Guardian: Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and Syria on ‘unprecedented scale’ – UN

Imagine: the uber-leftist, Israel-hating, pro-jihad Guardian is reporting this, and it is written by Spencer Ackerman (!) no less — the hard-Left propagandist whose “exposes”  of U.S. government training materials led to Obama’s wholesale purge of any true information about jihad and Islamic supremacism from those materials.

And the report cited is from the UN (!), which is driven by the largest world body, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a collective of 56 Muslim countries and the PA  — whose hatred of Israel is obsessive, whose every resolution targets Israel, avoids jihad at all costs. It has issued this report on “foreign jihadists flocking” to the Middle East.

No mea culpas, no apologies for all the blood on their hands for carrying water for me most savage and extreme ideology on the face of the earth.

Approximately 28,000 pro-Islamic State twitter accounts were created in the aftermath of the jihad beheadings of two American reporters.

Finally, after years of silence or worse complicity, the enemedia is now reporting on the growing number of Muslims from the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia who are flocking to the Middle East to wage jihad (exhorted to go by recruiters, such as this German Muslim), but in none of the coverage do they discuss why these young Muslims are leaving their homes to wage war in the cause of Islam.

Every article covering Muslims flocking to the Middle East to wage jihad avoids the story, and instead waxes poetic about how peaceful Muslims are and how Muslim leaders condemn “the actions of ISIS.” But they never ask these Muslim leaders what they are doing to reform Islam and expunge the Quran of its violent teachings. Their disingenuous condemnations are of a particular savage action (i.e., a beheading) but never the motive behind it.

The mainstream media are still much more concerned with “Islamophobia” than with jihad savagery. But in reality, the only people spreading Islamophobia are the Muslims who are slaughtering, beheading and violently converting non-Muslims in the cause of Islam.

At the risk of repeating myself for the umpeenth time, this war is ideological. It’s religious and political. Because Islam is political. Nationality, race, sex, ethnicity, borders, hair color, shoe size are irrelevant. It is Islamic jihad. That is the common thread. Holy war. Period.

Rappers in Germany, doctors in Glasgow, chemical engineering students in Canada, heart surgeons in Saudi Arabia, university students in Britain, imams in America, herdsmen in Nigeria and so forth – what brings these wildly different people together? Jihad. From the Sahara to the Kalahari, London to Lisbon, Manhattan to Madrid, Bali to Boston, Tiananmen Square to Thailand, Myanmar to Malaysia, Nairobi to Nigeria ….. no matter what the background, upbringing, schooling, wealth or poverty, color, what have you, it doesn’t matter. The understanding of Islam and jihad is the same, and it is the motive, the incitement to this monstrous war on the West and the East and all points in between.

If the world was as concerned with the mass slaughter of non-Muslims by jihadists as they are about the fictional narrative of “islamophobia,” we might begin to defeat this enemy of humanity.

“Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and Syria on ‘unprecedented scale’ – UN” Spencer Ackerman in New York,  The Guardian, October 30, 2014

UN report suggests decline of al-Qaida has yielded an explosion of jihadist enthusiasm for its even mightier successor organisations, chiefly Isis
Islamic State fighters

An image grab taken from a video released by Islamic State group’s official Al-Raqqa site via YouTube. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The United Nations has warned that foreign jihadists are swarming into the twin conflicts in Iraq and Syria on “an unprecedented scale” and from countries that had not previously contributed combatants to global terrorism.

A report by the UN security council, obtained by the Guardian, finds that 15,000 people have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State (Isis) and similar extremist groups. They come from more than 80 countries, the report states, “including a tail of countries that have not previously faced challenges relating to al-Qaida”.

The UN said it was uncertain whether al-Qaida would benefit from the surge. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida who booted Isis out of his organisation, “appears to be maneuvering for relevance”, the report says.

The UN’s numbers bolster recent estimates from US intelligence about the scope of the foreign fighter problem, which the UN report finds to have spread despite the Obama administration’s aggressive counter-terrorism strikes and global surveillance dragnets.

“Numbers since 2010 are now many times the size of the cumulative numbers of foreign terrorist fighters between 1990 and 2010 – and are growing,” says the report, produced by a security council committee that monitors al-Qaida.

The UN report did not list the 80-plus countries that it said were the source of fighters flowing fighters into Iraq and Syria. But in recent months, Isis supporters have appeared in places as unlikely as the Maldives, and its videos proudly display jihadists with Chilean-Norwegian and other diverse backgrounds.

“There are instances of foreign terrorist fighters from France, the Russian Federation and and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland operating together,” it states. More than 500 British citizens are believed to have travelled to the region since 2011.

The UN report, an update on the spread of transnational terrorism and efforts to staunch it, validates the Obama administration’s claim that “core al-Qaida remains weak”. But it suggests that the decline of al-Qaida has yielded an explosion of jihadist enthusiasm for its even mightier successor organizations, chiefly Isis.

Those organisations are less interested in assaults outside their frontiers: “Truly cross-border attacks – or attacks against international targets – remain a minority,” the report assesses. But the report indicates that more nations than ever will face the challenge of experienced fighters returning home from the Syria-Iraq conflict.

Wading into a debate with legal implications for Barack Obama’s new war against Isis, the UN considers Isis “a splinter group” from al-Qaida. It considers an ideological congruence between the two groups sufficient to categorise them as part a broader movement, notwithstanding al-Qaida’s formal excommunication of Isis last February.

“Al-Qaida core and Isil pursue similar strategic goals, albeit with tactical differences regarding sequencing and substantive differences about personal leadership,” the UN writes, using a different acronym for Isis.

Leadership disputes between the organisations are reflected in the shape of their propaganda, the UN finds. A “cosmopolitan” embrace of social media platforms andinternet culture by Isis (“as when extremists post kitten photographs”) has displaced the “long and turgid messaging” from al-Qaida. Zawahiri’s most recent video lasted 55 minutes, while Isis members incessantly use Twitter, Snapchat, Kik, Ask.fm, a communications apparatus “unhindered by organisational structures”.

A “lack of social media message discipline” in Isis points to a leadership “that recognizes the terror and recruitment value of multichannel, multi-language social and other media messaging,” reflecting a younger and “more international” membership than al-Qaida’s various affiliates.

With revenues just from its oil smuggling operations now estimated at $1m daily, Isis controls territory in Iraq and Syria home to between five and six million people, a population the size of Finland’s. Bolstering Isis’s treasury is up to $45m in money from kidnapping for ransom, the UN report finds. Family members of Isis victim James Foley, an American journalist, have questioned the policy of refusing to pay ransoms, which US officials argue would encourage more kidnappings.

Two months of outright US-led war against Isis has suffered from a lack of proxy ground forces to take territory from Isis, as Obama has formally ruled out direct US ground combat. On Thursday at the Pentagon, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the US has yet to even begin vetting Syrian rebels for potential inclusion in an anti-Isis army it seeks to muster in Syria. Dempsey encouraged the Iraqi government to directly arm Sunni tribes to withstand Isis’s advances through the western Anbar Province.

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