Chilling message from IS militants warns the world of their bloody intent in a video celebrating taking control of key locations in Iraq…report by The Telegraph
Video released by the Islamic State (IS) group has shown militants celebrating and raising the black IS flag over buildings and facilities in a number of key Iraqi locations under their control.
The militants took control of Mosul in June, and captured a string of towns and Iraq’s largest hydroelectric dam and reservoir in recent weeks.
In the video, armed militants of the Islamic State group stand by a tank, holding weapons as one declares to the camera: “Our message to the entire world is that we are the soldiers of the Caliphate state and we are coming.”
Pushing southward from Mosul, they swept over Sunni-majority towns almost to Iraq’s capital of Baghdad, and now hold large parts of western Iraq as well as swaths of neighbouring Syria.
Iraqi government forces crumbled in the face of the assault but have since been able to prevent the militants from advancing into Shiite-majority areas.
In the north, the Kurds have been the main line of defence against the militants, but their fighters are stretched over a long front trying to fend them off.
The US has launched a number of military airstrikes in northern Iraq to hold off Islamic State forces advancing on Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region.
US President Barack Obama ordered the intervention after militants used artillery to shell Kurdish forces defending Erbil, which is home to a US consulate and about three dozen US military trainers.
The US also airdropped aid to thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority who fled to a mountaintop after the militants took control of Sinjar, a city far from the Kurdish seats of power in Irbil and Suliminiya.
Original Post by The Telegraph