Category Archives: Syria

Palestinian refugees being sent by force back to Syria

Nina Strochlic writes: Ahmad is invisible. He uses a fake name, rarely ventures outside, and moves his family between apartments in Jordan’s capital of Amman frequently, sometimes at a moment’s notice if he thinks his cover has been blown.

Ahmad is a refugee twice over. His family fled land that now belongs to Israel for refuge in Syria, where he grew up. Now, he’s hiding from his foster country’s civil war in Jordan. Meanwhile, residents of his former neighborhood in Damascus who couldn’t escape survive by eating grass.

Ahmad is one of the estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria living undercover in Syria’s neighboring countries, all but one of which explicitly turn away Palestinians at the border. In Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, hundreds of people like Ahmad have been caught and deported back into Syria.

A mutual acquaintance took me to meet Ahmad on a Friday. The narrow streets of his neighborhood in eastern Amman were empty — I later learned our visit had been timed to coincide with Friday’s prayers, when a foreign visitor attracts less notice. We parked down the block and walked to his apartment, which was completely obscured behind a tall gate.

Tracking down this hidden demographic feels like making contact with a sleeper cell: phone calls come in from unknown numbers; fake names are used; middle men choose anonymous meeting spots. These people have everything to lose if they’re discovered, so they remain undercover, trusting their existence to only a few outsiders.

Palestinians refugees from Syria — known as PRS — are the shadow refugees of a four-year crisis with no end in sight. They are flat-out barred from entering any of Syria’s neighbors other than Turkey. If they do find a way in, they’re rejected by humanitarian organizations, banned from refugee camps, and face deportation back into Syria’s nightmare. [Continue reading…]

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83% of Syria is outside the control of the government

IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review reports: Territory fully controlled by President Assad’s forces has shrunk by 18% between 1 January and 10 August 2015 to 29,797 km2, roughly a sixth of the country, according to the latest data insights produced by IHS Conflict Monitor.

In a recently televised speech, President Assad admitted it was necessary to focus on holding certain areas of greater strategic importance, while sacrificing others. The key areas which Assad cannot afford to lose include the capital Damascus, the Alawite coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartous, and the city of Homs as the vital connection between them. These are likely to be defended, even at the expense of losing other major cities like Aleppo or Dar’a.

Assad also stated that manpower shortages were the greatest challenge to the government’s war effort. The Syrian Army is believed to have lost around 50% of its pre-war strength of 300,000. Many of the remaining soldiers are very young Alawite conscripts, sent to the front lines with minimal training and low morale. [Continue reading…]

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There may be reasons for hope in the Middle East

Henri J. Barkey and David F. Gordon write: The winds of change are unexpectedly blowing through the Levant.

In the aftermath of the Iran nuclear agreement, there was a broad expectation, both in the region and beyond, that sectarian tensions and conflict would intensify and deepen the proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In the United States, even some strong supporters of the nuclear deal emphasized that Washington needed to respond aggressively to the inevitable push by Tehran to expand its regional influence at the expense of traditional U.S. allies.

What we are seeing on the ground, however, looks quite different. There is an increasing possibility for new geopolitical alignments throughout the region. The confluence of the growing fear in both Saudi Arabia and Iran of the threat posed by Islamic State; the weakening of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policy shift to cooperate with the United States in Syria, and Moscow’s and Washington’s growing shared interests in steering the Saudi-Iran rivalry onto a less escalatory path, while also creating a broad coalition against Islamic State, is creating real political fluidity. [Continue reading…]

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The desparate journeys of tens of thousands of people seeking refuge in Europe

The New York Times reports: Aieh is blond and scrappy, with an elfin face and a heart condition. She is 2 and a half years old, but looks more like six months. Her mother, Samar Joukhadar, has carried her from Syria in a pouch hanging on her chest. Her goal is to get her to a doctor who can operate on her heart.

For now, they sit at the railroad track in Idomeni, Greece, waiting to cross the border to the Gevgelija transit camp in Macedonia.

Aieh’s father is a doctor, but the officials at the Syrian government-owned hospital where he worked hassled him until he fled to Yemen, leaving his family behind, Ms. Joukhadar said. He is working in a hospital there. But, she said, that hospital is not capable of doing the operation her daughter needs.

Besides, she says: “I want to find somewhere where there are no Arabs. Europeans are better people. The Arabs hurt us a lot.”

Europe was not their first choice, Ms. Joukhadar said. She tried to find a doctor in Saudi Arabia who would do the operation, but she could not.

Ms. Joukhadar left Syria with her three children and her brother and his two children. They went to Turkey and tried to leave from Mersin, a city on the Mediterranean coast, by boat in December 2014. But the smugglers stole her money — $12,000. She went to the police and gave them names and photographs, but nothing happened, she said.

Finally, they were able to leave from Izmir by dinghy, paying $1,200 per person. They landed on Lesbos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea that has seen a surge in refugees and migrants since the beginning of the year.

As she spoke, Aieh fidgeted and then started to cry. A cousin, Sidra, 15, took her into her arms and fed her a bottle, quieting her down.

Once they reached Athens, they slept on the streets for five days, Ms. Joukhadar said. She made a budget of 50 euros a day for herself, her brother and the five children between them. With that, they were able to eat one meal a day, usually a chicken and potato sandwich.

She had not spoken to her husband in four or five months, she said. [Continue reading…]

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Second commander of Syrian rebels assassinated in two weeks

McClatchy reports: A key commander of the U.S.-supported Syrian rebel forces was assassinated in a car bomb attack in southern Turkey Wednesday, a sign that the war raging next door is spilling across the border again.

The target of the attack was Col. Jemil Radoon, a defected Syrian Army officer who lives in the ancient city of Antakya. Turkish officials said he had just turned on the ignition of his black Hyundai hatchback when a bomb exploded. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Turkish government officials blamed the Assad regime in Syria and said it was part of a campaign to assassinate rebel officers. Other defected officers are also targeted, a security official said, citing field intelligence. [Continue reading…]

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The Arab Spring was a revolution of the hungry

Thanassis Cambanis writes: Early in the Tahrir Square revolution, a group of retired Egyptian generals sat poolside at Cairo’s Gezira Club and worried about whether the country’s ruling elite could survive a popular uprising. It was February 2011, a week before President Hosni Mubarak was toppled. Millions of freshly politicized Egyptians had already taken to the streets. And yet, some of these career security men were unfazed.

“The only thing we really need to worry about is a revolution of the hungry,” said one, a retired Air Force general. “That would be the end of us.”

As it turned out, it took less than four years for Egypt’s dictatorship to reconstitute itself, crushing the hope for real change among the people. In no small part, the regime’s resilience was due to its firm grasp of bread politics. The ruler who controls the main staples of life — bread and fuel — often controls everything else, too.

Nonetheless, the specter of a “revolution of the hungry” still worries authoritarian rulers today, in Egypt and throughout the Arab world. Roughly put, the idea is shorthand for an uprising that brings together not only the traditional cast of political and religious dissidents but also pits a far greater number of poor, uneducated, and apolitical citizens against the state.

Look across the region, and regimes have good reason to be afraid. Even in countries where obesity is widespread, people suffer from low-quality medical care and malnutrition due to a lack of healthy food.

The basic equation is stark: The Arab world cannot feed itself. Rulers obsessed with security have created a twisted web of importers and bakeries whose aim is not to feed the population efficiently or nutritiously but simply to maintain the regime and stave off that much feared revolution of the hungry. Vast subsidies eat up the lion’s share of national budgets. [Continue reading…]

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Germany is the first European country to free Syrian refugees from a draconian bureaucratic ‘trap’

Quartz reports: Germany, which has a better track record than most European countries on sheltering refugees, has made a move to address one of the more lunatic aspects of the European immigration crisis. The country has said (link in German) it will stop sending away refugees of the five-year war in Syria, and instead process their asylum claims in Germany.

Why doesn’t that already happen? It’s the result of a 2003 piece of legislation that human rights organizations have long been describing as a “trap.”

The legislation is called the Dublin Protocol, and was designed to stop migrants traveling through Europe to countries with favorable regimes before claiming asylum. If people need asylum, the argument ran, they should be claiming it straight away — and the state in which they do so should remain responsible for processing it.

There is a huge problem with this logic, however, and many northern European countries have chosen to turn a blind eye to it: geography. Most people fleeing from the wars in Syria or Afghanistan, as well as those trying to get to Europe for economic reasons, come by land or by sea. The land route brings them through Turkey, which is not a member of the EU, to Greece and Bulgaria, which are.

The sea routes, which are much more perilous and have led to thousands of deaths this year alone, lead migrants to Greece, to Italy, or to the islands of Lampedusa and Malta. Without the funds or paperwork necessary, most asylum claimants aren’t able to fly into the airports of northern European countries. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. constrained by its unwillingness to talk to Islamists fighting against ISIS in Syria

The New York Times reports: A rebel group with thousands of fighters, political clout and close ties to key regional powers has emerged as one of the most powerful opposition forces in Syria in recent months. It has vowed to fight the Islamic State and called for engagement with the West.

But despite a long struggle by the United States to find a viable opposition in Syria to counter President Bashar al-Assad and fight the Islamic State, the Obama administration has shown no interest in working with the group, Ahrar al-Sham, or the Free Men of Syria.

The problem for the United States is Ahrar al-Sham’s grounding in militant Islam — a concern that has also dogged previous efforts to find partners in Syria.

Confronted yet again with the reality in Syria — where the government, the Islamic State and an array of insurgents are fighting a complex civil war — some analysts and former United States officials say it is increasingly clear that to effectively challenge the Islamic State and influence the future of the country will require at least cautiously engaging with groups like Ahrar al-Sham.

“They are in a gray zone, but in a civil war if you are not willing to talk to factions in the gray zone, you’ll have precious few people to talk to,” said Robert S. Ford, a former United States ambassador to Syria now at the Middle East Institute.

“I do not advocate giving any material support to Ahrar, much less lethal material assistance, but given their prominence in the northern and central fronts, they will have a big role in any peace talks, so we should find a channel to begin talking to them,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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New report of ISIS using poison gas in Syria

The New York Times reports: The Islamic State may have used chemical agents in an attack against civilians and rival insurgents in northern Syria late last week, according to local rebels and an international aid group.

The assault on Friday in the city of Marea involved more than 50 shells and was centered on civilian areas, the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian group, reported.

After the attack, the group’s field hospital received more than 50 patients, 23 of whom, including some children, showed symptoms of chemical exposure, including coughing, vomiting, wheezing and severe itching. Some also had blisters associated with mustard gas, the society said in a statement.

The report was corroborated by local rebel forces, who claimed that shells had been fired from Isnibil, a village east of Marea that is controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

“At least half of the 50 mortar and artillery shells fired by ISIS contained poisonous mustard gas,” said Hussein Nasir, a spokesman for a Syrian rebel group, the Shami Front. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS plunders and destroys the heritage of the Middle East

The New York Times reports: Islamic State militants have razed a fifth-century Roman Catholic monastery and blown up one of the best-preserved first-century temples in Palmyra, the ancient Syrian city that is one of the world’s most important archaeological sites, according to government officials and local activists.

And that was just this past week — in one Syrian province.

Much like the grinding slaughter of human beings, the ravaging of irreplaceable antiquities in Syria and Iraq has become something of a grim wartime routine. Yet the cumulative destruction of antiquities has reached staggering levels that represent an irreversible loss to world heritage and future scholarship, archaeological experts and antiquities officials say.

It has accelerated in recent months as the self-declared Islamic State has stepped up its deliberate demolition and looting, piling onto battle damage wreaked by government forces and other insurgents in Syria’s four-year civil war. That has brought antiquities lovers on all sides to a new level of despair.

“I feel very weak, very pessimistic,” Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s director general of antiquities, said Monday in a phone interview from Damascus, adding that with his inability to protect Palmyra, “I became the saddest director general in the world.”

Syria’s antiquities, including cities that for thousands of years have been among the world’s most important crossroads, are “not for the government or the opposition, they are for all Syrians,” he said. “It’s for you also — for American people, for European people, for Japanese people. It’s all your heritage.”

The wrecking of the Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra over the weekend was a new shock for Syrians and for experts and antiquities enthusiasts worldwide. It was the first time since seizing Palmyra from the government in May that Islamic State militants had destroyed a major part of the sprawling complex of stone buildings that still rise majestically from the desert 20 centuries after the city’s heyday. [Continue reading…]

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Assad is more than happy to play a waiting game

Hassan Hassan writes: During this month, a military escalation by both sides of the Syrian conflict has led to a dramatic increase in bloodshed. For weeks, the Assad regime has been pounding Zabadani, a city near the Lebanese border, and Douma, near Damascus. The rebels have shelled the Shia villages of Foua and Kafraya in Idlib.

The regime’s offensive this year has probably been the worst in terms of human casualties and devastation. An air raid on a marketplace in Douma left more than 100 civilians dead and hundreds injured. The humanitarian situation in Zabadani was similarly catastrophic: Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria, described “unprecedented levels of destruction” in the city, the last of the rebels’ strongholds in the Qalamoun region.

The escalation prompted speculations that the two sides may be trying to prop up their bargaining positions after Iran and Russia initiated a flurry of diplomatic activities. On Thursday, Reuters quoted a western diplomat as saying that the increased hostilities were the warring sides’ way of preparing for a political solution: “It is still fragile, but it is the most concerted move yet to find a political solution. Everyone needs a political solution. Everyone is exhausted.”

But the statement appears to echo the hopes of the backers of the opposition rather than the thinking inside and outside Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Beheading of Khaled al-Asaad, keeper of Palmyra, unites Syria in condemnation; ISIS blows up temple

The Guardian reports: Islamic State’s execution of Khaled al-Asaad, the keeper of Palmyra’s extraordinary cultural artefacts, has inspired a rare consensus among Syria’s other political factions.

The archaeologist and historian reportedly opposed the 2011 uprising against the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, but his murder has provoked grief and condemnation from regime loyalists and opposition activists. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Militants from the Islamic State set off explosions at a temple in the ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria, activists and government officials said on Sunday, continuing a pattern of destruction that they have visited upon historical sites across the territory they control there and in Iraq.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist and monitoring group based in Britain, said Sunday in a statement that Islamic State fighters detonated “a large quantity of explosives” that they had arranged around the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the most grand and well-preserved structures in the sprawling complex of ruins. A government official told reporters that it was heavily damaged by the blast.

The temple stood “dozens of meters” away from a Roman amphitheater where the Islamic State held a mass execution, killing 25 prisoners, in a video released last month, the activist group said. The entire ancient city of Palmyra is a Unesco World Heritage site. [Continue reading…]

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Most of the drivers of regional destruction have little to do with Iranian-Saudi rivalry

Rami G Khouri writes: [Regional] destruction is painfully visible every day in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain, and Yemen, at the very least. This spectacle of multiple fragmenting states is bad enough; it is made even worse by the latest troubling development — it is too early to call it a trend — which is the spectacle of repeated bomb attacks and killings of government officials and security forces in three of the most important regional powers that should be stabilizing forces in the Middle East: Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Add to this the ongoing war in Yemen, and the erratic battle against “Islamic State” (ISIS) forces in Syria, Iraq and other tiny pockets of ISIS presence around the region, the massive refugee flows and the stresses they cause, and the dangerous sectarian dimensions of some of the confrontations underway, and we end up with a very complex and violent regional picture that cannot possibly be explained primarily as a consequence of Iranian-Saudi rivalries.

A more complete explanation of the battered Arab region today must include accounting for several other mega-tends: the impact of the last twenty-fix years of non-stop American military attacks, threats and sanctions from Libya to Afghanistan; the radicalizing impact of sixty-seven years of non-stop Zionist colonization and militarism against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and other Arabs; the hollowing out of Arab economic and governance systems by three generations of military-led, amateurish and corruption-riddled mismanaged governance that deprived citizens of their civic and political rights and pushed them to assert instead the primacy of their sectarian and tribal identities; and, the catalytic force of the 2003 Anglo-American led war on Iraq that opened the door for all these forces and others yet — like lack of water, jobs, and electricity that make normal daily life increasingly difficult — to combine into the current situation of widespread national polarization and violence.

Most of these drivers of the current regional condition have little to do with Iranian-Saudi sensitivities, and much more to do with decades of frail statehood, sustained and often violent Arab authoritarianism, denied citizenship, distorted development, and continuous regional and global assaults. [Continue reading…]

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The world stands by as Assad continues killing his own people

BILD am SONNTAG reports: As coroner Dr. Abed Tawab Shahrour (50) opens the blue rubbish bag, once again he thinks, “Please, not another child”. But contained within this makeshift body bag in the Pathology Department of the University Hospital of Aleppo lies the small body of Hadi Zahrour, lips dark purple, his face contorted in agony. Stuck to the dead boy’s forehead is a Post-It. Someone has written the number 2160 on it by hand. “Brown eyes, fair skin, under ten years old. Death caused by inhalation of toxic substances” will later appear in an eight-line report on number 2160. The dark-haired child’s file offers no further information. Here, on the tables at the morgue, there are too many victims of dictator Bashar al-Assad (49).

At that time, in 2013, Dr. Shahrour was Chief Pathologist at the University Hospital of Aleppo. He secretly took a photo of the dead child with his Nokia 5130. “I kept it so that later I could tell the world what is happening to my people”, says the doctor.

He is one of four witnesses interviewed by BILD am SONNTAG. None of them started out as revolutionaries. The only way to be awarded their posts was to be law-abiding members of Assad’s Baath Party. At the beginning of the Syrian revolution, they worked for the regime until, in the face of the atrocities they were witnessing and at the risk of their own lives, they switched sides. By doing so, they put themselves and their families at risk, lost their livelihoods and were forced to leave their homes.

We meet Dr. Shahrour in Turkey, to where he fled. The doctor tells us about 19th March two years ago, the day when Hadi ceased to be a cheerful schoolboy and became just another number in Assad’s death registers. In Khan al-Assal, a small suburb of Aleppo, a poison gas attack at seven o’ clock in the morning killed at least 13 people in addition to Hadi and injured approximately 120 others. On that spring day, seven months had passed since Barack Obama’s famous “red line” speech. In it, the US president warned of military intervention if Assad continued to use poison gas against his own people.

Five months later still, up to 1,700 people died in Ghouta in Damascus after an attack with the nerve agent sarin, and many more have followed – right up until the present day. U.N. inspectors dispatched to the scene were allegedly not able to find adequate proof of who was responsible for the attacks. Since Khan al-Assal, the delegation has not even travelled to Syria. “For security reasons”, according to the final report.

Three years after Obama’s speech, Syria lies in ruins. Every week, war crimes are still perpetrated: barrel bombs, prohibited under international law of war, continue to fall on schools, neighbourhoods and marketplaces. [Continue reading…]

Peter Bouckaert writes: Last Sunday’s bombing by the Syrian government of a busy marketplace in the town of Douma, killing at least 112 of its own citizens, was one of deadliest attacks in an ever-more-devastating conflict. The four strikes came during the busy midday period, as if to maximise destruction. Once again, we were confronted with haunting images of rooms filled with the bodies of the victims, many of them children, being prepared for burial.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, a similarly brutal bombing of a marketplace during the Bosnian war changed the course of that conflict. On 28 August, 1995, during its siege of the city of Sarajevo, forces of the breakaway Republika Srpska fired 5 mortar shells into the Markale market, killing 43 and wounding 75.

The horror and outrage generated by that attack – the second on the Markale market, following a 5 February, 1994 strike that killed 68 – unified much of the international community into action. Several of the main Serbian officers implicated in the two market shellings, including Generals Stanislav Galic, Dragomir Milosevic, and Momcilo Perisic, were later tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for their role in the market shellings. Galic was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity during the siege of Sarajevo.

Sadly, it seems unlikely that the horror of the latest market attack in Douma will bring about any effective international response. The attack received widespread media coverage, but faded almost immediately. Instead of becoming a game changer like the Markale market killings, Douma seems destined to become yet another grim marker in a conflict drowning in so many grim markers that even those who follow it closely have trouble remembering them all. In the meanwhile, the civilian population of Syria continues to suffer and die, almost bereft of any hope out of this ever-more brutal conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian town declares itself UN disaster area after latest regime attack

The Guardian reports: A town outside Damascus that this week endured one of the deadliest air raids in the Syrian civil war has declared itself a disaster zone, and called for measures to save civilians from a government-orchestrated siege that has lasted more than two years.

Opposition-held Douma, a few miles from the centre of Damascus, was hit by government aircraft bombing raids on its main market and other civilian targets on Sunday that left more than 100 dead and 500 injured in a town already suffering food and medical shortages.

“As a result of the humanitarian catastrophe, we in the local council for the city of Douma declare it a disaster area according to international, humanitarian and UN standards,” Douma’s governing council said in a statement circulated online.

The statement called on the international community to enforce UN security council resolutions and press Bashar al-Assad’s regime to end attacks against civilians, to allow the Red Cross access to local besieged towns to provide humanitarian assistance, and to open humanitarian corridors to relieve civilians inside the blockade. [Continue reading…]

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This is not Bin Laden’s jihad

William McCants writes: We’re used to thinking of al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden as the baddest of the bad, but the Islamic State is worse. Bin Laden tamped down messianic fervor and sought popular Muslim support; the return of the early Islamic empire, or caliphate, was a distant dream. In contrast, the Islamic State’s members fight and govern by their own version of Machiavelli’s dictum “It is far safer to be feared than loved.” They stir messianic fervor rather than suppress it. They want God’s kingdom now rather than later. This is not Bin Laden’s jihad.

In some ways, the difference between Bin Laden and the Islamic State’s leaders is generational. For Bin Laden’s cohort, the apocalypse wasn’t a great recruiting pitch. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and tyranny than against the Antichrist. Today, though, the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense. Titanic upheavals convulse the region in the very places mentioned in the prophecies. Sunnis and Shi’a are at war, both appealing to their own versions of prophecies to justify their politics.

The French scholar of Muslim apocalypticism, Jean-Pierre Filiu, has argued that most modern Sunni Muslims viewed apocalyptic thinking with suspicion before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. It was something the Shi’a or the conspiracy-addled fringe obsessed over, not right-thinking Sunnis. Sure, the Sunni fringe wrote books about the fulfillment of Islamic prophecies. They mixed Muslim apocalyptic villains in with UFOs, the Bermuda triangle, Nostradamus and the prognostications of evangelical Christians, all to reveal the hidden hand of the international Jew, the Antichrist, who cunningly shaped world events. But the books were commercial duds.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the stupendous violence that followed dramatically increased the Sunni public’s appetite for apocalyptic explanations of a world turned upside down. [Continue reading…]

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