generalspeaking

Slaughtering Defiant Activists and Beauty Queens in Iraq

"I was threatened with murder. My life was in danger. The killing of this many people scared me."
"I wasn't comfortable living there [Iraq] any more and that is why I left Iraq and came to Jordan."
Shimaa Qasim Abdulrahman, former Miss Iraq beauty queen

"These harrowing crimes are worrying us.":
"There are groups that want to terrify society through the killing of popular women and activists ... and to tell other women to abandon their work and stay at home."
Hana Adwar, Iraqi human rights activist

"A security team was formed to arrest those involved in Fares' murder."
"[Justice will prevail to] bring perpetrators of Fares' murder to justice to be tried in front of the Iraqi people."
Iraqi Interior Minister Qasim al-Araji

"I'm not doing anything in the dark like many others; everything I do is in the broad daylight."
"I'm not afraid of the one who denies the existence of God, but I'm really afraid of the one who kills and chops off heads to prove the existence of God."
Tara Fares, Iraqi beauty queen, social media star

Tara Fares was 22 when she was shot dead on September 27 in Baghdad while driving her Porsche, targeted by an assassin who shot her three times, fatally. Suad al-Ali a woman's rights activist in Basra was gunned down walking to her car, several weeks before Tara Fares was murdered. And then there was Dr. Rafeef al-Yassiri, a plastic surgeon whom authorities stated died from a drug overdose, not poisoned. She operated a medical centre offering cosmetic surgery and treatment for war victims along with those suffering from birth defects.

She had posted photographs of herself wearing makeup and high-fashion clothing. She had over a million followers on Instagram. Everything she did and stood for, in other words, offensive to the Iraqi culture of Islam. Shimaa Qasim Abdulrahman's flight for safety to Jordan seems a questionable choice. Jordan is infused with the presence of Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood is well established in Jordan, why would she think she would be safe there, when the same ethos that deems such women as she an insult to Islam?

The murder of Iraqi women who distinguish themselves through their clear and unequivocal rejection of stultifying, suffocating, insulting restraints on their human rights and freedom to chose their own way in life says much about Islam. The reality is that in Islam women have no rights, no freedoms, no choices they can make of their own free will. For in Islam there is no free will just as human rights is an unknown and unacknowledged concept; surrender to Islam means to be a slave to an inhuman and inhumane set of rules dictating every moment of one's life.

In Islam, there are three low categories of humans; slaves, non-believers and women, in that sequence of order. Women are men's playthings, not to be trusted, believed or given free reign, in recognition of their corrupt nature. They have their uses; above all, to bear the next generation, and to make men comfortable, seeing to their domestic duties. They are proscribed from appearing in public other than under a voluminous garment covering all but their eyes. Their lives are lived under the 'protection' of men; fathers, husbands, sons, uncles, any of whom has the right to end their women's lives.

Iraqis viewed the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant jihadis with awe and revulsion; awe at their indomitable power of instilling terror in their focus on fanatic dominating conflict, and revulsion at the chosen methods of killing their opponents, even though under Sharia law they are honoured as jihadists responding to the Koran's injunction to the faithful to engage in jihad. Their methods of slaughter were no more than Islamist states practise in capital punishment: public beheading, crucifixion....

Ironically, Saddam Hussein's Baathist Islam steeped in a brand of Marxism, oversaw a more liberalized society whose laws seemed almost progressive for women and the family, even while it practised searing styles of conflict and eradication of ethnic and sectarian groups it viewed as inimical to its governing plans. With the removal of Saddam Hussein and his restraining effect on Islamofascism, powerful religious groups emerged, engaged in extremism. Islamic State may be dying, but not the Medieval pathology of pure Islam that gave birth to it.

The dead Fares won a beauty pageant, became a darling of social media, posting photographs of herself in tight jeans, cleavage, and tattoos, elaborately made up to present herself as the idealized woman of free agency. She had 2.8 million Instagram followers, over 120,000 followers on a YouTube channel. Her popularity and defiance marked her for death.

An Iraqi woman at the grave of slain model and Instagram starlet Tara Fares in the central holy shrine city of Najaf on Oct. 2, 2018. Haidar Hamdani/AFP/Getty Images

Labels: Activism, Assassins, Iraq, Terror, Women

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, October 11, 2018

Escaping The Slaughter

"It was totally different from what they said jihad would be like."
"It's not a revolution or jihad. It's a slaughter."
Ghaith, escaped Islamic State recruit

"Not everyone who returns is a budding criminal. Not everyone is going to kill -- far from it. But it's probable that there is a small fringe that is capable of just about anything."
Marc Trebidic, anti-terror judge, France

english.alarabiya.net ISIS recruits at record pace in Syria

Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham battles a multi-faceted war. It fights against Shiite Muslims whom Sunni Muslims consider are not true Muslims since the ancient schism occurred when Shiites honoured the caliph succession of Mohammad's direct descendants, and Sunnis believed that anyone with the stature and influence required could take his place as Mohammad's successor. But then Islamic State also does battle with Sunni Muslims who are not as fanatical about the purity of Islam as they are.

Of course they also are in conflict with Western influence and Western interference in their plans of conquest. But they are also waging a battle of terrorism against the people whose geography they occupy; not only the minority ethnic and religious groups whom they prey upon, enslaving them and slaughtering them and raping their women, but the Sunni Muslim citizens of the towns and cities they have conquered in Syria and Iraq.

Many of whom feel great moral discomfort at being forced to live under the rule of strict Sharia enforced by people lacking human conscience that stops most people from committing heinous crimes as though they are obligated by a higher power to indulge in bloodthirsty carnage to advance that power's agenda of universal conquest.

So people living in the towns and cities are given warning that they must obey the edicts of Islamic State, and that should they come afoul of those expectations they can expect the same treatment that ISIS metes out to foreign aid workers, journalists and military personnel who are beheaded, crucified, immolated. Living in fear and foreboding lest they draw the attention of ISIS fighters, they cower and obey.

And then there are those who have joined the Islamic State ranks as mujahideen from across the Muslim geographic spectrum, familiar with the conflicts emanating from tribal enmities and unlikely to shrink away in horror at gruesome slaughter. Among them as well are jihadists who have embraced the opportunity to further the work of the faithful in Islam who have lived in Europe and North America believing as eager recruits that they are fulfilling their obligation to Islam by joining jihad.

When they discover that the conflict they have joined appears not to reflect their ideas of Islam as a holy religion of peace and comfort, one that proffers compassion to people in need, and is instead an avenging campaign of unrelenting pillage, rape and murder, a campaign whose leaders fully expect those recruits to become fully involved to prove their total surrender to Islam, they are hampered by conscience.

And this is the final group which Islamic State must exert the power of terror over, to constrain them from abandoning that cause, and returning to the countries from which they emanated. The austere living conditions and unending violence that reflects the Islamic State agenda becomes discomfiting to some tender souls disappointed in jihad, whom Islamic State takes steps to stop from departing.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims that Islamic State has killed 120 of its own members in the last six months, most representing foreign-derived fighters planning to return home. Perhaps not fully realizing that even if they manage to evade detection and leave before it becomes apparent that they have become traitors to ISIS, they may be unable to return, viewed as terrorist security risks in the places where they were born and lived.

The U.S.-led allied bombing campaign that has degraded the ISIS advance, once felt to be implacably inexorable in its juggernaut advance, has also struck fear into raw recruits. They face an immediate dilemma in wanting to return to Europe, since ISIS retains their passports and identity documents upon enlisting.

"They took all my documents and asked me if I wanted to be a fighter or a suicide bomber", said Abdul-Rahman from his prison cell in Baghdad. He had surrendered to Iraqi forces after making the choice to fight for ISIS. Another recruit from Tunisia, Ali had successfully completed four courier trips between Syria and Tunisia, and finally never returned to Syria after transporting money, propaganda videos and news.

"I feel like I was a terrorist, I was shocked by what I did", Ali confessed. "Go have a drink. Don't pray. It's not Islam. Don't give your life up for nothing", is his advice for those attracted to ISIS.

Labels: Iraq, Islamic State, Jihad, Syria, Terror

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, February 07, 2015

The Lonely Courage of Syria's Kurds

"If necessary, all our female and male fighters will become Arin. The attacks by mercenaries of Daesh against Kobani will not be allowed to achieve their goals."
YPG statement

Thousands of desperate refugees have fled once again across the border from Syria into Turkey since the launch by ISIS of its offensive with tanks and heavy artillery defended by the lightly armed Kurds determined to save Kobani. On Monday the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham jihadis raised their black flag temporarily over a building in Kobani and raised another on a hill near Kobani as they fired the heaviest yet barrage of artillery fire.


ISIS jihadis steadily advanced across fields in formation, well equipped wearing camouflage flak vests. Some of them have posted photographs on Internet sites showing them holding aloft the severed heads of female Kurdish fighters. Marching boldly in formation they would represent a ripe target for U.S. or allied planes, but the misfortune of the Kurds is that they fight without the intervention of foreign military intervention to save Kobani.

That vaunted European, American and Arab bombing campaign whose aim is to halt Islamic State advance has done little to achieve that aim. The Turkish army is just across the border, able to witness the ISIS advance, but though President Erdogan states his opinion that air strikes will not accomplish anything, that troops are required on the ground, he has made no move to deploy Turkish troops to aid the Kurds.

"They are using tanks, artillery and all kinds of weapons they captured in Iraq and Syria", Nasser Haj Mansour, a defence official in the Kurdish region of Syria said. Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in Britain said that on Sunday an attack against ISIS was led by a female Kurdish fighter who blew herself up, in the process killing ten terrorists. The suicide attacker was identified by the People's Protection Units as Deilar Kan Khamis.

A member of a YPG branch, the Women's Protection Units, the force is comprised of ten thousand female fighters playing a major role in the conflict against ISIS. Kurdish fighters had withdrawn from a position on the strategic hill of Mashta Nour close by Kobani, and Ms. Khanis had remained behind. As the ISIS jihadis moved in she struck at them with gunfire and grenades and eventually blew herself up allowing the Kurds to recapture the position.

Two ISIS "fighting positions" south of Kobani were said to have been destroyed by U.S. Central Command carrying out three air strikes on Sunday.  But it is the Kurds who are carrying the full brunt of countering and preventing a well-armed Islamist offensive from their goal. "Air strikes in Syria primarily are focused on choking off the ISIL ability to conduct operations in Iraq", stated Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.

Kurdish fighters, however, plead for more support as the air strikes on ISIS were conducted in Raqqa and Deir el-Zour provinces. Cut off from supply lines and surrounded by ISIS jihadis on three sides, the Kurds are in a desperate state. On the fourth side lies the Turkish border, guarded by Turkish forces and they're focused on preventing Turkish and Syrian Kurds from joining the fight against the Islamic State.

Although Turkish authorities have insisted they plan to assist in the fight against ISIS, it's abundantly clear that Turkey is more concerned with the potential of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region on the Syrian side of the border infiltrating Turkey and encouraging Turkish Kurds to resume their war for independence. Sacrificing the Syrian Kurds to the Islamic State is no matter of concern to Turkey.

Labels: Conflict, Islamic State, Kurds, Syria, Terror

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Obama said only that the strategy under preparation won’t be ready before next month.

debkafile’s counter-terrorism sources note that until then, and until Kerry’s coalition of nations comes together and decides what to do, Al Qaeda’s IS’s campaign of bloody atrocities and conquests will remain unchecked. And so will the spread of what the British Prime Minister David Cameron called, in a special news conference Friday, “the poisonous ideology of Islamist extremism.”

Cameron warned that, while there was much talk about the threat to Europe of returning home-grown Islamists, “IS is already here.” The return of at least 500 people from fighting in Syria and Iraq "for Islamic State extremists attempting to establish a caliphate” represented a "greater and deeper threat to our security than we have known before.”

New laws, said the British premier, would make it easier to take passports away from people traveling abroad to join the conflict.

Announcing the elevation of the UK terror threat from “substantial” to “severe,” Cameron cited the example of the British Islamist who took part in the beheading of the American journalist James Foley on Aug. 18.

He also confirmed that Al Qaeda’s Islamic State perpetrated the May 24 attack on the Jewish Museum of Brussels, in which the Israeli couple, Emanuel and Miriam Riva, was murdered  - as further evidence that Islamist terror was already loose on the streets of Europe.

He was the first prominent world leader to assign the Brussels attack to Al Qaeda, which Israeli officials have so far avoided doing.

The "severe" threat level was imposed in the UK only twice before: in 2006 after the discovery of liquid bombs aimed at airliners and when, the following year, extremists attempted to bomb Glasgow Airport and London's West End.

Friday, IS released another indescribable video showing the beheading of a Kurdish soldier among 15 captured Peshmerga in orange boiler suits, who were grouped before a Mosul mosque. It was labeled “2nd Message to America” and threatened to execute the entire group if Iraqi Kurdistan continued to cooperate with the United States.

Just a few hours earlier, footage was shown of the mass execution of 300 Syrian soldiers forced to run through the desert in their underwear. They were said to have been taken prisoner at the Syrian air base of Tabqa.

Those barbaric scenes were flashed across the world by international media.

Less noticed was the video tape released on Thursday, Aug. 28, by Al Qaeda’s Sinai branch, Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, which showed the beheading of four local citizens and their admission that they had collaborated with Israeli intelligence to identify targets for Egyptian and Israeli air raids. This tape runs 30 minutes.

Egyptian security sources said the four had been abducted Tuesday near the northern Sinai town of Sheikh Zuwaid.

And not far away, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas last week summarily executed 29 alleged collaborators with Israeli intelligence, three of them women, and seven in a public square.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has characterized Hamas as belonging to the same family of murderous extremists as the Islamic State. Israel did indeed fight a limited, inconclusive war on the Palestinian fundamentalists, but no order has gone out for an operation to rescue the 43 Fiji members of the UN Disengagement Observer Force, who were abducted by the Syrian Al Qaeda Nusra Front just 150 meters from its Golan border.

UNDOF policed the Golan buffer zone for 40 years until it was overrun in the fighting between Syrian insurgents including Islamists and the Syrian army. So far there have been no executions, but the danger to the observers is ever present.

Saturday, Saudi sources reported that Qatar had undertaken to broker their release from Nusra on behalf of the UN. Israel, which spurned Qatar in the role of middleman for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, now finds the emirate, which champions Islamist terrorists in the Middle East, assigned a task in its northern back yard. An IDF rescue operation would have prevented this intervention, as well as delivering a timely, preemptive blow to Al Qaeda fighters sitting on Israel’s borders.

It would also have gone far toward muting the many Israeli critics of their government’s decision to curtail the 50-day Gaza operation by a truce, before Hamas was finished off for good.

Bur after the IDF campaign against Hamas, the Israeli prime minister was ready to line up with Western leaders, who make speeches about the horrors of the Islamist extremists and shore up their defenses, while at the same time avoiding putting their hands in the wasps’ nest and their boots on the ground, for tackling them in their Middle East lairs. “Coalitions” and “allies” are assigned the brunt of this mission.

Hoping against hope to jerk them into action, Saudi King Abdullah Saturday issued a wake-up call. He asked Western foreign ambassadors summoned to his palace in Jeddah to convey an urgent message to their leaders: Terrorism at this time is an evil force that must be fought with wisdom and speed," said King Abdullah. "And if neglected I'm sure after a month it will arrive in Europe and a month after that in America."

Labels: Al- Qaeda, Defence, ISIS, Islamists, Israel, Middle East, Security, Terror, United States

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 30, 2014