Monthly Archives: August 2014

Gaza ceasefire: Israel and Palestinians agree to halt weeks of fighting

The Guardian reports: Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to an indefinite ceasefire, putting an end to seven weeks of catastrophic loss of life and destruction – but on terms that are likely to leave many on both sides of the conflict wondering what had been achieved.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the main militant groups in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority and Israel agreed to stop fighting on Tuesday evening, bringing relief to civilians on both sides of the border after rocket fire and air strikes continued in the hours running up to the ceasefire. One Israeli was killed and several injured by a mortar ahead of the announcement, according to Israeli media.

The terms of the deal – brokered by the Egyptian government, and reached on the 50th day of the conflict – are expected to be similar to those agreed at the end of the previous war 21 months ago. Israel will open crossings on its border to allow the movement of people and goods, and extend the permitted fishing zone off the coast of Gaza. Rafah, the border between Gaza and Egypt will also be opened; reconstruction of Gaza will begin.

More difficult issues will be deferred for further talks in about a month. They include Hamas’s demands for an airport and seaport in Gaza and the release of Palestinian prisoners, and Israel’s insistence of the disarmament of militant groups and the return of the remains of two of its soldiers killed in the fighting. [Continue reading…]

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How Assad fostered the growth of ISIS

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Islamic State, which metastasized from a group of militants seeking to overthrow the Syrian government into a marauding army gobbling up chunks of the Middle East, gained momentum early on from a calculated decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to go easy on it, according to people close to the regime.

Earlier in the three-year-old Syrian uprising, Mr. Assad decided to mostly avoid fighting the Islamic State to enable it to cannibalize the more secular rebel group supported by the West, the Free Syrian Army, said Izzat Shahbandar, an Assad ally and former Iraqi lawmaker who was Baghdad’s liaison to Damascus. The goal, he said, was to force the world to choose between the regime and extremists.

“When the Syrian army is not fighting the Islamic State, this makes the group stronger,” said Mr. Shahbandar, a close aide to former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who said Mr. Assad described the strategy to him personally during a visit in May to Damascus. “And sometimes, the army gives them a safe path to allow the Islamic State to attack the FSA and seize their weapons.”

“It’s a strategy to eliminate the FSA and have the two main players face each other in Syria: Assad and the Islamic State,” said Mr. Shahbandar. “And now [Damascus] is asking the world to help, and the world can’t say no.”

The Islamic State, also known by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL, has emerged recently as a major threat to the entire region and beyond. Its seizure of territory in neighboring Iraq triggered American airstrikes, and its execution this week of kidnapped American journalist James Foley prompted President Barack Obama to vow to continue the U.S. air war against the group in Iraq and to relentlessly pursue the killers. General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the group can’t be defeated without choking off its operations in Syria.

This account of how the Islamic State benefited from the complex three-way civil war in Syria between the government, the largely secular, moderate rebels and the hard-core Islamist groups was pieced together from interviews with Syrian rebel commanders and opposition figures, Iraqi government officials and Western diplomats, as well as al Qaeda documents seized by the U.S. military in Iraq.

The Assad regime now appears to be shifting away from its early reluctance to engage the group.

In June, Syria launched airstrikes on the group’s headquarters in Raqqa in northern Syria, the first large-scale offensive against the militant group since it rose to power a year ago. This week, Syria flew more than three dozen sorties on Raqqa, its biggest assault on the group yet.

The Syrian ambassador to Lebanon, Ali Abdel-Karim Ali, denied that Damascus supported the Islamic State early on and praised his government’s battlefield response to the group, pointing to dozens of recent strikes on the group’s headquarters.

“Our priorities changed as these groups emerged,” Mr. Ali said in an interview at his office. “Last month it was protecting Damascus, for example. Today it is Raqqa.”

Speaking of the Islamic State aggression that has decimated the more secular FSA, he said: “When these groups clashed, the Syrian government benefited. When you have so many enemies and they clash with each other, you must take advantage of it. You step back, see who is left and finish them off.”

Mr. Shahbandar said the Islamic State’s recent success forced the Syrian government and its Iranian allies to ramp up their military assaults, hoping the West will throw its weight behind Damascus and Tehran to defeat the extremists. Such cooperation would put the U.S. and its regional allies such as Saudi Arabia in an uncomfortable position, after years of supporting the FSA and demanding that Mr. Assad step down.

There are some signs that the opposing sides might be willing to work together. In Iraq, the U.S. began arming Kurdish Peshmerga forces this month, while the Iranians sent advisers.

The Syrian government facilitated the predecessor to the Islamic State — al Qaeda in Iraq — when that group’s primary target was U.S. troops then in the country. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. giving Syria intelligence on jihadists, sources say

AFP reports: The United States has begun reconnaissance flights over Syria and is sharing intelligence about jihadist deployments with Damascus through Iraqi and Russian channels, sources told AFP on Tuesday.

“The cooperation has already begun and the United States is giving Damascus information via Baghdad and Moscow,” one source close to the issue said on condition of anonymity.

The comments came a day after Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said Syria was willing to work with the international community against the jihadist Islamic State group, and US officials said they were poised to carry out surveillance flights over Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said foreign drones had been seen over the eastern province of Deir Ezzor on Monday.

“Non-Syrian spy planes carried out surveillance of Islamic State positions in Deir Ezzor province on Monday,” the Britain-based monitoring group’s director, Rami Abdel Rahman, said.

On Tuesday, Syrian warplanes bombed Islamic State positions in several areas of Deir Ezzor, an oil-rich province in the east of Syria, most of which is held by the jihadists.

A regional source told AFP that “a Western country has given the Syrian government lists of Islamic State targets on Syrian territory since just before air raids on Raqa, which started in mid-August.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama authorizes air surveillance of ISIS in Syria

The New York Times reports: President Obama has authorized surveillance flights over Syria, a precursor to potential airstrikes there, but a mounting concern for the White House is how to target the Sunni extremists without helping President Bashar al-Assad.

Defense officials said Monday evening that the Pentagon was sending in manned and unmanned reconnaissance flights over Syria, using a combination of aircraft, including drones and possibly U2 spy planes. Mr. Obama approved the flights over the weekend, a senior administration official said.

The flights are a significant step toward direct American military action in Syria, an intervention that could alter the battlefield in the nation’s three-year civil war.

Administration officials said the United States did not intend to notify the Assad government of the planned flights. Mr. Obama, who has repeatedly called for the ouster of Mr. Assad, is loath to be seen as aiding the Syrian government, even inadvertently. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS demands $6.6M ransom for 26-Year-old American woman

ABC News reports: A third American hostage held by ISIS has been identified as a 26-year-old American woman who was kidnapped a year ago while doing humanitarian relief work in Syria. The terror group is demanding $6.6 million and the release of U.S. prisoners for the life of the young woman, who the family requested not be identified.

She is the third of at least four Americans who were known to be held by ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. American journalist James Foley was executed by the group in a video that appeared online last week. Another writer, Steven Sotloff, was seen alive but under duress in the same footage.

In addition to the multi-million dollar ransom, the terror group has also demanded that the U.S. release Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-trained neuroscientist who was convicted by the U.S. in 2010 of trying to kill U.S. officials two years before, according to a supporter of Siddiqui who has been in contact with the hostage’s family.

Siddiqui’s release has been a regular demand of groups critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, but Monday Siddiqui’s family spoke out through supporters to say they were “very distraught” Siddiqui’s name was invoked with the ransom request and sought to distance themselves from ISIS.

“If the issue is true, we would like to state that our family does not have any connections to such groups or actions,” reads a letter written by Siddiqui’s family. “We believe in a struggle that is peaceful and dignified. Associating Aafia’s name with acts of violence is against everything we are struggling for.”

“While we deeply appreciate the sincere feelings of those who, like us, wish to see the freedom of our beloved Aafia, we cannot agree with a ‘by any means necessary’ approach to Aafia’s freedom. Nor can we accept that someone else’s daughter or sister suffer like Aafia is suffering,” the letter says. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt, UAE launched airstrikes in Libya

Foreign Policy: Two airstrikes in the past week on Islamist militias fighting for control of Tripoli, Libya, are raising questions about who was behind the attacks and whether the United States knew about or condoned them. On Saturday, Aug. 23, Agence France-Presse reported that Islamist militants in Libya pointed the finger at Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Egyptian military quickly denied any involvement. On Monday, the New York Times reported that American officials confirmed that the Egyptians and Emiratis had launched the strikes, but said they’d caught the United States by surprise.

That claim seemed incredible, though, in light of the presence in the region of the U.S. military, which would have certainly detected a series of airstrikes. “With as many Aegis-class ships as the U.S. Navy has in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean, there is no possible way the UAE could pull this off without the U.S. knowing it,” said Christopher Harmer, a former Navy officer and an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War. Harmer said that he had no information about U.S. involvement, “but the U.S. government knows who bombed what,” he said.

Egypt and the UAE are highly motivated to strike out at Islamist fighters, whose gains in Libya are only the latest reminder that a new wave of religiously aligned political groups and militias threaten secular regimes and monarchies across the region.

“Libya is a serious situation,” Moroccan Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar told Foreign Policy earlier this month. Morocco has organized a political dialogue among various factions in Libya in an effort to bring the country together. Mezouar has also worked closely with Egypt on the issue, specifically discussing concerns about terrorism in his July visit to Cairo.

State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki provided no additional information on the strikes during a press briefing on Monday. She reiterated the Obama administration’s policy that “Libya’s challenges are political, and violence will not resolve them.” She added: “Our focus is on the political process there. We believe outside interference exacerbates current divisions and undermines Libya’s democratic transition.”

When asked whether Washington would be “disappointed” if Egypt and the UAE had conducted the airstrikes, Psaki replied, “I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole.” [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press today reports: Egypt and the United Arab Emirates secretly carried out airstrikes against Islamist militias inside Libya, U.S. officials said Tuesday, decrying the intervention as an escalation of the North African country’s already debilitating turmoil. They said the United States had no prior notification of the attacks.

One official said the two countries and Saudi Arabia have been supporting for months a renegade general’s campaign against Libyan militant groups, but that the Saudis don’t appear to have played a role in recent strikes. Another official said Washington knew about Egyptian and U.A.E. plans for a possible operation and warned them against going through with the effort.

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Anya Schiffrin: Who knew we were living in the golden age of investigative journalism?

Almost a decade ago, I spent more than a year freelancing for a major metropolitan newspaper — one of the biggest in the country. I would, on an intermittent basis, work out of a newsroom that appeared to be in a state of constant churn. Whoever wasn’t being downsized seemed to be jumping ship or madly searching for a life raft. It looked as if bean counters were beating reporters and editors into submission or sending them out of the business and into journalism schools where they would train a new generation of young reporters. For just what wasn’t clear. Jobs that would no longer exist? 

Before the special series I was working on was complete, my co-writer — the paper’s Washington investigative editor — had left for the friendlier confines of academia and the editor who greenlit the series had resigned in the face of management’s demands for steep cuts to newsroom staff. It seemed as if the only remaining person associated with the series was a gifted photographer (who left for greener pastures within a year).

I thought I was witnessing the end of an era, the death of an institution. 

At the same time, I was also working for a small but growing online publication that managed to produce three original articles each week — a mix of commentary, news analysis, and original investigative reporting.  More than a decade into that gig, the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com is still going strong, still publishing three original articles per week, and syndicating that content out to dozens and dozens of online publications, reaching hundreds of thousands of potential readers.

Over that time, online outlets have come and gone, venerable newspapers have closed up shop, predictions of doom — of the death of print publications, the demise of investigative reporting (maybe even of journalism itself) — have been aired repeatedly. And it’s true that in this new era it hasn’t been easy to make a living as a journalist or keep a media outlet afloat.  Yet, as a reader, I notice something else: I can’t even hope to read every eye-catching article that flashes by on my Twitter feed or piles up in my inbox from one listserve or another. I end up with 25 open windows in my taskbar — top-quality journalism from legacy media outlets and new digital magazines that I hope I might be able to skim later that day or the next or sometime before my laptop slows to a crawl under the weight of so much groundbreaking reporting.

It turned out that, 10 years ago, I actually was witnessing the end of an era while living through the formative stages of another.  It’s been a moment in which stories published on a relatively tiny website like TomDispatch circle the globe in a flash and a writer like me, who never went to journalism school, can see his articles almost instantly translated into Spanish, Japanese, Italian, and languages I don’t even recognize, and then reposted on websites from South America to Africa to Asia. In other words, they sometimes reach the sort of global audience that once might have been a stretch even for a reporter at a prestigious mainstream media outlet. 

Over these years, I’ve also watched others who have passed through the Nation Institute wade into a scary media market and find great success. TomDispatch’s own former intern Andy Kroll, for example, has gone on to break one important story after another at Mother Jones, a print publication that now thrives online, while former Nation Institute program associate Liliana Segura has taken a top post at First Look Media, one of the most dynamic and talked-about new media ventures in years. And they are hardly anomalies.

In her new book, Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World, Anya Schiffrin, the director of the media and communications program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, chronicles the brave new world of global journalism in the age of the Internet (and how the stage was set for the new golden age of the reader we’re living in). In her inaugural article for TomDispatch, the longtime foreign correspondent reveals the investigative exposés by today’s top global muckrakers that you missed and explains why investigative journalism is on the rise, not the decline, worldwide. 

From Asia to Central America, a new generation of Nellie Blys and Ida Tarbells, Seymour Hershes and Rachel Carsons, is breaking one big story after another with equal parts old-fashioned shoe leather and twenty-first-century knowhow. “The fact that journalists have been calling attention to some of the same problems for more than a hundred years might make one despondent, but it shouldn’t…” Schiffrin writes in her book. “That the battles are still going on should remind us that new abuses, new forms of corruption, are always emerging, providing new opportunities and new responsibilities for the media.” Luckily, there is a new generation of reporters around the world, she points out, rising to the challenge. Nick Turse

The fall and rise of investigative journalism
From Asia to Africa to Latin America, muckrakers have corrupt officials and corporate cronies on the run
By Anya Schiffrin

In our world, the news about the news is often grim. Newspapers are shrinking, folding up, or being cut loose by their parent companies. Layoffs are up and staffs are down. That investigative reporter who covered the state capitol — she’s not there anymore. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune have suffered from multiple rounds of layoffs over the years. You know the story and it would be easy enough to imagine that it was the world’s story as well. But despite a long run of journalistic tough times, the loss of advertising dollars, and the challenge of the Internet, there’s been a blossoming of investigative journalism across the globe from Honduras to Myanmar, New Zealand to Indonesia.

Woodward and Bernstein may be a fading memory in this country, but journalists with names largely unknown in the U.S. like Khadija Ismayilova, Rafael Marques, and Gianina Segnina are breaking one blockbuster story after another, exposing corrupt government officials and their crony corporate pals in Azerbaijan, Angola, and Costa Rica. As I travel the world, I’m energized by the journalists I meet who are taking great risks to shine much needed light on shadowy wrongdoing.

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To defeat ISIS we must understand that despotism is the disease, not the cure

On Sunday, Richard Clarke, a former top counterterrorism adviser in the Bush administration, said:

If we want to eliminate this ISIS we are going to have to deal with people we don’t like. The president said we wanted Assad out. Well, we are going to have to say something to the Syrian government if we are going to start bombing in Syria. And if we are going to get rid of ISIS, we are going to have to start bombing in Syria.

This is one of the latest examples of the movement inside Washington which views a working relationship with Assad as a practical necessity — a form of realism which implies there is no alternative.

It is also an expression of a typically American view of what it means to be practical, which is to say that practicality is often viewed as a way of dispensing with the need for analysis. Just do it — don’t think.

Ziad Majed, a Lebanese political researcher teaching Middle East studies at the American University of Paris, has a response to Clarke and those making similar arguments:

Those who think that they should be impartial toward or even support tyrants like Assad in the fight against ISISism fail to realize that his regime is in fact at the root of the problem.

Until this fact is recognized — that despotism is the disease and not the cure — we can only expect more deadly repercussions, from the Middle East to the distant corners of the globe.

Majed sees ISIS as the progeny of six fathers:

ISIS is first the child of despotism in the most heinous form that has plagued the region. Therefore, it is no coincidence that we see its base, its source of strength concentrated in Iraq and Syria, where Saddam Hussein and Hafez and Bashar Al-Assad reigned for decades, killing hundreds of thousands of people, destroying political life, and deepening sectarianism by transforming it into a mechanism of exclusion and polarization, to the point that injustices and crimes against humanity became commonplace.

ISIS is second the progeny of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, both the way in which it was initially conducted and the catastrophic mismanagement that followed. Specifically, it was the exclusion of a wide swath of Iraqis from post invasion political processes and the formation of a new authority that discriminated against them and held them collectively at fault for the guilt of Saddam and his party, which together enabled groups (such as those first established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) whose activities have been resumed by ISIS to get in touch with some parts of Iraqi society and to establish itself among them.

ISIS is third the son of Iranian aggressive regional policies that have worsened in recent years — taking Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria as its backyard, feeding (directly or indirectly) confessional divisions and making these divides the backbone of ideological mobilization and a policy of revenge and retaliation that has constructed a destructive feedback loop. [Continue reading…]

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The Governorate of Homs: ISIS’s new fiefdom?

Romain Caillet writes: Before leaving the central part of Homs, which was besieged by the Syrian army, ‘Abd al-Basit Sarut, the goalkeeper for the national football team nicknamed the “icon of the revolution” by Syrian activists, had called on Jabhat al-Nusra and the IS to come to the revolutionaries’ assistance. Several days later, despite the fall of Homs, Sarut raised the IS flag on a visit to the organisation’s camp, which distinguishes him from the other jihadist groups. While one should not over-interpret this incident, nevertheless it shows a radicalisation of a part of the Syrian revolutionaries, who were feeling abandoned by western democracies, the Gulf monarchies and moderate rebel groups. So for those who suffered defeat at Baba ‘Amru, the siege of Homs and the town’s fall into the hands of the regime, there was the temptation to join with those who seemed to embody the growing strength of the Syrian insurrection, despite the IS’s radicalism.

A close associate of ‘Abd al-Basit Sarut, the militant Badawi al-Mugharbil, more famously known as Abu Ja‘far, is also one of the key figures in the revolution in the city of Homs. Highly critical of most rebel bands, he now feels that the IS is the only coherent armed force that is capable of conducting large-scale offensives either in Iraq or Syria:

I am not a member of the Islamic State, nor have I shown any allegiance to the Caliphate, but one must recognize the truth: IS is the most highly organised force, with a truly unified command, unlike all the other groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra.

According to Abu Ja‘far, the IS currently now enjoys a certain level of popularity among the Sunnis in Homs, which can apparently be explained by its victories in Syria and Iraq, and also by the harshness with which it treats its combatants whenever they transgress its version of Islamic law:

Recently IS executed [crucified] one of its members for oppressing civilians in Raqqa. Do you know of any other band that applies this type of justice to its own men? No, and so let’s say that the Syrians pay attention to this type of thing.

This reputation for integrity enjoyed by the IS is confirmed by other sources, specifically an humanitarian aid worker working for a European NGO who travels regularly to the area around Idlib, from which the IS withdrew several months ago. While the inhabitants he met were very hostile to the IS, they nevertheless recognised that the only positive element in its presence was precisely its Islamic courts. What had originally been appreciated in the way the IS courts operated was their implacable nature, because they never hesitated to condemn members of the powerful, influential families from the region, which other courts, whether Islamic or non-Islamic, had never done. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS: Berks with MANPADS?

Mehdi Hasan writes: [R]ead the books of the forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman; the political scientist Robert Pape; the international relations scholar Rik Coolsaet; the Islamism expert Olivier Roy; the anthropologist Scott Atran. They have all studied the lives and backgrounds of hundreds of gun-toting, bomb-throwing jihadists and they all agree that Islam isn’t to blame for the behaviour of such men (and, yes, they usually are men).

Instead they point to other drivers of radicalisation: moral outrage, disaffection, peer pressure, the search for a new identity, for a sense of belonging and purpose. As Atran pointed out in testimony to the US Senate in March 2010: “… what inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Quran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world.” He described wannabe jihadists as “bored, under­employed, overqualified and underwhelmed” young men for whom “jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer … thrilling, glorious and cool.”

Or, as Chris Morris, the writer and director of the 2010 black comedy Four Lions — which satirised the ignorance, incompetence and sheer banality of British Muslim jihadists — once put it: “Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.”

Berks, not martyrs. “Pathetic figures,” to quote the former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, not holy warriors. If we want to tackle jihadism, we need to stop exaggerating the threat these young men pose and giving them the oxygen of publicity they crave, and start highlighting how so many of them lead decidedly un-Islamic lives.

Just to be clear — since berk is a British expression some Americans may have never heard — berks tend to be harmless. They typically draw scorn from others because they have a habit of becoming the victims of their own foolishness.

I haven’t seen Four Lions yet but these clips and Chris Morris’s description of his own research make it clear that he took his subject seriously. Even though he chose a comedic form, he endeavored to give the issue an honest representation.

Accurate as Four Lions might be in its characterization of some of the individuals who might have been inspired to travel to Syria to join ISIS, this doesn’t really make the current picture less disturbing.

The capacity of ISIS to recruit berks doesn’t diminish the threat it poses; on the contrary, it means that ISIS commanders have a plentiful supply of cannon fodder.

It’s reported that in the battle to capture the Tabqa air base, 346 ISIS fighters were killed — twice as many casualties as there were among government forces.

For Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an abundance of berks in the lowest ranks of ISIS probably looks like one of his army’s greatest strengths.

But ISIS also has lots of other strengths — its successes can’t all be attributed to its ability to intimidate its adversaries through sheer brutality.

One of the photographs that showed up on Twitter soon after ISIS took control of Tabqa showed a fighter carrying what looks like an SA-24 MANPAD — one of the most sophisticated Russian-made antiaircraft missile launchers available.

Even if none of these berks know how to use it, it’s reasonable to assume that their commanders are currently interrogating prisoners with the promise that a would-be trainer can be assured that he won’t be decapitated — just yet.

Whether a guy wielding a MANPAD happens to be a berk is of less consequence than the fact that the weapon he is holding can strike an aircraft at 20,000 feet.

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The world’s failure to address the root causes of al Qaeda led to ISIS

Hassan Hassan writes: This past week was one of drawing parallels. Saudi Arabia’s top cleric condemned Isis’s behaviour, but authorities there have beheaded at least 19 convicts since 4 August. Many of those who condemned the summary execution of Isis rivals celebrated Hamas’s execution of 18 suspected informants. While the world’s attention was focused on Isis, a like-minded Shia militia attacked a Sunni mosque in the Iraqi province of Diyala on Friday, killing nearly 70 worshippers. This militia is linked to the government and has fought alongside the security forces against Isis.

The American defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, warned last Thursday that Isis is “beyond anything that we’ve seen before”. And yet the causes that led to the rise of Isis are all too familiar. And the Americans have contributed their share to these causes.

Isis thrive on the inconsistencies and injustices that plague the region. A response to Isis cannot involve, for example, working with a government-linked militia that indiscriminately kills worshippers, while rhetorically recognising that a credible and viable political process is necessary for Iraq. Nor does it involve flirting with the Assad regime to fight Isis after it killed or caused the death of close to 200,000 people. The battle against Isis, which itself came on the heels of failure to address the root causes of al-Qaida before it, has to be far-reaching and consistent. Otherwise, the defeat of Isis will only give way to an even more extreme and formidable force.

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Iraq: On the frontline with the Shia fighters taking the war to ISIS

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports: The new Iraqi “border” is marked by a two-metre-high wall of earth. The berm, as it is known, cuts through farmland and orchards, separating the shrinking lands of the Iraqi state as it has existed for 95 years from the expanding territory of the new Islamic caliphate.

On the northern side, the black flags of Islamic State (Isis) shimmer in the afternoon haze. But on the Iraqi side it is not a national flag that flutters but a black Shia banner.

“This land is what separates good from evil,” says a Shia fighter, pointing at the no man’s land between the two forces. “Here you see the flag of Imam Hussein and there you see the black flags of Isis. This is the same history repeating itself,” he says, referring to ancient Sunni-Shia enmities that played out on these plains centuries ago.

When the Iraqi army capitulated in the face of the Isis onslaught earlier this summer, it was left to Shia militias to fill the void and check the Islamist progress towards Baghdad. Like the Kurds in the north, the Shias are emerging as a far more effective fighting unit to confront the Islamists, whose murderous recent activities have elevated them to global public enemy number one.

But relying on the Shias brings problems of its own. On Friday, Shia militiamen were blamed for killing 70 people at a Sunni mosque in Diyala. It is attacks like these that have persuaded large numbers of ordinary Sunnis who live in the vast spaces between Baghdad and Damascus to side with Isis. [Continue reading…]

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Can ISIS govern?

The Economist’s Pomegranite blog: In between chopping off the heads of its adversaries, crucifying miscreants and committing acts of genocide, the Islamic State (IS), the al-Qaeda-minded extremist group that straddles Iraq and Syria and is being targeted by American airstrikes, is dealing with more mundane issues — such as the school curriculum.

This month, August, IS called in teachers in Raqqa province in eastern Syria and set out new conditions for them to receive their salaries, says the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (SOHR), a Britain-based group that has a network of informants in Syria. IS told the teachers to dedicate more hours to Islamic studies, as well as dropping subjects including philosophy and chemistry. The prompt for the rules appears to be that the government in Damascus has pulled the plug on the education budget of the region, 18 months after it was taken over by rebels opposed to Bashar Assad, Syria’s president.

The evolution of IS from insurgent group to a self-declared state straddling much of the Euphrates valley would not have been possible without careful financial and administrative management, alongside effective military tactics, exploitation of social media and an uncompromising ideology. The group operated a lucrative protection racket in Mosul, Iraq’s second city, long before it took it over on June 10th with the help of allied Sunnis disgruntled with the government in Baghdad. The funds helped to finance IS’s expansion into Syria in 2013.

IS may also have tapped into the pool of funds from Gulf Arab donors to Salafist and jihadist groups in Syria, but its Iraqi revenue streams gave it an edge over its rivals. The group’s takeover of the eastern Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor has given it access to a cluster of oilfields in that area that used to be operated by Shell and Total, Western energy companies, allowing it to sell oil, some allegedly to the regime in Damascus. Additional revenue comes from taxing farmers in both Syria and Iraq, and from various forms of extortion in the towns it controls, including levying jizya (tax) on Christians.

IS’s mission is to create its own caliphate, but until now many of its sources of revenue have depended on its host states. In Iraq, the money that IS extorted from contractors, businesses and institutions ultimately derived from the expenditure of the central government in Baghdad. In both countries, IS’s “subjects” include thousands of employees of the respective central governments, who are still drawing their salaries from the government and carrying out their functions. [Continue reading…]

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Hundreds dead as ISIS seizes Syrian air base

Reuters reports: Islamic State militants stormed an air base in northeast Syria on Sunday, capturing it from government forces after days of fighting that cost more than 500 lives, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 346 Islamic State fighters were killed and more than 170 members of government forces had died since Tuesday in the fight over Tabqa base, making it one of the deadliest confrontations between the two groups since the start of Syria’s war.

The Observatory, which monitors violence in Syria through sources on the ground, said fighting raged inside the air base on Sunday. It was the Syrian army’s last foothold in an area otherwise controlled by Islamic State, which has seized large areas of Syria and Iraq.

In nearby Raqqa city, an Islamic State stronghold, there was celebratory gunfire and several mosques announced through their loudspeakers that the base had fallen to the Islamists and cheered “God is greatest”, a witness told Reuters.

IS fighters displayed the severed heads of Syrian army soldiers in the city square, the witness said, adding that Syrian warplanes were heard over Raqqa following the air base attack. Earlier on Sunday the Syrian air force had bombed areas around the base.

Syrian state television said that after fierce battles, the military was “regrouping”. [Continue reading…]

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Syria warns against strikes on territory outside its control

The Washington Post reports: Syria warned the United States on Monday not to extend its air war against radical Islamist militants into Syria, saying that it would regard any attempt to do so as an act of “aggression.”

The warning came a day after fighters with the Islamic State group overran another important Syrian military facility, putting them in full control of the north-central province of Raqqah. American photojournalist James Foley was held for much of his captivity in the province before he was beheaded last week by a masked Islamic State guard with a British accent.

Raqqah is also the site of a failed rescue attempt earlier this summer in which Delta Force commandos sought to snatch Foley and a group of other Americans held by the Islamic State from a prison east of the city of Raqqah, according to U.S. officials and witnesses in the area.

U.S. officials have not ruled out extending the airstrikes launched in Iraq earlier this month into Syria, where the Islamic State has been battling the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

On Monday, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem signaled that Damascus would not be prepared to tolerate unilateral action against the extremists even in the parts of the country that the government no longer controls. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq urges global action against Islamic State, Iran vows solidarity

Reuters reports: Iraq’s Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday during talks with Iran’s foreign minister that international efforts would be necessary to destroy Islamic State Sunni militants who have seized swathes of his country and of Syria.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran, a Shi’ite Muslim regional power likely to wield influence over the formation of Abadi’s new cabinet, reaffirmed Tehran’s support for Iraq’s territorial unity and its fight against militants.

“Abadi pointed to the presence of many dangers posed in the region as a result of the existence of the terrorist gang Islamic State which requires regional and international efforts to exterminate this terrorist organization,” his office said in a statement after the talks with Zarif. [Continue reading…]

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