The ISIL-Assad connection

Sky News:
IS Files Reveal Assad's Deals With Militants

Islamic State forces pulled out of Palmyra in co-operation that has been going on for years, documents handed to Sky News show.

...
Our exclusive investigation into leaked secret IS files suggests one piece of co-operation was over the ancient city of Palmyra.

The files also show that the militant group has been training foreign fighters to attack Western targets for much longer than security services had suspected.

The revelations underscore fears in the United States that a network of sleeper cells is spread across Europe, avoiding detection, and is planning further Paris- and Brussels-style assaults.

IS defectors, meanwhile, have told Sky News that Palmyra was handed back to government forces by Islamic State as part of a series of cooperation agreements going back years.
...
The Assad regime has also been one of the biggest funders of ISIL by buying oil and other products from it.   While they have also sold oil on the black market to Turkey, Puting has only been critical of those sales and not the ones to Assad his ally.

The West needs to rethink its strategy in dealing with Assad and ISIL.  They appear to be two sides of the same coin.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more