Category Archives: Analysis

How ISIS picks its suicide bombers

Michael Weiss writes: “Suicide bomber is a choice,” said the man we’ll call Abu Khaled, stubbing out a Marlboro Red and lighting a new one. “When you join ISIS, during the clerical classes, they ask: ‘Who will be a martyr?’ People raise their hands, and they go off to a separate group.”

The number of recruits is declining, the former ISIS intelligence officer and trainer had told me here, on the shores of the Bosporus. But, at least in those indoctrination classes, there’s no want of young men looking for a quick trip to Paradise. “They keep volunteering,” said Abu Khaled.

In the wide world outside al-Dawla al-Islamiya, the Islamic State, we have caught occasional glimpses of these incendiary young zealots. There was, for instance, Jake Bilardi, a disaffected Australian 18-year-old, who, judging by the blog he left while still in Melbourne, made a rather seamless transition from Chomskyism to takfirism, before detonating himself at a checkpoint in Iraq.

Abu Abdullah al-Australi, as he went to his death in Ramadi, was convinced that he was carrying out a noble act of self-sacrifice, turning kamikaze for the caliphate. For him, jihad began at home. “The turning point in my ideological development,” he’d written, coincided with the “beginning of my complete hatred and opposition to the entire system Australia and the majority of the world was based upon. It was also the moment I realised that violent global revolution was necessary to eliminate this system of governance and that I would likely be killed in this struggle.” He was right about that last part, if not quite about how his fellow revolutionaries determined his use-value. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Paris attacks suspected mastermind was monitored by Western allies seeking to kill him

The Wall Street Journal reports: An Islamic State operative suspected of helping plan the Paris attacks had been monitored in Syria by Western allies seeking to kill him in an airstrike, but they couldn’t locate him in the weeks before the plot was carried out, two Western security officials said.

The operative, a Belgian citizen named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was convicted in absentia in Brussels earlier this year of recruiting jihadists, was suspected of masterminding a foiled plot to behead police officers, escaped to Syria and was profiled in Islamic State’s online magazine mocking European authorities for their failure to catch him. A year ago, video emerged of him in Syria, smiling as he drove a truck dragging the dead bodies of Islamic State’s opponents tied to the bumper.

Mr. Abaaoud is one of two people who have emerged at the center of a probe into the attacks that killed 129 people on Friday. Both are at large. French and Belgian authorities are also searching for a 26-year-old petty criminal named Salah Abdeslam, who they say rented a car used in the attacks on Friday and is suspected of driving some of the suicide bombers through Paris.

On Monday, dozens of masked Belgian police stormed a house in a predominantly Muslim district in Brussels in their hunt for Mr. Abdeslam.

French prosecutors said police had stopped Mr. Abdeslam and two other men on their way to Brussels just hours after the Friday massacre. But a roadside background check failed to show that Mr. Abdeslam had rented a car in Belgium that was found outside the Bataclan night club, the site of one of the attacks, and police let him go. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The economic fallout from the Paris attacks cannot be measured by stock markets

Andrew Ross Sorkin writes: On Monday, market participants steeled themselves for a steep decline, but the indexes in the United States were up more than 1 percent, and markets in Europe were close to flat.

But that reaction — and the reaction to previous attacks — may belie the true cost of terrorism and, more important, underestimate the potential cost of the Paris killings.

“The aftermath of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks may not in itself prompt extensive market-based volatility,” Citigroup wrote in a report, suggesting that financial markets “treat such developments as idiosyncratic and the unfortunate reality of a world where large-scale carnage has become an almost daily, if sickening, development.”

The report, however, said, “We think this time is different.”

That view is consistent with the opinions of some security experts, who in recent days have said that the attack in Paris represents just one in a continuum.

“We have upgraded the risk of terrorist attacks not only in the Middle East but also in the West, as well as the likelihood of increased international military intervention in IS strongholds in Syria, Iraq and Libya,” Citigroup said, referring to the Islamic State.

The attack in Paris could have far-reaching implications for the future of the eurozone and for companies doing business there. The events in Paris could add to the pressure to close borders in the eurozone. It is also reigniting a debate about privacy and surveillance that could have big implications for technology companies.

Over the weekend, Evercore ISI, the research arm of the investment bank Evercore, published a note to its clients suggesting that the events in Paris could threaten the political support inside Germany for its chancellor, Angela Merkel, who has been a big supporter of open borders, of the Syrian migration and of limiting electronic surveillance on civil liberty grounds.

“The connection between the terror threat and migration flows threatens to rupture the border-free Schengen zone,” the note said, describing the borderless, passport-free zone known as the Schengen area. “It challenges Merkel’s position at home and in the wider E.U., nudging higher the tail risk that Europe’s indispensable leader could fall from power.”

The economic implications of this are significant, to say the least. Evercore ISI even speculated it was possible that Ms. Merkel could ultimately be replaced by Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, who has seemingly been inclined to let Greece leave the eurozone.

Policy makers and investors estimating the cost of terrorism often miss the larger picture: While the stock market quickly rebounded after Sept. 11, the true economic damage may have been as high as $3.3 trillion. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

After Paris attacks, CIA director rekindles debate over surveillance

Scott Shane writes: A diabolical range of recent attacks claimed by the Islamic State — a Russian airliner blown up in Egypt, a double suicide bombing in Beirut and Friday’s ghastly assaults on Paris — has rekindled a debate over the proper limits of government surveillance in an age of terrorist mayhem.

On Monday, in unusually raw language, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, denounced what he called “hand-wringing” over intrusive government spying and said leaks about intelligence programs had made it harder to identify the “murderous sociopaths” of the Islamic State.

Mr. Brennan appeared to be speaking mainly of the disclosures since 2013 of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications by Edward J. Snowden, which prompted sharp criticism, lawsuits and new restrictions on electronic spying in the United States and in Europe.

In the wake of the 129 deaths in Paris, Mr. Brennan and some other officials sounded eager to reopen a clamorous argument over surveillance in which critics of the spy agencies had seemed to hold an advantage in recent years.

“As far as I know, there’s no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused.”

The debate over the proper limits on government dates to the origins of the United States, with periodic overreaching in the name of security being curtailed in the interest of liberty. This era of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in some ways resembles battles that American and European authorities fought in the late 1800s with anarchists who carried out a wave of assassinations and bombings, provoking a huge increase in police powers, said Audrey Kurth Cronin, a historian of terrorism at George Mason University.

Since then, there were the excesses of McCarthyism exploiting fears of Communist infiltration in the 1950s, the exposure of domestic spying and C.I.A. assassination plots in the 1970s, and the battles over torture, secret detention and drone strikes since Sept. 11, 2001. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

With ISIS lasting and expanding, global jihadism is stronger than ever

In Britain’s New Statesman, Shiraz Maher writes: In the early phases of the war, the terrorist threat to the West appeared to be in decline as jihadists made their way to Syria to fight the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. There was little interest in carrying out attacks at home. A naive romanticism surrounded these early fighters. The Guardian’s George Monbiot compared them to volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. British fighters I was interviewing at the time seemed to appreciate this. One man from London with whom I developed a long-standing relationship even asked me to thank Monbiot on his behalf. “It really helped the mujahedin,” he said. This man epitomised the optimism of the early wave of fighters, who could not understand why they were considered a security threat. “Why is the gov [sic] calling us security threat and terrorists akhi [brother]?” he asked. He was sincerely bemused.

Nasser Muthana, the fighter who later boasted about his bomb-making skills, was also keen to reassure the government that Islamic State posed no threat. “Mi6 believe 300 Brits have returned to the UK . . . and how many terror attacks have they done? 0!!” he wrote. “We aren’t interested in you. We want Khilafa [the caliphate].”

The change in IS’s posturing towards the West came after the declaration of the caliphate in late June 2014. From that point the group adopted a more belligerent and expansionist policy, with the first edition of its English-language magazine promising to conquer Rome and defeat “crusaders” around the world.

Its fighters became more brazen. They cheered the beheading of western hostages and boasted of planning attacks in the West. There is a rationale for this: the caliphate cannot have static borders and must be territorially expansionist. Its duty is to confront the West and subjugate it to Islam. [Continue reading…]

I recommend reading the whole article but want to forewarn readers that it includes a particularly graphic account of one of ISIS’s recent atrocities.

Facebooktwittermail

Mindless terrorists? The truth about ISIS is much worse

Scott Atran writes: It’s “the first of the storm”, says Islamic State. And little wonder. For the chaotic scenes on the streets of Paris and the fearful reaction those attacks provoked are precisely what Isis planned and prayed for. The greater the reaction against Muslims in Europe and the deeper the west becomes involved in military action in the Middle East, the happier Isis leaders will be. Because this is about the organisation’s key strategy: finding, creating and managing chaos.

There is a playbook, a manifesto: The Management of Savagery/Chaos, a tract written more than a decade ago under the name Abu Bakr Naji, for the Mesopotamian wing of al-Qaida that would become Isis. Think of the horror of Paris and then consider these, its principal axioms.

Hit soft targets. “Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.”

Strike when potential victims have their guard down. Sow fear in general populations, damage economies. “If a tourist resort that the crusaders patronise … is hit, all of the tourist resorts in all of the states of the world will have to be secured by the work of additional forces, which are double the ordinary amount, and a huge increase in spending.”

Consider reports suggesting a 15-year-old was involved in Friday’s atrocity. “Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach ‘moderation’ (wasatiyyah), security and avoidance of risk.”

Think of the group’s appreciation of focus on cause and effect: “Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralised power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.” Ditto for France, the UK and other allies.

There is a recruitment framework. The Grey Zone, a 10-page editorial in Isis’s online magazine Dabiq in early 2015, describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil, the caliphate and the infidel, which the “blessed operations of September 11” brought into relief. Quoting Bin Laden it said: “The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’, with the actual ‘terrorist’ being the western crusaders.” Now, it said, “the time had come for another event to … bring division to the world and destroy the grey zone”. The attacks in Paris were the latest instalment of this strategy, targeting Europe, as did the recent attacks in Turkey. There will be more, much more, to come. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Confessions of an ISIS defector

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. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

In ISIS interview, suspected Paris-attacks mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud taunted intelligence services

The Guardian reports: In an interview with the Islamic State magazine Dabiq [published in February], Abaaoud boasted that he had been able to plot attacks against the west right under the nose of Belgian intelligence agencies, and that he was in Syria in February.

The militant, also known as Abu Umar al-Baljiki, said he and two fellow jihadis travelled to Belgium to “terrorise the crusaders waging war against the Muslims”.

Posing for pictures holding an Isis flag and the Qu’ran, the bearded Abaaoud said: “We faced a number of trials during the journey. We spent months trying to find a way into Europe, and by Allah’s strength, we succeeded in finally making our way to Belgium,” he told the magazine.

“We were then able to obtain weapons and set up a safe house while we planned to carry out operations against the crusaders. All of this was facilitated for us by Allah. There is no might nor power except by him.”

Abaaoud revealed he was stopped during the journey by “an officer” after a picture of him fighting for Islamic State was published in Belgian media; however the officer “let me go, as he did not see the resemblance,” he said. It is not clear when or where this alleged police intervention took place.

The 27-year-old said the two fellow jihadis killed by Belgian police during the raid in January were “blessed with shahādah [martyrdom], which is what they had desired for so long”.

Asked by the magazine why he became a suspect, Abaaoud said: “The intelligence knew me from before as I had been previously imprisoned by them. After the raid on the safe house, they figured out that I had been with the brothers and that we had been planning operations together. So they gathered intelligence agents from all over the world – from Europe and America – in order to detain me.

“They arrested Muslims in Greece, Spain, France, and Belgium in order to apprehend me … All those arrested were not even connected to our plans! May Allah release all Muslims from the prisons of these crusaders.”

He boasted that he had been able to plan terror attacks against westerners while living in Belgium and being wanted by intelligence agencies when he travelled to Syria in January 2014.

“I was able to leave … despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies,” he told the magazine. “All this proves that a Muslim should not fear the bloated image of the crusader intelligence.

“My name and picture were all over the news yet I was able to stay in their homeland, plan operations against them, and leave safely when doing so became necessary. I ask Allah to accept the fruitful deeds of the shuhadā’ who terrorised the crusaders of America, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Belgium.”

Growing up in the Belgian capital’s Molenbeek district, a multi-ethnic area at the centre of Belgian police counter-terror operations, Abaaoud was described as a happy-go-lucky study who went to one of Brussels’ most prestigious high schools, Saint-Pierre d’Uccle. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Paris attacks: The Molenbeek, Belgium connection

The New York Times reports: Authorities there have arrested several people in Molenbeek, a poor section of Brussels that is home to many Arab immigrants and that has been linked to past terrorist attacks.

Amedy Coulibaly, who carried out the January attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris, is believed to have bought weapons in Molenbeek. Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman who targeted the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels in 2014, killing four people, also reportedly obtained weapons there.

Most recently, Ayoub El Khazzani, a Moroccan who was thwarted in his attempt to attack passengers on a high-speed train to Paris from Amsterdam, is also thought to have lived there at some point.

“I notice that each time there is a link with Molenbeek,” Prime Minister Charles Michel of Belgium said on Sunday. “This is a gigantic problem.”

Investigators have identified three brothers in Molenbeek as crucial suspects in the Paris attacks. Belgian prosecutors identified one, Ibrahim Abdeslam, as the suicide bomber who struck the Comptoir Voltaire cafe. Another brother, Mohamed, was detained Saturday in Molenbeek.

A third, Salah Abdeslam, 26, described as dangerous, is the subject of a widening manhunt by the French. He apparently slipped through their fingers immediately after the attacks.

“He was stopped and his papers were checked,” said Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office. “It was a routine road check. He showed his papers. ”

Asked if there had been anything in his papers to indicate that he should have been arrested, she replied, “Nothing.”

Two vehicles used in the attacks were rented in Belgium last week, the federal prosecutor for Belgium announced on Sunday. One was a gray Volkswagen Polo, abandoned near the Bataclan hall after being used by the three attackers who died there.

The other, a black Seat Leon, was discovered early Sunday morning in the eastern Paris suburb of Montreuil. Inside were three Kalashnikov rifles; there was speculation that the vehicle had been a getaway car for gunmen in central Paris. [Continue reading…]

CNN reports: In an interview with CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank in August, Alain Grignard, a senior member of the counterterror unit in the Brussels federal police and a lecturer on political Islam at the University of Liege, said the perpetrators of the Verviers plot [in January] fitted a typical profile of Belgian jihadists: “men in their early twenties mostly from the Molenbeek district of Brussels moving in circles with a track record of delinquency and petty crime.”

“They were radicalized very quickly, and when they came back from Syria they had no fear of death,” Grignard said in the interview, published in the Combating Terrorism Center’s publication, the CTC Sentinel. Cruickshank is also editor-in-chief of the CTC Sentinel.

“These guys had maybe more experience in gunbattles than our own commandos.”

Like many European jihadists, they were an outgrowth of the “inner-city gang phenomenon,” he said, who had already revolted against Western society through petty crime and delinquency before having their antisocial approach “legitimized” by a radical strain of Islam.

“These youngsters are getting quickly and completely sucked in. The next thing they know they’re in Syria and in a real video game,” he said.

He told Cruickshank that the terror threat in Belgium, fueled by the trail of young jihadists to fight in Syria and Iraq, had “never been higher in all the years I’ve been working on counterterrorism.”

“To give you an idea of the scale of the challenge, in the past two years we’ve charged more people with terrorism offenses than in the 30 years before that,” he said. “It’s impossible to do surveillance on everybody.”

Since 2012, he said, al Qaeda had been “trying to talent spot” Western jihadists on the battlefields of Syria for use in potential operations against the West, while ISIS had appeared more focused on state building. But since the start of the U.S.-led air campaign targeting ISIS, the concern had grown that ISIS would also focus on directly targeting Western countries.

“And the worry is that competition between al Qaeda and the Islamic State will see both groups try to outdo each other with attacks in the West,” he said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why Syrian refugee passport found at Paris attack scene must be treated with caution

The Guardian reports: there are several reasons why it’s worth waiting until all the facts are known before making too strong a link between the attacks and the refugee crisis. The first is a general one: on at least 12 occasions, Isis has actually criticised refugees for fleeing to Europe. “For those who want to blame the attacks on Paris on refugees, you might want to get your facts straight,” wrote Aaron Zelin, an analyst of jihad, in an online commentary about the 12 outbursts. “The reality is, [Isis] loathes that individuals are fleeing Syria for Europe. It undermines [Isis’s] message that its self-styled caliphate is a refuge.” It’s therefore unlikely that the vast majority of Syrians fleeing to Europe are Isis supporters, since their actions are in obvious contravention of the group’s creed.

The second reason for caution is more specific. Investigators still need to verify the Syrian passport was carried by an attacker rather than a dead bystander (one Egyptian passport-holder initially believed to be an assailant turned out to be an injured victim). They will then need to be certain that the passport’s carrier was the same as the passport’s legitimate owner.

It’s possible that it was stolen. Since the possession of a Syrian passport makes it easier to claim asylum in Europe, there is a busy trade in stolen Syrian documents. Syrians interviewed on Greece’s border with Macedonia have described how they were mugged for their passports after leaving the Greek islands as they tried to make their way north through the Balkans. Such passports can be sold on for as much as several thousand euros, in a trade that the EU’s border agency acknowledges is a growing problem. Forgeries are also common; a Dutch journalist recently had one made in the name of his prime minister. [Continue reading…]

CBS News reports: A U.S. intelligence official told CBS News that a name and picture were recovered from the Syrian passport and the individual was not known to intelligence officials.

However, a U.S. intelligence official told CBS News the Syrian passport might be fake. The official said the passport did not contain the correct numbers for a legitimate Syrian passport and the picture did not match the name. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Paris attacks may be a sign of worse to come

The Associated Press reports: Hassan Hassan, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London and co-author of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” said the Islamic State has a twin strategy of state-building within its self-declared caliphate and establishing itself as a “global leader of jihad” in place of al-Qaida. “They wanted to show they are the new al-Qaida … that this is going to be the new organization that everyone has to be part of. The old organization is dying.”

Hassan noted that until recently, many observers did not take IS seriously as a global threat. But their own statements make clear that their ambitions extend beyond the current limits of their “caliphate.” The group has urged supporters around the world to carry out attacks in the West.

In September 2014, the Islamic State group’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, called for lone-wolf attacks on Westerners and any “disbelievers” among countries fighting IS — a term understood to reference not only non-Muslims but anyone who is not a devout Sunni. That statement’s specific targets included any “disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French.” Other statements have threatened to topple Rome — apparently related to the location of the Vatican.

“They always speak about Iraq and Syria as the beginning of something, but with an eye on the West and conquering Rome,” Hassan said.

Online, almost all commentators referred to the new IS principle of retaliating promptly to what militants say are Western attacks against Muslims that that kill hundreds of people including women and children. That taps into frustration in the region over civilian deaths in the wars of recent years — a sentiment that exceeds the ranks of core supporters of jihadism.

A well-known IS ideologue, Gharib al-Ikhwan, commented IS now follows a new strategy: “Any killing in the Islamic nation will be met with an instant, decisive and horrible reaction.”

He mentioned the downing the Russian plane over Sinai, suicide bombing in southern Beirut and Paris attacks. He also considered the shooting in Jordan’s police training center, which killed five people including two Americans, as punishment for America — though there has been no mention yet of the motive of the killing.

Hussein bin Mahmoud, a leading militant ideologue, mocked those who fight Muslims in the region yet “think that we don’t have the right to kill them in a Paris theater, in train stations in London or Madrid or in a building in New York.”

“Sorry Paris for those evil villains who killed peaceful and civilized Parisians while your beautiful planes and your modern bombs kill the wicked Arab children,” he wrote in a piece carried by IS media arm al-Battar.

Observers assess that high-profile attacks involving mass murder of perceived enemies serves multiple goals for IS that go far beyond muscle-flexing. [Continue reading…]

Charlie Winter tweeted five reasons ISIS launched the Paris attacks:

Facebooktwittermail

Vienna talks may have delivered a gift to Assad

Hassan Hassan writes: Over the past five years in Syria, the Obama administration seems to have perfected the art of laying out the moral and practical argument against a decision it would later take.

In 2013, for example, Barack Obama said that the US would be setting a dangerous precedent if it did not respond to the chemical attack in a Damascus suburb that killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including 426 children. That precedent was already set as a botched process to destroy all the regime’s chemical arsenal or deter it from reusing it failed.

Also, US secretary of state John Kerry has repeatedly argued that Bashar Al Assad was a magnet for terrorists – a point that the Syrian president vigorously protested against at the weekend, arguing that it is the West and “especially France” that is to blame for Friday’s attacks in Paris. Mr Kerry has also stated that Mr Al Assad’s removal is vital for any hope for peace in the country.

That, too, has seemingly become a secondary issue in the effort to combat terrorism. Backers of both the opposition and the regime, along with representatives of the EU, the Arab League and the UN, agreed to support a ceasefire between the belligerent parties and on fighting terrorism. There was no mention of Mr Al Assad.

While western officials hailed the Vienna talks as a breakthrough, the statement issued by the participants is one of the most detached statements since the conflict started. Indeed, it is a regressive process that may make matters worse. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘It’s not just men fighting the war in Syria; it is women, too, and they feel forgotten’

The Observer reports: Who would want to be a woman in Aleppo? The female population of Syria’s second city find themselves threatened both by the murderous misogynists of Islamic State (Isis) and the Russian allies of the president, Bashar al-Assad, whose bombing raids mean that now even bad weather offers the city no respite.

“Before, Assad’s forces were not able to drop their bombs when it was raining or cloudy, so those were days we were glad to see,” said Zaina Erhaim, a documentary filmmaker from Aleppo. “But now the Russians have come and they can bomb in these conditions, so there is no relief any more from the death that comes from the sky.”

Amid the carnage and suffering, Erhaim has just completed a documentary that attempts to a tell a story that was in danger of being forgotten: the story of the women who chose not to leave, but to stay and help a city to survive its darkest hour.

“It’s not just men fighting the war in Syria; it is women, too, and they feel forgotten,” she told the Observer. “The women activists are working harder, against more problems, but are forgotten as the west obsesses on Islamic State. It is just Assad against Isis, but we are still here in this ruined place and now we are facing two enemies, Isis and Assad.”

In Erhaim’s film, entitled Syria’s Rebellious Women and made over the past 18 months, she profiles some of her friends who have helped to document the war, deliver supplies to civilians and provide medical services in ways that some within their country now regard as unacceptable behaviour for women. “Our patriarchal traditions now have guns,” she says.

“Despite the insult the word implies, I’m not bothered any more by those who call me hurma, suggesting weakness, dependency, minor, his pleasure tool, his property, his possession,” she said. Erhaim is project co-ordinator and trainer with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in Syria. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS’s French infiltration

Jean-Pierre Filiu writes: I have been warning against a “European 9/11” since the spring of 2014. On May 24 of that year, the French jihadi terrorist Mehdi Nemmouche attacked the Jewish museum in Brussels, killing three people on the spot (a fourth victim would die later from his injuries). Nemmouche was arrested six days later in the French city of Marseille, with a small arsenal of weaponry. He was also identified by Western hostages released by ISIS as one of their most brutal tormentors while in captivity.

The Brussels terror attack took place weeks before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed his “Caliphate” in the Iraqi city of Mosul and months before an American-led coalition started a vigorous campaign of bombing against ISIS targets. One can therefore only fall into the trap of the jihadi propagandists when explaining the Paris massacre as “retaliation” for France’s participation in the anti-ISIS coalition. Moreover, the Brussels-Marseille connection reveals a European pattern that has been manifested in all the subsequent attacks, including that of November 13.

From January 7 to January 9, 2015, three terror attacks targeted Paris and its vicinity with assaults on the Charlie Hebdo journal, a Jewish supermarket, and a policewoman. Seventeen people were murdered, before the French security forces managed to kill the three terrorists, first the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, then Amedy Coulibaly. The Kouachi brothers had been involved in 2004-2005 in the so-called “nineteenth district network” of French radicals who had enlisted in the anti-American jihad in Iraq.

The key figure and inspirational role model of this jihadi network was Boubaker al-Hakim, a French-Tunisian extremist who was protected by Bashar al-Assad’s intelligence apparatus when transiting through Syria from France to Iraq. Hakim was eventually jailed in France from 2005 to 2011 soon after his “nineteenth district” was dismantled. On release from prison he headed to Tunisia where he organized the military branch of the jihadi group “Supporters of the Sharia” (Ansar al-Sharia). He joined ISIS in 2013 and chose the moniker of “Abu Muqatil” to issue repeated threats against “infidel” France from the north-east of Syria. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Can France’s far-right Marine Le Pen use Paris attacks to win power?

The Daily Beast reports: Marine Le Pen, France’s answer to Donald Trump, lost no time cementing her growing power base as leader of the country’s far-right National Front just hours after the Paris attacks when she called for the “annihilation” of Islamist radicals.

Le Pen, whose stump speeches in the depressed cities of northern France include dire warnings of the “giant migratory wave,” told reporters in Paris on Saturday that the country had to clamp down on Islamist fundamentalism, shut down mosques and expel dangerous “foreigners” and “illegal migrants.”

Le Pen is the daughter of notorious xenophone Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972. She forced him out of the party this past summer after his latest racist remarks. This weekened, she was just one of Europe’s far-right figures attempting to make political capital out of the Paris attacks.

Populist leaders around Europe moved quickly to call for an end to allowing the steady stream of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

The Netherlands’ increasingly popular anti-Islamic far-right leader Geert Wilders demanded Dutch authorities close the borders immediately, accusing them of refusing to face reality about the connection between immigrants and terrorism. Poland’s Europe minister Konrad Szymanski said he would no longer agree to accept un-vetted migrants and refugees. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Paris gunmen single out François Hollande, and leave him with few palatable responses

The New York Times reports: For the second time this year, France has found itself singled out for calculated terrorist attacks that have at once stunned and united the country. But perhaps no one was singled out by Friday’s carnage more than the nation’s leader, President François Hollande.

Mr. Hollande was in the soccer stadium that was the attackers’ most spectacular target — a thwarted attempt by suicide bombers to blow themselves up under his very nose.

His name was evoked by the attackers who stormed a rock concert elsewhere in Paris, declaring, according to a witness, that their carnage “was the fault of Hollande. This was the fault of your president. He didn’t have to intervene in Syria.”

It was a strike not only at France but also at his policies, presidency and leadership, at home and abroad.

That messy reality presents Mr. Hollande with a particularly stark quandary: Taking the fight even more aggressively to Syria and Iraq, as he pledged to do on Saturday, carries the risk of inviting still more attacks from the Islamic State and its sympathizers and of fanning simmering divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims in France. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why ISIS attacked Paris — and what happens next

Aris Roussinos writes: At this stage in the war, with the combination of overwhelming US air power and effective local ground forces beginning to show significant results, it actually seems easier for IS to carry out a mass terrorist attack in the center of a major Western capital than it is for them to win a military victory on the ground in either Syria or Iraq.

The Paris attack, like the bombing of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai peninsula that IS has also claimed, is a remarkable inversion of roles in IS’ feud with its progenitor, al Qaeda. IS has sold itself on its ability to take and hold ground in the Middle East, scorning old-school al Qaeda for its reliance on occasional but meaningless spectacular attacks in the West.

But now IS is beginning to crumble on all fronts in both Syria and Iraq, while al Qaeda’s Syrian arm Jabhat al-Nusra has devoted its energies to quiet state-building efforts in the regions it controls

The meticulous coordination and sophistication of the attacks in Paris indicate the plot was hatched well in advance, but perhaps initiated as a sudden response to the group’s military setbacks. The purpose of the attacks is likely twofold: Partly to strike fear into Westerners, and also partly to reassure its core constituency of supporters — including those in the West — that the group’s setbacks are merely a blip. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

After Paris, is it time to ‘smash’ Raqqa, the ISIS capital?

Christopher Dickey writes: As this stunned city tried to come to terms with the horror that struck it the night of Friday the 13th, the word “war” echoed in cafes, on the streets, and in the statements of government officials.

Teams of suicide bombers from the so-called Islamic State, striking at soft targets in the heart of the city and a stadium on the outskirts, had taken their own lives along with those of at least 129 innocents, blasting away with Kalashnikovs at a rock concert and restaurants, and at a soccer game attended by more than 80,000 people, before blowing themselves up.

A statement purportedly from ISIS called the attacks “the Blessed Paris Invasion.” French President François Hollande, more accurately, described them as “an act of war committed by a terrorist army.” And he promised a “merciless” response.

But if this attack in the heart of a major Western capital represents the beginning of a new phase in the combat between ISIS and the civilized world, the question going forward is what kind of war will it be? What can be done not just to control and contain the threat? That approach by Washington and its allies clearly has not worked. There was nothing controlled or contained about what happened here. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail