Thomas Wictor

My new obsession is clandestine military operations. For the life of me, I can’t understand telegraphing your intent this way.

Crack SAS troops are in Libya preparing for the arrival of around 1,000 British infantrymen to be sent against ISIS there in early 2016.

Special Forces including military close observation experts from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment are spearheading a major coalition offensive against the terror network.

The operation will involve around 6,000 American and European soldiers and marines - led by Italian forces and supported mainly by Britain and France.

That’s an enemy intelligence report. It provides the number of troops, their units, the rough date they’ll arrive, and their mission. The Islamic State can use this information to better inflict casualties on the British, Americans, Italians, and “other Europeans.” At least someone had the good sense to not allow their nations’ names to be used.

A “senior military source” blathered excitedly to the media.

“This Coalition will provide a wide range of resources from surveillance, to strike operations against Islamic State who have made significant progress in Libya.

“We have an advance force on the ground who will make an assessment of the situation and identify where attacks should be made and highlight the threats to our forces”.

What’s the purpose of talking about this? Why couldn’t the UK and her allies secretly go to Libya and blow the hell out of the Islamic State without telling us?

Watch this video of the Syrian Democratic Forces (QSD) in action at the Tishreen Dam on December 26, 2015.

There’s much clandestine action going on, but nobody is taking responsibility. Here’s the area of Syria that we’re talking about.

Throughout the video, you can hear the engines of jet aircraft. They were not from the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve. These are the air strikes that the Task Force carried out on December 26, 2015.

Nowhere near the dam.

It wasn’t the Russians either.

Again, nowhere near the area.

In the video of the QSD at Tishreen Dam, you hear a double sonic boom at 1:02. I know it’s a sonic boom because of the strike on the powerhouse.

In a hydroelectric dam, the flow of water through the powerhouse generates electricity.

We see a QSD T-55 tank firing.

Then we see a hit on the dam powerhouse.

But that tank didn’t fire the munition that hit the powerhouse.

This is Tishreen Dam. As you can see, there’s no structure directly across the reservoir from the powerhouse.

The QSD T-55 was at the red arrow below when it fired.

A powered aerial munition—not a tank shell—hit the target, and a multi-engined jet fired it.

Clandestine means you never admit to it

Why strike the powerhouse in the first place?

Because the Islamic State had booby trapped it.

Israel and now the Arab League clearly have the ability to see inside buildings. They almost certainly use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) fitted with synthetic-aperture radar (SAR). It’s like an X-ray. There’s no telling how advanced Israeli and Arab League SAR capabilities are. I believe that the Israelis and the Arab League can see so clearly inside buildings that they can locate weapons caches and booby traps.

The Tishreen Dam powerhouse was hit with an aerial munition that flew too quickly to be caught on camera. Therefore I think it was a hypersonic missile, a variant of the high-velocity penetrating weapon (HVPW).

You hear the double sonic boom at 1:02. The powerhouse has an open center, like an atrium. The missile blasted through two walls and caused smoke to rise in the open center of the building.

The red arrow in the screen grab above shows the beginning of the smoke cloud that rises from the center, not from the holes made by the missile.

The powerhouse was hit twice.

Look how small the holes are, about the diameter of tea saucers. The missiles used kinetic energy to punch through the walls of the powerhouse and destroy the Islamic State explosives without letting them fully detonate. There are no reports of the dam being put out of commission, and I can think of no reason to fire on the powerhouse except to neutralize booby traps.

We don’t know who fired the missiles; we don’t know what kind of weapons they were. From the sound, a jet with at least two engines flew directly overhead as the missiles struck.

At the end of the video, we see the explosion of a 40mm cannon round, and we hear the humming turboprops of an AC-130 gunship.

I’m convinced that the Arab League has at least one AC-130A, an aircraft that the US retired in 1995 but has kept “pickled” in storage, ready to be brought back into service at any time.

There are people fighting in Syria who are masters at clandestine warfare. It’s no exaggeration to say that these may be the most skilled warriors of the current era. I don’t believe in these “Who Would Win?” scenarios because I’m not competitive. It doesn’t bother me to praise the armed forces of other nations.

Clandestine apostates?

On December 26, 2015, the leader of the Islamic State Abu Bakr al Baghdadi released an audio tape. It’s very interesting.

I haven’t been able to find the full text of the speech in English. Most of it is boilerplate jihadist threats. However, this is the part that I think matters.

Instead of fighting the “caliphate’s” soldiers directly on the ground, Baghdadi claims the US and its allies dream of annihilating the Islamic State using “agents,” including “the Awakenings, apostates, the heretic Kurds, and herds of rejectionist cattle.”

The “Awakening” is a reference to the US-backed Sunni tribes that rose up against the Islamic State’s predecessor organization, al Qaeda in Iraq, during the height of America’s involvement in the Iraq war. The Islamic State’s leaders have expanded the term to include even rival jihadist organizations that reject Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s claim to rule over the entire Muslim-majority world.

“Rejectionists” are Shia Muslims. But who are the apostates?

The Saudis. Baghdadi calls them “apostate tyrants” who are “perverting Islam.”

Yet American politicians claim that Saudi Arabia isn’t fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Hillary Rodham Clinton said America must lead the effort to fight Islamic State militants, but she called on Arab nations to increase their involvement in the wake of deadly attacks in Paris…

“This is a time for American leadership. No other country can rally the world to defeat ISIS and win the generational struggle to defeat jihadism,” she said. “The entire world must be part of this fight, but we must lead it.”

Vowing to keep American ground troops out of Syria, Clinton reiterated her support for a no-fly zone over the northern region of the country and backed the president’s use of special forces.

She urged Turkey and Saudi Arabia to redirect their attention from battling Kurdish forces and the conflict in Yemen to the fight against Islamic State militants.

So much clownishness. Clinton vows to keep American ground troops out of Syria but supports using special forces. Will they be stationed in zeppelins, floating among the clouds? And should we just assume that Baghdadi is hallucinating when he says that the Saudis are fighting the Islamic State?

Who did this?

It wasn’t the US, Europe, or Russia.

The notion that only the US can rally the world to defeat jihadist terrorism is absurd. Look how our training program in Iraq is going, according to the Inspector General of the Department of Defense.

We may someday recover from our self-imposed bozosity, but right now we’re not a serious culture. The people killing those who need to be killed aren’t looking to us for leadership.

We think it’s racist to police to our borders. Well, this is what happens when people try to break into the kingdom of clandestine warriors.

They make no apologies for defending themselves with utter ruthlessness.

Good.

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