Category Archives: Iraq

Maliki ignored ISIS warnings before Mosul’s fall, says city’s governor

The National reports: The governor in charge of Mosul when it was overrun by Islamist militants has blamed Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al Maliki for the extremists’ military successes and warned that a counteroffensive would lead to untold bloodshed.

Atheel Nujeifi, who headed Nineveh province, accused the Shiite premier of causing widespread anger at the central government that allowed the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant to capture the provincial capital last week.

Seizing swathes of territory since then, the Al Qaeda-splinter group’s onslaught has edged towards Baghdad and threatens to trigger a sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites.

“He created the crisis,” Mr Nujeifi, who fled the city on June 10, said of Mr Al Maliki, describing the premier’s handling of the crisis as “very bad”.

He said Mr Al Maliki “never listened” to repeated warnings about the deteriorating security situation around Mosul. [Continue reading…]

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My Iraqi city is falling, but America’s occupation unraveled all hope for unity

Najim Abed al-Jabouri writes: My city was supposed to be the model for a better tomorrow in Iraq. Integrated security forces from all ethnic groups, restored cohesion among the many segments of Iraqi society – this was the hope amid the surge, back when I was the mayor in Tal Afar.

But that was nearly a decade ago, and now my city is a battleground again, as government security forces attempt to withstand the march of Sunni militants, as the incubator for an Islamic state has turned into sectarian chaos. The dream of a unified Iraq has not just been deferred but destroyed.

Isis was a sleeping giant, and to see what went so wrong, you have to follow the destructive path set out by the United States as an occupying power in my country, almost from the moment those first air strikes began.

Back in 2003, most Shia Muslims and a good number of Kurds welcomed the Americans. The Sunni population, meanwhile, was not of one mind: many of them were outright opposed to US control, while others were holding out for things to change for the better. Give the occupiers six months, argued Sunni scholars, to see what happens. Iraq had suffered so many calamities – so many wars and siege after siege – that a population suffering in poverty and destitution, no matter one’s ethnic background, seemed willing to hope together.

Then the American occupational authority, led by Paul Bremer, dissolved state institutions (including the Iraqi army), uprooted the Ba’ath party (by way of harsh de-Baathification laws) and, even worse, failed to give adequate Sunni representation in the “transitional” government (five Sunni Muslims sat on the original Governing Council, to 13 Shia representatives, five Kurds and one Turkoman). This was the beginning of the end of that better tomorrow for Sunni people in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Three reasons why Turkey misunderstands ISIS

Mustafa Akyol writes: Many Turkish opinion leaders, especially those in the pro-government media, cannot accept ISIS, or its ilk, as extremist Islamist actors with genuinely held beliefs and self-defined goals. Rather they take it for granted that these terror groups are merely the pawns of a great game designed by none other than the Western powers.

For example, Abdulkadir Selvi, a senior journalist who has been quite vocal in the press and on television generally espousing a pro-government stance, wrote a piece last week titled “Who is ISIS working for?” This was his answer: “Al-Qaeda was a useful instrument for the US. To put it in an analogy, ISIS was born from al-Qaeda’s relationship with [the] CIA. The West gave its manners to al-Qaeda and now it designs our region through the hands of ISIS.” In short, al-Qaeda and its offshoot ISIS are both creations of the US Central Intelligence Agency and serve American interests.

Writing in the same pro-government daily, Yeni Şafak, the prominent columnist Yusuf Kaplan took a similar position. His culprit, however, was not the United States, but the United Kingdom. He wrote, “There is no such thing as ISIS. There is rather a heinous power called England … al-Qaeda was an instrument of the Americans, whereas ISIS is an instrument of the English.”

Yet another writer with strong pro-government views, Cemil Ertem, advanced a conspiratorial line in his column in the daily Star, but added a crucial element. ISIS, he argued, is “the product of the same center that also orchestrated Dec. 17” — referring to the day the corruption investigation, or “coup attempt,” against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan became public. Accordingly, that conspiratorial “center” first tried to topple Erdogan with a bogus corruption investigation, and when that failed, it reignited Kurdish tensions in the country and finally ordered ISIS to attack “Turkey’s political and economic assets in Iraq.”

I quoted just three writers, but there are many similar examples. It would not be unfair to say that this conspiratorial understanding of ISIS is a powerful, if not dominant, narrative within Turkey’s pro-government media. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq crisis hits Turkish economy

Mehmet Cetingulec writes: After ISIS took control of Mosul and began advancing toward other towns, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry warned hundreds of Turkish companies and thousands of Turkish workers to leave Anbar, Baghdad, Basra, Diyala, Kirkuk, Mosul and Salahuddin. Two major Turkish banks closed their branches in Baghdad. As Turks began the evacuation, the fallout on commerce became alarming. More than 1,500 Turkish companies operate throughout Iraq, and when some of them hastily closed their offices after ISIS went on the attack, more than 2,000 trucks headed to Iraq had to turn back.

The surrender of Iraqi towns to ISIS also hit the Turkish markets. The Istanbul stock exchange had climbed to 81,600 points on June 10. After ISIS occupied Mosul, within four days, the index fell to 77,646, a 4,000-point loss. Foreign exchange parity rose, while interest rates and oil prices rose. The worst effect has been the added burden to Turkey’s energy bill.

Minister of Economy Nihat Zeybekci thinks, however, that Mosul will not adversely affect Turkey. In a statement to the daily Milliyet, he said there were no problems in places such as Sulaimaniyah and Erbil, and that events in Mosul were therefore unlikely to have any negative bearing on Turkish exports.

Parts of Zeybekci’s surprising statement also appeared accepting of a fragmentation of Iraq. He said, “Borders that were drawn superficially 60 years ago will be re-demarcated. Parts of the region will find their right places. There is so much diversity, with Arabs, Sunnis, Shiites, Turkmen and Kurds. Then there are plenty of radical groups. They all want to have a say. The region is so sick that all germs freely attack it.”

Although Zeybekci seems relaxed about the current situation, exporters are not. [Continue reading…]

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To intervene, or not intervene? That is not the question

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes: For the last two years, many people in the foreign policy community, myself included, have argued repeatedly for the use of force in Syria — to no avail. We have been pilloried as warmongers and targeted, by none other than President Obama, as people who do not understand that force is not the solution to every question. A wiser course, he argued at West Point, is to use force only in defense of America’s vital interests.

Suddenly, however, in the space of a week, the administration has begun considering the use of force in Iraq, including drones, against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which has been occupying city after city and moving ever closer to Baghdad.

The sudden turn of events leaves people like me scratching our heads. Why is the threat of ISIS in Iraq a sufficiently vital interest, but not the rise of ISIS in Syria — and a hideous civil war that has dismembered Syria itself and destabilized Lebanon, Jordan and now Iraq?

I suspect White House officials would advance three reasons.

First, they would say, the fighters in Iraq include members of Al Qaeda. But that ignores recent history. Experts have predicted for over a year that unless we acted in Syria, ISIS would establish an Islamic state in eastern Syria and western Iraq, exactly what we are watching. So why not take them on directly in Syria, where their demise would strengthen the moderate opposition?

Because, the White House might say, of the second reason, the Iraqi government is asking for help. That makes the use of force legitimate under international law, whereas in Syria the same government that started the killing, deliberately fanned the flames of civil war, and will not allow humanitarian aid to starving and mortally ill civilians, objects to the use of force against it.

But here the law sets the interests of the Iraqi government against those of its people. It allows us to help a government that has repeatedly violated power-sharing agreements in ways that have driven Sunni support for ISIS. And from a strategic point of view, it is a government that is deeply in Iran’s pocket — to the extent, as Fareed Zakaria reported in his Washington Post column last week, that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki would not agree to a residual American force because the Iranians forbade it.

The third reason the White House would give is that America fought a decade-long war in Iraq, at a terrible cost. We overturned a stable, strong but brutal government, although far less brutal than President Bashar al-Assad’s has proved to be, and left a weak and unstable government. We cannot allow our soldiers to have fought in vain, the argument goes, so we should now prop up the government we left in place.

This is where the White House is most blind. It sees the world on two planes: the humanitarian world of individual suffering, where no matter how heart-rending the pictures and how horrific the crimes, American vital interests are not engaged because it is just people; and the strategic world of government interests, where what matters is the chess game of one leader against another, and stopping both state and nonstate actors who are able to harm the United States.

In fact, the two planes are inextricably linked. When a government begins to massacre its own citizens, with chemical weapons, barrel bombs and starvation, as Syria’s continues to do, it must be stopped. If it is not stopped, violence, displacement and fanaticism will flourish.

Deciding that the Syrian government, as bad as it is, was still better than the alternative of ISIS profoundly missed the point. As long as we allow the Syrian government to continue perpetrating the worst campaign of crimes against humanity since Rwanda, support for ISIS will continue. As long as we choose Prime Minister Maliki over the interests of his citizens, all his citizens, his government can never be safe.

President Obama should be asking the same question in Iraq and Syria. What course of action will be best, in the short and the long term, for the Iraqi and Syrian people?

And in response to that question, many will pose another: what’s best for the American people?

“We can no longer be the world’s policeman” — there’s probably no more widely held view among Americans right now. The world, perpetually inclined to misbehave, can’t expect us to come along and clean up its latest mess.

The conceit and condescension embedded in this view is breathtaking.

William Saletan puts it in slightly more refined terms: “We’ll help you, but only if you clean up your act. Our help is limited, and your initiative is required.”

The world is being told to stop taking advantage of American generosity.

But the mess in Iraq is very much of America’s making. The U.S. government broke up the Baathist state with very little thought about what was going to take its place, so for American commentators to be telling Iraqis to clean up their act, shows that American hubris is still alive and well even among those who concluded the war in Iraq was a mistake.

Anne-Marie Slaughter correctly asks: “What course of action will be best, in the short and the long term, for the Iraqi and Syrian people?”

She advocates the immediate and limited use of military force: “Enough force to remind all parties that we can, from the air, see and retaliate against not only Al Qaeda members, whom our drones track for months, but also any individuals guilty of mass atrocities and crimes against humanity.”

But even if it wants to, can the U.S. retaliate against any individuals guilty of mass atrocities and crimes against humanity? That sounds much easier said than done.

Fred Kaplan who like most American progressives these days believes U.S. foreign policy should be defined in terms of national interest, writes:

It is not in U.S. interests for a well-armed, well-funded jihadist group like the Islamist State of Iraq and Syria to fulfill its self-proclaimed destiny, i.e., to create an Islamist state that spans Iraq and Syria. The question is how to stop this from happening and what role, if any, the United States should play in the stopping.

The New York Times’ Roger Cohen, in an opinion piece headlined “Take Mosul Back,” concludes, “President Obama should use targeted military force to drive back the fanatics of ISIS,” but he doesn’t elaborate. “Targeted military force” — I assume that’s a finessing euphemism for smart bombs and drones. But it’s fantasy to believe that air power alone will “drive back” the ISIS fighters.

That’s right, because the U.S. can’t very well launch so-called surgical strikes against a largely invisible enemy.

The U.S. intelligence Panopticon is stumbling right now. Its ability to see everywhere isn’t matched by its ability to see one place in particular. White House officials are trying to figure out “how to gather useful intelligence about the militants.”

Mass collection and storage of largely useless cellphone metadata turns out to be much easier than tracking the most powerful terrorist organization in the world — even though ISIS has helpfully been publishing annual reports and it has not been shy about using the internet to further its aims as its small army carves up national boundaries.

It’s easy to conclude that since the U.S. had a major hand in creating this mess, since it lacks much influence on the ground, and since through ill-conceived military operations could easily make the situation worse, the only way of doing no harm is to do nothing at all.

The problem is that inaction also has effects.

Over the last three years, Bashar al-Assad has carefully tested the United States and through an empirical process and with Iranian support, created a model of effective tyrannical leadership.

In a gruesome way, his experiment has turned out to be surprisingly successful and thus must now be an appealing option for Nouri al-Maliki to follow. For the Iraqi leader, the fact that his country already got ripped apart by American and British forces, will make it all the more easy to try and use military force to solve his political problems.

Yet as the UN now warns, the Middle East is on the brink of a sectarian war that threatens to suck in the whole region. Such a war will have an impact on the whole world.

Sectarianism is a political disease. It reduces all people to immutable identities that become the basis for political affiliations.

If all that counts is whether you are Shia or Sunni it no longer matters what you think.

Political leaders no longer have to work to win arguments; all they have to do is rally their kin. Everyone is then governed by the politics of us and them.

The Middle East may currently be the epicenter of sectarian division, but we are all at risk of moving down the same politically regressive path.

The only alternative to worsening division is dialogue. A sectarian war is a war that no one can win.

The two powers who most urgently need to talk to each other are Saudi Arabia and Iran and yet each is adopting a tougher position.

The most constructive way in which the U.S. might now intervene would be by bringing together the region’s arch enemies.

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Why ISIS brags about its brutal sectarian murders

Aaron Y. Zelin writes: Over the weekend, dozens of pictures trickled out on one of the official Twitter accounts of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, the jihadist group currently setting off a panic in vast swathes of northern Iraq. The graphic photographs, according to ISIS, showed mass executions of Shiite soldiers who had fought in the Iraqi government’s military and security forces. In the images, ISIS fighters corral hundreds of individuals into trucks, forcing them to lie down in shallow graves with their heads to the ground, and then shooting them with Kalashnikovs.

ISIS claimed it had killed more than 1,700 people, though the pictures account for a few hundred at most. Though shocking, this level of brutality is hardly new for the extremist Sunni group, as it has attempted to provoke the Shiite population going back to last decade, when the volatile Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was its leader.

ISIS subscribes to takfir, a practice according to which it believes it is legitimate to kill a Muslim who has abandoned its hard-line interpretation of Islam. Last decade, when ISIS was under the control of Zarqawi and was then called Al Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers (better known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI), it used takfir to justify the murder of not only the Shiite population of Iraq but also other Sunnis who did not follow AQI’s narrow and severe interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law. (This broad use of takfir ended up backfiring against AQI, since most Iraqi Sunnis did not want to live under such an oppressive group.)

So ISIS, the latest incarnation of AQI, has religious reasons for massacring Shiites, all of whom it views as apostates. And there’s another motivation for it as well: old-fashioned vengeance. As ISIS’ official spokesperson noted in an audio message posted June 11, “It is true that between us revenge awaits … a long and heavy revenge awaits. However the revenge shall not be in Samara or Baghdad, but rather it shall be in Karbala the city made ?lthy, and in Najaf the polytheist city, so wait.” (Karbala and Najaf are important Shiite shrine cities.) So in ISIS’ estimation, its attacks on Shiites are merely retaliation for the Iraqi government’s actions against Sunnis.

But there’s also a strategic reason behind the executions — and the gruesome pictures posted online for all to see. ISIS’ goal is not only to scare Iraqi Shiites but to provoke them to radicalize, join Iranian-sponsored militias and then commit similar atrocities against Sunnis. ISIS then hopes to set itself up as the protectors of the Sunni population, helping to consolidate its hold on Sunni population centers. [Continue reading…]

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A sophisticated ISIS social media campaign

CBS News reports: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s on-the-ground offensive in northern Iraq this month has been aided, analysts say, by an unprecedented social media blitz.

Jihadi groups using Twitter and other social platforms is nothing new. During its 2013 attack on Kenya’s Westgate mall, the Somali militant group al-Shabab mixed tweets with gunshots. Observers have long warned about the growth of social media as powerful recruitment tools for terrorists.

What makes the ISIS social campaign stand out, analysts say, is its scale and sophistication.

“I think it was obvious very early on that they launched their offensive with a social media campaign well planned in advance. This wasn’t an afterthought. This wasn’t something that they made up as they went along,” said John Little, who monitors national security, conflicts and technology at Blogs of War.

The coordinated campaign has featured what appears to be disciplined, from-the-top-down message control designed to simulate organic grass-roots activity. Complete with an app and highly orchestrated hashtag pushes, the group’s social media strategy mirrors that of a marketing company building buzz around a new product.

“Big corporations wish they were as good at this as ISIS is,” said J.M. Berger, an author and analyst who specializes in social media and extremism, and has been closely monitoring the al Qaeda splinter group’s online activity.

“This is a combination of an extremely ambitious military campaign with an extremely ambitious PR campaign. Social media is most of that PR campaign.”

ISIS has developed a Twitter app for Android phones called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, Berger said. It offers users news and information about ISIS. When users sign up, they give ISIS permission to send tweets through their own personal accounts.

“Your account functions normally most of the time, but it will periodically broadcast tweets from ISIS that are also sent around at the same time to hundreds or even thousands of other accounts,” Berger told CBS News. He said the app helps ISIS get pre-approved hashtags trending on Twitter in certain areas, which then amplifies its message.

“It’s one of many tools that ISIS uses to manipulate the perception on social media that their content is bigger and more popular than it might actually be if you were looking at just their organic supporters.”

Berger reports that ISIS posted almost 40,000 tweets in one day last week as it took Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Its messages are then parroted by Internet users unaffiliated with the group and far away from the fight, sometimes called “E-hadis” or “Jihobbyists.”

“They have at least hundreds and probably more like thousands of fighters who are on social media, and then in addition to that they have many thousands of people who are casually or intensely interested in them as supporters online,” Berger said. [Continue reading…]

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Shiite militias decamping from Syria to fight in Iraq

The Wall Street Journal reports: Iraqi Shiite militias that have provided crucial support to President Bashar al-Assad on Syria’s battlefields are remobilizing to Iraq to help the government there fight off opposition forces closing in on Baghdad, diplomats and Syrian rebels say.

The mobilization away from Syria started in late December when antigovernment forces seized Iraq’s western Anbar province, but has recently gained pace as militants have taken more territory, including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Fighters from Hezbollah are filling the vacuum left in Syria by the withdrawing Iraqi militias, according to Syrian rebels and an official close to the Lebanese militant and political group.

Many of these Shiite militants are leaving Syria to fight alongside the Iraqi army, say Western and Arab diplomats, increasing the sectarian undertone of the conflict. The militants’ mobilization underscores accusations from Iraqi Sunnis that the Shiite-led government in Baghdad is dragging state institutions into a bloody sectarian war. [Continue reading…]

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Sectarian hatred — the driving force behind ISIS

Those self-obsessed Americans who are convinced that the dream of anyone dubbed a terrorist is that some day they will be able to attack the U.S., are now wondering how soon a new 9/11-like plot might emerge from the territory controlled by ISIS. But the organization that is still being referred to as an al Qaeda affiliate, never regarded as America as its principle enemy.

Back in 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who started Al Qaeda in Iraq (which then became the Islamic State of Iraq and in 2013 the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)) wrote a letter to the al Qaeda leadership in which he said:

The American army has begun to disappear from some cities, and its presence is rare. An Iraqi army has begun to take its place, and this is the real problem that we face, since our combat against the Americans is something easy. The enemy is apparent, his back is exposed, and he does not know the land or the current situation of the mujahidin because his intelligence information is weak. We know for certain that these Crusader forces will disappear tomorrow or the day after. He who looks at the current situation [will] see the enemy’s haste to constitute the army and the police, which have begun to carry out the missions assigned to them. This enemy, made up of the Shi’a filled out with Sunni agents, is the real danger that we face, for it is [made up of] our fellow countrymen, who know us inside and out. They are more cunning than their Crusader masters, and they have begun, as I have said, to try to take control of the security situation in Iraq. They have liquidated many Sunnis and many of their Ba’th Party enemies and others beholden to the Sunnis in an organized, studied way. They began by killing many mujahid brothers, passing to the liquidation of scientists, thinkers, doctors, engineers, and others. I believe, and God knows best, that the worst will not come to pass until most of the American army is in the rear lines and the secret Shi’i army and its military brigades are fighting as its proxy. They are infiltrating like snakes to reign over the army and police apparatus, which is the strike force and iron fist in our Third World, and to take complete control over the economy like their tutors the Jews. As the days pass, their hopes are growing that they will establish a Shi’i state stretching from Iran through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and ending in the Cardboard Kingdom of the Gulf.

Given ISIS’s well-documented roots in Iraq, it’s strange that one currently hears it said that ISIS was created by Turkey.

In a podcast by Aaron Stein, an Associate Fellow at RUSI, he interviews Aaron Zelin from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and they examine the purported links between Turkey and ISIS. I’ve posted the audio below, but the gist of Zelin’s view is that while the growth of ISIS has been supported by Turkey’s open border policy, the Turk’s willingness to allow foreign fighters passage to Syria has always been driven by the desire to topple the Assad regime rather than an interest in supporting ISIS.

ISIS views Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an “apostate” and with 49 staff members captured in a raid on the Turkish consulate in Mosul last week, the columnist Amberin Zaman says that the raid may serve as “a warning to Turkey of the consequences it is likely to face should it tighten the screws on jihadist groups moving across its borders.”

Reporting from Baghdad, Richard Engel says:

If Maliki starts acting like Assad?

On May 11, Al Jazeera reported on the Iraq army’s use of barrel bombs in Fallujah:

Shelling by the Iraqi army in the city of Fallujah has killed more civilians, hospital sources and witnesses have said, amid allegations that government forces were using barrel bombs in an attempt to drive out anti-government fighters from the area,

The use of barrel bombs in civilian areas is banned under international conventions given their indiscriminate nature.

But Mohammed al-Jumaili, a local journalist, told Al Jazeera that the army has dropped many barrel bombs “targeting mosques, houses and markets” in Fallujah.

Local hospital sources said the situation was getting worse for many people who had been trapped in the city since the army cut off a key bridge.

The Iraqi government has denied the use of barrel bombs and asserted that it was fighting in a “humane way”.

Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from the capital Baghdad, said that despite the government’s denial, there was strong evidence that barrel bombs havd been used in Fallujah.

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Iraqi Shia militias who were defending Assad are now returning home

ISW reports: As the Iraqi government and Shi’a militia groups attempt to mobilize and recruit fighters reports suggest that Iraqi Shi’a militia fighters, previously supporting the Syrian regime have begun to return to Iraq. The majority of these redeployments are likely occurring in Damascus, where Iraqi Shi’a militias have been heavily involved in fighting in Damascus’ southern suburbs near the Sayida Zeinab Shrine, and Aleppo province, where they have supported the regime’s offensive to besiege the rebel-held neighborhoods of eastern Aleppo city. A source close to Lebanese Hezbollah said the group has called for a general mobilization, announcing that 1,000 fighters are to be sent to Syria from Lebanon to defend the Sayida Zeinab Shrine in Damascus and replace Shi’a Iraqi militia troops, particularly from the Abu Fadl al-Abbas brigade who are returning to Iraq. This movement of troops could create a deficit in the regime’s forces, exacerbating its manpower challenge. Early indications of this include rebel gains in Mleiha, in the Damascus suburbs, and Rankous in the Qalamoun region.

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ISIS a fanatical force — with a weakness

Charles Lister writes: ISIS has substantial roots in Mosul, where it managed to remain a potent force during and after the U.S. troop “surge.” The group has recently been raising $1 million-$2 million per month in Mosul through an intricate extortion network. This reality, plus Mosul’s proximity to ISIS positions in eastern Syria, made the city a natural launching ground for this shock offensive in Iraq, which is ultimately aimed at Baghdad.

But this is not all about ISIS. Many other armed Sunni actors are involved in what has become, in effect, a Sunni uprising — groups such as the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandia, Jaish al-Mujahideen, Jamaat Ansar al-Islam, Al-Jaish al-Islami fil Iraq and various tribal military councils.

ISIS may be the largest force involved (with about 8,000 fighters in Iraq), but it is far from sufficient to take and hold multiple urban centers. It is still totally reliant on an interdependent relationship with what remains a tacitly sympathetic and facilitating Sunni population. But this “relationship” is by no means stable and should not be taken for granted. The militant group has consistently failed to retain popular support, or at minimum, acceptance.

Mosul residents might be praising the current stability and ISIS-subsidized bread and fuel prices, but once the public flogging, amputations and crucifixions begin, this may well change. In fact, it is not surprising that tribal elements are already preparing to force ISIS from captured areas.

The militants’ prospects are also dependent on the government and its supporters continuing to advance sectarianism — something that encourages Sunni actors to accept ISIS. Unfortunately, this apparent sectarianism has been consolidated in recent days with al-Maliki’s call for a “volunteer army” encouraging the further reconstitution of the Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Jaish al-Mahdi and the Badr Brigades (three Shiite militias active during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which appear to be receiving a new boost in recruitment).

Further calls by Muqtada al-Sadr to form “Peace Battalions” and by the Shiite community in Diyala to form “Peace Committees” — as well as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s call for Iraqis to take up arms against ISIS — have increased the perception of sectarianism inside and outside Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS, the slow insurgency

Dr Victoria Fontan is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Duhok University in the Kurdish region of Iraq and is currently working on her second PhD at Kings College, London. She has been in Iraq for over a decade and now writes:

So, this week, al-Qaeda offshoot the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) took over Mosul by storm and is on its way to Baghdad. We are told that the group is the next generation of al-Qaeda, a new and improved version of it, and that it will not be taking any prisoners, beheading its way into Iraq’s capital throughout a Mother of All Battles that will make the sacking of Rome look like a picnic. Thank you British Daily Mail for taking the fear mongering to a new extreme. I will remember that next time I meet ISIS over tea and biscuits, just like I did in the summer of 2013. True, they are tough, they were joking then that I would not make it one day in one of their desert hideouts, but is their story that simplistic?

Most media outlets and pundits are missing the most important story behind the recent take-over of Mosul, which is connection between the social movements that had been present in Sunni parts of Iraq, and the popular support that ISIS is presently benefiting from. Should ISIS not benefit from conscious popular support; there is no way that they would have captured so much territory in so little time. More importantly, most experts would rather not incriminate the international community, nor its enabler the United Nations, for their standing idly by as sectarianism crept into Iraqi life since the botched democratization process that was initiated by the 2005 electoral cycle. No one cares to remember for instance that despite being invited repeatedly to visit the Occupy Fallujah demonstration site since December 2012, UN chief in Iraq Nikolai Mladenov preferred to echo Maliki’s terrorism hate narrative against Iraqi Sunnis instead of doing his job and not siding with one party to the detriment of the other. Even as Maliki initiated his disastrous Anbar campaign to curb Occupy Fallujah’s political demands in late December 2013, Mladenov kept using the word “terrorism” when referring to the Fallujah leadership. He now keeps issuing statements of concern for local displaced populations, too little too late.

Once again, it all started in Fallujah, in December 2012. After the arbitrary arrest of several Sunni politicians and prominent figures on terrorism charges, within a context of relative deprivation and perceived government harassment, Occupy Fallujah was born with three simple political demands: an end of all talks of federalism, an enforcement of equal opportunities for Sunnis and Shi’ias, and a resignation of Prime Minister Maliki. In any healthy political system, those demands would have been labeled as political, but in Fallujah, they were called terrorism. As a response, Maliki sent troops to try and take Fallujah, and after many unsuccessful attempts; he sent barrel bombs instead, just like his neighbor Bashar al Assad on Aleppo, clearly committing crimes against humanity in the process. All throughout the process, the Fallujah tribes and military council made a deal with ISIS, upon realization that they needed help to keep the government at bay. Scores of ISIS militants came to the area and kept weakening the resolve and potency of the Iraqi army, whose special forces and regular troops lost a heavy amount of men while trying to enter Fallujah. Amongst desertions en masse came the decoy attack on Samarra last week, paving the way for an overtaking of Mosul. [Continue reading…]

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An arrest that exposed the wealth and power of ISIS

The Guardian reports: Two days before Mosul fell to the Islamic insurgent group Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Iraqi commanders stood eyeballing its most trusted messenger. The man, known within the extremist group as Abu Hajjar, had finally cracked after a fortnight of interrogation and given up the head of Isis’s military council.

“He said to us, ‘you don’t realise what you have done’,” an intelligence official recalled. “Then he said: ‘Mosul will be an inferno this week’.’

Several hours later, the man he had served as a courier and been attempting to protect, Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, lay dead in his hideout near Mosul. From the home of the dead man and the captive, Iraqi forces hoovered up more than 160 computer flash sticks which contained the most detailed information yet known about the terror group.

The treasure trove included names and noms de guerre of all foreign fighters, senior leaders and their code words, initials of sources inside ministries and full accounts of the group’s finances.

“We were all amazed and so were the Americans,” a senior intelligence official told the Guardian. “None of us had known most of this information.” [Continue reading…]

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Why did the advance of ISIS catch anyone by surprise?

The New York Times reports: When Islamic militants rampaged through the Iraqi city of Mosul last week, robbing banks of hundreds of millions of dollars, opening the gates of prisons and burning army vehicles, some residents greeted them as if they were liberators and threw rocks at retreating Iraqi soldiers.

It took only two days, though, for the fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to issue edicts laying out the harsh terms of Islamic law under which they would govern, and singling out some police officers and government workers for summary execution.

With just a few thousand fighters, the group’s lightning sweep into Mosul and farther south appeared to catch many Iraqi and American officials by surprise. But the gains were actually the realization of a yearslong strategy of state-building that the group itself promoted publicly. [Continue reading…]

The specter of terrorism invoked by Western political leaders over the last decade has emphasized not only its global reach but also its subterranean nature. We need such a vast counter-terrorism apparatus because the terrorists are so hard to find and their plots so cunning. So when officials say they have been caught by surprise, I imagine they expect the public will be forgiving because terrorists specialize in catching people by surprise.

ISIS, however, like a public corporation, publishes annual reports and those who have taken the trouble to read them say that the group is functioning more like a military organization than a terrorist network.

The Institute for the Study of War says:

The repeated publication of consecutive annual reports indicates that the ISIS military command in Iraq has exercised command and control over a national theater since at least early 2012. ISIS in Iraq is willing and able to organize centralized reporting procedures and to publish the results of its performance to achieve organizational effects… While the contents of the annual report are more significant as a message than as a measurement of actual attacks, it is important to understand what ISIS is reporting about its own performance in order to understand its own narrative about the war in Iraq.

Has anyone in the White House studied ISIS’s reports? Did they even know they exist?

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General Military Council of the Iraqi Revolutionaries: ‘We are stronger than ISIS’

Former General Muzhir al Qaisi, spokesman for the General Military Council of the Iraqi Revolutionaries, which controls Mosul alongside ISIS, when interviewed by the BBC said that his forces follow the Geneva Conventions whereas ISIS are “barbarians.” He also noted that with no more than 1,000 fighters, ISIS is not capable of controlling Mosul. He said that ISIS is only trying to apply sharia in one neighborhood but that the residents refuse that kind of rule and the local imams will not allow this to happen.

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Sunni residents return to Mosul

The Associated Press reports: Days after Iraq’s second-largest city fell to al-Qaida-inspired fighters, some Iraqis are already returning to Mosul, lured back by insurgents offering cheap gas and food, restoring power and water and removing traffic barricades.

Many people appear excited to return, taking sectarian pride in the extremist Sunni group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Some see them as liberators.

“I hope God supports them and makes them victorious over the oppression of al-Maliki,” said 80-year-old Abu Thaer.

He spoke at the Khazer checkpoint on the northern frontier of the largely autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, 65 miles (105 kilometers) from Mosul. Five veiled women and six children were crammed into the back seat of his car.

They were among tens of thousands of people who fled their homes as Islamic State fighters and other Sunni militants seized much of northern Iraq, including Mosul and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.

Many Sunni Arab men and women said they left, not because they feared the insurgents, but because of the risk of retaliatory airstrikes by Iraqi government forces.

Their return underscores the profound sectarianism cleaving Iraq and the depth of anger that many Sunnis harbor toward al-Maliki’s government, which they accuse of discrimination and harassment and pushing Sunnis to the political margins.

“We see that they have made Mosul better,” said Abu Mohammed, a 34-year-old taxi driver who ferries returnees back to the city. “The water is back. The electricity is back. The prices are lower.”

The anger many Iraqis felt toward al-Maliki’s government only increased after soldiers abandoned Mosul, fleeing before civilians. It’s likely that many Iraqi troops fled because they sensed insurgents would be welcomed by long-resentful Sunnis, and they did not want to risk their lives for a senseless battle.

“The army was only good at oppressing Sunnis, but it was nothing more,” Abu Thaer said. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS claims mass execution of Iraqi soldiers

The New York Times reports: Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria boasted on Twitter that they had executed 1,700 Iraqi government soldiers, posting gruesome photos to support their claim.

The authenticity of the photographs and the insurgents’ claim could not be verified, and Iraqi government officials initially cast doubt on whether such a mass execution took place. There were also no reports of large numbers of funerals in the Salahuddin Province area, where the executions were said to have been conducted.

If the claim is true, it would be the worst mass atrocity in either Syria or Iraq in recent years, surpassing even the chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian suburbs of Damascus last year, which killed 1,400 people and were attributed to the Syrian government.

The latest attack, if proved, would also raise the specter of the war in Iraq turning genocidal, particularly because the insurgents boasted that their victims were all Shiites. There were also fears that it could usher in a series of reprisal killings of Shiites and Sunnis, like those seen in the Iraq war in 2005-7. [Continue reading…]

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Syria pounds ISIS bases in coordination with Iraq

AFP reports: Syria’s army has been pounding major bases of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria in coordination with the Baghdad government for the last 24 hours, an activist group says Sunday.

The strikes against ISIS — which has spearheaded a week-long jihadist offensive in Iraq — have been more intense than ever, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“The regime air force has been pounding ISIS’s bases, including those in the northern province of Raqa and Hasakeh in the northeast,” which borders Iraq, said the Britain-based group.

The regime of President Bashar Assad was responding to the fact that ISIS “brought into Syria heavy weapons including tanks” captured from the Iraqi army.

In Raqa, the air force bombed the area surrounding ISIS’s main headquarters in Syria, as well as the group’s religious courts, said the Observatory, adding there were no reported casualties.

Photographs sent by activists in Raqa that could not be independently verified showed craters in the ground and rubble in front of the main gates of the headquarters, a former town hall. Saturday, the regime also bombarded ISIS’s headquarters at Shaddadi in Hasakeh, home to a frontier crossing from Iraq that is under the jihadists’ control.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said the strikes were the regime’s most “intense” against ISIS, and that they were being carried out “in coordination with the Iraqi authorities.” [Continue reading…]

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