Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Iraqi Sunnis forced to abandon homes and identity in battle for survival

The Guardian reports: Last November, with his home in flames and his father missing, 21-year-old Omar Mazen abandoned his home town of Baquba and fled to the Iraqi capital, 60 miles south.

But his home was not the only thing he left behind. He also decided to abandon his name.

The journey was perilous. At every checkpoint, Shia militiamen or Iraqi soldiers read his papers and stared suspiciously at his identifiably Sunni name. “I didn’t want to show them,” he said. “I was terrified every time. So many Sunnis had disappeared at checkpoints and my father was one of them.”

Somehow, he made it through the heart of the fight against Islamic State that was raging all along the highway. But afterwards he faced a constant dilemma of how to stay safe in a city and society in which Sunni Iraqis – the core of the ruling class under Saddam Hussein – were often viewed by the new Shia-led establishment as either enablers or agents of the extremist insurgency.

Mazen decided to change his name to a more neutral Ammar, and seek refuge among the Shias. In February, he went to the residency office and started the process. “They were helpful,” he said of the government officials he dealt with – not an observation often made about Iraq’s turgid bureaucracy. “They said it would take about a month.”

Mazen’s dilemma reflects the latest upheaval in Iraq, as its existential fight against Isis approaches a second year. In the past 10 months, huge numbers of people – perhaps a quarter of the population – have again been displaced, and Iraq’s social fabric, badly frayed through the years of civil war, is once more being tested. [Continue reading…]

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The Iraqi former Baathist army officers at the core of ISIS

The Washington Post reports: When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.

Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi PM: Armies have no chance against ISIS if it keeps recruiting foreigners

Reuters reports: Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi told a German magazine that armies in the region around Iraq had no chance of defeating Islamic State (IS) if the militants continued to recruit ideologically indoctrinated foreign fighters.

In an interview with Der Spiegel published on Saturday, Abadi said that around 57 percent of IS fighters were Iraqis but they did not cause any problems as they simply ran away when Iraqi troops entered towns.

“It is the 43 percent who are foreign fighters who have been indoctrinated ideologically who have their backs up against the wall. If Daesh continues to recruit so many from other countries, then no army in our region can stand up to it.” [Continue reading…]

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A Norway town and its pipeline to jihad in Syria

The New York Times reports: The real trouble started when they stopped causing trouble. Torleif Sanchez Hammer and his friends — all residents of the same small cluster of clapboard houses in southern Norway — had been having run-ins with the police for years but then suddenly halted their marijuana-fueled gatherings in the basement apartment of Mr. Hammer’s widowed mother.

Police officers in this placid Norwegian town had busted their marijuana parties so regularly that “we knew them all on a first-name basis,” recalled Ragnar Foss, head of a local police unit responsible for youth crime. But, two years ago, they cleaned up their act. “We wondered what had happened but were glad when they dropped off our radar,” Mr. Foss said.

One by one over the following months, Mr. Hammer and at least seven other young men who lived on or around just one street, Lislebyveien, made their way to Syria to wage jihad alongside the Islamic State and other militant groups.

As Europe tries to fathom such journeys by its young Muslims, politicians and scholars have variously blamed the influence of the Internet and radical mosques, or sources of despair like discrimination and unemployment. [Continue reading…]

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Shiite militias are the real winners of the battle of Tikrit

Nancy A. Youssef reports: The self-proclaimed Islamic State’s loss of the Iraqi city of Tikrit this week would not have been possible without thousands of rogue Iraqi Shiite militiamen, U.S. defense officials conceded.

And that could complicate coming battles, officials said.

With the first major victory over ISIS in Iraq, those militias, many of whom are backed by neighboring Iran, will now have a greater say in how aggressively and effectively Iraq goes after the ISIS threat. They could determine which cities to attack, how much to lean on the U.S.-led coalition and when to strike. And such a varied group of fighters will likely have differing opinions from the Iraqi government, the U.S.-led coalition, Iran and even among themselves, about what needs to happen next in the battle against ISIS.

Such growing influence by such varied non-state actors will only complicate future efforts against ISIS in Iraq, defense officials and experts agreed. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS takes control of 90 percent of a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus

Reuters: Islamic State has taken control of 90 percent of a Palestinian refugee camp on the Damascus outskirts where 18,000 civilians have suffered years of bombing, army siege and militia control, a monitoring group said on Saturday.

The hardline group’s offensive in Yarmouk gives it a major presence in the capital. Islamic State, the most powerful insurgent group in Syria, is now only a few kilometers from President Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power.

The United Nations has said it is extremely concerned about the safety and protection of Syrians and Palestinians in the camp. Civilians trapped there have long suffered a government siege that has led to starvation and disease.

“The situation in Yarmouk is an affront to the humanity of all of us, a source of universal shame,” U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunness said.

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After Iraqi forces take Tikrit, a wave of looting and lynching

Reuters reports: On April 1, the city of Tikrit was liberated from the extremist group Islamic State. The Shi’ite-led central government and allied militias, after a month-long battle, had expelled the barbarous Sunni radicals.

Then, some of the liberators took revenge.

Near the charred, bullet-scarred government headquarters, two federal policemen flanked a suspected Islamic State fighter. Urged on by a furious mob, the two officers took out knives and repeatedly stabbed the man in the neck and slit his throat. The killing was witnessed by two Reuters correspondents.

The incident is now under investigation, interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Saad Maan told Reuters.

Since its recapture two days ago, the Sunni city of Tikrit has been the scene of violence and looting. In addition to the killing of the extremist combatant, Reuters correspondents also saw a convoy of Shi’ite paramilitary fighters – the government’s partners in liberating the city – drag a corpse through the streets behind their car.

Local officials said the mayhem continues. Two security officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Friday that dozens of homes had been torched in the city. They added that they had witnessed the looting of stores by Shi’ite militiamen. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S.-Iran alliance that neither will acknowledge

The New York Times reports: In the battle to retake Saddam Hussein’s hometown, Tikrit, from the Islamic State, the United States and Iran have found a template for fighting the Sunni militancy in other parts of Iraq: American airstrikes and Iranian-backed ground assaults, with the Iraqi military serving as the go-between for two global adversaries that do not want to publicly acknowledge that they are working together.

The template, American officials said privately this week, could apply in particular to the looming battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Given that President Obama has ruled out the use of American ground troops in Iraq, and that the Iraqi military remains ill-trained for urban warfare, the fight for Mosul will require some combination of American air power, Iranian-backed Shiite militias, Iraqi military forces and perhaps Kurdish pesh merga fighters.

“You can see where this is going,” a senior Pentagon official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Are the Iraqi forces ready yet? I would say no.” [Continue reading…]

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In Russia, the struggle to un-recruit ISIS followers

The Daily Beast spoke to Sevil Navruzova, head of the Center for Countering Extremism in Dagestan, who spends her working hours on Skype interviewing Russian citizens who are fighting for ISIS: Most of the men and women interviewed each day by Navuzova and her staff say they are determined to die for their beliefs.

The “insane propaganda” on the Internet is the main source of information for the recruitment strategy of the so-called Islamic State, Navruzova said. Instructions tell them where to go and how to get the money for the trip.

Navruzova told The Daily Beast in a recent interview that some recruiters were local—Special Services had arrested at least two of them in the past two years, but that didn’t make a dent.

“The drain of youth is massive, it amounts to hundreds from Dagestan alone,” Navruzova said.

Young Russian Muslims watched videos of ISIS leaders and sheikhs calling to join the holy war. The travel package for a recruited Russian included an air ticket, $500 of pocket money and a backpack with T-shirts, socks and other basic needs.

“This is not just a popular trend, this is a lifestyle. Many in the Muslim community live day and night with the idea of joining the war, not for the sake of money but for pure hope to live for once in Sharia World. Recruiters say that the entire Muslim world has to be involved in the war now,” Navruzova said.

Male recruits are not the only ones who are leaving Russia. Women take off to join ISIS, too.

On the morning of February 27, Beke Gadzhiyeva, a 20-year-old from Derbent, seemed to be just another student at the local university, She had breakfast with her family, showing no sign of any plans to travel; a few hours later she was in a car driving across the Russian border to Azerbaijan. The last time she was seen was at Baku airport. “Somebody provided her with luggage,” said Navruzova, who now has to deal with Gadzhiyeva’s broken-hearted mother, looking for ways to bring her daughter back to Russia, “before she marries one of the fighters.”

It is one of Navruzova’s priorities to prevent widows of local insurgents from taking extreme actions against themselves or others, she said.

Nobody in ISIS has “zombified” the young Russian citizens, nobody offered them money: “On the contrary, insurgencies often recruit well-educated youths from wealthy, intelligent families,” says Navruzova. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq and Syria are ‘finishing schools’ for foreign extremists, says UN report

The Associated Press reports: Iraq and Syria have become “international finishing schools” for extremists according to a UN report which says the number of foreign fighters joining terrorist groups has spiked to more than 25,000 from more than 100 countries.

The panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against al-Qaida estimates the number of overseas terrorist fighters worldwide increased by 71% between mid-2014 and March 2015.

It said the scale of the problem had increased over the past three years and the flow of foreign fighters was “higher than it has ever been historically”.

The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has “risen sharply from a few thousand … a decade ago to more than 25,000 today,” the panel said in its report to the UN security council, which was obtained by Associated Press.

The report said just two countries had drawn more than 20,000 foreign fighters: Syria and Iraq. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State group but also the al-Nusra Front.

Looking ahead, the panel said the thousands of foreign fighters who travelled to Syria and Iraq were living and working in “a veritable ‘international finishing school’ for extremists”, as was the case in Afghanistan in the 1990s. [Continue reading…]

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In Tikrit, a celebratory mood but lingering concerns

The Washington Post reports: On Wednesday, there were no signs of civilians in the city center. An elderly woman and her daughter found there had been “taken to somewhere secure,” one militiaman said. Houses were largely intact, indicating that the city fell with relatively little combat. Iraqi forces had outnumbered the militants by at least 10 to 1, according to estimates by Iraqi officials. In addition, the U.S.-led strikes had killed several of the Islamic State’s leaders in the city.

But the scene is likely to be different in neighborhoods to the north, where some militants have dug in. The United Nations released images in February that showed that at least 536 buildings in the city have been damaged by the fighting.

Security forces had begun the painstaking task of defusing hundreds of roadside bombs and booby traps left by the retreating militants, with explosions ringing through the streets as they went about their task.

About 185 booby-trapped houses have been identified in the city, in addition to about 900 improvised explosive devices, Interior Minister Mohammed al-Ghaban said as he visited one of Hussein’s former palaces on the banks of the Tigris.

The largest palace had suffered significant damage, seemingly from airstrikes, with an entire wing sagging. Iraqi military officials have said that the strikes helped significantly in softening the way for ground operations after the offensive stalled — although the Shiite militiamen among the pro-government forces are reluctant to acknowledge that the air raids played a role.

Ghaban spoke a few feet from the site of one of the Islamic State’s worst atrocities, the slaughter of what the government estimates to have been as many as 1,700 soldiers from Camp Speicher, a military base just outside Tikrit.

Trails of dried blood could seen on the walls along the river, where soldiers were summarily executed and thrown in the water.

“Innocent blood has been spilled here,” Ghaban said. “We don’t want revenge. We want to liberate people and the land.”

The emotionally charged nature of the Tikrit fight had raised concerns about the potential for abuses by the plethora of armed groups taking part.

In a televised speech on Tuesday, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi insisted that only Iraqi blood was being spilled in the battle. But the Farsi graffiti scrawled next to an Islamic State flag painted on a wall outside the city’s presidential palace seemed to suggest otherwise. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS seizes most of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus

AFP reports: Militants from ISIS seized control of most of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus Wednesday, a local Palestinian official told AFP.

“Fighters from ISIS launched an assault this morning on Yarmouk and they took over the majority of the camp,” said Anwar Abdel Hadi, director of political affairs for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Damascus.

Fighting was continuing inside the camp, he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based activist group, said ISIS was in control of a “large part” of the camp after fighting with Palestinian groups also opposed to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

Yarmouk was once a thriving neighborhood home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees and Syrians but has been caught up in the country’s fighting and besieged by regime forces for more than a year.

Only about 18,000 residents are estimated to remain in the camp after many fled the fighting. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS targets Africa in new issue of recruitment magazine

Newsweek reports: ISIS have released a new issue of its recruitment magazine which is focused solely on expanding its presence across Africa, as the terror group’s propaganda strategy continues to develop.

The release, titled Shariah Alone Will Rule Africa, speaks of the ‘Libyan Arena’, Tunisia, Algeria, the Sinai Peninsula and West Africa. The cover of the magazine shows a large picture of Tunisia’s Great Mosque of Kairouan, seen as one of the holiest sites in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

The magazine, which includes another interview from British hostage and photojournalist John Cantlie, sees spokesman for ISIS, Muhammad al-Adnani, congratulate Nigerian radical Islamist group Boko Haram for “joining the caravan” of jihad, saying that they would “now guard yet another frontier of the Khilafah [caliphate]”. [Continue reading…]

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Signs that ISIS may be in decline in Syria

Jalal Zein Eddine writes: For Syrians under Islamic State (ISIS) rule, the jihadist group is an incidental disease, not an authentic part of the society in which it has appeared, and the peak of its growth bears the seeds of its disintegration and demise. A number of factors are contributing to the group’s disintegration:

Firstly, the significant drop in the number of foreign fighters has been boosted by the pledges of allegiance Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi attained in the Sinai Peninsula, Libya and Nigeria. The damage these pledges have done to the group outweighs the publicity they have generated, as believers in ISIS’s extremist doctrine in the Arab Maghreb, Africa and perhaps even parts of Europe will join groups in their home countries. This will impact negatively on the group’s strength in Syria and Iraq.

“There are also signs of a big drop in the influx of people from the Arab Maghreb, mainly after the group’s battles against the rebels,” says Adnan, who is close to ISIS members in Aleppo Countryside. “It can even be said that emigration has stopped.” Perhaps this is what made Baghdadi accept pledges of allegiance from outside of the Levant; gaining such allegiances, even in faraway areas, was better than losing foreign fighters altogether.

The decrease in the number of foreign fighters, due to intensified international monitoring of their movement, has contributed to locals’ hesitation to join the group. “All the biggest assaults have been attributed to foreign fighters, who have a highly-effective combat doctrine,” says Mustafa, a lawyer from eastern Aleppo Countryside. “The drop in their numbers has not only reduced the Islamic State’s combat readiness, it has caused a recession in the number of local entrants in to the group.” Foreign fighters amazed young Syrians, their mad bravery attracting many local recruits. The drop in the number of foreign fighters has also weakened the identity ISIS is trying to force on the region. [Continue reading…]

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In Iraq, Maliki still looms large months after his ouster

The Washington Post reports: [Former Prime Minister Nouri al-]Maliki’s looming presence presents a continued challenge for [his successor, Haidar al-]Abadi as he attempts to win back ground from the extremists and repair rifts with Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds. Meanwhile, an offensive to retake Tikrit has highlighted the premier’s lack of control over the array of Shiite volunteers and militias that are leading it.

“He still has a role and he’s not finished,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a parliamentarian with Maliki’s state of law bloc. “We haven’t seen the end of Maliki.”

A Western diplomat based in the region said there are deep concerns about what Maliki may be up to, with no doubt that he is trying to undermine Abadi. “He’s irredeemable,” he said.

Maliki appears to wield influence over more members of parliament than Abadi, with more support in the security institutions, he said. However, others doubt his reach, contending he has little chance of a comeback.

On a March trip to a recently cleared town near Tikrit to meet fighters who had driven out Islamic State militants, Maliki greeted the forces as if he were still in power. He said it’s natural that some security forces would feel a sense of loyalty to him.

Since leaving power, he has become a particular champion of the legions of largely Shiite volunteers and militias known as the “popular mobilizations” – many of whom answered a call from Iraq’s most senior Shiite cleric to sign up to fight.

“I established it in my time,” he says of the volunteer force that mustered in the dying days of Maliki’s leadership and has led the battle in the city of Tikrit. “And they feel very close to me, or may be loyal to me. Therefore I keep working with them and supporting them and pushing them to fight.” [Continue reading…]

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U.N. leader warns Iraq not to mistreat civilians after liberation from ISIS

The New York Times reports: Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations used a visit to Baghdad on Monday to warn the Iraqi government to treat civilians decently after it liberates territories like Tikrit, where a government offensive has been supported by heavy American-led airstrikes for the past five days.

“Civilians freed from the brutality of Daesh should not have to then fear their liberators,” Mr. Ban said, in a statement emailed to reporters after Iraqi officials canceled a scheduled news conference with him without explanation. Daesh is the Arabic pronunciation of the initials ISIS, by which the extremists in the Islamic State group are also known.

“One form of violence cannot replace another,” he said. The secretary general was clearly referring to reports, such as one by Human Rights Watch recently, that Iraqi Shiite militias were carrying out abuses in Sunni areas of Salahuddin Province that they had liberated from the extremists.

However, Mr. Ban may have joined his Iraqi governments hosts in speaking too soon about progress in Tikrit. Evidence is mounting that fighters of the Islamic State are much more numerous in the city, and hold much more territory, than the Iraqi government has previously revealed. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi forces in no hurry to expel ISIS from Tikrit

The New York Times reports: Here at the headquarters of Iraqi ground forces, after three days of American airstrikes that at times witnesses here described as “carpet bombing,” Iraq’s military seemed in no great hurry on Saturday to press its advantage.

It also seemed to be moving very slowly on promises to withdraw Shiite militias from the battlefield.

An Iraqi Air Force C-130 carrying 150 fresh militia volunteers, a dozen federal police officers, a few soldiers back from leave and two American journalists landed here late in the morning. Although the intensive bombardment of the night had eased, within half an hour two large explosions rattled the windows of the Salahuddin Operations Command building as bombs dropped by unseen aircraft brought satisfied smiles from the assembled military men.

Missing from this picture was any sense of urgency. The holdouts from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, who remain in the center of Tikrit are believed to number “about 400,” as one general here said. But the extremists have so far held off an offensive by an estimated 30,000 Iraqi troops and volunteer militiamen for nearly four weeks. [Continue reading…]

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Is ISIS in trouble in Iraq?

Der Spiegel reports: The trip from Baghdad to Tikrit remains extremely dangerous. There may be bombs planted along the road and snipers occasionally lurk nearby. As such, nobody knows for sure which car Iraqi Interior Minister Mohammed al-Ghabban is traveling. His convoy, protected by heavily armed soldiers, is heading north, driving by walls and schools where the black flag of Islamic State (IS) is still flying. And it passes through empty villages and past trenches that reflect the ongoing fighting.

The minister is headed for the front-line city of Tikrit, 180 kilometers (110 miles) north of Baghdad, from which IS has been forced to retreat in recent days. Ghabban, 53, is a wiry man in a simple police uniform. He was jailed at the young age of 18 during the Saddam Hussein regime and later joined the Iran-founded Shiite Badr Party. Tikrit is a place of some significance for him. This is where the hated dictator was born and it is not far from where he is buried.

The Tikrit water tower can be seen from afar: It too has been painted black and bears the white IS script. Tikrit used to have 260,000 inhabitants, but now it is a ghost town. Burnt-out vehicles dot the roadside, there is no electricity and the cell phone towers have been destroyed. But the Iraqi flag is once again flying over Alam Square. Behind it, on the main street, stand the men responsible for this victory: policemen, soldiers and, above all, Shiite militia members.

They have lined up hundreds of cartridges of mortar shells they say IS fighters fired during the battle for the city. An old police commander steps up to the interior minister and reports that his unit lost 60 troops during the fighting. But, he adds, the streets of Tikrit’s Qadisiya district are littered with the corpses of IS fighters. [Continue reading…]

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