The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant Megathread

[CountDeMoney]

Damn, even ISIS confuses "clit" with "magazine."

[Valmy]

My sister told me that when she was little and saw white people in make up commercials and never black people, she thought it was just because white people were ugly and black people were beautiful and didn’t need make up

It was always harder to pick up black women

[CountDeMoney]

It was always harder to pick up black women

Too high maintenance.  Too much violence drama involved.

[derspiess]

Also they tend to be a little heavier.

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like their war in Syria is going well.

http://newsok.com/islamic-militants-seize-part-of-syrian-army-base/article/feed/714628/?page=2

Islamic militants seize part of Syrian army base
Published on NewsOK Modified: July 24, 2014 at 8:38 am •  Published: July 24, 2014

BEIRUT (AP) — Fighters from the extremist Islamic State group on Thursday overran part of an army base in northern Syria, which has been under the militants' siege for months, in ferocious battles that killed or wounded dozens on both sides, activists said.

The battle over the base is the latest in the Islamic State's push to capture as much of Syrian territory as it can. Since June, the group has seized a huge chunk of territory straddling the Iraq-Syria border, where they have declared a self-styled caliphate.

The base lies in Raqqa province, where much of the territory fell to the Syrian opposition last year. Earlier this year, the Islamic State, which sided with the rebels at the start of the Syrian conflict three years ago, captured much of Raqqa and has tried to capture the base several times.

The assault on the base began around midnight on Wednesday with two suicide car bombs, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Syrian army helicopters fought back, targeting jihadi positions around the base, the activist group said.

The Observatory said 35 Islamic State fighters died and that dozens of government troops were killed or wounded, including six soldiers who were beheaded. It said both sides exchanged mortar and artillery fire.

The Syrian air force carried out 12 raids around Division 17 and the nearby provincial capital of Raqqa, which is also controlled by the Islamic State, said the Local Coordination Committees, another activist group. It said army helicopters were dropping barrel bombs around the base.

Elsewhere on Thursday, Islamic State fighters stormed the headquarters of Syrian President Bashar Assad's ruling Baath party in the northeastern city of Hassakeh in the predominantly Kurdish province that carries the same name, activists said. Black banners of the Islamic State were seen raised over the Baath party building, the Observatory said.

Juan Mohammed, a Kurdish official in Hassakeh, said there were two explosions near the building but he added that he had no immediate information about whether the Islamic State had stormed the Baath headquarters.

In their push, the Islamic State fighters have also captured much of Syria's oil-rich eastern province of Deir el-Zour, which borders Iraq. Last week, the jihadis captured a gas field in the central province of Homs, an attack that left more than 200 people dead.

Clashes between government forces and Islamic State fighters have been rare until after the group's blitz advance in northern and western Iraq in June. Since then, violence between the two intensified as jihadis try to remove all rival groups from areas under their control.

Assad's forces have fought back, but for now appear mostly intent on consolidating the territory firmly under their control in his powerbase, the capital of Damascus, and in his Allawite heartland to the west.

The Syrian conflict has killed at least 170,000 people, a third of them civilians, and displaced some 9 million, a third of the country's pre-war population, according to activists.

Also Thursday, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the watchdog agency overseeing Syria's disarmament, said ships had completed deliveries of 1,300 tons of chemicals removed from Syria to destruction facilities outside the country.

"Destruction activities are now underway in all locations," said Ahmet Uzumcu, the director-general of the OPCW Executive Council.

After 600 metric tons (661 tons) of chemicals were loaded for destruction onto the U.S. vessel MV Cape Ray in the Italian port of Gioia Tauro earlier this month, the remaining chemicals were delivered to commercial land-based facilities in Finland, the United Kingdom and United States where they are now in the process of being destroyed, Uzumcu said.

"As of 21 July, the amount of all Syrian chemicals destroyed stood at 31.8 percent of the total," the OPCW said.

The statement also said that seven facilities remaining in Syria will be razed to the ground and five underground structures will be sealed permanently to make them inaccessible. Those activities are to begin within 60 days, OPCW said.

Seems like that FGM announcement may be a hoax. Good news if so.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28466434

Isis denies ordering that all girls in Mosul undergo FGM
Doubts grow over UN report, seemingly reliant on year-old document from Syria thought to have been doctored

    Ian Black and Fazel Hawramy   
    The Guardian, Thursday 24 July 2014 18.29 BST   



Jihadi extremists who have taken over the Iraqi city of Mosul have denied ordering families to have their daughters undergo female genital mutilation in order to prevent "immorality" or face severe punishment, as claimed by a senior UN humanitarian official on Thursday.

Supporters of the Islamic State (Isis), previously known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, dismissed the story as propaganda based on a fake document – though residents of Mosul, as well as Kurdish officials, insisted it was true.

The claim about enforced FGM came from the UN's deputy humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Jacqueline Badcock, who told reporters that up to 4 million women and girls aged 11-46 faced the risk of genital mutilation. "This is something very new for Iraq, particularly in this area, and is of grave concern and does need to be addressed," she said. "This is a fatwa from Isis. This is not the will of Iraqi people, or the women of Iraq in these vulnerable areas covered by the terrorists."

Reports about the issue have been circulating in Iraqi media for the past few days. On Wednesday a Kurdish website, BasNews, reported that the fatwa had been issued by the self-proclaimed "Caliph" of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as a "gift" to the people of Mosul. BasNews said on Thursday that it stood by its story. "Of course Isis would deny this," the editor, Hawar Abdulrazaq, told the Guardian.

Badcock's comments came in a briefing by videolink from her base in Irbil, capital of the Kurdish regional government, to reporters at the UN headquarters in Geneva.

But plans for a statement by the UK international development secretary, Justine Greening, were dropped as doubts grew about the accuracy of the claim.

Suspicions about its veracity were based partly on the fact that FGM is not required by Islam and is not prevalent in Iraq. It is most widespread in Egypt, Sudan and east Africa.

A document circulating on social media purporting to be the Isis fatwa was in fact dated July 2013, originated in Aleppo, Syria, and was widely described as having being photoshopped. It appeared on Thursday on the website of the Saudi-owned TV channel al-Arabiya.

Ahmed Obaydi, a spokesman for Mosul police, told BasNews: "Baghdadi's decision to have all women circumcised is, as he claims, to prevent immorality and promote Islamic attitudes among Muslims. The decision was made by Baghdadi as a 'gift' for people in Mosul." But Mohammed, a local journalist, told the Guardian he knew no one who had been told by Isis that their female relatives should undergo FGM. "This is mainly media hype with no substance," he said.

Isis supporters quickly dismissed the story as a hoax. "If Isis responds to every lie and rumour they will not be able to control all these areas you hear about," tweeted one. "Please ask UN to prove their claims before you hear from us." The same Twitter account, whose name is derived from an Arabic word meaning "monster", contains multiple images of the decapitated heads of Syrian soldiers taken in the Raqqa areas near the Iraqi border.

According to the Iraqi paper al-Mustaqbal, which also reported on the alleged fatwa earlier this week, the practice of FGM is alien to Iraqi society except the Kurdish provinces. Worldwide, more than 130 million girls and women have undergone FGM.

The FGM story broke against a background of wider concern about the situation in Mosul, whose Christian community has been forced to flee under threat of forced conversion or execution by jihadists who have turned churches into mosques and confiscated property.

Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has lambasted Isis for its "criminality and terrorism". Last weekend Isis gave the city's Christians a stark choice: convert to Islam, pay a religious tax, or face death.

[jimmy olsen]

A whale of a tale!

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/24/isis-militants-blow-up-jonah-tomb

Isis militants blow up Jonah's tomb
Militants say revered Muslim shrine in Iraq, believed to be burial place of prophet swallowed by a whale, has become place for apostasy

    Associated Press in Baghdad
    The Guardian, Thursday 24 July 2014 18.45 BST   

Isis militants have blown up the Mosque of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, in Mosul
The blown-up Mosque of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, in Mosul. The mosque was built on an archaeological site dating back to the eighth century BC. Photograph: Uncredited/AP

Islamic State (Isis) militants have blown up a revered Muslim shrine traditionally said to be the burial place of the prophet Jonah in Mosul, residents of the city said.

Residents said on Thursday that the militants first ordered everyone out of the Mosque of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, then blew it up.

The mosque was built on an archaeological site dating back to the eighth century BC and is said to be the burial place of the prophet, who in stories from both the Bible and Qur'an is swallowed by a whale.

It was renovated in the 1990s under Iraq's late dictator Saddam Hussein and until the recent blitz by Isis that engulfed Mosul, remained a popular destination for religious pilgrims from around the world.

Several nearby houses were also damaged by the blast, said the residents, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared for their own safety.

The residents told AP that the militants claimed the mosque had become a place for apostasy, not prayer. The extremists also blew up another place of worship nearby on Thursday, the Imam Aoun Bin al-Hassan mosque, they said.

The attack came hours after Iraqi lawmakers elected veteran Kurdish politician Fouad Massoum as the nation's new president, as they struggle to form a new government amid the Isis blitz that has engulfed much of northern and western Iraq.

Iraq is facing its worst crisis since the 2011 withdrawal of US troops amid the offensive by the al-Qaida breakaway group that captured large swaths of land in the country's west and north, including Iraq's second largest city of Mosul. The militants have also seized a huge chunk of territory straddling the Iraq-Syria border, and have declared a self-styled caliphate in the territory they control.

[Syt]

It seems that the call for cutting all women may have been a fake.

[Razgovory]

I eagerly await all those totally not anti-semites and totally pro-humanists to march all around Europe to protest ISIS on this.

I don't think anti-Israeli sentiment is about anti-Semitism.  I think it's about two things:  the inability of people who lived in peace their whole life to comprehend that war is a nasty business, and the bigotry of low expectations.  Israel is a western state, so it's expected to act in a civilized manner, whereas you can't really expect anything other than brutal violence from the Arabs.

It is about your identity. Israel is a place holder or a vicarious target for something else in your life that annoys or bothers you. Where you stand of capitalism, free markets, redistribution and environmental issues is determinative of if you are anti-israel or pro-israel. I think it is obvious that it is not a split between pro-pals and pro-j00s, it is anti and pro israel. Note this is probably why the debate gets tricky for the pro-israel side since they find themselves having to justify or explain the real hard choices that need to be made while the anti-israel side merely attacks whatever hard choices Israel does make.

Alan Dershowitz's schtick about keeping Israel a bi-partisan issue is getting harder to maintain because it really isn't about israel, it's about the israel hater. This is why nobody gives a shit when arabs are massacred in greater numbers AT THE SAME TIME in Syria and Iraq today. On the 22nd alone (I think) more people died in syria from combat than have died in total in teh gaza war so far.

For arabs and muslims it is about their identity and dignity as arabs and muslims. Their impotence in stopping Israel shames them. For Socialists and lefties attacking israel is affirming their own communal belonging and their own expression of their values.

It's not about what the facts are it is about who you are.

Why do you hate them?  Religious angle?

[jimmy olsen]

Things are really heating up

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28454655

Hundreds die in Syria's 'deadliest week'

23 July 2014 Last updated at 18:31 BST

It has been described as one of the most deadly weeks in Syria since fighting began three years ago.

More than 1,700 people have been killed in seven days as fighting intensified after Presdent Assad was sworn in for a third term.

Fighters for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) have been accused of killing many government troops in a battle at a gas field.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/islamic-state-militants-confront-syria-forces-in-rare-confrontation-1406239224

Islamic State militants launched assaults on Syrian forces across three provinces on Thursday that killed key government figures, including two brigadier generals, said activists and residents, in a rare confrontation between the two sides during the war.

In one assault, the jihadists besieged two military bases outside Hasakah city in Syria's east, killing a commanding brigadier general, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group in London with a network of contacts across Syria.

The militants, wearing military uniforms, also stormed the headquarters of the ruling Baath Party, where they killed Hanna Atalla, a party leader in the city, according to the Observatory and residents in interviews. The Islamic State militants flew their black flag over the building, which had served as a government military operations center.

Also in Hasakah, the militants killed Abdul Samad al-Nazzal, a senior officer with the National Defense Forces, a pro-regime paramilitary group, these people said.
The Syrian government acknowledged that its Baath Party headquarters were attacked but didn't comment on any battles or deaths.

If the Islamic State militants can seize Hasakah city that will help them to consolidate their control over the major Syrian and Iraqi cities they have occupied on either side of the border. Hasakah sits in the middle of the Islamic State's two centers of power in both Syria and Iraq—Raqqa and Mosul.

Over the past two months, Islamic State jihadists have solidified their hold over a contiguous territory spanning over 400 miles and declared a caliphate, or Islamic empire, in June.

"If they take over the military bases in Malabiah and Kawkab [in Hasakah], they will gain tons of weapons," said a media activist who lives in Hasakah, in a Skype interview. "There are eight weapons warehouses with artillery, tanks and missile launchers."

The Islamic State seized large stockpiles of Iraqi military equipment including tanks and artillery when it overran Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, in June, ferrying away weapons, including some donated by the U.S. The war gains have enabled the Islamic State to fight on multiple fronts: against the Iraqi and Syrian governments and the multiple rebels groups in Syria that oppose them.

A recent surge in fighting between the government and Islamic State is a marked change. The two have rarely faced off on the battlefield, with President Bashar al-Assad's forces generally avoiding the same large-scale offensives it has launched against the Western and Arab-backed Free Syrian Army.

The Islamic State's victories on Thursday also extended to the north, where militants overran government positions in Raqqa province, where they killed another brigadier general.

The militants also beheaded six soldiers from the same division and posted photos of their heads lined up on a concrete floor to Twitter accounts associated with the Islamic State. Those same accounts posted a photo of a smiling Saudi they said launched the suicide blast that initiated the assault.

In retaliation, Syrian warplanes hit Islamic State positions on Raqqa and its environs, while government forces shelled the area, killing an unknown number of civilians, according to the observatory. Pro-government media confirmed the airstrikes.

In Syria's west, clashes continued for a second week in and around the al-Shaer gas field and production facility in Homs province, a major source of energy for the country. The Islamic State stormed al-Shaer last week, overrunning the facility and killing some 300 government forces and staging mass executions, according to statements made by supporters of the extremist group.

The government acknowledged the battle but didn't comment on any casualties.

The Syrian military sent in reinforcements to retake al-Shaer earlier this week and staged airstrikes, pro-government media said. The clashes killed 700 in just two days of fighting last week, according to the Observatory, marking the deadliest days of the civil war so far.

[jimmy olsen]

What wonderful proactive leadership we have. 

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/24/4253126/obama-administration-knew-islamic.html

By Jonathan S. Landay

McClatchy Washington Bureau


WASHINGTON --  Like the rest of the world, the U.S. government appeared to have been taken aback last month when Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, fell to an offensive by jihadis of the Islamic State that triggered the collapse of five Iraqi army divisions and carried the extremists to the threshold of Baghdad.

A review of the record shows, however, that the Obama administration wasn't surprised at all.

In congressional testimony as far back as November, U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials made clear that the United States had been closely tracking the al Qaida spinoff since 2012, when it enlarged its operations from Iraq to civil war-torn Syria, seized an oil-rich province there and signed up thousands of foreign fighters who'd infiltrated Syria through NATO ally Turkey.

The testimony, which received little news media attention at the time, also showed that Obama administration officials were well aware of the group's declared intention to turn its Syrian sanctuary into a springboard from which it would send men and materiel back into Iraq and unleash waves of suicide bombings there. And they knew that the Iraqi security forces couldn't handle it.

The group's operations "are calculated, coordinated and part of a strategic campaign led by its Syria-based leader, Abu Bakr al Baghadi," Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk told a House committee on Feb. 5, four months before fighting broke out in Mosul. "The campaign has a stated objective to cause the collapse of the Iraqi state and carve out a zone of governing control in western regions of Iraq and Syria."

The testimony raises an obvious question: If the Obama administration had such early warning of the Islamic State's ambitions, why, nearly two months after the fall of Mosul, is it still assessing what steps, if any, to take to halt the advance of Islamist extremists who threaten U.S. allies in the region and have vowed to attack Americans?



In fresh testimony before Congress this week, McGurk revealed that the administration knew three days in advance that the attack on Mosul was coming. He acknowledged that the Islamic State is no longer just a regional terrorist organization but a "full-blown" army that now controls nearly 50 percent of Iraq and more than one-third of Syria. Its fighters have turned back some of the best-trained Iraqi units trying to retake key cities, while in Syria, it's seized nearly all that country's oil and natural gas fields and is pushing the Syrian military from its last outposts in the country's east.



"What started as a crisis in Syria has become a regional disaster with serious global implications," Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Wednesday.

Yet Defense Department officials say they might not complete work on proposed options for U.S. actions until the middle of August, a lifetime in a region where every day brings word of another town or village falling to the Islamic State. Some lawmakers and experts say the delay borders on diplomatic malpractice.



"We did see this coming," said Royce, adding that Iraqi officials and some diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad began urging the administration in August 2013 to launch U.S. drone strikes against Islamic State bases near Iraq's border with Syria.



"This was a very clear case in which the U.S. knew what was going on but followed a policy of deliberate neglect," said Vali Nasr, the dean of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a former State Department adviser on the Middle East.

"This miscalculation essentially has helped realize the worst nightmare for this administration, an administration that prided itself on its counterterrorism strategy," said Nasr. "It is now presiding over the resurgence of a nightmare of extremism and terrorism."

Administration officials deny the charges of inaction. U.S. policy, they contend, was aimed at helping the Iraqi government deal with the growing threat.

"That was also the desire of the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government wanted to act on its own with our assistance," McGurk told Congress this week. He insisted that Baghdad didn't formally request U.S. airstrikes until May.

The situation, however, was far beyond the Iraqi government's ability to cope.

One complicating factor was the administration's approach to Syria and the uprising there to topple President Bashar Assad, a goal President Barack Obama adopted as America's own in an August 2011 statement that said Assad had lost all legitimacy to rule and must go.



Some experts argue that Obama committed a key error in 2012 by rejecting calls from top national security aides, lawmakers and others to train and arm a moderate rebel force to fight Assad.

Obama administration officials say that rejection was based on a variety of concerns, including that weapons passed to moderate rebels might end up in the hands of more radical elements such as the Nusra Front, an al Qaida affiliate that by mid-2012 had taken the lead in many of the anti-Assad movement's major victories.

But without a well-armed moderate force, the battlefield was left open to increasing jihadi influence, others respond.



"This crisis was allowed to fester and get worse in many ways due to inaction against Assad and ISIS," said Phillip Smyth, a Middle East researcher at the University of Maryland.

A review of the record shows, however, that support for the anti-Assad movement also hampered U.S. action to quash the Islamic State, which until earlier this year rebels considered an ally in the push to topple Assad.

In testimony in November, McGurk said that one of the reasons the United States had not granted Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's request for assistance against the Islamic State was Maliki's refusal to close Iraqi airspace to Iranian planes flying arms to Assad's military.

While Maliki's fears about the Islamic State "are legitimate," McGurk said then, "it's equally legitimate to question Iraq's independence given Iran's ongoing use of Iraqi airspace to resupply the Assad regime."



In another misstep, some experts said, the Obama administration appears to have turned a blind eye as U.S. allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others provided arms and money that allowed Islamist groups to hijack the Assad opposition and ultimately provide Baghdadi with a secure patch in Syria from which he eventually would send men and weapons back into Iraq.

Smyth disputed that idea in part, noting that the Islamic State was largely self-sufficient financially, although the influx of foreign fighters provided a crucial boost to its manpower.



What is indisputable, Smyth said, is that the White House became immobilized by the complexity of the crisis: Having declared that Assad had to go, it found that there was no opposition group that didn't have some ties to jihadists, and actively backing the rebels would put the United States on the same side as al Qaida.

"When you have a policy that was paralyzed by a number of different things, the result is a confused policy," he said.



On Iraq, meanwhile, the public testimony shows that the administration moved slowly to respond to the rising Islamic State threat. One complication: Doing so would have put the United States effectively on the same side as Iran, the main regional ally of Baghdad and Damascus.

Maliki, whose Shiite Muslim majority dominated Iraq's government, formally sought stepped-up U.S. military and counterterrorism assistance in October 2013. But he had been asking privately for help much earlier.

One such appeal came after a March 4, 2013, attack inside Iraq by Islamic State forces on Iraqi army troops who were escorting back to the border dozens of Syrian soldiers who'd fled into Iraq to escape an attack on their post by anti-Assad rebels. While still inside Iraq, their buses drove into bombs and gunfire. At least 49 Syrians and 14 Iraqis died. It was one of the first documented instances of the Islamic State coordinating attacks on both sides of the border.

Ali al Mousawi, Maliki's spokesman, called then for the United States to immediately give priority to arming Iraq with weapons that the country already had requested so that it could fend off any future incidents.



"We need equipment as fast as it was delivered to Turkey," Mousawi said, referring to the deployment of Patriot anti-missile batteries by the United States and several NATO allies after Syrian missiles landed in Turkish territory.

"They managed to install the Patriot systems within two weeks. We need something like that," he told McClatchy the day after the incident.



Instead, the White House stuck with a policy that tried to make use of the crisis to pressure Maliki into replicating the U.S. success late in the 2003-2011 occupation of enlisting Sunni tribes to help fight al Qaida's Iraqi affiliate, which eventually became the Islamic State.



"We made it clear to Maliki and other Iraqi leaders that the fight against terrorists and militias will require a holistic _ security, political, economic _ approach," McGurk told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Nov. 13 in describing talks held with the Iraqi leader during a visit he'd made to Washington a week earlier.

The approach called for Maliki to be more accommodating to his Sunni Muslim political rivals. The administration called on Maliki to end a harsh crackdown on Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority, restore their political rights and provide salaries and other benefits to Sunni tribes that agreed to fight the Islamic State. Maliki failed to make good on numerous assurances that he'd comply.

Washington also had other priorities: trying to mediate a feud between Maliki and Kurdish leaders over oil revenues, boost the country's petroleum industry and promote ties between Iraq and its Arab neighbors.



It was only after Islamic State assaults in December on the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi that the administration began stepping up military aid to Baghdad. It sent unarmed spy drones and 75 Hellfire missiles _ which had to be dropped from propeller-driven passenger planes _ for use against Islamic State bases in western Iraq.

And the United States has yet to deliver helicopter gunships and F-16 jet fighters that Iraq already had purchased. It also dragged its feet on Baghdad's request for U.S. military advisers, some 300 of whom were dispatched only after Mosul fell.



While there are many reasons for the Obama administration's failure to tackle the rise of the Islamic State earlier, lacking intelligence is not among them.

By early 2013, U.S. intelligence agencies began delivering more than a dozen top-secret high-level reports, known as strategic warnings, to senior administration officials detailing the danger posed by the Islamic State's rise, said a senior U.S. intelligence official. The reports also covered the threat to Europe and the United States from the return of thousands of battle-hardened foreign fighters, including dozens of Americans, who'd fought to topple Assad.

Intelligence analysts well into this year "continued to provide strategic warning of (the) increasing threat to Iraq's stability . . . the increasing difficulties Iraq's security forces faced . . . and the political strains that were contributing to Iraq's declining stability," said the senior U.S. intelligence official, who requested anonymity in order to discuss the sensitive issue.

On Feb. 11, Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in public that the Islamic State "probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014."

Flynn warned then that Iraqi forces were "unable to stem rising violence in part because they lack mature intelligence, logistics and other capabilities." They also "lack cohesion, are undermanned, and are poorly trained, equipped and supplied," leaving them "vulnerable to terrorist attack, infiltration and corruption," he said.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said his committee had been regularly briefed on both Syria and Iraq.

"I do not think it was an intelligence failure. I think that we got the information we needed to have," he said recently when asked his assessment of the developments in the region. "I don't feel like I could lay responsibility at the feet of the intelligence community for not seeing this coming, because they were aware of the growing risk."　

Nancy A. Youssef of the Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

[Savonarola]

It seems that the call for cutting all women may have been a fake.

I was surprised when the story came across; since FGM is widely practiced in parts of Africa (both Christian and Muslim) but not in the Middle East.

[Berkut]

Translation:

The Obama administration had no fucking idea what to do, and frankly, that is largely because there was and is no good idea about what to do.

You have a set of various bad actors - who do you decide to help?

[CountDeMoney]

Whatever happens, it will be the will of Allah.

[Viking]

Translation:

The Obama administration had no fucking idea what to do, and frankly, that is largely because there was and is no good idea about what to do.

You have a set of various bad actors - who do you decide to help?

Which is also the best and most substantial criticism of present israeli war policy.

[The Minsky Moment]

Translation:

The Obama administration had no fucking idea what to do, and frankly, that is largely because there was and is no good idea about what to do.

You have a set of various bad actors - who do you decide to help?

My translation is close but slightly different.
What we see now is the policy.  Of all the things that ISIS could do - getting themselves stuck between the resurgent Kurds and a mass of poorly organized but angry Sh'ia is the best case scenario - effective containment at low cost the USA.    If Maliki had been willing to play ball then it could have played out different but since he didn't, let the Iranians bail out their stooge.