![]() I tell Dennison’s story, including his descriptions of the U.S.-led coalition’s bombing campaign, in “ American ISIS,” an eight-episode Audible Original documentary podcast released in July from The Intercept and Topic Studios. Dennison’s later recordings captured the roar of airstrikes he and his small family witnessed, and Dennison regularly sent me photographs of the aftermath. Russell Dennison, who was among the first Americans to join ISIS as a fighter, secretly sent me more than 30 hours of recordings from August 2018 to February 2019. I know this because I was in touch almost daily with an American who lived through these bombings until he was killed by an airstrike in Baghuz, likely just before the bombing the Times described. The bombing was in fact one of the final strikes in a monthslong string of attacks that killed scores of civilians. The Times described the airstrike as “one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State.” It came to light only after investigations, including by the independent inspector general and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, had been blocked or buried.īut this bombing of women and children was not a tragic accident in an otherwise controlled and closely monitored aerial campaign. “We just dropped on 50 women and children,” another analyst responded. “Who dropped that?” a Defense Department analyst monitoring a drone typed in a secure chat, according to the Times story. Air Force dropped a 500-pound bomb, followed by two 2,000-pound explosives, on a crowd of women and children near the river in Baghuz. While the amount of territory ISIS controls in areas outside of Syria and Iraq is relatively small, in this case size might not matter so much.In an investigation published last weekend, the New York Times told the story of one those assaults. ![]() Fighters in Afghanistan have splintered away from the Taliban to wage war under the ISIS banner, while new "provinces" of the caliphate have cropped up in the Caucasus.Įven Nigeria's Boko Haram terror organization wants in on the caliphate - the group has pledged allegiance to ISIS and many analysts think it's only a matter of time before ISIS formally pronounces a West Africa province. Now, there are ISIS affiliates in Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and Pakistan. When ISIS declared a caliphate, the group was in control of a large swath of territory straddling Iraq and Syria. "It's not necessarily that the coalition campaigns in Iraq and Syria aren't having any impact, but they're not doing anything to stop the spread of the group around the world, to stop the appeal of the group, to stop new groups joining all the time," Henman said. Every month since has seen more than 220 attacks - often far more - with April and May of 2015 seeing 285 and 290 attacks respectively. Both months saw more than 500 non-militant fatalities attributed to ISIS. ISIS mounted 210 attacks in July and 300 in August of 2014, according to data from JTIC. IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre / IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency CentreĪ further breakdown of figures shows that the number of attacks has held relatively steady month to month. Similarly the four wilayaat announced in Russia’s North Caucasus in late June came too late to be integrated into this map. Nigeria is excluded from this map, because the formation of Wilayat Gharb Afriqa (West Africa Province) - as Boko Haram has seemingly renamed itself - has not been formally proclaimed by ISIS leadership as with other wilayaat. The black borders delineate where ISIS has formally announced a wilaya (province) and the red shows attacks carried out in the name of ISIS between the declaration of a caliphate on Jand June 22, 2015. ![]() This map shows where ISIS and the group's affiliates are located.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |