BAGHDAD (AP) — Militants from the Islamic State group blocked all mobile phone networks in the largest Iraqi city they control, Mosul, accusing informants in the city of tipping off coalition forces to their whereabouts, residents told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Residents described a scene of "chaos" and "paralysis" in the city Thursday, a day after the militants announced their decision on their Mosul-based radio network. Businesses were at a standstill as residents tried to understand what was happening, they said. Some are still able to access the Internet, which operates under a different network. . . . .
Strange bedfellows, indeed.Astronuc said:US says Iranian fighter jets bomb IS jihadists in Iraq
http://news.yahoo.com/iranian-jets-carried-anti-air-raids-iraq-us-232852689.html
Escalation? Awkward partnership?
Well, too bad they didn't figure this out before joining Daesh.London (AFP) - The Islamic State extremist group has executed 100 of its own foreign fighters who tried to flee their headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Financial Times newspaper said Saturday.
An activist opposed to both IS and the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is well-known to the British business broadsheet, said he had "verified 100 executions" of foreign IS fighters trying to leave the jihadist group's de facto capital.
IS fighters in Raqqa said the group has created a military police to clamp down on foreign fighters who do not report for duty.
Some jihadists have become disillusioned with the realities of fighting in Syria, reports have said. According to the British press in October, five Britons, three French, two Germans and two Belgians wanted to return home after complaining that they ended up fighting against other rebel groups rather than Assad's regime. They were being held prisoner by IS.
The general leading the new U.S. military task force carrying out operations in Iraq and Syria said Thursday that in future he’ll be calling the Islamic State “Daesh” — a first in the Pentagon but one that brings him in line with much of the Arab world.
I hope this sends a powerful message to anyone who was still considering sacrificing his future and go join them.Astronuc said:IS has executed 100 foreigners trying to quit: report
http://news.yahoo.com/executed-100-foreigners-trying-quit-report-140040461.html
""There is an awful sense of normalcy in Mosul," Todenhoefer said in an exclusive interview with CNN.
"130,000 Christians have been evicted from the city, the Shia have fled, many people have been murdered and yet the city is functioning and people actually like the stability that the Islamic State has brought them."
""I think the Islamic State is a lot more dangerous than Western leaders realize,""Astronuc said:Author's journey inside ISIS: They're 'more dangerous than people realize'
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/22/world/meast/inside-isis-juergen-todenhoefer/index.html"
- One ISIS spokesman told Todenhofer: "slavery and beheadings [are] part of our religion"
"
- ISIS "preparing the largest religious cleansing campaign the world has ever seen," says Todenhoefer
BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Islamic State militant group has killed 1,878 people in Syria during the past six months, the majority of them civilians, a British-based Syrian monitoring organization said on Sunday.
Islamic State also killed 120 of its own members, most of them foreign fighters trying to return home, in the last two months, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The militant group has taken vast parts of Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate in territory under its control in June. Since then it has fought the Syrian and Iraqi governments, other insurgents and Kurdish forces.
Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Syrian monitoring group, told Reuters that Islamic State killed 1,175 civilians, including eight women and four children.
He said 930 of the civilians were members of the Sheitaat, a Sunni Muslim tribe from eastern Syria which fought Islamic State for control of two oilfields in August.
. . .
HossamCFD said:I hope this sends a powerful message to anyone who was still considering sacrificing his future and go join them.
On a more fundamental level, I have a feeling that the whole ISIS thing might cause some disillusion about the caliphate idea in the minds of the general public in Muslim majority countries. I remember 10~15 years ago the concept of a caliphate was very often treated as a respected, albeit unattainable and a bit irrelevant, goal. Even though when people spoke of the caliphate they didn't usually have the stuff of ISIS in mind, some sort of Sharia law has always been at the heart of any discussion about the caliphate. Before ISIS the concept was pretty much untested, at least in the modern setup, and there was always room to argue for it at least theoretically. I feel like many people are now realising that this is just a bad idea.
I know and I think that will always remain the case. I think it's very difficult to completely defeat any ideology, however such an ideology becomes of little relevance when its proponents become the fringe. What matters to me is when the attitude of the average bloke towards the traditional caliphate idea changes from respect to almost ridicule.Czcibor said:As warning: in the West there are still some people who would tell you that communism is a good idea, just the true one actually wasn't implemented.
Czcibor said:As warning: in the West there are still some people who would tell you that communism is a good idea, just the true one actually wasn't implemented.
HossamCFD said:I know and I think that will always remain the case. ..
Not on a party in my country. In 1939 we had a joint Hitler-Stalin invasion, so it would not work. (nowadays we joke that Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact is a rare case of an agreement in which Russians haven't betrayed their ally.) However, still we have some serious level of double standard concerning treatment of those both regime in case of prosecutions.mheslep said:Perhaps, though that should not be the case IMO, that is, it should be beyond the pale. There's no social pass for saying Hitler had it all right at a cocktail party, but Stalin or Mao? Its radical, but one can get a way with it.
Yes, I should have excepted eastern Europe above. I traveled there years ago and made the mistake one day of wearing a shirt in public given to be me by a Russian athlete with Cyrillic writing on the back. The glares from every direction at me, and not my fiance, were unmistakable. Unfortunately, I'd guess that a large portion of the world's population outside Europe is oblivious that Stalin invaded Poland cooperatively with Hitler. Heck, there's no Hollywood film about the Stalin in Poland. Instead, we have this:Czcibor said:Not on a party in my country. In 1939 we had a joint Hitler-Stalin invasion, so it would not work. ...
...was made in response to a request by Franklin D. Roosevelt. ...
The film, made during World War II, shows the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in a positive light. Completed in late April 1943, the film is, in the words of Robert Buckner, the film's producer, "an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation"
So far an estimated few dozen Westerners have joined Kurdish fighters battling Islamic State in northern Syria, including Americans, Canadians, Germans, and Britons.
The Syrian Kurdish armed faction known as the YPG has not released official numbers confirming foreign or "freedom fighters" and academics say it's hard to assess the total.
But the number pales compared to an estimated 16,000 fighters from about 90 countries to join Islamic State since 2012, according to the U.S. Department of State figures.
Bystander said:"ISIS adopts two billion dollar budget for 2015" just now in my peripheral vision on the news ticker. Enough bean-counters and they'll be as paralyzed as the rest of the world...
Czcibor said:As warning: in the West there are still some people who would tell you that communism is a good idea, just the true one actually wasn't implemented.
Juergen Todenhoefer: "Terrible to feel that people can be enthusiastic about killing hundreds of millions of people"
"There is an enthusiasm that I've never seen before in warzones," he said.
"They are so confident, so sure of themselves. At the beginning of this year, few people knew of IS. But now they have conquered an area the size of the UK. This is a one per cent movement with the power of a nuclear bomb or a tsunami."
Why we should be concerned."Thirty years ago it took a long time to get everyone to Afghanistan" where jihadists were fighting Soviet troops, he said.
"Now they propagate through social media, that's why it can happen so quickly, they can rapidly ramp up recruitment."
Though jihadist propaganda is primarily intended to encourage Western recruits to join them in battle, it also urges sympathisers to carry out attacks at home.
Disenchanted extremists from the Taliban and other organizations, impressed by the Islamic State group's territorial gains and slick online propaganda, have begun raising its black flag in extremist-dominated areas of both countries.
The recent early morning clash between a Saudi border patrol and extremists trying to enter Saudi Arabia from Iraq appears to be the latest indicator of the Islamic State’s (ISIS) intent to expand its influence and control from its stronghold in Syria and Iraq south into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the rest of the Arab Gulf where there is oil and what ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers would consider the ultimate prizes: the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-border-guards-shoot-sight-orders-101257550.htmlRiyadh (AFP) - Saudi border guards have been given orders to shoot infiltrators on sight after three troopers were killed on the Iraqi frontier earlier this month, a spokesman said on Monday.
The orders apply to guards patrolling the southern border with Yemen as well as the northern frontier with Iraq, Major General Mohammed al-Ghamdi told AFP.
More than two dozen farmers told Reuters they had not planted the normal amount of seed, because they could not access their land, did not have the proper fertilizers or adequate fuel, or because they had no guarantees that Islamic State would buy their crop as Baghdad normally does.
Farmers, and Iraqi and United Nations' officials, now fear a drastically reduced crop this spring. That could leave hundreds of thousands of Iraqis hungry. But another big loser would be Islamic State, which controls territory that normally produces as much as 40 percent of Iraq's wheat crop.
I can't wait till these guys run out of oil moneyAstronuc said:How long can Saudi Arabia stand on the sidelines?
Astronuc said:How long can Saudi Arabia stand on the sidelines?
http://www.newsweek.com/islamic-state-aims-occupy-mecca-300205
Makes me think of a fireman who also happens to be the village pyromaniac.Czcibor said:What do you mean by sideline? ;)
In military and intelligence cooperation they are clearly in alliance with the USA.
In case of ideology they are using locally and exporting Wahhabism, which is fuelling ISIS like movements.
The problem is that dropping that ideology would mean collapse of Saudi gov, so they don't have much choice so are heroically fighting problems that they create in the same time.
Yukawa, aged around 42 and who dreamed of becoming a military contractor, was captured in August outside the Syrian city of Aleppo. Goto, 47, a war correspondent with experience in Middle East hot spots, went to Syria in late October to try to help Yukawa.
Astronuc said:How long can Saudi Arabia stand on the sidelines?