The Coming War- Middle East On Fire

There are an amazing number of parallels between the world of the 1930s and today; economically, politically, socially. All we've needed is the match to light the fire. Now we have the match - a dictator attempting to enlarge his empire, while hiding behind the cloak of nationalism and the alleged need to defend ethnic nationals within the borders of another nation.

We have weak, vacillating politicians who are willing to placate said dictator with talks, and treaties, and concessions. All the pieces are in place.

 

It is disturbing that there have been so many long range "Profile" missions flown by Russian Bears. We haven't flown a profile mission in over 40 years so I'm wondering what the payoff is for the Russians.
It may be that the Russians lack a decent flight simulator to train its crews, but I'm not so sure of that. It's an expensive airplane to fly.
Is it psyops or just old fashioned saber rattling?

 

What goes around comes around. We started this in the late 40s with the B-36 and then the B-52. Of course then we stuck ICBMs anywhere we could dig a hole for them. If that wasn't enough we built big ol' sinkable pipes just chock full of large cans of serious whoop azz and sent them prowling all arond the USSRs sphere of influence. And now you read the comments on the several articles and you see"OMG they're gonna bomb us!!!!" Vlad is just letting "O" know he DOES have a stick of his own. Of course, if "O" worries enough that it adds a stoke to his game he's gonna stomp his feet and draw another pink line in the sand......or vote present again.

 

Well duh Putin!
Even with UN mandate it's an act of aggression.

 

Am concerned that we will lose a lot of men somewhere and nobammy will be forced to start something. He will not go against his muzzie friends if it is at all possible to avoid.

 

It seems that ebola doom is starting to fade from the headlines. Did we all forget the other issues? Remember ISIS. This is such a big Whoops-

ISIS Video: America’s Air Dropped Weapons Now in Our Hands - The Daily Beast

Looks like we will finally be funding border security:

State Dept Spends $357K to Beef up Border Security – in Ukraine | CNS News

 

What...whoa...UKRAINE'S BORDER!?!?!?!

 

Yeah, they talked about a long partial fence, and just decided it was dumb.....

 

Obama=neville chamberlin

 

The Secret Life of an ISIS Warlord

(This is a very large article, but well worth the full read. Link at the bottom.)

EXCERPTS:
PANKISI GORGE, Georgia—The mother of martyrs, a woman in her fifties, is delicately beautiful and visibly in pain. She covers her hazel eyes and sobs over a photo album as the call to prayer echoes throughout the Georgian village of Jokolo, just south of the Chechen border.

The mother’s story involves one of the most notorious jihadists in the world, a man who served in intelligence units trained by Americans and the British, a man who is the face of the ISIS conquests, and a man who took her late son’s wife for his own bride.

The mother, Leila Achishvili, tries hard to maintain her poise, even as she discusses the death of both of her boys, Hamzat and Khalid Borchashvili. She is halfway through a box of tissues. Her story has just begun.

The eight-mile-long Pankisi Valley is notorious even in the infamous Caucasus as a lawless corridor for smuggling weapons, drugs, and jihadists into Chechnya, just a few miles to the north and the east. It is also one of the few places in Georgia where the sorrowful beauty of the call to prayer still can be heard. These days Pankisi feels closer to Syria than to the nation of Georgia, to which it belongs.

Among the younger generations, radical versions of Sunni Wahhabism have replaced the traditional moderate Sufi Islam of Pankisi’s Kist majority. There is rampant unemployment, and many of these disillusioned young Georgian jihadists now make their way west to Syria via neighboring Turkey. They are inspired by local legend and ISIS commander Abu Omar al-Shishani, who made the same journey only a few years before.

Stories and rumors circulate—whispers of his massive villa, his fiefdom and private harem, his 40 personal guards, his armored cavalcade of SUVs, and now his stunning and fierce Chechen warrior wife. For these young men, their Pankisi native son has already become part Josef Stalin (another native son of Georgia) and part rock star of the media-savvy Islamic caliphate. But according to his father, Abu Omar al-Shishani is a mirage: It’s his older brother who is running the ISIS show.

********

The name that Abu Omar al-Shishani grew up with was Tarkhan. And because we are here in his hometown talking to the people who once loved him, and perhaps still do, we’ll use that name, too. Tarkhan’s father, Temur, a grizzled, eccentric, well-read old Christian with a bitter sense of self-irony, tells his sons’ story in an extensive—almost bizarre—interview with The Daily Beast at his small gray house in the village of Birkiani, where his boys grew up.
.....

Despite Tarkhan’s fame as a holy warrior, the father doesn’t see him as particularly pious, his mother came from a Muslim family, but he didn’t show much interest. The old man claims that, in fact, before Tarkhan went to prison, he wasn’t religious at all. ......

Like so many of the world’s most brutal dictators, military leaders, tyrants, and jihadists, it appears Tarkhan was trained by the very best: the United States government. According to his father and former colleagues, Tarkhan worked for an elite “Spetsnaz” Georgian military-intelligence unit—at least until he caught tuberculosis, lost his job in the intelligence unit, was then framed by that same intelligence unit, and went to jail in 2010 for weapons possession.
.....

The United States government has been overtly training and funding Georgian troops for more than a decade. This is no secret. Last month, when U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel visited Georgia, he also visited U.S. Marines at the Krtsanisi National Training Center outside Tbilisi, where the leathernecks continue to train Georgian troops as they have for more than a dozen years.
.....

Yet despite Tarkhan’s American guidance and combat experience, Tarkhan’s father doesn’t see his son as any kind of military mastermind. Temur views his youngest boy as a kind of victim. Over the course of the interview, the father sketches a relationship that his two sons have gone to great lengths to create and to conceal in their command of ISIS troops in Syria.

“Tarkhan is 27, not more—a child! Tamaz is his teacher. Tamaz ruined everything I had,” says the father of these holy warriors. ..... It was Tamaz who took his whole family to Syria. “They are together. Tamaz is his mentor. .....

The conspicuous, red-bearded jihadist Tarkhan, a.k.a. Abu Omar, one of the most wanted terrorists on the planet, may well be a figurehead for his older brother, the mastermind behind the Chechen operatives running ISIS offensives in Syria and Iraq.

If this is true, it explains why, unlike the rest of the top ISIS commanders, Tarkhan allows himself to be photographed extensively. They are creating the illusion that he is the “head of snake”—while the real architect of ISIS’s Syria operation, Tamaz Batirashvili, remains in the shadows.
.....

The importance of Tamaz is not just a figment of the old man’s imagination. The elder brother’s military prowess and importance to Georgian intelligence was also confirmed by a former Georgian military official, who spoke on condition that he not be identified by name.
.....

But when Tarkhan got sick with tuberculosis and was ushered out, the government gave him no pension or medical assistance. He grew increasingly angry, and then the government went after him, charging him with arms possession—just as it had done with his older brother years before—and throwing him in jail.
.....

The home of Leila, the soft-spoken mother of martyrs, is warm and elegant, a far cry from the tiny cottage of the boisterous Temur, Tarkhan’s father. Yet Leila’s hearth is also the childhood home of two Wahhabi jihadists who left Pankisi to join Tarkhan’s fight in Syria. Leila’s sons, Hamzat and Khalid Borchashvili, also have not returned. And there is this curious connection as well: Leila and Temur have the same daughter-in-law.

Her name is Seda Dudurkaeva, although now she goes by the name Aisha. With big brown eyes, long lashes, and voluptuous features, she was once one of Chechnya’s most desired brides. Seda is the daughter of Asu Dudurkaev, who was a minister in the government of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov—who fired him because he could not “control” his fanatical daughter.
.....

Seda, the Chechen beauty, first went to Syria to marry Leila’s son Hamzat, and Leila’s sobs grow deeper as her story progresses. She says that when her two sons were just boys she sent them to live with her former husband in Austria. She thought he could provide better for them, and she wanted to get them away from the increasingly radical atmosphere in Pankisi. She remembers Hamzat coming home one day when he was only 12 years old wearing the kind of robes affected by the Wahhabi extremist. “I thought in Europe they would abandon Wahhabi teachings,” she say. “I was wrong.”

Fifteen years later, when Hamzat returned from Austria to Pankisi, he was well-educated, with an engineer’s diploma from a university in Vienna, and he could speak five languages. But he took all these skills to Syria, to fight alongside Tarkhan, now known as Abu Omar al-Shishani.

“I used to not sleep at night, waiting for Hamzat’s Skype call. One night he finally did. Suddenly there on the screen was my son wearing a black scarf on his head with ‘Allah u Akbar’ written in Arabic. When I saw him, I cannot express the feeling I had,” she said. “I asked him: ‘For God’s sake… For Allah’s sake, take me there with you to Syria, I just want to hug you, nothing more.’”

Hamzat agreed to let her visit.
.....


Leila also met with Tarkhan, who came to visit her: “I was taken to a room full of men where I was told that Omar al-Shishani would come the next day and we would meet separately. .....

Leila marvels at the reverence with which Tarkhan was treated. In her eyes he was just a boy from Pankisi: “I asked what kind of a position he held and why he was so heavily protected—why people were visiting him to get his advice and consultations or telling him their plans. I was told that he was like a second Bin Laden. He was seen this way.”

Four days after Leila returned home from Syria, she received a call from her younger son, Khalid. He informed her that Hamzat had “become a shahid,” a martyr, and he was dead. Leila desperately begged and pleaded with her youngest son not repeat the mistake of his brother, but Khalid replied: “I have been dreaming about this since my childhood.”

“When I heard these words, my heart froze,” the mother of martyrs told us there at her house in Pankisi. “After four or five weeks, I noticed that people were trying to hide something from me. My worst fear had come true: My Khalid was now dead too. They say he was shot by a sniper. But no one saw him dead or alive. Only his wallet was found. Seda, the widow of Hamzat, sent me the money she found in Khalid’s wallet. She said that it belonged to me.”

Leila Achishvili says she believes that after Hamzat was killed, Seda was ready to leave Syria and return home, but “Abu Omar did not let her go and today she is his wife.” Partly this is tradition as old as the history of warrior Islam. “If a shahid’s wife loses her husband, she should not stay alone without care. This is their rule and according to it now someone else had to marry her. Suddenly Seda found herself with Tarkhan, whom my son trusted and at whose side he used to stand!”

Inevitably there have been rumors and suspicions that Tarkhan might have arranged Hamzat’s death, much as King David in the Bible arranged the death of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah. But there is nothing to substantiate those stories. There is simply too little information.
.....

Tarkhan boldly claims that next he will bring the fight to Putin. ISIS has its sights set on the North Caucasus. After years of President Kadyrov’s reign in the Chechen Republic, ISIS may indeed find a niche as it did in Syria. But the Georgians who trained the red-bearded ISIS commander will not welcome his return at this point, no matter how the jihadists might hurt Putin’s cronies. ....

In this valley so far away from Syria, questions loom like mist drifting off the Caucasus. Leila has lost both of her sons. In a different way, Temur, the father of Tarkhan and Tamaz, also has lost his. With grave sincerity Leila asks, “What is the purpose of this war? With whom are they fighting and for what or why are they killing each other? Still today I cannot find an explanation for why these little children are dying.”

The Secret Life of an ISIS Warlord - The Daily Beast

 

U.S.-backed Syria rebels routed by fighters linked to al-Qaeda

By Liz Sly November 2
EXCERPTS:
The Obama administration’s Syria strategy suffered a major setback Sunday after fighters linked to al-Qaeda routed U.S.-backed rebels from their main northern strongholds, capturing significant quantities of weaponry, triggering widespread defections and ending hopes that Washington will readily find Syrian partners in its war against the Islamic State.

Moderate rebels who had been armed and trained by the United States either surrendered or defected to the extremists as the Jabhat al-Nusra group, affiliated with al-Qaeda, swept through the towns and villages the moderates controlled in the northern province of Idlib, in what appeared to be a concerted push to vanquish the moderate Free Syrian Army, according to rebel commanders, activists and analysts.

Other moderate fighters were on the run, headed for the Turkish border as the extremists closed in, heralding a significant defeat for the rebel forces Washington had been counting on as a bulwark against the Islamic State.
.....

Jabhat al-Nusra has long been regarded by Syrians as less radical than the breakaway Islamic State faction, and it had participated alongside moderate rebels in battles against the Islamic State earlier this year. But it is also on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations and is the only group in Syria that has formally declared its allegiance to the mainstream al-Qaeda leadership.

A Jabhat al-Nusra base was one of the first targets hit when the United States launched its air war in Syria in September, and activists said the tensions fueled by that attack had contributed to the success of the group’s push against the moderate rebels.
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Among the groups whose bases were overrun in the assault was Harakat Hazm, the biggest recipient of U.S. assistance offered under a small-scale, covert CIA program launched this year, including the first deliveries of U.S.-made TOW antitank missiles. The group’s headquarters outside the village of Khan Subbul was seized by Jabhat al-Nusra overnight Saturday, after rebel fighters there surrendered their weapons and fled without a fight, according to residents in the area.
.....

Although the administration has long voiced its support for the rebel fighters, direct U.S. aid to them has been slow and scant, with weapons shipments and a CIA training program limited by the need to vet the fighters for any ties to militants.

More extensive aid to the rebels has also been withheld in the interest of promoting a negotiated political solution that would remove Assad from power while leaving Syrian institutions, including the military, intact.
.....

U.S.-backed Syria rebels routed by fighters linked to al-Qaeda - The Washington Post