Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

How ISIS has advanced Iran’s interests in Iraq

Ali Hashem writes: For years, Iraqi Shiites have been immune to the Iranian copy of Shiism; the chemistry didn’t work. Iranians strained for years during the post-Saddam Hussein era to establish a solid footprint, but they always failed to reach their goals due to differences in mentality, ethnicity, the approach to political Islam and the de facto hostility that ruled the relationship between both nations. That is not to say Iran wasn’t influential, but that it failed all this time to win the hearts and minds of its fellow Shiites.

Iran backed and financed several groups in Iraq, and was the main ally of the former prime minister and now vice president, Nouri al-Maliki, and his Dawa party. The cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was close to them, but not close enough to be their man in Iraq; he had his own way of thinking that agrees and deviates according to his interests. The same applies to many other prominent Iraqi leaders. That’s why there was no Iraqi copy of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. This was until the Islamic State (IS) led by self-titled Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi invaded Mosul and reached only tens of meters from the shrine of the two Askari Imams in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

“That was another day,” an Iranian official with deep understanding of what’s going on in Iraq told me. “Hajj Qasem Soleimani [Quds Force commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and his men showed that Iran cares for Iraq as a nation. Our iconic commander himself went there and fought with the Iraqi volunteers who celebrated his presence,” the official said. “If it wasn’t for Hajj Qasem and his men, Daesh [IS] [would be] today destroying the shrines of the household of the Prophet Muhammad, and that’s why today is another day.” [Continue reading…]

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Support for ISIS stronger in Arabic social media in Europe than in Syria

The Guardian reports: Support for Islamic State (Isis) among Arabic-speaking social media users in Belgium, Britain, France and the US is greater than in the militant group’s heartlands of Syria and Iraq, a global analysis of over 2m Arabic-language online posts has found.

In what is understood to be the first rigorous mass analysis of those for and against the world’s largest jihadist organisation, Italian academics found that in a three-and-a-half month period starting in July, content posted by Arabic-speaking Europeans on Twitter and Facebook was more favourable to Isis than content posted in those countries on the frontline of the conflict.

In Syria, Isis appears to be dramatically losing the battle for hearts and minds with more than 92% of tweets, blogs and forum comments hostile to the militants who have rampaged through the east of the country and western Iraq, seizing large tracts of territory and declaring the establishment of a religious state. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS jumps on #Ferguson

Newsweek reports: Online activists for Islamic State (ISIS) have been using social media coverage of riots in Ferguson, Missouri over the shooting of unarmed black teenager Mike Brown by a white Missouri police officer to promote their cause.

Using the hashtags related to the riots ISIS activists have been reaching out to residents of the predominantly black St. Louis suburb of Ferguson urging them to join the ISIS wave of Islamist violence.

Some of the most popular ISIS social media accounts have been sending messages using the Ferguson hashtag such as “Hey blacks, ISIS will save you” or “The islamic state deal with people according to their religion because this is only one can choose it [sic]”. [Continue reading…]

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U.K. blamed Facebook to cover up the incompetence of its own intelligence services

Seumas Milne writes: It takes some mastery of spin to turn the litany of intelligence failures over last year’s butchery of the off-duty soldier Lee Rigby into a campaign against Facebook. But that’s exactly how David Cameron’s government and a pliant media have disposed of the report by Westminster’s committee of intelligence trusties.

You might have expected Whitehall’s security machine to be in the frame for its spectacular incompetence in spying on the two killers: from filling out surveillance applications wrongly and losing one suspect’s house number, to closing down the surveillance of another – just as the pair were preparing the Woolwich attack.

Centre stage might have been the admission that British intelligence could have been “complicit” in Michael Adebolajo’s torture in Kenya, and tried to cover that up. There is evidence that MI5’s attempts to recruit the Muslim convert on his return to Britain played a part in triggering the killing – though the trusties thought better than to inquire too closely into the matter.

Instead it was the US internet giant, Britain’s prime minister insisted, that was really to blame. Facebook had “blood on their hands”, the Sun declared, as the Daily Mail denounced the Mark Zuckerberg corporation’s “twisted libertarian ideology”.

It’s nonsense, of course, but it gets the authorities off the hook. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. sending A-10 ‘Warthogs’ to attack ISIS

Stars and Stripes reports: An attack aircraft that the Pentagon is trying to get rid of has been deployed to the Middle East to take on the Islamic State.

A squadron-sized element of A-10 Thunderbolts arrived in the region during the week of Nov. 17-21, according to the Air Force. The aircraft were previously being used in Afghanistan.

The move marks the first time the ugly but battle-proven jet, also known as the “Warthog,” has been thrown into the fight against Islamic State, which controls much of Iraq and Syria. The A-10 is a slow, low-flying plane that can unleash massive amounts of firepower against enemy ground forces while conducting close-air-support missions.

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ISIS ‘outbidding’ al Qaeda in South Asia

Karl Kaltenthaler writes: The landscape of violent extremist Islamism is changing in Asia. Al-Qaida, once a growing and potent threat, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is now a shadow of its former self.

In the late 1990s, al-Qaida co-ran Afghanistan with the Taliban. It also had a strong presence in Pakistan and close ties with many of that country’s myriad jihadi groups. Now al-Qaida’s core group is down to a few dozen members. Security operations against the group in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere have cut its numbers and operational capacity substantially. The organization is fighting for survival in Pakistan, its last real refuge in Asia.

The same cannot be said of the Islamic State group. The militant group, which has had spectacular success in Syria and Iraq, is now making inroads in many parts of Asia, but particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. [Continue reading…]

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In Mosul, ISIS struggles to govern

The Washington Post reports: After storming the Iraqi city of Mosul in June, the brutal Islamic State quickly solidified its control. Gunmen enforced its laws, and supportive imams preached at the mosques.

But the jihadists were missing something — doctors. So last month, the Islamic State issued an ultimatum to physicians who had fled: Return to work, or we’ll seize your property and you can never come back.

The Islamic State’s efforts to run Mosul’s health-care system provide a glimpse into its efforts to build a caliphate, or Islamic state, in Iraq and Syria. Despite their victories on the battlefield, the jihadists have struggled as everyday administrators in Mosul, with the city’s hospitals grappling with daily power outages and shortages of medicine. The Sunni fighters have also imposed measures that have alienated staff and compromised the lives of patients, doctors say.

The Islamic State’s rigidity and inexperience may ultimately cost it support in areas where some Sunni residents initially welcomed the group as an alternative to the Shiite-led central government. Already, the Islamic State has been forced to give ground on some of its stringent policies, such as barring male and female doctors from working together. [Continue reading…]

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The refusal to talk to hostage-takers has sucked the U.S. and U.K. into war

Jonathan Littell writes: A few months ago, the New York Times published a lengthy piece of investigative journalism detailing different countries’ policies on paying ransoms for journalists, aid workers or ordinary citizens taken hostage throughout the world, in particular by Islamist militant groups. The article pressed the case for the US and British policy of never – ever – negotiating for hostages, while presenting the covert European policy of paying ransoms as perverse, self-defeating and possibly even criminal. Its headline made this conclusion clear: “By paying ransoms, Europe bankrolls Qaeda terror.”

The article was, of course, researched and written before James Foley, and after him Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning and Peter Kassig – four other US and British citizens their governments refused to negotiate for – had their heads sawn off in front of a video camera by a masked goon claiming allegiance to the so-called Islamic State (Isis), thereby provoking the US to lead a major military intervention against the group.

France and several other countries who did negotiate on behalf of their hostages, and obtained their safe return home, have now also joined the coalition against Isis. These countries obviously believe, unlike the US and the UK, that they have a moral duty to protect their citizens, and that this principle on occasion can lead to unpleasant compromises (it might be added that Israel, a country no one would even remotely consider weak or soft on terrorism, adheres to a similar principle). However, what might be called their hostage “non-policy” (in most cases, paying ransoms and then denying it) has made it impossible for them to debate the matter constructively. While I would never advocate the systematic paying of ransoms, I feel it might be time to bring some nuance to the discussion: things are not simply black and white. [Continue reading…]

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UN: ISIS got up to $45M in ransoms

The Associated Press reports: The Islamic State group which controls a large swath of Syria and Iraq has received between $35 million and $45 million in ransom payments in the past year, a U.N. expert monitoring sanctions against al-Qaida said Monday.

Yotsna Lalji told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee that an estimated $120 million in ransom was paid to terrorist groups between 2004 and 2012.

Kidnapping for ransom “continues to grow,” she said, as demonstrated by the money the extremist group calling itself the Islamic State has collected, between $35 million and $45 million in the past years.

She said in recent years that al-Qaida and its affiliates have made kidnapping “the core al-Qaida tactic for generating revenue.” She pointed to an October 2012 recording in which al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri incites militants worldwide to kidnap Westerners. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Rudaw reports: The Islamic State (ISIS) has taken captive dozens of family members of Iraq’s defense minister in Mosul, a Kurdish official said.

Ismat Rajab, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official for the Mosul area said that on Sunday, ISIS militants arrested 78 family members of Khalid al-Obeidi, Iraq’s defense minister, among them brothers and cousins of the minister.

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The embargo against Rojava

TATORT Kurdistan: Although Rojava (in northern Syria) is a mosaic of languages and cultures, regional and international powers have isolated it both economically and politically—indeed, it is now entirely on its own. To the north, Turkey has walled the region off. To the east, South Kurdistan has lined its veritable ditch with military checkpoints. To the south, the radical Islamist combat units of ISIS and the Al Nusra Front have cut the region off from the rest of Syria.

This embargo is having severe consequences for the people of Rojava.

Taken by itself, Rojava is economically quite a wealthy place. It produces 60 percent of Syria’s wheat and oil, and it raises cotton for the Syrian market. Vis-à-vis Syria it had the status of a colony, in the sense of being a source of raw materials. Rojava doesn’t have processing industries. Thus it grows and harvests grains, but it doesn’t mill them. It doesn’t refine oil but shipped it at great expense to central Syria. That, at least, was the starting situation for Rojava.

The water supply for agriculture comes partly from deep wells, but after the jihadis took over the power stations in Raqqa, those pumps — and hence farming — were threatened. But Rojavans began to use diesel generators to produce power. First they had to develop the technology to generate diesel at all. Rojava’s first winter was very hard–snow fell for the first time in several years, and there was no heating oil. But today many small generators pollute the cities. Only a few of the large ones are available, and no more can be imported because of the embargo.

Turkey and South Kurdistan (the Kurdish region of Iraq) work closely together to maintain the embargo against Rojava. They recognize that Rojavans are attempting, through a grassroots organization, to go beyond capitalist modernity and Western intervention. If the Rojava project should turn out to function, the political and social consequences will ripple throughout the Middle East. That would interfere with the strategy of the NATO states, so they support the embargo. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. air strikes in Syria driving anti-Assad groups to support ISIS

The Guardian reports: US air strikes in Syria are encouraging anti-regime fighters to forge alliances with or even defect to Islamic State (Isis), according to a series of interviews conducted by the Guardian.

Fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Islamic military groups are joining forces with Isis, which has gained control of swaths of Syria and Iraq and has beheaded six western hostages in the past few months.

Some brigades have transferred their allegiance, while others are forming tactical alliances or truces. Support among civilians also appears to be growing in some areas as a result of resentment over US-led military action.

“Isis now is like a magnet that attracts large numbers of Muslims,” said Abu Talha, who defected from the FSA a few months ago and is now in negotiations with other fighters from groups such as the al-Nusra Front to follow suit.

Assam Murad, a fighter from a 600-strong dissident FSA brigade near Homs said: “There’s no way we would fight Isis after the US military campaign against them.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS threatens last hope of Christians in Iraq

Patrick Cockburn reports: Two years ago Jalal Yako, a Syriac Catholic priest, returned to his home town of Qaraqosh to persuade members of his community to stay in Iraq and not to emigrate because of the violence directed against them.

“I was in Italy for 18 years, and when I came back here my mission was to get Christians to stay here,” he says. “The Pope in Lebanon two years ago had established a mission to get Christians in the East to stay here.”

Father Yako laboured among the Syriac Catholics, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, who had seen the number of Christians in Iraq decline from over one million at the time of the American invasion in 2003 to about 250,000 today. He sought to convince people in Qaraqosh, an overwhelmingly Syriac Catholic town, that they had a future in Iraq and should not emigrate to the US, Australia or anywhere else that would accept them. His task was not easy, because Iraqi Christians have been frequent victims of murder, kidnapping and robbery.

But in the past six months Father Yako has changed his mind, and he now believes that, after 2,000 years of history, Christians must leave Iraq. Speaking at the entrance of a half-built mall in the Kurdish capital Irbil where 1,650 people from Qaraqosh have taken refuge, he said that “everything has changed since the coming of Daesh (the Arabic acronym for Islamic State). We should flee. There is nothing for us here.” When Islamic State (Isis) fighters captured Qaraqosh on 7 August, all the town’s 50,000 or so Syriac Catholics had to run for their lives and lost all their possessions.

Many now huddle in dark little prefabricated rooms provided by the UN High Commission for Refugees amid the raw concrete of the mall, crammed together without heat or electricity. They sound as if what happened to them is a nightmare from which they might awaken at any moment and speak about how, only three-and-a-half months ago, they owned houses, farms and shops, had well-paying jobs, and drove their own cars and tractors. They hope against hope to go back, but they have heard reports that everything in Qaraqosh has been destroyed or stolen by Isis. [Continue reading…]

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Rand Paul calls for a formal declaration of war against ISIS

The New York Times reports: Senator Rand Paul is calling for a declaration of war against the Islamic State, a move that promises to shake up the debate over the military campaign in Iraq and Syria as President Obama prepares to ask Congress to grant him formal authority to use force.

Mr. Paul, a likely presidential candidate who has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s most cautious voices on military intervention, offered a very circumscribed definition of war in his proposal, which he outlined in an interview on Saturday. He would, for instance, limit the duration of military action to one year and significantly restrict the use of ground forces.

Unlike other resolutions circulating on Capitol Hill that would give the president various degrees of authority to use force against Islamic militants, Mr. Paul would take the extra step of declaring war — something Congress has not done since World War II. [Continue reading…]

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Graft hobbles Iraq’s military in fighting ISIS

The New York Times reports: One Iraqi general is known as “chicken guy” because of his reputation for selling his soldiers’ poultry provisions. Another is “arak guy,” for his habit of enjoying that anis-flavored liquor on the job. A third is named after Iraq’s 10,000-dinar bills, “General Deftar,” and is infamous for selling officer commissions.

They are just a few of the faces of the entrenched corruption of the Iraqi security forces, according to Iraqi officers and lawmakers as well as American officials.

The Iraqi military and police forces had been so thoroughly pillaged by their own corrupt leadership that they all but collapsed this spring in the face of the advancing militants of the Islamic State — despite roughly $25 billion worth of American training and equipment over the past 10 years and far more from the Iraqi treasury.

Now the pattern of corruption and patronage in the Iraqi government forces threatens to undermine a new American-led effort to drive out the extremists, even as President Obama is doubling to 3,000 the number of American troops in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s options in Syria

Henri J. Barkey writes: Press reports suggest that President Obama has ordered a review of Syria strategy (though the White House is denying this). He has already made it clear that he does not favor direct U.S. intervention in Syria. While Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has lost large swathes of territory to a rebellion that has so far cost the lives of 200,000 Syrians, he shows no signs of giving up. What is worse, the chaos in Syria and neighboring Iraq has given rise to a virulent jihadist movement in the form of the Islamic State (IS), which has conquered vast territory throughout the region.

The options such a review would produce are unlikely to change policy anytime soon. This is not only because there are no good ones out there that can transform the situation, but also because the Syrian crisis has become part of a larger global struggle with Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s potential countermoves, especially in Ukraine, serve as a deterrent to American action in Syria.

Here are some of the options Obama’s advisers would likely present him. [Continue reading…]

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Biden in Turkey, warns about corrosive effect of concentration of powers

The Guardian reports: US vice-president Joe Biden on Saturday warned that a concentration of powers under a head of state was “corrosive” as he visited Turkey – which has been accused of increasing authoritarian tendencies.

Biden made the remarks before meeting Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who in August became the Turkish president after more than a decade as prime minister. Critics have accused Erdogan of seeking to centralise powers in a powerful presidency, which until he took office was largely a ceremonial role.

At a joint news conference held after a four-hour talks session, Biden said he and Erdogan had discussed a transition of power in Syria, away from President Bashar al-Assad. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy adds: Biden’s visit here also brought forth the first signs of policy convergence. Midway through the discussion here, the Turkish government disclosed that it is willing to train and equip Iraqi government forces, a dramatic shift to support Iraq’s new leadership of Prime Minister Haider Abadi after years of tensions with his predecessor, Nouri al Maliki. Turkey also disclosed it is training Peshmerga militias under control of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

This all seemed to have come about as part of the preparations for the Biden talks. Davutoglu pledged to train and assist national guard units that Abadi is setting up to fight the Islamic State, the Turkish official said. “We are always ready to give any kind of contribution” to the Iraqi authorities, added the official, who disclosed the policy changes on condition he not be identified by name.

Before returning to meet with Biden, Davutgoglu visited Irbil, the capital of the largely autonomous Kurdish region, and a camp where Turkey has already begun training Peshmerga forces, the official said. Just a few years ago, Turkey and the KRG were frequently at loggerheads over the KRG’s willingness to host armed Turkish separatists who were at war with the Turkish state.

Biden’s visit to Istanbul was his first since the blow-up last month that followed his public criticism of Turkey for “contributing to the rise” of the Islamic State. Erdogan said if Biden didn’t apologize for his remarks, he will be “history to me.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. plans to arm Iraq’s Sunni tribesmen with AK-47s, RPGs, mortars

Reuters reports: The United States plans to buy arms for Sunni tribesmen in Iraq including AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds to help bolster the battle against Islamic State militants in Anbar province, according to a Pentagon document prepared for Congress.

The plan to spend $24.1 million represents a small fraction of the larger, $1.6 billion spending request to Congress focusing on training and arming Iraqi and Kurdish forces.

But the document underscored the importance the Pentagon places on the Sunni tribesmen to its overall strategy to diminish Islamic State, and cautioned Congress about the consequences of failing to assist them. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-led airstrikes said to have killed more than 900 people including 52 civilians in Syria since September

Al Jazeera reports: Heavy fighting has been reported in a suburb of Damascus as government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad try to wrest the area from control of rebel fighters.

The suburb of Jobar on Saturday was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting the rebels holding the area have seen in the past year, they told Al Jazeera.

It comes as a prominent Syrian activist group monitoring the civil war said US-led air strikes in the country have killed more than 900 people since September.

Both fighters belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and civilians were included among the dead, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The activist network said air strikes have killed 785 ISIL fighters, as well as 72 members of al-Nusra Front, an affiliate of al-Qaeda based in Syria.

The group also said strikes have killed 52 civilians, including eight women and five children. [Continue reading…]

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