Top U.S. Military Officer: ISIS Has 'Apocalyptic End-of-Days Vision' That Must Be Defeated - Heather Clark - http://christiannews.net/2014/08/25/u-s-top-military-officer-isis-has-apocalyptic-strategic-vision-that-must-be-defeated/
During a recent press conference, America's top military officer asserted that the Islamic terrorist group ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has an 'apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision' that must be defeated by a coalition of forces.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the statements on Thursday as both he and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel discussed concerns about the group.
"This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated," he said.
Dempsey remarked that ISIS must be fought in Syria, but that various groups must join together to defeat the terrorist organization.
"[C]an they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no. That will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a nonexistent border," he said, referring to the Islamic group's takeover of parts of both Syria and Iraq. "And that will come when we have a coalition in the region that takes on the task of defeating ISIS over time."
"They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded," Hagel added. "This is beyond anything that we've seen. So we must prepare for everything."
As previously reported, Muslims believe that in the 10th century, the Islamic Mahdi-or redeemer-went into hiding, but will appear again to make all things right with the world. According to the website Answering Islam, Muslims also claim that Jesus will return as a follower of Islam and will establish the religion on the earth.
"Muslims believe that after Allah miraculously delivered Jesus from death, He was assumed into heaven alive in a similar fashion to the Biblical narrative regarding Elijah," the site outlines. "Since then, Muslims believe, Jesus has remained with Allah and has been awaiting His opportunity to return to the earth to finish His ministry and complete His life."
"While the Mahdi ... is clearly seen as being a superior to Jesus, Jesus is still said to be a leader of the Muslim Community [upon His return]," it continues. "According to the Islamic traditions, Jesus' primary purpose will be to oversee the institution and the enforcement of the Islamic Shariah law all over the world."
Nadeem Walayat of the Market Oracle echoed these sentiments.
"What ISIS and virtually all Muslims anticipate is for Jesus to return on the white Eastern Minaret of Damascus (Syria) gliding in on the wings of two angels and then through much blood and carnage will convert the whole world to Islam including killing all of the Jews, break all of the crosses and live as a Muslim for 40 years, before dying and thus heralding the final countdown to Judgment Day when Muslims expect to enter paradise," he explained.
ISIS specifically seeks to establish an Islamic State in the areas that it conquers, placing the regions under Islamic rule.
Earlier this month, VICE News released a video documentary showing Abu Mosa, a spokesman for ISIS threatening to retaliate if the U.S. interferes with its establishment of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
"I say to America that the Islamic Caliphate has been established," he said. "Don't be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq."
"We will humiliate them everywhere, Allah willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House," Mosa declared.
Inside the ISIS head office: A Who's Who of Saddam Hussein's military elite - Ben Hubbard and Eric Schmitt - http://jewishworldreview.com/0814/ISIS_Saddam.php3
The group's radical chief executive officer of sorts handpicked many of his deputies from among the men he met while a prisoner in U.S. custody
BAGHDAD - As fighters for the Islamic State continue to seize territory, the group has quietly built an effective management structure of mostly middle-aged Iraqis, including many military officers under Saddam Hussein, overseeing departments of finance, arms, local governance, military operations and recruitment.
At the top the organization is the self-declared leader of all Muslims, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, a radical chief executive officer of sorts, who handpicked many of his deputies from among the men he met while a prisoner in U.S. custody at the Camp Bucca detention centre.
He had a preference for military men, and so his leadership team includes many officers from Saddam's long-disbanded military.
They include former Iraqi officers like Fadel Al-Hayali, the top deputy for Iraq, who once served Saddam as a lieutenant colonel, and Adnan Al-Sweidawi, a former lieutenant colonel who now heads the group's military council.
Before he felt the pull of Syria's Islamic extremists, before he started going by the name "Yahya," and before he found his self-described "opportunity for martyrdom," John Maguire was just another Kemptville, Ont., teenager whose sharp wit sometimes got him into trouble.
Former classmate Evan Massey remembers being kicked out of class with Mr. Maguire - known to his peers as "JMag" - who teased him when he struggled to read something aloud during Grade 11 English.
John Maguire's photo in the North Grenville District High School yearbook for 2005-2006.
In the halls and classrooms of North Grenville District High School, Mr. Maguire was far from the strident, opinionated loner those who knew him later in life describe: He was smart, funny and sarcastic.
He and a friend would routinely read the morning announcements over the school's intercom, throwing in a few inappropriate inside jokes and calling out the principal for not standing up during Oh, Canada. He was involved in student council. He got 80s on his report card.
The pedigree of its leadership, outlined by an Iraqi expert and U.S. intelligence officials who have seen documents seized from Islamic State by the Iraqi military, helps explain its battlefield successes: Its leaders augmented traditional military skill with terrorist techniques refined though years of fighting U.S. troops, while also having deep local knowledge and contacts.
Islamic State is in effect a hybrid of terrorists and an army.
"These are the academies that these men graduated from to become what they are today," said the expert, an Iraqi researcher named Hisham Alhashimi.
Islamic State burst into global consciousness in June when its fighters seized Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, after moving into Iraq from their base in Syria. The Iraqi army melted away, and Al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, that erased borders and imposed Taliban-like rule over a large swath of territory.
Not everyone was surprised by the group's success.
"These guys know the terrorism business inside and out, and they are the ones who survived aggressive counterterrorism campaigns during the surge," said one U.S. intelligence official, referring to the increase in U.S. troops in Iraq in 2007. "They didn't survive by being incompetent." The official spoke on condition of anonymity, because of the delicate nature of the information.
After the Islamic State stormed into Mosul, one official recalled a startling phone call from a former major general in one of Saddam's elite forces. The former general had appealed months earlier to rejoin the Iraqi army, but the official had refused. Now the general was fighting for Islamic State and threatened revenge.
"We will reach you soon, and I will chop you into pieces," he said, according to the official, Bikhtiyar Al-Qadi, of the commission that bars some former members of Saddam's Baath Party from government posts.
Islamic State's success has alarmed regional security officials, who say it fights more like an army than most insurgent groups, holding territory and coordinating operations across large areas.
The group has also received support from other armed Sunni groups and former members of the Baath Party - which was founded as a secular movement - angry over their loss of status.
"In the terrorism game, these guys are at the center of a near perfect storm of factors," the U.S. official said.
Al-Baghdadi's deputies include 12 walis, or local rulers; a three-man war Cabinet; and eight others who manage portfolios like finance, prisoners and recruitment.
Its operations are carried out by a network of regional commanders who have their own subordinates and a degree of autonomy, but they have set "drop times" when they open a shared network to coordinate.
For example, the Islamic State responded to U.S. airstrikes on its positions in Iraq by distributing a professionally produced video last week of the beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley more than 320 kilometers away.
Islamic State is the current incarnation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the insurgent group that battled U.S. forces under the leadership of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi before his death in 2006. Much of what is known about the group's current structure comes from documents captured by Iraqi security services.
According to a map of the group developed by Alhashimi, the Iraqi expert, Al-Baghdadi has 25 deputies across Iraq and Syria. About one-third were military officers during Saddam's rule, and nearly all were imprisoned by U.S. forces.
The last two leaders of Islamic State's military council were former Iraqi military officers: a colonel and a captain. Both have been killed - and followed by a former lieutenant colonel, Adnan al-Sweidawi, who is about 50 years old.
Ahmed Al-Dulaimi, the governor of Anbar province, which is now largely controlled by Islamic State, said that all three men had graduated from the same military academy.
Al-Dulaimi said he had taught one of them, Adnan Nijim, who graduated in 1993 to become an infantry officer.
"It was never clear that he would turn out like that," al-Dulaimi said. "He was from a simple family, with high morals, but all his brothers went in that direction," becoming jihadists.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Nijim joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq and was detained by U.S. forces in 2005, Al-Dulaimi said.
"All of these guys got religious after 2003," Al-Dulaimi said. "Surely, ISIS benefits from their experience," he added, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
Other former military brass have also fought for the Islamic State.
Al-Baghdadi's top deputy in Syria, Samir al-Khlifawi, was a colonel. He was killed in Syria by other insurgents.
Derek Harvey, a former Army intelligence officer and specialist on Iraq who now directs the University of South Florida's Global Initiative for Civil Society and Conflict, said that former officers also had professional, personal and tribal relationships that had strengthened the Islamic State's coalition.
The group's campaign to free hundreds of militants from Iraqi prisons was executed with former Baath Party loyalists. These included intelligence officers and soldiers in Saddam's Republican Guard.
Hassan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian expert on Islamist groups, said that while Al-Baghdadi had relied mostly on Iraqis, he had left areas like religious guidance, recruitment and media production to foreigners.
Many of them, like the head of Islamic State's media department, are Saudis. This is at least partly to make the group appear "globalized," Abu Hanieh said. "They want to appeal to international jihadists so that they come and join the battle."
Some non-Iraqis have risen to prominence. Al-Baghdadi's chief spokesman is Syrian. And one group of foreign fighters is led by an ethnic Chechen who goes by the name Omar Al-Shishani.
Michael Knights, an Iraq analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said it was no surprise that so many officers from Saddam's era had joined the Islamic State. Discontent in the military was widespread near the end of his rule, and underground Islamist movements were gaining strength, even inside the military, he said.
Political changes after the U.S. invasion accelerated their rise. Members of Saddam's Baath Party were barred from government positions, and the political dominance of Iraq's Shiite majority made many Sunnis feel disenfranchised.
"After 2003, what did these guys have to do but get more radical?" Knights said.
For those who had served in Saddam's staunchly secular army, that transformation was complete by the time they joined the Islamic State. "There is no one in Baghdadi's state who is not a believer," Alhashimi said.
ISIS about to become a nuclear power? - F. Michael Maloof - http://www.wnd.com/2014/08/isis-gains-support-of-fierce-leader/?cat_orig=politics
Pakistan teetering as Islamic supremacists expand
Abdul Maulana Aziz, a follower of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar who led the infamous Red Mosque rebellion in Pakistan, has declared his support for the newly formed Islamic State, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The jihadist army of the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, had taken over large swaths of Iraq and declared the establishment of a caliphate, governed by Islamic law, or Shariah, that also includes northeastern Syria.
Aziz's backing of Baghdadi is seen as ominous by Western intelligence, since he is close to such groups as Sipa-e-Sahaba and the Tehnik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which seek the overthrow - even by violent means - of the Pakistani government, which possesses nuclear weapons.
Aziz's support for Baghdadi and ISIS comes as Pakistan, a predominantly Sunni country, faces yet another political crisis that threatens the existence of its democratic secular government. Political opponents of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif have demanded his resignation, which he has refused.
His opponents want sweeping constitutional reform to replace parliamentary democracy and confront alleged corruption that has crept into the electoral process.
However, jihadist groups see an opportunity now to assert their influence as Pakistan's political crisis grows worse.
Aziz was thrown into jail after the 2007 Red Mosque attack but later released. Although there were some 27 charges pending against him at one time, the Pakistani courts dismissed all of them.
The government then asked Aziz to be part of a negotiating team of the Taliban, which are an instrument of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Group, or ISI.
The Pakistani government enlisted Aziz in an effort to have a militant interlocutor to negotiate with the TTP, which seeks the overthrow of the Pakistani government.
However, Aziz pulled out as a negotiator with the government, insisting Shariah must replace Pakistan's constitutional law. His recent move comes despite what sources say are his strong ties to the ISI.
Aziz has vowed that Islam will "spread all over Pakistan, then all over the world."
As an apparent supporter of the TTP as well, Aziz backs groups that are actively training jihadists, including Uzbeks, who would give jihadist fighters access to all of Central Asia.
He also is supportive of the training in jihadist Pakistani camps of Chinese Uighurs, who seek to separate the westernmost Xinjiang province from the rest of China and declare an independent Islamic state of Turkestan.
Sources say Pakistan's ISI has been complicit in such training.
The development has also created problems in Beijing, which sources say Aziz blames for the reported death of his mother and brother in the July 2007 siege of Red Mosque.
According to sources, Red Mosque jihadists had targeted Chinese sex workers as part of a purification effort. The Pakistani government, then led by President Pervez Musharraf, bent to Chinese demands and sent in Pakistani troops to storm the mosque, which resulted in the death of hundreds of Muslims, including Aziz' mother and brother.
Aziz, who was at the Red Mosque at the time of the siege, had disguised himself in a woman's burka from head to toe, but he was discovered and paraded in a "humiliating fashion," sources say.
Nevertheless, the Red Mosque encounter showed that Islamic militancy, which has acted as a proxy for the Pakistani policy, especially toward India, was becoming a threat to the government itself.
Aziz's backing of ISIS puts Baghdadi and his Sunni radical caliphate in direct contact with the TTP, China's Uighurs and the Afghan Taliban, which was created by the ISI.
With the Afghan Taliban biding its time until U.S. forces completely leave Afghanistan in 2016, ISIS has the opportunity to extend its influence in that country as well.
For years, Aziz was a backer of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and recently named a library after bin Laden, who was killed in May 2012 by U.S. SEALs in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with the apparent knowledge of the ISI.
"If Pakistan truly has freedom of expression," Aziz said at the time of the inauguration of the library, "then we should be able to express our love for our heroes. And we love Osama bin Laden.
Aziz recently named a dispensary after Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman who is serving a life term in U.S. prison on charges of attempting to kill an American soldier and an official of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Afghanistan.
Sidiqui is an MIT-educated neuroscientist who also is known as "Lady al-Qaida."
Her release was one of the demands by ISIS captors of American journalist James Foley before he was beheaded in retaliation for U.S. air strikes against ISIS in Iraq.
Nearing Midnight: United States of ISIS? - Terry James - http://www.raptureready.com/rap16.html
A growing mantra among some prophecy observers proclaims that the Islamist State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will one day establish a worldwide Islamist caliphate. A caliphate is, in Muslim jargon, a theocracy established on a widespread basis for Allah, their god.
Such a movement is to be led by a caliph, a supreme religious and political leader who is traditionally viewed as a direct successor to Islam's prophet-founder, Muhammad. Succeeding Muslim empires have been considered caliphates and encompass all of believing Islam, supposedly.
Today's world of Islam is so widely divergent that the present effort at establishing a caliphate consists of only an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 extremist, militant fanatics, hundreds of whom are Americans and Europeans with passports to travel freely. These, unfortunately, are being allowed to completely dominate the region. It is the downside of removing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from the scene.
Saddam wrought bloodshed and terror on his own people and they lived under constant threat from the dictator and his two beastly sons. The terror, however, was very limited by the present standards of murderous rampage going on. The Butcher of Baghdad's ghastly death and destruction was reserved for very few, because very few went against him. ISIS forces first murder, rape, and destroy everything in their path, then-after the genocide and other destruction--pose the question: Will you bow the knee to Allah? They obviously are having a high ol' time with their unbridled rage.
One thing sure: Saddam Hussein, if he were still dictator, would make short work of the some 12,000-20,000 demonic monsters determined to establish the caliphate in his territory.
Am I saying we should have left Saddam and his two lunatic sons in power? Not at all. I'm just pointing out the nature of what is going on. Whether Saddam or the ISIS caliph of the moment--or, so it is claimed by some observers, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has written a manifesto declaring the determination to establish caliphate--madmen of the region are driven by demons to kill, maim, and destroy. the hard core nucleus group of some 300-500 jihadists have now attracted an estimated 12,000-20,000 foreign fighters. And, with Al-Qaeda's Yemen branch in the Arabian Penninsula recently declaring solidarity with ISIS, and reports of jihadists abandoning Al-Qaeda affiliates to join ISIS, this terrorist army could double in size.
In recent weeks the "peaceful" religion of Islam has sent tens of thousands of members of the Yazidi ethnic minority and Christians to their deaths, or fleeing for their lives. ISIS has put fear into everyone, from those in the Baghdad government to leaderships of Western nations. The genocidal horde also holds the supposedly most powerful nation in the world under its scimitar-swishing threat.
President Barack Obama made the bold assessment in a press conference last Monday that Islamic state posed a threat to Iraq and the entire region. He ordered a number of supposedly precision strikes by air to give the victims of ISIS time to get to freedom. The swarming Islamist murderers, rather than hunker in fear, made the following promise, saying, "We will drown all of you in blood."
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The Islamic State militant group that has seized large parts of Iraq and drawn the first American air strikes since the end of the occupation in 2011 has warned the United States it will attack Americans "in any place" if the raids hit its militants.
It is reported that the ISIS force is drawing the most fanatic of bloodthirsty militants from every segment of the region. Even many of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard from years ago have apparently found ISIS a means of venting their rage.
While America melts internally with the invasion to our south with illegals, the frenzy of black rage over a shooting that looks more and more like a trumped-up accusation of racism, and the Obama administration gives the go-ahead on the IRS and clandestine services to hunt, harass, and destroy anyone and everyone who opposes the president's policies, an American journalist is beheaded by the Islamists whom the nation's left consistently call a peaceful religion.
With such scant attention paid to the things that truly matter by those charged with the responsibility of keeping America safe, I'm starting to look again at the claims of the alarmists about Islam. It seems sometimes that there is about as much governmental sanity and safety consciousness in America as in the nations of the Middle East, which look to be about to be overrun by somewhat less than 20,000 Muslim wild men.
Maybe, if one considers the way America is going-away from godly morality, away from the Constitution our forefathers gave us to preserve the republic--one could legitimately make the case that soon there will be a caliphate that spans the Atlantic.
However, I believe God's Word. I believe Ezekiel 38-39 foretells the fate of Islam. Just how far that beastly horde will get before Gog-Magog settles their destiny remains to be seen.
Taking the US fight against ISIS into Syria would consolidate Assad and his Iranian-Hezbollah allies - http://www.debka.com/article/24211/Taking-the-US-fight-against-IS-into-Syria-would-consolidate-Assad-and-his-Iranian-Hizballah-allies
British and German intelligence sources reported Saturday, Aug. 23, that US intelligence aid to the Assad regime, channeled through German BND intelligence, had enabled the Syrian air force to more precisely target al Qaeda units. These reports tie in with proliferating accounts from Washington that President Barack Obama is on the point of a decision to extend military strikes into Syria for targeting the Islamic State's terrorist base. He has been warned by some top US generals that IS poses a threat to the United States and cannot be seriously engaged without dealing with the group's Syrian stronghold. "We're not going to be restricted by borders," said Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, in a comment Thursday.
debkafile's military and intelligence sources report that there is no confirmation from the ground in Syria that Washington is indeed passing intelligence to Syria through Berlin to help the Syrian air force reach IS targets. The fact is that Syria is falling well short of arresting the IS advance on two critical fronts:
1. Aleppo. The Islamist threat looms grimly over an approaching Syrian-Hezbollah military victory, under Iranian commanders, in Aleppo, Syria's largest city. They have come close to dislodging rebel forces from their last footholds, only to be faced with a new enemy. In the last fortnight, al Qaeda forces armed with American weapons taken booty in Iraq have surged out of their northern Syrian stronghold of Raqqa to capture dozens of villages around the city. Syrian and Hezbollah forces, after completing their takeover of Aleppo, will find themselves encircled by Islamist units.
2. Tabqa Air Base. IS forces have pinned down some 1,000 Syrian air force and military personnel in the Tabqa air base southwest of Raqqa. They are locked in fierce combat. Every attempt by the Syrian army in the last two weeks to break the siege has been repelled by the Islamists. The latest attempt by the new Syrian Republican Guard's 124th Brigade to reverse the battle has not so far broken the extremists' stranglehold.
The fall of Tabqa air base would represent the Islamic State's next major victory after the capture of Iraq's second city of Mosul in July. It would open the road to Hama, 480 km to the west, and the main highways to Syria's most important ports and naval bases in Latakia and Tartus in the Assad clan's heartland.
In a word, by taking Tabqa, IS would virtually roll back a year of advances made by the Hezbollah-backed Syrian military against the insurgency, and replace the former threat to the Assad regime with a new one from the Islamic State.
So in any decision to extend US military action from Iraq to Syria, President Obama must take into consideration its likely collateral effect - if successful, which would be to rescue Assad's rule in Damascus from the Islamist peril and relieve his Hizballah and Iranian allies of this pressure.
After declaring for nearly four years that Bashar Assad must go, the US president may end up sending a US aircraft carrier to save him.
This decision by the US president would bear heavily on the security of two of Syria's neighbors, Israel and Jordan. debkafile's military and intelligence sources add that, in view of Egyptian president Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi's recent clandestine contacts with President Assad, an American decision to strike al Qaeda in Syria may also influence El-Sisi's calculations about hosting diplomacy for an accommodation of the Gaza conflict.
The Islamic State, A Sample Of Things To Come? - Commentary by Jack Kelley - http://gracethrufaith.com/end-times-prophecy/islamic-state-sample-things-come/
Like most students of prophecy I've been watching events in Iraq for the last several weeks and wondering what they mean. And like most writers on the subject, I've been silent because I haven't been sure that what's going on is Biblically relevant. After all, not all current events are foretold in prophecy. Nor do they all fit on a timeline to the 2nd Coming. But after a fair amount of seeking the Lord on this, I think I finally have a glimpse of something worth writing about.
As I said, there's no end times prophecy into which the current situation neatly fits. The so-called Islamic State (aka ISIL and ISIS) does not currently appear to be some long awaited entity coming to neatly fulfill a popular prophecy, and give us that unmistakably clear sign that we're not long for the world.
Who Are These People?
Let's begin with a little background on this group. Although they seemingly came out of nowhere, they had their beginnings during the war in Iraq as part of al Qaida and gained a lot of their current strength and ability fighting against the Syrian army. The USA was actually quite helpful to them in this regard, having funded and equipped them in the hope that they could topple the Assad government without direct American involvement. During this time they've grown rapidly to a point where some estimates put their current strength at 80,000 fighters, 50,000 in Syria and 30,000 in Iraq, with thousands of new recruits joining them every month.
Some observers have been wondering if they're trying to recapture the territory Mohammed originally claimed for Allah. Others say maybe they're bringing the return of the Ottoman Empire. The Levant, which was originally part of their name (Islamic State In Iraq And The Levant or ISIL), refers to the Eastern Mediterranean and identified their territorial goals as being Iraq plus Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan (see map). But rumors indicate they're actually looking to become much bigger and have the entire Arabian Peninsula in mind as well. We'll just call them by their current name, The Islamic State, or IS.
The leader of IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, seems to have burst on the scene from relative obscurity and skyrocketed in popularity to a point where his admirers speak of him as the legitimate successor to Osama bin Laden. He has quickly turned thousands of fighters from diverse backgrounds and nationalities, including Western Europe and the US, into a formidable and highly motivated fighting force. Those who have researched his abilities claim he is an educated and accomplished leader with impressive command and control procedures in place that enable fast and efficient communications to and from the battlefield. More than just another terrorist group, the Islamic State is a private army in every sense of the word.
Because of this they've been able to roll through cities and towns with remarkable speed. Looting and plundering as they go, they've quickly become the wealthiest terrorist organization in the world. They have modern US equipment they stole from the fleeing Iraqi army, and nearly half a billion dollars in hard cash they've taken from various banks. They now control seven oil fields which they operate to help sustain themselves. By some accounts they are consistently selling as many as 40,000 barrels of oil on the black market, generating about $2 million in revenue each day. The potential already exists to double this production. These things give them a level of autonomy other groups can only dream about. Current internal reports show them with assets in the $2 billion range.
Like conquerors of the Middle Ages they're inhumanely cruel. Mass murders of adults and children involving live burials, crucifixions and beheadings have been reported, as have the wholesale rape of captured women and girls, driving people from their homes, and forcing them to convert or die. In an effort to "cleanse" their captured territories they're wiping out ethnic groups they consider to be beyond conversion or subjugation, whether Christian, pagan, or even Islamic groups with whom they disagree.
In a nutshell they are brutally efficient, brooking no resistance, a law unto themselves, answerable to no one, threatening everyone, primitive and sadistic, evil personified. To say the world is shocked and afraid is an understatement.
What Are People Saying?
To show you why people are afraid, here are some reports I've read in the world press just this week that will help us see how easily current events could escalate into a full blown war.
The Islamic State believes Saudi Arabia is vulnerable and if they fall the whole Arabian peninsula could come under IS control. This has become a stated goal of IS strategists. Imagine what that would mean to the world's oil supplies. The already fragile economies of the world could easily be devastated.
If the Islamic State continues to threaten Lebanon, Hizbollah will have to abandon Syria to protect their homeland. If that happens Syria will fall leaving 50,000 IS fighters on the Jordanian and Israeli borders.
Spanish police just arrested a group of Islamic State recruiters whose goal is to develop a fighting force sufficient to bring Spain under IS control.
The Islamic State already has agreements with Mexican cartels to bring IS operatives into the US. Texas Gov. Rick Perry believes some of them could already be here.
Islamic State engineers are working on an explosive device that can level a whole city at once, and have plans to use it in the US.
Speaking of the Islamic State, General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said, "This is an organization that has an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision and will eventually have to be defeated."
Past and present defense and military leaders are publicly urging the US to form a coalition of nations for the purpose of defeating the Islamic State now, while they can be defeated. They say the longer we wait the more difficult it will be.
What Does This Mean?
Is the Islamic State really leading the world down the path to Armageddon? Some people who don't know the future are beginning to think that way. So let's take a quick look at the future we know is coming because the Lord has already revealed it to us. We'll use Rev. 6 as our guide.
The White Horse (Rev. 6:1-2)
In the Battle of Ezekiel 38, God will so obviously display His power on Israel's behalf that it will cause them to renew their covenant with Him, build a temple, and reinstate their long abandoned Levitical worship system. They will receive assistance in accomplishing all this from an unlikely source. An emerging world leader who will appear to be a great peace maker (Daniel 8:25), but who will really have conquest on His mind, will confirm a 7 year treaty for Israel that will seem to finally bring peace to the Middle East. Daniel's missing 70th Week will have begun (Daniel 9:27).
The Red Horse (Rev. 6:3-4)
But it won't be long before this time of peace will end. Suddenly war will come again, and this time no one will be able to stop it. The time of conquest will have begun, and the goal will be world domination.
The Black Horse (Rev. 6:5-6)
War is expensive. The fragile economies of the world will not be able to absorb the costs. On top of that, war disrupts crop production. Soon the combination of run away inflation and food shortages will mean that for average people it will take all they can earn in a day just to feed themselves.
The Pale Horse (Rev. 6:7-8)
Because there will be no money to maintain them, sanitation and health systems will break down. Combined with starvation this will bring famine and plague over one quarter of the world.
The Martyrs (Rev. 6:9-11)
The conquest of Earth will be for the purpose of enforcing a single religious system on the people and it won't be Christianity. Many new Christians, having become so after witnessing of the rapture of the Church, will be the post-church world's first martyrs. Their souls will cry out to God for vengeance, but He will counsel patience, for many more must die.
The Blood Moon (Rev. 6:12-17)
Great earthquakes, falling stars, a sun with out light and the Bible's one and only blood moon will be the signals that the time of God's wrath has come.
As we look around us we can see most the events I've described growing toward fulfillment. After all, how many leaders in our time have come forward with the stated intent of bringing peace to the world? How many warlords have tried to enforce their will on people? How long have various economies hovered on the brink of collapse? How long has there been severe famine in the world and how many diseases have had the potential to achieve pandemic proportions?
And still, the time is not yet. All these are the birth pangs the Lord warned us about (Matt. 24:8), and as they become more frequent and more intense we are to understand that the end is ever closer. Soon, He will decide it's time. In a flash He will snatch His Church away (1 Cor. 15:51-53), prove to Israel that He's their Champion (Ezekiel 39:22), and bring a time of judgment upon the rebellious world from which they cannot escape (1 Thes. 5:3). At that time the world will understand that what it's experiencing now, as bad as it is in some places, is only the beginning. You can almost hear the footsteps of the Messiah.
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