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Russia pushing Ukraine conflict to ‘point of no return,’ EU leader says
The New York Times reports: Warning that Russia was pushing the conflict in Ukraine toward “the point of no return,” the president of the European Union’s executive arm said on Saturday that European leaders meeting in Brussels would probably endorse new and tougher sanctions in an effort to make Moscow “come to reason.”
After morning talks with the visiting president of Ukraine, Petro O. Poroshenko, the head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, voiced Europe’s growing alarm and exasperation at Russian actions in Ukraine and the risks of a wider war.
Mr. Poroshenko, speaking at a joint news conference with Mr. Barroso, said Ukraine still hoped for a political settlement with Russian-backed rebels in the east of his country but said a flow of Russian troops and armored vehicles into Ukraine in recent days in support of rebels were stoking the fires of a broader conflict.
“We are too close to a border where there will be no return to the peace plan,” Mr. Poroshenko said, asserting that, since Wednesday, “thousands of foreign troops and hundreds of foreign tanks are now on the territory of Ukraine, with a very high risk not only for the peace and stability of Ukraine but for the peace and stability of the whole of Europe.” [Continue reading…]
Female fighters of the PKK may be the ISIS’s worst nightmare
Stars and Stripes reports: It’s an Islamic State fighter’s worst fear: to be killed by a woman.Zekia Karhan
In northern Iraq, where Kurdish forces are rapidly regaining territory held by the Islamic State, that’s becoming real risk for the extremists.
There are plenty of female Kurdish soldiers on the front lines. They’re smaller than their male comrades, but they talk just as tough as they prowl the battlefield clutching automatic rifles and vowing vengeance for those victimized by the Islamic State.
“We are equal with the men,” said Zekia Karhan, 26, a female guerrilla from Turkey who is with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK. “Every responsibility for a man is the same for a woman. We are treated equally, and that is why we are fighting.”
The female PKK troops accessorize their olive drab uniforms with colorful scarfs, but they’re as thirsty for battle as anyone.
“I fired on this position from the mountain,” said Felice Budak, 24, another PKK fighter from Turkey, as she stood next to a window pierced by several bullet holes in Makhmur, a town that the PKK helped recapture from the Islamic State this month.
Budak said she wasn’t scared during the battle.
Islamic State fighters “are very scared of death because they are only here to kill people,” she said. “I don’t mind doing it over and over again. I’ve already fought in Turkey, Iran and Syria.”
The leftist PKK has been fighting the Turkish government for decades and is classed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. But its fighters have been going into battle alongside Kurdish peshmerga in recent weeks and are credited by some locals with turning the tide of battle in Iraq. [Continue reading…]
Brutal rise of ISIS turns old enemies into new friends
The Wall Street Journal reports: In the brutal calculation of Middle East politics, the baseline for friendship has always been simple: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
By that standard, the Islamic State extremist group is creating friendships aplenty. An odd set of bedfellows or potential bedfellows, transcending geographical, ideological and alliance bounds, is emerging from the ranks of those threatened by what many see as the most dangerous militant movement in a generation.
Shiite Muslim Iran and Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, for instance, have been bitter foes since at least 1979, when the Iranian revolutionary government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini hoped to inspire similar revolutions in the Sunni world. But both countries now fear Islamic State’s armed radical Islamist movement, which seeks to usurp their own claimed leadership of the Muslim world.
That led Iran and Saudi Arabia to independently back the same candidate to lead Iraq, in a push for a new government that might unite Sunnis and Shiites to battle Islamic State. This week, Iranian and Saudi diplomats held a rare meeting to consult.
Turkey has long distrusted and worked against ethnic Kurds, especially a violent splinter group known as the PKK that operates out of the mountainous environs of northern Iraq. But the Turks looked the other way when Syrian Kurdish militias affiliated with the PKK played a starring role in the rescue from Islamic State fighters of thousands of Yazidis stranded on a mountainside.
Russia and the U.S. are at loggerheads in Ukraine and elsewhere, including the Middle East. But they agree that the sort of violent Islam practiced by Islamic State, which now controls large swaths of Iraq and Syria, endangers the global order in which both countries compete for influence.
Islamic State even has had a falling out with al Qaeda, the group that spawned it. Al Qaeda’s official Syrian branch, known as the Nusra Front, is outflanked and mocked by Islamic State. So Nusra has joined the fight against Islamic State, clashing violently on the battlefields of Syria.
These countries and movements may be at odds over nearly everything else, but nothing focuses the mind like a mortal threat, say some analysts and former top security officials. Given not only Islamic State’s savagery but its potential to overthrow regimes and spill over borders, they all seem to agree on only one thing: It needs to be stopped.
Lacking a coalition of the willing, the Obama administration should muster up a sort of alliance of the unwilling, these analysts argue. Whether that is possible, and whether the U.S. has the guile and clout to unite such disparate forces—either formally, or more likely in a combination of overt, covert and arm’s-length arrangements—is an open question.
“It has to be patched together, somewhat ad hoc, with maybe some sort of informal and even clandestine agreements on who does what,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national-security adviser.
In a region where states such as Iraq and Syria are literally fragmenting, Mr. Brzezinski urges an approach focused on the handful of what he categorizes as truly “viable” states — Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia — to confront Islamic State, which also is known by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL. [Continue reading…]
Where do foreign fighters in Syria come from?
Where do foreign fighters in Syria come from? http://t.co/EfELekFGhX pic.twitter.com/L5FBbksLsm v @EconMEastAfrica
— Raza Rumi (@Razarumi) August 30, 2014
The Economist: Poverty does not explain the lure of jihad for Western fighters. Many of them are quite middle-class. Nasser Muthana, a 20-year-old Welshman who goes by the name Abu Muthana al-Yemeni in IS videos, had offers to study medicine from four universities. Nor does a failure to integrate into the societies around them. Photographs of Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, another British fighter thought to have recently been killed, show a young man in a snazzy suit with a slick hairstyle. He worked at Primark, a cheap retailer, in Portsmouth, a city on the English coast. His father ran a curry restaurant. Nor does religious piety. Before leaving for Syria, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, two young men from Birmingham who pleaded guilty to terrorism offences in July, ordered copies of “Islam for Dummies” and “The Koran for Dummies” from Amazon. Some fighters are religious novices, says Mr [Shiraz] Maher [of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, in London].
More plausible explanations are the desire to escape the ennui of home and to find an identity. “Some individuals are drawn out there because there is not a lot going on in their own lives,” says Raffaello Pantucci, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think-tank. Images of combatants playing snooker, eating sweets and splashing in swimming pools have sometimes suggested that jihad was not unlike a student holiday, without the booze. For young men working in dead-end jobs in drab towns, the brotherhood, glory and guns seem thrilling. Many of Belgium’s fighters come from the dullest of cities, where radicals have concentrated their efforts to get recruits.
Jihadist networks and radicals no longer need to base themselves in mosques. Some, such as the one in London’s Finsbury Park, where Abu Hamza shook his hook-hands and praised Osama bin Laden, is now under new management. Others are now more careful about whom they welcome. Small groups can meet instead in garages and flats, where their activities are harder to detect. Jihad-minded Europeans can find all the rabble-rousing they desire online. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter they do not even need to bother with password-protected specialist forums. [Continue reading…]
Disappearances in Syria: The ghosts of the war
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Peaceful activist Mohamed Bachir Arab has been missing since November 2, 2011.
Amnesty: The last time Rania (not her real name) spoke to her friend Mohamed Bachir Arab, was on 1 November 2011. As a hard working doctor and committed political activist, Mohamed had been living in hiding for six months, trying to evade the ever present tentacles of the Syrian intelligence forces, who routinely detain peaceful activists like him.
The following day her worst fears were realized. A strap line on the evening news announced he had been arrested. None of his relatives knew where he had been taken.
Mohamed was a marked man. He had been a student leader at his university in the city of Aleppo, in north-west Syria. Over the years, he had organized a number of protests against government policies, which had landed him in trouble with the authorities. Between 2004 and 2005 he was detained for several months before being released.
But this time, his relatives and colleagues feared it was different. Since the crisis in Syria began in March 2011, the number of individuals who have been detained in secret by the state – or forcibly disappeared – has spiralled out of control.
“The Syrian authorities’ strategy to deal with dissent is brutal: speak against them once and they’ll arrest you; do it again and they will simply make you disappear,” said Philip Luther, Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.
Many of those lucky enough to be released, after months sometimes years in detention, bear the scars of the brutal treatment they have been subjected to.
Most of them have spoken about passing through a number of the detention centres that make up the dark maze of abuse controlled by the Syrian security forces and intelligence agencies. [Continue reading…]
Bashar Al Assad is laying a deadly ambush for Obama in Syria
Fred Hof writes: President Barack Obama’s decision to authorize aerial surveillance of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) positions in Syria suggests that airstrikes employing manned and unmanned aircraft may not be far behind. All of this is right and proper. Yet danger lurks. The head of Syria’s preeminent crime family—President Bashar Al Assad—waits, crocodile-like, for the American angler to tumble out of the boat. For Assad, opportunity knocks. If he handles matters correctly he can, with an assist from American inaction, return to polite society while others do the anti-ISIS heavy lifting for him.
From the beginning of Syria’s 2011 popular uprising against a corrupt, incompetent, cynical, and brutal regime, Assad has pursued with singleminded discipline a very simple strategy: Sell oneself as the fire brigade to help hose the flames of one’s own arson. Determined to create an alternate opposition that would overwhelm peaceful protest, Assad emptied his jails of violent, Islamist prisoners and employed tactics of violent sectarianism to lure back to Syria the Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) terrorists his regime once escorted to Iraq from Damascus. As AQI in Syria morphed into ISIS and the Nusra Front, and as foreign fighters swelled their ranks, Assad’s message—amplified by Iran and Russia—has been unchanging: “I am the bulwark against terrorism. Sooner or later the West will have to crawl back into my good graces.”
Assad, his minions, and his apologists believe the hour of deliverance is nigh. Walid Al Mouallem, foreign minister of the pseudo-government providing clerical services to the ruling clan, has warned Washington against violating Syria’s sovereignty while offering coordination and collaboration against ISIS. The Obama administration has responded appropriately to the offer: with contemptuous rejection. Still, danger lurks in the murky waters of Levantine political intrigue.
For Bashar Al Assad the ideal scenario is one in which ISIS helps him kill off his armed nationalist opposition in western Syria, American aviation assets pound ISIS positions in the east, and he sits comfortably in Damascus, feeling once again needed by the West as a useful partner against those arguably more evil than him. And a lucrative dividend awaits: The fact or perception of collaboration between Washington and Damascus driving wedges between the U.S. and every one of its regional partners, thereby serving the interests of the party Assad has so faithfully served: Iran.
Based on his experience with Washington since mid-2011, Assad has every reason to believe his strategy will bear fruit. [Continue reading…]
Iraqi Kurds say their fight is against more than just ISIS
The Washington Post reports: Kurdish fighters are struggling to hold on to recent gains against Islamic State militants in Iraq in the face of constant shelling and sniper fire. But Kurds say the jihadists have another weapon: local Arab sympathizers.
The Kurds suspect ethnic Arabs have backed the militants in battles that have raged in Iraq’s north over the past month, including a stunning advance by the jihadists. The fighting has displaced thousands of families in a region long known as a flashpoint for Arab-Kurdish violence. Now many Sunni Arab residents are barred from coming home.
“The Arabs here stabbed us in the back, and now they are threatening us” from the villages nearby, a Kurdish intelligence officer, Ahmed Hawleri, said from the front-line district of Gwer.
About 30 miles from the city of Irbil, Gwer offers a glimpse into how the fighting has intensified the ethnic divide in some communities. The town was a diverse community of roughly 10,000 before Islamic State gunmen seized it on Aug. 7. Arabs and Kurds had lived side by side despite tensions that lurked beneath the surface.
Now the desolate landscape of shuttered shops and toppled power lines is a military and ethnic fault line. [Continue reading…]
Why ISIS immune to ‘naming and shaming’
Bill Frelick writes: We who work to promote human rights operate in the realm of treaties, rule of law, and state responsibility.
These are benchmarks of accountability that presume our world civilization has moved well beyond the horrors of the past: From the Biblical destruction of the Amalekites through Genghis Khan and the Crusades to the gas warfare of World War I.
Such atrocities may have continued well into the 20th century with the Nazi Holocaust and Khmer Rouge, but the Nuremberg trials, the development of international humanitarian law and human rights conventions, and the establishment of international criminal courts signaled that justice for the worst crimes was possible.
So we are dumbstruck when we confront the blatant and self-advertised brutality occurring in the parts of Iraq and Syria that have fallen under the control of the so-called Islamic State. There, the members of this group make no effort to hide their atrocities or even to make them look less atrocious. To the contrary, they advertise it and appear to relish their primitivism, showing a degree of sophistication only in their use of video technology and social media to document and disseminate evidence of their crimes.
One of the key tools of the human rights trade is “naming and shaming,” by which we seek to expose wrongdoers to the opprobrium their crimes deserve, and ensure accountability. We have better and more fine-tuned instruments at our disposal now than ever before to investigate and document rights abuses, as well as more comprehensive legal mechanisms for holding accountable those who commit crimes against humanity and other serious violations.
But what if those wrongdoers know no shame? What if they are proud of their deeds, seeing them in some manner as an expression of God’s will and not beholden to human law, even law that is universal in scope and application? [Continue reading…]
Inside Putinworld, secret club where aides fall like flies to wanton boys
Shaun Walker reports: Revered, even feared, to the point where no one will contradict him; aloof, isolated, a digital hermit who is never out of touch; broadly supported, but very narrowly advised by an ever-tighter group of confidantes. This is the picture of Vladimir Putin and his leadership style painted by a number of people with knowledge of the inner workings of the Kremlin, at a time when such things matter more than at any time since the collapse of communism.
Putin’s Ukraine actions this year have turned him once again into arguably the world’s most fascinating leader. But just as Kremlinology comes back into vogue, the walls of Putin’s central Moscow redoubt are becoming as opaque as they were during the time of Brezhnev.
One anecdote about Putin’s Kremlin reveals a tantalising glimpse of what it is to be a presidential adviser. Putin himself receives briefing information on printed sheets inside red folders; he very rarely uses the internet. According to one source, requirements for his briefing notes have changed significantly in recent months. The president now demands notes on any topic to be no more than three pages long and written in type no smaller than 18 point. [Continue reading…]
After Gaza cease-fire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in tough spot at home
The Washington Post reports: The contrast was stark.
In Gaza, as Hamas leaders stood in a rubble-filled central square to declare an unequivocal victory, thousands of flag-waving supporters cheered.
In Israel, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a televised news conference alongside his defense minister and army chief to claim a win, he was slammed by the media, the public, the opposition and even members of his own party and coalition.
Although it is still too early to say which side, if either, was victorious in the 50-day conflict that claimed more than 2,200 lives, destroyed thousands of homes and other structures, and traumatized many more on both sides, there appears to be little doubt that Netanyahu is emerging as the biggest loser, personally and politically.
“I can say that there is a major military achievement here, as well as a major diplomatic achievement for the state of Israel,” he said at the news conference.
Newspaper headlines Thursday, however, dismissed Netanyahu’s victory speech. He was even described as an “empty vessel.” An analysis in the Hebrew-language daily Maariv said the prime minister had been forced to “invent” a military and political victory and had failed to convey the “strategic calculations that guided him.”
Even before Wednesday’s news conference, members of Netanyahu’s cabinet were publicly questioning his decision to agree to a truce, saying Israel had achieved none of its objectives. [Continue reading…]
Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza neighborhood shocked the Pentagon
Mark Perry writes: The cease-fire announced Tuesday between Israel and Palestinian factions — if it holds — will end seven weeks of fighting that killed more than 2,200 Gazans and 69 Israelis. But as the rival camps seek to put their spin on the outcome, one assessment of Israel’s Gaza operation that won’t be publicized is the U.S. military’s. Though the Pentagon shies from publicly expressing judgments that might fall afoul of a decidedly pro-Israel Congress, senior U.S. military sources speaking on condition of anonymity offered scathing assessments of Israeli tactics, particularly in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City.
One of the more curious moments in Israel’s Operation Protective Edge came on July 20, when a live microphone at Fox News caught U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry commenting sarcastically on Israel’s military action. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” Kerry said. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation.”
Rain of high-explosive shellsKerry’s comment followed the heaviest bombardment of the war to that point, as Israeli artillery rained thousands of high-explosive shells on Shujaiya, a residential area on the eastern edge of Gaza City. A high-ranking U.S. military officer said that the source of Kerry’s apparent consternation was almost certainly a Pentagon summary report assessing the Israeli barrage on which he had been briefed by an aide moments earlier.
According to this senior U.S. officer, who had access to the July 21 Pentagon summary of the previous 24 hours of Israeli operations, the internal report showed that 11 Israeli artillery battalions — a minimum of 258 artillery pieces, according to the officer’s estimate — pumped at least 7,000 high explosive shells into the Gaza neighborhood, which included a barrage of some 4,800 shells during a seven-hour period at the height of the operation. Senior U.S. officers were stunned by the report. [Continue reading…]
How the U.S. is assisting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
Christopher Dickey writes: The senior military commanders at NATO, officials at the State Department, and, yes, even the president of the United States proved Thursday that they have a perfectly clear idea what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine. They just don’t want to say the word out loud.
So they talk about “interventions” and “incursions” but not, heaven forbid, “invasions.” This, even though they estimate considerably more than 1,000 Russian troops are operating in Ukraine to bolster separatist rebels who were incited, aided, and abetted by the Russian secret services; even though those troops have brought with them heavy weaponry, including motorized artillery and T-72 tanks; even though their anti-aircraft missile shot down a civilian airliner with almost 300 people aboard in July; and even though, in the last few days, they have opened up a new front near the Black Sea coast and engaged in direct, ferocious combat against the Ukrainian army. No, it seems that somehow “invasion” is too strong a word for all that.
“Our focus is more on what Russia is doing, [and] what we’re going to do about it, than what we’re calling it,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
But by playing semantic games, the Obama administration and European leaders are playing Putin’s game. “Confusion,” as a NATO briefer explained Thursday, “is part and parcel of this Russian hybrid warfare strategy.” We are watching an invasion using subversion, coercion, and somewhat limited military action. But it’s an invasion nonetheless. And when you refuse to call things by their real names, you are not only confusing the people who hear you, you’re accepting Putin’s obfuscations. You are sending a signal that says any Western response to his actions will be inconsequential. [Continue reading…]
Reflections on the war on Gaza
Azzam Tamimi writes: First: For the people of Gaza, the recent ceasefire deal between the resistance and Israel did not accomplish all they were seeking. Yet, at the same time, it achieved none of what the Israelis were hoping for. Perhaps the reason the two sides managed to agree, finally, on a ceasefire, was their conviction that there was no way any of them could achieve more under the prevalent circumstances.
It is true that the Israelis have enjoyed unprecedented Arab support in their war against Gaza and continuous encouragement from certain Arab quarters to inflict as much damage as they could on Gaza to pressure Hamas into capitulation. Yet, they have not been able to cripple the resistance or force it to surrender. As for the resistance, it has indeed enjoyed the full and unconditional backing of the people of Gaza, despite the siege and the pain, in the hope that this latest round of conflict would led to lifting the siege that has been imposed on the Strip for nearly eight years. Yet, it has not been possible for the resistance to obtain guarantees that the siege would finally be ended.
Second: The artillery and the rockets have gone silent and the annoying buzzing and whizzing of Israeli warplanes in Gaza’s skies is no longer there, yet the propaganda warfare will continue for some time to come. Each side will seek to prove it came out victorious having achieved its objectives.
The Israelis consider the continuation of the siege a sign of their success whereas the resistance considers the failure of the Israelis to impose demilitarisation a sign of victory. However, one can see a marked difference between the two sides. As soon as the ceasefire deal went into effect, the masses in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate and express joy over what they truly believed was victory.
On the other side, the Israeli masses seemed confused and even distressed. Few Israelis believe that the war has accomplished much for them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started the offensive against Gaza with high expectations. He promised his public that he would dismantle the military infrastructure of Hamas and the other resistance factions, that he would destroy the tunnels and that he would put an end to the firing of the rockets from Gaza. However, none of this was achieved. [Continue reading…]
With Gaza war, movement to boycott Israel gains momentum in Europe
The New York Times reports: A branch of Sainsbury’s grocery store removed kosher products from its shelves, it said, to prevent anti-Israel demonstrations. The Tricycle Theater in north London, after hosting a Jewish film festival for eight years, demanded to vet the content of any film made with arts funding from the Israeli government. George Galloway, a member of Parliament known for his vehement criticism of Israel, declared Bradford, England, an “Israel-free zone.”
Mr. Galloway, in comments being investigated by the police, said, “We don’t want any Israeli goods; we don’t want any Israeli services; we don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or college; we don’t even want any Israeli tourists to come to Bradford.”
The war in Gaza and its aftermath have inflamed opinion in Europe and, experts and analysts say, are likely to increase support for the movement to boycott, disinvest from and sanction Israel, known as BDS.
“We entered this war in Gaza with the perception that the Israeli government is not interested in reaching peace with the Palestinians,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli analyst at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a private university. “Now, after the casualties and the destruction, I’m very worried about the impact this could have on Israel. It could make it very easy for the BDS campaign to isolate Israel and call for more boycotts.”
Gilead Sher and Einav Yogev, in a paper for the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, warn that Gaza means Israel pays “a much heavier price in public opinion and in erosion of support for its positions in negotiations with the Palestinians.”
Along with reports of “familiar anti-Semitic attacks on Jews,” they said, “the movement to boycott Israel is expanding politically and among the public.”
Daniel Levy of the European Council on Foreign Relations points to the debate over halting arms exports to Israel, which has been given new momentum in Britain and Spain by the asymmetry of the Gaza war.
“You’re beginning to see the translation of public sympathy into something politically meaningful,” he said. He noted two tracks — the governmental one, which distinguishes between Israel and the occupied territories, and the social one of academic, commercial and artistic boycotts. [Continue reading…]
Obama says does not yet have military strategy for confronting ISIS
Reuters reports: President Barack Obama said on Thursday the United States has not yet developed a strategy for confronting Islamic State in Syria, an acknowledgement that a decision had not been made on whether to launch air strikes against the militant group.
Obama’s comment during a White House news conference before a meeting of national security advisers about how to proceed against Islamic State drew criticism from Republicans and a clarification from White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
Representative Tom Price, a Georgia Republican, said on Twitter: “President says “we don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with #ISIS. That’s obvious and increasingly unacceptable.”
Earnest said Obama was referring to military options and that Obama has a comprehensive strategy for confronting the group through diplomatic means.
Obama’s decision to begin U.S. surveillance flights over Syria this week prompted speculation that he was on the brink of expanding the fight against Islamic State from Iraq into Syria and criticism from some lawmakers concerned that they had not been properly consulted over possible U.S. actions.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress have called for lawmakers to vote on whether the United States should broaden its action against the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]
Military skill and terrorist technique fuel success of ISIS
The New York Times reports: As fighters for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria continue to seize territory, the group has quietly built an effective management structure of mostly middle-aged Iraqis overseeing departments of finance, arms, local governance, military operations and recruitment.
At the top the organization is the self-declared leader of all Muslims, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a radical chief executive officer of sorts, who handpicked many of his deputies from among the men he met while a prisoner in American custody at the Camp Bucca detention center a decade ago.
He had a preference for military men, and so his leadership team includes many officers from Saddam Hussein’s long-disbanded army.
They include former Iraqi officers like Fadel al-Hayali, the top deputy for Iraq, who once served Mr. Hussein as a lieutenant colonel, and Adnan al-Sweidawi, a former lieutenant colonel who now heads the group’s military council.
The pedigree of its leadership, outlined by an Iraqi who has seen documents seized by the Iraqi military, as well as by American intelligence officials, helps explain its battlefield successes: Its leaders augmented traditional military skill with terrorist techniques refined through years of fighting American troops, while also having deep local knowledge and contacts. ISIS is in effect a hybrid of terrorists and an army.
“These are the academies that these men graduated from to become what they are today,” said the Iraqi, a researcher named Hisham Alhashimi.
ISIS, which calls itself Islamic State, burst into global consciousness in June when its fighters seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, after moving into Iraq from their base in Syria.
The Iraqi Army melted away, and Mr. Baghdadi declared a caliphate, or Islamic state, that erased borders and imposed Taliban-like rule over a large territory. Not everyone was surprised by the group’s success. “These guys know the terrorism business inside and out, and they are the ones who survived aggressive counterterrorism campaigns during the surge,” said one American intelligence official, referring to the increase in American troops in Iraq in 2007. “They didn’t survive by being incompetent.” [Continue reading…]
ISIS fills coffers from illicit economy in Syria, Iraq
The Wall Street Journal reports: The Islamic State runs a self-sustaining economy across territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, pirating oil while exacting tribute from a population of at least eight million, Arab and Western officials said, making it one of the world’s richest terror groups and an unprecedented threat.
That illicit economy presents a new picture of Islamic State’s financial underpinnings. The group was once thought to depend on funding from Arab Gulf donors and donations from the broader Muslim world. Now, Islamic State—the former branch of al Qaeda that has swallowed parts of Iraq and Syria—is a largely self-financed organization.
Money from outside donors “pales in comparison to their self-funding through criminal and terrorist activities,” a U.S. State Department official said, adding that those activities generate millions of dollars a month.
For Western and Arab nations that are striving to stop Islamic State, the group’s local funding sources pose a conundrum: A clampdown on economic activity that helps fund the group, counterterrorism officials and experts said, could cause a humanitarian crisis in the already stressed areas it controls.
“Can you prevent ISIS from taking assets? Not really, because they’re sitting on a lot of assets already,” said a Western counterterrorism official. “So you must disrupt the network of trade. But if you disrupt trade in commodities like food, for example, then you risk starving thousands of civilians.”
From Raqqa in Syria to Mosul in Iraq, Sunni radicals from the group administer an orderly extortion system of business and farm tributes, public-transport fees and protection payments from Christians and other religious minorities who choose to live under the militants rather than flee, according to residents of these areas, analysts who have studied the group and government officials tracking it.
Islamic State also does business with people from some of the same regions whose governments are trying to stamp it out. From the territory the group has taken, it controls the sale of oil, wheat and antiquities, spurring a vast gray market with buyers as unlikely as the Syrian regime and Shiite and Kurdish businessmen from Lebanon and Iraq, said Western officials and Syrians and Iraqis with knowledge of the now-common business transactions.
“They have a stable economy, more or less, across their territory in Syria and Iraq,” said Hasan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian scholar of Sunni radicalism who is an expert on al Qaeda and Islamic State. [Continue reading…]