Category Archives: Syria

James Foley: U.S. and U.K. try to identify ISIS militant with British accent

The Guardian reports: Prof Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, said the militant was chosen to front the video to cause maximum impact in the west. “This is significant because it signifies a turn towards threatening the west. They are saying we’re going to come after you if you bomb us,” he said.

Neumann said British fighters had been carrying out “horrific acts” like beheadings, torture and executions for a year and a half, but this appeared to be the first with a western victim. He added: “They clearly wanted someone who spoke fluent English because they wanted it to create maximum impact, especially in the US, and because there are not that many Americans it was probably the best second option. They want this to have maximum impact on the west and for parts of it to be streamed on American television networks they needed an English speaker, so it was more about the English language than the nationality.

“It’s not significant that British fighters have been beheading and torturing because that’s been happening for a year and a half. That sort of horrific stuff is something British jihadis have been doing for some time. You will find a number of instances of British jihadis executing, torturing and beheading other people – and we know it’s not just Brits but other Europeans doing it – and occasionally this has come to the surface. Most people beheaded before were not westerners so that’s why this is different. The significant thing is that this was an American and was connected to a direct message that ‘we are targeting you’.”

Leading figures in the counter-terrorism field said it would be possible for intelligence services to identify the militant, despite it being filmed in an unknown location with the fighter dressed head to toe in black. Dr Claire Hardaker, a linguistics experts at Lancaster University, studied the clip and said the man’s vowels marked him out as likely from the south-east of England, but most likely from London. “We’re definitely looking at a British accent, from the south and probably from London, Kent or Essex. He does something interesting when he says ‘Muslims’. You typically get ‘Muzlims’ but he says something closer to ‘Musslims’.”

Dr Afzal Ashraf, of the Royal United Services Institute, said many of the estimated 500 British fighters in Syria and Iraq had left criminal pasts in the UK so were likely to be known to police. Intelligence agencies would also be using linguistics technology to track down the man, he said. [Continue reading…]

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Why did #ISIS kill James Foley?

Intimidation or provocation?

Since the U.S. has already launched at least 68 air strikes against ISIS, we’re already well past the point at which the U.S. needs drawing into the conflict — the enemy has already been engaged.

It thus seems more likely that the message from ISIS is not “bring it on” — it’s “back off.” More air strikes risk precipitating more executions.

The journalist Steven Joel Soltoff appeared in the same video showing Foley’s execution with the executioner making this threat: “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.”

Foley was kidnapped in November 2012 yet ISIS wasn’t formed until April 2013.

GlobalPost, the publication Foley was working for at that time, spared no effort in trying to locate him. In May 2013, AFP reported:

The co-founder and CEO of the online news network, Phil Balboni, said his company had hired the international security firm Kroll to investigate.

“With a high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group, commonly referred to as the Shabiha, and subsequently turned over to Syrian government forces,” Balboni said.

“We have obtained multiple independent reports from very credible confidential sources who have both indirect and direct access that confirm our assessment that Jim is now being held by the Syrian government.”

Balboni said the detention facility where Foley is reportedly being held is near the Syrian capital Damascus in an area still controlled by forces loyal to Assad’s regime, which is battling an armed revolt.

“We further believe that this facility is under the control of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence service,” he said, promising that GlobalPost would continue to press through private and diplomatic channels for Foley’s release.

Balboni said that GlobalPost knows the name and location of the detention center, and believes that other international journalists are also being held there, but said he could not go into details for security reasons.

This strongly suggests that the Assad regime handed Foley and the other hostages over to ISIS. Both the Syrian government and ISIS view journalists as a threat.

Although the majority of Americans currently support the air strikes the U.S. has launched in Iraq, that support is fairly weak:

Even as they approve of the airstrikes, Americans are more concerned about going too far in Iraq than they are about not going far enough to interdict Islamist militants who have swept through the country in recent months. Fifty-one percent say they are more worried about U.S. military action going too far; 32 percent say they are more concerned about not going far enough to stop the militants.

ISIS may now have as many as 80,000 fighters and it controls a third of Syria and a third of Iraq. At what point will its growth start to seriously worry most Americans?

Last week, while arguing against Western intervention against ISIS in Iraq, Seumas Milne wrote: “The likelihood is that [ISIS] can only be overcome by a functioning state in both Iraq and Syria.”

Let’s be clear: “overcome” doesn’t mean being thwarted in vigorous debate; it means military action. What was an antiwar movement is nowadays simply a not-our-war movement.

If Milne is correct in saying that functioning states in both Iraq and Syria are a precondition for overcoming ISIS, then before that happens it looks like it will grow from strength to strength.

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James Foley, missing American journalist, reportedly executed by ISIS in Syria

Huffington Post reports: James Foley, an American journalist who went missing in Syria more than a year ago, has reportedly been executed by the Islamic State, a militant group formerly known as ISIS. The group reportedly threatened to behead Steven Sotloff, another American journalist, next.

Video and photos purportedly of Foley emerged on Tuesday. A YouTube video — entitled “A Message to #America (from the #IslamicState)” — identified a man on his knees as “James Wright Foley,” and showed his execution. It also showed another man on his knees it claimed is Sotloff, whose future the executioner said “depends” on President Obama’s “next decision.” Sotloff, a freelance journalist, went missing in Syria in August 2013.

Foley was in Syria covering the country’s civil war when he went missing in November of 2012. In an earlier report on efforts to find him, the Columbia Journalism Review said that he was believed to have been held in Damascus.

Before he was abducted, Foley gave a short interview describing some of the things he had witnessed during a visit to Idlib province. The date of this video is unknown. It was uploaded onto YouTube in June, 2012.

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With new recruits ISIS said to have 80,000 fighters in Syria and Iraq

Al Jazeera reports: The Islamic State group has an army of more than 50,000 fighters in Syria, and recruited 6,000 people in the last month, a monitoring group has said.

Ramu Abdel Rahman, the director of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said on Tuesday that the group’s recruitment push was gathering pace every month.

“July saw the largest recruitment since the group appeared in Syria in 2013, with more than 6,000 new fighters,” he said.

“The number of IS fighters has passed 50,000 in Syria, including 20,000 non-Syrians,” he said.

Al Jazeera cannot verify the observatory’s figures. However, an Islamic State source backed the statement and told Al Jazeera that the group also had 30,000 fighters in Iraq.

Abdel Rahman said the new recruits in Syria included more than 1,000 foreign fighters from Chechnya, China, Europe and Arab countries. He said most had entered Syria from Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) announces support for ISIS

Yemen Times reports: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) published a statement on its Al-Manbar website on August 14 announcing support for the operations of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which now calls itself the Islamic State, in Iraq.

“We announce solidarity with our Muslim brothers in Iraq against the crusade. Their blood and injuries are ours and we will surely support them,” the statement read. “We assert to the Islamic Nation [all Muslims worldwide] that we stand by the side of our Muslim brothers in Iraq against the American and Iranian conspiracy and their agents of the apostate Gulf rulers.”

Many observers note that AQAP and ISIL are using similar tactics and are exchanging strategy and advice.

“Based on our experience with drones, we advise our brothers in Iraq to be cautious about spies among them because they are a key factor in setting goals; be cautious about dealing with cell phones and internet networks; do not gather in large numbers or move in large convoys; spread in farms or hide under trees in the case of loud humming of warplanes; and dig sophisticated trenches because they reduce the impact of shelling,” read the AQAP statement. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi top cleric blasts Qaeda, ISIS as ‘enemy No 1’ of Islam

AFP reports: Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh on Tuesday blasted Al-Qaeda and Islamic State jihadists as “enemy number one” of Islam, in a statement issued in Riyadh.

“The ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism… have nothing to do with Islam and (their proponents) are the enemy number one of Islam,” the kingdom’s top cleric said.

He cited jihadists from the Islamic State, which has declared a “caliphate” straddling large parts of Iraq and Syria, and the global Al-Qaeda terror network.

“Muslims are the main victims of this extremism, as shown by crimes committed by the so-called Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and groups linked to them,” the mufti said, quoting a verse in the Koran urging the “killing” of people who do deeds harmful to Islam.

His stance reflects the Saudi clerical community’s hostility towards IS jihadists, known for their brutality. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS recruits at record pace in Syria

Reuters reports: Thousands of new fighters joined Islamic State in Syria last month in its fastest expansion to date, a body monitoring the war said on Tuesday.

Now in control of roughly a third of Syria and large areas of Iraq, Islamic State has been seizing territory from rival Islamist groups in a belt of territory north of Aleppo, threatening rebel supply lines into the city where President Bashar al-Assad’s forces are seeking to encircle the insurgents.

Islamic State recruited at least 6,300 men in July, Rami Abdelrahman, founder of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters – a big expansion from early estimates suggesting the group numbered around 15,000. Around a thousand of the new fighters were foreign, and the rest Syrian, he said. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS kills hundreds of tribesmen in eastern Syria

The Associated Press reports: The extremist Islamic State group shot and beheaded hundreds of tribesmen from eastern Syria over the past two weeks after crushing an uprising they led against the jihadi fighters, activists said Monday.

The killing of members of the Shueitat tribe come as Islamic State group fighters close in on the last government-held army base in the region. Syrian warplanes bombed the extremists’ positions Monday in an attempt to halt their advance.

A Turkey-based activist who is originally from Deir el-Zour and is in contact with people in the province told The Associated Press that the Islamic State killed as many as 200 members of the Shueitat tribe. On Saturday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll among the tribesmen at 700. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian hackers use WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook and YouTube to spread malware aimed activists

IB Times reports: A group of pro-Assad hackers in Syria are using activist websites, WhatsApp, Viber, YouTube and social media to spread malware which claims to help protect privacy.

The group of hackers has infected more than 10,000 victims using sophisticated techniques to hide the malware they are sharing on websites visited by activists, social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Skype and even on instant messaging services WhatsApp and Viber.

The news comes from a report from Kasperksy Lab entitled “Syrian Malware – the ever-evolving threat” which says the group of hackers is highly organised and is targeting victims inside as well as outside of Syria.

The group is playing on the fears of victims in the worn-torn country by spreading fake messages (via email, Skype, Viber etc) which claim to give details about imminent cyber-attacks. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian airstrikes target ISIS

The Associated Press reports: Syrian government warplanes pounded an Islamic State group stronghold as well as other towns controlled by the jihadis Sunday, conducting more than a dozen airstrikes and killing at least 11 people, activists said.

For more than a year, President Bashar Assad’s air force rarely targeted territory controlled by the Islamic State group in northern Syria, instead focusing on mainstream rebel groups. But government jets have begun hitting the extremists more regularly since the jihadis overran much of neighboring northern and western Iraq in June.

Even in that context, the intensity of Sunday’s air raids appeared unusually high, with at least 19 strikes hitting the group’s stronghold of Raqqa in northeastern Syria, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Observatory directory Rami Abdurrahman said six of those raids targeted a military court.

He said at least 16 Islamic State members were killed in Raqqa, and around 40 wounded. He said there were an additional 22 civilian casualties, but he didn’t have an exact breakdown of dead and wounded. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS: A portrait of the menace that is sweeping my homeland

Hassan Hassan writes: Abu al-Mutasim, 18, from a Syrian border town in the province of Deir Ezzor, joined the rebellion against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in early 2012. He left his family home in Bahrain, where his parents worked, and fought for the Free Syrian Army for a few months before joining the hardline group Ahrar al-Sham. Around the end of the year, disillusioned, he went to visit his family. His parents banned him from travelling back to Syria. But last summer he returned to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis), now renamed the Islamic State.

I asked him what he would do if his father were a member of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s official franchise in Syria, and the two met in a battle. “I would kill him,” he replied firmly. “Abu Ubaida [a prophet’s companion] killed his father in battle.” What drives people such as al-Mutasim? I faced this question directly recently, as I saw Deir Ezzor, the province where I too come from, overrun by Isis, and as the group carried out some of the Syrian conflict’s grisliest atrocities. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. ‘told Syria rebels’ to seek intervention

Al Jazeera reports: US officials have asked the Syrian opposition to call on the international community to hit positions belonging to the Islamic State group and help rebels eliminate the self-declared jihadists, Al Jazeera has learned from sources inside the opposition.

The Syrian National Coalition, the main political opposition bloc, and the leadership of the Free Syrian Army, a loose conglomeration of armed rebel, are expected to make the appeal from Turkey on Saturday, the sources said. [Continue reading…]

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On the road with Syrian refugees walking to Europe

Newsweek reports: In a grim government compound 40 km from Vienna, five young Syrian men are huddled together examining the screen of a battered mobile phone. Beside them is a rickety plastic chair with a glass of sweet, amber-coloured tea perched on top, a vestige of Arab domesticity. This day is like any other: the young men pore over family photographs and talk incessantly of home as they wait for the residence permits that will allow them to start their lives here in Austria.

“Internet and talk,” says one of them, gesturing around the bare dormitory. “There is nothing else.” This compound could be anywhere; as it happens, it borders a quiet village with manicured gardens, picket fences and residents who keep to themselves – a far cry from the war-ravaged Syrian towns these men have abandoned. For the past few weeks, the village of Muthmannsdorf has been a place of surreal limbo, where they wait for the life of freedom they believe Europe holds. It has been hard won.

Murat is an ethnic Turkmen from Damascus, a 28-year-old with striking green eyes and prematurely white-flecked hair. The photo everyone is admiring is of his daughter, three-year-old Aya. Murat fled from Syria with his parents, wife and daughter in August 2012, when Bashar al-Assad’s army started dropping barrel bombs around their home in the southern suburbs of Damascus. Murat knew that even if they survived, he would be forced to join the army and might never see his family again. They drove to Tripoli in Lebanon, where they boarded a boat to the port of Mersin on the southeastern coast of Turkey, and then travelled on to Istanbul. There, with no official refugee status, no passport and no right to work, Murat left his pregnant wife and child in the care of his elder brother and set out for the more promising cities of Europe. Crossing to Greece one night in a rubber dinghy, he began a seven month odyssey during which he entrusted himself to a mafia of people smugglers, risked clandestine border crossings and Balkan police patrols and now, finally, confronts the stony face of Austrian bureaucracy. After weeks on the road, it’s time to wait.

Around 2.8 million Syrians have fled their homeland since conflict broke out in their country three years ago, and, while most are living in camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, those who can afford the journey are headed to Europe. I am in Austria to meet Murat and his friends, who made their way here overland from Greece, having traced their route, with the luxury of an EU passport, from the Turkish-Syrian border to Istanbul, then Athens and finally Vienna. At every stop I have encountered young Syrian men armed with their families’ savings and a few contacts in their mobile phones, relatively undaunted by the dangers of capsizing boats, impenetrable asylum procedures and the lack of any common language with the officials and smugglers who control their fate. Many of these men left Syria to avoid joining either the Islamic State rebels or Assad’s army, escaping without the passports that they could only claim by alerting the authorities to their presence – and subsequent absence. Many of them have left families behind. “The journey is too difficult for women and children,” says Khaled, a small, hoarse man in his late thirties. “We barely made it ourselves.” [Continue reading…]

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As ISIS closes in, is it game over for Syria’s opposition in Aleppo?

Charles Lister writes: The fate of Syria’s Western-backed opposition hangs on a knife edge in the northern part of the war-torn country — and with radical Sunni militants and regime forces closing in on them from all sides, time may be running out.

At least six villages north of Syria’s largest city of Aleppo fell Wednesday to militants from ISIS, according to AFP. The jihadist group has seized large swathes of land in Iraq and consolidated control over considerable territory in northeastern Syria in the past year.

ISIS fighters are now just 30 miles from the rebel-controlled northern suburbs of Aleppo and within striking distance of key opposition positions leading to the Turkish border.

The situation for the opposition may be even worse inside Aleppo city, where forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad are gaining ground after a brutal months-long campaign against opposition forces.

With the radical Sunni fighters bearing down on them from the north, and troops loyal to President Assad retaking Aleppo neighborhood by neighborhood from the south and west, Syria’s beleaguered rebels are facing an existential threat. [Continue reading…]

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Syria: Witnesses corroborate mass deaths in custody claims

Human Rights Watch: Horrific accounts by former detainees in Syria corroborate allegations of mass deaths in custody by a military defector. Four former detainees released from the Sednaya military prison in 2014 described deaths in custody and harsh prison conditions that closely match the allegations of the defector, who photographed thousands of dead bodies in military hospitals in Damascus.

In January, a team of senior international lawyers and forensic experts published a report concluding that Syrian authorities had committed systematic torture and killing of detainees. According to the report, a military defector, code-named Caesar, had taken 55,000 photographs of an estimated 11,000 bodies in military hospitals and other locations in Damascus. The bodies showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation, and other forms of torture and killing.

“The accounts of the four recently released detainees we interviewed lend further credibility to the already damning evidence about mass deaths in Syria’s prisons,” said Ole Solvang, senior emergencies researcher. “When the Syrian authorities are held to account, the deaths in custody will be one of the first crimes they will have to answer for.”

All four former detainees told Human Rights Watch that they had witnessed the death of fellow detainees in Sednaya prison in Damascus following a combination of beatings, torture, malnutrition, and disease. The former detainees, who were held for between 21 and 30 months, most of the time at Sednaya, described abhorrent conditions, including overcrowding, lack of food, inadequate heating and ventilation, poor medical services, and extremely poor sanitary conditions that caused detainees to develop skin diseases and diarrhea. The detainees said that they had lost significant weight during their detention. One said that he lost more than half of his body weight, weighing only 50 kilograms when he was released. [Continue reading…]

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Rebels gaining ground in Syria

Former ambassador Robert S. Ford writes: Don’t believe everything you read in the media: The moderate rebels of Syria are not finished. They have gained ground in different parts of the country and have broken publicly with both the al Qaeda affiliate operating there, as well as with the jihadists of the Islamic State. Meanwhile, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is showing new signs of weakness.

The death of moderate armed opposition elements has been greatly exaggerated. These groups — whom I define as fighters who are not seeking to impose an Islamic state, but rather leaving that to a popular decision after the war ends — have recently gained ground in Idlib province in northwestern Syria, and have nearly surrounded the provincial capital. If the rebels are ever to demonstrate military capacity, it should be in Idlib, where the supply lines from Turkey are easily accessible.

Their advances over the past month also extend beyond Idlib. Notably, moderate armed groups repelled regime attacks in the vicinity of the town of Mourek, in west-central Hama province, and also advanced on the Hamidiyah airbase there. They even damaged aircraft at the airbase, with some reports claiming that they used surface-to-air missiles.

Moreover, they launched renewed rebel incursions into Damascus from the nearby eastern suburb of Jobar on July 25 and 26. The regime reportedly even had to re-route Damascus city buses. These incursions follow the successful operations by the Army of Islam, led by an ambitious Islamist commander named Zahran Alloush, who declared war on the Islamic State and expelled it entirely from Damascus’s eastern suburbs after bloody fighting earlier in the month. Rebels in Aleppo have also begun an operation to cut off the regime’s supplies from the south, so their situation in the northern city is not hopeless.

For the regime, the last three weeks have been particularly painful. The most frequently cited source for casualty figures, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, put regime dead at more than 1,000; the figures provided by the armed opposition were more than double that number. Casualties at this rate are not sustainable for the minority-backed regime, and indeed there were reports of new Alawite grumbling about the growing toll. [Continue reading…]

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