Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

We cannot live in peace at home while millions of people are engulfed in war

Harleen Gambhir writes: Last week, President Obama said that the Islamic State is “contained” in Iraq and Syria, but the group’s attacks in Paris soon afterward showed that it poses a greater threat to the West than ever. The Islamic State is executing a global strategy to defend its territory in Iraq and Syria, foster affiliates in other Muslim-majority areas, and encourage and direct terrorist attacks in the wider world. It has exported its brutality and military methods to groups in Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now it is using tactical skills acquired on Middle Eastern battlefields to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash that will generate even more recruits within Western societies. The United States and its allies must respond quickly to this threat.

The Islamic State’s strategy is to polarize Western society — to “destroy the grayzone,” as it says in its publications. The group hopes frequent, devastating attacks in its name will provoke overreactions by European governments against innocent Muslims, thereby alienating and radicalizing Muslim communities throughout the continent. The atrocities in Paris are only the most recent instances of this accelerating campaign. Since January, European citizens fighting with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have provided online and material support to lethal operations in Paris, Copenhagen and near Lyon, France, as well as attempted attacks in London, Barcelona and near Brussels. Islamic State fighters are likely responsible for destroying the Russian airliner over the Sinai. These attacks are not random, nor are they aimed primarily at affecting Western policy in the Middle East. They are, rather, part of a militarily capable organization’s campaign to mobilize extremist actors already in Europe and to recruit new ones.

The strategy is explicit. The Islamic State explained after the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine that such attacks “compel the Crusaders to actively destroy the grayzone themselves. . . . Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one of two choices, they either apostatize . . . or they [emigrate] to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the Crusader governments and citizens.” The group calculates that a small number of attackers can profoundly shift the way that European society views its 44 million Muslim members and, as a result, the way European Muslims view themselves. Through this provocation, it seeks to set conditions for an apocalyptic war with the West.

Unfortunately, elements of European society are reacting as the Islamic State desires. Far-right parties have gained strength in many European countries. France’s National Front is expected to dominate local elections in northern France this winter; on Saturday, Marine Le Pen, its leader, declared “those who maintain links with Islamism” to be “France’s enemies.” The Danish People’s Party gained 21 percent of the vote in national elections in June on a nationalist, anti-Islamic platform. The anti-foreigner Sweden Democrats is steadily growing in popularity. [Continue reading…]

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Defeating ISIS is definitely the West’s fight

Shadi Hamid writes: The notion that ISIS could be contained was always based on wishful thinking. Perhaps just as problematically, it suggested a narrow Western-centric lens.

ISIS has been spilling over throughout the Middle East and beyond for quite some time now – in Libya, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Nigeria. An extremist, inherently expansionist state in the Middle East is not something anyone should learn to live with. Yet, as ISIS ravaged the region, the predominant response has been an aimless, desultory counter-ISIS effort on the part of the U.S. and its allies. Our hearts weren’t in it, but neither too were our minds.

The Obama administration seemed to take refuge in the idea that ISIS has “no place in the 21st century” or that ISIS and its ilk would ultimately “be defeated” – in the passive tense – “because they don’t have a vision that appeals to people.” It was almost as if the arc of history would intervene against them, even if we couldn’t be bothered to muster the effort.

The reluctance to consider direct military action in Iraq and Syria – beyond targeted airstrikes against ISIS – has been a constant feature of the public debate in Western capitals. Everything ISIS has done, with its ever increasing brutality, apparently wasn’t enough to shake the international community from its torpor. Yet even now, after the Paris attacks, the only thing that’s been promised is more of what we were already doing.

We can and should have a wide-ranging debate on how much force and treasure to commit to this new phase of the fight, but the argument that this is not “our fight” no longer has any standing. This does not mean repeating the blunders of the Iraq war, and, in any case, no one to my knowledge is advocating for an Iraq-style invasion of Iraq and Syria. There is quite a lot between a full-scale invasion and the desultory efforts of the past few years. As many have long been calling for, no-fly and no-drive zones should be established in Syria (in areas where Russia is not active) to protect civilians and allow rebels to hold territory and provide a governance alternative to ISIS. This would require a significantly larger number of special operations forces than the “fewer than 50” committed in October.

We’ve overlearned the lessons of the last war, and understandably so. This, in some sense, is a good thing. We can’t just go in and level Raqqa, ISIS’s de facto capital and hope for the best. As always, local Sunni forces are critical, and, in Syria, the United States has done a remarkably poor job of boosting, or even just engaging with, mainstream rebel actors who are both anti-ISIS and anti-Assad. The importance of local allies who have buy-in is something we learned in the devastating aftermath of the Iraq invasion. But what we haven’t learned, at least up until now, is that non-intervention can, sometimes, be just as costly and dangerous as intervention. Presumably, there is a middle ground between these two extremes of the Bush and Obama eras. Now is the right time to find it. [Continue reading…]

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The attacks in Paris reveal the strategic limits of ISIS

Olivier Roy writes: As President François Hollande of France has declared, the country is at war with the Islamic State. France considers the Islamist group, also known as ISIS, to be its greatest enemy today. It fights it on the front lines alongside the Americans in the Middle East, and as the sole Western nation in the Sahel. It has committed to this battle, first started in Mali in 2013, a share of its armed forces much greater than has the United States.

On Friday night, France paid the price for this. Messages expressing solidarity have since poured in from all over the Western world. Yet France stands oddly alone: Until now, no other state has treated ISIS as the greatest strategic threat to the world today.

The main actors in the Middle East deem other enemies to be more important. Bashar al-Assad’s main adversary is the Syrian opposition — now also the main target of Russia, which supports him. Mr. Assad would indeed benefit from there being nothing between him and ISIS: That would allow him to cast himself as the last bastion against Islamist terrorism, and to reclaim in the eyes of the West the legitimacy he lost by so violently repressing his own people.

The Turkish government is very clear: Its main enemy is Kurdish separatism. And a victory of Syrian Kurds over ISIS might allow the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., to gain a sanctuary, and resume its armed struggle against Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Americans who are afraid of refugees

Those now calling for America to close its doors to Syrian refugees are not only betraying the principles upon which this country was founded, but many are also betraying the core of their own faith.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. Matthew 25:35

To be afraid of Syrian refugees is like watching crowds of people fleeing from a burning building and being afraid that one among them might be an arsonist.

Fear of refugees is more than callous — it is simple cowardice.

To be afraid of refugees is to be afraid of people who are themselves living in fear because they have lost everything.

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GOP governors rely on ISIS lies to reject Syrian refugees

The Daily Beast reports: One of the Paris attackers was supposedly found with a Syrian passport—leading Republican governors here in America to vow to block Syrian refugees from entering their states.

But that passport was a fake, French officials told The Wall Street Journal, which means the governors’ freakout over refugees was likely based on a lie.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, a former member of ISIS emphasized that Syrian passports, like the one found on that Paris terrorist, can be bought from the Syrian regime.

“There are people who go back and forth to Aleppo or Hama or Latakia or Tartus—you give them $1,000 and a nice photograph, and they’ll print you a good passport,” Abu Khaled, a former member the Islamic State’s internal security service, Amn al-Dawleh, said Monday.

“The guys with the regime are corrupt; they’ll give you whatever you want for money,” he added.

That’s not the only way, though. A reporter for the London Daily Mail purchased an identical passport online for $2,000. German customs agents in September seized a shipment of fake Syrian passports being sold to asylum seekers from countries like Iraq, Libya, and Egypt. (Syrians get automatic refugee status in the European Union.) Many of the forgeries are suspected to come from Turkey.

French officials told the Journal that Ahmad al-Mohammed, who blew himself up outside the Stade de France, was carrying a counterfeit Syrian passport made for him. Al-Mohammed’s fingerprints matched those on the passport found near his body, the French added.

Greek officials said the information on Al-Mohammed’s passport was run against police databases after he landed in Leros on Oct. 3 and nothing was found. Another man carrying a passport with identical information, but a different photograph, was being used by a man in Serbia who was arrested on Monday.

In a sense, Republican governors of 14 states took ISIS at their word, accepting the counterfeit Syrian passport as the reason to deny 10,000 thousands of Syrian refugees from settling in the United States. [Continue reading…]

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Europe and the rising politics of fear

Anna Sauerbrey writes: in Germany as across Europe, Islamophobia is picking up speed. On Saturday, Heiko Maas, Germany’s minister of justice and a Social Democrat, wrote online, “We won’t recede. Freedom and democracy are stronger than terror.” The answer from anti-immigrant commenters was quick, brutal and expletive-laced. “Your boundless idiocy and freedom are making this possible,” was a typical reply.

Germany has, until now, been a political and geographic linchpin in maintaining European adherence to the Schengen agreement, which guarantees open borders across much of the Continent. It will now come under extreme pressure: France, the Netherlands and Spain had tightened border controls by Saturday afternoon, around the same time that Poland announced that it would reduce the number of refugees it had agreed to take.

Whatever we may learn about the actual lives and origins of the perpetrators, whether one or several of them really came to Europe just recently, hidden among hundreds of thousands of refugees, it doesn’t really matter. In the current climate in Germany, facts are fiction and vice versa. Pegida, Alternative für Deutschland and the rest of the right wing have long made it their mantra that the government and mainstream media are lying to the German population — and many agree.

Germany has grown increasingly anxious and angry for some months. Reason might now decide to leave the room, replaced by the politics of fear. And where Germany goes, the rest of Europe will follow. [Continue reading…]

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In France, ‘normal’ is no longer what it used to be

Sylvie Kauffmann writes: For most Europeans, war was a conflict between states that had either territorial or ideological claims, fought by regular armies. It had a starting date and an end date. It belonged to previous centuries. War nowadays, writes the political philosopher Pierre Hassner in a recent book on the subject, “La Revanche des passions” (“Revenge of the Passions”), “has been relegitimized in the form of jihad, of global war on terror, or with the aim of promoting democracy.”

The war we are asked to fight is against obscure men who one day target cartoonists, the next day Jews, another day football stadiums, cafés or rock concerts — who target people who live in “the capital of abominations and perversion,” as ISIS described us in a communiqué after Friday’s attacks. It added a chilling warning: “This is only the beginning of the storm.”

So how do you fight such a storm? “War is not a word used lightly,” former President Nicolas Sarkozy said Sunday on television after a long meeting with President Hollande. He advocates working with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to address the Syrian war; on the home front, he advocates putting some 10,000 suspect Muslim radicals under house arrest and fitting with them all with electronic bracelets. Another conservative politician, Laurent Wauquiez, even suggested interning them — a measure that was immediately denounced in the media as tantamount to “creating a French Guantánamo.” The government considers both proposals incompatible with the rule of law, but is now committed, under the state of emergency, to close radical mosques and deport imams who preach hatred. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS picks its suicide bombers

Michael Weiss writes: “Suicide bomber is a choice,” said the man we’ll call Abu Khaled, stubbing out a Marlboro Red and lighting a new one. “When you join ISIS, during the clerical classes, they ask: ‘Who will be a martyr?’ People raise their hands, and they go off to a separate group.”

The number of recruits is declining, the former ISIS intelligence officer and trainer had told me here, on the shores of the Bosporus. But, at least in those indoctrination classes, there’s no want of young men looking for a quick trip to Paradise. “They keep volunteering,” said Abu Khaled.

In the wide world outside al-Dawla al-Islamiya, the Islamic State, we have caught occasional glimpses of these incendiary young zealots. There was, for instance, Jake Bilardi, a disaffected Australian 18-year-old, who, judging by the blog he left while still in Melbourne, made a rather seamless transition from Chomskyism to takfirism, before detonating himself at a checkpoint in Iraq.

Abu Abdullah al-Australi, as he went to his death in Ramadi, was convinced that he was carrying out a noble act of self-sacrifice, turning kamikaze for the caliphate. For him, jihad began at home. “The turning point in my ideological development,” he’d written, coincided with the “beginning of my complete hatred and opposition to the entire system Australia and the majority of the world was based upon. It was also the moment I realised that violent global revolution was necessary to eliminate this system of governance and that I would likely be killed in this struggle.” He was right about that last part, if not quite about how his fellow revolutionaries determined his use-value. [Continue reading…]

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Paris attacks suspected mastermind was monitored by Western allies seeking to kill him

The Wall Street Journal reports: An Islamic State operative suspected of helping plan the Paris attacks had been monitored in Syria by Western allies seeking to kill him in an airstrike, but they couldn’t locate him in the weeks before the plot was carried out, two Western security officials said.

The operative, a Belgian citizen named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was convicted in absentia in Brussels earlier this year of recruiting jihadists, was suspected of masterminding a foiled plot to behead police officers, escaped to Syria and was profiled in Islamic State’s online magazine mocking European authorities for their failure to catch him. A year ago, video emerged of him in Syria, smiling as he drove a truck dragging the dead bodies of Islamic State’s opponents tied to the bumper.

Mr. Abaaoud is one of two people who have emerged at the center of a probe into the attacks that killed 129 people on Friday. Both are at large. French and Belgian authorities are also searching for a 26-year-old petty criminal named Salah Abdeslam, who they say rented a car used in the attacks on Friday and is suspected of driving some of the suicide bombers through Paris.

On Monday, dozens of masked Belgian police stormed a house in a predominantly Muslim district in Brussels in their hunt for Mr. Abdeslam.

French prosecutors said police had stopped Mr. Abdeslam and two other men on their way to Brussels just hours after the Friday massacre. But a roadside background check failed to show that Mr. Abdeslam had rented a car in Belgium that was found outside the Bataclan night club, the site of one of the attacks, and police let him go. [Continue reading…]

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Putin vows payback after confirmation of Egypt plane bomb

Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin vowed to hunt down those responsible for blowing up a Russian airliner over Egypt and intensified air strikes against militants in Syria, after the Kremlin concluded a bomb had destroyed the plane last month, killing 224 people.

Putin ordered the Russian navy in the eastern Mediterranean to coordinate its actions on the sea and in the air with the French navy, after the Kremlin used long-range bombers and cruise missiles in Syria and announced it would expand its strike force by 37 planes.

“We will find them anywhere on the planet and punish them,” Putin said of the plane bombers at a somber Kremlin meeting broadcast on Tuesday. The FSB security service swiftly announced a $50 million bounty in a global manhunt for the bombers.

Until Tuesday, Russia had played down assertions from Western countries that the Oct. 31 crash was the work of terrorists, saying it was important to let the official investigation run its course.

But four days after Islamist gunmen and bombers killed at least 129 people in Paris, Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB, said in televised comments that traces of foreign-made explosive had been found on fragments of the downed plane and on passengers’ personal belongings. [Continue reading…]

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Divisions exposed in fight against ISIS in Iraq

The Financial Times reports: When Iraqi Kurdish fighters backed by US and UK air strikes last week pushed Isis militants out of Sinjar, homeland of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, the victory was praised as a significant blow to the jihadis.

It was the plight of the Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar following last year’s Isis onslaught that prompted the first US air strikes in the war against the jihadist group. Retaking Sinjar gave a psychological boost to the war against the militants and severed a significant supply line between the cities of Mosul and Raqqa, the two main Isis command centres.

But by raising the Kurdish flag over the city and signalling they were taking over part of Baghdad-controlled Ninevah province, the Kurds highlighted deep-rooted disputes between Iraqis that are complicating the joint effort to defeat Isis in its Iraqi heartland. [Continue reading…]

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The economic fallout from the Paris attacks cannot be measured by stock markets

Andrew Ross Sorkin writes: On Monday, market participants steeled themselves for a steep decline, but the indexes in the United States were up more than 1 percent, and markets in Europe were close to flat.

But that reaction — and the reaction to previous attacks — may belie the true cost of terrorism and, more important, underestimate the potential cost of the Paris killings.

“The aftermath of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks may not in itself prompt extensive market-based volatility,” Citigroup wrote in a report, suggesting that financial markets “treat such developments as idiosyncratic and the unfortunate reality of a world where large-scale carnage has become an almost daily, if sickening, development.”

The report, however, said, “We think this time is different.”

That view is consistent with the opinions of some security experts, who in recent days have said that the attack in Paris represents just one in a continuum.

“We have upgraded the risk of terrorist attacks not only in the Middle East but also in the West, as well as the likelihood of increased international military intervention in IS strongholds in Syria, Iraq and Libya,” Citigroup said, referring to the Islamic State.

The attack in Paris could have far-reaching implications for the future of the eurozone and for companies doing business there. The events in Paris could add to the pressure to close borders in the eurozone. It is also reigniting a debate about privacy and surveillance that could have big implications for technology companies.

Over the weekend, Evercore ISI, the research arm of the investment bank Evercore, published a note to its clients suggesting that the events in Paris could threaten the political support inside Germany for its chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has been a big supporter of open borders, of the Syrian migration and of limiting electronic surveillance on civil liberty grounds.

“The connection between the terror threat and migration flows threatens to rupture the border-free Schengen zone,” the note said, describing the borderless, passport-free zone known as the Schengen area. “It challenges Merkel’s position at home and in the wider E.U., nudging higher the tail risk that Europe’s indispensable leader could fall from power.”

The economic implications of this are significant, to say the least. Evercore ISI even speculated it was possible that Ms. Merkel could ultimately be replaced by Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, who has seemingly been inclined to let Greece leave the eurozone.

Policy makers and investors estimating the cost of terrorism often miss the larger picture: While the stock market quickly rebounded after Sept. 11, the true economic damage may have been as high as $3.3 trillion. [Continue reading…]

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After Paris attacks, CIA director rekindles debate over surveillance

Scott Shane writes: A diabolical range of recent attacks claimed by the Islamic State — a Russian airliner blown up in Egypt, a double suicide bombing in Beirut and Friday’s ghastly assaults on Paris — has rekindled a debate over the proper limits of government surveillance in an age of terrorist mayhem.

On Monday, in unusually raw language, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, denounced what he called “hand-wringing” over intrusive government spying and said leaks about intelligence programs had made it harder to identify the “murderous sociopaths” of the Islamic State.

Mr. Brennan appeared to be speaking mainly of the disclosures since 2013 of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications by Edward J. Snowden, which prompted sharp criticism, lawsuits and new restrictions on electronic spying in the United States and in Europe.

In the wake of the 129 deaths in Paris, Mr. Brennan and some other officials sounded eager to reopen a clamorous argument over surveillance in which critics of the spy agencies had seemed to hold an advantage in recent years.

“As far as I know, there’s no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused.”

The debate over the proper limits on government dates to the origins of the United States, with periodic overreaching in the name of security being curtailed in the interest of liberty. This era of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in some ways resembles battles that American and European authorities fought in the late 1800s with anarchists who carried out a wave of assassinations and bombings, provoking a huge increase in police powers, said Audrey Kurth Cronin, a historian of terrorism at George Mason University.

Since then, there were the excesses of McCarthyism exploiting fears of Communist infiltration in the 1950s, the exposure of domestic spying and C.I.A. assassination plots in the 1970s, and the battles over torture, secret detention and drone strikes since Sept. 11, 2001. [Continue reading…]

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Iranian cartoonist arrested after showing solidarity with victims of Paris attacks

EA Worldview reports: A leading cartoonist. Hadi Heidari, has been detained in the latest crackdown by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Heidari was arrested at work at the daily newspaper Shahrvand on Monday, reportedly by the intelligence division of the Guards. One of his latest cartoons expressed sorrowful solidarity with the people of France over Islamic State’s attacks that killed 129 people last Friday.

The Guards have seized journalists, businessmen, and activists in recent weeks, amid their political clashes with the Rouhani Government. Among those held are two US citizens, Iranian-American oil executive Siamak Namazi and Lebanese-American businessman Nazar Zaka. [Continue reading…]

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With ISIS lasting and expanding, global jihadism is stronger than ever

In Britain’s New Statesman, Shiraz Maher writes: In the early phases of the war, the terrorist threat to the West appeared to be in decline as jihadists made their way to Syria to fight the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. There was little interest in carrying out attacks at home. A naive romanticism surrounded these early fighters. The Guardian’s George Monbiot compared them to volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. British fighters I was interviewing at the time seemed to appreciate this. One man from London with whom I developed a long-standing relationship even asked me to thank Monbiot on his behalf. “It really helped the mujahedin,” he said. This man epitomised the optimism of the early wave of fighters, who could not understand why they were considered a security threat. “Why is the gov [sic] calling us security threat and terrorists akhi [brother]?” he asked. He was sincerely bemused.

Nasser Muthana, the fighter who later boasted about his bomb-making skills, was also keen to reassure the government that Islamic State posed no threat. “Mi6 believe 300 Brits have returned to the UK . . . and how many terror attacks have they done? 0!!” he wrote. “We aren’t interested in you. We want Khilafa [the caliphate].”

The change in IS’s posturing towards the West came after the declaration of the caliphate in late June 2014. From that point the group adopted a more belligerent and expansionist policy, with the first edition of its English-language magazine promising to conquer Rome and defeat “crusaders” around the world.

Its fighters became more brazen. They cheered the beheading of western hostages and boasted of planning attacks in the West. There is a rationale for this: the caliphate cannot have static borders and must be territorially expansionist. Its duty is to confront the West and subjugate it to Islam. [Continue reading…]

I recommend reading the whole article but want to forewarn readers that it includes a particularly graphic account of one of ISIS’s recent atrocities.

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Peaceful protesters challenge ISIS rule in Syrian town

NOW reports: Residents of Syria’s northern Manbij have held an unprecedented set of protests against ISIS’ draconian policies in the Aleppo town, according to activists.

A popular pro-rebel Facebook page reporting on events in Manbij and Syria in general said that several small protest gatherings had taken place in the town on Thursday and posted what it said were pictures of the unusual event.

“In response to the oppressive practices of ISIS against residents of the city of Manbij… tens of citizens came out to criticize the group last Thursday afternoon and called on it to leave the city,” Manbij Mubasher reported on Sunday.

“Demonstrations took place on the Jarablus road and several streets [in the city] in the form of small gatherings, which the group met with gunfire and arrests.”

The post also went into detail on the alleged situation in the town — which was first seized by ISIS in January 2014 — outlining some of the factors that have raised the ire of locals. [Continue reading…]

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Raqqa activists reveal details of French airstrikes on ISIS stronghold

The Guardian reports: French warplanes have launched 30 airstrikes on more than a dozen Islamic State targets in Raqqa, activists in the Syrian city have said.

The raids were France’s first retaliation to Friday’s coordinated attacks in Paris claimed by Isis, in which at least 129 people were killed.

Residents said the targets bombed in the de facto capital of the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate included the local Isis political office, the southern entrance to the city and a military camp.

“The French airstrikes were precise and targeted Daesh positions,” said one activist, using an Arabic acronym for Isis. “They hit Isis headquarters and camps that have ammunition warehouses as well as vehicles and [Isis] members.” [Continue reading…]

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