Category Archives: Lands

Turkey shoots down Russian warplane after it violates Turkey’s airspace

The New York Times reports: Turkish fighter jets on patrol near the Syrian border shot down a Russian warplane on Tuesday after it violated Turkey’s airspace, a long-feared escalation that could further strain relations between Russia and the West.

The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that one of its jets, a Sukhoi SU-24, had crashed in Syria but said it had been downed “presumably as a result of shelling from the ground.”

The Russian Defense Ministry also asserted that, “The plane stayed exclusively above the territory of Syria throughout the entire flight,” and said that the two pilots had ejected.

The Turkish military did not identify the nationality of the plane but said in a statement on its website that its pilots fired only after repeated warnings to the other warplane.

“The aircraft entered Turkish airspace over the town of Yaylidag, in the southeastern Hatay province,” the statement read. “The plane was warned 10 times in the space of 5 minutes before it was taken down.” [Continue reading…]

A map released by Turkey shows the flight path of the Russian jet.

The finger of Turkish territory crossed is less than two miles wide. An aircraft flying at 600mph would take less than 10 seconds to enter and exit.

Given the warnings they have already received from Turkey, it’s hard to imagine that Russian pilots don’t pay close attention to their proximity to the Turkish border and, for that reason, it seems somewhat unlikely that this infringement was accidental.

At the same time, if this was a calculated provocation, it seems likely that it was calculated to be a taunt so brief that it would not result in an armed response.

The Russians seem to have miscalculated. The question now, is: have the Turks miscalculated too?

My guess — nothing more than that — is that the Russians will protest loudly while much more quietly looking for ways to deescalate.

Bloomberg reports: President Vladimir Putin accused Turkey of being accomplices of terrorism for shooting down a Russian warplane in Syria, warning of “very serious consequences” for relations.

“We understand that everyone has their own interests but we won’t allow such crimes to take place,” Putin said at talks with Jordanian King Abdullah in Sochi. “We received a stab in the back from accomplices of terrorism.”

Putin spoke after Turkey said two F-16 jets shot down a Russian warplane that violated its airspace near the border with northwestern Syria, roiling global markets and marking the first direct clash between foreign powers embroiled in the civil war. Russia’s Defense Ministry denied the plane had ever crossed the border and said it may have been hit by ground fire. Turkey’s action is the first time in decades that a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has downed a Russian military aircraft. [Continue reading…]

On October 6, Russia’s state-owned news agency, Sputnik, reported: The US and Turkey have threatened to shoot down Russian warplanes if they stray into Turkish airspace, following two accidental, momentary violations of the Syria-Turkey border by Russian military aircraft.

“Turkey’s rules of engagement apply to all planes, be they Syrian [or] Russian…Necessary steps would be taken against whoever violates Turkey’s borders, even if it’s a bird”, the Brussels-based online newspaper EUobserver quoted Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as telling the TV broadcaster HaberTurk on Monday.

US Secretary of State John Kerry concurred, saying the violation might result in a ‘shootdown’. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Canada to turn away single men as part of Syrian refugee resettlement plan

AFP reports: Canada will accept only whole families, lone women or children in its mass resettlement of Syrian refugees while unaccompanied men – considered a security risk – will be turned away.

Since the Paris attacks launched by Syria-linked jihadis, a plan by the new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to fast-track the intake of 25,000 refugees by year’s end has faced growing criticism in Canada.

Details of the plan will be announced Tuesday but Canada’s ambassador to Jordan confirmed that refugees from camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey will be flown to Canada from Jordan starting 1 December. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Ba’athism had been dead for a decade by the time Saddam fell

In an interview with Joel Wing over at Musings on Iraq, Kyle Orton, a Middle East analyst, contributing editor to Left Foot Forward and who blogs at The Syrian Intifada, said: In June 1993, Saddam begins the Faith Campaign. In effect it was the creation of a religious movement with Saddam at the helm. Saddam chose to mix Salafism into the regime’s ideology because he feared the Muslim Brotherhood; it was his old enemy and was more covert and had branches abroad. Under the sanctions-plus-dictatorship regime, the changes of the 1970s intensified, and many more looked for solace in the faith. Clerics become community leaders in Sunni areas in a way they hadn’t been since at least the 1950s and in the Shi’a areas the mid-level clerics had their power expanded at the expense of senior clerics, and a shari’a system was instituted, including with penalties like amputation of the hand for theft and execution for adultery (carried out by beheading in a public square or on the doorstep of a woman’s father.)

The resulting “Ba’athi-Salafism” worked in the Sunni areas, changing the majority’s conception of their faith and drawing them closer to the regime — not least because it was accompanied by a massive patronage network, much of it distributed through the mosques to the tribes, to give the regime some pillars to resist a repeat of the 1991 Shi’a revolt. The regime’s new Islamism also lowered the tension with the “pure” Salafi Trend, which Saddam now saw as a complement to his project, whereas previously they’d been seen as subversives — witness the difference in Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, dismissed from the police in the late 1980s, and Kamel Sachet who remained a senior officer until Saddam had him killed in 1998.

The Campaign really deeply affected the security sector. The religious instruction was intense, and a great number of Saddam’s officers ended up slipping into the “pure” Salafism. One of the less-advertised aspects of the Faith Campaign was the infiltration of the mosques to keep the religious revival Saddam was fostering under control, but since Ba’athism was a spent force and many of the military guys saw Saddam as having led the country to disaster, they found they could take the Salafism without the Saddamism. Some of the “pure” Salafis went too far and launched attacks against the regime, and Saddam tried to manipulate the Salafi Trend and took out some of its leaders, but that says more about Saddam’s approach to power than his beliefs. (It’s incidental to the effects of the Faith Campaign but Saddam seems to have got religion before the end — to have come to believe what he likely started cynically.)

In the Shi’a areas, the Faith Campaign backfired almost entirely, worsening State-Shi’a relations and exacerbating sectarianism generally. The regime’s fear of the Shi’a after the 1991 revolt got the better of it. The savagery with which the revolt was put down left a lot of scars, but they were not insurmountable. The security measures, however, which visibly told the Shi’a that the regime perceived of the community in toto as potential subversives, and the clear lack of equity in the distribution of resources — from State employment to mosque patronage to repairs from the Iran-Iraq War — meant that the resentments from 1991 never abated. Moreover, Shi’a clerics who spoke up too much — or who just got too popular — would be assassinated; nothing like that happened in the Sunni areas. Salafi clerics who spoke against Saddam would be arrested for a few days and roughed-up, but soon released.

So by the time the U.S. and Britain invade in 2003, you have a society that’s deep into a religious revival, with sectarian tensions at a level with few historical precedents. The middle-class — the bastion of secular nationalism — has been destroyed, and the security sector has been Islamized on its own account and has connections to a powerful underground network of “pure” Salafists, which has been formed partly by regime encouragement and partly because as the regime crumbled it couldn’t contain it even if it wanted to. And the government — whatever its leaders really believed — has been enforcing a version of Islamic law, empowering clerics as community leaders, and producing more religious individuals through the schools, mosques, and the party. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS is promoting its own form of imperialism

Sunny Hundal writes: It seems as though every atrocity committed against the West by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is followed by claims in the media that such attacks are the result of our military action against them. The former mayor of London Ken Livingstone told the BBC yesterday: “All these terrorist attacks, the statements they make on their websites and so on are all about foreign policy.” He added that the French-led military intervention against the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was “coming back to haunt [it].”

This attitude isn’t isolated. Not long after the Paris attacks, Stop the War Coalition, which organized the million-plus march in London against the war in Iraq in 2003, tweeted an article claiming Paris “reaped the whirlwind of Western extremism.” It was hastily deleted. Writing for Salon, foreign-affairs columnist Patrick L. Smith opined, “We brought this on ourselves,” while in The Guardian yesterday, the Al Jazeera English presenter Mehdi Hasan suggested that the Paris attacks were the result of geopolitcal blowback.

Claiming that terror attacks such as those that shook Paris on Nov. 13, are a “blowback” isn’t just offensive to its (mainly Muslim) victims—it misreads the very nature of ISIL. It amounts to an excusal of the terrorist group’s intentions, as if to say that ISIL would not have done any of this if the US, UK, France, and company weren’t so meddlesome. This is a convenient tale, which is told to push a non-interventionist foreign policy, but it doesn’t reflect reality. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How terror fits into ISIS’s plan

Christoph Reuter writes: What calculations have now led IS to perpetrate attacks in the West? For one, it plays into IS hands for Europeans to ratchet up their skepticism of Muslim refugees. For another, IS has positioned itself in the enormous battlefields surrounding its core territories in a way that it would make it difficult for others to launch a ground offensive against the jihadists. Such an offensive would also require a large number of troops. From Western comments, particularly those of the US, Islamic State strategists know that a ground offensive involving Western troops is extremely unlikely.

Should an offensive be launched anyway, though, IS believes that the attack could, paradoxically, help the group on the long term. Ground troops could likely only be deployed with Russia’s approval, and Moscow supports Assad. And if the West were to change course and suddenly intervene in Syria on Assad’s side, all rebels in the country would immediately become enemies of the West. Were that to happen, Islamic State could pose as the last protectors of Sunnis in the region and expand its influence.

The old saying, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, no longer applies in Syria and Iraq. In both combat zones, US efforts have been hampered thus far. In northern Syria, America’s Kurdish ally is unfortunately the enemy of another Washington ally, the Turks. In Iraq, Islamic State’s Shiite enemy is also America’s enemy. Shiite militias, under the military leadership of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, are heavily engaged in the battle against IS, but with their ferocity, they are also pushing more supporters into Islamic State arms.

Taken together, the Sunni-Shiite conflict combined with the Turkish bombardment of Kurdish positions has reduced pressure on IS. To be sure, Islamic State has been forced to accept some losses in recent days: It lost the small northern Iraq city of Sinjar not long ago following a 15 month fight with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. In two places, the Kurds have managed to block the most important road connecting the two IS “metropolises” of Raqqa and Mosul. US fighter bombers have likewise destroyed 116 tanker trucks used by Islamic State to transport its oil. In Iraq, IS has slowly been losing territory ever since it launched a lightning strike to take over the provincial capital of Ramadi, just west of Baghdad, in mid-May. In Syria, meanwhile, IS expansion has largely been halted since the end of the summer.

Yet it is still a long way from exhibiting the convulsions of a collapsing empire. The constant muttering about the end times and apocalyptic battles may serve as good Islamic State PR — with respect to both its followers and to the rest of the world. But if destruction was the only goal being pursued by IS, it wouldn’t try to establish a state, it wouldn’t be careful to avoid damaging grain silos when taking them over, and it wouldn’t pursue scrupulous realpolitik, even with its own enemies.

IS strategists look several moves into the future. To defeat the terror group, the West must do the same. It must bring together pro-regime Syrians with the rebels, a project that will not succeed so long as Assad remains in power and which is made all the more difficult by Russia’s intervention. In Iraq, Sunni and Shiite factions divided by fear and hate must be brought together again — though the West can only help, it is the Iraqis themselves that must achieve this. In short, the West — together with Russia, Iran and the Arab Gulf states — must create the conditions that could make a ground offensive against the jihadists possible in the first place. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘I married an ISIS fighter’

Little is known about daily life for women in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the so-called Islamic State. But three women who took the decision to collude with IS, and even marry IS fighters, managed to escape eventually to Turkey and told their stories to Azadeh Moaveni, a journalist from the New York Times.

Facebooktwittermail

Charles Lister talks about the history of the Syrian jihad

Jihadology: Charles Lister comes back on the show for an in-depth discussion on jihadism in Syria. Some of the topics covered include:

  • Islamism and jihadism in Syria prior to the 2011 uprising
  • The entrance and evolution of Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, and Jaysh al-Islam into what became the Syrian war
  • Why foreign fighters came into the Syrian conflict
  • Why the Islamic State of Iraq decided to enter the war in April 2013 and what it was up to prior to the fitness in January 2014
  • What the growth of ISIS and later IS meant for the other extreme factions – JN, Ahrar, and JI

Click here to listen to this one-hour podcast.

Facebooktwittermail

Raqqa is being slaughtered silently

David Remnick met five young Syrian activists — they work for the group, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), which through it’s website and social media has been reporting on ISIS — and he writes: The members of R.B.S.S. are utterly frustrated with the efforts of the West to defeat both Assad, who has fended off the opposition so far, and ISIS, which has suffered recent losses in Iraq and Syria, but which has proved capable of exacting suffering from Sinai to Beirut to Paris.

“The problem the Syrian people have with the United States is that we are suffering for five years with barrel bombs,” one R.B.S.S. journalist said. “Assad has killed so many innocents, and many people have lost hope. After Assad’s chemical attack, when he crossed the so-called ‘red line,’ the U.S. just took the weapons. It made America look like a liar and weak.

“When you say ‘Raqqa,’ the first thing people think of is ISIS,” he continued. “They forget hundreds of thousands of civilians, normal people like us. I am not a terrorist. There are so many people, normal people, who want to live in a free, democratic Syria. We want to rebuild Syria, and the only way we can do it is through our civil-society group and others like it. If the United States government and other governments want to fight ISIS on social media, their Twitter accounts are seen as propaganda. But when real life is shown through us, and you see what life is like, normal people believe it.”

Talking over the jukebox din and the raucous Saturday night conversations at the bar, Hamza asked that Americans try to imagine a city in which “the 9/11s keep happening month after month, year after year.”

“Daily life is twenty-four-seven warplanes over your head,” another member said. “People now feel more afraid about the idea that all over the world they want to bomb this small city. People are afraid. The city of Kubani is completely destroyed. The people of Raqqa don’t want that. We love our city. The West says, ‘Let’s get the people out and bomb ISIS.’ They can’t. It’s a big prison. Women under forty-five can’t leave without special permission. It’s a tribal area, and females can’t leave without men. ISIS uses the people of Raqqa as a human shield.”

The R.B.S.S. members said the American fighter planes have dropped most of their bombs on targets on the outskirts of the city or they use drones to target leaders of ISIS. They claim that Russian planes, however, have hit a hospital, two critical bridges, and a university. “The problem we have with the air strikes,” one said, “is that their planes are very stupid. They’re not smart bombs.”

The peril for the group is unceasing. When ISIS arrests or executes a member of R.B.S.S. — or someone that they believe might be sympathetic to the group — they make a show of it on social media. One video, a member told me, showed “two friends of ours accused of working for us. And they don’t. ISIS tied them to a tree and shot them. A second video shows the execution of another friend of ours accused of working for us. They strung them up in a tree in an abandoned place and shot them in the head; they made the video to say they died ‘silently.’ They are sending us messages like this all the time.”

Hamza will soon accept an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists in the name of his comrades, living and dead. (I’m on the board of C.P.J., which arranged our meeting.) He will dedicate the award “to our martyrs,” to the “anonymous heroes” of the campaign, and to the people of Raqqa.

“All of us get several threats daily,” Hamza said, finishing his drink. “The last threat against me was from someone in Germany. He said I would be the next one killed. But when I think about our reporters inside Raqqa, and I am outside … I live a normal life, doing normal things. Somehow, I don’t care what will happen to me. Compared to them, I am doing nothing.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Former terrorism adviser tells Obama: Change your strategy

Michael Vickers writes: One of the duties of a senior policy adviser is to tell the president when his strategy isn’t working. By any measure, our strategy in Iraq and Syria is not succeeding, or is not succeeding fast enough. We are playing a long game, when a more rapid and disruptive strategy is required. In my role as a senior counterterrorism adviser to both Presidents Bush and Obama, I played a major role in our counterterrorism campaigns against Al Qaeda, and in the Osama bin Laden raid; earlier, I was the principal strategist for the covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Were I still in government, this is some of what I would say.

First, time is not on our side. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is not just a regional insurgent army. It is a terrorist group with global reach and the leader of global jihad. We cannot rely on intelligence to disrupt all plots, and ISIL cannot be contained any more than Al Qaeda could prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The flow of Western passport holders in and out of Syria and the sanctuary ISIL enjoys there to train operatives and plan attacks is a clear and present danger. ISIL must be disrupted, dismantled and defeated. Whatever we would do if ISIL made good on its threat to attack Washington, D.C. and New York, we should instead do now, before the attack occurs.

Second, we need a “Syria-first” strategy to replace the Iraq-first strategy we’ve been pursuing. So far, two-thirds of coalition airstrikes have been in Iraq, as have the bulk of our capacity building efforts. But it’s now clear that the threat in Iraq is local, while in Syria, it’s global. It’s Syria where ISIL has its principal sanctuary, and that’s where the battle for the future of the Middle East is now taking place.

Third, we need a strategy that draws its inspiration from President Bush’s 2001 Afghanistan campaign and President Reagan’s Afghanistan strategy in the 1980s. ISIL, as its name implies, is a de facto state. It holds territory, controls population, and funds its operations from resources that it exploits on territory it controls. If there’s one thing the American military knows how to do it is defeating an opposing force trying to hold ground. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Women targeted as hate crime against British Muslims soars following Paris attacks

The Independent reports: Muslims living in Britain have suffered more than 100 racial attacks since the terrorist atrocities in Paris, figures prepared for ministers reveal.

A report to the Government’s working group on anti-Muslim hatred, seen by The Independent, shows a spike in Islamophobic hate crime of more than 300 per cent, to 115, in the week following the killings on November 13 in France.

Most victims of the UK hate crimes were Muslim girls and women aged from 14 to 45 in traditional Islamic dress. The perpetrators were mainly white males aged from 15 to35. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Magical thinking about ISIS

Adam Shatz writes: There has been a lot of magical thinking about IS. Liberal hawks, like Roger Cohen in the New York Times, have called for a ground offensive in the usual Churchillian terms – something no Western leader has any appetite (or sizeable constituency) for after Afghanistan and Iraq. Leftists have demanded an end to the drone war, a breaking of ties with Saudi Arabia and the creation of a Palestinian state. According to a writer in the online magazine Jadaliyya, only ‘hallucinating’ neoconservatives could argue that the attacks target the West or France for what they are, rather than for what they do. But IS says very clearly in its communiqué that it’s attacking Paris both for ‘the crusader campaign’ and as ‘the capital of prostitution and vice’ – and it seems obtuse not to take it at its word. To be sure, anger over Western policies is among the drivers of recruitment for groups like IS, but IS is not a purely reactive organisation: it is a millenarian movement with a distinctly apocalyptic agenda. As Elias Sanbar, a Palestinian diplomat in Paris, points out, ‘One of the most striking things about Islamic State is that it has no demands. All the movements we’ve known, from the Vietcong to the FLN to the Palestinians, had demands: if the occupation ends, if we get independence, the war ends. But Daesh’s project is to eliminate the frontiers of Sykes-Picot. It’s like the Biblical revisionism of the settlers, who invent a history that never existed.’ The creation of a Palestinian state is a necessity, above all for Palestinians, but it’s not likely to make much of an impression on IS, which rejects the Middle Eastern state system entirely.

A far more subtle – but in some ways just as wishful – analysis has come from Olivier Roy, who argued in the New York Times that the Paris attacks are a sign of desperation rather than strength:

Isis’s reach is bounded; there are no more areas in which it can extend by claiming to be a defender of Sunni Arab populations. To the north, there are Kurds; to the east, Iraqi Shiites; to the west, Alawites, now protected by the Russians. And all are resisting it. To the south, neither the Lebanese, who worry about the influx of Syrian refugees, nor the Jordanians, who are still reeling from the horrid execution of one of their pilots, nor the Palestinians have succumbed to any fascination for Isis. Stalled in the Middle East, Isis is rushing headlong into globalised terrorism.

It’s an intellectually seductive and almost reassuring argument: IS appears to be on the march, but it’s actually in its death throes, having suffered losses in Kobani and Sinjar. But it’s also an argument that has been made before. After 11 September, it was widely argued that al-Qaida attacked the ‘far enemy’ in the West because it had failed to defeat ‘the near enemy’, the regimes of the Middle East. Today that theory seems less credible. Al-Qaida experienced a regional revival, thanks in large part to the Iraq war. And for IS, an offshoot of al-Qaida in Iraq, the distinction between near and far enemies is porous: all apostates are enemies. Although it has conquered a significant piece of territory – something bin Laden and Zawahiri never dared attempt – its power is only partly rooted in the caliphate. It is as keen to conquer virtual as actual territory. It draws on a growing pool of recruits who discovered not only IS but Islam itself online, in chatrooms and through messaging services where distance vanishes at the tap of a keyboard. Indeed, the genius of IS has been to overcome the distance between two very different crises of citizenship, and weave them into a single narrative of Sunni Muslim disempowerment: the exclusion of young Muslims in Europe, and the exclusion of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq.

Roy is right that IS can’t ‘win’ in any conventional sense, but it doesn’t have to expand the caliphate in order to remain in business. In the global society of the spectacle, it’s on a roll. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Paris attacks and other assaults seen as evidence of a strategic shift by ISIS

The New York Times reports: The recent attacks in Paris and Beirut and the downing of a Russian airliner in Egypt were the first results of a centrally planned terrorism campaign by a wing of the Islamic State leadership that oversees “external” targets, according to American and European intelligence officials.

The Islamic State’s overseas operations planning cell offers strategic guidance, training and funding for actions aimed at inflicting the maximum possible civilian casualties, but leaves the task of picking the time, place and manner of the attacks largely to trusted operatives on the ground, the officials said.

Carrying out attacks far from the Islamic State’s base in Iraq and Syria represents an evolution of the group’s previous model of exhorting followers to take up arms wherever they live — but without significant help from the group. And it upends the view held by the United States and its allies of the Islamic State as a regional threat, with a new assessment that the group poses a whole new set of risks.

Debris from a Russian airliner downed in Egypt in October, killing all 224 people on board. The downing and the recent attacks in Paris and Beirut were the first results of a terrorism campaign by a wing of the Islamic State, according to American and European intelligence officials. Credit Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters
“Once the Islamic State possessed territory that provided them sanctuary and allowed them to act with impunity, they like other jihadist groups inevitably turned to external attacks,” said William Wechsler, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and until last January a top counterterrorism official at the Pentagon.

One possible motivation of the change in strategy by the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, is to seize leadership of the global jihad from Al Qaeda — from which the Islamic State broke away in 2013. The attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali on Friday was probably carried out by two Qaeda-linked groups, suggesting, as one senior European counterterrorism official put it, “The race is on between ISIS and Al Qaeda to see who can attack the West the best.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Just like any other political entity, ISIS is capable of miscalculations

Faisal Al Yafai writes: Analysts of terror groups like ISIL often make one of two framing errors. They either perceive the group as inherently irrational, lashing out without thought or planning. Or they assume extensive strategic thinking on the part of the group, imagining them to be cunning and far-sighted, able to intuit how governments will react to their provocations and planning accordingly.

But terror groups are at root political groups and the dynamics of power, planning and policy remain constant. As with political groups, there are disagreements that lead to miscalculations, decisions that turn out to be erroneous or counterproductive.

It is in that light that the Paris attacks should be seen. For ISIL may have miscalculated the impact of the attack – not in France or in the West, but within the militant group itself.

The Paris attacks represent a new departure for ISIL. The distinction between Al Qaeda and ISIL, which has superseded Al Qaeda as the dominant group in international jihad, lies in their political ambitions.

In Afghanistan, Al Qaeda had sought to create a base from which to launch attacks against the West in order to force the West to change policy and leave the Muslim world. Al Qaeda’s focus was not on creating a state and seeking to draw recruits to it.

ISIL, on the other hand, claims to already have a fledgling regime. And their insistence on declaring it a “caliphate” and referring to it as Al Dawla, Arabic for “state”, suggests they see themselves as creating an effective state, one that can defend its borders and run its own internal affairs.

The Paris attacks, then, are initially puzzling. Why seek to provoke a war while still in the process of building and securing a state? [Continue reading…]

Whenever anyone talks about “giving the terrorists what they want,” the presupposition is that a reaction that matches ISIS’s expectations and hopes will necessarily serve its interests — as though ISIS is incapable of acting against its own interests.

Moreover, implicit in the idea of “giving the terrorists what they want,” is the notion that this means falling into a carefully laid trap and thus coming under the control of ISIS.

But while it’s important to try and understand ISIS’s intentions and expectations, the only question that actually needs to be asked of any strategy for combating ISIS is whether it can accomplish its goals.

Facebooktwittermail

Will Turkey get tougher on ISIS?

Joseph Dana writes: Turkey is slowly starting to reveal how it intends to fight ISIL, both inside the country and beyond. Last weekend, Turkish security forces arrested three suspected ISIL fighters including one Belgian national of Moroccan origin with alleged ties to last week’s attacks in Paris.

While the European Union is moving quickly to tighten border controls and the United States and its anti-ISIL coalition allies are devising new military plans to bomb ISIL positions in Syria and Iraq, Turkey’s response to the crisis has been slow and scattered. Considering the outsize role Turkey continues to play in the ISIL saga as a primary transit country into and out of Syria, this is disconcerting.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister-turned-president, spent the last decade crafting a foreign policy propelled by the notion that Turkey was an emerging regional superpower. In 2011, Mr Erdogan threw Turkey’s weight firmly behind the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, betting on former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi’s ability to lead a post-Arab Spring Middle East. Concurrently, Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) developed a verbose anti-Bashar Al Assad stance regarding the civil war in Syria. As such, Turkey became the leading proponent for regime change in Damascus and engendered a close relationship with the rebels fighting Mr Assad’s forces. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran’s Guard simulates capture of Al-Aqsa Mosque

The Washington Post reports: Paramilitary forces from Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard held a war game simulating the capture of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the holy site that has been at the center of the tensions in Israel and the West Bank.

Iranian state media on Saturday said the forces stormed and “liberated” a replica of the mosque in the exercise. It said thousands of members of the Basij, the paramilitary unit of the Guard, participated in the exercise outside the holy city of Qom in central Iran.

The symbolic operations were backed up by Guard helicopters, drones and planes that bombed hypothetical enemy positions before ground troops captured the replica of the mosque. Official photos showed one of the troops going to the top of the dome and waving an Iranian flag and a red flag, a symbol of martyrdom. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Don’t let Paris attacks stop COP21 climate change deal, pleads Obama

The Guardian reports: Barack Obama has moved to ensure that the Paris attacks do not sabotage a crucial climate change summit in the city next week, urging his fellow leaders to attend and strike a new deal on global warming.

The US president spoke out amid concerns that security fears in Paris coupled with an understandable deflection of French attention away from the imminent two-week summit might undermine chances for a historic agreement to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

“I think it’s absolutely vital for every country, every leader, to send a signal that the viciousness of a handful of killers does not stop the world from doing vital business,” Obama said.

He added that world leaders had to show the murderous adversaries who killed at least 130 people “that we’re not afraid”. And the first chance to do that is next Monday, when the Paris climate change talks, known as COP21, start.

The Paris attacks have cast a deep shadow over COP21 – demonstrations have been banned and security has been stepped up – though none of the 130-plus heads of state and government due to attend has yet pulled out.

France has made a huge play of preparing for the summit, which is supposed to achieve a new global deal to curb emissions from 2020 and prevent the planet from catastrophic overheating. But in the wake of the 13 November attacks, there have been concerns that the French political leadership, and president François Hollande in particular, might have other things on their mind.

Privately, French officials insist they are determined not to let their agenda be set by terrorists. And some observers are hoping that the threat might galvanisethe talks to greater solidarity and urgency. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The refugees and the new war

Michael Ignatieff writes: According to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, since September 11 the US has taken in 784,000 refugees and of these only three have been arrested subsequently on terrorism-related charges.

Fear makes for bad strategy. A better policy starts by remembering a better America. In January 1957, none other than Elvis Presley sang a gospel tune called “There Will Be Peace in the Valley” on The Ed Sullivan Show to encourage Americans to welcome and donate to Hungarian refugees. After the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam, President Ford ordered an interagency task force to resettle 130,000 Vietnamese refugees; and later Jimmy Carter found room in America for Vietnamese boat people. In 1999, in a single month, the US processed four thousand Kosovar refugees through Fort Dix, New Jersey.

These examples show what can be done if the president authorizes rapid refugee clearance in US military installations, and if the US were to process and repatriate refugees directly from the frontline states of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. As Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative has been urging since September, direct processing in the camps themselves will cut down on deaths by drowning in the Mediterranean. If Europe and the United States show them a safe way out, refugees won’t take their chances by paying smugglers using rubber dinghies.

The Obama administration should say yes to the UNHCR appeal to settle 65,000 refugees on an expedited basis. Refugee agencies across the United States — as well as religious communities from all faiths — have said they will take the lead in resettlement and integration. If the Liberal government in Canada can take in 25,000 refugees directly from Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, and process their security clearance at Canadian army bases, the US can do the same with 65,000.

Taking 65,000 people will only relieve a small portion of a refugee flow of 4.1 million, but it is an essential political gesture designed to encourage other allies — Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina — and other immigrant countries to do their part. The strategic goal is to relieve the pressure on the three frontline states. Refugee resettlement by the US also acknowledges a fact that the refugees themselves are trying to tell us: even if peace eventually comes to their tormented country, there will be no life for all of them back home.

Once the US stops behaving like a bemused bystander, watching a neighbor trying to put out a fire, it can then put pressure on allies and adversaries to make up the shortfall in funding for refugee programs run by the UNHCR and the World Food Program. One of the drivers of the exodus this summer was a sudden reduction in refugee food aid caused by shortfalls in funding. Even now these agencies remain short of what they need to provide shelter and food to the people flooding out of Syria.

Now that ISIS has brought down a Russian aircraft over Sinai and bombed civilians in Paris, Beirut, and Ankara, the US needs to use its refugee policy to help stabilize its allies in the region. The presumption that it can sit out the refugee crisis makes a hugely unwise bet on the stability of Jordan, where refugees amount to 25 percent of the total population; and Lebanon, where largely Sunni refugees, who have hardly any camps, are already destabilizing the agonizingly fragile multiconfessional order; and Turkey, where the burdens of coping with nearly two million refugees are driving the increasingly authoritarian Erdoğan regime into the arms of Vladimir Putin. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Roots of ISIS go deeper than the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Since most of the victims of ISIS have been Muslims and since much of the group’s conduct and philosophy are widely viewed as a perversion of Islam, one of the commonly cited pieces of evidence supporting the view that ISIS is not genuinely religious, is the fact that it is run by Iraqi former Baathists. On that basis, the organization’s religious trappings could be seen as merely a cloak for a political project.

In a discussion on the BBC World Service, however, Hassan Hassan and Jason Burke underline that the Baathists in ISIS are indeed religiously driven.

Hassan Hassan: It’s well known that the top echelon of ISIS is dominated by former Baathists who served during the Saddam Hussein regime in one way or another and that also applies to some elements within Jabhat al-Nusra in fact.

For ISIS, the Saddamist elements within ISIS also should be viewed as religious zealots. They are not any more secular Saddamist —

Owen Bennett Jones: I’ve wondered about that. You think they’ve genuinely come around to this jihadi point of view…

Hassan Hassan: There’s no doubt that’s the case. The process of transformation that these people went through is quite clear.

Jason Burke: I was in Iraq in the 90s on a number of occasions and the vision from outside was of the secular Baathist state of Saddam Hussein. Whereas he had already by the mid-90s worked out that the broad shifts in the rest of the Arab world were towards a much more religious posture — culturally, politically, otherwise — and he was tacking very much that way.

I don’t think for a moment that he himself was in any way pious, but he launched a “faith campaign” as he called it. He talked about building the biggest mosque in the world. There was some huge construction under way in Baghdad that I used to go and look at. He talked about writing the Quran in his own blood. There was lots of religious programming on the TV.

So, at the same time of course you had the UN sanctions that were on Iraq. And I remember going to schools and hearing school children singing songs — the normal stuff about fighting the Zionists and so forth, but also against the U.S. and the West and so on. So the process of radicalization, if you like, or Islamization, was well advanced even before 2003 and an invasion that effectively ousted the Sunnis from their position of dominance.

And just a very telling anecdote: When I was in Baghdad after the war I spent a day with an insurgent fighter who was very much in that kind of Sunni nationalist mode and he clearly professed himself to be a devout Muslim, but he still didn’t like what he called the terrorists.

So, there were still all sorts of different currents at that stage, but I think it is certainly the case, as Hassan was saying, that a lot of the senior Baathists and a lot of the society more generally Shia and Sunni, was very much more advanced down the path towards a religious resurgence than people would think.

Amid the ongoing debate about how to tackle ISIS, many observers prefer to sidestep that question by pointing out that ISIS would not have come into existence had it not been for the disastrous choice the U.S. made by invading Iraq in 2003.

Much as this observation is valid, it also has the effect of reinforcing the dogma which portrays the ills of the world as all ultimately being products of America’s excessive military power and the misuse of that power.

Devout believers of this political dogma, especially those who are themselves Americans and who can easily point to the destructive impact of decades of U.S. meddling in global affairs, on this basis commonly conclude that little else really needs to be understood about the world than that America is the problem.

From this perspective, the best the U.S. can do is to get out of the way. If America is the problem, then non-interference is the panacea. Moreover, a common assumption is that even if chaos continues to prevail, U.S. involvement will only make the situation worse and thus we can and should disengage from the affairs of the Middle East.

I have little doubt that those Americans who subscribe to this view see it as a foreign-policy equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, thinking that the only way the U.S. can do no harm in the world is by attending to its domestic concerns and assuming a much more modest role on the global stage.

This sentiment, however, licenses ignorance and the ready acceptance of simplistic analysis — such as much of that now being applied to ISIS. It also facilitates the propagation of conspiracy theories.

But anyone who wants to seriously think about ISIS — to understand how it emerged and how it is evolving — needs to set aside this perspective that insistently overstates American power.

If we only see ISIS as a product of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, we’re not going to see how its emergence needs to be placed in a wider historical perspective: as a product of the failure of Arab secular nationalism and authoritarian rule.

The uprisings of 2011 during the Arab Spring posed a threat to every single government across the region. What has in large part saved most of them from the threat of democracy is the subsequent growth of a threat from terrorism.

ISIS as a reactionary political force has played a major role in shifting the regional debate from a contest between dictatorship and democracy, to a bloody struggle between stability and chaos.

Those who are threatened by ISIS’s expansion nevertheless also benefit from its existence. Stability becomes imperative only when instability is seen as the sole alternative.

This is how Bashar al-Assad, in spite of destroying much of Syria and driving half the population out of their homes, is succeeding in keeping tyranny alive.

Facebooktwittermail