Islamic State Becoming Urban Guerrilla Threat

Social media is the answer when pushing back on the AQ/IS info war side of the house that drives their recruitment and global marketing image.

This was finally picked up by a single MSM outlet but had been extensively covered in social media initially with little to no response from MSM.

Teenage Austrian 'poster girl for the Islamic State' killed by group for trying to escape - Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/12014951/Teena… …

MSM across all countries should be doing the following messaging but some how it isn't...young Muslims who might be duped into thinking ISIS is cool, need to learn from this. They're cold blooded killers in the name of Islam--use the truth of the event as the focal point of the messaging.

An interesting thesis..how intertwined is Assad and the IS in the attacks on France....???

Anonymous ‏@YourAnonCentral
Hours after the #Paris attacks Assad in a message to France said "he had warned the West not to meddle in #Syria’s affairs."

Assad Fueled The Al-Qaeda [#ISIS] Surge That Has Kept Him In Power. via @MichaelKelleyBI
http://www.businessinsider.com/assad-helped-build-al-qaeda-in-syria-2014 …

"We said do not mess with the fault-line in #Syria, it’s going to be an earthquake that will reverberate around the world,” Assad to EU.

Interesting article over at WOTR comparing IS to Hezbollah: http://warontherocks.com/2015/11/the-islamic-state-can-walk-and-chew-gu…

ISIS Jihadi Helpdesk Customer Log, Nov. 20

From NBC News come revelations that ISIS has its very own web-savvy, 24-hour Jihadi Help Desk manned by a half-dozen senior operatives to assist foot soldiers in spreading their message far and wide. My first reaction to this story was disbelief, then envy (hey, where the heck is my 24/7 support?). But soon enough I forgot about all that, my mind racing with other possibilities.

jihadihelpdeskImagine the epic trolling opportunities available to a bored or disgruntled Jihadi Help Desk operator. For this persona, we need to reach way back into the annals of Internet history to the Bastard Operator from Hell (BOFH) — a megalomaniacal system administrator who constantly toyed with the very co-workers he was paid to support. What might a conversation between a jihadi and the Bastard Jihadi Operator from Hell (BJOFH) sound like?

[RECORDED MESSAGE]: Thank you for contacting the ISIS Jihadi Help Desk. We are currently experiencing higher than normal call volume. Please wait and your inquiry will be answered in the order that it was received. This call may be monitored for customer service and Jihadi training purposes.

JIHADI: [audible sigh].

[MANY ISIS ANTHEMS RIFFING OFF OF BILLBOARD 100 HITS LATER…]

BJOFH: ISIS Jihadi Helpdesk, Mohammed speaking, how may I help you?

JIHADI: Finally! I thought someone would never answer! I’ve been sitting here sweating bullets and listening to the same infidel hold music over and over.

BJOFH: My sincerest apologies, sir. Someone hit “reply-all” on an operational email, and that really lit up our switchboard this morning. Also, most of the encrypted email services we use are under attack by some other terrorist group and are offline at the moment.

JIHADI: Too bad for them. Seriously, you guys call this 24/7 support?? I’ve been parked on this couch for hours waiting for some son-of-a-dog to answer!

BJOFH: [Pause. Deep breath.]…Well, you’ve got me now, sir. What can I do to…er…for you?

JIHADI: Right. So I’ve got a hardware problem. This itchy vest I have on..it keeps beeping, really loud. It’s getting super annoying, and I’ve got to have some quiet prayer…you know….me-time…pretty soon now, understand?

BJOFH: Yes, I see. Well, good news, brother! I think I can help you. Tell me…is there a mobile phone attached to the vest?

JIHADI: [inaudible…fumbling with receiver]….uh..yeah there is..Huh…feels like there’s one sewn into the left inside pocket.

BJOFH: So, I’m going to try something on my end. Sit tight, and I’ll be right back.

JIHADI: [pause] Uh…okay. But don’t be gone so long this time!

BJOFH: [one minute later]…Thanks for holding. Yeah, looks like I’m going to have to go ahead and troubleshoot this issue a bit more. Can you do me a favor and call me from the vest phone?

JIHADI: Uh..wait, through the jacket, you mean?

BJOFH: Yes, sir. My desk line here is 1-866-GO-JIHAD.

JIHADI: Okay. But it’s kinda hard to reach the keypad. So many wires….

BJOFH: Totally fine, sir. Take your time. You should still be able to feel the phone’s keypad through the pocket fabric.

JIHADI: Okay yeah, I think I got it. So how do I send the call?

BJOFH: If your vest is the model I think it is, the “Send Message” button should be the big one in the middle above the keypad.

JIHADI: [Fumbling with the phone] Okay, is it ringing?

BJOFH: [Line rings in background] Yep, got it, thanks. Okay, now I’m going to call you back.

JIHADI: Okay.

BJOFH: Great. Do me a favor and just wait until the phone rings at least once before answering, okay?

JIHADI: Fine, whatever. Just…today, maybe?

BJOFH: You bet. Go JIHAD!

JIHADI: Wait a second! how do I answer…[fumbling with the receiver]

[Vest phone rings. Line goes dead].

All satire aside, the jihadis take their security and privacy seriously, shouldn’t you? Wired.com has helpfully published a translated 34-page Opsec Guide (PDF), a document originally printed in Arabic and intended to introduce newbies to basic operational security measures, techniques and technologies. It’s not the easiest tutorial to read, but it does reference a great many resources worth investigating further.

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ISIS-OPSEC-Guide.pdf

BTW--the OPSEC manual was previously done for journalists traveling to the ME or working in war zones--IS just modified it for themselves and re-released it.

We refuse to call the Islamic State what it really is: the current iteration of Sunni supremacism.

IS is merely taking over from Al Qaeda, albeit while learning from its mistakes.

It fields conventional forces in Syria and Iraq, unconventional forces beyond its "borders", and can motivate lone wolves and sympathizers among the Muslim diaspora.

Even if we destroy the physical Islamic State, its ideology will persist.

What do Muslims offer the West that it can't get from any other group of people? Why do we have to lose our freedoms and manage a low-level civil war out of misguided tolerance?

Duplicate

We way to often underestimate the power of social media especially if it is used to block Russian and IS information warfare.

Tonight in Brussels there is a massive police and military operation underway--police asked for a social media blackout but the supporters of IS starting tweeting under various hashtags info concerning the locations and what was ongoing---social media started a blockade of those specific hashtags in order to assist the police....

BrusselsAlert People are now posting cats, dogs even hedgehogs to suppress any leaks about ongoing operations

brusselsattack #brusselslockdown #brusselsalert #niveau4 we have won operations are OVer WE HAVE WON - channels blocked

in half an hour press conference #bruissels #terrorism operation over NO MORE cats needed we have won

mailforlen @mailforlen
stop sending cats and pics the operation is over we have won #brusselslockdown all arrested

mailforlen @mailforlen
thank you for sending cats all that time - the world has learned now how to block channels quickly #brusselslockdown

There is an inherent power in social media that nation states are seemingly unwilling to use against IS.....why is that????

I have been saying this over and over here at SWJ….and Obama has never SEEN this coming at us???....…he is a President, has a DNI, has a 700 person NSC and the entire IC AND yet he twisted arms for his Iran Deal which was strictly for his legacy………

BREAKING: Head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards says country is leading a “single Islamic nation” in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Source for this item can be found here
http://www.ana.ir/news/66358

Iran coming out of the closet now: Their Islamic Revolution to spread throughout the Middle East.

How many times in say the last five years have I mentioned here at SWJ that Iran has since Khomeini stated his concept of the “revolutionary Islam” prior to the takeover of our Embassy and it’s declared defense by the IRGC as well as the Khomeini stated “Green Crescent”—the current Iran is not about to change.

Regardless of what the dreamers inside the WH think….

What we are now seeing and it is the core believe of IS--they are equally at war with the Shia and Iran as well as the West...we should never forget that tidbit......

We in the West are really bad about understanding lessons from history....Europe has had it's issues with urban terror groups since the PLO, PFPL under Habash (which by the way is now fighting along side Assad in Syria against Sunni's), the IRA, Red Brigade and the well known German RAF.

One thing we have forgotten is how these groups morphed a number of times and many had left wings that fractured into other urban guerrilla groups ie RAF which split into two/three groups.

Why we assume that IS is not right now a UW practitioner is beyond me---urban warfare is just another tactic in UW. They initially joined the Iraqi Salafist UW efforts in 1991 until they branched out on their own and have been up to now quite successful in using UW.

Urban guerrilla groups have a large number of single points of failure--they need safe houses, money, ID documents that can pass police checkpoints, transportation and logistical support. BTW---a number of failures in this chain is what led police to roll up the Paris and Brussels groups.

We also forget that there is an Salafist element called Takfiri that is used to mask their urban activities and we saw this very clearly in the second group of IS that was rolled up. We need to fully understand what Takfiri's are capable of--the entire 9/11 group were Takfiri as that wing of Islam allows them to mask themselves into a society --practically not acting like Muslims but rather like you or me as they fight their "near enemy".

But in the case of IS---there is one critical point of failure--informational warfare--it is used as their recruitment tool, their funding flows, their messaging both internal to local supporters and it defines their image.

Europe has a long history of using police and security agencies to push back --they just need to get organized --ie it is hard to get 28 different police and security services all on the same page on the info sharing side.

They did not see nor did we see the coming UW tactic urban warfare--but actually it has been there all the while--I am actually surprised that IS did not go to it sooner.

Europol was/is a beginning but that was focused on criminal activities not urban warfare.

I am not pessimistic as many are---we just need to understand that this is a long hual thing and that there will be wins and loses and that the urban guerrilla will morph to face the police challenge but in the end they will disappear as did RAF and the IRA because and it is from experience that I speak--it is hard to live in the underground and not eventually be found---it is all about tradecraft and IS still has not yet achieved that-if they get there first we might in fact be in trouble. Yes senior members of IS were trained by the KGB and MfS but that was for internal security not urban warfare--two completely different games.

BUT to truly win one must control the informational warfare battle space and there we are doing rather badly--we have virtually turned it over to the user of UW and their political warfare goals.

Duplicate.....

I recall Dr. Kilcullen a few years stating the obvious to the military, which was that in addition to nation building you still have kill your adversaries. Our COIN doctrine and liberal biases based on our Western upbringing turned our military into fools, as evidenced by making civil affairs the primary effort during certain points of war under the assumption we convince people to embrace our way, and embrace the flakey governments we helped form. All the while keeping our adversaries freedom of movement to strengthen and spread. We forgot we were at war, and confused political legitimacy with defeating/suppressing real threats to our security interests. This problem is compounded by the legacy of effects based targeting that still haunts our operational approach. An approach that assumes a minor targeting effort against select targets will make a system collapse. This has never been the case, yet we continue to believe it. Our restraints for rapidly degrading ISIL are self-induced by our national leadership's belief in a strategy based on false premises.

Paris was a tragedy, but is also an opportunity to generate the necessary political will to reduce this threat to a manageable level in relatively quick order. It won't happen overnight, and the long term defeat will not be easy. Fortunately, senior and knowledgeable administration members are speaking out. Quotes are from two articles in the SWJ News Roundup.

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/terrorism%E2%80%99s-wicked-parad…

"If your job is to protect the security of others, inaction is never the right answer--and so called "long-term solutions" ring pretty hollow. We are not dealing with individuals who can be "nudged" into better behavior; this generation is lost. And kinetic action always offers the opportunity that you will scare off some of their less-committed members and perhaps kill off some of their more talented leaders. But beware of the politicians and experts who think any of this is easy."

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/obama-isis-strategy-afgh…

Mike Vickers speaks out, and provides several recommendations. I'll only quote a couple.

"First, time is not on our side. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is not just a regional insurgent army. It is a terrorist group with global reach and the leader of global jihad".

"Second, we need a “Syria-first” strategy to replace the Iraq-first strategy we’ve been pursuing."

"Airstrikes are not enough, however. We must leverage the moderate Syrian opposition—and they do exist in the tens of thousands—to dislodge ISIL and Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, from their territory."

"Dislodging ISIL and Al Qaeda from Syria does not mean, moreover, that U.S. forces have to occupy and try to pacify the country afterward."

He then goes into a discussion on what our position on Russia should be.

This is a war, and pretending it is not has led us to a misguided strategy for dealing with ISIL. Yes, there are all sorts of complexities, and an uncertain tomorrow, but it is increasingly apparent to most of the world, that a world without ISIL will be better than a world with ISIL.

As promised here is the General David Deptuls USAF ret. interview on "Desert Drizzle" vs "Desert Storm" he asks some very sharp questions about why this even happend in the first place. Sorry about the long lead in to the actual interview but no way to edit it out.

http://www.msn.com/en-ph/video/watch/gen-deptula-we-cant-stop-isis-with…

Yes, it is a good model. Warden never said or meant for it to be perfect. But it is truly amazing all the absolute crap that is out there about the 5 rings and Warden. I am trying to get a recent clip of USAF ret. General David Deptula("who used to work with Warden back in the Desert Storm Days) on how we "should be using Airpower against ISIS". Will post as soon as I can get it

I can't speak for what would be the best strategy for fighting isis in Iraq and Syria. But as for Europe becoming a war zone, the mass immigration of muslim's needs to be dealt with very soon. The unwillingness to stop this invasion by the govt.'s of Europe, some even after the events in Paris, like Germany needs to change. In fact the integrity of some of these govt.'s may come into question soon because of there peoples anger at there govt.'s apathy of this issue. It may even lead to a back lash with mass persecution and deportation of migrants.

Of course, we should be using Warden's 5 rings of Victory!