Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Islamic state”
Washington has ‘adjusted’ its controversial program of aiding the Syrian rebels to vet commanders rather than individual fighters, and provide supplies instead of training. A new rebel group in northeastern Syria has emerged as a recipient of US aid. “The train-and-equip program has changed, but it has not gone away. We’re still equipping moderate Syrian opposition fighters,” Colonel Steve Warren, …
First came Fallujah, then Mosul, and later Ramadi in Iraq. Now, there is Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan. In all four places, the same story has played out: in cities that newspaper reporters like to call “strategically important,” security forces trained and equipped by the U.S. military at great expense simply folded, abandoning their posts (and much of their U.S.-supplied weaponry) without even …
In over a year of Washington’s phony war on ISIS, they’re stronger with more territory than when US bombing began – targeting Syrian and Iraqi infrastructure, not terrorist forces or facilities. On September 30, things changed markedly. Washington wants no interference in its policies. Putin’s intervention leveled the playing field. ISIS forces are panicking, retreating, hiding in residential areas and …
I couldn’t help but notice that over the past few weeks the Empire has become extremely silly—so silly that I believe it deserves the title of the World’s Silliest Empire. One could claim that it has been silly before, but recent developments seem to signal a quantum leap in its silliness level. The first bit of extreme silliness surfaced when …
Iraq has said its military officials are engaged in intelligence and security cooperation in Baghdad with Russia, Iran and Syria to counter the threat from the Islamic State militant group, a pact that could raise concerns in Washington. A statement from the Iraqi military’s joint operations command on Saturday said the cooperation had come “with increased Russian concern about the …
The 15 Chechens looking to cross the border from Turkey to Syria didn’t strike Abdullah as particularly important or unusual. It was early summer in 2012, and as a smuggler based in the Turkish border town of Killis, Abdullah, who’d fled his home village in Syria because of fighting on the outskirts of Aleppo, was used to secretive groups of …
First he bombed mercilessly, cruelly grinning throughout. Costumed in a flight suit, he proclaimed a “Mission Accomplished” after he had, with what they call “bipartisan support” (as though this lends some sort of legitimacy), destroyed the modern country of Iraq. George W. Bush destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, its institutions, its ruling party and its army. Then he destroyed its social fabric, …
The reigning politics and media culture of the United States is not without moments of high comic relief. Three weeks ago, for example, CNN’s Chris Cuomo presented the buffoonish Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a bizarre hypothetical situation. What would Trump do, Cuomo asked, if he met the Pope and the pontiff expressed his opinion that capitalism can be …
On September 4th, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin restated, as he has many times before, that he seeks a U.S.- Russian alliance to overcome the global Islamic jihad movement, in Syria, Iraq, and everywhere. Then, on Tuesday September 8th, Yahoo News bannered, “Austria joins growing voices that say Assad must be part of Syrian solution,” and reported that Austria’s Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said: …
The Pentagon has erupted in “revolt” amid claims from 50 intelligence analysts that senior defense officials manipulated intelligence reports to downplay the severity of the Islamic State’s increasing upper-hand in the Middle East. According to allegations made in an official complaint with the Department of Defense Inspector General, the officers in question doctored reports — among other things — in order …
