Category Archives: Al Qaeda

U.S. bombs Jabhat al-Nusra for third time

AFP reports: American aircraft bombed the Khorasan group in Syria on Thursday, in the third attack on the Al-Qaeda offshoot that is considered an immediate threat to the West, the US military’s Central Command said.

“We can confirm that US aircraft struck a target in Syria earlier today associated with a network of veteran Al-Qaeda operatives, sometimes called the ‘Khorasan group,’ who are plotting external attacks against the United States and our allies,” spokesman Colonel Patrick Ryder told AFP.

He declined to provide further details of the air raid, the latest in a series against the group that US officials say is a collection of militants from Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front, which is Qaeda’s Syrian branch. [Continue reading…]

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Jabhat al-Nusra blows up Armenian church in Deir el-Zour: A savage blow that echoes through Armenian history

Robert Fisk reports: In the most savage act of vandalism against Syria’s Christians, Islamists have blown up the great Armenian church in Deir el-Zour, built in dedication to the one and a half million Armenians slaughtered by the Turks during the 1915 genocide. All of the church archives, dating back to 1841 and containing thousands of documents on the Armenian holocaust, were burned to ashes, while the bones of hundreds of genocide victims, packed into the church’s crypt in memory of the mass killings 99 years ago, were thrown into the street beside the ruins.

This act of sacrilege will cause huge pain among the Armenians scattered across the world – as well as in the rump state of Armenia which emerged after the 1914-1918 war, not least because many hundreds of thousands of victims died in death camps around the very same city of Deir el-Zour. Jabhat al-Nusra rebels appear to have been the culprits this time, but since many Syrians believe that the group has received arms from Turkey, the destruction will be regarded by many Armenians as a further stage in their historical annihilation by the descendants of those who perpetrated the genocide 99 years ago.

Turkey, of course, miserably claims there was no genocide – the equivalent of modern day Germany denying the Jewish Holocaust – but hundreds of historians, including one prominent Turkish academic, have proved beyond any doubt that the Armenians were deliberately massacred on the orders of the Ottoman Turkish government across all of modern-day Turkey and inside the desert of what is now northern Syria – the very region where Isis and its kindred ideological armed groups now hold. Even Israelis refer to the Armenian genocide with the same Hebrew word they use for their own destruction by Nazi Germany: “Shoah”, which means “holocaust”. [Continue reading…]

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Houthi expansion puts Yemen on edge of civil war

Reuters reports: An advance into Yemen’s Sunni Muslim heartland by Shi’ite Houthi fighters has galvanised support for al Qaeda among some Sunnis, deepening the religious hue of the country’s many conflicts, with potential consequences well beyond its borders.

Yemen’s tribal, regional and political divisions were widened by the rapid fall of the capital Sanaa to Houthi fighters on Sept. 21 after weeks of protests against the government and its decision to cut fuel subsidies.

“The Houthi expansion has created a sectarian problem,” said Bassam al-Barq, a Sunni Muslim resident of the religiously mixed Sanaa, attending a protest by local activists held every week to demand the Houthis quit the capital.

“It has created sympathy with al Qaeda, as we see in Ibb and al-Baydah,” Barq said, referring to two provinces in central Yemen where some local tribes have allied themselves with al Qaeda’s local wing, Ansar al-Sharia. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. airstrikes on Jabhat al Nusra undermine opposition to Assad

The Daily Beast reports: It’s the clearest signal yet that the U.S.-led military campaign in Syria is widening: American warplanes on Thursday struck at al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists who attacked two groups of Western-backed rebels — fighters that the Obama administration is counting on to battle ISIS.

In an apparently improvised effort to relieve the rebels and prevent the loss of more of their strongholds close to the Turkish border, the U.S. bombed positions of Jabhat al Nusra, Al Qaeda’s Syria branch. It was a remarkable turnaround, because previously the administration had said it was avoiding attacks on the group, which used to occasionally fight alongside the American-supported rebels.

But it’s a turnaround the White House should have seen coming. In meetings of senior Obama administration officials before the first airstrikes began in Syria on Sept. 22, which hit both ISIS and al Qaeda positions, U.S. intelligence officials warned that any additional American attacks against al Nusra could drive a wedge between the group and their erstwhile allies in the American-backed, moderate opposition.

The U.S. intelligence community’s fear, according to individuals involved in the discussions, was that hitting al Nusra could draw a giant target on the rebels’ backs — which is precisely what appears to have happened. In the initial round of airstrikes in late September, the U.S. struck targets occupied both by al Nusra and a third group, an al Qaeda unit known Khorasan that U.S. intelligence agencies believed was plotting attacks against commercial airliners. Khorasan may have been the target, but Nusra was hit, too, and the impression on the ground was that the U.S. had meant to go after al Nusra all along. (Some Syrian rebel groups maintain that the Americans invented Khorasan as a pretext for the attack.) Soon after, al Nusra turned on U.S.-backed rebels, labeling them in official statements last week as “corrupt” lackeys of the Obama administration.

The administration now finds itself in the very position it had hoped to avoid, fighting a broader war against al Nusra forces and risking further alienation of Syrian civilians.

“The goal of the airstrikes has evolved from combatting ISIS in Iraq to combating ISIS and Al Nusra in Syria, because they pose an increasing threat to the opposition,” said a former U.S. official.

It’s those rebel forces that the Obama administration wanted to train and equip to help destroy ISIS. And it’s those forces that the U.S. military is now trying to save with these latest bombing raids against al Nusra.

“If the U.S. attacks Nusra without attacking Assad, all the average Syrian sees is that the U.S. is enabling, emboldening, and strengthening the Assad regime,” said Christopher Harmer, a former Navy officer and an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, which monitors developments in Syria. “It’s not that the Syrian people love Nusra; it’s that Nusra has been in the fight against Assad, and the U.S. has looked for every excuse to stay out of the fight against Assad.” [Continue reading…]

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Was David Drugeon — target of latest U.S. airstrikes in Syria — a French intelligence agent?

The Associated Press reports: American airstrikes overnight in Syria targeted a cell of al-Qaida militants, hitting and possibly killing a top bomb-maker in the group, a senior U.S. official said Thursday, amid widespread reports that other rebel factions were also hit.

It wasn’t certain whether the bomb-maker, French militant David Drugeon, was killed or injured, but the official said the strikes hit their intended targets near Sarmada, in the country’s northwest. The official was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Gen. Lloyd Austin, the Central Command commander in charge of U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East, said separately at a Washington forum that he would not discuss results of the strikes until they had been more fully studied. He suggested, however, the Drugeon may have been hit, or at least targeted.

“He is clearly one of the leadership elements and one of the most dangerous elements in that organization,” Austin said. “And so any time we can take their leadership out, it’s a good thing.”

At the Pentagon, Army Col. Steve Warren said the strikes hit five targets at two locations.

Noting that reports coming out of the region suggest members of other militant groups were hit, Warren that the Khorasan Group was the pre-planned target of the strikes.

The Khorasan Group, he said, “is a group of personnel, some of whom are also al-Nusra affiliated, some of whom are al-Qaida affiliated, some of whom are affiliated with other organizations. But these strikes weren’t specifically targeting any of those other organizations. They were targeting the Khorasan group. If a terrorist happens to be a member of both groups, so be it.”

Austin said none of the airstrikes was aimed at al-Nusra.

But as an earlier AP report notes: [B]y striking groups whose primary focus is fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad, the U.S. risks further enraging many Syrians in opposition-held areas who believe Washington is aiding Assad in his struggle to hold onto power in the country’s 3 ½-year-old civil war. Purported civilian casualties have only compounded those frustrations, and activists said Thursday that at least two children were killed in the overnight strikes.

“We are tired of people saying they are coming to help us, and then they kill us,” said activist Asaad Kanjo, based in Idlib.

McClatchy’s Mitchell Prothero published a report in early October claiming that Drugeon was “a former French intelligence officer who defected to al-Qaeda,” but Daveed Gartenstein-Ross casts doubt on that claim.

Many readers have interpreted Prothero’s report as suggesting that the French spy is extraordinarily high-ranking. This interpretation isn’t unreasonable, as Prothero reported that “two European intelligence officials described the former French officer as the highest ranking defector ever to go over to the terrorist group.” Given the large number of intelligence defectors to jihadist groups in the Arab world, including Syrians and Iraqis, that statement is doubtless incorrect: After all, Drugeon is only in his mid-twenties. However, it is possible that some qualifying context in the European officials’ statement was lost. For example, these sources may have been trying to say that Drugeon is the highest-ranking European defector.

So the question remains: Was Drugeon a French agent who defected? It is worth understanding the distinction between an agent and an asset. The short version of the difference between them is that an agent is given something back from the spy organization for which he is working, such as training or information. In contrast, an asset simply gives the organization information and doesn’t receive anything like training (although he obviously gets paid for his work).

Two articles in the French media elliptically state that Drugeon had received training. A French defense ministry official denied to L’Express that Drugeon had joined the army, but stated that “he trained with a civilian organization,” without specifying which one. (That official also categorically denied that Drugeon was a “French James Bond.”) And a defense ministry official (perhaps the same one, but it is not clear) told Le Monde that “this Frenchman [referred to in McClatchy’s report] exists, but he is neither a former member of secret services nor former military. As far as we know, he merely trained with former members of the French army.”

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Obama to seek new authorization for fight against ISIS

The Washington Post reports: President Obama said Wednesday that he will ask Congress for new authority to combat the Islamic State, replacing the administration’s reliance on laws passed more than a decade ago to justify its current military operations against the militants in Syria and Iraq.

“The idea is to right-size and update whatever authorization Congress provides to suit the current fight rather than previous fights,” the president said at a White House news conference.

“We now have a different type of enemy; the strategy is different,” Obama said. “It makes sense for us to make sure that the authorization . . . reflects what we perceive to be not just our strategy over the next two or three months, but our strategy going forward.”

Obama pledged nearly 18 months ago to work with lawmakers to “refine and ultimately repeal” what he said were the outdated 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, against al-Qaeda and the 2002 authority against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Since then, White House engagement with Congress on the issue has been minimal. [Continue reading…]

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The motivations of Syrian Islamist fighters

Vera Mironova, Loubna Mrie, and Sam Whitt write: With the Syrian civil war now well into its third year, there are scores of armed rebel forces fighting against the Bashar al-Assad regime, as well as against one another. In the marketplace of rebel groups vying for support, rebel fighters are offered incentives and face coercive pressures to join one group over another. The weakening of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) over the past year has led many Syrian rebels to rethink their allegiances on the battlefield. Possible suitors include nominally “Islamist” groups, including moderate revolutionary organizations like Ahrar al-Sham. A growing concern, however, is that rebels may be driven into the ranks of more extremist organizations such as Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This leads to a key question: what inspires thousands of ordinary Syrian people to join up with Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq?

To understand who these Syrian fighters are and what motivates them, the authors have been conducting survey research from inside Syria. Over the past year, the authors have surveyed more than 300 FSA fighters as well as Syrian civilians and refugees and 50 Syrian Islamist fighters in the Islamic Front (Ahrar al-Sham) and JN, the latter of which is al-Qa`ida’s affiliate in Syria.

This article proceeds by presenting a series of questions as the authors gave them to the interview subjects. It then discusses the implications that arise from their answers. To briefly summarize the findings, the interviews reveal that in contrast to foreign fighters, who have generally come to Syria on a quest for spiritual fulfillment and to build an Islamic state through jihad, Syrian fighters are joining Islamist groups primarily for instrumental purposes. Islamic groups are perceived as better equipped, led, and organized, and therefore are seen as more capable of defeating the al-Assad regime, which remains the primary goal of Syrian rebels. [Continue reading…]

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Insurgent in-fighting — how far will the Jabhat al-Nusra offensive go?

Scott Lucas writes: Headlines from Syria continue to be seized by the insurgent in-fighting in Idlib Province in the northwest, with the Islamist faction Jabhat al-Nusra taking the main positions of the Syrian Revolutionary Front and the Harakat Hazm brigade, both of whom have received support from the US.

There were no further reports of Jabhat al-Nusra advances on Sunday, after the faction took the main bases of the SRF and Harakat al-Hazm on Friday and Saturday.

The in-fighting began last Monday, amid claims that the SRF was “sitting on its hands” as other insurgents — led by Jabhat al-Nusra — pursued an offensive against the regime in Idlib city. After SRF fighters defected to other brigades, the SRF leader Jamal Maarouf tried to recover their weapons with raids on houses and reportedly some shelling of villages.

Jabhat al-Nusra, joined by the faction Jund al-Aqsa — which is mainly made up of foreign fighters — hit back hard. In the process, they attacked checkpoints of Harakat Hazm which tried to block their reinforcements.

Jabhat al-Nusra declared a unilateral ceasefire on Saturday, but demanded that the SRF and Maarouf appear in a Sharia court which is dominated by the Islamist faction. There is no sign of Maarouf’s compliance.

Meanwhile, other groups in the insurgency, including the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front, have called for a lasting cease-fire and a concentration on the fight against the Assad regime. They have also called for submission of disputes to a Sharia court — meaning an alternative Idlib court, not the one dominated by Jabhat al-Nusra.

Jabhat al-Nusra’s offensive was based in part on long-standing grievances with the SRF, which has been accused of war profiteering, corruption, and theft of supplies and weapons from other groups in the insurgency. This autumn, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic Front announced a drive against “corruption” in northwest Syria which led to some skirmishes with SRF members.

The offensive may also be a response to the US, which attacked Jabhat al-Nusra positions in Idlib and Aleppo Provinces last month, on the first day of its aerial intervention in Syria. More than 60 Jabhat al-Nusra fighters and at least 14 civilians died in the missile strikes.

Leading activists said the US attacks bolstered support for Jabhat al-Nusra among Syrians. [Continue reading…]

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Theo Padnos, an American writer, recounts being kidnapped, tortured and released in Syria

In a New York Times magazine feature article, Theo Padnos is described as a journalist, but his form of inquiry has gone far beyond the terrains explored by conventional news gatherers.

In 2004, when the United States was mired in the war in Iraq, I decided to embark on a private experiment. I moved from Vermont to Sana, the Yemeni capital, to study Arabic and Islam. I was good with languages — I had a Ph.D. in comparative literature — and I was eager to understand a world where the West often seemed to lose its way. I began my studies in a neighborhood mosque, then enrolled in a religious school popular among those who dream of a “back to the days of the prophet” version of Islam. Later, I moved to Syria to study at a religious academy in Damascus. I began to write a book about my time in Yemen — about the mosques and the reading circles that formed after prayer and the dangerous religious feeling that sometimes grew around them.

At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, I wrote a few articles from Damascus, then returned to Vermont in the summer of 2012.

One of those articles was a fascinating piece that appeared in The New Republic in October 2011.

In the New York Times, Padnos now recounts the last two years in which he was held in captivity by Jabhat al-Nusra after being kidnapped in late 2012 shortly after returning to Syria. Towards the end of his article (read the whole piece), he writes:

Earlier, in March [this year], the Nusra Front commanders in Deir al-Zour put a pair of Islamic State commanders in the cells on either side of mine. Because their religious learning was beyond question, the jail administrators allowed us to speak [previously Padnos had been forbidden to speak to fellow captives], provided it was about Islam. During this period, I occasionally brought up the “You killed my men, I must kill yours” logic in which the Muslims of the region seemed trapped. My cell neighbors were well placed to have an opinion. Abu Dhar, on my left, previously of Al Qaeda in Iraq, subsequently of the Nusra Front, lately of the Islamic State, had been a weapons trafficker. Abu Amran, on my right, had the same credentials and bragged of having been responsible for explosions that killed dozens — perhaps hundreds — of Syrians and Iraqis.

“But surely,” I said, “this violence is not good for Islam.” They temporized. In their view, the fight between Baghdadi [the leader of ISIS] and the Man of Learning [Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, a high commander in the Nusra Front] amounted to mere childishness. Abu Dhar and Abu Amran were almost too embarrassed to speak of it. Yet the explosions and sniper killings that both groups espoused were justifiable — even wise. Assad was bound to slink away into the undergrowth. The battle against his forces was just a skirmish in the great global combat to come, in which the believers would prevail against the unbelievers.

“After we conquer Jerusalem, we will conquer Rome,” Abu Amran told me.

“No one is trying to conquer you,” I said. “Why do you want to conquer everybody?”

The conquerors had come to Syria in the past, Abu Amran answered. “They are sure to come again.” He spoke of the oil fields over which the West slavered, the archaeological treasures and the rise of Islam, which the world’s governments — all of them unbelievers, especially the Middle Eastern ones — could not abide.

“If Obama bombs the believers here, we will bomb you there,” Abu Amran told me. We have our Tomahawk missiles too, they said, referring to human beings. Over the last 22 months, I had stopped being surprised when Nusra Front commanders introduced their 8-year-old sons to me by saying, “He will be a suicide martyr someday, by the will of God.” The children participated in the torture sessions. Around the prisons, they wore large pouches with red wires sticking out of them — apparently suicide belts — and sang their “destroy the Jews, death to America” anthems in the hallways. It would be a mistake to assume that only Syrians are educating their children in this manner. The Nusra Front higher-ups were inviting Westerners to the jihad in Syria not so much because they needed more foot soldiers — they didn’t — but because they want to teach the Westerners to take the struggle into every neighborhood and subway station back home. They want these Westerners to train their 8-year-olds to do the same. Over time, they said, the jihadists would carve mini-Islamic emirates out of the Western countries, as the Islamic State had done in Syria and Iraq. There, Western Muslims would at last live with dignity, under a true Quranic dispensation.

During my discussions with senior Nusra Front fighters, I would force them to confront the infinity of violence that this dream implied. “O.K., perhaps you have a point,” they would say. “Anyway, we only want to dispense with Bashar. We must build our caliphate here first. Provided the West doesn’t kill us, we won’t kill you.”

“Will your caliphate have schools?” I would ask. “Hospitals? Roads?”

“Yes, of course.” But not one of them seemed interested in repairing the mile after mile of destroyed cityscape encountered during any voyage in Syria. Not one seemed interested in recruiting teachers and doctors — or at least the kinds of teachers and doctors whose reading ventured beyond the Quran. They wanted bigger, more spectacular explosions. They wanted fleets of Humvees. Humvees don’t need roads. [Continue reading…]

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Denmark tries a progressive approach to fighters returning from Syria

The Washington Post reports: The rush of morning shoppers parted to make way for Talha, a lanky 21-year-old in desert camouflage and a long, religious beard. He strode through the local mall with a fighter’s gait picked up on the battlefields of Syria. Streams of young Muslim men greeted him like a returning king.

As-salamu alaykum.

Wa alaikum assalaam.

In other countries, Talha — one of hundreds of young jihadists from the West who has fought in Syria and Iraq — might be barred from return or thrown in jail. But in Denmark, a country that has spawned more foreign fighters per capita than almost anywhere else, the port city of Aarhus is taking a novel approach by rolling out a welcome mat.

In Denmark, not one returned fighter has been locked up. Instead, taking the view that discrimination at home is as criminal as Islamic State recruiting, officials here are providing free psychological counseling while finding returnees jobs and spots in schools and universities. Officials credit a new effort to reach out to a radical mosque with stanching the flow of recruits.

Some progressives say Aarhus should become a model for other communities in the United States and Europe that are trying to cope with the question of what to do when the jihad generation comes back to town. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-led air war in Syria is off to a difficult start

The Washington Post reports: The U.S.-led air war in Syria has gotten off to a rocky start, with even the Syrian rebel groups closest to the United States turning against it, U.S. ally Turkey refusing to contribute and the plight of a beleaguered Kurdish town exposing the limitations of the strategy.

U.S. officials caution that the strikes are just the beginning of a broader strategy that could take years to carry out. But the anger that the attacks have stirred risks undermining the effort, analysts and rebels say.

The main beneficiary of the strikes so far appears to be President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces have taken advantage of the shift in the military balance to step up attacks against the moderate rebels designated by President Obama as partners of the United States in the war against extremists.

The U.S. targets have included oil facilities, a granary and an electricity plant under Islamic State control. The damage to those facilities has caused shortages and price hikes across the rebel-held north that are harming ordinary Syrians more than the well-funded militants, residents and activists say. [Continue reading…]

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AP identifies French militant David Drugeon as target of U.S. airstrikes on ‘Khorasan Group’

The Associated Press reports: The barrage of U.S. cruise missiles last month aimed at a Syrian terrorist cell killed just one or two key militants, according to American intelligence officials who say the group of veteran al-Qaida fighters is still believed to be plotting attacks against U.S. and European targets.

The strikes on a compound near Aleppo did not deal a crippling blow to the Khorasan Group, officials said, partly because many important members had scattered amid news reports highlighting their activities. Among those who survived is a French-born jihadi who fought in Afghanistan with a military prowess that is of great concern to U.S. intelligence officials now.

News stories last month, including a Sept. 13 report by The Associated Press that first disclosed the group’s significance as a terrorist threat, led some members to flee before the U.S. military had a chance to strike their known locations, U.S. officials said.

One Khorasan leader, Muhsin al-Fadhli, has been eulogized on jihadi web sites, but American officials are not convinced that he is dead. They said they believe that another senior militant was killed, but have declined to name him.

A second Khorasan figure, a French militant named David Drugeon, is believed to be alive. Drugeon, who was born in the Brittany region and converted to Islam as a youth, spent time with al-Qaida in the tribal areas of Pakistan before traveling to Syria, French officials say.

He was identified as a member of the Khorasan Group by two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

On October 5, McClatchy reported: A former French intelligence officer who defected to al Qaida was among the targets of the first wave of U.S. air strikes in Syria last month, according to people familiar with the defector’s movements and identity.

Two European intelligence officials described the former French officer as the highest ranking defector ever to go over to the terrorist group and called his defection one of the most dangerous developments in the West’s long confrontation with al Qaida.

The identity of the officer is a closely guarded secret. Two people, independently of one another, provided the same name, which McClatchy is withholding pending further confirmation. All of the sources agreed that a former French officer was one of the people targeted when the United States struck eight locations occupied by the Nusra Front, al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate. The former officer apparently survived the assault, which included strikes by 47 cruise missiles.

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U.S. air strikes in Syria targeted French intelligence officer who defected to al Qaeda

McClatchy reports: A former French intelligence officer who defected to al Qaida was among the targets of the first wave of U.S. air strikes in Syria last month, according to people familiar with the defector’s movements and identity.

Two European intelligence officials described the former French officer as the highest ranking defector ever to go over to the terrorist group and called his defection one of the most dangerous developments in the West’s long confrontation with al Qaida.

The identity of the officer is a closely guarded secret. Two people, independently of one another, provided the same name, which McClatchy is withholding pending further confirmation. All of the sources agreed that a former French officer was one of the people targeted when the United States struck eight locations occupied by the Nusra Front, al Qaida’s Syrian affiliate. The former officer apparently survived the assault, which included strikes by 47 cruise missiles. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS and al Qaeda are ‘one and the same’ to Obama despite evidence of schism

The Guardian reports: The Obama administration is publicly conflating the Islamic State (Isis) and al-Qaida, taking a legally convenient position for its new war that dismisses a major public split between the two jihadist organizations.

While several US officials contend the rupture between Isis and al-Qaida is irrelevant – Secretary of State John Kerry has mocked it as a “publicity stunt” – the administration line undercuts its previous distinctions between al-Qaida’s core leadership, various affiliates and unrelated terrorist groups.

Amongst counter-terrorism veterans, the conflation is considered tendentious – and, to some, reminiscent of the Bush administration’s exaggerated linkages between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, part of the language that tried to sell the 2003 Iraq invasion.

While Isis began life as al-Qaida in Iraq, al-Qaida’s leadership ultimately renounced all ties and condemned the group in February 2014. It is believed to be the first time al-Qaida has declared itself “not responsible” for a former affiliate.

“We know from open sourcing that they are not part of al-Qaida,” said Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst. “Zawahiri denounced them. Baghdadi has declared his caliphate separate. We have no reason to believe they are currently operating as part of al-Qaida,” she said, referring to the respective leaders of al-Qaida and Isis.

Glenn Carle, a former CIA official who supports taking action against Isis, said that while the US public may not need a catalogue of the differences between Isis and al-Qaida, “each of them is different, and they are not one group.”

Much of the administration’s conflation of Isis and al-Qaida has occurred in a legal context, part of its argument that Obama possesses authority to attack Isis in Syria ahead of a congressional vote. But the contention is starting to migrate beyond legal discussions. [Continue reading…]

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Is Khorasan’s real name Jabhat al-Nusra’s ‘Wolf Group’?

Max Fisher writes: Last week, the United States and several Arab allies began bombing ISIS targets in Syria — as well as a mysterious and little-known faction of al-Qaeda that the US says is called Khorasan.

The group’s name, like much else about it, is the subject of some uncertainty and debate. Some have suggested that the US made up the name, perhaps derived from internal al-Qaeda communication referring to the militants as something perhaps like “Our brothers from Khorasan.”

But it turns out that the group may refer to itself by a very different name: the Wolf Unit of Jabhat al-Nusra. That’s according to some apparently internal documents uncovered by Jenan Moussa, a highly respected reporter with the Dubai-based outlet Al Aan TV.

Moussa found the documents in the rubble of a house the group used in the Syrian city of Aleppo and that had been bombed in the US-led airstrikes. (She is braver than you are.) A list of names identifies 13 men, one of them identified by the US as a Khorasan member, under the heading “Wolf Unit of Jabhat al-Nusra.” Moussa says the name appears to include four Turks, two Egyptians, two Yemenis, two Tunisians, one Palestinian, one Serbian, and one from the Caucasus region.

The following video features in Moussa’s Al Aan TV report. She says: “One video of the Wolves exist online.”

The video was uploaded a week ago on an account with the name “Ribat Medya” but after having had 16,600 views, YouTube removed it: “This video has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s Terms of Service.” Obviously, Jabhat al-Nusra weren’t complaining about copyright infringement and there’s nothing offensive in the content (unless one is offended by the sight of members of al Qaeda performing conventional military exercises in a forest, presumably somewhere in Syria). Is YouTube following directions from the Pentagon to censor videos for political reasons?

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White House exempts Syria airstrikes from tight standards on civilian deaths

Yahoo reports: The White House has acknowledged for the first time that strict standards President Obama imposed last year to prevent civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes will not apply to U.S. military operations in Syria and Iraq.

A White House statement to Yahoo News confirming the looser policy came in response to questions about reports that as many as a dozen civilians, including women and young children, were killed when a Tomahawk missile struck the village of Kafr Daryan in Syria’s Idlib province on the morning of Sept. 23.

The village has been described by Syrian rebel commanders as a reported stronghold of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front where U.S officials believed members of the so-called Khorasan group were plotting attacks against international aircraft.

But at a briefing for members and staffers of the House Foreign Affairs Committee late last week, Syrian rebel commanders described women and children being hauled from the rubble after an errant cruise missile destroyed a home for displaced civilians. Images of badly injured children also appeared on YouTube, helping to fuel anti-U.S. protests in a number of Syrian villages last week. [Continue reading…]

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Europeans say U.S. never briefed them on plot by the ‘Khorasan Group’

McClatchy reports: European counterterrorism specialists say their American counterparts never mentioned an imminent plot by al Qaida operatives in Syria to attack Western targets and didn’t brief them on the group that’s supposedly behind the plan, a previously unknown terrorist unit that American officials have dubbed the Khorasan group.

The interviews with the specialists, from two European NATO allies with close intelligence ties to the United States, raise questions about why the United States used its first series of airstrikes on the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in Syria to also attack eight installations belonging to the Nusra Front, an al Qaida affiliate that anti-government rebel groups consider an important ally in their fight to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

U.S. officials didn’t use the word Nusra to identify the targets, instead saying the strikes in Idlib province, far from Islamic State-controlled territory, were aimed at the Khorasan group. But activists and other rebels in Syria identified the positions hit as belonging to Nusra and said 50 Nusra fighters were killed.

U.S. officials said the Khorasan group was composed of senior al Qaida operatives who’d been dispatched to Syria to plot attacks against the West. The officials said the strikes were intended to break up a plan for an imminent attack.

The White House declined Friday to expand on that description or say with whom the intelligence about the group had been shared.

“We, along with our foreign partners, have been watching this group over the past two years since many of its members arrived in Syria from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and we took action when their plotting reached an advanced stage,” said Caitlyn Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “I’m not going to be able to discuss with whom intelligence was shared in this case.”

The European specialists, who meet regularly with U.S. officials on terrorism issues – particularly air travel and potential terrorist operations involving Western passport holders – said they were never specifically warned about such a group or such a plot. Such an omission, the specialists said, seemed unlikely if the plot were truly imminent. [Continue reading…]

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Glenn Greenwald’s Khorasan conspiracy theory misses the point

Washington is often — and justifiably — criticized for viewing the world through a U.S.-centric prism. But many of the U.S. government’s fiercest critics are guilty of the same narrow orientation.

A case in point is an analysis provided by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain in The Intercept yesterday: “The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria.”

Up until last week, hardly anyone, including seasoned Syria watchers and Syrians themselves, had heard of an outfit called the Khorasan Group and so sober warnings from high officials in the U.S. government that this group poses a greater threat to the U.S. than ISIS, were received by some observers with a measure of skepticism.

The Intercept analysis traces the recent evolution of the Khorasan narrative as presented by the servile American media and reaches this conclusion:

What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””

As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets – eager, as always, to justify American wars – spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. Government was trying not to talk about all of this – too secret! – but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerged only when it’s impotent.

The first problem with this conspiracy theory — its claim that the Khorasan Group was invented for domestic propaganda purposes — is that such an invention would largely be redundant.

Having successfully presented ISIS as worse than al Qaeda, why muddy the narrative by introducing into the picture a previously unheard of group? If a pretext for bombing Syria was being fabricated, why not posit an “imminent” threat to the U.S. coming from ISIS itself?

The actual story here is one that is somewhat more complex than appeals to conspiracy theorists like Glenn Greenwald and Alex Jones and it requires giving as much attention to what is happening in Syria as to what is happening behind closed doors in the capital of the Evil Empire.

The invention of the Khorasan Group — which is to say, the creation of the name — seems to have been necessitated not by the desire to find a pretext for bombing another Muslim country, but instead the desire to avoid headlines which would identify the target of a cluster of airstrikes by its real name: Jabhat al-Nusra (JN).

I dare say that the average American is no more familiar with the name Jabhat al-Nusra than they are with the Khorasan Group, so why construct a distinction between the two?

This actually has little to do with how expanding the airstrike targeting beyond ISIS would be perceived in the U.S. and everything to do with how it would be seen in Syria.

As was noted in a 2013 report “Jihadist Terrorism: A Threat Assessment,” by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Homeland Security Project chaired by Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, Jabhat al-Nusra is “widely acknowledged as the most effective fighting force in the war against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.”

Unlike ISIS, JN has pursued a strategy designed to avoid alienating Syrians who oppose the Assad regime yet do not support JN’s Islamist ideology. The Syrian fighters at its core, having learned from the mistake of alienating the local population while they were fighting in Iraq as members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq (the precursor of ISIS), made some strategic adjustments for JN.

As a Quilliam Foundation report notes, JN opted for:

  • predominantly military rather than civic targets, with no bombing of shrines and careful use of suicide bombs to minimise civilian casualties,
  • downplaying JN’s rhetoric concerning sectarianism and kuffar (labelling Alawites, Shiites and Sufis as non-Muslims)
  • the decision to use a different name to avoid preconceptions associated with Al Qaeda.

If the Obama administration chose for debatable reasons to target a unit inside JN and wanted to explain itself to the American public, it didn’t need to concoct a new name for this unit. It could simply present the same assertions about plots to attack the homeland and say that they emanate from Syria’s al Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra.

After all, Mohsin Al-Fadhli who in recent reports has been described as the leader of the Khorasan Group has also been referred to as the de facto leader of al Qaeda in Syria.

An Arab Times report in March this year said:

Al-Fadhli lives in north of Syria, where he is in control of al-Qaeda. He entices and recruits jihadists from among the European Muslim youths, or from those who embrace Islam. After choosing the youths, he trains them on how to execute terror operations in the western countries, focusing mostly on means of public transportation such as trains and airplanes. His activities were also focused on directing the al-Qaeda elements to execute operations against four main targets, which are Assad’s military, the Free Syrian Army, the ‘Islamic Front’ and ‘Da’esh’ [ISIS]. Sources revealed that Al-Fadhli supports ‘Al-Nusra Front’ against ‘Da’esh’, especially after the Al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammad Al-Joulani declared his loyalty to al- Qaeda group in April last year.

The decision taken by [Al Qaeda leader] Al-Zawahri to support ‘Al-Nusra Front’ to face ‘Da’esh’ was made after Al-Fadhli provided information about what is happening in Syria. Sources stressed that such a decision indicates the confidence al-Qaeda leadership has in Al-Fadhli. It also confirms that Al-Fadhli is the de facto leader of al-Qaeda in Syria, even though it has not been officially announced over fear of exposing him.

If the leader of the so-called Khorasan Group had such a central position in JN, why should the Obama administration see fit to try and educate the American public about some finer details in the organization’s internal structure?

It didn’t. The distinction between the Khorasan Group and Jabhat al-Nusra appears to have been contrived in a vain effort by Washington to fool Syrians rather than Americans. The U.S. hoped it could chop off one of JN’s limbs without appearing to strike its body.

The problem with a frontal attack on Jabhat al-Nusra is that this would inevitably be perceived in Syria as an attack on part of the opposition which has been on the frontline of the fight against ISIS and the regime — an attack that can thus only provide additional help to Bashar al-Assad.

President Obama says that the fight against ISIS will require ground forces drawn from the Syrian opposition, but by attacking JN the U.S. has swiftly alienated itself from the very fighters — the so-called moderates — on whose support the U.S. supposedly depends.

The ploy of inventing the Khorasan Group didn’t succeed in deceiving Syrians who knew that the men being killed in airstrikes in north-west Syria all belonged to Jabhat al-Nusra. Thus, by the end of last week instead of there being popular rallies welcoming a campaign to destroy the much-despised ISIS, ordinary Syrians were taking to the streets to protest against the U.S. airstrikes.

They already had reason to question American motives, given that Assad can be blamed for far more carnage and destruction than ISIS has wrought, and now it seems their worst fears have been confirmed — whether by design or sheer incompetence, the U.S. despite its oft-stated desire to hasten Assad’s departure seems to be doing more to ensure that he remains in power.

As for whether the U.S. truly has the desire to destroy ISIS remains far from clear. So far it has demonstrated a greater interest in destroying empty buildings than responding to desperate calls to block the ISIS assault on Kobane, the Kurdish city in northern Syria that truly faces an imminent threat to its survival.

Least of all is there any evidence that Obama has anything that barely resembles a coherent strategy.

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