Posts Tagged isis

Gunsmith Keeps Kurds in the Fight Against ISIS

From War is Boring:

His shop isn’t much more than a basement under Erbil’s central bazaar. Its only fittings are a work bench, a chair and some tools. Shotguns and air rifles line the walls. He even owns some ancient-looking muskets.

Before Islamic State swept into Iraq, Bakhtiar’s business mostly focused on repairing hunting weapons. He had run the family business since 1987, when he took over from his father during the reign of Saddam Hussein.

 

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Norwegian Telemark Battalion to Train Kurdish Peshmerga

From The Daily Mail:

The Telemark Battalion is an elite mechanised infantry unit of the Norwegian Army which has been involved in the fight against the Taliban as part of the NATO-led security mission since 2003. 

Around 50 soldiers from Telemark will be heading to the city of Irbil in northern Iraq to train Kurdish forces to help them in their fight against Islamic State, the Norwegian ministry of defence has confirmed. It is thought the mission will begin in early April.

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The Ramifications of the Swap For Bowe Bergdahl

From The Daily Caller:

Carl Mueller told NBC in an interview that aired Monday that he and his wife thought they could win his daughter’s freedom with a $6.2 million ransom payment, although he acknowledged the Arizona family faced a daunting task in raising that much money. But when the White House agreed last year to trade Bergdahl, who had been held for five years by the Taliban and Haqqani network, the family believes the price for their daughter went up.

“That made the whole situation worse,” Kayla Mueller’s brother, Eric, told the network. “Because that’s when the demands got greater. They got larger. They realized that they had something. They realized that, ‘Well, if they’re gonna let five people go for one person, why won’t they do this? Or why won’t they do that?’”

 

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Who Are ISIS and What Are Their Goals?

A long read from The Atlantic but well worth it:

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.

 

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US Citizen Joins Iraqi Kurds To Fight Islamists

From The Washington Free Beacon:

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ISIS Determined To Kill Millions In Religious Cleansing

From Breitbart.com:

“I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam,” but “I didn’t see any mercy in their behavior,” explained Todenhofer. He added, “Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.”

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Christian Civilians Defend Themselves Against ISIS

From The National:

In Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, close to the Syrian border, a cluster of Christian villages are living under the threat of attack from militants belonging to ISIL and the Al Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat Al Nusra. While the villages have been decorated with Christmas lights and inflatable Santa Claus figures, the festive spirit has been overwhelmed by fear.

The residents have formed armed units to defend their towns.

 

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Islamists Use Boy Preacher As Propaganda

From WND:

The preacher, apparently about 9 or 10 years old, is identified as Abu Jafar.

His message: “Make haste and purchase your place in paradise, my dear brother. Go to the battlefields of jihad and kill the enemies. Kill [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad and the enemies of Allah and of our religion. Destroy them, and if you die, you will become a martyr.”

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Shoebat: ISIS Will Take Over Pakistan

From Walid Shoebat:

ISIS now has camped in Pakistan and all across Pakistan, the black standard of the Islamic State has been popping up all over from urban slums to Taliban strongholds, the ISIS logo and name have appeared in graffiti, posters and pamphlets and a cluster of militant commanders in Pakistan declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State as ISIS presence there increases by the day. But the one trillion dollar question is will the world leaders secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of ISIS? It doesn’t look like it and the prospects of ISIS gaining nuclear bombs are very likely as the news from Pakistan reveals.

 

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SAS Eliminating Islamic State Fighters

From The Daily Mail:

The troops are also equipped with quad bikes – four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles that can have machine guns bolted on to a frame. They then seek out IS units and attack the terrorists using the element of surprise and under the cover of darkness.

The missions have taken place on a near daily basis in the past four weeks and the SAS soldiers have expended so much ammunition that regimental quartermasters have been forced to order a full replenishment of stocks of machine-gun rounds and sniper bullets.

An SAS source said: ‘Our tactics are putting the fear of God into IS as they don’t know where we’re going to strike next and there’s frankly nothing they can do to stop us.

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Muslim ASU Professor Says U.S. Military No Different Than ISIS

From Clarion Project:

“It would not be a stretch to say that the United States is actually a greater threat to peace and stability in the region than ISIS…But perhaps more disturbingly, many of the same behaviors condemned by the Obama administration and used to justify its most recent campaign into Iraq and Syria are commonly perpetrated by U.S. troops and are ubiquitous in the broader American society.”

Al-Gharbi was confronted on Twitter by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy and author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam, who served in the U.S. Navy.

“As a former U.S. Naval officer, I was disgusted by his revolting comparison of the barbaric and inhuman sexual violence perpetrated by ISIS to the behaviors he deceptively insinuates are committed by our sons and daughters in uniform,” Jasser told the Clarion Project.

 

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Islamic State Beheads Citizens of Syrian Border Town Kobane

From The Daily Mail:

According to those who escaped, the jihadis’ savagery is more hideous than anyone feared.

Headless corpses litter the streets of the besieged Syrian border town, they say, and some of the mainly Kurdish townsfolk have had their eyes gouged out.

Refugees who made it to Suruc, just across the border in Turkey, tell of witnessing appalling horrors in hushed tones, as if they can barely believe it themselves.

Father-of-four Amin Fajar, 38, said: ‘I have seen tens, maybe hundreds, of bodies with their heads cut off. Others with just their hands or legs missing. I have seen faces with their eyes or tongues cut out – I can never forget it for as long as I live. They put the heads on display to scare us all.’

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Violence Breaks Out In Germany Between Kurds and ISIS Supporters

From International Business Times:

A few hundred Kurdish protesters then gathered at a mosque near the train station before they were attacked by a group of 40 armed supporters of IS. Four people were taken to hospital with stab wounds following the incident.

Police used water cannons, batons and pepper spray to bring the unrest under control while both sides threw stones and bottles in an attempt to break police lines and attack the other.

The clashes in Celle occurred a day earlier, with 100 Kurds and 100 Muslims brawling until police calmed the situation.

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Deprive ISIS Of Its Finances

From RAND Corporation:

The Islamic State has emerged as the world’s richest terrorist group, with estimated assets of $1 billion to $2 billion. Its sophisticated and strategically driven financial scheme is a key reason that U.S. officials say this fight could last years.

 

An examination of newly declassified financial documents the group created dating to 2005 reveals an organized criminal operation that is funded through rackets like protection, extortion and the co-opting of the region’s oil industry. This makes the group a self-sustaining operation, largely free of reliance on the largesse of wealthy foreign patrons. While airstrikes may disrupt the flow of oil and profits, they will not lead to the group’s financial ruin anytime soon. Based on our research, we estimate the Islamic State will bring in $100 million to $200 million this year. And that’s being conservative.

 

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The ISIS Threat To The U.S.

From RAND Coporation:

Terrorists can operate in many environments. Al Qaeda cells have existed in hostile states with efficient law enforcement capabilities, like the United States or Germany. Terrorist organizations have a much easier time operating in states with low capability, even when those states are hostile to them. Examples would be Yemen or Nigeria. Terrorists have an easier time operating in ungoverned space, where little or no state apparatus exists, such as Somalia. But an even better place for terrorists to locate their home base is in a state that is sympathetic to their purposes. And the best place of all would be a state the terrorists actually controlled. In that environment they would not only be free of state interference, they would actually be able to employ the attributes of sovereignty to their purposes—the police, the security services, the banking system, the diplomatic establishment. Imagine the difficulty of dealing with terrorists with diplomatic immunity.

 

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