Music: Habib Koite & Bamada — ‘I Ka Barra’
ISIS emerged out of the dashed hopes of the Arab Spring
Adam Hanieh writes: In the wake of the November 13 attacks in Paris, much of the Left has linked the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to the deepening imperialist violence in the Middle East.
War and imperialism, on one side, and the growing reach of jihadist terrorism, on the other, are said to be locked together in a mutually reinforcing embrace of violence and destruction. “Imperialist cruelty and Islamist cruelty feed each other,” the French Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) argued shortly after the Paris attacks. In order to break this nihilistic death grip, we need to oppose foreign intervention, put an end to imperialist violence, and halt the ongoing plunder of wealth from countries in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.
The basic logic of this argument is undoubtedly sound. But in terms of explanatory value, this kind of analysis does not go far enough. It suffers from too much generality and abstractness — telling us little about the specificity of this particular moment, or the nature of ISIS as a movement. By attributing a kind of automaticity or natural mirror between ISIS and imperialism, we can miss the all-important context and history that has shaped the remarkably rapid rise of the organization.
Why does the response to Western aggression and the calamitous situations in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere across the region take this particular ideological and political form? What explains the support that ISIS finds on the ground in both the Arab world and Europe? In short: why now? And why like this?
The real genesis of the Islamic State’s rise needs to be seen in the trajectory of the Arab uprisings that erupted throughout 2011 and 2012. These uprisings represented enormous hope, a hope that must continue to be defended. They were met with repression and reversal, unable to move forward in any fundamental sense. It was into this breach that Islamist groups stepped, their rise closely calibrated to the pushback against the revolts and the popular democratic aspirations that they embodied.
There was no inevitability to this. Rather, the difficulties the uprisings faced created a vacuum that was necessarily filled by something else. [Continue reading…]
U.S.-backed and YPG-led alliance faces challenges as a force in Syria
The Associated Press reports: Drawing on thousands of combatants from Syria’s mix of religious and ethnic groups, a U.S.-backed alliance called the Syrian Democratic Forces has emerged as the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State group.
But the dominant role of Kurdish fighters in the alliance is a concern for majority Sunni Arab factions and their regional backers, raising questions about the group’s future role in a broader political context in Syria.
In its founding statement, the Syrian Democratic Forces said its aim beyond destroying IS was to build a democratic, pluralistic Syria “where all Syrian citizens of all sects enjoy freedom, justice and dignity.”
“Officially they represent a whole range of ethnicities and ostensibly the vision could be deemed moderate, but the coalition can only gain limited traction, as the YPG is justifiably perceived as the dominant actor to which the allied rebel groups in particular are junior partners,” said Aymen Tamimi, an expert on rebel and Islamic extremist groups and a fellow at the Middle East Forum think tank.
One of the alliance’s biggest challenges is reclaiming mostly Arab areas with a fighting force whose most effective combatants are Kurds.
“They added Arab groups to the alliance to dilute the Kurdish element, but everyone knows it’s the Wihdat,” said Abu Khaled, a rebel fighter loosely affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, using the Arabic abbreviation for the YPG.
“Their (YPG) record is not clean, and that is the biggest problem facing this alliance,” he said from Turkey, where he goes back and forth to Syria.
His comments reflected the wide distrust the YPG faces among mainstream rebels in Syria. [Continue reading…]
Syria’s Kurds at the center of America’s anti-jihadi strategy
Aron Lund writes: The self-proclaimed Islamic State is under pressure in Syria today. In the Aleppo area, its defenses have been pierced by a Syrian government offensive backed by the Russian Air Force. Although most of the Russian airstrikes have hit other Sunni rebel groups (regardless of what the pro-Kremlin propaganda claims), some attacks target the Islamic State as well. In the deserts east of Homs, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Russian-backed government is trying to reverse recent losses to the jihadi group. Should his army manage to recapture Palmyra, which was lost in May, it would be a severe blow to the Islamic State.
But until now, the most significant recent victories against the Islamic State have taken place further east and have come at the hands of an American-backed, Kurdish-majority alliance known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.
Created as recently as October, the SDF is a political umbrella designed to provide legal and political cover for American military support to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, better known as PKK. A Kurdish leftist group locked in battle with the Turkish government, it was designated a “ foreign terrorist organization” by the U.S. government in 1997 and graduated to become a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization in 2001, largely due to Turkish pressure.
The PKK, operating in Syria through a front group known as the People’s Defense Units, or YPG (with an all-female version called the YPJ), has emerged as the country’s most potent anti-jihadi force. Having crushed the Islamic State in Kobane in February, Tal Abyad in June, Hasakah City in July, and now in al-Houl on the Iraqi border, the Kurds and their local allies are gearing up for further offensives on jihadi strongholds near Raqqa and south of Hasakah. The White House desperately wants to support them, seeing few other ways to pressure the Islamic State in Syria.
So, in order to avoid any legal or political blowback, U.S. officials now insist that they are not at all working with the-organization-that-must-not-be-named, but rather with the SDF, where the YPG is only one member among many. And the United States has avoided adding the YPG to any blacklists, even though any American official could (but won’t) tell you that it’s a PKK front. [Continue reading…]
Yes, the rebels can defeat ISIS — and the UK’s increased involvement in Syria will help
Hassan Hassan writes: The US has thus far focused on working with particular forces in limited areas to battle Isis, while persistently striking the group’s bases and economic routes inside its heartlands. The tagetting of bridges and oil facilities and trucks is paralysing the economy in Isis-controlled areas. This sometimes pushed people to join the only employer in town to generate income for their families. Others have emptied their household of young members by sending them overseas as refugees.
Meanwhile, Isis embeds in residential areas to evade the airstrikes while still making money through taxation, extortion and other means that enabled it to take most of the areas now under control before it laid its hands on the oil infrastructure. It is also quietly expanding in less strategic but vulnerable areas such as the areas between Palmyra, the city of Homs and southern Syria, to avoid intensive bombardment or heavy military deployment.
Britain should not exacerbate the situation by merely deploying jets to fly more sorties onto Isis areas. Instead, most of the time and effort should be used to encourage and prop up local forces to fight ISIS. That requires a strategy that is independent from the one currently led by Washington. The focus for the UK should be to work mostly in the background through existing and new channels to advise, network, train and provide non-military services to armed fighting groups in different parts of the country.
For example, the UK has until recently sponsored an ambitious and unique programme to appoint moderate imams in an area controlled by various rebel forces, instead of extremist clerics affiliated to jihadi organisations. Part of the moderate clerics’ focus was to educate worshippers about the danger of takfir — or pronouncing fellow Muslims as infidels or apostates. According to a field commander of the faction overseeing the programme, the “culture of takfir” is a major impediment to getting fighters to combat groups such as Isis, especially if the faction is backed by western countries. [Continue reading…]
UK parliament votes to bomb ISIS in Syria – so, what will that mean internationally?
By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham
The British parliament has approved a government plan to join the international alliance bombing Islamic State targets in Syria. After more than 10 hours debating, the motion in favour of action passed with 397 votes for and 223 votes against the government.
Ahead of the vote, British newspaper columns had been filled with discussion of a new “war”, while those opposed to the airstrikes drew parallels with the catastrophe of the intervention in Iraq in 2003.
Both of these are exaggerations. Britain’s bombing will not be significant and it certainly will not be part of a coherent strategy against the Islamic State, let alone a reasonable approach to Syria’s 56-month conflict.
This is no more than a political sideshow, a diversion from the core issue – namely the continuing civil war between president Bashar al-Assad and his opponents.
Hilary Benn’s Syria speech applauded by British MPs
Helped by Russian airstrikes, ISIS advances in northern Aleppo
NOW reports: ISIS has swept into a village outside a key rebel supply line in northern Aleppo, with activists blaming the setback on Russian airstrikes against rebel factions which are also battling a Kurdish-affiliated coalition further to the west.
The new ISIS advance is the latest battlefield development to rock the flashpoint northern Aleppo front adjacent to a swathe of territory Turkey wants to turn into a “safe zone” free of both the extremist group and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YGP).
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Wednesday morning that “fierce clashes are raging in the area around the village of Kafrah and other nearby areas, between ISIS on one side and rebel factions on the other.” [Continue reading…]
Saudi Arabia ‘destabilising Arab world’, German intelligence warns
The Telegraph reports: Saudi Arabia is at risk of becoming a major destabilising influence in the Arab world, German intelligence has warned.
Internal power struggles and the desire to emerge as the leading Arab power threaten to make the key Western ally a source of instability, according to the BND intelligence service.
“The current cautious diplomatic stance of senior members of the Saudi royal family will be replaced by an impulsive intervention policy,” a BND memo widely distributed to the German press reads.
The memo focuses particularly on the role of Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 30-year-old son of King Salman who was recently appointed deputy crown prince and defence minister. [Continue reading…]
Texas sues U.S., relief agency, to block Syrian refugees
Reuters reports: A Texas state agency sued the U.S. State Department, a relief agency and others in federal court on Wednesday, seeking to block the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the state just ahead of a plan to bring a new group of Syrians within a week.
The International Rescue Committee is set to relocate two Syrian refugee families to Texas in the coming days despite a threat from state officials that such a move would be reckless and met with a cut in funding for the agency.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission sued, asking the U.S. District Court in Dallas for an immediate restraining order and a hearing by Dec. 9 for an injunction that would prevent resettlement. It is also asking that refugees not be resettled until then. [Continue reading…]
Can Washington separate its Iran policy from Israel?
Trita Parsi writes: A senior German official told me in 2010, quite proudly, that under the leadership of Angela Merkel, Germany’s Iran policy had become a function of its relations with Israel. Whether Germany would sanction Iran or engage in diplomacy very much depended on Israel’s reaction. In its simplest form, the German official was explaining to me the process of “Israelizing” Iran—that is, turning one’s policy towards Iran broadly into a function one’s relationship with Israel.
No U.S. official has ever described U.S. policy on Iran in those terms to me. And if they did, most likely, it would not be accurate. But in the course of the last two years, particularly this past summer, we have also seen that Israel has played a far greater role in America’s Iran policy than many previously would have admitted. And for many on Capitol Hill, the reality is that Iran is primarily viewed through an Israeli lens.
This will be a major problem for President Obama, and for subsequent administrations seeking to sustain the nuclear deal with Iran. Not because Washington would not like to see significant changes in Iran’s posture towards Israel, or that it doesn’t believe that continued Iranian hostility towards Israel wouldn’t be a threat to the nuclear deal, but because the de-Israelization of Iran requires much more than just a change in Iran’s policy on Israel.
To understand why, we must first recognize why and how Iran came to be viewed from an Israeli lens by so many in Washington in the first place. [Continue reading…]
Tony Blair’s blunder on Middle East peace
Ahmad Melhem writes: Tony Blair has kicked off his personal campaign of seeking peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but Palestinian Authority members and others have bluntly expressed their distrust of the former British prime minister and former envoy of the Middle East Quartet.
Palestinian leaders are clear about their resentment of Blair. During a Nov. 9 meeting with a group of Egyptian journalists in Cairo, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas attacked Blair and called him a “spy” for Israel because of his attempts to conclude an appeasement agreement between Hamas and Israel, while ignoring the PA.
“Abbas has been refusing to meet with Blair for two years because of his pro-Israeli negative role,” political sources in the PA told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. [Continue reading…]
The prize: Fighting for Libya’s oil wealth
International Crisis Group reports: Libya’s economic conditions could turn sharply for the worse, as rival authorities vie to control rapidly shrinking national wealth. The struggle affects oil fields, pipelines and export terminals, as well as the boardrooms of national financial institutions. Combined with runaway spending due to corruption and dwindling revenue because of falling exports and energy prices, the financial situation – and with it citizen welfare – faces collapse in the context of a deep political crisis, militia battles and the spread of radical groups, including the Islamic State (IS). If living conditions plunge and militia members’ government salaries are not paid, the two governments competing for legitimacy will both lose support, and mutiny, mob rule and chaos will take over. Rather than wait for creation of a unity government, political and military actors, backed by internationals supporting a political solution, must urgently tackle economic governance in the UN-led talks.
Since the Qadhafi regime fell in 2011, Libya has been beset by attacks on, labour strikes at and armed takeovers of oil and gas facilities, mostly by militias seeking rents from the fledging central government. Initially brief and usually resolved by government concessions, the incidents gradually took on a life of their own, in an alarming sign of the fragmentation of political, economic and military power. They show the power accrued by militias during and since the 2011 uprising and the failure of efforts to integrate them into the national security sector. The dysfunctional security system for oil and gas infrastructure presents a tempting target for IS militants, as attacks in 2015 have shown.
One aspect of the hydrocarbon dispute is a challenge to the centralised model of political and economic governance developed around oil and gas resources that was crucial to the old regime’s power. But corruption that greased patronage networks was at that model’s centre, and corrupt energy sector practices have increased. A federalist movement some consider secessionist controls a number of the most important crude-oil export terminals. It exploits the situation by pursuing its own sale channels, adding to the centrifugal forces tearing Libya apart. [Continue reading…]
James Hansen says current ‘half-assed’ plans to reduce emissions will lead to dangerous climate change
The Guardian reports: One of the world’s leading atmospheric scientists has told the UN that its present attempt to limit emissions is “half-arsed and half-baked” and risks handing the next generation a climate system that is out of their control.
James Hansen, former head of Nasa’s Goddard Center and the man who raised awareness of climate change in a key Senate hearing back in 1988 said that the UN meeting was on the wrong track by seeking a 2C maximum rise in temperatures.
“What I am hearing is that the heads of state are planning to clap each other on the back and say this is a very successful conference. If that is what happens, we are screwing the next generation, because we are doing the same as before.
“[A rise of ] 2C is definitely dangerous. We are at the point now where temperatures are hitting the 1C mark and are are on a path above 1C. Even if we reduce emissions 6% a year we will still get 1C.
“Instead we hear the same old thing as Kyoto [in 1997]. We are asking each country to cap emissions, or reduce emissions. In science when you do a well conducted experiment you expect to get the same result. So why are we talking about doing the same again? This is half-arsed and half-baked.”
Hansen, who was speaking at a climate summit for the first time, said the planet was out of energy balance. “There is more warming in the pipeline that will take us into real danger. We are on the edge of handing our children a climate system that is out of control, and that could mean losing half our coastal cities.” [Continue reading…]
The human flock
Helen Macdonald writes: There are 12 of us by the lake. Some have set out spotting scopes on tripods upon the grass; others carry binoculars. Silently we stand and wait for the Hungarian dusk. The sun slips behind an expanse of steely water, and the air grows colder. Then we hear a faint noise like baying hounds or discordant bugles, at first hardly discernible through the wind rattling the reeds. It grows into an unearthly clamor. ‘‘Here they come!’’ someone whispers. Overhead, a long, wavering chevron of beating wings is inked across the darkening sky. Behind it flows others, and there are others behind them, all passing overhead in ever-increasing waves, filling the air with an astonishing barrage of noise and beauty.
The birds above us are long-necked, graceful Eurasian cranes. Every autumn more than a hundred thousand of them stop off on their southward migration from Russia and Northern Europe to spend a few weeks in the Hortobagy region in northeastern Hungary, feeding on maize left in the fields after the harvest. Every night they fly to roost in huge numbers in the safety of shallow fish-farm lakes, attracting wildlife tourists who come here to witness the spectacle of their evening flights. Similarly impressive congregations can be seen in many other places. In Nebraska, more than half a million sandhill cranes fatten up in cornfields before continuing their spring migration; in Quebec, watchers thrill at blizzards of snow geese blotting out the sky as they rise from the St. François River. In Britain, clouds of wintering starlings flying to their roosts draw crowds of all ages.
Standing so close to such vast masses of birds affects everyone differently: Some people laugh, some cry, others shake their heads or utter profanities. Language fails in the face of immense flocks of beating wings. As I stare up in awe, it strikes me that this is, at heart, a kind of modern secular pilgrimage.
Our brains are built to wrest familiar meaning from the confusions of the world. Watching the cranes at dusk, I see them turn first into strings of musical notation, then mathematical patterns. The snaking lines synchronize so that each bird raises its wings a fraction before the one behind it, each moving flock suddenly resolving itself into a filmstrip showing a single bird stretched through time. It is an astonishing image that makes me blink in surprise. Part of the allure of flocking birds is their ability to provoke optical illusions. I remember my astonishment as a child watching thousands of shorebirds flying against a gray sky vanish and reappear in an instant as the birds turned their countershaded bodies in the air. Perhaps the best-known example is the hosts of European starlings that assemble in the sky before they roost. We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun. It captures their almost celestial strangeness. Standing on the Suffolk coast a few years ago, I saw a far-flung mist of starlings turn in a split second into an ominous sphere like a dark planet hanging over the marshes. Everyone around me gasped audibly before it exploded in a maelstrom of wings. [Continue reading…]
Music: Habib Koité — ‘Simany’
Five Great Guitars: Jan Kuiper, Habib Koite, Erwin Java, Zoumana Diarra, and Digmon Roovers, with Dra Diarra and Mousse Pathe M’baye
How America’s choice to ignore the plight of Syrians has fueled support for ISIS inside the U.S.
Given the reputation ISIS has earned as the largest and most violent terrorist organization of this era, it’s difficult for many observers to fathom why anyone — especially someone who has enjoyed the privileges of growing up in America — would choose to join this death cult. Surely it could only appeal to individuals suffering from some underlying pathology or profound social dysfunction?
A newly published study by researchers at George Washington University, ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa, examines the cases of 71 individuals who have been charged with ISIS-related activities since March 2014, of whom 56 were arrested in 2015 alone — the highest number of terrorism-related arrests in the U.S. since 9/11.
While ISIS has found foreign recruits in much larger numbers in other countries, such as Tunisia, Russia, and France, support in the U.S. is widespread and significant.
U.S. authorities say there are 250 Americans who have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria/Iraq to join ISIS and there are 900 active investigations against ISIS sympathizers in all 50 states.
As public support for expanding military action against ISIS increases, in tandem with a widening sense that Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria is the “lesser evil,” perhaps the most significant finding in the new study is this:
In many cases examined by our research team, an underlying sense of sympathy and compassion appeared to play an important role in initially motivating young Americans to become interested and invested in the Syrian conflict. Many were outraged by the appalling violence Bashar al Assad’s regime used to suppress the Syrian rebellion and the subsequent inaction on the part of the international community. Pictures and videos capturing the aftermath of civilian massacres perpetrated by the regime, displayed widely in both social and mainstream media, rocked the consciences of many — from those with an existing strong Sunni identity to those who were not Muslim — and led some to take the first steps to militancy.
From the vantage point of the ISIS leadership in Raqqa, the prospects for finding new recruits in the U.S. have probably never before looked so promising.
After years of disinterest in the war, American public sympathy towards Syrian refugees briefly spiked in September in response to a photograph of a single drowned infant, but just as quickly largely evaporated after the Paris attacks — even though the perpetrators were mostly European.
Russia’s intervention in Syria has, among other things, had the effect of removing the modest amount of pressure the Obama administration has long faced to impose a no-fly zone.
The Paris attacks have put ISIS at the top of the international agenda, reinvigorating the broad rallying cry that “ISIS must be destroyed.”
Those who once imagined that they could go to Syria to fight for defenseless Muslims in a territorially-defined war, are now even more likely to embrace the ideology which believes in a global war against Muslims, in response to which Muslims are called to take up arms wherever they are.
If the military campaign to contain, degrade and destroy ISIS, also has the ancillary effect of consolidating the Assad regime’s hold on power, the weakening of ISIS’s territorial base will no doubt lead to the expansion of its international operations.
The price we are likely to pay for imagining that the disaster in Syria was something we could comfortably ignore, separated as we are by a vast ocean, is that the war will open on new fronts most often discerned only after the fact.
As the Syrian writer and political dissident, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, recently said:
the Syrian struggle is not something confined to Syria, it is a global issue. And because the world did not help Syria change for better, I think that Syria is changing the whole world for worse.
Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the ISIS, and it is hurting the war
The Washington Post reports: On the front lines of the battle against the Islamic State, suspicion of the United States runs deep. Iraqi fighters say they have all seen the videos purportedly showing U.S. helicopters airdropping weapons to the militants, and many claim they have friends and relatives who have witnessed similar instances of collusion.
Ordinary people also have seen the videos, heard the stories and reached the same conclusion — one that might seem absurd to Americans but is widely believed among Iraqis — that the United States is supporting the Islamic State for a variety of pernicious reasons that have to do with asserting U.S. control over Iraq, the wider Middle East and, perhaps, its oil.
“It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army.
The Islamic State is “almost finished,” he said. “They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.”
U.S. military officials say the charges are too far-fetched to merit a response. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” said Col. Steve Warren, the military’s Baghdad-based spokesman. “There’s clearly no one in the West who buys it, but unfortunately, this is something that a segment of the Iraqi population believes.”
The perception among Iraqis that the United States is somehow in cahoots with the militants it claims to be fighting appears, however, to be widespread across the country’s Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide, and it speaks to more than just the troubling legacy of mistrust that has clouded the United States’ relationship with Iraq since the 2003 invasion and the subsequent withdrawal eight years later.
At a time when attacks by the Islamic State in Paris and elsewhere have intensified calls for tougher action on the ground, such is the level of suspicion with which the United States is viewed in Iraq that it is unclear whether the Obama administration would be able to significantly escalate its involvement even if it wanted to.
“What influence can we have if they think we are supporting the terrorists?” asked Kirk Sowell, an analyst based in neighboring Jordan who publishes the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics.
In one example of how little leverage the United States now has, Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi pushed back swiftly against an announcement Tuesday by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter that an expeditionary force of U.S. troops will be dispatched to Iraq to conduct raids, free hostages and capture Islamic State leaders.
Iraq’s semiautonomous region of Kurdistan, where support for the United States remains strong, has said it would welcome more troops. But Abadi indicated they would not be needed.
“There is no need for foreign ground combat troops,” he said in a statement. “Any such support and special operations anywhere in Iraq can only be deployed subject to the approval of the Iraqi Government and in coordination with the Iraqi forces and with full respect to Iraqi sovereignty.”
The allegations of U.S. collusion with the Islamic State are aired regularly in parliament by Shiite politicians and promoted in postings on social media. They are persistent enough to suggest a deliberate campaign on the part of Iran’s allies in Iraq to erode American influence, U.S. officials say.
In one typical recent video that appeared on the Facebook page of a Shiite militia, a lawmaker with the country’s biggest militia group, the Badr Organization, waves apparently new U.S military MREs (meals ready to eat) — one of them chicken and dumplings — allegedly found at a recently captured Islamic State base in Baiji, offering proof, he said, of U.S. support.
“The Iranians and the Iranian-backed Shiite militias are really pushing this line of propaganda, that the United States is supporting ISIL,” Warren said. “It’s part of the Iranian propaganda machine.” [Continue reading…]
The problem doesn’t just apply in Iraq. I have little doubt that there are Americans now reading this report who believe it must be a product of the Pentagon’s propaganda machine, duping gullible journalists in order to conceal “the truth” that ISIS is an American creation!
Such has been the “success” of the internet in spreading conspiracy theories.