Huffington Post reports: A man widely understood to be one of the chief drivers of the rise of the Islamic State wants the world to work with him following the extremist group’s attacks on Paris Friday.
Syrian President Bashar Assad told reporters Saturday that “mistaken policies” by the French government — a veiled reference to its support for the anti-Assad opposition — are to blame for the assault because they have empowered terrorists. Assad, speaking from his capital of Damascus, offered to work with France and other countries to help stamp out the group, which is also known as ISIS.
Assad conveniently did not mention his own state policy of empowering extremists in Syria, according to reports of his remarks in the pro-Assad and Western media. His regime has avoided direct assaults on the Islamic State, occasionally aided it on the battlefield and released known militants from prison. [Continue reading…]
Category Archives: Analysis
Paris terror attacks: France now faces fight against fear and exclusion
By Aurelien Mondon, University of Bath
The attacks that took place at a series of venues in Paris on November 13 are already the deadliest on French soil since 1945. At least 127 people have been killed in six different places. Reports say that another 100 are in “absolute” critical condition. Police have reported that eight people believed to have carried out the attacks are also dead – seven by blowing themselves up.
It was not as though France had not prepared itself to face such a tragedy. Anti-terrorist measures have been at their highest level in Paris since January, when two brothers attacked the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12.
This was obvious to any bystander over the past few months. Armed soldiers have become part of the Paris experience. Yet the government’s security plan, the plan vigipirate, was not enough to stop what is so far believed to be the most organised and coordinated attack Islamic State has perpetrated outside its territory. Details are still thin on the ground, but IS has claimed responsibility. President François Hollande has blamed the group and made it clear that he sees this as an act of war.
As scenes that were indeed reminiscent of war spread across the centre of Paris, Hollande declared a state of emergency. He announced a series of radical measures such as re-establishing border controls. Schools and universities have been closed.
Meanwhile, there was the blizzard of unconfirmed information that’s to be expected in such a situation. The climate of fear was reinforced by the 24-hour news media’s tendency to not only relate the facts – as messy and incomplete as they are – but to encourage speculation.
Even as the attacks were still underway, commentators could be heard discussing what could happen next and what type of attacks we could, or indeed should, expect. The sense of panic only intensified with the proliferation of amateur videos on social media.
Paris attack witness describes gunman: ‘He was dressed in black, professional, shooting and killing’
The Guardian reports: We were about 20 metres away from the cafe when we heard a firecracker and I looked around and I could see a man, maybe 185cm tall, and the position made it clear he was shooting.
He was standing in a shooting position. He had his right leg forward and he was standing with his left leg back. He was holding up to his left shoulder a long automatic machine gun – I saw it had a magazine beneath it.
Everything he was wearing was tight, either boots or shoes and the trousers were tight, the jumper he was wearing was tight, no zippers or collars. Everything was toned black.
If you think of what a combat soldier looks like, that is it – just without the webbing. Just a man in military uniform, black jumper, black trousers, black shoes or boots and a machine gun. Maybe a woolly hat.
He was left handed and shooting in bursts of three or four shots. It was fully intentional, professional bursts of three or four shots. [Continue reading…]
This is how AK-47s get to Paris
The Daily Beast reports: France outlaws most gun ownership and it’s almost impossible to legally acquire a high-powered rifle such as an AK-47, so where did the weapons in the Nov. 13 terror attack—not to mention the bloody January assault by Islamic terrorists on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo magazine and the 2012 shootings by a militant in Toulouse—come from?
The answer: Eastern Europe, most likely, where the trafficking of deadly small arms is big, shady business. And where local authorities find it difficult to intervene.
The French government and the European Union know they have a foreign gun problem. But as the chain of attacks illustrates, efforts to tamp down on the flow of weapons have, so far, failed to disarm terrorists.
French police reportedly seized more than 1,500 illegal weapons in 2009 and no fewer than 2,700 in 2010. The number of illegal guns in France has swelled by double-digit percentages annually for several years, Al Jazeera reported, citing figures from Paris-based National Observatory for Delinquency.
The seizures likely made just a tiny dent in the pool of available weapons. “The fact that a Kalashnikov or a rocket launcher can be acquired for as little as 300 to 700 Euros in some parts of the E.U. indicates their ready availability for [organized crime groups], street gangs or groups orchestrating high-profile attacks resulting in significant numbers of casualties,” Europol, the E.U.’s law-enforcement agency, explained in a policy brief. [Continue reading…]
In Syria, Assad foes pay high price for failed offensive
The Wall Street Journal reports: Before Russia started its bombing campaign in Syria in September, Syria’s moderate opposition bet a military offensive in the south of the country could change the course of the war and force President Bashar al-Assad to the negotiating table.
That summer offensive collapsed, bolstering Mr. Assad’s regime and depleting the ranks of mainstream rebel forces already struggling to stay relevant in Syria’s future. Mr. Assad and his Iranian and Russian patrons used the defeat to again portray the war as a fight against terrorism.
The failure of the offensive, dubbed “Southern Storm,” together with Russia’s entry into the war, shows the steep odds facing Mr. Assad’s opponents, both on the battlefield and in the next round of diplomacy scheduled for Saturday in Vienna, where foreign ministers from Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and other nations are scheduled to discuss a potential political solution to the Syrian conflict.
The offensive was viewed by moderate rebel factions, their foreign supporters and many civilians in southern Syria as an opportunity to show a viable alternative to rule by Mr. Assad or extremist rebel groups such as Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front that now hold such sway on the battlefield.
By establishing a swath of territory near the capital Damascus that was administered by moderates and served as a sanctuary for civilians, they hoped to pressure Mr. Assad into a political settlement, said commanders for the rebel Southern Front, a coalition of moderate and secular insurgent factions formed in early 2014.
The rebel campaign has attracted little attention in Washington, and a senior defense official said the U.S. hasn’t provided any substantial help. The official said the operation does represent a large, coordinated rebel effort against the Assad regime. “We’re watching very closely and we’re hopeful that we continue to see” such efforts, the official said.
Mr. Assad and his allies appear, for the moment at least, to have regained some battlefield momentum—the regime has mockingly named a Russian-backed ground offensive against rebels “Northern Storm.” [Continue reading…]
Putin’s doomsday machine: A dirty thermonuclear weapon

Jeffrey Lewis writes: On Nov. 9, President Vladimir Putin attended a meeting in Sochi on the state of the Russian defense industry. He gave a pretty boring speech about defeating U.S. missile defenses to some pretty bored-looking generals.
But there was one aspect of the event that was downright terrifying. Russian television cameras caught a page in a briefing book describing the development of a new nuclear weapons system called Status-6.
It’s nothing less than an underwater drone designed to carry a thermonuclear weapon into foreign ports. If detonated, Status-6 would be capable of dousing cities like New York in massive amounts of radioactive fallout.
At the risk of understating things, this project is bat-shit crazy. It harkens back to the most absurd moments of the Cold War, when nuclear strategists followed the logic of deterrence over the cliff and into the abyss. For his part, Putin seems positively nostalgic.
The Russian government reacted to the broadcast of the briefing-book images as if a major security breach had occurred. The offending footage was edited out of future broadcasts, and when asked about the incident, a Russian presidential spokesperson said: “Indeed, some secrets hit the camera lens, so were subsequently removed. We hope that in the future this will not happen again.”
The Russians doth protest too much. As Dr. Strangelove observed of the Soviet doomsday machine, “Of course, the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!” (As an aside, it’s worth noting that Status-6 bears more than a passing resemblance to the weapon in that Stanley Kubrick classic; more on that in a bit.)
This isn’t the first we’re hearing of such a project. Details of a similar Russian nuclear underwater drone, armed with a megaton-class thermonuclear warhead, were reported this fall by Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon. (Whatever you think of Gertz’s right-wing politics, he gets some decent scoops.) Gertz’s sources seemed to be describing the same system revealed this week, though they gave him a different name — Kanyon, rather than Status-6. (That shift in nomenclature shouldn’t come as a surprise: Russian military hardware acquires multiple names and numbers as it goes through research and development.)
The briefing-book slide fills in plenty of details about the project. A Russian attack submarine would be able to carry one or more of the drones, which could be remotely launched into the sea. The specs on the slide seem a little optimistic, but they suggest that once roaming wild, the underwater drone could travel a total distance of 10,000 kilometers, or 5,400 nautical miles. It would be designed in such a way that it could be navigated undetected into a U.S. port where it could then detonate its “combat payload” — a thermonuclear weapon. The system would never come up for air or encounter any pesky American missile defenses.
That’s bad enough, but the slide contains an additional gruesome detail: The purpose of the warhead would be to damage “the important components of the adversary’s economy in a coastal area and [inflict] unacceptable damage to a country’s territory by creating areas of wide radioactive contamination that would be unsuitable for military, economic, or other activity for long periods of time.”
Yes, you’re reading that right. It’s not just a thermonuclear weapon. It’s a dirty thermonuclear weapon. [Continue reading…]
What has filled the void left by the collapse of the Syrian state?
The New York Times reports: After boiling crude oil from the ground near here all day in a metal tank to refine it into diesel, Ali Mohammed braved the fumes to bang the tank’s drain open with a shovel. He stepped back as the dregs oozed into the dirt and burst into flames.
As a column of putrid smoke rose into the sky, he pulled a cigarette from his oil-soaked shirt and explained how the Syrian civil war had turned him into a diesel bootlegger.
He had once worn clean scrubs as a nurse in a state-run hospital, but was fired after rebels took over his village, making all residents suspect, he said. Later, stretched by the war, the government had left the area, leaving its oil up for grabs.
“Before, we saw the wells but we never saw the oil,” Mr. Mohammed said. Now, although its fumes made them sick, the oil helped hundreds of families like his scrape by.
“My wife doesn’t complain about the smell as long as there’s money,” Mr. Mohammed said.
Such scenes dotted the map during a recent 10-day visit in northeastern Syria, along the Turkish border. Everyone here, it seems, has an angle to work, scrambling to fill the void left by the collapse of the Syrian state.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, saw this crossroads as a prime place to expand its so-called caliphate. It was far from the major interests of the Syrian government in Damascus and along good river and road networks to allow the quick movement of fighters and contraband.
But as Kurdish fighters pushed the Islamic State jihadists out, they sought to stamp their vision of a better life onto northern Syria: an autonomous enclave built on the principles — part anarchist, part grass-roots socialist — of a Kurdish militant leader whose face now adorns arm bands and murals across the territory.
Others, like Mr. Mohammed, are just trying to get by: the farmers, herders and smugglers, or those just trying to piece their communities back together after months under the black flag and public punishments of the Islamic State.
The police are gone, and militias have flourished, snarling traffic with checkpoints and covering lampposts with pictures of dead fighters. Shuttered gas stations stand near shacks where fuel is sold in plastic jugs. And abandoned government offices house ad hoc administrations that struggle to keep the lights on. [Continue reading…]
U.S. steps up its attacks on ISIS-controlled oil fields in Syria
The New York Times reports: The United States and its allies have sharply increased their airstrikes against the sprawling oil fields that the Islamic State controls in eastern Syria in an effort to disrupt one of the terrorist group’s main sources of revenue, American officials said this week.
For months, the United States has been frustrated by the Islamic State’s ability to keep producing and exporting oil — what Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter recently called “a critical pillar of the financial infrastructure” of the group — which generates about $40 million a month, or nearly $500 million a year, according to Treasury Department estimates.
While the American-led air campaign has conducted periodic airstrikes against oil refineries and other production facilities in eastern Syria that the group controls, the organization’s engineers have been able to quickly repair damage, and keep the oil flowing, American officials said. The Obama administration has also balked at attacking the Islamic State’s fleet of tanker trucks — its main distribution network — fearing civilian casualties.
But now the administration has decided to increase the attacks and focus on inflicting damage that takes longer to fix or requires specially ordered parts, American officials said.
The first evidence of the new strategy came on Oct. 21, when B-1 bombers and other allied warplanes hit 26 targets in the Omar oil field, one of the two largest oil-production sites in all of Syria. American military analysts estimate the Omar field generates $1.7 million to $5.1 million per month for the Islamic State. French warplanes struck another oil field nearby earlier this week.
The goal of the operation over the next several weeks is to cripple eight major oil fields, about two-thirds of the refineries and other oil-production sites controlled by the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL. [Continue reading…]
The life of ‘Jihadi John’: How one man became the symbol of ISIS
By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham
Dubbed “Jihadi John” by the British media after video footage of his murderous exploits was seen around the world, Mohammed Emwazi became a symbol of a complex conflict – a shorthand for the evil threatening the West as well as those in Syria and Iraq.
On Friday the Pentagon announced that US warplanes carried out an operation in northern Syria targeting the British Islamic State fighter. In London, the UK government said there was a “high degree of certainty” that Emwazi was killed. If confirmed, Emwazi’s death marks the end to a 15-month story of a man who became the face of the barbaric cruelty of IS after his part in the beheading of eight hostages.
Emwazi first became headline news in August 2014, when IS released its first video of a foreign hostage being beheaded – the American journalist James Foley. Beside the kneeling victim stood his executioner, a man shrouded in black, holding a large sword. He addressed US officials in a British accent, stating:
As a government, you have been at the forefront of the aggression towards the Islamic State. You have plotted against us and have gone far out of your way to find reasons to interfere in our affairs. Today, your military air force is attacking us daily in Iraq, your strikes have caused casualties among Muslims.
Sequels quickly followed. American-Israeli journalist Steven Sotloff and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning were killed in a similar fashion.
Turkey haunted by its ghosts
Roger Cohen writes: “We don’t want Turkey to become Syria or Diyarbakir to become Aleppo.”
Those were the words of Tahir Elci, the president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association when I spoke to him after the recent Turkish election here in this troubled city of strong Kurdish national sentiment. On the night of the vote tires smoldered and the tear-gas-heavy air stung. In the center of the old city, rubble and walls pockmarked with bullet holes attest to the violence as police confront restive Kurds.
Elci was detained last month for a day and a half after saying in a television interview that the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., was not a “terrorist organization” but “an armed political organization which has large local support.” An indictment has been brought against him that seeks a prison sentence of more than seven years. The P.K.K. is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
“For a few words about the P.K.K., in which I said some of its operations were terrorist but it was not itself a terrorist organization, there is a lynching campaign against me,” Elci told me. “Yet there is no strategy among the Turkish security forces against the Islamic State, no real mobilization. If ISIS were treated like the P.K.K., it would be very different.” [Continue reading…]
Egypt ‘growing more unstable by the day’
Middle East Eye reports: After a series of crises over the past few weeks, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s government has come under deep domestic and international criticism for repression and inadequacy.
As widespread flooding in Alexandria has brought pressure upon Sisi domestically, his government has drawn global condemnation for its repression of journalists, so soon after his visit to the UK.
At the same time, and only a few weeks after a group of eight Mexican tourists were killed in the Egyptian desert, a Russian plane crashed in Sharm el-Sheikh killing all 224 passengers on board. The incident, suspected to be the result of a terrorist act, has raised questions about Egypt’s ability to maintain domestic security and provide the West a dependable regional partner.
This series of calamities has led to speculation among observers about whether President Sisi’s time in power may be slowly coming to an end.
Political analysts and observers have commented on the increasing instability in the country, saying that the crises highlight the government’s inability to deal with a wave of issues.
“Egypt, which was already unstable, is growing more unstable by the day,” said Shadi Hamid, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “This isn’t surprising.”
“It’s one crisis after another and the Sisi regime has only one response: maximise state power, deny responsibility, and force the media to stay quiet.” [Continue reading…]
Egyptian govt blamed recent floods on… the Muslim Brotherhood. Gotta give them credit for staying on message. #pt pic.twitter.com/Ma3cFqmmnT
— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) November 13, 2015
Rouhani says U.S. needs to apologize to the Iranian people before diplomatic relations can be restored
EA Worldview reports: Amid in-fighting among Iran’s regime over US-supported “sedition”, President Rouhani has called on Washington to apologize again to Tehran for past actions.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in Tehran, Rouhani said that the apology was necessary if the US wants to restore diplomatic relations with Iran:
One day these embassies will re-open but what counts is behavior and the Americans hold the key to this.
If they modify their policies, correct errors committed in these 37 years and apologize to the Iranian people, the situation will change and good things can happen.
In 2000, discussing grievances on both sides, Secretary of State Madeline Albright acknowledged the US “significant role” in the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected government and the American support of the Shah as he “brutally repressed political dissent”. She continued:
As President Clinton has said, the United States must bear its fair share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations. Even in more recent years, aspects of U.S. policy towards Iraq, during its conflict with Iran appear now to have been regrettably shortsighted, especially in light of our subsequent experiences with Saddam Hussein.
The President said the July 14 nuclear deal between Iran and the 5+1 Powers was a good starting point, but cautioned that the US must adhere to the terms: [Continue reading…]
Report: Fossil fuel industry benefits from $20 billion in subsidies in the U.S.
Desmog reports: A new joint investigative report by Oil Change International and the Overseas Development Institute reveals that, in the United States alone, the fossil fuel industry has benefited from over $20 billion per year in government subsidies between 2008-2015.
The percentage of subsidies has skyrocketed during the two terms of the Obama Administration, growing by 35 percent since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The findings are part of a broader report on subsidies given to G20 countries ahead of the forthcoming G20 Leaders Summit in Antalya, Turkey, set to take place November 15-16.
“Since the initial G20 commitment in Pittsburgh six years ago, US subsidies have increased dramatically in [the Obama] Administration, in line with the increase in US oil and gas production,” said Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International. “The President can and must do more to eliminate subsidies at home and to keep carbon in the ground in the time he has left.” [Continue reading…]
The new protest movements are paying a high price for their anti-institutional ethos
Ivan Krastev writes: Shortly after Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup in Paris, five of the greatest political minds in Europe hustled to their writing desks to capture the meaning of the events.
The five were very different people. Karl Marx was a Communist. Pierre Joseph Proudhon an anarchist. Victor Hugo, the most popular French poet of his time, a romantic. And Alexis de Tocqueville and Walter Bagehot were liberals. Their interpretations of the coup were as different as their philosophies. But in the manner of the man who mistook his wife for a hat, they all mistook the end of Europe’s three-year revolutionary wave for its beginning.
Has the Western media made the same mistake in recent years? Are its interpretations of the global wave of popular protests — spontaneous, leaderless, nonviolent, which Thomas Friedman memorably described as the rise of the “square people” — similarly off-base? It seems so: Just take the stunning and unexpected victory of the governing Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., in Turkey’s parliamentary elections last week. [Continue reading…]
Sinai’s stubborn insurgency: Why Egypt can’t win
Omar Ashour writes: The story of the Sinai insurgency goes back to the Israeli withdrawal from the territory in 1982. Since then, Egypt has mostly treated the area as a threat rather than an opportunity; Sinaians are potential informants, potential terrorists, potential spies, and potential smugglers, rather than full Egyptian citizens. According to a cable published by WikiLeaks, a senior Egyptian police official in Sinai once told a visiting American official delegation that “the only good Bedouin in Sinai was the dead Bedouin.”
Cairo’s official policies were designed to control and disempower Sinaians. They included preventing Sinaians from owning land, subjecting them to invasive scrutiny, and limiting any developmental projects. Such policies were ramped up after the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. Back then, several Egyptian security bureaucracies — principally the State Security Investigations (SSI, now renamed the National Security Apparatus) and the General Intelligence Service — believed that northeast Sinai was sending direct logistic support to Palestinian militant groups in Gaza. Since then, repression and attempted co-optation of selected tribal leaders has ruled the day.
Things escalated further after the simultaneous bombings of Taba and Nuweiba, where Israeli tourists used to spend vacation, in October 2004. The SSI had almost no information about the terrorists responsible and therefore conducted a wide crackdown in northeast Sinai. With the help of the Central Security Forces (CSF), the SSI arrested around 3,000 and held women and children hostage until other suspects surrendered. “They electrocuted us in the genitals for hours before asking any questions,” one of the former detainees told me in 2012. “Then the torture continues during and after the interrogations. Many of the young men swore revenge.” [Continue reading…]
ISIS is not competing in a war of ideas
J.M. Berger writes: “The United States is engaged in a war of ideas — and it’s losing.”
This refrain feels modern, but it has echoed through most of American history. The argument that the U.S. is losing a war of ideas or narratives to ISIS is only the latest iteration. As Scott Atran recently wrote at The Daily Beast, the various military campaigns against the Islamic State obscure “a central and potentially determining fact about the fight” — namely that it “is, fundamentally, a war of ideas that the West has virtually no idea how to wage, and that is a major reason anti-ISIS policies have been such abysmal failures.”
The myth that America’s narrative is losing to ISIS’s persists despite the fact that millions of people are fleeing ISIS territories, while mere thousands have traveled to join the group. It persists despite the fact that the Islamic State’s ideological sympathizers make up less than 1 percent of the world’s population, even using the most hysterically alarmist estimates, and the fact that active, voluntary participants in its caliphate project certainly make up less than a tenth of a percent.
In the United States, the notion of a “war of ideas” dates almost as far back as the Revolutionary War, according to Google Ngrams , which searches the text of English-language books that have been digitized. The phrase appeared during the Civil War, in the context of slavery, and returned during World War I. References soared as the United States entered World War II, and became a fixture of American political discourse during the Cold War. The Korean War was a war of ideas; so was Vietnam.
And in every era, the same alarm bell has sounded. [Continue reading…]
Russia’s brazen lying about Syrian refugees
Scott Lucas writes: With the approach of a second round of international talks about Syria’s crisis, Russia has stepped up its deceptive propaganda in support of the Assad regime.
Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov brazenly lied on Wednesday with the declaration, “Since the beginning of Russian operations, according to UN structures, more than one million people have returned to their homes in Syria.”
Meshkov gave no support for his claim, which was featured by Russian State outlet Sputnik News.
The UN has reported that more Syrians have fled their homes because of Russian bombing and the Syrian military’s offensives that Moscow is supporting. On October 26, the number was put at more than 120,000 since the start of the month, including at least 80,000 from Idlib and Hama Province and at least 44,000 from southern Aleppo Province.
The UN later revised the southern Aleppo figure to more than 75,000. The Syrian opposition and activists say the number from Aleppo and other areas is far higher than the UN’s totals. [Continue reading…]
A Russian dirty bomb? Or more dezinformatsiya?
The Daily Beast reports: A stray camera at a meeting of top Russian military leaders has allegedly captured a glimpse of the Kremlin’s possible plan for a bewildering and frightening new weapon — a radiation-scattering “dirty bomb.” One delivered by a drone submarine, which itself rides piggyback on another submarine.
The problem is: We have no way of knowing for sure if this is in fact an existing weapon or simply a media provocation designed to make us think that Russian President Vladimir Putin has got a dangerous new toy in his arsenal. If it’s real, then Russia is the first country we know about to come into possession of a weapon that, while not nearly as destructive as an atomic bomb, could spread lethal radiation over a wide area, rendering it uninhabitable. If the segment is a fake, it’s the latest in a long list of Kremlin media hoaxes.
“It’s true some secret data got into the shot, and it was subsequently deleted,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday about the mysterious footage. “We hope that this won’t repeat.”
The technical aspects of such a device aren’t all that complicated. A dirty bomb is simply any munition containing conventional explosives wrapped in radioactive material. It explodes like any normal munition, but the fragments it scatters are irradiated and thus more dangerous for far longer periods of time than the debris from any standard bomb.
Compared to nuclear weapons, dirty bombs are easy to make — and their use, while highly provocative, is less likely to spark global Armageddon. But they’re still nasty enough that, back in the 1970s, the United States and Russia came pretty close to banning them. [Continue reading…]
