“In this new video series, Washington Institute experts assess the current state of military operations in Iraq and evaluate Abadi’s ability to extricate his country from deadlock, defeat, and disintegration.”
From the looks and sound of the productions, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (TWI) has launched a DIY-AH (do-it-yourself-at-home) effort to promote its fellows’ analyses. May the TWI powers that be give them an upgrade in audio-visual recording technology.
What follows is an incomplete relay of the series, but in the way of the web, whether the viewer starts out with e-mail (as I did) or on TWI’s web page or YouTube, all routers lead back to some kind of primary media content.
Of course, if you heard it from me first — after I’ve heard it from them — in the older fashioned way of news, good!
“They are very good at using psychological operations to very quickly establish the sense that they control areas, putting up their flags on all key administrative buildings, cross-roads, wide visibility locations, and they’re very good at pursuing what they want in the mergers and acquisitions model of growth whereby they ruck into an area and immediately try to recruit the most like-minded insurgent group in the area to become part of ISIS.” (1:28 – 1:59).
“First, you can’t address the ISIS threat in Iraq, without addressing the ISIS threat in Syria. Secondly, you can’t address the ISIS threat in Iraq and Syria without addressing the foreign fighter problem. And third, the U.S. really cannot “solve” the region’s problems, because they are rooted in issues of religious and political identity and legitimacy, and this is a problem that can only be worked out among Muslims themselves. ” (2:18 – 2:41)
My “big picture” thought, which might make sense of an $11 billion arms sale): what ISIS scours Qatar will devour.
One day.
However, there are many days between this day and that one, and the Ummah, bloodied from Afghanistan to Yemen, has been pushed by the ambitions and behaviors of its own subscription into a larger global conversation about rightful power, despotism, barbarism, and democracy.
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.
“We are the generation that stays quiet about political corruption, favoring political correctness instead. We pride ourselves in sticking up for the underdog while throwing our friends and allies to the dogs.”
Hamas hasn’t a human program or a prayer to offer anyone. Its officers have made themselves millionaires (actually, Khaled Mashaal is a billionaire) on the way to dealing death to their own constituents, including 160 children recruited for the construction of their tunnels.
Of ISIS, one only finds worse things to mention — rape and rapine all the way to attempted genocide, Shiites, Christians, Yazidis, and anyone else just because and as it strikes BadDaddy’s fancy.
Talk about the “Hamaside” and “Muslim Botherhood” . . . .
WASHINGTON — U.S. warplanes made a second wave of airstrikes Friday in northern Iraq against the militants who have besieged a religious group and threatened the city of Irbil, a Pentagon official said.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, spokesman for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, said the second wave of strikes used a drone to attack a mortar position while four FA-18 fighter-attack planes hit a seven-vehicle convoy outside Irbil.
Hamas’ stated target may only be Israel, but that is deliberately misleading. As the actions of ISIS, which kills Muslims just as indiscriminately as it kills non-Muslims, demonstrate, the philosophy of terrorism knows no loyalty to anything or anyone but itself.
““We are being slaughtered!” she sobbed, her voice raw and worn out, as seen on this parliamentary video. “We are being exterminated! An entire religion is being exterminated from the face of the Earth. In the name of humanity, save us!””
One Yazidis showed al-Jazeera a series of text messages received by Yazidis upon the arrival of ISIS, reading: “Where are you going to go? I swear [to] God I will cut you into pieces… We are coming for you, you pig, you enemy of God.”
The Yazidis took the threat seriously. The Washington Post reports that estimates vary from 10,000 to 40,000 Yazidis currently stranded on a mountain above Sinjar, knowing their immediate death awaits them at the foot of the mountain.
No IPTC data found. Source of download: Breitbart.
Thousands of Yazidis — a Kurdish ethno-religious community — have been trapped on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq as they attempt to escape the extremists’ grasp. The sole parliamentary representative of the Yazidis, Vian Dakhil, warned that her small community, which has roots in a 4,000 year-old faith, faces the threat of extermination.
Other religious and ethnic groups, including Christians, Shiite Turkmens and Shabaks, have also recently been displaced since the Islamic State began waging a violent campaign against minorities in the territory it controls.
Yazidis believe in one God and worship seven angels. Melek Taus, known as the Peacock Angel, plays the most important role. Worship of the Peacock Angel is where the label “devil worshipper” stems from. Christianity and Islam view the Peacock Angel as a fallen angel or devil for refusing to bow before Adam. Yazidis interpret this as a test of the Peacock Angel’s commitment to God and see the Peacock Angel as the chief of God’s angels.
David Rubin: Is that then part of it? This is so savage that partly . . . you know, everyone keeps saying the images out of Gaza are horrible, which they are, but there’s this definitive narrative There’s a bomb that drops on something . . .
Nikki DeLoach: It’s a war that we recognize. That’s how we’ve seen war. This is not that. This is savage. It’s like . . . medieval . . . something you would see on Game of Thrones.”
I doubt any will see the mass beheading of children (as has been reported in relation to the slaughter of Chaldean Christians in Iraq) on Game of Thrones.
(CNN) — If you’re following the news about ISIS, which now calls itself the Islamic State, you might think you’ve mistakenly clicked on a historical story about barbarians from millennia ago.
“The heinous crime of the Islamic State was carried out not just against Christians, but against humanity,” Sako told a special church service in east Baghdad where around 200 Muslims joined Christians in solidarity.
http://phylliscartersjournal.blogspot.ca/2014/08/the-abuse-of-god-death-and-destruction.html – 8/8/2014 (I continue updating a piece for a little while afterwards as new and telling verbiage appears. As ISIS is basically a raiding party, events move very quickly through its machinations. Where it hustles, Iraq and its allies plod, by comparison, toward getting their act together. At the moment, Aug. 8, 2014, and despite some U.S. activity, ISIS has battlefield resource superiority — arms and ammo, cash, armor and domestic vehicles, a modern enough headquarters, and some techniques in cover and cruelty that have made them especially hard to get at. In their world, the world is running away from them, which for plunder must suit them fine).
“Tal Kayf is now in the hands of the Islamic State. They faced no resistance and rolled in just after midnight,” said Boutros Sargon, a resident who fled the town and was reached by phone in Arbil.
“I heard some gunshots last night and when I looked outside, I saw a military convoy from the Islamic State. They were shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is greatest],” he said.
Unfortunately, when it comes to political absolutism (why I call them the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”), despotism, and fascism (Hungary’s Jobbik now relates to Iranian heritage), there seems no end to variants.
ISIS has been proving vulnerable to the Kurdish Peshmerga, who know what will happen to them if they lose, and some ad hoc assembly of very small ambush parties that are targeting its leaders. Nonetheless, they’re using Erdogan’s embassy in Mosul as a headquarters (and they have gotten Erdogan to purchase $800 million in oil from them — and Erdogan has blacked out mention of the story in Turkey . . . all of which is bad news for NATO and the Turkish people).
The story with dictators who “take off” always ends in surreal depravity and sadism, and that much BadDaddy Baghdaddi’s lunatics have clearly accomplished.
More From the News
Jihadists who took over large areas of northern Iraq today have forced 100,000 Christians to flee as they occupied churches, removing crosses and destroying manuscripts.
They have fled with nothing but their clothes, some on foot, to reach the Kurdistan region, according to Louis Sako, the leader of Iraq’s largest Christian denomination.
Loud and hysterical shouts of “Allah akbar”, “To Jihad”, “there is none save Allah and the Shiites are his foes”, “He who fights for Jihad is loved by Allah”, “The Sunnis are Allah’s beloved”, “Allah is our god and not theirs (the Shiites’)”, “The Shiite god is Satan”, “Death is better than humiliation”, “With blood and spirit will we redeem you, Islam”, “Jihad is our way”, “Jihad state forever”, “O Shiite rulers, we are coming for you”, were heard at the demonstration and to serve as proof of its serious intentions, shots were fired in the air.
These have no idea what it is that’s coming for them:
The newly elected parliament convened with 255 out of 328 elected officials attending, which was enough for a legal quorum, the speaker said. But when many failed to return after the break, there were not enough members to continue.
He talks at length about all of the Western-made equipment ISIS has captured during its various routs of the Iraqi army. “Look how much money America spends on fighting Islam, and it ends up going to us,” he crows. “Message to the people of the West: just keep giving and we will keep taking.”
Vox. ISIS mocks Obama in Michael Bay-style propaganda video – 7/1/2014. Vox has imported the video to its page, so, to my friends around the world, if you want to see an ISIS representative in a ball cap and speaking American English, click through to it.
As ISIS has picked up “assets” in American machinery and weaponry, also Iraqi military uniforms, I was curious about the suggestion that the same were on the road to Damascus.
Is there an ISIS armored column gunning for Bashar al-Assad and his government?
Will U.S. arms shipments to “moderate” Syrian forces arrive in time to kill or capture that column and retake ownership of The Revolution?
About a week ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi noted, “The upcoming battles will reveal the extent of ISIS’ maturity. Most probably, it will stop at the maximum extent in the south like it now with the North’s Kurds and it will rest a little benefiting from international incompetence” (Al-Aribya, June 24, 2014).
How else could resistance to the developing and expanding conflict be characterized?
The Iraqi Parliament, so it appears, can’t keep itself seated for even one day.
The call-up of tens of thousands of young men from Iraq’s south, Shiites, for the most part, appear to be getting a pep talk, a helmet, a firearm, and a ride toward wherever the action is, pretty much just enough to get themselves killed.
I would like to be more optimistic, of course, but the good spirit of going off to war, the preparations with uniforms, steel, and gun oil, play to vanity more than the necessities of what has to be just the ugliest and most heartbreaking business on earth. For certain, I would not want to be an American military adviser handed recruits with two weeks (or much less) of “boot camp” behind them for a day’s work in an active field populated by so deeply a delusional and treacherous enemy, but perhaps that kind of challenge is what combat pay is all about.
From Sunday’s Guardian, this quote tells of a theme I’ve encountered elsewhere:
“We have Da’ash on one side,” said Abu Mustafa, a Baquba resident, using the colloquial word for Isis. “And we have Asa’ib ahl al-Haq on the other. I don’t know who to be more scared of.”
Even if held together for a time by Saddam Hussein’s power to manipulate his constituence and keep it roiled in fear, Iraq has been long divided by the Sunni-Shiite schism, and on that matter, never mind American secular ideals and military intervention, it has been laid open to Iranian and Saudi influence and related jockeying and meddling. Into that rift has roared ISIS with inhuman and frankly incontinent bloodletting and cruelty, and the state is on the edge — beyond it, possibly — of reverting to the language and terms of the war with which it’s familiar, a reenactment in reality of the obsessive bidding for succession that attended the death of Muhammad, who having left advice about how to do everything else appears to have left out the matter of continuing his enterprise beyond his final breath.
In Wikipedese:
The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which led to the Battle of Siffin. The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.
Although the headline sensationalizes the potential for an all-out Sunni-Shiite showdown, even in the field and among fellow Islamists, opinion of ISIS may run low. From the same article:
“The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state but they don’t have the elements for it,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.”
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