Photo Credit: ISIS propaganda videoISIS Can ‘Muster’ Between 20,000 and 31,500 Fighters, CIA Says
By Jim Sciutto, Jamie Crawford and Chelsea J. Carter.
A CIA assessment puts the number of ISIS fighters at possibly more than three times the previous estimates.
The terror group that calls itself the Islamic State “can muster between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria,” a CIA spokesman told CNN on Thursday.
Analysts and U.S. officials initially estimated there were as many as 10,000 fighters, including those who were freed from prisons by ISIS, and Sunni loyalists who have joined the fight as the group advanced across Iraq.
“This new total reflects an increase in members because of stronger recruitment since June following battlefield successes and the declaration of a caliphate, greater battlefield activity and additional intelligence,” the spokesman said.
The news came a day after President Barack Obama laid out his plan to “dismantle and ultimately destroy” ISIS, including authorizing airstrikes.
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Photo: UncreditedAn imminent beheading?
By Bill Gertz.
Counterterrorism officials are concerned that the Islamic State will behead a British hostage next week, noting consistencies in the terrorist group’s decapitations of two American journalists.
Analysts say the video releases of the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff took place two weeks apart and both were made public on a Tuesday evening.
If the timing was calculated, officials are concerned that the Islamic State will similarly murder British hostage David Haines on Tuesday.
Mr. Haines, a worker for a French non-governmental organization, was shown at the end of the Sotloff video dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The terrorist who spoke on the video said Mr. Haines would be the group’s next victim.
The videos of the Foley and Sotloff beheadings showed a masked, British-accented jihadist cutting off the American journalists’ heads, sparking global outrage and prompting calls for U.S. intervention against the Islamic State.
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The Three Types of People Who Fight for ISIS: A breakdown of the most evil group on the planet
By Graeme Wood.
On February 2012, a young, beefy Egyptian named Islam Yaken took a shirtless selfie and posted it on a Facebook competitor called Vk.com. The picture wouldn’t have attracted much attention outside his circle of Cairo friends, were it not for the photos of himself he tweeted two years later. In that time, the Wahlberg wannabe with tidy, cropped hair had transmogrified into a bushy-haired hipster with heavy-rimmed glasses—who had gone to fight for ISIS. The jihadi accessories in his new photos included a Kalashnikov, a sword, and a bucket of Shia heads.
When Yaken’s pictures went viral a month ago, they provoked some confusion about how this well-educated, urban gym-rat could so rapidly embrace a group known for its austere, backward-looking form of desert Islam. The same confusion reigns over the transformation of Abdel Majed Abdel Bary, the former stoner who rapped in London under the name L Jinny and is now a suspect in the murder of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.1 There is, of course, an obvious continuity between the Yaken who yanked his undies just below the pube-line to give a full glimpse of his abs and the narcissistic poseur now in Syria, as well as a thread of miscreance that runs through the life of Abdel Bary. But not all ISIS fighters are the type to have traded protein shakes and doobies for scimitars and explosive belts.
By now we’re starting to see an emerging taxonomy of the motivations of ISIS supporters. And as the types emerge, they reveal hints of ISIS’s vulnerability, and where its rapid expansion can be used against it. Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer now with The Soufan Group, estimates a total roster of 10,00 to 15,000 ISIS fighters, of whom hundreds may be foreigners, with the remainder from indigenous populations and ex-Baathists.
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