Category: Terror War

The Associated Press reports that the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) is steaming towards the Gulf of Aden to show the flag in response to the Iranian ships headed there in support of Houthi rebels in Yemen;

The deployment comes after a U.N. Security Council resolution approved last week imposed an arms embargo on leaders of the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels. The resolution passed in a 14-0 vote with Russia abstaining.

Navy officials said Monday that the Roosevelt was moving through the Arabian Sea. A massive ship that carries F/A-18 fighter jets, the Roosevelt is seen more of a deterrent and show of force in the region.

The Roosevelt is deployed along with the guided missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG-60) but don’t get your hopes up for a confrontation with the Iranians;

Officials said it’s too soon to speculate on what the Navy ships may do as the Iranian convoy approaches, including whether Iran would consent to a boarding request, and what actions the Navy would take if its request was refused.

The other day, while speaking to Congress, Joints Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey told the legislators that the fall of the Iraqi city, Ramadi to ISIS fighters, is “not symbolic in any way”. I wonder if General Dempsey realizes that he sounds just like Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, or as he’s more popularly known in this country, Baghdad Bob. That kind of rhetoric is commonly referred to as “sour grapes”.

Every loss of every city in Iraq to ISIS is symbolic. It’s certainly going to be used as a recruiting tool by ISIS, if nothing else rises to the level of “symbolic”.

Well, Dempsey certainly pissed off our buddy, Debbie Lee, the Gold Star Mother of a SEAL killed in Ramadi in 2006;

I am shaking and tears are flowing down my cheeks as I watch the news and listen to the insensitive, pain inflicting comments made by you in regards to the fall of Ramadi.

“The city itself is not symbolic in any way”? Oh, really? Are you willing to meet with me and with the families who have lost a son, daughter, husband, wife, father, mother, aunt, uncle, grandson, or teammate?

I know Dempsey was trying to say that the fall of that city wasn’t strategically important, but he made a poor choice of words. It was certainly symbolic to ISIS and it’s symbolic in that the strategy of this administration in this war against ISIS doesn’t seem to be working if the Islamic State can muster enough military force to take a city.

By the way, a few thousand Iraqis thought it was symbolic enough to leave the city and become someone’s refugee problem.

ABC News reports that six more people were arrested in San Diego and Minneapolis yesterday in a federal investigation of an ISIS recruiting operation;

The arrests come as the FBI has been trying to uncover ISIS sympathizers inside the U.S. homeland who might be looking to launch their own attacks. In addition, the FBI in Minneapolis has been trying to identify who has been helping to recruit so many young men and women to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

In December, federal prosecutors in Minneapolis called the recruitment pipeline “a longstanding criminal conspiracy with members known and unknown.”

What’s more, some of those Minnesotans persuaded to take up arms with the brutal terrorist group obtained money and other support from “a person or persons unknown” to the U.S. government, federal prosecutors said in December.

The article says that more than 50 people have been arrested in the last two years for their support of ISIS. There are two ways to stop this threat. The first would be to kill those ISIS dregs in Syria and Iraq in larger numbers so that it’s no longer attractive for people to want to be members. Another would be to effectively block the return of folks from this country when try to return to ply their particular trades against Americans.

While the feds have been successful up until now, all it takes is one slipping through and being successful for them to have a victory. They’re not particularly bright and easy to catch at the moment, but they’ll learn eventually.

Our buddy, Kristina Wong, writes in The Hill that a convoy of Iranian ships are moving towards Yemen ostensibly to lend support to the Shi’ite Houthis, where Saudi Arabia is enforcing a blockade of the ports in the war-torn country;

What’s unusual about the new deployment, which set out this week, is that the Iranians are not trying to conceal it, officials said. Instead, they appear to be trying to “communicate it” to the U.S. and its allies in the Gulf.

Even Jimmy Carter would have moved another carrier group or two in response to this latest threat in the region.

McClatchy reports that hundreds of Americans have escaped the violence in Yemen to the relative safety of Djibouti and the US embassy there.

Calling the flight from Yemen “a tough experience” for many of the evacuees, the U.S. envoy, Tom Kelly, said hundreds of Americans have arrived in Djibouti in recent days aboard foreign ships and aircraft after journeys that for some included hundreds of miles of dangerous land travel from Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, to the ports of Hodeidah and Aden.

The article says that US forces have left the country and that the Obama Administration has no intention to rescue these American citizens who have waited until the last minute to make their escape;

The Obama administration so far has declined to organize a rescue mission for the estimated 3,000 to 4,000 U.S. citizens in Yemen. U.S. officials have said they believe it is too dangerous for U.S. military assets to enter Yemeni waters and air space. They’ve also suggested that organizing Americans to meet at a single departure point would put them at risk of attack from al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or other terrorist groups seeking American hostages.

That, however, has left Americans largely on their own to find a way out of the country. The U.S. Embassy in Sanaa has been closed for months, and the last American troops in the country were evacuated last month, a few days before the Saudi bombing campaign began.

In a message posted on its website, the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa advises that an Indian naval vessel will be leaving Hodeidah for Djibouti and that it had been informed that Americans would be welcomed. But the embassy also noted that “unfortunately, we don’t have information on who to contact to board this ship.”

I don’t blame the White House, actually. It’s not the responsibility of the government to rescue people from their own bad judgement and ill-considered choices. If I was worried about my safety or the safety of my family, I would have left the country months ago. It’s not that I believe that they were asking for it, but they certainly didn’t consider that leaving the country before now would be the best choice. Putting more Americans in danger to save them those Americans from themselves is not a good answer.

Having said that, the State Department, that still has responsibility for Americans abroad, should be doing more to put those Americans in contact with folks who can move them out of the way. This is the age of quickly disseminated information and if the State Department could do that for trouble spots around the world in the 70s and 80s, they certainly should be able to do that now in the age of Twitter and email. And the State Department can do all of that from the safety of their offices in Foggy Bottom.

USAToday reports that Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, a 23-year-old who has allegedly trained with ISIS in Syria in 2014 was arrested in Ohio for plotting a terrorist attack;

According to the indictment, Mohamud was trained with weapons and explosives, hand-to-hand combat and even breaking into houses. He then was instructed by a cleric in the organization to return to the United States and commit an act of terrorism, the indictment said.

The indictment says Mohamud wanted to kill Americans, particularly soldiers and police officers. He apparently discussed plans to travel to a Texas military base and “kill three or four American soldiers execution style.”

The article doesn’t go into detail about how he was discovered before he could hatch his nefarious plot, but we can probably accurately guess that he plotted along with his FBI informant. There have been a number of these fellows lately, and I hope these FBI informants can keep up with them all – or we could just not let them come back to the US once they leave.

Thanks to our reader Ohio for the link.

John T Booker, Junior had planned to wage a jihad against the US Army. When the plan failed because the Army thought he was a little too nutty to enlist, he decided to team up with the FBI to create a bomb and attack Fort Riley, Kansas. Apparently, the FBI tried to get his local Muslim cleric to talk him out of being nutty, according to the Associated Press;

Imam Omar Hazim of the Islamic Center of Topeka told The Associated Press that two FBI agents brought Booker to him last year for counseling, hoping to turn the young man away from radical beliefs. Hazim said the agents told him that Booker suffered from bipolar disorder, characterized by unusual mood swings that can affect functioning.

Hazim said he expressed concerns to the FBI about allowing Booker to move freely in the community after their first encounter.

Hazim said he later heard that two others were involved in a bombing plot with Booker. He said the FBI told him they were undercover FBI agents and that the sting was arranged to get Booker “off the streets.”

“I think the two FBI agents set him up, because they felt at that point someone else might have done the same thing and put a real bomb in his hands,” Hazim said.

He said he has come to the conclusion that the sting was the right thing to do.

The cleric said that Booker had stopped taking his medication. A pretty blonde classmate of Booker, Chelsee Link, says that he was quiet in school;

“I couldn’t believe that I heard his name, and that he was said to be involved in something like this,” she said.

Link described Booker as quiet, a student who never got into fights with other students at Topeka West. But he took an interest in history classes and war events, and would argue with the teacher about the circumstances and dates of battles.

“He seemed to know a lot about that, but other than that, didn’t say anything in class,” she recalled. Link remembers the 20-year old as an ROTC cadet who also stay connected at school to his brother, Jeremy, and was picked on occasionally as being strange.

Also, the Feds have arrested another dude, Alexander E. Blair, for not reporting Booker’s plans according to ABC News.

— A second Topeka man is now charged in connection with an alleged plot to detonate a vehicle bomb at the Fort Riley.

U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom says 28-year-old Alexander E. Blair is charged with one count of failing to report a felony. A criminal complaint filed Friday alleges Blair knew of a plot by John T. Booker.

I’m not sure how I feel about that – sure Blair should have reported Booker’s activities, but I’m not happy that an American citizen can be arrested for not reporting something. I’m not saying that Blair didn’t have a responsibility to the nation and the community to report it, but that should come from his heart, not from the force of law.

But, it’s good to see that the media is being predictable and generating sympathy for the devil, which is probably the reason that Blair didn’t feel a responsibility to report Booker and his activities. The media is in the business of making celebrities out of these lone wolf fan boys instead of making them look like petty criminals with deadly intentions.

According to Yemeni militiamen, two Iranian Republican Guards officers, a colonel and a captain, were captured in the country’s capitol, Aden, says Reuters;

Tehran has denied providing military support for Houthi fighters, whose advances have drawn air strikes by a regional coalition led by Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic’s main rival for influence in the Gulf.

If confirmed, the presence of two Iranian officers, who the local militiamen said were from an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, would further worsen relations between Tehran and Riyadh who are vying for dominance in the region.

Well, if this turns out to be true, I guess the agreement that the US is fixing to sign with the Iranians in regards to their nuclear program will have all of the weight of the paper on which it is signed, and we can totally trust them to be good actors on the world stage, cuz they’d never lie to us, right?

Last month, an Iranian officer was killed in a firefight between Hezbollah and Israelis on the Golan Heights.