Islamic Caliphate

youtube.com/watch?v=12_5GCUY-2I
When I saw this footage I wondered if that’s how people like to visualize Islamic Caliphate utopia.

Considering the turbulent history of caliphate, that was from the very start full of internal conflicts, how will the new self appointed Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi manage to survive and unite the Muslims under his rule? Even Ottomans were plagued with continuous inner family fighting and competition for power. The word itself, caliph, a successor, implies a world of power struggle, a continuous game of thrones so to speak: who’s worthy enough (or better suited) to be the next successor? Not only does the caliphate have to deal with the West, but with itself, as well.

Bakr al-Baghdadi’s sermon: youtube.com/watch?v=R09FmLnWC8E

The Caliph Documentary:
interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/20 … c-history/

It appears, from americna mainstream sources like Time, that Bakr is ex Iraqi Baath and most IC heads are.

The thing is they dethroned the party, but left all of them their weapons and imprisoned none.

Likely IS is just a cheap Sunni (Saudi-US) way of keeping Iran from taking hold of Iraq and Syria entirely.

The USA qua foreign politics is entirely Islamic, sunni, it is the Islamic caliphates center.

Obama is indeed a muslim, in terms of how he thinks, or is thought for. But not one of god, but of oil. Same thing though really - without oil Islam would have been long dead.

It is all about declaration of war on all Non-moslems.

Look, if they manage to unite, we’ll just nuke them. If we wont, Russia will.

So lets hope they get themselves organized, so we can just swoop in and clean up humanity’s genepool a bit. All the most unfortunate accidents of nature hasten to join this organizations ranks.

Living with ISIS:
youtube.com/watch?v=TnPpz9MfbJ8

Sounds like living inside a madman’s dream. I doubt they will ever be organized, which makes it even worse. But I feel for the normal people, baptized in blood bath after blood bath and then bounced around the world like unwanted trash. So many mental cases.

They’ll never accept their cure until they can recognize their disease … much like the rest of the world.

Recognition requires contrast. What does non-diseased look like to them? The West? Has it ever been seen … by anyone?

Good point James.

Yes, an image of health is required.

I have ceased to believe in normal people but yes, pure hell out there.

I do blame their subservience, to religion in this case, but show me a people who arent subservient.

Iceland, maybe.

Iceland is the most subservient pussywhooped country out there. I have absolutely no idea where you come up with these things. You only claim Iceland because you think they all worship Loki(none of them do), has jack shit to do with this thread.

Note that most Muslims do not want Sharia law and are the first victims of this extremist ideology. In the Middle East, local civilians (non-jihadists) are used as a tool for manipulation and terror. And those that manage to escape to the West are often stigmatized and misunderstood by the Westerners. So what is their disease, that they are Muslim? If terrorism is a part of extremist Islamic view does it mean that all Islam is rotten because it can be stretched to that level? You can take any ideology with extremist subset and call the whole group extremist so that all Jews are Zionists, all Germans are Nazis, all Russians are Communist, all major Western powers Imperialist, etc. And even if they’re not, they have a potential to be, so they might as well be.

There is a very serious distinction between being diseased and being the disease.

Just watched the Living with ISIS link you gave. I was wincing bad 88 minutes in at the Al Nursa training camp, the team movement orders didn’t have any concept at all of lanes of fire. They figured out how to lowcrawl, I wouldn’t give much credit beyond that, was a big fat F. They really don’t have legions of trained foreign military fighters, if they did, those guts would of requested that boot camp be shut down, cause their training was worst than nothing.

And that guerilla fighter training MOUT- really? Your main concern moving room to room isn’t to clear it, but predicting where you wannaleap blindly into? Your method for dealing with guys behind corners is to duck your head real quick for a look, not with your rifle, just your head, while up against a thin plaster wall? I’m fairly certain that retard and the fool who trained him is dead.

Ethics is based on good tactics, you lack them, your military is going to bleed guys, and new recruits will have to be lured in with strong leniancies in their behavior, and punishments non-existant until they become hooked with love for the organization. Only then you can punish them. ISIS never got to the point where it could regularly punish troops without mass collapsing morale. Anyone they want to discipline ends up a suicide bomber, or denounced a enemy of Islam and killed.

They are a lot better organized than many give them credit for. I don’t know what this obsession is with claiming they are not. If they didn’t have coalition jets constantly pounding them, they would be a fully blown state. You can see from that video they follow very classical examples of statecraft. They monopolized the food supply, they have a monopoly on the use if force, of public mouthpieces using entertainment mixed with propaganda, they mix soldiers with social relief to make it risky to rebel against them, while equating them with food (conditioned response). They do pre-ops planning, plan on wide battlefields the placement of troops, counter and in turn spread disinformation. I can go on with a lot more from that video.

This isn’t to say they are not extremely fucked up and I don’t support blowing them up, but I’m not going to watch a propaganda piece and suffer in horror. First thing you should loo at is how they maintain their organization, the sinews of Fielding a fighting force beyond just fighting- as simple as how to get guys to piss and shit hygenically, where to bunk them, how they interact with the population, where they draw food and supplies, how taxation and civilian property and organization is handled. These are the first things I look at when studying a group.

From then on, your building a bigger picture of their organization. That Al Nyrsa outfit from the video- they were the ones laying siege to Assad’s military fortresses later in, breaking in, slaughtering all the top military staff. They are the reason Russia moved in. That footage is dated, not 2016. Don’t underestimate them. It is why they are so successful to begin with, everyone underestimated them.

For the very first video- that is just the hadj areas in Saudi Arabia. That’s no different than hearing Gregorian monks chanting to views of the Vatican. It is very common in middle eastern TV. That’s not a image of the caliphate, but the current nation-state matrix of a Said lead tourism business catering to international pilgrims. It wouldn’t be uncommon for someone to quote poetry as flowers blossom in such scenes. That’s what the middle east like- your using poetry reading with absolute violence, they accept both with ease. Took me a while to figure out myself.

Okay, James, what is the disease you’re talking about?

But not enough. Look at who’s fighting who? I see just brainwashed kids, looking for some action, and a chance to be a hero (not that it cannot be so else where). The levels we see there, although effective for their own kind, are very primitive; where actually wearing a body armor in combat is seen as some kind of extraordinary counterintuitive improvement. Did you see that lecture on the importance of wearing a body armor [1:22:23 - 1:24:16]? Is that a logical way to present the reasoning for it? Is that how they taught you in the Army, or is this how they teach it any where else? That wearing a vest is not a sign of weakness, but that of courage. That if you don’t wear it, it shows that you don’t respect the Prophet and your belief in him is not firm. These minds are either completely devoid/robbed of any logical reasoning, or these people are just plain scared. Does the speaker believes in it himself? It just sounds to me like he’s making shit up with an agenda in mind, because you can say the same thing about suicide bombing - do as I say, or your belief in Allah is not firm. This is very cult like reasoning, which brings attention to the quality of minds that willingly buy into it.

Actually, it was even more dumbed down than that, our exhortations to wear body armor, especially ballistic glasses (fancy safety glasses capable of repelling shrapnel).

You gotta remember, in Vietnam, we had flak jackets, quite capable of providing protection, troops rejected it most part. Why? It was hot. Iraq is hot too. Not sticky hot, more like a hot oven, keeping your hands in way too long hot.

Our glasses was very silly, our command sargent major decided several months in advanced we would be wearing them 24/7, if we were seen without them we would get into trouble. His own wacky idea. Well- a lot of guys lost their glasses prior to ever deploying, and ended up buying non-ballistic fakes so they wouldn’t get yelled at, deployed with them, everyone was stealing from one another. I ended up writing my name on the nose of them so I can see if it was mine if someone snatched them. We had a limited market in Alaska that close to deployment.

In the end, didn’t really work. Guys protesting would make their families wear it too, including kids. Sent a ugly signal. Then it was knee pads- turned into a mockery when your in full battle rattle, and have knee pads that aren’t designed for human knees, wouldn’t stay up. They sat strapped to the boots. Even in guard towers, had to have them, in case knee cancer struck. Many guys made fake sappi plates for towers, cardboard or foam inside to maintain the shape.

Reason for that level of entrenched disbelief and cynicism is a direct result of military pedogogy. You have guys in team, squad, and platoon leader positions who haven’t the slightest clue in regards to exhaustively explain why something needs to be done- I’ve seen examples of this being done, but those guys are usually isolated, sent off to “special schools” or given jobs in scouts (basically a infantry battalions special forces team), where the rest don’t have go deal with them. There is a strong distinction drawn between “book smarts” and “practical intelligence”. If your not as stupid and pugheaded as the rest who get promoted alongside of you, your in this first group, and that group flees the infantry- given I can try can’t find work as other than infantry, they leave the army. This is for enlisted men, obviously not officers.

So the enlisted command gets dumber and dumber the higher the rank, and their responses dumber. It comes down to “If I say the sky is pink, and you look up and see it is blue, then God dammit, you better believe it is pink” sort of insistence it works. It works, just fucking works, smart people at TRADOC made it work, have worked out every issue, shut up, quit questioning it, it fucking works.

It usually doesn’t work, especially when they have to resort to this level of reasoning. They are not well trained debaters or philosophers. One exception would be in the Airborne Infantry, the jump masters at Fort Benning. You may not be aware, but the fast majority of soldiers signing up to jump are deathly afraid of heights. I’m scared of heights too. Wasn’t uncommon with the old round parachutes for people in a class to die or be injured badly, they’ve recently modified them, square, fall I think 30/40% slower now, still faster than civilian shoots. They were trained to answer literally anything, and build off it in a question and reply format “What do you do if this then happens”. My favorite was what do you do if your jumping, land in power lines, in combat, guys are shooting at you, you fall to the ground into a pond and active piwerlines are jiggling around you, next to the pond, troops are approaching, your in your parachute wrapped up in water, get out following the Seams, and when you emerge from the water aquatic reeds are stuck in your release, and you step on the shore, wet parachute attached, stuck on you, and you see a sign marking the shore as a mine field- what do you do? "

Everyone of those aspects have a solution a soldier going through airborne school. He already knows how to “slowly” probe for mines with a stick- but what happens if he is under fire? Run, hope for the best. In Airborne School, electric wire landings and water landings are exhaustively explained, but even they can become overwhelmed when you start compounding “what if” situations, snapping their logic. Your just fucked. Unfortunately, our bizarre KIAs often happen from bizarre instances- our units first KIA was electrocuted from a mortar blowing up a electric pole, line dropped down, in contact with his rifle. Others drowned, while driving. Yeah…

So I’m Hardy surprised to see the local Al Nursa commander take the position he did in regards to body armor. He could be in literally any military. If your army didn’t have body armor, they would denigrate it, emphasizing light mobile flexibility, how much easier it to move and wear down a heavy infantry opponent. That only pussies wear it, real men don’t have to, because they blend in so well and fight so well the enemy can’t shoot back accurately- then when you get some body armor, it is like “this is the greatest fucking shit in the world, use it and be proud, don’t worry where it came from, we are looking out for you”. Wasn’t too different from both times the military equipped me with new stuff I never saw before, similar talk, saying army supports you. I think that guy went to the same school the guts at Fort Benning goes to who hand out the boots. I got in 2004 black cortex boots, neither warm enough in the winter to qualify as winter boots, or cool enough in the summer- they were hell. One guy had feet too big to fit inside of their stock, got the old Vietnam jungle boots, way better except one problem, hard as hell to break in, can take months if you don’t boil them for a hour in water. You can’t boil shit in basic training, so the guy was tortured with blisters and bleeding, while the rest had feet that roasted under the Georgian Sun.

None of te gear he handed out fit them, helmets too big, he either didn’t have the padding, or straps for making a oversized helmet fit, he didn’t try to show them how to adjust the chin straps. Did some effort to fit shoe size, no explanation of how sapi plates worked (easy to break them), so they clearly just liberated the stockpiles from Assad, not knowing to get the accessories, which were nearby guaranteed, but they were too ignorant to know better.

I can see him outfitting everyone, then once you run out, it is back to "oh, you don’t need body armor, real soldiers… "

We’ve historically have had light and heavy infantry. Airborne Infantry is mistakenly labeled as “light” (my full infantry title was Arctic Light Airborne Infantry) because non-airborbe infantry is all mechanized. They have armored vehicles. You cant jump many vehicles because they have nitrogen based components that explode upon the shock of contact, you can rig them up like the Dumbo Drop movie, but not for a whole unit. The actual difference historically between light and heavy infantry is personal body armor. Some were lighter skirmishers, others heavy, doing too very different jobs. Alexander the Great was the large scale innovator who used both systems in tangem. It isn’t shameful or primitive to be light infantry, not a sign of advancement to be heavy.

Under US classification, those uarmored guys hopping out of that armor car would be “heavy infantry” while a soldier in standard armor would be “light” if merely from a airborne unit. It is bizarre and not historically based.

I really don’t blame Al Nursa for doing that, as it is largely reasonable. It isn’t very different from how we do things. It is easy to denigrate them when you haven’t gone through a similar process yourself. Troops being trained and instructed can follow blindly like ducks, following accidental non-orders, Greeks used to laugh at this phenomena, I believe it was Onasander who first described this phenomena. Greeks also used to denigrate swords and arrows, how real men wore shields and spears, thrashing, taking it like a man. They had heavy infantry. It is a very silly mindset, but men like to find clever excuses to promote specializations, and some not so clever responses to when their great system fails, like Spartans being lured into uphill ambushes, slaughtered with darts, or killed through attrition by arrow barrages isolated on a barren island surrounded by Athenian boats. I’m sure some older Spartan fell back on the old explanation that you just need to shut up and believe me, then taking the poor soldier for questioning the system- cause Spartan pedogogy involved pedophilia to boot. I’m not joking, it is where pedo- cones from, the teaching method. It is today taken as purely intellectual teaching methods, but in ancient times, Anthony Weiner would be a scholar of great renown. Notice neither Al Nursa nor the US Army does this, at least for the most part. You can take that as evidence of advance thinking. Hard to say what ISIS does, maybe they manrape recruits, possible given some of the shit they do.

I’m 90% opposed to Al Nursa, but 200% to ISIS. Al Nursa doesn’t harvest human organs from prisoners for the black market and the rest, it is still body bombing and mutilation based on sharua, but not some of the even worst extremes ISIS does. Even Lawrence of Arabia got raped in that area, just never know what a completely irresponsible ad hoc organization will do when it lacks the ability to set standards and oluce their own men, in fear they will defect to other factions or rebel.

The article is indirectly referring to Bergdahl, who used to live in my building in Alaska, “as that soldier”. He was in Blackfoot, I was in Comanche company. Unfortunately, that bit of info is useless and incorrect, because he decided to lowcraw out of the country WITHOUT his rifle towards Russia or India, take your pick, years after the 1/501st hit those damn side sappi plates, as you can see from the article dated previously. We were told in 2006 some other unit in casual conversation said to a Iraqi weakness was on the side. That story, if true at all, was transferred to Bergdahl. No doubt he told them all sorts of shit, but that wasn’t exactly useful info, and was largely borrowed from earlier accusations of some unknown soldier in 2006, long before Bergdahl joined. It to s why I was cautious initially with bergdahl till he admitted to being a egotistical shithead. He caused a lot if guts to die searching for him, but I’m also aware how rumor mills circulate. Hope for his sake he is legally crazy and mentally incompetent, but stories like these indicted him on absurdities. We had side plates by then, 100% certain. I handed some of the out, their supply room was on the other side of the wall from mine. Bizarre to say otherwise.

We have a variety of face protection armor on the market and in the military, just isn’t used. We had a few Military Police ballistic face shields in your supply room in Iraq, was never used. Why not give it to the gunners in the humvees? Similar arguments “Man, I don’t need no damn face mask, I’m not putting down a riot with a baton, I’m a real soldier behind a machine gun” and our First Sargent, or worst, me, would of had to be like “oh, this is the mist wonderful shit in the world, let’s try it on and play dress up, let’s see how amazing you look, super trooper you!”

feeling a little nervous are you, panny? :wink:

I agree with you on one point, that in both situations a soldier does not question orders. That aside, I question the process, the reasoning behind implementation of body armor policy that I mentioned, which is nothing like in the West. Compare: in the West, there is an actual, strictly followed chain of command and heavily (over) maintained organizational structure. No cutting corners. If something happens, someone gets injured or killed, an e-x-t-e-n-s-I-v-e investigation will be started. Squad leaders will be called in. Brass will be called in. Even civilian experts will be invited. What really happened? How it happened? How could it have been prevented? What are the future risks? How will it affect the operations/budget, etc.? Every little change is accounted for. After a lot of negotiation and brain storming (and money), new policies will be suggested, then reviewed and edited, and then finally implemented. So when soldiers are required to wear an extra piece of PPE, it’s not just because the leadership wants to assert its power over them, to show who’s boss, but that it has been decided, from the very top, that it would prevent future incidents. And they will have a long trail of reasoning and paperwork to back it up. Of course, by the time the policy gets to the actual implementing, some time may have passed and maybe there were no incidents in the meantime, and so it will be a surprise to the soldiers who will roll their eyeballs and say, why the hell? Okay, so maybe the Jihadist dude bypassed the whole process by saying, I saw a young guy get shot in it and survive, so you should wear it. But at that point he’s just winging it. And he can do it because he is not accountable for every mistake his soldiers do in a way that the Western officers are. It was the will of Allah, he will just say. Everything is the will of Allah, so if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t; just seems like a way to unburden oneself from the all the responsibility/accountability and a careless way to treat someone who puts their life into your hands.