Tag: ISIS

“It’s like after the Afghanistan war in the 1980s,” said Neumann, citing the period after Soviet troops withdrew in 1989 and legions of foreign fighters formed a diaspora of radicalized veterans that subsequently fueled the rise of al-Qaeda. “They’ll be asking themselves, ‘What’s next?’ “

It’s not a matter of the Taliban learning their lesson. The Taliban has changed and the same original fighters do not comprise the bulk of the force. This is a question of what do they have to lose? Do they want revenge?

The Kurds should not be treated only as the brave allies to be thrown to the battle against ISIS, but also as the political allies, whose national demands should be part of any fundamental solution to the problems of Iraq and Syria.

Will all this, or even part of it, happen in the near future? Not really, and if that is the case, even the death of ‘’the Kurdish Angelina Jolie’’ will not lead to any salvation to the real Kurds. They will continue to fight, and continue to be betrayed.

It’s an open secret that the Rebels receive Toyota trucks. It’s en vogue to blame the U.S. and other Western forces for training the would-be terrorist groups. This gives extremely high praise to the training and the resources they receive. Why would any force knowingly train a force to be very effective against their interests?

In Middle Eastern wars, there is no single building to plant a flag on that would make the enemy surrender unconditionally.

Amidst the chaos of the Syrian Civil War, elements affiliated with the Free Syrian Army strike a Russian Gazelle helicopter with a TOW missile in Hama, Syria.

He equated our backing of both the rebels and the Kurds as a major contributor to the “mess.” But we all know it goes deeper, further back and is more complex than that.

The U.S.-led war on Islamic State has depleted the group’s funds, leadership and foreign fighters, but the biggest battle yet is expected later this year in Iraq’s northern city of Mosul, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his “caliphate” two years ago. The jihadist insurgents have lost more than half the territory they seized in Iraq […]

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton slammed each other over the Iraq War and the fight against ISIS at a national security forum Wednesday, with the Republican nominee also appearing willing to allow undocumented immigrants wishing to serve in the military to remain in the U.S. Though Trump and Clinton did not appear onstage together at […]

Brennan said that compared to al Qaeda, Daesh is a lot less “deliberate” in its planning and more “free-wheeling,” willing to carry out attacks on shorter notice.
“You look at 9/11 and other major attacks, and it was very deliberate, methodical, a lot of planning went into it. I think ISIL tries to move from idea to bang within months or within weeks,” Brennan said, using the administration’s preferred acronym for Daesh .

A black flag whips in the early-morning breeze. Planted in the middle of a rocky hill a few hundred yards south of the mud-walled compound where the Afghan commandos have taken shelter, the flag’s message is clear: ISIS is here, waiting. The mission of the commandos of Afghanistan’s First Platoon, First Special Operations Battalion is […]

The Islamic State claims to have executed 729 “martyrdom operations” in Iraq, Syria and Libya during the first eight months of 2016. The figure comes from monthly data published by Amaq News Agency, a propaganda arm of the so-called “caliphate” that releases infographics summarizing the group’s suicide attacks. Amaq’s most recent infographic was released on […]