Ghazkuul wrote:
Nothing new in that, I had my Captain frequently attempting to influence my analysis to go along with what he thought was happening. This continued for some time until finally my SSgt politely told him to go feth himself. You don't feth with the intel analysts, they are the ones who know whats going on, not the senior leadership nor the generals. All they know is what the analysts are feeding them.

You don’t need a weapon of mass destruction to ruin a city.

Well, maybe sometimes you do. You’re not getting rid of New York City without one. But some of the world’s cities are so vulnerable, so precariously perched above an abyss, that a single bloodthirsty nutjob with a rifle can bring it to its knees in a matter of minutes.

Look at Tunisia’s resort city of Sousse on the Mediterranean. Two months ago, an ISIS-inspired nutcase named Seifeddine Rezgui strolled up the beach with a Kalashnikov in his hand and murdered 38 people, most of them tourists from Britain.

The police shot him, of course. There was never going to be any other ending than that one. And before the police arrived, local Tunisians formed a protective human shield around Rezgui’s would-be foreign victims. “Kill us! Kill us, not these people!” shouted Mohamed Amine. According to survivor John Yeoman, hotel staff members charged the gunman and said, “We won’t let you through. You’ll have to go through us.”

Tunisia’s hospitality and customer service are deservedly legendary, but that was truly above and beyond. It’s how Tunisia rolls, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Tourists are not going back.

A few still wander around here and there, but the locals are calling them ghosts. Who else lives in a ghost town but ghosts?

Hotels are laying off workers. Shops are empty and many will have to be closed. The city is reeling with feelings of guilt and anxiety. Guilt because one of their own murdered guests, the gravest possible offense against the ancient Arab code of hospitality, and anxiety because—what now? How will the city survive? How will all the laid-off workers earn a living with their industry on its back? Sousse without tourists is like Hollywood without movies and Detroit without automobile manufacturing.

Even Tunisia’s agriculture economy is crashing. Prices are down by 35 percent because the resorts don’t need to feed tourists anymore.

Rezgui’s ghoulish attack was spectacularly successful, wasn’t it? A single act of violence and—boom. Just like that, it’s all over.

Tunisians can still hang out in Sousse when they have some leisure time, but why should foreigners go there on holiday when they can go to Morocco instead? And if a couple of freakjobs shoot a bunch of tourists in Morocco, that country, too, could go into a tailspin. Why go there for a Mediterranean holiday when you could go to Spain, Malta, Corsica, or Croatia? Europeans who want to go farther afield can fly down to Key West, the Azores, or Bermuda.

When it’s stable, Tunisia is a wonderful place for Westerners. The southern half of the country is quintessentially North African while the coast is startlingly European. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say the coast is Mediterranean. With a few exceptions (Gaza, Libya, and to a lesser extent Egypt), the European and Africans sides of the Mediterranean are two halves of a coherent whole.

Only when you move inland and away from the sea do the unique characteristics of each nation-state fully assert themselves. Coastal Morocco is a lot like Spain, partly because southern Spain is a lot like Morocco. Beirut is an Arabic-speaking version of Tel Aviv. Istanbul is a Greek city inhabited by Turks while Athens is an Ottoman city where Greeks dwell. Coastal Tunisia feels like an Arabic-speaking province of France without the clash between natives and immigrants.

A French person who holidays in Sousse will feel as eerily at home as a Californian in Cabo San Lucas.

There’s a lot to love about Sousse. It’s an Arab city to emulate. If only Egyptians and Saudis and Iraqis could see this place, I thought to myself when I first got there, they’d see what’s possible in their own countries.

And that’s precisely why the likes of ISIS want to destroy it. ISIS isn’t gunning for Mecca. It is not targeting the Taliban-ruled parts of Afghanistan. It wants to swallow as much as it can, of course, but it can’t tolerate anything in the Muslim world that reminds people like me of a decadent infidel nation like France.

*

Thousands of Tunisians have run off to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Tunisians are, in fact, overrepresented in ISIS’s ranks.

Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not because ISIS is popular in Tunisia. It’s not because Tunisians are more Islamist than people everywhere else. The democratically-elected government is composed of a staunchly secular coalition that spans the political spectrum from the socialist left to the moderate right.

Tunisia is the one Arab Spring success story. There is no chance it will voluntarily transform itself into anything resembling a Taliban state. The only Arab country less likely to rally around the ISIS flag is Lebanon, and that’s because a third of Lebanon’s people are Christians.

So if you live in Tunisia and yearn for that sort of thing, you have to go somewhere else.

Most of Tunisia’s ISIS members come from the same town anyway, a nasty place called Kasserine that I vowed to never visit again even before it became the ISIS factory that it is now.

Some countries suffer from brain drain. Their best and brightest emigrate to gentler and more prosperous lands when they can flourish. Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt—these places are all suffering from spectacular levels of brain drain.

Tunisia, meanwhile, is experiencing psychopath drain.

But some of its home-grown psychopaths are sticking around, and it’s extraordinary what just a handful can do. If they blew up their home town of Kasserine, hardly anybody would notice or care, but massacring people in Sousse is like massacring people in Miami. Americans by and large aren’t familiar with Sousse because it’s far away on a strange continent, but it’s a short hop for Europeans and Arabs and is as well-known on that side of the Atlantic as Cancun is on this side.

I’ve visited Sousse three times, first with my wife, then with my friend and occasional traveling companion Sean LaFreniere, and again with my colleague Armin Rosen.

A few years ago, in the early days of Tunisia’s democracy, Sean and I had dinner at an old French restaurant near the beach. The place was packed, the food outstanding, the bill tiny. I looked around the restaurant and saw bottles of red wine atop almost every table. None of the women were covered. The mood was care-free and light, airy and full of laugher. We could have been in France, but I heard no language in that restaurant but Arabic.

You can find restaurants like that one in Jordan, but they’re almost all attached to hotels and nearly all the patrons are foreign. In Sousse, though, Sean and I were perhaps the only foreigners, not because tourists were afraid to visit back then but because we were there in the winter, during the off season.

I’ve been almost everywhere in that country more than once. It felt solid. Kick the walls if you want. They won’t buckle. It will not come apart like Syria, Iraq or Libya. It was obvious from the very beginning that, post-Arab Spring, Tunisia would not explode in civil war like Syria, rupture into fragments like Libya, or devolve into another police state like Egypt. It sure as hell wouldn’t go the way of Afghanistan. That was clear.

“If the Islamists want to Talibanize this place,” I said to Sean as he sipped from his glass of Johnny Walker at that delightful restaurant in Sousse, “they’ll have to kill half the population in order to do it.”

He froze after I said that. I didn’t ask what he was thinking at that moment, and I doubt he’d remember if I asked him—this was years ago—but he clearly felt a chill. I felt a chill, too. And I remember what I thought when I felt it: The bastards will probably try.

The question of the Islamic State brings together two contradictory tendencies: the deployment of absolute rhetoric from 20th-century total war with the 21st-century urge to wage such a war on the cheap and without dilemmas. Over a year into this incoherent campaign, it’s time to rethink this odd imbalance. The mismatch of words and deeds betrays a deeper confusion about the nature of our security interests. Either the Islamic State is a supreme emergency, warranting otherwise unthinkable bargains with lesser evils, ultimately at the price of supporting a shift in the balance of power in the Gulf. Or it is not, and the real threat is that imbalance rather than one malign actor. Either way, after a year of big words and modest deeds, a cooler assessment is due.

The Islamic State's so-called "province" in the Caucasus region has claimed responsibility for its first official attack since it was established earlier this year.

In a statement released online — seen above — and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, the group says "the soldiers of the Caliphate were able to mount an attack on barracks of the Russian army in southern Dagestan, in Magharamakint village."

The raid allegedly "led to the killing and wounding of a number of them." Afterward, "the soldiers of the Caliphate returned to their positions safely and with spoils, and unto Allah is all praise and gratitude," SITE’s translation reads.

The Islamic State announced its Caucasus branch in June, but the jihadists had not claimed responsibility for any attacks since then.

In an audio message released June 23, the Islamic State's spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, accepted the bayat — oath of allegiance — from jihadists who defected from the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Caucasus Emirate.

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the "Emir of the Faithful," has "accepted your bayat and has appointed the noble sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Qadarī as Wali [governor] over" the Caucasus, Adnani said at the time.

He continued by calling for all the mujahedeen in the Caucasus "to join" al-Qadari's "caravan and to hear and obey him in everything except sin."

It appears that Qadari is Rustam Asilderov, an ICE leader in Dagestan who defected to the Islamic State late last year. One of Asilderov’s known aliases is similar to "Abu Muhammad al-Qadari," the same name used by Adnani.

chechen syriaYouTubeRussian-Chechen fighters in Syria.

Al-Qaida and ICE have tried to stem the tide of defections to the Islamic State, but the loss of three leaders in just more than a year and a half has destabilized ICE's operations and likely contributed to the Islamic State's gains in the region.

Russian forces killed ICE's emir, Magomed Suleimanov, also known as Abu Usman Gimrinsky, in August. Suleimanov was publicly identified as ICE's new leader just weeks earlier. Also killed in the raid was the jihadist selected to lead ICE's Dagestan "province" after Asilderov's defection.

Suleimanov had succeeded Aliaskhab Kebekov, more commonly known as Ali Abu Muhammad al Dagestani, who was killed by Russian forces in April. Kebekov rose to ICE's top leadership position after his predecessor, Doku Umarov, perished sometime in either late 2013 or early 2014.

Today's claim of responsibility by the Islamic State's Caucasus arm is formatted in the same fashion as other statements by the "caliphate's" declared provinces. The consistent branding demonstrates that the Islamic State's propaganda machine is coordinating information across multiple countries where the jihadists are fighting.

 Jihadin wrote:
They better ease off Russia being Putin not going to screw around. Putin would hold the hand of a Vulcan Intelligence Officer and go step by step how he himself will give the order to unleash the Red Orchestra of Mayhem and Duplicity

The Telegraph wrote: Russian troops are fighting alongside pro-Assad forces in Syria, state television in Damascus and several reports have claimed.

The video footage claimed to show troops and a Russian armoured vehicle fighting Syrian rebels alongside President Bashar al-Assad's troops in Latakia.

It is reportedly possible to hear Russian being spoken by the troops in the footage.

In further indications of Russian "mission creep" in Syria, a Twitter account linked to Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, published images of what appeared to be Russian planes and drones flying over Idlib.

#Syria Nusra linked acc. posted pics of Russian made drone & jets flying over Western #Idlib. Huge if true. pic.twitter.com/1xPuUbD9an
— Green lemon (@green_lemonnn) September 2, 2015

And a Russian naval vessel was photographed heading south through the Bosphorus strait carrying large amounts of military equipment, according to social media and a shipping blog.

While Russian military advisers are thought to have been in Syria for months, as the Kremlin tries to support its key Middle East ally, if confirmed, this would mark the first evidence of troops fighting on the front line.

It is possible the Russians in the state television clip could have been contractors, thereby putting some distance between themselves and the Kremlin.

#Breaking - #Russian soldiers were viewed in #Zabadani while fighting for #Assad regime. #Syria pic.twitter.com/tZn3rXP52n
— Levent Kemal (@ValkryV) August 31, 2015

An unnamed activist with the Syrian rebel group the Free Syrian Army told The Times: “The Russians have been there a long time.

"There are more Russian officials who came to Slunfeh in recent weeks. We don’t know how many but I can assure you there has been Russian reinforcement.”

Russia is also delaying the launch of an international investigation aimed at assigning blame for chemical weapon attacks in Syria, UN Security Council diplomats said on Wednesday, though Moscow's UN envoy said the holdup was for technical reasons.

In a letter to the 15-nation council last week, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon outlined his plans for an investigation into toxic gas attacks in Syria, to be conducted by the United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

The council was supposed to respond to Ban's letter within five days. The deadline lapsed on Tuesday and no response has been sent.

Several council diplomats said Russia, which holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council this month, was hesitating. Asked about it at a news conference, Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin played down concerns about a delay.

"The most important thing is to make sure we know what is going to happen and the mechanism will work as effectively as it can," he said.

Bran Dawri wrote:
Quite frankly, I'm not too concerned about who shoots the IS as the rabid dogs they are. I kinda hope they really do piss off Russia enough that it will... take steps.

Experiment 626 wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:
Quite frankly, I'm not too concerned about who shoots the IS as the rabid dogs they are. I kinda hope they really do piss off Russia enough that it will... take steps.

Just as long as Russia doesn't completely lose their gak and decide that a large scale chemical attack or a few suitcase nukes are how to solve the IS problem... It's not like Russia has ever really respected UN treaties, nor will anyone really endeavor to hold Russia to account if they do commit a few hardcore war crimes short of mass WWII level genocide.

 LeCacty wrote:
I wish we could save fighting and killing for the tabletop. God damn the world is depressing...

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

 LeCacty wrote:
I wish we could save fighting and killing for the tabletop. God damn the world is depressing...

Because humans have a long history of pacifism. Our first discoveries were how to kill each other more efficiently. We discovered that before fire or the wheel.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

 LeCacty wrote:
I wish we could save fighting and killing for the tabletop. God damn the world is depressing...

Because humans have a long history of pacifism. Our first discoveries were how to kill each other more efficiently. We discovered that before fire or the wheel.

So? Thats a natural side effect of intra-species competition. Animals kill other members of their own species all the time. We're just more better at it because we're more intelligent.

If there are sentient alien races throughout the Galaxy, their early history will no doubt mirror ours.

 Jihadin wrote:
Its like they forgot about Russia being in Afghanistan....

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Anyway, now that Russia is taking direct ground action against ISIS, I think it's actually very good news for us as it relieves the pressure for us to commit ground troops. Let's allow Russia to do the dirty work for us.

It’s being called a “revolt” by intelligence pros who are paid to give their honest assessment of the ISIS war—but are instead seeing their reports turned into happy talk.

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military's Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.

Two senior analysts at CENTCOM signed a written complaint sent to the Defense Department inspector general in July alleging that the reports, some of which were briefed to President Obama, portrayed the terror groups as weaker than the analysts believe they are. The reports were changed by CENTCOM higher-ups to adhere to the administration’s public line that the U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra, al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the analysts claim.

That complaint was supported by 50 other analysts, some of whom have complained about politicizing of intelligence reports for months. That’s according to 11 individuals who are knowledgeable about the details of the report and who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity.

The accusations suggest that a large number of people tracking the inner workings of the terror groups think that their reports are being manipulated to fit a public narrative. The allegations echoed charges that political appointees and senior officials cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons program in 2002 and 2003.

The two signatories to the complaint were described as the ones formally lodging it, and the additional analysts are willing and able to back up the substance of the allegations with concrete examples.

Some of those CENTCOM analysts described the sizeable cadre of protesting analysts as a “revolt” by intelligence professionals who are paid to give their honest assessment, based on facts, and not to be influenced by national-level policy. The analysts have accused senior-level leaders, including the commander in charge of intelligence and his deputy in CENTCOM, of changing their analyses to be more in line with the Obama administration’s public contention that the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda is making progress. The analysts take a more pessimistic view about how military efforts to destroy the groups are going.

The large number of analysts who complained to the Pentagon inspector general hasn’t been previously reported. Some of them are assigned to work at CENTCOM, the U.S. military's command for the Middle East and Central Asia, but are officially employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The complaints allege that in some cases key elements of intelligence reports were removed, resulting in a document that didn’t accurately capture the analysts’ conclusions, sources familiar with the protest said. But the complaint also goes beyond alleged altering of reports and accuses some senior leaders at CENTCOM of creating an unprofessional work environment. One person who knows the contents of the written complaint sent to the inspector general said it used the word “Stalinist” to describe the tone set by officials overseeing CENTCOM’s analysis.

Many described a climate in which analysts felt they could not give a candid assessment of the situation in Iraq and Syria. Some felt it was a product of commanders protecting their career advancement by putting the best spin on the war.

Some reports crafted by the analysts that were too negative in their assessment of the war were sent back the chain of the command or not shared up the chain, several analysts said. Still others, feeling the climate around them, self-censored so their reports affirmed already-held beliefs.

“While we cannot comment on ongoing investigations, we can speak to the process and about the valued contributions of the Intelligence Community (IC),” Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, director of public affairs for U.S. Central Command, told The Daily Beast. “The IC routinely produces a wide range of subjective assessments related to the current security environment. Prior to publication, it is customary for the IC to coordinate these intelligence assessments. More specifically, members of the IC are typically provided an opportunity to comment on draft assessments. However, it is ultimately up to the primary agency or organization whether or not they incorporate any recommended changes or additions.”

Two of the officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said that analysts began airing their complaints in October in an effort to address the issue internally and only went to the inspector general when that effort failed. Some of those who complained were urged to retire, one official familiar with the report told The Daily Beast. Some agreed to leave.

In recent months, members of the Obama administration have sought to paint the fight against ISIS in rosy hues—despite the terror army’s seizure of major cities like Mosul and Fallujah.

“ISIS is losing,” John Allen, the retired Marine general charged with coordinating the ISIS campaign, said in July.

 whembly wrote:

So... accusation is that some in the Obama Administration is 'cooking intelligence' to fit a narrative that's supportive to this administration?

Isn't that what critics of the Iraq War intel accuses of the Bush Administration?

 whembly wrote:
So... accusation is that some in the Obama Administration is 'cooking intelligence' to fit a narrative that's supportive to this administration?

Isn't that what critics of the Iraq War intel accuses of the Bush Administration?

 Jihadin wrote:
Putin is beating Britain to "mopping" up in Syria. They're moving troops in and expanded their foot print to a city at their Naval Base there I heard recently