Polarized Versions

The U.S.-led airstrike mission over Iraq to restrain the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham from gathering additional geographic territory to the huge one-third swath they have already taken from the government of Iraq is at somewhat of a standstill as far as additional initiatives are concerned. Islamic State has dug in, resilient to the combined airstrikes and Iraqi military push-backs with Iran's Revolutionary Guards and non-state Shiite militias combining with the Kurdish Peshmerga to rout them from territory gained. But they have been curtailed from making new gains.

ISIS Jihadists -- Iranian Press TV

And their threat to push on to Baghdad appeared to be on the threshhold of succeeding until the unspoken unholy alliance of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States to act in concert with the Kurdish Peshmerga to ensure they would not. Still, the coalition strategy for the defeat of the Islamic State finds itself at a standstill. A situation conditioned by coalition partners' unwillingness to commit commandos, infantry, armoured and artillery units to make a defining impact on the jihadists.

Irbil, Kirkuk and Baghdad appear to be, for now, removed from any working strategy the Islamic State might have harboured to invade and conquer. In Mosul they remain in firm control, as they do in the other wide-flung areas in Iraq and Syria that comprise their caliphate. The Islamic State is not languishing for want of eager conscripts, which continue to flood into Syria and Iraq from other points of the Muslim compass, including Europe.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians from Mosul and other traditional areas have celebrated Christmas in a manner none of them might have imagined a year ago. Yazidis who have managed to escape the carnage inflicted on many of their ethnic-religious group mourn those who have been slaughtered, and think mournfully of the women who have been raped, sold and enslaved as sexual chattel, ostensibly in accord with Islam's dictates on the spoils of war against non-believers.

A 27-point manifesto published a month ago gave a detailed religious justification for "masters" right under Islamic law to "buy, sell, gift" and pass on captured female "slaves" to male heirs while detailing the right of jihadists to have sex with those female slaves, including pre-pubescent girls. There is no odious offence against humanity that the Islamic State cannot glory in, however repulsive and savage, as their right.

The Public Relations Department of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps announced the death on duty of Brigadier General Hamid Taqavi, killed while busy on "an advisory mission" in Samarra, while conducting a cooperative mission with the "Iraqi army and popular mobilization forces against Islamic State". Samarra sits around 68 miles north of Baghdad, home to the Shiite-sacred shrines of the tenth and eleventh Shia Imams. Infamously, the Islamic State jihadis consider all Shiite shrines an insult to Islam and they are busy destroying the historical heritage of Islam.

Iran, slamming any suggestion it would work alongside the Great Satan of America is indulging in propaganda equating the United States with those who have funded terror groups like al-Qaeda, most famously wealthy Saudi patrons. The creation of al-Qaeda which Iran views as the real motivator behind ISIS, is the work of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and oh yes, Israel, and here are some memorable lines to prove that deadly trifecta's work:

Basically, ISIS, ISIL, whichever you want to call it – it’s been called many names – it’s just no more than al-Qaeda. What ISIS is is the same thing that’s happening in Ukraine, the ones that are lining themselves with that government there, are nothing but this so-called al-Qaeda, this boogeyman that was created.
But it’s really the US Department of Defense private contractors that Darth Vader Dick Cheney created during his reign. He allowed this privatized mercenary group to be created under Halliburton, mainly - that’s what was protecting oil pipelines, that’s what took over the oil in Iraq. Prior to the Iraq war, Iraq government controlled 90 percent of the oil and Halliburton got 10 percent.

We are aware, and US intelligence is quite aware, and I’m not an intelligence officer but I have many that I work with on a daily basis, are telling me that the funding is coming out of Saudi Arabia, that it’s coming out of Aramco, called the American Arabian Oil Company, who daddy Bush is the Saudi Arabian partners going back to 1982.
Now we do know that ISIS, its members, are being treated in Israeli hospitals after they’ve been wounded and shot. That tells you that it’s the Israelis and US Department of Defense private contractors, mercenaries, that are these ISIL members.
The US government has come to realize that. The Obama administration and also John Kerry has come to realize that.
What we have, and if you see the staged roles during the hearings this past couple, three, four days in Washington where Kerry was up there asking for approval to go after them, basically, in the event if he needs troops on the ground, which he does not need to do, all you’re seeing is AIPAC, the American-Israeli pact controlled Congress and Senate up there...John McCain and the others, sitting, yelling and screaming and demanding troops on the ground.
What they want to do, the Congress and Senate that’s controlled, and the Israelis and the crime syndicate, Cheney and Bush, that is daddy Bush – junior never had any brains – what they want to do is put 100,000 plus troops on the ground because their intention is to take over the whole frigging Middle East for its oil including Iran, along with Israel and make it a big state of Israel – the whole Middle East. Press TV has conducted an interview with Stew Webb, a columnist from Veterans Today, from Kansas City, to discuss the situation in the Middle East.