Category: Terror War

National Security Advisor HR McMaster took an unannounced trip to Pakistan this week according to AFP;

At his previous stop in neighbouring Afghanistan he suggested Washington may take a stronger line with Islamabad, for years seen as an unreliable US ally.

A statement by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s office said McMaster had “assured the Prime Minister that the new administration was committed to strengthening bilateral relations and working with Pakistan, to achieve peace and stability in Afghanistan and in the wider South Asian region.”

[…]

“As all of us have hoped for many, many years, we have hoped that Pakistani leaders will understand that it is in their interest to go after these groups less selectively than they have in the past and the best way to pursue their interest in Afghanistan and elsewhere is through diplomacy, not through the use of proxies that engage in violence,” McMaster said in an interview with Afghanistan’s Tolo News Sunday.

McMaster’s trip is overshadowed by Vice President Pence’s trip to South Korea and the demilitarized zone, but since there’s shooting war going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s still pretty important.

The New York Times reports that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, in an interview has presented a scenario of the recent use of chemical weapons in the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun which killed at least 80 people and injured hundreds more as either the fault of American bombing or completely manufactured and designed to unfairly portray him as a monster;

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria not only repeated the government’s denials of responsibility but contended without evidence that the episode had been fabricated as a pretext for an American retaliatory missile strike.

“We don’t know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhoun,” Mr. Assad told Agence France-Presse in the television interview from Damascus, which was recorded on Wednesday. “Were they dead at all?”

[…]

The interview with Mr. Assad was broadcast as the Syrian government’s news agency asserted without evidence that American warplanes had bombed what it called a chemical weapons cache possessed by Islamic State militants in Syria on Wednesday, leaving hundreds dead, including “a large number of civilians, due to suffocation caused by the inhalation of toxic materials.”

So their story is that it never happened but if it did, it was the fault of Trump and the US. Of course.

CNN reports that the Pentagon is sending about 40 more US troops to train and equip the Somali National Army as well as multi-national forces supporting the war against al Shabaab forces;

In an email to CNN, Charles Chuck Prichard, a spokesperson for US Africa Command, confirmed the deployment Friday, saying that the deployment of “a few dozen troops from the 101st Airborne Division” came “at the request and in close coordination with” the government of Somalia.

“The objective of this particular train and equip mission is to improve the logistical capacity of the Somali National Army and the focus will be on teaching basic logistics operations, which will allow Somalia forces to better fight al Shabaab,” the spokesman added.

The US troops will join the small number of US special operations forces already there providing counterterrorism support to local forces battling the local al Qaeda affiliate, al Shabaab. That advisory mission has been underway for several years.

There are already about 50 special forces troops in Somalia supporting the government of newly-elected president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, a dual US-Somali citizen in his war against al Shabaab.

Ex-PH2 sends us a link to the story from Chicago that reports 35-year-olds Joseph D. Jones and Edward Schimenti were charged in federal court yesterday with conspiring to support ISIS.

In the complaint filed in federal court, U.S. Attorney Joel Levin alleges Jones and Schimenti pledged allegiance to ISIS and “advocated on social media for violent extremism in support of the terrorist group.” Multiple federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies were involved in the investigation, including undercover FBI employees who befriended the pair while posing as fellow ISIS devotees.

According to the Department of Justice, the pair was conspiring with FBI informants;

According to a complaint and affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, [Joseph D. Jones, also known as “Yusuf Abdulhaqq,” 35, and Edward Schimenti, also known as “Abdul Wali,” 35], both U.S. citizens, pledged their allegiance to ISIS and advocated on social media for violent extremism in support of the terrorist group. In the fall of 2015, the pair befriended three individuals whom Jones and Schimenti believed were fellow ISIS devotees. Unbeknownst to Jones and Schimenti, two of the individuals were undercover FBI employees and the third individual was cooperating with law enforcement and was not an ISIS supporter.

Over the next several months, as part of the conspiracy, Jones and Schimenti allegedly took steps to assist the cooperating source with plans to travel overseas to join ISIS. The defendants met the undercover FBI employees and the cooperating source on numerous occasions, during which Jones and Schimenti discussed their devotion and commitment to ISIS, according to the complaint. Some of the meetings took place in Waukegan, Zion, Bridgeview, North Chicago, Highland Park and Chicago, in Illinois.

At one point, Jones and Schimenti shared photographs of themselves holding the ISIS flag at the Illinois Beach State Park in north suburban Zion, according to the complaint. In a recorded conversation with the cooperating source, Schimenti commented that Schimenti would like to see the ISIS flag “on top of the White House,” the complaint states.

Earlier this year, Schimenti engaged in physical training exercises with the cooperating source at a gym in Zion, the complaint states. Understanding that the cooperating source intended to travel overseas to fight for ISIS, Schimenti commented that the exercises would “make you good, you know, in the battlefield,” according to the complaint.

According to the complaint, last month, the pair furnished several cellular phones to the cooperating source, believing they would be used to detonate explosive devices in ISIS attacks overseas. On April 7, Jones and Schimenti drove the cooperating source to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago with the understanding that the source would be traveling to Syria to join and fight with ISIS. Schimenti told the source to “drench that land with they, they blood.”

Josh Rogin writes in the pages of the Washington Post that “Obama’s Syria strike plan was much bigger than Trump’s“. A real comedy piece to make Obama look more committed to the war against the use of chemical weapons than Trump;

…the Obama plan was designed to be substantial enough to have an impact on Assad’s calculus. There were also plans to follow up with strikes on even more targets if Assad continued to use chemical weapons.

“The military planners thought that the attack we had planned in 2013 was significant enough to have a real deterrent effect,” the official said. “We had a strike plan that included additional targets that would not have been struck in the initial go around.”

So why haven’t we heard about this big plan until now?

Obama changed his mind at the last minute and ended up not striking Syria at all.

Yeah, that’s what Nobel prize winners do when they’re trying to nail down their legacy and kick the can down the road.

Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.