeing an opportunity to counter Western influence in the region, backs Shia Iran and Alawite-led Syria.
> 
> The Shia-Sunni conflict “is not just a hoary religious dispute, a fossilized set piece from the early years of Islam’s unfolding, but a contemporary clash of identities,” Vali Nasr writes in The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future. “Theological and historical disagreements fuel it, but so do today’s concerns with power, subjugation, freedom and equality, not to mention regional conﬂicts and foreign intrigues. It is, paradoxically, a very old, very modern conflict.”
> 
> The Middle East’s sectarian divide sharpened following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. Until then, Sunnis dominated the region, with Shia strength concentrated in Iran. When America toppled Saddam Hussein and brought democracy to Iraq, it also liberated the country’s Shias, who had long been suppressed by Saddam and his mostly Sunni power base, despite forming a majority of Iraq’s population.
> 
> “This was a tremendous earthquake in the regional balance of power,” says Landis. “It strengthened Iran tremendously. It made the Sunni powers extremely fearful of this growing Shia menace—at least what they saw as a menace.”
> 
> The Shia’s ascendency in Iraq was neither smooth nor peaceful. Sunni extremists resisted with suicide bombings and attacks on Shia religious processions and mosques. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was clear about his movement’s goals. The Shia, he wrote in a 2004 letter, are “the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy and the penetrating venom.
> 
> “If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to waken the inattentive Sunnis, as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death at the hands of Sabeans.”
> 
> Zarqawi, like Syrian rebel commanders today, reached far into history for an anti-Shia slur. The Sabeans were pagans of southwest Arabia. The Shia of today, he implied, are similarly godless. Zarqawi succeeded, to some degree, in provoking a sectarian war in Iraq whose bloody reverberations continue today. He also pulled Iran deeper into the conflict. In 2005, a cleric there described Sunni suicide bombers in Iraq as “wolves without pity,” and vowed, “Sooner, rather than later, Iran will have to put them down.”
> 
> Since then, Shia prime ministers with close ties to Iran have governed Iraq. A once Sunni-ruled state has shifted into Iran’s sphere of influence. It was this reality that prompted King Abdullah of Jordan in 2004 to warn of a Shia “crescent” stretching from Iran to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon that would alter the Sunni-Shia balance of power and risk destabilizing the region.
> 
> At the time, Abdullah’s comments sounded alarmist, says Matteo Legrenzi, an associate professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Today, they seem prescient. “Sectarianism is now one of the defining characteristics of the current moment in Middle East politics.”
> 
> The hot centre of this divide is Syria, where Sunnis form a majority, but where the Alawite Assad family has ruled for more than 40 years. It might have been possible, early in the uprising, for the country to avoid the religious animosity now tearing it apart. The popular movement against Assad was not initially a rebellion against the Alawites and, for a time, Assad’s regime maintained the loyalty of many of his Sunni soldiers.
> 
> Assad’s decision to arm Alawite civilian militias helped shape the conflict as a religious one, creating the perception among Alawites that the uprising was against them and not just Assad’s regime, says Frederic Wehrey, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
> 
> Clerics and media outlets in the Gulf augmented the war’s sectarian nature by “demonizing” Alawites and focusing on Iran’s support for the Assad regime, says Wehrey, who is the author of Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprising. “The Gulf [states] and the Saudis see this as a pivotal moment in checking Iran’s regional influence. This is the strategic prize. The rest of the Arab world’s position hinges on what happens in Syria.”
> 
> This belief has pushed Sunni governments and private donors in the region to support Sunni rebel militias in Syria—some of whom subscribe to an extremist version of Islam and include foreign fighters in their ranks. Iran, for its part, has sent advisers from the Revolutionary Guards to ﬁght for Assad, along with the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia, Hezbollah.
> 
> “It’s a regional war. All the militias in Syria have become proxies for a much broader Sunni-Shia struggle,” says Landis. “You could look at this like Central Europe during the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics, because, in many ways, the Middle East is in the pre-Enlightenment world. Sunnis and Shias have not accepted each other as equal partners in Islam.”
> 
> By the time the Thirty Years War was over in 1648, millions were dead. The death toll from ongoing Sunni-Shia disputes—even in the charnel house of Syria—is much smaller. And while religious differences are an accelerant, the clashes are also about power and wealth.
> 
> “The grievances always stem from actual situations of disempowerment and of the nature of authoritarian systems of government,” says Legrenzi, citing as an example Bahrain, where a Sunni minority that includes the king dominates a Shia majority. Public demonstrations in 2011 were put down with help from Saudi troops and armour, and police from the United Arab Emirates.
> 
> Despite attempts by some commentators at the time—including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—to frame the unrest as an Iran-backed plot, Legrenzi and Wehrey both describe the uprising as an indigenous one fuelled by a genuine desire for a more just and equitable society.
> 
> Sunni and Shia powers have also co-operated when it suited them. Saudi Arabia and Iran were allies against Communism prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. More recently, Iran backed the Palestinian Sunni militia Hamas against Israel—though this partnership has unravelled because of Iran’s support for Assad.
> 
> The Muslim world, in other words, is not condemned to unending antagonism between its major sects. But the divide today is deep and violent, even at street level. Faith-driven lynchings have claimed victims from Egypt to Pakistan. There is little reason to believe this acrimony will soften soon.


 http://www2.macleans.ca/2014/01/03/an-ancient-war-is-new-again/


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## Edward Campbell

I'm pleased to see a reference to the Thirty Years War (one of my favourites) because I believe it was an essential "accelerant"* to the religious and *social* reformations that were going on in 16th and 17th century Europe and which were, themselves, essential precursors to the 18th century _Enlightenment_.

I believe, strongly, that the Islamic world - almost ALL of it - is sorely in need of a socio-cultural _enlightenment_ of its own; and I also think that religious and socio-economic _reformations_ are, now, in the Middle East, just as essential as they were in Europe 450 years ago.

A long, multi-generational, bloody and bitter series of internecine wars are just what the _Islamic Crescent_ needs.

_____
Thanks for that word, Mr Petrou, it's very apt in this situation


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## pbi

> And while religious differences are an accelerant, the clashes are also about power and wealth.



I'm glad to see this being pointed out. IMHO it's a knee-jerk of popular "wisdom" that religion causes wars. I think this description is far more apt. Religion is rarely a primary cause, but often a banner and usually an aggravating factor.



> A long, multi-generational, bloody and bitter series of internecine wars are just what the Islamic Crescent needs.



Of course we're assuming that this can all be kept nice, tidy and manageable, and won't spill over in any inconvenient ways and bother the rest of us, including Israel.  We can just be spectators as the Islamic world butchers itself. I have a feeling it won't be quite as simple as that. 

Rather than more slaughter, the three things the Islamic Arab world really needs, IMHO:

a)-the separation of religion from politics, such that political dissent can't be treated as an attack on God and thus worthy of all sorts of hideous treatment;

b)-a significant drop in the birth rate (admittedly a very long flash to bang on this one); and

c)-the widespread education and empowerment of women, which usually produces b) above


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## Edward Campbell

pbi said:
			
		

> I'm glad to see this being pointed out. IMHO it's a knee-jerk of popular "wisdom" that religion causes wars. I think this description is far more apt. Religion is rarely a primary cause, but often a banner and usually an aggravating factor.
> 
> Of course we're assuming that this can all be kept nice, tidy and manageable, and won't spill over in any inconvenient ways and bother the rest of us, including Israel.  We can just be spectators as the Islamic world butchers itself. I have a feeling it won't be quite as simple as that.
> 
> Rather than more slaughter, the three things the Islamic Arab world really needs, IMHO:
> 
> a)-the separation of religion from politics, such that political dissent can't be treated as an attack on God and thus worthy of all sorts of hideous treatment;
> 
> b)-a significant drop in the birth rate (admittedly a very long flash to bang on this one); and
> 
> c)-the widespread education and empowerment of women, which usually produces b) above




You're quite right. Israel lives in one of the worst "neighbourhoods" on the planet and, as the Israelis themselves point out, over and over again, in order to just survive Israel *must win every war* ... the Arabs only have to get lucky once. In my estimation Israel's survival, to the end of the 21st century, will require something akin to a miracle; it is more likely that we, and America and Australia, will benefit, greatly, from a small flood of well educated, sophisticated Jewish refugees.


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## CougarKing

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> it is more likely that we, and America and Australia, will benefit, greatly, from a small flood of well educated, sophisticated Jewish refugees.



I'm going to infer from your omission of the UK and other western European powers in the above statement- e.g. France- to mean that you've written them off as a destination for Jewish refugees, in part because of the unchecked immigration from Islamic nations to those countries would discourage a return exodus from Israel?


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## Colin Parkinson

Jordon is no doubt relieved to have Israel at it's back, at least they can count on the Israel not to go nuts on them.


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## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> I'm going to infer from your omission of the UK and other western European powers in the above statement- e.g. France- to mean that you've written them off as a destination for Jewish refugees, in part because of the unchecked immigration from Islamic nations to those countries would discourage a return exodus from Israel?




I'm anything but an expert, but the few Israelis I know have all expressed a fondness for America, Australia and Canada and a more general distaste for Europe, based on 20th century history ... it's hard to blame them I guess.

Some years ago I escorted a very senior Israeli back to Toronto after an official visit to Ottawa. He asked if we could drive ~ we had a day, plus to kill. I took him part way along Hy 7 and part way along the 401 and we stopped somewhere around Port Hope for lunch and then had dinner somewhere North West of the airport. He suggested that if things ever went wrong in Israel it was here, in Canada, specifically in "small town Ontario" that he would want to end up. I go the impression a lot of Israelis have similar views; certainly a few I met in Shanghai in 2010 peppered me with questions about life in Canada for people like them (young to early middle age, well educated, etc). But  :dunno:  impressions and guesses, not knowledge.


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## Ostrozac

Colin P said:
			
		

> Jordon is no doubt relieved to have Israel at it's back, at least they can count on the Israel not to go nuts on them.



Yes, but the Jordanians also share a border with the West Bank (which they used to occupy) -- and have a sizable Palestinian population. Even if Jordan feels it can count on Israel from a security standpoint, it still has to keep a close eye on Palestine.


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## a_majoor

Just cycling back to a previous post, the ME isn't _just_ divided by religion, but also by ethnicity. Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, Armenians, Copts and an host of smaller minorities rub shoulders, and also have centuries old divisions and hatreds. Suni Turks won't be particularly fond of Suni Kurds, for a well known example, while Bedouin Arabs look down on their Palestinian "brothers".

Lining up "sides" for this version of the 30 years war isn't going to be nice and neat at all. For a bit of fun, you might take some talc and start drawing overlays of ethnic and religious groups on a political map of the ME. Spice it up with some economic overlays to see where large pools of resources that can be used for warfighting (or coveted by their neighbours) lay. Now look at a geographic overlay to see where natural "redoubts" exist, giving certain groups shelter and much more breathing space than others. 

That should provide a nice introduction to why the next generation is going to be so "interesting" in the Chinese sense.


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## pbi

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Just cycling back to a previous post, the ME isn't _just_ divided by religion, but also by ethnicity...
> That should provide a nice introduction to why the next generation is going to be so "interesting" in the Chinese sense.



 :goodpost:

This is something that is perpetually overlooked in popular discourse here. As you point out, "Arab" does not equal "Muslim"; "Muslim" does not equal "Arab"; "Christian" does not equal "European"; and the Middle East is not a single country full of oil sheikhs.

Just like everything else that matters, it's far more complicated than pundits and ranters on either end of the political/religious spectrum would like us to think. The region may break up/realign on axes we can't even foresee yet.

As for the future of Israel: my guess is that this will be determined by demographics as much or more than by military force. My (anecdotal) understanding is that unless there is a considerable upsurge in Jewish Israeli birth rates, Arab Israelis will constitute a majority within a decade or so. If that were to happen (and I don't have any evidence that it will...), what are the political options for Israel?

Deny Arabs political participation and marginalize them? Not sure how this creation of "lesser" citizens would go down, given the history of how the Jews themselves have historically been treated.

Watch Israel drift away from being a Jewish state into being something else? Something that doesn't automatically look to the West for its models? Probably equally difficult, and IMHO a prospect likely to trigger violence from the Zionist hard liners.

It will definitely be interesting times.


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## Ignatius J. Reilly

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> A long, multi-generational, bloody and bitter series of internecine wars are just what the _Islamic Crescent_ needs.


Was not the early history of Islam just that?


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## Colin Parkinson

The best way to keep Israel going in my opinion is to help the Kurds form a state. Yes they have their own issues but they have shown a strong desire to move forward despite their internal bickering. They have shown to be sympathetic to Israel or at least neutral. A Kurdistan carved out of Syria and Iraq would be viable enough not to require carving chunks out of Turkey. However I have to wonder about Turkey being able to hold it's current borders and may eventually have to give up portions to the Kurds. As I recall the demographic trends in the eastern parts favour the Kurds.


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## Oldgateboatdriver

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Just cycling back to a previous post, the ME isn't _just_ divided by religion, but also by ethnicity. Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, Armenians, Copts and an host of smaller minorities rub shoulders, and also have centuries old divisions and hatreds.



For a humourus look at that aspect of the situation, I recommend the cartoon book "Asterix and the Black Gold" (L'odyssée d'Astérix in French), where, as Obelix and Asterix are crossing the desert, they keep running into countless tribes, each looking for the next one claiming that they have a revenge fight to finish with the other and asking our heroes if they have seen them.


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## a_majoor

Colin P said:
			
		

> The best way to keep Israel going in my opinion is to help the Kurds form a state. Yes they have their own issues but they have shown a strong desire to move forward despite their internal bickering. They have shown to be sympathetic to Israel or at least neutral. A Kurdistan carved out of Syria and Iraq would be viable enough not to require carving chunks out of Turkey. However I have to wonder about Turkey being able to hold it's current borders and may eventually have to give up portions to the Kurds. As I recall the demographic trends in the eastern parts favour the Kurds.



That and a chunk of Iran as well.....


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## Colin Parkinson

I think the west needs to support the Baluch Independence movement, that way we can return the favours to both Iran and Pakistan at the same time. While Iran is wrapped up in Baluchistan we can help the Kurds in Northern Iran form a semi-autonomous state. Peopel forget that Iran's population is only 51% Persian, lots of fertile ground their to stir up their domestic crap.


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## tomahawk6

Support the Kurds and tick off Turkey.


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## CougarKing

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Support the Kurds and tick off Turkey.



Won't supporting the Kurds tick off Iran and other nations as well? The notional borders of Kurdistan includes parts of Turkey, Iran, Syria and northern Iraq.


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## GAP

When the borders of these countries were established they were based on geopolitical boundaries, not ethnic boundaries.....it all had to come home to roost someday....


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## Colin Parkinson

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Support the Kurds and tick off Turkey.



The Turks are becoming less and less a friend of the west, plus Turkey may not have much choice in the long term. A Kurdish state in Iraq, Syria and Iran would actually need stable relations with Turkey to prosper.


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## pbi

Colin P said:
			
		

> The Turks are becoming less and less a friend of the west, plus Turkey may not have much choice in the long term. A Kurdish state in Iraq, Syria and Iran would actually need stable relations with Turkey to prosper.



Well, if that is true (as opposed to a dynamic between secularism traditionally defended by the Army, and an apparently Islamic political movement that is now in power..), wouldn't we seek to act to support and reinforce the secular forces (which may be a lot stronger than we think). If the West "ticks off Turkey", isn't that throwing a bone to the anti-Western, Islamist elements?


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## Colin Parkinson

Hard to say how strong the secular side is with it's support in the army being whittled down by the current government. My read is that most of the secular support is in the big cities and the rural areas are quite traditional and conservative.

The corruption scandal, the clash on the trucks smuggling weapons to Syria show that there appears to be a "Civil Service War" between various branches of the government.


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## pbi

Ok: you are better informed than I am. Still, I can't see any virtue whatsoever in the West acting out the very role the Islamists would like it to.


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## Colin Parkinson

Kurds have a long history, strong connection to the area and strong ethnic identity, based on their current actions and recent past I suspect they will eventually create their own state regardless of our intervention or not. Helping the Kurds create that state create bonds and helping them manage their relationship to Turkey is important. Any Kurdistan is going to need relatively decent relationships with Turkey. Kurdistan could become the next Israel.


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## Edward Campbell

More, from Richard Haas on the potential for a new Thirty Years War in the Middle East in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Project Syndicate_:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/richard-n--haass-argues-that-the-middle-east-is-less-a-problem-to-be-solved-than-a-condition-to-be-managed


> The New Thirty Years’ War
> 
> Richard N Haas
> 
> July 21, 2014
> 
> NEW YORK – It is a region wracked by religious struggle between competing traditions of the faith. But the conflict is also between militants and moderates, fueled by neighboring rulers seeking to defend their interests and increase their influence. Conflicts take place within and between states; civil wars and proxy wars become impossible to distinguish. Governments often forfeit control to smaller groups – militias and the like – operating within and across borders. The loss of life is devastating, and millions are rendered homeless.
> 
> That could be a description of today’s Middle East. In fact, it describes Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century.
> 
> In the Middle East in 2011, change came after a humiliated Tunisian fruit vendor set himself alight in protest; in a matter of weeks, the region was aflame. In seventeenth-century Europe, a local religious uprising by Bohemian Protestants against the Catholic Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II triggered that era’s conflagration.
> 
> Protestants and Catholics alike turned for support to their co-religionists within the territories that would one day become Germany. Many of the era’s major powers, including Spain, France, Sweden, and Austria, were drawn in. The result was the Thirty Years’ War, the most violent and destructive episode in European history until the two world wars of the twentieth century.
> 
> There are obvious differences between the events of 1618-1648 in Europe and those of 2011-2014 in the Middle East. But the similarities are many – and sobering. Three and a half years after the dawn of the “Arab Spring,” there is a real possibility that we are witnessing the early phase of a prolonged, costly, and deadly struggle; as bad as things are, they could well become worse.
> 
> The region is ripe for unrest. Most of its people are politically impotent and poor in terms of both wealth and prospects. Islam never experienced something akin to the Reformation in Europe; the lines between the sacred and the secular are unclear and contested.
> 
> Moreover, national identities often compete with – and are increasingly overwhelmed by – those stemming from religion, sect, and tribe. Civil society is weak. In some countries, the presence of oil and gas discourages the emergence of a diversified economy and, with it, a middle class. Education emphasizes rote learning over critical thinking. In many cases, authoritarian rulers lack legitimacy.
> 
> Outside actors, by what they did and failed to do, added fuel to the fire. The 2003 Iraq war was highly consequential, for it exacerbated Sunni-Shia tensions in one of the region’s most important countries and, as a result, in many of the region’s other divided societies. Regime change in Libya has created a failing state; lukewarm support for regime change in Syria has set the stage for prolonged civil war.
> 
> The region’s trajectory is worrisome: weak states unable to police their territory; the few relatively strong states competing for primacy; militias and terrorist groups gaining greater influence; and the erasure of borders. The local political culture confuses democracy with majoritarianism, with elections used as vehicles to consolidate power, not share it.
> 
> Beyond the enormous human suffering and loss of life, the most immediate byproduct of the region’s turmoil is the potential for more severe and frequent terrorism – both in the Middle East and emanating from it. There is also the potential for disruption of energy production and shipping.
> 
> There are limits to what outsiders can do. Sometimes, policymakers need to focus on preventing things from getting worse, rather than on ambitious agendas for improvement; this is one of those times.
> 
> What this calls for, above all, is prevention of nuclear proliferation (beginning with Iran), whether through diplomacy and sanctions, or, if need be, through sabotage and military attacks. The alternative – a Middle East in which several governments and, through them, militias and terrorist groups have access to nuclear weapons and materials – is too horrific to contemplate.
> 
> Steps that reduce global dependence on the region’s energy supplies (including improvements in fuel efficiency and development of alternative sources) also make great sense. Economic assistance should go simultaneously to Jordan and Lebanon to help them cope with the flood of refugees. Democracy promotion in Turkey and Egypt should focus on strengthening civil society and creating robust constitutions that diffuse power.
> 
> Counter-terrorism against groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (which now calls itself simply the “Islamic State”) – whether by drones, small raids, or the training and arming of local partners – must become a staple of policy. It is time to recognize the inevitability of Iraq’s break-up (the country is now more a vehicle for Iran’s influence than a bulwark against it) and bolster an independent Kurdistan within Iraq’s former borders.
> 
> There is no room for illusions. Regime change is no panacea; it can be difficult to achieve and nearly impossible to consolidate. Negotiations cannot resolve all or even most conflicts.
> 
> That is certainly true, for the time being, of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Even if this changes, a comprehensive settlement would help the locals but not affect the dynamics of neighboring countries or conflicts. That said, a narrow ceasefire between Israel and Hamas should be pursued.
> 
> Likewise, diplomacy can work in Syria only if it accepts the reality on the ground (including the survival of the Assad regime for the foreseeable future), rather than seeking to transform it. The answer is not to be found in drawing new maps, though once populations have shifted and political stability has been restored, recognition of new borders might prove both desirable and viable.
> 
> Policymakers must recognize their limits. For now and for the foreseeable future – until a new local order emerges or exhaustion sets in – the Middle East will be less a problem to be solved than a condition to be managed.


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## Kirkhill

A "Thirty Years War" is perhaps optimistic.

Another reading of European history might suggest that the Dutch Rebellion (1566) predated the Thirty Years war as did the French Wars of Religion (1560).  There were other incidents across Europe going back to the 1500s.    Equally there were Protestant/Catholic overtones to the Seven Years War (1763) and even the US War of Independence.

That equates to a span of more than two centuries and a lot of international conflict that spanned the globe......it also gave ample scope to non-state actors like pirates, privateers, buccaneers and corsairs.


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## wannabe SF member

pbi said:
			
		

> a)-the separation of religion from politics, such that political dissent can't be treated as an attack on God and thus worthy of all sorts of hideous treatment;
> 
> b)-a significant drop in the birth rate (admittedly a very long flash to bang on this one); and
> 
> c)-the widespread education and empowerment of women, which usually produces b) above



In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.
Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.

I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?

Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.

Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.

we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.


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## Edward Campbell

Inky said:
			
		

> In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.
> Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.
> 
> I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?
> 
> Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.
> 
> Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.
> 
> we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.




Bingo!

I thought George W Bush and the _Project For A New American Century_ folks were wrong in so far as they thought they could wander about the world bringing liberal democracy to the masses. It took, arguably, 1,000 years for a few basic democratic elements to secure a real foothold in Northern Europe (500 CE to,say, 1500 CE) and 400 more years for something like real, liberal democracy to be relatively secure in most of Northern Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand.

(I did not think all of the _PNAC_ aims were wrong, just the one about spreading democracy.)

There are, of course, other forms of democracy: conservative democracy which we find in e.g. Singapore, and, to a greater or lesser degree in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan; and _*illiberal*_ democracy,* which is far more common than either or both of the other sorts.

_____
* See: The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, By Fareed Zakaria Fom the November/December 1997 issue of _Foreign Affairs_


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## OldSolduer

I agree .....to have liberal democracy take root it needs time...not years but centuries.

I'd like to sit on the sidelines and watch them kick the crap out of each other.


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## a_majoor

This could go into a number of threads, but the idea there is a pool of 14 million displaced people and refugees (and the knowledge that this crisis actually predates both the Syrian Civil War and the "Arab Spring"; notice there were displaced Syrian farmers surrounding the cities before either of the other two events) suggests there is basically an unstoppable pool of recruits for radicals to fish from.

While the author rightly suggests that Iran's desire for regional hegemony is behind much of the crisis, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia have done their share in spreading radical forms of Islam, pushing their own radicals out into the region and supplying and arming *some* radical groups as a way of fighting the Iranian influence. 

This "thirty years war" is bound to spill out of the Middle East, and considering the current state of the world, with high levels of tension if not conflict in places that touch on the edges of the "Islamosphere" ranging from Sub Saharan Africa, Russia and China, this does not bode well for anyone:

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/09/08/14-million-refugees-make-the-levant-unmanageable/?print=1



> *14 Million Refugees Make the Levant Unmanageable*
> Posted By David P. Goldman On September 8, 2014 @ 9:33 pm In Uncategorized | 32 Comments
> 
> There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11 million Syrians, or half the country’s population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country’s population). When I wrote about the region’s refugee disaster at Tablet in July (“Between the Settlers and Unsettlers, the One State Solution is On Our Doorstep“) the going estimate was only 10 million. A new UN study, though, claims that half of Syrians are displaced. Many of them will have nothing to go back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others.
> 
> That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time. The roots of the crisis were visible four years ago before the so-called Arab Spring beguiled the foreign policy wonks. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrian farmers already were living in tent camps around Syrian cities before the Syrian civil war began in April 2011. Israeli analysts knew this. In March 2011 Paul Rivlin of Tel Aviv University released a study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture, widely cited in Arab media but unmentioned in the English language press (except my essay on the topic). Most of what passes for political science treats peoples and politicians as if they were so many pieces on a fixed game board. This time the game board is shrinking and the pieces are falling off.
> 
> The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states and, if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant.
> 
> When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg. The international organizations, Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant (“moderate” is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine branch Hamas), will compete with the caliphate for the loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.
> 
> *strong language warning for video*
> 
> That is also why ISIS is overrated. A terrorist organization that beheads Americans and posts the video needs to be annihilated, but it is not particularly difficult. The late Sam Kinison’s monologue on world hunger is to the point: they live in a desert. They may be hard to flush out of towns they occupy, but they cannot move from one town to another in open ground if warplanes are hunting them. That is what America and its allies should do.
> 
> More dangerous is Iran, as Henry Kissinger emphasized in a recent interview with National Public Radio. Iran’s backing for the Assad regime’s ethnic cleansing of Syrian Sunnis set the refugee crisis in motion, while the Iraqi Shi’ites’ alliance with Iran persuaded elements of Saddam Hussein’s military to fight for ISIS. Iran can make nuclear weapons and missiles; ISIS cannot. If we had had the foresight to neutralize Iran years ago, the crisis could have been managed without the unspeakable humanitarian cost.
> 
> We cannot do the killing ourselves, except, of course, from the air. We are too squeamish under the best of circumstances, and we are too corrupted by cultural relativism (remember George W. Bush’s claim that Islam is “a religion of peace”?) to recognize utterly evil nihilism when it stares us in the face. In practice, a great deal of the killing will be done by Iran and its allies: the Iraqi Shi’a, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad regime in Syria. It will be one of the most disgusting and disheartening episodes in modern history and there isn’t much we can do to prevent it.
> 
> Article printed from Spengler: http://pjmedia.com/spengler
> 
> URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/09/08/14-million-refugees-make-the-levant-unmanageable/


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Persians make up about 51% of the Iranian population. they have the Kurds in the North and the Balachs in the south, who sit on much of the oil reserves. Neither Pakistan or Iran can afford a successful Balach independence movement. While Iran would survive, Pakistan would lose a large amount of land and it would encourage the Pastuns in the NWF to declare independence and possibly cleave a chunk off of Afghanistan as well. At which point a fragmented afghanistan might even lose a chunk including Heret to Iran.


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting analogy that the Islamic radicals are more akin to the ancient horsemen from the Steppes than anything we are familiar with today:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-28/islamic-state-s-centuries-old-strategy



> *Islamic State's Centuries-Old Strategy*
> 36 AUG 28, 2014 5:25 PM EDT
> By Stephen L. Carter
> 
> The debate over how to think about Islamic State has mainly centered on important but abstruse questions -- is it evil or not? -- and on what combination of military and economic pressure might be necessary to prevent the establishment of a caliphate.
> 
> What the debate is lacking is a sense of history. And the historical antecedents do supply an early analogy to Islamic State -- a warrior people who came out of nowhere, defeated mightier forces in battle, accumulated wealth and, in their bloody ferocity, terrified every civilization with which they came into contact.
> 
> I refer to the steppe nomads.
> 
> The steppe nomads were fearsome horsemen of varying ethnicity who first encountered the great empires of antiquity around 700 B.C., and reappeared with regularity well into the Middle Ages. They lacked the sophisticated technology, wealth and professional bureaucracy of the great powers like Rome and China. Instead they had horses. Cavalry was something new, and the traditional empires had difficulty adjusting to the tactics of the unanticipated invaders, who although loosely organized slowly conquered vast swaths of territory.
> 
> Like Islamic State. As a matter of fact, back in the seventh century B.C., a group of steppe warriors, the Scythians, actually ruled a region roughly contiguous with the territory now controlled by Islamic State.
> 
> Ironies abound. For example, CNN has reported that the black robes and turban worn by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi intentionally “harken back” -- one assumes the writer meant “hark back” -- “to Arab rulers from 1,500 years ago." But if we go back that millennium and a half, to the era al-Baghdadi’s attire is meant to evoke, we find ourselves very close to the time when steppe warriors led by Attila the Hun came swarming into the remains of the Roman Empire, finally sacking the walled cities that had defied earlier invaders, because they had mastered the Roman technology. The Huns used battering rams and scaling ladders to take the fortified cities, and Attila spent his plunder wisely, hiring the finest engineers (many of them Romans) to figure out how to outwit the defensive technologies of the supposedly more advanced cultures of the West.
> 
> The story of the battle against the steppe nomads is powerfully told in Ian Morris’s excellent if controversial book, "War! What Is It Good For?" Morris, a historian and archeologist at Stanford, argues that there are two kinds of wars: productive wars that bring about greater prosperity and safety, and unproductive ones that are destructive to both. The wars with the steppe nomads were mostly unproductive. And although the territorial empires ultimately prevailed, the wars against the nomads were long and enormously costly.
> 
> By the 13th century, when Mongols under Genghis Khan successfully invaded what is now Iran, the technological sophistication of the steppe nomads had advanced considerably. Khan “employed a permanent corps of Chinese engineers,” writes Morris, and the engineers in turn forced prisoners to “dig tunnels; divert rivers; build catapults, rams, and towers; and rain burning gunpowder onto defenders." The Mongols’ use of technology helped them take Baghdad, “Islam’s richest city,” in 1258. A few years later, following a lengthy siege, the Mongols conquered Xiangyang in central China, “possibly the greatest fortress on earth.”
> 
> All of this was possible because the Mongols -- who began as classic mounted steppe warriors -- were far-sighted enough to see the advantage of using their accumulated wealth to hire the experts they needed to defeat the cultures of the West.
> 
> The Huns, another fearsome nomadic people, had earlier learned the same lesson. For the Hunnic Empire, writes the historian Peter Heather in "Empire and Barbarians," the “path to political triumph” was to take charge “of distributing the combined profits flowing from a potent mixture of raiding, mercenary service, and diplomatic subsidy.”
> 
> Islamic State has effectively checked off each of these boxes. The group has accumulated a great deal of wealth, and is spending a good deal of it on advanced technology, just as the Huns and Mongols did. Recent news reports suggest not only that the group now flies surveillance drones, but that the drones were used to study a military base recently captured by its fighters.
> 
> Islamic State has also captured a lot of sophisticated military hardware from the Iraqi army. Many experts are skeptical about the group’s ability to maintain or even learn how to use the equipment. Perhaps. But Islamic State doesn’t necessarily need to do maintenance and training on its own; it need only spend some of its wealth to hire outside experts interested in making a buck. It worked for the steppe warriors for centuries. There is no reason to think it wouldn’t work for Islamic State.
> 
> The steppe warriors lost in the end, of course. It cost the traditional empires of Europe and Asia dearly in blood and treasure, but they won. How? Morris lists several reasons, and all of them have relevance to the current threat of Islamic State.
> 
> Advancing technology -- particularly the discovery of military uses for gunpowder -- helped turn the tide of battle. So did constant and often massive attacks on the nomad territory, as well as simple bribery. Most important, perhaps, was a change in attitude. Not until they finally accepted their enemy for what it was, not a crowd of mindless barbarians but a powerful military and economic force that had to be fought with all the weapons and wealth at their command, did the great empires of history defeat the warriors of the steppes.
> 
> To contact the writer of this article: Stephen L. Carter at stephen.carter@yale.edu.
> 
> To contact the editor responsible for this article: Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net.


----------



## Marchog

I'd like to put my 2 cents in and say that a "30 Years War" _is exactly the opposite of what the Middle East needs_. That would open up exactly the same Pandora's box as it did in Western society (materialism, related revolutionary bloodbaths in search of earthly utopia and mass secular ideologies far more bloodthirsty than anything that had preceded them), the effects of which we still haven't managed to shove back inside despite a breathtakingly naive assumption of success following a half century of secure democracy (a mere heartbeat in history). What the Middle East (especially Iraq and Libya) needs is a return to the only thing that kept them even remotely stable in anything approaching recent memory, that is to say, _highly reactionary monarchies_ wielding an iron fist, whose absence allowed a power vacuum in which Islamic extremism (or pan-Arabist pseudo-fascism itself influenced by post "enlightenment" Western ethnic statehood) could thrive in the first place. Iraq and Libya don't need 1789. They need "l'état c'est moi". 

Of course, such a thing would be ideologically unthinkable for modern Europe or the United States, who seem hell-bent on establishing a political and social order which has barely been tested in the West, let alone elsewhere.


> In essence, you are suggesting that these cultures adopt western liberalism.
> Democracy might be acultural but liberal democracy is a beast of the west, ill suited for the Middle East and it's overwhelmingly conservative population.
> 
> I believe that is the wrong way to go about it especially since modern radical Islam is partly fueled by a reactionary movement that began in the twentieth century as a response to the "contamination" of Islamic countries by Western culture. Go back a few decades and you'll see the empowerment of Women in the Middle East. Where did that lead them?
> 
> Even to many secular Arabs, the notion that Church and state should be separate or that the widespread empowerment of women is a desirable thing is considered a fanciful notion.
> 
> Different cultures means different takes on modernity and we oughta stop assumng that the only way forward for the third world is by going down the same path as us and especially when it can be demonstrated that some of their geopolitical ills can be directly attributed to Western imperialism int the twentieh century.
> 
> we're not gonna make these countries into Western clones by the 22nd century and nor should we aspire to.


I largely agree with this sentiment, and again I think the best solution to achieve these things (stability, a lid on jihadism and safety from an unwanted liberal society) would be the aforementioned reactionary monarchies. Complain all you want about the currently existing monarchies over there (not always cuddly teddy bears), but if all of the Middle East was a collection of UAEs and Saudi Arabias, we'd have a lot less to worry about.


----------



## YZT580

Guess again.  Al Quaeda was a product of Saudi Arabia.  Iran is hardly a breeding ground for democracy but it is certainly a sponsor of anti-west terrorism and it has a stable dictatorship.  ISIS did not emerge simply to combat Assad.  These guys truly believe that the future belongs to Allah and you WILL bow or you will pay or you will die.  The idea of religious freedom or the freedom to have no religion doesn't exist over there.  Now that it ISIS has been let out of hell, we aren't going to find it so easy to push it back in again nor is it going to be easy to keep it in the Middle East.  I would suggest that they have declared war on us and we need to come to grips with that thought and do something about it and now, while they are still squabbling amongst themselves would be the ideal time to act before they get their s***t together.


----------



## Marchog

> Guess again.  Al Quaeda was a product of Saudi Arabia.  Iran is hardly a breeding ground for democracy but it is certainly a sponsor of anti-west terrorism and it has a stable dictatorship.


I would say Al Qaeda is operating in spite of, rather than because of, the Saudi monarchy. Iran is a republican dictatorship, not a monarchy, and it just so happens to be an _Islamic republic_ that appeared after the Shah was _deposed_, so hardly the thing I am advocating (in fact, pretty close to the opposite). 



> I would suggest that they have declared war on us and we need to come to grips with that thought and do something about it and now, while they are still squabbling amongst themselves would be the ideal time to act before they get their s***t together.


I'm not sure if you are addressing me directly with this, but I in no way implied that ISIS shouldn't be fought, in fact I think they should. I was simply arguing that trying to establish post 17th-century western society there is not the way to go, and not the thing ISIS should theoretically be replaced with once eliminated.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Actually I would say more like the Taliban, the forces that help create the ISIS had no idea of the success they would have and eventually the dog will bite the masters hands when it tries to control it. I am not sure how much technical help they will get in the long run, these guys are the like the scorpion on the fox crossing the river, they will kill the fox because it's their nature and will poison their own well with their nuttiness. In fact spreading lies and suspicion so they eat their own is a good way to fight them.


----------



## George Wallace

It appears that the barbarianism of ISIS / ISIL is spreading outside of Iraq and Syria.  

A French mountain guide while on a hiking tour, was captured and has been beheaded in Algeria by ISIS allies.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.



> Hervé Gourdel, French hostage, beheaded by ISIS allies
> 
> CBC NEWS WORLD
> The Associated Press Posted: Sep 24, 2014 11:59 AM ET Last Updated: Sep 24, 2014 2:18 PM ET
> 
> *Gourdel was a 55-year-old mountaineering guide seized in northern Algeria*
> 
> Algerian extremists allied with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group have decapitated a French hostage after France carried out airstrikes in Iraq, according to a video that appeared online Wednesday.
> 
> French President Francois Hollande condemned the killing of Herve Gourdel and said France would continue its fight against ISIS group, which are Sunni militants that have taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria.
> 
> "Herve Gourdel is dead because he is the representative of a people — ours — that defends human dignity against barbarity," Hollande said, speaking along the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. "My determination is total and this attack only reinforces it. We will continue to fight terrorism everywhere."
> 
> A group calling itself Jund al-Khilafah, or Soldiers of the Caliphate, had said they would kill the French mountaineer after abducting him Sunday unless France ended its airstrikes against ISIS fighters in Iraq within 24 hours.
> 
> France started airstrikes in Iraq on Friday, the first country to join the U.S. military campaign against ISIS fighters there.
> 
> France a special target for Islamic extremists
> 
> The killing of a hostage represents a departure for radical Islamic groups in Algeria, which in the past decade have made millions off ransoming hostages. France is also known for paying ransoms, though several hostages have died in the past at the hands of their captors.
> 
> In the video, masked gunmen from the newly formed group that split away from al-Qaeda's North Africa branch stood over a kneeling Gourdel. They pledged their allegiance to the leader of the ISIS group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and said they were fighting his enemies. They added they were following his instructions to attack the French.
> 
> The video showed the captive pushed to the ground and blindfolded before he was beheaded.
> 
> Islamic extremists have long singled out France as a special target for multiple reasons: the French military campaign against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Mali, the French involvement in the NATO force in Afghanistan and French laws banning the Muslim face veil anywhere in public and banning Muslim headscarves in public buildings.
> 
> Nearly 1,000 French radicals have joined or are trying to join ISIS in Syria and in Iraq — more than the number of fighters from any other Western country. French authorities are particularly concerned that they will return and stage attacks at home.
> 
> The video resembled those showing the beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker in recent weeks, but instead of starting with clips of U.S. President Barack Obama speaking, it showed Hollande.
> 
> The terrorism watchdog SITE Intelligence Group said the video had been posted on the social networking site Twitter. It was briefly available on YouTube before being taken down.
> 
> "Our values are at stake," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Wednesday after hearing about the video.
> 
> Taken during hiking trip in Algeria
> 
> Gourdel — a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice — was seized in the Djura Djura mountains of northern Algeria on Sunday during a hiking trip. His Algerian companions were released. On his Facebook page he had expressed his excitement about his camping trip and said he was looking forward to being shown around for a change, instead of being the guide.
> 
> The remote mountainous region, riddled with steep valleys and deep caves, however, is also one of the last strongholds of Islamist extremists in northern Algeria.
> 
> Algerian forces unleashed a massive search for Gourdel, sending in helicopters and special forces to comb the region.
> 
> According to a presidential aide, Hollande has spoken with his family. Gourdel's hometown in southern France is planning a vigil Thursday at the mountaineering office where he worked.
> 
> The head of a leading French Muslim group, Dalil Boubakeur expressed horror at the "this barbaric crime," condemning it "with the utmost energy." The group has called for imams to denounce the practices of ISIS.
> 
> Algeria has been fighting Islamic extremists since the 1990s. In recent years, they had been largely confined to a few mountainous areas, where they have concentrated on attacking soldiers and police while leaving civilians alone.
> 
> © The Associated Press, 2014




More on LINK.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

There was some very nasty stuff going on in the early 2000 there as I recall. So not inspired. Also in the Philippines the Muslims extremists there have been threatening to behead captives.


----------



## CougarKing

:facepalm: Will there be anything left of her to interview within a year?



> *Turks leave for "family-friendly" IS group*
> 
> ISTANBUL (AP) — *Asiya Ummi Abdullah doesn't share the view that the Islamic State group rules over a terrorist dystopia and she isn't scared by the American bombs falling on Raqqa,* its power center in Syria.
> 
> As far as she's concerned, it's the ideal place to raise a family.
> 
> In interviews with The Associated Press, *the 24-year-old Muslim convert explained her decision to move with her toddler to the territory controlled by the militant group, saying it offers them protection from the sex, crime, drugs and alcohol that she sees as rampant in largely secular Turkey.*
> 
> "The children of that country see all this and become either murderers or delinquents or homosexuals or thieves," Umi Abdullah wrote in one of several Facebook messages exchanged in recent days. She said that living under Shariah, the Islamic legal code, means that her 3-year-old boy's spiritual life is secure.
> 
> *"He will know God and live under his rules," she said. As for the American bombs being dropped on the Islamic State group, she said: "I only fear God."*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



More at the source: 
http://news.msn.com/world/turks-leave-for-family-friendly-is-group


----------



## George Wallace

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> :facepalm: Will there be anything left of her to interview within a year?
> 
> More at the source:
> http://news.msn.com/world/turks-leave-for-family-friendly-is-group



We will see then if she is a recipient of the Darwin Award.


----------



## George Wallace

From the Huffinton Post, a report on over 120 Muslim scholars gathered in Washington, DC and their open letter to the Islamic State.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.



> Muslim Scholars Release Open Letter To Islamic State Meticulously Blasting Its Ideology
> Religion News Service	 | By Lauren Markoe
> Posted: 09/24/2014 5:37 pm EDT Updated: 09/25/2014 10:59 am EDT
> 
> WASHINGTON (RNS) More than 120 Muslim scholars from around the world joined an open letter to the “fighters and followers” of the Islamic State, denouncing them as un-Islamic by using the most Islamic of terms.
> 
> Relying heavily on the Quran, the 18-page letter released Wednesday (Sept. 24) picks apart the extremist ideology of the militants who have left a wake of brutal death and destruction in their bid to establish a transnational Islamic state in Iraq and Syria.
> 
> Even translated into English, the letter will still sound alien to most Americans, said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, who released it in Washington with 10 other American Muslim religious and civil rights leaders.
> 
> “The letter is written in Arabic. It is using heavy classical religious texts and classical religious scholars that ISIS has used to mobilize young people to join its forces,” said Awad, using one of the acronyms for the group. “This letter is not meant for a liberal audience.”
> 
> Even mainstream Muslims, he said, may find it difficult to understand.
> 
> Awad said its aim is to offer a comprehensive Islamic refutation, “point-by-point,” to the philosophy of the Islamic State and the violence it has perpetrated. The letter’s authors include well-known religious and scholarly figures in the Muslim world, including Sheikh Shawqi Allam, the grand mufti of Egypt, and Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem and All Palestine.
> 
> A translated 24-point summary of the letter includes the following: “It is forbidden in Islam to torture”; “It is forbidden in Islam to attribute evil acts to God”; and “It is forbidden in Islam to declare people non-Muslims until he (or she) openly declares disbelief.”
> 
> This is not the first time Muslim leaders have joined to condemn the Islamic State. The chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, for example, last week told the nation’s Muslims that they should speak out against the “terrorist and murderers” who fight for the Islamic State and who have dragged Islam “through the mud.”
> 
> But the Muslim leaders who endorsed Wednesday’s letter called it an unprecedented refutation of the Islamic State ideology from a collaboration of religious scholars. It is addressed to the group’s self-anointed leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and “the fighters and followers of the self-declared ‘Islamic State.’”
> 
> But the words “Islamic State” are in quotes, and the Muslim leaders who released the letter asked people to stop using the term, arguing that it plays into the group’s unfounded logic that it is protecting Muslim lands from non-Muslims and is resurrecting the caliphate — a state governed by a Muslim leader that once controlled vast swaths of the Middle East.
> 
> “Please stop calling them the ‘Islamic State,’ because they are not a state and they are not a religion,” said Ahmed Bedier, a Muslim and the president of United Voices of America, a nonprofit that encourages minority groups to engage in civic life.
> 
> President Obama has made a similar point, referring to the Islamic State by one of its acronyms — “the group known as ISIL” — in his speech to the United Nations earlier Wednesday. In that speech, Obama also disconnected the group from Islam.
> 
> Enumerating its atrocities — the mass rape of women, the gunning down of children, the starvation of religious minorities — Obama concluded: “No God condones this terror.”
> 
> Here is the executive summary of their letter:
> 
> 1. It is forbidden in Islam to issue fatwas without all the necessary learning requirements. Even then fatwas must follow Islamic legal theory as defined in the Classical texts. It is also forbidden to cite a portion of a verse from the Qur’an—or part of a verse—to derive a ruling without looking at everything that the Qur’an and Hadith teach related to that matter. In other words, there are strict subjective and objective prerequisites for fatwas, and one cannot ‘cherry-pick’ Qur’anic verses for legal arguments without considering the entire Qur’an and Hadith.
> 
> 2. It is forbidden in Islam to issue legal rulings about anything without mastery of the Arabic language.
> 
> 3. It is forbidden in Islam to oversimplify Shari’ah matters and ignore established Islamic sciences.
> 
> 4. It is permissible in Islam [for scholars] to differ on any matter, except those fundamentals of religion that all Muslims must know.
> 
> 5. It is forbidden in Islam to ignore the reality of contemporary times when deriving legal rulings.
> 
> 6. It is forbidden in Islam to kill the innocent.
> 
> 7. It is forbidden in Islam to kill emissaries, ambassadors, and diplomats; hence it is forbidden to kill journalists and aid workers.
> 
> 8. Jihad in Islam is defensive war. It is not permissible without the right cause, the right purpose and without the right rules of conduct.
> 
> 9. It is forbidden in Islam to declare people non-Muslim unless he (or she) openly declares disbelief.
> 
> 10. It is forbidden in Islam to harm or mistreat—in any way—Christians or any ‘People of the Scripture’.
> 
> 11. It is obligatory to consider Yazidis as People of the Scripture.
> 
> 12. The re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam. It was abolished by universal consensus.
> 
> 13. It is forbidden in Islam to force people to convert.
> 
> 14. It is forbidden in Islam to deny women their rights.
> 
> 15. It is forbidden in Islam to deny children their rights.
> 
> 16. It is forbidden in Islam to enact legal punishments (hudud) without following the correct
> procedures that ensure justice and mercy.
> 
> 17. It is forbidden in Islam to torture people.
> 
> 18. It is forbidden in Islam to disfigure the dead.
> 
> 19. It is forbidden in Islam to attribute evil acts to God.
> 
> 20. It is forbidden in Islam to destroy the graves and shrines of Prophets and Companions.
> 
> 21. Armed insurrection is forbidden in Islam for any reason other than clear disbelief by the ruler and not allowing people to pray.
> 
> 22. It is forbidden in Islam to declare a caliphate without consensus from all Muslims.
> 
> 23. Loyalty to one’s nation is permissible in Islam.
> 
> 24. After the death of the Prophet, Islam does not require anyone to emigrate anywhere.
> 
> Read the full letter here.




More on LINK.


----------



## Hisoyaki

Too bad CAIR didn't deem nescessary to do the same vis-a-vis HAMAS.


----------



## ballz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDFrNQAjDYA

Bill Maher makes some purposefully provocative points here.

But the real point he's trying to make is very valid.

We will continue to have groups like AQ, ISIS, etc, and we can fight it with bombs and bullets as much as we want, but we will never rid the earth of their barbaric ways until we allow reason to triumph and refuse to allow it anything but rational thinking (yes, instead of faith, because they are two polar opposites) to guide our way forward.


----------



## tomahawk6

This thread really is unnecessary as the fighting in Iraq and Syria are the result of the spread of ISIS.Might as well merge the Syria and Iraq threads.


----------



## CougarKing

Here's one example of ISIS/ISIL sympathizer and bomb-maker in Asia. Somehow the codename "Pokemon" (named after a Japanese cartoon) used for him doesn't sound quite that terrifying. 

Interaksyon (Philippines news site)



> *Intelligence source IDs suspected Malaysian ISIS supporter*
> By: Thom Andrade, InterAksyon.com
> September 27, 2014 4:40 PM
> 
> MANILA - A source from the military intelligence community identified over the weekend a Malaysian member of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) as one of the alleged ardent local-based sympathizers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
> 
> ISIS has seized control of huge territories in the Middle East.
> 
> *The Manila-based intelligence source, who uses the code name "Pokemon" identified the suspected person as Amin Baco.*
> 
> "The Malaysian Amin Baco or Abu Jihad has been in the country for a long period," Pokemon said, adding that this same person "h*ad been involved in past bombing incidents in Basilan and Sulu."*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## George Wallace

Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) is a fairly wide spread Indonesia based terrorist organization in South East Asia.  They have links to Al-Qa‘ida and other off shoots of Al-Qa‘ida.  They have known associations with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).


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## Kilo_302

Some great analysis from Bill Moyers and two guests. The ex-USMC Captain spot on in regards to his comments on Saudi Arabia in my opinion:



http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-americas-new-war-middle-east/


----------



## a_majoor

What is making it harder to figure out what is going on is the deliberate obscuring of the situation by the Administration to try to maintain the political narrative. Anyone ever hear of this group before?

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/388990/print



> *The Khorosan Group Does Not Exist*
> It’s a fictitious name the Obama administration invented to deceive us.
> By Andrew C. McCarthy
> 
> We’re being had. Again.
> 
> For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name.
> 
> Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade.
> 
> Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.
> 
> The who?
> 
> There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.
> 
> You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.
> 
> *The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network’s Syrian franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week’s U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he’s something the administration is at pains to call “core al-Qaeda.”
> 
> “Core al-Qaeda,” you are to understand, is different from “Jabhat al-Nusra,” which in turn is distinct from “al-Qaeda in Iraq” (formerly “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” now the “Islamic State” al-Qaeda spin-off that is, itself, formerly “al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Sham” or “al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant”). That al-Qaeda, don’t you know, is a different outfit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of course, should never be mistaken for “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” “Boko Haram,” “Ansar al-Sharia,” or the latest entry, “al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.”*
> 
> Coming soon, “al-Qaeda on Hollywood and Vine.” In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if, come 2015, Obama issued an executive order decreeing twelve new jihad jayvees stretching from al-Qaeda in January through al-Qaeda in December.
> 
> Except you’ll hear only about the jayvees, not the jihad. You see, there is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries.
> 
> As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole — a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way.
> 
> For a product of the radical Left like Obama, terrorism is a regrettable but understandable consequence of American arrogance. That it happens to involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict. For the Left, America has to be the culprit. Despite its inbred pathologies, which we had no role in cultivating, Islam must be the victim, not the cause. As you’ll hear from Obama’s Islamist allies, who often double as Democrat activists, the problem is “Islamophobia,” not Muslim terrorism.
> 
> This is a gross distortion of reality, so the Left has to do some very heavy lifting to pull it off. Since the Islamic-supremacist ideology that unites the jihadists won’t disappear, it has to be denied and purged. The “real” jihad becomes the “internal struggle to become a better person.” The scriptural and scholarly underpinnings of Islamic supremacism must be bleached out of the materials used to train our national-security agents, and the instructors who resist going along with the program must be ostracized. The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.
> 
> The president has been telling us for years that he handled al-Qaeda by killing bin Laden. He has been telling us for weeks that the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda renegade that will soon reconcile with the mother ship for the greater good of unity in the anti-American jihad — is a regional nuisance that posed no threat to the United States. In recent days, however, reality intruded on this fiction. Suddenly, tens of thousands of terrorists, armed to the teeth, were demolishing American-trained armies, beheading American journalists, and threatening American targets.
> 
> Obama is not the manner of man who can say, “I was wrong: It turns out that al-Qaeda is actually on the rise, its Islamic State faction is overwhelming the region, and American interests — perhaps even American territory — are profoundly threatened.” So instead . . . you got “the Khorosan Group.”
> 
> You also got a smiley-face story about five Arab states joining the United States in a coalition to confront the terrorists. Finally, the story goes, Sunni governments were acting decisively to take Islam back from the “un-Islamic” elements that falsely commit “violent extremism” under Islam’s banner.
> 
> Sounds uplifting … until you read the fine print. You’ve got to dig deep to find it. It begins, for example, 42 paragraphs into the Wall Street Journal’s report on the start of the bombing campaign. After the business about our glorious alliance with “moderate” allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar who so despise terrorism, we learn:
> 
> Only the U.S. — not Arab allies — struck sites associated with the Khorasan group, officials said. Khorasan group members were in the final stages of preparations for an attack on U.S. and Western interests, a defense official said. Khorasan was planning an attack on international airliners, officials have said. . . . Rebels and activists contacted inside Syria said they had never heard of Khorasan and that the U.S. struck several bases and an ammunition warehouse belonging to the main al Qaeda-linked group fighting in Syria, Nusra Front. While U.S. officials have drawn a distinction between the two groups, they acknowledge their membership is intertwined and their goals are similar.
> 
> Oops. So it turns out that our moderate Islamist partners have no interest in fighting Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate. Yes, they reluctantly, and to a very limited extent, joined U.S. forces in the strikes against the Islamic State renegades. But that’s not because the Islamic State is jihadist while they are moderate. It is because the Islamic State has made mincemeat of Iraq’s forces, is a realistic threat to topple Assad, and has our partners fretting that they are next on the menu.
> 
> Meantime, though, the Saudis and Qatar want no trouble with the rest of al-Qaeda, particularly with al-Nusra. After all, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch is tightly allied with the “moderate opposition” that these “moderate” Gulf states have been funding, arming, and training for the jihad against Assad.
> 
> Oh, and what about those other “moderates” Obama has spent his presidency courting, the Muslim Brotherhood? It turns out they are not only all for al-Qaeda, they even condemn what one of their top sharia jurists, Wagdy Ghoneim, has labeled “the Crusader war against the Islamic State.”
> 
> “The Crusaders in America, Europe, and elsewhere are our enemies,” Ghoneim tells Muslims. For good measure he adds, “We shall never forget the terrorism of criminal America, which threw the body of the martyred heroic mujahid, Bin Laden, into the sea.”
> 
> Obama has his story and he’s sticking to it. But the same can be said for our enemies.
> 
> — Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Members who can might want to watch _The Agenda[/'i] on TVO right now. The subjects are IS** and then Saudi Arabia._


----------



## a_majoor

Yet another act of betrayal against one of the few groups which would be allies and supporters. No wonder no one trusts the *West* to keep their promises or live up to the rhetoric. If Canada is going to participate, then we need to identify who our allies on the ground really are and target our help to them:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389096/obama-betrays-kurds-robert-zubrin



> *Obama Betrays the Kurds *
> The Kurds are fighting bravely, but they need arms, and they need air support.
> By Robert Zubrin
> 
> In his speech to the United Nations last week, President Obama pledged to the world that the United States would use its might to stop the horrific depredations of the terrorist movement variously known as the Islamic State, ISIS, or, as he calls it, ISIL.
> 
> “This group has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria,” the president proclaimed. “Mothers, sisters, daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings have been beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.”
> 
> “No God condones this terror. No grievance justifies these actions,” he said. “There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death. . . . We will support Iraqis and Syrians fighting to reclaim their communities. We will use our military might in a campaign of air strikes to roll back ISIL. We will train and equip forces fighting against these terrorists on the ground.”
> These are brave words that well and truly denounce evil for what it is. Unfortunately, the president’s actions since then have been anything but consistent with his pledge to stop the terrorism.
> 
> As these lines are being written, some 400,000 Kurds in and around the town of Kobane in northern Syria, on the Turkish border, are being besieged and assaulted by massed legions of Islamic State killers armed with scores of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy artillery. Against these, the Kurdish defenders have only AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The Kurds have called on the U.S. to send in air strikes to take out the jihadist forces. In response, the administration sent in two fighter jets Saturday, which destroyed two Islamic State tanks and then flew away. The Kurds are begging for arms. The administration has not only refused to send arms, but is exerting pressure both on our NATO allies and on Israel not to send any either. Over 150,000 Kurds have fled their homes to try to escape to Turkey, but they are being blocked at the border by Turkish troops. Meanwhile, Turkey is allowing Islamist reinforcements to enter Syria to join the Islamic State, while Islamist elements of the Free Syrian Army, funded and armed by the United States, have joined forces with the group in the genocidal assault on the Kurdish enclave.
> 
> According to Kurdish sources, the Turks are massing troops on their own side of the border, with the apparent plan being to sit in place and allow the Kurds to be exterminated, and then move in to take over the region once they are gone. This is the same plan as Josef Stalin used when he allowed the Nazis to wipe out the Polish underground during the Warsaw rising of 1944, and only afterward sent in the Red Army to take control of what was left of the city. If anything, it is even more morally reprehensible, since it could be pointed out in Stalin’s defense that his forces were at least pummeling the enemy elsewhere while the Warsaw fight was under way. In contrast, the Turks are doing nothing of the sort. For an American administration to collude in such a mass atrocity is infamous.
> 
> If we are to win the war against the Islamic State, we need ground forces, and the Obama administration has rejected the idea of sending in any of our own. The Kurds, who have demonstrated both their bravery and their willingness to be friends with America, are right there, and already engaged in the fight. If supplied with adequate arms and backed by serious U.S. tactical air support, they could roll up ISIS as rapidly as the similarly reinforced Northern Alliance did the Taliban in the fall of 2001. Done right, this war could be won in months, instead of waged inconclusively for years.
> 
> The administration, however, has rejected this alternative, and has instead opted for a Saudi-Qatari plan to allow the Syrian Kurds to be exterminated while training a new Sunni Arab army in Saudi Arabia. Given the Saudi role in the new army’s tutelage and officer selection, the Islamist nature of this force is a foregone conclusion. At best it might provide a more disciplined replacement for the Islamic State as an Islamist Syrian opposition at some point in the distant future (current official administration estimates are at least a year) when it is considered ready for combat. Meanwhile the killing will simply go on, with the United States doing its part to further Islamist recruitment by indulging in endless strategy-free bombing of Sunni villages.
> 
> So now, to paraphrase the president, “Mothers, sisters, daughters will be subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children will be gunned down. Bodies will be dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities will be starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings will be beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.”
> 
> Surely we can do better.
> 
> — Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy​, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of The Case for Mars. The paperback edition of his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was recently published by Encounter Books.


----------



## CougarKing

More to validate why this should remain a separate topic from the Syria and Iraq superthreads

Defense News



> *Islamic State Influence Spreads Beyond Iraq and Syria*
> Oct. 2, 2014 - 07:55AM   |   By NAILA INAYAT and KACI RACELMA, Special for USA TODAY
> LAHORE, PAKISTAN — In Pakistan, some are slapping pro-Islamic State bumper stickers on their cars and writing chalk graffiti on walls exhorting young people to join the terrorist group.
> 
> In China, the government fears that Muslim Uighurs — a restive ethnic minority in the country's far west — have sought terrorist training from the Islamic State to establish a breakaway country.
> 
> *In eastern Mali, an Islamic State-affiliated group called "Soldiers of the Caliphate in the Land of Algeria" has taken over much of Gao province, inflicting severe punishments for breaches of the Quran, like drinking alcohol. *Those militants beheaded a French tourist in Algeria last month after France refused to halt its participation in U.S.-led airstrikes against the group in Iraq.
> 
> "The situation gets more and more complicated as our region becomes the stronghold of radical Islamists who only use violence to express their will," said Mamadou Idrissa, a businessman in Gao. "Our life has turned into a nightmare."
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## CougarKing

One by one, these Islamic extremist groups across the world from the BIFF (an MILF-MNLF splinter group) in the southern Philippines to the Pakistani Taliban, each of whom had ties to Al-Qaeda before, are now pledging allegiance to ISIS: 

Reuters



> *Pakistani Taliban declare allegiance to Islamic State and global jihad*
> Reuters
> By By Saud Mehsud and Maria Golovnina  – 23 hours ago
> 
> By Saud Mehsud and Maria Golovnina
> DERA ISMAIL KHAN/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The Pakistani Taliban declared allegiance to Islamic State on Saturday and ordered militants across the region to help the Middle Eastern jihadist group in its campaign to set up a global Islamic caliphate.
> 
> *Islamic State, which controls swathes of land in Syria and Iraq, has been making inroads into South Asia, which has traditionally been dominated by local Taliban insurgencies against both the Pakistan and Afghanistan governments.*
> 
> The announcement comes after a September move by al Qaeda chief, Ayman al-Zawahri, to name former Taliban commander Asim Umar as the "emir" of a new South Asia branch of the network that masterminded the 2001 attacks on the United States.
> 
> Although there is little evidence of a firm alliance yet between IS and al Qaeda-linked Taliban commanders, IS activists have been spotted recently in the Pakistani city of Peshawar distributing pamphlets praising the group.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Agence-France-Presse



> *BIFF, Abu Sayyaf pledge allegiance to Islamic State jihadists*
> By: Agence France-Presse
> August 16, 2014 5:33 AM
> 
> MANILA, Philippines - Hardline Muslim guerrillas in the Philippines said Friday they have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, the extremist jihadists who now control large swathes of Iraq and Syria.
> 
> Clips have been uploaded in recent weeks on the video sharing site YouTube showing both southern Philippines-based Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) and the Abu Sayyaf rebels pledging support to the Islamic State (IS).
> 
> "We have an alliance with the Islamic State and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi," BIFF spokesman Abu Misry Mama told Agence France-Presse by telephone on Friday, referring to the brutal jihadist group's leader.
> 
> Misry confirmed that a YouTube video uploaded on Wednesday, showing a purported BIFF leader flanked by armed men reading a statement of support for the IS, had come from his group.
> 
> (...EDITED)


----------



## George Wallace

Jim Seggie said:
			
		

> I remember the terrorists of the 70s - Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof, Carlos the Jackal etc. IIRC the terrorists were mostly university grads, upper middle class types with SFA better to do than kill people.
> 
> It seems to me that those joining ISIS are the same type.
> 
> Poor folk have better things to do than cause mayhem. They have to earn a living.



Germany has changed a lot in the decades since the Wall came down.   Those formerly known as "Gastarbeiter" of the 60's through 80's are now allowed to own property and run businesses.  

This is some of what Germany and the rest of Western Europe are facing today:  

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.



> Pro-ISIS radicals with machetes, knives attack Kurds in Germany (VIDEO)
> 
> RT
> Published time: October 08, 2014 08:34 Get short URL
> 
> 
> Peaceful protests against IS in Syria and Iraq organized by Kurdish nationals in several German cities ended with serious clashes with pro-jihadist Muslims in Hamburg and Celle. Police had to request reinforcements to restore order.
> 
> Police in Hamburg, a port city of 1.8 million people, used water cannons, batons and pepper spray late Tuesday to disperse crowds of warring Kurds and pro-jihadist Muslims, armed with knives and brass-knuckles, following a protest against Islamic State militants who are attacking the Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria near the Turkish border.
> 
> At first, on Tuesday afternoon about 80 Kurdish protesters occupied Hamburg's central train station for an hour, NDR.de reported. The Kurdish protesters left the railways voluntarily after 6pm, a police spokesman said.
> 
> A bigger group of about 500 Kurdish demonstrators marched through downtown Hamburg. On their way, they damaged several cars and Turkish snack bars, breaking panes of glass and throwing around plastic chairs. Police detained 14 rioters.
> 
> Later, several hundred Kurdish protesters gathered near the Al Nour Mosque on Steindamm Street near the city’s train station. At about 11:30pm local time (21:30 GMT), the Kurds were attacked by a group of approximately 40 armed supporters of the Islamic State (IS), RT’s Ruptly video news agency reported.
> 
> The violent clashes that followed the attack resulted in four people being hospitalized with stab wounds.
> 
> Anti-IS demonstrations of Kurds in northern Germany began Monday and were supported by hundreds of protesters in the cities of Bremen, Celle, Göttingen, Hannover, Kiel and Oldenburg.
> 
> In most of the cities, protests went off peacefully and were virtually trouble-free, but in Celle police failed to prevent clashes.
> 
> The first brawl between about 100 Kurds and Muslims on each side took place Monday, but police in Celle, a town of 71,000, with the help of colleagues from Hannover, Oldenburg and Wolfsburg, prevented serious clashes between the two groups.
> 
> On Tuesday, however, the two sides, armed with stones and bottles, attempted to break through police lines to attack each other.
> 
> Police in full anti-riot gear used pepper spray and batons to repel the attackers and prevent violence. Though the situation calmed down and no officers were injured, a large police force remains in the city to prevent a possible escalation.
> 
> Some of the Muslims taking part in the clashes in Celle were “Chechen nationals” who came there from all over Germany, Cellesche Zeitung reported.
> 
> A wave of anti-IS protests organized by Kurdish activists has rocked many European capitals, including London, Brussels, The Hague and in Sweden’s Gothenburg.
> 
> The Kurdish diaspora in Europe is protesting that the Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria are attacking Kurdish communities with impunity, without meeting any serious opposition on the ground apart from Kurdish peshmerga militias. The assault of jihadists on the Kurdish settlement of Kabani in Syria, near the Turkish border has already claimed over 400 lives, while airstrikes by the US and its allies against IS fighters in Syria are not focused on protecting Kobani.
> 
> Kristofer Lundberg, an activist with the Socialist Justice Party in Sweden’s Gothenburg who organized and spoke at a 1,000-strong rally in support of Kurdish people in Kobani on Tuesday, told RT: “We demand that Turkey open its border and let the refugees there flee ISIS terror, and also to let the fighters who are waiting at the border go to Kobani to defend the city. Thousands of Kurds are ready to defend Kobani.”



More on LINK.

Celle, for those familiar with the town, seems to always be a town that makes the news when there is violence involved.   :-\


Now we are witnessing the fight of pro ISIS/ISIL supporters against other Muslim sects in Europe.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Hopefully there will come the day that these pro IS shytes are hunted down in the west by those muslims and others who finally get tired of their BS.  Some vigilante justice sorted out armed robbers in Calgary in the 80's.


----------



## cryco

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> Hopefully there will come the day that these pro IS shytes are hunted down in the west by those muslims and others who finally get tired of their BS.  Some vigilante justice sorted out armed robbers in Calgary in the 80's.



that's wishful thinking. I don't see that ever happening. What I do see happening is the next time there's a protest with Kurds and IS supporters show up, a Kurd with an assault rifle will open fire on the grouped IS supporters (or vice versa)


----------



## jollyjacktar

It may be wishful, but I would still like to see the pack turn on them like wolves, with the same result.


----------



## a_majoor

No, packs of wild animals fighting in the middle of a city would be much like Montreal during the "Biker War" which finally ended when a small child was killed in a bomb blast aimed at a rival bike gang. 

The response then was the same as will be appropriate now: the sheepdogs are released to protect the flock.


----------



## daftandbarmy

Air Force Pilots Say They're Flying Blind Against ISIS

Obama’s no-boots-on-the-ground pledge is keeping America from fighting an effective air campaign in Iraq and Syria. 

Within the U.S. Air Force, there’s mounting frustration that the air campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq is moving far more slowly than expected. Instead of a fast-moving operation with hundreds of sorties flown in a single day—the kind favored by many in the air service—American warplanes are hitting small numbers of targets after a painstaking and cumbersome process.

The single biggest problem, current and former Air Force officers say, is the so-called kill-chain of properly identifying and making sure the right target is being attacked. At the moment, that process is very complicated and painfully slow.

“The kill-chain is very convoluted,” one combat-experienced Air Force A-10 Warthog pilot told The Daily Beast. “Nobody really has the control in the tactical environment.”

A major reason why: the lack of U.S. ground forces to direct American air power against ISIS positions. Air power, when it is applied in an area where the enemy is blended in with the civilian population, works best when there are troops on the ground who are able to call in strikes. From the sky, it can be hard to tell friend from foe. And by themselves, the GPS coordinates used to guide bombs aren’t nearly precise enough; landscape and weather can throw the coordinates off by as much as 500 feet. The planes need additional information from the guys on the ground. The only other option is to use laser-guided bombs, but even then the target has to be correctly indentified beforehand.



http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/10/troops-grumbling-that-obama-s-air-war-against-isis-is-too-little-too-late.html


----------



## jollyjacktar

Thucydides said:
			
		

> No, packs of wild animals fighting in the middle of a city would be much like Montreal during the "Biker War" which finally ended when a small child was killed in a bomb blast aimed at a rival bike gang.
> 
> The response then was the same as will be appropriate now: the sheepdogs are released to protect the flock.



In a perfect world, the sheep dogs wouldn't have their teeth kicked out already by the farmer and they wouldn't be on a Bug's Bunny dog's choke collar and line.  And the farmer wouldn't be a total pussy in dealing with the wolves when caught.  We need a trapper who wants to harvest hides.  Not to mention that some of the wolves have laughed at the dogs looking at them and then letting them run off to Syria.  Now they've let, so it's reported, 80+ of the bastards back into the country. 

You don't need to have Montreal style biker wars to get the result.  The group could self identify these assholes, as I also believe to a great extent the sheepdogs are incapable of picking out the wolves in sheep's clothing, and frogmarch the bastards into the dog kennels.  This cancer is eating away at their communities, stealing their youngster and making the collective look bad.  They are, I believe, the ones who are capable of stamping it out by turning on the assholes who are radicalizing the others.  They can find out who they are better than the dogs.

Forgive me if I have little faith in the system if what I see here in Canada and Europe is what is happening to the radicals.  (SFA)


----------



## CougarKing

Another example of how far the recruitment efforts of ISIS have reached despite efforts to curb it:

Agence-France-Presse



> *Indonesian suicide bomber dies fighting with IS in Iraq*
> 
> JAKARTA - An Indonesian suicide bomber has died fighting with the Islamic State organization in Iraq, a monitoring group said Tuesday, sparking fresh concern from Jakarta authorities who fear the group is spawning a new generation of radicals.
> 
> The bomber is believed to have died in a weekend attack in Iraq, and police suspect a total of five Indonesians have now been killed while fighting with jihadist groups this year in the Middle East.
> 
> Reports of foreigners from various countries heading to fight with IS, which controls vast swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, have raised fears they could return home and launch attacks.
> 
> Authorities in Indonesia, which has the world's biggest Muslim population, estimate that around 60 Indonesians have headed to the Middle East to fight with IS but analysts think the real figure may be as high as 200.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

This podcast from the BBC is well worth the 25 minutes spent listening to a former Brit CDS on the whole ISIS fight (also available here if the previous link doesn't work for you) ....


> The US led military operation against the so-called Islamic State organisation has raised a host of awkward questions. Is the makeshift coalition fighting a war, or mounting an anti-terror operation? What will victory look like, and how long will it take? HARDtalk speaks to General Lord Richards, who recently retired as Britain's top military chief. He has led military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sierra Leone. What does he make of this latest one?


Don't be put off too much by the tone of questioning - the aim of the program is to have the host ask VERY tough questions to ALL guests, no matter what their political position or views.


----------



## CougarKing

The Saudis show their intolerance for the Shias in their country:

Reuters



> *Saudi Arabia sentences outspoken Shi'ite cleric to death: brother*
> Reuters
> 
> By Angus McDowall
> 
> 
> RIYADH (Reuters) - A Saudi judge sentenced to death a prominent cleric on Wednesday who has called for greater rights for the kingdom's Shi'ites, the cleric's brother said, two years after his arrest prompted deadly protests in the oil-producing east of the country.
> 
> Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was detained in July 2012 following demonstrations that erupted in February 2011 in Qatif district, home to many of the Sunni-ruled country's Shi'ite minority.
> 
> His brother, Mohammed al-Nimr, reported Wednesday's sentencing on his Twitter account.
> 
> The sentence could raise tensions in Qatif, which has historically been the focal point of anti-government demonstrations demanding an end to discrimination, but where the frequency of protests has died down over the past year.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting if somewhat bizarre counter response to the growth of ISIS: Westerners going to the Middle East to fight them. Now this is more on the scale of individual adventurers going off to fight for their cause de jour, but if there was some sort of organizing principle we may see the growth of something like the "International Brigades" in the 1930's (but who will play the part of the Communist International in this case?):

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/10/15/bikers-volunteers-dutch-isis/17295699/



> *Westerners volunteer to take on the Islamic State*
> Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY 8:23 p.m. EDT October 15, 2014
> 
> As an estimated 2,000 expatriates from the United States and other Western nations join the Islamic State to fulfill a passion for conflict or jihad, a much smaller number of Westerners have signed up to fight against the militants. The latest: members of a biker gang from Holland.
> 
> The head of Never Surrender, Klaas Otto, told a Dutch radio station that three of its members went to Iraq to join Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS.
> 
> The gang touts a quote from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel on its Facebook page: "I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides."
> 
> The story was first reported Wednesday by NPR.
> 
> The bikers join others outraged over the brutality displayed by Islamic State fighters, who have seized wide swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. A former U.S. soldier from Racine, Wis., joined Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq and was wounded in a mortar attack.
> 
> "I couldn't just sit and watch Christians being slaughtered anymore," Jordan Matson, 28, told USA TODAY last week from a hospital bed in Derike, Syria. "These people are fighting for their homes, for everything they have."
> 
> Matson said he met one other American fighting the militants.
> 
> An Air Force veteran from Ohio, Brian Wilson, 43, said he fought in Syria with the Kurds, adding that a few other Americans have done the same, NBC News reported.
> 
> "They're nice, very accommodating, hospitable," Wilson said of the Kurds.
> 
> Al Jazeera reported that a few hundred Kurds from Europe also headed into the fight against the Islamic State.
> 
> President Barack Obama and military chiefs from more than 20 nations gathered in Washington on Tuesday in a show of unity against the Islamic State group. The president also talked about how "the world is not doing enough" to fight Ebola. (Oct. 14) AP
> 
> The U.S. government said about 100 Americans have traveled to, or tried to reach, the Middle East to join the Islamic State. A small number have died in the conflict. Some 2,000 Westerners from 80 countries have gone to Syria to fight with the Islamic State, according to government estimates, raising fears many could return to commit terrorist acts at home.
> 
> There was no government information offered Wednesday on how many Westerners have gone into the area seeking to fight against the militants.
> 
> A U.S.-led coalition is attacking the militants with airstrikes, but the U.S. has ruled out committing ground forces, prompting talk of other fighters taking on the Islamic State.
> 
> Fox News' Bill O'Reilly recommended in recent weeks that President Obama raise 25,000 mercenaries to battle the Islamic State. The use of such forces has been banned by the United Nations General Assembly.


----------



## CougarKing

The kind of violence between Sunni and Shia that will continue beyond our lifetimes? Even the enmity between Catholics and other Christian (Protestant) sects, for a time, outlasted the Thirty Years' War in the 1600s.

Reuters



> *Suicide bomber kills 19, wounds 28 outside Baghdad Shi'ite mosque*
> Sun Oct 19, 2014 1:09pm EDT
> 
> BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed 19 people and wounded 28 others on Sunday outside a Shi'ite Muslim mosque in western Baghdad, where mourners were attending a funeral, a police officer and medical official said.
> 
> "The attacker approached the entrance of the mosque and blew himself up among the crowd," the police officer said, declining to be named.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Another front of this perennial Sunni-Shia conflict is in Yemen, where the Shia Houthi rebels taken on local Al Qaeda branch:

Reuters



> *Yemen's Houthis dismantle Sanaa airport road camp, gunmen remain*
> Sun Oct 19, 2014 1:24pm EDT
> 
> By Mohammed Ghobari
> 
> SANAA (Reuters) - Yemen's Shi'ite Houthi group dismantled a protest camp blocking the country's main airport in Sanaa on Sunday, authorities said, but was keeping its fighters on the streets of the recently seized capital.
> 
> The dismantling of the encampment, which allowed traffic to move unobstructed between the airport and the capital for the first time in weeks, came as newly appointed Prime Minister Khaled Bahah, Yemen's ambassador to the United Nations, flew back home to take up his post as part of an agreement aimed at stabilizing the conflict-prone country.
> 
> *The Houthis captured Sanaa on Sept. 21 after weeks of anti-government protests centering on fuel price rises. The group signed a power-sharing agreement with other political parties soon afterwards,* a deal that was sanctioned by President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, but this has not deterred them from pushing in to other parts of the country.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Interesting if somewhat bizarre counter response to the growth of ISIS: Westerners going to the Middle East to fight them. Now this is more on the scale of individual adventurers going off to fight for their cause de jour, but if there was some sort of organizing principle we may see the growth of something like the "International Brigades" in the 1930's (but who will play the part of the Communist International in this case?):
> 
> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/10/15/bikers-volunteers-dutch-isis/17295699/



I think a lack of a common theme will limit it, many going back have a personal link. I don't see a "Crusader force" of angry Christians getting much love or support over there.


----------



## a_majoor

Colin P said:
			
		

> I think a lack of a common theme will limit it, many going back have a personal link. I don't see a "Crusader force" of angry Christians getting much love or support over there.



Perhaps not over there, but I can imagine "Crusader Forces" springing up in Europe and North America to fight radicalized Islam in their own midst. I also suspect that many of the smaller minority groups like the Kurds, Baloch and so on _might_ be more flexible about having such auxiliary forces operating out of their territories, at least until they get some breathing room of their own.


----------



## George Wallace

For some this may be great news; for others, it is really bad news to hear:

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.



> Isis threatens to kill British jihadis wanting to come home
> 
> *‘At least 30’ Britons seek to flee Islamic State as it is revealed that a fourth young Muslim from Portsmouth has died in Syria*
> 
> Mark Townsend
> The Observer, Saturday 25 October 2014 16.30 EDT
> 
> British jihadi fighters desperate to return home from Syria and Iraq are being issued with death threats by the leadership of Islamic State (Isis), the Observer has learned.
> 
> A source with extensive contacts among Syrian rebel groups said senior Isis figures were threatening Britons who were attempting to travel home. He said: “There are Britons who upon wanting to leave have been threatened with death, either directly or indirectly.”
> 
> The news comes after it was revealed that another young Muslim from Portsmouth had been killed on the frontline in Syria, the fourth to die from a group of six men known as the “Pompey lads” who travelled together to fight for Isis.
> 
> Meanwhile, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg confirmed that he was also aware of dozens of British men keen to return to the UK but who were trapped in Syria and Iraq, in effect held by a group they wanted to leave. Begg said he knew of more than 30 who wanted to come back. They had travelled to join rebels fighting the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad but had subsequently become embroiled with Isis, some for language reasons – Isis had more English-speaking members.
> 
> In Syria, Muhammad Mehdi Hassan, 19, from Portsmouth was killed in fighting on Friday. He is understood to have died during the Isis offensive to capture the Syrian border city of Kobani, which is continuing.
> 
> The chairman of Portsmouth’s Jami mosque, Abdul Jalil, said: “It has been confirmed with the family that he has died. Right now they are very upset. I am saddened and again shocked for the community about this news.” During Friday prayers at the mosque, young Muslims were urged not to travel to Syria.
> 
> Begg, whose offer to help secure the release of British hostage Alan Henning from Isis was rejected by the British government months before the Briton was killed, and who has extensive contacts in Syria, said: “When it becomes solidified as an Islamic State, a caliph, and you swear allegiance, thereafter if you do something disobedient you are now disobeying the caliph and could be subject to disciplinary measures which could include threats of death or death.”
> 
> Begg, 46, from Birmingham, called for Britain to introduce an amnesty for returnees from Syria and Iraq and to replicate the rehabilitation programmes of countries such as Denmark which help those who come back to get their lives back on track without the threat of prosecution. Begg said that groups had approached him to try to put pressure on the government to show leniency to disillusioned fighters returning. Recently, the government suggested British jihadis who went to fight in Iraq or Syria could be tried for treason.
> 
> He said that a lot of Britons were currently “stuck between a rock and a hard place”. He added: “There are a large number of people out there who want to come back. The number in January was around 30, that was the number given to me. That number has definitely increased since.”
> 
> Begg, outreach director for pressure group Cage, recently spent more than seven months in custody in Belmarsh prison after being arrested and questioned over a trip he had made to Syria in 2013 before being released earlier this month after it emerged secret intelligence material had been withheld from police and prosecutors.
> 
> He said that many of those who had gone to Syria to fight government forces and returned because they did not want to become embroiled in the rebel infighting were jailed despite being ideologically opposed to Isis.
> 
> “Some of the guys I met in Belmarsh had gone to Syria to help in a humanitarian defensive role, stayed for a few weeks and, crucially, didn’t want to get involved with the infighting between rebel groups yet the British government imprisoned them. If you come back because of the infighting it means that you are not ideologically attached to groups like Isis.”
> 
> Hassan’s Twitter account has been quiet since 17 October, the last entry documenting the frequency of US air strikes which have been targeting Isis positions near Kobani for weeks. Images of the teenager’s dead body with fellow fighters calling him a martyr emerged
> 
> Last Tuesday it was confirmed that another of the so-called “ Pompey lads”, Manunur Roshid, 24, was also killed in fighting on the Syrian frontline with reports suggesting he also died in the battle to seize Kobani, which borders Turkey. Reports of their death follow that of two other Portsmouth men, Ifthekar Jaman, 23, last December and Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, 25, in August.
> 
> Hassan’s death leaves Assad Uzzaman, 25, fighting in Syria with Isis while the other member of the group, Mashadur Choudhury, 31, returned to the UK shortly after arriving in Syria and is currently in jail.
> 
> The group are among an estimated 500 Britons who have travelled to fight in Iraq and Syria. Overall, 24 Britons are believed to have died after travelling to fight in the bloody civil war, says King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), meaning that British jihadis are being killed in the conflict in Syria and Iraq at a rate of one every three weeks, according to the most thorough documentation of the death toll to date.
> 
> Hassan was part of a group of five calling themselves the Britani Brigade Bangladeshi Bad Boys. The fanatics, all from Portsmouth, had been seduced by glamorous tales of martyrdom to join Isis in establishing a Muslim caliphate in the Middle East.
> 
> Shiraz Maher, from ICSR, said: “Now, of the six men who went from Portsmouth to fight jihad in Syria, four have now died and one is in prison.
> 
> “We know that Hassan was fighting for the battle of Kobani, likely alongside Manunur Rohsid, who was reported killed a few days ago.”





More on LINK.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Live by the sword ....  Funny how sometimes the grass isn't ALWAYS greener, like the jihad peddlers lead one to believe.

Mind you, great "anti-ambassadors" once back?


----------



## jollyjacktar

TS for them.  They've made their bed and will have to lie in it.  Hopefully it's for a dirt nap.


----------



## a_majoor

The aftermath. Once this "30 years war" ends, most of the historic borders we grew up with will be erased. Natural cantonments like the Anatolian highlands, "Kurdistan" and the Iranian plateau will remain as bastions for the people's living within, but otherwise much of the region will have dissolved into something else. In the more distant past, the "something else" was a series of city states astride the trade routes and in control of resources like water and whatever arable land existed. Not sure what the future version of that will look like:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/10/25/the-imaginary-borders-of-the-middle-east/



> *The Erased Borders of the Middle East*
> Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon gave a wide-ranging and provocative interview to NPR earlier this week. Of particular interest was his recognition that the national borders that were created after World War I are dissolving:
> 
> The borders of many Arab states were drawn up by Westerners a century ago, and wars in recent years show that a number of them are doomed to break apart, according to Ya’alon, a career soldier who became Israel’s defense minister last year.
> 
> “We have to distinguish between countries like Egypt, with their history. Egypt will stay Egypt,” Ya’alon, who is on a visit to Washington, tells Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep.
> 
> In contrast, Ya’alon says, “Libya was a new creation, a Western creation as a result of World War I. Syria, Iraq, the same — artificial nation-states — and what we see now is a collapse of this Western idea.”
> 
> Asked if Middle Eastern borders are likely to change in the coming years, Ya’alon says: “Yes, absolutely. It has been changed already. Can you unify Syria? [President] Bashar al-Assad is controlling only 25 percent of the Syrian territory. We have to deal with it.”
> 
> Ya’alon is right. As our own Adam Garfinkle concluded in June about Iraq: “The Iraqi state in its historic territorial configuration is gone—solid gone, and it ain’t coming back.” The region’s other “artificial nation-states” aren’t going to return to the status quo ante bellum either. Whatever comes out of the current war, it won’t look like the old landscape, and we shouldn’t imagine that there are natural nations waiting to be created out of the ethno-tribal-religious anarchy that the Middle East is witnessing.
> 
> Yaalon’s entire interview is quite thought-provoking, particularly his analysis of the latest Gaza war and the Palestinian right of return. Read the whole thing here.


----------



## Brasidas

Thucydides said:
			
		

> The aftermath. Once this "30 years war" ends, most of the historic borders we grew up with will be erased. Natural cantonments like the Anatolian highlands, "Kurdistan" and the Iranian plateau will remain as bastions for the people's living within, but otherwise much of the region will have dissolved into something else. In the more distant past, the "something else" was a series of city states astride the trade routes and in control of resources like water and whatever arable land existed. Not sure what the future version of that will look like:
> 
> http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/10/25/the-imaginary-borders-of-the-middle-east/



I'm not so sure I see Iran's borders being erased, or Turkey giving up its Kurdish territories.


----------



## a_majoor

Kurdistan extends beyond the current Turkish territory, including parts of Syria, Iraq and Iran. Parts of Iran is also inhabited by the Baloch people, who also inhabit parts of Pakistan.

Borders often change due to issues like demographics, changing climate/rainfall/arability or even different opportunities (people leaving one polity for another with lower taxes and regulatory burdens). Indeed, one of the reasons for the "Arab Spring" and subsequent instability is the impact of these sorts of changes pushing against the boundaries of brittle and authoritarian societies until they break.

I know Turkey and Iran will certainly fight to retain their current geographical boundaries, but in the end, even they may be swept by overwhelming changes.


----------



## George Wallace

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Kurdistan extends beyond the current Turkish territory, including parts of Syria, Iraq and Iran. Parts of Iran is also inhabited by the Baloch people, who also inhabit parts of Pakistan.
> 
> Borders often change due to issues like demographics, changing climate/rainfall/arability or even different opportunities (people leaving one polity for another with lower taxes and regulatory burdens). Indeed, one of the reasons for the "Arab Spring" and subsequent instability is the impact of these sorts of changes pushing against the boundaries of brittle and authoritarian societies until they break.
> 
> I know Turkey and Iran will certainly fight to retain their current geographical boundaries, but in the end, even they may be swept by overwhelming changes.



Yes, and the Sykes–Picot Agreement between Britain, France and the assent of Russia drew those lines on the map in 1916.  Europeans building empires carved up the traditional boundaries of the inhabitants, making new ones with no consideration of the ethnicity and cultures they were breaking up.  Those are the latest 'conquerors' to partition those lands.  How many times the map has been redrawn in that region over the centuries can't be counted.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Considering those lines were drawn with the Ottoman provinces in mind and a trade of what worthy spoils they were, not exactly a new concept and certainly judging by population movements, the Palestinian Mandate was more popular than the old Ottoman Empire administration. Also England was used as arbitrator for the border dispute between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire back the 1600's, which led to the modern border between Iran and Iraq.


----------



## cryco

oh yes, and we know the current borders are so harmonious...


----------



## Kirkhill

Oh come on. Everybody knows the right way to deal with those worthy oriental gentlemen is to treat them exactly as they treated themselves: erase all the borders and declare them to be subjects of one empire stretching from the Hindu Kush to the Atlas Mountains.

It worked for the Ottomans, Muhammed, the Byzantines, the Romans and Sassanians.  Borders be buggered.


----------



## cryco

sure, but under who's iron fist?


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Give me the army to do my bidding says Assad and I will give you an Empire!!!  8)


----------



## a_majoor

Colin P said:
			
		

> Give me the army to do my bidding says Assad and I will give you an Empire!!!  8)



The Turks also have ideas along these lines (they tacitly support ISIS since the Jihadis can do Turkey's dirty work for them), and the Saudis have been working a different angle (funding radical Imams and schools to spread and promote Wahabbism) to the same end. Since Assad is Iran's tool, we know which "Empire" he is working towards. Getting out of the affairs of the Middle East is probably our best COA, we can flood the market with our oil (India is _very_ interested in Energy East and getting access to the Oil Sands, for example) to hammer them with the economic weapons at our disposal, while they can spend their _own_ blood and treasure playing "Game of Thrones". Park a few carrier battle groups off the coasts to keep the fighting contained and put on the popcorn takes care of about 80% of the problems.


----------



## The Bread Guy

If you like graphics, here's who's contributing what ....





Source


----------



## cryco

nice chart.
But Australia named their op Okra? Really?


----------



## dimsum

cryco said:
			
		

> nice chart.
> But Australia named their op Okra? Really?



It's an OP name.  That's all.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Dimsum said:
			
		

> It's an OP name.  That's all.


Still not as cool as Op Chammal, named after a wind "blowing over northwest Iraq and the Persian Gulf (including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait)"





  8)


----------



## Edward Campbell

When I was a lad we were taught that codewords (the one word things we use to name Ops, etc, and opposed to the two word things we call nicknames and which our US allies use to name Ops) were not to have any special reference to anything at all. There was, if memory serves, a publication that contained a list of codewords, many of which seemed to have classical Greek and Roman origins.


----------



## cryco

I can understand that. Here at work we name  chips -microlelctronics, not doritos - (IP actually), after all kinds of unrelated things, but we don't choose silly sounding names like okra. ( I like to eat okra though)
We've used soccer player names, constellations, mountain ranges and so on. Someone would get fired if they named a project eggplant, or kefir.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> When I was a lad we were taught that codewords (the one word things we use to name Ops, etc, and opposed to the two word things we call nicknames and which our US allies use to name Ops) were not to have any special reference to anything at all. There was, if memory serves, a publication that contained a list of codewords, many of which seemed to have classical Greek and Roman origins.



Quite correct ERC. For OPSEC reasons, the name selected was to have no discernible meaning for the enemy.

Personnaly, I always wondered about the Army's choice of "Rendez-Vous XX" for its big land exercises. Why call them by a word that means "surrender!" in French ???

Anyhow, each nation has its own way for those operations that are not "within NATO". The French in the cold war era use to use precious stone, for instance: Op Diamant, Op Opale, Op Rubis, etc.


----------



## George Wallace

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> Personnaly, I always wondered about the Army's choice of "Rendez-Vous XX" for its big land exercises. Why call them by a word that means "surrender!" in French ???



???

What dictionary or translation service are you using?


You may want your money back.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Anglo/French lesson coming:

Surrender, in English, is the adoption of the French verb "rendre" when juxtaposed with French for yourself from the third person point of view: "se rendre".

Thus, in French when you intimate to someone that they should "rendre" themselves, you intimate to them the order: Rendez-vous.

That is why, if you look at my post, you will see that I put an exclamation mark at the end of my surrender in quotes.


----------



## jollyjacktar

That might explain why I would see LAVIII with white flags flying during my Maple Guardian workups for Roto 7.   >


----------



## The Bread Guy

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> Anglo/French lesson coming:
> 
> Surrender, in English, is the adoption of the French verb "rendre" when juxtaposed with French for yourself from the third person point of view: "se rendre".
> 
> Thus, in French when you intimate to someone that they should "rendre" themselves, you intimate to them the order: Rendez-vous.
> 
> That is why, if you look at my post, you will see that I put an exclamation mark at the end of my surrender in quotes.


Quite the explanation, considering most Francophones I know consider "rendezvous" 1)  one word, 2) a word meaning an agreed-to meeting or get-together (like, in these parts, The Great Rendezvous), 3) with no connection to surrender whatsoever.

Unless they figure "rendez vous" literally means "render yourself" (as in melting yourself like fat)


----------



## cryco

Actually, it can mean both, but 99.9% of the time used, its as one word and means an appointment. Un rendezvous au dentiste. 
The surrender version of it, "allez, rendez vous, vous n'avez aucune autre option... ", does indeed mean, surrender yourself, but, like I said, is unheard of in everyday conversation.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Alright!

Je me rends.

I shall make no further subtle attempts at injecting levity unless I use /JOKEON and /JOKEOFF symbols.

YES: rendezvous (one word, noun) means appointment or meeting in French, and split in two to become a verb takes on a new meaning. I just thought it was funny for a military exercise to use a noun that could be misinterpreted as a verb to cover an ignominious military act: surrendering. Sorry if this did not go over well.


----------



## cryco

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> Personnaly, I always wondered about the Army's choice of "Rendez-Vous XX" for its big land exercises. Why call them by a word that _can _ mean "surrender!" in French ???



Yea, we kinda missed that one. But the addition of one word may have made it clearer to us nitpickers.


----------



## George Wallace

cryco said:
			
		

> Actually, it can mean both, but 99.9% of the time used, its as one word and means an appointment. Un rendezvous au dentiste.
> The surrender version of it, "allez, rendez vous, vous n'avez aucune autre option... ", does indeed mean, surrender yourself, but, like I said, is unheard of in everyday conversation.



Ah!  OK.  One word and two words, that sound the same when spoken to my undiscerning tin ear, with completely different meanings.  J'ai remise à vous.

Kinda like when we get after people for their lack of capitals and punctuation:

"Go help your Uncle Jack off the horse." and "Go help your uncle jack off the horse."  Context is everything.   ;D


----------



## CougarKing

The USS _Carl Vinson_ carrier strike group relieved the USS _George H.W. Bush_ carrier group on station recently. The _Vinson_'s planes are now the ones conducting the strikes in Iraq.



			
				milnews.ca said:
			
		

> If you like graphics, here's who's contributing what ....
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Source


----------



## CougarKing

And ISIS now has a port city? The other report mentioning how ISIS intended to join Al-Shabaab in maritime piracy comes to mind.

Associated Press



> *Libyan city becomes the first outside of Iraq, Syria to join Islamic State group's 'caliphate'*
> The Canadian Press
> 
> By Maggie Michael, The Associated Press
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> The takeover of the city, some 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) from the nearest territory controlled by the Islamic State group, offers a revealing look into how the radical group is able to exploit local conditions. A new Islamic State "emir" now leads the city, identified as Mohammed Abdullah, a little-known Yemeni militant sent from Syria known by his nom de guerre Abu al-Baraa el-Azdi, according to several local activists and a former militant from Darna.
> 
> A number of leading Islamic State militants came to the city from Iraq and Syria earlier this year and over a few months united most of Darna's multiple but long-divided extremist factions behind them. They paved the way by killing any rivals, including militants, according to local activists, former city council members and a former militant interviewed by The Associated Press. They all spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for their lives.
> Darna could be a model for the group to try to expand elsewhere. Notably, in Lebanon, army troops recently captured a number of militants believed to be planning to seize several villages in the north and proclaim them part of the "caliphate." Around the region, a few militant groups have pledged allegiance to its leader, Iraqi militant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But none hold cohesive territory like those in Darna do.
> 
> *The vow of allegiance in Darna gives the Islamic State group a foothold in Libya, an oil-rich North African nation whose central government control has collapsed in the chaos since the 2011 ouster and death of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi.*
> 
> Extremists made Darna their stronghold in the 1980s and 1990s during an insurgency against Gadhafi, the city protected by the rugged terrain of the surrounding Green Mountain range in eastern Libya. Darna was the main source of Libyan jihadis and suicide bombers for the insurgency in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion. Entire brigades of Darna natives fight in Syria's civil war.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

IS** is more like a cancer rather than an army or a state, and our institutions and forces are rather poorly prepared or equipped to deal with this sort of thing. If our current "strategy" was taken to the logical extreme, the Alliance will need thousands of aircraft carrying out bombing missions throughout the world to swat every "outbreak" of IS**, and we would still be seeing self radicalized people popping up right here at home, and new groups springing up or changing sides to join IS**.

Letting IS** fight it out with the Syrians and Iranians is a good short term solution, since it allows the West to conserve "our" resources while draining theirs, but the longer term solution continues to elude *us*.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Following along from Thucydides' cancer analogy, there are two ways to deal with cancer:

     1. When it infects _*you*_, you take action ~ chemical therapy, radiation and surgery. In military terms you _attack_ the cancer with massive resources, all your resources, because
         there are only two possible outcomes: _*a) *_it wins and you die, or _*b)*_ you win and it dies (sending your cancer into remission is not a desirable outcome because it is temporary); or

     2. When it infects someone else, you can either donate to help others fight their cancer, or, if it infects someone about whom you don't care, you can go about your merry way.

Now, I _think_ I _might_ understand _some_ of the American strategy ~ the parts related to domestic US partisan politics. But I do not understand any other elements of America's strategy and I _suspect_ there might not be anything beyond domestic, partisan politics at stake.

My _sense_ of the issue is:

     1. We, the US led West, have one and only one real friend in the Middle East: *Israel* ... and it is a reluctant friend because it faces a real, existential threat and it doesn't give a damn about what
         we think, say and do except for how whatever we say and do impacts their security;

     2. One other country, Jordan, is trying, honestly and constructively to bring something like peace to the Middle East;

     3. All the rest of the Muslims, from Morocco to Indonesia are, at the very best, indifferent to our *interests*. They have their own and, save only Jordan, their interests and ours are incompatible;

     4. Thus: we have a situation where one bunch of people who _hate_ us (Iraq and Syria and so on) are killing and being killed by another group of people who _hate_ us (IS**). One must ask:
         "What's not to like?"

     5. Why in hell are we helping enemies to fight other enemies? A plague (biological and chemical warfare, anyone?) on both their houses, as my grandfather used to say about politicians.


----------



## Ostrozac

Good assessment, and I would add these points:

1. Turkey is an ally of the west. They often don't act like it, Europe often acts like they are an embarrassment, but they are a fully signed off member of NATO, and have to be considered in any Middle East strategy. They have a huge army, a large population, a growing economy, and they were, in the recent past, the dominant regional power. Should Turkey be westernizing and looking towards Europe? Or should they go back to their roots and look east for growth and influence? Does the Middle East start at Thrace?

2. Demographics is everything. It brings you taxpayers, troops, emigrants (who give back money and influence to the homeland), cities (the 21st century is going to be an urbanized century) and voters (should you choose to have elections). Israel simply lacks people. Egypt has 87 million people, Turkey has 76 million, Iran has 77 million, Israel has 8 million. Israel, no matter what else it is, is a small nation punching above it's weight, not a regional power. It is Switzerland or Norway, it is not Austria-Hungary.

3. The natural state of the Middle East is probably Iranian dominance (or a division of areas of influence between Iran, Turkey and Egypt) -- but the United States has a hard time articulating that it wants to help Iran dominate the Middle East, even as the actions of the United States say otherwise. Overthrowing Saddam Hussein, bombing ISIS rebels who are enemies of the pro-Iranian regimes in Iraq and Syria, even the tacit western support for the Arab Spring uprisings (which threatened the monarchies that most directly oppose Iran) -- intentionally or not, all of these actions are helping Iran move towards greater status as a regional power. That may be a good thing (unless you're in the House of Saud) -- it may be a natural thing -- some American action is even encouraging it -- but realize if you leave the Middle East to it's own devices you will probably wake up in 25 years with a new Persian Empire.


----------



## Edward Campbell

I like your points Ostrozac, but not, of course, without a quibble: I_ think_ that a large part of what we are seeing now, in Turkey, is a result of the EU's tacit rejection of Turkey a few years ago, _circa_ 2005. My sense is that forced Turkey to look East and South, not North and West.

I agree, fully, with your assessments of Israel and the desirability, in my _opinion_, of a balance between three _empires_: Egypt's ~ mostly West of Israel and Jordan, Iran's, mostly East of of the Euphrates River, and Turkey's, between the first two, excepting Israel and Jordan, and stretching all the way down to the Gulf of Aden.


----------



## Kirkhill

The camel used to be called "the ship of the desert".  That could infer that the desert is a "sea".  Both are inherently inhospitable and are merely spaces that must be crossed.

From that it might be possible to suggest that the cities of the desert are more akin to the islands of the Pacific or the Caribbean or Britain.  Each is an entity unto itself with its own distinct character, protected by a barrier.

I once commented to an Arab friend from Iraq about the lack of interior borders on the old maps of the region.  The best that could be generated were dotted lines that started at the coast and stopped somewhere in the interior without ever connecting to each other. That was standard practice in my school atlases in Britain up until the 1960s (the end of the era of the Trucial States).  I suggested to him that that would mean that the desert, like the seas, belonged to nobody.  He didn't disagree.

The history of the Arab world is the history not of countries but of cities like Rabah, Saleh, Tripoli, Carthage and Byblos and of desert tribes.  The history of the Turks is of tribes of the Steppes and market centres like Samarkand, Atil and Xinjiang.  Neither group has the same sense of geographic permanence as the European in his lush, fertile and defensible valley.

Parts of Turkey do have that history - history that predates the Turkish and Scythian and Hittite invaders by at least 8000 years.  And Islamic history in Turkey is only 600 years old - since the fall of the Byzantines.

All of this is to say that culture in Turkey is complex and neither its Islamic character nor its Turkic character can be taken for granted.  The Kurds have got at least as great a claim to the lands of Turkey as any Turk or Mohammedan.

Erdogan may have taken advantage of the European idiocy in not bringing Turkey into association with the EU to gain power, or in his terms get on the train of democracy.  But that doesn't mean that everyone in Turkey is inclined to get off at the same station as him.

Given a choice between living in Ataturk's westernized Turkey or reverting to a strict puritanical Mohammedanism run by mentally unstable Bedu camel jockeys (or if you prefer - buccaneers)  I suspect that your average Turk, devout Mohammedan or not, would prefer to keep Ataturk's state.


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting redaction of a story byu the NYT. This is a modern version of the old Soviet "airbrushing" of portraits and group shots to eliminate the traces of "Old Bolsheviks" with Stalin, Lenin etc. More disturbing is the realization that now that Hagel is gone, there really seems to be no one in the driver's seat WRT IS**. We _will_ live in interesting times....

http://www.redstate.com/2014/11/25/the-new-york-times-changes-its-story-deleting-the-most-remarkable-thing-about-chuck-hagels-firing/



> *The New York Times Changes Its Story Deleting The Most Remarkable Thing About Chuck Hagel’s Firing*
> By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  November 25th, 2014 at 04:30 AM  |  16
> 
> The Pentagon wants America to believe Secretary Hagel was not fired, but the New York Times hit job breaking the news of his retirement is proof he was. The White House did not just throw Secretary Hagel under the bus, it rolled over him multiple times to ensure he is finished.
> 
> After two Secretaries of Defense leaving, then writing critical pieces about President Obama, the White House decided the third SecDef needed to be destroyed on the way out so any criticisms can immediately be cast as sour grapes by a compliant press.
> 
> But that’s not the most remarkable thing about Chuck Hagel’s firing. The most remarkable thing is toward the end of the New York Times story. Look at how the story explains his firing.
> 
> First, there is this:
> 
> 
> _In his two years in the job, Mr. Hagel’s national security views closely followed Mr. Obama’s, which made his dismissal more noteworthy. Mr. Hagel largely carried out Mr. Obama’s orders on matters like bringing back American troops from Afghanistan and trimming the Pentagon budget, without the pushback that characterized the tenure of Mr. Gates_.
> 
> Then, there is this:
> 
> 
> _In the past few months he has been overshadowed by General Dempsey, who officials said had won the confidence of Mr. Obama with his recommendation of military action against the Islamic State_.
> 
> Then there is nothing. Or at least, if you check right now, that is how the story abruptly ends.
> 
> But that is not how the story ended originally. Originally, the New York Times story ended this way:
> 
> 
> _He raised the ire of the White House in August as the administration was ramping up its strategy to fight the Islamic State, directly contradicting the president, who months before had likened the Sunni militant group to a junior varsity basketball squad. Mr. Hagel, facing reporters in his now-familiar role next to General Dempsey, called the Islamic State an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” adding, “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” White House officials later said they viewed those comments as unhelpful, although the administration still appears to be struggling to define just how large is the threat posed by the Islamic State._
> 
> Interestingly, the New York Times does not note that it altered its story. But if you put that last paragraph in the search bar at the New York Times, the revised story comes up without that paragraph.
> 
> And the paragraph is very telling in juxtaposition to the rest. Here is how it all flowed together:
> 
> 
> _Mr. Hagel, for his part, spent his time on the job largely carrying out Mr. Obama’s stated wishes on matters like bringing back American troops from Afghanistan and trimming the Pentagon budget, with little pushback. He did manage to inspire loyalty among enlisted soldiers and often seemed at his most confident when talking to troops or sharing wartime experiences as a Vietnam veteran.
> 
> But Mr. Hagel has often had problems articulating his thoughts — or administration policy — in an effective manner, and has sometimes left reporters struggling to describe what he has said in news conferences. In his side-by-side appearances with both General Dempsey and Secretary of State Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)0%, Mr. Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran and the first former enlisted combat soldier to be defense secretary, has often been upstaged.
> 
> He raised the ire of the White House in August as the administration was ramping up its strategy to fight the Islamic State, directly contradicting the president, who months before had likened the Sunni militant group to a junior varsity basketball squad. Mr. Hagel, facing reporters in his now-familiar role next to General Dempsey, called the Islamic State an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” adding, “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” White House officials later said they viewed those comments as unhelpful, although the administration still appears to be struggling to define just how large is the threat posed by the Islamic State._
> 
> Also gone is this sentence:
> 
> 
> _Mr. Hagel, they said, in many ways was exactly the kind of defense secretary whom the president, after battling the military during his first term, wanted_.
> 
> Taken as a whole, the original New York Times story paints a pretty damning picture of the White House’s national security policy setting. Mr. Hagel, so long as he was a loyal foot soldier for the President, was okay even if he was on the outside of the White House cool kidz team.
> 
> But the moment Hagel spoke up on ISIS, contradicting the White House, it was game over.
> 
> In other words, Chuck Hagel was not fired for incompetence. He was fired for telling the truth on ISIS — calling it an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” thereby forcing Barack Obama to deal with a threat he very much would like to ignore.
> 
> It’s only made more interesting by the New York Times’s decision to complete delete that bit explaining the motivation for his firing.


----------



## CougarKing

The plot thickens in the siege of Kobani. Please note this post and this post which hint at Turkey's possibly assisting ISIS.

Military.com



> *Islamic State Group Attacks Kobani from Turkey*
> 
> Associated Press | Nov 29, 2014 | by Bassem Mroue
> BEIRUT — The Islamic State group launched an attack Saturday on the Syrian border town of Kobani from Turkey — a first in the ongoing siege, a Kurdish official and activists said.
> The assault began with a suicide attack by a bomber in an armored vehicle on the border crossing between Kobani and Turkey, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Nawaf Khalil, a spokesman for Syria's powerful Kurdish Democratic Union Party.
> 
> *The Islamic State group "used to attack the town from three sides," Khalil said. "Today, they are attacking from four sides."
> 
> Turkey, while previously backing the Syrian rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad in that country's civil war, has been hesitant to aid the Kobani fight over its own fears about stoking Kurdish ambitions for an independent state. *Ankara had no immediate comment Saturday about Islamic State group fighters launching the assault from Turkish soil.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## OldSolduer

"5. Why in hell are we helping enemies to fight other enemies? A plague (biological and chemical warfare, anyone?) on both their houses, as my grandfather used to say about politicians. "

I'd replace plague with pox, but only because I have been reading "A Game of Thrones"


----------



## The Bread Guy

Awwwww, no jammie jobs for jihadi converts headed overseas   :'(


> It ain’t half cold here mum. My iPod has packed up. All I do is the washing-up.
> 
> Some of the messages sent home to France by disgruntled Isis volunteers sound like letters from homesick school-children. A number of young French men and women fighting or working for Isis in Iraq and Syria have appealed to relatives and lawyers to help them to come home.
> 
> A selection of their messages, leaked to the newspaper Le Figaro, contrast bizarrely with the image of implacable and hard-hearted jihad peddled by terror websites. “I’m fed up to the back teeth. My iPod no longer works out here. I have got to come home,” said a message from a French fighter in Syria.
> 
> Another disillusioned volunteer said: “I’m sick of it. They make me do the washing-up.” A third appealed for clemency from the French authorities, who have a policy of arresting returning jihadis. “I’ve done hardly anything but hand out clothes and food,” he said. “I’ve also cleaned weapons and moved the bodies of killed fighters . Winter is beginning. It’s starting to get tough.”
> 
> Over 1,100 young French people – many of them converts to Islam of French rather than Arab origin – are believed to have thrown in their lot with Isis or other jihadist groups. Over 260 are believed to be in Syria or Iraq. More than 100 have already returned. Of these, 76 have been arrested.
> 
> (....)
> 
> Some messages reveal a fear of death or injury. “They want to send me to the front but I don’t know how to fight,” one young man said. The reluctant jihadis find themselves trapped between fear of their comrades and what might happen if they return to France ....


----------



## CougarKing

Chinese Uighurs and Huiren in ISIS?

Reuters



> *About 300 Chinese said fighting alongside Islamic State in Middle East*
> 
> (Reuters) - About 300 Chinese people are fighting alongside the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a Chinese state-run newspaper said on Monday, a rare tally that is likely to fuel worry in China that militants pose a threat to security.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

It isn't often that the _Globe and Mail's_ Jeffrey Simpson gets it right on foreign and/or defence policy but he does here, after you get past his _Laurentian Elite_, ingrained hatred of Bush, Chaney, _et al_.

His last bit is important: _"... the head of the_ North Atlantic Treaty Organization_ said this struggle will continue until the “roots” of fanaticism are understood and dealt with. That means the fight will be very long and ultimately only “won” by Islamic countries themselves against their mortal enemy, and not, by the way, by military means alone."_

So, how do we help the Islamic countries, the whole Islamic Crescent that stretches from Morocco on the Atlantic all the way to Malaysia and Indonesia?

First: we *defend *our friends and vital interests ... a geographic expression I will call _Palestina_ that consists, today, of Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan. "Defend" means we do not let them fall into the hands of anyone else. They have issues with one another. That's fine and we, the liberal West, can help them resolve them. But: we promise to preserve their independence against all comers.

Second: we ignore those who are not our friends ~ that is to say everyone else, including the Gulf Stares where the USA has major military bases, Saudi Arabia, Iran and all the others. If they threaten our friends we counter them, if they war amongst themselves we leave 'em to it.

Third ... there is no third; The first and second points are sufficient.


----------



## CougarKing

Now America's Arab allies want Pentagon or White House press conferences to refer to ISIL/ISIS by a different name...

Military.com



> *Arab Allies Now Want U.S. to Call ISIS, ‘Daeshi’*
> 
> The debate over what to call the terror group trying to set up a state in Iraq and Syria just got more complicated.
> 
> Army Lt. Gen. James Terry, commander of the newly-created task force to defeat the terror group, repeatedly used the Arabic acronym “DAESH” at a Pentagon news briefing Thursday.
> 
> *“DAESH” stands for al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham, or “the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham,” with “Sham’ being an Arabic term for Syria.
> *
> 
> “DAESH” is also similar to the verb “Das,” meaning to crush underfoot or to tread upon, Terry said. *Arab opponents of the Islamic State have been using the derogatory term “Daeshi” to refer to the terrorists, meaning the bigots who try to impose their will on others.* The terror group has threatened to cut out the tongues of those who call them “Daeshi,” according to the BBC.
> 
> At his news briefing, Terry said that Arab state partners in the coalition against the terrorists dislike the use by the U.S. of the acronym “ISIL,” for Islamic State of the Iraq and the Levant. *The Arab partners feel that by using the term ISIL, “you legitimize them,” Terry said.*
> 
> “They feel strongly we should not be doing that.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

I think that there's a "t" missing at the end of the new word of the day.    :nod:


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

Meanwhile, while Daesh are supposedly on the defensive  

Courtesy of the BBC:  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-30492064


> 19 December 2014 Last updated at 07:02 ET
> Inside Iraqi air base as Islamic State closes in
> Ain al-Asad air base, the largest in Iraq's western province of Anbar, has been encircled by militants from Islamic State (IS). The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, the first Western journalist to make it to the facility since IS launched a nationwide offensive in June, found soldiers on the defensive as the militants close in.
> At Ain al-Asad, soldiers and their armoured vehicles had departed. The camp was quiet, almost peaceful. But we were in fact in the eye of a storm.
> On multiple fronts, troops were out fighting - and losing - battles with Islamic State (IS) militants.
> We had come to see an offensive. Instead, we found a retreat.
> The army's planned assault on the IS stronghold of Hit was forgotten. IS had launched a surprise attack.
> "From 07:00 until 11:00, we lost territory that had taken us two weeks to gain. In a few hours, it was gone," said a senior officer from the Iraqi Army's 7th Division, who did not want to be named.
> As many as 15 villages surrounding the base fell to the militants: Mahboubiya, Juba, Jabha, Dulab... the list went on, the militants moving ever closer.
> Qais, a pro-government fighter from the Al Bu Nimr tribe, made it to the relative safety of the camp. "I'd had early prayers in Juba, but by the afternoon, it had fallen. IS took trailers full of weapons," he said.
> He was trying to get to Baghdad to meet his commanders. His family were still in Juba, which was now held by IS.
> Air strikes plea
> Ain al-Asad stretches for miles. It was the biggest US army base during the Iraq War.
> Reminders of American occupation are everywhere - spent artillery shells and dusty accommodation quarters, with uneaten ration packs strewn across the floor.
> By the camp's barber shop stands a duty-free store and the long-closed "Forever Cafe".
> Even though the base is much diminished, it remains a linchpin in the country's biggest province.
> If Anbar falls, Islamic State will stretch from Syria all the way to the edge of Baghdad.
> From near the edges of the camp, outgoing mortars could be heard, launching and landing. The soft booms of distant artillery occasionally made those on the base stop and look to the horizon for a moment.
> At night, two days into the IS offensive, soldiers from the 7th Division returned to the base, exhausted, and angry. They blamed the lack of aerial cover for the losses.
> "We stood our ground. But IS advanced with tanks - we only have Humvees," Pt Karar Hadi said.
> "What we need are helicopters and combat aircraft. I don't know why the planes didn't come. They're saying the conditions are wrong, but the weather is fine now. In two days, there wasn't a single air strike."
> Eventually, there were air raids, but by then much territory had already been lost. It could take weeks, if not months to regain, if it is ever retaken.
> Back in January, IS seized Falluja, one of Anbar's biggest cities. Since then, the militants have tightened their grip. With their supporters, they now control almost 80% of the province.
> With the world's attention on Syria, it has been a largely unseen humanitarian crisis, with more than 500,000 people displaced.
> Booby-traps
> We are the first Western journalists to visit Ain al-Asad since IS established its self-declared caliphate in June.
> In a convoy of armoured Humvees, we drove with the troops to their field command. In some of the villages we passed through, shops were open and children waved to the soldiers. But outside it was a different story.
> In the driving seat was Sgt Abu Mahdi. "When you're in a convoy, the biggest risks are the roadside bombs, from IS or their supporters - and they booby-trap houses, as well as having snipers. These are the most deadly of their tactics, but, God willing, we can deal with them."
> Anbar is mostly Sunni, and in many of its villages IS has been welcomed. Iraq's army is the enemy, and the soldiers remain on their guard.
> In only three days, the frontline had crept forward, closer to Ain al-Asad. When we arrived, it was 30km (18 miles) away. When we left, it was less than 10km.
> Sunni tribes who have taken up arms against the militants have suffered. They formed the backbone of the Awakening Councils, which helped the US defeat al-Qaeda militants during the Iraq War.
> Sheikh Naim al-Gaood of the Al Bu Nimr tribe, explained: "From my tribe there are 762 martyrs, [including] 31 women and 26 children.
> "Some of them were slaughtered with swords; some of them were executed by bullets to the head. Children as young as six months old were killed while sitting on their mothers' laps. Some of the children were thrown in the river, and others down wells."
> It is thought that dozens of Iraqi soldiers have been killed or kidnapped in the current offensive.
> Strong resolve
> On the chain-link fences around Ain al-Asad, ragged black death notices flap in the soft breeze. Among those killed was a Brig Abbas Radad, the head of the division's special forces.
> "It wasn't a tragedy - he is a martyr who sacrificed his life to defend his country," Col Abu Mahmoud told me.
> "All of us here would do the same. We will not allow these people to take Iraq. He was killed by a sniper - a coward who shot from afar - they don't show their faces," he added.
> The Americans are back in Ain al-Asad, and three of their army medics tried to save Brig Radad.
> Their primary role is training tribal fighters. They are in a private corner of the camp - largely unseen. But their presence is viewed as essential.
> Qais, the Al Bu Nimr fighter, said: "We know that Ain al-Asad will never fall while the Americans are here. They won't let it happen."


 
Yep. sure sounds like they are on the defensive  :


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

> Isis fighters 'shoot down US-led coalition war plane and capture pilot'
> 
> HEATHER SAUL Wednesday 24 December 2014
> 
> Isis fighters shot down a Jordanian warplane over Syria believed to be from the US-led coalition and captured one if its pilots, the Jordanian army has confirmed.
> 
> The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the aircraft was shot down yesterday near the northern city of Raqqa, Isis's biggest stronghold in Syria.
> 
> The Observatory said the warplane was part of the US-led coalition, adding that the captured pilot is an Arab.
> 
> The Jordanian army said on Wednesday one of its pilots was captured by Isis militants after his plane was downed during coalition air raids.
> 
> "Jordan holds the group and its supporters responsible for the safety of the pilot and his life," an army statement read on state television said.
> 
> The pro-Isis Raqqa Media Centre (RMC) posted pictures of the pilot shortly after he was captured by militants.
> 
> Relatives of the pilot say he was captured by fighters after his plane was downed. Two relatives told Reuters they were notified by the head of the Jordanian air force of his capture and verified the images of him.
> 
> Another photograph published by the RMC showed the man — wearing only a white shirt and soaking wet — being captured by three gunmen as he was taken out of what appeared to be a lake.
> 
> AL RAI Chief International Correspondent shared a picture of what he said was the captured pilot meeting the King of Jordan.
> 
> RMC later posted a photograph of the Jordanian military identity card of the pilot identifying him as Mu'ath Safi Yousef al-Kaseasbeh who was born on May 29, 1988.
> 
> The US-led coalition has carried out hundreds of air strikes against Isis positions in Syria since 23 September.
> 
> Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have joined in air strikes against the extremist group, while Qatar is providing logistical support.



Courtesy:  The Indepedent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-fighters-shoot-down-usled-coalition-war-plane-and-capture-pilot-9944068.html


Well I guess this proves Daesh does indeed possess the ability to shoot down aircraft.


----------



## SupersonicMax

Anybody with a bit of money can buy some capabilities to shoot aircraft down.  Now the real question is what kind of system shot it down?  If it is anything radar guided, that's a capability that is far more difficult to buy and operate than shoulder-mounted IR missiles...


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

SupersonicMax said:
			
		

> Anybody with a bit of money can buy some capabilities to shoot aircraft down.  Now the real question is what kind of system shot it down?  If it is anything radar guided, that's a capability that is far more difficult to buy and operate than shoulder-mounted IR missiles...



Well they have captured a number of Syrian bases containing a variety of air defence equipment (Buk, Strela, Osa, etc....).  The Jordanian's haven't confirmed it was actually shot down yet but independent sources are saying it was.  

I also don't know if just "anybody" can buy capabilities to shoot aircraft down.  If that were the case, the Taliban would of been picking birds out the sky long ago.


----------



## SupersonicMax

Unfortunately, I can't go into specifics anymore than I did.  I recommend you speak to your Int O if you want to know more about the kind of systems available to ISIL and Talibans in Afghanistan...


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

Another interesting post, this time from Jurgen Todenhofer, the first Western reporter allowed to visit the Islamic State:



> ‘ISLAMIC STATE’ – Seven Impressions Of A Difficult Journey
> 
> Dear friends, we are slowly recovering from the stress the journey into the “Islamic State” has induced on us. Frederic, my son, has lost several pounds. Of course, I have been aware that both, meeting with ISIS and American and Syrian bomb attacks, could put me into high risk.
> In Mosul, low-flying US aircraft circled over us numerous times. And our “apartment” in the Syrian town Raqqa was largely destroyed by a Syrian bomb while we were staying in Mosul, Iraq. Hence, our last night in Raqqa had to be spent in a bombed-out and glass-splittered apartment.
> 
> It’s difficult to uncover the truth without taking a risk, and I had needed authentic footage for a planned book about the ISIS. That’s something you only get by going there. In fact, I have done so for each of my books and thus traveled to areas of conflict many times. Moreover, I had received a security guarantee from the “caliphate”. There just was no way to know if it was genuine! Hence, all of my friends and family smelled a rat and tried to discourage me from taking the journey. But I always follow my gut feeling.
> 
> The guarantee turned out to be genuine, and the ISIS stuck to their agreement during our visits to Mosul and Raqqa. Though, we were under surveillance by the secret service for most of the time and had to hand over our mobile phones and laptops. Also, all of our pictures and photos were inspected at the end of the journey. ISIS deleted 9 out of approximately 800 photos to protect relatives of foreign fighters. That’s what censorship is.
> 
> On several occasions, ISIS and I ran into heated disagreements about details of the journey. Let me tell you that arguing with heavily armed ISIS fighters isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do. I was close to abandoning the journey twice during that time. In view of the acute danger that all of the involved were dealing with daily, they often were short tempered. Yet, overall, I was treated correctly.
> 
> HERE IS A SUMMARY OF MY 7 STRONGEST IMPRESSIONS OF ISIS:
> 
> 1.) THE WEST IS DRAMATICALLY UNDERESTIMATING THE THREAT EMANATING FROM ISIS, and ISIS’ fighters are much more intelligent and dangerous than our politicians realize. The Islamic State is drenched in almost infectious enthusiasm and confident of victory – something I have never before experienced in a warzone. More importantly, the ISIS fighters are convinced that their totalitarian faith and demonstrative brutality will help them move mountains. In Mosul, less than 400 ISIS fighters routed many as 25,000 Iraqi soldiers and militias despite their ultra-modern equipment. Within months, the ISIS has conquered a territory larger than Great Britain and dwarfed Al Qaeda.
> 
> Occasional losses or changes of terrain don’t seem to concern ISIS in any way. While some media outlets tend to exaggerate those events, ISIS considers them as normal in guerilla warfare.
> 
> 2.) THE INFLUX OF NEW FIGHTERS JOINING ISIS IS GROWING DAILY. I spent two days in an ISIS reception camp close to the Turkish border. On both days, more than 50 fighters from all over the world arrived. In fact, not all of them were young men who had failed in their home countries. Contrary to common belief, there were many successful and enthusiastic young people from countries like the USA, England, Sweden, Russia, France and Germany. One of them had recently passed his state examination in law and been admitted to the court as a lawyer. Yet, he preferred to fight for the “Islamic State”.
> 
> 3.) AS FAR AS I CAN TELL FROM 10 DAYS OF OBSERVATION, THE “ISLAMIC STATE” SEEMS TO FUNCTION AS WELL AS ANY OTHER TOTALITARIAN COUNTRY IN THIS REGION. This is particularly true in terms of internal security and social welfare; while many things differ greatly from our – or particularly my – ideas on how such institutions should be run, they do exist. The Sunni population living in the Iraqi part of the Islamic State seems to now have accepted the new state without further resistance, preferring it to the discrimination and oppression they had previously suffered from the Maliki regime in Bagdad. However, after all of the Christians, Shiites and Yazidis have fled the city, and after countless executions, they are now the only religious group inhabiting Mosul.
> 
> 4.) ISIS ISN’T JUST AIMING AT CONQUERING THE MIDDLE EAST AND, EVENTUALLY, THE REST OF THE WORLD. RATHER, THEY WANT THE LARGEST “RELIGOUS CLEANSING” IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. With the exception of the so-called “religions of the book” – that is, ISIS’ version of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity – ISIS wants to kill non-believers and apostates and enslave their women and children. This means that all of the Shiites, Yazidis, Hindus, Atheists and Polytheists are supposed to die, and that hundreds of millions of people would be eliminated in the course of this “ethnic cleansing”.
> 
> Additionally, all of the moderate Muslims approving of democracy are supposed to be killed, as they – from ISIS’ point of view – put human laws above God’s laws. Upon successful conquest of the West, this would also apply to democratically-minded Muslims here.
> 
> A non-believer’s only chance to escape death are voluntary repentance and voluntary conversion to “true Islam” which, allegedly, is represented by ISIS only. He or she must do so before their country is conquered.
> 
> ISIS does tolerate Jews and Christians. Though, they have to pay a fixed protection tax of several hundred dollars per year. Muslims would have to pay the zakat (Islamic tax), which may be higher for wealthy Muslims and lower for poor Muslims.
> 
> It needs not be said that ISIS and I disagreed in all of these points, and that I clearly expressed my opposition numerous times.
> 
> 5.) IN MY OPINION, ISIS IS A 1-PERCENT MOVEMENT WITH THE EFFECT OF A TSUNAMI. The movement preaches a type of Islam that is being rejected by 99 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion-strong Muslim population. Being a Christian who has read the Quran several times, I can’t wrap my head around how anyone could consider ISIS’ doctrine compatible with Islam. In fact, my lecture of the Quran has made me see Islam as a religion of compassion. 113 out of 114 suras start with the following words: “In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.” Yet, I haven’t perceived ISIS as particularly merciful.
> 
> 6.) ISIS CANNOT BE DEFEATED WITH BOMBS OR MISSILES. The three-million-city Mosul, for instance, is being controlled by 5,000 ISIS fighters. Whoever wants to eliminate them with bombs would have to first turn all of Mosul into rubble and kill thousands of civilians. Bombarding the Middle East has always been and still is a way to breed terrorism. Take ISIS as an example! This organization is a direct result of George W. Bush’s illegal Iraq War.
> 
> THE MODERATE SUNNI ARABS ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO CAN STOP ISIS, NOT THE WEST. That’s exactly what the Sunnis did 2007. Back then, they chased away the “Islamic State in Iraq” (ISI) – the predecessor of ISIS, which was much weaker than today’s ISIS.
> 
> However, the moderate Iraqi Sunni would only oppose ISIS if they were allowed to completely re-integrate into Iraqi society, from which the Americans and the Iraqi Shiites had excluded them after the US’ 2003 invasion of Iraq. It doesn’t currently look like things are going to change anytime soon. Yet, this is the only conceivable solution to stop ISIS.
> 
> There also exist solutions for Syria. Though, the West would need to correct its utterly unrealistic view of the situation. They have truly gotten on the wrong track in Syria.
> 
> 7.) THERE IS A LOT OF GUESSING ABOUT THE TERRORIST THREAT EMANATING FROM RETURNING ISIS FIGHTERS. I cannot rule out that there may indeed exist a threat. But due to the Islamic State considering those returnees as losers that failed in their life in the Islamic State, they may, in fact, not present a major risk. Although Brussels did suffer an attack from a returnee, sympathizers of ISIS who have not yet left the country might present a larger threat.
> 
> Germany, as well as the rest of the world, must neither trivialize nor exaggerate the terrorist threat. In Germany, for instance, no German has ever been killed by an Islamist while, on the other hand, many Muslims were killed by German right wing extremists. Extremist movements like Germany’s PEGIDA are misrepresenting the facts. And in doing so, they are unwittingly playing into the hands of the ISIS. The Islamic movement has stated numerous times that escalations between Muslims and Non-Muslims in Germany and other countries of the West are in its interest.
> 
> I firmly believe that ISIS currently is the largest threat to world peace since the Cold War. We are now paying the price for George W. Bush’s act of near-unparalleled folly; the invasion of Iraq. To date, the West remains clueless as to how this threat is to be addressed


Taken from:  http://juergentodenhoefer.de/seven-impressions-of-a-difficult-journey/?lang=en

I took this from his website rather then some third party news site who only gave tidbits of info.


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

SupersonicMax said:
			
		

> Unfortunately, I can't go into specifics anymore than I did.  I recommend you speak to your Int O if you want to know more about the kind of systems available to ISIL and Talibans in Afghanistan...



 :SOF: :SOF: :SOF:


----------



## The Bread Guy

RoyalDrew said:
			
		

> I also don't know if just "anybody" can buy capabilities to shoot aircraft down.  If that were the case, the Taliban would of been picking birds out the sky long ago.


They were not completely without their means, though.


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> They were not completely without their means, though.



No they were not but there's a big difference between bringing down a helicopter depositing soldiers into an LZ and shooting down fast-air.


----------



## The Bread Guy

RoyalDrew said:
			
		

> No they were not but there's a big difference between bringing down a helicopter depositing soldiers into an LZ and shooting down fast-air.


True dat.


----------



## GAP

US military equipment being detoured for possible battle vs. ISIS
Published December 25, 2014 FoxNews.com
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/12/25/us-military-equipment-being-detoured-for-possible-battle-vs-isis/

The U.S. military has been stockpiling huge quantities of gear in Kuwait in preparation for shipping it across the border into Iraq for possible use in a coordinated offensive against the terrorist group Islamic State, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The gear is being housed near a busy commercial port, which is now the place where roughly 3,100 vehicles -- mostly ambush-protected vehicles known as MRAPs – are parked, in addition to electronic equipment and other supplies, the magazine reported, citing defense officials.

The gear, which is primarily from the U.S. Army, will be repaired and assessed for use as planners decide what the United States and its allies will need to defeat Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

“From June to December, we’ve worked a lot on moving items into Kuwait,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Rowayne “Wayne” Schatz, the director of operations and plans for U.S. Transportation Command, told U.S. News. “The Army is holding the gear there, and it has room to hold it, as the mission fleshes out.”

The U.S. military reportedly is planning a massive spring offensive to help Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters take back territory from Islamic State. But Lt. Gen. James Terry said, “I don’t want to disclose any timelines.”

The original plan, which included destroying, selling or giving away as much as $7 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan to aid the war effort there, was scrapped as the rise of Islamic State -- also known as ISIL or by “Daesh,” its Arabic acronym -- prompted the military to stash some of that equipment back toward Iraq.


----------



## tomahawk6

The US will either have to go into Iraq with a Corps sized force from Kuwait or allow the Iranians to do the heavy lifting,which might ignite a civil war.ISIS has taken advantage of the civil war in Syria to expand its power.They control Syrian and Iraqi oil resources generating $2b in revenue.Currently they are dumping oil on the open market at $20-25 a barrel.To stop that the mission should be to retake those oil resources and deprive them of the revenue.


----------



## CougarKing

ISIS recruiting entire families to "recreate" what they see as a 7th century caliphate...  



> *Hoping to create a new society, the Islamic State recruits entire families*
> 
> LONDON — Last month in Syria, Siddhartha Dhar stood in front of a banged-up yellow pickup truck, holding an assault rifle in his right hand and cradling his newborn son with his left.
> 
> Dhar’s first four children had been born in London, his native city, but his new baby, wrapped in a fuzzy brown onesie, was born in territory controlled by the Islamic State.
> 
> *Someone snapped a photo of Dhar, 31, and he proudly tweeted it out as proof that he; his wife, Aisha; and their children had fled Britain and were now living in what the militants consider an Islamic caliphate that will one day reign over the world.*
> 
> More at the source below...
> 
> Washington Post


----------



## CougarKing

RoyalDrew said:
			
		

> Courtesy:  The Indepedent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-fighters-shoot-down-usled-coalition-war-plane-and-capture-pilot-9944068.html



Seems ISIS's reported shootdown of a Jordanian fighter pilot was greatly exaggerated...perhaps pro-Assad forces shot him down?

Business Insider



> *US Military Says ISIS Is Lying About Shooting Down A Jordanian F-16 In Syria*
> By Hunter Walker | Business Insider – Wed, 24 Dec, 2014 3:40 PM EST
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> US Central Command released a statement on Wednesday afternoon disputing a claim made by the jihadist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL) that they shot down a Jordanian F-16 aircraft earlier in the day.
> 
> "Evidence clearly indicates that ISIL did not down the aircraft as the terrorist organization is claiming," the statement said.
> 
> Islamic State fighters in the Syrian city of Raqqah released photos showing a man they identified as a captured Jordanian pilot. The Jordanian Armed Forces, which are part of the international coalition fighting ISIS, confirmed one of its warplanes went down on a mission in the area.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## McG

The capture of the pilot is not an exaggeration.  The shooting down of the plan vs. the plane crashing is the potential point of exaggeration.


----------



## CougarKing

Speaking of which:



> Although it has not been officially confirmed yet, pictures posted on Social Media seems to prove a Royal Jordanian Air Force F-16 has crashed in Syria. Pilot, whose military ID card was recovered and posted on Twitter, was captured by Islamic State militants.
> 
> <snipped>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> source: the aviationist


----------



## Colin Parkinson

SupersonicMax said:
			
		

> Unfortunately, I can't go into specifics anymore than I did.  I recommend you speak to your Int O if you want to know more about the kind of systems available to ISIL and Talibans in Afghanistan...



There is irony that we are being secretive about the weapons available to our enemies. I suspect they are quite aware of what they have. I must surmises that the information is being withheld to protect the guilty parties that supplied them.


----------



## SupersonicMax

Colin P said:
			
		

> There is irony that we are being secretive about the weapons available to our enemies. I suspect they are quite aware of what they have. I must surmises that the information is being withheld to protect the guilty parties that supplied them.



I don't agree it's an irony.  We don't want them to know what we know about them. They may have some weapons/programs we should not know about but for whatever reason, we do know about it and we developped counter-tactics or systems to defeat it.

It's also a matter of protecting our sources of information.  It is not to protect the guity parties that supplied the weapons; the US would have no issue pointing the finger at Russia (if it was the case).


----------



## Colin Parkinson

true, but if it was a US/French system supplied by the UAE that would be embarrassing yes?

I wonder what the Jordanian F-16 anti-missile defense are like?

This is from wiki

RJAF recognized the need to give these aircraft a mid-life update (MLU) in the next 2 or 3 years. (2 F-16A Block 15 ADF and 1 F-16B ADF aircraft crashed over the years of service),[5] Jordan received 3 F-16A from USA in 2008. 13 F-16 ADF (12 A, 1 B) Block 15 were sold to Pakistan

MLU Block 40 (Peace Falcon II, III, IV)/ 50 (Peace Falcon V, VI)

One F-16AM MLU crashed in feb 2011, 17 F-16 A/B upgraded by Turkish Aerospace Industries to F-16 AM/BM MLU standard Peace Falcon II, 16 F-16 AM/BM from Belgium Peace Falcon III, 6 F-16 BM from Netherlands[3] Peace Falcon IV[4] & An additional 9 F-16 AM/BM MLU-M4 (6 F-16 AM, 3 F-16 BM) delivered in July/ Aug 2011 from Belgium in 32 million euro Deal Peace Falcon V . RJAF bought 15 F-16 MLU-M5 [11] (13 F-16 AM, 2 F-16 BM) from Netherlands in 2013 in 100 million euro Deal Peace Falcon VI.[4][5][12][13][14][15]


----------



## The Bread Guy

"Running Away to Join the Jihad" Lesson #682:  turn off the geolocation function on your Twitter account unless you want to be the bomb magnet in your section  ;D


> A jihadist from New Zealand who is fighting with the Islamic State in Syria has been inadvertently publicizing his location – and that of his colleagues – by tweeting with geotag tracking turned on.
> 
> Geotag tracking, which is also available with Facebook, Instagram and Flickr, provides the user's location when using Twitter.
> 
> Mark Taylor, also known as Abu Abdul-Rahman, reportedly deleted 45 previous tweets last week after discovering they revealed his exact coordinates.
> 
> His Twitter mistake was uncovered by iBrabo, a Canadian open source intelligence research group that tracks terrorist activity on social networks ....


More from iBrabo here.


----------



## tomahawk6

The capture of the Jordanian pilot has caused Jordan to stop offensive operations against ISIS.Evidently the pilot is providing alot of intel to ISIS about current operations.


----------



## Good2Golf

SupersonicMax said:
			
		

> Anybody with a bit of money can buy some capabilities to shoot aircraft down.  Now the real question is what kind of system shot it down?  If it is anything radar guided, that's a capability that is far more difficult to buy and operate than shoulder-mounted IR missiles...



So you throw this out there trolling for comment and then follow it up with:



			
				SupersonicMax said:
			
		

> Unfortunately, I can't go into specifics anymore than I did.  I recommend you speak to your Int O if you want to know more about the kind of systems available to ISIL and Talibans in Afghanistan...



You need to focus less on passive-aggressive attention-seeking behaviour and speak/comment on generally open-source material.

There are a number of people on this site with clearances notably higher than yours who know and practice discretion.  You need to follow their lead. Anyone who needs or would like to know the details of what is going on doesn't need to be told by you to talk to their IntO...they can likely check things out on any number of high-side systems and if they aren't int-qualified already, probably know who to talk to for more information.  Please spare us your thinly-veiled 'I've got a secret but I can't tell you' antics.

Regards

G2G


----------



## SupersonicMax

It wasn't my intention, it got to a place I wasn't comfortable talking about it anymore.  I am sure there are a lot of open-source info, but I do not want to take either side even with that information.  People can search it for themselve and see.

It's no secret that they (ISIL and Talibans in AG) have S-A capabilities.  What I am not sure about is the level of classification of specific systems they may have.

I agree, I shouldn't have commented in the first place.

Happy New Year


----------



## George Wallace

Update on some of our young Jihadists who left to fight for ISIS.

http://ibrabo.wordpress.com/2014/10/


----------



## Good2Golf

SupersonicMax said:
			
		

> It wasn't my intention, it got to a place I wasn't comfortable talking about it anymore.  I am sure there are a lot of open-source info, but I do not want to take either side even with that information.  People can search it for themselve and see.
> 
> It's no secret that they (ISIL and Talibans in AG) have S-A capabilities.  What I am not sure about is the level of classification of specific systems they may have.
> 
> I agree, I shouldn't have commented in the first place.
> 
> Happy New Year



Fair enough.  Cheers,

G2G


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Good2Golf said:
			
		

> So you throw this out there trolling for comment and then follow it up with:
> 
> You need to focus less on passive-aggressive attention-seeking behaviour and speak/comment on generally open-source material.
> 
> There are a number of people on this site with clearances notably higher than yours who know and practice discretion.  You need to follow their lead. Anyone who needs or would like to know the details of what is going on doesn't need to be told by you to talk to their IntO...they can likely check things out on any number of high-side systems and if they aren't int-qualified already, probably know who to talk to for more information.  Please spare us your thinly-veiled 'I've got a secret but I can't tell you' antics.
> 
> Regards
> 
> G2G



I don't know where you got any of that from his posts ???

Cheers


----------



## CougarKing

Perhaps these two Sunni states see the Shia state that lies between them (Iran) as a future threat? Note that Pakistan reportedly sold nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia, who also sees Iran as a rival, not too long ago.

Defense News



> *Pakistani Turkish Defense Ties Continue to Deepen*
> By Usman Ansari 10:50 a.m. EST January 3, 2015
> ISLAMABAD — The Pakistan-Turkey defense industrial relationship continues to deepen with more bilateral projects being promoted and undertaken such as aircraft, ships and tanks.
> 
> "As a matter of policy, we encourage Turkish industry to broaden their business activity and defense cooperation with Pakistan," said a senior official with Turkey's Under Secretariat for Defence Industries. "Not only do the two countries have a fraternal relationship, politically speaking, but also there are prospective areas for technology sharing and joint development. We do not view Pakistan as a market but as a present and future partner."
> 
> A London-based Turkey specialist, however, highlighted the restrictions.
> 
> "Obviously both sides are keen to cooperate more than past and present. One major problem could be Pakistan's fiscal constraints."
> 
> The latest agreement was signed between Pakistan's Heavy Industries Taxila (HIT) and Turkey's Nurol Technologies at Pakistan's biennial defense show, the International Defence Exhibition And Seminar 2014 (IDEAS2014), held Dec. 1-4 in Karachi.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Let us hope Turkey does not plan on setting up Nuclear facilities in it's earthquake prone areas. The Seeds of Candu's indiscretions spread far and wide.


----------



## CougarKing

ISIS now on the Saudi border? 

Christian Science Monitor



> *Saudi border fight with militants: How much of a threat?*
> 
> Early Monday morning a group of militants clashed with Saudi border guards near the Saudi city of Arar, across the border from Iraq’s Islamic State-controlled Anbar Province.
> 
> A deadly confrontation on the Iraq-Saudi Arabia border Monday – between Saudi border guards and heavily armed men operating from Iraq’s Islamic State-controlled Anbar Province – presents a problematic US ally with the worrisome threat of rising challenges to internal security.
> 
> Saudi Arabia has long battled efforts by Al Qaeda to undermine the Western-backed Saudi royalty and its role as keeper of Islam’s holiest sites.
> 
> But now the Islamic State (IS) has joined the battle against the Saudi government, especially since IS forces swept into Iraq from Syria last year and Saudi Arabia signed on to the US-led coalition that aims to defeat IS.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Colin Parkinson

I am struggling to find sympathy for the Saudi's in this one.


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

Colin P said:
			
		

> I am struggling to find sympathy for the Saudi's in this one.



Then again, this might be just the sort of push the Saudi's need to roll the Armoured Divisions through Western Iraq.  Let ISIS keep hounding them.


----------



## CougarKing

The French CVN _Charles De Gaulle_ on the move again, most probably to join the air campaign against ISIS soon:

Reuters



> *France to send aircraft carrier for exercises in Indian Ocean*
> 
> PARIS (Reuters) - France is sending its aircraft carrier to the Indian Ocean for naval exercises, a defense ministry source said on Tuesday, adding that the ship was ready for military operations if needed.
> 
> Specialized naval internet website "Mer et Marine" reported that the Charles de Gaulle carrier, the flagship of the French fleet, was heading to the Gulf, where it would join operations against Islamic State in Iraq.
> 
> *The carrier is usually accompanied by an attack submarine, several frigates and a refueling ship. When asked if the aircraft carrier could be used to fight Islamic State, the defense ministry source said: "It's a military tool. It's purpose is to be used."*
> 
> President Francois Hollande is due to officially announce the carrier's departure on Jan. 14 when he gives his annual New Year's address to the military from the ship in the southern port city of Toulon.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Well i will give the French points for clarity of thought for that statement.


----------



## CougarKing

More on the group that sees entertaining people as actually a crime punishable by death...

Mirror



> *ISIS behead street magician for entertaining crowds in Syria with his tricks*
> 
> The street magician was arrested by IS thugs during an impromptu 'show' on a street corner as he tried to bring some much-needed cheer to the Syrian city.
> 
> *He was beheaded in public in a square after the religious fanatics branded his harmless tricks anti-Islam and an insult to God because they created 'illusions and falsehood'.*
> 
> They denounced the terrified magician's show as haram - or forbidden by the Koran - because it was idle entertainment and kept locals from praying and attending the mosque.
> 
> The activist who fled said: *"The magician was a popular man who entertained people with little tricks on the street like making coins or phone disappear.*
> 
> "He was just called Sorcerer by people and children loved him. He was doing nothing anti-Islamic but he paid for it with his life.


----------



## cryco

I was looking up the term dogs of hell, The Khawaarij, to see what it refers to; I heard it on the radio, the mention of dogs of hell referring to the ISIL/IS .
This led me to this video from 2013, which is in Arabic I believe, but has subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnK7OXlA7ZA
Basically, it's Shaykh Muhammad Sa'īd Raslān denouncing the Khawaarij (al-Qaeda, Muslim brotherhood etc..)


----------



## down on the upside

cryco said:
			
		

> I was looking up the term dogs of hell, The Khawaarij, to see what it refers to; I heard it on the radio, the mention of dogs of hell referring to the ISIL/IS .
> This led me to this video from 2013, which is in Arabic I believe, but has subtitles.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnK7OXlA7ZA
> Basically, it's Shaykh Muhammad Sa'īd Raslān denouncing the Khawaarij (al-Qaeda, Muslim brotherhood etc..)



I have heard of the word Khawarij, they were a group of people that followed Ali, Muhammad's cousin and then abondoned him during the first Islamic civil war in the late 7th century. The words means "those who leave" in english, which is probably why your shaykh is using it for AQ, MB etc. though there is no relationship between the early historical worthless people and the current group of filth.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

down on the upside said:
			
		

> I have heard of the word Khawarij, they were a group of people that followed Ali, Muhammad's cousin and then abondoned him during the first Islamic civil war in the late 7th century. The words means "those who leave" in english, which is probably why your shaykh is using it for AQ, MB etc. though there is no relationship between the early historical worthless people and the current group of filth.



In English they are known as the "Kharijites" who did rebel against Ali and it was actually one of their followers who later assassinated him.  More can be found here, and  here, and  here. 

They were the first Islamic rebels and were fanatics who considered any deviation from Islam as a sin and one of there tactics was to walk into a market place and then draw there swords and kill as many people as possible before they were, in turn killed (sound familiar). There was a nasty little civil war before they were finally suppressed. Moderate members survive to this day.(1)

(1) In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World by Tom Holland.


----------



## OldSolduer

Colin P said:
			
		

> Well i will give the French points for clarity of thought for that statement.



Just a bit amibiguous isn't it?


----------



## CougarKing

Some results of the US-allied air campaign against ISIS forces in both Syria and Iraq over the past couple of months:

Defensetech/Military.com



> *US Airstrikes against ISIS Destroy 184 Humvees and 58 Tanks *
> 
> Defense Tech | Jan 7, 2015
> 
> At least 184 Humvees, *58 tanks and nearly 700 other vehicles have been destroyed or damaged in the more than 1,600 airstrike missions that have hit more than 3,200 ISIS targets* in Iraq and Syria since bombing began last Aug. 8, the U.S. Central Command said Wednesday.
> 
> In addition, a total of *26 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles* and armored personnel carriers, 79 artillery and mortar positions, and 673 infantry fighting positions were destroyed, CentCom officials said.
> 
> The list of targets hit through Jan. 7 put out by CentCom *also included 14 small boats which the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was using to ferry personnel and supplies on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq.*
> 
> The target list also showed that U.S. and coalition aircraft have gone after ISIS infrastructure. At least 980 ISIS buildings and barracks, 92 checkpoints, 23 munitions caches, 52 bunkers and 673 infantry fighting positions were attacked.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## McG

Clearly, the 673 infantry fighting positions were pretty important to warrant mention twice in that short blurb.





			
				S.M.A. said:
			
		

> At least 184 Humvees, 58 tanks and nearly 700 other vehicles have been destroyed or damaged ...
> 
> In addition, a total of 26 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles and armored personnel carriers ... were destroyed ...
> 
> The list of targets ... also included 14 small boats ...


So, do the 700 other vehicles include the 26 MRAP & APC or the 14 boats?


----------



## McG

Looks like the ISIS fight might be moving to some of our old stomping grounds.


> Islamic State active in Afghan south
> Edmonton Journal
> 13 Jan 2015
> 
> CAMP SHORABAK, AFGHANISTAN - Afghan officials confirmed Monday that Islamic State is active in the south, recruiting fighters, flying black flags and, according to some sources, battling Taliban militants.
> 
> The sources, including an Afghan general and a provincial governor, said a man identified as Mullah Abdul Rauf was actively recruiting fighters for the group, which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq.
> 
> Gen. Mahmood Khan, the deputy commander of the army's 215 Corps, said that within the past week residents of a number of districts in the southern Helmand province have said Rauf's representatives are fanning out across the province to recruit people.


----------



## jollyjacktar

I wonder how long Iran will put up with them on their right and left arcs.  I can't imagine they'll not do "something" if they've got 
a-holes on a two front basis.  Should make for some interesting times.


----------



## George Wallace

One less to worry about coming home:

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.



> Former U of O student John Maguire killed fighting for ISIS in Syria: report
> Posted on 1/14/2015 6:02:00 PM by CTV News
> 
> Government officials are looking into reports that a Canadian who starred in an ISIS propaganda video has been killed in Syria while fighting for the terrorist group.
> 
> John Maguire, 23, who used the name Abu Anwar Al-Canadi, was killed in northern Syria, according to a pro-ISIS Twitter account.
> 
> The former University of Ottawa student had tried to encourage attacks on Canadian soil in a video posted online last December.
> 
> The Prime Minister’s Office said it was aware of reports Maguire had been killed, and was “seeking additional information on them.”
> 
> The Public Safety Minister’s office released a statement saying it could not speak about specific cases, but warned other Canadians planning to join ISIS, also known as ISIL and the Islamic State.
> 
> “Any individual who decides to join the ISIL jihadists runs the risk of meeting their ultimate demise,” the statement said.




More on LINK.


----------



## jollyjacktar

I won't hold my breath that it's true.


----------



## YZT580

“Any individual who decides to join the ISIL jihadists runs the risk of meeting their ultimate demise,” 

Does anyone actually talk this way?  Ultimate demise indeed how about "If you join ISIL you will wind up dead without the virgins just dead"


----------



## jollyjacktar

Maybe another three won't be coming back too.  Posted under the fair dealings provisions of the copyright act.



> *3 ISIS recruits from Edmonton believed killed*
> 
> *Mahad Hirsi, Hamsa Kariye and Hersi Kariye left Edmonton in October 2013*
> 
> CBC News Posted: Jan 14, 2015 6:01 PM MT| Last Updated: Jan 14, 2015 8:53 PM MT
> 
> Three Edmonton cousins have died while fighting overseas for ISIS, says the father of one of the men.  Ahmed Hirsi says his 20-year-old son Mahad was killed last fall along with cousins Hamsa and Hersi Kariye.  A third cousin from Minnesota, Hanad Abdullahi Mohallim, was also killed, he said.
> 
> Other family members deny the men died while fighting for ISIS, but Hirsi insists it's true.  He said his son and two nephews left Edmonton without telling him in October 2013.  He heard from Mahad for the last time when he called from Egypt saying he intended to leave for Syria.
> 
> Hirsi's sister Mulki Hirsi Hassan called him last fall to break the news that all four men had been killed, he said.  It’s not clear how the four died or if they died at the same time.
> 
> Family from war-torn Somalia
> 
> Hirsi said he can't understand how his son became radicalized.  He brought his family to Canada from war-torn Somalia to live in a peaceful country, he said, and he doesn't know why his son and nephews joined ISIS.
> 
> Mahad was an obedient son, regularly attending school. He was generous and respectful, but became unhappy with his faith, Hirsi said.  “Some people, I don't know who he is, they make him brainwash and they change his mind,” he said.
> 
> At least one family member insists the men did not go overseas to join ISIS.  Guled, a brother of Hamsa and Hersi, said the men went to Egypt to pursue an education.  “That is the path my brothers wanted to take from Day 1,” he said. "These people left their country to go study their religion.”  He confirmed his brothers are dead, but would not say how or where. He said the family has been co-operating with CSIS, RCMP and national security.
> 
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/3-isis-recruits-from-edmonton-believed-killed-1.2901146


----------



## Loachman

YZT580 said:
			
		

> "If you join ISIL you will wind up dead without the virgins just dead"



The virgins are thirty-five-year-old male Star Trek fans who live in their parents' basements.


----------



## CougarKing

An ancient solution to a 21st century problem... :

Look at how the original Great Wall(s) protected China from northern barbarian tribes...which it didn't because the Mongols conquered them to become the Yuan Dynasty, then later the Manchus conquered the Chinese again to become the Qing Dynasty. 

If they really wanted to solve the problem themselves, the Saudi military should have rolled a couple of armoured divisions into Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS.

Christian Science Monitor



> *The Great Wall of Saudi Arabia?*
> Saudi Arabia is building a 600-mile barrier on their border with Iraq designed to keep Islamic State militants out.
> 
> Christian Science Monitor
> 
> By Alexander LaCasse | Christian Science Monitor – 10 hours ago
> 
> Saudi Arabia has been constructing a 600-mile East-West barrier on its Northern Border with Iraq since September.
> The main function of the barrier will be keeping out ISIS militants, who have stated that among their goals is an eventual takeover of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, both of which lie deep inside Saudi territory, according to United Press International.
> 
> *This past week, a commander and two guards on the Saudi-Iraq border were killed during an attack by Islamic State militants, the first direct ground assault by the group on the border.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More on Saudi Arabia's "Great Wall" :



> Source: Business Insider


----------



## CougarKing

The Taliban losing recruits to ISIS?

Defense News



> *4-star: ISIS recruiting in Afghanistan, Pakistan*
> 
> The Islamic State terror group is recruiting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Thursday.
> 
> "We are seeing reports of some recruiting," said Gen. John Campbell, commander of the Resolute Support mission, during an interview with Army Times. "There have been some night letter drops, there have been reports of people trying to recruit both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, quite frankly."
> 
> The Islamic State, or "Daesh" as they're called in many parts of the Middle East, have a "hard message to sell" in Afghanistan, but leaders are still concerned about any potential for the group to spread, Campbell said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Further instances of IS committing atrocities against those who don't share their beliefs or fit their "cultural/social norms" :

Reuters



> *Islamic State threatens two Japanese captives in video*
> 
> By Luke Baker
> 
> JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The militant group Islamic State released an online video on Tuesday purporting to show two Japanese captives and threatening to kill them unless it received $200 million in ransom.
> 
> A black-clad figure with a knife, standing in a barren landscape along with two kneeling men wearing orange clothing, said the Japanese public had 72 hours to pressure their government to stop its "foolish" support for the U.S.-led coalition waging a military campaign against Islamic State.
> 
> *"To the prime minister of Japan: Although you are more than 8,500 km away from the Islamic State, you willingly have volunteered to take part in this crusade," said the militant, who spoke in English.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Yahoo News



> *IS crucifies 17 men, throws 'gay' men off tower in 'unprecedented' spate of 'retaliatory' killings*
> By ANI | ANI – Mon, Jan 19, 2015
> 
> London, Jan 19 (ANI): The Islamic State (IS) has reportedly carried out an "unprecedented" string of public executions in a 48-hour period by crucifying 17 young men, throwing men, accused of being gay, off towers and stoning a woman charged with adultery.
> 
> Disturbing images of these executions started to appear on IS-affiliated social media accounts on Thursday last week and culminated in the *killing of two blindfolded men who were pushed to their deaths from a height towards a watching crowd below*, reported The Independent.
> 
> The images were attributed to the "Information Office of the mandate of Nineveh", a city in Iraq, and claimed to show IS militants carrying out *"hudhud," a system of punishment for what the group's courts regard as serious crimes.*
> 
> The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the recent spate of public killings came after the terror outfit suffered a series of assassinations and a major setback to its overall military advance across Iraq and Syria.
> 
> The monitoring group insisted that *the crucifixion of 17 men in a span of 48 hours came as a direct retaliation to the deaths of 12 Syrian, Iraqi and Algerian jihadists*. It added that the killings were IS' way of sending a message to people living under its control that said, *"This is what will happen to any opponent."* (ANI)


----------



## CougarKing

The ISIS atrocities continue, targeting certain groups in order to perpetuate ignorance:

Christian Science Monitor



> *ISIS reportedly kills 13 boys for watching soccer: Is ISIS adopting Taliban tactics?*
> 
> Reports of torture and public executions being employed by ISIS have been circulating, but these harsh sharia tactics aren't new to those who lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
> 
> Unconfirmed reports say that ISIS had executed 13 young boys from Mosul, Iraq, over the weekend, by firing squad because they watched a soccer match on TV, according to Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, an activist group that claims to expose ISIS atrocities.
> The website is filled with descriptions of the harsh life under Islamic State rule.
> 
> The report of boys killed for watching soccer comes on the heels of images the Islamic State released last week that depicted ISIS security personnel throwing two individuals to their deaths from a tower because they were "convicted" of being homosexual, according to a report from the International Business Times
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Agence-France-Presse via Yahoo News



> *ISIS executing 'educated women' in new wave of horror, UN says*
> By AFP | Yahoo Canada News – 3 hours ago
> 
> Geneva (AFP) - The UN on Tuesday decried numerous executions of civilians in Iraq by the Islamic State group, warning that educated women appeared to be especially at risk.
> 
> The jihadist group is showing a "monstrous disregard for human life" in the areas it controls in Iraq, the UN human rights office said.
> 
> The group, which controls large swathes of territory in Iraq and in neighbouring war-ravaged Syria, last week published pictures of the "crucifixions" of two men accused of being bandits, and of a woman being stoned to death, allegedly for adultery.
> 
> Numerous other women have also reportedly been executed recently in ISIS-controlled areas, including Mosul, spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told reporters.
> 
> *She said "educated, professional women, particularly women who have run as candidates in elections for public office, seem to be particularly at risk."*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Facism masquerading as a religion.


----------



## a_majoor

The religious civil war spreads to Yemen, which is also acting as a front in the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia:

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20150121-embattled-yemen-primed-for-breakup.ece



> *Embattled Yemen primed for breakup *
> FROM WIRE REPORTS
> 
> Published: 21 January 2015 11:01 PM
> Updated: 22 January 2015 09:07 AM
> 
> WASHINGTON — Only months ago, U.S. officials were still referring to Yemen’s negotiated transition from autocratic government to an elected president as a model for post-revolutionary Arab states.
> 
> Now, after days of gunbattles in the Yemeni capital that left President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, a key U.S. ally, confined to his residence, the country appears to be at risk of fragmenting in ways that could provide greater opportunities for al-Qaeda, whose Yemeni branch claimed responsibility for directing the Paris terrorist attack this month.
> 
> Although the Houthi rebels who now effectively control the capital are at war with al-Qaeda, they are also allied with Iran and with Yemen’s former president, Abdullah Saleh. The Houthis’ rise to a dominant position may set off local conflicts that would give more breathing room to al-Qaeda’s local branch, which has repeatedly tried to strike at the United States.
> 
> “The Yemeni state has always been weak, but now there’s a real danger of economic meltdown and of the kind of fragmentation that could ultimately make Yemen almost ungovernable,” said April Alley, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that works to resolve conflicts.
> 
> The Houthi takeover, which began in September and was reinforced in recent days, has deepened sectarian and regional divisions in a poor country that has long been a sanctuary for jihadi followers. And though the latest round of fighting appeared to end Wednesday when Hadi conceded to the Houthis’ political demands, the underlying crisis will continue to fester, analysts say.
> 
> The deal announced Wednesday addressed a number of the Houthis’ grievances, including a lack of representation in government bodies and complaints about provisions in a draft constitution. In return, the Houthis agreed to withdraw fighters from the presidential palace and other parts of Sanaa and to release an aide to Hadi who was kidnapped by Houthi gunmen Saturday.
> 
> But there was little doubt that the Houthis, who have threatened repeatedly to use force to win political concessions, remain in control.
> 
> The Houthis’ public humiliation of Hadi — a southerner — prompted southern rebels to close the country’s chief port in Aden and shut the border between the north and south this week, raising the specter of actual secession. Armed tribesmen have cut off oil exports in three southern provinces. And Saudi Arabia, which sees the Houthis as a proxy of its regional rival, Iran, has shut off almost all aid to the Yemeni government, leaving it virtually penniless and unable to pay salaries.
> 
> The Saudis, who have long been Yemen’s economic lifeline, pumping in more than $4 billion since 2012, say they would rather allow the Houthis to take the blame for the approaching economic collapse than provide aid to an Iranian client, according to a Yemeni official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
> 
> In another ominous sign, the Houthis appear to be gearing up for a major battle with their Sunni rivals in Marib province, to the east of the capital, where much of Yemen’s oil infrastructure is. That could prove devastating to Yemen’s government and economy, which is dependent on oil.
> 
> It could also exacerbate sectarian tensions in a country that was almost entirely free of them until recently. The Houthis belong to the Zaydi branch of Shiite Islam, and Saudi Arabia — whose leaders see all Shiites as heretics — has been providing aid to Sunni tribes in Marib, diplomats say, fueling another proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
> 
> In Washington, military and intelligence officials expressed grave concern Wednesday about the violence in Sanaa and the impact any further deterioration could have on one of the Obama administration’s staunchest counterterrorism partners. Michael Vickers, the Pentagon’s top intelligence policy official, said analysts were still trying to determine the Houthis’ ultimate goal.
> 
> The Houthis’ leader, a charismatic guerrilla fighter in his early 30s named Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, inherited his mantle from his father and his older brother Hussein, who founded the movement in the 1990s and was killed in the first of a series of wars against the Yemeni state that ended in 2010.
> 
> Houthi’s speeches focus on fighting corruption and fulfilling the agreements reached in a series of “national dialogue” sessions that ended last year. Those demands have helped bolster public support for the Houthis — which remains strong — in a country where corruption has gutted the state and appears to have worsened since Hadi became president following the uprising of 2011.
> 
> The Houthis modeled themselves on Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, and though their ideology and leadership are distinct and unmistakably Yemeni, they are allied with Iran, which has provided them with weapons, training and money, especially since 2011.
> 
> The Houthis’ ongoing and bloody battle with al-Qaeda has led some in the West to see them as potential partners, despite the trademark Houthi slogan, “God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel.”
> 
> Under Yemen’s former president, Saleh, “the formula was to milk the USA for support in the fight against al-Qaeda, which was a recipe for more drones and more radicalization,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton who has written extensively on Yemen. “The Houthis actually want to fight al-Qaeda, which could be more effective.”
> 
> But the Houthis are also allied with Saleh, who remains a powerful figure in Yemen and is bent on revenge on those who engineered his ouster during the turmoil of 2011. If the Houthis succeed in consolidating power, many in Yemen expect a bloody power struggle between them and Saleh’s loyalists in the military and the tribes.
> 
> Capitalizing on the chaos, Saleh made a rare public statement Wednesday, calling on Hadi to call early presidential and parliamentary elections and urging the cancellation of U.N. Security Council sanctions imposed on him and two Houthi leaders last year after the Houthi seizure of power.
> 
> The conflict between the Houthis and their mostly Sunni rivals has led some Yemenis to give up on the state.
> 
> In Taiz, Yemen’s third-largest city, the local governor has taken over the military and intelligence quarters and is effectively governing a city-state.
> 
> In southern Yemen, which was a separate country from 1970 until 1990 and fought a brief civil war against the north in 1994, many have similarly seized on the Houthi ascendancy as an opportunity to break away. Those aspirations have fueled fears of a wider breakdown that could benefit al-Qaeda, which ejected government officials across a wide swath of the south in mid-2011 and declared an Islamic emirate that lasted about a year.
> 
> The New York Times,
> 
> The Associated Press


----------



## Fishbone Jones

Throwing people off towers because they may be homosexual.

This from the guys who perfected Man Love Thursdays and say it's alright for a boy to screw his buddy or fuck goats, mules and sheep, so long as they stop when they reach twelve.

By which time, those boys are now wearing makeup and dresses and dancing for the old bastards who are going to take them at the end of the night and trade them around as their own introduction to Man Love Thursdays to complete their hypocritical, self righteous ethos and initiate another group to complete their circle of depravity.


----------



## OldSolduer

Don't hold back recceguy.....


----------



## CougarKing

As the security situation deteriorates in Yemen, which has a 3-sided civil war between the Shia Houthi faction,  the Sunnis of the "Al Qaeda in Yemen" group and Yemeni government forces, the US mulls evacuating its nationals.

Military.com



> *2 US Navy Ships Move to Red Sea for Possible Yemen Evacuation*
> 
> Stars and Stripes | Jan 22, 2015 | by Steven Beardsley
> The Navy has positioned a pair of amphibious ships in the Red Sea for a possible evacuation of U.S. Embassy personnel from the Yemen capital of Sanaa.
> 
> The USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship, and the USS Fort McHenry, a dock landing ship, were moved in recent hours from the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, nearer to Yemen’s capital, U.S. 5th Fleet spokesman Cmdr. Kevin Stephens said. Both ships are part of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, and each has Marines embarked from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit.
> “They are ready to support operations to protect Americans in Yemen if that becomes necessary,” Stephens said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Another Obama foreign policy success. :


----------



## George Wallace

NBC interview with a former captive of ISIS/ISIL.

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/inside-isis-one-mans-story-being-captured-islamic-state-n293056


----------



## CougarKing

All the negotiations for the release of this Japanese reporter held hostage by ISIS came to no avail:

Reuters



> *Islamic State says it has beheaded second Japanese hostage Goto*
> Reuters
> 
> By Sylvia Westall and William Mallard
> 
> BEIRUT/TOKYO (Reuters) - Islamic State militants said on Saturday they had beheaded a second Japanese hostage, journalist Kenji Goto, after the failure of international efforts to secure his release through a prisoner swap.
> 
> The hardline Islamist group, which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq, released a video which seemed to show the beheaded body of Goto and threatened further attacks on Japanese targets. Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani said the video appeared to be genuine.
> Islamic State had said Goto, 47, was held along with a Jordanian pilot. Efforts to win their release had focused on the possible release of an Iraqi would-be suicide bomber jailed in Jordan 10 years ago. The video did not mention the pilo
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

I listened with interest to an interview on The Current on CBC radio yesterday on both of the hostages the barbarians have and this fugly bitch the barbarians want to trade for.  It was the general thought that the reason Jordan have not been able to get proof of life for the pilot as he is already gone.  There was an "interview" with him in the barbarian's magazine where at the end he was asked if he knew what would happen to him after this, to which he replied "I will be killed".

The guest on the radio was saying that many of the barbarian big wigs came from the Baath party and former Iraqi intelligence orgs.  They were Russian trained and are very savvy at making the most of their propaganda efforts.  Their present game with Jordan is having King Abdullah and his government twist in the wind while they attempt to make the best of an impossible situation.

Jordan have warned that if their pilot is killed they will stretch the necks of all the barbarian prisoners they have in custody.  I fervently hope the kid is OK,  but if not, I hope retribution is swift, final and public.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> The guest on the radio was saying that many of the barbarian big wigs came from the Baath party and former Iraqi intelligence orgs.  They were Russian trained and are very savvy at making the most of their propaganda efforts.



I have a very hard time believing this. The Baath party was most definitely socialist and atheist, and from one of Iraq's minority group on top of that. I don't believe that the underlings in ISIS/L would ever be convinced that they had now suddenly embraced faith and become "crazy for Allah". My feeling is that anyone from the old Baath party getting into the hands of ISIS/L is soon parted with his/her head.


----------



## jollyjacktar

That was what the man was saying.  That ISIS is not your run of the mill terrorist organization, that they are savvy in many ways and have talent who have come from many countries and are knowledgeable in their particular fields.  The political and strategic campaign they are waging is measured and planned for maximum effect against their opponents.  And can be observed at (military response aside) how countries such as Jordan have been forced to treat with them as a state entity which is playing right into their hands.

Here is the link to that episode.  http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/ID/ID/2651038739/


----------



## Rifleman62

Oldgateboatdriver: 


> I have a very hard time believing this. The Baath party was most definitely socialist and atheist, and from one of Iraq's minority group on top of that. I don't believe that the underlings in ISIS/L would ever be convinced that they had now suddenly embraced faith and become "crazy for Allah".



So I guess you don't believe the guys in jails who are murders, rapists et al suddenly find religion. 

ISIS is just like a lot of organizations who use "religion" as a cover/excuse for personal depravities.

I always thought the IRA did this: robbing banks, settling personal vendettas, murder, rape etc. daftandbarmy would know.


----------



## jollyjacktar

The barbarians have apparently burned the Jordanian pilot alive.  I don't suppose there's much they won't stoop to.  I wonder what will it take for the rest of the Muslim world to turn on them and put them down for the count.



> Updated
> Muath al-Kasaesbeh, ISIS hostage, purportedly burned alive
> 
> Jordanian pilot had been in captivity since December
> 
> Thomson Reuters Posted: Feb 03, 2015 12:09 PM ET| Last Updated: Feb 03, 2015 1:26 PM ET
> 
> A video released by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) today purports to show captive Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasaesbeh being burned alive.
> 
> Reuters could not immediately confirm the video, which shows a man resembling the pilot standing in a black cage before he was set ablaze.
> 
> Kasaesbeh has been in ISIS captivity since his plane crashed over Syria in December.
> 
> The head of the Jordanian armed forces told the pilot's family that Kasaesbeh had been killed, a member of the family told Reuters.
> 
> 
> The plane piloted by Kasaesbeh crashed over Syria while on a bombing mission against the insurgents.
> 
> In the video, the burned man wore orange clothes similar to those worn by other foreign ISIS captives who have been killed since a U.S.-led coalition started bombing the militants in July.
> 
> Prime Minister Stephen Harper tweeted that Canada’s thoughts and prayers are with the people of Jordan, and that he was "appalled" by Kasaesbeh's apparent death.
> 
> ISIS has released videos showing the beheadings of several Western hostages and has said it has killed two Japanese captives.
> 
> The ultra-radical militants have come under increased military pressure from airstrikes, and by Kurdish and Iraqi troops pushing to reverse ISIS's territorial gains in Iraq and Syria.
> 
> With files from CBC News
> © Thomson Reuters, 2015
> Reuters


----------



## Eye In The Sky

RIP


----------



## CougarKing

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> The barbarians have apparently burned the Jordanian pilot alive.  I don't suppose there's much they won't stoop to.  I wonder what will it take for the rest of the Muslim world to turn on them and put them down for the count.



What a horrible way to die! 

Reuters



> *Islamic State video purports to show Jordanian pilot burnt alive*
> Reuters
> 
> – 54 minutes ago
> 
> CAIRO/AMMAN (Reuters) - Islamic State militants released a video on Tuesday purporting to show a captive Jordanian pilot being burnt alive, and Jordanian state television said he was murdered a month ago.
> Reuters could not immediately confirm the video, which showed a man resembling the captive pilot standing in a black cage before being set ablaze.
> The pilot, *Mouath al-Kasaesbeh*, was captured by Islamic State insurgents after his plane crashed over Syria while on a bombing mission against the group in December. Jordanian state TV said Kasaesbeh had been killed on Jan. 3.
> There was no further comment from the Jordanian government. The head of the Jordanian armed forces broke the news of the pilot's killing to his family, a member of the family told Reuters.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> What a horrible way to die!
> 
> Reuters



Yes, the written description was bad enough to read that I would not want to watch the video.  I have refused to watch any of their snuff films, unless, of course, they're the one's snuffing it.  I can watch Predator porn all day long...


----------



## Loachman

And some bravely fight back:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2936629/Father-shoots-dead-seven-ISIS-militants-revenge-son-executed-spying-Iraqi-government.html

Iraqi father shoots dead seven ISIS militants in revenge for son's public online execution - before being gunned down himself

Iraqi man opened fire on ISIS militants in revenge attack in Tikrit
Basil Ramadan killed seven before he himself was shot dead
Ahmed Basil Ramadan, 18, was one of eight men executed last month 
Islamic State released photographs and a video of the execution
The victims are clearly identified and appear to have been interviewed 
The eight men are accused of spying on ISIS for the Iraqi government

By Tom Wyke for MailOnline and Sara Malm for MailOnline

Published: 17:06 GMT, 2 February 2015 | Updated: 23:20 GMT, 2 February 2015

An Iraqi man has shot and killed seven ISIS militants in an act of revenge for his son who was executed by the terrorist group, local media reports.

Basil Ramadan, said to be in his 60s, used an AK-47 to gun down a group of militants at a checkpoint in Tikrit, a city northwest of Baghdad currently under ISIS control, before he was shot.

Mr Ramadan's son, Ahmed Basil, 18, was one of eight men executed by ISIS in January, accused of infiltrating the organisation and spying for the Iraqi government.

ISIS released photos from a video of the execution of Ahmed Basil Ramadan and seven others, all said to be police officers, accused of informing on Islamic State for the Iraqi government. 

Entitled 'the Day of Judgement', the photos from the video show eight Iraqi men dressed in orange Guantanamo Bay style jumpsuits. 

Standing behind them are Islamic State's notorious security forces, known for carrying out mass public executions in broad daylight.

Several of the victims, including Mr Ramadan's son, are named in the captions and appear to have been interviewed for the video as they are seen wearing microphones.

In the video, Ahmad Basil Ramadan is accused of giving information on the location of Islamic State soldier houses.

The leader of the group is named as Captain Hossam Salah Bnosh. According to Islamic State media, Bnosh and seven other police officers converted to Sunni Islam and joined Islamic State.

However once they had infiltrated the Islamic State security forces, they began to secretly spy for the Iraqi government.

The group are accused of providing intelligence information to the Iraqi government, identifying targets for coalition airstrikes against Islamic State. 

Another prisoner wearing a microphone is named as Marwan Habib Said, who reportedly joined Islamic State security forces but was caught giving target information to the Iraqi government.

The photos show how the eight prisoners were blindfolded and frogmarched along the edge of the river, most likely the Euphrates.

Their hands are handcuffed behind their backs and each Islamic State fighter appears to be holding their victim's neck as they march to their deaths.

They appear to have been taken to a quiet area away from the city, possibly under a motorway bridge, near the river. Forced to kneel down and unable to see, the prisoners wait as each Islamic State fighter draws their pistol and takes aim.

Each prisoner is executed with a single bullet to the head. Afterwards, the security forces pose for a photo. The squadron are shown pointing their pistols at the video camera.


----------



## Loachman

Some good news:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2936231/The-Kill-List-Half-ISIS-commanders-believed-dead-executioner-chief-Jihadi-John-free-commit-barbaric-slaughter.html

The Kill List: Half of ISIS top commanders believed to be dead... but executioner-in-chief Jihadi John is still free to commit barbaric slaughter 

Allied airstrikes decimate ISIS' leadership, leaving terror group in chaos
Terror chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi left isolated and in hiding amid chaos
Nine out the 18 members of Baghdadi's ruling council have been killed
These include number two Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, who had previously served as a lieutenant colonel in Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army
But prominent killers such as Jihadi John are still free to commit atrocities

By John Hall for MailOnline

Published: 12:44 GMT, 2 February 2015 | Updated: 14:50 GMT, 2 February 2015

The Islamic State's leadership in Syria and Iraq has been decimated by months of sustained air strikes, leaving the terror group in chaos and isolating leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, it is claimed.

Allied airstrikes, including those carried out by British warplanes, have killed more than 6,000 fighters since September, including more than half the militants serving on ISIS' ruling council.

Among the dead jihadis is Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, a former Iraqi army lieutenant colonel considered Baghdadi's number two and ISIS' most senior militant in Iraq.

His death and that of as many as nine others on ISIS' 18-man leadership council have forced Baghdadi to promote local warlords to the status of regional commanders, as his inner circle of trusted advisers and battle-hardened loyalists becomes increasingly small. 

Baghdadi has not been seen in public since July and there have been numerous unconfirmed reports that he suffered serious injury or possibly even death as a result of targeted airstrikes.

The likelihood, however, is that Baghdadi has been forced deep into hiding to avoid being targeted by jets that have destroyed more than 1,000 vehicles used by terrorists over the past five months.

Other senior figures within the terror group have not been afforded that luxury and still need to travel across the vast swathes of Syria and Iraq that remain under ISIS' control. 

This forces them to make a decision whether to move as part of a large military convoy and risk being spotted by warplanes overhead, or whether to use cars that reduce the likelihood of aerial detection but leave them at risk of kidnap or killing at the hands if ISIS' rivals on the ground.
Despite the serious damage done to ISIS' leadership by the airstrikes, scores of prominent militants remain alive, including the terror group's British executioner in chief, Jihadi John

Among the ISIS leadership figures killed in airstrikes in recent months is Abu Musa al-Alwani, according to the Sun. Another former member of Saddam Hussein's army, Abu Musa - real name Waleed Jassem al-Alwani - had been a prominent member of ISIS' military council before his death.

Also killed by coalition airstrikes last year was Abu Abdulrahman al-Bilawi - who had been the head of Baghdadi's four man military council, having previously served on the terror leader's religious and strategic advisory body, known as the Shura Council.

Another militant reportedly killed by the first wave of coalition airstrikes in September was Abu Hajar Al-Sufi, also known as Abu Hajar al-Assafi, who had been one of Baghdadi's most trusted advisers on the Shura Council. 

His death came two months before that of Abu Jurnas. real name Rathwan Talib Hussein Ismail al-Hamdani, whose official title was believed to have been Governor of 'Border Provinces'.

Abu Jurnas' role was to ensure ISIS' barbaric interpretation of Sharia law was enforced along the Syria-Iraq crossing, and to ensure that the nations' respective armies are unable to reestablish the border that was effectively wiped out by the terror group's lightning advance last summer.

Baghdadi is likely to have replaced Abu Jurnas with another of his trusted lieutenants, but in less strategically important regions he is understood to have been forced to appoint local warlords to the role of senior commander as his inner circle of loyalists dwindles.

While many of these local tribal leaders are in favour of a Sunni Muslim caliphate and their opposition to the Syrian and Iraqi regimes confirmed, their allegiances remain largely tribal and they are not seen as entrenched supporters of the Baghdadi-led group.

Long-standing tensions between the tribes has also surfaced as they battle for regional prominence and advantage, causing chaos with ISIS ranks.

Despite the serious damage done to ISIS' leadership by the airstrikes, scores of prominent militants remain alive, including the terror group's British executioner in chief, Jihadi John.

Although he is unlikely to hold a senior position within the group's leadership, his death would be highly symbolic in the battle to defeat ISIS due to his in the deaths of British, American and Japanese aid workers and journalists.

Over the weekend ISIS' British executioner in chief, Jihadi John, savagely murdered Japanese journalist Kenji Goto in a shocking filmed beheading after days of intensive negotiations through intermediaries to save him.

Other well-known militants still alive and operational include Abu Wahib, the terror group's 28-year-old leader in Iraq's Anbar province, whose distinctive thick black beard has ensured he has been used prominently in ISIS propaganda.

Another is Abu Omar al-Shishani, another 28-year-old, who is understood to be responsible for ISIS' military operations within Syria. 

Before joining ISIS Georgian-born Shishani led the terror group Jaish al-Muhajireen wal Ansar in operations against the Syrian regime, but declared his allegiance to Baghdadi last year.

He had previously been a member of the Georgian army, but left ahead of his promotion to officer.


----------



## Kat Stevens

I hope the Jordanians take that female(?) bomber they're holding, chain her limbs to four camels, and give them all a swat in the arse.  I further hope they put it on Al Jazeeras Saturday night This Week in Fanaticism.


----------



## jollyjacktar

They say they'll stretch the ugly bitch's neck at dawn.  And the others too.  Hope they're good for it.  They should be, they're pissed.


----------



## Scoobie Newbie

So what's the thoughts/chances on Jordan and Japan wrecking havoc?


----------



## Haggis

Sheep Dog AT said:
			
		

> So what's the thoughts/chances on Jordan and Japan wrecking havoc?



Jordan, maybe, but not Japan.  The atrocities committed by the Japanese during WW2 are still recent memory and nobody in their government wants current day parallels to be drawn. That's political poison.

Whatever the west or it's allies does in retaliation will be easily eclipsed by IS's next and more spectacular act of barbarism.  This latest execution goes beyond terror and straight into horror. The intent is to show the west and it's allies that we cannot and should not fight them because to do so opens us all up to similar or greater punishment.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Such a shame that Japan is hobbled.  Can you imagine the effects of all the men and ferocity of the Imperial Japanese Army with today's weapons going across ISIS lines?  Would be like the Tasmanian Devil x 10000.  That, would be epic to watch as they show Jihadi John the proper way to take his head with a Samurai sword.


----------



## Scoobie Newbie

I wouldn't be so quick to pass on the Japanese. There appears to be A LOT of arguing going on in Their country and parliament.


----------



## cupper

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> They say they'll stretch the ugly bitch's neck at dawn.  And the others too.  Hope they're good for it.  They should be, they're pissed.





			
				Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> I hope the Jordanians take that female(?) bomber they're holding, chain her limbs to four camels, and give them all a swat in the arse.  I further hope they put it on Al Jazeeras Saturday night This Week in Fanaticism.



Hope they strap her body to the pylon of an F-16 and drop her in the middle of an ISIS assembly area. Alive or Dead. Doesn't matter.


----------



## Scoobie Newbie

I was surprised to learn the Jordanian Airforce fly F16's


----------



## cupper

Just watching an interview with Richard Engle.

There is some speculation that the timing of the video may be suspect. Jordan has been asking for proof of life all through the negotiations and was never received. RUMINT has it that the execution may have been carried out soon after his capture, and that the offer of a prisoner swap on the part of ISIS was never going to happen as they had already carried out the execution.

He is also reporting that it could be as many as 6 other ISIS / AQ prisoners that could be executed along with the female.


----------



## Scoobie Newbie

I strongly suspect they will be clearing house of all prisoners.


----------



## jollyjacktar

They stretched the b1tch along with another at dawn.  Good to see Jordan is as good as their word.

Full story with many photos and videos at link below.



> Jordan executes ISIS jihadists: Female suicide bomber among two put to death in dawn hangings in retaliation for terrorists releasing video of pilot being torched to death in cage
> Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziad al-Karbouli were both executed this morning
> Jordan had vowed to execute six of its ISIS-linked prisoners at dawn today
> Comes after pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh was filmed being burnt alive in a cage
> Jordan has confirmed pilot was brutally murdered by ISIS on January 3
> Barack Obama condemned the killing, branding it 'vicious and barbaric'
> 
> By John Hall and Julian Robinson and Tom Wyke and Steph Cockroft for MailOnline and David Williams, Chief Reporter for the Daily Mail
> 
> Published: 16:50 GMT, 3 February 2015  | Updated: 08:45 GMT, 4 February 2015
> 
> Jordan has executed two ISIS-linked prisoners, including a would-be female suicide bomber, it has been revealed this morning.
> 
> The executions, at about 4am local time today, came just hours after Islamic State militants released a sickening video showing a captured Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive in a cage.
> 
> Jordan had vowed a swift and lethal response and government officials this morning revealed that two prisoners, Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziad al-Karbouli, have already been hanged.
> 
> Al-Rishawi had been on death row for her role in a triple hotel bombing in the Jordanian capital Amman in 2005 that killed dozens.
> 
> The executions took place after gruesome footage emerged showing Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh being torched to death by his captors.
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2938199/Burned-alive-cage-ISIS-release-video-claiming-horrifying-murder-captured-Jordanian-pilot.html#ixzz3QlfRtW4x
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## The Bread Guy

And the murder capture of the Jordanian pilot leads to knock on effects ....


> The United Arab Emirates pulled out of the air campaign fighting ISIS militants after the capture of a Jordanian pilot who has since been killed by the extremists, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
> 
> (....)
> 
> The key U.S. ally in the campaign suspended airstrikes in December after the capture, fearing for the fate of its pilots, the Times said, quoting U.S. officials.
> 
> The United Arab Emirates want the U.S. to improve its search-and-rescue efforts, including the use of V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, in northern Iraq, closer to the battleground.
> 
> As it stands, the U.S.-led mission is based in Kuwait, administration officials said, according to the Times.
> 
> It said UAE pilots will not rejoin the fight until the Ospreys - which take off and land like helicopters but fly like planes - are deployed in northern Iraq ....


----------



## jollyjacktar

Which is exactly the goal the barbarians wanted.  I'll wager the pilot was killed shortly after his "interview" that was put into their magazine.  By showing they will stop at no civilized boundries I expect they'll have many running scared.  I'm surprised there's not the screams from the usual suspects for us to pull out of the mission.


----------



## George Wallace

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> And the murder of the Jordanian pilot leads to knock on effects ....



If the UAE and the other Arab states all pull out, leaving only the West to fight their battles; then the optics will favour those radical Muslims who are equating Western "interference" to the "Crusades" ten centuries ago, legitimizing their claims among other radical Muslims.  This action would leave the West in a predicament where they are getting sucked into a cesspool, escalating with ever increasing numbers of Western troops being sent in.  The WEST would be better off to pull out completely and let the fragile cards fall where they may and concentrate solely on sealing off the Region and the spread of barbarianism outside of those failed states.

We have already seen ISIL barbarians have no respect for human life, even executing their own.  If the Islamic states in the region do not want to stop the spread of these barbarians, who are we to stop them?  We have failed in the past with our good intentions.  Let them evolve to a higher plain and realize the barbarians are wrong or let them commit cultural suicide.  Our attempts to civilize them have failed, only flaming their radicalism.  Their hatred of the West can not be cured by the repeated attempts of the West to militarily suppress their insurgencies and prop up failed Regimes.  Time to let them 'sort themselves out'.


----------



## McG

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> And the murder of the Jordanian pilot leads to knock on effects ....


The quote does not support that conclusion.  It is stated that the UAE ceased air ops because of his capture and before his murder was known.


----------



## The Bread Guy

MCG said:
			
		

> The quote does not support that conclusion.  It is stated that the UAE ceased air ops because of his capture and before his murder was known.


Good point - fixed, and thanks.


----------



## Loachman

cupper said:
			
		

> RUMINT has it that the execution



"Execution" implies legitimacy.

This was no "execution". It was a brutal, savage, murder.

IS does not "execute". It has no legitimacy.

Terminology is important.


----------



## Scoobie Newbie

http://twitchy.com/2015/02/04/hard-core-jordans-king-abdullah-in-combat-gear-and-ready-to-fight-isis-photos/

I wonder if this rumour is true


----------



## midget-boyd91

Sheep Dog AT said:
			
		

> http://twitchy.com/2015/02/04/hard-core-jordans-king-abdullah-in-combat-gear-and-ready-to-fight-isis-photos/
> 
> I wonder if this rumour is true



Judging by the look on his face in the photos I was almost expecting to see a set of brass knuckles  on his hands..
If he is in fact going to personally fly combat missions against these scum, I tip my hat to the man.


----------



## Kat Stevens

Sheep Dog AT said:
			
		

> http://twitchy.com/2015/02/04/hard-core-jordans-king-abdullah-in-combat-gear-and-ready-to-fight-isis-photos/
> 
> I wonder if this rumour is true



Don't forget our great war leader;


----------



## Jed

I laugh every time someone posts that picture.  ;D  But I feel for the poor bugger who was in charge of the VIP party. The guy must be a sub culture cult hero.


----------



## Old Sweat

uncle-midget-Oddball said:
			
		

> Judging by the look on his face in the photos I was almost expecting to see a set of brass knuckles  on his hands..
> If he is in fact going to personally fly combat missions against these scum, I tip my hat to the man.



He is a Sandhurst graduate and is reportedly a qualified AH pilot. Who know?


----------



## CougarKing

The Royal Jordanian Air Force making ISIS pay for what they did to their pilot:

Reuters



> *Jordanian jets return after striking at IS targets in Syria: sources*
> 
> AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordanian fighter jets flew on Thursday over the hometown of a pilot killed by Islamic State militants after ending a mission against militants in Syria, a security official said.
> 
> Jordan's King Abdullah was visiting the pilot's family at the time of the flyover. The show of force came two days after the ultra hardline Islamic State released a video showing a captured Jordanian pilot being burned alive.
> 
> State television had earlier said the fighter jets had completed a mission without giving the location of their sortie. But a security official confirmed to Reuters the mission was in a location in Syria under Islamic State control.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Loachman

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The Royal Jordanian Air Force making ISIS pay for what they did to their pilot:



I have always had a liking and respect for Jordan.

This adds.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> Don't forget our great war leader;



THAT is some funny shit right there; thanks for a much-needed chuckle.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> And the murder capture of the Jordanian pilot leads to knock on effects ....



_The Jordanian pilot was captured by ISIS militants within minutes of his plane crashing in December near Raqqa, Syria, the Times said, quoting a senior U.S. military official.
_

_But UAE officials questioned if American military rescue teams would have been able to reach the pilot even if there had been more time for a rescue effort, administration officials said_. 


I feel for the pilot, his family.  It was pure shitty ass luck to go down that close to the enemy.  _But_ CSAR assets can't be 'a moments notice' away from every single square meter of ground.  My  :2c:

However, having said that:

US moves pilot rescue aircraft to northern Iraq: official

Washington: The US military has deployed aircraft and troops to northern Iraq to boost capabilities to rescue downed coalition pilots, after a Jordanian airman was captured and killed by jihadists in Syria, a defense official said Thursday. "We are repositioning some assets into northern Iraq," a US defense official told AFP.


----------



## Good2Golf

Jordan's King is indeed a trained attack helicopter pilot. He trained at the US Army's aviation training centre at Ft Rucker,Alabama and qualified on the AH-1 Cobra (shortly before the AH-64A Apached was rolled out), returning to serve in the Jordanian Army while still a Prince.  He is very well respected amidst forces in the region as well as a number of Allied nations around the world.


----------



## cupper

Was listening to an interview on NPR tonight on the way home tonight that was discussing the video ISIS put out. The person being interviewed is with an organization called The Symbol Intelligence Group.

 http://www.symbolintelligence.com

They were discussing the symbology of death by immolation within the Islamic world and that death by fire is only in the perview of Allah, and how ISIS is using it as a propaganda tool and so forth.

The SIG person also indicated that shortly after capturing the pilot ISIS tweeted out the hashtag #howshouldthepilotdie (or something
to that effect).

But what was most disturbing about the video in her opinion (and surprised me when she said it) was that at the end of the video they had photos and names of Jordanian pilots and a reward for anyone who killed a pilot on the list. Big question was how were they able to obtain the names and photos?

(will post a link when the story is accessible on their website later this evening)

Here is a link to the audio: 

http://www.npr.org/2015/02/05/384119665/video-of-jordanian-pilots-death-as-horrific-as-it-was-symbolic

Will post a transcript once it comes up.


----------



## The Bread Guy

The 100 golden dinar bounty also extends to Canadian pilots - see attached screen capture shared via Twitter.


----------



## George Wallace

cupper said:
			
		

> But what was most disturbing about the video in her opinion (and surprised me when she said it) was that at the end of the video they had photos and names of Jordanian pilots and a reward for anyone who killed a pilot on the list. Big question was how were they able to obtain the names and photos?
> 
> (will post a link when the story is accessible on their website later this evening)



Remember:  Some of the senior members of ISIL were former officers in the Iraqi military and Intelligence.   Through their military connections over the years, they could likely name names of allies they may have worked with in the past from memory.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

cupper said:
			
		

> Was listening to an interview on NPR tonight on the way home tonight that was discussing the video ISIS put out. The person being interviewed is with an organization called The Symbol Intelligence Group.
> 
> http://www.symbolintelligence.com
> 
> They were discussing the symbology of death by immolation within the Islamic world and that death by fire is only in the perview of Allah, and how ISIS is using it as a propaganda tool and so forth.
> 
> The SIG person also indicated that shortly after capturing the pilot ISIS tweeted out the hashtag #howshouldthepilotdie (or something
> to that effect).
> 
> But what was most disturbing about the video in her opinion (and surprised me when she said it) was that at the end of the video they had photos and names of Jordanian pilots and a reward for anyone who killed a pilot on the list. Big question was how were they able to obtain the names and photos?
> 
> (will post a link when the story is accessible on their website later this evening)



It also included locations in Lat/Long.  I watched the video.

The video can be watched here.  *I recommend caution to anyone who watches this - there is extremely disturbing footage from the 18:10 mark to the 19:35 mark.*  The portion showing the names, photos and locations of some aircrew begins at approx. the 19:40 mark.

Disturbing in many...many ways.  

RIP Moaz al-Kassasbeh.


----------



## cupper

That was disturbing.

There are no words…..


----------



## jollyjacktar

This says what I've always believed.  The Saudis are our enemies.  It will be interesting to see what the USG will do if and when the American public finally say "enough" to their so called cordial relations with the Kingdom.

Shared under the fair dealings provisions of the copyright act.



> Analysis
> New 9/11 accusations undermine U.S.-Saudi 'friendship'
> 
> Saudi princes accused of being patrons of al-Qaeda by 9/11 conspirator
> 
> By Neil Macdonald, CBC News Posted: Feb 06, 2015 5:00 AM ET| Last Updated: Feb 06, 2015 5:00 AM ET
> 
> The Saudi embassy in Washington says Zacarias Moussaoui is a deranged criminal.
> 
> He may well be; the so-called "20th hijacker" is certainly a criminal, confined to the most secure federal prison in America, and certainly portrayed himself as crazy during his 9/11 trial, 10 years ago in Virginia.
> 
> I covered it, and his courtroom rants were either delusional or meant to be perceived as such. (It didn't work; the presiding judge pronounced him competent to stand trial and "extremely intelligent.")
> 
> But his most recent testimony, given at the super-max penitentiary in Colorado last year and made public this week, reads like what it is: a detailed accounting by a man who holds a master's degree from a British university.
> 
> And what a remarkable account it is.
> 
> Moussaoui states that the 9/11 hijackers were supported not only by Saudi Arabian charities, but by Saudi princes and diplomats.
> 
> He reels off names he says were in an al-Qaeda database of moneyed donors, making it clear the jihadists couldn't really have accomplished much without them.
> 
> Moussaoui was testifying in civil proceedings in support of families of 9/11 victims who are suing the Saudi government.
> 
> So far, the White House has protected the kingdom. It has classified part of a congressional investigation — widely believed to have examined Saudi sources of funding for the attackers —  and has never emphasized that most of the attackers were Saudi citizens.
> 
> One suspects the feds weren't too keen on allowing Moussaoui to testify in the lawsuit, either.
> 
> Deranged or not, though, Moussaoui's testimony is further straining an ugly diplomatic bargain: In return for open gushers of oil and military co-operation, America and other Western nations smile and overlook the sometimes ugly elements of the Saudi regime.
> 
> A telling scene
> 
> It's instructive to watch video of President Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia last month. He abruptly rearranged his schedule to publicly mourn the dead king and fawn over Salman, the newly installed one.
> 
> The official welcoming ceremony was all smiles and fellowship, yet another staged display of American-Saudi solidarity.
> 
> (Also among the leaders who sent messages of high praise for the deceased King Abdullah was Stephen Harper, the same fellow who made a big deal of only reluctantly shaking Vladimir Putin's hand.)
> 
> But the kingdom's contempt for the West was easy to see.
> 
> Michelle Obama, forced to stand away from and behind her husband, keeping her face blank, as a procession of important Saudis conspicuously ignored her.
> 
> Most Saudi men practise a fundamentalist version of Islam, and won't publicly touch a woman. Especially one who had the nerve to appear before them with her hair uncovered.
> 
> The American first lady no doubt did that quite deliberately; she has covered her hair in other places, notably Indonesia and the Vatican.
> 
> Presumably, as a feminist, she disapproves of trying women in terrorism courts for the crime of driving, and hacking the head off a screaming, struggling woman in public, as someone videotaped it all, and a voice on a loudspeaker read from the Qur'an.
> 
> (No press releases after that episode about "barbarity" or "mindless violence" of the sort the State Department issues about ISIS beheadings, only diplomatic silence.)
> 
> At last month's welcoming ceremony, as one VIP after another shook the American president's hand, a man approached, ignored Obama, who seemed to try to shake his hand, too, and spoke directly to the king. It was prayer time.
> 
> The monarch and every other Saudi man present abruptly turned and walked away, leaving Obama standing there.
> 
> Obama, striving to maintain presidential dignity, turned to a nearby diplomat and began chatting, as though he hadn't just been left hanging.
> 
> It was a telling scene, one that belied the mask of amity the two countries wear in public.
> 
> The gift of secrecy
> 
> Obama, having endorsed the Arab Spring as a wonderful expression of the people's will, also had to look the other way in 2011 when the Saudis sent troops across the causeway into Bahrain to violently crush Shia crowds protesting their treatment by the emirate's Sunni rulers.
> 
> Saudi's minority Shias have met with similar treatment; a respected Shia cleric was sentenced to death recently for criticizing the government.
> 
> The Saudis, who fund the building of mosques in America and around the world, strictly prohibit the presence of any religion but Islam on their soil, and America, the champion of religious freedom, says nothing.
> 
> The Saudis also openly scorned Obama for not being quick enough or generous enough in funding Syria's rebel forces. (As it turned out, of course, much of the Saudi funding ended up being channeled to ISIS and its cohort, but never mind.)
> 
> But the American public's willingness to tolerate the hypocrisy around Saudi Arabia is wearing thin. According to reports in U.S. media, Obama was unwilling or unable to form any sort of real friendship with Abdullah, the recently deceased king.
> 
> Increasingly, Saudi Arabia is being discussed in the U.S. media with the same tone accorded Pakistan, another official ally with at least informal links to al-Qaeda.
> 
> Pakistani officials are still angry that Obama sent a team of assassins to Osama bin Laden's hideaway in Abbottabad without telling them. (They were completely unaware, of course, that bin Laden was living there, just down the road from one of their military bases.)
> 
> Now, politicians on both sides of the aisle in Congress have called on Obama to declassify the 9/11 chapter concerning the Saudis.
> 
> The American public, they say, has the right to know what their own Congress discovered.
> 
> It was ironic that Moussaoui would have testified in support of the 9/11 families; it would be profoundly so if this "20th hijacker," from his captivity in Colorado, forces the White House to lift the gift of secrecy it's extended to the Saudis.
> 
> 
> For those wishing to see Moussaoui's testimony in the civil suit, the New York Times provides links to the transcripts from its story.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/the-mask-of-u-s-saudi-friendship-is-finally-slipping-1.2947156

_- mod edit to add link to story -_


----------



## The Bread Guy

Eye In The Sky said:
			
		

> Disturbing in many...many ways.


Holy crap, indeed  - and I skipped over the murder bits.


----------



## tomahawk6

IS practices a form of sharia law that sanctions death by fire for dropping incendiary weapons.At least thats their cover story.How homosexual activity rates being thrown off a roof top,is beyond my understanding.The bottom line for me is that their brand of islam has no place in my country and must be crushed.If these acts were being perpetrated by Chrisitian zealots I would equally oppose them.


----------



## dimsum

Turns out not all of their folks believe in the method of murder either:



> The Islamic State has dumped one of its own clerics, who now faces trial by the Sunni Muslim militant group, for vocalizing his disapproval of the immolation killing of a captured Jordanian pilot.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> "There's actually a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad, who says: 'no one should be burned alive as a form of punishment'," Haris Tarin, spokesman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told VICE News. "Burning is one type of death that is specifically said to be torture in the religious tradition."



https://news.vice.com/article/islamic-state-cleric-facing-trial-for-objecting-to-jordanian-pilots-death-by-fire?utm_source=vicenewsfb


----------



## cupper

Here is the transcript of the interview I referenced upthread.



> ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
> 
> I have watched the video of Lieutenant Muath al-Kaseasbeh's death at the hands of ISIS. I don't recommend your doing it. It is not easy viewing. We're going to discuss it a bit right now, and if you don't wish to hear the discussion, now's a good time to leave us for four minutes or so. The beginning shows Jordan's king in the presence of Americans - President Obama, Charlie Rose. Later, scenes of buildings reduced to rubble presented as coalition airstrikes. It shows bodies of injured adults and children corpses, and for each one, the screen is consumed by a graphic of fire, symbolizing the flames that killed or injured them. Lieutenant Kaseasbeh is then consumed by a real fire, presented as a fitting revenge. He's buried in rubble, as are the victims of the coalition strikes in this video. When we first saw ISIS videos, we turned to Dawn Perlmutter of the Symbol Intelligence Group. She studies the symbolism of such things, and she joins us once again. Welcome to the program.
> 
> DAWN PERLMUTTER: Thank you.
> 
> SIEGEL: This is a far better production - I mean, just looking at it as a piece of video. It's much more sophisticated than anything we saw before out of ISIS.
> 
> PERLMUTTER: Correct. It also is different from the beheading videos in that it shows the actual murder. The beheading videos would cut to black and then show the body. This one shows a ritual killing.
> 
> SIEGEL: You say ritual killing. I have read that the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad include a saying cited by Saudi cleric yesterday that God alone has the right to punish by fire. Even Saudi where they behead convicted criminals - immolation is not a punishment.
> 
> PERLMUTTER: It may not be exempted in Islam, but it's very prevalent in this area of the world. In Iraq there's been hundreds of women that have been ritually killed in the same manner. The Pakistani school killings - there were - 140 children were murdered. They literally set the teacher on fire in front of the kids. The Islamic State has adopted these types of primal, ritual events.
> 
> SIEGEL: As we've heard today in Jordan, it's thought that this video just went too far - that this has actually unified the people of Jordan against the Islamic State. Do you think it's possible that this time ISIS has just overdone it?
> 
> PERLMUTTER: No, unfortunately, I do not think that. I think the video is very effective for their target audience. I think that it's essentially a recruitment video that they want to provoke attacks so that it can become this cycle of reciprocal violence. Then they can show more dead children and say that they're the victims and turn it all around. But I think the most disturbing thing other than the ritual murder was the images of the rewards for the pilots at the end of the video.
> 
> SIEGEL: Yes, at the end it says here are the other crusader pilots, meaning Jordanians, presumably, who fly with the coalition forces. It shows pictures and names and offers a reward for anyone who would kill them.
> 
> PERLMUTTER: Yes. That's extremely disturbing. First of all, how did they get the intelligence? How did they get those pictures? They have name, rank. They are trying to be provocative.
> 
> SIEGEL: I suppose one could say that a bombing is louder than a video no matter what. But there does seem to be something asymmetric about the kind of messages coming out of ISIS and whatever any government would ever do. I mean, that is not a video that I could ever imagine an organized state promulgating on the web. Can governments actually compete with this sort of thing?
> 
> PERLMUTTER: We can compete with this, but we have to understand that this is information warfare. When they first captured the Lieutenant, they actually tweeted out, hashtag, suggest a way to kill the Jordanian pilot pig. I mean, they turn everything into a reality show, and they know how to appeal to perspective recruits. And we're not counteracting in the same way.
> 
> SIEGEL: Well, Doctor Perlmutter, thank you very much for talking with us.
> 
> PERLMUTTER: You're welcome.
> 
> SIEGEL: That's Dawn Perlmutter who is director of the Symbol Intelligence Group based in Philadelphia.


----------



## a_majoor

Indoctrinating youth is a very old technique. One can think of the "Children's Crusade", the _Hitlerjugend_ or the Soviet Young Pioneers for some examples. Iran used this technique when they developed the Basji in 1979, so to see ISIS reviving tghe technique is hardly surprising. Perhaps because most reporters (and people in general) really have no historical reference to compare this too do they find this unusual in scale and scope. I am still of the opinion that isolating the area and frying all modern conveinience items using EMP devices on power stations, population centers and every where else these people choose to do their thing will bring the problem to far more manageable levels: if they want to dispute theology based on 7th century principles let them fight it out with swords....

http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/24/children-of-the-caliphate/



> *The Islamic State is raising an army of child soldiers, and the West could be fighting them for generations to come.*
> By Kate Brannen
> October 24, 2014
> Kate.Brannen
> @K8brannen
> 
> They stand in the front row at public beheadings and crucifixions held in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s stronghold in Syria. They’re used for blood transfusions when Islamic State fighters are injured. They are paid to inform on people who are disloyal or speak out against the Islamic State. They are trained to become suicide bombers. They are children as young as 6 years old, and they are being transformed into the Islamic State’s soldiers of the future.
> 
> The Islamic State has put in place a far-reaching and well-organized system for recruiting children, indoctrinating them with the group’s extremist beliefs, and then teaching them rudimentary fighting skills. The militants are preparing for a long war against the West, and hope the young warriors being trained today will still be fighting years from now.
> 
> While there are no hard figures for how many children are involved, refugee stories and evidence collected by the United Nations, human rights groups, and journalists suggest that the indoctrination and military training of children is widespread.
> 
> Child soldiers aren’t new to war. Dozens of African armies and militias use young boys as fighters, in part because research has shown that children lack fully formed moral compasses and can easily be persuaded to commit acts of cruelty and violence.
> 
> The young fighters of the Islamic State could pose a particularly dangerous long-term threat because they’re being kept away from their normal schools and instead inculcated with a steady diet of Islamist propaganda designed to dehumanize others and persuade them of the nobility of fighting and dying for their faith.
> 
> "[The Islamic State] deliberately deny education to the people who are in the territory under their control, and not only that, they brainwash them," said Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who’s tasked with thinking about future threats and planning for the Army’s future. "They engage in child abuse on an industrial scale. They brutalize and systematically dehumanize the young populations. This is going to make this a multigenerational problem."
> 
> Ivan Simonovic, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for human rights, recently returned from a visit to Iraq, where he interviewed displaced Iraqis in Baghdad, Dohuk, and Erbil. He said there is a "large and dangerously successful recruitment" program.
> 
> Speaking to a small group of reporters at the U.N., he said the fighters "appeal" to some of the youngsters and that they have approved adept at "manipulating young men and children." He explained that "they project an image of being victorious" and offer the promise that those who fall in battle will "go straight to heaven."
> 
> "What is striking for me is to meet mothers who [tell us], ‘We don’t know what to do,’" he said. "Our sons are volunteering and we can’t prevent it."
> 
> On the front lines of Iraq and Syria, the boys who join or are abducted by the Islamic State are sent to various religious and military training camps, depending on their age. At the camps, they are taught everything from the Islamic State’s interpretation of sharia law to how to handle a gun. They are even trained in how to behead another human and given dolls on which to practice, Syria Deeply, a website devoted to covering the Syrian civil war, reported in September.
> 
> Children are also sent into battle, where they are used as human shields on the front lines and to provide blood transfusions for Islamic State soldiers, according to Shelly Whitman, the executive director of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, an organization devoted to the eradication of the use of child soldiers.
> 
> Eyewitnesses from the Iraqi towns of Mosul and Tal Afar told United Nations investigators they have seen young children, armed with weapons they could barely carry and dressed in Islamic State uniforms, conducting street patrols and arresting locals.
> 
> U.N. human rights experts have "received confirmed reports of children as young as 12 or 13 undergoing military training organized by ISIL in Mosul," according to a report written jointly by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and the human rights office of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq.
> 
> In al-Sharqat district in Salah al-Din, the number of youngsters manning checkpoints "drastically increased" during the last week of August, the report said. And in the Nineveh Plains and Makhmour, male teenagers were swept up in August in a recruiting drive by advancing fighters from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Some of these boys reported that they "were forced to form the front line to shield ISIL fighters during fighting, and that they had been forced to donate blood for treating injured ISIL fighters," according to the report.
> 
> Abu Ibrahim Raqqawi, the pseudonym of a 22-year-old man who lived in Syria until about a month ago, is the founder of Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a Twitter account and Facebook page that documents the brutality of life in Raqqa, the city where he grew up. In addition to him and three others now living outside of Syria, there are 12 people inside of Raqqa, who contribute photos and information about what’s going on inside the city.
> 
> Reached via Skype, he told Foreign Policy that the Islamic State has stepped up its youth recruitment program, including a boot camp for young boys where they’re taught combat skills.
> 
> He said teenagers from Raqqa were being trained and then quickly sent to fight in Kobani, the Syrian-Turkish border town where the Islamic State has been in a brutal fight with Kurdish fighters for several weeks. U.S. and coalition aircraft have conducted more than 135 airstrikes against Islamic State targets in and around the town, killing hundreds of the militants.
> 
> In Raqqa, where poverty is widespread after more than three years of war, the group often persuades parents to send their children to the camps in exchange for money, Raqqawi said. Sometimes, the Islamic State appeals directly to the children themselves, holding public recruiting events or parties and then offering the children money to attend training. With all of the schools closed in Raqqa, there is little else for children to do, Raqqawi said.
> 
> There are several well-known youth training camps across Raqqa province, he said, including al-Zarqawi Camp, Osama Bin Laden Camp, al-Sherkrak Camp, al-Talaea Camp, and al-Sharea Camp.
> 
> Raqqawi estimated that there are between 250 and 300 children at al-Sharea Camp, which is for kids under the age of 16.
> 
> He provided photos of children at this camp, including one of young boys sitting down to a meal together, and another of a young boy smiling as he completed an obstacle course.
> 
> When there is a big battle, like the one in Kobani, the training is accelerated, Raqqawi said.
> 
> In Iraq, there is also substantial evidence that children are being forced into military training.
> 
> Fred Abrahams, special advisor at Human Rights Watch, interviewed Yazidis in Iraq who had escaped Islamic State detention. They said they had witnessed Islamic State fighters taking boys from their families for religious or military training.
> 
> One Yazidi man who escaped said he watched his captors separate 14 boys ages 8 to 12 at a military base the Islamic State had seized in Sinjar and take them off to learn how to be jihadists.
> 
> This summer, Vice News gained extraordinary access to the Islamic State, producing a five-part video documentary about life under the group’s control. The second installment focused on how the Islamic State is specifically grooming children for the future.
> 
> "For us, we believe that this generation of children is the generation of the caliphate. God willing, this generation will fight infidels and apostates, the Americans and their allies," one man tells Vice.
> 
> The video shows a 9-year-old boy saying that he’s headed to a training camp after Ramadan to learn how to use a Kalashnikov rifle.
> 
> An Islamic State spokesman told the Vice journalists that those under 15 go to sharia camp to learn about religion, but those older than 16 can go to military training camp.
> 
> The Islamic State’s command of social media also helps it convince people from all over the world to travel to Iraq or Syria to join the group.
> 
> Part of this effort involves using children as propaganda tools, posting photographs on social media sites of them dressed in Islamic State uniforms marching alongside grown-up fighters. "In mid-August, ISIL entered a cancer hospital in Mosul, forced at least two sick children to hold the ISIL flag and posted the pictures on the internet," the U.N. report said.
> 
> The Islamic State’s online recruitment has proved successful, drawing more than 3,000 Europeans. The FBI says it knows of roughly a dozen Americans fighting with the group, but acknowledges there could be more.
> 
> Three American high school girls from Colorado were caught last week in Frankfurt, Germany, apparently on their way to join the Islamic State in Syria. Reports say they were radicalized online.
> 
> The Vice News video shows a Belgian man who traveled to Raqqa with his young son, who appears to be 6 or 7 years old.
> 
> The father coaches his son to tell the cameraman that he’s from the Islamic State and not Belgium, and then asks him whether he wants to be a jihadist or a suicide bomber. The young boy says, "Jihadist."
> 
> Raqqawi told FP that when he was still living in Raqqa he saw an American woman, her Algerian husband, and their daughter, who looked to be about 4 years old.
> 
> He says he also saw a French fighter with two kids: a blond boy who looked to be 6 years old and a daughter who was about a year old.
> 
> "We see a lot of foreign fighters inside the city. It is shocking," he said.
> 
> In Syria and Iraq, children are not just being radicalized, but are also being exposed to extreme levels of violence every day.
> 
> Raqqawi provided FP photos he took while still living in the city, of children watching crucifixions.
> 
> He said the children have become so accustomed to these executions that the sight of a head separated from a human body no longer seems to faze them.
> 
> "The Islamic State destroys their childhood, destroys their hearts," he said.
> 
> Misty Buswell, who’s based in Jordan as the Middle East regional advocacy officer for Save the Children, said, "It’s not an exaggeration to say we could lose a whole generation of children to trauma."
> 
> Buswell said the child refugees she’s interviewed are having nightmares, avoiding interactions with their peers, and showing signs of aggression toward other children.
> 
> "I have met children who have stopped speaking, and who haven’t spoken for months, because of the terrible things that they witnessed," Buswell said. "And those are the lucky ones who actually made it across the border to safety."
> 
> With time and the right kind of intervention those children can be helped and can be able to have somewhat more of a normal life, Buswell said. "But for the kids who are still inside and who are witnessing this on a daily basis, the long-term effects are going to be quite significant."
> 
> Buswell said that refugees almost always want to return home once the situation there stabilizes and peace returns.
> 
> When she asked refugees from Sinjar that question a few weeks ago, however, she was surprised by their answer. "It’s one of the first times I’ve actually heard people telling me that the things that they saw and experienced were so horrific and traumatic — and the things that their children saw — that they didn’t want to go back, because there are too many bad memories."
> 
> Colum Lynch contributed reporting to this article.


----------



## CougarKing

The UAE stepping up again after temporarily withdrawing their planes from the coalition weeks ago:

Fox News



> *UAE rejoins airstrikes on ISIS after 'abominable' execution*
> 
> Published February 07, 2015
> 
> The United Arab Emirates announced Saturday it is sending a squadron of F-16 fighter jets to Jordan, resuming its participation in U.S.-led airstrikes on The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
> 
> The announcement was made by UAE’s official government news agency, following the U.S. State Department's announcement Friday that the Arab country had reaffirmed its commitment to the coalition and that suggested that “positive news” on the matter would be announced within the next few days.
> 
> *The UAE stopped flying airstrikes over Iraq shortly after Jordanian pilot Lt. Moath al Kasasbeh was shot down in a mission over Syria and captured by ISIS in December. News reports suggested the UAE dropped out because the United States did not have enough search-and-rescue assets in place to assist downed planes.*
> 
> [...]
> 
> Jordan has pledged harsh retaliation and said it would intensify strikes on Islamic State group targets. Starting Thursday, Jordanian jets have carried out daily attacks, according to the military and state media.
> 
> Jordan’s interior minister, Hussein al-Majali, told the state-run al-Rai newspaper in comments published Saturday that his country will go after the militants “wherever they are.”
> 
> The most recent airstrikes are “the beginning of a continued process to eliminate them and wipe them out completely,” he said of the militants who control about a third of neighboring Syria and Iraq.
> 
> [...]


----------



## a_majoor

Short article about pro western fighters arriving to fight against ISIS. Some embedded links in article:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rebeccafrech/2015/02/the-media-may-ignore-them-but-theyre-fighting-isis-and-winning.html



> *The Media May Ignore Them, But They’re Fighting ISIS and WINNING*
> 
> February 9, 2015 by Rebecca Frech 8 Comments
> 
> The news broke last week that the monsters of ISIS had burned a Jordanian pilot to death, and the King of Jordan responded with airstrikes and a public vow to wipe ISIS from the face of the Earth. Upon hearing this promise, social media exploded with gushing admiration for the badassery of the Jordanian king.
> 
> “At last there’s some real leadership on this,” people seemed to be saying as they celebrated the fact that someone was standing up to the Islamic State at long last. Which must have been news to the people who’ve been going toe-to-toe with ISIS for the past 146 days.
> 
> Five months ago, the Islamic State attacked the Kurdish territory of Kobane. The military pundits on the American news expected it to fall within days, and the gruesome images of beheadings and torture to follow, driving ratings and public disgust for days. But then it  didn’t fall.
> 
> Tales of Kurdish bravery, and women fighters, began to trickle out into the media, but it was overshadowed by the horrors of ISIS. Blood and gore drive ratings more than bravery and valor, and out media was mostly silent about the fighting in Kobane.
> 
> While we in the west were regaled with stories of Europeans and Americans rushing to Syria to join the jihad, no one mentioned that there were also men and women from the west who were rushing to fight against it. It wasn’t until I began following them on social media that I saw just how many there were. These were not young kids looking for adventure, but seasoned veterans who were resolute in their determination to fight evil.
> 
> When, after five long months of fighting, the YPG/YPJ declared that Kabane was at last free from the scourge of ISIS the people of that region literally danced in the streets and our media was mostly silent.
> 
> Which is why I’m telling you about them. Their sacrifice is too great for us  to ignore them any longer. As they continue to drive the ISIS forces further and further from their homeland, we should be praying for their continued successes, and for the health and safety of our own men. We should know about these men and women who have put their lives on hold in order to help protect the women and children of Iraq, Syria, and the Kurdish territories. May God bless them all in their fight.
> 
> If you want to learn more about the YPG/YPJ, you can visit their Facebook page and their website.
> 
> Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rebeccafrech/2015/02/the-media-may-ignore-them-but-theyre-fighting-isis-and-winning.html#ixzz3RNTOzGE0


----------



## Force

Here's a mini mini overview about the sunni/shia communities in the middle east and abroad.

First thing to know about the sunni communities is that Saudi Arabia Qatar and Turkey are the biggest financers of the sunni communities, and they do it big. Mosques/schools/tv channels all over the world that teach youngsters about how "evil" shias are. Because of this, alot of sunnis are driven into the hatred against shias.  The saudi wahhabi ideology that got created in the 19th century is being thought and promoted. Unfortunately, real moderate sunnis and figures are not given the spotlight and their voice is not heard. They have almost no source of funding, you don't hear about them. 

Because saudi arabia/qatar/and turkey share the same interests as the USA, Iran, the biggest threat to their influence in the middle east, is pictured as a demon that must be brought down. Since iran is 95% shia, the sunni governments allied to the USA raised a whole generation on the hatred towards iran and its allies (syria and hezbollah). We are witnessing today the fruits of this hatred-filled generation. Brainwashed youngsters from all over the world uniting in Turkey to fight shias in syria and irak. 

Theres alot more details, but that's a small overview.


----------



## CougarKing

Seems the radicalized recruits keep coming:



> *AP Exclusive: 20,000 foreign fighters flock to Syria, Iraq*
> Associated PressBy KEN DILANIAN | Associated Press – 12 hours ago
> 
> WASHINGTON (AP) — *Foreign fighters are streaming into Syria and Iraq in unprecedented numbers to join the Islamic State *or other extremist groups, including at least *3,400 from Western nations* among 20,000 from around the world, U.S. intelligence officials say in an updated estimate of a top terrorism concern.
> 
> Intelligence agencies now believe that as many as 150 Americans have tried and some have succeeded in reaching in the Syrian war zone, officials told the House Homeland Security Committee in testimony prepared for delivery on Wednesday. Some of those Americans were arrested en route, some died in the area and a small number are still fighting with extremists.
> 
> The testimony and other data were obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
> 
> Nick Rasmussen, chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, said the rate of foreign fighter travel to Syria is without precedent, far exceeding the rate of foreigners who went to wage jihad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia at any other point in the past 20 years.



Associated Pres via Yahoo News

Plus, a cyber attack by ISIS:
Defense News



> *CyberCaliphate claims Newsweek Twitter hack*
> The Twitter account for Newsweek was briefly hacked Tuesday morning by a group calling itself the CyberCaliphate, which claims to be affiliated with the Islamic State group.
> 
> Newsweek's Twitter feed, which has about 2.5 million followers, sent out one tweet threatening President Obama and his family. Others claimed to have "confidential" Pentagon documents detailing "warfare in social networks." Some of the documents were labeled for official use only and did contain personal identifying information for Defense Department personnel.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## cryco

I don't like where this is going. Let's see if the neighboring countries step up their efforts.
And where is the 'anonymous' group? Didn't they declare 'war' on the caliphate after the killings in France? I would have expected something by now.


----------



## dimsum

Well this wasn't in the recruiting brochure   :



> But at least for the less-skilled foreign recruits, the experience of fighting for the new caliphate is often brief and bloody. Kurdish and Iraqi commanders on the front lines of the war whom I interviewed in the last two weeks say that the suicide bombers and first-wave attackers deployed in Islamic State offensives are almost entirely made up of units of foreign fighters. These highly risky missions mean that the new "immigrants" fighting the infidels end up as cannon fodder, while the more prestigious organizational jobs and less-risky defensive assignments go to Syrian and Iraqi Arabs.



http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-02-11/foreign-fighters-are-islamic-state-s-cannon-fodder


----------



## jollyjacktar

Excellent, if they want to use up the western POS in banzai charges or other fatal excursions all the better.  They won't be a worry for the rest of us with coming home to carry on their crap here.


----------



## CougarKing

More ISIS atrocities:

Reuters



> *Islamic State releases video purporting to show beheading of 21 Egyptians in Libya*
> Reuters – 51 minutes ago
> 
> CAIRO (Reuters) - Islamic State released a video on Sunday purporting to show the militant group beheading 21 Egyptian Christians kidnapped in Libya.
> 
> In the video, militants in black marched the captives, dressed in orange jump suits, to a beach. They were forced down onto their knees, then beheaded. The video appeared on the Twitter feed of a website that supports Islamic State.
> 
> A caption on the five-minute video read: *"The people of the cross, followers of the hostile Egyptian church."*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Fishbone Jones

Loachman said:
			
		

> "Execution" implies legitimacy.
> 
> This was no "execution". It was a brutal, savage, murder.
> 
> IS does not "execute". It has no legitimacy.
> 
> Terminology is important.



Now if we could get the MSM to realize and report it as such. I think we do ourselves a disservice and add to the fear by calling these murders any thing but murder. ISIS(IL) count on the revulsion of the phrases horrific, barbaric, etc. Not to downplay the extent these animals will lower themselves to, but we have to stop helping them with their propaganda.


----------



## Jed

So why is it that when the Rwanda experience was occurring, with Hutus and Tutsis being genocidally slaughtered, the MSM media told it like it was happening but they can't seem get it right with ISIS/ISIL ?


----------



## jollyjacktar

Jed said:
			
		

> So why is it that when the Rwanda experience was occurring, with Hutus and Tutsis being genocidally slaughtered, the MSM media told it like it was happening but they can't seem get it right with ISIS/ISIL ?



Because, it involves Islam.  They're shyte scared of being accused of not being PC to the max when it comes to radical Islam.  Everyone else is fair game, but those jokers have far too many running scared.  Today's boogeymen.


----------



## OldSolduer

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> Because, it involves Islam.  They're shyte scared of being accused of not being PC to the max when it comes to radical Islam.  Everyone else is fair game, but those jokers have far too many running scared.  Today's boogeymen.



Being PC is biting us in the a$$. If we can't identify them as "Islamic Terrorists" without being attacked by our OWN side (media and fuzzy headed people who think hot chocolate and hugs solve every problem) we are fighting with one hand tied behind our collective backs.


----------



## Force

In my opinion, fighting the islamic terrorists shiuld not be done only by force. The best way is to track the people who fund them, and the people who recruit them, and the people who promote wahhabism(wahhabism is radical islam that got created in he 19th century in saudi arabia, with the alliance of the saudi family and muhammad ibn wahhab). This form of islam rejects anything that is against it, beginning with muslims themselves. So once saudi arabia and qatar stop promoting wahhabism and funding those groups, they will dissapear automatically within a few months. How is isis surviving in syria and irak? Who gives them ammunitions? Who gives them sophisticated anti-tank weapons? These are the main questions that have to be answered. Why is Turkey still recieving them from all over the world and dispatching them in syria and irak? Turkey have no control over its borders?


----------



## OldSolduer

We have to fight them ideologically as well. Thus far they are winning the battles because we are too afraid to "offend" anyone.


----------



## CougarKing

Stacked said:
			
		

> Did you gents read about the 21 Egyptian Christians beheaded on a beach by ISIS yesterday?
> 
> (...)
> 
> Sorry for the bit of a rant I am just so frustrated by all of this..... Something needs to be done....



And here is Egypt's response to the killings of its citizens:

Reuters



> *Egypt says it bombed Islamic State targets in Libya: state television*
> 
> CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's military said in a statement on state television it had carried out an air strike against Islamic State targets in Libya at dawn on Monday, a day after the group released a video appearing to show the beheading of 21 Egyptians there.
> 
> *The attack focused on Islamic State camps, training sites and weapons storage areas in Libya, where Islamist militants have thrived amid chaos.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Remius

Hamish Seggie said:
			
		

> Being PC is biting us in the a$$. If we can't identify them as "Islamic Terrorists" without being attacked by our OWN side (media and fuzzy headed people who think hot chocolate and hugs solve every problem) we are fighting with one hand tied behind our collective backs.



I'm guilty of this tbh.  Not so much trying to be PC but rather defining it as something more or maybe less than what might be the obvious label.

This article actually defines it quite well and defines exactly what it is and the mistakes we are making in the west.  Something that has made me look at this in a different light and agree that we are in fact dealing with Islamic Terrorists.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

It is long but very much worth the read.


----------



## Rifleman62

Here's where the problem is. (by the way, his nibs was in California for a three day golf/fund raising weekend).  This post is a continuation of  http://army.ca/forums/threads/117789.0.html 
*White House:Taliban not a terrorist group. It’s an Armed Insurgency’.*

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/15/statement-press-secretary-murder-egyptian-citizens

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
February 15, 2015
Statement by the Press Secretary on the Murder of Egyptian Citizens


> The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists. .......



Citizens, no mention the reason they where beheaded was that they where Christians. And who did it: radical Islamic Terrorists. No, the WH won't say that. They are ISIL-affiliated terrorists.

The video is “Safety for you crusaders is something you can only wish for,” one of the militants said in the video, as he stood with a knife in his hand. The video was titled “A Message Signed With Blood to the Nation of the Cross.”

It's obvious even to the Pope that these men where killed because they where Christians. Obvious to everyone but the Obama Administration.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Stacked said:
			
		

> Did you gents read about the 21 Egyptian Christians beheaded on a beach by ISIS yesterday?
> 
> Know what gets me about that.. Is that I haven't seen any articles yet of Muslims dencouning this. Yet i read numerous articles about the three Muslim college students who were shot over a parking spot (police say religion wasn't a factor) saying that it was an act of terror...  And that we are all islamaphobic is north america.    Everyone was very quick to jump and denounce the killing of the three muslims students, but nobody seems to care about the 21 beheaded christans...
> 
> Sorry for the bit of a rant I am just so frustrated by all of this..... Something needs to be done....



Things are being done, but those 'things' might not be on as big of a scale or as timely as 'we' would like to see.


----------



## Rifleman62

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/02/17/isis-reportedly-burns-alive-45-people-in-western-iraqi-town/

*ISIS reportedly burns alive 45 people in western Iraqi town*


Published February 17, 2015 - FoxNews.com

Islamic State militants have burned alive 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, its local police chief told the BBC Tuesday.


----------



## CougarKing

In this case, the enemy of our enemy is *not* our friend. Hezbollah is just a Shia/Shiite terrorist group that happens to oppose ISIS.

International Business Times



> *Hezbollah Actively Fighting ISIS Alongside Americans, Kurdish, Other Forces In Iraq -– Leader*
> 
> The leader of Lebanon’s Shiite movement Hezbollah has admitted its presence in Iraq, fighting against the ISIS alongside forces from the U.S. and the Kurdish, among others.
> 
> Chief Hassan Nasrallah disclosed the information in a speech to supporters in southern Beirut on Feb 16, 2015. "We may not have spoken about Iraq before, but we have a limited presence because of the sensitive phase that Iraq is going through," Nasrallah said.
> 
> Nasrallah's speech came two days after Saad Hariri, his leading Lebanese opponent, urged on Hezbollah to withdraw from Syria. Hezbollah is already fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's forces against the al-Qaida affiliated Jabat al-Nusra. He said it would look ridiculous for people and entities to differentiate Daesh [IS] and al-Nusra Front. “They are one reality, one ideology, one approach and one goal."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More about how ISIS is spreading to North Africa/Libya:

Reuters



> *Islamic State lays claim to North African outpost*
> By Patrick Markey and Michael Georgy
> 
> ALGIERS/CAIRO (Reuters) - The images match the worst of Islamic State's atrocities: black-clad fighters and an English-speaking jihadist taunt the West before slaughtering their victims in orange jumpsuits on a Libyan beach.
> 
> Their masked leader turns to the Mediterranean and points a bloodied knife towards Europe, declaring, "We will conquer Rome, God willing."
> 
> The execution of 21 Egyptian Christians by militants in Libya proclaiming allegiance to Islamic State was an announcement that the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has spread from Syria and Iraq to Libya. Militants have profited from chaos to claim a North African outpost a boat ride away from Italy's coast.
> 
> International reaction came swiftly. Egyptian jets pounded suspected militant sites in Libya, and Paris joined Cairo in calling for U.N. action to halt the militants' spread.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## daftandbarmy

Return to sender....

Kurds don't want foreign volunteers but Ottawa man says training force unaffected

Content removed IAW Army.ca policy


----------



## Rifleman62

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/02/19/387519422/obama-calls-the-idea-that-the-west-is-at-war-with-islam-an-ugly-lie

NPR - 19 Feb 15 - Bill Chappell

*Obama Calls Idea That The West Is At War With Islam 'An Ugly Lie'*

"The notion that the West is at war with Islam is an ugly lie and all of us — regardless of our faith — have a responsibility to reject it," President Obama said Thursday, at a summit on defusing violent extremism.

The statement echoes the president's remarks from Wednesday, when Obama said it's crucial to change the narrative about the intersection of religion, particularly Islam, and modern society. He called it "a generational challenge," as Eyder reported for the Two-Way.

Instead of focusing on Islam, the president and others have said at the summit, the U.S. and other countries should be trying to snip away at terrorism's ideological, economic and political roots.

Obama spoke on the issue today for more than 20 minutes, urging countries not to help lend legitimacy to extremist groups such as ISIS. Here are some highlights:

    "Nations need to break the cycles of conflict — especially sectarian conflict — that are magnets for violent extremism."

    "We have to confront the warped ideologies espoused by terrorists like al-Qaida and ISIL, especially their attempts to use Islam to justify their violence."

    "When people, especially young people, feel entirely trapped in impoverished communities — where there is no order and no path for advancement, where there are no educational opportunities, where there are no ways to support families and no escape from injustice and the humiliations of corruption — that feeds instability and disorder, and makes those communities ripe for extremist recruitment."

    "We must acknowledge that groups like al-Qaida and ISIL are deliberately targeting their propaganda to Muslim communities, particularly Muslim youth. Muslim communities, including scholars and clerics, therefore have a responsibility to push back — not just on twisted interpretations of Islam, but also on the lie that we are somehow engaged in a clash of civilizations, that America and the West are somehow at war with Islam, or seek to suppress Muslims, or that we are the cause of every ill in the Middle East."

Even before the U.S.-hosted Summit on Countering Violent Extremism began in Washington this week, the White House has been criticized for its position against using terms that directly link Islam or Muslims to terrorism.

Last month, Politico's Rich Lowry complained of "a haze of euphemism and cowardice" in a January article about the White House's stance, written following the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.

That prompted The New York Times' Thomas Friedman to write, "I am all for restraint on the issue, and would never hold every Muslim accountable for the acts of a few. But it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn't coming out of their faith community."

Yesterday, the Times explored the administration's stance:

"Obama aides say there is a strategic logic to his vocabulary: Labeling noxious beliefs and mass murder as 'Islamic' would play right into the hands of terrorists who claim that the United States is at war with Islam itself. The last thing the president should do, they say, is imply that the United States lumps the world's 1.5 billion Muslims with vicious terrorist groups."

Today, Obama said, "When people spew hatred towards others because of their faith or because they are immigrants, it feeds into terrorist narratives. If entire communities feel they can never become a full part of the society in which they reside, it feeds a cycle of fear and resentment — and a sense of injustice upon which extremists prey."


----------



## Robert0288

cryco said:
			
		

> I don't like where this is going. Let's see if the neighboring countries step up their efforts.
> And where is the 'anonymous' group? Didn't they declare 'war' on the caliphate after the killings in France? I would have expected something by now.



Last I saw they hacked and took down about 200 twitter feeds, facebook groups and individual users.


----------



## Kat Stevens

Robert0288 said:
			
		

> Last I saw they hacked and took down about 200 twitter feeds, facebook groups and individual users.



Yeah, just imagine the carnage that caused;
"Dammit, Mohammed, I've had enough of this jihad shit, I'm going back to Missisauga!"
"What's the matter Mohammed, don't you want your 70 virgins?"
"Look Mohammed, I can handle squatting in this cave wearing Michelin tire sandals, eating hummus three meals a day, and humping this damn rifle around everywhere, but I draw the line at no more twitter feeds about Vampire Diaries."
"Hey Mohammed, wait for me!"

The domino effect will be crippling.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

I get what you're saying, but just wanted to add that the cyber battlespace is becoming more and more prevalent and important.  Cyber warfare is not something to be ignored and a capable enemy can do as much damage there as they can in the kinetic one.

 :2c:


----------



## Kat Stevens

My point was that the mighty fearsome Anonymous has managed to shut down the twittersphere to a couple hundred cell phones.  Not quite the crippling blow they promised.


----------



## CougarKing

One source of ISIS recruits drying up?

Reuters



> *European jihadis unable to join Islamic State, locked at home*
> Fri Feb 20, 2015 1:13pm EST Email This Article |
> 
> By Mariam Karouny
> 
> BEIRUT(Reuters) -* The flow of European fighters from Europe to territory held by the ultra-hardline Islamic State is drying up due to tighter restrictions imposed by European states that have prevented would-be jihadis from traveling*, fighters from the group said.
> 
> Fighters in Syria and Iraq contacted by Reuters said the impact was limited on the battlefield since European fighters make up only a fraction of the forces of Islamic State.
> 
> *"Now most of the (foreign) fighters are coming from Asian countries, like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. They are tough fighters,"* an Islamic State militant who fought with the group in both Syria and Iraq, told Reuters via the internet.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## cupper

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> One source of ISIS recruits drying up?
> 
> Reuters



All that has really accomplished is keeping a group of frustrated radicals away from a place where the chances of them getting killed before they can do any real significant harm. 

Now they are sitting, pissed off that they can't reach their destiny, and now have to look at home to make their name in the radicalized terrorist world.


----------



## jollyjacktar

So it was for our two terrorists.


----------



## cupper

I'm torn as to which is the better option. 

Let them go and die in some foreign land remaining completely unknown by anyone who really matters. If they survive and decide to come back, deny them entry, or lock them up.

or

Keep them here where they can cause trouble domestically, use up critical resources keeping them under surveillance to ensure they walk the straight line. Short of setting up some form of detention, there isn't a whole hell of a lot we can do on that side of the equation.

:dunno:


----------



## jollyjacktar

What I would like to see happen and what will happen are so far apart they'll never meet in the middle.


----------



## a_majoor

Frankly, I would be very open to the idea of sending every radical wannabe on a one way flight straight to Syria, where they can fight the Syrians, Iranians and Hezbollah to their heart's content. Indeed, if it were possible to crank out the would be radicals from Europe and North America in a solid block, Iran would be forced to spend a huge amount of blood and treasure to fight them.

We, of course, should simply stay home and let the Iranians and their proxies do the fighting against ISIS. It would be nice to see both or all the various sides lose, and I'm sure that the crippling effects of the drop in oil prices combined with large military expenditures to support whatever faction the Iranians/Gulf States/Saudi Arabia want to succeed will have a great effect on their ability to spread trouble beyond the Middle East.


----------



## cupper

ISIS / ISIL threatens Italy, says they are coming to Rome. How do Italians respond? With travel advice. :nod:

*The Islamic State threatens to come to Rome; Italians respond with travel advice*

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/20/the-islamic-state-threatens-to-come-to-rome-italians-respond-with-travel-advice/



> In a recently released video that showed the killing of 21 Christians in Libya, all but one of them Egyptian, the Islamic State issued an ominous warning: “Today we are south of Rome,” one masked militant said. “We will conquer Rome with Allah’s permission.”
> 
> To make matters worse, Rita Katz, director of SITE Intelligence Group, pointed out that supporters of the Islamic State have begun using a hashtag to warn of their plan to reach "Rome."
> 
> Exactly what "Rome" means to the Islamic State is unclear -- some experts say it may actually be a reference to the United States or Turkey, or even the West in general. But Italy is worried. Libya is just a short boat ride across the Mediterranean. Thousands of refugees already make this journey to Italian shores every year. What's to stop the Islamic State?
> 
> As word of #We_Are_Coming_O_Rome spread across the Italian media, Rome residents took the opportunity to respond to the Islamic State. And they did so in an especially Roman way.
> 
> With warnings about the traffic.
> 
> With food recommendations.
> 
> A whole load of general complaints about their domestic woes.
> 
> And plenty of references to a recent soccer match against a Dutch team.
> 
> By this point, the Italian responses to the hashtag far outweigh any from Islamic State supporters, and some Italian publications are beginning to wonder how notable the hashtag was to begin with.
> 
> But the response does serve as a useful reminder: Italians may be scared of apocalyptic Islamic State warnings, but in their day-to-day life, they have many other issues on their minds.



The Twitter reads are quite funny and can be seen at the link.


----------



## cryco

that is so funny, great way to deal with the threat. 
I remember being chastised several months ago when I was all for sending out the homegrown extremists so that they may go kill themselves in the middle east.


----------



## cupper

The man is cruel. No Powerpoint? How does he expect them to win this thing? ;D

*Carter summons U.S. military commanders, diplomats to Kuwait*

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/carter-summons-us-military-commanders-diplomats-to-kuwait/2015/02/22/0d06c36e-baab-11e4-b274-e5209a3bc9a9_story.html?hpid=z5



> KUWAIT CITY — New Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, seeking to put his imprimatur on the U.S. fight against the Islamic State, has summoned about 30 high-ranking military commanders and diplomats to Kuwait for an unusual session to review war plans and strategy.
> 
> The summit, which is scheduled to take place Monday, will include the U.S. military’s combatant commanders for the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the three-star Army general in charge of the war in Iraq and Syria, the head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, several ambassadors in the region and other key players from Washington.
> 
> Defense officials said Carter called the gathering immediately upon taking office last week so he could more fully familiarize himself with the strategic underpinnings of the U.S.-led international campaign against the Islamic State. They said Carter was not necessarily seeking to change the fundamentals of the strategy, but they made clear that he would ask hard questions and press commanders and diplomats to justify their current approach.
> 
> “This is absolutely not coming from a place of his concern about the strategy,” said a senior defense official involved in planning the summit, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon. “He’s just the kind of guy who likes to dig.”
> 
> The senior official said the summit will focus less on basic military operations and more on complex issues such as sectarian political divisions in Iraq, the spread of Islamic State affiliates into North Africa and Afghanistan, the slow pace of training and equipping Syrian rebels, and fissures within the U.S.-led military coalition.
> 
> In a sign of how Carter intends to challenge his commanders’ thinking, he has banned them from making any PowerPoint presentations — a backbone feature of most U.S. military briefings.
> 
> Carter arrived in Kuwait after a two-day visit to Afghanistan, where he met with President Ashraf Ghani and toured U.S. bases in Kabul and Kandahar. He said he will soon make recommendations to President Obama about possibly slowing the pace of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan over the next two years.
> 
> Although the war against the Islamic State will occupy much of Carter’s agenda as defense secretary, he is not scheduled to visit Iraq during his inaugural trip as Pentagon chief.
> 
> About 2,600 U.S. troops have deployed to Iraq since last summer. Thousands more are based at permanent military installations in Kuwait, including Camp Arifjan and Ali al-Salem Air Base.
> 
> Speaking to reporters en route to the region, Carter said he wanted to visit some of the 10,600 U.S. troops in Afghanistan as quickly as he could after taking office, while also squeezing in time to meet in the field with commanders and diplomats involved in the campaign against the Islamic State. He is scheduled to return to Washington on Tuesday.
> 
> “This is my first week, and I’ve got a lot to do back in Washington,” he said. “And I wanted to go and return as quickly as I could and still learn what I think I needed to learn, and this is the way to do it.”


----------



## a_majoor

One thing about extremists is they tend to get everyone else organized to stop them. Christian militias are now springing up to fight ISIS, and evidently are quite happy to cooperate with the Kurds. Of course, until they get the same levels of funding and support ISIS got (or Hezbollah to represent the "other side") they will not be able to create a significant effect on the battlefield:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11430961/Christian-militia-takes-the-war-to-Islamic-State-in-Syria.html



> _Christian militia takes the war to Islamic State in Syria_
> Richard Spencer By Richard Spencer, Middle East Editor10:29PM GMT 23 Feb 2015
> 
> A Christian militia formed to protect the community as Syria falls apart is fighting its first major battle against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), attacking across a front in the north-east of the country before being driven back again in a fierce counter-blow.
> Christian groups said they were checking a report that up to 200 civilians had been kidnapped by Isil jihadists in the fighting and were being held as hostages.
> 
> A number of fighters from the militia, the Syriac Military Council, were also said to be missing.
> The council, known by the initials MFS from its title in Aramaic, the ancient language of the Christian church, was founded in 2013 as jihadists began to dominate more of northern Syria.
> 
> It is allied to the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish militia involved in the defence of the town of Kobane, and on Sunday joined it in a drive against Isil in the north-eastern province of Hassakeh.
> 
> Related Articles
> Isil fighters in Syria
> Isil abducts at least 90 from Christian villages in Syria 24 Feb 2015
> Deal to trade captive US soldier ‘crushed’ release efforts by family of female hostage 23 Feb 2015
> Moderate Sunni Islam leader blames 'new colonialism' for Middle East collapse 23 Feb 2015
> 'Jihadi bride' schoolgirls were not radicalised at school, head insists 23 Feb 2015
> 
> On Sunday night, it claimed to have driven the jihadists out of 22 villages, including a string of settlements occupied by the Assyrian Catholic minority between Hassakeh town and the Turkish border.
> 
> The attack was backed by bombing raids from the US-led coalition against Isil, which said it had carried out 11 air strikes in Hassakeh on Sunday, hitting 10 Isil tactical units and destroying two Isil vehicles, a bunker and a “fighting position”.
> 
> The coalition has been working closely with the YPG since the battle for Kobane, with YPG units phoning in combat positions to the jets, despite its being closely affiliated to the PKK, the Turkey-based Kurdish guerrilla group proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US and UN.
> 
> It is not clear what control in the area Isil had previously, but the villages had been subject to repeated attack, including at least one case where jihadists had entered the the village of Tel Hormizd and forced villagers to remove the cross from the church.
> 
> However, on Monday morning, Isil struck back, fighting its way into Tel Hormizd, nearby Tel Shamiran and Tel Tawil, and several other villages, according to a statement. According to one report, the Isil fighters were led by the infamous Chechen jihadist Omar al-Shishani.
> A separate statement issued on the Facebook page of a group set up to campaign for Christians under threat from Isil said a large number of Christians had been seized by the group in yesterday morning’s attack.
> 
> “The men were later brought to a mountain called Abd al Aziz to be held as hostages,” it said. “The women and children were left in the village with Isil guards controlling them.
> 
> “A witness left behind due to his poor health was able to raise the alarm and informed his family member in Canada who then spread the word about the latest atrocities of Isil.”
> 
> The witness could not be immediately contacted and there was no separate confirmation. A spokesman for the MFS said that Isil had kidnapped many residents from Christian villages recently but did not confirm this incident.
> 
> One man, who asked not to be named, told the Telegraph two of his mother’s uncles and several cousins had been seized. “My mother called the mobile phone of her cousins,” he said.
> 
> “They were answered by a man who said we have taken these people. Do not call again. We are afraid they have been taken as hostages,” he said.
> 
> Other Christians took refuge in the town of Tel Temir on the River Khabur. Andy Darmoo, who runs a London-based charity for the Assyrian Christian community, said he was also trying to investigate the report.
> 
> The MFS statement added that four of its soldiers had disappeared in Tel Hormizd, after staying to fight to the end.
> The growing alliance between the Kurds and other minority groups, along with some Free Syrian Army factions, is a recent development, likely to have been encouraged by America and its Western allies desperate for a solid fighting group it can back in the multi-sided battle for Syria.
> 
> The YPG has been especially distrusted by Turkey because of its links to the PKK, and in turn has accused the Turks of openly collaborating with Isil against it.
> 
> However, as Turkey becomes more concerned with the threat to its own population from Isil, that may be starting to change. It was confirmed on Monday that the YPG had helped Turkish armed forces extract troops guarding the shrine of Suleyman Shah, an enclave of Turkish territory inside Syria, through Kobane.
> 
> The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, said that 1,465 Isil fighters had been killed by coalition air strikes since they started in September.
> In addition, they had killed 73 fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, and 62 civilians.


----------



## CougarKing

It's about time a drone or a JDAM targetted his a**.

Reuters via Yahoo News



> *'Jihadi John' killer from Islamic State beheading videos named by media*
> 
> Reuters – 1 hour 48 minutes ago
> 
> By Michael Holden and Stephen Addison
> LONDON (Reuters) - Investigators believe that the "Jihadi John" masked fighter who fronted Islamic State beheading videos is a British man named *Mohammed Emwazi,* two U.S. government sources said on Thursday.
> 
> He was born in Kuwait and comes from a prosperous family in London, where he grew up and graduated with a computer programming degree, according to the Washington Post.
> 
> In videos released by Islamic State (IS), the black-clad militant brandishing a knife and speaking with an English accent appears to have decapitated hostages including Americans, Britons and Syrians.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Now that there is a name, we can only hope that was passed on to the SAS/SBS for action.....


----------



## jollyjacktar

I am speechless.  The Muslim Bros. want to do the same in Egypt too.  Photos and video at the story link below.   :rage:



> ISIS thugs take a hammer to civilisation: Priceless 3,000-year-old artworks smashed to pieces in minutes as militants destroy Mosul museum
> Extremists used power drills and sledgehammers to smash ancient items
> They wrecked a series of 3,000-year-old statues at museum in Mosul, Iraq
> One vandal says items being destroyed because they promoted idolatry
> Comes after thugs destroyed thousands of books at Mosul Public Library
> 
> ByJulian Robinson for MailOnline
> 
> Published: 12:38 GMT, 26 February 2015 | Updated: 16:20 GMT, 26 February 2015
> 
> Islamic State thugs have destroyed a collection of priceless statues and sculptures in Iraq dating back thousands of years.
> 
> Extremists used sledgehammers and power drills to smash ancient artwork as they rampaged through a museum in the northern city of Mosul.
> 
> Video footage shows a group of bearded men in the Nineveh Museum using tools to wreck 3,000-year-old statues after pushing them over.
> 
> One of the items, depicting a winged-bull Assyrian protective deity, dates back to the 9th century B.C.
> 
> A man shown in the video said the items were being destroyed because they promoted idolatry.
> 
> 'The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him,' the unidentified man said.
> 
> The articles destroyed appeared to come from an antiquities museum in the northern city of Mosul, which was overrun by Islamic State last June, a former employee at the museum told Reuters.
> 
> The extremist group has destroyed a number of shrines - including Muslim holy sites - in a bid to eliminate what it views as heresy.
> 
> Militants are also believed to have sold ancient artwork on the black market in order to finance their bloody campaign across the region.
> 
> The video bore the logo of the ISIS group's media arm and was posted on a Twitter account used by the group.
> 
> Yesterday it was revealed how terrorists had blown up the Mosul Public Library, sending 10,000 books and more than 700 rare manuscripts up in flames.
> 
> Leading members of Mosul society reportedly tried to stop the fanatics destroying the building, but failed.
> 
> The director of the library, Ghanim al-Ta'an, said that the extremists used homemade bombs in the attack, which took place on Sunday.
> 
> He told Middle Eastern website Geran: 'ISIS militants bombed the Mosul Public Library. They used improvised explosive devices.'
> 
> Presumed destroyed are the Central Library's collection of Iraqi newspapers dating to the early 20th century, maps and books from the Ottoman Empire and book collections contributed by around 100 of Mosul's establishment families.
> 
> Isis first invaded the Central Library in January. Residents say the extremists smashed the locks that had protected the biggest repository of learning in the northern Iraq town, and loaded around 2,000 books - including children's stories, poetry, philosophy and tomes on sports, health, culture and science - into six pickup trucks. They left only Islamic texts.
> 
> 'These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah. So they will be burned,' a bearded militant in traditional Afghani two-piece clothing told residents, according to one man living nearby who spoke to The Associated Press.
> 
> The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation, said the Islamic State group official made his impromptu address as others stuffed books into empty flour bags.
> 
> Since the Islamic State group seized a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria, they have sought to purge society of everything that doesn't conform to their violent interpretation of Islam.
> 
> They have already destroyed many archaeological relics, deeming them pagan, and even Islamic sites considered idolatrous. Increasingly books are in the firing line.
> 
> Mosul, the biggest city in the Islamic State group's self-declared caliphate, boasts a relatively educated, diverse population that seeks to preserve its heritage sites and libraries.
> 
> In the chaos that followed the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein, residents near the Central Library hid some of its centuries-old manuscripts in their own homes to prevent their theft or destruction by looters.
> 
> But this time, the Islamic State group has made the penalty for such actions death.
> 
> A University of Mosul history professor, who spoke on condition he not be named because of his fear of the Islamic State group, said the extremists started wrecking the collections of other public libraries in December.
> 
> He reported particularly heavy damage to the archives of a Sunni Muslim library, the library of the 265-year-old Latin Church and Monastery of the Dominican Fathers and the Mosul Museum Library with works dating back to 5000 BC.
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2970270/Islamic-State-fighters-destroy-antiquities-Iraq-video.html#ixzz3Ss8SWDga
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## cupper

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> It's about time a drone or a JDAM targetted his a**.
> 
> Reuters via Yahoo News



It will be a shame when he finds out that the 72 virgins are guys.


----------



## OldSolduer

cupper said:
			
		

> It will be a shame when he finds out that the 72 virgins are guys.



And may love bacon. 

One can only hope that karma bites them.....hard.....and I am sure it will.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> It's about time a drone or a JDAM targetted his a**.
> 
> Reuters via Yahoo News



There are many weapons out there that can deliver the proper effect.  Don't limit yourself to one.


----------



## cupper

Eye In The Sky said:
			
		

> There are many weapons out there that can deliver the proper effect.  Don't limit yourself to one.



Why don't we just use them all, and flatten the whole damned area. Nuke 'em till they glow.  :nod:


----------



## cupper

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> I am speechless.  The Muslim Bros. want to do the same in Egypt too.  Photos and video at the story link below.   :rage:



Its Bamiyan all over again.


----------



## OldSolduer

cupper said:
			
		

> Why don't we just use them all, and flatten the whole damned area. Nuke 'em till they glow.  :nod:



Hot bacon grease on all of them.


----------



## SeaKingTacco

You know, a bacon grease bomb would be an interesting weapon on a bunch of levels....


----------



## OldSolduer

SeaKingTacco said:
			
		

> You know, a bacon grease bomb would be an interesting weapon on a bunch of levels....



How about a pig feces claymore mine?   :'(


----------



## medicineman

Hamish Seggie said:
			
		

> How about a pig feces claymore mine?   :'(



I remember reading Charlie Beckwith's account of how, when Delta Force was first tagged to try and rescue the hostages in the US Embassy in Tehran, the CIA actually floated the idea of parachuting pigs into the compound on the off chance the IRG would freak out and be too busy dealing with filthy four legged creatures that they wouldn't notice the cammed up two legged ones with guns breaking in...the SEALs jump with their dogs, I suppose someone could teach pigs to parachute too.

MM


----------



## Remius

Another article about why some people refuse to use the term "Islamic".  They even quote the article I linked earlier in the Atlantic.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/why-barack-obama-won-t-say-islamic-extremists-1.2969404

A good piece.


----------



## a_majoor

And on to Lebanon? This could be where things get very interesting, especially since Hezbollah, as Iran's proxy army in the region, will be directly targetted by ISIS. I can't imagine Israel having a comfortable feeling about this if it comes to pass either. The introduction of French arms and Saudi money is also interesting, although the idea of either Hezbollah or ISIS getting (more) access to modern arms is not a comforting thoght either. This is just one of those fights where you want everyone to lose:

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/isis-next-target



> *ISIS' Next Target*
> 26 February 2015
> 
> ISIS has announced that Lebanon will be the next state to fall under the sway of its “caliphate.” According to Beirut's Daily Star newspaper, the only reason ISIS hasn't attacked yet in force is because they haven't decided on the mission's commander.
> 
> The Lebanese army is one of the least effective in the Middle East—and that's saying something in a region where the far more capable Syrian and Iraqi armies are utterly failing to safeguard what should be their own sovereign territory.
> 
> So France is going to send a three billion dollar package of weapons to Lebanon and the Saudis are going to pay for it. It won't solve the problem any more than a full-body cast will cure cancer, but it beats standing around and not even trying.
> 
> It may seem surprising at first that Riyadh is willing to fund a Lebanese Maginot Line. Saudi Arabia is the most culturally conservative Arab country and Lebanon is the most liberal, partly because of its one-third Christian minority, but also because Lebanon's Sunni Muslims are, for the most part, Mediterranean merchants rather than isolated desert-dwellers. They've been exposed to cosmopolitan ideas and culture for centuries while most Saudis outside the Hejaz region on the Red Sea have been hermetically sealed off from the wider world and its ways for millennia.
> 
> Despite the vast cultural differences between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, the Saudis want Beirut to remain exactly as it is—a freewheeling Arabic-speaking “Amsterdam” or “Hong Kong” on the Med. The Saudis vacation there in droves when they need a break from their fanatically conservative homeland. The country is like a pressure release valve. If they were to lose it, they'd have to holiday in France where they feel profoundly unwelcome.
> 
> But aside from all that, the Saudis feel just as uneasy about ISIS as everyone else. Never mind the ideological overlap between the upstart jihadists and the Wahhabi-backed monarchy. ISIS threatens every single government in the region. It would make permanent alliances with none and conquer all if it could.
> 
> The Lebanese, of course, are in far more immediate danger. They can feel ISIS' hot breath on their necks. The army has been scrapping with them along the Syrian border for some time now. A majority of Lebanon's population is either Christian, Shia, or Druze, and all three populations rightly see ISIS as a potentially genocidal threat to their very existence. Even the Sunnis, though, fear and loathe ISIS. Other than the nominal sectarian sameness—ISIS also is Sunni—Lebanon's culturally liberal Sunnis have little more in common with ISIS than the French or Italians do.
> 
> A serious invasion of Lebanon by ISIS could unleash a bloodbath that makes the civil war in Syria look like a bar fight with pool sticks and beer mugs. It would be tantamount to a Nazi invasion. Every family in Lebanon is armed to the gills thanks to the state being too weak and divided to provide basic security, but people anywhere in the world facing psychopathic mass-murderers will fight with kitchen knives and even their fingernails and teeth if they have to.
> 
> The only good thing that might emerge from an attempted ISIS invasion is that the eternally fractious Lebanese might finally realize they have enough in common with each other to band together for survival and kindle something that resembles a national identity for the first time in their history.
> 
> Foreign armies don't do well in Lebanon over the long term. The Israelis managed to invade and occupy a large part of the country during the civil war in 1982 and even exiled Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, but they ended up fighting a grinding counterinsurgency against Hezbollah until 2000. The Syrians invaded and dominated the rest of the country, but the biggest demonstrations in the history of the Middle East forced the Assad regime into a humiliating retreat in 2005. Those are just the most recent examples. At the mouth of the Dog River is a mural of sorts. Seventeen conquering armies carved inscriptions into the stone cliffs congratulating themselves for seizing new territory. All, Ozymandias-like, have been vanquished.
> 
> So ISIS will eventually lose if thrusts into Lebanon, but the cost could be unspeakable. Few of Lebanon's prior invaders murdered innocent people with such gleeful ferocity. If ISIS makes any headway at all in that country, the rest of us will see just how barbaric they really are when they violently encounter large numbers of people unlike themselves. And the odds that the West will get sucked even deeper into the great war of the Eastern Mediterranean will only loom larger.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

cupper said:
			
		

> Why don't we just use them all, and flatten the whole damned area. Nuke 'em till they glow.  :nod:



I don't think you meant this literally but comments like this are or can be damaging even if said tongue in cheek.  Obviously there are many innocent people in the area who are the real victims in this.  

Aside from that, there is that lilttle "LOAC" aspect.


----------



## cupper

Eye In The Sky said:
			
		

> I don't think you meant this literally but comments like this are or can be damaging even if said tongue in cheek.  Obviously there are many innocent people in the area who are the real victims in this.
> 
> Aside from that, there is that lilttle "LOAC" aspect.



It was meant in jest. But the fact that it raised the point you made shows the absurdity of doing anything in this shit storm. Because of the risk adverse nature of the Western Governments, and the potential for huge collateral damage resulting in damaging relations with "friendly" muslim populations, it has become a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. 

Short of waiting for ISIS to reach the point where even the most tepid moderate has had enough and the people in Syria and Iraq rise up and stomp them, only a scorched earth policy will ensure a quick and decisive ending. But the cost would be too high a price for the West to pay, and exacerbate the problems we are trying to avoid in the home countries.

But with the latest statement of a possible move into Lebanon could accelerate their demise.


----------



## Fishbone Jones

medicineman said:
			
		

> I remember reading Charlie Beckwith's account of how, when Delta Force was first tagged to try and rescue the hostages in the US Embassy in Tehran, the CIA actually floated the idea of parachuting pigs into the compound on the off chance the IRG would freak out and be too busy dealing with filthy four legged creatures that they wouldn't notice the cammed up two legged ones with guns breaking in...the SEALs jump with their dogs, I suppose someone could teach pigs to parachute too.
> 
> MM



Are you suggesting that pigs fly? We're all doomed.


----------



## cupper

recceguy said:
			
		

> Are you suggesting that pigs fly? We're all doomed.



I think he was suggesting that the fall gracefully. All is still well. ;D


----------



## CougarKing

Turkey and the Kurds making peace so they can focus on other threats?

Defense News



> *Turkey, Kurds Announce Landmark Deal for Peace*
> 
> ANKARA — Turkey and its restive Kurdish population have announced a landmark deal that may soon end 31 years violence in the country.
> 
> The pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) announced Feb. 28 at a joint press conference with senior cabinet ministers a call by the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) for a congress in spring to discuss disarmament.
> 
> Around 40,000 people have lost their lives since 1984 when the PKK launched an armed struggle for a Kurdish homeland.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Kat Stevens

If I were the Kurdish authorities I'd trust Turkey about as far as I could blow it down a brass tube.


----------



## Jed

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> If I were the Kurdish authorities I'd trust Turkey about as far as I could blow it down a brass tube.



You're thinkin' what I'm thinkin'.


----------



## OldSolduer

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> If I were the Kurdish authorities I'd trust Turkey about as far as I could blow it down a brass tube.



If I were Kurdish I wouldn't trust anyone.


----------



## Old Sweat

And the other way around too. One can only assume the long term objectives of both sides are unchanged.


----------



## CougarKing

Egypt taking its war against ISIS beyond mere air strikes in retaliation for the Egyptian Christian hostages killed by ISIS recently:

Debka.com



> *Egypt goes to war on ISIS, masses troops against Islamist Libyan stronghold at Darnah*
> 
> DEBKAfile Exclusive Report February 28, 2015, 8:51 AM (IDT)
> 
> *Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi has deployed his troops for all-out war on ISIS strongholds in Libya, the first Arab ruler to challenge the Islamists in a fellow Arab country.*
> 
> His intiative dramatizes the spillover of the Islamist State’s threat across the Middle East, and the fading impetus of the US-led coalition effort to reverse Islamic State gains in Iraq and Syria.
> 
> Our Washington sources report that the Obama administration’s planned spring campaign to free Iraqi Mosul from the Islamic State’s occupation is stuck in the sand. Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike accuse the president of having no clear war strategy and of holding back from the US-led coalition the fighting manpower necessary for a successful operation.
> 
> Answering questions in the Senate WEdnesday, Feb. 25, the coalition commander, retired Gen. John Allen, said he had no hard-and-fast timeline for the war. The influential Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California responded angrily: Your answers show one thing about the timeline defined by the White House as an enduring ground operation: “There is none.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> He is also considering aerial bombardments of the Gaza Strip to target Hamas’ military arm whose active collaboration with the jihadis has been confirmed by intelligence.
> 
> *Some of the militias which have divided Darnah, a town of app. 50,000, among themselves, have declared their territories provinces of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s Islamic Caliphate.
> 
> According to our military sources, Egyptian forces will be assigned to attack the town from the north after a beach landing. They plan to link up with allied Libyan militias commanded by the former Qaddafi regime general Khalifa Hifter*, who will come from Benghazi to strike the town from the south. Khalif and his armed men have been pursuing a relentless war on the inroads made by al Qaeda in Libya, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, with quiet backing from Cairo.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More young women lost to ISIS recruiting:

Reuters



> *CCTV shows British schoolgirls at Istanbul bus station on way to Syria: media*
> 
> ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Security footage appears to show three British schoolgirls, believed to be on their way to join Islamic State militants, waiting for hours at a bus station in Turkey before traveling to a city near the Syrian border, media reported on Sunday.
> 
> British police and the girls' families have issued urgent appeals for their daughters to return home after they flew to Istanbul from London on Feb. 17.* Friends Amira Abase, 15, Shamima Begum, 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16, are thought to have since entered Syria*, British police have said.
> 
> European governments have called on Turkey to stem the flow of foreign fighters to Syria, and British Prime Minister David Cameron has urged social media firms to do more to deal with online extremism, saying the girls appeared to have been radicalized "in their bedrooms."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

While this is sad for the parents, at this point in time if we are not willing to provide the social, political and cultural milieu to bring and keep people into western society, then probably the best way to cut our losses is to allow these radicalized people to leave and let them take their chances in the "hard rain" over Syria.

A lot of the blame for this does have to go to the sorts of people here in the West who have done everything possible to downgrade Western culture via Multiculturalism, relativism, "political correctness" and so on. If people who come to live or grow up in the West have no strong culture to identify with, then the rootless people will go to whoever promises to fill the vacuum.


----------



## CougarKing

Yemen disintegrating into a 3-sided civil war between Al Qaeda vs the Houthi/Shia rebels vs Yemeni Pres. Hadi's govt. forces...

Military.com



> *Yemen, a U.S. Counter-Terrorism Partner, Teeters on Edge of Collapse*
> 
> Los Angeles Times | Mar 01, 2015 | by Patrick J. McDonnell
> SANA, Yemen -- The capital remains firmly in the hands of northern-based Shiite Muslim rebels.
> 
> Sunni Muslim tribesmen to the east are arming in revolt and threatening to sabotage the country's crucial oil and gas infrastructure.
> 
> *In the south, where separatist sentiment is rampant, President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi is setting up a rival power base with loyal militiamen, army units and tribes -- and the backing of powerful Persian Gulf states.*
> 
> The fast-moving events of recent weeks have left Yemen, a key partner in U.S. counter-terrorism efforts, on the edge of collapse and veering toward a possible civil war with sectarian overtones.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

More Christian soldiers taking to the field. Sadly, as a minority group they simply don't have the numbers to do more than defend their own enclaves for however long they can:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11442355/How-Syrias-Christians-stopped-turning-the-other-cheek.html



> *How Syria's Christians stopped turning the other cheek*
> New Christian militia goes into battle against Isil - but pays a high price
> By RIchard Spencer, Middle East Editor
> 7:11PM GMT 28 Feb 2015
> 
> Like many of Syria’s warriors, Kino Gabriel was a student four years ago, training to be a dentist.
> 
> Like many other Syrians, he resisted the call to war, until he saw the threat to the towns and villages where he grew up and worshipped.
> 
> Like countless thousands, he soon found himself, gun in hand, snow falling in the bitter Syrian winter, fighting for his life, claiming his first kills.
> 
> Mr Gabriel, though, is a rarity in this remorseless conflict. He is a Christian, a member of a minority that in both Syrian and Iraqi wars has tried desperately to stay on the sidelines.
> 
> No longer. Christian militias have existed for a number of years, sometimes patrolling neighbourhoods, sometimes venturing further afield. But now they are engaged in their first major battle.
> 
> For the last week, they have been fighting the jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant across a major front in north-west Syria, in alliance with the YPG, the Kurdish defence forces. They have had mixed fortunes, but the battle has energised Middle East Christians worldwide - many of them exiles who fled the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.
> 
> “We saw what happened in Iraq in 2003,” Mr Gabriel said, speaking by Skype from Qamishli, near the front line. “Our people were left alone, with no autonomy, no army that could defend them.
> 
> “Most of our people have emigrated, thanks to attacks from al-Qaeda and other groups. They couldn’t defend themselves. We learned that lesson and have prepared ourselves.”
> 
> In 2003, the Christian population of Iraq was well over one million. Now it is less than half that. In June last year, more than 600,000 were driven out of their homes when Isil swept across the Nineveh plain, traditional homeland of Assyrian Christians, in northern Iraq last summer.
> 
> In Syria, when the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in 2011, the church was split, with many bishops supporting the regime but individuals joining forces with liberal activists in protest against him.
> 
> Few actually felt compelled to fight, though, until the onslaught against Christian villages and churches, first by Jabhat al-Nusra, and later by Isil.
> 
> Christians have seen churches blown up, crosses torn down, and those living under jihadist rule have been forced to pay the “jizya”, a special tax.
> 
> In a particular irony, Armenian Christians who came to Syria in flight from pogroms in their native Turkey 100 years ago have now been forced to flee in the opposite direction.
> 
> Syria, even more than Iraq, is a patchwork of sects and languages: many of these Christians speak and conduct services in Aramaic, the language of Christ.
> 
> Mr Gabriel’s chance at the front came at Christmas 2013, when he joined a militia known as the Syriac Military Council, which was fighting alongside Kurds in a battle for the town of Tel Hamis, south of Qamishli, his home city. Tel Hamis was in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian Al-Qaeda branch from which Isil then split off.
> 
> “I think I was prepared,” Mr Gabriel, a former lay servant in the church, said. “I was a little bit afraid - it was my first battle.”
> 
> He and his fellow fighters managed to drive the Jabhat al-Nusra fighters back, but the attack stalled in the December snow. The area has been fought over ever since, with the YPG and their Syriac Military Council allies claiming on Friday to have finally retaken Tel Hamis, this time from Isil, which took over Jabhat al-Nusra positions last year.
> 
> The local Arab population is split, with some supporting the Kurds, others the Islamists.
> 
> The effect on the wider community of the expanded fighting front, though, has been disastrous. Many of the Christians have fled - more than 1,000 families in the last week alone, according to George Merza, head of the local Assyrian council.
> 
> On Monday, more than 300 of those Christians that remained were taken hostage in a lightning Isil counter-offensive in villages around Tel Tamer, in north-west Syria’s semi-desert.
> 
> “They are innocent people, children, women and elders,” Mr Merza said. “We demand an immediate intervention to save our people, who have lived on this land for thousands of years in peace. Today they are driven to death and destruction. This is inhuman.”
> 
> The Syriac Military Council is hoping to offer Isil a prisoner swap, returning eight jihadis captured in the battle for Tel Hamis for the civilian captives, but no negotiations have yet begun.
> 
> The resistance put up by the Christian fighters from these ancient communities, heirs to Senacherib and Ashurnasirpal, the great Assyrian emperors of the Biblical era, has heartened an international diaspora which has up to now watched events unfold with glum, helpless horror.
> 
> Assyrians and Syriacs as far afield as London, New York and Sweden have posted patriotic appeals online. For many, it is their cousins who have been captured, and who are dying in battle.
> 
> Some have also taken it upon themselves to return home to join up, and have been joined by a number of other Western volunteers. Ashley Johnston, a former Australian soldier, became the first Westerner to die fighting alongside the Kurds and Christians in the battle for Tel Hamis on Monday.
> 
> “Ashley was a good man who never complained and was always positive,” Jordan Matson, the unofficial leader of the Kurds’ foreign legion, said in a Facebook tribute. “I consider it an honour to have known and served with him.”
> 
> Mr Matson pointed out that Mr Johnston was considered a criminal in Australia, which has made it an offence to fight in the war on either side.
> 
> The question of whether to fight or not remains, though, a major big question for the Christian exiles. They ask themselves whether it is right or even worthwhile to risk their lives for a diminished, violent homeland.
> 
> The Christians of the region have long held that they should “turn the other cheek” in the face of assault and discrimination.
> 
> Father Tony Malham, an Assyrian priest who has left Iraq and now serves the community in London, says that this is the only pragmatic response, given that Christians are overwhelmingly outnumbered.
> 
> “On the one hand, this is our homeland; on the other, it’s not true to say it’s our homeland any more,” he said. “If we want to have a home for ourselves we have to fight for it, but as Christians we can’t fight, we can’t kill.
> 
> “We have to talk, we have to talk in a civilised way. But these people who are against us can’t talk, they can only fight and kill.
> 
> Mr Gabriel acknowledges that at just 1,000 strong, his militia is a small force compared to those ranged against it. But he says he can no longer stand by and watch his people driven from their homes like sheep.
> 
> “Over the past century, our people six times have suffered displacement, massacres, other forms of aggression,” he said.
> 
> “This has targeted the Syriacs and the Christian presence in the Middle East. We are acting based on the facts before us - to protect ourselves on our historical land. This is our right and duty.”


----------



## jollyjacktar

Full story and photos at link below.



> *Isis 'fed murdered kidnap victim to his own mother after she travelled to their headquarters and demanded to see him' *
> 
> ByJennifer Newton for MailOnline
> 
> Published: 06:05 GMT, 2 March 2015 | Updated: 14:49 GMT, 2 March 2015
> 
> A British fighter who travelled to Iraq to stop the Islamic State claims the terror group fed a murdered kidnap victim to his own mother after she went to their headquarters and demanded to see him.
> 
> Yasir Abdulla, a security guard from Keighley, West Yorkshire decided to go to Iraq and fight against ISIS after hearing they came within six miles of taking control of his home village in Kurdistan, which he left in 2000.
> 
> It has been reported that the 36-year-old bought a set to combat fatigues online for £100 before going to Kurdistan and buying an assault rifle.
> 
> He then joined hundreds of other Kurdish and Peshmerga forces who are trying to stop the spread of ISIS by patrolling a ten-mile front line in Iraq.
> 
> Mr Abdulla returned to the UK last week but told The Sun how an elderly Kurdish woman, whose son was captured by ISIS and taken to Mosul, went to meet the jihadis to try and secure his release and was then fed his body.
> 
> The father of four told the newspaper: 'She was determined to find her son and went to ISIS headquarters and asked to see him.
> 
> 'The ISIS men told her to sit down because she had travelled a long way and said she should have some food before they took her to meet her son.
> 
> 'They brought her cups of tea and fed her a meal of cooked meat, rice and soup. She thought they were kind.
> 
> 'But they had killed him and chopped him up and after she finished the meal and asked to see her son they laughed and said "You've just eaten him."'
> 
> During his time on the front line, Mr Abdulla revealed how ISIS are terrorising locals by calling them and threatening to kidnap them and bury them alive unless they surrender.
> 
> He also told of how the terror group kill prisoners they capture by throwing them on a 'human bonfire' and that he saw his own cousin killed in an ISIS attack.
> 
> But despite returning back to his family in Yorkshire, Mr Abdulla is keen to go back to Kurdistan saying he wants to finish the job in defeating ISIS.
> 
> The new details about the cruelty of ISIS come as Iraq's prime minister called on tribal fighters to abandon the jihadis ahead of an offensive to retake Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit from extremists.
> 
> Haider al-Abadi offered no timeline for an attack on Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, which fell into the hands of ISIS last summer.
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2975200/Isis-fed-murdered-kidnap-victim-mother-travelled-headquarters-demanded-him.html#ixzz3TFJzYwMc
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## jollyjacktar

What a surprise...  :



> Jihadi John's mother screamed 'that's my son' when she saw first beheading video - but did not report him
> 
> Ghania Emwazi realised that the the knife-wielding executioner who appeared in video showing murder of US journalist James Foley was her son Mohammed
> 
> By Robert Tait, in Kuwait City  2:26PM GMT 02 Mar 2015
> 
> The mother of Mohammed Emwazi knew instantly he was Jihadi John when he first appeared in front of the cameras in the murder of American journalist James Foley after recognising his voice, Kuwaiti investigators have been told.
> 
> Ghania Emwazi screamed "that's my son" as the knife-wielding executioner made a speech in English while standing behind Mr Foley moments before beheading him last August.
> 
> But she did not tell the authorities, it has emerged.
> 
> Mr Foley, 40, was the first of at least five Western hostages of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant thought to have been executed at the hands of Mohammed Emzawi, who grew up in London.
> 
> Western media revealed last week that British and US intelligence had established that the killer was Emwazi, causing widespread shock and dismay in Kuwait, the Arab Gulf kingdom, where he was born.
> 
> But it emerged on Monday that Emwazi's parents had been aware of their son's activities for months after realising that his was the voice on the video, according to testimony given to Kuwaiti police by his father, Jassem, 51.
> 
> Mr Emwazi Snr was questioned along with one of his sons for most of the day on Sunday after being summoned by police.
> 
> "The mother recognised the voice and she screamed 'that is my son' while he was talking before beheading the first American hostage," a source familiar with the Kuwaiti investigation said. "When they played the video again, the father was sure it was his son."
> 
> Insiders described Mr Emwazi as "emotional and upset at what had happened to his son" while talking to investigators.
> 
> "I am waiting day-by-day to hear about his death," he is said to have told his interrogators."
> 
> Mr Emwazi – who now lives in Al-Oyoun, a neighbourhood near Taima, about 20 miles outside Kuwait City – said he last had contact with his son in 2013, shortly before he travelled to Turkey. He is said to have told his parents that he planned to move to Syria to "deliver aid".
> 
> The father, who holds British citizenship like his son, is understood to be employed by a Co-op supermarket in Kuwait. But workers there said he only showed up every six months in order to renew his Kuwaiti residence permit.
> 
> Although Emwazi emigrated to the UK along with his parents and siblings in the 1990s, most members of the family are believed to have moved back to Kuwait, where police kept them under close surveillance following the recent revelations.
> 
> The al-Oyoun area was described as a closed zone on Monday.
> 
> Mr Emwazi snr is said to have been a Kuwaiti police officer himself, having served from 1980 until 1993. He has been reported by some sources to have left Kuwait after collaborating with Saddam Hussien's Iraqi forces after they invaded Kuwait in 1990. He gained British citizeship in 2002 and moved back to Kuwait the following year, according to local sources.
> 
> The family belongs to a group known as Bedoons (without in Arabic), who do not have full Kuwaiti citizenship and lack full educational and employment rights. Many live in impoverished sprawling neighbourhoods in Taima in ramshackle tumbledown houses.
> 
> Full story here:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11444736/Mother-of-Mohammed-Emwazi-knew-he-was-Jihadi-John-from-the-outset.html


----------



## cupper

The more I read about what these turds carry out in the name of the twisted form of their religious beliefs, the more I think that we should institute retribution eye for eye, hand for hand.

Maybe rounding up family members if known ISIS members and doing to them the same that they do to hostages, subjugated populations. Taking captured ISIS members and doing the same as they do to captured allied forces.

But that would be wrong, and stooping to the same level of barbarism as these f__ktards.


----------



## Sean Murray

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/01/main-u-s-backed-syrian-rebel-group-disbanding-joining-islamists.html

This is a huge setback. Would it be safe to say that the West has failed in Syria? Is it fair to say that the failure of the west to get involved sufficiently has resulted in the decline of moderate forces and the rise of radical jihadists? Is it safe to say that with the loss of this brigade, there will be a further lack of will by the West to get involved more deeply in the conflict?


----------



## cupper

cupper said:
			
		

> Its Bamiyan all over again.



It appears that the damage may not be as bad as first thought, although there were some real antiquities destroyed. Turns out that a lot of the artifacts inside the museum were actually replicas, with the real artifacts "safely" ensconced in the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad.

*Did ISIS Smash Fake Sculptures in Mosul? Experts Say Many of Them Were Replicas*

http://news.artnet.com/art-world/did-isis-smash-fake-sculptures-in-mosul-271776



> While no one should take ISIS to be any less of a threat than it is, we might take some small consolation from the possibility that some of the sculptures the militants smashed on video this week at the Nineveh Museum in Mosul, Iraq, were replicas. While an Assyrian stone lion smashed in the videos is indisputably a terrible loss, the destruction of replicas in this particular case may soften the blow.
> 
> "According to archaeologists, most if not all the statues in the Mosul museum are replicas not originals," reports Channel 4 News, London. “The reason they crumble so easily is that they're made of plaster. ‘You can see iron bars inside," pointed out Mark Altaweel of the Institute of Archaeology at University College, London, as we watched the video together. ‘The originals don't have iron bars.'"
> 
> “According to the British Institute," adds Channel 4, “the originals were taken to Baghdad for safekeeping. ISIS probably wouldn't care about the distinction. One false idol is the same as another."
> 
> All the same, reaction around the world has been swift and horrified (see The Metropolitan Museum and Others Respond to ISIS Destruction of Assyrian Sculptures). ISIS has also done a brisk business in smuggling antiquities out of the region for sale on foreign markets (see Increase in Antiquities Smuggling Busts amidst Government Crackdown), though the international trade is mostly focused on smaller items.
> 
> Why are the militants so bent on destruction of the region's cultural heritage? Amr al-Azm, a Syrian anthropologist and historian, told the New York Times that the destruction of artworks, and the slaughter and capture of Assyrians and others in the area that it accompanied, are strategic. While the militants claim that they are smashing the sculptures because they are idols forbidden by Islam, he posits that “It's all a provocation" aimed to lure U.S. and Iraqi forces to try to retake Mosul. “They want a fight with the West because that's how they gain credibility and recruits," Azm said.
> 
> ISIS has “repeatedly threatened to destroy [the museum's] collection," according to the Times, since they took the city in June.




*Islamic State fighters smash historic statues in Iraq*

http://www.channel4.com/news/islamic-state-fighters-smash-historic-statues-in-iraq



> It looks terrible - vandals of the Islamic State attacking ancient Assyrian statues with sledge-hammers.
> 
> Nineveh, on the site of modern day Mosul, was the capital of the Assyrian empire that lasted nineteen centuries from 2500 to 605 BC.
> 
> But, according to archaeologists, most if not all the statues in the Mosul museum are replicas not originals. The reason they crumble so easily is that they're made of plaster.
> 
> "You can see iron bars inside," pointed out Mark Altaweel of the Institute of Archaeology at University College, London, as we watched the video together. "The originals don't have iron bars."
> 
> According to Eleanor Robson, chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, the majority of original statues have been taken to the Baghdad Museum for safe-keeping.
> 
> *'The winged bull'*
> 
> Nonetheless, the stone winged bull you can see being destroyed is an original, probably one at the gates to Nineveh, dating back to the seventh century.
> 
> "I think the Winged Bull is very important locally, because it's one of the few objects that hasn't left the country or gone to Baghdad," said Dr Robson.
> 
> The demolition squad of the Islamic State are following in the tradition of the Taliban who blew up the Buddhas at Bamyan, in Afghanistan, and the Malian jihadi group Ansar al Dine which destroyed mud tombs and ancient Islamic manuscripts in Timbuktu.
> 
> They quote suras from the Koran that they say demand the destruction of idols and icons. But iconoclasm isn't just a Salafi Islamic idea. In the 17th Century, puritans, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, destroyed Catholic holy objects and art in Britain.
> 
> "We pulled down two mighty great angells, with wings, and divers other angells . . . and about a hundred chirubims and angells," wrote William Dowsing, Cromwell's chief wrecker, after leading his henchmen into Peterhouse college chapel in Cambridge in December 1643.
> 
> Countless works of art were lost to history. But such vandalism doesn't just destroy objects. It's also an attempt to deny people their sense of self.
> 
> "What ISIS does by destroying cultural sites is fundamentally to undermine people's hope," said Dr Robson. "It undermines the cohesion that holds communities and societies together. That's why it's so damaging and so hard."


----------



## quadrapiper

cupper said:
			
		

> It appears that the damage may not be as bad as first thought, although there were some real antiquities destroyed. Turns out that a lot of the artifacts inside the museum were actually replicas, with the real artifacts "safely" ensconced in the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad.


Now would be the time for the National Museum, and any other institution with moveable antiquities in Iraq, to pack up their treasures and send them abroad: to India or Australia, perhaps. Can't imagine tourists are flocking to Baghdad at the moment.


----------



## cupper

quadrapiper said:
			
		

> Now would be the time for the National Museum, and any other institution with moveable antiquities in Iraq, to pack up their treasures and send them abroad: to India or Australia, perhaps. Can't imagine tourists are flocking to Baghdad at the moment.



In fact the Iraqi National Museum just pushed up it's reopening after the 2003 invasion to today, as a show of standing up to ISIS.

On another note, ISIS or agents acting for them have made threats against Twitter, its CEO and employees in reaction to having their Twitter feeds shut down,

http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2015/03/02/isis-threatens-billionaire-jack-dorsey-and-twitter-as-terrorists-display-social-media-savvy/


----------



## a_majoor

cupper said:
			
		

> The more I read about what these turds carry out in the name of the twisted form of their religious beliefs, the more I think that we should institute retribution eye for eye, hand for hand.
> 
> Maybe rounding up family members if known ISIS members and doing to them the same that they do to hostages, subjugated populations. Taking captured ISIS members and doing the same as they do to captured allied forces.
> 
> But that would be wrong, and stooping to the same level of barbarism as these f__ktards.



Jordan is already at that point, and given human nature I am fairly certain that more and more people are going to flip over to that way of looking at things. Looking at the history of the 30 years war, that is about a certain a prediction as you can get.

Since this is, to a large extent, a religious war between the Shia and Sunni's, the best thing *we* can do is to take a step back and let the Saudi's, Iranians and Turks use their proxies to fight it out for regional hegemony. They can bloody their hands with atrocities and take the consequences. Far better for us to stand aside and contain the fighting to within the region as the most active road we should take.


----------



## a_majoor

More on Christian soldiers coming to join the fight against ISIS, in the National Post:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/02/moved-by-plight-of-christians-modern-day-crusaders-head-to-iraq-as-holy-defenders-of-faith-against-isis/



> *Moved by plight of Christians, modern-day defenders of the faith head to Iraq to fight ISIS*
> Loveday Morris, Washington Post | March 2, 2015 | Last Updated: Mar 2 11:39 AM ET
> 
> DOHUK, Iraq — In a smoky living room in a makeshift military headquarters in this northern Iraqi city, Brett, a former U.S serviceman with tattoos of Jesus etched on his forearms, explains how he hopes to help to keep the church bells of Iraq ringing.
> 
> “Jesus tells us what you do unto the least of them, you do unto me,” said the 28-year-old from Detroit, who served an extended tour in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 and asked for his surname not to be published to protect his family at home. “I couldn’t sit back and watch what was happening, women being raped and sold wholesale.”
> 
> So in December he travelled to northern Iraq, where he joined a growing band of foreigners leaving their lives in the West behind to fight with newly formed Christian militias. The leaders of those militias say they’ve been swamped with hundreds of requests from veterans and volunteers from around the world who want to join them.
> 
> The new arrivals add to a varied array of foreign fighters and donors drawn to the expanding conflict, which has had a brutal impact on Iraq’s minority sects and is threatening Christianity here at its roots. But while they say they welcome the gesture, Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq are wondering how to vet foreign recruits who are clamoring to sign up.
> 
> Brett’s group, Dwekh Nawsha, which means “self-sacrifice” in Aramaic, the ancient language spoken by Jesus, has only six Westerners among its 200 Iraqi Assyrian Christian fighters. But Emanuel Khoshaba Youkhana, the secretary general of the Assyrian Patriotic Party, which funds the group, says more than 900 other foreigners have been in touch to find out how to join.
> 
> Some of the newly arrived say they’ve come to fight for their religion — others just to fight. Brett calls himself the “King of Nineveh” — after the province of ancient Christian villages now occupied by the Islamic State. He lifts his shirt to show a tattoo of St. Michael on his back and the Twenty-Third Psalm, inked up his side.
> 
> The Iraqi Assyrians he fights alongside, not all of whom are impressed by the “King of Nineveh” persona, stress that this is not a crusade, but a fight to return to their homes.
> 
> “We don’t want to fight a holy war for Christians,” said Marcus Naissan, 25, an Iraqi Assyrian fighter. “We fight for our land.”
> 
> He said that while the influx of foreigners brings the media spotlight and potential funding, it also brings concerns.
> 
> “We aren’t crusaders,” he said. “That’s how they make it look.”
> 
> Brett and others say they receive dozens of emails a day from potential recruits.
> 
> “This place will be flooded,” he said. “From Australia, Asia, literally everywhere. It’s overwhelming, it’s awesome.”
> 
> All recruits are interviewed before they come to ensure their intentions are good, he said. Youkhana says checks are carried out, but he wouldn’t go into the details.
> 
> At the base in Dohuk, Louis Park, a former Marine from Houston, nervously drums his fingers on his Kalashnikov as he explains that he’s desperate get to the front line to fight Islamic State militants.
> 
> “I was prepared for this to be a one-way ticket,” said the 24-year-old, who was discharged from the service just over a month ago after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, following a six-month tour in Afghanistan in 2012. “I just want to get out there.”
> 
> He decided to join the group after the Marines said he would not be deployed again because of his diagnosis.
> 
> “I couldn’t adjust to peacetime,” he said. “The fight for me wasn’t over. I felt I didn’t have a purpose anymore.”
> 
> While religion wasn’t a particular motivation, he said Dwekh Nawsha’s fight against the Islamic State was an easy one to relate to.
> 
> Some foreigners have concerns about potential legal entanglements on their return home. The Christian units are on the home turf of the Kurds, and a Kurdish paramilitary group that is battling the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, called the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
> 
> Masrour Barzani, Kurdistan’s national security chief, said that foreign governments were being kept up to date on those travelling to join military groups.
> 
> “There are regulations we have to bear in mind and make sure everything happens according to the legal structure,” said Barzani. “We are thankful for any volunteer that is coming here and fight. But we don’t lack men, we lack weapons.”
> 
> Currently waiting for papers to confirm that their status is legal, most of the foreigners with Dwekh Nawsha have yet to see much in the way of combat.
> 
> Just two have the right paperwork to travel with their weapons, Youkhana said, leaving the others largely confined to their base in Dohuk.
> 
> Other recruits are being held back until paperwork is organized for those who have already arrived.
> 
> Hussein Malla / AP PhotoIn this, Feb. 28, 2015 photo, an Assyrian man with a red cross painted on his forehead holds a banner as he walks during a protest of several hundred people in solidarity with Christians abducted in Syria and Iraq, in downtown Beirut, Lebanon. ..
> 
> Tim Locks, a 38-year-old from Britain who ran a construction firm before arriving in Iraq two weeks ago, admits the wait has been frustrating.
> 
> “We are just waiting for the I’s to be dotted and the T’s to be crossed,” he said.
> 
> As the Islamic State takes hundreds of Christians hostage across the border in Syria, the leaders here say they are still trying to work out how best to use outside assistance.
> 
> “It’s very good to have the Westerners coming,” said Cpt. Khalid Hamzo, an officer with the official peshmerga forces. He said he recently obtained permission to take two foreigners out to the front lines to see if they could help resolve an issue with a supply of mortars that weren’t exploding.
> 
> “But they couldn’t help without the Internet,” he said, as he left the makeshift headquarters with a printout of a manual on 81-mm. mortars. “We need artillery experts.”
> 
> The Assyrian Christian fighters are largely kept away from the front lines. At Dwekh Nawsha’s forward operating base in the Christian village of Baqufa, they make up the second line of defence behind Kurdish peshmerga forces. The battle here is largely static, but mortar fire is exchanged daily.
> 
> For the Iraqi Christian fighters here, the battle is more personal.
> 
> Roni Najm, 21, can see his village from the telescope positioned on the building’s roof. Islamic State’s black flag flutters above its church.
> 
> “It just makes you cry,” he said.


----------



## OldSolduer

IIRC a bunch of terrorists kidnapped some Soviet Citiznes in Lebanon in the 80s. According to the story, the Soviets kidnapped some Lebanese citizens and sent a finger of one of them to the terrorists with the note "Release ours or there will be more parts to follow".
The Soviets were released quite shortly after this.


----------



## Remius

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> Full story and photos at link below.



That story might be a fabrication...

http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/isisfedson.asp


----------



## jollyjacktar

Crantor said:
			
		

> That story might be a fabrication...
> 
> http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/isisfedson.asp



Yes, the thought did cross my mind as well.  But, so far pretty well everything and more that has been said about their antics has panned out.  There might be at the very least a grain, however small, of truth to this claim.  As this war seems to be a race to the bottom in regards of the depths they won't plunge to on all sides and cruelty abounds as the participants and war becomes vile, it would not surprise me if it is not a fabrication.


----------



## Remius

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> Yes, the thought did cross my mind as well.  But, so far pretty well everything and more that has been said about their antics has panned out.  There might be at the very least a grain, however small, of truth to this claim.  As this war seems to be a race to the bottom in regards of the depths they won't plunge to on all sides and cruelty abounds as the participants and war becomes vile, it would not surprise me if it is not a fabrication.



I wouldn't put it past them, though either.


----------



## CougarKing

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Places like Malaysia and Indonesia have a certain amount of "cultural" strength to resist the advances of Wahhabi fundamentalism, but ultimately it will take the collective will of the people saying "sod off!" and stomping on these goons to effectively preserve their culture and society.



Seems the cultural strength mentioned above by Colin P. wasn't enough to prevent these Malaysians from joining IS, or their predecessors from joining Jemaah Islamiyah (an Al-Qaeda affiliate) or a related Malaysian affiliate group called KMM.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were more IS recruits from Malaysia, Indonesia, the southern Philippines and southern Thailand. 

2 Islamic insurgent groups in the southern Philippines called BIFF and Abu Sayyaf recently pledged allegiance to ISIS, if I can recall correctly.

Reuters



> *Two Malaysians identified in IS beheading video from Syria*
> 
> KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysian authorities have identified two Malaysians in a video by the Islamic State of a beheading that is believed to have taken place in Syria.
> 
> Mohd Faris Anuar and Muhamad Wanndy Muhammad Jedi, aged 20 and 25 respectively, were identified as the men involved in the beheading of a Syrian man in a video posted to Facebook on Feb. 22, said Ayub Khan Mydin, the police counter-terrorism division's deputy chief.
> 
> Wanndy traveled with his wife Nor Mahmudah Ahmad to Syria on Jan. 26, while Faris went last September, said Ayub Khan.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

How was ISIS able to use these oil fields to fund its activities if most of the international community knows that buying from them essentially funds terrorism/instability? Black market buyers of oil from Turkey, etc.?

Reuters



> *Islamic State torches oil field near Tikrit as militia advance*
> 
> By Saif Hameed and Dominic Evans
> 
> BAGHDAD (Reuters) - *Islamic State militants have set fire to oil wells northeast of the city of Tikrit to obstruct an assault by Shi'ite militiamen and Iraqi soldiers trying to drive them from the Sunni Muslim city and surrounding towns*, a witness said.
> 
> The witness and a military source said Islamic State fighters ignited the fire at the Ajil oil field to shield themselves from attack by Iraqi military helicopters.
> 
> The offensive is the biggest Iraqi forces have yet mounted against IS, which has declared an Islamic caliphate on captured territory in Iraq and Syria and spread fear across the region by slaughtering Arab and Western hostages and killing or kidnapping members of religious minorities like Yazidis and Christians.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> How was ISIS able to use these oil fields to fund its activities if most of the international community knows that buying from them essentially funds terrorism/instability? Black market buyers of oil from Turkey, etc.?
> 
> Reuters



Because oil is a fungible commodity (i.e. the end user generally neither knows nor cares where it comes from), the black market is probably the best explanation. After a few links in the chain, the end buyer really has no idea where the oil came from if the documentation is doctored. Fungability works both ways; the crash in oil prices affects both friends (Alberta) and enemies (Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran), even if the proximate causes are far removed (modern tracking technology driving a production boom in the US is a big factor, reducing demand for imported oil).

And BTW, although the Persian Gulf is perhaps the main global source of crude oil, the US imported much of its oil from Mexico, Venezuela and Canada, so US reduction in demand for imported oil isn't _directly_ impacting OPEC, but by changing market forces is indirectly impacting prices. A surge in demand from China or India, or changes in supply by Saudi Arabia could reset the picture again.


----------



## Edward Campbell

According to the _Daily mail__:

'Sorry mum': Jihadi John apologises to his family for having his identity revealed - but not for beheading western hostages

"Mohammed Emwazi has apologised to his parents for bringing shame to the family after being unmasked as ISIS butcher 'Jihadi John'.

But the 26-year-old executioner, who has murdered a number of western hostages, including two British aid workers, has not expressed any remorse for the barbaric killings. 

Emwazi's family have been forced into hiding since his identity was revealed."






Killer: Mohammed Emwazi in the most recent
photograph known to have been taken of him before
he entered Syria to join ISIS militants. 

_


----------



## McG

If this war will decide which nation "leads" the middle east, Iran is stepping-up to be the heavy hitter.


> *Signs point to Iran taking over the ground war in Iraq*
> While Canadian and other forces are training Iraqi Kurds, and coalition jets are bombing select IS targets, Iranian-back militias and Iranian forces themselves are leading the charge against Islamic State strongholds
> Patrick Martin
> Globe and Mail
> 06 Mar 2015
> 
> While Canadian and other forces are training Iraqi Kurds, and coalition jets are bombing select IS targets, Iranian-back militias and Iranian forces themselves are leading the charge against Islamic State strongholds
> 
> It’s been said that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But, when it comes to Iraq and Iran, it’s not quite so simple, as the United States and allies such as Canada are finding out.
> 
> During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, Washington made a clear choice: Iran, ruled by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was the enemy. After all, it was Khomeini’s followers who had overrun the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held dozens of Americans hostage. Consequently, Jimmy Carter’s administration went to work helping Saddam Hussein’s forces take the fight to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. U.S. officials provided Iranian commanders with almost daily intelligence briefings on where Iran’s forces were located and what they were up to. The war was still a draw, except that more than a million people died.
> 
> These days, the United States and a coalition that includes Canada have decided that Islamic State is the enemy since it has overrun large areas of Iraq, threatening the peace and sanctity of this recovering country and the region. In the anti-IS campaign involving coalition aircraft and Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces, the United States finds itself in a defacto alliance with none other than Iran, its old enemy.
> 
> Iran too is doing much to help Iraqis fight back against Islamic State. In fact it’s doing a lot more than the U.S.-led coalition. While Canadian and other forces are training Iraqi Kurds, and coalition jets are bombing select IS targets, Iranian-back militias and Iranian forces themselves are leading the charge against Islamic State strongholds. The IS invasion last year was stopped in large part because of Iranian assistance.
> 
> This week the target is Tikrit a major Sunni city in the centre of Iraq that is famous for two things: It was the birthplace of Saladin, the great Kurdish warrior who drove the European Crusaders from the Holy Land, and home to Saddam Hussein, the brutal Iraqi dictator who would have liked to drive Kurds and Shiites out of his country.
> 
> Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Americans this week that Iran is as radicalized today as it ever has been and should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. He also argued that just because Iranians are fighting against Islamic State doesn’t make them good guys. The Shia radicals of Iran and the Sunni radicals of Islamic State are “competing for the crown of militant Islam,” he told the U.S. Congress. There may be something to that.
> 
> On Monday, the two competitors squared off as a reported 30,000 Iraqi personnel launched an assault on towns in the Tikrit area that have been occupied by IS forces since June.
> 
> The attack force was comprised of regular Iraqi army units (mostly Shiites), Shia Iraqi militias, who make up about two thirds of the forces, and some Sunni tribal militias who also have opposed the IS invasion. At the helm of the operation, was Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, who has been directing operations for some of Iraq’s Shia militias. Alongside the fighters Iranian advisers and troops were reported to be operating artillery and surveillance drones.
> 
> There was no U.S. or coalition aircraft anywhere near the fighting; nor were there any Canadian or other coalition trainers on the ground. Iraqi officials said they had not asked the United States or its partners for help. In this battle at least, it is Iran and Iraq that are the friends in the fight against the enemy, Islamic State. The United States and Canada are sidelined.
> 
> “We still welcome the international alliance’s support,” Ali al-Alaa, an aide to Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, told reporters this week. “But if they won’t be supporting us, we have no problem.”
> 
> There might be a big problem, however, if the predominantly Shia attack force attempts to drive the Sunni residents out of the Tikrit area along with the IS fighters, or to carry out reprisals against the population. Such things were perpetrated by Shia militias that defeated IS forces recently in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.
> 
> In June, when IS forces moved into the Tikrit area, there was an apparent massacre of some 1500 Shia cadets at a former U.S. base known as Camp Speicher. The mass execution was said to have been carried out with the assistance of Sunni groups from the area, groups that once were loyal to Saddam Hussein.
> 
> While Iraqi officials say they launched this large-scale operation in Tikrit to lay the groundwork for an assault later this year on the IS-occupied northern city of Mosul, others, including U.S. commanders, aren’t so sure. They worry that the Shia forces may have revenge against the Sunnis foremost in mind and that a sectarian bloodbath may result.
> 
> Sitting on the sidelines, however, they can only watch and wait.


----------



## a_majoor

Much as I have been saying all along. We should simply let Turkey and the Gulf States continue with their support of ISIS so they can fight their proxy war against Iran without the meddling *crusaders* getting in the way of the fun.

While this is going to be a disaster for civilians on all sides, there is really nothing we can do at this point, the problem has expanded far beyond our resources and ability to do anything decisive. We can continue to support the few "friends" we really have in the region (Israel, Jordan, the Kurds and Baloch) just to complicate matters for the Shia and Sunni sides of this 30 years’ war.

Even the idea that *we* would like regional stability to ensure energy supplies is moot these days, the United States now produces 9 million barrels of oil a day, and we are no slouches in the oil and energy department either. Europe will soon have access to giant natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea, and I'm fairly sure that Fracking technologies could be used in the North Sea to revive production in older wells.

So the reasons for *us* to be there are few and far between. Let them spend blood and treasure against each other.


----------



## Kat Stevens

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Much as I have been saying all along. We should simply let Turkey and the Gulf States continue with their support of ISIS so they can fight their proxy war against Iran without the meddling *crusaders* getting in the way of the fun.
> 
> While this is going to be a disaster for civilians on all sides, there is really nothing we can do at this point, the problem has expanded far beyond our resources and ability to do anything decisive. We can continue to support the few "friends" we really have in the region (Israel, Jordan, the Kurds and Baloch) just to complicate matters for the Shia and Sunni sides of this 30 years’ war.
> 
> Even the idea that *we* would like regional stability to ensure energy supplies is moot these days, the United States now produces 9 million barrels of oil a day, and we are no slouches in the oil and energy department either. Europe will soon have access to giant natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea, and I'm fairly sure that Fracking technologies could be used in the North Sea to revive production in older wells.
> 
> So the reasons for *us* to be there are few and far between. Let them spend blood and treasure against each other.



Maybe because there's a likelihood of this happening again, only far more rabid?


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> Maybe because there's a likelihood of this happening again, only far more rabid?




Hmmm ... many of you have been to, fought in, the Balkans; would "we" (the US led West) really miss Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Ukraine and even Greece?


----------



## Kat Stevens

Couldn't give a toss about them, but the rest of Europe may have a bit of a problem with it.


----------



## a_majoor

Realistically, the Ottoman Empire that marched to the gates of Vienna was much more comperable to the European powers of the day than the nations of the Islamic Crescent now. (Even then, the Ottoman Empire had a backwards social and cultural infrastructure and often adopted knockoffs of military hardware designed by the _Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta_)

Think about it; where do all the Arab nations get their military hardware, from small arms to jet fighters? Where does their telecommunications hardware and infrastructure come from? Who makes the cell phones, laptops and even cameras and software they use to make and post beheading videos on the internet? For that matter, while they strain mightlily to build a nuclear weapon, which nations built them on assembly lines?

The problem isn't actually capacity or capability, *rather political and cultural will power*. So long as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran (and to a lesser extent Egypt) are busy fighting each other to see who becomes the regional hegemon, they will be less inclined to march to the gates  of Vienna. For that matter, even if they shold consider such a COA, *we* have the ability to cut off the supply of hardware and technology, most likely have the ability to disable whatever is already there, and control the seaways, making it difficult for them to leave the Middle east or even transfer large numbers of men and equipment outside or even through the region if *we* choose.

Of course that is the sticking point: what will *we* choose to do?


----------



## OldSolduer

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> Couldn't give a toss about them, but the rest of Europe may have a bit of a problem with it.



Really neither would I, but can you hear the howls of indignation from the fuzzy head left leaners, all howling "the government has to do SOMETHING"


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> Couldn't give a toss about them, but the rest of Europe may have a bit of a problem with it.




Might ... but it's likely to happen gradually, if it happens at all.

Is Germany going to fight over Albania? Over Bosnia? Over Greece?


----------



## Kat Stevens

One thing about empires though, they're never happy with what they hold, Germany may not fight for Albania, but it most likely would for Austria, or for itself.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> One thing about empires though, they're never happy with what they hold, Germany may not fight for Albania, but it most likely would for Austria, or for itself.




I agree! The idea if _Mitteleuropa_ lives on. But it never included the Slavic regions ...






Mitteleuropa is the old _Königreich Preußen_ plus the old _Kaisertum Österreich_. One can debate the peripheries, but not very much ... it doesn't include Slavs or Italians or the French; they may be vassal states but they are not part of the _volk_ and, therefor, not worth defending with German blood and treasure ... remember Bismarck and the bones of those Pomeranian grenadiers.


----------



## a_majoor

A fairly good article from the Atlantic on why it is so hard to stop ISIS propaganda. Of course they actually identify the issue without managing to identify the root cause: the various groups attempting to "engage" on line do not have a counter narrative (identified), but the unstated reason they don't have a compelling counter narrative is decades of academics, media and even politicians who have worked so hard to tear down the Western narrative and smother it in a welter of moral relativism, political correctness and victimology. If we don't even fill our own people with a compelling cultural "core" set of values, why should be surprised when people identify with a competing narrative which does offer a very strong set of "core" values?

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/why-its-so-hard-to-stop-isis-propaganda/386216/?utm_source=SFTwitter



> *Why It's So Hard to Stop ISIS Propaganda*
> It requires telling a better story. And the U.S. hasn't come up with one yet.
> Simon CotteeMar 2 2015, 7:30 AM ET
> 
> “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, purportedly wrote in a 2005 letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who led al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time. The previous year, Zarqawi’s network, originally known as Tawhid and Jihad, had publicly released more than 10 beheading videos, including a video believed to show Zarqawi himself beheading the American businessman Nicholas Berg. This was bad PR, Zawahiri cautioned his hotheaded field commander, and risked alienating Muslims.
> 
> Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, but the hyper-violent form of sectarian jihad he pioneered emphatically lives on in the form of ISIS, the direct descendent of al-Qaeda in Iraq. While the group hasn’t exactly followed Zawahiri’s counsel about winning hearts and minds, it has proven fantastically adept at exploiting new social media to disseminate its message. Indeed, it is no exaggeration—although it may now be clichéd—to say that as well as being one of the most savage terrorist groups in the world today, ISIS also has the slickest propaganda. Its media arm Al Ḥayat has produced hundreds of films, ranging from three-minute beheading videos to hour-long features improbably combining elements of travelogue, historical documentary, and atrocity porn. Many are high-quality productions involving Hollywood-style techniques and special effects. One video, titled Clanging of the Swords, Part 4, drew particular praise from the late New York Times media critic David Carr, who wrote, “Anybody who doubts the technical ability of ISIS might want to watch a documentary of Fallujah that includes some remarkable drone camera work.”
> 
> “Media is more than half the battle" also happens to be the motto of the U.S. State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), founded in 2010 as the world’s first government-sponsored enterprise not run by an intelligence agency to counter online jihadist propaganda. The phrase is emblazoned across the opening PowerPoint slide in all CSCC presentations, according to the CSCC’s coordinator Alberto Fernandez. Alongside this quote is a second one, taken from the purported memoir of the American jihadist Omar Hammami, who until his death in 2013 was a leader in the Somali Islamist militant group al-Shabab: “The war of narratives has become even more important than the war of navies, napalm, and knives.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded a similar theme in describing the office’s mission a year after it was founded; it was vital, she said, to diminish the appeal of terrorism, and the CSCC was focused on “undermining terrorist propaganda and dissuading potential recruits.”
> 
> “It’s not about Louis Armstrong and isn’t jazz great and America loves Muslims,” Fernandez told me over a coffee recently, describing what he saw as the general tenor of previous public-relations efforts at the State Department after 9/11. “It’s not about quoting the secretary of state, because that’s boring, that’s lame. Our focus is not on the positive message. What we do is counter-messaging. We’re the guys in the political campaign that [do] negative advertising. We’re in people’s faces.”
> 
> Despite joining the fray relatively late, the CSCC is now at the forefront of what Hammami and Fernandez have both called “the war of narratives,” and has produced well over 50,000 online “engagements” in four languages—Arabic, Urdu, Somali, and English. An engagement in the State Department's terminology can be anything from one of the hundreds of “mash-up” videos the team assembles out of pre-existing footage—in many cases from ISIS’s own videos—to tweets or graphics highlighting the depredations and hypocrisies of the jihadists.
> 
> In addition to this, the CSCC’s so-called digital outreach team (DOT) crashes various online forums to troll ISIS sympathizers and regularly jumps onto pro-ISIS Twitter hashtags. For example, in April last year, an ISIS supporter created an Arabic hashtag translating to “#accomplishmentsofISIS.” Almost immediately the Arabic DOT used the same hashtag to post a series of sarcastic references to ISIS’s “accomplishments” at, variously, “starving people of #Aleppo,” “destroying mosques in #Riqqah,” “crucifixion of young men,” and “squatting, looting and damaging homes.” All of these messages linked to incriminating YouTube videos detailing ISIS atrocities in Syria. The CSCC has even entered into dialogue, if it can be called that, with actual jihadists, including Hammami, with whom Fernandez said it “exchanged barbs” in Arabic over Twitter. “He was clearly troubled,” Fernandez recalled. “I felt sorry for him. He was killed by al-Shabab, not the Americans. We actually referred to his death in one of our videos—‘see what happens if you join these guys.’”
> 
> But unlike their counterparts at the hard military end of the battle against ISIS, the American foot soldiers in the war of narratives are at a considerable disadvantage relative to their jihadist adversary.
> “The war of narratives has become even more important than the war of navies, napalm, and knives.”
> ISIS has beheading videos. The CSCC doesn’t. Beheading videos are shocking and repugnant. But they are also weirdly fascinating—and they go viral for this reason. The CSCC’s videos, by and large, are not shocking or repugnant, still less fascinating—and don’t go viral for this reason. ISIS’s métier is shock and gore, whereas the CSCC’s, to put it unkindly, is more mock and bore, more Fred Flintstone than Freddy Krueger. Shock and gore, needless to say, is where the action is—and hence where the Internet traffic tends to go. “You’re never going to be able to match the power of their outrageousness,” Fernandez said, conceding this disadvantage.
> 
> ISIS has a vast network of “fanboys,” as its virtual supporters are widely and derisively known, who disseminate the group’s online propaganda. (ISIS ennobles them with the title “knights of the uploading.”) They are dedicated, self-sufficient, and even, Fernandez said, occasionally funny. And they are everywhere on Twitter, despite the social-media network’s efforts to ban them. Fernandez described the group’s embrace of social media as “a stroke of genius on their part.” The CSCC doesn’t have fanboys.
> 
> More crucially, ISIS has a narrative. This is often described by the group’s opponents as “superficial” or “bankrupt.” Only it isn’t. It is immensely rich. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence estimates that of the 20,000 or more foreign jihadists believed to have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq, around 100 are from the United States. These fighters may be naive or stupid, but they didn’t sacrifice everything for nothing. John Horgan, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at University of Massachusetts Lowell, told me that people who join groups like ISIS “are trying to find a path, to answer a call to something, to right some perceived wrong, to do something truly meaningful with their lives.”
> 
> *The CSCC doesn’t have a narrative—not one, at any rate, remotely comparable in emotional affect and resonance to that of ISIS. No one is more sharply aware of this than Fernandez himself. “ISIS’s message,” he said, “is that Muslims are being killed and that they’re the solution. ... There is an appeal to violence, obviously, but there is also an appeal to the best in people, to people’s aspirations, hopes and dreams, to their deepest yearnings for identity, faith, and self-actualization. We don’t have a counter-narrative that speaks to that. What we have is half a message: ‘Don’t do this.’ But we lack the ‘do this instead.’ That’s not very exciting. The positive narrative is always more powerful, especially if it involves dressing in black like a ninja, having a cool flag, being on television, and fighting for your people.”
> "We don’t have a counter-narrative. We have half a message: ‘Don’t do this.’ But we lack the ‘do this instead.’"*
> In his biography of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ray Monk discussed Wittgenstein’s decision to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. It wasn’t really about patriotism, Monk suggested. Rather, Wittgenstein “felt that the experience of facing death would, in some way or other, improve him. ... What Wittgenstein wanted from the war was a transformation of his whole personality, a ‘variety of religious experience’ that would change his life irrevocably.” One of the greatest challenges in counterterrorism today is working out how to create a narrative that directly speaks to a similar kind of longing among potential terrorists—and channels that longing in a nonviolent direction. As Scott Atran argues in Talking to the Enemy, “In the long run, perhaps the most important counterterrorism measure of all is to provide alternative heroes and hopes that are more enticing and empowering than any moderating lessons or material offerings.”
> 
> The more immediate, but no less intractable, challenge is to change the reality on the ground in Syria and Iraq, so that ISIS’s narrative of Sunni Muslim persecution at the hands of the Assad regime and Iranian-backed Shiite militias commands less resonance among Sunnis. One problem in countering that narrative is that some of it happens to be true: Sunni Muslims are being persecuted in Syria and Iraq. This blunt empirical fact, just as much as ISIS’s success on the battlefield, and the rhetorical amplification and global dissemination of that success via ISIS propaganda, helps explain why ISIS has been so effective in recruiting so many foreign fighters to its cause.
> 
> Zawahiri was right: Half the battle is media. But the other half—the reality on the ground—is the more important part of the equation. And as long as that reality supports ISIS's narrative, its message will continue to appeal to disaffected Sunnis both within and outside the Muslim world. This is not lost on Fernandez, either: “Saying ISIS is bad is not good enough. There has to be change on the ground. Messaging can shape and shade, but it can’t turn black into white.”


----------



## McG

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Much as I have been saying all along. We should simply let Turkey and the Gulf States continue with their support of ISIS so they can fight their proxy war against Iran without the meddling *crusaders* getting in the way of the fun.


But it appears Saudi Arabia would rather the US fight this war.  I would think that if Saudi Arabia is worried that a power vacuum has given Iran too much influence in Iraq, then Saudi Arabia should send boots and advisors to fill that vacuum before demanding other nations do so.



> Iran ‘taking over’ Iraq, Saudis warn, blaming U.S. refusal to send troops against ISIS
> Richard Spencer, The Telegraph
> The National Post
> 05 Mar 2015
> 
> Saudi Arabia became the second key American ally in the Middle East to demand U.S. President Barack Obama change tack towards Iran Thursday, as it called for U.S.-led coalition “boots on the ground” to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham.
> 
> At a meeting in Riyadh, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, told John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, he risked allowing Iran to “take over Iraq,” echoing Israel’s recent concerns over the White House’s policy toward Tehran.
> 
> The United States and its coalition allies are attacking ISIS positions from the air in both Syria and Iraq, but refusing to send troops. As a result, outside Kurdish areas, the offensive in both countries is heavily influenced by Iran and its proxy Shiite militias, such as Hezbollah.
> 
> This has raised serious concerns in Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Sunni rival for Middle East dominance.
> 
> The Iraqi government is laying siege to ISIS positions in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home city north of Baghdad. But most of its forces are under the command of government-aligned Shiite militias, whose leaders are close to the Iranian regime, even though the population of Tikrit is largely Sunni.
> 
> About 28,000 people have fled their homes in the face of the military operation, according to the United Nations.
> 
> “Tikrit is a prime example of what we are worried about,” Prince Saud said. “Iran is taking over the country.”
> 
> ...
> 
> Saudi Arabia fears the multiple crises in the Arab world have given Tehran an opportunity to extend its power. In Syria, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is heavily dependent on Iranian money, the support of Iranian advisors and Hezbollah. In Yemen, an Iran-backed militia has driven Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, the Saudi-backed president, out of the capital Sanaa.
> 
> In Iraq, although the government is supposed to be balanced between Sunni and Shiite elements, Shiite militia are playing an ever stronger security role since the collapse of the army in the face of the ISIS push across the country last summer.
> 
> The current assault on Tikrit is being masterminded by two men — at least according to the publicity photographs released by pro-Baghdad sources. One is Hadi al-Ameri, the leader of the powerful Badr Organisation, a Shiite militia close to Iran.
> 
> The other is Qassem Suleimani, head of the Iranian Al-Quds force, the overseas operations arm of the Revolutionary Guard. He is said to be coordinating the assault from a village to the east of the city.
> 
> A speech he made at a rally in Iran last month caused alarm through the Persian Gulf.
> 
> “We are witnessing the export of the Islamic revolution throughout the region,” he said. “From Bahrain and Iraq to Syria, Yemen and North Africa.”
> 
> Saudi Arabia, which has long borders with Iraq and Yemen, also has a restive Shiite minority of its own.
> 
> “We see Iran involved in Syria and Lebanon and Yemen and Iraq, and God knows where,” Prince Saud said. “This must stop if Iran is to be part of the resolution for the region and not part of the problem.”
> 
> ...


http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/05/iran-taking-over-iraq-saudis-warn-blaming-u-s-refusal-to-send-troops-against-isis/


----------



## cupper

*Islamic State appears to be fraying from within*

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-islamic-state-is-fraying-from-within/2015/03/08/0003a2e0-c276-11e4-a188-8e4971d37a8d_story.html



> BEIRUT — The Islamic State ­appears to be starting to fray from within, as dissent, defections and setbacks on the battlefield sap the group’s strength and erode its aura of invincibility among those living under its despotic rule.
> 
> Reports of rising tensions between foreign and local fighters, aggressive and increasingly unsuccessful attempts to recruit local citizens for the front lines, and a growing incidence of guerrilla attacks against Islamic State targets suggest the militants are struggling to sustain their carefully cultivated image as a fearsome fighting force drawing Muslims together under the umbrella of a utopian Islamic state.
> 
> The anecdotal reports, drawn from activists and residents of areas under Islamic State control, don’t offer any indication that the group faces an immediate challenge to its stranglehold over the mostly Sunni provinces of eastern Syria and western Iraq that form the backbone of its self-proclaimed caliphate. Battlefield reversals have come mostly on the fringes of its territory, while organized opposition remains unlikely as long as viable alternatives are lacking and the fear of vicious retribution remains high, Syrians, Iraqis and analysts say.
> 
> The bigger threat to the Islamic State’s capacity to endure, however, may come from within, as its grandiose promises collide with realities on the ground, said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.
> 
> “The key challenge facing ISIS right now is more internal than external,” she said, using another term for the group. “We’re seeing basically a failure of the central tenet of ISIS ideology, which is to unify people of different origins under the caliphate. This is not working on the ground. It is making them less effective in governing and less effective in military operations.”
> 
> Most striking are the growing signs of friction between the foreigners lured by its state-building experiment and local recruits, who have grown resentful of the preferential treatment meted out to the expatriates, including higher salaries and better living conditions.
> 
> Foreign fighters get to live in the cities, where coalition airstrikes are relatively rare because of the risk of civilian casualties, while Syrian fighters are required to serve in rural outposts more vulnerable to attacks, said an activist who opposes the Islamic State and lives in the town of Abu Kamal on Syria’s border with Iraq. The activist spoke on the condition of anonymity.
> 
> Shootouts have erupted on several occasions on the streets of the town, including one last week between foreign fighters and Syrians who refused an order by a Kuwaiti commander to deploy to the front lines in Iraq, the activist said. The Syrian faction, under the command of Saddam Jamal, a former Free Syrian Army leader, remains in the town, keeping a tense and wary distance from the faction led by the Kuwaiti, he said.
> 
> In an incident in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in January, local allies battled a group made up mostly of Chechens after the foreigners decided to head back to Syria, according to Hassan al-Dulaimi, a retired police general who works with tribal fighters aligned against the Islamic State. “The Iraqis feared they were being abandoned,” he said.
> 
> There have been signs, too, that some foreign jihadists are growing disillusioned, with activists in the Syrian provinces of Deir al-Zour and Raqqa describing several instances in which foreigners have sought local help to escape across the border to Turkey. The bodies of between 30 and 40 men, many of whom appeared to be Asian, were found last month in the Raqqa town of Tabqa. They are thought to be the remains of a group of jihadist fighters who tried to flee but were caught, according to the activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which monitors Islamic State activities.
> 
> New restrictions on travel in and out of areas controlled by the Islamic State have been imposed in recent weeks, including a prohibition on truck drivers transporting men without permission, the activist group says. Public executions, a core component of Islamic State discipline, have in recent weeks been extended to about 120 of the group’s own members, according to the ­Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
> 
> Some were accused of spying and one of smoking, but suspicions are widespread that most were simply fighters caught trying to flee.
> 
> Meanwhile, territorial losses in northern Syria and elsewhere in Iraq are contributing to the sense that the group that stunned the world with its triumphant sweep through Iraq and Syria last summer is now not only on the defensive but also struggling to find a coherent strategy to confront the multiple forces ranged against it.
> 
> The Islamic State is battling major offensives waged on at least three fronts — by Kurds in northern Syria, Kurds in northern Iraq and the combined force of Iraqi army and Shiite militia fighters advancing on the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. Islamic State fighters have also been expanding into eastern areas of the Syrian provinces of Homs and Damascus, but the incremental advances there aren’t as spectacular as its conquests last year.
> 
> Most of the setbacks have come in non-Sunni areas, such as the Kurdish enclave around Kobane or the mixed province of Diyala in eastern Iraq, where the Islamic State’s territorial ambitions may have been doomed by the absence of allies on the ground.
> 
> A far bigger test of the Islamic State’s military capabilities is the battle underway for control of Tikrit, the Sunni home town of Saddam Hussein. As the ethnic and sectarian sentiments driving the fight for territory harden across Syria and Iraq, a victory for the overwhelmingly Shiite forces would also test the ability of non-Sunni groups to retain hold over conquered Sunni territories, analysts say.
> 
> The Islamic State’s losses in terms of land and blood have been fairly substantial, including the loss of hundreds of villages around the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria, near the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar and in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala.
> 
> The battles appear to have taken a high toll on the group’s strength, estimated at about 20,000 foreigners alongside an unknown number of Iraqis and Syrians. The Pentagon claimed last week that coalition airstrikes have killed 8,500 fighters, though that figure can’t be confirmed.
> 
> Syrians say the bloodshed is deterring the recruitment of local citizens who were clamoring a few months ago for the opportunity to earn salaries by joining the only new source of employment available.
> 
> Increasingly, the Islamic State is recruiting fighters among children and teens who remain more vulnerable than older adults to the group’s propaganda, said a businessman living in Raqqa who last week paid condolences to family friends whose 15-year-old son had been killed on the front line.
> 
> The parents didn’t know he had gone to fight and learned of his death from a neighbor just days after he had disappeared from home, recalled the businessman, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety.
> 
> Intensified efforts to persuade Syrians to go to the front lines in Iraq include offers of up to $800 a month in salary, according to Ahmed Mhidi, who arrived in Turkey two weeks ago from the Syrian city of Deir al-Zour and is setting up an opposition group called DZGraph. The offer has won few takers, he said.
> 
> The Islamic State “was never popular, but people supported them because they were scared or they needed money,” he said. “Now people want nothing to do with them, and if the Islamic State puts pressure on them, they just flee.”
> 
> The province of Deir al-Zour, bordering Iraq, appears to be where opposition to the Islamic State is hardening the most. Small-scale attacks involving ambushes of Islamic State patrols or checkpoints are on the rise — including one that killed 12 members of a feared police group Sunday.
> 
> Foreigners continue to volunteer, streaming across the Turkish border into the Islamic State’s self-styled capital of Raqqa, according to residents there. The city’s population has been swelled by thousands of Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Africans. Upon arrival they are given cars and apartments, and they mill about among the city’s cafes and markets, lending a cosmopolitan air to streets where foreigners once were rare, according to Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, the pseudonym of one of the founders of the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently group, who now lives in Turkey.
> 
> Many of the foreigners show little inclination to travel to the front lines, he said. “They just want to live in the Islamic State,” he said. “They didn’t come to fight.”
> 
> How useful they would be to the Islamic State’s military efforts is also in question, said the Carnegie Middle East Center’s Khatib.
> 
> “Ultimately, they are only attracting people on the margins of society, without much education or useful skills,” she said. “It’s not exactly bolstering their military capability.”


----------



## a_majoor

MCG said:
			
		

> But it appears Saudi Arabia would rather the US fight this war.  I would think that if Saudi Arabia is worried that a power vacuum has given Iran too much influence in Iraq, then Saudi Arabia should send boots and advisors to fill that vacuum before demanding other nations do so.
> http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/05/iran-taking-over-iraq-saudis-warn-blaming-u-s-refusal-to-send-troops-against-isis/



Well of course the Saudis would rather hire Janissaries to do the dirty work for them, and despite everything the US Army and Marine Corps are the biggest, best equipped force on the planet, have the most frightening conventional force ever assembled and are the ONLY force with global strategic mobility. Only a very small number of the wealthy Western nations can project power at all, and then only in tiny increments (a single Canadian Battlegroup, for example).

Now the real issue is the people who supply the gold get to call the shots, and I for one am not really ready for the idea that I am going to be sent into harm's way for the benefit of some Saudi princeling, so I am in total agreement with you and this article.


----------



## Fishbone Jones

I'm looking forward to a massive EMT, by our design, that does not hamper our communications. I don't know if that's possible, but it would throw a fucking huge wrench into anything they had going on, including the near future.

They want to act like ignorant savages, give them the means to do so.


----------



## CougarKing

ISIS's answer to facebook: "Caliphate book" .  :

So what happens if you "unfriend" someone on that network...stoning? :facepalm:

Reuters



> *Islamic State alternative to Facebook gets bumpy start*
> 
> DUBAI (Reuters) - Facing a ban from mainstream online social networks Facebook and Twitter, supporters of the Islamic State appear to have launched their own "caliphate book."
> 
> *But 5elafabook.com was offline on Monday just a day after its launch and its Twitter account was suspended, highlighting the challenges faced by backers of the ultra-violent militants based in Iraq and Syria in spreading their message and recruiting online.*
> 
> The amateur page showed a map of the world dotted with Islamic State's trademark Arabic insignia and was crafted by Socialkit, a program that lets users produce do-it-yourself social networks.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

While pregnant Chinese tourists go to North America to give birth to child passport holders who will later sponsor them for immigration...half way around the world, Indonesian tourists go to Turkey to give birth to future jihadists.  

Indonesian tourists go to Turkey to "give birth to" ISIS fighters:

Global Indonesian voices

Antara News



> *Indonesia Sends Team to Turkey to Look for Missing Citizens*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> He said the ministry does not want to speculate  about the reason why the 16 Indonesians left the tour group and up to now their whereabouts are still not known. The search and investigation are still going on, he added.
> 
> "The foreign ministry is reluctant to speculate about their motive of leaving the tour group, including about a suspicion that they might join ISIS," he noted.
> 
> In the meantime, the ministry's director for the protection of Indonesian citizens and Indonesian legal entities (PWNI-BHI), Muhammad Iqbal said, no relatives of the 16 Indonesians reported about their missing to the authorities. The ministry has not known how they were missing and could not confirm on the suspicion that they might join ISIS. (WDY)


----------



## OldSolduer

Child soldiers. And some people have issues with the cadet program.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987705/French-child-youngest-ISIS-member-killed-action-Boy-13-posed-M-16-assault-rifle-killed-Syria.html?ito=social-facebook


----------



## jollyjacktar

I read the story this morning.  A 13 year old will kill you just the same as a 23 year old.  He wants to get down and dirty with the adults then he can share the fate they do too.


----------



## Kat Stevens

Hamish Seggie said:
			
		

> Child soldiers. And some people have issues with the cadet program.
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987705/French-child-youngest-ISIS-member-killed-action-Boy-13-posed-M-16-assault-rifle-killed-Syria.html?ito=social-facebook



Good.  I hope his little dark soul is being spit roasted in hell.


----------



## a_majoor

More on how ISIS raises and recruits child soldiers. Deprogramming all these children at the end of the conflict will be one unholy mess, and the damage they sustain now will probably make them far less productive as adults, further crippling any possible rebuilding of society in that region:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/horror-of-isis-child-soldiers-state-of-terror



> *‘Raising tomorrow’s mujahideen’: the horrific world of Isis’s child soldiers *
> Children as young as 10 have been filmed executing prisoners for Isis, which has approached their training and indoctrination with characteristic ruthlessness
> 
> • How Isis attracts foreign fighters
> 
> Jessica Stern and JM Berger
> Tuesday 10 March 2015 18.15 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 11 March 2015 00.05 GMT
> 
> 
> Isis’s bid to build a society hasn’t stopped at the recruitment of women. Foreigners have been encouraged to bring their whole families to Iraq and Syria to “live under the shade of the caliphate”.
> 
> In November 2014, Isis released a video introducing “some of our newest brothers from Kazakhstan”, who had “responded to the crusader aggression … and raced to prepare themselves and their children”. The video showed dozens of smiling boys, the sons of a unit of Kazakh fighters, clambering into a bus and going to a schoolroom described as “the ultimate base for raising tomorrow’s mujahideen”.
> 
> “We spent our childhood far away from this blessing,” their Kazakh teacher explained. “We were raised on the methodology of atheism ... The kuffar [unbelievers] poisoned our minds ... Our children are happy. They’re living in the shade of the Qur’an and Sunnah.”
> 
> Another teacher was shown supervising a class of pre-teenage boys in uniforms. “They have completed lessons in Qur’an, [proper recitation of the Qur’an], and the Arabic language,” he said. “They will move on to do physical and military training.”
> 
> The scene shifted to show a Kazakh boy of about nine combat-stripping an assault rifle, then training with others in its use. The physical training included hand-to-hand combat and calisthenics. At the end of the day, a member of Isis’s media team questioned one of the students.
> 
> “What will you be in the future, if God wills it?” the interviewer asked.
> 
> “I will be the one who slaughters you, oh kuffar,” the boy responded, grinning at the camera. “I will be a mujahid, if God wills it.” One 10-year-old boy from the video was seen in a subsequent release executing two prisoners.
> 
> Such videos and images are far from rare. Isis members on social media routinely post images on social media of children holding severed heads and playing on streets where dismembered bodies are splayed carelessly on the sidewalk. One image posted to Twitter showed a child playacting the beheading of American hostage James Foley using a doll.
> 
> A UN report on war crimes in Syria pointed to the indoctrination of children as a “vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty” and creating a “cadre of fighters that will see violence as a way of life”.
> 
> While children have often been victims of such manipulation in war zones, Isis approached their “education” as it did almost everything else – systematically.
> 
> Isis actively recruits children to send them to training camps and then to use them in combat and suicide missions. It has used children as human shields, suicide bombers, snipers and blood donors. The UN secretary general’s special representative for children and armed conflict reports that Isis “has tasked boys as young as 13 to carry weapons, guard strategic locations or arrest civilians”. Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that hundreds of “non-civilian” male children had died in the fighting.
> 
> Isis strictly controls the education of children in the territory it holds. According to a teacher from Raqqa, Isis considers philosophy, science, history, art and sport to be incompatible with Islam. “Those under 15 go to sharia camp to learn about their creed and religion,” an Isis press officer in Raqqa told Vice News. “Those over 16, they can attend the military camp ... Those over 16 and who were previously enrolled in the camps can participate in military operations.” But in Isis propaganda videos, even younger children are shown being trained in the use of firearms.
> 
> This is a hallmark of a “total organisation”, which sociologist Erving Goffman defined as one that “has more or less monopoly control of its members’ everyday life.” Pol Pot experimented with creating a utopia in Kampuchea (the name used for Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge controlled it) in the 1970s, using methods not that different from those employed by Isis. The idea was to create an entirely new society, uncontaminated by the values the Khmer Rouge aimed to stamp out. Children were seen as the least corrupted by bourgeois values and would be educated “according to the precepts of the revolution”, which did not include traditional subjects. The children were both victims and perpetrators of terror.
> 
> Isis follows a trend of training ever-younger operatives. By doing so they hope to ensure a new generation of fighters. Leadership decapitation is significantly less likely to be effective against organisations that have children ready to step into their fathers’ shoes.
> 
> Residents of Raqqa reported to the news website Syria Deeply that children are taught how to behead another human being, and are given dolls on which to practice. One child told HRW interviewers, “When Isis came to my town ... I liked what they are wearing, they were like one herd. They had a lot of weapons. So I spoke to them, and decided to go to their training camp in Kafr Hamra in Aleppo.” He attended the camp when he was 16 years old, but the leader told him he preferred younger trainees. Pol Pot, too, preferred younger trainees.
> 
> Like other “total organisations”, Isis aims to create a new form of man. Young children are easier to mould into Isis’s vision of this new man. As psychiatrist Otto Kernberg explains, “Individuals born into a totalitarian system and educated by it from early childhood have very little choice to escape from total identification with that system.”
> 
> Another child, Amr, told the HRW interviewers that he had participated in a “sleeper cell” for Isis at age 15, to collect information on the Syrian government’s operation in Idlib. When he started working for Isis full time, he was given a Kalashnikov rifle, a military uniform and a bulletproof vest. He and the others in his unit, including other children, were encouraged to volunteer as suicide bombers, and several hundreds of fighters did so. Amr said that he didn’t want to be a suicide-bomber, so he delayed signing up, hoping his name would come up last. He told HRW that he felt social pressure to “volunteer” to die.
> 
> Some of the children come with their parents from abroad, to grow up in what their parents see as a pure Islamic state. They learn to say that they are citizens of the Islamic State rather than from their country of origin. The poorer neighbourhoods of Ankara, Turkey, are reportedly a source of child recruits. One such neighbourhood, Hacibayram, has become a recruitment hub for Isis. HRW discovered that child soldiers are paid the equivalent of $100 a month, around half as much as adult fighters. In Raqqa, Isis pays parents and bribes children to attend the camps. But the recruits are not always volunteers. Children of ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds and Yazidis, have been kidnapped and forced to join Isis. According to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in one case, more than 600 Kurdish students were kidnapped on their way home from taking exams in Aleppo. Their captors gave the boys an Islamic “education”, encouraging the children to join the jihad, showing them videos of beheadings and suicide attacks. A doctor told the HRW interviewers that he had treated a wounded boy between the ages of 10 and 12. The boy’s job was to whip prisoners.
> 
> Using children under the age of 18 as soldiers is a war crime. A study of 300 former Ugandan child soldiers found that approximately one third were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two-thirds were suffering behavioural and emotional problems, mostly anxiety and depression. So called “moral injury” – pain or damage to the conscience caused by witnessing, failing to prevent or perpetrating acts that violate ethical norms – is a risk factor for further violence, PTSD and depression. The widespread commission of atrocities could lead to a form of societal PTSD – both for victims and perpetrators. One of the results of continuously witnessing morally injurious actions, or of perpetrating them, is the blunting of feeling and loss of empathy.
> 
> Interestingly, some child soldiers may avoid adverse mental health outcomes by developing an appetite for aggression; those who learn to take pleasure from killing appear to be less susceptible to PTSD symptoms, according to work in northern Uganda and Colombia by Roland Weierstall and colleagues.
> 
> Is Isis deliberately trying to create a society with an appetite for violent aggression? It is impossible to know Isis’s conscious intentions, but either way, the end result of its rule in Syria and Iraq will no doubt be a deeply traumatised generation and a host of new challenges from within.
> 
> Lieutenant General HR McMaster is deputy commanding general for the future of US army training and doctrine command. His job is to assess threats of the future for the US army. He describes Isis as “engaging in child abuse on an industrial scale. They brutalise and systematically dehumanise the young populations. This is going to be a multigenerational problem.”
> 
> Extracted from Isis: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and JM Berger, published by HarperCollins (£14.99) on 12 March. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846


----------



## jollyjacktar

Thucydides said:
			
		

> More on how ISIS raises and recruits child soldiers. Deprogramming all these children at the end of the conflict will be one unholy mess, and the damage they sustain now will probably make them far less productive as adults, further crippling any possible rebuilding of society in that region:
> 
> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/horror-of-isis-child-soldiers-state-of-terror



It shouldn't be impossible, after all there were many (former) Hitler Youth running around after the dust settled.


----------



## a_majoor

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> It shouldn't be impossible, after all there were many (former) Hitler Youth running around after the dust settled.



Of course not, if *we* are willing to put in the time and resources that it will take. 

Do you think that Canadians or people in the West are going to support raising the political and social infrastructure to the ground, then occupying a Middle Eastern nation (or a block of them) for half a century with a huge garrison force and at the same time spend billions on a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild the infrastructure and create and support the social and political institutions needed to create a functioning democracy? 

I think that unless there is a huge cultural change here in the West, the correct answer is going to be.....no.


----------



## jollyjacktar

I agree and I hope the rest of the west does too.  Personally, I think that any of the little bastards that you see toting AK's, baying like wolves at the displays of barbarism alongside the adults and participating in murders of men in orange coveralls are not worth the effort.  Except what effort is required to mount some iron on the wing of an aircraft and hit the pickle button at the right time.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Do you think that Canadians or people in the West are going to support raising the political and social infrastructure to the ground, then occupying a Middle Eastern nation (or a block of them) for half a century with a huge garrison force and at the same time spend billions on a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild the infrastructure and create and support the social and political institutions needed to create a functioning democracy?


Isn't that always the tug-of-war:  elements in the West want to be seen as doing SOMETHING, but nobody has the resources or political backbone to do something that will solve the problem for as long as it takes to solve the problem.
"Politicians like to panic. They need activity; it's their substitute for achievement!"


----------



## Fishbone Jones

Thucydides said:
			
		

> More on how ISIS raises and recruits child soldiers. Deprogramming all these children at the end of the conflict will be one unholy mess, and the damage they sustain now will probably make them far less productive as adults, further crippling any possible rebuilding of society in that region:
> 
> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/horror-of-isis-child-soldiers-state-of-terror



Not if we just kill them all first. By the time we get them to where we can attempt re-education, it'll be to late. They'll be poison by that time and not worth the effort.


----------



## a_majoor

recceguy said:
			
		

> Not if we just kill them all first. By the time we get them to where we can attempt re-education, it'll be to late. They'll be poison by that time and not worth the effort.



Sadly, I think that COA is also off the table, both for the reasons noted above, and for the fact that even with nuclear weapons a 100% pK is virtually impossible.

So _someone_ is going to have to deal with these damaged children, or be prepared to manage the consequences of leaving them in place.


----------



## cryco

Just for a second I placed myself in the shoes of a parent who's child is kidnapped and brainwashed into this system. 
Quite a horrible feeling; yet once they become the next generation, it will indeed be too late for most.


----------



## cupper

Interesting take on psychological games ISIS is using 

*Why did victims in Islamic State beheading videos look so calm? They didn’t know it was real.*

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/11/why-did-victims-in-islamic-state-beheading-videos-look-so-calm-they-didnt-know-it-was-real/



> For all their stage-managed professionalism, the videos of killings released by the Islamic State have often left viewers confused about the exact circumstances of what was being shown in the video. Their videos of beheadings, for instance, do not show the act itself, which initially led some to speculate that they may have been faked.
> 
> More unnervingly, there was also the calm with which many hostages spoke to the camera. Why would hostages comply with Islamic State propaganda, if they knew that it would result in their death? Some even suggested that perhaps the hostages had struck a deal with their captors for a more humane death.
> 
> According to a new Sky News interview with an Islamic State defector, that wasn't the case. Instead, he explained that the hostages were calm because they had been in this situation before. They did not know they were about to die.
> 
> The former Islamic State member, referred to as "Saleh," told the British television company that the extremist group would put the hostages through mock executions. Saleh himself told the hostages that they would not be killed, recalling that he said to them, "Don't worry, doesn't matter, nothing dangerous for you." However, Sky News reports that Saleh knew the plan was always to kill the hostages eventually, despite any limited kindness shown to them by their captors.
> 
> Similar reports of mock executions have surfaced before: Last year, the New York Times reported that American journalist James Foley was subjected to them, as well as beatings and waterboarding. Counterterrorism officials recently told ABC News they believed these mock executions explained why hostages appeared compliant in videos.
> 
> The interview with Saleh, however, appears to have been the first confirmation of the practice from someone linked to the Islamic State. The interview is exclusive to Sky News, so The Post cannot independently confirm Saleh’s identity. But Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at the British security think tank Royal United Services Institute, said that the use of the kind of “psychological warfare” that Saleh describes seems characteristic of Islamic State.
> 
> “Indeed if you did not have that it would be very difficult to stage manage these killings,” he said in a phone interview.
> 
> The Islamic State militants may have decided on this tactic based on the experiences of their predecessors. Writing for The Post last year, Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst, noted that in videos of killings from the Iraq war, hostages who knew they were going to be killed often acted unpredictably and gave upsetting pleas for their lives. In one video from 2004, a South Korean named Kim Sun Il screamed for his life: "I don't want to die. I don't want to die." His captors were from Jamaat al-Tawhid, a precursor group to the Islamic State.
> 
> If the mock execution reports are true, they may also explain why the killings themselves were not shown on film. Even if the hostages realized what was happening at the last minute, they may still have put up a struggle that would have ruined the video's propaganda elements. In one video shot over a decade ago in Iraq, Italian Fabrizio Quattrocchi is said to have pulled off his mask and confronted his captors just before he was shot. "Now you'll see how an Italian dies," he was reported to have shouted.


----------



## OldSolduer

cryco said:
			
		

> Just for a second I placed myself in the shoes of a parent who's child is kidnapped and brainwashed into this system.
> Quite a horrible feeling; yet once they become the next generation, it will indeed be too late for most.



The truly formative years of a child's life are between the ages of 3 - 8. They learn 50% of what they will know by age 8, including behavior etc. This is what I have read and heard.

If we are to reprogram these kids it has to be done very early.


----------



## a_majoor

More Westerners going to join the fight against ISIS. While the numbers are still highly skewed towards the Jihadis (thousands of them pouring in from all over the world vs a hundred or so Westerners), it is interesting to see how the activities of ISIS is raising and hardening opposition to their activities. We now have national armies (Syria, Iraq, Iran and Jordan, plus the US led air campaign), trans national groups (Hezbollah), ethnic and tribal militias, Christian militias and foreign fighters in the field against ISIS. One question which no one seems to have raised is in the aftermath, what is going to happen with all these armed groups when their allience of conveinience is no longer in effect?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2997356/ISIS-Hunting-Club-formed-eight-former-British-soldiers-poses-shotguns-prepares-fight-alongside-Kurdish-fighters-halt-cancerous-spread-Islamic-State.html



> *'ISIS Hunting Club' formed by eight former British soldiers poses with shotguns as it prepares to fight alongside Kurdish fighters and halt the 'cancerous spread' of Islamic State *
> 
> Ex-servicemen will be travelling to northern Syria to fight ISIS militants
> Eight-strong unit currently training in Europe before joining Kurd militias
> They say they will be fighting for 'freedom and democracy' in the face of ISIS' 'cancerous, perverted form of Islam'
> Men say they are volunteering their skills to Kurdish YPG and Peshmerga
> Special Forces-trained unit are called the International Volunteer Force
> 
> ByJohn Hall for MailOnline
> 
> Published: 17:44 GMT, 16 March 2015 | Updated: 21:48 GMT, 16 March 2015
> 
> An eight strong volunteer unit of former British servicemen are preparing to travel to Syria to fight against militants from the Islamic State terrorist organisation, it has been claimed.
> 
> The ex-soldiers - some of whom have Special Forces training - call themselves the International Volunteer Force and will fight alongside the Kurdish resistance in the north of the country.
> 
> Images posted on social media purportedly show the men taking part in special training exercises in Europe ahead of their journey to Syria, where they join an estimated 100 other Western volunteers to have joined the Kurdish peshmerga and YPG armies in the fight against ISIS terrorists.
> 
> Images posted on social media purportedly show the men taking part in special training exercises in Europe ahead of their journey to Syria, where they join an estimated 100 other Western volunteers battling ISIS
> 
> The images were posted on a Facebook page titled 'Sgt Tom', which carries the colours of the Kurdish flag and disguises the faces of all the men photographed.
> 
> The images show the men wearing military fatigues and clothing suited to fighting in a desert environment while clutching large assault rifles.
> 
> Alongside captions making threats towards ISIS militants, one image appears to act a as the group's manifesto, identifying the leader as the aforementioned 'Sgt Tom' who says he is a former serviceman travelling to 'defeat you [ISIS] and the evil you stand for'.
> 
> 'Poor foreign policies, weak government and law have allowed the spread of a cancerous, perverted form of Islam to our shores,' he adds.
> 
> He goes on to state that ISIS 'do not have the right to claim Islam as their own property to pervert and undermine a magnificent that to true Muslims, is based on peace'.
> 
> 'I am not right wing, nor fascist, I am not anti-Islam nor anti any religion,' Sgt Tom says before adding 'I am a free man in a free country and free to fight for freedom and democracy'.
> 
> 'Your heinous crimes have stirred my inner morality, I will not turn against peaceful Muslims but I am sickened by what you [ISIS] do and as such...I volunteer my skill-set to the people of Kurdistan.'
> 
> The group have called themselves IVFOR (International Volunteer Force) but some of them are understood to have tattoos bearing the moniker 'ISIS Hunting Club'.
> 
> They will be leaving 'within weeks' to join the YPG militias that have so bravely defended northern Syria against ISIS in recent months - most notably in the town of Kobane, which the terrorists besieged for four months before being flushed out.
> 
> Speaking to the Evening Standard newspaper, one of the former soldiers said the group had bought uniforms and are training every day and have even created a lightning a sword based logo and adopted the Latin motto 'Cita et Certa', meaning Swift and Sure.
> 
> 'I and colleagues have formed a small unit which is open for any English-speaking individuals from any nation,' the former soldier was quoted by the newspaper as saying.
> 
> He added that the group had already raised more than £13,000 to fund their trip - with one of the men selling his sports car to raise the money.
> 
> There are estimated to be as many as 100 Western volunteers fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, including ex-public schoolboy Macer Gifford who has joined the fight against ISIS and insisted he would never be captured alive vowing: 'I’ve got a grenade in my pocket and I’ll take them with me'.
> 
> Many of the Britons who have travelled to fight the terrorists are ex-military and have joined the Kurdish People's Protection Unit - known as the YPG.
> 
> This group have a designated foreign legion for Western fighters, known as the Lions of Rojava, which is believed to be led by American Jordan Matson.
> 
> Last month 25-year-old Konstandinos Erik Scurfield became the first Briton to die in action against ISIS, having joined the Lions of Rojava within days of leaving the British army last November.
> 
> The former Royal Marine from Barnsley, South Yorkshire, was hit by mortar fire while fighting alongside Kurdish forces near the Syrian city of Qamishli.
> 
> Over the weekend his body was returned to his family in a special ceremony attended by hundreds of Syrian Kurds. His coffin, which was draped in both the Kurdish flag and the Union Jack, was handed over to his father and uncle in a special ceremony on the Syria-Iraq border.
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2997356/ISIS-Hunting-Club-formed-eight-former-British-soldiers-poses-shotguns-prepares-fight-alongside-Kurdish-fighters-halt-cancerous-spread-Islamic-State.html#ixzz3UeQMMwiu
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## CougarKing

ISIS has drones? WTF?   

Defense News



> *Officials: US Bombs ISIS Drone in Iraq*
> 
> WASHINGTON — US warplanes have bombed a small drone used by Islamic State extremists in Iraq, marking the first time American-led forces had targeted an unmanned aircraft flown by the jihadists, officials said Wednesday.
> 
> The strike took place on Tuesday near the western city of Fallujah, destroying "a remotely piloted aircraft" and a vehicle with the IS forces, according to a statement from the US military command overseeing the campaign against the group.
> 
> The drone, used for battlefield surveillance, was "small-scale" and not a sophisticated aircraft equivalent to some US-made robotic planes that can fly at high altitudes or launch missiles, US defense officials said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Remius

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> ISIS has drones? WTF?
> 
> Defense News



probably a store bought quad copter with a go pro camera....


----------



## a_majoor

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> ISIS has drones? WTF?
> 
> Defense News



While store bought drones with cameras seem like children's toys to us, they are very sophisticated pieces of equipment (I remember trying to build model airplanes out of balsa wood when I was a child; building working aircraft at any scale isn't easy at all), and provide a capability that until recently only fairly wealthy Western armies had. I'd actually be pretty worried about this development.


----------



## Remius

Thucydides said:
			
		

> While store bought drones with cameras seem like children's toys to us, they are very sophisticated pieces of equipment (I remember trying to build model airplanes out of balsa wood when I was a child; building working aircraft at any scale isn't easy at all), and provide a capability that until recently only fairly wealthy Western armies had. I'd actually be pretty worried about this development.



And anyone with an Internet account can get them fairly easily.  I can see why they targeted it.


----------



## Robert0288

Crantor said:
			
		

> And anyone with an Internet account can get them fairly easily.  I can see why they targeted it.



That and with some minor tweaking those things can get extremely dangerous very quickly.


----------



## dimsum

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> ISIS has drones? WTF?



That confusion is one of the reasons why "drone" isn't the preferred term.  

If the article were talking about manned airplanes, the journalist (one would hope) would qualify it with light, medium, heavy, armed, fighter, bomber, transport, etc.  When one says "drone" these days, Joe Public thinks it can be anything from Quadcopters to Global Hawk-sized RPAs.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Some good news.  Full story and photos at link below.



> Canadian jihadist Ahmad Waseem who travelled to Syria likely killed by Kurdish forces, says researcher
> Douglas Quan | March 20, 2015 | Last Updated: Mar 20 7:02 PM ET
> 
> A researcher studying Canadian foreign fighters believes a Windsor, Ont. man turned jihadist has been killed in Syria.
> 
> Amarnath Amarasingam said Friday that Ahmad Waseem was likely killed two or three days ago by Kurdish forces in Tal Hamis in northeast Syria.
> 
> Mr. Amarasingam, a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University who is in contact with 30 to 40 foreign fighters as part of his research project, says rumours circulated recently that someone going by the name of Abu Turab had been killed.
> 
> He said Friday that he sent a photograph of Mr. Waseem, who has previously identified himself on social media using that name, to two foreign fighters who are friends of his and they confirmed he had been killed.
> 
> Mr. Amarasingam said he also examined images on the website LiveLeak that purport to show the bodies of Islamic State fighters recently killed in an ambush. One of them bears a strong resemblance to Mr. Waseem.
> 
> The RCMP was unable Friday to confirm the status of Mr. Waseem, who is wanted on a charge of passport fraud.
> 
> A woman who answered the phone at Mr. Waseem’s family home in Windsor seemed aware of reports of his death but declined to comment. “It’s a personal matter,” she said.
> 
> Mr. Waseem attended Holy Names Catholic High School and St. Clair College.
> 
> Shaikh Mohamed Mahmoud, the imam at the Windsor mosque, has previously said that Mr. Waseem travelled to Egypt for study, but then went to Turkey.
> 
> Mr. Waseem returned home in 2013 claiming that he had been injured near the border with Syria. The imam said he tried to encourage Mr. Waseem to help Syrians by getting involved in humanitarian work. His mother also took away his passport.
> 
> But it didn’t work and Mr. Waseem returned to Syria.
> 
> Mr. Waseem has previously called Osama bin Laden a “hero” on social media and given advice about how to join the fight in Syria.
> 
> The RCMP confirmed earlier this month that Mohammed El Shaer, a friend of Mr. Waseem’s who is also on the force’s “high-risk traveller” list, was being sought after leaving the country without a valid passport.
> 
> The RCMP could not confirm that he had ended up in Syria, but Mr. Waseem posted a photo of the two of them together with the caption, “Canadian Muslims guess which ‘high-risk traveller’ made it into Sham?” He was referring to Syria.
> 
> In a recent post on the website Jihadology, Mr. Amarasingam said he believes there may be as many as 60 Canadians fighting in Syria and Iraq and that at least 12 have died in the fighting.
> 
> National Post
> 
> With files from Stewart Bell
> 
> http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/20/ahmad-waseem-likely-killed-in-syria/


----------



## a_majoor

The PanIslamic Civil War expands further int Yemen. Looking at the multitude of factions (tribes, Shia vs Sunni, Iranians, ISIS, Saudi Arabia) all involved, the withdrawl of US troops is probably the most sensible COA, given you really never know who you are dealing with or what side they are on (or in that region, if they will stay bought):

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/yemen-falls-apart



> *Yemen Falls Apart*
> 23 March 2015
> 
> Suicide-bombers killed at least 137 people and wounded more than 350 in Yemen at two Shia mosques in the capital city of Sanaa on Friday. The very next day, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seized control of the city of al-Houta, and the day after that, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebel movement conquered parts of Taiz, the nation's third-largest city. Rival militias are battling for control of the international airport in the coastal city of Aden, and the US government just announced that American troops are evacuating Al Anad airbase.
> 
> ISIS is taking credit for the Sanaa attacks. “Infidel Houthis should know that the soldiers of the Islamic State will not rest,” it said, “until they eradicate them and cut off the arm of the Safavid (Iranian) plan in Yemen.”  Al Qaeda has a much larger footprint in Yemen, so the ISIS claim is a little bit dubious, but ISIS is on the rise there and its attitude toward Shia Muslims is more bloodthirsty—more explicitly genocidal as the quote above shows—than Al Qaeda's.
> 
> Regardless of who committed the latest round of atrocities, everything in Yemen is about to become much, much worse. The region-wide storm of sectarian hatred has been gathering strength by the year for more than a decade, and it blew the roof off Yemen earlier this year when the Houthis, who are Shias, seized control of the capital and sent Sunni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi into semi-exile in Aden.
> 
> The Houthis see their takeover of the city and government institutions as a natural progression of the revolution in 2011 that toppled former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, but it isn't, not really. While they enjoy some backing beyond their Shia support base, the sectarian dimension is inescapable. Shias make up almost half the population, and the Sunni majority is keenly aware that minorities in the Middle East are capable of seizing power and lording it over everyone else—especially if they're sponsored by a regional mini superpower like Iran. Syria has been ruled by the Iranian-backed Alawite minority for decades, and Saddam Hussein used brute force to bring the Sunni minority to power in Iraq.
> 
> Still, the Houthis have virtually no chance of ruling the entire country. Their “territory,” so to speak, is restricted to the northwestern region surrounding the capital. Previous governments had a rough go of it too. South Yemen was a communist state—the so-called People's Democratic Republic of Yemen—until the Soviet Union finally ruptured, and four years after unification with North Yemen, the armed forces of each former half declared war on each other.
> 
> Far more likely than a comprehensive Houthi takeover is a new and more dangerous phase of Yemen's endless self-cannibalization—more dangerous because this otherwise parochial and irrelevant conflict has been internationalized, with ISIS, the Saudis, and Iran squaring off against each other in yet another regional proxy war.
> 
> The Houthi movement is named after Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, an insurrection leader killed by the former government in 2004. They are Shias, but unlike the “Twelver” Shia Muslims of Iran—who revere eleven imams and await the birth of the occluded twelfth—most of Yemen's Shias are “Fivers.” Iran doesn't mind. From its point of view, better the odd “Fiver” Shias than Sunnis, but all that really matters is that the Houthis are willing to say yes to Tehran, its weapon shipments, and its top-notch military advisors and trainers.
> 
> The next-door Saudis, of course, are backing what's left of Hadi's former government down in Aden. They've been Yemen's primary patron since the 1930s and won't sit back and idly watch as Iran's Islamic Revolution is exported to their back yard any more than the United States would have allowed the Moscow to conquer Canada during the Cold War.
> 
> Yemen's conflict is tribal, sectarian, and political at the same time, and it's becoming increasingly internationalized even as the US is leaving. It's also a little bizarre. Last month, President Hadi declared Aden the new capital, though no one in the world, not even his allies, recognize it as such. A few days ago a Houthi-commanded military jet flew over the city from Sanaa and fired missiles at his residence.
> 
> The US has few friends and even less leverage, especially now that it's all falling apart, so Washington is washing its hands and bringing everyone home. All we can really hope for there is less instability, not so much because Yemen's local squabbling affects us—until now it hardly registered outside the country—but because dangerous adversaries that threaten the West are hoping to expand their base of operations and their ability to export malfeasance everywhere else. Let's not forget that Osama bin Laden's family is of Yemeni origin, as was Anwar Al-Awlaki, one of Al Qaeda's chief propagandists before the Pentagon vaporized him with a Hellfire missile in 2011. The deadliest bomb-maker in the world plies his trade with Yemen's branch of Al Qaeda and has planned at least three attacks against commercial airliners. And now that Iran is involved in the Saudi family's sphere of influence and the Sunni majority is backsliding, ISIS and Al Qaeda are gaining even more traction.
> 
> Consider the city of Radaa. Al Qaeda briefly seized power there in 2012, but local tribesmen and government troops drove them out. Now that the Houthis are in the saddle in Sanaa, however, the tribes in Radaa are siding with Al Qaeda again. Al Qaeda's takeover of al-Houta three days ago shows that Radaa is anything but an isolated case.
> 
> *All this parallels events in Iraq. The Sunni tribes of Anbar Province forged an alliance with American soldiers and Marines against Al Qaeda in the mid-2000s, but after the US withdrew and President Nouri al-Maliki ruled the country as a heavy-handed Iranian proxy, many tribes in Anbar switched their allegiance to ISIS.*
> 
> Yemen may well turn into the Iraq or Syria—take your pick—of the Arabian Peninsula. All the US can really do at this point is watch in horror as the Middle East continues to chew its own leg off and malefactors with global ambitions thrive in the chaos.


----------



## CougarKing

Saudi Arabia about to intervene in Yemen?

Reuters



> *Exclusive: Saudi Arabia building up military near Yemen border - U.S. officials*
> 
> By Mark Hosenball, Phil Stewart and Matt Spetalnick
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia is moving heavy military equipment including artillery to areas near its border with Yemen, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, raising the risk that the Middle East’s top oil power will be drawn into the worsening Yemeni conflict.
> 
> The buildup follows a southward advance by Iranian-backed Houthi Shi'ite militants who took control of the capital Sanaa in September and seized the central city of Taiz at the weekend as they move closer to the new southern base of U.S.-supported President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
> 
> The slide toward war in Yemen has made the country a crucial front in Saudi Arabia's region-wide rivalry with Iran, which Riyadh accuses of sowing sectarian strife through its support for the Houthis.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Saudi Arabia about to intervene in Yemen?
> 
> Reuters



They're saying on the radio this morning that SA has stated if the rebels don't halt their advance on Aden, SA will come across and make them.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Exclusive: Saudi Arabia building up military near Yemen border - U.S. officials

By Mark Hosenball, Phil Stewart and Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - …

The slide toward war in Yemen has made the country a crucial front in Saudi Arabia's region-wide rivalry with Iran, which Riyadh accuses of sowing sectarian strife through its support for the Houthis.

(…SNIPPED)

Kettle, this is Pot, break, Black, I say again, Black, Over.


----------



## cupper

Update:

*Saudi officials say they have launched a military operation in Yemen*

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/report-yemens-embattled-president-flees-stronghold-as-rebels-advance/2015/03/25/e0913ae2-d2d5-11e4-a62f-ee745911a4ff_story.html?hpid=z1



> SANAA, Yemen — Saudi officials on Wednesday announced they had launched a military operation in neighboring Yemen, after Shiite rebels believed backed by Iran swept toward that country’s second-largest city and forced the president to flee.
> 
> The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, made the announcement on Wednesday evening.
> 
> Some parts of Aden remained held by forces loyal to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who abandoned his refuge in the seaside city. But the troops appeared initially overwhelmed by the rebel blitz, suggesting the insurgents were close to taking control of their latest major battlefield prize, witnesses said.
> 
> The fall of Aden to the rebels, known as Houthis, would give the insurgents control of both the capital, Sanaa, and the country’s main sea gateway.
> 
> It could mark the end of Hadi’s bid to stay in power, and the beginning of a fiefdom-versus-fiefdom civil war in a country that has been a critical front in the U.S.-led war against al-Qaeda. While the Houthis appeared on the verge of taking Aden, it was not clear they would be able to consolidate their control in the south, where they are unpopular.
> 
> 
> Yemen’s branch of al-Qaeda holds patches of the country and views the Houthis as foes in the competition for influence and Yemen’s modest oil wealth.
> 
> On a broader level, Yemen represents a potential proxy battlefield for Shiite power Iran and the Sunni Gulf Arab states allied with Washington, which had counted on Hadi as a partner in coordinating drone strikes against al-Qaeda.
> 
> Amid the widening chaos, Hadi’s whereabouts remained unclear.
> 
> Senior security officials told The Washington Post that Hadi had left his stronghold in Aden, where his government sought a foothold after being driven from the capital, Sanaa, by the Houthis.
> 
> Looters swarmed the presidential buildings in Aden, and fighting flared on several fronts on the edge of the city, said Anis Mansour, editor of the port city’s Huna Aden newspaper.
> 
> “What is happening in Aden is an invasion,” said Mansour.
> 
> Yemen’s foreign minister, Riyadh Yaseen, told Al Jazeera from Egypt that Hadi was in a “secure” place in Aden. Later, however, officials told the Associated Press that Hadi and top aides had escaped on two boats.
> 
> But a senior member of the Houthi political committee, Dhaif Allah Alshami, denied that Hadi had slipped away by sea and said rebels were seeking him in the city.
> 
> Alshami claimed the insurgents had taken over the compound where Hadi maintained his government after being driven from Sanaa. The deputy editor of the Almasdar news agency, Ali Alfaqeeh, said the site has come under shelling and there were no sign of Hadi’s forces mounting a counteroffensive.
> 
> In Washington, White House spokesman Josh Earnest strongly condemned the Houthi offensive, and accused former president Ali Abdullah Saleh of working with the rebels “to foment a lot of instability in the country.”
> 
> “And so, we would call on them to stop that instability and that violence,” he said. Saleh was driven from power by Arab Spring-inspired uprisings in 2012, but has remained an important power broker in Yemen. Earnest said that the Obama administration still recognized Hadi as president.
> 
> He added that “there are elements of the Yemeni government that we continue to be in touch with” on counter-terrorism operations aimed at the country’s al-Qaeda affiliate, but he did not provide details. He said he could not confirm Hadi’s location.
> 
> Neighboring Saudi Arabia has massed troops and dispatched tanks to its border with Yemen, a sign of its intense unease at the idea of Iranian-backed rebels taking control of a country that had been its close ally.
> 
> Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes against Houthi rebels near the countries’ border in 2009, after protesting that its border guards were fired on.
> 
> But any ground intervention would require a long and difficult trip through the heart of Houthi-held territory to reach Aden. And it appeared unlikely that Saudi troops could roll back Houthi control of large parts of Yemen.
> 
> The Reuters news agency quoted a Saudi official saying the frontier deployment was “only to defend the country” and not a prelude to a push into Yemen.
> 
> Hadi’s government has appealed for military intervention from the Gulf’s military alliance, which is anchored by neighboring Saudi Arabia, and has called on the United Nations to authorize foreign armed forces to enter Yemen.
> 
> But Gulf states have given no signals of plans for an immediate mobilization to aid Hadi, and the last units of U.S. and British commandos have been pulled from Yemen amid the widening instability.
> 
> In Aden, shopkeeper Abduljabar Mohammed said the streets emptied as the rebel attacks intensified.
> 
> “I have been hiding in my shop,” he said by telephone. “The people are afraid and worried for their safety. We don’t know what to expect.”
> 
> Houthi-controlled state television said a nearly $100,000 bounty was being offered for the president’s capture.
> 
> Some members of Hadi’s inner circle, meanwhile, appeared to run out of room. Rebels said they had captured the country’s defense minister and a top aide near Aden.
> 
> Security officials told the Post that Hadi fled his compound just hours after the rebels announced they had taken the important al-Anad air base, located less than 20 miles from Aden. The airfield was once a main link in the U.S.-directed drone missions against al-Qaeda.
> 
> Later, the rebels reported taking control of Aden’s civilian airport.
> 
> The unraveling of Hadi’s power over the past months has dealt a significant blow to U.S.-led efforts to wage drone attacks and other pinpoint strikes against suspected strongholds of the Yemen-based branch of al-Qaeda, which is considered among the terror group’s most active networks.
> 
> Meanwhile, the Houthi rebels — seen as foes of al-Qaeda — have claimed increasing territory since taking control of the capital in January.
> 
> Last week, suicide bombers killed at least 137 people at two Shiite mosques in Sanaa linked to the Houthi rebels.


----------



## CougarKing

More on the above: Saudi Arabia intervenes in the Yemen Civil War:

Reuters



> *Saudi Arabia, allies launch air campaign in Yemen against Houthi fighters*
> 
> By Sami Aboudi and Matt Spetalnick
> 
> ADEN/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia announced on Wednesday it had launched military operations in Yemen, carrying out air strikes in coordination with a 10-country coalition seeking to beat back Houthi militia forces besieging the southern city of Aden where the country's president had taken refuge.
> 
> At a news conference in Washington, Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir said Gulf Arab allies and others had joined with the desert kingdom in the military campaign in a bid "to protect and defend the legitimate government" of Yemen President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. He declined to give any information on Hadi's whereabouts.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## McG

Yemen has already asked the UN to endorse international intervention:


> *Yemen's President Hadi asks UN to back intervention*
> BBC News
> 25 March 2015
> 
> ...


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32045984

Maybe we should have the country added to the new resolution being discussed in Canadian Parliament ... just in case.


----------



## cryco

Wow, you gotta love religion, eh? Those were some rather informative articles. Thanks for linking to them.


----------



## a_majoor

All the restraints of "civilized warfare" seem to have broken down in the region. I would be very cautious of how much more *we* get involved in this conflict:

http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/kurdish-officials-claim-isis-used-chemical-weapons-on-peshmerga-forces-1.2279773



> *Kurdish officials claim ISIS used chemical weapons on peshmerga forces*
> 
> Vivian Salama, The Associated Press
> Published Saturday, March 14, 2015 9:04AM EDT
> Last Updated Saturday, March 14, 2015 6:14PM EDT
> 
> 
> BAGHDAD -- Kurdish authorities in Iraq said Saturday they have evidence that the Islamic State group used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon against peshmerga fighters, the latest alleged atrocity carried out by the extremist organization now under attack in Tikrit.
> 
> The allegation by the Kurdistan Region Security Council, stemming from a Jan. 23 suicide truck bomb attack in northern Iraq, did not immediately draw a reaction from the Islamic State group, which holds a third of Iraq and neighbouring Syria in its self-declared caliphate. However, Iraqi officials and Kurds fighting in Syria have made similar allegations about the militants using the low-grade chemical weapons against them.
> 
> In a statement, the council said the alleged chemical attack took place on a road between Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, and the Syrian border, as peshmerga forces fought to seize a vital supply line used by the Sunni militants. It said its fighters later found "around 20 gas canisters" that had been loaded onto the truck involved in the attack.
> 
> Video provided by the council showed a truck racing down a road, white smoke pouring out of it as it came under heavy fire from peshmerga fighters. It later showed a white, billowing cloud after the truck exploded and the remnants of it scattered across a road.
> 
> An official with the Kurdish council told The Associated Press that dozens of peshmerga fighters were treated for "dizziness, nausea, vomiting and general weakness" after the attack. He spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to discuss the incident.
> 
> The Kurds say samples of clothing and soil from the site were analyzed by an unnamed lab in an unnamed coalition partner nation, which found chlorine traces.
> 
> "The fact ISIS relies on such tactics demonstrates it has lost the initiative and is resorting to desperate measures," the Kurdish government said in the statement, using an alternate acronym for the Sunni militant group.
> 
> There was no independent confirmation of the Kurds' claim. Peter Sawczak, a spokesman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has monitored Syria dismantling its chemical weapons stockpile, said his group had not been asked to investigate the attack.
> 
> Alistair Baskey, a spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said American officials were aware of the Kurds' claim, though they had no information "regarding its veracity at this time."
> 
> "We find such allegations deeply disturbing, and if there are parties engaged in such use, they should be held appropriately accountable," Baskey said.
> 
> Chlorine, an industrial chemical, was first introduced as a chemical weapon at Ypres in World War I with disastrous effects as gas masks were not widely available at the time. While chlorine has many industrial and public uses, as a weapon it chokes victims to death.
> 
> In the Syrian civil war, a chlorine gas attack on the outskirts of Damascus in 2013 killed hundreds and nearly drove the U.S. to launch airstrikes against the government of embattled President Bashar Assad. The U.S. and Western allies accused Assad's government of being responsible for that attack, while Damascus blamed rebels.
> 
> There have been several allegations that the Islamic State group has used chlorine as well. In October, Iraqi officials claimed Islamic State militants may have used chlorine-filled cylinders during clashes in late September in the towns of Balad and Duluiya. Their disclosures came as reports from the Syrian border town of Kobani indicated that the extremist group added chlorine to an arsenal that already includes heavy weapons and tanks looted from captured military bases.
> 
> Insurgents have used chlorine gas in Iraq before. In May 2007, suicide bombers driving chlorine tankers struck three cities in Anbar province, killing two police officers and forcing about 350 Iraqi civilians and six U.S. troops to seek treatment for gas exposure. Those bombers belonged to al-Qaida in Iraq, which later became the Islamic State group.
> 
> Meanwhile Saturday, Iraqi security forces engaged in fierce clashes with the militants as they continued their offensive to retake Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit.
> 
> Iraqi forces, which include the military, police, Shiite militias and Sunni tribesmen, entered the city of Tikrit for the first time Thursday, gaining control of neighbourhoods on its northern and southern ends.
> 
> Militia commander Hadi al-Amiri has said security forces will hold their position until the area is cleared of any remaining civilians. He estimated on Friday that Iraqi forces would reach the centre of Tikrit within two to three days.


----------



## The Bread Guy

MCG said:
			
		

> Yemen has already asked the UN to endorse international intervention:http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32045984
> 
> Maybe we should have the country added to the new resolution being discussed in Canadian Parliament ... just in case.


Just as soon as someone there can reliably say, "If we get help from the outside world, we kick out all the terrorists and pirates for good" - like THAT'S going to happen anytime soon.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Interesting idea - let's see how receptive the other countries are ....


> Egypt's president has renewed calls for the creation of a joint Arab military force as it and other countries launch airstrikes against Iran-backed Houthi militias in Yemen.
> 
> Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi made the comment Saturday while addressing a summit of Arab leaders in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.
> 
> Saying that the crises in the Middle East and North Africa region have reached an unprecedented danger, Sisi said he “backs calls for a unified Arab force” to confront regional security threats.
> 
> Sisi added that there is an urgent need to filter the religious rhetoric of extremism,  emphasizing the need to support the elected, legitimate Libyan government.
> 
> The president also reiterated that Egypt’s participation in the Saudi-led coalition was ‘imperative,’ after meddling there by a foreign power – a thinly veiled reference to Iran, adding that it aims to preserve Yemen’s unity.
> 
> The campaign of airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition was in response to a power grab in the impoverished nation by Iranian-backed Shiite rebels known as the Houthis.
> 
> Iran and the Houthis deny that Tehran arms the rebel movement.
> 
> Sisi also said Arab countries are facing an unprecedented threat to their stability and identity.
> 
> Sisi met with Saudi Arabia's King Salman and Yemen's embattled President Abdrabbo Mansour Hadi before the summit.
> 
> The 26th Arab League summit began on Saturday ....


Also, I've gotta wonder how nervous Israel might get if these folks _do_ end up getting their act together collectively.


----------



## a_majoor

The behaviour of the Administration has translated into former allies and partners taking unilateral actions and not informing the United States. Having American officials discover Saudi Arabia and her allies are invading Yemen in "real time" is a bit shocking, especially when you consider the "end game" is almost certainly direct action against Iran itself. 

How will US forces be positioned when Saudi armed and equipped troops begin fighting in Lebanon against Hezbollah, or in Syria against Assad, or crossing Iraq to hit the Iranian oil terminals at the head of the Persian Gulf? (the second article is about one of the Gulf States hiring former Blackwater personnel to create a battalion sized Foreign Legion type unit. Given the vast cash reserves, the Saudis could conceivably "hire" virtually every Salafi extremist, empty out the Palestinian refugee camps and arm them all with ex Soviet weapons and ammo and turn them loose against Iranian troops, proxies and interests. The devastated "Levant" and armed groups in the shattered remains of the former ME states would serve as a convenient "firebreak" against resurgent Turkish interests in the region as well).

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/27/nbcs-engel-us-allies-fear-obama-admin-leaking-information-to-iran/



> *NBC’s Engel: US allies fear Obama admin leaking information to Iran*
> POSTED AT 4:01 PM ON MARCH 27, 2015 BY ED MORRISSEY
> 
> Just how badly has Barack Obama and his administration damaged relations with our allies in the Middle East? NBC’s Richard Engel reports that the Sunni nations in the region have begun to fear that the Obama administration leaks intel to Iran as part of its efforts at rapprochement with the mullahs, which is why the US got blindsided by the Saudi-led coalition’s operations in Yemen. The White House’s “incoherence” in policy, Engel reports, has most of them losing confidence in American leadership, according to Engel’s contacts (via Free Beacon):
> 
> 
> 
> _ENGEL (1:58): I know several people in the US military who were taken by surprise by this [action in Yemen]. Senior officials who would have been expected to know that there was going to be an operation in Yemen, they didn’t. They were finding out about it almost in real time.
> 
> And they believe, and some US members of Congress believe, that the reason Saudi Arabia and other states didn’t tell the US that it was going to launch this war against Shi’ite backed, or Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen, is because Saudi Arabia and other countries simply don’t trust the United States anymore, don’t trust this administration — think the administration is working to befriend Iran to try and make a deal in Switzerland, and therefore didn’t think that the intelligence frankly would be secure.
> 
> I think that is a situation that is quite troubling for US foreign policy, where traditional allies — like Saudi Arabia, like Egypt, like the United Arab Emirates — don’t know if the US is reliable at this stage to hold onto this information when it comes to Iran._
> 
> Initially, this looked like material for an update on my earlier post regarding the Saudi-GCC coalition and its decision to work around Obama, but it deserves its own thread for a couple of reasons. First, Engel reported this for NBC, and on MSNBC, the “Lean Forward” cable channel that usually acts as a clearinghouse for Barack Obama apologists (and the occasional slam on Middle America). Engel’s not among the apologists; he’s a first-class foreign correspondent whose reports follow no partisan agenda, and whose sources have usually provided him with highly accurate reporting.
> 
> More importantly, Engel’s report advances this to an allegation of betrayal, not just incompetence. Clearly, Saudi Arabia has little confidence left in the Obama administration; that much is evident from their actions to cut the US out of the loop on this coalition. Engel’s report strongly suggests that it’s not just incompetence that has the Saudis and other US allies rattled, but a suspicion that they’re being purposefully sold out by Obama to get a deal with Iran that will unleash their ambitions to dominate the region.
> 
> Yesterday, I wrote about this very point in my column for The Fiscal Times:
> 
> _It has become abundantly clear that Obama wants a deal for the sake of claiming a foreign policy achievement, no matter what the cost, and no matter what it does to our allies, especially Israel. The situation is reminiscent of another confrontation between Western powers and an extremist dictatorship that professed its own destiny to rule the world, and where the dictator even wrote out his plans for world domination and practically begged everyone to read them.
> 
> In both cases, Western leaders told themselves that the extremist rhetoric was only intended for domestic consumption. Also in both cases, they treated with contempt their allies whose very existence was threatened by the new hegemon, who kept breaking international agreements and stalling negotiations until the West appeased them by betraying those same allies — even locking their democratic allies out of the negotiations.
> 
> At least Neville Chamberlain learned his lesson after Munich, albeit far too late for the Czechoslovakians, Eastern Europe, and millions of Jews. Obama and Kerry seem determined to repeat those same mistakes. That can be described many ways, but smart power isn’t one of them._
> 
> That argument pertained specifically to Obama’s treatment of Israel in his pursuit of a deal with Iran. Israel’s not the only country in the region feeling the knife nearing the back.



http://www.your-poc.com/sources-say-erik-prince-was-hired-by-crown-prince-of-abu-dhabi-to-put-together-a-800-member-battalion/



> *Sources Say, Erik Prince was hired by crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together a 800-member battalion*
> Post Date: March 27, 2015 | Category: Around the World
> professional-overseas-contractors
> 
> According to the New York Time, Erik Prince billionaire founder of Blackwater was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by a reputable source.
> 
> The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.
> 
> The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.
> 
> In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.
> 
> The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.
> 
> “The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.”
> 
> Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.
> 
> For Mr. Prince, a 41-year-old former member of the Navy Seals, the battalion was an opportunity to turn vision into reality. At Blackwater, which had collected billions of dollars in security contracts from the United States government, he had hoped to build an army for hire that could be deployed to crisis zones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even had proposed that the Central Intelligence Agency use his company for special operations missions around the globe, but to no avail. In Abu Dhabi, which he praised in an Emirati newspaper interview last year for its “pro-business” climate, he got another chance.
> 
> BY: MARK MAZZETTI and EMILY B. HAGER of the NEW YORK TIME


----------



## Kat Stevens

In other news, I took unilateral action against an incursion of black polar saplings in my own back yard and didn't inform a fair weather friend on the other side of town.  Nobody was outraged.


----------



## Jed

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> In other news, I took unilateral action against an incursion of black polar saplings in my own back yard and didn't inform a fair weather friend on the other side of town.  Nobody was outraged.



How racist of you. You must be a white poplar cultist. You probably violently cut them off at the roots with a machete.


----------



## a_majoor

Expanding the war against Iran. Given the US seems to have been leaning towards Iran in the recent past, the emergence of a Sunni coalition of anti-Iranian states could spell even more trouble for US diplomacy in the region:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/29/arab-allies-wage-war-yemen-us-weapons-without-amer/?page=all#pagebreak



> *Arab allies wage war in Yemen with U.S. weapons, without U.S. leadership*
> 
> Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz (right) quickly put together a coalition last week to raid Yemen by air and position forces for an incursion by land. The regime has told President Obama that it simply will not tolerate an Iranian ... more >
> 
> By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Sunday, March 29, 2015
> 
> The U.S. has shipped billions of dollars worth of its best weapons to the Middle East in recent years, and today Arab nations are tapping that unprecedented arms buildup for the first time to wage war on multiple fronts, sometimes without American leadership.
> 
> The Persian Gulf states have joined a U.S.-led coalition to fight the Islamic State terrorist army that controls northern and western Iraq and parts of Syria. The level of Arab participation resembles, but is much more robust than, that of the 1991 Desert Storm conflict, in which Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates joined European and American operations to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
> 
> Outside that alliance, some of those same nations are going to war and not waiting for the U.S. to lead.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> SEE ALSO: Arab League to forge NATO-like military alliance of Sunni powers
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Saudi Arabia last week quickly formed an Arab coalition for Operation Decisive Storm, essentially to defend the Sunni kingdom against Iran at its doorstep on the southern border. Security analysts say Iran’s Quds Force helped rebel Houthi Shiites in Yemen oust a Saudi and U.S. ally, President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The Houthis also sent American troops retreating from the U.S. Embassy and from a counterterrorism base.
> 
> “Iran has provided support to the Houthis for years, and their ascendancy is increasing Iran’s influence,” James R. Clapper, the top U.S. intelligence official, told Congress last month.
> 
> The Saudis and the United Arab Emirates are conducting airstrikes on Houthi targets with the help of U.S. intelligence. On Sunday, news services reported that ground movements by Saudi forces signal an imminent invasion of Yemen — a strategically located country where U.S. warships transit the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
> 
> Egypt said it is proposing an Arab army, meaning all-out war between Arab Sunni states and a Shiite Iran proxy, for control of Yemen.
> 
> It is not the first time Arab allies have acted without the U.S.
> 
> In August, Egyptian and UAE jet fighters launched from an Egyptian airfield to attack Islamist terrorist targets in Libya. The U.S. has declined to directly confront various al Qaeda-linked groups in Libya with military muscle. Afterward, the State Department and Pentagon condemned such attacks.
> 
> Michael Rubin, a Middle East analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said the Gulf Cooperation Council was created in 1981 to stand up to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The council has struggled over unity, until now, and the alliance could mean a downgrade in U.S. influence.
> 
> “How ironic it is, then, that it took the collapse of U.S. leadership to inject unity and action into much of the GCC and the broader Arab world,” Mr. Rubin said. “Once the United States is cast aside, however, it will never restore the influence it once had. Successive presidents had Riyadh on speed dial when a crisis came, but no longer will the Saudi kings answer that 3 a.m. phone call. Ditto Cairo. Same with Abu Dhabi.”
> 
> A host of U.S. weapons
> 
> The U.S. has provided tools for the Gulf’s military independence.
> 
> First the George W. Bush administration and now President Obama have approved a record level of arms sales to Gulf Cooperation Council nations, particularly F-15 and F-16 advanced strike aircraft. The strategy: With the U.S. military shrinking and at times preoccupied in other regions, the Gulf states can take on more of their own defenses.
> 
> In the war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have turned to those state-of-the-art strike fighters and smart weapons not for deterrence, but for offensive military operations.
> 
> Both nations are uneasy about what appears to be Mr. Obama’s tilt toward Iran, which Sunni Muslim Gulf states have long viewed as their No. 1 threat.
> 
> “The Arab leaders have awakened to Obama’s policy shift in the Middle East,” said Robert Maginnis, a retired Army officer and analyst on international arms sales.
> 
> The year 2011 perhaps best illustrated the Gulf arms buildup: Of $56 billion in total overseas sales from the U.S., $33 billion were the result of deals with the Saudi kingdom, according to the Congressional Research Service.
> 
> The Saudi shopping list includes thousands of smart bomb systems, air-to-ground missiles, anti-ship missiles and, to unleash them, F-15SA attack fighters.
> 
> Lockheed Martin Corp. has been selling the United Arab Emirates an advanced version of the F-16 dubbed the “Desert Falcon.” The jet features extended range, new radars and the capability to drop U.S.-made satellite-guided bombs.
> 
> ‘Interesting shift’
> 
> Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz quickly put together a coalition last week to raid Yemen by air and position forces for an incursion by land. The regime has told Western powers that it simply will not tolerate an Iranian puppet state on its border.
> 
> The oil-rich nation sees itself being surrounded: Iran is moving into Yemen, dominating southern Iraq; keeping Syrian President Bashar Assad in power; and pulling strings in Lebanon via its terrorist army Hezbollah.
> 
> “Of course it is a very interesting shift that now Arab regimes like the one in Saudi Arabia are no longer asking the U.S. to protect them from regional unrest such as in Yemen,” Mr. Maginnis said. “They recognize that the Obama administration is unwilling to rush to help Arab nations floundering in yet another crisis.”
> 
> James Russell, a former Pentagon official who was involved in foreign arms sales, said that after the U.S. ousted Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Bush administration embarked on a Gulf arms buildup, along with more joint training, to help those Arab nations become more self-sufficient.
> 
> A decade later, it all has come to fruition, as Iran and the Islamic State have emerged as direct threats in a muddled Middle Eastern and North African security situation.
> 
> “The Yemen operation is interesting on many levels,” said Mr. Russell, an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. “We’ve sold the Saudis tens of billions of dollars of arms over the last quarter-century, and they have never seemed particularly interesting in learning how to actually use the weapons.”
> 
> “Their armed forces are being thrust into a role for which they are not prepared, and it’ll be interesting to see how they do,” he said. “Their pilots are probably reasonably competent, but the rubber will meet the road when and if the army enters the fray and they have to actually coordinate operations at the tactical level. The risks of the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces and the regime are substantial.”
> 
> If the Saudi coalition and their American weapons fail, Iran gains and the U.S. loses, he said.
> 
> Mr. Maginnis said: “They are afraid that without a serious effort to push back at Tehran the Shia crescent, once a Persian public dream, could very well become a regional fixture seriously undermining the Sunni states’ stability.”
> 
> 
> Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/29/arab-allies-wage-war-yemen-us-weapons-without-amer/#ixzz3VsFSFFfk
> Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter


----------



## a_majoor

Ever wonder how people are becoming radicalized to join ISIS? Here is an article which describes how a McGill student was radicalized (although not to join ISIS). The process is similar, and it may be possible to deradicalize people by interrupting the process or removing feedback mechanisms. (A side note, although the writer claims to have been deradicalized, she also holds most of the same opinions she did during the "radical" period. It is also sadly clear, especially reading the coda at the end, that this person's critical thinking and reasoning skills are very deficient, although this is probably more a result of the "education" she received): Long post Part 1

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/



> *“Everything is problematic”*
> My journey into the centre of a dark political world, and how I escaped
> Written by Aurora Dagny | Visual by Alice Shen | The McGill Daily
> 
> I’ve been a queer activist since I was 17. I grew up in a socially conservative rural town where people would shout homophobic slurs at me from the windows of their pickup trucks. My brushes with anti-gay hatred intimidated me, but they also lit a fire in me. In my last year of high school, I resolved to do whatever I could to make a change before I graduated and left town for good. I felt like I had a duty to help other queer kids who were too scared to come out or who had feelings of self-hatred. I gave an impassioned speech about tolerance at a school assembly, flyered every hallway and classroom, and started a group for LGBTQ students and allies.
> 
> Not long after, I was exposed to the ideas of Judith Butler, a bold and penetrating mix of third-wave feminism and queer theory. I saw truth in Butler’s radical perspective on gender, and it felt liberating. My lifelong discomfort with being put in a box — a binary gender category — was vindicated. This is when my passion for feminism began in earnest. I put a bumper sticker on my car that said “Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History.” I bought a subscription to Bitch magazine. When it came time to graduate and move on to McGill, I eagerly enrolled in a class on feminist theory, as well as a class in Sexual Diversity Studies, the subject that would later become my minor.
> 
> My world only kept expanding from there. In Montreal, I was exposed to a greater diversity of people and perspectives than ever before. The same sort of transformation that had occurred in my mind about gender happened with race and disability. I learned about classism and capitalism. At Rad Frosh, a workshop by the high-profile activist Jaggi Singh gave me my first real introduction to anarchism. My first year at McGill was a whirlwind of new people and new revelations.
> 
> In my second year, I dove in. I became heavily involved with a variety of queer, feminist, generally anti-oppressive, and radical leftist groups and organizations, in every combination thereof (Mob Squad is one example of many). I read books like Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? and The Coming Insurrection. I shouted my lungs out at protests. So many protests. Marching down the street carrying a sign that said “Fuck Capitalism” became my main form of exercise. That was the year of the tuition protests. There was a lot of excitement in the air. I thought maybe, just maybe, there would be a revolution. A girl can dream.
> 
> 2012 was the year I hit peak radicalism. Things I did that year included occupying a campus building (for the second time), bodychecking a security guard, getting rammed at low speed by a cop on a moped, sitting through an entire SSMU General Assembly, and running from flashbang grenades hurled by police. (I wasn’t nearly as hardcore as most of the people I knew. “I love how pepper spray clears out your sinuses,” one said. Some participated in black blocs. At one point, a few spent the night in jail.)
> 
> Since then, my political worldview has steadily grown and evolved and refined itself. I no longer pine for revolution. I don’t hate capitalism or the state as if those were the names of the people who killed my dog. My politics still lean to the left, just not quite so far, and now I view economic and political systems with an engineer’s eye, rather than in the stark colours of moral outrage. I am just as passionate about queer activism and feminism as I ever was, and aspire to be an ally to other anti-oppressive movements just as much as I ever did. I feel like I have a richer and more nuanced understanding of anti-oppressive politics and ethics than ever before. I’ve held onto all the lessons that I’ve learned. I am grateful to the many people who shared their insight with me.
> 
> 
> There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics.
> 
> I’ll be graduating soon, and I’ve been thinking about my years in Montreal with both nostalgia and regret. Something has been nagging at me for a long time. There’s something I need to say out loud, to everyone before I leave. It’s something that I’ve wanted to say for a long time, but I’ve struggled to find the right words. I need to tell people what was wrong with the activism I was engaged in, and why I bailed out. I have many fond memories from that time, but all in all, it was the darkest chapter of my life.
> 
> I used to endorse a particular brand of politics that is prevalent at McGill and in Montreal more widely. It is a fusion of a certain kind of anti-oppressive politics and a certain kind of radical leftist politics. *This particular brand of politics begins with good intentions and noble causes, but metastasizes into a nightmare*. In general, the activists involved are the nicest, most conscientious people you could hope to know. But at some point, they took a wrong turn, and their devotion to social justice led them down a dark path. Having been on both sides of the glass, I think I can bring some painful but necessary truth to light.
> 
> Important disclaimer: I passionately support anti-oppressive politics in general and have only good things to say about it. My current political worldview falls under the umbrella of leftism, although not radical leftism. I’m basically a social democrat who likes co-ops and believes in universal basic income, the so-called ‘capitalist road to communism.’ I agree with a lot of what the radical left has to say, but I disagree with a lot of what it has to say. I’m deeply against Marxism-Leninism and social anarchism, but I’m sympathetic to market socialism and direct democracy. I don’t have any criticism for radical leftism in general, at least not here, not today. What I feel compelled to criticize is only one very specific political phenomenon, one particular incarnation of radical leftist, anti-oppressive politics.
> 
> There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that is. *I’ve pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism.* I’ll go into detail about each one of these. The following is as much a confession as it is an admonishment. I will not mention a single sin that I have not been fully and damnably guilty of in my time.
> 
> First, dogmatism. *One way to define the difference between a regular belief and a sacred belief is that people who hold sacred beliefs think it is morally wrong for anyone to question those beliefs. If someone does question those beliefs, they’re not just being stupid or even depraved, they’re actively doing violence.* They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity. In this mindset, people who disagreed with my views weren’t just wrong, they were awful people. I watched what people said closely, scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist. Calling them ‘sacred beliefs’ is a nice way to put it. What I mean to say is that they are dogmas.
> 
> Thinking this way quickly divides the world into an ingroup and an outgroup — believers and heathens, the righteous and the wrong-teous. “I hate being around un-rad people,” a friend once texted me, infuriated with their liberal roommates. Members of the ingroup are held to the same stringent standards. Every minor heresy inches you further away from the group. People are reluctant to say that anything is too radical for fear of being been seen as too un-radical. Conversely, showing your devotion to the cause earns you respect. Groupthink becomes the modus operandi. When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues. Internal disagreement was rare. The insular community served as an incubator of extreme, irrational views.
> 
> High on their own supply, activists in these organizing circles end up developing a crusader mentality: *an extreme self-righteousness based on the conviction that they are doing the secular equivalent of God’s work*. It isn’t about ego or elevating oneself. In fact, the activists I knew and I tended to denigrate ourselves more than anything. It wasn’t about us, it was about the desperately needed work we were doing, it was about the people we were trying to help. The danger of the crusader mentality is that it turns the world in a battle between good and evil. Actions that would otherwise seem extreme and crazy become natural and expected. I didn’t think twice about doing a lot of things I would never do today.
> 
> There is a lot to admire about the activists I befriended. They have only the best intentions. They are selfless and dedicated to doing what they think is right, even at great personal sacrifice. Sadly, in this case their conscience has betrayed them. My conscience betrayed me. It was only when I finally gave myself permission to be selfish, after months and months of grinding on despite being horribly burnt out, that I eventually achieved the critical distance to rethink my political beliefs.
> 
> Anti-intellectualism was the one facet of this worldview I could never fully stomach.
> 
> Anti-intellectualism is a pill I swallowed, but it got caught in my throat, and that would eventually save me. It comes in a few forms. Activists in these circles often express disdain for theory because they take theoretical issues to be idle sudoku puzzles far removed from the real issues on the ground. This is what led one friend of mine to say, in anger and disbelief, “People’s lives aren’t some theoretical issue!” That same person also declared allegiance to a large number of theories about people’s lives, which reveals something important.* Almost everything we do depends on one theoretical belief or another, which range from simple to complex and from implicit to explicit. A theoretical issue is just a general or fundamental question about something that we find important enough to think about.* Theoretical issues include ethical issues, issues of political philosophy, and issues about the ontological status of gender, race, and disability. Ultimately, it’s hard to draw a clear line between theorizing and thinking in general. Disdain for thinking is ludicrous, and no one would ever express it if they knew that’s what they were doing.
> 
> Specifically on the radical leftist side of things, one problem created by this anti-theoretical bent is a lot of rhetoric and bluster, a lot of passionate railing against the world or some aspect of it, *without a clear, detailed, concrete alternative*. (_Rhetorical question What happens when someone DOES offer a clear, detailed, concrete alternative?_) There was a common excuse for this. As an activist friend wrote in an email, “The present organization of society fatally impairs our ability to imagine meaningful alternatives. As such, constructive proposals will simply end up reproducing present relations.” This claim is couched in theoretical language, but it is a rationale for not theorizing about political alternatives. For a long time I accepted this rationale. Then I realized that mere opposition to the status quo wasn’t enough to distinguish us from nihilists. In the software industry, a hyped-up piece of software that never actually gets released is called “vapourware.” We should be wary of political vapourware. If somebody’s alternative to the status quo is nothing, or at least nothing very specific, then what are they even talking about? They are hawking political vapourware, giving a “sales pitch” for something that doesn’t even exist.


----------



## a_majoor

part 2



> Anti-intellectualism also comes out in full force on the anti-oppressive side of things. It manifests itself in the view that knowledge not just about what oppression, is like, but also knowledge about all the ethical questions pertaining to oppression is accessible only through personal experience. The answers to these ethical questions are treated as a matter of private revelation. In the academic field of ethics, ethical claims are judged on the strength of their arguments, a form of public revelation. Some activists find this approach intolerable.
> 
> Perhaps the most deeply held tenet of a certain version of anti-oppressive politics – which is by no means the only version – is that members of an oppressed group are infallible in what they say about the oppression faced by that group. This tenet stems from the wise rule of thumb that marginalized groups must be allowed to speak for themselves. But it takes that rule of thumb to an unwieldy extreme.
> 
> Let me give an example. A gay person is typically much better acquainted with homophobia than a straight person. Moreover, a gay person has a much greater stake in what society does about homophobia, so their view on the matter is more important. However, there is nothing about the experience of being gay in itself that enlightens a gay person about the ethics of sexual orientation.
> 
> To take a dead simple case, you don’t have to hear it from a gay person to know that homosexuality is ethically just fine. If you’re a straight person and a gay person tells you that homosexuality is wrong, you can be confident in your judgement that they are full of shit. In this situation, the straight person is right and the gay person is wrong about homosexuality and homophobia. Gay people have no special access to ethical knowledge, in general or about sexual orientation specifically. Gay people do tend to have better ethical knowledge about sexual orientation than straight people, but that is only because of how our life circumstances move us to reflect on it.
> 
> If I said the same thing about another context that isn’t so simple — when the correct opinion isn’t so obvious — I would be roundly condemned. But the example’s simplicity isn’t what makes it valid. People who belong to oppressed groups are just people, with thoughts ultimately as fallible as anyone else’s. They aren’t oracles who dispense eternal wisdom. Ironically, this principle of infallibility, designed to combat oppression, has allowed essentialism to creep in. The trait that defines a person’s group membership is treated as a source of innate ethical knowledge. This is to say nothing about the broader problem of how you’re supposed to decide who’s a source of innate knowledge. Certainly not someone who innately “knows” that homosexuality is disgusting and wrong, but why not, if you’re simply relying on private revelation rather than public criteria?
> 
> Consider otherkin, people who believe they are literally animals or magical creatures and who use the concepts and language of anti-oppressive politics to talk about themselves. I have no problem drawing my own conclusions about the lived experience of otherkin. Nobody is literally a honeybee or a dragon. We have to assess claims about oppression based on more than just what people say about themselves. If I took the idea of the infallibility of the oppressed seriously, I would have to trust that dragons exist. That is why it’s such an unreliable guide. (I half-expect the response, “Check your human privilege!”)
> 
> It is an ominous sign whenever a political movement dispenses with methods and approaches of gaining knowledge that are anchored to public revelation and, moreover, becomes openly hostile to them. Anti-intellectualism and a corresponding reliance on innate knowledge is one of the hallmarks of a cult or a totalitarian ideology.
> 
> Anti-intellectualism was the one facet of this worldview I could never fully stomach. I was dogmatic, I fell prey to groupthink, and I had a crusader mentality, but I was never completely anti-intellectual. Ever since I was a child, the pursuit of knowledge has felt like my calling. It’s part of who I am. I could never turn my back on it. At least not completely. And that was the crack through which the light came in. My love for deep reflection and systematic thinking never ceased. Almost by accident, I took time off from being an activist. I spent time just trying to be happy and at peace, far away from Montreal. It had been a long while since I had the time and the freedom to just think. At first, I pulled on a few threads, and then with that eventually the whole thing unravelled. Slowly, my political worldview collapsed in on itself.
> 
> The aftermath was wonderful. A world that seemed grey and hopeless filled with colour. I can’t convey to you how bleak my worldview was. An activist friend once said to me, with complete sincerity, “Everything is problematic.” That was the general consensus. Far bleaker was something I said during a phone call to an old friend who lived in another city, far outside my political world. I, like a disproportionate number of radical leftists, was depressed, and spent a lot of time sighing into the receiver. “I’m not worried about you killing yourself,” he said. “I know you want to live forever.” I let out a weak, sad laugh. “When I said that,” I replied, “I was a lot happier than I am now.” Losing my political ideology was extremely liberating. I became a happier person. I also believe that I became a better person.
> 
> I’ve just said a lot of negative things. But, of course, my goal here is to do something positive. I’m cursing the darkness in the hope of seeing the light of a new day. Still, I don’t want to just criticize without offering an alternative. So, let me give a few pieces of constructive advice to anyone interested in anti-oppressive and/or leftist activism.
> 
> First, embrace humility. You may find it refreshing. Others will find it refreshing too. Be forceful, be impassioned, just don’t get too high on your own supply. Don’t drink your own kool aid. Question yourself as fiercely as you question society.
> 
> Second, treat people as individuals. For instance, don’t treat every person who belongs to an oppressed group as an authoritative mouthpiece of that group as a whole. People aren’t plugged into some kind of hive mind. Treating them like they are, besides being essentialist, also leads to contradictions since, obviously, not all people agree on all things. There is no shortcut that allows you to avoid thinking for yourself about oppression simply by deferring to the judgements of others. You have to decide whose judgements you are going to trust, and that comes to the same thing as judging for yourself. This drops a huge responsibility on your lap. Grasp the nettle firmly. Accept the responsibility and hone your thinking. Notice contradictions and logical fallacies. When you hear an opinion about a kind of oppression from a member of the group that experiences it, seek out countervailing opinions from members of the same group and weigh them against each other. Don’t be afraid to have original insights.
> 
> Third, learn to be diplomatic. Not everything is a war of good versus evil. Reasonable, informed, conscientious people often disagree about important ethical issues. People are going to have different conceptions of what being anti-oppressive entails, so get used to disagreement. When it comes to moral disagreements, disbelief, anger, and a sense of urgency are to be expected. They are inherent parts of moral disagreement. That’s what makes a diplomatic touch so necessary. Otherwise, everything turns into a shouting match.
> 
> Fourth, take a systems approach to the political spectrum. Treat the pursuit of the best kind of society as an engineering problem. Think about specific, concrete proposals. Would they actually work? Deconflate desirability and feasibility. Refine your categories beyond simple dichotomies like capitalism/socialism or statism/anarchism.
> 
> I am not going to let my disillusionment with my past activism discourage me from trying to do good in the future. If you find yourself similarly disillusioned, take heart. As long as you learn from your mistakes, no one can blame you for trying to be a good person. Don’t worry. We all get to come back.


----------



## McG

As IS eclipses AQ in the role of biggest bogey-man, understanding their differences will help in understanding the differences in how they must be fought.  Evan Dyer's analysis would seemingly lend weight to those arguing for containment and allowing the radicals to flow into the fight.  


> *How ISIS is different from al-Qaeda
> Jihadi group's rigid ideology is a weakness as well as a strength*
> Evan Dyer, CBC News
> 29 Mar 2015
> 
> According to the Government of Canada (and indeed, most Western politicians), the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria represents a dramatic escalation of the terror threat to Western countries.
> 
> So it may seem odd to read the following passage in ISIS's official English-language publication Dabiq, looking back on the years immediately after 9/11:
> 
> "Europe was struck by attacks that killed multitudes more of kuffar [disbelievers] than those killed in the recent Paris attacks. The 2004 Madrid operation and the 2005 London operation together killed more than 200 crusaders and injured more than 2000."
> 
> Indeed, the Paris attacks in January were by far the most lethal jihadi terror attack on the West in the decade since the 7/7 attacks in London. And yet the Madrid bombings killed more than 10 times as many people. (Moreover, the Charlie Hebdo attack was not even as ISIS operation, but the work of an older nemesis: al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.)
> 
> Dabiq goes on to ask:
> 
> "So why was the reaction to the recent attacks much greater than that of any previous attack? It is the international atmosphere of terror generated by the presence of the Islamic khilafah [caliphate] … It is the lively words contained in the khilafah's call."
> 
> In other words, fewer Westerners are being killed, but ISIS's hype – its "lively words" – maximizes the psychological effect of the smaller operations that take place today, which typically leave one or two dead, such as the soldiers attacked on a London street, or in St.Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., and on Parliament Hill. And the civilian attacks in cafés in Copenhagen and Sydney.
> 
> In some respects, ISIS is merely treading a path laid down by its parent organization al-Qaeda, from which it split a year ago.
> 
> It was al-Qaeda that developed the technique of dressing hostages in orange jumpsuits and beheading them on video. Westerners like Daniel Pearl and Ken Bigley suffered that fate long before anyone had had heard of ISIS.
> 
> So why has ISIS failed to inspire more and bigger attacks in the West?
> 
> The answer lies partly in the apocalyptic ideology of the movement.
> 
> ISIS believes that its future is already determined by prophesy. It is pre-ordained that ISIS will face and defeat the "crusader" forces on a plain near the Syrian farming village of Dabiq (hence the magazine's name.)
> 
> Some time after, the "Dajjal" [the anti-Christ] will appear. The forces of the caliphate will be reduced to a mere 5,000 men. There will be a final battle at the gates of Rum, commonly held to be Istanbul. At that point Issa ibn-Maryam, known to Christians as Jesus, will descend from heaven and kill Dajjal with a spear, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and heralding the end of the world.
> 
> The group also believes that for all of this to unfold as planned, it is necessary to re-establish the Muslim caliphate abolished by Ataturk in 1923.
> 
> That means that unlike al-Qaeda, a shape-shifting clandestine insurgency that operated around the world, ISIS must control and govern real territory.
> 
> The main service an aspiring jihadi can render to the Islamic State, therefore, is not to stage attacks far away in the West, but to come to the caliphate and join its army.
> 
> Dabiq explains the position of ISIS leadership to its readers:
> 
> "The first priority is to perform hijrah [pilgrimage] from wherever you are to the Islamic State ... Rush to the shade of the Islamic State with your parents, siblings, spouses, and children.
> 
> "Second, if you cannot perform hijrah for whatever extraordinary reason, then try in your location to organize bay'at [pledges of allegiance]) to the khalifah Ibrahim. Publicize them as much as possible … Try to record these bay'at and then distribute them through all forms of media including the internet."
> 
> Curiously, the article does not ask Muslims in the West to stage attacks. In some later pronouncements ISIS has called for attacks, but only in cases where it is impossible to travel.
> 
> There is no doubt that the announcement of the Islamic State has caused excitement in jihadi circles (though less noticed, it also caused division.) That excitement led to an unprecendented migration of jihadi-minded individuals.
> 
> ISIS has become like a vortex, sucking jihadis away from their home countries and into the maelstrom of Syria. Many are dying there, some within days. Others burn their passports or surrender them to the organization. Return to the West, far from being encouraged, is seen as a personal and religious failure.
> 
> With their departure, these jihadis lose the ability to stage attacks in the West. Where previously Western countries may have been unable to arrest them due to lack of evidence, they can now be targeted for death by Western bombs. And if they do attempt to return, they can be imprisoned for having joined ISIS.
> 
> To be clear, the spread of ISIS is a tragedy for the people of Syria and Iraq, particularly those who belong to minorities targeted for extermination under the group's ideology. The group continues to commit sickening atrocities against people under its rule.
> 
> But here in the West, politicians have failed to explain how the ISIS phenomenon is more dangerous than al-Qaeda, with its calculated efforts to insinuate agents into Western countries and its ambitious mass-casualty attacks.
> 
> The hype of ISIS — that stream of "lively words" — depends on an echo chamber in the West, made up of politicians and media who find it convenient to play up ISIS's claim that it is an existential threat to Western civilization. That feeds into its propaganda that it is a uniquely powerful force capable of bringing on the end of the world.


http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/how-isis-is-different-from-al-qaeda-1.3001969


----------



## McG

Saudi Jets may have hit a refugee camp in air strikes today.  Meanwhile, Pakistan joins the Saudi coalition in Yemen.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/yemen-airstrike-kills-45-at-refugee-camp-1.3014565


----------



## a_majoor

Statfor on this "Pan Arab" force. Given the speed in which it was seemingly assembled, the suggestion in this article that this coalition was assembled some time ago makes sense (and given the Americans were apparently caught flat footed by the coalition, it also speaks to a very good security plan). Now we have to see how this Arab Legion performs:

http://www.strategypage.com/on_point/20150331224238.aspx



> *Evaluating the Pan-Arab "Joint Army"*
> 
> by Austin Bay
> March 31, 2015
> A pan-Arab military coalition has begun waging war in Yemen, ostensibly on behalf of deposed Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Is this Arab League-approved "joint army" a credible combat force?
> 
> That depends on who emerges as the joint army's central actor and commander.
> 
> So far, Saudi Arabia has served as the coalition's most prominent public advocate and actor. The Saudis contend Iran backs the Houthi insurgents who overthrew Hadi. Strong evidence supports their contention.
> 
> Yemen's war involves sectarian sympathies. Ayatollah-led Iran, the world's great Shia Muslim power, supports the Shia Houthi movement. Saudi Arabia's Wahabi-sect leaders have concluded that Iran intends to use a Houthi-infested Yemen to harass and destabilize their Sunni kingdom.
> 
> In concept, Iran's Yemen proxies would attack the Saudis in somewhat the same way Tehran uses its Lebanon-based Hezbollah proxies to harass and distract Israel. The Arabian Peninsula, rife with tribal factions, gives the Iranians numerous volatile human targets to rile and exploit. Fracturing these often delicate tribal political arrangements would be a major step toward achieving a beloved Iranian goal: toppling the Saud family regime.
> 
> Israel, a nation state rather than tribal confederation, presents Iran's ayatollahs with a much harder and more ferocious target. Nation states vary in strength, but the Israeli nation state is a high-technology, highly trained warrior nation state. Iran needs nuclear weapons to destroy the Israeli nation state. Unfortunately, ayatollah Iran's nuclear weapons quest, thanks to feckless western governments, including the current one in Washington, appears to be on the verge of succeeding.
> 
> The sectarian analysis of Iranian ambitions stresses Shia regional hegemony as Tehran's goal. It's there, but don't buy it as a sufficient answer. A "golden age" myth of Aryan divine and ethnic right to rule, circa Persian Empire 500 BC, seduces Tehran's ayatollahs. Yes, Aryan. Iran is "Aryanistan." If you didn't know that, well, now you do. Arabs are Semitic peoples. So are Jews. If you didn't know this ethnic dimension is in play, well, it is.
> 
> Now to the pan-Arab military force.
> 
> Money talks, and the Saudis have the bankroll. The Saudis also have an air force (flying U.S.-made jets) capable of conducting a credible air campaign. On March 26, the coalition's Operation Resolute Storm began with air strikes against various Houthi targets. The question is how long can they keep it up before logistic and maintenance deficiencies emerge? They can hire private contractors to provide these services.
> 
> At the moment, naval operations are secondary, though that could change if the Iranian-Houthi coalition takes complete control. Yemen's Southwestern edge borders the strait connecting the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. However, coalition naval operations indicate the centrality of the Arab world's strongest nation state: Egypt. Egypt's Al-Ahram reported that Egyptian warships shelled Houthi fighters advancing on the Yemeni port of Aden. Egyptian officials did not comment, on the record.
> 
> Ground operations will determine Yemen's winner, and Egypt's large and comparatively capable army is the pan-Arab coalition's decisive force.
> 
> Bankrolls matter, but the quality of generals, captains, sergeants and privates matters as well. At times their quality matters more than cash. Egypt and Jordan both have fair-to-good military reputations. Every regime can field a small elite force, but the Egyptian and Jordanian armies field larger units (brigades) with comparatively higher training standards than other Arab states. Last year, Egyptian forces conducted some cursory training exercises with countries now participating in the coalition, so that coalition's formation may not be as sudden as the headlines suggest. Egyptian advisers are reportedly in Saudi Arabia, on both the Iraq and Yemen borders.
> 
> Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi adds credibility to the coalition. Al-Sisi has the military skills. He also understands the ideological component. He has shaped his own country's fight as one against militant Islam, whether Sunni or Shiite. If al-Sisi has the final decision in the pan-Arab army's operations against Iranian proxies and -- potentially -- Iran itself, there is a very good chance it will prevail. If the Arab force fails? The Israelis won't.


----------



## a_majoor

British Muslims declare Jihad against ISIS. *We* often wonder why Muslims do not denounce the activities of radicals and extremists, well perhaps now they are finally doing so. Longer term, there will still need to be something akin to the Reformation, but that is up to Muslims to do. At least some of them are taking the first step down the road:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/young-british-muslims-declare-own-jihad-against-isis-and-other-terrorists-who-hijack-islam-10146534.html



> *Young British Muslims declare own jihad against Isis and other terrorists who 'hijack' Islam*
> The Muslim Youth League UK has announced an ideological holy war against all extremist groups who misrepresent faith
> Lizzie Dearden
> Tuesday 31 March 2015
> 
> A group of young British Muslims have declared their own “jihad” against Isis and all other terrorist groups.
> 
> The Muslim Youth League UK announced an ideological holy war against the Islamic State at a conference in Glasgow on Sunday, saying militants had “no link with Islam or the Muslim community”.
> 
> It is concerned that recruitment by the group is on the rise in the UK, targeting teenage girls and boys with gory propaganda videos and social media accounts boasting of life under the “caliphate”. British Isis members including Amira Abase, Kadiza Sultana and Shamima Begum are believed to have been radicalised partly online
> 
> Shaykh Rehan Ahmed Raza, president of Muslim Youth League UK, said: "Our efforts are aimed at deterring further ISIS recruitment in Britain and defending the Muslim community, who feel their religion has been hijacked."
> 
> He announced a seven-point declaration calling the killing of any person un-Islamic, whatever their faith, and condemning extremists’ “deviation” from the teachings of Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.
> 
> Read more: • Comment: 'Isis girls have been groomed'
> • Ukip candidate says UK should let Isis fanatics go and never return
> • British girls as young as 15 have joined Isis in Syria
> 
> “The emergence of the terrorists, who would use the name of Islam to justify their atrocious activities, was prophesied by Prophet Muhammad. He declared them as being out of the ambit of Islam,” the declaration continues.
> 
> “We challenge Isis, similar groups and their supporters ideologically and intellectually.”
> 
> The league also announced that it rejects Islamophobic “labelling” of Muslims as extremists or terrorists by politicians, the media and public.
> 
> “We ask Muslims from all walks of life, regardless of the school of thought to which they belong, to stand united against extremists who have hijacked the true teachings of Islam,” its declaration added.
> 
> “We call upon scholars and community leaders to raise a united and unwavering voice against extremism.”
> 
> While an unknown number of British men, women and teenagers have joined Isis in Iraq or Syria, its atrocities against civilians and the murder of foreign hostages has provoked widespread condemnation.
> 
> The Muslim Youth League and other groups are fighting back against its propaganda online and through engagement work in schools and communities.
> 
> “The barbarism and lack of respect for the sanctity of human life shown by Isis is a challenge to every civilised value, not least to the tenets of Islam,” a spokesperson for the group said.
> 
> The Muslim Youth League represents young Muslims in the UK and aims to promote unity and tolerance.
> 
> A spokesperson said its declaration of “jihad” against Isis hoped to inspire similar statements from other British Islamic groups condemning extremism.
> 
> At least 60 British women and girls as young as 15 have joined Isis in Syria so far, police say, including three London schoolgirls who disappeared earlier this year. Jihadi John, the militant seen in execution videos including the beheading of journalist James Foley, is believed to be British
> 
> The numbers of British men travelling out to join the group’s bloody campaign to establish a hardline Muslim caliphate are believed to be much higher.
> 
> Among them is Mohammed Emwazi, the former London university student believed to be the masked militant known as “Jihadi John” seen in Isis’ gory execution videos.
> 
> In 2013, 25 arrests were made for Syria-related offences and last year that number rocketed to 165.


----------



## CougarKing

It seems the Saudi-led coalition air campaign is not having the desired effect on Iranian-backed Houthi forces:

Reuters



> *Yemen Houthi fighters backed by tanks reach central Aden*
> 
> By Mohammed Mukhashaf
> 
> ADEN (Reuters) - Houthi rebels and allies backed by tanks pushed on Wednesday into central Aden, the main foothold of fighters loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, witnesses said, despite more than a week of air strikes by Saudi-led coalition forces.
> 
> The alliance of mainly Sunni Gulf Arab states has also attacked the northern Shi'ite Houthis from the sea but their advance towards the southern port city has been relentless.
> 
> (...SNIPPED



Even China has been forced to evacuate its nationals from Yemen:

Yahoo News 



> *China evacuating from Yemen, suspending anti-piracy patrols*
> Associated Press – 1 hour 4 minutes ago
> 
> BEIJING (AP) — China is evacuating its citizens from Yemen and suspending anti-piracy patrols in the area amid the growing violence in the Middle Eastern country.
> 
> *Three Chinese navy ships were diverted to the port of Aden to rescue Chinese nationals caught in the conflict, state media reported on Monday, marking only the second time Chinese military assets have been used in such a mission. About 122 Chinese were evacuated from Yemen to Djibouti, and authorities were working to assist the more than 400 remaining Chinese*, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.
> 
> "The Chinese government is highly concerned over the safety of Chinese citizens and institutions in Yemen, and has taken immediate action to pull out Chinese citizens in an orderly fashion," Hua said during a regularly scheduled news briefing.
> 
> In 2011, China took the unprecedented step of dispatching one of its most sophisticated warships and military transport aircraft to help in the evacuation of about 35,000 Chinese citizens amid Libya's civil war.
> 
> No Chinese have been reported killed or injured in the fighting in Yemen that now threatens a potentially dangerous clash between U.S.-allied Arab states and Iran.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The Somali group Al Shabaab, which also pledged allegiance to ISIS at one point, strikes again in East Africa:

Reuters



> *Al Shabaab storms Kenyan university, 14 killed*
> 
> By Edith Honan
> 
> GARISSA, Kenya (Reuters) - At least 14 people were killed on Thursday when Islamist militant group al Shabaab stormed a Kenyan university campus, taking Christians hostage and engaging security forces in an extended shootout.
> 
> With scores of students wounded and hundreds unaccounted for, police and soldiers surrounded Garissa University College. They sealed off the compound and were trying to flush out the gunmen, Kenyan police chief Joseph Boinet said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## eharps

It greatly saddens me to keep reading stories like this, especially at places of "enlightenment" (i.e. Universities)  :'(

What saddens me more is the deafening silence on the world stage when groups such as ISIS/IL keep expanding, recruiting and attacking. Indirect efforts from major powers can only go so far, direct engagement will soon be the only resort left.

 :2c:


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Direct and indirect engagements are happening now.  Just in case you are wondering.


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, back in Yemen, the siege of Aden continues:

Reuters



> *Saudis airdrop arms to Aden defenders, Houthis pull back*
> 
> By Mohammad Mukhashaf
> 
> ADEN (Reuters) - Houthi forces pulled back from a central Aden district on Friday and warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition dropped weapons and medical aid to fighters defending the southern Yemeni city, a last symbolic foothold of the country's absent president.
> 
> The Shi'ite Houthi fighters and their allies withdrew from Crater neighborhood as well as one of Aden's presidential residences which they seized a day earlier, residents and a local official said.
> 
> Their withdrawal followed overnight clashes and an air strike on the presidential palace at Ma'ashiq, overlooking Crater. At least one Houthi tank was destroyed and another taken over by President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's loyalists, they said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Even China has been forced to evacuate its nationals from Yemen:
> 
> Yahoo News


And they're not JUST helping evacuate _Chinese_ nationals, either, according to Chinese media - highlight mine ....


> After evacuating its nationals from Yemen, the Chinese government is helping other countries get their citizens out of the conflict-ridden country.
> 
> On Thursday, 225 evacuees from 10 countries arrived in Djibouti onboard a Chinese frigate. The frigate arrived in the East African country after nearly eight hours at sea. The evacuated nationals are from Pakistan, Ethiopia, Singapore, Italy, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Britain, *Canada* and Yemen.
> 
> A Chinese military official involved in the operation says it is the first time that a Chinese military vessel evacuated foreign nationals as part of the country's international humanitarian aid efforts ....


----------



## McG

It would seem Russian armed forces have also evacuated a few Canadians and Poles.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canadians-taken-out-of-yemen-with-help-of-kremlin-russian-media-says-1.3021424


----------



## CougarKing

Curtailing these recruiting efforts by targeting ISIS's so-called "cyber division" efforts at foreign recruitment would be one step. And more than just preventing them from hacking into any western military's twitter account as what happened to the US CENTCOM's twitter feed recently.

Reuters



> *Iraqi PM: Armies have no chance against IS if it keeps recruiting foreigners*
> 
> BERLIN (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi told a German magazine that armies in the region around Iraq had no chance of defeating Islamic State (IS) if the militants continued to recruit ideologically indoctrinated foreign fighters.
> 
> In an interview with Der Spiegel published on Saturday, Abadi said that around 57 percent of IS fighters were Iraqis but they did not cause any problems as they simply ran away when Iraqi troops entered towns.
> 
> *"It is the 43 percent who are foreign fighters who have been indoctrinated ideologically who have their backs up against the wall. If Daesh continues to recruit so many from other countries, then no army in our region can stand up to it."*
> 
> Daesh is an Arabic name for Islamic State.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## McG

The Red Cross calls for a 24 hr ceasefire to push humanitarian aid in Yemen.  The UN SC considers the same proposal, being presented by Russia.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-32187861


----------



## a_majoor

An interesting look at the role of the Iraqis inside ISIS. While the actual role of the Iraqi officers may be open to interpretation (are they exploiting ISIS or is ISIS utilizing their skills and experience?), this article makes the multi faceted nature of ISIS a little more clear. For the clever, this may be another wedge that can be exploited to promote internal dissention and friction:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-hidden-hand-behind-the-islamic-state-militants-saddam-husseins/2015/04/04/aa97676c-cc32-11e4-8730-4f473416e759_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop_b



> *The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.*
> CONFRONTING THE ‘CALIPHATE’| This is part of an occasional series about the militant group Islamic State and its violent collision with the United States and others intent on halting the group’s rapid rise.
> By Liz Sly April 4 
> 
> SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.
> 
> Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.
> 
> Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.
> 
> His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.
> 
> Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.
> 
> They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading.
> 
> In Syria, local “emirs” are typically shadowed by a deputy who is Iraqi and makes the real decisions, said Abu Hamza, who fled to Turkey last summer after growing disillusioned with the group. He uses a pseudonym because he fears for his safety.
> 
> “All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans,” he said. “But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines.”
> 
> [The Islamic State is failing at being a state]
> 
> The public profile of the foreign jihadists frequently obscures the Islamic State’s roots in the bloody recent history of Iraq, its brutal excesses as much a symptom as a cause of the country’s woes.
> 
> The raw cruelty of Hussein’s Baathist regime, the disbandment of the Iraqi army after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the subsequent insurgency and the marginalization of Sunni Iraqis by the Shiite-dominated government all are intertwined with the Islamic State’s ascent, said Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.”
> 
> “A lot of people think of the Islamic State as a terrorist group, and it’s not useful,” Hassan said. “It is a terrorist group, but it is more than that. It is a homegrown Iraqi insurgency, and it is organic to Iraq.”
> 
> The de-Baathification law promulgated by L.­ Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns.
> 
> The U.S. military failed in the early years to recognize the role the disbanded Baathist officers would eventually come to play in the extremist group, eclipsing the foreign fighters whom American officials preferred to blame, said Col. Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the National Defense University who served as an adviser to top generals in Iraq and describes the links between Baathists and the Islamic State in his book, “Iraq After America.”
> 
> The U.S. military always knew that the former Baathist officers had joined other insurgent groups and were giving tactical support to the Al Qaeda in Iraq affiliate, the precursor to the Islamic State, he said. But American officials didn’t anticipate that they would become not only adjuncts to al-Qaeda, but core members of the jihadist group.
> 
> [Islamic State appears to be fraying from within]
> 
> “We might have been able to come up with ways to head off the fusion, the completion of the Iraqization process,” he said. The former officers were probably not reconcilable, “but it was the labeling of them as irrelevant that was the mistake.”
> 
> Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, the former officers became more than relevant. They were instrumental in the group’s rebirth from the defeats inflicted on insurgents by the U.S. military, which is now back in Iraq bombing many of the same men it had already fought twice before.
> 
> Shared traits
> 
> At first glance, the secularist dogma of Hussein’s tyrannical Baath Party seems at odds with the Islamic State’s harsh interpretation of the Islamic laws it purports to uphold.
> 
> But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Hussein dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today.
> 
> Like the Islamic State, Hussein’s Baath Party also regarded itself as a transnational movement, forming branches in countries across the Middle East and running training camps for foreign volunteers from across the Arab world.
> 
> By the time U.S. troops invaded in 2003, Hussein had begun to tilt toward a more religious approach to governance, making the transition from Baathist to Islamist ideology less improbable for some of the disenfranchised Iraqi officers, said Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor who is researching the ties at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
> 
> With the launch of the Iraqi dictator’s Faith Campaign in 1994, strict Islamic precepts were introduced. The words “God is Great” were inscribed on the Iraqi flag. Amputations were decreed for theft. Former Baathist officers recall friends who suddenly stopped drinking, started praying and embraced the deeply conservative form of Islam known as Salafism in the years preceding the U.S. invasion.
> 
> In the last two years of Hussein’s rule, a campaign of beheadings, mainly targeting women suspected of prostitution and carried out by his elite Fedayeen unit, killed more than 200 people, human rights groups reported at the time.
> 
> The brutality deployed by the Islamic State today recalls the bloodthirstiness of some of those Fedayeen, said Hassan. Promotional videos from the Hussein era include scenes resembling those broadcast today by the Islamic State, showing the Fedayeen training, marching in black masks, practicing the art of decapitation and in one instance eating a live dog.
> 
> Some of those Baathists became early recruits to the al-Qaeda affiliate established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Palestinian Jordanian fighter who is regarded as the progenitor of the current Islamic State, said Hisham al Hashemi, an Iraqi analyst who advises the Iraqi government and has relatives who served in the Iraqi military under Hussein. Other Iraqis were radicalized at Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq where thousands of ordinary citizens were detained and intermingled with jihadists.
> 
> Zarqawi kept the former Baathists at a distance, because he distrusted their secular outlook, according to Hashim, the professor.
> 
> It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers.
> 
> Tasked with rebuilding the greatly weakened insurgent organization after 2010, Baghdadi embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the former officers, drawing on the vast pool of men who had either remained unemployed or had joined other, less extremist insurgent groups.
> 
> Some of them had fought against al-Qaeda after changing sides and aligning with the American-backed Awakening movement during the surge of troops in 2007. When U.S. troops withdrew and the Iraqi government abandoned the Awakening fighters, the Islamic State was the only surviving option for those who felt betrayed and wanted to change sides again, said Brian Fishman, who researched the group in Iraq for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and is now a fellow with the New America Foundation.
> 
> Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after U.S. troops left in 2011 by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the U.S. military.
> 
> Among them was Brig. Gen. Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by U.S. troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, the capital of the long restive province of Anbar.
> 
> Within months of the American departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans.
> 
> “The crisis of ISIS didn’t happen by chance,” Dulaimi said in an interview in Baghdad, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “It was the result of an accumulation of problems created by the Americans and the [Iraqi] government.”
> 
> He cited the case of a close friend, a former intelligence officer in Baghdad who was fired in 2003 and struggled for many years to make a living. He now serves as the Islamic State’s wali, or leader, in the Anbar town of Hit, Dulaimi said.
> 
> “I last saw him in 2009. He complained that he was very poor. He is an old friend, so I gave him some money,” he recalled. “He was fixable. If someone had given him a job and a salary, he wouldn’t have joined the Islamic State.
> 
> “There are hundreds, thousands like him,” he added. “The people in charge of military operations in the Islamic State were the best officers in the former Iraqi army, and that is why the Islamic State beats us in intelligence and on the battlefield.”
> 
> The Islamic State’s seizure of territory was also smoothed by the Maliki government’s broader persecution of the Sunni minority, which intensified after U.S. troops withdrew and left many ordinary Sunnis willing to welcome the extremists as an alternative to the often brutal Iraqi security forces.
> 
> But it was the influx of Baathist officers into the ranks of the Islamic State itself that propelled its fresh military victories, said Hashem. By 2013, Baghdadi had surrounded himself with former officers, who oversaw the Islamic State’s expansion in Syria and drove the offensives in Iraq.
> 
> [The Islamic State’s war against history]
> 
> Some of Baghdadi’s closest aides, including Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, his deputy in Iraq, and Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, one of his top military commanders in Syria, both of them former Iraqi officers, have since reportedly been killed — though Dulaimi suspects that many feign their own deaths in order to evade detection, making its current leadership difficult to discern.
> 
> Any gaps however are filled by former officers, sustaining the Iraqi influence at the group’s core, even as its ranks are swelled by arriving foreigners, said Hassan.
> 
> Fearing infiltration and spies, the leadership insulates itself from the foreign fighters and the regular Syrian and Iraqi fighters through elaborate networks of intermediaries frequently drawn from the old Iraqi intelligence agencies, he said.
> 
> “They introduced the Baathist mind-set of secrecy as well as its skills,” he said.
> 
> The masked man who ordered the detention of Abu Hamza was one of a group of feared security officers who circulate within the Islamic State, monitoring its members for signs of dissent, the Syrian recalled.
> 
> “They are the eyes and ears of Daesh’s security, and they are very powerful,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
> 
> 
> Scores of hostages, including Westerners, have been killed by the Islamic State since 2014. Here are some of the major incidents where the Islamic State killed the hostages. View Graphic 
> 
> Abu Hamza was released from jail after agreeing to fall into line with the other commanders, he said. But the experience contributed to his disillusionment with the group.
> 
> The foreign fighters he served alongside were “good Muslims,” he said. But he is less sure about the Iraqi leaders.
> 
> “They pray and they fast and you can’t be an emir without praying, but inside I don’t think they believe it much,” he said. “The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam.
> 
> “They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.”
> 
> ‘They want to run Iraq’
> 
> Whether the former Baathists adhere to the Islamic State’s ideology is a matter of debate. Hashim suspects many of them do not.
> 
> “One could still argue that it’s a tactical alliance,” he said. “A lot of these Baathists are not interested in ISIS running Iraq. They want to run Iraq. A lot of them view the jihadists with this Leninist mind-set that they’re useful idiots who we can use to rise to power.”
> 
> Rayburn questions whether even some of the foreign volunteers realize the extent to which they are being drawn into Iraq’s morass. Some of the fiercest battles being waged today in Iraq are for control of communities and neighborhoods that have been hotly contested among Iraqis for years, before the extremists appeared.
> 
> “You have fighters coming from across the globe to fight these local political battles that the global jihad can’t possibly have a stake in.”
> 
> The Islamic State was dumped by al-Qaeda a year ago. Now look at it.
> 
> Former Baathist officers who served alongside some of those now fighting with the Islamic State believe it is the other way around. Rather than the Baathists using the jihadists to return to power, it is the jihadists who have exploited the desperation of the disbanded officers, according to a former general who commanded Iraqi troops during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety in Irbil, the capital of the northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan, where he now resides.
> 
> The ex-Baathists could be lured away, if they were offered alternatives and hope for the future, he said.
> 
> “The Americans bear the biggest responsibility. When they dismantled the army what did they expect those men to do?” he asked. “They were out in the cold with nothing to do and there was only one way out for them to put food on the table.”
> 
> When U.S. officials demobilized the Baathist army, “they didn’t de-Baathify people’s minds, they just took away their jobs,” he said.
> 
> There are former Baathists with other insurgent groups who might be persuaded to switch sides, said Hassan, citing the example of the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, usually referred to by its Arabic acronym JRTN. They welcomed the Islamic State during its sweep through northern Iraq last summer, but the groups have since fallen out.
> 
> But most of the Baathists who actually joined the Islamic State are now likely to have themselves become radicalized, either in prison or on the battlefield, he said.
> 
> “Even if you didn’t walk in with that vision you might walk out with it, after five years of hard fighting,” said Fishman, of the New America Foundation. “They have been through brutal things that are going to shape their vision in a really dramatic way.”
> 
> Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This version is correct.


----------



## CougarKing

The US contribution to the Saudi-led coalition air campaign conducted by Sunni Muslim states against Yemen's Houthi rebels. I wonder if this means a CC-150 Polaris might be joining in as well:

Defense News



> *US Prepared To Provide Saudi Refueling*
> 
> WASHINGTON — US Air Force refueling assets stand ready to support Saudi Arabian operations in Yemen, but the Saudi government has yet to request their use, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday.
> 
> Col. Steve Warren said there is nothing holding up that refueling, but it just has not yet been needed.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Plus more about Saudi boots already on the ground in Yemen:

Agence-France-Presse



> *Saudi special forces 'involved in Yemen ops'*
> 
> Riyadh (AFP) - Saudi Arabian special forces are involved in the military operation against Shiite Huthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen, a Saudi adviser said Saturday.
> 
> A Saudi-led coalition began air strikes on March 26 against the Iran-backed rebels, but says it has no plans for now to deploy ground forces.
> 
> However, Saudi army and naval special forces have carried out specific operations, said the adviser, without revealing if they had actually set foot on the ground.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

WRM on the possibility of the conflict spreading from Yemen. Egypt is already sending troops, and other parties are also involved throughout the region. This could end up being far worse than the currrent brewup in Iraq and Syria:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/04/06/will-yemen-hostilities-spill-into-saudi-arabia/



> *Will Yemen Hostilities Spill into Saudi Arabia?*
> 
> As the war in Yemen grinds through its second week, a water crisis is looming in Aden and calls for a humanitarian ceasefire are growing. But the next shoe to drop may be stability in Saudi Arabia itself, where a police officer was killed in the Shi’a-majority Eastern province during a raid on suspected terrorists. Reuters:
> 
> 
> “An exchange of fire led to the injury of Corporal Majid bin Turki al-Qahtani, and his death after being taken to hospital – may God have mercy on him and accept him as a martyr – and wounded three security men, a citizen, and a (foreign) resident,” with moderate wounds, SPA said.
> 
> The agency said forces undertook the search against “terrorist elements” and retrieved automatic weapons, pistols and communication equipment. It added that four Saudis were arrested after the firefight for targeting the officers.
> 
> Saudi Arabia’s Eastern province has been unstable ever since protests erupted in 2011. More than 20 people have been killed since then, and Saudi forces killed four militants in a shootout as recently as last December.
> 
> A Shi’a revolt in Saudi Arabia could have major consequences. The Shi’a-majority Eastern province also happens to be where much of Saudi Arabia’s oil is found.
> 
> *Beyond that fact, a fight in Saudi Arabia could pull more countries into the war in Yemen—most notably Pakistan.* Pakistan’s Defense Minister admitted today that Saudi Arabia had asked for warships, planes, and troops to help in Yemen. Thus far, mindful of the sensitivities of its own Shi’a minority, and of its relationship with neighboring Iran, Pakistan has been unwilling to commit fully, saying it will only send troops to help defend Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity. If conflict spreads to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan will find it difficult to maintain its delicate balancing act.


----------



## McG

Iran is joining the fray in Yemen ... or, just off-shore of Yemen.  One destroyer and a second ship are engaged in anti-piracy operations in relation to the civil war.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/iran-dispatches-destroyer-near-yemen-to-safeguard-naval-routes-as-saudis-pound-rebels-with-airstrikes#__federated=1


----------



## a_majoor

Oh good. If the Saudis are openly identifying Iran as the instigators and accusing them of supporting the rebels, and sending a coalition of Arab forces to fight these rebels, then the presence of Iranian ships just off the coast of Yemen is like waving a red cape.

Can hardly wait for some "accidental" collision, bombing or shoot down from one side or the other to happen...


----------



## CougarKing

MCG said:
			
		

> Iran is joining the fray in Yemen ...



The Houthi rebels are Shia Muslims, so Iran was already involved (covertly) helping their fellow Shias in Yemen against a Sunni government that is backed by the Saudis/Gulf states. 

Then there's also an Al-Qaeda rebel group fighting against both the government and the Houthis.

Reuters



> *Kerry says U.S. aware of Iran's support to Yemen's Houthis*
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday the United States is well aware of the support that Iran has been providing to Houthi forces who have driven Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the country.
> 
> Kerry said the United States would support countries in the Middle East who feel threatened by Iran.
> 
> "We're not looking for confrontation, obviously, but we're not going to step away from our alliances and our friendships and the need to stand with those who feel threatened as a consequence of the choices that Iran might be making," Kerry said in an interview with PBS Newshour.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

The new "Caliphate" demonstrates how they run things. Frankly, having diseases like this running riot through the ranks of ISIS and their supporters is a win for us, so long as we take care to ensure no one who goes into the "Caliphate" _ever_ returns to the west:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/567597/Islamic-State-Raqqa-Syria-Flesh-eating-disease



> *Could the Islamic State be wiped out by a deadly FLESH-EATING disease?*
> THE Islamic State is facing a new enemy – being wiped out by a FLESH-EATING disease, according to reports.
> 
> IS are said to be shutting down the organisations that are trying to combat the disease
> 
> The self-declared Islamic State capital is currently in the throes of an epidemic and a number of members of the Islamic State have reportedly been infected.
> 
> Efforts  are reportedly being made to prevent the further spread of the Leishmaniasis skin disease, which is highly virulent, in the IS stronghold.
> 
> Although organisations began work to combat the disease, this became impossible after IS is claimed to have closed down their city offices.
> 
> They also confiscated equipment and arrested officers trying to help fight the condition which can be deadly.
> 
> The first case of the disease, which is caused by protozoan parasites, was discovered in September 2013.
> 
> By the middle of 2014 500 people had been affected, according to a network of activists 'Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently.'
> 
> More than 2,500 cases of the flesh-eating disease have been recored in the north-east of Raqqa
> 
> The disease is spread by flies that are attracted by the rubble and rubbish of war.
> 
> It can sometimes be fatal and can also cause significant damage to parts of the body it affects.
> 
> More than 2,500 cases have been recored in the north-east of Raqqa.
> 
> IS is said to have a residual force of between 3,000 to 5,000 in the city, as they attempt to strengthen their so-called caliphate.
> 
> This comes after World Health Organisation reported that Syria's health system had collapsed, meaning that disease was spreading rapidly through a country already plagued by violence.


----------



## tomahawk6

Two Quds Force officers were captured by pre-government militia in Aden.One is a Colonel and the other a Captain.No more plausible deniability.

http://news.yahoo.com/heavy-saudi-led-air-strikes-ground-combat-shake-092356289.html;_ylt=AwrBT_30KClVGc4AebpXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTBzcDFndTFwBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDVklQNjEyXzE-


----------



## Rifleman62

Six/seven years ago these guys would have been interrogated by the CIA. Now, probably the Obama administration is not interested.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Photos and video at story link.   :rofl:



> Blown to kingdom come: Incredible footage shows ISIS suicide bomber's car explode in MID-AIR after vehicle is blasted skywards seconds before driver's IEDs detonate
> Jihadi tried to launch attack on Kurdish Peshmerga forces near Kirkuk, Iraq
> 
> BySimon Tomlinson for MailOnline
> 
> Published: 08:15 GMT, 14 April 2015 | Updated: 10:42 GMT, 14 April 2015
> 
> This is the incredible moment a car being driven by an ISIS suicide bomber detonates mid-air seconds after it is blasted skywards by an explosion on the ground.
> 
> Video shows the jihadi attempting to launch an attack on Kurdish Peshmerga forces, reportedly near Kirkuk in northern Iraq.
> 
> But as the car approaches, it hits what appears to be a roadside bomb, catapulting the vehicle at least 100ft into the air.
> 
> Just as it begins to fall back down to earth, the car detonates like a firework, either due to the explosives on board or the fuel tank igniting.
> 
> What's left of the car is then seen dropping back down into the massive cloud of smoke that has billowed up from the ground.
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3038067/Incredible-footage-shows-ISIS-suicide-bomber-s-car-explode-MID-AIR-vehicle-blasted-skywards-seconds-driver-s-IEDs-detonate.html#ixzz3XHwynSfH
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## Edward Campbell

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I'm pleased to see a reference to the Thirty Years War (one of my favourites) because I believe it was an essential "accelerant"* to the religious and *social* reformations that were going on in 16th and 17th century Europe and which were, themselves, essential precursors to the 18th century _Enlightenment_.
> 
> I believe, strongly, that the Islamic world - almost ALL of it - is sorely in need of a socio-cultural _enlightenment_ of its own; and I also think that religious and socio-economic _reformations_ are, now, in the Middle East, just as essential as they were in Europe 450 years ago.
> 
> A long, multi-generational, bloody and bitter series of internecine wars are just what the _Islamic Crescent_ needs.
> 
> _____
> Thanks for that word, Mr Petrou, it's very apt in this situation




I'm going back over a year, to the opening messages of this post because Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written a new book, _Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now_, which suggests that a religious _reformation_ is necessary and possible, now. The book is reviewed in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of _The Economist_:

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21648627-controversial-new-book-says-islam-must-change-five-important-areas-thoughts-its


> Reforming Islam
> Thoughts on its future
> *A controversial new book says Islam must change in five important areas*
> 
> Apr 18th 2015 | From the print edition
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now*. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali. HarperCollins; 272 pages; $27.99 and £18.99.
> 
> NOT many people have lived deep inside a ruthlessly patriarchal, theocratic world and also won acclaim in the great bastions of Western, liberal thought. Even fewer can describe the contrast with insight, and that is why the writings of Ayaan Hirsi Ali on religion, culture and violence always command attention.
> 
> In several senses, she has come a long way, and she is still travelling. Having moved to the Netherlands, and then America, after a childhood in Africa and Saudi Arabia, the Somali-born writer is now a fellow of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. In three earlier books she expounded her conviction that Islam, her family’s religion, was incorrigibly flawed. She faulted the faith for encouraging violence, for abusing women and ultimately for its belief in a punitive God whose existence she had rejected.
> 
> In her latest work, “Heretic”, Ms Hirsi Ali shifts her position and argues that Islam is capable of modernising reform. At the start of the book she sounds her old militant self, denouncing cultural relativists who want to muzzle her because they deny that the crimes of, say, Islamic State really are motivated by belief, as opposed to socioeconomic grievances.
> 
> As she goes on to argue, insisting that Islam is not the real motive is a convenient way of avoiding any examination of Muslim beliefs. But the opposite point also applies, and it is one that many would make of her. To take “religious” terrorists at face value, and say they are overwhelmingly motivated by spiritual convictions, can equally be a kind of cop-out, if it refuses to consider why some people with those beliefs resort to violence and others refrain; or why in some situations terrorists win support from those around them, while in others they are isolated.
> 
> The main body of Ms Hirsi Ali’s book is more nuanced—and optimistic—than her previous writings. She argues that some factors behind Christianity’s Reformation now exist in the Muslim world. The reforms of Martin Luther, for example, advanced with help from the newly invented printed press; a Muslim reformer today might well benefit from the rise of electronic communications.
> 
> But parallels between Christianity’s Reformation and a possible Muslim one have their limits. As Ms Hirsi Ali acknowledges, the link between the evolution of the Protestant Reformation and modernity is not simple. Protestantism began not as a move to dislodge the primacy of divine revelation, but to assert it. Only very indirectly did the Reformation lead Europe into a secular, scientific age. So anybody who advocates a Muslim Reformation must ask this question: if radical change starts in the Muslim world, is it certain that it will really lead to liberal freedoms, or could it trigger, either directly or indirectly, even greater religious fervour?
> 
> Ms Hirsi Ali, as you might expect, favours more freedom, and she reckons that some tentative movement in that direction is already in progress. At the moment, she says, the prevailing trend in Islam stresses the violent sayings of Muhammad, dating from his stay in Medina, over the peaceful ones issued earlier in Mecca. But the author notes that there is quite a large minority who eschew the aggressive tone of the “Medina” sayings, preferring the quiescent piety which, she says, marks the Prophet’s earlier declarations—certainly large enough for that minority to be worth encouraging.
> 
> Unfortunately, very few Muslims will accept Ms Hirsi Ali’s full-blown argument, which insists that Islam must change in at least five important ways. A moderate Muslim might be open to discussion of four of her suggestions if the question were framed sensitively. Muslims, she says, must stop prioritising the afterlife over this life; they must “shackle sharia” and respect secular law; they must abandon the idea of telling others, including non-Muslims, how to behave, dress or drink; and they must abandon holy war. However, her biggest proposal is a show-stopper: she wants her old co-religionists to “ensure that Muhammad and the Koran are open to interpretation and criticism”.
> 
> Hearing this last argument, a well-educated Muslim would probably give an answer like this: “If ‘criticism’ means denying that Muhammad was God’s final messenger, who delivered the Koran under divine inspiration, then it would be more honest to propose leaving Islam entirely—because without those beliefs, we would have nothing left.”
> 
> To put the point another way, if there is to be any chance that Muslims can be persuaded to set aside premodern ideas about law, war and punishment, the persuader will not be a sophisticated secularist; it is more likely to be somebody who fervently believes in the divine origins of the Koran, but is able to look at it again and extract from its words a completely fresh set of conclusions.



I agree with _The Economist_'s reviewer that someone other than Ms Hisri Ali, someone who is a believing Muslim, will have to make ~ repeat ~ the argument about _reformation_ and, _I hope_, _enlightenment_, too.

_I think_ that religious _reformation_ is only a catalyst for what we really need: a broad and deep socio-cultural _enlightenment_ in much of the Islamic Crescent.* In _my opinion_ the problem isn't Islam, _per se_, it is the Arab/Persian societies in which in arose and the African/Arab/Persian/West Asian societies in which it is strongest. They, those cultures, not Islam, are the real problem and they have to be dragged, into the 21st century. Reforming Islam may be, probably is, a necessary first step but it will be meaningless unless and until we have real socio-cultural _enlightenment_ amongst the Africans, Arabs, Persians and so on.

_____
* The Islamic Crescent stretches from the Atlantic coast of North Africa through the Middle East and all the way to Indonesia


----------



## YZT580

Sorry E.R.  It isn't possible to differentiate between Arabic culture and Islam.  Islam is government, Islam is culture, Islam is raison d'etre.  Spend a few weeks in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or any of the more traditional Muslim countries and you will find that out and until we understand that basic principle we will never be able to combat Islamic terrorism successfully.


----------



## dimsum

YZT580 said:
			
		

> Sorry E.R.  It isn't possible to differentiate between Arabic culture and Islam.  Islam is government, Islam is culture, Islam is raison d'etre.  Spend a few weeks in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or any of the more traditional Muslim countries and you will find that out and until we understand that basic principle we will never be able to combat Islamic terrorism successfully.



I'd have to disagree.  Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, have cultures/traditions vastly different than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Yemen but still maintain Islam as a state religion.


----------



## Lumber

YZT580 said:
			
		

> Sorry E.R.  It isn't possible to differentiate between Arabic culture and Islam.  Islam is government, Islam is culture, Islam is raison d'etre.  Spend a few weeks in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or any of the more traditional Muslim countries and you will find that out and until we understand that basic principle we will never be able to combat Islamic terrorism successfully.





			
				Dimsum said:
			
		

> I'd have to disagree.  Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, have cultures/traditions vastly different than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Yemen but still maintain Islam as a state religion.



To back up what Dimsum said, watch this video. The real lawyering starts around 1:20. Reza Aslan does an excellent job of revealing just how horribly we stereotype all muslims.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Video link?


----------



## YZT580

They provide their own stereotyping.  Those who are moderates are afraid to speak out for fear of retribution and their fear is well-founded.  The few stories that catch the news regarding honour killings, church bombings and the like are written in such a fashion as to imply that it is only a few radicals.  In Malaysia there is continuous conflict between Muslim and other religions.  In some areas the Muslims have demanded that crosses be removed from churches.  The government is desperately trying to contain the matter  through legislation and arrests but they are only having mediocre success.  More than 100 Malaysians have been arrested for attempting to join ISIS and more than 20 are known to have been killed in the fighting in Syria/Iraq.  I agree that the majority of Muslims are like the majority of Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists.  They just want to be left alone to follow their faith.  Unfortunately the public face of Islam is one of confrontation, domination, occupation and war. Countries like Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt that once had vibrant Christian communities all stand as evidence that we here in the west do not understand the danger the current Islamic leadership represents.


----------



## CougarKing

More Yemen news: I wonder how Iran will response to the US blockade?

Canadian Press



> *US warship heading to Yemeni waters prepared to block Iranian weapons shipments*
> The Canadian Press
> 
> By Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press
> 
> WASHINGTON - *The Navy aircraft carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt is steaming toward the waters off the country to beef up security and join other American ships that are prepared to intercept any Iranian vessels carrying weapons to the Houthi rebels.*
> 
> The deployment comes after a U.N. Security Council resolution approved last week imposed an arms embargo on the leaders of the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels. The resolution passed in a 14-0 vote with Russia abstaining.
> 
> Navy officials said Monday that the Roosevelt was moving through the Arabian Sea. A massive ship that carries F/A-18 fighter jets, the Roosevelt is seen more of a deterrent and show of force in the region.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Dimsum said:
			
		

> I'd have to disagree.  Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, have cultures/traditions vastly different than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Yemen but still maintain Islam as a state religion.



Not for long, Malaysia is busy trying to circle the Islamic drain

http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/snapshot-of-malaysia-after-hudud-a-nation-divided


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 1 of 2



			
				YZT580 said:
			
		

> Sorry E.R.  It isn't possible to differentiate between Arabic culture and Islam.  Islam is government, Islam is culture, Islam is raison d'etre.  Spend a few weeks in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or any of the more traditional Muslim countries and you will find that out and until we understand that basic principle we will never be able to combat Islamic terrorism successfully.



        "It is not Islam the religion that is generating discord. Rather, the problem is a deep disagreement among Muslims over the degree to which Islam ought to shape the laws and institutions of society. Most Muslims, Islamist or otherwise,
         are, of course, not jihadists or revolutionaries. But the ongoing competition over what constitutes good public order has polarized them, creating vicious enmities that resist compromise. The result is a self-tightening knot of problems
         in which each aggravates the others. "


I offer this, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Foreign Affairs_, from which the above quote is extracted:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143326/john-m-owen-iv/from-calvin-to-the-caliphate


> From Calvin to the Caliphate
> *What Europe’s Wars of Religion Tell Us About the Modern Middle East*
> 
> By John M. Owen IV
> 
> FROM OUR MAY/JUNE 2015 ISSUE
> 
> Nearly a century after it first emerged in Egypt, political Islam is redefining the Muslim world. Also called Islamism, this potent ideology holds that the billion-strong global Muslim community would be free and great if only it were pious—that is, if Muslims lived under state-enforced Islamic law, or sharia, as they have done for most of Islamic history. Islamists have long been confronted by Muslims who reject sharia and by non-Muslims who try to get them to reject it. At times benign and at times violent, these confrontations have fueled the revolutions in Egypt in 1952 and Iran in 1979, the al Qaeda attacks in 2001, the Arab Spring of 2011, and the rise of radical Islamist groups such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as ISIS).
> 
> It is not Islam the religion that is generating discord. Rather, the problem is a deep disagreement among Muslims over the degree to which Islam ought to shape the laws and institutions of society. Most Muslims, Islamist or otherwise, are, of course, not jihadists or revolutionaries. But the ongoing competition over what constitutes good public order has polarized them, creating vicious enmities that resist compromise. The result is a self-tightening knot of problems in which each aggravates the others.
> 
> Western scholars and policymakers have long struggled to understand the nature of this conflict, but so far, their efforts have fallen short. Although experts on Islamic jurisprudence, theology, and history have produced rich scholarship on Islamism, they have tended to treat it as if it were unique. What they forget is that Islamism is not only Islamic but also an “ism”—an ideology and a plan for ordering common life that should be analyzed alongside other ideologies. No part of the world has generated as many isms as the West itself, and so to aid clear thinking about the contemporary Middle East, it is useful to look back at the West’s own history of ideological strife.
> 
> Parts of the Muslim world today, in fact, bear an uncanny resemblance to northwestern Europe 450 years ago, during the so-called Wars of Religion. Then, as now, a wave of religious insurrection rolled across a vast region, engulfing several countries and threatening to break over more. In the 1560s alone, France, the Netherlands, and Scotland each faced revolts led by adherents of a new branch of Protestantism called Calvinism. Theirs was not the Calvinism of the Presbyterians of the twenty-first century or even the nineteenth. Early modern Calvinism—like Catholicism, Lutheranism, and other Christian isms of the time—was a political ideology as much as a set of religious doctrines. It emerged in an era when Europe’s socioeconomic order was built around, and partly by, the Roman Catholic Church, and it defined itself in opposition to that order. Choosing an ideology was as much a political commitment as a religious one; the Wars of Religion were also wars of politics.
> 
> _Parts of the modern Muslim world resemble Europe during the Wars of Religion 450 years ago._​
> 
> 
> 
> 
> St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France, 1572. (Painting by François Dubois)]
> 
> The revolts came in the middle of a 150-year-long contest over which form of Christianity the state should favor—and today, that story has a familiar ring. As ideologues vied for influence, dissent was brutally suppressed, religious massacres broke out periodically, and outside powers intervened on behalf of the rival parties. The turmoil ultimately led to the miserable Thirty Years’ War, which killed at least a quarter of the population of Germany (then the center of the Holy Roman Empire). And when that crisis ended, two other ideological battles followed: between monarchism and constitutionalism in the eighteenth century and between liberalism and communism in the twentieth.
> 
> These three long periods of ideological strife, in which Western countries were divided over the best way to order society, offer crucial lessons for the present. At the broadest level, Western history shows that the current legitimacy crisis in the Middle East is neither unprecedented in its gravity nor likely to resolve itself in any straightforward way. Political Islam, as did many ascendant ideologies of the past, has drawn new strength from the regional conflict it helped fuel, and it is here to stay. Moreover, ideological contests of the kind experienced by the Middle East rarely conclude in a winner-take-all fashion; they often rage until the competing doctrines either evolve or converge. Often this occurs only after the crisis has embroiled outside powers and redefined the regional order. These lessons yield no clear silver bullet for solving today’s challenges in the Middle East, but they do at least show that the region’s problems are not unique—and that leaders and countries can take steps to reduce the violence and create conditions more conducive to human flourishing.
> 
> FROM CALVIN IN EUROPE TO HOBBES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
> 
> “History doesn’t repeat itself,” the saying goes, “but it does rhyme.” Although the rise of Islamism in the Middle East is a uniquely modern phenomenon, the path it has followed and the crisis it has spurred echo parts of the West’s own past. What began as a simple contest between Islamism and secularism in the Muslim world has evolved into a complex struggle, but the nub of the question is who or what is sovereign in society, and the flashpoint is the source and content of law. Islamists insist that it must be sharia, meaning that it would be derived from the sacred texts of Islam: the direct revelations from Allah to the Prophet Muhammad, which make up the Koran, and the sayings of the Prophet (or hadith). Secularists counter that law should derive from human reason and experience, not from Islam—or, for moderate secularists, not from Islam alone.
> 
> Secularism came to the Middle East with European colonialism. Many Muslim elites adopted it following independence precisely because the powerful European states had surpassed and humiliated the Ottoman Empire, generally regarded as the caliphate, or the dominant Islamic polity. But secularism was met with pushback: Islamism. Although Islamists present their ideology not as an ism but as simply Islam, the pristine religion of the Prophet, their belief system has more modern origins. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, early Islamists grew convinced that it was hard to live as a pious Muslim under a secular regime and began organizing resistance movements. In the 1950s, Islamists became more radical and began advocating for a return to state-enforced sharia. Secularism had the upper hand until the 1960s, but key moments in subsequent decades—the 1967 defeat of secularist Egypt by Israel, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the 1990–91 Gulf War—turned the momentum in favor of Islamism.
> 
> In one sense, then, political Islam has already triumphed. Although modern Muslims are neither purely secularist nor purely Islamist, the average Muslim in the Middle East and North Africa leans Islamist. A 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center showed that large majorities in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and the Palestinian territories wished to see sharia as the law of the land. A 2012 Gallup poll revealed that in five countries of the region—Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen—women were as likely as men to favor sharia. And although deep internal divisions persist within the Islamist camp—over the role of religion in public life and the role of the clergy in government, for example—even secular rulers now embrace elements of Islamism.
> 
> Despite these successes, however, political Islam still encounters skepticism about its ability to survive. Early on, outside observers dismissed it as an idea that was out of step with modernity. More recently, experts have assured one another that rising violence in the Middle East, including suicide terrorism and beheadings practiced by jihadist groups such as ISIS, is a sign of a desperate movement on its last legs.
> 
> Yet if Europe’s own history of ideological strife provides one key lesson for the Middle East, it is this: do not sell Islamism short. Europe’s Wars of Religion illustrate why underestimating a seemingly outdated ideology is so dangerous. At many points during those wars, reason and progress appeared to dictate an end to hostilities, as the Catholic-Protestant rivalry was taking its toll on local populations and economies. At several junctures—including in 1555, when leading German principalities agreed to religious self-determination, and in the 1590s, when the French Wars of Religion ended and the Protestant Dutch Republic secured its independence from Catholic Spain—it appeared that the crisis had passed. Princes, nobles, city councils, and their subjects seemed to have settled on a practical peace. Pragmatic political rationality appeared to reign, raising hopes of a new Europe in which states would look after their material interests and not their ideological ones.
> 
> 
> _Early modern Calvinism was a political ideology as much as a set of religious doctrines._​
> But Europe was not finished with ideological violence, because the legitimacy crisis that had fueled it remained unresolved. Most Europeans continued to believe that permanent political stability required religious uniformity. So long as they thought so, the slightest spark could repolarize them into radically opposed groups—which is exactly what happened when a Protestant revolt in Bohemia tipped Europe into the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. It was not until Europeans separated questions of faith from those of politics, toward the end of the century, that religious dogmas lost their incendiary power.
> 
> A different kind of ideological short-selling took place in a more recent era: during the global contest between liberalism and communism in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the travails of the Great Depression convinced many leading Western intellectuals that liberal democracy was an idea whose time had passed. For a while, centralized, coercive states appeared to be better equipped to deal with the new economic and social challenges, leading some thinkers to buy into communism. A few visited and openly admired the Soviet Union, where, under Joseph Stalin, industrialization proceeded apace and workers never went on strike. The sentiment was captured by the U.S. journalist Lincoln Steffens: “I have been over into the future, and it works.” In the end, of course, liberal democracy rebounded and won out.
> 
> The point is not that Islamism will necessarily win in the Middle East but that smart people can underrate the viability of alternative political systems, sometimes with grievous results. Indeed, one secret of political Islam’s longevity is that outsiders have underestimated the system all along. History also shows that an ideology’s life can be extended when that ideology has state sponsors, as liberal democracy did in the 1930s and as Islamism does today. Far from being on its way out, political Islam may well be getting its second wind.



End of Part 1


----------



## Edward Campbell

Part 2 of 2



> IN GOD'S NAME?
> 
> Political Islam, like many competing ideologies of old, is not monolithic. Although Islamists share a general devotion to sharia, they come in many stripes: Sunnis and Shiites; extremists and moderates; nationalists, internationalists, and even imperialists. This kind of variance has led to a debate in the West over whether the United States and its allies should accommodate moderate, pragmatic Islamism in places where it competes with more radical movements. Those who say no generally depict Islamism as a single movement united by its hatred of the West. Those who say yes portray Islamism as internally divided.
> 
> This debate is nothing new, and opponents of an ideology often try to exploit ideological cleavages to tip a conflict in their favor. Throughout Western history, outside powers have periodically attempted to use such divide-and-conquer tactics, although they have had mixed results; at times, their efforts backfired. Take the Wars of Religion again. The prolonged conflict led to the splintering of Europe’s dominant ideologies, and some of the resulting mutations survived to compete with the originals. Protestantism started out as Lutheranism but quickly developed into Zwinglianism in Switzerland and Anabaptism in Germany, before sprouting a Calvinist version in France and an Anglican one in England. Calvinists and Lutherans often competed for influence and could be worse enemies of each other than either group was of the Catholics. The Catholic Habsburg dynasty that ruled the Holy Roman Empire worked tirelessly to nurture these divisions. In the end, however, this strategy failed to either weaken the Calvinists or prevent them from forming a united front with the Lutherans in the Thirty Years’ War.
> 
> The trick for outsiders, therefore, is to ascertain whether some ideologues are predisposed against radicalism and to know how to cultivate them. It’s possible to do this successfully. In the post–World War II effort to limit the Soviet Union’s influence in Europe, U.S. President Harry Truman showed great dexterity in determining which of the Western European leftist parties could become U.S. allies. He correctly concluded that Italy’s Communists and Socialists were monolithic: they were united in supporting the Soviet Union and opposing the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan. Truman instead cultivated the Christian Democrats, helping them win a crucial election in 1948. In France, however, Truman recognized that the Socialists opposed communism and struck a deal with them, allowing France to become an ornery but genuine U.S. partner.
> 
> Such overt and covert interventions by outside powers are another defining trait of prolonged legitimacy crises. The clash between Islamism and secularism is just the latest contest in which a host of external actors have involved themselves in the internal affairs of other states, either by working behind the scenes or by using military means. Some have criticized many such outside interventions; in particular, critics have argued that the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and, more recently, Libya represented irrational bursts of crusading that fell outside the bounds of prudent statecraft. In fact, however, it is normal practice for a great power to use force to alter or preserve another country’s regime. External interventions are not a separate, foolish, and avoidable addition to ideological struggles; they are part and parcel of them. More than 200 such interventions have occurred over the past 500 years, the vast majority of them during regionwide legitimacy crises such as the one racking the Middle East today.
> 
> The deep polarization produced by these kinds of struggles helps explain why intervention is so common. Often, ideological conflicts deepen social schisms so much that people become more loyal to foreigners who share their principles than to their own countrymen who do not. These clashes strongly predispose people and countries toward either friendship or enmity with foreign actors, especially with those that are powerful enough to give them or their opponents the upper hand. And foreign actors, for their part, see these kinds of crises as opportunities to make new friends or prevent the emergence of new enemies.
> 
> _Like all prolonged ideological contests, the one between Islamism and secularism will one day end._​
> Intervening powers need not have a religious stake in the conflict; sometimes a material stake is enough. At other times, ideological and material calculations combine to trigger an intervention. For example, in 2011, during the Arab Spring, Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain to help stop a Shiite rebellion, thereby containing both the reach of Shiite Islam and the power of Shiite-dominated Iran. A short while later, Iran intervened in Syria to prop up the Assad regime against Sunni rebels who would likely align Syria with Saudi Arabia if they won. Developments such as these have given rise to fears that the Middle East will see increasingly reckless, ideologically driven states that are bent on destroying the regional order. Some observers worry, for instance, that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it might use them to upset the precarious balance in the Middle East and even provoke an apocalypse.
> 
> History does not offer a simple verdict on that fear, but it does show that a state can be at once ideological and rational. A regime ruled by ideologues may have ideological ends, such as a radically different regional order. To pursue those ends, it may employ rational means, retreating when aggression becomes too costly. But it could also occasionally act in a way that belies the traditional cost-benefit logic of geopolitics.
> 
> The behavior of a leading German principality called the Palatinate during the Wars of Religion illustrates both of those possibilities. The principality’s rulers were militant Calvinists who strove to end Catholic domination in the Holy Roman Empire and all of Europe. They repeatedly tried to cobble together grand Protestant alliances against the Catholic powers, sending troops on several occasions to help Calvinists in France and the Netherlands. For much of the sixteenth century, however, their calculus included a healthy mix of ideology and rationality: when they encountered sufficient resistance from the mighty Habsburgs and indifference from fellow Protestants, they pulled back. But then, Calvinist rebels in Bohemia (another subject of the empire, governed by Catholics) invited the Palatinate ruler Frederick V to defy the Habsburgs and become their king. Frederick accepted and, in 1619, claimed Bohemia for himself despite the obvious risks of a Habsburg backlash and the fact that most European Protestants refused to openly support him. Sure enough, the Habsburgs crushed Frederick’s army and went on to ravage the Palatinate and suppress Protestantism there. These were the opening moves of the Thirty Years’ War.
> 
> SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
> 
> Like all prolonged, regionwide ideological contests, the one between Islamism and secularism will one day end. How that will happen, however, and what prospects there are for democracy in the Middle East are both open questions.
> 
> Western history shows that legitimacy crises usually resolve themselves in one of three ways: a decisive victory by one side, a transcending of the conflict by the warring parties, or the emergence of a hybrid regime that combines rival doctrines in ways that once seemed impossible. Today, the first scenario, a straight-out win by any single ideology, appears unlikely; given that Islamism is far from monolithic, a triumph of Islamism in general would not settle which of its many strands—Sunni or Shiite, moderate or extreme, monarchical or republican—would predominate. But the other two scenarios are conceivable.
> 
> Although it may be difficult to imagine a Middle East that transcended its current legitimacy crisis, one of the West’s past crises indeed concluded in that way. Early modern Europe ultimately overcame its religious strife with the emergence of new kinds of regimes that rendered old ideological differences irrelevant. Catholics and Protestants remained faithful to their religions, but they stopped thinking of them in zero-sum terms and gradually embraced the separation between church and state. A similar kind of outcome in the Middle East would require that Muslims, both elites and mass publics, cease to see the question of Islam’s influence on laws and the public order as a life-and-death matter. Given the deep polarization that prevails, however, the prospect of such a transcendence appears remote.
> 
> Alternatively, competing ideologies could begin to converge, adopting some of one another’s institutions and practices. Europe experienced this development, too. From the 1770s until the 1850s, the continent was torn between monarchists, who believed that rule must be inherited, and republicans, who wanted governments to be elected. These two ideas at first seemed mutually exclusive; monarchies repeatedly crushed republican revolts. But after a period of repression, Europe’s monarchs struck a new bargain with the middle classes. Following the lead of the United Kingdom, a number of states—Austria, France, Italy, and Prussia—constructed a new kind of regime. Sometimes called “liberal conservatism,” it combined monarchy with parliamentary constraints and greater civil liberties.
> 
> This story points to the final historical lesson: the ultimate success of an ideology, or a hybrid of several ideologies, often depends on whether it has a powerful state champion. The triumph of liberal conservatism in Europe was partly caused by the manifest success of the United Kingdom, the state that best exemplified it. That country had long had a hybrid regime, a constitutional monarchy that merged tradition and reform. The United Kingdom was also, without doubt, the world’s most successful state of the time, boasting the largest economy, the most extensive empire, and a remarkably stable social order. The reason its hybrid regime inspired imitation throughout the region was that it had proved to work.
> 
> Across the Muslim world, a hybrid regime of a different sort has recently been showing signs of strength. That hybrid has sometimes been called “Islamic democracy.” Although scholars have long thought that democracy and Islamism are inherently incompatible, some Islamists and democrats in different countries have been trying to join these two systems in theory and practice. In 2011–13, for example, Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party (the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood) took pains to portray itself as a moderate force by accepting religious and ideological pluralism. That effort ultimately failed, as President Mohamed Morsi began to accumulate power and Egypt’s military ousted him. Since then, Egypt appears to have abandoned democracy altogether, but the country certainly has the size and influence to become an exemplary state should it ever attempt the experiment again.
> 
> Meanwhile, a more successful attempt to combine Islamism and democracy was made by the political party Ennahda in Tunisia, which conducted democratic elections in late 2014 despite openly embracing Islamism. Tunisia is too small to become an exemplary state, but it represents the brightest spot to emerge from the Arab Spring and, at the very least, shows what is possible.
> 
> Much depends on the political choices of the two most powerful Muslim-majority countries in the region: Iran and Turkey. Although neither is Arab, each has a long history of regional influence. Iran exemplifies Islamism, having proclaimed itself the standard-bearer for the ideology in its 1979 revolution. Although the country is formally a republic with semicompetitive elections, supreme power rests in the hands of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Iran’s prospects as an exemplary state have suffered during the Arab Spring and its aftermath, as Tehran’s unstinting support for the Assad regime in Syria has alienated the vast majority of Sunni Arabs. Moreover, the regime has been looking brittle since the suspicious election of 2009, raising doubts that its neighbors would want to follow its example. So long as Iran remains the role model for Islamism, therefore, Islamism is in trouble.
> 
> Turkey could be a different story. Although the country is formally a secular republic, it has been drifting in the Islamist direction. For the past three years, Turkey has appeared well on its way to becoming a model of a new, hybrid kind of Islamic democracy. Competitive elections have repeatedly buoyed its ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has styled itself the vanguard of Islamic democracy (even though it prefers to call this style of government “conservative” rather than “Islamic”). The country enjoyed a burst of popularity among publics in the region early in the Arab Spring and has continued to expand its influence since. But when it comes to an Islamist-democratic hybrid, the bloom is off the rose, partly because Erdogan has instead begun embracing an authoritarian style of rule. Turkey may yet come to exemplify a hybrid regime, but that hybrid’s democratic component is now being replaced by old-fashioned autocracy.
> 
> WHY THEY FIGHT
> 
> As with the many ideological contests before it, the crisis in the Middle East has led some observers to question whether ideology is really its root cause at all. Many critics trace the conflict to something else altogether, claiming that Western imperialism—first European, now American—has humiliated Muslims and severely limited their ability to control their own future, both as individuals and as societies. In this view, the United States’ military presence in the region and its support for Israel are to blame for the rising violence. But arguments of this sort overlook a key fact: the world is full of powerless, frustrated people and groups, and U.S. hegemony is nearly global. Yet the peculiar knot of problems entangling the Middle East—serial unrest and repression, terrorism and brutality, and recurring foreign interventions—can hardly be found anywhere else.
> 
> Others blame poverty. If Muslims had more wealth and opportunity, they maintain, the crisis would abate. But this argument, too, is countered by the world’s numerous other poor societies, many of them much worse off than the average Middle Eastern state, that have managed to avoid turmoil. If poverty were what mattered most, then sub-Saharan Africa would be experiencing many more acts of terrorism, revolutionary waves, and foreign invasions. Evidence points to a different conclusion: although both powerlessness and poverty are key factors, they can produce the kind of dysfunction that defines today’s Middle East only when combined with a prolonged, regionwide legitimacy crisis.
> 
> The good news is that the United States may be able to encourage a more stable long-term outcome by nurturing countries and parties that exemplify a moderate system of government, even if that system falls short of being entirely secular. The bad news, however, is that this is all it can hope for: even the mighty United States cannot solve all of the region’s problems, since all sides would inevitably view its interventions as partisan. The United States must, of course, protect its interests—a duty that at certain times and places might again require force. But just as the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim superpower at the time of the Wars of Religion, could not resolve the strife among Christians in the sixteenth century, no outside actor can pacify the Middle East today. Only Muslims themselves can settle their ideological war.


----------



## CougarKing

recceguy said:
			
		

> Throwing people off towers because they may be homosexual.
> 
> This from the guys who perfected Man Love Thursdays and say it's alright for a boy to screw his buddy or frig goats, mules and sheep, so long as they stop when they reach twelve..



And speaking of which...

Daily Mail



> *A hug from the executioner... then two gay men are stoned to death: ISIS murderers stage show of kindness for the cameras before brutal killing *
> 
> Shocking images show men being savagely executed in Homs province
> Executioners embraced the two victims before stoning them to death
> Bloodthirsty crowds are seen in the desert clearing to watch the atrocity
> Men were executed after ISIS militants accused them of being a gay couple
> Depraved militants fighting for the Islamic State in Syria have brutally stoned two gay men to death only seconds after they were photographed embracing and 'forgiving' them.
> 
> The shocking images were taken in ISIS-held territory in the province of Homs and show the two accused men being savagely executed by up to four jihadis.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Perhaps Iran might try again now that the _Roosevelt_ battlegroup is reportedly sailing away  

Defense News



> *Officials: US Aircraft Carrier Heading Away From Yemen*
> 
> WASHINGTON — A US aircraft carrier and a guided-missile cruiser are leaving the waters off Yemen and heading back to the Gulf after an Iranian naval convoy also turned back from the area, officials said Friday.
> 
> The carrier and the cruiser, the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Normandy, had deployed to the region this week amid signs of a possible showdown with the Iranian flotilla. Washington suspected the convoy of carrying weapons destined for Shiite Huthi rebels in Yemen.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A major attack prevented?

Military.com



> *Saudi Arabia Foils US Embassy Attack, Arrests 93 Suspects*
> 
> Associated Press | Apr 29, 2015 | by Aya Batrawy
> RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Saudi Arabia on Tuesday announced the arrest of 93 suspects with ties to the Islamic State group who it says were planning multi-pronged attacks on the U.S. Embassy, security forces and residential compounds where foreigners live.
> The list of targets recalls a wave of attacks launched by al-Qaida inside the kingdom from 2004 to 2007, which killed dozens of people, including foreigners, and threatened the stability of one of the world's most important oil-producing nations. Saudi Arabia is also home to Islam's holiest sites, in Mecca and Medina.
> Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki told The Associated Press that Saudi Arabia's security forces are better prepared than ever to fight back against the Islamic State group. The kingdom is part of a U.S.-led coalition bombing the group in Iraq and Syria.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## cupper

> A hug from the executioner... then two gay men are stoned to death: ISIS murderers stage show of kindness for the cameras before brutal killing



'cause that just makes it all better. :


----------



## CougarKing

The Houthi rebels trying to bring the war to the Saudis:

BBC



> *Yemen crisis: Saudi Arabia 'repels Houthi border attack'*
> 
> Three Saudi troops and "dozens" of Houthi rebels were killed as Saudi forces repelled a major attack from inside Yemen, Saudi officials say.
> The rebels attacked near the town of Najran, reports say, in what would be their biggest assault on Saudi soil since a Saudi military campaign began.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

More Saudi proxies against Iran:

LA Times



> *Mysterious new force emerges in Yemen to fight rebels*
> 
> A shadowy new pro-government force has been deployed in the embattled Yemeni port city of Aden, according to reports Sunday, sparking speculation that ground troops from the Saudi-led coalition may have joined the battle against Houthi rebels and their allies.
> 
> Saudi Arabia, however, denied that it had sent ground forces to Aden or any other part of Yemen.
> 
> The deployment of Saudi troops in Yemen would mark a major escalation in the war.
> 
> The new fighting unit in Aden joined members of what is known as the *Southern Resistance Committees*, an anti-Houthi armed group, the resistance faction said. The new force reportedly includes special forces operatives.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

T6, I assume this guy is a US Army ROTC or OCS graduate?

Foreign Policy



> *Meet the Shadow Warrior Leading the Fight Against the Islamic State
> 
> Major General Mike Nagata predicted the rise of the militants. Can he train enough rebels to defeat them?*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Today, Nagata is a key player in the administration’s tortured debate about how significant a role the U.S. military should play in the fight against the Islamic State. Nagata is a key player in the administration’s tortured debate about how significant a role the U.S. military should play in the fight against the Islamic State. From Jordan, he oversees the Defense Department’s effort to train and equip the moderate Syrian rebels whom Washington sees as its best chance of gradually beating back the Islamic State without the use of American ground combat forces, an option U.S. President Barack Obama has flatly rejected. Instead, Obama has sent about 3,000 troops to Iraq in an effort to retrain the beleaguered Iraqi military and raise a new force of tribal fighters. *Meanwhile, 5th Special Forces Group is ramping up efforts in the Middle East aimed at training more than 5,000 Syrian rebels a year in Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and, perhaps, Jordan.*
> 
> The Obama administration waited more than two years to take even these limited steps against the Islamic State, a delay that many senior military officers found frustrating. That frustration began with the administration’s decision to pull all U.S. forces out of Iraq by the end of 2011, a policy that ignored “the best advice that DoD was providing the administration,” a former special operations officer who participated in some of the discussions said, adding that the military had provided the administration with options short of complete withdrawal. “We knew there was little appetite [in the administration] for a huge presence, but we said we knew from our extensive experience with the Iraqis and really the region that if there weren’t advisors left on the ground, there was little chance of long-term success,” he said, adding that Nagata’s was one of a chorus of military voices making this point.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *A Georgia State University graduate with a degree in physical therapy, Nagata was commissioned as an Army infantry lieutenant in 1982.* But after a year as a platoon leader in South Korea and five months at the Special Forces Qualification Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he took command of an A-team in 1st Special Forces Group in Fort Lewis, Washington. Nagata soon gained a reputation for coolness under pressure, and for a wry sense of humor.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

Graduate of Georgia State so I would say ROTC.


----------



## CougarKing

ISIS in Afghanistan?

Diplomat



> *Islamic State’s New Afghan Front
> The Islamic State has arrived in Afghanistan. Or has it?*
> 
> The Islamic State’s followers are making significant inroads and steadily gaining strength in Afghanistan, as demonstrated by their recent vicious attack in Jalalabad that left 35 people dead. However, new reports have surfaced, though unproved, *that the group’s emergence represents “a rebranding of marginalized Taliban” that has splintered from Taliban factions and pledged allegiance to the self-declared caliphate of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.*
> 
> But has the caliphate really arrived in the region? *Or could this rebranding be part of a new tactic employed by Pakistan’s security apparatus to disguise the Taliban, its historical proxies, as the Islamic State, to support its sinister regional statecraft?* It is certainly speculative, but it is nonetheless worth examining.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## McG

Hezbollah, which has already been sending combatants to join Syrian forces, announces it will begin its own cross boarder military operations from Lebanon into Syria.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-32596511


----------



## CougarKing

Hopefully he never regains command:

National Post



> *Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi seriously injured in U.S. air strike and may never regain command of ISIL, Iraq says*
> 
> After leading a desert blitzkrieg across Syria and Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stood before thousands of followers and proclaimed himself “Caliph” of a new “Islamic State.”
> 
> But the bloodsoaked reign of a terrorist who achieved global prominence by conquering swathes of the Middle East appears to have been cut short by an American airstrike.
> 
> Iraq’s government and other sources are convinced that, far from leading his men in battle, Baghdadi now lies critically wounded and subject to constant care. A U.S. air raid near the town of Al-Baaj, 90 miles west of the Iraqi city of Mosul, appears to have injured Baghdadi and killed three of his companions on March 18.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The changing roles of African Muslim nations in the Saudi Arabia vs Iran rivalry:

McClatchy DC



> *Once Iran’s ally, Sudan sends advisers for Yemeni offensive Iran opposes*
> BY TOM HUSSAIN
> McClatchy Foreign Staff
> May 5, 2015
> 
> ISLAMABAD — *Special operations advisers from Sudan – previously Iran’s key ally on the Red Sea *– have been deployed in support of a Saudi-backed militia offensive launched over the weekend in Yemen to seize control of Aden’s airport, according to analysts focused on the Middle East.
> 
> *Africa’s role in the Saudi-led coalition was further boosted this week by Senegal’s decision to dispatch 2,100 troops to provide security to Islam’s holiest shrines in the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina, freeing the Saudi National Guard to support Saudi forces positioned on the border with Yemen.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

I hope any downed Moroccan F16 pilot won't be burned alive by the Houthis the same way that Jordanian pilot was burned alive by ISIS:

Reuters



> *Moroccan F-16 jet from Saudi-led coalition in Yemen goes missing*
> RABAT/CAIRO | BY AZIZ EL YAAKOUBI AND MOHAMMED GHOBARI
> 
> A Moroccan F-16 warplane has gone missing while on a mission with Saudi-led forces in Yemen, Morocco's military said on Monday, and Yemen's dominant Houthi militia said regional tribesmen shot down the aircraft.
> 
> The disappearance of the Moroccan jet and intensifying duels of heavy-weapons fire across the border between the Iran-allied Houthis and Saudi forces could endanger a five-day humanitarian truce due to start in Yemen on Tuesday morning.
> 
> Saudi-led air strikes hit military bases and weapons stores in the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa on Monday evening, setting off huge blasts that residents said launched rockets into the air which then crashed back down.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

An update on the missing Moroccan F16 on the previous page:

Foxtrot Alpha



> *Moroccan F-16 Fighter And Saudi AH-64 Attack Helicopter Down In Yemen*
> 
> A Moroccan F-16 and a Saudi AH-64 Apache both went down while operating over Yemen yesterday. *The crew of the Apache has supposedly fallen into Houthi Rebel hands while the F-16’s pilot fate remains less clear*, although grisly images of a body said to be located at the crash site are making their rounds on Twitter.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Crews are always 15 seconds and 1 emergency away from being in the hurt locker.  This is shitty.

Hopefully all survive and make it back to homeplate sometime. :-\


----------



## CougarKing

Seems those 3 British jihadi brides, who tweeted alot about going to Syria/Iraq to be married to ISIS fighters, have suddenly changed their tune...

Daily Mail



> *Will fugitive jihadi brides be BARRED from Britain? Theresa May warns three London teenagers who fled ISIS might not be allowed back into UK if they escape *
> Source within ISIS-held Mosul reveals huge hunts underway to find girls
> Girls thought to be 16 - the same age as friends who ran away in February
> Father of another girl, who ran away first, hopes his daughter escaped
> Home Secretary refuses to say whether they'll be allowed to return to UK
> 
> Home Secretary Theresa May has suggested three British schoolgirls believed to have escaped the clutches of ISIS may not be allowed back into the UK even if they manage to return.
> 
> *Reports from Iraq suggest three teenagers who had been married off to ISIS fighters have now gone on the run near the city of Mosul.*
> It has been suggested the trio may be Shamima Begum, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, who disappeared from their homes in east London earlier this year.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

Yes, on of the little %^@#$'s was tweeting that she had enjoyed a nice take out meal and now she wanted to behead some Kuffars.  I guess the shoe's on the other foot now.  I hope they don't let them back into the country.  If they escape what they deserve (staying with their jihadi husbands).


----------



## CougarKing

ISIS going from destroying artifacts to selling them?

Foreign Policy



> *New Bill Targets U.S. Buyers Filling the Islamic State’s Coffers With Millions*
> 
> Famed fictional archaeologist Indiana Jones often said antiquities belong in museums. A new bill introduced this week in Congress agrees.
> 
> Rep. Bill Keating (D-Mass.) is offering new legislation, called the Prevent Trafficking in Cultural Property Act, to help the Homeland Security Department block Islamic State sales of antiquities on the black market, a major source of the group’s revenue. It’s not clear how much the sale of these artifacts, looted from museums and archaeological sites, is bringing in, but intelligence officials estimate it’s the second largest source of funding for the group, behind oil revenue. *In one region of Syria, the group reportedly cashed in on $36 million by selling plundered artifacts.*
> 
> The United Nations already has a ban against the sale of items looted from Iraq and Syria. But according to Keating, efforts within U.S. law enforcement to stop their sale are poorly coordinated, and officials charged with preventing the illicit trade are not well trained.
> 
> “It takes more expertise to be able to spot what’s an antiquity,” Keating told FP. “These investigations aren’t occurring the way they should.”
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

It's now reported the 3 previously mentioned "jihadi brides" now on the run from ISIS, will be PUBLICLY EXECUTED if they're captured:

Daily Mail



> *British 'terror twins', 17, who went to Syria tell family they are still in ISIS's capital as hunt for on-the-run jihadi brides continues*
> Zahra and Salma Halane contacted their father to say they are now in Syria
> They were believed to be among three British teenagers to 'flee from ISIS'
> Source within ISIS-held Mosul revealed huge hunts underway to find girls
> *Expert says ISIS is likely to publicly execute any it suspects of defecting*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

If they are in Syria they are beyond Britain's reach and they sure wont be sending a predator after them.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Oh dear.  How sad.  Too bad...


----------



## tomahawk6

According to reports ,IS has taken Ramadi or its fall is imminent.This would be a serious blow to the Iraqi government.

http://news.yahoo.com/jihadists-seizes-government-hq-iraqs-ramadi-officials-000848164.html


----------



## McG

It appears IS have won the battle for Ramadi and are making gains across Anbar province.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-32751728


----------



## jollyjacktar

Weren't these turd tampers supposed to be in dissaray and generally getting their asses handed to them for some time now?  Not only that but many of their star players being taken out of the game???


----------



## tomahawk6

A US Special Operations raid into Syria killed Abu Sayyaf and they captured his wife.She is now in custody in Iraq. 

http://news.yahoo.com/u-says-troops-kill-senior-islamic-state-leader-125658571.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American special operations forces killed a senior Islamic State leader who helped direct the group's oil, gas and financial operations during a raid in eastern Syria, U.S. officials said on Saturday.


----------



## tomahawk6

It has become open source that this raid was a Delta operation.I think the reason for sending in a team was to obtain computers and other intel.A replay of Bin Ladin raid IMO.Good job guys !!

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/16/us-conducts-raid-on-isis-in-syria-kills-top-official/

U.S. personnel overnight killed a key Islamic State leader in charge of the group's oil and gas operations in a raid in eastern Syria, the White House said Saturday.

A team of Delta Force commandos slipped across the border from Iraq under cover of darkness Saturday aboard Black Hawk helicopters and V-22 Osprey aircraft, according to a U.S. defense official knowledgeable about details of the raid.

The U.S. team killed leader Abu Sayyaf and 11 other ISIS fighters and captured his wife, Umm Sayyaf. A senior defense official told Fox News that while no Americans were injured or killed in the operation, some of the fighting was hand-to-hand and that Sayyaf used women and children as human shields.

"It was a real firefight - a no kidding old school firefight," a senior defense official said.


----------



## jollyjacktar

I always like reading good news like this.  BZ Delta force.


----------



## Retired AF Guy

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> It has become open source that this raid was a Delta operation.I think the reason for sending in a team was to obtain computers and other intel.A replay of Bin Ladin raid IMO.Good job guys !!
> 
> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/16/us-conducts-raid-on-isis-in-syria-kills-top-official/



And totally off-subject, I noticed that on the screen behind the reporter you can see a Canadian flag flying. Just kind kind of piqued my curiosity why Fox News would be doing that.


----------



## tomahawk6

JTF2 wouldnt have had operators tagging along would they ? Or else its Fox's way of acknowledging the contribution of a long time ally.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Retired AF Guy said:
			
		

> And totally off-subject, I noticed that on the screen behind the reporter you can see a Canadian flag flying. Just kind kind of piqued my curiosity why Fox News would be doing that.


Maybe it's one of several flags flying outside whatever Fox studio she was working out of?  It looks like a window, not a screen.

Edited to add:  Looks like it might be Fox/et. al's Washington DC studio.


----------



## tomahawk6

Its safe to say that the leadership of IS is no doubt reviewing their security TTP's. :camo:


----------



## George Wallace

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> Maybe it's one of several flags flying outside whatever Fox studio she was working out of?  It looks like a window, not a screen.
> 
> Edited to add:  Looks like it might be Fox/et. al's Washington DC studio.



Looking at the map on that link.....Behind that studio is the Hyatt Regency Hotel......Where in all likelihood they fly the flags of all nations that they have employees capable of speaking that nations language.


----------



## Halifax Tar

ISIS takes control of Ramadi, Iraqi troops flee

ISIS seized control of the city of Ramadi on Sunday, sending Iraqi forces racing out of the city in a major loss despite the support of U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the extremists.

Online video showed Humvees, trucks and other equipment purportedly speeding out of Ramadi, with some soldiers gripping onto their sides. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered security forces not to abandon their posts across Anbar province, apparently fearing the extremists could capture the entirety of the vast Sunni province that saw intense fighting after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/isis-takes-control-of-ramadi-iraqi-troops-flee-1.3077576


----------



## The Bread Guy

Where the "Europe's Boat People" and ISIS problems intersect - this from the BBC ....


> Islamic State (IS) fighters are being smuggled into Europe by gangs in the Mediterranean, an adviser to the Libyan government has told the BBC.
> 
> Abdul Basit Haroun said smugglers were hiding IS militants on boats filled with migrants.
> 
> Officials in Italy and Egypt have previously warned that IS militants could reach Europe by migrant boat.
> 
> However, experts have cautioned that it is very difficult to verify or assess such claims.
> 
> Mr Haroun based his claim on conversations with smugglers in parts of North Africa controlled by the militants.
> 
> He alleged that IS was allowing the boat owners to continue their operations in exchange for half of their income ....


.... and this elsewhere:


> EU foreign and defence ministers will meet in Brussels to discuss their concerns about the Mediterranean migrant crisis and consider whether to step up efforts to seize the boats of human traffickers and sink them before they are put out to sea with their human cargo.
> 
> Over the weekend the French government joined Britain in rejecting EU plans for a quota system for sharing asylum-seekers from Africa and the Middle East.
> 
> The Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, and the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, will join their European counterparts at a session of the EU foreign affairs council – chaired by the EU’s foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini with Nato’s General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen sitting in.
> 
> It follows reports that Isis militants are exploiting the refugee crisis to smuggle fighters into Europe.
> 
> Unlike Britain, France appears to be open to some kind of EU agreement to relieve the burden of the thousands of migrants arriving in Italy after perilous voyages across the Mediterranean from Libya ....


Meanwhile ....


> .... The latest plan to quell the flow of migrants is an EU naval operation to attack the shipyards of smugglers in Libya, where refugees board unsafe vessels to attempt the Mediterranean crossing. Under the plan, orchestrated by Britain and assisted by at least nine other countries, the Italian navy would enter Libyan territorial waters and use helicopter gunships to destroy the smuggling network ....


More on that option here.


----------



## a_majoor

Canada and the West simply should pack their bags and exit the region. There is no "Plan A", much less a "Plan B". The collapse of American foreign policy in the region is a danger to the region and enormously destabilizing, but we have neither the power or the will to impose any sort of satisfactory solution ourselves (even if anyone knew what a "satisfactory" solution would look like). Time to look for more profitable ways to spend our blood and treasure:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/obamas-middle-east-policy-is-in-a-state-of-collapse.php



> *OBAMA’S MIDDLE EAST POLICY IS IN A STATE OF COLLAPSE*
> 
> You know it’s bad when even the Associated Press notices: “Rout In Ramadi Calls US Iraq Strategy Into Question.”
> 
> The fall of Ramadi calls into question the Obama administration’s strategy in Iraq.
> 
> Is there a Plan B?
> 
> The current U.S. approach is a blend of retraining and rebuilding the Iraqi army, prodding Baghdad to reconcile with the nation’s Sunnis, and bombing Islamic State targets from the air without committing American ground combat troops.
> 
> But the rout revealed a weak Iraqi army, slow reconciliation and a bombing campaign that, while effective, is not decisive.
> 
> On Monday, administration officials acknowledged the fall of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, as a “setback” in America’s latest effort in Iraq. They still maintained the campaign would ultimately bring victory.
> 
> But anything close to a victory appeared far off. The Islamic State group captured Ramadi over the weekend, killing up to 500 Iraqi civilians and soldiers and causing 8,000 people to flee their homes. On Monday the militants did a door-to-door search looking for policemen and pro-government tribesmen.
> 
> 28D3FD9100000578-3085486-Parade_After_slaughtering_500_people_and_forcing_over_8_000_from-m-27_1431965893317
> 
> The Daily Mail has this map that shows ISIS closing in on Baghdad:
> 
> 28D32BC000000578-3085486-image-a-1_1431958274225
> 
> The “sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq” that Barack Obama and Joe Biden hailed as one of Obama’s “great achievements” in 2014 has regressed into chaos as a result of Obama’s premature withdrawal of American troops. But it isn’t just Iraq. Syria is the closest thing to Hell on Earth. Iran is working away on nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Yemen has fallen to Iran’s proxies. Saudi Arabia is looking for nuclear weapons to counter Iran’s. ISIS occupies an area the size of Great Britain. Libya, its dictator having been gratuitously overthrown by feckless Western governments that had no plan for what would follow, is a failed state and terrorist playground.
> 
> It seems as though things couldn’t possibly get worse, but they almost certainly will. We are seeing the fruit of a set of policies that were based on the false premise that problems in the Middle East are mostly the fault of the United States. Not only were such policies misbegotten, they have been executed incompetently. The resulting collapse is occurring with sickening speed.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> Its safe to say that the leadership of IS is no doubt reviewing their security TTP's. :camo:



Let intelligence leak that another important figure was passing information and let them eat their own. The Brits were very succesful at sowing the seeds of doubt in the Malay Emergency.


----------



## a_majoor

Looks like everyone is now running rings around this US Administration WRT nuclear proliferation:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/05/25/are-the-saudis-getting-their-nukes/



> *Are The Saudis Getting Their Nukes?*
> 
> Citing unnamed senior administration officials, the Times of London is reporting that Saudi Arabia has in fact followed up on its threats and made the “strategic decision” to get nukes from Pakistan, whose nuclear program Riyadh has paid for through the years. Some highlights:
> 
> “For the Saudis the moment has come,” a former American defence official said last week.
> “There has been a longstanding agreement in place with the Pakistanis and the House of Saud has now made the strategic decision to move forward.”
> 
> While the official did not believe “any actual weaponry has been transferred yet”, it was clear “the Saudis mean what they say and they will do what they say”, following last month’s Iranian outline nuclear deal. His assessment was echoed by a US intelligence official who said “hundreds of people at Langley”, the CIA’s headquarters, were working to establish whether or not Pakistan had already supplied nuclear technology or even weaponry to Saudi Arabia.
> 
> “We know this stuff is available to them off the shelf,” the intelligence official said. Asked whether the Saudis had decided to become a nuclear power, the official responded: “That has to be the assumption.”
> 
> If this story is just based on intelligence community assessments, there might not be that much actual ‘news’ here. But it does belie President Obama’s assurances in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg that Saudi Arabia in fact does not intend to go down this road:
> 
> Part of the reason why they would not pursue their own nuclear program—assuming that we have been successful in preventing Iran from continuing down the path of obtaining a nuclear weapon—is that the protection that we provide as their partner is a far greater deterrent than they could ever hope to achieve by developing their own nuclear stockpile or trying to achieve breakout capacity when it comes to nuclear weapons.
> 
> Maybe. Or maybe not. Recent reports have indicated that King Salman has thoroughly lost confidence in America as a reliable partner. The Guardian, in its excellent piece from the weekend which detailed how the Saudis had taken matters into their own hands over Syria, had this nugget in it:
> 
> King Salman, who was formerly defence minister, is known to have railed against Barack Obama’s equivocation on Syria, especially his decision not to bomb Damascus in August 2013, after a sarin gas attack blamed on the Syrian regime. “That was the moment when we realised that our most powerful friend was no longer reliable,” the official said. “We had to step out from behind the curtain.”
> 
> In any case, the incentives are there for the Saudis to loudly talk up this option right up until the deadline for the Iranian nuke talks in hopes of nudging Tehran to walk away. What happens after July 1 if the accords are signed is anyone’s guess. But we are not necessarily convinced that the Saudis are just bluffing.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Reports are circulating that the Saudi king, who refused to attend the recent Camp David ("reassure the Arabs") meeting is now headed for Russia to be fêted by Putin.

Way to go, President Obama ...


----------



## The Bread Guy

More proof that keyboards DO kill (the dummies, anyway) ....


> *Carlisle: Air Force intel uses ISIS 'moron's' social media posts to target airstrikes*
> 
> OPSEC isn't the Islamic State group's strong suit.
> 
> Airmen at Hurlburt Field, Florida, used social media posts by the insurgent group to track the location of an Islamic State group headquarters building. Twenty-two hours later, three joint direct attack munitions destroyed the target, said Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, at a June 1 speech in Arlington, Virginia.
> 
> "The [airmen are] combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command," Carlisle said at the speech, which was sponsored by the Air Force Association. "And in some social media, open forum, bragging about command and control capabilities for Da'esh, ISIL, And these guys go 'ah, we got an in.'
> 
> "So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three JDAMS take that entire building out. Through social media. It was a post on social media. Bombs on target in 22 hours.
> 
> "It was incredible work, and incredible airmen doing this sort of thing." ....


----------



## Kat Stevens

And now that we and the rest of the world, bad guys included, knows this, that's one source of int that will be shut off PDQ.


----------



## George Wallace

Poking the lion:


Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.



> Isis declares war on Israel: Islamic State affiliate in Gaza Strip threatens 'worse is coming'
> International Business Times
> By Arij Limam , Orlando Crowcroft
> June 4, 2015 13:18 BST
> 
> An Islamic State-affiliated jihadi group in Gaza has declared war on Israel after claiming responsibility for two rocket attacks over the past two weeks.
> 
> A group calling itself the Sheikh Omar Hadeed Brigade in Quds claims that it fired a rocket on 26 May which landed near the Israeli city of Ashdod as well as another on June 3 that also hit the city. Israel responded with air strikes in Gaza on Thursday.
> 
> The first rocket was widely believed to have been fired by Islamic Jihad and the IS-affiliated Omar Brigade claim – which came in a statement on June 1 – cannot be independently verified. The group took responsibility for Wednesday night's rocket in a second statement.
> 
> It has warned Israel that there will be more attacks: "Ashdod is the beginning. What's coming is worse."
> 
> Gaza is currently embroiled in an internal power struggle between Hamas and various salafi groups, of which the Omar Brigades appear to be most prominent.
> 
> On June 2, Hamas security forces killed an IS supporter in a shoot-out at his home in Gaza City and in May the Palestinian Islamist group – which has controlled the strip since 2006 – demolished a salafi mosque in central Gaza near Khan Younis.
> 
> While the Omar Brigades latest statement is explicit in its threat towards Israel, the bulk of the group's anger is directed at Hamas, which it accuses of arresting and jailing salafis across the strip, as well as confiscating their weapons and torturing them.
> 
> "Seeing as Hamas has chosen to rage war against the salafi jihadis to appease outside foreign agendas against the Gaza citizens. We the Sheikh Omar Hadeed Brigade have chosen to keep our weapons pointed at the Israelis," the statement reads.
> 
> Israel has blamed Hamas for the rockets that were fired on 26 May and 3 June, arguing that it will hold the group responsible for all attacks from the strip. Following the second rocket on Wednesday, Israel bombed what it claimed were Hamas and Islamic Jihad camps in Gaza.
> 
> Gaza has struggled to recover from the mass destruction of homes and infrastructure during last summer's 50-day war, during which over 2,200 Palestinians were killed. Over $5bn was pledged to the strip by international donors last year but it was revealed recently that only a fraction of that money has been paid to the Palestinian Authority.
> 
> The reconstruction efforts have been hampered by an almost total blockade of Gaza on three sides by Israel and in the south by Egypt, as well as the fact that the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction in the strip.
> 
> Fatah fought a short but brutal civil war with Hamas in 2006 following elections that the latter is widely accepted to have won. As a result, Hamas was left in power in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank. The two parties signed a reconciliation deal in 2014 that has had little real success.
> 
> The rise of Isis/salafi groups in Gaza is a serious challenge to Hamas, which has long campaigned on its Islamist credentials and its opposition to peace with Israel. The groups has always used its ideology to persuade Palestinians to support it over Fatah and the PA, which is seen by many Palestinians as at best weak and at worst collaborators with the Israelis.
> 
> It also comes as Hamas and Islamic Jihad both are fast running out of allies. Hamas lost a powerful supporter in Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi, who was ousted in a coup in 2013 and is now on death row in Egypt, while there are reports that Islamic Jihad has fallen out of favour with its main sponsor, Iran.
> 
> With Gaza residents fast realizing that they gained little out of last year's brutal war other than over 2,200 dead, a tanking economy and destruction on a mass scale, Hamas is sure to face increasing opposition from both Isis pretenders and moderate Palestinians.




More on LINK.


----------



## dimsum

George Wallace said:
			
		

> Poking the lion:
> 
> 
> Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.
> 
> 
> More on LINK.



Another group threatening Israel?  Join the line.   :


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

George Wallace said:
			
		

> Poking the lion:
> 
> 
> Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.
> 
> 
> More on LINK.



In response, Israel has launched Operation GET OFF MY LAWN.... I have provided a copy of their overlay order for everyones info:


----------



## McG

George Wallace said:
			
		

> Poking the lion: Isis declares war on Israel


It is the same stunt Iraq tried to create a popular mulsim cause by lobbing Scuds into Isreal during the Gulf War.


----------



## a_majoor

A bit of subtle nudging and Hamas and ISIS can fight a nastly little civil war in the Gaza strip and leave everyone else alone....


----------



## a_majoor

ISIS ups the stakes considerably:

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/060415-755847-sum-of-all-fears-is-a-nuclear-armed-islamic-state.htm



> *Apocalypse Now: ISIS Establishing Nuclear Caliphate*
> 06/04/2015 06:35 PM ET
> 
> Jihad: In the latest edition of its propaganda rag, the Islamic State says it has enough cash to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and smuggle it into the U.S. through Mexico. This is the sum of all fears, and it's not overblown.
> 
> The new issue of "Dabiq," IS' English-language webzine, includes a chilling article, "The Perfect Storm," that claims the group has amassed enough funds to purchase a "nuclear device" from Pakistan.
> 
> "The Islamic State has billions of dollars in the bank, so they call on their wilayah (province) in Pakistan to purchase a nuclear device through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials in the region," the magazine says. The weapon could be smuggled through drug-running routes from Islamist-controlled Nigeria to Central America to Mexico "and into the U.S.," it adds.
> 
> Far-fetched? Not when you consider that IS has the means to buy nukes or dirty bombs, and the opportunity to smuggle them through our porous borders.
> 
> A Rand Corp. study says IS has more than $2 billion in assets from seized oil fields and refineries, kidnap ransoms and taxation. The think tank figures the terror group now controls fields with a production capacity of more than 150,000 barrels a day. It smuggles this oil out in tanker trucks and sells it at steeply discounted rates to buyers in Syria, Turkey, Kurdistan and elsewhere.
> 
> Despite falling world oil prices that have slowed IS' energy revenues to about $2 million a week, the terror group is still raking in more than $1 million a day in extortion and taxes alone. IS has also stolen some $500 million from state-owned banks in Iraq.
> 
> This is far more cash than al-Qaida had access to before 9/11. And IS is more ambitious — and fanatical enough to actually detonate a nuke inside a U.S. city.
> 
> "ISIS has billions of dollars, and if they plan an attack from over there, it's going to be 75% successful and larger than 9/11," warns terror expert Jeffrey Addicott of St. Mary's University. Indeed, IS' magazine boasts that IS is "looking to do something big, something that would make any past operation look like a squirrel shoot."
> 
> In March 2011, long before IS announced the creation of its caliphate, we predicted that not only would a caliphate sprout from Barack Obama's feckless Mideast policies but that a "nuclear caliphate" would emerge.
> 
> Our piece, "Will A Nuclear Caliphate Rise From Unrest In The Mideast?" , warned that fanatics would try to bring the Mideast under a single Islamic ruler who could control "oil supplies and possibly even nuclear weapons." It further warned that this Mideast-based Islamic state would pose "a direct threat to the West."
> 
> At the time, the White House pooh-poohed the idea of any "caliphate" forming, arguing that Muslim terrorists could never exploit the power vacuum (which the White House helped create) in the Mideast because most reformers were "secular."
> 
> Ignoring Muslim polling to the contrary, then-deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough called it a "lie" that Muslims even desire a universal Islamic state. Now, thanks to such naivete, we're facing an Islamic state that could turn into the first nuclear terrorist state. And Obama's doing next to nothing to stop it.
> 
> Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/060415-755847-sum-of-all-fears-is-a-nuclear-armed-islamic-state.htm#ixzz3cJxVWaZ9
> Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook


----------



## Robert0288

Kat Stevens said:
			
		

> And now that we and the rest of the world, bad guys included, knows this, that's one source of int that will be shut off PDQ.



+1.  

I don't know what it is about the Americans, but they seem to like burning their sources and posting a lot of leaks from 'anonymous intel officials'


----------



## Colin Parkinson

or as mentioned elsewhere a cover for another leak they don't want found


----------



## a_majoor

ISIS suffers a defeat in Libya as people begin to revolt against the barbaric rules and actions of their oppressors:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/19/defeat-for-isis-in-libya/



> *Defeat for ISIS in Libya*
> 
> A month after ISIS’s sudden and nearly simultaneous seizures of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria shocked the world, the Islamist group may be in retreat on its third major battlefield: Libya. According to sources on the ground and the Libyan army, forces loyal to the internationally recognized government in Tobruk have retaken towns surrounding the ISIS stronghold of Derna, while rival jihadi groups and residents enraged by ISIS’s stringent rule have rebelled against it inside the city. More, via the Times of London:
> 
> Fierce fighting erupted in the city last Wednesday when Isis militants killed three top commanders from the Derna Mujahideen Shura Council, a rival al-Qaeda linked umbrella group, and Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade, another Islamist militia. The killings angered residents already weary of the jihadists’ reign of terror, marked by public beheadings, enforcement of strict interpretation of Sharia and a steady stream of foreign fighters. […]
> 
> Witnesses told The Times that Isis militants have scattered into their residential neighbourhoods, fleeing so quickly that they abandoned their injured.
> 
> “They are being forced to defend their homes. People came out with weapons they had been hiding for many months, everyone came together against them,” said Ali, a 55-year-old resident.
> On Sunday, a spokesman of the Derna Mujahideen Shura Council said on local Libyan TV that its forces had pushed Isis out of “90 per cent of the town”.
> 
> The Libyan military — who denied co-ordinating with Derna’s anti-Isis militias — said it would sweep in during the next few days and “finish the job”.
> 
> Though Western media frequently talk of its bases, strongholds, and even command structure, ISIS is not a traditional army in any sense, as Howard Gambrill Clark writes for our upcoming issue—and so defeats such as this may not be as devastating to it as they first appear. ISIS is excellent at fading into the local population after the loss of leaders or territory, then recalibrating and popping up elsewhere, exactly as it did has done in Syria and Iraq. Nor are any facts on the ground in war-torn Libya permanent, to say the least. Yet a blow to ISIS is something to cheer, especially as its toehold on Libya’s coast raises fears that it would sneak militants aboard refugee boats to attack European targets. A successful rebellion against ISIS’s unendurable rule is also heartening; as Clark points out (read the whole thing here) the greatest threat to jihadi rule is local intransigence.


----------



## jollyjacktar

I hope the animals the left behind in the panic to escape were dealt with as they deserved.  Might give the surviving cowards some thought of the lack of honour amongst thieves if they catch a bullet down the road.


----------



## a_majoor

Syrian Kurds take more territory from ISIS. I suspect the Turks, remaining Syrian government forces and their Iranian paymasters are not pleased:

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/World/2015/06/23/Syrian-Kurds-on-the-offensive-push-deeper-into-Islamic-State-territory/



> *Syrian Kurds, on offensive, seize military base from Islamic State *
> by Tom Perry
> 
> BEIRUT (Reuters) - Kurdish-led forces said on Monday that they had captured a military base from Islamic State in Syria's Raqqa province, advancing deeper into territory held by the group and showing new momentum after they seized a border crossing from the jihadists last week.
> 
> The Kurds, aided by U.S.-led air strikes and smaller Syrian rebel groups, pushed on Monday to within 7 km (4 miles) of Ain Issa, a town 50 km (30 miles) north of Islamic State's de facto capital Raqqa city, said Redur Xelil, a spokesman for the Kurdish forces.
> 
> "They have been defeated," YPG spokesman Redur Xelil told Reuters.
> 
> Islamic State had held the military base, Liwa 93, southwest of Ain Issa, since capturing it from the Syrian military last year.
> 
> "This means that the Islamic State keeps collapsing inside its own stronghold," said Rami Abdulrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict.
> 
> The rapid advance into Raqqa province has defied expectations of a protracted battle between the Kurdish YPG group and Islamic State fighters, who waged a four-month battle for the border town of Kobani, where the Kurds finally defeated the jihadists in January.
> 
> Raqqa is the main seat of power in Syria for Islamic State, the group also known as ISIS or ISIL, which has proclaimed a caliphate to rule over all Muslims from territory it controls in Syria and Iraq.
> 
> The United States has been leading an air campaign against the group in both countries since last year. The Kurds have been the most important partner so far for the U.S.-led campaign in Syria, where Washington has far fewer allies on the ground than in Iraq.
> 
> The Kurdish front in northern Syria has been one of the few sources of good news for the global campaign against Islamic State since the jihadists made major advances last month in western Iraq and central Syria.
> 
> A spokesman for the Pentagon said last week that Islamic State forces had appeared to "crack" at the Turkish border town of Tel Abyad, which fell to the YPG in less than two days, cutting Islamic State's supply route from Turkey.
> 
> Thousands of people had fled from Ain Issa towards Raqqa city in the last two days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
> 
> Some refugees from the Tel Abyad area had accused the YPG of driving Arabs and Turkmen from territory seized from Islamic State. More than 23,000 people had fled northern Syria into Turkey.
> 
> With the fighting having moved on and a border crossing reopening, some of the refugees were returning to Tel Abyad on Monday. Hundreds of Syrians, mostly women and children carrying bags of belongings, returned across the border from the Turkish town of Akcakale.
> 
> Kurdish officials denied forcing people out and said that such accusations were being made to stir up ethnic strife. The Observatory has said there has been no evidence of systematic abuses by the YPG, though there have been individual cases.
> 
> The Kurdish advance is alarming the Turkish government, which is worried the growing Kurdish sway in northern Syria could inflame ethnic unrest among its own Kurdish population.
> 
> Ankara has conveyed to Washington its concerns about signs of "a kind of ethnic cleansing" in areas captured by Kurds near Tel Abyad.
> 
> The Syrian Kurds have said they do not want their own state, but see their example of regional autonomy as a model for how to settle the war in Syria and elsewhere in the region. Their cousins in Iraq also have self-rule in an autonomous region.
> 
> The Kurdish administration's growing strength has led to friction with the Damascus government, which has tended to avoid direct conflict with the Kurds during the four-year war while maintaining a foothold in areas where the Kurds hold sway.
> 
> Tensions have flared in Qamishli, a northeastern city split between Kurdish and government forces. Kurdish forces seized several positions from government control there last week following clashes that Kurdish officials said the Syrian government had instigated to stir Arab-Kurdish conflict.
> 
> Syrian government officials did not comment specifically on the Qamishli events but have said they suspect some Kurds of harbouring separatist aims.
> 
> "In general, (the Kurds) and us are friends, but there is no state of permanent harmony," a Syrian government official said by telephone on condition of anonymity.
> 
> (Additional reporting by Seyhmus Cakan in Akcakale and Laila Bassamin Beirut; Editing by Peter Graff, Toni Reinhold)


----------



## a_majoor

From the WTF? newsfiles. American actions are becoming increasingly counterproductive, while regional actors are increasingly teaming up to oppose these actions. As an aside, our participation in the anti ISIS air campaign might not be looked upon very well in the Sunni world either:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/06/23/the-strangest-bedfellows-of-all/



> *The Strangest Bedfellows of All*
> 
> As the U.S. ups “advisor” deployments to Iraq, some of them are sharing bases with Iranian-backed Shi’a militia. Eli Lake & Josh Rogin at Bloomberg report:
> 
> Two senior administration officials confirmed to us that U.S. soldiers and Shiite militia groups are both using the Taqqadum military base in Anbar, the same Iraqi base where President Obama is sending an additional 450 U.S. military personnel to help train the local forces fighting against the Islamic State. Some of the Iran-backed Shiite militias at the base have killed American soldiers in the past.
> 
> This is, to say the least, strange. And it won’t just look strange to Americans; alarm bells will be ringing all across the Sunni world. Angry Sunni allies are already accusing the United States of acting as ‘the Shi’a air force’ for the duration of the fight against ISIS; the news that we are now sharing bases with them is going to confirm a worst-case scenario in many Sunni minds, and the word on the street will be that the infidel Americans are in bed with the heretics of Tehran.
> 
> This perception is not going to stabilize the Middle East. It’s going to make it easier for ISIS and Al-Qaeda linked groups to recruit. It’s going to increase the flow of money and arms from the Gulf to radical jihadis in Syria and beyond. And it’s going to add new urgency to the drive by Israel and Saudi Arabia to work together against American policy in the region. We can send as many officials as we want to the Gulf to tell the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis how much we love them; it won’t do much good.
> 
> Lake and Rogin go on to point out that some Obama Administration officials have privately expressed worries that the Shi’a might, gasp, spy on U.S. troops at the facility, and that the troops are “at risk”. As for the spying, two can play at that game, and let’s hope the Americans on the base are keeping their eyes and ears open. As for the risk question, who knows? Let’s just hope that the White House knows what it is doing.
> 
> For better or for worse, the administration is doubling down on its bet that making friends with the Shi’a is the best way to defend American interests at the least risk and cost. And maybe it thinks that displays of good will and support will win some points with the Supreme Leader as the nuclear talks near yet another ‘deadline’. We root for the home team at The American Interest, so we hope this all somehow turns out for the best; we can’t help but wonder, though, what will come next. An American honor guard for the Supreme Leader as he leads the chants at the next big “Death to America” rally?


----------



## The Bread Guy

While the old Cracked magazine may be better known for satire, it now appears to be doing more (in their own smart-ass way) news & pop culture coverage.  Sweary words aside, here's a pretty easy-to-understand piece on how ISIS came to be.


> *We Built Their Death Squads: ISIS's Bizarre Origin Story*
> 
> ISIS -- the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria -- is one of the least funny organizations on the planet. From child trafficking to attempted genocide, everything they touch turns into a big steaming pile of tragedy. Things seem to be going pretty well for them, too. The West's new boogeymen captured the city of Ramadi, Iraq, last month, and they appear to be drawing in new recruits slightly faster than American airstrikes can kill them.
> 
> But, the truly scary thing is that they seem to have just popped into existence overnight. How many of you had never even heard the term "ISIS" before last year? How is such a spontaneous mass of organized terror even possible? We were wondering that, too, so we sat down with a few people who were on the ground in Iraq during ISIS's real-life supervillain origin story. We learned that, if we're not the father of ISIS, the United States is at least some sort of uncle.
> 
> It started when ...
> 
> #5. We Put All Their Leaders In The Same Camp ....


More on Camp Bucca & ISIS, in more mainstream media language, here, here and here.


----------



## cupper

Watched a PBS Frontline documentary on how ISIS has taken hundreds of Yazidi women and children and forcing them into slavery, with numbers in the range of 4 of every 5 being raped. Their belief that girls as young as 9 years old can be used as sex slaves.

It's a disturbing story, with many first person interviews of victims who escaped their captors. The main focus of the story is of one Yazidi man who has developed a ring of contacts and volunteers who aid in the escape of these women and children.

These guys are just pure savage animals that need to be put down. There is no other way to describe it. 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/escaping-isis/

And NPR interview with the film maker

http://www.npr.org/2015/07/14/422800624/in-escaping-isis-an-underground-railroad-forms-to-save-yazidi-women



> RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
> 
> Until a year ago, few had heard of the Yazidi people of northern Iraq. But with the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the plight of this isolated ethnic group has become headline news. The Yazidi practice their own ancient form of religion rather than Islam, and that's made them a prime target of ISIS militants. Yazidi men have been slaughtered, and thousands of women and children have been carried away from mountain towns as slaves of war. That's the subject of a new PBS "Frontline" documentary. Directed by Edward Watts, the film uncovers the existence of what was long believed to be only a rumor - an underground railroad for Yazidi slaves.
> 
> Welcome to the program.
> 
> EDWARD WATTS: Thank you.
> 
> MONTAGNE: Your story is the story, really, in a sense, of one man on a mission. He's a Yazidi man who's taken it upon himself to free these Yazidi women and girls. Tell us about him.
> 
> WATTS: So Khalil al-Dakhi is one of a very small group of activists. There are about six or seven of these guys who are trying to rescue the captured Yazidi women and children. Prior to the war, he'd just been a small-town lawyer dealing with marriages, divorces, deaths - those kind of things. But in the aftermath of this cataclysm that hit their community, he began to gather testimony, firstly of people who had suffered from the simple military attack. And then as some of the women and children managed to escape from the clutches of ISIS, he began to gather the testimony of what they'd been through in the hope, I think, that there would eventually be possibly even a war crimes trial. And what he realized looking at this testimony was that the women were coming back with extraordinarily detailed information about the disposition of the Islamic State - so where there were checkpoints, where there were sort of fortified headquarters and, most importantly for him, where the Yazidi hostages were being held. That, in a sense, could provide a blueprint for a way in which he could rescue people from inside.
> 
> MONTAGNE: Well, one of the elements of this system is, kind of amazingly, some of these women managed to hide cell phones and call out. Let's play a clip of the film where you hear one of those voicemails that he would've been hearing.
> 
> (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "ESCAPING ISIS")
> 
> UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken).
> 
> MONTAGNE: What is that? What's going on there?
> 
> WATTS: This was a rather unusual case in that an ISIS fighter himself had called up the rescue team and said, well, you can buy these women and children off me, if you'd like. And in order to put the pressure on, in this case, he played a clip of this woman who is in his grasp to essentially - you know, you can hear the desperation in her voice. She was just desperately trying to appeal to the people to do whatever it would take to save her from that situation.
> 
> MONTAGNE: Well, let's get to that a little bit, briefly - ransom. Now, right off, Khalil claims he does not pay ransoms, but clearly some money is flowing in these situations.
> 
> WATTS: Yeah, I mean the majority of the money is going to the people who are actually involved in doing the rescues. So some people, I was told, they're doing it for free because of simple humanitarian reasons. Others are doing it because of poverty. There was one case they told me about a shepherd who was instrumental in guiding certain families through remote areas. And he literally just needed a few hundred dollars to feed his family, and that's why he was doing it. So there is money flowing around, but they are really adamant that they don't pay ISIS directly because they hate ISIS. And whenever I ask them this question, as I did repeatedly - I mean, ISIS set traps for them. There was actually just a case just a few weeks ago of two of Khalil's guys. ISIS set an ambush for them. And what they did was a similar phone call to the one you just heard. They got a girl to call the rescue network saying her captor was away at the frontline and therefore, she was, in a sense, in a position to be rescued. They sent two of their guys in. ISIS were waiting for them, captured them and executed them.
> 
> MONTAGNE: Well, there is much in this about what is happening, even as we speak, to women who have not been rescued. But amazingly, one of the harder things to watch is a little video that Khalil shows you...
> 
> WATTS: Yeah.
> 
> MONTAGNE: ...About the ISIS fighters making crude jokes and laughing about buying and selling what they call sabia. That is slaves captured in war, sex slaves.
> 
> (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "ESCAPING ISIS")
> 
> UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).
> 
> WATTS: Yeah - no, I mean this - that is an extraordinary clip. And actually a girl who had escaped had stolen the phone, and so the world was able to see this quite intimate scene amongst ISIS fighters. Unlike most of their output, this was not intended for public consumption. I think it just really gives you an idea of the callous brutality with which they were treating these very young and fragile and vulnerable women and girls because for them, they were slaves, and slaves could be bought and sold and treated entirely as they pleased.
> 
> MONTAGNE: Well, some of it is actually too sensitive for us to even talk about this morning on the air.
> 
> WATTS: Yeah.
> 
> MONTAGNE: But let's play just a few moments of Amal just to hear her voice. She's 18 and sadly telling a story that seems to be universal.
> 
> (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "ESCAPING ISIS")
> 
> AMAL: (Foreign language spoken).
> 
> WATTS: Yeah. I mean, what you're hearing there is the beginning of this most horrendous tale of sexual violence that I've ever heard.
> 
> She was initially placed under custody of a single ISIS commander who had six bodyguards. And not wanting to get into too much graphic detail for your listeners, but gradually through the course of her captivity with him, she was subjected to attacks by all of those men at different times and sometimes simultaneously, and then she was passed on to other fighters. And another little girl was bought and sold, and I'd asked her whether this was the case with her. And she said, no, I was just rented. The Yazidi culture is highly, highly conservative - no discussion of sex or anything of that nature. And these women - girls have been ripped out of that environment and subjected to this sexual violence.
> 
> MONTAGNE: And, though, you show the ends of rescues. It's pretty extraordinary footage. Families obviously want them back.
> 
> WATTS: This is a big thing, I mean, because in Yazidi society, it used to be so conservative. And we're only talking about a few years ago. If a single Yazidi woman ran off with a Muslim man, you know, she could be liable to an honor killing. But now so many of their community have been abducted and subjected to this sexual violence that, as a society really, they're having to massively sea change their whole conservative nature. And their religious leaders have actually been at the forefront of this from very early on in the process saying we have to welcome our girls back. We need to do whatever it takes to reintegrate them and make them feel at home once again in our community. And I think that certainly that what I saw was that the community were very much responding to those calls.
> 
> MONTAGNE: Well, thank you very much for joining us.
> 
> WATTS: Good to talk to you, thank you.
> 
> MONTAGNE: Edward Watts directed the documentary "Escaping ISIS". It premieres tonight on PBS's "Frontline."


----------



## a_majoor

The use and abuse of social media is something we will need to become better at identifying, monitoring and countering. While ISIS is perhaps the chief proponents right now, we should remember Russia ran an effective campaign in Georgia and Crimea, and the Chinese also have huge resources devoted to social media as well:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/07/19/140-characters-of-jihad/



> *140 Characters of Jihad*
> 
> In the age when terrorists can recruit followers from halfway around the world, a question looms over social media companies: how to deal with content posted by jihadi groups. From WashPo:
> 
> As the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, continues to hold large parts of Iraq and Syria and inspire terrorist attacks in more and more countries, it has come to rely upon U.S. social-media companies to summon fresh recruits to its cause, spread its propaganda and call for attacks, according to counterterrorism analysts. […]
> 
> “ISIS has been confronting us with these really inhumane and atrocious images, and there are some people who believe if you type ‘jihad’ or ‘ISIS’ on YouTube, you should get no results,” Victoria Grand, Google’s director of policy strategy, told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “We don’t believe that should be the case. Actually, a lot of the results you see on YouTube are educational about the origins of the group, educating people about the dangers and violence. But the goal here is how do you strike a balance between enabling people to discuss and access information about ISIS, but also not become the distribution channel for their propaganda?”
> Striking a proper balance is an elusive task indeed. Even if there were a clear line of demarkation between “good” and “bad” content, technological shortfalls make it “difficult to distinguish between communiques from terrorist groups and posts by news organizations and legitimate users.”
> 
> A recent feature in our magazine’s pages addressed this issue, arguing that it’s high time the Western world takes aggressive action to expel such content from its servers and social media sites. James van de Velde asserts that “[w]ithout contesting extremist use of the internet, the United States and its allies will fail to defeat the Islamic State and to eliminate al-Qaeda, both of which are, let us remember, the stated goals of U.S. policy.” Furthermore, shutting down those sites and accounts isn’t a useless game of whack-a-mole—it can do significant damage to jihadi web presence and slow their operations down. The piece, which can be found here, is worth reading in full—this issue isn’t going away.


----------



## RMJOE

I watched those PBS episode's of Frontline, containing two episodes one is a split with Ukraine. What is intriguing about the state of affairs; in the affected Middle East is the modern day G8 countries, and a lack of action to act upon genocide. The anticipation to help people in severe distress is so great that non militarised citizens are going to help. ISIS will not stop at anything, so we have to act and stop this from being the next holocaust.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> While the old Cracked magazine may be better known for satire, it now appears to be doing more (in their own smart-*** way) news & pop culture coverage.  Sweary words aside, here's a pretty easy-to-understand piece on how ISIS came to be.More on Camp Bucca & ISIS, in more mainstream media language, here, here and here.



Well there is a solution, but international law would get in the way.


----------



## cupper

Well, it looks like Turkey has decided to allow airstrikes to be run from Incerlik. I wonder how much influence the recent suicide bombing, and the report I heard earlier today of the killing of a Turkish soldier on the border by possible ISIS troops. 

*Turkey Agrees To Allow Use Of Its Soil For Airstrikes Against ISIS*

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/23/425666624/turkey-agrees-to-allow-its-soil-for-airstrikes-against-isis?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150723



> Updated at 5:35 p.m. ET
> 
> Turkey has agreed to allow anti-ISIS coalition warplanes to begin using the air base at Incirlik in the country's east to carry out airstrikes against the extremist group in neighboring Syria, NPR has confirmed.
> 
> The news, also reported in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, marks a sudden shift in Ankara's policy that until now has barred the U.S. and its allies from using the base for anything other than unarmed surveillance drones directed against the self-declared Islamic State.
> 
> "The United States and Turkey have held ongoing consultations about ways we can further our joint counter-ISIL efforts," National Security Council spokesman Alistair Baskey tells NPR's Brian Naylor, referring to an acronym that the administration uses for the Islamic State.
> 
> "We have decided to further deepen our cooperation in the fight against ISIL, our common efforts to promote security and stability in Iraq, and our work to bring about a political settlement to the conflict in Syria," Baskey says. "Due to operational security I don't have further details to share at this time."
> 
> According to The Associated Press, President Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the agreement by telephone on Wednesday.
> 
> The AP says:
> 
> "Turkey has yet to publicly confirm the agreement, and the U.S. officials requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to comment publicly. The White House declined to confirm the agreement, citing operational security concerns, but White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama and Erdogan had discussed efforts to fight IS during their phone call Wednesday.
> "'The two leaders did agree that we would deepen our cooperation as we take on this ISIL threat,' Josh Earnest said, using an alternative acronym for the militant group."
> 
> The WSJ reports:
> 
> "Use of the base is part of a broader deal between the U.S. and Turkey to deepen their cooperation in the fight against Islamic State, which is growing increasingly perilous for Turkey.
> 
> "The agreement comes after months of tense negotiations between U.S. officials seeking greater freedom to strike the extremist forces and reluctant Turkish leaders who have resisted American pressure to play a larger role in the fight across the border."


----------



## cupper

More from WaPo, including the engagement between Turkish troops and ISIS.

*Turkey agrees to allow U.S. military to use its base to attack Islamic State*

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/turkey-agrees-to-allow-us-military-to-use-its-base-to-attack-islamic-state/2015/07/23/317f23aa-3164-11e5-a879-213078d03dd3_story.html?hpid=z1



> BEIRUT — Turkey has agreed to allow the United States to use Turkish soil to launch air attacks against the Islamic State, signaling a major shift in policy on the part of the once-reluctant American ally, U.S. officials said Thursday.
> 
> The decision to allow U.S. warplanes to use the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey is one element in a broad cooperation plan first broached nine months ago. Additional elements, including expansion of U.S. airstrikes into the western part of the border area, and the use of Turkish military ground spotters to guide them, are still being discussed and finalized.
> 
> Turkey had resisted being drawn too deeply into the war against the Islamic State because of concerns about the direction of the Obama administration’s Syria policy.
> 
> The Incirlik agreement was sealed in a telephone conversation Wednesday between President Obama and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a senior U.S. administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
> 
> A White House statement said only that the two leaders had discussed “deepening our ongoing cooperation in the fight against ISIL, as well as common efforts to bring security and stability to Iraq and a political settlement to the conflict in Syria.” The Islamic State is also known as ISIS and ISIL.
> 
> Use of the Incirlik base , located just 60 miles from the northwest Syrian border, would enable piloted U.S. warplanes and armed drones to move more quickly and efficiently against Islamic State targets in their northern Syrian strongholds, U.S. officials have said. Planes currently fly from Iraq, to Syria’s east, and from Arab states such as Jordan and in the Persian Gulf that are a part of the anti-Islamic State coalition.
> 
> Survillance aircraft have been permitted to fly from Incirlik, but the Turkish government’s refusal to allow the base to be used for air attacks had triggered one of the deepest rifts in the U.S.-Turkish alliance in more than a decade, reflecting deep-seated policy differences between Ankara and Washington over ways to address the Syrian war. Incirlik has hosted American forces under the umbrella of the NATO alliance for many years, but it remains subject to Turkish sovereignty.
> 
> There was no immediate comment from Turkish officials, although several Turkish media outlets reported the Incirlik agreement. In a Wednesday press conference, Deputy Foreign Mnister Bulent Arinc said that Turkey had “agreed on certain topics to support the [anti-Islamic State] coalition’s efforts during a recent meeting with the U.S. special representative,” a reference to retired Gen. John Allen, the administration’s coordinator for the coalition, who visted Turkey earlier this month.
> 
> “A unanimity of thought and action has been reached about the issue of joint operations in the future,” Arinc said, according to the Hurriyet newspaper. “A related cabinet motion is now open for a signature.”
> 
> The newspaper quoted an unidentified U.S. official as saying that American strike operations from Incirlik would begin in August.
> 
> The agreement was reached amid heightened tensions on the Turkish-Syrian border. In their first significant ground engagement with the Islamic State, Turkish troops on Thursday fired artillery into miltant territory near the Kilis border crossing, killing two fighters. The move followed what Turkish media reports said was an Islamic State attack on Turkish troops in the area that killed at least one Turkish soldier.
> 
> The shooting erupted after Turkey sought to prevent militant fighters from entering its territory illegally via one of the many smuggling routes used to ferry goods, supplies and people in and out of Syria, Turkish media said. The Turkish military said in a statement that it scrambled four F-16 fighters to the area to guard against a possible escalation.
> 
> The U.S.-Turkish talks had already picked up speed in recent weeks as the Islamic State increased its presence in northwestern Syria, moving beyond its strongholds in the eastern and central parts of the country in the direction of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city.
> 
> Fighting in the northwest and in and around Aleppo has been primarily between Syrian opposition fighters and forces of President Bashar al-Assad’s government, and the United States has been reluctant to use its air power, which it has said is solely devoted to the fight against the Islamic State.
> 
> Under the plan currently being discussed, U.S. airstrikes could extend from Kobane, a Syrian town on the Turkish border, westward to the town of Azaz, about 20 miles north of Aleppo.
> 
> Whether Turkey has secured any concessions from the United States regarding its own concerns was not immediately clear. Turkey has repeatedly said it wants Washington to focus as much on removing Assad as on fighting the Islamic State. It has also said it wants a safe zone in the area, protected by air power, that would allow it to transfer back to Syria some of an estimated 2 million refugees on Turkish territory.
> 
> It was unclear whether the U.S.-Turkey arrangement under discussion would recognize any safe zone, but increased control of the 560-mile border would enhance efforts to prevent Islamist militants from crossing into Syria.
> 
> Significant gains by Syrian Kurds against the Islamic State in northern Syria to the east of Kobane have also contributed to the evolution of Turkey’s thinking. In recent weeks the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, have seized large swathes of territory, consolidating Kurdish control over what Turkey fears represents the early outlines of a new Kurdish state.
> 
> The Kurdish advances have been aided by U.S. airstrikes, leaving Turkey at risk of losing out all along the border.
> 
> By aligning more closely with the U.S.-led coalition, Turkey may be seeking to forestall further Kurdish gains in the eastern border region and secure more robust support for the Syrian rebels in the west than would have been possible had it remained on the sidelines of the fight.


----------



## CougarKing

Is a future Kurdistan less likely now that Turkey is directly involved in Syria, on the pretext of joining the War against ISIS?

Associated Press



> *Turkey military onslaught against Kurds, after IS assaults, raises anger in Kurdish heartland*
> The Canadian Press
> By Desmond Butler And Suzan Fraser, The Associated Press
> DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - Just when it seemed Turkey was getting serious about the fight against IS, it has turned its military focus to pounding its old foe: the Kurdish rebels.
> In Turkey's Kurdish heartland, the government's renewed military onslaught against the rebels has left many people crying treachery — with suspicions rife that Turkey used a brief offensive against IS as a cover to launch a broad attack against the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. Many Kurds also are venting frustration against the United States, accusing Washington of turning a blind eye to Turkish attacks on the Kurds in exchange for logistical support on IS.
> "We are used to this. Kurds have witnessed betrayal for centuries" said Axin Bro, a musician. "National powers use us for their own ends."
> The U.S. had welcomed Turkey's air assault last week on the Islamic State group, along with its decision to open air bases for American sorties, as a sign that Turkey had dropped its reluctance to fight the extremist group. Since then, Turkish jets taking off from this city in Kurdish-dominated lands have been hitting PKK targets in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey, as the militant group has targeted military and police in Turkey.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## tomahawk6

The Turks supported IS vs Assad.After losing the recent elections the government is trying to woo conservatives back by attacking IS and the Kurds for good measure.


----------



## Edward Campbell

KAL, in _The Economist_, gets it about right ...

          
	

	
	
		
		

		
			




          Source: http://www.economist.com/news/world-week/21660187-kals-cartoon?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/kal/st/aug1st


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile in Yemen, Saudi boots are on the ground in Yemen, with the support of Emirati Le Clerc tanks:

Defense News



> *Saudi-led Coalition Deploys 3,000 Troops in Yemen, Sources Say*
> 
> DUBAI — The Saudi-led Arab coalition has deployed 3,000 troops in Aden and main battle tanks, according to sources in Yemen.
> 
> Images have appeared over the past hour on Twitter from a number of Yemeni media outlets showing *United Arab Emirates LeClerc main battle tanks, BMP armored vehicle, including M-ATVs, being offloaded on to a port in Aden.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## cupper

*For the first time, U.S. launches armed flights over Syria from Turkish base*

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/for-the-first-time-us-launches-armed-flights-over-syria-from-turkish-base/2015/08/03/9ceceebe-3a11-11e5-b3ac-8a79bc44e5e2_story.html?hpid=z4



> The U.S. military has begun flying armed aircraft over Syria from Turkey, the Pentagon said Monday, a move that could expand its ability to carry out airstrikes to protect U.S.-trained rebels in northern Syria.
> 
> Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said that military officials had launched armed drones from Incirlik air base in southern Turkey over the weekend. Previously, Ankara had permitted the United States to use the base only to conduct surveillance flights over Syria.
> 
> “At this point, no actual strikes have been conducted, but they have begun flying armed,” Davis told reporters at the Pentagon. He said U.S. pilots would begin armed flights over Syria from the base as well.
> 
> A U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational planning, said the new flights from Incirlik, not far from northwest Syria, would increase the time that American aircraft could spend in Syrian airspace, collecting intelligence or dropping munitions.
> 
> “It’s proximity and it’s on-station duration, and it’s ability to respond in a timely manner,” the official said.
> 
> Last month’s agreement to expand U.S. operations out of the base is just one element of expanded U.S.-Turkish cooperation against the Islamic State, the extremist group that controls much of Iraq and Syria and that Ankara increasingly sees as a direct threat.
> 
> The two countries have also agreed to establish a de facto safe zone in northern Syria, which is intended to provide Turkey with a buffer from Syria’s civil war and create an area for displaced Syrians to take shelter from the brutal extremist group.
> 
> The Obama administration’s plans for standing up a new force to fight the Islamic State in Syria were dealt a blow last week when al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, claimed to have captured the leader of Division 30, an opposition unit that has sent some of its members to Turkey to be trained by U.S. forces.
> 
> On Friday, U.S. aircraft took the unusual step of conducting strikes against fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra, which had reportedly attacked the U.S.-backed unit. The strikes signaled a shift in policy for the Obama administration, which had resisted committing to using air power to protect the U.S. trainees, known as the New Syrian Force, from anyone other than the Islamic State.
> 
> Over the weekend, military officials said the new authorization extended to the use of American aircraft to shield fighters from attacks by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which have used chemical weapons and barrel bombs against opponents. The move marks a potential escalation for the United States four years into the Syrian conflict, creating the prospect of a direct U.S. engagement with Assad’s forces.
> 
> 
> The authorization against Assad forces was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
> 
> Military officials played down that scenario Monday, saying that a confrontation with Assad’s units is unlikely in large part because the United States has sent members of the New Syrian Force — who number only about 55 so far — into areas not contested by the government.
> 
> “It’s important to remember that’s not what this is about,” Davis said. “We’re not at war with the Assad regime. The people who we are training and equipping are pledged to fight ISIL and only ISIL.” ISIL is another name for the Islamic State.
> 
> U.S. officials also believe that Assad’s power to strike out against U.S.-backed fighters is diminished. Assad recently made a rare public admission that his government had lost ground and was struggling to maintain a large enough force to hold off adversaries.
> 
> The recent attacks by Jabhat al-Nusra underscore the vulnerability of U.S.-trained forces in Syria and highlight the obstacles that military officials must overcome if the program, which began training cadets after a long buildup this spring, can succeed.
> 
> “Train and equip as currently construed is going to have a very, very difficult time meeting any of its objectives in terms of manpower,” said Fred Hof, a former U.S. official who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
> 
> Part of the reason that the number of trainees has been so low is that the United States has struggled to find Syrians, after four years of bloody battles, who will agree to fight only the Islamic State and not the Assad regime.
> 
> Military officials are pushing forward with the program, which aims to eventually establish training sites in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
> 
> More Syrians are being trained. Defense officials have declined to specify the size of the next cohort but concede it is not large. They say the intense vetting that has suppressed numbers is necessary to avoid arming the wrong people.
> 
> Hof said the program could have negligible impact unless it changes course.
> 
> 
> “It could be that when we look at this . . . we may see it was absolutely the emptiest of gestures,” Hof said. “If it continues in its present form, that’s exactly the conclusion we’re going to reach.”


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile back to the Yemen Civil War...

So who's enforcing this...the Saudi Navy?

Reuters



> *Diversion of aid ships in Yemen spreads fear of shortages*
> Wed Aug 5, 2015 5:26pm EDT
> 
> SANAA/ADEN (Reuters) - Residents in the Yemeni capital Sanaa are stocking up on rare food and fuel supplies after the government in exile decided to divert aid ships from the Houthi rebel-held north to loyalist areas farther south.
> 
> Sources in Yemen's government confirmed the move, though there has been no official announcement, and Yemen's exiled information minister said on Tuesday that commercial flights would be diverted from the capital to the southern port of Aden.
> 
> The decisions come as southern fighters backed by weapons and air strikes by neighboring Gulf states have made rapid gains on southern battlefields against the Iran-allied Houthis.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



BBC



> *Yemen war: Does capture of air base mark a turning point?*
> By Michael Stephens
> Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), Doha
> 
> The retaking of a key air base to the north of the southern city of Aden is a major strategic victory for the Yemeni government in its fight against the Houthi-led insurgency.
> The al-Anad air base is important for a number of reasons, and if secured in the long run will provide an important logistical staging post for rearmament and resupply for pro-government forces pushing north towards the cities of Taiz and Ibb, as well as supporting operations toward the south-western coastline.
> Secondly it controls the main road into Aden, preventing the Houthis from pushing south back towards the city.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The UAE is providing armoured units including the Leclarc 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd5t28HkLqk


----------



## jollyjacktar

Some blow back from playing in Yemen?

Suicide Bomber Kills 13 in Saudi Mosque


----------



## McG

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> Some blow back from playing in Yemen?


Not blow-back from Yemen, but another element of the pan-Islamic civil war ... a manifestation of extremists' efforts to spread and increase the violence.



> Gulf Arab states face twin terror threats
> By Frank Gardner BBC security correspondent
> 03 Aug 2015
> 
> If Gulf Arab foreign ministers tell US Secretary of State John Kerry their full list of fears this week then he may need to extend his current visit to Doha. Because the list is growing longer almost by the day.
> 
> Qatar's Foreign Minister Khalid al-Attiya set the tone of the Gulf Co-operation Council's Foreign Ministers' meeting with his opening words, saying it was being held in "very exceptional circumstances and challenges that have been unprecedented".
> 
> The main topic of Monday's talks has been the US effort to allay Arab concerns over the 14 July nuclear deal with Iran.
> 
> Saudi Arabia and its closest allies fear that the deal will make it more, not less, likely, that Tehran will eventually build a nuclear bomb.
> 
> They also suspect that with up to $150bn (£96bn) of newly-unfrozen funds, Iran's more extremist elements will step up their support for militant Shia groups around the region.
> 
> A separate trilateral meeting between the US, Russian and Saudi foreign ministers has been focusing on Syria.
> 
> But Gulf Arab governments also have mounting security concerns closer to home.
> 
> Despite being the most prosperous and stable part of the Arab world, the six Gulf Arab states now find themselves facing a twin threat of domestic terrorist attacks from two ideologically opposed foes: Sunni and Shia extremists.
> 
> *'Promoting violent unrest'*
> 
> In late July, Bahrain suffered one of the most serious attacks on its police force. An improvised bomb ambushed a police convoy, killing two officers and injuring others.
> 
> Investigators say the explosive used was of military quality and similar to explosives the authorities say have been intercepted coming from Iran.
> 
> They believe this latest device came from Shia militants in Iraq, funded and trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps.
> 
> Bahrain has long accused Iran - and specifically elements of its intelligence security apparatus - of promoting violent unrest in the island state.
> 
> Opposition figures say the government has often talked up this threat as a pretext for cracking down on protests and stifling any challenge to the Sunni monarchy by the Shia, who form a majority of the indigenous population.
> 
> But Western diplomats share Bahrain's concerns, following a number of recent discoveries of explosives and weapons coming in by sea and over the causeway from Saudi Arabia, that Bahrain is being targeted by violent Shia extremists outside the country.
> 
> Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are also highly suspicious of Iran's activities in the region, which is why their armed forces have been actively helping Yemeni troops push the allegedly Iranian-backed Houthi rebels out of Aden.
> 
> *Murdered in their mosques*
> 
> But the deadliest terrorist threat in the Gulf right now comes from the Sunni jihadists of so-called Islamic State (IS).
> 
> In the space of five weeks this summer the Najd Province group, an IS affiliate, carried out three suicide bombings - two in Saudi Arabia and one in Kuwait.
> 
> In all, 52 people were killed and hundreds injured. In each case the targets were Shia Muslims, murdered in their mosques as they attended Friday prayers. The jihadists of IS consider the Shia to be heretics.
> 
> Analysts believe the aim of these bombings is to provoke a violent response from the Shia, setting off a sectarian conflict that will recruit more of the Gulf's Sunni citizens into the ranks of IS.
> 
> After hitting Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, experts believe Bahrain is the next likely target.
> 
> The numbers of IS supporters in the Gulf is disturbingly high and probably far greater than official figures suggest.
> 
> In July the Saudi authorities announced they had arrested 431 suspected IS members, on top of a further 93 announced in April.
> 
> Aymen Deen, the former al-Qaeda operative and expert on IS, believes there has been a recent change of strategy by the militant group.
> 
> He says that rather than encouraging Gulf Arab supporters to come to Syria, the IS leadership is now telling them to remain in their own countries to plan attacks there, on the authorities, on the Shia and on Westerners.


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33763566


----------



## CougarKing

Mass murder/Atrocity Inc. on the loose again:

Reuters



> *Islamic State executed 2,000 Iraqis in Nineveh: defense minister*
> Fri Aug 7, 2015 3:38pm EDT
> 
> BAGHDAD (Reuters) - More than two thousand Iraqis in the northern province of Nineveh have been executed by Islamic State militants controlling the area, the defense minister said on Friday in a recorded statement.
> 
> Ministry officials could not confirm when or how the deaths had occurred and Reuters was unable to immediately confirm the government's claims.
> 
> Access is severely restricted in large parts of Iraq's north and west, which Islamic State militants have controlled since sweeping across the Syrian border in mid-2014 in a bid to establish a modern caliphate.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile in Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition ground forces are taking casualties:

Reuters



> *Anti-Houthi forces take strategic city in Yemen, Emirati troops killed*
> Sat Aug 8, 2015 3:06pm EDT
> 
> ADEN/DUBAI (Reuters) - Fighters backed by an Arab military coalition seized the key city of Zinjibar in southern Yemen on Saturday, residents and militia sources said, dealing another major blow to the dominant Houthi group.
> 
> The capital city of Abyan province on the Arabian Sea had been a major focus of forces battling the Iranian-allied Houthis. It is the fourth regional capital they have won since taking control of the port of Aden last month.
> 
> *Three soldiers from the United Arab Emirates were reported killed while taking part in the Saudi-led military campaign against the Houthis, UAE state news agency WAM said on Saturday.*
> 
> Southern militia sources said they had been killed by landmines planted by the Houthis while entering Zinjibar.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, reinforcements arrive at Incirlik AFB:

Reuters



> *U.S. sends six jets, 300 personnel to Turkey base in Islamic State fight*
> Sun Aug 9, 2015 3:05pm EDT
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States sent six F-16 jets and about 300 personnel to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey on Sunday, the U.S. military said, after Ankara agreed last month to allow American planes to launch air strikes against Islamic State militants from there.
> 
> The Pentagon said in a statement the "small detachment" is from the *31st Fighter Wing* based at Aviano Air Base, Italy. Support equipment was also sent but no details were provided.
> 
> "The United States and Turkey, as members of the 60-plus nation coalition, are committed to the fight against ISIL in the pursuit of peace and stability in the region," the statement said, using an acronym for Islamic State.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The Turkish pounding of the Kurds on both sides of their border with Syria continues:

Reuters



> *Turkish air strikes hit 17 Kurdish militant targets, military says*
> Tue Aug 11, 2015 8:45am EDT
> By Ece Toksabay and and Seymus Cakan
> 
> ANKARA/DIYARBAKIR (Reuters) - Turkish warplanes hit 17 Kurdish militant targets in the southeastern province of Hakkari on Monday and Tuesday, the military said, as it ratchets up an offensive against the insurgents.
> 
> Turkey has been buffeted by increased fighting between its military and the outlawed Kurdistan People's Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency for greater Kurdish autonomy.
> 
> On Tuesday, the PKK claimed responsibility for Monday's bombing of an Istanbul police station in which four people died, three of them attackers. The bombing was one of a wave of attacks on Turkish security forces that have killed at least nine people.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A truce in Syria between Sunni forces (ISIS, Al-Nusra), pro-Shia forces (Iran, Hezbollah, Assad forces) and western-backed forces (Syrian Kurds, moderate US trained Sunni rebels)?

Reuters



> *Turkey, Iran help broker rare truce in Syria*
> Wed Aug 12, 2015 9:51am EDT
> 
> By Mariam Karouny and Tom Perry
> 
> BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria's warring parties declared a 48-hour ceasefire in two frontline areas on Wednesday after unprecedented mediation from Turkey and Iran, signaling a new approach by some of the main regional backers of the opposing sides.
> 
> The ceasefire halted fighting between insurgents on the one hand, and the army and its Lebanese militant Hezbollah allies on the other, in the rebel-held town of Zabadani and in a pair of Shi'ite Muslim villages in Idlib province.
> 
> The two areas are strongholds of each side under ferocious attack by the other. Sources familiar with the talks, which have been under way for weeks, said the truce could be extended to give time for ongoing negotiations aimed at evacuating civilians and combatants.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## McG

Looks like IS has added mustard gas to the list of chemical weapons it has employed.

IS suspected of chemical arms attack on Kurds in Iraq
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-33922493


----------



## cupper

When is the rest of the Muslim World going to stand up and say this cannot be allowed to exist?

*Leader of Islamic State used American hostage as sexual slave*

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/leader-of-islamic-state-raped-american-hostage/2015/08/14/266b6bf4-42c1-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html?hpid=z1



> The leader of the Islamic State personally kept a 26-year-old American woman as a hostage and raped her repeatedly, according to U.S. officials and her family.
> 
> The family of Kayla Mueller said in an interview Friday that the FBI had informed them that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, had sexually abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.
> 
> Mueller’s parents said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in late June and provided more details two weeks ago. The bureau pieced together what happened to the American from interviews with other hostages and the captured wife of a senior Islamic State figure.
> 
> The FBI also told the Muellers that their daughter had been tortured.
> 
> “June was hard for me,” said Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother. “I was really upset with what I heard.”
> 
> The disclosure that Mueller was raped by Baghdadi adds to the grim evidence that the exploitation and abuse of women has been sanctioned at the highest levels of the Islamic State. The sexual enslavement of even teenage girls is seen as religiously endorsed by the group and regarded as a recruiting tool.
> 
> News of Baghdadi’s abuse of Mueller, who was from Prescott, Ariz., was first reported Friday by the Independent, a London newspaper.
> 
> “As painful as this is for our family, we just feel like the world needs to know the truth,” said Carl Mueller, Kayla’s father. The Muellers noted that Friday would have been their daughter’s 27th birthday.
> 
> The Islamic State claimed that Mueller was killed earlier this year after a Jordanian fighter plane dropped a bomb on the building where she was being held. The U.S. government confirmed the death but not the cause.
> 
> Mueller’s family had previously released a letter their daughter had written in which she talked about the conditions of her captivity. “Please know I am in a safe location, completely unharmed + healthy (put on weight in fact); I have been treated w/the utmost respect + kindness,” she wrote in the letter, which the family received in the spring of 2014.
> 
> Kayla’s mother said she had thought her daughter had been treated reasonably until she learned about the conditions of her captivity during a June meeting with FBI officials in Washington. The FBI said they learned about Mueller’s mistreatment from the wife of a senior Islamic State operative captured earlier this year, as well as young female members of the Yazidi religious sect who had spent two months in captivity with Mueller before at least one of them escaped last fall.
> 
> U.S. officials had previously said that Mueller was abused by her captors, but it was not known until now that she was kept as a sex slave of the leader of the Islamic State.
> 
> Baghdadi is a former Iraqi insurgent who was detained by U.S. forces early in the Iraq war. He was part of an al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq that was thought to have been largely destroyed before the civil war in Syria allowed it to regenerate.
> 
> Though little is known about his background, Baghdadi is regarded as an experienced fighter and a capable leader. His most prominent public appearance came last year when he surfaced at a mosque in Mosul to declare himself the leader of a restored caliphate.
> 
> Mueller was abducted in August 2013 after leaving a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Three months after she died, the compound where she had been held was targeted in a raid by U.S. Special Operations forces.
> 
> The operation was aimed at capturing Abu Sayyaf, the nom de guerre of a high-ranking Tunisian member of the Islamic State, who was thought to be in charge of oil smuggling and other illicit enterprises that have funded the terrorist group.
> 
> Sayyaf was killed in what U.S. officials described as intense “close quarters combat.” But his wife, identified only as Umm Sayyaf, survived and was eventually brought back to Iraq aboard a bullet-riddled U.S. aircraft. She was then questioned by U.S. interrogators for months, providing information about Mueller as well as the Islamic State’s leadership, before recently being turned over to Iraqi custody.
> 
> 
> *Systematic abuse*
> 
> Mueller’s mistreatment is the latest evidence of the Islamic State’s systematic abuse of women on a significant scale.
> 
> A report released in April by Human Rights Watch accused the Islamic State of war crimes for its brutal treatment of female Yazidis — many of them teenagers — who were captured in Iraq last August, taken to Syria and forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State.
> 
> After surging into the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar last year, Islamic State fighters captured as many as 1,000 Yazidi women, many of whom were given a bleak choice of “marriage” to a fighter or imprisonment and potential death.
> 
> The Human Rights Watch report focused on 20 women who escaped the group and provided detailed accounts of their treatment.
> 
> One described attempting to kill herself by going into a bathroom, turning on water and grasping a wire “to electrocute myself but there was no electricity.”
> 
> After being discovered, she said she was badly beaten, handcuffed to a sink, stripped of her clothes and washed. “They took me out of the bathroom, brought in [a friend] and raped her in the room in front of me,” said the woman, who is referred to only as Leila. Later she, too, was raped.
> 
> Another victim, who was only 12 years old, said that after being abducted in Sinjar, the women in her family were separated from the men and sent to a house in Mosul. Islamic State fighters “would come and select us,” she said. One of the captors beat her, she said, and then “spent three days having sex with me.”
> 
> A recent issue of the English-language magazine published by the Islamic State described the taking of sex slaves as religiously justified. The article — titled “Slave girls or prostitutes?” — endorsed the practice, saying sex slaves are “lawful for the one who ends up possessing them even without pronouncement of divorce by their [non-Muslim] husbands.”
> 
> The article went on to cite accounts that the prophet Muhammad “took four slave-girls as concubines,” a purported religious basis for the practice.


----------



## McG

cupper said:
			
		

> When is the rest of the Muslim World going to stand up and say this cannot be allowed to exist?


You do realize that a significant chunk of the _Muslim World_ is currently engaged in the war with ISIS?


----------



## cupper

MCG said:
			
		

> You do realize that a significant chunk of the _Muslim World_ is currently engaged in the war with ISIS?



Yes, but there is also a significant chunk that is sitting on the sidelines. 

And I'm not just talking about the various Middle Eastern countries that are providing support for the airstrikes. 

But the communities in Europe that allow radicalized clerics to spout the perversion they do, encouraging the disaffected youth to go to carry on the fight. 

The Turks who allowed virtually free movement of those fighters across their territory up until the violence it started to take place inside their own cities.

ISIS is a cancer that needs to be excised from the face of the Earth.


----------



## Jed

cupper said:
			
		

> Yes, but there is also a significant chunk that is sitting on the sidelines.
> 
> And I'm not just talking about the various Middle Eastern countries that are providing support for the airstrikes.
> 
> But the communities in Europe that allow radicalized clerics to spout the perversion they do, encouraging the disaffected youth to go to carry on the fight.
> 
> The Turks who allowed virtually free movement of those fighters across their territory up until the violence it started to take place inside their own cities.
> 
> ISIS is a cancer that needs to be excised from the face of the Earth.



Too true. I fear we all will sit in the woods until the problem becomes so huge it will take enormous amounts of blood and treasure to do something about it.


----------



## a_majoor

An informal regional alliance seems to be forming up against the Iranians. This is going to be a difficult act to pull off given the various partners named in the article and the animosities between them. Of course given the greater threat Iran poses, various issues could be placed on the back burner to deal with the immediate threat:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/17/grand-bargain-afoot-between-turkey-israel-and-gulf-arabs/



> *Grand Bargain Afoot Between Turkey, Israel, and Gulf Arabs?*
> 
> Relations between Turkey and Israel took a turn for the worse in 2010, when an IDF raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara left nine dead. The ship was trying to get past Israeli’s blockade of Gaza. But things may now be warming a bit between the two countries as Jerusalem contemplates a ceasefire with Hamas, a move which was reportedly in the works as of last Friday. The Times of Israel:
> 
> 
> “The negotiations surrounding Marmara are proceeding gradually and are interlaced with Hamas’s negotiations on a ceasefire,” Yasin Aktay, an adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglo, told Hamas daily al-Resalah, which called the Gaza blockade “a Turkish matter.” […]
> 
> In the extensive al-Resalah interview, held on the heels of a visit by Hamas political chief Khaled Mashaal to Ankara last week, Aktay said Turkey is discussing with the government of Greek Cyprus the establishment of a waystation sea port, meant to deliver goods to the Gaza Strip under international supervision. He predicted that an agreement would be reached early next year.[…]
> He noted that Turkey has committed itself to building Gaza’s seaport and airport once Israel agrees to their construction.
> 
> Something’s afoot. Negotiations for a truce between Israel and Hamas appear to be gaining momentum, and now we have the prospect that the truce could lead to improved Israel-Turkish relations. The big losers here would be Iran and its Assad clients. With Saudis also warming to Hamas, the elements of a regional anti-Iran coalition are coming into focus.
> 
> This would be very tough to pull off—it would not be just herding cats, but herding cats and dogs together. How, for instance, would the putative grand coalition manage cooperation between the Egyptian and Turkish governments, who loathe each other? Much less, how would one square years of virulent anti-Israel propaganda among the populations of Turkey and the Arab nations with the sharp pivot to Israel. It’s a sign of how worried the region is that something so-far fetched is being considered.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Meanwhile, from the "Payback's a maternal seducer" file ....


> *Two Moroccan Women Infect 16 ISIL Terrorists with AIDS*
> 
> As militants of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) continue to hold off an international air strike coalition and advances from local fighters in Syria and Iraq, the terror group is now facing a new threat that has already wiped off some of its members: sexually transmitted disease ....


Live by the "sword" .... >


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Ahhhh! The wrath of God in action... :nod:


----------



## George Wallace

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> Meanwhile, from the "Payback's a maternal seducer" file ....Live by the "sword" .... >



I guess they will have their revenge before they are stoned to death for their indiscretions.


----------



## cupper

> Earlier this year, an Indonesian IS fighter who infected a Yazidi sex slave with AIDS in the Hasakah province was executed. The same fighter also donated blood at an IS-run hospital before it was discovered that he had AIDS. *The Saudi doctor who revealed the information about the AIDS spread from the Indonesian fighter was also executed by IS leaders.*



I guess they believe in shooting the messenger.

It's interesting how significant a part that sex plays in the life of the radicalized muslim jihadist.

I recall an interview on NPR's Fresh Air earlier this year with Maajid Nawaz, a former extremist who was a recruiter in the global Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Nawaz is the author of the memoir Radical: My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism. He was the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate in the 2015 UK General Election.

At one point in the interview they discuss the hypocrisy of radical Islamists and their views on sex and their own actions.

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/15/377442344/how-orwells-animal-farm-led-a-radical-muslim-to-moderation



> GROSS: Let me ask you this. As a young man - and you were 16 when you became an Islamist - that's the age when, I mean, so many teenagers have sex on their mind a good deal of the time. When you're an Islamist, you're not supposed to be thinking about sex all the time. You're certainly not supposed to be having sex outside of marriage. If this isn't too personal, what did you do with that impulse?
> 
> NAWAZ: (Laughter) That's a good question.
> 
> GROSS: And I ask that, in part, because we read that, like, some of the 9/11 attackers were at strip clubs, you know, before the attack. I read that Amedy Coulibaly - police raided his home in 2010 and found, in addition to all the religious texts on his computer, they had - he had photos of, quote, "pedo-pornographic character," unquote.
> 
> NAWAZ: Yeah. Yeah. You know, for all their holier-than-thou attitude, Islamists are the most - of the most sexualized beings living among us. And I know I was one. And, you know, likewise, I was very sexualized. And, you know, that's really that, deep down, when you say that a woman's face arouses me and therefore she should cover it and that's what God wants - or her hair or any other part of her body. And some of them insist that women must wear gloves. What it's really saying is that they can't take the fact that these things arouse them.
> 
> And so I joined at 16. Before that, you know, I had a liberal upbringing, and I had very, you know, many (laughter) - I say many girlfriends, you know. I had my fair share of relationships. And when I joined at 16, all of that had to stop. And that's actually one of the reasons I married young. I married my ex-wife at roughly 21. And, you know, we had a kid a year later. And that's probably why I did that because I found it extremely difficult, especially as somebody who was in my early teens, late teens and then in my early 20s to resist that impulse, as you said. And those who don't have the opportunity that I did to get married they - I, you know, I genuinely believe having - remembering what it was like, you know.
> 
> So I, as an 18-year-old, wasn't having sex, knowing what it was like because, prior to 16, I was sexually active. So I knew what I was missing. And so I can say this with a level of certainty, that those who don't immediately get married in the way that I did, early, which has its own challenges - those that don't, do often end up developing very, very severe sexual perversions. It's no surprise to me that they find pornography on the hard drives of - and not just any - I'm not arguing here that pornography is perverted, because that's a different discussion - but the very perverted type of pornography that you referred to that involves children and what have you. And also because those who take scripture vacuously go back to medieval interpretations of religion, and they find that, in Muslim medieval times, we didn't have this understanding that women were too young at 16 or too young at 15 or too young at 13 to consent to sex. And so they take that and literally apply it today.
> 
> And as we see with ISIL, you know, it's an abomination in itself that they're enslaving woman. But then, beyond that, they've issued guidance to their followers that their slaves don't have an age limit. They can, you know, they can rape a 21-year-old slave, a 50-year-old slave, and they could rape, God forbid, a 12-year-old slave. And that's the issue here, that when you can go back to medieval interpretations of religion where the standards we've become accustomed to for good, moral reasons didn't apply. And then, on top of that, you're highly sexually frustrated. You will rail against the West for their sexual promiscuity, for the way in which women are treated like meat because they're wearing miniskirts and the pornographic industry and what not have you. At yet, at the same time, you're enslaving women or you're justifying the enslavement of women, or you're justifying, likewise, treating women like meat by insisting they must cover up. And you don't see the irony there. You really don't see that you are actually a product of everything you're complaining about.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Interesting commentary in today's Halifax Chronicle Herald, shared under the fair dealings provisions of the copyright act.



> WONG: ISIS attraction no surprise
> 
> JAN WONG
> Published August 24, 2015 - 9:54pm
> 
> Young women join for adventure while ignorant of real world.
> 
> Are you shocked that young women in Canada, Britain and the United States are joining ISIS? I’m not.
> 
> ISIS, as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is known, believes Muslim girls should marry at nine and end their education at 15. For infidel females, ISIS enshrines a theology of mass rape. Most recently, it has abducted women and girls of the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq, enslaving them as all-you-can-rape recruiting bait.
> 
> Yet young women are heading to ISIS from Montreal, London and even small U.S. cities like Starkville, Miss. (pop. 24,775). Once upon a time, I did something similar, but instead of the lure of Islam, it was Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
> 
> Teens are hard-wired to run off in search of adventure. They just need a little alienation, a middling desire to search for one’s roots and a breathtaking ignorance of the real world.
> 
> The young women who slipped away to join ISIS apparently felt marginalized in the West. They were attracted by a fanatic version of their religion, the inclusivity of sisterhood and a naive ideal of marriage.
> 
> Growing up in Montreal in the 1960s, I was a visible minority before the term existed. I was Canadian born, but people around me assumed I wasn’t. I wondered if there was any place I truly belonged.
> 
> Naturally, I majored in Asian studies. That’s what young ethnics do when searching for their identities. They study themselves, or try to.
> 
> In this fog of confusion, a single evangelist can trigger an inordinate response. In my case, a left-wing history professor at McGill University described communist China in glowing terms. It was a utopia, he said, where everyone is equal.
> 
> I was hooked.
> 
> After classes ended that spring, I went alone to the People’s Republic on my summer vacation. It was 1972 and I was 19. I knew only a few hundred words of Mandarin, laboriously learned in a language lab.
> 
> At the end of the summer, I didn’t come home. Instead, I wired my parents that I was staying. I was going to learn Chinese at Peking University, the first Canadian to study there since the start of the Cultural Revolution.
> 
> My Canadian-born parents were alarmed, especially when I wrote propagandistic letters home about the wonders of communism. I embraced food rationing and thought control. Each Saturday afternoon, I gaily joined other students in hard labour.
> 
> As a budding feminist, I was entranced by a society without pantyhose or wedding rings. I’m not surprised these westernized teens — the one in Mississippi was a cheerleader — would embrace the veil. In Beijing, I chopped off my long hair and donned baggy Mao suits.
> 
> By the end of my year in China, I was so brainwashed that I ratted out a Chinese student to the authorities. Yin’s only crime: she wanted to go to the U.S.
> 
> Eventually I saw the light. I came home, finished my studies and got a job. Now I’m so bourgeois I have two dishwashers in my kitchen (not including my husband.)
> 
> In 2006, I tried to track down Yin to apologize. I eventually found her, a quest described in my book, Beijing Confidential. Yin had suffered for what I did, but she forgave me. By the time we reunited, she was rich and owned a house and two condominiums. She had even fulfilled her dream of visiting the U.S.
> 
> At least nobody died.
> 
> Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the young women joining ISIS. Once the scales fall from their eyes, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for them to quit being teenage brides — or widows.
> 
> http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1307048-wong-isis-attraction-no-surprise


----------



## McG

More chemical attacks by IS in Syria.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34056543


----------



## CougarKing

Good riddens:

Reuters



> *British hacker for Islamic State killed in U.S. drone strike in Syria: sources*
> Wed Aug 26, 2015 10:12pm
> By Mark Hosenball
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A British hacker who U.S. and European officials said became a top cyber expert for Islamic State in Syria has been killed in a U.S. drone strike, a U.S. source familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
> 
> It was the second reported killing of a senior Islamic State figure in the last eight days after the group's second-in-command was killed in a U.S. air strike in Iraq on Aug. 18.
> 
> The source indicated that the U.S. Defense Department was likely involved in the drone strike that killed British hacker Junaid Hussain, a former Birmingham, England, resident.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, back in Yemen, Saudi/Gulf-state coalition forces continue their air-ground campaign against the Houthis:

Reuters



> *Coalition poised to retake capital, but Yemen risks grow*
> By Mohammed Ghobari and Angus McDowall
> 
> SANAA/RIYADH (Reuters) - Weeks after seizing Yemen's southern port, Aden, members of a Saudi-led military coalition and the local fighters it supports say they are poised to oust Iranian-allied Houthi forces from the capital Sanaa.
> 
> But al Qaeda militants appear to be using the coalition's gains against the Houthis in the south to entrench their position, as fractures start to show between local groups of fighters with the departure of their common enemy.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## cupper

> British hacker for Islamic State killed in U.S. drone strike in Syria: sources



Should'a stayed in his parent's basement searching for porn like all the other millennial hackers.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Friggin barbarians... :rage:



> 2,000 years of history wiped off the face of the Earth: Satellite images prove ISIS extremists have flattened ancient Syrian temple in Palmyra amid fears the rest of the city will follow
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3215148/Satellite-images-confirm-ISIS-extremists-destroyed-2-000-year-old-Syrian-temple-Baal-Shamin-amid-fears-raze-Palmyra-s-treasures-ground.html#ixzz3kDY97E10
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## jollyjacktar

Twitter account, "ISIS Karaoke", makes these idiots look more ridiculous than they already are.  Love some of them, photos at story link below.  Shared under the fair dealings provisions of the copyright act.



> 'Killing me softly with his song': Twitter account mocks ISIS jihadists by imagining enraged militants are singing karaoke classics in series of hilarious tweets
> •New Twitter account shows how militants would look singing pop songs
> •ISIS Karaoke captions images of the extremists with Western music lyrics
> •The hilarious satire has amassed 35,000 followers in just a few weeks
> •It depicts jihadis singing Destiny's Child, Katy Perry and the Beastie Boys
> 
> ByCorey Charlton for MailOnline
> 
> Published: 19:58 GMT, 31 August 2015 | Updated: 23:56 GMT, 31 August 2015
> .
> Islamic State jihadis are being lampooned by a new Twitter account which shows the extremists as they would appear singing karaoke pop songs.
> 
> The bio of the new Twitter account claims to depict extremists 'dropping songs not bombs' in a hilarious new satire of the terrorist group.
> 
> Among the photographs to be posted are shots depicting ISIS militants and extremists with microphones in their hands singing Madonna, Kelis, Katy Perry and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
> 
> ISIS isn't exactly renowned for its comedy value, or its sense of humour - but the account has proved popular and has gained more than 35,000 followers within a few weeks.
> 
> The posts usually depict extremists and fighters in a position which offers some semblance to the chosen song lyrics
> 
> One shows a group of militants on a stage before a crowd. One jihadi is holding his hands in the air alongside a microphone.
> 
> Below him, the photo is captioned with the lyrics from Katy Perry's song roar, which declares he has 'the eye of a tiger, a fighter, dancing through the fire'.
> 
> Another shows a man holding a piece of paper and microphone aloft before a cheering crowd.
> 
> The song lyrics below, taken from a cringeworthy Carly Rae Jepsen song, declare: 'Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here's my number, so call me crazy.'
> 
> While the account is the first to create a Twitter feed showing fighters as they would look while performing, it isn't the first time the bloodthirsty group has been lampooned on social media.
> 
> Last year thousands of social media users mocked the group under the hashtag #AskIslamicState.
> 
> A wave of tongue-in-cheek virals ridiculing the terrorist organisation began sweeping the internet, in the form of an 'ask me anything', in which everyday users posed questions to the group.
> 
> This included queries about Big Brother - 'I'm thinking of visiting, but hate the idea of missing Celebrity Big Brother. Do you show it?' to 'did you cry when Patrick Swazye died in GHOST?'
> 
> And under the hashtag #ISISmovies, users re-wrote famous film titles, but with an Islamic State undertone.
> 
> One of those included 'To Kill a Mocking Kurd' - a take on the book, play and film To Kill a Mocking Bird.
> 
> 'Return of the Jihadi', based on the Star Wars movie and 'Stoned', the 2005 film about the Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, were also tweeted by several users.
> 
> Such treatment gives ISIS a taste of its own medicine - the group has previously hijacked social media hashtags in an attempt to spread its propaganda.
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3217436/Killing-softly-song-Twitter-mocks-ISIS-imagining-militants-look-struggling-sing-karaoke.html#ixzz3kVCoF9s5
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## Tuan

Ex-Osama aide urges Muslims not to join IS


> A former aide of Osama bin Laden has appealed to British Muslims not to join Islamic State for the so-called jihad in Syria as he denounced the group’s beheadings and mass rape as “completely against Islam.”
> 
> Abdullah Anas is the most senior former jihadist and one of the architects of the Afghan jihad against the Russians.
> 
> In a rare interview, Anas told The Sunday Times that ISIS was exploiting conflict to advance its own agenda, rather than helping oppressed Syrians. “This jihad is not legitimate,” Anas said.
> 
> He denounced the group’s beheadings and mass rape as “completely against Islam.”


----------



## The Bread Guy

Tuan said:
			
		

> He denounced the group’s beheadings and mass rape as “completely against Islam.”
Click to expand...

As opposed to flying planes into office buildings, right?


----------



## Tuan

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> As opposed to flying planes into office buildings, right?



Right, hypocrisy at its best!

I was discussing this with my friends in India and according to them, it is the Pakistani Army and its think tank ISI, its proxies al Qaeda and LeT are the real existing problem. For them ISIS is nowhere close to Pakistani Army - an ISIS clone in itself.


----------



## Tuan

IS in Afghanistan


> *News reports suggest that the Islamic State (IS) is struggling to achieve its ambitious expansion into Afghanistan. Earlier reports revealed that IS was well on its way to consolidating its foothold in the country, with disgruntled Taliban fighters in some provinces rebranding themselves under the IS flag. However, according to NATO officials, IS has been hampered due to the Taliban fighting back under its new leadership, the Afghan government’s resistance, and US drone strikes on its forces. In addition to the pushback against IS, it is also theorised that since Afghanistan, unlike Syria and Iraq, has a majority of Sunni Muslims, the IS cannot feed off pre-existing sectarian tensions (the marginalised and persecuted status of the Hazara Shias notwithstanding). *The barbarity of their acts, where they are seen to murder droves without reason has also been a factor that has horrified and repelled the Afghan people. It is indeed shocking to imagine what kind of brutality the IS practices, that the Taliban under Mullah Akhtar Mansour are seeking to appear as the bulwark to hold it back and trying to assert themselves as a ‘legitimate’ Islamist group.
> 
> 
> The spectre of IS expanding its reach to other territories and spreading its brand of relentless savagery to other corners of the world is a fearful one. *In a strange way, the Taliban’s success in containing them is welcome, especially when it is not just the Taliban who are resisting but also a quasi-coalition of the Afghan government, NATO and ordinary Afghan citizens.* The IS has ambitions of world domination, and the appeal they currently have for disaffected people from all over the globe has to be countered. The IS and its hateful ideology are unquestionably the worst threat facing humanity today, and it will be to the betterment of concerned regimes to place the need to fend off IS on the top of their priority list. Already we have evidence of how the IS has a tendency to focus the minds of its enemies against it, with Turkey letting go of its regional plans and ambitions to join the coalition airstrikes against IS in Syria. No alliance can be seen as too inconceivable to consider in the fight against IS and the threat of it encroaching on more territories. *In the case of Afghanistan, it is a difficult decision but it is preferable to have only one major network of fighters rather than multiple, since if only the Taliban are being dealt with, they can be nudged to the negotiating table. Needless to say, the IS has never shown any proclivity for peace talks. All possible options and efforts must be utilised to stop it in its tracks. **


----------



## Tuan

Biography of ISIS leader by William McCants

The Believer


----------



## a_majoor

Now the Russians are arriving in greater force"

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-31/russian-military-forces-arrive-syria-set-forward-operating-base-near-damascus



> *Russian Military Forces Arrive In Syria, Set Forward Operating Base Near Damascus*
> Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/01/2015 09:59 -0400
> 
> While military direct intervention by US, Turkish, and Gulf forces over Syrian soil escalates with every passing day, even as Islamic State forces capture increasingly more sovereign territory, in the central part of the country, the Nusra Front dominant in the northwestern region province of Idlib and the official "rebel" forces in close proximity to Damascus, the biggest question on everyone's lips has been one: would Putin abandon his protege, Syria's president Assad, to western "liberators" in the process ceding control over Syrian territory which for years had been a Russian national interest as it prevented the passage of regional pipelines from Qatar and Saudi Arabia into Europe, in the process eliminating Gazprom's - and Russia's - influence over the continent.
> 
> As recently as a month ago, the surprising answer appeared to be an unexpected "yes", as we described in detail in "The End Draws Near For Syria's Assad As Putin's Patience "Wears Thin." Which would make no sense: why would Putin abdicate a carefully cultivated relationship, one which served both sides (Russia exported weapons, provides military support, and in exchange got a right of first and only refusal on any traversing pipelines through Syria) for years, just to take a gamble on an unknown future when the only aggressor was a jihadist spinoff which had been created as byproduct of US intervention in the region with the specific intention of achieving precisely this outcome: overthrowing Assad (see "Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US "Created" ISIS As A "Tool" To Overthrow Syria's President Assad").
> 
> As it turns out, it may all have been just a ruse. Because as Ynet reports, not only has Putin not turned his back on Assad, or Syria, but the Russian reinforcements are well on their way. Reinforcements for what? Why to fight the evil Islamic jihadists from ISIS of course, the same artificially created group of bogeyman that the US, Turkey, and Saudis are all all fighting. In fact, this may be the first world war in which everyone is "fighting" an opponent that everyone knows is a proxy for something else.
> 
> According to Ynet, Russian fighter pilots are expected to begin arriving in Syria in the coming days, and will fly their Russian air force fighter jets and attack helicopters against ISIS and rebel-aligned targets within the failing state.
> 
> And just like the US and Turkish air forces are supposedly in the region to "eradicate the ISIS threat", there can't be any possible complaints that Russia has also decided to take its fight to the jihadists - even if it is doing so from the territory of what the real goal of US and Turkish intervention is - Syria. After all, it is a free for all against ISIS, right?
> 
> From Ynet:
> 
> According to Western diplomats, a Russian expeditionary force has already arrived in Syria and set up camp in an Assad-controlled airbase. The base is said to be in area surrounding Damascus, and will serve, for all intents and purposes, as a Russian forward operating base.
> 
> In the coming weeks thousands of Russian military personnel are set to touch down in Syria, including advisors, instructors, logistics personnel, technical personnel, members of the aerial protection division, and the pilots who will operate the aircraft.
> The Israeli outlet needless adds that while the current makeup of the Russian expeditionary force is still unknown, "there is no doubt that Russian pilots flying combat missions in Syrian skies will definitely change the existing dynamics in the Middle East."
> 
> Why certainly: because in one move Putin, who until this moment had been curiously non-commital over Syria's various internal and exteranl wars, just made the one move the puts everyone else in check: with Russian forces in Damascus implicitly supporting and guarding Assad, the western plan instantly falls apart.
> 
> It gets better: if what Ynet reports is accurate, Iran's brief tenure as Obama's BFF in the middle east is about to expire:
> 
> Western diplomatic sources recently reported that a series of negotiations had been held between the Russians and the Iranians, mainly focusing on ISIS and the threat it poses to the Assad regime. The infamous Iranian Quds Force commander Major General Qasem Soleimani recently visited Moscow in the framework of these talks. As a result the Russians and the Iranians reached a strategic decision: Make any effort necessary to preserve Assad's seat of power, so that Syria may act as a barrier, and prevent the spread of ISIS and Islamist backed militias into the former Soviet Islamic republics.
> 
> See: the red herring that is ISIS can be used just as effectively for defensive purposes as for offensive ones. And since the US can't possibly admit the whole situation is one made up farce, it is quite possible that the world will witness its first regional war when everyone is fighting a dummy, proxy enemy which doesn't really exist, when in reality everyone is fighting everyone else!
> 
> That said, we look forward to Obama explaining the American people how the US is collaborating with the one mid-east entity that is supporting not only Syria, but now is explicitly backing Putin as well.
> 
> It gets better: Ynet adds that "Western diplomatic sources have emphasized that the Obama administration is fully aware of the Russian intent to intervene directly in Syria, but has yet to issue any reaction... The Iranians and the Russians- with the US well aware- have begun the struggle to reequip the Syrian army, which has been left in tatters by the civil war. They intend not only to train Assad's army, but to also equip it. During the entire duration of the civil war, the Russians have consistently sent a weapons supply ship to the Russian held port of Tartus in Syria on a weekly basis. The ships would bring missiles, replacement parts, and different types of ammunition for the Syrian army."
> 
> Finally, it appears not only the US military-industrial complex is set to profit from the upcoming war: Russian dockbuilders will also be rewarded:
> 
> Arab media outlets have recently published reports that Syria and Russia were looking for an additional port on the Syrian coast, which will serve the Russians in their mission to hasten the pace of the Syrian rearmament.
> 
> If all of the above is correct, the situation in the middle-east is set to escalate very rapidly over the next few months, and is likely set to return to the face-off last seen in the summer of 2013 when the US and Russian navies were within earshot of each other, just off the coast of Syria, and only a last minute bungled intervention by Kerry avoided the escalation into all out war. Let's hope Kerry has it in him to make the same mistake twice.


----------



## Tuan

‘Steps required to counter threat from Afghanistan-based Islamic State’



> *National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Defence Chairman Rohail Asghar on Thursday said necessary steps are required to counter threat emanating from the Islamic State as the terrorists are joining the militant outfit.
> 
> After chairing meeting at the Parliament House, he told reporters that the terrorists have returned to Afghanistan where they were joining the Islamic State. “Necessary steps are required to counter threat emanating from this group,” he said.
> 
> The lawmaker said that several Taliban ‘commanders’ have pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State so their eradication was vital too.* “Facilitators of terrorists are being rounded up in the second phase of Zarb-e-Azb,” he added.
> 
> To a question, the committee chairman said that there was no exact timeframe regarding conclusion of the Zarb-e-Azb military operation. Defence Secretary Aalam Khattak and top army officials also attended meeting of the committee.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Thucydides said:
			
		

> Now the Russians are arriving in greater force"
> 
> http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-31/russian-military-forces-arrive-syria-set-forward-operating-base-near-damascus


Russia's Foreign Ministry response?


> Media reports about Russian military planes in Syria have already been disavowed by Russia’s Defense Ministry and presidential administration, Russian Foreign Ministry’s official spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.
> 
> "I saw reports about Russian planes on the Syrian territory. I also saw comments on this matter by Russia’s Defense Ministry and presidential administration that disavowed this information. There is nothing to add here," Zakharova said.
> 
> "Sensational statements are often made about military-technical cooperation between Russia and Syria - that it grows or decreases," she said. "We see them in different parts of the world. And it is always made to sound sensational. We say that we never tried to make a secret out of this. This is our consistent position connected with assisting official Damascus in its fight against the terrorism threat," the diplomat stressed ....


----------



## Tuan

US takes Pakistan into confidence over anti-IS alliance 



> The United States has taken Pakistan into confidence over a new US military alliance to fight the growing global presence of the self-styled Islamic State (IS).
> 
> *The new alliance, called “Sahel to South Asia” is expected to be announced soon by the White House. “Pakistan has been consulted by the US at the highest level,” according to a top government official. Pakistan will take a formal decision after conducting consultations with all domestic stakeholders over joining the alliance, added the official. “IS has presence in Afghanistan, and they maintain close collaboration with militant organisations, and if not tackled they can pose a threat to Pakistan’s security,” the government official further said.*
> 
> More details are expected to be worked out through a high-level meeting between the military leadership of both countries, once the alliance is officially announced and made public by the US. The development comes after US National Security Adviser (NSA) Susan Rice called on Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif at the General Headquarters (GHQ) last week, where she “appreciated and acknowledged Pakistan Army’s sincere efforts and sacrifices in the war against terrorism.” During the meeting, matters of mutual interest – including the security situation in the region – were discussed.
> 
> Rice’s visit was preceded by the visit of US Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander General Lloyd J Austin in which he called on General Raheel Sharif at the GHQ in Rawalpindi. General Lloyd Austin acknowledged the role played by the armed forces of Pakistan in fighting the menace of terrorism. In February this year, Foreign Office had broken its silence regarding the IS activities inside Pakistan, admitting that the radical group posed a “serious threat” to the country. Earlier this year, leaflets calling for support for IS were seen in parts of northwest Pakistan, while pro-IS slogans had also appeared on walls in several cities.
> 
> *Security forces had also arrested a man in January, whom they believed was the commander of IS in the country involved in recruiting and sending fighters to Syria. Intelligence sources, said the man, Yousaf al-Salafi, was arrested in Lahore and confessed during interrogation that he represented IS. Rifts among the Taliban and disputes about the future of the insurgency have contributed to the rise of IS’s popularity but security sources believe there are no operational links yet between IS and South Asia. Disgruntled former Taliban commanders have formed the so-called Khorasan chapter — an umbrella IS group covering Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and other South Asian countries — in recent months but have not been involved in any fighting. Their leader, Hafiz Saeed Khan Orakzai, a former Pakistani Taliban commander, appeared in a video address in February urging people in the region to join the group. *


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, in Yemen, the Saudi-led air and ground campaign continues against the Houthis:

Reuters



> *Coalition attacks Yemen capital after UAE, Saudi soldiers killed*
> Sat Sep 5, 2015 10:53am EDT
> By Mohammed Ghobari
> 
> SANAA (Reuters) - Warplanes from the United Arab Emirates struck Houthi targets across Yemen, state news agency WAM said on Saturday, a day after at least 60 soldiers from a Saudi-led coalition, mostly Emiratis, were killed in an attack in central Yemen.
> 
> Medical sources at hospitals in the capital Sanaa, which has been under effective control of the Iranian-allied Houthi militia for almost a year, said about 24 civilians were killed in the city as a result of the attacks.
> 
> WAM said the UAE air force struck a mine-making plant in the Houthi-dominated Saada province in northern Yemen, as well as military camps and weapon stores in the central Ibb province, causing "heavy damage".
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Kirkhill

Blackadder1916 said:
			
		

> Syria and Iraq.  Two different countries. Two different political, diplomatic and legal scenarios.  Two different authorizations for military action.



Indeed.  Iraq claims it is handling a foreign incursion.  Syria claims it is handling an insurrection.


----------



## Infanteer

Blackadder1916 said:
			
		

> Syria and Iraq.  Two different countries. Two different political, diplomatic and legal scenarios.  Two different authorizations for military action.



Perhaps that is why we are having such trouble in the area - we only see it through the lens of Sykes-Picot?


----------



## Kirkhill

Infanteer said:
			
		

> Perhaps that is why we are having such trouble in the area - we only see it through the lens of Sykes-Picot?



The United Nations pretty much ensure that we have to manage it that way, don't they? And I am pretty sure that Vlad and the local players all prefer it that way.

Just like the Armstrongs.  Scots today.  English tomorrow.  Just as circumstances demand.  :nod:


----------



## Edward Campbell

Infanteer said:
			
		

> Perhaps that is why we are having such trouble in the area - we only see it through the lens of Sykes-Picot?




Good point ... maybe the notion of a caliphate makes more, or better sense in the region.

There were several caliphates, the greatest (at least the most enduring) were the _Abbasid_ and the _Ottoman_ caliphates, but the _Fatimid_ caliphate and the Caliphate of Cordoba were also geographically/militarily "great" and each lasted for a good while. Maybe the IS** folks are plowing fertile ground ~ it's certainly a more traditional structure than Iraq - Syria - Jordan - Saudi Arabia, etc ... 





The Abbasid Caliphate _circa_ 880CE


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

True enough, ERC. But those various Caliphates were all, in their own way, merely empires. Never countries. They incorporated various "nationalities", so to speak, who never considered that they had ceased to exist to be part of a new "country" that would correspond to the Caliphate's borders.

Sykes-Picot led to the creation of political countries with defined (well almost defined  ) borders that some times cut across the "borders" of what preceded them, which was mostly groups that belonged to their village/town or small area to which they claimed to belong. As part of the various caliphates, these village/towns/regions had never really developed into countries like Europe or Asia had, save perhaps for Egypt.


----------



## CougarKing

The Sunni/Gulf states seem more than willing to send their own ground troops to fight Iran's Houthi proxies in Yemen rather than fight ISIS:

Reuters



> *Qatar sends 1,000 ground troops to Yemen conflict: al Jazeera*
> Mon Sep 7, 2015 9:55am EDT
> People salvage belongings from the rubble of a house destroyed by a Saudi-led air strike in Yemen's capital Sanaa September 7, 2015. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
> 1 of 1Full Size
> SANAA (Reuters) - Qatar has sent 1,000 ground troops to Yemen, Doha-based Al Jazeera television said, escalating Gulf Arab intervention in Yemen's war ahead of a planned offensive against Iranian-backed Houthis holding the capital Sanaa.
> 
> Qatari pilots had already joined months of Saudi-led air strikes on the Houthi militia, which seized Sanaa a year ago and then advanced across much of the country, forcing President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile in March.
> 
> Military sources told Reuters that Qatari troops were on their way to Yemen and preparing to join a new push on Houthi positions in Sanaa. They told Reuters the Qatari force had not yet entered the Arabian Peninsula country.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The Sunni/Gulf states seem more than willing to send their own ground troops to fight Iran's Houthi proxies in Yemen rather than fight ISIS:
> 
> Reuters



That is because the Sunni/Gulf states consider Iran to be the true enemy, and the Salafi extremists of ISIS and related radical groups can be considered shock troops to be expended against Iran and Iranian proxies such as Syria and Hezbollah fighters. From a longer perspective, the Saudi's have their own hegemonic designs on the region, so I would suggest they are also using ISIS to create a sort of "firebreak" to keep the Turks penned up in the north, so they don't have as much reason to consider their own imperialistic designs of reviving their influence over the former Ottoman Empire (and you thought the plot of Game of Thrones to be overly complex).


----------



## CougarKing

Egypt joining the Sunni cause against Iran:

Reuters



> *Egypt sends up to 800 ground troops to Yemen's war: Egyptian security sources*
> Wed Sep 9, 2015 12:21pm EDT
> SANAA (Reuters) - *As many as 800 Egyptian soldiers arrived in Yemen late on Tuesday, Egyptian security sources said, swelling the ranks of a Gulf Arab military contingent which aims to rout the Iran-allied Houthi group after a five-month civil war.*
> 
> It was the first reported deployment of ground troops there by Egypt, which has one of the Arab world's strongest armies.
> 
> A coalition led by Saudi Arabia has scored major gains against the militia and its allies in Yemen's army, backing a push by Yemeni fighters to seize much of the country's south and now setting its sights on the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> /quote]


----------



## a_majoor

Zerohedge on unfolding events in Syria. Frankly, it is time to pull out and allow the Russians, Syrians and Iranians spend their own blood and treasure against ISIS and their backers in the Gulf States. It will be interesting to see just who exactly has more resources to keep up the fight:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-10/major-humiliation-obama-iran-has-sent-soldiers-support-russian-troops-syria



> *In Major Humiliation For Obama, Iran Sends Soldiers To Support Russian Troops In Syria*
> 
> When Zero Hedge first reported ten days ago that Russian troops, in their bid to support the Assad regime in its ongoing confrontation with various ISIS, Al Nusra, and other US-supported groups in what has become the proxy war of 2015 (one which even comes with thousands of refugees for dramatic media impact) had been quietly massing in Syria and have set up a forward operating base near Damascus, there were those who were openly skeptical.
> Then, just a few hours ago, Bloomberg finally confirmed that "top officials were scheduled to meet at the National Security Council Deputies Committee level to discuss how to respond to the growing buildup of Russian military equipment and personnel in Latakia" and that Russia is "set to start flying combat missions from a new air base inside Syria."
> 
> So yes, for whatever reason (and the reason as we explained is clear: natural gas pipelines) Russia is making not only its increasing support for Assad known, but also that it is in Syria and that any further US-funded and supported incursions by ISIS or whatever is the media scapegoat terrorist organization du jour, will not be tolerated.
> 
> To be sure, none of this is in any way a surprise to the US - just as the US is using ISIS as a pretext to invade or pressure any mid-east nation it desires "in order to hold the jihadist terrorist scourge", so Russia is now using ISIS as a comparable excuse to intervene. After all, if ISIS is the friend of humanity, then surely Russian aid will be welcome. That it is not, had made it abundantly clear that not only is ISIS just a convenient diversion, but the reasons for a Syrian invasion and deposition of Assad, are purely political and entirely in the realm of real-politik. Also, Russia's return to Syria in greater numbers is no surprise to anyone in the Pentagon - this was merely the long-awaited escalation of the foreplay that started when ISIS mysteriously emerged on the scene just over a year ago.
> 
> But in the latest twist in what we have been warning for months has the makings of the biggest proxy shooting war in years, one that will come as a major humiliation to the Obama administration, today we find out that none other than America's most recent diplomatic sweetheart in the Gulf region, Iran, has deployed ground soldiers into Syria in the past few days in cooperation with Russia's President Vladimir Putin.
> This answers our question from earlier this week:
> 
> So as the coalition drives towards Sana'a - which the Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper says will be "liberated" after a "decisive battle" in Marib - and as Turkey, the US, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar mull options for the final push to oust Assad in Syria, the only remaining question is whether Iran will remain on the sidelines and allow the Houthis to be routed and Assad deposed, or whether, like Moscow, Tehran finally decides that the time for rheotric has come to an end.
> 
> And on that note, we'll close with the following from AP: "Iran's foreign minister on Monday criticized demands for the resignation of Syrian President Bashar Assad, saying such calls have prolonged the Arab country's civil war. Mohammad Javad Zarif went so far as to say that those who have in the past years demanded Assad's ouster "are responsible for the bloodshed in Syria."
> 
> And so, Iran appears to have picked its side, and knowing that it has Obama wrapped around its finger as part of Obama's huge "diplomatic coup" of restoring relations with Iran as part of the Nuclear Deal (since any backtracking would further embarrass the US president) and can pivot in any direction in the Syrian conflict, it has decided to side with Russia and Syria.
> 
> According to Ynet, a further said that the increased military involvement in Syria was "due to Assad's crisis and under Russian-Iranian cooperation as a result of a meeting between Soleimani with Russian President Vladimir Putin."
> 
> Where things get even more complicated, is that while Israel would do everything it can to turn public opinion against Iran, especially if it is now involved in the Syrian debacle, Israel still has cordial relations with Russia: "We have dialogue with Russia and we aren't in the  middle of the Cold War," said the source. "We have open channels with the Russians."
> 
> So what does Iran joining the conflict really mean?  "It's hard to forecast whether Russia's presence will decide the fate of Syria, but it will lengthen the fighting and bloodletting for at least another year because ISIS won't give up," said the source.
> 
> In other words, unless even more foreign powers intervene, you know "to stop ISIS" by focusing all their firepower on attacking or defending Assad, the Syria conflict will drag on indefinitely with an unknown outcome. Which in turn begs the question: how long will Israel keep out of the war, and if it decides to join whether it be using one of the more traditional, false flag methods to enflame public opinion against Iran. Who will be collateral damage then.
> 
> One thing is certain: with the GOP unable to block the Iran nuclear deal in the Senate, should it emerge and be confirmed, that Iran is indeed present, then Obama will be faced with the biggest diplomatic headache in his administration's history, namely the explanation of why he is scrambling to restore diplomatic connections with a regime that couldn't even wait for the Iran deal to be formally passed before it turned its back on its newest "best friend" in the Oval Cabinet, and promptly side with the KGB agent who over the past two years has emerged as the biggest US enemy in three decades.
> 
> Furthermore, it also means that now Russia suddenly has the media leverage in its hands: a few "leaked" photos of Iran troops to the press and the phones in the US Department of State will explode.
> 
> But the most important news is that, as we warned previously, with every incremental party entering the Syria conflict, the probability of a non-violent outcome becomes increasingly negligible. And now that Iran is involved, it means that both Israel and Saudi Arabia will be dragged in, whether they like it or not.



Posted in the wrong thread, but realized that as Russia is now heavily engaged in two separate wars, this will affect how much resources Russia can put into Ukraine and Eastern Europe


----------



## Tuan

58 ISIS defectors -including 7 women- speak out against the outfit. These folks should be treated as an asset and turned against ISIS.

 ISIS Defectors Reveal Disillusionment


----------



## Tuan

How to defeat ISIS: 10 ideas 
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/28/opinions/bergen-how-to-defeat-isis/index.html


----------



## PanaEng

That sounds like a good start for overt measures.


----------



## CougarKing

The Saudi-led coalition of Sunni nations seem to be winning this campaign against Iran's Houthi proxies:

Reuters



> *Yemeni government, Saudi-led forces retake Red Sea strait*
> Thu Oct 1, 2015 1:43pm EDT
> By Noah Browning
> 
> DUBAI (Reuters) - Loyalist Yemeni troops and Gulf Arab forces on Thursday seized control of the Arabian side of the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden from Houthi fighters, a spokesman for the Gulf-backed government said.
> 
> Six months of war in Yemen has raised fears for the security of oil supplies through Bab al-Mandab, a main thoroughfare for vessels heading for the United States or Europe from Asia or the Gulf. Its western shore is controlled by Djibouti and Eritrea.
> 
> Residents on the Yemeni side of Bab al-Mandab reported air strikes and shelling by warships in support of a ground thrust, but could not immediately confirm that the Iranian-allied Houthis had lost the eastern shore of the strait.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The Saudi-led Sunni coalition forces continue advancing against Iran's proxies...

Reuters



> *Gulf Arabs wrest strategic Yemen island from Iran-allied group*
> Mon Oct 5, 2015 9:29am EDT
> 
> By Mohammed Mukhashaf
> 
> PERIM ISLAND, YEMEN (Reuters) - Perim Island may be a small lump of windswept volcanic rock at the entrance to the Red Sea but its capture by Gulf Arab forces from Houthi fighters was a welcome victory for Yemen's government and its allies.
> 
> Gulf Arab troops swooped in from air and sea last week to take back Perim, which sits on one of the world's most important sea lanes.
> 
> *The successful action denied Iran, the Houthis' main ally, a symbolic foothold astride trade routes as the Saudi-led Gulf Arab states and Tehran vie for influence across the Arab world.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

I wonder if this is a warmup before going against the larger Iranian proxies? The long term strategy certainly seems to be trying to bleed Iran from a distance, cutting off oil revenues while forcing them into an expensive fight in Syria. Even with Russian backing, this could be too much for Iran to absorb in the long term, especially if Iranian resources, ground troops and proxies like Hezbollah fighters are being consumed faster than they can be replaced.


----------



## YZT580

With the lifting of sanctions, Iran will have lots of money with which to sponsor Jihad.  Another diplomatic triumph from the community organizer in charge of the u.s.


----------



## Tuan

Guess who infiltrated Europe : 

https://unfetteredfreedom.wordpress.com/2015/10/03/list-of-shabiha-posing-as-refugees-in-europe/


----------



## CougarKing

Definitely NOT an honour any company would like to have...

And it's not just for ISIS, but for the Taliban who have used such "technicals" in the past.

Diplomat



> *Japan’s Largest Company Is ISIS’ Car Maker of Choice
> How did so many Toyota pickup trucks and SUVs end up in the hands of ISIS?*
> 
> L1001025
> By Franz-Stefan Gady
> October 08, 2015
> 
> The United States has launched an investigation to determine how the terror group ISIS was able to acquire a large number of Toyota pickup trucks and SUVs ABC News reported this week.
> 
> Japanese car manufacturer Toyota, the world’s second-largest auto maker, has pledged full cooperation with U.S. authorities and is “supporting” the inquiry led by the Terror Financing division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
> 
> “We briefed Treasury on Toyota’s supply chains in the Middle East and the procedures that Toyota has in place to protect supply chain integrity,” according to a D.C.-based spokesperson of Toyota. However, “it is impossible for Toyota to completely control indirect or illegal channels through which our vehicles could be misappropriated,” he added.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Definitely NOT an honour any company would like to have...
> 
> And it's not just for ISIS, but for the Taliban who have used such "technicals" in the past.
> 
> Diplomat




I actually think this is part of _K Street_'s (the Washington Lobby firms who work on behalf of the Big Three automakers and the UAW) ongoing war against the Japanese (and Korean) car makers.


----------



## George Wallace

:camo:

Not to mention it being a vehicle of choice by Technicals in countries like Somalia and Eritrea way back in the late '80's and early '90's.


----------



## McG

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> [Japan’s Largest Company Is ISIS’ Car Maker of Choice] ... it's not just for ISIS, but for the Taliban who have used such "technicals" in the past.


Toyota seems to be the car-maker of choice for everybody in those countries.  It does not seem that odd that a large number would be in use with criminal elements.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Who doesn't love the Hilux?   They were fantastic trucks overseas.


----------



## Good2Golf

...because they don't need dealerships at every corner doing warranty work that shouldn't have been required in the first place? ???

HiLux, Landcruiser, Corolla (especially the yellow and white variety)...what's not to like?

Oh, you mean the Saudis and Kuwaitis supplying ISIS?


----------



## larry Strong

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I actually think this is part of _K Street_'s (the Washington Lobby firms who work on behalf of the Big Three automakers and the UAW) ongoing war against the Japanese (and Korean) car makers.



Guess they would not like me....1 Nissan and 2 Hyundai's on my drive way....


Larry


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

MCG said:
			
		

> Toyota seems to be the car-maker of choice for everybody in those countries.  It does not seem that odd that a large number would be in use with criminal elements.



Maybe the Syrian government (is there one left?) should create a Toyota Long-Box Pick-up registry  ;D

"Toyotas don't kill people. People kill people with Toyotas" Declared the president of the NTA (National Toyota Association). 8)


----------



## McG

Giant suicide attack in Ankara was IS.  I wonder how (or if) this will change the Turkish response in Syria.

Turkish PM blames Ankara bombing on Islamic State
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34505030


----------



## jollyjacktar

Seeing as Kurds were the target, I don't see them shedding too many tears in private.  I don't think they'll start really hitting ISIS even after this either.


----------



## CougarKing

The Houthis getting desperate as Saudi-led Sunni coalition forces close in?

Reuters



> *Yemeni forces launch Scud missile toward Saudi Arabia: Houthi TV*
> Thu Oct 15, 2015 1:31am EDT
> SANAA (Reuters) - Yemeni army units allied to the Houthi militia on Thursday fired a ballistic missile toward a Saudi air base, the group's television channel said, escalating six months of war between the kingdom and the Iran-allied group.
> 
> "The missile unit of the Yemeni army fired a Scud missile toward Khaled bin Abdulaziz base at Khamees Mushait," Houthi-run Al Maseera TV reported on its Twitter page.
> 
> Residents in the capital, Sanaa, reported hearing a big roar rousing them from their sleep at around 6 a.m. as the Scud was launched near the city.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



Reuters



> *Arab coalition slowing aid efforts in Yemen: U.S. Navy report*
> Wed Oct 14, 2015 9:17am EDT
> 
> LONDON/DUBAI (Reuters) - Aid to Yemen is being slowed by a Saudi-led coalition which has warned commercial vessels to stay away from areas hit by fighting, a U.S. Navy report said.
> 
> The Arab coalition, fighting to end control of much of Yemen by the Iran-allied Houthi movement, denied the allegation and said it was keen for ships to take in relief.
> 
> Yemen is suffering what the United Nations says is one of its worst humanitarian crises. Aid efforts have been hampered by fighting and air and sea ports being blocked for long periods.
> 
> A report published on Tuesday by the U.S. Navy and seen by Reuters said coalition warships off the Red Sea port of Hodeida were "broadcasting a warning to commercial vessels to stay clear of operational areas.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

More Iranian forces joining the fight. The balance of forces isn't looking very good for the Sunni plan to knock out Syria and hobble Iran's chances to become the regional Hegemon:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/10/15/iranians-prepare-major-combat-offensives-in-syria/



> *Iranians Prepare Major Combat Offensives in Syria*
> 
> Looks like Washington has been caught flat-footed in Syria again. The Times of London reports:
> 
> Thousands of Iranian troops have been flown into an airbase in Latakia for deployment to the front lines in Idlib, where heavy fighting with rebels is under way. Others are being moved towards Aleppo, where they will join a ground offensive involving regime forces and Hezbollah fighters in the coming days, according to Iranian sources.
> 
> Reports of Iranian troops on the ground in Syria have been mounting in recent weeks, with Iran confirming the death of several Iranian officers killed in combat outside Aleppo last week. Though an unnamed Obama Administration official has said that figures for the number of Iranian troops deployed overstate the reality by an order of magnitude, that misses the point.
> 
> Whatever the final figure ends up being, the Obama Administration’s apparent determination to downplay the significance of Iran’s contribution to the fight could be a grave miscalculation. When you have so many forces on so many scattered battlefronts, even a few hundred well-equipped, professionally trained, fresh troops can make a significant difference if you use them well. Thousands of such troops, if the numbers indeed reach that high, could help tip the regional balance, making President Obama’s public predictions of failure seem… premature at best.


----------



## a_majoor

If true, this puts a very clear timeline on Saudi Arabia's ability to crush Iran's attempts to become the regional Hegemon, or to block Russia's attempts to support Iran, Syria and so on. The real race is between Saudi Arabia and Russia or Iran over who will run out of cash first?

http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/25/investing/oil-prices-saudi-arabia-cash-opec-middle-east/index.html?sr=twcnnbrk102515oilpricessaudiarabiacashopecmiddleeast512pStoryMoneyPhoto



> *Not even the mighty Middle East can survive cheap oil forever.*
> 
> If oil stays around $50 a barrel, most countries in the region will run out of cash in five years or less, warned a dire report from the International Monetary Fund this week. That includes OPEC leader Saudi Arabia as well as Oman and Bahrain.
> 
> Low oil prices will wipe out an estimated $360 billion from the region this year alone, the IMF said.
> Huge budget surpluses are quickly swinging to massive deficits as oil prices have crashed to around $45 currently from over $100 last year.
> 
> Many of these countries are being forced to tap into rainy day funds to weather the storm.
> "Oil exporters will need to adjust their spending and revenue policies to ensure fiscal sustainability," the IMF wrote.
> The depressed oil prices have come at a time when spending has gone up as many of these countries are grappling with regional violence and turbulence in financial markets.
> saudi arabia cash crunch
> 
> Related: Infographic: Cheap oil is crushing these Middle Eastern countries
> 
> Saudi Arabia is getting squeezed
> 
> Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, needs to sell oil at around $106 to balance its budget, according to IMF estimates. The kingdom barely has enough fiscal buffers to survive five years of $50 oil, the IMF said.
> 
> That's why Saudi Arabia is moving fast to preserve cash. The kingdom not only raised $4 billion by selling bonds earlier this year, but its central bank has yanked up to $70 billion from asset management firms like BlackRock (BLK) over the past six months.
> After years of huge surpluses, Saudi Arabia's current account deficit is projected to soar to 20% of gross domestic product this year, Capital Economics estimates. Saudi Arabia's war chest of cash is still humungous at nearly $700 billion, but it's shrinking fast.
> cheap oil middle east
> 
> Related: Saudi Arabia is facing a cash crunch
> 
> Spending cuts ahead
> 
> Saudi Arabia is unlikely to jack up taxes, but it is poised to cut at least some forms of spending.
> It's not likely to cut social and military spending programs as leaders fear a repeat of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising.
> "In an environment with regional insecurity and domestic instability, to chip away at that social contract is a bit of a political gamble," said Henry Smith, a Dubai-based associate director with consultancy Control Risks.
> 
> Yet Smith said big government spending projects are already seeing far greater scrutiny.
> "Some of the projects that are less economically essential are quietly being sidelined," Smith said.
> 
> Related: Saudi Arabia's oil policy 'does not help anyone'
> 
> Iran, Iraq under pressure
> 
> Iran's break-even oil price is estimated at $72 and it could survive cheap oil for less than 10 years, the IMF estimates. It's a rosier outlook compared to its neighbors. But Iran's outlook is clouded by potential sanctions relief (which hasn't come yet) and a surge in oil production from its nuclear deal with the West.
> 
> Iraq has virtually no fiscal buffer remaining, according to the IMF. The country is grappling with internal strife and has lost large swaths of land to ISIS.
> 
> "Violence increasingly affects civilians, and has a particularly adverse effect on confidence and expectations, and consequently on economic activity," the IMF warned.
> 
> Bahrain is also under great financial pressure, with the likelihood of also running out of options in less than five years. The country already has lots of debt and has been running deficits for several years in a row.
> 
> "They are in a relatively tight spot. They are going to have to undertake a more significant tightening," said Jason Tuvey, a Middle East economist at Capital Economics.
> 
> Related: How cheap oil will hurt Iran's comeback
> 
> UAE, Kuwait and Qatar can survive decades of $50 oil
> 
> However, a handful of countries are well positioned to face the storm. Topping that list are Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. That's partially because these countries don't need sky-high oil prices to balance their budgets.
> Kuwait's break-even oil price is estimated by the IMF at just $49, or just a tad higher than current levels. The magic number is believed to be $56 in Qatar, the host of the 2022 World Cup, while the UAE needs $73 oil.
> 
> But these three countries have built up mountains of oil money that protect them during the leaner times. The IMF said the UAE has enough fiscal buffers to withstand $50 oil for nearly 30 years. Qatar and Kuwait can sustain cheap oil for almost 25 years.


----------



## jollyjacktar

I wouldn't shed a tear for the Saudis becoming beggars.


----------



## PPCLI Guy

Ecept that they are the regional counter-balance to Iran, and keep the Turks on the sidelines


----------



## jollyjacktar

Screw em.


----------



## McG

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> I wouldn't shed a tear for the Saudis becoming beggars.





			
				PPCLI Guy said:
			
		

> Ecept that they are the regional counter-balance to Iran, and keep the Turks on the sidelines


Where they are all in competition for the same pieces of pie, what is the risk that they come to direct blows over the current conflict?


----------



## PPCLI Guy

I think I may have said it before - this is the Game of Empires - Persian, Arabian, and Ottoman.  They are going to sort out the geo-strategic tectonic plates one way or another.  The American and Russian Empires get involved at their peril, albeit for reasons that resonate with their respective internal logic.

So far, only the Chinese Empire has managed to resist the temptation to stick their hands on the hot stove.


----------



## GAP

> So far, only the Chinese Empire has managed to resist the temptation to stick their hands on the hot stove.



I think they have peripherally but only to protect their own game plan regarding their vested interests in surrounding countries. Even then it has all been very low key, we seldom hear much more than the end result.


----------



## Good2Golf

PPCLI Guy said:
			
		

> ...So far, only the Chinese Empire has managed to resist the temptation to stick their hands on the hot stove.



At least one nation reads Sun Tzu and actually follows his advice...  :nod:


----------



## cavalryman

Good2Golf said:
			
		

> At least one nation reads Sun Tzu and actually follows his advice...  :nod:



Cultural bias no doubt.  ;D


----------



## a_majoor

Good question. What if this _is_ the Islamic reformation?

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/217973



> *ANDREW KLAVAN: IS THIS BLOODSHED ISLAM’S REFORMATION?*
> 
> The current chaos in the Levant did not just happen. It has its internal causes but no small amount of the horror can be laid at the door of Barack Obama too. From his re-establishment of relations with the tyrant Bashar Hafez al-Assad to his surrender of George W. Bush’s victory in Iraq, to his standing by with his thumb up his brain while peaceful protestors took to the Syrian streets and the country then descended into civil war, to his weak sauce bombing campaign, Putin stealing his lunch at the UN and Obama’s puny U.S. response — through it all, President Right-Side-of-History has been on the wrong side of every decision. And so yes, now, the current mess looks remarkably like the Thirty Years War with its religious underpinnings, warring states and over-involved mega powers. And so it does indeed raise the question of whether it will be the turning point in Islam’s reformation, leading to an enlightened Westphalia-style peace.
> 
> One can hope. But the tenets of Westphalia grew out of Christian thinking and Christian religion. Christians were appalled by the bloodletting of the the Thirty Years War precisely because it violated the central preachings of the Prince of Peace: Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you. The outline for modern statehood and separation of church and state were written into the Gospels: Judge not lest ye be judged; render under Caesar that which is Caesar and unto God that which is God’s, and so on.
> 
> Does the same hope lie in the tenets of Islam?
> 
> Well, it would be nice if it ultimately turned out that way, but if so, I suspect things may take quite a while – and I’m not sure if the west can wait as long as Zhou Enlai’s apocryphal quip regarding the French Revolution to determine the outcome. In the meantime, as Mark Steyn asked in 2007, “What if we’ve already had the reformation of Islam and jihadism is it?”



and the article here: http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2015/11/02/is-this-bloodshed-islams-reformation/


----------



## jollyjacktar

Fingers crossed.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/isis-jihadi-john-drone-strike-1.3317183


----------



## The Bread Guy

Loachman said:
			
		

> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2936231/The-Kill-List-Half-ISIS-commanders-believed-dead-executioner-chief-Jihadi-John-free-commit-barbaric-slaughter.html
> 
> The Kill List: Half of ISIS top commanders believed to be dead... but executioner-in-chief Jihadi John is still free to commit barbaric slaughter ....


Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe not anymore (usual "initial reports" caveats apply) ....


> The Pentagon said late Thursday that it had targeted Mohammed Emwazi, a member of the Islamic State often referred to as Jihadi John, in an airstrike near Raqqa, Syria.
> 
> Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement that the military was “assessing the results” of the strike to determine if Mr. Emwazi had been killed.
> 
> Mr. Emwazi, considered the most prominent British member of the militant group, was shown in videos in late 2014 and early 2015 killing several American and other Western hostages ....


Another account:


> As the U.S. government is working today to confirm the death of "Jihadi John", a U.S. official appeared confident the notorious ISIS executioner was taken out in what he called a "flawless" American airstrike.
> 
> "He walked out of a building and got in the car. We struck it right after with zero collateral damage," a counter-terrorism official told ABC News late Thursday. "The vehicle was on fire. It was a 100 percent flawless, direct hit."
> 
> "Jihadi John" essentially "evaporated" in the explosion, the official said ....


More here via Google News if you're interested.

Play with the bull ....


----------



## jollyjacktar

and here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3316497/Has-Jihadi-John-killed-drone-strike-Officials-claim-British-ISIS-fanatic-targeted-Raqqa.html


----------



## McG

USAF gets another IS leader, this time in Libya.

Libya IS head 'killed in US air strike'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-34823466


----------



## a_majoor

Sometimes war is the answer: we certainly need to ramp up if we are really serious about defeating ISIS and other radicals:

http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/11/17/politics/war-is-the-answer/



> *War Is The Answer*
> 
> “War is not the answer!” the bumper sticker proudly proclaims. It’s a ridiculous assertion. Sometimes war is the answer. It depends on the question.
> 
> If the question is “do you need to impose your will on an enemy who will otherwise not stop hurting you?” then war is the only answer.
> 
> Don’t let the limited wars that America has fought in recent memory fool you.
> 
> War, real war, total war, the sort of war that the West created and mastered, is decisive. It shatters nations. It destroys cultures. It obliterates the will to fight and leaves a civilization reduced to pacifism…or rubble.
> 
> Until 1945, Imperial Japan was defended by a fighting force that had a worldwide reputation for brutality and fanaticism. The Rape of Nanking is the most notorious of the Imperial Japanese Army’s many war crimes. The soldiers themselves believed in gyokusai (“glorious death”), preferring to make suicidal attacks rather than surrender to the enemy. Only 921 out of 31,000 soldiers surrendered in the Battle of Saipan. The suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese culminated in the kamikaze, pilots flying planes filled with explosives who deliberately crashed their aircraft into enemy warships. In all, 3,860 kamikaze pilots died to destroy between 30 and 50 warships and kill around 4,000 sailors. The fighting spirit of the Japanese was so terrifying that our war planners expected that the Japanese would kill one million Americans if we invaded.
> 
> Today, we primarily know the Japanese for their fuel-efficient cars and game consoles. There are no Japanese suicide bombers. American visitors to Tokyo need not fear being blown up by an adherent of gyokusai seeking to avenge the Divine Emperor.
> 
> Until 1945, Germany was considered among the most militaristic nations on earth. Germany was built on Prussia, and Prussia was built on war – “Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country,” to use von Schrotter’s adage. Militarism reached its height under the National Socialist regime of Hitler, which created the most efficient fighting force in the world. Germany conquered Paris in five weeks; it took six months for the Allies to re-conquer it. German forces blitzkrieged from Poland to Moscow in five months; it took the Soviet Union four years to cross back. In between Germany engaged in deeds of villainy which even today scar the psyche to study them – the Holocaust foremost among them.
> 
> Today, Germany is among the most peaceful nations in the world – a country so devoted to pacifism that even the New York Times has urged it to consider taking a stronger stance on military action.
> 
> The ideology of the Islamic State is as fanatical and militaristic as anything that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had to offer. They will not stop their expansion, their aggression, and their terror. So we must stop it, or surrender to it. To defeat ISIS we must break its will to fight.
> 
> The militarist cultures of Japan and Germany were not ended with candlelit vigils, Twitter hashtags, and peace signs. They were ended with bombs and tanks. Germany’s war dead are estimated at 7.4 million out of a population of 70 million – more than 10%. Japan lost an estimated 4.5 million out of 71 million. It would have lost more, but the Emperor surrendered when a pair of atomic bombs convinced him that we were willing to do whatever it took to win.
> 
> Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that a similar defeat could not be inflicted on the Islamic State, on Iran, and any other nation that treats the West as an enemy. War, real war, is decisive.
> 
> It is we who are not decisive. We, the West, presently lack the will to wage real war. And the enemy knows this. In the aftermath of World War I, another total war was unthinkable to America, Britain, and France. It had been “The War to End All War.” Even the risk of war was enough to unsettle the Neville Chamberlains of Europe. Hitler knew this, and exploited it; and the result was total war on his terms, after he had grown strong, when Churchill was proven right, and the West regained its martial spirit.
> 
> History repeats itself. ISIS grows stronger daily, and our Churchill is not yet in sight. War is not the answer? No, it is the answer, the only answer we can give, save one: “Allah Akbar”.
> 
> Read more: http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/11/17/politics/war-is-the-answer/#ixzz3roFsRRSm


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting bit in Instapundit, showing how ISIS is a very sophisticated operation and quite capable of operating in a 4GW environment. The bit about how some hapless jihadis are now working the night shift on the IT help desk is a bit humorous, I suspect that they are going to have some manning and motivation issues as well. Go to article to access multiple links:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/219247



> IN THE ’80s, WE WERE TOLD THAT 21st CENTURY CYBER WARFARE WOULD RESEMBLE SKYNET, OR W.O.P.R. FROM WARGAMES. Instead, here’s what’s going on in the backrooms of 21st century warfare:
> 
> Shot:
> 
> NBC News also revealed that ISIS has a 24-hour help desk:
> 
> Counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army tell NBC News that the ISIS help desk, manned by a half-dozen senior operatives around the clock, was established with the express purpose of helping would-be jihadists use encryption and other secure communications in order to evade detection by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.
> 
> Personally, I’m not sure there’s a worse fate than quitting your comfortable job to run off and join the caliphate, all psyched to defeat the infidels, only to be told you’re being stuck on the graveyard shift at the IT desk, and you start tomorrow, oh, and if you don’t like it they’ll put you in a cage.
> 
> —Stephen L. Miller, “A Day in the Life of the ISIS 24-Hour Help Desk.”
> 
> Chaser:
> 
> Anonymous has taken credit for eliminating some 3,800 pro-ISIS social-media accounts, and it has suggested that, as in its campaign against the rather less significant Ku Klux Klan, it will gather a great deal of real-world information on Islamic State sympathizers and confederates and make it public. In the case of the Klan, that would mean mainly exposure to social opprobrium; in the case of Islamic State groupies and co-conspirators, that could mean a great deal more.
> 
> Anonymous is a famously fractious coalition of individuals and factions with internal rivalries and disagreements — a collective front rather than a united front, as Jamie Condliffe put it in Gizmodo — but it is generally regarded as being reasonably good at what it does. Terrorist groups are critically dependent upon electronic communication for everything from recruitment and motivation to actual operations, and there is some reason to suspect that groups such as Anonymous will prove more adept at disrupting that communication than our conventional intelligence and law-enforcement forces have. The Islamic State isn’t really a state, yet; like al-Qaeda, it is a non-state actor, and it is likely that other non-state actors will be enormously important in countering it.
> 
> —Kevin D. Williamson, “Anonymous at War,” who adds the line that made the rounds on Twitter earlier this week — these are not the 72 virgins that ISIS was expecting when it launched its jihad…


----------



## CougarKing

The impact of the oil glut being felt by ISIS as well:

Yahoo News



> *Flow of ISIL oil revenue slowing, reports say*
> By Sherry Noik | Insight – Tue, 17 Nov, 2015 3:52 PM EST
> 
> The falling oil prices that are devastating Canada’s economy are also hurting ISIL, but it’s unclear if the commodity’s decline will spell an end to the murderous terrorist group that’s behind the Paris attacks.
> 
> “Operating in large swathes of territory in eastern Syria and western and northern Iraq allows ISIL to control numerous oilfields from which it continues to extract oil for its own use, its own refining and for onward sale or swap to local and regional markets,” according to the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF), of which Canada is a member.
> 
> In a February report, the FATF estimated that ISIL was selling crude at source for a deeply discounted $25-$30 per barrel to middlemen, who then marked it up to $60-$100 per barrel (bbl).
> 
> “We note that during the preparation of this report, *there has been a substantial decline in global crude oil prices (from approximately $80USD/bbl to $50USD/bbl), and so the price at which ISIL sells crude oil (and the revenue generated from the sale of crude oil) has likely declined as well,” *the report said.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## McG

Some background for those unfamiliar:



> The Sunni-Shia split at the heart of regional conflict in the middle east explained
> The National Post
> Adrian Humpheries
> 18 Nov 15
> 
> It was in another time — more than 1,300 years ago — in a land known as the Islamic State that, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, a succession crisis divided Muslims; and the widening schism continues to play out today as ISIL carves its bloody notion of a new Islamic State on the same soil these feuds were first fought, lashing out at targets both within the Muslim world and in the West.
> 
> Succession can be a tough adjustment for any group, but is especially emotional when a departing leader of a nascent religion is particularly strong, effective or loved.
> 
> A dispute over how to replace Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim world after his death in 632 — and increasingly after the deaths of subsequent leaders — led to competing iterations of the Islamic faith, diverting followers into two major branches — the Sunni and the Shia.
> 
> While doctrinal distinctions created the schism, evolving geopolitical notions make it an important matter for world attention.
> 
> The split began in the early history of Islam.
> 
> Those pushing for selecting successors as caliph of the Islamic State and as the religious authority only from among the family of Muhammad became known as the Shia, from the Arabic for “the followers of Ali,” a reference to Muhammad’s son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Those pushing for a selective process based on seeking the most qualified from the wider tribal context became known as the Sunni, from the Arabic for “people of the tradition.”
> 
> “This was really a political dispute, but that political dispute early on over who should lead turned into — over centuries — the beginnings of a theological sectarian split,” said Anver Emon, professor of law and Canada Research Chair in religion, pluralism and the rule of law at the University of Toronto
> 
> “It is a secession crisis between the two groups, in political terms. But following that, of course, it has had a lot of legacy in terms of religious and legal and ritualistic kinds of distinctions,” said Khalid Mustafa Medani, an associate professor of political science and Islamic studies at Montreal’s McGill University.
> 
> What to outsiders may seem an arcane distinction, within Islam can mean everything.
> 
> Members of the two branches have lived together peacefully and intermarried, but for some, especially the highly politicized, the divide becomes “very heated” and can even lead to calls for excommunication from the Islamic faith, said Medani.
> 
> In the current context of the self-declared Islamic State, that can mean death.
> 
> A study in 2009 by the Pew Research Center says there were more than 1.57 billion Muslims around the world, about 23% of the world’s population. Of those, 10 to 13 percent were Shia and 87-90 percent were Sunni.
> 
> It is largely where those Shia live that has become important. The majority of Shias (between 68 to 80 percent) live in just four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq. In many other countries in the Persian Gulf, Shia remain a minority within Sunni dominated states.
> 
> That makes theology increasingly political.
> 
> The schism first fully registered in the West in 1979 with the Iranian revolution.
> 
> The shah, a secular monarch of Iran, was ousted and replaced by an Islamic republic. The revolutionaries seized the American embassy and held its staff hostage.
> 
> That movement was Shia.
> 
> The Iranians funded and trained Hezbollah in the 1980s that embarked on a deadly campaign against Israel with suicide bombings, kidnappings and assassinations.
> 
> The vast majority of followers of both branches lead peaceful lives — and neither has a monopoly on militancy or moderation. The Iranian revolution and Hezbollah, however, set a popular notion in the West of Shia being the dangerous iteration.
> 
> It was a view embraced by many Sunni elites.
> 
> “It served the Gulf countries, like Bahrain, like Saudi Arabia, like Kuwait, to strongly associate Shiaism with revolution and thereby raise concerns about their own domestic Shia population,” said Emon. Casting Shiites as heretics aided that domestic need.
> 
> Some Sunni leaders also exported their own, competing, brand of the narrative.
> 
> It makes the Shia-Sunni split terribly important when the major backers of each branch are dominating influences in the same, sensitive region: Iran and Saudi Arabia.
> 
> “To understand the geopolitical rivalries of a country like Iran versus Saudi Arabia is an important way to understand why people are so mobilized,” said Medani, “It is very important to really centre this increasing animosity between Shia and Sunni based on the role of these leaders and the states.”
> 
> The Western notion of Shia being the dangerous iteration shifted through fundamentalist Sunni groups such as the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also referred to as ISIS).
> 
> For a while, exploiting the Sunni-Shia split served the interests of nations controlled by either branch.
> 
> But instability rarely helps heal divides.
> 
> In Iraq, for instance, a Sunni minority under Saddam Hussein ruled over a Shia majority. The overthrow of Hussein left people looking to reclaim a lost position and neighbours anxiously eyeing the change.
> 
> “For a country like Saudi Arabia, through its exportation of its own Islamist ideology,” said Emon, “they’re responsible for the underlying ideology that informs al Qaeda and ISIS.”
> 
> But then ISIL changed the rules.
> 
> In 2014, after taking control of territory in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, ISIL proclaimed itself a caliphate, calling other states illegitimate and placing itself as the exclusive authority over the Islamic world, as if the world was the same as it was 1,300 years ago.
> 
> ISIL targets Shia Muslims as well as the West as it imposes its strict interpretations within territory it controls.
> 
> “ISIS is simply coming home to roost,” said Emon.
> 
> The benefactor of viewing ISIL’s brutal campaign as part of the ancient legacy of Islam, however, is ISIL itself.
> 
> ISIL wants to convince everyone the struggle is one epic clash of civilizations between the West and the Islamic World — with themselves as the representative of the world’s Muslims and as their religious authority — their caliph, the scholars said.
> 
> “That is the greatest lie that can lead to the greatest conflict,” said Medani.


http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/israel-middle-east/the-sunni-shia-split-at-the-heart-of-regional-conflict-in-the-middle-east-explained


----------



## Edward Campbell

This could go in damned nearly half the threads on the first page of this topic:

          
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





          It's a short letter to the editor from a someone named K.N. Al-Sabah that appeared in the _Financial Times_ on 22 Aug 2013.


----------



## Rifleman62

It seems that oil production facilities were not actually targets as their distruction would endanger the environment/pollute etc. Same with destroying the truck oil tankers, plus it could kill a civilian. Many reports on FOX by retired Generals re ROE' that no civilians, none, none must be injured.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/11/20/signs-pentagon-moving-to-loosen-rules-isis-war.html

*Signs Pentagon moving to loosen 'rules' of ISIS war*

By Lucas Tomlinson, Jennifer Griffin Published November 20, 2015 

of ISIS war

By Lucas Tomlinson, Jennifer Griffin Published November 20, 2015 FoxNews.com
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The Defense Department may be moving to loosen the rules of engagement in the war against the Islamic State, following criticism that the military’s strict policies are undermining the 14-month air campaign over Iraq and Syria.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened the door to the changes in an interview on Thursday, even as President Obama defends the current military strategy in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.

“We're prepared to change the rules of engagement. We've changed tactics, as we just did in the case of the fuel trucks,” Carter said on MSNBC.

The fuel trucks Carter mentioned were targeted in an airstrike by U.S. Air Force A-10 and AC-130 gunships Monday. The strike destroyed 116 ISIS fuel trucks, part of the U.S.-led coalition’s new effort to destroy a key revenue source for the terror network.

Prior to that strike, U.S. military jets were not allowed to hit ISIS fuel trucks because killing the drivers was seen as killing civilians. For the past year, ISIS has earned $1 million a day from black-market oil sales, according to the Pentagon.

As Carter mentioned, the Monday strike showed the Defense Department already is adjusting its tactics to a degree, in a bid to address factors that ISIS is exploiting.

"ISIS uses our rules of engagement against us," one U.S. military official told Fox News.

ISIS has used civilians from the beginning of the air war as shields against U.S. airstrikes. ISIS leadership also is known to hide in plain view above a prison in the de-facto ISIS capital of Raqqa, not far from where “Jihadi John” was killed recently by a U.S. drone.

Even before the Paris terror attacks, the U.S. launched Operation Tidal Wave II last month to destroy oil infrastructure in eastern Syria used by ISIS to generate two-thirds of its revenue – sites the airstrikes previously had avoided.

Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the new U.S. Army general leading the coalition against ISIS, has made destroying ISIS oil infrastructure a priority, according to defense officials. He named the current operation after a U.S. operation of the same name in World War II that targeted Nazi oil infrastructure in Romania.

Loosening the rules of engagement is something critics have been demanding for months.

Retired Air Force Gen. David Deptula, in charge of the Afghanistan air war against the Taliban in 2001 and responsible for the “no-fly zone” over Iraq during the 1990s, said restrictive rules of engagement for U.S. pilots since the start of the anti-ISIS air campaign have enabled the enemy to inflict massive civilian casualties – even though the rules are meant to avoid civilian casualties.

“There is a lot of frustration because of the onerous restrictions that are being placed on individuals who are prosecuting air operations,” Deptula said. “The ‘mother may I?’ request chain to be able to engage is inducing delay in actually being effective. You have obvious Islamic State targets you would like to engage but you have to wait to get approval that takes hours.”

He asked: “What is the logic of a policy that restricts the application of air power to prevent the potential of collateral damage, while assuring the certainty of the Islamic State's crimes against humanity?”

Russia does not appear to be under the same constraints as the United States when it comes to civilian casualties.

On Wednesday, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition said Russia was using “dumb” bombs to carry out the majority of its strikes against ISIS.

“Their history has been both reckless and irresponsible,” Col. Steve Warren said.  “Those are antiquated tactics. We don't even use those type of tactics anymore. … Those are the type of tactics needed only if you don't possess the technology, the skills and the capabilities to conduct the type of precision strikes that our coalition conducts.”

While the Pentagon weighs its approach, pressure may be building from both sides of the aisle. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, speaking in New York Thursday, also indicated a desire to expand the air campaign against ISIS and loosen the rules of engagement.

“It is time to begin a new phase and intensify and broaden our efforts to smash the would-be caliphate and deny ISIS control of territory in Iraq and Syria. That starts with a more effective coalition air campaign, with more allied planes, more strikes, and a broader target set,” she said at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews

Jennifer Griffin currently serves as a national security correspondent for FOX News Channel . She joined FNC in October 1999 as a Jerusalem-based correspondent. 

_- mod edit to make link work -_


----------



## CougarKing

The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) one of Al-Qaeda's former franchises in Southeast Asia, might in turn become quite the tool for ISIS ever since the ASG pledged allegiance to them: 

Diplomat



> *Has a Philippine Militant Group Gone Regional Amid Islamic State Fears?
> 
> The Islamic militant group Abu Sayyaf may be spreading its unwanted tentacles*.
> luke_hunt_q
> By Luke Hunt
> November 25, 2015
> 
> As the rest of the world grapples with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), their latest attacks on Paris, and what some commentators are calling the Global Jihad Insurgency, Philippines-based Islamic militant group the Abu Sayyaf may be spreading its own unwanted tentacles.
> 
> That message was clear following a leaked memo from within the *Malaysian police published by the news portal Malaysiakini detailing how the Abu Sayyaf has established cell networks in East and West Malaysia, which were prepared to carry out terrorist-styled attacks.*
> 
> Local police in Kota Kinabalu – where tourist dollars hold pride of place on the local political agenda – denied the reports circulating on social media that eight suicide bombers had been planted in the state of Sabah and another 10 in Kuala Lumpur.
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Tuan

haha


----------



## Altair

Tuan said:
			
		

> haha


assad 

Russia

Turkey

Kurds

Iraq (trying desperately to off itself )

Turkey

Saudis

Hezbollah 

Israel

Moderate rebels?

Missing anyone?


----------



## jollyjacktar

The Sunny Ways team...


----------



## CougarKing

I don't see Merkel/Germany in the cartoon above. And Putin looks like he's out of shape in the cartoon.  ;D

Defense News



> *Army Chief: Germany Planning To Deploy 1,200 Troops for IS Fight*
> Agence France-Presse 3:21 p.m. EST November 29, 2015
> 
> BERLIN — Germany is planning to deploy 1,200 troops to help France in the fight against Islamic State jihadists in Syria, its army chief said Sunday, in what would be the military's biggest deployment abroad.
> 
> "From a military point of view, around 1,200 soldiers would be necessary to run the planes and ship," army chief of staff Gen. Volker Wieker told Bild am Sonntag newspaper, adding that the mission would begin "very quickly once a mandate is obtained."
> 
> "The government is seeking a mandate this year," said Wieker.
> 
> Berlin on Thursday offered France Tornado reconnaissance jets, a naval frigate, aerial refueling and satellite images in the fight against the IS group.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

A pretext of fighting ISIS just so Emirati troops can go right to overthrowing Assad? 

Let's see who else is willing to commit troops to Syria to fight ISIS:

Defense News



> *UAE Says Ready To Commit Troops To Fight Syria Jihadists*
> Agence France-Presse 3:07 p.m. EST November 30, 2015
> Anwar Mohammed Gargash
> 
> ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The United Arab Emirates has said it is ready to commit ground troops against jihadists in Syria and described Russian airstrikes in the country as attacks on a "common enemy."
> 
> Quoted by the official WAM news agency on Monday, Emirati State Minister for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said the UAE would "participate in any international effort demanding a ground intervention to fight terrorism."
> 
> "Regional countries must bear part of the burden" of such an intervention, he said during a Sunday discussion on Syria.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Long article in The American Interest on what the future will look like. The effects will be rippling into the future for the next century (think of the millions of young people without jobs or prospects, much less their counterparts in the camps with even less hope). Until _someone, somewhere_ is willing to commit massive amounts of resources, this wil continue until basically all sides are exhausted and have no more resources.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/11/30/the-middle-east-as-it-will-be/



> *The Middle East as It Will Be*
> Eliot A. Cohen
> 
> We are in the early or, at best, early-middle stages of a vicious cycle of violence.
> 
> Every so often, one should stop ascribing blame and prescribing remedies and put down exactly what one thinks is likely to happen. As George Orwell observed, this can be a humbling experience, because our predictions so often reflect our hopes or fears rather than careful analysis. Besides, castigating politicians one dislikes, and concocting policies that have no chance of encountering the test of practice, is much more fun than peering into the future. Yet no other topic could benefit more from a cold-blooded analysis of the probabilities than the current conflict in Syria and Iraq and the various burning cinders that it has spewed into other lands—Libya and, most recently, France.
> 
> It is safe to predict that, barring a calamitous attack on the scale of September 11 in the American homeland, the United States will not lead a coalition attempting to root out the Islamic State in its lairs, above all the city of Mosul. President Obama, in every possible way, has made it clear that he thinks such an effort misguided. Nor should one expect a President who has pledged himself to ending Middle East wars to conclude his term by sending tens of thousands of infantrymen back to Mesopotamia (a much better term these days than Syria and Iraq, which, for all practical purposes, no longer exist as states). A bit more bombing, a few more commando raids, some additional trainers and spotters, perhaps, but a ground force—no. He would be acting contrary to every instinct, every judgment, and, most importantly, his self-understanding were he to do so.
> 
> This being the case, the Islamic State will continue to control territory in Iraq and Syria. The Kurds and Iraqi army may nibble at the edges and cut lines of supply; the Russians, Iranians, and Shi’a militias may do the same; but to take back any major city and, above all, Mosul will require lots of troops. To do it the American or Israeli way would mean surrounding it, persuading the population to leave, and then painstakingly working one’s way through the booby-traps, ambushes, bunkers, and tunnels using all the advantages of meticulously collected intelligence and persistent observation, as well as a wide variety of low-yield precision-guided weapons. Even so, the damage to infrastructure and loss of civilian life would be considerable, as would the casualties sustained by the forces going in. Mosul—a city of two-and-a-half million before the Islamic State invaded—would require a clean-up operation an order of magnitude larger than the clearing of Fallujah (prewar population roughly 300,000) or recent Israeli incursions into Gaza City (perhaps half a million), with tens of thousands of well-trained and -disciplined troops. Those are not on offer, and certainly not from the United States.
> 
> To think that Iraqi troops and Sunni tribesmen will do what they did in 2006–2008 in taking down al-Qaeda in Iraq—the Islamic State’s smaller and less expert predecessor—is fantasy. Iraqi soldiers and tribal forces did indeed fight, and bravely, but they knew they were allied with what Bing West has dubbed “the strongest tribe,” i.e., the United States.Iraqi soldiers and tribal forces did indeed fight, and bravely, but they knew they were allied with what Bing West has dubbed “the strongest tribe,” i.e., the United States. They could see the tanks and attack helicopters, the confident soldiers and Marines going into battle with them. They will have no such support this time, and they know it. They can be terrorized, and the evidence suggests, have been.
> 
> The Russian way is simpler, and Putin has done it before, most famously in Chechnya’s capital of Grozny, a largely Russian-inhabited city, in 1999–2000: flatten the city, shoot anything that moves, and rebuild it with a client governor in charge. But today’s Russia, as impressive at it has been strategically, may not have the resources and probably does not have the inclination to do something that will involve killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs, thereby inflaming its own domestic Muslim problem.
> 
> The Islamic State will not be easily strangled, either. It has shown itself remarkably capable of drawing money in from many sources, and it has no compunction about squeezing to the limit the population among which it resides. It is a tenacious parasite, and although it has suffered thousands of casualties, it still gets recruits and is adapting to the continuous aerial bombardment. There is no reason to think it will quit.
> 
> So the Islamic State will continue to exist, and as recent reports suggest, put down roots in a number of countries. The appeal of its cruelty, religious purity, and apocalyptic faith will not be diminished. Indeed, just the reverse, the longer it appears to stand up to the unholy coalition of the United States, Europe, Russia, the Persians, and the Shi’a. At the same time, however, it is equally unlikely that the Syrian civil war will be resolved, and above all, that Bashar al-Asad will recover control of more than a fraction of his shattered country. He relies now on foreign arms and armies, his own Alawite base having been exhausted. His allies may be willing to send thousands of troops to keep him going, but are unlikely to commit the tens or hundreds of thousands to really restore him to power. Were that to happen, one should expect to see the Gulf states pump ever more military aid into his opponents, including the Islamic State and other jihadi movements. It is a lesson in the relative unimportance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to compare the vituperative fear and hatred that many Sunni Arabs have for the Persian Shi’a with their equally sincere but distinctly feebler loathing of the Jews. Furthermore, in light of the breakdown in Russo-Turkish relations, and the presence of an increasingly arbitrary and dictatorial Islamist at the head of the Turkish government, Ankara may well ramp up support for the insurgents, including the Islamic State. For these reasons and more, the would-be Talleyrands who think that tacit American support for Russo-Iranian hegemony over this region in the name of stability is either desirable or possible had better think again. That kind of devil’s deal would simply brew even more violence, as even our current President seems to recognize.
> 
> The upshot, then, will be large-scale mayhem across an increasingly large area, which will in turn breed more mayhem. We are in the early or, at best, early-middle stages of a vicious cycle of violence. Consider only the refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. What sorts of experiences have the teenagers in those camps had? What future can they expect? How many murders, maimings, and rapes might they wish to avenge? What sorts of experiences have the teenagers in those camps had? What future can they expect? How many murders, maimings, and rapes might they wish to avenge? In those camps lie a well-nigh infinite pool of recruits for the jihadi cause, and they will make their way into the fight. To be sure, there will be some islands of stability in the Middle East. The Israelis will deter direct attacks, and will help the Druze carve out communal enclaves under their aegis. The Kurdish quasi-state will become ever more real, and the United States will quietly recognize that fact by arming it to the teeth. Jordan may hang on, although the Hashemite King may have to fight, yet again, for his monarchy’s existence.
> 
> What we cannot predict are the sparks that could ignite other fires. A second Russo-Turkish incident—an S-400 missile taking down a Turkish F-16, another Russian jet shot down, raids on Russian or Turkish bases coming from areas controlled by the other sides’ clients—may not bring a shooting war, exactly, but it could lead to a much deadlier proxy war than we have seen thus far. Should Turkey then invoke Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, and Russia choose to demonstrate the West’s vulnerabilities on other fronts, the winds of the Syrian war could blow as far away as the Baltic states. A more immediate matter: the refugee flow to Europe may be slowed but will not stop unless the unwieldy and befuddled European Union slams the gates shut. If it does, that may be one of the developments that helps end the EU as we know it. If it does not, the rise of seriously nasty rightwing parties in the European core may bring it to a different kind of end.
> 
> The next American president will probably do more to take the lead in this crisis, but not much. It takes at least six months to fully staff up a government (which you want to do if you are going to go to war), but more importantly, what president wishes to begin his or her term by sending large forces to the Middle East? Even if the President did so desire, and even if we did wipe out the Islamic State and liberate Mosul, what would we do then—hand it back to an Iranian-controlled client state headquartered in Baghdad, while deploring the depredations of the Shi’a militias re-establishing control in Iraq’s largest Sunni city?
> 
> It is amazing to consider what we now accept as normal politics in this part of the world. A quarter of a million civilians dead. Chemical weapons used routinely by a state and by insurgents. Millions of refugees. The eviction of Christians from vast areas they have inhabited very nearly since the time of Jesus. An apocalyptic religious sect that has constructed at least an embryonic state, revels in publicizing every kind of barbarity from crucifixion to partial beheadings, and now controls an area the size of a small European country. Murderous assaults on European capitals inspired and directed by that state. Russian forces engaged in combat in the Middle East on a scale not seen since the early 1970s. Iranian operatives openly waging war in countries that Iran does not even neighbor.
> 
> The future will be ghastly for that part of the world, and all that borders it. The United States will be somewhat distant from this whirlpool of blood, but only somewhat—we, our allies, and our interests will increasingly be spattered by it.The United States will be somewhat distant from this whirlpool of blood, but only somewhat—we, our allies, and our interests will increasingly be spattered by it. It is disheartening that at a time when countries are desperate for the United States merely to appear to want to lead them out of this, Americans are preoccupied on the one side with a braggart bully billionaire who knows little and cares less about civil liberties and on the other side with the contest between a marginal monomaniac and a terminally deceitful triangulator. Meanwhile, on the beautiful campuses of our oldest and wealthiest universities, mobs of the luckiest young people in the world are whimpering belligerently because they believe themselves to be victims—an obscene notion, if you think about their Syrian and Iraqi contemporaries. This may not be the early 1930s, but it is getting close. And as one might have said back then, this is not likely to get any better.


----------



## jollyjacktar

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> A pretext of fighting ISIS just so Emirati troops can go right to overthrowing Assad?
> 
> Let's see who else is willing to commit troops to Syria to fight ISIS:
> 
> Defense News



I listened to a segment of The Current on CBC radio yesterday about UAE and their involvement in Yemen.  They have hired South American PMC's (mostly Columbian) and have deployed them in combat operations in Yemen.  Will they use more PMC in Syria?


----------



## jollyjacktar

And on another front, the Daily Mail are reporting that the Daesh dickheads are in fact expanding quite a bit into Afghanistan and are hell bent on knocking off the Taliban and supplanting them as King of the Hill.  I am all for those two tearing into each other like the rabid animals they are, but say the Daesh do come out on top?  Will they then go on a tear into Pakistan?  That has me worried as then they could possibly gain access to very big firecrackers.



> ISIS moves in on Afghanistan: Chilling pictures show jihadis have set up terror training camps as it's claimed they have KILLED the Taliban's leader and seized control of large parts of the war-torn nation
> -Taliban has been divided by a bitter turmoil, leading to ISIS-led splinter cell
> -ISIS is targeting Taliban's territory in Afghanistan with a campaign of terror
> -Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour is reported to have been shot dead
> -His death could be an ISIS attempt to destroy Taliban from the top down
> See our full news coverage of ISIS at www.dailymail.co.uk/isis
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3347137/Has-ISIS-killed-head-Taliban-Attempt-terror-chief-s-life-signals-surge-jihadi-network-Afghanistan.html#ixzz3tTjzsqFT
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> And on another front, the Daily Mail are reporting that the Daesh dickheads are in fact expanding quite a bit into Afghanistan and are hell bent on knocking off the Taliban and supplanting them as King of the Hill.  I am all for those two tearing into each other like the rabid animals they are, but say the Daesh do come out on top?  Will they then go on a tear into Pakistan?  That has me worried as then they could possibly gain access to very big firecrackers.



Would Obama draw another red line  ;D


----------



## a_majoor

Saudi Arabia's "Grand Strategy" seems to be to use the oil weapon to depress prices and keep their enemies (Iran, Russia and Syria as the first tier) starved for resources and less able to compete for the position of Regional Hegemon or enabler. It is estimated that Saudi Arabia could continue to spend at the current rate for five to seven years (depending on the assumptions you are using), so it is going to be a race to see who runs out of resources first. Keeping oil prices depressed will also prevent Iran from gaining any advantage to the lifting of sanctions, so the situation will continue to devolve in the Middle East (perhaps as Saudi and the Gulf States use ISIS to goad Iran, Russia, Syria and Hezbollah into spending more resources, someone will crack that much ealier).

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/12/05/whats-the-point-of-opec/



> *What’s the Point of OPEC?*
> 
> That’s the question on the minds of many of the cartel’s members, after OPEC’s semiannual meeting in Vienna ended without any agreement on how to coordinate efforts to drive oil prices back up. A barrel of crude goes for under $43 today, a far cry from the $110+ per barrel levels achieved 18 months ago. While in the past OPEC has acted to cut production in order to set a price floor to bearish markets, this time around Saudi Arabia has strong-armed its less productive fellow members into adopting a business-as-usual strategy, preferring to endure today’s low prices in order to compete with non-OPEC producers for market share.
> 
> But this approach hasn’t been well received by OPEC’s less wealthy member countries, many of which have publicly called for the cartel to curtail output. As the FT reports, the meeting did little to bridge the widening gap between Riyadh and the rest of the group:
> 
> After a marathon seven-hour session that ended in chaotic scenes outside the Opec secretariat in Vienna, the only agreement reached by the cartel members was to meet again in June. […]
> 
> “For the first time in many years Opec has failed to specify a production ceiling and has decided to wait on events in 2016 before making its next move,” said Neil Atkinson of Lloyd’s List Intelligence. “This is a holding decision.”
> 
> The cartel’s decision not to set any targets for output over the next six months reflects significant uncertainty over how much more oil Iran will be able to produce once Western sanctions are lifted, and how quickly. Iran’s oil minister said he “didn’t have any other expectation,” adding his hope that “at the next meeting we can reach agreement.” The president of Petroleos De Venezuela said his country is “really worried.”
> 
> OPEC’s smaller fish will have six more months to position themselves and trumpet their anxieties, but it’s clear that without Riyadh’s blessing, the cartel isn’t going to change its course. As Atkinson put it, OPEC has “formalised the decision taken a year ago to produce as much oil as necessary to preserve market share while leaving prices to the market place.”
> 
> With the Saudis no longer willing to act as the global swing producer, OPEC lacks the capacity to cut production back enough significantly to affect prices, which leads to the obvious question: What purpose does the cartel now serve? We’ll check back in in June, but for now OPEC has resigned itself to letting the market set prices, which means crude is going to stay on sale.


----------



## a_majoor

And meanwhile, the ideology that underpins ISIS and radical Islam implodes on contact with the real world:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/12/02/more-evidence-that-isis-fails-the-reality-test/



> *More Evidence that ISIS Fails the Reality Test*
> 
> ISIS’s attempt to build a state is faltering under the strain of both external attacks and internal failings as its ideology collides with reality. The New York Times reports:
> 
> 
> Some fighters have taken pay cuts, while others have quit and slipped away. Important services have been failing because of poor maintenance. And as its smuggling and oil businesses have faltered, the Islamic State has fallen back on ever-increasing taxes and tolls imposed on its squeezed citizens.[..]
> 
> Stories abound of the Islamic State putting loyal members in positions they are not qualified for. The head of medical services in one town is a former construction worker, residents said. The boss at an oil field was a date merchant, according to a former employee.
> 
> In Raqqa, the National Hospital featured in a propaganda video about health services in the caliphate is all but closed because so many doctors have fled, according to an aid worker with relatives in the city.[..]
> 
> Also driving people out is an onerous tax system carried out in the name of zakat, or Islamic alms. The jihadists collect, among other taxes, a yearly share of every harvest and herd of livestock, and make shopkeepers pay a share of their inventory.
> 
> ISIS is selling a dream, as we’ve written before. But everyday life grinds away at the fantasy world ISIS wants to live in.
> Nothing kills an ideology like success. This is what happened to Communism: the Marxist-Leninists had 70 years and half the world’s population as a laboratory. They produced misery, oppression, poverty, pollution and corruption. The fantasy of a utopian Communist world could not survive reality.
> 
> The caliphate crazies claimed that a “pure Islamic state” with a real, live caliph and strict sharia law would bring victory and prestige to Islam and good governance to its inhabitants. In fact, ISIS has damaged Islam more than its worst enemies could hope, wrecked the lives of millions, and created a gangster state that mistreats and exploits its residents.
> 
> The failure of ISIS as a state means more trouble for the rest of us, at least in the short- to medium-term. To keep the fantasy alive, the brain-sick fanatics and true believers are likely to try more Paris style massacres and acts of spectacular terror. But the ideology that undergirds ISIS isn’t just bad in the sense of evil. It is bad in the sense that it does not provide a framework that can organize the life and work of a community on a productive and enduring basis.
> 
> Even more than was the case for Communism, failure is baked into the ISIS cake. That doesn’t mean we can sit and wait serenely for the forces of history to destroy it; Stalin and Mao between them after all managed to murder something like 100 million people before the forces of history kicked in, and the Soviet Union managed to drag the world to the precipice of nuclear war before it imploded. So the intrinsic shortcomings of jihadi ideology doesn’t justify a passive policy. But the wrong-headed ideas at the core of this nonsense should give us hope: real victory over this nasty perversion of religion is not just possible; it is likely.


----------



## CougarKing

ISIS makes a propaganda video...in Mandarin Chinese. That means they probably have Chinese Uighurs or Hui Ren from China's Xinjiang province working for them.

Shanghaiist



> *ISIS has a new song in Mandarin calling Chinese Muslims to jihad*
> 
> 
> The Islamic State has released a catchy new song in Mandarin Chinese in an attempt to recruit Chinese Muslims to join their fight. China, the most populous country in the world, is home to more than 30 million Muslims.
> 
> The song, which can be heard here, is four minutes long. In it, a male voice, digitally enhanced using reverb and harmonies, chants these lyrics, translation provided by The Wall Street Journal:
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

Well they got  the Korean's on their side... no, wait... that was just some idiot losing control of his AK at the Yemen wedding all guy dance party not doing Gangnam Style.


----------



## CougarKing

Iraq/OIF is still fresh on US voters' minds, so wouldn't it be fair to say the US public might not be able to stomach another protracted ground campaign?

Defense News



> *Carter Cautions US Ground Troops Would 'Americanize' ISIS Fight*
> 
> WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Ash Carter told lawmakers on Wednesday that adding a significant US ground force to the fight against the Islamic State group would “Americanize” the fight and fuel “a call to jihad” in Iraq and Syria.
> 
> *The Pentagon is urgently calling on Congress to lift a hold on $116 million in funding for its rebooted Syria train-and-equip program after Gen. Lloyd Austin, the chief of US Central Command, revealed its stunning failure at a Capitol Hill hearing in September. The $500-million program had only a handful of trained Syrian fighters left.*
> 
> Despite pressure from lawmakers, Carter said that he and Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have not recommended sending US ground troops.* The US has deployed about 3,500 US troops to Iraq in noncombat roles, and Carter announced last week that it would deploy a new “specialized expeditionary force” to augment US special operations forces there and assist local forces.
> *
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

This from the Pentagon Info-machine on an ... interesting ... Canadian helping in the fight:


> By his own admission, (Mubin) Shaikh was a Muslim extremist living in Canada when the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks occurred.
> 
> He celebrated the attacks like others in the group he hung-out with.
> 
> But that was then and this is now. Two years spent studying his religion in Syria during 2002-2004, led him to a new understanding. Returning to Canada, Shaikh worked with Canada’s intelligence and police force as an undercover informant against Muslim extremists who were planning other attacks in Canada. His testimony led to the conviction of more than a dozen extremists. He was taking back his religion from those who were corrupting it. Many people he knew from his former extremist life are either in jail or dead.
> 
> Shaikh says he is now a public figure and defender of his faith from those extremist groups like ISIL who hijack pieces and parts of the Muslim faith for illegal activities. He returned to the George C. Marshall European Center, Dec. 8, to share his personal insights on how terrorist and extremist groups use the internet with participants representing 47 different countries who are attending the Program for Cyber Security Studies course ...


----------



## Journeyman

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> His testimony led to the conviction of more than a dozen extremists...
> 
> ...Shaikh says he is now a public figure and defender of his faith....


A very brave individual.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Let's see how effective this new coalition is going to be ...


> Saudi Arabia on Tuesday announced the formation of a 34-state Islamic military coalition to combat terrorism, according to a joint statement published on state news agency SPA.
> 
> "The countries here mentioned have decided on the formation of a military alliance led by Saudi Arabia to fight terrorism, with a joint operations center based in Riyadh to coordinate and support military operations," the statement said.
> 
> A long list of Arab countries such as Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, together with Islamic countries Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan and Gulf Arab and African states were mentioned.
> 
> The announcement cited "a duty to protect the Islamic nation from the evils of all terrorist groups and organizations whatever their sect and name which wreak death and corruption on earth and aim to terrorize the innocent."
> 
> Shi'ite Muslim Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia's arch rival for influence in the Arab world, was absent from the states named as participants, as proxy conflicts between the two regional powers rage from Syria to Yemen ...


More here - Saudi Press Agency statement attached.


----------



## Good2Golf

The writer misses a bit of nuance in describing Iran as Saudi Arabia's rival in the "Arab" world.  Notwithstanding the Shi'ia/Sunni(Wahhabist) issue, Iranians are Persian, not Arabic.  A better description would be Saudi Arabia's rival for influence in the Islamic region.

Regards
G2G


----------



## a_majoor

Interesting that Turkey is on the list. Saudi Arabia is also not keen on the Turks reviving their interest and influence over the former Ottoman Empire. Must be a case of keeping your friends close and enemies closer...


----------



## CougarKing

More on the above: A coalition of Sunni nations...what's to stop them from turning on the west once they've eliminated the Shiite threat Iran and its proxies like Syria's Assad regime?

Defense News



> *Saudi-Led Islamic Military Coalition Formed to FIght Terrorism*
> Awad Mustafa 6:56 p.m. EST December 14, 2015
> 
> DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has announced the formation of a 35-state Islamic military coalition to combat terrorism.
> 
> The statements came after a cabinet meeting was held in the Saudi capital Riyadh, according to the Saudi Press Agency
> 
> The Islamic military coalition's headquarters will be in Riyadh, according to the statement, where a Joint Operations Center will be set up and military engagements will be coordinated.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> More on the above: A coalition of Sunni nations...what's to stop them from turning on the west once they've eliminated the Shiite threat Iran and its proxies like Syria's Assad regime?
> 
> Defense News



Besides having exhausted their resources prosecuting the war; internal factionalization, resentment against Saudi hegemony, radical Sunni splinter groups and ethnic tensions between the Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Baloch, Yazidis.....


----------



## Journeyman

Thucydides said:
			
		

> A coalition of Sunni nations...what's to stop them from turning on the west once they've eliminated the Shiite threat Iran and its proxies .....
> 
> 
> 
> Besides having exhausted their resources prosecuting the war; internal factionalization, resentment against Saudi hegemony, radical Sunni splinter groups and ethnic tensions between the Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Baloch, Yazidis.....
Click to expand...

I was going to suggest the massively increased background radiation.  :-\

I suspect Iran would not go peacefully.


----------



## George Wallace

Journeyman said:
			
		

> I was going to suggest the massively increased background radiation.  :-\
> 
> I suspect Iran would not go peacefully.



Background radiation would only be one of the problems.  Not much grows in a series of hundred mile radius glass bowls.


----------



## YZT580

They were unable to reach agreement on destroying Israel it is unlikely that they will reach agreement on attacking further west.  As well, the Saudi royal family enjoys too many trips to Europe to risk.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

I don't think it is safe to predict _any_ certainties in that region with those players for the future.  As Thomas Ricks said in the ending minutes of Losing Iraq, "..._I keep on thinking in terms of a Shakespearean tragedy. And I think we’re probably only in Act 4 right now. Act 5, you know, the bloody conclusion of Hamlet or Macbeth, still has not happened"_.

Pulling out the coalition and letting the region get 'sorted out' by the neighboring states, nations, etc may not be in the global communities best interest.


----------



## a_majoor

Eye In The Sky said:
			
		

> I don't think it is safe to predict _any_ certainties in that region with those players for the future.  As Thomas Ricks said in the ending minutes of Losing Iraq, "..._I keep on thinking in terms of a Shakespearean tragedy. And I think we’re probably only in Act 4 right now. Act 5, you know, the bloody conclusion of Hamlet or Macbeth, still has not happened"_.
> 
> Pulling out the coalition and letting the region get 'sorted out' by the neighboring states, nations, etc may not be in the global communities best interest.



While you are most certainly right, *we* seem unable to muster the willpower or resources to do anything practical other than "let them sort it out". I suppose letting Russia get sucked into the mess and have the three competing hegemonic powers (Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran) take turns playing "whack a mole" against various insurgent groups, the Russians and each other (maybe the Chinese can be induced to come and play as well) at least gives us an opportunity to sit back and let others expend their blood and treasure, giving us the somewhat easier task of coming in at the end to clean up the mess.


----------



## CougarKing

Another attempt by the UN to not be seen as irrelevant:

Source: Vice News


> *The UN Security Council Is Trying to Cut Off the Islamic State's Funding — Again*
> 
> By Samuel Oakford
> December 18, 2015 | 7:10 am
> 
> The United Nations Security Council on Thursday unanimously approved a resolution aimed at further pinching the financial resources available to the Islamic State (IS), and cajoled governments to stand up to their existing obligations to target terrorist financing.
> 
> The afternoon session was chaired by US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who was joined by finance ministers from most other members — a Council first. In a rare display of unity, the resolution was jointly drafted by Russian and American diplomats, who tabled the lengthy 28-page text earlier this week. IS, everyone agreed, needs to be put out of business.
> 
> Reflecting on the shifting power rankings of global terror outfits, the council decided to change the name of a sanctions committee that for more than a decade bore only the terrorist organization al Qaeda's name. It will now be known instead as the "ISIL (Da'esh) and al-Qaida Sanctions List," leading with two alternative names of IS, which is also widely known as ISIS.
> 
> The resolution includes binding language requiring countries to implement asset freezes, travel bans, and arms embargoes on anyone listed under the renamed sanctions regime. But in a sign of how difficult it is to translate such votes into results, the text also expressed "concern about the lack of implementation" of three similar resolutions dating to 1999, and noted that many countries failed to sufficiently report on what measures they had taken to comply with them.
> 
> "This resolution is a critical step, but the real test will be determined by actions we each take after adoption," said Lew. "We need meaningful implementation, coordination, and enforcement from each country represented here, and many others."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Eye In The Sky

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> UN



 :boring:


----------



## CougarKing

The Pakistanis...who would readily supply the Saudis with nukes to face Iran, as mentioned in another thread

Diplomat



> *Understanding Pakistan’s Role in the Saudi-Led Anti-Terror Coalition
> 
> Islamabad is reportedly part of the new alliance. What might that mean?*
> Akhi 18
> By Akhilesh Pillalamarri
> December 19, 2015
> 
> According to recent reports, Pakistan is now part of a Saudi Arabia-led Islamic military alliance of 34 countries fighting terrorism in the Muslim world. Foreign Office spokesman Qazi Khalilullah confirmed this on Thursday, December 17, telling reporters, “Yes, we’re part of it.” Saudi Arabia announced the anti-terror alliance on Tuesday.
> 
> This news comes after initial confusion regarding the purpose and extent of this alliance, including in Pakistan itself. On Wednesday, just one day before Pakistan declared it was part of the Saudi alliance, its officials said otherwise, declaring that they had not been consulted by anyone in Saudi Arabia. Aizaz Chaudhry, Pakistan’s foreign secretary, told reporters on December 16 that he had asked his ambassador in Riyadh to discover how the “error” was made. By the next day however, these two diverging narratives were reconciled, with Khalilullah denying that Pakistan was “surprised” about its inclusion in the alliance, and insisting that Chaudhry had earlier “only said that Pakistan was ‘ascertaining details’ about the announcement.”
> 
> One possible explanation is that Pakistan genuinely did not know it was part of the Saudi-led alliance but changed its position to save face and shore up its ties with Saudi Arabia. The two countries are close, and it would seriously undermine the alliance in its infancy if Pakistan did not sign up. Additionally, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia both confirmed that they had been exchanging ideas on how to deal with terrorism prior to the announcement. It is also possible that the delay in Pakistan’s confirmation of membership was a function of internal debates in that country about joining the alliance, with the military establishment being more in favor than the civilian government, despite Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s close ties with Saudi Arabia. It is in fact quite possible that the confusion was due to the fact that the military took the decision to cooperate with Saudi Arabia without consulting with Pakistan’s civilian government. Pakistan’s military has never really ceded control over the country’s foreign and defense policies to the civilian government.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

While this is an article about American oil production, the real lesson here is that American producers can react quickly to market signals, and will probably keep the downward pressure on oil prices, much to the detriment of ISIS, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia (not to mention a big F.U. to the Russians). So long as the contestants are burring through resources faster than they can raise cash, the amount of mischief they can do to the West:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/12/26/fracklog-grows-as-producers-await-price-rebound/



> *Fracklog Grows as Producers Await Price Rebound*
> 
> These are grim days for oil producers. Europe’s oil benchmark is below $38 per barrel, a far cry from the $115 high water mark it set in June of last year. America’s benchmark is similarly depressed. For petrostates, the plunge that prices have taken over the past 18 months has pinched national budgets; in the private sector, oil companies are scrambling to find ways to stay profitable in the bearish market. Trimming capital expenditures is the most obvious way to try and get out of the red, but a number of U.S. shale firms are employing a more forward-looking tactic: drilling wells but not yet starting production, choosing instead to wait for prices to rebound before they get the crude flowing. The New York Times reports:
> 
> [Deferred completions]—known in the oil business as D.U.C.s (an acronym for drilled but uncomplete)—are a bet on higher oil prices than the current level of about $38 a barrel, which is about 60 percent lower than in summer 2014. They are viewed by oil executives as a way to hoard cash as service costs plummet and are a flexible lever to rapidly increase production whenever oil rises again. […]
> 
> But the incomplete wells are also another reason many analysts say a recovery in the oil price is nowhere in sight. Together the well backlog could produce as many as 500,000 barrels of oil a day, about the same amount of oil that Iran is expected to add to the glutted global market after it complies with the recent nuclear deal by the end of next year.
> 
> This “fracklog” has been growing all year long, and is in some way a product of one of the key features of shale drilling: the ability to rapidly increase or decrease production at wellheads. In contrast to more conventional oil projects which require larger capital outlays and investments, shale production requires relatively little infrastructure and time to get the crude flowing. Fracked wells also see output decline quite quickly, so the industry as a whole has been forced to become quick on its feet, capable of drilling and fracking the next well as soon as the current one is tapped.
> 
> Producers have found that, by drilling but not yet fracking shale formations, they can do all the heavy lifting on the front end and wait for prices to tick upwards before actually bringing the oil out of the ground. Thanks to sustained low crude prices, the American fracklog is quickly growing.
> 
> Looking ahead to next year, this array of unfracked wells, combined with the prospect of an oil output renaissance in sanctions-free Iran, promises to keep the global supply of crude well above demand. The world is swimming in oil, and as soon as prices inch back up, a new wave of American shale production will quickly come online and send prices back down again.


----------



## a_majoor

A look farther downrange. No a lot of attention seems to have been paid to the longer term goals of the players on the ground, which should be a big factor in determining what and how we in the West should be doing:

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2015/12/28/already-ending-or-just-getting-started



> *Already Ending or Just Getting Started?*
> BY RICHARD FERNANDEZ DECEMBER 27, 2015 CHAT 19 COMMENTS
> 
> Everybody's getting ready for the UN peace conference on Syria by preparing the political battlespace for advantage.  President Bashar al-Assad is turning the hideously ruined city of Homs into a political theme park showcasing the savage choices of the civil war by reconstructing the neighborhoods friendly to the regime while leaving the rest to pointedly rot.  The lesson, Assad hopes, is obvious.
> 
> The Russians, for their part, are busily rearranging the attendance list by killing off those whose presence Putin finds objectionable.  A few days ago, Moscow's aircraft killed "Zahran Allouch, the head of one of the most powerful Saudi-backed insurgent groups fighting against President Bashar Assad's government" in a precision strike.  The leader of Jaysh al Islam (“Army of Islam”) led one of the most powerful factions of the broad Salafi-jihadi coalition supported by Saudi Arabia.
> 
> Putin's airplanes were also busy blasting oil convoys allegedly selling ISIS' contraband in Turkey in a further effort to squeeze the Saudis even as the Kremlin was trying to split Erdogan off from the Gulf States.  The Turkish president, speaking to the Al Arabiya news agency, said he would not double-cross the West despite Russia's overtures.
> 
> it seems that the developments in Syria have affected the situation in Iraq. Syria, Iran, Iraq and Russia have formed a quartet alliance in Baghdad and asked Turkey to join, but I told President [Vladimir] Putin that I cannot sit alongside a president whose legitimacy is distrustful.
> That was good of him especially since the Obama administration has been in secret contact with Assad for years according to the Wall Street Journal, in a failed attempt to persuade him to step down.
> 
> The Obama administration pursued secret communications with elements of Syria’s regime over several years in a failed attempt to limit violence and get President Bashar al-Assad to relinquish power, according to U.S. and Arab officials.
> Early on, the U.S. looked for cracks in the regime it could exploit to encourage a military coup, but found few.
> 
> Obama may be in touch with Assad again since analysis of the UN peace conference draft resolution by National Interest shows that the parties in Geneva will principally argue over "President Assad’s future" a point some hope can be resolved through UN-supervised elections.
> 
> Some analysts counsel that, given the ferocity of the civil war, it would be unwise to bet on UN elections . Michael Knights in War on the Rocks argues the present civil war is just an undercard to the scheduled main event; that all the parties on the ground are warming up for the Big One leaving precious little interest for such Western concerns as "fighting ISIS" or worrying about humanitarian catastrophes.
> 
> The first priority of most actors is consolidating their control on the ground. The Kurds in Syria and Iraq are staking out their long-term territorial claims. Iranian-backed groups like Badr are carving out principalities in Iraqi areas like Diyala and Tuz Khurmatu. Abu Mahdi al-Muhadis, the most senior Iranian proxy in Iraq and a U.S.-designated terrorist involved in the deaths of U.S. and British troops, is seeking to quickly build the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) into a new permanent institution akin to a ministry, complete with budgets and infrastructure, in order to stave off the risk of demobilization after the Islamic State is gone. His ambition is no less than to grow a new parallel army equivalent to and subservient to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, boosting Iran’s efforts to take over Iraq’s political and religious leadership. ...
> 
> Local actors’ preparations for the next war — or, likely, wars — helps explain the slow progress of the battle against the Islamic State so far. Iraqi Kurdish leaders are open about the coming clash with Shia militias and other Baghdad-backed forces along the disputed boundary with federal Iraq. The Baghdad Operations Command continues to hold around half of the offensive-capable Iraqi military units in reserve in the capital despite the declining risk of an Islamic State attack on Baghdad. Why? To offset the risk posed by the Shia militias. The Kurds in Syria are readying for a future war against Turkey to preserve their de facto statelet along the Turkish–Syrian border. All these actors will use the weapons provided or captured during today’s war against the Islamic State to fight tomorrow’s wars against each other. ...
> 
> On one side is the “Axis of Resistance” — actors like Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian proxies in Iraq like Badr, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis’ Kataib Hezbollah. Russia has seemingly bet on that camp. ... In the other corner is a less cohesive but strengthening alliance that comprises Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the UAE.
> 
> If Obama's diplomatic train stops in Geneva the rest are bound for points further on. As Iyad El-Baghdadi eloquently put it: "the story of the Arab Spring is far from over" having only just begun.   The "Arab ancien régime, of which the Arab Spring signaled a rejection" is unfinished. "The Arab Spring is more than a wave of political uprisings launched in 2011. It’s an intergenerational shift whereby a new generation of youth rejected regimes built by tyrants from a previous era."
> 
> Putin, according to the New York Times, is preparing for the long trip by re-arming.  The Daily Beast reports the Russian strongman is extending its alliances by "seducing" Iraq's Sunni tribes.  Even the radical Islamists are looking past Geneva.  Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Qasim al Raymi argues a Syrian stalemate will prove that an Islamic State can only be built by first destroying America.
> 
> On Dec. 20, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a video featuring the group’s top leader (or emir), Qasim al Raymi. Sitting in front of a marker board, al Raymi delivers a nearly 20-minute lecture on jihad and the importance of confronting America. He claims that the US is the primary obstacle standing in the way of the jihadists’ quest to build a truly Islamic state.
> 
> Al Raymi describes the US as the “primary” and “real” enemy, because it supposedly props up the jihadists’ adversaries around the globe. ...
> 
> The AQAP chief criticizes attempts to establish an Islamic nation “in the abode war,” before sharia law can be fully implemented. This is undoubtedly a critique of AQAP’s rivals in Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Islamic State, which claims to rule over a “caliphate” covering large portions of Iraq and Syria even as it fights multiple actors.... Therefore, al Raymi argues, both he and other jihadists are obligated to “eliminate this obstacle” and “direct” their weapons against America.
> 
> In other words the jihad is again preparing to shift its attack to the West.  The administration's preparations for the coming challenge consists of doubling down on its old approaches, a strategy charmingly characterized as strategic patience. A flurry of recent pieces in flagship media has laid out the talking points: trust in the president. Rick Klein in ABC News describes the strident, panicked tone of the president's critics. "An anxious nation enters a political year with security and economic fears and with loud, angry voices dominating.
> 
> It suggests a quieter year for a humbled president -- yet still an ambitious and active one, with a rare window for governing presenting itself through the outside noise. ... He’ll be playing more defense than offense, preserving ground gained in those early, heady days of 2009 and 2010. ...
> 
> “The president has some more tricks up his sleeve,” said Bill Burton, a former White House aide who was among the first campaign workers hired by Obama when he launched his bid for the presidency. ... “The longer Donald Trump is in the mix, the more the vast majority of Americans are yearning for an adult in the national conversation,” Burton said.
> 
> Fred Kaplan at Slate takes up the idea that the public must defer to its betters and eat its spinach.  He reports that the administration believes its soaring triumphs have gone unappreciated by those who can only see the short term. "The potential for peace, prosperity, and global improvement, arising from his diplomatic achievements, is considerable, even transformative; but the results aren’t yet in ... President Obama sees his current poor ratings in polls as stemming from a failure to communicate. Aides say that he plans to spend more time next year explaining his policies and describing what he has been doing both to defeat ISIS abroad and to stop acts of terrorism at home."
> 
> The narrative is that a better sales job will calm the doubting Thomases down. The pitch appears to be: "Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?"
> 
> Completing the picture of a president wronged were two articles: a Reuters article announcing that the president was praying for persecuted Christians at Christmas and a Washington Post article describing how the president patiently endured the calumnies of his detractors through the power of his "Christian faith".  "His faith had been central to his identity as a new kind of Democrat who would bring civility to the country’s political debates by appealing to Republicans through the shared language of their Judeo-Christian values."
> 
> Yet what the administration might call "faith" might to from another point of view be seen as unyielding pride.  Naseem Nicholas Taleb and Gregory Treverton, writing in Foreign Policy argue that inflexible rigidity is often not a sign of strength, but of a fragility. Citing the Arab Spring Taleb points out that the weakest systems were those which could not adapt.
> 
> Many pundits argued that Syria’s sturdy police state, which exercised tight control over the country’s people and economy, would survive the Arab Spring undisturbed. Compared with its neighbor Lebanon, Syria looked positively stable. ... But appearances were deceiving: today, Syria is in a shambles, with the regime fighting for its very survival, whereas Lebanon has withstood the influx of Syrian refugees and the other considerable pressures of the civil war next door. ...
> 
> Syria’s biggest vulnerability was that it had no recent record of recovering from turmoil. Countries that have survived past bouts of chaos tend to be vaccinated against future ones. Thus, the best indicator of a country’s future stability is not past stability but moderate volatility in the relatively recent past.
> 
> By this measure the Obama administration's dogged persistence is not the sanctum of adulthood it pretends to be, but the expression of brittleness. Taleb says that "simply put, fragility is aversion to disorder. Things that are fragile do not like variability, volatility, stress, chaos, and random events, which cause them to either gain little or suffer."
> 
> The Obama administration's penchant for actively doing nothing, what it calls "leading from behind" and doubling down suggests it is a one trick pony. Yet in fairness to the administration the five markers of fragility that Taleb enumerates apply even more closely to the other actors in the international drama.  Europe, China and Russia may be even more fragile than America.
> 
> The first marker of a fragile state is a concentrated decision-making system. ... The second soft spot is the absence of economic diversity. ... The third source of fragility is also economic in nature: being highly indebted and highly leveraged. ... The fourth source of fragility is a lack of political variability. Contrary to conventional wisdom, genuinely stable countries experience moderate political changes, continually switching governments and reversing their political orientations. ... The fifth marker of fragility takes the proposition that there is no stability without volatility a step further: it is the lack of a record of surviving big shocks. ...
> 
> When it comes to overall fragility, countries can vary from exhibiting no signs of fragility to being very fragile.
> 
> Saudi Arabia is an easy call: it is extremely dependent on oil, has no political variability, and is highly centralized. Its oil wealth and powerful government have papered over the splits between its ethnoreligious units, with the Shiite minority living where the oil is. For the same reason, Bahrain should be considered extremely fragile, mainly on account of its repressed Shiite majority.
> 
> Saudi Arabia's possible fragility may be one reason why Putin is tap-tap-tapping at the foundations of the kingdom. The outlook for 2016 suggests a world struggling to come to terms with a situation that has shifted under its feet, caught up in a crisis it will not recognize.  The forces unleashed during during the "heady days" of 2009 and 2010, far from coming under control are continuing to build their momentum.  The administration has really given up and is going through the motions of preserving a system that is gone.  It is like a dinosaur park supervisor hiding behind a pickup truck in the hope an escaped monster won't notice it. Maybe the monster will pass it by.  But then again, maybe not.


----------



## CougarKing

"The Force" wins out over fatwas...  [Xp

CBC


> *Muslims tell ISIS they'd rather see Star Wars than fight in Syria
> [CBC]*
> CBC
> December 28, 2015
> 
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> Yet, many Muslims didn't quite see the point in joining ISIS. Instead, they responded with sarcasm, saying that they're simply too busy to head all the way down to the Middle East.
> 
> It was Boxing Day after all, and you can't miss those sales.
> 
> 
> ... or a nice meal with your family.
> 
> Others hadn't seen the new Star Wars film yet, and they definitely couldn't go and join ISIS before seeing that.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

As stated in the Iran thread, there's a diplomatic furor occurring between the Saudis and Iranians after the execution of that Shia cleric in Saudi Arabia, and the storming of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran:

Meanwhile proxies of this Islamic schism continue their fight in Yemen, with the Bahraini allies of the Saudis losing an F16:

Aviationist



> *Amateur video shows Bahraini F-16 already in flames before hitting the ground*
> Jan 04 2016 -
> By Dario Leone
> The Royal Bahraini Air Force (RBAF) has lost one of its F-16s performing a mission to support the Saudi-led air offensive in Yemen.
> 
> The Bahrain Defence Force (BDF) General Command reported that am RBAF‘s F-16 jet went down in Jizan province, Saudi Arabia, on Dec. 30, 2015, while it was undertaking the national duty of defending the kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)’s southern borders as part of the Saudi-led Arab Coalition’s “Operation Decisive Storm” and “Operation Restore Hope.”
> 
> The pilot safely ejected from the aircraft and investigations are underway to determine the cause of the incident.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Kirkhill

An interesting piece of Kurdish speculation.....



> the head of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies in Jeddah, Dr. Anwar Eshki – former adviser to the king, Salman bin Abdul Aziz- at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC on 8-June in 2015.
> 
> During his lecture entitled “Regional Challenges and Opportunities: The View from Saudi Arabia and Israel”, he said that the *stability of the region requires many things such as”the achievement of peace between the Arabs and Israel, changing the political regime in Iran and establishing an Arab force in the region with the blessing of America and Europe, to protect the Gulf and Arab countries and preserve stability in the region… work to create a Greater Kurdistan by peaceful means because it would alleviate the Iranian, Turkish and Iraqi ambitions, which carves a third of each of these countries in favor of the Kurdistan, “*.
> 
> According to Anwar Eshki’s statement, the formation of this alliance was planned afore, because this debate was on June 8, 2015, several months ago. It seems, as well, that Saudi Arabia has changed its foreign policy in the Middle East towards Israel, Iran and the Kurds. Nowadays, Saudi Arabia therefore, is considering the establishment of a Kurdish state in the interest of the Arab countries, especially the Gulf countries. Anwar Eshki argued that Iran’s agenda is to expand its influence in the Arab world; it has been recruiting Shiites in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. As for Yemen, it has recruited the former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthis to achieve this purpose. Therefore, the formation of this alliance is part of the preparations taken by Saudi Arabia to face Iran’s influence in the region, which threatens Saudi Arabia. In addition, Saudi Arabia leads already the Arab coalition in Yemen for the same purpose.
> 
> Thus, according to the new Saudi policy towards the Kurds, the establishment of a Kurdish state becomes a goal of the Islamic Alliance, led by Saudi Arabia. The recent invitation by King, Salman bin Abdulaziz to President Massoud Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq to visit Saudi Arabia, and the hospitality that this latter received can only be translated or and interpreted into this new Saudi policy towards the Kurds in the Middle East.



So, if true the new Saudi policy calls for a Sunni Hegemony in the Middle East, regime change in Iran, accommodation with Israel  and sacrificing Turkish, Iranian and Iraqi land - all with Sunni troops fighting with the support of the US and the EU.

Interesting.

http://ekurd.net/saudi-islamic-alliance-kurdish-state-2015-12-27


----------



## CougarKing

The fallout from the Iran-Saudi rift continues:

Canadian Press



> *After Saudi-Iran cut, kingdom's allies start scaling down their ties to Iran as tensions soar*
> [The Canadian Press]
> 
> January 4, 2016
> 
> TEHRAN, Iran - Allies of Saudi Arabia followed the kingdom's lead and on Monday began scaling down their diplomatic ties to Iran in the wake of the ransacking of Saudi diplomatic missions in the Islamic Republic, violence that was sparked by the Saudis' execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.
> 
> The tiny island kingdom of Bahrain announced it would sever its ties completely from Iran, as Saudi Arabia did late on Sunday.
> 
> Within hours, the United Arab Emirates announced it would downgrade its own diplomatic ties to Tehran, bringing them down to the level of the charge d'affaires and would from now on focus entirely on the business relationships between the two countries.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

A look at some of the issue with Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is quite brittle, and tensions between members of the Royal family may cause more trouble within the Kingdom and prevent them from taking effective action against external enemies (or give external enemies more traction):

http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/01/risks-of-more-saudi-arabia-and-iran.html



> *Risks of more Saudi Arabia and Iran conflicts and risks of a splintered Saudi Arabia*
> 
> Saudi Arabia has become the focus of a lot of potential bad scenarios.
> 
> Hot and cold war conflicts with Iran could get worse.
> Saudi Arabia could splinter.
> 
> Executions in Saudi Arabia was - Saudi Arabia saying, 'The gloves are off,'"
> 
> There is now no hope of diplomatic solution in Syria or Yemen.
> 
> Saudi Arabia put together a coalition to fight in Yemen.
> Saudi Arabia has put together an anti-terrorism (aka anti Iran and anti-Syria) group
> 
> Saudi Arabia is the fifth of Eurasiagroup Top Ten 2016 Risks
> 
> The Saudi kingdom will face growing and destabilizing discord within the royal family this year, and will be increasingly isolated internationally. This will lead Saudi rulers to act more aggressively in their near-abroad and will further heighten instability in the Middle East.
> 
> The threat of intra-royal family strife is on the rise. A scenario of open conflict, unimaginable prior to King Salman’s January 2015 ascension, has now become realistic. The core problem is that Salman has moved boldly to empower his 30-year old son, Mohammed bin Salman, almost certainly in preparation to make him heir apparent, fueling frustration among competitors within the royal family. This rivalry is unlikely to lead to near-term Saudi collapse, but the credibility of this scenario—and the general trend of growing instability—in a nation critical to the global economy make it a top risk.
> 
> Salman’s radical reshaping of power within the family is happening in a Saudi Arabia grappling with $40 oil, negative demographics, and an undiversified economy. The era of power-sharing among a small number of brothers has been replaced with one in which a shrinking pie is divvied up among hundreds of cousins. The risk is that a group of princes could strike back by attempting to oust bin Salman from his position as deputy crown prince, or by publicly opposing the king. Political instability in a country that produces roughly 10.5% of global oil production would pose significant risk to every market participant.
> 
> Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is more geopolitically isolated than at any other point in the last several decades. The announcement of a Sunni “Islamic military alliance” is mostly window dressing. Members of this diverse group don’t have the political will or mutual trust to develop a military arm to confront the Islamic State, and several of them, including Pakistan, apparently didn’t know they’d joined when the alliance was first announced. That aside, even the most deafening declaration of political collaboration can’t obscure the fact that Saudi Arabia is losing influence over its historic Sunni allies
> 
> Riyadh’s Egyptian and Pakistani partners dodged requests to support the kingdom’s military intervention in Yemen. Key Gulf Cooperation Council states (and ostensible Saudi allies) are hedging their positions in relation to an ever more influential Iran. OPEC is in shambles. Egypt has backed Moscow’s pro-Assad intervention in Syria, directly opposing the kingdom. Turkey hews to a position closer to Riyadh’s, but is also an increasingly infuriating competitor for leadership of the Sunni world. The Iran deal and US response to the Arab Spring leave Saudi leaders questioning the depth of America’s commitment to their security
> 
> The key source of Saudi anxiety is Iran. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, views escalating tensions against the Saudi kingdom as a particularly useful way to whip up political support at home. The threat will intensify because, soon to be free of sanctions, Iran’s economy will strengthen, and its government will have more money to spend in support of regional clients. And unlike Saudi Arabia’s, Tehran’s alliances are consolidating: Iraq is drawing closer, and it is likely Assad will be around a good while longer.
> 
> A more isolated Saudi Arabia will double down on protecting its interests, and will be sorely tempted to act upon the saying that offense is the best defense in 2016. Riyadh will continue to support anti-Assad rebels in Syria, and ramp up that aid, despite the opposition’s inability to effectively challenge the Syrian president. Even a shooting war with Iran is possible in extremis; the kingdom will push back wherever it views Tehran to be gaining an advantage. More generally, expect an isolated and domestically weaker kingdom to lash out in new ways.


----------



## CougarKing

Apparently the "obvious" isn't so obvious to certain US politicians, when the Saudi-led Sunni Muslim coalition see the Iranian-led Shia "heretics" as the greatest immediate threat, not ISIS. 

Defense News



> *US Presidential Candidates Want a Sunni Arab Coalition to Fight ISIS. They Need a Reality Check.
> 
> America deems ISIS a major threat, but to Saudi Arabia and Gulf states the priority is Iran.*
> 
> By Joe Gould
> 
> WASHINGTON — Several US presidential candidates from both parties share a bullet point in their plans to fight the Islamic State group while limiting American ground troops’ involvement: Build a coalition of Sunni Arab nations to help shoulder the effort.
> 
> Unfortunately, there is a wide gap between this attractive idea and the muddy reality of Middle Eastern politics.
> 
> Candidates differ on the number of US ground troops to send, if any, and the establishment of a US-patrolled no-fly zone in Syria, or whether the US should force out President Bashar al-Assad.
> 
> But Sunni Arab involvement in the fight — a key tenet of the Obama administration’s plan — has also been voiced by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side, and by Sens. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul on the Republican side. (Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who quit the race Dec. 21, also voiced this view.)
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

I'd actually say the Saudis and Gulf States view ISIS as a useful tool in order to apply pressure on Iran's proxies like Syria and Hezbollah fighters, and would not be in the least surprised to see ISIS mobilized to start making strikes directly against Iran proper (even now ISIS is fighting Iranian Quds force troops, and being attacked by Iranian air force jets, so the setup conditions are already there).


----------



## CougarKing

ISIS's intolerance for failure may actually thin their ranks as well:

Fox News



> *ISIS burns fighters alive for letting Ramadi fall*
> 
> By Hollie McKay Published January 12, 2016 FoxNews.com
> 
> ISIS fighters who fled to the terror group’s Iraqi stronghold of Mosul after being defeated in Ramadi were burned alive in the town square, sources told FoxNews.com, in an unmistakable message to fighters who may soon be defending the northern city from government forces.
> 
> “They were grouped together and made to stand in a circle,” a former resident of northern Iraq now living in the U.S. but in touch with family back home told FoxNews.com. “And set on fire to die.”
> 
> Several Iraqi-Americans and recent refugees with close relatives in Mosul told of ISIS fighters fresh off defeat in Ramadi being shunned – and executed – for not fighting to the death in Ramadi.
> 
> Michael Pregent, a terrorism expert and former intelligence adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, said such an act isn’t new for the callous terror group. A similar fate was meted out to fighters who lost Saddam’s hometown to Kurdish forces last year.
> 
> “There is no surprise on executing ISIS fighters from Ramadi,” he said. “They did the same to fighters after Tikrit.”



Plus, more on Pakistan's role in helping the Saudi-led Sunni coalition:

Defense News



> *Pakistan Would Defend Saudi Territory, But Not Join Coalition*
> By Awad Mustafa 2:17 p.m. EST January 12, 2016
> 
> DUBAI — Despite Pakistan's assertion that it will defend Saudi Arabia's territorial integrity militarily, it still may not provide any troops to the Saudi-announced Islamic counterterrorism military coalition.
> 
> During a visit to Pakistan on Sunday by Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Pakistani Chief of Army Staff Gen. Raheel Sharif asserted that any threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity would be answered by a strong response.
> 
> “Pakistan holds its defense ties with the kingdom in highest esteem, reasserting that any threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity would evoke a strong response from Pakistan,” Raheel said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The latest atrocity:

CNN



> *ISIS fighter executes own mother in Syria for 'apostasy,' rights groups say*
> 
> By Hamdi Alkhshali and Ben Brumfield, CNN
> 
> Updated 11:59 AM ET, Fri January 8, 2016
> 
> (CNN)An ISIS fighter has executed his own mother before a public audience, an expat Syrian rights group said.
> 
> The 20-year-old killed his mother in the Syrian city of Raqqa, ISIS' de facto capital, as hundreds looked on near the post office where she worked, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
> 
> ISIS had accused her of apostasy after her son turned her in, the activists said. She allegedly had been "inciting her son to leave the Islamic State." She wanted to escape with him and told him "that the coalition will kill all members of the organization."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

Last week's news.  I doubt Allah will approve.


----------



## Kat Stevens

I've seen this movie, friggin barbarians.


----------



## CougarKing

Aside from today's terror attacks in Jakarta, Indonesia, mentioned in the another thread, ISIS is also gaining ground in Malaysia?

Source: Diplomat



> *How Serious is the Islamic State Threat in Malaysia?
> 
> A brief look at the bigger picture in the wake of recent incidents.*
> 
> By Prashanth Parameswaran
> January 14, 2016
> 
> In the opening weeks of 2016, Malaysia has been grappling with a series of reports suggesting that the threat from the Islamic State (IS) is rising.
> 
> As I reported for The Diplomat, on January 11 the New Straits Times disclosed that two Malaysian suicide bombers linked to IS had blown themselves up in Syria and Iraq in the last two weeks, killing more than 30 others (See: “Malaysian Islamic State Suicide Bombers Kill More Than 30 in Middle East”). Apart from the impact of the acts themselves, the incidents – confirmed by Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein Thursday – also suggested a troubling trend of a growing role for Malaysians within IS.
> 
> Meanwhile, within Malaysia, a 16-year old male dressed in an Islamic-State style outfit held a woman at knifepoint in the northern state of Kedah. *While the individual was arrested by police, the incident highlighted the real risk of lone-wolf attacks in the country which Malaysian officials have continued to stress.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The competing agendas of the Shia and Sunni Muslim regional powers in Afghanistan are examined in this article:

Diplomat



> *Iran and Saudi Arabia in Afghanistan
> 
> For the religious rivals, Afghanistan is another front in the fight for influence.*
> By Rustam Ali Seerat
> January 14, 2016
> 
> Last August, I attended a conference in Kashmir. On the way to Srinagar, in the hilly areas of the Kashmir valley, I saw billboards of Iran’s supreme leaders Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei lining the streets. As a Shia from Afghanistan, this reminded me of years ago when I was a child, and Ruhollah Khomeini’s picture was hanging on the walls of my home while my uncle, who had worked in a brick-making factory in Esfahan, Iran, would recite Khomeini’s sayings and poems. I grew up in a prominently Shiite-dominated area west of Kabul, where, on certain auspicious days, the roads of Kabul would be covered with pictures, billboards, flags and Shiite religious texts mostly printed in Iran.
> 
> After the fall of the Taliban in post-2001, violence targeting Afghanistan’s Shia population declined. That persisted until the Day of Ashura 2011, when more than 63 Shiites were killed in twin suicide bombings in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif. Now, concerns about emerging sectarian violence are again rising due to the country’s increasing Islamic State (ISIS) presence and the ever-increasing series of kidnappings and murders targeting the Hazara Shia community.
> 
> Religious tensions has surged in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia executed a prominent Shia cleric, along with 46 other political prisoners. Following the executions, angry crowds attacked the Saudi consulate in Mashahad and its embassy in Tehran. In response, the Saudi government cut diplomatic relations with Iran, with several Saudi allies following suit.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Rifleman62

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/18/obama-too-cautious-in-bombing-isis-former-war-plan/

*Obama too cautious in bombing Islamic State, former war planners say*

By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Monday, January 18, 2016

Amid the 25th anniversary of the devastating Desert Storm air war, the Obama administration is bombing the Islamic State terrorist army so carefully that commanders are falling well short of enemy destruction allowed by international law.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, a key planner of both the Desert Storm air campaign and the invasion of Afghanistan, says he realizes that the hundreds of daily strikes against Iraq, which kicked off on Jan. 16, 1991, are not required today to dismantle the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS.

But he said that U.S. Central Command’s 17-month aerial war — of more than 500 days — is only averaging six U.S. strikes daily in Syria, where the Islamic State directs and exports its murder sprees. He said the command is adhering to a meticulous, zero civilian death objective, as if it were conducting a counterinsurgency against mostly tactical targets — when the enemy is actually a functioning state with many strategic targets.

“This nonsense that this is going to take years — it only takes years if you want it to take years,” Mr. Deptula, a former F-15 combat pilot, told The Washington Times. “We can put together an operation that can have such a devastating impact on the Islamic State. It would cause them to stop being able to function as they have been.”

Mr. Deptula said international law acknowledges that some civilian, or collateral, casualties will happen when legitimate military targets are hit. As a seasoned air war planner, Mr. Deptula is an authority on what an air force may and may not do under the laws of armed conflict, which derive from the 1949 Geneva Conventions and subsequent amendments.

The U.S. owns the most precise satellite- and laser-guided munitions, unleashed by the world’s most advanced warplanes. Yet Mr. Deptula has watched in frustration as the Obama team put in place rules of engagement so strict that critical operations in Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s nerve center, go untouched.

PHOTOS: BOOM! U.S. military turns ISIS targets to rubble

Meanwhile, the Islamic State keeps killing people, meaning a light air campaign is actually leading to more civilians deaths, not fewer, he argues.

“The logic that is being applied with these excessive restrictions is actually creating greater civilian casualties because it has allowed the Islamic State to exist and to continue their heinous operations of killing innocent men, women and children,” Mr. Deptula said. “Drawing out of a campaign, with the anemic, absolutely ridiculous low level of effort that [has] been conducted, is creating greater civilian casualties.”

Told of complaints by Mr. Deptula and other former war planners, Air Force Col. Patrick S. Ryder, a Central Command spokesman, told The Times:

“The Desert Storm air campaign was very different from the current Operation Inherent Resolve air campaign to defeat ISIL. In Desert Storm we were fighting against a conventional army who operated in large, massed formations with a very hierarchical Iraqi military chain of command. ISIL, however, is a hybrid force — employing conventional tactics but also operating like an insurgency, hidden among the population and putting innocent civilians at great risk.

“As has been the case from the beginning of this campaign, we have continued to strike ISIL targets wherever we’ve seen them, and we continue to put intense pressure on the terrorist group in numerous locations — to include Raqqa. As indigenous anti-ISIL ground forces continue to make progress on the ground against ISIL, the intelligence and information we’ve gleaned from this has allowed us to keep up the momentum in our strikes and significantly impact ISIL’s command and control capability, logistics, infrastructure, financial resources and capacity to conduct offensive operations.”

Targeting oil trucks

The Obama administration has left the power on in Raqqa, and apparently has spared a network of operations centers that includes the Islamic State’s vaunted social media propaganda that draws in foreign fighters.

Said Mr. Deptula: “I can tell you, the headquarters buildings, the buildings in which they administer their finances, control their oil production, their electricity generations, their prison system, their police system — those are all physical locations in Raqqa that have not been struck as a result of this zero civilian/collateral damage standard.

“They have been going through excess amounts of time and analysis to determine whether or not a target can be struck to achieve zero civilian casualties. You can understand from that standard that, therefore, there are many, many, many targets that are critical to allowing the Islamic State its ability to operate,” he said.

The frustration of American fighter pilots has leaked out in a few emails. They tell of holding fire until they receive permission to attack, only to see the targets disappear, or their aircraft run low on fuel, forcing their return to base — ordnance still in place.

No target set has come to symbolize the painstaking air war more than the Islamic State’s fleet of oil trucks, from which it derives much of its cash on hand. The tankers were off limits until two months ago, and still pilots must go through several steps to ensure the drivers are given a chance to run.

“Are you kidding me?” said Mr. Deptula. “We spend 15 months before we start hitting oil trucks because we were concerned about notifying the drivers they might be the subject of an attack. That’s not a requirement in the laws of armed conflict. Why did we wait 15 months to do that? Meanwhile, you’ve pumped over $600 million dollars into the coffers of the Islamic State to allow them to conduct their crimes against humanity.”

Ex-fighter jockeys in Congress also have vented when Defense Secretary Ashton Carter testified about counter-Islamic State strategy.

At a House Armed Services Committee hearing last month, Rep. Martha McSally, a former Air Force A-10 pilot and the first U.S. female pilot to fly into combat, recalled air power seminars that called for the maximum strikes possible.

“You identify those centers of gravity or critical capabilities and vulnerabilities, and then you unleash American air power that overwhelmingly goes after them,” said Ms. McSally, Arizona Republican. “We’re just now realizing oil trucks are moving. It’s been reported from the very beginning. I’m deeply concerned about the lack of using American air power for all it brings to the fight.”

Six airstrikes a day

Last month Mr. Carter also appeared before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and ran up against its incredulous chairman, Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and a Navy combat pilot and POW in Vietnam.

Mr. Carter said it was only recently that the command developed the intelligence on how to identify oil trucks, but Mr. McCain apparently wasn’t buying the defense chief’s explanation.

“We knew those fuel trucks were moving back and forth,” the senator said. “We saw them through ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance], and the decision was not made in the White House to attack them or not. You can’t tell me they were moving all that stuff back and forth for over a year and we didn’t know about it. I mean, it’s just not possible given our technological capabilities.”

Mr. Carter, who has spoken this month of accelerating the war against the Islamic State by injecting more special operations troops into Iraq and Syria, explained the overall targeting philosophy.

“We have and continue to try to withhold attacks upon that part of the general infrastructure — energy, electricity, water, etc. — that is also necessary for the people of Syria,” he testified. “And we’re trying to peel off that which ISIL uses and commands and controls for its own revenue source. We’re now able to make that distinction, which is what enabled the airstrikes.”

As of Jan. 10, Operation Inherent Resolve has unleashed 3,029 strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria by U.S. aircraft and 190 more by the allies. Over more than 500 days, the pace works out to an average of a little less than six strikes a day.

In Desert Storm, the first air war to feature precision-guided weapons, the U.S. conducted about 1,200 strikes daily over 43 days against Saddam Hussein’s far-flung military, security and industrial complex. The campaign also took out power generation.

Mr. Carter told the Senate committee that commanders had ramped up air attacks on oil-related targets.

“Because of improved intelligence and understanding of ISIL’s operations, we’ve intensified the air campaign against ISIL’s war-sustaining oil enterprise, a critical pillar of ISIL’s financial infrastructure,” he testified. “In addition to destroying fixed facilities like wells and processing facilities, we’ve destroyed nearly 400 of ISIL’s oil tanker trucks, reducing a major source of its daily revenues. There’s more to come, too.”

Copyright © 2016 The Washington Times


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Yes, what a horrible thing to do, to try to minimize to the very lowest possible number, the innocent casualties.  Hopefully ZERO.  You fuckin' morons.  

Why would 'we' do that to women and kids who are effectively helpless to escape the battlespace and are being used as human shields?  There's no debate in my mind if this is happening.  There shouldn't be in anyone's.  If there is, take my word for it.  It is happening.  

If ISIS kills people, they are responsible for that.  If we drop bombs on kids and women and elderly and the sick, we are responsible for that.  If we do that, knowingly kill innocent people, how the fuck are we any better than ISIS? 

It's not the Gulf War, or the 2003 (re) invasion, and the US already fucked the region up enough, you think they'd learn from their goddamn mistakes. 



> “The Desert Storm air campaign was very different from the current Operation Inherent Resolve air campaign to defeat ISIL. In Desert Storm we were fighting against a conventional army who operated in large, massed formations with a very hierarchical Iraqi military chain of command. ISIL, however, is a hybrid force — employing conventional tactics but also operating like an insurgency, hidden among the population and putting innocent civilians at great risk.



Pretty clear and accurate to me.  Maybe Deptula would get this if he was still in and had been in theatre, instead of judging from the sidelines based on shit that went down in 1991.  Get over it, you'r retired.  Take up lawn bowling or something.  

Last point, you can drop all the shit you want, until ground forces move in and clear each block, street, and village, ISIS is going to be there.  Air power is an enabler, not the end all be all.  Hitler wasn't defeated over a weekend either.

I think I know their mentality, though, judging by that article.  Major Harry Schmidt comes immediately to my mind...


----------



## Edward Campbell

I am one of those who, fairly routinely, suggests that "Islam is incompatible with democracy," at least with the modern, liberal, secular sort of democracy we have.

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from _Al Jazeera_ is an interesting and thought provoking article which says that I'm wrong:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/01/arabs-eye-history-160119093305885.html


> Arabs in the eye of history
> *Five years that transformed the Middle East: What went right, how it's gone wrong and why it got so ugly*
> 
> 19 Jan 2016
> 
> Marwan Bishara, senior political analyst at Al Jazeera
> 
> When the Arab Spring swept through the Middle East five years ago, progress seemed inevitable and the contagion unstoppable. But then everything started to regress and now looks destined to go from bad to worse unless we identify why and how something so divine turned so ugly so fast.
> 
> Unfortunately, the most peddled answers one hears nowadays are also the most flawed.
> 
> In the Middle East, the conspiracy theorists blame the West's intervention and manipulation of a misguided Arab youth who bought into its subversive ideas. And in the West, smug, told-you-so cynics repeat the same derisive cliches: the Arabs are hopeless; Islam is incompatible with democracy.
> 
> Some see the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL) as proof of their scepticism of the democratic promise of the Arab Spring, and advocate support for Arab autocracy, proclaiming its security apparatuses the essential bulwark against chaos.
> 
> But that is a misreading of history.
> 
> *What went wrong?*
> 
> The Arab Spring was an authentic and potent response to United States neoconservative attempts to spread democracy on the back of US tanks. It showed the world that millions of Arabs, Christian and Muslim, are just as passionate as citizens of Western democracies are about the universal values of human rights, justice and political freedom. To claim otherwise is either ignorant, or racist.
> 
> If the young leaders of the Arab rebellion are at fault, it's not because they dared to act, but rather because they didn't act vigorously enough. For example, they failed to turn their slogans into political programmes and form political parties to rally the support of the wider public around their democratic vision.
> 
> Predictably, given the absence of a civil society space for opposition movements, when the grip of autocracy was breached, older and better-organised Islamist groups rushed to fill the void. Those groups failed to heed the sentiment expressed in the streets and squares of the Arab world.
> 
> Instead of embracing pluralism and strengthening the democratic process, the Islamists were seen as seeking to monopolise power, albeit through the ballot box.
> 
> But the fallout from the Islamist-secular divide could have been contained peacefully, as in Tunisia, if only the ancien regime had accepted the principle of peaceful transition towards a more just society and representative democracy. It didn't. As expected.
> 
> *How it got so ugly*
> 
> The old political, business and military elites - the so-called "deep state" - worked to subvert the democratic process and resorted to extreme violence in the cases of Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt, in the belief that they could bludgeon their way back to stability.
> 
> When that didn't work, they redefined their oppression, as a much-needed anti-terror campaign.
> 
> And ISIL was more than happy to provide the alibi for dictators to continue to repress their people. If ISIL didn't exist, it would have been necessary to invent it. But was that really the case?
> 
> Meanwhile, the region continues to unravel at terrible cost of life and property because defenders of the status quo have failed to grasp the historic transformation their repression has helped to trigger.
> 
> What began as peaceful calls for freedom, justice and jobs became revolutionary challenges that exposed the rottenness of the post-colonial regional order of Arab states.
> 
> The failure of the Arab Spring to transform those states peacefully has quickened the erosion of the entire system of the post-colonial nation state. Not necessarily a bad thing if it led to region-wide Arab unity, but in reality, it is creating new rifts within the colonial partitions.
> 
> By eschewing a relatively painless path towards political change, the security states put the region on a course towards a more painful transition. Chaos and insecurity have pushed people to seek refuge in tribal, ethnic and other primordial affiliations that undermine state legitimacy and threaten to reshape the entire region. It's a process that started in Iraq after the US invasion of the country in 2003.
> 
> Powers beyond the pale
> 
> The region is now in the throes of what Condoleezza Rice, George Bush's secretary of state, memorably (if mistakenly at the time) called "the birth pangs of a new Middle East".
> 
> And there is a lot of blame to go around for the region's descent into a series of interlocking ethnic and sectarian proxy wars. Especially those players with high stakes and few scruples, such as those ruling in Moscow and Tehran.
> 
> But unlike Western powers, Russia and Iran never claimed to support or stand for the values and aspiration of the Arab Spring. Indeed, they have been consistently dead set against them.
> 
> However, US President Barack Obama, who has been marked by his predecessor's military blunders and preoccupied by negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme, has insisted that no good can come of intervening in distant civil wars. And while he may be right, there is much the West could have done to stop the deterioration and reduce the pain.
> 
> For example, the US could have acted early and decisively against ISIL before it exploited the chaos and entrenched itself in vast areas of Iraq and Syria, by providing sufficient support to the secular or so-called moderate opposition.
> 
> He should have at least spoken forcefully in defence of the oppressed Egyptian youth, and helped to impose a no-fly zone to protect the Syrian people from the daily barrel bombings.
> 
> As the US and others held back, the situation deteriorated dangerously, the death toll rose and the prospects for a decent outcome dimmed.
> 
> Obama's hesitation on Syria was underscored by the lesson he said he had learned from the Libya debacle - that toppling a dictator without extensive, patient involvement in managing the aftermath was a recipe for an even more dangerous civil war.
> 
> After five years of turmoil and bloodshed and 50 years of dictatorships, one might not expect the West to act decisively in the spirit of the Arab Spring, but at least to refrain from selling expensive military hardware, as the US and France have done to the likes of the bankrupt Egyptian regime.
> 
> *Silver lining*
> 
> But the US and Russia are not paying attention.
> 
> Neither Egyptian General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, nor any of the regional dictators such as Syria's Assad are able to restore stability or security, let alone bring prosperity to their peoples.
> 
> They have violently suppressed opposition with total impunity, but have failed to tame the spirit of change.
> 
> When Assad and Sisi held elections, the turnout figures show that Syrians and Egyptians voted with their feet. Their fall is only a matter of time, but the substitute or the alternative, it seems, will be transitional at best.
> 
> The Arab world is going through an historic transformation that is certain to take more time and many lives, alas. But judging from other similar experiences in other areas and eras, history is not on the side of violent tyrannies of the Arab region.
> 
> _Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.
> 
> The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy._




I agree that "millions of Arabs, Christian and Muslim, are just as passionate as citizens of Western democracies are about the universal values of human rights, justice and political freedom." But I reject the notion that I am either ignorant or racist because I believe that our sort of democracy depends upon cultural "institutions" ~ respect for the rule of law, for just one example, respect for common, community property, for another and belief in individual equality, for a third ~ that are weak to non-existent in the Arab world.


----------



## Good2Golf

> However, US President Barack Obama, who has been marked by his predecessor's military blunders and preoccupied by negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme, has insisted that no good can come of intervening in distant civil wars. And while he may be right, there is much the West could have done to stop the deterioration and reduce the pain.
> 
> *For example, the US could have acted early and decisively against ISIL before it exploited the chaos and entrenched itself in vast areas of Iraq and Syria, by providing sufficient support to the secular or so-called moderate opposition.
> 
> He should have at least spoken forcefully in defence of the oppressed Egyptian youth, and helped to impose a no-fly zone to protect the Syrian people from the daily barrel bombings.*
> 
> As the US and others held back, the situation deteriorated dangerously, the death toll rose and the prospects for a decent outcome dimmed.
> 
> *Obama's hesitation on Syria was underscored by the lesson he said he had learned from the Libya debacle - that toppling a dictator without extensive, patient involvement in managing the aftermath was a recipe for an even more dangerous civil war.
> *
> After five years of turmoil and bloodshed and 50 years of dictatorships, one might not expect the West to act decisively in the spirit of the Arab Spring, but at least to refrain from selling expensive military hardware, as the US and France have done to the likes of the bankrupt Egyptian regime.




*Damned if you do*, *damned if you don't*...

The author is a little thin on why the Muslim Brotherhood didn't, or wasn't able to replace the dictatorial power vacuum enough to keep ISIL and the like from gaining a foothold to develop...

G2G


----------



## CougarKing

Kudos to the Singapore security services for finding the threat and neutralizing it before it could do any damage: 

Diplomat



> *Singapore Cracks Down on Bangladeshi Terror Cell
> 
> The incident marks the first time a foreign jihadist terror cell has been uncovered in the city-state.*
> 
> By Rui Hao Puah
> January 21, 2016
> 
> On January 20, Singapore unveiled that it had uncovered a jihadist terror cell comprising Bangladeshi workers and had moved to arrest and deport the suspected militants. The incident marked the first time a foreign terror cell had been uncovered in the city-state.
> 
> According to Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, 27 male Bangladeshi nationals, all working the construction industry, were arrested under Singapore’s Internal Security Act (ISA) between Nov 16 and Dec 1, 2015. 26 of them have been repatriated to Bangladesh, with one remaining national serving a 12-week jail sentence in Singapore after attempting to leave the republic clandestinely. 14 of the 26 have been given jail sentences by a Dhaka Court on Dec 27 in a case filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act.
> 
> *All but one of the 27 arrested were reported to be members of a closed religious study group that supported armed jihad ideology of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). *The remaining Bangladeshi national was not a member of the group but was found in possession of jihadist-related material.  The 26 reportedly subscribed to the teaching of radical ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki, an Al-Qaeda linked extremist teacher who was killed in Yemen in 2011.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

They should have caned the crap out of them before they were deported.


----------



## McG

Saudi Arabia says it is ready to send ground forces into Syria if others agree to the same ... I believe the desired "others" would be western armies.  Meanwhile, Russia says that Turkey is visibly preparing an invasion.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/saudi-arabia-ready-to-send-ground-troops-to-syria-official-1.2765065


----------



## Altair

MCG said:
			
		

> Saudi Arabia says it is ready to send ground forces into Syria if others agree to the same ... I believe the desired "others" would be western armies.  Meanwhile, Russia says that Turkey is visibly preparing an invasion.
> 
> http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/saudi-arabia-ready-to-send-ground-troops-to-syria-official-1.2765065


Where in the world is Saudi Arabia going to find the money for this? 

Unless they're  hoping a wider conflict leads to a higher price of oil?

Don't get their end game here.


----------



## Good2Golf

Altair said:
			
		

> Where in the world is Saudi Arabia going to find the money for this?
> 
> Unless they're  hoping a wider conflict leads to a higher price of oil?
> 
> Don't get their end game here.



The still have about $0.6T in reserves and they just jacked gasoline prices by 50%....they still have a bit of room to go before they hit the floor.

G2G


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

MCG said:
			
		

> Saudi Arabia says it is ready to send ground forces into Syria if others agree to the same ... I believe the desired "others" would be western armies.  Meanwhile, Russia says that Turkey is visibly preparing an invasion.
> 
> http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/saudi-arabia-ready-to-send-ground-troops-to-syria-official-1.2765065



Great!  If their performance in Yemen is anything to go by, their Army should make it a couple of kilometres in to Syria before they get curb stomped and run back to Riyadh, tails firmly between their legs.


----------



## Altair

Good2Golf said:
			
		

> The still have about $0.6T in reserves and they just jacked gasoline prices by 50%....they still have a bit of room to go before they hit the floor.
> 
> G2G


Yes,  I know they still have a bit in reserve, but if I was them I would be saving every penny of it, not engaging in costly foreign ventures.


----------



## McG

Altair said:
			
		

> Don't get their end game here.


ISIS is a more direct threat to Saudi Arabia than it is to the west.  From the perspective of Saudi leadership, this would not be a foreign venture so much as a war of survival.


----------



## Altair

Weren't the Saudis funding isil to help topple assad?


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

The Saudis have been funding any group that endorses and seeks to impose the Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam, especially those who seek to impose it on their arch enemy Shia Islam.


----------



## McG

Altair said:
			
		

> Weren't the Saudis funding isil to help topple assad?


The phrase "blowback" was used to describe the US investments, into the Soviet-Afghan war, that provided catalyst/genesis for Al Qaeda.  Saudi Arabia now has its own blowback problem.


----------



## Edward Campbell

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> The Saudis have been funding any group that endorses and seeks to impose the Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam, especially those who seek to impose it on their arch enemy Shia Islam.




I think that in fairness to the actual Saudi government, we need to note that what the government, _per se_, funds, officially, is different from what is funded by any of the 6,000+ Saudi princes and princelings (and princesses, too) from their private share of the family fortune.

I have no brief for the House of Saud, in my opinion the world will be a better place when they're all in a mass grave, but there is some sort of "policy" at the very top which is, very often, scuppered by folks nearer to the bottom of the _Royal_ heap.


----------



## The Bread Guy

E.R. Campbell said:
			
		

> I think that in fairness to the actual Saudi government, we need to note that what the government, _per se_, funds, officially, is different from what is funded by any of the 6,000+ Saudi princes and princelings (and princesses, too) from their private share of the family fortune.


While that's _technically_ correct, this week, I listened to a BBC interview with an SA Interior Ministry official (with a general's rank) get asked about this.  He he said something to the effect of "there are laws in our country against financing terrorism."  If that's the case, giddyup, Saudi authorities!  ;D


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> While that's _technically_ correct, this week, I listened to a BBC interview with SA's Interior Ministry official (with a general's rank) get asked about this.  He he said something to the effect of "there are laws in our country against financing terrorism."  If that's the case, giddyup, Saudi authorities!  ;D



One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter


----------



## The Bread Guy

Humphrey Bogart said:
			
		

> One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter


I guess this is where authorities show "discretion", right?


----------



## Good2Golf

Altair said:
			
		

> Yes,  I know they still have a bit in reserve, but if I was them I would be saving every penny of it, not engaging in costly foreign ventures.




Don't necessarily disagree.  Was just answering your question.



			
				Altair said:
			
		

> Where in the world is Saudi Arabia going to find the money for this?


----------



## a_majoor

Times of India article on the scale and scope of Saudi funding of Madrassas overseas. Considering they are basically a springboard for inducting people into the cultural and religious teachings of the House of Saud and have been exploited to generate radicals to fight various "enemies" since the Afghan war of the 1980's, this seems to be a cost effective means of generating both fighters for the cause and "colonize" areas with Shia cultural values. Certainly this is more cost effective than developing nuclear weapons or conventional war, and is much more dispersed and harder to eradicate once it has taken root. The Saudis have mastered 4GW on a strategic scale:

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2016-01-30/news/70200925_1_saudi-arabia-wahhabi-islam-religious-schools



> *'Tsunami of money' from Saudi Arabia funding 24,000 Pakistan madrassas*
> PTI Jan 30, 2016, 11.21AM IST
> 
> WASHINGTON: About 24,000 'madrassas' in Pakistan are funded by Saudi Arabia which has unleashed a "tsunami of money" to "export intolerance", a top American senator has said adding that the US needs to end its effective acquiescence to the Saudi sponsorship of radical Islamism.
> 
> Senator Chris Murphy said Pakistan is the best example of where money coming from Saudi Arabia is funnelled to religious schools that nurture hatred and terrorism.
> 
> "In 1956, there were 244 madrassas in Pakistan. Today, there are 24,000. These schools are multiplying all over the globe. These schools, by and large, don't teach violence. They aren't the minor leagues for al-Qaeda or ISIS. But they do teach a version of Islam that leads very nicely into an anti-Shia, anti-Western militancy.
> 
> "Those 24,000 religious schools in Pakistan - thousands of them are funded with money that originates in Saudi Arabia," Murphy said in an address yesterday to the Council on Foreign Relations, a top American think-tank.
> 
> According to some estimates, since the 1960s, the Saudis have funnelled over USD 100 billion into funding schools and mosques all over the world with the mission of spreading puritanical Wahhabi Islam.
> 
> As a point of comparison, researchers estimate that the former Soviet Union spent about USD 7 billion exporting its communist ideology from 1920-1991.
> 
> "Less-well-funded governments and other strains of Islam can hardly keep up with the tsunami of money behind this export of intolerance," Murphy said.
> 
> "The uncomfortable truth is for all the positive aspects of our alliance with Saudi Arabia, there is another side to Saudi Arabia that we can no longer afford to ignore as our fight against Islamic extremism becomes more focused and more complicated," he said.
> 
> "The United States should suspend supporting Saudi Arabia's military campaign in Yemen, at the very least until we get assurances that this campaign does not distract from the fight against IS and al-Qaeda, and until we make some progress on the Saudi export of Wahhabism," he said.
> 
> Murphy demanded that Congress should not sign off on any more US military sales to Saudi Arabia until similar assurances are granted.
> 
> He said that the political alliance between the House of Saud - Saudi Arabia's ruling royal family - and orthodox Wahhabi clerics is as old as the nation, resulting in billions funnelled to and through the Wahhabi movement.
> 
> The vicious terrorist groups that Americans know by name are Sunni in derivation, and greatly influenced by Wahhabi and Salafist teachings, Murphy said adding that leaders of both Democratic and Republican parties should avoid the extremes of this debate, and enter into a real conversation about how America can help the moderate voices within Islam win out over those who sow seeds of extremism.


----------



## a_majoor

Former ISIS sex slaves out to take revenge. It occurs to me that the massive influx of armed women fighters from various groups fighting to survive will do more to change the perception of women and their place in society than any amount of pious rhetoric from Western "Feminists"

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/02/08/former-isis-sex-slaves-now-army-sun-ladies-ready-to-defeat-terror-group.print.html



> Former ISIS sex slaves now army of ‘Sun Ladies’ ready to defeat terror group
> By  Hollie McKay
> Published February 08, 2016
> FoxNews.com
> 
> ERBIL, Iraq –  They witnessed the slaughter of their families on Mount Sinjar, and then were forced by ISIS into sexual slavery. Now the “Sun Ladies” are ready to fight - for vengeance as well as survival.
> 
> Some 2,000 Yazidi women who were captured in the brutal August 2014 attack on their mountain stronghold have escaped and have taken up arms against their former tormentors. Driven by the fresh memories of unspeakable atrocities and the survival of their people, hundreds have signed up to fight the black-clad terrorist army.
> 
> 
> “Whenever a war wages, our women end up as the victims.”
> 
> - Capt. Khatoon Khider, Yazidi female fighter
> 
> “Now we are defending ourselves from the evil; we are defending all the minorities in the region,” Capt. Khatoon Khider told FoxNews.com from the unit’s makeshift base in Duhok, Iraq. “We will do whatever is asked of us.”
> 
> Khider is one of 123 Yazidi women who have undergone training and taken their place alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, as they skirmish almost daily with ISIS and prepare for a looming assault on the terrorist army’s Iraqi base in Mosul. The women range in age from 17 to 37, and there are another 500 who are awaiting training.
> 
> Khider, (r.), leads more than 100 Yazidi women, many of who escaped sexual slavery. On left is one of her fighters.
> 
> They call themselves the “Force of the Sun Ladies,” a name that reflects the culture’s solar reverence. Monotheistic and embracing elements of several religions, Yazidi once numbered 650,000 in Iraq, nearly all on the northern Nineveh Plain. ISIS’ genocidal campaign to “purify” Iraq of non-Muslims led to the slaughter of thousands and displaced at least 200,000.
> 
> “Women were throwing their children from the mountains and then jumping themselves because it was a faster way to die,” Khider recalled. “Our hands were all tied. We couldn’t do anything about it.
> 
> “Whenever a war wages, our women end up as the victims,” she added.
> 
> The Yazidi women are fighting for their people, and for revenge aganst the terrorists who enslaved them.
> 
> Some managed to escape when coalition forces pounded ISIS from the air and broke its siege of Mount Sinjar. But thousands starved to death or died of heatstroke, and ISIS later systematically killed men, as well as women, deemed too old or too young to be sold into sexual slavery. Boys who could be brainwashed and conscripted as child soldiers were kidnapped.
> 
> Women taken as captives were ordered to convert to Islam, subjected to forced marriages and repeatedly raped. Several escaped after being sold off to low-level fighters, while others were ransomed back to their families.
> 
> Khider had no experience with weapons or combat when she approached the Peshmerga senior command and proposed the idea of a specialized all-female Yazidi force after having survived the assault on Mount Sinjar. She hopes that in forming the force, the women will be able to protect themselves and inspire other minority groups to follow suit.
> 
> “Our elite force is a model for other women in the region,” she said. “We want to thank all the other countries who help us in this difficult time, we want everyone to take up weapons and know how to protect themselves from the evil.”
> 
> The women willfully stepped into the line of fire as a support force to the Peshmerga on Nov. 13, the day the Kurdish forces took back their hometowns and villages from ISIS occupation. The newly formed unit engaged in direct combat and later helped clear streets and buildings rigged with explosives.
> 
> As with the Christians, Kurds and Iraqi military, they know the imminent battle to retake Mosul will be the real test. Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul is the terrorist group’s regional base. Most of the Yazidi women who escaped ISIS were held in Mosul and can help provide valuable intelligence, as well as boots on the ground. And fighting to free those left behind provides added motivation.
> 
> “We have a lot of our women in Mosul being held as slaves,” Khider said. “Their families are waiting for them. We are waiting for them. The liberation might help bring them home.”
> 
> ISIS has taken girls as young as 8 and traded them at the market for a few dollars. One mother who gave birth while an ISIS slave told FoxNews.com she was not permitted by her captor to feed her newborn son. When the baby cried, the Muslim militant beheaded him, she said.
> 
> “It’s important to us to be able to protect our dignity and honor,” a 19-year-old “Sun Lady” named Mesa told FoxNews.com. “My family is very proud; they encouraged me to join.
> 
> “I’m very proud to protect my people,” she said. “And after all that has happened to us Yazidis, we are no longer afraid.”
> 
> But one prospect frightens the Yazidi women as they prepare to fight ISIS. Yazidi boys kidnapped from Mount Sinjar have been drugged and brainwashed, and could now be fighting their mothers and sisters under the black flag of ISIS.
> 
> “Now there will be terrorist Yazidis, something that never used to be,” Khider added. “But we have many missions left. We will do whatever is needed.”
> 
> Mylee Cardenas contributed to this report.


----------



## CougarKing

Something tells me they're more eager to fight Assad and Iran's other proxies supporting him, aside from the Russians. 

Defense News



> *Syria: 'Quicksand' for Saudi Forces?*
> By Awad Mustafa and Aaron Mehta, Defense News 10:03 a.m. EST February 14, 2016
> 
> DUBAI and BRUSSELS — As the United States receives commitments from Gulf Arab allies to contribute more to a coalition campaign in Syria, doubts remain because of their ongoing military involvement in Yemen.
> 
> Furthermore,* statements by unnamed Saudi officials earlier this month about a force of 150,000 — including troops from Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners Sudan, Egypt and Jordan — being prepared to invade Syria from Turkey have been rebuffed by at least two members of the anti-Islamic State coalition.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## McG

Jordan would seem a much easier stepping-off point for a gulf states land force.  The route to Turkey is over Iranian proxies, or through a Russian kill zone in the Mediterranean.


----------



## CougarKing

Turkey's own fears about the Kurds has the Turkish Army itching to step into Syria:

Canadian Press



> *Turkey pushes case for ground operations as Kurds advance*
> 
> Bassem Mroue And Philip Issa, The Associated Press
> The Canadian Press
> February 16, 2016
> 
> BEIRUT - Turkey said Tuesday it is pressing for ground operations in Syria, hoping for the involvement of the U.S. and other allies as a force dominated by Kurdish fighters pushed through rebel lines and captured more territory near the Turkish border.
> 
> In Damascus, the U.N. envoy to Syria suggested that humanitarian aid would be allowed into several besieged areas Wednesday, calling it the "duty of the government of Syria."
> 
> "Tomorrow we test this," Staffan de Mistura said after meeting with Syria's foreign minister. The U.N. later announced the government of President Bashar Assad has approved access to seven such areas across the country and that convoys would head out in the coming days.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

Smells too much like Bush's WMD agenda to me.


----------



## a_majoor

Commenter known as "Goat Guy" on NBF offers these observations on the situation:

http://api.solidopinion.com/seo/nbf/2016/02/iran-and-russia-to-co-produce-su-30.htmlseo.html



> Well… another way to look at it is, _The Mideast is Perpetually in a dynamic Conflict_ of interests, political power and territorial border claims…
> 
> Most of the borders are either (a) sand overlying more sand (and thus neither markedly contested, nor much of any concern) or (b) defining two sides of a critical resource.
> 
> If (B) then they are highly contested with skirmishes-to-wars being acted out in attempts to move (popularly, 'restore') them. If 90% of the oil is on THAT side, then THIS side is going to make claims and warring action to annex at least some of the stuff. Same could be said for water rights, highlands (good lookouts to preëmpt surprise attacks), mountain ranges and agriculturally useful tracts.
> 
> Now, it also must be understood that for the most part, all this perpetual warring is mostly in the better interest of the people of _“The West”_ who consume the product(s) of the Mideast. Oil, mostly. If one can keep them separate-but-warring, the money that the resources provides keeps the warring parties buying more stuff, and making more war. It unfortunately also raises the price of the petroleum (raw and refined), but the flow itself doesn't much waiver.
> 
> Historically - in the Age of Oil, or last 100 years - the _Great Sand Kingdoms_ such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and North Africa went from almost geopolitically sterile to central in world planning. Before Oil, what-all either came from the Islamic World, or for that matter could reasonably be sold to it?
> 
> Nothing much: there are only so many figs and dates, fake hieroglyphs and eccentric sandals that one can covet (on the buy side). And, tho' one might really want to sell them the Fruits of the Technological West (cars, trucks, pumps, pipes, transformers and electric appliances, computers and business equipment), any people known as _“the market”_ must at the very least have _“money”_. Which, without something hugely desired, of value, and ready supply, they're not going to have.
> 
> So, Before Oil, the Sand Kingdoms … were the sand kingdoms. Without any irony, one should note that even on the most detailed and reputed maps of the Mideast of say "1850", the political borders between nations and/or peoples were pencilled in, using dotted lines. No one knew the details. Not even the natives, and moreover they didn't much care. Sand … divided into north, south, east and west … remains sand.
> 
> Now however, things are much, much, much different. The sand kingdoms are no longer the sand kingdoms. They're full of decades - yea nearly a century - of intense economic investment into their cities, towns, wadis and turegs. Most of the region's cities are almost parables of the flowers that burst forth after sudden Spring desert rains. Brilliant, unrestrained, show-offs trying to attract what few bees and pollinators might be around for the fun. But … when the water evaporates, or percolates with inevitability into the desert sands, just as fast to dry up, to become indistinguishable from the sand itself.
> 
> At present the Mideast has gone a LONG time without an existential war. The conflict in Iraq - as widely covered and photographically documented as it was - hardly impacted the region's ability to pump oil. It changed no political country border line. It rooted out some of the theologically inspired forces, and upturned the basket of snakes. But it didn't materially degrade the ability of the Mideast to pump, pump, and pump oil.
> 
> RUSSIA is making a power-play for Syria, Iran and perhaps large sectors of Iraq. It is almost inevitable since the United States influence on the region is only short-term. Russia hopes to assert control-rights over Mideast oil, and it may well do this. It also has significant material interest in fomenting _East versus West_ military conflict in the region. Selling tanks, planes, bullets and bombs … is definitely one of the cashflow mandates of the Russian Oligarchy.
> 
> AND LETS NOT FORGET that Iran has long-stewing, long-brewing plans to expand its geopolitical reach to reignite _“the caliphate”_ if it can figure a way to do so. Which is hugely ironic, since at the heyday of every Caliphate, was also a veritable _Renaissance of Intellectual Attainment_.
> 
> IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN IT… I highly recommend using NetFlix to watch *The Physician (2013)* for a bit of admittedly-hollywood-ized history of one of Persia's Caliphate periods. Its definitely an entertaining movie, and has more than a glimmer of historic reality too.
> 
> Phoenixes. From the ashes of failed civilizations, do they rise.
> On this more shall we see.
> 
> Keenly observing,
> *Goat*Guy


----------



## CougarKing

There goes Lebanon's gravy train...

*Saudi Arabia Cancels $3B Aid to Lebanon; French Weapons Deal Held*

Defense News



> February 19, 2016
> 
> Saudi Arabia has suspended a $3 billion aid package to the Lebanese Army to buy French weapons, according to statement by the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ...
> 
> "This shows that there is a consideration from the kingdom that the Lebanese government has very little control over the country's affairs with Hezbollah and Iran having the majority control over affairs in Lebanon," said Riad Kahwaji, CEO of the Institute for Gulf and Near East Military Analysis, a Dubai-based think tank. ...
> 
> The shopping list included 250 combat and transport vehicles, seven Cougar attack helicopters, three small corvette warships, and a range of surveillance and communication equipment over four years as part of the $3 billion modernization program. ...
> 
> Kahwaji said that the Super Tucano sale has reached an advanced level and should not to be affected at this time, and that if the Kingdom were to cancel the deal they would be subject to penalties.
> 
> The American deals are also not expected to be affected as they were quick deals and negotiated directly, plus most of it has been cashed, he said.



This aid package going by the acronym DONAS amounts to a very long shopping list of the latest French hardware: Defense Aerospace, Jane's


----------



## CougarKing

Libya IS groups now in the US military's target crosshairs...

Defense News



> *US Airstrike in Libya Targeted Sousse Attack 'Facilitator'*
> Agence France-Presse 12:33 p.m. EST February 19, 2016
> 
> TRIPOLI – A US air strike on a jihadist training camp in Libya killed dozens of people Friday, probably including a senior Islamic State group operative behind attacks in Tunisia, officials said.
> 
> It was the second US air raid in the violence-wracked North African country targeting the fast-expanding jihadist group in the past three months.
> 
> The strike early Friday against an IS camp near the city of Sabratha "likely killed" IS operative Noureddine Chouchane, a US official said.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Eye In The Sky

^-^


----------



## CougarKing

Cutting down on the pariah state's revenue sources:

New York Times



> *Hundreds of Millions of Islamic State Funds Destroyed in Air Strikes: U.S.*
> By REUTERS
> FEB. 17, 2016, 1:54 P.M. E.S.T.
> 
> 
> WASHINGTON — U.S.-led air strikes on Islamic State cash storage sites have cost the militant group hundreds of millions of dollars, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday.
> 
> The United States is trying to cut revenue to Islamic State - believed to be one of the best-funded militant groups in the world - through air strikes targeting its oil production as well as cash storage sites. U.S. officials believe the ultra-hardline Sunni group is more dependent on cash as it has seen its access to the formal banking system reduced through sanctions and other measures.
> 
> Colonel Steve Warren, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military effort against Islamic State, said the air strikes on cash storage and collection sites have destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of currency. He declined to give a more precise estimate of how much money had been destroyed.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)
> 
> *In addition to selling oil pumped from territory it controls, Islamic State also has earned revenue through taxation, selling antiquities and raids on banks in its territory,* U.S. officials say.
> 
> Islamic State has declared a self-styled caliphate across areas of territory it controls in Iraq and Syria, imposing its own harsh interpretation of Islamic law.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Why do I have a feeling it won't be long before the NDP starts to blame the CCC? (Isn't this the crown corporation that also oversees foreign exports such as arms sales?)

CBC




> *Canadian rifles may have fallen into Yemen rebel hands, likely via Saudi Arabia*
> [CBC]
> 
> February 21, 2016
> 
> 
> Canadian-made weapons may have fallen into the hands of Houthi fighters in Yemen's civil war, raising new concerns about Canada's arms exports to Saudi Arabia.
> 
> The rifles were most likely seized from Saudi forces, and it appears to have happened more than once, according to Armament Research Services, an international intelligence consultancy that traces arms.
> 
> The weapons first appeared in photos and video featured on a Houthi-linked TV channel and social media, showcased as "modern weapons" captured in battle with "Saudi border guards." It seemed a coup for a group that's been under a UN arms embargo for the past year.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Why do I have a feeling it won't be long before the NDP starts to blame the CCC? (Isn't this the crown corporation that also oversees foreign exports such as arms sales?)
> 
> CBC



I read that story this morning and wondered if they come with little surrender flags as accessories when being sold to the Saudis.


----------



## a_majoor

Saudi Foreign minister interview

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-saudi-foreign-minister-adel-al-jubeir-on-syrian-war-a-1078337.html



> *Saudi Foreign Minister: 'I Don't Think World War III Is Going To Happen in Syria'*
> Interview Conducted By Samiha Shafy and Bernhard Zand
> Armin Smailovic/ DER SPIEGEL
> 
> Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir at the Westin Grand Hotel during the Munich Security Conference: "ISIS is as much an Islamic organization as the KKK in America is a Christian organization."
> 
> In an interview, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir expresses his continued support for regime change in Syria and his desire for rebels to be supplied with anti-aircraft missiles that could shift the balance of power in the war.
> 
> The wait for the interview with the minister takes six hours, but then he greets the journalists in a large conference room in a grand hotel in Munich. Adel al-Jubeir, 54, a slim, amiable man, wears a traditional robe and looks a bit fatigued. He and his counterparts spent the previous evening negotiating a cease-fire in Syria well into the night. And since early this morning, they have been busily discussing current global events. Al-Jubeir is the embodiment of a new breed of top Saudi Arabian leaders: He went to school in Germany and college in the United States and then served as the Saudi ambassador to Washington. In contrast to his longtime predecessor Prince Saud al-Faisal, who served as the country's top diplomat for decades stretching from the oil crisis in the 1970s until early 2015, al-Jubeir is not a member of the royal family. At the time of his appointment as foreign minister last April, Saudi Arabia had just gone to war with neighboring Yemen and the situation in Syria was escalating. Al-Jubeir is now responsible for representing his country's controversial foreign policy. And he allowed himself plenty of time to do so in this interview with SPIEGEL. When his staff sought to end the interview after 45 minutes because he had a speech to give at the Munich Security Conference, al-Jubeir suggested we continue the discussion in his limousine -- both on the way to his talk and back to the hotel afterward.
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> SPIEGEL: Mr. al-Jubeir, have you ever seen the Middle East in worse shape than it is in today?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: The Middle East has gone through periods of turmoil before. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were revolutions. When monarchies were collapsing in a number of countries, we had radicals and we had Nasserism. Today it's a little bit more complicated.
> 
> SPIEGEL: The most complicated and dangerous situation, obviously, is the one in Syria. What does Saudi Arabia want to achieve in this conflict?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: I don't think anyone can predict what the short term will look like. In the long term, it will be a Syria without Bashar Assad. The longer it takes, the worse it will get. We warned when the crisis began in 2011 that unless it was resolved quickly, the country would be destroyed. Unfortunately, our warnings are coming true.
> 
> SPIEGEL: What do you want to do now that the Assad regime has gained the upper hand?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: We have always said there are two ways to resolve Syria, and both will end up with the same result: a Syria without Bashar Assad. There is a political process which we are trying to achieve through what is called the Vienna Group. That involves the establishment of a governing council, which is to take power away from Bashar Assad, to write a constitution and to open the way for elections. It is important that Bashar leaves in the beginning, not at the end of the process. This will make the transition happen with less death and destruction.
> 
> SPIEGEL: And the other option?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: The other option is that the war will continue and Bashar Assad will be defeated. If, as we decided in Munich, there will be a cessation of hostilities and humanitarian assistance can flow into Syria -- then this will open the door for the beginning of the political transition process. We are at a very delicate juncture, and it may not work, but we have to try it. Should the political process not work, there is always the other approach.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Assad has said he considers a short-term cease-fire in Syria to be impossible. Has the Munich agreement failed already?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Bashar Assad has said many things. We will see in the near term whether he is serious about a political process.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev spoke of the danger of "World War III" at the Munich Security Conference.
> 
> Al-Jubeir: I think this is an over-dramatization. Let's not forget: This all began when you had eight- and nine-year-old children writing graffiti on walls. Their parents were told: "You will never see them again. If you want to have children, go to your wife and make new ones." Assad's people rebelled. He crushed them brutally. But his military could not protect him. So he asked the Iranians to come in and help. Iran sent its Revolutionary Guards into Syria, they brought in Shia militias, Hezbollah from Lebanon, militias from Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, all Shia, and they couldn't help. Then he brought in Russia, and Russia will not save him. At the same time, we have a war against Daesh (the Islamic State, or IS) in Syria. A coalition that was led by the United States, with Saudi Arabia being one of the first members of that coalition.
> 
> SPIEGEL: You've just named all the actors. Is that not already a world war of sorts?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: I will get to this in a second, if you allow me. The air campaign started, but it became very obvious that there may have to be a ground component. Saudi Arabia has said that if the US-led coalition against Daesh is prepared to engage in ground operations, we will be prepared to participate with special forces. The Russians say their objective is to defeat Daesh, too. If the deployment of ground troops helps in the fight against Daesh, why is that World War III? Is Russia worried that defeating Daesh will open the door for defeating Bashar Assad? That would be a different story. But I don't think World War III is going to happen in Syria.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Would Saudi Arabian ground troops only battle Islamic State or would you also join the fight against Assad?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: We expressed our readiness to join the US-led, international coalition against Daesh with special forces. All of this, however, is still in the discussion phase and in the initial planning phase.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Is Saudi Arabia in favor of supplying anti-aircraft missiles to the rebels?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Yes. We believe that introducing surface-to-air missiles in Syria is going to change the balance of power on the ground. It will allow the moderate opposition to be able to neutralize the helicopters and aircraft that are dropping chemicals and have been carpet-bombing them, just like surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan were able to change the balance of power there. This has to be studied very carefully, however, because you don't want such weapons to fall into the wrong hands.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Into the hands of Islamic State.
> 
> Al-Jubeir: This is a decision that the international coalition will have to make. This is not Saudi Arabia's decision.
> 
> SPIEGEL: The Russian intervention has had a big impact on the situation in Syria. How would you describe Saudi Arabia's relationship with Russia at this point?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Other than our disagreement over Syria, I would say our relationship with Russia is very good and we are seeking to broaden and deepen it. Twenty million Russians are Muslims. Like Russia, we have an interest in fighting radicalism and extremism. We both have an interest in stable energy markets. Even the disagreement over Syria is more of a tactical one than a strategic one. We both want a unified Syria that is stable in which all Syrians enjoy equal rights.
> 
> SPIEGEL: That sounds well and good, but you are also providing support to the opposing camp in a war. Even more than your relationship with Russia, the world is worried about the deep schism between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
> 
> Al-Jubeir : Iran has been a neighbor for millenia, and will continue to be a neighbor for millenia. We have no issue with seeking to develop the best terms we can with Iran. But after the revolution of 1979, Iran embarked on a policy of sectarianism. Iran began a policy of expanding its revolution, of interfering with the affairs of its neighbors, a policy of assassinating diplomats and of attacking embassies. Iran is responsible for a number of terrorist attacks in the Kingdom, it is responsible for smuggling explosives and drugs into Saudi Arabia. And Iran is responsible for setting up sectarian militias in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, whose objective is to destabilize those countries.
> 
> SPIEGEL: If all this is the case, then how can you possibly establish "the best terms you can" with Iran?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Yes, we want to have good ties with the Iranians, but if they want good ties with us, then I tell them: Don't keep attacking us as you have done for the last 35 years. As long as Iran's aggressive policies continue, it's going to be bad for the region. Iran has to decide whether it wants a revolution or a nation-state.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Are the Iranians the only ones to blame? What can Saudi Arabia offer to improve this vital relationship?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Show me one Iranian diplomat we killed! I can show you many Saudi diplomats who were killed by Iran. Show me one Iranian embassy that was attacked by Saudi Arabia. Show me one terrorist cell that we planted in Iran. Show me one activity by Saudi Arabia to create problems among Iranian minorities.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Your Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, accused Saudi Arabia of provoking Iran by actively sponsoring violent extremist groups.
> 
> Al-Jubeir: What's the provocation that he's talking about?
> 
> SPIEGEL: Is Saudi Arabia not financing extremist groups? Zarif speaks of attacks by al-Qaida, the Syrian al-Nusra and other groups -- of attacks on Shiite mosques from Iraq to Yemen.
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Yes, but that's not us. We don't tolerate terrorism. We go after the terrorists and those who support them and those who justify their actions. Our record has been very clear, contrary to their record. They harbor al-Qaida leaders. They facilitate al-Qaida operations. They complain about Daesh, but Iran is the only country around the negotiating table that has not been attacked by either al-Qaida or Daesh.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Can the West play a role in mediating between Saudi Arabia and Iran, following the example of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the organization which helped end the Cold War?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: The Iranians know what they need to do in order to become a responsible member of the international community and in order to become a good neighbor, and it's really up to them to change their behavior.
> 
> SPIEGEL: So there is nothing that Saudi Arabia itself or the West could do to encourage this process?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: There is nothing to encourage. The Iranians should just stay away from us.
> 
> SPIEGEL: How do you explain the ideological closeness between the Wahhabi faith in Saudi Arabia and Islamic State's ideology? How do you explain that Daesh applies, with slight differences, the same draconian punishments that the Saudi judiciary does?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: This is an oversimplification which doesn't make sense. Daesh is attacking us. Their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wants to destroy the Saudi state. These people are criminals. They're psychopaths. Daesh members wear shoes. Does this mean everybody who wears shoes is Daesh?
> 
> SPIEGEL: Are you contesting the similarities between the extremely conservative interpretation of Islam in Saudi Arabia and Islamic State's religious ideology?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: ISIS is as much an Islamic organization as the KKK in America is a Christian organization. They burned people of African descent on the cross, and they said they're doing it in the name of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, in every religion there are people who pervert the faith. We should not take the actions of psychopaths and paint them as being representative of the whole religion.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Doesn't Saudi Arabia have to do a lot more to distance itself from ISIS and its ideology?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: It seems people don't read or listen. Our scholars and our media have been very outspoken. We were the first country in the world to hold a national public awareness campaign against extremism and terrorism. Why would we not want to fight an ideology whose objective is to kill us?
> 
> SPIEGEL: At the same time, your judges mete out sentences that shock the world. The blogger Raif Badawi has been sentenced to prison and 1,000 lashes. On Jan. 2, 47 men were beheaded, among them Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. His nephew Ali has been sentenced to death as well and his body is to be crucified after the execution.
> 
> Al-Jubeir: We have a legal system, and we have a penal code. We have the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, and people should respect this. You don't have the death penalty, and we respect that.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Should we respect the flogging of people?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Just like we respect your legal system, you should respect our legal system. You cannot impose your values on us, otherwise the world will become the law of the jungle. Every society decides what its laws are, and it's the people who make decisions with regards to these laws. You cannot lecture another people about what you think is right or wrong based on your value system unless you're willing to accept others imposing their value system on you.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Is it even compatible with human rights to display the body of an executed person?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: This is a judgment call. We have a legal system, and this is not something that happens all the time. We have capital punishment. America has capital punishment. Iran has capital punishment. Iran hangs people and leaves their bodies hanging on cranes. Iran put to death more than a thousand people last year. I don't see you reporting on it.
> 
> SPIEGEL: We have reported on it.
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Anyway, Nimr al-Nimr …
> 
> SPIEGEL: … who was executed on Jan. 2 and was the uncle of Ali al-Nimr …
> 
> Al-Jubeir: Nimr was a terrorist, he recruited, he plotted, he financed and as a consequence of his actions a number of Saudi Arabian police were killed. Are we supposed to put him on a pedestal? He was put on trial. His trial was reviewed at the appellate level. It went to the supreme court, and the sentence was death, like the other 46 people who were put to death.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Your foreign policy has become more aggressive as well. According to the United Nations, about 6,000 people have been killed in Yemen since the beginning of the Saudi Arabian offensive in March 2015. What do you want to achieve with this war?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: The war in Yemen is not a war that we wanted. We had no other option -- there was a radical militia allied with Iran and Hezbollah that took over the country. It was in possession of heavy weapons, ballistic missiles and even an air force. Should we stand by idly while this happens at our doorstep, in one of the countries in which al-Qaida has a huge presence? So we responded, as part of a coalition, at the request of the legitimate government of Yemen, and we stepped in to support them. We have removed, to a large extent, the threat that these weapons posed to Saudi Arabia. Now 75 percent of Yemen has been liberated and is under the control of the government forces.
> 
> Yemeni men inspect the damage at the site of a Saudi-led coalition air strike which hit a sewing workshop in the capital Sanaa, on Feb. 14, 2016.
> SPIEGEL: For how long is this supposed to continue? Half of the victims in this war have been civilians.
> 
> Al-Jubeir: We will continue the operation until the objective is achieved. We hope that the Houthis and Saleh will agree to a political settlement, and we are prepared, along with our Gulf allies, to put in place a very substantial reconstruction plan for Yemen. We have no interest in seeing an unstable Yemen or seeing a Yemen that is devastated.
> 
> SPIEGEL: With several interventions in Yemen, Syria and other countries in the region, it appears that Saudi Arabia is aspiring to become the Middle East's hegemonial power. Isn't your country punching above its weight?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: We are not seeking this role for Saudi Arabia. What we want is stability and security so we can focus on our own development. But we have these problems in our region, and nobody has been able to resolve them. The whole world was saying that the countries of the regions should step up and resolve their problems, so we stepped up. Now people are saying, "Oh my God, Saudi Arabia has changed." It's a contradiction. Do you want us to lead, or do you want us to play a supporting role? Because we can't do both. If you want us to lead, don't criticize us. And if you want us to play a supporting role, then tell us who is going to lead.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Does Saudi Arabia feel threatened by the Iranian nuclear deal, by a possible rapprochement between your hostile neighbor and your closest ally in the West, the United States?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: We support any deal that denies Iran nuclear weapons, that has a continuous and robust inspection mechanism and that has snap-back provisions in case Iran violates the agreement. Our concern is that Iran will use the income it receives as a result of the lifting of the nuclear sanctions in order to fund its nefarious activities in the region.
> 
> SPIEGEL: The United States' foreign policy in the Middle East has become more restrained under President Obama. Is that a mistake?
> 
> Al-Jubeir: I don't believe in the theory that the United States is reducing its presence in the Middle East. Quite the contrary, in the Gulf, we see an increase in American military presence, as well as an increase in American investments. The argument is more accurate when one says America is focusing more attention to the Far East. But I don't believe it comes at the expense of the Middle East.
> 
> SPIEGEL: Your Excellency, we thank you for this interview.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Taliban suicide bomber class goes off with a bang.  Bwhahahahaha, gotta love fucking idiots in training.  

"Seven Taliban terrorists have been killed and two were seriously injured after they were blown up at a suicide bomber training session in a Madrassa in Afghanistan.

The explosion ripped through the Hazrat Sahib Madrassa in Mastofi villiage in the Andar District on Wednesday night. 

A senior Taliban commander was believed to have been showing several recruits on the safe way of manufacturing  and handling suicide vests so they do not detonate prematurely. Unfortunately for the commander and his recruits, the device exploded.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3464357/Must-die-harder-Seven-Taliban-militants-killed-explosive-belt-detonates-class-suicide-bomber.html#ixzz41EbgIdF0 
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook"


----------



## CougarKing

Pressure from Iran on the EU? I doubt an arms embargo will heavily influence any outcome of the Yemen Civil War.

Independent (UK)



> *European Parliament votes for EU-wide arms export embargo against Saudi Arabia
> Saudi Arabia has been accused of bombing civilians with European-made equipment during in its war in Yemen*
> 
> Jon Stone
> @joncstone
> Thursday 25 February 2016
> 
> Saudi Arabian special forces stand in front of a picture of the country's Interior minister Mohammed bin Nayef Getty Images
> 
> The European Parliament has voted in favour of an EU-wide embargo on selling arms to Saudi Arabia.
> 
> A resolution calling for a ban on all weapons sales to the country was passed by 359 votes to 212, with 31 MEPs abstaining.
> 
> The non-binding motion calls on member states to stop selling weapons to the country, *which is currently conducting a widely-criticised military operation in neighbouring Yemen marked by high civilian casualties.*
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> Taliban suicide bomber class goes off with a bang.  Bwhahahahaha, gotta love fucking idiots in training.


Own goal, as the Brits say?


----------



## The Bread Guy

Here's one who's been brought back - well done all involved...


> A Swedish teenager who was “lured” to Iraq by her jihadist boyfriend has been rescued from the Islamic State-controlled city of Mosul, officials said Tuesday.
> 
> Sixteen-year-old Marilyn Nevalainen, who left Sweden last June after her 19-year-old partner decided to fight for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, was freed in a secret operation by Kurdish special forces, the Kurdistan Regional Security Council said.
> 
> Her boyfriend, who has not been named, is thought to have died in an air strike in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, which was retaken by Iraqi troops in December.
> 
> Precise details of Nevalainen’s trip to Iraq remained unclear Tuesday night, but it is understood that she went there in the company of a man she met in the town of Boras in south-west Sweden. A number of other people from Boras’s small Arab community have also travelled to the Middle East to fight for ISIL.
> 
> In a statement given to Kurdish television, Nevalainen said she lived without money, electricity and running water at her lodgings with ISIL.
> 
> “It was a really hard life,” she said. “When I had a phone, I started to call my mom and I said to her that I want to go home.”
> 
> Nevalainen, who was in foster care, was pregnant when she left Sweden. She is said to have told her biological parents that she was going to Stockholm for a few days, only to then travel to Iraq overland via Bulgaria and Turkey.
> 
> Shortly after arriving in Iraq, she rang her parents to say that there had bombing in the area where she was living, and that she feared she might die. “If I do not call back, it means I’m dead,” she told them, according to Swedish media.
> 
> There were conflicting accounts Tuesday of how she came to be freed. Kurdish security officials said that their special forces had sneaked into Mosul and freed Nevalainen without a shot being fired ...


This, from the Kurdish Info-machine:


> In a statement today, the Kurdistan Region Security Council, KRSC, said that Special Forces from the Directorate General of Counter Terrorism, CTD, part and parcel of the KRSC, rescued a young Swedish woman near ISIL-occupied Mosul on 17 February 2016.
> 
> According to the statement the Swedish national is 16 years old and “was misled by an ISIL member in Sweden to travel to Syria and later to Mosul.”
> 
> “The Kurdistan Region Security Council was called upon by Swedish authorities and members of her family to assist in locating and rescuing her from ISIL.
> 
> “She is currently in the Kurdistan Region and is provided the care afforded to her under international law. She will be transferred to Swedish authorities to return home once necessary arrangements are put place”, said the statement.


----------



## Kirkhill

> Canadian foreign policy: A case for Mideast disengagement
> MICHAEL BLISS
> Special to The Globe and Mail
> Published Wednesday, Mar. 02, 2016 6:00AM EST
> Last updated Tuesday, Mar. 01, 2016 5:38PM EST





> Still, the evidence so far suggests that we in Canada, the United States, and Europe, do not understand the world well enough to sacrifice the lives of our young men and women, and the lives of countless other men, women, and children, in so-called “missions” into the black vortex of fighting, destruction, and death.



http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/a-case-for-mideast-disengagement/article28976312/

For some folks, I guess, there will never be enough information to permit action.  Heck, even God had to leave some things to chance.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

The biggest blundering I have witnessed is the panty-wearing crowd of cowards who would sit back and let ISIL throw men off roofs, put kids in cages on the top of buildings they are using, and enslave women.

Or, the long-winded 'fans of yester-year', who are fixated on 'how things were' and offer no way forward for 'how things are'.

Or, 'masters of history', such as the author of that article.  Men who study the history other men make, and claim to have done something significant, to understand 'how these things work', although most of their time in uniform was at age 14 at the local McDonalds.

I say "go fuck yourself" to all the armchair experts who have 'studied the problem', criticize the current efforts of any and all, from the safety of their den after supper and the news without offering the 'magic DS solution' to fix things.  

Sometimes you can't put out the fire, its out of control but you can contain it and do whatever you can to make sure your home doesn't go up next.  Perfect solution?  Nope, but this isn't a perfect world.  Sometime I might help my neighbor if his house is on fire, and damn straight part of that reason is so mine doesn't go up too.

Seems like my signature block is a fitting end to this post and my thoughts on the comments of this 'expert'.   :2c:


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## a_majoor

Syria and Iraq may never return, but what will the post war shape of the region look like? One possible answer (a Sunni "center" pusing against Shiite edges on the East and West)is presented here, although given the multiplicity of groups, ethnicities and access to resources it isn't likely to be a series of clean boundary lines:

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-destruction-of-the-iraqi-and-syrian-states/



> *The Destruction of the Iraqi and Syrian States*
> By Kamran Bokhari
> Feb. 18, 2016
> 
> Both countries have disintegrated to the point that their governments no longer have control.
> 
> While the international community seeks to find a solution to the conflicts raging in the Middle East, Syria and Iraq have – for all practical purposes – effectively dissolved as nation-states. These two countries – conceived after the implosion of the Ottoman Empire following World War I – are not simply casualties of the rise of the Islamic State and its self-proclaimed caliphate. Rather, they have collapsed under the weight of a complex and interlocking set of dynamics involving transnational jihadism, geopolitical sectarian struggles and the meltdown of autocracy in the Arab world. Even if the Islamic State is defeated and Turkey and Iran – the two major Muslim powers with the greatest stake in Syria and Iraq – are able to reach an understanding, the Levantine-Mesopotamian land mass will still be divided between multiple Sunni emirates, Kurdish enclaves and Shiite dominions.
> 
> Defending the Integrity of Nation-States
> 
> Over the past several weeks, the media has highlighted four developments with regards to Syria and Iraq: 1) Rebels have lost significant ground to Syrian regime forces backed by Russian air support, especially in the strategic Aleppo area near the Turkish border; 2) The United States and Russia engaged in negotiations toward a cessation of hostilities in Syria; 3) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, on the prodding of the United States, said they would send forces to Syria to fight the Islamic State and; 4) The Islamic State lost control over the city of Ramadi to the Iraqi government.
> 
> Taken together, these events would seem to suggest that considerable progress is being made by the Iraqi and Syrian governments – supported, respectively, by the American-led coalition and Russia – in restoring the territorial integrity of both states. Certainly, the world powers are dealing with the cross-border conflicts on the basis of the idea that national boundaries must be respected. Regimes may come and go but the nation-state is a fixed sacrosanct entity that cannot be altered. Indeed, in 1991, the United States led a 29-nation military coalition (the largest since World War II), which restored the sovereignty of Kuwait after it was forcibly annexed by Baathist Iraq, with the intent of making it Iraq’s 19th province.
> 
> Today, IS controls large tracts of territory in eastern Syria and western Iraq and has effectively erased the borders established by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. Again, the international community is invoking the principle of inviolability of borders drawn up by European colonial powers a century ago. More important, the expectation is that IS will eventually be defeated, a new republic will emerge in Syria as a result of a negotiated settlement between the regime and rebels and the Sunnis of Iraq will rejoin the post-Baathist republic. In other words, once the dust of war settles, Syria and Iraq will yet again be sovereign states.
> 
> From a normative point of view, a return to the status quo prior to the wars in Iraq and Syria is what the international community must be working toward. If the world accepts the dissolution of the Syrian-Iraqi border, then that would set a precedent for other fault lines that run through the international system. Not pushing back against transnational currents would lead to greater anarchy around the world. Therefore, there is no choice for the United States and other global and regional players but to try to reverse the course of the region and defend the integrity of nation-states.
> 
> That said, there is a great need to be mindful of the massive variance between what global powers want and what they can achieve. The conditions on the ground – shaped by the imperatives of multiple state and non-state actors as well as the constraints of extra-regional powers, including the United States – are as such that it is unlikely that Syria and Iraq can be put back together. These two countries may continue to exist on paper but the areas that they will actually control will be much smaller. In order to understand why the maps of Syria and Iraq will not be going back to the way they were before the conflicts erupted, let us consider both countries separately.
> 
> Iraq: A Broken State
> 
> We begin with Iraq, where the U.S. move to effect regime change in 2003 led to the toppling of the Baathist regime led by former President Saddam Hussein. Washington spent eight years and $2 trillion in a military intervention that sought to replace an autocratic polity with a democratic one. The result was a fragile Shiite-dominated state whose authority is largely limited to Baghdad and the south, while an Erbil-based autonomous Kurdish region in the north has been trying to enhance its territory and self-rule capabilities. The Sunni regions in the central and western parts of the country had never really been brought into the new order but since the summer of 2014 the situation has gone from bad to worse.
> 
> The Islamic State re-emerged in the Sunni areas with its seizure in June 2014 of the country’s second largest city, Mosul, and its declaration of the caliphate. It is true that since that time, Iraqi and Kurdish security forces have prevented IS from further expanding and have even taken back significant areas. However, the fact of the matter is that neither the Shia nor the Kurds are willing to make the political compromises with the Sunnis or with each other needed to ensure that IS will be defeated. The bottom line is that Iraq is a state broken along triangular fault lines and is dominated by three different entities.
> 
> That said, there is still an international consensus that the resolution to the conflict in Iraq lies in the Sunnis being brought back into the fold of the post-Baathist republic built by the Americans, as well as having Baghdad and Erbil work out their differences.
> 
> Syria: Fractured Beyond Repair
> 
> In sharp contrast to Iraq, the problem in Syria is that there is no political system that the various warring sides can be brought back into. The regime of Bashar al-Assad is at the heart of the dispute, and if there is to be a settlement to the war radiating out of Syria then a new political dispensation will have to emerge out of a power-sharing arrangement between the regime and the rebels. But the situation is far more complex than a classic civil war between two sides.
> 
> The Syrian rebel landscape is highly fragmented with countless groups, most of whom are Salafist-jihadists with different agendas controlling territories in different parts of the country. In the northeast, we have Kurdish separatists. But the largest obstacle to uniting the country is the fact that IS, with its transnational agenda, controls a big chunk of territory in the provinces of Raqqa and Deir el-Zour in the east, which is organically linked to its holdings in western Iraq. The country is fractured into different pieces. What is more significant is that despite the recent gains made by the regime, it is not in a position to retake lands from any of the other opposing sides and thus what we have is a precarious balance where all sides are weak.
> 
> There is also no outside power that can easily impose order and patch the various parts back together again. The United States has been hoping that the regional players will take the lead in dealing with the situation in Syria. But the regional powers themselves are divided. The most glaring divide is the sectarian one between the Saudi-led Arab Sunni camp, which backs the Syrian rebels, and the Iranian-led Shiite camp, which hopes to strengthen the Assad regime. Even on the Sunni side, Saudi Arabia faces competition from Turkey, which is pursuing its own interests in Syria.
> 
> Being the strongest power in the region, Turkey has the capability to play the biggest role in Syria. However, it has to overcome a number of hurdles before it can project power on its southern flank. It must first deal with the Syrian Kurds who hold territory right on the Turkish-Syrian border and are deeply linked to Turkey’s own Kurdish separatists. Russian support for the Assad regime and the Syrian Kurds further complicates matters for Turkey, which is trying to manage the chaos south of its border.
> 
> In fact, for the Turks to effectively pursue their goal of regime change in Damascus, they have to deal with Kurdish separatism in Syria, which directly impacts Turkish domestic security. In the event that they are able to suppress Syria’s Kurds, they will then have to turn to the Islamic State, which will have benefited from a weakening of the Kurds. Getting Turkey’s Syrian rebel allies to fight IS will not be easy given that the Turks do not have a monopoly on influence over the rebels. Saudi Arabia also has some clout over rebel groups. IS may be weakened but it is unlikely to be eliminated as a stakeholder.
> 
> In addition, a weakened IS does not mean that a more coherent rebel configuration will materialize. New groups may emerge from old ones. While the rebels will continue to hold different territories in the eastern half of the country, the Assad regime can be expected to remain fortified in the western half. While the Turks become increasingly engaged in rebel-held territories, they will have to eventually confront the Assad regime, which also means dealing with their traditional rivals, the Iranians.
> 
> A Return to the Levant and Mesopotamia
> 
> Five hundred years ago, the Turks during the Ottoman era occupied the territory that is now known as Syria and Iraq. This allowed them to largely limit the Safavid Empire, which ruled over what is today Iran, to its Persian core. Fast forward half a millennium, the situation is almost the reverse. It is the Iranians who have greater presence in both Syria and Iraq and are thus blocking the Turkish path into the Arab world. The Iranians are not about to allow the erosion of their influence in the Levant. In other words, the Turks will at some point have to confront the Iranians. Regardless of how this new Turkish-Iranian competition plays out, it will not lead to the restoration of the Syrian nation-state.
> 
> In fact, it will worsen the fracturing in neighboring Iraq. Turkish-allied Syrian rebels can be expected to align with their counterparts in Iraq to weaken both the Islamic State and confront the Iranian-supported Shiite government in Baghdad. The leadership of Iraqi Sunnis may not be in the hands of IS but that does not translate into the Iraqi government expanding its writ into the Sunni areas. The Sunnis on both sides of the border – even if the so-called caliphate is somehow dismantled – will not go their separate ways. On the contrary, they have an imperative to work together to fight their respective Shiite enemies.
> 
> The Iraqi Sunnis have the Shia to their east, while the Syrian Sunnis have to deal with the Alawites to the west. Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis will undoubtedly use each other as strategic depth to confront their respective foes. At the same time, the Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis cannot be treated as monoliths. Even within their respective realms, different groups can be expected to be in control of different areas. IS may be a temporary construct but it is one that is built on a sectarian logic overlaid by geography, which is far more permanent.
> 
> Conclusion
> 
> These tensions were suppressed for decades by the post-colonial states of Syria and Iraq, which kept these ethnic and sectarian forces at bay. Regime change in Baghdad, followed by the efforts to undo its unintended consequences in Damascus, has led to the dismantling of these two neighboring states dominated by rival wings of the Baath Party. What remains is a landmass stretching from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea divided between different warlord-type forces. The Kurds control a good chunk of the northeastern part of this area, though their situation is very vulnerable given the lack of natural boundaries of defense and the fact that they are taking advantage of chaos. The Sunnis control the central parts of this territory while the Shia are in possession of the areas along the far eastern and western parts.
> 
> This is the new emerging map of what used to be called Syria and Iraq, which Turkey and Iran will be competing over for the foreseeable future.


----------



## CougarKing

An update on IS-linked groups in Southeast Asia:

As if the recent 1MDB scanndal wasn't enough for this Malaysian PM...

CNN



> *Malaysia says ISIS plot to kidnap Prime Minister was foiled*
> 
> By Euan McKirdy, CNN
> 
> Updated 0608 GMT (1408 HKT) March 9, 2016
> 
> (CNN)Malaysian authorities foiled an ISIS plot to kidnap Prime Minister Najib Razak, along with two other ranking officials, the country's deputy prime minister told Parliament on Tuesday.
> 
> The operation also uncovered plans to initiate multiple attacks in various parts of the country, including the capital, Kuala Lumpur, just over a year ago.
> 
> "On Jan. 30, 2015, a total of 13 people with ties to Daesh had planned to kidnap the leaders, including the prime minister, home minister and defense minister," Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi -- who is also the home minister and one of the targets -- told the country's parliament Tuesday. Daesh is another name for the terror group.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Brad Sallows

So Daesh is run by Mr Mugatu.


----------



## CougarKing

Vietnam-era OV10s proving their value in CAS for the US again:

Daily Beast via MSN.com



> *America’s Antique Planes Battling ISIS*
> The Daily Beast
> 
> David Axe
> 1 day ago
> 
> 
> War was just an experiment for two of the U.S. military’s oldest and most unusual warplanes. A pair of OV-10 Broncos—small, Vietnam War-vintage, propeller-driven attack planes—recently spent three months flying top cover for ground troops battling ISIS militants in the Middle East.
> 
> The OV-10s’ deployment is one of the latest examples of a remarkable phenomenon. The United States—and, to a lesser extent, Russia—has seized the opportunity afforded it by the aerial free-for-all over Iraq and Syria and other war zones to conduct live combat trials with new and upgraded warplanes, testing out the aircraft in potentially deadly conditions before committing to expensive manufacturing programs.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


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## jollyjacktar

Maybe they'll bring back the Skyraiders into service again.


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## a_majoor

Remarkable claim by German media that a list of over 22,000 ISIS "applicants" has been recovered.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/isis-list-germany/473184/



> *The Islamic State’s Orientation Questionnaire*
> German media said they have a list of 22,000 names of foreign ISIS fighters, gleaned from questionnaires the terrorist organization asks new recruits to fill out.
> J. Weston Phippen
> Mar 10, 2016
> 
> Name, education, references, and a preference of fighting over suicide operations are some of the 23 questions being asked of ISIS recruits, according to news reports.
> 
> German news organizations, including the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung and NDR and WDR, the public broadcasters, said they obtained thousands of documents that include a list of 22,000 names of potential ISIS recruits.
> 
> NBC News and Britain’s Sky News also said they received similar lists, secreted to them on a USB drive by a former ISIS recruit named Abu Hamed who said he stole it from the head of ISIS’s internal security police.
> 
> The documents, if authenticated, are likely to provide Western intelligence agencies the closest look at Western recruits to the terrorist organization, their motivations, their connection to others in the group, and ISIS’s sympathizers. News of the documents also comes a week after The New York Times reported that U.S. Special Operations forces had captured a “significant” ISIS operative in Iraq and were interrogating him at a temporary detention facility in the city of Erbil.
> 
> German authorities have looked at the list and, Süddeutsche Zeitung reported, called it “very likely to be real documents.” Thomas de Maiziére, the German interior minister, confirmed the authenticity of the documents, The Guardian reported, and said the list would help explain “the underlying structures of this terrorist organization.” All the documents have been turned over to authorities.
> 
> The BBC reported the documents seem to have come from late 2013 or early 2014. They look like initial recruitment forms, and show not only names of recruits, but ask 23 questions that cover things like who recommended them, if they have any previous combat experience, how they traveled out of their home countries, and their mother’s maiden name, as well as their blood type. Sky News also reported that many of the telephone numbers listed still worked, some of them belonging to family, but also “a significant number … used by the jihadis themselves.”
> 
> Some of the names on the list, like that of Abdel Bary, a young British rapper turned jihadist, shows up on the list. Bary is presumed alive, but authorities don’t know where he is. Others are fighters known already to be dead, or who are standing trial, like Kermin Marc B and Abdelkarim B, who are standing trial in Germany, the BBC reported.
> 
> Among the names on the list were at least 16 Britons, six Canadians, and four Americans. German authorities say that, in all, more than 800 of its citizens have left to fight for ISIS. Part of the difficulty of prosecuting these people though, is that once they return, it’s hard to prove they fought for the organization. The list will likely help with that.
> 
> An independent Syrian website called Zaman al-Wasl published copies of the questionnaires Tuesday. It also said it had exclusively received the personal information of 1,736 ISIS fighters.
> 
> These recruits came from 40 countries: A quarter were Saudi, and the list also included Tunisians, Moroccans, and Egyptians. When a potential recruit crosses into ISIS territory, Zaman al-Wasl reported, the border administration wants to know everything about that person, “even what he wants to be in ISIS, a fighter or a suicide bomber.”


----------



## CougarKing

Turkey's response to the 2nd horrific car bombing in their capital in a couple of months:

Source: Associated Press



> *Turkey carries out airstrikes after deadly bombing in Ankara*
> By Suzan Fraser (Associated Press) | Updated March 14, 2016 - 11:31pm
> 
> ANKARA — Turkey lashed out at Kurdish targets on Monday, bombing military positions in northern Iraq and rounding up dozens of militants across Turkey, after a suicide car bombing in the heart of the capital drew the country even deeper into the complex Syrian conflict.
> 
> There was no claim of responsibility for the attack on bus stops that killed 37 people in Ankara on Sunday, but a senior government official said the two attackers — a man and a woman — were suspected of links to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

The latest air loss in the Saudi-led air campaign over Yemen:

Defense News



> *UAE Mirage Fighter Jet Crashes Over Yemen*
> Awad Mustafa, Defense News 9:37 a.m. EDT March 14, 2016
> 
> 
> DUBAI — A United Arab Emirates fighter jet has crashed in the southern port city of Aden during a combat operation in the early morning hours of Monday, killing two pilots.
> *
> A statement from the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen confirmed that the fighter jet was one of the French-made Dassault Mirage 2000-9s participating in the operations.
> 
> The UAE operates alongside the Mirage 2000-9s F-16 block 60s in their Operation Restoring Hope missions over Yemen as well as other logistical and transport aircraft.
> *
> "The Supreme Command of the Armed Forces announced today that a fighter jet taking part in the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia ... in Yemen was missing," a statement on the official WAM news agency said Monday afternoon, without giving further details.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

A horrifying possibility: the pan Islamic civil wars will not stop for any reason until demographic exhaustion (i.e. a 30% casualty rate) is achieved. This artricle suggests that many of the historical condition to meet this threshold are already in place:

http://atimes.com/2016/03/the-30-solution-when-war-without-end-ends-spengler/
Part 1


> *The 30% solution — when war without end ends: Spengler *
> By David P. Goldman on March 13, 2016 in AT Top Writers, David P. Goldman, Middle East
> 
> During the Cold War, the assumption that nations are rational actors dominated foreign policy research, and with good reason: the United States and the Soviet Union pursued their rivalry by rational means. Mathematical simulation provided baseline scenarios for conflict management. Today, the emergence of militant Islam as a major (and perhaps the most important) strategic threat to the United States challenges the old assumption of rationality. Where this assumption prevails, as in the effort to bring Iran into the strategic architecture of Western Asia, it is deeply controversial.
> 
> Cold War planners had the benefit of an extensive body of academic work and a consensus that embraced the majority of practitioners. Today, academic research into the prospective behavior of actors with limited rationality is rare._ Policymakers are forced back to guesswork about practical issues, for example, the prospect of supporting “moderate” Islamists against less-moderate Islamists. Public debate over pressing issues is highly colored by ideological rhetoric.
> 
> Analyzing irrational impulses in the context of real-world events is an inherently contradictory exercise. Paranoid schizophrenics may act with great rationality in the service of an irrational delusion. Distinguishing an irrational impulse from the rational means placed at its service requires highly subjective judgments. When an irrational impulse is combined with irrational leadership (for example, Adolf Hitler’s personal conduct of the war in the Eastern Front), we encounter yet another order of complexity. I have argued that Franz Rosenzweig’s Existentialist sociology of religion provides indispensable insights into this phenomena.[ii]
> 
> Nonetheless, the foreign policy failures of the United States and its coalition partners in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere during the past fifteen years have taught us that rationality is overrated. We observe behavior on the part of combatants that appears suicidal. Here some historical examples provide a helpful starting point. We encounter in many of the great conflicts of the past elements of irrationality, including overtly suicidal actions, which provide insights into the kind of conflicts that have emerged during the past two decades and are likely to continue through the rest of the present century. A fresh look at great conflicts of the past should provide a corrective to our past preoccupation with rationality.
> 
> Nations do not fight to the death, but they frequently fight until their pool of prospective fighters has reached a point of practical exhaustion. In most cases, this involves reaching the 30% mark where casualties are concerned.
> 
> Wars of this character demarcate many turning points in world history. They include the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War and, at least in some respects, the two World Wars of the 20th century. The 30% solution appears yet again in Germany’s casualty figures during the Second World War. Germany lost 5,330,000 of 17,718,714 men aged 15-44 years, or again 30% of the total.
> 
> There are disturbing similarities in these wars to the present situation in Western Asia.
> 
> There is no simple common characterization that applies to all the wars of demographic exhaustion, but there surely are common elements to be found in all or most of them. These include the belief that the alternative to pursuing the war would be national ruin, as well as the belief of ordinary soldiers that the war will lead to their social and economic advancement for ordinary soldiers (the “field marshal’s baton in the rucksack”).  These were existential wars rather than wars of choice in the minds of the major combatants. Wide historical surveys risk selecting data that fits broad patterns, to be sure, but the parallelisms are sufficiently compelling to make the effort worthwhile.
> 
> What we know of these wars challenges the usual way in which we think about rationality in politics. With hindsight, the decision to initiate and continue hostilities on this scale seems an act of madness. In most cases, moreover, the greatest number of casualties occurred after hope of ultimate victory had diminished or disappeared. The principal actors, to be sure, evinced a certain kind of rationality, albeit of a perverse order: They believed that failure to fight and win would undermine their national raison d’etre. In fact, their fear of national decline was not entirely misplaced.
> 
> In many cases the consequence of war was a catastrophic decline marked by falling birth rates and declining population, wealth and power after the cessation of hostilities. The population of Greece declined sharply after the Peloponnesian War. After the Napoleonic Wars, France entered a long period of demographic stagnation and relative decline. The American South suffered a long and terrible economic setback. And Germany came out of the 20th century in aggravated demographic decline.
> 
> The belief among combatants in wars of exhaustion that nothing less than national survival was at stake was not wholly irrational, although in some cases the cause of national decline appears more psychological than objective. The Greek city-states after Alexander appear to have lost their will to live; France, after dominating Europe for a century and half, entered a long period of demoralization after Napoleon’s defeat. Germany has regained economic power and international standing, but fails to reproduce.
> 
> We may conjecture that a combination of objective economic stress and a subjective crisis of national identity join to create conditions for a perfect storm. In that case combatants are motivated to fight to the death, and a very large proportion of them have had the opportunity to do so. The proportion we observe most often is 30% of the military-age male population, as in the Napoleonic Wars, the South in the American Civil War, and Germany in the Second World War. Casualty rates in the ancient world were considerably higher, in part because the pool of military-age citizens was not typically needed for manual labor.
> 
> Detecting such patterns has great practical importance, because perfect storm conditions are possible, indeed difficult to avoid, in the contemporary world—notably in the Sunni-Shia conflict in Western Asia. The intra-Muslim conflict, to be sure, remains scattered among geographically-contained civil wars and proxy conflicts, but it has the potential to erupt into a much larger war of exhaustion. The combination of economic stress and the cultural challenges to traditional life in the Muslim world is explosive, and might give rise to civilization wars on the scale of the past.
> 
> Before attempting to identify common patterns among these great wars, a summary of the scale of the conflicts is in order.
> 
> Athens in the Peloponnesian War
> 
> The Casualties: Athens lost half its adult male population in the course of the war. According to Barry L. Strauss, “Hoplite numbers were cut by 50% or more between 431 and 394, from 22,000 to c. 9,250. There were c. 15,000 thetes in …it is difficult to imagine more than 5,000-7,000 thetes in 394. Hence, the adult male citizen population of Athens after the Peloponnesian War was 14,000-16,250. It had been over 40,000 in 434, so the cost of the Peloponnesian War to Athens in citizen population was some 60%.[iii]
> 
> The Causes: The expansion of the Athenian Empire, in the conventional reading, led Sparta to believe that Athens had grown too powerful. Tribute from Athens’ colonies paid for half of the city’s food supply and made it possible for Athenian democracy to support a large part of its population with imports. The economy shifted away from a base among small-holding farmers to slaveholders and subsidized soldiers.[iv] Aristophanes, a traditionalist, railed against the changes in Athenian society. One of his stage characters in The Wasps declares, “We have now a thousand towns that pay us tribute; let them command each of these to feed twenty Athenians; then twenty thousand of our citizens would be eating nothing but hare, would drink nothing but the purest of milk, and always crowned with garlands.”
> 
> Thucydides argued that the Athenian mob’s desire for subsidies motivated the disastrous Sicily Campaign of 413-415 B.C.E. Athens voted to attack Syracuse “on a slight pretext, which looked reasonable, [but] was in fact aiming at conquering the whole of Sicily …The general masses and the average soldier himself saw the prospect of getting pay for the time being and of adding to the empire so as to secure permanent paid employment in the future.”[v]
> 
> The consequences: Thirty-three years after the Spartan (and Persian) victory over Athens in 404 B.C.E., Thebes defeated Sparta and liberated its helot population. Macedon conquered Athens and Thebes in 338 B.C.E., and Greece began a rapid demographic decline. Aristotle blamed Sparta’s defeat at the hands of Thebes on its declining population (“the city could not support one shock, and was ruined for want of men”[vi]). Modern archaeologists note “the disappearance in the [eastern Peloponnese], by about 250 B.C.E., of the dense pattern of rural sites, and of the intensive agriculture that implies.” This rural depopulation was associated with “a growing divide between a small class of wealthy individuals and an increasingly impoverished free lower class of citizens, declining in numbers relative to slaves and immigrants.”[vii]
> 
> The 2nd-century Greek general Polybius later complained, “In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us … For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number.”[viii]
> 
> The Peloponnesian War is of special interest to policy-making today because a certain interpretation of the war has been advanced to justify America’s efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East. Two recent histories of the war, by Donald Kagan[ix] and Victor Davis Hanson[x], were prominently associated with the policies of the late George W. Bush administration. Prof. Hanson went so far as to claim that Athens’ efforts to export its democratic political system helped bring about the conflict with oligarchical Sparta. This interpretation requires us to reject the account of Thucydides, who blames the rapacity of the Athenian democrats and the mob they alimented for the campaign against Syracuse, a fellow democracy.
> 
> Hanson and Kagan treat the Syracuse disaster as an unfortunate mistake rather than view it with Thucydides as a tragic outcome of Athens’ inherent character flaws. Hanson blames the disaster on the malign influence of Alcibiades, and Kagan blames the Athenian general Nicias. I think it soundest to follow Thucydides. Scholars with an ideological stake in notion that democracy is a universal political salve find themselves defending the indefensible when a democracy does it. Perhaps the closest analogy to Athens’ drive for empire is the Confederate dream of a Caribbean slave empire before the American Civil War—a depredation on the part of another democracy. More on this is found below.
> 
> France in the Napoleonic Wars
> 
> The Casualties: After Waterloo France probably was demographically exhausted. France suffered between 1.4-1.7 military deaths as well as a very large number of civilians, out of a total population of 29 million. As noted, the population aged 20 to 40 comprised two-fifths of the total population (a characteristic number for pre-industrial societies. Assuming gender parity, men of military age would have comprised about one-fifth of the population. The total military manpower pool of Napoleonic France was less than six million men, so civilian and military casualties together exceeded 30% of the total number.
> 
> The Causes: From a modern vantage point it seems odd to think of Napoleon’s conquests as an existential rather than an elective war. The founding of the French state, though, was bound up with a quasi-religious belief in France’s divine mission. As Aldous Huxley wrote of Cardinal Richelieu, “In working for France, he was doing God’s external will. Gesta Dei per Francos was an axiom, from which it followed that France was divine, and those who worked for French greatness were God’s instruments, and that the means they employed could not but be in accord with God’s will.”[xi] Frances’ war aims “had been rationalized into a religious principle by means of the old crusading faith in the divine mission of France and the divine right of kings,”[xii]
> 
> Religious wars had consumed France during the sixteenth century. In 1618, Bohemia’s rebellion against Austria began the Thirty Years War. France determined to challenge Austria and Spain for pride of place in Christendom. Richelieu subsidized the Protestant side, paying Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus to intervene against Austria. The first half of the Thirty Years War was fought between Protestants and French proxies; the second half (starting with the French intervention of 1635) was fought largely between Austria and Spain.
> 
> In Spain, France found an antagonist whose ambitions mirrored her own. As the political theorist Juan de Salazar wrote in 1619, “The Spanish were elected to realize the New Testament just as Israel had been elected to realize the Old Testament. The miracles with which Providence had favored Spanish policy confirmed this analogy of the Spanish people to the Jewish people, so that ‘the similarity of events in all epochs, and the singular fashion in which God has maintained the election and governance of the Spanish people, declare it to be his chosen people by law of grace, just as the other was his elect in the times of Scripture … From this it is proper to conclude from actual circumstances as well as sacred Scripture that the Spanish monarchy will endure for many centuries and will be the last monarchy.’”[xiii]
> 
> Salazar evinced “a not uncommon attitude at court and among part of the Castilian elite.”[xiv]  France emerged from the Thirty Years War as the dominant land power in Europe, while Spain began its long national decline.
> 
> Europe’s population rose from 110 million to 190 million during the 18th century, in part due to gains in the productivity of agriculture; the French population rose from 19 million to 28 million, of which two-fifths were between the ages of 20 and 40. Unemployment rose sharply during the economic crisis of 1785-1794, and provided the raw material for the Revolution’s mass conscription.[xv] During the Thirty Years War, the Imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein created mass mercenary armies that lived off the land, transforming warfare while starving the civilian population. Napoleon did Wallenstein one better, employing mass citizen armies to conquer France’s neighbors, thereby attracting a multinational horde to his banner.
> 
> Napoleon famously (if perhaps apocryphally) said that one can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. Like Wallenstein, Napoleon became the most powerful man in Europe by undermining traditional society and summoning the young men freed by the dissolution of civil society.  Schiller well depicted Wallenstein in his 1799 dramatic trilogy as the creature of his army as much as his creator. Napoleon could recruit soldiers with a field marshal’s baton in their rucksacks without offering them new worlds to conquer.
> 
> So powerful was the ambition of ordinary soldiers under Napoleon that he retained his popularity despite the Russian blunder. After the retreat from Russia he was able to recruit an army of 350,000 by 1813. This time his German satrapies revolted, and defeated him at the Battle of Leipzig. In 1814 the European powers exiled him to Elba, yet he returned to France a year later and quickly raised 200,000 more soldiers. After Waterloo France’s demographic resources probably were too drained to support another mass army.
> 
> The Consequences: After Europe’s population explosion in the 19th century, the Great Demographic Transition began in France, where fertility fell sharply relative to the rest of Europe. As Gregory Macris observed, “France, once the most populous nation in Western Europe, saw its population growth inexplicably slow in the early 1800s. Awareness of population decline in the halls of government and in the popular press led to strategic heartburn. The leadership class fretted over potential threats from the faster-growing Germans and pondered ‘the end of France as a nation.’[xvi]
> 
> Attempts to explain French demographic decline in terms of economics, urbanization or other objective indicators do not provide adequate answers. The most recent research by the French national demographics institute asserts that the reasons were psychological rather than objective. In a March 2012 study, Gilles Pison of the French National Institute of Demographic Studies wrote:
> 
> In the mid-18th century, women in both [France and Germany] had 5 or 6 children on average. But by the end of the century, the practice of birth control was spreading in France, and fertility fell from 5.4 children per women in the 1750s to 4.4 in the 1800s and 3.4 in the 1850s. In Germany, on the other hand, it was not until the late 19th century that German women, in turn, started to limit their family size. This timing differential is often attributed to the early spread of Enlightenment ideas across France, or to the lifting of religious constraints.[xvii]
> 
> Contemporary observes in the middle of the 19th century compared France’s decline to that of Greece after the Peloponnesian War. A British historian remarked in 1857 that the infertility “observed with regard to the oligarchies of Sparta and Rome had its effect even on the more extended citizenship of Athens, and it even affected, in our times, the two hundred thousand electors who formed the oligarchy of France during the reign of Louis Philippe.”[xviii]
> 
> The collapse of the French conceit of national election led to a long national demoralization and the eclipse of France as the dominant European power. With hindsight, one can argue that Napoleon’s wars were existential after all.
> _


_
_


----------



## a_majoor

Part 2



> The American Confederacy
> 
> The Casualties:  Gary Gallagher summarized the South’s losses as follows: “The Confederacy mobilized between 750,000 and 850,000 men, a figure representing 75 to 85% of its available draft-age white military population (only the presence of slaves to keep the economy running permitted such an astonishing mobilization. At least 258,000 of them perished during the war…and those wounded in combat totaled nearly 200,000. Deaths thus ran to about one in three of all men in uniform.” In all, the South lost close to 30% of its military-age men, the same proportion as France during the Napoleonic Wars.[xix]
> 
> The Causes: If Napoleon’s soldiers carried a field marshal’s baton in their rucksacks, the Confederates carried an overseer’s whip. Southerners had been fighting for slave territory in Texas, Kansas and other disputed territories for a generation. They continued to fight for the chance to acquire slaves. Lincoln’s election portended the end of the expansion of slave territories, without which the Southern economic system would strangle in a decade or two. Jefferson Davis offered to acquiesce to Lincoln’s election if only Lincoln would sanction the conquest of Cuba as a slave territory. The definitive history of Southern ambitions is found in Robert E. May’s 1973 book, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire (1973). He writes, for example:
> 
> The Memphis Daily Appeal, December 30, 1860, wrote that a slave “empire” would arise “from San Diego, on the Pacific Ocean, thence southward, along the shore line of Mexico and Central America, at low tide, to the Isthmus of Panama; thence South—still South!—along the western shore line of New Granada and Ecuador, to where the southern boundary of the latter strikes the ocean; thence east over the Andes to the head springs of the Amazon; thence down the mightiest of inland seas, through the teeming bosom of the broadest and richest delta in the world, to the Atlantic Ocean.” [xx]
> 
> For those who do not believe that democracies start wars, the Confederacy is a stumbling block. Like Pericles’ Athens, it democratically decided to conduct an imperial war of enslavement with the enthusiastic support of its lower classes. Like Napoleon’s soldiers, the Confederates fought with bravery and abandon until the point of demographic exhaustion. It is interesting to observe that the bloodiest battles (Cold Harbor, Chickamauga, the Wilderness) all took place after the South’s chance for victory had fallen markedly due to the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in July 1863. The rate of casualties increased sharply in the second half of 1863 and the first half of 1864, as the South responded to its losses by fighting all the more desperately.
> 
> The consequences: In the American South, per capita income was higher than the Midwest’s in 1840, but fell to half that of the Midwest by 1880. By 1950, it was still only 70% of that of the Midwest.[xxi]
> 
> The Middle East today
> 
> The Causes: Several important countries in the Middle East are subject to perfect storm of demographics and economics. The population cohort aged 15 to 24 years in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran jumped from 15 million in 1995 to about 30 million in 2010. This bulge population has poor prospects. Youth unemployment, according to the World Bank, stands at 30% in Iran and 35% in Iraq. The concept hardly applies to Syria, whose economy is in ruins after five years of a civil war that has displaced perhaps 10 million Syrians out of a population of 22 million. Never, perhaps, has such a large military-age population encountered such poor future prospects in a war zone dominated by non-state extremist actors.
> 
> The prospects for economic stabilization of the region’s main actors are poor. The official unemployment rate is 11%, but only 37% of the population is considered economically active, an extremely low ratio given the concentration of Iran’s population in working-age brackets. Social indicators point to deteriorating conditions of life are alarming. The number of marriages has fallen by 20% since 2012. “In Iran, the customary marriage age range is 20-34 for men and 15-29 for women … 46% of men and 48% of women in those age ranges remain unmarried,” according to a June 2, 2015 report in AL-Monitor.[xxii]
> 
> Economic problems explain part of the falling marriage rate, but the corrosion of traditional values also is a factor. Iranian researchers estimated late in 2015 that one out of eight Iranian women was infected by chlamydia, a common venereal disease that frequently causes infertility.[xxiii]
> 
> When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, the average Iranian woman had seven children; today the total fertility rate has fallen to just 1.6 children, the sharpest drop in demographic history. Iran still has a young population, but it has no children to succeed them. By mid-century Iran will have a higher proportion of elderly dependents than Europe, an impossible and unprecedented burden for a poor country.
> 
> At $30 a barrel, moreover, Iran’s oil and gas revenues are less than $30 billion a year, by my calculations, and less than half of the country’s $64 billion budget for fiscal year 2014.[xxiv] Iran’s sudden aging will be followed by Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia. Iran is the most literate Muslim country, thanks in large part to an ambitious literacy campaign introduced by the Shah in the early 1970s. Literacy is the best predictor of fertility in the Muslim world: Muslim women who attend high school and university marry late or not at all and have fewer children.[xxv]
> 
> Between 2005 and 2020, Iran’s population aged 15 to 24, that is, its pool of potential army recruits, will have fallen by nearly half. Meanwhile Pakistan’s military-age population will rise by nearly 50%. In 2000, Iran had half the military-age men of its eastern Sunni neighbor; by 2020 it will have one-fourth as many. Iran’s bulge generation of youth born in the 1980s is likely to be its last, and its window for asserting Shiite power in the region will close within a decade.
> 
> More important, 45% of Iran’s population will be over the age of 65 years by 2050, according to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects constant fertility scenario. No poor country has ever carried such a burden of dependent elderly, because poor countries invariably have a disproportionate number of young people. Iran is the first country to get old before it got rich, and the economic consequences will be catastrophic. This is a danger of which Iran’s leaders are keenly aware.
> 
> Saudi Arabia has the opposite problem: it has a high fertility rate and a growing cohort of young people, and may lack the financial resources to meet their expectations. At present oil prices, Saudi Arabia will exhaust its monetary reserves within five years, according a 2015 report by the International Monetary fund.[xxvi]
> 
> There are no official data on poverty in Saudi Arabia, but one Saudi newspaper used social service data to estimate that 6 million of the kingdom’s 20 million inhabitants are poor, some desperately so. After the 2011 “Arab Spring” disturbances, Riyadh increased social spending by $37 billion–or $6,000 for every poor person in the kingdom–in order to preempt the spread of discontent to its own territory.
> 
> Saudi Arabia now spends $48.5 billion on defense, according to IHS, and plans to increase the total to $63 billion by 2020. The monarchy has to match Iran’s coming conventional military buildup after the P5+1 nuclear agreement to maintain credibility. If oil prices remain low Saudi Arabia will have to sharply reduce subsidies, opening the risk of social instability.
> 
> Turkey faces yet another sort of demographic challenge. It fought a four-decade war with its Kurdish separates that killed perhaps 40,000 people. The problem is that Turkey is gradually becoming Kurdish. The Kurds have 3.3 children per female versus only 1.8 for ethnic Turks, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt estimates, which means that within a generation, half the recruits to the Turkish army will come from Kurdish-speaking homes. Turkey’s intervention in the Syrian civil war is motivated in large measure by its fear that the Kurds will succeed in creating an independent self-governing zone on their border, and link up with the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq.
> 
> Demographics, economics and ideology in Asia Minor, the Levant and Mesopotamia combine to create the conditions for a perfect storm. Political analysis of the region tends to focus on the ideological and religious rivalries among Iranian Shi’ism, Sunni Wahhabism and Turkish neo-Ottoman aspirations. To this must be added the demographic and economic challenges that face oil monocultures in an adverse financial environment in the midst of a treacherous demographic transition.
> 
> That challenges conventional ways of assessing the options open to rational actors. Game theory considers the behavior of individuals with well-defined interests; it does not consider situations in which one or more of the players (for example) suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. Iran may decide that its existential interest require it to expand its Shi’ite empire now, before its rapid aging deprives it of manpower and financial resources. Saudi Arabia may decide that its ability to control its own restive population requires pre-emptive action against its Shia opponents. Turkey may decide that the threat of territorial amputation requires pre-emptive action against the Kurds.
> 
> 30% solution here again?
> 
> To a great extent, all of this is happening now, through proxy wars: Saudi Arabia and Turkey are engaged in a proxy war with Iran in Syria and to some extent elsewhere in the region. Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops are heavily engaged in Syria, and Saudi Arabia has threatened to introduce its own troops in the country. The problem is that Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all face fundamental economic and demographic challenges to internal stability that will get worse within a horizon of five to ten years.
> 
> American planners have sought to stabilize the region through proxies (supporting “moderate Islamists” in Syria against the Assad regime, encouraging the Iranians to join the regional security architecture, and so forth). Conditions for a perfect storm on the scale of past wars of exhaustion already prevail, and the likelihood of another war of exhaustion on the scale of the Napoleonic Wars or the Thirty Years War is much higher than foreign policy analysts seem to appreciate. The result may be the 30% solution we have seen so many times in history, and the appropriate American response may be not to extinguish the fire, but to maintain a controlled burn.
> 
> _ See for example Heaven on Earth: Variety of Millenarian Experience, by Richard Landes (Oxford 2011); Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism, by Anna Geifman (Praeger 2010); and How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too), by the present author (Regnery 2011).
> 
> [ii] David Goldman, op. cit.
> 
> [iii] Athens After the Peloponnesian War: Class, Faction and Policy, by Barry S. Strauss (Routledge 2014), p 81
> 
> [iv] Maritime Trades in the Ancient Greek World, by Charles M. Reed (Cambridge University Press 2003) p. 16.
> 
> [v] Rex Warner’s translation in the Penguin edition, pp. 372, 382.
> 
> [vi] Aristotle, Politics (trans. William Ellis); The Floating Press (2009), p. 99.
> 
> [vii] Michael H. Jameson et. Al., A Greek Countryside: the southern Argolid from prehistory to the present day (Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 396.
> 
> [viii] Polybius, Histories Volume II translated by Evelyn S. Shuckburg (London: MacMillan 1889), p. 511.
> 
> [ix] Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (Penguin, 2003).
> 
> [x] Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other, Random House 2005.
> 
> [xi] Aldous Huxley, The Grey Eminence (Vintage, 2005), p. 185
> 
> [xii] Huxley, p. 133
> 
> [xiii] Quoted in Luis Suárez Fernández and José Andrés Gallego, La crisis de la hegemonía española, siglo XVII (Ediciones Rialp, 1986), p. 12
> 
> [xiv] Spain: A Unique History, by Stanley G. Payne (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), p. 106
> 
> [xv] Political Demograpy, Demographic Engineering, by Myron Weiner and Michael S. Teitelbaum (Berghan: Oxford, 2001) pp. 20-21.
> 
> [xvi] https://www.usnwc.edu/Lucent/OpenPdf.aspx?id=128&title=Perspective. For more background
> 
> [xvii] Giles Pison, “France and Germany: a history of criss-crossing demographic curves,” in Population and Societies, Mulletin Mensuel d’Information de l’Institut National d’études Démographiques, n. 487 (March 2012).
> 
> [xviii] George Finlay, Greece under the Romans (London: Blackwell 1857), p. 68.
> 
> [xix] The Confederate War, by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard, 1997), pp. 28-29.
> 
> [xx] The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861, by Robert E. May (Louisiana State University Press, 1973), p. 164.
> 
> [xxi] Richard Easterlin, “Regional Income Trends, 1840-1950,” in, ed. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman (New York: Harper % Row, 1971), p. 40.
> 
> [xxii] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/06/iran-birth-rate-marriage-decline-divorce.html
> 
> [xxiii] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26343285
> 
> [xxiv] http://atimes.com/2016/01/no-prosperity-for-iran-after-nuclear-deal/
> 
> [xxv] See Goldman, p. 12.
> 
> [xxvi] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/reo/2015/mcd/eng/pdf/mreo1015ch4.pdf
> _


----------



## Edward Campbell

Thucydides said:
			
		

> A horrifying possibility: the pan Islamic civil wars will not stop for any reason until demographic exhaustion (i.e. a 30% casualty rate) is achieved. This artricle suggests that many of the historical condition to meet this threshold are already in place:
> 
> http://atimes.com/2016/03/the-30-solution-when-war-without-end-ends-spengler/
> Part 1




It's a good article and I broadly agree with David Goldman (_Spengler_), including the concluding bit about all America (and the whole US led West) can (should?) try to do is to maintain a "controlled burn." But my question is (assuming we _can_ maintain the "controlled burn"): what's the problem? So they fight to exhaustion, à la the Thirty Years War. I believe Europe was a much improved place in 1648, far, far better than it had been in 1618. Sometimes long, bloody, brutal wars, that come at HUGE costs to the people involved, are good things.


----------



## jollyjacktar

I have to agree.  The thought of 30%+ of their fighting age males killing each other off seems to be a win-win situation to me.


----------



## ueo

Or move to Canada.


----------



## CougarKing

Another Kurdish autonomous region (aside from the one in Northern Iraq), to the annoyance of Turkey:

Canadian Press



> *Syria's Kurds declare de-facto federal region in north*
> [The Canadian Press]
> Zeina Karam, The Associated Press
> The Canadian Press
> March 17, 2016
> 
> BEIRUT - Syria's Kurds on Thursday declared a de-facto federal region in Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Syria, drawing sharp condemnation from both the Damascus government and its opponents who decried the unilateral move as unconstitutional and setting a dangerous precedent.
> 
> The declaration further complicates the situation on the ground in Syria even as peace talks press ahead in Geneva. The main Syrian Kurdish party has been excluded from those talks — perhaps an indication of why the Kurds chose this particular moment for their move.
> 
> In Syria's civil war, Kurdish fighters have emerged as the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State group and are backed militarily by the United States. More recently, Russia has backed them politically.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Instapundit's history lesson on how we got to this point in time (lots of video and embedded links; go to original article for everything):

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/229685/



> March 22, 2016
> *NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: No Doubt About It — We’re Back in a Ground War in Iraq*.
> 
> Without much fanfare, Obama has dramatically reversed his Iraq policy — sending thousands of troops back in the country after he declared the war over, engaging in ground combat despite initially promising that his strategy “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Well, they’re on foreign soil, and they’re fighting.
> 
> It would have been easier — and would have cost far fewer lives — if we had just stayed. But Obama had to have a campaign issue.
> 
> And I suppose I should repeat my Iraq War history lesson: Things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes.
> 
> 
> 
> In the interest of historical accuracy, I think I’ll repeat this post again:
> 
> BOB WOODWARD: Bush Didn’t Lie About WMD, And Obama Sure Screwed Up Iraq In 2011.
> 
> 
> 
> [Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.
> 
> Plus:
> 
> 
> 
> Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:
> 
> 
> 
> Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.
> 
> We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.
> 
> Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:
> 
> 
> As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.
> 
> Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls.
> 
> 
> 
> Related: What Kind Of Iraq Did Obama Inherit?
> 
> Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:
> 
> 
> 
> Because I expect a lot of revisionist history over the next few months.
> 
> Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.
> 
> And who can forget this?
> 
> 
> FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”
> 
> — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012
> 
> 
> 
> Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.
> 
> Related: Obama’s Betrayal Of The Iraqis.
> 
> Plus: Maybe that Iraq withdrawal was a bad thing in hindsight. Obama’s actions, if not his words, suggest that even he may think so.


----------



## The Bread Guy

An interesting world map attached, showing one think tank's assessment of ISIL's efforts - note that North America is in white, meaning they see this area as an ISIL "Far Abroad Ring", where the aims are to "Defend and Expand - Attack and *Polarize*".  That bit in yellow intrigued me.

Source


----------



## daftandbarmy

ueo said:
			
		

> Or move to Canada.



And avoid Iraq:

https://www.statista.com/chart/4094/number-of-persons-killed-by-terrorist-attacks-in-iraq-afghanistan-pakistan-et-al/


----------



## The Bread Guy

Canadian guy (dual citizenship?) one of three dinged for being Hezbollah in UAE (where Hezbollah's considered a terrorist organization):


> Three men charged with setting up an affiliate of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah group in the UAE were sentenced to six months in prison to be followed by deportation, the Federal Supreme Court ruled on Monday.
> 
> The men, Canadian Lebanese Suhail Naif Gareeb, 62; Lebanese Asa’d Ameen Qansouh, 66; and Ahmad Ebrahim Qansouh, 30, were found guilty of setting up an office of the militant group in the UAE and carrying out commercial, economic and political activities without licences, the court presided over by judge Falah Al Hajeri ruled.
> 
> The General Prosecutor earlier told the court that the three men established and managed an international group belonging to Lebanon-based Hezbollah without official permission or licences ...


----------



## CougarKing

Perhaps the Saudis might respond to this by simply getting munitions from alternate suppliers?

Defense News



> *Senators Want Legislation To Limit US Bomb Sales to Saudi Arabia*
> Joe Gould, Defense News 4:35 p.m. EDT April 12, 2016
> 
> WASHINGTON — US Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said he is proposing a bill to limit US munition sales to Saudi Arabia in protest for its conduct of the war in Yemen.
> 
> Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he is troubled by civilian deaths in the Saudi-led bombing campaign and would like to see restrictions placed on US sales of air-to-ground bombs. Though he said support for the measure might be slim, he sees "a growing discomfort [in Congress] about the growing level of arms sales to the Mideast, and a lot more people willing to ask questions than there were just a few years ago."
> 
> The legislation, which would be focused on future sales of air-to-ground munitions to Saudi Arabia, is co-sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

I guess the Iranians are using the same "tourist agency" the Russians used for "visits" to eastern Ukraine ...


> Iran’s Army Commander Major General Ataollah Salehi denied an organized deployment of the Army Ground Force Special Forces to Syria, but at the same time noted that just a number of army forces are in the Arab country on a voluntary basis.
> 
> Some volunteers from the Army have been dispatched to Syria among whom may be a number of forces from the 65th Nohed Brigade (Special Forces), the commander told reporters on Wednesday.
> 
> He added that the Army has no responsibility in advisory assistance to Syria, stressing that those sent to the Arab country have volunteered to go there and are acting under the responsibility of an organization in Iran which governs measures related to the advisory assistance.
> 
> It came after four members of Iran’s Army Ground Force Special Forces who were on an advisory mission in Syria’s Aleppo were martyred earlier this month.
> 
> Army Ground Force Commander Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan told Tasnim at the time that the force’s advisers are helping Syria along with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force advisers.
> 
> According to the commander, the four were killed in a large-scale raid launched by thousands of al-Nusra Front militants and other Takfiri terrorists south of Syria’s Aleppo ...


----------



## jollyjacktar

Taliban suffer a work place accident.   ;D



> [size=12pt]*Taliban suicide bomber accidentally triggers explosives early, killing himself and eight other would-be martyrs at their base*[/size]
> -Taliban suicide bomber sets off his own vest by accident
> -Set off fellow fighters's vests, killing himself and eight others
> -Had planned to target Kunduz where Taliban launch new offensive
> 
> By Sara Malm for MailOnline
> 
> Published: 11:02 GMT, 27 April 2016  | Updated: 15:06 GMT, 27 April 2016
> 
> A Taliban suicide bomber accidentally killed himself and eight fellow militants after triggering his explosives vest by mistake.
> 
> The jihadist fighters had been ordered to carry out an attack in Kunduz city, Afghanistan, but all died before their got there.
> 
> However, one of the militants detonated his vest shortly after leaving a Taliban base in Dasht-e-Archi, triggering everyone elses explosives, the Afghan Interior Ministry said.
> 
> The Taliban fighters had been part of a group operating under commander Mullah Wali, the MoI statement said.
> 
> The Taliban have been trying to recapture Kunduz, a city which they held for just 14 days after months of fighting with government forces.
> 
> The fall of Kunduz, if only for a few days, was a symbolic triumph for the Taliban, who have just launched a spring offensive in Afghanistan.
> 
> The Taliban say they stalled their Kunduz assault thismonth, because they had captured four 'important points' outsidethe city and wanted to avoid harming civilians.
> 
> 'Local residents are now gradually leaving for safer placesand the moment our fighters get approval from centralleadership, they will start (the) advance,' said the group'smain spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
> 
> Uncertainty over which side has the upper hand lingers inthe streets of Kunduz, where memories of last year's deadly routare fresh.
> 
> Nearly 300 civilians were killed in the mainfighting, which lasted from April to October, according to the most conservative estimates.
> 
> 'This is not how normal life should be,' said Jawad Azadzoy,whose cousin was wounded when a makeshift bomb went off outsidehis shop in downtown Kunduz on Monday.
> 
> 'Life has not been normal for a long time.'
> 
> Masoom Baha, a senior doctor at the city's public hospital,said medical staff were barely able to keep up with casualtiesof the fighting, mainly from rockets and artillery fire.
> 
> Adding to the strain on emergency services, a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz on Oct. 3 killed 42 people and destroyed ahospital run by Medecins Sans Frontieres, in what the U.S.military has since called a 'tragic mistake'.
> 
> To prevent the city from falling again, Afghan troops havetried to secure main roads leading into Kunduz, includingHighway 3 to the east, after supply lines were cut during the2015 siege, slowing efforts to regain control.
> 
> Taliban fighters maintain strongholds close to thethoroughfares, however, and during recent skirmishes, somepolice checkpoints on Highway 3 were overrun.
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3561255/Taliban-suicide-bomber-accidentally-triggers-explosives-early-killing-eight-martyrs-base.html#ixzz472i9n2HI
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## ueo

Give what's left of him a cigar. Keep this up and the world will be somewhat safer and saner.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Bit of a chain own goal, eh?  Good one!


----------



## jollyjacktar

Premature martyrification,  could happen to anyone their first time.  ;D


----------



## AbdullahD

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> Premature martyrification,  could happen to anyone their first time.  ;D



omg that is funny, wrong but funny lol


----------



## The Bread Guy

Cyberfighter/IT geek exploitation team -- UP!


> Dozens of foreign IT experts from the terrorist group of ISIS have deserted the group’s ranks in Iraq’s northwestern city of Mosul over the past few days, leaving a remarkable vacuum in the ISIS-linked media centers in the region, local sources.
> 
> Local sources confirmed that hundreds of foreign terrorists have recently left ISIS ranks and returned to their home countries, including technical support experts. This has put a pressure on the group’s media centers, which used to broadcast the pro-ISIS propaganda in support of the group’s self-declared Caliphate.
> 
> The new wave of dissidence also included a number of American nationals who used to serve as professional film makers on behalf of the extremist group in Mosul and other parts of Iraq.
> 
> The head of the Nineveh media center Raafat al-Zarari said that pro-ISIS sources admitted that the group has been suffering a shortage of media workers and IT experts “because many of them have left their areas” ...


More at link


----------



## Flavus101

We can only hope that they will not be allowed to quietly return to their past lives.


----------



## YZT580

But did they really desert?


----------



## Colin Parkinson

AbdullahD said:
			
		

> omg that is funny, wrong but funny lol



seconded and I had to steal it for FB  [lol:


----------



## CougarKing

Meanwhile, in Yemen:

Military Times



> *U.S. reveals troops on the ground in Yemen*
> Andrew Tilghman, Military Times 7:01 p.m. EDT May 6, 2016
> 
> A “small number” of U.S troops are deployed on the ground in Yemen to help fight the al-Qaida affiliate there that was controlling a major port city, a defense official said Friday.
> 
> A Pentagon spokesman declined to say how many U.S. troops are there supporting operations led by the Yemeni military and the United Arab Emirates around the port city of Mukalla.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Edward Campbell

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> Meanwhile, in Yemen:
> 
> Military Times



An old idea, updated, just a bit ...


----------



## The Bread Guy

Mmmmm, Al Qaeda looking to Syria instead of Pakistan as new home turf?


> Al Qaeda’s top leadership in Pakistan, badly weakened after a decade of C.I.A. drone strikes, has decided that the terror group’s future lies in Syria and has secretly dispatched more than a dozen of its most seasoned veterans there, according to senior American and European intelligence and counterterrorism officials.
> 
> The movement of the senior Qaeda jihadists reflects Syria’s growing importance to the terrorist organization and most likely foreshadows an escalation of the group’s bloody rivalry with the Islamic State, Western officials say.
> 
> The operatives have been told to start the process of creating an alternate headquarters in Syria and lay the groundwork for possibly establishing an emirate through Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, to compete with the Islamic State, from which Nusra broke in 2013. This would be a significant shift for Al Qaeda and its affiliate, which have resisted creating an emirate, or formal sovereign state, until they deem conditions on the ground are ready. Such an entity could also pose a heightened terrorist threat to the United States and Europe.
> 
> Qaeda operatives have moved in and out of Syria for years. Ayman al-Zawahri, the group’s supreme leader in Pakistan, dispatched senior jihadists to bolster the Nusra Front in 2013. A year later, Mr. Zawahri sent to Syria a shadowy Qaeda cell called Khorasan that American officials say has been plotting attacks against the West.
> 
> But establishing a more enduring presence in Syria would present the group with an invaluable opportunity, Western analysts said. A Syria-based Qaeda state would not only be within closer striking distance of Europe but also benefit from the recruiting and logistical support of fighters from Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon ...


----------



## Journeyman

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> .....The operatives have been told to start the process of creating an alternate headquarters in Syria and lay the groundwork for possibly establishing an emirate through Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, to compete with the Islamic State, from which Nusra broke in 2013.


For anyone seriously interested in some background info on this "schism," I recommend the Institute for the Study of War's series, which includes _Jabhat al Nusra and ISIS: Sources of Strength_.  

It includes sufficient detail without getting too pedantic (or assuming that the reader knows each of the 'Abu al-_NAME_  players); it's particular strength (attached link to report #3) is in explaining why the current Western 'plan' will inevitably fail.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

There's a _plan_?  Wow.  ;D


----------



## CougarKing

The prelude to a more substantial US armed intervention to stabilize this country?

Reuters



> *Report says US special forces stationed in Libya as rival groups race to expel IS from bastion*
> By: Agence France-Presse | Reuters
> May 13, 2016 10:44 AM
> 
> 
> TRIPOLI, Libya -- (UPDATE - 10:59 a.m.) US special operations troops have been stationed at two outposts in Libya since late last year to try to enlist local support for a possible offensive against Islamic State, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing US officials.
> 
> Two teams totaling fewer than 25 troops are operating from around the cities of Misurata and Benghazi to seek potential allies and glean intelligence on threats, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the newspaper reported.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## The Bread Guy

S.M.A. said:
			
		

> The prelude to a more substantial US armed intervention to stabilize this country?
> 
> Reuters



And a little something on what such a fight might look like, from the tech editor of _Defense One_.


> ... Defense Department officials said they were “realistically hopeful” about the prospects for the Unity Government*** but added, “there will be hardliners who continue to push back.”
> 
> “There are likely to be spoilers...dead-enders that will be irreconcilable under any conditions. That could be anywhere between ten to 40 percent of the militias that are out there,” said Chris Chivvis associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND “That’s a reality that Libya has to deal with.”
> 
> Such spoilers would put an international protection force in an awkward position, depending on how many people side against the government. Exactly how unified or unifying is a government that rules from behind a wall of foreign troops? ...


Soup sandwich, indeed ...

*** - That's a "Unity" gov't between, according to different sources, two or three currently-trying-to-govern bodies.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Looking a bit more broadly at some recent attacks ...


> A series of coordinated attacks in three cities in Syria and Yemen Monday by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) provides important new insights into the group's current capabilities and strategy, suggesting that the months ahead will be increasingly violent in the Middle East and perhaps further afield.
> 
> At least five distinct aspects of the Monday attacks should raise eyebrows and security concerns in many countries: their locations, simultaneity, logistical prowess, multi-country coordination and ISIL's evolving strategy in its wider political-military context.
> 
> The most noteworthy aspect of the attacks was the combination of multiple, large-scale bombings in the political hearts of the Syrian and Yemeni governments, which both appear more vulnerable than assumed ...


----------



## Journeyman

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> “There are likely to be spoilers...dead-enders that will be irreconcilable under any conditions. That could be anywhere between ten to 40 percent of the militias that are out there,” said Chris Chivvis associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND *“That’s a reality that Libya has to deal with.”*


I would suggest that Libyans are quite aware of the reality on the ground.  That's a reality that 'the West' has to honestly deal with.


* And by "the West," I'm not remotely including _anyone_  who believes that UN blue berets are the answer;  those people don't even understand the question.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Journeyman said:
			
		

> ... That's a reality that 'the West' has to honestly deal with ...


And I think they have to _understand_ it first, no?


----------



## Good2Golf

More importantly, did Journeyman just split an infinitive?


----------



## Journeyman

Good2Golf said:
			
		

> More importantly, did Journeyman just split an infinitive?


No, but the clause following my semi-colon was not grammatically complete.

_~sigh~_


----------



## Good2Golf

I would have taken the split infinitive over termination with a preposition.  James Tiberius K would also have gone the infinitive route... :not-again:


----------



## The Bread Guy

ISIS still learning the interwebs, episode 387 ...


> Police in at least four European countries have been alerted to a backfiring ISIL propaganda stunt in which sympathisers based in the West were apparently urged to show their allegiance in social media posts.
> 
> The use of handwritten messages photographed against mostly European backdrops, intended to demonstrate the strength of support for ISIL in Europe and elsewhere, has enabled the discovery of the precise or likely locations in which these images were taken.
> 
> Hands or parts of hands were visible in some of the photographs – each of which showed a pro-ISIL message written in Arabic. But while no one revealed his or her face, specific streets and even apartment blocks were pinpointed with relative ease by readers of a citizen journalism platform, Bellingcat.com, and other websites, using basic internet search tools.
> 
> ISIL’s initiative, launched on Saturday, was intended as a social media coup ahead of a statement from its Syrian spokesman, Abu Mohammed Al Adnani.
> 
> Sympathisers who posted photographs were among thousands of supporters, also known as the extremists’ “fanboys", who took to Twitter and Telegram – an instant messaging service long favoured by ISIL – in an attempt to drum up interest for the statement ...


----------



## CougarKing

A message to the House of Saud to disengage from their proxy war in Yemen?

Defense News



> *US Blocks Cluster-Bomb Sales To Saudis: Report*
> Agence France-Presse 1:08 p.m. EDT May 29, 2016
> 
> 
> WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has moved to block sales of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen, amid reports of mounting civilian casualties there, a US media report said Saturday.
> 
> The report in the journal Foreign Policy, citing US officials, said that the White House had quietly placed a hold on the transfer of such munitions to the Sunni kingdom as it carries out a bloody war on Shiite rebels in Yemen.
> 
> A Saudi-led coalition has been fighting the Iranian-backed Huthis since March 2015, trying to roll back their control of wide swaths of Yemen.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Journeyman

Good2Golf said:
			
		

> James Tiberius K would also have gone the infinitive route... :not-again:


Sorry for the tardy (and equally irrelevant) response.  I was mailing something to Canada Alberta, and Canada Post has a series of Star Trek stamps, under the grammatically-painful slogan "to boldly go."

Thank you.... for the salt & vinegar chips into that wound.


----------



## The Bread Guy

ISIS boss:  prepare to pull pole, folks -- shared under the Fair Dealing provisions of the _Copyright Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42)_ ...


> Abu bakr Al-Baghdadi, the Leader of the ISIS, has reportedly ordered his group to withdraw from Iraq and move to some other countries.
> 
> According to the president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Ammar al-Hakim, the Iraqi forces have obtained a letter signed by Baghdadi which was supposed to be received by his men in Iraq.
> 
> Hakim revealed that in the letter, Baghdadi orders the terrorists in Iraq to gradually withdraw from Iraq, and move to other countries.
> 
> Hakim also urged the Iraqi government to prepare a prior plan for the post-IS era as the extremist group is realizing its failure in the country.
> 
> “This is the beginning of the end of IS in Iraq,” he claimed.
> 
> Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official, Wahid Bakozi, said last week that they have obtained a copy of IS leader Abubakir al-Baghdadi’s letter to the group’s commanders, ordering them to eventually withdraw to the major cities as “the people of Iraq and Syria do not deserve the sacrifices IS is making.”
> 
> The Kurdish official pointed out that, according to Baghdadi’s letter, the terrorists are required to focus on Misrata city of Libya instead of continuing in the current situation of Iraq and Syria.


We'll see ...


----------



## jollyjacktar

Maybe a red letter day, here's hoping.



> Has ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi been killed in US air strike? Reports say he has died in Raqqa but no confirmation from coalition
> - Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has reportedly been killed in air strike in Raqqa If confirmed it would be a huge blow to ISIS, which he leads
> 
> ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has reportedly been killed in a US air strike in Raqqa.
> 
> His death, reported by the respected Turkish daily Yenis Safak, would be a major blow for the jihadists and comes only days after 50 people were killed in an Orlando nightclub by a man pledging allegiance to ISIS.
> 
> But there have previously been reports that al-Baghdadi, who proclaimed himself caliph of all Muslims two years ago, has been killed or wounded.
> 
> The Abna24 website said al-Baghdadi had been killed on Sunday morning by an air strike in Syria but the US-led coalition has made no comment.
> 
> But there has been no confirmation from the US or any other coalition powers.
> 
> A Pentagon spokesman told Mail Online they were not aware of any 'high value targets' having been killed.
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3640726/ISIS-leader-Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi-killed-air-strike-Raqqa-according-pro-Islamic-State-news-agency.html#ixzz4BYof8qXC
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## CougarKing

The UAE pulling out of the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen:

Defense News



> *UAE Announces End of Yemen Military Operations*
> Awad Mustafa
> 6:05 p.m. EDT June 15, 2016
> 
> 
> DUBAI — The United Arab Emirates on Wednesday announced the end of its military operations in Yemen.
> 
> Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Dr. Anwar Gargash made the announcement during a lecture at the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi's court on Wednesday night.
> 
> In a tweet summarizing Gargash’s remarks, Sheikh Mohammed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the armed forces, said: “Our standpoint is clear: war is over for our troops. We are monitoring political arrangements, empowering Yemenis in liberated areas."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## a_majoor

Turns out that those crazy Bollywood movies have a PSYOPS application as well:

http://strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/articles/20160614.aspx



> *Morale: Weaponizing Bollywood*
> 
> June 14, 2016: Loud music can be incredibly annoying and sometimes extremely dangerous if if the aggrieved is an Islamic terrorists or a desperate tyrant armed with nuclear weapons. This odd but important phenomenon was reaffirmed recently when it was reported that British commandos in Libya, working with local forces resisting ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) efforts to establish a presence there, suggested that loud Indian movie music be played near ISIL positions. This would annoy the Islamic terrorists and persuade them to either attack (and be killed) or retreat (and allow the Libyan forces to advance). If nothing else it makes the much hated (by most Libyans) ISIL gunmen (most of them foreigners) uncomfortable.
> 
> It’s not just ISIL that hates music. Conservative Arab Moslems have a particular distaste for all music and especially “Bollywood” (hit tunes from Indian movies) music. Early Moslems were particularly hostile to Hinduism (for reasons too complex to explain here) but young Moslem men in Arabia and throughout Asia find Bollywood films, especially the many musicals and their memorable melodies, irresistible. The images of pretty young women dancing with handsome young men added to the appeal but all of this stuff was strictly forbidden by Islamic radicals, like those running al Qaeda and ISIL. Worse, when this music is used as a “weapon” some of the young men on the receiving end find they do like it but have to conceal that lest they be accused of apostasy and executed. No one expected Bollywood sound tracks to be weaponized, but commandos are known for coming up with clever solutions. Nevertheless music as a weapon has been around for a long time.
> 
> Religion doesn’t have to be involved for pop music to be annoying. In February 2016 South Korea resumed using large loudspeaker systems to play South Korean pop music and uncensored news across the DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone) and deep into North Korea. This was done via eleven loudspeaker systems that were installed on the DMZ in 2010 but were not turned on until August 2015. That annoyed the north so much that they made concessions and negotiated a deal to shut the loudspeakers down again a month later. But in 2016 North Korea fought back and in addition to protests used their own loudspeaker system to try and drown out the South Korean music and news. That had limited success because the North Korean equipment was weaker. The northern broadcasts featured praise for North Korean leaders and the superior lifestyle of the north and that made little impression on any South Koreans who heard it. The southern broadcasts could be heard as far as 10 kilometers in the day and over 20 kilometers at night. The southerners turned on their loudspeakers for two t0 six hours a day and at random times.
> 
> These broadcasts, using less powerful equipment, had gone on for decades until, by mutual agreement, they were halted in 2004. The North Korea attacks in 2010 led South Korea to install new, more powerful, speaker systems in response. These new speaker systems are more powerful than anything the north has been able to install and the broadcasts, especially at night, had an impact. So much so that North Korea undertook a nationwide propaganda campaign. This effort required people to attend mandatory meetings where local officials lectured them for hours on the dangers of the messages from the loudspeakers. These meetings backfired because many North Koreans had not heard about the South Korean loudspeakers being turned on again or what the news they were broadcasting was. So after the mandatory lectures many more North Koreans sought to find out what the loudspeakers were blasting into the north. Many of the North Korean troops and civilians who heard the music and news broadcasts liked it. North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un himself likes the K-Pop (South Korea pop music) so much that he ordered the creation of two all-girl pop bands and called K-Pop a North Korean invention. No one believes that because all-boy and all-girl pop groups are a specialty in South Korea and have achieved worldwide fame. Say whatever you want, but you can’t stop the music or the news when the loudspeakers come on.
> 
> Some Islamic countries, especially those in the Persian Gulf, were so upset with the growing use of blasphemous pop music as a weapon that they have tried to get the UN and Western countries to ban the practice. They have not been able to muster enough support in UN, yet, but they have had some success getting Western nations to go along. Thus in 2006 the U.S. Department of Defense forbade American troops from making music videos by taking their combat videos (often taken with a GoPro camera on their helmet) and adding a pop music sound track and then posting them on the Internet. The Department of Defense order was made so that Arab feelings would not be hurt. These videos showed Islamic terrorists getting killed to accompaniment of rap or heavy metal music. Arab media depicted this as a sign of American barbarism and anti-Arab attitudes.
> 
> Yet American troops first discovered this type of “combat video” in Iraq and Afghanistan where Islamic terrorists took video images of attacks on American troops and added a music or spoken audio track. In some cases, the audio was Arab rock and roll, the kind of music that would get wannabe jihadis ("holy warriors") all fired up. U.S. troops had their own video cameras, and were collecting a lot of combat videos. So, copying the enemy practice, they added pop music to the videos and began passing them around. Despite the Department of Defense ban the troops continued to make and distribute these videos but without the usual screens identifying the unit involved, or images that make it possible to easily identify who the troops are. The troops are not terribly concerned about Arab morale, especially after a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Article Link

Iraq: PM Abadi declares victory over ISIL in Fallujah

Haider al-Abadi says security forces have retaken most of Fallujah and only "small pockets" of ISIL remain within city.

Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi says Iraqi forces have retaken most of Fallujah from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), as clearing operations are under way to flush out the armed group's remaining fighters in the city.

The government lost control of Fallujah in 2014, months before ISIL, also known as ISIS, took Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, and swept across large parts of the country.

"We promised you the liberation of Fallujah and we retook it. Our security forces control the city except for small pockets that need to be cleared within the coming hours," Abadi said on Friday in a brief address on state TV.

"Fallujah has returned to the nation and Mosul is the next battle," Abadi also said on Twitter. "Daesh will be defeated," he added, using an Arabic acronym for ISIL.

Earlier on Friday, Iraqi forces said they had entered the centre of Fallujah, nearly four weeks after the start of a US-backed offensive to retake the city 50km west of the capital, Baghdad.

"The counterterrorism service and the rapid response forces have retaken the government compound in the centre of Fallujah," the operation's overall commander, Lieutenant-General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, told the AFP news agency. 

The Iraqi flag is now raised on top of the building, symbolising government control.

Commanders said their forces had met limited resistance from ISIL fighters during the push into the city centre.

"This is a very significant development," said Al Jazeera's Omar Al Saleh, who has reported extensively on the conflict in Iraq.

"It is a big moral boost for Iraqi soldiers."

Matthew Henman, from the Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, said that even with the "breakthrough", it would take "much longer" to completely get rid of ISIL in Fallujah, and prevent future attacks.

He also said that if the fight over Fallujah wraps us quickly, then more troops would be realigned to help the government push against ISIL in Mosul.

 Government troops and Shia units known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces are leading the campaign to retake the Sunni city from ISIL. They are supported by US-led coalition air strikes.

Al Jazeera's Saleh said the death toll from the fighting so far is based on estimates by medical sources from the city of Fallujah.

"They say it is in the hundreds," he said.

Although the Iraqi government previously said it had a particular strategy to establish safe corridors for civilians in the city centre to leave, many have been reluctant to go for fear of how they may be treated by the Shia units. 

Thousands have fled the city and its surrounding areas since the military offensive was launched on May 23, but the UN said that tens of thousands are still inside the city - last week, the UN said up to 90,000 people were believed to be inside Fallujah, in a significant revision of a previous estimate of 50,000.

Many escaping the fighting have been detained and kept at detention facilities, with reports of abuse and violations by government forces and Shia fighters.

The UN says detention facilities lack basic services, including medicine and food.

The humanitarian crisis in Iraq has been dubbed   one of the world's worst by the UN.

Since the beginning of the present conflict in 2014, more than 3.4 million people have been internally displaced and 2.6 million have fled Iraq.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


----------



## tomahawk6

I wonder whats worse living under IS rule or that of the Iraqi government ?


----------



## Eye In The Sky

tomahawk6 said:
			
		

> I wonder whats worse living under IS rule or that of the Iraqi government ?



Yup;  clearing ISIS out of Iraq stops very very well short of fixing the problems that exist there.


----------



## CougarKing

No Saudi troops going to Syria or Iraq, since Iran might see their entry as a move against them and their proxies in Syria.

Defense News



> *US Sees No Place for Saudi Ground Troops in ISIS Fight*
> Joe Gould, Defense News 4:17 p.m. EDT June 28, 2016
> 
> WASHINGTON — The anti-Islamic State coalition will pass on Saudi Arabia’s offer to send ground troops into the fight, the US representative to the coalition told Congress on Tuesday.
> 
> Saudi Arabia in February announced it would send its troops if the US and other allied partners approved. But that won’t be happening, as the 66-member coalition plans to stick with only local ground troops, Special Presidential Envoy Brett McGurk told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
> 
> “In terms of ground capability, I think our focus on empowering local actors to liberate their own territory is the most sustainable strategy for defeating ISIL, and will remain our fundamental approach,” McGurk said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

Probably just as well for them.  They're getting a shit kicking in Yemen if I understand things correctly.


----------



## MarkOttawa

Meanwhile in Bangladesh:



> ISIS Massacre in Dhaka, Bangladesh: Possible Canadian Link?
> https://cgai3ds.wordpress.com/2016/07/03/mark-collins-isis-massacre-in-dhaka-bangladesh-possible-canadian-link/



_Globe and Mail_ July 2:



> Bangladeshi terror group affiliated with IS reportedly led by Canadian
> 
> Islamic State militants have claimed responsibility for the attack in Dhaka, but authorities are still investigating who led the hostage-taking that resulted in at least 20 deaths.
> 
> One of the likely suspects: a terrorist group in Bangladesh that is affiliated with IS and is reportedly led by a Canadian.
> 
> Tamim Chowdhury, who goes by Shaykh Abu Ibrahim al-Hanif, is a Bangladeshi-Canadian who is leading a militant arm with close ties to Islamic State, according to the Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star.
> 
> Mr. Chowdhury is also connected with an IS study group, which cited him as the leader of the Bangladeshi IS effort. In the April issue of Daqbi, a glossy magazine published by Islamic State, Mr. Chowdhury called for a united country free of “deviant sects, who are busy misleading the masses.” The magazine identified Mr. Chowdhury as the “emir,” or ruler, of its Bangladesh branch.
> 
> “I know that he’s from Windsor,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a post-doctoral fellow in the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University who specializes in radicalization and terrorism. “I know he’s the head of the ISIS group, or at least a pro-ISIS group, in Bangladesh.”
> 
> Mr. Amarasingam said Mr. Chowdhury’s name came up repeatedly during his research in the community…
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/bangladeshi-terror-group-affiliated-with-is-reportedly-led-by-canadian/article30733718/



Plus more on ISIS going global at the _NYT_:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/world/asia/bangladesh-hostage-standoff.html

Mark
Ottawa


----------



## MarkOttawa

Then there's the insidious Saudi spreading of Wahhabism, yet the West, including Canada, persists in trying to put up with The Kingdom--because anything else would be even worse?  At the _NY Times_:



> How Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for ISIS
> Extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudis and others
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/world/europe/how-the-saudis-turned-kosovo-into-fertile-ground-for-isis.html
> 
> The Terrorists the Saudis Cultivate in Peaceful Countries
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/opinion/sunday/the-terrorists-the-saudis-cultivate-in-peaceful-countries.html?ref=todayspaper



Mark
Ottawa


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Everytime I mention this stuff I get people telling me how bad Christians are...they are willfully blind.


----------



## CougarKing

The civil war in Yemen continues to rage:

Agence France Presse via Yahoo News



> *Army ousts jihadists from Yemen base HQ after hours-long battle*
> AFP•July 5, 2016
> 
> 
> Aden (AFP) - Yemeni troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition recaptured an army headquarters adjoining Aden airport from suspected jihadists on Wednesday after an assault that killed 10 soldiers, the base commander said.
> 
> There was no immediate word on the fate of the officers who had been inside the headquarters building when it was seized by between 15 and 20 militants in the early hours.
> 
> The militants had penetrated the base after detonating two car bombs in the latest attack on security forces to hit the southern port city where Yemen's government took refuge after rebels seized the capital Sanaa.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Malaysia’s first ISIS attack. This is just the beginning I am afraid. AQ used Malaysia quite a bit, but more as a R&R and planning base, ISIS on the other hand sees it as another ripe fruit. Going by their normal early taget list, I don’t worry so much for my family there, but we do worry about my wife’s non-Muslim friends.

http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2016/07/04/movida-igp-confirm-is-attack/


----------



## a_majoor

A long article which both looks at the formation of the problem, and a forecast of the ultimate outcome. While not exactly a desirable state of affairs, it won't be the revival of some craptacular empire either:

http://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2016/07/the-great-arab-implosion-and-its-consequences/

Part i


> *The Great Arab Implosion and Its Consequences*
> Who or what will replace a century of failed Sunni Arab dominance? What, if anything, can the West do to help shape the future?
> 
> ESSAY
> OFIR HAIVRY
> JULY 5 2016
> About the author
> Ofir Haivry is vice-president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and head of its National Strategy Initiative.
> 
> In 2007, in a seminar room in Jerusalem, a day-long session was devoted to Israeli regional strategic perspectives. I was among the participants together with several other scholars, a former Israeli interior minister, a future Israeli defense minister, and two future Israeli ambassadors to the U.S. At a certain point, the talk turned to various scenarios for the regional future and the opportunities or dangers each of these entailed for Israel. When the possible breakup and partition of Arab states like Iraq or Syria was raised, the near-unanimous response was that this was simply too fantastic a scenario to contemplate.
> 
> Now we live that scenario. The great Sunni Arab implosion that began with the 2011 “Arab Spring” was unforeseen in its suddenness, violence, and extent. But some, both inside and outside the Arab world, had long suspected that, sooner or later, a day of reckoning would indeed arrive. (Among Westerners, the names of Bernard Lewis and David Pryce-Jones come most readily to mind.) Today, those in the West who acknowledge this great collapse for what it is will be better able to face the emerging realities. But the first and most important step is to recognize that there is no going back.
> 
> I. Creating the Modern Middle East
> 
> The current mayhem in the Middle East displays so many moving parts as to obscure basic trends and processes. Events are multiple, alliances are fragile and fissiparous, and even with a scorecard it’s often impossible to tell the players or to keep them apart.
> 
> Still, efforts have been made, by participants as well as by onlookers, to make sense of the whole. One such effort, prompted by the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, was mounted by King Abdullah of Jordan a little over a decade ago. In the power vacuum created by the U.S. action, Abdullah discerned the potential emergence of a “Shiite Crescent,” spearheaded by a newly energized Iran and extending in a hegemonic arc from Tehran northeast through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon (the latter courtesy of Iran’s proxy Hizballah), and south all the way to Bahrain. In an update just this past January, a confidant of the Saudi royal family, referring to Iran-backed fighters in Yemen on the kingdom’s southern border, upgraded the Shiite crescent to a “Shiite Full Moon.”
> 
> To be sure, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Sunni or Sunni-related powers, alarmed not only by Shiite aggression but also, if not more so, by America’s withdrawal from the region, have been taking measures to fight back. But the very term “powers” in relation to these states has become a misnomer. For if there is a single prime mover of the dizzying kaleidoscope of events we have been witnessing in the last years, it is the crumbling of a century-old Sunni Arab regional order and, no less piercingly, the entire worldview that upheld it. In a world where Sunnis vastly outnumber Shiites, this is a crisis of epic proportions.
> 
> Understanding the causes and the extent of this collapse is critical to thinking clearly about the political landscape that will emerge from the debris and how it may or may not be influenced by the actions of outside forces. For that purpose, a little history is in order.
> 
> The modern Middle East was created when Britain and France penciled new borders to replace the defeated Ottoman empire. Superseding the centuries-old Ottoman hegemony would be the hegemony of the Sunni Arabs.
> 
> The modern Middle East was created a century ago when the Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France, subsequently revised and supplemented, penciled new borders to replace the defeated Ottoman empire. Behind the particular lines in the sand delineating one or another concocted political entity stood one basic assumption: superseding the centuries-old Turkish hegemony would be the hegemony of the Sunni Arabs.
> 
> This assumption was put forward most explicitly in the 1915-16 correspondence between Sharif Hussein of Mecca and Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt. As Hussein described it, Britain would recognize a new Arab nation, or in his words “an Arab Caliphate of Islam,” dominated by the Arabic-speaking Sunnis who then as now formed a regional plurality and in some areas a distinct majority. These would come to dominate all non-Arab and non-Sunni groups in the core areas of the Mesopotamia-Levant crescent and the Arabian peninsula; later on, the North African littoral would be added. That position of dominance was in turn expected to be capable of repelling any incursions by geographically adjacent non-Arab powers like the Turks, the Persians, or the Ethiopians.
> 
> After World War I, this scheme led to the drawing of borders aimed at ensuring Sunni Arab predominance everywhere except for the two small enclaves of Jewish Palestine and Christian Lebanon. The borders put the overwhelmingly Kurd areas of northern Mesopotamia under Arab rule in Syria and Iraq; the Shiite Arab majorities around the Persian Gulf under the rule of Sunni or Sunni-related dynasties in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia; the Christians of northern Mesopotamia and the southern Nile regions under the Muslim regimes of Syria, Iraq, and Sudan. An Arab identity was thus impressed on the region, complete with a founding myth of an original Sunni Arab “Golden Age” running from Muhammad through the early caliphs to Muslim Spain, then derailed by evil Crusaders, heretical Shiites, and devious Turks, and now triumphantly restored.
> 
> In this narrative, identities other than the Sunni Arab one were to be regarded as aberrations from the ideal of the “Arab world.” There followed campaigns to impose a unified language on the whole region, erasing the teaching and use of the Kurdish, Berber, and Aramaic tongues and to dissolve Christian, Alawite, Druze, and Shiite identities into an Arab nationalist ideal, itself a somewhat secularized version of the Sunni Arab one.
> 
> Naturally, many in the region resented the wholesale obliteration of their culture and identity. But there were also some among the minorities who embraced it with relish, seeing in the Arabized vision of history a welcome parallel to what they regarded as the successful experiments in national integration practiced in Republican France and the Soviet Union. It was not incidental, for example, that most of the main figures behind the creation of the pan-Arab nationalist Ba’ath party were not Sunnis but rather Christians, Alawites, and Druze. The identification of Arab nationalism with the Sunni Arab golden age reached the point where the Hafez Assad regime in Syria would officially declare its own Alawite sect to be a part of mainstream Islam (which it certainly is not), and the otherwise secularist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq would inscribe the Islamic invocation “Allahu Akbar” on the national flag.
> 
> Yet all such attempts at integration and nation-building failed miserably. After centuries of rule by Turkish overlords or European imperial satraps, no real Sunni Arab political tradition or ruling class existed anywhere. Dynasties exerting quasi-autonomous rule over some areas, like the Hashemites and Saudis in Arabia or the Alouites in Morocco, essentially presided over makeshift tribal coalitions rather than actual or embryonic states. A phrase attributed to the Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir (1925-2002) put the matter pithily: “Egypt is the only nation-state in the Arab world; the rest are just tribes with flags.” But even Egypt, purportedly the exception to the rule, lacked an Arab political tradition or ruling class, having been founded in 1811 by an Albanian military dynasty that surrounded itself with largely non-Arab and non-Muslim functionaries and was propped up both militarily and financially by Britain.
> 
> After centuries of rule by Turkish overlords or European imperial satraps, no real Sunni Arab political tradition or ruling class existed anywhere.
> 
> Nor was this glum political landscape offset by any notable economic, social, or cultural assets. Almost everywhere, the majority comprised poor and illiterate subsistence farmers; in the few urban centers of significant trade or manufacturing, like Aleppo, Alexandria, and Algiers, the elites were preponderantly non-Sunni or non-Arab.
> 
> All of these evident shortcomings were pointed out at the time by many of those involved in setting up the new regional order. No less than François Georges-Picot himself described the Arabs as “a myriad of tribes”; Sir Arthur Nicholson, then-head of the British Foreign Office, similarly characterized them as “a heap of scattered tribes with no cohesion or organization.” For the most part, however, such views were set aside both by infatuated Western romantics like T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” and by great-power calculators like Picot and Nicholson themselves. The latter, ignoring or suppressing the contrary evidence of their eyes, promoted a totally unrealistic picture of the benefits that the new dispensation was bound to confer upon these societies.
> 
> This is hardly to deny the existence of certain native writers, activists, thinkers, and journalists—dissidents, we might call them today—who agitated for modernizing, Westernizing, and liberalizing their societies, and who made up what some optimistically called the Arab “Renaissance”(al-Nahda). But they could hardly compensate for the inherent feebleness of political structures whose perdurance depended on outside powers mainly preoccupied with carving up the region into effective zones of influence.


----------



## a_majoor

Part 2



> II. The Pan-Arab Delusion
> 
> Between the end of World War I and the end of World War II, virtually all Arab “states” were either direct colonies of or effectively controlled by some European power. After World War II, as old-style colonial power waned and Arab regimes gained effective independence, their inherent debilities emerged even more starkly, leaving them reliant for survival upon cruel political repression or massive oil revenues, often buttressed with continuing great-power support in the now-updated form of the U.S. and the USSR.
> 
> Having neglected to foster political coalitions, intermediary institutions, and the growth of civil society in the years between the great wars, these regimes, even as they publicly adopted some version of the Arab nationalist ideology and pan-Arab identity, continued to rest either upon narrow tribal or sectarian loyalties (as in the case of the royal dynasties of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, plus North Africa), upon direct army rule (Egypt since 1952, Sudan since 1969), or upon a combination of the two (Muammar Ghaddafi’s Libya, Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Yemen, Hafez Assad’s Syria).
> 
> Even in those few locales where centuries of Ottoman or colonial rule had bequeathed a more open and diverse society, clan domination and military repression rapidly became the rule. Wave after wave of political oppression, economic expropriation, and religious persecution—the last conducted not by frenzied Islamists but by the ostensibly secular Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghaddafi, Saddam, and the Algerian National Liberation Front—squeezed out the most dynamic and creative communities: Jews certainly, but also Armenians, Greeks, and populations of European descent as well as many other Christian groups. The inevitable result was the further impoverishment of social, cultural, and educational capital. The remaining non-Sunni Arabs—like the Egyptian Copts, Sudanese Christians, and Iraqi Shiites—were completely downtrodden, or else transformed themselves into quasi-military sects like the Alawites in Syria, the Kurds of Iraq, and the Shiites in Yemen and southern Lebanon.
> 
> As the 20th century progressed, Arabic-speaking societies actually lost ground relative to the world’s other emerging regions save only sub-Saharan Africa. By the 1980s, the dirt-poor South Koreans and Taiwanese, without any significant local political traditions or natural resources, had successfully pulled themselves into the ranks of developed and democratic nations. By the 2000s, not only China and India but also Muslim-majority societies like Indonesia and Malaysia had made substantial strides in the same direction. Meanwhile, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, beginning from a more advanced point than most of their Asian counterparts, were squandering endless opportunities and falling woefully behind. They stumbled into the 21st century completely exhausted, as well as economically and culturally bankrupt.
> 
> For all the profuse revenues gushing into their coffers, the oil-rich Arab countries patently failed to create even a single significant industry apart from the petroleum business.
> 
> As for the oil-rich Arab countries, for all the profuse revenues gushing into their coffers, they patently failed to create even a single significant industry apart from the petroleum business (itself largely Western-built and -operated), a single educational or research institution of note, a single admirable political or social experiment. Most of the oil revenue, moreover, went to funding extravagant lives for the ruling circle, pervasively inefficient and corrupt economic structures, and a gargantuan security apparatus aimed at crushing all internal dissent. With their populations veering increasingly between inert acceptance of the massive government bribes thrown at them and the allure of moral regeneration in the form of blood-and-fire Islamism, these regimes, too, though still financially solvent, courted bankruptcy of one kind or another.
> 
> And the grand pan-Arabic identity? Without exception, its one sustaining focal point became hatred of Israel, portrayed by regimes across the region as the tiny pebble preventing the mighty Arab machine from functioning smoothly. Everywhere, regime failure was laid at the door of the “Zionist Entity.” In the Arab narrative (dutifully adopted by many in the West as well), the Jewish nation served as the main culprit and lightning-rod for the stubborn refusal of the great Arab project to ignite.
> 
> With the end of the cold war some 25 years ago, great-power involvement in the region began to retreat. The process was sealed with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, who as much as announced explicitly that the U.S. had no further stomach for boots on the sand—and a year later committed America to withdraw its military presence from Iraq by the end of 2011. In turn, this withdrawal played a central role in precipitating the explosion of the Arab Spring and its aftermath, including the consequent attempts by peripheral powers like Iran and Turkey to have a crack at regional domination, not to mention the recent re-entry of Russia, ever on the lookout for spoils, into an arena where it once held and then lost sway.


----------



## a_majoor

Part 3



> III. After the Arab Spring
> 
> On the eve of the 2011 Arab Spring, Arab regimes could be roughly divided into two main groups. The larger group comprised the self-styled Arab “republics,” from Algeria to Yemen and from Syria to Sudan, led in every case by a dictatorial strongman (usually a former general, sometimes with his son as co-regent), formally ruling by way of a secular party and ideology but actually representing clan or tribal loyalties. After enjoying their heyday in the 1960s and 70s, all such regimes had gradually become social and economic basket cases, politically sclerotic and mired in corruption and brutality.
> 
> The second grouping was the monarchies, even more uniformly tribal in nature, their legitimacy propped up either by alleged descent from the prophet Muhammad (the kings of Morocco and Jordan) or by oil revenues sustaining a mercenary army and a massive welfare system (the Gulf sheikhdoms). In the Saudi case, these were augmented by the self-conferred title of “guardian of Islam’s two holiest cities.”
> 
> Long before 2011, widespread simmering resentment and opposition were making themselves felt among non-Arab and non-Sunni groups from the Berbers of North Africa to the Kurds in northern Mesopotamia. And there was internal Arab opposition as well, to both republics and monarchies. This tended to be mainly Islamist in ideology, and was itself roughly divided between a populist version and a literalist version. In the 1980s and 90s, both would foment serious armed insurgencies in places like Syria and Algeria, though they never succeeded in toppling existing Arab governments.
> 
> The populist challenge was led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which consistently won every (partially) open election ever held in an Arabic-speaking country. Repeatedly it reached the threshold of power in Egypt, Algeria, and Jordan, only to be violently crushed by the regime. But in the early 21st century its fortunes began to turn. Hamas, a local branch of the Brotherhood, successfully wrested control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority, and the Brotherhood also came to enjoy the strategic support of Qatar, the minuscule but fabulously wealthy oil sheikhdom intent on buying insurance from Islamist threats at home by funding Islamists abroad.
> 
> The other, seemingly minor Islamist challenge arose from groups usually identified as Salafist. These advocated an austerely literalist interpretation of 7th-century Islam that made Brotherhood-style Islamism look liberal by comparison. Lacking any interest in politics and elections, the Salafists instead tend to hold a highly hierarchical view of society, placing at the top an undisputed Emir or, ideally, the all-Muslim Caliph.
> 
> Numerically small, but ruthlessly efficient in meting out violence and chaos, the Salafist current was composed of many competing groups, of which the most famous in the first decade of this century was al-Qaeda. Bereft of state sponsorship after 2001, when the U.S. toppled the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, Salafist Islamism nevertheless continued to enjoy the private support of many wealthy Arabs who regarded it as a rebooted version of the fanatical Wahhabi Islam of early Saudi Arabia (allegedly diluted by decades of power-sharing with the corrupt Saudi dynasty). In time, a virtually unknown sub-group, originally named al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant, would swiftly outpace its predecessor, rising to Islamist superstardom first under the brand of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and later as Islamic State or IS, period.
> 
> During the two decades preceding 2011, successive developments in Somalia, Iraq, and Sudan should have served as warning signs of the fundamental fragility of Arab states.
> 
> In Somalia, the 1991 fall of strongman Siad Barre was followed by internecine warfare that resulted in the eventual collapse of central authority, leaving the country hopelessly divided, to this day, between clans and militias.
> 
> In Iraq, the American invasion of 2003 succeeded in ousting Saddam and the Baath regime. But since nothing resembling a stable and unified Iraqi state ever existed or could be assembled to replace them, the country soon became effectively partitioned into three ethno-religious zones: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish.
> 
> In Sudan, after a series of disastrous internal conflicts, the strongman Omar El-Bashir averted total collapse only by acquiescing in early 2011 to the spin-off of the oil-rich southern third of the country as independent, Christian-majority South Sudan. The remaining Sudanese state, although now almost wholly Muslim, barely survives after a genocidal conflict between the Arabic-speaking eastern parts of the country and the non-Arabic-speaking populations of the westerns regions of Darfur and Kordofan.
> 
> So powerful was the grip of the “Arab” myth on most minds that the many warning signs went unheeded. When the day of reckoning did arrive in 2011, it exploded spectacularly.
> 
> So powerful, however, was the grip of the “Arab” myth on most minds inside and outside the region that these and other signs went unheeded. When the day of reckoning did arrive in 2011, it exploded swiftly and spectacularly, as local demonstrations turned into political chaos.
> 
> At first, each regional Arab group attempted to confront the challenge on its own terms, believing it could not only weather the storm but come out on top. From Saudi Arabia to Syria, many Arab regimes, even while confronted with growing dissent at home, proved eager to fan the flames of conflicts elsewhere, including in neighboring states; soon enough, however, they reaped the whirlwind at home, with localized conflicts coalescing into a regional crisis. As one regime after another became dangerously destabilized or collapsed, a domino effect developed that would gradually finish off, forever, the whole Sunni Arab order.
> 
> The first domino to fall, with a spectacular thud, was the largest: the demise of most of the so-called Arab “republics” in which dwelled the vast majority of Arabic-speakers. In Somalia and Iraq, as we have seen, both regime and state had disintegrated in the 1990s and 2000s. Within two years of 2011, they were joined by the collapse of regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen—in the last two cases, pulverizing the country in the process. In Syria, the Assad regime now survives only as an Alawite rump in the western third of the country thanks to massive Iranian and Russian intervention, with the rest of the state shredded by warring factions.
> 
> Only two old-style “republics” endure today: Algeria and Sudan. Neither is much more than a hollow shell, having barely outlasted the civil wars of the 1990s and 2000s at the cost of hundreds of thousands dead (and the partition of Sudan). They are now rickety barrack states, economically bankrupt, devoid of any coherent ideological justification and constantly on the brink of terminal collapse
> 
> Two further regimes on the “republican” model still stand in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority (PA), but these have long been more semi-autonomous entities than real states, and are themselves effectively partitioned: Lebanon since the 1970s among various sects, the PA since 2007 between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the Abbas-ruled areas of the West Bank.
> 
> That leaves Tunisia and Egypt, the two places where breakdown has not led to complete state disintegration. Both are now desperately attempting to revive the old system.
> 
> Tunisia, encouraged by its small size and overall uniform population, went out on a limb with the first real attempt at Arab democracy. It has held two successive and relatively free elections—by regional standards, an enormous political success. But with corruption rampant and the economy in the doldrums, the country remains extremely unstable and permanently on the verge of renewed unrest.
> 
> Egypt went the opposite way: the army initially allowed free parliamentary and presidential elections, which ended by replacing the decrepit Mubarak regime with the Muslim Brotherhood. A military coup headed by General Sisi was then staged in 2013. Built on little more than fear and loathing of the Brotherhood, the Sisi regime is mired in contradictions and virtually bankrupt, making it precariously dependent on foreign financial backing as well as the personal appeal of its president. If (or rather, when) one of these fails, the country will swiftly plunge into renewed chaos.
> 
> In short, no Arab “republic” is now stable enough to be confident of survival for more than a couple of years.
> 
> The next domino is the Arab monarchies. Less identified with Arab nationalism and better positioned to appeal to the sensibilities of devout Muslims, these outlasted the first onslaught of the 2011 crisis but at the price of increased internal discord. In Morocco, the king had to concede a share in governance to the local Muslim Brotherhood, and sooner or later the two are headed for a showdown; meanwhile, a revolt led by the Polisario Front is simmering in the western Sahara, which Morocco has occupied since 1975. In Jordan, which is now flooded with Iraqi and Syrian refugees and faces growing Islamist unrest, the king endures only by virtue of massive Saudi and Western aid. Most smaller monarchies, from Kuwait to the UAE, wouldn’t last a fortnight without Saudi military and political backing, and in Bahrain the regime withstands Shiite restiveness only through the direct deployment of Saudi troops.
> 
> Which brings us to Saudi Arabia itself, the linchpin and most potent of the monarchies. The Saudis, still heavily influenced by their centuries-old alliance with Wahhabi fanaticism, at first believed the regional crisis could actually work to increase their power, and therefore bankrolled Islamist insurgents in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. They soon discovered that their Islamist clients not only failed to advance but in most cases fell prey to even harder-line Islamist factions aligned with al-Qaeda or IS. The effort left the Saudis both overstretched abroad and facing turmoil at home, the latter including rebelliousness in the kingdom’s Shiite-majority regions and the attraction of many Saudi Sunnis to al-Qaeda and IS. More recently, a bumbling military intervention against the Shiite Houthis in neighboring Yemen has led to increasing friction with Iran and intensified repression of the Shiite population at home.
> 
> The apparent solidity of the Arab monarchies is thus very much a façade. All are reeling from shock, even as the oil revenues on which they have traditionally relied to finance the massive bribery of their populations have been drastically depleted by the recent fall in prices.
> 
> The third domino is the populist-Islamist regimes and movements, which fully expected not only to benefit from the 2011 uprisings against the republics and monarchies but indeed to take over. At first, that certainly seemed possible. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the Brotherhood won majorities or pluralities in relatively free elections; in Yemen, it formed part of the coalition replacing the Saleh regime; in Syria, Brotherhood-aligned groups led the anti-Assad insurgency. Gradually however, problems accrued on all fronts. In Yemen the post-Saleh regime was ousted by Shiite Houthi rebels; in Syria the anti-Assad forces came to be dominated by Salafist militias; in Libya the state fractured into several pieces, with the Brotherhood-dominated government controlling only the western third around the capital of Tripoli; and in Tunisia a Brotherhood-inspired party only precariously dominated the government until being ousted in 2014. As for Egypt, the Brotherhood’s glittering prize, the government led by Mohammad Morsi was toppled, as we’ve seen, after a scant year in power, and the ferocious repression that followed has crushed the movement, at least temporarily.
> 
> So the populist Islamists are also reeling everywhere. Their main sponsors, Turkey and Qatar, are themselves facing internal failure and are beleaguered by rising Iranian influence. Abandoning the drive to install Brotherhood regimes, they appear instead to be closing ranks with the monarchies in a last-ditch Sunni grand coalition—about which, more below.
> 
> Fourth come the Salafist Islamists, seemingly the greatest beneficiaries of the general collapse. To many Sunni Arabs, indeed, this is the only force capable of defending them from the Kurds, Shiites, and Christians who have lately risen against their erstwhile oppressors. Despite recent losses, Islamic State still straddles the deserts of eastern Syria and western Iraq, with smaller “provinces” in the Sinai desert and in central Libya; for their part, al-Qaeda-aligned Islamists head rebel-held regions in northern and southern Syria as well as eastern Yemen.
> 
> The Salafists’ rise is in truth a rearguard action. Instead of bringing about the promised empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, they are successful only in the most homogeneous Sunni Arab zones.
> 
> But behind these local military successes, the Salafists’ rise is in truth a rearguard action. Instead of bringing about the promised Sunni Arab empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, they are successful only in the most homogeneous Sunni Arab zones: usually, desert areas populated by tribes. By contrast, northern Syria and Iraq are now solidly controlled by anti-Islamist Kurds, southern Iraq is now a Shiite country, as is northern Yemen, and the western and southern regions of Syria are now rapidly approaching the status of, respectively, Alawite and Druze quasi-states. Even the Christians and Yazidis of northern Mesopotamia are carving out autonomous areas of their own.
> 
> Indeed, some Sunni Arab tribesmen, fearful of being overrun by Kurds and Shiites when the Islamists are ousted, are now lobbying the U.S. for aid in setting up a new Sunni Arab state that would supposedly unite western Iraq with eastern Syria and perhaps join with Jordan. Whatever one may make of such a scheme, which in effect relinquishes Sunni control over most of Mesopotamia and the Levant in favor of a homogeneous “Sunnistan” in the interior deserts, it signals the utter failure of the Salafist domino to bring deliverance to Arab Sunnis.


----------



## a_majoor

Part 4



> IV. Mapping the Future
> 
> If a Sunni Arab collapse of colossal proportions is under way, what then will replace the former regional system? In truth there are several contenders, but it will be some time before it is possible to see clearly the shape of things to come.
> 
> As mentioned early on, peripheral regional powers have been positioning themselves to enter the fray. One of them is Turkey, where the AKP party, a local version of populist Islamism, came to power in 2002. Sensing inherent Arab weakness and the power vacuum created by American (and, for a time, Russian) pullback from the region, Turkish national strategy was gradually redirected from its European orientation toward the sometimes explicitly articulated aim of replacing the Sunni Arab system with one—aptly dubbed “Neo-Ottoman”—in which Ankara would function as the new regional hegemon.
> 
> But Turkey increasingly seems to have bitten off more than it can chew. Far from successfully projecting power abroad, it is choking on the region-wide strife it has inadvertently introduced into its own home. Its populist-Islamist allies have been routed all across the Middle East, and even in nearby Syria the rebel groups it backed are in tatters while those it targeted for defeat now contemplate meting out vengeance inside Turkey proper. Meanwhile, the Kurds have established autonomous areas on Turkey’s doorstep in northern Syria and Iraq, and Kurdish unrest in southeastern Turkey itself is now dangerously close to a boiling point, bringing Ankara to the edge of civil war.
> 
> A no less and possibly more significant player is Iran, which ever since 1979, under its own Shiite brand of populist Islamism, has repositioned itself as a main contender for regional domination. Carefully cultivating downtrodden Shiite populations across the Middle East, Iran has successfully replaced their former Arab allegiances with a Shiite sectarian one. A pointed illustration of this shift is the recent report that Iran-supported Iraqi Shiite militiamen assaulting the IS-held Sunni Arab city of Fallujah had plastered their artillery shells with the name of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the prominent Shiite Saudi cleric executed earlier this year by the Saudi regime.
> 
> Today, the Iranian regime’s tentacles are to be seen everywhere from Yemen’s Houthis (who actually belong to a different Shiite sub-sect) to Sunni populist organizations like Hamas, which it assists in anti-Israeli aggression. But the main Iranian effort has been directed at establishing Shiite hegemony in Iraq and Lebanon. If successful, this, combined with a strategic alliance with Alawite-controlled Syria, would indeed create the “Shiite Crescent” across Mesopotamia and the Levant feared by Jordan’s King Abdullah, driving a stake through the heart of the Arab world and establishing Tehran’s undisputed dominion from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Mediterranean.
> 
> And success is by no means impossible: Iran’s military buildup, including its growing nuclear-threshold infrastructure, is today abetted by Russia—and, if opposed by the U.S. at all, only in the most desultory fashion. With the U.S. out of the great game, with Tehran’s Shiite allies on the rise in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and with the Syrian regime its virtual puppet, Iran has seemed to many unstoppable.
> 
> With the U.S. out of the great game, with Tehran’s Shiite allies on the rise in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and with the Syrian regime its virtual puppet, Iran has seemed to many unstoppable. But has it, too, overreached?
> 
> But is it really unstoppable—or has it, too, overreached? Iran’s dominance in Syria is now threatened by Bashar Assad’s deft embrace of the Russians, who have been only too happy to reciprocate. Meanwhile, direct Iranian involvement in so many of the ongoing regional conflicts has ignited an all-out Sunni backlash that could be very costly to combat. If a new administration in Washington should entertain second thoughts about abandoning the Middle East, even modest support to select anti-Iranian groups might easily ensnare Teheran and sap its already overextended resources.
> 
> One might also mention a third peripheral power, as yet far weaker than the first two. That is Christian-dominated Ethiopia, only lately emerging from the disastrous effects of decades of Communist rule. So far much less ambitious than either Turkey or Iran, Ethiopia has nevertheless gone a long way toward securing ascendance over its disintegrating Sunni neighbors of Sudan, Somalia, and tiny but strategically placed Djibouti, a formal member of the Arab League that controls the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Ethiopia’s gigantic Renaissance dam now being built on the Blue Nile is making downriver Sudan and Egypt completely dependent on upriver goodwill for the continued flow of vital waters. Egypt, formerly the regnant power in northeastern Africa, is now so weak that it cannot but bend to Ethiopian demands.
> 
> The one other significant—highly significant—power in the Middle East is Israel. As warring Arab groups concentrate on killing each other, Israel has mostly been sitting on the sidelines. Hardly anxious to expose itself needlessly to knee-jerk international condemnation for its alleged propensity to use “disproportionate” force, it engages in tactical strikes only when it identifies a clear and present danger. How long it will be able to maintain this posture without harming its strategic interests is as yet unclear.
> 
> What about the remaining Sunni powers? As hinted above, they are desperately trying to regroup by closing ranks and seeking outside assistance wherever they can find it. Saudi Arabia, the only major Arab country that is still solvent though bogged down on multiple fronts, has conceived a grand Sunni alliance. Formally declared last December, the Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism (IMAFT) consists of a coalition of 30-something countries, with the poorer ones supposed to supply the manpower while the oil sheikhdoms supply the funds.
> 
> In reality, however, there remain virtually no Arab countries capable of seriously contributing to the effort. For obvious reasons, Iraq and Syria have not been invited to join; Egypt has signed up, but, with Cairo still unsuccessful even at putting down an Islamist resurgence in Sinai, its contribution is mainly symbolic; Algeria, the lone surviving old-style “republican” regime, has opted out; and the “governments” of Yemen and Libya represent at best a fragment of the nations they allegedly rule.
> 
> The Saudis have tried to compensate for the missing Arabs by recruiting non-Arab Sunni African and Asian nations as well as Turkey and Qatar, erstwhile main sponsors of Islamist populism now scrambling to stop the forces they have helped to unleash. Even a decade ago, it would have been unthinkable, from the point of view of Arab honor, for Pakistanis, Turks, and Africans to be substituting for most major Arab countries in what is essentially a last-ditch attempt to save the Arab world from self-immolation. Even the fact that the coalition was created under a Sunni rather than an Arab banner acknowledges the crumbling of Arab identity.
> 
> Even a decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for Pakistanis, Turks, and Africans to be substituting for most major Arab countries in what is essentially a last-ditch attempt to save the Arab world from self-immolation.
> 
> And it should be clear by now that IMAFT’s chances of success are pretty much non-existent. Billed as a Sunni version of NATO, it is nothing more than a ramshackle parody, with nothing like either the resources or the resolve needed to create a common strategy or common action. Nor, ultimately, is anyone on the Sunni periphery of Africa and Asia willing to commit the manpower necessary to join the wars of the Arabs.
> 
> And war is what it would all come down to: war against Iran and its Shiite proxies around the region, against Russian intervention and Kurdish separatism, against Islamist and tribal groups ripping apart even wholly Sunni areas; war in Iraq and Syria, in Yemen and Libya, in Somalia and Sudan, and, perhaps sooner than later, war also in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon.
> 
> To fight and die in such godforsaken battlefields, only to prop up hopeless regimes like the house of Saud in Riyadh and the military clique in Cairo? Not an alluring prospect. Ironically, the only pan-Islamic Sunnis ready to serve the Sunni cause, regardless of odds, are the most resolute enemies of the existing Sunni regimes: that is, the militant Islamist groups like al-Qaeda and IS whose international recruits, from as far away as Paris, Chechnya, and China’s Muslim west, are killing and being killed in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen.


----------



## a_majoor

Part V


> V. Options
> 
> Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have been partitioned, and Lebanon has long been de-facto partitioned. Libya will be partitioned if it is lucky, or, if not, it will follow Somalia into chaos. Saudi Arabia could be next, and so could Algeria.
> 
> To repeat: what will replace the old order? An Iranian hegemony is possible, but obviously unsafe and highly undesirable. A revamped Sunni Arab dominance is unlikely, as it would need to be established by a gigantic bloodbath and would be even more unstable than an Iranian order. Some kind of Islamist dominance is even less likely and even less desirable. Overflowing chaos for generations is a distinct possibility. But it does not have to be inevitable.
> 
> Curiously enough, within all the regional chaos and desuetude, another reality, largely ignored, is already emerging and reshaping the Middle East, redrawing the regional power balances and eventually the maps. This is the rise of newly armed, self-governing nations and tribes.
> 
> Within all the regional chaos, another reality is already emerging: the rise of newly armed, self-governing nations and tribes.
> Whatever dominant powers, if any, emerge out of the current regional turbulence, they will have to deal with a de-facto Kurdistan possessing the largest undefeated armed force between Jerusalem and Tehran; with an Alawite-dominated western Syria unwilling to risk any reunion with the Sunni-dominated eastern provinces; with a consolidated Shiite southern Iraq; with an increasingly autonomous Druzistan in southern Syria; with a Yemen redivided into de-facto northern Shiite and southern Sunni countries; with Libya’s historical provinces of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania recreating their old division; with the possibility, as suggested above, of the Sunni tribes of western Syria and eastern Iraq coalescing into a desert Sunnistan with or without IS. Not to mention similar developments clearly brewing in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as among the Berbers of Algeria and of course the Kurds of Turkey and Iran.
> 
> And what would all this entail for Western interests and for the regional policy of the U.S. (should it wish to have an active one)? There is no point in dreaming any longer of a grand deal with Iran, or of rebooting the good old days with Turkey, let alone resuscitating an Arab hegemony led by Egypt and the Saudis. As with the huge, decades-long effort by Great Britain to prop up the Ottoman empire, finally blasted in World War I, so with the increasingly forlorn effort by the U.S. to save the Sunni Arab regional order from collapsing, now finally revealed as a road to nowhere. One might as well attempt to restore the Balkans to the Habsburg empire or the Ottoman fold, or to resuscitate Yugoslavia.
> 
> With artificial regimes and borders gone, people in the region seek protection and solidarity in the old identities that have survived the Arab reverie: their nation, their religion, their tribe. These are the only building blocks upon which a new and stable system can be founded. The process will be long, complex, and fraught with difficulty, but it offers a prospect of strategic as well as moral coherence. A region redrawn along lines of actual self-definition would give voice to the communities on the ground that will become invested in its success and work for its stability.
> 
> For Western observers and policy makers, the principle should be to look with appropriately cautious favor on significant groupings that possess their own voice and some degree of self-government, while ensuring that in the event of their political defeat, they will not be exterminated—which is far more than any of the Arab world’s political systems ever offered anyone. Some of these groupings will evolve into robust independent nations, others into weak federal states or new tribal confederations. Some, cherishing the opportunity, will build thriving and prosperous democracies, and perhaps even become natural allies of the West and Israel. Others will undoubtedly, yet again, waste their opportunities, devolving into another round of petty and corrupt tribal entities—though with the advantage to themselves of ethnic and religious cohesiveness and to outsiders of being too small to entertain dreams of internal or external genocide. In the Middle East, again, not such a bad outcome.
> 
> Might there also be, one day, a new regional alliance truly similar to NATO or ASEAN in which, with the blessing and support of the U.S., Israel would be joined by all existing or newly independent entities willing to commit themselves to democracy and free markets, serving as a cornerstone for regional stability and prosperity? A shaky prospect at the moment, to say the least, and, assuming it even gets off the ground, a shaky enterprise to hold together. But so was NATO to begin with, until eventually the dividends of democracy and capitalism paid off.


----------



## Eye In The Sky

Coles note version?  >


----------



## Good2Golf

EITS: actually, well worth the full read!  Very interesting assessment!!!


----------



## dimsum

Good2Golf said:
			
		

> EITS: actually, well worth the full read!  Very interesting assessment!!!



Agreed; it was a great take on the current situation and possible options.  Thanks for sharing, Thucydides.


----------



## larry Strong

The Russians are trying to say a TOW missile shot down the Mi-25 last Friday. Is that even feasible?

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/russia-may-have-lied-about-losing-a-gunship-to-isil-after-two-of-its-pilots-were-shot-down-in-Syria


Cheers
Larry


----------



## jollyjacktar

Larry Strong said:
			
		

> The Russians are trying to say a TOW missile shot down the Mi-25 last Friday. Is that even feasible?
> 
> http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/russia-may-have-lied-about-losing-a-gunship-to-isil-after-two-of-its-pilots-were-shot-down-in-Syria
> 
> 
> Cheers
> Larry



Are you suggesting they're trying to TOW a line...


----------



## Good2Golf

If ISIL fired the TOW first and the Foxbat pilots flew into it from behind, then possibly...other than that, I've seen guys fire a TOW, then go for a leak while others watch the missile slowly wiggle its way downrange...eventually striking the intended target...usually within the hour...


----------



## BurmaShave

Good2Golf said:
			
		

> If ISIL fired the TOW first and the Foxbat pilots flew into it from behind, then possibly...other than that, I've seen guys fire a TOW, then go for a leak while others watch the missile slowly wiggle its way downrange...eventually striking the intended target...usually within the hour...



G2G, the Mi-24/25/35 in the article is a helicopter. They're (somehow) slower than a TOW, although they are so ugly that they might frighten it away.

The Foxbat, the MiG-25, is a plane.


----------



## a_majoor

Meanwhile, in Somaia, al Shabaab is arousing opposition from the local population by attacking cell phone towers. Not everyone is thrilled to be propelled back into the 7th century:

http://strategypage.com/qnd/somalia/articles/20160711.aspx



> *Somalia: The Cell Phone Effect*
> 
> July 11, 2016: Early today al Shabaab attacked an army base fifty kilometers southwest of Mogadishu. After using a suicide car bomb at the main entrance al Shabaab gunmen entered the base. The shooting went on for several hours. Over twenty people died, most of them al Shabaab. The Islamic terrorists promptly declared this a great victory but it was a failed attack and the local civilians noticed that.
> 
> Al Shabaab is making fewer attacks than in the past but is still managing to do enough to stay in the headlines and make some parts of Somalia sufficiently unstable that the Islamic terrorist group can maintain a regular presence and camps. Yet a lot of the al Shabaab violence is an extension of the traditional clan feuds and warlord politics that has characterized Somalia for thousands of years. The clan violence was never newsworthy but add the Islamic terrorism angle plus mentions of al Qaeda and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and you have the world’s attention. The UN certainly agrees and recently approved another year of support for peacekeeping in Somalia with an emphasis on eliminating al Shabaab.
> 
> Meanwhile al Shabaab has helped by fighting amongst themselves. The internal feud between al Qaeda, ISIL and nationalist (no international connections) factions has led to desertions, defections (of leaders siding with clans or the government) and lack of coordination. The turmoil in the leadership has been made worse by the American strategy of finding and killing key leaders. This has mostly been done from the air but on the ground American Special Forces (and other NATO trainers) have created some Somali commando units and recent raids have killed or captured some al Shabaab leaders. Al Shabaab also gets involved in clan politics, which is unavoidable and where al Shabaab started (as a coalition of clan factions seeking an “Islamic” solution to the chaos in Somalia) and can never be ignored. In many parts of the country al Shabaab has not only lost support of the local clans but been declared outlaws by local clan leaders and often are forced to move to less hostile areas.
> 
> Meanwhile the national army, something Somalia rarely had in the past, has survived and become more effective. That, plus the 22,000 peacekeepers, gives the national government a force of over 50,000 reliable fighters. While over half this forces is Somali soldiers and pro-government local militias, it has kept al Shabaab on the run since 2010. Actually destroying the Islamic terrorist organization has proved more difficult. The widespread corruption and unemployment (largely caused by the corruption) provide a steady supply of angry young men willing to “defend Islam”, improve their economic prospects and engage in some traditional mayhem. Despite the increasing likelihood of an early death al Shabaab leaders have adapted.
> 
> In many parts of Somalia a pattern has developed in which surviving al Shabaab groups move around, seeking areas where there is little organized resistance (from government forces or local clan militias) and establish a presence. Because of the arrival of cell phone networks after 2000 al Shabaab has a hard time hiding their presence even in the most remote areas. Eventually the government and the American UAVs find out and it is time to move to get attacked.
> 
> The cell phone is itself a key player in the two decades of civil war in Somalia. By 2000 clan militias and warlords had created enough stability to enable growth in commercial activity. For example, by 2004 three cell phone companies competed to provide service ($10 a month for free local calls, 50 cents a minute for international calls and 50 cents an hour to get on the Internet.) Each new cell phone transmitter installed required that the local clan chief or warlord get a payment. Everyone recognizes the value of the new phone service, after having gone without for years after the old government run phone company was looted and destroyed. As a result, phone company equipment really is protected by the clans and warlords, who do not want to lose their dial tone. The new phone service is cheaper and more reliable than the old government owned landline phone network. This is because there is competition, no government bureaucracy and no taxes (other than the necessary bribes and security payments). There is some fear that if a new government gets established well enough regulations and taxes will greatly increase the cost of service, and reduce reliability. Not yet and for years all of Somalia had better, and cheaper, phone service than any of the other nations in the region. But that’s another story. Even al Shabaab had to respect the cell phone network, even though they tried to shut down cell towers some of the time to avoid detection. Al Shabaab lost that battle. Cell phone service became one of the things nearly all Somalis would fight for.
> 
> The Unseen Battles
> 
> While al Shabaab can still carry out spectacular attacks the reality is that the Islamic terrorists are on the defensive most of the time. There are many more army, police and militia checkpoints on the roads, all them with reinforcements on call in case there is a major attack. American and Kenyan aircraft are often overhead watching. Al Shabaab cannot move freely and has a difficult time concentrating large (over a hundred men) forces for major attacks. When they do pull this off they usually fail and take heavy losses. Every week more al Shabaab members are arrested, usually at checkpoints while trying to smuggle bombs and other weapons. There are a growing number of raids on al Shabaab bases and safe houses that capture some Islamic terrorists but almost always seize weapons, bomb making materials and documents. This stuff doesn’t make the news, but it hurts al Shabaab big time.
> 
> July 9, 2016: In the south, just across the border in Kenya, over a hundred al Shabaab attacked a police base in the town of Diffu. The attack was repulsed but the attackers also managed to loot parts of the town and among other items taken were at least 13 assault rifles and over 10,000 rounds of ammo. The police suffered no dead but it is unclear how many al Shabaab were hurt as they had trucks with them to carry away (to Somalia) loot as well as their dead and wounded. Later in the day, west of Diffu, over a dozen al Shabaab men spent some time (before police showed up) stopping civilian vehicles and robbing passengers. One vehicle that did not stop was fired on, killing one person and wounding the other four.
> 
> July 7, 2016: The UN agreed to finance the peacekeeping operation until June 2017, with an emphasis on reducing al Shabaab as a threat.
> 
> July 4, 2016: Kenya and Israel signed several security and economic cooperation agreements. These included Israeli assistance in planning and building the security fence along most of the 869 kilometer Somali border. Construction was supposed to start in October 2015 but was delayed because of corruption (money to get the fence going had “disappeared”) and opposition from some of the pro-government militias on the Somali side of the border. Work sort of resumed in April. Many still believe the fence is unlikely to be finished because of high cost and the government corruption that cripples so many major efforts. The Somali militias were persuaded to accept the fence and the Kenyan government made it clear that the fence was necessary to reduce Somali Islamic terrorism inside Kenya. This has killed over 400 Kenyans since 2012 and voters most definitely back anything that can reduce the terrorist threat. The Kenyan government says it has the needed funds and has organized the workforce. There is still concern that the fence (wall, watch towers and fencing) would cost more than Kenya can afford as the most effective security wall was built by the Israelis at a cost of $2 million per kilometer. A less effective wall would slow down illegal border crossers but that would not keep determined Islamic terrorists out. Somalia accuses Kenya of planning to build some of the wall in Somali territory. The border was never precisely defined and that is a dispute that has largely been avoided because the frontier area is rural and it normally makes little difference where the border actually is. Kenya and Somalia appear to have settled that dispute. Israel has long been a pioneer in developing effective border security fence technology and many Arab countries use it (without mentioning where the tech came from). Kenya also agreed to increase information sharing with Israel on terrorism matters.
> 
> July 2, 2016: In Baidoa (250 kilometers southwest of Mogadishu) al Shabaab fired several mortar shells into the town killing two civilians and wounding 18 others.
> 
> July 1, 2016: In the south, just across the border in Kenya, several al Shabaab men fired on two passing busses killing six passengers (one of them a policeman).
> 
> June 30, 2016: Outside Mogadishu an al Shabaab roadside bomb being used to attack a truckload of soldiers missed the army vehicle and hit a nearby bus killing the 18 civilians aboard. Attacks like this turn more civilians against al Shabaab, which was probably why al Shabaab did not boast online about this attack. But the locals know who did it.
> 
> June 29, 2016: In Galguduud (385 kilometers north of Mogadishu) over a hundred al Shabaab fighters attacked an army base and were repulsed. The attackers lost at least 18 dead while five soldiers and a local civilian also died. Soldiers and clan militia pursued the fleeing attackers. Al Shabaab has been trying to establish a presence in Galguduud and the autonomous Puntland region to the north for years. Puntland troops and clan militias have pushed al Shabaab south into Galguduud and since early 2016 government and local clan forces have been fighting regularly. If al Shabaab cannot survive in Galguduud the Islamic terrorists there have no better place to go and that will diminish al Shabaab considerably, leaving the Kenya border region as their last base area.
> 
> June 25, 2016: In Mogadishu al Shabaab used a suicide car bomb and gunmen to attack another hotel used by foreigners and wealthy Somalis. Police were soon on the scene but not before 16 people died (including all the attackers) and 30 were wounded. Several prominent hotel guests died, including at least one senior government official. This is the second such attack in June and that makes people aware of the fact that Mogadishu is not as safe has it appears these days.
> 
> June 21, 2016: In the northeast (90 kilometers north of Mogadishu) the head of security for the Middle Shabelle region (the coastal area north of the capital) was killed by one of his bodyguards, who then fled. The bodyguard had belonged to al Shabaab and had defected. Al Shabaab took credit for the killing but it was unclear exactly why the bodyguard turned on his boss. There is often personal or clan politics involved in these killings.
> 
> June 20, 2016: In the south, just across the border in Kenya, al Shabaab ambushed a police vehicle killing five policemen and wounding four others.


----------



## George Wallace

BurmaShave said:
			
		

> G2G, the Mi-24/25/35 in the article is a helicopter. They're (somehow) slower than a TOW, although they are so ugly that they might frighten it away.
> 
> The Foxbat, the MiG-25, is a plane.



 [

I think G2G is very good at AFV Rec...........Looks like he made an oppsy in skimming the article and got sidetracked by the media's need to insert a photo of a fighter.


----------



## Good2Golf

BurmaShave said:
			
		

> G2G, the Mi-24/25/35 in the article is a helicopter. They're (somehow) slower than a TOW, although they are so ugly that they might frighten it away.
> 
> The Foxbat, the MiG-25, is a plane.



That makes more sense...especially when I wear my reading glasses and use my laptop vice phone...that said, you never know what stuff Vlad's going to throw into the AO. ;D   The tac aviator in me always winces when I see a helo take a Strela, or Stinger, or....TOW...up the hoop.

I'd give the Hind-D 'minutes' instead of 'about an hour'...TOW is still a slow-arse missile...  :nod:

Cheers
G2G


----------



## CougarKing

The US air campaign expands to Libya beyond mere drone strikes:

BBC



> *US launches air strikes on IS in Libya*
> August 1, 2016
> 
> The United States has carried out air strikes on positions of so-called Islamic State (IS) in Libya, following a request by the UN-backed government there, the Pentagon says.
> The strikes targeted positions in the port city of Sirte, an IS stronghold.
> Libyan PM Fayez Sarraj, in a televised address, said the strikes caused "heavy losses".
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

Get some.


----------



## CougarKing

An IS insurgency in the making:

Army Times



> *Top commander in Iraq says Islamic State group will 'morph into a true insurgent force'*
> Andrew Tilghman, Military Times3:34 p.m. EDT August 10, 2016
> 
> The top U.S. commander in Baghdad is confident that Iraqi forces can oust Islamic State militants from their stronghold in Mosul, but he warned that the extremist group may soon re-emerge as an insurgency that continues to mount attacks and destabilize the region.
> 
> “I'd like to register a note of caution,” Army Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the commander of Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, said Wednesday.
> 
> “Military success in Iraq and Syria will not necessarily mean the end of Daesh. We can expect the enemy to adapt, to morph into a true insurgent force..."
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## CougarKing

Iran winning the war for "hearts and minds" in Yemen against the Sunni coalition?

Reuters



> *Tens of thousands of Yemenis rally to support Houthi-led council*
> By: Reuters
> August 21, 2016 7:19 AM
> 
> 
> SANAA, Yemen - Tens of thousands of Yemenis rallied in the center of the capital on Saturday to show support for the Houthi-led bloc as the head of the group's new governing council vowed to form a full government in the coming days.
> 
> In apparent response to the Houthi show of force, ambassadors from the G18 group of nations that has backed UN peace talks to end Yemen's civil war issued a statement condemning "unconstitutional and unilateral actions in Sanaa."
> 
> "The Group of Ambassadors repeats its concern that actions taken by elements of the General People's Congress and the Houthis as well as their supporters are making the search for a peaceful solution more difficult," the envoys added in a statement posted on the US embassy's Facebook page.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

Militants are attacking the American University in Kabul.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/attack-american-university-kabul-afghanistan-1.3733894


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Is it just me, or is this quote from the news report a little weird?

"*Associated Press photographer Massoud Hossaini said he was in a classroom with 15 students when he heard an explosion on the southern flank of the campus.*"

I mean: You just have to know you are in a combat zone when your University has a "flank" instead of  a "side" or "boundary" or "border" or "campus line" or "campus limits"


----------



## jollyjacktar

franca linga, I suppose


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

Don't think so. Even in French "flanc" has a definite military connotation - not a term you would ever use to talk about limits or edges of a campus. Heck, you would not even use that term to talk about a military base, unless it was an actual fort.


----------



## McG

Oldgateboatdriver said:
			
		

> Don't think so. Even in French "flanc" has a definite military connotation - not a term you would ever use to talk about limits or edges of a campus. Heck, you would not even use that term to talk about a military base, unless it was an actual fort.


But is there a distinction in Dari or Pashto?


----------



## The Bread Guy

Also keep in mind that if it's written in the text of a news story, but _not_ in quotes, it's the person who wrote the story (or maybe even their editor) who chose the word to paraphrase, not necessarily the speaker.


----------



## Lumber

I think the writer of that headline is getting a little too excited about the idea of writing about war. He may not be old enough to realize it's not all fun and headshots.


----------



## The Bread Guy

MarkOttawa said:
			
		

> _Globe and Mail_ July 2:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Bangladeshi terror group affiliated with IS reportedly led by Canadian
> 
> Islamic State militants have claimed responsibility for the attack in Dhaka, but authorities are still investigating who led the hostage-taking that resulted in at least 20 deaths.
> 
> One of the likely suspects: a terrorist group in Bangladesh that is affiliated with IS and is reportedly led by a Canadian.
> 
> Tamim Chowdhury, who goes by Shaykh Abu Ibrahim al-Hanif, is a Bangladeshi-Canadian who is leading a militant arm with close ties to Islamic State, according to the Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star.
> 
> Mr. Chowdhury is also connected with an IS study group, which cited him as the leader of the Bangladeshi IS effort. In the April issue of Daqbi, a glossy magazine published by Islamic State, Mr. Chowdhury called for a united country free of “deviant sects, who are busy misleading the masses.” The magazine identified Mr. Chowdhury as the “emir,” or ruler, of its Bangladesh branch.
> 
> “I know that he’s from Windsor,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a post-doctoral fellow in the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University who specializes in radicalization and terrorism. “I know he’s the head of the ISIS group, or at least a pro-ISIS group, in Bangladesh.”
> 
> Mr. Amarasingam said Mr. Chowdhury’s name came up repeatedly during his research in the community…
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/bangladeshi-terror-group-affiliated-with-is-reportedly-led-by-canadian/article30733718/
Click to expand...

An update ...


> *Bangladesh security forces killed three Islamist militants on Saturday, including a Bangladesh-born Canadian citizen accused of masterminding an attack on a cafe in Dhaka last month that killed 22 people, mostly foreigners, police said.*
> 
> The militants were cornered in a hideout on the outskirts of the capital and, having refused to surrender, were killed in the ensuing gunbattle, Monirul Islam, the head of the Dhaka police counterterrorism unit, told Reuters.
> 
> He initially said four militants had been killed but later revised the number to three.
> 
> (...)
> 
> *The suspected mastermind killed in Saturday's raid was identified as Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, a 30-year-old Canadian citizen born in Bangladesh. Analysts say Islamic State in April identified Chowdhury as its national commander.*
> 
> "According to our evidence we are now sure that Tamim was among the three killed," Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters. "So the chapter of Tamim has ended here." ...


----------



## a_majoor

BBC publishes a smuggled diary from Mosul:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37411167



> *Mosul: Smuggled diary reveals life of fear under IS*
> By Nafiseh Kohnavard
> BBC Persian
> 22 September 2016
> 
> "Ahmed" was an engineering student at Mosul University when so-called Islamic State (IS) militants stormed into the city in June 2014. From that day, everything changed.
> 
> The university shut and life became a daily struggle to survive. This summer, after two years, Ahmed (not his real name) managed to escape. In the weeks before, at great personal risk, he secretly kept a diary of living in the shadow of death under IS.
> Ahmed has shared his diary exclusively with the BBC. Here are some excerpts documenting one week.
> 
> Monday: 'They kill anyone'
> 
> Today I met a smuggler. In the next few days I'm hoping to escape. I'm a bit scared because the road isn't 100 per cent safe. If we meet any Isis [IS] fighters along the way we'll be in big trouble. But we have people there. They will give us a signal when the road is safe. So wish me luck!
> 
> Life under Isis is not good at all. Men aren't allowed to cut their beards and they have to shorten their trousers. You shouldn't smoke cigarettes. Women have to wear the niqab and cover their hands. In addition they have banned the internet at home and phone calls.
> 
> They're stopping people watching TV because they say most satellite channels are against Muslims. But everyone knows it's because they want to cover up their losses. Anyone who breaks the rules is beaten and goes to prison. You have to pay money to get out.
> 
> When Isis took over Mosul in 2014 no-one knew who they were. We thought they were tribal militants resisting the suffering caused by the Iraqi army. But then they proclaimed the caliphate and started imposing strict laws on people, and discontent started spreading.
> 
> Now everyone knows who they are. They're all about personal interest. They kill anyone who opposes their ideas. They've destroyed the historical monuments in the city. Now people have rejected them and are waiting for the Iraqi army to liberate them.
> 
> Tuesday: 'No work, no pay'
> 
> This morning my friend went out shopping and saw Isis executing three people because they'd been talking about Isis losses. It's really shocking to hear news like that. They're robbing people of their lives for trivial reasons. They are twisting the word of God for their own interests.
> 
> In the past I used to go out with my friends to the cafes, to play football, or study together. But now most of the places we used to go are shut down. When I go out I try to be careful and not to go too far from home or to public places because it's unsafe there.
> 
> Today my mother made some delicious cookies for us. You can sometimes buy the ingredients on the market, but they're expensive. People here survive on local products which they grow themselves. It's quite easy to get vegetables but it's very difficult to get flour, sugar and rice because it's expensive. People don't have money. There's no work, no salaries.
> 
> Wednesday: 'Taking our houses'
> 
> Today I really missed my university. I used to go there and see my friends. But after Isis came everything changed. They made it a meeting place for their leaders. They also used the labs and warehouses to produce and store booby traps. As a result, coalition aircraft bombed all the main buildings and the university was reduced to rubble. I was so sad that day.
> 
> Isis have begun to confiscate some of the houses in our town because the owners have left. They've given them to their fighters. They exploit the presence of civilians, to stop them being targeted by coalition aircraft.
> 
> Many homes have been bombed by the coalition after they were seized by Isis. This makes people worry and despair. Isis don't care about people. On the contrary they wish for coalition air raids in order to incite people against the coalition. But people know this now.
> 
> Thursday: Hiding phones
> 
> Isis have been carrying out house-to-house searches. They're looking for mobile phones. They're trying to find out who is in contact with the coalition. They arrested a man because they found a phone in his pocket.
> 
> I have taken measures to hide my phone in a secret place. We don't feel safe even inside our homes. If they find a phone in your pocket, you are dead. When you carry a phone in your pocket you feel like you are carrying a nuclear weapon.
> 
> Friday: 'Really tense'
> 
> Today I went to the mosque. Isis tried to persuade people to join them, but no-one cares. Today I felt confused. Do I stay here and wait for the arrival of Iraqi forces, or do I risk it and escape from Isis?
> 
> I want to escape but I won't be better off, because Iraqi forces will put me in a camp. No-one is allowed to leave the camp unless you have a sponsor - either a Kurd or someone from the government.
> 
> The situation is really tense here now. I hope that in the coming days the road will be safe and I will be able to escape from Isis because I can't bear the situation here any longer.
> 
> Days after this final diary entry Ahmed managed to escape. He is now living in another Iraqi city and is resuming his studies. His family remain in Mosul.
> {/quote]


----------



## CougarKing

Centuries after the Sunni-Shia Schism, little has changed:

Reuters



> *Top Saudi cleric says Iran leaders not Muslims as haj row mounts*
> By: Sami Aboudi, Reuters
> September 7, 2016 7:28 PM
> 
> DUBAI - Saudi Arabia's top religious authority said Iran's leaders were not Muslims, drawing a rebuke from Tehran in an unusually harsh exchange between the regional rivals over the running of the annual haj pilgrimage.
> 
> The war of words on the eve of the mass pilgrimage will deepen a long-running rift between the Sunni kingdom and the Shi'ite revolutionary power. They back opposing sides in Syria's civil war and a list of other conflicts across the Middle East.
> 
> Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message published on Monday, criticized Saudi Arabia over how it runs the haj after a crush last year killed hundreds of pilgrims. He said Saudi authorities had "murdered" some of them, describing Saudi rulers as godless and irreligious.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)



And the proxy war in Syria continues:

Reuters



> *Gulf states may arm Syrian rebels after truce collapse*
> By: Jonathan Landay and Arshad Mohammed, Reuters
> September 27, 2016 8:50 AM
> 
> WASHINGTON -- The collapse of the latest Syria ceasefire has heightened the possibility that Gulf states might arm Syrian rebels with shoulder-fired missiles to defend themselves against Syrian and Russian warplanes, US officials said on Monday.
> 
> Still, the US administration continues to maintain that negotiations are the only way to end the carnage after Russian-backed Syrian forces intensified their bombing of Aleppo, the last major urban area in rebel hands.
> 
> The latest US attempt to end Syria's 5-1/2 year civil war was shattered on Sept. 19 when a humanitarian aid convoy was bombed in an attack Washington blamed on Russian aircraft. Moscow denied involvement.
> 
> (...SNIPPED)


----------



## jollyjacktar

My kind of Grannie.



> 'I beheaded them, I cooked their heads, I burned their bodies': The 'housewife' militia leader and grandmother who tops ISIS's most wanted list in Iraq
> 
> -Wahida Mohamed has been fighting Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq since 2004
> -The 39-year-old grandmother's husband, father and brother were killed by ISIS, and she has survived six assassination attempts
> -Her Facebook page shows graphic images of dead enemies
> -She commands a 70-strong militia group in Shirqat and helped drive ISIS terrorists away
> 
> Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3813316/I-beheaded-cooked-heads-burned-bodies-housewife-militia-leader-grandmother-tops-ISIS-s-wanted-list-Iraq.html#ixzz4LfGf9Pcu
> Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## AbdullahD

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> My kind of Grannie.



I wonder if she will adopt? Awesome lady.


----------



## jollyjacktar

She's making sure they won't make it to Paradise at any rate.  That's really got to get into the heads of the living dickheads left.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

the video is not clear, but a anti-ship missile vessel a high speed catamaran  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieVFTHrsxh8


----------



## jollyjacktar

Bwahahahahaha what a bunch of fucking wankers.  :rofl:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3819905/16-ISIS-fighters-killed-faulty-suicide-vest-goes-meeting-attack-Iraq.html


----------



## The Bread Guy

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> An update ...
> 
> 
> 
> *Bangladesh security forces killed three Islamist militants on Saturday, including a Bangladesh-born Canadian citizen accused of masterminding an attack on a cafe in Dhaka last month that killed 22 people, mostly foreigners, police said.*
> 
> The militants were cornered in a hideout on the outskirts of the capital and, having refused to surrender, were killed in the ensuing gunbattle, Monirul Islam, the head of the Dhaka police counterterrorism unit, told Reuters.
> 
> He initially said four militants had been killed but later revised the number to three.
> 
> (...)
> 
> The suspected mastermind killed in Saturday's raid was identified as Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, a 30-year-old Canadian citizen born in Bangladesh. Analysts say Islamic State in April identified Chowdhury as its national commander.
> 
> "According to our evidence we are now sure that Tamim was among the three killed," Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan told reporters. "So the chapter of Tamim has ended here." ...
Click to expand...

A bit more detail from the bad guys themselves ...


> Six weeks after a Canadian terrorist leader was killed by security forces in Bangladesh, ISIL has released what it said was his account of how his group attacked a Dhaka restaurant popular among foreigners.
> 
> The Holey Artisan Bakery “was selected for this blessed operation because it was well-known for being frequented by the citizens of the Crusader countries,” Tamim Chowdhury wrote in the ISIL magazine Rumiyah.
> 
> Posted online Tuesday, it was the first acknowledgement from ISIL that Chowdhury, 30, was the head of “military and covert operations” in Bangladesh. The former Windsor resident died when police raided a Dhaka apartment on Aug. 27 ...


If you want to read Daesh's account, you can download a PDF of the story (4 pages) in English at a non-terrorist site here.


----------



## a_majoor

With Russia's victory in Syria, the traditional American policy of supporting the Sunni Kingdoms to ensure stability is in ruins, and the Obama policy of supporting the Shiites also has collapsed due to the inherent incoherence and incredibly inept execution. The future of the Middle East should involve us drawing down and allowing the four regional hegemonic powers to fight it out: Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and (to a lesser extent) Egypt. If Russia would like to spend blood and treasure in the Mddle East, they should be welcome to do so.





> *Syria’s Civil War Is Over—Russia Won*
> It’s time to accept the painful reality of Syria’s fratricide
> By John R. Schindler • 10/26/16 10:45am
> 
> It’s not every day an American presidential candidate flatly says his opponent will cause World War Three. But Donald Trump did just that yesterday, accusing Hillary Clinton of recklessly seeking confrontation with Russia over Syria—where, he claims, the Democratic nominee is insufficiently worried about the Islamic State.
> 
> “What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” Trump stated in Florida at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.” He then hinted at possible nuclear Armageddon caused by Hillary’s recklessness.
> 
> That’s strong stuff, even for Trump, and it’s impossible to miss that, yet again, the GOP nominee is parroting the Kremlin’s foreign policy line, essentially verbatim. That Washington is fighting the wrong people in Syria is a standard Russian trope. According to Vladimir Putin, the Americans are supporting terrorists in Syria at the expense of the country’s government, led by Bashar al-Assad, who happens to be Moscow’s client. In recent months, the Kremlin has breathed fire, issuing warning after warning to Washington to stay away from further involvement in that country’s awful civil war, which has raged for more than five years now.
> 
> Earlier this month, Russia’s defense ministry, which has reinforced its air defenses in Syria with very modern S-300 and S-400 missiles—although ISIS has no airplanes—bluntly informed the Pentagon that any efforts by the U.S. Air Force to bomb targets in Syria without Moscow’s approval will be met with force, without delay or hesitation.
> 
> Moscow is now practically egging on the Americans. And why not? In Syria, Putin has achieved his strategic aims of saving the Assad regime while painting the West as inept villains who back jihadists. President Obama’s confident prediction that Moscow’s Syrian intervention would find the same quagmires his White House has abetted in Iraq and Afghanistan was badly wrong. For the Kremlin, shooting down American warplanes would be the crowning glory of Russia’s Levantine expedition, which has exceeded strategic expectations at limited cost to Moscow.
> 
> The Pentagon is well aware that the Russian military would greet a confrontation in Syria with glee. We need to accept strategic reality, now. While many American politicos and foreign policy mavens—importantly Hillary Clinton is among them—advocate a No-Fly Zone in Syria to prevent the Assad regime and its Russian allies from using airpower to kill civilians, the reality is that an NFZ already exists in Syria. It’s supplied by the Russians.
> 
> If Hillary Clinton becomes president, she would be well advised to admit what her predecessor did in Syria and what it means for the region and the world.
> 
> Payback is an underestimated reality in international relations, and for the Kremlin, putting the Americans in their place in Syria is unquestionably a delicious feast. Revenge served cold is still sweet. Putin and his retinue crave retribution against the West generally and the United States particularly, for a multitude of alleged occidental sins, and Syria since 2011 has been an ideal proving-ground for Russian retribution.
> 
> Similarities between Syria and Yugoslavia are unavoidable, and nobody in Moscow seeks to avoid them. Both were unnatural, ethnically and religiously diverse states cobbled together by the victorious Allies after World War One, really no more than lines on the wrong map held together by unpleasant dictatorial regimes, and both collapsed in war and genocide.
> 
> Yugoslavia fell apart exactly 20 years before Syria did, but the conflicts that resulted appear similar: a brutal mishmash of warring groups, many motivated by religious and ethnic extremism, that are unconcerned about civilian dead. The big difference now, a generation later, is that Russia is in a position to change the conflict’s outcome.
> 
> Moscow, reeling from its Cold War defeat and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire, was impotent to save Yugoslavia from Western aggression—to use Russian terms. Indeed, the dismantling of Yugoslavia by NATO stands as a lesson to Putin about what neoliberal imperialists named Clinton will do to weaker states.
> 
> The fate of Yugoslavia in the 1990s—including the fact that significant chunks of that former country remain under NATO and European Union occupation today—is a cautionary tale for the Kremlin, and Putin has spoken passionately about how he will never allow Russia to be dismantled by the West like Yugoslavia was. He pointedly defended his 2014 seizure of Crimea from Ukraine by noting that redrawing Europe’s map—Putin cited NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia that achieved Kosovo’s independence from Belgrade—was acceptable when the West did it.
> 
> For Putin, his Syrian intervention has been an unambiguous win on the world stage. Its benefits exist on many levels, not least Russia’s reinforcing the potent message that Moscow, unlike Washington, stands by its friends. When his regime was collapsing in 2011, Hosni Mubarak, who had led Egypt for three decades as a loyal ally of America, was coldly abandoned by the White House. President Obama, against the advice of his own national security experts, cut Mubarak loose to the mob, refusing to take his panicked phone calls pleading for help.
> 
> That same year, when his regime was facing the abyss as civil war enveloped Syria, Bashar al-Assad got all the help he wanted from Moscow. Russia saved Assad and has not cared one whit about cries from the international community and NGOs about the brutal methods employed by the Syrian regime against rebels. This message has not been missed in the Middle East. It’s no wonder that even Israel has sought parley with Moscow, which has replaced Washington as the new regional kingmaker-cum-sheriff, while Egypt has renewed security ties with the Kremlin that Cairo abandoned more than four decades ago, in favor of the Americans. No more.
> 
> Putin and his ministers have acted cynically and cunningly in Syria, to good effect for Russia. However, it would be wrong to portray Moscow as strategic geniuses here. It’s much more about the staggering, unprecedented foreign policy incompetence of President Obama and his White House than anything else. Time and again, Obama and his coterie of self-proclaimed foreign policy masterminds on his National Security Council have been bested by the Russians, who view them with undisguised contempt.
> 
> The critical moment came slightly more than three years ago, in September 2013, when Obama walked away from his own “redline” in Syria over Assad’s use of chemical weapons against rebels. I never favored American military intervention in that civil war – seeing the incompetent hash Washington made of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya I knew the disasters that would likely follow – but I strongly believed that the global hegemon’s word had to be honored. If Obama said it was a redline, he had to mean it. Alas, he did not. As I explained at the time, outsourcing American policy in Syria to the Russians was sure to end in tears and diplomatic defeat with wider consequences.
> 
> Predictably, Obama’s defenders in the media proclaimed the president’s redline decision an act of geopolitical genius that mere mortals couldn’t comprehend. Nevertheless, empowering the Kremlin in Syria would have lasting effects far beyond the Levant, as I predicted at the time. Just six months later, Putin seized Ukraine then invaded the east of that country. Russia was back, on the march—and seeking confrontation with the West.
> 
> We should not lose sight of the human cost of this tragic folly. Something approaching half a million people have been killed, most of them civilians, in Syria’s fratricide, which Obama says he’s pretty upset about—as well he should be. There’s ample schadenfreude here, not least the key role played by Samantha Power, one of Obama’s top foreign policy players (she’s currently our ambassador to the United Nations). Having won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, written fresh out of Yale, castigating Bill Clinton’s administration and American “impotence” in the Balkans in the 1990s that enabled genocide, as one of Obama’s mavens Power has delivered a far greater humanitarian catastrophe in Syria than anything that happened in Bosnia or Kosovo.
> 
> Syria’s civil war will linger, probably for years. Innocents will keep dying. Significant parts of the country will remain outside the control of Damascus and its Russian and Iranian allies. However, the Assad regime has prevailed, thanks to Moscow. It will survive and the Middle Eastern balance of power has shifted to Russia’s advantage. If Hillary Clinton becomes president in January, as looks likely, she would be well advised to admit what her predecessor did in Syria and what it means for the region and the world. She would be very foolish to give Vladimir Putin a military confrontation in Syria that he actually wants.


----------



## Humphrey Bogart

Thucydides said:
			
		

> With Russia's victory in Syria, the traditional American policy of supporting the Sunni Kingdoms to ensure stability is in ruins, and the Obama policy of supporting the Shiites also has collapsed due to the inherent incoherence and incredibly inept execution. The future of the Middle East should involve us drawing down and allowing the four regional hegemonic powers to fight it out: Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and (to a lesser extent) Egypt. If Russia would like to spend blood and treasure in the Mddle East, they should be welcome to do so.



The article you posted reads like a bunch of incoherent blabbering.  On one hand we should smash the Assad Regime, on the other hand, we should draw down and let the Arabs smash each other?  

The only real message in the article is "Obama is incompetent" although the author can't actually make a coherent argument as to why he thinks so.  

The strategy employed by the US to defeat ISIS is a good one and it's working, at very little cost to the US in blood or treasure.  The Assad Regime is now in control of what amounts to little more than a rump state and they've got no more chemical weapons which is very good news for Israel.  We've got Muslims fighting radical Muslims which is good news for us and Iranian nuclear ambitions have been ratcheted back?  So what exactly is the problem?


----------



## The Bread Guy

Humphrey Bogart said:
			
		

> The article you posted reads like a bunch of incoherent blabbering.  On one hand we should smash the Assad Regime, on the other hand, we should draw down and let the Arabs smash each other?
> 
> *The only real message in the article is "Obama is incompetent"* although the author can't actually make a coherent argument as to why he thinks so ...


Funny that, given who the publisher of the site posting said article is in his other life ...


----------



## jollyjacktar

I can't say I feel really sorry about this.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3945566/ISIS-teenage-Cub-Caliphate-kills-entire-family-suicide-belt-accidentally-goes-home-Mosul.html?login#readerCommentsCommand-message-field


----------



## Journeyman

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> I can't say I feel really sorry about this.
> 
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3945566/ISIS-teenage-Cub-Caliphate-kills-entire-family-suicide-belt-accidentally-goes-home-Mosul.html?login#readerCommentsCommand-message-field


Ah, _al-Darwin_  at work.   ;D


----------



## AbdullahD

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> I can't say I feel really sorry about this.
> 
> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3945566/ISIS-teenage-Cub-Caliphate-kills-entire-family-suicide-belt-accidentally-goes-home-Mosul.html?login#readerCommentsCommand-message-field



I am torn here, was the entire family sympathetic to Daesh? If so, I couldn't care less.

But other children died and the article from my understanding, said that it came from another terrorist, not the family. So it leaves the possibility that the family was not sympathetic to Daesh and were acting under duress, if that is or was the case I hope that the hereafter is easy on them.

Maybe I misread it, but as mean as it is, I guess it is better for it to happen at home.. then at a time when it could possibly give them a tactical advantage.

Abdullah


----------



## jollyjacktar

If the family wasn't necessarily running with Daesh, then what was their son doing with a suicide vest that was intended to kill unsuspecting people?


----------



## AbdullahD

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> If the family wasn't necessarily running with Daesh, then what was their son doing with a suicide vest that was intended to kill unsuspecting people?



I honestly do not know, I just suspect the pro Daesh vs Anti Daesh lines are not clear cut over there. It is like what Nazi Germany would have been like I imagine, if they wanted to 'honor' your child then saying 'no' could get you killed.

I also wonder why it went off at the home.. where they trying to take it off or disarm it? 

If they were daesh supporters, then I don't care at all and I hope this serves as a lesson to them all. But I find that black and white answers are hard to come by these days. Also most of my knowledge is in Islamic fiqh, not contemporary affairs, so I am just thinking out loud.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Would they not only "honour" the kids of families that were with the program?  As for it's premature Martification misfire, I suspect the quality assurance at al-Baghdaddy's Kaboom Factory is less than professional.


----------



## George Wallace

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> Would they not only "honour" the kids of families that were with the program?  As for it's premature Martification misfire, I suspect the quality assurance at al-Baghdaddy's Kaboom Factory is less than professional.



Or a 'youngster' wanted to demonstrate his new 'outfit'.


----------



## AbdullahD

Good points, both of you. Maybe it is the bleeding heart liberal in me showing through right now, I will concede, until and unless we get more information.


----------



## George Wallace

One of the main commonalities found in most of these reports, is the lack of education of the bombers, in some cases the use of the mentally handicapped.  This latest article points out the lack of schooling being provided to children in these regions.  

This is not uncommon, as it was also found in other regions such as the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR) where a "Hatfield vs McCoy" atmosphere could be witnessed between the various factions.  Rumours and innuendo were used to influence uneducated members of their society.


----------



## Oldgateboatdriver

AbdullahD said:
			
		

> I also wonder why it went off at the home.. where they trying to take it off or disarm it?



You are all (not just you Abdullah) missing a possible "1984" scenario: The bomber child was onboard with DAESH, had denounced his family for non-Islamist deportment and as a result, was given the "honour" of taking them out on his way to "paradise".


----------



## Eye In The Sky

There is also the possibility that the device was on a timer and did exactly what it was intended to do;  go off and take some innocents with it.

There's lots of nasty shit going on, and it would not be the first time the shitheads killed people with timers on things.

Mosul is a distant 'thing' or concept to some, but there is great suffering going on and innocents are on the shitty end of the stick day after day after day.


----------



## Infanteer

This seemed like the best place to put these (contentious) articles from someone (not military) on the ground, who published under a pseudonym.

https://warontherocks.com/2016/08/washingtons-sunni-myth-and-the-civil-wars-in-syria-and-iraq/

https://warontherocks.com/2016/08/washingtons-sunni-myth-and-the-middle-east-undone/

Interesting reads.  In summary, Shia vs Sunni is a myth as neither Shia nor Sunni blocs really exist.  Syrian government = bad, but not the worst (perhaps redeemable).  Saudi Arabia = terrible, a polished version of ISIL.

Accepting this means changing policy towards the region.


----------



## The Bread Guy

On a more tactical level, a bit of OSINT on how ISIS/ISIL/Daesh is using tanks in SYR & IRQ:
-- _*"How ISIS Utilizes Battle Tanks In Syria And Iraq"*_ (southfront.org, generally pro-RUS OSINT)
-- _*"Etat islamique et chars d'assaut: comment les djihadistes emploient leurs blindés en Irak et en Syrie"*_ (original source article, francesoir.fr, French online tabloid, in French)


----------



## a_majoor

US involvement becomes fraught with the potential for miscalculations and accidents as a multitude of players move into a small area:

http://freebeacon.com/columns/the-isis-endgame/



> *Column: Beware mission creep in Syria  *
> BY:  Matthew Continetti
> March 10, 2017 5:00 am
> 
> The Islamic Caliphate announced in 2014 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, is approaching the end of its short and terrible life. Iraqi forces, supported by Americans, have reclaimed the eastern half of Mosul and are retaking the western one. Kurdish militias in Syria, also backed by the United States, are homing in on the ISIS capital of Raqqa. Word came this week that a contingent of Marines has been deployed in Syria to position heavy artillery for the fight ahead. "We expect that within a few weeks there will be a siege of the city," a militia spokesman tells Reuters.
> 
> ISIS doesn't have a chance. American air and ground forces, working with local proxies, are about to terminate its existence as a state. "Crushed," to paraphrase President Trump. A just—and popular—cause.
> 
> But that won't be the end. Recent events suggest that the military defeat of ISIS is just the beginning of a renewed American involvement in Iraq and Syria. And whether the American public and president are prepared for or willing to accept the probable costs of such involvement is unknown. That is reason for concern.
> 
> To glimpse the future, look at the city of Manbij in northeast Syria. Humvees and Strykers flying the American flag have appeared there in recent days. The mission? Not to defeat ISIS. Our proxies kicked them out last year. What we are doing in Manbij is something altogether different from a military assault: a "deterrence and reassurance" operation meant to dissuade rival factions from massacring one another. If you can't remember when President Obama or President Trump called for such an operation, that's because they never did.
> 
> And there's a twist. One of the factions we are trying to intimidate is none other than the army of Turkey, a NATO member and purported ally. Turkey moved in on Manbij not because of ISIS but because of the Kurds. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish autocrat, opposes one of our Kurdish proxies. He says the YPG is the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Worker's Party, which has conducted an insurgency against his government for decades. Yet the YPG is also the most effective indigenous anti-ISIS force on the ground. We need it to take Raqqa.
> 
> Things get even more complicated. Also in Manbij are the Russians, who are helping units of the Syrian army police a group of villages. The Kurds invited them, too, presumably as a separate hedge against Turkey. To keep score: The Americans, the Russians, the Turks, the Kurds, and the Syrians are all converging on an impoverished city in the middle of nowhere that has no strategic importance to the United States.
> 
> One needn't have read The Guns of August to fret about the risks of miscalculation and misinterpretation. Which is why, on Tuesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Joseph Dunford, met with his Russian and Turkish counterparts. "One American official described the situation around Manbij as a potential tinderbox," reports the New York Times. As if we didn't have enough to worry about.
> 
> U.S. intervention in Syria is following a pattern that has ended in regret. Having entered the conflict to pursue the narrow aim of destroying ISIS, we are likely to assume much more abstract and open-ended responsibilities once our immediate goal has been achieved. Similar vague and unspecific policies led to Americans being killed in Lebanon in 1983 and in Somalia a decade later. Where peacekeeping has been successful, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the mission was clear from the beginning, authorized by all parties by treaty, and adequately resourced—tens of thousands of troops, most of them American. None of these conditions apply today.
> 
> It is one thing to maintain a presence in Iraq, a country whose fate seems to be entangled with our own. It is another to expand our involvement in Syria with little public rationale or debate. At the very least Congress deserves an opportunity to take up the issue. But don't get your hopes up. The GOP Congress resisted taking ownership of the war in Syria when the president was a Democrat. There is little reason to think it will do so now when the president is a Republican.
> 
> What happens the day after Raqqa falls? Should American troops remain in Syria once ISIS has been defeated, and if so for what purpose? Will there be clear lines of authority between CENTCOM and SOCOM? Just what is America's position on the Kurds—are we for an independent Kurdistan, and if so are we prepared to resist Turkish and Iraqi attempts to quash it? Who is making key military and diplomatic decisions: the president, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or the combatant commanders?
> 
> The president is charged with answering such questions. And he must be ready to defend his answers. To do otherwise risks complacency and drift. This is an unstable and murky situation. And it could end, as so often happens, in lost lives, reduced credibility, and an even wider conflict.
> 
> A contributor to The Weekly Standard likes to tell the following story: Covering the Lebanese civil war in 1983, he visited an outpost of U.S. Marines. They came under sniper fire from one militia. Then another militia started shooting. Then the Syrians joined in. At which point a lance corporal turned to him and said, "Sir, never get involved in a five-sided argument."


----------



## a_majoor

American frackers finally put a bullet in Saudi Arabia. The long term question is "now what?" So long as US production keeps oil prices low it takes resources from the hands of potential and actual enemies ranging from Gulf and Saudi supported Sunni and Wahhabi radicals, Iran and even Russia, reducing their ability to meddle or project power, but the resulting vacuum could be even worse than the Arab Spring or the implosion in Syria. Something our own politicians should keep in mind, as turmoil in the Middle East affects foreign policy, while low oil prices affect our domestic economy and policies:

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2017/03/12/the-problem-of-success/



> *The Problem of Success*
> By Richard Fernandez March 12, 2017
> 
> By all accounts the Saudi economy is in decline. Low oil prices are forcing the Kingdom to live off savings, a process which can only last for so long. "The International Monetary Fund in January slashed its forecast for Saudi economic growth this year to 0.4 percent from 2 percent. ... Net foreign assets, though still above $500 billion, are shrinking as the government uses savings to plug a budget deficit that reached $79 billion last year -- $107 billion if delayed payments to contractors are included." The Saudi government has a six-point plan aimed at tightening its belt and minimizing economic unrest as it tries to shift away from oil but it may be too little, too late to sustain it in the same old style.
> 
> The Citizen’s Account is a programme meant to soften the impact of austerity measures on low and middle-income Saudis ... The government began a multiyear programme of gradual reductions to fuel, water and electricity subsidies with a surprise announcement in late 2015, sending Saudis rushing to petrol stations to fill up. ... From July, the government will charge an unprecedented monthly fee for foreign workers with dependents in the kingdom.
> 
> Although Riyadh has tried to reinvent itself as an "arsenal of Arabia" with an arms industry taking the place of oil, the Islamic Military Alliance  whose arsenal it was to have been built around a Turkish-Saudi Army based in Riyadh  has been less than impressive. Actions by the Trump administration to drive back Iran in Yemen and Syria may be aimed less at ensuring Saudi victory than a rearguard action against too swift a Russian and Iranian advance.
> 
> One person who understood the growing strategic weakness of the Saudi position was Rex Tillerson. Speaking in October 2016 as the chairman of Exxon Mobile, when a president Hillary was still universally anticipated, "Tillerson told Saudi Arabia's energy minister ... that fears of a new global oil supply crunch were exaggerated as the U.S. oil industry was adapting to the low price shock and was set to resume growth."  The Saudis had cut oil prices in the belief that it would bankrupt American producers. Instead innovation turned North America into the big swing producer.
> 
> The remarks by Tillerson ...  come as the Saudis have effectively abandoned their strategy to drive higher cost producers out of the market by ramping up cheap supplies from their own fields ... shale oil producers' resilience in cutting costs to make some wells profitable at as low as $40 a barrel means that North America has effectively become a swing producer that will be able to respond rapidly to any global supply shortage.
> 
> "I don't quite share the same view that others have that we are somehow on the edge of a precipice. I think because we have confirmed viability of very large resource base in North America ... that serves as enormous spare capacity in the system," Tillerson told the Oil & Money conference.
> 
> The twilight of Saudi oil dominance has arrived, a point underscored by the announcement of a giant onshore oil find in Alaska. "Some 1.2 billion barrels of oil have been discovered in Alaska, marking the biggest onshore discovery in the U.S. in three decades. The massive find of conventional oil on state land could bring relief to budget pains in Alaska brought on by slumping production in the state and the crash in oil prices." But the impact of that change has not yet been assimilated in public perception.
> 
> Just as the US won the Cold War not because federal government agencies outwitted the Reds but because American society out-competed the Soviets, the frackers may have bankrupted the Sunni Jihad. But in doing so, the oilmen have created a potential power vacuum even bigger than which resulted from the Arab Spring. Technology often creates new power relationships which officials only belatedly respond to. The consequences of American oil power have not yet been fully assimilated by the political system. Turmoil in the Kingdom and the Gulf might trigger a tragedy that would make events in Syria and Libya seem trivial by comparison.
> 
> The declining fortunes of the Kingdom may have led President Obama to attempt a rapprochement with its Islamic nemesis Iran. It may have tempted Erdogan to grasp at the mantle of Sunni leadership as it was up for grabs. And it may now be impelling the Trump administration to put a hand in the game before Putin sweeps up the pot. But none of these answered the basic question of how to transition whole populations from a resource-based economy into something more sustainable. If the discovery of vast oil reserves in Arabia was pivotal in giving impetus to the Sunni Jihad, the present shift will incontestably create another trajectory-changing moment.
> 
> For years, a reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil has been a policy goal. The dog's caught the car. What now?


----------



## jollyjacktar

Come what may, I won't shed a tear to see the Saudi's begging on the street corners of the world economy.  I've often wanted to see their backs broken, returning them to nomads in the desert.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Infanteer said:
			
		

> This seemed like the best place to put these (contentious) articles from someone (not military) on the ground, who published under a pseudonym.
> 
> https://warontherocks.com/2016/08/washingtons-sunni-myth-and-the-civil-wars-in-syria-and-iraq/
> 
> https://warontherocks.com/2016/08/washingtons-sunni-myth-and-the-middle-east-undone/
> 
> Interesting reads.  In summary, Shia vs Sunni is a myth as neither Shia nor Sunni blocs really exist.  Syrian government = bad, but not the worst (perhaps redeemable).  Saudi Arabia = terrible, a polished version of ISIL.
> 
> Accepting this means changing policy towards the region.



I don’t buy that the civil war is a myth, it’s painfully real, but it’s not the only dynamic at play. More like a multi-layered cake. The Sunni vs Shia issue is the base, historical events on top of that, regional alliances next, geographical and resource access issues next, Regional government, Tribal alliances and economic layered on that and finally Individual and family ties. The layering may varying from region to region as to which layer is on top of which.

  If you look at how the House of Saud acted when they first seized Mecca, you can see the ISIS roots run deep, sadly the Ottomans did not exterminate the lot of them back then.


----------



## jollyjacktar

This lady has an interesting job.  Photos and full story at link below.



> Meet the Winnipeg woman taking weapons from ISIS
> 
> Devin Morrow is working on the front lines in Iraq tracking illegal weapons
> 
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/devin-morrow-iraq-1.4051833


----------



## The Bread Guy

Kind of ironic*** if true ...


> Three Islamic State militants died late Sunday when wild boars attacked them in southern Kirkuk, a local source was quoted saying.
> 
> The animals went on a rampage near a farmland in al-Rashad region, an Islamic State pocket 53 kilometers south of Kirkuk. They attacked the militants and left three killed, according to the source.
> 
> Alsumaria News quoted the source saying that “Daesh (Islamic State) militants took revenge at the pigs that attacked the farmland,” but did not clarify the method ...


*** - If boars are considered in the same category as pigs by Muslims.


----------



## Kirkhill

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> Kind of ironic*** if true ...*** - If boars are considered in the same category as pigs by Muslims.



A PsyOps triumph?   >


----------



## jollyjacktar

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> Kind of ironic*** if true ...*** - If boars are considered in the same category as pigs by Muslims.



If true, they're probably doubly screwed from getting into Paradise.  tsk, tsk  No doubt porky had a good meal afterwards.  Bricktop would be proud.


----------



## The Bread Guy

jollyjacktar said:
			
		

> ... t*u*sk, t*u*sk ...


FTFY  ;D


----------



## jollyjacktar

milnews.ca said:
			
		

> FTFY  ;D



 :rofl:   badoom bing, rimshot


----------



## The Bread Guy

The dance continues ....

_*"Dunford: Counter-ISIS Coalition Would Benefit From NATO Membership"*_ (US DoD)
_*"NATO Chief Rules out Combat Role Against Islamic State "*_ (Voice of America)


----------



## The Bread Guy

Live by the sword ...

_*"Islamic State Claims Deadly Iran Attacks on Parliament and Khomeini Tomb"*_
_*"In rare attacks in Tehran, gunmen storm parliament and shrine in assaults claimed by Islamic State"*_
_*"Iran attacks leave 12 dead at parliament and Khomeini mausoleum"*_
_*"Attackers bomb Iran parliament and mausoleum, at least 12 dead: Iranian media"*_


----------



## jollyjacktar

I read the attackers were men who wore woman's clothing.  I didn't know Daesh had a tranvestite unit.  >


----------



## The Bread Guy

An interesting twist to the Iranian attacks - highlights mine ...


> Suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the Iranian parliament and the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran on Wednesday, killing at least 12 people in a twin assault which *Iran's Revolutionary Guards blamed on regional rival Saudi Arabia*.
> 
> Islamic State claimed responsibility and released a video purporting to show gunmen inside the parliament building. It also threatened more attacks against Iran's majority Shi'ite population, seen by the hardline Sunni militants as "heretics".
> 
> *Saudi Arabia denied any involvement*, but the assault further fuels boiling tensions between Riyadh and Tehran as they vie for control of the Gulf and influence in the wider Islamic world. It comes days after Riyadh and other Sunni Muslim powers cut ties with Qatar, accusing it of backing Tehran and militant groups.
> 
> They were the first attacks claimed by Islamic State inside the tightly controlled Shi'ite Muslim country, one of the powers leading the fight against IS forces in nearby Iraq and Syria.
> 
> Iranian police said they had arrested five suspects over the attacks and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, struck a defiant tone.
> 
> "These fireworks have no effect on Iran. They will soon be eliminated ... They are too small to affect the will of the Iranian nation and its officials," state TV quoted him saying.
> 
> Khamenei added that Iran, which is helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fight rebels including Islamic State fighters, had prevented worse attacks through its foreign policy.
> 
> *The powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps accused Riyadh of being behind the attacks and vowed to seek revenge.*
> 
> "This terrorist attack happened only a week after the meeting between the U.S. president (Donald Trump) and the (Saudi) backward leaders who support terrorists. The fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility proves that they were involved in the brutal attack," a Guards statement said ...


----------



## Colin Parkinson

The Iran Regime will use this as an excuse to arrest, imprison and torture anyone that has annoyed them regardless of any potential guilt.


----------



## jollyjacktar

Another case of premature martyrfication , they shouldn't get so excited to show off the latest fashion craze from Raqqa   ;D

'ISIS suicide bomber accidentally kills 12 comrades when his belt explodes while they wished him good luck as he prepared to carry out an attack in Iraq'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4642504/ISIS-suicide-bomber-kills-12-comrades-wishing-luck.html#ixzz4lDz0uEzE 
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook


----------



## jollyjacktar

Love the way these Egyptian soldiers dealt with this VBEID.

https://youtu.be/oXD1heMN_Ss


----------



## The Bread Guy

Some further splintering in PAK?

_*"Al-Qaeda-Inspired Group Launches as Islamic State Alternative in Pakistan"*_ (Breitbart)
_*"Former Al-Qaida Operatives Launch New Militant Group in Pakistan"*_ (Voice of America)
_*"ASP militants were trained in Afghanistan"*_ (_Daily Times_ - PAK media)


----------



## The Bread Guy

It'll be interesting to see what happens next with this guy ...


> A U.S. citizen fighting for ISIS surrendered to U.S.-backed fighters in Syria, two U.S. military officials confirmed to Fox News on Thursday.
> 
> It was not immediately clear where or when the surrender took place, but one official said it occurred in northern Syria in an area controlled by a U.S.-backed militia called the Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF is a Kurdish and Arab army that has been fighting ISIS.
> 
> The man was not immediately identified and it was not clear where he was being held.
> 
> Col. Ryan Dillon, a U.S. military spokesman for the coalition against ISIS, would not comment on the surrender. Dillon deferred to the State Department on the issue.
> 
> The U.S. military command told the Daily Beast they were aware of the report.
> 
> “We are aware of the report that a U.S. citizen believed to be fighting for ISIS surrendered to Syrian Democratic Forces on or about Sept. 12," the command said in a statement. "As a precondition for Coalition support, SDF and Iraqi forces have pledged to observe international laws and the laws of armed conflict. Foreign fighters who are captured or surrender to SDF partners in Syria will be safeguarded and transported humanely, and their home nations will be contacted regarding the next steps." ...


----------



## Colin Parkinson

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-raqqa-syria-foreign-fighters-british-french-certain-death-jihadis-a8012781.html

The forces fighting the remnants of Isis in Syria have tacit instructions on dealing with the foreigners who joined the extremist group by the thousands: kill them on the battlefield. 

As they made their last stand in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, an estimated 300 extremists holed up in and around a sports stadium and a hospital argued among themselves about whether to surrender, according to Kurdish commanders leading the forces that closed in. The final days were brutal – 75 coalition air strikes in 48 hours and a flurry of desperate Isis car bombs that were easily spotted in the sliver of devastated landscape still under militant control. 

No government publicly expressed concern about the fate of its citizens who left and joined Isis fighters plotting attacks at home and abroad. In France, which has suffered repeated violence claimed by Isis – including the November 2015 attacks in Paris – defence minister Florence Parly was among the few to say it aloud. 

“If the jihadis perish in this fight, I would say that’s for the best,” she told Europe 1 radio last week. (rest on link)


----------



## jollyjacktar

I couldn't agree more with this COA.  Once eliminated, they'll never pose a threat to anyone again.


----------



## Colin Parkinson

Just being culturally sensitive to their needs to meet virgins.


----------



## McG

http://ipolitics.ca/2017/11/08/saudi-arabia-just-cleared-decks-war-iran/

Some interesting observations and tea-leaf reading on the current goings on in Saudi Arabia and the implications for the broader Middle East.


----------



## jollyjacktar

As long as he's kicking the shit out of the Wahabbi assholes, l like it.


----------



## Kirkhill

More on Saudi Arabia 



> How Britain fell for Saudi Arabia’s reforming Crown Prince
> 
> Mohammad bin Salman is just 32, and already he is redefining the kingdom for a new generation
> Fraser Nelson
> 
> 11 November 2017
> 9:00 AM
> 
> There are two ways of seeing the extraordinary rise of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince: the blood-stained debut of a new dictator, or the long-overdue emergence of a reformer with the steel to take on the kingdom’s old guard. The British government is firmly in the second camp.
> 
> Mohammad bin Salman is just 32 years old, and his effective seizure of power means he defines the kingdom for a generation. He’s seen in Whitehall as a history maker, whose ruthless impatience might not only liberalise his country but create an alliance with Israel that could change the region.
> 
> Minsters talk about MbS (as he’s known in Whitehall) with admiration and awe. He recently laid on a trade fair, and the British delegation was amazed to hear a band playing upon arrival at the airport. They were then taken to a room where men were sitting next to unveiled women, with none of the usual intermission for prayers. ‘It was like we’d got off at the wrong country,’ says one official. MbS is talking about various investments: new cities built from scratch, a 30-mile bridge being built to the Egyptian resort of Sharm El Sheikh. Deepening alliances with several countries, Israel included. There is even hope, in Britain, that the Saudi-Israeli alliance could pave the way for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
> 
> Dictators quite often make such noises to extract concessions from a gullible West. When Colonel Gaddafi disposed of chemical weapons that no one knew he had, Tony Blair flew off to Tripoli with businessmen offering trade, cash and military training. Gaddafi’s son Saif was hailed as a young leader at Davos. Libya carried on imprisoning and torturing opponents, and found out that the West doesn’t mind if you talk about reform.
> 
> But the calculation in Britain is that MbS is different. It’s thought that he’s motivated by consolidating his personal power and by economic concerns. The oil money is running out, and Saudi Arabia needs new sources of income. MbS has been heavily influenced by Mohammed bin Zayed, the 56-year-old Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, who has acted as his mentor. He has shown how quickly an economy can develop if the reforms are right.
> 
> So far, the Saudi Crown Prince has been defined by action rather than words. Women will be able to drive in June next year, a huge challenge to the clerical establishment. The religious police, who made sure men and women didn’t mix, are no more. The sexes are beginning to drink coffee, jog and ride bikes together. Cinemas are expected to open next year. Just as the Wahhabis sought to rule the kingdom by controlling the culture, so Mohammed bin Salman is making his reign felt by culture — turning Saudi Arabia into Salman’s Arabia.
> 
> To the British, it all makes sense. As one senior official puts it, ‘He’s pro-women, so he’ll have half the population on his side.’ Perhaps more: he’s a millennial, and likes to point out that 70 per cent of his fellow Saudis are under 30 years old. ‘So we will not waste 30 years of our lives dealing with extremist ideas,’ he said last week, ‘we will destroy them today.’ This is not the language of accommodation. And it’s almost inviting an Islamist backlash, in the nation that produced most of the 9/11 hijackers.
> 
> The Crown Prince is frank about the risks, saying his country’s youth bulge is a ‘double-edged sword’. Young Saudis, he said, can create a new Saudi Arabia if empowered ‘but if they go the other way, they will bring destruction’. By his own admission, it’s quite a gamble. But one which the British government, such as it is, fully supports.



https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/11/how-britain-fell-for-saudi-arabias-reforming-crown-prince/

And for comparison - this article on Sultan Qaboos in Oman.

https://www.chris-kutschera.com/A/Oman%201970.htm


----------



## a_majoor

The Iranian=Saudi war continues to heat up:

https://strategypage.com/on_point/20171107221459.aspx



> The Saudi Arabia-Iran War Escalates
> by Austin Bay
> November 7, 2017
> 
> On November 4, a U.S.-made Patriot missile intercepted an Iranian-manufactured Burkan H-2 short-range ballistic missile as its warhead plunged toward the international airport outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital.
> 
> Though the missile was launched from Yemen, with good reason Saudi leaders called the attack an act of "aggression" by Iran. A human rights organization said the "indiscriminate" missile attack was "an apparent war crime."
> 
> Under any circumstances, the missile attack signals that war between the Sunni Muslim kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran's Shia Islamic revolutionary regime is escalating and their proxy war in Yemen will become more intense.
> 
> Iran covets Saudi oil fields, but this fight is not all about oil. Historical enmity is a factor. Both governments confront serious domestic challenges that create internal instability. Iran apparently believes that at this moment in time it is positioned to exploit Saudi domestic weaknesses -- but that remains to be seen.
> 
> Since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, Iran and Saudi Arabia have confronted each other across the waters of the Persian Gulf. The presence of the U.S. naval forces in the region still deter overt Iranian military action in the Gulf.
> 
> Iran's Shia regime, however, is expansionist. The ayatollahs seek to control or influence Shia Muslim communities globally, but particularly in the Middle East.
> 
> The Iranian regime concluded that the 2011 Arab Spring revolts and the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011 created a regional power vacuum. For different reasons and in differing guises Iranian involvement in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon expanded, but it expanded nonetheless.
> 
> Yemen was the launch site for the November 4 SRBM because Saudi Arabia and Iran fight a "proxy war" in that miserable land.
> 
> Arab Spring chaos in Yemen presented Iran with a target of opportunity. In 2011 a revolt forced Yemen's president Ali Abdullah Saleh to cede power in early 2012. Vice-president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi replaced him. In 2014, Houthi militants seized the capital, Sanaa. In 2015, they dismissed Hadi and took over Yemen's government.
> 
> The Houthis are a political-religious movement led by the Shia Muslim Zaidi sect. Though the movement has Sunni followers and does not theologically align with Tehran's zealots, Shia Iran began providing the Houthis with weapons, advisers and intelligence. Houthi power within Yemen increased.
> 
> If the Houthis dominate Yemen, Iran is on Saudi Arabia's strategic rear, positioned to destabilize the House of Saud along a land frontier. The Saudis could not permit that. With the aid of the U.S., the Saudis formed a coalition to support the internationally recognized Hadi government.
> 
> So far the proxy war has killed some 9,000 Yemenis and inured 60,000. 18 million displaced people need food and medical assistance. Yemen's total population is 28.5 million.
> 
> The Saudis conduct air strikes on Houthi targets, which is why the Houthis portray the SRBM attacks as retaliatory. The Saudis, however, are certain that the November 4 missile was fired by members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and Lebanese Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia that Iran trains and finances. Hezbollah also provides proxy fighters for Iran elsewhere in the region (Syria).
> 
> From Lebanon , Lebanese Hezbollah fires Iranian-provided missiles at targets in Israel. Iran denies involvement, while promising the eventual destruction of Israel. From Yemen, Iran can pull the same trick on the Saudis -- another reason the Saudis can't let Yemen become an Iranian base.
> 
> Does Saudi Arabia have the power to win a war with Iran in the Gulf? Not by itself. It has the assets to seed stir within Iran. Its anti-Iran coalition could extend the war beyond Yemen, but it would be an indecisive war. Without the participation of U.S. forces, toppling the ayatollah regime by military means is most unlikely.
> 
> However, the nuclear weapons clock is ticking. Iran remains committed to obtaining nuclear weapons. The Saudis have ballistic missiles and the cash to buy or build nukes. Moreover, they now have the support of a new American administration that says it won't permit a nuclear armed Iranian dictatorship.


----------



## McG

CBC predicts the next massive pan Middle East war is soon to start.

http://www.cbc.ca/1.4407876

But somehow, Turkey gets no mention in this foreshadowing.


----------



## Journeyman

MCG said:
			
		

> CBC predicts the next massive pan Middle East war is soon to start.
> 
> http://www.cbc.ca/1.4407876


For clarity -- not mindless nit-picking -- it's not CBC's view but just another opinion piece by Michael Coren. 


_Caveat Emptor_


----------



## McG

Journeyman said:
			
		

> For clarity -- not mindless nit-picking -- it's not CBC's view but just another opinion piece by Michael Coren.


Yes, that is a more accurate statement.



			
				YZT580 said:
			
		

> and by what magical means does SA get through Syria in order to attack Lebanon?  Regardless of their collaboration I doubt very much that Israel would allow a Saudi armoured division to drive up the highway past Jerusalem on the way to the Lebanese border and I am even more certain that Damascus would file an objection or two


More proxies maybe. Or they all meet somewhere central?  Saudi Arabia & Syria fight it out inside Iraq maybe?


----------



## Colin Parkinson

If the Iraq government goes full retard on the remaining Sunni tribes along the KSA border, KSA may feel obligated to protect them, moving forces into the those tribal areas. The Anbar region is west of Baghdad bumps against Syria, Jordon and KSA and is populated by Sunni tribes.


----------



## jollyjacktar

One thing that whole region isn't short of is retards.


----------



## a_majoor

Profile of the Man who would be King:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/28/mohammad-bin-salman-intends-to-be-a-liberalizer-bu/



> *The man who would be Saudi king*
> By Clifford D. May - - Tuesday, November 28, 2017
> 
> ANALYSIS/OPINION:
> 
> Mohammad bin Salman is a young man in a hurry. When I visited Saudi Arabia back in February he was only the deputy crown prince. Nevertheless, it was he — not 81-year-old King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and not the crown prince, 58-year-old Muhammad bin Nayef — who was the talk of the town.
> 
> The 32-year old MBS, as he is known, was regarded as the brains and energy behind Vision 2030, an ambitious plan to construct, by the aforementioned date, a dynamic and diverse Saudi economy, one not dependent on extracting and exporting petroleum. To achieve that, he appeared to understand, will require significant economic, social and religious reforms.
> 
> Then, in June, King Salman suddenly decided to replace the crown prince, his nephew, with MBS, his son. Perhaps the king prefers to have a direct descendant as his heir apparent. Perhaps he thinks MBS is better equipped to navigate the stormy seas of the 21st century Middle East. Difficult to say; Saudi Arabia is not transparent.
> 
> There have been reports — rumors really — that the king plans to step down any day now. In the meantime, the new crown prince has not been idle. Last month, he announced plans to create a $500 billion independent economic zone on the Red Sea, a cosmopolitan city of the future to be governed by laws “on par with international standards.”
> 
> Change is coming to other parts of the country as well. The powers of the religious police have been curbed. Concerts are no longer forbidden. Next year, women will be permitted to drive cars. The prohibition on unrelated men and women mixing and mingling has been loosening.
> 
> MBS is promising that under his rule Saudi Arabia will follow “a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions.” As for “extremist thoughts, we will destroy them now and immediately.”
> 
> A few decades ago, he added, the kingdom became “not normal.” His meaning was clear: Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Saudis spent billions of dollars attempting to demonstrate that they were no less committed to jihad against the West than the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Al Qaeda was one result.
> 
> Early this month, MBS ordered what’s being called a “corruption crackdown.” More than 30 princes, government ministers and senior military officers were arrested. They have not been incarcerated in a royal dungeon. They’ve been confined instead to the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, which boasts landscaped gardens, restaurants, a “world-class spa,” a swimming pool and a bowling alley. Still, these guests of the crown prince may not be having a wonderful holiday. And checking out may be expensive.
> 
> The Saudi prosecutor has reportedly determined how much wealth each detainee has accumulated illicitly. Those who agree to turn over ill-gotten gains to the government will be allowed to go home. Those who profess their innocence can go to court instead. More than $100 billion is expected to be deposited in government coffers.
> 
> Putting the screws to the big shots is likely increasing MBS’ popularity among the young — more than 70 percent of Saudis are under 30. It also communicates that the future king’s authority is not to be challenged.
> 
> Those who say he is violating due process have a point. But MBS is pursuing modernization, which is facilitated by social liberalization. Neither should be confused with democratization. More to the point, MBS has only one overriding concern: the survival of the kingdom.
> 
> Which brings us back to Iran. In the mainstream media, you’ll see references to a Saudi-Iranian “rivalry.” That’s misleading. What’s going on in the Middle East isn’t akin to a competition between the Yankees and the Red Sox.
> 
> MBS believes Iran’s rulers pose an existential threat to Saudi Arabia and other nations in the region. With this in mind he last week told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: “We learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work.” Referring to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, he said: “We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East.” (Not surprisingly, this outraged Tehran’s apologists and enablers in the U.S. and Europe.)
> 
> The Saudis were dismayed by President Obama, who seemed eager to accommodate the Islamic republic’s rising hegemony, and they have embraced President Trump, who at least talks tough about the ruling mullahs. MBS also appears to be looking at Israel — which Iran’s rulers openly vow to eradicate — with new eyes.
> 
> There are those who don’t believe MBS is serious, who regard the notion of a liberalized Saudi Arabia as oxymoronic. Some may observe that prisoners of conscience who pose no threat to the throne, for example Raif Badawi, founder of Free Saudi Liberals, an online forum, has been publicly flogged and imprisoned since 2012 (and not in a luxury hotel). Releasing Mr. Badawi and other prisoners of conscience would go a long way toward proving MBS’ sincerity.
> 
> Confronting a mortal enemy on the march, cleaning up deep-rooted corruption, diversifying an extractive economy and moderating the Saudi reading of Islam — these are not modest goals and time is probably not on MBS’ side.
> 
> Should he fail, critics will say: “He was inexperienced, took too many risks and alienated too many powerful people.” On the other hand, if a generation from now Saudi Arabia is stable, prosperous and capable of deterring its enemies, MBS will be seen as a brilliant visionary and strategist. Might he then choose to transition from benevolent dictator to constitutional monarch in a democratic system of his own making? My guess is he figures he’ll cross that bridge if he’s lucky enough to come to it.
> 
> • Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Via publicintelligence.net ...


> This Joint Intelligence Bulletin (JIB)*** is intended to provide information on the recent video appearance by the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The video addresses the group’s territorial defeat in Syria, discusses the acceptance of pledges of allegiance from ISIS supporters, and praises recent attacks in Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia. This JIB is provided by the FBI, DHS, and NCTC to support their respective activities and to assist federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial government counterterrorism and law enforcement officials and private sector security partners in deterring, preventing, or disrupting terrorist attacks against the United States. All video details described in this JIB are taken from the translated transcript of Baghdadi’s speech. The information cutoff date is 1 May 2019.
> 
> (...)
> 
> (U//FOUO) The video shows Baghdadi being handed booklets by one of the unidentified men which are labeled with the names of ISIS provinces, including Libya, Khorasan, Somalia, Yemen, Caucasus, West Africa, Central Africa, and Turkey, as well as Tunisia, which is not publicly identified as a province. This is the first time ISIS has referred to Turkey as an official province, or “wilayah,” in its media releases.
> 
> • (U//FOUO) Additionally, Baghdadi accepts pledges of allegiance from ISIS members in Burkina Faso and Mali, and congratulates them for joining the “caliphate.” He recommends they intensify their attacks against France and its allies and to avenge their brothers in Iraq and Syria.
> 
> • (U//FOUO) Baghdadi congratulates ISIS members in Libya for their resoluteness and their raid on the town of Al Fugaha, Libya. He states that despite their withdrawal from it, they have shown their enemies that they are capable of taking the initiative, knowing their battle today is a battle of attrition.
> 
> (...)


More @ link or in attached 4-page PDF if link doesn't work.

*** - Jointly issued by USA Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation & National Counterterrorism Center.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Another one nabbed ...


> Ukraine's security service said on Friday it had detained the deputy of Abu Omar al-Shishani, the man the Pentagon described as Islamic State's "minister of war", after he crossed into Ukraine on a fake passport last year.
> 
> The SBU security service said it had taken into custody Al Bara Shishani, a Georgian citizen, in a joint operation with Georgia's Interior Ministry and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
> 
> An SBU statement said an examination of a photograph of Al Bara Shishani in the agency's possession "proved that the detained foreigner is indeed a wanted leader of Islamic State".
> 
> Georgia's state security service confirmed Al Bara Shishani was being held in Ukraine. "Yes, we can confirm this fact ... His (birth) name is Cezar Tokhosashvili," said Vika Klimicheva, a spokeswoman for the state security service ...


This, from the Security Service of Ukraine (also source of attached photos):


> As a result of joint special operation of the Security Service of Ukraine with foreign special services in Kyiv region, one of the key leaders of the terrorist organization Islamic State was detained.
> 
> According to obtained information, a Georgian citizen, nicknamed as Al Bara Shyshani, held a post of Amir of the Jamaat “Ahadun Ahat” in the Latakia province of the Syrian Arab Republic from 2012. In 2013, he held one of the highest positions at ISIS, the deputy military Amir known as Abu Umar al-Shishani. In 2016, when the military Amir was killed, Al Bara Shishani went to Turkey, where he continued to coordinate the activities of the terrorist organization.
> 
> In summer 2018, the terrorist illegally arrived in Ukraine using a fake passport. Due to possession of the forged documents, he obtained the legal status in Ukraine.
> 
> According to available information, while in Ukraine, the terrorist continued to coordinate the ISIS special centers, so-called the Amniyat.
> 
> Law-enforcement officers detained the criminal near the private residence in Kyiv region where he lived.
> 
> The facial recognition confirmed that the detainee is indeed the wanted ISIS leader. The terrorist is arrested for extradition purposes.
> 
> The information regarding  his affiliation to the crimes on the territory of Ukraine shall be verified.
> 
> SBU on regular basis  effectively cooperates with partnership special law-enforcement bodies to detect  and neutralize terrorist threats timely.


This from Georgian media:


> State Security Service of Georgia has released a statement regarding the detention of Georgian citizen Tsezar Tokhosashvili by the State Security Service of Ukraine.
> 
> “The State Security Service of Ukraine, in cooperation with the State Security Service of Georgia, detained in Kiev, Ukraine a citizen of Georgia, Tsezar Tokhosashvili wanted by Georgia under a Red notice of INTERPOL on a charge of involvement in the activities of a terrorist organization.
> 
> As a result of investigation carried out by the Counterterrorism Center of the State Security Service of Georgia, it was established that in 2014, Tsezar Tokhosashvili left for the Syrian Arab Republic and joined combat activities against Syrian government forces. Investigation established that in 2015, Tsezar Tokhosashvili became a member of the terrorist organization “Islamic State”. He had a close relations with the leaders of the “Islamic State”: Tarkhan Batirashvili, Islam Atabiev and Ahmed Chatayev.
> 
> On November 6, 2019, Tbilisi City Court sentenced Tsezar Tokhosashvili to imprisonment,” the statement reads.


----------



## The Bread Guy

Taliban-hostage trade


> The Taliban freed two Western hostages Tuesday after the Afghan government released three important Taliban prisoners, who were flown to Qatar where the Taliban has a political team.
> 
> Sources told VOA the hostages, American Kevin C. King, 63, and Australian Timothy J. Weeks, 50, were released in Zabul province in southern Afghanistan. A 48-hour ceasefire was in place in multiple districts in Zabul to help the process.
> 
> Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid confirmed that 10 Afghan soldiers were also released as part of the deal.
> 
> The three Taliban prisoners were flown from Kabul to Doha in a special Qatar government plane, according to sources in the Afghan government. A former Taliban ambassador currently based in Doha, Mawlawi Abdul Salam Zaeef, confirmed that the prisoners had arrived.
> 
> Another source said the prisoners were allowed to meet the Taliban political team in Doha Monday night.
> 
> Qatar has, for years, facilitated an unofficial Taliban political office in Doha, the capital of Qatar, in order to enable Western governments to negotiate with the group. Most direct talks between the U.S. and the Taliban have taken place there.
> 
> In a statement welcoming the release of the three prisoners, Mujahid thanked the emir of Qatar and the Qatari foreign minister for assisting the process. "These actions are a step forward in good-will and confidence building measures that can aid the peace process," he said.
> 
> King and Weeks were kidnapped in Kabul in August 2016 as they were leaving the American University of Afghanistan where they taught ...


A bit more @ link


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## The Bread Guy

Another bad guy nabbed in Ukraine ...


> An elite Ukrainian police unit has apprehended a suspected 30-year-old member of the Islamic State (IS) extremist group in Zhytomyr region west of Kyiv.
> 
> The Russian citizen was detained based on an Interpol notice related to murder and was hiding in Ukraine to evade arrest, the National Police said in a statement on November 21.
> 
> The unnamed suspect was born in the easternmost Ukrainian region of Luhansk but had lived in Russia for an extended period.
> 
> "According to reports, the detainee is a member of the terrorist radical organization Islamic State and even the leader of one of its groups," the police said.
> 
> "By ethnicity, he is Daghestani, but was born in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. He lived in Russia for a long time. He was hiding in the territory of our country in order to avoid responsibility for murder." ...


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## The Bread Guy

A look at these ISIS types being nabbed in Ukraine ...


> As far as extreme terror went, Al Bara Shishani had a reputation.
> 
> Understood to have held the post of Isis’ deputy minister of war, head of a unit responsible for “special operations” and surveillance, the Georgian-born commander reportedly had a hand in it all: executions of “non-believers”; public beheadings; terror operations abroad.
> 
> He also had a reputation for being dead – that is, until last Friday.
> 
> Al Bara Shishani’s dramatic reappearance in the dock of a court room in central Kiev was shocking not only for the fact of how alive he was.
> 
> As details emerged about his miraculous resurrection – how he dodged what had been reported as a fatal air strike in Syria, then used a fake passport to travel to Turkey and Ukraine, where he would live untroubled for two years – a number of questions came begging about Kiev’s capacity and willingness to deal with terrorists taking shelter within.
> 
> According to the SBU, Ukraine’s admittedly unreliable security agency, Al Bara Shishani even continued to coordinate Isis terror operations from Kiev.
> 
> (...)
> 
> Ukrainian authorities have long fostered holes in their legal and law enforcement systems. The usual beneficiary is organised crime, which sustains itself on the flow of fake IDs and contraband, says Philip Ingram, a former British intelligence officer. But the lax regime has also created an obvious vulnerability to international terrorism.
> 
> “It is a vulnerability that Kiev does not seem entirely interested in addressing,” Ingram said.
> 
> The US has been particularly frustrated at Kiev’s inability to stop the fake passport trade. In remarks made during the Trump impeachment inquiry, State Department official George Kent revealed how a major conflict erupted between the US embassy and Ukrainian authorities in 2017. Mr Kent had been deputy ambassador at the time.
> 
> (...)
> 
> Ukraine offers several advantages over the competition too: the common Russian language, chaos of war, unprofessionalism of local security services, and the low risk of extradition to countries such as Russia.
> 
> (Jihad expert and visiting fellow at Harvard University Vera) Mironova estimates “hundreds” of former Isis fighters have decamped to Ukraine. But it is not the numbers that should be of primary concern, she said. The cluster of terrorists in Ukraine were by their nature a “self-selecting” elite: “This isn’t a random selection. The slower guys stop as soon as they get to Turkey. After all, it is a multiple-step operation to get to Ukraine. The ones who get there are the dangerous ones.”
> 
> Once militants get to Ukraine, they rarely encounter problems with authorities, said Mironova ...


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## MarkOttawa

Start of a post:



> Struggles Within Islam, or, Persians vs Arabs for Power Actually
> 
> Further to this post from 2015,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Yemen: And Another Arab Capital Falls to Iran
> 
> 
> 
> 
> excerpts from a review by David D. Kirkpatrick (tweets here) in the _New York Times Book Review_:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Unraveling of the Muslim World
> ...
> 
> Click to expand...
Click to expand...

https://mark3ds.wordpress.com/2020/03/01/struggles-within-islam-or-persians-vs-arabs-for-power-actually/comment-page-1/

Mark
Ottawa


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