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I first thought they were the rebels from Syria. But then I heard ISIS fights thise guys also. So where did thousands of these guys come from seemingly overnight? Something doesn't make sense. And why the hell did we take Saddam Hussein out when something 10x worse has taken his place?
And how come Europe doesn't do one friggen thing about anything ISIS, Russia or Anyother issues going on in the world?
It might help to relate them to a "clan or tribe" instead of a country. They were one of several Sunni terrorist groups closely related to Al Qaeda, they broke off last year. The press seldom mentioned them by name, but their black flag is in a lot the photos.
I first thought they were the rebels from Syria. But then I heard ISIS fights thise guys also. So where did thousands of these guys come from seemingly overnight? Something doesn't make sense. And why the hell did we take Saddam Hussein out when something 10x worse has taken his place?
And how come Europe doesn't do one friggen thing about anything ISIS, Russia or Anyother issues going on in the world?
For industrialized nations, they don't do sh*t!!
ISIS is a breakaway group from Al-Qaeda in Iraq which was itself a breakaway from the main structure of Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq broke off from Al-Qaeda because Osama bin Laden and many of the other leaders of Al-Qaeda took issue with the beheading videos being produced by the Iraqi Al-Qaeda chapters and the random car bombings. He felt it was giving Al-Qaeda a bad image. Osama bin Laden preferred large scale terrorist attacks focusing on Western economic and military power. Osama liked the symbolism of flaming skyscrapers and military bases and that played well in the Muslim world, but he thought the idea of blowing up random Muslims in a marketplace or sawing the head off a terrified civilian on camera (even if it was an infidel) was giving them a bad image and instead of "giving the West a taste of its own medicine" it made them look like bloodthirsty psychopaths.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other leaders of the Al-Qaeda in Iraq basically told Osama bin Laden to mind his own business. Osama was wherever he was at the time and they were running the show in Iraq and they felt that he had no right to judge them or tell them what to do since the only influence Osama had was whatever they would allow him. Eventually Al-Qaeda in Iraq became its own entity and despite the name, Al-Qaeda has little influence on the group.
It should also be noted that Al-Qaeda in Iraq wasn't a purely Iraqi operation. It's leadership came from other parts of the Arab world (al-Zarqawi was Jordanian) and even a lot of its fighters came from outside of Iraq. It should be noted that in the weeks leading up to the Iraq War that Saddam loosened Iraqi immigration and let in thousands of Jihadis from the Arab world to help with the war effort. Most of those fighters came from Syria. If you read accounts of Coalition soldiers who took part in the initial invasion, you will read about just how many foreign fighters they came across.
The Syrian Civil War is an outgrowth of the Arab Spring. Assad put down the initial protests and uprising and it eventually escalated into a civil war. The Syrian opposition is made of Islamic Fundamentalists, secular democratic reformers, defectors from the Syrian military, socialists, Syrian Kurds, and so on. It's quite the motley crew. You have groups that are just as bad as ISIS and share the exact same goals (like the al-Nursa Front) and you have former Syrian military officers who have goals that go no further than the overthrow of Assad fighting side by side and sometimes against each other.
ISIS is merely the largest and most ambitious of the Jihadist groups and they want it all and don't want t share even with the other Jihadis. There are also reports that Assad is actually focusing most of his resources in fighting the secular opposition as opposed to fighting ISIS and the Islamic Fundamentalist portion of the Syrian opposition. Since Syria has a large Shia and Christian population the idea is that Assad will have got rid of any realistic alternative for the majority of the Syrian people. It's either Assad or the guys who will cut your head off.
I first thought they were the rebels from Syria. But then I heard ISIS fights thise guys also. So where did thousands of these guys come from seemingly overnight? Something doesn't make sense. And why the hell did we take Saddam Hussein out when something 10x worse has taken his place?
And how come Europe doesn't do one friggen thing about anything ISIS, Russia or Anyother issues going on in the world?
For industrialized nations, they don't do sh*t!!
They've done plenty in other parts of the world. The US really didn't do a lot in Libya for instance.
I first thought they were the rebels from Syria. But then I heard ISIS fights thise guys also. So where did thousands of these guys come from seemingly overnight? Something doesn't make sense. And why the hell did we take Saddam Hussein out when something 10x worse has taken his place?
And how come Europe doesn't do one friggen thing about anything ISIS, Russia or Anyother issues going on in the world?
For industrialized nations, they don't do sh*t!!
Europe doesn't do anything about ISIS because the continent isn't populated by paranoid and perpetually frightened right wing goobers like that other nation on that other continent across the Atlantic from them.
I was listening to Radio Ground Zero last night and they had a theory that these guys are being propelled by dark supernatural forces. The puppet masters want us fighting over there and when we initially refused, then these guys show up and begin committing atrocities against Christians. Likewise the Palestinians and Hamas get stirred up.
Removing Assad was the initial plan which we seemed to have avoided. I'm tending more to thinking we need to have a hot war someplace, maybe there and in the Ukraine. To keep our attention from an even worse problem. Maybe a banking and economic collapse.
They could stage some sort of domestic terror and blame it on them. But the ISIS people are definitely in need of being wiped off the face of the earth.
Europe doesn't do anything about ISIS because the continent isn't populated by paranoid and perpetually frightened right wing goobers like that other nation on that other continent across the Atlantic from them.
No, just populated by complacent and obsequious Left-wing toadies that routinely ignore Jihadis in their own countries and crap themselves at identifying rioters, gang rapists, and violent thugs as Muslims, I mean "youths".
ISIS fighters are camera saying that even if they don't succeed that they have plenty of fighters from around the Western world who will be coming back to carry out Jihad in the West. Will they "raise the flag of Allah over the White House"? Of course not, at least not in my lifetime. Can they kill a lot of people and blow some s--t up in the meantime? Oh yeah.
But the best you can come up with is "I'm going to eat a steak. Hur hur hur." Good for you. But the problems of the world don't just go away when you ignore them.
We have the opportunity to nip this in the bud before it does become a real threat. ISIS has made it explicitly clear that they want to take on the West the second they have a chance. They are known to have hundreds of Westerners in their ranks. In areas they occupy they are working indoctrinate the youth. They called the "Generation of Jihad" and "Those that were born to die". You don't think ISIS taking over a country or two (maybe more) and turning them into a totalitarian states with the sole goal of making our lives a little more interesting might just cause a few problems down the road?
ISIS is a breakaway group from Al-Qaeda in Iraq which was itself a breakaway from the main structure of Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq broke off from Al-Qaeda because Osama bin Laden and many of the other leaders of Al-Qaeda took issue with the beheading videos being produced by the Iraqi Al-Qaeda chapters and the random car bombings. He felt it was giving Al-Qaeda a bad image. Osama bin Laden preferred large scale terrorist attacks focusing on Western economic and military power. Osama liked the symbolism of flaming skyscrapers and military bases and that played well in the Muslim world, but he thought the idea of blowing up random Muslims in a marketplace or sawing the head off a terrified civilian on camera (even if it was an infidel) was giving them a bad image and instead of "giving the West a taste of its own medicine" it made them look like bloodthirsty psychopaths.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other leaders of the Al-Qaeda in Iraq basically told Osama bin Laden to mind his own business. Osama was wherever he was at the time and they were running the show in Iraq and they felt that he had no right to judge them or tell them what to do since the only influence Osama had was whatever they would allow him. Eventually Al-Qaeda in Iraq became its own entity and despite the name, Al-Qaeda has little influence on the group.
It should also be noted that Al-Qaeda in Iraq wasn't a purely Iraqi operation. It's leadership came from other parts of the Arab world (al-Zarqawi was Jordanian) and even a lot of its fighters came from outside of Iraq. It should be noted that in the weeks leading up to the Iraq War that Saddam loosened Iraqi immigration and let in thousands of Jihadis from the Arab world to help with the war effort. Most of those fighters came from Syria. If you read accounts of Coalition soldiers who took part in the initial invasion, you will read about just how many foreign fighters they came across.
The Syrian Civil War is an outgrowth of the Arab Spring. Assad put down the initial protests and uprising and it eventually escalated into a civil war. The Syrian opposition is made of Islamic Fundamentalists, secular democratic reformers, defectors from the Syrian military, socialists, Syrian Kurds, and so on. It's quite the motley crew. You have groups that are just as bad as ISIS and share the exact same goals (like the al-Nursa Front) and you have former Syrian military officers who have goals that go no further than the overthrow of Assad fighting side by side and sometimes against each other.
ISIS is merely the largest and most ambitious of the Jihadist groups and they want it all and don't want t share even with the other Jihadis. There are also reports that Assad is actually focusing most of his resources in fighting the secular opposition as opposed to fighting ISIS and the Islamic Fundamentalist portion of the Syrian opposition. Since Syria has a large Shia and Christian population the idea is that Assad will have got rid of any realistic alternative for the majority of the Syrian people. It's either Assad or the guys who will cut your head off.
Good Post - I follow events in the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan & Israel) pretty closely - that means I read articles from a variety of sources every week, and most days. You can't keep up if you don't do it regularly -- I've done this for 8 years.
That's a good background - but let's discuss Syria a bit more to fill in some details. Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS/ISIL/IS are not the same, IS is much worse as al-Nusra follows the bin-Laden, and his successor - Ayman al-Zawahiri method of Jihad. They are Salafists just as ISIS/ISIL/IS are and both want to establish the Islamic State - but the Zawahiri led Al-Qaeda does not believe you can do it by chopping heads. They are perfectly willing to kill those who don't practice Islam the way they demand, but also know that excess brutality turns people away. I have no patience with those who think that the Al Qaeda group called Al-Nusra is the same as the Head Chopping group ISIS/ISIL/IS .... they are rivals, two forms of leadership who both want to establish an Islamic State and claim the crown of bin-Laden.
Now ..... how did these two groups begin? Neither of them could have formed with Bashar al-Assad. AQI couldn't have grown and sustained it's self without Bashar al-Assad. His (and his father's) history was to put down the Muslim Brotherhood (father of all Jihad groups) in Syria - the massacre of 20,000 people at Hama, pretty much put a stop to Extremist Jihadi groups in Syria. They were imprisoned and then al-Assad started funneling them into Iraq during the war to join al-Qaeda in Iraq. After they were defeated in Iraq, they tried to come back into Syria (those that didn't go to other places to fight) and Assad threw them back into prison.
According to a cache of al Qaeda in Iraq personnel files captured in 2007 in the Iraqi border town of Sinjar, every single one of the 600-plus foreign fighters in the records had entered Iraq from Syria. Some, including top U.S. officials, have concluded that the Syrian government was complicit in the movement of these men through its territory, and that in so doing it achieved two objectives—domestically, it (temporarily) rid itself of potential threats from homegrown Islamists, and regionally, it would help hobble an American force that might turn its attention to Syria next.
As these battle hardened Jihadis started returning to Syria - they mostly ended up in either a detention center in Damascus or in the three-story Sednaya military prison. The second floor of Sednaya was devoted to Muslim Brothers captured in the 70-80's and the 4th floor became the Al-Qaeda wing which was isolated from all other prisoners. The rest of the prison is for Lebanese tossed there during the 15 year Syrian occupation of Lebanon and Sryian citizens that 'offended' Assad and his rule. This isolated group formed a close bond during the years they were Assad's prisoners. The AQI remnant Jihahis moved into Northern Syria and started to re-group in 2011.
After the Syrian uprising by civilians and the bad press Assad received for his brutality - he needed a scape goat AND somebody to put down the uprising by the Free Syrian Army (many of whole were Assad's Army deserters) .... he had a handy dandy group of "Terrorists" at hand, right in his own prison.
[b]In the summer of 2011 - Bashar al-Assad released prisoners (300) from a detention center in Damascus and (400) from Sednaya Prison. This group became the core (battle hardened fighters) of al-Nusra.
“We were told by brothers with lots of experience [in jihad], who had spent a lot of time in Sednaya, that upon our release we should sit and not work,” he recalled. “Just sit and wait.”
The Islamists were sure that the Assad regime had offered the amnesty knowing full well that they would take up arms against it, and that kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, Othman and others who were in Sednaya told me, must have been what the government wanted. “If an Islamist brother was going to act, he was going to do so with weapons to face the security [forces]. It would be jihadi, and this would allow the regime to say to the world ‘Look at the terrorists.’ We were aware of this,” he said, but that didn’t stop them from preparing to do just that anyway. “In secret, we were working.”
Bashar al-Assad was telling the world that he was fighting "Terrorists", so he had to produce the "Terrorists". So we know where the fighters came from - where did they get the funding to form their Army and acquire weapons? Initially, it came from Turkey-Saudi Arabia-Qatar. Arms came in from Libya and Turkey. The new al-Nusra mostly fought in the countryside and gradually made their way to the "must keep at all costs" stronghold's of Assad in North-Eastern Syria. They were joined by fighters from the old AQ in Iraq (the head chopping bunch). The leaders of these two groups eventually butted heads on who would be the Leader of the new Islamic State - and now they fight each other. Sunni, mostly killing Sunni. It's also worth noting that ISIS/ISIL/IS made no attempts at all (same basically for al-Nusra) to take the battle to Damascus. Western Powers couldn't figure out what was going on - and made many errors in how to handle the situation. The Butcher of Damascus pretty much out-foxed them all ..... the point was to absolve himself from blame AND to get the USA to believe that only Assad could bring "stability" to Syria. We are now seeing that play out, with suggestions that the USA needs to "ally" with Assad for "stability" and to defeat ISIS/ISIL/IS. I actually think TeamO has been doing this for some time - "stability" & "containment" is a basic goal for most Administrations and for some odd reason that I've never been able to figure out - Assad plays this Game well. John Kerry & Hillary Clinton called him "a Reformer", even as he was rolling his first Tanks against his own people. IF there is anyone who really understands Assad well - it is probably the Lebanese & the Leadership in Saudi Arabia. I don't think TeamObama will ally themselves openly with Assad - the other Sunni Arab Nations would go berserk and it's difficult to flip-flop and become an Ally of The Butcher of Damascus - a man responsible for almost 200,000 dead Syrians.
Some articles that may be of interest to those who follow these events.
Calling terrorists by any name is legitimizing their existence.
They are terrorists that need to be exterminated.
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