Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

The forces besieging Aleppo are counting on our indifference

Natalie Nougayrède writes: As Europe reels from terrorist attacks, Aleppo, once Syria’s second city, is suffering its own nightmare. The connection between these two developments is more than coincidence. As bombs, guns and knives were being wielded in France and Germany, a massive military operation was under way to besiege, and perhaps empty or starve, the eastern districts of Aleppo that since 2012 have been controlled by the anti-Assad rebellion.

When responding to the latest terror in Europe, few if any western officials draw parallels with the plight of Aleppo. That is understandable. Public opinion is naturally more focused on the domestic fallout from traumatic events. When security fears take over and political passions are aroused, it is hard to look beyond what lies in your immediate vicinity. Yet Aleppo will have consequences for Europe and for its citizens, and there is little cause to think they will be positive.

This is why: Islamic State cannot be defeated just through military action in Iraq and Syria, or police operations in Europe. It can be defeated only if the attraction that the militant group exerts on young, confused Sunni Muslims, in the Middle East and elsewhere, is somehow neutralised. The massacres carried out by the Assad regime in Syria over the past five years, and the failure of the international community to put an end to them – or even to hold his power accountable – have provided no small reason for the radicalisation now making Europe bleed.

The summer of 2015 went down in history as a time when the chaos of the Middle East suddenly became a vivid reality for Europeans because of the refugee crisis. The summer of 2016 may go down as the tipping point when all hope of a negotiated settlement in Syria’s civil war, one that would deprive Isis of much of its ability to recruit and sow terror, entirely faded. [Continue reading…]

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Muslims mourn in solidarity with Catholics across France after priest’s murder

BBC News reports: Muslims across France have attended Catholic Mass in a gesture of solidarity after the murder of a priest on Tuesday.

Fr Jacques Hamel was killed in his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen by two men who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

France’s Muslim council, the CFCM, urged Muslims to show “solidarity and compassion” over the murder.

“We are all Catholics of France,” said Anouar Kbibech, the head of the CFCM. [Continue reading…]

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National security leaders talk about ISIS like a chronic illness in the global body politic

The Daily Beast reports: Officially, the Obama administration is still committed to defeating ISIS. But at the annual gathering of national security chiefs in Aspen, no one was talking about beating the terror army and its adherents. Instead, grim resignation and dark warnings of a long hard fight to come dominated the discussion, with every official predicting a global rise in terror attacks, including in the United States.

“Do we expect more attacks? Regrettably we do, both in Europe and the U.S.,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee.

While some here held out hope for a military triumph over ISIS in Iraq and Syria, they acknowledged that any such advances would represent the first stage in a years-long battle against a group that’s already spread to unstable parts of the Mideast, Africa, and Southeast Asia—and already inspired attacks from Paris to San Bernardino, Orlando to Istanbul.

“If we destroy [ISIS] in Syria and Iraq so they don’t have a territory anymore, of course that reduces their influence. But the virtual caliphate has not been destroyed,” said European Union Counterterrorist Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove in an interview, referring to ISIS’s prodigious online presence. “The capacity to inspire in the west will remain for some time.”

It was a far cry from earlier gatherings of the Aspen Security Forum, where officials and experts hailed the killing of al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden as a death blow to Islamic extremism. And it was a markedly different tone from President Obama’s statements of just a few months ago, when he redoubled his commitment to “defeat [ISIS] and to eliminate the scourge of this barbaric terrorism that’s been taking place around the world.”

In contrast, national security officials at Aspen didn’t really speak of ISIS as an enemy that could be taken out. They talked about the terror group like a long-term problem to be managed—a chronic illness in the global body politic. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. secures vast new trove of intelligence on ISIS

The New York Times reports: The United States is poring over a vast trove of new intelligence about Islamic State fighters who have flowed into Syria and Iraq and some who then returned to their home countries, information that American officials say could help fight militants on the battlefield and prevent potential plotters from slipping into Europe.

American-backed Syrian Kurdish and Arab militias have seized more than 10,000 documents and 4.5 terabytes of digital data in recent weeks while fighting insurgents in Manbij in northern Syria, near the Turkish border, a major hub for Islamic State fighters entering and leaving Syria, American officials said.

An initial American review of the material offers new clues about “foreign fighters, the networks, where they’re from,” according to Brett McGurk, President Obama’s special envoy for combating the Islamic State. Other officials said the information included the fighters’ identities, countries of origin, routes into Syria and the illicit networks that recruited and ferried them to the region. Those details are being shared with allies to help stanch the flow of militants. [Continue reading…]

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Jacques Hamel, 85, a beloved French priest, killed in his church

The New York Times reports: Like many people who enjoy their work, the Rev. Jacques Hamel did not want to stop. At 85, he was well past retirement age, but he kept in shape and kept on going — baptizing infants, celebrating Mass and tending to parishioners in St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, the working-class town in Normandy where he had spent much of his life.

“He could have retired at 75 years old, but seeing how few priests were around he decided to stay and work, to continue to be of service to people, up until it all ended, tragically,” the Rev. Auguste Moanda-Phuati, the parish priest of the Église St.-Étienne, where Father Hamel worked as an auxiliary priest, said in a phone interview. “He was loved by all. He was a little like a grandfather. We were happy when he was around and worried when we hadn’t seen him in a while.”

Father Hamel was celebrating Mass on Tuesday morning when two men with knives entered the small church and slit his throat, an attack that horrified people across France and the world. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that the two assailants — who were shot dead by the police — were “soldiers” retaliating against the United States-led coalition fighting the group in Iraq and Syria. [Continue reading…]

The Age reports: On Tuesday, [Adel] Kermiche was identified by prosecutors as one of the young men who slit the throat of a Catholic priest during mass in a church in northern France. He was shot dead by police with an accomplice after they entered the Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray church near Rouen on Tuesday morning, cut the priest’s throat and seriously injured another parishioner.

Kermiche was a local teenager, born in 1997, who had tried to join IS in Syria, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said – though he failed in two attempts and instead served jail time in France.

His mother, a teacher, told the Tribune de Geneve in 2015 that the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015 had “acted as a detonator” on a teen who had been cheerful, kind, sociable, music-loving and a regular mosque-goer.

“He said we could not practise our religion in peace in France,” she said. “He was speaking with words that did not belong to him. He was bewitched, like he was in a cult.” [Continue reading…]

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Germany faces one of its greatest political challenges since World War II

By Holger Nehring, University of Stirling

Within the space of a week a teenager seriously injured three people on a train in Würzburg before being shot dead by police and another shot and killed nine people in a Munich shopping centre. A Syrian man was also arrested in the city of Reutlingen after a woman died in a knife attack, and another Syrian man is dead and several injured after he set off a bomb in Ansbach.

Four events, one seeming similarity. The attackers were all either asylum seekers or Germans from an immigrant background. They seemed to be people bringing terror from war-torn places to the pristine streets of German towns and cities. This is certainly the conclusion that the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) promotes. Curiously, it is also one that has coloured news reports of these incidents outside Germany.

Before the facts were known, the BBC wheeled out various counter-terrorism experts to comment on Munich and CNN reported that Muslim fundamentalists were thought to be on the loose before any such knowledge was clear. French president François Hollande was calling Munich a terrorist incident before the facts were available.

For many Germans, for many around the world, Islamic State (IS) – and even Islam itself – provide good placeholders while we gather specific knowledge about what is going on. We must have someone to blame as soon as possible.

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When ISIS claims terrorist attacks, it’s worth reading closely

The Washington Post reports: The terrorist attacks seem to come one right after the other, by truck, handgun, ax, assault rifle, machete, bomb and knife. Each day, a string of news alerts on your phone. Or worse, the sound of shots fired, or sirens blaring in your city.

In a show of the Islamic State’s increasing influence, we now await, and even expect, revelations that the attackers are affiliated with the group. Terrorism in most of the world has become synonymous with its name.

But in many recent cases, it seems that the Islamic State’s media apparatus is also waiting for those revelations. Since the highly coordinated attacks in Paris last November, most of the attacks that the group eventually claimed were carried out by individuals who may never have come into direct contact with operatives in their supposed “caliphate” in northern Iraq and Syria. These attackers did not give the Islamic State notice that they would be acting in its name. Instead, some of them self-radicalized and left behind recordings offering oaths of allegiance.

By reading the language in the Islamic State’s claims on attacks, one can see which of them were heavily directed, as in Paris and Brussels, and which were simply inspired by the group’s ideology. There is a clear difference between claims made after attacks that Islamic State leaders knew about beforehand, and attacks they didn’t know about. [Continue reading…]

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Libyan forces advance in ISIS-held city

The Wall Street Journal reports: Forces fighting for the United Nations-backed Libyan government said Monday they had seized the security headquarters in Sirte, a crucial step toward retaking control of the coastal city that Islamic State captured more than a year ago.

Sirte is the militant group’s most important base outside its strongholds in Syria and Iraq, and its fighters have put up stiff resistance since the initial drive by government-allied forces into the city in late May.

But Libyan commanders said Monday they had shrunk Islamic State’s area of control around Sirte, the birthplace of late dictator Moammar Gadhafi, from 150 miles of coastline to just two square miles in the city center. U.S. and Libyan intelligence officials earlier this year estimated some 5,000 militants were inside Sirte, though they say the number has dwindled.

“We’re slowly tightening our grip on them,” a senior Libyan officer said.

The security headquarters in Sirte is a complex in a part of the city that the forces backing the government have been trying to enter for weeks. [Continue reading…]

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Kabul bombing adds new layers of agony for Afghanistan’s Hazaras

The New York Times reports: One after another, the bodies arrived on the steep hill in western Kabul.

For much of Sunday afternoon, an excavator was flattening the dusty area as men with shovels and pickaxes dug graves — four rows of 20 or so, packed so close that if the dead could stretch out their arms, they would touch those next to them.

In the hours that followed, nearly two dozen of the at least 80 protesters killed in a bombing claimed by the Islamic State on Saturday were buried here, in overlapping ceremonies that blurred into one large scene of public mourning. As the final prayer for one body lowered into a grave was being recited, dirt was shoveled onto another body at the next.

“Oh, brothers, slow! Slow!” one mourner at the grave of Muhammad Hassan, a 25-year-old construction worker killed in the bombing, urged the men piling dirt over the next grave. Dust covered the white turban of the mullah who crouched over Mr. Hassan’s headstone, reading from a little book of prayer.

The attack on peaceful protesters in Kabul — who were mostly from the Hazara ethnic minority — stirred an international outcry, in part because it was the first time that the Islamic State’s leadership in Syria had claimed responsibility for such a deadly strike in Afghanistan.

But some here voiced skepticism that the terrorist group, whose fighters in Afghanistan are concentrated in the east, was behind it. The detail hardly seemed to matter to others, who see the bombing as another in a long procession of attacks born of a chaotic and unending war. Many of the mourners burying their dead on the hill, or continuing their protest near a convention center, bitterly accused the Afghan government of failing to protect its people no matter the threat. [Continue reading…]

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The folly of Obama’s disengagement doctrine

Thanassis Cambanis writes: A generational war has engulfed the Levant. The ruination of Iraq and Syria is akin to a core meltdown within the Arab state system, with consequences that already have rocked the world: new wars flaring across the Middle East, political ferment in Turkey, a global refugee crisis, and the rise of the Islamic State group, to name just a few.

Today we can begin the sad work of taking inventory of an American presidency that aspired to a humane and humble foreign policy. President Barack Obama didn’t start the Levantine conflagration — that ignoble credit belongs to his predecessor — but he has kept America fighting in Iraq and deployed forces in Syria to support a vast, billion-dollar covert proxy effort. All to little effect.

The long, horrific war that President George W. Bush launched in March 2003, with his illegal invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, has shattered the cradle of civilization beyond all recognition. During the subsequent occupation, U.S. officials dismantled the pillars of the Iraqi state, including its military and bureaucracy, and then stood by as newly empowered sectarian warlords and mob bosses tore apart the country. Many wars flared simultaneously in Iraq, some of which spread to neighboring Syria after the popular uprising sparked there in 2011.

President Obama’s signal intellectual and policy contribution was his minimalist response towards the chaos left behind by Bush. American policy at turns sought to contain the implosion of Syria and the ongoing fighting in Iraq, and at others accelerated or tried to steer the conflict, often by trying to balance ethnic or sectarian militias in a manner that, perhaps inadvertently, deepened the hold of sectarian warlords.

The president’s lackluster attitude has poisoned much of the serious policy conversation in Washington. His policies have spread the spurious conviction that whatever happens in the Middle East is not a core U.S. or international interest, but rather a sad and regional affair. [Continue reading…]

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‘I was an ISIS jihadist — until they arrested and tortured me’

Michael Weiss writes: Now in exile in Mersin, on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey, the 31-year-old Abu Omar laid out a story that was equal parts Midnight Express and Darkness at Noon.

It purports to be a first-hand account of an ISIS prison system, which is every bit as gruesome as you’d imagine it to be. His account is also a useful documentary insight into how an organization that once thrived on its shrewd guerrilla intelligence and counterintelligence tradecraft, able to spot informants, spies, and sleepers, and find agents with whom to infiltrate and vitiate rival factions, has come to resemble all totalitarianisms by devouring its own.

Originally from Kafr Zita in Hama province, which, among other things, would later be the site of a deadly chlorine and ammonia gas attack by the Assad regime, Abu Omar was a house painter by trade before the revolution began — a revolution that was supposed to be gloriously concluded by now.

Instead, the uprising is entering its sixth year as an endless series of slow-burning civil wars.

Abu Omar became a protestor in 2011 after the Syrian security services and military opened fire on others carrying banners calling for economic and social reforms in the spring of 2011. [Continue reading…]

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Civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes in Syria now ‘nearing Russian levels’

Charles Davies writes: somehow, someway, the news from Syria invariably manages to get worse, for those not yet fatigued by the routine of atrocity.

“It’s the worst week we’ve ever tracked,” Chris Woods, director of the monitoring group Airwars, told The Daily Beast. He was referring to a threat that emerged nearly two years ago: U.S. airstrikes, aimed at the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, but exacting a deadly toll on those stuck between ostensibly religious and ostensibly secular extremists.

Ahmad Mohammad, a 24-year-old Syrian activist, described it as a “massacre”: On July 19, over 90 civilians in the northern Syria village of Tokhar, just outside the town Manbij, were killed by suspected U.S. airstrikes as a U.S.-backed coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces, is fighting to reclaim the area along the Turkish border from the Islamic State.

When the uprising in Syria began in 2011, Mohammad said his goal was to spread “news of the revolution”; in 2016 his activism takes the form of “documenting abuses” — in this case, he sent along photos of women and children being buried in a mass grave, “human beings like all of us,” he said, whose only offense was living in a town occupied by terrorists from abroad.

In a statement, U.S. Central Command confirmed it carried out airstrikes in the area. “We are aware of reports alleging civilian casualties in the area,” it said. “If the information supporting the allegation is determined to be credible, we will then determine the next appropriate step.”

The CENTCOM-supported SDF, meanwhile, has dismissed reports of mass casualties in Manbij as “fabricated news” circulated by groups who “support terrorism,” according to a statement obtained by the Kurdish media network Rudaw.

Independent monitors and anti-ISIS activists on the ground, by contrast, insist that air support for the SDF has killed hundreds of innocents.

According to Airwars, the human beings dumped in that hole, along with corpses on streets and under rubble in and around Manbij that could not be afforded even a mass burial, bring the civilian death count from U.S.-led airstrikes in the area up to at least 190 since May 31.

Local activists claim the number is at least 368, and an activist with the Free Manbij Media Center told The Daily Beast the death toll on July 19 alone was “more than 150 people, mostly women and children” who were “killed while in their homes.”

The latest airstrikes have grabbed international headlines, but they are nothing new for Syrians. Since the U.S.-led coalition began bombing Syria, Airwars states there are credible reports of between 682 and 942 civilian deaths, meaning that nearly a third of what the military terms “collateral damage” has occurred in the last two months. It has gotten “so bad,” Woods said, “that we’re nearing Russian levels” (between 1,098 and 1,450 “likely” dead civilians since September 2015). The U.S. has thus far confirmed just 24 civilian deaths from its campaign in Syria. Like Russia, none of its partners — Australia, Bahrain, France, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, among others — has admitted to any. [Continue reading…]

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Jihad and the French exception

Farhad Khosrokhavar writes: Whether Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who killed more than 80 people during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, was an agent of the Islamic State or an unhinged loner who borrowed the group’s jihadist symbols, the slaughter raises the same fundamental question: Why do so many more attacks of this magnitude occur in France than in other European countries?

Belgium has also been hit recently, but less often. In Britain and Spain no terrorist attack has killed more than 10 people in over a decade. In Germany, there hasn’t been a major attack at all.

Failures in the French security and intelligence services cannot account for the difference, because communication problems afflict such services throughout Europe. The answer lies elsewhere: When it comes to jihad, too, there is a French exception.

France’s distinctiveness arises in part from the ideological strength of the idea the nation has had of itself since the French Revolution, including an assertive form of republicanism and an open distrust of all religions, beginning, historically, with Catholicism. This model has been knocked around over the years, first by decolonization, then by decades of economic hardship, the growing stigmatization of cultural differences, the fervent individualism of new generations and globalization, which has narrowed the state’s room for maneuver.

Above all, France hasn’t been able to solve the problem of economic and social exclusion. Its system, which is too protective of those people who have jobs and not open enough to those who don’t, breeds angst all around. Young people in the banlieues, marginalized and with few prospects, feel like victims. They become prime targets for jihadist propaganda, often after a stint in prison for petty crimes. [Continue reading…]

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The misguided logic of keeping calm in the face of terror

Emile Simpson writes: Statistically, there is a minuscule individual chance of being killed by terrorism in the West.

Commentators will delight in finding comparisons that capture the apparent absurdity of being frightened by terrorism — perhaps telling us that more people are killed by bee stings than terrorism, or that there is more chance of being killed in a car crash than having your kids crushed by a terrorist-driven truck, or such like. Be resilient, they’ll say. Statistically speaking, we’re good here. Statistically speaking, we should all calm down, keep cool heads, and celebrate peace in the West.

But the statistical approach utterly misses the point. The essence of terrorism is that it is not just any sort of crime. It is a crime against the very fabric of the state, as the timing of the attack on Bastille Day was perhaps intended to emphasize.

To view terrorism through the lens of the personal risk of death implies an impoverished, almost nonexistent, view of the state — that is, the community of citizens that is the basis of all political life. In the statistical view, the state evaporates into a collection of atomized individuals who care only about themselves. A peace that requires — even applauds — a sort of numb, cold acceptance in the face of events like Thursday’s and calls it resilience is a rather pathetic peace to celebrate.

Peace depends on the stability of the political order. That political order has an identity in its own right. There is, in other words, a nation behind the state; when the state is attacked, the nation is attacked. Responding to terror with a cold, individualized, statistical message only opens the doors to Europe’s populists, who then appear the only ones not allergic to the recognition that the nation, a body with its own history, culture, and identity, has been wounded. Their response to that is identity politics, which is the path to social disaster. But until the political mainstream stands up for the idea that the state does have certain basic values that demand the loyalty of all its citizens — not just in terms of the law but in spirit as well — they can’t expect to tame today’s populist zeitgeist. [Continue reading…]

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Nice attacker had fascination with extreme violence

The Wall Street Journal reports: The man who killed 84 people in Nice was a violent drinker and drug taker with an “unbridled sex life” who developed a fascination with Islamic State and other terrorist propaganda, prosecutors said as they deepened their probe into whether a broader network fostered his radicalization.

François Molins, the chief Paris prosecutor overseeing the investigation into the Bastille Day attack, said Monday that police haven’t found any evidence that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel explicitly pledged allegiance to Islamic State or had links to any people associated with the Sunni Muslim militant group.

However, the prosecutor painted a picture of a man who underwent a rapid transformation in the weeks leading up the massacre and became suddenly enthralled with extremist messages and ultra-violent images.

Data recovered from Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s computer included pictures of militants draped in Islamic State flags and corpses as well as photos of Osama bin Laden and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the head of an al Qaeda-aligned group called Murabitun. His computer also turned up searches for “horrible car accidents” and “shock videos,” Mr. Molins said. [Continue reading…]

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The Nice attack heralds a new kind of terror — one we can’t define

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Peter Beaumont writes: After attacks such as Nice, we demand answers. A requirement to understand is necessary both to protect ourselves in the future and to deal with the consequences of horror. What was the motivation? Are there links to other individuals? How did the killer arrive at the decision to kill?

That desire to understand is hardly a new phenomenon, although modern media have made it more pervasive. Joseph Conrad, in the complex character of Verloc – the anarchist bomber, double agent and provocateur of the The Secret Agent – was an early explorer of this territory.

White people who buy guns to shoot up cinemas and schools are put into one category: “lone wolves”. And inevitably the focus is on psychological and social problems. Individuals from a Muslim background are instantly placed in another category: “terrorists”. But when it comes to attacks such as those in Nice and Orlando, the distinction is increasingly unclear.

If those two attacks – as seems very possible – were as much about the inadequacies of the attackers as about Islamic State; if Isis, or simply the fact of the attention given to such mass killings claimed by Isis, is no more than a nudge that legitimises, in the perpetrator’s mind, mass killing – then perhaps there is no meaningful distinction. [Continue reading…]

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Coup attempt highlights widening faultlines in Turkish alliance with U.S.

Martin Chulov reports: US jets have resumed operations in the fight against Islamic State after being grounded for two days at an airbase in southern Turkey amid uncertainty over what the country’s failed coup might mean for bilateral ties and for the war itself.

The early signs were confusing. While Barack Obama spoke out in support of his counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as Friday night’s plot unfolded, dialogue since has underlined a mistrust that has plagued the fight against Isis and left two nominal allies once again struggling to find common ground.

Erdoğan’s demands that his foe, Fethullah Gülen, in self-imposed exile in the US, be extradited over claims that he drove the plot, were perceived as a slight in Washington. Officials quickly disavowed links to Gülen, demanded evidence of any connections, and rejected an implication that the US itself may have been involved. [Continue reading…]

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