• New terror group forms from ISIS remnants in Iraq
    26 replies, posted
HAMREEN MOUNTAINS, Iraq — Way up in the mountain range that cuts through this volatile region of northern Iraq, a group of ISIS veterans is readying itself to terrorize the country once more. Led by Hiwa Chor, a one-eyed militant in his early forties, they are known as the White Flags. Arriving around mid-November, Chor and his men — said to number anywhere between 500 and 1,100 — are digging into the Hamreen mountains and launching attacks on local security forces. “After ISIS was finished in the area, they began to gather in the mountains,” Maj. Gen. Rasul Omar Latif, commander of the Iraqi Kurdish forces in Sulaymaniyah province, told BuzzFeed News. Latif shared for the first time with a Western journalist intelligence about the group gathered by Kurdish fighters, spies, and their network of informants. “They are ISIS, but they gave themselves a new name.” Chor and his fighters named themselves the White Flags, perhaps to contrast themselves with the black flag that symbolizes ISIS. Armed with weapons accumulated over the years fighting alongside ISIS, the White Flags ride in four-wheel-drive pickup trucks through the folds of the mountains, finding shelter from patrols, mortars, and airstrikes launched by Iraqi forces. They dig tunnels to scuttle back and forth between nearby Kurdish and Arab areas, firing mortars at Shia militias arrayed along the mountain range. Equipped with night-vision goggles, they operate deep within the mountains, 7 miles from the outskirts of the city of Tuz Khurmatu, along the highway between Baghdad and the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Last week, fighters still loyal to ISIS claimed to have captured and executed eight members of the Iraqi federal police and a pro-government Shia militia, the so-called Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), along the Baghdad–Kirkuk road, the site of another recent ambush. Though ISIS and its successors no longer control any of Iraq’s cities, they continue to wreak havoc, with a detectable increase in both attacks and propaganda. Suicide bomb attacks attributed to ISIS have struck Baghdad and Kirkuk. In mid-March, militants reportedly killed seven Iraqi soldiers in the country’s far west. “They move from place to place in the Hamreen mountains,” said Ahmad Sharifi, a former Iraqi intelligence officer who now serves as security adviser to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest-ranking Shia cleric in Iraq. “No one from our units can recognize the paths they take, because they know the geography. They know the caves.” In one of their most brazen and complex recent attacks, in February ISIS militants lured members of the PMU to a village just outside Hawija in northern Iraq. The ISIS fighters wore military uniforms and pretended to be members of the Iraqi federal police, manning a checkpoint. The subsequent firefight — partially documented in an ISIS video — lasted two hours, leaving 27 Shia militiamen dead. A week later, charred bone fragments and bits of uniforms remained lodged in the soil. The New Face Of ISIS In Iraq Calls Itself The White Flags It never ends
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I love that they're called the white flags. Picking up right where ISIS ended, I see. Also... https://i.imgur.com/hzDGv3p.png I see someone about to have a real bad day if that RPG is fired.
christ these people will not give up until they're wiped off the face of the earth.
Well Isis operates from some sort of prophecy, that states that they will be forced into a corner by a string of defeats, leaving only 500 warriors or so. And then ironically, jesus will come and save them, and lead them to dominate the world.
They are waiting in their mansions waiting for the end of days also, the rapture will come to wipe the queers from the earth! The hardline jews have the same prophecy, the end of days are coming to free Israel. It's all just one big death cult.
Fucking taliban DLC...
No surprise that some of the survivors have crawled back into the ground to form yet another insurgency, I only hope this time the lessons learned from the last fourteen years are applied with earnest this time by the Iraqi state.
This group has been around in one form or another for nearly 20 years. It's probably going to survive in some kind of manner for another 20. I do wonder what happened to ISIS's Shura Council that supposedly governed the state, and how they feel about this group as a successor.
Here we go again...
They should be called ISWAS
Them having night vision goggles is a worrying advantage. Hopefully they don't have many of them.
I hope they've stock piled enough white flags then, they'll need them.
More like Taliban: White Flag expansion pack
This reminds me of those boss battles where they'll just jump out and have a second health bar when you think the fight is done
War breeds radicalism
War never changes
No I think he's trying to say that war has radicalized these people to become terrorists and that's why they refuse to give up and keep relabeling themselves.
The initial war that started the whole extremism issue was. After a certain point it becomes defensive.
revalations is just one giant fanfic at best, its just this giant tale of how the world will end and only you special snowflakes get to die in such a way hat you don't have to be on the shitty earth as the world burns.
A large reason (perhaps the main one) as to why terrorism even exists is because the Middle East is generally not a good place to live in. A lot of that has to do with inner strife and ridiculous income inequality, leading to great impoverishment and thus radicalization in order to find something "better". Not to mention Western intervention in the past century.
At least it's not a mana bar, fuck that noise.
Yup. And it will continue to happen for decades, centures, maybe even another millenia or two, because it really doesn't look like there's a snowball's chance in hell of those social measures ever happening.
"Mostly negative reviews"
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