Podcasts about Abu Musab

Ein Kommentar von Rainer Rupp.Washington hat seinen schmutzigen Krieg in Syrien gewonnen; vorerst. Der syrische Präsident al-Assad wurde gestürzt und durch den al-Kaida-Terroristen Abu Mohammad al-Julani ersetzt, der von den USA offiziell steckbrieflich gesucht, aber zugleich von der CIA militärisch unterstützt wurde. Was 2011 als geheime CIA-Operation mit dem Schmuggel von Waffen und Dschihadisten von Libyen nach Syrien begonnen hatte, wurde nun mit einem weiteren ekelerregenden Beispiel westlicher Doppelmoral und Heuchelei gekrönt, indem Terrorismus öffentlich verurteilt und zugleich über geheime Wege unterstützt wird.Der Terroristen-Chef al-Julani, der neue Herr über Syrien, hat sich seinen Weg nach Damaskus über die Umwege von Al-Kaida und ISIS gebahnt. Inspiriert vom 11. September, schloss er sich ursprünglich Al-Kaida an, um gegen die USA im Irak-Krieg zu kämpfen. Er war ein enger Verbündeter des AI-Kaida Führers Abu Musab al-Zarqawi und gründete die Al-Kaida-Splittergruppe in Syrien in Zusammenarbeit mit ISIS-Anführer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.Als immer mehr Amerikaner von der geheimen CIA-Operation in Syrien erfuhren, mit denen die islamistischen Halsabschneider unterstützt wurden, folgte Julani den Ratschlägen seiner westlichen Berater. Um die al-Kaida- und spätere Al-Nusra-Herkunft seiner Organisation zu verschleiern, nannte er sie um, erst in Jabhat Fateh al-Sham und schließlich zu Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS). Das erleichterte die Aufgabe der Desinformanten in den westlichen Medien, die Kämpfer der „neuen“ HTS-Organisation als „gemäßigte“ Rebellen oder Oppositionellen darzustellen.Doch HTS war und ist alles andere als eine moderate Gruppe. Nach dem Zusammenbruch von al-Bagdadis ISIS-Kalifat konzentrierte sich al Julani erfolgreich darauf, die „arbeitslos“ gewordenen ISIS-Kämpfer in seiner HTS aufzufangen und unter seine Kontrolle zu bringen. Das US-Außenministerium ließ sich von al-Julanis Scharade wechselnder Namen jedoch nicht täuschen und veröffentlichte 2017 einen internationalen Steckbrief, der eine Belohnung von 10 Millionen Dollar für seine Ergreifung auslobte.Derweil hatte Julani unter dem Schutz von Washingtons NATO-Verbündetem Türkei die letzten 10 Jahre die Idlib-Provinz im Nordwesten Syriens an der Grenze zur Türkei als brutal-islamistischer Alleinherrscher regiert. Ohne die türkischen Stützpunkte, die al-Julanis Territorium umgaben, hätten Syrien und seine Verbündeten, Russland, Iran und Hisbollah, die anhaltende Bedrohung durch Dschihadisten beseitigen können. Das Gegenteil war jedoch der Fall, denn während dieser Zeit war al-Julanis Provinz Idlib der größte uns sicherste Hafen für Dschihadisten auf dem Planeten und zog Terroristen aus allen Himmelsrichtungen an.Seit al-Bagdadis ISIS-Kalifat zerschlagen war, waren die Frontlinien im syrischen Krieg größtenteils eingefroren. Dennoch setzten Washington und seine Verbündeten aus der westlichen Wertegemeinschaft erbarmungslos ihre Angriffe auf Damaskus fort. Die Türkei schützte Dschihadisten an Syriens nördlicher Grenze, die dort die Kurden terrorisierten. Israel führte wöchentliche Angriffe auf Assad und seine Verbündeten durch, die in den letzten Jahren sogar zivilen und diplomatischen Zielen in Damaskus galten. Tel Aviv bombardierte sogar den Flughafen Aleppo nach einem großen Erdbeben, um die Hilfe für die verzweifelten Bürger zu verhindern...hier weiterlesen: https://apolut.net/der-westen-bejubelt-al-kaida-sieg-in-syrien-von-rainer-rupp/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In late April, 2004, Nicholas Berg was grusomelly beheaded, by hand, by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The 5 minute and 37 second long video was recorded and distributed thoughout the internet for all the world to see. It was an instant hit. It would be the worlds sobering and tragic intoduction to the tactics and commitment that would come to represent al Qaeda in Iraq. It would prove to be a monumental domino among many that would soon fall. On this episode... - The Nick Berg story - Ramadi and Fallujah crumble - Zarqawi attacks his home - Jordan and the United States join forces - Keeping the pressure on - "Thats him" - Looking into American eyes, as he took his last breath   This episode was recorded in late March, 2024.  

In questo nuovissimo episodio di Facciamo un Podcast, Matteo ci parla del suo percorso di studi in Relazioni Internazionali, del suo master e, in particolare, della sindrome di Stoccolma da cui è affetto nei confronti di Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Claro, conciso e inequívoco. En este libro, la autora analiza la peligrosa deriva del terrorismo internacional, hasta ahora completamente malinterpretada por Occidente y sus aliados». Michael Chandler, coautor de Countering Terrorism y presidente y exmiembro del Equipo de Seguimiento del Comité de Sanciones a Al Qaeda en el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU Desde su aparición a finales de la década de 1990 como aspiración yihadista del líder terrorista Abu Musab al Zarqawi, el Estado Islámico (conocido bajo diversos nombres, ISIS, ISIL, Al Qaeda de Irak) se ha transformado en una imponente empresa que trastoca las fronteras de países de Medio Oriente e impone en una superficie geográfica mayor que la del Reino Unido su brutal marca de la sharía. Mediante una guerra tradicional de conquista para abrir camino a su versión siglo XXI del califato histórico, el Estado Islámico utiliza una tecnología moderna para el reclutamiento y la financiación, asociando cada día poblaciones locales al nuevo Estado. Surgido de las cenizas de fallidas aventuras yihadistas, el Estado Islámico no es ya una simple red terrorista sino un portentoso enemigo en sintonía con la nueva modernidad del actual desorden mundial. Como dice Napoleoni, «ignorar estos hechos no solo es engañoso y trivial, sino peligroso. “Conoce a tu enemigo” sigue siendo el proverbio más importante en la lucha contra el terrorismo». About the Author Loretta Napoleoni es autora del bestseller mundial Economía canalla. En su condición de presidenta del grupo del Club de Madrid para contrarrestar el financiamiento del terrorismo, Napoleoni logró reunir a destacadas personalidades de la política de todo el mundo para crear una nueva estrategia de combate contra el financiamiento de redes terroristas. Ha sido corresponsal en Londres y columnista de La Stampa, La Repubblica y El País. Receptora de una beca Fulbright, es licenciada en Economía y en Relaciones Internacionales por la Escuela Superior de Estudios Internacionales de la Universidad Johns Hopkins y máster en Terrorismo por la London School of Economics. Por su cargo de consultora sobre materias primas ha viajado con frecuencia a Pakistán, Turquía, Irán, Irak, Siria y otros países de Medio Oriente, en los que ha tratado con importantes personalidades de la economía y la política. Reside alternativamente en Londres y Montana. Entre sus obras se cuentan Democracia en venta, 10 años que conmovieron al mundo, Maonomics, La mordaza y Economía canalla, todas ellas publicadas por Paidós. Para ordenes puede visitarnos gracias por escucharnos https://www.amazon.com/s?me=A1P0HKGH39IBZ3&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dany-mac-pherson/support

Today we hear an incredible Combat Story of Mike Sarraille, former Marine Recon and a SEAL Team leader who served 20 years in the special operations community, earning a Silver Star, multiple Bronze Stars with Valor, and more. He was also part of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (or DEVGRU). NOTE: We have just launched our Patreon. Join our Combat Story community at https://www.patreon.com/combatstory Mike served in multiple leadership roles to include the Battles of Ramadi and Sadr City, to name just a few. Since retiring from service, Mike founded and is the CEO of Talent War Group, a specialized executive search firm and talent advisory; he's co-author of ‘The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent' and is the face of Men's Journal's ‘The Everyday Warrior.' I stumbled across Mike when I saw posts about a recent expedition to the Himalayas where he did six free fall jumps over Mount Everest. Mike is a very, very humble but distinguished warrior leader and I hope you enjoy this insightful deep dive into the life of a Tier 1 and private sector operator and leader as much as I did. Find Mike Online: Mike's Linktree Mike on Instagram @mr.sarraille ATTA Instagram @live_atta Talent War Group Instagram @talentwargroup Find Ryan Online: Patreon Community Combat Story Merch Ryan's Linktree Instagram @combatstory Facebook @combatstoryofficial Send us messages Email ryan@combatstory.com Learn more about Ryan Intro Song: Sport Rock from Audio Jungle Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:31 - Guest Introduction (Mike Sarraille) 2:34 - Interview begins 3:02 – Skydiving at Mt. Everest after retiring from the military 10:51 – Childhood in the Bay Area, joining the Marines, and what drew him to the SEALs 24:26 – How the leadership and examples set by the military motivated him and gave him direction 33:36 – Differences in BUDS and Marine Recon training 38:52 - Story of an experience with Johnny Kim and making a snap judgment while in training 45:10 - First experience in combat isolating and containing the Ramadi hospital where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was 53:50 – Being a Marine liaison (LNO) 55:31 – The importance of preparedness in leadership 1:01:23 – A hard lesson learned after deviating from procedure 1:13:35 – What he is doing today with his different companies, his book, and talent development 1:23:40 Shared Adversity and After Action Reviews (AAR) in the corporate environment 1:34:00 - What did you carry into combat? 1:35:49 - Would you do it all again? 1:37:15 - Listener comments and shout outs

Retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal calls on more than three decades of military experience to discuss the fundamental tenets of leadership, and practical advice for taking calculated risks and making important decisions. This wide-ranging conversation includes insights on mitigating risk, making decisions under uncertainty, why civilian leadership is tougher than military leadership, developing mental toughness, teaching discipline, and so much more.   A veteran of four U.S. wars in the Middle East, McChrystal was a four-star general best known for his command of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-08, when he oversaw special operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. His troops were responsible for both the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the 2006 death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. After retiring from the military in 2010 he joined Yale University as a Jackson Institute for Global Affairs senior fellow, and in 2011 he founded a consultancy firm, McChrystal Group, which helps organizations tap into human potential in service of stronger business outcomes.   -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish

The son and grandson of Army officers, McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976 as an infantry officer, completed Ranger Training, and later, Special Forces Training. Over the course of his career, he held leadership and staff positions in the Army Special Forces, Army Rangers, 82nd Airborne Division, the XVIII Army Airborne Corp, and the Joint Staff. He is a graduate of the US Naval War College, and he completed fellowships at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997 and at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2000. From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal commanded JSOC - responsible for leading the nation's deployed military counterterrorism efforts around the globe. His leadership of JSOC is credited with the 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein and the 2006 location and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In June 2009, McChrystal received his fourth star and assumed command of all international forces in Afghanistan. Since retiring from the military, McChrystal has served on several corporate boards of directors, that include Deutsche Bank America, JetBlue Airways, Navistar, Siemens Government Technologies, Fiscal Note, and Accent Technologies. A passionate advocate for national service, McChrystal is the Chair of the Board of Service Year Alliance, which envisions a future in which a service year is a cultural expectation and common opportunity for every young American. He is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a course on leadership. Additionally, he is the author of the bestselling leadership books, My Share of the Task: A Memoir, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, Leaders: Myth and Reality, and Risk: A User's Guide. General McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group in January 2011. Recognizing that companies today are experiencing parallels to what he faced in the war theater, McChrystal established this advisory services firm to help businesses challenge the hierarchical, “command and control” approach to organizational management. https://www.mcchrystalgroup.com https://www.linkedin.com/feed/?trk=guest_homepage-basic_nav-header-signin https://youtu.be/kuoJbrwheJs --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/richard-lamonica/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/richard-lamonica/support

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military's most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity transformed JSOC into a global man-hunting machine.” His tenure included the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing infamous terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today Stanley is founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group, a strategic consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His new book is, Risk. A User's Guide, published by Portolio in October of 2021. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military's most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity transformed JSOC into a global man-hunting machine.” His tenure included the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing infamous terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today Stanley is founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group, a strategic consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His new book is, Risk. A User's Guide, published by Portolio in October of 2021. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military's most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity transformed JSOC into a global man-hunting machine.” His tenure included the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing infamous terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today Stanley is founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group, a strategic consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His new book is, Risk. A User's Guide, published by Portolio in October of 2021. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military's most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity transformed JSOC into a global man-hunting machine.” His tenure included the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing infamous terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today Stanley is founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group, a strategic consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His new book is, Risk. A User's Guide, published by Portolio in October of 2021. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military's most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity transformed JSOC into a global man-hunting machine.” His tenure included the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing infamous terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today Stanley is founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group, a strategic consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His new book is, Risk. A User's Guide, published by Portolio in October of 2021. Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Today we're excited and honored to have with us, retired US Army General Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Prior to this, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military's most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity transformed JSOC into a global man-hunting machine.” His tenure included the capture of Sadam Hussein and the killing infamous terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today Stanley is founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group, a strategic consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a course on Leadership. His books include, My Share of the Task, Team of Teams, Leadership- Myths and Realities and his newest book that we'll be discussing today, Risk. A Users Guide. I'm really proud of how this conversation came out. It was a lot of fun and we hope you enjoy. With that said, let's get started.

Nigeria's military says Abu Musab al-Barnawi leader of ISWAP dead+++Zimbabwe: Mandatory COVID-19 jabs for civil servants

General Stanley McChrystal — Mastering Risk: A User's Guide | Brought to you by Kettle & Fire high quality, tasty, and conveniently packaged bone broths; Eight Sleep's Pod Pro Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating; and ShipStation shipping software. More on all three below.General Stanley McChrystal (@stanmcchrystal) was called “one of America's greatest warriors” by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Having held leadership and staff positions in the Army Special Forces, Army Rangers, 82nd Airborne Division, the XVIII Army Airborne Corp, and the Joint Staff, McChrystal became commander of JSOC in 2003, responsible for leading the nation's deployed military counterterrorism efforts around the globe. His leadership is credited with the 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein and the 2006 locating and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In June 2009, McChrystal received his fourth star and assumed command of all international forces in Afghanistan.General McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group in January 2011, an advisory services firm that helps businesses challenge the hierarchical “command and control” approach to organizational management.He is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a course on leadership, and he is the author of the bestselling leadership books My Share of the Task: A Memoir; Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World; and Leaders: Myth and Reality. His new book is Risk: A User's Guide. He is also the co-host (with former Navy SEAL Chris Fussell) of the No Turning Back podcast, where they explore the future of leadership and teams with the world's most consequential leaders.Please enjoy!This episode is brought to you by Kettle & Fire! 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For most leaders, failure is not a matter of life or death. But for some, making life-or-death decisions is part of the job. What can high-risk decision-making teach us about the more ordinary and conventional risk leaders assume every day? What roles do preparation and instinct play in this process? How can leaders become better at conquering a fear of failure in order to make hard decisions? In this episode, Host Gautam Mukunda speaks about risk and high-stake decision-making with two remarkable individuals who have spent their lives doing the impossible in the face of enormous danger. General Stan McChrystal is a retired four-star general, former Head of Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan, and the founder and CEO of the McCrystal Group. Alex Honnold is a professional adventure rock climber, who is known for his free solo ascents, most notably El Capitán as documented in the movie Free Solo. “The more often you encounter the unexpected, the more comfortable you feel with the unexpected in general. You can prepare as much as you can, but you kind of know that some random thing is always going to go sideways, but then the more often that you encounter those kinds of sideways challenges and manage them… I think you build some confidence to just know that when a situation arises you'll figure it out quickly” — Alex Honnold “Nothing helps innovation like necessity.”         — General Stan McChrystal Follow @GMukunda on Twitter or email us at WorldReimagined@nasdaq.com   Books Referenced: Alone on the Wall, by Alex Honnold Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley A. McChrystal and Anna Butrico Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe   Guest Info: Alex Honnold is a professional rock climber whose audacious free-solo ascents of America's biggest cliffs have made him one of the most recognized and followed climbers in the world. A gifted but hard-working athlete, Honnold is distinguished for his uncanny ability to control his fear while scaling cliffs of dizzying heights without a rope to protect him if he falls. His humble, self-effacing attitude toward such extreme risk has earned him the nickname Alex “No Big Deal” Honnold. This Sacramento, California-native's most celebrated achievements include the first and only free-solos of the Moonlight Buttress (5.12d, 1,200 feet) in Zion National Park, Utah, and the Northwest Face (5.12a) of Half Dome (2,200 feet), Yosemite, California. In 2012 he achieved Yosemite's first “Triple Solo”: climbing, in succession, the National Park's three largest faces — Mt. Watkins, Half Dome, and El Capitan — alone, and in under 24 hours. In 2017 Alex completed the first and only free-solo of El Capitan's “Freerider” route (5.13a, 3,000 feet), a historic accomplishment that has been hailed by many as one of the greatest sporting achievements of our time. The story of this feat was told in the Academy Award-winning documentary, FREE SOLO. Whether climbing with a rope or without, Honnold believes climbing is a fantastic vehicle for adventure, an opportunity to seek out those high-test moments with uncertain outcomes in which you're forced to push through to survive. Though Honnold often downplays his achievements, his rope-less climbs have attracted the attention of a broad and stunned audience. He has been profiled by 60 Minutes and the New York Times, featured on the cover of National Geographic, appeared in international television commercials, and starred in numerous adventure films including the Emmy-nominated “Alone on the Wall.” He is the founder of the Honnold Foundation, an environmental non-profit.   General Stanley A. McChrystal is A transformational leader with a remarkable record of achievement, General Stanley A. McChrystal was called “one of America's greatest warriors” by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. He is widely praised for launching a revolution in warfare by leading a comprehensive counter-terrorism organization that fused intelligence and operations, redefining the way military and government agencies interact. The son and grandson of Army officers, McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976 as an infantry officer, completed Ranger Training, and later Special Forces Training. Over the course of his career, he held leadership and staff positions in the Army Special Forces, Army Rangers, 82 nd Airborne Division, the XVIII Army Airborne Corp, and the Joint Staff. He is a graduate of the US Naval War College, and he completed fellowships at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997 and the Council on Foreign Relations in 2000. From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal commanded JSOC - responsible for leading the nations deployed military counterterrorism efforts around the globe. His leadership of JSOC is credited with the 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein and the 2006 location and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In June 2009, McChrystal received his fourth star and assumed command of all international forces in Afghanistan. Since retiring from the military, McChrystal has served on several corporate boards of directors that include Deutsche Bank America, JetBlue Airways, Navistar, Siemens Government Technologies, Fiscal Note, and Accent Technologies. A passionate advocate for national service, McChrystal is the Chair of the Board of Service Year Alliance, which envisions a future in which a service year is a cultural expectation and common opportunity for every young American. He is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a course on leadership. Additionally, he is the author of the bestselling leadership books, My Share of the Task: A Memoir, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, and Leaders: Myth and Reality. General McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group in January 2011. Recognizing that companies today are experiencing parallels to what he faced in the war theater, McChrystal established this advisory services firm to help businesses challenge the hierarchical, “command and control” approach to organizational management.

We take another crack at an interactive episode with yet another quiz. This time it's the IStandWith quiz, where we discover which political parties and popular American politicians we are deemed to most agree with – some of it may surprise you, other comparisons likely won't. Either way, we had more fun tackling it as counterfactuals, (fun) predictions, historical trivia and personal anecdotes ensue. It's the show you know, you know? Stay tuned for a teaser to our next interactive quiz next week. (It's been a manic week so we goof on some of our information: Ryan confuses Anwar al-Awlaki for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Sebastian says Biden's been president for two years already – COME ON, MAN!) Keep an eye out for appearances by John C. Reilly, Richard Nixon, Caitlyn Jenner and previous "Mars on Life" guest Heather Friedman. Interested in taking the IStandWith quiz? Find out who you side with at https://www.isidewith.com Social media: Mars on Life: @marsonlifeshow on Twitter and Instagram Sebastian Schug: @drsebby (Instagram) and Seabass on YouTube Ryan Mancini: @mancinira (Twitter) and @manciniryan (Instagram) Artwork by Zachary Erberich (@zacharyerberichart) "Space X-plorers" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mars-on-life-show/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/mars-on-life-show/support

Daniel 7:13-14 The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is said to have been founded by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2004, although it did not go by that name until 2013.  At its height, ISIS was able to take control and hold about a third of Syria and nearly half of Iraq.  The goal of ISIS was to establish Sharīʿah, which is the law of Islam for Muslims.  Because Islam believes Jesus was only a prophet and Mohammad their The post The Day Death Died appeared first on Meadowbrooke Church.

**Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism**: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T7RD14R/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1 -- If you find value in the content, please consider donating to my PayPal KeithKnight590@gmail.com LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone:b -- 0:00 - Operation Cyclone (1979-1989) 4:56 - Anti-war quote 5:14 - In 2001 there were 400 Al-Qaeda members, how many exist today after trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives spent? 7:08 - Azzam group 8:12 - Osama Bin Laden 11:11 - Ayman al-Zawahiri 14:21 - Abu Musab al-Zarkowi 18:55 - Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi & Abu Yahya al-Libi (Libya, LIFG, Benghazi, Ghadaffi) 24:29 - Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi 32:27 - Difference between Mujahideen & Al-Qaeda 37:46 - Did the U.S. military intentionally let Bin Laden escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan? (Thomas Greer aka Dalton Fury) 46:55 - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Yousef, & Emad Salem (WTC 1993, FBI, Carson Dunbar) 52:34 - How many civilians have been killed in the war on terrorism?

Michael is a very interesting person. He is very passionate about his career of choice and he will do whatever it takes to help a client. Michael Waddington is an attorney who defends high-profile cases in military courts around the world, and the bestselling Author of Battlemind: A Military Legal Thriller. He served as an Army JAG lawyer, and his cases have been covered by Rolling Stone, CNN, The New York Times, 60 Minutes, Nightline, The New Yorker, and others. Michael Waddington is a real life character out of the film "A Few Good Men," times 10. He travels the world representing American military members that find themselves in trouble. From battlefields in Iraq, to bases in Europe, and throughout the USA, Waddington has been intimately involved in hundreds of unbelievable criminal cases involving the US military. He is also the best selling author of Battlemind: A Military Legal Thriller, mentor, and coach. He teaches lawyers across the USA winning trial techniques as well as ways to create a work-life balance. He focuses on how to be a happy and successful parent, partner, lawyer, and member of society. From saving sea turtles in Puerto Rico to saving American soldiers, Waddington has traveled the world and has a lot of stories and lessons to share. In 2006, Michael was in Iraq, defending a soldier from the 101st Airborne. His client was accused of triple murder during the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was working alongside attorney Paul Bergrin, a celebrity lawyer out of New York. He defended another soldier. Colonel Michael Steele, the commander from Black Hawk Down, allegedly gave his men an order to "kill all military-age males on the objective." The case pitted many low-level soldiers against the Army and the Pentagon, who were desperate to win the case and protect America's image and a few high-ranking officers. As Bergrin and Michael dug deeper, they unraveled a deep-rooted conspiracy. There are too many details to explain here. A few weeks later, Michael was preparing to go to trial when a producer from Nightline called him. She told him Bergrin was on the steps of the Manhattan courthouse giving a press conference. He had been indicted for running a high-profile escort business out of his law firm. The madame was his "paralegal." The escorts catered to celebrities, politicians, and the ultra-rich. As a result, Bergrin turned his client against the other soldiers to deal with his case. When Michael called him, he swore, "He would never do a day in jail." He was right. He never went to jail for the prostitution business, for various reasons, although he was convicted. Bergrin then went on to practice law in New Jersey. Later, the FBI indicted him for murdering witnesses, and he ended up getting convicted and getting life in prison. Meanwhile, Michael's client did a few years and is now a free man. For nearly 20 years, Michael has traveled the world defending American service members accused of serious crimes. From secret prison torture allegations, to Navy SEALS accused of rape, he has been involved in some of the most high profile and insane criminal cases involving the US military. Most of these have never hit the media. You can go to Michael S Waddington email at msw@ucmjdefense.com WEBSITES: http://www.ucmjdefense.com https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Waddington/e/B0060NPCG8  

There’s a certain mythos around the founders of the United States. George Washington gets this treatment to the extreme. He’s painted riding brilliant white horses, standing up in boats, and puffing out his chest as he presides over the signing of the Constitution. He’s essentially an American folk hero.What’s odd is that this mythical understanding of a real person conceals the truth of what real leadership looks like. At least, that’s the perspective of General Stanley McChrystal, who rose through the ranks of the military and had to learn a lot about leadership along the way.General McChrystal thinks that too many people view our leaders as if they’re cut from a different cloth, when in fact, leaders are fallible, and reliant on the people around them to succeed.He co-wrote the book Leaders: Myth and Reality, wherein he profiles many influential leaders, both moral and corrupt. The book is loosely structured on Plutarch’s Parallel Lives biographies. In the book, he profiles the leadership strategies of Martin Luther, Coco Chanel, Walt Disney, William “Boss” Tweed and others. He also gives one chapter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda leader that he fought for years.General McChrystal is quick to separate his respect for a leader’s style from that leader’s actions. While that’s certainly true of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, McChrystal also attempts to clarify his complicated relationship with General Robert E Lee, a man who he grew up nearly worshipping as a leader. In his years since childhood, McChrystal’s tried to balance his respect for Lee’s leadership with a moral obligation to fight bigotry and symbols of hate.After his military career ended, General McChrystal became the Board Chair of the Service Year Alliance, which helps youth to do a paid year of civil service.Guest: General Stanley McChrystalBook: Leaders: Myth and RealityProducer: Victor YeMusic: Silas Bohen and Coleman HamiltonEditors: Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman

General Stanley McChrystal talks about the myths and reality of leadership.  He shares how he came to reassess the legacy of his military hero General Robert E. Lee in the aftermath of Charlottseville, how he personally learned that the man at the top often gets credit he doesn’t deserve, and why leaders aren’t always judged by their results.  He discusses a 15th century Chinese admiral who has become the symbol for that country’s global ambitions, why he didn’t realize that Coco Chanel was a real person, and one leadership flaw that he shares with Walt Disney.  He reveals why he decided to include his former enemy in combat Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the book, and what it was like to get into the dark mind of the Al Qaeda in Iraq leader.  This episode is a rebroadcast of an interview that originally aired on November 19, 2018. Order General McChrystal's book Leaders: Myth and Reality on Amazon, Audible, or wherever books are sold.  Visit Kickass News at www.kickassnews.com, subscribe to Kickass News on Apple Podcasts, and follow us on twitter at @KickassNewsPod.

On this episode, CIA targeting officer Nada Bakos leads a two-year hunt for one of the most dangerous militants in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This season, there’s more I Spy with I Spy Plus. Get ad-free I Spy episodes and access to weekly bonus episodes right in your favorite podcast app, plus more exclusive espionage content. Subscribe to I Spy Plus today at foreignpolicy.com/ispy.

Foreign Policy’s hit show returns Tuesday, April 28 with the first of eight new episodes. From a former CIA officer’s retelling of how he survived a plane crash in the Congo to the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq – tune in to hear more spies tell the stories of clandestine operations in their own words. And this season, there’s more I Spy with I Spy Plus. Get ad-free I Spy episodes and weekly bonus episodes right in your podcast feed, plus more exclusive espionage content. Subscribe to I Spy Plus today at foreignpolicy.com/ispy.

Today, we have a legendary conversation with a legendary American Hero, retired 4-Star General, bestselling author, entrepreneur and educator Stan McChrystal. He is the partner of Chris Fussel who was recently on Follow Your Different Episode #149. We get into these topics: leadership, digital leadership, crisis management, his view on how we got here with COVID19 and how we get out of it. We also discuss the digital divide between the public and private sectors and what we should do about, Pay special attention to The General’s advice for business leaders, State Governors and The President of The United States. An Experience No One Predicted Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls Stan "perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met.” This was definitely one of the greatest descriptions one could say about him. He is the kind of leader any company would want in their team, especially during these unusual times. Stan described this coronavirus pandemic as disorienting. It is highly different from most of the crises in our lives. We face an amorphous viral threat and we get affected economically as well/.  “So the average person is going through an experience he probably has never predicted. He got to get his mind around it and not just their own mind, but also their family, their organization and all the people they care about.” - Stan McChrystal Leadership During Unusual Times Aside from possessing leadership fundamentals, Stan calls for a different kind of leadership during these unusual times.  “Your organization can have had a strategy you're very comfortable with that was executing in a set of places. Suddenly that strategy, for any number of reasons, appear to be absolutely invalid now. So the leaders got a role to first, give people a sense of direction and then provide direction. And finally, the leaders got to inspire.”  - Stan McChrystal On Digital Leadership Christopher asked Stan about the daily video briefings he spearheaded when he was in the military and Stan gave a nice story back in memory lane. He was citing this as one of the best examples of digital leadership especially in times of crisis. “Out of necessity, we spread our force. That was 2003 and then we realize, how do you synchronize that? We were at the beginning of the technological boom and we latched on the video conferences, laptops and we connected the entire force, every day, for 90 minutes. When I took command, it was 50 people for 30 minutes. Then we opened it to 7500 people for 90 minutes. To some people, it may sound like madness but it was the most efficient thing I’d ever been a part of,” - Stan McChrystal To know more about the digital divide between the public and private sectors and what we should do about it and The General’s advice for business leaders, State Governors and The President of The United States, download and listen to this episode,  Bio: Stan McChrystal is a retired 4-Star US General. He is best known for his command of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the mid-2000s. His last assignment was as Commander, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, United States Forces – Afghanistan (USFOR-A).[5] He previously served as Director, Joint Staff from August 2008 to June 2009 and as Commander of JSOC from 2003 to 2008, where he was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.  General McChrystal was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey and the Defense Distinguished Service Medal by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. General McChrystal founded McChrystal Group in January 2011 to deliver innovative leadership solutions to businesses globally in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments.  Links: McChrystal Group Linkedin - Stan McCrystal Leaders: Myth and Reality My Share of the Task: A Memoir Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

Today, we have a legendary conversation with a legendary American Hero, retired 4-Star General, bestselling author, entrepreneur and educator Stan McChrystal. He is the partner of Chris Fussel who was recently on Follow Your Different Episode #149. We get into these topics: leadership, digital leadership, crisis management, his view on how we got here with COVID19 and how we get out of it. We also discuss the digital divide between the public and private sectors and what we should do about, Pay special attention to The General’s advice for business leaders, State Governors and The President of The United States. An Experience No One Predicted Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls Stan "perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met.” This was definitely one of the greatest descriptions one could say about him. He is the kind of leader any company would want in their team, especially during these unusual times. Stan described this coronavirus pandemic as disorienting. It is highly different from most of the crises in our lives. We face an amorphous viral threat and we get affected economically as well/.  “So the average person is going through an experience he probably has never predicted. He got to get his mind around it and not just their own mind, but also their family, their organization and all the people they care about.” - Stan McChrystal Leadership During Unusual Times Aside from possessing leadership fundamentals, Stan calls for a different kind of leadership during these unusual times.  “Your organization can have had a strategy you're very comfortable with that was executing in a set of places. Suddenly that strategy, for any number of reasons, appear to be absolutely invalid now. So the leaders got a role to first, give people a sense of direction and then provide direction. And finally, the leaders got to inspire.”  - Stan McChrystal On Digital Leadership Christopher asked Stan about the daily video briefings he spearheaded when he was in the military and Stan gave a nice story back in memory lane. He was citing this as one of the best examples of digital leadership especially in times of crisis. “Out of necessity, we spread our force. That was 2003 and then we realize, how do you synchronize that? We were at the beginning of the technological boom and we latched on the video conferences, laptops and we connected the entire force, every day, for 90 minutes. When I took command, it was 50 people for 30 minutes. Then we opened it to 7500 people for 90 minutes. To some people, it may sound like madness but it was the most efficient thing I’d ever been a part of,” - Stan McChrystal To know more about the digital divide between the public and private sectors and what we should do about it and The General’s advice for business leaders, State Governors and The President of The United States, download and listen to this episode,  Bio: Stan McChrystal is a retired 4-Star US General. He is best known for his command of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the mid-2000s. His last assignment was as Commander, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, United States Forces – Afghanistan (USFOR-A).[5] He previously served as Director, Joint Staff from August 2008 to June 2009 and as Commander of JSOC from 2003 to 2008, where he was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.  General McChrystal was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey and the Defense Distinguished Service Medal by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. General McChrystal founded McChrystal Group in January 2011 to deliver innovative leadership solutions to businesses globally in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments.  Links: McChrystal Group Linkedin - Stan McCrystal Leaders: Myth and Reality My Share of the Task: A Memoir Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

Amidst the grandstanding and partisan bickering, no one wants to talk about the decades of U.S. policy that helped give rise to ISIS and al Qaeda. Jeremy Scahill discusses how U.S. policy opened a Pandora’s box in Iraq and Syria. Islamic studies scholar Amanda Rogers discusses the actual founder of ISIS, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and how ISIS adopted tactics from the U.S. “war on terror.” War reporter Mike Giglio talks about his time on the ground covering ISIS. He documents this experience in his new book,  “Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate.”

This is the true story of how a coalition effort between American and British special force units brought down, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the mastermind behind countless bombings, kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq as the leader of A.Q.I. This episode is sponsored by: Great Courses (https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/covert) Mint Mobile (https://www.mintmobile.com/covert) Covert's theme is "Anxiety" by Kai Engel (https://www.kai-engel.com/) .  Music in this episode is “Something (Bonus Track)” by Kai Engel; “Never Again” by Ars Sonor (https://www.deviantart.com/frequency-alcyone) ; "Haunty Fourstroke", "Violin Spider" and "Blhlicht" by Marco Trovatello (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Marco_Trovatello/) . Sound effects from freesound.org (http://freesound.org/) by syna-max (https://freesound.org/people/Syna-Max/sounds/60345/) , justinbw (https://freesound.org/people/JustinBW/sounds/70107/) , Dymewiz (https://freesound.org/people/Dymewiz/sounds/114390/) , kangaroovindaloo (https://freesound.org/people/kangaroovindaloo/sounds/138288/) , Huggy13ear (https://freesound.org/people/Huggy13ear/sounds/138959/) , soundmary (https://freesound.org/people/soundmary/sounds/194978/) , tehlordoswag420 (https://freesound.org/people/tehlordoswag420/sounds/204949/) , laurenmg95 (https://freesound.org/people/laurenmg95/sounds/386691/) , felix.blume (https://freesound.org/people/felix.blume/sounds/434076/) and nicklas3799 (https://freesound.org/people/nicklas3799/sounds/467359/) . Additional sound effects from freesfx.co.uk. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

In this episode of Battle Rhythm, Steve and Stef start by discussing the highlights of their summer and the start of the semester. They move on to a discussion of the recent G7 meeting in Biarritz. In particular, they explore Trump's approach to such meetings and Macron's efforts at diplomacy with Iran. In a bonus segment, fitness expert Veronique Malo offers some tips on adopting good habits at the start of the semester. The Emerging Scholar interview is with Tanya Irwin who talks about her fascinating research on rebel group taxation. In the feature interview, Steve speaks with Nada Bakos about her new book, The Targeter, which chronicles her experiences at the CIA. Finally, in Steve's Peeves, some commentary from Steve on former Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis's new book tour. Battle Rhythm is part of the CGAI Podcast Network, © 2019, all rights reserved. Subscribe to the CGAI Podcast Network on SoundCloud, iTunes, or wherever else you can find Podcasts! Bios: - Stéfanie von Hlatky: Associate Professor of political studies at Queen's University and the former Director of the Queen's Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP). Her research focuses on NATO, armed forces, military interventions, and defence policy. Fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. - Stephen M. Saideman: Paterson Chair in International Affairs, as well as Director of the Canadian Defence and Security Network – Réseau Canadien Sur La Défense et la Sécurité, and Professor of International Affairs at Carleton University. Fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. - Tanya Irwin: pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Toronto. She holds an MA in International Affairs from the Norman Patterson School, specializing in Conflict Analysis and Resolution in August 2017. She also holds a BA in Politics (International Relations) from Queen's University. She is interested in state-building and the relationship between revenues (natural resources, taxes, foreign aid, industry, agriculture, etc.) and accountability in governance, usually in the Horn of Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. - Nada Bakos: a highly-regarded national security expert with 20 years of in-depth knowledge base in global intelligence. As a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, she was a key member of the team charged with analyzing the relationship between Iraq, al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Subsequently, during the war in Iraq, Ms. Bakos was asked to serve as the Chief Targeting officer tracking the world's most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. She has appeared as a guest commentator on CNN, ABC, FOX, MSNBC, BBC, CBC and as a resource for journalists at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and other major international and national media outlets.  Ms. Bakos' book, The Targeter, was released in June 2019. Related Links: - CDSN-RCDS (www.cdsn-rcds.com/)

در این قسمت نگاهی اجمالی میکنیم به شکل گیری سه تا از مهم ترین گروه های جهادی اسلامی یعنی القاعده، طالبان و داعش.   لینک پرسشنامه اسپانسر: https://emrc.info/en-us/surveys/capitalism-vs-socialism/     منابع: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ltr7x8nO2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzmO6RWy1v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9j1H330Nmo&t=29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6usr-C3lcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apG-lqLsDXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V_qEYxV72E&t=401s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHPrU7R8L2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC7sRyh80lY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyp7a_RI-oU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6cgakzf2Rg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJs7udS-fZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDQLHFBp4aM https://www.britannica.com/place/Afghanistan/Dust-Mohammad-1826-39-1843-63 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saur_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan#Barakzai_dynasty_and_British_influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-11451718 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden#Formation_and_structuring_of_Al-Qaeda https://www.counterextremism.com/threat/taliban https://www.mashreghnews.ir/news/176518 https://www.nber.org/digest/jun16/w22190.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Bakr_al-Baghdadi

In 1999, 30-year-old Nada Bakos moved from her lifelong home in Montana to Washington, DC, to join the CIA. Through determination and an affinity for intelligence work, she rose through the ranks of the CIA as an analyst and Targeting Officer and found herself on the front lines of America’s war against Islamic extremists. Nada brought her story to Town Hall, drawing from her book The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House. She described how she was charged with determining if Iraq had a relationship with 9/11 and Al-Qaeda—and with finding the mastermind behind this terrorist activity: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Bakos chronicled the struggles of the determined men and women who worked in the heart of the CIA to ensure our nation’s safety at home and abroad. Through on-the-ground insights and poignant personal anecdotes, Bakos showed us the great personal sacrifice that comes with intelligence work. Sit in for a tight, tension-packed narrative that reveals the inner workings of the Agency and the largely hidden world of post 9/11 intelligence gathering. Nada Bakos is a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Bakos served as one of the key members of the team charged with analyzing the relationship between Iraq, al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, and for her role as the Chief Targeting officer tracking one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Bakos is also known for her interview in the documentary, Manhunt:The Hunt for Bin Laden and “PBS Frontline: The Secret History of ISIS.” Recorded live in The Forum at Town Hall Seattle on June 30, 2019. 

Dave Ross talks with Nada Bakos, who worked as a "targeter" in the CIA tracking terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They discuss the escalating tension with Iran, why she considers climate change one of our biggest national security threats, and how Trump's tweets are giving volatile foreign leaders like Putin and Kim Jong Un a dangerously intimate view into our nation's psyche. Nada Bakos will discuss her new book The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House at Seattle's Town Hall on Sunday, June 30th.

In this episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell speaks with former CIA analyst and targeting officer Nada Bakos about the post-9/11 hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the low-level jihadist and eventual head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS's predecessor organization. Morell and Bakos discuss the intense political pressure some analysts felt as they worked to identify links between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Bakos also describes how targeting officers employed tactical analysis in an effort to dismantle terror networks and the human intelligence that led to Zarqawi's demise.

In movies and TV shows like Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland, Hollywood has fictionalized the roles of intelligence officers in tracking down terrorists. But the truth is often filled with personal and political challenges beyond those that screenwriters imagine. Nada Bakos worked in several jobs at the CIA, including as a targeting officer focusing on the founder of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In her new book, 'The Targeter,' she describes the experiences and challenges she faced along the way. Last week, David Priess got on the phone with Nada to talk about what a CIA targeting officer does, what it was like interrogating detainees in Iraq, and the difficulties she encountered in getting her book to print.

Martha Raddatz is co-anchor of “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and ABC News Chief Global Affairs Correspondent. She has covered all aspects of foreign policy for nearly 20 years – reporting from the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, and from conflict zones around the world. Prior to her current role she served as White House correspondent during the last term of President George W. Bush's administration. She has reported from a range of locations throughout the world from Haiti and Yemen to the Mideast and through south Asia. Raddatz has traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan dozens of times, and to Iraq 21 times to cover the conflicts there. She was on the last convoy out of Iraq and is the only television reporter allowed to cover a combat mission over Afghanistan in an F15 fighter jet, spending nearly 10 hours in the air on two separate missions. In the early hours of June 8, 2006, she was the first correspondent to report that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, had been killed in a U.S. air strike north of Baghdad. In 2011 she reported exclusive details on the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. That same year she had an exclusive interview on the USS Kearsage off the coast of Libya with the Marines who helped rescue two American pilots who had gone down in Libya. In 2012, Raddatz was on a USS destroyer as it made its way through the Strait of Hormuz. In October 2012, Raddatz moderated the only Vice Presidential debate between Congressman Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden, which covered both domestic and foreign topics. Post-debate Raddatz received an outpouring of praise for asking pointed questions on a range of issues while asserting control over the conversation. Raddatz joined ABC News in January, 1999 as the network's State Department correspondent. There she covered the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, as well as traveled to Africa, Pakistan and India with then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Her coverage at the State Department after the attacks of September 11 was recognized, along with that of other ABC News recipients, with a Peabody Award as well as an Emmy Award. In May of 2004, Raddatz was named Senior National Security correspondent. During her time at the Pentagon, she reported exclusively on a number of stories, including the near capture of al-Zarqawi in April 2005, plus the discovery of his laptop computer. From 1993-1998 Raddatz was the Pentagon correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), where she reported on foreign policy, defense and intelligence issues. During her tenure at NPR, she made numerous trips to Eastern Europe to cover the war in Bosnia. Prior to joining NPR in 1993, she was the chief correspondent at the ABC News Boston affiliate WCVB-TV. In addition to covering several Presidential campaigns, she reported from the former Soviet Union, Africa, the Middle East, the Philippines and Europe. In 2012 Raddatz received the First Amendment Award from the Radio Television Digital News Foundation (RTDNF) for excellence in journalism as well as the prestigious Fred Friendly First Amendment Award. She received four Emmy Awards, including an Emmy for being on the team covering the inauguration of Barack Obama. She was also the recipient the 2007 International Urbino Press Award, the 2005 Daniel Pearl Award from the Chicago Journalists Association, and a 1996 Overseas Press Club Award for her live coverage of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. In 2007 the White House Correspondents' Association awarded her the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for excellence in Presidential news coverage under deadline pressure. Her reporting was also recognized with the National Headliner Award for team coverage of the 1988 Presidential campaign. Raddatz is the author of The Long Road Home—a Story of War and Family, a highly acclaimed book waSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/GWPPodcast)

What makes a good leader? Do we create false leaders? What role does context play in leadership? Gen. Stanley McChrystal joined Mayor Emanuel for a fascinating conversation on the myths and realities of leadership and how they continue to shape our society today. Tune in as they also discuss striking the right balance between civilian leadership and the military, share a captivating retelling of Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and advocate for creating a universal national service.

This week on the program: • The true origins of the Islamic State terrorist group. Hassan Hassan, a Syrian-born scholar of the Middle East, recently found a 93-page document from ISIS chronicling the jihadi landscape of pre-9/11 Iraq. New details show that the man originally thought to have created ISIS — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — was not at all the group’s creator. Hassan tells us all about a man named Abu Ali al-Anbari and this new, revised history of al-Qaeda in Iraq. • Then in our second half, we’ll consider the United States’ global war on terror now 17 years after 2001, what seemed to work, some things that didn’t, and where it could be headed in the years to come. *** Qs for Hassan Hassan: 1. [2:07] Can you remind our listeners who we all believed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to have been before you wrote your article? 2. [4:05] How did you come across this revelatory new information about Abu Ali al-Anbari? 3. [6:19] Why didn't you buy Zarqawi as the driving force others believed him to be? 4. [12:19] The “ideological contours” of al-Qaeda, as you called it — you write that these were in place in Iraq before Zarqawi entered the scene. Can you tell us a bit about why those things preceded Zarqawi? 5. [16:50] So what, if anything, does this change about how nations resist al-Qaeda and off-shoots like ISIS moving forward? 6. [18:00] What does all this suggest about the future of ISIS? 7. [22:05] Have you considered re-writing any portions of your 2015 book, “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror?” 8. [23:56] U.S. Marine Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie — President Trump’s new nominee to lead U.S. Central Command — told lawmakers this week that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is "a very scared man running for his life in the desert." Is that your impression as well? 9. [25:48] How did Abu Ali al-Anbari get on the U.S. military's radar? 10. [26:24] What are your thoughts when you consider how long America has been openly at war with al-Qaeda — and offshoots of al-Qaeda? 11. [33:47] Is there anybody out there that you’ve seen who appears to be doing productive work or who is on the right track when trying to address the roots causes of extremism today? 12. [39:49] Has the U.S. overstayed its welcome in the Middle East? 13. [43:48] There's a tolerance developing in eastern Syria and parts of the Middle East where sectarianism had dominated in recent years?

General Stanley McChrystal talks about the myths and reality of leadership.  He shares how he came to reassess the legacy of his military hero General Robert E. Lee in the aftermath of Charlottseville, how he personally learned that the man at the top often gets credit he doesn’t deserve, and why leaders aren’t always judged by their results.  He discusses a 15th century Chinese admiral who has become the symbol for that country’s global ambitions, why he didn’t realize that Coco Chanel was a real person, and one leadership flaw that he shares with Walt Disney.  He reveals why he decided to include his former enemy in combat Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the book, and what it was like to get into the dark mind of the Al Qaeda in Iraq leader.   Order General McChrystal's book Leaders: Myth and Reality on Amazon, Audible, or wherever books are sold.   Today's episode was sponsored by Espresso Monster, Homecoming on Amazon Prime Video, Zeel, Bombas, and Flatiron School. Visit Kickass News at www.kickassnews.com, subscribe to Kickass News on Apple Podcasts, and follow us on twitter at @KickassNewsPod.

This episode, hosted by Tally Helfont, Director of FPRI's Program on the Middle East, is the first in a four part series exploring topics related to FPRI's latest project: After the Caliphate: Reassessing the Jihadi Threat and Restoring Stability in the Fertile Crescent. Today we explore how ISIS and others are able to utilize online platforms to continue sowing global terror with Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst who served as Chief Targeting Officer tracking one of the world's most wanted terrorists, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Mia Bloom, professor of Communication at Georgia State University, known for her research and writings on women and terrorism, child soldiers, and suicide terrorism.

This episode, hosted by Tally Helfont, Director of FPRI's Program on the Middle East, is the first in a four part series exploring topics related to FPRI's latest project: After the Caliphate: Reassessing the Jihadi Threat and Restoring Stability in the Fertile Crescent. Today we explore how ISIS and others are able to utilize online platforms to continue sowing global terror with Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst who served as Chief Targeting Officer tracking one of the world's most wanted terrorists, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Mia Bloom, professor of Communication at Georgia State University, known for her research and writings on women and terrorism, child soldiers, and suicide terrorism.

On for this week’s podcast is a 20-year veteran of the Army Special Operations Command is the owner of Storm Tactical Consulting Fred. Fred served as a Special Forces Medic for a number of years before trying out and getting selected to serve as an operator in a Special Missions Unit. We discussed the oversaturation of the tactical training industry, and some of the core principles of being an effective gunfighter i.e. mastering the basics. We talked about combat medicine and the evolution of trauma protocols as the wars progressed. I wanted to get Fred’s take on leadership. He shared a story of a time in Fallujah, Iraq where his Special Forces ODA could have easily avoided an ambush, but due to poor leadership, they walked right into one. Recently I’d listened to a popular podcast on iTunes where the host talked about how ISIS shocked everyone and kind of popped up out of nowhere. This couldn’t be further from the truth so Fred and I discussed a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who is the ideological founder of ISIS but was killed in 2006 in Iraq. His followers have continued on the path set forth by him and in recent years we’ve seen the rise of the Islamic State. Over a long career, Fred has served as an Assaulter, Breacher, Sniper, Human Intel Specialist, and finishing up as a Dog Handler. We touched on PTSD and TBI to close out the episode. 0:00-Intro 2:30- Storm Tactical Consulting 3:37-The oversaturation of the tactical training industry 6:00-Mastering the basics, muscle memory 7:44- Fred’s background 20 years of service as an 18 Delta Green Beret Medic, and later as an operator in the Army’s Special Missions Unit 12:48-Special Operations Combat Medics Course(SOCM) Combat Trauma, Special Forces Medical Sergeant(SFMS) Dentistry, veterinary care, public sanitation, water quality, and optometry. TCCC 17:00-Great leadership 20:55-Story of an avoidable ambush in Fallujah, Iraq under poor leadership 31:38- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the rise of the Islamic State 38:15-Assaulter, Sniper, Breacher, and a dive into Special Operations Dog Handling 53:39-Traumatic Brain Injury, PTSD Storm Tactical Consulting: http://stormtacticalconsu.wixsite.com/stormtactical https://www.instagram.com/storm_tactical_consulting/ Global Recon: www.Globalrecon.net https://www.instagram.com/igrecon https://www.instagram.com/blackopsmatter www.twitter.com/igrecon https://www.facebook.com/GlobalReconPodcast/ Chantel Taylor: https://www.instagram.com/mission_critical https://www.instagram.com/altern8rv

Jacob Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari discuss the geopolitical importance of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and whether the realities it created will define the future. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: JS: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. My name is Jacob Shapiro, I am the director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures and I am joined again this week by Kamran Bokhari, who is our senior analyst, welcome Kamran. KB: Thanks for having me, Jacob. JS: I just want to apologize to our listeners, I know that we didn't manage to get a podcast out last week, so we're going to try and get two out this week. In general, we are going to try to stick to one a week, so we appreciate you guys bearing with us as we go along. Last time we talked, Kamran, we talked about the Islamic State and we talked about the Islamic State's origins and its futures. And one of the things I think is interesting right now is that the Middle East is really in a state of flux. The balance of power in the Middle East is changing. We can see it changing all the time. One of the things we are chronicling in our writing is how the balance of power in the Middle East is changing all the time. You brought up to us when we were thinking about what to talk about today, that we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and also Lebanon and Iraq had some token forces in there, but really it was between Israel and Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The 50th anniversary is coming up in June. How about you lay out for our readers why you think this is such an important anniversary to note? KB: I think 50 years is a good point in time to go back and review and measure just how things have unfolded in the region. And 1967 is particularly important because it really shaped the way the region has unfolded. It was a pivotal moment. Israel, as a result of that war, its massive victory over three Arab states, really established it as a military power in the region. And it was only 19 years old, Israel was only 19 years old when that war happened. And at the time, no one could've foreseen that Israel would be able to defend itself against three major Arab powers, at least they were perceived as major Arab powers. And the whole perception of Arab strength was essentially laid bare. The image of the Arabs was tarnished. I mean the fact that in the collective Arab memory, June 5, 1967, is seen as Yawm al-Naksa, which is loosely defined or translated as the day of setback, although ‘naksa' in Arabic is far more, if you will, stronger than just the word ‘setback' as we know it in English, but nonetheless, it left a deep imprint on the Arab world and established that the Arab world was very much hollow and it could not impose a military solution on Israel. JS: Kamran, I think this was one of the things you brought up last week that was interesting, which was when we were talking about the Islamic State and we were talking about the rise of radical jihadist Islam as a major ideology in the region, you pointed towards this moment as the moment at which the political ideology of the time, which was secular nationalism, Arab nationalism – in 1967 Egypt was still known as the United Arab Republic technically, right, which is an ode to the short-lived entity that existed when Egypt and Syria were part of the same republic from 1958 to 1961. So you sort of pointed out last week just how important this moment was in history and how it really defined how the Arab world was going to move forward. It amounted to the failure of Nasserism and in some ways, it was the moment that Egypt abdicated leadership in the Arab world, wouldn't you say? KB: Absolutely, and I think that it was forced to do that. I think that nobody could argue and nobody could sustain the image of this leadership role that Egypt had projected, that it was the leader of Arab nationalism, the Arab soul, the Arab world. When the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed in a matter of hours on the fifth of June, you couldn't make that argument anymore. And it was essentially the beginning of the end of the Nasser regime, at least Nasserite Egypt – though some would argue that we are still living in the legacy of Nasserite Egypt – but Nasser himself didn't live too long after that. He died in 1970, and that really closed that chapter of Arab nationalism, but it also demonstrated that the Arab states, and here we are talking about Egypt, I mean Egypt is the heart of the Arab world given it is the largest Arab state by population, any type of cultural renaissance, new ideologies that take shape in Egypt, in Cairo particularly, and then disseminate to the rest of the Arab world. So that was the status of Egypt. That war really, really demonstrated the impotence of the Egyptian military in the face of Israel, which was seen as a weak state at that point, and it really established many of the boundaries that we are currently dealing with and the relationships that Israel has with many of its Arab neighbors. So we know that in 1978, Israel and Egypt made peace and in many ways the outcome of 1967, really laid the foundation for that eventual rapprochement and the diplomatic relationship, the uneasy diplomatic relationship that has existed since then. Likewise, the relationship with Jordan, even though the formal peace treaty between Jordan and Israel did not emerge until 1994, but it is well known that Israelis and Jordanians have had a very close security relationship, especially as it pertains to the Palestinians and those living in the West Bank. The Israeli-Syrian relationship was also established. The hostilities that exist till this day, the state of war as many would refer to it, was established in 1967 when Israel conquered the Golan Heights and was able to seize that territory from the Syrians and the Syrians have not been able to take that back. So the entire geopolitical landscape that we now know as sort of the defining borders and the boundaries that established the Arab-Israeli dynamic were set in the aftermath of the 1967 war with a little bit of modification within the case of the Sinai, which Egypt was able to take back in the form of the peace treaty. JS: Well you are right to an extent, I will say that you are overlooking a little bit just how important 1973 was. So Israel and Egypt again fight another war in '73, and as much as 1967 was a success for the Israeli Defense Forces and for the strategy of preemptive attack, I mean Israel was in a weak position in some sense and it was forced to attack Egypt preemptively if it was going to be able to achieve its objectives. This led to a certain amount of arrogance on the part of the Israelis and in '73, there was a massive intelligence failure where they dismissed Egyptian mobilization in the Sinai. Israel ended up winning that war with U.S. support and then that sort of is what led to the peace treaty in the end. But I think you are right in the sense that a lot of the geopolitical realities that have defined this part of the world, which is the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, the sort of frozen state of conflict between Syria and Israel as I would call it, Israel obviously went into Lebanon a couple more times after that. But another thing that I think we need to point out here is that before '67, there really wasn't a very strong relationship between the United States and Israel, at least not the way that people think about that relationship now. Israel's success in the '67 war was really the moment the United States realized two things, first of all that most of the Arab states were in the Soviet Union's camp and that there was no getting them back, and second of all, that Israel could be a meaningful partner in balancing power against the Soviet Union in the Middle East. And I bring this up because I think it raises an interesting point, because you're right that a lot of the seeds of how things developed after '67 were laid in the results of that war. But at the same time, if we look 50 years later, a lot of those things are beginning to fall apart, right? The Soviet Union has collapsed, people are making a lot of Russia's involvement in the Middle East, but it's very miniscule compared to the chest pumping that everybody talks about. You know the Russians are not funding or massively arming states that are thinking about attacking Israel or other U.S. allies in the region. Egypt is an economic basket case, it just went through a pretty massive political transition, which began you know with the Arab Spring around 2010-2011, and they have issues of their own. Jordan is sort of the miracle of the region, how Jordan hasn't been affected by the stuff that's going on in the region is pretty incredible. Syria, I mean Syria is basically half a state right now. The Assad regime has been able to consolidate itself, but Syria, which really was one of the biggest vulnerabilities Israel faced from a military point of view, Syria is completely involved with its own fight against its own anti-regime rebels, and the Islamic State is there and they are having to rely on Hezbollah and all this other stuff. So when Israel looks out at its current strategic landscape, it doesn't see Egypt and Syria and Jordan as these major problems anymore. In '67 the major concern was, well what if Israel gets attacked by three entities at the same time. Those three entities aren't there. When you think about Israel's strategic position right now, the sort of first, most immediate thing that comes to mind is Hezbollah. We had those reports recently of Israel just a couple days ago striking a weapons convoy, an alleged weapons convoy of Hezbollah in Palmyra, which is pretty far in for the Israelis to go into Syria. So that's sort of the first thing. But Hezbollah is also completely distracted by the Syrian civil war. But then you take a step back and the challenges for Israel really aren't set by 1967, they are set by different things. So the first thing I would say is that, you know, what is going to happen with the Islamic State? Maybe the Islamic State is going to get defeated and maybe it's going to collapse but the real concern for Israel is the state of disrepair that is in the Arab world won't reign forever. Is there any potential for some kind of radical Sunni entity to rise in the Arab world and unite the factions and once again treat Israel as a common enemy? Taking a further step back, you look at Iran which was dealt a setback with the Syrian civil war and with the degradation of the Assad regime, but still maintains a lot of influence in Iraq and is still aggressively trying to push its influence in the region. And then farther back is Turkey. Turkey is rising, one of George Friedman's most identifiable forecasts and one of the things we write about a lot and that we get a lot of attention for, is our position that Turkey is going to rise and it's going to be the major power in the Middle East. Right now, there are decent relations between Israel and Turkey, but I think Israel's long-term thinking is about what a strategic landscape looks like, it has to think about Turkey as this major power reasserting itself in the region. So I agree with you in the sense that it's important, and '67 really did set the chain for a lot of different events, but in some ways, it's become obsolete. Would you agree with that characterization or do you want to argue with any of that? KB: No, I think you are right. I think we are still dealing with the post-1967 architecture but with the caveat that that architecture is in a meltdown mode. Defeating three of its neighbors at the same time established Israel's superiority in a military sense and really consolidated the state of Israel, and since that time, what's become clear, even though we had the 1973 war, it became clear to Egypt that there was no military solution. This almost romantic view of being able to establish Arab hegemony over all of historic Palestine through military means was shattered. That perception was completely shattered. And even though 1973 happened and was a surprise and intelligence failure for Israel, nonetheless the Egyptians I would argue did not think when they launched that war that they would be able to militarily defeat Israel. There's always the possibility you could do that, but deep down you know and if you have been dealt a blow like 1967, that really weighs heavily on your national psyche and your military strategy moving forward. And if you look at the way the negotiations panned out after that, with the moderation or the intercession of the United States, it becomes clear that really 1973 from the Egyptian point of view was enhancing your bargaining power. Improving your position to achieve some sort of, if you will, win-win scenario in which the Egyptians can come back and say yes, we were able to retake the Sinai from Israel and we restored national dignity. But 1967 really showed that the military option was no longer there for the Arabs. And moving forward from the Israeli point of view, those very states that were threatening them in 1967, Israel really relied on their behavior to not wage war against Israel as part of its natural security doctrine. Keep in mind that these are autocratic regimes that may view Israel in a certain way because they believe in it or maybe because it's pragmatic and because they are in power and have to balance pressures from all sides. But the sentiment in many of these countries until this day is one of hostility towards Israel. Israel relied on these capitols: Damascus, Cairo and Amman, to make sure that that national sentiment did not alter the national behavior of those countries, and Israel would not be threatened again. Now if you fast forward to the Arab Spring, that whole strategy seems to be falling apart, because if these countries, if these regimes cannot maintain order within their own country, then that is a problem. And if you have a power vacuum, we just recently published a couple of articles on how Jordan is weakening, and the implications particularly for Israel are massive, if the regime were to weaken much and God forbid fall, that could create a vacuum in which Israel faces a new kind of threat, an uncertainty. Clearly this is not a threat from a state, but non-state actors create a new dynamic. If we look at what is happening in Syria and how the Israelis have been trying to balance between the hostile forces on the Sunni side of the conflict, which includes ISIS, which includes al-Qaida and all those whom we call the moderate Sunni Arab rebel forces. They're not friends of Israel. Given a chance, they would wage war against Israel. On the other side is Syria, Iran and Hezbollah – again enemies of Israel. And Israel has to do this careful balancing act. At the moment, the Sunni side is not in a position to threaten Israel and therefore Israel is trying to make sure that Hezbollah does not gain more power than it already has and pose a bigger threat than it already does to Israel. Should those circumstances be replicated in Jordan and Egypt, then that's a tough balancing act for Israel to maintain. Because we're talking three different countries on the entire periphery of the Jewish state. JS: Well let's dig into that a little bit then. We know that Syria is in a state of civil war, the Assad regime seems to have been able to consolidate control there. For the most part that situation is actually ok with Israel because it's weakened an enemy, but not so much that there is just chaos reigning everywhere. But you've brought up Jordan and you've brought up Egypt. You said that Jordan is weakening. How about we dig a little more into that? What do you mean when you said Jordan is weakening? KB: Well if you look at Jordan geographically, it is sitting at the crossroads of major areas of conflict. It borders both the countries in which ISIS is operating i.e. Syria and Iraq. It has the second largest refugee population coming from Syria after Turkey. We're talking somewhere around 680,000 people. That's a huge strain on an already poor country. The economy really historically hasn't done well, it's gotten by with assistance from both the West, the United States and the U.K., and of course assistance from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. But with the price of oil declining, and we know that Saudi Arabia is in trouble on the home front, it has less and less financial bandwidth to come to the aid of Jordan. We also see the situation in the West Bank evolving towards a crisis where President Mahmoud Abbas is at an advanced age. He's not ill or anything, at least apparently. But when you reach, go beyond 80, you are operating on borrowed time. So what will happen to the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority, especially in the wake of Israeli policies that are now aggressively pushing more settlements? That creates a large pressure on the Jordanians whose population is somewhere a little above 50 percent of Palestinian origin. Many of those people came in the aftermath of the 1948 war, a lot of them came after the 1967 one. But there's already an existing Palestinian population, which has been to one degree or another, if you will, assimilated into Jordanian mainstream political life. We recently had protests because of the cutting of subsidies by the government. There are no shortage of Islamist forces, from the Muslim Brotherhood, it has at least two major factions. You have a large Salafi population. You have al-Qaida there. The founder of ISIS, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is from Jordan and the town of Zarqa. And you have Hizb ut-Tahrir. And then you have the spillover effect from Syria. So these are circumstances, to expect Jordan that it will continue to behave the way it has since the '67 war or over the decades, I think that would be a mistake. I don't think that the Israelis are looking at it that way. Recall the recent report in which the Jordanian ambassador to Amman told the IDF chief that he is worried about stability and security in the Jordanian kingdom. We've not had these kind of statements coming from Israel. So if the Israelis are worried, I would say that is a good barometer of how the situation is deteriorating in Jordan. JS: Yeah although, I would challenge you to go a little bit deeper, which is to say that you've just laid out a pretty scary laundry list of challenges for any country let alone one like Jordan that really doesn't have a lot of natural resources of its own, which like you say, has an incredibly diverse population. There's a lot of Palestinians in Jordan. Really Jordanians are Hashemites right, there are actually very small numbers of people who can actually claim to be Jordanian, so many of them are Bedouins and Circassians and this, that and the other thing. How do you explain the fact that Jordan hasn't succumbed to all this stuff? Because unlike Syria or unlike Egypt or unlike even Lebanon it has for the most part avoided a lot of the domestic political instability and a lot of the violence that a lot of the Arab states around it haven't avoided and with much fewer resources. KB: So I would say that there are three aspects to that in terms of how the Jordanian regime has maintained stability and security. So the first and foremost is that the Jordanian security establishment has been very competent. Particularly the General Intelligence Department, its main intelligence agency, it has a very good handle in pre-empting and not being on the reactive side that things happen and then the Jordanians act. They've been ahead of the curve in terms of making sure that any radical elements, be they ISIS or others, that they are kept under lock and key and so that's one aspect. The other aspect I mentioned earlier is that there has been this historic relationship between Israel and Jordan, a quiet one that is not really talked about much and understandably so from the Jordanian point of view, and that has helped quite a bit. Then it is a very close ally of the West, the United States and prior to that, the U.K., and the U.K. continues to be an ally of the Hashemite monarchy. They also have had assistance from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to the extent that they have been able to do that. So I think a mix of forces has allowed Jordan to continue to maintain stability even though we're six years out from the Arab Spring. But I think that the pressures are building and this is not a sustainable situation. Should there be a, we talk about the southern provinces of Syria where the government and different rebel factions and ISIS is in the mix as well. There's sort of this lack of clarity over who has the upper hand, its sort of a balance of weakness in southern Syria when it comes to the civil war, it has not been a major theater compared to Aleppo or Palmyra or ISIS-land up near Raqqa or Damascus. These are the things that have maintained order and these are the factors that enabled the regime. But to assume that this will continue, especially at a time when the established states, I mean Saudi Arabia is the largest state in that region and it also shares a large border with Jordan, although historically a quiet one. But nonetheless, if Saudi Arabia is having less and less financial bandwidth to assist countries around its periphery, then we are looking at a situation that is not something that the Jordanians will be able to handle on their own. There's a lot of hope that goes into this idea that Jordan will continue to manage its domestic politics and of course the wider geopolitics, it's a balancing act. But I think we need to get out of this assumption that things will continue and nothing will go wrong and there's a need for out-of-the-box thinking. JS: Although I just want to drive home for our listeners that a lot of people when they think about geopolitics, they think about geographical determinism, and what I mean by that is they think that it's as easy as looking at a map. And a map is going to be able to tell you exactly what's wrong with a country and what is going to happen to a particular country. Jordan is a really good example of where just the basics of a map or just the basics of geography or a layout of resources isn't enough to tell you everything. I think there is a conservative element in Jordanian society and an element that has always had to fight an uphill battle against a real lack of resources. I mean Jordan, its borders were not drawn in any logical way when you are thinking in terms of nationality or economic production or just about anything. So I agree with you that Jordan faces many challenges, but one of the things about Jordan is this intangible thing that has kept the kingdom together so far, and I think will serve it in good stead. But leaving Jordan aside for now, it's a relatively small country. One of the things that people brought up from the last podcast and I think it fits in exactly with this conversation, because we started by talking about 1967 and as you mentioned, in a lot of ways 1967 was one of the moments where Israel and the United States realized that they had interests in common. Those interests really were about blocking the Soviet Union and about Israel becoming a U.S. ally in a region that was becoming dominated by Arab states that were allied with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union obviously is no longer there, and the strategic basis of the relationship between Israel and the United States is not as strong as it once was. I know that there was a lot of talk about how special the relationship is and how close it is. But that strategic reason for the relationship has gone away and I think you've seen the United States and Israel pull away from each other a little bit. That's both because Israel has a lot more freedom of action than it did before and also because from a U.S. perspective the interests don't line up quite as well as they used to. But the question that I am circling around here is, so we've talked about how we're in this 50 years since 1967, but we're also in a Middle East that is changing rapidly, how does the U.S. respond to the things were talking about here, how does the U.S. respond to the hollowing out of the Arab world, how does the U.S. respond to Jordan and the serious challenges that Jordan is facing and what is the U.S.-Israel relationship going to look like going forward? I know that a lot of people were thinking that Donald Trump was going to make that relationship much different than the relationship with Obama, but as with so many things with President Trump, he said one thing before getting into office and continues to say things all the time, but the things that he's actually doing don't always line up with what he says. He has not moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he has criticized the Netanyahu administration for settlements at some level, all things that Trump said he was going to do, but when we look in practice, it looks remarkably similar to before and it also seems like Trump is willing to throw his hat in the ring and to be yet another U.S. president who wants to try and solve the eternal conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, so I just threw some things at you but I think the main thing is so what does the U.S. do, how does the U.S. deal with all these dynamics we've brought up? KB: We've written about how the United States is pursuing a balance of power strategy. A balance of power strategy doesn't mean that there is a nice balance, that you can essentially create this system that's going to work for a while. It's a constant act of balancing, it doesn't end at one point, it doesn't begin at one point. You just have to continue to play with it, tweak it, to make sure that it is working and the U.S. balance of power strategy relies on working with the major powers of the region, we've identified them as Turkey, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Now if you go into each one of them, we've talked about the historic relationship with Israel, and there is this disconnect between Israeli and American interests, but I still think that despite that divergence in interests, the United States and Israel aren't really that far apart if you look at it from a strategic point of view. Yes, tactically there can be many differences, you know, we can say that the United States does not want Israel to build new settlements but I think that that's sort of a minor issue in the larger regional geopolitical scheme of things. I don't think that the United States does not want Israel to assume a posture or an aggressive interventionist posture in its neighborhood and I don't think that the Israelis want to do that either. So if you look at the airstrikes in Syria, they do not demonstrate any desire on the part of the Israelis to intervene in the way they did in Lebanon, and that's great from an American perspective, because the United States is already dealing with a whole lot. The United States under the Obama administration was able to end that hostility that erupted between Turkey and Israel over the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010, and there was the re-establishment of full diplomatic relations and a sort of normalization. So I think that there again is another example of the United States trying to balance. The United States needs Turkey to manage Syria, and it has made it very clear to the Israelis that we need your cooperation. If the Israelis and the Turks are going after each other, then that undermines the United States' interests. You flip over to Iran's nuclear program and the way the nuclear agreement was forged, yes there was a lot of huffing and puffing on the part of the Israelis, there was a lot of bellicose rhetoric and unhappiness, and the media was all about how Netanyahu's personality clashes with that of Obama, but at the end of the day, Israel didn't do anything substantive to block that agreement from taking place. Israel maintains that it has very little faith in that agreement to produce the desired outcome, but that's a different story than saying we will go and actively work against American interests. JS: I am going to jump in and disagree with you a little bit in the sense that I think you are understating just how much the Netanyahu administration opposed the Iran deal. Israel didn't do anything in terms of Iran's nuclear program and won't do anything in terms of Iran's nuclear program, at least anything overt, because it doesn't have the capability. It simply does not have the military capability to go in and knock out the Iranian nuclear program. If it did, I would submit that it probably already would have done it. It did that with Iraq, it did that with Syria. If it felt like it had the capability, I think it would have gone and done it already. And I don't think it was a small thing what Netanyahu did when he came and addressed the U.S. Senate and gave that very flowery speech about how it was a bad deal and how the Obama administration had committed a catastrophic mistake. I don't think that Israel had much of a choice in the end though. At the end of the day, Israel knows where its bread is buttered and knows that it needs the United States as a key strategic ally. If this was the path that the United States would go down and this was the path that the United States thought was most in U.S. interests, Israel wasn't going to be able to thwart that. But I think that Israel in general is very intimidated by Iran, especially by Iran's rhetoric, and they would've preferred a much stronger U.S. reaction to Iran. I think that's one of the areas where you see that there's not going to be a break in relations between the United States and Israel but I think there you see a very, very different set of priorities. Israel is still a small country in a very hostile neighborhood that looks at things one way and the United States is the most powerful country in the world with a lot of different challenges in a lot of different regions. You've got everything going on with Russia, you've got everything going on with China, you've got allies all over the place, you've got a NATO alliance that isn't working the way the United States wants it to, the United States does not have time to get involved in every little thing inside the Middle East. The United States really can use Iran, not necessarily as an ally, I am not saying the United States and Iran are going to become best friends or anything, but the United States needs an Iran it can work with on a pragmatic basis, because there are bigger fish to fry. You've got ISIS sitting there right smack dab in the Middle East, you've got whatever is going to come after ISIS, you've got this huge jostling and competition for what's going to come after the hulking carcasses of Syria and Iraq going on there, so I think that's actually one of the areas where you see a little bit of the divergence and where you see that the challenges of '67 and the challenges that have really defined relations in the region since '67 are beginning to change. KB: Yes they are changing, but what I was pointing towards or trying to make the case for is that there is the divergence, and yes it is a function of capability that Israel did not opt for a military solution to the Iranian nuclear issue and went along with the U.S. diplomatic option, but at the end of the day, this is that difficult balancing act we've been talking about. The difficulty in maintaining a balance of power strategy whether it's between Turkey and Israel or Israel and Iran, I mean even between Turkey and Iran, although this is one of those relations that has yet to really emerge in terms of where it's going at this point. Even though they are at odds with one another over the outcome of Syria, Tehran and Ankara are not going to be seeing eye-to-eye, but for now they have both decided that it's not in their interests to go head-to-head with one another. I mean similarly if you look at how the U.S. is sort of caught. On one hand, there is an Iran that can be useful in the fight against ISIS in making sure that Iraq functions in some kind of semi-coherent way. But at the same time, the more that the Americans appear to be working with the Iranians – that deeply upsets the Saudis and the other Arab states, and therefore yet again you have a balancing act. We saw a lot of this balancing, it's not as if the United States can just say okay, Saudi Arabia has very little to offer and Iran has a little more to offer, therefore we're going to sort of swing that pendulum in the direction of Tehran. I don't think that would sort of undermine the entire thesis of a balance of power strategy, but once you immerse yourself into that, you put yourself in the shoes of Washington, it's a difficult balancing act. How do you make sure that the enmity between the Iranians and the Saudis does not upset your interests in the region. On one hand, the United States does not like the Saudis sponsoring militias in Syria that are not very different honestly from al-Qaida and ISIS. But at the same time, the United States needs the Saudis to make sure that the Iranians don't jump out of their box and become disproportionately powerful. So I guess, I am talking about a very complex balance of power strategy that will continue to twist and turn whether it involves the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the U.S.-Iranian tensions, the tensions that currently exist between Turkey, which we have identified as being the key to the American strategy for the long haul in Syria and in the wider region. We see great tensions, at least in the short term, there's a divergence of interests especially over the Kurds and the extent to which Turkey wants to commit forces in the fight against ISIS. But nonetheless the two sides have to work with each other, so Washington has been caught in between these four powers. JS: It's funny as you were talking, it's really striking to me when you think in terms of, you know, if you think about the 1960s and '70s, it was punctuated by these very intense wars. We call them wars in the full sense of the term. But overall it was a much more stable situation in the Middle East. You know, there were the people that were in the U.S. camp, there were the states that were in the Soviet camp and the states themselves were fairly stable. Egypt was a fairly stable state, Syria you know, there was the coup d'etat in ‘61 that brought the Baath party to power, but once the Assads eventually came to power, Syria also was very stable, the Hashemite kingdom has also been there since the 1940s. Right now, it's not so simple. The Arab world, as you said, really has been hollowed out. And there's a great deal of instability and there's a great deal of uncertainty about what is going to emerge out of it. I would suggest that if we are looking forward another 50 years, if we are talking about 100 years from 1967, I think that what we might see is we might see the pendulum swing back to the stability that we saw in '67. I just think the actors are going to be very different. I don't think that Egypt and Syria and war between Arabs and the Israelis is going to be the thing animating the region. I think the thing to really focus on is the rise of Turkey, how Iran is going to respond to that, how the Arab world is going to deal both with its own problems with radical Islam and then how Israel is going to try to navigate through all this and who the U.S. is going to use and how. I want to close, I just want to hit one more topic while we're here Kamran. It's one we've sort of danced around and it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it feels like the eternal conflict. And in some ways, it's strange to go to this issue after talking about such large weighty things, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in strategic terms really does not matter that much. And I wonder how you are going to answer this question, because it's something that I ask people all the time. Why do you think there is such a degree of fascination and attention with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East? The attention that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it gets, really I don't think lines up with the strategic importance that it has overall, and I think it's appropriate to talk about it in this conversation, because as you said 1967 is when Israel takes over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and it hasn't relinquished them since. And the Palestinians, which used to be – the West Bank was a Jordanian problem and the Gaza Strip was an Egyptian problem. Since '67 it became an Israeli problem. So why do you think that there is such a level of focus such that even the Trump administration is sending out envoys talking about solution to this conflict that has eluded every single president. KB: I think there are two reasons for that. I think the first reason has to do with the fact that the Palestinian issue remains unresolved. In many ways there is, as time has gone by and as we move forward, the situation becomes more and more complex and resolution appears more and more elusive. But the fact is that the question of Palestine, the Palestinian issue, has not been resolved in some shape or form to where we can move beyond this idea of an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though successive American administrations have failed to really tackle this issue. I think the closest that we ever came was in the Clinton administration when there were final status talks between Yasser Arafat and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the late '90s. But we've drifted far from that and we've come to a point where the entire Palestinian landscape has become so incoherent that even before we talk about an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, there has to be some form of intra-Palestinian settlement and nothing tells me when I look at the Gaza Strip, when I look at the West Bank, when I look at Hamas, and when I look at Fatah and I look at the other Palestinian factions and the disunity and the incoherence, I look at it and I say we are moving even further away from anything called a Palestinian national entity. And therefore it becomes even less and less possible for a serious Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. But I think that there is another assumption built into the way we in the West look at this problem. Which is that if we were to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict then somehow the Middle East becomes far more manageable. I don't believe that. But that is the way I think that many within the various governments in the West, whether it's the British government or the French or the German or the American. And in many ways, this narrative has been peddled by the Arab regimes and the wider Muslim world, you know Turkey has been pushing this as well on its end, that you need to solve this problem, if you solve this problem then we won't have radicalism. Radicalism and al-Qaida, ISIS exist largely because of what has happened to the Palestinians and the wider fallout of that. I think there's the failure to recognize that it's not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Arab Muslim world faces a deep malaise. We talked about this in our first podcast a couple of weeks ago. And that is at the heart of this issue, but I think that there is this obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as being central to the wider problems of the Middle East. I will argue that even assuming somehow we can miraculously solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and we have this quote-unquote two-state solution before us, the problems of Syria, Egypt and Iraq and the rest of that region are not going to go away. But nonetheless because it's a historic continuing unfinished business, there is this tendency to sort of organically link it to the other problems, and if you look at every administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration and even now the Trump administration, there's always this effort, this new effort to say let's get the Israelis and the Palestinians to start talking in a serious way. But at the end, we haven't seen any breakthrough, because the fundamentals have not changed, they've actually become worse. You have two Palestines, effectively there are two Palestinian Territories, not just geographically separated, they are ideologically separated, they are politically separated. Right now, the Israelis don't occupy Gaza, that is a Palestinian sort of self-ruled territory spinning on its own axis controlled by Hamas. That will continue, I don't think the Israelis are going to go in anytime soon or in the foreseeable future and reoccupy Gaza. So what can happen in the form of some negotiation is that there may be another Palestinian territory that emerges as a semi-quasi-sovereign in the West Bank. You will effectively have two Palestines. Does that solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I would argue no, it just makes it much, much more complex. JS: And I think just the way I always talk about the Middle East when people ask me about it is my favorite metaphor to describe it basically as a chess board, that really for over a century now the Middle East has been a chess board for major powers outside the region to try and make moves against each other. And for the most part since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, it's been mostly pawns on the chess board with mostly people moving back less valuable pieces as they challenge each other. And I think the most important thing to think about going forward when we think about the next 50 years and where we are going to be 50 years from now is to watch the powers in the Middle East itself that are beginning to come up. I think really that means keeping a very close eye on Turkey, keeping a very close eye on Iran, keeping a very close eye on Saudi Arabia and whether and how it's able to tackle many of the issues facing it. I know that here at GPF, we're fairly bearish on Saudi Arabia's ability to do that, they are just facing too much. And then Israel, as it always has been, you know smaller country in a very messy neighborhood trying to figure out its right place in it all and trying to build the right level of strategic relationships that allow it to exist with a maximum amount of independence. All right, thanks Kamran. Thank you for joining me. Thank you everybody for listening. If you want to send us questions or comments, you can comment on our website or on SoundCloud. You can also send comments to comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. Again, I am Jacob Shapiro, I'm the Director of Analysis for GPF and this is Kamran Bokhari, and we will see you next time.

1992 åkte Arklöv till Zagreb i Kroatien. Han tyckte att de ideologiskt stod hans nazistiska tankevärld närmast. Arklöv var inte den ende svensk som deltog i striderna, det fanns också de som kämpade på den andra sidan. En av dem var Mikael Glinka, mer känd under sitt arabiska namn Abu Musab al-Swedani, skulle bli den förste svenske ”martyren” i Bosnienkriget. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Kamran Bokhari and Jacob L. Shapiro discuss where IS came from, the history and politics of radical Islam, and what happens if IS is defeated in Raqqa. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: JS: Hello, my name is Jacob Shapiro, I'm broadcasting today from Avignon, in the south of France. I'm joined by Kamran Bokhari, who I believe is in Washington, D.C. Is that right Kamran? KB: Yes I am. JS: I'm joined by Kamran Bokhari who is our senior analyst and who focuses on the Middle East, and we're going to be talking a little bit about ISIS. Thanks for joining us Kamran. KB: Pleasure to be here. JS: So, Kamran, I thought instead of talking about every single battle and every single report that seems to indicate ISIS is imminently falling, we might take a broader look at the subject for our listeners. So, how about we just start with a rather broad question – tell me about how ISIS started. How did ISIS come to be in the middle of Syria and Iraq? KB: Well if you recall, Jacob, this happened in the wake of regime change, or regime collapse, in Iraq, when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled the Saddam government and has since been unable to form a viable state. And it was not just the lack of a state, but it also brought to the fore forces that were until then very much contained under the autocratic leadership of the Baathist regime. And so what we had was the disenfranchisement of the Sunnis, the rise of the Shiites and of course the rise of the Kurds, in the form of regional autonomy. ISIS did not exist, in fact, there were hardly any Islamist groups of any shade in Iraq, but in war, especially when you have the sectarian problem in the Middle East where the Sunnis and the Shia are struggling with one another – yes, the Sunni government came down, but it's not like the Shiites were able to establish their own government. There was a window of opportunity in which the founders of ISIS, particularly Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded what used to be called al-Qaida in Iraq, laid the foundation for ISIS. And as the years rolled on, ISIS continued to gain strength from the conflict that was brewing. It was a complex conflict. There were Shiites fighting Shiites, Shiites fighting Sunnis, Sunnis fighting Kurds and Sunnis fighting the United States. So in that complex warlike scenario, that's where we find the birth of ISIS. JS: Yes, well, as usual in the Middle East, everybody is fighting everybody and it's all complicated. But so there's a lot there to unpack. So how about we start with this: You mentioned that the original name of ISIS was al-Qaida in Iraq and you also said that ISIS began, or really, its generation point came in 2003 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. How about we go back a little step further, and can you talk about the relationship between al-Qaida and between ISIS and what the relationship was and how it's developed? KB: If we go back to the aftermath of 9/11 and after the United States invaded Afghanistan and destroyed the infrastructure of al-Qaida, disrupted its operations, forcing al-Qaida, the original organization, to disperse and relocate largely in northwestern Pakistan. Al-Qaida had basically very little power projection capability at that point. I'm talking between 2001 and 2003. And at that point in time, it seemed like al-Qaida's purpose for staging the 9/11 attacks, which was to bait the United States into militarily acting in a very large way in the Middle East, in the heart of the Muslim world, that didn't succeed. The United States sent in a small force, largely special operations forces and intelligence operatives and later NATO forces came in, but originally it was Afghan forces on the ground who toppled the Taliban regime. That didn't produce the kind of effect that al-Qaida was hoping for. But then when the United States invaded Iraq, that was an opportunity. But al-Qaida didn't have any horses in this race. Al-Qaida could not reach Iraq. But Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who ran his own jihadist training camp in Afghanistan pre-9/11, was able to make his way from Afghanistan between 2001, and by the time the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, he had set up his shop in the Sunni areas in northern Iraq. And he was able to take advantage of that vacuum that was created with the fall of the Saddam regime and he began an insurgency. But at that point in time his group used to be called something like Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and it wasn't even called al-Qaida. But this individual and this outfit were on the ground, al-Qaida was at a distance. Both needed each other. Zarqawi's outfit was not getting the kind of coverage or the kind of support, financially or otherwise, because it was an unknown quantity. Al-Qaida was a brand at the time and therefore it was a marriage of convenience. Bin Laden and Zawahiri and al-Qaida, the original organization, or what was left of it, did not have the ability to act in Iraq. These guys were acting, so they formed an alliance and Zarqawi became the leader of what became the al-Qaida branch in Iraq. And that's sort of where these guys started to work together. Operationally, Zarqawi was his own guy, he didn't have to report on a daily basis, he did what he thought was right and he was essentially following strategic guidance from Bin Laden and the top leadership, to the extent that he cared to do that. But it was an arrangement that worked for a while. But effectively, Zarqawi became more and more powerful and at one point, he didn't really need to report back. He never rebelled, in his lifetime, he was killed in 2006, and by that time his group was institutionalized to the point where his successors were able to take the group to the next level. And as the years rolled on, until the United States in 2007-2008 were able to get the Sunnis to turn against Zarqawi and his al-Qaida in Iraq, these guys had put down quite a bit of roots inside the country. And therefore, I think that's where the foundation was laid. Now, everything that's happened since is sort of building upon this foundation. JS: Well if I can – I'll stop you there and I'll just say, one of the interesting things that you're saying is that Zarqawi wasn't in Iraq. But you also said that one of al-Qaida's original goals was to draw the United States into the Middle East. Another of al-Qaida's goals was to try and demonstrate to much of the Islamic world, especially the Arab world, that all of these secular dictatorships, or dictatorships that had been propped up by the West, had no legitimacy. They thought if they could bring the United States in and if they could show the people of the Middle East that their regimes had no legitimacy that there would be some kind of popular revolt. So they didn't – they weren't able to bring the United States into the Middle East right away, but the fact that Zarqawi was able to get himself to Iraq and found there a very fertile ground for recruits indicates that perhaps Bin Laden, and al-Qaida in general, had a much better assessment of the level of discontent in that part of the world than anybody else. Would you agree with that characterization? KB: I would, but I would also say that this wasn't sort of – this was one of those things that they, al-Qaida, the original organization led by Bin Laden, intended to do, but had it not been for Zarqawi and his efforts and his ability to implant himself in Iraq at a time when the United States was going to war in that country, I don't think we would've come this far. So there's a bit of luck if you think from al-Qaida's point of view. Now obviously, ever since, al-Qaida has taken sort of the backseat, and now ISIS as we know it, or the Islamic State, it's essentially a different organization. It has its roots in al-Qaida, in many ways it took al-Qaida's original view and ideas and really operationalized them in a way that al-Qaida could not because of the lack of capability and the fact that Bin Laden and his top associates traded away day-to-day operational control for physical security of the leadership of the movement, they thought if the leadership was killed then al-Qaida would collapse, and therefore, the price was that you allow these groups to operate on their own. Now they didn't think that al-Qaida in Iraq would become not just an independent organization but one that would eclipse al-Qaida itself. JS: That's true, too, but you made another interesting point that I want to take you back to, which is that you mentioned that Zarqawi was the right man in the right place at the right time. That's an important point because when we're dealing with geopolitics and especially when we're dealing with state actors, the role of the individual, generally speaking, is not that important. We put less emphasis on the individual. Maybe with a sub-state actor it has a little bit of difference. But I guess the question I would pose to you then, is, was it really Zarqawi that was that special or was there going to be a Zarqawi anyway? And was the situation going to mushroom into that anyway, or did it really require someone who had that connection to al-Qaida, who had that experience, who had that training, who had that world view, who knew how to operationalize it, who knew how to put it together, to go to Iraq and to take advantage of the situation? Or would it have been, when the United States went in and when things started going wrong in Iraq, that this kind of movement would've sort of organically sprouted up anyway? KB: I think that this was bound to happen. If it was not Zarqawi it could've been someone else, because in reality, Zarqawi the personality could only do so much unless the ground realities allowed for it, and there were enabling factors, the disenfranchisement of the Sunnis, created a lot of leaders. Back in the day, I'm talking 2003 to 2005-6 I remember that Zarqawi was just one of many militia leaders, one of many factions. At the time, the group had yet to distinguish itself. So there were no shortage of outfits and organizations. I think probably what did make a bit of a difference was the fact that this individual had experience in running training camps, in running an organization going back to the late '90s and I think that experience came in handy. But it's not that Zarqawi was so important to all of this. Now, the insurgency may have taken a different route, but the fact that there is a Shiite-Sunni struggle going on at the time, that didn't require Zarqawi. That was going on independent of any personality per se. And so I think that the ground was fertile. It required an individual and an outfit that had the experience. If you fast-forward just a little bit to 2012, and when the Syrian uprising morphed into a full-scale civil war, again it was Zarqawi's outfit – because of its experience – that was able to take advantage of the vacuum that was created in eastern Syria and was able to take over places like Raqqa and Deir el-Zour and the oil fields. And it became the biggest militia and really eclipsed the rebels who started the war. So I think there's something to be said about institutionalization. I'm not a big fan of personalities, I think that there were many others, and the fact that Zarqawi only lived for three years as the leader and we are now in year 14 of this entity, says a lot. I mean, there are a lot of leaders who had come by and taken over the same group and really moved on, so you know, there's institutionalization and there are ground realities that sustain these type of entities. JS: I want to talk about the sectarian part of all this and I also want to fast forward to the present day, but before we do that I want to ask you one more question that goes back a little bit and sets the stage, which is that, so we have now identified that there was a fertile ground there for recruitment for Zarqawi and for these other heads of militias to recruit for al-Qaida, to recruit for the general mission and this may be an impossible question for you to answer, but we specialize in impossible questions, so when do you think this moment in the Muslim world started happening? When did the discontent get to such an extent that people were so upset that they would be open to this kind of ideology? When did it start to move away from secular nationalism or any of the other things that were peoples' identifying political ideology, particularly Arab nationalism too – when did it go from that to Islam being one of the major things, and this radical version of Islam being something that could be used as a tool to create these organizations? KB: I think if I had to put my finger on a date, I would say right after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, in which Egypt, Syria and Jordan suffered a major defeat at the hands of Israel. And I think that was sort of the turning point. But having said that, I will also point out that these are not, sort of, on-and-off switches. Things are taking shape in parallel. So a new movement is operating parallel to an older movement and at some point the new movement overtakes the pre-existing movement, in terms of its popular appeal. I think that the crisis essentially allowed, the devastating defeat of the Arab states really allowed for the Islamists to come out and say, what have the secularists given to this region, to the people of this region, to the Arabs, to the Muslims? And they were able to really craft a narrative, or take an existing narrative to the next level and say, it is because we have left the ideas that made us great in the past. We have abandoned that, that has led us to this kind of lull, and if we were to go back to Islam, then this region can regain its lost glory. I think that's the really turning point, but groups, if you were to measure Islamism in the form of groups, I would say that by the mid-'70s, these groups had started to come out, and I think by the end of the 1970s, Islamism had exploded onto the scene. We had the revolution in Iran, albeit a Shiite Islamist regime took over from the monarchy of the shah, but nonetheless, it had a real impact, a psychological impact on the majority Sunni Islamists. There was also the taking over of the Kaaba in 1979 in November by radical Salafis trying to overthrow the Saudi regime, and then I think that really the incubator that really took Islamism to the next level, was the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan that allowed for different Islamists from different parts of the Arab Muslim world to come together and have a shared experience for a decade and really become battle hardened and not just ideologically advance themselves, but acquire capabilities that make political change a bit more, if you will, realizable. JS: Would you say that though – I mean, yes, so Afghanistan was that ground where they all met, but I'm struck by the fact that most of the examples you use are Arab. Would you describe radical Islam and this particular strain of jihadism as an Arab phenomenon or a Muslim phenomenon? KB: I would say it's an Arab phenomenon. One of the things to note is that Egypt is the cradle of all ideologies that have spread across the Arab Muslim world. Secularism in the Arab world began in Egypt. Islamism, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, began in Egypt. Jihadism, what later was made transnational by al-Qaida and more recently by ISIS, has its roots in Egypt. So definitely it is – and then of course the Salafism of Saudi Arabia and its input into the making of this broader phenomenon. So yes, there is no doubt that it is an Arab ideology at its core, at its root. That doesn't mean that it doesn't take other shapes, though the Chechens have Islamism in a different direction and have emerged as leaders, for lack of a better term, in the Caucasus region. We have Central Asian jihadists, Southeast Asia has their own jihadists. But really, jihadism and the entire Islamist project is very much Arab at its core. JS: It also seems to be very Sunni. So you brought up Iran a little earlier, but I guess we could talk about Hezbollah and I guess we could talk about some of these groups, but how do you account for the fact that the majority of these groups are Sunni? Is there something within Sunni Islam or within their particular interpretation of Sunni Islam that leads to this kind of ideology? Is it really just that the political and geographic circumstances in countries that were Sunni and were Arab were bad enough and were the right mix of things that it really wasn't anything embedded within Sunni Islam itself? It was just that there was a situation in those countries and Sunni Islam was the religion that they practiced and therefore that was how it got manifested? So how do you – and I know we're going to talk about sectarianism a little more because it's so important, especially for the rise of ISIS, particularly in Iraq, but how do you account for the fact that most of these groups when we talk about them are all Sunni? KB: So I think that the easy way to understand this is simply that Sunnis have always been the majority sect in Islam. And the overwhelming majority. Even today, there aren't real good, if you will, we don't have a reliable census that we can say – OK, you know what, this is how many percentage of Shiites and Sunnis per country. But it's fair to say, I would say, that a good 80 percent of the Arab Muslim world is Sunni. Therefore, you know, the ideology of jihadism or any other ideology that came before, has always been dominated by the Sunnis. And so it's demography, it's sectarian demography, but it's also geography. If you look at the history of the expansion of Islam, and how over time, it gets factionalized and geography imposes its limits, and creates problems and leads to the rise of new regimes and new ideas, it becomes very clear that it's not something inherent in Sunni Islam, necessarily. Yes, there is this crisis of what does it mean to be a Muslim in the here and now in a collective sense. And the Muslim world has not seen, has not really come far beyond the old imperial age, that for the rest of the world, is now a good – you know it's in its second century, that was 200 years ago that the rest of the world, or the Western world in particular, really left the imperial form of governance for a modern nation-state based on a secular order and a commitment to self-determination and democracy. I think that evolution has not occurred in the Muslim world and therefore there is this crisis. But I don't think it's necessarily something in Sunni Islam. If Shiites had been the majority, in a counterfactual reality, I think we'd be facing the same problems. JS: I think I agree with you, but I'll play devil's advocate for a second, which is to say that I think you're right generally and this is not so much a Muslim issue especially in the Middle East, but it goes beyond the Middle East. But Iran is the Islamic Republic, right? You talked about the Iranian Revolution and Iran is really the center of Shiite Islam in the world. And we could say that there is a much more mature political, or at least a much more mature idea, about what the relationship is supposed to be between politics and between religion in Iran. It's not necessarily all settled. There are obviously large disagreements within Iran itself, but we might say that Turkey is another example that is fighting through this right now. It's not stable, but there's a much, much more mature sense of what that relationship is between politics and religion. So how do you account for a country like Iran, which went through its own turmoil and it has its own pressure, or a country like Turkey, which is currently doing it right now, how do you account for those countries developing the way they're developing versus the Arab world, which is essentially cannibalizing itself right now? KB: So there are a number of factors with it. The first one is that Sunni Islam has been preoccupied for, you know, over a millennia with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy has been its obsession. What are the boundaries of justifiable behavior and thought? That's what Sunni Islam – and I think that there is a certain logic here, that if you are the majority, you're not worried about existential issues. You're worried about the, you know, legitimacy, authenticity in terms of religious ideas. And so I think that is something that the Sunnis have been preoccupied for a very long time. And, therefore, they were not open to experimentation, for a lack of a better term, or to, you know, what the noted Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush will call “extra-religious ideas,” in other words moving beyond the religious text and borrowing from other civilizations. Not to say that that did not happen, but I think that by and large, that kind of borrowing or attempt to borrow from other civilizations and advance your social and political discourse, that's something that the Shiites were much more open to from the very beginning. I mean, for them, it wasn't the orthodoxy. It was much more about the sect itself. Being a minority, you know, issues of survival, that force you to innovate and force you to look beyond, if you will, your own belief. And so I think that the Shiites have had a head start in social, political and economic development. And keep in mind, it's not just Shiites. It's the idea that, we have to keep in mind that there is Iran. Persian nationalism is also at play here. So it's the interplay between the Persian ethno-linguistic civilization that flourished for a very long time, predating Islam. So, I think that when we look at Iran, its Islamism – the Islamic Republic – is a blend of a lot of ideas that are not necessarily Islamic in origin. So I think that's why you have Iran looking very different and far more healthy than the Arab world. And jumping over to Turkey, I think Turkey – although a Sunni power – does not come from the orthodox core, i.e. Arab core of Islam. I mean, the Turks came from Central Asia. And they went from Central Asia to Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and they set up shop over there. And before they did that, I'd like to add, they were in Europe (in Eastern Europe) and they were a European power well before they became a Middle Eastern power. And the Islam that is practiced over in Turkey is very different, or at least was very different. There has been a lot of blending and spillover of Salafism and these jihadi ideas and Islamic ideas, even in Turkey. But by and large, Turkey has had a different trajectory. And then, of course, secularism. And here I don't mean just Atatürk – Mustafa Kemal – the founder of the modern Republic. He didn't come out of nowhere. What he instituted, the Westernization of Turkey, the Europeanization of the Ottoman Empire and the building of the Turkish Republic along European lines, that didn't happen all of a sudden. It was built on the reforms that Sultan Mahmud II, (the Ottoman Emperor in the early 19th century), something he began and borrowed from Europe. So, you have very different trajectories here. And, of course, the geography of this region – I mean anybody who controls the Anatolian plateau, and anybody who is headquartered in Persia, is very secure. It's a strategic location from which you can build civilizations. The Arab world, if you go back to history, the Arabs really lost power and leadership of Islam, I would say, by the late 800s, mid-800s. They had lost the leadership of Islam because Turkic and Persianate dominions began to emerge and challenge the Arabs for leadership over Islam. And I'm not talking Shiite Islam, I'm talking Sunni Islam. JS: This is all interesting, and we're going a little bit over time, but I think it's worth it because this is an interesting conversation. I'd also just like to point out to our listeners that we didn't exactly plan this little divergence in the conversation. You can already see one of the reasons we appreciate Kamran, because he's a veritable encyclopedia for everything that has happened in the Muslim world ever. But one thing I want to ask you that is based on that, I want to take it a little away from what we were talking about before and then come back to ISIS to finish it of, is that I'm currently in southern France for some meetings, and for some conferences and for some other things, and obviously one of the main issues here and throughout most of Europe is the migration issue. You have, I wouldn't say a large number, it's a large enough number that the European Union is not able to organize itself to bring them in, in absolute terms it's not a huge number. But there are Muslim immigrants to Europe who are looking to find a place to live and to start a new life. And one of the concerns, especially here, especially in other places in Europe, is that they won't be able to assimilate, that they'll want to have their own culture, their own sense of law, and what is right and wrong, and that this presents a major challenge for the nation-states of Europe. Because how do they integrate them in? They don't want to just turn them away, but they don't want to lose the basic facts of their national identity. So you're talking about especially Sunni Islam and about the concern with orthodoxy and all these other things. I know that for instance in Jewish religion there is a rule in the religious text that is the law of the land is the law. It's supposed to supersede religious law. So, I've thrown a bunch of different issues at you off the cuff when I bring all those things up, what do you think about the migration crisis in general, and what do the things that we've talked about relating to Islam here say about the ability of Muslims who are coming to Europe or who are coming to the United States to assimilate? Do you think that Islam presents a major optical for them, or do you view those Muslims as any other group that has emigrated from one place to another and has to go through certain growing pains but will eventually assimilate? KB: I think it's a bit of the latter. But there are concerns, and I do have concerns that there are issues. And it's not because of Islam. Islam is what you make of it, if we are to borrow from Reza Aslan, the prominent author of the book on Jesus recently, and he now has a show on CNN. But really, I do think that Islam inherently is not something that prevents assimilation. I mean, we've seen this before, and I've just talked about how Persians and Turkic peoples and others, Chechens, took Islam in their own direction. I think that that's very much possible. But the question is, what is the geopolitics that we're dealing with when we talk about migration from the Middle East, particularly Syria, to Europe? In places like France, particularly, where there is sort of this if you will pre-existing strong, secular tendency and this desire by French people to have those who come to their country embrace that secularism with the same fervor. I think that's going to create some problems, and then of course, economic issues. So, there will be a lot of Syrian refugees for whom these issues are not really important. Because for them the first thing is, how do I get my family to safety? How can I escape war, get to a place where we're not going to be killed, and then of course, we have opportunities of livelihood. But I think that while they do that, a good chunk of them are still concerned about losing their religion in the process. And when that happens, and then you have this overarching, if you will, dynamic of ISIS and political Islam that these people can't ignore, then you're looking at a real recipe for conflict in these countries. And therefore, I think that the European states are justified in their fear. I don't buy the idea that this has something to do with religion, but I think that it's the geopolitical expression of religion that is the problem, and how immigrants are going to be welcomed or not, and how they see secularism. We say that there has to be moderation on the part of those who come from these areas, there has to be Islamist moderation. But I think at the same time that that's only possible if the European states also have a role to play in this. If they expect that these people will just say, oh you know what, I'm French now, and that's the way to go, I don't think that's going to happen. So there has to be a bit of give and take on both sides. And that give and take in the current geopolitical climate is really not possible where you're having terrorist attacks, there's the ISIS threat that's not going away, and economies are not doing well, there's not enough money to go around, and people are worried about losing their jobs to immigrants. And so in this atmosphere I think we're looking more at conflict rather than the ability to assimilate. JS: I'm afraid I agree with all of that. But to get us out of here, the question, and I'll take us back, we started all of this by talking about ISIS, and we sort of wandered around the Islamic world, even stepped our foot a little bit into Europe. I think one of the points we wanted to make in this podcast was that there's a lot of talk about the Islamic State is about to collapse. People have been saying the Islamic State is about to collapse for well over a year, a year and a half now. It's true that the Islamic State is facing a lot of pressure, a lot more pressure than it has previously on a lot of its borders. But I think the issue that you're really driving at here is that this isn't about one group, and it isn't just about a group in a particular state. It's really about a broader phenomenon, and it's a game of Whack-a-Mole. Sure, you might be able to hit the Islamic State and you might even be able to dislodge them out of Raqqa. It'll take a lot of casualties, but maybe you'll be able to get rid of the caliphate in that way. But the general ground, the fertile ground that Zarqawi came to after 2001 and was able to build this group into what it is today, I think what you're saying is that the ground is still fertile. The basic problems that we're talking about have not been resolved and perhaps have even been exacerbated because there's even less opportunity than there was before. Is that an accurate characterization of what you think? KB: Absolutely. I totally agree with you Jacob. I think that what we have to keep in mind is that we've been here before. So the predecessor organizations of ISIS, or IS, they were defeated at one point in time. But then they came back. And I'll give you a very clear example. In 2008, a large segment of Iraqi Sunnis had turned their guns away from fighting U.S. soldiers to fighting al-Qaida in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS. And that group had been weakened. It wasn't completely uprooted, but it had been sufficiently weakened, and we saw respite. If you go back to between 2008 and 2011, the frequency of bombings had dropped, and things were looking better. But this group came out of the woodwork in 2011 when the United States left Iraq and the Shiite-dominated government basically double-crossed the Sunnis. They did not want to share power with the Sunnis fearing that the Sunnis had decades of experience, and if we let our guard down, it'll only be a matter of time before this Shiite-dominated republic falls, even before it's taking root. And so, that allowed for ISIS to come out. And then, on top of that, you had the Syrian civil war emerge and that created far more time and space for ISIS. And so, I think moving forward, if ISIS at the time, the predecessor of ISIS, which was muck weaker, much smaller, was able to revive itself in very difficult circumstances, I think that now they have far more opportunity to revive themselves, because that war that was confined to Iraq is now expanded. It's in Yemen, it's spilling over into Turkey, we see it playing out in Egypt and North Africa, and Syria is a mess. So, I think that maybe ISIS will be decimated as we know it today. Maybe the remnants of ISIS will form a new group that will eclipse ISIS of today, some other organization. We mustn't forget that al-Qaida is still there in Syria. And it's changed a few names, it used to be Jabhat al-Nusra, then Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, and now they have a new coalition in Idlib. There are plenty of forces to take this caliphate project and take it to the next level, because the underlying political problems are still there, Shiite-Sunni conflict is still there, both in Syria and Iraq and the wider region, Iran and Saudi Arabia are at each other's throats, and there is no viable political-economic model that we're seeing in the Arab world. So, this hollowing out of the Arab world that you've written about, I mean that is not going away. And I suspect that the problem that we're dealing with, which we today call ISIS, will be with us, but with a different name in the years to come. JS: Well, thanks Kamran, and thanks for staying overtime a little bit with us to talk about this issue. I know it's a complicated one, and it's a really important one. So, I'm glad we were able to talk about it in some depth. Once again, I'm Jacob Shapiro, I'm the director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures. I was just talking with Kamran Bokhari, he is a senior analyst at Geopolitical Futures. We'll be doing another podcast next week. Please feel free to send us feedback on these podcasts by emailing us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com, and for analysis on how ISIS is going to develop, and how all the things we have talked about are going to develop over time, you can check out our analysis in GeopoliticalFutures.com. Thanks.

Joby Warrick is an American Journalist who has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His work at The Washington Post covers topics on the Middle East, diplomacy, and national security. On today’s discussion, Warrick discusses his book, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, in greater detail, and gives some history on how ISIS began.   Key Takeaways: [2:55] Even though we’re not under attack, the American people are still affected by ISIS. [6:10] Who is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, really? [9:25] Warrick discusses Zarqawi and his relationship with his mother. [13:45] How did prison make Zarqawi more radical? [16:10] Prison helped form a brotherhood, a university, for a lot of these men. [21:25] Zarqawi and his associates were disowned by Al-Qaeda because they were almost too brutal. [22:20] ISIS and Al-Qaeda do not like each other. Al-Qaeda views them as ‘crazy heretics.’ [27:55] How was Zarqawi connected to Saddam's regime? [32:30] The U.S. decided to wait until after after the Iraq invasion to go after Zarqawi. [40:05] Zarqawi created a new and more brutal form of terrorism. [47:55] Zarqawi died by the hands of American soldiers. We finally got him! [48:20] The third part of Warrick’s book focuses on ISIS. [48:45] If Zarqawi was neutralized, how did ISIS rise up in Syria? [56:35] Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and what was his role in all of this? [1:01:10] When ISIS takes credit for terrorist attacks/acts of violence, is it really them or are they just capitalizing on an opportunity? [1:02:50] What is happening in Iraq right now? [1:09:25] Warrick revisits the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and how it still applies today. [1:12:50] Where does Jordan stand in all of this?   Mentioned in This Episode: Joby Warrick Joby Warrick on Wikipedia Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by Jody Warrick

Nada Bakos was a CIA analyst and the Chief Targeting officer charged with finding the godfather of ISIS and mastermind of al Qaida in Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. She’s also (according to some) the inspiration for the character of “Maya,” the CIA analyst in the Oscar-winning film Zero Dark Thirty. Today, Nada Bakos will talk about how she rose up through the predominantly male world of the CIA to become one of the agencies top analysts and the chief targeter of the most wanted man in the world. She reveals how CIA trackers finally found Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, how communications intercepts gave her a unique window on the power struggle between Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq, and how those communications eventually led to the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden himself. Special thanks to the Milken Institute for hosting this interview during the 2016 Milken Global Conference. Visit www.milkeninstitute.org to learn more about their work to improve global stability and prosperity. You can visit Nada Bakos’s website at www.NadaBakos.com and read more of her work as a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute at www.fpri.org. Follow Nada Bakos on twitter at @NadaBakos and pre-order her book The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, on the Hunt for the Godfather of ISIS which hits book shelves in June 2017. Today's podcast is sponsored by Reuters TV, video news that's personalized, always up to date, and ready when you are. Visit www.reuters.tv/kickass to check out their cool new free news app and show your support for the podcast. Please subscribe to Kickass News on iTunes and take a moment to take our listener survey at www.podsurvey.com/KICK. And support the show by donating at www.gofundme.com/kickassnews. Visit www.kickassnews.com for more fun stuff.

GRP 56-Co hosting for this podcast is Army veteran Tim Kolczak the man behind the Veterans Project. On with us for this podcast is Australian Special Forces Veteran Eddy Robinson. Eddy has multiple combat rotations with the 2 Commando Regiment. We discuss Eddy's career path, get into some combat stories, and honor Eddy's best friend Corporal Cameron Baird, VC, MG. Corporal Cameron Baird is the first Australian commando to be awarded a Victoria Cross and the first posthumous recipient of the Victoria Cross for Australia. Corporal Baird is also the 100th Australian to be awarded a Victoria Cross. He's one of Australia’s most highly decorated soldiers of the modern era. We discuss Iraq, counter-terrorism, and Afghanistan. Below is an excerpt from the episode: John: I'm reading about the rise and roots of ISIS. A lot of it is credited a to the Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The U.S. named him as one of the reasons for going into Iraq when he was just in charge of a small terror cell prior to that. After naming him it catapulted him into the spotlight. Making him a major player. He then stoked the flames for a civil war being Sunni and Shia Muslims throwing the country into chaos. Eddy Robinson: My experience there was from a contracting perspective 05-06 period. Every morning before 10'o clock you hear the huge IED's being detonated. For the guys on the ground, it was relentless. Zarqawi was the perfect catalyst for making the situation worse. We got our intelligence reports about mass graves being found on the side of the road. People being mass executed by these guys. It was a very difficult situation during that time. Tim Kolczak: I joined in 05 I was 17. My drill sergeants were coming back from their 18-month tours. You could just tell how it affected them. We were the first trainees to get trained up by these guys. I remember the recruiter telling me not to become a truck driver because 1 in 5 was getting killed. One of the guys I knew was killed by a Somali contingent in Samarra. We were fighting people from all over the globe.

No sexto episódio da série “O Coração do Mundo”, encerramos a história do US Marine Francesco Tessitore, brasileiro que lutou nas guerras do Iraque e Afeganistão. Nesta terceira parte, saberemos como foi que ele participou ativamente da caçada de um dos terroristas mais perigosos do mundo, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, ex-líder da Al Qaeda Iraquiana – hoje conhecida como o autointitulado Estado Islâmico. Além disso, também aprendemos sobre o chamado “estresse pós-traumático” de guerra, que afeta inúmeros soldados após experiências de combate – e que afetou profundamente a vida de Francesco. Apresentado por Ivan Mizanzuk.Patreon do AntiCast – Contribua! http://patreon.com/anticastdesignTwitterIvan Mizanzuk http://www.twitter.com/mizanzukAntiCast http://www.twitter.com/AntiCast Arte da capa por Amanda Menezes http://behance.net/MeneezesLettering por Luiz Amorim http://Luizflamorim.com.brFale conosco: contato@projetohumanos.com.br

Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley, a former Predator drone pilot and squadron commander joins the Steve Fast Show. MCCurley led the drone strike mission that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. #drones #Predator

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joby Warrick has written a new book, "Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS" that traces the roots of the terrorist state back several decades. He looks at the founder: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the current leader and caliphate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In this special edition of the Townhall Review, Hugh Hewitt spends an hour with the author discussing ISIS's birth and how it might be defeated.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"Push yourself harder than you think you're capable of. You'll find new depth inside yourself." - Stanley McChrystal Stanley McChrystal (@StanMcChrystal) retired from the U.S. Army as a four-star general after more than 34 years of service. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described McChrystal as “perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met.” From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal served as Commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), where he was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The follow-up questions are really fun. In this particular episode, he answers questions such as: If he could put a billboard anywhere and write anything on it, where would it be and what would it say? What are three tests/practices from the military that civilians could use to help develop mental toughness? What are his favorite documentaries or movies? Why? What $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted his life in the last twelve months and why? Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This episode is brought to you by Audible which I have used for years. I love audiobooks. I have two to recommend right off the bat: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman - Perhaps my favorite audiobook of all time. Vagabonding by Rolf Potts - This book had a huge impact on my life and formed the basis for a lot of what has become The 4-Hour Workweek To get your free audiobook and a free 30-day trial, go to Audible.com/Tim. You can choose from the two audiobooks listed above or from 180,000+ audio programs. They offer audiobooks, magazines, newspapers and even classes. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and grab your free audiobook. It's that easy. Enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Stanley McChrystal (@StanMcChrystal) retired from the U.S. Army as a four-star general after more than 34 years of service. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates described McChrystal as "perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I ever met." From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal served as Commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), where he was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. His last assignment was as the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. He is currently a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the co-founder of CrossLead, a leadership consulting firm. In this episode, we discuss everything imaginable, including: - Why he eats only one meal per day - His exact exercise routines - Tactical and psychological lessons of combat - Self-talk used before and after difficult missions - The value and development of mental toughness - Favorite books, documentaries, etc. - And much, much more Chris Fussell (@FussellChris), who also joins the conversation, is a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, former Aide-de-Camp for General McChrystal, and a current senior executive at CrossLead. Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This episode is sponsored by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at https://www.AthleticGreens.com/Tim This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade: http://www.99designs.com/tim Give it a test run. Enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Is ISIS a threat to America? Most Americans feel that all the ISIS activity is in a distant, far away place and has nothing to do with the avarage American going to the store, or filling the car with gas, maybe taking the kids to school, ...well what if your wrong !!!  ...ISIS operatives are likely already inside America, but nobody knows how many, where, or in what capacity. - our border is so porous, and they could easily come across the southern border as thousands of people do every day,. “And they could have Western passports from a country which requires no visa. My guess is there are ISIS fighters in the country doing advance scouting, studying all the preliminary things a professional terror attack takes into account, because a professional terrorist attack takes months to set up.”ISIS is an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). As an October 2014 Congressional Research Service report explained, “The Islamic State’s ideological and organizational roots lie in the forces built and led by the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq from 2002 through 2006—Tawhid wal Jihad (Monotheism and Jihad) and Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers (aka Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQ-I). Following Zarqawi’s death at the hands of U.S. forces in June 2006, AQ-I leaders repackaged the group as a coalition known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).” In April 2013, having expanded its operations into Syria the year before, the group renamed itself ISIS.      

This volume focuses on how al-Qaeda in Iraq(AQI) became ISIS.  Through a series of miscalculations on the part of AQI in 2006, they were defeated and their leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed.  The United States, however, failed to conclude a Status of Forces Agreement and their own miscalculations created by domestic political pressure and the fulfillment of campaign promises, led to the complete withdrawal of American military forces, creating a power vacuum into which ISIS moved.

A one-of-a-kind commander with a remarkable record of achievement, General Stan McChrystal is widely known for developing and implementing the counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan and for creating a comprehensive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the way military agencies interact and operate. In 2002, General McChrystal was appointed chief of staff of military operations in Afghanistan. Two years later, McChrystal was selected to deliver the nationally televised Pentagon briefings about military operations in Iraq. From 2003–2008, he commanded JSOC and was responsible for leading the nation’s deployed military counter-terrorism efforts around the globe, assuming command of all international forces in Afghanistan in June 2009. President Obama’s order for an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan was based on McChrystal’s assessment of the war. General McChrystal is a four-star general, the former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan and the former leader of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which oversees the military’s most sensitive forces. His leadership of JSOC is credited with the 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein and the 2006 location and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. General McChrystal retired from the military in 2010. He now serves on the board of directors for JetBlue Airways, Navistar, and the Yellow Ribbon Fund. He is also the chairman of the board for Siemens Government Technologies. In 2011, McChrystal returned to public service after the Obama administration invited him to oversee Joining Forces, a high-profile initiative that supports military families. McChrystal is a part of its three-member advisory board. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches a popular course on leadership. General McChrystal co-founded the McChrystal Group in January 2011. The mission of the McChrystal Group is to deliver innovative leadership solutions to organizations, which help them transform and succeed in challenging and dynamic environments. To do this, the group teaches McChrystal’s leadership methodology CrossLead, whose principles and operational structure are based on his military successes. CrossLead also addresses key leadership principles such as transparency and inclusion, leveraging the power of teams, and sharing a clear vision. The son and grandson of Army officers, McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976 and trained at the Special Forces School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Osama bin Laden may have been the most notorious face of al-Qaeda before his death, but a terrorist by the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi arguably had far more blood on his hands—and for years was enemy number one for the United States government. Running the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq, Zarqawi and his followers usurped the Sunni insurgency and through vicious attacks on Iraqi civilians stoked a civil war pitting Sunnis and Shiites against each other. His damage was so great that even after American special operators, intelligence experts and Air Force pilots successfully tracked down and killed Zarqawi in June 2006, General Stanley McChrystal wrote in his newly published memoir My Share of the Task (Penguin Group USA, 2013) that it was “too late. He bequeathed Iraq a sectarian paranoia and an incipient civil war.” Nevertheless, the special operations machine built to defeat Zarqawi’s network continued to run full tilt, eventually having a strategic impact when married to the full-spectrum counterinsurgency and diplomatic pressures of "the surge." On January 28, the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings hosted a discussion featuring a keynote address by General Stanley A. McChrystal (ret.) that will, for the first time, focus on this crucial part of his career and the careers of so many who worked with him. The story of how Joint Special Operations Command, working with many other agencies and nations, built itself into a powerful network capable of studying, tracking, hunting, and finally killing Zarqawi is at the heart General Stanley McChrystal’s memoir. Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for Foreign Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks. Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, interviewed General McChrystal, before moderating a discussion with the audience.

Both Bush and Blair got on television as soon as possible after the U.S. military killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to take credit for killing him. They should not have. Their comments contributed nothing to the world's knowledge or understanding of the event, and only made a thug into a martyr. Shame on Bush and Blair.

When we weren't busy ignoring the World Cup or burning photos of the Jolie-Pitt Anti-Christ, we found the time to speculate on how many virgins await Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in martyr heaven (Hint: He ain't in heaven and Ann Coulter ain't a virgin). Other chaste mentions include Britney Spears' manny, the gay marriage ban and Wesley Crusher. It's a politics and culture abstinence pledge!