Category Archives: Syria

Jihadi groups killed more than 5,000 people in November

The Guardian reports: Jihadi groups killed more than 5,000 people last month, with Iraq topping the league table of deaths, followed by Nigeria, Afghanistan and Syria.

In 664 incidents recorded in November by the BBC World Service and researched jointly with King’s College London, the overall death toll was 5,042, or an average of 168 deaths per day and nearly twice the number of people who were killed in the 11 September 2001 attacks on America.

After Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Syria, Yemen was fifth in the deadly league table, tying with Somalia, with 37 incidents each.

The data, shared with the Guardian, provides a unique insight into the human cost, intensity, scale and geographical distribution of a phenomenon that has captured headlines and driven political and security agendas across the world. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian rebel training program months from starting

The Hill reports: A program to train and equip 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels will begin in March and will not be completed until a year later in 2016, a senior State Department official told lawmakers on Wednesday.

“The training we hope will start in March,” Brett McGurk, deputy special presidential envoy to the coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) said at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed concern the program wasn’t moving fast enough to be effective against ISIS.

“There’s no telling what ISIS can do in that year, and however many months it is,” said Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), a member of the committee.

“I don’t know anyone who seriously thinks that you can train effectively, even with successful vetting, 5,000 insurgents who are moderate and maybe secular, and they’re going to be reintroduced to Syria, and turn the tide,” said Rep. Gerry Connelly (D-Va.) [Continue reading…]

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Contrary to earlier claims, U.S. officials now believe French jihadist David Drugeon survived airstrikes

CNN reports: New information leads U.S. officials to believe that French jihadist David Drugeon, a bomb maker in the al-Qaeda affiliated Khorasan Group, survived U.S. strikes last month, U.S. officials tell CNN.

CNN’s reporting on Drugeon is the result of a collaboration with the French newspaper L’Express. Intelligence indicates Drugeon was seriously injured in the drone strike on his vehicle in November and immediately driven away for treatment at a location Jihadis felt was secure, L’Express is reporting Wednesday.

The new information is based in part on monitoring of al Qaeda and Khorasan communications, in additional to human intelligence, the official said. Initial information after the strikes in Idlib, Syria, led US intelligence to assess that it was possible Drugeon was killed. But recent intelligence changed that assessment. [Continue reading…]

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Aid fatigue is hurting displaced Syrians

Newsweek reports: As civil war in Syria inches toward its four-year anniversary, the nation’s humanitarian catastrophe deepens. Some 7.6 million Syrians are now internally displaced, and another 3.3 million have fled to neighboring countries to avoid the complex three-way dogfight among Assad’s forces, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Syrian rebels.

In Lebanon the influx of one million refugees is straining the capacities of a country of only 4.4 million. Today, some 12.2 million Syrians, both inside and outside Syria, rely on emergency food aid.

It thus came as a shock when the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) announced on December 1 that a lack of funds was forcing it to suspend aid to help feed and clothe Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. In fact, the WFP had been signaling for months that its program for Syria was in dire need of a cash injection from international donors.

Last week, the United States donated $125 million to prop up the program until the end of the year, but it clearly wasn’t enough. The WFP stated that it needed an additional $64 million for December alone to support its system of prepaid voucher cards, which can be used at local stores to buy food and supplies.

Without this lifeline, refugees will face the impending harsh winter without food, warm clothes, or heat. [Continue reading…]

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UN reports Israeli support for Syria rebels

Christian Science Monitor reports: The Israeli military has been in direct contact with Syrian rebels for more than 18 months, facilitating the treatment of wounded fighters and at times exchanging parcels and ushering uninjured Syrians into Israel, according to UN reports.

The quarterly reports bolster speculation over the past year that Israel’s humanitarian assistance to more than 1,000 wounded Syrians had also opened a channel of communication with Syrian rebels.

Today, the Syrian military accused Israel of carrying out two airstrikes near Damascus. The Israeli military declined to comment on that claim.

Though some in Israel appear to support the Assad regime as the lesser evil, Israel is no doubt interested in gleaning intelligence from rebel groups in order to better assess and defend itself against jihadi activity in the occupied Golan Heights.

In August this year, the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front) took over the Quneitra border crossing, raising concerns of infiltration and attacks on Israeli targets. [Continue reading…]

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Chechen militants: ‘more prestigious’ to fight for ISIS

Syria Direct interview: Fighters from Chechnya are one of the forces behind IS’s meteoric rise in Syria. The attraction to jihad is not only ideological but practical.

“The Syrian ‘jihad’ began as a sort of proxy conflict for fighters who could not go home to fight in Chechnya or Dagestan,” says Joanna Paraszczuk, a journalist and blogger who has lived and worked in the Middle East and Russia and has a special interest in researching Russian-speaking foreign fighters in Syria. Many of them, she says, are wanted by security authorities.

ShowImageBranching out from the Caucasus and fighting for the Islamic State is now seen as “prestigious,” Paraszczuk, who writes and curates Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s blog on the Islamic State, tells Syria Direct’s Kristen Gillespie.

“IS gets a lot more media attention than the Caucasus Emirate, which they see as a parochial sort of jihad, struggling away unnoticed while the IS Chechens are part of a movement that controls vast tracts of land and is (to them) successful.” [Continue reading…]

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Israel accused of launching air strikes near Damascus in act of ‘aggression against Syria’

The Independent reports: Syria has accused Israel of carrying out air strikes near its capital that have inflicted “widespread damage”, according to state media reports.

Residents in Damascus reported loud explosions on Sunday in what some media reports described as a possible attack on missile deliveries from Iran bound for Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

SANA, the Syrian state news agency, said Israel bombed targets near Damascus’s international airport, as well as the town of Dimas northwest of the capital. It described the attack as “an aggression against Syria” but said there were no reported casualties.

Israeli defence officials, speaking to the Jerusalem Post, declined to confirm or deny the strike – but stressed that the country’s focus was to deny Hezbollah new Iranian firepower rather than to take sides in the Syrian civil war. [Continue reading…]

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As ISIS kills, media can’t count the dead

Peter Schwartzstein reports: In any war, it’s the wanton acts of barbarism that grab the headlines and reel in the news teams. But when it comes to showcasing the true measure of a conflict’s horror, there are few statistics starker than a sky-high civilian death toll.

In Iraq, where hostilities have raged in fits and starts for over a decade since the US-led invasion of 2003, non-combatants have been particularly hard hit by the violence. Many were caught up in the “Shock and Awe” aerial campaign that marked the beginning of the war, some succumbed to disease as the country’s infrastructure collapsed, and still others died in the brutal bouts of tribal in-fighting that marred the years following the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Through it all, an eclectic band of organizations, ranging from a multinational team of anti-war activists to the UN’s local office, maintained scrupulous records of the dead. They logged every incident and released depressing day-by-day accounts of the carnage.

The emergence of the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL) jihadist group has, however, plunged Iraq into a period of turbulence so debilitating that, for the first time, these death counts can no longer keep up with the killing. [Continue reading…]

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Jabhat al-Nusra gains in Syria undermine U.S. strategy

The Washington Post reports: The main al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria is extending its control over a swath of territory that was until recently held by the collapsing moderate opposition, jeopardizing U.S. plans to form a new rebel force to fight extremists.

Since routing two of the biggest Western-backed rebel movements last month from the province of Idlib, Jabhat al-Nusra has been steadily consolidating its position as the single most powerful military force in northwestern Syria.

The group has overrun towns and villages throughout the province, secured supply routes into neighboring Turkey and potentially paved the way for the establishment of an Islamic “emirate” — a competing entity to the “caliphate” declared last summer by the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq.

The al-Qaeda affiliate’s expanding footprint risks further complicating the U.S.-led effort to contain and destroy the far more powerful Islamic State, a fierce rival to Jabhat al-Nusra that ejected the al-Qaeda loyalists from its territories last summer. [Continue reading…]

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The world’s pitiful response to Syria’s refugee crisis

World leaders are failing to offer protection to Syria’s most vulnerable refugees with catastrophic consequences, Amnesty International has warned in a new briefing ahead of a UN pledging conference in Geneva on 9 December.

Left Out in the Cold: Syrian refugees abandoned by the international community highlights the pitiful numbers of resettlement places offered by the international community. Around 3.8 million refugees from are being hosted in five main countries within the region: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Only 1.7 per cent of this number have been offered sanctuary by the rest of the world since the crisis began more than three years ago.

The Gulf states– which include some of the world’s wealthiest countries – have not offered to take a single refugee from Syria so far. Russia and China have similarly failed to pledge a single resettlement place. Excluding Germany, the rest of the European Union (EU) has pledged to resettle a paltry 0.17 per cent of refugees in the main host countries.

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How ISIS governs its caliphate

Newsweek reports: This year has seen the map of the Middle East redrawn. The West has acquired a new public enemy number one: remorseless, faceless and vicious. The Islamic State, or ISIS, has expanded from a relatively obscure terrorist group at the start of the year, to one that wields near absolute control over anywhere between 12,000 square miles (according to the Wall Street Journal) and 35,000 square miles (according to The New Yorker) of formerly Syrian and Iraqi territory. Within the region, around 56 million people must navigate between the armies of the rival militias, warlords and national armies that are barely distinguishable from one another.

But while Western forces attempt to counter the ISIS surge with its sustained bombing strategy, little attention is paid to an unpalatable reality within the borders of the so-called new Islamic State, or caliphate. In the midst of the chaos, ISIS is deliberately and methodically establishing clear areas of definable civil governance, breathing new life into the memory of a series of caliphates that united a succession of Muslim empires until 1924.

Scott Atran, an anthropologist and senior research fellow at Oxford University, recently submitted a report to the U.S. Department of Defense and Congress on the difficulty of fighting the ideology of such a state.

“The caliphate as an idea has never gone away,” Atran says, “And now that it is here again after a hiatus of nearly 100 years, as a concrete matter of fact, it will focus the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people. The critical question is not, ‘How can we thwart or destroy the caliphate?’ because attempts to do that will likely backfire. Rather the question is, ‘How can we live with and transform the idea and reality of a caliphate – and one that will be nuclear-capable probably sooner rather than later – into something that does not threaten other peoples’ ways of life?’ That is a question for everyone, but it is not even on our political radar.” [Continue reading…]

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Raed Fares: Voice of the Syrian revolution

Eliza Griswold writes: The overhead light in the blue Mazda 626 wasn’t working. Raed Fares, a Syrian activist whose video protests skewer ISIS and President Bashar al-Assad alike, reached up to fiddle with the light bulb before squeezing himself out of the driver’s side door. The street was in darkness. In the last few years, the Assad government cut most of the electricity (along with running water and mobile-phone service) to Kafranbel, the town in northwestern Syria where Fares lives. The only light came from an LED strip in his neighbor’s front doorway that was hooked up to a car battery. It was 12:45 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2014, and Fares, who often works until 4 a.m., had left the office early. As he fumbled to fit his key into the car’s lock, he heard the slap-slap of feet running toward him.

Here they come, he thought.

The feet stopped just in front of his car. The Czech pistol he usually carries was in his house, 15 feet away. In the watery glow of the light behind him, Fares could make out two ISIS soldiers. One, clad in a woolen mask, ammunition vest, windbreaker and unlaced boots, opened fire, spraying the car, the mud wall and Fares with bullets. Fares felt their heat sear through his canvas jacket and jean shirt and into the right side of his chest and shoulder. When he collapsed to the ground, a childhood nightmare returned: three black dogs, chasing him.

“There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his prophet,” he said as loudly as he could. He hoped this statement of faith would send him to heaven.

As a pool of his own blood spread around him, Fares lay in the road. He tried to stifle his groans, in fear that his attackers would return. Minutes later, his elder brother, who heard the shots from his home nearby, dragged Fares out of the street and into a car to race to the hospital.

“Who shot him?” a friend in the car asked his brother.

Raed struggled to repeat what he had seen.

“Stop talking,” his brother said.

“I’m dying,” he said. Then he slipped from consciousness.

Eight months later, Fares, 42, was in the back seat of a pewter-colored Kia, driving through southern Turkey and chain-smoking Lebanese cigarettes. In all, the would-be assassins fired at Fares 46 times. Twenty-seven bullets struck the wall behind him; 17 hit his car. Only two struck him. They shattered seven bones in his shoulder and ribs and punctured his right lung. From his hospital bed, he continued to orchestrate protests, posting them on Facebook and YouTube. Many used the block-lettered banners for which he’s known, broadcasting messages like: “OBAMA! YOUR ROLE IN SYRIA WILL NEVER BE ACCEPTED AS A MISTAKE LIKE CLINTON’S IN RWANDA, BUT IT WILL BE A PREMEDITATED CRIME.” Others relied on cartoons, like one of a Trojan horse with ISIS inside and “Made in U.S.A.” on its side.

“I still have trouble breathing,” Fares said. “My doctor says my lungs should be no problem because of the size of my nose.” (Fares does have a big nose.) The two Americans in the front seat laughed. One, a 57-year-old named Jim Hake, is the founder and chief executive of Spirit of America, a nongovernmental organization with the explicit mission to support U.S. military and diplomatic efforts. (He relentlessly asks “What do you need?” The first time he asked it of Fares, Fares answered with withering dryness, “A new country.”) [Continue reading…]

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Spying effort drives ISIS to shut down cellphone service in Mosul

McClatchy reports: A covert campaign of spying by residents and Iraqi intelligence agents hunting for top leaders of the Islamic State has forced the group to suspend cellphone service in areas it controls – a move Kurdish and Iraqi officials say will do little to stop the program but will further infuriate people living under the extremists’ rule.

Iraqi officials read as a sign of success the Islamic State’s announcement last week that it had suspended cellphone service indefinitely in Mosul, the city in northern Iraq it’s controlled since June, and parts of Anbar province for fear local residents were phoning in tips that were used by U.S. and Iraqi commanders to select airstrike targets.

The U.S. military hasn’t said which of its hundreds of airstrikes since August were aimed at suspected Islamic State leaders, limiting its descriptions to generalities – an Islamic State vehicle, a fighting position or a fighting unit. But Iraqi officials confirmed that an aggressive intelligence collection program is in place to help pinpoint Islamic State leaders and military positions.

“Certainly this is an important element,” said Kurdish Foreign Minister Falah Mustafa, who agreed to speak about the intelligence collection only in general. “It helps a great deal when you know the details of what your enemy is doing in terms of their strength, their presence, their weapons, their situation, their internal situation, their supply lines, so all that is very important.” [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Hürriyet Daily News reports: The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) has confirmed that 150 Kurdish Iraqi fighters combatting Islamist jihadists in Kobane will be replaced with a new group that will also use Turkish soil to travel to the northern Syrian town.

Although precise details are not yet known, a group of around 110 fighters is expected to enter Kobane, passing through Turkey as the first group did, Turkish military sources told daily Hürriyet on Dec. 1.

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The new Revolutionary Command Council — the latest effort to unify the Syrian opposition

Aron Lund writes about the launch of the Watasimo — “hold fast” — initiative that has led to the formation of “a joint leadership called the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC, majlis qiyadat al-thawra), which would replace the collapsed institutions of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA)”:

On November 27–29, the RCC finally held its founding congress in the Turkish town of Gaziantep. It was attended by several dozen rebel groups, 72 all in all according to the organizers. Also present were a number of well-known exile politicians and Islamist figures, including the pro-Qatari businessman Mustafa Sabbagh, the Salafi televangelist Adnan al-Arour, and members of the National Coalition for the Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main body of Syria’s perpetually-splintering exile opposition.

A politico-military structure was set up and a leadership elected that represented a wide variety of rebel factions and regions. It is perhaps the most-broadly-based such rebel unification attempt yet although it excludes the ultra-radical Islamic State, the al-Qaeda-aligned Nusra Front, and the independent jihadis of Ansar al-Din, as well as the Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) — all of which are among Syria’s most powerful armed factions.

The RCC also adopted a charter describing its political goals. Most of the charter is a spiceless mixture of standard rebel fare such as “overthrowing the criminal Syrian regime,” safeguarding Syria’s territorial unity against unspecified “partition projects,” “preserving the Islamic identity of Syria’s society,” and the requisite little bit about fighting terrorism. It provides little detail, skirts the big issues about what sort of political system should be created, and is clearly written to be acceptable to the widest possible spectrum of the opposition and its foreign backers.

However, the charter also signaled that the RCC has grand ambitions by announcing that it will create its own “independent judiciary” and “administer the liberated territories in a way that serves the interests of the citizenry.” It plans to rule Syria in “the interim period until the people’s representatives can accede to power in the state.” [Continue reading…]

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Lebanon detains wife of ISIS leader

Reuters reports: The Lebanese army detained a wife and daughter of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as they crossed from Syria nine days ago, security officials said on Tuesday, in a setback to the group as it comes under increased military pressure.

The woman was identified her as Saja al-Dulaimi, an Iraqi, by a senior Lebanese political source and security official.

The Lebanese newspaper As-Safir reported she had been detained in coordination with “foreign intelligence”.

The arrest is a blow to Baghdadi and could be used as a bargaining chip against his group, which has captured many foreign, Iraqi and Syrian prisoners and declared a caliphate across territory it has seized in Syria and Iraq.

A senior Lebanese security official said Baghdadi’s wife had been travelling with one of their daughters, contradicting earlier reports that it was his son. DNA tests were conducted to verify it was Baghdadi’s child, the official said. [Continue reading…]

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Syria: Black holes and media missionaries

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: The lights are going off in Syria. Peter Kassig is only the most recent witness that succumbed to the darkness. David Haines, Steve Satloff and James Foley went before him. They had all gone there to assist and bear witness. A measure of the Islamic State’s (IS) monstrosity is the nobility of the people it has killed. International media has rightly condemned these horrific murders.

For IS murder is a political act. But is also a performance–a spectacle as a means to amplify its message. The ritual act of murder, especially of a westerner, is certain to receive media coverage. IS uses this to rudely force attention.

The emergence of IS has been a godsend for the regime. IS is the monster that the regime always claimed it was fighting. Ideologues who echoed and amplified this regime line over the years have proclaimed IS the true face of the opposition. Left unmentioned is the fact that until recently IS fought its biggest battles against the Syrian opposition. Indeed, earlier in the year, rebels had driven it out of Idlib, Deir Ezzor, much of Aleppo and areas around Damascus. It was only after its successes in Iraq and its newly acquired arsenal that it returned to Syria in triumph. But for many western ideologues, IS is part of an undifferentiated radical opposition to the secular regime of Bashar al Assad.

In fact, IS has a lot more in common with the regime. It is a totalitarian force that uses terror as a means of control. The regime kills but is loath to take responsibility; IS revels in murder. The regime kills more, but IS better amplifies its acts. The regime’s audience is domestic; IS has transnational ambitions. Significantly, where IS proudly rejects the international order, the regime presents itself as its indispensable, if ruthless guardian. For the media, IS is a more exciting story.

The media is selective elsewhere too. Foley and Satloff aren’t the only journalists IS has killed: there have been many more—Iraqis and Syrians—whose names remain unknown to the world. And IS isn’t the only force in Syria killing journalists and aid workers: Bashar al Assad’s regime has been doing it far longer. [Continue reading…]

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Germany struggles to make room for Syrian refugees

The New York Times reports: Ahmad Mahayni, a 38-year-old businessman from Damascus, is one of about 200,000 people expected to throw themselves on Germany’s mercy this year and apply for asylum.

Mr. Mahayni is resourceful, and he seems determined to build a future for his family. He helps out in the refugee facility where he was sent after arriving at the Berlin airport and telling the police that he was seeking asylum. A fairly fluent English speaker, he quickly figured out that “the key of success here is the language” and began taking 10 hours of German class each week.

But even as refugees like Mr. Mahayni work hard to adapt to their new homes in Germany, Germans are contending with a stream of new arrivals.

Three and a half years of war in Syria have produced the world’s worst refugee crisis, the United Nations says. In Germany now, refugees are arriving by the thousands, and even in the country where a Nazi past constantly evokes reminders of a special duty to help, the welcome mat is wearing thin.

To a large extent, the reluctance begins with a question of where to house ever more arrivals. Cities from Hamburg to Munich to Berlin have variously resorted to tents and modified shipping containers, and even talked of vast ships — a solution last used in the 1990s, when the Balkan wars created a similar influx into a recently reunited Germany.

The problem has grown so acute that Chancellor Angela Merkel has summoned the governors of Germany’s 16 states to meet in the coming weeks. Her vice chancellor, the Social Democratic leader Sigmar Gabriel, has already urged the allocation of an extra billion euros, or about $1.2 billion, in aid to hard-pressed communities. The authorities admit that they failed to anticipate such a wave of refugees and in recent years tore down too many empty buildings that could have been useful now. [Continue reading…]

Bill Frelick writes: With the number of Syrian refugees in the Middle East hitting 3 million, it’s worth examining how the United States and other countries not on the frontline of the conflict have stepped in to help countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. These countries have the misfortune to be neighbors not only of Syria, but of Iraq and Israel/Palestine as well, other places that have been the source of millions of refugees.

Consider this: Lebanon is hosting 1.14 million refugees from Syria, the equivalent of 83 million refugees in the United States — or the combined population of California, Texas, and New York. And what has the United States done to relieve the human burden on Lebanon and Syria’s other neighbors? In the first 10 months of fiscal year 2014, the US admitted a grand total of 63 Syrian refugees. [Continue reading…]

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