{"id":58189,"date":"2015-02-11T09:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-02-11T14:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=58189"},"modified":"2015-02-10T17:59:51","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T22:59:51","slug":"intelligence-20000-foreign-fighters-flocked-to-islamic-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=58189","title":{"rendered":"Intelligence; 20,000 foreign fighters flocked to Islamic State"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press<\/a> reports that US intelligence agencies have estimated that at least twenty thousand foreign fighters have gathered inside the Islamic State. They have come from 90 nations, thirty four hundred from Western nations and about 150 from the US;<\/p>\n

Nick Rasmussen, chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, said the rate of foreign fighter travel to Syria is without precedent, far exceeding the rate of foreigners who went to wage jihad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia at any other point in the past 20 years.<\/p>\n

U.S. officials fear that some of the foreign fighters, who come from 90 countries, will return undetected to their homes in Europe or the U.S. to mount terrorist attacks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If they survive. It sounds like a target-rich environment to me. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Congress and the President are preparing the political environment surrounding the battlefield. The request from the White House to Congress begins by ending the 2002 authorization for the use of military force in Iraq and seriously restricts the use of troops in this current war in Iraq as well as hamstrings the next president, according to Bloomberg;<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s AUMF for the fight against Islamic State would restrict the use of ground troops through a prohibition on \u201cenduring offensive ground operations,” but provide several exemptions. First, all existing ground troops, including the 3,000 U.S. military personnel now on the ground in Iraq, would be explicitly excluded from the restrictions. After that, the president would be allowed to deploy new military personnel in several specific roles: advisers, special operations forces, Joint Terminal Attack Controllers to assist U.S. air strikes and Combat Search and Rescue personnel.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The new statute would authorize military action against Islamic State and its associated forces, which are defined in the text as organizations fighting alongside the jihadists and engaged in active hostilities. This means the president would be free to attack groups such as the al-Nusra Front or Iraqi Baathist elements who have partnered with the Islamic terrorists in Syria or Iraq. There are no geographic limitations, so the administration would be free to expand the war to other countries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is no provision to expand time on this authorization beyond 2018 meaning the next President would have to go back to Congress and get a new authorization for the use of military force – that’s how Obama plans to preserve his legacy, I suppose, leaving it to the next President to take the blame for this newest Iraq War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Associated Press reports that US intelligence agencies have estimated that at least twenty thousand foreign … Intelligence; 20,000 foreign fighters flocked to Islamic State<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}