Category Archives: Analysis

John Muir’s last stand

Tom Butler and Eileen Crist write: In this centennial anniversary of Muir’s death, it is disturbing, but not surprising, that the man and his legacy are suffering the slings and arrows of critics. These attacks are concurrent with an ongoing assault on traditional conservation ideas and tactics from some academics, think tanks, and practitioners affiliated with large nonprofits. This body of thinkers, variously called “new conservationists,” “eco-pragmatists,” or “postmodern greens,” have articulated a set of views about where they think conservation should go in the so-called Anthropocene, the new epoch of human dominion. Wilderness preservation is not on their wish list this Christmas, though corporate partnerships are.

The postmodern greens aim to reorient conservation’s primary focus away from establishing protected areas intended to help prevent human-caused extinctions and to sustain large-scale natural ecosystems. Instead, they advocate sustainable management of the biosphere to support human aspirations, particularly for a growing global economy. If some species go extinct that may be regrettable, goes their thinking, but the bottom line is that nature is resilient. As long as “working landscapes” (places we manipulate to produce commodities) are managed well enough to sustain “ecosystem services” (things like water filtration, soil health, and crop pollination), human welfare can be supported without lots of new protected areas (habitat for other species) getting in the way of economic growth.

Some of the most prominent of these new conservationists have warned against critiquing the techno-industrial growth economy that is everywhere gobbling up wild nature. “Instead of scolding capitalism,” they write, “conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How civilization has given humans brittle bones

Nicholas St. Fleur writes: Somewhere in a dense forest of ash and elm trees, a hunter readies his spear for the kill. He hurls his stone-tipped weapon at his prey, an unsuspecting white-tailed deer he has tracked since morning. The crude projectile pierces the animal’s hide, killing it and giving the hunter food to bring back to his family many miles away. Such was survival circa 5,000 B.C. in ancient North America.

But today, the average person barely has to lift a finger, let alone throw a spear to quell their appetite. The next meal is a mere online order away. And according to anthropologists, this convenient, sedentary way of life is making bones weak. Ahead, there’s a future of fractures, breaks, and osteoporosis. But for some anthropologists, the key to preventing aches in bones is by better understanding the skeletons of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

“Over the vast majority of human prehistory, our ancestors engaged in far more activity over longer distances than we do today,” said Brian Richmond, an anthropologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in a statement. “We cannot fully understand human health today without knowing how our bodies evolved to work in the past, so it is important to understand how our skeletons evolved within the context of those high levels of activity.”

For thousands of years, Native American hunter-gatherers trekked on strenuous ventures for food. And for those same thousands of years, dense skeletons supported their movements. But about 6,000 years later with the advent of agriculture the bones and joints of Native Americans became less rigid and more fragile. Similar transitions occurred across the world as populations shifted from foraging to farming, according to two new papers published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

An integrated model of creativity and personality

Scott Barry Kaufman writes: Psychologists Guillaume Furst, Paolo Ghisletta and Todd Lubart present an integrative model of creativity and personality that is deeply grounded in past research on the personality of creative people.

Bringing together lots of different research threads over the years, they identified three “super-factors” of personality that predict creativity: Plasticity, Divergence, and Convergence.

Plasticity consists of the personality traits openness to experience, extraversion, high energy, and inspiration. The common factor here is high drive for exploration, and those high in this super-factor of personality tend to have a lot of dopamine — “the neuromodulator of exploration” — coursing through their brains. Prior research has shown a strong link between Plasticity and creativity, especially in the arts.

Divergence consists of non-conformity, impulsivity, low agreeableness, and low conscientiousness. People high in divergence may seem like jerks, but they are often just very independent thinkers. This super-factor is close to Hans Eysenck’s concept of “Psychoticism.” Throughout his life, Eysenck argued that these non-conforming characteristics were important contributors to high creative achievements.

Finally, Convergence consists of high conscientiousness, precision, persistence, and critical sense. While not typically included in discussions of creativity, these characteristics are also important contributors to the creative process. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Tunisia: Cheers and doubts

Robin Wright writes: The celebratory honking and shouting on Habib Bourguiba Avenue, the elegant boulevard that runs through Tunisia’s capital, began within seconds of the announcement that Sunday’s election had produced the country’s first democratically elected President—the culmination of an uneasy transition that began, in 2011, with the Jasmine Revolution. In a tight runoff, Beji Caid Essebsi, who recently turned eighty-eight, was declared the winner. He is Tunisia’s most experienced politician; he has served as defense minister, foreign minister, and interior minister. But these positions were held under Tunisia’s two most autocratic leaders, and Essebsi personifies the old guard—known by critics as the Remnants.

Tunisia has emerged as a model for Arab nations. Its three elections since October, held in unheated schools around the country, have been serious and well run—especially compared to the flagrant vote-buying and vote-rigging elsewhere in the Middle East. Tunisians “raised the bar of what is possible,” Ken Dryden, the former Canadian M.P. (and hockey star), who served as an international monitor for the election, said. “They have done their part.” Yet the country, with a population of eleven million, has also provided roughly three thousand fighters—more than any other nation—to the Islamic State and the Al Nusra Front as they sweep through Syria and Iraq. (Tunisia’s government says it has prevented almost nine thousand more from joining.) “Any time these people decide to go to their deaths, it’s because they don’t accept conditions of life. They believe they are rejected by society,” Karim Helali, of Afek, or Horizons, a progressive party favored by Tunisia’s young people, told me.

Essebsi defeated a human-rights activist, Moncef Marzouki, who was appointed to serve as interim President in 2011, while the country wrote a new constitution. The process took three years. During that time, Tunisia grappled with the assassination of two leading politicians, the rise of an extremist underground, attacks on the U.S. Embassy and an American school in Tunis, and thousands of labor strikes. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Is Sony’s crackdown a bigger threat to western free speech than North Korea?

Trevor Timm writes: After a pre-Christmas week full of massive backlash for caving to a vague and unsubstantiated threat by hackers supposedly from North Korea, Sony has reversed course and decided it will allow The Interview to be shown after all – thus all but ending what Senator John McCain absurdly called “the greatest blow to free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime probably”.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s unequivocally good news that North Korea (or whoever hacked Sony) won’t succeed in invoking a ludicrous heckler’s veto over a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen, but there are far greater threats to our freedom of speech here in the United States. For example, Sony itself.

Lost in the will-they-or-won’t-they controversy over Sony’s potential release of The Interview has been the outright viciousness that Sony has unleashed on some of the biggest social-media sites and news outlets in the world. For the past two weeks, the studio has been trying to bully these publishing platforms into stopping the release of newsworthy stories or outright censoring already-public information contained in the hacked emails, despite a clear First Amendment right to the contrary.

On top of Sony’s worrying and legally dubious threats, the most explosive and under-read story inside the hacked trove involves Sony and its close allies at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) attempting to censor the internet on a much larger scale, by reviving a re-tooled version of a highly controversial bill known as Sopa that was scuttled back in 2011 because of widespread fears that it would destroy online free speech as we know it. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why China celebrates Christmas

Robert Foyle Hunwick writes: There’s a joke going around: “Santa Claus was descending into China from the sky. Due to the heavy smog, he fell to the ground, but no one dared help him up. While he was still lying in the snow, his bag was ransacked for presents, and his reindeer and sleigh taken away by the chengguan. Therefore, no Christmas this year.”

While some of the humor needs context—there are digs at China’s notorious bystander effect and much-despised urban-management officials, chengguan — the larger meaning is clear. Ironic jokes about Santa’s routine being disrupted with uniquely Chinese characteristics are a sure sign that, yes, they do know it’s Christmas time in communist China.

Retailers lead the way here: An annual spending season that once focused on Chinese New Year in the winter is now bloated and elongated, stretching from the invented Singles’ Day on November 11 through February, with Christmas as a kind of hump day. Even before December, shops, streets, and hotels begin filling with slightly off-kilter Yuletide scenes: performers in elf suits play traditional cymbals while a grinning plastic Santa Claus toots a saxophone outside his gingerbread cabin. Why the sax? Theorists point to everything from the instrument’s romantic associations with the avuncular Bill Clinton jamming on one in the 1990s, to the smooth alto-sax muzak that’s the preferred soundtrack of Santa’s typical dwelling, the shopping mall.

There’s no sign of Jesus, but in many big cities, you’re still more likely to see Father Christmas’s face than that of “Uncle” Xi Jinping, as state media has characterized the country’s president, presenting a homely, familial image that’s quite at odds with the repressive manner in which he’s coldly eliminated opponents. But Xi is not above the fray himself, visiting Santa’s official cabin in Rovaniemi, Finland in 2010.

The Western religious festival is so trendy, in fact, that it may be the second-most-celebrated festival in China after the Spring Festival among young Chinese, according to research conducted by the China Social Survey Institute (CSSI), which found that 15- to 45-year-olds are the most likely to observe it. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Escape from hell — torture, sexual slavery in ISIS captivity in Iraq

Amnesty International: Torture, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, suffered by women and girls from Iraq’s Yezidi minority who were abducted by the armed group calling itself the Islamic State (IS), highlights the savagery of IS rule.

Escape from Hell – Torture, Sexual Slavery in Islamic State Captivity in Iraq provides an insight into the horrifying abuse suffered by hundreds and possibly thousands of Yezidi women and girls who have been forcibly married, “sold” or given as “gifts” to IS fighters or their supporters. Often, captives were forced to convert to Islam.

The women and girls are among thousands of Yezidis from the Sinjar region in north-west Iraq who have been targeted since August in a wave of ethnic cleansing by IS fighters bent on wiping out ethnic and religious minorities in the area.

The horrors endured in IS captivity have left these women and girls so severely traumatized that some have been driven to end their own lives. Nineteen-year-old Jilan committed suicide while being held captive in Mosul because she feared she would be raped, her brother told Amnesty International.

One of the girls who was held in the same room as Jilan and 20 others, including two girls aged 10 and 12, told Amnesty International: “One day we were given clothes that looked like dance costumes and were told to bathe and wear those clothes. Jilan killed herself in the bathroom. She cut her wrists and hanged herself. She was very beautiful; I think she knew she was going to be taken away by a man and that is why she killed herself.” The girl was among those who later escaped.

Wafa, 27, another former captive, told Amnesty International how she and her sister attempted to end their lives one night after their captor threatened them with forced marriage. They tried to strangle themselves with scarves but two girls sleeping in the same room awoke and stopped them.

“We tied the scarves around our necks and pulled away from each other as hard as we could, until I fainted…I could not speak for several days after that,” she said.

The majority of the perpetrators are Iraqi and Syrian men; many of them are IS fighters but others are believed to be supporters of the group. Several former captives said they had been held in family homes where they lived with their captors’ wives and children. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS female bloggers draw European women to Syria

Brenda Stoter reports: On Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, young Muslim women who live in the so-called Islamic State portray their lives as a sort of Disneyland for Muslims. IS’ recruitment campaign is mostly conducted online, and female jihadists have proved to be some of the best propagandists. They share pictures of their dinners, write blogs about their husbands and encourage others to join them by posting sentimental status updates about the advantages of living in an Islamic state. They even offer to help plan the trips of those interested in joining them.

Photographs of cozy dinners, jars of Nutella and romantic updates about their husbands are not the only things Western women share on social media, however. Those who join IS also learn how to handle an AK-47 (“women here don’t ask for jewelry, they go for a kalash”), excitedly show off such items as suicide belts (“a gift from my husband”) and glorify the murder of opponents by decapitation (“I can watch those video’s over and over again”).

Although most of the women fulfill such traditional roles as taking care of the household and giving birth and raising children, they are also allowed to work. An English-speaking woman who runs the Diary of a Muhajirah wrote on her Facebook page that women can work as teachers, doctors and nurses. “The Islamic State is planning more programs which sisters can benefit from. And if you are single and you don’t want to get married, no one will force you. You can stay in an all-sisters hostel and get a monthly allowance,” she wrote. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. strikes in Syria ease ISIS pressure on moderate rebels

McClatchy reports: Assisted by intelligence from moderate rebel fighters on the ground, the U.S. carried out remarkably accurate airstrikes against Islamic State targets north of Aleppo over the weekend that destroyed bases hidden in farm buildings and killed dozens of militants, rebel officials and local activists said Tuesday.

But because the airstrikes were not coordinated with the U.S.-backed rebels and caught them by surprise, the rebels were unable to advance on the ground, the officials and activists said.

“The rebels didn’t advance,” said one rebel official. “Each party remains where it is.”

“Had there been coordination, there could have been an advance,” a second rebel official told McClatchy. He added: “We’re still wondering what is U.S. strategy against the Islamic State in Syria. They seem in no rush to solve the problem.”

These and other rebel officials insisted on anonymity so as not to jeopardize their relationship with the U.S. government.

There was no question, however, that the airstrikes – the U.S. Central Command said three airstrikes were carried out against 10 targets – also benefited rebel forces. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Cyberwar on North Korea could be illegal

Shane Harris reports: North Korea’s limited connection to the Internet was temporarily severed Monday, just three days after President Barack Obama promised a “proportional” response for what he said was Pyongyang’s brazen hacking of Sony.

It’s too soon to say whether the United States knocked the Hermit Kingdom offline, or persuaded China to do it, or whether the North Koreans did it to themselves. One hacktivist group appears to be taking responsibility for the denial-of-service strike that targeted mostly North Korean government-operated sites.

But the outage has raised the question of what that proportional response would look like, and whether it would be legal. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Rebecca Solnit: Everything’s coming together while everything falls apart

No one would call TomDispatch a traditional website.  Still, we do have our traditions.  Among them, none is more “traditional” — a full decade old at a website that just turned 13 this November — than having Rebecca Solnit end our year.  Sometimes as the year winds down, she’s dreaming of the future, sometimes thinking about the past, sometimes focused on the last few seconds, but always, as was true from her very first moment at this website, she offers some version of hope in the face of a reality that others find almost too grim and obdurate to consider.

As this year ends, Solnit, the author of the 2014 hit book Men Explain Things to Me and an even more recent collection of essays, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, considers humanity’s latest breakthrough into the apocalyptic.  She takes on climate change in a clear-eyed way without losing her sense of hope and purpose.  As ever, it’s an impressive performance and a reminder to all of us that the future remains ours, if only we care to focus on what truly endangers us.  Someday, those who sent the most recent rounds of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere utterly wittingly, with profits on the brain — and I’m talking, of course, about the CEOs of Big Energy (and the various figures who run the energy operations we’ve given names like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and “Saudi America”) — will be remembered as the greatest criminals in history, the true terrorists (or as I’ve called them, “terrarists”) of our age.  It’s one of the jokes of our time that we Americans have literally plowed trillions of dollars into what’s called “national security” in the post-9/11 years without seriously facing climate change, a phenomenon that, if not brought under control, guarantees us a kind of insecurity we’ve never known.  Call it irony or call it idiocy, but call it something.

And let me end 2014, the year that revealed to all of us so much more about the hidden world of surveillance that is ours, with my own New Year’s wish: if I could be granted one relatively modest thing to end 2014, it would be the release from prison of former Army private Chelsea Manning and former CIA Agent John Kiriakou, and the release from exile of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.  For their genuine service, for letting us know what no one else would about the nature of the American world we inhabit, they deserve so unbearably much better from this country than they’ve gotten.  Someday, when those who jailed or exiled them are forgotten or scorned, they will, I’m convinced, be remembered as heroes of our moment.  In the meantime, a guy can hope, can’t he?  I take my hat off to all three of them as 2014 ends. Tom Engelhardt

Everything’s coming together while everything falls apart
The climate for 2015
By Rebecca Solnit

It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again.

In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award she noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Yazidi women tell of being used as sex slaves by ISIS

Paul Wood reports: The Yazidi religious minority community in Iraq says 3,500 of its women and girls are still being held by the so-called Islamic State (IS), many being used as sex slaves. A few have managed to escape and here tell their harrowing stories.

One day in August, Hannan woke to find her family frantically packing. She was taken aback: she had not realised the jihadists calling themselves “the Islamic State” were so close.

Outside, the main street in her hometown of Sinjar was choked. Her family joined other Yazidis “running and crying”, bullets flying overhead, she says.

Rain drums on the tent as she tells me her story, nervously twisting her fingers.

“Hannan” is not her real name. None of the former captives I spoke to could bear to be identified. Hannan is 18 and wants to be a nurse, a future almost snatched away by IS. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS’s threat to the Kurds in Syria and northern Iraq

Jamestown Terrorism Monitor: The Kurds in both Iraq and Syria have managed to attain significant degrees of autonomy in the last two decades. With the advances of the Islamic State organization, the Kurds have also become one of the West’s most prominent allies against the militant Salafist group. This has made them a target of the Islamic State, whose attacks on the Kurds have led to increased pan-Kurdish cooperation and more Western support for the Kurds despite opposition from Turkey.

There are many ideological differences between Kurdish nationalist groups and the Islamic State organization, however, the Islamic State have said that they are not against Kurdish Muslims per se. As Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s spokesman, explained in September: “We do not fight Kurds because they are Kurds. Rather we fight the disbelievers amongst them, the allies of the crusaders and Jews in their war against the Muslims” (Reuters, September 22). The Islamic State organization, like other jihadist groups, has also recruited some Kurds, largely from Iraq, to fight against the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga and the Syrian Kurdish Yekiniyen Parastina Gel (YPG – People’s Protections Units), a Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

In Islamic State operations in both Iraq and Syria, Kurdish jihadists have been used as suicide bombers and foot soldiers and have led operations in Kurdish territories. Reportedly, Abu Khattab al-Kurdi (i.e. the Kurd) was the top commander of the Islamic State’s attack on Kobane. An Islamic State Kurdish bomber, Abd al-Rahman al-Kurdi, also blew himself up in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, on November 19 (AP, November 5). Most of these Kurds have been recruited in the Kurdish Islamist stronghold of Halabja in Iraq, where Kurdish and American forces uprooted Islamist militants in 2003. Recent regional instability has resulted in Kurdish Islamists again posing a threat to the KRG and YPG, now by joining the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Islamophobia on the rise across Germany

Der Spiegel reports: Felix Menzel is sitting in his study in an elegant villa in Dresden’s Striesen neighborhood on a dark afternoon in early December. He’s thinking about Europe. A portrait of Ernst Jünger, a favorite author of many German archconservatives is hung on the wall.

Menzel, 29, is a polite, unimposing man wearing corduroys and rimless glasses. He takes pains to come across as intellectual, and avoids virulent rhetoric like “Foreigners out!” He prefers to talk about “Europe’s Western soul,” which, as he believes, includes Christianity and the legacy of antiquity, but not Islam. “I see serious threats coming our way from outside Europe. I feel especially pessimistic about the overpopulation of Africa and Asia,” says Menzel, looking serious. “And I believe that what is unfolding in Iraq and Syria at the moment is a clear harbinger of the first global civil war.”

Menzel, a media scholar, has been running the Blaue Narzisse (Blue Narcissus), a conservative right-wing magazine for high school and university students, for the last 10 years. His small magazine had attracted little interest until now. But that is about to change, at least if Menzel has his way. “The uprising of the masses that we have long yearned for is slowly getting underway,” he writes on his magazine’s website. “And this movement is moving toward the right.”

In Dresden, at least, the sentiments expressed in the Blaue Narzisse have become more palpable in recent weeks. Protests staged each week on Mondays initially attracted only a few dozen to a few hundred people, but more recently the number of citizens taking to the streets has reached 10,000. The group, which calls itself Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (and goes by the German acronym PEGIDA), demonstrates against economic migrants and a supposed “cultural foreign domination of our country” — whatever is meant by that.

What is going on in Germany, the world’s second most popular destination for immigrants? Has the open-mindedness for which Germans had long been praised now ended? Are we seeing a return of the vague fear of being overwhelmed by immigrants that Germany experienced in the 1990s, when a hostel for asylum seekers was burned down? How large is the new right-wing movement, and will it remain limited to Dresden, or is it spreading nationwide?

So far, protests held under the PEGIDA label in under cities — like Kassel and Würzburg — have attracted only a few hundred people at a time. In fact, some of the protests attracted significantly larger numbers of counter-demonstrators. And while thousands of “patriotic Europeans” aim to take to the streets in Dresden again in the coming days, their counterparts in Germany’s western states are taking a Christmas break. PEGIDA supporters are waiting until after the holidays to return to the streets in cities like Cologne, Düsseldorf and Unna.

Still, many Germans share the protestors’ views, according to a current SPIEGEL poll. Some 34 percent of citizens agreed with the PEGIDA protestors that Germany is becoming increasingly Islamicized. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Libya’s descent into chaos: Warring clans and its impact on regional stability

Jamestown Terrorism Monitor: Since the outbreak of the Libyan revolution in 2011 and the collapse of Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s Jamahiriya (Republic of the Masses), Libya has fallen into a process of constant and ever deeper chaos, which has lately reached a new climax. This conflict, however, has its roots in some specific features characterizing Libya as a “nation-state”: while Libya may be a nation-state on paper, it has yet to become a proper and unified national society. Indeed, the very roots of the revolution in Libya lie in the significant structural, regional and territorial imbalances that have characterized Libya since its establishment and the dominance of parochial and narrow interests.

Indeed, regional and political imbalances – the neglected east and south against the stronger and richer west – were key in setting the landscape in which the Libyan revolution took place. Revolts started in Benghazi and moved east to west, with a long military stalemate occurring in Ras Lanuf, historically a sort of informal cultural border dividing Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Geographically, this was similar to what happened with the 1969 revolution. That revolution was a reaction against the dominance of the east, Benghazi and the royal circle. Among the 12 members of the Revolutionary Command Council, which led the revolution and then acted as the supreme authority in Libya between 1969 and 1975, only four were from the east.

Moreover, another factor explaining the complete collapse of order in post-Qaddafi Libya is the complete lack of any reliable state institution. Despite being the “Republic of the Masses”, Qaddafi’s Jamahiriya was essentially based on his sole, complete personal rule: 42 years under this system left Libya as a sort of institutional desert following the collapse of the regime. The regime overlapped the state and as a result the boundaries, both conceptual and organizational, between the two became soon nonexistent. That explains why, in Libya, the fall of the regime caused the fall of the state, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt where the regimes, not the state, collapsed. However, this lack of institutional capacity must be seen in a longer-term perspective: that was a structural feature of Libya as a nation-state since its foundation. Libya at independence did not have a stable state apparatus and oil and external revenue allowed the rulers to avoid building a bureaucratic state, moving from the rentier patronage of King Idris and the Senussi monarchy to the distributive republic led by Qaddafi. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Did North Korea really attack Sony?

Bruce Schneier writes: I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the U.S. government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it.

Clues in the hackers’ attack code seem to point in all directions at once. The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks. Korean language in the code also suggests a Korean origin, though not necessarily a North Korean one since North Koreans use a unique dialect. However you read it, this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It’s easy to fake, and it’s even easier to interpret it wrong. In general, it’s a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the “evidence” to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.

In reality, there are several possibilities to consider: [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS morale falls as momentum slows and casualties mount

The Financial Times reports: An activist opposed to both the Syrian regime and Isis, and well known to the Financial Times, said he had verified 100 executions of foreign Isis fighters trying to flee the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, Isis’s de facto capital. Like most people interviewed or described in this article, he asked for his name to be withheld for security reasons.

“After the fall of Mosul in June, Isis was presenting itself as unstoppable and it was selling a sense of adventure,” a US official said. He added that the dynamics have changed since the US launched air strikes in August and helped break the momentum of the Isis advance, which has helped stem the flow of foreign recruits — though he warned that the change of mood “doesn’t affect the hardcore people of Isis”.

Analyst Torbjorn Soltvedt, of Verisk Maplecroft, a UK-based risk analysis group, said morale may be taking a hit as militants grapple with the shift from mobile army to governing force.

“Before they were seizing territory, forcing armies in Iraq and Syria to retreat,” he said. “Now they’re basically an occupying force trying to govern.”

After flocking to Syria and Iraq during Isis’s heady days of quick victories, some foreigners may also be questioning the long, gruelling fight ahead.

Mr Solvedt said his organisation has had many reports of foreign fighters, including Britons, contacting family members and state authorities seeking ways to return home.

Isis members in Raqqa said the organisation has created a military police to crack down on fighters who fail to report for duty. According to activists, dozens of fighters’ homes have been raided and many have been arrested. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How ISIS rules

Sarah Birke writes: In late November, there were widespread reports that both the US-led coalition and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus have stepped up their bombing campaign against the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, in eastern Syria. The jihadist organization has long been secretive about where its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and other senior members are based — locals say they move around between Iraq and Syria — but Raqqa is often referred to as the “capital” of ISIS’s self-declared caliphate, and has become its most emblematic city.

To judge from images distributed by the group, Raqqa is an extremist hotbed whose inhabitants crave a radical version of Islam, enjoy public executions, and fervently support their ruthless black-clad overlords; the beheading of James Foley — and of several of the other hostages — was filmed on a hill in its outskirts. Yet there is little about this provincial center of some 500,000 people that might have suggested jihadist or even Islamist tendencies. In fact, Raqqa did not even enter the Syrian conflict until 2013.

Living in Damascus before the war, I had several occasions to visit Raqqa, and I was struck by how ordinary it was. A dusty place far from the country’s other major cities, it offered few amenities and most Syrians complained about it, if they chanced to visit. It was true that the local population, a mixture of tribes and settled Bedouins, were almost entirely Sunni Muslim, but unlike such eastern cities as Hama and Aleppo it didn’t have a tradition of Islamist activism. As a resident of al-Tabqa, a town near Raqqa with a Syrian air base that was captured by ISIS in August, put it: “The irony is we were famous for not praying!”

But Raqqa’s substantial size, location, and relative remove from the main areas of conflict have been critical to ISIS’s aim of creating a large and highly centralized state. The group holds territory that now extends from the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria’s west to Iraq’s Iranian border in the east, from the Syrian-Turkish border in the north down through Iraq’s Anbar province to six miles outside of Baghdad in the south. Although its forces have been pushed back, slowly, from Kobane, on the Syrian-Turkish border, they have also won land elsewhere, including at Heet and Ramadi in Iraq, despite US-led bombardment. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail