6
0

ISIS on Last Legs, thanks Trump


 invite response                
2017 Nov 12, 6:18pm   5,115 views  25 comments

by MisdemeanorRebel   ➕follow (12)   💰tip   ignore  

On In January of 2014, this statement was made by Barak Obama about the AQ Affiliates (that soon merged into ISIS) in Iraq:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/27/going-the-distance-david-remnick
Falluja was the first ISIL/ISIS conquest of a city, in January 2014. Obama flippantly dismisses Falluja as a "Profoundly Conservative Sunni City." in the above piece.

In June, ISIL had completed a merger with several Al Qaeda affiliates, and then broke with the Al Qaeda organization.

Here is ISIS, 2014-2015:


Like lightening, ISIS conquered Mosul and Ramadi, prompting a huge crisis in Iraq. Then they followed up with the seizure of Palmyra, and further encircled Aleppo.

An article from BI captures the sense of "Shock and Awe" at the rapid expansion of the "JV Team" in May 2015.
http://www.businessinsider.com/isis-gains-in-syira-and-iraq-2015-5
Russia began intervening on behalf of Syrian Government forces in the Fall of 2015.

Aleppo and Palmyra were finally liberated in late 2016, the key combats during and after the Elections, much to the chagrin of the Neoliberals and their Media Machine (see posts to follow, I just found more evidence that Samantha Power, Sunstein's wife, is a total Cunt, btw).

Mosul was declared liberated in July of 2017 by the Iraqi Government.

Here is ISIS today, in late 2017:


Thanks to the magic powers drawn by the Orb of Cofeve:


... and letting Arab Special Forces, Kurds, and Russians, along with US air support and advisers, work their magic without interference from Neoliberals and Political Islam symps.

#Politics #ISIS

The defeats of ISIS under Trump's watch is a major accomplishment; Obama reacted very late to the crisis and indeed apologizes for ISIS' early gains in 2014-2015.

Comments 1 - 25 of 25        Search these comments

1   Goran_K   2017 Nov 12, 6:28pm  

It helps that Obama isn’t able to give the “good terrorist” weapons anymore.
2   anonymous   2017 Nov 12, 7:13pm  

Care to explain who actually defeated the main forces of ISIS? Thought not. To single out Trump for praise is just ridiculous and shows a glaring lack of awareness (or more likely deliberate misrepresentation ) of what actually happened.
3   anonymous   2017 Nov 12, 7:21pm  

How about starting by explaining the radical shifts in policy that Trump implemented back in May? You know, those things that made all the difference to the campaign as distinct from the Iraqi army finally being sufficiently combat ready to drive ISiS out of Mosul (for example).
4   Strategist   2017 Nov 12, 7:34pm  

Goran_K says
It helps that Obama isn’t able to give the “good terrorist” weapons anymore.


There are Good terrorists, Bad terrorists, and Ugly terrorists. Actually, they are all UGLY terrorists. Have you seen their faces?
As long as they are willing to kill each other, let's give them lots of weapons.
5   Strategist   2017 Nov 12, 7:36pm  

anon_6331c says
Care to explain who actually defeated the main forces of ISIS? Thought not.


It wasn't Obama, was it?
6   Goran_K   2017 Nov 12, 7:36pm  

Strategist says
Goran_K says
It helps that Obama isn’t able to give the “good terrorist” weapons anymore.


There are Good terrorists, Bad terrorists, and Ugly terrorists. Actually, they are all UGLY terrorists. Have you seen their faces?
As long as they are willing to kill each other, let's give them lots of weapons.


Until they use those weapons against us and our own allies.
7   bob2356   2017 Nov 12, 10:47pm  

TwoScoopsMcGee says
Aleppo and Palmyra were finally liberated in late 2016, the key combats during and after the Elections,


What trump policies in late 2016 lead to this liberation?
9   Y   2017 Nov 24, 7:55pm  

bob2356 says
What trump policies in late 2016 lead to this liberation?
10   bob2356   2017 Nov 24, 8:03pm  

BlueSardine says
bob2356 says
What trump policies in late 2016 lead to this liberation?


So you have no answer to the question.
11   Strategist   2017 Nov 24, 8:36pm  

BlueSardine says
bob2356 says
What trump policies in late 2016 lead to this liberation?


I didn't know Trump was President then.
12   Shaman   2017 Nov 25, 5:28am  

Strategist says
I didn't know Trump was President then.


Right, the lame duck organizer in Chief was still bitterly clinging to the office, desperately signing thousands of executive orders that Trump was going to cancel in a couple of months. Oh and trying to provoke Russia into WWIII so he could stay on as a wartime POTUS. The last few months of Obama’s would have been abjectly pathetic if they weren’t so unnerving with the radical jihadist actions he was taking to undermine the country as much as possible before getting the boot.
13   bob2356   2017 Nov 25, 6:55am  

Strategist says
BlueSardine says
bob2356 says
What trump policies in late 2016 lead to this liberation?


I didn't know Trump was President then.


That's when ISIS started being rolled back big time. The battle of mosul started in sept 2016. Of the 60k isis fighters killed in the war against isis 50k were killed before trump took office Since two scoops says it's thanks to trump I want to know what trump did in 2016 for this to happen. It's yet one more simple question that will never be answered by yet one more patnet fanatical ideologue.

Fumy how two scoops has such a convenient memory. Clinton pushed hard in 2010-12 for maintaining a substantial presence in Iraq specifically to prevent a resurgence of AQI. The right wing echo chamber went ballistic about that. Despite Clintons push Maliki refused to accept the troops and the republican congress refused to fund them insisting on following bush's withdrawal plan. So in two scoops pink sky world If the troops went in obama/clinton would be globalist war mongers, if they didn't they were the people responsible for the rise ISIS. Nice. "logic".
14   Strategist   2017 Nov 25, 8:16am  

bob2356 says
Strategist says
BlueSardine says
bob2356 says
What trump policies in late 2016 lead to this liberation?


I didn't know Trump was President then.


That's when ISIS started being rolled back big time. The battle of mosul started in sept 2016. Of the 60k isis fighters killed in the war against isis 50k were killed before trump took office Since two scoops says it's thanks to trump I want to know what trump did in 2016 for this to happen. It's yet one more simple question that will never be answered by yet one more patnet fanatical ideologue.


It was the Russians who started going after ISIS. Obama was forced to follow like a lap dog. Very pathetic on Obama's part to just allow ISIS to rise, and do nothing while they engaged in mass genocide, rape and slavery.
I will never forgive Obama.
15   anonymous   2017 Nov 25, 9:43am  

Strategist says
It was the Russians who started going after ISIS. Obama was forced to follow like a lap dog. Very pathetic on Obama's part to just allow ISIS to rise, and do nothing while they engaged in mass genocide, rape and slavery.
I will never forgive Obama.


The russians went after all the groups in Syria opposing al-Assad at his request.ISIS was just one of the groups. Obama stayed out of Iraq because the leader of Iraq wanted him to stay out and congress opposed him going back in. Silly assertion.
16   bob2356   2017 Nov 25, 9:50am  

Strategist says

It was the Russians who started going after ISIS. Obama was forced to follow like a lap dog. Very pathetic on Obama's part to just allow ISIS to rise, and do nothing while they engaged in mass genocide, rape and slavery.


ISIS lost over 50% of it's territory between 2014 and trump being electied. Even more before he took office. That's certainly doing nothing.

Still waiting for someone to tell me what trump did that ISIS was defeated thanks to trump? Most of ISIS fighters were killed before trump took office. Mosul was mostly recaputred when trump took office. Almost all of the ISIS controlled Iraq cities were recaptured before trump took office. Lots of running and hiding going on.
17   Strategist   2017 Nov 25, 9:59am  

bob2356 says
Strategist says

It was the Russians who started going after ISIS. Obama was forced to follow like a lap dog. Very pathetic on Obama's part to just allow ISIS to rise, and do nothing while they engaged in mass genocide, rape and slavery.


ISIS lost over 50% of it's territory between 2014 and trump being electied. Even more before he took office. That's certainly doing nothing.

Like I said, no thanks to Obama.

bob2356 says
Still waiting for someone to tell me what trump did that ISIS was defeated thanks to trump? Most of ISIS fighters were killed before trump took office. Mosul was mostly recaputred when trump took office. Almost all of the ISIS controlled Iraq cities were recaptured before trump took office. Lots of running and hiding going on.

Trump accelerated the defeat of ISIS by increasing the bombings. Even more important, unlike pussy Obama he will quickly take action against new Islamist terrorist groups that we all know will emerge.
Why don't we just call it the way it is....A duck is a duck, and a pussy is Obama.
18   anonymous   2017 Nov 25, 10:14am  

19   MisdemeanorRebel   2017 Nov 25, 11:15am  

bob2356 says
ISIS lost over 50% of it's territory between 2014 and trump being electied. Even more before he took office. That's certainly doing nothing.


How big was ISIS when Obama proclaimed it the "JV Team"?

You wanna give him credit for reducing it, you gotta give him the responsibility for letting it grow as big as it did.

The Saudi Reforms are 100% Trump and Tillerson. State Department insiders were MOCKING Trump's Middle East policy that is producing results never before seen.
20   Strategist   2017 Nov 25, 3:44pm  

Sniper says
Didn't Pelosi say "We have to grow ISIS before we can start reducing ISIS"?


You are supposed to grow a PENIS before you reduce it. Pelosi does not know the difference between a penis and ISIS.
21   MisdemeanorRebel   2017 Nov 25, 3:45pm  

2014 was the year ISIS took off. It started retreating after peaking in mid- 2015, when the Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi Shi'a got involved in Syria and to a smaller extent in Iraq. When King Salman came to the throne and Prince Bandar "Bush" was removed from the Saudi Intel Ministry.

All of the snotty State, PR, and Foreign Relations assholes, like Nuland and Psaki, were the ones in charge when ISIS flourished and bombed the Syrian Army to support their "Moderate Rebels" (aka Al Qaeda Affiliates, Wahabi Fundies backed by the Gulf States before Salman became King).

This summer Moqtada Al-Sadr visited Saudi Arabia, and then the UAE, and the WaPo and Al-Jazeera were all "WTF?!"

Tillerson, T-Rex, good show.

David Ignatius, totally in the pocket of the Saudi Old Guard.
22   MrMagic   2017 Nov 25, 6:45pm  

anonymous says
One day we better wise up and learn the "play book" because they are not playing by our rules or our playbook.


Really??

Who actually thinks they are playing by our playbook? Mother Jones or Slate?
23   Strategist   2017 Nov 25, 7:41pm  

anonymous says
ISIS/ISIL whatever is not on there last legs by a long shot.

Baghdadi has been "killed" more times than Bin Laden and each time this country calls it "Mission Accomplished", we find out it isn't.

One day we better wise up and learn the "play book" because they are not playing by our rules or our playbook.


We all know the battle with ISIS is not over, because the battle with Islam is not over. ISIS is just another name for Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the hundreds of names they go by. The reality is, we are at war with Islam, and we will be at war with Islam for a long time to come.
24   bob2356   2017 Nov 25, 9:35pm  

Strategist says

Like I said, no thanks to Obama.


Isis is 3/4 defeated before trump takes office and it's no thanks to obama. Sure right. You and two scoops just keep on posting nonsense.
25   anonymous   2019 Feb 14, 1:31am  

President Trump says that in the coming week the US and its allies will announce that they have captured all of the land previously controlled by Isis. He claims that US-led forces “have liberated virtually all of the territory previously held by Isis in Syria and Iraq … we will have 100 per cent of the caliphate.“

The prediction has sparked a sterile and misleading debate about whether or not Isis is finally defeated, something which will remain unproven since the movement is unlikely to run up a white flag and sign terms of surrender. The discussion has – like all debates about foreign policy in the US – very little to do with the real situation on the ground in Syria and Iraq and everything to do with the forces at play in Washington politics.

In discussing the demise or survival of Isis, pundits make the same glaring omission. They ignore the fact that by far the largest stronghold in Syria held by an al-Qaeda type group is not the few shattered villages for which Isis has been battling in the east of the country. Much more important is the jihadi enclave in and around Idlib province in north-west Syria which is held by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Liberation of Levant Organisation), a powerful breakaway faction from Isis which founded the group under the name of Jabhat al-Nusra in 2011 and with whom it shares the same fanatical beliefs and military tactics. Its leaders wear suicide vests studded with metal balls just like their Isis equivalents.

It is not that the US has any doubts about what HTS is – since last year, a foreign terrorist organisation despite a name change. Nathan A Sales, the State Department’s coordinator of counterterrorism, noted that “today’s designation serves notice that the United States is not fooled by this al-Qaeda affiliate’s attempt to rebrand itself.”

Over the past year HTS has expanded its control to almost all of the Idlib enclave, which the UN estimates to have a population of three million, half of whom are refugees, and can put at least 50,000 fighters into the field. The zone is surrounded on three sides by the Syrian Army backed by the Russians and on the fourth side it shares a common border with Turkey whose local proxies it has crushed. Fighting between Assad government forces and the armed opposition in Idlib has largely died away under the terms of a shaky ceasefire agreed and enforced by Moscow and Ankara.

Blindness in the west to this embattled al-Qaeda-run mini-state, which has a population the same size as Wales and a fighting force not much smaller than the British army, is explained by the fact that such an admission would reveal that the US and its allies are weak players in Syria and there is more than one jihadi group in the country. A recurrent and disastrous theme of western involvement in the war in Syria is for governments and media to focus only on part of the multilayered crisis in which they are engaged.

Pretending that Isis is anything close to the potent threat it used to be is part of the struggle between Trump and the foreign policy and security establishment in Washington. They represent what President Obama derided as “the Washington playbook” which he denounced as always looking to military solutions and always overplaying its hand in fighting wars that never end.

This skewed vision of the Syrian conflict – with its over-emphasis on whether or not the death certificate of the caliphate should be formally signed – diverts attention from a more important question. In the short term, it is true that can Isis carry out guerrilla and terrorist attacks, but for all practical purposes Trump is right in saying that it has been decisively defeated. The caliphate that once ruled a de facto state the size of Great Britain with a population of eight million is gone.

A more important question to ask now is how far the whole al-Qaeda idea and mode of operating have become obsolete and discredited. Not so long ago, this militarised cult of extreme fanaticism with core beliefs derived from the Wahhabi version of Islam was extraordinarily successful. Suicide bombing on an industrial scale enabled it to turn untrained but committed believers into a devastating military weapon.

Suicide attacks as an expression of Islamic faith produced 9/11, which was the most successful terrorist attack in history: the overwhelming impact of the destruction of the Twin Towers provoked the US to jump into a trap of its own making by launching wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda, which had scarcely existed as an international organisation before 9/11, instantly took advantage of this overreaction. The US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003 enabled the local al-Qaeda franchise to became the core of the armed resistance of the Sunni Arabs against their enemies at home and abroad.

Can these conditions be recreated in Idlib or in the deserts of western Iraq, eastern Syria or wherever else al-Qaeda type groups have their hideouts from Pakistan to Nigeria and Chechnya to Somalia? A ferociously disciplined group with experienced military leaders will always have an influence out of proportion to its size in chaotic war-time conditions.

But al-Qaeda and its clones should not be allowed to remain a bugbear, a cause of obsessive fear because of its past successes in staging 9/11, dominating the armed opposition in Iraq in 2004-09, and unexpectedly resurrecting itself in Syria and Iraq after 2011.

It once was able to offer miraculous victories to its followers but for the past few years it has been able to offer them nothing but defeat and martyrdom for a cause that has been failing demonstrably.

The al-Qaeda formula worked because it caught its enemies by surprise and this will not happen again. Early successes after 2003 required a degree of covert assistance or tolerance from Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, all of whom imagined at different moments that they could channel or manipulate the jihadis into acting in their own interest.

Al-Qaeda operated through fear and fanaticism but it also required a constituency among the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and Syria which no longer exists; and for which the Sunni have paid a terrible price in the form of lost wars and devastated cities from east Aleppo to Raqqa and Mosul.

Al-Qaeda no longer works as a winning formula, but this does not mean that its destructive capacity is exhausted. Its track record of savagery was such that its limited attacks can still provoke almost unlimited terror among potential victims. I was in Baghdad last year when Isis kidnapped and killed some half dozen police on the main road north to Kirkuk, provoking a wave of fear out of proportion to what had happened among my friends who started to recall past massacres by Isis.

Casual remarks by Trump such as saying that the US might keep troops in Iraq in future to watch Iran will continue to keep the pot boiling which is to the advantage of al-Qaeda. But the all-conquering warrior cult whose columns of fanatical fighters were wining Napoleonic victories in 2014-15 has gone for good and cannot be recreated.

http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/trump-says-isis-is-defeated-he-is-ignoring-the-bigger-picture/

NOTE: For the MAGA crowd please consult your world atlas for the area known as Southeast Asia - pick any country - this is where ISIS/ISIL
has relocated for the time being, acutally they are really well established and growing across the region and will bring new nation building adventures to the adventuresome as well as a whole lot of pain and suffering in so many different ways to so many places the average American can't find on a map.

But if the Dotard says they're defeated - is must be so. Let's not let reality could the bullshit.....er Alternate Facts

Please register to comment:

api   best comments   contact   latest images   memes   one year ago   random   suggestions