Something Strange About ISIS
I recently returned from the Terrorism and Religious Extremism Conference in Damascus. While there, I had the opportunity to meet with Syrian militia leaders. What they had to tell me and show me confirmed some of my suspicions. I already knew that the United States had trained at least 3000 ISIS “cadre” leaders at camps in Jordan. Colonel Jim Hanke US Army Special Forces (ret) had accompanied me and spoke of this during the conference.
However, the militia leaders brought evidence. They had photographed not only ISIS dead but their identity papers as well. One group of 74 killed in fighting near Kobani included 15 Ukrainians and 8 Chechens. Others included fighters from Saudi Arabia, Yemen but the rest were from North Africa. There was no gloating over the dead despite the fact the exchange took place in a restaurant at the Damas Rose, a government owned hotel in Syria. There was a sadness, a solemnity about this as even ISIS dead, reputed to be mass murderers, looked no different than others, all young, bearded though many distinctly European.
What was surprising was the lack of curiosity as to how any of these fighters had gotten into Syria in the first place. I had travelled through Lebanon, was picked up by security at the airport and, on the way to Damascus, stopped many times at military checkpoints and subjected to 4 hours of background checks at remote border crossings. Even inside Syria it took hours to get clearance despite carrying a letter from the Minister of Justice.
Simply put, jihadists don’t just walk through Lebanon. This leaves only two possibilities, they travel through Turkey, something more than obvious or they receive transit across Israel. A cursory examination of the geography of the region leaves only two other remote possibilities. One is that they manage to cross the Red Sea like Moses or they are flown in somehow, magically passing through airport security checkpoints all overseen by Interpol, America’s Department of Homeland Security and NATO financed security forces.
