In January Obama called ISIS an al-Qaeda “jayvee team.”
Today they’re marching in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda fighters linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) carry their weapons during a military parade. The terror group is planning to take siege of Baghdad. (Al Monitor)
Yet, now we know the Obama administration knew ISIS was serious threat as far back as 2012.
McClatchy reported, via Lucianne:
Like the rest of the world, the U.S. government appeared to have been taken aback last month when Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, fell to an offensive by jihadis of the Islamic State that triggered the collapse of five Iraqi army divisions and carried the extremists to the threshold of Baghdad.
A review of the record shows, however, that the Obama administration wasn’t surprised at all.
In congressional testimony as far back as November, U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials made clear that the United States had been closely tracking the al Qaida spinoff since 2012, when it enlarged its operations from Iraq to civil war-torn Syria, seized an oil-rich province there and signed up thousands of foreign fighters who’d infiltrated Syria through NATO ally Turkey.
The testimony, which received little news media attention at the time, also showed that Obama administration officials were well aware of the group’s declared intention to turn its Syrian sanctuary into a springboard from which it would send men and materiel back into Iraq and unleash waves of suicide bombings there. And they knew that the Iraqi security forces couldn’t handle it.
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