Islamic State

The PKK is not affiliated with the Kurdistan Regional Government or the Peshmerga. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK (Kurdish: Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê‎) is a far left-wing guerilla organization that operates in the mountainous border regions of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

The combat between the PKK and Turkish army within this video demonstrates one of many longstanding conflicts in volatile proximity of the fight against, Daesh, or the Islamic State, as well as the Syrian Civil War.

Yesterday, a Muslim man, identified as Dahir Adan, dressed in a security guard uniform stabbed nine people at a mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota.  He reportedly praised Allah and asked one of the injured if they were Muslim before he stabbed them. An off-duty police officer was able to shoot and kill Adan before he could […]

ISIL fighters shot down a Syrian military plane in the eastern Syrian city of Deir Az Zor, the group’s Amaq news agency reported on Sunday. “A Syrian warplane belonging to the Syrian regime was brought down when targeted by fighters from the Islamic State in the city of Deir al-Zor,” Amaq said in an online […]

U.S. Special Operation Forces are helping the Syrian Kurdish police known as Asayish in their task to provide security to the newly liberated town of Manbij.

Why is this important? The intelligence community deals with such a large amount of data, you can’t always assume people who have the “need to know,” and who should have access to the data, have seen all of the available information on any topic. The challenge of the intelligence professional is to rapidly sort through all of the data in order to develop usable intelligence analysis, enabling decision makers and warfighters to make informed decisions. Depending on the scenario, these decisions sometimes have to be made within minutes. Sometimes seconds.

Think of someone shoving you into a room filled with thousands of puzzle pieces, and then telling you to put it together in a few hours.

The U.S. military is in principle all about metrics and assessments. Here at West Point, we have binders full of metrics on every cadet, from their physical training prowess to their math scores. Yet strangely in Iraq and Afghanistan we lack basic feedback mechanisms to determine whether our spending has the desired effect on the ground.

As an evidence-based approach to stability and reconstruction operations, tactical economics seeks to measure the impact of economic programs, in a manner similar to the “impact evaluations” that the international development community began employing over the past decade. If a program is not producing results, rapid assessment of the data can allow the resources to be conserved so military units can try a different approach.

The Ranger training program, led by Company A, 1-502nd, is one of the multiple building partner capacity missions the around 1,800 member strong task force leads in Iraq.

“This program is important because it lays the foundation for an elite Iraqi unit,” said Capt. Peter Jacob, commander of Company A. “Students start at day one as an individual and come away at the end of this course as part of a team.”

“Every day, the intelligence services, the police, gendarmes, are foiling attacks, unraveling Iraqi-Syrian networks. The threat today is maximum and we are a target, everyone understands that.”

Valls said 700 French jihadis were believed to be fighting with Islamic State in Syria, among them more than 200 women. French intelligence services were watching 15,000 people suspected of being radicalized.

Three Americans volunteered for combat alongside Kurdish militia; repatriation was a complicated affair.
Americans don’t need a visa to enter Iraqi Kurdistan, but their passports are stamped there before they are driven into Syria through YPG-controlled border checkpoints. The volunteers don’t get Syrian government visas.

When fighters die in Syria, getting them home is a far more complex affair, and an expensive one. Representatives of the Rojava government paid $43,600 dollars for the cost to return the remains of all three men this time, according to Lucy Usoyan, a Washington-based representative of a Kurdish group that helped organize the return.

Three Syrian men believed to have been sent to Germany last year by the Islamic State group as a possible “sleeper cell” were arrested in raids on Tuesday, part of efforts to root out extremists sent to Europe amid the migrant influx, authorities said. The three are accused of coming to Germany in mid-November at […]

Yesterday, a statement from Peter Cook, the Pentagon’s Press Secretary, confirmed that the US airstrike on August 30th targeting Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani, one of the Islamic State’s senior leaders was successful. Al- Adnani was responsible not only for a large part of Islamic State’s propaganda but he also recruited and facilitated most of their foreign terrorist operations. The Department of […]

“If you have [the Islamic State’s] No. 3 in the crosshairs and he’s using human shields, would we be able to strike him or not?” the officer asked. “This is an important debate. But are we fighting a war or are we not? They are clearly waging a war against us. Are we waging a war, or are we conducting a police action?
“How do you ‘advise and assist’ someone when you are not allowed to go into combat with them?” the officer added.