Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

UK parliament votes to bomb ISIS in Syria – so, what will that mean internationally?

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

The British parliament has approved a government plan to join the international alliance bombing Islamic State targets in Syria. After more than 10 hours debating, the motion in favour of action passed with 397 votes for and 223 votes against the government.

Ahead of the vote, British newspaper columns had been filled with discussion of a new “war”, while those opposed to the airstrikes drew parallels with the catastrophe of the intervention in Iraq in 2003.

Both of these are exaggerations. Britain’s bombing will not be significant and it certainly will not be part of a coherent strategy against the Islamic State, let alone a reasonable approach to Syria’s 56-month conflict.

This is no more than a political sideshow, a diversion from the core issue – namely the continuing civil war between president Bashar al-Assad and his opponents.

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Helped by Russian airstrikes, ISIS advances in northern Aleppo

NOW reports: ISIS has swept into a village outside a key rebel supply line in northern Aleppo, with activists blaming the setback on Russian airstrikes against rebel factions which are also battling a Kurdish-affiliated coalition further to the west.

The new ISIS advance is the latest battlefield development to rock the flashpoint northern Aleppo front adjacent to a swathe of territory Turkey wants to turn into a “safe zone” free of both the extremist group and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YGP).

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Wednesday morning that “fierce clashes are raging in the area around the village of Kafrah and other nearby areas, between ISIS on one side and rebel factions on the other.” [Continue reading…]

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The prize: Fighting for Libya’s oil wealth

International Crisis Group reports: Libya’s economic conditions could turn sharply for the worse, as rival authorities vie to control rapidly shrinking national wealth. The struggle affects oil fields, pipelines and export terminals, as well as the boardrooms of national financial institutions. Combined with runaway spending due to corruption and dwindling revenue because of falling exports and energy prices, the financial situation – and with it citizen welfare – faces collapse in the context of a deep political crisis, militia battles and the spread of radical groups, including the Islamic State (IS). If living conditions plunge and militia members’ government salaries are not paid, the two governments competing for legitimacy will both lose support, and mutiny, mob rule and chaos will take over. Rather than wait for creation of a unity government, political and military actors, backed by internationals supporting a political solution, must urgently tackle economic governance in the UN-led talks.

Since the Qadhafi regime fell in 2011, Libya has been beset by attacks on, labour strikes at and armed takeovers of oil and gas facilities, mostly by militias seeking rents from the fledging central government. Initially brief and usually resolved by government concessions, the incidents gradually took on a life of their own, in an alarming sign of the fragmentation of political, economic and military power. They show the power accrued by militias during and since the 2011 uprising and the failure of efforts to integrate them into the national security sector. The dysfunctional security system for oil and gas infrastructure presents a tempting target for IS militants, as attacks in 2015 have shown.

One aspect of the hydrocarbon dispute is a challenge to the centralised model of political and economic governance developed around oil and gas resources that was crucial to the old regime’s power. But corruption that greased patronage networks was at that model’s centre, and corrupt energy sector practices have increased. A federalist movement some consider secessionist controls a number of the most important crude-oil export terminals. It exploits the situation by pursuing its own sale channels, adding to the centrifugal forces tearing Libya apart. [Continue reading…]

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How America’s choice to ignore the plight of Syrians has fueled support for ISIS inside the U.S.

Given the reputation ISIS has earned as the largest and most violent terrorist organization of this era, it’s difficult for many observers to fathom why anyone — especially someone who has enjoyed the privileges of growing up in America — would choose to join this death cult. Surely it could only appeal to individuals suffering from some underlying pathology or profound social dysfunction?

A newly published study by researchers at George Washington University, ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa, examines the cases of 71 individuals who have been charged with ISIS-related activities since March 2014, of whom 56 were arrested in 2015 alone — the highest number of terrorism-related arrests in the U.S. since 9/11.

While ISIS has found foreign recruits in much larger numbers in other countries, such as Tunisia, Russia, and France, support in the U.S. is widespread and significant.

U.S. authorities say there are 250 Americans who have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria/Iraq to join ISIS and there are 900 active investigations against ISIS sympathizers in all 50 states.

As public support for expanding military action against ISIS increases, in tandem with a widening sense that Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria is the “lesser evil,” perhaps the most significant finding in the new study is this:

In many cases examined by our research team, an underlying sense of sympathy and compassion appeared to play an important role in initially motivating young Americans to become interested and invested in the Syrian conflict. Many were outraged by the appalling violence Bashar al Assad’s regime used to suppress the Syrian rebellion and the subsequent inaction on the part of the international community. Pictures and videos capturing the aftermath of civilian massacres perpetrated by the regime, displayed widely in both social and mainstream media, rocked the consciences of many — from those with an existing strong Sunni identity to those who were not Muslim — and led some to take the first steps to militancy.

From the vantage point of the ISIS leadership in Raqqa, the prospects for finding new recruits in the U.S. have probably never before looked so promising.

After years of disinterest in the war, American public sympathy towards Syrian refugees briefly spiked in September in response to a photograph of a single drowned infant, but just as quickly largely evaporated after the Paris attacks — even though the perpetrators were mostly European.

Russia’s intervention in Syria has, among other things, had the effect of removing the modest amount of pressure the Obama administration has long faced to impose a no-fly zone.

The Paris attacks have put ISIS at the top of the international agenda, reinvigorating the broad rallying cry that “ISIS must be destroyed.”

Those who once imagined that they could go to Syria to fight for defenseless Muslims in a territorially-defined war, are now even more likely to embrace the ideology which believes in a global war against Muslims, in response to which Muslims are called to take up arms wherever they are.

If the military campaign to contain, degrade and destroy ISIS, also has the ancillary effect of consolidating the Assad regime’s hold on power, the weakening of ISIS’s territorial base will no doubt lead to the expansion of its international operations.

The price we are likely to pay for imagining that the disaster in Syria was something we could comfortably ignore, separated as we are by a vast ocean, is that the war will open on new fronts most often discerned only after the fact.

As the Syrian writer and political dissident, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, recently said:

the Syrian struggle is not something confined to Syria, it is a global issue. And because the world did not help Syria change for better, I think that Syria is changing the whole world for worse.

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Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the ISIS, and it is hurting the war

The Washington Post reports: On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.

Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.

“It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army.

The Islamic State is “almost finished,” he said. “They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.”

U.S. military officials say the charges are too far-fetched to merit a response. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” said Col. Steve Warren, the military’s Baghdad-based spokesman. “There’s clearly no one in the West who buys it, but unfortunately, this is something that a segment of the Iraqi population believes.”

The perception among Iraqis that the United States is somehow in cahoots with the militants it claims to be fighting appears, however, to be widespread across the country’s Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide, and it speaks to more than just the troubling legacy of mistrust that has clouded the United States’ relationship with Iraq since the 2003 invasion and the subsequent withdrawal eight years later.

At a time when attacks by the Islamic State in Paris and elsewhere have intensified calls for tougher action on the ground, such is the level of suspicion with which the United States is viewed in Iraq that it is unclear whether the Obama administration would be able to significantly escalate its involvement even if it wanted to.

“What influence can we have if they think we are supporting the terrorists?” asked Kirk Sowell, an analyst based in neighboring Jordan who publishes the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics.

In one example of how little leverage the United States now has, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi pushed back swiftly against an announcement Tuesday by Defense Secretary ­Ashton B. Carter that an expeditionary force of U.S. troops will be dispatched to Iraq to conduct raids, free hostages and capture Islamic State leaders.

Iraq’s semiautonomous region of Kurdistan, where support for the United States remains strong, has said it would welcome more troops. But Abadi indicated they would not be needed.

“There is no need for foreign ground combat troops,” he said in a statement. “Any such support and special operations anywhere in Iraq can only be deployed subject to the approval of the Iraqi Government and in coordination with the Iraqi forces and with full respect to Iraqi sovereignty.”

The allegations of U.S. collusion with the Islamic State are aired regularly in parliament by Shiite politicians and promoted in postings on social media. They are persistent enough to suggest a deliberate campaign on the part of Iran’s allies in Iraq to erode American influence, U.S. officials say.

In one typical recent video that appeared on the Facebook page of a Shiite militia, a lawmaker with the country’s biggest militia group, the Badr Organization, waves apparently new U.S military MREs (meals ready to eat) — one of them chicken and dumplings — allegedly found at a recently captured Islamic State base in Baiji, offering proof, he said, of U.S. support.

“The Iranians and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias are really pushing this line of propaganda, that the United States is supporting ISIL,” Warren said. “It’s part of the Iranian propaganda machine.” [Continue reading…]

The problem doesn’t just apply in Iraq. I have little doubt that there are Americans now reading this report who believe it must be a product of the Pentagon’s propaganda machine, duping gullible journalists in order to conceal “the truth” that ISIS is an American creation!

Such has been the “success” of the internet in spreading conspiracy theories.

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Support grows for U.S. commando raids to fight ISIS

Bloomberg reports: As lawmakers and former Pentagon officials push President Barack Obama to deploy special-operations forces more aggressively against Islamic State, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the U.S. is taking a step in that direction.

“We’re deploying a specialized expeditionary targeting force to assist Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces and put even more pressure on ISIL,” Carter told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, using an acronym for Islamic State. “This force will also be in a position to conduct unilateral operations in Syria.” The new force may start with about 200 personnel, a U.S. official said.

With the attacks in Paris putting new pressure on Obama to show progress in the stalemated war against terrorists, defense analysts are calling for an intensified campaign of raids to disrupt the group’s leadership, gather intelligence and build momentum.

“The goal is to start a chain reaction of intelligence-driven raids that increase in frequency and expand in scope over time,” said Robert Martinage, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations under Obama. “The metric becomes can you disrupt and dismantle the network faster than the enemy can repair and regenerate it?”

A model for such special operations would be the commando raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011. The tactics, honed in hundreds of raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, were developed by groups such as Task Force 714 in Iraq, which joined the intelligence resources of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency with Navy Seal Team Six and Army Delta Force commandos. [Continue reading…]

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UK Syria vote: Who MPs should (and should not) be listening to

Alex Rowell writes: In Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, set in February 2003, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne is discussing the day’s big event — the million-strong march in Hyde Park against the coming invasion of Iraq — with his “newly adult” daughter, who’s just returned, flushed with righteous vivacity, from the jubilant scene.

The liberal Henry doesn’t, in fact, support the war, but when his daughter asks, slightly too judgmentally, why he hadn’t joined the enlightened masses on the streets, a friendly argument breaks out that then turns into a less-friendly argument, eventually leading Henry to realize what it is that makes him uneasy about the demonstrators:

“Let me ask you a question. Why is it among those two million idealists today I didn’t see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam?”

“He’s loathsome,” she says. “It’s a given.”

“No it’s not. It’s a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?”

This has always struck me as an insight of the highest moral clarity, and it bears revisiting as the British parliament meets today to vote on extending Royal Air Force strikes against ISIS in Iraq (already approved by parliament last year) to include ISIS targets in neighboring Syria as well. Today, as in 2003, any serious consideration of whether or not to intervene must begin with the acknowledgment that both options are terrible. MPs voting against the motion put forth by David Cameron’s cabinet must understand that they are doing a favor to the rapists of children, the tyrannisers of Arab and Muslim civilians generally, and the butchers of British tourists, French concert-goers, and Egyptian Christians, just as MPs voting for the motion must concede that opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is probably right to say “we are going to kill [innocent] people in their homes by our bombs.”

Both options entail further horror and misery for civilians. There will be blood on British MPs’ hands whether they vote for or against. Neither course should be taken, then, without the requisite degrees of discomfort and remorse — there can be no singing and dancing in the park. The people who must be morally distrusted right away, in other words, are those for whom the decision comes easily.

These include, on the (purported) left, the anti-war absolutists, who care not the slightest for the welfare of Syrian civilians, or even for their opinions. Perhaps best represented in Britain by the questionably-named Stop the War Coalition, they made this clear last month when they prevented Syrian activists from speaking at a panel discussion on intervention in Syria, heckling and then calling the police on a small group who turned up hoping to have a say on the fate of their own country. To call these groups ‘anti-war’ is in fact much too kind, for they have no problem with war in Syria per se as long as it can be used against Downing Street. They are the sort who would have told you (as indeed they might still) that the most dangerous man in Europe in 1939 was Winston Churchill.

A closely related faction are those who actively support war in Syria — who expend column inches and public speaking hours defending and advocating it — when it’s carried out by regimes Britain opposes. Of these there could be no better example than Patrick Cockburn, the journalist Corbyn invited to give Labour MPs a final pep talk before parliament opened this morning. When 10 weeks ago Russia began its own intervention in Syria — which has since killed a number of rebels and a higher number of civilians, but conspicuously few ISIS fighters — Cockburn penned an op-ed titled ‘Why We Should Welcome Russia’s Entry Into Syrian War.’ Moscow’s air strikes on rebel positions and residential homes “could have a positive impact,” Cockburn explained, even helping in “de-escalating the war.” Needless to say the prospect of Britain following Russia’s lead, however, is another matter entirely.

“Based on wishful thinking and poor information,” Cockburn said in his briefing Wednesday, Britain is stumbling into the unknown “without a realistic policy to win” against ISIS. What might a realistic policy involve? “If ISIS is really going to be destroyed, it is difficult to see how the US and UK can avoid having some degree of co-operation with the Syrian army,” Cockburn wrote two weeks ago. He further applauded the “clear-sighted” remarks by former British Army head Gen. David Richards that Assad and even “Hezbollah and their Iranian backers” should be welcomed into the Coalition’s fold. In this, the ostensibly left-wing Cockburn is on common ground with such right-wingers as UKIP leader Nigel Farage and the Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, MP Crispin Blunt, both of whom have opposed fighting ISIS without an accompanying entente cordiale with Damascus.

If these are some of the voices MPs would do well to ignore when voting Wednesday, where might they turn instead for valuable insight? A sensible starting place would surely be those Syrian civilians who stand to be most directly affected by the dispatch of Tornado GR4s to the skies above the caliphate. [Continue reading…]

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Western-friendly forces in Syria closer to 100-120,000 in number than Cameron’s 70,000

Michael Stephens writes: In advocating a case for extending UK air strikes into Syria, Prime Minister David Cameron outlined a strategy of targeting so-called Islamic State (IS), paralleled with a diplomatic track in which the main opposition groupings sat down with the Syrian regime and worked out a transition of power.

As part of making the case for a robust diplomatic process, the prime minister noted that as many as 70,000 fighters who did not belong to extremist groups were still committed to fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

The figure has raised eyebrows: there was no clarity offered as to who these fighters are, where they are fighting, and what sort of relationships these moderate groups have to al-Qaeda, and indeed IS.

Many politicians and commentators have outright dismissed the figure as fantastical, feeding into the Russian propagandists’ line that there are no “moderate” rebels left in Syria.

In the past week, a number of analysts have taken up the challenge to identify these rebels. [Continue reading…]

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Russia said to plan new Syria airbase

NOW reports: Russia plans to expand its military force in Syria and deploy jets to a second airbase near Homs, according to a Kuwaiti daily with close access to Moscow’s military intervention in Syria.

Al-Rai reported Monday morning that a Russian intelligence brigade would deploy near the Al-Shayrat Airbase located approximately 35 kilometers southeast of Homs.

“The Al-Shayrat airbase houses around 45 airplane hangars, each of which is fortified in a way that prevents any damage if it is shelled or targeted,” sources in the Damascus joint operations room of the “4+1” military coalition of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah told the newspaper’s chief international correspondent, Elijah J. Magnier.

“It also has a main runway and a 3 kilometer backup runway that engineering teams are working to prepare,” the sources added.

Russia currently conducts its air sorties from the Hmeimim airbase adjacent to Latakia’s International Airport, where it has deployed a force of approximately 50 aircraft since the late summer.

The report added that Moscow wants Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iraqi militias fighting on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime to seize the ISIS-held towns of Qaryatayn and Palmyra, both of which are located near the Al-Shayrat base, in order to “prevent any shelling that might affect the Russian air forces inside it.” [Continue reading…]

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Living as a Muslim in the West’s ‘gray zone’

Laila Lalami writes: It was probably not a coincidence that the Paris attacks were aimed at restaurants, a concert hall and a sports stadium, places of leisure and community, nor that the victims included Muslims. As [ISIS’s magazine] Dabiq makes clear, ISIS wants to eliminate coexistence between religions and to create a response from the West that will force Muslims to choose sides: either they “apostatize and adopt” the infidel religion of the crusaders or “they perform hijrah to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens.” For ISIS to win, the gray zone must be eliminated.

Whose lives are gray? Mine, certainly. I was born in one nation (Morocco) speaking Arabic, came to my love of literature through a second language (French) and now live in a third country (America), where I write books and teach classes in yet another language (English). I have made my home in between all these cultures, all these languages, all these countries. And I have found it a glorious place to be. My friends are atheists and Muslims, Jews and Christians, believers and doubters. Each one makes my life richer.

This gray life of mine is not unique. I share it with millions of people around the world. My brother in Dallas is a practicing Muslim — he prays, he fasts, he attends mosque — but he, too, would be considered to be in the gray zone, because he despises ISIS and everything it stands for.

Most of the time, gray lives go unnoticed in America. Other times, especially when people are scared, gray lives become targets. Hate crimes against Muslims spike after every major terrorist attack. But rather than stigmatize this hate, politicians and pundits often stoke it with fiery rhetoric, further diminishing the gray zone. Every time the gray zone recedes, ISIS gains ground.

The language that ISIS uses may be new, but the message is not. When President George W. Bush spoke to a joint session of Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, he declared, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” It was a decisive threat, and it worked well for him in those early, confusing days, so he returned to it. “Either you are with us,” he said in 2002, “or you are with the enemy. There’s no in between.” This polarized thinking led to the United States invasion of Iraq, which led to the destabilization of the Middle East, which in turn led to the creation of ISIS.

Terrorist attacks affect all of us in the same way: We experience sorrow and anger at the loss of life. For Muslims, however, there is an additional layer of grief as we become subjects of suspicion. Muslims are called upon to condemn terrorism, but no matter how often or how loud or how clear the condemnations, the calls remain. Imagine if, after every mass shooting in a school or a movie theater in the United States, young white men in this country were told that they must publicly denounce gun violence. The reason this is not the case is that we presume each young white man to be solely responsible for his actions, whereas Muslims are held collectively responsible. To be a Muslim in the West is to be constantly on trial. [Continue reading…]

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Could this Quran curb extremism?

Daniel Burke writes: On a warm November night in Washington, a small group of American Muslims gathered at Georgetown University to celebrate “The Study Quran,” new English translation of Islam’s most sacred scripture.

By the next evening, several said, the need for the book became painfully apparent.

The Islamic State had struck again, this time slaughtering 130 men and women in Paris. The group quoted the Quran twice in its celebratory statement.

After the attacks, President Barack Obama renewed his call for Muslim scholars and clerics to “push back” against “twisted interpretations of Islam.” Some U.S. presidential candidates fed anti-Islamic flames, creating the most hostile environment since 9/11, American Muslims said.

“The whole program of ISIS is to turn Muslims against the West and the West against Muslims,” said Joseph Lumbard, one of the five scholars behind “The Study Quran.”

“They want the West not to understand Islam.”

Thus far, many English translations of the Quran have been ill-suited to foiling extremist ideology or introducing Americans to Islam. Even after 9/11, when interest surged and publishers rushed Qurans to the market, few of the 25 or so available in English are furnished with helpful footnotes or accessible prose.

Meanwhile, Christians or Jews may pick up a Quran and find their worst fears confirmed.

“I never advise a non-Muslim who wants to find out more about Islam to blindly grab the nearest copy of an English-language Quran they can find,” Mehdi Hasan, a journalist for Al Jazeera, said during the panel discussion at Georgetown.

Ten years in the making, “The Study Quran” is more than a rebuttal to terrorists, said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian-born intellectual and the book’s editor-in-chief. His aim was to produce an accurate, unbiased translation understandable to English-speaking Muslims, scholars and general readers.

The editors paid particular attention to passages that seem to condone bloodshed, explaining in extensive commentaries the context in which certain verses were revealed and written.

“The commentaries don’t try to delete or hide the verses that refer to violence. We have to be faithful to the text, ” said Nasr, a longtime professor at George Washington University. “But they can explain that war and violence were always understood as a painful part of the human condition.”

The scholar hopes his approach can convince readers that no part of the Quran sanctions the brutal acts of ISIS.

“The best way to counter extremism in modern Islam,” he said, “is a revival of classical Islam.” [Continue reading…]

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A growing jihadist presence in Syria’s opposition

Syria Deeply interviewed Hassan Hassan: How prevalent are jihadist groups in Syria? How naturalized are they becoming within their respective areas of control, and how are they changing the nature of the opposition?

Hassan: Well it’s worrying and I’m convinced that these groups are here to stay. Whether it’s the Islamic State or al-Nusra, they’re not going anywhere. But at the same time, the conflict isn’t going away either. It’s intractable, and I don’t see a resolution to it any time soon. But the longer these groups stick around, the more acceptable their ideologies become.

Unless we can begin to establish some sort of calm in Syria, nobody is going to turn against al-Nusra and think of them as a ‘terrorist’ group. Al-Nusra is fighting the Assad government, and it has been quietly establishing control of both Idlib and Aleppo, especially since the Russian intervention. They’ve made a lot of progress since March of this year in quietly taking over Idlib, establishing the group as a “kingmaker.” After the Russian intervention, it’s been clear that they’re trying to replicate the Idlib scenario in Aleppo. Slowly, al-Nusra is establishing itself as the dominant force in the area. That’s coming a long way considering local nationalist rebels had always dominated Aleppo. Some of them might have been Islamists, but they were still committed to Syria. Now, you have al-Nusra slowly benefiting from the deepening crisis, especially after the Russian intervention, and it’s beginning to achieve some of its goals. This is a consequence of the global failure to end this crisis. We’ve allowed groups to entrench themselves throughout Syria, whether it’s ISIS in southeastern Syria and elsewhere, or al-Nusra in northern Syria and elsewhere. It’s a direct result of the lack of vision and the disproportionate focus on what is and will happen in Damascus.

But give these ideas time and they will entrench themselves. That’s the simple formula. This is exactly what al-Qaida is trying to do. They always talk about themselves as a trigger for ordinary people to take up arms and to consider jihad as a way of life and the way to free the Muslim world, to put it back on the map. That’s their vision and that’s what they’re trying to do. Winning hearts and minds to convince people that they’re freedom fighters, not terrorists. They’re gaining traction in Syria, but they’re not yet mainstream. [Continue reading…]

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We need to talk about how ISIS interprets Islam

By Balsam Mustafa, University of Birmingham

Since capturing swathes of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State has embarked on a cyber-offensive to spread its message through social media. A great effort has been made to block and remove the content, to understand how this information spreads – and to understand why some find it so convincing.

But it is also important to look at the message itself. Islamic State’s claims are not plucked out of the sky. As unpalatable as they may be, they are framed by religious narratives and debates about Islam that have spanned centuries.

A look at Islamic State’s online magazine, Dabiq, reveals arguments built on Wahabbism, a fundamentalist branch of Islam. There are invocations of the founder Ibn Taimaya, “Sheik al Islam”, and references to Ibn Abbas, Ibn Masood, Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn Hajar, Muhammad Ibn Abdil-Wahhab, Bukhari, and Sahih Muslim – Muslim scholars either collecting, interpreting, or narrating Hadith (the words of the prophet). The broader message is blunt: “Kill whoever changes his religion [Sahīh al-Bukhārī]“.

To claim that Islamic State is not related to Islam is therefore naive, even wilfully dismissive. It ignores the interpretations of Islam that IS presents in its videos, statements and other communication.

Arguing that IS is comprehensively Islamic, on the other hand, is simplistic, too. That is to see the group as representing all Muslims and the different and competing readings and interpretations of Islam around the world. Clearly, they do not.

Grabbing either of these easy, polar explanations for what IS represents will not provide a solution to the problem. We need to consider some controversial issues upon which most of the varying sects of Islam agree in order to understand IS, and subvert its narratives.

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ISIS defections mount as death toll rises, U.S. official says

USA Today reports: Defections of Islamic State fighters — a closely watched measure by officials of U.S.-led coalition — have begun to thin the ranks of the militants in Iraq in the last month, intelligence reports and drone footage show.

Wholesale defections, sparsely manned checkpoints and elite foreign fighters pressed into mundane duty indicate that the U.S.-led bombing campaign and advances by Kurdish forces are eroding the forces of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, said Army Col. Steve Warren, the top spokesman for the counter-ISIL coalition in Baghdad.

Top military officials estimate that the campaign has killed 23,000 Islamic State fighters, raising their death toll by 3,000 since mid-October. Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East as chief of Central Command, told troops last week in Iraq that the campaign is inflicting maximum pain on the enemy, according to a military official who attended the meeting but who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. [Continue reading…]

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After Paris attacks, air campaign escalates against ISIS oil assets

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration accused the Syrian government last week of purchasing oil from Islamic State and froze the U.S. assets of a Syrian businessman for allegedly facilitating these transactions.

An air raid by French warplanes on Oct. 23 in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzour severely damaged the Omar field, which supplied most of the extremist group’s oil and was once partly operated by Royal Dutch Shell PLC.

Before the raid, up to 2,000 trucks were lined up at any one time at the installation, but that number has fallen to 200, a Western counterterrorism official said.

After the Nov. 13 terror attacks in the French capital, airstrikes against Islamic State’s oil assets intensified as part of Operation Tidal Wave II, named after the World War II military campaign against Nazi oil assets.

The coalition said five days later it had destroyed 116 tanker trucks near Albu Kamal. On Nov. 23, it said it carried out airstrikes near the cities of Deir Ezzour and Hasakah, smashing 283 tanker trucks that were used by Islamic State to transport oil out of eastern Syria.

“We know that two-thirds of their oil comes from the oil fields we struck” in Deir Ezzour province, Col. Steve Warren, the coalition spokesman, said from Baghdad. “We need to take this away from them so that their operations are more difficult to conduct.”

A raid in Syria in May that killed Islamic State’s finance chief Abu Sayyaf yielded what U.S. officials have described as a trove of material about its operations.

A Western counterterrorism official said the confiscated archive included computer files showing the group’s oil production peaking at 55,000 barrels a day in the months after a wave of airstrikes in October 2014, with sales of up to $46 million a month.

The focus on cutting that stream has emerged as a rare point of agreement between the U.S. and Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose support for Mr. Assad has drawn criticism from the West.

Russian bombers destroyed some 500 oil trucks doing business with Islamic State on Nov. 21 and 22, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Col. Warren expressed skepticism about the figure, saying the U.S. had seen no evidence the Russians had enough aircraft in theater to bomb such a large number of trucks during that period. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi forces prepare next U.S.-backed attack on ISIS, with Mosul on horizon

The New York Times reports: In Sinjar, Iraq, fighters from the Islamic State carved a network of tunnels. To defend Hawija, Iraq, they erected a 10-foot sand wall. And virtually everywhere they have surrounded their positions with dense minefields of I.E.D.s, backed by machine guns, mortars and suicide bombers.

While a huge act of terrorism in Paris drew the world’s attention to the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, the group’s primary focus in Iraq and Syria has been a far more traditional military goal: the capture and defense of cities and towns. And in doing so the Islamic State has developed a hybrid style of warfare that combines insurgent and conventional military tactics — vehicles full of explosives used as rolling bombs, and trenches that would be familiar to students of World War I.

Those tactics are being put to the test in Ramadi, Iraq, where an estimated 300 to 400 fighters for the Islamic State, and several hundred additional supporters, have squared off against about 10,000 Iraqi troops. The militant group’s ability to construct elaborate defenses in Ramadi — and to cover them with sniper, machine-gun and mortar fire — has slowed the American-supported campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Passenger rants about ISIS before shooting Muslim taxi driver in back

The Washington Post reports: It began as an ordinary cab ride.

But by the time it was over, the Pittsburgh taxi driver — a 38-year-old Muslim man from Morocco — had a bullet wound in his upper back and was lucky to be alive, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Pittsburgh police are investigating the Thanksgiving Day shooting, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is asking for more help: CAIR, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, has called on the Justice Department to investigate the incident as a hate crime — which, it said, was “similar to a growing number of attacks targeting the nation’s Muslim community following the recent terror attacks in Paris.”

The passenger, according to CAIR, “reportedly began asking the driver about his background, including asking whether he was a ‘Pakistani guy.’” CAIR says the passenger also asked the driver “about the terror group ISIS” and mocked the prophet Muhammad.

The driver, who moved to Pittsburgh from Morocco five years ago, told the Post-Gazette that he is three months away from becoming a U.S. citizen. His plan is to bring his wife to the United States and start a family in the country he considers home.

“This [incident] is due to the person, not the city,” he told the paper. “Pittsburgh is my style, it is like my home town [of Safi] in Morocco. My dream is to be an American.” [Continue reading…]

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