Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

ISIS morale falls as momentum slows and casualties mount

The Financial Times reports: An activist opposed to both the Syrian regime and Isis, and well known to the Financial Times, said he had verified 100 executions of foreign Isis fighters trying to flee the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, Isis’s de facto capital. Like most people interviewed or described in this article, he asked for his name to be withheld for security reasons.

“After the fall of Mosul in June, Isis was presenting itself as unstoppable and it was selling a sense of adventure,” a US official said. He added that the dynamics have changed since the US launched air strikes in August and helped break the momentum of the Isis advance, which has helped stem the flow of foreign recruits — though he warned that the change of mood “doesn’t affect the hardcore people of Isis”.

Analyst Torbjorn Soltvedt, of Verisk Maplecroft, a UK-based risk analysis group, said morale may be taking a hit as militants grapple with the shift from mobile army to governing force.

“Before they were seizing territory, forcing armies in Iraq and Syria to retreat,” he said. “Now they’re basically an occupying force trying to govern.”

After flocking to Syria and Iraq during Isis’s heady days of quick victories, some foreigners may also be questioning the long, gruelling fight ahead.

Mr Solvedt said his organisation has had many reports of foreign fighters, including Britons, contacting family members and state authorities seeking ways to return home.

Isis members in Raqqa said the organisation has created a military police to crack down on fighters who fail to report for duty. According to activists, dozens of fighters’ homes have been raided and many have been arrested. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS rules

Sarah Birke writes: In late November, there were widespread reports that both the US-led coalition and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus have stepped up their bombing campaign against the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, in eastern Syria. The jihadist organization has long been secretive about where its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and other senior members are based — locals say they move around between Iraq and Syria — but Raqqa is often referred to as the “capital” of ISIS’s self-declared caliphate, and has become its most emblematic city.

To judge from images distributed by the group, Raqqa is an extremist hotbed whose inhabitants crave a radical version of Islam, enjoy public executions, and fervently support their ruthless black-clad overlords; the beheading of James Foley — and of several of the other hostages — was filmed on a hill in its outskirts. Yet there is little about this provincial center of some 500,000 people that might have suggested jihadist or even Islamist tendencies. In fact, Raqqa did not even enter the Syrian conflict until 2013.

Living in Damascus before the war, I had several occasions to visit Raqqa, and I was struck by how ordinary it was. A dusty place far from the country’s other major cities, it offered few amenities and most Syrians complained about it, if they chanced to visit. It was true that the local population, a mixture of tribes and settled Bedouins, were almost entirely Sunni Muslim, but unlike such eastern cities as Hama and Aleppo it didn’t have a tradition of Islamist activism. As a resident of al-Tabqa, a town near Raqqa with a Syrian air base that was captured by ISIS in August, put it: “The irony is we were famous for not praying!”

But Raqqa’s substantial size, location, and relative remove from the main areas of conflict have been critical to ISIS’s aim of creating a large and highly centralized state. The group holds territory that now extends from the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria’s west to Iraq’s Iranian border in the east, from the Syrian-Turkish border in the north down through Iraq’s Anbar province to six miles outside of Baghdad in the south. Although its forces have been pushed back, slowly, from Kobane, on the Syrian-Turkish border, they have also won land elsewhere, including at Heet and Ramadi in Iraq, despite US-led bombardment. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS ‘executes 100 deserters’ in Syria’s Raqqa

Al Arabiya reports: Militants belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have executed 100 members for trying to flee their base in the northern Syrian city of Raqaa, the Financial Times reported on Saturday.

An activist, who was identified by the newspaper as opposed to the Syrian regime and ISIS, confirmed to the FT the execution of the 100 foreign fighters attempting to flee Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital.

After being on the run for months, “frustration” began sweeping among the Islamist militants, the daily said.

Fighters sense a halt to ISIS’ military progress and are witnessing mounting casualties among their ranks, the report added.

“Morale isn’t falling – it’s hit the ground,” an opposition activist from ISIS-controlled areas of in Deir al-Zor told the newspaper.

Morale among the fighters was affected by the group’s shift toward governing areas it controls and because of U.S.-led air strikes halting their advances in Syria and Iraq.

“Local fighters are frustrated – they feel they’re doing most of the work and the dying … foreign fighters who thought they were on an adventure are now exhausted,” the opposition activist told the daily. [Continue reading…]

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Yazidis cheer Kurds on Iraqi mountain for breaking ISIS siege

Reuters reports: Iraqi Kurdish fighters flashed victory signs as they swept across the northern side of Sinjar mountain on Saturday, two days after breaking through to free hundreds of Yazidis trapped there for months by Islamic State fighters.

A Reuters correspondent, who arrived on the mountain late Saturday, witnessed Kurdish and Yazidi fighters celebrating their gains after launching their offensive on Wednesday with heavy U.S. air support.

The Iraqi Kurdish flag fluttered, with its yellow sun, and celebratory gunfire rang out. Little children cheered “Barzani’s party”, in reference to the Kurdish region’s president, Massoud Barzani.

“We have been surrounded the last three months. We were living off of raw wheat and barley,” said Yazidi fighter Haso Mishko Haso. [Continue reading…]

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Spain jails four accused of recruiting women for ISIS

Vice News reports: Three women and a man, accused of recruiting young women for the Islamic State through social media and WhatsApp forums, were sent to prison by a Spanish judge on Thursday. They were allegedly part of a jihadist network that has managed to send 12 women to join the terrorist group in Syria and Iraq.

Spanish National Court Judge Santiago Pedraz “ordered unconditional detention for membership in a terrorist organisation,” according to a judicial source.

Police arrested seven suspects this week — four people in Melilla and Ceuta, Spanish territories in northern Africa, a Chilean woman in Barcelona, and two men in the Moroccan town of Castillejos. Two women arrested in Barcelona and Ceuta were apparently about to travel to the Middle East. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS targets Afghanistan just as the U.S. quits

The Daily Beast reports: Few sayings of the Prophet Mohammed have a stronger hold on the imagination of the world’s jihadists than his prophecy about the flags: “If you see the black banners coming from Khorasan, join that army, even if you have to crawl over ice,” he is supposed to have admonished the faithful. “No power will be able to stop them and they will finally reach Baitul Maqdisi”—Jerusalem— “where they will erect flags.”

And where was this magical land of Khorasan, whence the conquerors would come? Think Afghanistan and pieces of all the countries that surround it, including and especially Iran.

For the great ideologues of modern jihadist terror, Ayman al Zawahiri of al Qaeda and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi of the so-called Islamic State, the strategic and symbolic importance of Khorasan is huge, and there are already signs that they are competing for control there. Some factions of both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and some members of al Qaeda in the area have pledged allegiance to Baghdadi’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Zawahiri’s most elite group of operatives, meanwhile, has become known as the Khorasan Group.

As terrorists compete for prestige and authority, they are under attack by the governments of the region. To make their mark on the minds of potential followers, they carry out ever more desperate and horrifying acts, like the slaughter of children at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, earlier this week.

A central figure in these dangerous wider developments is a soft-spoken scholar, journalist and poet, Sheikh Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who spent more than three years as a prisoner of the Americans at Guantanamo, then found himself imprisoned again by the Pakistanis. News reports in the region recently named his as the Islamic State-appointed governor or wali of Khorasan. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS now regulates rape and slavery

Zvi Bar’el reports: The rape and trafficking of women now has rules, according to a short explanatory pamphlet released recently by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL).

According to this publication, which appears in Q&A format, a man may take a woman as a slave and have sexual intercourse with her if she has reached puberty. However, if a man is only part-owner of a woman, he must purchase her fully from his co-owners before he can have intercourse with her. If the slave becomes pregnant, she may not be sold. However, if her owner dies, she goes free.

A man may not have intercourse with his wife’s slave, because the latter is another’s property. One may sexually enjoy a slave without having full intercourse with her if she has not reached puberty. A slave should be treated as property, as long as that property is not damaged. A woman must not be separated from her child when she is bought or sold, except if her children have reached adulthood.

These rules are presented together with quotes from the words of the prophet Mohammed and verses of wisdom from Islamic luminaries. Not only is the abduction of women and selling them as sex slaves an inseparable part of the strategy of terror imposed by ISIS in areas under its control in Iraq and Syria, the butchering of women is also an accepted act. [Continue reading…]

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Several ISIS leaders have been killed in Iraq, U.S. says

The Wall Street Journal reports: U.S. airstrikes have killed three military leaders of the extremist group Islamic State in Iraq in recent weeks, the Pentagon’s top uniformed officer said Thursday.

The action came as U.S. and Iraqi forces step up operations in Iraq, officials said, part of an expanding coalition effort ahead of an expected offensive next year to try to retake key cities seized by the militant group.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that the strikes that killed the military leaders were designed to hamper Islamic State’s ability to conduct attacks, supply fighters and finance operations. [Continue reading…]

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Boko Haram now appears intent on governing

The Wall Street Journal reports: After seizing another village in Nigeria’s northeast last month, Boko Haram militants took a step in their transition from terror group to governing authority. They rounded up the men and ordered them to wear pants as the prophet Mohammed did, several inches above the ankle.

Otherwise, a Boko Haram commander told a crowd of men, they would be killed. “So we folded our trousers,” said Birgamus Kadams, a 26-year-old who was among the group of several hundred residents of Garkidi village the militant addressed.

Like 1.5 million other Nigerians, Mr. Kadams fled his home, in his case to the government-held town of Yola. But the world he left behind is changing.

After years of sowing chaos—bombing mosques, gunning up markets, kidnapping children, and leaving thousands dead, Boko Haram now appears intent on establishing order in towns it holds.

Fighters are imposing rigorous Islamic law in a bid to carve out a corner of a strategic, oil-rich country—just as its fellow jihadists in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are doing. [Continue reading…]

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Backed by U.S. airstrikes, Kurds break ISIS siege of Mount Sinjar

The New York Times reports: Kurdish forces, backed by a surge of American airstrikes in recent days, recaptured a large swath of territory from Islamic State militants on Thursday, opening a path from the autonomous Kurdish region to Mount Sinjar in the west, near the Syrian border.

The two-day offensive, which involved 8,000 fighters, known as pesh merga, was the largest one to date in the war against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, according to Kurdish officials. It was also a successful demonstration of President Obama’s strategy for battling the extremist group: American air power combined with local forces doing the fighting on the ground.

A statement released Thursday night by the office of Masrour Barzani, the head of the Kurdistan Regional Security Council, called the operation “the single biggest military offensive against ISIS, and the most successful.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS implicated in botched cyberattack

The Associated Press reports: A cyberattack aimed at unmasking Syrian dissidents has experts worried that ISIS is adding malicious software to its arsenal.

Internet watchdog Citizen Lab says an attempt to hack into systems operated by dissidents within the self-styled caliphate could be the work of hackers affiliated with ISIS.

Citizen Lab analyst John Scott-Railton said there is circumstantial evidence of the group’s involvement, and cautioned that if the group has moved into cyber-espionage, “the targets might not stop with the borders of Syria.”

The Nov. 24 attack came in the form of a booby-trapped email sent to an activist collective in Raqqa, Syria, that documents human rights abuses in ISIS’ de-facto capital. The activist at the receiving end wasn’t fooled and forwarded the message to an online safety group.

“We are wanted – even just as corpses,” the activist, whose name is being withheld to protect his safety, wrote in his message to cybersafety trainer Bahaa Nasr. “This email has a virus; we want to know the source.”

The message eventually found its way to Citizen Lab, based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. There, Scott-Railton and malware researcher Seth Hardy determined that it could act as a kind of electronic homing beacon by revealing a victim’s Internet Protocol address. [Continue reading…]

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I’m a soldier, I have no regrets, says ISIS Twitter promoter @ShamiWitness

The Times of India reports: “I’m a soldier and messenger. I don’t regret what I’ve done,” Mehdi Masroor Biswas, 24, told an advocate as a posse of policemen escorted him out of court hall 49, Civil Court Complex, Bengaluru, on Thursday.

Mehdi, arrested for operating a pro-ISIS Twitter handle, was remanded to 15 days in police custody by special judge Somaraju. One of the advocates asked Mehdi outside the courtroom, “Why did you do this, man?” Mehdi replied he had no regrets.

His parents were present in the courtroom. West Bengal-born Mehdi was as a management executive in an MNC, and allegedly worked as an ISIS propaganda activist, tweeting and retweeting thousands of messages. Arrested in the early hours of Saturday, Mehdi was produced before court on Thursday when his five-day police custody ended. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq: 150 women executed after refusing to marry ISIS militants

Anadolu Agency reports: At least 150 women who refused to marry militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, were executed in the western Iraqi province of Al-Anbar, Iraq’s Ministry of Human Rights said.

According to a ministry statement released Tuesday, ISIL militants carried out a number of attacks in Fallujah and buried the victims in mass graves in one of the city’s neighborhoods.

“At least 150 females, including pregnant women, were executed in Fallujah by a militant named Abu Anas Al-Libi after they refused to accept jihad marriage,” the statement said. “Many families were also forced to migrate from the province’s northern town of Al-Wafa after hundreds of residents received death threats.”

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A contrivance of an alliance against ISIS

Time reports: The U.S. is largely flying solo when it comes to attacking ISIS

The U.S.-led bombing campaign against Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is complex. A coalition made up of the U.S. and seven allies began bombing ISIS targets in Iraq in August. A month later, the U.S. began bombing targets belonging to the militant group in Syria, along with four allies.

Should the civilized world care that none of the seven U.S. allies bombing ISIS targets in Iraq (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Netherlands and the United Kingdom) are bombing ISIS in Syria? And that, ipso facto, none of the four U.S. allies bombing targets in Syria (Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) are bombing ISIS targets in Iraq?

Does it matter that the U.S. stands alone when it comes to bombing both?

Perhaps more important is the lopsided nature of the air strikes: since Sept. 23, the allies have accounted for nearly 40% of close air support, interdiction and escort sorties, and 25% of total missions flown. “Many of those sorties that conduct dynamic targeting in support of ground forces require specialized capability, and frequently they do not result in a necessary strike on [ISIS] forces, equipment or facilities,” Gary Boucher, spokesman for the campaign, dubbed Operation Inherent Resolve, said Tuesday. [Continue reading…]

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@ShamiWitness arrest rattles ISIS’ cages on Twitter

Joyce Karam reports: The arrest of Mehdi Masroor Biswas, author of the highly influential pro-ISIS twitter account @ShamiWitness, on Saturday in Bangalore, India, is putting jihadist tweeps on notice. Deactivation, suspension and anxious-ridden tweets have been widely visible in the last two days, while more questions are being raised to improve Twitter’s anti-extremism tools and prevent ISIS from using it as a platform.

“He became a hub for ISIS recruits and propaganda,” that’s how Frances Townsend, president of the “Counter extremism Project” (CEP), sums up the rise and fall of Shami Witness, who raked up more than 18,000 followers on Twitter in the last two years.

From his executive office in India’s “silicon valley,” Shami Witness cheered on ISIS and its reign of horror more than 4,000 km away in Iraq and Syria. His outing and arrest this week after a Channel 4 investigation is a “very good development,” Townsend tells Al Arabiya News, proving that an anonymous address and fake Twitter handles are no guarantee for impunity. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS supporter @ShamiWitness arrested in Bangalore while his defenders threaten to decapitate more journalists

IBT reports: Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who was arrested Saturday in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, was only a sympathizer of the Islamic State group, and was not directly involved in recruiting for the militant outfit, M.N. Reddi, chief of Bangalore police, announced at a press conference. Biswas will be produced before a judge within 24 hours.

Biswas was detained by local police earlier in the day after a search was triggered following a report from UK-based Channel 4, which revealed that he was managing a popular Twitter account sympathetic to ISIS. Biswas, “who was never directly recruited” or left the country, will now be charged under Section 125 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, authorities told the media in Bangalore on Saturday. He will also be charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

“Mehdi Masroor Biswas has confessed to the fact that he was operating @ShamiWitness Twitter account for the last many years,” according to a press release from the Office of the Commissioner of Police in Bangalore, which added that “he was particularly close to the english speaking terrorists of ISIS & became a source of incitement and information for the new recruits trying to join ISIS/ISIL.”

The 24-year-old man, who reportedly worked for a local office of ITC, a multinational conglomerate, was “only active in the virtual world,” Reddi said, at the press conference, adding that most of his 17,000 followers were from the UK. Indian authorities will also investigate Biswas’ online followers. [Continue reading…]

A #FreeShamiWitness campaign has already been launched on Twitter. Here’s one tweet which threatens kafir (“infidel”) journalists with decapitation:


But as @ShamiWitness and ISIS supporters speak out on Twitter, they highlight not only the extent to which their cause has been advanced by social media but also the fact that their favorite tool for propaganda is also indispensable for gathering intelligence.

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Understanding the drivers of radicalization in Syria

Syria Deeply: Syria has not traditionally been a seat of extremist Islam. What has contributed to the radicalization of the country? What’s driving it now?

Nader Hashemi: First and foremost, it’s the conflict itself. It’s not a coincidence that we are seeing the spread of Islamic radicalism in Syria as a direct result of the barbarity of the Assad regime, and as a result of a conflict that in my view is borderline genocidal.

In the midst of the chaos, mayhem, bloodshed and crimes against humanity, you don’t produce liberal, democratic opinion. You produce the antithesis of it: an environment that reflects the social conditions of chaos and anarchy.

There is also an ideological battle taking place in the Middle East today with respect to different political currents of Islamism, and it’s not a coincidence that we are seeing the upsurge and the rise of radical Islamism of various forms, with the most radical being ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, after the crushing of the Arab Spring and the democratic openings it unleashed.

Syria is a case study of the deep and intimate relationship between the closure of political opportunities and democratization, and in the aftermath of their demise, the upsurge of the rise of radical Islamic tendencies. In the early days of the revolution, in the first six months of 2011, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra weren’t present inside Syria. The early formation of radical jihadism in Syria started to take root and gain currency as political openings and possibilities for political change started to diminish. Human-rights violations and repression feed into a narrative of radical extremism and they undermine the prospects for more democratic and more moderate expressions of political Islam. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. concern grows over ISIS fighters training in Libya

The Los Angeles Times reports: Fighters for the Islamic State militant group have been training in remote areas of Libya, heightening the Obama administration’s concern about a country that U.S. officials have largely ignored since its 2011 revolution.

Training camps with several hundred Islamic State fighters have been spotted in parts of eastern Libya, and some U.S. intelligence reports suggest a new presence for the militant group near Tripoli, in the country’s west, U.S. officials disclosed in recent days.

Although the officials say no immediate military response is planned, the appearance of the camps is giving new impetus to a debate about whether the United States eventually will need to expand its campaign against the militants beyond Iraq and Syria.[Continue reading…]

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