And the USA military has noted that ISIS has been able to lure scientists to its side.
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However, he said Islamic State has greater financial resources, adding that intelligence agencies have long underestimated IS’ capabilities. According to USA and European counterterrorism officials, the terror group is changing its ways, using lieutenants to orchestrate more coordinate and bigger plots.
In measuring progress in the American-led air war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, numbers tell one story but results tell another.
Islamic State follows an extreme version of Sunni Islam, analysts say.
A United Nations chemical weapons expert, wearing a gas mask, holds a plastic bag containing samples from one of the sites of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Damascus on August 29, 2013.
American officials said that most, though not all, of the five identified attackers involved in last Friday’s atrocities, were on a USA no-fly list.
To be sure, there are other sources of revenue: Bloomberg correctly notes that “even if the US finally weakens the group’s oil income, Bahney and other analysts in the USA, the Middle East, and Europe contend, Islamic State has resources beyond crude-from selling sex slaves to ransoming hostages to plundering stolen farmland-that can likely keep it fighting for years”. In any case, $500 million buys a lot of $500 black-market AK-47s. That was apparently out of concern about an eventual assault on Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which Islamic State captured in the summer of 2014.
While in occupation of Iraq, we worked to weed anyone who had supported the prior regime out of government jobs.
It is not surprising that media audiences – and journalists – around the world are expressing confusion about the many iterations of the name of the terrorist organization that struck Paris last week, killing 129 people and injuring many others. But the ISIS vs. ISIL war of words is also about the West’s desire to control political narratives. (The “sh” is a single letter in Arabic; transcribed, it has come over to us as Daesh.) Many in the Muslim world nevertheless insist on the term, principally because ISIS finds it so offensive that it has threatened to cut out the tongues of anyone who uses the term.
After nearly 18 months of the Obama administration’s half-measures, it’s obvious that defeat of the Islamic State is not going to happen absent a first-class, mobile ground force being launched to mate with overwhelming air power.
Militants increasingly sell raw crude to truckers and middlemen, rather than refining it themselves. Former NATO commander James Stavrides and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a leading establishment figure in the Republican presidential field, urged NATO to take charge of the anti-Islamic State campaign. They also are called IS and ISIL.
“None of these guys are ISIS”. For example, on Sunday it used A-10 attack planes and AC-130 gunships to destroy 116 tanker trucks in eastern Syria as they lined up near an oil facility in the open desert. That, the US can not allow.
The new branch of the terrorist group will consist of scientists from the region, including Iraq and Syria, and will conduct research and experiments to develop chemical weapons, US and Iraqi intelligence officials said.
The taxes bring in real money.
What the Islamic State wants is to kill infidels and build a caliphate.
“We’ve seen them use it on at least four separate occasions on both sides of the border – both Iraq and Syria”. The Islamic State doesn’t hate refugees as a matter of principle.
Before even starting the engine of a single tractor, the group is believed to have grabbed as much as $200 million in wheat from Iraqi silos alone.
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The United States and its coalition partners have targeted ISIS with 8,216 airstrikes – 5,383 in Iraq and 2,833 in Syria, through November 16, the Pentagon says. For example, they misrepresent or misunderstand what the Islamic State desires because they are often unwilling to concede the most obvious motivation of terrorism: faith.
