Be Well
may all be well
That's not even the real problem. The real problem is that they all hate America and like Jihad.
WoT Main Islamic State (ISIS) thread
- Thread starter Lilbitsnana
- Start date
That's not even the real problem. The real problem is that they all hate America and like Jihad.
Be Well
may all be well
I keep reading about the executed prisoners like the 250 Syrian soldiers executed yesterday when IS/ISIS/ISIL captured the Syrian Tabqa air base.
Story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rbase-stripped-led-desert-mass-execution.html
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/08/28/1409235115819_wps_6_Isis_marches_soldiers_to_.jpg
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/08/28/1409235195169_wps_11_Isis_marches_soldiers_to_.jpg
This begs the question: Why in HELL would you surrender to these fiends?!
Not me. Maybe the Syrian army has some sort of news blackout. I just cannot understand not fighting to the death.
Palmetto
Every hour that the rest of the world does not use every resource they have to utterly pulverize and destroy ISIS or whatever it's called, is a huge load of bad karma for the rest of the world. Any country who continues to allow these fiends from hell to torture, rape and butcher like diabolical locusts is an assistant to them, a helper, an ally.
For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use......
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html
You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
Posted: 08/27/2014 11:56 am EDT Updated: 08/28/2014 3:59 pm EDT
Comments 1053
BEIRUT -- The dramatic arrival of Da'ish (ISIS) on the stage of Iraq has shocked many in the West. Many have been perplexed -- and horrified -- by its violence and its evident magnetism for Sunni youth. But more than this, they find Saudi Arabia's ambivalence in the face of this manifestation both troubling and inexplicable, wondering, "Don't the Saudis understand that ISIS threatens them, too?"
It appears -- even now -- that Saudi Arabia's ruling elite is divided. Some applaud that ISIS is fighting Iranian Shiite "fire" with Sunni "fire"; that a new Sunni state is taking shape at the very heart of what they regard as a historical Sunni patrimony; and they are drawn by Da'ish's strict Salafist ideology.
Other Saudis are more fearful, and recall the history of the revolt against Abd-al Aziz by the Wahhabist Ikhwan (Disclaimer: this Ikhwan has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan -- please note, all further references hereafter are to the Wahhabist Ikhwan, and not to the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan), but which nearly imploded Wahhabism and the al-Saud in the late 1920s.
Many Saudis are deeply disturbed by the radical doctrines of Da'ish (ISIS) -- and are beginning to question some aspects of Saudi Arabia's direction and discourse.
THE SAUDI DUALITY
Saudi Arabia's internal discord and tensions over ISIS can only be understood by grasping the inherent (and persisting) duality that lies at the core of the Kingdom's doctrinal makeup and its historical origins.
One dominant strand to the Saudi identity pertains directly to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism), and the use to which his radical, exclusionist puritanism was put by Ibn Saud. (The latter was then no more than a minor leader -- amongst many -- of continually sparring and raiding Bedouin tribes in the baking and desperately poor deserts of the Nejd.)
The second strand to this perplexing duality, relates precisely to King Abd-al Aziz's subsequent shift towards statehood in the 1920s: his curbing of Ikhwani violence (in order to have diplomatic standing as a nation-state with Britain and America); his institutionalization of the original Wahhabist impulse -- and the subsequent seizing of the opportunely surging petrodollar spigot in the 1970s, to channel the volatile Ikhwani current away from home towards export -- by diffusing a cultural revolution, rather than violent revolution throughout the Muslim world.
But this "cultural revolution" was no docile reformism. It was a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab's Jacobin-like hatred for the putrescence and deviationism that he perceived all about him -- hence his call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.
MUSLIM IMPOSTORS
The American author and journalist, Steven Coll, has written how this austere and censorious disciple of the 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, Abd al-Wahhab, despised "the decorous, arty, tobacco smoking, hashish imbibing, drum pounding Egyptian and Ottoman nobility who travelled across Arabia to pray at Mecca."
In Abd al-Wahhab's view, these were not Muslims; they were imposters masquerading as Muslims. Nor, indeed, did he find the behavior of local Bedouin Arabs much better. They aggravated Abd al-Wahhab by their honoring of saints, by their erecting of tombstones, and their "superstition" (e.g. revering graves or places that were deemed particularly imbued with the divine).
All this behavior, Abd al-Wahhab denounced as bida -- forbidden by God.
Like Taymiyyah before him, Abd al-Wahhab believed that the period of the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the "best of times"), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate (this, essentially, is Salafism).
Taymiyyah had declared war on Shi'ism, Sufism and Greek philosophy. He spoke out, too against visiting the grave of the prophet and the celebration of his birthday, declaring that all such behavior represented mere imitation of the Christian worship of Jesus as God (i.e. idolatry). Abd al-Wahhab assimilated all this earlier teaching, stating that "any doubt or hesitation" on the part of a believer in respect to his or her acknowledging this particular interpretation of Islam should "deprive a man of immunity of his property and his life."
One of the main tenets of Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine has become the key idea of takfir. Under the takfiri doctrine, Abd al-Wahhab and his followers could deem fellow Muslims infidels should they engage in activities that in any way could be said to encroach on the sovereignty of the absolute Authority (that is, the King). Abd al-Wahhab denounced all Muslims who honored the dead, saints, or angels. He held that such sentiments detracted from the complete subservience one must feel towards God, and only God. Wahhabi Islam thus bans any prayer to saints and dead loved ones, pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, religious festivals celebrating saints, the honoring of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and even prohibits the use of gravestones when burying the dead.
"Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. "
Abd al-Wahhab demanded conformity -- a conformity that was to be demonstrated in physical and tangible ways. He argued that all Muslims must individually pledge their allegiance to a single Muslim leader (a Caliph, if there were one). Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. The list of apostates meriting death included the Shiite, Sufis and other Muslim denominations, whom Abd al-Wahhab did not consider to be Muslim at all.
There is nothing here that separates Wahhabism from ISIS. The rift would emerge only later: from the subsequent institutionalization of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab's doctrine of "One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque" -- these three pillars being taken respectively to refer to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of official Wahhabism, and its control of "the word" (i.e. the mosque).
It is this rift -- the ISIS denial of these three pillars on which the whole of Sunni authority presently rests -- makes ISIS, which in all other respects conforms to Wahhabism, a deep threat to Saudi Arabia.
BRIEF HISTORY 1741- 1818
Abd al-Wahhab's advocacy of these ultra radical views inevitably led to his expulsion from his own town -- and in 1741, after some wanderings, he found refuge under the protection of Ibn Saud and his tribe. What Ibn Saud perceived in Abd al-Wahhab's novel teaching was the means to overturn Arab tradition and convention. It was a path to seizing power.
"Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. "
Ibn Saud's clan, seizing on Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine, now could do what they always did, which was raiding neighboring villages and robbing them of their possessions. Only now they were doing it not within the ambit of Arab tradition, but rather under the banner of jihad. Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab also reintroduced the idea of martyrdom in the name of jihad, as it granted those martyred immediate entry into paradise.
In the beginning, they conquered a few local communities and imposed their rule over them. (The conquered inhabitants were given a limited choice: conversion to Wahhabism or death.) By 1790, the Alliance controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula and repeatedly raided Medina, Syria and Iraq.
Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the Allies attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed, including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet Muhammad.
A British official, Lieutenant Francis Warden, observing the situation at the time, wrote: "They pillaged the whole of it [Karbala], and plundered the Tomb of Hussein... slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants ..."
Osman Ibn Bishr Najdi, the historian of the first Saudi state, wrote that Ibn Saud committed a massacre in Karbala in 1801. He proudly documented that massacre saying, "we took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people (as slaves), then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that and say: 'And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.'"
In 1803, Abdul Aziz then entered the Holy City of Mecca, which surrendered under the impact of terror and panic (the same fate was to befall Medina, too). Abd al-Wahhab's followers demolished historical monuments and all the tombs and shrines in their midst. By the end, they had destroyed centuries of Islamic architecture near the Grand Mosque.
But in November of 1803, a Shiite assassin killed King Abdul Aziz (taking revenge for the massacre at Karbala). His son, Saud bin Abd al Aziz, succeeded him and continued the conquest of Arabia. Ottoman rulers, however, could no longer just sit back and watch as their empire was devoured piece by piece. In 1812, the Ottoman army, composed of Egyptians, pushed the Alliance out from Medina, Jeddah and Mecca. In 1814, Saud bin Abd al Aziz died of fever. His unfortunate son Abdullah bin Saud, however, was taken by the Ottomans to Istanbul, where he was gruesomely executed (a visitor to Istanbul reported seeing him having been humiliated in the streets of Istanbul for three days, then hanged and beheaded, his severed head fired from a canon, and his heart cut out and impaled on his body).
In 1815, Wahhabi forces were crushed by the Egyptians (acting on the Ottoman's behalf) in a decisive battle. In 1818, the Ottomans captured and destroyed the Wahhabi capital of Dariyah. The first Saudi state was no more. The few remaining Wahhabis withdrew into the desert to regroup, and there they remained, quiescent for most of the 19th century.
HISTORY RETURNS WITH ISIS
It is not hard to understand how the founding of the Islamic State by ISIS in contemporary Iraq might resonate amongst those who recall this history. Indeed, the ethos of 18th century Wahhabism did not just wither in Nejd, but it roared back into life when the Ottoman Empire collapsed amongst the chaos of World War I.
The Al Saud -- in this 20th century renaissance -- were led by the laconic and politically astute Abd-al Aziz, who, on uniting the fractious Bedouin tribes, launched the Saudi "Ikhwan" in the spirit of Abd-al Wahhab's and Ibn Saud's earlier fighting proselytisers.
The Ikhwan was a reincarnation of the early, fierce, semi-independent vanguard movement of committed armed Wahhabist "moralists" who almost had succeeded in seizing Arabia by the early 1800s. In the same manner as earlier, the Ikhwan again succeeded in capturing Mecca, Medina and Jeddah between 1914 and 1926. Abd-al Aziz, however, began to feel his wider interests to be threatened by the revolutionary "Jacobinism" exhibited by the Ikhwan. The Ikhwan revolted -- leading to a civil war that lasted until the 1930s, when the King had them put down: he machine-gunned them.
For this king, (Abd-al Aziz), the simple verities of previous decades were eroding. Oil was being discovered in the peninsular. Britain and America were courting Abd-al Aziz, but still were inclined to support Sharif Husain as the only legitimate ruler of Arabia. The Saudis needed to develop a more sophisticated diplomatic posture.
So Wahhabism was forcefully changed from a movement of revolutionary jihad and theological takfiri purification, to a movement of conservative social, political, theological, and religious da'wa (Islamic call) and to justifying the institution that upholds loyalty to the royal Saudi family and the King's absolute power.
OIL WEALTH SPREAD WAHHABISM
With the advent of the oil bonanza -- as the French scholar, Giles Kepel writes, Saudi goals were to "reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world ... to "Wahhabise" Islam, thereby reducing the "multitude of voices within the religion" to a "single creed" -- a movement which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were -- and continue to be -- invested in this manifestation of soft power.
It was this heady mix of billion dollar soft power projection -- and the Saudi willingness to manage Sunni Islam both to further America's interests, as it concomitantly embedded Wahhabism educationally, socially and culturally throughout the lands of Islam -- that brought into being a western policy dependency on Saudi Arabia, a dependency that has endured since Abd-al Aziz's meeting with Roosevelt on a U.S. warship (returning the president from the Yalta Conference) until today.
Westerners looked at the Kingdom and their gaze was taken by the wealth; by the apparent modernization; by the professed leadership of the Islamic world. They chose to presume that the Kingdom was bending to the imperatives of modern life -- and that the management of Sunni Islam would bend the Kingdom, too, to modern life.
"On the one hand, ISIS is deeply Wahhabist. On the other hand, it is ultra radical in a different way. It could be seen essentially as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism."
But the Saudi Ikhwan approach to Islam did not die in the 1930s. It retreated, but it maintained its hold over parts of the system -- hence the duality that we observe today in the Saudi attitude towards ISIS.
On the one hand, ISIS is deeply Wahhabist. On the other hand, it is ultra radical in a different way. It could be seen essentially as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism.
ISIS is a "post-Medina" movement: it looks to the actions of the first two Caliphs, rather than the Prophet Muhammad himself, as a source of emulation, and it forcefully denies the Saudis' claim of authority to rule.
As the Saudi monarchy blossomed in the oil age into an ever more inflated institution, the appeal of the Ikhwan message gained ground (despite King Faisal's modernization campaign). The "Ikhwan approach" enjoyed -- and still enjoys -- the support of many prominent men and women and sheikhs. In a sense, Osama bin Laden was precisely the representative of a late flowering of this Ikhwani approach.
Today, ISIS' undermining of the legitimacy of the King's legitimacy is not seen to be problematic, but rather a return to the true origins of the Saudi-Wahhab project.
In the collaborative management of the region by the Saudis and the West in pursuit of the many western projects (countering socialism, Ba'athism, Nasserism, Soviet and Iranian influence), western politicians have highlighted their chosen reading of Saudi Arabia (wealth, modernization and influence), but they chose to ignore the Wahhabist impulse.
After all, the more radical Islamist movements were perceived by Western intelligence services as being more effective in toppling the USSR in Afghanistan -- and in combatting out-of-favor Middle Eastern leaders and states.
Why should we be surprised then, that from Prince Bandar's Saudi-Western mandate to manage the insurgency in Syria against President Assad should have emerged a neo-Ikhwan type of violent, fear-inducing vanguard movement: ISIS? And why should we be surprised -- knowing a little about Wahhabism -- that "moderate" insurgents in Syria would become rarer than a mythical unicorn? Why should we have imagined that radical Wahhabism would create moderates? Or why could we imagine that a doctrine of "One leader, One authority, One mosque: submit to it, or be killed" could ever ultimately lead to moderation or tolerance?
Or, perhaps, we never imagined.
Posted for fair use......
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html
You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
Posted: 08/27/2014 11:56 am EDT Updated: 08/28/2014 3:59 pm EDT
Comments 1053
BEIRUT -- The dramatic arrival of Da'ish (ISIS) on the stage of Iraq has shocked many in the West. Many have been perplexed -- and horrified -- by its violence and its evident magnetism for Sunni youth. But more than this, they find Saudi Arabia's ambivalence in the face of this manifestation both troubling and inexplicable, wondering, "Don't the Saudis understand that ISIS threatens them, too?"
It appears -- even now -- that Saudi Arabia's ruling elite is divided. Some applaud that ISIS is fighting Iranian Shiite "fire" with Sunni "fire"; that a new Sunni state is taking shape at the very heart of what they regard as a historical Sunni patrimony; and they are drawn by Da'ish's strict Salafist ideology.
Other Saudis are more fearful, and recall the history of the revolt against Abd-al Aziz by the Wahhabist Ikhwan (Disclaimer: this Ikhwan has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan -- please note, all further references hereafter are to the Wahhabist Ikhwan, and not to the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan), but which nearly imploded Wahhabism and the al-Saud in the late 1920s.
Many Saudis are deeply disturbed by the radical doctrines of Da'ish (ISIS) -- and are beginning to question some aspects of Saudi Arabia's direction and discourse.
THE SAUDI DUALITY
Saudi Arabia's internal discord and tensions over ISIS can only be understood by grasping the inherent (and persisting) duality that lies at the core of the Kingdom's doctrinal makeup and its historical origins.
One dominant strand to the Saudi identity pertains directly to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism), and the use to which his radical, exclusionist puritanism was put by Ibn Saud. (The latter was then no more than a minor leader -- amongst many -- of continually sparring and raiding Bedouin tribes in the baking and desperately poor deserts of the Nejd.)
The second strand to this perplexing duality, relates precisely to King Abd-al Aziz's subsequent shift towards statehood in the 1920s: his curbing of Ikhwani violence (in order to have diplomatic standing as a nation-state with Britain and America); his institutionalization of the original Wahhabist impulse -- and the subsequent seizing of the opportunely surging petrodollar spigot in the 1970s, to channel the volatile Ikhwani current away from home towards export -- by diffusing a cultural revolution, rather than violent revolution throughout the Muslim world.
But this "cultural revolution" was no docile reformism. It was a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab's Jacobin-like hatred for the putrescence and deviationism that he perceived all about him -- hence his call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.
MUSLIM IMPOSTORS
The American author and journalist, Steven Coll, has written how this austere and censorious disciple of the 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, Abd al-Wahhab, despised "the decorous, arty, tobacco smoking, hashish imbibing, drum pounding Egyptian and Ottoman nobility who travelled across Arabia to pray at Mecca."
In Abd al-Wahhab's view, these were not Muslims; they were imposters masquerading as Muslims. Nor, indeed, did he find the behavior of local Bedouin Arabs much better. They aggravated Abd al-Wahhab by their honoring of saints, by their erecting of tombstones, and their "superstition" (e.g. revering graves or places that were deemed particularly imbued with the divine).
All this behavior, Abd al-Wahhab denounced as bida -- forbidden by God.
Like Taymiyyah before him, Abd al-Wahhab believed that the period of the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the "best of times"), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate (this, essentially, is Salafism).
Taymiyyah had declared war on Shi'ism, Sufism and Greek philosophy. He spoke out, too against visiting the grave of the prophet and the celebration of his birthday, declaring that all such behavior represented mere imitation of the Christian worship of Jesus as God (i.e. idolatry). Abd al-Wahhab assimilated all this earlier teaching, stating that "any doubt or hesitation" on the part of a believer in respect to his or her acknowledging this particular interpretation of Islam should "deprive a man of immunity of his property and his life."
One of the main tenets of Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine has become the key idea of takfir. Under the takfiri doctrine, Abd al-Wahhab and his followers could deem fellow Muslims infidels should they engage in activities that in any way could be said to encroach on the sovereignty of the absolute Authority (that is, the King). Abd al-Wahhab denounced all Muslims who honored the dead, saints, or angels. He held that such sentiments detracted from the complete subservience one must feel towards God, and only God. Wahhabi Islam thus bans any prayer to saints and dead loved ones, pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, religious festivals celebrating saints, the honoring of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and even prohibits the use of gravestones when burying the dead.
"Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. "
Abd al-Wahhab demanded conformity -- a conformity that was to be demonstrated in physical and tangible ways. He argued that all Muslims must individually pledge their allegiance to a single Muslim leader (a Caliph, if there were one). Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. The list of apostates meriting death included the Shiite, Sufis and other Muslim denominations, whom Abd al-Wahhab did not consider to be Muslim at all.
There is nothing here that separates Wahhabism from ISIS. The rift would emerge only later: from the subsequent institutionalization of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab's doctrine of "One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque" -- these three pillars being taken respectively to refer to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of official Wahhabism, and its control of "the word" (i.e. the mosque).
It is this rift -- the ISIS denial of these three pillars on which the whole of Sunni authority presently rests -- makes ISIS, which in all other respects conforms to Wahhabism, a deep threat to Saudi Arabia.
BRIEF HISTORY 1741- 1818
Abd al-Wahhab's advocacy of these ultra radical views inevitably led to his expulsion from his own town -- and in 1741, after some wanderings, he found refuge under the protection of Ibn Saud and his tribe. What Ibn Saud perceived in Abd al-Wahhab's novel teaching was the means to overturn Arab tradition and convention. It was a path to seizing power.
"Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. "
Ibn Saud's clan, seizing on Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine, now could do what they always did, which was raiding neighboring villages and robbing them of their possessions. Only now they were doing it not within the ambit of Arab tradition, but rather under the banner of jihad. Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab also reintroduced the idea of martyrdom in the name of jihad, as it granted those martyred immediate entry into paradise.
In the beginning, they conquered a few local communities and imposed their rule over them. (The conquered inhabitants were given a limited choice: conversion to Wahhabism or death.) By 1790, the Alliance controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula and repeatedly raided Medina, Syria and Iraq.
Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the Allies attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed, including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet Muhammad.
A British official, Lieutenant Francis Warden, observing the situation at the time, wrote: "They pillaged the whole of it [Karbala], and plundered the Tomb of Hussein... slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants ..."
Osman Ibn Bishr Najdi, the historian of the first Saudi state, wrote that Ibn Saud committed a massacre in Karbala in 1801. He proudly documented that massacre saying, "we took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people (as slaves), then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that and say: 'And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.'"
In 1803, Abdul Aziz then entered the Holy City of Mecca, which surrendered under the impact of terror and panic (the same fate was to befall Medina, too). Abd al-Wahhab's followers demolished historical monuments and all the tombs and shrines in their midst. By the end, they had destroyed centuries of Islamic architecture near the Grand Mosque.
But in November of 1803, a Shiite assassin killed King Abdul Aziz (taking revenge for the massacre at Karbala). His son, Saud bin Abd al Aziz, succeeded him and continued the conquest of Arabia. Ottoman rulers, however, could no longer just sit back and watch as their empire was devoured piece by piece. In 1812, the Ottoman army, composed of Egyptians, pushed the Alliance out from Medina, Jeddah and Mecca. In 1814, Saud bin Abd al Aziz died of fever. His unfortunate son Abdullah bin Saud, however, was taken by the Ottomans to Istanbul, where he was gruesomely executed (a visitor to Istanbul reported seeing him having been humiliated in the streets of Istanbul for three days, then hanged and beheaded, his severed head fired from a canon, and his heart cut out and impaled on his body).
In 1815, Wahhabi forces were crushed by the Egyptians (acting on the Ottoman's behalf) in a decisive battle. In 1818, the Ottomans captured and destroyed the Wahhabi capital of Dariyah. The first Saudi state was no more. The few remaining Wahhabis withdrew into the desert to regroup, and there they remained, quiescent for most of the 19th century.
HISTORY RETURNS WITH ISIS
It is not hard to understand how the founding of the Islamic State by ISIS in contemporary Iraq might resonate amongst those who recall this history. Indeed, the ethos of 18th century Wahhabism did not just wither in Nejd, but it roared back into life when the Ottoman Empire collapsed amongst the chaos of World War I.
The Al Saud -- in this 20th century renaissance -- were led by the laconic and politically astute Abd-al Aziz, who, on uniting the fractious Bedouin tribes, launched the Saudi "Ikhwan" in the spirit of Abd-al Wahhab's and Ibn Saud's earlier fighting proselytisers.
The Ikhwan was a reincarnation of the early, fierce, semi-independent vanguard movement of committed armed Wahhabist "moralists" who almost had succeeded in seizing Arabia by the early 1800s. In the same manner as earlier, the Ikhwan again succeeded in capturing Mecca, Medina and Jeddah between 1914 and 1926. Abd-al Aziz, however, began to feel his wider interests to be threatened by the revolutionary "Jacobinism" exhibited by the Ikhwan. The Ikhwan revolted -- leading to a civil war that lasted until the 1930s, when the King had them put down: he machine-gunned them.
For this king, (Abd-al Aziz), the simple verities of previous decades were eroding. Oil was being discovered in the peninsular. Britain and America were courting Abd-al Aziz, but still were inclined to support Sharif Husain as the only legitimate ruler of Arabia. The Saudis needed to develop a more sophisticated diplomatic posture.
So Wahhabism was forcefully changed from a movement of revolutionary jihad and theological takfiri purification, to a movement of conservative social, political, theological, and religious da'wa (Islamic call) and to justifying the institution that upholds loyalty to the royal Saudi family and the King's absolute power.
OIL WEALTH SPREAD WAHHABISM
With the advent of the oil bonanza -- as the French scholar, Giles Kepel writes, Saudi goals were to "reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world ... to "Wahhabise" Islam, thereby reducing the "multitude of voices within the religion" to a "single creed" -- a movement which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were -- and continue to be -- invested in this manifestation of soft power.
It was this heady mix of billion dollar soft power projection -- and the Saudi willingness to manage Sunni Islam both to further America's interests, as it concomitantly embedded Wahhabism educationally, socially and culturally throughout the lands of Islam -- that brought into being a western policy dependency on Saudi Arabia, a dependency that has endured since Abd-al Aziz's meeting with Roosevelt on a U.S. warship (returning the president from the Yalta Conference) until today.
Westerners looked at the Kingdom and their gaze was taken by the wealth; by the apparent modernization; by the professed leadership of the Islamic world. They chose to presume that the Kingdom was bending to the imperatives of modern life -- and that the management of Sunni Islam would bend the Kingdom, too, to modern life.
"On the one hand, ISIS is deeply Wahhabist. On the other hand, it is ultra radical in a different way. It could be seen essentially as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism."
But the Saudi Ikhwan approach to Islam did not die in the 1930s. It retreated, but it maintained its hold over parts of the system -- hence the duality that we observe today in the Saudi attitude towards ISIS.
On the one hand, ISIS is deeply Wahhabist. On the other hand, it is ultra radical in a different way. It could be seen essentially as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism.
ISIS is a "post-Medina" movement: it looks to the actions of the first two Caliphs, rather than the Prophet Muhammad himself, as a source of emulation, and it forcefully denies the Saudis' claim of authority to rule.
As the Saudi monarchy blossomed in the oil age into an ever more inflated institution, the appeal of the Ikhwan message gained ground (despite King Faisal's modernization campaign). The "Ikhwan approach" enjoyed -- and still enjoys -- the support of many prominent men and women and sheikhs. In a sense, Osama bin Laden was precisely the representative of a late flowering of this Ikhwani approach.
Today, ISIS' undermining of the legitimacy of the King's legitimacy is not seen to be problematic, but rather a return to the true origins of the Saudi-Wahhab project.
In the collaborative management of the region by the Saudis and the West in pursuit of the many western projects (countering socialism, Ba'athism, Nasserism, Soviet and Iranian influence), western politicians have highlighted their chosen reading of Saudi Arabia (wealth, modernization and influence), but they chose to ignore the Wahhabist impulse.
After all, the more radical Islamist movements were perceived by Western intelligence services as being more effective in toppling the USSR in Afghanistan -- and in combatting out-of-favor Middle Eastern leaders and states.
Why should we be surprised then, that from Prince Bandar's Saudi-Western mandate to manage the insurgency in Syria against President Assad should have emerged a neo-Ikhwan type of violent, fear-inducing vanguard movement: ISIS? And why should we be surprised -- knowing a little about Wahhabism -- that "moderate" insurgents in Syria would become rarer than a mythical unicorn? Why should we have imagined that radical Wahhabism would create moderates? Or why could we imagine that a doctrine of "One leader, One authority, One mosque: submit to it, or be killed" could ever ultimately lead to moderation or tolerance?
Or, perhaps, we never imagined.
For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...ec6df6-2ed6-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html
Can Saudi Arabia help combat the Islamic State?
By David Ignatius Opinion writer August 28 at 8:35 PM „³
Comments 60
With Iraq and Syria ablaze, the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia seems almost an afterthought. But Riyadh will be a crucial, if quixotic, ally as the United States seeks to mobilize Sunni Muslims against the terrorist Islamic State.
The kingdom¡¦s many critics argue that Saudi Arabia itself helped spread the toxic virus by bankrolling Islamist rebels and their extremist Salafist Muslim ideology. As if to insulate itself from such criticism, the kingdom recently donated $100 million to a new U.N. counterterrorism center, and its senior religious leader, the grand mufti, declared the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda forebear ¡§enemy No. 1 of Islam.¡¨
David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the
Complicating Saudi Arabia¡¦s pivotal role in containing regional instability is the fact that generational change is slowly coming in the kingdom. The stakes for the United States in this leadership transition are large, and the outcome is hard to predict.
King Abdullah remains in power, a generally popular and respected monarch. But at 90, his energy and attention span are limited. Tensions have surfaced at several Saudi ministries over the last year, suggesting a jockeying for power.
For a generation, Americans and Saudis have worried that the kingdom was a potential tinderbox, with Muslim and secular extremists vying to undermine the conservative monarchy. If anything, the kingdom seems slightly more stable now than a decade ago ¡X but Sunni and Shiite extremists, otherwise deadly adversaries, share a common dream of toppling the House of Saud.
The inner workings of the royal family remain all but impenetrable to outsiders. The senior princes are slow-moving, self-protective and resistant to foreign counsel ¡X traits that invite speculation about what¡¦s happening behind the palace walls. But whatever their internal disagreements, the sons and grandsons of King Abdul Aziz, the kingdom¡¦s modern founder, have been able to maintain the family consensus necessary to preserve their rule.
U.S. and Arab experts describe a kingdom that is worried about three dangers: the rise of Iran and its Shiite Muslim allies; the resurgence of Sunni extremism embodied by the Islamic State; and the reliability of the United States, the kingdom¡¦s protector, which is seen by many Saudis as a superpower in retreat.
The unsettled situation is illustrated by the mercurial Prince Bandar bin Sultan. He was ousted as intelligence chief last April, then rehabilitated this summer with the honorific title of chairman of the national security council. The outcome is probably a net gain for Saudi stability: Khaled bin Bandar bin Abdul Aziz, the new chief of the spy service, is seen as a more reliable and professional operator; he works well with Prince Mohammed bin Naif, the interior minister who is trusted by the United States.
The new spy chief and the interior minister, accompanied by Bandar and Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, traveled to Qatar this week, presenting a common front to a regional rival that has often bedeviled Saudi and U.S. policy.
One question mark has been Crown Prince Salman, 78, the defense minister, who is reportedly in poor health. Speculation about succession was fueled by the appointment of Prince Muqrin as deputy crown prince last March. Meanwhile, Salman has struggled to run the defense ministry. Since assuming that post in November 2011, he has had four deputies, including two sons of his predecessor, Prince Sultan.
The wild card in the Saudi deck is Bandar, the flamboyant former ambassador to Washington. When he was head of Saudi intelligence and paymaster to Saudi allies in Syria and Lebanon, he was an unpredictable ¡X and in Washington¡¦s eyes, sometimes untrustworthy ¡X operator.
Some Americans feared Bandar¡¦s covert efforts in the Syrian civil war were unintentionally spawning al-Qaeda terrorists. U.S. officials were relieved when Bandar was removed as steward of the Syrian opposition.
It has been Saudi Arabia¡¦s recurring nightmare to fight external enemies by encouraging Sunni movements that turn extremist and threaten the kingdom itself. This happened in the 1980s, when the Saudis joined the CIA in sponsoring the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The devout Muslim fighters drove out Soviet troops but evolved into the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The Saudis must worry that a similar process has happened again. Some of the Sunni fighters they backed against Iran have drifted toward the Islamic State. The Saudis didn¡¦t intend the ensuing disaster, but they must now deal with it.
Western analysts credit Mohammed bin Naif and Khaled bin Bandar for seeking to build more competent, professional security services at Interior and Intelligence. They¡¦ll need that skill, and luck, too. For Saudi Arabia, big challenges lie just over the horizon.
Read more from David Ignatius¡¦s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Read more on this from Opinions:
The Post¡¦s View: Saudi Arabia continues its repression of human rights activists
David Ignatius: The Islamic State¡¦s challenge to the United States
Fareed Zakaria: An enclave strategy for Iraq
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...ec6df6-2ed6-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html
Can Saudi Arabia help combat the Islamic State?
By David Ignatius Opinion writer August 28 at 8:35 PM „³
Comments 60
With Iraq and Syria ablaze, the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia seems almost an afterthought. But Riyadh will be a crucial, if quixotic, ally as the United States seeks to mobilize Sunni Muslims against the terrorist Islamic State.
The kingdom¡¦s many critics argue that Saudi Arabia itself helped spread the toxic virus by bankrolling Islamist rebels and their extremist Salafist Muslim ideology. As if to insulate itself from such criticism, the kingdom recently donated $100 million to a new U.N. counterterrorism center, and its senior religious leader, the grand mufti, declared the Islamic State and its al-Qaeda forebear ¡§enemy No. 1 of Islam.¡¨
David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the
Complicating Saudi Arabia¡¦s pivotal role in containing regional instability is the fact that generational change is slowly coming in the kingdom. The stakes for the United States in this leadership transition are large, and the outcome is hard to predict.
King Abdullah remains in power, a generally popular and respected monarch. But at 90, his energy and attention span are limited. Tensions have surfaced at several Saudi ministries over the last year, suggesting a jockeying for power.
For a generation, Americans and Saudis have worried that the kingdom was a potential tinderbox, with Muslim and secular extremists vying to undermine the conservative monarchy. If anything, the kingdom seems slightly more stable now than a decade ago ¡X but Sunni and Shiite extremists, otherwise deadly adversaries, share a common dream of toppling the House of Saud.
The inner workings of the royal family remain all but impenetrable to outsiders. The senior princes are slow-moving, self-protective and resistant to foreign counsel ¡X traits that invite speculation about what¡¦s happening behind the palace walls. But whatever their internal disagreements, the sons and grandsons of King Abdul Aziz, the kingdom¡¦s modern founder, have been able to maintain the family consensus necessary to preserve their rule.
U.S. and Arab experts describe a kingdom that is worried about three dangers: the rise of Iran and its Shiite Muslim allies; the resurgence of Sunni extremism embodied by the Islamic State; and the reliability of the United States, the kingdom¡¦s protector, which is seen by many Saudis as a superpower in retreat.
The unsettled situation is illustrated by the mercurial Prince Bandar bin Sultan. He was ousted as intelligence chief last April, then rehabilitated this summer with the honorific title of chairman of the national security council. The outcome is probably a net gain for Saudi stability: Khaled bin Bandar bin Abdul Aziz, the new chief of the spy service, is seen as a more reliable and professional operator; he works well with Prince Mohammed bin Naif, the interior minister who is trusted by the United States.
The new spy chief and the interior minister, accompanied by Bandar and Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, traveled to Qatar this week, presenting a common front to a regional rival that has often bedeviled Saudi and U.S. policy.
One question mark has been Crown Prince Salman, 78, the defense minister, who is reportedly in poor health. Speculation about succession was fueled by the appointment of Prince Muqrin as deputy crown prince last March. Meanwhile, Salman has struggled to run the defense ministry. Since assuming that post in November 2011, he has had four deputies, including two sons of his predecessor, Prince Sultan.
The wild card in the Saudi deck is Bandar, the flamboyant former ambassador to Washington. When he was head of Saudi intelligence and paymaster to Saudi allies in Syria and Lebanon, he was an unpredictable ¡X and in Washington¡¦s eyes, sometimes untrustworthy ¡X operator.
Some Americans feared Bandar¡¦s covert efforts in the Syrian civil war were unintentionally spawning al-Qaeda terrorists. U.S. officials were relieved when Bandar was removed as steward of the Syrian opposition.
It has been Saudi Arabia¡¦s recurring nightmare to fight external enemies by encouraging Sunni movements that turn extremist and threaten the kingdom itself. This happened in the 1980s, when the Saudis joined the CIA in sponsoring the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The devout Muslim fighters drove out Soviet troops but evolved into the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The Saudis must worry that a similar process has happened again. Some of the Sunni fighters they backed against Iran have drifted toward the Islamic State. The Saudis didn¡¦t intend the ensuing disaster, but they must now deal with it.
Western analysts credit Mohammed bin Naif and Khaled bin Bandar for seeking to build more competent, professional security services at Interior and Intelligence. They¡¦ll need that skill, and luck, too. For Saudi Arabia, big challenges lie just over the horizon.
Read more from David Ignatius¡¦s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Read more on this from Opinions:
The Post¡¦s View: Saudi Arabia continues its repression of human rights activists
David Ignatius: The Islamic State¡¦s challenge to the United States
Fareed Zakaria: An enclave strategy for Iraq
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
Fahad Nazer @fanazer 11h
#Saudi King Abdullah warns ambassadors to kingdom that #ISIS will reach Europe in a month & US in two ! (video) http://bit.ly/1nKiw8O
english version: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/New...king-warns-of-terror-threat-to-the-world.html
Saudi king warns of terror threat to the world
King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz warned the world to unite in the face of terrorism. (AFP)
Text size A A A
Staff Writer, Al Arabiya News
Friday, 29 August 2014
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz warned on Friday that the threat of terrorism will reach Europe and America if the world does not unite to confront it, Al Arabiya News Channel reported.
The king made the statement during a reception of foreign ambassadors to the kingdom in the coastal city of Jeddah.
Britain on Friday raised the terror threat level to severe, the second-highest level.
The decision was related to developments in Iraq and Syria, but there was no information to suggest an attack was imminent.
“What we are facing in Iraq now with ISIL is a greater threat to our security than we have seen before,” Prime Minister David Cameron said.
He told reporters that while the Taliban facilitated al-Qaeda terrorism, the Islamic State group is “effectively a state run by terrorists.”
He said the ambition to create an Islamist caliphate isn't something that could be ignored.
“We could be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a NATO member,” he said, referring to Turkey.
Intelligence and security services now believe around 500 Britons have gone to fight in Syria and potentially Iraq,
Some of the plots are likely to involve fighters who have traveled from Britain and Europe to take part in fighting in the Middle East, Associated Press reported.
The White House said Friday it has no plans to raise terror alert levels in the United States, despite Britain's decision to raise its threat level to “severe,” according to AFP.
“I don't anticipate at this point there is a plan to change that level,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, when asked whether Washington anticipated issuing a similar warning to Americans over a perceived threat from operatives of ISIS.
The Obama administration dispensed with its previous color coded threat alert level system for terrorist threats introduced after the September 11 attacks in 2001, reasoning it rarely changed and was often unspecific.
Currently, terror threat alerts are issued by the Department of Homeland Security on a case-by-case basis, but there are no current alerts.
Last Update: Saturday, 30 August 2014 KSA 23:40 - GMT 20:40
#Saudi King Abdullah warns ambassadors to kingdom that #ISIS will reach Europe in a month & US in two ! (video) http://bit.ly/1nKiw8O
english version: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/New...king-warns-of-terror-threat-to-the-world.html
Saudi king warns of terror threat to the world
Text size A A A
Staff Writer, Al Arabiya News
Friday, 29 August 2014
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz warned on Friday that the threat of terrorism will reach Europe and America if the world does not unite to confront it, Al Arabiya News Channel reported.
The king made the statement during a reception of foreign ambassadors to the kingdom in the coastal city of Jeddah.
Britain on Friday raised the terror threat level to severe, the second-highest level.
The decision was related to developments in Iraq and Syria, but there was no information to suggest an attack was imminent.
“What we are facing in Iraq now with ISIL is a greater threat to our security than we have seen before,” Prime Minister David Cameron said.
He told reporters that while the Taliban facilitated al-Qaeda terrorism, the Islamic State group is “effectively a state run by terrorists.”
He said the ambition to create an Islamist caliphate isn't something that could be ignored.
“We could be facing a terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a NATO member,” he said, referring to Turkey.
Intelligence and security services now believe around 500 Britons have gone to fight in Syria and potentially Iraq,
Some of the plots are likely to involve fighters who have traveled from Britain and Europe to take part in fighting in the Middle East, Associated Press reported.
The White House said Friday it has no plans to raise terror alert levels in the United States, despite Britain's decision to raise its threat level to “severe,” according to AFP.
“I don't anticipate at this point there is a plan to change that level,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, when asked whether Washington anticipated issuing a similar warning to Americans over a perceived threat from operatives of ISIS.
The Obama administration dispensed with its previous color coded threat alert level system for terrorist threats introduced after the September 11 attacks in 2001, reasoning it rarely changed and was often unspecific.
Currently, terror threat alerts are issued by the Department of Homeland Security on a case-by-case basis, but there are no current alerts.
Last Update: Saturday, 30 August 2014 KSA 23:40 - GMT 20:40
Last edited:
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
I read the announcement(s) Saturday, but all I had to post were hard to understand translations, so I didn't post it.
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai · 1h
#BreakingNews: "Euphrates Province"/Wilayat al-Furat #IS has created cross Sykes-Picot. #Iraq #Syria by @ghazishami pic.twitter.com/fzldVd0SUT
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai · 1h
#BreakingNews: "Euphrates Province"/Wilayat al-Furat #IS has created cross Sykes-Picot. #Iraq #Syria by @ghazishami pic.twitter.com/fzldVd0SUT
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
I have said repeatedly, Erdogan has his dreams of a Caliphate too...maybe he is just letting ISIS do all the dirty work, then he can step in and take charge (after his mil takes out the top ones?). I guess the Khilafah isn't big enough yet for Erdogan.
convo/info:
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai 5h
Turkish deputy PM: Hostages held by #IS are alive, their locations r known, & contact with them has been maintained.@DR_SHAHID #Mosul #Iraq
Ahmed Al-Jazrawi @Ahmed__Hussain_ 4h
@EjmAlrai @DR_SHAHID what hostages? Thought the Turks were released
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai 4h
@Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID Only drivers not the diplomats taken in Mosul after the first week of IS control
Tommy Mommy @watchpigs 4h
@EjmAlrai @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID what IS want from the turkish consul
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai
It is a strange relationship. Don't know @watchpigs @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID
Tommy Mommy @watchpigs 4h
@EjmAlrai maybe Turkey left their diplom extra their to excuse no mil involvment. Their answer is always z same "they have hostages from us"
Fer Gunay @FiratGunay 3h
@EjmAlrai @watchpigs @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID When Peshmerga asked diplomats 2 evacuate & escape w them they refused, ordered to stay
❖ Миша ☠_No2卐EU @filokalia 3h
@FiratGunay @EjmAlrai he tells lies -> http://www.aina.org/news/20140519180618.htm … @watchpigs @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID
Fer Gunay @FiratGunay 3h
@EjmAlrai @watchpigs @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID they were ordered to stay until IS arrived. Turkey created an excuse not to intervene
convo/info:
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai 5h
Turkish deputy PM: Hostages held by #IS are alive, their locations r known, & contact with them has been maintained.@DR_SHAHID #Mosul #Iraq
Ahmed Al-Jazrawi @Ahmed__Hussain_ 4h
@EjmAlrai @DR_SHAHID what hostages? Thought the Turks were released
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai 4h
@Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID Only drivers not the diplomats taken in Mosul after the first week of IS control
Tommy Mommy @watchpigs 4h
@EjmAlrai @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID what IS want from the turkish consul
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai
It is a strange relationship. Don't know @watchpigs @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID
Tommy Mommy @watchpigs 4h
@EjmAlrai maybe Turkey left their diplom extra their to excuse no mil involvment. Their answer is always z same "they have hostages from us"
Fer Gunay @FiratGunay 3h
@EjmAlrai @watchpigs @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID When Peshmerga asked diplomats 2 evacuate & escape w them they refused, ordered to stay
❖ Миша ☠_No2卐EU @filokalia 3h
@FiratGunay @EjmAlrai he tells lies -> http://www.aina.org/news/20140519180618.htm … @watchpigs @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID
Fer Gunay @FiratGunay 3h
@EjmAlrai @watchpigs @Ahmed__Hussain_ @DR_SHAHID they were ordered to stay until IS arrived. Turkey created an excuse not to intervene
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
posted for fair use
1 September 2014 Last updated at 00:45 ET
Islamic State: Where does jihadist group get its support?
A militant islamist fighter takes part in an ISIS parade in Syria's eastern city of Raqqa June 30 2014
Islamic State outperformed all other militant rebel groups in Syria and continues to claim ground
Many Gulf states have been accused of funding Islamic State (IS) extremists in Iraq and Syria.
But as Michael Stephens, director of the Royal United Services Institute in Qatar, explains, not all is clear-cut in war.
Much has been written about the support Islamic State (IS) has received from donors and sympathisers, particularly in the wealthy Gulf States.
Indeed the accusation I hear most from those fighting IS in Iraq and Syria is that Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are solely responsible for the group's existence.
But the truth is a little more complex and needs some exploring.
It is true that some wealthy individuals from the Gulf have funded extremist groups in Syria, many taking bags of cash to Turkey and simply handing over millions of dollars at a time.
This was an extremely common practice in 2012 and 2013 but has since diminished and is at most only a tiny percentage of the total income that flows into Islamic State coffers in 2014.
It is also true that Saudi Arabia and Qatar, believing that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would soon fall and that Sunni political Islam was a true vehicle for their political goals, funded groups that had strongly Islamist credentials.
Liwa al-Tawhid, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam were just such groups, all holding tenuous links to the "bad guy" of the time - the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's wing in Syria.
Qatar's Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani The new emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani with French President Francois Hollande
Saudi King Abdullah, file pic Saudi Arabia has been accused of funding Islamists under the banner of IS, an accusation it staunchly denies
Bashar al Assad, date unknown as provided by 3rd party Gulf funds have flowed to opposition groups since the early days of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad
Qatar especially attracted criticism for its cloudy links to the group.
Turkey for its part operated a highly questionable policy of border enforcement in which weapons and money flooded into Syria, with Qatari and Saudi backing.
All had thought that this would facilitate the end of Mr Assad's regime and the reordering of Syria into a Sunni power, breaking Shia Iran's link to the Mediterranean.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
Islamic State's goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate is certainly attractive in some corners of Islamic thinking”
Yet as IS began its seemingly unstoppable rise in 2013, these groups were either swept away by it, or deciding it was better to join the winning team, simply defected bringing their weapons and money with them.
Only al-Nusra has really held firm, managing a tenuous alliance with its more radical cousin, but even so it is estimated that at least 3,000 fighters from al-Nusra swapped their allegiance during this time.
So has Qatar funded Islamic State? Directly, the answer is no. Indirectly, a combination of shoddy policy and naivety has led to Qatar-funded weapons and money making their way into the hands of IS.
Saudi Arabia likewise is innocent of a direct state policy to fund the group, but as with Qatar its determination to remove Mr Assad has led to serious mistakes in its choice of allies.
Both countries must undertake some soul searching at this point, although it is doubtful that any such introspection will be admitted in public.
Light years ahead
But there are deeper issues here; religious ties and sympathy for a group that both acts explicitly against Shia Iran's interests in the region and has the tacit support of more people in the Gulf than many would care to admit.
The horrific acts committed by IS are difficult for anybody to support, but its goal of establishing a caliphate is certainly attractive in some corners of Islamic thought.
Militant Islamist fighters from IS take part in a parade in Raqqa Syria 30 June 2014 The goal of IS militants is to create an independent Islamic State stretching from Iraq across to the Levant
Many of those who supported the goal have already found their way to Syria and have fought and died for Islamic State and other groups. Others express support more passively and will continue to do so for many years.
The pull of IS, a group that has outperformed all others in combat and put into place a slick media campaign in dozens of languages to attract young men and women to its cause, has proven highly successful.
In every activity - from fighting, to organisation and hierarchy, to media messaging - IS is light years ahead of the assorted motley crew of opposition factions operating in the region.
'War economy'
Islamic State has put in place what appear to be the beginnings of quasi-state structures - ministries, law courts and even a rudimentary taxation system, which incidentally asks for far less than what was paid by citizens of Mr Assad's Syria.
IS has displayed a consistent pattern since it first began to take territory in early 2013.
Upon taking control of a town it quickly secures the water, flour and hydrocarbon resources of the area, centralising distribution and thereby making the local population dependent on it for survival.
Militant Islamist fighters from IS take part in a parade in Raqqa Syria 30 June 2014 Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is accused of doing business with Islamic State in Syria
Dependency and support are not the same thing, and it is impossible to quantify how many of Islamic State's "citizens" are willing partners in its project or simply acquiescing to its rule out of a need for stability or fear of punishment.
To understand how the Islamic State economy functions is to delve into a murky world of middlemen and shady business dealings, in which "loyal ideologues" on differing sides spot business opportunities and pounce upon them.
IS exports about 9,000 barrels of oil per day at prices ranging from about $25-$45 (£15-£27).
Some of this goes to Kurdish middlemen up towards Turkey, some goes for domestic IS consumption and some goes to the Assad regime, which in turn sells weapons back to the group.
"It is a traditional war economy," notes Jamestown analyst Wladimir van Wilgenburg.
Indeed, the dodgy dealings and strange alliances are beginning to look very similar to events that occurred during the Lebanese civil war, when feuding war lords would similarly fight and do business with each other.
The point is that Islamic State is essentially self-financing; it cannot be isolated and cut off from the world because it is intimately tied into regional stability in a way that benefits not only itself, but also the people it fights.
The larger question of course is whether such an integral pillar of the region (albeit shockingly violent and extreme) can be defeated.
Without Western military intervention it is unlikely. Although Sunni tribes in Iraq ponder their allegiances to the group, they do not have the firepower or finances necessary to topple IS and neither does the Iraqi army nor its Syrian counterpart.
Michael Stephens is Director of the Royal United Services Institute, Qatar, and is currently in Irbil
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29004253
1 September 2014 Last updated at 00:45 ET
Islamic State: Where does jihadist group get its support?
A militant islamist fighter takes part in an ISIS parade in Syria's eastern city of Raqqa June 30 2014
Islamic State outperformed all other militant rebel groups in Syria and continues to claim ground
Many Gulf states have been accused of funding Islamic State (IS) extremists in Iraq and Syria.
But as Michael Stephens, director of the Royal United Services Institute in Qatar, explains, not all is clear-cut in war.
Much has been written about the support Islamic State (IS) has received from donors and sympathisers, particularly in the wealthy Gulf States.
Indeed the accusation I hear most from those fighting IS in Iraq and Syria is that Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are solely responsible for the group's existence.
But the truth is a little more complex and needs some exploring.
It is true that some wealthy individuals from the Gulf have funded extremist groups in Syria, many taking bags of cash to Turkey and simply handing over millions of dollars at a time.
This was an extremely common practice in 2012 and 2013 but has since diminished and is at most only a tiny percentage of the total income that flows into Islamic State coffers in 2014.
It is also true that Saudi Arabia and Qatar, believing that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would soon fall and that Sunni political Islam was a true vehicle for their political goals, funded groups that had strongly Islamist credentials.
Liwa al-Tawhid, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam were just such groups, all holding tenuous links to the "bad guy" of the time - the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's wing in Syria.
Qatar's Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani The new emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani with French President Francois Hollande
Saudi King Abdullah, file pic Saudi Arabia has been accused of funding Islamists under the banner of IS, an accusation it staunchly denies
Bashar al Assad, date unknown as provided by 3rd party Gulf funds have flowed to opposition groups since the early days of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad
Qatar especially attracted criticism for its cloudy links to the group.
Turkey for its part operated a highly questionable policy of border enforcement in which weapons and money flooded into Syria, with Qatari and Saudi backing.
All had thought that this would facilitate the end of Mr Assad's regime and the reordering of Syria into a Sunni power, breaking Shia Iran's link to the Mediterranean.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
Islamic State's goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate is certainly attractive in some corners of Islamic thinking”
Yet as IS began its seemingly unstoppable rise in 2013, these groups were either swept away by it, or deciding it was better to join the winning team, simply defected bringing their weapons and money with them.
Only al-Nusra has really held firm, managing a tenuous alliance with its more radical cousin, but even so it is estimated that at least 3,000 fighters from al-Nusra swapped their allegiance during this time.
So has Qatar funded Islamic State? Directly, the answer is no. Indirectly, a combination of shoddy policy and naivety has led to Qatar-funded weapons and money making their way into the hands of IS.
Saudi Arabia likewise is innocent of a direct state policy to fund the group, but as with Qatar its determination to remove Mr Assad has led to serious mistakes in its choice of allies.
Both countries must undertake some soul searching at this point, although it is doubtful that any such introspection will be admitted in public.
Light years ahead
But there are deeper issues here; religious ties and sympathy for a group that both acts explicitly against Shia Iran's interests in the region and has the tacit support of more people in the Gulf than many would care to admit.
The horrific acts committed by IS are difficult for anybody to support, but its goal of establishing a caliphate is certainly attractive in some corners of Islamic thought.
Militant Islamist fighters from IS take part in a parade in Raqqa Syria 30 June 2014 The goal of IS militants is to create an independent Islamic State stretching from Iraq across to the Levant
Many of those who supported the goal have already found their way to Syria and have fought and died for Islamic State and other groups. Others express support more passively and will continue to do so for many years.
The pull of IS, a group that has outperformed all others in combat and put into place a slick media campaign in dozens of languages to attract young men and women to its cause, has proven highly successful.
In every activity - from fighting, to organisation and hierarchy, to media messaging - IS is light years ahead of the assorted motley crew of opposition factions operating in the region.
'War economy'
Islamic State has put in place what appear to be the beginnings of quasi-state structures - ministries, law courts and even a rudimentary taxation system, which incidentally asks for far less than what was paid by citizens of Mr Assad's Syria.
IS has displayed a consistent pattern since it first began to take territory in early 2013.
Upon taking control of a town it quickly secures the water, flour and hydrocarbon resources of the area, centralising distribution and thereby making the local population dependent on it for survival.
Militant Islamist fighters from IS take part in a parade in Raqqa Syria 30 June 2014 Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is accused of doing business with Islamic State in Syria
Dependency and support are not the same thing, and it is impossible to quantify how many of Islamic State's "citizens" are willing partners in its project or simply acquiescing to its rule out of a need for stability or fear of punishment.
To understand how the Islamic State economy functions is to delve into a murky world of middlemen and shady business dealings, in which "loyal ideologues" on differing sides spot business opportunities and pounce upon them.
IS exports about 9,000 barrels of oil per day at prices ranging from about $25-$45 (£15-£27).
Some of this goes to Kurdish middlemen up towards Turkey, some goes for domestic IS consumption and some goes to the Assad regime, which in turn sells weapons back to the group.
"It is a traditional war economy," notes Jamestown analyst Wladimir van Wilgenburg.
Indeed, the dodgy dealings and strange alliances are beginning to look very similar to events that occurred during the Lebanese civil war, when feuding war lords would similarly fight and do business with each other.
The point is that Islamic State is essentially self-financing; it cannot be isolated and cut off from the world because it is intimately tied into regional stability in a way that benefits not only itself, but also the people it fights.
The larger question of course is whether such an integral pillar of the region (albeit shockingly violent and extreme) can be defeated.
Without Western military intervention it is unlikely. Although Sunni tribes in Iraq ponder their allegiances to the group, they do not have the firepower or finances necessary to topple IS and neither does the Iraqi army nor its Syrian counterpart.
Michael Stephens is Director of the Royal United Services Institute, Qatar, and is currently in Irbil
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29004253
ParanoidNot
Veteran Member
No. The Mahdi is a belief held by only a subset of the Shia (Shia Ali), and are known as Twelvers, and traditionally have only been in Iran.
Per the eschatology of the Twelvers, the Madhi will not return (i.e. ascend up the stairs of a water well somewhere in Iran IIRC), and then only after the world is cleansed by fire (now interpreted by the Twelvers as global thermonuclear war).
As to the Caliphate, it was/is a Sunni religious/political ideology. The Ottoman Empire more or less started at the end of the last crusade in 1299 and ran until it was dismantled by the British and the French at the end of WWI as punishment for siding with the Germans.
Baloo
Veteran Member
Caliph is basically the leader of everything-politics, religion etc (within the lands controlled by him/Islam--the Caliphate). Mohammad was the first caliph and it has gone on ever since--until WWI when the last one was ended.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Caliphs
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
David B. Cohen @DavidBCohen1 Aug 30
#ButTheRealProblemIsIsrael @gatewaypundit: ISIS MOVES INTO LEBANON – Captures Soldiers Beheads 1on Tape http://shar.es/112J7V
Shami Witness @ShamiWitness Aug 30
#Breaking MTV Lebanon and others reporting massive march in Ain al Hilweh camp in support of Islamic State, Hezb flags burnt. #Lebanon
sanjeevsanyal @sanjeevsanyal Aug 30
ISIS moves into Lebanon, still no systematic response from the world: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/201...n-captures-nine-soldiers-beheads-one-on-tape/ …
Al Arabiya English @AlArabiya_Eng Aug 31
BREAKING: Lebanese authorities are handed over five soldiers released by al-Nusra Front. #Lebanon
(al-Nusra Front = AQ, not ISIS)
@jeanassy Aug 31
What happened yesterday proves that a big part of the Lebanese support the "Islamic State" and are ready to welcome it in #Lebanon..
عاصي @jeanassy Aug 31
Relatives of soldier Ali AlSayyed, who was beheaded by "Islamic State" militants, mourn his death. #Lebanon (reuters) pic.twitter.com/6zfGDEUaeL
Aki Peritz @AkiPeritz Aug 31
Just so we're clear, #isis just beheaded a Sunni soldier from Lebanon. In Lebanon. Then posted his murder vid online. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/w...id=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone …
Ghaffar Hussain @GhaffarH Aug 31
ISIS leave burning crosses in Lebanon just like their fellow fascists the KKK used to do - pic.twitter.com/TWXZmD3Y53
Zaid Benjamin @zaidbenjamin
#ISIS sympathizers in #Tripoli #Lebanon burning the Cross in a warning to the Christians of the country pic.twitter.com/ZQ6scflIg2
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwU0UQhIEAELVd1.jpg:large
-------------------------------
ShiaWehdatNews! @ShiaWehdatNews 12h
#Lebanon: These Words Were Sprayed On St. Michael Church By #ISIS : "The Islamic State Is Coming" #Tripoli See > pic.twitter.com/LsqAYEFogr
Zaid Benjamin @zaidbenjamin
#ISIS infamous hashtag "Baqiya wa Tatameded" on school walls east of the #Saudi capital #Riyadh - al-Hayat pic.twitter.com/4xYzrHkg9c
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai Aug 30
#KSA #IS Here it comes: #IS infamous hashtag "Baqiya wa Tatameded" on school walls east #Saudi #Riyadh pic.twitter.com/jEci4GPAW7 @zaidbenjamin
C. Huth-Hildebrandt @Anaminona
@EjmAlrai @zaidbenjamin Found that in our University too and did not understand at that time.
^^^she is in Germany; so the message has been found in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Germany; just three of many countries
#ButTheRealProblemIsIsrael @gatewaypundit: ISIS MOVES INTO LEBANON – Captures Soldiers Beheads 1on Tape http://shar.es/112J7V
Shami Witness @ShamiWitness Aug 30
#Breaking MTV Lebanon and others reporting massive march in Ain al Hilweh camp in support of Islamic State, Hezb flags burnt. #Lebanon
sanjeevsanyal @sanjeevsanyal Aug 30
ISIS moves into Lebanon, still no systematic response from the world: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/201...n-captures-nine-soldiers-beheads-one-on-tape/ …
Al Arabiya English @AlArabiya_Eng Aug 31
BREAKING: Lebanese authorities are handed over five soldiers released by al-Nusra Front. #Lebanon
(al-Nusra Front = AQ, not ISIS)
@jeanassy Aug 31
What happened yesterday proves that a big part of the Lebanese support the "Islamic State" and are ready to welcome it in #Lebanon..
عاصي @jeanassy Aug 31
Relatives of soldier Ali AlSayyed, who was beheaded by "Islamic State" militants, mourn his death. #Lebanon (reuters) pic.twitter.com/6zfGDEUaeL
Aki Peritz @AkiPeritz Aug 31
Just so we're clear, #isis just beheaded a Sunni soldier from Lebanon. In Lebanon. Then posted his murder vid online. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/w...id=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone …
Ghaffar Hussain @GhaffarH Aug 31
ISIS leave burning crosses in Lebanon just like their fellow fascists the KKK used to do - pic.twitter.com/TWXZmD3Y53
Zaid Benjamin @zaidbenjamin
#ISIS sympathizers in #Tripoli #Lebanon burning the Cross in a warning to the Christians of the country pic.twitter.com/ZQ6scflIg2
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwU0UQhIEAELVd1.jpg:large
-------------------------------
ShiaWehdatNews! @ShiaWehdatNews 12h
#Lebanon: These Words Were Sprayed On St. Michael Church By #ISIS : "The Islamic State Is Coming" #Tripoli See > pic.twitter.com/LsqAYEFogr
Zaid Benjamin @zaidbenjamin
#ISIS infamous hashtag "Baqiya wa Tatameded" on school walls east of the #Saudi capital #Riyadh - al-Hayat pic.twitter.com/4xYzrHkg9c
Elijah J Magnier @EjmAlrai Aug 30
#KSA #IS Here it comes: #IS infamous hashtag "Baqiya wa Tatameded" on school walls east #Saudi #Riyadh pic.twitter.com/jEci4GPAW7 @zaidbenjamin
C. Huth-Hildebrandt @Anaminona
@EjmAlrai @zaidbenjamin Found that in our University too and did not understand at that time.
^^^she is in Germany; so the message has been found in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Germany; just three of many countries
readynwaiting
Contributing Member
I don't understand why Sunni's would behead another Sunni...
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
various reasons:
refuse to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi or whoever
a spy
wrong sect of Sunni
siding with the enemy
The soldier was with the Lebanese Army, therefore an enemy of ISIS
JohnGaltfla
#NeverTrump
Conflict News @rConflictNews 10m
RT @GhaffarH: Iraqi army catches Chinese ISIS fighter - pic.twitter.com/XCwIXgfdfk
RT @GhaffarH: Iraqi army catches Chinese ISIS fighter - pic.twitter.com/XCwIXgfdfk
"The Covert Origins of ISIS" - US role in fostering Islamist radicalism
I had put this post in a separate thread, but it belongs here in the main ISIS thread ... so this is a copy of that post from several days ago.
I am unfamiliar with scgnews.com, the site that hosted this story, but if it is true, Obama (and his advisers, and his predecessors) have a lot of explaining to do.
http://scgnews.com/the-covert-origins-of-isis
I am just copying the text. The original site contains lots of links and embedded videos; go to that site to view them.
========================
The Covert Origins of ISIS
28.Aug.2014
Evidence exposing who put ISIS in power, and how it was done.
The Islamic militant group ISIS, formerly known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and recently rebranded as the so called Islamic State, is the stuff of nightmares. They are ruthless, fanatical, killers, on a mission, and that mission is to wipe out anyone and everyone, from any religion or belief system and to impose Shari'ah law. The mass executions, beheadings and even crucifixions that they are committing as they work towards this goal are flaunted like badges of pride, video taped and uploaded for the whole world to see. This is the new face of evil.
Would it interest you to know who helped these psychopaths rise to power? Would it interest you to know who armed them, funded them and trained them? Would it interest you to know why?
This story makes more sense if we start in the middle, so we'll begin with the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
The Libyan revolution was Obama's first major foreign intervention. It was portrayed as an extension of the Arab Spring, and NATO involvement was framed in humanitarian terms.
The fact that the CIA was actively working to help the Libyan rebels topple Gaddafi was no secret, nor were the airstrikes that Obama ordered against the Libyan government. However, little was said about the identity or the ideological leanings of these Libyan rebels. Not surprising, considering the fact that the leader of the Libyan rebels later admitted that his fighters included Al-Qaeda linked jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq.
These jihadist militants from Iraq were part of what national security analysts commonly referred to as Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Remember Al-Qaeda in Iraq was ISIS before it was rebranded.
With the assistance of U.S. and NATO intelligence and air support, the Libyan rebels captured Gaddafi and summarily executed him in the street, all the while enthusiastically chanting "Allah Akbar". For many of those who had bought the official line about how these rebels were freedom fighters aiming to establish a liberal democracy in Libya, this was the beginning of the end of their illusions.
Prior to the U.S. and NATO backed intervention, Libya had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa. This according to the U.N.'s Human Development Index rankings for 2010. However in the years following the coup, the country descended into chaos, with extremism and violence running rampant. Libya is now widely regarded as failed state (of course those who were naive enough to buy into the propaganda leading up to the war get defensive when this is said).
Now after Gaddafi was overthrown, the Libyan armories were looted, and massive quantities of weapons were sent by the Libyan rebels to Syria. The weapons, which included anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were smuggled into Syria through Turkey, a NATO ally. The times of London reported on the arrival of the shipment on September 14th, 2012. (Secondary confirmation in this NYT article) This was just three days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi. Chris Stevens had served as the U.S. government's liaison to the Libyan rebels since April of 2011.
While a great deal media attention has focused on the fact that the State Department did not provide adequate security at the consulate, and was slow to send assistance when the attack started, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh released an article in April of 2014 which exposed a classified agreement between the CIA, Turkey and the Syrian rebels to create what was referred to as a "rat line". The "rat line" was covert network used to channel weapons and ammunition from Libya, through southern turkey and across the Syrian border. Funding was provided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
With Stevens dead any direct U.S. involvement in that arms shipment was buried, and Washington would continue to claim that they had not sent heavy weaponry into Syria.
It was at this time that jihadist fighters from Libya began flooding into Syria as well. And not just low level militants. Many were experienced commanders who had fought in multiple theaters.
The U.S. and its allies were now fully focused on taking down Assad's government in Syria. As in Libya this regime change was to be framed in terms of human rights, and now overt support began to supplement the backdoor channels. The growing jihadist presence was swept under the rug and covered up.
However as the rebels gained strength, the reports of war crimes and atrocities that they were committing began to create a bit of a public relations problem for Washington. It then became standard policy to insist that U.S. support was only being given to what they referred to as "moderate" rebel forces.
This distinction, however, had no basis in reality.
In an interview given in April of 2014, FSA commander Jamal Maarouf admitted that his fighters regularly conduct joint operations with Al-Nusra. Al-Nusra is the official Al-Qa’ida branch in Syria. This statement is further validated by an interview given in June of 2013 by Colonel Abdel Basset Al-Tawil, commander of the FSA's Northern Front. In this interview he openly discusses his ties with Al-Nusra, and expresses his desire to see Syria ruled by sharia law. (You can verify the identities of these two commanders here in this document from The Institute for the Study of War)
Moderate rebels? Well it's complicated. Not that this should really come as any surprise. Reuters had reported in 2012 that the FSA's command was dominated by Islamic extremists, and the New York Times had reported that same year that the majority of the weapons that Washington were sending into Syria was ending up in the hands Jihadists. For two years the U.S. government knew that this was happening, but they kept doing it.
And the FSA's ties to Al-Nusra are just the beginning. In June of 2014 Al-Nusra merged with ISIS at the border between Iraq and Syria.
So to review, the FSA is working with Al-Nusra, Al-Nusra is working with ISIS, and the U.S. has been sending money and weapons to the FSA even though they've known since 2012 that most of these weapons were ending up in the hands of extremists. You do the math.
In that context, the sarin gas attacks of 2013 which turned out to have been committed by the Syrian rebels, makes a lot more sense doesn't it? If it wasn't enough that U.N. investigators, Russian investigators, and Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh all pinned that crime on Washington's proxies, the rebels themselves threatened the West that they would expose what really happened if they were not given more advanced weaponry within one month.
By the way, this also explains why Washington then decided to target Russia next.
This threat was made on June 10th, 2013. In what can only be described as an amazing coincidence, just nine days later, the rebels received their first official shipment of heavy weapons in Aleppo.
After the second sarin gas fiasco, which was also exposed and therefore failed to garner public support for airstrikes, the U.S. continued to increase its the training and support for the rebels.
In February of 2014, Haaretz reported that the U.S. and its allies in the region, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, were in the process of helping the Syrian rebels plan and prepare for a massive attack in the south. According to Haaretz Israel had also provided direct assistance in military operations against Assad four months prior (you can access a free cached version of the page here).
Then in May of 2014 PBS ran a report in which they interviewed rebels who were trained by the U.S. in Qatar. According to those rebels they were being trained to finish off soldiers who survived attacks.
"They trained us to ambush regime or enemy vehicles and cut off the road,” said the fighter, who is identified only as "Hussein." "They also trained us on how to attack a vehicle, raid it, retrieve information or weapons and munitions, and how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush."
This is a blatant violation of the Geneva conventions. It also runs contrary to conventional military strategy. In conventional military strategy soldiers are better off left wounded, because this ends up costing the enemy more resources. Executing captured enemy soldiers is the kind of tactic used when you want to strike terror in the hearts of the enemy. It also just happens to be standard operating procedure for ISIS.
One month after this report, in June of 2014, ISIS made its dramatic entry, crossing over the Syrian border into Iraq, capturing Mosul, Baiji and almost reaching Baghdad. The internet was suddenly flooded with footage of drive by shootings, large scale death marches, and mass graves. And of course any Iraqi soldier that was captured was executed.
Massive quantities of American military equipment were seized during that operation. ISIS took entire truckloads of humvees, they took helicopters, tanks, and artillery. They photographed and video taped themselves and advertised what they were doing on social media, and yet for some reason Washington didn't even TRY to stop them.
U.S. military doctrine clearly calls for the destruction of military equipment and supplies when friendly forces cannot prevent them from falling into enemy hands, but that didn't happen here. ISIS was allowed to carry this equipment out of Iraq and into Syria unimpeded. The U.S. military had the means to strike these convoys, but they didn't lift a finger, even though they had been launching drone strikes in Pakistan that same week.
Why would they do that?
Though Obama plays the role of a weak, indecisive, liberal president, and while pundits from the right have had a lot of fun with that image, this is just a facade. Some presidents, like George W. Bush, rely primarily on overt military aggression. Obama gets the same job done, but he prefers covert means. Not really surprising considering the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski was his mentor.
Those who know their history will remember that Zbigniew Brzezinski was directly involved in the funding and arming the Islamic extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to weaken the Soviets.
By the way Osama bin Laden was one of these anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" the U.S. was funding and arming.
This operation is no secret at this point, nor are the unintended side effects.
Officially the U.S. government's arming and funding of the Mujahideen was a response to the Soviet invasion in December of 1979, however in his memoir entitled "From the Shadows" Robert Gates, director of the CIA under Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, and Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, revealed that the U.S. actually began the covert operation 6 months prior, with the express intention of luring the Soviets into a quagmire. (You can preview the relevant text here on google books)
The strategy worked. The Soviets invaded, and the ten years of war that followed are considered by many historians as being one of the primary causes of the fall of the USSR.
This example doesn't just establish precedent, what we're seeing happen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria right now is actually a continuation of a old story. Al-Nusra and ISIS are ideological and organizational decedents of these extremist elements that the U.S. government made use of thirty years ago.
The U.S. the went on to create a breeding ground for these extremists by invading Iraq in 2003. Had it not been for the vacuum of power left by the removal and execution of Saddam, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, aka ISIS, would not exist. And had it not been for Washington's attempt at toppling Assad by arming, funding and training shadowy militant groups in Syria, there is no way that ISIS would have been capable of storming into Iraq in June of 2014.
On every level, no matter how you cut it, ISIS is a product of U.S. government's twisted and decrepit foreign policy.
Now all of this may seem contradictory to you as you watch the drums of war against ISIS begin to beat louder and the air strikes against them are gradually widened. Why would the U.S. help a terrorist organization get established, only to attack them later?
Well why did the CIA put Saddam Hussein in power in 1963?, Why did the U.S. government back Saddam in 1980 when he launched a war of aggression against Iran, even though they knew that he was using chemical weapons? Why did the U.S. fund and arm Islamic extremists in Afghanistan against the Soviets?
There's a pattern here if you look closely. This is a tried and true geopolitical strategy.
Step 1: Build up a dictator or extremist group which can then be used to wage proxy wars against opponents. During this stage any crimes committed by these proxies are swept under the rug. [Problem]
Step 2: When these nasty characters have outlived their usefulness, that's when it's time to pull out all that dirt from under the rug and start publicizing it 24/7. This obviously works best when the public has no idea how these bad guys came to power.[Reaction]
Step 3: Finally, when the public practically begging for the government to do something, a solution is proposed. Usually the solution involves military intervention, the loss of certain liberties, or both. [Solution]
ISIS is extremely useful. They have essentially done Washington dirty work by weakening Assad. In 2014, while the news cycle has focused almost exclusively on Ukraine and Russia, ISIS made major headway in Syria, and as of August they already controlled 35% of the country.
Since ISIS largely based in Syria, this gives the U.S. a pretext to move into Syria. Sooner or later the U.S. will extend the airstrikes into Assad's backyard, and when they do U.S. officials are already making it clear that both ISIS and the Syrian government will be targeted. That, after all, is the whole point. Washington may allow ISIS to capture a bit more territory first, but the writing is on the wall, and has been for some time now.
The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that this will never lead to boots on the ground, however, the truth of the matter is that anyone who understands anything about military tactics knows full well that ISIS cannot be defeated by airstrikes alone. In response to airstrikes ISIS will merely disperse and conceal their forces. ISIS isn't an established state power which can be destroyed by knocking out key government buildings and infrastructure. These are guerrilla fighters who cut their teeth in urban warfare.
To significantly weaken them, the war will have to involve ground troops, but even this is a lost cause. U.S. troops could certainly route ISIS in street to street battles for some time, and they might even succeed in fully occupying Syria and Iraq for a number of years, but eventually they will have to leave, and when they do, it should be obvious what will come next.
The puppets that the U.S. government has installed in the various countries that they have brought down in recent years have without exception proven to be utterly incompetent and corrupt. No one that Washington places in power will be capable of maintaining stability in Syria. Period.
Right now, Assad is the last bastion of stability in the region. He is the last chance they have for a moderate non-sectarian government and he is the only hope of anything even remotely resembling democracy for the foreseeable future. If Assad falls, Islamic extremist will take the helm, they will impose shari'ah law, and they will do everything in their power to continue spreading their ideology as far and wide as they can.
If the world truly wants to stop ISIS, there is only one way to do it:
1. First and foremost, the U.S. government and its allies must be heavily pressured to cut all support to the rebels who are attempting to topple Assad. Even if these rebels that the U.S. is arming and funding were moderate, and they're not, the fact that they are forcing Assad to fight a war on multiple fronts, only strengthens ISIS. This is lunacy.
2. The Syrian government should be provided with financial support, equipment, training and intelligence to enable them to turn the tide against ISIS. This is their territory, they should be the ones to reclaim it.
Now obviously this support isn't going to come from the U.S. or any NATO country, but there are a number of nations who have a strategic interest in preventing another regime change and chaotic aftermath. If these countries respond promptly, as in right now, they could preempt a U.S. intervention, and as long this support does not include the presence of foreign troops, doing so will greatly reduce the likelihood of a major confrontation down the road.
3. The U.S. government and its allies should should be aggressively condemned for their failed regime change policies and the individuals behind these decisions should be charged for war crimes. This would have to be done on an nation by nation level since the U.N. has done nothing but enable NATO aggression. While this may not immediately result in these criminals being arrested, it would send a message. This can be done. Malaysia has already proven this by convicting the Bush administration of war crimes in absentia.
Now you might be thinking: "This all sounds fine and good, but what does this have to do with me? I can't influence this situation."
That perspective is quite common, and for most people, it's paralyzing, but the truth of the matter is that we can influence this. We've done it before, and we can do it again.
I'll be honest with you though, this isn't going to be easy. To succeed we have to start thinking strategically. Like it or not, this is a chess game. If we really want to rock the boat, we have to start reaching out to people in positions of influence. This can mean talking to broadcasters at your local radio station, news paper, or t.v. station, or it can mean contacting influential bloggers, celebrities, business figures or government officials. Reaching out to current serving military and young people who may be considering joining up is also important. But even if it's just your neighbor, or your coworker, every single person we can reach brings us closer to critical mass. The most important step is to start trying.
========================
As you think about this article, remember the WSJ story that was recently posted on this board within the last few weeks, proving that the Israelis had a hand in creating and sustaining the growth of Hamas.
It seems that our policy elites think that sowing dragons' teeth is a great idea, and they imagine that the resulting dragons will be tame.
Lee
I had put this post in a separate thread, but it belongs here in the main ISIS thread ... so this is a copy of that post from several days ago.
I am unfamiliar with scgnews.com, the site that hosted this story, but if it is true, Obama (and his advisers, and his predecessors) have a lot of explaining to do.
http://scgnews.com/the-covert-origins-of-isis
I am just copying the text. The original site contains lots of links and embedded videos; go to that site to view them.
========================
The Covert Origins of ISIS
28.Aug.2014
Evidence exposing who put ISIS in power, and how it was done.
The Islamic militant group ISIS, formerly known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and recently rebranded as the so called Islamic State, is the stuff of nightmares. They are ruthless, fanatical, killers, on a mission, and that mission is to wipe out anyone and everyone, from any religion or belief system and to impose Shari'ah law. The mass executions, beheadings and even crucifixions that they are committing as they work towards this goal are flaunted like badges of pride, video taped and uploaded for the whole world to see. This is the new face of evil.
Would it interest you to know who helped these psychopaths rise to power? Would it interest you to know who armed them, funded them and trained them? Would it interest you to know why?
This story makes more sense if we start in the middle, so we'll begin with the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
The Libyan revolution was Obama's first major foreign intervention. It was portrayed as an extension of the Arab Spring, and NATO involvement was framed in humanitarian terms.
The fact that the CIA was actively working to help the Libyan rebels topple Gaddafi was no secret, nor were the airstrikes that Obama ordered against the Libyan government. However, little was said about the identity or the ideological leanings of these Libyan rebels. Not surprising, considering the fact that the leader of the Libyan rebels later admitted that his fighters included Al-Qaeda linked jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq.
These jihadist militants from Iraq were part of what national security analysts commonly referred to as Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Remember Al-Qaeda in Iraq was ISIS before it was rebranded.
With the assistance of U.S. and NATO intelligence and air support, the Libyan rebels captured Gaddafi and summarily executed him in the street, all the while enthusiastically chanting "Allah Akbar". For many of those who had bought the official line about how these rebels were freedom fighters aiming to establish a liberal democracy in Libya, this was the beginning of the end of their illusions.
Prior to the U.S. and NATO backed intervention, Libya had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa. This according to the U.N.'s Human Development Index rankings for 2010. However in the years following the coup, the country descended into chaos, with extremism and violence running rampant. Libya is now widely regarded as failed state (of course those who were naive enough to buy into the propaganda leading up to the war get defensive when this is said).
Now after Gaddafi was overthrown, the Libyan armories were looted, and massive quantities of weapons were sent by the Libyan rebels to Syria. The weapons, which included anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were smuggled into Syria through Turkey, a NATO ally. The times of London reported on the arrival of the shipment on September 14th, 2012. (Secondary confirmation in this NYT article) This was just three days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed by the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi. Chris Stevens had served as the U.S. government's liaison to the Libyan rebels since April of 2011.
While a great deal media attention has focused on the fact that the State Department did not provide adequate security at the consulate, and was slow to send assistance when the attack started, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh released an article in April of 2014 which exposed a classified agreement between the CIA, Turkey and the Syrian rebels to create what was referred to as a "rat line". The "rat line" was covert network used to channel weapons and ammunition from Libya, through southern turkey and across the Syrian border. Funding was provided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
With Stevens dead any direct U.S. involvement in that arms shipment was buried, and Washington would continue to claim that they had not sent heavy weaponry into Syria.
It was at this time that jihadist fighters from Libya began flooding into Syria as well. And not just low level militants. Many were experienced commanders who had fought in multiple theaters.
The U.S. and its allies were now fully focused on taking down Assad's government in Syria. As in Libya this regime change was to be framed in terms of human rights, and now overt support began to supplement the backdoor channels. The growing jihadist presence was swept under the rug and covered up.
However as the rebels gained strength, the reports of war crimes and atrocities that they were committing began to create a bit of a public relations problem for Washington. It then became standard policy to insist that U.S. support was only being given to what they referred to as "moderate" rebel forces.
This distinction, however, had no basis in reality.
In an interview given in April of 2014, FSA commander Jamal Maarouf admitted that his fighters regularly conduct joint operations with Al-Nusra. Al-Nusra is the official Al-Qa’ida branch in Syria. This statement is further validated by an interview given in June of 2013 by Colonel Abdel Basset Al-Tawil, commander of the FSA's Northern Front. In this interview he openly discusses his ties with Al-Nusra, and expresses his desire to see Syria ruled by sharia law. (You can verify the identities of these two commanders here in this document from The Institute for the Study of War)
Moderate rebels? Well it's complicated. Not that this should really come as any surprise. Reuters had reported in 2012 that the FSA's command was dominated by Islamic extremists, and the New York Times had reported that same year that the majority of the weapons that Washington were sending into Syria was ending up in the hands Jihadists. For two years the U.S. government knew that this was happening, but they kept doing it.
And the FSA's ties to Al-Nusra are just the beginning. In June of 2014 Al-Nusra merged with ISIS at the border between Iraq and Syria.
So to review, the FSA is working with Al-Nusra, Al-Nusra is working with ISIS, and the U.S. has been sending money and weapons to the FSA even though they've known since 2012 that most of these weapons were ending up in the hands of extremists. You do the math.
In that context, the sarin gas attacks of 2013 which turned out to have been committed by the Syrian rebels, makes a lot more sense doesn't it? If it wasn't enough that U.N. investigators, Russian investigators, and Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh all pinned that crime on Washington's proxies, the rebels themselves threatened the West that they would expose what really happened if they were not given more advanced weaponry within one month.
By the way, this also explains why Washington then decided to target Russia next.
This threat was made on June 10th, 2013. In what can only be described as an amazing coincidence, just nine days later, the rebels received their first official shipment of heavy weapons in Aleppo.
After the second sarin gas fiasco, which was also exposed and therefore failed to garner public support for airstrikes, the U.S. continued to increase its the training and support for the rebels.
In February of 2014, Haaretz reported that the U.S. and its allies in the region, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, were in the process of helping the Syrian rebels plan and prepare for a massive attack in the south. According to Haaretz Israel had also provided direct assistance in military operations against Assad four months prior (you can access a free cached version of the page here).
Then in May of 2014 PBS ran a report in which they interviewed rebels who were trained by the U.S. in Qatar. According to those rebels they were being trained to finish off soldiers who survived attacks.
"They trained us to ambush regime or enemy vehicles and cut off the road,” said the fighter, who is identified only as "Hussein." "They also trained us on how to attack a vehicle, raid it, retrieve information or weapons and munitions, and how to finish off soldiers still alive after an ambush."
This is a blatant violation of the Geneva conventions. It also runs contrary to conventional military strategy. In conventional military strategy soldiers are better off left wounded, because this ends up costing the enemy more resources. Executing captured enemy soldiers is the kind of tactic used when you want to strike terror in the hearts of the enemy. It also just happens to be standard operating procedure for ISIS.
One month after this report, in June of 2014, ISIS made its dramatic entry, crossing over the Syrian border into Iraq, capturing Mosul, Baiji and almost reaching Baghdad. The internet was suddenly flooded with footage of drive by shootings, large scale death marches, and mass graves. And of course any Iraqi soldier that was captured was executed.
Massive quantities of American military equipment were seized during that operation. ISIS took entire truckloads of humvees, they took helicopters, tanks, and artillery. They photographed and video taped themselves and advertised what they were doing on social media, and yet for some reason Washington didn't even TRY to stop them.
U.S. military doctrine clearly calls for the destruction of military equipment and supplies when friendly forces cannot prevent them from falling into enemy hands, but that didn't happen here. ISIS was allowed to carry this equipment out of Iraq and into Syria unimpeded. The U.S. military had the means to strike these convoys, but they didn't lift a finger, even though they had been launching drone strikes in Pakistan that same week.
Why would they do that?
Though Obama plays the role of a weak, indecisive, liberal president, and while pundits from the right have had a lot of fun with that image, this is just a facade. Some presidents, like George W. Bush, rely primarily on overt military aggression. Obama gets the same job done, but he prefers covert means. Not really surprising considering the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski was his mentor.
Those who know their history will remember that Zbigniew Brzezinski was directly involved in the funding and arming the Islamic extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to weaken the Soviets.
By the way Osama bin Laden was one of these anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" the U.S. was funding and arming.
This operation is no secret at this point, nor are the unintended side effects.
Officially the U.S. government's arming and funding of the Mujahideen was a response to the Soviet invasion in December of 1979, however in his memoir entitled "From the Shadows" Robert Gates, director of the CIA under Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, and Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, revealed that the U.S. actually began the covert operation 6 months prior, with the express intention of luring the Soviets into a quagmire. (You can preview the relevant text here on google books)
The strategy worked. The Soviets invaded, and the ten years of war that followed are considered by many historians as being one of the primary causes of the fall of the USSR.
This example doesn't just establish precedent, what we're seeing happen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria right now is actually a continuation of a old story. Al-Nusra and ISIS are ideological and organizational decedents of these extremist elements that the U.S. government made use of thirty years ago.
The U.S. the went on to create a breeding ground for these extremists by invading Iraq in 2003. Had it not been for the vacuum of power left by the removal and execution of Saddam, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, aka ISIS, would not exist. And had it not been for Washington's attempt at toppling Assad by arming, funding and training shadowy militant groups in Syria, there is no way that ISIS would have been capable of storming into Iraq in June of 2014.
On every level, no matter how you cut it, ISIS is a product of U.S. government's twisted and decrepit foreign policy.
Now all of this may seem contradictory to you as you watch the drums of war against ISIS begin to beat louder and the air strikes against them are gradually widened. Why would the U.S. help a terrorist organization get established, only to attack them later?
Well why did the CIA put Saddam Hussein in power in 1963?, Why did the U.S. government back Saddam in 1980 when he launched a war of aggression against Iran, even though they knew that he was using chemical weapons? Why did the U.S. fund and arm Islamic extremists in Afghanistan against the Soviets?
There's a pattern here if you look closely. This is a tried and true geopolitical strategy.
Step 1: Build up a dictator or extremist group which can then be used to wage proxy wars against opponents. During this stage any crimes committed by these proxies are swept under the rug. [Problem]
Step 2: When these nasty characters have outlived their usefulness, that's when it's time to pull out all that dirt from under the rug and start publicizing it 24/7. This obviously works best when the public has no idea how these bad guys came to power.[Reaction]
Step 3: Finally, when the public practically begging for the government to do something, a solution is proposed. Usually the solution involves military intervention, the loss of certain liberties, or both. [Solution]
ISIS is extremely useful. They have essentially done Washington dirty work by weakening Assad. In 2014, while the news cycle has focused almost exclusively on Ukraine and Russia, ISIS made major headway in Syria, and as of August they already controlled 35% of the country.
Since ISIS largely based in Syria, this gives the U.S. a pretext to move into Syria. Sooner or later the U.S. will extend the airstrikes into Assad's backyard, and when they do U.S. officials are already making it clear that both ISIS and the Syrian government will be targeted. That, after all, is the whole point. Washington may allow ISIS to capture a bit more territory first, but the writing is on the wall, and has been for some time now.
The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that this will never lead to boots on the ground, however, the truth of the matter is that anyone who understands anything about military tactics knows full well that ISIS cannot be defeated by airstrikes alone. In response to airstrikes ISIS will merely disperse and conceal their forces. ISIS isn't an established state power which can be destroyed by knocking out key government buildings and infrastructure. These are guerrilla fighters who cut their teeth in urban warfare.
To significantly weaken them, the war will have to involve ground troops, but even this is a lost cause. U.S. troops could certainly route ISIS in street to street battles for some time, and they might even succeed in fully occupying Syria and Iraq for a number of years, but eventually they will have to leave, and when they do, it should be obvious what will come next.
The puppets that the U.S. government has installed in the various countries that they have brought down in recent years have without exception proven to be utterly incompetent and corrupt. No one that Washington places in power will be capable of maintaining stability in Syria. Period.
Right now, Assad is the last bastion of stability in the region. He is the last chance they have for a moderate non-sectarian government and he is the only hope of anything even remotely resembling democracy for the foreseeable future. If Assad falls, Islamic extremist will take the helm, they will impose shari'ah law, and they will do everything in their power to continue spreading their ideology as far and wide as they can.
If the world truly wants to stop ISIS, there is only one way to do it:
1. First and foremost, the U.S. government and its allies must be heavily pressured to cut all support to the rebels who are attempting to topple Assad. Even if these rebels that the U.S. is arming and funding were moderate, and they're not, the fact that they are forcing Assad to fight a war on multiple fronts, only strengthens ISIS. This is lunacy.
2. The Syrian government should be provided with financial support, equipment, training and intelligence to enable them to turn the tide against ISIS. This is their territory, they should be the ones to reclaim it.
Now obviously this support isn't going to come from the U.S. or any NATO country, but there are a number of nations who have a strategic interest in preventing another regime change and chaotic aftermath. If these countries respond promptly, as in right now, they could preempt a U.S. intervention, and as long this support does not include the presence of foreign troops, doing so will greatly reduce the likelihood of a major confrontation down the road.
3. The U.S. government and its allies should should be aggressively condemned for their failed regime change policies and the individuals behind these decisions should be charged for war crimes. This would have to be done on an nation by nation level since the U.N. has done nothing but enable NATO aggression. While this may not immediately result in these criminals being arrested, it would send a message. This can be done. Malaysia has already proven this by convicting the Bush administration of war crimes in absentia.
Now you might be thinking: "This all sounds fine and good, but what does this have to do with me? I can't influence this situation."
That perspective is quite common, and for most people, it's paralyzing, but the truth of the matter is that we can influence this. We've done it before, and we can do it again.
I'll be honest with you though, this isn't going to be easy. To succeed we have to start thinking strategically. Like it or not, this is a chess game. If we really want to rock the boat, we have to start reaching out to people in positions of influence. This can mean talking to broadcasters at your local radio station, news paper, or t.v. station, or it can mean contacting influential bloggers, celebrities, business figures or government officials. Reaching out to current serving military and young people who may be considering joining up is also important. But even if it's just your neighbor, or your coworker, every single person we can reach brings us closer to critical mass. The most important step is to start trying.
========================
As you think about this article, remember the WSJ story that was recently posted on this board within the last few weeks, proving that the Israelis had a hand in creating and sustaining the growth of Hamas.
It seems that our policy elites think that sowing dragons' teeth is a great idea, and they imagine that the resulting dragons will be tame.
Lee
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
Retweeted by Pieter Van Ostaeyen
Joas Wagemakers @JoasWagemakers · 14h
"'ISIS' has fighters of 81 nationalities from around the world": http://www.aawsat.com/home/article/172201#.VAQhqojz3Ls.twitter … via @aawsat_News
google translation:
Last update: Saturday 5 November 1435 e - August 31, 2014 AD, time: 23:06
«Daash» featuring fighters from 81 nationalities around the world
12 thousand foreign fighters, including thousands of European 3 .. The danger starts with a return to their countries
Sunday 6 November 1435 e - September 1, 2014 AD, time: 22:25 Issue number [13061]
Washington: «Middle East»
It is estimated that the conflict in Syria for three years to attract foreign fighters to the front lines at a faster rate than any other war in recent memory, including conflict, the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the eighties. The group, which boasts that it is likely this majority of these fighters are «Daash», powerful terrorist organization that now controls large tracts of land from the center of Syria to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
Accounted for the presence of these foreign jihadis on the media attention in recent times. Earlier this week, reports emerged of the killing of an American soldier citizenship in Syria in a battle with another Islamist faction. This has set the White House on Thursday, nearly ten Americans are believed to have joined the conflict in Syria. It is suspected that a British citizen has beheaded American journalist James Foley this month, while the two Australians gained notoriety for Aotaiadahma their forms of self-publishing via social media and while Mbtzmann while holding two severed heads of the soldiers belonging to the Assad regime.
Estimated range tinder, intelligence company based in New York, in June, that there are at least 12 thousand foreign fighters who came from 81 countries in the Syrian conflict, including about 3,000 of European citizens. Due to the rise of Daash - and ingenious ways in online recruitment - it is likely that the bulk of the militants present in the Western ranks.
It is likely that the overall figures higher. The New York Times reported on Friday that more than 100 Americans have participated in the ongoing conflict in Syria, according to American intelligence officials. At the same time, The Independent reported that a quarter of European fighters, who numbered 2,000 fighters in Daash Britaniyon.
For several months, European governments are not in a position to do something about the consequences of this migration and the threat posed by these extremist fighters return to their homes, where their extremism will be deployed and will plan to launch terrorist attacks. It was a brutal murder at the hands of Foley Daash as a signal to the West in the range of interest, even a battling on multiple fronts against rival militias and governments in Iraq and Syria. Rung British Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday the alarm, warning that the battle against the militias will continue Daash «for years and perhaps decades».
And extended the scope of the geographical spread of foreign fighters in the war, to the degree of involvement of Japan and Singapore, more countries that are believed to be far from the turmoil in the Middle East. As translated videos recruitment programs of the Daash languages countless, including Urdu, Tamil, and Bahasa Indonesian. And given that the number of Muslims in South and South-East Asia more than in the Arab world.
In spite of that, the majority of foreign fighters in the struggle of the Arab countries. The Times Magazine and reached through the deepening of the working methods Daash to that organization relies on local support, which comes largely from the Sunnis, who are bitter because of systems that are dominated by Shiites around them. It is believed that the loyalists of the Baath Party regime in Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein - an institution which was once a secular dimensions - indulged in the structure of the current leadership to Daash in Iraq.
And continue to be organized Daash, at the same time, in the heinous massacres against the captured soldiers and religious and ethnic minorities trapped now in the control of the actual Daash. It must be the great role played by these foreigners in the actions of the organization's most brutal and scary as a signal to the leaders of the world in any other place, who are struggling to develop a strategy to counter this growing threat.
http://www.aawsat.com/home/article/172201#.VAQhqojz3Ls.twitter
Joas Wagemakers @JoasWagemakers · 14h
"'ISIS' has fighters of 81 nationalities from around the world": http://www.aawsat.com/home/article/172201#.VAQhqojz3Ls.twitter … via @aawsat_News
google translation:
Last update: Saturday 5 November 1435 e - August 31, 2014 AD, time: 23:06
«Daash» featuring fighters from 81 nationalities around the world
12 thousand foreign fighters, including thousands of European 3 .. The danger starts with a return to their countries
Sunday 6 November 1435 e - September 1, 2014 AD, time: 22:25 Issue number [13061]
Washington: «Middle East»
It is estimated that the conflict in Syria for three years to attract foreign fighters to the front lines at a faster rate than any other war in recent memory, including conflict, the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union in the eighties. The group, which boasts that it is likely this majority of these fighters are «Daash», powerful terrorist organization that now controls large tracts of land from the center of Syria to the outskirts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
Accounted for the presence of these foreign jihadis on the media attention in recent times. Earlier this week, reports emerged of the killing of an American soldier citizenship in Syria in a battle with another Islamist faction. This has set the White House on Thursday, nearly ten Americans are believed to have joined the conflict in Syria. It is suspected that a British citizen has beheaded American journalist James Foley this month, while the two Australians gained notoriety for Aotaiadahma their forms of self-publishing via social media and while Mbtzmann while holding two severed heads of the soldiers belonging to the Assad regime.
Estimated range tinder, intelligence company based in New York, in June, that there are at least 12 thousand foreign fighters who came from 81 countries in the Syrian conflict, including about 3,000 of European citizens. Due to the rise of Daash - and ingenious ways in online recruitment - it is likely that the bulk of the militants present in the Western ranks.
It is likely that the overall figures higher. The New York Times reported on Friday that more than 100 Americans have participated in the ongoing conflict in Syria, according to American intelligence officials. At the same time, The Independent reported that a quarter of European fighters, who numbered 2,000 fighters in Daash Britaniyon.
For several months, European governments are not in a position to do something about the consequences of this migration and the threat posed by these extremist fighters return to their homes, where their extremism will be deployed and will plan to launch terrorist attacks. It was a brutal murder at the hands of Foley Daash as a signal to the West in the range of interest, even a battling on multiple fronts against rival militias and governments in Iraq and Syria. Rung British Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday the alarm, warning that the battle against the militias will continue Daash «for years and perhaps decades».
And extended the scope of the geographical spread of foreign fighters in the war, to the degree of involvement of Japan and Singapore, more countries that are believed to be far from the turmoil in the Middle East. As translated videos recruitment programs of the Daash languages countless, including Urdu, Tamil, and Bahasa Indonesian. And given that the number of Muslims in South and South-East Asia more than in the Arab world.
In spite of that, the majority of foreign fighters in the struggle of the Arab countries. The Times Magazine and reached through the deepening of the working methods Daash to that organization relies on local support, which comes largely from the Sunnis, who are bitter because of systems that are dominated by Shiites around them. It is believed that the loyalists of the Baath Party regime in Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein - an institution which was once a secular dimensions - indulged in the structure of the current leadership to Daash in Iraq.
And continue to be organized Daash, at the same time, in the heinous massacres against the captured soldiers and religious and ethnic minorities trapped now in the control of the actual Daash. It must be the great role played by these foreigners in the actions of the organization's most brutal and scary as a signal to the leaders of the world in any other place, who are struggling to develop a strategy to counter this growing threat.
http://www.aawsat.com/home/article/172201#.VAQhqojz3Ls.twitter
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
Koert Debeuf @koertdebeuf · 7h
Real number Belgian fighters in Syria. RT“@p_vanostaeyen: @koertdebeuf in total 385, about 325 remaining. See http://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/belgian-fighters-in-syria-and-iraq-august-2014/ …”
Pieter Van Ostaeyen @p_vanostaeyen · 4h
Foreign fighters in #Syria : percentage of Muslims in European countries involved. #Finland is number one contributor
Pieter Van Ostaeyen @p_vanostaeyen 2h
Reactions by #UK #Netherlands and #Belgium on foreign fighters joining IS are unsurprisingly harsh yet seem justifiable. The next ... 1/
Pieter Van Ostaeyen @p_vanostaeyen
few weeks we will most likely notice an important increase of reported cases of foreign fighters. Expect more Belgians and Dutch in #Syria
Pieter Van Ostaeyen @p_vanostaeyen 55m
MT “@Censored31: #Antwerp Province will remain absolute number One qua foreign IS-fighters per capita in EU 4 a while” jolly little #Belgium
Real number Belgian fighters in Syria. RT“@p_vanostaeyen: @koertdebeuf in total 385, about 325 remaining. See http://pietervanostaeyen.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/belgian-fighters-in-syria-and-iraq-august-2014/ …”
Pieter Van Ostaeyen @p_vanostaeyen · 4h
Foreign fighters in #Syria : percentage of Muslims in European countries involved. #Finland is number one contributor
Pieter Van Ostaeyen @p_vanostaeyen 2h
Reactions by #UK #Netherlands and #Belgium on foreign fighters joining IS are unsurprisingly harsh yet seem justifiable. The next ... 1/
Pieter Van Ostaeyen @p_vanostaeyen
few weeks we will most likely notice an important increase of reported cases of foreign fighters. Expect more Belgians and Dutch in #Syria
Pieter Van Ostaeyen @p_vanostaeyen 55m
MT “@Censored31: #Antwerp Province will remain absolute number One qua foreign IS-fighters per capita in EU 4 a while” jolly little #Belgium
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
Zaid Benjamin @zaidbenjamin · 30m
A 4.3 magnitude earthquake hits 60 km northeast #Beirut #Lebanon at 23:50 local time
A 4.3 magnitude earthquake hits 60 km northeast #Beirut #Lebanon at 23:50 local time
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
maryam slayman @a58diamonds 3h
I see isis are in Morocco now and Algeria my son is there in Morocco ffs he's coming here on October .. I hope nothing happens. .
بنت القايدة @DarkTunel_ 5h
What if those people " Moroccans #ISIS fighters" want to come back to their country #Morocco ?? Are they allowed to enter ?
Trita Parsi @tparsi 7h
#Tunisia, #Saudi and #Morocco have sent the most jihadists to #Syria according to CNN http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2014/09/syria-foreign-jihadis/ … #ISIS pic.twitter.com/BMAn5ngnSW
I see isis are in Morocco now and Algeria my son is there in Morocco ffs he's coming here on October .. I hope nothing happens. .
بنت القايدة @DarkTunel_ 5h
What if those people " Moroccans #ISIS fighters" want to come back to their country #Morocco ?? Are they allowed to enter ?
Trita Parsi @tparsi 7h
#Tunisia, #Saudi and #Morocco have sent the most jihadists to #Syria according to CNN http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2014/09/syria-foreign-jihadis/ … #ISIS pic.twitter.com/BMAn5ngnSW
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...nic-cleansing-against-minorities-emerges.html
ISIS has turned northern Iraq into 'blood-soaked killing fields', says Amnesty International as new evidence of ethnic cleansing against minorities emerges
Amnesty International accused Isis of carrying out 'despicable crimes'
Assyrian Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen and Shabaks 'risk being wiped out'
Amnesty has released terrifying accounts from survivors of massacres
Men and boys, as young as 12, have been rounded up and shot dead
Eighty-eight terror suspects have been arrested in Saudi Arabia
By TED THORNHILL FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 09:03, 2 September 2014 | UPDATED: 17:48, 2 September 2014
Gruesome evidence has emerged of attempted ethnic cleansing by Isis, with Amnesty International claiming that the terrorist group has turned northern Iraq into 'blood-soaked killing fields'.
The London-based rights group says that Isis, also known as the Islamic State (IS), is trying to wipe out ethnic and religious minorities with mass summary killings that could amount to war crimes.
It fears that vulnerable communities such as Assyrian Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen and Shabaks 'risk being wiped off the map of Iraq' by the terrorists, who in June overran northern and western parts of the country.
Amnesty has released a series of terrifying accounts from survivors of massacres, who describe how men and boys have been rounded up and shot dead and women and children abducted.
Mass exodus: Refugees who've fled from Mount Sinjar in Iraq, after being surrounded by Isis
Homeless: Yezidis arrive in Feshkhabour, Iraq, having just managed to flee Mount Sinjar after being under siege there for a week
Ordeal: Khaled Saleh told Amnesty that he witnessed around 40 people being killed by Isis - and he was the lone survivor of the group
Heartache: This woman's husband was abducted on August 3 and she can't get through to him on his phone
Mirze Ezdin described to Amnesty how women and children from his family were abducted on August 3 in Qinyieh and 60 to 70 men, dozens of them related to him, were massacred. Here he shows a picture of a little girl who is now in Isis's hands, her father having been killed
The parents and siblings of three-year-old Nisrin Shero Elias, who died on Mount Sinjar. There was not enough water for all, said her father. The family is now displaced
Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International's Senior Crisis Response Adviser, currently in Iraq, said: 'The Islamic State is carrying out despicable crimes and has transformed rural areas of Sinjar into blood-soaked killing fields in its brutal campaign to obliterate all trace of non-Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims.
More...
Liberated from ISIS: Iraqi minority celebrate end of two-month siege after fundamentalists are defeated by Shia militias backed by American air power
Will Saudi Arabia MOVE the remains of Prophet Muhammad? Controversial plan for 'anonymous' burial to prevent the site itself being worshipped as an idol
The private school jihadist: As PM unveils new terror crackdown, a Scots girl incites bloody massacre on British streets
'Your cowardly lack of leadership has left a gaping hole': Parents of SEAL Team Six soldier killed in action call for President Obama's resignation in searing open letter about his handling of ISIS
'The massacres and abductions being carried out by the Islamic State provide harrowing new evidence that a wave of ethnic cleansing against minorities is sweeping across northern Iraq.'
Amnesty interviewed hundreds of witnesses and survivors, gathering evidence showing that several mass killings took place in Sinjar in August.
Marwa and Fadi, a Christian couple, got married on August 2 and the following day their hometowns in Sinjar and al-Hamdaniya were taken over by the Islamic State
Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, who fled violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, walk in Bajed Kadal refugee camp south west of Dohuk province
Amnesty International highlights ethnic cleansing in Iraq
Two of the deadliest incidents occurred when Islamic State fighters raided the villages of Qiniyeh on August 3 and Kocho on August 15, with the number of those killed in these two villages alone running into the hundreds.
Isis systematically divided the villages' men and boys, some as young as 12, from the women and younger children, taking the men and boys in pick-up trucks to the outskirts of the villages and shooting them dead.
Many victims were forced to squat at the edge of large holes in the ground and shot into them.
A handful of survivors escaped death by sheer chance, either sustaining non-fatal gunshot wounds or falling into the death pits unharmed.
One of the survivors of the Kocho massacre - Khider, a 17-year-old student - told Amnesty what happened:
Obama: US developing strategy to deal with ISIS
A Yazidi man prays at the door of the holy temple of Lalesh, having recently fled Mount Sinjar
ISIS promise to kill captured Kurds in shocking new video
WHO ARE THE GROUPS BEING TARGETTED BY ISIS?
Ethnic and religious minorities – Assyrian Christians, Turkmen Shia, Shabak Shia, Yezidis, Kakai and Sabean Mandaeans – have lived together in the Nineveh province, much of it now under IS control, for centuries.
Today, only those who were unable to flee when IS fighters seized the area remain trapped there, under threat of death if they do not convert to Islam.
Amnesty said that the victims of killings and abductions have essentially been Yezidis.
Initially, in June, in and around Mosul and Tal-Afar, the Islamic State killed and abducted some people from the Turkmen Shi'a and Shabak Shi'a. These numbers were relatively small, it said.
No Christians or other communities have been killed, but all of them have been forced out, the group said.
Assyrian Christians are indigenous to the Middle East. Northern Iraq is their homeland.
Turkmen Shia are Iraq's third-largest ethnic group and follow Islam.
The religion of the Shabak Shia people is a mix of Christianity and Islam. They number around 250,000.
The Yezidis believe in one God, who ordered seven angels to watch over the earth, with one of them being a 'peacock angel'. Their religion is a mixture of pagan, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Jewish, Nestorian Christian and Muslim teachings.
The Kakai religion is mainly adhered to by the Kurds, who follow the 14th century teachings of Sultan Sahak. They believe the universe is divided into two - an internal and external world.
The faith of Sabean Mandaeans forbids them to carry weapons or carry out any act of violence.
'My cousin Ghaleb Elias and I were pushed into the same vehicle. We were next to each other as they lined us up face down on the ground. He was killed. He was the same age as me, and worked as a day labourer, mostly in construction. I have no news of what happened to my parents and my four brothers and six sisters. Did they kill them? Did they abduct them?
'I don't know anything about them. After the IS armed men shot us I ran away, stopping to hide when I thought someone might see me or when I could not walk any more. I had to walk many hours to reach Mount Sinjar.'
One of the survivors of the Qiniyeh killings - Fawas Safel 'Ammo - described the scene:
'They marched us men and boys towards the mountain, about 15 minutes' walk away. We stopped at a place where there was a big hole, by the wadi (valley). We were on the edge of the hole. They opened fire and some tried to run away.
'I let myself fall in the hole, and others fell on top of me. I stayed still. After the continuous fire stopped, IS militants fired individual shots, at those they saw were not yet dead. After they left - I don't know how much time passed exactly - I got up and so did my friend Ezzedin Amin and we ran away.
'Neither of us were injured. We walked to the mountain and there we found three others who had also escaped alive from the massacre. They were injured, one very lightly and two more seriously.'
Fatwas Safel 'Ammo gave Amnesty a list of 28 men from his family who are missing since the massacre, all believed killed.
Another survivor, Salem, who managed to hide near the Kocho massacre site, described to Amnesty the horror of hearing others who had been injured crying out in pain:
'Some could not move and could not save themselves; they lay there in agony waiting to die. They died a horrible death. I managed to drag myself away and was saved by a Muslim neighbour. He risked his life to save me. For 12 days he brought me food and water every night. I could not walk and had no hope of getting away and it was becoming increasingly dangerous for him to continue to keep me there.'
A boy from the minority Yazidi sect, who fled violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, squats on the ground in Bajed Kadal refugee camp
Salem was later able to escape by donkey and rode to the mountains and then on into the areas controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Mirze Ezdin described to Amnesty how women and children from his family were in Qinyieh and 60 to 70 men, dozens of them related to him, were massacred.
Another man, Khaled Saleh, said he witnessed around 40 people being killed by Isis - and he was the lone survivor of the group.
The mass killings and abductions have succeeded in terrorising the entire population in northern Iraq, leading thousands to flee in fear for their lives.
The fate of many of the hundreds - possibly thousands - of Yezidis abducted and held captive by Isis remains unknown, though several hundred women and children who were abducted from Kocho on 15 August are currently held in Tal Afar - halfway between Sinjar and Mosul - where militants are holding other Yezidi captives.
Many of those held have been threatened with rape or sexual assault, or threatened with death if they refuse to convert to Islam.
In some cases entire families have been abducted. One man who gave Amnesty a list of 45 names of missing relatives, all of whom are women and children, said: 'We get news from some of them but others are missing and we don't know if they are alive or dead or what has happened to them.'
Amnesty described the forced displacement of Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities, including some of the region's oldest communities, as a 'tragedy of historic proportions'.
Ms Rovera added: 'The people of northern Iraq deserve to live free from persecution without fearing for their lives at every turn. Those ordering, carrying out, or assisting in these war crimes must be apprehended and brought to justice.'
Meanwhile, 88 terror suspects have been arrested in Saudi Arabia following a months-long investigation.
Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry said on Tuesday that the individuals, mostly Suadis, were arrested 'for having links with terror groups outside the Kingdom', according to Al Arabiya.
The suspects were divided into four separate cells spread around the country and all were plotting assassinations, the Ministry's spokesperson Maj Gen Mansour al-Turkey said.
'They [the suspects] were on the verge of committing acts of terrorism both in Saudi Arabia and abroad,' al-Turki said.
TIMELINE OF EVENTS IN MOSUL AND SURROUNDING AREAS
10 June: The IS (then known as ISIS) takes control of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, and its surroundings. The Iraqi army and security forces flee Mosul and the entire north of Iraq without resisting. Several hundred thousand residents of Mosul, including both members of minority communities and Arab Sunni Muslims, flee the city, some for fear of the IS and others for fear of Iraqi government air strikes against the IS. Significant numbers of Christians, Shi'a Turkmen and Shi'a Shabak remain in their homes, in and around Mosul. Kurdish Peshmerga forces of the KRG take control of all areas not under IS control in the north of the country
13 June: After Friday prayer the IS distribute a communiqué containing 16 rules, including a ban on smoking and a ban on women leaving the house unless necessary. These and other rules are not immediately enforced but are implemented progressively in subsequent weeks. IS fighters destroy the Qabr al-Bint (Tomb of the Girl) monument in Mosul.
16 June: IS takes control of Tal 'Afar, a large town west of Mosul where the population (of up to 200,000) is almost all Turkmen. Most of the Turkmen Shi'a flee the city westwards to Sinjar and from there make their way to Erbil on their way to the capital, Baghdad, and further south to Najaf, Karbala and other Shi'a majority areas.
Third week of June: the IS remove a statue of the Virgin Mary from atop the Tahira (Immaculate) Church in Mosul and destroy the tombs of three well-known poets in the city centre.
25 June: Armed confrontations break out between IS fighters and Peshmerga forces east of Mosul, on the outskirts of the majority Christian town of Qaraqosh (also known as al-Hamdaniya), prompting the entire population of the town to flee. Most residents return after the clashes end three days later.
27 June: Two Chaldean Christian nuns and three orphans (two girls and one boy) are abducted in Mosul when they visit the orphanage (run by the nuns) which they had fled soon after 10 June. Many Christians who had fled Mosul but had continued to visit their homes and their relatives in the city stop visiting Mosul.
Late June/early July: Several men from the Turkmen and Shabak Shi'a communities are abducted and killed and their homes and places of worship are destroyed by the IS in Tal 'Afar, Mosul and surrounding areas, prompting most of the members of the two communities who had remained in IS-controlled areas to flee. Dozens of Yezidi border guards and soldiers are captured by IS fighters in north-western Iraq and taken across the border to IS-controlled areas in Syria, where they are pressured into converting to Islam. They are eventually released on payment of a ransom.
14 July: The two Christian nuns and three orphan children abducted on 27 June are released unharmed but report having been pressured into converting to Islam by some of their captors.
18 July: Christian residents of Mosul who had remained in the city flee after having been given an ultimatum by IS fighters two days earlier to either convert to Islam, pay jizya (a tax historically levied on non-Muslim subjects) leave or be killed. Many tell Amnesty International that they were robbed of money and jewellery by IS fighters as they left the city.
3 August: IS fighters attack towns and villages in the mostly Yezidi Sinjar region, in north-west Iraq, killing scores – possibly hundreds – of men, abducting more than 1,000 women, children and men, and forcing more than 200,000 people - the entire Yezidi population, as well as the remaining small number of Christian residents - to flee the area.
Most manage to flee to KRG areas but tens of thousands of Yezidis attempting to flee get trapped on Mount Sinjar, where they remain under siege for several days, surrounded by the IS and in dire conditions with hardly any food, water or shelter.
Several die due to lack of water and medical care and the rest are eventually able to escape with the help of Syrian Kurdish separatist fighters from the People's Protection Units, who open a safe passage for them off the mountain, through Syria and into the KRG region of northern Iraq. Some who do not manage to flee remain trapped in the Sinjar region and unable to leave. Thousands of Yezidi fighters and an unknown number of Yezidi civilian residents of villages on Mount Sinjar remain on the mountain area, determined to prevent the IS from taking control of the mountain area.
6-7 August: IS fighters storm and take control of more towns and villages north-east of Mosul, displacing tens of thousands of Christians, Yezidis and members of other minorities living in the area. Some who do not manage to flee remain trapped and unable to leave. Among those displaced from the area are thousands who were sheltering there after having fled their homes in surrounding areas in previous weeks, including thousands who were sheltering in a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) in the al-Khazer/Kalak area, half way between Mosul and the KRG capital, Erbil.
15 August: IS fighters kill scores, possibly hundreds of Yezidi men and abduct hundreds of women, children and men in the village of Kocho (also known as Kuju), south of the town of Sinjar. These residents have been trapped in the village, unable to leave since 3 August.
22 August: IS fighters abduct a three-year-old girl, two teenage boys and a 20-year-old woman – all Christians – as they and their families are finally allowed to leave al-Hamdaniya area, where they had been trapped in their homes for the previous two weeks. They remain unaccounted for.
Source: Amnesty
what do you mean COULD
ISIS has turned northern Iraq into 'blood-soaked killing fields', says Amnesty International as new evidence of ethnic cleansing against minorities emerges
Amnesty International accused Isis of carrying out 'despicable crimes'
Assyrian Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen and Shabaks 'risk being wiped out'
Amnesty has released terrifying accounts from survivors of massacres
Men and boys, as young as 12, have been rounded up and shot dead
Eighty-eight terror suspects have been arrested in Saudi Arabia
By TED THORNHILL FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 09:03, 2 September 2014 | UPDATED: 17:48, 2 September 2014
Gruesome evidence has emerged of attempted ethnic cleansing by Isis, with Amnesty International claiming that the terrorist group has turned northern Iraq into 'blood-soaked killing fields'.
The London-based rights group says that Isis, also known as the Islamic State (IS), is trying to wipe out ethnic and religious minorities with mass summary killings that could amount to war crimes.
It fears that vulnerable communities such as Assyrian Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen and Shabaks 'risk being wiped off the map of Iraq' by the terrorists, who in June overran northern and western parts of the country.
Amnesty has released a series of terrifying accounts from survivors of massacres, who describe how men and boys have been rounded up and shot dead and women and children abducted.
Mass exodus: Refugees who've fled from Mount Sinjar in Iraq, after being surrounded by Isis
Homeless: Yezidis arrive in Feshkhabour, Iraq, having just managed to flee Mount Sinjar after being under siege there for a week
Ordeal: Khaled Saleh told Amnesty that he witnessed around 40 people being killed by Isis - and he was the lone survivor of the group
Heartache: This woman's husband was abducted on August 3 and she can't get through to him on his phone
Mirze Ezdin described to Amnesty how women and children from his family were abducted on August 3 in Qinyieh and 60 to 70 men, dozens of them related to him, were massacred. Here he shows a picture of a little girl who is now in Isis's hands, her father having been killed
The parents and siblings of three-year-old Nisrin Shero Elias, who died on Mount Sinjar. There was not enough water for all, said her father. The family is now displaced
Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International's Senior Crisis Response Adviser, currently in Iraq, said: 'The Islamic State is carrying out despicable crimes and has transformed rural areas of Sinjar into blood-soaked killing fields in its brutal campaign to obliterate all trace of non-Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims.
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'The massacres and abductions being carried out by the Islamic State provide harrowing new evidence that a wave of ethnic cleansing against minorities is sweeping across northern Iraq.'
Amnesty interviewed hundreds of witnesses and survivors, gathering evidence showing that several mass killings took place in Sinjar in August.
Marwa and Fadi, a Christian couple, got married on August 2 and the following day their hometowns in Sinjar and al-Hamdaniya were taken over by the Islamic State
Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, who fled violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, walk in Bajed Kadal refugee camp south west of Dohuk province
Amnesty International highlights ethnic cleansing in Iraq
Two of the deadliest incidents occurred when Islamic State fighters raided the villages of Qiniyeh on August 3 and Kocho on August 15, with the number of those killed in these two villages alone running into the hundreds.
Isis systematically divided the villages' men and boys, some as young as 12, from the women and younger children, taking the men and boys in pick-up trucks to the outskirts of the villages and shooting them dead.
Many victims were forced to squat at the edge of large holes in the ground and shot into them.
A handful of survivors escaped death by sheer chance, either sustaining non-fatal gunshot wounds or falling into the death pits unharmed.
One of the survivors of the Kocho massacre - Khider, a 17-year-old student - told Amnesty what happened:
Obama: US developing strategy to deal with ISIS
A Yazidi man prays at the door of the holy temple of Lalesh, having recently fled Mount Sinjar
ISIS promise to kill captured Kurds in shocking new video
WHO ARE THE GROUPS BEING TARGETTED BY ISIS?
Ethnic and religious minorities – Assyrian Christians, Turkmen Shia, Shabak Shia, Yezidis, Kakai and Sabean Mandaeans – have lived together in the Nineveh province, much of it now under IS control, for centuries.
Today, only those who were unable to flee when IS fighters seized the area remain trapped there, under threat of death if they do not convert to Islam.
Amnesty said that the victims of killings and abductions have essentially been Yezidis.
Initially, in June, in and around Mosul and Tal-Afar, the Islamic State killed and abducted some people from the Turkmen Shi'a and Shabak Shi'a. These numbers were relatively small, it said.
No Christians or other communities have been killed, but all of them have been forced out, the group said.
Assyrian Christians are indigenous to the Middle East. Northern Iraq is their homeland.
Turkmen Shia are Iraq's third-largest ethnic group and follow Islam.
The religion of the Shabak Shia people is a mix of Christianity and Islam. They number around 250,000.
The Yezidis believe in one God, who ordered seven angels to watch over the earth, with one of them being a 'peacock angel'. Their religion is a mixture of pagan, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, Jewish, Nestorian Christian and Muslim teachings.
The Kakai religion is mainly adhered to by the Kurds, who follow the 14th century teachings of Sultan Sahak. They believe the universe is divided into two - an internal and external world.
The faith of Sabean Mandaeans forbids them to carry weapons or carry out any act of violence.
'My cousin Ghaleb Elias and I were pushed into the same vehicle. We were next to each other as they lined us up face down on the ground. He was killed. He was the same age as me, and worked as a day labourer, mostly in construction. I have no news of what happened to my parents and my four brothers and six sisters. Did they kill them? Did they abduct them?
'I don't know anything about them. After the IS armed men shot us I ran away, stopping to hide when I thought someone might see me or when I could not walk any more. I had to walk many hours to reach Mount Sinjar.'
One of the survivors of the Qiniyeh killings - Fawas Safel 'Ammo - described the scene:
'They marched us men and boys towards the mountain, about 15 minutes' walk away. We stopped at a place where there was a big hole, by the wadi (valley). We were on the edge of the hole. They opened fire and some tried to run away.
'I let myself fall in the hole, and others fell on top of me. I stayed still. After the continuous fire stopped, IS militants fired individual shots, at those they saw were not yet dead. After they left - I don't know how much time passed exactly - I got up and so did my friend Ezzedin Amin and we ran away.
'Neither of us were injured. We walked to the mountain and there we found three others who had also escaped alive from the massacre. They were injured, one very lightly and two more seriously.'
Fatwas Safel 'Ammo gave Amnesty a list of 28 men from his family who are missing since the massacre, all believed killed.
Another survivor, Salem, who managed to hide near the Kocho massacre site, described to Amnesty the horror of hearing others who had been injured crying out in pain:
'Some could not move and could not save themselves; they lay there in agony waiting to die. They died a horrible death. I managed to drag myself away and was saved by a Muslim neighbour. He risked his life to save me. For 12 days he brought me food and water every night. I could not walk and had no hope of getting away and it was becoming increasingly dangerous for him to continue to keep me there.'
A boy from the minority Yazidi sect, who fled violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, squats on the ground in Bajed Kadal refugee camp
Salem was later able to escape by donkey and rode to the mountains and then on into the areas controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Mirze Ezdin described to Amnesty how women and children from his family were in Qinyieh and 60 to 70 men, dozens of them related to him, were massacred.
Another man, Khaled Saleh, said he witnessed around 40 people being killed by Isis - and he was the lone survivor of the group.
The mass killings and abductions have succeeded in terrorising the entire population in northern Iraq, leading thousands to flee in fear for their lives.
The fate of many of the hundreds - possibly thousands - of Yezidis abducted and held captive by Isis remains unknown, though several hundred women and children who were abducted from Kocho on 15 August are currently held in Tal Afar - halfway between Sinjar and Mosul - where militants are holding other Yezidi captives.
Many of those held have been threatened with rape or sexual assault, or threatened with death if they refuse to convert to Islam.
In some cases entire families have been abducted. One man who gave Amnesty a list of 45 names of missing relatives, all of whom are women and children, said: 'We get news from some of them but others are missing and we don't know if they are alive or dead or what has happened to them.'
Amnesty described the forced displacement of Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities, including some of the region's oldest communities, as a 'tragedy of historic proportions'.
Ms Rovera added: 'The people of northern Iraq deserve to live free from persecution without fearing for their lives at every turn. Those ordering, carrying out, or assisting in these war crimes must be apprehended and brought to justice.'
Meanwhile, 88 terror suspects have been arrested in Saudi Arabia following a months-long investigation.
Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry said on Tuesday that the individuals, mostly Suadis, were arrested 'for having links with terror groups outside the Kingdom', according to Al Arabiya.
The suspects were divided into four separate cells spread around the country and all were plotting assassinations, the Ministry's spokesperson Maj Gen Mansour al-Turkey said.
'They [the suspects] were on the verge of committing acts of terrorism both in Saudi Arabia and abroad,' al-Turki said.
TIMELINE OF EVENTS IN MOSUL AND SURROUNDING AREAS
10 June: The IS (then known as ISIS) takes control of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, and its surroundings. The Iraqi army and security forces flee Mosul and the entire north of Iraq without resisting. Several hundred thousand residents of Mosul, including both members of minority communities and Arab Sunni Muslims, flee the city, some for fear of the IS and others for fear of Iraqi government air strikes against the IS. Significant numbers of Christians, Shi'a Turkmen and Shi'a Shabak remain in their homes, in and around Mosul. Kurdish Peshmerga forces of the KRG take control of all areas not under IS control in the north of the country
13 June: After Friday prayer the IS distribute a communiqué containing 16 rules, including a ban on smoking and a ban on women leaving the house unless necessary. These and other rules are not immediately enforced but are implemented progressively in subsequent weeks. IS fighters destroy the Qabr al-Bint (Tomb of the Girl) monument in Mosul.
16 June: IS takes control of Tal 'Afar, a large town west of Mosul where the population (of up to 200,000) is almost all Turkmen. Most of the Turkmen Shi'a flee the city westwards to Sinjar and from there make their way to Erbil on their way to the capital, Baghdad, and further south to Najaf, Karbala and other Shi'a majority areas.
Third week of June: the IS remove a statue of the Virgin Mary from atop the Tahira (Immaculate) Church in Mosul and destroy the tombs of three well-known poets in the city centre.
25 June: Armed confrontations break out between IS fighters and Peshmerga forces east of Mosul, on the outskirts of the majority Christian town of Qaraqosh (also known as al-Hamdaniya), prompting the entire population of the town to flee. Most residents return after the clashes end three days later.
27 June: Two Chaldean Christian nuns and three orphans (two girls and one boy) are abducted in Mosul when they visit the orphanage (run by the nuns) which they had fled soon after 10 June. Many Christians who had fled Mosul but had continued to visit their homes and their relatives in the city stop visiting Mosul.
Late June/early July: Several men from the Turkmen and Shabak Shi'a communities are abducted and killed and their homes and places of worship are destroyed by the IS in Tal 'Afar, Mosul and surrounding areas, prompting most of the members of the two communities who had remained in IS-controlled areas to flee. Dozens of Yezidi border guards and soldiers are captured by IS fighters in north-western Iraq and taken across the border to IS-controlled areas in Syria, where they are pressured into converting to Islam. They are eventually released on payment of a ransom.
14 July: The two Christian nuns and three orphan children abducted on 27 June are released unharmed but report having been pressured into converting to Islam by some of their captors.
18 July: Christian residents of Mosul who had remained in the city flee after having been given an ultimatum by IS fighters two days earlier to either convert to Islam, pay jizya (a tax historically levied on non-Muslim subjects) leave or be killed. Many tell Amnesty International that they were robbed of money and jewellery by IS fighters as they left the city.
3 August: IS fighters attack towns and villages in the mostly Yezidi Sinjar region, in north-west Iraq, killing scores – possibly hundreds – of men, abducting more than 1,000 women, children and men, and forcing more than 200,000 people - the entire Yezidi population, as well as the remaining small number of Christian residents - to flee the area.
Most manage to flee to KRG areas but tens of thousands of Yezidis attempting to flee get trapped on Mount Sinjar, where they remain under siege for several days, surrounded by the IS and in dire conditions with hardly any food, water or shelter.
Several die due to lack of water and medical care and the rest are eventually able to escape with the help of Syrian Kurdish separatist fighters from the People's Protection Units, who open a safe passage for them off the mountain, through Syria and into the KRG region of northern Iraq. Some who do not manage to flee remain trapped in the Sinjar region and unable to leave. Thousands of Yezidi fighters and an unknown number of Yezidi civilian residents of villages on Mount Sinjar remain on the mountain area, determined to prevent the IS from taking control of the mountain area.
6-7 August: IS fighters storm and take control of more towns and villages north-east of Mosul, displacing tens of thousands of Christians, Yezidis and members of other minorities living in the area. Some who do not manage to flee remain trapped and unable to leave. Among those displaced from the area are thousands who were sheltering there after having fled their homes in surrounding areas in previous weeks, including thousands who were sheltering in a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) in the al-Khazer/Kalak area, half way between Mosul and the KRG capital, Erbil.
15 August: IS fighters kill scores, possibly hundreds of Yezidi men and abduct hundreds of women, children and men in the village of Kocho (also known as Kuju), south of the town of Sinjar. These residents have been trapped in the village, unable to leave since 3 August.
22 August: IS fighters abduct a three-year-old girl, two teenage boys and a 20-year-old woman – all Christians – as they and their families are finally allowed to leave al-Hamdaniya area, where they had been trapped in their homes for the previous two weeks. They remain unaccounted for.
Source: Amnesty
what do you mean COULD
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Baloo
Veteran Member
Came across this; don't know if accurate but interesting that ISIS is posting online to enter US--"The US-Mexican Border Is Now Open,”
http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/09/i...der-now-open-planning-crossing-united-states/
http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/09/i...der-now-open-planning-crossing-united-states/
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
The weird thing is, I have searched in English and Arabic several times and the only times I have ever seen Mexico/US mentioned like that was when they were repeating or discussing what Gov Perry said, of course, I don't have FB so I can't check that. But, there are tens of thousands pro ISIS accounts and no way for me to find everything and twitter deletes a lot of accounts faster than I can come across them.
I just think, I would see it mentioned on some of the official ISIS accounts or on one of their forums or media/propaganda/threat sites.
ETA: I have seen info that Iran says they have people here and in Mexico waiting for the go signal (if Israel attacks Iran) and I have seen stuff that Hezbollah has lots of people in South America, but Hezbollah denies it.
All could be true just as easily as all could be fear factor propaganda.
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Doomer Doug
TB Fanatic
The world has a decision to make. The decision is whether to tolerate the brutality of Militant Islam in general, and ISIS in particular. The choice the world makes will define just how violent our planet is going to get over the next few years.
ISIS may very well lead to the first effective global government, initially under the farce called the UN, but eventually a fully functional and effective federation style global government. The world is eventually going to end up doing what Pompey the Great did in the dying gasp of the Roman Republic. Pompey divided up the Med up into a chess board and hunted down the pirates one square at a time. He kept doing this until he had killed every pirate that potentially threatened Rome.
We, and by we I mean all nations of the world, non Islamic nations mostly, are going to have to set out on a multi year Crusade scale deployment and go from country to country killing Militant Islam. It is possible that by the time this Crusade ends modern Islam will be no longer capable of any type of military action.
The level of political discipline and leadership needed to do this will require a fascist type government. Assuming the conspiracy types are correct, this is the reason the globalists have allowed ISIS to become what it is.
Future historians will date the creation of the first global Federation type government from the effort to crush militant Islam.
ISIS may very well lead to the first effective global government, initially under the farce called the UN, but eventually a fully functional and effective federation style global government. The world is eventually going to end up doing what Pompey the Great did in the dying gasp of the Roman Republic. Pompey divided up the Med up into a chess board and hunted down the pirates one square at a time. He kept doing this until he had killed every pirate that potentially threatened Rome.
We, and by we I mean all nations of the world, non Islamic nations mostly, are going to have to set out on a multi year Crusade scale deployment and go from country to country killing Militant Islam. It is possible that by the time this Crusade ends modern Islam will be no longer capable of any type of military action.
The level of political discipline and leadership needed to do this will require a fascist type government. Assuming the conspiracy types are correct, this is the reason the globalists have allowed ISIS to become what it is.
Future historians will date the creation of the first global Federation type government from the effort to crush militant Islam.
Be Well
may all be well
I partly agree and partly don't, Doomer Doug.
I do agree that the nations of the world that are capable, will have to eradicate jihadi fighters, jihad supporters, and jihad fomenters, and give every surviving Mozzlem the choice to leave Islam if they wish, and if they want to keep doing the Koran/five prayers a day thing; fine, but none of the killing stuff every again.
But I do not see a one world gov at all.
We will also have to have an entirely different administration here in order to fight Islam. Why would the freakinchief in the Pale Dwelling and his handlers/backers/string pullers want to fight Islam? They are Mozzlems and/or Islam lovers. So major change will have to happen here first.
I do agree that the nations of the world that are capable, will have to eradicate jihadi fighters, jihad supporters, and jihad fomenters, and give every surviving Mozzlem the choice to leave Islam if they wish, and if they want to keep doing the Koran/five prayers a day thing; fine, but none of the killing stuff every again.
But I do not see a one world gov at all.
We will also have to have an entirely different administration here in order to fight Islam. Why would the freakinchief in the Pale Dwelling and his handlers/backers/string pullers want to fight Islam? They are Mozzlems and/or Islam lovers. So major change will have to happen here first.
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
It will be almost impossible.
I saw a pic tonight of a young boy, approx 7-9 yrs old, cutting a man's throat while an adult male held the guy's head and mouth.
Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
That's never gonna happen.
Having the firepower and having the training and will to use it are two different things.
To attack IS, being a Sunni organization, the House of Saud need to get the "ok" from the Wahhabi clerics that really run the country.
msswv123
Veteran Member
Have you guys ever seen this....this was tweeted today with the tag line "will the real ISIS please stand up"
.
OVERVIEW
ISIS is headquartered outside Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Our Washington D.C. office is located in the Ronald Reagan Building. We are dedicated to supporting our national defense and security departments, as well as government contractors and private business, with mission-critical services performed by highly skilled experts in their fields. ISIS professionals can be found working side by side with the U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. Government and Prime Contractors on the ground in such strategic environments as the Middle East. See Our Locations Map at the bottom of the page.
https://public.isishq.com/public/clients/default.aspx
and the Ice on the head for ALS. This is one of the companies developing the meds
We are the leading company in antisense drug discovery and development, exploiting a novel drug discovery platform we created to generate a broad pipeline of first-in-class drugs. Antisense technology provides a direct route from genomics to drugs
http://www.isispharm.com/index.htm
.
OVERVIEW
ISIS is headquartered outside Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Our Washington D.C. office is located in the Ronald Reagan Building. We are dedicated to supporting our national defense and security departments, as well as government contractors and private business, with mission-critical services performed by highly skilled experts in their fields. ISIS professionals can be found working side by side with the U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. Government and Prime Contractors on the ground in such strategic environments as the Middle East. See Our Locations Map at the bottom of the page.
https://public.isishq.com/public/clients/default.aspx
and the Ice on the head for ALS. This is one of the companies developing the meds
We are the leading company in antisense drug discovery and development, exploiting a novel drug discovery platform we created to generate a broad pipeline of first-in-class drugs. Antisense technology provides a direct route from genomics to drugs
http://www.isispharm.com/index.htm
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
That is not the Islamic State ISIS
Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
That's not "pipsqueak-ism"... I spoke without thinking.
Yes... It WILL happen.
Ezekiel 28:7 - " I am going to bring foreigners against you, the most ruthless of nations; they will draw their swords against your beauty and wisdom and pierce your shining splendor. "
Just not under the current pres.
My bad...
Thanks for giving me pause to reconsider.
Conflict News @rConflictNews 10m
RT @GhaffarH: Iraqi army catches Chinese ISIS fighter - pic.twitter.com/XCwIXgfdfk
"Found the body of" I think is more accurate.
Internal politics and right now IS/ISIS/ISIL is more of a threat to Iran and her allies at the moment.
[QUOTE
Join Date:Nov 2003Posts:758
Quote Originally Posted by Countrymouse View Post
Does this mean their head-guy is going to be presumed to be the returned Mahdi / 12th Imam, now?][/QUOTE]
The idea of a Mahdi doesn't come from the Koran but from the hadith (the reports and traditions of Muhammad's teachings collected after his death).
All of the sects, Sunni, Shia and the minor ones all have interpretation. Short answer is that he'll be a redeemer of Islam who'll rule for seven, nine or nineteen years before the Day of Judgment/the Day of Resurrection and rid the world of evil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdi#Modern_views
One such claimant was Muhammad Ahmad who kicked off the Mahdist War in Sudan in 1881 that ended in 1916 when the last areas of Darfur were "cleared".
Join Date:Nov 2003Posts:758
Quote Originally Posted by Countrymouse View Post
Does this mean their head-guy is going to be presumed to be the returned Mahdi / 12th Imam, now?][/QUOTE]
The idea of a Mahdi doesn't come from the Koran but from the hadith (the reports and traditions of Muhammad's teachings collected after his death).
All of the sects, Sunni, Shia and the minor ones all have interpretation. Short answer is that he'll be a redeemer of Islam who'll rule for seven, nine or nineteen years before the Day of Judgment/the Day of Resurrection and rid the world of evil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdi#Modern_views
One such claimant was Muhammad Ahmad who kicked off the Mahdist War in Sudan in 1881 that ended in 1916 when the last areas of Darfur were "cleared".
Ragnarok
On and On, South of Heaven
Thanks, HC...
I didn't see that incorrect answer posted.
Both Sunni Muslims and Shia are awaiting a person whose is referred to as Al-Mahdi.
For Sunni Muslims, the Mahdi is just a Muslim leader who will act as a Caliph, ruling the Muslim World. He is not a prophet but must be a descendant of Mohammad.
That is why Baghdadi is making the claim:
Descendant of the Prophet
In July 2013, a Bahraini ideologue Turki al-Binali, writing under the pen name Abu Humam Bakr bin Abd al-Aziz al-Athari, wrote a biography of Baghdadi.
It highlighted Baghdadi's family history which claims that Baghdadi was indeed a descendant of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's Quraysh tribe - one of the key qualifications in Islamic history for becoming the caliph
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28560449
Therefore, it can be assumed that Baghdadi IS setting himself up for the title but, as far as I know, hasn't made the claim, yet.
Shia's claim that Imam Mahdi is Mohammad bin Hasan Al-Askari who disappeared as a young boy at the age of 5 and went into hiding (or state of occultation) and has been hiding for 10 centuries. The Shia are awaiting for him to re-appear in the End Times.
Doomer Doug
TB Fanatic
Well, it will either happen or it will not. If it does not, then the entire Western culture going back to the Roman Empire will be eliminated down to the last baby.
I agree the current PC mindset and the power structure and elite now in place will never do what is needed to deal with Militant Islam. I am saying that there are moments in human history when what was not thought possible happens in a rapid and decisive manner for reasons that are not clear before that. The 100th monkey syndrome is what it has been called.
Assuming ISIS continues to act in a savage and barbaric way, it will execute a straw that broke the camel's back type of attack. Once that happens one of two things will happen. The first is the PC crowd remains in control and we go towards the end of Western Civilization. The second is they are overwhelmed by events and the kind of radical change in thinking required to derail the PC mindset simply happens. The PC crowd will be stripped of moral authority, political authority and political power. A lot of things will be done by people who are no longer limited by the PC stay in the sandbox mental limitations.
There are moments in human history when deeply radical changes happen in the flash of a moment. Despite what many here think, I am saying if Militant Islam starts random, widespread attacks in the USA, the political equation will change in an instant. Things that are not PC, not thought possible will happen as the massive populist backlash redefines what is possible in the new context.
I agree the current PC mindset and the power structure and elite now in place will never do what is needed to deal with Militant Islam. I am saying that there are moments in human history when what was not thought possible happens in a rapid and decisive manner for reasons that are not clear before that. The 100th monkey syndrome is what it has been called.
Assuming ISIS continues to act in a savage and barbaric way, it will execute a straw that broke the camel's back type of attack. Once that happens one of two things will happen. The first is the PC crowd remains in control and we go towards the end of Western Civilization. The second is they are overwhelmed by events and the kind of radical change in thinking required to derail the PC mindset simply happens. The PC crowd will be stripped of moral authority, political authority and political power. A lot of things will be done by people who are no longer limited by the PC stay in the sandbox mental limitations.
There are moments in human history when deeply radical changes happen in the flash of a moment. Despite what many here think, I am saying if Militant Islam starts random, widespread attacks in the USA, the political equation will change in an instant. Things that are not PC, not thought possible will happen as the massive populist backlash redefines what is possible in the new context.
Lilbitsnana
On TB every waking moment
How about these guys?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ebrand-avoid-association-terrorist-group.html
No, they're not Islamic State either. If you read the article it very plainly says they are not and were named that before ISIS/ISIL and changed the name due to the negative association.
JohnGaltfla
#NeverTrump
Saudi Gazette @Saudi_Gazette 1m
#IS militants killed 770 Iraqi troops, says HRW http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20140904216995 … #ISIS
#IS militants killed 770 Iraqi troops, says HRW http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20140904216995 … #ISIS