So I had occasion to think of this again today:
Where the fuck are our flags?
The two images I’ve seen most used to galvanize or discourage people have been flags: The Russian one triumphantly flown over a former US base; and the American flag pictures from the oils rigs.
I didn’t use to be a big Lame Stream Media basher, but this is how far behind the story they are not just in the facts but with respect to any narrative coherence.
I mean, they posted this story yesterday. So now they are all in the kind of flag image that was hugely symbolic for anyone watching… weeks ago the first time it happened.
Fucking yesterday.
Democrats here were claiming it would be political malfeasance not to plaster the “Come and Take It” pics all over.
Well… I gotta feeling that ain’t happening.
dhappy42
The editors and executive producers at America’s newspapers and TV networks are patriots. Or something something …
Seriously, how can this not be a big story?
Good question. Like, you know how dogs can’t talk, but you can still figure out what they want you to know?
I think the military wants us to know that Trump is trying to throw the war on ISIS.
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Almost two years after the Islamic State group was announced territorially defeated in Iraq, the US-led coalition fighting the militant group has said it conducted 47 airstrikes on targets over September and October, while Iraq’s counter-terrorism forces and predominantly Shiite militias have reported counter-ISIS gains in operations conducted on Monday.
Nineteen airstrikes were conducted against ISIS targets in Iraq in October, according to a November 13 press release from the US-led Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR). In September, it conducted 28 airstrikes against ISIS targets in the country, their November 16 release detailed.
The coalition was established in 2014 after ISIS militants seized vast swathes of northern Iraq, including Iraq’s second city of Mosul, and threatened to march on Baghdad and Erbil. It has conducted some 34,674 strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria between August 2014 and the end of September 2019.
The group was declared defeated by former Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi in December 2017. However, remnants of the group continue to operate, returning to earlier insurgency tactics including ambushes, kidnaps and targeted killings.
The US-led coalition has supported the Iraqi army in operations to eradicate these remnants. Operations have focused on the northwest of the country, including areas disputed between Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. As yet, operations have failed to entirely clear their presence, and military bodies worldwide have warned the group is still resurging.
ISIS propaganda outlets have continued to publish claims of attacks it has conducted. According to the group’s weekly Al-Naba newspaper, its militants conducted more than 161 attacks against security forces and locals in Iraq in September alone.
Iraqi Counter Terrorism Forces(ICTS) conducted an anti-ISIS operation on Makhool Mountain, Saladin province on Monday, destroying six ISIS ‘nests’ in the area, according to state media outlet INA .
The Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, also known as Hashd al-Shaabi), a predominantly Shiite group of militias and a long-term partner in Iraqi security force operations against ISIS, claimed on Monday that it had detained a number of ISIS militants and family members in Mosul.
The detained were reportedly smuggled into the city from northeastern Syria’s notorious al-Hol camp, where tens of thousands of ISIS suspects, widows and children are being held.
“A unit of Hashd al-Shaabi detained a number of ISIS militants and ISIS families who have been smuggled into the Iraqi city of Mosul on Monday,” a Monday statement from the PMF read. “The Hashd al-Shaabi unit handed the detainees over to the Iraqi army for investigations.”
They can’t tell us that. But they’d really like us to know. And for all the support Americans say they give these guys, listening to them might be a start.
Like, there are several things that should independently be big stories here. Like, GWOT is often in the news, yeah?
UPDATE: CNN Still Awful
I just thought of this post because the whole, hey, this conflict may have a negative affect on the war against ISiS thing is now official.
CNN: New Pentagon report says Turkey’s Syria incursion is helping ISIS mount a comeback
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said in the report “that ISIS has exploited the Turkish incursion and subsequent drawdown of US troops from northeastern Syria to reconstitute its capabilities and resources both within Syria in the short term and globally in the longer term.”
Also, it seems I’m this report, the Pentagon denies Turkey’s claim that it is fighting ISIS (actually, their claim is that they do the mostest ISIS fighting of anyone in the world):
The report said the intelligence agency assesses that ISIS is “postured to withstand al-Baghdadi’s death, and probably will maintain ‘continuity of operations, global cohesion, and at least its current trajectory.’ ”
Over the weekend, the Turkish Ministry of Defense issued a statement saying it was the only member of NATO or the coalition fighting ISIS “toe to toe.” That statement ignored US operations against ISIS, including the mission that killed al-Baghdadi, and US casualties that have been incurred while fighting ISIS.
And the Pentagon report judges it to be an empty claim, finding that the Turkish-commanded militias that compose the majority of Ankara’s invasion forces are unlikely to fight ISIS.
So that’s bad. Awful really. But we’ve known this for ages. CNN is official Pentagon report. It makes sense to a degree to wait for official sources. Of corse, the problems wirhndoing so should seem quite obvious—some stories are important as they develop, not just something to know after the fact.
But here’s a further problem: They do a shit job assessing the report. Now, we usually think of assessing a government report as looking bullshit. But that’s very limited and makes a lot of assumptions.
CNN omits a crucial piece of info that RUDAW points out:
This merits paragraph 2 of the RUDAW coverage:
Published on Monday, the report extended beyond its quarterly deadline of September 30 in order to account for the US troop withdrawal and subsequent Turkish invasion of northeast Syria in October. Citing intelligence reports, Lead Inspector General Glenn A. Fine was clear in characterizing the US withdrawal as detrimental to the Combined Joint Task Force -Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
It’s a quarterly report. The Pentagon delayed it a month, which effectively means not wanting to wait two additional months to over the results of our withdrawal. And for that matter, they offer plenty of reason they delayed it because they knew our withdrawal would have this effect.
That information seems pretty important to me: The Pentagom isn’t just telling us stuff, they think it’s so important that they reorganizes reports.
So basically, I can’t decide which is more important here: Turkey and ourselves and Russia are exacerbating the ISIS problem (strangely, Assad is the not—just along for the ride on this one, though that is where he eats), or that outlets like CNN are a month or more behind things.
If you’ve been reading this thread, then you know there is easy access to highly established sources screaming about this stuff.
It’s not like I got my news from CNN before and have long told people that they are unbiased because that would require content. But except for some good special reporting on MSMBC and some good stuff on the ISIS camps, none of the major networks are rally covering it.
I thought they’d at least be lured in by the sensationalist aspect. Like, every human drama/tragedy/tragicomic narrative is going on over there somewhere.
Who is it that Marie Claire.uk is the largest outlet to interview hat Dani Ellis woman that I found in like a week on Twitter?
Like, I went over the intentional conspiracy building to fuck with our sense of reality the other day (I haven’t gotten into it, but that really fucked with me. I still fee covered in shit and vaguely paranoid. It’s a powerful effect.). And we all bash the major news outlets. But I’ve never watched a story like this closely enough or had a theead like this where I could go back and track the coverage, and it’s like, really bad.
But that’s just what I discovered as a sidebar to the news I was looking for:
tl;dr: The Pentagon delayed a quarterly report to cover the month following. US withdrawal from Syria and reports that the ISIS problem is worsening and Turkey is not helping.
CNN not bothering to tell us they delayed the report to get the information out more quickly is just the whipped cream on top.
By comparison, account still doesn’t have a fucking blue check despite becoming a go to resource for other news outlets.
Why does infinite news mean less content. This is dumb.
Rojava to Rock 