Islamic State's Rapid Growth Caught U.S. By Surprise -- L.A. Times
As Islamic State fighters from Syria blitzed across northern Iraq this summer, they swept thousands of fresh recruits from Iraqi Sunni tribal militias, prisons and insurgent groups into their ranks, nearly tripling the size of their armed force and catching U.S. authorities by surprise, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday.
Dismantling the lethal new alliances in Iraq will be a key focus as the Obama administration scrambles to push back the fast-growing extremist army, which has achieved major military gains, shows sophisticated command and control, and is exceedingly well-funded, the intelligence officials said.
In coming days, the U.S. military "will be more aggressive and shift a focus from what has been, to date, primarily defensive in nature to offensive in nature," said Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary.
Read more ....
My Comment: The spin-masters are already trying their best to paint the CIA as clueless in understanding the growth and threat of the Islamic State .... ISIS can 'muster' between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters, CIA says (CNN). But this blog .... and news organizations .... have been consistent in documenting and explaining the growth of ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State for the past year .... information that I am sure that the CIA and other relevant U.S. intelligence agencies had .... if not in more detail.
I contend that the ones who should be blamed for being caught by surprise is the White House and Congress. Congress should have asked the hard-nosed questions on what was happening .... they did not. And the White House .... either they denied the threat was real (after-all they have been claiming for the past two years that Al Qaeda and its affiliate groups were on the run) .... or they choose to willfully (starting from the President on down) to ignore the threat. Either way .... the Islamic State has had a "free-pass" from the U.S. for the past year .... and everyone is now paying the price for it.
5 comments:
War news, just a tip there is fighting in Ukraine again, it's near the Donetsk airport, many different newspapers are writing some small notices about it. There has also been talks from Ukraine that the ceasefire is now at risk:
http://www.rferl.org/contentlive/liveblog/25416257.html
http://www.reddit.com/live/3rgnbke2rai6hen7ciytwcxadi
Several separatists and Ukrainian sources are reporting about this. May this be the end of the ceasefire or will both sides ignore this? Have there been any reports of military moments on one of the sides or both?
Also some reports from small newspapers that there are huge Chinese troop concentrations near the Russian border:
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=316277
http://investmentwatchblog.com/china-moves-troops-to-the-border-w-russia-something-smells-bad/
May be rumors but I think its worth looking into, do you know something about this? Do you have any friends who are working near the Russian-Chinese border? If this is true i think it's collaborative military training since Russia has the far eastern districts on combat alert, either this can be a near war which is highly unlikely or it's just some military war games with Russia and China.
Everyone expected ceasefire violations were going to occur. I wrote about it yesterday. For the moment .... everyone is ignoring it.
Chinese military movements are a surprise. I am not aware of it but I will find more information on it later.
Rhaegar .... my girl friend has an emergency at her house .... must go there to give her a hand. I will be updating this news later tonight.
Thank you for your Chinese military movement lead.
"Congress should have asked the hard-nosed questions on what was happening .... they did not. "
I would add the mainstream press. If mainstream press support is worth 15 percentage point to John Kerry in 2004, that is a lot of pressure that the press can apply to or for political parties.
A quick guess is that China and Russia are worried about North Korea. Some people including Chinese academics have said China is going to have to go into North Korea at some point and clean it up. North Korea will collapse or will be too moribund to allow to continue as it is currently constituted. a key point is that China would rather clean up North Korea, then let South Korea clean it up, so they keep a buffer state.
That is unless they can wean South Korea from the U.S. Which might not be too hard with another 2 years of Obama or the election of an Obama clone IMO.
Some people have speculated of a war between China and Japan in the next 20 years. I doubt that they would go to war with Japan at this point.
Or it could be wargames like you wrote.
I don't know but that is what I would look to confirm or not.
A 4th choice is a China Russian dust up. I don't see why that would happen at this point although China has historical grievances as recently as the 1950s and 1970s from what I underand.
I didn't think about North Korea, that could be a good explenation, thank you.
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