(8/8/2014, posted 8/11/2014)
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11 Monday Aug 2014
11 Monday Aug 2014
Abduction
Beheading
Brigandage
Burial Alive
Chemical Weapons
Child Soldiers
Concubinage
Crucifixion
Cultural Annihilation
Drive-By Shooting
Firing squad
Kidnapping
Rape
Siege
Slavery
Torture
Just when I think I’ve picked up enough material on ISIS for a while and this post should end . . . it doesn’t. Sadly, what’s reported seems but fragments from the surface of an infinitely dark and devouring machine.
(8/11/2014)
http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/110820141 – 8/11/2014.
“With my own eyes, I saw dogs feeding off dead bodies,” one of those Yazidis, a man named Tariq, told CNN.
“It’s not a crisis. It’s a catastrophe.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/09/world/meast/yazidi-survivor/index.html – 8/11/2014.
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(8/11/2014)
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To cruise the various hashtags that ISIS and its advocates frequent is to be appalled. There, in photograph after photograph and video after video, men, women, and children are herded into ditches and shot dead. Decapitated and impaled heads are ten a penny. One especially harrowing video shows a man screaming as his head is slowly severed. If the intention is to scare potential victims in the Middle East, it will undoubtedly be working. But these things have also found eyes in the Pentagon, in American newsrooms, and — crucially — among voters across the United States. One wonders if, by broadcasting its misdeeds so explicitly, ISIS is ultimately signing its own death warrant.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/385117/hashtag-wars-charles-c-w-cooke – 8/11/2014.
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Much to the horror of the city’s adults, children and teens in masks, carrying guns, are becoming an increasingly common sight on Mosul’s streets. NIQASH meets ISIS’s youngest recruit – he’s ten years old – and asks the city’s youth why they think it’s so glamorous to fight for the Sunni extremist group.
http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/soldiers-trickily-recruits.html – 6/28/2014.
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Pope Francis has expressed his “disbelief” and outrage at the violence suffered by religious minorities in Iraq. Reports said Islamic militants, Isis, have resorted to beheading children and burying them alive including women for refusing to convert to Islam.
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/562237/20140811/isis-iraq-christians-genocide-pope-francis.htm#.U-jrr-NdV8E – 8/11/2014.
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Women and children have been buried alive in mass graves by the fanatics terrorising Iraq, it was claimed last night.
Up to 500 members of the ancient Yazidi sect have suffered the appalling fate, according to an Iraqi minister.
Fighters from the Islamic State group are also accused of kidnapping 300 women to use for sex or as domestic slaves.
Some 150,000 Yazidis fled their homes after the militants overran their main town of Sinjar in northern Iraq last week.
The fresh claims of horrific atrocities will add to pressure on the West to take further action to halt Islamic State’s relentless expansion through Iraq.
Related:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2721415/JONATHAN-KROHN-My-glimpse-horror-despair-besieged-Mount-Sinjar.html – 8/11/2014.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4392/isis-gaza – 7/4/2014.
http://news.sky.com/story/1316536/iraq-pm-calls-for-unity-against-barbaric-isis – 8/11/2014.
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“In some of the images we have obtained there are lines of dead Yazidis who have been shot in the head while the Islamic State fighters cheer and wave their weapons over the corpses,” he added. “This is a vicious atrocity.”
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http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/10/world/meast/iraq-crisis/ – 8/11/2014.
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Given that Iraqi security forces still need time to ramp up and Iraqi politicians need space to form to form a more inclusive government to whittle Sunni support for ISIS, “this is going to be a long-term project,” Obama said from the White House South Lawn.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/09/world/meast/iraq-crisis/index.html – 8/10/2014
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Analysts and U.S. officials estimate ISIS has as many as 10,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, including those who were freed from prisons by ISIS and Sunni loyalists who have joined the fight as the group advanced.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/09/world/meast/iraq-isis-recruit/index.html – 8/11/2014.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381460/isis-dysfunctional-tom-rogan – 6/28/2014.
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(8/11/2014)
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(6/25/2014)
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Kobanê Canton Health Minister Dr. Na’san Ahmed told KT in a telephone interview that seven local doctors carried out post-mortem examinations on the bodies of two Kurdish YPG fighters recently killed by ISIS and that they found traces indicating “they were killed by ISIS using chemical weapon.”
http://kurdistantribune.com/2014/doctors-confirm-isis-use-of-chemical-weapon-kobane/ – 7/15/2014.
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Individuals suspected of violating Sharia law or opposing ISIS, including children as young as 8 years old, are abducted and transported to prisons, where they are flogged, tortured, and summarily executed. . . .
http://aclj.org/radical-islam/isis-caliphate-is-evil-incarnate – 8/8/2014.
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Things grew darker from there. As the first week bled into a second, new captors showed Lawand a list of YPG soldiers and officials who were members of his family, and asked him to confirm it. He pretended not to know the familiar faces on the list. That’s when the gentle attitude of his captors changed. Lawand was taken to a former regime prison with other kids who refused to cooperate.
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11 Monday Aug 2014
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(8/10/2014)
Ethnic self-determination has been theme in conflict and general politics throughout the ages as no child is born without legacy, and it seems no legacy goes uncontested in the wilds of history.
The Declaration comprises four sections. The first section declares the Independent State of the United Tribes of New Zealand. The second proclaims all sovereign power to reside in the hereditary chiefs and heads of tribes and states that no other legislative power will be allowed to exist. The third section outlines the Chiefs’ intentions to meet every year to make laws for the peace and good order of the country. The final section requests the King of England to be the parent of their infant state and its protector from all attempts upon its independence.
http://archives.govt.nz/events/declaration-independence – New Zealand – “Declaration of Independence of the Northern Chiefs” – 1835
God bless the Queen, for the history of empire has not only its twists but its revelations too. The Crown System has turned out politically progressive, protective of minority interests, and able to accommodate and respond to contemporary indigenous and minority complaint.
Over coffee and on the other side of the global fence, the morning horror . . .
“Khaled Sharrouf reportedly posted the picture of his son with the decapitated head on Twitter with the comment: “That’s my boy!” The image was reportedly taken in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, which fell to the Islamist fighters earlier this year and shows Sharrouf’s seven-year old son, who was raised in Sydney, dressed in blue-checked trousers, a blue shirt and a baseball cap, while struggling to hold up the severed head of a slain Syrian soldier.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/australian-boy-poses-severed-head-country-joins-rescue-efforts-iraq-1654378 – 8/11/2014.
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11 Monday Aug 2014
In 2007, the Islamic State of Iraq was seen as “the richest of the insurgency groups” in Iraq with $1 billion to 1.5 billion “collected in revenue by the group through foreign donations, enforced taxation and confiscation of the property and funds of Iraqis.” But the U.S. surge and ISI missteps significantly damaged the jihadist group’s ability to raise funds.
Seven years and three names later, ISIS amassed a $2 billion comeback and took control of large swathes of territory in northern Iraq including Mosul and 35 percent of Syria.
ISIS’s financial recovery has been marked by a slight shift away from reliance on local extortion networks (although those are still in effect), improved organizational and financial management by ISIS leader and self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the departure of U.S. troops in 2011.
The most important elements of ISIS’s funding are sadaqa (voluntary donations) from Arab…
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10 Sunday Aug 2014
Tags
Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Israeli, Kurdish-Israeli relationship, Kurdistan, Kurds, political, politics
(Posted 8/10/2014; Event: 8/9/2014)
Israel-Kurd Magazine, Issue No. 1 – 2009
There is some horrible news out of Kurdistan today. Ekurd.net reports that Mawloud Afand, editor of an Israel-Kurdish magazine called Israel Kurd “disappeared ten days ago in [the] Kurdistan region of Iraq.” Israeli news sources say he was kidnapped by Iranian intelligence in the city of Sulaimaniyah. Ekurd.net claims that Iran had told the Kurdish government to shut Israel Kurd down and it refused.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/06/25/iran-kidnaps-pro-israeli-kurd-iraq-mawloud-afand/ – 6/25/2012
Related: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/topic/israel-kurd-magazine/ – 7/16/2012.
ERBIL-Hewlêr, Kurdistan region ‘Iraq’, — A number of Israeli political experts say Israel will be among the countries that would support Iraqi Kurdistan if it declared independence. They also suggest that Kurdistan not make the decision hastily and ensure the grounds are properly prepared first, Rudaw reported
http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/5/state6172.htm 5/1/2012.
Furthermore, with their initial sale last week of a tanker full of oil, to Israel no less, the Kurds have shown that they are willing not just to cleave themselves from Baghdad but to stand as a magnanimous force for stability in the region.
According to numerous reports by Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, the tanker SCF Altai transferred a cargo of Kurdish oil from another tanker United Emblem, which had been plying the Mediterranean for two weeks after loading at the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The SCF Altai then docked at the Israeli city of Ashkelon and off-loaded its crude.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2014/06/23/iraqs-kurds-sell-oil-to-israel-move-closer-to-independence/ – 6/23/2014.
In 1966, Iraqi defense minister Abd al-Aziz al-Uqayli blamed the Kurds of Iraq for seeking to establish “a second Israel” in the Middle East. He also claimed that “the West and the East are supporting the rebels to create [khalq] a new Israeli state in the north of the homeland as they had done in 1948 when they created Israel. It is as if history is repeating itself.”
http://www.meforum.org/3838/israel-kurds – Summer 2014.
What attracts me to a story like this one is the possibility of encouraging and securing ethnic self-determination for a true ethnic minority. In that regard, Kurds and Israelis may understand one another. The above scholarly piece by Ofra Bengio goes into detail on the history of the Kurdish-Israeli relationship, and that in turn informs just a little bit how it has turned out that members of the Kurdish community seeing an Israeli group in Lafayette Park (in front of the White House) would (naturally) join them in solidarity.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/11/10/canadian-israeli-woman-fighting-with-kurds-against-isis-audio/ – 11/10/2014
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10 Sunday Aug 2014
(7/24/2014)
(7/24/2014)
(8/5/2014)
” . . . a separate militant group to Hamas! They are also responsible for rocket fire into Israel . . .” (1:21)
(8/10/2014)
(6/18/2014)
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10 Sunday Aug 2014
Obama has given MB plenty of room for operating and for being observed. As he is not a President for Life, the stronger elements that comprise our government will survive him and probably be able to use the knowledge gained during his tenure. I would fear as much a flip toward the extreme Right in America. We really need a central, progressive, and prudent politics, and the zealots in politics have really skewed the conversation away from the middle ranks. That needs fixing, so I am becoming a Passionate Moderate Liberal.
The above comes not from The Awesome Conversation but rather from private correspondence.
As with the polarizing of American politics, which so far remain civil, a glance at the hot conflicts within the Islamic Small Wars campus tell a tale about the possession of armies in the name of the people: Syria just didn’t have one.
Bashar the Butcher al-Assad had an army.
Every band of mixed pedigree with heavy jihad on its mind made itself an army.
The greater portion of the population of Syria, which numbers above six million internally displace and refugee: no army — no defense — nothing against the state’s military power or the ruthless ambition of spoilers ambitious for plunder, rape, and rapine beneath their black banners.
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Iraq appeared to have had an army before ISIS bore down on it and got it to jump out of its boots and uniforms, so it may be said that moderate Sunnis, Chaldean Christians, and the Yezedis also had no more army in Iraq than they would have had in Syria.
To its credit plus the rightful defensive stance of Shiites looking north toward Sunni extremists, it might be said that Baghdad, finally, has an army, and it’s moving but with the pace known to other armies challenged by Islamist irregulars. Even with an army formed to defend the middle humanity of a state, the same would seem to need an army of detectives to deal with the state’s major irritants.
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10 Sunday Aug 2014
While UNRWA’s mission is to “relieve” and “support” the Palestinians, it has been doing exactly the opposite. It has been keeping Palestinians in pens as refugees and obstructing them from integrating and from normalizing their lives, all while UNRWA seems to be funnelling international aid money to whitewashing the terrorist organization Hamas . . .
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2962/unrwa-the-palestinians-enemy – 3/21/2012
Tuesday’s incident was the third instance in which Palestinian armaments were found in UN facilities in the Gaza Strip. On July 22, the UN agency found rockets stockpiled in another school which “is situated between two other UNRWA schools that currently each accommodate 1,500 internally displaced persons.”
A week before that, UNRWA found some 20 rockets in a school under its auspices, also during a standard inspection.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/rockets-found-in-unrwa-school-for-third-time/ – 7/30/2014.
When there was talk of reforming the UNRWA by removing Hamas members from its ranks, the editor of a Hamas paper wrote that, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance,’ in its various forms.”
The official word from Hamas was that it and the UNRWA are the same thing. The UNRWA’s vast majority of locally sourced Gazans are part of Hamas.
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-unrwa-is-hamas/2014/08/07/ – 8/7/2014
How did those rockets, whatever the number, get into the UNRWA schools in the first place?
Is it not possible someone had a key and let themselves in?
That would be the better story.
Any other explanation would belie explicit complicity with Hamas, making UNRWA perhaps the largest publicly funded terror agency in history.
http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-strongly-condemns-placement-rockets-school – 7/17/2014.
http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns-placement-rockets-second-time-one-its-schools – 7/22/2014.
http://af.reuters.com/article/egyptNews/idAFL6N0Q45TO20140729 – “U.N. says more rockets found at one of its Gaza schools” – 7/29/2014
Israel was denounced for destroying “homes and neighborhoods” and “civilian infrastructure.” But the fact that Israel had destroyed an extraordinary labyrinth of 32 terror tunnels deep underground – running for miles, jam packed with explosives, opening near Israeli towns, and built for the sole purpose of killing Jews – somehow just got left out.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/65178 – “The Continuing United Nations War Against the Jews” – 8/9/2014.
Also by Anne Bayefsky —
As the terrorist organization Hamas breaks yet another ceasefire, it operates with the firm belief that it will be protected on the international stage. That’s because the modern United Nations has become an instrument of war, just seven decades after it was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
But Gaza under Hamas is a place with only two basic industries: aid and terrorism. These are much entwined, and not solely because Hamas controls Unrwa’s staff unions in Gaza, where in 2012 a Hamas-affiliated slate swept 25 of 27 seats. In effect the U.N. group subsidizes Hamas. Among U.N. agencies in the Middle East, Unrwa is the largest employer, with a regular budget for 2014 of $731 million, and a total budget that, with emergency appeals, tops $1 billion.
The agency has roughly 30,000 staff on its payroll, almost all Palestinian. Some 12,500 work in Gaza, home to 1.2 million Unrwa-registered refugees, who account for about two-thirds of Gaza’s population. The U.N. agency’s welfare programs relieve Hamas of many of the costs of servicing the enclave it controls as its launchpad for terror.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/65157 – “The U.N. Handmaiden of Hamas” – 8/8/2014.
From search string “UNRWA, corruption” —
“Most Western donor countries have been reluctant, for obvious political reasons, to call the P.A. or the U.N. to account for the theft and waste of their taxpayers’ money in the morass of corruption and political extremism that is Palestinian politics,” Danby said.
http://www.jta.org/2009/02/26/news-opinion/world/aussie-lawmaker-unrwa-notoriously-corrupt – 2/26/2009.
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http://www.israelifrontline.com/2011/10/busted-60-years-of-unrwa-corruption.html – 10/24/2011 – Vimeo Video, 30 minutes.
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The demonstrators blocked Ain al-Hilweh’s main road with burning tires and dumpsters.
They waved banners that read: “No to UNRWA’s corrupt policy,” and “No to UNRWA’s conspiratorial policies.” Another placard said: “People want medical care and medication.”
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Backgrounders –
http://www.meforum.org/3404/reforming-unrwa – Fall 2012.
http://israelseen.com/2014/07/21/michael-shine-unrwa-for-palestinian-refugees-corruption-of-the-recipients/ – 7/21/2014. “The shame is that the refugees have suffered far more at the hands of their Arab brethren than they ever would have been by Israel. We can’t turn back the clock to tell them that they would have been better off staying where they were in 1948, what is for sure is that they would have been, and deep down, many of them know it! They have been lied to, stolen from and killed by their own Arab Muslim brothers and cousins, and now the only place and people which they can find to blame are Israel and the Jews. I cry for the mothers and children in Gaza, hurt as a direct result of the actions of those that they chose to represent them, but my sympathy is for the people and soldiers of Israel who are forced, once again, to defend the land of Israel against indiscriminate rocket attacks on innocent civilians.”
I seldom, perhaps never, have used the “N” word (here related to German history, not the history of America’s southern states) in discourse and on this post, despite the rueful cuteness of the title, do no use it lightly. However, UNRWA appears to have melded with Arab pan-nationalist willpower and vitriol to hold captive as useful weapons the descendants of the refugees of 1948.
More than that, with rocket stores appearing repeatedly in UNRWA facilities in the course of recent hostilities, with tons of building supplies diverted to the construction of tunnels packed with explosives and weapons intended for an assault on Israel, with Hamas firing on, from within, or around UNRWA facilities, and with unknown members directly employed as “Palestinians” — I’m not going to use that made-up empty invention of a term anymore: I will call them “Gazans”, those refugees long settled in Gaza — it seems entirely appropriate to embed the “N” word in “UNRWA”.
The growing wealth of Hamas’s leadership has led to increased resentment of the terrorist organization that governs Gaza. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2011 that Gazans “tell stories of Hamas officials who used to drive modest cars now sporting luxury vehicles, and … complain the government is reaching into their pockets in every way it can.” The Ynet report notes that in contrast to the leadership of Hamas, a World Bank report ranks “the Gaza Strip … third in the Arab region in terms of poverty, ranking above only Sudan and Yemen.”
The irony is that Hamas reportedly gained popularity, in part, due to its reputation for honesty as opposed to its rival Fatah, which is known for corruption.
http://www.thetower.org/0707-while-gazans-suffer-in-poverty-leaders-of-hamas-live-in-luxury/ – 7/15/2014.
Sources in the Gaza Strip said on Thursday that Taha was executed because Hamas feared he might implicate some of its leaders in many corruption scandals. “The man knew too much about the senior leaders of Hamas,” said a veteran journalist living in Gaza City who had close ties with Taha. “Hamas leaders used to take him with them on their visits to different countries.”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4588/ayman-taha – 8/8/2014.
Despite the often-heard statement that the Gaza Strip is “densely populated” – a point repeatedly used to explain why Hamas fires rockets from busy civilian areas – the reality is that there are indeed parts of Gaza that are thinly populated.
Built on the abuse and exploitation of Gazans en masse, it appears the “solidarity movement” in Gaza has turned out another business enterprise fit to mafia-styled “men of honor” who appear at the moment (of need) to be absent from Gaza and suffering deeply with the worry of husbanding their millions to billions of looted dollars.
What kind of persons do that to those they have purported to represent?
What kind of global organizations supports that kind of person?
I should think the “N” word suits both perfectly.
“Rather than falsely accusing Israel,” the letter continued, “one might have expected that as the executive head of the UN, you would have admitted responsibility of the UN for such abuse of its facilities, and instituted a thorough inquiry as to how and why UNRWA facilities were placed at the disposal of the Hamas terror organization, how and why the UN officials responsible for such facilities permitted this situation to occur, and why those rockets and other weapons that were discovered in such facilities were transferred to Hamas, for their continued use against Israel’s citizens.
“In permitting the storage of weapons, and in transferring such weapons into the hands of Hamas,” the letter asserted, “the UN has in fact permitted itself to become accessory to the commission of war crimes.”
http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/20841/unrwa-aiding-terrorism/#MxaSrOKRGtDwAy43.99 – 8/31/2014.
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