Death to ISIS: Crushing a stone age ideology
The barbarians who call themselves the Islamic State subscribe to a stone-age ideology in which women are chattel and infidels are executed. But it turns out they’ve built themselves a sophisticated 21st century arsenal that turns their brutal Jihadism exponentially more lethal.
So concludes a new report by Conflict Armament Research, a London-based nonprofit group. Inspectors from the organization embedded with Iraqi forces discovered a “robust and reliable” supply chain delivering weaponry to the radical Islamists, including a network of factories, warehouses and workshops east of Mosul.
“The degree of organization, quality control and inventory management indicates a complex, centrally controlled industrial production system,” they write. This gives ISIS the “capacity to produce weapons on a massive scale.”
Potentially making matters worse: Last week, ISIS reclaimed the ancient city of Palmyra — less than a year after Syrian government forces took it back from them.
Mourn the imprisonment of Palmyra’s people and the destruction of its beautiful religious and historical monuments, some of which date back to the 19th century B.C.
But fear the fact that in the same city, the terrorists have apparently seized a massive cache of armor and ammo, including three Russian surface-to-air missile launchers.
The good guys aren’t sitting idly by. Iraqi troops, with U.S. help, pushed ISIS militants back around Mosul, which is their last major stronghold in that country — potentially interrupting supply lines crucial to the infrastructure identified in the experts’ report.
And coalition airstrikes near Palmyra battered ISIS from the air, blasting tanks and artillery.
U.S. officials last week boasted that, since it got underway in 2014, the coalition’s campaign — 17,000 air strikes and counting — has killed 50,000 of the Jihadists, leaving somewhere south of 15,000 on the ground in the two countries.
But even 15,000 is a large enough contingent of maniacs to wreak havoc, especially since they’re in possession of some deadly hardware.
President-elect Donald Trump, flanked by a cadre of experienced and tough-talking generals, has promised to execute a genius, as-yet-unknown strategy to crush the group.
We wait.
The barbarians who call themselves the Islamic State subscribe to a stone-age ideology in which women are chattel and infidels are executed. But it turns out they’ve built themselves a sophisticated 21st century arsenal that turns their brutal Jihadism exponentially more lethal.
So concludes a new report by Conflict Armament Research, a London-based nonprofit group. Inspectors from the organization embedded with Iraqi forces discovered a “robust and reliable” supply chain delivering weaponry to the radical Islamists, including a network of factories, warehouses and workshops east of Mosul.
“The degree of organization, quality control and inventory management indicates a complex, centrally controlled industrial production system,” they write. This gives ISIS the “capacity to produce weapons on a massive scale.”
Potentially making matters worse: Last week, ISIS reclaimed the ancient city of Palmyra — less than a year after Syrian government forces took it back from them.
Mourn the imprisonment of Palmyra’s people and the destruction of its beautiful religious and historical monuments, some of which date back to the 19th century B.C.
But fear the fact that in the same city, the terrorists have apparently seized a massive cache of armor and ammo, including three Russian surface-to-air missile launchers.
The good guys aren’t sitting idly by. Iraqi troops, with U.S. help, pushed ISIS militants back around Mosul, which is their last major stronghold in that country — potentially interrupting supply lines crucial to the infrastructure identified in the experts’ report.
And coalition airstrikes near Palmyra battered ISIS from the air, blasting tanks and artillery.
U.S. officials last week boasted that, since it got underway in 2014, the coalition’s campaign — 17,000 air strikes and counting — has killed 50,000 of the Jihadists, leaving somewhere south of 15,000 on the ground in the two countries.
But even 15,000 is a large enough contingent of maniacs to wreak havoc, especially since they’re in possession of some deadly hardware.
President-elect Donald Trump, flanked by a cadre of experienced and tough-talking generals, has promised to execute a genius, as-yet-unknown strategy to crush the group.
We wait.
