Crusader Corner: The Attack On The ISIS Convoy Is a Tactic As Old As War

Personally, I got a lot of satisfaction watching these ISIS camel turds  get wiped off the face of the planet, I hope you do too.-SF

 

Killing retreating soldiers has a long — and totally legal — history

As the Iraqi army overran the last of Fallujah’s neighborhoods remaining in the Islamic State’s hands this week, more than 500 vehicles left the city and headed toward Syria. Along a desert highway, the convoy came under aerial attack.

What followed now appears to be the destruction of one of the largest single concentrations of Islamic State fighters and equipment seen so far in the war, and may count among the group’s worst defeats.

U.S. and Iraqi officials cited by the Washington Post claim more than 150 vehicles were destroyed in attacks on two separate parts of the convoy.

t’s unclear how many people died, although one estimate from U.S. officials places the number at 250 Islamic State fighters. Some fighters, according to eyewitnesses, stripped off their clothes and fled into the desert.

An Iraqi Mi-28 Havoc gunship, Cessna Caravan ground-attack planes and U.S. warplanes joined in the attack. A video released by the U.S.-led coalition shows bombs hitting one convoy, which strikes in different sections before more bombs and explosive rounds strafe the highway.

Videos and imagery released on Iraqi social media show bodies of men, some wearing camouflage, lying along a road where the second of two convoys was attacked. Abandoned, wrecked civilian vehicles — a few converted into armed “technicals” — littered the road.

Read the Remainder at War is Boring

Crusader Corner: Fast and Furious Part Deux…CIA Weapons For Syrian Rebels End Up On Jordanian Black Market

A botched weapons program run by the CIA and several Arab intelligence agencies to arm Syrian rebels is being compared to the ATF’s botched gun-running operation Fast and Furious, which ran guns to Mexican drug cartels.

A New York Times and Al Jazeera joint investigation found that weapons shipped into Jordan by the CIA and Saudi Arabia as part of the classified program known as “Timber Sycamore” were systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold on the black market.

According to the Times, this program, which began in 2013, is separate from the one approved by Congress in September of 2014 that the Pentagon set up to train rebels to fight Islamic State fighters.

 That program was shut down after it managed to train only a handful of Syrian rebels.Jordanian and American officials described the weapons theft and subsequent investigation on the condition of anonymity because the Syrian rebel training is classified in the United States and is a government secret in Jordan.

While it’s impossible to know how many innocent civilians have been killed by these weapons, the FBI believes that some of the guns were used in a shooting last November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman.

The theft, involving millions of dollars of weapons, highlights the messy, unplanned consequences of programs to arm and train rebels — the kind of program the CIA and Pentagon have conducted for decades — even after the Obama administration had hoped to keep the training program in Jordan under tight control.The Jordanian officers who were part of the scheme reaped a windfall from the weapons sales, using the money to buy expensive SUVs, iPhones, and other luxury items, Jordanian officials said.

The theft and resale of the arms — including Kalashnikov assault rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades — have led to a flood of new weapons available on the arms black market.

Investigators do not know what became of most of the weapons, but a disparate collection of groups, including criminal networks and rural Jordanian tribes, use the arms bazaars to build their arsenals. Smugglers also buy weapons in the arms bazaars to ship outside the country.

ISIS has built a substantial arsenal of U.S. weapons taken from stockpiles captured from the U.S.-allied Iraqi military and Syrian rebels (who are infested with “Muslim Brotherhood types” and al Qaeda fighters.) The terrorists have to buy ammo for their American-made weapons on the black market.

Throughout 2013 and 2014, Christians and Alawites throughout Syria were under siege and slaughtered en masse by well-armed Syrian rebel terrorists. Syrian Christians blamed Obama for the carnage.

A Christian woman from the besieged town of Maaloula who had fled to Damascus, tearfully told a BBC reporter about the Free Syrian Army & Al Qaeda Infestation, and begged Obama to stop sending them weapons “because they are killing us!” When asked what the rebels she saw terrorizing the town looked like, she said said they were wearing “Free Syrian Army” clothes.

That fall, the U.S. House and Senate introduced legislation aimed at stopping Obama from arming the terrorists.

The simple three-page bill, the Protecting Americans from the Proliferation of Weapons to Terrorists Act of 2013, would have prohibited the president from “using any funds on activities that would escalate U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war.”

The fact that the CIA lost track of these weapons should not come as a surprise to anyone. It’s been known for three years that they were falling into the hands of terrorists.

The FBI investigation into the Amman shooting, run by the bureau’s Washington field office, is continuing. But US and Jordanian officials said the investigators think that the weapons a Jordanian police captain, Anwar Abu Zaid, used to gun down two American contractors, two Jordanians, and one South African originally had arrived in Jordan intended for the Syrian rebel-training program.The officials said this finding had come from tracing the serial numbers of the weapons.

Mohammad al-Momani, Jordan’s minister of state for media affairs, said allegations that Jordanian intelligence officers had been involved in any weapons thefts were “absolutely incorrect.”

“Weapons of our security institutions are concretely tracked, with the highest discipline,” he said.

At least they tried to track them.

During the Fast and Furious fiasco, about 2,000 firearms — including AK-47 variants, Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles, .38 caliber revolvers, and FN Five-sevens without any tracking devices — were bought by straw purchasers and allowed to cross the border into Mexico. Most of the guns went to the Sinaloa cartel; others made their way to El Teo and La Familia. Hundreds of Mexican civilians were killed by the guns. In December of 2010, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was shot and killed by illegal immigrants armed with rifles that were traced back to a Phoenix gun store involved in the Fast and Furious operation.

Read the Original Article at PJ Media

Espionage Files: Our Man in Syria?

Russia Is Recruiting The U.S.’s Rebel Allies In Syria

ANTAKYA, Turkey — The rebel commander was nervous. He had changed phone numbers and been difficult to reach before finally agreeing to meet in Antakya, a city near the border with war-torn Syria that has long swarmed with rebels, refugees, and spies. On the road to an out-of-the-way hotel, he told the driver to avoid the main route through town. “It’s better not to drive among all the people,” he said.

It was an open secret that the commander had once received cash and weapons from the CIA, part of a covert U.S. program that backs rebel groups against both ISIS and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

When his battalion was eventually driven from Syria by its jihadi rivals, like a number of U.S.-backed groups, he pleaded with his U.S. handlers for better support, but it wasn’t enough. So he was, he said, “out of the game.”

Now, he said, sitting at a quiet table at the hotel, he had received an offer that could bring him back in — and potentially make him even stronger than before.

He was being recruited, he said, to work for the U.S.’s rival in Syria: Russia.

“They told me, ‘We will support you forever. We won’t leave you on your own like your old friends did,’” he said. “Honestly, I’m still thinking about it.”

The commander said that five years into a war that has killed some 400,000 people and created nearly 5 million refugees, Russia is recruiting current and former U.S. allies to its side. His revelation was confirmed by four people who said they, too, had been approached with offers from Russia and by two Syrian middlemen who said they delivered them.

The moves come as Russia ratchets up its involvement in Syria with troops and airstrikes. Russia says its military campaign is designed to target ISIS — in reality it has targeted all rebels, including some who are still backed by the U.S., while also wreaking havoc on civilians.

Read the Remainder at Buzz Feed News

 

Cold War Files: The Secret US/UK Plan To Bomb Middle East Oil Facilities

Recently uncovered documents shed further light on an ultra-secret plan, devised by the British and American governments, to destroy oil facilities in the Middle East in the event the region was invaded by Soviet troops. The documents, published on Thursday by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, were found in the British government archives and date from 1951 to 1955. They describe a top-secret United States plan known as NSC 26/2, which was approved by the National Security Council in 1949 and authorized by President Harry Truman. The plan aimed to prevent the use of Middle East oil facilities by Soviet troops if the latter were able to successfully invade the region.

American documents from the 1950s describe NSC 26/2 as a “denial policy”, which called for a secret collaboration between Middle East-based American and British oil companies. The goal was to sabotage or completely destroy oil facilities and equipment that were in British and American hands, before the Soviets could take them over. The most sensitive part of the plan was the need to keep it secret from the governments of Middle Eastern countries like Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, even though most of them were allies of the West at the time.

The existence of NSC 26/2 was first revealed in 1996, when the American newspaper Kansas City Star published an extensive article about it, written by Steve Everly. But the recently unearthed British documents shed more light than ever before on the intelligence aspects of the secret plan. Specifically, they reveal the leading role played by the Central Intelligence Agency in implementing the details of the plan in nearly every Middle Eastern country, including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. As part of the plan, the CIA systematically inserted what the National Security Archive describes as “undercover operatives” into posts in American and British oil companies. Their mission was to collect inside information and recruit other oil employees to facilitate the requirements of NSC 26/2. In essence, says the National Security Archive, the CIA created “a paramilitary force ready to execute the denial policy”.

Some of the documents also show that American and British leaders discussed the possibility of bombing —in some cases using nuclear weapons— some oil facilities in countries like Iraq and Iran that were state-owned and thus had no Western connections. In 1953, NSC 26/2 was updated and replaced with NSC 176, which was later renamed NSC 5401. The plan continued to call for the destruction of oil facilities in the Middle East, using “direct action”, if they were close to being seized by Soviet troops.

Read the Original at Intel News

Modern War: How Tactics Used in Iraq and A-Stan Can Make The U.S. More Vulnerable in Future Wars

We need to ask ourselves which lessons are worth retaining versus which do we think we should retain but make us more vulnerable.

Editor’s Note: This article is drawn from a talk given by the author to the Special Operations Medical Association Scientific Assembly in Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 24, 2016.

Question: Do the wars of the last 15 years really prefigure the future? Many people think they do. But, the answer is “Yes” only if all future fighting is done in tribal shatter zones, where we retain air dominance. Meanwhile, additional questions that should haunt everyone in uniform for the remainder of their careers are: What is particular to Afghanistan and Iraq, and what is generalizable? What belongs in the lockbox because it won’t apply elsewhere? Or, which lessons are worth retaining versus which will we think we should retain, but will make us more vulnerable?

Historically, being able to reach, keep, and smash objectives so that your forces can move forward without you having to fear for your rear was critical. At the broadest level, no war was deemed over until one side conceded defeat. This required killing your adversary’s hope and not just his will to continue. When your enemy acceded to the terms you dictated, you had finally succeeded.

The piss poor substitute today, given our inexplicable reluctance to declare war, is to talk about end states instead. Yet, if you stop and think about it, there is no such thing as an end state. Time goes on. More events occur. End states don’t end anything. But, repeat “end state” often enough and the term begins to take on a reality of its own.

In my mind, this is similar to invoking “complexity,” which everyone now accepts as a description of today’s reality. Yet nothing we face today is more complicated than World War II. Instead, the scope of what we think we should consider seems to have expanded, thanks to the speed and volume of information flows. On top of that, we think we have the capacity — or will soon develop the ability and/or the software — to help us think through all likely consequences, even though this will only compound paralysis by analysis.

Meanwhile, who are we currently up against? Jihadis, to whom nothing is particularly complex or nuanced, except how long it might take to undermine us. They aren’t encumbered with our same sensibilities: If you’reof us, good. If not, you’re expendable.

To be clear, I am not advocating that we become more like them. Just the opposite. I want us to tilt war back to a format that advantages us, which means we need a 21st century rethink of Just War theory, and of who deserves noncombatant status among other things. We also need to give serious consideration to the following lessons that have emerged out of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1. More technological innovation is not always a better means of warfare.

But along with this, we need to rethink our conviction that if we just keep on technologically innovating we will retain a sufficient edge. Take improvised explosive devices versus drones. Which have had a more profound psychic effect on people? With precision-strike, the individuals we target change their tactics, techniques, and procedures, and a lot of them get killed. But the pressure is Darwinist and we are helping individuals get smarter faster; drones do not dissuade communities from supporting terrorists. With IEDs, on the other hand, the randomness has been pernicious, forcing us into rolling fortresses and sowing seeds of not-yet-detonated post-traumatic stress disorder.

Meanwhile, in the who-is-out-innovating-whom sphere, we not only overlook innovations in what people are willing to do with and to other human beings at our growing peril, but we ignore the ways in which future adversaries will be able to take greater advantage of our self-inflicted Achilles’ heels. We have quite a few.

Read the Remainder at Task and Purpose