Category Archives: Analysis

New research reveals the extent of the Alaska permafrost meltdown

Scientific American reports: Up to a quarter of the permafrost that lies just under the ground surface in Alaska could thaw by the end of the century, releasing long-trapped carbon that could make its way into the atmosphere and exacerbate global warming, a new study finds.

The study, detailed in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment, maps where that near-surface permafrost lies across Alaska in more detail than previous efforts. That detail could help determine where to focus future work and what areas are at risk of other effects of permafrost melt, such as changes to local ecosystems and threats to infrastructure, the study’s authors say.

About one quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere is permafrost, or ground that stays frozen for at least two years. Some of it has been in that frozen state for thousands of years, locking up an amount of carbon that is more than double what is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere. But with temperatures in the Arctic rising at twice the rate of the planet as a whole, permafrost across the region is beginning to thaw, releasing that carbon from its icy confines. [Continue reading…]

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A new field called paleoepigenetics is probing how evolution responds to sudden stress

Ferris Jabr writes: Every year the paleontologist Alan Cooper meets up with a band of miners in the Yukon. As the miners go about their work, spraying massive jets of water at frozen mud and silt to excavate gold, they also expose animal remains from the Pleistocene, between 2 million and 12,000 years ago. Back then, North America was a riot of big mammals. Antelope, camels, llamas, and indigenous horses roamed the vast plains; lions, saber-toothed cats, and dire wolves prowled for prey; and giant ground sloths lumbered along, stripping tree branches of leaves and fruit.

But, by the time the planet transitioned to the current geological epoch, the Holocene, the vast majority of those species had gone extinct, most likely due to climate change or hunting by humans. Climate change in the Pleistocene was “huge, frequent, and rapid,” says Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide. “Sometimes a change of 10 degrees centigrade over a space of a decade or two.” It’s difficult for animals to cope with such dramatic shifts through standard evolution by natural selection, which often takes decades — even millennia — to spread advantageous genetic mutations and hone adaptations. [Continue reading…]

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The military reasons why Assad cannot beat ISIS

David Blair writes: The essential precondition for defeating Isil is to turn the Sunni population against them. The corollary is that only a largely Sunni force can achieve strategic victory against Isil.

The rank-and-file of the old Syrian army was mainly Sunni, reflecting the composition of the country’s population. But the old Syrian army has been put through the meat-grinder represented by over four years of civil war.

Before the insurrection against Assad began in 2011, the army had a paper strength of 220,000. Yet a huge proportion of that number – possibly the majority – defected to the rebels in the first 18 months of the uprising.

By the summer of 2012, Assad had placed the survival of his regime in the hands of only two units: the 4th Armoured Division and the Republican Guard. Both were recruited disproportionately from Assad’s own Alawite sect – and the 4th Armoured Division was commanded by his brother, Maher. The combined strength of both formations was never more than 30,000 men, or 14 per cent of the old army. Assad had effectively written off the other 86 per cent.

Since then, even these two units have been badly mauled. Today, the backbone of Assad’s forces is provided by Hizbollah, the radical Shia movement based in Lebanon, and the “National Defence Force”, a new Alawite-dominated militia, armed and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

So Assad now commands a largely Shia and Alawite force, backed by Christian Russia and Shia Iran. He is a leader kept in power by foreign bayonets. His fighters also have a blood-curdling record of sectarian massacres of Sunnis. After more than four years of wanton slaughter, involving hideous barrel bombs and poison gas, Assad has been responsible for the deaths of more Sunnis than any man alive.

I put the conclusion delicately: it is not obvious that a force of this kind is best placed to drive a wedge between Isil and the Sunni population. If you really compelled the Sunnis of eastern Syria to choose between Isil and Assad – with his Shia and Alawite fighters steeped in Sunni blood – then they might make a very inconvenient decision. [Continue reading…]

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Obama no longer seems sure Assad must go

Josh Rogin writes: In his prime-time address Sunday night, President Barack Obama listed the diplomatic process on the Syria war, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, as one of the five most important things the administration is doing to fight the Islamic State. Yet behind the scenes, there is growing schism within the administration over whether ending that civil war requires eliminating its cause: the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

And there is increasing evidence that Obama is siding with those advisers who feel that demanding Assad’s ouster is holding back broader efforts to defeat the Islamic State. After years of insisting that Assad had to go, last month Obama spoke of a political process in which “we can start looking at Mr. Assad choosing not run.” From the Oval Office on Sunday, he made no mention of the dictator whatsoever.

“With American leadership, the international community has begun to establish a process — and timeline — to pursue cease-fires and a political resolution to the Syrian war,” said Obama. “Doing so will allow the Syrian people and every country, including our allies, but also countries like Russia, to focus on the common goal of destroying ISIL — a group that threatens us all.”

Everyone at the top level of the Obama administration agrees with the president that resolving the civil war in Syria is necessary to defeat the Islamic State. But when other officials talk about how to fight terrorism in the Middle East, they emphasize that ending Assad’s rule is a crucial and necessary part of that plan. [Continue reading…]

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Why ISIS isn’t going anywhere

Michael Weiss, in text prepared for his testimony in front of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on December 2, wrote: Policymakers here and abroad often speak as if ISIS only debuted as a significant insurgency and international terror threat in June 2014, when its soldiers stormed into Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, almost uncontested. The president surely forgot himself when, in conversation with the New Yorker’s David Remnick, he referred to the group that had dispatched mentally disabled girls in Tal Afar as suicide bombers and blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra as the “JV team.” But as you well know, this is a jihadist franchise, which with we have grown intimately acquainted for over a decade. It has long memory and is playing an even longer game.

Has it altered its strategy? No, not really, although it has placed greater tactical emphasis on its foreign operations since its capacity for receiving emigrating jihadists from New Jersey to Peshawar has shrunk, thanks to better policing and the relative closure of the Syrian-Turkish border.

Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, officially ISIS’s spokesman but in reality the man in charge of its dominion in Syria, defined the “state’s” foreign policy rather plainly in September: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State,” he said, “then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be.”

But Adnani was only reiterating what has always been ISIS’s global ambition—to export its holy war well beyond its immediate precincts or purview. The domestic pillar of ISIS’s project is what it calls “remaining and expanding”—the pushing of the borders of the caliphate in the Levant and Mesopotamia and the swelling of the ranks of its fighters and supporters there. We may pretend that ISIS is no state, but its ideologues and bureaucrats and petty officials behave as if they fully believe their own propaganda.

The foreign pillar is the opportunistic spreading of chaos, harm and wanton destruction in the West, relying upon agents who come from the West and who may or may not be returning veterans from a regional battlefield but rather everymen, Muslim or non-Muslim, who have been radicalized remotely. These jihadists are encouraged to strike at the kufar, the unbelievers, on the latter’s home turf or wherever they may be found, using methods both clever and crude: “an explosive device, a bullet, a knife, a car, a rock, or even a boot or a fist,” as al-Adnani elsewhere specified.

The two pillars have been in existence since the era of ISIS’s founder and godfather, the Jordanian jailbird Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Lest we forget, Zarqawi personally beheaded the American contractor Nicholas Berg in Iraq in 2004; two years before that, he had a direct hand in the assassination of 60 year-old American citizen and USAID worker Laurence Foley in Amman. [Continue reading…]

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The number of foreign fighters in Syria surged in 2015

The Soufan Group reports: In June 2014, The Soufan Group (TSG) released a report on Foreign Fighters in Syria. Now, 18 months later, despite sustained international effort to contain the so-called Islamic State and stem the flow of militants traveling to Syria, the number of foreign fighters has more than doubled. In an updated report released today, it becomes clear that neither the challenge of preventing people from traveling to Syria to join extremist groups nor the threat of unknown numbers returning to commit Paris-style attacks has been adequately countered or addressed.

The original report listed an estimated 12,000 people from 83 countries; today’s update estimates that between 27,000 and 31,000 people from at least 86 countries have traveled to Syria. Some of the increase likely stems from better disclosure and accounting by governments, but the increase is also testament to the enduring pull of the Islamic State’s narrative spread by social media across the globe. It also shows that as long as would-be foreign fighters have a physical destination to travel to, they will do so. As long as the group holds onto its self-proclaimed caliphate, people will try to join it.

The updated report also shows that while the phenomenon of Syrian-bound foreign fighters is indeed global, there are hotbeds of terror that send citizens to Raqqa and beyond in disproportionate numbers. Some are long-time generators of foreign fighters: Derna, Libya; Ben Gardane and Bizerte, Tunisia; and the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia. Other places are more recent additions to the list of communities losing their youth to terror: the Molenbeek district of Brussels, Belgium; and the Lisleby district of Fredrikstad in Norway.

These hotbeds show the power of peer-to-peer recruitment. While the power of the Islamic State’s social media outreach is undeniable, it appears more often to prepare the ground for persuasion, rather than to force the decision. There are few places on earth in which the group’s message and imagery cannot be seen or heard, and its ubiquitous reach has led to the recruitment of individuals from Algeria to Uzbekistan. Yet, as hotbeds develop, recruitment through social media becomes less important than via direct human contact; clusters of friends and neighbors persuade each other to travel separately or together to join the Islamic State.

The report concludes that the issue of foreign fighters is both a near-term threat and a long-term challenge. The Syrian civil war will not end soon, and although the Islamic State is under more pressure than it was in June 2014 when TSG produced its original report, it is likely to survive in some form for a considerable time to come. It will attract more recruits from abroad, but they may differ from the earlier wave of hopefuls who were attracted by the prospect of a brand new state that would provide them what they could not find at home. As the Islamic State changes its focus from consolidating control of territory to attacking its foreign enemies in their homelands, or their interests elsewhere, the profile of its foreign recruits will also change. All the while, the group will continue to inspire attacks by those who do not wish to travel, but rather fight for the group in their country of residence.

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How does someone become an alien in the country of their birth?

America is a country with few deep-rooted natives. Nearly everyone’s ancestral tree leads somewhere else. In spite of this, the mark of foreignness is skin color. If you’re white and have an American accent, no one’s going to ask you when your family emigrated here — even though, without exception, every single white American’s roots lead overseas.

The truism that this is a nation of immigrants, repeatedly gets denied by a white America endowed with a sense of belonging which often doubts the capacity of non-whites to be full equals in sharing an American identity.

How then, can someone who knows no other country than this one and yet who is perceived and treated as though in some subtle or crude sense they are foreign, fully share in the experience of belonging that every human being deserves?

If at this moment of heightened xenophobia, we look at alienation through the narrow prism of counter-terrorism and only ask how just a handful of individuals become radicalized, we are likely to ignore the implications of much wider issues, such as inequality, cultural identity, and citizenship.

America succeeds or fails by one measure alone: its ability to sustain an inclusive society.

Donald Trump could not currently threaten this inclusivity were it not for the fact that that he speaks for so many other white Americans who have conferred on themselves the right to determine who does or does not belong here.

America doesn’t need to wall itself in; what it needs is fewer self-appointed gatekeepers.

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Experts: Trump’s Muslim entry ban idea ‘ridiculous,’ ‘unconstitutional’

The Washington Post reports: Donald Trump’s proposal to bar all Muslims from entering the United States violates U.S. and international law and would never be allowed by the courts, legal scholars said late Monday.

“Oh, for the love of God,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University. “This would not only violate international law, but do so by embracing open discrimination against one religion. It would make the United States a virtual pariah among nations.’’

The GOP presidential candidate on Monday called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, including immigrants, tourists and even Muslims who are U.S. citizens and travel abroad. His plan to bar U.S. citizens drew particular ire from legal experts, some of whom fumbled for words as they tried to explain its illegality, since none had considered the matter before.

“That’s blatantly unconstitutional if it excludes U.S. citizens because they are Muslims. It’s ridiculous,” said Richard Friedman, a law professor at the University of Michigan. He cited the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause and the First Amendment’s doctrine of freedom of religion. [Continue reading…]

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How fringe attacks on American Muslims became mainstream

Christopher Bail writes: Donald Trump recently claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating in New Jersey after the September 11 attacks. He later reaffirmed this account despite a lack of evidence, adding that suspected terrorists should be tortured during counterterrorism investigations even if it “doesn’t work” because they “deserve it anyway.”

Though such brazen criticisms of minority groups are characteristic of Trump, his comments also illustrate the degree to which fringe ideas about Islam have become mainstream. Public figures of all political stripes have proposed that Muslims are secretly a fifth column quietly plotting to implement shariah law under the guise of political correctness. Over the past decade, 32 states proposed shariah law bans, controversies about the construction of mosques have increased by more than 800 percent, and the number of Americans with negative opinions of Islam has more than doubled, as my research shows.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State delights in these developments. The group’s propaganda cites anti-Muslim sentiments as evidence for its claim that the United States is at war with Islam. The Islamic State has repeatedly stated that its goal is to make the West so hostile to Muslims that they have no choice but to side with the Islamic State.

The battle against the Islamic State therefore requires careful analysis of how fringe ideas about Muslims become mainstream and what might be done to stem the tide. [Continue reading…]

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Muslims in U.S. report spike in discrimination, threats

CBS News reports: In the wake of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Muslims around the U.S. say the rhetoric against them has becoming increasingly incendiary.

A few weeks ago, armed protesters picketed a mosque in Irving, Texas, some chanting “Every Muslim is a terrorist!”

In Virginia, tempers erupted at a meeting over building a mosque — one man yelled “every one of you are terrorists” at a Muslim man. Sunday night in Philadelphia, a severed pig’s head was found outside a mosque.

And voice messages saying “you’re not welcome here, I hope you get sprayed with pig’s blood,” among other things, was left on an answering machine of the Dallas chapter of CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey sticks its neck out again, this time in Iraq

Metin Gurcan writes: In its second incredibly controversial move in as many weeks, Turkey drew Baghdad’s wrath over the weekend by dispatching uninvited reinforcement troops to Iraq. While Turkey said the move was merely routine, Baghdad called it a “violation of sovereignty” and told Ankara it had 48 hours to get those troops out.

Turkey has since said it will send no more troops but has not withdrawn any soldiers.

Ankara deployed the troops to the Bashiqa area of Iraq, just north of Mosul, the night of Dec. 4 — less than two weeks after Turkey downed a Russian warplane Nov. 24 near the Turkish-Syrian border. [Continue reading…]

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American donors funding West Bank settlements

Mitchell Plitnick writes: A great deal of support for Israeli settlements comes from the United States in the form of tax-deductible contributions from private donors. The Obama administration, like all administrations before it, opposes Israeli settlement in the West Bank and considers it an obstacle to peace. Yet, at the same time, the United States government effectively incentivizes support for the settlements by allowing American charities to disburse millions of tax-deductible dollars in support for them.

This problem has not gone unnoticed, even though it continues unimpeded at this point. The Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, is publishing a series of reports and data uncovered by journalist Uri Blau detailing the extent of private American support for the settlements.

This investigation by Blau pushes forward efforts that a number of US-based groups have made in the past. Most recently, T’Ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights brought attention to this issue by filing a complaint against one such group, Honenu, in New York. Earlier in 2015, the group Avaaz petitioned the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of The Hebron Fund, which directly supports the flashpoint Israeli settlement in that Palestinian city. [Continue reading…]

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What most people don’t understand about climate change

The Atlantic reports: The world’s highest-ranking diplomats are meeting in Paris this week to complete the final version of a new UN agreement on climate change.

They are working on a 48-page draft resolution, prepared during the first week of the talks by lower-ranking climate ministers. One of the questions they’ll take up during the week to come: Should the world’s nations attempt to limit climatic warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, instead of the previously agreed-upon 2 degrees?

1.5 degrees has become one of the most surprising stories of Paris. Many observers expected the international community to drop the two-degree target at the Paris talks due to its scientific impracticability. Instead, thanks to climate activists and sustained diplomacy from the countries most vulnerable to sea-level rise, it might settle on an even more ambitious target. The United States and China have both signaled tentative support for 1.5, despite Saudi Arabian and Indian opposition.

Yet actually achieving 1.5 degrees will be extraordinarily difficult. Speaking to The Atlantic Monday morning from Paris, President Obama’s top science advisor said that it will be an near impossible target to meet. [Continue reading…]

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Russian bombs halt relief work in northern Syria, as hundreds of thousands of civilians flee and ISIS advances

McClatchy reports: In the days since Turkey downed a Russian warplane that flew into its airspace, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a bombing campaign that’s destroyed bakeries and relief convoys in northern Syria, cutting the flow of food to more than half a million civilians.

The result has been a complete halt in relief operations by major humanitarian aid groups, all of which operate out of Turkey. It’s also brought the region to the brink of further catastrophe as hundreds of thousands of residents are caught in the crossfire and are unable to flee their homes.

Since Russia began bombing Sept. 30, “there’s been a huge wave of internally displaced,” said Karl Schembri, regional coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council. The situation has grown worse since the shoot-down Nov. 24. “People cannot move at all, and there is nowhere for them to flee to,” he told McClatchy.

All of Syria’s neighbors, including Turkey, have now shut their borders to fleeing refugees, and informal camps for displaced persons just inside the Syrian border are reported to be packed.

The stepped-up Russian bombing campaign has had another effect, rebels and aid workers say, allowing the Islamic State to move into areas that it previously had not controlled close to the Turkish border. [Continue reading…]

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The most intensive state-building project currently in operation is run by ISIS

The Guardian reports: John Kerry has branded its members psychopathic monsters, François Hollande calls them barbarians, and David Cameron describes them as a death cult. But Islamic State is much more than that.

As newly obtained documents demonstrate, Isis is also made up of bureaucrats, civil servants and jobsworths. Hundreds if not thousands of cadres have set themselves to work creating rules and regulations on everything from fishing and dress codes to the sale of counterfeit brands and university admission systems.

About 340 official documents, notices, receipts, and internal memos seen by the Guardian show that they have been trying to rebuild everything from roads to nurseries to hotels to marketplaces, from the Euphrates to the Tigris. They have also established 16 centralised departments including one for public health and a natural resources department that oversees oil and antiquities.

This has been the plan all along. A 24-page statecraft blueprint obtained by the Guardian, written in the months after Isis’s declaration of a caliphate, shows how deliberate the state-building exercise has been, and how central it is to its overall aims. [Continue reading…]

The researcher, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, who translated the document and gave it to The Guardian, asks to what extent ISIS is following its own plan and among several observations says this:

The text calls for breaking down the differences between muhajireen (foreign fighters) and ansar (local Iraqis and Syrians) by integrating them together in the military ranks, uniformly accepting a fundamentally Arabic and Islamic character to their identity of affiliation with the Caliphate alone. In the pre-Caliphate era, one will have noted the existence of foreign fighter battalions for what was then ISIS fundamentally based around single nationalities and ethnicities, such as Katiba al-Battar al-Libi (Libyan while attracting some Europeans of Maghrebi and north African origin) and the Abu al-Nur al-Maqdisi Battalion (Gazan). However, since the Caliphate declaration, these battalions have generally dropped off the radar of social media, and as colleague Michael Weiss was able to establish in an interview with an Islamic State defector, the Katiba al-Battar al-Libi was in fact disbanded for precisely these reasons of discouraging affiliations on ethncity, which of course may give rise to loyalties beyond those owed to the Caliph.

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Sorry, we can’t negotiate with ISIS

As Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military leader and politician, once said: “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”

So why not negotiate with ISIS?

Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s Shadow Foreign Minister who led a revolt of opposition MPs by voting in favor of Britain’s entry into the air campaign against ISIS in Syria, went back to his Leeds Central constituency this weekend to explain his position.

Members of the Stop the War Coalition, challenged Benn, saying that Britain should negotiate with ISIS.

In Britain and elsewhere, a lot of people are going to see an exchange like this as an argument between diplomacy and militarism, remembering perhaps Winston Churchill’s famous observation: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Anyone who says we can’t negotiate with ISIS, is easy to cast as being addicted to the use of brute force. This perception gets further reinforced as politicians hammer their podiums declaring, we must destroy ISIS.

So again: why not negotiate with ISIS?

Here’s why: Negotiation requires compromise and the discovery of common ground and for ISIS to negotiate it would have to abandon the goals which are the reason for its existence.

In the latest issue of Dabiq, ISIS’s 65-page color magazine, the possibility of a truce between the West and ISIS is raised and they say that in such an event “nothing changes for the Islamic State… It will continue to wage war against the apostates until they repent from apostasy. It will continue to wage war against the pagans until they accept Islam… Thereafter, the slave markets will commence in Rome by Allah’s power and might.”

Wild rhetoric, no doubt, but what we already know is that on a more limited territorial scale, ISIS practices exactly what it preaches. It has no interest in co-existing with those it opposes. It is engaged in what it regards as a Manichean struggle which allows for no other possibility than the death, subjugation, or submission of its enemies.

The contents of Dabiq might be dismissed as propaganda written merely to appeal to the grandiose fantasies of ISIS recruits, but a newly published translation of an internal ISIS document appearing in The Guardian today shows that the organization is not only earnest in its goals but also in their meticulous application.

As far as foreign policy is concerned, again we see an utterly uncompromising position, modeled, it is claimed, on the example of earlier caliphates.

The objective in relation to “heretic communities” is “dispersing their groupings so there no longer remained any impeding opinion, strength or ability, and the Muslim alone remains the master of the state and decision-making and no one is in conflict with him.”

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