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fade5 posted:This right here, this is an excellent post. I'm really glad to hear there's a concrete plan for how Mosul's liberation is going to go. It's amazing how thing have changed in a year. Wasn't the deadline for the Mosul Offensive supposed to be October 2016? I really didn't think they'd hit it in time, there has been constant talk of delays for months. This is great news.
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Aug 29, 2016 23:47
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Torpor posted:I am continually amazed at how many armored vehicles are still rolling around Syria. ISIS often welds lots of metal sheets and armor onto Toyota trucks and then puts steel mesh around it to protect it from RPG fire, then uses the trucks in SVBIED attacks. They used to have way more Humvees when they captured huge swathes of Iraq in 2014. And obviously I'd expect the SAA to still have lots of armored vehicles.
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Aug 30, 2016 02:18
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rear end struggle posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3kQUKQQo4Y JFS is way more clever with its propaganda videos than Daesh is.
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Aug 30, 2016 12:09
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No way that Adnani is dead...no way. al-Adnani has been around since the year 2000, he was al-Zarqawi's deputy during the Iraq War too. If he actually is dead then that's HUGE news.
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Aug 30, 2016 20:44
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MothraAttack posted:He's dead. Yeah, I just saw that it was confirmed by Amaq. Crazy, I actually expected him to outlive Baghdadi since he's cheated death so many times. Big setback for Daesh in Syria.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:11
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54.4 crowns posted:Some nice That curly red-head kid looks so out of place in Syria Syrians generally look similar to Italians and Spaniards, but RED hair?
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Aug 31, 2016 01:38
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Radio Prune posted:Those jets are too busy cluster-bombing civilians and dropping burning thermite on hospitals dozens of miles away from any frontline. This. Also, lots of people seem to underestimate just how little is left of the SAA. This article addresses it: https://warisboring.com/whats-left-of-the-syrian-arab-army-eec39485df43#.u126prkp2 So I presume they move the guns constantly, and once jets are out of sight, they are free to shell the SAA on the ground into oblivion.
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Sep 1, 2016 03:15
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The director of foreign media relations for JFS, which up until a month ago was an al-Qaeda affiliate, did a live interview for Sky News. The world is such a funny, bizarre place.
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Sep 1, 2016 03:31
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I was under the impression that the New York Times was a really good, prestigious newspaper. Guess I was wrong. I'm really concerned if this is the average amount of knowledge the average westerner has about the conflict.
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Sep 8, 2016 18:43
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Count Roland posted:I'd love though if more questions were asked of political leaders that included basic geography. I remember W Bush bombing on stuff like this to a hilarious degree. Got any links to Bush screwing up like this? It's really entertaining (and worrying).
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Sep 8, 2016 20:03
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Sinteres posted:They've praised ISIS attacks, and were openly affiliated with Al Qaeda until a month ago, so there's every reason to believe they'd carry them out themselves if they have the opportunity in the future. They've already stated that they will not carry out attacks in the west (or outside Syria) and that they are just focusing on Syria and fighting the regime. Obviously there's no reason to just believe that and let them carry out their business, but as of now they really are just focusing on Syria. Can't say anything about the future though.
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Sep 9, 2016 03:11
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Volkerball posted:You cannot demand JaN not be involved in the future of Syria, and bomb them in pursuit of that, while doing nothing about the forces responsible for 90% of the civilian casualties in the country. That is such a willful blindness towards the human rights of certain Syrians, and a massive double standard, oriented solely around the selfish interests of the US at the expense of everyone else. It deserves to be portrayed as the blatant sectarianism and imperialism that it most certainly will be. And that portrayal makes the fight that JaN fights look like a real and necessary one, which will empower them in the long run, and is certainly a major reason why they severed ties with al-Qaeda, to give that portrayal more legitimacy. If the US is committed to not doing anything whatsoever about the regime, then it has to do nothing, period, as the result of any other strategy will be vastly worse than doing nothing, due to the clear double standard along sectarian lines. "Well there's no good outcomes," doesn't absolve that stupidity. ISIS is an exception, but targeting JaN and other opposition groups is much, much shakier ground. And JaN/JFS has noticed this stance too and is using it to its advantage. The split from al-Qaeda, the re-branding, everything was done in order to receive ground support from the Syrian population and convince them that their jihad is a noble cause against the tyrant and his government who have been responsible for more Syrian deaths than anyone else. If JFS wins support from the locals in the areas it controls and is then bombed by the USA while the USA does nothing about the regime itself, they (the USA) will instantly be seen as traitors of the revolution. They'll be seen as being on the same side as Assad and over time, JFS will become more and more legitimate and "the good guys" in the eyes of the Syrians, especially as they are putting a lot of effort into working with the other rebel groups and pushing a message of "together, we are stronger". We need to combat JFS, but in a different form (e.g: sahwat) rather than just screaming "kill the terrorists!!" and bombing the area they control into oblivion. It's a lot more complex than that, and as Volkerball said, it didn't work in Iraq.
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Sep 9, 2016 03:58
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Sinteres posted:Nothing worked in Iraq though, ultimately. Yeah, there was a lull in the violence, but it became worse than it was to start with after that lull. Radical groups are gaining power even in liberal Western democracies, so at the end of the day I don't know that there really is anything we can do to prevent the rise of radical movements in war-torn countries with sectarian conflicts, even if we do everything we're supposed to do. We tried plenty of hearts and minds campaigns in Afghanistan too, and that's another war we'll never win. Maybe none of that is an argument for bombing, but I think the idea that we were going to co-opt jihadist fighters in the middle of an ongoing sectarian civil war that dwarfed the violence during our occupation of Iraq was absurdly optimistic. There was no long term plan for Iraq though. The Islamic State's top positions are filled with ex-Ba'athists from the old regime and the detainees at Camp Bucca and the country was still horribly corrupt. I remember reading an article somewhere that said the mayor of Mosul basically let the city fall to the Islamic State back in 2014. And Fallujah has always been the heart of sectarianism and extremism which was never solved after the invasion and the civil war either. But IS is being pushed back in Iraq now and with their defeat, things will look a lot better for Iraq than it did during or before the Iraq War. I'm not talking about starting a hearts and minds campaign in Syria. I'm just saying that it's ridiculous for the USA to be on one hand arming the rebels, while on the other hand bombing JFS (who are working closely with the rebels in Aleppo) and doing NOTHING against Assad's regime. An indirect approach to combating JFS would be better, like establishing a group such as the New Syrian Army (who were entirely constructed by the USA to be the sahwat that fights the Islamic State) that will fight JFS and the government while improving relations on the ground. Obviously I know that my opinion could end up not working out either, you never know in a conflict like this. But bombing isn't the answer either. We can only speculate what will work to eradicate extremism and not letting Assad get away with the murder of thousands of Syrians.
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Sep 9, 2016 04:24
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Randarkman posted:The Gulf War and stationing of American troops on the Arabian peninsula arguably played a much greater part in leading the way towards 9/11 than the war in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan did play a part too though, as did the war in Lebanon in the 80's.
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Sep 9, 2016 11:52
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What actually is Hillary's plans for Syria? Same as Obama? I'm not that well informed on the US presidential election.
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Sep 9, 2016 12:28
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Kurtofan posted:It's the most important issue in everywhere that's not Syria. Except Afghanistan
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Sep 10, 2016 23:41
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SDF captured the 17th Division base north of Raqqa today, which was also besieged by IS for a while but was overrun in 2014.
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Jun 13, 2017 06:42
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:Recaptured. They lost it after an SVBIED attack didn't they? Yes. There was a lot of confusion about it actually. There were unconfirmed reports that they'd taken it, which then turned out to be false. Then they did eventually take it, but ISIS recaptured it fairly quickly. And now they've taken it again and pushed further south.
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Jun 13, 2017 07:41
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TyroneGoldstein posted:That is genuinely depressing. And all the more reason to engage in diplomatic talks with the Taliban, especially so that Afghanistan can focus more on the threat of IS-K in Nangarhar. The insurgency will continue forever otherwise.
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Nov 2, 2017 12:47
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Bohemian Nights posted:It's been a foregone conclusion for a while but: Crazy how just over two years ago, the caliphate stretched from the Turkish border all the way to Fallujah and the outskirts of western Baghdad at Abu Ghraib. Guess declaring war on basically every nation didn't pan out too well.
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Nov 3, 2017 13:46
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Saladin Rising posted:Holy poo poo that was fast: Hawija and Tal 'Afar were liberated so quickly because both were under siege for a long time and in Tal 'Afar, IS used all their resources and manpower to push out into the Ninawa desert and break the siege. Same goes for Hawija, throughout the entire Mosul campaign they launched daily attacks on the Mosul-Tikrit highway in order to disrupt or break the flow of equipment and manpower to Mosul. The result was that they were low on men and weapons when the offensives were launched. Whereas al-Qa'im wasn't under siege and they apparently still have a lot of manpower and weapons there. Weird how it fell so quickly. I would compare it to Mayadin but not Hawija or Tal 'Afar.
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Nov 3, 2017 21:47
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Duckbox posted:I wonder how much of ISIS's operational leadership is even still alive at this point. They have no capital and whatever is left of their central command is cowering somewhere along the Euphrates with three armies closing in on it amid sustained bombing and information warfare. At this point IS is basically back to being an insurgency. They are still very active in Diyala and Salahuddin and pretty much conduct raids every single day on PMU and ISF positions before retreating back to wherever they're hiding. The IS fighters take their commands from their Wilayat's and not from the central leadership, at this point they all know their caliphate is over. It wouldn't surprise me if some high-up IS figures have managed to smuggle their way out of the Euphrates area, maybe even out of Syria and Iraq.
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Nov 4, 2017 17:04
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Grouchio posted:1. Holy poo poo a coup/purge in my least favorite country. How likely is this going to bite back hard for the Crown Prince? Can we expect a Saudi-Iran war soon? I reckon it's far more likely we'd have another bullshit proxy war like Yemen.
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Nov 6, 2017 13:39
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