Related: ISIS Melts Into Lebanon
"Syrian rebels kill 10, capture others in Lebanon" Associated Press August 04, 2014
BEIRUT — Syrian rebels killed 10 Lebanese troops and probably captured more than a dozen more in a raid on a Lebanese border town, Lebanon’s military chief said, the most serious spillover of violence into the tiny country from its neighbor’s civil war.
The capture of Lebanese soldiers and police raised fears that the country could become further entangled in the Syrian civil war and could worsen sectarian tensions.
‘‘What happened today is more serious than what some people imagine,’’ Lebanon’s army chief, General Jean Kahwaji, told journalists.
As fighting raged Sunday, some residents tried to flee from the eastern Lebanese border town of Arsal, home to 40,000 residents and 120,000 Syrian refugees. The attack began Saturday as Syrian rebels made a cross-border raid into Arsal, some 55 miles from the capital, Beirut. The clashes continued into Sunday around the municipal building and an army checkpoint, Lebanon’s state news agency reported.
The raid came hours after the army said troops detained Syrian Imad Ahmad Jomaa, who identified himself as a member of the Nusra Front. The state-run National News Agency said Jomaa was detained as he was being taken to a hospital in Lebanon after being wounded while fighting Syrian troops.
The Nusra Front is one of the most powerful groups fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad. The army chief said the rebels fighting in Lebanon belonged to extremist Sunni groups but did not name them.
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Related: ISIS Tunneling Into Israel From Syria
Why Is Islamic State Waging War On Lebanon and Not On Israel?
Well, [SEE: Jihadist group takes credit for teens’ killings ; Snowden confirms that Al Baghdadi was trained by MOSSAD] -- ty
Simon Elliot, aka Al-Baghdadi, son of Jewish parents, Mossad agent
Occupation Iraq: ISIS in Stasis
They are on the move again:
"Extremists overrun Kurds, seize 3 towns in Iraqi north" by Tim Arango | New York Times August 04, 2014
BAGHDAD — Sunni extremists seized control of three towns in northern Iraq on Sunday after fierce battles with Kurdish security forces, sending thousands of people fleeing to the nearby mountains and threatening the country’s largest dam.
In the darkness of Sunday morning, the Sunni fighters swept in to take one of the towns, Sinjar, and set about their method of conquest that is as familiar as it is brutal: They destroyed a Shi’ite shrine, executed resisters, overran local security forces, and hoisted the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria above government buildings.
Hours later, as the militants demanded that the city’s residents swear allegiance to the Islamic State or be killed, the group’s social media campaign was underway, with photos posted online showing militants patrolling the city’s streets.
Have you had enough of the propaganda?
The UN representative in Baghdad, Nickolay Mladenov, issued a statement Sunday afternoon, citing reports he had that as many as 200,000 civilians, mostly from the minority Yazidi community, had fled the new fighting.
“A humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in Sinjar,” Mladenov said.
Those things are everywhere these days.
In the face of stiff resistance from Shi’ite militias aligned with Iran that have stalled their march on Baghdad, the Islamic State fighters who captured Mosul in June pushed north this weekend, and by Sunday afternoon they were in control of two other towns after fierce battles with Kurdish security forces, known as the pesh merga, who have been increasingly thrust into battle to defend the border of their autonomous region in northern Iraq from encroachments by the Islamic State.
The Kurds are supposed to be battle-hardened, too.
In a statement, the Islamic State boasted of conquering “more important areas which were controlled by the pesh merga and the secular militias.”
With the new territory, which the group described as “the border triangle of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey,” the Islamic State has strengthened its hold on territory that traverses the frontiers of Iraq and Syria, giving it a greater ability to move fighters and weapons between the front lines of the civil wars in both countries.
See: Kerry's Sunni Triangle
According to security officials and residents in the area, the Kurdish forces were routed from Zumar, a town amid oil fields along the road from the Syrian border, and then Sinjar, an isolated city in northwestern Iraq.
Sinjar has been home to a sizable community of Yazidis, Kurdish speakers who ascribe to a religion that combines elements of Islam and ancient Persian religions and who are considered apostates by Muslim extremists.
Time to throw this recycled propaganda out.
Later Sunday, the militants captured Wana, a strategic town near the Tigris River — putting them within striking distance of the Mosul Dam, the country’s largest and an important supplier of electricity and water. The dam is on the Tigris River about 30 miles northwest of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which fell to the Islamic State on June 10.
Did they ever take over that oil complex because my ma$$ media let that drop?
Yazidi residents of Sinjar, who were reached by phone, were terrified. They told of kidnappings and executions of members of their group. One resident, Sami Hassan, said he was at work as a nurse at a hospital Sunday when an injured Islamic State fighter arrived and demanded to know the sect to which Hassan belonged.
That's how a few thousand fighters win over people, huh? Uh-huh.
Hassan said he escaped from a window while being shot at.
Another local resident, Khudhur Rasho, said he had seen two Yazidi men executed and the members of 10 families, their hands bound behind their back, being led away by militants.
The seizure of the three towns in a triangle that stretches north and west from Mosul to the borders of Syria and Turkey allowed the extremists to expand their territory, but the capture of the Mosul Dam would be a bigger prize.
On Sunday, conflicting reports emerged about who was in control of the dam, with some local news media reporting it had been captured by the Islamic State. But Kurdish officials and an official at the Ministry of Water Resources in Baghdad denied those reports.
Keeping important infrastructure out of militant hands has been a priority of the Iraqi government.
I didn't see the word Maliki, did you?
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Related: Occupation Iraq: Divide and Conquer
Yeah, who benefits from terrorism again?
UPDATE: Suicidal, Pseudo-Islamist Terrorists Gain Control of Iraqi Dam Upstream
from Baghdad
So WHEN is the FLOOD?
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"Iraqi air force to aid embattled Kurds" Associated Press August 05, 2014
BAGHDAD — Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has called upon his country’s armed forces to help Kurdish forces battle a Sunni militant offensive in northern Iraq that has caused tens of thousands of people from the minority Yazidi community to flee their homes.
I read that and laughed since the Kurds are cooperating with ISIS or IS as it is now being called. The Kurds stood out of the way on this one, folks. They are trying to tell us the battle-hardened, fighting for their homeland Kurds scurried out because of a few ISIS brutes showing up? They want Maliki gone, too, and allowing ISIS to flood Baghdad would hasten that.
Iraq’s military spokesman, Lieutenant General Qassim al-Moussawi, said Monday Maliki has commanded the air force to provide aerial support to the Kurds in the first sign of cooperation between the two militaries since Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, was captured by the militants on June 10.
Iraq is facing its worst crisis since the 2006 civil war. The Islamic State group has captured large swaths of land straddling the Syria-Iraq border with the goal of establishing a self-styled caliphate.
When it overran the northern cities of Mosul and Tikrit in June, Iraqi security forces virtually collapsed, with police and soldiers abandoning arsenals of heavy weapons.
Kurdish forces have been battling with the militants for control of several towns stretching between the province of Nineveh and the Kurdish Iraqi province of Dahuk. At least 25 Kurdish fighters were killed in clashes with the militants on Sunday, and another 120 were wounded, according to Muhssin Mohamed, a Dahuk-based doctor.
Relations between Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region, which has its own military, and the central government have long been strained.
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Not a damn thing about the dam. What's up with that?
"Lebanese army, Islamists intensifying clash over town" by Hwaida Saad | New York Times August 05, 2014
I'm already not liking the report.
BEIRUT — A deadly confrontation worsened Monday between Lebanese forces and Islamist insurgents from Syria who seized the border town of Arsal over the weekend, in the most serious spillover of the Syrian civil war into Lebanese territory since the conflict began more than three years ago.
The Lebanese army said it was engaged in fierce battles with the Islamists in Arsal, where witnesses reached by telephone, including the deputy mayor, said shelling had hit the town from multiple directions and many residents had fled.
Thousands of Lebanese civilians and Syrian war refugees fled the area Monday, the Associated Press reported. It said 17 Lebanese soldiers had been killed in three days of fighting.
Arsal is the temporary home of many Syrians seeking sanctuary from the fighting in their home country. A predominantly Sunni Muslim town, it has a population of 40,000, but that number has almost tripled because of the presence of Syrian refugees and rebels.
“The situation is miserable,” said Arsal’s deputy mayor, Ahmad Flitti. “Now the shelters are full, soon we are going to have shortages in drugs, and hospitals here will not be able to receive more wounded.”
Israel will be bombing them shortly.
The Lebanese army said 86 of its soldiers were wounded and 22 missing. More than 20 Islamist fighters were also believed to have been killed.
The Arsal fighting began on Friday when the Lebanese army arrested Imad Ahmad Jomaa, the commander of a Syrian Islamist rebel group there.
His disciples, which included brigades affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, responded by attacking Lebanese troops and quickly seized control of the town. They have demanded Jomaa’s release as a condition for any cease-fire.
$audi-supported and supplied.
“Let them release our emir and we are ready to pull out from all over the town,” said a Jomaa deputy, reached by phone in Arsal, “or else we will escalate and expand, and we will ask for more demands.”
Why do Islamic insurgents act like Israelis?
Cross-border clashes and shelling from the Syrian side have occasionally disrupted the Syria-Lebanon frontier, but the takeover of a town in Lebanon by members of the Islamic State had not happened before.
“It’s another front for ISIS and another sign containment of the Syria crisis has failed,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, using another acronym for the group.
Related: Washington Institute for Near East Policy
They employed an Israeli spy?
Looks like Israel is clearing all NYT reports now.
The Lebanese Cabinet met in an emergency session Monday to deal with the Arsal crisis, and Prime Minister Tammam Salam appeared to rule out negotiations, even if the occupiers are holding soldiers as captives.
“There is no political solution with extremist groups who are manipulating the Arab communities under religious obscurantism and strange titles, seeking to transfer their sick acts into Lebanon,” Salam said in a televised statement. “The only solution is the withdrawal of the gunmen from Arsal and its surroundings.”
He knows what we know: ISIS and Al-CIA-Duh are false fronts for intelligence agency mercenaries.
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UPDATES HERE
