The War With ISIS/ISIL

ISIS has claimed the Belgian attack as theirs. Jury still out for the one in London.
 
As the mayor of Venice states, in St. Mark's Square, the guttural demonic cry of ''Allan's Snackbar!'' will get you taken out by a well placed sniper.

The game is changing, the burden of Italy is unbearable, the fight back among the political class begins. I mean, those unlike Wilders, who are in position of power to fight against this horror. And Eastern Europe continues in their bold fight against the imposition of German concentration camps on their soil twice in a century.

The drums are beating, the resistance is clarifying, running deep, running silent, ready for the decisive moment.
 
US Commander Lt Gen Stephen Townsend on Mosul

TIME: What can you tell us about the intensity of the battle for Mosul?

LT. GEN. TOWNSEND: The city was under Iraqi control on July 10. There remained a patch of less than 200 meters by 200 meters that took another six days to finish. Eventually it reminded me of something out of World War II war footage, say Iwo Jima. Marines tackling the final holdouts of the Japanese in caves and bunkers. That's what it looked like in West Mosul there.

In the final stand an Iraqi bulldozer led the way burying ISIS fighters popping up out of the rubble with suicide vests on, and the bulldozer basically dozing them under the rubble. The Iraqi infantry were walking alongside the bulldozer, protecting the dozer, throwing grenades, and shooting ISIS fighters as they popped up. It was incredibly brutal.

It was the longest battle I personally have been a participant in or borne witness to in my entire military career. It was the most constant heavy combat I think that we have [seen] since maybe before Vietnam, maybe Korea or World War II. This large, urban battle, nine months in length. Incredible.

Was ISIS’ use of civilians as human shields more widespread than was expected?

We didn't really have hard evidence of it until we struck a house in March in the al-Jadida neighborhood of western Mosul. Mid-March we struck this house with a bomb that was designed to take out two snipers in a room on the top floor and the entire house exploded. It should not have done that with the ordinance that we used.

No one could even get to that house for awhile, and after several days reports started emerging of hundreds of civilian dead. What the investigation concluded was that the enemy had rigged the house to detonate. Explosives experts demonstrated how the house had to have been deliberately prepared. ISIS moved those explosives into that house knowing that there were 100 plus people in the basement and on the first floor. That gives you just one example of this evil that I'm talking about here. They deliberately baited us into striking a house full of civilians knowing what would happen and the world condemnation that would come from that.

In your mind is there anything else that could've been done to save more civilian lives in Mosul?

Yeah. ISIS could've not taken tens of thousands of civilians hostage in Mosul. ISIS could have not turned Mosul into a Stalingrad. ISIS could have let civilians flee when they wanted to flee. ISIS didn't have to pack them into houses and pack explosives in on top of them. ISIS didn't have to pack them into buildings and weld the doors shut. Those are the things that could've been done to lessen civilian lives. I don't find that the coalition or our Iraqi partners could have done much more to lessen civilian losses.

Is true victory even possible against this kind of brutal group that has shown a remarkable ability to persist and change?

I absolutely believe that victory is possible in Iraq and Syria. We've already taken big steps towards destroying the physical caliphate by taking away Mosul, their capital in Iraq. The largest population center they held anywhere in the world. We have their self-proclaimed global capital under assault in Raqqa, Syria.

Now, defeating the physical caliphate or the physical state, does that defeat ISIS? I don't believe so. They will evolve because they're survivors and they've been resilient. They'll evolve into an insurgency. They have a significant presence on the Internet; some people call it a virtual caliphate. They'll continue to be there. They will try to raise franchises in other parts of the world. I think we have to defeat their idea. That's more important than defeating their force.

[But] a lot of their narrative is tied to their physical state. ‘Come to the caliphate. It's a blissful life here.’ Well, you come here and you're going to get killed by the coalition. You're just going to live a life of misery until you die. Right now, their defeat here is the largest blow we could make to their narrative.

Where's ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Is he alive?

If I knew where Baghdadi was he would be dead and I would announce that to the world. It always baffles me, you guys want to know where Baghdadi is. If I knew where he was there'd be a B-1 bomber heading there right now, or some of our partner forces, or the coalition troopers. I wouldn't tell you if I did know, and if I did know he'd be dead. I don't have a clue where Baghdadi is.
 
Iraq holding 1,400 foreign wives, children of suspected Islamic State fighters

Reuters reporters saw hundreds of the women and children sitting on mattresses crawling with bugs in tents without air-conditioning in what aid workers called a “militarized site”. Turkish, French and Russian were among the languages spoken.

“I want to go back (to France) but don’t know how,” said a French-speaking veiled woman of Chechen origin who said she had lived in Paris before. She said she did not know what had happened to her husband, who had brought her to Iraq when he joined Islamic State.
 
Iraq holding 1,400 foreign wives, children of suspected Islamic State fighters

Reuters reporters saw hundreds of the women and children sitting on mattresses crawling with bugs in tents without air-conditioning in what aid workers called a “militarized site”. Turkish, French and Russian were among the languages spoken.

“I want to go back (to France) but don’t know how,” said a French-speaking veiled woman of Chechen origin who said she had lived in Paris before. She said she did not know what had happened to her husband, who had brought her to Iraq when he joined Islamic State.

No decent person really gives a toss about jihadi brides. Let them wallow in the glory of the total Sharia State. And let them die there as a lesson to others and less we forget what total Islamism looks like. As for the children, they should be taken from them and raised with civilized people.
 
Stranded IS convoy reaches Deir al-Zour

"Syria's government allowed the convoy to travel across the country as part of a deal that saw the militants leave an enclave on the Syrian-Lebanese border. But it was stranded in the desert for days after a US-led coalition vowed to stop it reaching Deir al-Zour province. Activists said late on Wednesday that the buses had made it through."

Activists? ISIS has activists? There are people advocating for ISIS?
 
anyone paying attention to the kurds?

https://www.independent.co.uk/voice...itia-islamic-state-syria-turkey-a7961566.html

Afraid of their waning power once Isis is defeated, the Kurds are calling for independence from Iraq
If nothing else, KRG President Barzani has demonstrated that the international community is terrified by anything that destabilises Iraq and that the cooperation of the Kurds cannot be taken for granted
 
anyone paying attention to the kurds?

Now that ISIS is about to be defeated, no one wants to pay attention to them. None of the powers there including the US want Kurds to carve out a territory in northern Iraq, Syria and then incite Kurds on the borders of Turkey and Iran to join their new country. They might even work together to prevent that.
 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/jasper-downtown-edmonton-pedestrians-struck-1.4315545

"A man who stabbed a police officer with a knife and deliberately plowed into pedestrians on Edmonton's busiest downtown strip is being investigated for 'acts of terrorism,'" police said at a news conference early Sunday."

Allegedly has an ISIS flag, but then again isn't it just a pure black flag? Could have been rags to polish the rental car.

Hopefully your media and Trudeau will ensure the perpetrator and reporting is fully M103 compliant by the early morning editions.
 
Raqqa deal agreed to evacuate civilians

"A deal has been struck to evacuate civilians by bus from the Syrian city of Raqqa, where so-called Islamic State (IS) is surrounded by a US-led coalition of Kurdish and Arab fighters. Under the agreement arranged by local officials, a convoy is due to leave on Saturday, a coalition spokesman said.
But foreign members of the IS jihadist group are apparently excluded.

Fighting is expected to continue for days before the former IS stronghold is fully liberated, the coalition added. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have been besieging the city for nearly four months. They say about 100 IS fighters have surrendered in recent days."

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Is it just me or did the purple secular rebels have a resurgence down in the south?
 
ISIS capital falls to SDF

"The jihadist group still has a number of footholds, the largest of which runs along the Euphrates river valley in the south-eastern province of Deir al-Zour. However, the SDF and Syrian government forces - which are backed by Russian air strikes and fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah movement - have launched separate offensives in the province with the aim of taking control of a key crossing on the border with Iraq. IS has also suffered a series of defeats in recent months to Iraqi government forces, who are advancing along the Euphrates on the other side of the border."

Now after you Kurds mop up, go back to where you're from when the incumbent governments roll in with their hardware.

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Our children are being blown up at pop concerts, every day we sit around waiting for the next terror atrocity, the head of MI5 warns us that the we face threats of the "highest tempo'' and those good folks at The Guardian respond with this jolly retort that we've never been safer or had it so good:

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-britain-safer-than-ever-andrew-parker-terror

Who should one believe, the head of MI5, or some hack down at The Guardian?
 
Who should one believe, the head of MI5, or some hack down at The Guardian?

I'm quite possibly wrong, but I tend towards the Guardian's view.

I have no desire to be blown up, run over or stabbed, but the reaction to these attacks, and our society's apparent willingness to sign away our privacy and some of our other rights for some supposed security, nonetheless surprises me.

It seems that people today have forgotten - or perhaps don't even know about - the terrorist attacks of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s - the IRA, Baader Meinhof, Japanese Red Army, PLO, various other factions.

Perhaps I'm giving in to some sort of fallacious, rose-tinted nostalgia but it seems to me that people didn't kick up as much of a fuss back then. Public rubbish bins were removed from much of London but, apart from that, nothing really seemed to change. There was no need for draconian security laws and so on, no public announcement of threat levels etc.

Or is it somehow worse to be killed by someone who's brown, rather than someone who's white?
 
It seems that people today have forgotten - or perhaps don't even know about - the terrorist attacks of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s - the IRA, Baader Meinhof, Japanese Red Army, PLO, various other factions.

Perhaps I'm giving in to some sort of fallacious, rose-tinted nostalgia but it seems to me that people didn't kick up as much of a fuss back then. Public rubbish bins were removed from much of London but, apart from that, nothing really seemed to change. There was no need for draconian security laws and so on, no public announcement of threat levels etc.

Or is it somehow worse to be killed by someone who's brown, rather than someone who's white?

People did kick-up a fuss back then and security measures were tight. I remember travelling to Dublin for work on the ferry back in the very early 1990s - we couldn't travel in the normal work's van as it had "United Kingdom....." emblazoned on it. So we travelled in a white van with lots of equipment, tackle, theodolites and such and we were grilled quite intensively and for quite some time by British security services in Holyhead. The UK television news in the 1970s was particularly depressing with the Troubles on every night with the latest death toll and how near to death the hunger strikers were.

People didn't like it and they were all pissed-off with the threat that the Provo's coded warning might not get through to the police in time and you might get blown up Christmas shopping somewhere. There was none of this "Let's pretend it's all fine and dandy-o!"

Certainly the response to the IRA and the Beider Meinhof Gang was a lot more robust internally in the UK and in Germany than the response now. Both nations entertained extra-judiciarly killings and West Germany may have executed prisoners which were made to look like suicides. The security response now is much tamer.

Most of the factions cited, whilst some support came from global sources and they sometimes engaged in international terrorist activities, were nationalistic or European in outlook, albeit with some international socialism added. They had nothing equivalent to the Global Caliphate going on.

With the exception of the PLO who sought to target Israeli civilians, the other organisations, at least at a PR level said they did not target civilians deliberately. Whilst there were deliberate killings of civilians by both Loyalist and Republican factions during the Troubles. With the exception of the Brabant Killings, I don't think any of those groups come close to the horror of Islamism.

Islamism's threat is greater for the West. It knows no colour bar, so we are equally at risk of being killed by some white convert than someone who is brown or black. So our fear is not one based on race.

It holds my children as legitimate targest based solely on their holy scripture. We have seen the horror of a pure Islamic state in the ISIS territories and that should be a warning that we in the West must take heed and prepare to defend ourselves should we find democracy can be replaced by our parliaments based on a vote to enshrine Sharia.

We need to be worried as the Sunni disaspora is growing in Europe, we are now beginning to see what the Arab street looks like and how it behaves. And it's not very nice. Not quite our cup of tea.

And pundits can pull up all the statistics they want telling us that Islamic terror is not a problem, you're more likely to get run down by a car, or struck by lightning, or the gang rapes are not really rapes as they've changed the classification system. But the equivalence is not the same, this is a self-inflicted wound that should never have been.

Our political elites and media have entered into the greatest deception since Goebbels, but we are not so dumb, if they think the West is going to go gently into that good night, they are soon to be sadly mistaken.
 
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Perhaps I'm giving in to some sort of fallacious, rose-tinted nostalgia but it seems to me that people didn't kick up as much of a fuss back then. Public rubbish bins were removed from much of London but, apart from that, nothing really seemed to change. There was no need for draconian security laws and so on, no public announcement of threat levels etc.

I remember that was one of the first things I noticed in London. No bins at rail stations and other public areas.

That said it seems no one learnt any lessons from the rise of the Islamic State mere years ago. Kurds and Iraqis fighting each other - potentially leaving a vacuum for another extremist group to take over. Mankind seems unable to learn from its mistakes.
 
I'm quite possibly wrong, but I tend towards the Guardian's view.

I have no desire to be blown up, run over or stabbed, but the reaction to these attacks, and our society's apparent willingness to sign away our privacy and some of our other rights for some supposed security, nonetheless surprises me.

It seems that people today have forgotten - or perhaps don't even know about - the terrorist attacks of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s - the IRA, Baader Meinhof, Japanese Red Army, PLO, various other factions.

Perhaps I'm giving in to some sort of fallacious, rose-tinted nostalgia but it seems to me that people didn't kick up as much of a fuss back then. Public rubbish bins were removed from much of London but, apart from that, nothing really seemed to change. There was no need for draconian security laws and so on, no public announcement of threat levels etc.

Or is it somehow worse to be killed by someone who's brown, rather than someone who's white?

With the IRA (Britain) you knew what they wanted, they didn't go in for suicide bombing, and they usually gave the police advanced warning with a coded message that only the police and IRA knew...

With the current bunch of terrorists, we don't know what they want, they do go in for suicide bombing, and they don't give the police an advanced warning with a coded message...

Its got nothing to do with the colour of their skin...
 
With the IRA (Britain) you knew what they wanted, they didn't go in for suicide bombing, and they usually gave the police advanced warning with a coded message that only the police and IRA knew...

With the current bunch of terrorists, we don't know what they want, they do go in for suicide bombing, and they don't give the police an advanced warning with a coded message...

Its got nothing to do with the colour of their skin...

We know exactly what they want, there's 1400 years of history and the religious texts to cross reference. It's all there plain to see.

We don't know what they want, because to answer that question would probably cause most people to shit their pants.

And the great experiment underway is too noble to let history get in the way. That's how the enablers sleep at night.
 
We know exactly what they want, there's 1400 years of history and the religious texts to cross reference. It's all there plain to see.

We don't know what they want, because to answer that question would probably cause most people to shit their pants.

And the great experiment underway is too noble to let history get in the way. That's how the enablers sleep at night.

We don't know what they want, it just seems like a rage against modernity.

I normally like Jenkins, just bought one of iz bucks az it appens, Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations (I'll be wearing an anorak next or a fur coat!) but he's a bit off here....
 
Now that the war against Daesh in Syria is winding down, Jihadi Jack’s parents want him home.
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While the liberating foreign volunteers will also be returning home.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41818290

What should happen to IS fighters in Syria and Iraq?

Countries must remember "our shared humanity" when dealing with captured fighters from so-called Islamic State, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

At a briefing in Geneva, the ICRC's deputy director for the Middle East, Patrick Hamilton, insisted that international law on the treatment of combatants must be followed, and rejected calls for the "annihilation" of fighters.
 
Nah. I’m good with executions. They were not soldiers or combatants, they were terrorist.

That said, I wouldn’t trust the Iraqi government to do it. They’d just execute their tribal enemies and let their mates go.
 
Nah. I’m good with executions. They were not soldiers or combatants, they were terrorist.

That said, I wouldn’t trust the Iraqi government to do it. They’d just execute their tribal enemies and let their mates go.

I'm waiting with abated breath for Mr. Smith.

As for your opinion, capital punishment isn't universal.
 
8 dead in New York after a real winner drive over a bunch of people.

Anyone going to honour his freedom of speech and expression request to have the ISIS black flag on display?
 
They do have cells in every major town and city in Europe. The battle for Europe will continue long after the caliphate is extinguished in the Middle East.
 

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