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Seeks More Arms and Vehicles From US

by Jason Ditz, May 31, 2015


In an interview today on Iraqiya TV, Prime Minister Hayder Abadi made a plea for more US military aid, saying the country lost a lot of weapons over the course of last year’s war, including large caches abandoned by troops in the initial ISIS push last summer.

“We lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone,” noted Abadi. The Humvees weren’t destroyed, by and large, but were rather simply left behind by fleeing troops, and were subsequently taken by ISIS. The Humvees were only a portion of what was lost, as ISIS acquired tanks, artillery, armored vehicles, basically a small army’s worth of advanced US gear in the fall of the major city.

After the fall of Mosul, the US began seeking to ratchet up sales and aid to Iraq, and approved the sale of another 1,000 Humvees to Iraq, an estimated $579 million deal. How much of that has been delivered so far is unclear, but the fall of Ramadi this month led to scores of additional armored vehicles, including Humvees, being seized by ISIS.

There has been surprisingly little debate in the US about the wisdom of further shipments to Iraq’s military, inasmuch as those shipments have tended to amount to delayed shipments to ISIS, and the Pentagon has hyped the large number of Humvees and armored vehicles it has destroyed in the war so far, seemingly oblivious to the fact that those are US-provided arms that the US is just going to keep providing.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/05/31/iraq-pm-we-lost-2300-american-humvees-to-isis-in-mosul-alone/

ISIS Suicide Bombers Kill 45 Police in Anbar Province
63 Others Wounded as Humvee Bombs Demolish Police Base

by Jason Ditz, June 01, 2015

ISIS continues to push against Iraqi security forces around the Anbar Province today, with a major round of suicide bombing attacks leveling an important police base in Madina al-Tharthar, just north of Ramadi, and killing 45 Iraqi police and security forces, wounding 63 others.

The attacks were carried out by three separate suicide bombers, each in explosive-laden Humvees. ISIS secured thousands of US-made Humvees in the capture of Mosul last summer, and has added more with each new city taken from fleeing Iraqi troops.

The bases in and around that area have been a rallying point for both the remnants of Iraqi police forces and thousands of Shi’ite militia fighters who have been called to Anbar to stop the ISIS advance. So far, this has just turned them into an easier to reach target for the ISIS forces.

Though Iraqi officials have tried to downplay the loss of Ramadi, insisting they believe they’ll retake it soon, top Iraqi militia leader Badr Brigade head Hadi Ameri said it was unrealistic to expect any near-term moves on the city, citing sectarian tensions between the Shi’ite government and the Sunni population of Anbar.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/06/01/isis-suicide-bombers-kill-45-police-in-anbar-province/

Yep, this whole situation is blowing up in the faces of these neocons that run the foreign policy of the US. Either that or it was figured that the Iraqi army would fold eventually and this stuff would end up in bad hands which would restart another conflict all over again.

There has been surprisingly little debate in the US about the wisdom of further shipments to Iraq’s military

Not so surprising. The war industry is a racket and the racketeers own the people who rubberstamp those shipments on behalf of taxpayers and they own the mass media. Those are businessmen and businessmen usually create business opportunities. Peace isn´t really in their business interests. They´re not going to fill all available warehouses with bombs and armaments and then happily go out of business. Stuff´s got to be used and then replenished.

It's strange how fairly easy Iraqis army have lost their vehicles, considering the advantage they had in the equipment and also the fact that even today there are few American soldiers still training Iraqis.


"U.S. invested $25 billion in training and equipping the country’s armed forces before withdrawing in 2011. To this day, a much smaller number of American soldiers remain in the country in order to train Iraqi soldiers."

Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter said: “That says to me and, I think, to most of us, that we have an issue with the will of the Iraqis to fight ISIS and defend themselves.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/05/why-iraqs-military-has-no-will-to-fight/394067/ (http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/05/why-iraqs-military-has-no-will-to-fight/394067/)

If this one is posting to me that´s totally pointless if it expects any reply. Once on my ignore list that´s permanent, I never read that again.

If You are referring to me then You could use my nickname instead of addressing to me as "it". But that just shows personal culture and the inability to discuss the difficult and uncomfortable topics. Regards.

Is this some sort of a joke? Is the ISIS really having 2,300 Humvees with them? For heaven's sake even the countries such as Croatia and Colombia (some of the most loyal vassals of the United States) are having far fewer of them in their armed forces. And the Kurds don't even have a single Humvee (or other equivalents) with them at this point of time.

The question is, how did the ISIS even acquired them? Also, if situations like this continues to happen, the picture would be like this: Iraq funds ISIS' weapons and armored vehicles and the US is supplying them those gears of war. US is making money and at the same time giving the enemy weapons to fight them. This has to stop.

The Iraq army fucked off at the first sign of ISIS and that's why they had such an easy time capturing the weaponry, not everything is a giant conspiracy, sometimes America fucks itself over through sheer incompetence.

They probably have even more than that by now. And enough other materiel for an army. Uncle Sam keeps shipping the stuff over and their vassal keeps handing it over to the "enemy".

It's the same in Afghanistan, the US government is actively funding Taliban warlords and insurgents so they don't bomb or hijack their supply trucks. Perpetual war is a great money maker.




https://abcnews.go.com/WN/Afghanistan/united-states-military-funding-taliban-afghanistan/story?id=10980527

Hard Truths About Iraq

by Ivan Eland, June 02, 2015

In Washington, a town in which most people, both government and non-government employees, are involved, one way or another, in public relations spin, the thing that will get you in the most trouble is telling the simple truth. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter recently stepped in it by stating what should have been obvious to the world: he blamed Iraqi forces for the loss to ISIS of Ramadi, an important Iraqi provincial capital, telling CNN that, "The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They vastly outnumbered the opposing force and yet they withdrew from the site."

Although evidence that Carter’s conclusion was not rocket science came in the form of video showing Iraqi military vehicles fleeing at high speeds from the town, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi diplomatically rebuffed the provider of U.S. military assistance to his forces by saying, "I am sure he was fed with wrong information." Yeah, right.

In classic Washington form, Vice President Joe Biden had to call Abadi to clean up Carter’s truthful indiscretion. The White House issued the following statement: "The vice president recognized the enormous sacrifice and bravery of Iraqi forces over the past eighteen months in Ramadi and elsewhere." Although episodes of "sacrifice and bravery" on the part of the Iraqi troops very well could have occurred, these forces, which the United States spent eight years training, cut and ran in critical situations when ISIS forces, inferior in number, initially took over about one-third Iraq last year and in Ramadi more recently.

If all of this wasn’t enough, Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, which is helping the Shi’ite Iraqi government defend against ISIS, countered that the United States "has no will to fight" against ISIS and was leaving everything up to the Iranians and Iraqis. He then added that the United States "didn’t do a damn thing" to stop ISIS’s advance on Ramadi.

There is some truth to Suleimani’s second allegation. Ramadi was besieged for a long time, but neither the United States nor the Iraqi government did much to send assistance. In the case of the Iraqi government, it was scared to arm Sunni tribes to fight ISIS, because it was afraid those weapons could later be used for Sunni resistance to its oppressive Shi’ite regime. As for Suleimani’s first allegation, that has some truth to it too. U.S. public opinion is tired of overseas military quagmires, especially in Iraq. The American people, reacting to Isis’s beheading of a few Americans after the United States had commenced bombing the group, seemed to want some U.S. action against it, as long American military casualties weren’t high and the operation didn’t turn into another quagmire on the ground. That is why the Obama administration has confined itself to ineffectual, and maybe even counterproductive, air strikes instead of reinserting large numbers of U.S. ground forces back into Iraq.

Yet, Suleimani’s snide comments, although largely correct, beg the question of why the United States – being on the other side of the world from the conflict – should be involved at all. However, the Iraqi government should be concerned about ISIS, which is largely a threat to the Middle East region, and so should neighboring Iran. The major reason that ISIS could encourage lone wolf terrorists (of much less threat than organized groups, such as al Qaeda or its regional affiliates) to launch attacks on American soil is to get non-Muslim (read: U.S.) forces out of the Middle East. (Come to think of it, that is al Qaeda’s main gripe with the United States too.) In the 1980s, Hezbollah, a Shi’ite group that was created to counter non-Muslim Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, also attacked U.S. targets until the United States withdrew its troops from that country, then on a one-sided "peacekeeping" mission to help Israel and its Christian allies there. Once U.S. forces pulled out, Hezbollah attacks on the U.S. targets gradually dissipated. The same likely would happen with any lame lone wolf attacks against U.S. targets by ISIS, which is mainly concerned with setting up an Islamist state in Iraq and Syria.

Islamist terrorism against the United States is primarily caused by the fact that it’s a non-Islamic country attacking or invading Muslim lands. One doesn’t need to agree with the terrorists’ methods to scrutinize their motives for attacking. Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Bush and Obama administrations – and Americans in general – have not had the courage to examine this question. Instead, subsequent to 9/11, they merely doubled down and attacked or invaded more Islamic countries – seven to be exact – thus helping to proliferate and strengthen Islamist terrorist groups around the region.

Perhaps the fall of Ramadi will be similar to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. The Viet Cong, backed by the North Vietnamese, invaded South Vietnam. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces defeated the Viet Cong militarily, but politically the war effort lost much steam at home because the U.S. government had assured Americans that the United States was winning there. The massive enemy offensive belied that claim. Up until Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria were overrun by ISIS, the U.S. government was once again telling Americans that the enemy was on the run. This time, the enemy didn’t just win politically but militarily too.

If a "Tet Offensive-style effect" eventually stopped U.S. bombing of ISIS, and all U.S. forces were withdrawn from non-strategic Iraq and Syria, the United States and its people actually would be safer. However, now no military draft exists to involuntary shanghai young men (and now maybe women) to fight and die in faraway lands for no reason, as there was during the Vietnam War. The only downside to this improvement in policy is that the full cost of war is felt by only the small percentage of the population in the voluntary American military’s families. Thus, unfortunately, the United States probably will continue muddling along in Iraq and Syria and may even gradually get sucked into another ground quagmire.

http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2015/06/01/hard-truths-about-iraq/

The US, actively fighting acts of terrorism and funding terrorist at the same time. Seems legit. If crushing terrorism is their target, then they must not fund terrorist and stop supplying weapons of war to them. If this continues to happen, then the freedom fighters would be the ultimate enemy in the end. The terrorist wouldn't gain that much power if they aren't provided the weapons they "need" to continue their acts of terrorism. But oh well, capitalism it is.

I hope you guys are teaching your children to speak Arabic. The real war will be kicking off when Baghdad and/or Damascus falls. Then comes decades of fighting and the scale will require drafting of soldiers. We could not really even keep up with recruiting during the little war Iraq has been so far. You ain't seen nothing yet.

 :'(

Even the US government can do nothing about it. Once the two cities fall, the takeover of the ISIS would soon be easier, spreading chaos into its neighboring countries. Heck, even Al Qaeda once had different branches and controls all over the world, and what do we know what's really happening behind the scenes? These terrorist groups could have merged into one group without us, nor the top intelligence agencies knowing. I hope those taxes that we pay are really wisely spent on things that will defend us, not on things that would potentially destroy us in the end.

What alot of people don't understand is the middle east hasn't changed much since the Sumerian era. Most Arab countries are still nothing more than the majority of the population crammed into a few large city states surrounded by uninhabitable desert. ISIS doesn't need to conquer vast swathes of territory, they just need to control the capitals alongside the water supply, like you mentioned taking Baghdad or Damascus or both would be catastrophic.

Also we are finding out fast the Iranians are all bark and no bite, their advisers have done little to reverse the ISIS tide and even in the 1980s when they still had fresh equipment and trained soldiers from the Shah era they were never able to beat back Saddam's army. If they find themselves in a large-scale war with a militant Sunni army they WILL lose.

The Iranians and Shiite Arabs better learn to get along with the Jews and the Kurds quick because they are a minority just like them.

U.S. 'expedites' weapons shipments to Iraq in wake of ISIS advances

By Karl de Vries, CNN

Updated 0234 GMT (0934 HKT) May 16, 2015

(CNN)The U.S. is "expediting" weapons shipments to Iraq in light of the ISIS advances in Ramadi, Vice President Joe Biden told Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi in a telephone call on Friday.

The announcement from the White House comes on the heels of a flurry of new airstrikes against ISIS, also known as ISIL, as Iraqi forces desperately try to hold the key city, the capital of the key Anbar province.

RELATED: ISIS on offensive in Iraq's Ramadi

Earlier Friday, the terror group raised its trademark black flag over the provincial government building and captured the city's police headquarters and the Ramadi Great Mosque. The Pentagon says it is part of a propaganda tactic where the terror group raises a flag and posts it to social media before the Iraqi army moves in and tries to take it back.

The city, located in the middle of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, is located just 70 miles west of Baghdad.

The White House said in a statement that the weapons include AT-4 shoulder-held rockets to counter vehicle-bourne improvised explosive devices, as well as ammunition and other supplies.

"The vice president assured the prime minister of continued and expedited U.S. security assistance to confront ISIL," the statement said. "Both leaders agreed on the importance and urgency of mobilizing tribal fighters working in coordination with Iraqi security forces to counter ISIL and to ensure unity of effort among all of Iraq's communities."

A U.S. official said Friday that the Ramadi situation "remains very fluid," and characterized the situation as "50/50," with Iraqi forces in control of much of the city center and ISIS in the suburbs surrounding it. A senior administration confirmed to CNN earlier Friday that eight new airstrikes were launched against ISIS targets in Ramadi since 7 p.m. local time, as the coalition ramps up its efforts.

The ISIS push began Thursday, using armored bulldozers and at least 10 suicide bombings to burst through gates and blast through walls in Ramadi, according to a security source who has since left the city. Dozens of militants followed them into the city center. The US military called it a "complex attack."

Anbar Gov. Suhaib Al-Rawi said the offensive, including suicide-attacks with explosive-rigged cars near security posts, continued into Friday.

Each side has since alternated gains and losses in territory. Ramadi citizens have suffered greatly in the process. About 114,000 people have fled the area -- many heading to Baghdad -- in the last month alone, the United Nations refugee agency has said, citing the Iraqi government.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/15/politics/us-weapons-shipments-iraq-ramadi/

US-led coalition doubles down on strategy to fight Islamic State group despite extremist gains

Associated Press June 2, 2015 | 3:54 p.m. EDT + More

By LORI HINNANT and JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — The U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State is doubling down on its strategy to fight the extremists, insisting on staying the course it set last year despite the radical group's recent conquests on both sides of the border between Iraq and Syria.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi pressed his case Tuesday for more support from the 25 countries in the coalition at a one-day Paris conference on fighting the militant group, organized within weeks of the fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi and the Syrian city of Palmyra.

The coalition has mustered a mix of airstrikes, intelligence sharing and assistance for Iraqi ground operations against the extremists. Al-Abadi said more was needed - his country reeling after troops pulled out of Ramadi without a fight and abandoned U.S.-supplied tanks and weapons.

"We will redouble our efforts," said Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who was leading the delegation after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry broke his leg in a cycling accident in eastern France over the weekend. IS, Blinken said, "stands for nothing and depends on people who will fall for anything."

But Tuesday's conference offered no strategy beyond that which has yet to bear fruit, and none had been expected. A member of the main Western-backed Syrian Coalition, Hadi al-Bahra, criticized the plan, saying the U.S. was avoiding targeting the Assad government and making it easier for Islamic State's takeover.

Blinken, who like the others focused primarily on Iraq on Tuesday, said the U.S. would make it easier for Iraq to obtain new weapons, after al-Abadi said the sanctions-hit countries of Iran and Russia were potentially important arms suppliers.

"Armament and ammunition, we haven't seen much. Almost none. We're relying on ourselves, but fighting is very hard this way," al-Abadi said before the conference.

Later Tuesday, the Pentagon said that 2,000 AT-4 rockets for use against armored suicide truck bombs arrived in Iraq over the weekend. A spokesman, Col. Steve Warren, said 1,000 went directly to the Iraqi for use against IS and 1,000 are intended for use in training Iraqi security forces. The Pentagon has said for some time that it also will provide the Iraqis with a variety of other unspecified anti-tank weaponry as well as capabilities to counter IS homemade bombs.

Iran and Russia are not part of the U.S.-led coalition and they did not attend Tuesday's conference, nor was there a representative from Syria. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Iraq's problems wouldn't end until Syria's government changes.

"Stabilization of Iraq cannot be achieved if there is not a political transition in Syria," he said. Just as important is political reconciliation within Iraq, notably between the Shiite-dominated government and disaffected Sunnis, who may not sympathize with IS but who have little love for the country's leadership.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the coalition is "under no illusion that a victory by military means will be easy and also we know that winning peace will be difficult."

"That's why we talked today not just about the necessary military means, but also about what's needed to bring stability to the areas that have been freed from ISIS troops," he said, using another acronym for IS.

Al-Abadi said his government was making progress, although a measure to increase the Sunni presence in Iraq's security forces has stalled in the legislature.

Acknowledging the loss of Ramadi, al-Abadi said Iraq's military needs more intelligence and more action from international allies. Within a week of the Iraqi city's fall to IS, the extremists captured the historic Syrian city of Palmyra.

More than 4,100 airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition have failed to stem the gains by IS radicals.

Wait, so now we've got 2,300 TARGETS?

:)

No no, the 2300 is old news. Maybe you don´t follow the news much. Mosul? That ring a bell at all? The U.S "trained" Iraqi so called military has been busy handing much more stuff over to ISIS since then which Uncle Sam keeps shipping over.

I was listening to Al-Abidi(ISF) talk about an attack a few days ago that killed 45 soldiers.  He was very concerned about how sophisticated the VBIED(car bomb) had become. The enemy now uses heavenly reinforced dump trucks and even captured MRAPs. The explosions are like "mini atomic bombs" that take out whole city blocks. He went on to say that "they can't stop them".

Think about how hard a target that is. A military vehicle, like the one below, coming at you at  50MPH. Bullets won't stop it, even a lucky shot from an RPG likely won't stop it. Such vehicles can also shoot back with a withering stream of bullets. Gate duty must suck in Iraq.

http://www.defense-update.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/kaiman_mtv-e1284747045466.jpg

ISIS Closes Ramadi Dam Gates, Cutting Water Flow to Govt-Held Territory
Anbar Council Chief Urges US Airstrikes on Dam

by Jason Ditz, June 02, 2015

Dams all along the Euphrates River have become an increasingly important target in the ongoing ISIS war in Iraq. The capture of dams upriver has allowed ISIS to control waterflow into government-held areas downriver. Most recent, they have closed the dams in Ramadi, dramatically cutting water levels further east.

Anbar Provincial Council Chief Sabah Karhout warned that the lower water level to the east, the last part of Anbar that is still government-held, could mean a massive humanitarian crisis across Iraq. He is calling for the US to launch airstrikes on the dam to reopen the water flow.

That’s potentially hugely dangerous, not only because Ramadi is a major city of 500,000 people, but because the destruction of the dam is liable to flood parts of the surrounding area, at least temporarily. That’s been a long-standing concern in Anbar, as control over the dams has raised the possibility of each side using flooding as a weapon, either offensively or simply as cover for attacks.

The US probably won’t launch attacks on the dam, however, as it would undercut Pentagon predictions that the city, and the dam by extension, are going to be retaken in a matter of days.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/06/02/isis-closes-ramadi-dam-gates-cutting-water-flow-to-govt-held-territory/

Dude, where’s my Humvee? Iraq losing equipment to Islamic State at staggering rate

By Peter Van Buren June 2, 2015

Iraqi security forces lost 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles when Islamic State overran the northern city of Mosul in June 2014, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday in an interview with Iraqiya state television. Coupled with previous losses of American weapons, the conclusion is simple: The United States is effectively supplying Islamic State with tools of war the militant group cannot otherwise hope to acquire from its patrons.

In addition to the Humvees, Iraqi forces previously abandoned significant types and numbers of heavy weapons to Islamic State. For example, losses to Islamic State include at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, as well as small arms and ammunition, including 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems.

“We lost a lot of weapons,” Abadi admitted.

To help replenish Iraq’s motor pool, the U.S. State Department last year approved a sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees, along with their armor upgrades, machine guns and grenade launchers. The United States previously donated 250 Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carriers (MRAPs) to Iraq, plus unaccountable amounts of material left behind when American forces departed in 2011. The United States is currently in the process of moving to Iraq 175 M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, 55,000 rounds of main tank-gun ammunition, $600 million in howitzers and trucks, $700 million worth of Hellfire missiles and 2,000 AT-4 rockets.

The Hellfires and AT-4′s, anti-tank weapons, are presumably going to be used to help destroy the American armor in the hands of Islamic State. The United States is also conducting air strikes to destroy weapons seized by Islamic State. It’s a surreal state of affairs in which American weaponry is being sent into Iraq to destroy American weaponry previously sent into Iraq. If a new sequel to Catch-22 were to be written, this would be the plot line.

The United States also continues to spend money on training the Iraqi military. Some 3,000 American soldiers are currently in Iraq preparing Iraqi soldiers to perhaps someday fight Islamic State; many of the Americans are conducting the training on former military bases abandoned by the United States following Gulf War 2.0. In addition, some $1.2 billion in training funds for Iraq were tucked into an omnibus spending bill that Congress passed earlier this year. This is in spite of the sad reality that from 2003 to 2011, the United States spent $25 billion training Iraqi security forces.

The return on these training investments? The Iraqi army had 30,000 soldiers in Mosul, who ran away in the face of about 1,000 Islamic State fighters. The same thing happened just a few weeks ago in Ramadi, where 10,000 Iraqi soldiers, collapsing faster than a cardboard box in the rain, fled ahead of only 400 Islamic State fighters. The Iraqis left behind more weapons.

In an interview with me a year ago, Chris Coyne, professor of economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, predicted this exact scenario well before the United States sent troops back into Iraq:

“The United States government provided significant amounts of military hardware to the Iraqi government with the intention that it would be used for good. However, during the Islamic State offensive, many of the Iraqis turned and ran, leaving behind the United States-supplied hardware. This weapons windfall may further alter the dynamics in Syria.

“Now the United States government wants to provide more military supplies to the Iraqi government to combat Islamic State. But I haven’t heard many people recognizing, let alone discussing, the potential negative unintended consequences of doing so. How do we know the weapons and supplies will be used as desired? Why should we have any confidence that supplying more military hardware to a country with a dysfunctional and ineffective government will lead to a good outcome either in Iraq or in the broader region?”

The impact of all these heavy weapons falling into Islamic State hands is significant for American foreign policy goals in the Middle East. A report prepared for the United Nations Security Council warns that Islamic State possesses sufficient reserves of small arms, ammunition and vehicles to wage its war in Syria and Iraq for two more years.

And that presumes the United States won’t be losing more tools of war to Islamic State, thanks to the Iraqi army.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/06/02/dude-wheres-my-humvee-iraqi-equipment-losses-to-islamic-state-are-out-of-control/

lol.... 10,000 Iraqi soldiers, who were trained for years by the United States military officers could not defend against a mere 400 Islamic State fighters, many of whom lacking any sort of military training at all. Either there is something seriously wrong with the US military training, or the United States is training the wrong people.

It is sad. I think early on the best fighters joined the insurgency and vowed to never fight with the Americans. Combine that with the "de-Bathafication" rule that snubbed the entire Iraqi army and we were left with dropouts, criminals, the homeless. Now put those guys under the leadership of corrupt officers who regularly steal from their troops and you have the kind of army that flees a fight with 10 to 1 odds in their favor.

Well, those so called "trainers" and "advisers" are much more concerned about being shot in the back by their "allies" than being much out in the field "training".

I will agree partially. But there was a much better option. The Americans had a large pool of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters with them. These fighters were having decades of fighting experience, and were much more motivated compared to their Shiite Arab colleagues. However, the Peshmerga are lacking quality weapons. And the Americans are refusing to help them, as NATO member Turkey is against any move to transfer arms to the Peshmerga.

Yeah disbanding the entire Iraqi army probably was the smartest move by the US, now that Iraq is pretty much a failed state you can't really blame the soldiers there for not wanting to fight ISIS.
They're stuck between a rock and a hard place, if I was a civilian there I'd be getting the hell out of there sharpish, I can only see it getting worse once the fighting intensifies.

Yep, they´ve created an endless gravy train.

Gen. Allen: ISIS War to Last ‘A Generation or More’
Obama's War Envoy Insists ISIS a Threat to Progress

by Jason Ditz, June 03, 2015

Out of and quickly back into Iraq, the Pentagon and its officials have talked about the new ISIS war with barely restrained glee as another chance to keep pushing Congress for bigger budgets, and for “emergency” war funding every single year.

Retired Marine Gen. John Allen, who has become President Obama’s special ambassador for the war, going around the world selling it to potential allies, today predicted the conflict would be much longer than anyone imagines, saying it “will likely take a generation or more.”

Citing his four decades in the Marines, Allen insists ISIS is the most brutal group ever, and claimed they are a threat to “the progress of humanity” if not defeated militarily. Which, again, he says is going to take “a generation or more.”

The American publicly is likely not up for another protracted, nation-bankrupting conflict, particularly since they’ve already got one ongoing in Afghanistan and just freshly got extricated from the last one in Iraq. Polls show war weariness already growing among voters nine months into the new war, with 61% saying the war is going badly, and 29% saying it’s going “very badly.”

That’s a surprising level of skepticism for this early in a war, particularly with the administration loudly insisting, every chance they get, that they are “winning” the war. The public is clearly not buying it, and that’s going to be a problem for the pro-war factions of both parties as months extend into years, let alone “generations.”

To the extent officials attempted to sell the American public on the ISIS war at all, it was couched as an extremely limited conflict, both in scope and timescale. The Pentagon has since escalated their involvement countless times, seemingly only making things worse with each escalation, and is now making it plain that what was supposed to be a  quick intervention to shift the momentum in favor of the Iraqi military is actually going to be an endless war of attrition aimed at destroying the de facto caliphate.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/06/03/gen-allen-isis-war-to-last-a-generation-or-more/

The NATO allowed only people with no combat experience to enroll in to the new Iraqi army. Also, the old army was dominated by the Sunni Arabs, and Shiites were mostly excluded. The current Iraqi army is almost 90% Shiite, and none of these guys have any combat experience. Most of the Sunni ex-soldiers joined the ISIS, to wage war against the central government.

US-trained snr Tajik special forces commander defects to ISIS, swears jihad

Published on Jun 4, 2015
A senior Tajik police officer has defected to Islamic State - that's despite spending years in US military training bases, undergoing counter-terrorism courses. READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/0s6wk6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15dL4TOYRPE

Let me get this straight, you are running away from the enemy army and you leave the Humvee?  Wouldn't you drive the Humvee away?

Seriously, it is shameful that the Iraqi army ran away from ISIS in Mosul, and incompetent that they failed to destroy the supplies and equipment they left behind.

Well, the U.S. has been "training" these people for over a decade so I guess they acted accordingly. Unless all this "training" is nothing but yet another gravy train scam exploiting these fraudulent wars and it didn´t really take place.

Incidentally; the Ukrainian military also left a treasure trove of materiel at the Debaltsevo pocket after retreating from there last winter. When militaries act like this, leaving armaments and material intact for the opposition to use - well you have to sort of wonder where the sympathies lie.

Galdur, you really reminded me last aired episode of GoT with Caliph instead of White Walker King  :) "Whatever, you send at us, it will just make us stronger, so come on bitch."

http://www.geeksofdoom.com/GoD/img/2015/05/game-of-thrones-night-king-white-walker.png

Well, like the Russians say - a fish rots from the head. When the high command is crap which is puppets for more crap the military commanded by said crap is likely to be rather how should I put it...crappy?

The Humvee is a vary heavy vehicle, which is difficult to manoeuvre through bumpy terrain. And most of the vehicles were parked inside the miltary base parking lots, away from the barracks. The ISIS attack happened all of a sudden, and the first priority for the Iraqi soldiers was to save their lives. Rather than going to the parking lot and conducting a organized withdrawal, they fled in whatever vehicles they could find.  ;D

Yes, like 1500 ISIS fighters advanced on Mosul for about a week under the watchful eyes of brain-dead U.S. satellite info watchers and other worthless intelligence before defeating a totally useless military force which outnumbered them 15-20 to one.

ISIS will need a huge recruitment drive for manpower to use all this stuff that´s on the way now:

Officials: Pentagon Quietly Starts Massive New Arms Deliveries to Iraq
$1.6 Billion Fund Being Used for New Military Aid Shipments

by Jason Ditz, June 05, 2015

Even though Iraqi Prime Minister Hayder Abadi spent this week’s Paris summit complaining about the lack of aid deliveries, US officials say that the Pentagon had already begun its massive new shipments of armament to the Iraqi military, and that the first deliveries were made two weeks ago.

The shipments are the first part of the $1.6 billion “Iraqi Train and Equip Fund” that Congress created last year, and shipments delivered so far have included grenade launchers, mortars, and machine guns. Iraqi officials are still complaining about the slow rate of shipment.

Pentagon spokeswoman Commander Elissa Smith says that there will be a number of additional arms shipments in the coming weeks, including some direct provision of arms to the Iraqi Kurdish paramilitary force the Peshmerga.

That’s been a contentious subject with the Iraqi government. Under US law, shipment to forces inside a country have to be approved by that country’s central government, and the Iraqis aren’t keen to see the Peshmerga get too powerful because of Kurdish secessionist ambitions. Pentagon officials, however, have indicated the arms shipping will continue irrespective of Iraqi objections.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/06/05/officials-pentagon-quietly-starts-massive-new-arms-deliveries-to-iraq/

.....The Humvees were specifically created by the US to be able to carry heavy loads and to sustain small-arms fire — qualities ISIS has found make the vehicles perfect for suicide bombings.

"There's a simple reason the militants are using Humvees and other armored vehicles as rolling bombs," Sean D. Naylor reports for Foreign Policy. "Their protective armored plating prevents defenders from killing the trucks' drivers before the militants can detonate their loads, while the vehicles' capacity to carry enormous amounts of weight means the Islamic State can sometimes pack in a ton of explosives."

ISIS has used these bomb-laden Humvees in waves of suicide bombings across both Syria and Iraq, targeting strategic locations including Syrian military bases and the Iraqi provincial capital of Ramadi, which fell to the militants at the end of May. The Kurds are increasingly concerned that they will face a wave as well.

According to The Soufan Group, ISIS used more than 30 car bombs in its Ramadi offensive. Many of these involved armored US Humvees, and some of the bombs were large enough to level an entire city block.´´´´



Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/isis-turning-us-humvees-into-iraqs-nightmare-2015-6?r=US#ixzz3cG2unaet

The excuse given by the Americans is that the attack happened all of a sudden, and the ISIS advanced at a pace which was not anticipated earlier. And most of the United States military satellites are being used to spy on "enemy" countries such as Russia and China. They don't have any spare capacity to do areal surveillance on Iraq.

Right, and when Ramadi fell they were all away attending the annual CIA feet-picking meet in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or so I heard.

Wow, what´ll he figure out next....LOL

CIA DIRECTOR JOHN BRENNAN ADMITS U.S. FOREIGN POLICY COULD SPUR TERRORISM

BY JON SCHWARZ @tinyrevolution

https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/06/GettyImages-477845835-feature-display-b.jpg

John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, went on “Face the Nation” last Sunday and did something weird: he acknowledged that U.S. foreign policy might sometimes cause terrorism. Of course, he didn’t word it exactly like that, but close enough:

BRENNAN: I think the president has tried to make sure that we’re able to push the envelope when we can to protect this country. But we have to recognize that sometimes our engagement and direct involvement will stimulate and spur additional threats to our national security interests.

This is notable because the people who run our foreign policy usually tell us that terrorists are like zombies, driven by some incomprehensible force to kill and kill and kill until we take them out with a head shot/drone strike. Brennan himself did this five years ago while “answering” questions from the late reporter Helen Thomas about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian man who tried to blow up a Northwest flight over Detroit:

THOMAS: And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.

BRENNAN: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents …

THOMAS: Why?

BRENDAN: I think this is a — this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.

The next year Abdulmutallab explained at his sentencing what had motivated him:

I [attempted] to attack the United States in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants.

In fact, the government’s own sentencing memorandum for Abdulmutallab cites this statement, and points out that trying “to retaliate against government conduct” is part of the legal definition of terrorism.

So Brennan well understands that our foreign policy causes attacks against Americans. And our legal code specifies that attempting to retaliate against U.S. actions is what makes you a terrorist. Nonetheless, this obvious reality is almost never said out loud by government officials.

On the other hand, comedians can say it (though not on TV). Immediately after 9/11, George W. Bush famously asked “Why do they hate us?” and answered: “They hate our freedoms.” On David Cross’s 2004 “It’s Not Funny” stand-up album, recorded at the DC Improv Club, Cross said:

CROSS: I don’t think Osama Bin Laden sent those planes in to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because our support for Israel and ties to the Saudi family and all our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that’s what he fucking said.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/06/cia-director-john-brennan-admits-killing-people-countries-might-make-want-kill-us/

After the pull out of the American troops from Iraq, Obama is not much bothered about that nation. He doesn't care if the ISIS is going to take Baghdad or if the pro-American central government is overthrown. Now it is no longer his headache. He believes that it is the responsibility of the Iraqis to take care of themselves.

Dude, where’s my Humvee? Iraq losing equipment to Islamic State at staggering rate

Iraqi security forces lost 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles when Islamic State overran the northern city of Mosul in June 2014, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday in an interview with Iraqiya state television. Coupled with previous losses of American weapons, the conclusion is simple: The United States is effectively supplying Islamic State with tools of war the militant group cannot otherwise hope to acquire from its patrons.

In addition to the Humvees, Iraqi forces previously abandoned significant types and numbers of heavy weapons to Islamic State. For example, losses to Islamic State include at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, as well as small arms and ammunition, including 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems.

“We lost a lot of weapons,” Abadi admitted.

To help replenish Iraq’s motor pool, the U.S. State Department last year approved a sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees, along with their armor upgrades, machine guns and grenade launchers. The United States previously donated 250 Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carriers (MRAPs) to Iraq, plus unaccountable amounts of material left behind when American forces departed in 2011. The United States is currently in the process of moving to Iraq 175 M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, 55,000 rounds of main tank-gun ammunition, $600 million in howitzers and trucks, $700 million worth of Hellfire missiles and 2,000 AT-4 rockets.

The Hellfires and AT-4′s, anti-tank weapons, are presumably going to be used to help destroy the American armor in the hands of Islamic State. The United States is also conducting air strikes to destroy weapons seized by Islamic State. It’s a surreal state of affairs in which American weaponry is being sent into Iraq to destroy American weaponry previously sent into Iraq. If a new sequel to Catch-22 were to be written, this would be the plot line.

The United States also continues to spend money on training the Iraqi military. Some 3,000 American soldiers are currently in Iraq preparing Iraqi soldiers to perhaps someday fight Islamic State; many of the Americans are conducting the training on former military bases abandoned by the United States following Gulf War 2.0. In addition, some $1.2 billion in training funds for Iraq were tucked into an omnibus spending bill that Congress passed earlier this year. This is in spite of the sad reality that from 2003 to 2011, the United States spent $25 billion training Iraqi security forces.

The return on these training investments? The Iraqi army had 30,000 soldiers in Mosul, who ran away in the face of about 1,000 Islamic State fighters. The same thing happened just a few weeks ago in Ramadi, where 10,000 Iraqi soldiers, collapsing faster than a cardboard box in the rain, fled ahead of only 400 Islamic State fighters. The Iraqis left behind more weapons.

In an interview with me a year ago, Chris Coyne, professor of economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, predicted this exact scenario well before the United States sent troops back into Iraq:

“The United States government provided significant amounts of military hardware to the Iraqi government with the intention that it would be used for good. However, during the Islamic State offensive, many of the Iraqis turned and ran, leaving behind the United States-supplied hardware. This weapons windfall may further alter the dynamics in Syria.

“Now the United States government wants to provide more military supplies to the Iraqi government to combat Islamic State. But I haven’t heard many people recognizing, let alone discussing, the potential negative unintended consequences of doing so. How do we know the weapons and supplies will be used as desired? Why should we have any confidence that supplying more military hardware to a country with a dysfunctional and ineffective government will lead to a good outcome either in Iraq or in the broader region?”

The impact of all these heavy weapons falling into Islamic State hands is significant for American foreign policy goals in the Middle East. A report prepared for the United Nations Security Council warns that Islamic State possesses sufficient reserves of small arms, ammunition and vehicles to wage its war in Syria and Iraq for two more years.

And that presumes the United States won’t be losing more tools of war to Islamic State, thanks to the Iraqi army.

More...http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/06/02/dude-wheres-my-humvee-iraqi-equipment-losses-to-islamic-state-are-out-of-control/?utm_content=15915441&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook (http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/06/02/dude-wheres-my-humvee-iraqi-equipment-losses-to-islamic-state-are-out-of-control/?utm_content=15915441&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook)

No freaking wonder why ISIS is so potent w/ such a small crew. They can roam the countryside in these MRAPs and have unlimited ammo and heavier power to overwhelm everyone, including the chumps in the Iraqi army.

Yes. Obviously if you´re manning a defensive position and see 5-10 Humvees laden with high explosives approaching you don´t really want to stick around. That´s how ISIS breaches key defensive points whereupon the rest of the line soon crumbles. Simple but very effective. The Humvee is exceptionally well suited for such tactics. Sometimes the high command of your enemy, in this case U.S., being absolutely brain-dead is a more valuable asset to you than the strength of your own forces.

How hard it is to take out these Humvees in air-strikes? As I can see from the news, the ISIS is not even trying to hide these vehicles. They are always using them to attack the Iraqi Army / Peshmerga locations. Why can't the American pilots destroy these vehicles by dropping bombs on top of them? They have been conducting air strikes for many months now.

I don´t know; I´m not a friggin shrink. I have no training enabling me to figure out why psychopaths do or don´t do this or that.

Currently about 75% of the sorties are returning without dropping their bombs. Despite how easy it looks in the movies it is very hard to hit these things in an urban environment. Vehicles are easy to hide or disguise from the air. And our policies on civilian casualties require someone on the ground and observing that the target is free of non-combatants.
The enemy has been fighting against airplanes for a generation now and they know how to mitigate some of the risk. They bivouac in civilian homes, they hide military vehicles in the garage and patrol using civilian vehicles or on foot, they shuffle things around when a sandstorm comes; they know what they are doing. These are not the guys in street clothing spraying and praying from the middle of the street. Those guys are dead now and these are the ones who survived and learned.

Humvees might be difficult to spot from the air, when they are not moving. I was not referring about this situation. When 10 or 15 of these vehicles advance towards the Kurdish Peshmerga positions, armed with high-intensity explosives, I don't think that they will be that hard to distinguish from the other civilian vehicles. 

Too Big to Recover: Mosul Enters Second Year Under ISIS Rule
Locals Complain Iraq Seems Disinterested in Retaking City

by Jason Ditz, June 07, 2015

This time last year, the world was expressing shock with the news that ISIS had successfully captured the major city of Mosul. Iraq’s second-largest city, the fall of Mosul was a huge blow to Iraqi military morale, and played a big role in US and Iranian officials deciding the join the fight to “save” Iraq.

Retaking Mosul was the top priority then, and as summer gave way to autumn, it was pushed back to a “spring offensive.” A year in, the promises haven’t led to a single effort to retake the city at all, and some locals believe Iraq isn’t that interested in recovering their city at all.

It’s not that Mosul isn’t a valuable prize, of course. Rather, it’s that Mosul is such a big city, and Iraq’s military has struggled mightily with much smaller and less defended targets. Retaking cities like Tikrit and Baiji have become “priorities” because they’re at least attainable.

With Iraq unable to even keep the city of Ramadi from falling to ISIS, mustering a counteroffensive to retake Mosul is just not realistic. The official promises to retake Ramadi, which is more conveniently located near Baghdad and more easily reached by the military, still haven’t amounted to more than a stalemate outside the city.

Mosul residents were waiting for their turn to by “deliberated” to come last year, but at this point are resigned to the reality that their turn may not be coming at all, as their city is simply too big for Iraq’s bungling military to even think about retaking.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/06/07/too-big-to-recover-mosul-enters-second-year-under-isis-rule/

Ah yes. A vehicle out in the open desert, especially at night, is an easy target. They likely do not have civilians near them when fighting, they are less able to hide their heat signature. This is when we get them.
But they try their best to shoot, move, then hide before the airstrike comes. If an aircraft is on station then it could be minutes, if not it could take an hour or more to show up. Other problems include the enemy possessing better anti-air weapons and economic advantage. What I mean by that is the enemy can fight for less money against an air campaign. Each time an airplane makes a sortie it burns something like $2000 an hour in fuel. The bombs it drops cost more than the vehicle they hit. A hellfire missile costs $70,00 while an old pickup truck with a heavy machine gun costs half as much. So unless Iraq is willing to spend billions on an air campaign, they are going to have to fight these vehicles on the ground with cheaper indirect fire weapons.  

They should build some advance AT obstacles with hedgehogs and/or dragon's teeth, dig some trenches on the sides and a deploy a few BMPs (preferably BMP-2s) or M3s. None of those Iraqi army guys learned anything about building a defensive position?!

Oh common, the Americans have spent more than $2 trillion in Iraq so far. Why can't they spend a few million more to stop the ISIS advancing? Also, the real economic cost if the ISIS capture Baghdad, or some of the major Iraqi oilfields will be in hundreds of billions of USD. So it will be better to spend some money now, rather than incurring huge costs later.

We did not have the 2 trillion we already spent. lol. And defeating DAESH will cost many billions more. Each time a jet flies a sortie it carries about 1/3 of a million dollars in ordinance. Let's say each time they get three vehicles. In that case just to get the 2,300 HMMWVs will cost $245,336,333.33. Those HMMWVs are just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of checkpoints, artillery, tens of thousands of other vehicles, etc.
At some point after degrading all these assets we still have to get out of our vehicles and fight with small arms. This is the most dangerous phase and will require motivated and highly trained troops. Troops Iraq does not have.  If we (America) is going to pay for this it is going to require a significant increase in taxation. And an acceptance of the reality that we might still lose. 

It was the Americans who toppled the secular regime of Saddam Hussein, thereby creating the power vacuum, which ultimately resulted in the creation of the ISIS. So IMO, the Americans should bear the cost of defeating the ISIS. Else, the Americans can pay for these operations, using the revenues from Iraqi petroleum and natural gas deposits.

The question remains what did the U.S. regime hope to achieve by rendering this so called Iraqi military absolutely useless? They´ve been spending billions upon billions "training" that force for over a decade. The results should be obvious even to total retards around here.

I agree. I think we broke it, we bought it. The ethical thing to do is stand with Iraq even if it bleeds us dry. And it will. This is why I was dead against going there in the first place. In 2003 you could not convince anyone that this would take decades. The administration predicted the war would be over in 6 months. That was over 12 years ago and the end is no where in sight. Now we have only bad choices. If I were king I would draft 500,000 troops and get this over. It is going to take tens of thousands of U.S. lives and years, but we would win if we committed. 

Lesson for next time... Don't poke the fucking bear!

Loosing 2,300 American Humvees to ISIS in Mosul Alone? LOL, just as planned. Burn middle east, burn. For the profit of international bankers. America, fuck, yeah!

Uh oh, looks like more easy times ahead for ISIS...

------------------------------------------------------------

Britain to expand Iraq training mission to counter IS: Cameron

Britain is to expand its military training mission in Iraq in the coming weeks, Prime Minister David Cameron announced on Sunday, saying the Iraqi army needed more help to deal with improvised bombs planted by Islamic State militants.

Cameron, speaking before a meeting of the Group of Seven industrial nations (G7), said Britain would send 125 new military advisers to Iraq, most of whom would train the Iraqi army in how to counter improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

That will take the total number of British military trainers in Iraq up to 275, officials said, and the overall number of British personnel engaged in various roles against Islamic State across the region up to around 900.

"We’re already the second largest contributor in terms of air strikes in Iraq, and support for the Syrian opposition," Cameron told reporters at the G7 in Germany. blah blah bleh and meh

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/07/us-mideast-crisis-britain-idUSKBN0ON0RE20150607

Wasn't long ago that British and US special forces trained the Taliban how to make IED's when fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, and now we're back to square one: training Iraq's army how to counter them. I've come to the conclusion that geopolitics is just a revolving door of unnecessary bullshit.

Well, it may look unnecessary to you and me and total bullshit but for the armament industries and Wall St. it means huge and reliable profits. It´s always a question of perspective. And interests.

I disagree with notion, that Iraq was supposed to be "new Vietnam" from the start. However vultures from military-industrial complex adapted to short-sightedness of politicians and public quite well.

Obama: U.S. Lacks 'Complete Strategy' for Fighting ISIS

By Nedra Pickler - June 8, 2015


ELMAU, Germany (AP) -- The United States does not yet have a "complete strategy" for training Iraqi forces to fight Islamic State militants, President Barack Obama said Monday amid signs of weakness in Iraq's military. Obama said the Pentagon was reviewing plans to ramp up training and assistance to the Iraqi forces, but he also said there must be full commitment by the Iraqis themselves. He said...

Blah, bleh YAWN

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/06/08/obama_us_lacks_complete_strategy_for_fighting_isis_126893-comments.html

Well, after a decade of "training" and billions upon billions wasted on that they better try something new now like putting people with complete $#%&$#% brains into formulating that complete strategy.

The decades of training did its best to make some of the Americans (especially those involved in the private defense industry) filthy rich. Most of the money came from the oil and gas revenue, which is generated in Iraq. I have a feeling that that money should have been spent better, to improve the lives and livelihoods of the millions of Iraqis.

Either the Iraqi forces are woeful beyond belief or they sympathise with ISIS. Running away without the Humvees reminded me of the cartoons where in an emergency the character used to pick up the bicycle or horse and run.

It´s just another gravy-train war scam. There is no training to speak of. Just billions upon billions of dollars that end up somewhere.

Ran across the following on the net. It sounds about right.

Almost all of the Iraqi soldiers are Shiite Arabs. So it will be difficult to imagine them supporting the ISIS, as the terrorists have conducted many campaigns of genocide against the Shiite civilians in the past. But then, who knows? There will always be some corrupt official, who is willing to hand over his humvees in exchange for money.

Well, i don´t know the veracity of it but a long time ago I read where an Israeli soldier was ridiculing their Arab opposition



Didn´t those wankers at Mosul do exactly that? I remember that they threw off some clothes to be lighter on the run.

All of this resulted from the extreme corruption, which prevails in Iraq. First the Iraqi central government recruited some 300,000 soldiers. Out of this number, only some 10% to 20% were actual soldiers. The remaining were "ghost soldiers", menaing that the commanding officers "enrolled" Nonexistent people, inorder to get their salary and benefits. And even out of the small number of real soldiers, very few could wage a war, as most of them got their jobs by paying bribes or other favors.

Iraq Trolls US, Calls Latest Military Operation "We Are At Your Services, Hussein"

While some have argued that President Obama and his folly-prone foreign policy debacle is the laughing stock of the world, it seems, as DefenseNews reports, that the Iraqi military is directly mocking America. Just a day after Defense Secretary Ash Carter accused them of cowardice, an umbrella group for mostly Shiite militia and volunteer fighters, Hashed al-Shaabi, said it had dubbed a military campaign to cut off the Islamic State group in Anbar province as "Operation Labaik ya Hussein," which roughly translates as "We are at your service, Hussein."

The name refers to one of the most revered imams in Shiite Islam. ....etc

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-26/iraq-trolls-us-calls-latest-military-operation-we-are-your-services-hussein

Yeah, or it refers to U.S. Pres. Barack Hussein Obama.

“The idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic. I was concerned about it when I first heard those words,” Rumsfeld said, adding, “I’m not one who thinks that our particular template of democracy is appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-08/donald-rumsfeld-george-w-bush-was-wrong-about-iraq

Well Don, to make it "appropriate" you fruitcakes always install psychopathic crap in your own image to run the ruins of your war scams. The results are always very predictable. Just because Americans love you and your deranged ilk in the U.S. political establishment doesn´t necessarily mean that the rest of the world does.

If it makes you feel better "Don" is among the most hated Americans now. The only people hated more are the Congress and Senate. It makes me feel better anyway.

People vote for crap that then appoints more crap when it´s in office. They must do this for some reason. The most likely one seems to be that they like crap, even love it. BTW, pretty much the same neocon shitpile that scammed the Iraq war going has been used by Obama to ruin Ukraine. And other places. This particular neocon crap seems to have their own personal and permanent fiefdoms in State and other departments under both parts of the one-party system. I think you get the picture.

https://i.imgur.com/8kgB7eJ.png

We DO have a strategy to fight ISIS, the president didn’t really mean to say we don't, claims State Department
Speaking from Kruen, Germany, Obama said Monday the Pentagon was re-evaluating its program to train Iraqi security forces
'We don't yet have a complete strategy,' Obama said, 'because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis as well about how recruitment takes place, how that training takes place'
State Department spokesman today: 'The president was referring to a specific plan to improve training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces'
Obama administration seeking to discredit Republicans claiming POTUS lacks a 'robust' strategy to eliminate ISIS, as they've been saying all along
House Speaker John Bohner mocked the president on Twitter: 'Shorter President Obama on defeating #ISIL: ¯\_(ツ)_/ '

....crickets....

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3117055/We-strategy-fight-ISIS-president-didn-t-really-mean-say-didn-t-claims-State-Department.html#ixzz3cbXCkACw
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

US to Send More Troops to Iraq, But No Strategy Overhaul
Promised Changes to War Just Mean More Ground Troops Deploying

by Jason Ditz, June 09, 2015

One day after President Obama protested that his strategy for the ISIS war was “not complete” and promised changes, officials say they are planning to send another 500 ground troops into the nation to “devise a counterattack” against ISIS. Beyond this, there will be no significant changes to the war effort.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey suggested changes to the actual war strategy were never even under serious consideration, and that President Obama had only requested ideas for “enhancements” to be made to the existing strategy, which is to say throwing more troops at the war.

Officials are couching the new deployment as part of the effort to retake the Anbar capital of Ramadi, and say many of the troops are going to be heading to the Anbar Province to establish a new base there.

This was not entirely unexpected, as President Obama had previously indicated this his primary goal at this point was to speed up the training of Iraqi troops. The new troops are being labeled “trainers,” but are likely to be among those that Pentagon officials are openly talking about “embedding” on the front lines, meaning they’d be sent into direct combat.

As losses have mounted in Iraq and Syria, with ISIS taking more and more cities, the Pentagon has repeatedly rejected the idea that the strategy was at all flawed, and has tried to blame Iraqi troops for not winning more. The US appears to be doubling down on this narrative by adding troops.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/06/09/us-to-send-more-troops-to-iraq-but-no-strategy-overhaul/

Similarly,
US to announce plans to deploy more troops and add military base in Iraq

This is what you call: Mission creep...

The Obama administration is planning to send several hundred more troops to Iraq to expand training of Iraqi forces, a move that’s intended to help them retake the provincial capital of Ramadi from the self-described Islamic State.

The plan reportedly involves increasing the number of US training sites in Iraq from four to five by establishing a new military base in Anbar Province. The US would send 400 to 500 additional troops to recruit and train Iraqis – largely Sunni tribal volunteers – to join the fight against IS.
...
A formal announcement could come as early as today. Reuters also cites a US official as confirming the additional troop deployment.
...
Obama has ruled out sending ground combat forces to Iraq, reports The Associated Press. There are currently about 3,000 US military personnel, including trainers and advisers, in Iraq.

The Times reports that the number of trained and equipped Iraqi tribal fighters in Anbar would need to rise from about 5,500 to as many as 10,000 for them to retake Ramadi. On Monday, Obama urged Iraq's Shiite-led government to allow more of the nation's Sunnis to join the fight.
...

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/terrorism-security/2015/0610/US-to-announce-plans-to-deploy-more-troops-and-add-military-base-in-Iraq (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/terrorism-security/2015/0610/US-to-announce-plans-to-deploy-more-troops-and-add-military-base-in-Iraq)

Seems like these American idiots never learn from their past mistakes. If you give arms and training to the Sunni tribesmen, 90% of them will take the weapons with them, and then defect to the ISIS. This has happened multiple times in Syria. As of now, I can see only one way to defeat the ISIS. Ask the Iranians to send their army to the ISIS held areas.

In defense of those currently failing in Iraq. No one has a plan to defeat DAESH. Some say the "Peshmerga will do it!" Unfortunately they are in no way equipped to win. There is a lot of wishful thinking about their abilities, but in reality they ONLY use a simple rolling attack that can be defended against.
Only Iran is willing and in a position to fight them hard. Of course this is to expand the areas under their control and foment a sectarian fight that will surely split the country. And the western coalition only want's to train some other persons kids to fight. Who that will be is completely unknown. We need to wake up now. The real war is coming. 

Bashar-al-Assad have plans to defeat him enemies and ISIL. But...

Trust me. The Peshmerga is the only fighting force in Iraq right now, which is having the capability to defeat the ISIS. Neither the Iraqi army, nor the Shiite militias can take on the ISIS. If the Americans and the other NATO members are willing to provide the Peshmerga with heavy weapons, then the ISIS can be defeated in a matter of months.

Jun. 13, 2015 | 08:23 PM

Maliki blames 'conspiracies' for Iraq losses

Agence France Presse
BAGHDAD: Iraq's former premier and current vice president, Nouri al-Maliki, blamed "conspiracies" Saturday for the loss of major cities to jihadis and said Baghdad should prioritize paramilitaries over the army to fight them.

But Maliki, who was prime minister when ISIS began a brutally effective offensive last year, failed to mention the role he and his government played in the debacle.

"Mosul would not have fallen except for a conspiracy, and Ramadi would not have fallen except for a conspiracy," he said in televised remarks, referring to two major cities lost to ISIS.

He blamed politicians who opposed him and said a plot to weaken the army was hatched in a neighboring country, but did not name names.

And he even said that denying the existence of a conspiracy amounts to one: "It is a conspiracy to say that there is not a conspiracy."

Maliki, a Shiite, pursued policies while premier that angered and isolated Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who make up the backbone of ISIS' support, making it easier for the group to operate and expand. .... more

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2015/Jun-13/301993-maliki-blames-conspiracies-for-iraq-losses.ashx

This guy, Nouri al-Maliki is completely shameless. When he was in power, he pursued a radical pro-Shiite and anti-Sunni policy, which alienated most of the Sunni Arabs in provinces such as Anbar and Diyala. This in turn led to the creation of the ISIS. And now he is giving lectures on conspiracy theories hatched in the neighboring countries.

Yeah well, you would expect the vassals of totally certifiable fruitcakes like Bush, Cheney and Blair to be about the same calibre as the masters. Now, fast forward to Ukraine, pretty much the same neocon nutcases worked that as did Iraq for Bush. I think you see the pattern. A shitpile does attract shitflies.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Lsr86Rj2CYM/U5ob9KSWyFI/AAAAAAAAhtE/rXeb-i5QPLQ/s1600/david+pope+abbott.jpg

Iraq hesitant to let U.S. "trainers" continue rendering its military totally useless


WASHINGTON:  The US Secretary of Defense called out Baghdad Wednesday to send more recruits to American-run training camps, as Iraq struggles to battle the Islamic State group with a weakened military.

Plans to train some 24,000 Iraqi security forces by the fall are falling short, as only enough trainees for 7,000 troops and 2,000 "anti-terrorist forces" have enrolled for training, Defense chief Ashton Carter said while speaking before the House Armed Services Committee.

"As I've told Iraqi leaders, while the United States is open to supporting Iraq more than we already are, we must see a greater commitment from all parts of the Iraqi government," Carter said.....

http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/iraq-not-sending-enough-forces-for-training-pentagon-chief-ashton-carter-772713

Well, since everything those neocons have meddled with since like forever has turned into horse manure and they were STILL being used to screw up Ukraine it´s obvious that they´re viewed about as favorably by both parts of the one-party system. Look up the Cohen Personal Fiefdom in the State Dept. (Victoria Nuland Cohen). She worked for Dick Cheney and did so well helping scam the Iraq war going that Barry Banana thought she was just the ticket for messing up Ukraine.

Being an Iraqi soldier is one of the deadliest jobs in the world right now. So, I will not blame the young Iraqis, who are reluctant to defend their country from the ISIS. In the past, the ISIS have deliberately targeted the members of the security forces (including policemen) and have committed barbarous atrocities against them and their families.

Who the hell is named Ashton, BTW? Is it even a proper name? It´s almost as bad as being named Wimpy I guess. Sounds like something for a horse or a dog or maybe an English deviant. Speaking of deviants this Ass guy is a Rhodes scholar and trained by British fruitcakes just like Billy Bob Clinton which probably explains why Obammy picked this latest in a row of non-entities to head the Pentagon.

I don't think the peshmerga have a chance at defeating DAESH. They have won individual battles in Kurdistan, but there are not enough of them to fight in Iraq or Syria. And the YPG has been very clear that they are not fighting outside of Kurdistan. Many forget about the country of Kurdistan because it is not on many maps. But for the Kurds it is on all maps of the region.

YPG is one of the numerous Peshmerga factions. There are other larger factions, which are ready to fight the ISIS in its core heartlands. And cities such as Mosul historically belonged to the Kurdistan, although the current population is mostly composed of Sunni Arabs. The Kurds will be ready to liberate Mosul from the ISIS, and if they can do that, it will be a devastating blow for the ISIS.

I agree. Mosul will be a key fight for peshmerga troops. My concern is Baghdad, Anbar, and the south east. The Kurd political leadership keep saying that they are securing the Kurd homeland and are not  going to fight in Iraq. Perhaps that will change if we offer money, state level weapons and most importantly recognition of Kurdistan. We might as well. If we went to visit north Iraq we would see only the flags of Kurdistan, we would use Kurd money not Iraqi money, and all the maps would say Kurdistan. Only people outside of the area pretend it is still Iraq.

My other concern is the effectiveness of peshmerga fighters. Frankly, they are not very good. Their victories have been exaggerated, IMO. When I looked into their battlefield tactics their mystique diminished greatly. They use a "rolling attack" almost 100% of the time. That technique must have shocked DASEH, who are used to the enemy running away in disarray. But it is a technique that can be resisted effectively if you know its coming. So repeating the recent victories will get harder and, once the enemy has learned, will no longer work.

A rolling attack requires brave fighters and momentum. Basically they keep moving forward at all costs. It is terrifying to see such an attack coming at you, but if you keep your cool and halt the attack it tends to fall apart. At that point you sally from your positions and slaughter the attackers as they try to escape. I think the peshmerga are vulnerable to such a counterattack.  Once the attack starts they don't communicate much. If their line collapses anywhere then it's chaos.

It looks to me increasingly like only Iran is in a position to really hurt DAESH. They have enough fighters, anti armor weapons, and organization on the ground. Of course for them this is about furthering the influence of Shia Islam. What a mess.

I favor a grand Iranian-Peshmerga coalition against the ISIS. The Americans can chip in, by conducting air strikes against the ISIS targets (not like the ineffective token strikes which they are doing right now), and the Russians can provide weapons support and trainers to the Iranians. Add in the other smaller minorities, such as the Assyrians and Turkmen, and we'll be having a very effective fighting force.


The Peshmerga fighters (both male and female) are really brave, and they are ready to give up their lives fighting against the ISIS. Also, they are numerically superior to the ISIS, with some 200,000 fighters available from the Iraqi Kurdish factions alone. This numerically superiority will allow them to conduct a large number of rolling attacks.

The U.S. Government Supplied ISIS’ Iconic Pickup Trucks

Posted on October 12, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

U.S. counter-terror officials have launched an investigation into how ISIS got so many of those identical Toyota pickup trucks which they use in their convoys.

They don’t have to look very far …

The Spectator reported last year:

The [Toyota] Hilux [pics] is light, fast, manoeuvrable and all but indestructible (‘bomb-proof’ might not, in this instance, be a happy usage).  The weapons experts Jane’s claimed for the Hilux a similar significance to the longbows of Agincourt or the Huey choppers of Nam. A US Army Ranger said the Toyota sure ‘kicks the hell out of a Humvee’ (referring to the clumsy and over-sized High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle made by AM General).

***

The fact is the Toyotas were supplied by the US government to the Al Nusra Front as ‘non-lethal aid’ then ‘acquired’ by ISIS.

Al Nusra Front is literally Al Qaeda.

Public Radio International – an American public radio outlet – also documented a specific shipment of Toyotas by the U.S. State Department in 2014:

Recently, when the US State Department resumed sending non-lethal aid to Syrian rebels, the delivery list included 43 Toyota trucks.

Hiluxes were on the Free Syrian Army’s wish list. Oubai Shahbander, a Washington-based advisor to the Syrian National Coalition, is a fan of the truck.

“Specific equipment like the Toyota Hiluxes are what we refer to as force enablers for the moderate opposition forces on the ground,” he adds. Shahbander says the US-supplied pickups will be delivering troops and supplies into battle. Some of the fleet will even become battlefield weapons.

That’s exactly what happened …

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/the-u-s-government-supplied-isis-iconic-pickup-trucks.html

Bump I guess. It´s always good to start threads early and gather info. When the shit

predictably

hits the fan later it´s good to read it through.

Are you fucking kidding?

The Toyota Hilux is just a pickup truck. 
  There is nothing "military" about a pickup truck last I heard.

The Humvees are a whole different thing depending on configuration. 

Neither is in the category of Stryker or Bradley of course.

Take it up with these people

Bah.  Think "air-land-sea."  Not 19th century concepts.

YES. The Hillux does kick ass. There is a reason that armies all over the world use them. The HMMWV has become a jeep for sissies. They keep adding armor all over it and turning it into a armor vehicle that's a lot less useful.
There is a role for an unarmored light, fast vehicle in any conflict. In WW2 it was the jeep. Once you start up-armoring the vehicle becomes less useful. It can go less places, it moves slower and wares on the engine, it's harder to see where your going, and there is less interior space.
They do hold up better in an IED attack and will stop small arms fire but you can't spend all your time trying to not get hurt. In combat you have to take risks and smash teeth. Special forces, like the SAS, know this. The guys I trained with all had the phrase below on their uniform.

http://files.gamebanana.com/img/ico/sprays/whodareswins.jpg

Kuwait has uncovered an international cell that supplied Islamic State (previously ISIS/ISIL) with weapons bought in Ukraine, funds and new recruits. Six members were arrested but four others, including Australian-Lebanese nationals, remain on the run abroad.

The information came from Kuwait’s Interior Ministry, which identified the leader of the group as a 45-year-old Lebanese national, Osama Khayat. The ringleader was detained first and gave up the information about the rest of the members during interrogation, the ministry said in a statement.

https://www.rt.com/news/322788-isis-kuwait-ukraine-weapons/

Those junior varsity guys must have watched quite a bit of GTA to be so adept at acquiring that much machinery /facepalm.

Moral of the story:  don't work for u.s.a. terrorist country.

Can someone please summarize how much weapons in total daesh got from iraq/us?

All weapons used to do evil seem to come from u.s. military supplies.  What are the odds...

Well, the Iraqis admitted abandoning in Mosul

2,300 Humvee armored vehicles
40 M1A1 Abram tanks
52 M198 Howitzer mobile gun systems
74,000 Army machine guns

That was last year and since then the Pentagon has had its hands full sending over more stuff for the Iraqis to lose/hand over and it´s anybody´s guess how much the CIA have dropped to ISIS or other terrorists that the U.S. employs in the area. It´s difficult to follow these things because the people in the U.S. that run these terrorists have no accountability at all and the mass media there is worse than useless.

"ISIS has captured thousands of American-supplied vehicles," said retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, a Fox News contributor. "So both sides travel in the same vehicles and use the same weapons."

"We have been the number one source of sophisticated military gear for Islamic State," Peters said "The Iraqis were only middlemen."

TUESDAY, NOV 17, 2015 08:48 PM GST

We created Islamic extremism: Those blaming Islam for ISIS would have supported Osama bin Laden in the ’80s

Jingoists conveniently forget the West's Cold War strategy was to arm the Islamic extremists that became al-Qaida

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

In order to understand the rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida; in order to wrap our minds around their heinous, abominable attacks on civilians in the U.S., France, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Turkey, Yemen, Afghanistan and many, many more countries, we must rekindle this historical memory.

Where did violent Islamic extremism come from? In the wake of the horrific Paris attacks on Friday, November the 13, this is the question no one is asking — yet it is the most important one of all. If one doesn’t know why a problem emerged, if one cannot find its root, one will never be able to solve and uproot it.

Where did militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida come from? The answer is not as complicated as many make it out to be — but, to understand, we must delve into the history of the Cold War, the historical period lied about in the West perhaps more than any other..... more

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/17/we_created_islamic_extremism_those_blaming_islam_for_isis_would_have_supported_osama_bin_laden_in_the_80s/


http://media.salon.com/2015/11/reagan-mujahideen-oval-office.jpg

http://media.salon.com/2015/11/osama-bin-laden-independent.jpg

Pentagon/CIA falsifying intelligence reports on their own creation? No shit, Sherlock.

------------------------------

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Sunday he has told top military officials to "get to the bottom" of reports that intelligence assessments have been altered to give a rosier assessment of progress in turning back the Islamic State.

Obama was responding to a report in The New York Times that the Pentagon's inspector general has expanded its probe of intelligence reports from Central Command, or CENTCOM, and that congressional committees were seeking answers about whether that intelligence had been shaded to make it appear more progress is being made. The Times reported that the Pentagon has added more investigators who have seized documents related to intelligence reports. ...

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/obama-to-pentagon-get-to-the-bottom-of-altered-islamic-state-intelligence/ar-BBnjuPI?ocid=spartandhp

Coming from Obama and his guys I'd believe this.  How about that, and what do all the Europeans who so loved him, have to say about that?

PSYCHOLOGY

Why People Keep Saying, “That’s What the Terrorists Want”

Max Abrahms
NOVEMBER 20, 2015

On September 11, 2001, I was enjoying the tail end of my summer holiday with family in Connecticut. Over the past year, I had been studying Osama bin Laden’s enigmatic fatwas as a graduate student at Oxford. At the time, al-Qaeda was not well known, so I was surprised to find that in the climate of paralyzing fear after the attacks, everyone around me professed to know exactly why this group had struck the United States.

A local soccer coach defiantly told me that practice was still on because keeping his team of eight-year olds cooped up indoors in fear is exactly what al-Qaeda secretly wanted. A cab driver told me he was going to keep taking customers from the train station because taking a few days off from work to grieve is exactly what al-Qaeda wanted.

But for the life of me, I couldn’t recall anything in bin Laden’s fatwas about playing soccer or driving cabs.

When President George W. Bush later responded by occupying Iraq in 2003, millions of Americans insisted that doing so was exactly what al Qaeda wanted. When, in 2004, Spain had the opposite reaction after the Madrid train bombings, and pulled back from that conflict, Americans told me that withdrawing from Iraq was actually what al-Qaeda wanted.

Today, a similar thing is happening with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as politicians and pundits accuse one another of “playing into the terrorists’ hands.”

How is everyone so savvy when it comes to knowing what terrorists want?

One explanation comes from a cognitive bias called correspondent inference theory. It was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the social psychologist Edward Jones to explain the cognitive process by which an observer infers the motives of an actor.

The theory comes from the foundational work of Fritz Heider, the father of attributional theory. Heider saw individuals as “naïve psychologists” motivated by a practical concern – a need to simplify, comprehend, and predict the motives of others. Heider postulated that people process information by applying inferential rules that shape their response to behavior. In laboratory experiments, he found that we tend to attribute the behavior of others to inherent characteristics of their personality — or dispositions — rather than to external or situational factors.

Correspondent inference theory resolves a crucial question that Heider left unanswered: How does an observer infer the motives of an actor based on its behavior?

Jones showed that observers tend to interpret an actor’s objective in terms of the consequence of the action. He offered the following simple example to illustrate the observer’s assumption of similarity between the effect and objective of an actor: A boy notices his mother shut the door, and the room becomes less noisy; the correspondent inference is that she wanted quiet. The essential point is what Jones called the “attribute-effect linkage,” whereby the objectives of the actor are presumed to be encoded in the observable outcome of the behavior.

This is why soccer coaches, cab drivers, and everyone else in the world think they know what the terrorists want. People infer the motives of terrorists directly from the observable consequences of their violent behavior – not from studying the groups more scientifically.

This also helps explain why the presumed motives of terrorists seem to shift so rapidly and contradictorily. Consider that until the Paris attacks this past week, the conventional wisdom held that the group wields violence to achieve a Caliphate unadulterated by Western interference. Since the attacks, however, we’ve been told that actually the Islamic State wants to provoke the West into more military interference in order to showcase the West’s brutal behavior. Before the attacks, we were told that France is a juicy target for the Islamic State because of its failure to integrate its Muslim population. After the attacks, we are being told that the Islamic State actually wants France and the rest of the world to become even more xenophobic against Muslims on the theory that alienated moderates may be more receptive to extremism.

It’s no wonder the media are constantly talking up terrorists as “masterminds” who commit “sophisticated” attacks. Regardless of their outcome, whatever happens will invariably be seen as exactly what the terrorists want.

https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-people-keep-saying-thats-what-the-terrorists-want

"This Is The Most Dangerous Time Ever" Ex-CIA Boss Says US To Blame For "Scourge Without Parallel" ISIS

"I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today," warns former CIA Director Jack Devine, saying that, with "frankly uncivilized" ISIS, there is a greater risk of violence worldwide than ever before.

According to The Hill,

“I think this is the most dangerous time in terms of sustained violence,” he said on “The Cats Roundtable” in an interview airing Sunday on New York’s AM-970.
 
“I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today,” he told host John Catsimatidis. “Some percentage of the world today is always either unbalanced or radicalized. When you have a small group of people who are willing to lose their lives and kill anyone they can, we’re all vulnerable.”
Devine cited the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as an unprecedented threat in terms of its wanton disregard for human life...

“I dealt with terrorists in South America in the 1970s, but they never attacked innocent women and children indiscriminately,” he said.
 
“You have a group in ISIS today that is frankly uncivilized. These folks could get stronger and stronger. We basically have to destroy ISIS over there,” Devine said.
 
Devine argued that dismantling ISIS’s command structure is crucial for minimizing the danger it presents, much like al Qaeda before them.
 
“We killed three-fourths of their leadership,” he said of al Qaeda.  “We have to do the same thing with ISIS. “We have to destroy their refuge over there. When they start to lose, their recruiting numbers start to fall.”
Devine, who mainly served during the Cold War, said ISIS is a scourge without parallel because it has no concern for self-preservation.

“There is nothing that can be compared with nuclear weapons and their use,” he said of tensions between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.
 
“[But] people felt safe in the sense there was countervailing balance,” he added. “Early in our contest with the Russians, it was clear we had checks and balances.”
Finally Devine admits...

“If there’s blame to be put, it’s on our failure to have done that by this point.”

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-23/most-dangerous-time-ever-ex-cia-boss-says-us-blame-scourge-without-parallel-isis

Yeah, just don't get the idea that I want ISIS attacking us, i'm just saying what comes around goes around.  I'm flabergasted this all such a surprise.

Putin Accuses Turkey Of "Backstabbing", Funding ISIS, Sees "Serious Consequences" To Ties

Moments ago Putin delivered a brief statement following the downing of the Russian jet by Turkish forces during a press conference with the King of Jordan. Here are the highlights:

PUTIN SAYS LOSS OF RUSSIAN WARPLANE TODAY DUE TO BACKSTABBING
PUTIN: DOWNED WARPLANE INCIDENT GOES BEYOND FIGHT VS TERROR
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT PUTIN SAYS TURKEY BEHAVING AS IF RUSSIA SHOT DOWN ITS OWN PLANE
PUTIN SAYS INCIDENT TO HAVE SERIOUS CONSQUENCES FOR TURKEY TIES
PUTIN SAYS RUSSIAN WARPLANE IN NO WAY THREATENED TURKEY
PUTIN SAYS RUSSIA HAS SIGNED AN ACCORD WITH THE US TO AVOID AIR INCIDENTS
Putin makes it quite clear that Turkey, a NATO state, is responsible for ISIS funding:

PUTIN: OIL FROM ISLAMIC STATE IS BEING SHIPPED TO TURKEY
PUTIN SAYS ISLAMIC STATE GETS CASH BY SELLING OIL TO TURKEY
PUTIN: ISLAMIC STATE GETS MILITARY SUPPORT FROM MANY STATES
And the first official diplomatic escalation:

TURKISH DEFENCE ATTACHE IN MOSCOW SUMMONED TO RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY - TASS
Some more from Russia's Gazeta:


Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Turkey's appeal to NATO partners to the incident with the Russian Su-24 looks like an attempt to put the alliance at the service of an "Islamic state."
 
"We will analyze everything that happened, the tragedy would have serious consequences, including for the Russian-Turkish relations. I do not know who needed what is done today, but in any case not to us. And instead of immediately establish the necessary contacts with us, the Turkish side asked its NATO partners to discuss the incident, as if it were we shot down a Turkish plane, but they are not us. Do they want to put NATO at the service of ISIS? "- Putin said.
 
Earlier, Putin said that the incident with the Su-24 in Syria - a stab in the back, which caused us accomplices of terrorists.
 
The Su-24 has fallen in the Syrian province of Latakia. Earlier, the Turkish side took out Russian warnings for violating Turkish airspace during a military operation in Syria.
 
"Islamic State" - a terrorist organization banned in several countries, including Russia.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-24/putin-accuses-turkey-backstabbing-funding-isis-sees-serious-consequences-ties

Paddy Ashdown: UK failing to pressure Gulf states over jihadist funding

Lord Ashdown has accused the government of failing to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states which he said were funding jihadism.

The former Lib Dem leader told the Today programme he worried that the "closeness" of the Conservative party to Gulf interests was hampering the effort to tackle extremism.

"The failure to put pressure on the Gulf States - and especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar - first of all to stop funding the Salafists and Wahabists, and secondly to play a larger part in this campaign... leads me to worry about the closeness between the Conservative Party and rich Arab, Gulf individuals,” he told presenter John Humphrys.

"Will he launch an inquiry into the funding of jihadism? If not, I think we're entitled to ask some questions about why not."

Release date: 24 November 2015

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p038zy22

'We will be coming, we will come to crush your country': Homegrown French ISIS fighters issue warning to François Hollande with chilling threat of new attacks on France

French ISIS fighters have issued chilling threat of new attacks on France
Footage also includes a warning to French President François Hollande
It follows other videos released in the past week threatening similar attacks
One had threat to blow up White House, other a suicide bomb in New York

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3332376/French-ISIS-fighters-issue-warning-Fran-ois-Hollande-chilling-threat-new-attacks-France.html

Recap: Newly-Declassified U.S. Government Documents: The West Supported the Creation of ISIS

The documents were written by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency on August 12, 2012

Redacted, redacted and more redacted...

https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf

AQI= al Queda in Iraq, ISIS is basically a revamping of that

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ISIS1.jpg

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ISIS-2.jpg

I guess glaring similarities between Saudi methods and those of the Islamic State – both have a peculiar fondness for beheadings – are harder and harder to ignore for most people. But with Saudi executions now running at triple the 2014 rate according to Amnesty International, the Saudis are pressing on regardless. And why shouldn´t they; their big friends in Paris and London are fawning at their feet like never before and crawling over each other to sell them weapons. Uncle Sam seems to be giving up on those fruitcakes and Cameron and Hollande are desperate to replace it as the Saudi´s very best and dearest friends. Like seeks like. Must be the mentality that attracts these people to each other. That and oil and weapons sales.

Former DIA Chief Michael Flynn Says Rise of Islamic State was “a willful decision” and Defends Accuracy of 2012 Memo

August 6, 2015 by Brad Hoff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG3j8OYKgn4

In Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was “a willful decision.”
Amazingly, Flynn actually took issue with the way interviewer Mehdi Hasan posed the question—Flynn seemed to want to make it clear that the policies that led to the rise of ISIL were not merely the result of ignorance or looking the other way, but the result of conscious decision making:

Hasan: You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?
Flynn: I think the administration.
Hasan: So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?
Flynn: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.
Hasan: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?
Flynn: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.

Hasan himself expresses surprise at Flynn’s frankness during this portion of the interview. While holding up a paper copy of the 2012 DIA report declassified through FOIA, Hasan reads aloud key passages such as, “there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

Rather than downplay the importance of the document and these startling passages, as did the State Department soon after its release, Flynn does the opposite: he confirms that while acting DIA chief he “paid very close attention” to this report in particular and later adds that “the intelligence was very clear.”
Lt. Gen. Flynn, speaking safely from retirement, is the highest ranking intelligence official to go on record saying the United States and other state sponsors of rebels in Syria knowingly gave political backing and shipped weapons to Al-Qaeda in order to put pressure on the Syrian regime:

Hasan: In 2012 the U.S. was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups [Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda in Iraq], why did you not stop that if you’re worried about the rise of quote-unquote Islamic extremists?
Flynn: I hate to say it’s not my job…but that…my job was to…was to to ensure that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be.

The early reporting that treated the DIA memo as newsworthy and hugely revelatory was criticized and even mocked by some experts, as well as outlets like The Daily Beast. Yet the very DIA director at the time the memo was drafted and circulated widely now unambiguously confirms the document to be of high value, and indicates that it served as source material in his own discussions over Syria policy with the White House.
As Michael Flynn also previously served as director of intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during a time when its prime global mission was dismantling Al-Qaeda, his honest admission that the White House was in fact arming and bolstering Al-Qaeda linked groups in Syria is especially shocking given his stature.
Consider further the dissonance that comes with viewing the Pentagon’s former highest ranking intelligence officer in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden now calmly and coolly confessing that the United States directly aided the foot soldiers of Ayman al-Zawahiri beginning in at least 2012 in Syria.

This confirmation is significant to my own coverage of the DIA report, as I was contacted by a number of individuals who attempted to assure me that the true experts and “insiders” knew the document was unimportant and therefore irrelevant within the intelligence community and broader Syria policy.
This began after a Daily Beast article entitled The ISIS Conspiracy That Ate the Web  cited former NSA officer John Schindler as an expert source. Schindler concluded of the DIA document: “it’s difficult to say much meaningful about it… Nothing special here, not one bit.”

To my surprise, only hours after I published a rebuttal of Schindler and the Daily Beast article, I was contacted by a current high level CIA official who is also a personal friend from my time living in the D.C. area.
This official, who spent most of his career with CIA Public Affairs, made a personal appeal urging me to drop my comments attacking John Schindler’s credibility, as I had noted that Schindler is a highly ideological and scandal-laden commentator who consistently claims special insider knowledge in support of his arguments. This CIA official further attempted to convince me of Schindler’s credibility as an insider and expert, assuring me that “he has written insightfully.”

Mehdi Hasan’s historic interview with General Flynn should put the issue to rest—the declassified DIA report is now confirmed to be a central and vital source that sheds light on the origins of ISIS, and must inform a candid national debate on American policy in Syria and Iraq.
As it is now already becoming part of the official record on conflict in Syria among respected international historians, knowledge of the declassified document must make it into every American household.

http://levantreport.com/2015/08/06/former-dia-chief-michael-flynn-says-rise-of-islamic-state-was-a-willful-decision-and-defends-accuracy-of-2012-memo/

ISIS should just go ahead and merge with Saudi Arabia.
Then they can carry on with their activities undisturbed.

The One Thing You Need to Know About ISIS

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

Die Anstalt: ISIS terrorism documentary doku 2015 terrorist - English subtitles ENG SUB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHbStsy11j0

Published on Jan 13, 2015
Political satire by Max Uthoff and Claus von Wagner
Topic: ISIS and terrorism in general and how it all began - An entertaining summary with real facts.
Chronological topics for research:
Mohammad Mosaddegh
1953 Iranian coup d'état
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi
1979 Iranian Revolution
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
Saddam Hussain
1979 Soviet war in Afghanistan
Osama Bin Laden
1990 Invasion of Kuwait
Nayirah (testimony)
Nayirah al-sabah
Hill & Knowlton
Citizens for a Free Kuwait
1990 Holy Ground: Mecca and Medina
Al-Qaeda
Osama bin Laden
2013 IS – Islamic State
ISIS - Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
ISIL - Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

You could add this important event to the list above. Soon after, all hell started breaking loose, needless to say.

Iraq, Iran, Syria Sign $10 Billion Gas-Pipeline Deal

By HASSAN HAFIDH And  BENOIT FAUCON

July 25, 2011 8:35 a.m. ET

AMMAN, Jordan—The oil ministers of Iraq, Iran and Syria Monday signed a preliminary agreement for a $10 billion natural-gas-pipeline deal, the official Iranian News Agency IRNA and other Iranian media reported....

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903591104576467631289250392


--------------------------------

Later that year, the US, UK, France and Israel were ramping up covert assistance to rebel factions in Syria to elicit the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.” The rest is history.

It is a waste to give weapon to Arabs. As you can see most of these weapons will be seized and used in fight with anti ISIS coalition.
You have now 2300 more vehicles to destroy because of that. Great idea to weaponize Muslims.

Waste is relative. The more waste and destruction of weapons and other war materiel the better for the business interests that manufacture them. And since those interests fund politicians there will be some crumbs for them too. Which of course leads to even more waste and crumbs and so on. It´s a perpetual machine driven by human dysfunction I guess.

Are 'We' Bombing The Wrong Country?

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2015/11-overflow/20151116_isis.jpg

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2015/11-overflow/20151116_isis.jpg

The Saudis are a slightly sophisticated form of ISIS.
They impose similar rules on their inhabitants, but are slightly tolerant of what goes on outside their boundaries.

Iraqi Politician Claims Turkey Lets ISIL Sell Oil for Meager $20 a Barrel

MIDDLE EAST

15:53 28.11.2015(updated 16:11 28.11.2015) Get short URL

Turkey allows the Islamic State terrorist group to sell Iraqi and Syrian oil for just $20 a barrel, Iraq's former National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie wrote on Saturday.

In a statement posted on his Facebook page al-Rubaie, who is also a leader of the Law-Governed State  parliamentary coalition, outlined Ankara’s four-pronged support for the Islamic militants, with the illegal oil trade topping the list.

“First and foremost, the Turks help the militants sell stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil for $20 a barrel, which is half the market price,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie  wrote.

The Million Dollar Question: How Is ISIL Selling Oil and Who Is Buying It?
Turkey in general, and Istanbul in particular, is also a place where ISIL commanders recruit local migrants and take them to Mosul in Iraq or Raqqa in Syria, he noted.
“Each month hundreds of radicals cross the Turkish border, while the local law enforcers pretend they just don’t see,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie wrote, adding that many wounded ISIL fighters were apparently undergoing treatment in Turkish hospitals.

During a joint news conference with French President Francois Hollande in Moscow earlier this week, President Vladimir Putin mentioned the massive supplies of Syrian oil being sent to Turkey by the Islamic State terrorist group.

http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20151128/1030913013/turkey-isil-oil.html

And they share the same obsession with beheadings. The latest fruitcake on the throne was a 79-year old crown prince last January when the king kicked the bucket. He is already breaking all beheadings records which isn´t surprising since he´s severely demented.

http://images.indianexpress.com/2015/01/mideast-obama-us-saudi_759.jpg

British deviants and weirdos just love this kind of fruitcake obviously.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mHSCjczB2pU/hqdefault.jpg

Jan. 2015

Prince Charles and David Cameron arrived in Saudi Arabia yesterday to pay their respects after the death of King Abdullah – despite mounting protests over the country’s ‘appalling’ human rights record.

There were also claims that flying the Union Jack at half-mast last week was unnecessary, because the Saudis had not lowered their own flag.

The Prince of Wales, Mr Cameron and other leaders were set to meet the new ruler King Salman in the capital, Riyadh. But the visit was dogged by claims that UK tributes – including lowering flags at Buckingham Palace and Downing Street – were inappropriate.

http://chrisspivey.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/David-Cameron-Prince-Wales-Hosts-Reception-G49Qbrl_mDfl.jpg

The Saudis spent $1.35 million in gifts to the Obamas in 2014.
Who said they weren't generous?  ;D

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/saudi-king-showered-obamas-with-1308621692543030.html

Well, it´s a protection racket. If you don´t pay there are unpleasant consequences. That´s how it is with the mob, it´s a tried and trusted business model in Chicago and other places. Yeah I know; it´s not politically correct to mention Chicago in this context, especially since Obama got most of his training there.

It is an open secret that King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is a "King" only in name. He is having mental and medical issues, and is completely under the control of other powerful people. And he might be the last King of Saudi, if things go on like this. The oil wealth will run out in 4 or 5 years, and after that there will be rebellions and riots in Riyadh. The monarchy will be overthrown, and Saudi Arabia will disintegrate in to smaller states. There is also a chance of the ISIS seizing power there.

Go ahead, mention Chicago.  But also mention that Obama can't keep any of those gifts, they just go into the National Archives.  Although maybe the Saudi givers didn't know or believe that.

Something interesting for the future:

Find out how much money the sauds donated to the clinton(hillary and bill) foundations.

I've found a good article about this whole mess around Syria: http://oil-price.net/en/articles/oil-prices-and-syrian-civil-war.php (http://oil-price.net/en/articles/oil-prices-and-syrian-civil-war.php)
Probably the author is quite right on the root causes.

The US is demanding that Turkey close a 60-mile stretch of its border with Syria which is the sole remaining crossing point for Isis militants, including some of those involved in the massacre in Paris and other terrorist plots.

The complete closure of the 550-mile-long border would be a serious blow to Isis, which has brought tens of thousands of Islamist volunteers across the frontier over the past three years.

In the wake of the Isis attacks in Paris, Washington is making clear to Ankara that it will no longer accept Turkish claims that it is unable to cordon off the remaining short section of the border still used by Isis. “The game has changed. Enough is enough. The border needs to be sealed,” a senior official in President Barack Obama’s administration told The Wall Street Journal, describing the tough message that Washington has sent to the Turkish government. “This is an international threat, and it’s coming out of Syria and it’s coming through Turkish territory.”....

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/war-with-isis-president-obama-demands-that-turkey-close-stretch-of-frontier-with-syria-a6753836.html

-------------------------------

It runs both ways. First European nationals go to the Middle East to join this terrorist organization and get training and combat experience, then they go back via the same route to carry out terror attacks back home.

The Islamic State (IS) and Saudi Arabia prescribe near-identical punishments for a host of crimes, according to documents circulated by the militant group.

IS published a list of crimes and their punishments on 16 December 2014 to serve “as an explanation and as a warning” to those living in territory under their control in large parts of Iraq and Syria.

The document lists hadd crimes, which are considered to be “against the rights of God,” and includes fixed punishments for theft, adultery, slander and banditry.

Crimes deemed hadd and their punishments are derived from the Quran and the hadith, the collected teachings and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. However, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, and IS-controlled areas, they are rarely applied.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_large/public/images/Punishments_FINAL-01.jpg

- See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/crime-and-punishment-islamic-state-vs-saudi-arabia-1588245666#sthash.8SIiD9Gb.dpuf

‘Turkish government to blame for terrorist funding’ – retired US Army Major General

Published on Dec 1, 2015
Russia is preparing a draft UN resolution aimed at cutting off financing to terrorist groups, including ISIS. The jihadi group makes up to 1.5 million dollars a day from black-market fuel exports. The Russian government says it has proof that most of the oil sold by terrorists makes it way to Middle East markets via Turkey. Paul Vallely, a retired Major General of the US Army, thinks world powers need to put greater pressure on the Turkish government.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF1BBlQ5GlU

Prime Minister Dr. Haider Al-Abadi: I did not ask any country to send foreign ground troops, and we will treat any sent as a hostile act

Dec 3 2015

Prime Minister and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Dr. Haider Al-Abadi renews emphasis on the lack of need for foreign ground troops to Iraq and that the Iraqi government is committed to not allowing the presence of any ground force on the land of Iraq, and did not ask any side, whether regional or from the international coalition to send ground troops to Iraq.

The Iraqi government confirms its firm and categorical rejection of any action of this kind issued by any country and violates our national sovereignty and we will treat any foreign ground combat troops sent by an country as a hostile act and deal with it on that basis.

The Iraqi government affirms its fixed position that it has declared repeatedly that it demanded and demands of the world and the international coalition to stand with Iraq in its war against the terrorism of Daesh by providing air support, weapons, ammunition and training, and stressed the need to increase the effectiveness of air support to Iraqi forces and the targeting of the members and leaders of Daesh terrorist gangs on the border and in the desert and to stop the funding, which is the demand that the US side responded to, ensuring to not undertake any activity without the approval of the Iraqi government and under full Iraqi sovereignty.

Prime Minister's Media Office

3 December 2015

http://pmo.iq/pme/press2015en/3-12-20152en.htm

We´ve always been at war with Oceania.

Obama: ‘No Boots on the Ground’ Just Meant No Battalions
Insists New Troops Will 'Squeeze and Ultimately Destroy' ISIS

by Jason Ditz, December 03, 2015

Throughout a year and a half of war against ISIS, President Obama’s “no boots on the ground” pledge has been repeatedly revised by officials, initially insisting it meant no troops, then no combat troops, and now, according to President Obama, it simply meant no battlion-level deployments.

Obama now insists he never had any intention not to send combat troops to Iraq and Syria, and that the American people always understood he simply meant deployments would be small and limited to company-sized deployments or smaller.

Obama insists that the latest deployment of troops into Iraq, which the Pentagon has suggested will be in the 100 soldier level, will “squeeze and ultimately destroy” ISIS. During his comments, he continued to play up the idea that the war is going well, insisting ISIS is totally incapable of launching Paris-style attacks within the US.

http://news.antiwar.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/obama.jpg

With US deployments by and large limited to numbers in the dozens or low hundreds, the administration seems to be gambling it can avoid serious debate about its repeated escalations. At the same time, the promise of “no battalions” is all but meaningless, since the deployments are happening with such regularity that they are building up into the thousands in short order.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/12/03/obama-no-boots-on-the-ground-just-meant-no-battalions/

Islamic State in Details

Infographics

http://sputniknews.com/infographics/20151010/1028307681/isis-infographics.html

“This time… Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that ‘they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at…”

“Thanks for paying for our jihad in the 80s. And sorry about your towers. But this time around it’ll be totally different, trust us. Sincerely, the Wahhabis”


https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*gZn_8Owu2_I_cK6or9R6Fg.jpeg

Former U.S. official who bungled Iraq occupation wants to send troops back there again

Paul Bremer, the former American diplomat who presided over the initial stages of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, wants the Obama administration to redeploy 10,000 U.S. troops to the country to aid the fight against the Islamic State.

For 13 months between 2003 and 2004, Bremer headed the provisional authority that governed Iraq in the wake of the invasion. It was under the Bush appointee's watch that Iraq's standing army was disbanded and members of the ruling Baath Party purged from the ranks of the government bureaucracy -- two key factors that contributed to the vicious sectarian insurgency that would follow in the years to come.

Bremer was speaking to Al Jazeera English's Mehdi Hasan in an interview that's scheduled for broadcast on Friday. Here's a bit from a summary published in advance by the TV network:

In a forthcoming interview with Al Jazeera’s Head to Head show, Paul Bremer called on Obama to order a "much more vigorous air campaign" against [the Islamic State], adding that US troops should stay "as long as American interests are served by being in Iraq".

Asked how many US troops are required, he answered, "probably 10,000".

He also stuck to his guns, defending his record during a brief tenure in charge:

Bremer, however, denied disbanding the military, saying that when he arrived in Iraq following the appointment by then-President George W. Bush, "not a single unit" of the Iraqi army was standing.

"The question wasn’t to disband. That was a mistake. We should never have used that verb. The question was should we recall the army," he told Head to Head host Mehdi Hassan.

Bremer also defended his order to ban members of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party from government, saying it affected "only one percent" of its membership representing 20,000 people.

"The mistake I made was turning it over to Iraqi politicians" to decide who should be affected, he said.

This is a familiar refrain now from Washington's neo-conservatives. Aghast at the rise and shocking success of the jihadist Islamic State, they have pinned the fault on the misguided, divisive rule of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, while glossing over the American intervention that brought it into being.

"Certainly [it] was not ideal" Bremer tells Hasan in the Al Jazeera interview, referring to Shiite-majority rule, but that it was “the least bad solution."

Bremer remains convinced of the necessity of American power to stabilize the region.

"Only the Americans can help the Iraqis broker across these sectarian and ethnic lines," Bremer told MSNBC last year. "There is nobody else who can do it."

Robert Kagan, one of the ideological architects of the Iraq war, recently argued along similar lines in the Wall Street Journal, urging U.S. policymakers to get over the "trauma" of Iraq:


Iraqis, who have perished in the tens of thousands since the U.S. invasion, are traumatized, too. And there's little indication that a return to the muscular hubris of the past will somehow have altogether different effects.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/04/former-u-s-official-who-bungled-iraq-occupation-wants-to-send-troops-back-there-again/

The Americans can say whatever they want for media PR purposes. But the fact remains on the ground that Turkey is NEVER going to close their border with the ISIS. Now there are two options:

1. Give proper weapons to the Kurds, so that they will be able to conquer the remaining part of the North Syria, thereby closing the Turkish-ISIS border.

2. Help the regime forces, and they will advance to the North of Kuweires in East Aleppo to link up with the Kurds, there by cutting the ISIS-Turkish border.

I guess we´ll be seeing even more desperation and hectic moves in some quarters in the west now that the ISIS corridor between Turkey and Iraq is about to be cut.

Here is the latest status map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Syrian_civil_war.png/300px-Syrian_civil_war.png

It can be clearly seen that only about 100 km of the Turkish-Syrian border is under the control of the ISIS. But it will take a lot of time and effort to close this, as the regime forces and the Kurds are not well equipped to capture the North-Central parts.

The best solution would be a combined assault by the regime forces as well as the Kurds. The regime forces can advance towards North-East, targeting Deir Hafir, and the Kurds can advance towards the West targeting Manbij.

He isn´t interested in U.S. or British "help", who can blame him, but...

Iraq asks Germany for help in fight against 'Islamic State'

Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi has asked German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier for further assistance in the fight against the "Islamic State," saying terrorism is "not only a threat to Iraq, but also to Europe."...

http://www.dw.com/en/iraq-asks-germany-for-help-in-fight-against-islamic-state/a-18899812

http://www.dw.com/image/0,,18899741_303,00.jpg

The Iraqis wanted to invite Russia to conduct air strikes against the ISIS positions in central Iraq last month. But at the last moment they had to cancel their plans, after the Americans blackmailed them. So far, the American strikes have been ineffective. The Iraqis are getting more and more desperate and are looking out for other options.

US refuses to bomb Islamic State’s ‘media centers’ over possible civilian casualties

Published time: 17 Dec, 2015 10:43
Edited time: 17 Dec, 2015 10:47

US intelligence services have mapped Islamic State’s media installations producing terrorist propaganda for the internet, yet none of them have been bombed out for fear of collateral damage and the need for intelligence to monitor the jihadists’ operations.
The terrorists’ media centers, which edit and compile video and written material for propaganda over the web are located in residential areas in Iraq, Libya and Syria. The whereabouts of such installations are well known and thoroughly mapped out after a months-long clandestine intelligence program, The Washington Times reports, citing anonymous sources.....

https://www.rt.com/news/326249-isis-us-media-centers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Chess in the Age of ISIS


December 17, 2015
by Tom Mysiewicz

“Iraq is breaking up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to John Kerry in Paris, 26 June 2014

“The goal is to proclaim a ‘Kurdistan’ straddling the border between Iraq and Syria, and then expel the Syrian populations who live there, followed by the transfer of 10 million Turkish Kurds to this new state.”[1]

Thierry Meyssan, 2015

Unfolding now is a multidimensional chess game comprising centuries-old animosities, petrodollars, pipelines, a neo-Ottoman sultanate, plans for balkanizing the Mid East into manageable ethnic states, Israeli energy plans and oligarchs, Neoconservatives, the U.S. military-industrial complex, Daesh-ISIS, NATO, the EU, Kurdistan, Ukraine and a gaggle of nation states. I first addressed this hard-to-fathom situation in my 2014 piece “War With ISIS: Multiplexing a New World Order.”[2]

In my earlier piece I saw the creation of “Kurdistan” from energy-rich areas of a partitioned Iraq and Syria as central to the plan. (This plan had existed in Neoconservative circles and within groups like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) well prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion. And I wrote about it, often.)[3]

Understand that I’m sympathetic to the Kurds. If both Syria and Iraq adopted a Federal system giving autonomy to their Kurdish regions—and provisions were made to equitably divide the energy resources (or their revenue streams via a neutral body)–it would avoid national disintegration and millions of new refugees. And it would avoid the inevitable destabilization of surrounding countries. However, based on the Egyptian experience with supplying natural gas to Israeli companies—and getting it back at higher prices—it would be wise for all of the parties to avoid selling energy resources disproportionately or exclusively to Israel simply on a pragmatic level.

This is not a religious issue. The nonagenarian Zionist pioneer Uri Avnery, recently noted that he and “King Bibi” (actually Benjamin Mileikowsky) are both atheists but that “Bibi” courts extremist religious elements for political reasons. A recent Avnery op-ed gives us a clue that the current energy struggle involving Turkey is of an entirely secular nature:

“All of Israel has been consumed for months with the debate about the “natural gas plan” – the way of dividing the profits from the natural gas reservoirs discovered in the sea near the shores of Israel. Netanyahu supports with all his might the “plan” that pours the riches into the pockets of a handful of tycoons connected somehow with Sheldon Adelson, his protector (and, some say, his owner).”[4]

First and foremost, massive amounts of money and, basically, political and military control of the world is at stake. In the process of attaining these goals, various entities (including the U.S., Zionist oligarchs, Saudi monarchs and neo-Ottoman Turks) are employing religious fanaticism—as asymmetric weapons in the struggle—of which ISIS-ISIL-Daesh are the most obvious manifestations.

In fact, it now appears ISIS was largely funded by illicit sales of stolen oil transported by Turkish entities. Which oil was, in turn, mostly sold to Israel at deep discounts from the price it would have otherwise paid for Russian oil, presumably reducing its demand for that product. According to Globes Online, Israel Business News of 30 November 2015:

In August, the “Financial Times” reported that Israel obtained 75% of its oil supplies from Iraqi Kurdistan. More than a third of such exports go through the port of Ceyhan, which the FT describe as a “potential gateway for ISIS-smuggled crude…“Israel has in one way or another become the main marketer of ISIS oil. Without them, most ISIS-produced oil would have remained going between Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Even the three countries would not receive the oil if they did not have a buyer in Israel,” an industry official told the newspaper “al-Araby al-Jadeed.”[5]

The above was hardly a surprise to me, but I didn’t anticipate in 2014 how the overall situation might be tied in directly to events in the Ukraine. Or that Erdogan would be capable of directly attacking Russia as well as mounting a “soft invasion” of Europe (with the connivance of NATO and EU leaders seeking, in part, alternative energy sources) in pursuit of a neo-Ottoman “caliphate.”

But, clearly, ISIS was and is the vehicle for the policy goals of the various players—some of whom really are indeed trying to form a “new world order.” And, it appears, the biggest beneficiary of this situation may be Israel, which has profited from the crisis all along and has given artillery support to Daesh on the Golan, bombed Damascus, and even cared for Daesh wounded in its hospitals. “King Bibi” can sit on the sidelines, taking virtually no risks, and professing neutrality while things fall into place as planned. (My guess is that Erdogan sees the “handwriting on the wall” and is already taking some of his marching orders from Tel Aviv and not from Washington.)

PORTENTS OF A “SEA CHANGE”

A sudden uptick in the pace of the Iraq-Syria-Kurdistan situation, not surprisingly, coincides with the elimination, by Russia, of the ISIS portion of Israel’s oil supply. The U.S. reaction to the destruction of this ISIS “pipeline on wheels,” predictably, relates to the likelihood that it is treaty bound to see that Israel continues to receive the previous amount of oil at the below-market ISIS price or replace it out of its own stocks. (And not simply because McCain and Neocon elements in the U.S. Government probably helped create ISIS.)

According to a Sept. 1st, 1975 MoU (memorandum of understanding) between the U.S. and Israel during the Sadat-Begin Camp David peace process (kept secret but later leaked to the New York Times and other media):

(b) If the oil Israel needs to meet all of its normal requirements for domestic consumption is unavailable for purchase in circumstances where quantitative restrictions through embargo or otherwise also prevent the United States from procuring oil to meet its normal requirements, the United States Government will promptly make oil available for purchase by Israel in accordance with the International Energy Agency conservation and allocation formula as applied by the United States Government, in order to meet Israel’s essential requirements. If Israel is unable to secure the necessary means to transport such oil to Israel, the United States Government will make every effort to help Israel secure the necessary means of transport[6]

As I anticipated the above situation in my 2014 article, I assumed there would be an attempt to rush the creation of Kurdistan and reopen the Mosul-Haifa pipeline. Another reason for this assumption: Netanyahu’s 2003 post-Iraq-invasion comment that soon “…you will see Iraqi oil flowing to Haifa. It is just a matter of time until the pipeline is reconstituted, and Iraqi oil will flow to the Mediterranean.”

(In actual fact, that pipeline must be wholly rebuilt but it reportedly can be done easily at a cost of $400,000 per kilometer. An Israeli feasibility study was done in 2004, reportedly at the request of the U.S. Pentagon.)

Another “tell” of a coming change with regard to partition of Iraq and Syria can be found in growing pro-Kurdistan screeds from various U.S. and Israeli mainstream media and the Neocon-centered NGOs.

We suddenly learn that the majority of Jews around the world are closely related to the Kurdish people — more closely than they are to the Semitic-speaking Arabs or any other population that was tested.[7]

Or, we are on the receiving end of this 2014 “gem” from Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin, Colonel in the USAF Reserve and Military Attaché to Israel:

“Most Kurds are Sunni Muslim and one can hear the five-times-a-day Muslim call to prayer, but it is muted and ignored by most…Zako, once the center of Kurdistan’s Jewish population, still invites back descendants of those who long ago left for Zion…

For all of the above reasons, Kurdistan reminds one of Israel. Like Israel, Kurdistan is not dominated by the Arab, nor by Islam. Like Israel, Kurdistan is more democratic than any of its neighbors. Like Israel, Kurdistan is surrounded by enemies that wish it did not exist. Like Israel, Kurdistan looks West. And like Israel, Kurdistan has maintained an internal equilibrium though all the world betrays it.”[8]

Other mainstream media take a more direct approach (in case the audience missed the point of the above “soft sell”):

Kerry discussed the Iraqi crisis with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in Paris on Thursday.

Iraq is breaking up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion,” Lieberman’s spokesman quoted him as telling Kerry.

A day earlier, Israeli President Shimon Peres had a similar message for U.S. President Barack Obama…Peres said he had told Obama he did not see unifying Iraq as possible without “massive” foreign military intervention and that this underscored Kurdish separation from the Shi’ite Muslim majority and Sunni Arab minority…

He added that neighbouring Turkey appeared to accept the Kurds’ status as it was helping them pump out oil for sale…

Israel last Friday took its first delivery of the disputed crude from Iraqi Kurdistan’s new pipeline. The United States disapproves of such go-it-alone Kurdish exports.[9]

And, then we are told by the Israeli press that, like an only child who desperately wants a little brother or sister, Israel desperately wants and needs Kurdistan:

“Kurds are deeply sympathetic to Israel and an independent Kurdistan will be beneficial to Israel,” argued Kurdish journalist Ayub Nuri in July. “It will create a balance of power. Right now, Israel is one country against many. But with an independent Kurdish state, first of all Israel will have a genuine friend in the region for the first time, and second, Kurdistan will be like a buffer zone in the face of the Turkey, Iran and Iraq…With few friends in the region, the Kurds will likely look to Israel to help them gain security and closer relations with the United States. As Arab governments in the Middle East totter and fall, and Islamists look to exploit the chaos, the alliance is one that both countries may find beneficial to pursue.”[10]

What readers are not being told is that the recent Israeli energy squabble involving natural gas[11] may be just the tip of a looming energy “iceberg.” The submerged part of the energy “berg” may be the confiscation of the Syrian Golan, with its historically large oil discovery, Syrian and Gazan offshore gas fields, and the focus of this article, the creation of “Kurdistan” out of the oil- and gas-rich portions of the wreckage of Iraq and Syria. Ancillary to this would be the aforementioned reopening of the Mosul-Haifa pipeline closed in 1948 due to Arab sabotage. Because of this demonstrated vulnerability (despite the best efforts of British Col. Wingate and the Irgun) a reopening would require the cooperation of any future ISIS/ISIL “Sunnistan,” a future Kurdistan and a large military presence in Iraq by Turkey, the U.S., Gulf States and NATO in the vicinity of the pipeline, the first steps of which have been taken.

Also not considered is the fact that Russia has long been one of Israel’s oil suppliers but that need has been cut back by the large quantities of oil (illegally) sold to Israel by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and ISIS oil transited through Turkey—at fire-sale prices. That’s got to make Ivan do some thinking.

Then there’s the little-considered possibility that Erdogan sees his oil revenues evaporating if the Mosul line is built and Jordan gets all the oil-transit revenues, in which case his recent invasion may be an attempt to deal himself in by invading and threatening the plan. Such a pipeline would permanently eliminate the need for the “pipeline on wheels” to the Israelis—but it might be adapted to allow continued ISIS oil sales as a sort of kickback. It’s my belief that, if this is the case, Turkey’s role will quickly change to that of a defender.

Apparently mulling over the above complexities, Russia belatedly criticized on December 8th the latest move by Turkey as “a very serious factor of tensions.” Did Russia also consider another aspect of this potential development; namely, destabilization of Iran and Lebanon via massive numbers of Iraqi Shia refugees following a partition of Iraq and its subsequent disintegration? How would Iraq survive on 10% of its oil revenues? And Iran is Russia’s Caspian neighbor.

Iraq itself is becoming increasingly restive about the prospect of its imminent breakup at the hands of Turkey and its NATO cohorts (for the benefit of Israel)–and even some Sunnis must have second thoughts about allowing the neo-Ottoman Erdogan to serve as de facto sultan over a restored Kurdistan and a Sunnistan. In this regard, the Iraqi parliament’s Security and Defense Committee is re-assessing their nation’s security agreement with the United States, and again asked Turkish forces to depart. According to one of the Committee members “The [Iraqi] government and the parliament need to review its security agreement with the US, because Washington is not serious about its implementation. We will demand its cancellation.”[12]

ERDOGAN: METHOD TO HIS MADNESS?

I’ve long maintained that partition of Iraq (as an economic and political benefit to Israel) was the major reason for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.[13] Many were skeptical of my view as they imagined NATO member Turkey would be immovably opposed to such an outcome as would Iran.

Turkey, after this time, deceptively dumped its toolbox of tricks down the proverbial steps– apparently secretly agreeing with Israel to accept a Kurdistan while attacking the PKK and giving ISIS logistical and other covert support (fighters and weapons seemingly passed largely unhindered across its borders) and spouting anti-ISIS rhetoric while, simultaneously, Turkish nationals were buying ISIS stolen oil. (The massive oil trade with ISIS can now be borne out by chemical oil-test data and information released by the Russian Federation.)

Confusing as it seems, Erdogan (like his Israeli partner Netanyahu) is not crazy and is pursuing asymmetric warfare with vigor, I believe. He and his family likely were profiting from ISIS oil trading while he was (in deference to his Israeli partners) allowing the Kurdish Peshmerga (PKK) to cross the border into Syria in 2014 to fight ISIS in Kobani while the U.S. simultaneously attacked its own partial creation, ISIS, and dropped large quantities of arms to the Kurds.[14]

What then accounts for the ambush of Russia’s plane over Syria and Erdogan’s subsequent bellicose behavior? As Erdogan plans to be a major player with the EU, NATO and Israel, it could be a way to wean the Turkish business sector away from its previously increasing trade with Russia—which supplies an estimated 40% of Turkish gas needs.  (By increasing business sanctions, Russia may well be playing Erdogan’s game. In any case, Russia’s energy leverage over both Turkey (and Ukraine) will be greatly diminished should Iraq be partitioned and Kurdistan commence Turkish gas deliveries in 2017):

Derbas Resul, the minister of reconstruction and development of the Kurdish Regional Government, announced a 50-year oil-and-gas agreement has been reached with Turkey…Iraq can supply Turkey with 20-30 billion cubic meters of natural gas, experts say. Iraqi gas is expected to be 50% cheaper than the Iranian gas…As for the Israeli natural gas…(construction of) a natural gas pipeline from Israel to Turkey…may start in the second half of 2015. It is believed that a 25-year gas agreement between Turkey and Israel will improve the relations between two countries.”

Ata Altun of the Eastern Mediterranean University said:”Israel has understood that it will be more economic to ship the natural gas it discovered in the eastern Mediterranean via pipelines over Turkey.” Altun said Israel wants to sell 6 billion cubic meters of the 16 billion cubic meters of natural gas it plans to produce from its Leviathan field to Palestine and Jordan, and the remaining 9 billion cubic meters to Turkey and Europe.

Recently there were reports of a major Turkish company negotiating in Tel Aviv to carry the Israeli gas to Turkey. (See: http://www.ntv.com.tr/dunya/israilin-dogalgazi-turkiyeye-geliyor,8948H3im3kew81yiSxB52w.)

In sum, Turkey’s bridge status in natural gas should firm up in the coming three to four years, when Iraqi and Azerbaijani natural gas will be flowing to Europe via Turkey.[15]

Turkey is currently heavily dependent on Russian natural gas transited through Ukraine. But perhaps not for long. Russian gas to Ukraine is certain to be cut off in the event Ukraine attacks Novorussia—a possibility as Ukraine is being primed to renege on its sovereign debt to Russia and is moving heavy arms back to the engagement lines. The apparent suspension of the “Turkstream” gas pipeline talks by Russia[16] may have been just the excuse Erdogan was seeking to break ties with Russia, in fact.

While Ankara is awaiting the large flow of Kurdistan natural gas and new Ukrainian and EU markets for that and Israeli gas (hence Merkel’s restart of Turkish EU membership) the Baghdad central government, with the help of Russia, could militarily put a stop to these probably-illegal sales by the KRG. From Erdogan’s standpoint, this is unacceptable in light of Turkish-Israeli plans—so his current military stance in Iraq is also “not nice” but is by no means crazy.

In addition to his energy ambitions, Erdogan is seemingly motivated by neo-Ottoman desires to restore the pre-Sykes-Picot Ottoman Sultanate and “multiplexing” a new world order through the vehicle of ISIS, a use my original article anticipated. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has echoed Erdogan’s call for Turkish regional hegemony and a “new order,” seeing a Turkish caliphate being a “litmus test for globalization”:

“When people can pass from a free Palestine through Istanbul to London. That’s our vision. Not building walls around Turkey, but opening up to share with our neighbors. In Cairo we are the Middle East, in Europe we are Europeans. We must shape history with all the nations around us”[17]

Davutoglu’s vision, in fact, begins with the very human wave invasion sweeping Europe and originating in Turkey. This “soft invasion” through its “multiculturalism” is intended to transform the EU. His view is an expansion of the argument of Turkish thinker Abdurrahman Dilipak that Turkey was the legitimate heir of the Ottoman Caliphate.[18]

Could Erdogan be hoping that Russian setbacks in Ukraine and Crimea, a disastrous outcome in the Mid East, and continuing isolation economically will leave a weakened Russia with Putin deposed? Available “plums” could then fall into Turkey’s lap: these could well include Crimea and areas with Turkic peoples in what is today the Russian Federation. But he needs to buy some time if this is his intention.

With this possibility in mind, it’s worth remembering that Turkey could soon reverse roles and replace Russia as Ukraine’s (and Europe’s) natural gas supplier. Advanced offensive weapons have reportedly been supplied to Ukraine by Turkey. And Erdogan and the Turkish leaders apparently “looked the other way” (as with ISIS) while Turkey’s illegal “Grey Wolves”–Bozkurtkar Turk ulkuculeri—left to participate with Ukrainian nationalists in the blockade of Crimea. (The “Wolves”: are supposed enemies of Erdogan and the ruling party, but in 2014 he made conciliatory gestures toward a related political group.) One Russian source comments:

“It is known that our pilot, catapulted from the downed su-24, was shot by the son of the leader of the “Party of the nationalist revival” and the Commander “the Grey wolves”, Alparslan çelik. As was stated in an interview to Aleksey Zhuravko, now, in the Kherson region, there are about 700 fighters of “Bozkurtkar”. There are documented cases of attacks on local residents. In Kherson region the wolves are going to create some kind of “Tatar Republic”…

Turkey is making great efforts, creating elites in Turkic regions of Russia. Ankara relies on a very powerful system, built by followers of Nursi — the so-called “nurdzhular”…So Turkey has someone to rely on in Russia. The power of Turkish intelligence is comparable to that of Israel. It is headed by a professional soldier and political activist who doesn’t speak about the methods of his work. The name of the head of intelligence is Hakan Fidan, who is close to Erdogan.[19]

As Erdogan has already “crossed the Rubicon” with Russia—Turkey’s pressing economic needs and commitment to the NATO attempt to wall off Russia will not likely be altered by mere soothing words, although many are now trying. I wish them luck. For instance, while Erdogan moved some troops out of the illegal outpost in Iraq he will not state they have returned to Turkey but that they have only moved “North” claiming they were invited into the country in 2014 by Iraq.[20]

Erdogan is clearly keeping options open for additional incursions should things not go the way he likes. As Anthony Shadid, writing in 2011 put it:

“Oil is still king in Iraq, and as much as anything else, underlines Turkey’s interests here. The pipeline from Kirkuk, Iraq, to Ceyhan, Turkey, already carries roughly 25 percent of Iraq’s oil exports…

The Turks have (also) signed on to the ambitious $11 billion Nabucco gas pipeline project, which may bypass Russia and bring Iraqi gas to Europe.”[21]

U.S. CONGRESS FOLLOWS ISRAELI LEAD

The recent change in the U.S. stance towards Kurdistan—especially as the U.S. Congress is concerned—is made evident by remembering the October 2007 U.S. reaction to Erdogan’s threats to invade Iraq:

“Turkey is moving fire power and troops closer to Iraq as a border war threatens to become an invasion the United States desperately does not want to happen…
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the leader of Iraq’s Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, on Sunday to press the U.S. case for restraint from Turkey and Iraqi action against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

“We do not believe unilateral cross-border operations are the best way to address this issue,” he said, describing Rice’s call to Erdogan…”In our view, there are better ways to deal with this issue,” he said, stressing that United States regards the PKK as a terrorist organization.”[22]

An almost sure way to determine the actual position of Israel in any matter involving the Mid East is to study the sentiment of the U.S. Congress, most of whose members hold their seats by sufferance of wealthy Zionist supporters. And Congress did not disappoint! It will deal with these PKK former “terrorists” as it has dealt with ISIS. On Dec. 9th, 2015 the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bipartisan bill by unanimous voice vote authorizing the U.S. to directly arm and train the Kurdish Peshmerga (PKK) in both Syria and Iraq and to treat them as a separate country with passage of the $600-billion Defense Authorization Bill. (The U.S. Senate, had already voted 54:45 in June to arm the Kurds directly as a “separate country.”) President Obama’s office has issued a claim that he will veto the legislation, arousing the fury of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ.)

To add insult to injury to President Obama’s foreign policy of maintaining Iraq’s integrity, according to AP, Turkey’s Erdogan is vague about withdrawing troops from Camp Bashiqua and has left at least a skeleton force behind that can quickly be reinforced by two armored brigades just across the Turkish border. Further, as of this writing, the U.S. has scheduled a trilateral meeting, gathering officials from Turkey, the United States and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq on Dec. 21st—without the Iraqi central government in attendance.[23]

#####

[Endnotes Follow]

Thierry Meyssan, “The unavowable project for a pseudo-Kurdistan,” Voltaire Network, 7 December 2015, link: http://www.voltairenet.org/article189562.html↑
 Tom Mysiewicz, “War With ISIS: Multiplexing a New World Order,” Vineyard Saker, 17 September 2014, link: http://www.vineyardsaker.co.nz/2014/09/17/war-with-isis-multiplexing-a-new-world-order-by-tom-mysiewicz/ ↑
 Tom Mysiewicz, “Iraq Partition—The Real Strategy Is About to Succeed,” Future-Fastforward, 16 June 2014, link: http://futurefastforward.com/feature-articles/9739-iraq-partition-the-real-strategy-is-about-to-succeed-by-tom-mysiewicz-16614.html ↑
 Uri Avnery in privately circulated piece “King Bibi,” 12 December 2015 ↑
 “Israel Buys Most Oil Smuggled from ISIS Territory—Report,” Globes Online, Israel Business News, 30 November 2015, link: http://www.globes.co.il/en/article.aspx?did=1001084873 ↑
 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/mou1975.html ↑
 Kevin Alan Brook,”The Genetic Bonds Between Kurds and Jews”, Barzan (Kurdish News), 4 May 2006, link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1626606/posts ↑
 Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin, “Kurdistan: More Like Israel, Less Like Iraq”, Gatestone Institute, 25 December 2014, link: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4975/kurdistan-israel ↑
 Dan Williams, “Israel tells U.S. Kurdish independence is ‘foregone conclusion’,” Reuters, 26 January 2014, link: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-crisis-israel-kurds-idUSKBN0F11I520140626#KobzryUWBTuwTVOB.97 ↑
 Lazar Berman, “Is a free Kurdistan, and a new Israeli ally, upon us?” Times of Israel, 10 August 2013, link: http://www.timesofisrael.com/is-a-free-kurdistan-and-a-new-israeli-ally-upon-us/ ↑
 Op cit. Uri Avnery in privately circulated piece “King Bibi,” 12 December 2015 ↑
 Jonathan Krause, “The U.S. Is About to be Kicked out of Iraq and Replaced with Russia”, Daily Sheeple, 9 December 2015, link: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/u-s-military-is-about-to-be-kicked-out-of-iraq-and-replaced-with-russia_122015 ↑
 Tom Mysiewicz, “Mission Accomplished,” Bush’s claims that the “mission” had been accomplished in Iraq may be true, the author asserts. But that mission may, in fact, have been the future partition of that hapless country. MediaMonitors, 9 May 2004, link: http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/6646↑
 Ben Mathis-Lilley, “Turkey Will Reverse Course, Will Let Kurds Cross Border to Fight ISIS?”, Slate.com, 20 October 2014, link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/10/20/turkey_kurds_isis_new_policy_announced.html ↑
 Mehmet Cetingulec, “In Natural Gas, All Pipelines Go through Turkey”, Al Monitor, 10 December 2014, link: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/12/turkey-russia-natural-gas-blue-stream-tanap.html ↑
 http://www.worldbulletin.net/turkey/167001/erdogans-redirects-isil-oil-claims-to-russia ↑
 Eric Walberg, “Islamic Resistance to Imperialism””, Clarity Press, Atlanta, GA, 2015, p. 261. ↑
 Ibid. ↑
 “Erdogan sends ‘Grey Wolves’ to Crimea—a History Lesson”, Anna News, 9 December 2015, link: http://fortruss.blogspot.com.br/2015/12/erdogan-sends-grey-wolves-to-crimea.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+FortRuss+(Fort+Russ and http://anna-news.info/node/48838 ↑
 http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/turkey-plans-pull-troops-stationed-iraq-35696141 ↑
 Anthony Shadid, “Resurgent Turkey Flexes its Muscles Around Iraq”, New York Times, 4 January 2011, link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/world/middleeast/05turkey.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print ↑
 “U.S. Urges Turkey Not to Invade Iraq”, CBS News, 22 October 2007, link: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-urges-turkey-not-to-invade-iraq/ ↑
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/turkey-plans-pull-troops-stationed-iraq-35696141 ↑


http://thesaker.is/chess-in-the-age-of-isis/

ISIS BEHEADING PLOT - Jihadis send LETTERS to EU civilians ordering them to convert or die

CRAZED Islamic State (ISIS) jihadis have sent letters to European civilians ordering them to convert to Islam within three days or face being DECAPITATED in their own homes.

By NICK GUTTERIDGE
PUBLISHED: 10:06, Thu, Dec 17, 2015 | UPDATED: 12:49, Thu, Dec 17, 2015

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/626885/Islamic-State-ISIS-letters-Sweden-convert-Islam-decapitated-murder-jihadi-Syria

ISIS Axis Assemble! Turkey To Establish Military Base In Qatar

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/18/2015 17:00 -0500

As we never tire of reminding readers, it’s critical to understand that the conflict in Syria, as interesting and important as it is in isolation, is part of larger story. As we documented in “Mid-East Coup: As Russia Pounds Militant Targets, Iran Readies Ground Invasions While Saudis Panic,” an epochal shift is taking place in the region

Preserving the Assad government is absolutely critical for Iran. Syria serves as a key link between Tehran and Hezbollah in Lebanon and were Damascus to fall to a Western puppet government, Iran’s so-called “Shiite crescent” would wane. Riyadh, Doha, and Ankara know this of course and would like nothing more than to push the Iranians out of the Arab Peninsula, and ideally, undercut Tehran’s influence in Iraq as well.

The conflict in Yemen is the same story. Iran backs the Houthis and just about the last thing the Saudis, Qatar, and the UAE want to happen is for Iran to effectively establish a colony on Riyadh’s southern border with a cozy view of the  Bab-el-Mandeb. That explains why the Gulf monarchies have put so much effort into driving the Houthis back and why the they won’t likely stop until Sana’a is recaptured (even if a few MSF hospitals and a UNESCO world heritage site have to be destroyed along the way).

In short, this is an all-out regional Sunni vs. Shiite proxy war with the US backing the Sunnis and Russia backing the Shiites. If Iran and Russia win, Tehran will have cemented its foothold in Syria and Iraq just as international sanctions are lifted. If the Saudis win, the status quo will be preserved only with a “friendly” government in Damascus and a restored Hadi regime in Yemen.

With the stakes so high, it’s no wonder that all sides are sparing no expense. The Saudis are pouring resources into the Yemen fight even as Riyadh’s fiscal deficit has ballooned to some 20% of GDP in the face of slumping crude prices. Qatar and Turkey are funneling weapons and money to proxy armies in Syria and Ankara is apparently willing to risk its international reputation on the way to facilitating the ISIS oil trade. Meanwhile, Russia is all-in on the air campaign in Syria and Iran has committed Hezbollah, thousands of Iraqi Shiite militiamen, and its most important generals to Assad’s cause.

As Hezbollah advances on Aleppo under cover of Russian airstrikes, the anti-Iran/anti-Assad nexus is getting concerned. Recall that in October, Qatar hinted at direct military action in Syria when Foreign Minister Khalid al-Attiyah told CNN that "if a military intervention will protect the Syrian people from the brutality of the regime, we will do it [along with] our Saudi and Turkish brothers.”

Well don’t look now, but Turkey is set to establish a military base in Qatar in order to help the countries “confront common enemies.” As Reuters reports, “establishment of the base, part of an agreement signed in 2014 and ratified by Turkey's parliament in June, intensifies the partnership with Qatar at a time of rising instability and a perceived waning of U.S. interest in the region.”



“The two countries have provided support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, backed rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and raised the alarm about creeping Iranian influence in the region,” Reuters goes on to note, adding that “3,000 ground troops would be stationed at the base - Turkey's first overseas military installation in the Middle East - as well as air and naval units, military trainers and special operations forces.”

The deal also opens the door for Doha to establish its own base in Turkey in the future. "Turkey and Qatar face common problems and we are both very concerned about developments in the region and uncertain policies of other countries," Turkey's ambassador to Qatar Ahmet Demirok said. "We confront common enemies. At this critical time for the Middle East cooperation between us is vital."

Yes, "more cooperation" is "critical." Because the current level of cooperation apprently hasn't created enough instability and outright carnage.

Bear in mind that this comes just as speculation is running high regarding the possibility that the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey may soon look to send in tens of thousands of ground troops to Iraq (and possibly Syria). The takeaway is this: even as Germany (and next France) seem to be moving towards a more cooperative approach when it comes to coordinating with the Assad government in the war on terror, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey's resolve to see the Syrian government fall has only hardened. The question is whether the US will continue to back its allies in the region or follow Germany down a more conciliatory path when it comes to dealing with the Syrian "problem."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-18/isis-axis-assemble-turkey-establish-military-base-qatar

This is very funny. Here is the letter:


Considering how weak the Swedish law enforcement is, the only option for these idiots will be to convert, or to request for asylum in countries such as Russia and Belarus.

Qatar is a blatant supporter of terrorist groups. It's unbelievable the Western world even have diplomatic ties with this minuscule country that actually paid to have the world cup on it's land... what utter madness. It's all about money, who cares if hundreds of thousands die in the process.

Do you know that Qatar is the richest country in the world (in terms of per capita GDP)? And the Americans want to make them even richer, by obstructing the Russian natural gas sales to the European Union nations. Qatari LNG is much more expensive than the Russian gas, but the Europeans are forced to give a preference to the former.

This sounds promising. Maybe it´s just more hot air, maybe not. Time will tell...

------------------------------

On Friday, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution outlining a peace process for Syria following talks between 18 ministers of the International Syria Support Group.

"The UN Security Council resolution is important in principle not only for Syrian peace process. Without exaggeration, this is probably the first resolution in recent years, which could be truly significant for resolving other long-standing conflicts," Franz Klintsevich, the first deputy chair of the upper-house Committee on Security and Defense, told journalists.

I wonder what ISIS will do when all their oil feilds have been bombed and they run out of gas to keep the 2000 hummers running.
At that point they'll worthless to ISIS and I bet they'll just leave them in the middle of the street after this war is finished and the Amercians can come back and pick up their hummers again.

There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of oil rigs in the ISIS controlled territories of Syria and Iraq. It is not possible to destroy each one of them. If by some miracle the coalition forces are able to destroy all these oil wells, then the ISIS will use crude oil hidden away in residential areas to run these vehicles. So which one is easier? Bombing 100,000 oil wells, or bombing 2,000 Humvees?

Those Hummers and incidentally 40 tanks and lots of other goodies in that Mosul package are from 2014. Uncle Sam has shipped megatons of stuff and then some over there since then. Also, it has been bombing those terrorists and their oil fields for a year and a half with limited results it seems.

Uncle Sam has been winning the war on terror for fourteen freakin years now, according to itself. And for fourteen years morons, sorry the clinically intellectually challenged, have been lapping up this bunk. Others have noticed the growing chaos and mayhem and destruction (and of course ballooning terrorism) that this war scam keeps bringing.

Yeah... all these stuff captured by the ISIS during their "lightning attack" on Mosul. Where were the Americans back then? Had they provided some air support to the Iraqi army, then this fiasco could have been avoided. Never mind, the Russians are doing the job for them, supported by the regime forces, Iran, Hezbollah and the Kurds.

My guess is the 2000 Hummers.

Meet ISIL’s Most Dangerous Affiliates

By HARLEEN GAMBHIR December 14, 2015

With startling speed, the Middle Eastern terrorist organization known as ISIL has burst into the local news in Western nations, associated with attacks in Paris and now, if indirectly, with the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

This might have shocked Americans and Parisians for whom the group was long a distant-sounding threat, but for close observers of the organization, ISIL’s global strategy should come as no surprise. In fact, ISIL has pursued an international expansion campaign from the moment it declared its “caliphate” in June 2014. While the group solidifies its proto-state in parts of Iraq and Syria, it also is expanding its would-be caliphate regionally—and preparing for the apocalyptic war it desires with the West.

To do that, it’s fostering affiliates in Muslim-majority areas and directing and inspiring terror attacks in the wider world. And for the U.S., this means that defeating ISIL will require not just combatting the group in Iraq and Syria, and countering its messaging and recruitment of foreign fighters. It also will require serious attention to ISIL’s growing affiliates in other nations.

How widespread are these affiliates? This is a crucial, if underappreciated part of the challenge ISIL now poses. Our counterterrorism research team has been tracking ISIL’s activity through everything from social media to satellite imagery, and we’ve begun assembling a detailed portrait of ISIL’s formal affiliates in Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Russia and Nigeria. Looking ahead, ISIL also appears to be preparing to establish entities in Bangladesh and Tunisia, where it has launched a spate of attacks, and another in Somalia, where some militants have declared allegiance to ISIL.

Its growth strategy is sophisticated and systematic, much like a multinational corporation expanding by acquisition. Rather than build affiliates from the ground up, ISIL co-opts and changes existing militant groups or networks, some of which have splintered from Al Qaeda. Potential affiliates must consolidate factions, select a leader and present a military plan to ISIL's leadership for approval, according to ISIL's own standards. ISIL then chooses whether to establish a wilayat, or province, in the affiliate’s operating area. ISIL’s leaders help these affiliates to become more brutal and effective by exporting military training and expertise. ISIL calls for international recruits to reinforce its strongest partners; it also provides military training and funding to some affiliates.

The relationship benefits both parties. ISIL gains a responsive global network, while the affiliate receives an influx of capabilities and cash.

http://static2.politico.com/dims4/default/2a4f3c1/2147483647/resize/1003x%3E/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2Fad%2Fea%2Ff4d1eaa84ee8bd20fa02bf5ed4dd%2Fisilmap.jpg

The affiliates are tremendously damaging to the nations where they take root, either undermining relatively stable states as ISIL did in Iraq, or exploiting governance vacuums to expand, as it did in Syria. The affiliates’ military operations increase regional disorder and create security gaps that will help ISIL grow beyond Iraq and Syria. Affiliate commanders impose brutal forms of Shari’a governance on the local populace, enabling ISIL to claim that it has delivered on its promise of a trans-regional caliphate. ISIL benefits from its affiliates without needing to micromanage their operations.

Not all the affiliates are created equal, though: Some pose a meaningful strategic threat, while others are barely formed. As the U.S. shapes the next phases of its policy against ISIL and its affiliates, it will need to triage by analyzing the international threat posed by each one. Our research suggests they fall into three broad tiers, plus a wild card.

Most dangerous tier: Egypt and Libya

ISIL’s most dangerous affiliates are those that give the group strategic resilience: They’re strong enough that they could help the group survive even if the group were to be wiped out in its home territory of Syria and Iraq. These affiliates can extend ISIL’s global reach, increase the organization’s fighter pool, and provide safe-haven to ISIL’s leadership. They maintain strong ties to ISIL’s network and have demonstrated an increase in military capability since their affiliation with ISIL. Defeating ISIL in the long term requires degrading these affiliates.

ISIL’s affiliate in Egypt, Wilayat Sinai, has already conducted a major act of international terrorism. The group claimed responsibility for downing Russia’s Metrojet flight 9268 over the Sinai Peninsula on October 31, killing all 224 individuals onboard.

The group’s capabilities should not come as a surprise. ISIL has been giving this affiliate training and expertise since July 2014, shortly after declaring its caliphate, when the Egyptian jihadist group formerly known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis reportedly sent a representative to ISIL’s stronghold of Raqqa, Syria. This envoy pledged allegiance to ISIL and agreed to send ABM members to Syria for military training. ABM exhibited a concrete growth in capability soon after this pledge. The group launched one of Egypt’s deadliest attacks in decades on October 24, 2014, killing 33 security personnel. Three weeks later, ABM formally rebranded itself as Wilayat Sinai, or ISIL’s Sinai Province.

Now ISIL has transferred signature capabilities to Wilayat Sinai, which has steadily increased the frequency, scope and effectiveness of its attacks against Egyptian security forces. In particular, Wilayat Sinai expanded its vehicle-borne IED campaign in the North Sinai in the spring of 2015, increasing its use of ISIL’s signature tactic. VBIEDs require significant expertise to deploy successfully, suggesting that ISIL’s leadership provided Wilayat Sinai with resources and training. Wilayat Sinai also initiated a house-borne IED (rigging a house with concealed explosives) campaign against Egyptian security personnel in the summer of 2015, resembling the “Soldier’s Harvest” campaign ISIS conducted to degrade Iraqi Security Forces in 2013. The group has increasingly claimed attacks on Egypt’s mainland since this past summer, signaling its intent to attack the Egyptian state as a whole rather than just security forces in the Sinai Peninsula.

In Libya, meanwhile, ISIL’s affiliates on the central coast control territory, administer Sharia law, and run militant training camps. These affiliates are exploiting Libya’s civil war to recruit and expand. ISIL initiated operations in Libya through the al-Battar Brigade, a jihadist group that fights with ISIL in eastern Syria. ISIL-trained militants returned home to Libya and pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October 2014. ISIL subsequently sent several senior leaders to Libya to cultivate the group, including Iraqi Abu Nabil al-Anbari, who recently was killed by a U.S. airstrike.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/isil-paris-san-bernardino-affiliates-213438

^^^^ I am surprised that there are no "future affiliates" in countries such as India and Indonesia. There is a lot of support for the ISIS from the native Muslims in these countries and hundreds of Indian and Indonesian nationals have traveled to Syria and Iraq, in order to join the Caliphate. Considering the huge Muslim population residing in these countries, these two nations can become the main focus of the ISIS in the near future.

I´m sure they´re working hard in India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. It may be more at a subversive stage at this point than actual terrorist attacks and destabilization, these people work very systematically for their goals. What works greatly in their favour is that the public generally seems pretty much oblivious to how dangerous and sophisticated this organisation is. Maybe they´ll wake up later.

ISIS NEWS: SWEDEN ON LOCKDOWN; TERROR ATTACKS PLANNED FOR EUROPE; ISIS IN US;

“Feds don’t have a clue where 1,000’s of immigrants with terrorist ties are in the US.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzjVKDaq7Lo

https://www.youtube.com/user/WCJournalism/featured

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/01/politics/isis-in-united-states-research/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/isis-former-german-militant-claims-group-is-planning-co-ordinated-terror-attacks-in-europe-a6778151.html

http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/

In Bangladesh they have carried out a few high profile attacks in the past few months, but they have mostly remained dormant in the other countries. As you said, it is a worrying sign that the law enforcement and intelligence agencies in countries such as India and Indonesia are not taking the threat from the Islamic State seriously.

Yeah yeah, how could I forget BanglaDesh. Now; that´s very fertile ground I´m sure. They´ve been attacking secular forces there and foreigners and Shia clerics etc.

ISIS unveil the Philippines as their new breeding ground for jihadis with their latest propaganda video featuring a secret Filipino jungle training camp

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3368646/ISIS-unveil-Philippines-new-breeding-ground-jihadis-latest-propaganda-video-featuring-secret-Filipino-jungle-training-camp.html

^^^^ I am not surprised. Islamic extremism has a long history in the Philippines (especially in the southern island of Mindanao). The situation has been exacerbated in the recent years, with the huge inflow of Filipino Muslims to Saudi Arabia and Qatar in search of blue-collar jobs. These laborers are brainwashed in Saudi Arabia, and once they return home, they are likely to join any of the local terrorist organizations.  

Syria’s Kurds Have Nearly Tripled Their Territory Fighting the Islamic State in 2015

By Avi Asher-Schapiro

December 22, 2015 | 8:59 pm

Amid the chaos in Syria, the country's Kurds have managed to resist the advances of the Islamic State and carve out a zone of unprecedented autonomy in their own lands.

Over the past year, the YPG Kurdish militia beat back the Islamic State (IS) and nearly tripled the size of Kurdish-controlled territory in Northern Syria, all the while helping shrink the size of the IS caliphate by around 14 percent.

That's according to a new report by the IHS Jane's, a private intelligence company that analyzes international security issues,  and has been tracking the ground war in Syria.

As a result, the Kurds are essentially in control of their own mini-state — which they call Rojava — that runs across the Turkish-Syrian border. Administered by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) the political arm of the YPG, the government in Rojava has reached an understanding with the Assad regime that allows the Kurds to govern their own territory, while beating back IS from the borders.

"The Kurds have had autonomy thrust upon them," explained Michael Gunter, a professor of political science at Tennessee Tech University, and the author of Out of Nowhere: The Kurds of Syria in Peace and War, a recent study of Kurdish politics in Syria. "There's no way they will go back to a subservient position of not controlling their own lands anytime in the future."

Syria's Kurds had long been denied self-determination by president Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez, who both discouraged celebration of Kurdish identity — Hafez even banned their language from schools. But the Syrian Civil War forced Assad to focus his energies elsewhere. And as the Syrian military was re-deployed away from Kurdish territory beginning in 2012, the Kurds seized the initiative, mobilizing militias and asserting control over their own territory with the tacit approval of the Assad regime, which is much more focused on shoring up its major cities than butting heads with the Kurds.

Assad and the Kurds now jointly administer the city of Qamishli, and share control of the oil rich region of Hasakah. That uneasy alliance has been made possible by a mutual enemy: The Islamic State. Since the Islamic State captured Raqqa — the city it consider its capital — back in 2013, the Kurds have shared a long border with the group that stretches across most of northern Syria. Over the past year, the Kurds have fought — and won — two key battles against IS, shoring up their own territory, and cutting off much of IS access to the Turkish border.

https://news-images.vice.com/images/2015/12/22/syrias-kurds-have-nearly-trippled-their-territory-fighting-the-islamic-state-body-image-1450813953.jpg?output-quality=75

Related: Protests Erupt in Turkey as Military Campaign Intensifies in Country's Southeast

Beginning in the fall of 2014, the Islamic State laid siege to Kobani, a Kurdish city on the western edge of Rojava. Kurdish fighters, backed by US airpower, lifted the siege and pushed IS back, effectively liberating the area by the end of January, 2015. In the following months, as IS focused its energies on major cities in Iraq and Syria, the Kurds were able to capture the villages and countryside outside the city, dealing a major territorial blow to IS.

The IHS Jane's report explains that IS lost so much ground to the Kurds because it did not have the military resources to fight on all its fronts.

"Geospatial analysis of our data shows that Islamic State activity outside areas it controls is heavily concentrated around Baghdad and Damascus, but much less so in Kurdish territory," explained Columb Strack, senior Middle East analyst at IHS, and lead analyst for the IHS Conflict Monitor. "This indicates that the Islamic State was overstretched."

WIth IS fighting a multi-front battle against a dizzying array of adversaries —al Qaeda, the Free Syrian Army, the Assad regime and its allies — the Kurds continued to seize the initiative.

In the Spring of 2015, the YPG launched an offensive to take out the IS-controlled border crossing of Tal Abyad, a strategic key city that lies between Kobani in the West and the bulk of Kurdish territory in the East. Fighting between IS and the Kurds — who were backed by US air support — displaced more than 16,000 people.

This past October, Tal Abyad was officially cleared of IS fighters, and integrated into Rojava. The Kurdish victory was made possible, Strack said, because IS had redeployed its forces to far-flung battles in western Syria and Iraq. "The remaining forces in Tal Abyad were so depleted that they had to be re-enforced with... religious police units from Raqqa," Strack explained.

Related: Caught Between the Islamic State and Erdogan: Turkey's Most Important Opposition Politician Talks to VICE News

For the Kurds in Syria, the fight against IS has been existential. "It's a struggle for their very lives," Gunter said.

But it's also been an opportunity to forge an entirely new political culture in the burgeoning lands under their control. Rajava is governed by a co-presidents Asya Abdullah and Salih Muslim Muhammad, who espouse a secular, leftist, and unabashedly feminist worldview drawn from the writings of the Kurdish nationalist thinker Abdullah Ocalan, who sits in a Turkish jail.

"They see themselves as a post-state, utopian project," Gunter explains.

But so far, building a new society sandwiched between IS, Assad, and Turkey is far from utopian. IS continues to launch deadly suicide raids into Kurdish territory, and Turkey has more than once bombed YPG positions across the Syrian border as punishment for Rojava's links to the Turkish Kurdish militant group the PKK.

With no end in sight in the Syrian Civil War, the Kurds are hunkering down. "They live amidst a series of broken states," Gunter said. "There's no way to know what the future will be."

Watch VICE News' documentary PKK Youth: Fighting for Kurdish Neighborhoods:

https://news.vice.com/article/syrias-kurds-have-nearly-tripled-their-territory-fighting-the-islamic-state-in-2015

Iraqi Troops Attack Central Ramadi, Vow Victory in a Few Days
Ferocious Fighting Reported Against Remaining ISIS Forces

by Jason Ditz, December 22, 2015

Still hoping to fulfill their pledge to capture the Anbar Province capital city of Ramadi by the end of the year, Iraqi troops advanced against the central part of the city, with reports of fierce fighting against ISIS forces who are still defending the district where the government buildings are.

ISIS captured Ramadi back in May, and Iraqi troops have spent the last seven months attempting to surround it, with the hope of eventually retaking it. Officials now say they believe they will have a full victory in “a few days.”

Details are still emerging, but Iraqi Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool claimed “dozens” of ISIS fighters had been killed. He refused to provide any casualty estimates on the government side, but they reported facing sniper fire as well as suicide bombers.

The US has offered “advisers” and attack helicopters for the battle, but Iraq refused. Iraqi officials say the primary difficulty was crossing the Euphrates River after ISIS blew up the bridge, but their army engineers have since repaired it and advanced again.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/12/22/iraqi-troops-attack-central-ramadi-vow-victory-in-a-few-days/

At least 17 people were killed when Islamic State militants attacked a shopping mall in Baghdad on Monday night, the New York Times reports. Five members of the Iraqi security forces were among the dead. Forty people were wounded.

From the Times:

Amid a gun battle that raged for nearly two hours, officials initially feared a hostage crisis was in the works. But when the battle was over, they said most of the deaths had been caused by a car bomb that initiated the attack and by two suicide bombers who struck at the entrance to the mall, which houses mostly women’s clothing stores known for discount prices.
According to SITE Intelligence Group, ISIS took responsibility for the attack on social media, saying that a total of four militants had been involved.

http://gawker.com/at-least-17-dead-in-isis-suicide-attack-on-baghdad-mall-1752392844?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

UN Reports ‘Staggering’ Civilian Toll in ISIS War in Iraq
Faults Human Rights Violations by All Sides

by Jason Ditz, January 19, 2016

A new report by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) is warning of a “staggering” civilian death toll in the ISIS war in Iraq, with their own accounting putting the toll at 18,802 civilians killed and 36,245 wounded since the beginning of 2014.

Officials acknowledge that this is almost certainly a dramatic under-count, with the death tolls in the Anbar Province, where all the heaviest fighting has happened, coming straight from the provincial health directorate, and generally not covering the broad territory held by ISIS within the province.

While the report focuses heavily on human rights violations by ISIS, it also reports continued evidence being amassed of violations by the Iraqi security forces and its militia allies, along with the Kurdish Peshmerga.

The report also accuses ISIS of holding an estimated 3,500 people as slaves across Iraqi territory, using many as human shields, and also pressing 800-900 children into military service for the conflict.

It particularly concludes that it is important for the Iraqi government to ensure that its associated factions are fighting under government control and being held accountable for their actions, particularly if they move against civilians. This has been a long-standing problem for Iraq, which heavily relies on the Shi’ite militias but has been forced to more or less give them the run of Sunni towns they conquer, leading to widespread revenge killings.

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/01/19/un-reports-staggering-civilian-toll-in-isis-war-in-iraq/

i thought it was gifted to the ISIS  ;D

I think it was. Over 2000 Humvees, 40 tanks, artillery batteries and enough smaller arms for an army. If you don´t blow all that up before leaving it´s a gift.

In a new video purportedly released by the Islamic State titled “Kill Them Wherever You Find Them,” ISIS threatens Paris with more “November 13” style attacks. The video was released by ISIS’ Al-Hayat Media and features the eight November 13 Paris attackers, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud.

The video begins and is presented as if it were an encrypted email. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has commented on the encryption code shown and has called it “fake.”

The video then shows the eight Paris attackers (four Belgian, three French, and two Iraqi) killing ISIS prisoners. The footage appears to prove that the Paris attackers spent time being radicalized by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria before the November 13 attacks.

Two of the men that perpetrated beheadings in the video include Abu Fuad and Abu Qital, who were allegedly “sent by [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi.”

The video also calls for more lone wolf attacks by ISIS members in Paris and the West.

http://heavy.com/news/2016/01/new-isis-islamic-state-news-pictures-videos-kill-them-wherever-you-find-them-et-tuez-les-ou-que-vous-les-rencontriez-french-english-translation-paris-attacks-full-uncensored-youtube/

ISIS planning for 'large-scale' attacks on Europe: Europol

AMSTERDAM (AFP) - The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has honed the ability to launch global attacks and is set to focus more on Europe following the Paris massacre, the chief of the EU police agency Europol said on Monday (Jan 25).

Rob Wainwright told a news conference that “the so-called Islamic State had developed a new combat style capability to carry out a campaign of large-scale terrorist attacks on a global stage – with a particular focus in Europe.”

“So-called Islamic State has a willingness and a capability to carry out further attacks in Europe, and of course all national authorities are working to prevent that from happening,” he added.


Wainwright was unveiling the findings of a new Europol report on changes in how the extremist group operates, coinciding with the launch of the agency’s new counterterrorism centre in The Hague.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the Nov 13 Paris attacks in which 130 people were killed, releasing a video on Sunday purporting to show nine of the extremsts in which they threaten “coalition countries” including Britain.

A US-led coalition has been fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq since September 2014.

“ISIS is preparing more terrorist attacks, including more ‘Mumbai-style’ attacks, to be executed in member states of the EU, and in France in particular,” the Europol report said.

“The attacks will be primarily directed at soft targets, because of the impact it generates. Both the November Paris attacks and the October 2015 bombing of a Russian airliner suggest a shift in ISIS strategy towards going global.”

ISIS had developed an “external action command” which was trained for “special forces-style attacks” internationally, the report said.

But the report played down fears that extremists were smuggling themselves into Europe as part of the huge wave of refugees and migrants that the continent is dealing with, many of whom are fleeing the war in Syria.

“There is no concrete evidence that terrorist travellers systematically use the flow of refugees to enter Europe unnoticed,” it said.

It warned however that many new arrivals were vulnerable to radicalisation or recruitment, with evidence that extremist recruiters were specifically targeting refugee centres.

One of the main tasks of the new Europol counter-terrorism centre was to collect details on the estimated 5,000 Europeans who have gone to fight with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Wainwright said.

“We already have details on 3,700 fighters actively engaged in the conflict zone but that’s not the full picture and it’s something we will be addressing through priority work of the new centre,” it said.

Meanwhile British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office on Monday dismissed the latest video released by ISIS.

“We’re in the process of examining this latest propaganda video which is another move from an appalling terrorist group that’s clearly in decline and in retreat,” Cameron’s spokeswoman told reporters.

The footage shows a picture of Cameron accompanied by the words in English: “Whoever stands in the ranks of kufr (unbelievers) will be a target for our swords.”

http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/isis-planning-for-large-scale-attacks-on-europe-europol

it is really scary that isis has such powerful weapons... now, they can attack every country whenever they want.. nato shoud take precatuions..

But the report played down fears that jihadists were smuggling themselves into Europe as part of the huge wave of refugees and migrants that the continent is dealing with many of whom are fleeing the war in Syria.

Iraq's military said on Friday it was mobilizing troops to prepare for an offensive the government has pledged to launch this year to retake the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State.

Hundreds of forces from the army's 15th division reached Makhmour base, 70 km (45 miles) south of Mosul, and more forces, including Sunni Muslim tribal fighters, were expected to arrive in coming days, said Brigadier-General Yahya Rasool, spokesman for the joint operations command.

Defense Minister Khaled al-Obaidi told Reuters last month that Iraq would launch the Mosul operation in the first half of the year and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said 2016 would see the "final victory" against the militants.

Some U.S. officials have endorsed that assessment, but a top U.S. intelligence officer told Congress this week any operation to retake Mosul would be long and complex and unlikely to finish this year.

With more than a million people still living there, Mosul is the largest city controlled by Islamic State, which declared a 'caliphate' in swathes of territory it seized in Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014.

Retaking it would be a huge boost for Iraqi forces who, backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition, reclaimed the western city of Ramadi from Islamic State in late December.

Mosul, however, is a far larger city with a populace made up of many sects. And even in Ramadi, Iraqi forces are still working to secure that city and its environs.

Iraq's Rasool told Reuters on Friday that troop movements south of Mosul were being coordinated with the peshmerga, the armed forces of the autonomous Kurdish region north and east of Nineveh which are expected to join the campaign.

"Once we complete all the preparations, we will officially announce the date for the start of Mosul operations," he added.

The United States, which is leading an international campaign in both Iraq and Syria to defeat the jihadist group, has said its strategy is to regain territory at the heart of Islamic State's cross-border state, take Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa, and destroy the confidence of its fighters that it can expand as a magnet for jihadis.

Iraq's army, weakened by years of corruption and mismanagement following the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, is trying to rebuild itself after collapsing 18 months ago in the face of Islamic State's lightning advance.

(Reporting By Stephen Kalin and Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-mosul-idUSKCN0VL27Z

Why these vehicles should be blown up? They were not surrounded or under siege. There was a land passage connecting the government held areas, and it was possible to evacuate these heavy weaponry and equipment rather than handing them over to the ISIS in a platter. Had they run out of fuel, then it was still understandable. But that was not the case.

They ran away leaving those vehicles and tanks and a mountain of arms. If you leave it intact for the enemy it´s a gift.

I wouldn't wonder if those vehicles were left on purpose. They want the war to continue. Wars make money.

That was not my point. Why couldn't these soldiers take their vehicles, and then run away using them? All the Humvees were loaded with fuel, and it was possible to transport them to the government controlled territory. And we should not forget the fact that the Iraqi soldiers had the numerical advantage of 1:100 over the ISIS barbarians.

ISIS Engages in Heavy Recruiting in Pakistan
New Affiliate Has Growing Presence in Karachi

by Jason Ditz, March 02, 2016

Beyond its massive territorial possessions in Iraq and Syria, ISIS is establishing affiliates across the world, recruiting wherever they can find potential followers. One of the biggest potential recruiting pools is Pakistan.

ISIS has found several fertile environments around the world for recruitment, and several where territory was more readily seized. In Pakistan, seizing territory outright is likely to be far more difficult, with myriad Islamist factions already in place in the tribal areas, and a powerful military.

Karachi, one of the biggest cities on the planet, seems to be the center of ISIS recruitment in Pakistan, reflecting the different approach ISIS has to take in Pakistan than in, say, Libya. There’s no realistic chance of ISIS ever taking over Karachi, but it’s a huge city with a lot of disaffected people in it, perfect recruitment targets.

ISIS has also established a fast growing affiliate in neighboring Afghanistan, and with that affiliate based around Jalalabad, on the Pakistan border, they are finding themselves quickly at odds with not only the governments there, but with rival militants who don’t want the competition.

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/03/02/isis-engages-in-heavy-recruiting-in-pakistan/

Syrian Kurds: Over 200 Killed in Fighting With ISIS Over Tel Abyad
YPG Insists They Retain Control Over Town

by Jason Ditz, March 02, 2016

ISIS attacked the town of Tel Abyad, on the Syria-Turkey border, over the weekend and fighting raged for several days. The Kurdish YPG is claiming victory, but a costly one, claiming over 200 people were killed in the fighting there.

YPG official Redur Xelil reported 140 ISIS fighters were killed in the battle, along with 43 YPG fighters. 23 civilian bystanders were also slain in the course of the fighting over the key border crossing.

http://news.antiwar.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/abyad.png

Initial reports were that some of the ISIS fighters who attacked Tel Abyad crossed in from the Turkish side of the border. US airstrikes were launched around the area over the weekend, aiming to stall the ISIS advance.

The YPG seized Tel Abyad back in June and has held it in the face of several offensives by ISIS since. The town is the most convenient border crossing into Turkey from the ISIS capital of Raqqa, and its loss has forced ISIS to use more roundabout paths.

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/03/02/syrian-kurds-over-200-killed-in-fighting-with-isis-over-tel-abyad/

ISIS Lines Collapsing as Syrian Army Closes in on Palmyra, Raqqa
With the ceasefire largely holding, the Syrian Army and its allies can now focus on destroying ISIS

With the fragile ceasefire largely holding, the Syrian army and its allies have driven eastward into ISIS-held territory. And they've made significant gains in the last week:

On Friday morning in the southeastern countryside of the Homs Governorate, the Syrian Arab Army’s 120th Brigade of the 2nd Division – in close coordination with the National Defense Forces (NDF), Liwaa Suqour Al-Sham (Desert Hawks Brigade), and Dara’ Qalamoun (Qalamoun Shield) – continued their advance towards the strategic city of Quraytayn, striking the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham’s (ISIS) positions at the important hilltop of Tal Quraytayn.
ISIS is now facing attacks on at least 3 fronts:...more

http://russia-insider.com/en/isis-lines-collapsing-syrian-army-closes-raqqa/ri13187

Usa directly supported Isis by dropping them logistical materials from planes in Iraq. It is, interesting that, when Al Queda ended, ISIS began from Al Queda left.
Did you know that Bin Ladeen was Bush's company's partner?

That's good. Keep sending supplies.

The definition of Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.---A. Einstein

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/20151126_insane.jpg?1448550733

Idiots arming morons, chapter 638...

Tanks for nothing! US-backed Syrian rebel division attacked & looted by Al-Qaeda affiliate

Published time: 14 Mar, 2016 05:52

In what could be one of the worst failures of the Pentagon’s program to arm Syrian rebels, several bases with American weapons, armored vehicles and US-trained fighters were captured by Al-Nusra Front. The jihadists and “moderate rebels” are blaming each other for the attack.
Trends
Syria unrest
READ MORE: ‘Truce hasn’t changed anything, terrorists intensified attacks’ – Aleppo residents to RT

Division 13 of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which had received both US weapons and training, on Sunday said it was attacked by Al-Nusra Front militants – radical Islamist fighters affiliated with Al-Qaeda. The jihadists looted the FSA group’s depots in the town of Maarrat Al-Nuuman in Syria’s Idlib province.

Read more
EXCLUSIVE: Turkey ‘protects & supplies’ Al-Nusra camps at its border – Syria’s YPG to RT
Though it has widely been reported that weapons and dozens of Division 13 fighters have been captured, there are conflicting accounts of how much the jihadists could actually carry. Some media reports claimed that the haul included US-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles, firearms and ammunition, and unspecified armored vehicles, including a tank. The rebel group’s chief has denied they have lost anti-tank missiles, telling AFP that only “light weapons” have been taken.

Moreover, up to 40 Division 13 fighters have been taken hostage and four killed, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said, though the remote “sources on the ground” routinely cited by the UK-based organization are often hard to verify.

Adding to the rebel group’s dismay, Al-Nusra was also the first to release an online statement – blaming Division 13 for provoking the attack. In turn, the rebels denied attacking Al-Nusra and accused them of an unexpected armed assault on a checkpoint, set up at the request of the local population.

The reason reportedly given by the US-backed group as to why they couldn’t have attacked the Islamists? Too weak for the job.


The feud between the militant factions, once close allies in fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces, has been brewing for some time, according to AP. Al-Nusra has recently suppressed demonstrations and arrested protesters in the city of Idlib, and reportedly replaced the tricolor of the Syrian rebels with the black Al-Qaeda flag there.

On Friday, in Maaret al-Numan, motorcyclists waving the black flag of Al-Nusra threatened to fire on a protest, shouting “Allahu akbar” or “God is greatest.”

Read more
Members of Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front. © Ammar AbdullahCapture or betrayal? US-trained Syrian rebels with weapons end up in hands of Nusra jihadists
Interestingly, Al-Nusra has a history of looting US-backed opposition forces: last summer, jihadists kidnapped members of the US-trained Division 30, while in September a whole stock of US-supplied weapons and hardware was captured.

The Pentagon’s failed rebel-training program was canceled in October, after dozens of US-trained rebels abandoned Division 30 and handed the weapons they had been supplied to Al-Nusra upon crossing from Turkey into Syria.

However, the head of US Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, proposed to restart training for Syria’s so-called “moderate” rebels.

A month later, the US State Department admitted that some of the “moderates” had been successfully recruited by Al-Nusra in Syria.

READ MORE: ‘US created monster of al-Qaeda, yet believes Iran supported 9/11 terrorists' (OP-ED)

https://www.rt.com/news/335476-syria-nusra-loots-pentagon-rebels/

ISIS plans for mini-Caliphate gains momentum

Hafsa Kara-Mustapha

Hafsa Kara-Mustapha is a journalist, political analyst and commentator with a special focus on the Middle East and Africa. She has worked for the FT group and Reuters and her work has been published in the Middle East magazine, Jane's Foreign report, El Watan and a host of international publications. A regular pundit on TV and radio, Hafsa can regularly be seen on RT and Press TV.

Published time: 21 Mar, 2016 12:17

According to ISIS, the Caliphate needs to spread from Iraq all the way to the Atlantic. The terror network that emerged in Iraq in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of 2003, is moving West after establishing a firm base in Libya.
The organization that relies on US support to clear Arab ground before it settles has opted for Tunisia as its next outpost.

In early March, ISIS operatives carried out a daring attack on a small town in the south of Tunisia, close to the Libyan border.

Most of the assailants were eventually killed or captured, but the attack left Tunisia severely scarred. After suffering several attacks in the last twelve months, this latest foray well inside Tunisian territory clearly indicates ISIS is looking to settle in the small North African nation.

The Tunisian army, which in the past couple of years has been working in close collaboration with the Algerian military in a bid to stop both ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb from crossing their respective borders, failed this time to stop what numerous sources had been predicting for weeks.

ISIS terrorists entered Tunisia and attempted the take-over of the town of Ben Guedrane. The town itself is small and insignificant, but its capture would have signaled the permanent presence of ISIS inside a new nation.

The goal, as it turned out, was to establish a small Caliphate inside Tunisia.

Despite having an overtly anti-radical government Tunisia is the country that surprisingly has provided ISIS with its highest number of recruits.

The deepening economic crisis in which Tunisia was thrown into after the ouster of Ben Ali and the consequent Arab Spring meant that young unemployed Tunisians were increasingly attracted to the concept of 'jihad' that would guarantee them a regular income and potential for progression in the ranks of an organization with grand ambitions.

The disenfranchised youth of Tunisia were providing the ideal fertile ground for ISIS to not only inflate its numbers but act as the 'respectable' face of ISIS. As perfect Arab speakers, Tunisians can therefore claim to understand Arabic and the sacred texts used by the organization to justify its actions. Those recruits coming from Europe or Asia and who do not understand Arabic are therefore entirely reliant upon native speakers to translate or narrate the texts they will need to establish the much dreamed about Caliphate.

Interestingly, while the Tunisian recruits are neither scholars or even remotely versed in theological studies, their limited knowledge is what makes them prized recruits, teaching non- Arab speaking arrivals whatever is needed to be learned irrespective of its authenticity or not: packaging the teachings in Arabic is what makes the discourse appear authentic. The European recruits rely on Arab speakers to translate supposedly sacred texts their 'teachers' never actually read themselves.

In this opaque scene of selective learning, recruiters are able to manipulate the new arrivals as they wish, but the help of native Arab speakers is essential in making the deceit believable.

That some Tunisian recruits were in fact involved in a life of petty crime prior to their arrival in Syria or Iraq is neither a deterrent for ISIS' leadership or a barrier for progress. In fact, their murky pasts are often a boon to the organization as they become favorable to carrying out the worst crimes in a bid to prove their loyalty to their new - generous - employers.

Exploiting oil resources from Southern Iraq, as well as generating money from human trafficking, ISIS is a fabulously wealthy organization that can afford to reward its diligent recruits handsomely.

For those escaping what has now become abject poverty in Tunisia, the offer is attractive in particular as job opportunities in once prosperous Libya have dried up since the country was destroyed by a NATO-led war in 2011.

The fall of Ben Guedrane would have signaled a major victory for ISIS in particular as it is having to retreat from some areas of Syria, and is looking to develop its presence in Libya and further southwest into the African continent.

Meanwhile, Britain and the US are deploying troops with the official aim of destroying ISIS, implanted in Libya thanks to their military operation five years ago.

A return to peace in Libya is certainly not in Britain or the US' interest in light of the huge funds frozen by these governments when it was decided Gaddafi had to be removed.

Through the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), Gaddafi - thanks to the oil price hike of 2007-2010 - pumped billions into scores of projects. From stakes in major companies, to prime real estate in London, Paris or Rome, the funds currently frozen and unaccounted for run into several billions.

Pearson, one time owner of the Financial Times, even sold a 3 percent stake to the LIA.

Should ISIS target Tunisia in such a spectacular way, both the US and Britain will have no trouble in selling further military interventions in North Africa, even if it was those initial interventions in Iraq and later in Libya, which paved the way for ISIS' criminal enterprise.

During a meeting with British Premier David Cameron, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al Sisi warned against Western intervention in Libya.

Despite his apparent willingness to work with Western capitals, even Sisi recognises that US troops on Arab ground usually make bad situations far worse.

In an uncharacteristically candid remark to Cameron, Sisi explained why adding fuel to a raging fire was never a good idea, especially when the flames risk engulfing the rest of the region while both London and Washington will remain sheltered from its consequences.

At a time when the British government is approving major cuts to its welfare system, public opinion is wary of more costly foreign operations. However, the spectre of having an ISIS 'Caliphate' - however insignificant - so close to European shores would give Cameron the much-needed boost he needs in parliament should he put the motion to go into Libya to a vote.

In the US, Obama is in the last leg of his second and therefore final term in office. He is already more focused on his legacy than any short term plans for war. Thus, in order to get support for further intervention the casus belli would have to be substantial.

As Libya continues to sink ever deeper into lawlessness, Tunisia appears to be ISIS' next short term plan. Having considerably affected its vital tourism sector in the last year alone, forcing scores of young Tunisians into unemployment, the network will have to strike again and in a formidable way in order to indicate the Maghreb is its next treasured outpost.

Meanwhile, as war loving leaders and their lucrative partners in the military industrial complex continue to look for ways to justify further Arab interventions, no doubt ISIS - which has so far worked almost in tandem with those leaders -  will provide the much needed impetus for US troops on African ground.

In that respect, ISIS has never failed to disappoint.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/336426-isis-plans-caliphate-libya/

ISIS, oil & Turkey: RT films trove of jihadist docs detailing illegal trade with Ankara (EXCLUSIVE)

Published time: 24 Mar, 2016 03:00
Edited time: 24 Mar, 2016 05:12

https://www.rt.com/news/336967-isis-files-oil-turkey-exclusive/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

An RT Documentary crew filming in northern Syria has seen Islamic State (IS, ISIS/ISIL) documents abandoned by retreating terrorists and found by the Kurds that, along with captured IS recruits, provide a stunning insight into the alleged Turkey-IS oil trade links.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Syrian war, IS became a game-changer in Iraq and, in particular, Syria. Beheadings on camera, mass killings, and enslavement, as well as apparent connections to the Paris and Brussels attacks had become synonymous with the terror group, giving it wide publicity.

Running a viable militant organization with such remarkable capabilities would be impossible without some logistical and financial support from the outside.

Turkey, which has been actively engaged in the Syrian war since the outset, has repeatedly denied claims that it is aiding IS. However, while Ankara insists that it is the jihadist group’s sworn enemy, facts on the ground often tell a different story.

RT has spoken to several witnesses who were involved in Islamic State’s trade activities and accessed the terror group’s documents, which provide insight into how and where foreign militants enter Syria to join the terrorist “state.”

Detailed oil invoices
The RT Documentary team did most of its filming in the town of Shaddadi, located in the Syrian province Hasakah, which has been partly overrun by IS jihadists. Following the liberation of Shaddadi, which is home to some 10,000 people, RT filmed Kurdish soldiers walking around what used to be the homes of IS fighters and examining piles documents that had been left behind.

Some of the files seized at the scene turned out to be detailed invoices used by IS to calculate daily revenues from their oil fields and refineries, as well as the amount of oil extracted there. All the documents had Islamic State’s symbol at the top.

The files showed that “IS has kept very professional records of their oil business,” said the author of the new RT Documentary on Islamic State filmed in northern Syria, who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons.

Every invoice included the name of the driver, the vehicle type driven, and the weight of the truck, both full and empty, as well as the agreed upon price and invoice number.

One of the discovered invoices dated 11 January, 2016, says that IS had extracted some 1,925 barrels of oil from Kabibah oil field and sold it for $38,342.

IS oil goes to Turkey – IS fighters come via Turkey
RT spoke to local residents who had been forced to work in the IS oil industry about what it was like working at the terrorist-controlled oil refinery and where the extracted oil was sold.

The locals attested that “the extracted oil was delivered to an oil refinery, where it was converted into gasoline, gas and other petroleum products. Then the refined product was sold,” the RT documentary’s author said. “Then intermediaries from Raqqa and Allepo arrived to pick up the oil and often mentioned Turkey.”

Important information revealing the connection between IS and Turkey was provided by a Turkish militant previously captured by the Kurds. The IS recruit said on camera that the terrorist group does, in fact, sell oil to Turkey.

“Without even us asking the fighter directly, he admitted that the reason why it was so easy for him to cross the Turkish border and join IS was, in part, due to the fact that Turkey also benefited. When asked how, he said that Turkey gets something out of it – something such as oil.”

RT was also able to speak with a Kurdish soldier in the area, who displayed a collection of passports he had gathered from the dead bodies of IS fighters. The documentary crew’s exclusive footage shows the documents of several jihadists who had come from all over the world, including countries such as Bahrain, Libya, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Most of these foreign fighters seemed to have come via Turkey, as all of their passports contained entry stamps issued at Turkish border checkpoints.

A YPG member also provided some photos that were retrieved from a USB drive allegedly belonging to future IS militants. One photo showed three men standing in front of the Obelisk of Theodosius, known today as Sultanahmet Meydani, a famous landmark in Istanbul. The next photo showed the three among other fellow militants somewhere in Syria – all armed and equipped.

One of the IS fighters that RT interviewed revealed that there had been no border guards waiting for them when they crossed from Turkey into Syria.

Islamist propaganda printed in Istanbul
Turkey’s logistical support for extremist fighters trying to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, or at least its non-interference with their cross-border movements, has been widely reported, but little has been said about the ideological support coming from Turkish soil.

Among the documents left behind by the terrorists at an IS-run hospital, RT’s crew discovered an Islamist propaganda leaflet printed in Arabic titled “How to wage a perfect battle against the criminal Assad’s regime,” which described ways to combat the Syrian government.

Curiously, the brochure was printed in Turkey, with the cover openly displaying the postal address and phone number of an Istanbul printing house, supplemented by Facebook contacts.

“Many of the people spoke about the connection with Turkey. Turkey is the direct neighbor of IS. If it was willing to close the ‘connection’ between Turkey and IS, the terrorist organization could no longer survive,” the author of the RT documentary said, recalling interviews with Kurds and captured IS recruits. “If IS would stop receiving weapons, new recruits, food, and other help from Turkey, then IS would lose a big sponsor.”

Turkey benefits from Islamic State because the terrorist group provides it with cheap oil and is fighting both Syria’s government and Kurdish population. This is an opinion shared by both Kurds and their mortal enemies from the jihadist organization. The IS documents obtained by RT may provide additional evidence revealing the dirty game being played by the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Syria.

Isis attacked Mousul and captured all those weapons and wehicles with billions dollars in banks. Iraqi's couldn't defend their homeland against them and retrated without shooting even one bullet. And you expect  us to believe this?
USAF drops logistical aid to enemies of Isis bu unfortunately they dropped them to Isis. It was by mistake guys!
Whoever if doesn't understand that US founded and supported Isis, should be a big moron.

It certainly seems fishy. The U.S. dropped over 20 thousand bombs on ISIS for a year with no meaningful results, except for bomb makers and their stock prices of course. It´s all murky to say the last and now those terrorists strike next door to the headquarters of freakin NATO and the European Union in Brussels !

Published on Mar 24, 2016
An RT Documentary crew filming in northern Syria has seen Islamic State (IS, ISIS/ISIL) documents abandoned by retreating terrorists and found by the Kurds that, along with captured IS recruits, provide a stunning insight into the alleged Turkey-IS oil trade links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tosgw2HZehQ

Arrest of ‘high risk, high value’ suspect in France interrupts terror plot in ‘advanced stages’

Twitchy  by Brett Taylor Yesterday

Breaking news from Europe Thursday night: The deadly bombings in Brussels, Belgium put Europe on high alert this week and accelerated the investigation of other potential terror plots in major cities like London and Paris. One of those terror sweeps is said to have led French police to arrest a man who was in the “advanced stages” of planning yet another terrorist attack on France, although France’s interior minister is not yet revealing any details.

BREAKING: Man arrested in France in "advanced stages" of plotting another terror attack https://t.co/bJQIaH8Q5h pic.twitter.com/KrYLrFaDR9

— The Hill (@thehill) March 24, 2016

Breaking: Cops bust terror suspect in France who was in "advanced stages" of attack plot, AP reports

— Shepard Smith (@ShepNewsTeam) March 24, 2016

Frenchman in advanced stages of plot arrested – Catherine Herridge reports for us live now -OTR #greta @FoxNews

— Greta Van Susteren (@greta) March 24, 2016

@greta @FoxNews And he's not talking. .

— Lass4x4 (@lass4x4) March 24, 2016

@ShepNewsTeam you think the French waterboarded ol Salah Abdelslam? Things are going south when Americans are bigger pussies that the French

— graeme (@theshockers10) March 24, 2016

MORE: France arrests man in ‘advanced stages’ of terror plot against country, officials say https://t.co/nl5Q3a8xMk pic.twitter.com/BBmcut4olo

— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 24, 2016

Fox News reports:

Twin terror raids in France and Belgium Thursday resulted in multiple arrests, including one Frenchman who was described as being in the “advanced stages” of a plot to attack the country.

However, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the man arrested in Argenteuil, on the northern outskirts of Paris, was not linked “at this stage” to recent attacks in Paris and Brussels.

He said the person was implicated at a “high level” in the alleged plot but provided no details.

@greta @FoxNews "Frenchman"

— Albert Reichmann (@AlbertReichmann) March 24, 2016

@greta @FoxNews Please stop calling them "Frenchmen." They are radical Muslims who reside in France. They are NOT French.

— Lydia Lozano (@LydiaLaLo) March 24, 2016

An ISIS-led attack on Paris last November killed 130 people and wounded more than 300.

The post Arrest of ‘high risk, high value’ suspect in France interrupts terror plot in ‘advanced stages’ appeared first on twitchy.com.

Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was occupied by Islamic State since May of 2014 before the Syrian Army liberated it on Thursday. The US State Dept is less than enthusiastic about the development, however.

As the Syrian Army advanced on Palmyra, the US government seemed indifferent to the ancient city’s liberation from the hands of Islamic State. Only when pressed by reporters did the State Department call ISIS “probably a greater evil” than President Assad.

Is 'Syrian Gov't or Islamic State' Better? Confused State Dept Spokesman Struggles to Answer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE_mXD-k_4o

According to Belgian authorities, six people have been detained as part of the investigation into Tuesday’s suicide bombings in Brussels. Three of them were detained in front of the federal prosecutor’s office, which said the arrests came during police searches in the neighborhoods of Schaerbeek and Jette, as well as in the city centre. This comes after the authorities lowered the security alert level down a notch from four – the highest level – to three, and as the search continues for at least one Brussels attacker now on the run. Police are looking for the man captured by a security camera at Brussels airport along with two suicide bombers. The man who was wearing a hat and a cream jacket has not been named. There are reports that a suspected second bomber in the attack on the metro is also being sought. The self-proclaimed Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks which killed at least 31 people and wounded 270. Turkey’s accusations that it had deported one of the suicide bombers and had warned Belgium about him prompted two Belgian ministers to offer to resign on Thursday. -- Asia Times

Iraq’s Offensive Near Mosul Collapsing in the Face of Mass Desertions
Locals Accuse Army of Looting Early in Offensive

by Jason Ditz, March 29, 2016

Less than a week ago, Iraqi officials were touting a new military offensive against some villages near Mosul as a major sign of progress in the war against ISIS, and their success in taking three villages was proof of ISIS being “in retreat.”

Today that offensive is stalled outright, on the brink of collapse, as low morale has many Iraqi troops leaving their positions, with Kurdish officials who were involved in the fighting saying the army “have no will to fight.”

The Kurds are in a position to know, as they hold a checkpoint between the villages and Shi’ite territory, and have been stopping deserters en masse, detaining those they can but ultimately watching as their key allies ditch the battle.

US officials are downplaying the concerns, insisting that the Iraqi troops are performing up to expectations. Locals are complaining that the troops showed up, looted their villages, and then just left, insisting they are no better than ISIS.

Looting and sectarian unrest are old problems, however, and the real problem is that this force of thousands of Iraqi troops is supposed to be the one taking over the heavily guarded city of Mosul. If they can’t even handle the villages, that Mosul offensive is far, far out of reach.

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/03/29/iraqs-offensive-near-mosul-collapsing-in-the-face-of-mass-desertions/

That, was a planned operation i think. Isis attacked Mousul. There wasn't any intelligence, there wasn't any preparation, no counterattack. Then easily they got all vehicles, weapons, amnos and billions dollars in banks. And they expect us to believe that.

It looks very fishy. That Iraqi force in Mosul outnumbered ISIS like 30 to 1. And they ran away leaving enough armaments and stuff for an army. Then later there was a similar debacle at Ramadi although on a smaller scale. This took place in 2014. Ramadi has been retaken of course, at the cost of pretty much a total ruin of that city. It´s going to be ugly in Mosul.

Most of the Iraqi soldiers who were stationed in Mosul were "ghost soldiers". They existed only in paper. So I am not very sure about this "outnumbered by 30 to 1" claim. And most of the remaining conscripts were Shiite Arabs from Southern Iraq, who had no intention to defend the Northern Sunni heartland from the ISIS barbarians.

Yes, those ghost soldiers. That´s also a huge and extremely expensive problem in Afghanistan. Non-existent forces. The country is falling back into the lap of the Taliban and ISIS is well entrenched there too. The U.S. puppets in charge control major cities and hardly that. The other day the parliament building in Kabul got hit with rocket fire. NATO has some forces in Afghanistan but those tin soldiers from Germany and other European military non-powers are largely useless.

Pretty sure the US military just left them behind...
Back in Nam, when we pulled out, we burned and blew up everything.

Goes to show you how the political perspective changed, or did we aid isis on purpose?

In Mosul ISIS also got some 40 tanks, serious artillery pieces and a mountain of small arms and other very useful military gear. It´s just tragi-comic.

Well... now the policy is to refrain from carpet bombing the terrorists. The American pilots no longer have the power to bomb enemy troops on their own disposition. They should first get the permission from the Head Quarters. By the time the permission arrives, the enemy might have vanished out of their sights.

Near Mosul, Iraqi Troops Again Flee From ISIS as Soon as Shooting Starts
Rout of Iraqi Troops Another Morale Boost for ISIS

by Jason Ditz, April 08, 2016

The notion that ISIS fighters are unrivaled on the battlefield doesn’t always stand up to close scrutiny, but the ISIS leadership can certainly continue to push that narrative this week, after routing an Iraqi military offensive near Mosul.

As has so often been the case, the Iraqi troops didn’t handle coming under fire particularly well, and fled en masse as soon as the shooting started in earnest, with analysts warning that the Iraqi troops simply aren’t combat ready, and lost what little ground they took almost immediately.

Having ISIS drastically outnumbered by most estimates, Iraqi officials have been talking up the idea that the entire war would be won by year’s end, only to have this preliminary offensive put on indefinite hiatus, as they wait for reinforcements to replace the deserters.

It’s unsurprising, given how poorly the military has done, that Iraq is again turning to Shi”ite militias to try to turn the tide of battle, but many Shi’ites oppose sending their fighters so deep into Sunni country, to fight against Sunni Islamists.

And while the Pentagon is downplaying the losses, insisting the Iraqi troops are “learning the area,” it’s undeniable that ISIS has once again fallen into a major propaganda win, as Iraqi troops turn their tails and run, and reportedly flagging ISIS morale has been boosted.

http://news.antiwar.com/2016/04/08/near-mosul-iraqi-troops-again-flee-from-isis-as-soon-as-shooting-starts/

Philippine troops clash with Muslim rebels; 23 killed, 73 hurt

Hurriyet Daily News  9:35 am

Philippine soldiers battled a group of about 120 Muslim rebels linked to ISIL in a ten-hour assault on a southern island that killed 23 people, an army spokesman said on April 10

Interesting article from the Indy:

The female fighters that put the fear into jihadis - because they'll rob them of paradise
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-in-iraq-the-women-kurd-and-yazidi-fighters-that-put-the-fear-into-jihadis-because-theyll-rob-a6977761.html

http://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_medium/public/thumbnails/image/2016/04/10/16/20160405-diego_cupolo_dsc_1.jpg

I don´t doubt that there are female militia units over there but I´m not sure about the story about ISIS being fearful of them because of the heaven thing. If they are, they´re probably not worth much generally as fighters. These are mercenaries, if they´re worth their salt they won´t especially care whether they fight men or women.

Radical muslim has made ISIS & al-qaeda stronger than they ever were before, looks this problem will never finish until good muslim take a part to fight with ISIS,al-qaeda.

German soldiers 'may have joined Isis in Syria'

Published: 12 Apr 2016 10:15 GMT+02:00

At least 29 German soldiers have travelled to Syria or Iraq in recent years, an internal military report has found, with some believed to have joined terror group Isis.

Syrian arrested in Germany on war crimes charges (06 Apr 16)
Germany 'struggling to jail Isis fighters' (29 Mar 16)
Extra defence spending won't be enough, soldiers warn (24 Mar 16)
The internal report from the military counter-intelligence service MAD, seen by DPA, also showed that 65 active soldiers are currently under investigation on suspicion of having Islamist sympathies.

Since 2007, the Bundeswehr (German army) has identified 22 soldiers in its ranks as Islamists and relieved 17 of them from their duties.

The remaining five had reached the end of their service by the time the investigation concluded.

That overall figure has increased by four cases since the first report on Islamists in the army in 2015.

“Islamism isn't the main problem of the Bundeswehr,” Social Democratic Party (SPD) MP Hans-Peter Bartels – responsible for oversight of the army – said on Tuesday. “But it represents a real danger that we have to take seriously.”

In future, the defence ministry wants to have MAD investigate every prospective soldier for links to anti-Constitutional movements, a move which would require a change in the law.

Until now, soldiers have only been checked before assignment to sensitive areas of the military, for example with access to secret files, but not for ordinary soldiers with access to battlefield weapons.

“Just like other fighting forces, the Bundeswehr can be attractive for Islamists who want to acquire weapons training,” Bartels said. “But to my knowledge there is so far no systematic push by Islamist organizations to infiltrate the army.”

http://www.thelocal.de/20160412/german-soldiers-may-have-joined-isis-in-syria

The media is over-hyping the female fighters to increase circulation. In most of the cases, the female fighters are used only for support roles by the YPG. The front-line fighting is mostly done by the experienced male fighters. If you check the casualty figures, then it becomes very evident. 99% of the casualties are among the male fighters.