Category Archives: Analysis

Magical thinking about ISIS

Adam Shatz writes: There has been a lot of magical thinking about IS. Liberal hawks, like Roger Cohen in the New York Times, have called for a ground offensive in the usual Churchillian terms – something no Western leader has any appetite (or sizeable constituency) for after Afghanistan and Iraq. Leftists have demanded an end to the drone war, a breaking of ties with Saudi Arabia and the creation of a Palestinian state. According to a writer in the online magazine Jadaliyya, only ‘hallucinating’ neoconservatives could argue that the attacks target the West or France for what they are, rather than for what they do. But IS says very clearly in its communiqué that it’s attacking Paris both for ‘the crusader campaign’ and as ‘the capital of prostitution and vice’ – and it seems obtuse not to take it at its word. To be sure, anger over Western policies is among the drivers of recruitment for groups like IS, but IS is not a purely reactive organisation: it is a millenarian movement with a distinctly apocalyptic agenda. As Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian diplomat in Paris, points out, ‘One of the most striking things about Islamic State is that it has no demands. All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed.’ The creation of a Palestinian state is a necessity, above all for Palestinians, but it’s not likely to make much of an impression on IS, which rejects the Middle Eastern state system entirely.

A far more subtle – but in some ways just as wishful – analysis has come from Olivier Roy, who argued in the New York Times that the Paris attacks are a sign of desperation rather than strength:

Isis’s reach is bounded; there are no more areas in which it can extend by claiming to be a defender of Sunni Arab populations. To the north, there are Kurds; to the east, Iraqi Shiites; to the west, Alawites, now protected by the Russians. And all are resisting it. To the south, neither the Lebanese, who worry about the influx of Syrian refugees, nor the Jordanians, who are still reeling from the horrid execution of one of their pilots, nor the Palestinians have succumbed to any fascination for Isis. Stalled in the Middle East, Isis is rushing headlong into globalised terrorism.

It’s an intellectually seductive and almost reassuring argument: IS appears to be on the march, but it’s actually in its death throes, having suffered losses in Kobani and Sinjar. But it’s also an argument that has been made before. After 11 September, it was widely argued that al-Qaida attacked the ‘far enemy’ in the West because it had failed to defeat ‘the near enemy’, the regimes of the Middle East. Today that theory seems less credible. Al-Qaida experienced a regional revival, thanks in large part to the Iraq war. And for IS, an offshoot of al-Qaida in Iraq, the distinction between near and far enemies is porous: all apostates are enemies. Although it has conquered a significant piece of territory – something bin Laden and Zawahiri never dared attempt – its power is only partly rooted in the caliphate. It is as keen to conquer virtual as actual territory. It draws on a growing pool of recruits who discovered not only IS but Islam itself online, in chatrooms and through messaging services where distance vanishes at the tap of a keyboard. Indeed, the genius of IS has been to overcome the distance between two very different crises of citizenship, and weave them into a single narrative of Sunni Muslim disempowerment: the exclusion of young Muslims in Europe, and the exclusion of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq.

Roy is right that IS can’t ‘win’ in any conventional sense, but it doesn’t have to expand the caliphate in order to remain in business. In the global society of the spectacle, it’s on a roll. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Paris attacks and other assaults seen as evidence of a strategic shift by ISIS

The New York Times reports: The recent attacks in Paris and Beirut and the downing of a Russian airliner in Egypt were the first results of a centrally planned terrorism campaign by a wing of the Islamic State leadership that oversees “external” targets, according to American and European intelligence officials.

The Islamic State’s overseas operations planning cell offers strategic guidance, training and funding for actions aimed at inflicting the maximum possible civilian casualties, but leaves the task of picking the time, place and manner of the attacks largely to trusted operatives on the ground, the officials said.

Carrying out attacks far from the Islamic State’s base in Iraq and Syria represents an evolution of the group’s previous model of exhorting followers to take up arms wherever they live — but without significant help from the group. And it upends the view held by the United States and its allies of the Islamic State as a regional threat, with a new assessment that the group poses a whole new set of risks.

Debris from a Russian airliner downed in Egypt in October, killing all 224 people on board. The downing and the recent attacks in Paris and Beirut were the first results of a terrorism campaign by a wing of the Islamic State, according to American and European intelligence officials. Credit Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters
“Once the Islamic State possessed territory that provided them sanctuary and allowed them to act with impunity, they like other jihadist groups inevitably turned to external attacks,” said William Wechsler, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and until last January a top counterterrorism official at the Pentagon.

One possible motivation of the change in strategy by the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, is to seize leadership of the global jihad from Al Qaeda — from which the Islamic State broke away in 2013. The attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali on Friday was probably carried out by two Qaeda-linked groups, suggesting, as one senior European counterterrorism official put it, “The race is on between ISIS and Al Qaeda to see who can attack the West the best.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Just like any other political entity, ISIS is capable of miscalculations

Faisal Al Yafai writes: Analysts of terror groups like ISIL often make one of two framing errors. They either perceive the group as inherently irrational, lashing out without thought or planning. Or they assume extensive strategic thinking on the part of the group, imagining them to be cunning and far-sighted, able to intuit how governments will react to their provocations and planning accordingly.

But terror groups are at root political groups and the dynamics of power, planning and policy remain constant. As with political groups, there are disagreements that lead to miscalculations, decisions that turn out to be erroneous or counterproductive.

It is in that light that the Paris attacks should be seen. For ISIL may have miscalculated the impact of the attack – not in France or in the West, but within the militant group itself.

The Paris attacks represent a new departure for ISIL. The distinction between Al Qaeda and ISIL, which has superseded Al Qaeda as the dominant group in international jihad, lies in their political ambitions.

In Afghanistan, Al Qaeda had sought to create a base from which to launch attacks against the West in order to force the West to change policy and leave the Muslim world. Al Qaeda’s focus was not on creating a state and seeking to draw recruits to it.

ISIL, on the other hand, claims to already have a fledgling regime. And their insistence on declaring it a “caliphate” and referring to it as Al Dawla, Arabic for “state”, suggests they see themselves as creating an effective state, one that can defend its borders and run its own internal affairs.

The Paris attacks, then, are initially puzzling. Why seek to provoke a war while still in the process of building and securing a state? [Continue reading…]

Whenever anyone talks about “giving the terrorists what they want,” the presupposition is that a reaction that matches ISIS’s expectations and hopes will necessarily serve its interests — as though ISIS is incapable of acting against its own interests.

Moreover, implicit in the idea of “giving the terrorists what they want,” is the notion that this means falling into a carefully laid trap and thus coming under the control of ISIS.

But while it’s important to try and understand ISIS’s intentions and expectations, the only question that actually needs to be asked of any strategy for combating ISIS is whether it can accomplish its goals.

Facebooktwittermail

Will Turkey get tougher on ISIS?

Joseph Dana writes: Turkey is slowly starting to reveal how it intends to fight ISIL, both inside the country and beyond. Last weekend, Turkish security forces arrested three suspected ISIL fighters including one Belgian national of Moroccan origin with alleged ties to last week’s attacks in Paris.

While the European Union is moving quickly to tighten border controls and the United States and its anti-ISIL coalition allies are devising new military plans to bomb ISIL positions in Syria and Iraq, Turkey’s response to the crisis has been slow and scattered. Considering the outsize role Turkey continues to play in the ISIL saga as a primary transit country into and out of Syria, this is disconcerting.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister-turned-president, spent the last decade crafting a foreign policy propelled by the notion that Turkey was an emerging regional superpower. In 2011, Mr Erdogan threw Turkey’s weight firmly behind the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, betting on former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi’s ability to lead a post-Arab Spring Middle East. Concurrently, Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) developed a verbose anti-Bashar Al Assad stance regarding the civil war in Syria. As such, Turkey became the leading proponent for regime change in Damascus and engendered a close relationship with the rebels fighting Mr Assad’s forces. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Memo to Trump: The cheering in New Jersey on 9/11 was coming from Israelis, not Arabs

The Daily Beast reports: It seemed likely that after Donald Trump lied about the residents of Jersey City’s behavior on Sept. 11, 2001 — claiming they cheered the attacks across the river in New York City — Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, would be first in line to repudiate him.

That was a naive assumption. It turns out a Republican presidential candidate would sooner slow-dance with Hillary Clinton than criticize the party’s frontrunner in defense of American Muslims.

At a rally in Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday, Trump said, “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, and I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering!”

This is, of course, incorrect. The New York Times reported that rumors of Muslims cheering in New Jersey were “discounted by police officials at the time.”

Trump then claimed on Sunday on ABC’s This Week that he had seen footage of the thousands of people cheering on TV — but no such footage seems to exist.

A request for comment from Christie, sent at around 10:30 Sunday morning, went ignored all day by his campaign. Which was curious, since the governor’s tough talk against “crazies” fear-mongering about Muslims — never mind his constant talk about the 9/11 attacks throughout the course of his presidential campaign — has been a defining aspect of his governorship.

In 2011, Christie nominated Sohail Mohammed as a Superior Court judge. When rumors began to circulate on the Internet that Mohammed was tied to terrorism and sympathetic to Sharia, Christie came to his aid.

“This Sharia law business is crap,” he said. “It’s just crazy and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.” [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post spoke to Jerry Speziale, the police commissioner of Paterson, N.J., for his response to Trump’s claims and he said: “That is totally false. That is patently false. That never happened. There were no flags burning, no one was dancing. That is bullshit.”

Speziale’s statement might not be completely accurate because as Jim Galloway, a journalist at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, noted yesterday: “As the towers came down, some people indeed saw a group of five — not thousands, but five — Middle Eastern men clowning around and photographing themselves in front of the burning towers from the New Jersey waterfront. They weren’t Arabs, and they weren’t Muslims.”

At that time, an FBI bulletin was issued warning law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:

White, 2000 Chevrolet van with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

Twenty-five minutes after the alert had been sent out, the van was stopped by officers with the East Rutherford Police Department who arrested its five occupants who all turned out to be Israelis.

Christopher Ketcham later investigated the story in detail and published his findings in a 2007 report, “What did Israel know in advance of the 9/11 attacks?”

I have reposted that report and an accompanying article, “The Kuala Lumpur deceit.”

Facebooktwittermail

From the archives: What did Israel know in advance of the 9/11 attacks?

By Christopher Ketcham, March 16, 2007

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO — “be on lookout” — was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:

White, 2000 Chevrolet van with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and “was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag”. With guns drawn, the police then “physically removed” Kurzberg, while four other men — two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning — were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights.

They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo’s report, “this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg],’We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'” Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo — falsely — that “we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident”. From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey’s Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle “maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like they’re hooked in with this”, the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.”

The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counter-terrorism teams, who referred to the men as the “high-fivers” for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven lie-detector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it. Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Don’t let Paris attacks stop COP21 climate change deal, pleads Obama

The Guardian reports: Barack Obama has moved to ensure that the Paris attacks do not sabotage a crucial climate change summit in the city next week, urging his fellow leaders to attend and strike a new deal on global warming.

The US president spoke out amid concerns that security fears in Paris coupled with an understandable deflection of French attention away from the imminent two-week summit might undermine chances for a historic agreement to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

“I think it’s absolutely vital for every country, every leader, to send a signal that the viciousness of a handful of killers does not stop the world from doing vital business,” Obama said.

He added that world leaders had to show the murderous adversaries who killed at least 130 people “that we’re not afraid”. And the first chance to do that is next Monday, when the Paris climate change talks, known as COP21, start.

The Paris attacks have cast a deep shadow over COP21 – demonstrations have been banned and security has been stepped up – though none of the 130-plus heads of state and government due to attend has yet pulled out.

France has made a huge play of preparing for the summit, which is supposed to achieve a new global deal to curb emissions from 2020 and prevent the planet from catastrophic overheating. But in the wake of the 13 November attacks, there have been concerns that the French political leadership, and president François Hollande in particular, might have other things on their mind.

Privately, French officials insist they are determined not to let their agenda be set by terrorists. And some observers are hoping that the threat might galvanisethe talks to greater solidarity and urgency. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The refugees and the new war

Michael Ignatieff writes: According to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, since September 11 the US has taken in 784,000 refugees and of these only three have been arrested subsequently on terrorism-related charges.

Fear makes for bad strategy. A better policy starts by remembering a better America. In January 1957, none other than Elvis Presley sang a gospel tune called “There Will Be Peace in the Valley” on The Ed Sullivan Show to encourage Americans to welcome and donate to Hungarian refugees. After the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam, President Ford ordered an interagency task force to resettle 130,000 Vietnamese refugees; and later Jimmy Carter found room in America for Vietnamese boat people. In 1999, in a single month, the US processed four thousand Kosovar refugees through Fort Dix, New Jersey.

These examples show what can be done if the president authorizes rapid refugee clearance in US military installations, and if the US were to process and repatriate refugees directly from the frontline states of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. As Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative has been urging since September, direct processing in the camps themselves will cut down on deaths by drowning in the Mediterranean. If Europe and the United States show them a safe way out, refugees won’t take their chances by paying smugglers using rubber dinghies.

The Obama administration should say yes to the UNHCR appeal to settle 65,000 refugees on an expedited basis. Refugee agencies across the United States — as well as religious communities from all faiths — have said they will take the lead in resettlement and integration. If the Liberal government in Canada can take in 25,000 refugees directly from Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, and process their security clearance at Canadian army bases, the US can do the same with 65,000.

Taking 65,000 people will only relieve a small portion of a refugee flow of 4.1 million, but it is an essential political gesture designed to encourage other allies — Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina — and other immigrant countries to do their part. The strategic goal is to relieve the pressure on the three frontline states. Refugee resettlement by the US also acknowledges a fact that the refugees themselves are trying to tell us: even if peace eventually comes to their tormented country, there will be no life for all of them back home.

Once the US stops behaving like a bemused bystander, watching a neighbor trying to put out a fire, it can then put pressure on allies and adversaries to make up the shortfall in funding for refugee programs run by the UNHCR and the World Food Program. One of the drivers of the exodus this summer was a sudden reduction in refugee food aid caused by shortfalls in funding. Even now these agencies remain short of what they need to provide shelter and food to the people flooding out of Syria.

Now that ISIS has brought down a Russian aircraft over Sinai and bombed civilians in Paris, Beirut, and Ankara, the US needs to use its refugee policy to help stabilize its allies in the region. The presumption that it can sit out the refugee crisis makes a hugely unwise bet on the stability of Jordan, where refugees amount to 25 percent of the total population; and Lebanon, where largely Sunni refugees, who have hardly any camps, are already destabilizing the agonizingly fragile multiconfessional order; and Turkey, where the burdens of coping with nearly two million refugees are driving the increasingly authoritarian Erdoğan regime into the arms of Vladimir Putin. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Roots of ISIS go deeper than the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Since most of the victims of ISIS have been Muslims and since much of the group’s conduct and philosophy are widely viewed as a perversion of Islam, one of the commonly cited pieces of evidence supporting the view that ISIS is not genuinely religious, is the fact that it is run by Iraqi former Baathists. On that basis, the organization’s religious trappings could be seen as merely a cloak for a political project.

In a discussion on the BBC World Service, however, Hassan Hassan and Jason Burke underline that the Baathists in ISIS are indeed religiously driven.

Hassan Hassan: It’s well known that the top echelon of ISIS is dominated by former Baathists who served during the Saddam Hussein regime in one way or another and that also applies to some elements within Jabhat al-Nusra in fact.

For ISIS, the Saddamist elements within ISIS also should be viewed as religious zealots. They are not any more secular Saddamist —

Owen Bennett Jones: I’ve wondered about that. You think they’ve genuinely come around to this jihadi point of view…

Hassan Hassan: There’s no doubt that’s the case. The process of transformation that these people went through is quite clear.

Jason Burke: I was in Iraq in the 90s on a number of occasions and the vision from outside was of the secular Baathist state of Saddam Hussein. Whereas he had already by the mid-90s worked out that the broad shifts in the rest of the Arab world were towards a much more religious posture — culturally, politically, otherwise — and he was tacking very much that way.

I don’t think for a moment that he himself was in any way pious, but he launched a “faith campaign” as he called it. He talked about building the biggest mosque in the world. There was some huge construction under way in Baghdad that I used to go and look at. He talked about writing the Quran in his own blood. There was lots of religious programming on the TV.

So, at the same time of course you had the UN sanctions that were on Iraq. And I remember going to schools and hearing school children singing songs — the normal stuff about fighting the Zionists and so forth, but also against the U.S. and the West and so on. So the process of radicalization, if you like, or Islamization, was well advanced even before 2003 and an invasion that effectively ousted the Sunnis from their position of dominance.

And just a very telling anecdote: When I was in Baghdad after the war I spent a day with an insurgent fighter who was very much in that kind of Sunni nationalist mode and he clearly professed himself to be a devout Muslim, but he still didn’t like what he called the terrorists.

So, there were still all sorts of different currents at that stage, but I think it is certainly the case, as Hassan was saying, that a lot of the senior Baathists and a lot of the society more generally Shia and Sunni, was very much more advanced down the path towards a religious resurgence than people would think.

Amid the ongoing debate about how to tackle ISIS, many observers prefer to sidestep that question by pointing out that ISIS would not have come into existence had it not been for the disastrous choice the U.S. made by invading Iraq in 2003.

Much as this observation is valid, it also has the effect of reinforcing the dogma which portrays the ills of the world as all ultimately being products of America’s excessive military power and the misuse of that power.

Devout believers of this political dogma, especially those who are themselves Americans and who can easily point to the destructive impact of decades of U.S. meddling in global affairs, on this basis commonly conclude that little else really needs to be understood about the world than that America is the problem.

From this perspective, the best the U.S. can do is to get out of the way. If America is the problem, then non-interference is the panacea. Moreover, a common assumption is that even if chaos continues to prevail, U.S. involvement will only make the situation worse and thus we can and should disengage from the affairs of the Middle East.

I have little doubt that those Americans who subscribe to this view see it as a foreign-policy equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, thinking that the only way the U.S. can do no harm in the world is by attending to its domestic concerns and assuming a much more modest role on the global stage.

This sentiment, however, licenses ignorance and the ready acceptance of simplistic analysis — such as much of that now being applied to ISIS. It also facilitates the propagation of conspiracy theories.

But anyone who wants to seriously think about ISIS — to understand how it emerged and how it is evolving — needs to set aside this perspective that insistently overstates American power.

If we only see ISIS as a product of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, we’re not going to see how its emergence needs to be placed in a wider historical perspective: as a product of the failure of Arab secular nationalism and authoritarian rule.

The uprisings of 2011 during the Arab Spring posed a threat to every single government across the region. What has in large part saved most of them from the threat of democracy is the subsequent growth of a threat from terrorism.

ISIS as a reactionary political force has played a major role in shifting the regional debate from a contest between dictatorship and democracy, to a bloody struggle between stability and chaos.

Those who are threatened by ISIS’s expansion nevertheless also benefit from its existence. Stability becomes imperative only when instability is seen as the sole alternative.

This is how Bashar al-Assad, in spite of destroying much of Syria and driving half the population out of their homes, is succeeding in keeping tyranny alive.

Facebooktwittermail

What would the world look like if we defeated ISIS?

Paul Mason writes: Isis attacked civilians irrespective of their position on Islam or imperialist war; it attacked, specifically, symbols of a secular, liberal lifestyle. It did these things because that is what it is fighting: the west, its people, their values and their lifestyle.

In formulating the UK’s response – with or without Nato – the problems are large. The electorate mistrusts offensive military action. It fears – rightly on the basis of the evidence from Iraq and Afghanistan – that expeditionary warfare creates mainly chaos, opening a space for sectarian conflict, jihadism and killing civilians. Western electorates have no taste for the kind of allies we would need to reimpose the old “order” on the territories Isis operates in. Bashar al-Assad and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are not only serial human-rights violators; they have each proved ready to attack those fighting Isis – the Kurds and the secular resistance.

But the biggest challenge comes if you imagine what victory would look like. Isis-held territory being reoccupied by armies that, this time, can withstand the suicide bombings, truck bombs and kidnappings that a defeated Isis would unleash. Mosques and madrassas across the region stripped of their jihadi preachers. A massive programme of economic development focused on human capital – education, healthcare and institution building – as well as physical reconstruction. Nonsectarian, democratic states in Iraq and Syria and an independent Kurdistan state spanning parts of both countries. To achieve this you would need to unleash surveillance, policing and military action on a scale that could only be acceptable to western electorates if carried out with a restraint and accountability not shown in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The alternative is to disengage, contain Isis, deal with the refugees and try to ignore the beheading videos.

In reality, this question is only really posed for three countries that have the power diplomatically and militarily to take significant action: Britain, France and the US.

But that’s not the main question Isis posed last Friday. The main question is the one John Maynard Keynes threw at Britain’s political leadership in 1939: what is the world going to look like when we win?

By answering this, the British and American populations were persuaded to endure total war in the fight against Nazism. So the question now is not how many bombs we want to drop on the HQ of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It is: what do we want at the peace conference, and what will our own society look like after the struggle is over? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

European fighters in ISIS were radical before they were religious

In August, Paul Cruickshank at West Point’s Combatting Terrorism center spoke to Alain Grignard, a senior member of the counterterror unit in the Brussels Federal Police: Are we seeing the emergence of a new breed of jihadi in the West?

Grignard: There’s no doubt there has been a shift. The travel flow we are seeing to Syria is to a significant degree an extension of the “inner-city” gang phenomenon. Young Muslim men with a history of social and criminal delinquency are joining up with the Islamic State as part of a sort of “super-gang.”

Previously we were mostly dealing with “radical Islamists”—individuals radicalized toward violence by an extremist interpretation of Islam—but now we’re increasingly dealing with what are best described as “Islamized radicals.” The young Muslims from “inner-city” areas of Belgium, France, and other European countries joining up with the Islamic State were radical before they were religious. Their revolt from society manifested itself through petty crime and delinquency. Many are essentially part of street gangs. What the Islamic State brought in its wake was a new strain of Islam which legitimized their radical approach. These youngsters are getting quickly and completely sucked in. The next thing they know they’re in Syria and in a real video game. The environment they find themselves in over there is attractive to them. Just like in gangs in Europe, respect is equated with fear. They feel like somebody when they’re over in Syria. If someone crosses you there, you put a bullet in his head. The Islamic State has legitimized their violent street credo. The gang dimension, and the group loyalty that it creates, make the social media messages by Belgian fighters in Syria to their circle back home encouraging attacks especially concerning.

CTC: Are you seeing any links between organized crime and Islamist terror cells?

Grignard: So far the links we’ve uncovered are almost all to unorganized crime rather than organized crime. The link between petty crime and Islamic terror is not of course a new phenomenon. For some time we’ve seen so-called takfiris operating in Europe who justified criminality through their radical interpretation of Islam. Additionally, we saw some young Belgians with a history of delinquency joining up with al-Qa`ida in the tribal areas of Pakistan in the late 2000s. But it has now become a much bigger phenomenon. Islamic State propaganda distributed over social media has had a big accelerating effect.

As we saw with the Brussels Jewish museum shooting and the Paris kosher market attack it’s all too easy for young men with a history of criminality to get access to weapons. And petty criminality has been the main source of funding for terrorist plots since 9/11 in Europe, whether it’s stolen cars, stolen credit cards, or fraudulently applying for bank loans.

Prison radicalization is a big factor in all of this. The message of radical recruiters inside jail to Muslim inmates goes something like this: “You had no choice but to carry out criminal actions because you were part of a discriminated against community. You were only defending yourself. And if you now put yourself in service of the cause by supplying false papers and weapons, not only are these actions legitimate but they will win you redemption and reward in paradise.” It’s a message that is unfortunately resonating. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Surveillance challenge: The transition from struggling identity to mujahid is often fast and furious

Scott Atran and Nafees Hamid write: French counterterrorism surveillance data (FSPRT) has identified 11,400 radical Islamists, 25 percent of whom are women and 16 percent minors — among the minors, females are in a majority. Legal proceedings are now underway against 646 people suspected of involvement in terrorist activity. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls conceded after Friday’s attacks that even keeping full track of those suspected of being prone to violent acts is practically impossible: around-the-clock surveillance of a single individual requires ten to twenty security agents, of which there are only 6,500 for all of France.

Nor is it a matter of controlling the flow of people into France. France’s Center for the Prevention of Sectarian Drift Related to Islam (CPDSI) estimates that 90 percent of French citizens who have radical Islamist beliefs have French grandparents and 80 percent come from non-religious families. In fact, most Europeans who are drawn into jihad are “born again” into radical religion by their social peers. In France, and in Europe more generally, more than three of every four recruits join the Islamic State together with friends, while only one in five do so with family members and very few through direct recruitment by strangers. Many of these young people identify with neither the country their parents come from nor the country in which they live. Other identities are weak and non-motivating. One woman in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois described her conversion as being like that of a transgender person who opts out of the gender assigned at birth: “I was like a Muslim trapped in a Christian body,” she said. She believed she was only able to live fully as a Muslim with dignity in the Islamic State.

For others who have struggled to find meaning in their lives, ISIS is a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that many of them will never live to enjoy. A July 2014 poll by ICM Research suggested that more than one in four French youth of all creeds between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a favorable or very favorable opinion of ISIS. Even if these estimates are high, in our own interviews with young people in the vast and soulless housing projects of the Paris banlieues we found surprisingly wide tolerance or support for ISIS among young people who want to be rebels with a cause — who want, as they see it, to defend the oppressed.

Yet the desire these young people in France express is not to be a “devout Muslim” but to become a mujahid (“holy warrior”): to take the radical step, immediately satisfying and life-changing, to obtain meaning through self-sacrifice. Although feelings of marginalization and outrage may build over a long time, the transition from struggling identity to mujahid is often fast and furious. The death of six of the eight Paris attackers by suicide bombs and one in a hail of police bullets testifies to the sincerity of this commitment, as do the hundreds of French volunteer deaths in Syria and Iraq. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS vs Al Qaeda

The attack in Mali’s capital Bamako has been claimed by Al Mourabitou, a North African militant group linked to Al Qaeda. It was another Al Qaeda affiliate which said it was behind the attacks in Paris in January this year. But Islamic State seems to be eclipsing Al Qaeda. Fawaz Gerges has written about Islamic State and began by discussing Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the leader behind the Bamako attack.

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS women and enforcers in Syria recount collaboration, anguish and escape

Azadeh Moaveni reports: Dua had only been working for two months with the Khansaa Brigade, the all-female morality police of the Islamic State, when her friends were brought to the station to be whipped.

The police had hauled in two women she had known since childhood, a mother and her teenage daughter, both distraught. Their abayas, flowing black robes, had been deemed too form-fitting.

When the mother saw Dua, she rushed over and begged her to intercede. The room felt stuffy as Dua weighed what to do.

“Their abayas really were very tight. I told her it was their own fault; they had come out wearing the wrong thing,” she said. “They were unhappy with that.”

Dua sat back down and watched as the other officers took the women into a back room to be whipped. When they removed their face-concealing niqabs, her friends were also found to be wearing makeup. It was 20 lashes for the abaya offense, five for the makeup, and another five for not being meek enough when detained.

Their cries began ringing out, and Dua stared hard at the ceiling, a lump building in her throat.

In the short time since she had joined the Khansaa Brigade in her hometown, Raqqa, in northern Syria, the morality force had grown more harsh. Mandatory abayas and niqabs were still new for many women in the weeks after the jihadists of the Islamic State had purged the city of competing militants and taken over. At first, the brigade was told to give the community a chance to adapt, and clothing offenses brought small fines. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Confessions of an ISIS spy

(This article originally appeared as a four-part series in the Daily Beast from which I previously posted four extracts.)

Michael Weiss writes: It took some convincing, but the man we’ll call Abu Khaled finally came to tell his story. Weeks of discussion over Skype and WhatsApp had established enough of his biography since last we’d encountered each other, in the early, more hopeful days of the Syrian revolution. He had since joined the ranks of the so-called Islamic State and served with its “state security” branch, the Amn al-Dawla, training jihadist infantry and foreign operatives. Now, he said, he had left ISIS as a defector — making him a marked man. But he did not want to leave Syria, and The Daily Beast was not about to send me there to the kidnap and decapitation capital of the world. I had met him often enough in Syria’s war zones in the past, before the rise of ISIS, to think I might trust him. But not that much. “Lucky for you, the Americans don’t pay ransoms,” he ventured, after the two of us began to grow more relaxed around each other and the question of ISIS hostage-taking inevitably came up. He said he was joking.

I knew from our digital parlays that, if he were telling the truth, he had extraordinary, granular information about the way ISIS operates: who is really in charge, how they come and go, what divisions there are in the ranks of the fighters and the population. Abu Khaled saw firsthand, he said, what amounted to the colonial arrogance of Iraqi and other foreign elites in the ISIS leadership occupying large swaths of his Syrian homeland. He was in a position to explain the banality of the bureaucracy in a would-be state, and the extraordinary savagery of the multiple security services ISIS has created to watch the people, and to watch each other. He could also tell me why so many remain beholden to a totalitarian cult which, far from shrinking from its atrocities and acts of ultra-violence, glories in them.

Abu Khaled had worked with hundreds of foreign recruits to the ISIS banner, some of whom had already traveled back to their home countries as part of the group’s effort to sow clandestine agents among its enemies.

But Abu Khaled didn’t want to leave his wife and an apartment he’d just acquired in the suburbs of embattled Aleppo. He didn’t want to risk the long journey to this Turkish port city. Since he’d bailed out of ISIS, he said, he’d been busy building his own 78-man katiba, or battalion, to fight his former jihadist comrades.

All very interesting, I answered, but still we would have to meet face to face, even if that meant both of us taking calculated risks.

The worst terrorist bombing in modern Turkish history had just been carried out by ISIS operatives in the streets of Ankara, killing over 100 people in a NATO country, reinforcing yet again one of the core ideological conceits of the putative caliphate: Borders are obsolete, and ISIS can get to you anywhere, as it wants everyone to know. There was at least a possibility Abu Khaled was still a spy for ISIS, and that he was part of an operation to collect new hostages. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Conflict makes countries more vulnerable to climate change

Reuters reports: Syria, Libya and Yemen are among the countries whose ability to withstand climate change shocks and stresses has deteriorated most in the past five years, suggesting conflict makes people more vulnerable to climate impacts, researchers said.

The University of Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index (ND-GAIN), released on Tuesday, uses 46 indicators to measure climate change risks to 180 countries and how ready they are to accept investment that could help them cope with more extreme weather and rising seas.

The main contributing factors to the falling scores of the three fragile states in the Middle East and North Africa, riven by armed conflict, are increases in political instability, violence, corruption and poor rule of law, according to the index. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How the Western diet has derailed our evolution

Moises Velesquez-Manoff writes: For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment — the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease — came from a village in the African hinterlands.

A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.

Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

France leaps to Assad’s allies after Paris attacks

Alex Rowell writes: “Tremblez, tyrans,” warns La Marseillaise, the French revolutionary song that, in abridged form, has been the national anthem of the Republic since 1795. “[We are] all soldiers combating you.”

One tyrant unlikely to tremble at these words today is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is one of the few people to have had reason to enjoy the aftermath of last Friday’s attacks by ISIS in Paris. What has transpired in the week since on the French political scene – as it has to varying extents across Europe generally – is tantamount to a bloodless coup d’état for supporters and fellow travelers of Damascus and its allies Moscow and Tehran.

The phrase used by one source in Paris is “the defeat of the [Foreign Minister Laurent] Fabius Doctrine,” and indeed the man who once wrote a Washington Post op-ed arguing that “Assad and Daesh [ISIS] are two sides of the same barbaric coin,” and who just weeks ago said Russian strikes in Syria were killing civilians, on Thursday declared Russian intentions against ISIS were “sincere,” and called on France to “gather all our forces” in alliance with them.

This followed the news that the French military, which in August 2013 was just “hours” from air-striking Syrian regime targets until US President Barack Obama telephoned President François Hollande to call them off, is now formally coordinating the dispatch of an aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean with Russia, whose President Vladimir Putin has instructed his navy to welcome the French crew “as allies.” Perhaps most tellingly, Hollande is combining a trip to Washington on Tuesday to discuss the fight against ISIS with an equivalent visit to Moscow two days later – suggesting, if only symbolically, an unprecedented new parity of relationships. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail