Members of the group – which seized Iraq’s second city as part of its so-called Islamic State caliphate last summer – blew up a church which had been standing for thousands of years.
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“Why is this group being given this massive honor of being referred to as Islamic State, when they don’t deserve it?” he said in an interview.
It covers a stretch of land straddling the border between northern Iraq and eastern Syria.
The United States’ had initially urged the Iraqis to focus on reclaiming Mosul, but later changed tack, arguing for a focus on the Isil-held city of Ramadi, the capital of Sunni-majority Anbar province which extremists overran two months ago. Along with its ability to generate unprecedented numbers of foreign recruits-12 times as many as at the height of the Iraq War in 2006-08-Islamic State’s ability to inspire attacks like these illustrates its mastery of social media and electronic propaganda, and the effectiveness of its “leaderless resistance” model of individual and small-team guerrilla-style terrorism.
An Iraqi fighter plane was returning to base on Monday after a sortie against ISIS militants when a large bomb it carried was deployed – cause yet undetermined – and obliterated several houses in an east Baghdad neighborhood.
As the U.K.’s government weighs whether to start bombing ISIS in Syria, it has been drawn into a separate global argument over what to call the group it’s fighting against.
At the recently concluded Senate Armed Services Committee meeting, Defense Secretary Aston Carter and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey were grilled on the United States government’s strategy to fight ISIS. “As the Islamic State is getting locked down, they are squeezing the local population”.
Urban warfare eats armies – it sure as hell took some big, bloody bites out of USA forces after 2003 – and these ISIS troops aren’t just pissed-off teenagers with AK-47s.
The Observatory said 78 IS fighters have been killed since Sunday either in clashes with the YPG or by airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition.
One Kurdish commander described the shock troops who raided Kobani as suicidal.
Around the same time, they also overran a central Syrian town, al-Sukhna. “From what we saw, they weren’t planning to leave alive. I at least give it between three to five years, and three to five years of sustained US commitment to support forces on the ground”. “It seems we are training people to fight for a territory they don’t believe is their country”. First came a wave of more than a dozen suicide bombings that hammered the military’s positions, then the fighters moved in during a sandstorm.
Omran said that when the extremists figured out the military was listening in on its radio frequencies, it switched to more secure lines but continued using the infiltrated frequencies to feed the military false information.
It has a narrative about its own goals that is “straightforward, simple and direct,” and its enemies need to develop a better counternarrative, he said.
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Mroue reported from Beirut, Lebanon.
