Syrian Civil War (Graphic Photos/Vid Not Allowed)

[munchkin]

Assad gasses and starves own people.

Do u know many people beside Hitler doing it? Call it whatever u want.

No proof.

 

[f1000n]

I complained to no one.
What solutions ? it's too late, they don't care for us and we don't care for them.
As for Iraq, it is a bad-bad-bad situation for Sunnis. Peshmerga is racist, Asa'ib Ahl Al-Haq is sectarianist, ISIS is extremist. Should have given Sunnis autonomy and accepted to create a Peshmerga-like forces for Sunnis.
Shiites have been acting as if they were the only people who live in Iraq, they don't even know what is going on in Northern Iraq.

You're complaining all the time but providing no solutions, it's not too late for a solution, do you want the fight to continue until everyone dies ? Lebanese civil war lasted 15 years, far longer than Syrian war, if it was too late their war would still be ongoing.

As for Iraq, thing is Sunnis in Iraq have and are not requesting autonomy, many of them feel superior and want to rule the entire country with iron fist like in the old days of Saddam, they want to kill the evil Safavids and take back the country as they say. They were protesting against the 'Maliki' army in 2013, they invited in ISIS so the Maliki army left them to have their revolution. What more can you ask for, should they've gassed them ? Actually in my opinion they should've been given the chemical treatment of Al-Majid in the name of Saddam but their limit in operational freedom due to political terrorists prevented them from acting as every move they made was deemed sectarian as i've already explained before.

However, click here to see some good news from Al-Najaf.
See, they share the same opinion with me. You "do not know much about Iraq so stop talking about it" .

Already posted a similar pic before, don't care about him.

It is Allah and ONLY Allah can keep Sunnis of Iraq safe.

Heard that before.

Let's talk about Sunnis in general (True Muslims ), they're their own enemy like we saw in Algeria during the 90's, like we see in Syria with the extremist Muslims vs other Muslims, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Sinai, Tunisia terrorism etc. Do you see the links ? The issue is in political Islam itself, you can pray all you want but it won't stop some Muslims from bombing and slaughtering, as infact those Muslims terrorizing pray as well.. So Allah can keep Sunnis of Iraq safe you say, you can pray for that but if you (Sunnis) keep doing the same nothing will change. In Iraq & Eastern Syria it's Sunni fighting Sunni. Who do you think IS is anyway ? How come you don't see any IS in the south of Iraq, simple as no one there will accept them, no one supports/houses them and people will resist them whatever it takes as they did during the siege of Amirli whereas in Ramadi the population does what ? Lets them in and leaves to enter evil Majoos area's. So keeping Sunnis safe is in their own hands, quit bombing and terrorizing and you'll be safe.

 

[Dr.Thrax]

Celebrations in Idlib after Asshead keeps losing territory to the rebels:

 

[elszADaQ]

FSA direct hit on Assad forces with TOW missile

 

[Madali]

You know why Iran is wasting time and effort in Iraq & Syria? To defeat ISIS extremists. Do you know what is the best way to stop Iran, you people who love to hate Iran?

The solution is simple.

STOP ISIS YOURSELF. Send brave Arab soldiers to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, etc, and instead of funding ISIS & giving weapons to "moderates" who become "extremists" the next day, AND KILL THEM.

Because your leaders don't stop the wave of terrorism, since they think in only 2 seconds in the future. They think, hey, ISIS isn't that bad because they aren't threatening OUR country, so let's forget about them. Maybe even give them some money and help because they seem to be against our "enemies".

We Iranians care about our own butts. When your leaders aren't doing jackshit, 10 years from now, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, all our neighbors would be infested with ISIS and Al Qaeda scum, and they will start giving us more & more headache at our borders. And who will help us? You people will be shitting your pants with excitement, if these guys get to Iran and suicide bombs a school, EVEN if they do the same in your own countries.

The best way to stop Iran's regional influence is to JOIN Iran. Don't let Iran save villages in Syria & Iraq from extremist scum, DO IT YOURSELF.

Why didn't the great 10 country coalition bomb Al Qaeda bases in Yemen? Why weren't ANY of you upset that because of King Salman's fun war gave Al Qaeda the upper hand?

Iran has said this again and again and it is true. We WANT stable neighbors. Iranians don't care if its Sunni or Shia or Hindu as long as it does not breed terrorism & civil war. Are we trying to convert Armenia to Shiasm? How about Azerbaijan, why aren't we sending shitload of weapons to the Shias there to take over the government?? Because Iran wants stability.

Iran only got involved in Iraq went ISIS was growing and the country was going to turn into Somalia or Libya. Iran only got into Syria for the same exact reason. Iran did not ferment instability, it tries to preserve stability.

But most of you are too short sighted to see this.

All problems in the middle east are because us middle easterns being so fucking short-sighted to make long term plans. Look at Saddam. First he is the most awesome guy in the universe for Arabs and they all support him to attack Iran. Next day, he's the worst guy because he attacked Kuwait. You know how Kuwait being attacked could have been prevented? By not supporting a fascist moron in the first place against Iran!!

Or look at Egypt. First its, WE WANT DEMOCRACY. Thousands die, then it's, HMM, we change our mind, democracy isn't as good as we thought it was, let's go back.

Or look at Libya. Let's all go and kick Ghadaffi in his butt. Then it's like, civil war? Let's just look the other way.

Or how about every time, EVERY TIME, terrorist groups are supported and funded and armed and in a year, everyone is like, shit, it wasn't us! EVERY TIME!!

And on and on and on.

 

[munchkin]

What's the writing on the head veils of these female FSA terrorists?

Photographs offer look at female soldiers tackling ISIS to fighting in Ukraine | Daily Mail Online

 

[Serpentine]

Terrorists have launched a huge attack from 3 fronts in Idlib province. It's reported to be largest offensive since 2012 Aleppo battle. There are reportedly 9000-12000 terrorists involved and they have brought in everything they had: Tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, suicide bombers and literally anything they had.

First front: Areas around Mastouma south of Idlib city and also Qarmid army army base.

Second front: battle to capture city of Jisr al Shughur.

Third front: Battle to capture Ghab plains southwest of Idlib.

As per reports until now, terrorists have lost too many members, especially around Jisr al Shughur and Qarmid base, numbers vary between 100 to hundreds. SAA has lost 21 soldiers as of now. SAA is using heavy artillery pounding their positions.


This is a very important battle for both sides, if terrorists win, they'll have control over whole Idlib province and if SAA wins, besides killing a large number of its enemies, it will be even more determined to recapture city of Idlib.

We should wait and see what'll happen in coming hours and days.

Here's a map of 3 fronts:

Muslim Shishani, the 'moderate rebel' from Chechen is leading the battle in Jisr al Shughur:

 

[SipahSalar]

This is a very important battle for both sides, if terrorists win, they'll have control over whole Idlib province and if SAA wins, besides killing a large number of its enemies, it will be even more determined to recapture city of Idlib.

Can you elaborate? By "terrorists" you must mean ISIS? If so, then it is indeed worrisome.
If it's the freedom fighters, then it's great news.

 

[f1000n]

Can you elaborate? By "terrorists" you must mean ISIS? If so, then it is indeed worrisome.
If it's the freedom fighters, then it's great news.

Nusra presence is large in this area, Nusra has fought IS before but currently works with them as people in yarmouk said

 

[Serpentine]

Can you elaborate? By "terrorists" you must mean ISIS? If so, then it is indeed worrisome.
If it's the freedom fighters, then it's great news.

Can you define 'freedom fighters'?

By terrorists I mean Al-Nusra front, official branch of Al-Qaeda in Syria, Ashrar al-Sham and Jund-al-Sham which is popular for its beheadings in Homs province, but if they are freedom fighters to you, it's cool, one's freedom fighter is another one's terrorist.

 

[500]

Terrorists have launched a huge attack from 3 fronts in Idlib province. It's reported to be largest offensive since 2012 Aleppo battle. There are reportedly 9000-12000 terrorists involved and they have brought in everything they had: Tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, suicide bombers and literally anything they had.

12,000 . If u have everything u need, you dont use suicide bombers.

There are 5,000 rebels at most. Their "heavy artillery" is cooking gas canisters. They have few tanks captured from Assad itself. Thats about it.

This super force is kicking *** of army with 5000 tanks, 500 jets, uncounted artillery and BMP.

Can you define 'freedom fighters'?

By terrorists I mean Al-Nusra front, official branch of Al-Qaeda in Syria, Ashrar al-Sham and Jund-al-Sham which is popular for its beheadings in Homs province, but if they are freedom fighters to you, it's cool, one's freedom fighter is another one's terrorist.

Assadists are beheading too.

 

[Serpentine]

12,000 . If u have everything u need, you dont use suicide bombers.

There are 5,000 rebels at most. Their "heavy artillery" is cooking gas canisters. They have few tanks captured from Assad itself. Thats about it.

This super force is kicking *** of army with 5000 tanks, 500 jets, uncounted artillery and BMP.

Suicide bombers are an effective way to break in to first line of enemies as we have seen in previous battles.

Yes they have artilleries, they have few tanks and BMPs and I said they have brought in everything they had.

Those 5000 tanks and 500 jets are not gathered in one spot, thanks for bringing up that stupid statement.

 

[500]

Suicide bombers are an effective way to break in to first line of enemies as we have seen in previous battles.

Suicide bombers are replacing heavy artillery and air force bombs which rebels lack.

Yes they have artilleries, they have few tanks and BMPs and I said they have brought in everything they had.

I just wrote what is their "heavy artillery".

Those 5000 tanks and 500 jets are not gathered in one spot, thanks for bringing up that stupid statement.

U need couple days to send tanks from one spot to another and several minutes for jets.

 

[GBU-28]

500, what's your position about the two sides? have you got a preference as to who you want to see come out on top?

 

[Solomon2]

Dispatches
Michael J. Totten

Under the Black Flag
22 April 2015

I reviewed ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan for Commentary. Here's the first half.

ISIS isn’t a terrorist organization. It’s a transnational army of terror. The CIA claims it has as many as 31,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq, and Massoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, thinks the number may be as high as 200,000. When ISIS fighters conquered the Iraqi city of Mosul last year, they stole enough materiel to supply three fighting divisions, including up-armored American Humvees, T-55 tanks, mobile Chinese artillery pieces, Soviet anti-aircraft guns, and American-made Stinger missile systems. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of Great Britain and is expanding into Libya and Yemen.

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, paints a gripping and disturbing picture of this new “caliphate” in the Levant and Mesopotamia. In the most comprehensive account to date, the authors chronicle ISIS’s roots as the Iraqi franchise of al-Qaeda under its founding father, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, its near defeat at the hands of Americans and Iraqi militias in Anbar Province, its rebirth during the Syrian civil war, and its catastrophic return to Iraq as a conquering army last summer.

The book is personal for both authors. Hassan was born and raised in the Syrian border town Al-Bukamal, right in the center of ISIS-held territory. Weiss is an American journalist who reported from the Aleppo suburb of al-Bab, back when it had a burgeoning democratic civil-society movement and wasn’t the “dismal fief ruled by Sharia law” it is today. Anger and disgust are at times palpable on the page, but emotion never distracts from the richly detailed narrative—based in part on interviews with ISIS commanders and fighters—that forms the backbone of their book.

Like all good historians, they start at the beginning. ISIS began its life as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) after the United States demolished Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003. The Bush administration saw Arab democracy as the solution to the Middle East’s woes, and Syria’s tyrant Bashar al-Assad didn’t want to be the next Saddam. Assad waged a proxy war to convince Washington that participatory politics in the region would be perilous. Weiss and Hassan quote former Syrian diplomat Bassam Barabandi, who says candidly that “[Assad] started to work with the mujahideen.” He dispatched Syria’s homegrown jihadists to fight American occupation forces, and most of those jihadists would sign up with AQI. Assad pulled off a win-win scheme, purging Syria of potential enemies while teaching both the American government and citizenry a lesson they still haven’t forgotten: Occupying and democratizing an Arab land is a far messier and bloodier business than most in the West are willing to stomach.

It worked so well in Iraq that Assad would eventually replicate it inside his own country. When the uprising against him began in 2011, he framed the conflict as one between his secular regime and Islamist terrorists, even when the only serious movement against him consisted of nonviolent protests for reform and democracy. Few in the West bought Assad’s line at the time, so he then facilitated an Islamist terrorist opposition. His loyalists like to present a choice: “Assad or we burn the country.” And they are not kidding.

As Weiss and Hassan detail, Assad opened the jails and let Islamist prisoners free as part of an ostensible “reform” process, but he kept democracy activists in their cages. He knew perfectly well that those he let loose would cut a burning and bleeding gash across the country, casting him as the only thing standing between the rest of us and the abyss. That was the point. “Après moi, le déluge,” as Louis XV used to say.

The first thing ISIS does when conquering a new city or town is set up the grisly machinery for medieval punishments in town squares. “Letting black-clad terrorists run around a provincial capital,” Weiss and Hassan write, “crucifying and beheading people, made for great propaganda.” It was all Assad could do to ensure the Obama administration wouldn’t pursue a policy of regime-change as it had in Libya and as the previous administration had in Iraq.

There was a precedent for this perverted Baathist-Islamist alliance. Osama bin Laden had declared the “socialist infidels” of Saddam’s government worthy allies against Americans, and the remnants of Iraq’s ancien régime—what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mistakenly called the dead enders—felt the same way. As a result, Weiss and Hassan note, “most of [AQI’s] top decision-makers served either in Saddam Hussein’s military or security services.”

[2nd half]
Had Assad been forced into exile or dragged from his palace before the Arab Spring soured, Syria might look strikingly different today. Weiss and Hassan cite an International Republican Institute survey of Syrian public opinion in 2012 that found 76 percent of the country favored one kind of democratic transition or another. But Assad guarantees that bullets rather than ballots will decide political outcomes, and millions would rather flee to squalid refugee camps abroad than get caught between the anvil of Syria’s totalitarian state and the hammer of ISIS.

If ISIS conquers the entire country, the ruling elite and its backers will end up joining those refugees—if they live long enough to escape. Syria’s regime is first and foremost the political vehicle for the nation’s Alawite minority, a heterodox religious sect that fuses together elements of Shia Islam, Christianity, and Gnosticism, and ISIS marks all religious minorities for extinction. This makes Assad, as the authors put it, “one of the most dramatic recipients of blowback in modern history.”

ISIS’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, loved beheading hapless victims on camera as much as the new leadership does, and his grisly behavior earned him the nickname “Sheikh of the Slaughterers.” He hated no one on earth—not even Americans—more than he hated Shia Muslims who, in his view, were beneath even Sunni Muslim apostates. The Shia, he wrote, are “the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom.” “Genocidal rhetoric,” Weiss and Hassan write, “was followed by genocidal behavior,” from ruthless sectarian “cleansing” to videotaped mass executions. Abu Bakr Naji, one of ISIS’s intellectual architects, published a book online outlining its strategy and vision: The Management of Savagery. It is used today as a manual not only in Syria and Iraq but also by al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. “Jihad,” he writes, “is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening [people], and massacring.”

The authors make a compelling case that ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a would-be Saddam Hussein in religious garb. “Even though he is originally from Samarra,” they write, “his chosen nom de guerre, al-Baghdadi, immediately situates the Iraqi capital as ISIS’s center of gravity, which it was under the Abbasid caliphate, itself an important Islamic touchstone for the dead Iraqi dictator.” Yet ISIS’s leader, like Zarqawi before him, is even more genocidal than Iraq’s former strongman. Al-Baghdadi has “so far demonstrated nothing short of annihilationist intention…To ISIS, the Shia are religiously void, deceitful, and marked only for death.”

Syrians and Iraqis aren’t the only ones threatened by all this, of course. ISIS aspires to wage its exterminationist war beyond the Middle East, not only in the United States but also in Europe. “We will raid you thereafter,” it boasts in its online magazine, Dabiq, “and you will never raid us. We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the Permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us.”

The West’s war against ISIS puts the U.S. and Europe tacitly on the side of Assad, the Iranians, and their joint Lebanese proxy Hezbollah for the simple reason that we’re all fighting ISIS at the same time while leaving one another alone. Tehran can hardly contain itself. “One of the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism,” Weiss and Hassan write, “now presents itself as the last line of defense against terrorism.” The idea that a state sponsor of terrorism could ever be a reliable partner against international terrorism is ludicrous. “Whatever Washington’s intentions,” Weiss and Hassan write, “its perceived alliance of convenience with the murderous regimes of Syria and Iran is keeping Sunnis who loathe or fear ISIS from participating in another grassroots effort to expel the terrorists from their midst.”

ISIS continues to grow at an alarming rate and has so far recruited thousands of members from Europe. “What draws people to ISIS,” the authors write, “could easily bring them to any number of cults or totalitarian movements, even those ideologically contradictory to Salafist jihadism.” Indeed, its ranks are swollen with tribal sectarians, thrill seekers, former “socialist infidels,” foreign losers looking for meaning and community, and psychopaths pining for butchery. Many find the execution videos of “Jihadi John”—a modern version of what 19th-century Italian revolutionary Carlo Pisacane called propaganda of the deed—darkly compelling. For the most dangerous ISIS recruits, what the rest of us see as bad press is seductive.

Many, however, are painfully naive. Savvy ISIS recruiters do an outstanding job convincing the gullible that its notoriety is unjustified. “Don’t hear about us,” they say. “Hear from us.” Weiss and Hassan dig up comments from some of ISIS’s obtuse fans in online Western forums who have bought the sales pitch: “Does the Islamic State sell hair gel and Nutella in Raqqa?” “Should I bring an iPad to let Mom and Dad know that I arrived safely in caliphate?”

The foolish recruits are more likely to become victims themselves than to victimize others—in March, ISIS forced a 12-year-old boy to execute an Israeli Arab man for trying to flee—but ISIS will continue to attract newcomers as long as it’s permitted to thrive. And thrive it will until it faces a more determined resistance force and as long as radical Sunni Muslims around the world feel galvanized by the perceived American-Iranian axis against them. As the authors say in their book’s stark conclusion, “the army of terror will be with us indefinitely.”