IS

Borachio said:
May I ask just how exactly much the death of "this heinous" person fills you with glee?
Click to expand...
This person cut dozens of other peoples' heads off. Of course I am glad he is dead and will do no more harm. The world is a better place without him. I can't believe this is actually controversial here.
 
I can understand your attitude. It's a very common one, and shared by Cameron.

But the world isn't a better place without anyone. It would be a better place if he hadn't decapitated dozens of people, of course.

But it would be a better place if he'd merely stopped decapitating people instead of being killed himself.

What you're assuming is that the only way to stop him was by killing him, I think. This isn't at all evidently true to me.

It comes down to this: could you ever accept that the world would be a better place without you?

Moreover, don't you think that Jihadi John thought that he was making the world a better place, too?
 
SINONE, Iraq — The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for the
catastrophic attacks in the French capital, calling them “the first of the storm”
and mocking France as a “capital of prostitution and obscenity,” according to
statements released in multiple languages on one of the terror group’s
encrypted messaging accounts.

The statement was released on the same Telegram channel that was used
to claim responsibility for the crash of a Russian jet over the Sinai Peninsula
two weeks ago, killing 224 people. As in that case, it made the announcement
in multiple languages and audio recordings.
President François Hollande of France said on Saturday that the Islamic
State was responsible Analysts said that the nature of the attacks was more in
keeping with actions of the Islamic State than with those of Al Qaeda, and the
timing and extent of the celebration expressed online by the group’s
supporters added weight to the claim.

“Eight brothers, wrapped in explosive belts and armed with machine
rifles, targeted sites that were accurately chosen in the heart of the capital of
France,” the group said in the statement, “including the Stade de France
during the match between the Crusader German and French teams, where the
fool of France, François Hollande, was present.”
“Let France and those who walk in its path know that they will remain on
the top of the list of targets of the Islamic State,” the statement added,
referring to the attacks at the Bataclan concert hall and several districts in
Paris.

The style of the attack was in line with the Islamic State’s tactic of
indiscriminate killings and goes against Al Qaeda’s guidelines. In a 2013
directive, the leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahri, stated that Qaeda
operatives should avoid attacks that could inadvertently cause the death of
Muslim civilians and noncombatant women or children.
He argued that targeting markets, for example, was unadvisable because
innocent Muslims might accidentally be killed.
Although Qaeda branches have deviated from these guidelines on
numerous occasions, their attacks reflect more carefully defined targeting, as
was the case in the killings at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris in January.

Moderator Action: RD threads require more than just dumping a news article. Please also ensure that when you do post an article, you post a link to the article, and put the article in quote tags, so to properly attribute it, rather than presenting it as your own words.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
 
Tigranes, while I thank you for posting the article can you please provide links to where the article came from?
(I would also ask that things you didn't write be presented in quotes so as to highlight it is a quote, but baby steps.)
 
Anyone interested in defeating ISIS should read this article in WSJ. It makes much better and more realistic points than any of the US presidential candidates (including Ted Cruz) about letting the Kurds to fight West's war. I also liked this thoughtful comment by the responsible reader:

Maybe it is time for the West to say to Islam, "You are not our enemies, but you cannot be our friends for too many of you do not really believe in friendship with non-Muslims. And those who hate non-Muslims are intermixed with those who do not."

As someone asked, "If you are offered a hundred grapes and you know that five are poisonous, would you eat the grapes?" Surely any rational person would say no. This is not fair to the 95 innocent grapes, but at the same time we do not want to die.

The West should have a friendly dialogue with Islam which has much to brag about. The Taj Mahal for instance. Or the fact that Islam studied Aristotle at a time when Europe had forgotten about him. Or that Islam gave refuge to Spanish Jews when Spain threw them out.

But having millions of Muslims living in the West is a terrible idea. Only our obsession with equality which translates into "all religions are equal" hides this fact from us.
Click to expand...


In case WSJ require you to sign in in order to read I will share the entire article in the spoiler window:
Spoiler :
By SOHRAB AHMARI
Dec. 4, 2015 6:52 p.m. ET
47 COMMENTS
Dohuk Province, Iraq

Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani’s forward base on the Iraqi-Syrian border isn’t easy to reach. On a bright Sunday morning, two members of his staff drive me there from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. We race four hours around Kurdistan’s barren hills, passing numerous checkpoints, a circuitous route that avoids the tentacular territory that Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has carved out of Iraq and Syria.

It is late November, and the Kurds have just severed one of those ISIS tentacles by capturing Sinjar, 15 months after the jihadist army overran the Iraqi city and forced Kurdish Peshmerga forces to beat a hasty retreat. The Kurds’ comeback at Sinjar means the main highway linking ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq, and the so-called caliphate’s capital in Raqqa, Syria, is now cut off.

Security is tight at the base. Mr. Barzani, who heads the Security Council of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, is dressed in fatigues, with a pistol at his waist. We sit in a trailer that serves as a conference room. A portrait of Kurdish-nationalist hero Mustafa Barzani—Mr. Barzani’s grandfather; his father is KRG President Masoud Barzani—hangs above opulent furniture with golden, rococo details that look oddly out of place. Liberated Sinjar lies 40 miles southwest. A little beyond it is an ISIS front that stretches for 650 miles.

“The Kurds have broken the myth of ISIS,” says Mr. Barzani, who speaks English fluently. Including Sinjar, Peshmerga forces have retaken 7,700 square miles of territory and nearly double that if you count the successes of Syrian Kurds across the border. The Kurds’ front-line efforts combined with coalition airstrikes, Mr. Barzani says, have removed about 20,000 ISIS fighters from the battlefield.

He attributes the Sinjar triumph to Western air cover, good planning and a swiftness that surprised ISIS fighters. “Excellent intelligence” also helped, Mr. Barzani adds, because it allowed the Kurds to defuse the jihadists’ main defensive barrier, a network of remotely controlled booby traps and improvised explosive devices, before it could be detonated. Military analysts had predicted days of house-to-house combat. “But it didn’t happen,” Mr. Barzani says. It was all over in 48 hours.

While ISIS fighters may be inspired by a “radical, terrorist, extremist ideology,” he says, the Peshmerga go into battle with a fervor “to defend their territories and defend their people.” It was the same spirit that deterred previous attempts, by Saddam Hussein’s regime and others, to eradicate the Kurds, he says. “That has been the only reason that we as the Kurds still exist.”

But Kurds alone can’t put ISIS on the path to defeat, especially with the group still able to recruit new members and acquire weapons. Defeating the jihadists will require stanching the flow of funding, arms and fighters. War needs to be carried out on the ideological front too. “If Islam doesn’t accept what ISIS is doing,” he says, “the Islamic scholars have to talk to their own people, to say ‘Islam rejects this. You cannot terrorize people.’ ” This, he adds, “is an Islamic duty—the West cannot help.”

The most important factor remains geography. Islamic State’s legitimacy rests on its ability to exercise sovereignty over land. The Kurds have reclaimed much of their territory, but now the front has moved to “other parts of Iraq, and in Syria, where you don’t have such a reliable force to fight on the ground while airstrikes target the enemy,” Mr. Barzani says.

That’s an implicit rebuke to the Obama White House, which says it can “degrade and destroy” ISIS without committing U.S. ground forces. The American strategy of airstrikes and special operations, Mr. Barzani says, is “very effective in terms of weakening ISIS, disabling their movements, targeting their leadership. But you can never defeat an enemy if you don’t have ground forces.” And contrary to Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, the Kurds can’t serve as “our troops on the ground”—at least not outside their traditional territories.

Consider Mosul. The second-largest city in Iraq, today it remains under ISIS control. Mosul lies just 50 miles west of Erbil, and were it not for coalition airstrikes that came in the nick of time last year, the Kurds’ vibrant capital would almost certainly have fallen to ISIS as well.

Today Peshmerga surround Mosul. Kurds have pledged to help dislodge ISIS from the city, but they can’t spearhead the operation. The majority of Mosul’s 1.5 million people are Sunni Arabs, the core ISIS constituency. The Kurds think it’s up to the Iraqi central government in Baghdad and the coalition to take the lead on Mosul.

The job calls for a “liberating force, not a force that can create sensitivities in that community,” Mr. Barzani says. That is, a Shiite-dominated Baghdad must win the trust of Sunnis and encourage them to rise against ISIS. That’s a tall order for an Iraqi government increasingly under Iran’s thumb, and dependent on Shiite militias whose preferred counterinsurgency methods are burning Sunni villages and drilling Sunni skulls with power tools.

It doesn’t help that Washington has for years tolerated Baghdad’s ethnic and sectarian chauvinism, an indulgence that even colors U.S. military support for the Kurds. The Obama administration, bowing to Baghdad’s demands, insists that arms shipments intended for Kurdish forces be routed through the capital, despite the near-complete breakdown in relations between the Kurds and the central government.

‘We haven’t received the kind of equipment we want or the amount we need,” Mr. Barzani says. Ammunition shortages are sometimes acute, and many of the Iraqi Kurds’ heavier weapons are antiques wrested years ago from Saddam Hussein’s regime. ISIS, by contrast, fields 12 divisions’ worth of armored vehicles and heavy equipment, Mr. Barzani says, much of it originally supplied by the U.S. to the post-Saddam Iraqi army and later captured by the jihadists.

One Washington argument against directly arming the Kurds is that the Peshmerga aren’t a professional army but a citizen militia with units that pledge allegiance to Kurdish political parties rather than to the Kurdish government.

Mr. Barzani bristles at this: “Peshmerga to us is the honor of our nation. America after the fall of Saddam trained a professional Iraqi army for 10 years and spent billions of dollars. They couldn’t withstand ISIS for 10 days. . . . You tell me which is a professional force, Peshmerga or the Iraqi army?”

Fourteen Peshmerga brigades, of about 2,500 soldiers each, have already been integrated under a Kurdish Ministry of Peshmerga, but reform takes time, and defending the homeland from the world’s deadliest terror outfit takes precedence. “Please do not tell us that this is the reason,” Mr. Barzani says. “It’s a political decision that so far they haven’t supported the Peshmerga in the way that they need and deserve to be supported.”

The Kurds, he notes, are fighting the West’s fight. “We are giving blood. We are giving flesh. We are giving lives, which are much more valuable than any weapons system. . . . To help us win this war, you—the world, the West, the United States—must provide us with better weapons.” Advanced tanks, medical-evacuation helicopters and vehicles resistant to roadside bombs would be a good start. (A U.S. package that includes some of these systems is on its way, Peshmerga officials told Kurdish media on Wednesday.)

The Obama administration also won’t transfer arms directly to the Kurds because it is averse to doing anything that might jeopardize a unified, federal Iraq—even after the rise of ISIS revealed Iraq to be something of a geographic fiction. How sovereign is a state, after all, whose armed forces have lost control of its borders and can’t enter vast swaths of nominally Iraqi territory, including the Kurdish autonomous zone and ISIS-held territory?

“The biggest problem is to run away from reality and work with illusions,” Mr. Barzani says. “Iraq is a fabricated state that has failed. It has always been a failure. It exists on the map. On the map, it has some borders, but these borders weren’t drawn naturally.”

The Iraq created in the World War I peace settlement lasted nearly a century, with Sunnis lording over Shiites, Kurds and other groups for much of that time. The trouble, Mr. Barzani says, was that “people living in this country have never had a common ground.” Once Saddam was gone, Sunnis and Shiites sought vengeance, and sectarian terror escalated once Mr. Obama hastily withdrew U.S. troops in 2011. Syria’s furies arrived in Iraq soon after.

The Kurds took better advantage of the post-Saddam moment. Having attained autonomy with the help of a no-fly zone after the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurds built new democratic institutions and fortified existing ones following the 2003 U.S. invasion. Kurdish democracy isn’t perfect, but Kurdish society is free in ways unimaginable in most of the region. Iraqi Kurdistan welcomes foreign investors, and it has trod a pragmatic path in its relations with neighboring powers like Iran and Turkey.

Most important, Iraqi Kurds have proved themselves reliable Western allies, most recently in the anti-ISIS struggle. “In this entire area the Kurds are probably the most pro-American people that you can find,” Mr. Barzani says. “Forever we will be thankful for the U.S. support since the day of toppling Saddam’s regime.”

Sooner or later, ISIS will cease to exist, or else the future is even bleaker than it now appears. When that time comes, the various communities in Syria and Iraq, U.S. friends and foes alike, will ask where they belong on the new map. It’s better, then, to see today’s tectonic shifts as an opportunity to revisit the old Mideast configuration. For Mr. Barzani that means Kurdish independence and what he hopes will be an amicable divorce from Baghdad.

“Why does every nation on earth have the right to be independent, to have self-determination, except Kurds?” he asks. “Is this justice? Is this what the world wants?” The Turks and the Iranians each have their own state, while the Arabs have 22. “So why cannot the Kurds have one? We’re not asking for any more, and we won’t settle for any less. It will happen.” He adds: “It doesn’t have to be by fighting.”

The Peshmerga, meanwhile, steel themselves for Islamic State’s next move. Since the Sinjar victory the jihadists have been testing the Kurds’ defenses, assaulting perceived weak points. So far, the attacks have been repelled, but ISIS has many fighters and operates with a murderous unpredictability. “Where they counterattack doesn’t have to be in Sinjar,” Mr. Barzani says. “It can be anywhere.”

It could even be in London, New York or San Bernardino.

Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial writer based in London.
 
Tigranes said:
Anyone interested in defeating ISIS should read this article in WSJ. It makes much better and more realistic points than any of the US presidential candidates (including Ted Cruz) about letting the Kurds to fight West's war. I also liked this thoughtful comment by the responsible reader:




In case WSJ require you to sign in in order to read I will share the entire article in the spoiler window:
Spoiler :
By SOHRAB AHMARI
Dec. 4, 2015 6:52 p.m. ET
47 COMMENTS
Dohuk Province, Iraq

Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani’s forward base on the Iraqi-Syrian border isn’t easy to reach. On a bright Sunday morning, two members of his staff drive me there from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. We race four hours around Kurdistan’s barren hills, passing numerous checkpoints, a circuitous route that avoids the tentacular territory that Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has carved out of Iraq and Syria.

It is late November, and the Kurds have just severed one of those ISIS tentacles by capturing Sinjar, 15 months after the jihadist army overran the Iraqi city and forced Kurdish Peshmerga forces to beat a hasty retreat. The Kurds’ comeback at Sinjar means the main highway linking ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq, and the so-called caliphate’s capital in Raqqa, Syria, is now cut off.

Security is tight at the base. Mr. Barzani, who heads the Security Council of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, is dressed in fatigues, with a pistol at his waist. We sit in a trailer that serves as a conference room. A portrait of Kurdish-nationalist hero Mustafa Barzani—Mr. Barzani’s grandfather; his father is KRG President Masoud Barzani—hangs above opulent furniture with golden, rococo details that look oddly out of place. Liberated Sinjar lies 40 miles southwest. A little beyond it is an ISIS front that stretches for 650 miles.

“The Kurds have broken the myth of ISIS,” says Mr. Barzani, who speaks English fluently. Including Sinjar, Peshmerga forces have retaken 7,700 square miles of territory and nearly double that if you count the successes of Syrian Kurds across the border. The Kurds’ front-line efforts combined with coalition airstrikes, Mr. Barzani says, have removed about 20,000 ISIS fighters from the battlefield.

He attributes the Sinjar triumph to Western air cover, good planning and a swiftness that surprised ISIS fighters. “Excellent intelligence” also helped, Mr. Barzani adds, because it allowed the Kurds to defuse the jihadists’ main defensive barrier, a network of remotely controlled booby traps and improvised explosive devices, before it could be detonated. Military analysts had predicted days of house-to-house combat. “But it didn’t happen,” Mr. Barzani says. It was all over in 48 hours.

While ISIS fighters may be inspired by a “radical, terrorist, extremist ideology,” he says, the Peshmerga go into battle with a fervor “to defend their territories and defend their people.” It was the same spirit that deterred previous attempts, by Saddam Hussein’s regime and others, to eradicate the Kurds, he says. “That has been the only reason that we as the Kurds still exist.”

But Kurds alone can’t put ISIS on the path to defeat, especially with the group still able to recruit new members and acquire weapons. Defeating the jihadists will require stanching the flow of funding, arms and fighters. War needs to be carried out on the ideological front too. “If Islam doesn’t accept what ISIS is doing,” he says, “the Islamic scholars have to talk to their own people, to say ‘Islam rejects this. You cannot terrorize people.’ ” This, he adds, “is an Islamic duty—the West cannot help.”

The most important factor remains geography. Islamic State’s legitimacy rests on its ability to exercise sovereignty over land. The Kurds have reclaimed much of their territory, but now the front has moved to “other parts of Iraq, and in Syria, where you don’t have such a reliable force to fight on the ground while airstrikes target the enemy,” Mr. Barzani says.

That’s an implicit rebuke to the Obama White House, which says it can “degrade and destroy” ISIS without committing U.S. ground forces. The American strategy of airstrikes and special operations, Mr. Barzani says, is “very effective in terms of weakening ISIS, disabling their movements, targeting their leadership. But you can never defeat an enemy if you don’t have ground forces.” And contrary to Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, the Kurds can’t serve as “our troops on the ground”—at least not outside their traditional territories.

Consider Mosul. The second-largest city in Iraq, today it remains under ISIS control. Mosul lies just 50 miles west of Erbil, and were it not for coalition airstrikes that came in the nick of time last year, the Kurds’ vibrant capital would almost certainly have fallen to ISIS as well.

Today Peshmerga surround Mosul. Kurds have pledged to help dislodge ISIS from the city, but they can’t spearhead the operation. The majority of Mosul’s 1.5 million people are Sunni Arabs, the core ISIS constituency. The Kurds think it’s up to the Iraqi central government in Baghdad and the coalition to take the lead on Mosul.

The job calls for a “liberating force, not a force that can create sensitivities in that community,” Mr. Barzani says. That is, a Shiite-dominated Baghdad must win the trust of Sunnis and encourage them to rise against ISIS. That’s a tall order for an Iraqi government increasingly under Iran’s thumb, and dependent on Shiite militias whose preferred counterinsurgency methods are burning Sunni villages and drilling Sunni skulls with power tools.

It doesn’t help that Washington has for years tolerated Baghdad’s ethnic and sectarian chauvinism, an indulgence that even colors U.S. military support for the Kurds. The Obama administration, bowing to Baghdad’s demands, insists that arms shipments intended for Kurdish forces be routed through the capital, despite the near-complete breakdown in relations between the Kurds and the central government.

‘We haven’t received the kind of equipment we want or the amount we need,” Mr. Barzani says. Ammunition shortages are sometimes acute, and many of the Iraqi Kurds’ heavier weapons are antiques wrested years ago from Saddam Hussein’s regime. ISIS, by contrast, fields 12 divisions’ worth of armored vehicles and heavy equipment, Mr. Barzani says, much of it originally supplied by the U.S. to the post-Saddam Iraqi army and later captured by the jihadists.

One Washington argument against directly arming the Kurds is that the Peshmerga aren’t a professional army but a citizen militia with units that pledge allegiance to Kurdish political parties rather than to the Kurdish government.

Mr. Barzani bristles at this: “Peshmerga to us is the honor of our nation. America after the fall of Saddam trained a professional Iraqi army for 10 years and spent billions of dollars. They couldn’t withstand ISIS for 10 days. . . . You tell me which is a professional force, Peshmerga or the Iraqi army?”

Fourteen Peshmerga brigades, of about 2,500 soldiers each, have already been integrated under a Kurdish Ministry of Peshmerga, but reform takes time, and defending the homeland from the world’s deadliest terror outfit takes precedence. “Please do not tell us that this is the reason,” Mr. Barzani says. “It’s a political decision that so far they haven’t supported the Peshmerga in the way that they need and deserve to be supported.”

The Kurds, he notes, are fighting the West’s fight. “We are giving blood. We are giving flesh. We are giving lives, which are much more valuable than any weapons system. . . . To help us win this war, you—the world, the West, the United States—must provide us with better weapons.” Advanced tanks, medical-evacuation helicopters and vehicles resistant to roadside bombs would be a good start. (A U.S. package that includes some of these systems is on its way, Peshmerga officials told Kurdish media on Wednesday.)

The Obama administration also won’t transfer arms directly to the Kurds because it is averse to doing anything that might jeopardize a unified, federal Iraq—even after the rise of ISIS revealed Iraq to be something of a geographic fiction. How sovereign is a state, after all, whose armed forces have lost control of its borders and can’t enter vast swaths of nominally Iraqi territory, including the Kurdish autonomous zone and ISIS-held territory?

“The biggest problem is to run away from reality and work with illusions,” Mr. Barzani says. “Iraq is a fabricated state that has failed. It has always been a failure. It exists on the map. On the map, it has some borders, but these borders weren’t drawn naturally.”

The Iraq created in the World War I peace settlement lasted nearly a century, with Sunnis lording over Shiites, Kurds and other groups for much of that time. The trouble, Mr. Barzani says, was that “people living in this country have never had a common ground.” Once Saddam was gone, Sunnis and Shiites sought vengeance, and sectarian terror escalated once Mr. Obama hastily withdrew U.S. troops in 2011. Syria’s furies arrived in Iraq soon after.

The Kurds took better advantage of the post-Saddam moment. Having attained autonomy with the help of a no-fly zone after the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurds built new democratic institutions and fortified existing ones following the 2003 U.S. invasion. Kurdish democracy isn’t perfect, but Kurdish society is free in ways unimaginable in most of the region. Iraqi Kurdistan welcomes foreign investors, and it has trod a pragmatic path in its relations with neighboring powers like Iran and Turkey.

Most important, Iraqi Kurds have proved themselves reliable Western allies, most recently in the anti-ISIS struggle. “In this entire area the Kurds are probably the most pro-American people that you can find,” Mr. Barzani says. “Forever we will be thankful for the U.S. support since the day of toppling Saddam’s regime.”

Sooner or later, ISIS will cease to exist, or else the future is even bleaker than it now appears. When that time comes, the various communities in Syria and Iraq, U.S. friends and foes alike, will ask where they belong on the new map. It’s better, then, to see today’s tectonic shifts as an opportunity to revisit the old Mideast configuration. For Mr. Barzani that means Kurdish independence and what he hopes will be an amicable divorce from Baghdad.

“Why does every nation on earth have the right to be independent, to have self-determination, except Kurds?” he asks. “Is this justice? Is this what the world wants?” The Turks and the Iranians each have their own state, while the Arabs have 22. “So why cannot the Kurds have one? We’re not asking for any more, and we won’t settle for any less. It will happen.” He adds: “It doesn’t have to be by fighting.”

The Peshmerga, meanwhile, steel themselves for Islamic State’s next move. Since the Sinjar victory the jihadists have been testing the Kurds’ defenses, assaulting perceived weak points. So far, the attacks have been repelled, but ISIS has many fighters and operates with a murderous unpredictability. “Where they counterattack doesn’t have to be in Sinjar,” Mr. Barzani says. “It can be anywhere.”

It could even be in London, New York or San Bernardino.

Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial writer based in London.
Click to expand...

That article does seem to make sense.

I would agree that in the long run, only other Sunni forces can defeat Sunni ISIS. A large western force of ground troops might be able to squash them militarily, but they would do nothing for any sort of long lasting peace.

The Kurds may be able to push back ISIS to recapture traditional Kurdish areas but I don't believe that the Kurds have the will be venture outside of traditionally Kurdish areas. As said in the article, its not in their interest to do so and it would just lead to long term problems. Western forces (particularly the US) should be willing to directly train and supply Kurdish forces (for the purposes of Kurdish self defense).
Only Iraqi Sunnis will have the support of local Sunnis to defeat ISIS forces in the Iraqi Sunni areas. And only local forces (Sunni, Alawite, or whatever) will have the support of locals to defeat ISIS in Syria.

IMHO other than supplying the Kurds with training and weapons, the US should butt out of what is going on there. The Iraqi Armed Forces have shown themselves to be inept and the Baghdad government is no better.
 
chijohnaok said:
IMHO other than supplying the Kurds with training and weapons, the US should butt out of what is going on there. The Iraqi Armed Forces have shown themselves to be inept and the Baghdad government is no better.
Click to expand...

That's is a very tall order for the current president. And current situation illustrates WHY you don't want to start wars overseas without UN approval. The legacy of the Second Gulf war, which was unnecessary, unsupported by UN and brought us to this mess in a first place -- makes it almost impossible to win a support for a ground war which is actually needed and can be authorized by UN. I mean it is really the IS versus UN, not US. Islamic State is an enemy of all, Christians, atheists and Muslims alike. And those Muslims in Mosul and Raqqa will slowly but surely grow tired of IS.
 
no , they won't because anyone who attempts to get bored of them will be beheaded . It's the US strategic designs that extremists are getting it easy while underlining the need for the break up of the region into mini states that can never say no to the US .
 
BN-LX556_12321s_J_20151231081242.jpg


Pretty stunning. Especially for those who live in Miami.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights both reported casualties of at least 16 and no more than 20, and about 30 wounded.

The majority of the victims were Christian, says WSJ.

Qamishli, the largest city under Kurdish control in Hasakah, has a historically large Christian population that has previously come under attack by Islamic State. Many have fled to neighboring countries as the group has closed in.

“The people of Qamishli are living in a state of anxiety because of these fierce terrorist attacks, unprecedented for the city, particularly on the eve of New Year holiday,” said The Assyrian Monitor for Human Rights, a local monitoring group, in a Facebook post on Thursday.

Earlier this month, Islamic State attacked the neighboring town of Tal Tamr in a triple suicide bombing that killed at least 60 people. Three explosive-packed vehicles driven by suicide bombers targeted bases of the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, a U.S. ground partner in the fight against Islamic State.

Many Christians in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast are allied with the YPG in the fight against Islamic State, in return for Kurdish protection of Christian communities in the area.
 
A brave Russian special forces soldier who was on a Rambo-style one man mission to hunt for ISIS militants died a "hero" after calling in an airstrike on HIMSELF.

The fearless officer was directing Russian airstrikes at Islamic State targets near the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria when he was surrounded by terrorists.

Not prepared to go down without a fight, he ordered military officials to drop bombs on his location and died in the blast.

A spokesperson for the Russian military said: "An officer of Russian special operations forces was killed near Palmyra while carrying out a special task to direct Russian airstrikes at Islamic State group targets."
 
Borachio said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-35906568

Hmm. So Assad, with the help of the Russians, Hezebollah, and who knows who else, has managed to recapture (most) of Palmyra after IS has controlled it for nearly a year.

I suppose this is good news. If he can hold it for long.

Now, how about Raqqa?
Click to expand...

A few weeks ago there were rumors of an uprising against ISIS in Raqqa. Were those rumors ever confirmed? If so, ISIS may be losing Raqqa soon as well.
 
Bastards have destroyed the arc which was on cover of our Soviet ancient history schoolbooks.

35004.jpg


Revenge was just a matter of time.
 
I remember that textbook and I was fascinated with history ever since we had to color countered historical maps with the help of that book.

However revenge is a strong word, sadly. One cannot send IS fanatics back in time to rebuild the arch. Even when one executes a guilty soul for murdering an innocent one -- it is still not a revenge. Evil can be diminished in the future but past evil acts cannot be adequately avenged in this world. Which quite passionately begs for the existence of a world beyond this visible one. "Vengeance is mine, I will repay",-- says the Lord.
 
You can call it as you wish if the final result is the extermination of all those bastards.

wow, i get more furious when IS blows up historical monuments than when it blows up people. it is a bit worrysome.
 
Thorgalaeg said:
wow, i get more furious when IS blows up historical monuments than when it blows up people. it is a bit worrysome.
Click to expand...

I think its a somewhat natural reaction. Not only are we slightly wired towards keeping within a smaller group of people, but our brains have a hard time conceptualizing large numbers. It's hard to imagine 50 individual people who, say, die in an Islamic State related attack in Iraq. Each of those people is just like you and me. They not only existed, but they've lived full lives. They had mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. Moments of glory, embarrassment, enjoyment and envy. Fifty of those ended in a single attack, and it's just really hard to conceptualize.

On the other hand, we have a pile of dirt and rock that has done nothing other than stand in the same spot for centuries. Yet we're slightly more attached, I think, because its easier to consider its significance or age. Those rocks represent something far older, and are a testament to some former greatness. They remind us of previous human presence (as opposed to contemporary human presence). Their destruction hurts far more because it is just a single object as opposed to 50 people. That one thing represents many, while on the other hand many people represent, well, many people.

Its easier to attach to the simple thing than the complex. I mean, this isn't all that great for empathy and consideration for our fellow human beings, but it's easier for our brains to break down.
 
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