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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.
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!
That's a rather simplistic viewpoint you have there. These Sunni extremists who call themselves 'Islamic State' are using social media on the Internet as a major component in their propaganda machine, and also using it to recruit useful idiots to their cause, often in a very literal sense. Some group that has little to no regard for the legality of their actions (unlike actual law enforcement and government military) that can hack their way into their Facebook, Twitter, and other Internet assets and expose the operators behind them (and maybe their physical location) would be extremely disruptive to their operations on that front. Meanwhile 'signing up for the military' really won't do shit except give these assholes more targets to shoot at. Personally I send all my best to this particular faction of Anonymous, and wish them good hunting and much success in disrupting these assholes as much as possible.
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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.
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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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... 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.