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ISIS Tag

Posted by Amy Miller on January 02, 2015 3 Comments
U.S. troops' boots may not "be on the ground" in the sense of the popular wartime narrative, but Islamic State insurgents are getting awfully close to where those boots are stationed. From the Washington Post:
In Iraq’s western Anbar province, more than 300 U.S. troops are posted at a base in the thick of a pitched battle between Iraqi forces, backed by tribal fighters, and well-armed Islamic State militants. The militants, positioned at a nearby town, have repeatedly hit the base with artillery and rocket fire in recent weeks. Since the middle of December, the U.S.-led military coalition has launched 13 airstrikes around the facility. U.S. troops have suffered no casualties in the attacks. But the violence has underlined the risks to American personnel as they fan out across Iraq as part of the expanding U.S. mission against the Islamic State, even as President Obama has pledged that U.S. operations “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” In a sign of the risks, military officials said American soldiers have been transported to the Ayn al-Asad base under the cover of night by helicopter — partly to maintain a low profile for the renewed U.S. operation in Iraq but also to protect U.S. personnel amid fierce fighting west of the capital, Baghdad.
No wonder troops feel like they're getting mixed messages on what their mission in Iraq actually is.

Posted by Amy Miller on December 24, 2014 4 Comments
ISIS has gained another hostage. The Jordanian military has confirmed that one of its pilots, 26 year-old First Lieutenant Muadh al-Kasasbeh, was shot down over Raqqa, Syria, and has been taken hostage. Al-Kasasbeh was flying missions in the region as part of the US-led coalition force against ISIS. After he was taken prisoner, ISIS militants posted his name and picture on Twitter, along with shots of his military ID and a description of his survival pack, which was found near the crash site. From The Guardian:
The F-16 was the first warplane lost since the US-led coalition began air strikes against Isis in Syria three months ago. The group said it had shot down the fighter jet with a heat-seeking missile. It was not immediately clear whether it had indeed been shot down or suffered a technical failure. Another image on social media showing the plane’s intact cockpit canopy suggested that the pilot might have ejected. The Jordanian military issued a statement confirming the capture by Isis and saying it “holds the group and its supporters responsible for the safety of the pilot and his life”. It did not name him. “During a mission on Wednesday morning conducted by several Jordanian air force planes against hideouts of the IS terrorist organisation in the Raqqa region, one of the planes went down and the pilot was taken hostage,”, the Petra news agency quoted a source from the military’s general staff as saying. The Jordanian government went into emergency session to discuss its response.
This development is both horrific and problematic for the tiny country of Jordan, which shares borders with both Iraq and Syria and has been heavily criticized for its enthusiastic participation in the coalition force. Fortunately, King Abdullah recognizes the dangers of Islamic extremism, and is willing to get his military involved, even if he can't publicize it.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 22, 2014 5 Comments
The saga of Stanley Cohen took an unexpected twist recently. For background, see our Stanley Cohen Tag. Short version: Cohen is a virulently anti-Israel, pro-Hamas lawyer who has defended many high-profile terrorists in court. Cohen pleaded guilty to obstructing the IRS and failing to file income tax returns for several years. He admitted in open court that the government could prove its allegations of multi-year effort by Cohen to conceal cash transactions and to fail to report income. Cohen was sentenced to 18 months in prison on November 21, 2014, and must report to prison on January 6, 2015. There were multiple delays in his plea appearance, which struck me as odd at the time, particularly since the court record reflected that he was traveling abroad in the Middle East Gulf states. Not exactly the place you would expect to allow a person to go on the eve of a guilty plea. Cohen did return, however; he appeared in court, and then came the explanation about his trip to the Gulf states: Cohen apparently was engaged in an ultimately futile effort to obtain the release of ISIS hostage Peter Kassig, who later would be beheaded. The Guardian has the story, The race to save Peter Kassig:

Posted by Amy Miller on November 16, 2014 7 Comments
Multiple outlets have already reported on ISIS' latest (and as yet unverified) video claiming to show the severed head of U.S. aid worker Peter Kassig. The new video does not show Kassig alive, or his alleged murder; instead it shows a masked militant standing next to what he claims to be Kassig's head, blaming both Barack Obama and Kassig's own service as an Army Ranger for the brutality inflicted upon western hostages. From the Associated Press:
"We say to you, Obama: ... You claim to have withdrawn from Iraq four years ago," the militant said. "Here you are: You have not withdrawn. Rather, you hid some of your forces behind your proxies." A U.S.-led coalition is targeting the Islamic State group in airstrikes, supporting Western-backed Syrian rebels, Kurdish fighters and the Iraqi military. The militant's voice is distorted in the video. Previous videos featured a militant with a British accent that the FBI says it has identified, though it hasn't named him publicly. Later, the militant claims Kassig, 26, was killed because he "fought against the Muslims in Iraq while serving as a soldier." Kassig, from Indianapolis, Indiana, served in the U.S. Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, a special operations unit, and deployed to Iraq in 2007.
The fact that Kassig does not appear alive in the video has many wondering whether or not he refused to deliver ISIS' message to the west firsthand. (In previous videos released by the militant group, hostages were forced to recite a prepared statement before their executions.) According to Fox, this video is longer than those previously released, and shows multiple hostages being executed. U.S. officials are working to verify the authenticity of the video. ISIS released this video just as President Obama left for the G-20 summit in Brisbane, which means they're hoping that their actions will derail discussions on climate change, the conflict in Ukraine, and other issues. I don't believe that ISIS is terribly concerned with whether or not the world condones their violent takeover of territory in Iraq and Syria, but I do believe that part of their strategy in the timing of this release could relate to their need to maintain a steady stream of funding from the west.

Posted by Amy Miller on November 15, 2014 4 Comments
Reports have surfaced that "Jihadi John," the masked Brit responsible for the beheadings of four western hostages, was injured last Saturday's airstrikes near the Iraqi-Syrian border. Via the Daily Mail:
‘We are aware of reports that this individual [Jihadi John] has been injured, and we are looking into them,’ a Foreign Office spokesman told The Mail on Sunday. This newspaper has received an independent account of how Jihadi John was injured and rushed to hospital after a devastating air strike in Al Qaim, in Anbar Province, Western Iraq. The Foreign Office spokesman added: ‘We have a number of sources of information coming in. ‘The incident occurred last weekend, and so we have received the reports in the last few days. We don’t have any representation inside Syria, and so it is difficult to confirm these reports.’ The Foreign Office also issued an official statement saying: ‘We are aware of reports. We cannot confirm these reports.’ A spokesman for US Central Command said they were unable to confirm the details for security reasons. The joint US-Iraqi mission left at least ten IS commanders dead, and around 40 injured. Those reportedly hurt included IS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
The Mail provides a great infographic detailing the fractured timeline as we have it so far: 1416081735658_wps_43_BANNER_jpg

Posted by Amy Miller on November 08, 2014 7 Comments
Congress is gearing up for the next big budget battle, and the Administration's latest funding request could stir tensions between the midterm election's winners and losers. This week President Obama approved deployment of an additional 1,500 U.S. soldiers to help train Iraqi and Kurdish forces in their battle against ISIS. The additional forces and support activities will tack on an additional $5.6 billion to the budget, but defense officials argue that continuing success in the region means putting more resources to the task:
Lately, with the aid of the U.S. strikes, the Islamic State has suffered a number of losses in Iraq, where it is fighting government forces, peshmerga and Shiite militias aided by Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah group. Last week, Iraqi forces recaptured the town of Jurf al-Sakher. ISIS also lost Rabia, Mahmoudiyah and Zumar, a string of towns near the Syrian border, last month. Besieged Iraqi troops have also managed to maintain control of Iraq's largest oil refinery outside the town of Beiji north of Baghdad, despite numerous attempts by the Islamic State group to capture it. At the same time, some have warned the U.S. operation is insufficient. In particular, there have been calls to send troops to the western Anbar province, where extremists have been slaughtering men, women and children. A senior military official said one of the operations centers being set up by the U.S. will be in Anbar Province, and that it is likely that the bulk of the additional troops will be in Iraq by the end of the year. ... The money will also go toward “replenishing or replacing munitions expended while conducting air strikes against ISIL, including from Air force and Navy platforms” as well as “financing operations and maintenance costs for air, ground and naval operations, including: flying hours; ship steaming days; and fuel, supplies and repair parts,” according to the White House.
The elephant in the room, of course, is this past week's elections, which many believe served as a mandate against President Obama's policies at home and abroad. The media has already begun to hint at trouble brewing for this new mission and its funding.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 24, 2014 7 Comments
We've discussed previously the vast sources of funding that ISIS controls. Whether those funds come from their control (and smuggling) the region's oil supply, or from the home governments and families of hostages, the steady stream of cash flowing into ISIS coffers enables its members to step out of the shadows and fight not only for territory, but for the hearts and minds of the people they threaten to savage. From Yahoo News:
“With the important exception of some state-sponsored terrorist organizations, ISIL is probably the best-funded terrorist organization we have confronted,” Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen said on Thursday in a speech to a Washington,D.C., think tank. At a subsequent briefing at the White House, Cohen declined to provide an estimate of the group’s net worth today. From mid-June until President Barack Obama unleashed airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against it, the Islamist organization scored $1 million per day from smuggled oil, Cohen said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He declined to say how much the airstrikes, which began on Sept. 23, have sliced into the group’s oil revenue.
Their sources of funding go beyond what we've seen highlighted in the news. In addition to oil smuggling and kidnapping, ISIS enjoys healthy profits from local extortion schemes, the plundering of antiquities, and sex trafficking. A report from the American Foreign Press details how ISIS makes these schemes work: through use of legitimate, existing economic structures. For example, their oil smuggling scheme is so intricate that at one point, Syria was buying its own oil; the oil had been harvested on Syrian territory controlled by ISIS.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 17, 2014 3 Comments
The U.S. Military is on a mission to manage expectations regarding the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of U.S. military operations against Islamic State, gave an update at the Pentagon about the military campaign in Iraq, and emphasized that while U.S. forces have made gains against Islamic State militants, we still have a long way to go. From AP's Big Story:
Army Gen. Lloyd Austin said he believes the Iraqi government will successfully enlist the support of Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province to turn the tide in that important region, where the militants have made recent gains. And he said he sees no imminent threat to the international airport west of Baghdad, where U.S. Apache helicopters are monitoring IS efforts to make inroads on the capital. "The campaign to destroy ISIL will take time and there will be occasional setbacks along the way," Austin told a Pentagon news conference, using another acronym for the Islamic State group, "and particularly in these early stages of the campaign as we coach and mentor a force that is actively working to regenerate capability after years of neglect and poor leadership."
I recently wrote a rather frustrated article about the actions of the Obama administration in conjunction with our mission in northern Iraq; the optics surrounding this administration are embarrassing on an international level, which is why I believe that it's a smart move for the military to temper expectations while emphasizing plans and progress.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 13, 2014 3 Comments
I was in high school when U.S. troops laid siege to Baghdad. My boyfriend at the time helped secure and eventually occupy several of the palaces, and his phone calls from the first warzone either of us had ever known helped me gain a deeper understanding into what it means to send our troops in to "take" a city. So you'll understand when I say that I find the recent developments in northern Iraq and Baghdad a little difficult to swallow. Today's report from Bloomberg details how ISIS militants are using their own unique tactics to push back against U.S. airstrikes in northern Iraq:
Islamic State claimed responsibility for a triple suicide bombing in northern Iraq that killed at least 58 people as militants defied U.S.-led airstrikes to stage attacks across Iraq and Syria. The group said on a jihadist website that three foreign fighters carried out the attacks yesterday in Qara Tappah in the ethnically mixed province of Diyala, 75 miles north of Baghdad. A roadside bomb also killed the police chief of the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, where security forces are struggling to repel militant attacks. Islamic State has so far resisted efforts by the Iraqi military to wrest back control of Sunni areas of the country, while continuing its own offensive in Iraq and neighboring Syria. President Barack Obama’s senior military adviser warned that militants were blending with Sunni populations in communities near Baghdad, increasing the likelihood of attacks on the Iraqi capital. “I have no doubt there will be days when they use indirect fire into Baghdad,” the adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey, said in an interview yesterday with “This Week” on ABC. Indirect fire can refer to use of mortars or artillery fire.

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 09, 2014 15 Comments
Plenty of conservatives have faulted President Obama for his handling of ISIS but now even President Jimmy Carter is jumping on board. Jonathan Topaz of Politico reported:
Jimmy Carter: President Obama blew it on ISIL Former President Jimmy Carter is criticizing President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, saying he has shifting policies and waited too long to take action against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In an interviewed published Tuesday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the 39th president said the Obama administration, by not acting sooner, allowed ISIL to build up its strength. “[W]e waited too long. We let the Islamic State build up its money, capability and strength and weapons while it was still in Syria,” he said, using an alternate name for the terrorist group. “Then when [ISIL] moved into Iraq, the Sunni Muslims didn’t object to their being there and about a third of the territory in Iraq was abandoned.”
Politico is referencing this article by Jim Jones:
Carter unhappy with Obama’s policies in Middle East Former President Jimmy Carter put down his hammer at a Meadowbrook Habitat for Humanity project Tuesday for a wide-ranging interview that touched on subjects such as the Obama administration’s use of drones, women’s rights and faith.

Posted by Amy Miller on October 08, 2014 19 Comments
Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's new book, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace, was released yesterday, and what it reveals has the media gaping---Democrats scrambling for a distraction. Panetta's memoir focuses on several aspects of Obama's foreign policy, but the section that's causing the most chatter highlights the complete lack of leadership shown after the attack on our embassy in Benghazi:
On the deadly 2012 siege of the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, Panetta said the administration had no indication of an attack coinciding with the Sept. 11 anniversary. U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the violence. Panetta, who also served as director of the CIA, said he questioned "from the beginning" the CIA's initial assessment that the attack was the work of a mob of protesters rather than an organized assault. "It seemed to me that most spontaneous demonstrators don't arrive for a protest carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers," he said. But Panetta defended the intelligence agency, saying such work is difficult and often contradictory. "It was not clear at the time that there were two separate incidents, separated by distance and by several hours," he said.
"I didn't have any specific information, but the fact was, when you bring grenade launchers to a demonstration, there's something else going and. And I just---from the very beginning sensed that this was an attack...that this was a terrorist attack on our compound."

Posted by Mike LaChance on September 30, 2014 8 Comments
Do we really need to invent new terror groups to justify America's actions in the Middle East? Is the Obama administration so reluctant to admit that al-Qaeda still exists? If you ask Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review, the answer to both of those questions is yes:
The Khorosan Group Does Not Exist We’re being had. Again. For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name. Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade. Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group. The who? There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize. You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it. The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda.
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. As we all know, the Obama administration loves to fuss with nomenclature.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 28, 2014 13 Comments
Someone who will be mortified that I am citing him asks this question:
DID ALTON NOLEN JUST WIN THE SENATE FOR THE GOP?
Good question, though I don't think the answer is correct:
.... So if what we're reading is accurate, I'd say the narrative is this: man with a rap sheet converts to Islam in prison -- where Islamic identity is, to some extent, like gang membership (as is white supremacism). He's not the most stable person and Internet calls to violence speak to him. But it's hard to know whether something else would have made him snap sooner or later.... However, the right is going to tell us between now and November that eight-year-old Central Americans surrendering to the Border Patrol equal a beheading by a guy born in Oklahoma who never got closer to a Middle Eastern battlefield than a high-speed Internet connection could take him -- and America, I fear, will believe them. Will the GOP win all the close Senate races as a result? If so, I won't be surprised.
I don't think the Oklahoma beheading in itself will have any impact on the elections. With multiple ISIS beheadings of Americans all over the news, and with tales of ethnic and religious cleansing, torture and rape on a massive scale common knowledge, the beheading factor already is baked into the electoral cake. Obama's policy towards radical Islam and foreign policy generally has failed. The Middle East is as big a mess as it has been in several decades, maybe ever. Our President just went to the U.N. and equated a disputed shooting in Ferguson, MO, with ISIS mass terror.  That's the problem. The problem is not the Oklahoma beheading, it's an out of touch President, a polarizing Attorney General who finally is resigning, and an administration which picks and chooses its outrage in divisive ways:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on September 27, 2014 7 Comments
A Muslim civil rights lawyer and mother of three was found guilty of apostasy by an ISIS-founded sharia court in Mosul. Her offense? She posted a blog post to Facebook that was critical of ISIS' destruction of places of worship. She was then tortured for days and suffered a public executed by masked firing squad. According to Newser:
The UN Assistance Mission in Iraq says Samira Salih al-Nuaimi was seized from her home on Sept. 17 after allegedly posting messages on Facebook that were critical of the militants' destruction of places of worship in Mosul. According to the UN mission, al-Nuaimi was tried in a so-called "Sharia court" for apostasy, after which she was tortured for five days before the militants sentenced her to "public execution." She was killed on Monday, the UN mission said. Her Facebook page appears to have been removed since her death. "By torturing and executing a female human rights' lawyer and activist, defending in particular the civil and human rights of her fellow citizens in Mosul, [ISIS] continues to attest to its infamous nature, combining hatred, nihilism, and savagery, as well as its total disregard of human decency," Nickolay Mladenov, the UN envoy to Iraq, said in a statement. 
An AP wire story posted on Women of Grace has more details:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 26, 2014 52 Comments
A woman was beheaded by a fired co-worker, who recently had been trying to convert co-workers to Islam. Because the ISIS beheadings are so much in the news, one has to wonder if the perp was motivated by those beheadings, as opposed to "going postal" and using a firearm or just stabbing people. From USA Today:
A newly fired employee at a food processing plant in Moore, Okla., allegedly stabbed and beheaded a 54-year-old front office worker, police said Friday, according to local media. Police said the FBI was asked for assistance in the case because of the "manner of death" of the victim and reports from co-workers that the suspect, 30-year-old Alton Nolen, had recently started trying to convert several employees to Islam. Nolen had just been fired from Vaughan Foods on Thursday afternoon when he drove to the front of the building, hit another vehicle and walked inside, according to police, KFOR-TV reports. "Nolen encountered (fellow worker Colleen) Hufford with a knife," said Sgt. Jeremy Lewis with the Moore Police Department. "During the attack, Nolen severed the victims head."
Local television reports:

Posted by New Neo on September 24, 2014 20 Comments
The NY Times made a rather large error the other day, and then issued a correction:
"...[Our article] gave an incorrect comparison between efforts by the president to seek allies' support for this plans and President George W. Bush's efforts on such backing for the Iraq War. The approach Mr. Obama is taking is similar to the one Mr. Bush took; it is not the case that "Unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners."
Hot Air points out that the Times is hardly alone in its egregious error (or was it a purposeful falsehood, otherwise known as a lie?) What's more, what took the Times ten days to figure it out, when the Times own contemporaneous coverage of the Iraq War easily refuted it? It's the old "fool or knave" question again. You might ask why we should care anymore, and I have to admit I care a lot less than I once did, because I have grown accustomed to the MSM's tendency toward stupidity/ignorance, reckless disregard for the truth, propensity to lie, blatant bias, and intense and shameless arrogance. But the process by which the Times and the rest of the MSM forms the opinions of the public (and it still is highly influential in doing so) remains a huge problem.

Posted by Amy Miller on September 23, 2014 10 Comments
President Obama has come under fire not only from voters but from Congressmen and members of the media over his strategy---or lack thereof---to roll back ISIS in the Middle East. The U.S. has already escalated involvement in the region by initiating air strikes as part of a joint U.S.-Arab offensive against ISIS strongholds:
The U.S. and five Arab nations attacked the Islamic State group's headquarters in eastern Syria in nighttime raids Monday using land- and sea-based U.S. aircraft as well as Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from two Navy ships in the Red Sea and the northern Persian Gulf. American warplanes also carried out eight airstrikes to disrupt what the military described as "imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests" by a network of al-Qaida veterans "with significant explosives skills," said Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
If what Dempsey says is true (and as blunt as he has been in his testimony and media hits, I tend to trust the veracity of what he's saying,) these missions are a necessary part of protecting American interests both in the Middle East and on U.S. soil. What isn't clear yet is how far Barack Obama will take these missions; he's declared time and again that he won't put boots back on the ground, but military officials and analysts are already asking questions about the possibility of doing so if airstrikes aren't sufficient to eradicate the ISIS network. One theory that pundits and academics are floating is troubling, but what's more troubling than the theory itself is its plausibility. Brit Hume laid it out on Monday's edition of Special Report with Bret Baier:

Posted by Amy Miller on September 22, 2014 1 Comment
After years of political opposition, conflict, and even comparisons to our infamous involvement in Vietnam and southeast Asia, lawmakers---especially those up for re-election this year---are hesitant to send another round of money and troops into Iraq. Last week, Congress approved the funding required to arm and train Syrian rebels opposed to ISIS as part of a continuing resolution to fund the government through mid-December. When the CR expires, so will the funding for Syria, and top leaders in Congress are questioning President Obama's long term strategy for the Middle East. Via the AP:
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., haven't said whether they'll take up a broader authorization. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who hopes to replace Reid as the Senate majority leader, also isn't committing to such a process; he was a major force in ensuring the training element of Obama's plan be kept on a short leash. "I lean toward giving the president more latitude, and some of my colleagues want to be more restrictive," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a leading proponent of even more forceful military action, said. "I don't know if we'll work out those differences or not." Still, McCain faulted the Obama administration for not explicitly asking for Congress' blessing on the larger war strategy. "This is going to be an extended conflict, and they're going to need an authorization," he said. "And they're being very short-sighted by not asking for it.
On the other end of the spectrum from Senator McCain is Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who voted "no" on the funding for training and arms for Syrian rebels:
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