Tag Archives: Islamic State

FTAC: After Islamic State, the Continued Rise in the World of Fascist Absolute Power

30 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Syria

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Conversation Starter

Blanga, Yehuda. “Implications of the US Withdrawal from Syria.” The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, October 30, 2019.

Inspirational comment for what follows noted that “the #1 and #2 ISIS leaders” were now dead.

True and factored into the response that follows here.

From the Awesome Conversation

Islamist leaders believe themselves — and their followers believe them to be — as Muhammad, the channeled voice of God on Earth. Of rivals for Ayatollah and Caliph there may be no short lists to which another strident Believer may not be added.

As with other dictators, their power resides in part in the closed political systems one or another may be able to wrap around themselves as a defensive as defensive political political, religious, and social bubble. In my reductive way, as much responds in leaders to the humiliations of childhood or early adolescence as part of malign narcissistic development. All become politically absolute — and for practical conclusions, kleptocratic.

In the Syrian theater, Bashar al-Assad cultivated ISIS / ISIL / Islamic State in the gathering of the al-Qaeda types that streamed into his state as the 2011 “Civil War” (I call it the “Syrian Tragedy”) developed. His purpose, and well in the KGB style, was to produce a war he knew he could win by first choosing his enemy. So he bombed the hell out of noncombatant Syrians while failing (deliberately) to focus his forces on the Islamists until the same coalesced and he could add to them.

Russia removed her citizens early in this process, but it by no means abandoned its old client. On the other wing, Iran had its eye on Israel and plenty of nefarious conflict-encouraging and martial power of its own — it is no mistake or coincidence that the IRG and Hezbollah would come to the battle (as would Russian forces).

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/09/syria-assad-isil-background/

On this reading page, BackChannels has another piece — different author and publication — suggesting about the same thing. Our retreat has been a retreat before “political absolutism” or in the most undemocratic and illiberal support of it.

Related Online

Wechsler, William F. “Five Takeaways from the Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Atlantic Council, October 28, 2019.

Addendum: Perpetuation of Threat

The bond between conflict and money may well make the world go around.

That may be fine as a part of our “human condition”.

Here, however, for the remaining and fully functioning liberal democracies of the 21st Century, the underlying argument that might be characterized — as I characterize it — as “Medieval (Absolute Power) v Modern (Democratic Distribution of Power)” involves the leveraging of the presence of unreasoning threat and “unassailable” leadership into the endless “wars of all against all”.

Is that what y’all want?

Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin-Erdogan: as much appears the world wanted. Their states are their personal ventures; their slogans the whips for their mobs; their ends: their own aggrandizement.

For the West that should be pushing back: mere containment of these old and evil forces, and the “containment” appears quite permeable for the methods now associated with Russia’s “Active Measures” and “Hybrid Warfare”.

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FNS: Nearing the End of ISIS in Syria

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Islamic Small Wars, Syria

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Baghouz – Internally Displaced: 43,000.

Regarding the women . . . the mothers —

Many of them have fled from town to town to town under bombing. They have seen the most terrible things in war. And yet they are true believers. It’s going to take a lot to get them to change their minds.

https://www.channel4.com/news/speaking-to-the-syrian-and-iraqi-women-still-loyal-to-islamic-state-who-married-fighters (3/5/2019)

US-supported forces besieging Islamic State holdouts in the Syrian village of Baghouz cannot cope with the more than 43,000 men, women and children who fled the battlefield and are currently being held in an internment camp and prisons in the north.
Among those who fled are 500 foreign jihadi wives and children. The women, who are held in a separate compound from other escapees, say their husbands are fighting, are fugitives, are dead or are in prison.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/middle-east/kurdish-led-forces-struggle-to-cope-with-escapees-amid-baghouz-siege-1.3815462

The Pentagon rerouted millions of dollars’ worth of weapons and vehicles from Iraq to Syria in the second half of 2018, Al-Monitor has learned, as US-backed forces cornered the last remnants of the Islamic State (IS).
In a series of notifications to Congress reviewed by Al-Monitor, the Defense Department said it had determined that a bevy of supplies purchased by the Pentagon for the Iraqi military would instead go to the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The Pentagon sent lawmakers its last reprogramming notification for 2018 on Dec. 31, 12 days after President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw US troops from Syria.

Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/03/us-shifts-weapons-iraq-syria-pentagon.html#ixzz5hOnD1L2

https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/03/us-shifts-weapons-iraq-syria-pentagon.html – 3/4/2019.

While much of the U.S. presence in Syria has been diminished, the transfer of war equipment and materiel to SDF forces tells Damascus (Moscow and Tehran) that nothing’s over as regards their intents to sustain medieval absolutism (and its characteristic sadism, power in that mode being the power to inflict suffering on others with impunity).

While some idiots view east-west conflict in the region as being all about oil, the cynicism conveniently overlooks the more compelling of ethical and moral arguments for the defense of some goodness still in the world.


BEIRUT — As Syria’s government consolidates control after years of civil war, President Bashar al-Assad’s army is doubling down on executions of political prisoners, with military judges accelerating the pace they issue death sentences, according to survivors of the country’s most notorious prison.
In interviews, more than two dozen Syrians recently released from the Sednaya military prison in Damascus described a government campaign to clear the decks of political detainees. The former inmates said prisoners are being transferred from jails across Syria to join death-row detainees in Sednaya’s basement and then be executed in pre-dawn hangings.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/syria-bodies/ — 12/23/2018
https://twitter.com/the_rojava/status/1103004321422209024

God must be in the mind and a malign narcissism in the heart that produces so painful a mission as that of doing God’s will on earth by striking terror into the souls of others. Add: beheading, burning, enslavement, mass murder, rape, and torture.

God has helped the Islamic State jihadists in Baghouz lose everything but their madness.

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From Gaza to Mosul With Some Dwelling on Ankara in Relation to the Enabling of Islamic Jihad

23 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion

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The groups that comprise “Islamic Jihad” do worse than push innocents out in front of their violence: they hide in plain sight, infiltrate target communities, and creep forward with programs of intimidation, theft, and murder until they have a developed opportunity to surface in an attack. From Boco Haram to the “islamic State” north of Baghdad, that’s how they work. Moreover, noting Turkey’s apparent cooperation with the Islamic State (underscored by its failure to call the NATO card in on the takeover of its embassy in Mosul), containing this force calls for active blocking and dismantling wherever it is found.

The agony experienced in Gaza may be only prolonged by indecision as regards the “islamist” enterprise and the full spread of its overt objectives, including the genocide of the Jews, and its underlying motivations related to malignant and unbridled narcissism and the criminality it generates.

The note responds to the suggestion that civilians in Gaza be allowed into Egypt to flee the fighting on the strip.  However, as all know, and not least the Egyptian military, “the terrorists” look like anybody when it suits them, and Egypt has appropriately restricted traffic through the Rafah Crossing.

The allusion to Turkish cooperation with the “Islamic Stat” stems from a WordPress article, possibly reposted here, asserting that “ISIS gets men and $800 million from Turkey” (Money Jihad, July 8, 2014).  The body of that piece appears to have been based on a piece in The Algemeiner (June 22) that no longer appears online.

😦

Was the Algemeiner report real?

Has the report allegedly appearing there been suppressed?

Welcome to journalism from the web’s second row seat to history (and see the addendum to this piece).

Be that as it may, I’ve compiled a short list of articles having to do with the character of the Turkish-ISIS relationship.  The salient points that might be best defended via online information sourcing:

  • Whatever the process involved or the stat’s position on it, Turkey has long served as a transfer point for fighters transiting through to Islamic Jihad groups in Syria.  The effect of that lax security makes it as if the state abetted terrorists on their way to battle.
  • The attack by ISIS on Turkey’s embassy in Mosul has been accepted to the extent that the “Islamic State” has been using the facility as its headquarters and without interruption.  The story, which may be slugged “Mosul hostage crisis” has been suppressed within Turkey, and I / we may not know what talk-talk-and-more-talk has been taking place between Prime Minister Erdogan’s government and BadDaddy Baghdaddi’s murderous machinery. In its attempt to manage its blackened eye — the Turks have lost evident sovereignty over both their embassy in Mosul and its personnel — the Turkish state machinery has moved the hostages off the front page and hidden its negotiations and attendant politics from the Turkish constituency at large.
  • Turkey’s issues with the Kurdish community play through in the politics attending its stance toward al-Qaeda / Brotherhood-type organizations on top of its own AKP-driven government.  The longer the secular constituency remains secondary in the power structure of the state, the worse fascist tendencies may be expected to become, and that may include the passive-aggressive response of enabling rogue Islamic Jihad by simply going soft with it.

For about a month now, Erdogan’s government has muzzled the press and the opposition with regard to the Mosul hostage crisis:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has taken all measures to keep the public in the dark on the issue. The prime minister first warned the media on June 15 not to write or talk about the developments in Mosul. A Turkish court followed up on the warning the next day by imposing a gag order to all print, visual and Internet media. The government is now applying a similar gag order to opposition party members in parliament, denying their requests to be informed about the issue.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/daloglu-mosul-hostage-crisis-erdogan-isis-iraq-turkey.html#ixzz38IWGWWg5 – 6/25/2014.

The situation is so absurd that on look-up, this header appeared just last week: “Iraqi Kurds Offer Turkey Intel on Mosul Hostages” (Hurriyet Daily News, July 16, 2014).

Reference Arranged by Ascending Date of Publication

http://www.todayszaman.com/diplomacy_isil-seizes-turkish-consulate-in-mosul-takes-diplomats-captive_350080.html – 6/11/2014.

http://www.todayszaman.com/diplomacy_isil-seizes-turkish-consulate-in-mosul-takes-diplomats-captive_350080.html – 6/12/2014.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/daloglu-nato-turkey-syria-isis–al-qaeda-mosul-iraq.html – 6/11/2014. “Turkey not asking NATO for help with ISIS.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/14/america-s-allies-are-funding-isis.html – 6/14/2014.

http://english.cntv.cn/2014/06/16/ARTI1402877168646586.shtml – 6/16/2014.  “NATO chief to visit Turkey amid worsening situation in Iraq.”

http://www.danielpipes.org/14486/turkey-isis – 6/18/2014 – “Turkish Support of ISIS.”

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/06/turkeys_new_neighbor.php – 6/21/2014.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/zaman-salih-muslim-turkey-blind-eye-isis-mosul-syria-iraq.html – 6/23/2014 – “Syrian Kurdish leader: Turkey turns blind eye to ISIS.”

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/zaman-isis-turkeys-mosul-consulate-headquarter-iraq.html – 7/17/2014.

http://www.todayszaman.com/national_hostages-relatives-davutoglu-has-been-testing-our-patience_353461.html – 7/20/2014.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2014/Jul-22/264649-turkeys-benign-neglect-helped-spur-the-islamic-states-rise.ashx#axzz38IL0BDe2 – 7/22/2014.

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2014/07/23/turkeys-top-cleric-calls-new-islamic-states-caliphate-illegitimate/ – 7/23/2014.

Addendum

One Turkish opposition politician estimates that Turkey has paid $800 million to ISIS for oil shipments. Another politician released information about active duty Turkish soldiers training ISIS members. Critics note that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has met three times with someone, Yasin al-Qadi, who has close ties to ISIS and has funded it.

Apparently, as comment reflects, The Algemeiner article was that by Daniel Pipes from which the above excerpt was taken.

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