Category: Terror War

We talked briefly about the gunman in Copenhagen this weekend who killed two people and injured five police officers in a shootout. The UK’s Telegraph reports that he was only recently released from prison where he had served a two-year sentence for “grievous bodily harm”;

“He was on the radar but he was not known to have travelled to conflict areas like Iraq or Syria,” [Danish security and intelligence service, Jens] Madsen said. “We cannot yet say anything concrete about the motive … but we are considering that he might have been inspired by the events in Paris,” he told a news conference.

But the “why” doesn’t really matter to the folks who have lost family members, does it? That’s why we have Guantanamo – because these creatures need to be removed from society. There is no chance for rehabilitation, no one is safe as long as they’re running around unsupervised.

The New York Times reports that the CIA’s Operation Avarice was a program designed to buy chemical weapons from a dealer in Iraq that had put old chemical weapons on the market. The New York Times admits that these particular weapons had not been inventoried by the United Nations’ arms inspectors;

It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said. Many rockets were in poor condition and some were empty or held a nonlethal liquid, the officials said. But others contained the nerve agent sarin, which analysis showed to be purer than the intelligence community had expected given the age of the stock.

[…]

The purchases were made from a sole Iraqi source who was eager to sell his stock, officials said. The amount of money that the United States paid for the rockets is not publicly known, and neither are the affiliations of the seller.

Most of the officials and veterans who spoke about the program did so anonymously because, they said, the details remain classified. The C.I.A. declined to comment. The Pentagon, citing continuing secrecy about the effort, did not answer written questions and acknowledged its role only obliquely.

It has been the habit of the BDS crowd to tell us how the 500 tons of “yellow cake uranium” that was taken from Iraq to Canada was known by the UN arms inspectors, so it wasn’t part of the search for WMDs. These rockets in this report weren’t discovered or inventoried by those inspectors, though. So I wonder what their excuse will be this time.

A video appeared on the internet yesterday of some Coptic Christian Egyptians who were beheaded by Islamic State thugs in Libya. Egypt wasted no time in paying IS back. According to BBC, Egypt responded with airstrikes in the Libyan city of Derna with the coordination of the Libyan government;

The kidnapped Egyptian workers, all Coptic Christians, were seized in separate incidents in December and January from the coastal town of Sirte in eastern Libya, under the control of Islamist groups.

[…]

The video describes the Copts as “crusaders” and refers among other things to two women, wives of Coptic priests, whose alleged conversion to Islam triggered a sectarian dispute in Egypt in 2010.

From Fox News;

A spokesman for the Armed Forces General Command announced the strikes on state radio Monday, marking the first time Cairo has publicly acknowledged taking military action in neighboring Libya, where extremist groups seen as a threat to both countries have taken root in recent years.

The statement said the warplanes targeted weapons caches and training camps before returning safely. It said the strikes were “to avenge the bloodshed and to seek retribution from the killers.”

“Let those far and near know that Egyptians have a shield that protects them,” it said.

[…]

Libya’s air force commander, Saqr al-Joroushi, told Egyptian state TV that the airstrikes were coordinated with the Libyan side and that they killed about 50 militants. Libya’s air force also announced it had launched strikes in the eastern city of Darna, which was taken over by an ISIS affiliate last year.

The Copts had gone to Libya for work since Egypt has fallen on economic hard times since their revolutions.

But, good for Egypt – they’re also battling IS militants in the Sinai, so this is just an extension of that battle. It’s about time that the regional governments stepped into the breech and started dealing with the Islamic State. It’s unfortunate that they waited this long, but late is better than never. The ultimate defeat of ISIS depends on the participation of the regional governments in this war.

The Colorado Springs Gazette reports that 4,000 Fort Carson soldiers who have been training for the past year are headed to Kuwait to replace the brigade that is there now.

The 3rd Brigade Combat Team bid farewell to the post in a ceremony and soon will serve as U.S. Central Command’s Reserve force in the Middle East – the first soldiers into battle if a major combat force is used to battle Islamic State fighters.

The unit is Fort Carson’s heaviest force, armed with tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Many of its soldiers are veterans of one or more of the brigade’s four combat tours in Iraq.

[…]

Sierra’s soldiers have trained for more than a year for the Kuwait mission. They practiced skills that atrophied over more than a decade of counterinsurgency fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, relearning the armored combat skills last used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The article says that the Army has been rotating brigades in and out of Kuwait since 2011 when the last troops left Iraq…the last time. Shades of the Bush ’41/Clinton years when there was a brigade of pre-positioned equipment in Kuwait that had to be issued every time Hussein sneezed.

This unit from Carson is armor heavy, though, according to the article, so their mission is different than the unit that it is replacing. The brigade that is there now is supposed to be training regional forces while this new brigade appears to have a combat mission, should it be needed.

ISIS had better hope that no one decides to employ these studs in northern Iraq. No unit in that theater is more lethal than these folks. Ask the Iraqi Republican Guards.

CNN reports that US troops in Ayn al-Assad Air Base have allowed ISIS to surround them so that they can begin eliminating Islamic State fighters systematically.

The ISIS fighters seized Al-Baghdadi, northwest of the capital of Baghdad, on Friday after attacking from three directions against Iraqi government forces, the security officials told CNN.

Ayn al-Assad, the largest military base in western Anbar province still under government control, is also where U.S. instructors train Iraqi pilots.
ISIS launches attacks on multiple fronts in Iraq

Already, the air base is taking sporadic indirect fire from militants using rocket launchers and mortars, the officials said.

Two security officials in the Anbar provincial office told CNN that security forces inside Ayn al-Assad killed eight suicide bombers Friday who were trying to breach the air base’s perimeter from the direction of Al-Baghdadi.

Yeah, the Chinese thought they had the Marines surrounded at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, too. The Germans had the 101st Airborne Division surrounded at Bastogne. How did those battles work out?

The U.S. defense official…reiterated what has been said many times publicly by Pentagon officials: That U.S. forces retain the right to defend themselves if necessary, but at this point there have been no injuries to U.S. forces at the airbase and there is no change in status.

Funny how that “no boots on the ground” thing changes overnight isn’t it?

As ISIS said the other day, Kayla Mueller is dead. ISIS’ story was that she was killed by a Jordanian airstrike, but my sense is that ISIS murdered her on video, however, because of the backlash from the video of the death of the Jordanian pilot, they decided to kill her another way in the media.

The White House said that Mueller’s family received a private message from her captors over the weekend and the information contained in that communication was authenticated by the U.S. intelligence community. It was not immediately clear how and when Mueller died.

“We are heartbroken to share that we’ve received confirmation that Kayla Jean Mueller, has lost her life,” Carl and Marsha Mueller said in a statement.

Mueller had been working in a hospital helping injured Syrian refugees and then felt drawn to Syria by her faith. She worked for the humanitarian aid agency Support to Life.

President Barack Obama said that Mueller, who was an aid worker who assisted humanitarian organizations working with Syrian refugees, “epitomized all that is good in our world.”

“No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death,” the president said.

Yeah, well, we’ll see won’t we.