ISIS driven out of Mosul airport by Iraqi forces with American air support.

[applegrove]

Thanks Obama for rebuilding the Iraqi Army.

[Warpy]

1. BBC has been describing the rush to retake western Mosul

as happening at Blitzkrieg speed. After years of pushback, it seems DAESH is finally hitting that wall of exhaustion. Even their most ardent supporters in the population have run out of enthusiasm after experiencing the reality of the harsh, 13th century rule of the New Caliphate. Most other people just want it all to be over so they can rebuild, reopen their shops, tend to their fields.

DAESH will have to start to negotiate soon, hoping for a piece of any government they can get.

[applegrove]

3. I wonder if they have run out of jihad-derall (that middle east version of speed

Last edited Fri Feb 24, 2017, 12:27 AM - Edit history (1)

ISIS has been giving their troops from the start).

[Warpy]

4. The Saudis got ahold of the stuff and tested it in a lab

and only about a quarter of it was what was on the label. The rest was either combined with meth or was pure meth. Meth is bathtub chemistry, so I imagine they have a fairly limitless supply. I also strongly suspect that a lot of "IED" bombs that go off and don't hurt anybody are meth cookers blowing themselves up.

There will be a lot of human wreckage left over from this war.

[applegrove]

5. I don't know anything about illegal drugs. It may not have been speed.

Thanks for updating me.

[Warpy]

6. Oh, yeah, it was speed.

it's a combination of amphetamine and theophylline, the upper in tea. It's fairly mild as amphetamines go.

Like Adderall, Captagon was once used to treat behavioral problems.

It was used in the 1960s and 1970s to treat people with attention deficit disorder, Rawson said. It didn't seem to have some of the side effects of other stimulants, he said. But it also didn't have many advantages either, and was eventually phased out, he said.

Despite fizzling out in the United States, the drug has been popular in the Middle East for some time.

Abuse of it has "been a problem in Saudi Arabia now for well over a decade," Rawson said.

http://www.livescience.com/52904-captagon-amphetamine-pill-explainer.html

I couldn't find the English .pdf of the Saudi lab report.

[applegrove]

7. Thanks.

[edhopper]

2. but Drumpf

said it was bad to announce the assalt on Mosul.

[smirkymonkey]

8. My brother helped with that.

He just returned from that mission.

[applegrove]

9. Congrats to him. It is no way near over. May the people of Iraq and Syria get some peace

and freedom from fear of war crimes.