Islamic State Terrorists Trained in Jordan and Turkey
Its Fighting Abilities & Hardware
ISIL, the Khmer Rouge of Islamism ;MUSTAFA AKYOL in Hurriyet Daily News.
From time to time Washington blatantly announces how it will give hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions in bringing about democracy through its overt organisations like the National Endowment for Democracy et al but it also has the temerity and audacity against all international laws that USD 500 million would be spent to overthrow the recently re-elected Syrian Pres Bashar Assad. It has been suggested that more such terrorists would be trained in, of all the places Saudi Arabia. Who will train them, Pakistani ISI, CIA or British special groups?
It would appear that the training of these nearly 30,000 odd black robed, their faces covered, somewhat like the Tuareg nomads in Sahara Desert, who normally use dark blue colour, was organised in Jordan and Turkey. This number also includes reportedly a few thousand from EU and USA, either Muslims or even some Christian converts.
Islamic State's war machine
According to Metin Turcan , who has a master's degree in security studies writes in Al-Monitor this is how Islamic state jihadis have been fighting. He certainly knows a thing or two.
Although much has been written to explain the tactical military successes of the Islamic State (IS), there has not yet been a comprehensive assessment of how, since June 2014, IS has managed to rule over terrain larger than Lebanon to include 8 million Iraqis and Syrians.
Fluid and decentralized command control structure
IS does not have permanent and centralized command and control structure in the traditional sense of warfare. Unlike contemporary armies of the world, IS doesn't make sharp distinctions between strategic, operative and tactical levels. In their traditional warfare, tactical achievements are the way to achieve strategic objectives. For IS, the basic goal is to score tactical successes and expand on them step by step. Deviating from the traditional approach, what IS fields is a bottom-up command structure focused on a fast pace for small military achievements. At the moment, US-led airstrikes have been mostly against IS communication and training facilities. It is extraordinary that there is not a single control facility that has been hit by allied airstrikes.
IS warfare combines and hybridizes terrorist tactics, urban guerrilla warfare and conventional warfare.IS is adept enough to conduct armor attacks at night and is skilled in accurate firing of their main tank guns with thermal cameras, and is capable of planting improvised explosive devices in critical areas and routes. It wages hybridized guerrilla warfare and conventional armored warfare by deploying eight to 10 men teams carrying out building-by-building, block-by-block clear and hold operations in urban terrain.
After the recent air attacks, IS has dispersed its forces to the extreme. Its teams have been minimized to two or three vehicles and eight to 10 men. Their concealment has been highly professional. IS' executive orders are brief, setting out what the mission is in simple terms, leaving how it is to be carried out to field units.
It is imperative to acknowledge that a typical IS militant is endowed with a win-win mindset that assures him that to kill in jihad is a blessing, but if he is martyred he will end up in paradise also. No wonder IS combatants are high-adrenalin fighters who can kill and get killed without hesitation.
A typical IS operation goes like this: An IS armored unit of tanks or a mobile unit of eight to 12 fighters with two to three vehicles are informed by WhatsApp, a message on Facebook or Twitter or phone text message, and if this mode is not available through their own radio net, to assemble at a certain place at a certain time. This is the first time we are seeing combat units making use of social media in combat operations. Before its operations, IS disseminates propaganda messages via social media to enemy fighters and civilians living in the targeted urban settlements to demoralize and dishearten them. IS operations and logistics units that are thus alerted assemble at a meeting point within two to three hours, and after another 1 ½ hours of coordination discussions and logistics preparations the operation is underway.
IS terrorists trained in Jordan and Turkey
Jordanian officials recently revealed that members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also known as ISIS) were trained in 2012 by U.S. military instructors at a secret base in Jordan, which had first made violent advances through northern and western Iraq, then north east Syria, videotaping executions of civilians and soldiers and even taking over Mosul – Iraq's second largest city.
ISIS' ultimate goal is to create an Islamic caliphate state in Iraq and Syria based on Sharia law. Later IS terrorists also made serious advances in north east Syrian region populated by Kurds, whose fighters have links with Marxist PKK fighters of Turkey. ISIS have besieged the Kurdish city of Kobane in north Syria , close to the Turkish border , creating a very serious and inflammable situation with long term consequences and ramifications for the region and the world.
Jordanian officials claimed these Syrian rebels were screened to ensure they had no ties to Al-Qaeda or any other overly radical Islamic group. They also said that this training had no intention of being used in Iraq.
It appears that these U.S.-trained forces are better prepared than their Iraqi counterparts. Many American-trained Iraqi soldiers threw down their weapons and uniforms or didn't offer much resistance to the invading Islamic forces. The Jordanian officials who spoke to World Net Daily are also concerned this sectarian violence will spill over into their country.
JERUSALEM – Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in Iraq.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it was not clear whether the Americans worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan reportedly focused on use of anti-tank weaponry.
The Jordanian officials spoke to WND amid concern the sectarian violence in Iraq will spill over into their own country as well as into Syria.
WND also reported that, according to Jordanian and Syrian regime sources, Saudi Arabia has been arming the ISIS and that the Saudis are a driving force in supporting the al-Qaida-linked group.
WND further reported that, according to a Shiite source in contact with a high official in the former government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Obama administration was aware that the al-Qaida-inspired group that has taken over two Iraqi cities and now is threatening Baghdad was also training fighters in Turkey.
The source told WND that at least one of the training camps of the group Iraq of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Syria, the ISIS, is in the vicinity of Incirlik Air Base near Adana, Turkey, where American personnel and equipment are located.
He called Obama "an accomplice" in the attacks that were threatening the Maliki government the U.S. helped establishes through the Iraq war. The source said that after training in Turkey, thousands of ISIS fighters went to Iraq by way of Syria to join the effort to establish an Islamic caliphate subject to strict Islamic law, or Sharia.
Jordan
Jordan, the Hashemite Kingdom's survival depends on Dollars from USA and Rials from Saudi Arabia. The late wise King Hussein was born of an Arab mother, unlike his son King Abdulla II, whose mother was the daughter of a British colonel training Jordanian forces. Late King Hussein, whom I came to admire during my tenure as ambassador in Amman from 1989 to 1992, was a statesman, personally brave and generous. During the 1990-91 crises and the U.S.-led coalition war to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait, he adroitly did not join the coalition and maintained neutrality. He was clear in his mind that Washington would need his intelligence, dexterity and political and strategic acumen for any peace process in Middle East, even a temporary one.
I fear for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,
Jordan's history;
When Turkey sided with Germany in WWI, Britain, to protect its Indian possession and the Suez Canal lifeline, encouraged Arabs under Hashemite ruler Sharif Hussein of Hajj to revolt against the caliph in Istanbul (and deputed spy T E Lawrence to mislead). The war's end did not bring freedom to the Arabs as promised; at the same time, by secret Sykes-Picot agreement, the British and French arbitrarily divided the sultan's Arab domains and their warring populations of Shi'ites, Sunnis, Alawite Muslims, Druze, and Christians. The French took most of greater Syria, dividing it into Syria and Christian-dominated Lebanon. The British kept Palestine, Iraq and the rest of Arabia.
When Sharif Hussein's son Emir Feisal arrived to claim Damascus, Syria, the French chased him out. So the British installed him on the Iraqi throne. When the other son, Emir Abdullah, turned up in Amman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, dining in a Jerusalem hotel, reportedly drew on a napkin the borders of a new Emirate of Trans-Jordan, encompassing wasteland vaguely claimed by Syrians, Saudis and Iraqis.
By 1917 Britain's Balfour Declaration had also promised a homeland for Jews in Palestine. European Jews began immigrating to Palestine, and the trickle became a flood with the rise of anti-Semitic policies in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe. After World War II, the state of Israel, carved out of British Palestine, was not recognized by the Arabs. The 1948 Arab-Israeli war allowed Israel to expand its area, while Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt took over Gaza. In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel captured the West bank and Gaza. Thus were laid the foundations for most of the problems of the region.
I am not surprised that Jordan has been a major centre for training the Islamic states fighters. Before I left a man for Ankara in July 1992, I was surprised to see a grand very large new American embassy compared to a very small one in the centre of Amman.
Despite very strong control by the security establishment in Jordan, mostly manned by loyal tribesmen, the country with nearly a 60 percent population of Palestinian origin remains a place of acute underground activity. Daily killings and counter-killings across the border in the occupied West Bank and Gaza make things worse.
Jordan has produced many well-known jihadis, like Ibn-al-Khatib and others like Zarqawi, from Amman's neighbourhood. There are now two new factors. The reported linkages between Jordanians of Caucasus origin and Chechens. Most of them are Circassians, known as Cherkes. It could be a very dangerous development because the Cherkes are the Hashemite kingdom's palace guards and hold important key positions in the police establishment and elsewhere.
Although only about 15,000 in number, a seat in parliament is reserved for them. After World War I, when Emir Abdullah, son of King Hussein of Hejaz and great great-grandfather of King Abdullah II, stopped at Amman to reclaim Syria, which had been promised by the British to the Arabs for revolting against the Ottomans, the Cherkes community, which had been established since the 19th century, was the first to express its loyalty to him. Although the Cherkes community has remained loyal, there are now murmurs of disaffection. The number of Circassians in Syria is much higher, but then Syria exercised very strict control over such groups. Since 2011, thoughtless efforts by the US neo-conservatives to destabilize Syria are having devastating consequences.
The new US embassy in Amman, which I visited in 1992 just before leaving, is like a fortress, replete with underground chambers.
During the 1990- 91 Gulf crises and war, King Hussein adroitly remained neutral, much to the anger of the Anglo-Saxons, but the masses remained peaceful and under control. King Abdullah is not as nimble or experienced, and many Jordanians feel that he is siding with the Americans and extending them help, so there remains a danger to the throne.
We must never forget that what is happening in the deserts of eastern Syria and north-west Iraq and elsewhere in the region is nothing but part of a getting hotter Cold War between U.S.-led West and Russia's Putin, with China, Iran, and many other countries on his side, so far covertly. This Western poker game of brinkmanship is being played both in Ukraine, a country which has been destroyed like the countries of Middle East, on way of further destruction by the warmongers and criminal leaders in Washington, London, Paris and newly installed dictator president of Turkey, Erdogan.
Erdogan has already led Turkey into a civil war with its Kurds, who form 20% of the population .There are also disaffected Alevis, 15%, similar to Alawite Bashar Assad in belief, apart from Erdogan making all stakeholders in Turkey his enemies, like its armed forces, secular elite and businessmen and lastly till December last year, his ally Fatheullah Gulen resident in USA. If something happens to president Erdogan, there is always Gulen and his supporters. Perhaps even ex-President and sober and moderate Abdullah Gul, Erdogan's predecessor .Even at the peak of friendship and alliance between Ankara and Washington, America took no serious steps to control PKK fighters in Washington's enclave since 1991 in north Iraqi mountains, home of PKK fighters .It is also quite clear that Erdogan was just using the so-called peace process to eliminate his opponents and enemies. One by one, and had never any intention of working out a solution with the Kurds of Turkey.
Amb. (Retd) K.Gajendra Singh.16 October, 2014.
