ISIS = Pakistan ISI = SISI = That depends what IS IS. or ISRAEL. ISIS RA EL.
Or, the goddess
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... /?page=all
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by 8bitagent » Sun Feb 22, 2015 7:14 am
by 8bitagent » Sun Feb 22, 2015 7:18 am
by Sounder » Sun Feb 22, 2015 9:02 am
by IanEye » Sun Feb 22, 2015 9:17 am
Turkish Military Enters Syria to Evacuate Soldiers and Move Tomb’s Remains, Reports Say
ISTANBUL — The Turkish Army launched an operation into Syria to evacuate soldiers guarding the Tomb of Suleyman Shah, which has been besieged by Islamic State militants, and move the tomb’s remains, an official and Turkish news media reported on Sunday.
The military then destroyed what was left of the site to prevent the militants from using the enclave, and one soldier was killed by accident during the operation, CNN Turk said Sunday, citing military officials.
The operation, called “Sah Firat,” began on Saturday and involved a large convoy of tanks and other heavy weaponry that entered Syria through Kobani, the Kurdish territory in Syria that has recently been freed of Islamic State militants in an American-led military operation, according to the Turkish newspapers Milliyet and Yeni Safak. The reports were pulled from the Internet almost immediately after being posted.
The military operation was conducted in correspondence with Enver Muslim, the leader of the Syrian Kurdish group in control of Kobani, and aimed to evacuate around 40 soldiers, including 20 elite troops from the Turkish special forces who guarded the tomb. Suleyman Shah was the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire. His tomb is considered by the government here to be in Turkish territory, and it has been guarded by Turkish soldiers.
The reports said that the operation, which started on Saturday, continued through Sunday, although it was uncertain whether the Turkish military had confronted the militants who held the territory around the tomb, which lies about 20 miles inside Syria.
As of early Sunday, there was no official statement regarding the military operation.
But a Turkish lawmaker said on his Twitter account that the military had entered Syria and arrived at the tomb early Sunday.
“TSK (Turkish Armed Forces) entered in Saygi Station. Our station is taken under protection. Clashes or attacks out of question,” wrote Sinan Ogan, a deputy of Nationalist Movement Party in opposition.
And Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu posted to Twitter that all the tomb’s valuables, including historical remains, were delivered back to Turkey.
In March, Mr. Davutoglu, the foreign minister at the time, said that Turkey would take any measure necessary to safeguard the security of the tomb, referred to as Turkish soil based on an accord signed between Turkey and France in 1921.
“Should there be an attack, either from the regime, or radical groups or elsewhere, it would be countered equally,” he said.
Mr. Davutoglu’s statement was soon followed by the replacement of the tomb’s regular guards with special forces troops.
In 2012, at a time Syrian conflict had intensified and started to threaten the security along Turkey’s southern borders, Ankara revised its military engagement rules and licensed the army to launch cross-border operations as deemed necessary.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, on Friday denied claims that Turkish troops guarding the Suleyman Shah tomb had been taken hostage by the Islamic State, also known ISIS or ISIL, calling such reports “false,” the semiofficial Anadolu News Agency reported.
by Searcher08 » Sun Feb 22, 2015 10:19 am
The military then destroyed what was left of the site
by 82_28 » Sun Feb 22, 2015 10:46 am
by Searcher08 » Sun Feb 22, 2015 10:55 am
82_28 » Sun Feb 22, 2015 2:46 pm wrote:Like seriously. Is there any way to make ALL of this shit go away for good? No, I don't mean "war", but can we please be done with this shit?
by AlicetheKurious » Sun Feb 22, 2015 11:06 am
IanEye wrote:...referred to as Turkish soil based on an accord signed between Turkey and France in 1921.
by Nordic » Sun Feb 22, 2015 2:55 pm
Sounder » Sun Feb 22, 2015 8:02 am wrote:Well, some are tempted to think that if these vids are ISIS propaganda, then ISIS would be 'releasing' the vids. However given that SITE releases the vids, maybe just possibly these are SITE propaganda vids, not theoretically, but right on the face of it.
But anyway, if FOX says they are fake, then they must be real, right?
by AlicetheKurious » Mon Feb 23, 2015 2:25 am
Nordic » Sun Feb 22, 2015 8:55 pm wrote:Sounder » Sun Feb 22, 2015 8:02 am wrote:Well, some are tempted to think that if these vids are ISIS propaganda, then ISIS would be 'releasing' the vids. However given that SITE releases the vids, maybe just possibly these are SITE propaganda vids, not theoretically, but right on the face of it.
But anyway, if FOX says they are fake, then they must be real, right?
Ha. Yeah maybe that's what this is about ....?
Weird beyond weird.
by AlicetheKurious » Mon Feb 23, 2015 3:55 am
by seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 23, 2015 2:33 pm
FEBRUARY 23, 2015
Gulf Oil cash is Shoring up the Terrorists, Which, Suggests a Long War Ahead
Private donors from Gulf Oil States Helping to Bankroll Salaries of Up to 100,000 ISIS Fighters
by PATRICK COCKBURN
Islamic State is still receiving significant financial support from Arab sympathisers outside Iraq and Syria, enabling it to expand its war effort, says a senior Kurdish official.
The US has being trying to stop such private donors in the Gulf oil states sending to Islamic State (Isis) funds that help pay the salaries of fighters who may number well over 100,000.
Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish President, Massoud Barzani, told The Independent on Sunday: “There is sympathy for Da’esh [the Arabic acronym for IS, also known as Isis] in many Arab countries and this has translated into money – and that is a disaster.” He pointed out that until recently financial aid was being given more or less openly by Gulf states to the opposition in Syria – but by now most of these rebel groups have been absorbed into IS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, so it is they “who now have the money and the weapons”.
Mr Hussein would not identify the states from which the funding for IS comes today, but implied that they were the same Gulf oil states that financed Sunni Arab rebels in Iraq and Syria in the past.
Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran member of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership who recently retired from the Iraqi parliament, said there was a misunderstanding as to why Gulf countries paid off IS. It is not only that donors are supporters of IS, but that the movement “gets money from the Arab countries because they are afraid of it”, he says. “Gulf countries give money to Da’esh so that it promises not to carry out operations on their territory.”
Iraqi leaders in Baghdad privately express similar suspicions that IS – with a territory the size of Great Britain and a population of six million fighting a war on multiple fronts, from Aleppo to the Iranian border – could not be financially self-sufficient, given the calls on its limited resources.
Islamic State is doing everything it can to expand its military capacity, as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, and the US Central Command (CentCom) threaten an offensive later this year to recapture Mosul. Regardless of the feasibility of this operation, IS forces are fighting in widely different locations across northern and central Iraq.
On Tuesday night they made a surprise attack with between 300 and 400 fighters, many of them North Africans from Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, on Kurdish forces 40 miles west of the Kurdish capital, Irbil. The Kurds say that 34 IS fighters were killed in fighting and by US air strikes. At the same time, IS was battling for control of the town of al-Baghdadi, several hundred miles away in Anbar province. Despite forecasts by a CentCom spokesman last week that the tide has turned and that IS is on the retreat there is little sign of this on the ground.
On the contrary, IS appears to have the human and financial resources to fight a long war, though both are under strain. According to interviews by The Independent with people living in Mosul reached by phone, or with recent refugees from the city, IS officials are conscripting at least one young man from every family in Mosul, which has a population of 1.5 million. It has drafted a list of draconian punishments for those not willing to fight, starting with 80 lashes and ending with execution.
All these new recruits receive pay, as well as their keep, which until recently was $500 (£324) a month but has now been cut to about $350. Officers and commanders receive much more. A local source, who did not want to be named, says that foreign fighters, of whom there are an estimated 20,000 in IS, get a much higher salary – starting at $800 a month.
“I know three foreign fighters,” said Ahmad, a 45-year-old shopkeeper still working in Mosul. “I usually see them at checkpoints in our neighbourhood: one is Turkish and the others are Europeans. Some of them speak a little Arabic. I know them well because they buy soft drinks from the shops in our neighbourhood. The Turkish one is my customer. He says he talks to his family using the satellite internet service that is available for the foreigners, who have excellent privileges in terms of salaries, spoils and even captives.”
Ahmad added: “Isis fighters have arrested four high-school teachers for telling their students not to join Isis.” Islamic State fighters have entered the schools and demanded that students in their final year join them. Isis has also lowered the conscription age below 18 years of age, leading some families to leave the city. Military bases for the training and arming of children have also been established.
Given this degree of mobilisation by Islamic State, statements from Mr Abadi and CentCom about recapturing Mosul this spring, using between 20,000 and 25,000 Baghdad government and Kurdish forces, sound like an effort to boost morale on the anti-Isis side.
The CentCom spokesman claimed there were only between 1,000 and 2,000 Isis fighters in Mosul, which is out of keeping with what local observers report. Ominously, Iraqi and foreign governments have an impressive record of underestimating Isis as a military and political force over the past two years.
Mr Hussein said at the end of last year that Isis had “hundreds of thousands of fighters”, at a time when the CIA was claiming they numbered between 20,000 and 31,500. He does not wholly rule out an offensive to take Mosul but, as he outlines the conditions for a successful attack, it becomes clear that he does not expect the city to be recaptured any time soon. For the Kurdish Peshmerga forces to storm Mosul they would need far better equipment “in order to wage a decisive war against Isis and defeat them”, he says. “So far we are only defeating them in various places in Kurdistan by giving our blood. We have had 1,011 Peshmerga killed and about 5,000 wounded.”
The Kurds want heavy weapons including Humvees, tanks to surround but not to enter Mosul, snipers’ rifles, because Isis has many highly accurate snipers, as well as equipment to deal with improvised explosive devices and booby traps, both of which Isis uses profusely.
Above all, Kurdish participation in an offensive would require a military partner in the shape of an effective Iraqi army and local Sunni allies. Without the latter, a battle for Mosul conducted by Shia and Kurds alone would provoke Sunni Arab resistance. Mr Hussein is dubious about the effectiveness of the Iraqi army, which disintegrated last June when, though nominally it had 350,000 soldiers, it was defeated by a few thousand Isis fighters.
“The Iraqi army has two divisions to protect Baghdad, but is it possible for the Iraqi government to release them?” asks Mr Hussein. “And how will they get to Mosul? If they have to come through Tikrit and Baiji, they will have to fight hard along the way even before they get to Mosul.”
Of course, an anti-Isis offensive has advantages not available last year, such as US air strikes, but these might be difficult to use in a city. The US air force carried out at least 600 air strikes on the Isis-held part of the small Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani before Isis finally retreated after a siege of 134 days. In the most optimistic scenarios Isis splits or there is a popular uprising against it, but so far there is no sign of this and Isis has proved that it exacts merciless vengeance against any individual or community opposed to it.
Mr Hussein makes another important point: difficult and dangerous though it may be for the Kurds and the Baghdad government to recapture Mosul, they cannot afford to leave it alone. It was here that Isis won its first great victory and Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi declared the caliphate on 29 June last year.
“Mosul is important politically and militarily,” he says. “Without defeating Isis in Mosul, it will be very difficult to talk about the defeat of Isis in the rest of Iraq.”
At the moment, Peshmerga forces are only eight miles from Mosul. But Isis fighters are likewise not much further from the Kurdish-held oil city of Kirkuk, which Isis assaulted last month. Given the size of Iraq and the small size of the armies deployed, each side can inflict tactical surprises on the other by punching through scantily held frontlines.
There are two further developments to the advantage of Islamic State. Even in the face of the common threat, the leaders in Baghdad and Erbil remain deeply divided. When Mosul fell last year, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claimed that the Iraqi army had been stabbed in the back by a conspiracy between Kurds and Isis. The two sides remain deeply suspicious of each other and, at the start of last week, a delegation led by the Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani failed to reach an agreement in Baghdad on how much of Iraq’s oil revenues should go to the Kurds in exchange for a previously agreed quantity of oil from Kurdish-held northern oilfields.
“Unbelievably, the divisions now are as great as under Maliki,” says Dr Othman. Islamic State has made many enemies, but it may be saved by their inability to unite.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution (Verso)
by AlicetheKurious » Tue Feb 24, 2015 3:02 am
Islamic State is still receiving significant financial support from Arab sympathisers outside Iraq and Syria, enabling it to expand its war effort, says a senior Kurdish official.
The US has being trying to stop such private donors in the Gulf oil states sending to Islamic State (Isis) funds that help pay the salaries of fighters who may number well over 100,000.
In all, nine members of the Islamic State’s top command did time at Bucca, according to the terrorist analyst organization Soufan Group. Apart from Baghdadi himself, who spent five years there, the leader’s number two, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, as well as senior military leader Haji Bakr, (now deceased), and leader of foreign fighters Abu Qasim were incarcerated there, Soufan said. Though it’s likely the men were extremists when they entered Bucca, the group added, it’s certain they were when they left.
“Before their detention, Mr al-Baghdadi and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America,” wrote military veteran Andrew Thompson and academic Jeremi Suri in the New York Times this month. “Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities to broaden their following. The prisons became virtual terrorist universities: the hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian.” ....
Many were guilty of attacking American soldiers. But many more were not; “simply being a ‘suspicious looking’ military-aged male in the vicinity of an attack was enough to land one behind bars,” according to the Times opinion piece. Shadid reported as much in 2009, confirming many viewed it “as an appalling miscarriage of justice where prisoners were not charged or permitted to see evidence against them and freed detainees may end up swelling the ranks of a subdued insurgency.”
...Inhabitants were divided along sectarian lines to ameliorate tension, a military report said, and inmates settled their disputes with Islamic law. “Inside the wire at these compounds are Islamic extremists who will maim or kill fellow detainees for behavior they consider against Islam,” the military report said.
“Sharia courts enforce a lot of rules inside the compounds,” one soldier quoted in the report said. "Anyone who takes part in behavior which is seen as western is severely punished by the extremist elements of the compound. It’s quite appalling sometimes."
Prison commanders such as Gerrond observed the growing extremism: “There was a huge amount of collective pressure exerted on detainees to become more radical in their beliefs,” he told Mother Jones. Link
...until recently financial aid was being given more or less openly by Gulf states to the opposition in Syria – but by now most of these rebel groups have been absorbed into IS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, so it is they “who now have the money and the weapons”.
The first training sessions are to last between six and eight weeks. The training will focus on helping the rebel forces hold territory and counter Islamic State fighters—not to take on the Syrian army.
After that the U.S. will consider introducing what it is calling “the new Syrian force” onto the battlefield in Syria, officials said.
A team of four to six rebels will each be given a Toyota Hi-Lux pickup, outfitted with a machine gun, communications gear and Global Positioning System trackers enabling them to call in airstrikes. The fighters will also be given mortars, but the administration hasn’t decided to provide the teams with more sophisticated antitank weapons. ...
The U.S.-trained rebels most likely will be calling in strikes on Islamic State fighters, rather than on fixed targets, military officials said.
The planes would drop 500- and 2,000-pound guided bombs, a typical load for the B-1s that have operated in Afghanistan as well as Syria. Link
Welcome to the United States’ Moderate Syrian Rebel Vetting Process. To see if you qualify for $500 million in American weapons, please choose an answer to the following questions:
As a Syrian rebel, I think the word or phrase that best describes me is:
A) Moderate
B) Very moderate
C) Crazy moderate
D) Other
I became a Syrian rebel because I believe in:
A) Truth
B) Justice
C) The American Way
D) Creating an Islamic caliphate
If I were given a highly lethal automatic weapon by the United States, I would:
A) Only kill exactly the people that the United States wanted me to kill
B) Try to kill the right people, with the caveat that I have never used an automatic weapon before
C) Kill people only after submitting them to a rigorous vetting process
D) Immediately let the weapon fall into the wrong hands
I have previously received weapons from:
A) Al Qaeda
B) The Taliban
C) North Korea
D) I did not receive weapons from any of them because after they vetted me I was deemed way too moderate
I consider ISIS:
A) An existential threat to Iraq
B) An existential threat to Syria
C) An existential threat to Iraq and Syria
D) The people who will pick up my American weapon after I drop it and run away
Complete the following sentence. “American weapons are…”
A) Always a good thing to randomly add to any international hot spot
B) Exactly what this raging civil war has been missing for the past three years
C) Best when used moderately
D) Super easy to resell online
Thank you for completing the Moderate Syrian Rebel Application Form. We will process your application in the next one to two business days. Please indicate a current mailing address where you would like your weapons to be sent. If there is no one to sign for them we will leave them outside the front door. Link
by 82_28 » Tue Feb 24, 2015 6:38 am
A New York Times piece about new Islamic State offshots infringes on the U.S. military's trademark of using orange jumpsuit when torturing prisoners by assigning that trademark to the Islamic State:
A publication released by the central group last week included a photograph of fighters in Libya with its affiliate there parading 20 Egyptian Christian captives in the Islamic State’s trademark orange jumpsuits, indicating at least a degree of communication.
This is like saying the Statue of Liberty is a trademark of the Islamic State because some of its propaganda videos depicts the Statue as falling down.
It is obvious that the orange jumpsuit trademark is fully owned by the U.S. military and has been used by it for at least a decade now. Here is some photographic proof.
The Times suggests that the use of orange jumpsuits for prisoners by Jihadi groups is "indicating at least a degree of communication" with the Islamic State. As the trademark attribution by the NYT is wrong the correct conclusion in the NYT's logic is that the Libyan Jihadists have "at least a degree of communication" with the U.S. military.
That conclusion would also be supported by the historic fact that the U.S. in 2011 actively supported the Libyan Jihadist in overthrowing the Libyan government.
But the NYT would like you to forget that. Just like it wants you to forget that the NYT itself propagandized for the war in Iraq and that the U.S. military used the orange jumpsuits for torturing prisoners there, many of whom turned out to be not guilty of anything.
The trademark infringing NYT article itself is a shill piece to propagandize for more global war of terror and for Obama's requests to Congress to give him limitless authority to wage it. But the NYT will conveniently forget that too when the guaranteed blowback will hit home.
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