ISIS update 1/3/2016.. ISIL hits Iraqi troops with car bombs in Ramadi
ISIL hits Iraqi troops with car bombs in Ramadi
Iraq continues mop-up operation in Ramadi
15 Iraqi security forces killed in bombing
US Hawks Upset Over Iraqi Army’s Successes Against Daesh
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160102/1032601902/disappointment-over-victory.html#ixzz3wDChC3nP
Late last month, the Iraqi army entered Ramadi, the capital of western Iraq’s Anbar province and one of Daesh’s key strongholds in the country. However, as The National Interest contributor Christopher Preble explains, not everyone is happy about Iraq’s success.
The last weeks of 2015 witnessed an important turning point in the Iraqi army’s struggle against Daesh (ISIL/ISIS) terrorists in western Iraq, with officials announcing late last month that they were on course to completely liberate Ramadi, a city in central Iraq which had been occupied by Daesh militants since May.
But paradoxically, the joyous victory against the terrorist group and its self-declared caliphate, which has brought misery to millions and condemnation from around the globe, wasn’t as joyously met by some commentators and policy experts in Washington, who treated the victory as if it was a lump of Christmas coal.
………….The heart of the matter, the journalist argues, is that US interventionists’ “worldview hinges on the argument that Iraqis and others in the region can’t be trusted to take ownership of their security. Thus, the need for more US troops in both Iraq and Syria. According to some, many more US troops are required.” Now, “the Iraqi government’s clear progress over the past few months seriously challenges the claim that the US military is the only force capable of containing and ultimately defeating [Daesh].”
America’s presence in Iraq, ostensibly aimed at ensuring security, hasn’t been without an element of coercion, the journalist admits. Moreover, “unsurprisingly, relations between Washington and Baghdad have been consistently rocky,” from US pressures to restructure the country’s political system and the economy, to Washington’s vain and unconvincing attempts to promote a Sunni-Shia reconciliation, to its effort to secure an agreement allowing US troops to remain in the country after 2011.
“The pattern of resistance, confrontation and defiance,” Preble suggests, “calls into question the many claims that an extended US military presence would have altered Iraqi politics and forestalled the rise of [Daesh] in the first place.”
Therefore, the journalist suggests, “it’s well past time” for Iraq to prove that it is capable of defending itself. Moreover, “officials in the Obama administration, much as they might like to push back against their many critics, should not make this out as an American victory. While US support helped, it is the Iraqis who deserve the credit for the hard fighting on the ground. And it is the Iraqis who will likewise be chiefly responsible for removing the rest of the [Daesh] cancer from their territory.”
Life in Cizre: ‘They are shelling us with mortars’
Turkey to consider lifting HDP leaders’ immunity
Syrian army captures 3 villages in Hama
Turkey, Saudi Reap Machiavellian Whirlwind
The year ended, appropriately, with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan flying to Riyadh to hold a summit with Saudi King Salman. The meeting had the air of two leaders closing ranks after a year of setbacks. As the old adage puts it, misery needs company. And there is much misery that the Turkish and Saudi leadership have to console each other about.
Both Ankara and Riyadh have seen their military schemes in the region turn decidedly sour. Russia’s military intervention in Syria over the past three months has helped to stabilize the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which was targeted covertly by Turkey and Saudi Arabia for regime change. Washington and other NATO powers were to be sure part of the criminal plot. But it was Turkey and Saudi Arabia that served as the «point men».
Devastating losses inflicted by Russia against jihadist mercenaries have turned the tide on the dirty war co-sponsored by Ankara and Riyadh, with even the United States recently admitting that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in his strategic goals of stabilizing the Syrian state and long-time ally of Moscow.
Russia’s aerial bombardment of oil smuggling and weapons routes used by the jihadist proxy army have cut off supply lines that Turkey had enabled the terror brigades with. Estimated to have been earning the mercenaries millions of dollars per day, thanks to the collusion of Erdogan’s regime in Ankara, the decimation of oil contraband by Russian bombing raids has plugged the cash and weapons fuel for the terrorists waging war in Syria.
No wonder then that Erdogan was in Riyadh on December 29-30 to discuss the formation of a new «strategic cooperation council» with the House of Saud. The Turks and Saudis now find themselves with a serious funding problem for their regime-change scheme in Syria.
Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir, of course, did not mention Syria in public, and he tried his best to sanitize proceedings, saying of the summit: «The meeting produced a desire to set up a high-level strategic cooperation council between the two countries», in order to strengthen military, economic and investment cooperation.
But reading between the lines, the all-important, urgent backdrop for the summit is Syria.
According to Syrian sources, the Turk-Saudi arrangement for regime change in the neighboring state worked as follows. The Turks provided the logistical connections for weapons, jihadist fighters and training camps across the Syrian border, while the House of Saud was the main funding source for the nefarious enterprise going back to the origin of the conflict in March 2011. The Saudis would also provide weapons from their copious US-supplied arsenals, with tacit approval from the American Central Intelligence Agency.
Erdogan’s renewed military campaign against the breakaway Kurdish population in the southeast of his country and in northern Iraq, plus a general downturn in Turkey’s once-bustling economy has meant that Ankara certainly does not have the finances to fund its neo-Ottoman schemes. As already noted, the Russian air assaults along the Turk-Syrian border has put paid to illicit sources of smuggling cash. Thus, cash-strapped Erdogan is in a bind.
So too is Erdogan’s erstwhile financier in Riyadh. The oil-rich kingdom ended the year by posting a record budget deficit put at $98 billion – or 15 per cent of the country’s economy.
The Saudi rulers are now having to embark on a previously unheard-of austerity drive to rectify their awry finances. As the Financial Times headlined: «Saudis unveil radical austerity programme». The Saudi population is facing price hikes in fuel, electricity and water, which is an abrupt departure from the country’s «social contract» whereby the autocratic rulers have up to now always bought off discontent among «the commoners» with lavish subsidies to ease the cost of living.
This has implications for social unrest in the authoritarian kingdom. Despite decades of royal largesse, Saudi Arabia suffers from high levels of chronic unemployment and poverty, particularly among its youth. This reflects the rentier nature of the Saudi economy, typical of the oil-rich Gulf states. As much as one-third of the Saudi total population of 27 million are foreign expatriate workers, many of them from South Asia, providing cheap slave-labor. This has resulted in large sections of the Saudi native population being unemployed, which has been kept docile up to now through «hand-outs» from the Saudi oil coffers………………. Turkey, Saudi Reap Machiavellian Whirlwind
ISIS: The ‘Enemy’ The US Created, Armed, & Funded
by Robert Fantina via TheAntiMedia.org,
Out of nowhere, it seems, Daesh, also commonly referred to as ISIL or ISIS, spontaneously formed, a group that perverts aspects of Islam for its own violent ends, and threatens, we are told, all that the civilized world holds dear.
The “war on terror,” governments inform their citizens, has a new front. And that front is Daesh.
Let us not be too hasty. Things are not always what they appear. Daesh is well-financed, and that money must be coming from somewhere other than a ragtag band of malcontents. Daesh soldiers have advanced weaponry and sophisticated communications methods. They have tanks and Humvees. None of these can be obtained without significant funding. Though the source is quite illusive, there is some evidence that will lead to a trail.
First, we must look at Daesh’s origins, and even that is not easily discernible. Writing for The Guardian in August 2014, Ali Khedery suggests:
“Principally, Isis is the product of a genocide that continued unabated as the world stood back and watched. It is the illegitimate child born of pure hate and pure fear – the result of 200,000 murdered Syrians and of millions more displaced and divorced from their hopes and dreams. Isis’s rise is also a reminder of how Bashar al-Assad’s Machiavellian embrace of al-Qaida would come back to haunt him.
Facing Assad’s army and intelligence services, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraq’s Shia Islamist militias and their grand patron, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Syria’s initially peaceful protesters quickly became disenchanted, disillusioned and disenfranchised – and then radicalised and violently militant.”
It is interesting that Mr. Khedery says that Assad’s “embrace of al-Qaida” came back to haunt him. It brings to mind a parallel situation in the United States. (Actually, there are many, but we will look at only one.)
Examining the theories of the origins of Daesh
In the early 1960s, when the U.S.-supported leadership of Iraq was becoming just a bit too big for its britches — at least in the United States’ view — in wanting to challenge Israel as a major player in the Middle East, the U.S. decided that its leader, Abdel Karim Kassem, had to go. Selecting a virulent anti-communist party to throw its support to, the U.S. worked closely with a young man named Saddam Hussein. We all know how well that ultimately worked out. The source of much, but not all, of the unrest in the Middle East today can be traced back to that U.S. decision.
Other theories on the formation of Daesh are also worth considering. Yasmina Haifi, a senior employee of the Dutch Justice Ministry’s National Cyber Security Center, asserted that Daesh was created by Zionists seeking to give Islam a bad reputation. “ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It’s part of a plan by Zionists who are deliberately trying to blacken Islam’s name,” she wrote on Twitter in August 2014.
And finally, it has been more than suggested that Daesh “is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region,” as Garikai Chengu, a research scholar at Harvard University, put it in September 2014.
Yet if the United States’ role wasn’t that blatant, it certainly existed, according to Seumas Milne, a columnist and associate editor at The Guardian. He argued in a June opinion piece:
“[T]he U.S. and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of ‘Islamic state’ – despite the ‘grave danger’ to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.”
No matter how one looks at it, there are many possible causes that spawned Daesh. As we look at its funding sources, it may all become clearer.
Funding and materiel, courtesy of Uncle Sam and his friends
In Daesh’s role as opposing Syria (just one of its many roles) the terrorist outfit is believed to have received funding from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as part of their opposition to the Assad regime.
But it also generates its own income, having taken control of local businesses, taxing others, and selling oil. Among its customers, incredibly, is Syria. Since Daesh controls much of the oil-production infrastructure in the country, Syria has little choice but to purchase oil from the very group that seeks to overthrow its government.
Reports also indicate that Israel is a main buyer of Daesh oil. The sale is not direct; oil is smuggled by Kurdish and Turkish smugglers, and then Turkish and Israeli negotiators determine the price. As a result of these oil sales, Daesh has annual revenues estimated at $500 million, according to data compiled by the U.S. Treasury.
In November of this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Daesh is being financed by at least 40 countries — including G20 members. With such widespread financing, it will be difficult to defeat Deash.
The U.S., in its misguided and destructive foreign policy toward the Middle East (its misguided and destructive foreign policies toward the rest of the world are topics for a separate discussion), also provided Daesh with a vast arsenal……………ISIS: The ‘Enemy’ The US Created, Armed, & Funded
Militant Groups Confirm Death, Injury of Over 300 Members in Syria’s Sheikh Meskeen
Source: Syrian Army Destroys Jeish Al-Fateh’s Ammunition Depot, TOW Missiles near Idlib
Ahrar Al-Sham Commander Forced to Stand down after Heavy Defeats in Aleppo
Homs: Syrian Army, Al-Nusra Militants Resume Fierce Clashes over Strategic Village
Syria: Growing Number of Militants Surrender to Government
Aleppo: Army Crushes ISIL’s Command Center, Military Positions
Severe Infighting Leavees Three Senior Militant Commanders Dead in Syria
Source: http://blogdogcicle.blogspot.com/2016/01/isis-update-132016-isil-hits-iraqi.html
