President Obama has ordered 450 more U.S. troops to Iraq, saying that they will not engage ISIS but train the Iraqi army.
The move by the White House will also including sending weapons to Sunni tribes and the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters that are operating under the Iraqi command structure. An administration official said the hope is that a new “Sunni uprising” will take place against the terrorists.
The order comes after President Obama admitted last week ahead of the G7 conference that the U.S. did not have a cohesive plan to stop the Islamic terrorists.
The additional troops will be based at Taqaddum military base in Anbar province.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey told reporters the President asked military leaders to “take a look at what we’ve learned over the last eight months in the train-and-equip program and make recommendations to him on whether there are capabilities that we may want to provide to the Iraqis to actually make them more capable.”
Great Britain said they would be sending an additional 125 troops to help in training.
Currently, there are approximately 3,050 U.S. forces in Iraq. The majority support Iraqi security forces, about 450 train Iraqi troops, and roughly 200 fill advising and assisting roles.
An American who recently became a Christian died while fighting ISIS terrorists alongside Kurdish forces in Syria.
The State Department confirmed that Keith Broomfield, 36, was killed fighting with the Kurdish Protection Unit. He is believed to be the first American to die after volunteering to fight against the terrorists.
Keith’s mother, Donna Broomfield, said that Keith found Christ and said that God told him to stop the terrorists.
“He turned his life over to the Lord and he decided this was God’s will and God wanted him to do it,” she said.
Jennifer Broomfield, Keith’s sister, posted on Facebook what she said was the last text message conversation between herself and her brother.
“I’m gonna do what I got to do,” Keith wrote. “Sometimes you got to be a man whether you want to or not. I don’t expect anyone to understand but I don’t need anyone to either. I appreciate your concern and take it as kindness.”
“My brother died to defend my sisters who are being sold, enslaved, raped and murdered. To defend my brothers who are shot beheaded and dumped into piles off trucks,” Jennifer Bloomfield added.
A Kurdish official said that Keith’s body was returned to his family at the Turkish border on Thursday.
Australia’s foreign minister has said their intelligence shows ISIS has enough radioactive material to create a large “dirty” bomb.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told The Australian newspaper that ISIS has collected enough radioactive materials from hospitals and research centers in areas they have overtaken in the last few years. She also said the group is now recruiting “highly trained professionals” to develop chemical weapons which could also be used to create “dirty” bombs.
“They seek to undermine and overthrow that order and as we have seen, are prepared to use any and all means, any and all forms of violence they can think of to advance their demented cause,” she said. “That includes use of chemical weapons.”
“Chemical weapons often receive less public attention than nuclear and biological threats,” she also said, later adding, “However, toxic chemicals were, by far, the most widely used and proliferated weapons of mass destruction in the 20th century.”
Bishop is not the first international intelligence official to comment on the possibility of dirty bombs or nuclear weapons falling into the hands of ISIS. Indian defense officials said that the terrorists are working to obtain a nuclear weapon from Pakistan.
Several intelligence officials are concerned about the approach of Ramadan, as ISIS has ramped up attacks in connection with the Muslim holy month.
Islamic terrorist group ISIS swooped in on Eritrean refugees in Libya, kidnapping anyone who said they were not a Muslim.
The Commission on Eritrean Refugees reported the attack Sunday.
“IS militants asked everyone who is Muslim or not and everybody started saying they are Muslims,” Meron Estefanos, the co-founder of the International Commission on Eritrean Refugees, told the International Business Times.
The terrorists then began quizzing those who claimed to be Muslims on the Koran and took those who could not answer the questions.
The kidnappings came just two days after two Eritrean refugees were shot dead during a similar attack by ISIS.
Eritrean refugees are fleeing their country’s political oppression. They risk passing through ISIS controlled areas of Libya to obtain a boat ride to Italy and freedom.
The refugees are tracing similar paths to Ethiopian refugees, just like the 28 Ethiopian Christians who were slaughtered by ISIS in April in their quest for freedom.
CER said that many Eritrean refugees are now trying to avoid Libya because of the terrorists.
The U.S. Army’s official website was taken down Monday by hackers who claim they were the Syrian Electronic Army.
The attack forced the Army to take army.mil offline to protect from further damage.
The hacking comes less than a week after the discovery of Chinese hackers breaking into several important federal government servers that housed the personal information of millions of federal employees.
“Today an element of the Army.mil service provider’s content was compromised,” Army Brig. Gen. Malcolm Frost said in a statement. “After this came to our attention, the Army took appropriate preventive measures to ensure there was no breach of Army data by taking down the website temporarily.”
The Syrian Electronic Army launched in 2011 with a stated goal of attacking the enemies of the Syrian government. They claim to not be officially connected to the Syrian government.
The Army has been the target of hacking in the recent past. Five months ago the website was hit by pro-ISIS hackers who posted messages on the Army’s YouTube and twitter accounts.
While ISIS has been successfully using social media to recruit new members and radicalize those sympathetic to their cause, some members are posting items that undermine their own case.
The U.S. military said a recent post by a “moron” helped them take out an ISIS command and control center.
“These guys that are working down at Hurlburt (Florida), they’re combing through social media. And they see some moron standing at this command and control capability for Da’Esh, ISIL. These guys go, ‘ah we got an in,'” Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, said during a Monday speech in Arlington, Virginia.
Twenty-two hours later, the center no longer existed.
“Long story short…three JDAMs take the entire building out,” Carlisle said in the speech to the Air Force Association.
A JDAM is a device that guides bombs to their targets using a global positioning system and internal navigation system.
ISIS has recruited around 3,400 westerners and at least 200 Americans using social media according to Nicholas Rasmussen of the National Counterterrorism Center.
The Islamic terrorist group ISIS is reducing the water flowing into Iraq’s Anbar province as the government is trying to retake land from the terrorists.
The tactic is not new to Middle East conflicts. ISIS had previously restricted water flowing through the ISIS controlled town of Fallujah but reopened locks after residents complained about the lack of water.
Anbar Provincial Council Member Taha Abdul-Ghani told the Associated Press the terrorists are blocking water at a dam on the Euphrates river that will dry up irrigation system and water treatment plans for the government and tribes that are opposed to ISIS. Other areas to the south and central areas of the country would be provided water from the Tigris River.
The United Nations quickly condemned the terrorist’s actions.
“The use of water as a tool of war is to be condemned in no uncertain terms,” the spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, Stephane Dujarric, told reporters. “These kinds of reports are disturbing, to say the least.”
He said the U.N. would work to bring water to the impacted residents of the region.
Military experts say the withdrawl of water also lowers the level of the river to where terrorists would be able to walk across, allowing for attacks in locations that previously had been impeded by the water.
Residents of Habbaniya, Husaybah and Khalidiyah have been fleeing out of fear of an assault by the terrorists.
Islamic terrorist group ISIS has kidnapped 500 children and Iraqi officials are concerned they’re being trained to be suicide bombers.
Farhan Mohammed of Anbar’s Provincial Council told reporters that ISIS was able to kidnap over 400 children from their region in less than a week.
“Daesh [Arabic acronym for ISIS] has kidnapped at least 400 children in the western province of Anbar and taken them to their bases in Iraq and Syria,” Mohammed was quoted as saying by the Christian Post.
The terrorists also kidnapped 120 children from schools in the northern part of Nineveh province.
ISIS has been releasing videos to social media showing children who are being indoctrinated by the terrorists. They call their camps training for “cubs of the caliphate.” The Iraqi Human Rights Commission estimates that 1,000 children have been trained by the terrorist group.
“They use children because it is easy to brainwash them,” Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory, told Reuters. “They can build these children into what they want. They stop them from going to school and send them to IS schools instead.”
The Islamic terrorist group ISIS, attempting to solidify their takeover of the ancient city of Palmyra, have forced the residents of the town to fill an ancient amphitheater to watch the execution of 20 men.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the men were accused of serving as members of the army for President Bashir al-Assad. The method of execution was not reported by the group.
The United Nations World Heritage site was overrun by the terrorists last week. The U.N. also reported that residents told them the Syrian government forced them to remain until all troops withdrew from the city, placing them at the mercy of the terrorists.
The terrorists have also killed 67 civilians, including 14 children and 12 women, in the city of al-Sikhni. The terrorists said they were harboring regime forces to hide them from ISIS.
The UN has also reported that the terrorists burned a young woman alive because she would not be used as a sex slave by the group.
“They are institutionalizing sexual violence,” Zainab Bangura, the U.N.’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, said of the Islamic State. “The brutalization of women and girls is central to their ideology.”
Islamic terrorist group ISIS officially captured the ancient city of Palmyra on May 20th, meaning the terrorists now control over half of Syria.
The United Nations is particularly concerned about the fall of Palmyra, which is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“Palmyra tells us all cultures are linked. There’s no pure culture, no point in imposing a single culture on others,” Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO, said.
Tim Muret of Open Doors told the Christian Post that the news is covering Palmyra because of the UNESCO connection but that many Christian villages being destroyed by the terrorists are being ignored.
“This certainly makes a lot of news in the states because this is a UNESCO heritage site, but the kidnappings, killings, and all the villages being destroyed usually don’t make the news. These too have historical significance, and many of the villages are Christian,” declared Muret. “We do our best as an organization to educate churches that what you see in the news is really just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Palmyra is an another example of how IS has no regard for civilization or human life,” added Muret.
Muret also added because of the terrorists the Christian population in Syria has significantly declined over the last few years.
“The number of Christians has now dwindled down to 1.1 million or about 5 percent of the Syrian population.” Muret emphasized that Christian villages and populations are essential heritage sites too, “because those populations and much of that culture is the cradle of some of the earliest Christian communities.” The Apostle Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, which at the time had a rapidly expanding Christian population.