Islamic State forces now only 60 miles from Baghdad.
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Iraq braced for the Battle of Baghdad: Chilling images show ISIS victory parade after fanatics seize key city of Ramadi – just 60 miles from the capital – in an orgy of violence and beheadings
by Jay Akbar, Steph Cockroft, Simon Tomlinson and Julian Robinson
MailOnline — May 19, 2015 (h/t Jihad Watch)
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| ISIS victory parade in Ramadi |
ISIS militants have held a twisted victory parade after taking the key city of Ramadi in an orgy of violence and beheadings – and the extremists could march on the Iraqi capital Baghdad within the next month.
Mutilated bodies scatter the streets of the ‘Gateway of Baghdad’, where Islamic State slaughtered around 500 and forced nearly 25,000 to flee their homes over the last few days.
Now ISIS has released images of militants celebrating, children wielding automatic weapons and a fleet of pick-up trucks carrying its jubilant fighters through the blood-stained streets of Ramadi.
Shi’ite fighters have already launched a counter-offensive to recapture the city, but these kinds of tactics play straight into Islamic State’s grand plan to spark all-out war in the region, according to the Middle East director of counter-terrorism think-tank RUSI.
Islamic State militants are already marching east towards the Habbaniya army base – around 20 miles east of Ramadi – where a column of 3,000 Shi’ite paramilitaries are amassing, witnesses and a military officer has said.
And if ISIS manage to reach Baghdad, it would be ‘utter carnage’, Professor Gareth Stansfield told MailOnline.
He said: ‘If ISIS turn up in great numbers in Baghdad, it will be an absolute slaughter between Sunni’s [sic] and Shia’s [sic] there.
‘They [ISIS] are now having so many successes, and moving so quickly, that Baghdad is under very real threat from ISIS forces outside Baghdad and also the ISIS terror cells inside Baghdad as well...
ISLAMIC STATE STRONGHOLD GROWS IN NORTH AFRICA WITH ALLEGIANCE OF TUNISIAN MUJAHIDIN
by Thomas D. Williams, PhD, Breitbart News — May 19, 2015
As ISIS influence increases daily in the North African nation of Libya, it has also succeeded in penetrating the ranks of Islamists in neighboring Tunisia, securing an oath of fealty from the Mujahidin of Kairouan.
According to reports, the Mujahidin have released an audio message addressed to the ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi containing a sworn oath of allegiance.
The nine-minute audio message was disseminated primarily through social networks and was still able to be heard in the original language on the net on Tuesday.
The new pact with Tunisian Islamists comes just a week after the Algerian group al-Mourabitoun allegedly also swore its allegiance to the Islamic State. Al-Mourabitoun militias have reportedly been active in the fighting in Libya.
The Mauritanian news source Alakhbar cited a recording it had received from a spokesman for al-Mourabitoun in which a speaker calling himself Adnan Abu Waleed al-Sahrawi asserted that al-Mourabitoun had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and urged other jihadi groups to do likewise. A co-founder of al-Mourabitoun, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, later denied reports that the jihadist group has shifted its allegiance to the Islamic State from al-Qaeda.
Analysts suggest that the new Islamic State allies in Tunisia have been recruited to assist in galvanizing ISIS’ strategic base in Libya, rather than primarily to infiltrate Italy, which at only 96 miles away is the closest African state to Italy. The distance is so short, in fact, that less than a decade ago an Italian government agency proposed a project to build a tunnel under the Strait of Sicily connecting the two nations.
Just last month ISIS launched an appeal to Tunisian jihadists through a 3-minute video inviting them to join the fight in Libya.
The newly established European mission in Libya has ruled out sending ground troops to Libya, at least for the moment. According to Gianandrea Gaiani, editor-in-chief of Analisi Difesa, an Italian journal of geopolitical and military analysis, a European military presence on Libyan soil would represent a provocation that would summon all jihadists within hundreds of miles.
For the moment, the European intervention in Libya will be an exclusively naval mission. On the one hand it aims at stemming the urgent problem of human trafficking and terrorist infiltration, and on the other it seeks to better secure the southern Mediterranean, especially between Sicily and North Africa.