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Anonymous Vows Revenge For ISIS Paris Attacks
An anonymous reader writes: As usual, Anonymous members are quicker to respond to threats than investigators and have announced #OpParis as revenge for the Paris attacks. Their action is similar to #OpISIS from this spring, launched after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Previously Anonymous ousted thousands of ISIS Twitter accounts in #OpISIS. In a more conventional response, the government of France has been bombarding ISIS positions in Syria with airstrikes, and hunting for suspect Salah Abdeslam in connection with Friday's killings.
As usual, Anonymous members are quicker to respond to threats than investigators
That's because they don't have any requirement to perform due diligence or, well, investigate anything. Investigators do. Anonymous are more like instigators.
they would sign up for the military and go bust some rear
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
IS will ignore Anonymous, military, cops, and intelligence services in favor of unsuspecting theatergoers and people out for an evening at a cafe. Military and cops shoot back, and Anonymous is simply impotent against an organization like IS.
Those ISIS guys better watch now! Anonymous will be sending a barrage of pizzas to them that they didn't even order, and probably posting some dick pics on the their websites!
Two weeks ago more people were killed on the russian plane. Where did these anonymous guys were at that time?
There are other considerations as well. You can only fly so many sorties per day at a sustainable level over a longer term so all targets need to be prioritised against each other. RIght now the French authorities are going to be absolutely pissed so they are likely operating at the short term sprint level. Without getting additional equipment to the area and additional people to the area the step up in attacks will likely be unsustainable.
According to http://www.theguardian.com/wor... they have 12 strike aircraft currently in the area. Depending on the mission time they MIGHT be able to run 3 sorties per day with pilot swapping but the aircraft will need to be grounded for maintenance after a couple of days of that level of use.
IS will ignore Anonymous, military, cops, and intelligence services in favor of unsuspecting theatergoers and people out for an evening at a cafe. Military and cops shoot back, and Anonymous is simply impotent against an organization like IS.
That depends on whether Anonymous plans do useless stuff like tear down ISIS websites or something useful like hack the PCs of ISIS leaders and steal their financial records or details of their oil smuggling operation which would be most useful to the military and the cops even if it would probably embarrass Turkish president Erdoan and his AKP party pretty severely but then they have it coming.
And really, we all know this isn't going to be won from the air.
I'm no proponent of "Victory through Air-Power," but as long as we have Air Supremacy, we might as well make proper use of it. (Why go all the trouble to get it if we're not going to use it?) Cut their supply lines, bomb any supply dumps we can locate and attack any truck convoys we find. That will isolate their front-line troups, making it easier for our ground forces to smash them and win the war. Make no mistake: it's the infantry and armor who are going to finish this in the long run, but the Air Force can make their job much easier if they do their part properly.
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Anonymous could do the most good by hacking into and diverting - or simply revealing, if nothing else is possible - the finances of ISIS. Is there any hackable digital money stream involved, or is at all greasy piles of cash?
IS is one of the largest threats to our way of life in the west, but we are thinking too small when we think of ways to combat it. They believe they are on a mission from God, bringing about the final reckoning between good and evil - the Apocalypse. We think of them as trouble-makers that need to be sorted out as painlessly as possible, a short-term problem that can be solved with conventional weaponry, with relatively small losses. They aren't.
How we respond to them is difficult to work out. Maybe the Anon approach of hacking and defacing their web sites - cutting off the oxygen of publicity - would be a Good Idea. It may be better than trying to pick the right targets out of the desert with smart bombs and drones. It might be better than turning the entire region into green, glowing glass.
One thing you can do is screw with their social media, make it look as if ISIS hates Allah and Mohammed, not in big ways that are obvious, but smaller that makes recruits stand back and second guess. Undermine their ability to recruit anyone and recruit money and they will crumble faster than 10,000 bombs can hurt them.
Sever their income, destroy their ability to recruit and communicate. and please do it decently instead of carpet bombing that gets a lot of innocents as well. redirect their bank accounts to supporting Israel or other groups they hate.
Reveal all their financial supporters, and feel free to drain their accounts as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
taking out a conventional city that ISIS wholly controls in a Dresden like firebombing is now perfectly acceptable
No, it's a war crime and can be prosecuted under international law.
You realize that Raqqah is one of the largest cities in Syria, right? People there don't have a choice about "working with Daesh". Daesh runs the city, and every city within a great distance around them. And does all sorts of measures to prevent people from leaving.
These are people living in a densely populated city. Their city is being bombed. This puts them at risk. Some targets are low civilian risk. Others are high civilian risk. France's sudden intensive wave of bombing means that they've shifted the dividing line on the amount of risk to civilians they're willing to take.
Where to start?
1) There were two separate programs: the Pentagon program and the CIA program. The Pentagon program was a total failure. The CIA program was an unexpectedly huge success (perhaps too much - the FSA's rapid advances and breakinto Latakia triggered Russia and Iran's freakout and doubling down in Syria).
2) None of the soldiers trained by the Pentagon "prompty joined Daesh". The first handful of soldiers were poorly inserted, in way too small numbers and unevenly. They never manged to form into a unit in Syria. Some of them never made it into Syria. Others made it into Syria but were captured by al-Nusra, only released after negotiators convinced al-Nusra that they were focused only on Daesh. The few that made it into Syria and weren't captured were too disorganized to form a unit.
The Pentagon program - in stark contrast to the CIA program - was a colossal failure. But let's not spew falsehoods about it.
Beyond all of this are other actions that have been taken that are not part of these "programs". Most recently has been the arming of the YPG and arab militias - nominally just the latter, so as not to tick off Turkey, but in practice both - to resist Daesh in northeastern Syria. This effort too has been quite success thusfar, although it's too young to really evaluate at this point, and there's some risk of future seeds of discord being sown.
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It sounds ridiculous on the face of it because everyone is nominally adimantly opposed to it, but that is an actual possibility here. If any coalition ground troops end up getting deployed in response to these (or future) attacks, they'd take over eastern Syria, where Daesh has its "caliphate"...but stop advancing west because A) they have no interest in taking land from the FSA and probably don't want to turn the Army of Conquest into a hostile force, B) Russia is heavily bombing there, and C) Russia would only let go of Latakia through their cold dead hands - it has their only Mediterranean naval base, their largest airbase in the region, one of their most important listening posts, etc. So you have the "clearly Russian" zone, the "clearly Coalition" zone, and then this in-between squabble area (including Damascus).
Of course, this is all assuming that Russia can actually defend Latakia against the rebels. I mean, normally I'd assume that, but they've done a pretty crappy job of it so far. But I bet they could put a lot more assets there if they needed to (though it might take weakening their forces on Donbas). It's easy for them to deploy air assets to Syria because they're not needed in Donbas, but if they take too much ground forces from Donbas and Crimea, Ukraine might be tempted to reescalate. The other issue is Iran, Iran could also commit itself a lot more to Syria if they need to... the current few thousand Iranian troops (plus Hezbollah) is one thing, but it's a small fraction of their total military manpower. Plus, a lot of the Syrian/Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah assets are currently directed on the Aleppo offensive, which actually has gone pretty well for them... so that could be redirected to Latakia if need be. And to Hama too, the way things are going on that front.
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hack the PCs of ISIS leaders
Which is bullshit. They need to hack the PCs of the national governments and corporations that finance them. To bring down ISIS means to bring down everything.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
More specifically, we have Russia (nuclear) on the Assad side, along with Iran (nearly nuclear), while on the other side, we have the coalition (including nuclear powers US, UK and France), and then there are third parties, including Israel (who's started bombing Hezbollah weapons shipments within Syria - including bombing the Damascus airport the other day) and major rebel weapons supplier Saudi Arabia (not nuclear, but believed to have an agreement with Pakistan to be able to rapidly acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for having funded over half of their program). Everyone has the capability to reach all of their potential foes except Iran->US.
It's a nightmare scenario just waiting for an accident :P
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... look to Saudi Arabia !
...Why does anyone require 'due diligence' and fact-checking against insane violent assholes like these Sunni extremist fuckstains that laughingly call themselves the 'Islamic State'
People simply can *NOT* get radicalized out of a vaccuum
Most of the sunni moslems get radicalized from the teachings of their imams, from the hate filled sermons uttered by the imams on the pulpit inside the mosques all over the world, and from the teachings they received when they were studying their 'peaceful religions' inside the madrasa ... and most of the imams, the mosques, the madrasas of the sunni sect in the whole world are being funded by the oil money from Saudi Arabia
Every year the Saudis provide funding for all these programs, to the tunes of tens of billions of dollars --- yes, you read it right, TENS OF BILLIONS
This has been an open secret for decades
The government of the United States of America knows about Saudi's funding of radicalization of moslems
The governments of the European countries know about Saudi's funding of radicalizations of moslems
All the nations in the world know it too, but no one dare to tell Saudi Arabia to stop radicalizing the moslems because everyone needs their oil
Sure. Except the IS doesn't have any cities. They occupy some territory in Iraq and Syria, where they're mostly bent on executing the majority of the populace. The Nazis would have laughed pretty hard if the allied strategy in WWII was extermination bombing of Jewish neighbourhoods in Paris.
You're absolutely right, the way to attack the islamic state is to attack it's ability to wage war. Stop converting moderate muslims into new recruits, stop littering the area with weapons and political instability, and work towards not giving any more money to oil rich middle eastern dictatorships.
As someone who has traveled the globe, to some extent, including into areas with active conflict zones (a turn of phrase that I don't prefer but will save time by using it - clarification is available if requested) - I've been in majority-Muslim countries. I've been in areas where there are armed children on the street. I've been in areas where the people are truly desperate.
So, while this may seem an appeal to authority - that is not my intent, this is my experience so it is anecdotal and only my observations.
You're correct. No matter where I've gone (and I've had the State Department tell me that I'm on my own and strongly advise me to not go), the VAST majority of the people are just people. To varied degrees they put their head down and do what they need to do to make the best of their situation. They're not intrinsically evil - even the people we disagree with. Most of those, the armed folks, are just doing what they need to do in order to survive. There are exceptions, there always are. However, the overwhelming majority seems to support my conclusion.
People are people, no matter where you go.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Iran are not "nearly nuclear". They have shown no interest in nuclear weapons with their program. The Ayatollah has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons in their hands. Mossad don't believe them to be trying to make nuclear weapons, and the CIA and SIS ('MI6') agree.
" you'd have to be an idiot to think we couldn't have stayed had we just asked. "
Bush negotiated the withdrawal date with the Iraqi government. When the date was approaching, the idea of an ongoing U.S. presence was indeed proposed, but the Iraqis refused to renew the Status Of Forces Agreement(SOFA). That's the agreement which grants U.S. military personnel the permission to operate with impunity inside the country. This was unacceptable to the USA. I suppose Obama could have forced the issue, but based on his campaign promises, he had to maintain the illusion of being the "peace" guy.
There's no good time to withdraw from a mess like this other than ASAP. Given the aftermath of the U.S. government's withdrawal from Vietnam, it could also be argued that the withdrawal happened "too soon". But, just like Vietnam, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are both completely untenable. There is no possible way to "win". The defeat is not a military defeat. It's a defeat based on the creation and maintenance of an endless morass of human misery and a sinkhole of U.S. taxpayer wealth.
ISIS's name is “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham.” is converted to an acronym Daesh which is an Arabic word
ISIS hates the term and often makes death threats against those who use; relabeling ISIS as Daesh is used as a provocative insult.
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