The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is speaking out about the Islamic terrorist group ISIS and showing that the head of the military’s top advisors to the President see the group as a real threat.
“This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated,” Army General Martin Dempsey said.
Gen. Dempsey and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel discussed the terrorist organization with a group of reporters.
“Can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no,” Gen. Dempsey said. “That will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a nonexistent border and that will come when we have a coalition in the region that takes on the task of defeating ISIS over time.”
The “nonexistent border” referred to by the general was the parts of Iraq and Syria taken over by the terrorist entity.
Defense Secretary Hagel said the group is different that previous terrorist outfits.
“They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded,” Hagel said. “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen. So we must prepare for everything.”
President Obama held a press conference to address the beheading of an American journalist by the Islamic terrorist group ISIS and made an unusually strong denouncement of an Islamic group.
“The United States of America will continue to do what we must do to protect our people. We will be vigilant and we will be relentless. When people harm Americans, anywhere, we do what’s necessary to see that justice is done. And we act against ISIL, standing alongside others,” President Obama said, referring to the group by their previous name, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The President went on to denounce the group has not being a religious group at all because of their extreme views and actions.
“No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day,” the President said. “ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision, and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.”
The President ordered the U.S. military to continue to conduct air strikes against positions of the terrorists in northern Iraq. After the President’s address, the military carried out a series of strikes against terror positions near the country’s biggest dam to help support Iraqi and Kurdish troops who recaptured the dam earlier this week.
The President also spoke of the victim of the killing, photojournalist James Foley.
“Jim Foley’s life stands in stark contrast to his killers,” President Obama said.
The plight of Christians in Iraq has reached the point that even Islamic broadcasters are unable to deal with the level of violence and hatred shown by the extremist group Islamist State of Iraq and Syria.
Nahi Mahdi was participating in a discussion on his show when the subject was brought up about Christians being forced from their homes and killed by the terrorists. Mahdi surprised his fellow panelists when he said that he had been crying that morning over the treatment of the Christians.
“They are our own flesh and blood,” Mahdi said. “Some of them have left for Sweden, for Germany. Who does (ISIS) think it is to drive out our fellow countrymen? They must take immediate measures to help these people.”
One of the other Muslim men on the show said Mahdi breaking down in tears showed the marks of “a true Iraqi.”
“Our country is like a rose,” Mahdi said. “And its petals are the Christians, the Arabs, the Kurds, the Sabians, the Shabak people…these are all our countrymen.”
The Islamic extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has posted a video online showing the brutal beheading of an American journalist.
James Foley, a reporter working for Agence France-Presse and Boston media company GlobalPost, was taken captive while reporting in Syria November 2012. He was passing through a zone that had been a focal point of Sunni rebel forces when four terrorists stopped his car.
The death of Foley is the first American to have been killed as a result of the Syrian conflict that began in March 2011.
A British man who had joined the terrorist group who spoke in the video using English conducted the killing. The group showed video of a second captured American journalist and said they would kill him if the U.S. continued to make airstrikes against their forces in Iraq.
Foley’s family released a statement saying they were proud of him.
“He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people,” said the statement, which was attributed to Foley’s mother, Diane Foley. She implored the militants to spare the lives of other hostages. “Like Jim, they are innocents. They have no control over American government policy in Iraq, Syria or anywhere in the world.”
The Islamic extremists who have taken over large parts of Iraq and Syria have posted a message online to America.
We will drown you in blood.
The Islamic State said Tuesday that it will attack Americans “in any place” because of the air strikes against their terrorist groups and that they would “drown” Americans in blood. The message, which was in English, was accompanied by photographs of victims of snipers in Iraq and an American who was beheaded during the Iraq War.
The U.S. airstrikes on the terrorist group has allowed Kurdish forces to make gains in the last week. On Monday the fighters were able to take back the country’s largest dam that provides power to most of Iraq.
The off-shoot group of Al-Qaeda, which was determine to be “too extreme” for the Al-Qaeda leadership, has so far focused on capturing land for their own Islamic state rather than launching western attacks. However, the airstrikes from the U.S. is the first direct assault on the terrorists by a major western power.
Christians forced to flee Mosul, Iraq because of the extreme Islamic terrorist group Islamic State are recounting their tales of horror as they fled for their lives.
“We heard the gunshots outside our door, and knew the terrorists were killing Christians,” Munira Aziz told Fox News. “But we hoped someone might rescue us. We cowered inside for two days, then knew we had to leave. We gathered some clothes and left at night.”
Aziz is now living inside a church in the northern Iraqi city of Sulemaniyah suffering from a broken hip. All she has left is the clothes on her back.
Aziz said that thousands of Christians were killed simply because they had no way to flee the city.
“There were Christians everywhere we went. In every garden, and in every doorway, there are just so many with nothing and with nowhere to go,” Aziz told Fox News. “But I am so happy now we are safe, we are the lucky ones.”
The exiled believers have stood firm in their faith.
“People say it would be easy to become a Muslim, but my religion is everything I now have — why would I give that up?” a refugee said. “I would die first.”
The Christians in exile are hoping that the recent advances by Kurdish fighters with the help of U.S. airstrikes will allow them to return their homes and churches.
The Islamic extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has committed a horrific war atrocity that was caught on video: the cutting in half of a 5-year-old Christian boy.
The boy, named Andrew, was the child of a founding member of St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad. He was slaughtered in an attack on the Christian town of Qaraqosh.
“I’m almost in tears because I’ve just had somebody in my room whose little child was cut in half,” Anglican Canon Andrew White of St. George’s Church told the Anglican Communion News Service Friday. “I baptized his child in my church in Baghdad. This little boy, they named him after me — he was called Andrew.”
The family had fled to Qaraqosh, which had been under the protection of Kurdish fighters. However, the Islamic State overran the Kurdish fighters and slaughtered as many Christians as they could capture as the believers fled the city.
The dead boy’s parents and brother were able to make it to the city of Arbil, which President Obama said would be under the protection of the U.S. military because of the U.S. consulate being located in the town.
The Christian Post reports that Iraqi church leaders have asked for the world to pray for them and to send money so they can purchase supplies, food and clothing for the tens of thousands of Christians fleeing the terrorists.
While the world has only recently become aware of the brutality and extremism of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, late Taliban leader Osama Bin Laden reportedly had been warned about the group before his death in 2011.
The London Daily Mail is reporting that a letter found in the Bin Laden compound after the removal of Osama Bin Laden outlined the dangers of the group calling themselves the Islamic State.
The letter had Bin Laden calling for anyone connected to al-Qaeda to immediately sever their ties with Islamic State because of their “extreme brutality” and said the group obtained and had been using chemical weapons even on mosques.
The United States began air strikes last week against ISIS over their continued attempts to take over Iraq. The U.S. also has announced they will be providing weapons to the Kurdish fighters in the northern part of Iraq to help drive the terrorists away from villages housing tens of thousands of Christian and Jewish refugees.
International aid drops have been conducted in northern regions where the terrorists have trapped refugees in mountain regions.
The terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are reportedly holding hundreds of women captive inside school buildings in various cities under their control.
A spokesman for Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry says that the women are all below the age of 35 and are mostly in the city of Mosul. The kidnapping and captivity of the women is being reported to the Ministry through relatives who have escaped the terrorist group.
“We think that the terrorists by now consider them slaves and they have vicious plans for them,” Kamil Amin told The Associated Press. “We think that these women are going to be used in demeaning ways by those terrorists to satisfy their animalistic urges in a way that contradicts all the human and Islamic values.”
A U.S. official who spoke under condition of anonymity said that U.S. intelligence has confirmed the captivity of the women and that they are being placed into forced marriages with terrorist fighters.
One Iraqi lawmaker who escaped the region said that some of the women have been sold in the public square “in a slavery market.”