Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

ISIS aims to provoke backlash against Muslims in West

Yaroslav Trofimov writes: Before dawn in February 2006, militants sent by the precursor of today’s Islamic State sneaked into the golden-domed Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra, disarmed the guards and rigged the building with explosives.

By most accounts, nobody died in the explosion itself, which blew off the dome and reduced the venerated mosque to rubble. But the bombing achieved its goal of baiting Iraq’s Shiite majority into a spree of retaliation against the country’s Sunnis. Thousands died in the wave of sectarian killings that began hours later, and the social fabric of Iraq was torn forever.

In this environment of sectarian strife, many Iraqi Sunnis eventually came to view Islamic State as their only, however unpalatable, protector.

That is why just a few hundred of the group’s militants were able to seize Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, home to 1.5 million people, in June 2014.

This lesson of Samarra now looms over the West. Islamic State is using the same playbook in its attacks on Western targets this year — be it the ones directly organized by the group, such as the Nov. 13 massacre in Paris, or ones apparently only inspired, such as the shooting in San Bernardino.

The group’s objective is clear: to try to bait Western societies into an indiscriminate backlash against millions of Muslims living in Europe and the U.S. It is a backlash that, if successfully provoked, would disrupt these Muslims’ bonds with their countries of citizenship and residence and — as is it happened with Iraq’s Sunnis — validate Islamic State’s claim to be their only protector.

“ISIS thrives on polarization,” said Hassan Hassan, an expert on the group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “They want people to say — they hate us, and so we hate them. This is the foundation of their success.” [Continue reading…]

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Putin says he ‘hopes’ nuclear warheads will never be needed against ISIS… or anyone else

The Independent reports: Vladimir Putin has said he hopes nuclear warheads will not be needed to deal with terrorists or anyone else, after Russia launched cruise missiles from its submarine at Syria.

During a meeting in the Kremlin, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told the President that Kalibr cruise missiles had been fired by the submerged Rostov-on-Don submarine from the Mediterranean Sea for the first time.

He said TU-22 bombers also took part in the latest raids and that “significant damage” had been done to a munitions depot, a factory manufacturing mortar rounds and oil facilities. Two major targets in Raqqa, the defacto capital of Isis, had been hit, said Mr Shoigu. [Continue reading…]

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Why Assad is uninterested in defeating ISIS

Christoph Reuter writes: Assad’s official army is now just one of many fighting forces on the side of the regime — and is also suffering from poor morale and a lack of soldiers. For many young Syrians from areas under government control, forced conscription has become the most significant motivator for embarking on the refugee trail to Europe.

This is also one reason why Russia’s initial strategy for Syria is not finding success. Moscow had been hoping that massive air strikes would force rebel fighters in opposition-held areas to abandon the fight. That would then pave the way for Assad’s ground forces to advance and take back those regions. But in October, when Assad’s tank units rolled into those areas that Russian jets had previously bombed, they didn’t get very far. Instead of fleeing, rebels there had dug in instead.

Using TOW anti-tank missiles supplied by the US, in addition to Russian anti-tank weapons that had been captured or acquired from corrupt officers, the rebels struck some 20 tanks before the others turned back. The army’s ground offensive south of Aleppo likewise quickly ground to a halt. Meanwhile, rebels near Hama were able to finally take control of a long-contested city.

Assad’s army isn’t just vulnerable, it also isn’t strictly a Syrian force anymore. For the last two years, the forces on his side have increasingly been made up of foreigners, including Revolutionary Guards from Iran, members of Iraqi militias and Hezbollah units from Lebanon. They are joined at the front by Shiite Afghans from the Hazara people, up to 2 million of whom live in Iran, mostly as illegal immigrants. They are forcibly conscripted in Iranian prisons and sent to Syria — according to internal Iranian estimates, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 of them fighting in the country. The situation leads to absurd scenes: In the southern Syrian town of Daraa, rebels began desperately searching for Persian interpreters after an offensive of 2,500 Afghans suddenly began approaching.

It is the first international Shiite jihad in history, one which has been compensating for the demographic inferiority of Assad’s troops since 2012. The alliance has prevented Assad’s defeat, but it hasn’t been enough for victory either. Furthermore, the orders are no longer coming exclusively from the Syrian officer corps. Iranian officers control their own troops in addition to the Afghan units, and they plan offensives that also involve Syrian soldiers. Hezbollah commanders coordinate small elite units under their control. Iraqis give orders to Iraqi and Pakistani militia groups. And the Russians don’t let anyone tell them what to do. [Continue reading…]

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To defeat ISIS, embrace refugees

Musa al-Gharbi writes: In the aftermath of the series of attacks in Paris, attributed to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), French President François Hollande has declared a three-month state of emergency. This measure enables the military and law enforcement to monitor, arrest, detain and interrogate persons, with little or no due process. These powers will be exercised primarily against France’s besieged Arab, Muslim, immigrant and refugee populations.

Meanwhile, France has closed its borders and is calling for an indefinite suspension of the EU’s open-border (“Schengen”) system. Other EU states are calling for reducing the Schengen zone to exclude those countries most effected by the refugee crisis. Throughout the EU there is growing resistance to admitting or resettling refugees from the greater Middle East.

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly voted to halt the already stringent and meager U.S. program to resettle refugees from Iraq and Syria. Thirty-one governors have warned that would-be migrants from the Middle East are not welcome in their states, and a majority of the American public has turned against accepting more refugees. One of the frontrunner candidates for president of the United States, Donald Trump, has even called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” All of these maneuvers are playing into the hands of ISIS.

ISIS has strongly condemned refugees’ seeking asylum in Western nations, repeatedly warned would-be expatriates that Muslims will never be truly accepted in the United States and the EU (hence the importance of an “Islamic State”). In order to render this a self-fulfilling prophecy, ISIS ensured that one of the attackers carried a fraudulent Syrian passport, which was left to be discovered at the scene of the crime before its owner detonated his suicide vest.

ISIS is counting on Western nations to turn would-be refugees back towards their “caliphate,” because this massive outpouring of asylum seekers poses a severe threat to the legitimacy and long-term viability of ISIS. Accordingly, if Western nations were truly committed to undermining ISIS, they should embrace and integrate refugees from ISIS-occupied lands. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS has become the overwhelming obsession of Western governments, clouding all other issues

An extract from Jonathan Littell’s new book, Syrian Notebooks, begins:

The world is not yours alone
There is a place for all of us
You don’t have the right to own it all.

– An anonymous Syrian yelling in the night at a regime sniper

It starts, as always, with a dream, a dream of youth, liberty, and collective joy; and it ends, as all too often, in a nightmare. The nightmare still goes on and will last much longer than the dream: struggle as they can, no one knows how to wake up from it. And it keeps spilling over, infecting ever wider zones, all the while seeping through our screens to come lap up against our gray mornings, tingeing them with a distant bitterness we do our best to ignore. A vague and remote nightmare, highly cinematographic, a kaleidoscope of mass executions, orange jumpsuits, and severed heads, triumphant columns of looted American armor, beards and black masks, and a black banner all too reminiscent of the pirate flags of our childhoods. Spectacular images that have served to mask, even erase, those forming the undertow of the same nightmare: thousands of naked bodies tortured and meticulously recorded by an obscenely precise administration, barrels of explosives tossed at random on neighborhoods full of women and children, toxic gasses sending hundreds into foaming convulsions, flags, parades, posters, a tall smiling ophthalmologist and his triumphant “re-election.” The medieval barbarians on one side, the pitiless dictator on the other, the only two images we retain of a reality far more complex, opposing them when in fact they are but two sides of the same coin, one coin among many in a variety of currencies for which no exchange rate was ever set. [Continue reading…]

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Residents of Ramadi say ISIS ‘treat us like prisoners’ as Iraqi forces close in

Reuters reports: As Iraqi forces close in on the western city of Ramadi, thousands of civilians are effectively being held hostage inside by Islamic State militants who want to use them as human shields.

Iraqi forces cut the hardline group’s last supply line into Ramadi in November, surrounding the city and making it almost impossible for the militants to send in reinforcements.

But for thousands of residents who remain trapped inside the mainly Sunni city, life has become even harder as the militants grow increasingly paranoid, residents said.

Reuters spoke to five residents inside the city and three who recently managed to get out. All said conditions inside had deteriorated to their worst since Islamic State overran it earlier this year.

“Daesh fighters are becoming more hostile and suspicious. They prevent us from leaving houses. Everyone who goes out against orders is caught and investigated,” said Abu Ahmed. “We feel we’re living inside a sealed casket.” [Continue reading…]

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Why do people join ISIS?

A March report from Lebanon-based Quantum Communications cited by Defence One, identifies nine categories of ISIS recruits:

  • Status seekers: Intent on improving “their social standing” these people are driven primarily by money “and a certain recognition by others around them.”
  • Identity seekers: Prone to feeling isolated or alienated,these individuals “often feel like outsiders in their initial unfamiliar/unintelligible environment and seek to identify with another group.” Islam, for many of these provides “a pre-packaged transnational identity.”
  • Revenge seekers: They consider themselves part of a group that is being repressed by the West or someone else.
  • Redemption seekers: They joined ISIS because they believe it vindicates them, or ameliorates previous sinfulness.
  • Responsibility seekers: Basically, people who have joined or support ISIS because it provides some material or financial support for their family.
  • Thrill seekers: Joined ISIS for adventure.
  • Ideology seekers: These want to impose their view of Islam on others.
  • Justice seekers: They respond to what they perceive as injustice. The justice seekers’ ‘raison d’être’ ceases to exist once the perceived injustice stops,” the report says.
  • Death seekers: These people “have most probably suffered from a significant trauma/loss in their lives and consider death as the only way out with a reputation of martyr instead of someone who has committed suicide.”

[Continue reading…]

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The military reasons why Assad cannot beat ISIS

David Blair writes: The essential precondition for defeating Isil is to turn the Sunni population against them. The corollary is that only a largely Sunni force can achieve strategic victory against Isil.

The rank-and-file of the old Syrian army was mainly Sunni, reflecting the composition of the country’s population. But the old Syrian army has been put through the meat-grinder represented by over four years of civil war.

Before the insurrection against Assad began in 2011, the army had a paper strength of 220,000. Yet a huge proportion of that number – possibly the majority – defected to the rebels in the first 18 months of the uprising.

By the summer of 2012, Assad had placed the survival of his regime in the hands of only two units: the 4th Armoured Division and the Republican Guard. Both were recruited disproportionately from Assad’s own Alawite sect – and the 4th Armoured Division was commanded by his brother, Maher. The combined strength of both formations was never more than 30,000 men, or 14 per cent of the old army. Assad had effectively written off the other 86 per cent.

Since then, even these two units have been badly mauled. Today, the backbone of Assad’s forces is provided by Hizbollah, the radical Shia movement based in Lebanon, and the “National Defence Force”, a new Alawite-dominated militia, armed and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

So Assad now commands a largely Shia and Alawite force, backed by Christian Russia and Shia Iran. He is a leader kept in power by foreign bayonets. His fighters also have a blood-curdling record of sectarian massacres of Sunnis. After more than four years of wanton slaughter, involving hideous barrel bombs and poison gas, Assad has been responsible for the deaths of more Sunnis than any man alive.

I put the conclusion delicately: it is not obvious that a force of this kind is best placed to drive a wedge between Isil and the Sunni population. If you really compelled the Sunnis of eastern Syria to choose between Isil and Assad – with his Shia and Alawite fighters steeped in Sunni blood – then they might make a very inconvenient decision. [Continue reading…]

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Obama no longer seems sure Assad must go

Josh Rogin writes: In his prime-time address Sunday night, President Barack Obama listed the diplomatic process on the Syria war, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, as one of the five most important things the administration is doing to fight the Islamic State. Yet behind the scenes, there is growing schism within the administration over whether ending that civil war requires eliminating its cause: the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

And there is increasing evidence that Obama is siding with those advisers who feel that demanding Assad’s ouster is holding back broader efforts to defeat the Islamic State. After years of insisting that Assad had to go, last month Obama spoke of a political process in which “we can start looking at Mr. Assad choosing not run.” From the Oval Office on Sunday, he made no mention of the dictator whatsoever.

“With American leadership, the international community has begun to establish a process — and timeline — to pursue cease-fires and a political resolution to the Syrian war,” said Obama. “Doing so will allow the Syrian people and every country, including our allies, but also countries like Russia, to focus on the common goal of destroying ISIL — a group that threatens us all.”

Everyone at the top level of the Obama administration agrees with the president that resolving the civil war in Syria is necessary to defeat the Islamic State. But when other officials talk about how to fight terrorism in the Middle East, they emphasize that ending Assad’s rule is a crucial and necessary part of that plan. [Continue reading…]

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Why ISIS isn’t going anywhere

Michael Weiss, in text prepared for his testimony in front of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on December 2, wrote: Policymakers here and abroad often speak as if ISIS only debuted as a significant insurgency and international terror threat in June 2014, when its soldiers stormed into Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, almost uncontested. The president surely forgot himself when, in conversation with the New Yorker’s David Remnick, he referred to the group that had dispatched mentally disabled girls in Tal Afar as suicide bombers and blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra as the “JV team.” But as you well know, this is a jihadist franchise, which with we have grown intimately acquainted for over a decade. It has long memory and is playing an even longer game.

Has it altered its strategy? No, not really, although it has placed greater tactical emphasis on its foreign operations since its capacity for receiving emigrating jihadists from New Jersey to Peshawar has shrunk, thanks to better policing and the relative closure of the Syrian-Turkish border.

Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, officially ISIS’s spokesman but in reality the man in charge of its dominion in Syria, defined the “state’s” foreign policy rather plainly in September: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State,” he said, “then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be.”

But Adnani was only reiterating what has always been ISIS’s global ambition—to export its holy war well beyond its immediate precincts or purview. The domestic pillar of ISIS’s project is what it calls “remaining and expanding”—the pushing of the borders of the caliphate in the Levant and Mesopotamia and the swelling of the ranks of its fighters and supporters there. We may pretend that ISIS is no state, but its ideologues and bureaucrats and petty officials behave as if they fully believe their own propaganda.

The foreign pillar is the opportunistic spreading of chaos, harm and wanton destruction in the West, relying upon agents who come from the West and who may or may not be returning veterans from a regional battlefield but rather everymen, Muslim or non-Muslim, who have been radicalized remotely. These jihadists are encouraged to strike at the kufar, the unbelievers, on the latter’s home turf or wherever they may be found, using methods both clever and crude: “an explosive device, a bullet, a knife, a car, a rock, or even a boot or a fist,” as al-Adnani elsewhere specified.

The two pillars have been in existence since the era of ISIS’s founder and godfather, the Jordanian jailbird Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Lest we forget, Zarqawi personally beheaded the American contractor Nicholas Berg in Iraq in 2004; two years before that, he had a direct hand in the assassination of 60 year-old American citizen and USAID worker Laurence Foley in Amman. [Continue reading…]

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The number of foreign fighters in Syria surged in 2015

The Soufan Group reports: In June 2014, The Soufan Group (TSG) released a report on Foreign Fighters in Syria. Now, 18 months later, despite sustained international effort to contain the so-called Islamic State and stem the flow of militants traveling to Syria, the number of foreign fighters has more than doubled. In an updated report released today, it becomes clear that neither the challenge of preventing people from traveling to Syria to join extremist groups nor the threat of unknown numbers returning to commit Paris-style attacks has been adequately countered or addressed.

The original report listed an estimated 12,000 people from 83 countries; today’s update estimates that between 27,000 and 31,000 people from at least 86 countries have traveled to Syria. Some of the increase likely stems from better disclosure and accounting by governments, but the increase is also testament to the enduring pull of the Islamic State’s narrative spread by social media across the globe. It also shows that as long as would-be foreign fighters have a physical destination to travel to, they will do so. As long as the group holds onto its self-proclaimed caliphate, people will try to join it.

The updated report also shows that while the phenomenon of Syrian-bound foreign fighters is indeed global, there are hotbeds of terror that send citizens to Raqqa and beyond in disproportionate numbers. Some are long-time generators of foreign fighters: Derna, Libya; Ben Gardane and Bizerte, Tunisia; and the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia. Other places are more recent additions to the list of communities losing their youth to terror: the Molenbeek district of Brussels, Belgium; and the Lisleby district of Fredrikstad in Norway.

These hotbeds show the power of peer-to-peer recruitment. While the power of the Islamic State’s social media outreach is undeniable, it appears more often to prepare the ground for persuasion, rather than to force the decision. There are few places on earth in which the group’s message and imagery cannot be seen or heard, and its ubiquitous reach has led to the recruitment of individuals from Algeria to Uzbekistan. Yet, as hotbeds develop, recruitment through social media becomes less important than via direct human contact; clusters of friends and neighbors persuade each other to travel separately or together to join the Islamic State.

The report concludes that the issue of foreign fighters is both a near-term threat and a long-term challenge. The Syrian civil war will not end soon, and although the Islamic State is under more pressure than it was in June 2014 when TSG produced its original report, it is likely to survive in some form for a considerable time to come. It will attract more recruits from abroad, but they may differ from the earlier wave of hopefuls who were attracted by the prospect of a brand new state that would provide them what they could not find at home. As the Islamic State changes its focus from consolidating control of territory to attacking its foreign enemies in their homelands, or their interests elsewhere, the profile of its foreign recruits will also change. All the while, the group will continue to inspire attacks by those who do not wish to travel, but rather fight for the group in their country of residence.

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How fringe attacks on American Muslims became mainstream

Christopher Bail writes: Donald Trump recently claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating in New Jersey after the September 11 attacks. He later reaffirmed this account despite a lack of evidence, adding that suspected terrorists should be tortured during counterterrorism investigations even if it “doesn’t work” because they “deserve it anyway.”

Though such brazen criticisms of minority groups are characteristic of Trump, his comments also illustrate the degree to which fringe ideas about Islam have become mainstream. Public figures of all political stripes have proposed that Muslims are secretly a fifth column quietly plotting to implement shariah law under the guise of political correctness. Over the past decade, 32 states proposed shariah law bans, controversies about the construction of mosques have increased by more than 800 percent, and the number of Americans with negative opinions of Islam has more than doubled, as my research shows.

The self-proclaimed Islamic State delights in these developments. The group’s propaganda cites anti-Muslim sentiments as evidence for its claim that the United States is at war with Islam. The Islamic State has repeatedly stated that its goal is to make the West so hostile to Muslims that they have no choice but to side with the Islamic State.

The battle against the Islamic State therefore requires careful analysis of how fringe ideas about Muslims become mainstream and what might be done to stem the tide. [Continue reading…]

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Muslims in U.S. report spike in discrimination, threats

CBS News reports: In the wake of the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Muslims around the U.S. say the rhetoric against them has becoming increasingly incendiary.

A few weeks ago, armed protesters picketed a mosque in Irving, Texas, some chanting “Every Muslim is a terrorist!”

In Virginia, tempers erupted at a meeting over building a mosque — one man yelled “every one of you are terrorists” at a Muslim man. Sunday night in Philadelphia, a severed pig’s head was found outside a mosque.

And voice messages saying “you’re not welcome here, I hope you get sprayed with pig’s blood,” among other things, was left on an answering machine of the Dallas chapter of CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations. [Continue reading…]

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Russian bombs halt relief work in northern Syria, as hundreds of thousands of civilians flee and ISIS advances

McClatchy reports: In the days since Turkey downed a Russian warplane that flew into its airspace, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a bombing campaign that’s destroyed bakeries and relief convoys in northern Syria, cutting the flow of food to more than half a million civilians.

The result has been a complete halt in relief operations by major humanitarian aid groups, all of which operate out of Turkey. It’s also brought the region to the brink of further catastrophe as hundreds of thousands of residents are caught in the crossfire and are unable to flee their homes.

Since Russia began bombing Sept. 30, “there’s been a huge wave of internally displaced,” said Karl Schembri, regional coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council. The situation has grown worse since the shoot-down Nov. 24. “People cannot move at all, and there is nowhere for them to flee to,” he told McClatchy.

All of Syria’s neighbors, including Turkey, have now shut their borders to fleeing refugees, and informal camps for displaced persons just inside the Syrian border are reported to be packed.

The stepped-up Russian bombing campaign has had another effect, rebels and aid workers say, allowing the Islamic State to move into areas that it previously had not controlled close to the Turkish border. [Continue reading…]

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The most intensive state-building project currently in operation is run by ISIS

The Guardian reports: John Kerry has branded its members psychopathic monsters, François Hollande calls them barbarians, and David Cameron describes them as a death cult. But Islamic State is much more than that.

As newly obtained documents demonstrate, Isis is also made up of bureaucrats, civil servants and jobsworths. Hundreds if not thousands of cadres have set themselves to work creating rules and regulations on everything from fishing and dress codes to the sale of counterfeit brands and university admission systems.

About 340 official documents, notices, receipts, and internal memos seen by the Guardian show that they have been trying to rebuild everything from roads to nurseries to hotels to marketplaces, from the Euphrates to the Tigris. They have also established 16 centralised departments including one for public health and a natural resources department that oversees oil and antiquities.

This has been the plan all along. A 24-page statecraft blueprint obtained by the Guardian, written in the months after Isis’s declaration of a caliphate, shows how deliberate the state-building exercise has been, and how central it is to its overall aims. [Continue reading…]

The researcher, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, who translated the document and gave it to The Guardian, asks to what extent ISIS is following its own plan and among several observations says this:

The text calls for breaking down the differences between muhajireen (foreign fighters) and ansar (local Iraqis and Syrians) by integrating them together in the military ranks, uniformly accepting a fundamentally Arabic and Islamic character to their identity of affiliation with the Caliphate alone. In the pre-Caliphate era, one will have noted the existence of foreign fighter battalions for what was then ISIS fundamentally based around single nationalities and ethnicities, such as Katiba al-Battar al-Libi (Libyan while attracting some Europeans of Maghrebi and north African origin) and the Abu al-Nur al-Maqdisi Battalion (Gazan). However, since the Caliphate declaration, these battalions have generally dropped off the radar of social media, and as colleague Michael Weiss was able to establish in an interview with an Islamic State defector, the Katiba al-Battar al-Libi was in fact disbanded for precisely these reasons of discouraging affiliations on ethncity, which of course may give rise to loyalties beyond those owed to the Caliph.

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Sorry, we can’t negotiate with ISIS

As Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military leader and politician, once said: “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”

So why not negotiate with ISIS?

Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s Shadow Foreign Minister who led a revolt of opposition MPs by voting in favor of Britain’s entry into the air campaign against ISIS in Syria, went back to his Leeds Central constituency this weekend to explain his position.

Members of the Stop the War Coalition, challenged Benn, saying that Britain should negotiate with ISIS.

In Britain and elsewhere, a lot of people are going to see an exchange like this as an argument between diplomacy and militarism, remembering perhaps Winston Churchill’s famous observation: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Anyone who says we can’t negotiate with ISIS, is easy to cast as being addicted to the use of brute force. This perception gets further reinforced as politicians hammer their podiums declaring, we must destroy ISIS.

So again: why not negotiate with ISIS?

Here’s why: Negotiation requires compromise and the discovery of common ground and for ISIS to negotiate it would have to abandon the goals which are the reason for its existence.

In the latest issue of Dabiq, ISIS’s 65-page color magazine, the possibility of a truce between the West and ISIS is raised and they say that in such an event “nothing changes for the Islamic State… It will continue to wage war against the apostates until they repent from apostasy. It will continue to wage war against the pagans until they accept Islam… Thereafter, the slave markets will commence in Rome by Allah’s power and might.”

Wild rhetoric, no doubt, but what we already know is that on a more limited territorial scale, ISIS practices exactly what it preaches. It has no interest in co-existing with those it opposes. It is engaged in what it regards as a Manichean struggle which allows for no other possibility than the death, subjugation, or submission of its enemies.

The contents of Dabiq might be dismissed as propaganda written merely to appeal to the grandiose fantasies of ISIS recruits, but a newly published translation of an internal ISIS document appearing in The Guardian today shows that the organization is not only earnest in its goals but also in their meticulous application.

As far as foreign policy is concerned, again we see an utterly uncompromising position, modeled, it is claimed, on the example of earlier caliphates.

The objective in relation to “heretic communities” is “dispersing their groupings so there no longer remained any impeding opinion, strength or ability, and the Muslim alone remains the master of the state and decision-making and no one is in conflict with him.”

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Residents of Raqqa now more terrified of airstrikes than ISIS

Financial Times reports: “This is what daily life is like. You wake up in the morning and if you don’t hear the sound of shelling, or a jet breaking the sound barrier, you feel like it could be a good day,” says Abu Hadi. “The first thing I do next is look outside for clouds and pray for them to come — or better yet a storm.”

Sorties are always fewer in number during bad weather, he says. On Monday it rained — a good day.

Abu Hadi lives 2km from the centre of Raqqa, Isis’s de facto capital in Syria. The city has become the focal point of an intensified air campaign by the US-led international coalition since the Isis attacks on Paris. France has led with stepped up air strikes and has been joined by the UK. But Raqqa is also home to hundreds of thousands of civilians who are prevented from leaving by the jihadis. One of the only ways to leave the city is to prove a health condition requiring treatment that Isis hospitals cannot provide.

Abu Hadi speaks to the Financial Times on an internet connection he had secretly rigged and uses only at dead of night. Like all those interviewed for this report, he asks for his real name not to be used.

The 50-year-old used to worry more about Isis brutality — he speaks of militants on motorcycles dragging mangled corpses behind them as he was walking his son to school. Now, terror for him is waking to the sound of warplanes. “If someone looks upwards without an obvious reason, everyone around will be terrified . . . When there is quiet, you spend all your time thinking, OK now a plane is coming.” [Continue reading…]

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