Syrian National Coalition President Hadi al-Bahra interviewed by Jon Stewart
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Europeans say U.S. never briefed them on plot by the ‘Khorasan Group’
McClatchy reports: European counterterrorism specialists say their American counterparts never mentioned an imminent plot by al Qaida operatives in Syria to attack Western targets and didn’t brief them on the group that’s supposedly behind the plan, a previously unknown terrorist unit that American officials have dubbed the Khorasan group.
The interviews with the specialists, from two European NATO allies with close intelligence ties to the United States, raise questions about why the United States used its first series of airstrikes on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in Syria to also attack eight installations belonging to the Nusra Front, an al Qaida affiliate that anti-government rebel groups consider an important ally in their fight to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
U.S. officials didn’t use the word Nusra to identify the targets, instead saying the strikes in Idlib province, far from Islamic State-controlled territory, were aimed at the Khorasan group. But activists and other rebels in Syria identified the positions hit as belonging to Nusra and said 50 Nusra fighters were killed.
U.S. officials said the Khorasan group was composed of senior al Qaida operatives who’d been dispatched to Syria to plot attacks against the West. The officials said the strikes were intended to break up a plan for an imminent attack.
The White House declined Friday to expand on that description or say with whom the intelligence about the group had been shared.
“We, along with our foreign partners, have been watching this group over the past two years since many of its members arrived in Syria from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and we took action when their plotting reached an advanced stage,” said Caitlyn Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “I’m not going to be able to discuss with whom intelligence was shared in this case.”
The European specialists, who meet regularly with U.S. officials on terrorism issues – particularly air travel and potential terrorist operations involving Western passport holders – said they were never specifically warned about such a group or such a plot. Such an omission, the specialists said, seemed unlikely if the plot were truly imminent. [Continue reading…]
ISIS closes in on Kobane
The Associated Press reports: Militants of the Islamic State group were closing in Monday on a Kurdish area of Syria on the border with Turkey — an advance unhindered so far by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, including one that struck a grain silo, killing two civilians, according to activists.
Islamic State fighters pounded the city of Kobani with mortars and artillery shells, advancing within three miles (five kilometers) of the Kurdish frontier city, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Nawaf Khalil, a Kurdish official.
The Islamic extremists intensified their shelling of the border region following U.S.-led strikes Saturday. The aerial assault appeared to have done little to thwart the militants, Kurdish officials and activists said, adding that of anything, the extremists seemed more determined to seize the area, which would deepen their control over territory stretching from the Turkish border, across Syria and to the western edge of Baghdad.
“Instead of pushing them back, now every time they hear the planes, they shell more,” Ahmad Sheikho, an activist operating along the Syria-Turkey border, said of the Islamic State fighters. He estimated he heard a rocket explosion every 15 minutes or so.
Three mortar shells landed in a field in nearby Turkey, the Turkish military said in a statement. After the strike, Turkey’s military moved tanks away from the army post in the area, positioning them on a hill overlooking the border. [Continue reading…]
Today’s Zaman reports: After a visit to the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani, a leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) called on the Turkish government to support Syrian Kurds’ fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to defend the besieged town near the Turkish border, saying this is a chance to strengthen Turkey’s peace process with the Kurds.
Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chairman of the HDP, was speaking to reporters on the Turkish side of the border after visiting Kobani.
Turning point as Kurds push back ISIS at Iraqi-Syrian border
Rudaw reports: In a potential turning point in the fightback against the Islamic State, Kurdish forces on Tuesday said they had retaken the strategic Iraqi town of Rabia that straddles a main road near the border with Syria.
Rabia has provided a road link for the jihadists between their strongholds in Syria and Iraq, including the country’s second largest city of Mosul which IS captured in June.
The loss of Rabia would be the most significant setback for ISIS forces in northern Iraq since the launch of U.S. and allied air strike earlier this month.
A Peshmerga commander, Shiekh Ahmad Mohammad, told Rudaw: “Rabia is under the control of Kurdish forces. We are leaving their bodies behind and picking up their abandoned weapons.”
The YPG, the protection force of the Kurdish-held zone in neighbouring Syria, said the capture of Rabia was a joint operation between them and the Peshmerga of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) but this was not immediately confirmed by the Peshmerga side.
The YPG has been harassing ISIS forces in the area, while further west, in Rojava, its units have been resisting the advance of ISIS forces against the Syrian-Turkish border town of Kobane.
Selahattin Demirtas, a leader of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) crossed the border into Kobane on Tuesday in a visit of solidarity. He later called on the Turkish government to support the fight of Syrian Kurds against ISIS. He said this was an opportunity to strengthen Turkey’s peace process with its own Kurdish population. [Continue reading…]
Turkish government to ask parliament for approval to join campaign against ISIS
The Wall Street Journal reports: The Turkish government was expected to submit motions to parliament Tuesday that if approved would give it authorization to intervene in Iraq and Syria against forces of the extremist Islamic State.
The motions are to be debated in a closed or open session of parliament Thursday, with a vote immediately to follow. An affirmative vote is predicted.
“We will definitely be where we need to be,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said over the weekend. “We cannot stay out of this.”
Some opposition political parties in Turkey have staunchly opposed any Turkish military action in Syria and are expected to challenge the motions, despite government pleas. [Continue reading…]
Today’s Zaman reports: Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants are advancing on a tomb in northern Syria regarded by Turkey as sovereign territory and guarded by Turkish soldiers, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç said on Tuesday.
Arınç’s remarks, made after a Cabinet meeting, confirmed a news report by pro-government Yeni Şafak daily that ISIL has been reinforcing militants around the tomb of Süleyman Şah, the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, Osman I, for the past three days.
“It is true that ISIL militants are approaching Süleyman Şah tomb,” Arınç said, adding, however, that Turkish troops guarding the tomb have not been evacuated.
The report said there are now 1,100 ISIL militants surrounding the Süleyman Shah tomb, citing unnamed local sources. It also said an attack on the tomb is possible and that ISIL militants might take some 36 Turkish soldiers stationed there hostage.
ISIS’s ‘medieval’ ideology owes a lot to revolutionary France
By Kevin McDonald, Middlesex University
Over recent weeks there has been a constant background noise that Islamic State and its ideology are some sort of throwback to a distant past. It is often framed in language used last week by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, who claimed that ISIS is “medieval”. In fact, the terrorist group’s thinking is very much in a more modern western tradition.
Clegg’s intervention is not surprising. Given the extreme violence of Islamic State fighters and the frequent images of decapitated bodies, it is understandable that we attempt to make sense of this violence as somehow radically “other”.
But this does not necessarily help us understand what is at stake. Above all, this tends to accept one of the core assertions of contemporary jihadism, namely its claim that it reaches back to the origins of Islam. As one Islamic State supporter I follow on Twitter is fond of saying: “the world changes, Islam doesn’t”.
Generation gap
This is not just a question for academic debate. It has real impact. One of the attractions of jihadist ideology to many young people is that it shifts generational power in their communities. Jihadists and, more broadly, Islamists present themselves as true to their religion, while their parents, so they argue, are mired in tradition or “culture”.
It needs to be said very clearly: contemporary jihadism is not a return to the past. It is a modern, anti-traditional ideology, with a very significant debt to western political history and culture.
When he made his speech in July at Mosul’s Great Mosque, declaring the creation of an Islamic State with himself as its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi quoted at length from the Indian/Pakistani thinker, Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in 1941 and originator of the contemporary term “Islamic State”.
Maududi’s Islamic State is profoundly shaped by western ideas and concepts. He takes a belief shared between Islam and other religious traditions, namely that God alone is the ultimate judge of a person, and transforms this – reframing God’s possession of judgement into possession of, and ultimately monopoly of, “sovereignty”. Maududi also draws upon understandings of the natural world governed by laws that are expressions of the power of God – ideas at the heart of the 17th-century scientific revolution. He combines these in a vision of the sovereignty of God, then goes on to define this sovereignty in political terms, affirming that “God alone is the sovereign” (The Islamic Way of Life). The State and the divine thus fuse together, so that as God becomes political and politics becomes sacred.
Anti-Syrian sentiment in Lebanon
Mahmoud Mroueh writes: According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of September 11, 2014 close to 9.5 million Syrians have been forced to leave their homes since the uprising began in March of 2011. Of those who were forced to move, 6.5 million are internally displaced; the remaining three million left the country as refugees.
Forty percent of those who left Syria (1.2 million people) headed into neighbouring Lebanon. In Lebanon they were met with endemic racism manifesting itself through chauvinistic rhetoric, discrimination, curfews, evacuation notices, and increasingly frequent racial attacks against their person and their livelihood. The Lebanese laud themselves for their sense of hospitality and exceptional generosity, but these claims are now being tested by what has been described as the ‘worst refugee crisis in recent history’, and Lebanon has been failing miserably.
Violence against refugees has been steadily becoming more common and more gruesome, most notably after the conflagration in Arsal. ‘Revenge’ attacks for the actions of groups like the Islamic State or Jabhat al-Nusra, or for isolated crimes by Syrian individuals, that target refugees, their homes, and their property are becoming increasingly frequent. It is worth noting that the Islamic State militant responsible for the beheadings of two Lebanese Armed Forces soldiers, an act that spurred a large part of these ‘revenge attacks’ was Lebanese, not Syrian. Reports of refugee camps being set alight, drive-by shootings, and attacks against refugees by racist mobs are now a daily feature of Lebanese news broadcasts, and some have begun to (accurately) describe these events as ‘pogroms’. [Continue reading…]
ISIS fighter says U.S. airstrikes aren’t effective
How the U.S. lost its latest war within hours
Scott Lucas writes: Wednesday morning’s statement from US Central Command was — unsurprisingly — buoyant. The US and allies from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Jordan had launched attacks the previous day inside Syria, with 14 airstrikes and 47 Tomahawk missiles. Multiple targets of the Islamic State had been hit in northern and eastern Syria, including “fighters, training compounds, headquarters and command and control facilities, storage facilities, a finance center, supply trucks, and armed vehicles”.
Central Command promised, “The U.S. military will continue to conduct targeted airstrikes against ISIL in Syria and Iraq as local forces go on the offensive against this terrorist group.”
Behind the confident assessment, Central Command did not point to — and presumably did not recognize — reality: with those initial strikes, the US had probably already lost its belated intervention in the 42-month Syrian conflict.
The military did not mention that the greatest casualties of the first night’s attacks had not been suffered by the Islamic State, which had moved most of its forces before the arrival of the warplanes. Instead, the US had struck hardest on two locations of the Islamist insurgents Jabhat al-Nusra, killing more than 70 fighters and civilians in Idlib and Aleppo Provinces. [Continue reading…]
Turkish military forces quietly watch while ISIS advances on Kobane
Reuters reports: Turkish tanks and armoured vehicles took up positions on hills overlooking the besieged Syrian border town of Kobani on Monday as shelling by Islamic State insurgents intensified and stray fire hit Turkish soil, a Reuters correspondent said.
At least 30 tanks and armoured vehicles, some with their guns pointed towards Syrian territory, were positioned near a Turkish military base just northwest of Kobani. Plumes of smoke rose up as shells hit the eastern and western sides of Kobani and sporadic bursts of machinegun fire rang out.
“We have taken the border under full control. We have ramped up our security measures in the Suruc region,” Interior Minister Efkan Ala told reporters in Istanbul, referring to the area on the Turkish side of the border with Kobani.
A local official inside the besieged town said Islamic State continued to bombard it from the east, west and south and that the militants were 10 km (6 miles) from the outskirts.
“From the morning there have been bomb shellings into Kobani and not one rocket, but maybe about 20 rockets,” Idris Nassan, deputy foreign minister in the Kobani canton, said by telephone.
Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights which monitors Syria’s civil war, said at least 15 mortar rounds had landed on Kobani on Monday, killing at least one person. He said Islamic State fighters had advanced to within 5 km of the town. [Continue reading…]
VIDEO: Turkey stops Kurds from Syria fight http://t.co/yBhUNh1OPX
— Blogs of War (@BlogsofWar) September 29, 2014
Protests against ISIS’s Kobane siege continue across Turkey
Today’s Zaman reports: Demonstrators have gathered in cities across Turkey to protest the terrorist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL) siege of the strategic Syrian town of Kobane, which is inhabited predominantly by ethnic Kurds.
An all-female protest including women from some 36 civil society organizations gathered in İstanbul to protest against ISIL over the weekend, marching towards the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AK Party) headquarters in Kadıköy.
The group included women activists from civil society organizations such as the Human Rights Association (İHD) and the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). The group chanted slogans, saying, “If there is no Rojava [the Kurdish-populated region of northern Syria], there won’t be peace,” “Women’s solidarity against ISIL” and “Murderer ISIL, collaborator AK Party.”
The group said in a statement made during the protest that the ISIL attacks are also targeting the settlement process in Turkey, which aims to solve the Kurdish problem in the country, and called on the international community to take action for Kobane. The statement said the Turkish government should not allow ISIL members to cross into Syria from Turkey.
The protesters also stressed that they do not want a buffer zone in Syria.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has insisted that a buffer zone to protect Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Syria, as well as a no-fly zone over Syria, must be established. US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made clear at a Pentagon news conference that the US is not actively considering a buffer zone. [Continue reading…]
Turkey’s clumsy politics and the Kurdish question
Cengiz Aktar writes: As the US-led war on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) gathers steam, there has been a great deal of speculation over the role Turkey might play in the campaign. Ankara kept a low profile while 49 of its nationals were held hostage by ISIL in Mosul. Since their release on September 20, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made statements affirming Turkey’s commitment to take part in the campaign.
Yet Ankara’s ISIL policy is not only ambiguous in the eyes of many but appears at odds with its regional Kurdish policy. Conflicting statements made by various Turkish officials do not help either. For instance on September 28, a deputy of the ruling AKP party Yalcin Akdogan declared that he thought the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), an armed Kurdish group from Turkey, should fight ISIL instead of resting in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan where they are currently based.
Well, it so happens that the PKK has been engaged in this fight for some time, supporting the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds in their battles against ISIL. Not to mention, the irony of a Turkish deputy calling for assistance from a group still designated as “terrorist” by the government – especially when on that same day, the president makes a statement comparing PKK to ISIL. This, despite the “peace talks” Erdogan himself inaugurated in January 2013 to resolve the festering decades-long conflict with the PKK. [Continue reading…]
U.S-led raids hit grain silos in Syria, kill workers
Reuters reports: U.S.-led air strikes hit grain silos and other targets in Islamic State-controlled territory in northern and eastern Syria overnight, killing civilians and wounding militants, a group monitoring the war said on Monday.
The aircraft may have mistaken the mills and grain storage areas in the northern Syrian town of Manbij for an Islamic State base, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. There was no immediate comment from Washington.
The United States has targeted Islamic State and other fighters in Syria since last week with the help of Arab allies, and in Iraq since last month. It aims to damage and destroy the bases, forces and supply lines of the al Qaeda offshoot which has captured large areas of both countries.
The strikes in Manbij appeared to have killed only civilians, not fighters, said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the Observatory which gathers information from sources in Syria.
“These were the workers at the silos. They provide food for the people,” he said. He could not give a number of casualties and it was not immediately possible to verify the information. [Continue reading…]
A CENTCOM news release said the airstrikes “struck an ISIL training camp and ISIL vehicles in a staging area next to an ISIL-held grain storage facility near Manbij that ISIL was using as a logistics hub and vehicle staging facility.”
Causes of California drought linked to climate change
EurekAlert!: The atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought currently afflicting California are “very likely” linked to human-caused climate change, Stanford scientists say.
In a new study, a team led by Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh used a novel combination of computer simulations and statistical techniques to show that a persistent region of high atmospheric pressure hovering over the Pacific Ocean that diverted storms away from California was much more likely to form in the presence of modern greenhouse gas concentrations.
The research, published on Sept. 29 as a supplement to this month’s issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is one of the most comprehensive studies to investigate the link between climate change and California’s ongoing drought.
“Our research finds that extreme atmospheric high pressure in this region—which is strongly linked to unusually low precipitation in California—is much more likely to occur today than prior to the human emission of greenhouse gases that began during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s,” said Diffenbaugh, associate professor of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
The exceptional drought currently crippling California is by some metrics the worst in state history. Combined with unusually warm temperatures and stagnant air conditions, the lack of precipitation has triggered a dangerous increase in wildfires and incidents of air pollution across the state. A recent report estimated that the water shortage would result in direct and indirect agricultural losses of at least $2.2 billion, and lead to the loss of more than 17,000 seasonal and part-time jobs in 2014 alone. Such impacts prompted California Governor Jerry Brown to declare a drought emergency, and the federal government to designate all 58 California counties as “natural disaster areas.” [Continue reading…]
‘Where’s Obama?’ Refugees flood across Turkish border as ISIS steps up attacks on Syrian Kurds
The New York Times reports: Shelling intensified Sunday on Kobani, the Syrian town at the center of a region of Kurdish farming villages that has been under a weeklong assault by Islamic State militants, setting fire to buildings and driving a stream of new refugees toward the fence here at the border with Turkey.
The extremist Sunni militants have been closing in on the town from the east and west after moving into villages with tanks and artillery, outgunning Kurdish fighters struggling to defend the area. The Kurds fear a massacre, especially after recent Islamic State attacks on Kurdish civilians in Iraq. More than 150,000 people have fled into Turkey over the past week.
There were no sounds of jets overhead to indicate to the Kurds that help was coming from the American-led coalition, whose stated mission is to degrade and destroy the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Two airstrikes on the eastern front hit Islamic State armored vehicles on Saturday, but did not appear to halt the advance.
“Where’s Obama?” one Turkish Kurd demanded, watching in anguish near the border fence as the headlights of cars could be seen streaming out of Kobani toward the border, although there was no way to cross it. “Does he care about the Kurds?” [Continue reading…]
Kurdistan on the horizon
Betsy Hiel reports: In June, as ISIS overran Mosul and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, the Iraqi army melted away. Kurdish forces — the peshmerga, or “those who face death” — raced to secure the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and other areas that Kurds have long claimed as their own.
Amid the chaos, Kurdish President Masoud Barzani ordered preparations for a self-determination referendum.
In August, the outgunned, outmanned Kurds pulled back to defend Irbil, leaving scores of Iraqi Christians and Yazidis, a religious minority, to ISIS’ savagery.
Kurds accused Baghdad of withholding weapons and ammunition, including emergency aid from the United States.
ISIS’ defeat of the Kurdish peshmerga, long respected as fierce fighters, left many Kurds rethinking their timeline for independence — but not their ultimate goal.
Hiwa Osman, a Kurdish political analyst, considers it “a wake-up call for the Kurds, that what we have today … is not viable to give us complete independence.”
Only America’s airstrikes on ISIS, he said, “came to our rescue.”
Henri Barkey, an international relations professor and Kurdish expert at Lehigh University in Northampton County, predicts that if Kurds held a referendum, “90 percent would say ‘yes’ to independence. Who wouldn’t?”
But “the timing is bad now,” he added, because “ISIS is a real serious danger.”
Barkey, a trustee at American University of Iraq in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, believes the longer Kurds wait, the better their chance of achieving independence: “The more they play that centralizing-glue role, the more they build up chips, the more time they have to consolidate some of (their) positions … for instance, on Kirkuk.”
Osman believes the problem “is what kind of independence do we want?”
The “makeup of ISIS, the demographic and the geopolitics of ISIS, do not suggest that ISIS is going to end anytime soon,” he explained. “ISIS is a Sunni Arab problem — Kurds and Shias cannot end them; Sunni Arabs have to.
“My worry is that with the continuation of ISIS where they are, we will end up with a Taliban-style state just to our south. … We could become a strong-security state, ruled by an elite that isn’t accountable.
“When security kicks in, democratic values (can) be sacrificed,” he said. “That is what we really don’t want.
“Defending Kurdistan is one thing, but turning (it) into a security state is my biggest fear.” [Continue reading…]
Iranian president gives qualified support for Western action against ISIS
The Guardian reports: The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, gave qualified support to western military action against Isis inside Iraq, saying a concerted campaign could be successful as long as it was requested by the Iraqi government.
Speaking to journalists in New York while attending the UN general assembly, Rouhani appeared to draw a sharp distinction between Syria, where the Assad regime had not been informed of US air strikes, let alone asking for them; and Iraq, where the new government has formally called for military assistance.
He criticised western states for responding late to Iraq’s call for help, claiming Iran had been the first to come to its defence and helped prevent Irbil and Baghdad falling to Isis. He also questioned the value of relying on aerial power alone. [Continue reading…]
AFP adds: Iran will attack ISIS inside Iraq if they advance near the border, ground forces commander General Ahmad Reza Pourdestana said in comments published Saturday.
“If the terrorist group (IS) come near our borders, we will attack deep into Iraqi territory and we will not allow it to approach our border,” the official IRNA news agency quoted Pourdestana as saying.
Secret Service fumbled response after gunman hit White House residence in 2011
The Washington Post reports: The gunman parked his black Honda directly south of the White House, in the dark of a November night, in a closed lane of Constitution Avenue. He pointed his semiautomatic rifle out of the passenger window, aimed directly at the home of the president of the United States, and pulled the trigger.
A bullet smashed a window on the second floor, just steps from the first family’s formal living room. Another lodged in a window frame, and more pinged off the roof, sending bits of wood and concrete to the ground. At least seven bullets struck the upstairs residence of the White House, flying some 700 yards across the South Lawn.
President Obama and his wife were out of town on that evening of Nov. 11, 2011, but their younger daughter, Sasha, and Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, were inside, while older daughter Malia was expected back any moment from an outing with friends.
Secret Service officers initially rushed to respond. One, stationed directly under the second-floor terrace where the bullets struck, drew her .357 handgun and prepared to crack open an emergency gun box. Snipers on the roof, standing just 20 feet from where one bullet struck, scanned the South Lawn through their rifle scopes for signs of an attack. With little camera surveillance on the White House perimeter, it was up to the Secret Service officers on duty to figure out what was going on.
Then came an order that surprised some of the officers. “No shots have been fired. . . . Stand down,” a supervisor called over his radio. He said the noise was the backfire from a nearby construction vehicle.
That command was the first of a string of security lapses, never previously reported, as the Secret Service failed to identify and properly investigate a serious attack on the White House. [Continue reading…]