Operation Featherweight: Month 7, Week 1, Day 7

As I covered in my previous post on the subject on Friday (30/1/15) the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched an attack on and captured some territory surrounding the Iraqi city of Kirkuk which sits around 236km (141 miles) north of Baghdad and around 130km (78 miles) south-west of the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Arbil. Although it's taken until now for me to discover the operational details the Kurdish Peshmerga who are guarding Kirkuk immediately launched a counter-offensive to force ISIL back.

As the ISIL operation itself was on a small-scale the Peshmerga operation has also been rather small but hugely successful. By the end of Friday the Peshmerga had succeeded in re-capturing 5 of 8 bridges that led into Kirkuk. On Saturday (31/1/15) the Peshmerga re-captured the remaining three bridges and reinforced their defences allowing them to repel an ISIL counter-attack that came on Sunday (1/2/15). During this operation the Peshmerga received co-ordinated close air-support from the US-led coalition and the US has been telling anyone who will listen about all the support they're giving to the Peshmerga. It must be said though that as this only really one of handful of times that the Peshmerga have received this level of support from the coalition it is hardly something for the US to boast about. After all the Kurdish and Iraqi forces should be receiving this type of support on every operation and they should have been receiving it throughout the six months this operation has dragged on for.

The recent headlines though have been grabbed by the release on Tuesday (3/2/15) of an ISIL video that shows the murder of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasaesbeh who was captured in Raqqa, Syria on December 24th (24/12/14).

Purporting to be have been produced by ISIL's own intelligence/spy agency the 22 minute video entitled "Healing of the Believers Chests" begins with a montage of news footage showing Jordan's role in the anti-ISIL coalition interspersed with battle footage. Although I can't be certain I'm pretty sure this battle footage has been stolen directly from the CGI heavy 2013 Russian film "Stalingrad" which narrowly missed out on an Oscar nomination. This may have been done because ISIL needed some really cool battle footage that few people would recognise. However along with their use of greenscreen special effects in the January 20th (20/1/15) hostage video I'm starting to think that ISIL's propaganda department are starting to get really excited about the Oscars. Those film awards are of course a big event in the western world but are considered less important in the Arab world that ISIL claim to represent.

Following the opening montage the video moves into a roughly 15 minute portion in which al-Kasaesbeh wearing an orange jumpsuit sits at a desk and is interviewed by an unseen interrogator. This is all done in un-subtitled Arabic and is clearly staged for propaganda purposes making it yet another war crime we can add to ISIL's charge sheet. In the interview al-Kasaesbeh details the mission that led to his crash and capture. Being a propaganda video al-Kasaesbeh is forced to claim that his plane was shot down by heroic ISIL fighters.

This is utter nonsense because the type of aircraft that al-Kasaesbeh was flying and the tactics he was using are specifically designed to render ISIL's air defences useless. However these military fast jets are not as reliable as people like to believe. Although I'm not overly familiar with F-16 back in October the amount of time similar Eurofighter jets can spend in the air was halved to 1,500 flying hours in order to stop its wings falling off. While it's furiously denied by the US it is also rumoured that the F-35 which is supposed to replace the F-16 and is the most expensive military aircraft ever produced has a problem where by the fuel overheats causing the engines to shut-down. At 35,000ft this type of Engine Flameout is a major problem and the most likely explanation of how al-Kasaesbeh came to crash.

After covering his specific mission al-Kasaesbeh is forced to then detail aspects of the entire coalition air operation such as exactly how many aircraft are being used, what type of weapons they are using, what nations they come from and where they are operating from. This was all pretty standard information which far from being secret or even classified is freely available on the Internet particularly the coalitions own website.

However al-Kasaesbeh did claim that Morocco are operating as part of the coalition which I have certainly not heard from any other source. However you may remember that back in August 2014 when Egypt was frantically trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza the US sensationally claimed that Egypt had conducted secret bombing missions against ISIL allies in Libya. This seemed to be a completely unfounded politically motivated declaration by the US because everybody else knew that the air-strikes had been carried out by another nation to the west of Libya which has had a lot of problems with Jihadists in the past. Al-Kasaesbeh was also forced to declare that Turkey is allowing its airbases to be used by the coalition. This is completely untrue and is a major source of tension within the coalition. ISIL however seem to have included the claim in al-Kasaesbeh's script in an effort to distract attention away from their allegiance with Turkey.

Following the interview portion the video uses on-screen graphics to offer a bonkers explanation of how Israel has secretly taken over Jordan. In reality any relationship between Jordan and Israel is actually brokered by the UK which established both Jordan and the mandate for Palestine. The video then directly links the anti-ISIL operation to the last summer's war between Israel and Hamas. At the risk of going off on a tangent if you are familiar with just how brutal war can be you'd understand that Israel's actions in Gaza were not the outrage they were claimed to be. Instead it was a necessary and controlled operation which was conducted in a much more humane fashion then the 2008/9 Gaza war. The coalition operation against ISIL is being carried out at a far lower intensity then even the most recent Gaza war with great efforts being made to only kill civilians. I don't have the most recent figures to hand but we are talking about less then 70 civilians being killed in 6 months of bombing.

However this video was produced by ISIL to make themselves looks like the hero so it goes on to use a montage of stock footage from other wars and even scenes from just everyday hospitals to claim that the coalition (which is secretly run by Zionists remember) is purposefully massacring large numbers of innocent Muslims.

That montage then leads into the most gruesome sequence in the video. This shows al-Kasaesbeh being led around the site of a coalition air-strike by masked ISIL fighters who are keen to present themselves as well disciplined all in identical military uniforms and carrying identical weapons. The footage from the bomb site is interspersed with footage that claims to show the immediate aftermath of the strike - corpses and all. Al-Kasaesbeh is then placed in a cage and doused in what I assume to be gasoline. A masked ISIL fighter who is pointedly not the infamous "Jihadi John" then lights a trail of gasoline leading up to the cage. As the flames make their way towards al-Kasaesbeh the video takes great pleasure in his terror even using the type of visual effects seen in music videos like Rihanna's "Disturbia" to illustrate mental distress. When the flames reach al-Kasaesbeh the video shows him being burnt for at least 70 seconds although it may have been edited down. Finally the flames are extinguished by what Americans term a front loader but what most people would call a JCB dumping rubble on the cage. This is of course supposed to symbolise the rubble created by the air-strikes.

This particularly horrific method of murder seems to stem from an very literal interpretation of a quote by the Prophet Mohamed that Muslims who kill innocents must be burnt in the fires of hell. Following al-Kasaesbeh's capture ISIL held an online competition amongst its supporters to decide the best way to murder him. The winning suggestion appears to have been inspired by this quote from the Prophet leading to them to decide that they should burn al-Kasaesbeh here on earth in order to save him from the hell fire which is a rather Catholic interpretation of Islam. Of course the Prophet also said that Muslims are forbidden to burn anyone as punishment so you have to wonder if many ISIL fighters have even read the Qu'ran let alone the Hadith.

With the video seeming to be a reward for ISIL's online fan boys and it clearly having taken time to edit together I am confident that it was all filmed and al-Kasaesbeh was killed weeks ago. As a result ISIL's decision to kill al-Kasaesbeh was in no way influenced by Jordan's decision not to give into ISIL's demand to release Sajida al-Rishawi. Jordanian intelligence have but the exact date of death at January 3rd (3/1/15) which sounds about right to me give or take a day.

The video ends with a sequence in which ISIL offer a bounty of 100 Gold Dinars for the killing of other members of the Jordanian military whose identities were supposedly given up by al-Kasaebeh during interrogation. As the majority of those named are pilots rather then being a genuine threat this is simply ISIL acting like a frightened cat by trying to make themselves appear as big and scary as possible. In my football days we used to sarcastically refer to this type of behaviour as; "Giving it the large."

In order to maximise the impact the message that rather then being proper Muslims like ISIL the Jordanians are simply puppets of the global Zionist conspiracy the video was released to coincide with Jordanian King Abdullah II visiting the US to meet with President Obama. In order to prepare his nations response King Abdullah cut short his US visit and immediately ordered that Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziyad Karboli be executed. Both al-Rishawi and Karboli were already awaiting execution after being tried and convicted of terrorism offences. Al-Rishawi in particular was arrested at the scene of a suicide bombing wearing a suicide vest that had failed to detonate. As a result I wholeheartedly agree with Jordan's decision to simply move forward the date of execution.

The US' response however was much harder to justify. Just as Obama and King Abdullah were meeting a Jeep 4x4 collided with a train in the Valhalla area of New York state creating a fiery mess and killing 7 Americans. Putting aside strange little details such as Jeep's Superbowl commercial featuring a Muslim woman Valhalla comes from Norse/Viking mythology where it is a special heaven that warriors who have gloriously died in battle are carried to on wings. I suppose you could describe a fighter pilot as "a winged warrior." However the Norse warriors don't sprout wings of their own but instead are carried to Valhalla by winged, female angels called "Valkyries" who are specially chosen to care for the warriors in death.

Probably the most famous references to Valkyries is the piece of music "The Ride of the Valkyries" by Richard Wagner. It is this piece of music that is used in the 1979 Vietnam war film "Apocalypse Now" to accompany a battle scene in which US helicopter gunships and bomber aircraft attack a suspected enemy village with cannon fire, bombs and Napalm. In a later scene where ground troops have moved in their commander delivers the famous line; "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning. It smells like victory!"

Originally invented as a way to manage forest fires Napalm is basically just gasoline mixed with a gel to make it stick to what you want it to burn without accidentally setting fire to everything else. However when you use it as a weapon against people Napalm produces exactly the same effects that ISIL's gasoline had on al-Kasaesbeh. Although its set during a war Apocalypse now has a very strong anti-war message but I'll save you the tangent about Dantes Inferno. As such the US's response to al-Kasaesbeh's murder was to kill 7 Americans in order to launch an angry attack against Jordan for suggesting that the coalition responds by intensifying the fight against ISIL. King Abdullah promised an "Earth shaking response."

In terms of the type of weaponry being used by the coalition I don't think they really need to intensify. After all there's no point Napalming an entire city to kill a handful of ISIL fighters when we can simply destroy their vehicle with a Hellfire-type missile. However the operation does need to become more a lot more focused.

This means that Obama needs to drop his foolish idea of training Sunni-Arab Insurgents in Syria and instead provide proper air-support to the Iraqi and Kurdish fighters who are already in place to drive ISIL out of Iraq as quickly as possible. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) have already suspended their operations in Syria in order to put pressure on Obama to get his act together.

18:00 on 4/2/15 (UK date).