ISIS Boldly Announces That Southern Israel Will be attacked in Coming Days - Geoffrey Grider - http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?p=33281
ISIS terrorists in the Sinai Peninsula linked to the radical Islamic State group reportedly threatened Thursday to strike the port in Israel's southern city of Eilat "in the coming days," according to Egyptian media.
"They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance." Psalm 83:4 (KJV)
According to reports, the Islamist group Sinai Province, formerly known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, "threatened to strike the Eilat Port, following coordination with Islamic State's wing in the Gaza Strip."
"ISIS will begin operations against Hamas positions in the Gaza Strip," the Egyptian reports added. Tensions between the Islamist group ruling the coastal Palestinian enclave and ISIS have mounted amid waves of arrests by the former of Salafi-jihadists in Gaza linked to Islamic State.
Abu Othman Al-Mosley, one of the leaders of the northern Sinai group took to the 'Sinai Province' Facebook page, calling for its members to "enlist new members from jihadist factions and the Muslim Brotherhood organization in other provinces of Egypt." In addition, he called for new recruits to immigrate to the Sinai region in order to operate against opposing Egyptian security forces.
In addition, the call urged the ISIS-aligned terrorists in Sinai to "make their way to the Gaza Strip to fight against Hamas's military branch, the Izzadin al-Kassam Brigades, and takeover control of the Strip."
Sinai Province changed its name from Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis after pledging allegiance to Islamic State, the ultra-hardline Sunni group that has seized large parts of Iraq and Syria.
Egypt is facing a Sinai-based insurgency that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers since the army toppled Islamist president Mohamed Morsi after mass protests against his rule in 2013.
No army in Mid East is challenging ISIS - Iran regroups to defend S. Iraqi Shiites, Assad to save Damascus - http://www.debka.com/article/24619/No-army-in-Mid-East-is-challenging-ISIS-Iran-regroups-to-defend-S-Iraqi-Shiites-Assad-to-save-Damascus-
Hassan Nasrallah Saturday, May 23, called his Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement to the flag, because "we are faced with an existential crisis" from the rising belligerence of the Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant. His deputy, Sheik Naim Qssem, sounded even more desperate: "The Middle East is at the risk of partition" in a war with no end in sight, he said. "Solutions for Syria are suspended. We must now see what happens in Iraq."
The price Iran's Lebanese proxy has paid for fighting alongside Bashar Assad's army for four years is cruel: some 1,000 dead and many times that number of wounded. Its leaders now understood that their sacrifice was in vain. ISIS has brought the Syrian civil war to a new dead end.
This week, a 15-year old boy was eulogized by Hezbollah's leaders for performing his "jihadist duty" in Syria.
Clearly, for their last throw in Syria, the group, having run out of adult combatants, is calling up young boys to reinforce the 7,000 fighting there.
The Syrian president Bashar Assad is in no better shape. He too has run dangerously short of fresh fighting manpower. Even his own Alawite community has let him down. Scarcely one-tenth of the 1.8 million Alawites have remained in Syria. Their birthrate is low, and those who stayed behind are hiding their young sons to keep them from being sent to the front lines.
Assad also failed to enlist the Syrian Druze minority to fight for his regime, just as Hezbollah's Nasrallah was rebuffed when he sought to mobilize the Lebanese army to their cause. This has left Hezbollah and the Syrian ruler alone in the battlefield with dwindling strength against two rival foes: ISIS and the radical Syrian opposition coalition calling itself Jaish al-Fatah - the Army of Conquest - which is spearheaded by Al Qaeda's Nusra Front and backed to topple Assad by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
Nasrallah tried to paint a brave picture of full mobilization to expand the war to all parts of Syria. However, Sunday, May 24, a key adviser to Assad admitted that his regime and its allies were being forced to regroup.
Their forces were withdrawing from the effort to shift the Islamists from the land they have conquered - about three-quarters of Syrian territory - and concentrating on defending the cities, Damascus, Homs and Latakia, home to the bulk of the population, as well as the strategic Damascus highway to the coast and Beirut. Hezbollah needed to build up the Lebanese border against hostile access.
But Syrian cities, the Lebanese border and the highway are still under threat - from Syrian rebel forces.
The Iraqi army, for its part, has been virtually wiped out, along with the many billions of dollars the US spent on training and weapons. There is no longer any military force in Iraq, whether Sunni or Shiite, able to take on ISIS and loosen its grip on the central and western regions.
The Kurdish peshmerga army, to whom President Barack refused to provide armaments for combating the Islamists, has run out of steam. An new offensive would expose the two main towns of the semi-autonomous Kurdish Republic - the capital Irbil and the oil city of Kirkuk - to the depredations of the Islamist belligerents.
A quick scan of Shiite resources reveals that in the space between the Jordan River and the Euphrates and Tigris, Iran commands the only force still intact in Iraq - namely, the Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani Shiite militias, who are trained and armed by the Revolutionary Guards.
This last remaining fighting force faces its acid test in the battle ongoing to recover Baiji, Iraq's main oil refinery town. For the first time, Iranian troops are fighting in Iraq, not just their surrogates, but in the Baiji campaign they have made little headway in three weeks of combat. All they have managed to do is break through to the 100 Iraqi troops stranded in the town, but ISIS fighting strength is still not dislodged from the refinery.
The Obama administration can no longer pretend that the pro-Iranian Shiite militias are the panacea for the ISIS peril. Like Assad, Tehran too is being forced to regroup. It is abandoning the effort to uproot the Islamists from central and western Iraq and mustering all its Shiite military assets, such as the Badr Brigade, to defend the Shiite south - the shrine towns of Najef and Karbala, Babil (ancient Babylon) and Qadisiya - as well as planting an obstacle in the path of the Islamists to Iraq's biggest oil fields and only port of Basra.
The Shiite militias flown in by Tehran from Pakistan and Afghanistan have demonstrated in Syria and Iraq alike that they are neither capable nor willing to jump into any battlefields.
The upshot of this cursory scan is that not a single competent army capable of launching all-out war on ISIS is to be found in the Middle East heartland - in the space between the 1,000km long Jordan and the Euphrates and Tigris to the east, or between Ramadi and the Saudi capital of Riyadh to the south.
By Sunday, May 24, this perception had seeped through to the West. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, remarked: "What apparently happened was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight." The former British army chief Lord Dannatt was more down to earth. Since the coalition air force campaign had failed to stop ISIS's advance, he said "it was time to think the previously unthinkable" and send 5,000 ground troops to fight the Islamists in Syria and Iraq.
The next day, Monday, Tehran pointed the finger of blame for the latest debacles in Iraq at Washington. Al Qods Brigades chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani was quoted by the English language Revolutionary Guards mouthpiece Javan as commenting: "The US didn't do a damn thing to stop the extremists' advance on Ramadi."
The US and Iraqi and Syrian armies go to pieces against ISIS drive. Israel, Jordan, Saudis alarmed -
http://www.debka.com/article/24615/The-US-and-Iraqi-and-Syrian-armies-go-to-pieces-against-ISIS-drive-Israel-Jordan-Saudis-alarmedThe fall of Damascus and Baghdad, or large slices thereof, into the rapacious hands of the Islamic State, is no longer a debatable subject of strategic forecasts. Today, the capital cities of Syria and Iraq are within the Islamists' grasp. The Middle East is about to pay the price for President Barack Obama's single-minded obsession with a US détente with Tehran and a nuclear accord. It is the end product of Washington's insistence on playing down ISIS as a formidable opponent and contention that the meager US-led coalition air campaign destroyed much of its operational capabilities, which proved to be an illusion. Equally fallacious was Obama's trust in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its terrorist arm, the Al Qods Brigades, to curtail the Islamist momentum.
Washington's trust has since faded. Tehran too has cooled to the idea.
In March, a group of Iraqi Shiite militias commanded by Al Qods chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani, managed to snatch parts of the Sunni Iraqi town of Tikrit from Islamist grasp. That was Iran's first and last engagement against ISIS in Iraq. After that, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to pull back from engaging Sunni Muslims in an overt sectarian showdown. It was clear to him, that the battlefield was not Iran's forte, but rather subversion, clandestine warfare and limited support for local Shiite surrogates.
As the Islamists advanced, therefore, Tehran cut back on further military intervention in Syria and Iraq and turned instead to Yemen and the Houthi rebellion as its vehicle. This is a smaller arena, which is no less strategically valuable than Iraq and Syria, thanks to its command of the globally important Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb to world shipping.
Khamenei also saw the US president had little appetite for fighting the Islamic State. He concluded that Tehran would be better off saving the Iranian army and Revolutionary Guards forces for defending its borders against potential ISIS assault from neighboring Iraq, instead of wearing them down in Iraq and Syria.
The Iranian leader also decided that if the United States could only afford a very minor-key air campaign against the Islamist terrorists, Iran's air force should not be called on for a greater effort.
All these circumstances combined to tip America over into the heart of the fiercely burning Middle sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. Washington's latest plan to send arms to Iraqis of both sects who are ready to defend Baghdad looks like a certain recipe for stoking the sectarian fire, or even pushing ISIS into an offensive to seize the city.
The Islamists have until now held back from an all-out offensive to capture Baghdad for a variety of tactical considerations. A city of this size is a bit too large for the Islamists to swallow, hold and administer. It suits the jihadists better to hold the town to siege and under constant terrorist harassment.
The most knowledgeable sources in the region can't explain what part the US Central Command is playing as a military factor in any of these conflicts - in particular, Gen. John Allen, whom Obama last year named Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. Some account for their low-to-vanishing profile by their having been preoccupied in preparing a grand campaign for the recovery of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, which is under ISIS rule.
Today, this plan looks like a pipe dream. ISIS has caused a Middle East earthquake after another by capturing Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria in a matter of days. Their alarmed neighbors in Jerusalem, Amman and Riyadh have been forced to conclude that their borders are in danger - not just from Iran, but also from ISIS, and they will have to confront these perils on their own.
ISIS Approaches Israel: Islamic State Loyalists Thwarted by Syrian Rebels along Golan Heights Border - By Morgan Winsor - http://www.ibtimes.com/isis-approaches-israel-islamic-state-loyalists-thwarted-syrian-rebels-along-golan-1931033
Islamic State loyalists in Syria have made attempts in recent weeks to expand the extremist group's territory near the border with Israel, but have been twice thwarted by Syrian rebels along the Golan Heights. Israel has not yet responded to the incidents, even as mortar shells from the battles with ISIS fighters landed across the border into Israeli territory, Israeli news site Ynetnews said.
In the past, Israel has increased its forces in the Golan Heights near the Syrian border when shells fired by the Syrian army spilled over into Israeli territory, the Jerusalem Post said. However, Israel has remained quiet during the past two weeks as rebel fighters from Syria repelled militants loyal to the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
The ISIS-loyalists have so far failed to gain foothold on the Golan Heights border, which would allow the Islamic State to set up a base for operations against Israel, Ynetnews said. Their attacks have been thwarted by the Free Syrian Army, which reportedly receives Israeli humanitarian aid, in cooperation with the Nusra Front, a Sunni Muslim branch of al Qaeda operating in Syria and Lebanon.
Israel views al Qaeda-affiliated groups as enemies but is far more hostile with Iran and its allies. Earlier this year, Israel opened its borders with Syria to provide medical treatment to the Nusra Front and al Qaeda fighters wounded along the Golan Heights, the Wall Street Journal said.
Nusra Front, which has referred to the United States and Israel as enemies of Islam, is fighting the Iranian-backed alliance of Syrain President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah. Nusra Front seized the border area last summer but hasn't attacked Israel.
"There is no doubt that Hezbollah and Iran are the major threat to Israel, much more than the radical Sunni Islamists, who are also an enemy," Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israel's military intelligence, told the Wall Street Journal in March. "Those Sunni elements who control some two-thirds to 90 percent of the border on the Golan aren't attacking Israel. This gives you some basis to think that they understand who is their real enemy-maybe it isn't Israel."
The 1,300-year-old apocalyptic prophecy that predicted a war between an Islamic army and 'infidel horde' in Syria and is fueling ISIS's brutal killers - By Emma Glanfield - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786039/The-1-300-year-old-apocalyptic-prophecy-predicted-war-Islamic-army-infidel-horde-Syria-fuelling-ISIS-s-brutal-killers.html
An ancient prophecy romanticized by ISIS militants warns of a battle between an Islamic army and an 'infidel horde' in Syria which will herald the destruction of the world.
The 1,300-year-old hadith, which is a report of the deeds, teachings and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, refers to the 'horde' flying 80 banners as they take on a Muslim army in the Syrian town of Dabiq.
It warns of a 'malahim' - the equivalent to Armageddon in Christian teachings - in which the Muslims ultimately prevail.
The ancient prophecy is said to be a fundamental part of Islamic State's ideology and is being used to fuel recruitment of jihadists. The 1,300-year-old tale predicted a war between an Islamic army and an 'infidel horde'
The prophecy is said to be a fundamental part of Islamic State's ideology and is being used to fuel recruitment of jihadists who believe they are on the 'cusp of history'.
ISIS supporters on social media have started comparing recent developments in Syria to the prophecy amid warnings the 'malahim' is coming.
Islamic State fighters are said to have drawn on the prophecy even more so since conquering Dabiq in August and the town's name has become a byword for the struggle against the West.
The terrorist group has even named its official magazine 'Dabiq', in which it pushes its extremist views and reports victories.
Supporters appear to be convinced of the prophecy's validity, with one writing on Twitter: 'Dabiq will happen for certain.
'The U.S. and its allies will descend on Syria once they see that the air campaign has failed. That is a promise by God and his Messenger.'
Another, from Tunisia, wrote. 'The lions of Islam have raised the banner of the Caliphate in Dabiq. Now they await the arrival of the Crusader army.'
Shadi Hamid, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, said the hadith is heavily relied upon by ISIS because it 'raises morale'.
He said: 'It is fair to assume that the vast majority of (ISIS) fighters believe in this type of talk.'
It comes as U.S.-led airstrikes continue in Kobani, where ISIS militants have been fighting with Kurdish forces to take hold.
In the wake of the ongoing conflict, President Barack Obama met with military commanders to discuss fears that airstrikes alone may not be enough to stop the fanatics.
'As I've indicated from the start, this is not something that is going to be solved overnight,' he said.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby added: 'Airstrikes alone are not going to do this, not going to fix this, not going to save the town of Kobani.
'We know that. And we've been saying that over and over again.'
The ancient hadith has been passed down in different versions over the last 1,000 years but in all cases it has centered on a battle between a Muslim army and the forces of non-believers.
Prophecy has played a role in the movement's ideology since its early days as Al-Qaeda in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Before Zarqawi was killed in Iraq in a U.S. airstrike in 2006 and long before his movement evolved into ISIS he was already referring to the epic battle in Dabiq.
'The spark has been ignited in Iraq, and its flames will grow until they burn the Crusader armies in Dabiq,' he once said.
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