Al Qaeda Leader Declares War On ISIS 'Caliph'

a reply to: neo96

There's a lot of layers to that onion. Saudis have a backer and so does Iran.

The money's in the volatility.

a reply to: xuenchen

Anybody smell a conspiracy?

"It's pretty interesting," said former National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen. "Zawahiri until now has not been willing to openly condemn Baghdadi and ISIS. It highlights how deep the division is between al Qaeda leadership and ISIS. It suggests that the differences are irreconcilable."

Foreign policy sounds like Domestic policy? Could we be getting played?

Olsen said the U.S. could use misinformation to further pit the two jihadi menaces against each other and encourage the series of gunfights and assassinations each has waged against the other -- like when ISIS reportedly killed a top Zawahiri emissary trying to broker a ceasefire between the fighters in Syria in February 2014.

The fledgling franchise in Afghanistan and Pakistan, known as IS Khorasan Province, "has been fighting non-stop" with the Taliban and al Qaeda there, a counter-terrorism official told ABC News. "Fighting each other makes our job easier," said the official in Afghanistan.

Perhaps the same deal goes down here as well as there. I wonder if this is all misinformation. Could even the official beginnings of these groups be misinformation in a running psy-op?

"Everyone was surprised" by Baghdadi's declaration anointing himself the fourth caliph in Islamic history, Zawahiri remarked, saying al-Baghdadi had done this "without consulting the Muslims."

Though it didn't foresee the rise of ISIS, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said the intelligence community had predicted a rift in al Qaeda emerging after bin Laden's death -- something like what's happening now between ISIS and al Qaeda, which the U.S. could use to its advantage.

"It would be a good idea to do so. We always thought that the death of bin Laden could create a rift between the Egyptians and the other Arabs inside al Qaeda since Zawahiri was an Egyptian. Seems to have played out," former CIA Director Michael Hayden told ABC News.

Seems like a running playbook. Create a wedge and run through the middle. Wonder how many saw this coming.

a reply to: kountzero

ISIS vs Al Qaeda?
Looks like a great Wrestling show!
Their father taught them how to do things the American way.

i started a new thread about this and i apologize i never saw this one!

it scares me that my first reaction just like my wife was to cheer on al qeada! then realize they are just as bad. lets hope they wipe themselves out.

a reply to: yeahright

They've been fighting each other in the mideast tooth and nail for thousands of years. It takes a hardliner to keep the lid on.

With all due respect, this is a woefully inaccurate/incomplete narrative.

First and foremost, you're giving the impression that the history of the region is uniquely filled with conflict and strife which is exactly the sort of thing that leads idiots to think that the people of the region are predisposed to war and there's effectively nothing that can be done about it. Also critically absent is any mention of the rise of nationalism and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

While nationalism may have its roots in tendencies evolved in humans over eons, modern nations as we know them now are a fairly recent phenomena kicked off in early 18th century Europe. Prior to that, most people were subjects of one empire or another. In regards to the region most people simply refer to as the Middle East was controlled by a series of caliphates which are basically just Islamic empires. Roughly comparable in the West would be Holy Roman Empire, a Christian empire, controlled by German nobility who elected emperors crowned by the Pope. Ironic considering how the concept of a caliphate seems so alien to people in the West today.

For the sake of brevity will skip over the first six centuries of rule by various caliphates spanning from the death of Muhammad to 1299 when the Anatolian Turk, Osman I, established the Ottoman Empire, a sultanate and the political embodiment of what would later be the Ottoman Caliphate. The Ottoman Empire existed through to its defeat in WWI. However, it was already on the way out following the rise of nationalism in Europe, when nationalist movements also took off among the various ethnic groups within the Ottoman Empire (Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Serbs, etc) and some of the movements led to secession and wars that the Ottomans weren't winning.

Long story short, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire began at the turn of the 20th century and there are too many events to summarize succinctly but however that was going to play out on its own, the Ottomans losing in WWI brought it all crashing down at once and enabled the UK, France, the US, etc to partition the empire as as they saw fit, ultimately creating nations that were doomed to fail from the start because they were created without consideration for culture, history or the nationalist sentiments of the various peoples. For example, Kurdistan should be an actual nation composed of parts of what are now Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

originally posted by: SGTkilt
i started a new thread about this and i apologize i never saw this one!

it scares me that my first reaction just like my wife was to cheer on al qeada! then realize they are just as bad. lets hope they wipe themselves out.

Sometimes I think that's what we've done. We've set them up to self-destruct. The whole region.

I just saw on the news that Yemen is being steadily bombed by Saudi. A population of millions living in near-ruble. I wonder if they too, will begin to flee by the thousands and to where?

US government is probably going to blame Al Qaeda again and make excuse to send soldiers there.

President: Forget ISIS. Al Qaeda is back and threatening our nation! They must end first.

a reply to: angeldoll

Many of the thousands of refugees now crossing from Greece and Hungary on their way to more welcoming countries such as Germany are Syrians and Kurds, fleeing the wars and political repression in the Levant. Another large refugee problem may now loom, which is unlikely to leave Europe unaffected. The war in Yemen, already highly destructive, may be getting hotter as it reaches an endgame, with the potential for putting a large proportion of its 24 million people—a slightly larger population than pre-war Syria—on the road (or, more likely, the seas).

Yemen, the World’s Next Great Refugee Crisis