A Merry Christmas, We Hope

We are entering the holiday season and with the eager anticipation of turkey, family gatherings, football, and gift giving also comes the sobering announcements by ISIS of various forms of death and destruction to the infidel and Christian societies. Islamic terrorists keep close track of our holidays just as we do.

This is nothing new, but events in the Middle East make this season especially inviting for an attack. Within the last week one ISIS-following intelligence site revealed a direct threat against the Pope and the Vatican. The Vatican security forces insist that these threats come in all the time and this one will be treated with the required scrutiny. This Christmas will be radically different that the last few years however, because the Islamic Caliphate has been crushed. The ISIS terrorists need a big event to change the momentum, and the Vatican at Christmas fills the bill.

There is another event that adds gravitas to the threat which is the fall of Raqqa, the last stronghold of the Islamic State in Syria. As the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) tightened the noose around the IS forces, the original plan was to annihilate the remaining IS leaders and foreign fighters. However, at the last moment, a deal was brokered by the American, British, and Arab leaders to allow these remaining terrorists to leave the city and save the need for further bloodshed. One of the agreements in the truce was that no foreign fighters or heavy weapons would be allowed to leave. As the convoy departed however, the trucks were filled with those same foreign fighters and loads of weapons and munitions. The BBC chronicles the entire movement in this article. (Here)

So now, as the Western countries prepare to celebrate Christmas, truckloads of battle-hardened fighters and their munitions have spread out to Europe and beyond. To make the decision to destroy what was left of Raqqa in order to truly destroy ISIS would have been a hard decision. The ISIS controlled area was booby-trapped and manned with individuals who would fight to the death, and there were still civilians trapped in that hellhole. But what do we tell the citizens of Europe or the United States when these Muslim extremists launch their attacks against unsuspecting civilians? We had the troops on the ground, the air support, and a depleted and exhausted enemy. I am afraid we should have stayed with the original plan