Category Archives: News

ISIS’s hearts and minds campaign in Mosul

Reuters reports: It’s been a week since Sunni rebels took Iraq’s biggest northern city from the army and – with security forces still on the defensive – the fighters in Mosul are settling down and starting to govern their new territory.

Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, al Qaeda’s wayward Iraqi offspring who spearheaded last week’s offensive across north and western Iraq, drive around Mosul in stolen police cars and station themselves at banks and government buildings.

Haitham Abdul Salam, a 50-year-old blacksmith, says he has resumed work in his shop as life readjusts itself. He says ISIL have removed the huge blast walls from the streets as well as checkpoints in an attempt to ease traffic in the city.

“ISIL treat us in a nice way. There is no harassment, even for women. Prices for foodstuffs are less,” he said, although he added that government salaries are not being paid.

The hearts and minds campaign in Mosul mirrors ISIL’s tactics in Syria, where it has exploited the power vacuum left by a three-year civil war in order to take ground.

In the Syrian city of Raqqa, ISIL moved in with other rebel battalions and started providing food and money to locals. It was only once ISIL had solidified its control of Raqqa did it open courts which imposed public executions and amputations.

Then it violently evicted the rebel groups that helped it take Raqqa and destroyed religious shrines.

In Mosul, unveiled women still walk through the streets and ISIL has stayed away from Christian churches, including the Tomb of Jonah.

However, militants razed the tomb of Ibn al-Athir, an Arab philosopher, according to eyewitnesses, and state television announced on Wednesday that ISIL had in fact threatened to demolish Jonah’s Tomb within three days.

ISIL are being aided by secular Baathists as well as Sunni groups that disagree with their vision of an Islamic Caliphate but share a deep hatred for the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad.

A member of the Islamic Army, a smaller insurgent group, said ISIL had agreed to run the city in consultation with all Sunni groups through a military council and that all decisions would be consultative.

The different armed factions were debating who to nominative for governor of the city, he added. The favorites are thought to include several ex-generals from Saddam Hussein’s army. [Continue reading…]

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Maliki ignored ISIS warnings before Mosul’s fall, says city’s governor

The National reports: The governor in charge of Mosul when it was overrun by Islamist militants has blamed Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al Maliki for the extremists’ military successes and warned that a counteroffensive would lead to untold bloodshed.

Atheel Nujeifi, who headed Nineveh province, accused the Shiite premier of causing widespread anger at the central government that allowed the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant to capture the provincial capital last week.

Seizing swathes of territory since then, the Al Qaeda-splinter group’s onslaught has edged towards Baghdad and threatens to trigger a sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites.

“He created the crisis,” Mr Nujeifi, who fled the city on June 10, said of Mr Al Maliki, describing the premier’s handling of the crisis as “very bad”.

He said Mr Al Maliki “never listened” to repeated warnings about the deteriorating security situation around Mosul. [Continue reading…]

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A sophisticated ISIS social media campaign

CBS News reports: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s on-the-ground offensive in northern Iraq this month has been aided, analysts say, by an unprecedented social media blitz.

Jihadi groups using Twitter and other social platforms is nothing new. During its 2013 attack on Kenya’s Westgate mall, the Somali militant group al-Shabab mixed tweets with gunshots. Observers have long warned about the growth of social media as powerful recruitment tools for terrorists.

What makes the ISIS social campaign stand out, analysts say, is its scale and sophistication.

“I think it was obvious very early on that they launched their offensive with a social media campaign well planned in advance. This wasn’t an afterthought. This wasn’t something that they made up as they went along,” said John Little, who monitors national security, conflicts and technology at Blogs of War.

The coordinated campaign has featured what appears to be disciplined, from-the-top-down message control designed to simulate organic grass-roots activity. Complete with an app and highly orchestrated hashtag pushes, the group’s social media strategy mirrors that of a marketing company building buzz around a new product.

“Big corporations wish they were as good at this as ISIS is,” said J.M. Berger, an author and analyst who specializes in social media and extremism, and has been closely monitoring the al Qaeda splinter group’s online activity.

“This is a combination of an extremely ambitious military campaign with an extremely ambitious PR campaign. Social media is most of that PR campaign.”

ISIS has developed a Twitter app for Android phones called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, Berger said. It offers users news and information about ISIS. When users sign up, they give ISIS permission to send tweets through their own personal accounts.

“Your account functions normally most of the time, but it will periodically broadcast tweets from ISIS that are also sent around at the same time to hundreds or even thousands of other accounts,” Berger told CBS News. He said the app helps ISIS get pre-approved hashtags trending on Twitter in certain areas, which then amplifies its message.

“It’s one of many tools that ISIS uses to manipulate the perception on social media that their content is bigger and more popular than it might actually be if you were looking at just their organic supporters.”

Berger reports that ISIS posted almost 40,000 tweets in one day last week as it took Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Its messages are then parroted by Internet users unaffiliated with the group and far away from the fight, sometimes called “E-hadis” or “Jihobbyists.”

“They have at least hundreds and probably more like thousands of fighters who are on social media, and then in addition to that they have many thousands of people who are casually or intensely interested in them as supporters online,” Berger said. [Continue reading…]

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Shiite militias decamping from Syria to fight in Iraq

The Wall Street Journal reports: Iraqi Shiite militias that have provided crucial support to President Bashar al-Assad on Syria’s battlefields are remobilizing to Iraq to help the government there fight off opposition forces closing in on Baghdad, diplomats and Syrian rebels say.

The mobilization away from Syria started in late December when antigovernment forces seized Iraq’s western Anbar province, but has recently gained pace as militants have taken more territory, including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Fighters from Hezbollah are filling the vacuum left in Syria by the withdrawing Iraqi militias, according to Syrian rebels and an official close to the Lebanese militant and political group.

Many of these Shiite militants are leaving Syria to fight alongside the Iraqi army, say Western and Arab diplomats, increasing the sectarian undertone of the conflict. The militants’ mobilization underscores accusations from Iraqi Sunnis that the Shiite-led government in Baghdad is dragging state institutions into a bloody sectarian war. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Shia militias who were defending Assad are now returning home

ISW reports: As the Iraqi government and Shi’a militia groups attempt to mobilize and recruit fighters reports suggest that Iraqi Shi’a militia fighters, previously supporting the Syrian regime have begun to return to Iraq. The majority of these redeployments are likely occurring in Damascus, where Iraqi Shi’a militias have been heavily involved in fighting in Damascus’ southern suburbs near the Sayida Zeinab Shrine, and Aleppo province, where they have supported the regime’s offensive to besiege the rebel-held neighborhoods of eastern Aleppo city. A source close to Lebanese Hezbollah said the group has called for a general mobilization, announcing that 1,000 fighters are to be sent to Syria from Lebanon to defend the Sayida Zeinab Shrine in Damascus and replace Shi’a Iraqi militia troops, particularly from the Abu Fadl al-Abbas brigade who are returning to Iraq. This movement of troops could create a deficit in the regime’s forces, exacerbating its manpower challenge. Early indications of this include rebel gains in Mleiha, in the Damascus suburbs, and Rankous in the Qalamoun region.

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Ukraine says Russia has 38,000 troops on border amid ‘invasion’

Bloomberg reports: Russia has amassed as many as 38,000 soldiers on its borders with Ukraine and continues to supply arms and personnel to rebel forces in the eastern part of the country, Ukraine’s National Security Council chief said.

Russia has moved about 16,000 troops to Ukraine’s eastern frontier and has another 22,000 in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that President Vladimir Putin annexed in March, Andriy Parubiy told reporters in the capital Kiev today.

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An arrest that exposed the wealth and power of ISIS

The Guardian reports: Two days before Mosul fell to the Islamic insurgent group Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Iraqi commanders stood eyeballing its most trusted messenger. The man, known within the extremist group as Abu Hajjar, had finally cracked after a fortnight of interrogation and given up the head of Isis’s military council.

“He said to us, ‘you don’t realise what you have done’,” an intelligence official recalled. “Then he said: ‘Mosul will be an inferno this week’.’

Several hours later, the man he had served as a courier and been attempting to protect, Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, lay dead in his hideout near Mosul. From the home of the dead man and the captive, Iraqi forces hoovered up more than 160 computer flash sticks which contained the most detailed information yet known about the terror group.

The treasure trove included names and noms de guerre of all foreign fighters, senior leaders and their code words, initials of sources inside ministries and full accounts of the group’s finances.

“We were all amazed and so were the Americans,” a senior intelligence official told the Guardian. “None of us had known most of this information.” [Continue reading…]

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General Military Council of the Iraqi Revolutionaries: ‘We are stronger than ISIS’

Former General Muzhir al Qaisi, spokesman for the General Military Council of the Iraqi Revolutionaries, which controls Mosul alongside ISIS, when interviewed by the BBC said that his forces follow the Geneva Conventions whereas ISIS are “barbarians.” He also noted that with no more than 1,000 fighters, ISIS is not capable of controlling Mosul. He said that ISIS is only trying to apply sharia in one neighborhood but that the residents refuse that kind of rule and the local imams will not allow this to happen.

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Sunni residents return to Mosul

The Associated Press reports: Days after Iraq’s second-largest city fell to al-Qaida-inspired fighters, some Iraqis are already returning to Mosul, lured back by insurgents offering cheap gas and food, restoring power and water and removing traffic barricades.

Many people appear excited to return, taking sectarian pride in the extremist Sunni group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Some see them as liberators.

“I hope God supports them and makes them victorious over the oppression of al-Maliki,” said 80-year-old Abu Thaer.

He spoke at the Khazer checkpoint on the northern frontier of the largely autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, 65 miles (105 kilometers) from Mosul. Five veiled women and six children were crammed into the back seat of his car.

They were among tens of thousands of people who fled their homes as Islamic State fighters and other Sunni militants seized much of northern Iraq, including Mosul and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.

Many Sunni Arab men and women said they left, not because they feared the insurgents, but because of the risk of retaliatory airstrikes by Iraqi government forces.

Their return underscores the profound sectarianism cleaving Iraq and the depth of anger that many Sunnis harbor toward al-Maliki’s government, which they accuse of discrimination and harassment and pushing Sunnis to the political margins.

“We see that they have made Mosul better,” said Abu Mohammed, a 34-year-old taxi driver who ferries returnees back to the city. “The water is back. The electricity is back. The prices are lower.”

The anger many Iraqis felt toward al-Maliki’s government only increased after soldiers abandoned Mosul, fleeing before civilians. It’s likely that many Iraqi troops fled because they sensed insurgents would be welcomed by long-resentful Sunnis, and they did not want to risk their lives for a senseless battle.

“The army was only good at oppressing Sunnis, but it was nothing more,” Abu Thaer said. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS claims mass execution of Iraqi soldiers

The New York Times reports: Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria boasted on Twitter that they had executed 1,700 Iraqi government soldiers, posting gruesome photos to support their claim.

The authenticity of the photographs and the insurgents’ claim could not be verified, and Iraqi government officials initially cast doubt on whether such a mass execution took place. There were also no reports of large numbers of funerals in the Salahuddin Province area, where the executions were said to have been conducted.

If the claim is true, it would be the worst mass atrocity in either Syria or Iraq in recent years, surpassing even the chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian suburbs of Damascus last year, which killed 1,400 people and were attributed to the Syrian government.

The latest attack, if proved, would also raise the specter of the war in Iraq turning genocidal, particularly because the insurgents boasted that their victims were all Shiites. There were also fears that it could usher in a series of reprisal killings of Shiites and Sunnis, like those seen in the Iraq war in 2005-7. [Continue reading…]

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Syria pounds ISIS bases in coordination with Iraq

AFP reports: Syria’s army has been pounding major bases of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria in coordination with the Baghdad government for the last 24 hours, an activist group says Sunday.

The strikes against ISIS — which has spearheaded a week-long jihadist offensive in Iraq — have been more intense than ever, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“The regime air force has been pounding ISIS’s bases, including those in the northern province of Raqa and Hasakeh in the northeast,” which borders Iraq, said the Britain-based group.

The regime of President Bashar Assad was responding to the fact that ISIS “brought into Syria heavy weapons including tanks” captured from the Iraqi army.

In Raqa, the air force bombed the area surrounding ISIS’s main headquarters in Syria, as well as the group’s religious courts, said the Observatory, adding there were no reported casualties.

Photographs sent by activists in Raqa that could not be independently verified showed craters in the ground and rubble in front of the main gates of the headquarters, a former town hall. Saturday, the regime also bombarded ISIS’s headquarters at Shaddadi in Hasakeh, home to a frontier crossing from Iraq that is under the jihadists’ control.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said the strikes were the regime’s most “intense” against ISIS, and that they were being carried out “in coordination with the Iraqi authorities.” [Continue reading…]

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Washington and Tehran’s shared interests in Iraq

Robin Wright writes: On Monday, Iran and the United States, along with envoys from Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia, will meet again in Vienna to work on specific terms for a nuclear agreement. The talks resume just as Washington and Tehran suddenly find that they have common cause in preventing Iraq’s abrupt disintegration. For both, their longtime strategies toward Iraq appear to be failing, as a few thousand thugs in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) burn their way across the country.

Washington and Tehran have started using the same language. President Obama, in his remarks on the South Lawn of the White House on Friday, said, “Nobody has an interest in seeing terrorists gain a foothold inside of Iraq, and nobody is going to benefit from seeing Iraq descend into chaos.” An hour later, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, told me, by telephone, from Tehran, “It is in the interest of everybody to stabilize the government of Iraq. If the U.S. has come to realize that these groups pose a threat to the security of the region, and if the U.S. truly wants to fight terrorism and extremism, then it’s a common global cause.”

Obama said that Washington is “going to pursue diplomacy” across the region. Zarif told me that he’d been working the phones with Iraq’s neighbors for the past two days. Obama warned of the dangers of the Sunni extremists trying to “overrun sacred Shia sites.” Iran is the world’s largest Shiite country, and its interests in Iraq are focussed on protecting the Shiite plurality that was long dominated by a Sunni minority.

Twitter pundits are already speculating about the potential for de facto coöperation between the countries. Among the scenarios: U.S. drones striking ISIS targets and, in effect, providing air cover for Iranian Revolutionary Guards dispatched to help hold back the ISIS jihadis, who have been pushing toward Baghdad. In our conversation, Zarif denied reports that Tehran has already dispatched battalions of Revolutionary Guards to aid and protect Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government, but its élite Quds Force has long had a presence — in various forms — inside Iraq. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian adds: The US should “sit down and talk” with Iran over the crisis in Iraq, top Republican senator Lindsey Graham said on Sunday.

Graham, a leading foreign policy hawk, also attacked President Barack Obama for what he said was his “delusional and detached” response to the crisis.

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Iran sets deadline for nuclear programme deal

The Guardian reports: Iran is seeking a deal with major world powers within weeks that would end years of dispute over the country’s nuclear programme and economic sanctions imposed on it by western powers, President Hassan Rouhani has said.

He said he wanted to reach an agreement by 20 July, adding that the the international sanctions regime had crumbled and would not be rebuilt – even if no final nuclear deal could be reached.

Rouhani also said he would be willing to work with the White House to meet the danger posed by Islamist extremists who have taken towns in northern Iraq, in a sign of shifting attitudes towards the US in Tehran.

“The disputes can be resolved with goodwill and flexibility … I believe that the 20 July deadline can be met despite remaining disputes. If not, we can continue the talks for a month or more,” he said, addressing the nation in a live broadcast on state television.

“During the nuclear negotiations we have displayed our strong commitment to diplomacy (but even) if a deal can’t be reached by July 20, conditions will never be like the past. The sanctions regime has been broken.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran open to cooperating with U.S. in defense of Iraq

Reuters reports: Shi’te Muslim Iran is so alarmed by Sunni insurgent gains in Iraq that it may be willing to cooperate with Washington in helping Baghdad fight back, a senior Iranian official told Reuters.

The idea is being discussed internally among the Islamic Republic’s leadership, the senior Iranian official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official had no word on whether the idea had been raised with any other party.

Officials say Iran will send its neighbor advisers and weaponry, although probably not troops, to help its ally Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki check what Tehran sees as a profound threat to regional stability, officials and analysts say.

Islamist militants have captured swathes of territory including the country’s second biggest city Mosul.

Tehran is open to the possibility of working with the United States to support Baghdad, the senior official said.

“We can work with Americans to end the insurgency in the Middle East,” the official said, referring to events in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Iran deploys Revolutionary Guards units to Iraq

The Wall Street Journal reports: The threat of Sunni extremists eclipsing the power of its Shiite-dominated Arab ally presents Iran with the biggest security and strategic challenge it has faced since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

With the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, an offshoot of al Qaeda, rapidly gaining territory, Iran deployed Revolutionary Guards units to Iraq, according to Iranian security officials.

Iran has invested considerable financial, political and military resources over the past decade to ensure Iraq emerged from U.S. war as a strategic partner for the Islamic Republic and a strong Shiite-led state. The so-called Shiite crescent—stretching from Iran to Iraq, Lebanon and Syria—was forged largely as a result of this effort.

Two Guards’ units, dispatched from Iran’s western border provinces on Wednesday, were tasked with protecting Baghdad and the holy Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, these security sources said. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqis who fled Mosul say they prefer militants to government

From Erbil, the New York Times reports: After Islamic extremists swarmed his city this week, Saad Hussein fled here with his wife and six children. But after one night, he was on his way back home to Mosul, hearing that things were quiet there.

“What can we do?” said Mr. Hussein, at a checkpoint on the road from Erbil to Mosul. “You have to depend on your God.”

Another man stood nearby, his two small sons tugging at his belt. He had left Mosul and was waiting to enter Erbil, about 50 miles to the east. “We don’t know what will happen in the future,” said the man, Ahmed Ali, 31. “The government is not there. It’s empty.”

As many as 500,000 Iraqis fled Mosul this week after the city was besieged by the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, many of them Sunnis who seemed less fearful of the beheadings and summary justice that the group is known for than of their own government and the barrage it might unleash in an effort to take the city back. [Continue reading…]

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Ayatollah Sistani calls on volunteers to defend Iraq, its citizens and shrines

The Washington Post reports: Shiite clerics called on Iraqi civilians Friday to take up arms against advancing Sunni insurgents inspired by al-Qaeda, drawing the battle lines for a major sectarian confrontation in the fracturing state.

President Obama, meanwhile, said he would not exercise any military option until Iraq’s leaders show they are committed to bridging their differences with the opposition.

With heavily armed fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seizing more territory overnight in a rampage that threatens to tear the country apart, Iraqi officials said tens of thousands of civilians had volunteered to fight alongside the crumbling security forces.

Shiite religious leaders, including Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, used Friday prayers to call on the faithful to take up arms against the radical Sunni Muslim insurgents. In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani urged anyone who can carry a weapon to “defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.” [Continue reading…]

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Methodists to sell shares as a protest over Israeli occupation

The New York Times reports: The pension board of the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, the United Methodist Church, has decided to divest its shares in a British company that supplies security equipment to Israel for use in prisons and in the occupied West Bank.

The move comes as Israel has been trying to fend off resolutions by academic institutions, businesses and church groups to divest from companies that do business with Israel.

The Methodist Church’s investment in the company, G4S, involves only about $110,000 worth of stock holdings, said David Wildman, executive secretary for human rights and racial justice for the church’s General Board of Global Ministries. But the action is intended to have a larger symbolic impact, adding to the pressure on Israel to stop building settlements and end the occupation. [Continue reading…]

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