Baghdad Falling

[ELVIS]

http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/fb1DYIg88bya5ITfeK.eLQ--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTQyMTtweG9mZj01MDtweW 9mZj0wO3E9NzU7dz03NDk-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ap_webfeeds/669c729ad3c1c916560f6a7067005231.jpg




:mad2:

[ELVIS]

The group so extreme it got booted from al Qaeda controls huge swaths of territory. And now ISIS has got the heavy weaponry to back it up.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/12/article-2655977-1EB3EDBF00000578-813_964x557.jpg

With the fall of Mosul on Tuesday, Iraq’s al Qaeda offshoot has not only seized the country’s second-largest city, it appears it also has come into possession of the heavy weapons and vehicles the U.S. military had provided Iraq’s military to fight them.

That’s terrible news for America’s few allies left in Iraq as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) morph from terrorist menace to a military force capable of over-running an army the U.S. military trained for nearly a decade. It also calls into question the American government’s decision to withdraw the last of its forces from Iraq in 2011. Three years later that withdrawal now appears premature.

ISIS themselves appear to be pleased with the booty of the Mosul campaign. On Twitter the group posted a photo of a beaming Umar al-Shishani, a senior ISIS commander, examining a captured American-made Humvee, which had already been driven from the Iraqi city to the eastern Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor. “Umar al-Shishani inspects spoils of war…Looks quite pleased,” the tweet said.

General Najim al-Jabouri, a former mayor of Tel Afar, which is a little more than 31 miles from Mosul, told The Daily Beast the bases seized by ISIS this week would provide the group with even more heavy weapons than they currently control. “The Iraqi army left helicopters, humvees, cargo planes and other heavy machine guns, along with body armor and uniforms,” the general, who is now a scholar at the National Defense University, said. He said he was able to learn about the equipment from soldiers and other politicians in and around Mosul with whom he keeps in touch.

General Najim is not alone in this assessment. Jack Keane, a retired four-star Army general who was a key adviser to General David Petraeus during the counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 known as the surge, said ISIS has now established itself as a formidable military force.

“This organization has grown into a military organization that is no longer conducting terrorist activities exclusively but is conducting conventional military operations,” he said. “They are attacking Iraqi military positions with company- and battalion-size formations. And in the face of that the Iraqi security forces have not been able to stand up to it.”“We in Anbar want U.S. air and military support because what happened in Mosul could happen in Anbar and we want to prevent it.”


There were signs this was coming. Sheik Jassim Muhammad Suwaydawi, one of the remaining pro-American tribal leaders in western Iraq, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that his forces have fought ISIS companies that drove tanks in western Iraq. “ISIS is using heavy weapons, in some cases even tanks because of the weakness of the Iraqi Army.”

It was not supposed to be this way. Back in 2008, U.S. counter-insurgency commanders touted the Iraqi city of Mosul, 200 miles northwest of Baghdad, as a model success in the American “troop surge” that helped contain the Sunni-Shia civil war. But today Mosul became the de facto capital of a jihadist newcomer that is not only crumbling the authority of the Iraqi government but also overshadowing al Qaeda.

The siege of Mosul by ISIS, who overran the northern city on Tuesday after Iraqi forces fled posts and government buildings, also amounts to a severe blow to the government of Nouri al-Maliki. The Iraqi government has floundered in its efforts to stop the country from sliding back into a vicious spiral of bloodshed that claimed more than 8,800 lives last year alone.

Following the loss of his country’s second-largest city, the hard-pressed Iraqi prime minister is now turning to the U.S. for more assistance, reportedly asking the Obama administration for missiles and artillery—although he has not asked for a return of U.S. troops, a request unlikely to be viewed favorably either in Washington, D.C., or by Maliki’s Shia Muslim supporters.

Sheik Jassim told The Daily Beast. “The situation on the ground has been deteriorating for the last seven months, but in the last couple of days it has significantly gotten worse.” He added, “We in Anbar want U.S. air and military support because what happened in Mosul could happen in Anbar and we want to prevent it.”

The resurrection of ISIS in Iraq began a year ago. Last summer ISIS staged a successful jailbreak at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, freeing many of its leaders. After the jailbreak ISIS not only expanded into neighboring Syria while breaking away from al Qaeda’s central command in Pakistan, the group also took Fallujah, the site of one of the Iraq war’s most infamous battles in 2004.

At this point Iraqi leaders in Baghdad are considering asking the Kurdish militia known as the Peshmerga to intervene in Mosul. A senior official with the Kurdistan Regional Government told The Daily Beast that lower-level Iraqi officials have floated the idea today of Kurdish forces stepping into Mosul, a Sunni Arab majority city that is close to Kurdish territory, to try to restore order. This official said: “We have significant interests and assets in the region,” although he noted that ISIS has not attacked Kurdish targets in western Iraq.

That isn’t the case in Syria, where Syrian Kurds have been locked in a ferocious months-long struggle with ISIS and have been unable to maintain the advances they were managing in the winter.

“The jihadists have mounted several attacks in recent weeks,” Kurdish activist Kovan Direj told The Daily Beast in a phone interview.

The capture of Mosul won’t make life any easier for the Syrian Kurds. It is a further major step in the establishing of ISIS, which is made up at its core of battle-hardened Iraqis but has attracted fighters from across the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe, as the most successful jihadi group in history in terms of strategic territory controlled or land battles won.

ISIS’s rise since its formation in 2010 by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has taken many analysts by surprise: Premature obituaries were written when the jihadi group, which emerged from the Islamist insurgency in Iraq, was disowned this year by al Qaeda’s top leaders, who were furious with its brazen refusal to obey orders to withdraw to Iraq, allowing the compliant Jabhat al-Nusra the unchallenged al Qaeda franchise in Syria.

The Iraqi government is not the only one seemingly unable to halt the expansion of ISIS, which has grabbed a swath of cross-border land stretching from Iraq’s Mosul up through Iraq’s Anbar province and all the way west to the Syrian town of Al Bab on the outskirts of Aleppo.

Since being disavowed in February, ISIS has fiercely competed with al Qaeda to secure the allegiance of affiliates and jihadi groups across the Middle East. And for months jihadi religious scholars have been waging theological debate and lining up behind core al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri or al-Baghdadi in the struggle for jihadi supremacy.

Success breeds success, say analysts. The dramatic seizing of Mosul will only add to ISIS’s luster, helping it to recruit more fighters as it seeks to carve out a “caliphate” across western Iraq and eastern Syria—much as 9/11 was a recruitment driver for al Qaeda. Jihadist social media sites were jubilant Tuesday. “Jihadis are ecstatic with ISIS’s achievement,” say researchers at the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-D.C.-based nonprofit.

Mosul’s capture is being presented by ISIS as a validation of al-Baghdadi’s jihad strategy, one that focuses on controlling territory and proto-state building. Al Qaeda in its videos and websites focuses on global jihad; ISIS in its propaganda celebrates towns captured and land controlled, notes Pieter Nanninga, a Mideast scholar at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.

There are also funding and logistical imperatives for ISIS to pursue the proto-state strategy. The group has been able to fund itself by running extortion rackets in the towns it controls in Iraq and Syria and from oil smuggling—essential revenue streams with al Qaeda dominating funding from jihadist-sympathizers in the Gulf.

With its overrunning of Mosul ISIS has taken a significant step in its carving out of a caliphate that is reshaping both Iraq and Syria.


:elvis:

[ELVIS]

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/12/article-2655977-1EB3BE7D00000578-885_964x640.jpg

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/12/article-2655977-1EADE0A900000578-993_964x654.jpg

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http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/12/article-2655977-1EAB47AC00000578-494_964x496.jpg

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/12/article-2655977-1EB1264400000578-32_964x641.jpg


:elvis:

[FORD]

As much as I hate to credit the rancid son of a bitch for anything, Poppy Bush was right. His idiot Chimp son should have listened to him.

Saddam was a fucking asshole, but he knew what he was doing, keeping the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds from fucking with each other.

I said this back in 2003, and I'll say it again.... it's just like fucking Yugoslavia all over again.... you can't keep these artificially created countries together without an all powerful dictator scaring the shit out of everybody equally.

I don't agree with MBNA Biden all that often, but I know he's on the same page that I am with this one... should have split it up into three different countries and let the BP created false entity pass into the trashbin of history.

[ELVIS]

Wow, FORD said something correct and worth reading...

Do that again in the next 24 hours and you'll be like a clock...;)

[Kristy]

Saddam was a fucking asshole, but he knew what he was doing, keeping the Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds from fucking with each other.

As long they're friendly to Halliburton, America will look the other way.

[FORD]

As long they're friendly to Halliburton, America will look the other way.

Well, there was a partition plan that allowed Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds to each end up with a piece of the oil industry, so they could all make their individual deals with Darth Cheney Inc, if they wanted to.

Of course Halliburton now claims to be a Dubai corporation for tax dodging purposes, so if "corporations are people", wouldn't that make Halliburton Muslim? And wouldn't Allah tell these folks to do business with fellow Muslims?

[ELVIS]

One's geographical location does not dictate their faith...

[FORD]

One's geographical location does not dictate their faith...

.....Says the guy who became a Fundagelical after he moved to the Deep South.

[ELVIS]

That's as stupid as saying the occupants of modern Israel are God's chosen people...

But I'm not surprised by your ignorance...

[ELVIS]

(CNSNews.com) (http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/iraq-s-vulnerable-christians-further-imperiled-jihadist-advance) – The startling gains made by jihadist fighters in Iraq are placing the region’s already extremely vulnerable Christians in even greater peril, Christian advocacy groups are warning.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/11/1/1288635408419/Iraqi-Christians-carry-th-006.jpg

While hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are affected by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s takeover of key cities including the Ninawa (Nineveh) provincial capital, Mosul, minority Christians – some of whom trace their origins to the earliest years of Christianity – are among those with the most to lose.

In previous years, Christians fleeting violence in Baghdad or elsewhere in the south often headed for the Mosul area. The Nineveh Plain formed the historic homeland of Assyrians, an ancient non-Arab ethnic group in Iraq. Main Christian denominations include Chaldean Catholic, Assyrian, Syrian Orthodox, Armenian and evangelicals.

Syria was another key destination for Christians who were able to leave Iraq, but the civil war there made life even riskier across the border than at home, prompting some to return.

For many Christians in the Mosul area now, the autonomous Kurdish region to the north-east may offer the best short-term hope – if they are able to cross over. Chaldean archbishop Amel Nona told the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) he believed all Mosul’s Christians had left the city, and spoke of efforts to find emergency accommodation in ancient Christian villages in the Nineveh Plain.

As the jihadists swept into Mosul this week, they reportedly looted and torched churches, raised their black “there is no god but Allah” flags and started demanding that women wear the Islamic veil.

The Assyrian International News Agency identified two of the targeted churches as the Chaldean Church of the Holy Spirit, and an Armenian church under construction, which it said was bombed.

Barnabas Fund, an aid agency that supports minority Christians in Islamic countries, said the attacks on churches were “a clear statement from ISIS that they are no longer welcome in Mosul.”

“It is feared that this latest exodus could be the final death knell for the Christians of Iraq,” said Barnabas international director Patrick Sookdheo.

“Having previously sought refuge in Syria, this is no longer an option, and as ISIS violence threatens the stability of the wider region, Christians have very few places of safety to which to run.”

An Iraq-based representative of the religious freedom advocacy group Open Doors sounded a similar warning.

“This could be the last migration of Christians from Mosul,” the organization quoted the representative as saying. Open Doors says an estimated 1,000 Christian families were living in the city as of Monday this week.

“The Islamist terrorists want to make Iraq a ‘Muslim only’ nation and as a result they want all Christians out,” Open Doors USA President/CEO Dr. David Curry said in a statement.

“The situation for Christians has deteriorated each year over the past 10 years. Iraqi Christians have faced kidnappings, threats and even death for being followers of Jesus. And they have little faith in their government to provide security as we see in the tragedy unfolding this week.”

Open Doors urged Christians to pray for their Iraqi brothers and sisters caught up in the conflict.

Syrian atrocities

ISIS’s conduct in Syria, where it is engaged in the jihad against the Assad regime but has also been fighting against other rebel groups, gives Christians in Iraq particular cause to be fearful.

In areas under its control, including its stronghold in the north, Raqqa, ISIS militants have imposed Taliban-like shari’a regulations, enforced through brutal punishments including public beheadings and crucifixions.

Sookdheo recalled that earlier this year Christians in Raqqa were given the choice between converting to Islam, paying the jizya tax – a humiliating Qur’an-mandated tribute to be paid by conquered non-Muslims – or risk death.

“Earlier this month, ISIS confiscated houses and land belonging to Christians in Raqqa; the owners were forced to leave the area,” Sookdheo reported. “ISIS has turned the main Armenian church in Raqqa into an office for the management of Islamic affairs and the promotion of shari’a.”

Under its former name, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), ISIS was responsible for the deadliest single act of violence against Iraqi Christians. Its Oct. 31, 2010 attack on Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation church cost the lives two priests, 44 congregants and seven Iraqi security force members. Five terrorists were also killed.

When AQI claimed responsibility for the church assault, it called Iraqi Christians “legitimate targets” and warned that the “killing sword will not be lifted.”

(A brief White House statement issued the following day did not identify the victims as Christians or note that the killings took place in a church. It condemned “this senseless act of hostage taking and violence by terrorists linked to al Qaeda in Iraq that occurred Sunday in Baghdad killing so many innocent Iraqis.”)

‘Seismic consequences’

In a hard-hitting statement Thursday Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), a veteran advocate for religious freedom on Capitol Hill, lamented the plight of Iraq’s beleaguered Christians and attributed the jihadists’ effective carving out of “a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East” to the administration’s policies on both Iraq and Syria.

“The president’s precipitous withdraw from Iraq and continued failure to develop a coherent policy to fight extremists in Syria has undermined the ability of the U.S. and our allies to prevent these troubling developments which have seismic consequences for the region and U.S. national interests,” Wolf said.

“The utter lack of urgency on the part of the administration with regard to ISIS’s efforts to solidify its territorial gains is baffling at best, and inexcusable at worst,” he said. “Thousands of innocents will be affected in unimaginable ways, not the least of which are vulnerable religious minorities which for centuries have inhabited these lands.”

A 1987 census recorded 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, and in the 1990s the Christian population was estimated at over 1.2 million. Many left the country following the toppling of Saddam Hussein and while there are no accurate figures available today, advocacy groups believe there are fewer than 400,000.


:elvis:

[lesfunk]

I really feel bad for all the US troops who are seeing this happen. Anybody who didn't feel like a chump for joining the US Military probably does now

[BITEYOASS]

I'm not surprised about this at all! Iraq was just another colonial designed clusterfuck held together by a dictator/strongman. It's like the Yugoslavian civil war all over again. Once Tito croaked, the whole place fell apart. What really sets this war apart from Vietnam was the fact that servicemen were not allowed booze, prostitutes or porn. Which made me and other Marines fuckin' miserable and couldn't wait to get the fuck out of here. Alongside that, I'm glad I'm not there anymore and will never go back. EVER!

[BITEYOASS]

Here's is what motivated me during my deployment:

http://www.worldoffemale.com/wp-content/gallery/brooke-burke-2004/brooke-burke-playboy-pics-2004-9.jpg

Someone was able to sneak in one Playboy with the lovely Miss Burke on the cover.

[BITEYOASS]

And then there was this lovely Cuban lady with an incredible ass!

http://newcelebspics.com/Vida_Guerra/Vida_Guerra15.jpg

[BITEYOASS]

More than likely, we'll just bomb the fuck out of these hadji cave dwellers, and the bitching from the Neocons and the teabaggers will continue.

[ELVIS]

That's a man...

[FORD]

That's as stupid as saying the occupants of modern Israel are God's chosen people...

But I'm not surprised by your ignorance...

Shit.... the ones running the country (like NuttyYahoo) aren't even really JEWS. These white Russian nazis have pretty much taken over and the actual descendants of Abe, Ike, and Jake have only slightly more political power than the Palestinians do :(

[ELVIS]

White Russian Nazis ??

[FORD]

That's a man...

Nope... this ain't one of Izzy's "girls"......

http://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/vida_guerra1.jpg?w=640

No tranny could "tuck" her way around that pic.

[ELVIS]

Looks like a butchy half breed to me...

Definitely more manly than Obomba...:biggrin:

[DONNIEP]

Nope... this ain't one of Izzy's "girls"......

http://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/vida_guerra1.jpg?w=640

No tranny could "tuck" her way around that pic.

You'd be surprised...

:biggrin:

[smorgdonkey]

Iraq = toilet of humanity.

[ELVIS]

Thanks to the US...

[FORD]

Thanks to the BUSH CRIMINAL EMPIRE...

Fixed that for ya.

[DLR Bridge]

"Romney and McCain back launching broadsides, reminder why they lost. If all GOP offers is same, or worse, in '16, WH will remain elusive," Obama strategist David Plouffe tweeted just before Obama spoke.

"Some of the biggest GOP cheerleaders for the disastrous war in Iraq are now joining the blame-America-first crowd rather than working with our commander-in-chief to confront this crisis," Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said in a statement Thursday.

"What is happening in Iraq now is awful, but it is a consequence of our invasion, not our withdrawal," added Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Twitter on Friday morning.

[ELVIS]

Fuck the whole lot of 'em...

[DLR Bridge]

Yeah? Why's that?

[ELVIS]

They're like children rallying for a sports team, that's why...

These self serving billionaire cock sucking politicians have no idea what's going on...

Very very few of them are actual representatives of the people...

They're easily bought off...cheap...

But it's really the people's (our) fault for letting these cocksuckers get away with murder...

[ELVIS]

:mad2:

[DLR Bridge]

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/international/2014/06/16/orig-jag-isis-leader.cnn.html

So the guy heading up ISIS is the successor to Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi and we had his ass for 4 years. The 1:20 mark is a bit chilling.

[FORD]

OK... if they're bringing back the name of the computer generated "Max Towelheadroom" Hopalong Zarqawi into this, then I'm really going to start thinking this is all bullshit.

Think about it.... a "terrorist" group that nobody heard of two weeks ago, suddenly controls the upper 1/3 of Iraq, has videos all over "social media" and is doing neighborhood food drops so they can show the people what a bunch of swell guys they are??

Seems like some awfully slick marketing for a rag tag bunch of wackjobs who came out of nowhere. If they are literally attaching the name of a guy whose very existence was documented about as well as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny (and I mean Hopalong Zarqawi here, not Mohammed) then I'm really going to start wondering if this isn't some Mossad/CIA theater.

Hate to get all Alex Jones on this shit, but it just all seems too convenient, and computer generated sketch man Zarqawi would be just too big of a red flag to ignore.

[vandeleur]

Yeah they had him in that terrorist factory , not sure if your a terrorist when you go in ,sure as shit are one when you get out .

[binnie]

It just makes you sad, doesn't it? What makes it worse is that no-one is surprised.

Libya is a state of chaos, Egypt is in a state of chaos, Syria is in a state of chaos, and now Iraq has moved into all-out civil war. How on earth does this get sorted out? Who knows. Personally, I think that countries in the Middle East should be stepping up to the plate (leaving Israel out of it), unless the UN actually wants to do something other than embarass itself. Single-country Western intervention just adds fuel to the jihadist fire: it's counter productive.

I really don't think any workable solution will be found in my life-time.

[ELVIS]

I'm really going to start wondering if this isn't some Mossad/CIA theater.



Ask Hitlary...

She let Christopher Stevens die to keep the arms flowing directly to radical groups...

[ELVIS]

Here ya go FORD...




:elvis:

[DLR Bridge]

Last few seconds of the clip holds the answer that's been in front everyone's noses for God only knows how long. Divide that hell hole in three already.