ISIS slaughter 250 Syrian soldiers (Graphic Video)

And they have it so bad in Missouri

That made me sick to my stomach to watch. We're looking at and talking about pure evil when it comes to ISIS.

It's a sight like that that can make me question my foreign policy beliefs.

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One of my first "welcome to Iraq" moments was finding a 14 year old girl with her head cut off dumped on the side of the road - she had the gall to wear blue jeans and no hijab in public. Not a day or two later, we found three brothers - I think they were around 10, 12, and 13 - blown to smitherines. All we found were burned pieces of flesh...they had refused to plant bombs for ISI (the precursor to ISIS).

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Just curious to how exactly you know who did this, much less the explanations for it?

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Just curious to how exactly you know who did this, much less the explanations for it?

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Because we would later catch ISI in the actual act of doing stuff like this?

This isn't difficult. It's not too dissimilar from police work, really. When something like that keeps popping up in the same neighborhoods again and again and again, you can eventually pin down who is doing what (and why). Spend enough time around those neighborhoods and towns, and you can recognize people by the way they walk and talk. You know everything about the area that there is to know. It's grunt work, to use a familiar term, but when you get to know everyone in a neighborhood or village, you get to understand the dynamics of the place, and you can get a clear picture of what is actually going on. I assure you that these animals were doing far worse than the two anecdotes I just gave.

Agreed. I can't help but think a tyrant is needed to keep these people in line. As for us, level anything that isn't worth a shite to us. Take oil fields and pump them dry.

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I can't help but think a tyrant is needed to keep these people in line.

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We made a mistake in removing Saddam from power. He may have been a a-hole thug piece of shite but we could control him and he would keep things quiet in iraq and ensure stability in the Mideast compared to today where we have bat shite crazy jihadists running around and fricking shite up.

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Pardon my skepticism but what exactly did you catch them doing and how did you know they were ISI?
I mean, crime happens in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Why would you automatically assume it's the boogeyman?
If I walk the slums of New Orleans, I'm going to see some pretty horrific things. I'm not going to automatically assume it's ISI.

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We'd catch people either at or near torture chambers emblazoned with ISI signatory. We had ballistics and fingerprint tech that would connect certain people to events. We'd piece together our own developed intel from local sources. We'd talk to people on the street. Communications eavesdroppings...I think you get the idea.

I am pretty sure I know far, far more than you will ever know about this particular slice of Iraq (and the broader Middle East, for that matter), so nice try trying to pick at the knowledge.

For the record this wasn't some crime-ridden slum. They were Sunni middle-class and upper-middle class neighborhoods and suburbs of Baghdad in which things like common theft, fraud, murder, etc were virtually non-existent outside the insurgency.

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Pardon my skepticism but what exactly did you catch them doing and how did you know they were ISI? I mean, crime happens in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Why would you automatically assume it's the boogeyman? If I walk the slums of New Orleans, I'm going to see some pretty horrific things. I'm not going to automatically assume it's ISI.




We'd catch people either at or near torture chambers emblazoned with ISI signatory.

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Did they also have decoder rings and a secret handshake?

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We had ballistics and fingerprint tech that would connect certain people to events. We'd piece together our own developed intel from local sources. We'd talk to people on the street. Communications eavesdroppings...I think you get the idea.

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I do. Sounds like you fellas were afforded extensive experience in running a police state.

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I am pretty sure I know far, far more than you will ever know about this particular slice of Iraq (and the broader Middle East, for that matter),

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Yeah, the way a burger-flipper at McDonald's knows more than I do about the corporate structure of that company.

It must be awfully frustrating for you to know that you located the enemy, have fingerprint proof, even eavesdropped on them....yet for 13 years the greatest military in the history of man just can't seem to capture/kill them.

Look, I'm sure you believe you fought terrorism and served to protect our freedoms. I can't possibly thank you enough for that effort.
Unfortunately, the fact is you were caught up in an operation far too complicated for any of us to fully understand. And it literally makes me want to vomit that good folks like yourself were put in that situation by a bunch of money-hungry, power-mad motherfrickers.

Not to sound heartless but wtf are armed soldiers surrendering to terrorists in their own country for?