Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Destroying ISIS is about more than vengeance

Hassan Hassan writes: Less than three weeks before ISIL captured Jordanian pilot Maaz Al Kassasbeh on December 24, Jordan’s King Abdullah described the fight against the extremist group as “our third world war”. He said that Muslim leaders should take ownership of the fight, which requires a pan-regional strategy to counter extremism.

Two months later, Jordan is now finding itself being pushed to the forefront of this “generational fight”, as the king put it then. Since the terror group burnt Al Kassasbeh to death in a cage, the country’s air force has carried out at least 56 sorties, and been joined by F16s of the UAE. Jordan’s fight against ISIL is no longer someone else’s war.

The greatest mistake that Jordan can make is to define its battle against ISIL purely in the language of vengeance. The pain and anger that define the atmosphere in Jordan today might abate in coming weeks, but the country’s commitment to the destruction of ISIL should become part of a long-term strategy. The rise of ISIL was a result of reactionary and inconsistent policies in the first place – something Jordan must avoid if it is to win this war.

Jordan must heed the king’s own advice during his interview with CBS News in December, when he said that ISIL would not go away without a “holistic” strategy that views the group as part of greater challenges facing the region. ISIL, he said, is one face of many extremist groups in the Middle East. [Continue reading…]

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Why Turkey backs Al-Nusra but shuns ISIS

Aaron Stein writes: In April 2011, senior members of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) met in Ankara to discuss the unrest in Syria. The meeting focused on Syria and how the government should respond to Bashar al-Assad’s violent suppression of antigovernment demonstrations. For the AKP, the unrest posed a unique set of challenges. Since 2002, Turkey had prioritized good relations with Damascus, arguing that areas of northern Syria were part of what they called Turkey’s “natural hinterland.”

In the end, the meeting’s participants decided to cautiously support Assad, albeit while prodding him to make political concessions to allow the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood to reenter Syrian politics. Unlike during the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, when Turkey called on President Hosni Mubarak to step down after only eight days of rallies, Ankara’s initial preference in Syria was for the regime to reform and remain in power. To this end, Recep Tayyip Erdogan—then prime minister and now president—dispatched two trusted advisers to try to convince Assad to make cosmetic democratic reforms to appease the protesters. In April 2011, he sent Intelligence Chief Hakan Fidan to try to convince Assad to deescalate the unfolding crisis. Thereafter, he dispatched Ahmet Davutoglu, foreign minister at the time and now prime minister, on numerous occasions. Despite these efforts, neither man was successful. In September 2011, Turkey severed ties with the regime and began to take active part in regional efforts to overthrow the Syrian dictator. [Continue reading…]

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‘Cyber Caliphate’ unmasked as lone Algerian hacker

The Desk: A hacking collective calling itself the “Cyber Caliphate” that claims to be affiliated with the Islamic State militia is actually a lone hacker from Algeria with no connection to the terrorist group, The Desk has learned.

The revelation came following the compromise of a Twitter account used by Newsweek magazine on Tuesday. The attack was said to have been done in the name of the “Cyber Caliphate,” a group that has targeted other news organizations over the past few months in the name of the Islamic State.

But The Desk has learned the attacks are actually conducted by a lone Algeria-based hacker who goes by the alias “Poti Satz.” The hacker was once affiliated with a collective known as “Team System Dz,” which was active for a few months in 2014 before going dark in October.

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Assad says Syria is informed on anti-ISIS air campaign

BBC News: Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad says his government is receiving messages from the US-led coalition battling the jihadist group, Islamic State.

Mr Assad told the BBC that there had been no direct co-operation since air strikes began in Syria in September.

But third parties – among them Iraq – were conveying “information”.

The US National Security Council has denied co-ordinating with the Syrian government.

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Family of ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller confirms U.S. aid worker has been killed

The Guardian: The family of Kayla Mueller, the 26-year-old aid worker held hostage by Isis since August 2013, has confirmed in a statement that she has been killed.

“We are heartbroken to share that we’ve received confirmation that Kayla Jean Mueller, has lost her life,” her parents and brother said on Tuesday.

Supporters of Islamic State had claimed on Friday that she was killed in a Jordanian air strike intended to avenge the burning to death of a captured Jordanian pilot.

Carl and Marsha Mueller, her parents, said: “Our hearts are breaking for our only daughter, but we will continue on in peace, dignity, and love for her.”

In a statement released by the White House, Barack Obama sent his “deepest condolences” to the Mueller family, and vowed to bring those responsible for Kayla’s death to justice.

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ISIS pulls forces and hardware from Syria’s Aleppo, say rebels

Reuters reports: Islamic State has withdrawn some of its insurgents and equipment from areas northeast of the Syrian city of Aleppo, rebels and residents say, adding to signs of strain in the Syrian provinces of its self-declared caliphate.

The group, which has recently lost ground to Kurdish and Syrian government forces elsewhere in Syria, has pulled fighters and hardware from several villages in areas northeast of Aleppo, they said. But it has not fully withdrawn from area.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the war using a network of sources on the ground, said Islamic State had redeployed forces from Aleppo province to join battles further east with Kurdish forces and mainstream rebel groups.

Islamic State-held areas northeast of Aleppo mark the western edge of a domain that expanded rapidly in Syria and Iraq last year after the jihadists seized the Iraqi city of Mosul. [Continue reading…]

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Jordan says conducted 56 air raids in three days against ISIS

Reuters reports: Jordan’s air force chief said on Sunday his country’s jet fighters had conducted 56 bombing raids in three days against Islamic State militants in northeast Syria, targeting key bases and arms depots.

Jordan stepped up its bombing of the jihadist group on Thursday in response to the brutal killing by Islamic State of a captured Jordanian pilot, and continued until Saturday.

No new strikes were announced for Sunday.

“We achieved what we aimed for. We destroyed logistics centers, arms depots and targeted hideouts of their fighters,” General Mansour al-Jbour, head of the Jordanian airforce, told a news conference.

Jordan has carried out nearly a fifth of the sorties of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State in Syria to date, Jbour said. U.S. aircraft joined the mission to provide intelligence, surveillance, a U.S. official told Reuters earlier on Sunday. [Continue reading…]

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America’s alignment with Iranian interests is undermining the fight against ISIS

Left Foot Forward: ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, is brilliantly easy to read. Concise yet thorough the book charts the history of a group, “[a]t once sensationalized and underestimated,” that is simultaneously a terrorist organisation, mafia, conventional army, sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus, propaganda machine and the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime which controls an area the size of Britain in the heart of the Middle East.

The book begins with an underemphasised point: neither the Islamic State (ISIS) nor its governing method – extreme violence coupled with distributing stolen oil revenue and extortion – is new. The United States battled ISIS, then known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), as the US tried to stabilise and democratise Iraq in the last decade. Moreover, ISIS is built out of the ruins of the Saddam regime.

In the late 1980s, Saddam launched the Faith Campaign and “Islamised his regime”. The campaign pushed a hardline Salafism combined with a cult of the leader, and involved setting up of elaborate networks of patronage, informants, militias and weapons to control the religious institutions and prevent a renewed Shi’a uprising as followed Saddam’s eviction from Kuwait in 1991. In tandem, Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri, to this day an important insurgent, set up smuggling networks into neighbouring States. These networks would come under ISIS’ control as the Ba’athist-Salafist remnants of the regime fused with foreign al-Qaeda forces in the post-Saddam insurgency.

ISIS was initially led by a Jordanian drug-taker and street-thug turned religious militant named Ahmad al-Khalaylah. Khalaylah had arrived in Afghanistan in time to see the Red Army leave, and then been imprisoned when he tried to take jihad home. In prison, Khalaylah gained status over his mentor, al-Qaeda ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, and migrated to Taliban Afghanistan in 1999, where he was given start-up funds for a terrorism camp by Osama bin Laden. The world would come to know Khalaylah as Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, and his group would become AQI in 2004. Zarqawi’s supporters would brand him the “Shaykh of the Slaughterers” because of his fondness for decapitating prisoners on film.

While AQI primarily stayed in Iraq, Zarqawi often targeted the homeland he fled: the first attack of the Iraqi insurgency was against the Jordanian Embassy in August 2003; and there was a massive attack against hotels in Amman in November 2005

In post-Saddam Iraq, many Sunni Arabs joined the insurgency to thwart Shi’a power, and others joined because they were made jobless by the disbanding of the army. If the insurgents were not radicalised beforehand they were after time in American prisons, which were “little more than social-networking furloughs for jihadists”.

“If you were looking to build an army, prison is the perfect place to do it,” one expert says. “We gave them health care, dental, fed them, and, most importantly, we kept them from getting killed in combat.” AQI also actively infiltrated the US prisons to help make them jihadist production facilities. [Continue reading…]

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The fight against ISIS and the wider war

Hassan Hassan writes: Savagery is part of Isis’s ideological DNA. The danger of the group lies in its effort to transform the concept of jihad not through individual fatwas, as al-Qaida does to justify suicide bombing in civilian areas, but through a fully fledged ideology. To do so, Isis uses stories from Islamic history and modern jihadi texts to change the paradigm of how to understand and conduct jihad.

One of the most prominent of those jihadi texts is a book called Idarat al-Tawahush, or Management of Savagery, by an anonymous jihadi ideologue who calls himself Abu Bakr Naji. The book, translated by William McCants of the US Brookings Institution in 2006, has been widely distributed on jihadist online forums. But for the first time, Isis members have confirmed that the book is part of the organisation’s curriculum. As part of research for a book I co-wrote, one Isis-affiliated cleric said that Naji’s book is widely read among provisional commanders and some rank-and-file fighters as a way to justify beheadings as not only religiously permissible but recommended by God and Muhammad. Another member gave a list of books and ideologues that influence Isis, including Naji’s book.

The Management of Savagery’s greatest contribution lies in its differentiation between the meaning of jihad and other religious tenets. The author argues that the way jihad is taught “on paper” makes it harder for young mujahideen and Muslims to grasp the true meaning of the concept. “One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, [deterrence] and massacring,” Naji writes, as translated by McCants. “I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them. He cannot continue to fight and move from one stage to another unless the beginning state contains a stage of massacring the enemy and deterring him.”

The concept Isis used to justify the massacre of hundreds of Shaitat tribesmen in Deir Ezzor, Syria, in August was tashreed, a word that can be translated as “deterrence”, as mentioned in the quoted text. “That is the true jihad,” said Abu Moussa, an Isis-affiliated religious cleric, echoing Naji’s text. “The layman who learned some of his religion from [mainstream] clerics think of jihad as a fanciful act, conducted far away from him. In reality, jihad is a heavy responsibility and requires toughness.”

Naji’s book offers practical tips on how to fill the power vacuum left by what he calls the retreating armies of the west and its regional agent regimes, as a result of gradual violence applied by the mujahideen. He says that the defeat of the crusaders in the past was not a result of decisive battles between the Muslim and Christian armies, but was a process of exhaustion and depletion. He argues that the Muslim victory in the 12th-century Battle of Hattin, when crusaders led by the king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, were defeated by the Muslim army, led by Saladin, was possible only because of previous small-scale skirmishes in a variety of locations. Such small acts, Naji writes, include “hitting a crusader with a stick on his head”, a statement echoed by Isis’s spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani in the wake of the air strikes in Syria.

Naji says that people think of Muslims at the time of the crusaders as one state, led by Saladin al-Ayubi and Nouradin Zinki, but “the fact is they were small families controlling citadels and fighting jihad against crusaders on a low level, in a hard hitting way. What Zinki and Ayubi did was to bring together those small blocs into one big organisation but the largest role was played by those small blocs.” According to Isis, violence has to be steady and escalatory to continue to shock and deter. Random acts of violence are not enough in this context. Brutality has to be ever more savage, creative and shocking. So if the immolation of the pilot is more savage than previous murders, Isis will undoubtedly be searching for an even more savage method to carry out its violent punishments.

J.M. Berger notes that following the release of the video of Muath al-Kasaesbeh’s murder, many commentators suggested that this time ISIS’s brutality may have been so extreme that it will provoke a backlash, potentially leading to the group’s downfall. Berger cautioned against jumping to this conclusion:

When ISIS publicizes its inhuman horrors, its goal is to infuriate and horrify its enemies, to create divisions within the coalition fighting it, and to draw more and more countries ever deeper into the conflict. The “gone too far” theme may be reassuring, but it’s dangerous. We shouldn’t be congratulating ourselves for reacting to ISIS propaganda exactly as ISIS intends.

This is a popular idea: that if we react the way the terrorists want us to react, then we have given in to terrorism. We have allowed ourselves to bend to their will.

Emotionally, this makes sense. Provocation is an exercise in attempting to hijack agency. So refusing to be provoked in the desired way seems like the best way of avoiding losing control.

But on Twitter, @kufr666 says: “It’s a mistake to take IS ‘intentions’ into account at all when measuring our response to their provocations.” I’m inclined to agree with him.

This isn’t a game in which the winner turns out to be simply whoever succeeds in the exercise of their will. Outcomes matter more.

When ISIS launched its assault on Kobane, the small Kurdish town on the Syrian side of the Turkish border held little strategic value. What it offered instead was an opportunity for the media to have a grandstand view of ISIS in action and a demonstration that they are an unstoppable force. ISIS expressed no doubt about how swiftly or decisively it could accomplish its goal.

Initially, the U.S. deployed its “strategic patience,” responded cautiously to the provocation of ISIS’s muscle-flexing and was willing to allow Kobane to fall under the jihadists’ control.

It turned out, however, that when YPG fighters declared they were willing to fight to their last drop of blood, they really meant it.

The U.S. then faced a dilemma. It could either sit on the sidelines with Turkey and watch the Kurds getting slaughtered, or it could step in and provide air support and hopefully help demonstrate that ISIS is not an unstoppable force.

Some may argue that Kobane ended up being destroyed in order to save it, but the town’s residents were in no doubt that they could claim victory. It was ISIS which sustained the heaviest losses while Kobane itself can be rebuilt.

While the savagery of ISIS is indeed calculated to intimidate those who would stand in its way, the danger for its opponents seems to come less from the risk of overreacting than it does from viewing a small irregular army as a global terrorist organization.

ISIS will succeed or fail based on its ability to conquer and govern territory. It can’t be sustained on propaganda victories alone.

ISIS has staked its credibility on its ability to create a caliphate. It can’t survive as nothing more than a network and an ideology. Ultimately, without land, populations, and resources under its control, it has nothing.

Paradoxically, what some would like to characterize as the greatest terrorist threat in human history, might be better viewed through the prism of conventional warfare with potential winners and losers. ISIS is unlikely to ever surrender, but that does not preclude the possibility of its defeat.

Nevertheless, even if it turned out that the fall of ISIS were to come as rapidly as its rise, the consequences of such a victory would likely have a limited impact on the wider conflict — a conflict currently seen through multiple fractures that span all the way from Pakistan to Libya, but which when history is written may eventually come to be seen as a single war: the Greater Middle East War of the 21st century.

In that war, the fight against ISIS is just one battle. And in that war, ultimately either everyone finds a way of coexisting or everyone continues losing.

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Shiite militia drives back ISIS, but divides much of Iraq

The New York Times reports: At their victory rally, the Shiite militiamen used poetry, song and swagger to sweeten their celebration of an ugly battle.

More than a hundred fighters from the militia, the Badr Organization, had been killed in the farms and villages of Diyala Province in recent fighting against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State. During the battle, thousands of residents had been forced from their homes — including Sunni families who accused Shiite paramilitary groups like Badr of forced displacement and summary executions.

But the militias had pushed the Islamic State back from key areas in a crucial battle. So on Monday, the Badr Organization convened in a mosque at Camp Ashraf, its base in Diyala, to celebrate its “liberation” of the province — and to serve notice that it was the vanguard force battling the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Speaking at the rally, to an audience that included giddy fighters barely past their teens, the head of the Badr Organization, Hadi al-Ameri, boasted of the towns his men and allied militias had set free. “These were big operations that others must learn lessons from,” he said.

But even as Mr. Ameri was fishing for broad support and recognition, his group stands among the most divisive in Iraq, accused of atrocities against Sunnis and known for its close ties to Iran. The new government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, which has promised to rule inclusively, has been under pressure to distance itself from retaliatory attacks against Sunnis by both Shiite and Kurdish militiamen. [Continue reading…]

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Syria death toll now exceeds 210,000

Reuters reports: The death toll after nearly four years of civil war in Syria has risen to 210,060, nearly half of them civilians, but the real figure is probably much higher, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Saturday.

The Observatory, which is based in Britain and has a network of activists across Syria, said that 10,664 children and 6,783 women were among the dead.

Reuters tried to contact Syrian authorities for comment, but they were not immediately available.

Peaceful protests against four decades of rule by President Bashar al-Assad’s family in March 2011 degenerated into an armed insurgency following a fierce security crackdown.

The rights group said it had counted 35,827 Syrian rebels and 45,385 Syrian army soldiers killed. The Observatory’s toll could not be independently verified by Reuters.

Among the Observatory’s documented deaths were 24,989 foreign jihadist fighters, including radical Sunni rebel groups such as Al Qaeda offshoot Nusra Front and Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Vian Dakhil: Iraq’s only female Yazidi MP on the battle to save her people

Abigail Haworth reports: The young Yazidi woman in a blue headscarf says her name is Hana. She is 18. She is standing in the muddy courtyard of her new temporary home – an abandoned, unfinished building outside the Iraqi-Kurdish town of Zakho. Beside her is Vian Dakhil, a politician from the same religious minority. Hana is speaking rapidly and clutching Dakhil’s hand as though she’s terrified this local heroine has something far more important to do than listen to her story.

Hana was abducted by Islamic State (Isis) last August. Heavily armed, black-clad militants stormed her village and shot dead her father, four brothers, two uncles and six cousins. They then separated her from her older female relatives. “They drove me away in a truck with other unmarried girls. Two fighters took me and held me prisoner in their house. They beat me and gave me scraps to eat.” After 36 days, Hana escaped when one of her captors left a window unlocked. “It was like a suicide mission, but I didn’t care. I ran for three days and nights to get away.”

Dakhil, a slim woman with long auburn hair, is not going anywhere. She listens intently as her two armed bodyguards stand at a discreet distance. “How is your health? What else did the men do to you?” she asks.

Blood rushes to Hana’s cheeks. Her eyes, locked on to Dakhil’s, well up with tears. They look at each other in silence. “It’s OK, I will help you, I will help you,” says the politician eventually, freeing her hand from Hana’s grip to pull the girl into a hug.

Vian Dakhil is one of only two Yazidis in Iraq’s parliament. It seems obvious that it’s a lonely job; she’s also the only woman from the besieged minority in an assembly that is three-quarters male. (The other Yazidi politician, a man, is so inactive that few people seem to know he exists.) But I don’t realise how lonely her job is until I’ve spent a 14-hour day with her in northern Iraq, visiting Yazidi survivors of Isis carnage. It’s a relentless marathon of inhaling dust, kissing babies and comforting catastrophically traumatised, grief-wracked refugees like Hana. [Continue reading…]

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Kayla Mueller’s calling

Amy Davidson writes: In May, 2013, Kayla Jean Mueller spoke at the Kiwanis Club in Prescott, Arizona, about her work with Syrian refugees. Mueller’s father was a club member, and the Daily Courier, Prescott’s local paper, photographed her, smiling and wearing a lime-green cardigan, in front of a banner that said “KIWANIS HONORS: WE ARE PROUD OF . . . ” with the chapter’s various badges. The Courier reported that she told the audience about helping to reunite two members of a family, a father and a six-year-old boy, and quoted her saying, “In the chaos of waking up in the middle of the night and being shelled, we’re hearing of more children being separated from their families by accident.” She described how she and her colleagues, in their work with traumatized, displaced children, would encourage them to draw their ideal place; they always chose their own home. “They told us everything about their house. They said, ‘There’s a tree in front of my house that I climb.’ ‘There’s this squeaky door that my dad never fixed.’ ”

Three months after that talk, Mueller disappeared in Syria. She spent more than a year and a half as a prisoner of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham — separated from her own family, who kept her name out of the press in an effort to protect her. On Friday, the group announced that she was dead; that has not officially been confirmed. She was, or — one might still hope — is, twenty-six years old. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS resorts to forced conscription and pointless suicide attacks after losing 2,000 fighters in Kobane

Reuters reports: Islamic State’s defeat in Kobani and other recent setbacks in Syria suggest the group is under strain but far from collapse in the Syrian half of its self-declared caliphate.

Islamic State’s high-profile defeat by Kurdish militia backed by U.S.-led air strikes capped a four-month battle that cost Islamic State 2,000 of its fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the war.

Further from the spotlight, Islamic State has also lost ground to Syrian government and Syrian Kurdish forces elsewhere. Its foes have noted unusual signs of disorganization in its ranks, while reports of forced conscription may indicate a manpower problem as the group wages war in both Syria and Iraq.

There is a long way to go before the tide turns decisively against the group in Syria, where it has faced less military pressure than in Iraq. Islamic State still has a firm grip over its Syrian stronghold in Raqqa province and territory stretching all the way to the other half of its caliphate in Iraq.

The group faces no serious challenge to its rule over those Sunni Arab areas, where it has violently crushed all opposition.

It may yet respond to the Kobani defeat by opening new fronts in Syria. And its capacity to wage psychological warfare was amply demonstrated by this week’s video showing the group burning to death a captive Jordanian pilot.

Yet the Kobani defeat marks the first significant setback for Islamic State (ISIL) in Syria since the rapid expansion of its territorial grip there last year following its capture of Iraqi city of Mosul in June. [Continue reading…]

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Female jihadis publish guide to life under ISIS

The Guardian reports: Girls can marry at the age of nine, should ideally have husbands by 16 or 17 and should not be corrupted by going to work, according to a treatise published by female Islamic State supporters in Iraq and Syria.

The document, Women of the Islamic State: Manifesto and Case Study, says women must stay behind closed doors and leave the house only in exceptional circumstances.

“It is always preferable for a woman to remain hidden and veiled, to maintain society from behind this veil,” the English translation says. Fashion shops and beauty salons are denounced as the work of the devil.

The semi-official Islamic State manifesto on women – believed to be the first of its kind – was published on a jihadi forum in Arabic last month and is purported to be by the media wing of the al-Khanssaa Brigade, an all-female militia set up by Islamic State (Isis).

It has now been translated into English by the London-based counter-extremism thinktank Quilliam Foundation. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS cleric who objected to pilot Muath al-Kasaesbeh being burned alive is arrested

The Independent reports: An Isis cleric who objected to burning a Jordanian pilot alive has been arrested and faces trial, a Syrian human rights watchdog has said.

The Saudi national reportedly objected to the execution during a meeting of Isis’ clerical body in the town of al-Bab in Aleppo province.

The cleric also said those responsible for Lieutenant Muath al-Kasaesbeh’s death should face trial, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

It said Isis had “isolated one of its Sharia judges” in al-Bab city, in Aleppo, during the meeting of Amirs.

The SOHR director Rami Abdulrahman told The Independent the cleric was later arrested for speaking out and could be sentenced to death. [Continue reading…]

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Inside ISIS

In a review of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, Justin Vela writes: The rebellion by a younger generation of extremists against an older one is at the heart of the book. The battle over ideology and how to employ terror remains a key argument between ISIL and Al Qaeda today.

The unblinking ease with which the authors describe the horrific reality of this debate reflects the degree to which violence has become normalised in the age of ISIL. The authors’ use of the term “head-loppers” to describe men who have beheaded hundreds of Iraqis and Syrians, along with several Europeans, and US and Japanese citizens, is a rather graphic shorthand and one that’s indicative of how casual the daily horrors have become, at least at a ­distance.

And ominously, the conflicts are likely to get worse, the authors suggest. There are few options other than to fight ISIL, but a series of well-researched examples show how deeply the group has embedded itself within the largely conservative and previously disenfranchised communities they now rule. Mapping out how ISIL learnt to divide and conquer tribes in Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq and Syria, Hassan and Weiss show it to be an organisation that cleverly markets itself as both a defender against Iran and a mediator in tribal disputes. It allows local rule in many areas it conquers, but makes clear that an attack on any of its supporters will result in annihilation. This mixture of local empowerment and fear is key to its success, according to the authors. [Continue reading…]

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Raqqa, the ISIS ‘capital’ — a city under ‘a foreign occupation’

The Wall Street Journal reports: In Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, a Syrian city on the banks of the Euphrates, few Syrians hold positions of power these days. Running the show, residents say, are the thousands of foreigners who have converged there to establish an Islamic utopia they believe will soon conquer the planet.

“What we have is a foreign occupation,” said Sarmad al-Jilane, a former electronics student from Raqqa who now runs a website from neighboring Turkey documenting Islamic State abuses in his hometown called Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. “Those who are paid by them, like them, of course. But most others hate them because of all these killings and beheadings.”

Around 20,000 foreign fighters have joined Islamic State in Syria and Iraq over the past two years, Western intelligence officials estimate. While many nationalities are represented, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Russia and France have produced some of the largest contingents.

As this unprecedented influx continues, mostly through Syria’s long and porous border with Turkey, the rise of the foreign fighters is changing the very nature of the Syrian war.

In the early days of the conflict, many of these combatants came to Syria because of their desire to defend fellow Sunni Muslims against President Bashar al-Assad ’s regime.

Now, their main motivation often appears to be participating in the experiment of creating a new Islamic society — an experiment in which the fate of Syria and Syrians is secondary at best.

“People go now because they envisage a future there, not just because they want to fight on behalf of the Syrian people,” said Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on Islamic State and director of terrorism research at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. “Many think it is a historical project that they can be part of, and that they will be remembered for being among the first — almost like the companions of the prophet.” [Continue reading…]

Cults commonly entice their recruits with the promise that they can have a unique place in history. For individuals burdened by their own lack of sense of purpose, this can be an irresistible promise.

Cults also maximize the division between insiders and outsiders — outsiders are defined, in part, by their incapacity to recognize the supposedly historic nature of the movement.

The plight of the trailblazers — so the conceit goes — is to be unrecognized and maligned by a world that lacks their vision.

This is why ISIS cannot be defeated by the construction of a persuasive counter-narrative. The proponents of such a narrative will be seen by those inside ISIS as essentially blind, which is to say, incapable of offering an alternative to something they have failed to appreciate.

The vilification of ISIS by the U.S. government, for instance, is thus unlikely to sow seeds of doubt and much more likely to prompt derisory laughter from the group’s followers.

For ISIS to break down ideologically, it seems like the fractures will have to develop from within the group.

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