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You know what all this reminds me of
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more great news.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have dramatically ramped up their warnings about the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), concluding that the well-armed group is expanding its ambitions outside the Middle East and may be planning terror attacks against western Europe — and even the U.S. homeland.
ISIL's conquest of vast swaths of Iraqi territory this spring and summer netted it a “significant” arsenal of U.S. weapons from two Iraqi military bases, including hundreds of tanks, heavily armored Humvees, assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, officials say. One U.S official tells Yahoo News ISIL is now considered “the most potent military force” of any terrorist group in the world.
Led by its charismatic chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the radical Islamist group is looking beyond its short-term goal of overthrowing the Iraqi and Syrian governments and replacing them with a self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate. “We’re seeing an expansion of its external terrorist ambitions,” one U.S. counterterrorism official said in a briefing for reporters Thursday. “As its capabilities grow, it has attracted thousands of foreign extremists — some of whom are going home to start cells. As it carves out territory [in Iraq], it wants to go beyond that and do attacks outside. ” U.S. counterterrorism agencies had put the number of ISIL fighters at about 10,000, but that figure is now being reassessed and is likely to be raised, officials say.
Just four years ago the group, then calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, was scattered and on the run from American forces, aided by Sunni tribes horrified by the group’s often grotesque violence. Its reign has been marked by summary executions, ritual stonings, beheadings and even crucifixions.
What fueled its resurgence? Officials say the group fed off Sunni resentment over the Shia-dominated government of Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who announced his resignation Thursday night. It took advantage of the power vacuum in northern Iraq to seize large chunks of essentially ungoverned territory. It saw an opportunity in recruiting prisoners; in July 2013, its suicide bombers blew their way into the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, freeing up to 500 inmates, including al-Qaida leaders.
These demonstrable successes gave the group new credibility among jihadis around the world, especially after it joined the civil war in Syria and changed its name to ISIL. (It has at times also been known as ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.) It has since changed its name again to the Islamic State after proclaiming itself a caliphate, the latest in a succession of Muslim empires dating back to the seventh century. Its ranks were soon swelled by foreigners, including hundreds of followers of the red-bearded Chechen militant Omar al-Shishani, a former Georgian army sergeant known for his deep hatred of America.
Concerns about terrorism spilling over from Syria and Iraq hit home in June when French police arrested an "armed jihadi" who had just returned from Syria in connection with the May 24 killing of four people — including two Israeli tourists — at a Jewish Center in Brussels.
Since then, authorities in Europe have broken up terror cells linked to ISIL, including one in Kosovo where officials this week arrested 40 suspects who had returned from Iraq and Syria—including some who had fought with ISIL — and seized weapons and explosives in dozens of locations.
ISIL and its followers have also proven adept at using social media, making a steady barrage of threats against the West, including the United States.
“Probably most striking are the threats on Twitter,” said a U.S. official who monitors the postings. “We’ve seen tens of thousands of postings by ten of thousands of people supporting ISIL, making threats to blow up U.S. Embassies." One posting showed an ISIL banner apparently superimposed on an image of the White House.
It is still unclear how real those threats are, at least while ISIL is focused on its war with the Iraqi government. And the resignation of the deeply unpopular Maliki could allow for more U.S.-Iraqi cooperation in the fight against the insurgents.
But increasingly, officials say, ISIL has the perception of momentum. For the first time there are signs that some jihadis linked to al-Qaida are expressing sympathy, if not allegiance, to ISIL — despite al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri’s disavowal of the group.
One thing ISIL does not lack is funds. The group has seized banks, accumulating vast amounts of cash and raking in more by selling oil and other commodities to smugglers. ISIL “is flush with cash. It has plenty of money. They control oil fields, they have refiners. They have hundreds of millions of dollars,” said one U.S. analyst at the Thursday briefing.
And it is exceptionally well armed. When ISIL forces assaulted two Iraqi military bases, Camp Speicher and Rasheed Air Base, in July, they got the keys to the kingdom — hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of American tanks, armored personal carriers, howitzers and other equipment. ISIL fighters have posed for videos brandishing MANPADS, shoulder-launched surface to air missiles that can shoot down low-flying aircraft.
“They’ve got enough supplies, equipment and ammunition to last them five years,” said John Maguire, a former top CIA officer in Iraq who retains close ties to the Kurdish regional government. Thanks in part to assistance from former Iraqi military officers who have defected to ISIL, “they know how to operate American equipment.”
What they also have, at least for the moment, is a de facto safe haven. Al-Baghdadi — who officials say sees himself as the true successor to Osama bin Laden — is believed to be constantly on the move. But ISIL appears to have established a headquarters in Raqqa in northern Syria, where the group’s black banners reportedly fly over administrative buildings.
Given that President Obama has placed sharp limits on U.S. airstrikes and confined them to Iraq, that effectively makes Baghdadi and his top deputies — almost all of whom were once in U.S. custody — off-limits to U.S. military action. The Raqqa safe haven “is a problem,” acknowledged one U.S. official.
The bottom line, U.S. counterterrorism officials say, is that new strategies are urgently needed to counter the surging ISIL threat. In the briefing for reporters Thursday, one senior official made the point in the most understated way possible: “We don’t assess at the moment this [the threat from ISIL] is something that will collapse on its own.”Comment
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"Self-government won't work without self-discipline." - Paul HarveyComment
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Nice find.Originally posted by GhostTX View Post
And this just in... http://rt.com/usa/180660-secret-service-isis-flag/Last edited by BoostedD1; 08-15-2014, 01:20 PM.Comment
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One of the earliest major setbacks in the war against ISIS came last June when the U.S.-backed Iraqi army was routed by Islamic militants in the northern Iraq city of Mosul. Government forces retreated from the Islamic jihadists’ assault. They left behind a trove of costly military hardware, including U.S.-made armored Humvees, trucks, rockets, machine guns and even a helicopter.
Last weekend, the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, gave Iraqi state television the first detailed accounting of those lost weapons. Some were old or barely functioning, but others were in good shape and of great value to the ISIS militants.
According to Reuters, the U.S.-made weaponry that fell into enemy hands including 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles, at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems, plus small arms and ammunition.
Although al-Abadi and other Iraqi and U.S. officials haven’t attached a dollar sign to the lost weaponry and vehicles, a back-of-the-envelope calculation of those losses might look something like this:
2,300 Humvee armored vehicles @ $70,000 per copy. Total: $161 million
40 M1A1 Abram tanks @ $4.3 million per copy. Total: $172 million
52 M198 Howitzer mobile gun systems @ $527,337 per copy. Total: $27.4 million
74,000 Army machine guns @ $4,000 per copy. Total: $296 million
The grand total comes to $656.4 million, but experts say those losses represent just a portion of the many hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-supplied military equipment that has fallen into ISIS’s hands and is being used against the U.S. and allied forces on the ground in Iraq and neighboring Syria.
ISIS added to its armada of captured U.S. military vehicles and tanks when Iraqi Security Forces fled the provincial capital of Ramadi late last month and left behind their equipment, according to Military.com. A Pentagon spokesman said that some artillery pieces had been left behind, but he could not say exactly how many. He said about 100 wheeled vehicles and dozens of tracked vehicles were lost to ISIS when the last remaining Iraqi defenders abandoned the city, which is 60 miles west of Baghdad.
With hundreds of millions of dollars that they stole from banks and businesses, and profits from the black market sale of oil, ISIS has amassed a huge arsenal of weaponry, including heavy armored vehicles and artillery during its two-year offensive in Syria and Iraq. According to the International Business Times, the armaments “are predominantly a mix of veteran Soviet tanks, large, advanced U.S.-made systems, and black market arms.”
James Carafano, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, warned last year that ISIS had assembled an extraordinarily formidable fighting force that would be difficult to take down. ““The problem [for the U.S. and its allies] is that ISIS is armed as well if not better than the other people they are fighting right now,” he said at the time.
Add to that the many hundreds of U.S.-manufactured weapons and vehicles left behind by Iraqi troops on the battle field, and ISIS apparently doesn’t have to worry about running short on weapons and ammunition
Gordon Adams, a military expert at American University, said on Wednesday that while gauging the extent of military equipment losses to ISIS is a risky game, “There is a fair amount of evidence that ISIS is walking off with not only tons of our equipment but a fair amount of the Syrian government’s equipment as well.”
Whatever the numbers, Adams added, it’s an unusual and troubling phenomenon that “we’re helping to arm our enemy.”
Others offer varying guestimates of the extent of the losses of U.S.-made military equipment and weapons to ISIS. “If you say they have captured the equivalent of at least three to four [Iraqi Army] divisions’ worth of equipment, much of it American-supplied, you would be very safe,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
While President Obama has vowed to “degrade and eventually destroy” the ISIS forces, recent setbacks in Ramadi and elsewhere have signaled that the war is not going well for the United States and its nearly two-dozen allies. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter recently publicly berated Iraqi troops for lacking the “will to fight” ISIS and for retreating from a showdown in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. Then last Sunday, CIA Director John Brennan offered at best a perfunctory defense of the president’s air-strike strategy on CBS’s Face the Nation.
In order to help replenish Iraq’s depleted military arms and equipment, the State Department last year approved a sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees, along with armor upgrades, machine guns and grenade launchers, according to Peter Van Buren of Reuters. The U.S. previously donated 250 Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carriers to Iraq, as well as huge amounts of material left behind when American combat forces departed Iraq in 2011.
Moreover, the U.S. is shipping to Iraq 175 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 55,000 rounds of tank-gun ammunition, $600 million in howitzers and trucks, $700 million worth of Hellfire missiles and 2,000 AT-4 rockets, according to Reuters.
Michael Knights, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an authority on the Iraq war, cautioned yesterday that too much is being made of the loss of U.S.-made military equipment to ISIS. “A lot of that equipment was not operational when it was lost,” he said in an interview. “A lot of it was burned by ISIS. A lot of it has been subsequently destroyed by the coalition, and a lot of it has been used as suicide vehicles by ISIS.”
“This is a no-kidding war,” Knights said, “and in serious wars you lose thousands of vehicles and you lose hundreds of artillery pieces, and the enemy captures it and use it against you.”Comment
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Holy crap...Comment
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Your tax dollars at work...Comment
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Holy fucking shitballs."It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."Comment
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M1A1s?!?! #$@~"Self-government won't work without self-discipline." - Paul HarveyComment
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Forty m1s. What a catastropheDE OPPRESSO LIBER
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If they can operate all that AND have adequate ammo, Iraqi forces won't beat them.Comment
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With all of the money thay have, ammo can be obtained."It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."Comment
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Post #17 ftwComment
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What in the actual fuck? Why was a call for immediate destruction not placed the moment they found out.
Somewhere, former soviets are laughing at us because we learned nothing from their Afghanistan exercise in the 80s.Comment
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