ISIL War in Iraq and Syria

[Treize]

Governments practice terrorism daily, nobody cares.

Fact of the matter is that Hezbollah does behead thousands of people.

[Senex]

Never said they were godlike, I have always provided pretty realistic analysis of their capabilities. So far this group continues to take ground despite airstrikes and local set backs. The strikes are actually increasing their popularity and leading to more defections to their cause. It also scuttled a planned IF and JAN offensive on the Tishrin Dam which is the main obstacle to them marching on Raqqa. IS knows its opponents abilities and knows their opponents have little clue as to the actual ground reality.

Turkey has the smartest plan of all the regional players which is to let all these factions kill each other, accept those who want to get away from the madness, and step in once all sides are exhausted and start twisting arms at the negotiation table. US Airstrikes are doing little to IS strategically and actually aiding them by increasing their recruitment and undermining the Gulf States politically who have now publicly sided with Assad. IS knows its audience is the Sunnis, no one else matters, Obama played to the American audience by bombing IS. The American audience is not the audience Obama needs to convince that IS has to go, we don't live there, and our actions are base hypocrisy as we didn't stop Burma's genocide of the Karen and Roghgynia Tribes of Burma who are Christian and Muslim respectfully, nor did we intervene to stop the massacre of Palestine. To the Sunnis on the street in Iraq and Syria, America has demonstrated they don't matter, only American oil interests, and their lives are worth less than an American life. Obama is repeating all the same mistakes of Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the war wasn't between us and the NVA/Viet Cong, but between the villagers and ARVN/Viet Cong/NVA. The Villagers had a choice of a corrupt South Vietnamese Government that largely ignored them, bombed them regulary and used US soldiers as shock troops to attack their villages just because VC were present and the VC and NVA who were providing services and settling tribal disputes in an impartial way and weren't puppets of a foreign power. American inability to understand this meant we increasingly drove the Villagers into the VC and NVA arms while the ARVN and RVN Government grew increasingly more corrupt and incompetent. Failure to understand the political, social, economic, and strategic realities of Vietnam cost America the war because we failed to convince the Villagers who we were slaughtering to reject the VC and NVA.

Any event the situation of Kobane has deteriorated further. The Southern Front pockets have been cleared and the Live Feed by RT showed ISA ranging shots on Kobane. This puts ISA 300m south of Kobane, less than 3 klicks from the West, and a klick on the East. They still have to clear a few more villages before they can actually storm the city itself. YPG has roughly 9,000 fighters in Kobane not counting armed civilians. ISA hit them with a reinforced Mechanized Brigade of 6,000+ men. Their firepower and tactics were simply too great for YPG to fight against. A YPG attack towards Tal Abyad from Hasakah has bogged down and ISA counterattacked.

ISA has also begun a new push to Ithriya which controls the Regime's access to Aleppo. Their first push a few weeks ago bogged down.



Only in lala land are Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist organizations. Both are democratically elected Governments with uniformed militaries that formed in response to illegal Israeli occupation of their lands. PFLP-GC is more a drug cartel than anything else and is a part of the Syrian Government.

The term Terrorist is undefinable and has no valid legal definition that can stand by itself as such definitions easily apply to US Government actions themselves. The Drone Strikes can certainly be called a terrorist campaign considering the high number of innocents killed in them. That and the US loses its audience when it throws out the terrorist label.

6,000 is an overestimation for IS troops in Ain al-Arab if you ask me. From what I've seen, they've got at the most a thousand men there fighting at any one(they probably have a a decent rotation system in place right now up there) time, plus garrisons behind the frontlines. It's a very conservative offensive, they're committing only a tiny part of their forces to the offensive, it would reckless of them do fighting in large columns there because of the pre-announced American airstrikes. It's light infantry backed by HMGs on Toyotas with fire fire support from a few tanks, mostly T-55s and I saw a T-62, and then a handful of howitzers being constantly moved around, a few mortars, and a couple of Grads. YPG are fighting with pretty much nothing more than a few AK-74s and hunting rifles so they can't do crap.

[snuggans]

anyone see the video on CNN of Daesh terrorists on the Syria-Turkey border pinned down on a ridge, taking fire, dragging their injured around to no effect, while the crowd near the camera are applauding and cheering each time a Kurdish tracer whizzes past their heads? also it was reported that airstrikes took out some of their tanks and a command outpost recently

[mrmouth]

Nusra and other rebel groups are saying Nusra is being hit by the airstrikes, not any splinter group or anything, but Nusra, and that's why they're denouncing the airstrikes. So that's not true.

Khorasan doesn't exist. It's a mythical terrorist group invented by the media on Saturday.

It's semantics.

The Pentagon has a white board with the name "Khorasan" on it, with the names of people in Syria who have stopped actively fighting in order to recruit for suicide missions in the West. Does someone need to say it in a beheading video for it to be a valid name to you?

In the meantime, call them whatever you want. Bunch of dead people now.

[Treize]

USA now openly arming Salafists.

[Derpy Hooves]

USA now openly arming Salafists.

Source?

[Treize]

Source?

They plan to arm/train "Jaysh al-Mujahedeen".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Mujahedeen

[Basil II the B.S]

USA now openly arming Salafists.

I want that Polandball comic with America saying ''this cannot possibly go wrong'' right now.

[caratacus]

anyone see the video on CNN of Daesh terrorists on the Syria-Turkey border pinned down on a ridge, taking fire, dragging their injured around to no effect, while the crowd near the camera are applauding and cheering each time a Kurdish tracer whizzes past their heads? also it was reported that airstrikes took out some of their tanks and a command outpost recently

If airstrikes happened it will be difficult to see how it could take out a small group of IS fighters like that, for which there are probably thousands.

Airstrikes will weaken IS but lets face it these can only be effective if used in the context of fighting on the ground. Yes the Kurds could prove effective against IS but it really needs a mobilisation of armour into Iraq and Syria from which a protected zone can be created and expanded. The danger of course is that this is not an army, they are terrorists and terrorists hide and attack using the civilian population. You could sweep the IS fighters aside within a few days with a direct attack. But they would only go to ground and start undertaking the type of bombing campaign in Afghanistan.

It is a difficult situation that grows worse with each passing day. But I am not hopeful that it will be tackled effectively no matter how much time, despite Obama's rhetoric. Just look at Somalia to see a comparison of what happens when Islamic radicalism is set within a state. Obama's right about one thing though, that IS barbarity requires a tough response. But that response cannot be constrained by modern standards of warfare against an enemy with Dark Age thinking.

[Treize]

[Winston Smith]

Today the brave SAA forces backed up by brave NDF volunteers have liberated Adra which is a suburb of Damascus. The terrorists have been driven away. This operation in Adra is related to weaken the Al-Ghouta front!!!! It's a good day for syria!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0HK0PZ20140925

Don't act like Assad and his thugs are the good guys in this. ISIS are terrible, this is true, but Assad is a mass murdering thug.

[mrmouth]

They plan to arm/train "Jaysh al-Mujahedeen".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Mujahedeen

The United States plans to supply weapons to the group.^[19]

See those little numbers next to additions or edits to a wiki article? You can actually source the articles that the editor used to make that assertion or the quote they used. It provides some context if you want your post to be anything more than hollow criticism.

The CIA has been running a small-scale covert weapons program since early this year, according to rebels who have been trained and are now receiving arms shipments. The modest program has strengthened moderate battalions, according to Western and regional analysts, even as rebel commanders complain about the meager arms flow.

The first American anti-tank missiles, known as TOWs, arrived in northern Syria early this spring. There were just a handful, delivered to only one rebel group carefully vetted by the CIA.

It's part of the complex program that is run from the joint Military Operations Center near the front lines. The U.S. is a "leading participant" in the MOC, according to a report by the International Crisis Group, confirmed by rebels who are recipients of the program.


Tight Control Over Weapons

The CIA keeps a tight rein on the rebels and the weapons. Rebels say they have to document every strike by a vetted video team and turn in the documentation, even the spent canisters from the weapons they've used before they can be resupplied.

The resupplies are limited — no more than five at a time — say rebels who chafe at this "lending library" approach to fighting a war. But U.S. support has benefits and has boosted the ranks of moderate rebel groups, says Noah Bonsey, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.

"Harakat Hazm quickly went from not existing to being one of the most powerful groups in the north," says Bonsey.

Since the first weapons arrived in the spring, more than a dozen groups have been deemed moderate enough to qualify for training on sophisticated weapons systems.

"More groups have been steadily making their way through the vetting process and receiving various kinds of material support, including anti-tank weapons," says Bonsey.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2...-will-now-flow

[Derpy Hooves]

They plan to arm/train "Jaysh al-Mujahedeen".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Mujahedeen

So where in that link does it describe them as Salafists? While the name makes it sound like that, the description of them from wikipedia, doesn't make them out to be like that. Islamic units have left the army, and some have been kicked out because of theft and kidnapping.

[Treize]

Yeah I checked the source ofcourse:

"We are crying for weapons," says a rebel known as Abu Abdullah, with the Mujahedeen army, the latest group to undergo vetting by the U.S. for training and eventual weapon supplies.

And also:

Harakat Hazm: America’s new favorite jihadist group

http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/19874


Remember all the Sunni Islamist factions come from the "Salafi" strain.
This basically means they follow the theologic doctrines of Abdul Wahhab and Ibn Taymiyyah.

Maybe you should check those out before believing it is a wise idea to support such people.

[mrmouth]

They can be whatever the they want to be as long as they are not attacking people. The US has never been against Islamism in any form, until it reaches beyond its own borders.

If people want an Islamist government then they need to vote for it and then be a responsible member of the international community that does not support extremists. If a Syria, without Assad, would ultimately be that, just as it was in Egypt before another Arab strongman overthrew the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the US would openly support that.

[Treize]

Do you know Ibn Taymiyyah, who ALL the Salafi groups consider one of the greatest scholars of Islam, called for genocide against Alawites? Do you know Abdul Wahhab declared everyone who rules using even a SINGLE man-made law an infidel who must be killed?

People who consider Ibn Taymiyyah and/or Abdul Wahhab sound scholars surely are the enemies of reasonable people.

EDIT:


But then again it is hardly surprising because Americans understand nothing about the Middle-East and the religious dimensions in place.
Siding with Salafi regimes such as Saudi-Arabia to weaken Iran. Yuck. How extremely dangerous.

Now we have petrodollars funding Salafi dawah from Rabat to Mindanao and from Zanzibar to Sarajevo.

[mrmouth]

The guy lived in the 11th century. Create a list of all the crazy things that religious scholars or texts have said and that have not been followed.

The tangible, modern day links that this boogeyman group has is to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. They are the kind of reasonable Arabs you see in those Vice videos.

[Treize]

They do take that guy seriously.

[Mary The Quene]

Good progress By the SAA. Next targets Douma and Jobar?

[Senex]

The SAA has liberated the whole Adra area, the new city, the old city, the workers' housing, and the industrial facilities, all within 4 days. This is the most rapid SAA offensive thus far in the war.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByO0XjhIMAA862H.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByjXkSGIEAE8x51.jpg