As western aircraft step up their aerial war on Isis targets in Syria, the implication is that the military task is not simply one of battlefield arithmetic. Isis is already far more than the sum of its fighters.
The document - written as a foundation text to train “cadres of administrators” in the months after Isis's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria on 28 June 2014 - sketches out how to organise government departments including education, natural resources, industry, foreign relations, public relations and military camps.
Lt Gen Graeme Lamb, former head of UK special forces, said the playbook carried a warning for current military strategy.
Referring to sections of the statecraft text in which Isis repeatedly claims it is the only true representatives of Sunni Arab Muslims in the region, Lamb said it was all the more important to ensure wider Sunni leadership in the fight with Isis, or risk “fuelling this monster”.
“Seeing Daesh [Isis] and the caliphate as simply a target to be systematically broken by forces other than Middle Eastern Sunnis... is to fail to understand this fight.
“It must be led by the Sunni Arab leadership and its many tribes across the region, with us in the west and the other religious factions in the Middle East acting in support.
“It is not currently how we are shaping the present counter-Isis campaign, thereby setting ourselves up for potential failure.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/07/leaked-isis-document-reveals-plan-building-state-syria
“Let me give you the punchline here: Iraq doesn't exist. Syria doesn't exist. And they ain't coming back. They're gone,” Hayden said.
http://www.airforcetimes.com/story/military/2015/12/06/us-must-adapt-ever-changing-world-former-cia-director-says/76785604/
Investigators lost access to NSA-held phone records 4 days before California shootings.
The U.S. government’s ability to review and analyze five years’ worth of telephone records for the married couple blamed in the deadly shootings in California lapsed just four days earlier when the National Security Agency’s controversial mass surveillance program was formally shut down.
Under a court order, those historical calling records at the NSA are now off-limits to agents running the FBI terrorism investigation even with a warrant.
How many days until this is fixed?