Category: Terror War

According to the Associated Press, the President is meeting with King Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in hopes of strengthening relationships with the Kingdom. The Saudis are worried that Congress will blame the Saudis for 9-11 during their latest investigation. To express their mistrust of Obama, a lower-ranking prince met him at the airport;

Stepping off of Air Force One earlier at King Khalid International Airport, Obama was greeted not by King Salman but by a lower-ranking royal, Prince Faisal bin Bandar Al Saud, the governor of Riyadh.

[…]

Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center, said the Saudi decision not to dispatch a high-level delegation to greet the president was unusual and intended to send a clear message that they have little faith in him.

“He will find a leadership that’s not ready to believe him,” Alani said. “The Saudis had disagreements with previous presidents. Here you have deep distrust that the president won’t deliver anything.”

Meanwhile, Ashton Carter, the US Secretary of Defense, is meeting with regional defense ministers to encourage them to put a little more skin in the game against ISIS;

A senior defense official said the defense chiefs had a robust discussion, but came to no solid agreements on the increased aid.

The official said it appears the Gulf nations will be willing to consider doing more. But the Sunni leaders want to wait until they see more political improvements in Baghdad and greater participation and aid for the Sunni population before they agree to do more. Iraq is a Sunni-majority country with a Shiite-led government.

The U.S. has been unhappy with what the Gulf nations have been willing to do in the fight, both with their military forces and financial contributions.

Basically, the Obama Administration has a good strategy for the war against ISIS, that being using US firepower to support the Arabs in their ground war against ISIS. However, in practice it’s not working out, mostly because the Arabs aren’t doing their part – that’s because Obama is depending on his incompetent team – Biden, Carter and Kerry – to do the hard work of convincing the Arabs to pick up their load. Because of political pressure from home, US troops can’t fight a ground war against ISIS with a restrictive set of rules of engagement that won’t allow them to kill the bad guys. The Arabs have no such restrictions. Obama should let Iran have their way with ISIS in order to convince the Arabs to do their fair share.

The war against ISIS won’t be successful until they’re all bloody heaps in the sand, and only the Persians and the Arabs can do that.

Nicki sends us a link to Stars & Stripes which reports the arrest of Abdul Saboor who has admitted that in 2012 he murdered Air Force Lt. Col. John D. Loftis of Paducah, Ky., and Maryland Army National Guard Maj. Robert J. Marchanti II of Baltimore while they were in the Interior Ministry building.

The shooting deaths of the two American advisers came in the early days of deadly riots across the country over news that American soldiers had burned Qurans at Bagram Air Field. The slayings prompted NATO to temporarily withdraw all coalition advisers from Afghan ministries.

[…]

The Taliban had claimed responsibility for the incident and said it was retaliation by one of their fighters for the Quran burning. News about the burning of the Muslim holy books at the Parwan Detention Facility came just weeks after video surfaced of Marines urinating on Taliban corpses.

The Afghans had identified Saboor as the shooter at the time, but he had fled to Bamiyan province where he was arrested Monday.

What’s the difference between the cartel tunnels between Mexico and The United States and the terror tunnels between Palestine and Israel?

The terror tunnels into Israel bring in terrorists that take human life immediately.

The cartel tunnels into the United States bring in drugs and criminality that ruin/take lives eventually.

Take home truth:  Nothing good comes from secret tunnels from one country to another.

Of course, we Americans should not be concerned with the radical Islamist trends that are currently plaguing our allies in Europe and ally in the Middle East.

I’m sure a mass migration of Muslims will never come to our shores, and the tunnels on our southern border will never be used by terrorists.

We will never experience terror stabbing attacks like Israel deals with (except this one and that one).

We will never have mass rape mobs like European women experienced as they rang in the New Year in 2016.  That is, as long as we decide sooner rather than later, that accepting tens of thousands of titillated Muslim men—that believe that women are property—is a horrible idea.

It would behoove the United States to consider seriously the ramifications of going the way of Europe and avoiding the migrant quagmire, but we won’t I am mildly pessimistic.

Oh, and the southern border is probably a significant issue too–and not just the tunnels underneath it.

 

On April 6th, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, an Iraqi refugee and senior at the University of California Berkeley, was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight. This past wekend, the story was about how he was booted merely because he was speaking in his native Arabic tongue and how the racist fear-mongers on the flight were frightened by that fact. He used the incident to demonstrate how he has been the target of hatred because of his swarthy looks. From an earlier Dallas News article;

“I said to him, ‘This is what Islamophobia got this country into,’ and that made him so angry. That is when he told me I could not go back on the plane.”

Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said there had been at least six cases of Muslims being pulled off flights so far this year. The conduct of Southwest Airlines was of particular concern, she said, after another Muslim passenger was removed from a flight in Chicago last week.

“We are concerned that Muslims are facing more and more scrutiny and baseless harassment when they are attempting to travel,” Billoo said.

Well, today we find out that the person who reported the youngster to the aircrew also spoke Arabic, and it was the content of the conversation, not the fact that it was in Arabic that concerned the passenger, according to the Dallas News;

One new detail revealed in the statement is that the woman who overheard Makhzoomi’s comments, which came during a phone conversation with his uncle, also spoke Arabic.

“It was the content of the passenger’s conversation, not the language used, that prompted the report leading to our investigation,” Southwest said in its statement. “Once the report was made, an Arabic-speaking Southwest Manager at LAX participated in the decision to request the passenger leave the aircraft and continue the conversation in the gate area.”

The statement from Southwest is at the second link.

Thanks to David for the links.

The Obama Pentagon announced that they’re sending almost 200 more US troops to Iraq to bolster numbers there from 3,870 to 4,087, according to the Washington Post. They’re mostly artillery and a aviation assets to help the Iraqis take back Mosul;

Raising the Iraqi flag in Mosul would be a symbolic victory for the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, facing a mounting political crisis, and for the White House, which is seeking to deal a decisive blow to the Islamic State before President Obama leaves office.

The decisions are the latest indication of officials’ increasingly urgent desire to make the U.S.-led campaign of airstrikes and training efforts, which began in 2014, more effective.

You know what would have been really great? If they hadn’t lost Mosul in the first place, but then that would have detracted from the number of campaign slogans available for the 2012 election.

From AFP;

While most American forces in Iraq play advisory and support roles, Washington has also sent in special forces to carry out raids against IS, and US Marines have deployed to provide artillery support for Iraqi troops.

Obama repeatedly pledged that there would be no “boots on the ground” to combat IS, but US forces are engaged in combat with the jihadists and two American military personnel have already been killed.

“No boots on the ground” has become “closer to the action”;

Speaking to reporters Monday in Baghdad, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the decision to move U.S. advisers to the Iraqi brigade and battalion level will put them “closer to the action,” but he said they will have security forces with them and the U.S. will do what’s needed to reduce the risks.

A senior U.S. official said that there will be eight Apache helicopters authorized to help the Iraqi forces when Iraq leaders determine they need them.

Of course, a real leader would have put enough troops AND equipment in the fight in the first place. Who the hell sends attack helicopters to Iraq with no crews?

Thanks to Pinto Nag and Chief Tango for the links.