Category Archives: ISIS

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Syria’s military and ISIS have been ‘ignoring’ each other on battlefield, data suggests

NBC News reports: Syria’s military and ISIS may be sworn enemies but instead of wiping each other off the battlefield they have been delicately dancing around each other, according to new data exclusively obtained by NBC News.

Both sides in the bloody conflict appear to be eliminating smaller rivals ahead of a possible final showdown.

Around 64 percent of verifiable ISIS attacks in Syria this year targeted other non-state groups, an analysis of the IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center’s (JTIC) database showed. Just 13 percent of the militants’ attacks during the same period — the year through Nov. 21 — targeted Syrian security forces. That’s a stark contrast to the Sunni extremist group’s operations in Iraq, where more than half of ISIS attacks (54 percent) were aimed at security forces. [Continue reading…]

ISIS shoots down Iraqi helicopter

The Associated Press reports: Islamic State group militants shot down an Iraqi military helicopter, officials said Saturday, killing the two pilots onboard and raising fresh concerns about the extremists’ ability to attack aircraft amid ongoing U.S.-led coalition airstrikes.

The attack happened late Friday in the Shiite holy city of Samarra, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad. A senior Defense Ministry official told The Associated Press the Sunni militants used a shoulder-fired rocket launcher to shoot down the EC635 helicopter on the outskirts of the city.

An army official corroborated the information. Both spoke on condition of anonymity as they weren’t authorized to speak to journalists. [Continue reading…]

U.S.-led warplanes hit militants in Syria and Iraq 27 times this week

The Los Angeles Times reports: U.S.-led warplanes launched 27 airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria this week, officials said Friday.

The three-day attack by jets and drones was focused on militants in Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo; the embattled Syrian city of Kobani and several cities in Iraq: Ramadi and Rutba to the west; Samarra and Mosul to the north.

In Aleppo and Kobani, U.S. officials claim to have destroyed Islamic State bunkers and fortified structures. In Iraq, the airstrikes destroyed armored vehicles as well as bulldozers and an excavator, they said.

President Obama has described the airstrike campaign as an effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy” Islamic State, which rose to prominence during the summer when its fighters crossed the border from Syria into Iraq and conquered large swaths of territory, including Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities. [Continue reading…]

Nineveh’s police: A force to fight ISIS has manpower, but little firepower

The New York Times reports: Smoking cigarettes in a tent with a dirt floor just outside an isolated village in northern Iraq, the police officers recalled the heady days working alongside American forces and launching dozens of operations to kill and capture Qaeda militants in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

The Americans are long gone, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has morphed into the Islamic State and the Iraqi government has not paid their salaries in months, leaving the officers grappling with their fate in a cold tent in what is supposed to be a training camp.

“We are in a camp like refugees, without work or salaries,” said Seif Ahmed, a SWAT team member wearing a “U.S. Army” T-shirt. “ISIS is our target, but what are we supposed to fight it with?”

As the United States dispatches military advisers to help Iraq build a force to fight the Islamic State, often referred to as ISIS, the police of Nineveh Province, who have experience and self-interest in actually battling the jihadists, have been largely abandoned. In a region that the Islamic State now controls, lingering distrust by the Shiite-led central government has stymied efforts by provincial officials to turn the former police into a local force. The central government fears that the police officers, who are mostly Sunni, will sell their weapons to the jihadists — or join them.

The marginalization of Nineveh’s police force is one example of how the key to rebuilding Iraq may rest less in the airpower and bombing runs of the United States and its allies than in bridging the differences between the Shiite-led central government and Sunni communities. Shortly after the jihadists seized most of the province in June, the Iraqi government was so distrustful it cut off the officers’ salaries, rendering most of them destitute. [Continue reading…]

ISIS: The inside story

Martin Chulov reports: In the summer of 2004, a young jihadist in shackles and chains was walked by his captors slowly into the Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq. He was nervous as two American soldiers led him through three brightly-lit buildings and then a maze of wire corridors, into an open yard, where men with middle-distance stares, wearing brightly-coloured prison uniforms, stood back warily, watching him.

“I knew some of them straight away,” he told me last month. “I had feared Bucca all the way down on the plane. But when I got there, it was much better than I thought. In every way.”

The jihadist, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed, entered Camp Bucca as a young man a decade ago, and is now a senior official within Islamic State (Isis) – having risen through its ranks with many of the men who served time alongside him in prison. Like him, the other detainees had been snatched by US soldiers from Iraq’s towns and cities and flown to a place that had already become infamous: a foreboding desert fortress that would shape the legacy of the US presence in Iraq.

The other prisoners did not take long to warm to him, Abu Ahmed recalled. They had also been terrified of Bucca, but quickly realised that far from their worst fears, the US-run prison provided an extraordinary opportunity. “We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else,” he told me. “It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred metres away from the entire al-Qaida leadership.”

It was at Camp Bucca that Abu Ahmed first met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of Isis who is now frequently described as the world’s most dangerous terrorist leader. From the beginning, Abu Ahmed said, others in the camp seemed to defer to him. “Even then, he was Abu Bakr. But none of us knew he would ever end up as leader.”

Abu Ahmed was an essential member of the earliest incarnation of the group. He had been galvanised into militancy as a young man by an American occupation that he and many like him believed was trying to impose a power shift in Iraq, favouring the country’s larger Shia population at the expense of the dominant Sunnis. His early role in what would become Isis led naturally to the senior position he now occupies within a revitalised insurgency that has spilled across the border into Syria. Most of his colleagues regard the crumbling order in the region as a fulfilment of their ambitions in Iraq – which had remained unfinished business, until the war in Syria gave them a new arena.

He agreed to speak publicly after more than two years of discussions, over the course of which he revealed his own past as one of Iraq’s most formidable and connected militants – and shared his deepening worry about Isis and its vision for the region. With Iraq and Syria ablaze, and the Middle East apparently condemned to another generation of upheaval and bloodshed at the hands of his fellow ideologues, Abu Ahmed is having second thoughts. The brutality of Isis is increasingly at odds with his own views, which have mellowed with age as he has come to believe that the teachings of the Koran can be interpreted and not read literally.

His misgivings about what the Islamic State has become led him to speak to the Guardian in a series of expansive conversations, which offer unique insight into its enigmatic leader and the nascent days of the terror group – stretching from 2004, when he met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Camp Bucca, to 2011, when the Iraqi insurgency crossed the border into Syria. [Continue reading…]

Jihadi groups killed more than 5,000 people in November

The Guardian reports: Jihadi groups killed more than 5,000 people last month, with Iraq topping the league table of deaths, followed by Nigeria, Afghanistan and Syria.

In 664 incidents recorded in November by the BBC World Service and researched jointly with King’s College London, the overall death toll was 5,042, or an average of 168 deaths per day and nearly twice the number of people who were killed in the 11 September 2001 attacks on America.

After Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Syria, Yemen was fifth in the deadly league table, tying with Somalia, with 37 incidents each.

The data, shared with the Guardian, provides a unique insight into the human cost, intensity, scale and geographical distribution of a phenomenon that has captured headlines and driven political and security agendas across the world. [Continue reading…]

Iran escalates in Iraq

The Soufan Group reports: Tehran’s employment of direct airpower in Iraq is a significant increase in its involvement and willingness to take military risks to defeat the so-called Islamic State. In terms of airpower, Iran had previously confined itself to returning to the Iraqi Air Force seven combat aircraft that the Saddam Hussein regime had flown to Iran at the start of the 1991 Gulf war to avoid destruction by U.S. and coalition air power. Because Iraq’s pilots do not have much experience operating combat jets, Iranian pilots flew the returned aircraft for Iraq; Iran acknowledged the death of one of its pilots at the hands of Islamic State anti-aircraft fire in October.

To date, the bulk of Iran’s involvement in Iraq has consisted of weapons shipments to the Iraq Security Forces (ISF) and Kurdish peshmerga fighters, reactivation and funding of Shi’a militia forces Iran formed in 2004, and military advice by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-QF). Photographs of the head of the IRGC-QF, General Qasim Sulaymani, have appeared frequently on social media on various Iraq battlefields, providing advice to Iraqi Shi’a militia and ISF commanders.

The Iranian airstrike in early December was reportedly conducted near the town of Jalula, a mostly Kurdish town in Diyala Province that lies only about 25 miles from the Iranian border. In late November, Kurdish peshmerga recaptured Jalula and nearby towns from Islamic State fighters, but these fighters remained nearby and continue to pose a threat to those towns and areas closer to the Iranian border. At the start of the major Islamic State offensive in June, Tehran had declared it would act militarily if Islamic State fighters moved to within 40 miles of Iran’s border; the Iranian airstrike was a direct enforcement of that threat. [Continue reading…]

Chechen militants: ‘more prestigious’ to fight for ISIS

Syria Direct interview: Fighters from Chechnya are one of the forces behind IS’s meteoric rise in Syria. The attraction to jihad is not only ideological but practical.

“The Syrian ‘jihad’ began as a sort of proxy conflict for fighters who could not go home to fight in Chechnya or Dagestan,” says Joanna Paraszczuk, a journalist and blogger who has lived and worked in the Middle East and Russia and has a special interest in researching Russian-speaking foreign fighters in Syria. Many of them, she says, are wanted by security authorities.

ShowImageBranching out from the Caucasus and fighting for the Islamic State is now seen as “prestigious,” Paraszczuk, who writes and curates Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s blog on the Islamic State, tells Syria Direct’s Kristen Gillespie.

“IS gets a lot more media attention than the Caucasus Emirate, which they see as a parochial sort of jihad, struggling away unnoticed while the IS Chechens are part of a movement that controls vast tracts of land and is (to them) successful.” [Continue reading…]

As ISIS kills, media can’t count the dead

Peter Schwartzstein reports: In any war, it’s the wanton acts of barbarism that grab the headlines and reel in the news teams. But when it comes to showcasing the true measure of a conflict’s horror, there are few statistics starker than a sky-high civilian death toll.

In Iraq, where hostilities have raged in fits and starts for over a decade since the US-led invasion of 2003, non-combatants have been particularly hard hit by the violence. Many were caught up in the “Shock and Awe” aerial campaign that marked the beginning of the war, some succumbed to disease as the country’s infrastructure collapsed, and still others died in the brutal bouts of tribal in-fighting that marred the years following the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Through it all, an eclectic band of organizations, ranging from a multinational team of anti-war activists to the UN’s local office, maintained scrupulous records of the dead. They logged every incident and released depressing day-by-day accounts of the carnage.

The emergence of the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL) jihadist group has, however, plunged Iraq into a period of turbulence so debilitating that, for the first time, these death counts can no longer keep up with the killing. [Continue reading…]

U.S. expresses fears as ISIS takes control of northern Libyan town

The Guardian reports: It is a warm October evening in Derna, a small town on Libya’s north east coast, 450 miles from the capital, Tripoli.

The main square is packed with young men, brought by a summons from the town’s self-proclaimed emir to swear allegiance to a newly formed Islamic caliphate.

The emir, on a stage just visible through the jumping throng, calls for the crowd to repeat his calls to join the a caliphate, to listen and follow orders, and to acclaim that the Islamic State (Isis) is here to stay.

To each call, they repeat the chant, roaring their support – and with that, the emir declares Derna the first town in Libya to join the Islamic State, making common cause with fighters in Iraq and Syria.

This week, the Pentagon went public with its concerns, when the commander of the US army’s Africa Command told reporters that Isis – also known as Isil – is now running training camps in Libya, where as many as 200 fighters are receiving instruction. [Continue reading…]

Jabhat al-Nusra gains in Syria undermine U.S. strategy

The Washington Post reports: The main al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria is extending its control over a swath of territory that was until recently held by the collapsing moderate opposition, jeopardizing U.S. plans to form a new rebel force to fight extremists.

Since routing two of the biggest Western-backed rebel movements last month from the province of Idlib, Jabhat al-Nusra has been steadily consolidating its position as the single most powerful military force in northwestern Syria.

The group has overrun towns and villages throughout the province, secured supply routes into neighboring Turkey and potentially paved the way for the establishment of an Islamic “emirate” — a competing entity to the “caliphate” declared last summer by the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq.

The al-Qaeda affiliate’s expanding footprint risks further complicating the U.S.-led effort to contain and destroy the far more powerful Islamic State, a fierce rival to Jabhat al-Nusra that ejected the al-Qaeda loyalists from its territories last summer. [Continue reading…]

How ISIS governs its caliphate

Newsweek reports: This year has seen the map of the Middle East redrawn. The West has acquired a new public enemy number one: remorseless, faceless and vicious. The Islamic State, or ISIS, has expanded from a relatively obscure terrorist group at the start of the year, to one that wields near absolute control over anywhere between 12,000 square miles (according to the Wall Street Journal) and 35,000 square miles (according to The New Yorker) of formerly Syrian and Iraqi territory. Within the region, around 56 million people must navigate between the armies of the rival militias, warlords and national armies that are barely distinguishable from one another.

But while Western forces attempt to counter the ISIS surge with its sustained bombing strategy, little attention is paid to an unpalatable reality within the borders of the so-called new Islamic State, or caliphate. In the midst of the chaos, ISIS is deliberately and methodically establishing clear areas of definable civil governance, breathing new life into the memory of a series of caliphates that united a succession of Muslim empires until 1924.

Scott Atran, an anthropologist and senior research fellow at Oxford University, recently submitted a report to the U.S. Department of Defense and Congress on the difficulty of fighting the ideology of such a state.

“The caliphate as an idea has never gone away,” Atran says, “And now that it is here again after a hiatus of nearly 100 years, as a concrete matter of fact, it will focus the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people. The critical question is not, ‘How can we thwart or destroy the caliphate?’ because attempts to do that will likely backfire. Rather the question is, ‘How can we live with and transform the idea and reality of a caliphate – and one that will be nuclear-capable probably sooner rather than later – into something that does not threaten other peoples’ ways of life?’ That is a question for everyone, but it is not even on our political radar.” [Continue reading…]

How al Qaeda operates like the Boy Scouts of America

The Washington Post reports: Matthew Atkins was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, on his way to full colonel, with 20 years of intelligence and counter-terrorism experience. He was frustrated. Time and again, he had watched the U.S. military take out leaders of al-Qaeda and other terror cells. And time and again, he had watched those cells regroup.

Atkins thought there might be a better way. He wanted to, in his words, “achieve truly disruptive effects on terror cells.” There is one place in America, above all others, where would-be disruptors flock. Atkins went there, to Silicon Valley, to study for a year on a fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He set up interviews with dozens of CEOs and venture capitalists. He read up on how successful terror groups organize themselves. He developed a theory on how to truly disrupt terrorists, and he published a research paper on it.

His breakthrough insight was that the best terror cells work a lot like a big nonprofit group. Like the Boy Scouts of America.

From studying the scouts, he determined the best way to stop terrorists is to target their bureaucrats – not top leaders.

“The reason I like the Boy Scouts,” Atkins said in an interview, “is they face a lot of the same management challenges that al-Qaeda does.” [Continue reading…]

The case against dividing Iraq

Nicholas Sambanis and Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl write: At this point, partition might sound preferable to persistent sectarian conflict. U.S. policymakers were tempted by the idea at the height of Iraq’s sectarian war in 2006, when Joseph Biden, who was a senator at the time, and Leslie Gelb, the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, advanced a plan for the “soft partition” of Iraq. In a 2006 Foreign Affairs roundtable focused on policy options for Iraq, Chaim Kaufmann, a well-known scholar of international relations, argued that only through separating the population would the violence end. This summer’s bloodshed seemed to revive the idea. Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Fareed Zakaria advocated that the United States adapt to the reality of sectarian enclaves. Others, like the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven A. Cook, hinted that the United States might need to come to terms with a full partition of Iraq, however “bloody and protracted” the process would be.

Events in Syria, meanwhile, have further revived the partition debate. ISIS has kept a firm grip on its Syrian territory in the face of a U.S.-led air campaign, and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have proved unwilling to back down. Appearing on Zakaria’s CNN show, GPS, in November, Syria expert Joshua Landis promoted a partition plan for Syria. Landis argued that partition would “accept [the] reality” of a Sunni state spanning Syria and Iraq. Partition would be more stable, and, as Zakaria added, would “reflec[t] the realities of sectarianism.”

The usual argument for partition is that, once ethnic or sectarian fighting gets too bloody, nobody can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. War reveals the fault lines in a country’s social terrain, the thinking goes, and redrawing official borders along those lines is the only way out of a perpetual cycle of identity-based bloodletting.

The argument seems intuitive, but it rests on a flawed premise. It treats social identities as givens and ignores the fact that it was politics — not identities in and of themselves — that brought Sunnis and Shias to blows in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Far from resolving disputes, partitions can actually activate dormant fault lines. [Continue reading…]

Raed Fares: Voice of the Syrian revolution

Eliza Griswold writes: The overhead light in the blue Mazda 626 wasn’t working. Raed Fares, a Syrian activist whose video protests skewer ISIS and President Bashar al-Assad alike, reached up to fiddle with the light bulb before squeezing himself out of the driver’s side door. The street was in darkness. In the last few years, the Assad government cut most of the electricity (along with running water and mobile-phone service) to Kafranbel, the town in northwestern Syria where Fares lives. The only light came from an LED strip in his neighbor’s front doorway that was hooked up to a car battery. It was 12:45 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2014, and Fares, who often works until 4 a.m., had left the office early. As he fumbled to fit his key into the car’s lock, he heard the slap-slap of feet running toward him.

Here they come, he thought.

The feet stopped just in front of his car. The Czech pistol he usually carries was in his house, 15 feet away. In the watery glow of the light behind him, Fares could make out two ISIS soldiers. One, clad in a woolen mask, ammunition vest, windbreaker and unlaced boots, opened fire, spraying the car, the mud wall and Fares with bullets. Fares felt their heat sear through his canvas jacket and jean shirt and into the right side of his chest and shoulder. When he collapsed to the ground, a childhood nightmare returned: three black dogs, chasing him.

“There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his prophet,” he said as loudly as he could. He hoped this statement of faith would send him to heaven.

As a pool of his own blood spread around him, Fares lay in the road. He tried to stifle his groans, in fear that his attackers would return. Minutes later, his elder brother, who heard the shots from his home nearby, dragged Fares out of the street and into a car to race to the hospital.

“Who shot him?” a friend in the car asked his brother.

Raed struggled to repeat what he had seen.

“Stop talking,” his brother said.

“I’m dying,” he said. Then he slipped from consciousness.

Eight months later, Fares, 42, was in the back seat of a pewter-colored Kia, driving through southern Turkey and chain-smoking Lebanese cigarettes. In all, the would-be assassins fired at Fares 46 times. Twenty-seven bullets struck the wall behind him; 17 hit his car. Only two struck him. They shattered seven bones in his shoulder and ribs and punctured his right lung. From his hospital bed, he continued to orchestrate protests, posting them on Facebook and YouTube. Many used the block-lettered banners for which he’s known, broadcasting messages like: “OBAMA! YOUR ROLE IN SYRIA WILL NEVER BE ACCEPTED AS A MISTAKE LIKE CLINTON’S IN RWANDA, BUT IT WILL BE A PREMEDITATED CRIME.” Others relied on cartoons, like one of a Trojan horse with ISIS inside and “Made in U.S.A.” on its side.

“I still have trouble breathing,” Fares said. “My doctor says my lungs should be no problem because of the size of my nose.” (Fares does have a big nose.) The two Americans in the front seat laughed. One, a 57-year-old named Jim Hake, is the founder and chief executive of Spirit of America, a nongovernmental organization with the explicit mission to support U.S. military and diplomatic efforts. (He relentlessly asks “What do you need?” The first time he asked it of Fares, Fares answered with withering dryness, “A new country.”) [Continue reading…]

U.S. and Iran both attack ISIS, but try not to look like allies

The New York Times reports: Iranian fighter jets struck extremist targets in Iraq recently, Iranian and American officials have confirmed, in the latest display of Tehran’s new willingness to conduct military operations openly on foreign battlefields rather than covertly and through proxies.

The shift stems in part from Iran’s deepening military role in Iraq in the war against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State. But it also reflects a profound change in Iran’s strategy, stepping from the shadows into a more overt use of hard power as it promotes Shiite influence around the region.

Iranian and Pentagon officials acknowledged that Iran had stepped up its military operations in Iraq last week, using 1970s-era fighter jets to bomb targets in a buffer zone that extends 25 miles into Iraq.

The new military approach highlights an unusual confluence of interests in both Iraq and Syria, where Tehran and Washington find themselves fighting the same enemy in an increasingly public fashion. While there is no direct coordination between Iran and the United States, there is a de facto nonaggression pact that neither side is eager to acknowledge. [Continue reading…]

War in Context

… with attention to the unseen

Category Archives: ISIS

Syria’s military and ISIS have been ‘ignoring’ each other on battlefield, data suggests

ISIS shoots down Iraqi helicopter

U.S.-led warplanes hit militants in Syria and Iraq 27 times this week

Nineveh’s police: A force to fight ISIS has manpower, but little firepower

ISIS: The inside story

Jihadi groups killed more than 5,000 people in November

Iran escalates in Iraq

Chechen militants: ‘more prestigious’ to fight for ISIS

As ISIS kills, media can’t count the dead

U.S. expresses fears as ISIS takes control of northern Libyan town

Jabhat al-Nusra gains in Syria undermine U.S. strategy

How ISIS governs its caliphate

How al Qaeda operates like the Boy Scouts of America

The case against dividing Iraq

Raed Fares: Voice of the Syrian revolution

U.S. and Iran both attack ISIS, but try not to look like allies