Abu Hajar al-Sufi dead?
CBS News reports that Abu Hajar al-Sufi, one of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s commanders was killed by a US airstrike according to the Iraqi government. The US is being more cautious on the announcement, though;
The White House confirmed the air raid, but deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, brother of CBS News president David Rhodes, said the U.S. is still investigating reports of al-Sufi’s death.
“We are very careful not to make declarative statements until we know with certainty that someone like that, who’s a very high value individual in the organization, has been taken out,” Rhodes said. “Any time that there’s a leader taken off the battlefield in a terrorist organization like that, it does have an impact on their ability to operate as effectively as they did before.”
Yeah, while I’m glad that they’re killing these folks, the strategy of killing leaders doesn’t seemed to have slowed the Taliban any more than it slowed al Qaeda in Iraq in the early years of that war. They should really just come to the conclusion that they need to kill all of the ISIS trigger pullers, not just place importance on the leaders. You know, return to the days when the Democrats used to think that killing the leaders has no real effect, like they did when someone else was in the White House. Kill them all equally, by the thousands.
Category: Terror War
You guys that have fought in Iraq or Afghanistan….what’s your opinion as to whether or not there are SF guys in place directing air strikes.
I ask because I’m from a different era when it comes to current munitions.
Thanks.
LIRight…Thanks for the question. It was on my mind too. I would imagine, not knowing better, that they have SF in place to direct these things and aren’t just depending on satellite images.
Sparks – thank you.
Anyone would have to be crazy to not think we have SF types imbedded with the Iraqis and Kurds to go over intel and guide ythose birds in, Its like the SF giys we had with the Northern Alliance if Afghanistan when that goat rope jumped off.
Apparently we don’t and the SF deployed at the embassy are getting all pissy because they’ve been there for months sitting on their hands.
” Kill them all equally, by the thousands.”
Too bad we can’t catch them lined up at a change of command ceremony or in a parade like Hezbollah used to stage in Beirut.
I suspect that strategy did work in Iraq, and I have no idea if it worked at all in Afghanistan.
I was watching, purely as an interested civilian, but there was a lot of information from different kinds of sources (milblogs, blogs, newsies, US armed forced, the WH, for example).
In Iraq, Al-Qaeda came in initially as a helper force to overthrow the invaders. For a while, they appeared to act as a normal, guerrilla force with political intentions. Then something changed. The actions of Al-Qaeda turned on their allies. They were no longer interested in winning friends and influencing people among the locals: they were deeply interested in killing them in more and more spectacular ways.
At the time, I posited that somebody important to Al-Qaeda had died.
If that is indeed true, then on the basis of the experience in Iraq, I would say that killing the leaders makes the decision-making ability of the organization as a whole poorer, and is an element of a strategy for victory, but it is only an element.
The hard work of chasing down and killing the now-undirected monsters produced by the organization remains.
I do not use the word “monsters” lightly, here. Islamists deliberately teach their young men to do monstrous things, allegedly in the name of God. Once leaderless and uncontrolled, the behavior does not stop.
If you kill the top goat-herder, then the next biggest will simply take his herd and call themselves the top goat-herder.
During our Civil War General Sherman said loud and often that the North needed to kill 300,000 Southern soldiers to win. When the war ended that’s about how many of them died. Wars end when the enemy can no longer field an army.
Rest in pieces you shitlord.
Too bad we don’t have pictures of these clowns and their mangled bodies to retweet to ISIS’ twitter accounts.
Friend of mine brought up this little gem of wisdom…if these fuckers are so bad ass and proud of their asshattery in th ename of Allah, why wear masks?
The nicest thing you can do to Islamic terrorists is to KILL THEM and let satan eat their souls. Killing all of them seems quite impossible, but reducing their numbers in the quickest and most brutal way possible will go a long way in making them shut up like Quadafi did after Ronald Reagan sent some F-111’s to show that he was serious!
Please leave Ronnie out of this … He has got to be exhausted with all the spinning in his grave!
I thought the big cheese himself was killed by an airstrike.
Damn! They killed Captain Caveman!