Tag Archives: ISIS

Culture, History, Iraq, Islam, Jihadists, Saudi Arabia

Biblical Monuments, Islamic Monuments………

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“Soon afterward the minions of the self-appointed caliph of the freshly self-declared Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, paid a visit to the Mosul Museum. It has been closed for years for restoration, ever since it was looted along with many of Iraq’s other institutions in the wake of the culturally oblivious American-led invasion of 2003. But the Mosul Museum was on the verge of reopening, at last, and the full collection had been stored there……… … Soon after al-Bagdhadi’s men arrived in Mosul, they told the museum staff that the ancient statues were “against Islam.” But then they left the building. The collections remained unmolested for several days, and the initial reports that the statues had been smashed appear to have been erroneous. The photographs of shattered sculptures that circulated on the Web actually came from Syria, according to local officials in Mosul. But the caliphate’s gauleiters issued a city charter and declared in its Article 13 that “false idols” would have to be destroyed. For this strain of Sunni Muslim jihadists, any representation of the human form (with the apparent exception of their own propaganda videos), any shrine that might lend itself to idolatry, and any place of worship dedicated to the faith of supposedly heretical Shia Muslims must be obliterated…………..”

Before ISIS (ISIL) the other Wahhabi power, Saudi Arabia, had started to dismantle the premier monuments of early Islamic history in its birthplace of Mecca and Madinah. Excerpts from relevant previous posts:

“I have written earlier posts on this topic, how a combination, an alliance of royal greed and Wahhabi dogma has destroyed, is still destroying the priceless historical monuments of early Islam. It is downright criminal what the Al Saudi princes and their merchant allies and retainers are doing. Properties closest to the Kaaba are the priciest, and that is where monuments of early Islam were located. Ergo, these monuments were doomed once the Saudi princes set their eyes on that prime land, within walking distance to the Holy Mosques”.

“It is not only the Wahhabi dogma against any historic sites, nay against history. It is also greed: properties in Mecca that are near the Kaaba are valuable. The tear them down to build expensive 5-star or 7-star hotels and apartments and shopping centers. Greed combines with Salafi dogma to doom the ancient monuments of early Islam. Homes and mosques of the Prophet and some of his early followers have been destroyed and built over with new ‘properties’.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

[email protected]

Iran, Iraq, Jihadis

First Blood? Iranians in the Battle for Iraq……..

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“Iran is pursuing a delicate strategy of supporting fellow Shiite Muslims and preserving its influence in neighboring Iraq—where the government is under siege by radical Sunni militants—without pushing the confrontation into outright sectarian warfare. For the second straight week, influential clerics, who are appointed by the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, used their Friday sermons to denounce the militant groups and support Iraq’s government. But their speeches steered clear of explicitly encouraging individual Shiites to act against the Sunni insurgents……… The country has openly sent top military advisers to help the Iraqi government, and blamed a collection of foreign enemies from Saudi Arabia to Israel and the U.S. for the violence. It deployed at least three battalions of elite Revolutionary Guards units to Iraq, according to Iranian security officials—an action Iran’s foreign ministry denied…………….Yet it has stopped short of sending in large numbers of its own troops and discouraged ordinary Iranians from crossing the border to fight or defend holy sites in Iraq.………..”

So which one is it, pray tell? Did they send three battalions of the IRGC as those usual “unnamed security officials” have claimed or is it untrue as the foreign ministry says? Is Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani of Quds Force in Baghdad as Western and Arab media have claimed for three weeks, or is he in Syria, or maybe in Lebanon, or could it be that he has snuck into Yemen? Can he be lurking somewhere in the Gulf trying to reinvigorate the mythical Wahhabi-created ‘Gulf Hezbollah’ smack in the middle of the royal police states?

Or maybe he is making some deal with the new Saudi ambassador-at-large Prince Bandar over a cold glass or two of Leban (in Gulf Arabic) or Dough (in Gulf Persian).

On the other hand the Iranian news agency IRNA reported that an Iranian citizen has died fighting in Iraq. It claimed he died protecting the Shi’a shrines; maybe, but that can cover a lot of territory in Iraq. It did not specify his military service or rank. Which means that there are now some Iranians on the front lines inside Iraq, and some of them will die. More problematic is that these Iranians will also be killing Iraqis, not a very good prospect for either Iraqis or Iranians. They will not be able to keep it private, anymore than it was possible for Lebanese Hezbollah to keep its casualties in Syria private.  A death and its aftermath are very public affairs for us Muslims, whether we are Sunni, Shi’a, Wahhabi, Sofi, Khawarij, or Episcopalian.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

[email protected]

Iraq, Jihadis, OPEC, Petroleum, Syria

The IS Caliphate and Kurdistan, Jihadist Enclave Facing Two Fronts………

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“Russia is asking the U.N. Security Council to condemn the illegal sale of Syrian oil by terrorist groups and encourage all countries to take “necessary measures” to prevent it. A draft presidential statement circulated to council members and obtained Monday by The Associated Press expresses “grave concern” at the seizure of oilfields in Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusra and stresses that any export or import of crude oil without authorization of a sovereign state is illegal………….”

“Militants, who declared an Islamic caliphate in the Middle East, now claimed to have seized Syria’s largest oilfield. Fighters of the Islamic State, previously known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis), said they took over the al-Omar oil field in the eastern Deir al-Zour province from rival rebel groups. Video footage uploaded online showed armed Islamic State jihadist standing in front of the entrance of the field as the group’s flag flew over a sign reading “Euphrates Oil Company – al-Omar field…………….”

The Wahhabi Jihadists are nowhere near Iraq’s major oil fields, but they have grabbed some Syrian oil fields. Apparently there is worry that they will soon start shipping Syrian oil to buyers. There is a precedent for this: already foreign buyers are eager to buy oil controlled by Kurdish separatists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks and among those mentioned in reports. Already Benyamin Netanyahu, sensing a future opportunity, has blessed the Kurdish ‘enterprise’ when he opined (without being asked) that they should be able to go independent. Netanyahu, who is not known to observe international legal niceties anymore than his neighbors, would not accept the same independent ‘fate’ for Palestinians.

Would an Islamic State be in the future of OPEC? Fortunately not: the Jihadists may harass the vast border region between Syria and Iraq for a few more years, but they may have reached their peak during the last week of June 2014. From now on, it may be the period of pushback in both Iraq and Syria. The hairy ones are likely to get squeezed on two fronts now, with their ‘realm’ getting smaller. If the tribes turn against them, they may be fighting on three fronts. That would be an untenable situation if their suppliers and enablers in Turkey and some Arab states tighten the squeeze on the flow of supplies and fighters. Even the mighty Wehrmacht could not withstand a multi-front war for long.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

[email protected]

Al Aqeda, GCC, Iran, Jihad, Saudi Arabia, Sectarian, Terrorism, Wahhabi

A Wahhabi Neocon Explanation for the Rise of ISIS and other Terrorists…………

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“There has never been any doubt in my mind that elements within Iran’s security services have facilitated ISIS,” Col. Derek Harvey told Foreign Policy, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, a terrorist network-cum-jihadist army that has now taken over territory in Syria and Iraq that, when combined, is roughly the size of Jordan. “When given opportunities to interdict, or have an effect, [the Iranians] have refrained.” Harvey, a retired Army intelligence officer and senior Central Command advisor, was emphatic that any solution for containing the rising threat of ISIS, an al Qaeda breakaway group, must foreclose on the possibility of U.S.-Iranian collusion. ………… Intelligence reporting during this period, Welch added, suggested that Iran was indeed funding “al Qaeda-type elements” in Iraq as well as Shiite militias such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataib Hezbollah, both of which are now said to be playing a major role in fortifying central Baghdad and Shiite-predominant cities and towns in southern Iraq. Iranian documents captured by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2007 did indeed state that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC) was helping Sunni jihadists along with Shiite militias ……………”

This Neocon piece is closely following the Saudi Wahhabi marketed script on Iraq and Syria and the origins of the ISIS and al-Nusra Front. The Saudi strategy has been to divert attention from the fact that these terrorist groups and militias are Wahhabi movements with roots close to the power structure in Riyadh. The fact that they are the products of the triple alliance of: the Wahhabi religious doctrine which distorts Islam, the Saudi educational system, and Saudi oil money.

The extensive campaign to absolve Wahhabism from the modern rise of terrorism has been so audacious as to try and blame some of its primary victims. Some elements of American media and retired former officials and generals have been pushing this as well. Some Neocons are happy to adopt this even if it rewrites the history of Al Qaeda to blame anyone but their Arab allies.

Sectarian fault lines in the Arab world should exist, if they must, only in a few countries of the region from the eastern Mediterranean to the Gulf. That is where the populations are divided, that is where Iranians have made political and economic inroads into Arab territory. That is also where the Wahhabis have counterattacked with the only weapon they can rely on: the sowing of sectarian division and hatred. That is why the Wahhabi Salafis and their allies quickly took over the Syrian uprising in 2011 and made it into a sectarian civil war, drawing in Lebanese factions from both sides (and not only Hezbollah as is commonly misrepresented in Western media). That is also why the Wahhabis sent their mercenary forces to help crush the Bahrain uprising and worked hard to paint it as a sectarian movement inspired by Iran. That is also why the Wahhabi princes early on painted Iraqi politics as purely sectarian (they are sectarian but no more so than in most other Arab countries, and less than in some like Saudi Arabia for example). In doing so, and in sending their money and terrorists to commit mass murder in Iraq, they helped widen the Iraqi sectarian and political divide.

Even in the countries of North Africa, where the sectarian issue should be irrelevant, where there are few Shi’as and the population is mainly divided among Sunni Muslims and some recently converted to Wahhabism. In Egypt, now fully back under the Saudi sphere of influence, much of the political and religious classes occasionally tend to ignore their serious major problems and go sectarian: they profess that they are facing a Shi’a threat. That is the way to conform to this new Wahhabi Arab age. That same trend now extends west from Libya to Morocco.

Is this Wahhabi sectarianism spreading to Washington? Congressmen and senators and (mostly former) generals are eagerly taking sides. Will we soon hear senators discussing comparative Shi’a and Wahhabi theology like so many mullahs and shaikhs and imams?

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

[email protected]

Al Aqeda, Iraq, Jihadis, Salafi, Syria, Theocracy, Wahhabi

The Islamic State: ISIS Morphs into a Caliphate, World Cup Goes On……

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Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (another tale mentions Islamic State of Sham or Levant instead of little Syria) is no more. A new state called The Islamic State was born. A nutjob of a Wahhabi cutthroat who calls himself Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi just interrupted the World Cup games to announce that he has become the new Muslim Caliph (Khalifa) of the new state. Thus he preempted the three other potential claimants who aspired to the job: Turkey’s Recip Erdogan, the King of Morocco, the King of Saudi Arabia. Most of the world did not pay immediate attention as they were in a state of shock at the garbage-time penalty the Mexico-Netherlands referee awarded the latter and the Costa Ricans completely frustrated and defeated the Greeks in Brazil.

A leader of the rival Wahhabi gang, Al Nusra Front, a guy named Abu Maria Al Qahtani, pooh-poohed this declaration by the interloper and pretender of ISIS (or ISIL). Apparently he was angling to declare himself the new Caliph, even with the handicap of a name like Abu Maria.

What should we make  of all this? To start with it is a clever move, not specifying fixed borders for the state. This Abu Bakr (or even Abu Maria) could be holed up in a cave and it would still be The Islamic State to his fans. He could be in jail awaiting execution and he would still be in The Islamic State.

Some tribal Wahhabi Salafis on the Persian Gulf, the usual suspects who funded and preached for the Syrian Jihadists, have already started a support group for this new Wahhabi state. They call it the “Popular Drive for the Nusra of the Iraqi People”.

Cheers

Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

[email protected]

Arab Revolutions, Iraq, Jihadis, Saudi Arabia, Syria, US Foreign Policy, Wahhabi

John Kerry of Arabia: Levantine Illusions of a Good Man………


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“The top US diplomat, who landed in the Red Sea city of Jeddah in the afternoon, also met Saudi King Abdullah a day after hosting urgent talks in Paris with the Saudi, Jordanian and UAE foreign ministers on the widening crisis in Iraq and Syria. King Abdullah has consistently called for greater US military support for the Syrian rebels, whom the Sunni Gulf kingdom has long backed. Following several signals in recent weeks by US President Barack Obama’s administration, the White House said Thursday it intends to “ramp up US support to the moderate Syrian opposition”……….. Ahmad Jarba, leader of the Syrian National Coalition, welcomed the huge US boost to his forces, battling to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “The situation is very grave and there are sectarian leaders ruling the country so we have to have greater efforts on the part of the US and regional powers to address the situation in Iraq,” Jarba said. Kerry said “the moderate opposition in Syria… has the ability to be a very important player in pushing back against (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) ISIL’s presence… not just in Syria, but also in Iraq“………….”

Secretary Kerry’s statement about the role of the Syrian opposition in solving the Iraq crisis makes little sense here. It is like the advice about taking “a bit of the hair of the dog that bit you“. He is bent on going the old route he was warned off for the past year or two. He seems to have just bought some more of the Saudi snake oil about arming and further empowering the Syrian opposition militias.

The Wahhabi opposition in Syria got their start, their money and their ‘seed weapons’, from the same countries Mr. Kerry has been visiting this past week. The sources were on the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Much of the weapons that got the Jihadists their “booty” in land and property and hostages and death is American and European. Weapons supplied by these same governments to the “Syrian opposition” seeking to “liberate” Syria: in one case for the tender mercies of the Wahhabi doctrine, in the other case for the dubious rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. Arming and funding the Syrian militias will not increase the chances of peace in either Syria or Iraq. It is an invitation, nay a recipe, to keep the Syrian civil war going and to increase the sectarian unrest inside Iraq.

Mr. Jarba is reported to be heading to the door: apparently he will soon be out of the Syrian National Coalition, according to media reports. Either he saw the futility of his position or he is being booted by the Saudi princes who will now have to appoint another man of their choosing to lead the “liberation” of Syria for the Wahhabi cause. Moreover, there are Arab reports that the “general” who heads the allegedly Free Syrian Salafi Army, the man appointed and anointed as the Napoleon of the Syrian-Turkish border, will be officially sacked.

Cheers

mhg

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Al-Qaeda, Iraq, Jihadis, Sectarian, Syria, US Foreign Policy

No Pasaran! Political Holding Pattern over Iraq and Syria……

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Events are moving fast in this new combined war for Iraq and Syria. The Syrian theater has cooled down somewhat, relatively speaking, with the regime and its allies regaining the momentum. Now the Iraqi theater of this Wahhabi-inspired sectarian civil war is heating up. The Jihadists of ISIS, and now probably al-Nusra Front as well, have moved the front deep into Iraq, in alliance with the remnant Iraqi Baathists who never reconciled to the new electoral system. Things are moving fast now, as this summary shows:

  • Earlier there was a Wahhabi split in Syria: ISIS Split from AL Qaeda after giving Al Zawahri the middle finger. But that may not last (logically it should not).
  • Al Nusra Front was declared months ago the sole ‘legal’ and authorized halal and kosher al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. Remember only a year or two ago when the ‘moderate’ Syrian opposition and Persian Gulf Wahhabis swore al-Nusra was a moderate democratic liberal movement?
  • ISIS sweeps the Syria-Iraq border, creating facts on the ground, for now.
  • ISIS along with Wahhabi and Baathist allies sweep northern Iraq, creating new fronts with Iraq’s Shi’a heartland and with the Kurdish region.
  • American warplanes reported flying over Iraq again, apparently in a political holding pattern as Mr. Kerry sniffs up and around the Gulf princes and potentates. The Saudi princes no doubt will make a pitch for their own allies inside Iraq.
  • Just to further complicate things, and lest they be forgotten by the world, the Israelis decide to bomb inside Syria again. They seem to have some kind of UN mandate to bomb inside any Arab borders with impunity, and why not since everybody else in the world seems to reserve the right to bomb inside any Arab border.
  • Syrian warplanes are reported to be bombing inside Iraq now. And who would have thunk it only a few months ago when Mr. Assad was on his way to foreign exile as prognosticated by Saudi and hence American media and leaders.
  • Wahhabi terrorists seek to spread the sectarian war by speeding up their activities inside the cities of Lebanon, with several bombings this past week.
  • There are reports that the Wahhabi split may have been fixed by events on the Syrian-Iraqi border, that ISIS and al-Nusra may be re-uniting again.
  • Regardless, I can fatwa now that this ISIS business will not last. As the Spaniards facing the Fascist onslaught said seven decades ago: No Pasaran! And this time it will be true, they shall not pass, unlike the case of the unfortunate Spaniards who were betrayed by the European democracies.

Stay tuned for more…………

Cheers
mhg

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Iraq, Jihadis, Sectarian, Terrorism, Uncategorized, US Foreign Policy, Wahhabi

War for Iraq: the Middle East as a Jealous Mistress……..

  

 Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter When it comes to American world attention the Middle East is a jealous wife. Or maybe just a high-maintenance mistress. Ukraine and Crimea barely had a few short weeks of attention before our region reasserted its place in the sun, in the limelight of misery and hatred and blood. Its supremacy as ‘the trouble spot’ of the world:

  • Pivot to Asia? Maybe so, but you would never know it from the headlines and media coverage. Hillary Clinton came close but fell way short of the Middle East in American media coverage this past week. But that was mainly because she has yet another book out explaining her positions over the past six years.
  • Benyamin Netanyahu? Who is he: we rarely saw his name this past week in U.S. media, and what little we saw was due to the disappearance of three young Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank (the shooting of several Palestinian Arabs got very little coverage: dead Arab youths are of no interest to the West).
  • Snowden and NSA and all that? No doubt the beat goes on on that one, but all is now kosher with Merkel and the Germans.
  • Obamacare, ACA, Benghazi, and Snowden? Maybe in 2016.
  • Pervasive Chinese cyber espionage? Don’t be so rude.

Iraq: the one country the American people, and many American pundits (but not the damaged war veterans), had thought they had left behind, has reared its head again. It was weird, like going back in history. Like going back to Vietnam after 1975. As if D-Day had left some loose ends that needed to be retied a couple of years later. Suddenly Iraq has become a major American concern again. 

Wahhabi Jihadists of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or Levant), a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL or WTF and allies had blitzkrieged the Sunni parts of western Iraq, beginning with Mosul and through to Tikrit. Apparently they did it in cahoots with remnant Baathists: to the barely-concealed cheers of the former victims of the Baathists on the Gulf. Blitzkrieg is supposed to be un-Islamic, a heathen style of war only reserved for non-Muslims. Only Germans and Israelis are supposed to wage such heathen war. But the Salafi terrorists, flush with money from the Persian Gulf princes and oligarchs and volunteers from Arab and Western countries, went on a rampage. They took several Sunni towns and performed the obligatory mass killings, lining up thousands of Shi’a (and likely some Sunni) soldiers and employees of the Iraqi state, having them dig up their own mass graves, and mowing them down with very un-Islamic machine guns. In the best tradition of the German Nazi SS and their auxiliaries of World War II. 
We don’t know anymore of what else is happening now in Mosul and other places where the terrorists have taken over. There has been direct media silence for a few days since the early Wahhabi surge (not a pun). There is no first-hand media presence. Which might mean the new ghazis, the conquerors are taking the next logical step: ‘cleaning house, ethnically or otherwise’.
Cheers
mhg
Iraq, Jihad

Iraq: Rumors of War and Politicking at a Convenient Time……

      

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CNBC reporter this morning in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan: the Obama administration is trying to pick an alternative to Al Maliki to be Iraq’s next prime minister.
It does seem suspicious all his recent flurry of military and terrorist and political moves, the timing of it all. That the terrorists of the ISIS and Baathist remnants in northern Iraq started their assault on Iraq just after the elections. Just as they were haggling to pick a new government. Was it time to affect the politics? Was it aimed to get rid of Al Maliki? Did they coordinate it with brotherly and sisterly (and maybe motherly) neighboring despotic Arab regimes who facilitate the financing and pull their strings? You betcha…………

Saudi-backed Iyad (or is it Ayad) Allawi, the perennial quasi-Baathist candidate is out in public again. He is publicly pissed at the Americans for not making him prime minister of Iraq in 2009-10 when he could not get enough parliamentary votes to form a quasi-Baathist government. That Saudi-Qatari-UAE attempt at a political coup in Baghdad failed, as I had fatwa-d that it would. Allawi is railing at foreign (meaning Iranian) influence in the Iraqi government, even as he has been trying to get foreign powers, the U.S. and Gulf princes, to get him the job of prime minister of Iraq. His chances of ever getting the job would almost certainly require another American invasion of Iraq: that is how he got appointed to the (unelected) job last time.

 

Cheers

mhg

[email protected]

Al Aqeda, Finance, GCC, Iraq, Jihad, Syria

Economics of Terrorism in Iraq and Syria: Follow the Money if You Can………

      

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“The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region……….. But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime. “Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”…………..”


The money, it all comes down to the money. Any army or militia needs a source of money: zealotry alone is useless. God will surely not help an army or militia that is flat broke. Thousands of Wahhabi terrorists in Iraq and Syria would not function long without money, a lot of money. It is not money from captured oil fields in Iraq and Syria. It is not from taxes in impoverished western Iraqi regions. It is not locally printed money. It is not from ransoms paid for hostages: most of the hostages are poor pilgrims or soldiers who can’t afford a ransom. It is hard currency, mainly U.S. dollars. I have posted on this in the past, more than once. Yet nobody seems able to discover the exact source and route of the money. Correction: we can guess the sources of the money, but nobody wants to come out and say it publicly and do something effective about it. And who has that kind of money, to spend many millions without having to get anyone’s approval?

In the case of Kuwait the writer exaggerates: it has been the pro-Wahhabi elements of the private sector that aid and abet the Jihadis, rather than the government. In the case of Qatar and Saudi Arabia (and possibly the UAE) the situation is different: the princes and potentates started throwing money and weapons at the Jihadis in Syria early on. Some of the same princes and potentates are still at it, financing the terrorists even as official policy seems to be against it. Instability in Iraq has always been part of the strategy of the princes and oil potentates.………… 

Here is what I posted one year ago about The Economics of Jihad in Syria:
“Local Kuwait media report that the tribal Islamist opposition has called for a mobilization for war in Syria (they called it for Jihad in Syria). A bunch of former opposition tribal Islamist MP’s held a sort of tribal charity ball but stag, a large gathering of men to start a campaign to raise money to equip and arm 12 thousand ghazis (ghazi is Arabic for invader, raider, meaning here Jihadi) for Syria. They have called for every family (that listens to them) to equip and arm one Mujahid to go to Syria to fight. One of them suggested that 700 Dinars (about US $2400) would prepare and send a Jihadis to battle in Syria. (No idea if this amount covers one or multiple multiple wives). That of course does not cover the current cost of operations: food, bullets, shelter, bribes, booze, weed, women, etc. All that minus current revenues: whatever can be looted as war booty or obtained as ransom for hostages the FSA and Jihadist militias like to take (they are avid hostage-takers and are still holding two Christian bishops and two other priests hostage, in addition to many Alawis and Shi’as). Some of the well-heeled tribal Islamists at the gathering contributed new non-Islamist cars. One gave a new heathen-made Chevrolet Suburban, another donated a new infidel-made Mercedes-Benz. One former member of parliament got a family to pay for the arming and equipping 28 ghazis (raiders or Jihadis) for Syria. Another former member deposited funds to cover three Jihadis………………”

If $2,400 will send one terrorist fighter to Syria or Iraq. One thousand jihadis would cost $ 2.4 million (as a starting fixed cost, not counting current expenses). Add all other expenses over time, and you do the rest of the math. Take into consideration that the $2,400 might just be a ‘teaser’, a hook, to get things started.

Cheers

mhg[email protected]