The 'All Things ISIS' tread

[Lenno]

isis uses mustard agent against US troops in iraq

[Lenno]

Islamic Republic of Mauritania intensifies crackdown on anti-slavery activists

September 30, 201610:17 am By Robert Spencer 12 Comments
We constantly hear in the West that Islam forbids slavery. Reality is otherwise.
The Qur’an has Allah telling Muhammad that he has given him girls as sex slaves: “Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty.” (Qur’an 33:50)
Muhammad bought slaves: “Jabir (Allah be pleased with him) reported: There came a slave and pledged allegiance to Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) on migration; he (the Holy Prophet) did not know that he was a slave. Then there came his master and demanded him back, whereupon Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) said: Sell him to me. And he bought him for two black slaves, and he did not afterwards take allegiance from anyone until he had asked him whether he was a slave (or a free man).” (Muslim 3901)
Muhammad took female Infidel captives as slaves: “Narrated Anas: The Prophet offered the Fajr Prayer near Khaibar when it was still dark and then said, ‘Allahu-Akbar! Khaibar is destroyed, for whenever we approach a (hostile) nation (to fight), then evil will be the morning for those who have been warned.’ Then the inhabitants of Khaibar came out running on the roads. The Prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives. Safiya was amongst the captives. She first came in the share of Dahya Alkali but later on she belonged to the Prophet. The Prophet made her manumission as her ‘Mahr.’” (Bukhari 5.59.512) Mahr is bride price: Muhammad freed her and married her. But he didn’t do this to all his slaves:
Muhammad owned slaves: “Narrated Anas bin Malik: Allah’s Apostle was on a journey and he had a black slave called Anjasha, and he was driving the camels (very fast, and there were women riding on those camels). Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Waihaka (May Allah be merciful to you), O Anjasha! Drive slowly (the camels) with the glass vessels (women)!’” (Bukhari 8.73.182) There is no mention of Muhammad’s freeing Anjasha.

“Mauritania intensifies crackdown on anti-slavery activists, says campaigner,” by Nellie Peyton, Reuters, September 30, 2016 (thanks to Lookmann):

DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Mauritanian anti-slavery activists jailed last month have been tortured in detention and transferred to a remote desert location in an “intensification of repression” by the state, a leading campaigner said.
The West African nation in August jailed 13 members of the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) for up to 15 years for their role in June protests by residents of a slum in the capital Nouakchott, many of whom are former slaves.
Slavery is a historical practice in Mauritania, which became the last country worldwide to legally abolish it in 1981.
Today some 43,000 people or at least one percent of the population live as slaves, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. Yet other estimates put the number as high as 20 percent in a country that is a focus of activism by the modern anti-slavery movement.
The 13 activists have been tortured and were this week moved to the desert north where they are cut off from their families, doctors, and lawyers, according to members of the IRA in the northern town of Zouerate who were informed of the relocation.
Mauritanian government officials did not respond for requests to comment.
“This intensification of repression is equal to the intensification of the fight (against slavery),” Biram Dah Abeid, head of the IRA and an opposition politician, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Dakar, Senegal.
“Our colleagues suffered physical and psychological harm,” he said, adding that people cannot even visit the prisoners’ families for fear of being watched by the government….

[Lenno]

At 62, US special forces veteran battles against ISIS on lonely desert front



By Benjamin Hall
Published November 04, 2016







Now Playing Former US Special Forces operator fights ISIS in Iraq




NORTHERN IRAQ – On the Western side of Mosul, far from the media’s attention, lies a forgotten front crucial to choking off ISIS' lifeline to Syria.


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Fox News recently made the eight hour trip west from Mosul to the front outside the devastated city of Sinjar and found a small outpost where a handful of men hold off near-daily attacks from ISIS fighters.
One soldier manning the post was David Shumock, a 62-year-old Floridian and former U.S. Air Foreces pararescueman. The American fights side-by-side with the Kurdish Peshmerga, and serves as medic and trainer to his comrades, as well.
ALLIES WATCH AS ISIS EXODUS HEADS FOR RAQQA
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Shumock has called the dusty, makeshift, camp surrounded on three sides by ISIS, for a year. When he and his fellow fighters arrived, ISIS had only just been ousted from Sinjar city. Their first effort was to rebuild the forward base by hand – fixing roofs, and ringing it with lookouts posts.
From this base, the men, part of the Kurdish quick reaction force, support a 500-mile long line, responding to attacks wherever and whenever they come. Often, it’s their base under attack from artillery.
The line they oversee straddles the ISIS corridor to Syria, and is a key supply route to reinforce Mosul with both men and equipment. Yet even as the long-awaited move to retake Mosul is underway, the western front has been largely unguarded by the coalition of Iraqi army, Kurdish forces, Shia militia and U.S. advisersworking together against ISIS.
“Conventional military wisdom says you encircle your enemy and defeat him," Shumock said. "For some reason, they’ve left the western side of Mosul all the way to Syria open, and, as the general told you, we see 500 vehicles moving every day, resupplying Mosul and Tal Afar. And there’s nothing we can do.”
As he watches these convoys, Shumock explained how they’re prohibited from attacking unless they are certain no civilians are in the line of fire.
It's not just the rules of engagement handcuffing Shumock and his fellow fighters. They are sorely lacking in support, he said.

“In the year I’ve been here, we’ve never seen a U.S. officer, or received any support from them,” he said.
They’re so undersupplied they’ve had to raise money in the U.S. just to buy night vision goggles so they can see what they’re shooting at during nightly raids.
Shumock came to Iraq after losing his only daughter in a car crash, and seeing videos of ISIS murdering women and children. He said he wanted to put his military skills into service of a righteous cause.
Near the base lies a grim reminder of the brutality of ISIS: The mass graves of thousands of Yazidi villagers who were killed as their ancestral home was overrun.
Shumock himself has found some of the mass graves while on patrol. Once, he followed a trail of bone fragments to a place where the skulls and bones of countless souls were piled up.

[Lenno]

Islamic State in Egypt executes 100-year-old Sufi cleric for “witchcraft”

November 20, 2016 1:51 pm By Robert Spencer 23 Comments
The fact that the Islamic State kills other Muslims is often proffered by Barack Obama and others as a sign that it is itself not Muslim. In reality, the fact that the Islamic State kills other Muslims is a sign that it considers itself the arbiter of what is true Islam and what isn’t, and […]

[Lenno]

Libya: Monkey pulls off girl’s hijab, violence ensues, 16 dead

November 21, 20169:29 am By Christine Williams 3 Comments

According to residents and local reports, the latest bout of violence erupted between two tribes after an incident in which a monkey that belonged to a shopkeeper from the Gaddadfa tribe attacked a group of schoolgirls who were passing by.
The monkey pulled off one of the girls’ head scarf.

Must have been an “Islamophobic” monkey.
Life means little to nothing among barbaric jihadists. This one is difficult to impossible for any Western, thinking individual to fathom: how does a monkey elicit this kind of deadly response over a hijab? Thoroughly mystifying, but telling about the kind of mindset that is inevitably going to be found among some Muslim immigrants who have now arrived on Western soil. Human lives lost over a monkey. Enough said.

“Monkey incident sparks clashes in southern Libyan city of Sabha, 16 dead”, Globe and Mail, November 20, 2016:

At least 16 people died and 50 were wounded in Libya in four days of clashes between rival factions in the southern city of Sabha, a health official said on Sunday.
According to residents and local reports, the latest bout of violence erupted between two tribes after an incident in which a monkey that belonged to a shopkeeper from the Gaddadfa tribe attacked a group of schoolgirls who were passing by.
The monkey pulled off one of the girls’ head scarf, leading men from the Awlad Suleiman tribe to retaliate by killing three people from the Gaddadfa tribe as well as the monkey, according to a resident who spoke to Reuters….
Like other parts of Libya, Sabha has been periodically plagued by conflict since the uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi five years ago splintered the country into warring factions.
In the Sabha region, a hub for migrant and arms smuggling in Libya’s often neglected south, militia abuses and the deterioration of living conditions have been especially acute.
The Gaddadfa and the Awlad Suleiman represent the most powerful armed factions in the region.
During the latest clashes, which took place in the city center, initial attempts by tribal leaders to calm the fighting and arrange a ceasefire so that bodies could be recovered had failed, residents said….

[willowlady]

I thought for sure that the men retaliating would have killed the school girl, rather than the monkey and other people.

[Lenno]

Islamic State burns alive two caged Turkish soldiers

December 25, 2016 By Robert Spencer 50 Comments
Obama and others often invoke the Islamic State’s murders of other Muslims to support their claim that the Islamic State is un-Islamic. But since Islamic law mandates death for apostasy and heresy, this doesn’t establish their point. They burned these soldiers alive probably because they believe that they were involved in burning areas under Islamic […]

[Lenno]

Thursday, 23 March 2017

The London Terrorist Attack and the JCC Bomb Threats

Jewish Community Center Bomb Threats
Last summer I wrote about how hacking the phone system could be used to automate terrorism. That analysis is proving to be spot on. Today, we learned that a 19 year old American-Israeli living in Israel, hacked satellites and phone equipment to make 120 fake bomb threats Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) in the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Further, the timing, target type, and number of threats led to the successful exploitation of a social systempunkt (the most vulnerable part of a complex network). In this case, the attack exploited anti-Trump media narratives to label the President as an anti-semite. It worked.
London Terrorist Attack
Last summer, I wrote extensively about how ISIS was using social networking innovatively to remotely activate terrorist attacks around the world. In short, this new model did away with the training, planning, and support required for traditional attacks. This lack of communication makes an attack very hard to detect.
Here's how they did it:

• Planning, preparing, and executing an attack on your own is a rite of initiation into ISIS.
• An online pledge of fealty to the Caliph (Facebook live video or post) during or just before the attack connects the attack to ISIS.
• Upon seeing the attack and the pledge, ISIS will immediately accept the attacker as a 'soldier of the Islamic state.'

Since I wrote about this method, we've seen ISIS make a wholesale shift to it as this NYT graphic shows:

How does this relate to the attack in London?
London appears to fit the my model for online activation. We'll know for sure when we get confirmation when we find an online pledge of fealty by the attacker.
Sincerely,
John Robb
PS: Since I first wrote about this model last year, lots of attacks using it have been made. It's now possible to ask the question: Is online activation more effective than planned attacks?
The attacks appear to be as large as planned attacks. e.g.
Orlando: 49
Nice: 86
Istanbul: 39
They also appear to be more numerous, more geographically dispersed, far harder to detect/foil (fewer attacks prevented), and nearly costless. This suggests that online activation is a more successful method than planned/coordinated attacks.

[Bezukhov]

Keep up the good work!!!

CIA: ISIS “terrified” of white guys posing with guns on Facebook
Satire

http://thedailyer.com/cia-isis-terri...s-on-facebook/

[Bezukhov]

ISIS is out of the oil business.

Unable to Capitalize on Oil Reserves, ISIS Breaks Ground on Libya’s First Chipotle
Satire

https://www.themideastbeast.com/unab...irst-chipotle/