{"id":7749,"date":"2015-08-30T09:40:03","date_gmt":"2015-08-30T14:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=7749"},"modified":"2015-08-30T09:40:03","modified_gmt":"2015-08-30T14:40:03","slug":"meet-the-american-civilian-operators-fighting-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2015\/08\/30\/meet-the-american-civilian-operators-fighting-isis\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the American Civilian Operator’s Fighting ISIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

These brave CO’s represent the best of America IMO and it is no surprise to me at least that the majority are from TEXAS!<\/strong> Thank God there is still a small remnant of people who cannot turn a blind eye to the atrocities being committed by ISIS against Christians and are not waiting until ISIS are on America’s \u00a0front door steps before acting.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"is_fighters\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A motley crew of Texans, Iraq War veterans, evangelicals, and bored young men are battling to take down the caliphate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Adam Rawnsley<\/em><\/p>\n

When a U.S. citizen going by the name \u201cAbu Abdullah al-Amriki\u201d blew himself up in a suicide attack in Baiji, Iraq, this month, he was the most recent example of a troubling trend: the roughly 200 Americans who have traveled or attempted to travel to Iraq and Syria to fight for the Islamic State.<\/p>\n

Not all of the foreigners have left for the region looking to fight for the Islamic State, however. Instead, growing numbers of Americans are heading there to fight against the extremists. The American fighters \u2014 mostly military veterans, with a strangely disproportionate share of Texans \u2014 are linking up with Kurdish groups and Christian militias in the region to battle the Islamic State militants who currently control broad swaths of Iraq and Afghanistan. A new report<\/a> by the investigative website Bellingcat, released Wednesday, takes the first systematic look at these \u201cother foreign fighters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report finds that at least 108 Americans \u2014 including one woman<\/a> \u2014 have made the journey to Iraq and Syria to take on the Islamic State, highlighting the global nature of the conflict and the relative ease of recruitment and travel to the battlefield. It\u2019s a dangerous undertaking, and one American has already been killed in the fighting. Massachusetts resident Keith Broomfield, 36, died while fighting<\/a> with a Kurdish militia in Syria earlier this year. Broomfield, who had no military experience, traveled to the war zone after aChristian religious awakening<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nathan Patin, the author of the Bellingcat report, combed through social media posts and news accounts to compile the database. Although Patin was able to find information on the fighters using open sources, the report withholds the identities of those fighters who haven\u2019t gone public in prior news accounts and does not include personally identifying information or information that could lead to their location on the battlefield, out of concern for their safety and that of their families.<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at Foreign Policy<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These brave CO’s represent the best of America IMO and it is no surprise to me at least that the majority are from TEXAS! Thank God there is still a small remnant of people who cannot turn a blind eye to the atrocities being committed by ISIS against Christians and are not waiting until ISIS…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1444,1704,74,2004,1247,1860,272],"tags":[2047,2048,2049,2050,1779,2051],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7749"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}