Report: Islamic State Expanding by the Thousands
Report: Islamic State Expanding by the Thousands, Breitbart, Frances Martel, August 20, 2014
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group dedicated to following the developments on the ground in the Syrian Civil War, tells Reuters that the jihadist terror group, the Islamic State (IS), has expanded by “at least 6,300” jihadists in the past month, the fastest expansion of the organization to date.
Rami Abdelrahman, founder of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told the news outlet that this expansion significantly enhances the Islamic State’s ability to grow its activities outside of strongholds. Reuters notes that anecdotal evidence from speaking to individuals living in Raqqa, Syria–the city the Islamic State has proclaimed its capital–corroborates the large increase in Islamic State members. While as many as one thousand of these recruits are international, the majority who have been enlisted into the terrorist group are Syrian.
Reuters cites the total number of Islamic State fighters at 15,000, but estimates vary. Al Jazeera is reporting that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights offered a number as large as 50,000 jihadists, including 20,000 foreigners from “Chechnya, China, Europe and Arab countries,” who had entered Syria mostly through Turkey. They also cite a source directly tied to the Islamic State telling the Qatari outlet that there were 30,000 active jihadists working for IS in Iraq.
The Islamic State’s media operation has dedicated much of its efforts to recruiting international jihadists to travel out of the West and into Iraq and Syria. The group’s Al Hayat Media outlet has released videos calling for Indonesian, Bosnian, Canadian, and other Western Muslims to abandon their families and move to Syria to fight jihad. One video specifically targeted UK and Australian Muslims to leave the West. Reports have surfaced that the Islamic State has even resorted to handing out free fried chicken vouchers to recruit Muslims to wage jihad on their behalf in the Middle East.
On the ground in Syria, the Islamic State also uses “preaching vans” to travel from town to town recruiting jihadists–this in addition to forcing religious minorities in areas they control to convert to Islam and pay the infidel’s tax (jizya), leave the area, or be killed. The Islamic State has been known not only to target and kill those of other religions, but execute fellow Sunni Muslims who are considered insufficiently extreme in their religious ideology. In June, Islamic State jihadists displayed the bodies of nine men crucified in Syria who were identified as anti-Assad Muslims rebels, but were not considered extreme enough in their embrace of jihad. They were, therefore, crucified as an example to others.
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WarSclerotic 
August 21, 2014 at 12:50 PM
More IS recruits just means more military targets for us now. NATO needs to step up to this threat on its doorstep – Turkey has to stop secretly supporting these savages and send its forces to control the border crossings and other transit points. The West needs to quietly make a deal with Assad to work together – the rebellion has long since failed and serves no purpose now other than to strengthen IS. The IS needs to be surrounded, cornered at every point, including getting the Iraqi Sunni tribes back on side (already in motion) and then hit hard with brutal and merciless air and ground assaults from every side. Fuel air bombs, cluster bombs, napalm, carpet bombing where possible. Any non-locals found in the area should be given no way to escape back to their homelands, and killed to a man. Do what the Afghan army is now doing to the Taliban. Kill on sight, no prisoners. These scum renounced their humanity long ago and need to be treated as the bugs that they are. Eradication to the last one. They are an insult to the human race and our planet, as well as to Islam in general, which has largely denounced them as scum too.
August 21, 2014 at 2:48 PM
Not only that, they are hypocritical. ISIS aka ISIL aka IS (whoever) denounces the West and our ways, but readily adopts the ways of Western warfare using Western weapons.