Posted tagged ‘Iraq’

Iraq Welcomes Russian Airstrikes Against ISIL

October 6, 2015

Top Diplomat: Iraq Welcomes Russian Airstrikes Against Islamic State

BY:
October 5, 2015 4:50 pm

Source: Iraq Welcomes Russian Airstrikes Against ISIL

 

Unsatisfied by the Obama administration’s campaign against the Islamic State in the region, the Iraqi government welcomes Russian airstrikes against the terrorist group inside Iraq, according to a top diplomat.

The Air Force Times reported:

The Iraqis feel that the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State has become too focused on Syria and has not made enough progress on the ground in Iraq, a senior Iraqi diplomat, who asked to speak on condition of anonymity, told Air Force Times on Monday. The official accused the coalition fores of moving too slowly, thereby missing opportunities to roll back the Islamic State in Iraqi cities. Since more than 2,000 Russians are among the Islamic State’s ranks and Russia has experience fighting Islamic militants in Chechnya, it makes sense to include Russia in anti-Islamic State efforts, he said.

While Iraq is open to the possibility of Russian airstrikes, the diplomat said that the Iraqi government would not welcome Russian troops on the ground fighting the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIL or ISIS). Iraq has not formally asked Russia to conduct airstrikes in the country.

Ignoring warnings from the Obama administration, Russia has been increasing its military activity in Syria in recent weeks in order to allegedly combat IS and bolster the Bashar al-Assad regime. Moscow has sent troops and military aid to Syria and last week conducted its first airstrikes there.

Russian warplanes dropped bombs near the city of Homs in western Syria Wednesday, an area that is not controlled by Islamic State militants. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has expressed skepticism that the Russian strikes were targeting IS.

Iraq agreed last month to share intelligence with Russia and Syria in the effort against IS, but the top diplomat insisted Monday that the agreement will not put U.S. or other coalition forces at risk. He also called on the U.S. to provide Iraq with more M1A1 Abrams tanks so that Iraqi forces can reclaim the Anbar province from IS.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in July that the Obama administration bomb campaign against IS in the Middle East has yielded no perceivable degradation in the terrorist group’s forces.

Chinese warplanes to join Russian air strikes in Syria. Russia gains Iraqi air base

October 2, 2015

Chinese warplanes to join Russian air strikes in Syria. Russia gains Iraqi air base, DEBKAfile, October 2, 2015

Russia_China_480

Russia’s military intervention in Syria has expanded radically in two directions.DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report that China sent word to Moscow Friday, Oct. 2, that J-15 fighter bombers would shortly join the Russian air campaign that was launched Wednesday, Sept. 30. Baghdad has moreover offered Moscow an air base for targeting the Islamic State now occupying large swathes of Iraqi territory

Russia’s military intervention in Syria has five additional participants: China, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hizballah.

The J-15 warplanes will take off from the Chinese Liaoning-CV-16 aircraft carrier, which reached Syrian shores on Sept. 26 (as DEBKAfile exclusively reported at the time). This will be a landmark event for Beijing: its first military operation in the Middle East as well the carrier’s first taste of action in conditions of real combat.

Thursday night, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, made this comment on the Syrian crisis at a UN Security Council session in New York: “The world cannot afford to stand by and look on with folded arms, but must also not arbitrarily interfere (in the crisis).”

A no less significant development occurred at about the same time when Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, speaking to the US PBS NewsHour, said he would welcome a deployment of Russian troops to Iraq to fight ISIS forces in his country too. As an added incentive, he noted that this would also give Moscow the chance to deal with the 2,500 Chechen Muslims whom, he said, are fighting with ISIS in Iraq.

DEBKAfile’s military sources add that Al-Abadi’s words came against the backdrop of two events closely related to Russia’s expanding role in the war arena:

1.  A joint Russian-Iranian-Syrian-Iraqi war room has been working since last week out of the Iraqi Defense Ministry and military staff headquarters in Baghdad to coordinate the passage of Russian and Iranian airlifts to Syria and also Russian air raids. This command center is also organizing the transfer of Iranian and pro-Iranian Shiite forces into Syria.

2.  Baghdad and Moscow have just concluded a deal for the Russian air force to start using the Al Taqaddum Air Base at Habbaniyah, 74 km west of Baghdad, both as a way station for the Russian air corridor to Syria and as a launching-pad for bombing missions against ISIS forces and infrastructure in northern Iraq and northern Syria.

Russia has thus gained a military enclave in Iraq, just as it has in Syria, where it has taken over a base outside Latakia on the western coast of Syria. At the same time, the Habbaniyah air base also serves US forces operating in Iraq, which number an estimated 5,000.

‘Yesterday Russia Turned A New Page In The History Of The World’

October 1, 2015

Chairman Of The Hizbullah-Affiliated ‘Al-Akhbar’ Daily On Russian Air Campaign In Syria: ‘Yesterday Russia Turned A New Page In The History Of The World,’ Middle East Media Research Institute, October 1, 2015

In an article published in the Hizbullah-affiliated Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar on October 1, 2015, the chairman of the newspaper’s board of directors, Ibrahim Al-Amin, predicted that Russia’s air campaign in Syria will be merely a prelude to a larger military offensive involving ground operations by the Syrian Army, Iran, Hizbullah, and even the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces. Al-Amin is known to have close ties to Hizbullah, and in the past he has proven a reliable source on matters relating to the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah axis.

24967Ibrahim Al-Amin (source: Siyese.net)

The following is the translation of the article:

“…This is the first test for the granddaughter of the Eastern dynasty [i.e. Russia] since World War II, and it is the first field test of whether America’s unipolar position in the world over the past quarter century has truly been broken. Above all, this is a repositioning of Russian military force in the direct labor market of the regions of ‘cold’ confrontation with the U.S.-led West… Today we find ourselves before the best opportunity of putting Syria on a path to a true solution, even if it be prefaced by fire.

“As for the facts, the Russian air force carried out the first missions of a working program laid out in detailed form in an existing plan of cooperation between Moscow and its allies in the war in Syria and Iraq. This is a plan that is coordinated down to the finest details with the two allies Syria and Iran, and consequently with Hizbullah [as well]… What happened yesterday, and which will soon reach its culmination, is a necessary preface to a larger military action that will include a land component undertaken by other forces in the alliance. To put it more directly, [Russia’s] aerial bombardment of [the rebels’] command and control centers, major weapons arsenals, and artillery positions will be a preface to a military operation carried out by the Syrian army on the ground, with direct support from Iran and Hizbullah, and even from the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces… It may be emphasized that Russia’s activity yesterday means clearly that all the discussions in New York didn’t change an iota in the military plan of action…

“The signs of surprise and astonishment on [the faces of] the Americans, the Westerners, the Israelis, the Turks, and the Saudis are an additional proof of the weakness of the prior coordination regarding the fate of the initiatives surrounding the Syria crisis. In fact, the step taken by Russia is a kind of dare to all those who employed every violent means they could against the Syrian regime. If they decide to broaden the confrontation, they will be forced to deal with the new realities, which today are openly represented by the Russian military presence, and tomorrow will be represented by an open Iranian military presence as well…

“This must not hide from our eyes the picture of the complicated reality, which tells us that the joy felt by the regime elements in Syria must not turn into any slackening, not on the part of the regime itself, and not on the part of all those who fight alongside it. It would be naive to consider the Russian strikes sufficient to counter the enemies. It would rather be realistic to profit from the support of Russia – which is a supporting actor, and is not [itself] a member of the axis of resistance – in order to prepare to wage harsh and decisive battles in a number of places in Syria. This is a matter that requires raising the level of readiness and mobilization, and the creation of operative means of benefitting from the Russian military arsenal that is present in or coming to Syria.

“Yesterday Russia turned a new page in the history of the world. However far its military action in the field reaches, it is the political and strategic results that will remain more important. These results will invite those who delude themselves in thinking that America is still the leader of the world and controller of its fate to revise their stance. Those who do not want to change their minds, let them stay as they wish, but they should take into account that they must rely on themselves more than at any time in the past. This goes for Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and even the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa!”

At the U.N., Obama refuses to see the chaotic world he has made,

September 29, 2015

At the U.N., Obama refuses to see the chaotic world he has made, BreitbartJohn Hayward, September 28, 2015

ISIS-beheading-Christians-Libya-ap-640x480

President Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday morning was a rambling journey through a fantasy world where his foreign policy hasn’t been an unmitigated disaster.

Perhaps the most bizarre moment came when he tried to tout his Libyan adventure as a success.

There was plenty of tough-guy posturing that intimidated absolutely no one.  The Russian and Iranian delegations were especially good at looking bored and unimpressed when he called upon them to do this-or-that because The World supposedly demanded it. Obama hasn’t figured out he’s the only leader at the U.N. eager to sacrifice his nation’s interests to please The World.

Obama made the weird decision to vaguely threaten Russia over its invasion of Ukraine by claiming that The World would not stand idly by and allow it… when that’s exactly what The World, and especially First Citizen of the World Barack Obama, has been doing.  He essentially pleaded with Iran to stop supporting terrorist proxies and pursuing its aggressive regional ambitions, and focus on their economy instead.  (Of course, in Obama’s vigorous imagination, the U.S. has been enjoying an economic boom under his stewardship, instead of an endless grinding non-recovery and limp, sporadic growth, after Obama’s spending doubled the national debt in a single presidency.)

It was bad enough that the President talked about American troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan as the triumphant conclusion of an effective policy, rather than the hideous blunder that allowed ISIS to create a terror state, al-Qaeda to rise from the ashes, and the Taliban to begin planning its return to power.  At the same moment Obama was speaking, the Taliban was conducting a major offensive in Afghanistan, on par with the importance of ISIS taking Mosul in Iraq.  Obama’s pitifully small “New Syrian Force” of U.S.-backed rebels just handed a good deal of its American equipment over to al-Qaeda, and no one really knows what became of the unit itself.  Their predecessors were destroyed by al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in Syria, with less than half a dozen survivors still on the field.

When Obama boasted of the Libyan operation as the successful removal of a tyrant, jaws must have hit the floor around the room.  Libya is an unholy disaster, a wasteland of warlords fighting to keep ISIS off their turf.  It’s a key gateway for the incredible migratory tide blasting out of Africa and the Middle East and now surging across Europe.  And yet, Obama portrays it as [a] laudable example of tyrant removal… while modestly admitting that “our coalition could have, and should have, done more to fill a vacuum left behind.”

Of course he blamed everyone else in the “coalition” for the disaster in Libya. He’s Barack Obama.  The day may come when he takes responsibility for something, but today is not that day, and tomorrow isn’t looking good either.

The scary thing about Obama is that he believes so completely in the power of his own rhetoric.

He thinks he can reshape reality with his words.  When he scolds the Iranians for their “Death to America!” rhetoric by saying bloodthirsty chants don’t create jobs, he’s asking Iran to live up to the silly talking points he foisted off on the American people to cover the Iranian nuclear deal.  He’s commanding Iran to act like the enlightened, responsible nation-state he gambled the future of Israel, America, and much of the Western world on.

The Iranians, on the other hand, see no reason to knock off the “Death to America!” chants, disband their theocracy, and begin spending their days arguing about stimulus bills.  Belligerence has gotten them everything so far.  They’ve been rewarded for it… by Barack Obama.  They’ve got $150 billion in sanctions relief coming their way.  They can afford to send a few guys to sit in the U.N. General Assembly with pissy expressions on their faces while Obama rambles on about how geo-political crime does not pay.  They know for a fact it pays, quite handsomely.  The Iranians are already using their Obama loot to reinforce terror proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, and secure Bashar Assad in power.

Ah, yes, Bashar Assad… the dictator Obama still blathers on about removing from power, even as his own diplomatic apparatus gets used to the idea Assad is not going anywhere.  The only really good part of Obama’s speech was when he spent five seconds glaring at the Syrian ambassador before launching into his denunciation of barrel bombs and chemical weapons.  But you know what?  That Syrian ambassador gets paid enough to take a few seconds of hairy eyeball from the ineffectual American president.  The Russians are smoothly replacing American influence across the Middle East, in partnership with Iran.  The new order is taking shape.  Obama isn’t going to reverse that process by telling aggressive, bare-knuckle conquerors they should be ashamed of themselves.

The other dangerous thing about this delusional President is his belief in the “judgment of history.”

He’s constantly hitting on the idea that all of the world’s villains are on the wrong side of history, and will find themselves buried in the sands of time any day now.  It’s a dodge, a way of Obama evading responsibility.  Bashar Assad is going to remerge from the Wrong Side of History in pretty good shape.  ISIS is very comfortable there, as is Iran.  Qaddafi didn’t assume room temperature because History caught up with him. Vladimir Putin has a lovely view of Crimea from the wrong side of history.  The history of Europe is being reshaped by the tramping of a million “refugee” feet.

In every example, Obama clings to the idea that he can change the world by talking and scoring debate points, while his adversaries seize territory and control the course of events.  It’s not as though Obama has some deep-seated reluctance to use deadly force – there have been a lot of deaths by drone strike since he won that Nobel Peace Prize.  What Obama lacks is commitment.  His foreign policy is all about gestures and distractions.  He cooks up half-baked plans that will blow up a terrorist here and there, so he can’t be accused of doing “nothing,” but he won’t do anything that could cost him political capital at home.  Even Libya was half-hearted and calculated for minimum risk, which is why the place went to an even deeper Hell after Qaddafi was overthrown.

Obama talks as if he’s taken action against numerous crises, but all he ever did was talk about them.  The men of action are stacking up bodies, and raising flags over conquered cities, while this President is writing speeches and trying to win applause from editorial boards.  The men of action know that Obama’s promises all have expiration dates, his vows of action always have escape clauses, and no matter how he loves to boast that he heads up the most powerful military the world has ever seen, he’s done everything he can to make it weaker.

President Obama is still clinging to a romantic vision of the “Arab Spring” as a flourishing of democracy, despite all evidence to the contrary.  He’s giving the same foreign policy speeches he gave in 2009 because he can’t bear to live in the world he made.  He talks about filling vacuums and voids… but those voids are already filled, by hard characters with plans to make the most of the extraordinary opportunity Barack Obama afforded them.

(Video of Obama’s UN address — DM):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaJkTsy2SsQ

 

Two-State Solutions and Double Standards

September 22, 2015

Two-State Solutions and Double Standards Why is it only the Jewish state, and not Iraq or Syria, that is pressured to split into parts?

September 22, 2015

Joseph Puder

Source: Two-State Solutions and Double Standards | Frontpage Mag

The Assads in Syria and the Sunni-Muslim Saddam Hussein (now deceased) are examples of minorities ruling over majority populations not of their own ethnic or religious branch. The fall of Saddam’s Iraq was like Humpty Dumpty: once broken, it cannot be put together again.  In the Syrian civil-war, the Sunni-Muslim majority is determined to end the Assad dictatorial rule through unprecedented violence and mayhem. Atrocities are perpetrated by both the Assad regime and the Islamic State. It has resulted in fracturing Syria. Millions of Iraqis and Syrians are now displaced, streaming toward European shores. It is fair to ask why the U.S. and the West in general are not openly supporting the new realities in the Levant.

The George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama administrations have displayed double standards toward Israel with respect to the “two-state solution.” One can legitimately ask why not apply the three-state solution to Iraq and the five-state solution to Syria? Why is it that, according to Obama, the Jewish state can be split into parts (two states), while the artificial colonial creations of Iraq and Syria must remain unitary states? In the case of Israel, the territory it occupies from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean was recognized by the League of Nations as the historical homeland of the Jews.

British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill wrote in June, 1922 that the Jews are “in Palestine as of Right and not on Sufferance.” The text of the League of Nations mandate (July 24, 1922) entrusting the Mandate to Britain reads: “Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country; and whereas the Principal Allied Powers have selected His Britannic Majesty as the Mandatory for Palestine…”

Charles Krauthammer summarized in the National Post (March 20, 2015) the reasons why a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible at this time. “The fundamental reality remains: This generation of Palestinian leadership – from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas – has never and will never sign its name to a final peace settlement dividing the land with a Jewish State. And without that, no [Israeli] government of any kind will agree to a Palestinian state.”

Israel is being surrounded by jihadist forces in Gaza (Hamas) and in Lebanon (Hezbollah). In the Sinai Islamic state affiliates are attempting to destabilize the government of President al-Sisi of Egypt, and King Abdullah’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In Syria, both the Islamic State and the Assad regime with its Iranian allies threaten Israel. Should Israel vacate the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) to satisfy the Two-State solution, it will likely fall into Hamas’ hands. Israel’s population centers and industrial infrastructure will then be within range of Hamas’ rockets. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority ruled by Mahmoud Abbas is tottering and with little legitimacy. The two-state solution can only work if the Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state, take off the table Palestinian “right of return,” and only when the Middle East finds a modicum of regional stability that might allow Israel to take risks.

It is a different story in Iraq and Syria. Following the bloodbath in Syria that killed 250,000, few, if any, would want to live under the Assad dictatorial regime or the murderous and intolerant Caliphate of the Islamic State. The Kurds, after Kobane, want independence and perhaps a merger with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil (Northern Iraq). The Alawis (10-15% of the population of Syria) whose base is in northwestern Syria, expect the Sunni majority to exact revenge for the deadly attacks the Bashar Assad’s regime perpetrated against them. They too, would like an independent state or some form of loose federalism. The Sunni-Arab majority wants to rule Syria again, but that Syria would have to be without approximately 1.8 million Christians, or 10% of the population who would rather join their co-religionists in an expanded Christian Lebanon. The Kurds, Alawis, and Druze (the smallest group) would likewise not want to live in a fundamentalist Sunni-Arab dominated state.

One can easily envision five states (or statelets) in Syria: a large Sunni-Arab state in central-eastern Syria, bordering Iraq’s Anbar province (which contains some of the same tribes); a Kurdish state in the Northeastern corner of Syria bordering the KRG in northeastern Iraq; an Alawi state in northwestern Syria along the Mediterranean Sea; a new Christian state that would bring together the diminished Christians of Lebanon (who at one time led Lebanon and for whom the state was created in 1943 by the French) and the suffering Syrian Christians, in a territorially expanded region that would stretch from Beirut northeastward, including the Mount Lebanon area. Also, the Druze would prefer a small independent state around Jabal Druze in southwestern Syria.

Salman Shaikh, Director of the Brookings Doha Center, had this to say about Syria (January 6, 2015): “We have to recognize that Syria is now a broken, fragmented, divided state.” A regime change in Damascus and the demise of the Assad regime will inevitably bring an end to a unitary Syria.

Jeffrey Goldberg (January/February 2008) writing in The Atlantic pointed out that

[i]t was Winston Churchill who, in the aftermath of World War I, roped together three provinces of the defeated and dissolved Ottoman Empire, adopted the name Iraq, and bequeathed it to the luckless branch of the Hashemite tribe of West Arabia. Churchill would eventually call the forced inclusion of the Kurds in Iraq one of his worst mistakes ­­- but by then, there was nothing he could do about it. The British, together with the French, gave the world the modern Middle East. In addition to manufacturing the country now called Iraq, the grand Middle East settlement shrank Turkey by the middle of the 1920’s to the size of the Anatolian peninsula; granted what are now Syria and Lebanon to the French; and kept Egypt under British control.

The situation in Iraq has been clear since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Only a brutal dictator could keep Iraq together. Appearing on PBS News Hour, David Brooks of the New York Times (May 30, 2015) opined, “I give Joe Biden credit. He’ll renounce it, but years and years ago, probably 2006, 2007, he had an idea for a loose federal Iraq. And that, in retrospect – that looks to me like a smarter and smarter idea. We have tried to keep this country together, but the Shias are not really sharing power with the Sunnis. They’re not willing to give the Sunni forces the weapons and other things they need to defeat ISIS. The political system is still fractured. The soldiers clearly do not believe in that country[.]”

Recent U.S. administrations have pressured Israel to negotiate for an impractical two-state solution. They have, at the same time, insisted on maintaining Iraq and Syria as unitary states when it is clear that these artificial states created by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement are collapsing and are ungovernable. The time has come for the U.S. to support the hopes of the Kurds and others for independence, while supporting Israel’s historical rights to Judea and Samaria and its genuine security needs.

Islamic State building capacity for mass casualty attacks

August 10, 2015

Islamic State building capacity for mass casualty attacks

ByPamela Geller on August 9, 2015

Global jihad 2015

via Islamic State building capacity for mass casualty attacks | Pamela Geller.

Video added by me .

What, Obama worry? The “Junior Varsity” team is not Islamic, says our supreme leader.

The U.S. intelligence community warns that ISIS may be working to build the capability to carry out mass casualty attacks, calling it a “a significant departure from the terror group’s current focus on encouraging lone wolf attacks.” Nonsense. It’s merely in addition to. It’s a jihad, a holy war, on all fronts — individual Muslims, Muslim armies, et al: “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them.”

When are we going to actually deal with the enemy and its ideology?

“ISIS seen building capacity for mass casualty attacks,” By Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent, CNN, August 8, 2015

Washington (CNN)Some in the U.S. intelligence community warn that ISIS may be working to build the capability to carry out mass casualty attacks, a significant departure from the terror group’s current focus on encouraging lone wolf attacks, a senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Friday.

To date, the intelligence view has been that ISIS is focused on less ambitious attacks, involving one or a small group of attackers armed with simple weapons. In contrast, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, has been viewed as both more focused on — and more capable of — mass casualty attacks, such as plots on commercial aviation. Now the intelligence community is divided.

Meanwhile, the U.S. effort to train rebels in Syria to fight ISIS is having trouble.

Having trouble?? The 50 that the US recruited at the mind-blowing cost of 500 million dollars have “disappeared.”

The few rebels that the U.S. has put through training are already in disarray, with defense officials telling CNN that up to half are missing, having deserted soon after training or having been captured after last week’s attack by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front attack on a rebel site.

Al Nusra claims attack on U.S.-trained rebels in Syria

One defense official admitted to CNN that “they are no longer a coherent military unit,” and Pentagon officials acknowledged the approach of how to support the rebels has to change.

The potential change within ISIS itself is driven — in part — by a broadening competition between ISIS and AQAP for attention and recruits.

More nonsense. It’s a power struggle, no doubt, but both groups are the same. They are waging jihad to impose Islam on the world. Their playbook is the Qur’an. Their example is Muhammad.

There were struggles between the SA and SS in Nazi Germany. It hardly stopped the Nazis.

That same competition was evident this week when AQAP bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri made an online appeal to supporters to carry out lone wolf attacks.

“I think they’re taking a lot of the new recruits that don’t have time to train, who have not been brought up in their systems, and they’re using them to create the type of mass casualty which produces the media attention, which is exactly what they want, that shows they’re still powerful,” said CNN Military analysts Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling. Meanwhile, ISIS is continuing to draw large numbers of new foreign recruits. U.S. intelligence assesses that the formidable flow of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq has not abated.

isis tank

Currently, the total number of ISIS fighters is between 20,000 and 30,000, similar to the levels when the air campaign began, despite thousands of ISIS fighters believed to have been killed in coalition air strikes.

This number is far too low.

Turkey, the prime transit point into Syria, is still struggling to stem the flow. However, the U.S. believes its agreement to allow U.S. air strikes from a Turkish air base and to help establish a safe zone indicate Istanbul is stepping up.

The administration is also claiming gains on the ground.

Newly-Declassified U.S. Government Documents: The West Supported the Creation of ISIS Washington’s Blog

August 8, 2015

Newly-Declassified U.S. Government Documents: The West Supported the Creation of ISIS

Posted on May 24, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

via Newly-Declassified U.S. Government Documents: The West Supported the Creation of ISIS Washington’s Blog.

https://youtu.be/SG3j8OYKgn4

Judicial Watch has – for many years – obtained sensitive U.S. government documents through freedom of information requests and lawsuits.

The government just produced documents to Judicial Watch in response to a freedom of information suit which show that the West has long supported ISIS.   The documents were written by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency on August 12, 2012 … years before ISIS burst onto the world stage.

Here are screenshots from the documents. We have highlighted the relevant parts in yellow:

ISIS1Why is this important? It shows that extreme Muslim terrorists – salafists, Muslims Brotherhood, and AQI (i.e. Al Qaeda in Iraq) – have always been the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”

This verifies what the alternative media has been saying for years: there aren’t any moderate rebels in Syria (and see this, this and this).

The newly-declassified document continues:

ISIS 2Yes, you read that correctly:

there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime ….

In other words, the powers supporting the Syrian opposition – the West, our Gulf allies, and Turkey wanted an Islamic caliphate in order to challenge Syrian president Assad.

Sure, top U.S. generals – and vice president Vice President Joe Biden – have said that America’s closest allies support ISIS.  And mainstream American media have called for direct support of ISIS.

But the declassified DIA documents show that the U.S. and the West supported ISIS at its inception … as a way to isolate the Syrian government.  And see this.

This is a big deal.  A former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer and a former MI5 officer confirm that the newly-released documents are a smoking gun.

This is a train wreck long in the making.

Qatari Group Accused of Funding Hamas Hires D.C. Lobbyist

August 4, 2015

Qatari Group Accused of Funding Hamas Hires D.C. Lobbyist

Founding member Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aym funneled millions to al Qaeda in Syria, Iraq

BY:
August 4, 2015 5:00 am

via Qatari Group Accused of Funding Hamas Hires D.C. Lobbyist | Washington Free Beacon.

A Qatar-based charity accused of funding Hamas has hired a lobbyist to represent it in the United States.

The Sheikh Eid Bin Mohammed al-Thani Charitable Foundation, located in Doha, Qatar, recently brought aboard Wendell Belew, a Washington D.C.-based lawyer, to lobby on its behalf. Belew, who will work on issues dealing with “NGO regulations and charity best practices,” previously served as chief counsel of the House Budget Committee.

The foundation was one of 36 organizations banned in Israel in July 2008 for its links to fundraising for Hamas.

“This is a significant step against the global network which assists Hamas in raising funds. The order outlaws a great number of bodies that are active abroad and which are responsible for raising very large sums,” the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs said at the time of the foundation bans.

Abd al-Rahman al-Nu’aymi, a founding member of the organization, was said by U.S. officials in 2013 to have funneled millions of dollars to al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq.

The Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on Nu’aymi in December 2013 after he was named a specially designated global terrorist for being a “financier and facilitator who has provided money and material support and conveyed communications to al-Qa’ida and its affiliates in Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen for more than a decade.”

Nu’aymi ordered the transfer of $600,000 through an al Qaeda representative in Syria with the intention of transferring at least $50,000 more at a later date, according to the Treasury. Additionally, he oversaw a transfer of $2 million per month to al Qaeda in Iraq for an unspecified period of time.

This is not the first time that Belew has worked on behalf of a group with ties to terrorist organizations.

Belew previously represented the Saudi Arabia-based Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, an organization that was found to be a significant backer of al Qaeda.

In July 2004, Aqeel Abdulaziz Aqeel al-Aqeel, the foundation’s leader, was put on the United Nations Security Council Special Notice list of terrorists associated with al Qaeda.

In September 2004, the Treasury announced that the foundation’s American branch, which is based out of Oregon, had direct connections with Osama Bin Laden.

The Treasury investigation found “direct links” between the American branch and Osama bin Laden. It also alleged that the foundation had violated tax laws and engaged in other money laundering offenses. Individuals associated with the branch tried to conceal funds intended for Chechnya by omitting the information from their tax returns and instead claimed that the money was intended to purchase a prayer house in Springfield, Mo.

The Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation is now defunct. Wendell Belew could not be reached for comment.

General Michael Flynn and Ambassador Robert Joseph on Iran’s Missile Program and a Nuclear Deal

June 11, 2015

General Michael Flynn and Ambassador Robert Joseph on Iran’s Missile Program and a Nuclear Deal, Secure Freedom.Org. via You Tube, June 11, 2015

Former DIA Director Lt. General Michael Flynn and Ambassador Robert Joseph discuss their concerns about the exclusion of Iran’s ballistic missile program from the nuclear agreement currently being negotiated with Tehran and their belief that this deal will not stop or slow Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

 

Directive 11: Obama’s Secret Islamist Plan

June 8, 2015

Directive 11: Obama’s Secret Islamist Plan, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 8, 2015

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What little we know about the resulting classified 18-page report is that it used euphemisms to call for aiding Islamist takeovers in parts of the Middle East. Four countries were targeted. Of those four, we only know for certain that Egypt and Yemen were on the list. But we do know for certain the outcome.

Obama’s insistence that human rights be made a core national security interest paved the way for political and military interventions on behalf of Islamists. Obama had never been interested in human rights; his record of pandering to the world’s worst genocide plotters and perpetrators from Iran to Turkey to Sudan made that clear. When he said “human rights”, Obama really meant “Islamist power.”

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Behind the rise of ISIS, the Libyan Civil War, the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and across the region may be a single classified document.

That document is Presidential Study Directive 11.

You can download Presidential Study Directive 10 on “Preventing Mass Atrocities” from the White House website, but as of yet no one has been able to properly pry number 11 out of Obama Inc.

Presidential Study Directive 10, in which Obama asked for non-military options for stopping genocide, proved to be a miserable failure. The Atrocities Prevention Board’s only use was as a fig leaf for a policy that had caused the atrocities. And the cause of those atrocities is buried inside Directive 11.

With Obama’s typical use of technicalities to avoid transparency, Directive 11 was used to guide policy in the Middle East without being officially submitted. It is possible that it will never be submitted. And yet the Directive 11 group was described as “just finishing its work” when the Arab Spring began.

That is certainly one way of looking at it.

Directive 11 brought together activists and operatives at multiple agencies to come up with a “tailored” approach for regime change in each country. The goal was to “manage” the political transitions. It tossed aside American national security interests by insisting that Islamist regimes would be equally committed to fighting terrorism and cooperating with Israel. Its greatest gymnastic feat may have been arguing that the best way to achieve political stability in the region was through regime change.

What little we know about the resulting classified 18-page report is that it used euphemisms to call for aiding Islamist takeovers in parts of the Middle East. Four countries were targeted. Of those four, we only know for certain that Egypt and Yemen were on the list. But we do know for certain the outcome.

Egypt fell to the Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with Al Qaeda, Hamas and Iran, before being undone by a counterrevolution. Yemen is currently controlled by Iran’s Houthi terrorists and Al Qaeda.

According to a New York Times story, Obama’s Directive 11 agenda appeared to resemble Che or Castro as he “pressed his advisers to study popular uprisings in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to determine which ones worked and which did not.”

The story also noted that he “is drawn to Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, which ousted its longtime leader, Suharto, in 1998.”

The coup against Mubarak with its coordination of liberals, Islamists and the military did strongly resemble what happened in Indonesia. The most ominous similarity may be that the Muslim mobs in Indonesia targeted the Chinese, many of whom are Christians, while the Muslim mobs in Egypt targeted Coptic Christians.

Both were talented groups that were disproportionately successful because they lacked the traditional Islamic hostility to education, integrity and achievement. Islamist demagogues had succeeded in associating them with the regime and promoted attacks on them as part of the anti-regime protests.

Chinese stores were looted and thousands of Chinese women were raped by rampaging Muslims. Just as in Egypt, the protesters and their media allies spread the claim that these atrocities committed by Muslim protesters were the work of the regime’s secret police. That remains the official story today.

Suharto’s fall paved the way for the rise of the Prosperous Justice Party, which was founded a few months after his resignation and has become one of the largest parties in the Indonesian parliament. PJP was set up by the Muslim Brotherhood’s local arm in Indonesia.

His successor, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, was more explicitly Islamist than Suharto and his Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI) conducted a campaign against Christians, Hindus and Buddhists. It helped purge non-Muslims from government while Islamizing the government and Indonesia’s key institutions.

Habibie had been the Chairman of ICMI and ICMI’s Islamists played a key role in moving Suharto out and moving him in. It was obvious why Obama would have considered the Islamization of Indonesia and the purge of Christians under the guise of democratic political change to be a fine example for Egypt.

While we don’t know the full contents of Directive 11 and unless a new administration decides to open the vaults of the old regime, we may never know. But we do know a good deal about the results.

In its own way, PSD-10 tells us something about PSD-11.

Obama’s insistence that human rights be made a core national security interest paved the way for political and military interventions on behalf of Islamists. Obama had never been interested in human rights; his record of pandering to the world’s worst genocide plotters and perpetrators from Iran to Turkey to Sudan made that clear. When he said “human rights”, Obama really meant “Islamist power”.

That was why Obama refused to intervene when the Muslim Brotherhood conducted real genocide in Sudan, but did interfere in Libya on behalf of the Brotherhood using a phony claim of genocide.

Positioning Samantha Power in the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council was part of the process that made over the NSC from national security to servicing a progressive wish list of Islamist terrorist groups that were to be transformed into national governments.

Power, along with Gayle Smith and Dennis Ross, led the Directive 11 project.

Secret proceedings were used to spawn regime change infrastructure. Some of these tools had official names, such as “The Office of The Special Coordinator For Middle East Transitions” which currently reports directly to former ambassador Anne Patterson who told Coptic Christians not to protest against Morsi. After being driven out of the country by angry mobs over her support for the Muslim Brotherhood tyranny, she was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

“The Office” is still focused on “outreach to emergent political, economic and social forces in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya” even though counterrevolutions have pushed out Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia, while Libya is in the middle of a bloody civil war in which an alliance of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda controls the nation’s capital.

But even as Morsi’s abuses of power were driving outraged Egyptians into the streets, Gayle Smith, one of the three leaders of Directive 11, reached out to the “International Union of Muslim Scholars”, a Muslim Brotherhood group that supported terrorism against American soldiers in Iraq and which was now looking for American support for its Islamist terrorist brigades in the Syrian Civil War.

The men and women responsible for Directive 11 were making it clear that they had learned nothing.

Directive 11 ended up giving us the Islamic State through its Arab Spring. PSD-11’s twisted claim that regional stability could only be achieved through Islamist regime change tore apart the region and turned it into a playground for terrorists. ISIS is simply the biggest and toughest of the terror groups that were able to thrive in the environment of violent civil wars created by Obama’s Directive 11.

During the Arab Spring protests, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit had told Hillary Clinton that his government could not hand over power to the Muslim Brotherhood. “My daughter gets to go out at night. And, God damn it, I’m not going to turn this country over to people who will turn back the clock on her rights.”

But that was exactly what Hillary Clinton and Obama were after. And they got it. Countless women were raped in Egypt. Beyond Egypt, Hillary and Obama’s policy saw Yazidi women actually sold into slavery.

Directive 11 codified the left’s dirty alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood into our foreign policy. Its support for Islamist takeovers paved the way for riots and civil wars culminating in the violence that birthed ISIS and covered the region in blood.

And it remains secret to this day.