📖 🇮🇱 🇮🇶 Middle East military briefing: Battle for Mosul points to IDF’s ‘fiendish’ task in Gaza
🔶️ The mission to clear the city of jihadist militants was ultimately successful. But the fighting was intense, took three times longer than planned, left 10,000 civilians dead, and killed more coalition soldiers than expected.
🔶️ It also offers a cautionary tale for the Israeli troops massing for the widely expected attack.
“It’s going to be fiendishly difficult,” said David Petraeus, a former US general who led Iraq’s allied forces during the 2007 “surge” and then Nato and US forces in Afghanistan. “I just can’t imagine more difficult circumstances.”
🔶️ “There is also no limit to the troop requirements,” he added. “Even if Israel sent 10mn soldiers into Gaza, it would still take a long time. And that’s just taking the territory; holding it is another matter.”
🔶️ The battle for Mosul — which is similar in size to Gaza’s urban areas and had a comparable population of about 2mn when the city was occupied by Isis — began on October 16, 2016.
Inside the city were roughly 8,000 Isis fighters, compared to Gaza where Hamas has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 fighters and Palestinian Islamic Jihad another 15,000 men under arms.
🔶️ Ranged against the militants in Mosul was an attacking force of 100,000 US-led Iraqi forces, compared with more than 160,000 troops in Israel’s standing army and 360,000 newly-mobilised reservists.
In the skies above Mosul, international coalition planes provided constant surveillance and air strikes — similar to the Israeli fighter jets that have been hitting hundreds of Hamas targets. “Intelligence soaks”, by drones and other forms of surveillance, provided a detailed set of targets for them to hit.
🔶️ Half-destroyed buildings surrounded by rubble meanwhile provided the jihadists with what one US commander described as ideal bombproof shelters.
“Cities have thousands of hiding places,” said the special forces officer. “If you want to remove an enemy, you have to clear the area house by house. But that puts you in 360 degrees of danger. You can’t just sweep through.”
🔶️ The battle for Mosul claimed the lives of 8,000 soldiers from the US-led coalition, and a fight expected to take three months ultimately took nine.
“Hamas knows Gaza far better than [Isis] knew Mosul,” Petraeus said. “Moreover, it took us nine months [to capture Mosul] and Israel does not have that time . . . They know that international public opinion is going to shift . . . as the damage accumulates, and innocent civilians are killed.”
https://www.ft.com/content/32bc687b-1385-401b-a60a-7320848ceb16
“Bondi Hero” Ahmed Al-Ahmed (the man who disarmed the ISIS terrorist in Australia on Sunday) received a phone call from the Foreign Minister of Syria.
During the call, Ahmed asks the Foreign Minister to pass on his “regards” to the new President of Syria, Al-Julani.
Both Al-Julani and Asaad al-Shaibani (the Foreign Minister of Syria) are members of Al Qaeda.
So we allegedly have somebody who sympathizes with terrorist Syrians stopping other terrorists?
Feels like a simulation.
"It does not matter whether this situation reflects planning on the part of a shadowy elite, or is emergent from the decline of your civilization. No matter whom you vote for, or what gloss your preferred candidate puts on these issues, nothing will change until you and enough of the people around you wake up to reality, and launch a campaign of consistent non-compliance with the antihuman trajectory that manipulative elites have set us upon.
It does not matter whether you label the centralizing ambitions of those elites as socialism, communism, technocracy, gobalism or fascism. It doesn’t matter whether you see them as reflecting philanthropic, criminal or satanic motives. The important thing about centralisation is that it absolutely requires censorship and comprehensive obliteration of rights and freedoms to persist, and that it is wholly incompatible with the flourishing of human beings...”
History doesn’t offer much hope. It seems always to have been the case that an ...
FBI Arrested A Fifth Trantifa Militant In NYE Bomb Plot
https://themanhattan.press/2025/12/17/fbi-arrested-a-fifth-trantifa-militant-in-nye-bomb-plot/