ISIS

ISIS appears to be at a bit of a crossroads. As we detailed yesterday, faced with a cash crunch and significant military losses, the organization is becoming quite strained. The group has reached the point where the rank and file are becoming frustrated and have started to defect.

In order to stop the defections, ISIS dug deep in its bag of incentives and decided to employ the carrot and stick method.

First we learned of the stick, which is to literally freeze members to death if they're caught trying to defect.

As we wrote yesterday

Several weeks ago when we reported on the latest territorial losses by ISIS and the curious disappearance of the "war against ISIS" from the media's front pages, we said that this was the expected outcome of the recent Russian airborne military operations over northern Syria which had destroyed much of the Islamic State's oil infrastructure and, more importantly, had cutoff key ISIS oil transit lines to Turkey.

This dramatically reduced ISIS' inbound cash from oil sales, which had previously been estimated to amount to over a billion dollars annually.

An Iraqi tank nicknamed “The Beast” is loose on the battlefields of Iraq, tearing down the countryside, looking for ISIS fighters, in the western city of Hit. A Twitter post on the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service’s account shows The Beast obliterating an ISIS car loaded with explosives. The Daily Caller reports: The ISIS car was approaching ICTS personnel outside Ramadi in Hit, Iraq, apparently loaded with explosives, ICTS said in a tweet describing the video.

A new ISIS video warns the West that “vengeance is coming” to the people of Europe, showing the Eiffel Tower in Paris exploding and crashing to the ground.  The video, released this week on social media, promises to attack unexpectedly in cities across Europe, including: London, Berlin and Brussels. Pjmedia.com reports: The video begins with a river of blood pooling and dripping off a wooden table filled with stacks of American money, guns, knives and bullets. It’s ripped from a video game, as betrayed by the name of a video game designer with a U.S.

US Defense Secretary Ash Carter has confirmed the death of senior ISIS commander Haji Imam, finance minister, second-in-command and potential successor to leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This is a setback for so called Islamic State/ISIS militants who have recently lost territories in Iraq and Syria which had been designated for a caliphate. It comes just three weeks after the killing of another top ISIS commander, Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvil, known as Omar al-Shishani or Omar the Chechen.