Damn fine shot Reşo Teyrebaz @r3sho 52m52 minutes ago PKK spots an #ISIS fuel truck in #Shengal from ~1km away & blows up it up w/ a single tracer bullet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mil_Sz26F5w… via @Rojnewsku
Will be interesting to see what the deal with Iran does in regard to Syria. Iran ramping up support for Assad means Saudi Arabia among others will do more for the rebels. Of course, there's only so much Iran can do without committing thousands of trained troops and competent commanders which are Assad's biggest need.
US has really been increasing air strikes around Ramadi and Falljuah. Will be interesting to see if the ISF can take those cities
think this is the 3rd Iranian "general" killed archicivilians @archicivilians #Syria: Iranian #IRGC General AbdulKarim Ghobash, killed by Rebels in the ongoing battle in #Zabadani city. Doloroso @Pyrrha108 16m16 minutes ago #Hasakah 34 Daeshbags killed by YPG YPJ. Hasakah - Raqqa road now under YPG YPJ control http://en.hawarnews.com/ypg-road-between-heseke-and-raqqa-under-control-of-our-forces/… Rojava
I'm pretty sure this hasn't happened yet but is just on the table at this point, but is Turkey still making moves against the Kurds if this happens? Because that is some wild equivocating they've get going on if so.
“I had collected 20 million tomans to buy a Kia. But now with sanctions lifted, I’m not sure if I should go for a Maserati or a Porsche.”
Did the bitch from Hoover ever surface? Is she like a full fledge member to ISIS now? By full fledge member I mean does she have a head dress covering 99% of her face and her job is popping out little terrorist babies?
I think they're still gonna go after their extreme element but let the YPG do their thing. If they keep expanding in Syria and Iraq won't it mean less for Turkey to worry about if/when the wars finish? Turkey has done more to stop ISIS recently, likely because we've put pressure on them. What the fuck are they talking about with the "coalition hitting Assad's forces"? We're obviously targeting ISIS and have recently hit Al-Nusra/Al-Qaeda but not Assad. If anything we're silently hoping the SAA can stop ISIS and other Islamic groups since the so called "moderate rebels" are way too small to matter.
I refuse to believe that 80% of that black area is anything but uninhabited desert. it's like taking Wyoming and coloring in the entire state as an inhabited area.
Ok, not to defend child soldier making here, but should 15-17 really be considered "child soldier" category? You can enlist at 17 here, for goodness sake. We had a 12-year old fight in WW2 and a 15 year old die in Vietnam. And the definition of "adult" can be very different in different cultures.
It's mainly desert. Most of the population of Syria lives in areas controlled by the Assad regime despite ISIS and other groups controlling most of the land.
yea I mean I buy them being in the major cities for sure but if there's x amount of square kilometers of desert and there happens to be one village with 8 people and 2 goats in it and they send 2 schmucks with a broken AK and a shitty truck out to make an outpost out of the village I don't think they actually control that x amount of land.
This is why all of the ISIS rampaging in Iraq stuff from earlier this year was bullshit. For the most part they were taking huge swaths of the desert in Anbar. The real battles are the ones for the cities.
Well I mean they did capture the 2nd largest city in the country and start rampaging what we thought was stable Kurdish territory. No doubt Erbil was in serious trouble if we didn't begin airstrikes.
They attacked Erbil and didn't succeed, I'm not sure that counts as rampaging. The Ramadi thing was bad but ISIS has done nothing but lose ground to the Kurds in northern Iraq and Syria, and lost Tikrit.
Read it wrong, didn't realize you limited it to this year. I was talking about 2014 when they took Mosul, and seemed about to take Erbil. I don't think Erbil has ever actually been attacked.
Follow Coldkurd™@ColdKurd #Al_hasaka During the last 24 hours #YPG advanced in the south-west and south-east #ISIS almost trapped in the city
ISIS in Egypt hit an Egyptian Navy vessel with a guided missile: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/re...-egy-1718202121
Will be interesting to see what happens with the Kurds and SAA. There's a whole lotta "enemy of my enemy" stuff in Syria, Assad doesn't wanna give in to the Kurds but he's too weak to do anything about them. Hopefully people have stopped spouting the "Assad is allied with ISIS" shit.
Of course he wasn't allied with them, but he did actively aid ISIS in several different battles. There's no doubt that he viewed ISIS as a tool in all of this, that if he could eliminate the "moderate" rebel factions, and it was just he vs. ISIS, that the international community would support him.
It's definitely helped him politically and obviously more people are on his side now. The most common example people use is the regime buying oil from ISIS(where else would they get it?). The number of airstrikes against ISIS compared to the FSA, Nusra, etc is also used but they've still hit ISIS plenty. The Air Force wastes a lot on deplorable barrel bombing anyway and that started before ISIS became the power they are today.
But there have been specific occasions where the SAA has bombed "moderate" rebel positions when they were engaged with ISIS rather than Syrian state forces, and did not strike ISIS. I don't think there's really any way to view that other than a form of collusion.
Retired General: Drones Create More Terrorists Than They Kill, Iraq War Helped Create ISIS Retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, a top intelligence official in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says in a forthcoming interview on Al Jazeera English that the drone war is creating more terrorists than it is killing. He also asserts that the U.S. invasion of Iraq helped create the Islamic State and that U.S. soldiers involved in torturing detainees need to be held legally accountable for their actions. Flynn, who in 2014 was forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s Middle East strategy, calling for a more hawkish approach to the Islamic State and Iran. But his enthusiasm for the application of force doesn’t extend to the use of drones. In the interview with Al Jazeera presenter Mehdi Hasan, set to air July 31, the former three star general says: “When you drop a bomb from a drone … you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good.” Pressed by Hasan as to whether drone strikes are creating more terrorists than they kill, Flynn says, “I don’t disagree with that.” He describes the present approach of drone warfare as “a failed strategy.” “What we have is this continued investment in conflict,” the retired general says. “The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just … fuels the conflict.” https://firstlook.org/theintercept/...-terrorists-kill-iraq-war-helped-create-isis/ Totally agree with him.
Yeah think it happened most recently when ISIS tried to advance towards Aleppo, that's fair enough to call it collusion. There's a million "enemy of my enemy" scenarios that have taken place in the civil war, I don't view it as an alliance when ISIS is executing every SAA soldier they capture. Besides the southern faction of the FSA who are the closet thing to moderates, pretty much every other group has allied with Islamic extremists.
Seems like the US bombing campaign is really picking up lately. Seeing 30+ strikes a day now. Going to be interesting to see if ISIS starts collapsing a bit in Anbar and northern Syria. I don't know how they can fight on so many fronts.
Yeah, I don't call it an alliance, because both want the destruction of the other, but there's no doubt the SAA wants ISIS to destroy the FSA/IF/etc., and will help them do so.
Doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. Shitty AMC Show of innocents along with the terrorists, or their families is only going to result in regular people seeing it as a cause to take up arms or harbor further animosity to the US. The drones are fine attacking purely military positions of Islamic State, but not as some kind of Orwellian police force.
There's a shitload more jihadists who will die for their cause as opposed to Alawites willing to die for Assad.
New ISIS video purports to show child cutting off a prisoner’s head ISIS The boy, whose age is not known, uses a small knife to cut off the head of a Syrian soldier, according to the latest video released by ISIS. ISIS has hit a new low of depravity with the Friday release of a video showing a boy sawing off the head of a Syrian soldier with a small knife. The child, clad in camouflage, leans over the handcuffed prisoner and jerks the man's head back by his hair. Then the boy methodically cuts off the man's head. ISIS TEENS EXECUTE 25 SYRIAN PRISONERS IN FRONT OF CROWD An older militant stands watch over Shitty AMC Show, according to Britain's The Independent. The video, seen by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, is believed to be the first showing a child decapitating an ISIS prisoner. It was taken near the ancient city of Palmyra, which was overrun by ISIS killers in May. Meanwhile, in France, three young men appeared in a Paris court, charged with plotting an attack on a military base after receiving orders from ISIS, prosecutors said. ISIS ISIS releases video purporting to show this unidentified boy decapitating a Syrian soldier near the ancient city of Palmyra. EDITORIAL: SLAUGHTER RUNS WILD AS ISIS EXPANDS AND U.S. DOES LITTLE The boy in the video, whose age was not known, looks at the camera with soulless eyes as he takes the man's severed head and places it on the corpse's back. The marauding militants have previously shown male children shooting to death prisoners, including a May massacre in which 25 boys were lined up to assassinate 25 prisoners. In March, smiling children were seen escorting prisoners to their decapitations and handing over knives to executioners. That same month, a boy was seen shooting to death a man ISIS claimed was an Israeli spy. The terrorists call the boys the “cubs of the Caliphate.” In the latest video, an ISIS gunman says the group's goal is to conquer Jerusalem and Rome, "inshallah" (God willing). ON A MOBILE DEVICE? WATCH THE VIDEO HERE. Tags: isis
Net result of the Hasakah fighting: 3090x1122 Basically the Kurds got a lot of the outlying (former) SAA areas, while the SAA kept some of their dense city-held parts. Also ISIL may not be 100% encircled yet since that southern YPG part is very sparely controlled/populated, so ISIL may try to do a blitz/retreat through nominally-YPG territory. http://america.aljazeera.com/articl...e-isil-run-schools-as-shariah-institutes.html
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer250/foot-soldiers-islamic-republic’s-“culture-modesty” good article about the workings of Iranian's morality police, from a good periodical.
ISIS leadership wants to ban execution videos http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/isis-islam...ghdadi-bans-gruesome-execution-videos-1511497 I mean, the executions aren't gonna stop. But the videos hopefully will
(CNN)An explosion ripped through a rally Monday in the Turkish border town of Suruc, leaving at least 27 people dead and wounding 100 others, the country's Interior Ministry said. The ministry blamed the explosion on a "terrorist attack" and said the death toll may rise. The explosion occurred at midday at the Amara Cultural Park in Suruc, where a group had gathered calling for more help to rebuild the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani, CNN Turk reported. Suruc is across the border from that Syrian city, which was the scene of intense fighting between Syrian rebels and Kurdish forces and ISIS.
Cahit Storm@cahitstorm 11m11 minutes ago PKK statement: we can no longer distinguish ISIS members from Turkish intelligence agent.massacre in Suruç was perpetrated by AKP & partner Hope PKK doesn't start bombings in Turkey now. Would give Turkey a reason to invade.
at least 24 of the victims in Suruc were university students. 8 psychology, 6 sociology, 6 law and 6 medicine.
The suicide bombing of Kurds today. They blame turkey intelligence and are rioting all over turkey and syria