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Has ISIS, also known as IS for Islamic State — which actually should be KS for “Kinky State” since it’s like a death cult such as old India’s thuggees, a movement such as the Nazis (except they tried to hide some of their barbarity,” or the S in S&M since it is the world’s most popular producer of snuff videos — finally gone too far? From it’s first beheading and reports of it butchering men, women, and children, it has gone too far, but when it burned a young Jordian pilot alive, and released a video gleefully and professional produced showing a human being in agony, has it now unleashed forces that’ll make its conquer and carnage more difficult?
Michael Totten has a report that must be read in full. Here’s part of it:
The idea that what happens in Syria stays in Syria is as dead as Saddam Hussein, but ISIS is meeting steel as it expands.
The Lebanese army is facing as many as 3,000 fighters in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains along the Syrian border and Nicholas Blanford reports a war of attrition is taking place there. In late January the army “roasted” ISIS with artillery, according to a military advisor he spoke to, then picked up “the smoking remains.”
Meanwhile, the Jordanian air force flew devastating sorties over the Islamic State’s “capital” of Raqqa in Syria yesterday to retaliate for the gruesome murder of its fighter pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh.
Farther afield, ISIS attacked and killed at least 30 Egyptian security men in the Sinai and killed 10 at a hotel in the Libya’s capital Tripoli.
It should have been obvious from the very beginning that a terrorist army like ISIS threatens the entire region and points well beyond, but somehow it wasn’t. The prevailing view in the West held that ISIS and the Assad regime might somehow cancel each other out (as if war has ever worked that way in the past), but even right next door a large percentage Jordanians opposed their country’s involvement in this fight. Yet after ISIS put al-Kaseasbeh in a cage, burned him alive, and uploaded the video onto the Internet, everything changed. The mood in the capital Amman is eerily similar to that in New York City and Washington DC shortly after September 11, 2001. “These criminals aim to stamp out life and rights everywhere,” King Abdullah said. “Their hate and murder has reached Asia, Europe, Africa, America and Australia.”
Go to the link to read the rest.
Go to the link and read the rest.
And, yes, by all accounts it sounds like this is for Jordan their Pearl Harbor, their 9/11. Only the old character Polyanna might think that the pilot didn’t have a chance of being killed, but ISIS’s method of doing it, its pride in packaging and displaying every second of it, and the fact it now comes out that it was lying to the Jordanian government all along and the murder took place a month before ISIS was trying to use his release as a bargaining chip may now force governments in the region to realize they have two and only two choices:
Fight — or flight.
But reasoning with ISIS will not be a choice, nor will negotiating them.
And so The Civilized World Strikes Back continues:
(CNN)Coalition airstrikes again pounded ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria on Saturday, including at least a dozen strikes on Mosul, where anti-ISIS forces have been trying to weaken targets ahead of an anticipated fight to wrest Iraq’s second largest city from the terror group.
A CNN crew watching from Kurdish positions on Mount Zartak, to the southeast of Mosul, saw at least 12 blasts in the city and heard jets streaking overhead.
ISIS swept into Mosul in June, with Iraqi forces at the time largely fleeing the advance. The Sunni Muslim terror group, also called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, folded Mosul into what it calls its Islamic caliphate — territory that it has captured in both countries.
Kurdish forces, which protect a Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, recently have been trying to surround Mosul to cut off ISIS’s lines of supply from Syria, setting up what could be an eventual assault to try to expel the terror group from the city.
Iraqi ground forces could begin a move to retake the city as soon as April, a U.S. Central Command official told CNN earlier this week.
Kurdish forces say the frequency and intensity of airstrikes on Mosul have increased sharply since Tuesday, when ISIS released a video showing its fighters burning to death a Jordanian captive pilot, Lt. Moath al-Kasasbeh, who was captured in December after his jet crashed in Syria.
ISIS defenses in Mosul could be trigger for U.S. ground troop recommendation
Airstrikes also hit ISIS targets near the terror group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, on Saturday, anti-ISIS activists there said.
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.