discipline posted:I tried to reach out to reza negarestani last year when daash came around
catchphrase
tpaine posted:i made that joke several times. maybe not there, but i did
tyhank you for your service
US Christians back emerging private war on Iraq jihadists Feb 26 AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/us-christians-back-emerging-private-war-iraq-jihadists-110207743.html
VanDyke, who rose to fame as a foreign fighter backing Libyan rebels against Moamer Kadhafi, has just finished leading his new military contracting firm through its first assignment -- training Christian volunteers to take on jihadists.
Funded by Christian groups from abroad, mainly from the United States, the Nineveh Plains Protection Unit (NPU) aims to bring a local Christian militia to bear against the Islamic State group that has seized swathes of Iraq and Syria.
A few months ago, VanDyke changed tack and decided to form his military contracting firm, the Sons of Liberty International (SOLI), with the training of a few hundred NPU volunteers as a first assignment.
"Generally the attitude of the United States seems to be as long as you shoot in the right direction they don't care," he says.
Western volunteers rally to Iraq Christian militia Feb 18 AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/western-volunteers-rally-iraq-christian-militia-005949324.html
Bearing a tattoo of a machinegun on his left arm and another of Jesus in a crown of thorns on his right, Brett jokingly refers to himself as a "crusader".
Brett's first recruit was Louis Park, a mild-mannered Texan who retired from the Marines in December.
"I did not adjust well at peace time," he said with dipping tobacco tucked in his lip. "I wanted to get back out here."
After serving in Afghanistan, Park says he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder "and some other things" that barred him from combat deployments.
"I'm patriotic as hell," he says. "If my government won't fight them I will."
Westerners join Iraqi Christian militia to fight Islamic State Feb 15 Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/western-volunteers-rally-iraq-christian-militia-005949324.html
DUHOK, Iraq (Reuters) - Saint Michael, the archangel of battle, is tattooed across the back of a U.S. army veteran who recently returned to Iraq and joined a Christian militia fighting Islamic State in what he sees as a biblical war between good and evil.
“These are some of the only towns in Nineveh where church bells ring. In every other town the bells have gone silent, and that’s unacceptable,” said Brett, who has "The King of Nineveh" written in Arabic on the front of his army vest.
Scott, the software engineer, served in the U.S. Army in the 1990s, but lately spent most of his time in front of a computer screen in North Carolina.
He was mesmerized by images of Islamic State militants hounding Iraq's Yazidi minority and became fixated on the struggle for the Syrian border town of Kobani -- the target of a relentless campaign by the jihadists, who were held off by the lightly armed Kurdish YPG militia, backed by U.S. air strikes.
Scott had planned to join the YPG, which has drawn a flurry of foreign recruits, but changed his mind four days before heading to the Middle East after growing suspicious of the group's ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
He and the other volunteers worried they would not be allowed home if they were associated with the PKK, which the United States and Europe consider a terrorist organization.
(i mean half of them are on cia payroll, but whatever)
American aid to Daesh confirmed: Marines and Apache helicopters among the Jihadists
2 March 2015
http://www.almanar.com.lb/french/adetails.php?fromval=2&cid=29&frid=76&seccatid=29&eid=222143
The Iraqis continue to detect contacts between Americans in Iraq and Daesh (ISIL) in the regions they occupy.
Contrary to American claims of combatting this Wahhabist Takfirist militia inside the framework of the international coalition, more and more accusations have been proferred by Iraqi administrators of the links they maintain with them.
According to news site Arabi-Press, two new facts have been revealed this week by the chief of the Iraqi Militia, which counts in its ranks young Iraqi volunteers since the takeover of Mosul and Anbar by Daesh.
These actions coincide with the advances of the Iraqi army and their auxiliary militias in these regions. Wednesday, the Iraqi Minister of Defence affirmed that they had liberated two regions between Diyala and Salaheddin provinces: Albu Bakr and Albu Awad.
According to Thamer al-Khakafji, who spoke with the Arabi-Press correspondant, three American Marines had parachuted into the province of Babylon, and two helicopters of unknown origin landed in two regions of the province of Diyala, at two separate times.
The parachutists were seen last Wednesday at dawn, jumping from an Apache helicopter in the al-Obaidate area, in the Musayyib region, in the north of Babylon.
As far as the second event, first an Apache was spotted late Tuesday night / early Wednesday morning landing in the area of the village of al-Safra, in the greater al-Azim area, in north Diyala.
Some hours later, Wednesday morning a helicopter of unknown origin landed in turn in the area south of Buhriz, towards Kanaane, in south Diyala. It stayed some 15 minutes before lifting off again.
Many local officials in the province claimed they have seen unidentified helicopters landing in Daesh bastions in the northeast of Diyala and dropping arms and provisions.
An Iraqi legislator, Hakem al-Zameli reported for Fars News that the current Baghdad government receives daily reports from security forces in Anbar province of parachute drops of arms for Daesh. He accursed the United States of wanting to provoke chaos in Iraq and supporting the Islamic State.
Other parliamentarians in Iraqi have complained about this situation.
"We have discovered arms manufactured in the United States, in European countries and in Israel in the zones liberated from ISIL control in the al-Baghdadi area," writes news site al-Ahad, citing Khalaf Tarmouz, head of the Anbar Provincial Council. Tarmouz also said that arms made in Europe and Israel were also found in Ramadi.
"The United States leaves out guns for ISIS with the excuse that they don't know where ISIS positions are. They're trying to twist reality with these kinds of claims," he said.
According to InfoWars, in December, the Iranian state media has asserted that the US Air Force has dropped, for the second time, arms in areas held by the Islamic State.
In November, sources in Iraqi intelligence agencies said that the United States is actively supplying ISIS with arms. "Iraqi intelligence agencies have repeated that American military aircraft have dropped several shipments of aid to ISIS terrorists in order to help them resist the siege of the Iraqi army, security forces and people," claims one report.
In October, Coalition sources admitted to what they considered to be an supposedly erroneous parachute drop of weapons which fell into the hands of ISIS combatants outside of Kobane in Syria.
In July (2014), InfoWars mentioned the great quantity of American arms captured by ISIS.
In addition to the combat vehicles and artillery previously acquired by the Iraqi army, the haul of arms from US bases included more than 50 155mm M-198 artillery batteries and 4000 PKC machine guns.
discipline posted:InfoWars
BNtcWpY4YLY
A few months ago, VanDyke changed tack and decided to form his military contracting firm, the Sons of Liberty International (SOLI), with the training of a few hundred NPU volunteers as a first assignment.
holy shit metal gear solid is happening haha I'll join if you guys will pay my bus fare. oh yeah and a gopro to strap on my bicycle helmet o war
piss posted:piss posted:
discipline posted:
everyone should read cyclonopedia again
just got my copy in the mail
i got it because of this post http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/1147/?page=7#post-45217
It was actually in searching for stuff on Cyclonopedia that I found this forum, and somehow while I haven't yet got around to reading it I've been lurking the forum since.
I barely post, but I wanted you all to know that I care about you and somehow I feel I know you all very well.
<3
Gssh posted:I know you all very well
hmm
piss posted:piss posted:discipline posted:everyone should read cyclonopedia again
just got my copy in the mail
i got it because of this post http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/topic/1147/?page=7#post-45217
i got it because of this post http://www.rhizzone.net/forum/post/118492/
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.ru/2015/03/washingtons-al-qaeda-ally-now-leading.html posted:According to recent reports, Abdelhakim Belhadj has now firmly ensconced himself as the organizational commander of the ISIS presence inside Libya. The information comes from an unnamed US intelligence official who has confirmed that Belhadj is supporting and coordinating the efforts of the ISIS training centers in eastern Libya around the city of Derna, an area long known as a hotbed of jihadi militancy.
While it may not seem to be a major story – Al Qaeda terrorist turns ISIS commander – the reality is that since 2011 the US and its NATO allies have held up Belhadj as a “freedom fighter.” They portrayed him as a man who courageously led his fellow freedom-lovers against the “tyrannical despot” Gaddafi whose security forces at one time captured and imprisoned many members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), including Belhadj.
Belhadj served the US cause in Libya so well that he can be seen receiving accolades from Sen. John McCain who referred to Belhadj and his followers as heroes. He was initially rewarded after the fall of Gaddafi with the post of military commander of Tripoli, though he was forced to give way to a more politically palatable “transitional government” which has since evaporated in that chaotic, war-ravaged country.
The ancient statues that Islamic State militants smashed in Mosul on camera last month have been proved to be exact replicas of precious artifacts of Iraqi heritage. The real masterpieces of antiquity are said to be in Baghdad.
“They were copies. The originals are all here,” Baghdad’s museum director told Germany’s Deutsche Welle.
The head of the antiquity department in Iraq’s cultural heritage authority, Fawzye al-Mahdi, also told the German broadcaster that “none” of the artifacts “were originals.”
This, experts say, explains why in a video that shows the destruction statues crumble so easily.
“The reason they crumble so easily is that they're made of plaster. You can see iron bars inside," Mark Altaweel of the Institute of Archaeology at University College, London said to Channel 4.
However, Mosul’s exiled governor Atheel Nuafi, said that, while many of destroyed items were not originals, but there were real ones demolished afterward.
drwhat posted:This is from al-Manar, which the West says is Literally Hezbollah. But I can't find this in English (the stuff from Arabi-Press, everything else is old):
al-manar is hezbollah. my family used to get it & watch it on foreign satellite (telestar5?) before the french company shut down the channel.
btw hezzies & the IR are no long a terror threat.
http://www.newsweek.com/iran-and-hezbollah-omitted-us-terror-threat-list-amid-nuclear-talks-314073
An annual security assessment presented to the U.S. Senate by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, has excluded Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah from its list of terror threats to U.S. interests, despite both being consistently included as threats in previous years.
The unclassified report, issued by Clapper on February 26 and entitled the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Communities, was published by the Times of Israel amid Israeli concerns that Iran was omitted simply because of Tehran’s efforts to combat ISIS.
In a previous report from January 2014, Clapper included Iran and Hezbollah in the ‘Terrorism’ section, writing that both “continue to directly threaten the interests of U.S. allies. Hizballah has increased its global terrorist activity in recent years to a level that we have not seen since the 1990s”. Iran was also given its own sub-heading in the ‘Terrorism’ section of such assessments in 2011, 2012 and 2013.
Yet in the latest report, Clapper omits both Iran and Hezbollah from this section, only mentioning the Shiite Muslim militant group once in reference to the threat it faces from radical Sunni groups - such as ISIS and the al-Nusra Front - on Lebanon’s borders. In regard to Iran, the report names it as both a cyber and regional threat to the U.S. because of its support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
However, the report speaks of Tehran’s assistance in preventing “ISIL from gaining large swaths of additional territory” in Iraq. It adds that the Islamic Republic has “intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia”.
The report fails to mention that Hezbollah is labelled as a terrorist organisation by both the U.S. and the European Union, while it receives the majority of its funding from Tehran. The omission comes as Washington and other world powers continue to negotiate with Iran to strike a deal over its nuclear program and capabilities.
The assessment adds that Iran has “overarching strategic goals of enhancing its security, prestige, and regional influence have led it to pursue capabilities to meet its civilian goals and give it the ability to build missile-deliverable nuclear weapons, if it chooses to do so.”
The Israeli thinktank Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has claimed that the removal of both actors from the U.S. terror assessment comes amid Iranian support in the fight against ISIS, where Tehran’s shadowy former spymaster Qasem Soleimani is directing the offensive on the Sunni-majority city of Tikrit.
“We believe that this results from a combination of diplomatic interests (the United States’ talks with Iran about a nuclear deal) with the idea that Iran could assist in the battle against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and maybe even in the battle against jihadist terrorism in other countries,” the NGO’s assessment of the report said.
Max Abrahms, professor of political science at Northeastern University and member at the Council of Foreign Relations, believes that the omission signals a “quid pro quo” between Washington and Tehran.
“I think that we are looking at a quid pro quo, where Iran helps us with counter-terrorism and we facilitate their nuclear ambitions and cut down on our labelling of them as terrorists,” says Abrahms. “The world has changed. The Sunni threat has gotten worse, the Islamic State is a greater danger than al-Qaeda ever was, and the Iranians have really come up big in terms of helping us out in combating the Islamic State.”
Hezbollah has been accused of responsibility for a number of terror attacks against U.S. or its partners interests, such as the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and American military barracks in the Lebanese capital, Beirut; the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina and the 2012 Burgas bus bomb on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria.
i still dont "get" the buenos aires bombing thing after all these years.
dank_xiaopeng posted:lmao : http://rt.com/news/240801-isis-destroy-statues-fake/
The ancient statues that Islamic State militants smashed in Mosul on camera last month have been proved to be exact replicas of precious artifacts of Iraqi heritage. The real masterpieces of antiquity are said to be in Baghdad.
“They were copies. The originals are all here,” Baghdad’s museum director told Germany’s Deutsche Welle.
The head of the antiquity department in Iraq’s cultural heritage authority, Fawzye al-Mahdi, also told the German broadcaster that “none” of the artifacts “were originals.”
This, experts say, explains why in a video that shows the destruction statues crumble so easily.
“The reason they crumble so easily is that they're made of plaster. You can see iron bars inside," Mark Altaweel of the Institute of Archaeology at University College, London said to Channel 4.
However, Mosul’s exiled governor Atheel Nuafi, said that, while many of destroyed items were not originals, but there were real ones demolished afterward.
wow, i'm so surprised. well, i'm sure this will be headline news everywhere
Gssh posted:It was actually in searching for stuff on Cyclonopedia that I found this forum
same
I barely post, but I wanted you all to know that I care about you and somehow I feel I know you all very well.
same
handy article to link people to:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11473515/Statues-destroyed-by-Islamic-State-in-Mosul-were-fakes-with-originals-safely-in-Baghdad.html
The author is drawing the wrong Northern Ireland lesson, in other words. Which partly flows, perhaps, from his apparent belief that the IRA and ISIS/ISIL are equivalent organizations.
Yeah I have seen this push to make IRA nothing more than another double plus bad terrorist group and a lot of equivalances between them an al-qaeda and it makes me mad. full disclosure:I used to subscribe to the Sinn Fein newsletter on AOL
ISIL has blown up Palmyra’s ancient Baalshamin Temple, Syrian activists say
Bassem Mroue, The Associated Press
BEIRUT — ISIL militants have destroyed a temple at Syria’s ancient ruins of Palmyra, activists said Sunday, realizing the worst fears archaeologists had for the 2,000-year-old Roman-era city after the extremists seized it and beheaded a local scholar.
Palmyra, one of the Middle East’s most spectacular archaeological sites and a UNESCO World Heritage site, sits near the modern Syrian city of the same name. Activists said Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militants used explosives to blow up the Baalshamin Temple on its grounds, the blast so powerful it also damaged some of the Roman columns around it.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (hello old friend) said Sunday night that the temple was blown up a month ago. Turkey-based activist Osama al-Khatib, who is originally from Palmyra, said the temple was blown up Sunday. Both said the extremists used a large amount of explosives to destroy it.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/isil-has-blown-up-palmyras-ancient-baalshamin-temple-syrian-activists-say
Only later did Abdullah realize that the network that funneled these men to him was the beginnings of the Islamic State, and that one of the 15 would turn out to be the most important non-Arab figure in the Islamic State hierarchy, a former American-trained noncommissioned officer in the special forces of the nation of Georgia, who’d led his men heroically during the 2008 Russian invasion of his homeland.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/middle-east/article35322882.html#storylink=cpy