20,000 foreign fighters flock to Syria, Iraq

[Valin]

AP:

KEN DILANIAN

Feb. 10, 2015

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Foreign fighters are streaming into Syria and Iraq in unprecedented numbers to join the Islamic State or other extremist groups, including at least 3,400 from Western nations among 20,000 from around the world, U.S. intelligence officials say in an updated estimate of a top terrorism concern.

 

Intelligence agencies now believe that as many as 150 Americans have tried and some have succeeded in reaching in the Syrian war zone, officials told the House Homeland Security Committee in testimony prepared for delivery on Wednesday. Some of those Americans were arrested en route, some died in the area and a small number are still fighting with extremists.

 

The testimony and other data were obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

 

Nick Rasmussen, chief of the National Counterterrorism Center, said the rate of foreign fighter travel to Syria is without precedent, far exceeding the rate of foreigners who went to wage jihad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia at any other point in the past 20 years.

 

U.S. officials fear that some of the foreign fighters will return undetected to their homes in Europe or the U.S. to mount terrorist attacks. At least one of the men responsible for the attack on a satirical magazine in Paris had spent time with Islamic extremists in Yemen.

 

(Snip)

 

 

H/T Robert Caruso

[Valin]

How Many Fighters Does the Islamic State Really Have?
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
February 9, 2015

 

Estimates of the number of fighters in the ranks of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are extraordinarily wide-ranging. On the low end of things, CNN’s Barbara Starr recently reported that “U.S. intelligence estimates that ISIL has a total force of somewhere between 9,000 to 18,000 fighters.” In late 2014, the CIA’s estimate of ISIL’s numbers was slightly higher, as its analysts assessed that the group had between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters between its Iraq and Syria holdings.

 

Other estimates are far higher. Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, has said that ISIL has more than 50,000 fighters in Syria alone. The chief of the Russian General Staff recently said that Russia estimates ISIL to have “70,000 gunmen of various nationalities.” In late August of 2014, Baghdad-based security expert Hisham al-Hashimi claimed that ISIL’s total membership could be close to 100,000. By November, Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff to Kurdish president Massoud Barzani, told Patrick Cockburn of The Independent that the CIA’s estimates were far too low, and that ISIL had at least 200,000 fighters.

 

(Snip)

 

In addition to ISIL’s force structure and the extent of its holdings, another indication that U.S. intelligence estimates are too low is the amount of attrition that has been inflicted upon ISIL. CENTCOM has said that it has killed 6,000 ISIL fighters in airstrikes alone since August. If the low-end estimates are accurate, then between 20-30% of ISIL’s total manpower has been eliminated by airstrikes. Such a conclusion is clearly unrealistic: Even if ISIL were able to replenish its ranks at a rate equal to the attrition, the group would be performing far worse on the battlefield if it had had to replace such a large percentage of its force in such a short period. By contrast, if you accept Hashimi’s figure of 100,000 ISIL fighters, the group has only lost about one-tenth of its total force.

 

It still isn’t clear precisely how many fighters ISIL has, but its total force is likely to be closer to 100,000 than to 30,000 (although, unlike the martyrdom-seeking fanatics in its ranks, ISIL’s conscripts are more likely to turn tail and run in a tough situation). The low-end estimates are simply too low to be realistic, while the high-end estimates—of which many observers are intuitively skeptical—are far more plausible than they first appear once one attempts to break them down more systematically.

[Pepper]

@Valin

Find the entry points and call in Wart Hogs

[Valin]

@Valin

Find the entry points and call in Wart Hogs

 

 

The thing I'm not sure a lot of people don't understand. If we do this (and I believe we should), we're going to be there for a very very long time, and the job ahead (bringing this part of the world into the XXIst century) is going to be really hard....I mean REALLY HARD. We need to make it plain, so we don't repeat Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. This is going to make Germany, Japan, the ROK look like a walk in the park.