Signaling that they’re planning to be there awhile, and to continue to consolidate and expand their caliphate.
“Commencing jihad: ISIS tweets photos of military ‘graduation,'” by Malia Zimmerman, FoxNews.com, March 30, 2015:
The Twitter photos show a “graduating class” of ISIS fighters.
The black-clad graduates listened intently as speakers inspired them to change the world, but instead of caps and gowns, they wore masks and fatigues, and in place of diplomas, they clutched AK-47s.
Photos tweeted out from the Islamic State in Syria in the last few days showed the terror group’s latest “graduating class,” which included dozens of foreign fighters who came to Syria to join the Islamic caliphate. The graduation pictures capped 18 months of training in ideology and weaponry at a university in Deir Az-Zour, in northern Syria, and grads are now ready to advance to killing in the cause of radical Islam. Experts say ISIS has reasons for attaching the formal trappings of commencement exercises to the training of its fighters….
By promoting their special force in a series of propaganda photos, experts said ISIS is sending a message to potential recruits that it has created a professional, deadly and well-equipped force ready to protect its expanding Caliphate….
Don McKellar says
“expanding Caliphate…”
You mean that Obama’s strategy of token theatre air attacks and proclaiming the Islamic State as not Islamic hasn’t crushed them yet?
CogitoErgoSum says
The JV team has graduated and most likely has at least two more years to go before they meet any real competition. The longer they stay on the field the tougher they will be to defeat. I don’t think they are about to go quietly into that good night.
Gary says
To bad the commencement speech didn’t include the following….
“Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ”
2 Peter 1:5-8
mortimer says
Gary, This is a forum about political Islam.
Westman says
If they and their relatives are so proud, why are their faces covered? There can only be one reason; they plan to return to their home countries or other countries as sleeper Jihadists.
mortimer says
They cover their faces to avoid war crimes identification.
They are all war criminals.
Kris says
A graduation in sanity would be more appropriate.
Undaunted says
Make no mistake; the training these graduates undergo is pretty much the same as the US gives its SF operators. Probably no lectures on how to not catch VD or dig latrines.
pongidae rex says
‘The Caliphate’ is the solution to global human overpopulation. I was wondering when this issue would be addressed.
Jay Boo says
Islam is all about image.
The goal is to divert attention from the reality of its vacuous ideology at its rotted core and spiritual emptiness.