ISIS

“We are helpless and not being able to do anything against this deliberate destruction to the oil installations. NOC urges all faithful and honorable people of this homeland to hurry to rescue what is left from our resources before it is too late.”

That’s from Libya’s National Oil Corp and as you might have guessed, it references the seizure of state oil assets by Islamic State, whose influence in the country has grown over the past year amid the power vacuum the West created by engineering the demise of Moammar Qaddafi.

At the cost to world peace, the Saudi government experiments with terror on its perceived Shia enemies. Dan Sanchez reports: The Saudis Go Full ISIS In Their US-Backed Takfiri War on the Shia Saudi Arabia has perpetrated a mass execution that puts ISIS’s beach beheadings to shame. Forty-seven heads rolled on Saturday. One of them belonged to Nimr al-Nimr, a revered Shi’ite cleric who had been sentenced to death for sermons in which he criticized the government (especially for its persecution of the country’s Shi’ite minority). His brother has been sentenced to be crucified.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has posted controversial images on his website which liken the executions in Saudi Arabia with the practises of ISIS.  The provocative images depicts an ISIS fighter holding a knife above a hostage, alongside an image of a Saudi executioner brandishing a sword with a prisoner kneeling before him. The text reads “any differences?” above the two images. Independent.co.uk reports: The image comes as the Iranian supreme leader renewed his attack on Saudi Arabia over its execution of leading Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr-al Nimr.

Over the last six or so months, it’s become abundantly clear that Turkey is home to several of the key transit and supply routes utilized by Islamic State. 

Ankara has long been suspected of turning a blind eye to the legions of foreign fighters that flow across the border into Syria and as Nafeez Ahmed noted last month, there’s voluminous evidence to support the contention that Turkey’s government is complicit in the terror group’s activities. This evidence was available long before the Russian MoD blew the whistle on Erdogan’s ties to the group’s illicit crude trade.

Back on July 20, a suicide bomber detonated in Suruc, Turkey, killing 33 people. 

Suruc is a mere stone’s throw away from the Syrian border and from Kobani, where many of those killed were planning on assisting in a rebuilding effort.

The attack was quickly attributed to Islamic State. Two days later, two Turkish police officers were killed by the PKK in Ceylanpinar. Kurdish militants said the men had cooperated with ISIS. Their deaths, PKK’s Syrian affiliate said, were “in revenge for the massacre in Suruc.”