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…]

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…]

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…]