Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Aleppo faces ISIS ‘siege nightmare’

NOW reports: Fears have risen in regime-controlled quarters of Aleppo after ISIS cut off the government’s main supply line leading into the city late last week.

Pro-Damascus daily Al-Akhbar published a report Tuesday on the situation in Syria’s second city, saying the mood among residents has worsened after “the great extent of the breach ISIS has achieved” on the key front became clear.

Describing the feelings of regime supporters in the Aleppo, Al-Akhbar reporter Basel Dayoub said that the city’s residents were “remembering the nightmare of the first siege in 2013,” in reference to a rebel siege from August to October of that year.

The period was marked by the hardships suffered by residents of the regime controlled areas of east Aleppo, which saw an increase of prices and shortages of basic staples.

The prospects of another long-siege renewed last Friday when ISIS seized a stretch of the Khanaser-Ithriyah highway southeast of Aleppo—cutting off the main regime controlled route into the city—while rebels staged fierce counterattacks against the Iranian-backed government offensive southwest of Aleppo. [Continue reading…]

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Obama weighs moving U.S. troops closer to front lines in Syria, Iraq

The Washington Post reports: President Obama’s most senior national security advisers have recommended measures that would move U.S. troops closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, officials said, a sign of mounting White House dissatisfaction with progress against the Islamic State and a renewed Pentagon push to expand military involvement in long-running conflicts overseas.

The debate over the proposed steps, which would for the first time position a limited number of Special Operations forces on the ground in Syria and put U.S. advisers closer to the firefights in Iraq, comes as Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter presses the military to deliver new options for greater military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

The changes would represent a significant escalation of the American role in Iraq and Syria. They still require formal approval from Obama, who could make a decision as soon as this week and could decide not to alter the current course, said U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are still ongoing. It’s unclear how many additional troops would be required to implement the changes being considered by the president, but the number for now is likely to be relatively small, these officials said. [Continue reading…]

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New allies in northern Syria don’t seem to share U.S. goals

McClatchy reports: After the failure of its $500 million program to stand up a Syrian volunteer force to battle Islamic State extremists, the Obama administration has begun an effort to enable Arab militias to fight alongside a Kurdish force that has gotten U.S. air support for the past year.

The stated U.S. aim is to oust the Islamic State from its de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria. But if the Shammar tribal militia, the biggest in Hasaka province, is any example, many Arab forces on the ground have a different agenda. For that matter, so does the Kurdish People’s Protection Force, or YPG, which dominates this area and has worked closely with the United States since the siege last year of the border town of Kobani.

The road to the palace of Sheikh Humaydi Daham al Hadi, the head of the Shammar tribe, winds through vast wheat fields in this isolated corner of eastern Syria, past checkpoints manned by YPG fighters, and then by his own guards.

Hasaka, an oil, gas and grain producing area, is now part of what the YPG calls Jazera, one of three cantons that comprise Rojava, or west Kurdistan, a 200-mile-long corridor on Syria’s border with Turkey. The Syrian government, which still has troops in at least two cities, has acquiesced to YPG control.

Because Turkey views the YPG as a terrorist group and has closed its borders because of the YPG’s affiliation with the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, the only way into Rojava is by a ferry across the Tigris River from Iraq and hours of driving on secondary roads.

Welcoming visitors in his vast reception room, Sheikh Humaydi says his goal is to lead a Shammar tribal uprising against the Islamic State “to liberate Syria, Iraq and beyond.” But he also wants to carry on a 2-century-old struggle against conservative Wahabi Islam, which he said destroyed the last Shammar emirate, and he favors the breakup of Saudi Arabia, where the puritanical sect dominates. “We are already working on that,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Freed prisoners of ISIS describe beatings and torture

The New York Times reports: Muhammad Hassan Abdullah al-Jibouri had little hope that he would ever make it out of the Islamic State’s jail alive, and he had not even seen the sun in more than a month. Then, early last Thursday morning, he heard the helicopters overhead.

The 35-year-old police officer heard bursts of gunfire, and shouts in Kurdish and in English. Suddenly, the door to his cell was battered open.

“Who is there? Who is there?” a soldier yelled, first in Kurdish and then in Arabic.

“We are prisoners!” Mr. Jibouri’s cellmates yelled back.

Mr. Jibouri was one of 69 Arab prisoners of the Islamic State freed in a military raid near the northern Iraqi town of Hawija last week, the first in which American Special Operations forces were confirmed to have accompanied their Kurdish counterparts onto the battlefield.

On Tuesday, in their first interviews since being brought to the Kurdish autonomous region by American Chinook helicopters, four of the former prisoners described life under the thumb of the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Taliban and Russian interests may converge in fight against ISIS

The Daily Beast reports: The Taliban are not as lonely as they once were. The pariahs who protected Osama bin Laden and quickly collapsed when the U.S. counter-attacked after September 11, 2001, have been developing contacts with neighboring states and even with Russia, driven out of Afghanistan in 1989.

There’s nothing simple about this picture, and, interestingly, it appears partly tied to Russian efforts to oppose the spread in Afghanistan of groups pledging allegiance to the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. That same concern has helped to forge links between the Taliban and their longtime enemies in Iran.

And the Russian connection is emerging, ironically, at the same time that Afghanistan’s Uzbek warlord and vice president, Abdul Rashid Dostum, has openly warmed to his onetime allies in Russia and tried to strengthen ties to the former Soviet states on Afghan frontier.

Dostum visited Moscow and Grozny this month and launched an offensive just last week in provinces near the Turkmenistan border. Dostum lumped the Taliban together with Daesh, a common Arabic acronym for the Islamic state, on his enemies list.

“The countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States from Russia to Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, all these states are willing to stand with us against Daesh [one of the acronyms for the so-called Islamic State], against extremism, against the bloodthirsty Taliban,” Dostum declared.

But The Daily Beast has learned that Russia and some of these neighboring states may be playing a double game, or, at the very least keeping their options open if the Taliban manage to retake power. [Continue reading…]

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The foundations of ISIS: How secular tyranny fostered religious zealotry in the Middle East

In a review of Wendell Steavenson’s The Weight of a Mustard Seed, Kyle W. Orton writes: Kamel Sachet [one of Saddam Hussein’s favourite and most senior generals] came to religion in prison. In 1983, for no given reason, Sachet was thrown in Ar-Rashid Number One prison, where the only thing detainees were allowed to read was the Qur’an. While State radio was permitted, even State newspapers were banned. Sachet learned the Qur’an by rote, expressing regret he had not done so when he was young.

Sachet showed signs of a more Salafist view of Islam even at this early stage. Sachet told a prisoner he befriended that he wished his friend was not a Shi’a because the shrines were Islamically wrong. Sachet was deeply, personally offended by alcohol and the mixing of the sexes. Perhaps above all, Sachet was given to Islamic fatalism. “If I die … then it means that is the time for me to die,” Sachet said. This apolitical piety also counselled loyalty to the ruler.

In prison, under threat of death and daily torture, men began to take solace in the faith. This pattern of prisons as Islamist production facilities is repeated all throughout the region, notoriously in Syria.

In pondering why the monstrous apparatus of Saddam’s regime functioned — — why didn’t the population just rise as one and refuse any longer to be ruled in this way?  —  Steavenson mentions the Zimbardo prison experiment. It is a good analogy and it can be pushed further.

During the war with Iran, most Iraqi officers  —  with the straight choice of continuing to throw young men into an inferno or be tortured and murdered — resorted to a fatalism of their own: “What could I do?” (a phrase that recurs as Steavenson meets the old Ba’athists). At all levels, some Iraqis found solace in Dutch courage, some found solace in the promise of a life to follow this one.

Anyone can see why, during the horror of the Iran-Iraq War or one of Saddam’s prisons, Islam, with its calming rituals and promise of paradise, would have an appeal. But just look at Saddam’s Iraq. From 1980 through Kuwait 1990–91, then the “armed truce” and siege of the 1990s, Iraq was at war for very nearly twenty-five years. The conditions of political terror that went along with this in Saddam’s Iraq are notorious, and the breakdown of provisions and order in the 1990s was heaped on top. In short, Iraq under Saddam was one big prison with wartime conditions. Is it any wonder religion’s appeal increased in Iraq during Saddam’s rule? Or that the aftermath should resemble the disorder and brutality of a prison riot?

The “modern” ideologies — — pan-Arabism, Communism, Ba’athism  — failed; nobody could be convinced that the period of trauma was going to give way to a brighter tomorrow. People gave up on the promise of this life and instead sought to compensate the misery endured in the here-and-now with the promise of a blissful life to come. [Continue reading…]

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Russian intervention has unintended effect of unifying Syrian rebel forces

The Daily Beast reports: As Charles Lister, an analyst of Syria’s multifarious insurgency at the Brookings Institution, calculated, the use of the TOW missile has increased a staggering 850% since the Russians started bombing, a metric that bolstered by press accounts featuring rebels attest to sudden bonanza of the tank-killer. Also reappearing on the battlefield is the RBG-6 multiple grenade launcher, a munition purchased by the Saudis from Croatia and imported into southern Syria via Jordan in 2013. (That supply line was abandoned after the launcher was found in the hands of jihadists not long after its import.)

Evidence of rebel victories is everywhere on social media. Here’s a video of Liwa Suquour al-Jabal destroying an artillery gun with a TOW missile in Khirbat al Naqus, near Latakia. Here’s one of a BMP being wiped out with a TOW near al-Qarassi, Aleppo, a town the rebels appear to have sacked, along with Tel Qurha, which lies just hundreds of meters south of a regime army base. According to the opposition-run Local Coordination Committees, Jaysh al-Fateh seized the village of Mansoura in Hama today after intense combat with pro-regime forces. The FSA participated in that operation, too, because the same anti-tank missile system was put to use in Mansoura.

Mohammed Rasheed, a fighter with Suqur al-Ghab, one of the CIA-backed militias fighting in Hama, told The Daily Beast, “We have managed to liberate two towns; Mea’ar Kabi in the northern [suburb] of Hama and Lahaya. We have been planning for this operation since the start of the Russian invasion. We wanted to reverse the situation and attack them instead of just defending ourselves.” Rasheed said that his brigade destroyed 23 regime tanks and killed 15 Syrian soliders — in the last 24 hours. “What helped us in this operation is that we all got united and fought as one army.” [Continue reading…]

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The real power of ISIS

Scott Atran writes: As U.S. troops and their allies stage commando raids to rescue prisoners slated for slaughter by the so-called Islamic State, and the Russians mount bombing raids to bolster the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it’s easy amid the kinetics to lose sight of a central and potentially determining fact about the fight against ISIS (or ISIL, or Daesh): This is, fundamentally, a war of ideas that the West has virtually no idea how to wage, and that is a major reason anti-ISIS policies have been such abysmal failures.

It’s not as if the core approach of ISIS is a mystery. Required reading for the emirs of the Islamic State is Abu Bakr Baji’s The Management of Savagery, a detailed manifesto, published a decade ago, looking at the West’s debilities and the potential strengths of a rising, ruthless caliphate. One typical maxim: “Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.” That is, suck U.S. troops into the fight.

In the meantime ISIS is reaching out, especially in Africa but also in Central Asia and wherever a state of “chaos” or “savagery” (at-tawahoush) exists, to fill the void. It is establishing its caliphate as a global archipelago where “volcanoes of jihad” erupt, so that it may survive even if its current core base between the Euphrates River in Syria (Raqqa) and the Tigris in Iraq (Mosul) is seriously degraded. Libya is a prime target as the gateway to a continent in chaos, where ISIS is investing heavily. Over 700 Saudi fighters have gone there in recent months, according to evidence Saudi leaders presented to me in August. [Continue reading…]

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Overextension by the Kurds will only benefit ISIS

Hassan Hassan writes: Ever since they expelled ISIL from Tal Abyad in mid-June, Syria’s Kurds have been at the centre of many rumours. In particular, there has been talk of upcoming battles against ISIL in northern Syria, including Kurdish-Russian cooperation.

The idea of a Kurdish-led offensive to capture Raqqa has been widely discussed in policy circles in western capitals in recent weeks. The idea has became more relevant since the Russian intervention, which many thought would include a campaign to retake Palmyra so Moscow could have a public-relations win over the US.

Fighting between ISIL and the Kurdish and Shia militias has become less intense in recent months. ISIL has turned to low-scale attacks in vulnerable or less strategic areas to avoid air attacks, primarily in Syria where the Russian air campaign has targeted groups that fight on two fronts against the Assad regime and ISIL.

This new reality, along with the recent breakthrough between Ankara and Washington about a Kurdish role in the war, spurred talk of a major offensive against ISIL in northern Syria, building on the success in Tal Abyad. The fact that the Kurds control key areas near ISIL heartlands in both Iraq and Syria, and that Syrian rebels have all but vanished from eastern Syria, leaves the Kurds and the regime as the only forces that could potentially provide ground troops for any air campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Plans by U.S. to capture ISIS’s capital already go awry

The Washington Post reports from Ain Issa: In this abandoned desert town on the front line of the war against the Islamic State in Raqqa, local fighters are fired up by announcements in Washington that the militants’ self-proclaimed capital is to be the next focus of the war.

But there is still no sign of the help the United States has delivered ostensibly for the use of the Arab groups fighting the Islamic State, nor is there any indication it will imminently arrive, calling into question whether there can be an offensive to capture Raqqa anytime soon.

Fifty tons of ammunition air­dropped by the U.S. military last week and intended for Arab groups has instead been claimed by the overall command of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, which is fighting alongside Arab units but overwhelmingly dominates their uneasy alliance, according to Kurdish and Arab commanders.

The question of whether Arab or Kurdish fighters get the weapons is crucial, in part because of Turkish sensitivities surrounding the United States’ burgeoning relationship with the Syrian Kurds. Turkey accuses the YPG of affiliation with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, designated a terrorist organization by Ankara and Washington, and has already lodged a complaint with the U.S. Embassy in Ankara that the YPG received the weapons intended for Arabs.

Just as significant, however, is the recognition that Kurds are unlikely to be able — or perhaps even willing — to fight for the Sunni Arab lands controlled by the Islamic State, including Raqqa, the jewel in the crown of the militants’ self-styled caliphate and a city the Kurds do not aspire to govern. [Continue reading…]

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What jihadis do when they are not fighting

In a lecture he delivered earlier this year, Thomas Hegghammer said: My starting point is the truism that military life is about much more than fighting. Look inside any militant group – or conventional army for that matter – and you will see lots of artistic products and social practices that serve no obvious military purpose. Think of the cadence calls of the U.S. Marines, the songs of leftist revolutionaries, or the tattoos of neo-nazis. Look inside jihadi groups and you’ll see bearded men with kalashnikovs reciting poetry, discussing dreams, and weeping on a regular basis.

It took me a long time to even notice these things. I’ve studied jihadi groups for almost fifteen years, and for the first ten, I was addressing standard questions, like, how did group A evolve, what has ideologue B written, who joins movement C, etc. The thing is, when you study one type of group for a while, you take certain things for granted. I knew that these groups were weeping and reading poetry, but it didn’t really register – it was background noise to me, stuff I needed to shove aside to get to the hard information about people and events.

Then it occurred to me one day that these practices are not obvious at all; in fact, they are really quite strange. For one, there is the incongruence of hard men doing soft things. It is curious, for example, that Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi should be known simultaneously as “al-dhabbah” (the slaughterer) and “al-baki” (he who weeps a lot). Second and more important, these “soft” activities pose a big social science puzzle, in that they defy expectations of utility-maximising behaviour. Terrorists are hunted men with limited resources; they should be spending all their time on “useful” things like training, raising funds, or studying the enemy. Yet they “waste” time – quite a lot of time actually – on activities like the ones I’ve mentioned. So I started paying attention to these things, and the more I looked, the more I saw.

But when I turned to the academic literature for help to make sense of it, I didn’t find much to read. Studies of terrorist groups tend to focus on the hard stuff of rebellion or “the great men and events” of terrorist history. We’ve devoted much more attention to attack histories, organizational structures, and financing sources than to the softer side of rebel life. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s online recruitment strategy

J.M. Berger writes: Observers have focused, rightly, on the quality and quantity of Islamic State propaganda as a factor in its success, but passive material can only take the typical radicalization so far. Therefore, the organization deploys a wide variety of tailored online interventions to bring their targets into the fold.

Sometimes referred to as “grooming,” these interventions are conducted by small teams of prolific social media users who lavish attention on potential recruits in order to shape their worldview and encourage direct action in support of the Islamic State, ranging from lone wolf–style terrorist attacks to migration to Islamic State territories. Some interveners are more formally affiliated with the Islamic State while others appear to be informal volunteers.

Online interventions are more prevalent in countries where the social climate offers few opportunities to safely discuss an interest in the Islamic State in a face-to-face setting, but even in such environments, many cases incorporate activity that crosses over from online to real-world interactions. [Continue reading…]

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Four-fifths of Russia’s Syria strikes don’t target ISIS

Reuters reports: Almost 80 percent of Russia’s declared targets in Syria have been in areas not held by Islamic State, a Reuters analysis of Russian Defence Ministry data shows, undermining Moscow’s assertions that its aim is to defeat the group.

The majority of strikes, according to the analysis, have instead been in areas held by other groups opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which include al Qaeda offshoots but also fighters backed by Washington and its allies.

Defence ministry statements of targets hit by the Russian Air Force and an online archive of Russian military maps show Russia has hit 64 named locations since President Vladimir Putin ordered the first round of air strikes three weeks ago.

Of those targets, a maximum of 15 were in areas held by Islamic State, according to a survey of locations of the rival forces in Syria compiled by the Institute for the Study of War.

“If you look at the map, you can easily understand that they are not fighting Islamic State but other opposition groups,” said Alexander Golts, a Moscow-based defense columnist and deputy editor of online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s partition plan for Syria

Hussein Ibish writes: Russia’s unspoken but unmistakable message is that Moscow is trying one — and perhaps the only — way of ending the conflict by means of a Lebanese-style segregation of Syria into zones controlled by rival militias. To Washington’s perennial concern in any Middle Eastern imbroglio, “Tell me how this ends,” Moscow responds: The Syrian conflict will be “resolved” on Russia’s terms, even if Mr. Assad proves dispensable to the Kremlin in the long run.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s desire to see the conflict end without actually doing anything itself means that, as Bloomberg View suggested recently, there is a group of senior American officials prepared to go along with the Russian plan. After all, America’s own policy in Syria has rapidly moved from tragedy to farce. The latest fiasco was the cancellation of the $500 million military training program for anti-Islamic State rebels that produced barely a handful of fighters on the ground.

So if Moscow has a policy, and Washington doesn’t, why not just support that?

Beyond the fact that it’s absurd to hope that Mr. Putin’s approach is likely to benefit American interests, giving way to Russia’s policy would, in effect, entail abandoning the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. And the militants cannot be effectively countered in Iraq alone. So what this final, ignominious capitulation would really mean is that not only would Mr. Assad (or some Russian-appointed successor) menace Syrians for the foreseeable future, but so too would the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq: How Iranian-backed militias have become stronger than the government

Reuters reports: The Shi’ite militias, which dominate most frontlines, say they support the government and pose no threat to Iraq’s minority Sunni sect. The Popular Mobilisation Committee, or Hashid Shaabi, as the militias are collectively known, belongs “to the Iraqi government,” said Naim al-Aboudi, a spokesman for the Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia. “The Hashid doesn’t represent a sect. It represents all Iraqis.”

But the militias make no secret of their independence from Baghdad. Militia leader Amiri warned in a televised interview last month that if the Shi’ite groups did not approve of U.S. military operations in Iraq, “We can go to Abadi and the government and … pressure them: ‘Either you will do this, or we will do that.’” Amiri did not specify what action his group would take.

A senior Iraqi government official close to the prime minister said the militias operate independently. He said their objectives only sometimes align with Abadi’s: They concentrate on defending areas that are strategically important for their sect.

“If they are not paid by the prime minister,” this official said, “they can do what they want.” [Continue reading…]

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Canada to end airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, new prime minister Trudeau says

The Guardian reports: Canadian Liberal prime minister designate Justin Trudeau has confirmed that Canada will withdraw its fighter jets from the US-led mission against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

In his first news conference following the sweeping majority Liberal victory in Canada’s federal election, the visibly fatigued leader said he had spoken with US president Barack Obama in a phone call during which he discussed his intention to pull Canada’s fighter jets out of the anti-Isis campaign.

“I committed that we would continue to engage in a responsible way that understands how important Canada’s role is to play in the fight against Isil, but he understands the commitments I’ve made about ending the combat mission,” Trudeau said. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian Kurdish and Arab rebels say they are poised to attack the ISIS capital of Raqqa

Wladimir van Wilgenburg reports from Raqqa province: [A]ccording to the men here on the eastern front, the U.S. is hoping to capitalize on the recent successes of Kurdish and Arab rebels in Kobane and Tal Abyad, where, with coalition air support, they pushed ISIS back.

“There are around 20,000 Kurdish fighters, and around 3,000 to 5,000 Arab fighters,” senior Kurdish official Idris Nassan told The Daily Beast in his office in Kobane. That jibes, roughly, with the numbers given by Abu Hamza, an FSA fighter, who says there are a total of 30,000 troops poised to move on Raqqa, but the numbers could not be verified independently.

In the field, one way to spot the difference between the fighters of the Free Syrian Army and those of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG, is that the FSA soldiers appear to lack strict military discipline, sometimes manning checkpoints without uniforms and in slippers.

They are, as they say themselves, reluctant soldiers. Many came from Raqqa and Deir ar-Zour, another eastern Syrian city, but were driven out by ISIS during clashes in January 2014. They consist of a ragtag band of Arab and also Kurdish fighters who are eager to go back to their home towns. Holding up a Kalashnikov, local FSA commander Abu Isa ar-Raqqawi says, “We were forced to hold this weapon, it was not our will.”

Their flight from ISIS put these FSA fighters in the territory of an unlikely ally. Previously they had fought against the YPG and accused it of links to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Unlike the FSA, the multi-ethnic but mainly Kurdish YPG force has dozens of years of experience fighting the well-equipped Turkish army as part of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) established in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan, who is now held in an island prison near Istanbul. Until shortly before his capture in 1999, Ocalan had been able to operate out of Syrian territory with the cooperation of Hafiz al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father and predecessor as dictator. So mistrust by other anti-Assad fighters today has deep roots. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s self-inflicted disaster

Suat Kiniklioglu was a member of the Turkish Parliament from 2007-11. He writes: Although I am a former air force officer and I believe strongly in the virtues of a secular state, I joined the A.K.P. in 2007 because I believed Turkey was at a critical juncture. I had little regard for the militant secularism and nationalism harbored by many within Turkey’s old establishment. The election of Abdullah Gul in 2007, who was almost blocked from becoming president because his wife wore a head scarf, was a critical moment for the consolidation of our democracy. By that time, the A.K.P. had already put Turkey into accession negotiations with the European Union, managed an impressive economic growth story and improved Turkey’s international standing. In many quarters, Turkey was seen as an inspiration for other Muslim countries.

It’s true that the A.K.P. was never a liberal party, but it had a clear interest in Turkey’s democratization. That’s why the party enjoyed support from democrats, liberals and some social democrats who were eager to balance the excesses of the stern old secularist regime. Both in Parliament and abroad we enjoyed the moral high ground of normalizing civil-military relations, overseeing a growing economy and obtaining greater democratic legitimacy through growing support from the electorate. I comforted myself in thinking that the European accession process would serve as an anchor if the A.K.P.’s conservatism ever pulled the country off course.

By 2009, the process had slowed down. Then, in September 2010, a referendum allowed Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then the prime minister and now the president, to shape the judiciary to his own liking. After that vote, he believed he had defeated the establishment for good. Regrettably, he came to the conclusion that he no longer needed the moderates in the party.

When I examined the new candidates list in 2011 I immediately understood what was going on. He had decided to root out all of the democrats, liberals and moderate conservatives. Those who replaced us were ideologically conservative Islamists who showed absolute loyalty to him. [Continue reading…]

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