Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

ISIS ‘being driven out of Syria’s Kobane’

BBC News reports: The Islamic State (IS) militant group has been driven out of most of the northern Syrian town of Kobane, a Kurdish commander has told the BBC.

Baharin Kandal said IS fighters had retreated from all areas, except for two pockets of resistance in the east.

US-led air strikes have helped push back the militants, with another 14 conducted over the past 24 hours.

Meanwhile, the new UN human rights commissioner has called IS a “potentially genocidal” movement.

Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein described the group as the antithesis of human rights.

Speaking by phone, Kurdish commander Baharin Kandal told the BBC’s Kasra Naji that she hoped the city would be “liberated soon”.

Ms Kandal said her militia group had been receiving arms, supplies and fighters but she refused to say how, reports our correspondent, who is on the Turkish border near Kobane. [Continue reading…]

CBS/AP report: A Syrian Kurdish official called on the international community on Thursday to allow weapons into the border town of Kobani, saying the town is still in danger from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Idriss Nassan, deputy head of Kobani’s foreign relations committee, said ISIS can bring in reinforcements and weapons at any time and endanger the town near Turkey. He said airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition are “effective” but not enough to defeat the jihadis.

Nassan’s comments came a day after the Pentagon spokesman said Kobani remains under threat of falling to the ISIS fighters. Rear Adm. John Kirby said two weeks of airstrikes have killed hundreds of ISIS fighters, and have stiffened Kobani’s defenders.

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My childhood friend, the ISIS jihadist

Jakob Sheikh writes: Amir and I are childhood friends. We grew up in the same estate in Western Copenhagen. We played in the same courtyard, played football together at the street pitches in Saxogade Road, bought slush-ice and small blue chewing gums with stickers of American wrestlers in the same tobacconist on New Carlsberg Road.

We are both 27 years old — Amir was born four months before I was. During our childhood we shared the same interest in sports and computer games. Like me, Amir has a Danish mother and a Pakistani father. Our fathers even come from the same region in Pakistan, the military city of Rawalpindi.

Yes, Amir and I have had more or less had the same upbringing, a path to ease in Danish society. We have been formed by the same institutions, saw the world through the same eyes.

But our lives have taken completely different paths. How did that happen? I find it difficult to understand. In fact, I had no idea what had happened to Amir before I met him by chance on Istedgade Road a few weeks ago.

“Hi Bro. What gives?” he asked and gave me a friendly hug.

It was warm outside but Amir was wearing a big, black down jacket drooping loosely over a pair of dark Adidas training trousers. He had a crew cut, his eyes had a warm glow and he looked as if he compensated for his small stature with regular visits to the training centre. His stubble was not much longer than mine, and while we were talking Amir had his hands politely behind his back, to show he was listening with interest to my story.

I, on the other hand, was more interested in his. And a few minutes into the conversation it took a more interesting turn.

“I’ve been in Syria, my friend,” he said, adding, “I’m going back soon.”

Amir, my childhood friend had become a jihadi. The polite man full of empathy, had killed in God’s name. I, on the other hand, have been employed as a journalist. I write about jihadi just like Amir.

Soon Amir was to embark on yet another crusade. This time for what is arguably the most violent terrorist group of all: Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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White House says expired War Powers timetable irrelevant to ISIS campaign

The Guardian reports: The White House on Wednesday said a timetable that expired over a week ago limiting its ability to continue a war unauthorized by Congress does not apply to the operation against the Islamic State (Isis) militant group.

The 1973 War Powers Resolution holds that presidents have a 60-day window to conduct hostilities without an act of Congress blessing the conflict. Absent such an explicit authorization, wars are supposed to lose their legal force.

The White House repeatedly cited the War Powers Resolution throughout the summer, as it notified Congress about troop deployments and airstrikes that inaugurated the war. Initial troop deployments for the war began in mid-June, although some legal scholars doubted that the ostensibly non-combat deployments started the clock.

7 October marked 60 days after US warplanes began bombing Isis positions in Iraq. The newest war – officially christened Operation Inherent Resolve by the US military on Wednesday – now includes attacks on Isis targets in Syria and is expected to last for years.

But according to the White House, a pair of 2001 and 2002 congressional resolutions, known as Authorizations to Use Military Force (AUMF), satisfy the War Powers Resolution’s requirement for a “specific authorization” from the US legislature.

“Because the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs constitute specific authorization within the meaning of the War Powers Resolution, the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day limitation on operations does not apply here,” said Bernadette Meehan, spokeswoman for the National Security Council. [Continue reading…]

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Kurds claim to have turned tide against ISIS in Kobane

The Washington Post reports: Kurdish fighters have turned the tide against Islamic State militants in the battle for control of the Syrian border town of Kobane after two days of relentless bombardment by U.S. warplanes, Kurdish officials and activists said Wednesday.

By nightfall, the town’s Kurdish defenders had pushed the jihadists back more than four miles from the western edge of the town and were advancing into the eastern and southern neighborhoods of the city, said Ihsan Naasan, the deputy foreign minister of Kobane’s self-proclaimed government, speaking from the Kurdish-controlled town.

He claimed that Kurdish fighters with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, now control 80 percent of the town, after losing more than half of it in heavy fighting over the previous days.

“The YPG now have the initiative,” he said, crediting heavy U.S. bombardments in recent days alongside resistance by the outgunned and outnumbered Kurdish militia. “They are on the counteroffensive against the Islamic State.”

If the Kurdish fighters manage to retain their momentum and retake the town, it would mark the first time that U.S. airstrikes have helped eject the Islamic State from territory in Syria since the war was expanded to include the northern and eastern parts of the country a little over three weeks ago. [Continue reading…]

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Who remains in Kobane?

Fehim Tastekin writes: I called Idris Nassan, the Kobani canton’s deputy foreign relations minister, to ask how many civilians remain in Kobani. “Don’t ask me for a number because it could be misleading,” he said frankly. Then he went on: “There are many civilians who have not fled the city. Thousands of other people are waiting in the area between the Turkish border and Kobani. Some families who have sons and daughters fighting in the People’s Protection Units (YPG) ranks have stayed in their homes. Others are [physically] unable to leave. Some people, on the other hand, stay along the border but return home periodically to feed their livestock. IS controls 25% of the city, but life is still going on in a way. The administrative units remain largely operational. Only the Asaish [security forces] building has been seized by IS, while all other public buildings remain open.”

According to the UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, about 500-700 mostly elderly people remain in Kobani, while 10,000-13,000 are stuck in a nearby area close to the Syrian-Turkish border.

Is the YPG alone? Is there any other group fighting alongside them? Has the Euphrates volcano, the joint operation room the YPG set up with the Free Syrian Army and some elements of the Islamic Front, broken up? Isn’t there anyone backing the YPG?

According to Nassan, the following groups side with the YPG: Suwar al-Raqqa (Raqqa Revolutionaries), Suwar Umnaa al-Raqqa, Jabhat al-Akrad (Kurdish Front), Shams al-Shimal (Northern Sun), Ahrar al-Suriya and Shukr al-Sefira. He did not provide any figures for [the fighters of] those groups. [Continue reading…]

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Families struggle as German Kurds join ISIS in Syria

Der Spiegel reports: A few months before Sedat Aras set off to join the jihad, the young man took down the Kurdish flag which had been hanging on the wall of his bedroom in his family’s home in Hamburg, Germany. “I’m a mujahedeen now,” he said.

Aras’ family reacted with indifference at the time, his older sister Elif recalls. “I thought this was just my brother’s usual nonsense,” she says. “Sedat had been on an Islamist trip for quite a while.” Elif Aras shakes her head, her eyes dry and empty. “I had no idea what havoc this idiocy would wreak,” she says.

In July, her brother took off for Syria together with others holding similar beliefs. German domestic intelligence sources believe the group included around a dozen young jihadists from Hamburg. Sedat’s family are Alevi Kurds and yet he is now fighting on the side of Islamic State (IS), even though it is attacking Kobani, the Kurdish city in Syria that has become the symbol of the war against the Sunni terrorist organization. In his sister’s eyes, Sedat is waging war against his own people.

After her brother disappeared, Elif also left Germany and flew to Istanbul. The 33-year-old says she could no longer take the gossiping of her neighbors in Hamburg or the calls from worried friends. “I blame myself for not having noticed Sedat’s transformation earlier and for not having kept him from leaving,” she says.

The trip to Syria by German-Kurd Sedat Aras, 23, follows a rapid period of radicalization. His story combines the identity crisis experienced by some children born into immigrant families with the seemingly magnetic force exerted by radical Islam.

Many immigrants have had to work very hard to establish themselves and eke out a living for their families in Germany. But suddenly a conflict raging thousands of kilometers away in Syria and Iraq began intruding on their lives. Salafists began recruiting young Muslims in Germany to join the jihad. And so it was that the war in the Middle East also reached immigrants in Germany, driving a wedge between family members here. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS fights and how it can be defeated

Metin Turcan writes: A typical IS operation goes like this: An IS armored unit of tanks or a mobile unit of eight to 12 fighters with two to three vehicles are informed by WhatsApp, a message on Facebook or Twitter or phone text message, and if this mode is not available through their own radio net, to assemble at a certain place at a certain time. This is the first time we are seeing combat units making use of social media in combat operations. Before its operations, IS disseminates propaganda messages via social media to enemy fighters and civilians living in the targeted urban settlements to demoralize and dishearten them. IS operations and logistics units that are thus alerted assemble at a meeting point within two to three hours, and after another 1 ½ hours of coordination discussions and logistics preparations the operation is underway.

One must remember that a regular IS tank driver is trained to drive his tank at night with a thermal camera, and that the commander of the team has enough tactical military knowledge to best deploy his tanks. Then it is a matter of attacking the enemy’s weakest point, preferably after the morning prayers. Vehicles stage the first phase of the attacks, followed by infantry attacks that depend on the nature of the enemy’s opposition. In these attacks, IS has been remarkably successful in creating a balance between the phased campaign design and maintaining the tempo of warfare. The high tempo of combat is routine for an IS fighter, but usually too high for opposing soldiers.

How to first stop IS and then defeat it? The secret is in a concept that has so far been lacking the forces fighting IS in Syria and Iraq: Close air support that can only be provided by intense cooperation between ground troops and air units. Coalition air attacks so far are at least limiting IS advances; close cooperation between ground forces and armed helicopters such as AH-64 or fixed-wing platforms such as A-10 Thunderbolts can enable full integration of each air mission with fire and movement of ground forces, and bring the end to IS. [Continue reading…]

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160 detained Kobane Kurds continue hunger strike in Turkey

Middle East Eye reports: Scores of Kurds from the besieged Syrian town of Kobane are still on hunger strike after being detained by Turkish authorities in border town Suruc when they fled the advance of IS militants, an MP said on Wednesday.

The 160 Syrian Kurds, members of the main Syrian Kurdish party the Democratic Union Party (PYD), have been held for the last nine days in a sports hall in Suruc. The mostly middle class professionals and their families were taken into custody after crossing into Turkey on 5 October as IS threatened to overrun Kobane.

Ibrahim Ayhan, an MP from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), said the detainees were continuing the hunger strike they launched after their arrest.

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Syria rebels warn of backlash over U.S. air strikes and poor ground strategy

Ian Pannell reports: Major Tayseer Darwish is a member of a secretive operations room run by the Friends of Syria group and rebel fighters.

He and other opposition leaders fear their support base could not only dwindle but also become hostile because of their co-operation with the West.

“Our popular support will be seriously damaged when it sees that the West and the Friends of Syria are going in a different direction than that of the revolution,” he says. “This is what we don’t want to lose.”

While the world focuses on Islamic State, gruesome beheadings and the coalition air campaign, Syria’s civil war grinds on.

Horrific daily attacks that kill and maim far more people than the jihadist militants do continue unabated.

That is why there is anger on the ground. Even though coalition jets are in the skies, people are barely safer than before.

Without a comprehensive ground strategy there is a risk of alienating the very people America and its allies should be winning over.

And in turn there is a risk that the threat to the West could actually grow as a result of its current tactics in Syria.

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ISIS loses its oil business

Bloomberg reports: It’s been a month since President Obama announced that the U.S. would engage in a sustained campaign of airstrikes against Islamic State, the militant Sunni rebellion in Syria and Iraq. The idea was to bomb Islamic State into nonexistence, which has proved difficult. Not only is the movement well-armed, battle-hardened, and deeply entrenched in much of Syria and northern Iraq, it’s also very well-financed, thanks to oil wells and refineries it’s been able to capture. By late June, Islamic State was raising as much as $2 million a day refining and smuggling oil, making it one of history’s wealthiest terrorist groups.

Though the airstrikes have failed to keep Islamic State from advancing in the field, they have apparently succeeded in dismantling its sophisticated oil network, reducing the movement’s ability to make gasoline and diesel for its tanks and trucks and cutting off a vital source of funding. A report from the International Energy Agency in Paris has just estimated that Islamic State controls only about 20,000 barrels of daily oil production, down from about 70,000 as of August. Most of it remains in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon’s war-naming problem resolved — chooses ‘just kind of bleh’ name

On October 3 the Wall Street Journal reported: For weeks, military planners have debated a thorny strategic problem. In recent days, they sent a suggestion to the Pentagon’s top brass.

It was rejected. America’s newest war won’t be called Operation Inherent Resolve.

Two months since war planes first started striking Islamic State targets, operations in Iraq and Syria don’t have a fancy name. One of the generic placeholders found on classified Pentagon PowerPoint slides reads: “Operations in Iraq and Syria.”

To some military officers, Inherent Resolve didn’t properly evoke the Middle East. Others faulted it for failing to highlight the international coalition the U.S. had assembled. Still others simply found it uninspiring.

One senior official said Inherent Resolve was a placeholder name and never seriously considered for the overall war effort. Other officials said had the name been better received it might well be the new war’s moniker.

“It is just kind of bleh,” said a military officer.

What’s happened since then? Focus groups? Brand testing? An urgent demand to mint medals?

It turns out that the kind of bleh name is now the official name.

Lack of imagination is perhaps the signature of the Pentagon, but in this case they could have just followed the lead of the French and called it Operation Shamal (like Opération Chammal) after the regional wind, or like the British gone with a studiously opaque code name, theirs being Operation Shader. Instead it’s the standard corny Hollywood summertime blockbuster-style name — a name in response to which ISIS commanders are no doubt already snickering: “You’ve got the name; we’re got the resolve.”

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The gains Turkey may hope to make from the defeats of the Kurds

Christopher de Bellaigue writes: Whatever the fate of Kobani, Turkey’s complicity in its human miseries has already had fearsome effects beyond this parched, benighted bit of land, where, ninety-nine years ago, some of the survivors of the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians slogged into Mesopotamia. Last month, from his headquarters in northern Iraq, the PKK’s operational commander, Cemil Bayık, presented more evidence that Turkey had been arming ISIS, and threatened to end its twenty-month-old ceasefire if Turkey did not stop its “war” against the Kurds of Syria.

Then, on October 7, the PKK demonstrated its undimmed ability to bring chaos to metropolitan Turkey, organizing violent protests not only across the country’s Kurdish-majority region in the southeast, but also in several cities further west. These were met — again, violently — by the security forces and by members of a Kurdish Islamist group that has been useful to the state in the past. More than twenty people were killed before the PKK’s incarcerated leader, Abdullah Öcalan, reportedly sent word that the unrest should stop.

One might wonder why the Turkish government would risk endangering a peace process with the PKK that has greatly contributed to Turkish stability, improved human rights and the rule of law, and facilitated economic development. The Turks may be calculating that the PKK cannot easily abandon a process that has brought its members new political power in some Kurdish areas and allowed Kurdish nationalist MP back into the national parliament. They also seem to believe that the Kurds are due a sharp reality check as to the impossibility of replicating Syria-style autonomy in Turkey. The ISIS advance on Kobani could serve that purpose, while the contraction of the Kurdish fief pushes the nationalists onto the tender mercies of the Turkish state — as Kobani has demonstrated. Weakened by the defeats suffered by its affiliate in Syria, the PKK may be less able to resist political demands made by the Turkish government if serious negotiations are renewed toward a final settlement. [Continue reading…]

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Is there an answer for Syria?

Jessica T. Mathews writes: In August 2012, not long after former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stepped down as the international community’s special envoy on Syria, he and I shared a coffee break between airplane flights. Speaking with deep sadness, this consummate international negotiator said he’d never worked harder on a problem with less to show for it. Since then, the widely respected former Algerian foreign minister and international civil servant Lakhdar Brahimi has done the same, with the same result.

What Annan and Brahimi tried to do through a series of meetings in Geneva was to weave together enough threads of political agreement to form the basis for a cease-fire. The problem was that when one side had brought off recent military success, it felt optimistic enough to believe it could fight to victory and was uninterested in making political concessions. Even had the fighters themselves come close to equal levels of exhaustion and suffering, half a dozen powers that were fueling the war by proxy could and did ensure that a stable military equilibrium was never reached. Those powers included Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, which were backing Assad, and Saudi Arabia, various Gulf States, and the US, which were backing the opposition. Despite enormous efforts, the Geneva talks failed.

What’s different now is that the two most important players, Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, share an urgent interest in defeating ISIS before the chaos it is sowing reaches their own borders. According to a leading expert on the Syrian conflict, this might make it possible for the Assad regime and the non-jihadi opposition to take a highly unusual step. Yezid Sayigh — my colleague at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut — argues that the time is ripe for both the Assad regime and the non-jihadi opposition groups to execute comprehensive (that is, not local), unilateral truces, undertaken separately but in parallel.

For this to take place, no formal agreement would be necessary or indeed possible. No agreement-blocking preconditions would be considered, just two clean cease-fires. Sayigh’s insight is that both sides currently share a balance of weakness. Both need a respite from fighting each other to enable them to concentrate their forces on preventing ISIS from winning what could be game-changing military victories. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS recruits young Syrians from Turkish refugee camps

Mike Giglio reports: For one 15-year-old Syrian boy who lives in a refugee camp near the Turkish border, the calls to become an extremist fighter came from all around. He heard one on an afternoon this summer, while he and his friends played soccer around the tents. Taking a break from the game, the boys were approached by a man they knew as a sheikh, a term Syrians use to describe a learned religious man.

The sheikh was a supporter of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a group of militants rampaging across the border as they try to establish a fanatical version of a modern-day caliphate. He told the boys they should cross over and help. “You are playing soccer at a time like this?” the sheikh scolded them. “It is better to go and fight for ISIS than to stay in the camp and play.”

The boy already had his heart set on joining ISIS, in fact. After three years of living with his family in the camp, he was enthralled by the idea of helping to create what ISIS billed as a new Islamic state. Some of his friends had already joined the group, and in chats via Facebook they urged him to follow suit. So did other ISIS supporters whom the boy knew only online. Like-minded boys and young men, meanwhile, were leaving the camp for ISIS regularly.

But the boy had a problem: His father was vehemently opposed to ISIS and would try to stop his only son from joining if he caught wind of the plan.

One day last month, the boy linked up with a friend in the camp even younger than himself, who had an older brother fighting with ISIS in Syria. At the older brother’s instruction, they snuck past the Turkish border guards and into the ISIS-controlled town of al-Bab. From there the boys joined a group of some 50 recruits for what they were told would be a three-week course on ISIS’s brand of religious law. Their military training would come next. The boys were told that during their instruction they should have no contact with the outside world.

More than 20 camps like the boy’s — whose location, like his name, is being withheld for his safety — sit in Turkey, mostly along its 565-mile border with Syria. They hold more than 200,000 refugees, many of them young men and boys approaching fighting age. The conditions in the camps are relatively good, but they’re still heavy with the bleakness of waiting out a war without end. Together with ISIS’s recent surge in publicity, this is fueling what some residents describe as a rising tide of young recruits. [Continue reading…]

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Hollande urges Turkey to open up its border to help Kobane

AFP reports: France’s president Tuesday urged Turkey to open its border to allow reinforcements to reach the besieged city of Kobani and called for more help to those fighting the advance of ISIS.

Francois Hollande stressed that “all countries concerned,” including those not in the coalition fighting the ISIS, should provide weapons to those battling the jihadists.

“I think about what is happening today in Kobani, a martyred town, a symbolic town. If we have to intervene, as we decided for France in Iraq, we also have to give the moderate Syrian opposition … all the support, all the help necessary,” he said.

“I am launching an appeal here, beyond the coalition, to all countries concerned to give this opposition the support they expect from us, the means they need to fight against terrorism,” Hollande said. [Continue reading…]

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Anger as wounded Kurdish fighters die stranded at Turkish border

Reuters reports: With medical supplies depleted in the war-ravaged north Syrian town of Kobani, Kurdish activist Blesa Omar rushed three comrades wounded in battle against Islamic State fighters straight to the border to dispatch them to a Turkish hospital.

He said he spent the next four hours watching them die, one by one, from what he thinks were treatable shrapnel wounds as Turkish border guards refused to let them through the frontier.

“To me it is clear they died because they waited so long. If they had received help, even up to one hour before their deaths, they could have lived,” said Omar, 34, an ethnic Kurd originally from Iraq who holds Swedish nationality.

“Once the soldiers realized they were dead, they said, ‘Now you can cross with the bodies.’ I cannot forget that. It was total chaos, it was a catastrophe,” he said, choking back tears. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq: Evidence of war crimes by government-backed Shi’a militias

Amnesty: Shi’a militias, supported and armed by the government of Iraq, have abducted and killed scores of Sunni civilians in recent months and enjoy total impunity for these war crimes, said Amnesty International in a new briefing published today.

Absolute Impunity: Militia Rule in Iraq provides harrowing details of sectarian attacks carried out by increasingly powerful Shi’a militias in Baghdad, Samarra and Kirkuk, apparently in revenge for attacks by the armed group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). Scores of unidentified bodies have been discovered across the country handcuffed and with gunshot wounds to the head, indicating a pattern of deliberate execution-style killings.

“By granting its blessing to militias who routinely commit such abhorrent abuses, the Iraqi government is sanctioning war crimes and fuelling a dangerous cycle of sectarian violence that is tearing the country apart. Iraqi government support for militia rule must end now,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Response Adviser.

The fate of many of those abducted by Shi’a militias weeks and months ago remains unknown. Some captives were killed even after their families had paid ransoms of $80,000 and more to secure their release. [Continue reading…]

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Major increase in airstrikes around Kobane slows ISIS advance

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