The war against ISIS is taking a dangerous, perhaps inevitable turn. The terror organization has been keen to expand to southern Syria and the Syrian capital of Damascus. Now it says it has recruited three Syrian rebel groups operating in the south of the country in an area bordering the Israeli occupied Golan Heights — that have switched their loyalties to ISIS.

This switch means that Israel, the U.S.’s closes ally in the Middle East, could be threatened from the southwest by the Egyptian ISIS group of Ansar Bait al-Maqdis in Sinai and by ISIS in southern Syria.

The ISIS war is not going well at all for the US-led alliance in Syria. ISIS and al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, are still the dominant rebel groups in the country. The U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army is still not a reliable fighting force.

Related: Reports of U.S. Ground Fighters Emerge as ISIS Gains in Iraq

“If Israel was attacked by ISIS, America would expect a proportionate response by Israel, which is militarily capable of defending itself,” said Geoffrey Levin, a professor at New York University. “America would counsel against sustained Israeli involvement because it could threaten the tacit alliance between America, Iran, Turkey, and several Arab states against ISIS.”

The three rebel groups that just joined ISIS have been at odds with al-Nusra Front and have switched their allegiance to what it believes is the future of Islam. Two of the groups are small in number, but Al-Yarmuk Martyrs Brigade has hundreds of fighters.

“More recent reports indicated a closer alliance with [the Islamic State] due to tensions with JN [al-Nusra Front],” said Jasmine Opperman, a researcher at Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium (TRAC). She said al-Nusra attacked the headquarters of the Yarmouk Brigade in southern Syria in early December 2014 following clashes between the two groups.

Al-Yarmuk Martyrs Brigade controlled an area near the Jordan-Israel border in March 2013. That same month, the brigade took as hostages some of the United Nations peacekeeping mission soldiers. Even so, Israel reportedly allowed the brigade to have its wounded fighters treated in Israeli hospitals.

Related: Iraq's 'Bodyguards' Subvert the War Against ISIS

ISIS has been known for launching surprise attacks and opening new battlefronts when it seems to be losing. ISIS also has been criticized by many Arabs and Muslims for not taking its fight to Israel and instead fighting fellow Arabs and Muslims. An attack aimed at Israel may boost ISIS’s popularity in the Arab world and refresh its recruitment and funding efforts.

On the other hand, some of ISIS’s top military commanders were former officers in Saddam Hussein’s army, and they may resort to what Saddam did in the 1991 Gulf War when he attacked Israel with mid-range rockets, hoping to drag the Israelis into a conflict that he was losing.

An Israeli retaliation in 1991 could have jeopardized the U.S-led coalition that then included Arab countries like Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The same is true now.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Despite some recent tensions between the countries, Israel remains America’s closest ally in the Middle East. Attacks on Israel by ISIS or affiliated groups could further escalate war in the region, or they could further strain ties between the Obama administration and the Israeli government.

Related: This Laser Could Take Out ISIS

“It would be more likely a sign of desperation, as were Saddam's attempts to lure Israel into the 1991 war as a way of breaking the Arab coalition against him,” said NYU’s Levin. At that time, continuous pressure from the first Bush administration and the installation of the Patriot anti-rocket system convinced the Israelis to refrain from reacting to Saddam’s attack.

Israel could launch a preemptive attack to destroy or significantly damage these ISIS-affiliated units whether by air or by ground forces. Israel used its advanced air force to launch attacks in Syriaseveral times since the beginning of Syrian civil war in 2011.

Meanwhile, Israel has recently boosted its defenses in the Golan Heights, saying its main concern was to prevent any major weapon transfer from Syria to Hezbollah, the Lebanese guerrilla organization that has engaged in several rounds of war with the Israelis since the 1980s.

Wochit
Off Duty, Black Cops in New York Feel Threat From Fellow Police

By Michelle Conlin

NEW YORK (Reuters) - From the dingy donut shops of Manhattan to the cloistered police watering holes in Brooklyn, a number of black NYPD officers say they have experienced the same racial profiling that cost Eric Garner his life.

Garner, a 43-year-old black man suspected of illegally peddling loose cigarettes, died in July after a white officer put him in a chokehold. His death, and that of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, has sparked a slew of nationwide protests against police tactics. On Saturday, those tensions escalated after a black gunman, who wrote of avenging the black deaths on social media, shot dead two New York policemen.

The protests and the ambush of the uniformed officers pose a major challenge for New York Mayor Bill De Blasio. The mayor must try to ease damaged relations with a police force that feels he hasn’t fully supported them, while at the same time bridging a chasm with communities who say the police unfairly target them.

What’s emerging now is that, within the thin blue line of the NYPD, there is another divide - between black and white officers.

Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the NYPD, 15 of whom are retired and 10 of whom are still serving. All but one said that, when off duty and out of uniform, they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime.

The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.

View gallery

Retired NYPD detective Harold Thomas poses with his retired NYPD identification card in West Hempste …

Desmond Blaize, who retired two years ago as a sergeant in the 41st Precinct in the Bronx, said he once got stopped while taking a jog through Brooklyn’s upmarket Prospect Park. "I had my ID on me so it didn’t escalate," said Blaize, who has sued the department alleging he was racially harassed on the job. "But what’s suspicious about a jogger? In jogging clothes?"

The NYPD and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the police officers’ union, declined requests for comment. However, defenders of the NYPD credit its policing methods with transforming New York from the former murder capital of the world into the safest big city in the United States.

EX-POLICE CHIEF SKEPTICAL

"It makes good headlines to say this is occurring, but I don’t think you can validate it until you look into the circumstances they were stopped in," said Bernard Parks, the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is African American.

"Now if you want to get into the essence of why certain groups are stopped more than others, then you only need to go to the crime reports and see which ethnic groups are listed more as suspects. That’s the crime data the officers are living with."

View gallery

1500 new New York City Police Officers graduate from the Police Academy at Madison Square Garden. (D …

Blacks made up 73 percent of the shooting perpetrators in New York in 2011 and were 23 percent of the population.

A number of academics believe those statistics are potentially skewed because police over-focus on black communities, while ignoring crime in other areas. They also note that being stopped as a suspect does not automatically equate to criminality. Nearly 90 percent of blacks stopped by the NYPD, for example, are found not to be engaged in any crime.

The black officers interviewed said they had been racially profiled by white officers exclusively, and about one third said they made some form of complaint to a supervisor.

All but one said their supervisors either dismissed the complaints or retaliated against them by denying them overtime, choice assignments, or promotions. The remaining officers who made no complaints said they refrained from doing so either because they feared retribution or because they saw racial profiling as part of the system.

In declining to comment to Reuters, the NYPD did not respond to a specific request for data showing the racial breakdown of officers who made complaints and how such cases were handled.

White officers were not the only ones accused of wrongdoing. Civilian complaints against police officers are in direct proportion to their demographic makeup on the force, according to the NYPD’s Civilian Complaint Review Board.

View gallery

Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks responds after it was announced that the Police Commission ha …

Indeed, some of the officers Reuters interviewed acknowledged that they themselves had been defendants in lawsuits, with allegations ranging from making a false arrest to use of excessive force. Such claims against police are not uncommon in New York, say veterans.

STUDIES FIND INHERENT BIAS

Still, social psychologists from Stanford and Yale universities and John Jay College of Criminal Justice have conducted research – including the 2004 study "Seeing Black: Race, Crime and Visual Processing" - showing there is an implicit racial bias in the American psyche that correlates black maleness with crime.

John Jay professor Delores Jones-Brown cited a 2010 New York State Task Force report on police-on-police shootings - the first such inquiry of its kind - that found that in the previous 15 years, officers of color had suffered the highest fatalities in encounters with police officers who mistook them for criminals.

There’s evidence that aggressive policing in the NYPD is intensifying, according to data from the New York City Comptroller.

Police misconduct claims - including lawsuits against police for using the kind of excessive force that killed Garner - have risen 214 percent since 2000, while the amount the city paid out has risen 75 percent in the same period, to $64.4 million in fiscal year 2012, the last year for which data is available.

View gallery

Borough presidents Gale Brewer (Manhattan) (L) Eric Adams (Brooklyn) (C) and Ruben Diaz Jr. (Bronx) …

REPORTING ABUSE

People who have taken part in the marches against Garner's death - and that of Ferguson teenager Michael Brown - say they are protesting against the indignity of being stopped by police for little or no reason as much as for the deaths themselves.

“There’s no real outlet to report the abuse,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain who said he was stigmatized and retaliated against throughout his 22-year career for speaking out against racial profiling and police brutality.

Officers make complaints to the NYPD’s investigative arm, the Internal Affairs Bureau, only to later have their identities leaked, said Adams.

One of the better-known cases of alleged racial profiling of a black policeman concerns Harold Thomas, a decorated detective who retired this year after 30 years of service, including in New York's elite Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Shortly before 1 a.m. one night in August 2012, Thomas was leaving a birthday party at a trendy New York nightclub.

Wearing flashy jewelry, green sweatpants and a white t-shirt, Thomas walked toward his brand-new white Escalade when two white police officers approached him. What happened next is in dispute, but an altercation ensued, culminating in Thomas getting his head smashed against the hood of his car and then spun to the ground and put in handcuffs.

“If I was white, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Thomas, who has filed a lawsuit against the city over the incident. The New York City Corporation Counsel said it could not comment on pending litigation.

At an ale house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last week, a group of black police officers from across the city gathered for the beer and chicken wing special. They discussed how the officers involved in the Garner incident could have tried harder to talk down an upset Garner, or sprayed mace in his face, or forced him to the ground without using a chokehold. They all agreed his death was avoidable.

Said one officer from the 106th Precinct in Queens, “That could have been any one of us.”

(Editing by Ross Colvin)

WASHINGTON — A former aide to General David Petraeus warns that as the Pentagon prepares to send another 1,500 US troops to Iraq to help “destroy” the Islamic State fighters, there may be an even greater danger that forces face: Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

The power of these militias has been growing throughout the country this year after Iraqi security forces were unable to prevail – and in some cases shed their uniforms and ran – while battling Islamic State fighters.

The Shiite militias are well-trained, in many cases by Iranian military commanders, and battle-tested. During the height of the Iraq war, these militias were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US troops.

While the Islamic State is a potent military foe, it has comparatively little support from Iraqis. But Shiite militias play upon the worst fears of Iraq's Sunni and Kurdish minorities – that the Shiite majority is ruthlessly consolidating power. Indeed, some analysts say Iraqi Sunnis tolerate the Islamic State because it is seen as a counterweight to the Shiite militias.

In that way, Shiite militias could present a thornier problem to the future of a unified Iraq than does the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.

Back in 2007, “when I was serving with Petraeus, I mentioned to him that although Al Qaeda in Iraq was the wolf closest to the shed, in the long run Shiite militias could be more dangerous to Iraqi sovereignty,” says retired Colonel Peter Mansoor.

“Not much has changed – Al Qaeda in Iraq has been replaced by ISIS as the wolf closest to the shed,” says Dr. Mansoor, who is now an associate professor of military history at Ohio State University.

This is a view seconded by a number of seasoned Iraq analysts.

“As significant as is the threat from the Islamic State – and it is very significant – the threat posed by Shiite militias may well prove to be the long-term threat to Iraq,” says a former senior US commander in Iraq, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

This is because the Islamic State “has nowhere near the roots, numbers, nor attraction” to the Sunni population of Iraq that Al Qaeda in Iraq did at the start of the surge of US forces into Iraq in early 2007, the former commander explains.

What’s more, as US trainers come in with more intelligence and air attack assets, the security forces can be expected to engage the lslamic State with “increasing success,” he predicts.

And so the most significant challenge for Iraq may come later, “when Shiite and Sunni militia – and in some cases, Kurdish Peshmerga – clash over who will control areas of mixed sectarian populations.”

Shiite militias have displaced Sunni families from such areas for years. But those tensions could escalate and multiply in the months ahead if Islamic State fighters are cleared from such mixed areas, he adds.

In order to destroy the Islamic State, it’s going to be vital “to get Sunni tribes once again to turn on ISIS as they turned on Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mansoor says. “I don’t think they’ll do that if they see the hidden hand behind the Iraqi government are these Shiite militias that are very sectarian.”

This “hidden hand” – which includes Iranian influence and, in some cases, command-and-control of operations – is increasingly apparent in the Shiite militias, says Kimberly Kagan, founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War.

“They ... going to erode Iraq’s sovereignty by taking the command-and-control of the security forces out of the hands of Iraqi officials, and placing that command-and-control into the hands of Iran.”

She cites photographic evidence of Iraqi security force (ISF) command centers “in which there are ISF commanders and Iranian-backed Shiite militias all sitting over a map evaluating plans.”

This has some implications for US troops headed to Iraq next month to train Iraqi security forces. The troops headed to Iraq will likely be deployed north of Baghdad and in Anbar province, where US officials are pushing to establish an “Iraqi National Guard” that would be composed of Sunni tribesmen.

“We must focus on training the Sunni tribes that actually stand a chance of providing long-term security in Anbar province,” the Sunni-dominated area of western Iraq, she adds.

The problem is that the Iraqi government continues to show “a preference for mobilizing Shiite militias rather than using the national guard force and mobilizing Sunni tribal leaders,” Kagan says.

The new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who was elected to the job in August, has pledged to change not just tenor and tone, but the substance of politics.

“In the short time he’s been in office he has succeeded in the former,” Mansoor says. “It’s unclear whether he’ll succeed in the latter.”

Watch video

Beirut (AFP) - US-led air strikes in Syria have killed more than 1,000 jihadists in the past three months, nearly all of them from the Islamic State group, a monitoring group said Tuesday.

"At least 1,171 have been killed in the Arab and international air strikes (since September 23), including 1,119 jihadists of the Islamic State group and Al-Nusra Front," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of activists and medics across the war-ravaged country for its information.

Among the dead were 1,046 members of IS, which has seized large chunks of Iraq and Syria and is the main target of the air campaign.

Seventy-two of those killed were members of Al-Qaeda's branch in Syria, the Al-Nusra Front, while another was a jihadist prisoner whose affiliation was unknown, an Observatory statement said.

The remaining 52 were civilians.

IS has declared a "caliphate" in the parts of Iraq and Syria that it has overrun, and its militants have been accused of widespread atrocities, including beheading Western hostages.

On another front, the Observatory reported the deaths of 37 civilians in regime air raids across Syria on Tuesday, among them nine children in IS stronghold Raqa alone.

Syria's war began as a peaceful pro-democracy revolt. It later morphed into a brutal civil war after the regime unleashed a massive crackdown against dissent.

Thousands of people, most of them civilians, have been killed in air strikes since July 2012 when the regime's air force was first deployed in the war.