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Post by Admin on Aug 24, 2014 15:36:34 GMT
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary is a former West London rapper who performed under the name L Jinny. A British rapper now fighting with the Islamic State (aka ISIS) is reportedly a suspect in the beheading of American journalist James Foley, according to several unconfirmed published reports, including the Independent. Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, 24, a former West London rapper who performed under the name L Jinny, is allegedly one of three British jihadists identified as possibly being the masked murderer known as “John the Beatle,” according to the Daily Mail. A former hostage held by ISIS said Bary is one of several jihadists nicknamed “The Beatles” because of their British accents. He has a similar accent, build and skin tone to “John,” the man who killed Foley, according to a report published in the Telegraph. "We have not identified who the man in the video is at this time," a representative from Scotland Yard told Billboard. Bary was an aspiring rapper whose music was played on BBC Radio in 2012, according to the Independent. He left his home in Maida Vale, West London, to fight in Syria’s civil war, saying he was “leaving everything for the sake of Allah,” the Daily Mail reports. Bary’s songs have been posted online, with titles like “Overdose,” “Flying High,” “Dreamer” and “The Beginning.” His music makes reference to violence, drug use and threats of his family being deported to Egypt. “I can’t differentiate the angels from the demons, my heart’s disintegrating. I ain't got normal feelings,” he reportedly raps in one song.
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Post by Admin on Sept 11, 2014 4:02:19 GMT
In ordering a sustained military campaign against Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq, President Obama on Wednesday night effectively set a new course for the remainder of his presidency and all but ensured that he would pass his successor a volatile and incomplete war, much like the one he inherited when he took office. It will be a significantly different kind of war — not like Iraq or Afghanistan, where many tens of thousands of American troops were still deployed when Mr. Obama took the oath nearly six years ago. And even though Mr. Obama compared it to the small-scale, sporadic strikes against isolated terrorists in places like Yemen and Somalia, it will not be exactly like those either. Instead, the widening battle with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria will be the next chapter in a grueling, generational struggle that has kept the United States at war in one form or another now for 13 years. Waged by a president with faded public standing, the new phase will not involve substantial numbers of American troops on the ground. But it seems certain to result in a far more intense American bombing blitz than in either Somalia or Yemen, as well as closer ties to Syrian rebels whom Mr. Obama wants to turn into a proxy force against ISIS. And after years of trying to avoid entangling the United States in another “dumb war,” as he called the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mr. Obama is now plunging the United States into the middle of one of the bloodiest, most vicious, fratricidal conflicts now in existence in the form of Syria’s civil war. Whether he can wage this war in a more effective way, crushing a jihadist group while minimizing American casualties, could be the central national security challenge of his final two years in office — and the first one confronting his successor. “This is going to be more than three years,” said former Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, a Republican who was once the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Confronting ISIS, we may get done with the biggest part of this in three years, but that’s not going to take care of the threat from radical Islam.” Leading such a campaign will present a challenge to Mr. Obama perhaps unlike that of any of his predecessors’. While other commanders in chief enjoyed a surge in public support when they took the nation to war, the nation is not exactly rallying behind Mr. Obama this time around. A fresh battery of polls this week indicated that most Americans do want him to go after ISIS yet disapprIn his speech to the nation, Mr. Obama tried to equate the emerging strategy to the way he has pursued terrorist cells in Yemen and Somalia. Aides said that by working with local forces on the ground and targeting leaders from the air, the United States had been able to damage extremist groups without occupying countries or engaging in costly nation building. Love of his leadership. In other words, they support the policy but not the president. But what Mr. Obama has in mind for Iraq and Syria goes beyond that approach. By some counts, the United States under Mr. Obama has conducted a dozen or so lethal strikes in Somalia in recent years and about 100 in Yemen. Even at the height of the drone war in Pakistan, Americans conducted fewer than 120 strikes in a single year, 2010, and were down to seven so far this year, according to the Long War Journal. By contrast, the air campaign against ISIS that Mr. Obama ordered in Iraq has involved 154 strikes in the course of a month — far fewer than necessary in the view of some hawks, but far more than the occasional attacks on satellite terror groups in Africa and Arabia. And that was before Mr. Obama officially expanded the mission to destroying ISIS and effectively erased the border with Syria to send warplanes there as well. In addition, this war involves a more sprawling and complicated geopolitical landscape than that of Somalia and Yemen, encompassing a broad array of groups, multiple countries, and the difficult relationship between the United States and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. For all that, the campaign Mr. Obama outlined Wednesday night is likely to continue past his departure from office. Much as he was inaugurated with the challenge of finishing Mr. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the next president will be heir to Mr. Obama’s war in Syria and Iraq.
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Post by Admin on Sept 25, 2014 23:06:37 GMT
Mission creep need not be harmful if the route of creep is clear. The objective of today’s US bombing of Islamic State (Isis) bases in Syria is indeed clear, the wiping out of militant Islam in northern Iraq and, as a tactical necessity, in Syria. The objective has moral force. America has done more than anyone to fan the flames of Islamic militancy in that part of the world. It created the current mess in Iraq, and has some obligation to prevent a worse mess from arising. How it intends to achieve that is wholly obscure. Bombing in itself never achieves a political goal. It terrifies, provokes, destroys, kills. It can assist victory when in close support of ground forces, as in the conquest of Kabul or Tripoli. But that impact is limited to the battlefield. So-called strategic bombing has an appalling record, mitigated only by the power of the arms lobby and a cosy perception that air strikes “send messages”, a sort of beefed-up economic sanctions. The current wave of bombing in Syria appears to be a response, as is often the case with air wars, to US domestic politics. It is to show Barack Obama is “not a wimp” and is “taking the fight to the enemy”. Even so he has been forced to justify it on the grounds that Isis is a “threat to American security”, a ludicrous claim. Terrorists can explode bombs and kill people, but they do not endanger modern democracies. David Cameron may be about to make the same claim to justify the same military action by Britain. That young British Muslims may be moved to kill on British streets is deplorable and a matter for the security services and the police. The idea that bombing Syria will do anything beyond possibly encourage them is absurd. This is the reality of mission creep. It pretends not to be all-out war. Domestic political motives and a general “feel-goodism” overwhelm caution. Promises are abandoned. Reservations are cast aside under the pressure of cumulative failure. Violence escalates. If we want to set the outside world to rights, we should at least do it, as we did in Kuwait in 1990, with all resources and total commitment. That is inconceivable in Iraq or Syria. Instead we are sucked into halfhearted wars and halfhearted defeats in countries that were never our business. Today’s air attacks are apparently limited to “degrading and destroying Isis assets” in the vague hope that this might help local troops on the ground. Fine, then what?
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Post by Admin on Sept 29, 2014 0:00:14 GMT
America’s airstrikes inside Syria against both the Islamic State, often known as ISIL, and Al Qaeda’s primary affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, come with some obvious benefits — taking on a genuine threat to U.S. interests and security — but may also expose the United States to some unintended consequences — dangers that could haunt the United States for years to come. Some of these dangers are apparent and some less obvious. As of July, more than 12,000 foreign fighters had flocked to Syria, hundreds bearing passports that could allow them to slip in and out of Western countries unnoticed. ISIL members in the region, or ISIL supporters globally, might soon conduct reprisal attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities abroad and could launch dangerous attacks in Europe or even against the U.S. homeland. The United States might see a hurried, conventional weapons attack by an unconnected but inspired supporter or, in the worst case, a former foreign fighter with sufficient skill and experience to hit a soft target like a transportation hub or shopping center. Whatever the scenario, in taking the lead against ISIL, the United States has painted a bull’s-eye on its citizens. A more indirect U.S. strategy to counter ISIL with proxies and supporting allies could have deflected the group’s most passionate members from hitting the U.S. homeland. But now, the United States has moved itself up in ISIL’s targeting priorities, from one of many to the very top of the list. Abu Muhammed al-Adnani, ISIL’s official spokesman, said in an official statement released this week, “O Americans, and O Europeans, the Islamic State did not initiate a war against you, as your governments and media try to make you believe. It is you who started the transgression against us, and thus you deserve blame and you will pay a great price.” More subtly, U.S. airstrikes in Syria against ISIL confirm Al Qaeda’s narrative of more than two decades: The United States, as the “Far Enemy” propping up the “Near Enemy”— corrupt dictators and apostate regimes repressing Al Qaeda’s vision of an Islamic state. And the strikes, by attacking the biggest threat to the Assad regime’s grip on power, potentially empower a far more serious enemy of the United States than the jihadis: Iran. There’s also the danger that the United States is uniting, rather than dividing, its terrorist adversaries. ISIL’s rejection of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership weakened the latter group’s grasp on foreign fighter flows and donor cash. By striking both ISIL and Al Qaeda’s official arm in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, the United States may be encouraging ISIL and Al Qaeda to return to coordinating rather than competing against each other. There are already hints of this happening elsewhere. Last week, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, two Al Qaeda affiliates losing manpower and momentum to the hot new kid on the block — ISIL — called for unity among jihadi groups in the fight against America. If Nusra and ISIL, rather than eroding each other’s support and competing for resources, join forces to combine ISIL’s resources and skill at insurgency in Iraq and Syria with Al Qaeda’s international terrorism knowhow, the danger to the United States and its interest around the world could multiply rapidly. In other words, the United States could win some tactical victories by hitting both groups hard in Syria, but might be committing a massive strategic blunder by uniting a jihadi landscape it desperately sought to fracture over the past decade. The Obama administration was under tremendous pressure, both in Washington and among America’s Sunni allies, to act in Syria. But bombing ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusra could create consequences beyond the president’s control. What happens when the jihadis scatter to the winds, and American jets run out of targets? The task of countering both Assad and the jihadis while rebuilding two war-shattered societies in Iraq and Syria — even if, as the president said Wednesday, Arabs themselves must be in the lead — seems overwhelming. No small challenge for a man who came into office promising to end America’s wars, not begin new ones.
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Post by Admin on Oct 14, 2014 23:04:47 GMT
ISIS did not fall from the sky. They were armed, financed and trained in the refugee camps built for “Syrian refugees,” in Turkey and Jordan. Both countries are staunch allies of the West; Turkey is on top of it a member of NATO. Several regional reporters, including Turkish investigative journalist Huseyin Guler and Ulusal’s TV documentary filmmaker Serkan Koc, identified the camps as training facilities, particularly Apaydin in the vicinity of Hatay, near the Turkish border. The fact that Jordan is offering its territory for purposes of “training the opposition” is no secret. Earlier this year I worked in two refugee camps near the Jordan-Syrian border: an old and overcrowded Zaatari Camp and one new one, which is still only partially operational – Azraq. From testimonies given to me by both refugees and local inhabitants, Zaatari Camp has been used as a training facility for “Syrian opposition fighters,” for years. In the area, there was a clear presence of both Saudi and Qatari cadres. The AP reported: “Jordan is… officially denying that any training of anti-Assad fighters takes place on its soil, though both Jordanian and American officials have acknowledged it does.” The National, a daily newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates, reported on December 28 2013: “A command centre in Amman or "operations room" as Syrian rebels describe it, gives military advice to the Free Syrian Army and channels weapons to them for their fight against Bashar Al Assad's regime… Rebels say there is also a complex, shadowy system of weapons movement, with diverse, sometimes parallel, supply routes. The command centre works with the FSA and the Supreme Military Council - the FSA high command headed by General Selim Idriss and allied with the Syrian National Coalition, the opposition political alliance backed by Arab states and the West.” I investigated the situation on the Turkish-Syrian border, in the vicinity of the city of Hatay, on several occasions, for both the documentary film I was producing for Venezuelan TV channel TeleSur, and for several of my written reports. The tolerant and multi-cultural city of Hatay has been living in fear for years, terrorized by those machinegun-waving bearded jihadi cadres who were transplanted there from Saudi Arabia and from the rest of the Gulf, in order to train and radicalize Syrian “opposition fighters.” Apayadin Camp is where many of the ISIS fighters have their roots. Serkan Koc, who has produced several groundbreaking works on the subject of the “Syrian opposition,” explained to me in Istanbul: “Of course you do realize that those people are not really ‘Syrian opposition.’ They are modern-day legionnaires collected from various Arab countries, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, paid by Western imperialist powers. Some are members of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Most are militant Sunni Muslims. One could describe them as rogue elements hired to fight the Assad government.” Some of those legionnaires, including those who belong to Islamic State (ISIS) had mutated and began wearing several hats (President Assad was warning for months that they would). They are still after President Assad whom they mainly hate for being secular, and for belonging to the Alawite sect, which is considered to be heretical in some Sunni Muslim circles, especially in the most radical ones. But now they are also after non-Muslims and non-Arabs, even after the interests of those who actually helped them to come to life – the West. All this is not unlike how al-Qaida was born. It mutated from Western-trained and financed Mujahedeen that were first involved in the fighting against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) and later the Soviet Union. The West is historically using, even grooming, the most horrendous allies, be it Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, the military and religious cadres in 1965 Indonesia, fascist military in Chile, Paraguay and Argentina, or present-day Ukrainian fascists crews. “Syrian opposition” is just one of the latest editions. It is clear who is benefiting: the military and political establishment of the West, which supplies the weapons, destabilizes countries, even entire regions, and tries to establish full control over the world. Then, if and when the situation changes and a former client’s movements go gaga, there is always another use for them: they can serve as a justification for direct invasions and further militarization of the regions and the entire planet.
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