Out Of Money, Losing Ground And Soon Mosul
What appeared as a rather aggressive prediction in this space sometime this past winter is now all-but a reality. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria will soon have to remove Iraq from its fancy acronym by Christmas. Renewed Iraqi Forces backed by an infusion of additional U.S. Special Forces, bolstered by relentless U.S. airstrikes, and the two-front war being waged by Iran, before and after its historic nuclear deal with the west, and a heroic effort by Kurdish militants, has pushed the severely weakened terrorist organization into end game.
The operative word there is “end”.
It is all but over in Iraq for ISIS. It is dead broke; unable to pay its “military”, which began defecting in droves once the money dried up. In large part this is thanks to the international banking freeze-out on financial institutions heretofore laundering its cash flow. The dramatic reduction of its dwindling brain trust—many of whom were assassinated in the Pentagon’s ongoing mob-like drone hits for months on end—has been reduced to burning oil fields and abandoning the airports that were crucial to its operations there.
The increased and random terror attacks on the sieve-like borders and flimsy security measures in Europe and the highly misguided hits in Turkey, along with the flow of unarmed and wounded ISIS defectors into Syria and Libya, have not only provided glaring signs of its implosion in Iraq, but proves what anyone who has studied the history of not only the Middle East but civilization at large has learned; building a “state” on spastically conceived murders crudely promoted as religious insurrection is a doomed wager. Always has been, always will be.
The operative word there is “doomed”.
A report this week from CNN on a secret underground terrorist anti-ISIS fighting force within the key city of Mosul, which ISIS captured and has used as its capital since June 2014, has sped up the timetable for the death rattle. Using the ISIS model of hit-and-run propaganda, daylight mortar attacks, and ingenious social media meets smart phone network of picking off ISIS intelligence stalwarts and skillfully planting of landmines on main roads in and out of town, with coded messages to frightened citizens to steer clear of planned attacks, is beginning to spook what is left of this mess.
Moreover, this incredibly effective shadow insurrection has been arming the city’s citizens for weeks now with hidden Iraqi Army weapons left over from the chaos following the initial U.S. invasion to rise up once the country’s new forces break through into the outskirts of Mosul, which could be any day now.
The operative words to focus on there are “any day”.
Soon, this gutless turn-tail-and-run into Syria maneuver will go belly up. According to an August 11 report in the Independent, ISIS has been “decimated” in Syria, where it is predictably beginning to turn on itself, another absolute in the history of civilization when stupid lunatics claim to forge a “new world order’ but are really brainless religious-fanatic thugs whose mission statement to break shit is misinterpreted by the dolt class as revolution. A senior U.S. Commander there, Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland estimates that the number of ISIS fighters now stands between a paltry 15,000 and 20,000, down from 45,000 six months ago.
“The enemy is in retreat on all fronts,” MacFarland told the Associated Press two days later.
Admittedly, the Pentagon’s history, whether more recent (Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya) or classic (Korea/Viet Nam/Lebanon) of predicting sunshine right before midnight is dubious, but widespread reporting from Al Jazeera, hardly a cheerleading media outlet for U.S. military operations, has been describing this ass-kicking since mid-February when towns that ISIS was supposed to have locked up until Muhammad comes back, began tanking. In June, the State Department estimates 120 ISIS leaders, many of them mindlessly ran their images all over the Internet for more than a year, have been cut down by either U.S. strikes or its ground forces in the past 12 months.
Does this mean that the west is free of terrorism? Of course not. If anything, the last vestiges of a movement can be expected to lash out in the most radical subterranean fashion. We have seen this already. As stated, the ramp-up of ISIS random attacks (many if not all of them copycat rogue loons with mommy issues trying to impress girls) began once the failure of its jihad was evident. But make no mistake, this caliphate is over. For all intents and purposes, its very existence, based on the bully edict of fear, intimidation and the ruse of its indestructibility, is gone. Long, long gone.
And the operative word here kids is “gone”.
It is actually miraculous it lasted this long. Underestimated, sure. Hatched from a textbook cultural and economic vacuum, absolutely. Flush with funds and an abnormal recruitment in a perfect storm of religious brain washing meets squalor, bingo. But it always had a shelf life, especially when the killing of Americans began and the Turks were dragged into this, and it has reached it. Yet, for militant crazies with no real plan but YouTube beheadings and wrecking shit, it was quite a run. People around here were pretty scared. And that is something.
But the ISIS we have grown to despise and fear is really a shell of itself, and now it will be relegated to that ever-packed ash heap of history. A sad reminder of humanity’s darkest spirit, always ready to appear from nowhere, but really, it was there all the time.
And before long, sadly, there will be another one.
But for now…caliphate out!
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James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. and his new book, “Shout It Out Loud—The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”.
