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Pan-Islamic merged mega thread

Much as I have been saying all along. We should simply let Turkey and the Gulf States continue with their support of ISIS so they can fight their proxy war against Iran without the meddling *crusaders* getting in the way of the fun.

While this is going to be a disaster for civilians on all sides, there is really nothing we can do at this point, the problem has expanded far beyond our resources and ability to do anything decisive. We can continue to support the few "friends" we really have in the region (Israel, Jordan, the Kurds and Baloch) just to complicate matters for the Shia and Sunni sides of this 30 years’ war.

Even the idea that *we* would like regional stability to ensure energy supplies is moot these days, the United States now produces 9 million barrels of oil a day, and we are no slouches in the oil and energy department either. Europe will soon have access to giant natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea, and I'm fairly sure that Fracking technologies could be used in the North Sea to revive production in older wells.

So the reasons for *us* to be there are few and far between. Let them spend blood and treasure against each other.
 
Thucydides said:
Much as I have been saying all along. We should simply let Turkey and the Gulf States continue with their support of ISIS so they can fight their proxy war against Iran without the meddling *crusaders* getting in the way of the fun.

While this is going to be a disaster for civilians on all sides, there is really nothing we can do at this point, the problem has expanded far beyond our resources and ability to do anything decisive. We can continue to support the few "friends" we really have in the region (Israel, Jordan, the Kurds and Baloch) just to complicate matters for the Shia and Sunni sides of this 30 years’ war.

Even the idea that *we* would like regional stability to ensure energy supplies is moot these days, the United States now produces 9 million barrels of oil a day, and we are no slouches in the oil and energy department either. Europe will soon have access to giant natural gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea, and I'm fairly sure that Fracking technologies could be used in the North Sea to revive production in older wells.

So the reasons for *us* to be there are few and far between. Let them spend blood and treasure against each other.

Maybe because there's a likelihood of this happening again, only far more rabid?
 
Kat Stevens said:
Maybe because there's a likelihood of this happening again, only far more rabid?


Hmmm ... many of you have been to, fought in, the Balkans; would "we" (the US led West) really miss Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Ukraine and even Greece?
 
Couldn't give a toss about them, but the rest of Europe may have a bit of a problem with it.
 
Realistically, the Ottoman Empire that marched to the gates of Vienna was much more comperable to the European powers of the day than the nations of the Islamic Crescent now. (Even then, the Ottoman Empire had a backwards social and cultural infrastructure and often adopted knockoffs of military hardware designed by the Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta)

Think about it; where do all the Arab nations get their military hardware, from small arms to jet fighters? Where does their telecommunications hardware and infrastructure come from? Who makes the cell phones, laptops and even cameras and software they use to make and post beheading videos on the internet? For that matter, while they strain mightlily to build a nuclear weapon, which nations built them on assembly lines?

The problem isn't actually capacity or capability, rather political and cultural will power. So long as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran (and to a lesser extent Egypt) are busy fighting each other to see who becomes the regional hegemon, they will be less inclined to march to the gates  of Vienna. For that matter, even if they shold consider such a COA, *we* have the ability to cut off the supply of hardware and technology, most likely have the ability to disable whatever is already there, and control the seaways, making it difficult for them to leave the Middle east or even transfer large numbers of men and equipment outside or even through the region if *we* choose.

Of course that is the sticking point: what will *we* choose to do?
 
Kat Stevens said:
Couldn't give a toss about them, but the rest of Europe may have a bit of a problem with it.

Really neither would I, but can you hear the howls of indignation from the fuzzy head left leaners, all howling "the government has to do SOMETHING"
 
Kat Stevens said:
Couldn't give a toss about them, but the rest of Europe may have a bit of a problem with it.


Might ... but it's likely to happen gradually, if it happens at all.

Is Germany going to fight over Albania? Over Bosnia? Over Greece?

shaking_head_breaking_bad.gif
 
One thing about empires though, they're never happy with what they hold, Germany may not fight for Albania, but it most likely would for Austria, or for itself.
 
Kat Stevens said:
One thing about empires though, they're never happy with what they hold, Germany may not fight for Albania, but it most likely would for Austria, or for itself.


I agree! The idea if Mitteleuropa lives on. But it never included the Slavic regions ...

142658-st-original.jpg


Mitteleuropa is the old Königreich Preußen plus the old Kaisertum Österreich. One can debate the peripheries, but not very much ... it doesn't include Slavs or Italians or the French; they may be vassal states but they are not part of the volk and, therefor, not worth defending with German blood and treasure ... remember Bismarck and the bones of those Pomeranian grenadiers.
 
A fairly good article from the Atlantic on why it is so hard to stop ISIS propaganda. Of course they actually identify the issue without managing to identify the root cause: the various groups attempting to "engage" on line do not have a counter narrative (identified), but the unstated reason they don't have a compelling counter narrative is decades of academics, media and even politicians who have worked so hard to tear down the Western narrative and smother it in a welter of moral relativism, political correctness and victimology. If we don't even fill our own people with a compelling cultural "core" set of values, why should be surprised when people identify with a competing narrative which does offer a very strong set of "core" values?

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/why-its-so-hard-to-stop-isis-propaganda/386216/?utm_source=SFTwitter

Why It's So Hard to Stop ISIS Propaganda
It requires telling a better story. And the U.S. hasn't come up with one yet.
Simon CotteeMar 2 2015, 7:30 AM ET

“We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, purportedly wrote in a 2005 letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who led al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time. The previous year, Zarqawi’s network, originally known as Tawhid and Jihad, had publicly released more than 10 beheading videos, including a video believed to show Zarqawi himself beheading the American businessman Nicholas Berg. This was bad PR, Zawahiri cautioned his hotheaded field commander, and risked alienating Muslims.

Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, but the hyper-violent form of sectarian jihad he pioneered emphatically lives on in the form of ISIS, the direct descendent of al-Qaeda in Iraq. While the group hasn’t exactly followed Zawahiri’s counsel about winning hearts and minds, it has proven fantastically adept at exploiting new social media to disseminate its message. Indeed, it is no exaggeration—although it may now be clichéd—to say that as well as being one of the most savage terrorist groups in the world today, ISIS also has the slickest propaganda. Its media arm Al Ḥayat has produced hundreds of films, ranging from three-minute beheading videos to hour-long features improbably combining elements of travelogue, historical documentary, and atrocity porn. Many are high-quality productions involving Hollywood-style techniques and special effects. One video, titled Clanging of the Swords, Part 4, drew particular praise from the late New York Times media critic David Carr, who wrote, “Anybody who doubts the technical ability of ISIS might want to watch a documentary of Fallujah that includes some remarkable drone camera work.”

“Media is more than half the battle" also happens to be the motto of the U.S. State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), founded in 2010 as the world’s first government-sponsored enterprise not run by an intelligence agency to counter online jihadist propaganda. The phrase is emblazoned across the opening PowerPoint slide in all CSCC presentations, according to the CSCC’s coordinator Alberto Fernandez. Alongside this quote is a second one, taken from the purported memoir of the American jihadist Omar Hammami, who until his death in 2013 was a leader in the Somali Islamist militant group al-Shabab: “The war of narratives has become even more important than the war of navies, napalm, and knives.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded a similar theme in describing the office’s mission a year after it was founded; it was vital, she said, to diminish the appeal of terrorism, and the CSCC was focused on “undermining terrorist propaganda and dissuading potential recruits.”

“It’s not about Louis Armstrong and isn’t jazz great and America loves Muslims,” Fernandez told me over a coffee recently, describing what he saw as the general tenor of previous public-relations efforts at the State Department after 9/11. “It’s not about quoting the secretary of state, because that’s boring, that’s lame. Our focus is not on the positive message. What we do is counter-messaging. We’re the guys in the political campaign that [do] negative advertising. We’re in people’s faces.”

Despite joining the fray relatively late, the CSCC is now at the forefront of what Hammami and Fernandez have both called “the war of narratives,” and has produced well over 50,000 online “engagements” in four languages—Arabic, Urdu, Somali, and English. An engagement in the State Department's terminology can be anything from one of the hundreds of “mash-up” videos the team assembles out of pre-existing footage—in many cases from ISIS’s own videos—to tweets or graphics highlighting the depredations and hypocrisies of the jihadists.

In addition to this, the CSCC’s so-called digital outreach team (DOT) crashes various online forums to troll ISIS sympathizers and regularly jumps onto pro-ISIS Twitter hashtags. For example, in April last year, an ISIS supporter created an Arabic hashtag translating to “#accomplishmentsofISIS.” Almost immediately the Arabic DOT used the same hashtag to post a series of sarcastic references to ISIS’s “accomplishments” at, variously, “starving people of #Aleppo,” “destroying mosques in #Riqqah,” “crucifixion of young men,” and “squatting, looting and damaging homes.” All of these messages linked to incriminating YouTube videos detailing ISIS atrocities in Syria. The CSCC has even entered into dialogue, if it can be called that, with actual jihadists, including Hammami, with whom Fernandez said it “exchanged barbs” in Arabic over Twitter. “He was clearly troubled,” Fernandez recalled. “I felt sorry for him. He was killed by al-Shabab, not the Americans. We actually referred to his death in one of our videos—‘see what happens if you join these guys.’”

But unlike their counterparts at the hard military end of the battle against ISIS, the American foot soldiers in the war of narratives are at a considerable disadvantage relative to their jihadist adversary.
“The war of narratives has become even more important than the war of navies, napalm, and knives.”
ISIS has beheading videos. The CSCC doesn’t. Beheading videos are shocking and repugnant. But they are also weirdly fascinating—and they go viral for this reason. The CSCC’s videos, by and large, are not shocking or repugnant, still less fascinating—and don’t go viral for this reason. ISIS’s métier is shock and gore, whereas the CSCC’s, to put it unkindly, is more mock and bore, more Fred Flintstone than Freddy Krueger. Shock and gore, needless to say, is where the action is—and hence where the Internet traffic tends to go. “You’re never going to be able to match the power of their outrageousness,” Fernandez said, conceding this disadvantage.

ISIS has a vast network of “fanboys,” as its virtual supporters are widely and derisively known, who disseminate the group’s online propaganda. (ISIS ennobles them with the title “knights of the uploading.”) They are dedicated, self-sufficient, and even, Fernandez said, occasionally funny. And they are everywhere on Twitter, despite the social-media network’s efforts to ban them. Fernandez described the group’s embrace of social media as “a stroke of genius on their part.” The CSCC doesn’t have fanboys.

More crucially, ISIS has a narrative. This is often described by the group’s opponents as “superficial” or “bankrupt.” Only it isn’t. It is immensely rich. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence estimates that of the 20,000 or more foreign jihadists believed to have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq, around 100 are from the United States. These fighters may be naive or stupid, but they didn’t sacrifice everything for nothing. John Horgan, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at University of Massachusetts Lowell, told me that people who join groups like ISIS “are trying to find a path, to answer a call to something, to right some perceived wrong, to do something truly meaningful with their lives.”

The CSCC doesn’t have a narrative—not one, at any rate, remotely comparable in emotional affect and resonance to that of ISIS. No one is more sharply aware of this than Fernandez himself. “ISIS’s message,” he said, “is that Muslims are being killed and that they’re the solution. ... There is an appeal to violence, obviously, but there is also an appeal to the best in people, to people’s aspirations, hopes and dreams, to their deepest yearnings for identity, faith, and self-actualization. We don’t have a counter-narrative that speaks to that. What we have is half a message: ‘Don’t do this.’ But we lack the ‘do this instead.’ That’s not very exciting. The positive narrative is always more powerful, especially if it involves dressing in black like a ninja, having a cool flag, being on television, and fighting for your people.”
"We don’t have a counter-narrative. We have half a message: ‘Don’t do this.’ But we lack the ‘do this instead.’"

In his biography of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ray Monk discussed Wittgenstein’s decision to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. It wasn’t really about patriotism, Monk suggested. Rather, Wittgenstein “felt that the experience of facing death would, in some way or other, improve him. ... What Wittgenstein wanted from the war was a transformation of his whole personality, a ‘variety of religious experience’ that would change his life irrevocably.” One of the greatest challenges in counterterrorism today is working out how to create a narrative that directly speaks to a similar kind of longing among potential terrorists—and channels that longing in a nonviolent direction. As Scott Atran argues in Talking to the Enemy, “In the long run, perhaps the most important counterterrorism measure of all is to provide alternative heroes and hopes that are more enticing and empowering than any moderating lessons or material offerings.”

The more immediate, but no less intractable, challenge is to change the reality on the ground in Syria and Iraq, so that ISIS’s narrative of Sunni Muslim persecution at the hands of the Assad regime and Iranian-backed Shiite militias commands less resonance among Sunnis. One problem in countering that narrative is that some of it happens to be true: Sunni Muslims are being persecuted in Syria and Iraq. This blunt empirical fact, just as much as ISIS’s success on the battlefield, and the rhetorical amplification and global dissemination of that success via ISIS propaganda, helps explain why ISIS has been so effective in recruiting so many foreign fighters to its cause.

Zawahiri was right: Half the battle is media. But the other half—the reality on the ground—is the more important part of the equation. And as long as that reality supports ISIS's narrative, its message will continue to appeal to disaffected Sunnis both within and outside the Muslim world. This is not lost on Fernandez, either: “Saying ISIS is bad is not good enough. There has to be change on the ground. Messaging can shape and shade, but it can’t turn black into white.”
 
Thucydides said:
Much as I have been saying all along. We should simply let Turkey and the Gulf States continue with their support of ISIS so they can fight their proxy war against Iran without the meddling *crusaders* getting in the way of the fun.
But it appears Saudi Arabia would rather the US fight this war.  I would think that if Saudi Arabia is worried that a power vacuum has given Iran too much influence in Iraq, then Saudi Arabia should send boots and advisors to fill that vacuum before demanding other nations do so.

Iran ‘taking over’ Iraq, Saudis warn, blaming U.S. refusal to send troops against ISIS
Richard Spencer, The Telegraph
The National Post
05 Mar 2015

Saudi Arabia became the second key American ally in the Middle East to demand U.S. President Barack Obama change tack towards Iran Thursday, as it called for U.S.-led coalition “boots on the ground” to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham.

At a meeting in Riyadh, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, told John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, he risked allowing Iran to “take over Iraq,” echoing Israel’s recent concerns over the White House’s policy toward Tehran.

The United States and its coalition allies are attacking ISIS positions from the air in both Syria and Iraq, but refusing to send troops. As a result, outside Kurdish areas, the offensive in both countries is heavily influenced by Iran and its proxy Shiite militias, such as Hezbollah.

This has raised serious concerns in Saudi Arabia, Iran’s Sunni rival for Middle East dominance.

The Iraqi government is laying siege to ISIS positions in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home city north of Baghdad. But most of its forces are under the command of government-aligned Shiite militias, whose leaders are close to the Iranian regime, even though the population of Tikrit is largely Sunni.

About 28,000 people have fled their homes in the face of the military operation, according to the United Nations.

“Tikrit is a prime example of what we are worried about,” Prince Saud said. “Iran is taking over the country.”

...

Saudi Arabia fears the multiple crises in the Arab world have given Tehran an opportunity to extend its power. In Syria, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is heavily dependent on Iranian money, the support of Iranian advisors and Hezbollah. In Yemen, an Iran-backed militia has driven Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, the Saudi-backed president, out of the capital Sanaa.

In Iraq, although the government is supposed to be balanced between Sunni and Shiite elements, Shiite militia are playing an ever stronger security role since the collapse of the army in the face of the ISIS push across the country last summer.

The current assault on Tikrit is being masterminded by two men — at least according to the publicity photographs released by pro-Baghdad sources. One is Hadi al-Ameri, the leader of the powerful Badr Organisation, a Shiite militia close to Iran.

The other is Qassem Suleimani, head of the Iranian Al-Quds force, the overseas operations arm of the Revolutionary Guard. He is said to be coordinating the assault from a village to the east of the city.

A speech he made at a rally in Iran last month caused alarm through the Persian Gulf.

“We are witnessing the export of the Islamic revolution throughout the region,” he said. “From Bahrain and Iraq to Syria, Yemen and North Africa.”

Saudi Arabia, which has long borders with Iraq and Yemen, also has a restive Shiite minority of its own.

“We see Iran involved in Syria and Lebanon and Yemen and Iraq, and God knows where,” Prince Saud said. “This must stop if Iran is to be part of the resolution for the region and not part of the problem.”

...
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/05/iran-taking-over-iraq-saudis-warn-blaming-u-s-refusal-to-send-troops-against-isis/
 
Islamic State appears to be fraying from within

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-islamic-state-is-fraying-from-within/2015/03/08/0003a2e0-c276-11e4-a188-8e4971d37a8d_story.html

BEIRUT — The Islamic State ­appears to be starting to fray from within, as dissent, defections and setbacks on the battlefield sap the group’s strength and erode its aura of invincibility among those living under its despotic rule.

Reports of rising tensions between foreign and local fighters, aggressive and increasingly unsuccessful attempts to recruit local citizens for the front lines, and a growing incidence of guerrilla attacks against Islamic State targets suggest the militants are struggling to sustain their carefully cultivated image as a fearsome fighting force drawing Muslims together under the umbrella of a utopian Islamic state.

The anecdotal reports, drawn from activists and residents of areas under Islamic State control, don’t offer any indication that the group faces an immediate challenge to its stranglehold over the mostly Sunni provinces of eastern Syria and western Iraq that form the backbone of its self-proclaimed caliphate. Battlefield reversals have come mostly on the fringes of its territory, while organized opposition remains unlikely as long as viable alternatives are lacking and the fear of vicious retribution remains high, Syrians, Iraqis and analysts say.

The bigger threat to the Islamic State’s capacity to endure, however, may come from within, as its grandiose promises collide with realities on the ground, said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

“The key challenge facing ISIS right now is more internal than external,” she said, using another term for the group. “We’re seeing basically a failure of the central tenet of ISIS ideology, which is to unify people of different origins under the caliphate. This is not working on the ground. It is making them less effective in governing and less effective in military operations.”

Most striking are the growing signs of friction between the foreigners lured by its state-building experiment and local recruits, who have grown resentful of the preferential treatment meted out to the expatriates, including higher salaries and better living conditions.

Foreign fighters get to live in the cities, where coalition airstrikes are relatively rare because of the risk of civilian casualties, while Syrian fighters are required to serve in rural outposts more vulnerable to attacks, said an activist who opposes the Islamic State and lives in the town of Abu Kamal on Syria’s border with Iraq. The activist spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Shootouts have erupted on several occasions on the streets of the town, including one last week between foreign fighters and Syrians who refused an order by a Kuwaiti commander to deploy to the front lines in Iraq, the activist said. The Syrian faction, under the command of Saddam Jamal, a former Free Syrian Army leader, remains in the town, keeping a tense and wary distance from the faction led by the Kuwaiti, he said.

In an incident in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in January, local allies battled a group made up mostly of Chechens after the foreigners decided to head back to Syria, according to Hassan al-Dulaimi, a retired police general who works with tribal fighters aligned against the Islamic State. “The Iraqis feared they were being abandoned,” he said.

There have been signs, too, that some foreign jihadists are growing disillusioned, with activists in the Syrian provinces of Deir al-Zour and Raqqa describing several instances in which foreigners have sought local help to escape across the border to Turkey. The bodies of between 30 and 40 men, many of whom appeared to be Asian, were found last month in the Raqqa town of Tabqa. They are thought to be the remains of a group of jihadist fighters who tried to flee but were caught, according to the activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which monitors Islamic State activities.

New restrictions on travel in and out of areas controlled by the Islamic State have been imposed in recent weeks, including a prohibition on truck drivers transporting men without permission, the activist group says. Public executions, a core component of Islamic State discipline, have in recent weeks been extended to about 120 of the group’s own members, according to the ­Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Some were accused of spying and one of smoking, but suspicions are widespread that most were simply fighters caught trying to flee.

Meanwhile, territorial losses in northern Syria and elsewhere in Iraq are contributing to the sense that the group that stunned the world with its triumphant sweep through Iraq and Syria last summer is now not only on the defensive but also struggling to find a coherent strategy to confront the multiple forces ranged against it.

The Islamic State is battling major offensives waged on at least three fronts — by Kurds in northern Syria, Kurds in northern Iraq and the combined force of Iraqi army and Shiite militia fighters advancing on the central Iraqi city of Tikrit. Islamic State fighters have also been expanding into eastern areas of the Syrian provinces of Homs and Damascus, but the incremental advances there aren’t as spectacular as its conquests last year.

Most of the setbacks have come in non-Sunni areas, such as the Kurdish enclave around Kobane or the mixed province of Diyala in eastern Iraq, where the Islamic State’s territorial ambitions may have been doomed by the absence of allies on the ground.

A far bigger test of the Islamic State’s military capabilities is the battle underway for control of Tikrit, the Sunni home town of Saddam Hussein. As the ethnic and sectarian sentiments driving the fight for territory harden across Syria and Iraq, a victory for the overwhelmingly Shiite forces would also test the ability of non-Sunni groups to retain hold over conquered Sunni territories, analysts say.

The Islamic State’s losses in terms of land and blood have been fairly substantial, including the loss of hundreds of villages around the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria, near the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar and in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala.

The battles appear to have taken a high toll on the group’s strength, estimated at about 20,000 foreigners alongside an unknown number of Iraqis and Syrians. The Pentagon claimed last week that coalition airstrikes have killed 8,500 fighters, though that figure can’t be confirmed.

Syrians say the bloodshed is deterring the recruitment of local citizens who were clamoring a few months ago for the opportunity to earn salaries by joining the only new source of employment available.

Increasingly, the Islamic State is recruiting fighters among children and teens who remain more vulnerable than older adults to the group’s propaganda, said a businessman living in Raqqa who last week paid condolences to family friends whose 15-year-old son had been killed on the front line.

The parents didn’t know he had gone to fight and learned of his death from a neighbor just days after he had disappeared from home, recalled the businessman, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety.

Intensified efforts to persuade Syrians to go to the front lines in Iraq include offers of up to $800 a month in salary, according to Ahmed Mhidi, who arrived in Turkey two weeks ago from the Syrian city of Deir al-Zour and is setting up an opposition group called DZGraph. The offer has won few takers, he said.

The Islamic State “was never popular, but people supported them because they were scared or they needed money,” he said. “Now people want nothing to do with them, and if the Islamic State puts pressure on them, they just flee.”

The province of Deir al-Zour, bordering Iraq, appears to be where opposition to the Islamic State is hardening the most. Small-scale attacks involving ambushes of Islamic State patrols or checkpoints are on the rise — including one that killed 12 members of a feared police group Sunday.

Foreigners continue to volunteer, streaming across the Turkish border into the Islamic State’s self-styled capital of Raqqa, according to residents there. The city’s population has been swelled by thousands of Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Africans. Upon arrival they are given cars and apartments, and they mill about among the city’s cafes and markets, lending a cosmopolitan air to streets where foreigners once were rare, according to Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, the pseudonym of one of the founders of the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently group, who now lives in Turkey.

Many of the foreigners show little inclination to travel to the front lines, he said. “They just want to live in the Islamic State,” he said. “They didn’t come to fight.”

How useful they would be to the Islamic State’s military efforts is also in question, said the Carnegie Middle East Center’s Khatib.

“Ultimately, they are only attracting people on the margins of society, without much education or useful skills,” she said. “It’s not exactly bolstering their military capability.”
 
MCG said:
But it appears Saudi Arabia would rather the US fight this war.  I would think that if Saudi Arabia is worried that a power vacuum has given Iran too much influence in Iraq, then Saudi Arabia should send boots and advisors to fill that vacuum before demanding other nations do so.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/05/iran-taking-over-iraq-saudis-warn-blaming-u-s-refusal-to-send-troops-against-isis/

Well of course the Saudis would rather hire Janissaries to do the dirty work for them, and despite everything the US Army and Marine Corps are the biggest, best equipped force on the planet, have the most frightening conventional force ever assembled and are the ONLY force with global strategic mobility. Only a very small number of the wealthy Western nations can project power at all, and then only in tiny increments (a single Canadian Battlegroup, for example).

Now the real issue is the people who supply the gold get to call the shots, and I for one am not really ready for the idea that I am going to be sent into harm's way for the benefit of some Saudi princeling, so I am in total agreement with you and this article.
 
I'm looking forward to a massive EMT, by our design, that does not hamper our communications. I don't know if that's possible, but it would throw a fucking huge wrench into anything they had going on, including the near future.

They want to act like ignorant savages, give them the means to do so.
 
ISIS's answer to facebook: "Caliphate book" .  ::)

So what happens if you "unfriend" someone on that network...stoning? :facepalm:

Reuters

Islamic State alternative to Facebook gets bumpy start

DUBAI (Reuters) - Facing a ban from mainstream online social networks Facebook and Twitter, supporters of the Islamic State appear to have launched their own "caliphate book."

But 5elafabook.com was offline on Monday just a day after its launch and its Twitter account was suspended, highlighting the challenges faced by backers of the ultra-violent militants based in Iraq and Syria in spreading their message and recruiting online.

The amateur page showed a map of the world dotted with Islamic State's trademark Arabic insignia and was crafted by Socialkit, a program that lets users produce do-it-yourself social networks.

(...SNIPPED)
 
While pregnant Chinese tourists go to North America to give birth to child passport holders who will later sponsor them for immigration...half way around the world, Indonesian tourists go to Turkey to give birth to future jihadists.  :o

Indonesian tourists go to Turkey to "give birth to" ISIS fighters:

Global Indonesian voices

Antara News

Indonesia Sends Team to Turkey to Look for Missing Citizens

(...SNIPPED)

He said the ministry does not want to speculate  about the reason why the 16 Indonesians left the tour group and up to now their whereabouts are still not known. The search and investigation are still going on, he added.

"The foreign ministry is reluctant to speculate about their motive of leaving the tour group, including about a suspicion that they might join ISIS," he noted. 

In the meantime, the ministry's director for the protection of Indonesian citizens and Indonesian legal entities (PWNI-BHI), Muhammad Iqbal said, no relatives of the 16 Indonesians reported about their missing to the authorities. The ministry has not known how they were missing and could not confirm on the suspicion that they might join ISIS. (WDY)
 
Child soldiers. And some people have issues with the cadet program.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987705/French-child-youngest-ISIS-member-killed-action-Boy-13-posed-M-16-assault-rifle-killed-Syria.html?ito=social-facebook

 
I read the story this morning.  A 13 year old will kill you just the same as a 23 year old.  He wants to get down and dirty with the adults then he can share the fate they do too.
 
Hamish Seggie said:
Child soldiers. And some people have issues with the cadet program.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2987705/French-child-youngest-ISIS-member-killed-action-Boy-13-posed-M-16-assault-rifle-killed-Syria.html?ito=social-facebook

Good.  I hope his little dark soul is being spit roasted in hell.
 
More on how ISIS raises and recruits child soldiers. Deprogramming all these children at the end of the conflict will be one unholy mess, and the damage they sustain now will probably make them far less productive as adults, further crippling any possible rebuilding of society in that region:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/10/horror-of-isis-child-soldiers-state-of-terror

‘Raising tomorrow’s mujahideen’: the horrific world of Isis’s child soldiers
Children as young as 10 have been filmed executing prisoners for Isis, which has approached their training and indoctrination with characteristic ruthlessness

• How Isis attracts foreign fighters

Jessica Stern and JM Berger
Tuesday 10 March 2015 18.15 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 11 March 2015 00.05 GMT


Isis’s bid to build a society hasn’t stopped at the recruitment of women. Foreigners have been encouraged to bring their whole families to Iraq and Syria to “live under the shade of the caliphate”.

In November 2014, Isis released a video introducing “some of our newest brothers from Kazakhstan”, who had “responded to the crusader aggression … and raced to prepare themselves and their children”. The video showed dozens of smiling boys, the sons of a unit of Kazakh fighters, clambering into a bus and going to a schoolroom described as “the ultimate base for raising tomorrow’s mujahideen”.

“We spent our childhood far away from this blessing,” their Kazakh teacher explained. “We were raised on the methodology of atheism ... The kuffar [unbelievers] poisoned our minds ... Our children are happy. They’re living in the shade of the Qur’an and Sunnah.”

Another teacher was shown supervising a class of pre-teenage boys in uniforms. “They have completed lessons in Qur’an, [proper recitation of the Qur’an], and the Arabic language,” he said. “They will move on to do physical and military training.”

The scene shifted to show a Kazakh boy of about nine combat-stripping an assault rifle, then training with others in its use. The physical training included hand-to-hand combat and calisthenics. At the end of the day, a member of Isis’s media team questioned one of the students.

“What will you be in the future, if God wills it?” the interviewer asked.

“I will be the one who slaughters you, oh kuffar,” the boy responded, grinning at the camera. “I will be a mujahid, if God wills it.” One 10-year-old boy from the video was seen in a subsequent release executing two prisoners.

Such videos and images are far from rare. Isis members on social media routinely post images on social media of children holding severed heads and playing on streets where dismembered bodies are splayed carelessly on the sidewalk. One image posted to Twitter showed a child playacting the beheading of American hostage James Foley using a doll.

A UN report on war crimes in Syria pointed to the indoctrination of children as a “vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty” and creating a “cadre of fighters that will see violence as a way of life”.

While children have often been victims of such manipulation in war zones, Isis approached their “education” as it did almost everything else – systematically.

Isis actively recruits children to send them to training camps and then to use them in combat and suicide missions. It has used children as human shields, suicide bombers, snipers and blood donors. The UN secretary general’s special representative for children and armed conflict reports that Isis “has tasked boys as young as 13 to carry weapons, guard strategic locations or arrest civilians”. Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that hundreds of “non-civilian” male children had died in the fighting.

Isis strictly controls the education of children in the territory it holds. According to a teacher from Raqqa, Isis considers philosophy, science, history, art and sport to be incompatible with Islam. “Those under 15 go to sharia camp to learn about their creed and religion,” an Isis press officer in Raqqa told Vice News. “Those over 16, they can attend the military camp ... Those over 16 and who were previously enrolled in the camps can participate in military operations.” But in Isis propaganda videos, even younger children are shown being trained in the use of firearms.

This is a hallmark of a “total organisation”, which sociologist Erving Goffman defined as one that “has more or less monopoly control of its members’ everyday life.” Pol Pot experimented with creating a utopia in Kampuchea (the name used for Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge controlled it) in the 1970s, using methods not that different from those employed by Isis. The idea was to create an entirely new society, uncontaminated by the values the Khmer Rouge aimed to stamp out. Children were seen as the least corrupted by bourgeois values and would be educated “according to the precepts of the revolution”, which did not include traditional subjects. The children were both victims and perpetrators of terror.

Isis follows a trend of training ever-younger operatives. By doing so they hope to ensure a new generation of fighters. Leadership decapitation is significantly less likely to be effective against organisations that have children ready to step into their fathers’ shoes.

Residents of Raqqa reported to the news website Syria Deeply that children are taught how to behead another human being, and are given dolls on which to practice. One child told HRW interviewers, “When Isis came to my town ... I liked what they are wearing, they were like one herd. They had a lot of weapons. So I spoke to them, and decided to go to their training camp in Kafr Hamra in Aleppo.” He attended the camp when he was 16 years old, but the leader told him he preferred younger trainees. Pol Pot, too, preferred younger trainees.

Like other “total organisations”, Isis aims to create a new form of man. Young children are easier to mould into Isis’s vision of this new man. As psychiatrist Otto Kernberg explains, “Individuals born into a totalitarian system and educated by it from early childhood have very little choice to escape from total identification with that system.”

Another child, Amr, told the HRW interviewers that he had participated in a “sleeper cell” for Isis at age 15, to collect information on the Syrian government’s operation in Idlib. When he started working for Isis full time, he was given a Kalashnikov rifle, a military uniform and a bulletproof vest. He and the others in his unit, including other children, were encouraged to volunteer as suicide bombers, and several hundreds of fighters did so. Amr said that he didn’t want to be a suicide-bomber, so he delayed signing up, hoping his name would come up last. He told HRW that he felt social pressure to “volunteer” to die.

Some of the children come with their parents from abroad, to grow up in what their parents see as a pure Islamic state. They learn to say that they are citizens of the Islamic State rather than from their country of origin. The poorer neighbourhoods of Ankara, Turkey, are reportedly a source of child recruits. One such neighbourhood, Hacibayram, has become a recruitment hub for Isis. HRW discovered that child soldiers are paid the equivalent of $100 a month, around half as much as adult fighters. In Raqqa, Isis pays parents and bribes children to attend the camps. But the recruits are not always volunteers. Children of ethnic minorities, particularly the Kurds and Yazidis, have been kidnapped and forced to join Isis. According to Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in one case, more than 600 Kurdish students were kidnapped on their way home from taking exams in Aleppo. Their captors gave the boys an Islamic “education”, encouraging the children to join the jihad, showing them videos of beheadings and suicide attacks. A doctor told the HRW interviewers that he had treated a wounded boy between the ages of 10 and 12. The boy’s job was to whip prisoners.

Using children under the age of 18 as soldiers is a war crime. A study of 300 former Ugandan child soldiers found that approximately one third were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two-thirds were suffering behavioural and emotional problems, mostly anxiety and depression. So called “moral injury” – pain or damage to the conscience caused by witnessing, failing to prevent or perpetrating acts that violate ethical norms – is a risk factor for further violence, PTSD and depression. The widespread commission of atrocities could lead to a form of societal PTSD – both for victims and perpetrators. One of the results of continuously witnessing morally injurious actions, or of perpetrating them, is the blunting of feeling and loss of empathy.

Interestingly, some child soldiers may avoid adverse mental health outcomes by developing an appetite for aggression; those who learn to take pleasure from killing appear to be less susceptible to PTSD symptoms, according to work in northern Uganda and Colombia by Roland Weierstall and colleagues.

Is Isis deliberately trying to create a society with an appetite for violent aggression? It is impossible to know Isis’s conscious intentions, but either way, the end result of its rule in Syria and Iraq will no doubt be a deeply traumatised generation and a host of new challenges from within.

Lieutenant General HR McMaster is deputy commanding general for the future of US army training and doctrine command. His job is to assess threats of the future for the US army. He describes Isis as “engaging in child abuse on an industrial scale. They brutalise and systematically dehumanise the young populations. This is going to be a multigenerational problem.”

Extracted from Isis: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and JM Berger, published by HarperCollins (£14.99) on 12 March. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
 
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