It seems that the U.S. military is propagandizing against the Islamic State by distributing fake Islamic State documents. This, in effect, will make the Islamic State look better than it is.
Iraqi Forces Fighting for Ramadi Make Their Way Toward City Center
In a telephone briefing on Tuesday, [Col. Steven H. Warren, the United States military spokesman in Baghdad,] said that coalition forces had recovered Islamic State leaflets in the nearby city of Falluja urging its fighters — if they lose control of the city — to impersonate Iraqi security forces and commit atrocities. “Some acts that they’re instructed to do on this document include blowing up mosques, killing and torturing civilians and breaking into homes while dressed as I.S.F. fighters,” Colonel Warren said, referring to Iraqi security forces. “They do all this to discredit the I.S.F.”
Colonel Warren called the instructions in the leaflets “the behavior of thugs, behavior of killers, the behavior of terrorists.”
Colonel Warren also tweeted the "Islamic State leaflet" and its translation:
COL Steve Warren Verified account @OIRSpox
ISIL fighters ordered to dress as ISF and commit atrocities before fleeing Fallujah.
[Photo of the document and its translation]
7:30 AM - 22 Dec 2015"
"The other day, as I was reading through the New York Times, I came upon this headline: "Powerful Afghan Police Chief Killed in Kabul." His name was Matiullah Khan. He had once been "an illiterate highway patrol commander" in an obscure southern province of Afghanistan and was taken out in a "targeted suicide bombing" on the streets of the capital -- and I realized that I knew him! Since I've never been within a few thousand miles of Kabul, I certainly didn't know him in the normal sense. I had, you might say, edited Matiullah Khan. He was one of a crop of new warlords who rose to wealth and power by hitching their ambitions to the American war and the U.S. military personnel sent to their country to fight it. Khan, in particular, made staggering sums by essentially setting up an "Afghan Blackwater," a hire-a-gun -- in fact, so many guns -- protection agency for American convoys delivering supplies to far-flung U.S. bases and outposts in southern Afghanistan. He became the protector and benefactor of a remarkable Afghan woman who is a key character in Anand Gopal's No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which I edited and published in the American Empire Project series I co-run for Metropolitan Books. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Gopal covered the Afghan War for years in a way no other Western journalist did. He spent time with crucial allies of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and with a Taliban commander, with warlords and American Special Ops guys, politicians and housewives. He traveled rural Afghanistan as few American reporters were capable of doing. In the process, he made a discovery that was startling indeed and has yet to really sink in here. In a nutshell, in 2001, the invading Americans put al-Qaeda to flight and crushed the Taliban. From most of its top leadership to its foot soldiers, the Talibs were almost uniformly prepared, even eager, to put down thei
