This is my first time featuring music on the website, mostly because I found this really interesting, politically motivated and haunting. 

The song is called 'Afraid Of Women' created by Olivia Louvel, and as I first heard it, the song comes with the following introduction;

'There are over 7000 women fighters on the border of Northern Syria. These women are collectively known as the YPJ or the Women's Protection Unit, an all-women unit. They are fighting on the front line against IS / Daesh. To build a new society in Rojava, they are forced to defend themselves.'

​https://soundcloud.com/olivialouvel/afraid-of-women
 
Olivia Louvel

French-born, British composer, producer and performer, Olivia Louvel works on the frontier of art and electronic music, often blurring the boundary between the two.
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Her innovative songwriting brought her to perform alongside artists such as Planningtorock at the Earsthetic Festival, Brighton Dome and also Recoil (aka Alan Wilder) for various concerts on the European 'Selected' tour.
 
In 2011, she won the album of the year at the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards for 'Doll Divider', her third album. 'Doll Divider' was originally inspired by A4 paintings which she made using pages from fashion magazines and repainting on top of the photos of the models. Collectively these paintings are called 'Processed Dolls'. The same year, she received the composition prize from SACD, Society of Dramatic Authors & Composers in France.
 
In 2014, she was awarded a grant by The Arts Council for her sound-art project 'Beauty Sleep'. Subsequently, she released 'Beauty Sleep', 11 songs complemented by a series of experimental short films shot in West Sussex, reinventing herself as a bird-woman.

In December 2014, she produced an exclusive mix for Electronic Beats , "odd and fantastic", which features an extended version of 'O Don’t Worry' from 'Doll Divider', edits of tunes from her latest release, 'Beauty Sleep', and a remix of AGF’s 'Poemproducer'.

https://soundcloud.com/olivialouvel/afraid-of-women

An article from abc News by Luis Martinez

The Pentagon has released a copy of a leaflet that was dropped over ISIS’s defacto capital in Syria earlier this month.

The leaflet drop is part of the U.S. military’s psychological operations to show potential ISIS recruits that they are part of a losing effort.

Some 60,000 of the leaflets were dropped over Ar Raqqa, Syria early on the morning of March 16, officials said.

The leaflets were dropped by a single U.S. Air Force F-15E fighter aircraft carrying a PDU-5B leaflet canister, according to the Pentagon.

Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters today that the drop was intended to dissuade potential ISIS recruits from joining the group.

"The message of this leaflet is if you allow yourself to be recruited by Daesh you will find yourself in a meat grinder,” said Warren, using the Islamic acronym for the group.

The leaflet shows a room identified by a sign with the arrow as a "Daesh Recruiting Office," and the meat grinder is labelled "Daesh."

 

Too often we see reports of the horrors of war in the middle east, we feel the threat of its presence, a threat born out of the shadows of 9/11 and echoes from the sirens of the ‘War on TERROR’

This extract is pulled from an article in the New York Times by Thomas L Friedman, titled ‘ISIS and Vietnam’ the article gives an insight into the mind of ISIS as well as helping us understand some of the reasons behind the war and how it will be won.

The North Vietnamese were both communists and nationalists — and still are. The key reason we (America) failed in Vietnam was that the communists managed to harness the Vietnamese nationalist narrative much more effectively than our South Vietnamese allies, who were too often seen as corrupt or illegitimate.

I believe something loosely akin to this is afoot in Iraq. The Islamic State, or ISIS, with its small core of jihadists, was able to seize so much non-jihadist Sunni territory in Syria and Iraq almost overnight — not because most Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis suddenly bought into the Islamist narrative of ISIS’s self-appointed caliph. Most Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis don’t want to marry off their daughters to a bearded Chechen fanatic, and more than a few of them pray five times a day and like to wash it down with a good Scotch. They have embraced or resigned themselves to ISIS because they were systematically abused by the pro-Shiite, pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in Iraq — and because they see ISIS as a vehicle to revive Sunni nationalism and end Shiite oppression.

I wonder what would have happened had ISIS not engaged in barbarism and declared: “We are the Islamic State. We represent the interests of Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis who have been brutalized by Persian-directed regimes of Damascus and Baghdad. If you think we’re murderous, then just Google ‘Bashar al-Assad and barrel bombs’ or ‘Iraqi Shiite militias and the use of power drills to kill Sunnis.’ You’ll see what we faced after you Americans left. Our goal is to secure the interests of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria. We want an autonomous ‘Sunnistan’ in Iraq just like the Kurds have a Kurdistan — with our own cut of Iraq’s oil wealth.”

Then why did ISIS behead two American journalists? Because ISIS is a coalition of foreign jihadists, local Sunni tribes and former Iraqi Baath Party military officers. I suspect the jihadists in charge want to draw the U.S. into another “crusade” against Muslims

You can read the full article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/opinion/thomas-friedman-isis-and-vietnam.html&asset&_r=1