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The Latest US Invasion Of Iraq Begins: US Military Search And Rescue Teams Arrive In Northern Iraq
The Latest US Invasion Of Iraq Begins: US Military Search And Rescue Teams Arrive In Northern Iraq
Despite numerous explanations that no boots-on-the-ground will be on-the-ground in Iraq in the war against Islamic State, it appears, as CNN reports, that the US military has moved Search-and-Rescue (S&R) assets to Northern Iraq as part of a “constant rebalancing” depending on the evolving airstrike-only mission.
Of course, as the ‘unnamed source’ was so quick to explain, this was in no way a response to threats from The UAE to pull out of the coalition unless S&R assets were placed in Iraq since, cynically speaking, the UAE demands are only the result of US demands that it demand it anyway.
However, as Bloomberg notes – on the heels of selling 170 M-1 Abrams tanks to Iraq indirectly ‘stimulating’ the US economy (“middle-class economics” don’t forget) – US allies are now withholding military power in an effort to get Obama to do more in Syria (which once again cynically-speaking – gives the President further excuse to provide billions in fresh military contracts to General Dynamics & Northrop Grummond) all in the name of peace, prosperity and the American way of life.
U.S. allies in the fight against Islamic State extremists are withholding military capabilities as leverage on President Barack Obama to do more in Syria, according to Bloomberg.
At issue are calls from the U.A.E. for U.S. pilot-rescue teams to be positioned closer to the Syrian battleground, where they’d be primed for quicker action, and from Turkey to impose a protected safe zone in Syria. Their demands create problems for Obama, who officials have said is wary of drawing the U.S. more deeply into Syria’s turmoil.
Underlying that issue is disagreement over Obama’s decision to make fighting Islamic State the priority over efforts to remove the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
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The Paris Jihad, Ready or Not, Has Begun, and Will Widen
The Paris Jihad, Ready or Not, Has Begun, and Will Widen
“The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”
— Barack Hussein Obama (address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 2012)
The jihadist murders at the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, on January 7, 2015, was inevitable and long anticipated.
So was the concurrent detonation of a car-bomb in front of a Paris synagogue, and so were the lethal clashes with Paris police on January 8, the hostage taking in a kosher market in Paris (where the hostage takers threatened to execute six hostages if the Charlie Hebdo attackers were harmed by police), and the random shooting near the Eiffel Tower on January 9. The attack on the Charlie Hebdo is a spark and a catalyst for a still-unfolding eruption of rage of the jihadist youth of France and Western Europe.
By late afternoon on January 9, 2015, both hostage situations had been resolved, with the jihadist hostage-takers killed by police.
A witness at the scene of the shooting told police that one of the shooters told the bystanders: “You can tell the media that it’s al-Qaida in Yemen.” Indeed, Charlie Hebdo and the key editors, writers, and cartoonists were for a long time on the “most wanted” list of the Yemen-based Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). They featured on the list of the most hated Westerners in the March 2013 issue of AQAP’s Inspire Magazine.
On January 9, 2015, Caliphate senior official Abu Saad al-Ansari claimed responsibility in a sermon deliv-ered during the Friday prayers in Mosul. He explained that the attacks in Paris were the first salvo in a major offensive against the West avenging the US-led “transgression” — air strikes — against the Cali-phate’s forces. “We started with the France operation for which we take responsibility. Tomorrow will be in Britain, America and others,” Abu Saad al-Ansari stated. “This is a message to all countries participating in the [US-led] coalition that has killed Islamic State members.”
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Saudi border guards killed in attack
Saudi border guards killed in attack
Attackers have killed two Saudi Arabian border guards and injured another near the country’s border with Iraq in a shooting and suicide assault, the Saudi Interior Ministry said.
The attackers opened fire on a border patrol near the city of Arar on early on Monday, the ministry said.
When security officers responded, one of the attackers was captured and detonated an explosives belt, the ministry added in a brief statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
It said another attacker was killed by security forces but did not specify the number of assailants.
Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, covering the conflict in Iraq, said the attack was likely to be carried out by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), that controls large parts of Iraq and Syria.
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After turbulent 2014, next year may be no calmer | Reuters
After turbulent 2014, next year may be no calmer | Reuters.
(Reuters) – From financial crisis in Russia to cyber warfare withNorth Korea, 2014 has generated new flashpoints right into its final days, setting 2015 up to be just as turbulent.
Almost all of the major confrontations, such as the battle with Islamic State militants, the West’s stand-off with Russia overUkraine and the fight against Ebola, will rumble on. Others could erupt at short notice.
“Normally after a year like this you might expect things to calm down,” said John Bassett, former senior official with British signals intelligence agency GCHQ now an associate at Oxford University. “But none of these problems have been resolved and the drivers of them are not going away.”
The causes are varied – a global shift of economic power from the West, new technologies, regional rivalries and anger over rising wealth gaps.
In June, a report by the Institute for Economics and Peace showed world peace declining for the seventh consecutive year since 2007, reversing a trend of improvement over decades.
This Week In Energy: Low Oil Prices Not The Only Threat To US Energy
This Week In Energy: Low Oil Prices Not The Only Threat To US Energy.
Urgent Note: This week, our analyst Dan Dicker provides key insights into the companies now considered to be the walking dead in the energy space. The debt burdens of these companies make for a bleak outlook, and this information is need-to-know for all investors, so they can spot the trend that is taking these companies down and protect their own investment portfolios accordingly. Dan’s report is a must read for those interested in the bigger picture of the low oil price situation and you can receive it for Free – just click here and start a 30 day free trial to Oilprice Premium.
With the war against the Islamic State (IS) raging in Iraq and Syria, and getting too close to Turkey for comfort, experts in the US are wondering if the next terrorist attack on American soil might target the 182,000 miles of pipelines carrying oil, chemicals and other hazardous liquids, 325,000 miles of bulk natural gas pipelines, and 2.2 million miles of natural gas distribution pipelines.
These millions of miles of critical infrastructure make for easy targets. All it requires is that the digital intruder gets close enough to privately owned pipelines that the government doesn’t have much control over.
As noted earlier this week by Bloomberg, a 2008 attack on Turkey’s portion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline is now being viewed as a model for future calamity in the US. The pipeline—majority owned by BP—saw digital intruders inject malicious software into the control network and then tamper with the system to cause an explosion. It’s only now that investigators realize that it was a cyberattack.
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ISIL and Iran to dominate Gulf Arab summit – Middle East – Al Jazeera English
ISIL and Iran to dominate Gulf Arab summit – Middle East – Al Jazeera English.
Gulf Arab leaders have arrived in the Qatari capital for a summit expected to push forward plans for a unified military command and an Interpol-like agency to counter regional foe Iran and self-declared jihadist groups.
Foreign ministers from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) gathered on Tuesday afternoon in Doha, ahead of the formal opening of the summit at 6pm local time, which will be inaugurated by Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.
The annual meeting comes after an eight-month diplomatic spat in the bloc which pitted Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain against Qatar over its alleged support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood, from which toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi hailed, has been labelled a “terrorist organisation” by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The other two GCC members, Kuwait and Oman, tried to stay neutral.
A reconciliation meeting attended by the six foreign ministers three weeks ago in the Saudi capital Riyadh, appears to have eased tensions and paved the way for the one-day summit.
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Purported Islamic State Video Calls For Attacks On Canadians
Purported Islamic State Video Calls For Attacks On Canadians.
OTTAWA – A slickly produced video released on Sunday urged Muslims to launch indiscriminate attacks against Canadians, similar to those carried out in October in Ottawa and Montreal.
The SITE Intelligence Group, an American based company that monitors trends within the global jihadist movement, said the video was produced by the Islamic State and the Levant. It was also been distributed on Twitter and jihadi forums.
On the video a man, who says he is a Canadian and identifies himself as “Abu Anwar al-Canadi,” urges his Muslim countrymen to follow the example of Martin Couture-Rouleau.
The National Post identified the man as John Maguire, a former University of Ottawa student who converted to Islam and became radicalized before leaving Canada last year. The newspaper cited friends and family.
The 23-year-old is among dozens of Canadians under RCMP investigation after allegedly making their way to Syria.
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Latest ISIS attack on Kobanê implicates Turkey once more | ROAR Magazine
Latest ISIS attack on Kobanê implicates Turkey once more | ROAR Magazine.
This weekend ISIS attacked Kobanê from Turkish soil. While Turkish complicity in the attack is hard to prove, the events raises some important questions.
In the early hours of Saturday, November 29, on the 75th day of the resistance of Kobanê, the militants of the Islamic State launched yet another attack against the city. In the 2.5 months that ISIS has been besieging the predominantly Kurdish city at the border with Turkey it launched numerous attacks — ranging from indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas with tanks, mortars and heavy artillery to suicide attacks by individuals and car bombs (VBIEDs) — but never before did it attack the city from the north, from the Turkish side of the border.
For many international observers and Kurdish activists this fact confirmed once again that the Turkish state is in bed with the Islamist militants, and that the two are collaborating closely in their fight against the region’s Kurdish population. Despite many clues pointing in this direction, one has to be careful in drawing too many conclusions from Saturday’s attack.
At this point it is a well-established fact that ISIS launched its latest attack on Kobanê from Turkish soil, but the extent to which the Turkish military and/or state has been complicit in this event remains impossible to determine. Aaron Stein’s Open Source Analysis of the attack presents the possibility that ISIS entered Turkey without the latter’s knowledge, crossing the border from Kobanê just a few hundred meters to the east of the border crossing before looping south and attacking the border gate from the north.
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Islamic State Expanding into North Africa – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Islamic State Expanding into North Africa – SPIEGEL ONLINE.
The caliphate has a beach. It is located on the Mediterranean Sea around 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Crete in Darna. The eastern Libya city has a population of around 80,000, a beautiful old town and an 18th century mosque, from which the black flag of the Islamic State flies. The port city is equipped with Sharia courts and an “Islamic Police” force which patrols the streets in all-terrain vehicles. A wall has been built in the university to separate female students from their male counterparts and the disciplines of law, natural sciences and languages have all been abolished. Those who would question the city’s new societal order risk death.
Darna has become a colony of terror, and it is the first Islamic State enclave in North Africa. The conditions in Libya are perfect for the radical Islamists: a disintegrating state, a location that is strategically well situated and home to the largest oil reserves on the continent. Should Islamic State (IS) manage to establish control over a significant portion of Libya, it could trigger the destabilization of the entire Arab world.
The IS puts down roots wherever chaos reigns, where governments are weakest and where disillusionment over the Arab Spring is deepest. In recent weeks, terror groups that had thus far operated locally have quickly begun siding with the extremists from IS.
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Egypt armed group pledges allegiance to ISIL – Middle East – Al Jazeera English
Egypt armed group pledges allegiance to ISIL – Middle East – Al Jazeera English.
Egypt’s Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, the country’s most active armed group, pledged its allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, in a recording posted on its Twitter account.
If genuine, the declaration of allegiance would be a boost for ISIL which has changed its name to Islamic State, showing its widening influence in the region alongside its territorial advances in Iraq and Syria.
“We announce our pledge of allegiance to the caliph Ibrahim Ibn Awad … to listen and obey,” the audio recording said, referring to ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In the audio clip, which is 9 minutes and 26 seconds in length, the Sinai-based armed group also urged Muslims around the world to follow suit and support ISIL.
“Your unity is strength and your division is weakness… Determine your fate, unite among yourself, and support your [Islamic] State,” the recording said.
Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which means Partisans of Jerusalem, had previously expressed support for ISIL, but stopped short of pledging its allegiance before Monday, even denying it last week.
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Al-Qaeda Declares War on China, Too | The Diplomat
Al-Qaeda Declares War on China, Too | The Diplomat.
Al-Qaeda central appears to have joined the Islamic State in calling for jihad against China over its alleged occupation of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
This week, al-Sahab media organization, al-Qaeda’s propaganda arm, released the first issue of its new English-language magazine Resurgence. The magazine has a strong focus on the Asia-Pacific in general, with feature articles on both India and Bangladesh, as well as others on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
However, the first issue also contains an article entitled “10 Facts About East Turkistan,” which refers to the name given to Xinjiang by those who favor independence from China. The ten facts seek to cast Xinjiang as a longtime independent state that has only recently been brutally colonized by Han Chinese, who are determined to obliterate its Islamic heritage.
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