West Asia News and Discussions (YEMEN, gulf)

[vijaykarthik]

^^ precisely what I meant by I don't understand the ways of the world.

[ramana]

vijaykarthik, Roman Catholics vs Eastern Orthodoxy predates all these new games. So map out the descendants and see if it fits.

[Shreeman]

I just dont understand the ways of the world and more particularly the idiots at the top.

You seem to be assuming those tools at the top know what they are doing -- they are being adviced by the same f@rts in academia who think that Russia is a bigger threat to this planet than ISIS. These aholes at the top get there because of a mix of cleverness, ambition, luck (being at the right place at the right time) and because everyone else was less of a player than they were...they have ****** up spectacularly over and over again, and decades later admit their "mistake" (after refusing to consider other points of view when they could do something about it). A great example is Robert Macnamara who sent 10000s of American kids to their death, he had the highest IQ in the world at that time (if you believe in IQ tests) and decided to send them to their deaths to fight the evil called communism -- there is probably some other ahole in his place right now taking on Russia over ukraine and pretending ISIS can be manipulated to his will. It is a general rule that when it comes to complex situations, everyone is working off partial information and also usually absolutely certain that they have figured it all out. No one really knows what the f*** they are doing -- they just do sh!t and the masses (the same aholes in academia and think tanks) either decry them as murderers or great men a few decades after the fact. Robert MacNamara went back to Vietnam to apologize to them for all the pain and misery he had caused, in some fit on contrition in his old age, and they and mocked and laughed at his sorry ass.

I will conjecture that the "aholes in academia" today, are worse and more cowardly than they were a generation ago. But they are held in the same "expert" esteem.

In their defense, that previous generation also did not fear students coming back with guns, or leaders jailing them, and the shame of getting caught doing something wrong was astronomically higher.

I am *very* biased.

[Prem]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -isis.html
Will It Take The End of the World For Obama To Recognize ISIS As 'Islamic'?
( These ME desertwalas are really s..up Snakes &Scopions.)

At the White House summit on “countering violent extremism,” President Obama declared that violent jihad in the name of Islam isn’t the work of “religious leaders” but rather “terrorists.” American-Muslim leaders, attending the summit, cheered and applauded, later taking selfies in front of the president’s seal. But, as liberal Muslim feminist journalists who reject the vision of the Islamic State, we can say that the Islamic State, al Qaeda and the alphabet soup of Islamic militant groups, like HUM (Harkut-ul Mujahideen) and LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), rely very much on the scholarship of “religious leaders,” from Ibn Tamiyyah in the 14th century to Sayyid Qutb in the 20th century, who very much have credibility and authority among too many Muslims as “religious leaders.”
A very nuanced and thorough Atlantic article by journalist Graeme Wood this week, arguing “The Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” set off a firestorm of “derision,” as labeled by an article at ThinkProgress, a media site affiliated with the Center for American Progress, a think tank started by former Democratic operative John Podesta. ThinkProgress religion reporter Jack Jenkins wrote that the Atlantic article elicited “staunch criticism and derision from many Muslims and academics who study Islam.”Wood argues the Islamic State views itself as “a key agent of the coming Apocalypse.” He is absolutely right, and we have been seeing the symbols for months. After spending about 200 hours combined over the last few weeks, analyzing every word and symbol in the burning video of the Jordanian Air Force pilot and the execution video of the Coptic Christians, we can tell you that both videos reveal Islamic State strategists, propagandists and recruiters are very much grounded in a logical interpretation of the Quran, the hadith, or sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad, and fatwa, or religious rulings.They are also hell-bent on one mission: Chasing the apocalypse, according to Islamic eschatology—the study of the end of the world.
Among Muslims, stuck in face-saving, shame-based cultures, we need to own up to our extremist theology instead of always reverting to a strategy of denial, deflection, and demonization. /b]
While Rome burns in the war plans of the Islamic State and other militants, it is important to identify the enemy clearly. As sixth-century Chinese military strategy Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy.” This is particularly important in the kind of asymmetrical war America has been fighting for 14 years since the 9/11 attacks. We know “America is not at war with Islam.” We settled that in the days after 9/11. But we are at war with an ideology and theology of Islam. At the summit on “countering violent extremism,” Obama said that it would hand America’s enemy a propaganda victory if we called out the Islamic theology that is the underpinning of their violence, but the enemy will despise us no matter how politically correct we try to be. And by returning always to “historical grievances” and “root causes,” from the Crusades to colonialism, we only feed a culture of “wound collectors,” as former FBI agent Joe Navarro calls terrorists.As Obama argues it, the murders of the Coptic Christian—or “Egyptian citizens,” as the White House spokesman first put it—following the immolation of Jordanian Air Force pilot Lt. Muadh al Kasasbeh and the beheadings of Japanese hostages, journalists and others reveal a “brutal, vicious death cult.”

But we, as Muslims, recognize every word in the Islamic State’s theology from teachings, ideas and interpretations we’ve heard through our approximately 50 years on this earth, from the living room chatter of “couch jihadis,” as one FBI agent describes “wound collectors,” to sermons, Facebook posts and Twitter messages.. The media company name that produced the video flashes “Al-Hayat Media Center,” on screen, invoking an oft-repeated Quranic principle of hay at, or “life.” The Jordanian pilot burn video carried the brand “Al Furqan” media company. Furqan, a Quranic chapter title, represents “the standard” between good and “evil.”In English, a title appears above a beach scene: “A Message Signed in Blood to the Nation of the Cross.” The phrase used is actually Ummat El-Saleeb, which actually means “Community of the Cross,” though ummat can be used as “nation.” In the burn video, the West and its Muslim allies are called “the crusader coalition”—the language of a doomsday showdown. n English, the Islamic State lambasts, “The people of the cross, the followers of the hostile Egyptian Church.” But in Arabic, the Islamic State refers to Christians as ra’aya, which means “subjects,” not “people,” of “the cross,” or al-saleeb. The Arabic word used to describe “the Egyptian Church” is al-mohariba, which means “militant,” not “hostile.” So, the actual translation is: “Subjects of the cross, from the followers of the militant Egyptian church.”
At 18 seconds, the Islamic State fighters bring the captives onto the beach, and the fighters flash a signal of orthopraxy, or external ritual. The fighters’ pant hems are high, or “high-water,” as it’s said in American slang. Again, these are signs any Muslim would recognize, from a supposed hadith of the prophet Muhammad: “Lift up your lower garment to the middle of your shank, and if you don’t wish to, then to the ankles. Beware the trailing of the lower garment, for it is arrogance, and Allah does not like arrogance.” The “shank” is around the calf, making the fighters, in our eyes, “high-water jihadis.”Two minutes into the video, the chief fighter says, “Oh, you people, you’ve seen us on the hills of Al-Sham and Dabiq’s plain.” Al-Sham is a reference to Syria, and it is the second “S” in the name “ISIS.”In Islamic prophetic text, Sham is where the Muslim messiah, the “Mahdi,” will appear. Eschatologists in Islam argue the murder of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat by a dissident Egyptian in 1981, plus a string of killed rulers from Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, realizes a prediction that “the inhabitants of Egypt and Sham will kill their ruler and his commands.” Sham, to Muslim eschatologists, is not only the word for Damascus but also the word for “left” and is a way to describe countries to the left of the Hijaz, the region in modern-day Saudi Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina.A hadith, or saying of the prophet Muhammad, is translated as: “The Last Hour (of history) would not come until the Romans land at (either) al-A’maq or in Dabiq. An army consisting of the best (soldiers) of the people (the Muslims) of the earth at that time will come from Medina (to counteract them).” Dabiq and al-A’maq are towns in Syria along the Turkish border. Dabiq is about an hour’s drive north of Aleppo. According to another hadith attributed to the prophet Muhammad, this area will witness a war in which Muslims will defeat the Romans, conquer Constantinople (now Istanbul) and usher the return of Jesus, thus triggering the apocalypse.As the Islamic State fighters pushed the captors to their knees, one of the captors’ lips moving in silent speech, another looking furtively around, the video reads, in Arabic: “Until this war ends and Issa, may the blessings and the peace of Allah be upon him, descends….”Islamic eschatology, based on hadith, says Jesus will descend to Earth and meet the Mahdi in the grand mosque of Damascus, after the Mahdi arrives from Khorosan in modern-day eastern Iran and northern Afghanistan, with an army waving black banners, a black flag of the Islamic state with the shahada, or Islmic proclamation of faith, flapping in a corner of the Jordanian pilot immolation video. There, according to Islamic eschatology, the Mahdi will ask Jesus to lead the prayer, but Jesus will say, “No,” and pray behind the Mahdi.
Another hadith says: “At this very time Allah would send Christ, son of Mary, and he will descend at the white minaret in the eastern side of Damascus wearing two garments lightly dyed with saffron and placing his hands on the wings of two Angels. When he would lower his head, there would fall beads of perspiration from his head, and when he would raise it up, beads like pearls would scatter from it.”These Muslim end-timers’ beliefs aren’t much unlike those of the Christian mullahs of apocalyptic prophecy, including groups that call themselves “Christian Zionists,” but the Islamic State doomsday believers are, literally, killing in the name of their prophecies. Pointing his knife at the screen, holding it in his left hand, an oddity for a culture that still scolds children to use their right hand, the main Islamic State fighter says, “To break the cross, kill the swine and impose the jizya,” the “tribute.”The hadith for this prediction, goes like this: “The Prophet said: There is no prophet between me and him, that is, Jesus. He will descent [sic] (to the earth)… He will break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizya. Allah will perish all religions except Islam.”
AThe song continues, “If apostasy became widespread,” a sign of the impending apocalypse, according to a hadith, “and incandescent, we will fill the valleys with red blood,” as the screen shows the sea filled with red.We made the conscious decision to study the propaganda videos of the Islamic State because we feel there is just too much silence among Muslims against the logic of the Islamic State and like-minded militants. One of us, Hala, shook in her home in Fairfax Station, Va., after she translated the murder video of the Coptic Christians. The other, Asra, retreated into a corner of her family’s home in Morgantown, W.Va., to take screenshots of the video behind a locked bedroom door.Moderates must unite, to see that “revenge” isn’t our answer and that end-time eschatology doesn’t become something very dangerous: a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[vijaykarthik]

Ibn Saud family tree details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud

Diagrammatic view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_S ... rulers.svg

And one more thing I checked last time. If anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashemites

Family tree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashemites ... Tree_2.PNG

The Hashemites will ofcourse be the logical owners of the holy places which Ibn Saud ended up capturing and annexing.

[Tuvaluan]

I will conjecture that the "aholes in academia" today, are worse and more cowardly than they were a generation ago. But they are held in the same "expert" esteem.

In their defense, that previous generation also did not fear students coming back with guns, or leaders jailing them, and the shame of getting caught doing something wrong was astronomically higher.

I am *very* biased.

biased for or against? Sorry if I touched some raw nerve, since you are/were part of the academic scene I think. To be more precise, I am specifically dumping on the academics in "political science" and "international relations" and assorted aholes who write books and articles and create an army of their students, and the entire gang gets a circle jerk going with self-referential "wisdom" from their own crowd to explain their own theories on how the world "actually" operates and why they understand deep stuff that is beyond the ken of people who are not part of their group-think gang.

At some point, all their knowledge is self-referential and they set themselves up for an enormous screwup that will get a lot of their own citizens killed or put in harm's way for no appreciable benefit.

Academics in the hard sciences and math can also indulge in such behavior, but it is easy to separate the wheat from the chaff in those cases.

[ramana]

Vijay, Thanks. Will study them.

[Philip]

Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad
Gulf between Israeli secret service and PM revealed in documents shared with the Guardian along with other secrets including CIA bids to contact Hamas
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/f ... omb-mossad

Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad, leaked spy cables show

Seumas Milne, Ewen MacAskill and Clayton Swisher

Monday 23 February 2015

Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.

It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times.

Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.

But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

An extract from the document Photograph: The Guardian

The disclosure comes as tensions between Israel and its staunchest ally, the US, have dramatically increased ahead of Netanyahu’s planned address to the US Congress on 3 March.

The White House fears the Israeli leader’s anticipated inflammatory rhetoric could damage sensitive negotiations between Tehran and the world’s six big powers over Iran’s nuclear programme. The deadline to agree on a framework is in late March, with the final settlement to come on 30 June. Netanyahu has vowed to block an agreement he claims would give Iran access to a nuclear weapons capability.

The US president, Barack Obama, will not meet Netanyahu during his visit, saying protocol precludes a meeting so close to next month’s general election in Israel.

The documents, almost all marked as confidential or top secret, span almost a decade of global intelligence traffic, from 2006 to December last year. It has been leaked to the al-Jazeera investigative unit and shared with the Guardian.

The papers include details of operations against al-Qaida, Islamic State and other terrorist organisations, but also the targeting of environmental activists.

The files reveal that:

• The CIA attempted to establish contact with Hamas in spite of a US ban.

• South Korean intelligence targeted the leader of Greenpeace.

• Barack Obama “threatened” the Palestinian president to withdraw a bid for recognition of Palestine at the UN.

• South African intelligence spied on Russia over a controversial $100m joint satellite deal.

The cache, which has been independently authenticated by the Guardian, mainly involves exchanges between South Africa’s intelligence agency and its counterparts around the world. It is not the entire volume of traffic but a selective leak.

One of the biggest hauls is from Mossad. But there are also documents from Russia’s FSB, which is responsible for counter-terrorism. Such leaks of Russian material are extremely rare.

Other spy agencies caught up in the trawl include those of the US, Britain, France, Jordan, the UAE, Oman and several African nations.

The scale of the leak, coming 20 months after US whistleblower Edward Snowden handed over tens of thousands of NSA and GCHQ documents to the Guardian, highlights the increasing inability of intelligence agencies to keep their secrets secure.

While the Snowden trove revealed the scale of technological surveillance, the latest spy cables deal with espionage at street level – known to the intelligence agencies as human intelligence, or “humint”. They include surveillance reports, inter-agency information trading, disinformation and backbiting, as well as evidence of infiltration, theft and blackmail.

The leaks show how Africa is becoming increasingly important for global espionage, with the US and other western states building up their presence on the continent and China expanding its economic influence. One serving intelligence officer told the Guardian: “South Africa is the El Dorado of espionage.”

Africa has also become caught up in the US, Israeli and British covert global campaigns to stem the spread of Iranian influence, tighten sanctions and block its nuclear programme.

The Mossad briefing about Iran’s nuclear programme in 2012 was in stark contrast to the alarmist tone set by Netanyahu, who has long presented the Iranian nuclear programme as an existential threat to Israel and a huge risk to world security. The Israeli prime minister told the UN: “By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move[d] on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.”

He said his information was not based on secret information or military intelligence but International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports.

Behind the scenes, Mossad took a different view. In a report shared with South African spies on 22 October 2012 – but likely written earlier – it conceded that Iran was “working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors, which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given”.

But the report also states that Iran “does not appear to be ready” to enrich uranium to the higher levels necessary for nuclear weapons. To build a bomb requires enrichment to 90%. Mossad estimated that Iran then had “about 100kg of material enriched to 20%” (which was later diluted or converted under the terms of the 2013 Geneva agreement). Iran has always said it is developing a nuclear programme for civilian energy purposes.

Last week, Netanyahu’s office repeated the claim that “Iran is closer than ever today to obtaining enriched material for a nuclear bomb” in a statement in response to an IAEA report.

A senior Israeli government official said there was no contradiction between Netanyahu’s statements on the Iranian nuclear threat and “the quotes in your story – allegedly from Israeli intelligence”. Both the prime minister and Mossad said Iran was enriching uranium in order to produce weapons, he added.

“Israel believes the proposed nuclear deal with Iran is a bad deal, for it enables the world’s foremost terror state to create capabilities to produce the elements necessary for a nuclear bomb,” he said.

However, Mossad had been at odds with Netanyahu on Iran before. The former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who left office in December 2010, let it be known that he had opposed an order from Netanyahu to prepare a military attack on Iran.

Other members of Israel’s security establishment were riled by Netanyahu’s rhetoric on the Iranian nuclear threat and his advocacy of military confrontation. In April 2012, a former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, accused Netanyahu of “messianic” political leadership for pressing for military action, saying he and the then defence minister, Ehud Barak, were misleading the public on the Iran issue. Benny Gantz, the Israeli military chief of staff, said decisions on tackling Iran “must be made carefully, out of historic responsibility but without hysteria”.

There were also suspicions in Washington that Netanyahu was seeking to bounce Obama into taking a more hawkish line on Iran.

A few days before Netanyahu’s speech to the UN, the then US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, accused the Israeli prime minister of trying to force the US into a corner. “The fact is … presidents of the United States, prime ministers of Israel or any other country … don’t have, you know, a bunch of little red lines that determine their decisions,” he said.

“What they have are facts that are presented to them about what a country is up to, and then they weigh what kind of action is needed in order to deal with that situation. I mean, that’s the real world. Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner.”

Bibi N has opposition at home from diverse sources.he has been itching to "have a go" at Iran for years,but it appears that he is unable to convince western/US leaders and his own intel about the actual nature/threat from Iran. The Israelis have allegedly been behind a string of assassinations of top Iranian N-scientists/mil figures involved,which has kept the Iranian N-ambitions stunted.Iran too is desperate for a deal with the EU/West so that it can get sanctions removed and its economy up and running.The leak of the Mossad cables may have been deliberately done as many in the Israeli establishment,though intensely against the Iranian regime,feel that to widen conflict in the ME with a rampaging ISIS devouring all in its apth would be an act of folly...at this time.

PS:Russia offers Iran latest anti-ballistic missile system, Tehran considering deal – Rostec CEO
Published time: February 24, 2015
http://rt.com/news/234855-russia-iran-missiles-deal/

[Prem]

A tweet
Breaking News ‏@NewsOnTheMin
BREAKING: Al-Arabiya, is reporting that its most likely ISIS leader Al-Baghdadi was killed this evening. Unconfirmed at the moment.

[Tuvaluan]

This is starting to sound like Lakhvi getting killed over and over, only to show up every few months.

[Santosh]

Ok, so now the pieces of the puzzle are starting to make more sense. Looks like the West wants to cleanse the leadership of ISIS (bad Taliban) and re-purpose the remaining ISIS (good Taliban) to what it really wants to do - which is turn them against Syria. That's why they are arming the so called moderate rebels who will ultimately join ISIS and fight Assad. Now that they don't have the option to bomb Syria since it has come clean on chemical weapons, they are forced to fight thru their munna which is not always well behaved. Once Syria falls, Saudi gas will flow to Oierope thru Syria and Russki will get the royal finger.

[Tuvaluan]

Not sure there is any evidence of the above scenario re good/bad ISIS.

(1) There is nothing to indicate that ISIS is divided, besides the "good taliban" was a creation of the paki army. There is only one ISIS (2) ISIS is already selling all their oil to turkey, so there is nothing that stops ISIS from selling oil to europe via Turkey right now. (3) US does not really seem to care about the EU's gas/oil supply, seeing as to how they are taking on Russia -- so why would they go through all this drama to get saudi oil to EU.

[Shreeman]

{quote="Philip"}Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad
Gulf between Israeli secret service and PM revealed in documents shared with the Guardian along with other secrets including CIA bids to contact Hamas
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/f ... omb-mossad

Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim contradicted by Mossad, leaked spy cables show

Seumas Milne, Ewen MacAskill and Clayton Swisher

Monday 23 February 2015

Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.

It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times.

Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.

But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

An extract from the document Photograph: The Guardian

The disclosure comes as tensions between Israel and its staunchest ally, the US, have dramatically increased ahead of Netanyahu’s planned address to the US Congress on 3 March.

The White House fears the Israeli leader’s anticipated inflammatory rhetoric could damage sensitive negotiations between Tehran and the world’s six big powers over Iran’s nuclear programme. The deadline to agree on a framework is in late March, with the final settlement to come on 30 June. Netanyahu has vowed to block an agreement he claims would give Iran access to a nuclear weapons capability.

The US president, Barack Obama, will not meet Netanyahu during his visit, saying protocol precludes a meeting so close to next month’s general election in Israel.

The documents, almost all marked as confidential or top secret, span almost a decade of global intelligence traffic, from 2006 to December last year. It has been leaked to the al-Jazeera investigative unit and shared with the Guardian.

The papers include details of operations against al-Qaida, Islamic State and other terrorist organisations, but also the targeting of environmental activists.

The files reveal that:

• The CIA attempted to establish contact with Hamas in spite of a US ban.

• South Korean intelligence targeted the leader of Greenpeace.

• Barack Obama “threatened” the Palestinian president to withdraw a bid for recognition of Palestine at the UN.

• South African intelligence spied on Russia over a controversial $100m joint satellite deal.

The cache, which has been independently authenticated by the Guardian, mainly involves exchanges between South Africa’s intelligence agency and its counterparts around the world. It is not the entire volume of traffic but a selective leak.

One of the biggest hauls is from Mossad. But there are also documents from Russia’s FSB, which is responsible for counter-terrorism. Such leaks of Russian material are extremely rare.

Other spy agencies caught up in the trawl include those of the US, Britain, France, Jordan, the UAE, Oman and several African nations.

The scale of the leak, coming 20 months after US whistleblower Edward Snowden handed over tens of thousands of NSA and GCHQ documents to the Guardian, highlights the increasing inability of intelligence agencies to keep their secrets secure.

While the Snowden trove revealed the scale of technological surveillance, the latest spy cables deal with espionage at street level – known to the intelligence agencies as human intelligence, or “humint”. They include surveillance reports, inter-agency information trading, disinformation and backbiting, as well as evidence of infiltration, theft and blackmail.

The leaks show how Africa is becoming increasingly important for global espionage, with the US and other western states building up their presence on the continent and China expanding its economic influence. One serving intelligence officer told the Guardian: “South Africa is the El Dorado of espionage.”

Africa has also become caught up in the US, Israeli and British covert global campaigns to stem the spread of Iranian influence, tighten sanctions and block its nuclear programme.

The Mossad briefing about Iran’s nuclear programme in 2012 was in stark contrast to the alarmist tone set by Netanyahu, who has long presented the Iranian nuclear programme as an existential threat to Israel and a huge risk to world security. The Israeli prime minister told the UN: “By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move[d] on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.”

He said his information was not based on secret information or military intelligence but International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports.

Behind the scenes, Mossad took a different view. In a report shared with South African spies on 22 October 2012 – but likely written earlier – it conceded that Iran was “working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors, which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given”.

But the report also states that Iran “does not appear to be ready” to enrich uranium to the higher levels necessary for nuclear weapons. To build a bomb requires enrichment to 90%. Mossad estimated that Iran then had “about 100kg of material enriched to 20%” (which was later diluted or converted under the terms of the 2013 Geneva agreement). Iran has always said it is developing a nuclear programme for civilian energy purposes.

Last week, Netanyahu’s office repeated the claim that “Iran is closer than ever today to obtaining enriched material for a nuclear bomb” in a statement in response to an IAEA report.

A senior Israeli government official said there was no contradiction between Netanyahu’s statements on the Iranian nuclear threat and “the quotes in your story – allegedly from Israeli intelligence”. Both the prime minister and Mossad said Iran was enriching uranium in order to produce weapons, he added.

“Israel believes the proposed nuclear deal with Iran is a bad deal, for it enables the world’s foremost terror state to create capabilities to produce the elements necessary for a nuclear bomb,” he said.

However, Mossad had been at odds with Netanyahu on Iran before. The former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who left office in December 2010, let it be known that he had opposed an order from Netanyahu to prepare a military attack on Iran.

Other members of Israel’s security establishment were riled by Netanyahu’s rhetoric on the Iranian nuclear threat and his advocacy of military confrontation. In April 2012, a former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, accused Netanyahu of “messianic” political leadership for pressing for military action, saying he and the then defence minister, Ehud Barak, were misleading the public on the Iran issue. Benny Gantz, the Israeli military chief of staff, said decisions on tackling Iran “must be made carefully, out of historic responsibility but without hysteria”.

There were also suspicions in Washington that Netanyahu was seeking to bounce Obama into taking a more hawkish line on Iran.

A few days before Netanyahu’s speech to the UN, the then US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, accused the Israeli prime minister of trying to force the US into a corner. “The fact is … presidents of the United States, prime ministers of Israel or any other country … don’t have, you know, a bunch of little red lines that determine their decisions,” he said.

“What they have are facts that are presented to them about what a country is up to, and then they weigh what kind of action is needed in order to deal with that situation. I mean, that’s the real world. Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner.”
{/quote}

Bibi N has opposition at home from diverse sources.he has been itching to "have a go" at Iran for years,but it appears that he is unable to convince western/US leaders and his own intel about the actual nature/threat from Iran. The Israelis have allegedly been behind a string of assassinations of top Iranian N-scientists/mil figures involved,which has kept the Iranian N-ambitions stunted.Iran too is desperate for a deal with the EU/West so that it can get sanctions removed and its economy up and running.The leak of the Mossad cables may have been deliberately done as many in the Israeli establishment,though intensely against the Iranian regime,feel that to widen conflict in the ME with a rampaging ISIS devouring all in its apth would be an act of folly...at this time.

PS:Russia offers Iran latest anti-ballistic missile system, Tehran considering deal – Rostec CEO
Published time: February 24, 2015
http://rt.com/news/234855-russia-iran-missiles-deal/

Phillip,

Iranians want their S-300. Russia isnt giving it to them, wants them to take Antey-2500. They aren't taking it because it does nothing for them. This has been tried twice in the past three years. Russia has the Iranian money AFAIK, and is acting all cheese-eating-surrender-mistral-monkey with it.

[vijaykarthik]

Mmh, where does this link come under?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/f ... ian-cables

FTA: Al-Qaida has developed a seaborne unit to attack targets around the Mediterranean, according to a confidential report from Russian intelligence, one of a cache of secret documents from spy agencies around the world tracking jihadi terrorist groups.

According to the Russians, North African al-Qaida (Aqim – al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb) has established a 60-strong team of suicide bombers to plant mines under the hull of ships and to use small, fast craft for kamikaze attacks.

The claim, in a leaked document from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), is one of a string of reports on the rise of Islamic State (Isis) and al-Qaida.

[Singha]

the usual paroxysm of rage against ancient idols.

the winged lions (Shir) of babylon and the relics dating back Cyrus, hammurabi, Darius , xerxes ..... ancient cities like Ctesiphon, Ur, persepolis ... soon to fall under the Scythe of Islam...gone forever...

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/worl ... /24048865/

[ramana]

Wonder when they will outrage against the winged horse 'barak' that Muhammad is alleged to have flown?

[ramana]

Whenever the West Asia appears ready to clam down a new vector of instability rises. Latest is ISIS.


Now go back to Zbig's Grand Chessboard. He advocates perpetual chaos in the region in order to control both Russia and China eventually.


This ISIS rises around August 2014. It might have earlier founding stage.

Its now sucking in India too.

[vijaykarthik]

^^ how can China be controlled by boiling the cauldron in ME? Confused. Since a lot of you here are old timers, one of you could perhaps help?

[Tuvaluan]

"control" is usually not possible -- too many variables and unpredictability to achieve any level of predictable outcomes. But clearly what is possible is tying countries down with conflicts and wasting their resources and efforts elsewhere so that it is not directed at those who have the ability to engineer conflicts. Russia and Ukraine is the most recent example -- support for ISIS and support for Pakistan also seems to fall in that category.

[vijaykarthik]

Stratfor on the ongoing mess and the new ground rules: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-risk ... -26?page=1

[Philip]

Russia strengthening its presence in the Meditt with deal with Cyprus. Added to the stationing of formidable anti-air and anti-ship missiles in the Crimean peninsula after its annexation,the deal with Cyrus is to give Russia a foothold in the Meditt.esp with respect tot the Syrian civil war ,where Russia supports the Syrian regime of Assad ,aimed at preventing its overthrow by western-backed rebels and ISIS.

http://uatoday.tv/politics/russia-signs ... 11949.html

Feb. 26, 2015
Russia signs deal with Cyprus to gain naval access to Cypriot ports
Russia's new military cooperation with Cyprus can potentially expand Moscow's military presence

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a deal with visiting Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades to gain naval access to Cypriot ports.

Putin said that the new agreement refers to navy ships involved in anti-terrorism and piracy efforts adding that the new military cooperation is not aimed against anyone.

Associated Press has reported that Russian ships have already stopped at the Greek Cypriot port of Limassol.

Anastasiade, before his trip to Russia, said that Cyprus and Russia were also discussing the possibility of Russian planes using a Cypriot air base, according to Russian news agency Tass.

Meanwhile ,crisis in the Israeli security establishment,as former Mossad chief bats for ousting Bibi N.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/f ... gan-israel
Former Mossad head urges Israeli voters to oust Binyamin Netanyahu
Meir Dagan says prime minister’s policies are ‘destructive to the future and security of Israel’

[Philip]

Full report here.

Former Mossad head urges Israeli voters to oust Binyamin Netanyahu
Meir Dagan says prime minister’s policies are ‘destructive to the future and security of Israel’

Binyamin Netanyahu has said he believes that his speech is necessary to strengthen opposition to a potential nuclear deal with Iran being negotiated by the US and key allies. Photograph: Abir Sultan/AP

Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem
Friday 27 February 2015 19.09 GMT Last modified on Saturday 28 February 2015 00.07 GMT

A former head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service Mossad is urging voters to oust Binyamin Netanyahu in the next general election, accusing the prime minister of endangering the country’s security with his stance on the Iranian nuclear programme.

Meir Dagan, a vocal critic of Netanyahu’s Iran policy since stepping down as Mossad chief four years ago, is to be a keynote speaker at a rally in Tel Aviv next weekend, calling on the public to turf the prime minister out of office on 17 March.

Netanyahu was due to fly to Washington on Friday.

In a trenchant critique of Netanyahu’s leadership, delivered in a long interview in Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Dagan said the prime minister’s policies were “destructive to the future and security of Israel”.

Netanyahu’s planned speech has brought the already uncomfortable state of relations with the Obama administration to a new low amid suspicion that the speech – at the invitation of Republican house speaker John Boehner – was designed to enhance the Israeli prime minister’s electoral prospects.

Netanyahu has said he believes that his speech is necessary to strengthen opposition to a potential nuclear deal with Iran being negotiated by the US and key allies.

The intervention by Dagan – who ended his tenure as the head of Mossad in 2011 – is doubly significant because he shares the prime minister’s view over the risk posed by a nuclear Iran and is regarded as generally hawkish on defence and security matters.

Netanyahu has made security and the Iranian nuclear programme – and the US-led negotiations to contain it – his key election issue.


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Recent days have also seen anonymous criticism of Netanyahu’s speech from serving intelligence officers as well as from former diplomats and political figures in Israel, including Isaac Herzog, the leader of the opposition.

Saying that he was aware that Israel was already “paying a high price” over the confrontation with the Obama administration – albeit in ways he could not disclose – Dagan said: “The person causing the most strategic harm to Israel on the Iranian issue is the prime minister.

“As someone who has served Israel in various security capacities for 45 years, including during the country’s most difficult hours, I feel that we are now at a critical point regarding our existence and our security.

“Our standing in the world is not brilliant right now. The question of Israel’s legitimacy is up for debate. We should not erode our relations with our most important friend. Certainly not in public, certainly not by becoming involved in its domestic politics. This is not proper behaviour for a prime minister.”

Insisting he held no personal animus towards Netanyahu, who had helped him get a liver transplant, he said: “I have no personal issue with the prime minister, his wife, his spending and the way he conducts himself. I’m talking about the country he leads.

“An Israeli prime minister who clashes with the US administration has to ask himself what the risks are. On the matter of settlements, there is no difference between the two [US] parties. And even so, they provide us with a veto umbrella. In a situation of a confrontation, this umbrella is liable to vanish, and within a short time, Israel could find itself facing international sanctions.

“The risks of such a clash are intolerable. We are already today paying a high price. Some of them I know and cannot elaborate.

“I would not have confronted the United States and its president. Netanyahu may get applause in Congress, but all the power is in the White House. What will Netanyahu gain by addressing Congress? I just don’t understand it. Is his goal to get a standing ovation? This trip to Washington is doomed to failure.”

Dagan’s intervention follows that of fellow former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit and the former head of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit who are among scores of former commanders involved in a video published on Facebook calling for Israel to replace Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s determination to push on with his speech has seen unusually critical remarks from senior US administration officials in the last week who have gone out of their way to express their displeasure.

Among them was John Kerry, the secretary of state, who openly questioned Netanyahu’s judgment on the issue, and Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice who warned that it was “destructive to the fabric” of US-Israeli relations.

Netanyahu’s plans to speak to Congress have also irritated many Democratic party members who view the speech as a partisan intervention in US politics on the side of the Republican party, prompting a number of Democrats to say they would not attend the speech.

The speech is also being snubbed by Obama and Joe Biden, his vice president.

After leaving Mossad, Dagan went public with his criticism of Netanyahu’s Iran policy, saying a military attack on Iran was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard”.

[symontk]

Ibn Saud family tree details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud

Diagrammatic view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_S ... rulers.svg

And one more thing I checked last time. If anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashemites

Family tree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashemites ... Tree_2.PNG

The Hashemites will ofcourse be the logical owners of the holy places which Ibn Saud ended up capturing and annexing.

This could be the reason for ISIS, assuming that ISIS is a creation of Saud with US help. The other 2 supposed claimants to Mecca are thoroughly discredited namely, Pakistan and Egypt. The only one remaining is Jordan. ISIS are near to Jordan and can wipe out the country in no time

[symontk]

Russia strengthening its presence in the Meditt with deal with Cyprus. Added to the stationing of formidable anti-air and anti-ship missiles in the Crimean peninsula after its annexation,the deal with Cyrus is to give Russia a foothold in the Meditt.esp with respect tot the Syrian civil war ,where Russia supports the Syrian regime of Assad ,aimed at preventing its overthrow by western-backed rebels and ISIS.

http://uatoday.tv/politics/russia-signs ... 11949.html

Feb. 26, 2015
Russia signs deal with Cyprus to gain naval access to Cypriot ports
Russia's new military cooperation with Cyprus can potentially expand Moscow's military presence

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a deal with visiting Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades to gain naval access to Cypriot ports.

Putin said that the new agreement refers to navy ships involved in anti-terrorism and piracy efforts adding that the new military cooperation is not aimed against anyone.

Associated Press has reported that Russian ships have already stopped at the Greek Cypriot port of Limassol.

Anastasiade, before his trip to Russia, said that Cyprus and Russia were also discussing the possibility of Russian planes using a Cypriot air base, according to Russian news agency Tass.

If Cyprus has moved to Russian side, can Greece & Serbia be far away? Nice expansion for Russia during the grim times due to the UK conflict. Expect Turkey to go ballistic

[Lalmohan]

jordan used to be the protector of the mosques before the haus of saud came along
the saudis are busy turning mecca into a shopping mall and razing anything of historical interest
the pakistanis have lost any relevance to the islamic world
the turks still have all the relics of the prophet in the topkapi museum in istanbul
the beards are killing the less bearded
all is as it should be
move along now

[Shanmukh]

A very interesting article about Bibi's coming address to the US Congress by Caroline Glick - the lady is a hard Israeli (nationalistic, not religious) right columnist

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One ... eed-392348

It is hard to get your arms around the stubborn determination of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today. For most of the nine years he has served as Israel’s leader, first from 1996 to 1999 and now since 2009, Netanyahu shied away from confrontations or buckled under pressure. He signed deals with the Palestinians he knew the Palestinians would never uphold in the hopes of winning the support of hostile US administrations and a fair shake from the pathologically hateful Israeli media.

In recent years he released terrorist murderers from prison. He abrogated Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. He agreed to support the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. He agreed to keep giving the Palestinians of Gaza free electricity while they waged war against Israel. He did all of these things in a bid to accommodate US President Barack Obama and win over the media, while keeping the leftist parties in his coalitions happy.

For his part, for the past six years Obama has undermined Israel’s national security. He has publicly humiliated Netanyahu repeatedly. He has delegitimized Israel’s very existence, embracing the jihadist lie that Israel’s existence is the product of post-Holocaust European guilt rather than 4,000 years of Jewish history.

He and his representatives have given a backwind to the forces that seek to wage economic warfare against Israel, repeatedly indicating that the application of economic sanctions against Israel – illegal under the World Trade Organization treaties – are a natural response to Israel’s unwillingness to bow to every Palestinian demand. The same goes for the movement to deny the legitimacy of Israel’s very existence. Senior administration officials have threatened that Israel will become illegitimate if it refuses to surrender to Palestinian demands.

Last summer, Obama openly colluded with Hamas’s terrorist war against Israel. He tried to coerce Israel into accepting ceasefire terms that would have amounted to an unconditional surrender to Hamas’s demands for open borders and the free flow of funds to the terrorist group. He enacted a partial arms embargo on Israel in the midst of war. He cut off air traffic to Ben-Gurion International Airport under specious and grossly prejudicial terms in an open act of economic warfare against Israel.

And yet, despite Obama’s scandalous treatment of Israel, Netanyahu has continued to paper over differences in public and thank Obama for the little his has done on Israel’s behalf. He always makes a point of thanking Obama for agreeing to Congress’s demand to continue funding the Iron Dome missile defense system (although Obama has sought repeatedly to slash funding for the project).

Obama’s policies that are hostile to Israel are not limited to his unconditional support for the Palestinians in their campaign against Israel. Obama shocked the entire Israeli defense community when he supported the overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, despite Mubarak’s dependability as a US ally in the war on Islamist terrorism, and as the guardian of both Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and the safety and freedom of maritime traffic in the Suez Canal.

Obama supported Mubarak’s overthrow despite the fact that the only political force in Egypt capable of replacing him was the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks the destruction of Israel and is the ideological home and spawning ground of jihadist terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and Hamas. Obama then supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s regime even as then-president Mohamed Morsi took concrete steps to transform Egypt into an Islamist, jihadist state and end Egypt’s peace with Israel.

Israelis were united in our opposition to Obama’s behavior. But Netanyahu said nothing publicly in criticism of Obama’s destructive, dangerous policy.

He held his tongue in the hopes of winning Obama over through quiet diplomacy.

He held his tongue, because he believed that the damage Obama was causing Israel was not irreversible in most cases. And it was better to maintain the guise of good relations, in the hopes of actually achieving them, than to expose the fractures in US-Israel ties caused by Obama’s enormous hostility toward Israel and by his strategic myopia that endangered both Israel and the US’s other regional allies.

And yet, today Netanyahu, the serial accommodator, is putting everything on the line. He will not accommodate. He will not be bullied. He will not be threatened, even as all the powers that have grown used to bringing him to his knees – the Obama administration, the American Jewish Left, the Israeli media, and the Labor party grow ever more shrill and threatening in their attacks against him.

As he has made clear in daily statements, Netanyahu is convinced that we have reached a juncture in our relations with the Obama administration where accommodation is no longer possible.

Obama’s one policy that Netanyahu has never acquiesced to either publicly or privately is his policy of accommodating Iran.

Since Obama’s earliest days in office, Netanyahu has warned openly and behind closed doors that Obama’s plan to forge a nuclear deal with Iran is dangerous. And as the years have passed, and the lengths Obama is willing to go to appease Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been left their marks on the region, Netanyahu’s warnings have grown stronger and more urgent.

Netanyahu has been clear since his first tenure in office in the 1990s, that Iran’s nuclear program – as well as its ballistic missile program – constitutes a threat to Israel’s very existence. He has never wavered from his position that Israel cannot accept an Iran armed with nuclear weapons.

Until Obama entered office, and to an ever escalating degree until his reelection in 2012, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons has been such an obvious imperative among both Israelis and Americans that Netanyahu’s forthright rejection of any nuclear deal in which Iran would be permitted to maintain the components of its nuclear program was uncontroversial. In some Israeli circles, his trenchant opposition to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear capabilities was the object of derision, with critics insisting that he was standing strong on something uncontroversial while buckling on issues like negotiations with the Palestinians, where he should have stood strong.

But now we are seeing that far from being an opportunist, Netanyahu is a leader of historical dimensions. For the past two years, in the interest of reaching a deal, Obama has enabled Iran to take over Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. For the first time since 1974, due to Obama’s policies, the Golan Heights is an active front in the war against Israel, with Iranian military personnel commanding Syrian and Hezbollah forces along the border.

Iran’s single-minded dedication to its goal of becoming a regional hegemon and its commitment to its ultimate goal of destroying the US is being enabled by Obama’s policies of accommodation. An Iran in possession of a nuclear arsenal is an Iran that can not only destroy Israel with just one or two warheads. It can make it impossible for Israel to respond to conventional aggression carried out by terrorist forces and others operating under an Iranian nuclear umbrella.

Whereas Israel can survive Obama on the Palestinian front by stalling, waiting him out and placating him where possible, and can even survive his support for Hamas by making common cause with the Egyptian military and the government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the damage Obama’s intended deal with Iran will cause Israel will be irreversible. The moment that Obama grants Iran a path to a nuclear arsenal – and the terms of the agreement that Obama has offered Iran grant Iran an unimpeded path to nuclear power – a future US administration will be hard-pressed to put the genie back in the bottle.

For his efforts to prevent irreparable harm to Israel Netanyahu is being subjected to the most brutal and vicious attacks any Israeli leader has ever been subjected to by an American administration and its political allies. They are being assisted in their efforts by a shameless Israeli opposition that is willing to endanger the future of the country in order to seize political power.

Every day brings another serving of abuse. Wednesday National Security Adviser Susan Rice accused Netanyahu of destroying US relations with Israel. Secretary of State John Kerry effectively called him a serial alarmist, liar, and warmonger.

For its part, the Congressional Black Caucus reportedly intends to sabotage Netanyahu’s address before the joint houses of Congress by walking out in the middle, thus symbolically accusing of racism the leader of the Middle East’s only liberal democracy, and the leader of the most persecuted people in human history.

Radical leftist representatives who happen to be Jewish, like Jan Schakowsky of suburban Chicago and Steve Cohen of Memphis, are joining Netanyahu’s boycotters in order to give the patina of Jewish legitimacy to an administration whose central foreign policy threatens the viability of the Jewish state.

As for Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, their behavior is simply inexcusable. In Israel’s hour of peril, just weeks before Obama intends to conclude his nuclear deal with the mullahs that will endanger Israel’s existence, Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog insists that his primary duty is to defeat Netanyahu.

And as far as Iran is concerned, he acts as a free loader ad a spoiler. Either he believes that Netanyahu will succeed in his mission to derail the deal with or without his support, or he doesn’t care. But Herzog’s rejection of Netanyahu’s entreaties that he join him in Washington next week, and his persistent attacks on Netanyahu for refusing accommodate that which cannot be accommodated shows that he is both an opportunist and utterly unworthy of a leadership role in this country.

Netanyahu is not coming to Washington next Tuesday to warn Congress against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, because he seeks a fight with Obama. Netanyahu has devoted the last six years to avoiding a fight with Obama, often at great cost to Israel’s national security and to his own political position.

Netanyahu is coming to Washington next week because Obama has left him no choice. And all decent people of good will should support him, and those who do not, and those who are silent, should be called out for their treachery and cowardice.

[Prem]

https://www.facebook.com/FranklinGraham ... 9730174876

Franklin Graham
The evil of ISIS really shouldn’t shock us--it is fully in keeping with their ultimate agenda of hastening a final apocalypse. God’s Word tells us that there will be a final battle one day, but it will result in the defeat of Satan and all those allied with him. One thing is for sure—one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

t

NutcracrackerJackerWhackeridiotSaanaWana!

[devesh]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... mists.html

Main U.S.-Backed Syrian Rebel Group Disbanding, Joining Islamists

The Syrian rebel group Harakat al-Hazm, one of the White House’s most trusted militias fighting President Bashar al Assad, appeared to be collapsing Sunday, with activists posting a statement online from frontline commanders saying they are disbanding their units and folding them into brigades aligned with a larger Islamist insurgent alliance distrusted by Washington.

The statement bore Hazm’s stamp and logo, and according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group, the brigade’s fighting units are disbanding. Emails and phone calls to Hazm’s political leaders were not returned.

“Given what is happening on the Syrian front, offenses by the criminal regime with its cronies against Syria as a whole, and Aleppo specifically, and in an effort to stem the bloodshed of the fighters, the Hazm movement announces its dissolution,” the statement said.

The apparent implosion comes just weeks after the Obama administration halved its funding of the 4,000-strong secular brigade—one of several more moderate rebel militias that have seen their U.S. funding cut or scaled back since Christmas.

Hazm has suffered an increasing number of defections in recent weeks in the face of repeated attacks from al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra on its remaining redoubts in Aleppo and in the area west of the city.

This weekend the brigade suffered dozens of casualties from fighting with the jihadists and its leaders say that to avoid further bloodshed they have had no choice but to dissolve themselves and throw in their lot with the larger Shamiah Front, an alliance of mainly-Islamist militias in Aleppo. They say the morale of the militia—one of the few rebel brigades to be have been trusted in the past by the U.S. with TOW anti-tank rockets—had plummeted as the American money spigot was slowly turned off.

A 50-man intelligence unit formed by Hazm to assist in on-the-ground damage assessment of U.S. airstrikes on ISIS and to provide information on al Nusra was disbanded because of the funding reductions, a senior opposition source told The Daily Beast.

The cuts in Hazm’s funding coincided with Obama administration aides claiming they were ramping up their efforts to launch a train-and-equip program—promised since September—for rebel militias, part of a U.S. effort to form a proxy force to battle the so-called Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS.

Hazm was frequently touted by Obama aides as one of the militias they could rely on—a brigade that could partner on train-and-equip.

[devesh]

Caliphate keeps expanding. Meanwhile, US strategy looks more like a "non-action" is best action. a.k.a. they don't know what to do, so they'll simply wait and see who comes out on top.

[Singha]

going by this map, if the remaining jihadists like al nusrah front either fold into ISIS or sign a JV , the caliphate will expand west right up the embattled govt controlled areas on the coast like latakia and tartus..these were where the old french/crusader forts and trading ports used to be with some in lebanon also.

so the caliphs warriors would finally be able to "dip their feet in the waters of two oceans"

the blue circle Hasakah in contested yellow zone in top right corner is where the assyrian christians were captured from.

the huge empty quarter along the jordanian border is marked as govt held but in effect it has no major towns or roads and is no-mans land awaiting the arrival of whoever wants to put people in charge of it. the Govt only controls a belt parallel to the Lebanon border going through Damascus and the coastal provinces of tartus and latakia and a bit inland to Aleppo.

[Singha]

the next thing is a islamist revolt in turkish anatolia among the peasants against the korrupt and pleasure loving istanbul elites who sold out to the west. in due course the caliphate could take over Anatolia and achieve a contiguous region of sorts with gerogia, armenia, azerbaijan and the holy cities in chechnya and dagestan.

with limbs in caspian, black, mediterranean and persian gulf it would occupy the most strategic real estate in the world.
TSP would do its bit to take over afghanistan and link up with the unravelling CAR stans.
Egypt would fall to a new western mahdistan sweeting east from tripoli and across the red sea into jordan.

finally peace and order as the baghdad caliphate is restored

http://www.cristyli.com/wp-content/uplo ... Terror.jpg

USAF would likely send fleets of B52 and B1 bombers to pound the new sultans army with bags of printed $$ notes as payment to keep off doing mischief in EU and US and pointing them east to the soft target - Yindustan & Russia. western MSM would be full of stories as to why it was all Yindia's fault in not handing over Cashmere and calling for making peace with the new caliph.

[SanjayC]

Caliphate keeps expanding. Meanwhile, US strategy looks more like a "non-action" is best action. a.k.a. they don't know what to do, so they'll simply wait and see who comes out on top.

ISIS has covert support of the Whites -- they will only indulge in tokenism against it.

[Philip]

Veteran ME expert Fisk alleges there are no diferences between the USA and Bibi N.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com ... 78658.html

Robert Fisk
Sunday 1 March 2015
The difference between America and Israel? There isn’t one
Netanyahu knows he can get away with anything in America – with the same confidence that he can support his army when they slaughter hundreds of children in Gaza

Uri Avnery is without doubt the most intellectual, philosophical, prescient leftist Israeli seer I have ever met. Like TS Eliot, he has a habit of using the fewest words to tell the greatest truth. Every essay he writes, this reader always says the same thing: Exactly! Yet, for the first time in 40 years, I disagree with the great man.

He has just suggested that Benjamin Netanyahu’s agreement to address the US Congress at the invitation of Republicans tomorrow – two weeks before an Israeli general election – and Barack Obama’s decision not to see the old rogue, has destroyed Israel’s bipartisan support in America. For the first time, says Uri, Democratic politicians are allowed to criticise Israel.

Absolute Tosh.

Congressmen of both parties have grovelled and fainted and shrieked their support for Bibi and his predecessors with more enthusiasm that the Roman hordes in the Colosseum. Last time Bibi turned up on the Hill, he received literally dozens of standing ovations from the sheep-like representatives of the American people, whose uncritical adoration of the Israeli state – and their abject fear of uttering the most faint-hearted criticism lest they be called anti-Semites – suggest that Bibi would be a far more popular US president than Barack. And Bibi’s impeccable American accent doesn’t hurt.

And his aim – to earn votes for himself and to destroy the one foreign policy achievement within Obama’s grasp – will have absolutely no effect at all on Israeli-US relations. When Bibi made himself the laughing stock of the UN Security Council – by producing an infantile cartoon of an Iranian bomb with a red line in the middle, indicating that Iran could build nuclear weapons by the end of 2013 – his charade was treated with indulgence by the American media. These mythical deadlines have been expiring regularly for more than a decade, yet still we are supposed to take them seriously. Obama is struggling to reach an agreement with Iran which would protect the world from any nuclear weapon production by the Islamic Republic.

Read more:
• Netanyahu dwells on Iran threat to win votes
• Netanyahu visit to US Congress puts strain on Israeli relations
• A bombshell for Bibi - if Israel's Prime Minister could feel any shame

Bibi wants to destroy this opportunity. He wants more sanctions. He wants to win the Israeli elections on 17 March. He might even bomb Iran – which would bring an immediate military response against the United States. But he’s going to be telling Congress that the entire existence of Israel is at stake. According to Uri, Bibi will be spitting in the face of President Obama. “I don’t think there was ever anything like it,” Uri Avnery wrote this weekend. “The Prime Minister of a small vassal country, dependent on the US for practically everything, comes to the US to openly challenge its President, in effect branding him a cheat and a liar… like Abraham, who was ready to slaughter his son to please God, Netanyahu is ready to sacrifice Israel’s most vital interests for election victory.”

I don’t wish to exonerate Bibi’s cynicism. Even Uri admits that he cannot imagine any more effective election ploy. “Using the Congress of the United States of America as a propaganda prop is a stroke of genius,” he says. But the Prime Minister of Israel knows he can get away with anything in America – with the same confidence that he can support his army when they slaughter hundreds of children in Gaza in the “self-defence” of Israel. Bibi’s speech to Congress will be as disproportionate as his soldiers’ bombardment of the world’s mightiest slum. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after an adress to a joint session of Congress in the US Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after an adress to a joint session of Congress in the US

And he’ll do just fine. We’re told the Democrats are upset. We are informed that Obama is very, very – really – very angry. But the Democrat presidentess-in-waiting is no problem for Bibi. It was Hillary, remember, who told us last summer that she wasn’t sure it was “possible to parcel out blame” for the Gaza slaughter “because it’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war”. The media stories may have obscured what was happening. “I do think oftentimes that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and children and all the rest of that [sic], makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the truth.” So the fewer reporters, the closer to the truth about the dead women and children and “all the rest of that”, we’ll all get. No wonder liberal Zionists, according to The New York Times, are worried that Hillary is getting too close to Bibi.

As for the Republicans, well take a look at ‘ol Jeb Bush, promising that all will be a clean sweep if he becomes the US commander-in-chief. There’ll be no focus, understandably, on “the past” – Daddy George and Big Bro George W. But his probable advisers in a future presidency include Paul Wolfowitz, John Hannah (Cheney’s old “national security adviser”), Michael Hayden (who misled Congress about torture) and Condi Rice, after whom an entire oil tanker was once named and then un-named – in other words, the same mangy crew who produced “weapons of mass destruction”, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, trillions of dollars in debt, torture and that infamous “mushroom cloud” (a real “fog of war”, if ever there was one). Columnist Maureen Dowd says that Jeb Bush should be holding to account those who inflicted “deep scars on America”. But why should he? The only thing unmentioned by Jeb is that in 2003, Israel was also producing the same scams about WMD and Saddam’s links to “world terror”.

Bibi won’t be reminding Congress of this on Tuesday, of course. It will be Iran’s WMD and the Islamic State’s links to “world terror” which will have Congress on its feet. It’s a pity Bibi wasn’t born in New York. Then we could have US President Netanyahu – and stop pretending there’s any difference between the Israeli and American governments.

PS:ISIS was like OBL the creation of the US/West who turned a blind eye to the sponsorship of it by their bumchums,the oily Kingdoms and sheikhdoms of the MEast.Its intended role was to overthrow the non-Sunni states who didn't toe Washington and the despots' line,esp. the Shiites who had the moral and material support of Iran.thus Iraq and Assad had to be "cleansed" in the worst manner of ethnic cleansing seen since the holocausts of Rwanda and Cambodia.Now that the genie has escaped from the bottle,puerile and futile attempts are being made to fool the globe into thinking that a concerted all-out war against ISIS is on the cards. To divert attention from the utter catastrophe that the entire ME is in right now,the US and its poodles are trying to showcase the UKR crisis as another potential WW3 in the making and demonising Putin as Hitler.

Unfortunately the Israeli-Palestinian spat shows little signs of being resolved .The UN/intl. community seems to have washed its hands of it,allowing "blood to find its own level".The ME mediator,Tony B.Liar is more interested in collecting his 30 shekels of silver from all and sundry on his talk tours,stuffing his coffers with filthy lucre instead of trying to end the bloodshed.

[Singha]

A large-scale military operation to recapture Saddam Hussein's home town from the Islamic State extremist group has begun, Iraq's state TV says.

Al-Iraqiya television said today that government forces backed by allied Shiite and Sunni fighters were attacking the city of Tikrit, backed by artillery and air strikes by Iraqi fighter jets.

It said the militants were dislodged from some areas outside the city, but gave no details.

Hours ahead of the operation, prime minister Haider al-Abadi called on Sunni tribal fighters to abandon the extremist group, promising them a pardon.

Tikrit, some 80 miles north of Baghdad, fell in to the hands of the Islamic State group last summer along with the country's second-largest city of Mosul and other areas in the Sunni heartland.

----

[Singha]

hopefully another few 100 isis rats will gain +72 here and the residents of tikrit their peace again.

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/mi ... krit-.html

The offensive will be supported by air strikes from the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, the Iraqi army said earlier.

Residents of Tikrit were reportedly told to evacuate the area ahead of the military operation.

Iraqi officials and militia commanders regard the recapture of Tikrit as an essential step toward the liberation of Mosul.

The specifics of the battle’s plan were not revealed. But military experts believe that joint Iraq forces will attack from multiple fronts.

The first location will be from the Aoja area, south of Tikrit, with the support of Iraqi Special Forces. The second front will be from an area close to Tikrit University in which the Iraqi army and police will attack from. The third attack will carried from the southwest of Tikrit.

Security sources told Al Arabiya News Channel that Iraqi forces are now in control of the northern areas of the Albu Obaid village and west of Tikrit.

The operation to retake Tikrit, the home town of Iraq’s former President Saddam Hussein, marks a major test for Iraqi forces.

[vijaykarthik]

KSA Salman has given the top prize to Zakir Naik. Yaay. Even more MSM proof that our beloved Salman is a closet Wahhabist.

Has lots of implications, mind you.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/m ... sh-for-911

[Singha]

since the old iraqi army disintegrated last summer, us army trainers have been onsite trying to build up a new nucleus of a couple of brigades trained and equipped to a professional std, but the videos one sees if they are really the A-team fills me with a sense of dread...overweight middle aged looking chaps some older than me marching around, clearly unfit for any professional army.
there are supposed to be another couple of special forces units who will be tip of the spear against the ISIS in the coming war.
the photos show convoys of vehicles ranging from basic pickup trucks to armed hummers as the main columns of the advance of Tikrit.
artillery will fire quite wildly. and iraqi AF is not exactly the best around in precision attacks.

ISIS does not care for civilian deaths. and the Iraqi army is not skilfull enough to contain damage either.

I figure after a 2 week bloodbath Tikrit will be in govt hands and the battle with then shift north to the promised "Steel Hammer" on Mosul in the summer comprised of all that the iraqi army, militias, kurds and usaf can throw at the problem.

perhaps by onset of winter if the supply of weapons and men can be sustained, ISIS will be routed and chased out Iraq into northern syria, to fester as a sore on bashar assad's govt.

[Singha]

(Bloomberg) -- Iraq is deploying 27,000 troops to retake the city of Tikrit from Islamic State, in a mission that will test the military’s ability to stage major offensives against the group before trying to capture its stronghold in Mosul.

The state-sponsored al-Iraqiyah television said that paramilitary forces, a term that usually describes Shiite militias, are backing up police and army soldiers. Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, arrived two days ago to “review and advise” Iraqi field commanders, the Fars news agency reported on Monday.

[Singha]

Gen Suleimani at Tikrit airbase inspecting his shia militia forces a few hrs before the tikrit op started

http://i.imgur.com/YxPu2a6.jpg

looks like behind the scenes he is the theater commander.

[Singha]

you will get flow of latest updates here from iraqis

https://twitter.com/hashtag/tikrit

seems tikrit was in process of being surrounded from all sides since around Feb10. once the buildup was complete, the ring started to tighten....ISIS has done some suicide attacks using armoured trucks loaded with explosive.