Category: Terror War

Chief Tango sends us a link from Radio Free Europe which tells the story of Rezagul (she goes by one name like Cher) who lost her son in a firefight with the Taliban, so she took out her grief on the attackers, sending at least ten to Allah;

“I was so enraged that I took a gun and started firing at them, and I kept throwing hand grenades,” Rezagul told RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan. “I was hitting anyone who was coming at us. They were firing and firing at us, we were firing back.”

[…]

“It started around five in the morning. They were attacking with Kalashnikovs, hand grenades, and all kinds of different weapons,” Rezagul says. With two police officers in her family, the housewife was familiar with weapons, although she says she had never used them before.

Rezagul says her daughter, daughter-in-law, and youngest son also joined her in fending off the assault. “I was helping [policemen] to put bullets into their Kalashnikovs,” says Fatima, Rezagul’s daughter-in-law. “And I was also throwing hand grenades. I was wounded in my leg. My husband was martyred that day.”

[…]

Farah police chief Abdul Razzaq Yaqoobi corroborated Rezagul’s account and praised the family, “especially the brave Afghan women,” for their “exceptional courage and heroism.”

The Afghan government says that about 700 Taliban attacked the outpost and Rezgul’s home was leveled in the battle, but they’ve provided the family with a mud hut.

The Taliban has no comment, strangely. She needs to start training the ANA.

Hamid Karzai, the most Taliban man in Afghanistan, banned night raids last year to help his pals out in their war against Karzai’s government. According to Stars & Stripes, and the New York Times, the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, is going to lift that ban with the coming of the new year;

Afghan National Army Special Forces units are planning to resume the raids in 2015, and in some cases the raids will include members of American Special Operations units in an advisory role, according to Afghan military officials as well as officials with the American-led military coalition.

That news comes after published accounts of an order by President Obama to allow the American military to continue some limited combat operations in 2015. That order allows for the sort of air support necessary for successful night raids.

Afghanistan military leaders are pleased about the end of the ban, I guess because they’re fighting a war and stuff;

General Hameed welcomed a continuation of intelligence sharing, air transportation and close air support from American forces past the end of the year.

“We need strong backing of foreign forces during night raids, the helicopters and night vision goggles, GPS equipment, and better guidance,” he said. “Now we have noticed free movement of the Taliban, they are moving around at night and passing messages and recruiting people for fighting, and the only solution to stop their movement is night raids.”

Yeah, well, that why Karzai stopped the night operations – US forces are real good at night operations.

On Saturday a White House official responded to an article in The New York Times that said that President Obama had issued a secret order continuing combat operations in 2015, after their planned end on Dec. 31. The official reiterated that “the United States’ combat mission in Afghanistan will be over by the end of this year.”

Lawyer speak for “we’re calling it something else” because we can’t have a Nobel Peace winner who conducts combat operations.

Rand Paul is probably one of the leading contenders at this point for the Republican nomination and the New York Times reports that he wants a declaration of war against ISIS and he wants to put boots on the ground. Yeah, he’ll go without me because of the restrictions he wants to place on the operation;

Mr. Paul…offered a very circumscribed definition of war in his proposal, which he outlined in an interview on Saturday. He would, for instance, limit the duration of military action to one year and significantly restrict the use of ground forces.

I guess no one noticed how poorly those “time line withdrawals” work.

Mr. Paul faces doubts within the Republican Party, particularly among those who take a more traditional interventionist approach, that he is trustworthy on matters of national security and defense. He has sought to shake the “isolationist” label that he believes is unfairly attached to him because of the noninterventionist views of his father, Ron Paul.

Unfairly? We used to have a video posted on this blog, until it mysteriously disappeared a few years ago in which Rand Paul endorsed local madman and IVAW/Code Pink member, Adam Kokesh for Congress. That was in 2010. And now he wants to fight ISIS while putting absurd limits on the troops and he wants to fight ISIS hoping they’ll agree to be defeated within a year. OK, it’s not quite isolationist, but it’s as close as he can get without getting both feet wet in it.

That’s why Senators make poor executives. They make decisions that are so spineless, we’re better off if they’d make no decisions at all. The country needs a leader, from either party, not another fellow who wants to make everyone happy. A leader makes a decision and then convinces everyone that he’s right. That’s not what Paul is doing here.

Two Presidents have said that the war against terror isn’t a war against Islam, and I guess that makes everyone feel better about themselves. But in Kenya, yesterday morning, al Shabab terrorists of the al Qaeda variety executed 28 people who could not recite the Shahada, a tenet of the Muslim faith, according to Associated Press;

The survivor, Douglas Ochwodho, a non-Muslim head teacher of a private primary school in Mandera, said was travelling home for the Christmas vacation since school had closed.

Ochwodho told AP that the passengers who did not look Somali were separated from the others. The non-Somali passengers were then asked to recite the Shahada, an Islamic creed declaring oneness with God. Those who couldn’t recite the creed were ordered to lie down. Ochwodho was among those who had to lie on the ground.

Two gunmen started shooting those on the ground; one gunman started from the left and other from the right, Ochwodho said. When they reached him they were confused on whether either had shot him, he said.

Ochwodho lay still until the gunmen left, he said.

So, I guess we’re not at war against Islam, but the terrorists are at war with everyone who isn’t Muslim.

In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz reports that California Congressman Duncan Hunter is continuing to ask the Obama Administration about the failed ransom payment that the Department of Defense paid to a member of the Haqqani network of terrorists for the release of Bowe Bergdahl, the hostage they held for five years. Since it is the policy of the US government to not pay ransoms to terrorists;

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Tuesday that Mr. Obama “continues to believe, as previous presidents have concluded, that it’s not in the best interest of American citizens to pay ransoms to any organization, let alone a terrorist organization.”

“And the reason for that is simple: We don’t want to put other American citizens at even greater risk when they’re around the world,” he said.

[…]

The Pentagon’s spin on the payment is that the money was not technically a ransom. Instead, defense officials are claiming the cash was intelligence money paid to a source for information that would lead to the release of Sgt. Bergdahl.

Needless to say, the fellow to whom the government paid the ransom absconded with the funds, and then in addition to the money, we also released five hardened terrorists.

Officials said the Bergdahl ransom was an unspecified large amount of money and that the exchange was handled by the Army’s elite Delta Force anti-terrorism squad. The FBI also was involved in the ransom payment attempt and was waiting inside Afghanistan’s border with North Waziristan when the release failed, confirming that it had been a scam.

So, whoever it was that stole the cash bought many happy endings at the goat farm. The US is starting to look like the world’s nerdy victim in all of our foreign policy dealings.

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

Fox News reports that Virginian Heather Elizabeth Coffman is facing charges that she lied to federal investigators in regards to her support for terrorists. She ran several Facebook accounts which attracted the FBI’s attention. Coffman advertised that she had made arrangements for her husband to assist ISIS, well, until he left her and backed out;

Coffman offered to make similar arrangements for the FBI agent and a fictitious friend. The agent told Coffman that his friend wanted to fight with the terrorist group and become a “shaheed,” or martyr. The agent said Coffman encouraged him to support the friend’s plan and offered to use her contacts to help him achieve his goal.

After several meetings between the agent and Coffman, two other FBI agents interviewed the woman at her workplace. She denied supporting any terrorist groups, the affidavit said.

I just figure that everyone on Facebook who I don’t know are Federal agents anyway. Well, Feds or phony soldiers.