Category Archives: Analysis

Militant group in Egypt vows loyalty to ISIS

The New York Times reports: They have slaughtered hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and police officers, recruited experienced fighters and staged increasingly sophisticated raids from the Western desert to the Sinai Peninsula. They have beheaded informants and killed an American in a carjacking, say Western officials familiar with intelligence reports.

On Monday, Egypt’s most dangerous militant group, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, also pledged obedience to the organization that calls itself the Islamic State, becoming its first significant international affiliate in the bet that the link will provide new money, weapons and recruits to battle the government in Cairo.

The affiliation could pull the militant group away from its current, almost exclusive focus on attacking Egyptian military and security forces toward the Islamic State’s indiscriminate mass killings of civilians. The pledge alone could undermine the government’s efforts to win the trust of Western tourists, a vital source of hard currency.

The decision injects the Islamic State into the most populous and historically most influential Arab nation, a milestone weeks into an American-led bombing campaign against its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. The endorsement is a major victory for the Islamic State in its rivalry with Al Qaeda — a group with deep Egyptian roots — and could now help recruit fighters and affiliates far beyond Egypt. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s support for net neutrality

(The text of President Obama’s statement on net neutrality.)

Tim Wu, who coined the term “net neutrality,” writes: The President has long been criticized as a compromiser: a man whose cool temperament leads him to always seek out a way to please everyone. But here he appears to have concluded that, with the industry and Republicans already religiously opposed to any form of net-neutrality rule, that there was nothing to be gained from playing the middle. And there’s something else: he’s right. Only a strong net-neutrality rule will actually protect the open Internet.

In short, the White House today is forcing the F.C.C. to take sides instead of reaching for an appeasement that isn’t possible. The cable and telephone companies and the Republican Congress aren’t going to like any version of strong net-neutrality rules. There really is no middle ground here.

Grant Gross writes: While the FCC is an independent agency, Obama’s policy statement takes some heat off FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler as he leans toward reclassifying broadband, said several telecom law experts, both for and against reclassification.

Obama’s new statement may be intended both to nudge the FCC toward broadband reclassification and give Wheeler some space to make it happen, said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group that supports strong net neutrality rules.

“There’s a real issue of historical legacy here,” Black said. “You don’t want to be the president, and I don’t think you want to be the FCC chairman, who would be looked back upon as the ones who ended net neutrality for the Internet.”

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Senator who put Pentagon Papers into public record urges Udall to do same with torture report

Dan Froomkin writes: Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution establishes an absolute free-speech right for members of Congress on the floor or in committee, even if they are disclosing classified material. It states that “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

Within hours of Colorado Senator Mark Udall losing his reelection bid last week, transparency activists were talking about how he should go out with a bang and put the Senate intelligence committee’s torture report into the congressional record. The report is said to detail shockingly brutal abuse of detainees by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration, as well as rampant deception about the program by top officials. But the Obama White House is refusing to declassify even a summary of the report without major redactions. And Republicans take over the Senate in January.

Udall is one of two senators — along with fellow Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden — who have consistently demanded greater transparency from the intelligence community. If he made the report public on the Senate floor or during a hearing, he couldn’t be prosecuted.

The last time any senator did anything nearly so grand was in 1971, when Mike Gravel, two years into his 12 years representing the state of Alaska, entered 4,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record just before the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an injunction on publishing them in the press.

Now, Gravel is urging Udall to join the club. [Continue reading…]

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The Pentagon wants an airborne aircraft carrier to launch drones

Dan Lamothe writes: In the 2012 movie “The Avengers,” Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and the rest of the gang flew on a massive aircraft carrier that carried dozens of planes through the air and disappeared from plain view with the help of a cloaking device. The idea that the U.S. military could develop something similar is still seen as far-fetched, but this much is true: a Pentagon agency has just launched a new effort to develop an airship sure to draw comparisons.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is exploring whether it would be possible to turn an existing plane into a flying fortress capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft. Doing so would extend the range of drones that gather intelligence and perform other missions while saving money and limiting the risks pilots take, DARPA officials said Sunday.

“We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become ‘aircraft carriers in the sky,’” said Dan Patt a DARPA program manager. “We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new [unmanned aerial system] designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies.” [Continue reading…]

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Mirror neurons may reveal more about neurons than they do about people

Jason G. Goldman writes: In his 2011 book, The Tell-Tale Brain, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran says that some of the cells in your brain are of a special variety. He calls them the “neurons that built civilization,” but you might know them as mirror neurons. They’ve been implicated in just about everything from the development of empathy in earlier primates, millions of years ago, to the emergence of complex culture in our species.

Ramachandran says that mirror neurons help explain the things that make us so apparently unique: tool use, cooking with fire, using complex linguistics to communicate.

It’s an inherently seductive idea: that one small tweak to a particular set of brain cells could have transformed an early primate into something that was somehow more. Indeed, experimental psychologist Cecilia Hayes wrote in 2010 (pdf), “[mirror neurons] intrigue both specialists and non-specialists, celebrated as a ‘revolution’ in understanding social behaviour and ‘the driving force’ behind ‘the great leap forward’ in human evolution.”

The story of mirror neurons begins in the 1990s at the University of Parma in Italy. A group of neuroscientists were studying rhesus monkeys by implanting small electrodes in their brains, and they found that some cells exhibited a curious kind of behavior. They fired both when the monkey executed a movement, such as grasping a banana, and also when the monkey watched the experimenter execute that very same movement.

It was immediately an exciting find. These neurons were located in a part of the brain thought solely responsible for sending motor commands out from the brain, through the brainstem to the spine, and out to the nerves that control the body’s muscles. This finding suggested that they’re not just used for executing actions, but are somehow involved in understanding the observed actions of others.

After that came a flood of research connecting mirror neurons to the development of empathy, autism, language, tool use, fire, and more. Psychologist and science writer Christian Jarrett has twice referred to mirror neurons as “the most hyped concept in neuroscience.” Is he right? Where does empirical evidence end and overheated speculation begin? [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s one-state reality

David Remnick writes: Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin, the new President of Israel, is ardently opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. He is instead a proponent of Greater Israel, one Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. He professes to be mystified that anyone should object to the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank: “It can’t be ‘occupied territory’ if the land is your own.”

Rivlin does not have the starched personality of an ideologue, however. He resembles a cheerfully overbearing Borscht Belt comedian who knows too many bad jokes to tell in a single set but is determined to try. Sitting in an office decorated with mementos of his right-wing Zionist lineage, he unleashes a cataract of anecdotes, asides, humble bromides, corny one-liners, and historical footnotes. At seventy-five, he has the florid, bulbous mug of a cartoon flatfoot, if that flatfoot were descended from Lithuanian Talmudists and six generations of Jerusalemites. Rivlin’s father, Yosef, was a scholar of Arabic literature. (He translated the Koran and “The Thousand and One Nights.”) Ruvi Rivlin’s temperament is other than scholarly. He is, in fact, given to categorical provocations. After a visit some years ago to a Reform synagogue in Westfield, New Jersey, he declared that the service was “idol worship and not Judaism.”

And yet, since Rivlin was elected President, in June, he has become Israel’s most unlikely moralist. Rivlin—not a left-wing writer from Tel Aviv, not an idealistic justice of the Supreme Court—has emerged as the most prominent critic of racist rhetoric, jingoism, fundamentalism, and sectarian violence, the highest-ranking advocate among Jewish Israelis for the civil rights of the Palestinians both in Israel and in the occupied territories. Last month, he told an academic conference in Jerusalem, “It is time to honestly admit that Israel is sick, and it is our duty to treat this illness.”

Around Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Rivlin made a video in which he sat next to an eleven-year-old Palestinian Israeli boy from Jaffa who had been bullied: the two held up cards to the camera calling for empathy, decency, and harmony. “We are exactly the same,” one pair read. A couple of weeks ago, Rivlin visited the Arab town of Kafr Qasim to apologize for the massacre, in 1956, of forty-eight Palestinian workers and children by Israeli border guards. No small part of the Palestinian claim is that Israel must take responsibility for the Arab suffering it has caused. Rivlin said, “I hereby swear, in my name and that of all our descendants, that we will never act against the principle of equal rights, and we will never try and force someone from our land.”

Every Israeli and Palestinian understands the context of these remarks. In recent years, anti-Arab harassment and vitriol have reached miserable levels. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who treasures his fragile ruling coalition above all else, is more apt to manipulate the darkling mood to his political advantage than to ease it.

“I’ve been called a ‘lying little Jew’ by my critics,” Rivlin told the Knesset recently. “ ‘Damn your name, Arab agent,’ ‘Go be President in Gaza,’ ‘disgusting sycophant,’ ‘rotten filth,’ ‘lowest of the low,’ ‘traitor,’ ‘President of Hezbollah.’ These are just a few of the things that have been said to me in the wake of events I’ve attended and speeches I’ve made. I must say that I’ve been horrified by this thuggishness that has permeated the national dialogue.” [Continue reading…]

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The Kurds can’t afford to leave Iraq

Luay Al Khatteeb and Ahmed Mehdi write: The federal government in Baghdad believes the Kurds have been playing a double game by demanding their share of federal oil revenues while also signing a string of independent contracts with international oil companies and midsize wildcatters and then pocketing the oil export profits after bypassing Baghdad.

In the past, Iraq and the Kurds have always come back to the negotiating table. This time could be different.

Despite Mr. Barzani’s calls for an independence referendum, K.R.G. officials are still counting on Baghdad to send them money. However, this double strategy is precarious — and the threat doesn’t come from Baghdad, but from Basra in the south.

There is a real risk that Iraq’s southern Shiite provinces — which produce over 90 percent of Iraq’s oil — could copy the Kurds in their call for autonomy. Basra’s political elites do not see why a share of their oil profits should go to the K.R.G. government in Erbil if those funds are only helping to subsidize Kurdish independence ambitions.

The Kurds face a hard choice: either they become part of a viable federal oil revenue sharing system or go their own way. And for the K.R.G., losing revenues from the central government would be irreversible and disastrous. That’s because an independent Kurdistan would make less than $7 billion per year — almost a third less than they received when given just 12 percent of Iraq’s total oil revenues. [Continue reading…]

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Gossip makes human society possible

Julie Beck writes: While gossiping is a behavior that has long been frowned upon, perhaps no one has frowned quite so intensely as the 16th- and 17th-century British. Back then, gossips, or “scolds” were sometimes forced to wear a menacing iron cage on their heads, called the “branks” or “scold’s bridle.” These masks purportedly had iron spikes or bits that went in the mouth and prevented the wearer from speaking. (And of course, of course, this ghastly punishment seems to have been mostly for women who were talking too much.)

Today, people who gossip are still not very well-liked, though we tend to resist the urge to cage their heads. Progress. And yet the reflexive distaste people feel for gossip and those who gossip in general is often nowhere to be found when people find themselves actually faced with a juicy morsel about someone they know. Social topics—personal relationships, likes and dislikes, anecdotes about social activities—made up about two-thirds of all conversations in analyses done by evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. The remaining one-third of their time not spent talking about other people was devoted to discussing everything else: sports, music, politics, etc.

“Language in freely forming natural conversations is principally used for the exchange of social information,” Dunbar writes. “That such topics are so overwhelmingly important to us suggests that this is a primary function of language.” He even goes so far as to say: “Gossip is what makes human society as we know it possible.”

In recent years, research on the positive effects of gossip has proliferated. Rather than just a means to humiliate people and make them cry in the bathroom, gossip is now being considered by scientists as a way to learn about cultural norms, bond with others, promote cooperation, and even, as one recent study found, allow individuals to gauge their own success and social standing. [Continue reading…]

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War on ISIS: Only one of every four strike missions result in airstrikes

The New York Times reports: More than three months into the American-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria, commanders are challenged by spotty intelligence, poor weather and an Iraqi Army that is only now starting to go on the offensive against the Islamic State, meaning that warplanes are mostly limited to hitting pop-up targets of opportunity.

Weekend airstrikes hit just such targets: a convoy of 10 armed trucks of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, near Mosul, as well as vehicles and two of the group’s checkpoints near the border with Syria. News reports from Iraq said the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been wounded in one of the raids, but American officials said Sunday that they were still assessing his status.

In Iraq, the air war is tethered to the slow pace of operations by the Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces. With relatively few Iraqi offensives to flush out militants, many Islamic State fighters have dug in to shield themselves from attack.

The vast majority of bombing runs, including the weekend strike near Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, are now searching for targets of opportunity, such as checkpoints, artillery pieces and combat vehicles in the open. But only one of every four strike missions — some 800 of 3,200 — dropped its weapons, according to the military’s Central Command. [Continue reading…]

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How the NSA began a new form of warfare in Iraq

Shane Harris writes: In a meeting of senior national security officials with President George W. Bush in the spring of 2007, the commander-in-chief authorized the NSA to begin hacking into the phone and computer networks of Iraqi insurgents.

The Iraqi cell phone network was a potential intelligence gold mine. Cell phone contracts were among the first business deals struck in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was driven from power. Wireless was cheaper than wired communications, and cell phones were proliferating. The NSA had access to foreign telecommunications networks through agreements struck with the United States—based carriers that operated them. These companies were paid handsomely — each receiving tens of millions of dollars annually, according to one former company executive — to give the spy agencies privileged access to their networks and the data coursing through them….

After Bush gave his order, daily strikes in Iraq were being carried about by a hybrid military and intelligence unit that brought together soldiers and spies. Their center of operations was a concrete hangar at the Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, which had once housed Iraqi fighter jets. Most of the planes here now were unmanned drones. Their pilots worked alongside NSA hackers, FBI cyber forensics investigators, and special operations forces — the military’s elite commando squads. They all broke off into clusters, working with a seamless, almost organic precision. The hackers stole information from the enemy’s electronic devices and passed it to the analysts, who drew up target lists for the troops. As they went off on raids, the drone pilots watched overhead, giving eye-in-the-sky warning to the troops on the ground, thanks to sophisticated cameras and other sensors developed by the CIA. Sometimes the drone pilots themselves made the kill with a missile shot.

When an attack was finished, the troops gathered more intelligence from the site or from the fighters they captured — cell phones, laptop computers, thumb drives, address books, scraps of paper called “pocket litter” that might contain nothing more than a name, a phone number, or a physical or e-mail address. The troops brought the information back to the base and gave it to the analysts, who fed it into their databases and used data-mining software to look for connections to other fighters either in custody or at large. They paid close attention to how the fighters were getting money for their operations, including sources outside Iraq — in Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

Every day the unit netted between ten and twenty fighters. Whole terrorist networks were illuminated in this way, by U.S. forces who were starting to think and act like their enemy. They structured themselves not in vertical hierarchies but in networks, each member responding to conditions on the ground. They were making it up as they went along, and creating a new kind of warfare. [Continue reading…]

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How Oman became the Middle East’s indispensable nation

Bilal Y. Saab writes: To many Omanis, it is offensive to openly contemplate life after Sultan Qaboos Bin Said, the widely admired albeit absolute monarch who has been receiving medical treatment in Germany since July. But policymakers elsewhere in the world have no choice but to do just that. The 73-year-old Qaboos is said to have colon cancer and rumors suggest he may not be around for too long. The Omani royal court has said he is recovering from successful surgery, and some say that he will return to Oman in time to attend the annual National Day military parade on November 18. But dark clouds of uncertainty nevertheless hover over the country’s future. And given Qaboos’ importance as a strategic partner for the West — and for Washington in particular — it’s only natural to wonder what will transpire after he is no longer in charge in Muscat.

Oman tends to feature far less in international discussions about the Middle East than other countries in the region. But that is mostly a reflection of its deliberate preference for avoiding the spotlight. Indeed, Oman has long had tremendous strategic significance for Washington — although, unusually for the region, not because of its oil. Rather, it provides a rare regional example of domestic tranquility, cosmopolitanism, religious tolerance, and skillful diplomacy.

The country benefits greatly from its geography. Oman controls the southern half of the Strait of Hormuz — which includes the waterway’s main deep-water channels and shipping lanes — through which approximately 30–40 percent of the world’s oil supplies pass (the other half of the Strait is controlled by Iran). Oman also has an extensive coastline that faces the Indian Ocean, which has allowed the country to become a regional trading hub and spurred a more open society. In recent years, Oman has built the second-biggest dry dock in the Middle East at the strategically important town of Duqm, with quays stretching for 2.5 miles. Given its location, Duqm has a vast advantage over Dubai, a rival regional trade powerhouse: Duqm is not along the Strait of Hormuz, which brings enormous savings in insurance and fuel costs because of Iran’s tendency to threaten to close off the waterway for political reasons.

Oman is also an island of religious moderation and tolerance in the region. The country is religiously distinctive from its neighbors: It is the only one in the Arab world with a population that predominantly adheres to Ibadism (a sect of Islam that is neither Sunni nor Shia); it is also the only Arab country that has developed truly tolerant religious traditions. It is common practice in Oman, for example, for different Muslim sects to pray in one another’s mosques. Amid the violent hostility between Sunni and Shia Muslims elsewhere in the Arab world, Oman offers a model of peaceful coexistence. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. ties to terrorism in Iran

The New York Times reports: After a car bombing in southeastern Iran killed 11 Revolutionary Guard members in 2007, a C.I.A. officer noticed something surprising in the agency’s files: an intelligence report, filed ahead of the bombing, that had warned that something big was about to happen in Iran.

Though the report had provided few specifics, the C.I.A. officer realized it meant that the United States had known in advance that a Sunni terrorist group called Jundallah was planning an operation inside Shiite-dominated Iran, two former American officials familiar with the matter recalled. Just as surprising was the source of the report. It had originated in Newark, with a detective for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The Port Authority police are responsible for patrolling bridges and tunnels and issuing airport parking tickets. But the detective, a hard-charging and occasionally brusque former ironworker named Thomas McHale, was also a member of an F.B.I. counterterrorism task force. He had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and developed informants inside Jundallah’s leadership, who then came under the joint supervision of the F.B.I. and C.I.A.

Reading the report, the C.I.A. officer became increasingly concerned. Agency lawyers he consulted concluded that using Islamic militants to gather intelligence — and obtaining information about attacks ahead of time — could suggest tacit American support for terrorism. Without specific approval from the president, the lawyers said, that could represent an unauthorized covert action program. The C.I.A. ended its involvement with Mr. McHale’s informants.

Despite the C.I.A.’s concerns, American officials continued to obtain intelligence from inside Jundallah, first through the F.B.I., and then the Pentagon. Contacts with informants did not end when Jundallah’s attacks led to the deaths of Iranian civilians, or when the State Department designated it a terrorist organization. [Continue reading…]

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Ruthless police chief has become most powerful and feared man in southern Afghanistan

Declan Walsh reports: With his boyish looks and hesitant smile, Lt. Gen. Abdul Raziq cuts a modest figure that belies his reputation as a man of both courage and cruelty: the tough-guy sheriff who kept the Taliban out of Kandahar.

“I don’t think people fear me,” said the 37-year-old police chief of Kandahar Province, speaking in the garden of his tightly guarded home as three giggling children swarmed him. “At least I don’t want them to fear me.”

Yet “fear” is a word frequently associated with General Raziq, a favorite of American officials who has, by most reckonings, become the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan and one of the richest.

Since taking control of security in Kandahar three years ago, he has imposed an uneasy peace on this onetime Taliban citadel — insurgent attacks in the city have fallen by two-thirds, according to Western estimates. His name prompts dread among the Taliban, experts say.

But those gains have been sullied by accounts of widespread human rights abuses by the security forces that have caused his erstwhile American champions to publicly distance themselves from the hard-charging police chief. [Continue reading…]

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Sunni tribes join Shiite militias in battle for Iraqi town, a rare show of sectarian unity

McClatchy reports: Sunni Muslim tribesmen, Shiite militia fighters and Iraqi security forces set out Saturday to recapture a key city in Anbar province and stop Islamic State atrocities against a local tribe in an extraordinary coalition that could stir sectarian tensions or potentially serve as a model for future cooperation against the militants.

The operation to liberate Hit, about 90 miles west of Baghdad, could reshape the situation in Anbar in a way that would impact the mission of U.S. troops who are being deployed to the province from among the additional 1,500 U.S. military advisers the Pentagon said it is sending to Iraq at the end of the year.

“This is a dramatic change,” said Hisham al Hashimi, a prominent Iraqi defense analyst. “We have the Sunni Arab tribes fighting hand in hand with the Shiites.”

The move was preceded by U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State positions on the route of the advance, which was moving slowly because of numerous roadside bombs, according to two tribal leaders reached by telephone. [Continue reading…]

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Yes, ISIS exploits technology. But that’s no reason to compromise our privacy

John Naughton writes: A headline caught my eye last Tuesday morning. “Privacy not an absolute right, says GCHQ chief”, it read. Given that GCHQ bosses are normally sensibly taciturn types, it looked puzzling. But it turns out that Sir Iain Lobban has retired from GCHQ to spend more time with his pension, to be followed no doubt, after a discreet interval, with some lucrative non-exec directorships. His successor is a Foreign Office smoothie, name of Robert Hannigan, who obviously decided that the best form of defence against the Snowden revelations is attack, which he mounted via an op-ed piece in the Financial Times, in the course of which he wrote some very puzzling things.

Much of his piece is a rehearsal of how good Isis has become at exploiting social media. Its members “use messaging and social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, and a language their peers understand. The videos they post of themselves attacking towns, firing weapons or detonating explosives have a self-conscious online gaming quality. Their use of the World Cup and Ebola hashtags to insert the Isis message into a wider news feed, and their ability to send 40,000 tweets a day during the advance on Mosul without triggering spam controls, illustrates their ease with new media. There is no need for today’s would-be jihadis to seek out restricted websites with secret passwords: they can follow other young people posting their adventures in Syria as they would anywhere else.”

All of which is spot-on. From the very beginning, Isis fanatics have been up to speed on this stuff. Which raises an interesting question: how come that GCHQ and the other intelligence agencies failed to notice the rise of the Isis menace until it was upon us? Were they so busy hoovering metadata and tapping submarine cables and “mastering the internet” (as the code name of one of their projects puts it) that they didn’t have time to see what every impressionable Muslim 14-year-old in the world with an internet connection could see? [Continue reading…]

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Physicists prove surprising rule of threes

Natalie Wolchover writes: More than 40 years after a Soviet nuclear physicist proposed an outlandish theory that trios of particles can arrange themselves in an infinite nesting-doll configuration, experimentalists have reported strong evidence that this bizarre state of matter is real.

In 1970, Vitaly Efimov was manipulating the equations of quantum mechanics in an attempt to calculate the behavior of sets of three particles, such as the protons and neutrons that populate atomic nuclei, when he discovered a law that pertained not only to nuclear ingredients but also, under the right conditions, to any trio of particles in nature.

While most forces act between pairs, such as the north and south poles of a magnet or a planet and its sun, Efimov identified an effect that requires three components to spring into action. Together, the components form a state of matter similar to Borromean rings, an ancient symbol of three interconnected circles in which no two are directly linked. The so-called Efimov “trimer” could consist of a trio of protons, a triatomic molecule or any other set of three particles, as long as their properties were tuned to the right values. And in a surprising flourish, this hypothetical state of matter exhibited an unheard-of feature: the ability to range in size from practically infinitesimal to infinite. [Continue reading…]

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How the U.S. incubated ISIS in Camp Bucca

The Washington Post reports: In March 2009, in a wind-swept sliver of Iraq, a sense of uncertainty befell the southern town of Garma, home to one of the Iraq war’s most notorious prisons. The sprawling Camp Bucca detention center, which had detained some of the war’s most radical extremists along the Kuwait border, had just freed hundreds of inmates. Families rejoiced, anxiously awaiting their sons, brothers and fathers who had been lost to Bucca for years. But a local official fretted.

“These men weren’t planting flowers in a garden,” police chief Saad Abbas Mahmoud told The Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid, estimating that 90 percent of the freed prisoners would soon resume fighting. “They weren’t strolling down the street. This problem is both big and dangerous. And regrettably, the Iraqi government and the authorities don’t know how big the problem has become.”

Mahmoud’s assessment of Camp Bucca, which funneled 100,000 detainees through its barracks and closed months later, would prove prescient. The camp now represents an opening chapter in the history of the Islamic State — many of its leaders, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, were incarcerated and probably met there. According to former prison commanders, analysts and soldiers, Camp Bucca provided a unique setting for both prisoner radicalization and inmate collaboration — and was formative in the development of today’s most potent jihadist force. [Continue reading…]

The Soufan Group: It is likely that many of the soon-to-be leaders of what is now the Islamic State (IS) were extremists before they walked through the gates of Camp Bucca, the U.S. military prison in southern Iraq, from 2003 to 2009. But it is certain that they all were when they walked out months or years later.

In Camp Bucca, the reshaping of the future IS took place among the mixing of violent ideological extremists and former Ba’athist military officers who were also no strangers to violence. Along with other circumstances (such as the Syrian civil war and the sectarian rule of Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki), it is this Bucca bond that forms the nucleus of a cancerous cell that has taken over so much of Iraq and Syria.

Apart from IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, even a partial list of former Bucca detainees who would play major roles in reshaping IS is impressive: Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, al-Baghdadi’s number two; Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, senior military leader; Haji Bakr, instrumental in helping al-Baghdadi into power; Abu ‘Abdul Rahman al-Bilawi, responsible for the operational planning that seized Mosul, Iraq; Abu Qasim, in charge of foreign fighters and suicide bombers; Abu Lu’ay, senior military official; Abu Shema, in charge of logistics; Abu Suja, in charge of programs for families of martyrs; and on and on. Some were officers in Saddam Hussein’s military (usually air force or army), the others were teachers, imams, or bureaucrats. But all were dedicated, motivated, and organized members of a smoldering anti-Shi’a group when they left Bucca. [Continue reading…]

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