Volkerball posted:

Lebanon is closing its border to refugees. Syrian refugees currently make up 1/4 of Lebanons population, and tensions haven't really let up since the fighting in Arsal. Was to be expected sooner or later I suppose.

http://www.syriadeeply.org/articles/2014/10/6315/lebanon-closes-borders-syrian-refugees-surge-numbers/

Panzeh posted:

This isn't the first time Lebanon had refugees come in and impact the country's stability.

VanSandman posted:

Wait, guys, I figured it out. We just need to double down on the bombing!

Honestly, in my opinion, the only result that can possibly come from the Syrian madness is a major redrawing of the de facto territory maps of the countries nearby. I don't think there has ever been a redrawing of the map along ethnic lines that has gone without some ethnic mass murder, but if someone can think of one please tell me!

Cippalippus posted:

It might surprise you that I'm all but a rightist, as I've said before I'm a supporter of the swiss green party. I don't find hard to reconcile my leftist views about cultures and welcoming the others with my intense dislike for a religion whose members, at least here where I live, march hand in hand with neo-fascists to deny basic rights to LGBT community members: http://www.quibrescia.it/cms/2014/06/09/centro-islamico-e-sentinelle-in-piedi-unite-contro-i-gay/

For different reasons, I agree that US failed to manage the situation. Obama on one hand showed that his words are worth nothing and on the other proved that he hasn't got the faintest clue of what diplomacy is, or how it works. He had a masterpiece of diplomacy at hand, appease Russia and Iran and normalize relations with them, probably ousting Assad in the process; instead, he looked like a jackass to the world and like a weakling to his enemies. Had he not said anything about Syria, no one could say a thing about it, but after posturing and huffing and puffing he couldn't. You can't just enter in other powers' spheres of influence, if tomorrow Iran became a secular democracy and the most perfect republic in the world, would the USA stop an Iranian invasion of Saudi Arabia if their aim were to bring down an oppressive regime? Ceteris paribus, it's what Obama wanted to do, but at some point it became clear that it was just a bluff.

Cippalippus posted:

There's a funny article related to ISIS on a Swiss newspaper talking about the following mythological creatures: unicorns, Santa Claus and moderate Muslims talking against the ISIS. Goes on to talk about how right we were when we banned minarets a few years ago and quotes the late Oriana Fallaci.
I bet a lot of posters here would become mad at it, for it isn't very politically correct and some would even label it "islamophobic" or whatever term you use to people who point out facts about Islam and its pedophile, war criminal founder Muhammed.

Cippalippus posted:

I know, and it felt so good to vote yes for that referendum.

Torpor posted:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...led-Kobane.html

Here is an exciting livestream of Peshmerga standing around in Turkey not being in Kobane. Well, either that or the border itself. I think the camera man is getting harassed.

Libluini posted:

Launching cross-border attacks is actually quite smart, since ISIS can't very well counter-attack back into Turkey itself, that would be suicide after all.

I just wish the article would go into deeper detail about the FSA-groups fighting against ISIS. Are they fighting from Turkey, or from inside Kobanê?

Torpor posted:

The plan was always to have them go to Kobane and stay there. I don't think that the Peshmerga are staging from Turkey, they are waiting to cross the boarder.

quote:

Iraqi Peshmerga troops have arrived in Turkey to launch cross-border attacks against Islamic State militants in Kobane, the Syrian town currently under siege from the jihadis.

Libluini posted:

The article you posted says the exact opposite, though. Didn't you read it?

Especially this part:

quote:

ERBIL/SYRIAN-TURKISH BORDER - The first Peshmerga forces have entered the besieged city of Kobane, according to local witnesses and Kurdish officers.

An advance team of 10-15 officers entered Kobane through the Turkish border on Wednesday afternoon to plan a collective strategy with the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian-Kurdish force that has been defending the city against an Islamic State (ISIS) takeover.

The Peshmerga team is also exploring an entry strategy for the approximately 150 Iraqi Kurdish soldiers that will provide artillery support to the YPG in Kobane. Those men await orders to deploy at a temporary camp at Pirsus, seven miles from Turkey’s border with Syria, where they are being guarded by the Turkish military.

Torpor posted:

In a sense crossing the border into kobane is a "attack across the border" but I would not describe it as "cross-border attacks" which implies that they are setting up shop in Turkey and repeatedly crossing the border.

The plan was to have the Peshmerga go to Kobane. Near as I can tell, the housing of the peshmerga has been received as a further insult to the Kurds.

http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/301020141



http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/31102014


Australia going to valiantly destroy IS in Iraq...just as soon as the paperwork gets cleared.


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29816644

Some people are probably curious as to the place of Kurdish women in their society. This lady speaks briefly about it.

Edit: looks like the kurdish troops are moving out.. OPSEC PEOPLE OPSEEECC.

I don't even think this stream has a delay.

quote:

“We are getting a lot of micromanagement from the White House. Basic decisions that should take hours are taking days sometimes,” one senior defense official told The Daily Beast.

Other gripes among the top Pentagon and military brass are about the White House’s decision not to work with what’s left of the existing Syrian moderate opposition on the ground, which prevents intelligence sharing on fighting ISIS and prevents the military from using trained fighters to build the new rebel army that President Obama has said is needed to push Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into a political negotiation to end the conflict.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel himself is among the critics of Obama’s strategy in Syria. Hagel wrote a memo last week to Rice warning that Obama’s Syria strategy was unclear about U.S. intentions with respect to Assad, undermining the plan.

quote:

Nagata has been tasked with building a new rebel army from scratch but is not permitted to work with existing brigades, meaning he must find and vet new soldiers, mostly sourcing from Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. What’s more, the size of the program will produce only 5,000 fighters a year after the training begins, most of whom who will serve as “local defense forces” and not go after ISIS, according to two officials briefed on the plan. Of those forces, 500 would be given additional training in “counterterrorism.” That’s a small attack force to face an ISIS military that is estimated to have tens of thousands of fighters.

quote:

Gen. Michael Nagata is promising to build a new force to destroy ISIS, but lawmakers worry he has been given an impossible mission.

As lawmakers prepared to take a risky and fateful vote on Obama’s plan to train and equip the Syrian rebels, the man who assured them it could be done was Gen. Michael Nagata, Obama’s point man for the mission to build an ISIS-killing army in Syria.

There are skeptics both inside and outside the government who doubt Obama’s new plan to arm the Syrian rebels can work. First of all, the administration has said for years that the moderate opposition can’t be a reliable partner for the United States in Syria. Only last month, Obama said that the rag-tag bunch of “former doctors, farmers, and pharmacists” could never win their civil war and the whole idea that arming them earlier would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy.”

J33uk posted:

The small insular group of advisors above all others is apparently a strategy that works for winning elections but not for foreign policy. I wonder if Obama himself actually understands this isn't going to work.

J33uk posted:

The small insular group of advisors above all others is apparently a strategy that works for winning elections but not for foreign policy. I wonder if Obama himself actually understands this isn't going to work.

J33uk posted:

The small insular group of advisors above all others is apparently a strategy that works for winning elections but not for foreign policy. I wonder if Obama himself actually understands this isn't going to work.

quote:

She was peppered with critiques of the president’s Syria and China policies, as well as the White House’s delays in releasing a national security strategy, a congressionally mandated document that sets out foreign policy goals. On that last point, Ms. Rice had a sardonic reply.

“If we had put it out in February or April or July,” she said, according to two people who were in the room, “it would have been overtaken by events two weeks later, in any one of those months.”

...

Mr. Obama is also leaning more than ever on his small circle of White House aides, who forged their relationships with him during his 2008 campaign and loom even larger in an administration without weighty voices like those of Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, or Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state.

...

Defenders of Mr. Hagel attribute his reticence in meetings to fears that the details will leak into the news media, and say he is more vocal in one-on-one sessions with the president. They also insist that he is more assertive on policy than his reputation suggests, citing a sharply critical two-page memo that he sent to Ms. Rice last week, in which he warned that the administration’s Syria policy was in danger of unraveling because of its failure to clarify its intentions toward President Bashar al-Assad.

quote:

...
Some 80 Peshmerga fighters stopped off late Wednesday at the Demirol motorway services restaurant just outside the city of Sanliurfa as they travelled from Iraq through Turkey to the border with Syria.

Enjoying the spicy local specialty of Urfa Kebab, as well as soup, beans and rice, the party of 80 worked up a bill of 1,040 Turkish lira ($473).

“The Peshmerga group left the restaurant without paying. So far there has been no sign of payment,” a restaurant source, who was not named, told Hurriyet.

“But we have kept the bills. And we are waiting for the payment,” the source added.

The paper later quoted one of the partners in the restaurant, Bekir Demirol, as saying that there had been a “misunderstanding”, and the bill was subsequently paid by the office of the Sanliurfa province governor.

quote:

...
In Turkey, not only are the numbers of persons addicted to drugs or alcohol rising rapidly, but also the age of addiction is getting progressively younger. Between 2004 and 2012, the number of people requesting addiction recovery help rose 5X from 40,000 to 227,000, as noted on the website Today's Zaman. The great majority of those needing treatment are struggling with opiate abuse and nearly all of them are men under 25 years of age. More than half of these people are entering treatment for the second or more times.
...

quote:

Turkish officials would reject any suggestion that this is their first contribution against ISIS, of course. They claim that for some time already they have been clamping down on jihadis crossing into Syria and ISIS smuggled oil. The protests ring hollow, unfortunately, as journalists on the ground describe only half-hearted official measures on these issues. Ankara’s claims sound even more hollow when video footage emerges, such as that shown this week by the private Dicle television station, showing Turkish soldiers meeting with ISIS militants on the border near Kobane, chatting with them for half an hour and then exchanging friendly goodbyes after their talk. Everyone knows that any jihadi wishing to fight in Syria generally buys an airplane ticket for Istanbul rather than Amman, Beirut or elsewhere.

quote:

Every family has a member who went abroad to work – someone who could be vulnerable to extremist recruiters with their promises of martial "glory" and of high salaries that never materialise.

"These people who lack all feeling and don't think about their ... families," Solekhzod said.

Some refuse to fall for the lies.

"I recently went abroad to meet Tajik migrant workers," Sadriddin Sodikov, imam-hatib of a mosque in Chorkishlok, said. "I met more than 150 migrants from our village and other parts of Tajikistan. They promised me they would never give in [to recruiters]. All of them expressed concern that our youths are going off to their deaths."

But not all have the wherewithal to stand against the militants' false promises.

"These are typical naïve villagers," Sodikov said of many of the migrant workers. "They're uneducated, so they're ... easily fooled."

quote:

...
The teens were apprehended by German authorities in Frankfurt on Oct. 21, based on information supplied by the FBI. Two are sisters of Somali descent, the third is of Sudanese descent. They had stolen money from their parents and paid cash for their tickets, officials said. They were bound for Syria via stops in Frankfurt and Turkey.
...
"If they didn't have access to the Internet, I doubt very much they would be in the stage that they are," said SITE director and co-founder Rita Katz, according to the paper. What happened to the teens is "a case study" of Islamic terrorists trying to recruit women, she said.
...

quote:

...
Mashala, who also lost a nephew in the battle, said he witnessed evidence of Turkish complicity when he went to the border to recover his relative’s body.

“There were 20 of us. We witnessed there the friendly relations between Daesh and the Turkish state,” said Mashala, referring to the IS group by its Arabic acronym.

“They were giving some Islamic State fighters crates of weapons or ammunition. Twenty people saw it like me.”
...

quote:

One senior Israeli official, who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said Brookings’s funding from Doha “has definitely caused some parts of the [Israeli] government to look skeptically on the work of Brookings.”

“It is still widely seen as the leading think tank, or one of them, in Washington,” the official added. “But it definitely makes you look at the institution differently.”

My Imaginary GF posted:

Torpor posted:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/31/military-upset-with-white-house-micromanagement-of-isis-war.html?via=mobile&source=twitter

Not the comprehensive strategy!

That plan is completely doomed to fail, why would anyone even consider that?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/21/obama-taps-star-general-to-build-syrian-rebel-army-to-fight-isis.html

For context:

I missed this article from last month but holy poo poo. I am certain Obama has no idea what the gently caress; certainly he has zero vision for the region.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/27/world/meast/syria-former-us-soldier/index.html?sr=sharebar_twitter

The YPG is getting a shitload of mileage out of this guy.

Apparently the YPG recruits through their facebook page, "lions of rojava". You apparently just PM them and list your skills and experience.

I wonder if they need fedora wearing shitposters? Probably not

fade5 posted:

Oh loving Christ, I know it's the Daily Beast, but how is "build an ISIS fighting force out of (half-starved) refugees who have probably had little/no military training and probably aren't really keen to fight" any sort of loving plan? A plan that ends up falling apart after the fighting is done or even partway though is one thing, but this "plan" won't even work from the very beginning.

The only Syrian strategy that's seemed to "work" so far is airstriking ISIS outside of Kobane, and that's only "working" because the Kurds are a competent fighting force, and because we're coordinating with said Kurds so that they can direct the airstrikes to where they'll be most useful (what a loving concept).

The one ME strategy that's not poo poo: backing the Kurds. Keep backing the Kurds, Obama. Ignore Erdogan, he's an rear end in a top hat.

Dilkington posted:

I'm sorry I misrepresented your politics. I sympathize with the notion that "we must not tolerate the intolerant." I'm aware of the marriages of convenience sometimes made between radical Islamists and fascists (bad things recognize each other), but such arrangements are the exception. What I said is still true- that the far-right mostly supports Assad because his killing of Muslims makes him a rassengenosse.

http://www.ibtimes.com/assads-unlikely-allies-who-west-supporting-maligned-syrian-dictator-why-1205445
https://www.hate-speech.org/other-volunteers/
http://www.huffingtonpost.it/2013/06/05/manifestazione-pro-assad-fascisti-da-tutta-europa_n_3390190.html
http://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/syria-who-are-assads-fascist-supporters/

You'll understand why I mistook you for a rightist- you seem to share much with Fallaci, in having not only a political but also cultural or ethnic disdain for Muslims.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrfh-tuKaFs

Mans posted:

Is there any decent newsfeed about the Middle-East out there in a single website? Half the posts in this thread nowadays is a fakeposter ironically calling for genocide and 70's style political action and people responding to it.

Not even Brown Moses posts that much in this thread anymore.

gently caress, if it wasn't for Volkerball this thread would have literal zero news content.

quote:

Washington (CNN) -- Pentagon officials are readying a plan that would deploy U.S. military advisers to the volatile Iraqi province of Anbar to advise and assist Iraqi security forces in a region currently dominated by ISIS militants.

"To be clear, this is not a change in mission nor is it a combat role, as they will be operating in the same advisory role as the other locations," Col. Edward Thomas, spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN.

U.S. advisers currently operate in areas around Baghdad and Irbil in the north of the country. The new proposal would put U.S. troops in the middle of some of the most violent situations in Iraq.

Thomas said the plan is still "under development."

kustomkarkommando posted:

So you don't favour an actual organized partition, just a massive free-for-all with the international community stepping in after x people have died to hold up the hands of the "winner".

As a policy that amount's to "gently caress it, this poo poo is too hard"

quote:

Caesar, however, has looked to the United States for more than evidence for a possible war crimes trial. When he visited Washington last summer, he was hoping that his trip would lead to more forceful American action.

Besides testifying before Mr. Royce’s panel, Caesar sought a meeting with Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, his aides say. Told she was not available, he scribbled a note in Arabic to Mr. Obama, which he gave to Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, at an emotional meeting at the State Department.

“I have risked my life and the life of my immediate family, and even exposed my relatives to extreme danger, in order to stop the systematic torture that is practiced by the regime against prisoners,” Caesar wrote. “What is it that you can possibly do to prevent the killing, especially since there are more than 150,000 prisoners in the jails of the regime awaiting this black fate?”

Though Mr. Rhodes mentioned the humanitarian aid the United States has provided and alluded to the effort to train moderate Syrian rebels, Mr. Rashid said he had told the White House that it risked losing the support of the Syrian public if it did not stop the Assad government from dropping barrel bombs on Syrian cities.

“The Syrian people are slowly coming to a realization that the United States does not value their lives,” Mr. Rashid recalled warning the White House aides.

In his Oct. 20 letter, which came nearly three months after Caesar’s letter to the president, Mr. Rhodes reaffirmed that the Pentagon would “train and equip Syria’s moderate opposition.” But his response still fell short of the sort of action Caesar had sought.

“Your letter mentions that more than 150,000 people are still in Assad’s custody,” Mr. Rhodes wrote. “The United States Government has consistently condemned the regime’s failures to grant independent monitors access to detainees. We will continue to push for full access to all detainees in Syria, just as we will push to bring the perpetrators of atrocities in Syria to justice.”

Gmaz posted:

I've read somewhere but can't recall the source that ISIS basically left the city of Mosul and that it's in the control of JRTN.

Torpor posted:

Here are some video scenes of fighting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2aQu6WeHKM

Tanks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH9ej7JU3JY

Urban combat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9AKY1fYvvo

Tanks in urban combat!

Though I am almost certain that every video of combat in Kobane is not actually from Kobane.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DovglwhNKoQ

I think this is the aftermath of a US airstrike in Kobane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rpEl2LzgVw

Title translates to: Opinions and garnish with our units Front "secret Kaineh"



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEM7dhkOl7Y

"Stronger battles led our units valiant in Kobanî "street fighting""

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4aYgdu5zTg
translated interview with YPG fighter about attacking Rabia (I think thats the border town between Syria and Iraq.)


#twitterkurds is murmuring about a KRG counter-offensive in the Sinjar region.

Gmaz posted:

I've read somewhere but can't recall the source that ISIS basically left the city of Mosul and that it's in the control of JRTN.

Torpor posted:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...tml?tid=rssfeed

So IS is conducting purges to get rid of possible rebels in their control. The article covers an ex-officer in Mosul who had previously been given a "repentance badge". If that is the case that is a huge mistake on IS's part. Why in the world would you surrender to IS, even if you are a Sunni? Similarly that one tribal group that surrendered recently got 220 of it's members massacred. I think if IS is trying to follow the Khmer Rouge's playbook they should wait until they are in power first.

Niqash posted:

When the IS group entered the city many of the local security personnel fled, staying on the outskirts of the city or going all the way into the relative safety of the nearby semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. When the IS group announced an amnesty – on condition that the men give up their weapons and repent – many returned to the city and their families, partially because it was difficult and expensive to stay away from their homes for longer.

Those who returned before the end of June found themselves in long queues outside the Sabireen mosque in Mosul's eastern Wahda neighbourhood or in front of the Omar al-Aswad mosque in the Farouq neighbourhood.

There they took turns to repent. They did this by signing a piece of paper entitled the “Certificate of Repentance”, stamped with the seal of Ninawa province, now part of the IS group’s self-pronounced Caliphate. The certificate has a number of important details, including the full name of the person repenting, the date of repentance, date of birth and Iraqi ID number, his place of work, his last rank, the type of weapon he carries and its serial number, his current place of residency, his phone number and an up to date picture.

One of the conditions for an acceptable repentance was that the officer handed over their weapon. “But many police and military men had actually lost their weapons during battles or left them behind so they were forced to buy new guns on the black market at high prices, just so they could hand them over,” says one former Mosul police captain, Ahmad Ali.

At first security staffers were just asked to repeat a few lines in a local mosque and this was considered enough. But then the IS group started asking the men to sign the certificates and to hand over their weapons because they were well aware that these people could prove a threat to their authority eventually, Ali explains.

The IS group’s suspicions were confirmed when, toward the end of July and at the beginning of August, members of the group were shot by unknown assailants in different parts of the city.

kustomkarkommando posted:

Seems the impetus for the current massacres of ex-policemen was Usama al-Nujayfi's announcement of the formation of the Kata’ib al-Mosul, an anti-ISIS Sunni resistance group operating in Mosul. Jawad Al-Tamimi published a brief piece on them recently which includes a list of attacks they have carried out against ISIS starting from the end of August.

My Imaginary GF posted:

Kustomkarkommando, thats some very informative information; I don't suppose you've run across any semi-current lists of ISIS' armory and weapon stocks? I'm wondering their capacity to turn eastern Mosul into a modern-day Warsaw Uprising.

quote:

The source, who asked not to be named, added that “This decision came after internal security breaches due to the covert cooperation of some Kurdish members of ISIS with Kurdish Peshmerga forces by providing information on the activities and movements of ISIS units, which led to targeted strikes, resulting in heavy losses in lives and equipment among the organization ISIS.”

S.T.C.A. posted:

Nice to see more about the specific factions fighting against IS. That is the most uplifting news I've read in a while, even though he concludes, "they're still all tiny and spread out."