Category: Terror War

According to Die Welt, a terror suspect was taken into custody when he assaulted Buckingham Palace with a sword;

British counterterrorism police were in investigating a man Saturday who drove a car at police outside Buckingham Palace and then attacked the officers with a 4-foot sword.

The man was quickly subdued with pepper spray by the unarmed police. But he injured three officers, two of whom were hospitalized with light injuries, as was the attacker. The 26-year-old man from Luton, a London suburb 30 miles (50 km) north of the capital, has been taken to a London police station for questioning.

Police believe that he was operating alone;

“The officers acted very quickly to detain him. During a struggle the three officers sustained minor injuries. The man, who repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar,” which means “God is great,” was incapacitated with (pepper) spray,” police said.

Meanwhile, across the channel;

The attack occurred just an hour after a machete-wielding terror suspect attacked soldiers in Belgium – he was shot dead.

According to Newsweek, during the 27 months that Obama was president in the war against ISIS, the group “Airwars”, which describes itself as a “journalist-led transparency project, reports that “we tracked 855 alleged civilian casualty events which likely killed 2298-3398 civilians,” and for the seven months of the Trump Administration, “we tracked 1,196 alleged incidents in which we assess at least 2,819-4,529 civilians died.”

Of course, there’s a simple reason for that – the Obama Administration did it’s level best to avoid fighting ISIS for any excuse.

During the Trump months, the coalition took back Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq and they’re working on taking Raqqa, Syria back. Most of the fighting has been in cities and population centers since Fallujah fell last year. ISIS tends to hide themselves behind women and children, so it’s only natural that these human shields are going to be casualties.

Airwars said that about 80 civilians were killed per month under Obama and that that figure had risen to 360 under Trump by July.

Read any of the books published recently, like “Outlaw Platoon” or Dakota Myer’s “Into the Fire” and you’ll read how the Obama Administration made avoiding combat for supporting fire units a matter of national policy, putting our own forces at risk, costing American lives, so the Nobel Prize winner could salvage his legacy.

FACT: President Obama has a plan to end the war in Afghanistan in 2014—Mitt Romney does not.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012

President Obama: "By the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over."

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 13, 2013

In case you missed it last night, here’s the video of the President’s 25 minute speech at Fort Myers, Virginia in which he expressed his plan for finishing the war in Afghanistan;

If you’d prefer, you can read the speech here at White House.gov

It can be summed up in this quote from Fox News;

“From now on, victory will have a clear definition: attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing Al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America…Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on,” he said, vowing, “America’s enemies will never know our plans.”

Fox says that last week the Taliban helpfully sent a letter to the President warning against sending more troops, that more troops will only delay their eventual victory. Apparently, Trump ignored the enemies’ advice and he signed off on the Pentagon’s plan to send 4,000 more troops to the fray.

Of course, the Taliban’s main spokesman, Nancy Pelosi slept through the speech;

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said, “Tonight, the President said he knew what he was getting into and had a plan to go forward. Clearly, he did not. The President’s announcement is low on details but raises serious questions.”

Well, if he intends to win, if he intends to turn Taliban members into smoking holes in the ground, that’s head and shoulders above anything I’ve heard in the past eight years. The President said he won’t repeat the mistakes of Iraq, and that’s better than any policy Obama expressed – the Obama Doctrine was “Withdrawal at any cost”.

From CNN, Democrats clearly haven’t learned from their mistakes;

Democrats argued Trump was proposing an open-ended commitment with no exit strategy or ceiling on US troops there.

The same old drumbeat, the same old tired shit.

The UK’s Daily Mail reports that police have killed Younes Abouyaaqoub, the 22-year-old suspected of driving a van through pedestrians on the Las Ramblas shopping district of Barcelona, Spain. After a four day man-hunt, a vineyard owner spotted a car driving at a high rate of speed through his vineyard and notified police.

Roser Venura says police told them to immediately leave the Ventura Soler cava vineyard, located between the towns of Sadurni d’Anoia and Subirats. She says “we heard a helicopter flying around and many police cars coming toward the gas station” near the property.

Armed units were scrambled before confronting Abouyaaquob who was wearing what appeared to be a suicide vest. He died in a hail of bullets while yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ – meaning ‘God is greatest’ in Arabic.

Abouyaaqoub’s death brings to an end the worst terror attack in Spain in 13 years, as all of his co-conspirators are either dead or in detention.

The death toll from the terrorists’ attacks is holding steady at 15 and 50 are still being treated for their injuries.

According to Military.com, President Trump approved the creation of a Global War On Terror Memorial “somewhere on “federal land in the District of Columbia.””

The bill to establish the memorial was sponsored in the Senate by Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, an Army veteran of the Iraq War, and Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.

On the House side, the bill’s sponsors were Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisconsin, and Seth Moulton, D-Massachusetts; both are Marine Corps veterans of the Iraq War.

In a statement, Ernst said “I am thrilled the President has signed into law this important legislation authorizing the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation to begin creating a place of remembrance for those who served, their loved ones, and all impacted by this war.”

Manchin said “I’m proud of the work done by my colleagues in approving the first step towards building a memorial that commemorates our sons and daughters who answered the call to fight.”

It’s too bad that there can’t be bi-partisan support for the actual war like there was for another memorial. By the way, if no one had noticed, the war is still going on, folks are still dying in the war against terror.

Here’s a link to the GWOT Memorial Foundation.

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.

It looks like another terrorist attack was foiled by Spanish police near Barcelona in the town of Cambrils according to BBC.

Seven people, including a police officer, were wounded when a car was driven into them early on Friday, Catalan emergency services said. One later died in hospital.

The attackers’ vehicle overturned and when the men got out they were quickly fired upon by police, media say. One was reportedly brandishing a knife.

The men were wearing what appeared to be explosive belts, police said, and a series of controlled explosions was carried out. The belts proved to be fake, Catalan regional head Carles Puigdemont later told local radio.

The driver from the van in Barcelona is still on the loose. He’s believed to be Moussa Oubakir, 18, who used his brother Driss Oubakir’s documentation to rent the vans that were used in the two attacks.

Teletrader reports that an explosion which destroyed a house in Alcanar Platja village in southern Catalonia was caused by terrorists trying to build explosives with propane tanks;

Police initially presumed a gas leak was the cause of the explosion that destroyed a house and left one person of Moroccan origin dead and six injured. Neighbors said two brothers of Maghreb origin lived in the house.

Head of the Catalan police Josep Lluis Trapero, however, said on Thursday night that the Alcanar Platja explosion is related to the van attack in Las Ramblas in which at least 13 people were murdered and 100 injured, some badly.

Fox News reports that a Moroccan man, Driss Oukabir, ran a van through the crowd shopping in Las Ramblas district of Barcelona, Spain. As many as 13 people may have been killed, although Spanish police claim one was killed and several more injured.

A Barcelona public broadcaster reported a man thought to be the driver of a van is held up in a bar that is surrounded by police. Barcelona’s Tv3: also reported the Spanish passport of a person of Moroccan origin was found at the scene of the attack.

The television station said police have surrounded a bar called Rey de Istanbul. Police haven’t confirmed they have a suspect cornered. Barcelona’s El Pais newspaper reported earlier that police were seeking more than one suspect in an unnamed bar.

From ABC News;

At least 13 people are dead and more than 50 are injured after a van slammed into pedestrians in a busy tourist spot in Barcelona, Spain, this afternoon.

The attack took place near Catalunya Square in Barcelona’s Las Ramblas district. One man is in custody, police said.

Authorities are treating the crash as a terror attack.

From CNN;

“We can confirm 13 dead and more than 50 injured,” Joaquim Forn, the Catalan interior minister, told a news conference.

He had earlier given initial figures of one dead and 32 injured but warned that the toll was “bound to rise.”

ADDED: From Daily Caller; Wolf Blitzer links Barcelona to Charlottesville;

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer wondered on air whether the suspected terrorist attack on Thursday in Barcelona, Spain, was related to the violence that broke out last weekend at a white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Va…

“Yeah, there will be questions about copycats,” Blitzer said during his coverage of the incident. “There will be questions if what happened in Barcelona was at all — at all — a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Va., even though there may be different characters, different political ambitions. They used the same killing device: A vehicle going at high speed into a group, a large group of pedestrians.”