Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Remote warfare handicapped by being remote

U.S. News & World Report: The 480th operates one of many hubs the Air Force uses to receive, process and disseminate intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information from spy aircraft it flies, known in military jargon as a Distributed Common Ground System. It works with all branches of the U.S. military and with some allied countries, and receives requests from all levels of the chain of command for the detailed intelligence it provides, such as images, videos or live information.

Right now, U.S. troops are embedded with the land component of the Iraqi army to teach its fighters how to file an efficient request for the Air Force’s information.

[Air Force Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, the commander of Air Combat Command] points to the intense difficulty of managing so much information about environments as ethnically complex as the Middle East, a task some say is further hampered by the mandate passed down from President Barack Obama: No U.S. combat troops will be deployed to Iraq or Syria. That includes Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, or JTACs – special operations forces who work in deep enemy territory to help find targets and call in airstrikes from above .

“It does make it more difficult” to develop intelligence without human sources on the ground, said Jennifer, a senior master sergeant, who like many of her fellow analysts could not reveal her last name for security reasons. A personal perspective can lead to much stronger intelligence.

“They’re the ones feeling and smelling and tasting better than we can,” she said. “The closest thing to human intelligence we have is the embassy.”

These analysts instead must rely on seasoned veterans with multiple tours of Iraq – many of them now back home and serving in the Air Force Reserve – to provide some on-the-ground insights.

The number of clear targets in the conflict also may be shrinking. U.S. warplanes have conducted more than 9,500 flights over Iraq and Syria since Aug. 8 when combat operations began, 950 of which have resulted in direct strikes. But the Islamic State group has quickly learned it can no longer operate out in the open, waving its ominous black banner. Fighters now must hide themselves among innocent civilian populations that fear them. [Continue reading…]

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Religious extremism main cause of terrorism, according to report

The Guardian reports: Religious extremism has become the main driver of terrorism in recent years, according to this year’s Global Terrorism Index.

The report recorded 18,000 deaths in 2013, a rise of 60% on the previous year. The majority (66%) of these were attributable to just four groups: Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaida.

Overall there has been a fivefold increase in deaths from terrorism since the 9/11 suicide attacks.

The report’s authors attribute the majority of incidents over the past few years to groups with a religious agenda. [Continue reading…]

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Kurds say ISIS militants near defeat in Kobane

The Los Angeles Times reports: Kurdish forces say the battle against Islamic State for control of the Syrian border city of Kobani has turned definitively in their favor following weeks of punishing U.S.-led airstrikes and the arrival of Kurdish reinforcements from Iraq.

Commanders belonging to the Popular Protection Units – YPG, by its Kurdish initials – said the intensive bombardment in recent days had allowed their fighters to seize several strategic hills from Islamic State militants.

The U.S Central Command on Monday reported nine new airstrikes in the Kobani area, hitting Islamic State fighting positions, staging areas and one “tactical” militant unit.

About 250 Islamic State fighters remain in Kobani, concentrated in the southeastern corner of town, Rafiq Baradar, a YPG commander from Kobani, said during a visit to the Turkish border town of Suruc.

“They will probably be finished in four or five days,” Baradar said in an interview here. [Continue reading…]

Reuters adds: Kurdish fighters captured six buildings used by Islamic State militants besieging the Syrian town of Kobani on Tuesday, and seized a large amount of the jihadist group’s weapons and ammunition, a group monitoring the war said….

Kurdish fighters seized six buildings used by Islamic State close to council offices in the north of the town and took a large quantity of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, guns and machine gun ammunition, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

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Maxime Hauchard, seen in ISIS beheading video, known to French since 2011

The Guardian reports: Maxime Hauchard, the Frenchman identified by authorities as a jihadi involved in the beheadings of an American and Syrian captives, is a 22-year-old from Normandy who converted to Islam at 17.

Hauchard appeared in the Islamic State (Isis) video which on Sunday showed the killings of 18 Syrian captives and American aid worker Peter Kassig. In the video he is standing in a lineup of jihadis and is not masked. He was recognised by French writer and journalist David Thomson who tweeted a picture of him. Prosecutor François Molins confirmed his identity at a press conference on Monday afternoon.

Hauchard is from Le Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, which has a population of 3,250. He took on the nom de guerre Abu Abdallah el-Faransi, reflecting his French citizenship, and has never sought to conceal his affiliation with Islamist fighters, posting photos on social media of himself carrying weapons. In July he gave an interview to BFMTV in which he described how he became interested in Islam via the internet and how he travelled to Syria in August last year to help create a caliphate. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS tightens up its entry requirements

Asharq Al-Awsat reports: If any group could be said to have powerful enemies these days, it is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), making a certain amount of paranoia on the part of the organization and its leaders understandable. It is therefore not surprising that it has just made it harder for jihadist hopefuls to join the group in an effort to weed out spies.

The extremist organization has issued new instructions to Western recruits seeking to join the terrorist group, including the need to obtain a glowing reference from at least one sheikh known to ISIS leadership, according to Islamist leaders in London. The British Islamists informed Asharq Al-Awsat that ISIS recruits will now need this “recommendation” to be allowed into the fold.

The new instructions include detailed advice on what ISIS recruits should wear and carry with them when travelling to Syria and Iraq as well as pointers on how best to avoid detection. The recruits are told to avoid bringing religious books, but should not forget to bring their own cigarettes with them.

“Your clothes should not identify your religion and you should remain silent and not talk too much. The only thing people should know about you is that you are a normal traveler . . . and you should not give any detailed information about yourself,” went the advice.

The latest directives follow ISIS fears that Western intelligence organizations are seeking to infiltrate the group. This is the first time that ISIS has explicitly called for new recruits to provide proof of identity and the new rules mean that ISIS recruits will need at least one affiliated sheikh or recruiter to vouch for them. The instructions add that it would be even better if potential recruits have more than one “recommendation,” the Islamist sources told Asharq Al-Awsat. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS executes nearly 1,500 people in Syria in 5 months

AFP report: The jihadist Islamic State group (IS) has executed nearly 1,500 people in Syria in the five months since it declared the establishment of a “caliphate”, a monitoring group said Monday.

“The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented the execution of 1,429 people since the IS announced its ‘caliphate’ in June,” the group’s director, Rami Abdel Rahman, said.

The majority of IS’s victims in Syria have been civilians, he said.

“Of the total number of people beheaded or shot dead in mass killings by IS, 879 have been civilians, some 700 of them members of the Shaitat tribe.” [Continue reading…]

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Digital doublethink: Playing truth or dare with Putin, Assad and ISIS

Christopher Dickey writes: The videos of American and British hostages being beheaded are so valuable to ISIS as memes of power and fear that now it has murdered a convert to Islam: Peter Kassig, 26, whose sole desire after serving in Iraq was to return to the region to help suffering civilians. Kassig had acknowledged the one God and His one Messenger, taken the name Abdel Rahman (Servant of the Merciful) and prayed five times a day, according to his parents. The Prophet would have understood, and spared him. The thugs of ISIS simply used him.

Such is the world of doublethink and triplethink.

Orwell put his finger on the core problem years before he wrote 1984. In wars, everybody lies. We do, they do, the victimizers and the victims do, too. But totalitarianism is different. Putin, Assad and ISIS all aspire to the kind of complete control that Stalin, Hitler, or the caliphs once had: total domination over their own people, brutal intimidation of their enemies. And, as Orwell wrote in a 1944 essay, “the really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

Orwell hoped, without complete confidence, that “the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive.”

One hopes. But 70 years after Orwell wrote those words, doublethink seems to be winning.

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How journalists became worth more dead than alive

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: The extremists don’t need us anymore. Fourteen years ago, while I was staying at the Taliban madrasa [outside of Peshawar, in Pakistan], its administrators were launching a Web site. I remember being amused by this. I shouldn’t have been. There is no need for a middleman now. Journalists have been replaced by YouTube and Twitter. And when there is no need for us, we become targets.

Three years ago, Dexter [Filkins] and I both found ourselves in Pakistan again, staying in the same anonymous guesthouse in Islamabad, which seemed safer than any alternative. Especially after the killing of Osama bin Laden, when so many people in Pakistan were contemplating revenge, the large hotels had become irresistible targets for terrorists. They were also infested with agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, the handmaiden of many of the terrorist groups.

I was reporting on the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons; Dexter was investigating the murder of a Pakistani journalist who was killed, apparently, by agents of the ISI. Both topics were dangerous territory, and we came under harassment. I was followed; Dexter’s phone was tapped. Each time I returned to the guesthouse, I could tell that strangers had been in my room. One day, I got a call from someone who identified himself as a reporter for a major Urdu daily newspaper. “We understand that you’re a prominent Zionist, and we want to write about you on the front page,” he said.

Such an article would have gotten me killed. The reporter’s call represented an invitation from the ISI to leave Pakistan right away. I knocked on Dexter’s door. He had been in the country for a month, and he seemed haunted. His room reminded me of Martin Sheen’s in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. Time to go, I said. In the taxi to the airport, we discovered that Dexter’s visa had expired. We edited his passport with a Sharpie, while standing behind a tree outside the terminal. The ISI did not impede our departure.

Each unhappy place has its own rules. In Iran, Western reporters are often welcome, and sometimes arrested while performing their duties. In Gaza over the summer, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, was both eager to help reporters inspect the damage done by Israeli air strikes, and rigorous about denying reporters access to the rocket crews launching attacks on Israeli civilians. In Lebanon, Hezbollah maintains a sophisticated media-relations operation designed in part to thwart independent reporting.

I no longer spend much time with Islamist groups. Today, even places that shouldn’t be dangerous for journalists are dangerous. Whole stretches of Muslim countries are becoming off-limits. This is a minor facet of a much larger calamity, but it has consequences: the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan and Syria and Iraq are not going away; our ability to see these problems, however, is becoming progressively more circumscribed. [Continue reading…]

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Detailed map showing areas under control of ISIS in Syria and Iraq

[Note to readers who arrive here from Google: This map was created based on information from Sept. 5 for Syria and Aug. 20 for Iraq, 2014. By early 2015, the military campaign against ISIS had resulted in the group suffering small territorial losses in Iraq while making gains in Syria. A more recent map can be viewed here.]

Reuters has produced the most detailed map of Syria and Iraq that I’ve seen thus far showing populated areas where a government or non-state armed group is dominant or control is contested.

Maps shown on TV and elsewhere are often misleading because they usually depict vast areas of uninhabited desert being under ISIS control when in fact these are areas essentially outside any human control.

Whether the Reuters map is as accurate as it is detailed is hard to say and as with all these kinds of maps, they can do no more than attempt to represent a moment in time (Sept. 5 for Syria and Aug. 20 for Iraq) in an environment where the lines of control are continuously shifting.

One of the interesting features of this map is that it indicates that the area of the region under Kurdish control (Rojava and Iraqi Kurdistan) extends as widely as the area under ISIS control.

Kobane is located in the small blue circle at the top of the largest patch of red. (Click on the image to see a larger version and click on that to make it even larger.)

isis-areas-of-influence

This map comes from a collection of graphics Reuters has compiled on the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS.

Contrast Reuters’ commendable work with an ocean-of-blood map that CNN used in June:

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Abdul-Rahman Kassig: Idealist ‘simply seeking to help’

BBC News reports: Abdul-Rahman Kassig believed it was his duty to alleviate the suffering of people affected by conflict in the Middle East.

Mr Kassig, known as Peter Kassig before he converted to Islam, founded a humanitarian organisation to help refugees who had fled from Syria.

In interviews and letters to his family, Mr Kassig, 26, said he was driven by a “sense of purpose” and a desire to help others after serving with the US military in Iraq.

In 2012, he wrote: “The truth is sometimes I really think I would like to do something else, but at the end of the day this work is really the only thing that I have found that gives my life both meaning and direction.” [Continue reading…]

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Peace-talks between the ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria

Jennifer Cafarella writes: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is said to have told CBS’s 60 Minutes that he has observed tactical cooperation between the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). The two global, Salafi jihadist groups are engaged in an ideological struggle, or fitnah. They are competing for the leadership of the fight in Syria and recognition by the al-Qaeda movement, which has been conducting mediation attempts between the two since 2013 and in 2014 recognized JN as its official affiliate in Syria. Director Clapper’s statements challenge recent public reports of their negotiations, which suggest that more fundamental mediation may be underway, indicating the possibility of heightened cooperation in coming months. The interview has not aired, and his statements may be more nuanced than the advanced press publicizing the show. But the issue at hand should not be whether more than tactical cooperation has already been observed, but rather, whether conditions are being set that will favor operational cooperation between ISIS and JN in the medium term. The mediation effort may not quickly result in Baghdadi and his inner circle reconciling with JN leader Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, but the groups are eventually likely to cooperate at the operational and strategic level, as they share mutual goals. In the short term, this may include joint action against the Assad regime, which could relieve pressure on ISIS from the regime in Deir ez-Zour and embolden JN to initiate offensive operations against the regime on battlefronts that have stalled. Furthermore, ISIS is under stress in Iraq, and may pursue the acquisition of manpower and other support from JN in Syria in order to reinforce and retake the offensive.

The publicly released information tells the story of hitherto unsuccessful attempts at cooperation at operational and strategic levels. According to a high-level Syrian opposition official and rebel commander cited by the AP, seven high-ranking members of JN and ISIS conducted a meeting in the town of Atareb, West of Aleppo city, on November 2 from midnight until 4:00 a.m. A “commander of brigades affiliated with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army” corroborated the report, adding that it was organized by a third party. According to the opposition official, the meeting included an IS representative, two emissaries from JN, and attendees from the Khorasan Group, who likely served as both the mediating force and organizing party. The AP also reported that Ahrar al-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa were present, however mistakenly characterized Jund al-Aqsa as a group that has pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Involvement of the Khorasan Group in ongoing attempts to mediate the fitna has also been reported by the Daily Beast, and, if true, likely indicates the veracity of reports of ongoing JN and ISIS negotiations. A number of Khorasan members initially entered Syria in the summer of 2013 as part of AQ’s “Victory Committee,” led by Khorasan member Sanafi al Nasr, that had been deployed by Zawahiri to mediate the growing schism between JN and ISIS. The involvement of these figures in current negotiations is therefore not a departure from past activities in Syria, and is likely a secondary line of effort complimenting the ongoing attempt to develop an attack against the West.

The Syrian opposition official cited by the AP also stated that JN and ISIS agreed to eliminate the moderate, Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF) at this meeting. This may have been a sensationalist claim attempting to inflate the threat to the moderate opposition in order to advocate for increased support from the west to the moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA)-linked rebels in Syria, under which the SRF falls. Since the initiation of U.S. – led airstrikes against both JN-linked “Khorasan Group” targets and ISIS in Syria, moderate rebels have accused the Obama administration of encouraging a future JN and ISIS partnership by giving them a common enemy. This is not an unfounded claim, as civilian discontent with the air campaign has fostered increased support for JN, whose rhetoric has shifted to condemn the air campaign in its entirety in a sign of rhetorical support to ISIS against the coalition. However, there is no indication that JN has yet shifted its disposition to the SRF in southern Syria, where JN and the SRF continue to cooperate in military action against the regime. [Continue reading…]

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Murder videos recruitment tools for ISIS

Thomas Joscelyn writes: Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Islamic State, the al Qaeda offshoot that controls large portions of Iraq and Syria, has claimed to have beheaded yet another Western hostage, along with more than a dozen captured Syrian soldiers. In a newly-released video, a henchman for the group stands over what appears to be the severed head of Peter Kassig, a former U.S. Army Ranger turned aid worker who was kidnapped in Syria in late 2013.

From the Islamic State’s perspective, such videos serve multiple purposes. They are meant to intimidate the organization’s enemies in the West and elsewhere, show defiance in the face of opposition, and to convince other jihadists that Baghdadi’s state is the strong horse. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s rival, long ago determined that graphic beheading videos do more harm than good for the jihadists’ cause, as they turn off more prospective supporters than they earn. But the Islamic State has clearly come to the opposite conclusion, cornering the market on savagery. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq and U.S. find some potential Sunni allies have already been lost

The New York Times reports: When the militants of the Islamic State entered the Sunni Arab area of Al Alam, they gave its tribal leaders a message of reconciliation: We are here to defend you and all the Sunnis, they said, so join us.

But after a group of angry residents sneaked out one night, burned the jihadists’ black banners and raised Iraqi flags, the response was swift.

“They started blowing up the houses of tribal leaders and those who were in the security forces,” Laith al-Jubouri, a local official, said. Since then, the jihadists have demolished dozens of homes and kidnapped more than 100 residents, he said. The captives’ fates remain unknown.

In the Islamic State’s rapid consolidation of the Sunni parts of Iraq and Syria, the jihadists have used a double-pronged strategy to gain the obedience of Sunni tribes. While using their abundant cash and arms to entice tribal leaders to join their self-declared caliphate, the jihadists have also eliminated potential foes, hunting down soldiers, police officers, government officials and anyone who once cooperated with the United States as it battled Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Now, as the United States and the Iraqi government urgently seek to enlist the Sunni tribes to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, they are struggling to undo the militants’ success in co-opting or conquering the majority of them.[Continue reading…]

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Yazidi girls seized by ISIS speak out after escape

The New York Times reports: The 15-year-old girl, crying and terrified, refused to release her grip on her sister’s hand. Days earlier, Islamic State fighters had torn the girls from their family, and now were trying to split them up and distribute them as spoils of war.

The jihadist who had selected the 15-year-old as his prize pressed a pistol to her head, promising to pull the trigger. But it was only when the man put a knife to her 19-year-old sister’s neck that she finally relented, taking her next step in a dark odyssey of abduction and abuse at the hands of the Islamic State.

The sisters were among several thousand girls and young women from the minority Yazidi religion who were seized by the Islamic State in northern Iraq in early August.

The 15-year-old is also among a small number of kidnapping victims who have managed to escape, bringing with them stories of a coldly systemized industry of slavery.

Their accounts tell of girls and young women separated from their families, divvied up or traded among the Islamic State’s men, ordered to convert to Islam, subjected to forced marriages and repeatedly raped. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS keeps getting better at dodging U.S. spies

The Daily Beast reports: On Thursday, around the same time ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced that he had survived a U.S. airstrike and promised in a recorded message to “erupt volcanos of jihad,” American officials were meeting to discuss just how hard it was to track the militant group.

Baghdadi and his followers have proven exceptionally difficult to track and kill because they’re encrypting their communications and taking steps to avoid being detected by U.S. surveillance, according to several current and former officials. Without American intelligence operatives on the ground in ISIS’s home base of Syria—and with only a limited number of surveillance planes in the air—those communications are one of the only surefire ways to keep tabs on ISIS.

In addition to encryption that American officials say has proven very difficult to crack, ISIS is also using a commercially available service that permanently deletes messages sent via the Internet, making them nearly impossible to intercept, according to an individual who was briefed on the issue Thursday. This person didn’t name the service, but one application widely used in Iraq is called FireChat, which allows users to send messages to each other without connecting to the Internet. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS faces war of attrition in Syria’s Kobane

AFP reports: The Islamic State group is locked in a war of attrition in the Syrian border town of Kobane, where Kurdish fighters backed by US-led air strikes are mounting fierce resistance.

Two months after IS launched a major offensive to try to capture the strategic prize on the Turkish frontier, the jihadists have failed to defeat the town’s Kurdish defenders.

“Several weeks ago, it looked like Kobane would fall, but it is now clear that it will not,” said Romain Caillet, a French expert on jihadist movements. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS says it plans to issue its own currency

The New York Times reports: They have paraded their own flag, formed courts and ministries, issued passports and even license plates. Now, the leaders of the Islamic State, the violent jihadist group that has seized parts of Syria and Iraq, have created their own currency, part of a grandiose plan to restore the caliphate era that dominated the Middle East more than 1,300 years ago.

In an announcement on Thursday heralding a liberation from the “satanic usury-based global economic system,” the Islamic State said it would begin minting gold, silver and copper coins, in likenesses similar to the days of the seventh-century caliphs.

The coins will have standardized weights and values, the announcement said, and they will be the legal tender of the lands controlled by the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Important details such as the exact timing of when the coins would begin to circulate, and how they would be minted, were not disclosed, and a question remained: Can the group really create a viable currency?

Many money historians and other experts said no, describing the announcement as a propaganda exercise, meant largely to reinforce the Islamic State’s self-anointed legitimacy. [Continue reading…]

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