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December 9, 2022 - January 3, 2023
Amal stands in front of him. Bin Laden keeps his hands on her shoulders, using the mother of his young child, who now sits sobbing just a few feet away, as a human shield.
Indeed, the measured caution and the White House bureaucracy will eventually doom Kayla Mueller, James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig.
As always, intelligence must be verified. This necessary but laborious process precedes the lightning-quick execution of the mission itself, described by one top administration official as “Slow, slow, slow, slow—BANG!”
“I am going to marry you by force and you are going to be my wife,” al-Baghdadi informs the terrified woman. “If you refuse, I will kill you.” So Kayla Mueller submits to the rapes.
Predictably, ISIS boasts about Kayla’s death on Twitter. The terrorists then send an email to Kayla’s parents. Included in the message is a photograph of Kayla, face bruised and an open wound on her cheek. She lies on her back beneath a shroud.
On June 24, 2015, four months after Kayla Mueller’s death, President Barack Obama officially announces a change in US policy regarding kidnap victims. There will no longer be prosecution for American citizens who raise the money to make ransom payments to terrorists.
It would seem unlikely to the casual observer that Soleimani would even be capable of terrorism. He lives in Tehran with his wife, rising at four o’clock every morning. He has trouble with his prostate and takes pills for a sore back. Soleimani is a disciplinarian to his five children—three boys and two girls. Sometimes, when the general appears in public, it is not uncommon for citizens to clamor for the privilege of kissing his hand. Meanwhile, the general is successfully launching a new wave of terror attacks in Somalia, India, and Thailand. Thousands die as a result. And his forces in
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Yet ISIS thrives. The caliphate is no longer confined to the Middle East, now numbering nine outposts flourishing in distant locations like Nigeria, Libya, and Pakistan. Revenue from kidnappings and captured oil fields is considerable, paying for the arms necessary to wage jihad. Attacks such as the downing of a Russian airliner the previous October, which killed all 224 passengers, as well as terror events in Paris, Brussels, and Tunisia excite the faithful. New recruits pour in from around the world, easily replacing the more than one thousand fighters killed each month—at least fifty of
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At 5:00 a.m., three hours into the massacre, Orlando police finally storm the building. The long delay has no explanation.
The current focus of Obama’s kill list is the ongoing ISIS expansion into Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mullah Akhtar Mansour, a former Taliban official thought to be joining forces with the Islamic State, was assassinated just one month ago—vaporized on a rural farm road, his Toyota Corolla a flaming wreck after being struck by two Hellfire missiles. The cleric was driving the N-40 national highway in Pakistan. Photographs will show green fields, a dusty highway, and a single mangled vehicle burning alongside the road.
Abedi is known to have a long history of association with terror groups, beginning at the age of fifteen, including al-Qaeda and ISIS. Despite this, he successfully applied for a $3,000 student loan funded by British taxpayers, using the money to build his bomb.
It is more than likely that al-Ethawi was taken to the Iraqi Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Office’s prison in Qayyarah, forty miles south of Mosul, which has a very low release rate. This facility is notorious for torture. Interrogations start with being blindfolded and beaten, then grow more medieval.
Ground-penetrating radar shows signs of a mass grave, but it takes Iraqi authorities nine months to finally begin digging. ISIS has murdered so many innocent citizens that there is a waiting list to excavate these atrocities.
Half a world away, in a secure facility at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, American hunters track al-Baghdadi at thirty thousand feet over Syria. Two-person teams of air force drone pilots sit in air-conditioned cockpits that never leave the ground—video screens, joysticks, headsets, padded armchairs. These military people are flying remote-controlled unmanned aircraft over Syria from this remote location in the United States. They are young men and women in flight suits who were just children on 9/11. Though these pilots live at home, buy groceries at the base commissary, drive to
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There is currently no place on earth so devoted to the terrorist way of life as the land around Barisha. Terrorism has become so ingrained into the region’s culture that many young males see this as their only future.
One week later, the order comes again. However, more complications arise, and the teams are again told to stand down. There is grumbling and a frustrating sense that this mission might never happen. Some of the men remember the attempt to rescue Kayla Mueller five years ago, when US forces arrived just one day after she had been moved to a new location. No one wants that to happen with al-Baghdadi.
Bullets ping off each armored helicopter as muzzle flashes give away the location of ISIS shooters. The soldiers inside are annoyed but unhurt.
There is no hesitation. All four are shot in the head and die instantly. To shoot them in the torso would have detonated the vests. In another part of the compound, two ISIS fighters, men, are also shot dead trying to detonate explosives. Delta Force is too quick for them, and the terrorists are eliminated.
Unbeknownst to Delta Force, the coward Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has now pulled his two young children to his side. Neither is over the age of ten. The terrorist grips them tightly, feeling the fear in their young bodies. Al-Baghdadi finds the detonator switch attached to his suicide vest, then presses down hard with his right thumb.
Some United States senators and congresspeople are also likely to be at the popular bistro. But Soleimani does not care. “They want that guy done, if a hundred go with him, f**k ’em,” Arbabsiar says in a call monitored by the Drug Enforcement Agency. The assassination is thwarted. Soleimani’s plot is discovered by undercover agents of the FBI and DEA. Manssor Arbabsiar is arrested, convicted of attempted murder, and sentenced to twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary. His partner, Quds commander Shakuri, is more fortunate. He is charged in absentia by the United States for his crimes
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Technicians enter the hangars housing the drones and run a series of tests on the cameras, which are capable of clearly photographing the name on a golf ball from three miles in the sky.
An average-looking man, al-Rimi is a fanatic and has been on a list of the world’s most wanted terror suspects since 2011. He is responsible for bombing hospitals and killing innocent tourists.
The “infidels” have a choice to make: they can join ISIS and live, or they will suffer a slow beheading with a dull machete—one which might require several blows to do the job. However, should these men choose to join ISIS, they must prove their loyalty through a simple initiation rite: accept the machete and perform the beheading and dismemberment of a fellow villager.
The name “Boko Haram” means “Western education is sinful.” The group believes that reading any book other than the Koran is a violation of sharia law. Its goal is to create an Islamic state in Nigeria. Its adherents have killed thousands and displaced an estimated two million Africans to make that a reality.
The battle rages for five hours. But the Nigerian government refuses to send reinforcements. The terrorists eventually overrun the soldiers and descend upon the school, shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “We are Boko Haram.” The frightened girls are rounded up. A terrorist leader makes an announcement: “If you want to die, sit down here. We will kill you. If you don’t want to die, you will enter the trucks.”
“If we can’t handle learning about the darkest places in the world, they will turn into the darkest places in ourselves.”
Al Logari is a former engineering student who has been known to the Central Intelligence Agency to have had terrorist ties since at least 2017. At that time, he was plotting a suicide bombing in New Delhi, India. Tipped by the CIA, Indian officials arrested Al Logari and turned him over to the United States. He remained in American custody until Kabul fell. Now the man stands just fifteen feet from the nearest marine.
the United States, Great Britain, and Australia have all directed their citizens still remaining in Afghanistan to stay away from the airport. Instead, they are told to meet at a nearby hotel, where they are flown in a military CH-47 helicopter to the runway. That order was given four days ago as thousands of ISIS prisoners were released from detention in nearby Bagram. The directive came from the US State Department, which somehow did not calibrate the possibility that Abdul Raman al Logari and others would immediately turn to mayhem.
Some of the danger could have been avoided when President Joe Biden ordered the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan after twenty years of war. Bagram would have been a far more secure option for evacuations. The base, forty-five miles north of Kabul, is ringed with antiterror devices. It is much harder to penetrate than the Kabul airport. In just a few hours, President Biden will feel the repercussions of his decision to abandon Bagram in the middle of the night.
American and European news consumers rarely see video of Boko Haram’s atrocities because it is too dangerous for photographers to track the group.
President Joe Biden ordered a cessation of air strikes on African terror groups upon taking office in January 2021. No reason was given, nor was there any public announcement.

