Category Archives: Syria

Kurds say ISIS militants near defeat in Kobane

The Los Angeles Times reports: Kurdish forces say the battle against Islamic State for control of the Syrian border city of Kobani has turned definitively in their favor following weeks of punishing U.S.-led airstrikes and the arrival of Kurdish reinforcements from Iraq.

Commanders belonging to the Popular Protection Units – YPG, by its Kurdish initials – said the intensive bombardment in recent days had allowed their fighters to seize several strategic hills from Islamic State militants.

The U.S Central Command on Monday reported nine new airstrikes in the Kobani area, hitting Islamic State fighting positions, staging areas and one “tactical” militant unit.

About 250 Islamic State fighters remain in Kobani, concentrated in the southeastern corner of town, Rafiq Baradar, a YPG commander from Kobani, said during a visit to the Turkish border town of Suruc.

“They will probably be finished in four or five days,” Baradar said in an interview here. [Continue reading…]

Reuters adds: Kurdish fighters captured six buildings used by Islamic State militants besieging the Syrian town of Kobani on Tuesday, and seized a large amount of the jihadist group’s weapons and ammunition, a group monitoring the war said….

Kurdish fighters seized six buildings used by Islamic State close to council offices in the north of the town and took a large quantity of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, guns and machine gun ammunition, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS executes nearly 1,500 people in Syria in 5 months

AFP report: The jihadist Islamic State group (IS) has executed nearly 1,500 people in Syria in the five months since it declared the establishment of a “caliphate”, a monitoring group said Monday.

“The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented the execution of 1,429 people since the IS announced its ‘caliphate’ in June,” the group’s director, Rami Abdel Rahman, said.

The majority of IS’s victims in Syria have been civilians, he said.

“Of the total number of people beheaded or shot dead in mass killings by IS, 879 have been civilians, some 700 of them members of the Shaitat tribe.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Digital doublethink: Playing truth or dare with Putin, Assad and ISIS

Christopher Dickey writes: The videos of American and British hostages being beheaded are so valuable to ISIS as memes of power and fear that now it has murdered a convert to Islam: Peter Kassig, 26, whose sole desire after serving in Iraq was to return to the region to help suffering civilians. Kassig had acknowledged the one God and His one Messenger, taken the name Abdel Rahman (Servant of the Merciful) and prayed five times a day, according to his parents. The Prophet would have understood, and spared him. The thugs of ISIS simply used him.

Such is the world of doublethink and triplethink.

Orwell put his finger on the core problem years before he wrote 1984. In wars, everybody lies. We do, they do, the victimizers and the victims do, too. But totalitarianism is different. Putin, Assad and ISIS all aspire to the kind of complete control that Stalin, Hitler, or the caliphs once had: total domination over their own people, brutal intimidation of their enemies. And, as Orwell wrote in a 1944 essay, “the really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

Orwell hoped, without complete confidence, that “the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive.”

One hopes. But 70 years after Orwell wrote those words, doublethink seems to be winning.

Facebooktwittermail

Detailed map showing areas under control of ISIS in Syria and Iraq

[Note to readers who arrive here from Google: This map was created based on information from Sept. 5 for Syria and Aug. 20 for Iraq, 2014. By early 2015, the military campaign against ISIS had resulted in the group suffering small territorial losses in Iraq while making gains in Syria. A more recent map can be viewed here.]

Reuters has produced the most detailed map of Syria and Iraq that I’ve seen thus far showing populated areas where a government or non-state armed group is dominant or control is contested.

Maps shown on TV and elsewhere are often misleading because they usually depict vast areas of uninhabited desert being under ISIS control when in fact these are areas essentially outside any human control.

Whether the Reuters map is as accurate as it is detailed is hard to say and as with all these kinds of maps, they can do no more than attempt to represent a moment in time (Sept. 5 for Syria and Aug. 20 for Iraq) in an environment where the lines of control are continuously shifting.

One of the interesting features of this map is that it indicates that the area of the region under Kurdish control (Rojava and Iraqi Kurdistan) extends as widely as the area under ISIS control.

Kobane is located in the small blue circle at the top of the largest patch of red. (Click on the image to see a larger version and click on that to make it even larger.)

isis-areas-of-influence

This map comes from a collection of graphics Reuters has compiled on the U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS.

Contrast Reuters’ commendable work with an ocean-of-blood map that CNN used in June:

Facebooktwittermail

Peace-talks between the ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria

Jennifer Cafarella writes: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is said to have told CBS’s 60 Minutes that he has observed tactical cooperation between the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). The two global, Salafi jihadist groups are engaged in an ideological struggle, or fitnah. They are competing for the leadership of the fight in Syria and recognition by the al-Qaeda movement, which has been conducting mediation attempts between the two since 2013 and in 2014 recognized JN as its official affiliate in Syria. Director Clapper’s statements challenge recent public reports of their negotiations, which suggest that more fundamental mediation may be underway, indicating the possibility of heightened cooperation in coming months. The interview has not aired, and his statements may be more nuanced than the advanced press publicizing the show. But the issue at hand should not be whether more than tactical cooperation has already been observed, but rather, whether conditions are being set that will favor operational cooperation between ISIS and JN in the medium term. The mediation effort may not quickly result in Baghdadi and his inner circle reconciling with JN leader Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, but the groups are eventually likely to cooperate at the operational and strategic level, as they share mutual goals. In the short term, this may include joint action against the Assad regime, which could relieve pressure on ISIS from the regime in Deir ez-Zour and embolden JN to initiate offensive operations against the regime on battlefronts that have stalled. Furthermore, ISIS is under stress in Iraq, and may pursue the acquisition of manpower and other support from JN in Syria in order to reinforce and retake the offensive.

The publicly released information tells the story of hitherto unsuccessful attempts at cooperation at operational and strategic levels. According to a high-level Syrian opposition official and rebel commander cited by the AP, seven high-ranking members of JN and ISIS conducted a meeting in the town of Atareb, West of Aleppo city, on November 2 from midnight until 4:00 a.m. A “commander of brigades affiliated with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army” corroborated the report, adding that it was organized by a third party. According to the opposition official, the meeting included an IS representative, two emissaries from JN, and attendees from the Khorasan Group, who likely served as both the mediating force and organizing party. The AP also reported that Ahrar al-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa were present, however mistakenly characterized Jund al-Aqsa as a group that has pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Involvement of the Khorasan Group in ongoing attempts to mediate the fitna has also been reported by the Daily Beast, and, if true, likely indicates the veracity of reports of ongoing JN and ISIS negotiations. A number of Khorasan members initially entered Syria in the summer of 2013 as part of AQ’s “Victory Committee,” led by Khorasan member Sanafi al Nasr, that had been deployed by Zawahiri to mediate the growing schism between JN and ISIS. The involvement of these figures in current negotiations is therefore not a departure from past activities in Syria, and is likely a secondary line of effort complimenting the ongoing attempt to develop an attack against the West.

The Syrian opposition official cited by the AP also stated that JN and ISIS agreed to eliminate the moderate, Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF) at this meeting. This may have been a sensationalist claim attempting to inflate the threat to the moderate opposition in order to advocate for increased support from the west to the moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA)-linked rebels in Syria, under which the SRF falls. Since the initiation of U.S. – led airstrikes against both JN-linked “Khorasan Group” targets and ISIS in Syria, moderate rebels have accused the Obama administration of encouraging a future JN and ISIS partnership by giving them a common enemy. This is not an unfounded claim, as civilian discontent with the air campaign has fostered increased support for JN, whose rhetoric has shifted to condemn the air campaign in its entirety in a sign of rhetorical support to ISIS against the coalition. However, there is no indication that JN has yet shifted its disposition to the SRF in southern Syria, where JN and the SRF continue to cooperate in military action against the regime. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Murder videos recruitment tools for ISIS

Thomas Joscelyn writes: Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s Islamic State, the al Qaeda offshoot that controls large portions of Iraq and Syria, has claimed to have beheaded yet another Western hostage, along with more than a dozen captured Syrian soldiers. In a newly-released video, a henchman for the group stands over what appears to be the severed head of Peter Kassig, a former U.S. Army Ranger turned aid worker who was kidnapped in Syria in late 2013.

From the Islamic State’s perspective, such videos serve multiple purposes. They are meant to intimidate the organization’s enemies in the West and elsewhere, show defiance in the face of opposition, and to convince other jihadists that Baghdadi’s state is the strong horse. Al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s rival, long ago determined that graphic beheading videos do more harm than good for the jihadists’ cause, as they turn off more prospective supporters than they earn. But the Islamic State has clearly come to the opposite conclusion, cornering the market on savagery. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. weighs expanded CIA training, arming of Syrian allies struggling against Assad

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration has been weighing plans to escalate the CIA’s role in arming and training fighters in Syria, a move aimed at accelerating covert U.S. support to moderate rebel factions while the Pentagon is preparing to establish its own training bases, U.S. officials said.

The proposed CIA buildup would expand a clandestine mission that has grown substantially over the past year, U.S. officials said. The agency now vets and trains about 400 fighters each month — as many as are expected to be trained by the Pentagon when its program reaches full strength late next year.

The prospect of expanding the CIA program was on the agenda of a meeting of senior national security officials at the White House last week. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the meeting or to address whether officials had reached a decision on the matter. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The anti-imperialist and religious ideology of ISIS

Geneive Abdo and Lulwa Rizkallah write: For many in the West, it seems abhorrent that anyone would voluntarily join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). However, it is only through support from local Iraqi communities that the militants have been able to conquer cities, such as Mosul, while waiting at the gates of Baghdad.

In recent interviews with Iraqi Sunni tribal leaders, the ISIS appeal became more apparent. When ISIS began taking territory in Iraq, “Sunnis had no choice but between fleeing or getting killed or defending themselves. To defend themselves they could either possess weapons or turn to ISIS as an alternative because they had weapons, and followed Islamic thinking,” said one Sunni tribal leader, who travels to Iraq frequently from Jordan, and wished to remain unidentified for his own safety.

While much focus has been centered on the economic incentives ISIS provides, its powerful religious and ideological appeal to Iraqi communities, particularly the younger generation, is perhaps most luring. It is simplistic to dismiss the ISIS Caliphate as neither “Islamic nor a state,” as is often stated in the Arabic press. Among Western governments, the religious dimension of the ISIS appeal is downplayed for two primary reasons: Admitting religion as a role is an acknowledgement that little can be done to stop the spread of ISIS. And two, if ISIS is about religion, then how is it that the vast majority of Muslims condemn the movement?

While it is difficult to clearly state what branch of Islam ISIS follows, many have found commonalities with at least some precepts of the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam, founded in Saudi Arabia. Reference is made here to the concepts of takfir, or the rejection of those who are not Muslims, and jihad, waging war against those who are not Muslims, or who are Muslims, but are deemed to reject strict Islamic traditions. One is thus required to identify themselves first and foremost as a Muslim—but a Muslim according to ISIS’ definition, which is not uncontroversial. The duties they then perform are portrayed as religious. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Poll: Arab opinion strongly opposed to ISIS

Christian Science Monitor reports: The Arab public has an overwhelmingly negative view of the Islamic State and a clear majority of Arabs support the goal of the US-led coalition to “degrade and destroy” the extremist Islamist group – even though the same public sees the US and Israel as the biggest beneficiaries of the anti-IS fight.

Those are among the key findings of a poll carried out in seven Arab countries and among Syrian refugees, which the survey’s organizers say is the first serious attempt to gauge Arab opinion concerning IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

“We keep hearing there is fertile ground in Arab society for ISIL [but] there is no love lost for ISIL,” says Khalil Jahshan, executive director of the Arab Center of Washington, which conducted the poll, released today, with its parent organization, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Jabhat al-Nusra reaches accord with ISIS in Syria

The Associated Press reports: Militant leaders from the Islamic State group and al-Qaida gathered at a farm house in northern Syria last week and agreed on a plan to stop fighting each other and work together against their opponents, a high-level Syrian opposition official and a rebel commander have told The Associated Press.

Such an accord could present new difficulties for Washington’s strategy against the IS group. While warplanes from a U.S.-led coalition strike militants from the air, the Obama administration has counted on arming “moderate” rebel factions to push them back on the ground. Those rebels, already considered relatively weak and disorganized, would face far stronger opposition if the two heavy-hitting militant groups now are working together. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. bombs Jabhat al-Nusra for third time

AFP reports: American aircraft bombed the Khorasan group in Syria on Thursday, in the third attack on the Al-Qaeda offshoot that is considered an immediate threat to the West, the US military’s Central Command said.

“We can confirm that US aircraft struck a target in Syria earlier today associated with a network of veteran Al-Qaeda operatives, sometimes called the ‘Khorasan group,’ who are plotting external attacks against the United States and our allies,” spokesman Colonel Patrick Ryder told AFP.

He declined to provide further details of the air raid, the latest in a series against the group that US officials say is a collection of militants from Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front, which is Qaeda’s Syrian branch. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. forces carry out most strikes against ISIS

AFP reports: US forces have carried out the overwhelming majority of airstrikes against Islamic State jihadists since August, with American warplanes conducting about 85 percent of the raids, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

Arab coalition partners have carried out 56 out of 393 airstrikes over Syria, and Western allies have conducted about 70 out of more than 470 bombing raids in Iraq, Col. Patrick Ryder, spokesman for US Central Command, told AFP.

President Barack Obama’s administration frequently touts the vital role of coalition partners in the air war, particularly four Arab states, but the numbers convey how the Americans are bearing most of the burden of the campaign.

Since launching airstrikes on Aug. 8 on IS jihadists in Iraq, and later extending it to Syria on Sept. 23, US forces and allied aircraft have carried out roughly 9,020 flights, including thousands of surveillance and refueling runs, according to the military’s latest tally.

The overwhelming majority of the intelligence and refueling flights also have been conducted by US aircraft, defense officials said.

After more than 800 airstrikes over about three months, US and coalition aircraft have unloaded about 2,400 bombs and missiles, defense officials said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama seeks new Syria strategy review to deal with ISIS and Assad

CNN reports: President Barack Obama has asked his national security team for another review of the U.S. policy toward Syria after realizing that ISIS may not be defeated without a political transition in Syria and the removal of President Bashar al-Assad, senior U.S. officials and diplomats tell CNN.

The review is a tacit admission that the initial strategy of trying to confront ISIS first in Iraq and then take the group’s fighters on in Syria, without also focusing on the removal of al-Assad, was a miscalculation.

In just the past week, the White House has convened four meetings of the President’s national security team, one of which was chaired by Obama and others that were attended by principals like the secretary of state. These meetings, in the words of one senior official, were “driven to a large degree how our Syria strategy fits into our ISIS strategy.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Airstrikes blunt ISIS in Raqqa, but many Syrians there see little reason to be grateful

The New York Times reports: American airstrikes on the Syrian city of Raqqa, the vaunted capital of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, have scattered its fighters and disrupted the harsh system they had imposed, residents and visitors there say. But they see no gratitude toward the United States.

Rather, they suggested in interviews, many people are angry at the Americans. Food and fuel prices in Raqqa have soared, power blackouts have prevailed, and order is now threatened by a vacuum of any authority.

For all their violence and intolerance toward disbelievers, the fighters of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, at least functioned as a government, providing basic services and some semblance of stability.

“People don’t want some outside power to attack,” Khalid Farhan, a Raqqa resident, said during a recent trip to Turkey.

The anger in Raqqa underscored the potentially destabilizing consequences of the United States-led military campaign, in a place where there was little desire to see the Syrian government or other rebel groups return to power. The campaign also risks further alienating Syrians in opposition areas in the north who were already angered by the Obama administration’s narrow focus on destroying the Islamic State and refusal to counter attacks by the Syrian military. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS chief promises victory in purported audio

Bloomberg News reports: Islamic State is still advancing in the face of intensified military action against it, the group’s leader said in a purported audio message released a few days after reports he had been injured or killed.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said the recent campaign against his group has been “one of the toughest so far, but it is one of the most failed ones,” according to an audio message posted on social media networks.

“The Crusader air strikes and continuous bombing day and night on the locations of Islamic State have not stopped its advances,” al-Baghdadi said. “The Crusaders will be defeated and Muslims will be victorious.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria rebels in south emerge as West’s last hope as moderates crushed elsewhere

Reuters reports: In the past, rebels on the ground have mainly steered clear of politics, a subject left to umbrella groups like the largely exile-based National Coalition, which meets in Turkey. But leaders of the Southern Front say they have decided to take political issues into their own hands.

“We did not get involved in these matters before. We left them to others. But now it is time. We can no longer risk squandering Syria,” defected army officer Abu Osama al-Jolani, 37, southern commander of the Syria Revolutionaries’ Front, told Reuters in an interview over the Internet.

Their plan, still unpublished but disclosed to Reuters, calls for turning the Southern Front rebels into a civilian security force. National institutions including the military would be safeguarded, and a technocratic interim authority would be set up to be followed by elections.

The plan emphasizes protection for all Syrians regardless of religious, cultural or ethnic affiliations – language apparently aimed at reassuring Assad’s Alawite sect and Christians who fear the alternative to him is a radical Islamist government.

It could be in line with thinking in Washington, where CNN reported Obama wants a policy review, realizing Islamic State may not be defeated without a transition and Assad’s removal. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Kurdish fighters recapture strategic hill in Kobane and cut off key supply route for ISIS

Middle East Eye reports: Kurdish and Syrian fighters in Kobane have recaptured a strategic landmark and cut off a key supply route on Wednesday after more than 50 days of fighting against Islamic State fighters, a Kobane official told MEE.

After fierce fighting that started on Monday, the fighters – which include soldiers from the People’s Protection Units (YPG), Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and the Free Syrian Army – have taken back a strategic part of Mashta al-Nur, a hill which overlooks Kobane.

From this hill, the fighters will be able to bomb IS fighters around the city and also on the other side of the hill, said Idris Nassan, deputy foreign affairs minister for the Kobane, who said he was holed up in a safe location about 1km from Mashta al-Nur.

Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party called the capture a ‘game changer’ on its official Twitter account.


“ISIS is defeated mostly,” Nassan told MEE. “ISIS is still in Kobane, but with Mashta al-Nur, ISIS will be in a very small part of Kobane. Defeating ISIS will be more easy.”

In addition to regaining control of most of Mashta al-Nur, the fighters have also cut off the Halanj-Ain al-Arab road south of the town, a key supply route that IS has been using during the battle. Sixteen IS members were reportedly killed in the advance. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail