Mike Giglio reports: The soldier pressed a handkerchief to his face to fight the smell of corpses at his feet. Then he crossed the street, sat on a curb, put his head between his knees, and spit. He lit a cigarette. “I’d rather smell the smoke,” he said, “because the stench is rotten, it’s gross.”
The soldier gazed warily at three young ISIS fighters who lay dead at the foot of a crumbled wall. One was charred from a rocket-propelled grenade. Another had a hole in his head. The jihadis wore thick socks but no shoes, to muffle their steps along the pockmarked streets during the battle that raged there the day before.
The soldier was part of an ethnic Kurdish force called the peshmerga that has spent more than six months battling ISIS in northern Iraq. He and his colleagues won this town south of the Mosul Dam, called Wana, the previous afternoon. They spoke as if they’d been dispatching demons. “They are like animals,” a 30-year-old lieutenant said, “and they don’t have brains to think.”
It was ISIS’s push into Iraq’s Kurdish region that prompted the U.S. to begin airstrikes against the group in August, paving the way for the Obama administration to launch a new war. Two months after taking over the Iraqi city of Mosul, the extremists were threatening genocide against the Yazidi religious minority around Mt. Sinjar and advancing toward the regional capital of Erbil.
The peshmerga have since become the main partner on the ground for the U.S. and its coalition of allies, shouldering the grunt work of combat. More than half of the airstrikes the U.S. has carried out in Iraq, according to the U.S. military command overseeing operations against ISIS, have hit along Kurdish lines. The extent of U.S. cooperation with the Kurds suggests the true percentage is far higher, said Christopher Harmer, an analyst tracking the conflict at the Institute for the Study of War.
Six months into the offensive, soldiers along the peshmerga’s 650-mile front with ISIS show the strain of a grueling war. They fight to protect their land — but also feel they’re doing the dirty work for Western countries that keep far from the smell of death. A major in Sinjar called the peshmerga “the only ones on the front fighting” as soldiers fired over stacks of sandbags; a colonel barricaded across from ISIS in Kirkuk said, “It’s not supposed to be this way.” At a western outpost overlooking ISIS-held Syria, an officer said the Kurds hold the line “for every single country fighting ISIS,” while in Wana, the weary soldiers prepared to clear the three corpses as feral cats began to pick at their flesh. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: For weeks, U.S.-backed forces have been fighting to oust the Islamic State from key areas of northern Iraq in a series of small-scale battles that could have an enormous impact on the group’s “caliphate.”
A major prize in the clashes is a highway that serves as a lifeline for the Islamic State. It runs from the group’s Iraq stronghold in Mosul to its enclaves in northeastern Syria, including its self-styled capital, Raqqa, 300 miles away.
The battles are occurring as Islamic State is causing growing alarm internationally over its brutal actions, which have included the murder of a captured Jordanian pilot and the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians by Libya-based adherents of the extremist group.
In late January, however, Islamic State fighters suffered a setback as Iraqi Kurdish forces seized a stretch of the key highway at the town of Kiske, west of Mosul.
The Islamic State is still using the highway, detouring onto back roads to get around Kiske. But if the Iraqi Kurdish fighters can maintain and expand their hold on the road, the Islamist extremists “will be under a kind of siege in the area. It will be very hard for them” logistically, said Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi researcher who is an expert on the radical group. [Continue reading…]
Rudaw reports: Peshmerga leaders have been turning away foreign volunteers eager to fight against the Islamic State, explaining the Kurdish military needs weapons, not manpower.
Citing reasons ranging from safety to diplomatic relations, Peshmerga officials say the practice of putting foreigners on the frontline is just not done. For one thing, as Ministry of Peshmerga spokesman Helgurd Hekmat explained, it’s illegal.
“The Peshmerga is a professional fighting force,” Hekmat said, adding that Kurdish law expressly forbids admission of foreigners to the iconic Kurdish military corps whose name means “those who face death.”
Still, Hekmat said he routinely turns away wide-eyed Westerners drawn to put their lives on the line in the name of fighting ISIS, and adventure. [Continue reading…]
Nancy A. Youssef reports: Skepticism about the U.S. and Iraqi military plans for the next phase of the ISIS war begins inside the Pentagon.
Less than 24 hours after U.S. military officials publicly detailed their plans for a spring offensive on ISIS-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, many within the Pentagon privately questioned whether that timetable was plausible. They said that they were dubious that their partners in the Iraqi military — the troops supposed to lead the offensive — would be capable of conducting such a campaign by then.
“I really doubt it is going to happen that soon,” said one military officer who, like several others, served in Iraq between 2003-2011 and spoke on condition of anonymity. “And if it does, it will take months.”
The largely Shiite troops of the Iraqi army are unlikely to risk their lives to win back a Sunni dominated city, several U.S. military officers told The Daily Beast on Friday. Indeed, when ISIS stormed the city last June, Iraqi forces walked away, leading the U.S. and 60 other nations to form a coalition against the terror group.
Even if the Iraqi troops do stand up and fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State, having a Shiite force move in and potentially ravage a major Sunni city in a bid to save it could have adverse affects on the Sunnis in Iraq and broader Sunni Arab world. Sectarian tensions, particularly in Iraq, run that deep.
“I cannot believe that Shiites would fight for Mosul,” one officer who served in the restive Sunni province of Anbar during the Iraq War told The Daily Beast.
So far, there is no evidence of a strong Sunni-majority Iraqi Army brigade, and U.S. Central Command has said it will take at least eight brigades to win back the city. [Continue reading…]
Ali Khedery writes: It took the fall of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, for Western elites to finally begin to understand what many of us saw firsthand in the years since 2003:
The Iraqi government is hopelessly sectarian, corrupt, and generally unfit to govern what could be one of the world’s most prosperous nations. Washington’s response to the Islamic State’s (IS) advance, however, has been disgraceful: The United States is now acting as the air force, the armory, and the diplomatic cover for Iraqi militias that are committing some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet. These are “allies” that are actually beholden to our strategic foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and which often resort to the same vile tactics as the Islamic State itself.
The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was branded the “Republic of Fear” due to its wanton disregard for the sanctity of human life. Saddam’s abuses were legendary: The invasion of Iran in 1980, where his forces employed chemical and biological weapons; the genocide of more than 100,000 Kurds during the Anfal campaign; the invasion of Kuwait in 1990; and 1991’s massacre of Shiites in Karbala are only a few examples of his gruesome handiwork.
Post-2003 Iraq was supposed to be different. Throughout the past decade, however, countlessNGOs and internationalnews organizations have borne witness to the accelerating pace of abuses. The Republic of Fear is being reborn. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: The killings have been both deliberately lurid and strangely intimate. Designed for broadcast, they have helped the Islamic State militant group build a brand of violence that shocks with its extreme brutality, yet feels as close to viewers as the family images on their smartphones.
Broadcast specifically to frighten and manipulate, the Islamic State’s flamboyant violence consumes the world’s attention while more familiar threats, like the Syrian government’s barrel bombs, kill far more but rarely provoke global outrage.
A few human rights advocates and antigovernment activists in Syria are creating shocking if nonviolent images and videos — even herding children in orange jumpsuits into a cage — to call attention to the wider scope of violence. So far, though, their voices have hardly been heard.
The Islamic State’s campaign of high-profile killings is not war at a remove, with the mechanized distance of drone strikes or carpet bombing. It is one-on-one slaughter with Hollywood production values, seeking to maximize emotional impact and propaganda value. [Continue reading…]
Mona El-Naggar reports: He winced at the mere mention of his son’s name, visibly overcome by an unceasing thought that he struggled to articulate. He looked down to hide the tears in his eyes.
“You have to understand, I am in pain,” said Yaken Aly, choking on the words: “My son is gone.”
Mr. Aly raised his son, Islam Yaken, in Heliopolis, a middle-class Cairo neighborhood with tended gardens and trendy coffee shops, and sent him to a private school, where he studied in French. As a young man, Mr. Yaken wanted to be a fitness instructor. He trained relentlessly, hoping that his effort would bring him success, girlfriends and wealth. But his goals never materialized. He left that life and found religion, extremism and, ultimately, his way into a photograph where he knelt beside a decapitated corpse on the killing fields of Syria, smiling.
“Surely, the holiday won’t be complete without a picture with one of the dogs’ corpses,” Mr. Yaken, now 22 and fighting for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, wrote in a Twitter post in July, during Ramadan.
The West is struggling to confront the rise of Islamic extremism and the brutality committed in the name of religion. But it is not alone in trying to understand how this has happened — why young men raised in homes that would never condone violence, let alone coldblooded murder, are joining the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. It is a phenomenon that is as much a threat to Muslim nations as to the West, if not more so, as thousands of young men volunteer as foot soldiers, ready to kill and willing to die. [Continue reading…]
According to the logic of a few boneheads, if ISIS is Islamic, then the real problem isn’t with ISIS — it’s with Islam.
To refute that logic by refusing to call ISIS Islamic, is equally boneheaded, since it implies that conceding ISIS’s Islamic roots will inevitably then tarnish all Muslims.
Asra Q. Nomani and Hala Arafa write: At the White House summit on “countering violent extremism,” President Obama declared that violent jihad in the name of Islam isn’t the work of “religious leaders” but rather “terrorists.” American-Muslim leaders, attending the summit, cheered and applauded, later taking selfies in front of the president’s seal.
But, as liberal Muslim feminist journalists who reject the vision of the Islamic State, we can say that the Islamic State, al Qaeda and the alphabet soup of Islamic militant groups, like HUM (Harkut-ul Mujahideen) and LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), rely very much on the scholarship of “religious leaders,” from Ibn Tamiyyah in the 14th century to Sayyid Qutb in the 20th century, who very much have credibility and authority among too many Muslims as “religious leaders.”
A very nuanced and thorough Atlantic article by journalist Graeme Wood this week, arguing “The Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” set off a firestorm of “derision,” as labeled by an article at ThinkProgress, a media site affiliated with the Center for American Progress, a think tank started by former Democratic operative John Podesta. ThinkProgress religion reporter Jack Jenkins wrote that the Atlantic article elicited “staunch criticism and derision from many Muslims and academics who study Islam.”
Wood argues the Islamic State views itself as “a key agent of the coming Apocalypse.” He is absolutely right, and we have been seeing the symbols for months. After spending about 200 hours combined over the last few weeks, analyzing every word and symbol in the burning video of the Jordanian Air Force pilot and the execution video of the Coptic Christians, we can tell you that both videos reveal Islamic State strategists, propagandists and recruiters are very much grounded in a logical interpretation of the Quran, the hadith, or sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad, and fatwa, or religious rulings. [Continue reading…]
Mashable: The latest video posted by West African Islamist extremists Boko Haram marks a change in tactics for the militant group.
The footage, featuring a man believed to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, depicts the reclusive leader delivering a 12-minute “message” to leaders in the Nigerian government and western democracies, condemning their rule of law and urging their leaders to turn to Allah.
But perhaps most interesting is the way in which the video was shared, the iconography used throughout, its higher resolution and the cues the group seems to be taking from its colleagues in the Islamic State (ISIS), militants thousands of miles away.
There are an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If one knows nothing else about Islam, that number alone provides sufficient reason to understand why there is no intrinsic relationship between Islam and terrorism. If Islam did indeed breed terrorists, how could there be so many Muslims and so few terrorists?
To view ISIS as revealing the true nature of Islam makes no more sense than believing that a small fundamentalist sect might define Christianity.
Fundamentalists of all stripes see themselves as the standard bearers of “true” religion in a wider context which, by definition, they view as corrupt. Pure religion only needs to be promoted where impure religion supposedly runs rampant.
As soon as we enter into debates about true or false Islam, good or bad Muslims, we are granting ISIS one of its key claims: that Muslims need to defend Islam by policing who does or does not have the right to call themselves a Muslim.
Both ethically and practically, it should be sufficient to recognize that anyone who identifies themselves as a Muslim, is a Muslim — no litmus test required.
In the following interview, Bernard Haykel addresses the question of whether ISIS is truly Islamic.
In Washington, conceding the fact that ISIS probably can’t be bombed out of existence, there is much talk nowadays about the need to challenge the group’s ideology.
Whoever came up with the slogan, “think again, turn away,” must have been a graduate of the Nancy Reagan school of psychology.
Right! That’s sure to work — just like a program to pacify violent urban ghetto gang members by recruiting them to the Boy Scouts of America.
It should be axiomatic that in the art of persuasion you will never make a connection with your target audience if you treat them like vulnerable fools, susceptible to being led astray.
Such an approach is bound to be ineffective and likely rests on a false premise: that ones adversary is engaged in willful deception.
The threat from ISIS derives less from deception than it does from the fact that its leaders actually believe what they are saying.
In his closing address at the White House’s Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, President Obama yesterday referred to the “false promises of extremism.” In using that phrase, he echoed a widely held belief that the leaders of extremist organizations do not genuinely believe in the ideologies they promote — that their intent is to dupe naive recruits.
This is all part of the prevailing narrative that emphasizes the importance of de-legitimizing terrorism. In the same vain, ISIS is described as having perverted Islam, for which reason it should not be called Islamic.
This is a wrong-headed approach because it disregards the foundation of radicalization: the rejection of what are perceived as inauthentic expressions of religion, corrupt political systems, and failed societies.
The radical believes he is tapping into the pure root of something that has in its wider manifestations lost its authenticity. Those who don’t share that perception are themselves seen as having no legitimacy and no capacity to distinguish between authenticity and inauthencity.
When an American president, attempts to engage in PR on behalf of the global Muslim community, those Muslims with whom ISIS’s message resonates, will most likely respond to Obama’s words with howls of scorn.
In Congress last week, as the New York Timesreported, there was a rare note of realism from an unlikely source who provided a reality check on the ability of the U.S. government to challenge ISIS ideologically.
“Unfortunately, as we all know, the government is probably not the best platform to try to communicate with the set of actors who are potentially vulnerable to this kind of propaganda and this kind of recruitment,” Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week.
“We try to find ways to stimulate this kind of counternarrative, this kind of countermessaging, without having a U.S. government hand in it,” Mr. Rasmussen continued. “People who are attracted to this don’t go to the government for their guidance on what to do, not the U.S. government and certainly not their governments in the Middle East.”
Neither do they go to their parents, or their imams, or other community leaders.
Obama suggested, among other things, that we need to: “lift up the voices of those who know the hypocrisy of groups like ISIL firsthand, including former extremists.”
That could be useful, but I wouldn’t overestimate the power of such voices. The disaffected have a tendency of being perceived as dropouts — people who didn’t have what it takes, whose commitment wasn’t deep enough, and whose fears undermined their faith.
What would cut the ground from under the extremists’ feet is not a counter-narrative that deligitimizes their claims, but instead a vision that is even more radical than the one ISIS offers.
Obama said:
When governments oppress their people, deny human rights, stifle dissent, or marginalize ethnic and religious groups, or favor certain religious groups over others, it sows the seeds of extremism and violence. It makes those communities more vulnerable to recruitment. Terrorist groups claim that change can only come through violence. And if peaceful change is impossible, that plays into extremist propaganda.
So the essential ingredient to real and lasting stability and progress is not less democracy; it’s more democracy. It’s institutions that uphold the rule of law and apply justice equally. It’s security forces and police that respect human rights and treat people with dignity. It’s free speech and strong civil societies where people can organize and assemble and advocate for peaceful change. It’s freedom of religion where all people can practice their faith without fear and intimidation. All of this is part of countering violent extremism.
The trouble is, these are all observations that have been made many times before, and especially coming from Obama’s lips they sound like nothing more than a wish-list.
For decades, the United States has consistently undermined democracy in the Middle East. Even after the Arab Spring erupted, Obama was only halfhearted in his support for grassroots democracy movements.
The United States does not have it in its power to deliver democracy to the region. What it could do is set expiration dates on the support it provides to its many corrupt allies.
Ultimately it is the choice of these governments to either continue concerning themselves exclusively with their own survival, or to collectively construct a new Middle East in which its people matter more than its rulers.
Right now, the only choices on offer are between two forms of managed chaos. On one side the institutionalized violence of authoritarian and corrupt rulers and on the other the savagery of ISIS.
Neither side has a vision of the future in which the dignity and respect that ordinary people deserve is even being offered.
Jacob Siegel writes: There’s a gnawing contradiction at the center of a high profile White House summit being held this week dedicated to curbing violent extremism: The U.S. is heading the opposition to extremism at the same moment the country is increasingly allied with violent extremists in the fight against ISIS.
It’s one of a number of inconvenient issues as national and global leaders gather to figure out what to do about the radicals in their midst. Critics, including former administration officials and terrorism experts, are skeptical about the effectiveness of government initiatives. Many question whether the summit amounts to much more than a feel good PR spectacle.
The “Countering Violent Extremism” conference, which began Tuesday and runs through Friday, has drawn elected leaders and lawmakers from around the world, U.S. law enforcement officials, religious leaders, and experts on radical ideologies and their adherents. Participants are supposed to address a broad range of extremist threats, but it’s clear from President Obama’s own remarks that ISIS and the threat from jihadist groups have an outsized presence at the summit.
Few details about the summit’s agenda were released ahead of the event but even before it began there was debate over how extremism would be defined. The White House was accused, variously, of “avoiding the world Muslim” in its discussion of extremist threats and focusing too narrowly on Islamic radicalism at the exclusion of other violent groups. The terms of that debate miss another distinction. As the war against ISIS illustrates, there are extremist groups the government is willing to tolerate, and in some cases work alongside, and others it is not. [Continue reading…]
Nancy A. Youssef reports: The Obama administration was given multiple chances Wednesday to endorse a longtime ally’s airstrikes on America’s biggest enemy at the moment, the so-called Islamic State. Over and over again, Obama’s aides declined to back Egypt’s military operation against ISIS. It’s another sign of the growing strain between the United States and Egypt, once one of its closest friends in the Middle East.
This shouldn’t be a complete surprise; Cairo, after all, didn’t tell Washington about its strikes on the ISIS hotbed of Derna, Libya. Still, Wednesday’s disconnect was jarring. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest passed on a reporter’s question about an endorsement of Egypt’s growing campaign against ISIS. So did State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
“We are neither condemning nor condoning” the Egyptian strikes, is all one U.S. official would tell The Daily Beast.
In other words, these once-close nations are now fighting separate campaigns against their mutual foe. And that could prove to be very good news for ISIS. The rift between U.S. and the region’s most populous country portends of another division that ISIS could exploit, this time for its expansion into northern Africa and the broader Middle East. [Continue reading…]
Sarah Leah Whitson writes: Six months and 16,000 airstrikes into the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, with less than 1% of the territory it held in Iraq recovered, an honest accounting leads to only one conclusion: The U.S.-led strategy is failing.
With the effort focused almost exclusively on a military defeat of the armed group, also known as ISIS, neither the Iraqi government nor its anti-ISIS allies – Iran included – have seriously addressed the reforms and accountability for abuses that could earn back the support of Iraq’s Sunni population. The fragmentation of Iraq’s fighting forces into unaccountable sectarian militias responsible for horrific abuses against Iraqi civilians is part of Iraq’s slide into a broken state that no amount of foreign aid and military intervention will be likely to put back together.
Despite the grievances underlying initial Sunni support for ISIS, the anti-ISIS coalition has focused almost exclusively on an airstrikes campaign, with Shi’a militias supported by Iran as the primary boots on the ground.
The stunning takeover by ISIS of a massive swath of Iraqi territory testified to the alienation of Sunni communities. Many Sunnis welcomed ISIS fighters as “liberators” from the sectarian oppression of government forces. But let’s not forget how Iraq got to that point – with the U.S.-led Iraq war that displaced a dictator but resulted in an abusive occupation and destructive civil war, leaving more than a million dead. [Continue reading…]
BBC News: Jihadist militants from Islamic State (IS) have burned to death 45 people in the western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, the local police chief says.
Exactly who these people were and why they were killed is not clear, but Col Qasim al-Obeidi said he believed some were members of the security forces.
IS fighters captured much of the town, near Ain al-Asad air base, last week.
Col Obeidi said a compound that houses the families of security personnel and local officials was now under attack.
He pleaded for help from the government and the international community.
Anakana Schofield writes: There isn’t much primary source material on the foreign women who have gone voluntarily to Syria and Iraq and chosen to live under the Islamic State, alongside the thousands of women Isis have kidnapped, beaten, raped, forced to convert and sold into sexual slavery. We know the places the volunteers have left but can only speculate as to why.
The women who join Isis are often referred to as female foreign fighters or women jihadis. But according to Women of the Islamic State: A Manifesto on Women by the Al-Khanssaa Brigade, in a section headed ‘secondary functions of a woman’, it would require a fatwa for them actively to fight, ‘as the blessed women of Iraq and Chechnya did, with great sadness’.
The manifesto has been translated by the Quilliam Foundation, ‘the world’s first counter-extremism think tank’, which says that it is aimed at recruiting Arab women, especially from Saudi Arabia. It is supposedly written by women but doesn’t sound like it. It reads as if written by a bunch of men squashed in a hot shed. [Continue reading…]
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