ISIS Jihadists Are Becoming A Full-Blown Army

Iraq’s Terrorists Are Becoming A Full-Blown Army -- Jamie Dettmer & Jamie Dettmer, Daily Beast

The group so extreme it got booted from al Qaeda controls huge swaths of territory. And now ISIS has got the heavy weaponry to back it up.

With the fall of Mosul on Tuesday, Iraq’s al Qaeda offshoot has not only seized the country’s second-largest city, it appears it also has come into possession of the heavy weapons and vehicles the U.S. military had provided Iraq’s military to fight them.

That’s terrible news for America’s few allies left in Iraq as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) morph from terrorist menace to a military force capable of over-running an army the U.S. military trained for nearly a decade. It also calls into question the American government’s decision to withdraw the last of its forces from Iraq in 2011. Three years later that withdrawal now appears premature.

ISIS themselves appear to be pleased with the booty of the Mosul campaign. On Twitter the group posted a photo of a beaming Umar al-Shishani, a senior ISIS commander, examining a captured American-made Humvee, which had already been driven from the Iraqi city to the eastern Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor. “Umar al-Shishani inspects spoils of war…Looks quite pleased,” the tweet said.

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My Comment: ISIS controls huge swaths of territory .... and after seizing yesterday's Iraqi military armories in Mosul .... they now have the weapons and means to arm thousands of their followers. For all intents and purposes .... ISIS is now not only a full blown army, but one that is capable of fighting the Syrian military and the Iraqi military at the same time.