conec posted:

james foley was my cousin i looked up to him like a big bro nd now he`s dead

Now he can look up to himself, lol

postposting posted:

anyone have any theories on why obama always refers to it as ISIL?

because that second S in ISIS actually stands for al-Sham. the US is bloody minded about referring to it as the Levant for ideological reasons

NoFreeWill posted:

there was a good article today in LA times of all places, despite some propoganda, about how the syrian kurds are badasses (they are members of Kurdistan Workers Party and have women soldiers) whereas the peshmerga aren't.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syria-kurds-20140910-story.html

Yeah Channel 4 in the UK are putting on a charm offensive for the PKK also

I hope they (PKK) dont get their hopes up about this being anythign more than a temporary love affair lol

AmericanNazbro posted:

$10 bucks says he's just going to bomb the PKK while claiming to be "trying his darnedest to stop isis" that is until they manage to overthrow assad and destroy hezbollah. Aw shucks, golly gee, those wrascally wahabists keep alluding us, continually driving away in American made humvees and tanks right *before* we arrive. They're just too slippery for us, I tells ya'

Timely reminder about the http://news.yahoo.com/islamic-state-fighters-begin-blend-defeating-them-no-173220134.html

I don't know that the US will literally be bombing PKK, the charm offensive suggests they're actually going to be put to some use in the short term. But they will happily do strategic strikes to (a) help friendlies secure oil supplies and (b) pick off anyone they think might talk about what the fuck has actually been going on there

thirdplace posted:

watch obama start a war

"(american values)will endure long after those who offer only hate and destruction have been vanquished from the earth." ~obama 2014~

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/11088684/Barack-Obama-orders-US-strikes-in-Syria-to-destroy-Isil.html posted:

White House aides aides* said the US had secured a commitment from Saudi Arabia to host training camps for the Syrian rebels. "We now have the commitment from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to be a full partner in this effort," one said.
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, will be in Saudi Arabia on Thursday to discuss cooperation against the jihadists.

* clearly this is a typo. should read 'White House AIDS aides'. because White House has the fail aids.

postposting posted:

but now it seems like they're trying to go whole kahuna and actually say the a fight against isis is also somehow against assad so idk

*grows thirty extra shoulders and shrugs all of them in an undulating wave as all my posts itt drift airily down from the ceiling*

NoFreeWill posted:

there was a good article today in LA times of all places, despite some propoganda, about how the syrian kurds are badasses (they are members of Kurdistan Workers Party and have women soldiers) whereas the peshmerga aren't.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syria-kurds-20140910-story.html

the fun fact is that kurds are actually fractious as heck even though they're trying to get their own country

Impper posted:

what ja[[eme, hjere?

he died. james joley died so tehe cia sins can be foregiven. rip

Petrol posted:

Husband, father - and now a hostage: Brave British aid worker jihadis are threatening to kill

The British father-of-two facing death at the hands of Islamic State fanatics has spent his career as an aid worker helping to protect innocent civilians across the Third World.

For more than two decades, David Haines has travelled with aid agencies through Syria, Libya, the former Yugoslavia and South Sudan.

He has dedicated his life to promoting peace in places of violent conflict and has overseen projects to save civilians from land mines.

The 44-year-old has been described as a hero by his family, who have been inspired by him to travel the world themselves on aid missions.

Mr Haines was born in Holderness in East Yorkshire, before being brought up in Perth, Scotland, by his parents Herbert, 77, and Mary, 79.

He studied at Perth Academy before, at the age of 17, joining the military where he enjoyed a 12-year career.

Between 1999 and 2004, he was at a German NGO helping to revive abandoned villages and to return refugees to their homes after the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

The work led to swift promotion and he left a few years later to become an independent consultant, spreading his experience in dealing with security to various charities and organisations.

He worked as a consultant director for manufacturing company Astraea, based in Croatia, and went to Libya three years ago, working with Handicap International on demining programmes.

A year later, the aid worker travelled to South Sudan, where he was a security manager for Nonviolent Peaceforce, a civilian peacekeeping group.

Wanting more freedom and a shorter-term contract, Mr Haines left to join French non-governmental organisation ACTED, or the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development, which works to support civilians affected by wars, natural disasters and economic and social crises.

He was with the organisation in Syria when he was kidnapped with a colleague in March last year by IS forces near the Atmeh refugee camp, by the Turkish border...

Mr Haines is believed to have been abducted in Syria along with Italian aid worker Federico Motka, 31, who was also doing relief work for ACTED with Syrian civilians affected by conflict.

Mr Motka was released in May. He said he had been tortured and moved six times.

Afterwards, an ACTED spokesman said: ‘Our thoughts go towards all of those, humanitarian workers and journalists among others, still held hostage in Syria and throughout the world.’

His linkedin has more details.

e: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/world/middleeast/islamic-state-says-it-has-executed-david-cawthorne-haines-british-aid-worker.html

Mr. Haines had been working as a security consultant for Acted when he was captured in a refugee camp in Atmeh, in northern Syria. On his LinkedIn profile, he wrote that he had 23 years of “working experience in private, NGO and military environments,” referring to nongovernmental organizations. Before Acted, Mr. Haines worked in South Sudan in 2012 for a Belgium-based organization, Nonviolent Peaceforce, which describes itself as an “unarmed, civilian peacekeeping force” and operates in South Sudan, Myanmar and the Philippines.

He also worked as a country director for Handicap International, a disability charity, in Libya during the Arab Spring.

During his captivity, he tried to hide his military background, a former hostage said, but like many of the others held in a cell in Raqqa, he was repeatedly tortured, one of his former cellmates said.

Or maybe they just googled him lol

Edited by Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia (Sept. 14, 2014 04:08:14)

AmericanNazbro posted:

Is there a way to get around the FT.com paywell other than google cache? I see people continually link to FT and I doubt they, or the people who click the links, actually have paid memberships.

I forgot it was paywalled, I got there via google and it just worked.

FT.com posted:

It was described as one the biggest heists in the history of bank robbery: more than $400m reportedly stolen from Mosul financial institutions by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, known as Isis, as it seized control of Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul last month.

But Iraqi bankers in Mosul and the capital, Baghdad, are saying the robbery never took place and that the cash remains inside the vaults of the city’s banks.

“We have been following up on this question of the stolen money since the beginning of the crisis,” Abdul-Aziz Hassoun, executive director of the Iraqi Private Banks League, told the Financial Times during a recent meeting in Baghdad.
“We speak to the banks there all the time. We have been informed that all are guarded from the outside by their own guards and that nothing has been removed from the premises of any banks, not even a piece of paper.”

Reports that Isis had stolen 500bn Iraqi dinars ($430m) from Mosul financial institutions as the Islamist group and its Sunni insurgent allies seized control of the city more than a month ago raised alarm bells in the west and throughout the region, amid concern over the ambitions and growing capacity of extremist Islamists.

Iraq officials, including one-time CIA asset and lawmaker Ahmed Chalabi, described the alleged bank heist in comments cited by Iraqi and international media.

But Atheel al-Nujaifi, governor of Nineveh province, which includes Mosul, rejects the stories of vast sums of money being taken away by militants.

“Nobody until now has confirmed that story,” he said in a telephone interview from Erbil.

Not a single witness account has emerged of the Isis members making off with any money, and executives and employees from among the 20 private banks and 15 or so government bank branches in Mosul say there is no evidence that militants stole any money from the banks, many of which continue to operate.

Isis itself has never claimed to have stolen the cash, though it has boasted repeatedly of the millions of dollars in US military equipment it looted from Iraqi armed forces who fled the city.

“Our branch in Mosul is working normally,” said Alaa Karam Allah, chief executive of Iraq’s United Bank for Investment, which has 21 branches across the country. “It did not close and work has not stopped for a day. None of our workers have been assaulted, and the building is untouched.”

Mr Hassoun, with decades of experience in Iraqi banking, said it was doubtful so much money was stored in the city anyway. “Iraq’s market is only consumer goods, not much of capital goods,” he said.

Only the central bank branch in Mosul keeps large quantities of money in its vaults, he said, but the “Central Bank of Iraq has given no hint of such an action”.
Reached by telephone in Iraq, Zuhair Ali Akbar, deputy governor of Iraq’s central bank, twice refused to confirm or deny whether the money had been stolen. The bank itself has issued no public statements about any theft of such a large sum.

But other officials in touch with the central bank said the money in Mosul remains untouched. “As for the central bank in Mosul, it was never robbed,” said Talal Ibrahim, executive director of the private Union Bank of Iraq, citing a contact who works at the Mosul branch of the central bank. “Not a single cent had been stolen from the bank. Isis never put a hand on the money.”

Mr Ibrahim said the Mosul branch of his office had remained open throughout the crisis. “Operations are going on with utmost normality; deposit and withdrawal actions have never stopped,” he said. “Currency exchange operations are done according to international rates and sometimes even cheaper.”

Several Mosul residents and bank officials said government-operated banks, such as Rafidain and Rasheed, which normally distribute the salaries of public-sector employees in Mosul, have been closed. Workers are directed to branches outside the city to collect their earnings.

An employee of the Mosul Bank for Development and Investment said offices there had been closed for weeks. “There are no workers here,” he said in a telephone interview from Mosul. “The bank has been closed for weeks now. But there was no storming and no looting.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/islamic-state-fighters-are-drawing-on-oil-assets-for-funding-and-fuel/2014/09/15/a2927d02-39bd-11e4-8601-97ba88884ffd_story.html posted:

Oil has helped fund and fuel the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, with small amounts of production coming from fields in northern Iraq and being smuggled across the borders in tanker trucks. A tiny drop in the sea of petroleum globally, the oil tapped by the Islamic State has given it a revenue source most extremist groups lack.

But the oil installations and tanker trucks could offer targets for the U.S.-led coalition that hopes to cripple the self-proclaimed caliphate. And the poor quality of crude oil in northern Iraqi fields and the steep cost of smuggling probably limited earnings to $1 million a day over the summer, according to oil industry sources.

Recent counteroffensives, international sanctions and crackdowns on smuggling might have reduced that figure to as little as $250,000 a day, according to Ben Lando, editor-in-chief of the Iraq Oil Report. So far, the Pentagon says, U.S. air strikes have not targeted any oil installations or transportation.

The Islamic State is producing between 25,000 and 40,000 barrels a day from Syria and Iraq, according to estimates by industry analysts and trading companies familiar with the region. Most of that is being smuggled through Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria or through Kurdish territory to Turkey on trucks that carry nearly 2,000 barrels each. Payoffs at border checkpoints may be easing passage, oil analysts say.

Since Kurdish oil that is trucked to Turkish ports usually sells for about $50 to $55 a barrel, the Islamic State region is probably charging smugglers no more than $40 a barrel to compensate for the danger and illegality of selling Islamic State oil, said an industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve her relationships. Other industry analysts said the Islamic State price could be even lower.

e: flashback!!

http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/310720142 posted:

State Department: US Has no Ban on Oil Sales from Any Part of Iraq
By RUDAW 1/8/2014

WASHINGTON DC—Deputy Spokesperson for the US State Department, Marie Harf, said on Thursday that the United States doesn’t have a ban on oil sales from any part of Iraq and that Iraqis have to come to an agreement on energy issues to avoid “any legal ramifications”.

“There is no US ban on the transfer or sale of oil originated from any part of Iraq,” Harf told Namo Abdulla, Rudaw’s Washington correspondent.

“Our policy on this issue has been clear,” Harf added. “Iraq’s energy resources belong to all of the Iraqi people. These questions should be resolved in a manner consistent with the Iraqi constitution.”

These comments resonated with a statement by federal magistrate Nancy K. Johnson who said on Wednesday that the dispute over a ship carrying Kurdish oil and currently offshore Texas should be resolved in Iraq between the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan autonomous region.

On Monday, the judge issued an order for US Marshals to seize the one million barrels of crude from the United Kalavrvta, but later decided that was not enforceable.

In response to another journalist who said if the Kurdish oil doesn’t go through the central government it would be considered illegal, Harf said, “This is not a legal issue, it is a policy issue.”

“The US has told different parties in Iraq that if they attempt to do things that we have seen recently, there could be legal ramifications,” she added.

Edited by Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia (Sept. 16, 2014 00:05:08)