Category Archives: Analysis

ISIS strategies include lines of succession and deadly ringtones

The New York Times reports: The Islamic State’s reclusive leader has empowered his inner circle of deputies as well as regional commanders in Syria and Iraq with wide-ranging authority, a plan to ensure that if he or other top figures are killed, the organization will quickly adapt and continue fighting, American and Iraqi intelligence officials say.

The officials say the leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, delegates authority to his cabinet, or shura council, which includes ministers of war, finance, religious affairs and others.

The Islamic State’s leadership under Mr. Baghdadi has drawn mainly from two pools: veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq who survived the insurgency against American forces with battle-tested militant skills, and former Baathist officers under Saddam Hussein with expertise in organization, intelligence and internal security. It is the merger of these two skill sets that has made the organization such a potent force, the officials say. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS bans Internet access for most residents of Raqqa

Michael Weiss writes: Like all totalitarian movements, ISIS demands not only absolute obedience but captive minds. Everyone must be made complicit in the Big Lie, and there is no truth other than that which has been decreed by the clerics of the caliphate. All information gleaned from Crusader sources is disinformation designed to weaken the resolve of the warriors of Islam.

It’s rather surprising, then, that it took the jihadist army this long to shut off the Internet. But that’s exactly what ISIS has just attempted. Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, one of the founders of the grassroots organization Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, explained to The Daily Beast that WiFi was now “banned” in the city of Raqqa, ISIS’s de facto capital, a diktat that did not require the cutting of coaxial cable lines (because there are none) but rather the elimination of what al-Raqqawi called the “Space Internet.” By this he meant the Broadband Global Area Networks, expensive mobile devices that are roughly the size of books and enable users to log on via satellite after paying for data packages from their local Internet cafe.

Raqqa’s preferred BGAN is the Hughes model, which al-Raqqawi said sells for about $2,000 each. Nevertheless, there are an abundance of Internet cafes equipped with them in Raqqa — some 5,000 by al-Raqqawi’s count — although the cafes are unlike any you’d see in Western cities. [Continue reading…]

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Chattanooga: On the need to fight terror with reason

By David Alpher, George Mason University

In the wake of the Chattanooga shootings, another apparent act of lone-wolf terrorism, the search for answers and for retaliation comes again.

After every such incident, that search is renewed: why did this happen? Is it religion? Poverty? How do we stop it?

But maybe we are asking the wrong questions – sharpening the same tools again and again will do us no good if they weren’t the right tools.

What we need instead is an examination of whether we’re looking at the problem the right way to begin with. That perspective comes from 14 years of studying extremism, terrorism and sectarian conflict in the field – and 14 years studying American responses to terrorism post-9/11.

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Wesley Clark calls for internment camps for ‘radicalized’ Americans

The Intercept reports: Retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Friday called for World War II-style internment camps to be revived for “disloyal Americans.” In an interview with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts in the wake of the mass shooting in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Clark said that during World War II, “if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.”

He called for a revival of internment camps to help combat Muslim extremism, saying, “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”

The comments were shockingly out of character for Clark, who after serving as supreme allied commander of NATO made a name for himself in progressive political circles. In 2004, his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was highly critical of the Bush administration’s excessive response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then, he has been a critic of policies that violate the Geneva Convention, saying in 2006 that policies such as torture violate “the very values that [we] espouse.” [Continue reading…]

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Greek austerity may be an economic tale but children are the human cost

By Panos Vostanis, University of Leicester

Many perspectives have been shared about the social and economic repercussions that the third EU bailout proposal for Greece may have. The impact of these tough austerity measures is yet to unfold for the country, for the other southern states, or indeed Europe as a whole.

But moving beyond a purely economic lens, there is already evidence about the extent of deprivation and youth unemployment of more than 50% during the past five years of the first and second bailout programmes, meaning that the likely effects of the third are easier to predict, at least for this generation.

The links between poverty and a range of risk factors for child mental health problems and related outcomes is well established. Nevertheless, the reality hit home a few weeks ago when I joined the Children’s SOS Villages in Greece in training their prospective new carers, or “mothers” and “aunts” as they are widely called. These carers work in a similar way to foster carers and residential care staff in other welfare systems. The villages were established in Austria after World War II to care for orphan children and since then their model has successfully spread across more than 120 countries.

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Europe’s vindictive privatization plan for Greece

Yanis Varoufakis writes: On July 12, the summit of eurozone leaders dictated its terms of surrender to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who, terrified by the alternatives, accepted all of them. One of those terms concerned the disposition of Greece’s remaining public assets.

Eurozone leaders demanded that Greek public assets be transferred to a Treuhand-like fund – a fire-sale vehicle similar to the one used after the fall of the Berlin Wall to privatize quickly, at great financial loss, and with devastating effects on employment all of the vanishing East German state’s public property.

This Greek Treuhand would be based in – wait for it – Luxembourg, and would be run by an outfit overseen by Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, the author of the scheme. It would complete the fire sales within three years. But, whereas the work of the original Treuhand was accompanied by massive West German investment in infrastructure and large-scale social transfers to the East German population, the people of Greece would receive no corresponding benefit of any sort. [Continue reading…]

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2015 likely to be hottest year ever recorded

The Associated Press reports: Earth dialed the heat up in June, smashing warm temperature records for both the month and the first half of the year.

Off-the-charts heat is “getting to be a monthly thing,” said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. June was the fourth month of 2015 that set a record, she said.

“There is almost no way that 2015 isn’t going to be the warmest on record,” she added.

NOAA calculated that the world’s average temperature in June hit 61.48 degrees Fahrenheit (16.33 Celsius), breaking the old record set last year by 0.22 degrees (.12 degrees Celsius). Usually temperature records are broken by one or two one-hundredths of a degree, not nearly a quarter of a degree, Blunden said. [Continue reading…]

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Organic farms don’t have the tiny carbon footprint they like to tout. But they could

Julius McGee writes: Can organic agriculture mitigate climate change? If you were to simply Google the question – which, being a millennial I have done – you would be led to believe that it does. I love a good underdog story and, like The Little Engine That Could, I think a lot of things are possible through optimism and hard work. But advocates of for organic farming, like the United Nations Food and Drug Administration, think that it can mitigate climate change without the hard work necessary to truly make it happen.

A recent study by the Rodale Institute found that, if all conventional agricultural land started using organic farming practices, such as mulch tilling and seasonal crop rotations, agriculture could – in theory – capture 100% of annual carbon emissions. The study also found that organic farms have lower greenhouse emissions than conventional farms due to avoidance of synthetic fertilizers, which are compounded with nitrogen and require fossil fuels to produce. However, some studies have argued that it conclusion is premature as lower emissions depend on the amount fertilizers used on organic and conventional farms and the amount of food that can be produced per acre of land.

In a research article I published in 2014, regarding the ability of organic farming to reduce greenhouse gas emission in the Agriculture and Human Values, I argued that recent patterns in the organic market in the United States limit the ability of organic farming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu steered U.S. toward war with Iran — the result is a deal he hates

Shibley Telhami writes: Much of the criticism of the Iran nuclear deal has focused on the fact that it is entirely limited to the nuclear issue, which leaves Iran a free hand — and new resources — to continue policies that have angered regional and international players. There is no denying that if Iran plays its hands well and uses the next decade to build its economic and political potential, its regional influence is likely to expand, as is its capacity to do the sort of things that have angered Israel and Gulf Arab states.

The deal’s biggest critic may be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called it “a historic mistake.” The irony is that the urgency with which the Obama administration pursued a nuclear deal was itself a product of Israeli actions. For Netanyahu, the deal was a good example of “be careful what you wish for.”

A little reminder is helpful here. To his credit, President Barack Obama succeeded early in his first term to get international support for sanctioning Iran — one critical reason for Iran’s willingness to take the negotiations more seriously. There have been deliberate and sustained efforts to continue pressuring Iran on multiple levels, including its behavior outside the nuclear issue. [Continue reading…]

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Iran is drama, but Iraq is destiny

Rami G Khouri writes: The dramatic events surrounding the intense negotiations for a deal on Iran’s nuclear industry and the sanctions on it deserve immense attention because of what they tell us about two pivotal dynamics in the Middle East, namely the role of Iran in the region and the world and the more mature attitude of the United States towards countries and movements that it disagrees with, like Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and others. Yet, despite the momentous impact of an agreement on Iran, the dynamic this week that I am watching much more closely is the offensive launched Monday by the Iraqi government to retake Anbar Province from the hands of “Islamic State” (IS). Anbar Province’s convoluted and fast changing condition in the past decade is a sign of wider stresses that plague Iraq, including the province’s successive anti-American, anti-Islamic State in Mesopotamia, and anti-Baghdad rebellions, its gradual loss to IS during the past year, and Baghdad’s current strategy to return it to the fold of the Iraqi state.

What happens in Iraq in the coming months and years matters dearly to the entire Arab world because Anbar’s turbulent recent history and its current condition manifest the most fundamental and crucial issues that still challenge most Arab states, and are likely to determine if they persist as sovereign, stable states. These issues relate to the ability of citizens and state to negotiate a social contract that ensures good governance and equitable participation and life opportunities for all citizens, which in turn would guarantee stability and security, and probably also prosperity, given Iraq’s immense natural and human resources. A social contract that meets these criteria has evaded every single Arab country in the past century — only because not a single Arab country (before Tunisia since 2011) ever attempted to credibly engage its citizens in the process of shaping public life, governance, participation, accountability, national values, and state policies. The test that Iraq and all Arab countries face is how to allow populations composed of several different ethnic and religious groups to work together within the context of the institutions and national integrity of their state. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS is here to stay

Andrew J. Bowen and Courtney Bliler write: As the United States struggles to grapple with a strategy in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is growing more diffuse yet more salient. In Kuwait, a suicide bombing at a Shia mosque on June 26 killed 27 people. In France on that same day, one man was beheaded in an attempt to blow up an American-owned chemical plant. In Tunisia, the massacre of 38 tourists at a beach resort in Sousse has prompted the Tunisian government to declare a state of emergency. ISIS claimed responsibility for all three attacks and is now actively recruiting Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. These events ignite fears that ISIS could gain formal footholds in other states besides Syria, Libya, and Iraq and mobilize sleeper cells to perpetrate remote terrorist attacks.

“The army of terror will be with us indefinitely.” This argument, made by columnists Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan in their new book ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, seems supported by recent events. The book seeks to answer the question: “Where did ISIS come from, and how did it manage to do so much damage in so short a period of time?” Starting from the early life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s organizational ancestor Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the authors paint a detailed historical narrative of the ideological and political evolution of ISIS.

Most importantly, their argument strikes down the assumption often embedded in government statements, media stories, and public sentiment that ISIS’s power is only temporary and that it, like its peers and predecessors, can be resolutely targeted, denied safe haven, defeated and ultimately destroyed. ISIS is not merely a terrorist group, Weiss and Hassan point out. Rather, ISIS is a “conventional military that mobilizes and deploys foot soldiers with a professional acumen that has impressed members of the U.S. military.” It is also a “mafia adept at exploiting decades-old transnational gray markets for oil and arms trafficking.” ISIS is an experienced “intelligence-gathering apparatus.” The extremist group is a polished and effective “propaganda machine.” These differences, Weiss and Hassan argue, distinguish the success of ISIS from the stagnation or failure of its predecessors, namely Al Qaeda. ISIS is here to stay.

Hassan and Weiss note that ISIS, for all its singularity, still borrows a number of traditions from its jihadi progenitors. Many of ISIS’s current trademarks—fondness for televised beheadings, mobilization of fighters through mass media, and fixation on killing Westerners, Shi’ites, and non-Salafist Sunnis alike—find their origins in al-Zarqawi’s fringe interpretation of takfiri ideology, which emphasizes targeting Shia and non-Salafi “apostates” before turning to the United States and Middle Eastern regimes colluding with the “far enemy.” The group has learned from the mistakes of its predecessors and actively creates its own narrative, rather than allowing the foreign press to drive popular perceptions about the group.

The law of unintended consequences is the most common refrain in Weiss and Hassan’s narrative. [Continue reading…]

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Libya: An execution designed to humiliate the local ISIS leader

The Daily Beast reports: In a scene of medieval brutality, a jihadi group fighting to control a strategically important Libyan port captured ISIS’s local commander there, paraded him through the streets amid the taunts of onlookers, and then walked him to a gallows, where he was hanged.

The public spectacle—the details of which have not been previously reported in the Western press—was meant to send a message to local residents: Side with ISIS, and this is your fate. But it also vividly conveyed that, despite ISIS’s territorial gains in Syria and Iraq, the self-proclaimed caliphate does not exercise total control of Libya, a fractured country that it’s trying to use as a safe-haven, training ground, and potential launching point for attacks in North Africa and potentially Europe.

The execution in the eastern city of Derna was described to The Daily Beast by two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity and are familiar with video footage of the shaming and hanging. U.S. government intelligence analysts have also seen the footage, the sources said.

The ISIS commander was marched through the street “Cersei Lannister-style,” one source said, an allusion to the queen mother in Game of Thrones, who, in the series’ recent season finale, is forced to walk naked through the streets to atone for her sins. [Continue reading…]

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Tens of thousands of Syrians, Yemenis, and others seeking refuge in Europe

The Daily Beast reports: At first glance, nothing seems amiss on Greece’s northern border. Corn and wheat are slowly ripening in fields on the frontier with the former Yugoslav Macedonia. Along their edges, the uncultivated dirt bursts forth with poppies and chicory.

At dusk, the scene comes to life: Scores of people emerge from among the stands of poplars and plane trees that line the Vardar River. By nightfall, groups of hikers carrying backpacks and long walking sticks made from stripped branches gather at the borderline, preparing to cross north. They speak little, and only in whispers.

Almost all of them are fleeing war or repression in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Most are trying to get to Germany, where they hope to apply for political or humanitarian asylum. They hope to follow the Vardar valley all the way to Serbia, often walking on a freight track that follows the river’s gentle contours. From there, they plan to walk through Hungary and Austria.

The leader of one such group explained why he was there with his two eldest sons, aged 15 and 16. “I decided to leave Yemen so that I will never see my children fight for al Qaeda or any other side. Sooner or later, one militia or another will approach them.” Hashim, as he identifies himself, has had to leave behind a wife and four younger children he may never see again. [Continue reading…]

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The oceans are warming faster than climate models predicted

John Abraham writes: As I have said many times on this blog, if you want to know how much “global warming” is happening, you really have to be able to measure “ocean warming”. That is because more than 90% of the excess energy coming to the Earth from greenhouse gases goes into the ocean waters. My colleagues and I have a new publication, which better characterizes this heating and also compares climate model predictions with actual measurements. It turns out models have under-predicted ocean warming over the past few decades.

But how would you measure the ocean? How would you make consistent, long-term measurements that would allow people to compare ocean heat from decades ago to today? How would you make enough measurements throughout the ocean so that we have a true global picture?

This is one of the most challenging problems in climate science, and one that my colleagues and I are working hard on. We look throughout measurement history; first measurements were made with canvas buckets, then insulated buckets, and other more progressively complex devices. Many measurements were made along ocean passageways as ships transported goods across the planet. [Continue reading…]

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Arctic sea ice volume showed strong recovery in 2013

The Guardian reports: Ice in the Arctic staged a surprise revival in 2013, bucking the long-term trend of decline, according to the first analysis of the entire ice cap’s volume. The revival was the result of cooler temperatures that year and suggests that, if global warming was curbed, the Arctic might recover more rapidly than previously thought.

The shrinking Arctic ice cap is one of the best known impacts of climate change. The indication that it could be reversible is rare good news for a region where climate change has driven up temperatures far faster than the global average.

The extent of Arctic ice has shrunk by 40% since the late 1970s, when satellite measurements began. But getting comprehensive data on the thickness of the ice, rather than just its area, was difficult until the European Space Agency launched the Cryosat satellite in 2010.

The satellite’s 88 million measurements, analysed in Nature Geoscience, show that from 2010-12 the Arctic ice volume fell by 14%, in step with the warming trend of the last few decades. But in 2013, the ice volume jumped up by 41%. [Continue reading…]

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Saudis cast net for ISIS sympathizers

The New York Times reports: The security forces in Saudi Arabia have carried out a nationwide dragnet in recent months that resulted in the arrest of more than 400 people believed to be connected to the Islamic State jihadist group, the Saudi Interior Ministry said on Saturday.

The people who were arrested were linked to recent attacks inside the kingdom; they planned attacks or monitored potential targets, or used social media to spread extremist ideology and entice new recruits, the Interior Ministry said.

The high number of arrests highlights the profound fears inside the conservative, oil-rich kingdom that the jihadists who control territory in nearby Iraq and Syria will sow further trouble inside Saudi Arabia, as the militants’ leaders have vowed to do.

While Saudi Arabia’s strict version of Islam shares some aspects with the one espoused by the Islamic State, the kingdom’s leaders have denounced the group for its wanton violence and mobilized state clerics to condemn its acts. The Saudi Air Force has also joined an American-led coalition bombing Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria.

But the jihadists have also found some support in parts of Saudi society, and a few thousand Saudi citizens have traveled to Iraq and Syria to join the group. The government also makes little effort to reign in hard-line Sunni clerics who brand Shiites as heretics, as does the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS has fired chemical mortar shells, evidence indicates

The New York Times reports: The Islamic State appears to have manufactured rudimentary chemical warfare shells and attacked Kurdish positions in Iraq and Syria with them as many as three times in recent weeks, according to field investigators, Kurdish officials and a Western ordnance disposal technician who examined the incidents and recovered one of the shells.

The development, which the investigators said involved toxic industrial or agricultural chemicals repurposed as weapons, signaled a potential escalation of the group’s capabilities, though it was not entirely without precedent.

Beginning more than a decade ago, Sunni militants in Iraq have occasionally used chlorine or old chemical warfare shells in makeshift bombs against American and Iraqi government forces. And Kurdish forces have claimed that militants affiliated with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, used a chlorine-based chemical in at least one suicide truck bomb in Iraq this year. [Continue reading…]

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AIPAC forms new lobby group to oppose Iran deal

The New York Times reports: The pro-Israel group Aipac has formed a tax-exempt lobbying group to oppose the nuclear deal reached this week with Iran.

Aipac, an acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has been a vocal critic of President Obama’s policies toward Israel and his negotiations with Iran. The new group, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, was formed with the sole mission of educating the public “about the dangers of the proposed Iran deal,” said Patrick Dorton, a spokesman.

“This will be a sizable and significant national campaign on the flaws in the Iran deal,” Mr. Dorton said.

A person who had been briefed on the plan said the group planned to spend upward of $20 million on the effort. Another person familiar with the campaign said advertising was planned in 30 to 40 states. [Continue reading…]

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