One friend who has pursued her own course in conflict and Islamic studies suggests that al-Qaeda represents the authentic Islam and all else are trying to wriggle through it or reform and revolutionize its cultural technology. In that the Ummah is as broad and varied as one might expect a natural human system to be, Muslims on many paths have become the first victims of “those” Muslims, and, indeed, out of themselves must come the army that defeats the past.
While it surprises me that Baghdaddi has gotten as large as he has — he has the basics: an ample treasury and believing or compliant troops — what is coming for him and his followers may surprise him.
Regarding the psychological character of the tropes of Jew hate, I use the term “paranoid delusional narcissistic REFLECTION of motivation”. Their language is their sheet of music, and no attack on any physical body amounts to anything without effort to get in the way of that poetic programming.
One hopes the “radical” (conservative) mosque message finds repudiation among the believers of a more modern cast, but the conservative kafir-side endorses a rightfully cautious paranoia: the speech presages a well-known, well-witnessed fascist evil.
The political program works probably works about the same way for the modern political and religious authority as it may have for Muhammad himself: it deeply manipulates and exploits the believing. While Hamas, for example, places noncombatants as shields against Israeli strikes at its war making facilities, Khaled Mashaal works the levers from his billionaire’s safety in Doha, his wealth having come out of treating the residents of Gaza as a business enterprise.
One could travel from one Botherhood-promoting Muslim autocrat to another and find pretty much the same canards and abetting political and social structures in place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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. . . .
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.
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.
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.”
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…
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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
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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