ISIS/ISIL conflict in Syria/Iraq (No OpEd, No Politics)

December 14, 2014, 12:00 pm
Defunding the failed policy of regime change in Syria

By Hannibal Travis

The House has blessed the Obama administration’s plan to earmark U.S. taxpayer dollars for the training and arming of “vetted” members of the Syrian opposition. There has been no declaration of war or even an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Syrian government. Amnesty International and the State Department have warned that the plan will not work.

The Senate should seize the opportunity to defund the failed policy of arming and funding Syrian rebels, sometimes called the Free Syrian Army (FSA). They should filibuster the spending bill, if necessary, to get the Congress out of the business of arming extremists, and of prolonging the Syrian civil war.

The Obama administration is linking a proposal for $500 million in aid to Syrian rebels with the AUMF against the Islamic State. Due to the way in which the budget bill has come down to the wire, some members of Congress feel “blackmailed” to vote for it or face a government shutdown. Some Senators, led by presidential hopeful Rand Paul, would delink the war on the Islamic State from the funding of the Syrian opposition.

The first problem with the plan is a legal one. Under domestic and international law, many of the rebels should be considered as terrorists and war criminals for destroying public infrastructure, devastating Syria’s economy, firing missiles and mortars at Christian churches and civilian neighborhoods, using children as human shields, and plundering antiquities and the other national wealth of the Syrian people. Arming such people not only harms the various peoples of Iraq and Syria, but places those carrying out the policy at risk of facilitating war crimes, crimes against humanity, aggression, and even genocide.

Since the Obama administration recognized the Syrian Opposition Coalition as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people in 2012, the instability and suffering in the region have intensified. In Syria and Iraq, the regime change policy has probably accelerated the religious cleansing of Christians and more secular Muslims, and the destruction of cultural property and essential infrastructure. Assyrian Christians in places like Al-Qamishli in Syria and Mosul in Iraq are being raped and killed by the FSA or the Islamic State, and some Christians are committing suicide in despair, in Catholic bishops and Orthodox patriarchs from the region call a “genocide.” The Yezidi non-Muslims of Iraq are being exterminated despite President Obama’s and the Senate’s pledges to protect them.

The Russian Federation and other UN members have accused the Syrian opposition of using chemical weapons after rebels sacked airbases or research facilities. There have been no inspections of the weapons of mass destruction owned or used by the FSA or the Islamic State, and nothing stopped countless FSA members from joining the Islamic State.

Defunding the Syrian opposition is the best response to a series of damning reports that US arms provided to their leaders by the Obama administration have fallen into the hands of the Islamic State. While some of FSA factions have fought some Islamic State factions, FSA leaders have publicly condemned the recent US-led attacks on the Islamic State.

The line between the FSA and the Islamic State is blurry. Its brigades have “merged” with the Islamic State in many places. It has sold an American to the Islamic State, according to a spokesman for the family of Steven Sotloff, who was beheaded. The FSA’s social media activity has similar jihadist content to that of the Islamic State.

As Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has remarked, “out of the 9 major rebel groups, 7 of them had significant alliances or connections to al Qaeda or al Nusra or to other radical Islamic groups like ISIS.” Senator Rand Paul (R-ky.) has similarly explained that “[d]egrading Assad’s military capacity also degrades his ability to fend off the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.” Most peoples in Syria’s neighborhood oppose foreign military aid to Syrian rebels, with about 80% of Israelis and Lebanese being concerned about further extremist victories.

Secretary of State John Kerry recently admitted that the Islamic State is “controlling half the country” of Syria. Further aid to the rebellion in Syria threatens to give it the other half.

The Senate would be on solid ground with the American people in defunding the Syrian opposition. While some recent polling does not separately survey the policy of providing arms and training to Syrian rebels, the public clearly does not want to pay their bills.

Travis is a professor of Law at Florida International University, and the author of Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan (2010).

Click to expand...

US servicemen in first ground battle with ISIS – Kurdish media
Published time: December 17, 2014 17:54

American forces were involved in their first ground battle with Islamic State fighters, according to Kurdish media outlet Shafaq News, near the Ain Al-Assad base in the Anbar province of Iraq early Sunday. The report could not be independently verified.

US forces allegedly came to the aid of tribal fighters and the Iraqi Army battling Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) militants in the Al-Dolab area, 10 km (6.2 miles) from the Ain Al-Assad base, which is about 90 km (56 miles) west of Anbar’s capital, Ramadi.

"US forces intervened because … ISIS started to come near the base, which they are stationed in so out of self-defense, they responded,” said Sheikh Mahmud Nimrawi, a tribal leader in the area, according to Shafaq.

The base hosts about 100 US military advisers, the report claimed.

An Iraqi Army field commander in Anbar said that "the US force equipped with light and medium weapons, supported by fighter force model F-18" was able to hit Islamic State targets, forcing them to retreat from Al-Dolab.

The clash with Islamic forces lasted for more than two hours, as American jets also hit several Islamic State fighters, according to Colonel Salam Nazim.

"We have made progress in Al-Dolab area, in which ISIS has withdrawn from to the villages beyond, after the battles which involved a private American force” that surprised Islamic State fighters, tribal leader Sheikh Mahmud Nimrawi said.

The American forces returned to Ain Al-Assad base after the mission, according to Nimrawi, who added that the "US promised to provide tribal fighters who are in that region exclusively with weapons.”

The Pentagon has not released information on any American involvement in ground fighting with Islamic State.

Since announcing US-led-coalition airstrikes against Islamic State in August, US President Barack Obama has repeatedly stated that he would not commit troops to another ground war in Iraq. Yet the Pentagon’s top brass have since said that the option remains on the table.

US Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress last week that President Obama “has been crystal clear” about his preference to rely on local forces to defeat the Islamic State. But Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that any congressional authorization of military force against Islamic State militants should not ban the use of American ground forces, or place a “geographic limitation” on the effort.

“[W]e certainly believe this is the soundest policy, and while the president has been clear he's open to clarifications on the use of US combat troops to be outlined in an AUMF, that does not mean we should preemptively bind the hands of the commander in chief – or our commanders in the field – in responding to scenarios and contingencies that are impossible to foresee,” Kerry said.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Kurdish forces began Wednesday an operation to retake Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq, after US-led coalition airstrikes targeted Islamic State positions overnight, Kurdish security officials said, according to Reuters.

"At 8:00 this morning the ground offensive began to liberate Sinjar town," said one official in the region's Security Council, adding that coalition jets hit the area beforehand.

"There's evidence that a lot of IS fighters abandoned their weapons and fled the area."

Should the offensive prove successful, it could open a path to Sinjar mountain, where hundreds of Yazidis - an ethnic Kurdish minority - have been trapped by Islamic State since August.

Upon authorizing airstrikes in August, Obama said the action was necessary to protect American personnel and to offer humanitarian aid to the besieged Yazidis

Kurdish forces have regained much ground lost to Islamic State in northern Iraq since the summer, according to Reuters.

Click to expand...

The Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) group conducted a mass execution of women in Fallujah, according to a statement issued by the Iraqi government.

The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights announced Tuesday that a man identified as Abu Anas al-Libi had killed more than 150 women and girls in Iraq's Fallujah, some of whom were pregnant.

"The women were executed because they refused to accept the policy of Jihad al-Nikah that ISIS is enforcing in Fallujah," the ministry's statement added.

ISIS has carried out "wide-ranging massacres" in the Anbar province's Fallujah, the ministry also said, specifying that the jihadist group has been burying the dead in two mass graves in the city's Hayy al-Jolan neighborhood as well as the suburb of Al-Saqlawiyyah.

According to the report, ISIS has also turned the city’s Al-Hadra al-Mohammadiyyah mosque into a large prison where hundreds of men and women are being held. There was no independent confirmation of the Iraqi ministry’s report.
Jihad al-Nikah

Jihad al-Nikah, or the controversial practice of women serving as consorts to jihadist fighters, first came to media attention during the Syrian civil war.

In late 2013, Tunisia's Interior Ministry said numerous women from the country had traveled to Syria for Jihad al-Nikah, however subsequent media reports played down the claims.
As ISIS pressed its lightning advances in Iraq in this summer, reports began to emerge of the jihadist group's mass abuse of women.

The Egyptian daily Al-Masry al-Yawm reported in June that ISIS had distributed notices in Mosul calling on women to submit to Jihad al-Nikah.
Although this specific report was never confirmed, a UN human rights spokesperson said four women in Mosul "were believed to have committed suicide after being raped by insurgents or forced into marriages with them."

ISIS in October announced in its Dabiqjournal that it had enslaved Yazidi women, boasting it was the "first [enslavement] since the abandonment of sharia law."

"After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharia among the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one-fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State's authority to be divided as khums," the journal said.

Videos have since emerged of ISIS bartering Yazidi slave women on markets, and the group in December issued a follow-up flyer that discussed the specifics of how to take women captive and treat them.

Click to expand...

Miragedriver said:

ISIS Just Executed More Than 150 Women In Fallujah

Click to expand...

thunderchief said:

Hope it is not true, but nothing would surprise me any more :S

Anyway, one Abu Anas al Libi is in US custody, don't think it is same man

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Israel lends al-Nusra a hand in Syria
By Nicola Nasser

Overtly, the Israeli superpower of the Middle East has been keen to posture as having no role whatsoever in the four-year old devastating conflict in Syria, where all major regional and international powers are politically and militarily deeply involved and settling scores by Syrian blood.

In his geopolitical weekly analysis, entitled "The Islamic State Reshapes the Middle East", on November 25 Stratfor's George Friedman raised eyebrows when he reviewed the effects which the terrorist group had on all regional powers, but seemed unaware of the existence of the Israeli regional superpower.

It was an instructive omission that says a lot about the no more discreet role Israel is playing to maintain what the Israeli commentator Amos Harel described as the "stable instability" in Syria and the region, from the Israeli perspective of course.

Friedman in fact was reflecting a similar official omission by the US administration. When President Barak Obama appealed for a "broad international coalition" to fight the Islamic State (IS), Israel - the strongest military power in the region and the well - positioned logistically to fight it - was not asked to join. The Obama administration explained later that Israel's contribution would reflect negatively on the Arab partners in the coalition.

"Highlighting Israel's contributions could be problematic in terms of complicating efforts to enlist Muslim allies" in the coalition, said Michael Eisenstadt, a senior fellow at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's arm, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Covertly however Israel is a key player in prolonging the depleting war on Syria and the major beneficiary of neutralizing the military of the only immediate Arab neighbor that has so far eluded yielding to the terms dictated by the US-backed Israeli regional force majeure for making peace with the Hebrew state.

Several recent developments however have brought the Israeli role into the open.

First the latest bombing of Syrian targets near the Damascus international civilian airport on December 7 was the seventh major unprovoked air strike of its kind since 2011 and the fifth in the past 18 months on Syrian defenses. Syrian scientific research centers, missile depots, air defense sites, radar and electronic monitoring stations and the Republican Guards were targeted by Israel.

Facilitating the Israeli mission and complementing it, the terrorist organizations operating in the country tried several times to hit the same targets. They succeeded in killing several military pilots and experts whom Israeli intelligence services would have paid dearly to hunt down.

Foreign Policy on last June 14 quoted a report by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as saying that the "battle-hardened Syrian rebels ... once in Israel, they receive medical treatment in a field clinic before being sent back to Syria", describing the arrangement as a "gentleman's agreement".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in February this year visited this "military field hospital" and shook hands with some of the more than 1,000 rebels treated in Israeli hospitals, according to Lt Col Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).

Foreign Policy quoted also Ehud Yaari, an Israeli fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as saying that Israel was supplying the rebel - controlled Syrian villages with medicines, heaters, and other humanitarian supplies. The assistance, he said, has benefited civilians and "insurgents". Yaari ignored the reports about the Israeli intelligence services to those "insurgents".

Israel facilitates war on UNDOF

Second, the latest quarterly report by the UN Disengagement Force (UNDOF) to the UN Security Council (UNSC) on December 1 confirmed what eight previous similar reports had stated about the "interaction across the [Syrian - Israeli] ceasefire line" between the IOF and the "armed members of the [Syrian] opposition", in the words of Ban Ki-Moon's report to the Security Council on December 4.

Third, Ki-moon in his report confirmed that the UNDOF "was forced to relocate its troops" to the Israeli side of the ceasefire line, leaving the Syrian side a safe haven zone for the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front, which the UNSC had designated a "terrorist group".

UNDOF's commander, Lieutenant General Iqbal Singh Singha, told the UNSC on October 9 that his troops were "under fire, been abducted, hijacked, had weapons snatched and offices vandalized". Australia was the latest among the troop contributing countries to pull out its forces from UNDOF.

UNDOF and the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) operate in the buffer zone of about 80 kilometers long and between 0.5 to 10 km wide, forming an area of 235 square km. The zone borders the Lebanon Blue Line to the north and forms a border of less than 1 km with Jordan to the south. It straddles the Purple Line which separates the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria. The west Israeli side of this line is known as "Alpha" and the east Syrian side as "Bravo".

Speaking at the US military base Fort Dix on Monday, President Obama warned those who "threaten America" that they "will have no safe haven", but that is exactly what Israel is providing them.

Israeli "interaction" has practically helped the UNDOF "to relocate" from Bravo to Alpha and to hand Bravo as a safe haven over to an al-Nusra Front-led coalition of terrorist groups.

Al-Nusra Front is officially the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. US Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Committee on Foreign relations on this December 9 that his administration considers the IS to be a branch of al-Qaeda operating under a different name. Both terrorist groups were one under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and only recently separated. Whoever accommodates either one is in fact courting the other.

"The 1,200-strong UN force is now mostly huddled inside Camp Ziouani, a drab base just inside the Israeli - controlled side of the Golan Heights. Its patrols along the de facto border have all but ceased," the Associated Press (AP) reported on last September 18.

Israeli air force and artillery intervened several times to protect the al-Nusra Front's "safe haven" against fire power from Syria, which is still committed to its ceasefire agreement of 1974 with Israel. Last September for example, Israel shot down a Syrian fighter jet that was bombing the Front's positions, only three weeks after shooting down a Syrian drone over the area.

Israel is not only violating Syrian sovereignty, but violating also the UN-sponsored ceasefire agreement and the UNSC anti-terror resolutions. More important, Israel is in fact undermining the UNDOF mandate on the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

This situation could only be interpreted as an Israeli premeditated war by proxy on the UN presence on the Golan Heights.

"Israel is the most interested in having [UN] peacekeepers evacuated from the occupied Golan so as to be left without international monitoring," Syria's permanent envoy to the UN, Bashar al-Jaafari, told reporters on September 17.

The UNSC seems helpless or uninterested in defending the UNDOF mandate on the Golan against Israeli violations, which risk the collapse of the 1974 ceasefire arrangements.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry was on record condemning these violations as a "declaration of war", asserting that Syria reserves its right to retaliate "at the right moment and the right place". Obviously a regional outbreak is at stake here without the UN presence as a buffer.

Upgrading unanimously Israel's status from a "major non-NATO ally" to a "major strategic partner" of the United States by the US Congress on December 3 could explain the UNSC inaction.

The undeclared understanding between the Syrian government and the US-led coalition against the self-declared "Islamic State" (IS) not to target the latter's forces seems to have left this mission to Israel, who could not join the coalition publicly for subjective as well as objective reasons.

The AP on September 18 did not hesitate to announce that the "collapse of UN peacekeeping mission on Golan Heights marks a new era on Israel-Syria front". Aron Heller, the writer of the AP report, quoted the former Israeli military liaison officer with UNDOF, Stephane Cohen, as saying: "Their mandate is just not relevant anymore." Heller concluded that this situation "endangers" the "status quo", which indeed has become a status quo ante.

Israeli strategic gains

The emerging fait accompli seems very convenient to Israel, creating positive strategic benefits for the Hebrew state and arming it with a pretext not to withdraw the IOF from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian territories.

In an analysis paper published by The Saban Center at Brookings in November 2012, Itamar Rabinovich wrote that, "Clearly, the uncertainty in Syria has put the question of the Golan Heights on hold indefinitely. It may be a long time until Israel can readdress the prospect of giving the Golan back to Damascus."

Moreover, according to Rabinovich, "the Syrian conflict has the potential to bring the damaged Israeli - Turkish relationship closer to normalcy ? they can find common ground in seeking to foster a stable post - Assad government in Syria."

The hostile Turkish insistence on toppling the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, the concentration of the IS and other rebel forces in the north of the country and in central, eastern and southern Syria are diverting the potential and focus of the Syrian Arab Army northward and inward, away from the western front with the Israeli occupying power on the Golan Heights.

The protracted war on the Syrian government is depleting its army in manpower and materially. Rebuilding the Syrian army and the devastated Syrian infrastructure will preoccupy the country for a long time to come and defuse any military threat to Israel for an extended time span.

On the Palestinian front, the rise of the IS has made fighting it the top US priority in the Middle East, which led Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to several US administrations on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, to warn in Foreign Policy early in September that the rise of the IS would pose "a serious setback to Palestinian hopes of statehood".

The expected fallback internally of the post-war Syria would "hopefully" relieve Israel of the Syrian historical support for the Palestinian anti - Israeli occupation movements, at least temporarily.

Netanyahu on Sunday opened a cabinet meeting by explicitly using the IS as a pretext to evade the prerequisites of making peace. Israel "stands ... as a solitary island against the waves of Islamic extremism washing over the entire Middle East", he said, adding that "to force upon us" a timeframe for a withdrawal from the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, as proposed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the UN Security Council, "will bring the radical Islamic elements to the suburbs of Tel Aviv and to the heart of Jerusalem. We will not allow this."

Israel is also capitalizing on the war on the IS to misleadingly align it with the Palestinian "Islamic" resistance movements. "When it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas," Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly on September 29.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories ([email protected]).

(Copyright 2014 Nicola Nasser)

Click to expand...

Attacking Islamic State, from a Navy aircraft carrier

BOARD THE USS CARL VINSON, in the Persian Gulf

More than a dozen Navy F/A-18 warplanes roar off this aircraft carrier every day to attack Islamic State targets in support of Iraqi troops battling to regain ground lost to the militants in June.

These Navy pilots face an array of lethal risks during their six-hour round-trip missions. Surface-to-air missiles and other enemy fire lurk below, as the downing of an Iraqi military helicopter late Friday underscored. About 60 percent of the aircrews are still learning the ropes on their first combat tours.

The U.S.-led coalition improvises how the Iraqis call in airstrikes: Iraqi troops talk by radio to U.S. controllers at Iraqi command centers, who in turn talk to the Navy pilots to help pinpoint what to hit. Senior commanders have said that placing U.S. spotters with the Iraqi troops would be more effective, but they have yet to recommend that step knowing that President Barack Obama opposes it.

In the initial weeks of an air campaign that started in August, Iraq’s troops were tentative. Fighters from the Islamic State quickly learned not to move in large numbers to avoid being struck. Three out of every four missions still return with their bombs for lack of approved targets.

But in recent days, the Iraqis have been advancing, forcing Islamic State to fight more in the open. The airstrikes are severing the militants’ supply lines, killing some top leaders and crimping their ability to pump and ship the oil that they control.

“It wasn’t going so well there for a while, but the momentum seems to have reversed,” said Cmdr. Eric Doyle, a 41-year-old F/A-18 Hornet pilot from Houston who also flew combat missions in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

About one quarter of the 1,200 total airstrikes in Iraq and Syria so far have been flown off a carrier — the other missions began from bases around the Gulf — an enduring symbol of American power in the Middle East.

After Islamic State fighters rolled south into Mosul six months ago and threatened Baghdad, the Pentagon rushed the carrier USS George H.W. Bush to the Persian Gulf from the coast of Pakistan, where it was flying missions in support of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Within two days, the carrier was sending surveillance and reconnaissance flights over Iraq and Syria. It was weeks before the United States ironed out arrangements with regional allies to allow land-based planes to carry out strikes. The Vinson relieved the Bush in mid-October and will stay until next spring.

“You don’t have to ask anybody for permission to use a carrier,” said Vice Adm. John W. Miller, commander of the Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain. “It’s five acres of sovereign U.S. territory.”

This ship has an unusual place in the annals of the campaign against terrorism. Some of the first airstrikes of the Afghan War in October 2001 were by jets from the Vinson; nearly a decade later, it was here that Navy SEALs brought Osama bin Laden’s body after the raid in Pakistan and buried it at sea after religious rites on the lower hangar deck.

The flight deck is the bustling hub of this nuclear-powered behemoth, which is home to 5,200 sailors and officers for nearly 10 months at a time. Sailors in light helmets and goggles, mostly in their early 20s, scurry about in vests and long-sleeve shirts color-coded to their jobs — red shirts handle bombs, purple shirts handle fuel, yellow shirts handle the flights.

Racks of bombs and missiles rise from elevators below deck amid the din. MH-60 Seahawk search-and-rescue helicopters buzz overhead on their way out to sea.

It is like a crowded suburban parking lot, except these are $57 million jets taxiing for takeoff with 500-pound laser-guided bombs tucked under their wings. The slightest misstep around these high-performance jets and turboprop planes could be fatal. “Beware of Jet Blast, Propellers and Rotors” is emblazoned in large yellow letters on the ship’s superstructure, lest anyone forget.

It is a dangerous business, even when the ship is not at war. In September, while training in the western Pacific, two F/A-18s from the Vinson collided in midair soon after takeoff. One pilot was rescued in the accident, but the other was killed. His body was never found in waters nearly 3 miles deep.

About 20 percent of the 100 daily flights are strike missions into Iraq and Syria. The others are a mix of training, supply, reconnaissance and other flights, usually between 10:30 a.m. and 11 p.m.

About an hour before takeoff, fighter pilots in flight suits stride to their planes for a final inspection. Tiny black bombs are stenciled below the cockpit for each weapon dropped from that aircraft. A giant steam-powered catapult then hurls the jets off the ship, from a dead start to more than 125 miles an hour in less than three seconds.

By then, the pilots have studied their routes, the weather and the targets assigned by an American air command center in Qatar, a tiny gulf state. Targeting specialists have selected bombs big enough to do the job but mindful of the risk to civilians.

The allied jets are operating under some of the strictest rules intended to prevent civilian casualties in modern warfare.

“If there’s any doubt, we do not drop ordnance,” said Capt. Matt Leahey, a 44-year-old Naval Academy graduate from Lewiston, Maine, who commands the 2,100 personnel and 63 aircraft in the carrier’s air wing.

The Vinson has steamed to the northern part of the Gulf to shorten flight times as much as possible, but it is still 450 miles to Baghdad and much farther to Syria. The F/A-18s burn 5,700 gallons of fuel on a typical mission, and pilots must refuel in midair three or four times.

The jets fly well above 20,000 feet, out of the range of most anti-aircraft guns. Islamic State has surface-to-air missiles and has downed a few Iraqi helicopters, so pilots cannot fly as low as they would like to get the best look at their targets.

“MANPADS are a real threat,” said Doyle, referring to Man-Portable Air Defense Systems.

In some cases, pilots are striking specific, planned targets such as headquarters buildings. But most of the Vinson’s missions are targets of opportunity while safeguarding Iraqi troops below.

Pilots fly over designated grid areas, typically 60 square miles, searching for fighters, artillery and other signs of the enemy. An aerial armada of surveillance planes with names like Joint Stars and Rivet Joint track militant movements on the ground and intercept their electronic communications, feeding a steady stream of information to pilots.

“It can be pretty boring, then all of sudden it gets heated and you’ve got a whole lot of work to do in 120 seconds,” said Doyle, who has flown eight strike missions so far. “We’re trying to find things and kill them.”

Working with the U.S. air controllers in the Iraqi command centers — special operations troops in contact with Iraqi or Kurdish ground troops — pilots say they are aiming to weaken Islamic State’s war machine in a fight they caution could take months or even years.

“We’re taking away the enemy’s ability to reinforce and resupply,” said Lt. Adam Bryan, 31, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot from northwestern Connecticut. “It’s a pretty dynamic situation.”

Click to expand...