ISIS holding at least 20 media workers hostage in Mosul

Reporters Without Borders: As the US-led international coalition continues its airstrikes in Iraq and northern Syria in a bid to halt the Jihadi advance, Islamic State is stepping up its persecution of journalists, either threatening to kill them, kidnapping them or mistreating those it is already holding.

Islamic State is now holding at least 20 journalists in Mosul (in northern Iraq), the largest city it controls.

According to the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO), Islamic State kidnapped nine journalists more than a month ago, six of whom it is still holding and three it released. Then it kidnapped another 14 reporters, cameramen and TV engineers and technicians – most employed by Sama Mosul TV ­– in Mosul in late October and early November.

JFO also reports that IS has issued a new list of names of 50 journalists and media workers who are personally threatened. This has obviously increased the already considerable alarm in media circles in Mosul. [Continue reading…]

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Utah considers cutting off water to the NSA’s monster data center

Wired reports: Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

The legislation, proposed by Utah lawmaker Marc Roberts, is due to go to the floor of the Utah House of Representatives early next year, but it was debated in a Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee meeting on Wednesday. The bill, H.B. 161, directs municipalities like Bluffdale to “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.”

The NSA brought its Bluffdale data center online about a year ago, taking advantage Utah’s cheap power and a cut-rate deal for millions of gallons of local water, used to cool the 1-million-square-foot building’s servers. Roberts’ bill, however, would prohibit the NSA from negotiating new water deals when its current Bluffdale agreement runs out in 2021.

The law seems like a long-shot to clear legislative hurdles when Utah’s legislature re-convenes next year, but Wednesday’s committee hearing was remarkable, nonetheless, says Nate Carlisle, a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune who has waged a fight with the NSA and Bluffdale officials to determine how much water the data center is actually using. “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,’” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.” [Continue reading…]

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How broken sleep can unleash creativity

Karen Emslie writes: It is 4.18am. In the fireplace, where logs burned, there are now orange lumps that will soon be ash. Orion the Hunter is above the hill. Taurus, a sparkling V, is directly overhead, pointing to the Seven Sisters. Sirius, one of Orion’s heel dogs, is pumping red-blue-violet, like a galactic disco ball. As the night moves on, the old dog will set into the hill.

It is 4.18am and I am awake. Such early waking is often viewed as a disorder, a glitch in the body’s natural rhythm – a sign of depression or anxiety. It is true that when I wake at 4am I have a whirring mind. And, even though I am a happy person, if I lie in the dark my thoughts veer towards worry. I have found it better to get up than to lie in bed teetering on the edge of nocturnal lunacy.

If I write in these small hours, black thoughts become clear and colourful. They form themselves into words and sentences, hook one to the next – like elephants walking trunk to tail. My brain works differently at this time of night; I can only write, I cannot edit. I can only add, I cannot take away. I need my day-brain for finesse. I will work for several hours and then go back to bed.

All humans, animals, insects and birds have clocks inside, biological devices controlled by genes, proteins and molecular cascades. These inner clocks are connected to the ceaseless yet varying cycle of light and dark caused by the rotation and tilt of our planet. They drive primal physiological, neural and behavioural systems according to a roughly 24-hour cycle, otherwise known as our circadian rhythm, affecting our moods, desires, appetites, sleep patterns, and sense of the passage of time.

The Romans, Greeks and Incas woke up without iPhone alarms or digital radio clocks. Nature was their timekeeper: the rise of the sun, the dawn chorus, the needs of the field or livestock. Sundials and hourglasses recorded the passage of time until the 14th century when the first mechanical clocks were erected on churches and monasteries. By the 1800s, mechanical timepieces were widely worn on neck chains, wrists or lapels; appointments could be made and meal- or bed-times set.

Societies built around industrialisation and clock-time brought with them urgency and the concept of being ‘on time’ or having ‘wasted time’. Clock-time became increasingly out of synch with natural time, yet light and dark still dictated our working day and social structures.

Then, in the late 19th century, everything changed. [Continue reading…]

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America just launched its 500th drone strike

Micah Zenko writes: The most consistent and era-defining tactic of America’s post-9/11 counterterrorism strategies has been the targeted killing of suspected terrorists and militants outside of defined battlefields. As one senior Bush administration official explained in October 2001, “The president has given the [CIA] the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway.” Shortly thereafter, a former CIA official told the New Yorker, “There are five hundred guys out there you have to kill.” It is quaint to recall that such a position was considered extremist and even morally unthinkable. Today, these strikes are broadly popular with the public and totally uncontroversial in Washington, both within the executive branch and on Capitol Hill. Therefore, it is easy to forget that this tactic, envisioned to be rare and used exclusively for senior al-Qaeda leaders 13 years ago, has become a completely accepted and routine foreign policy activity.

Thus, just as you probably missed the 10th anniversary — November 3, 2012 — of what I labeled the Third War, it’s unlikely you will hear or read that the United States just launched its 500th non-battlefield targeted killing.

As of today, the United States has now conducted 500 targeted killings (approximately 98 percent of them with drones), which have killed an estimated 3,674 people, including 473 civilians. Fifty of these were authorized by President George W. Bush, 450 and counting by President Obama. Noticeably, these targeted killings have not diminished the size of the targeted groups according to the State Department’s own numbers. [Continue reading…]

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White House sides with CIA in effort to shield torturers

The New York Times reports: In a tense confrontation with President Obama’s closest adviser on Thursday, a group of Senate Democrats accused the White House of trying to censor significant details in a voluminous report on the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency.

During a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill with Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, the senators said that the White House was siding with the C.I.A. and trying to thwart negotiations over the report’s release. The negotiations have dragged on for months because of a dispute over the C.I.A.’s demand that pseudonyms of agency officers be deleted from the report.

The C.I.A., supported by the White House, has argued that even without using the real names of the officers, their identities could still be revealed.

According to several people in attendance, the meeting was civil, but neither side gave ground, and it ended without resolution. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent five years working on the 6,000-page report, which is said to provide grim details about the torture of detainees in C.I.A. prisons during the Bush administration, and describe a persistent effort by C.I.A. officials to mislead the White House and Congress about the efficacy of its interrogation techniques. The committee voted this year to declassify the report’s executive summary, numbering several hundred pages, but the fight over redactions has delayed the release.

The confrontation on Thursday was a sign that Senate Democrats are worried that whatever leverage they have in having the report declassified on their terms is dwindling. Republicans will take control of the Senate in January, and the Intelligence Committee’s new leadership could choose to drag out the report’s release even longer. Most Republican members of the committee have long been opposed to the investigation — which they have said is a partisan attempt to discredit the Bush administration — although several committee Republicans voted in favor of declassifying the report’s executive summary.

With their time in power running out, some Democrats have suggested that they might take the extreme step of bypassing the executive branch and declassifying the report themselves. One option would be to use an arcane Senate procedure to release the report, and another would be to use the Constitution’s “speech or debate clause” to read it into the record from the Senate floor — an echo of 1971, when Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska read parts of the Pentagon Papers aloud in a Senate committee hearing.

Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee who recently lost a bid for re-election, suggested recently he might resort to this tactic. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt closes schools in Sinai towns as area inches toward open war

Reuters reports: Egypt has indefinitely shut schools in two border towns in northern Sinai as the army prepares to intensify a battle with Islamist militants that turned the daily trip to lessons into a “journey of death”.

Local people say children’s education has fallen victim while the military stages air strikes against jihadists, who are targeting soldiers and police, and have started beheading army informers.

“We are putting our lives at risk on a daily basis,” said Mohamed, a teacher who lives in the town of Sheikh Zuweid. “Sometimes there is fire between gunmen and the armed forces and sometimes stray bullets hit some of us.”

Militancy has surged in the Sinai Peninsula, which borders Israel, Gaza and the Suez Canal, since the army ousted an elected Islamist president last summer. At least 33 security personnel were killed last month and one Sinai-based group has pledged its loyalty to Islamic State, which has overrun large areas of Syria and Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS corporatized terror

Businessweek reports: During a routine January 2007 patrol in Anbar province, in a town along the Euphrates called Tuzliyah al Gharbiyah, a unit of U.S. Marines stumbled on a cache of nine documents in a roadside ditch. They included financial records, payrolls, supply purchase records, administrative records, and other details of fund flows into and out of a single local cell in Anbar of a group then calling itself the “Islamic State of Iraq.” Not long after, Iraqi militiamen working with the U.S. stormed a home in a town farther down the Euphrates. They found a computer hard drive holding ledgers with 1,200 files detailing the finances and operations of provincial-level managers overseeing the cell and others like it across Anbar province.

Taken together, the Anbar records allowed for a forensic ­reconstruction of the back-office operations of a terrorist ­insurgency from its local level up to its divisional headquarters. The data were handed over to the National Defense ­Research ­Institute of Rand Corp., a U.S. ­Department of Defense-funded think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif. Seven researchers set out to ­determine what the ledgers, receipts, memos, and other records meant. What they concluded in a 2010 report, written for then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, should be ­familiar to students of business management: The group was ­decentralized, organized, and run on what’s called the “multidivisional-­hierarchy form” of management, or M-form for short.

It’s the structure that started taking root in the corporate world in the 1920s, thanks to Alfred Sloan’s decision to reorganize General Motors. After becoming GM’s president in 1923, Sloan began transforming the company by creating semiautonomous divisions ordered largely around geography, freeing him and other top leaders from daily decision-making so they could focus on strategy and overall performance. Divisions also were largely self-­financed. Scholars credit his model for the company’s extraordinary growth in the early 20th century. It contrasted sharply with what had been the dominant “unitary form” of management, where control is centralized. In a pioneering study, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Harvard business professor Alfred Chandler Jr. held up the success of GM and others as a triumph of the M-form structure of corporate management, as did Oliver Williamson, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009.

According to the Rand study, Islamic State of Iraq was set up along the lines of the best multinationals studied by Chandler and Williamson. (The researchers even cited the Nobel Prize winner’s work.) The Anbar provincial division offered ­influence, oversight, and some financing to smaller, semi­autonomous cells within the province, closely monitoring their books and their results. But it left day-to-day decisions to the local commanders. The cells carrying out the group’s daily functions were organized into units such as finance, intelligence, military, medical, media, logistics, and even a courier arm called the “mail” division. Bosses for each specialty at the headquarters for Anbar province monitored performance of their local ­divisions, sometimes relying on detailed reports from the field. But command ­decisions appear to have been left largely to the locals, Rand found.

The seized hard drive containing 1,200 files was especially valuable. It appeared to belong to the man who was akin to Islamic State of Iraq’s divisional auditor. The group maintained strict ­accounting procedures, and its financial functions were organized in the same semiautonomous model of the M-form structure. [Continue reading…]

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Between China and Keystone XL

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: On Tuesday evening, when Senate Democrats rejected efforts to force a vote approving the Keystone XL pipeline, they knew they were just delaying the inevitable. The measure was defeated by one vote, and several naysayers will no longer be around come January. The new, Republican-controlled Senate will take up the measure again — “This’ll be an early item on the agenda in the next Congress,” incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed on Tuesday night — and, the next time around, everyone knows, it will pass. In preparation for this eventuality, White House officials have begun hinting that President Barack Obama might be willing to trade approval of the pipeline for Republican acceptance of one of his favored policies.

If this is indeed the President’s plan, let’s hope he asks the right price. Otherwise, his claim to an environmental legacy will end up being what he traded away. As it happens, the Keystone vote came exactly one week after Obama and China’s President, Xi Jinping, announced that they had agreed on a plan to curb carbon emissions. Under the agreement, China, which is now the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter on an annual basis, would cap its emissions by 2030. For its part, the United States, which is still the world’s greatest emitter on a cumulative basis, would reduce its emissions by twenty-eight per cent by 2025. (This is against a 2005 baseline — U.S. emissions have already fallen about ten per cent since that year, owing, in part, to a substitution of natural gas for coal in electricity production.) Obama called the agreement “historic,” and rightly so. It marks the first time that China has officially acknowledged that its rapidly rising emissions need to stop rising, and it also offers a significantly more ambitious goal for the U.S. than it has previously been willing to commit to. Grist called the deal “a game changer,” while Vox labelled it a “BFD.” Many commentators noted that the odds of getting a meaningful global agreement on climate change at a summit scheduled for next year in Paris — odds that had seemed close to zero — suddenly looked a good deal better. The U.S.-China deal, as a Guardian editorial put it, “transforms the prospects” for the summit.

President Obama deserves a great deal of credit for the agreement, as does Secretary of State John Kerry, who conducted the behind-the-scenes negotiations. But, as many commentators have also noted, the deal doesn’t get the U.S. or China remotely near where they need to be if the world is to avoid disaster — which both countries, along with pretty much every other state in the world, have defined as warming of more than two degrees Celsius. Chris Hope, a policy researcher at Cambridge University, ran the terms of the agreement through what’s known as an “integrated assessment model.” He also included in his analysis a recent commitment by the European Union to cut its emissions by forty per cent before 2030. He found that even if all of the pledges made so far are fulfilled, there will be “less than a 1% chance of keeping the rise in global mean temperatures” below two degrees Celsius: “Most likely the rise will be about 3.8° C.” [Continue reading…]

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The unsafety net: How social media turned against women

Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly write: In December 2012, an Icelandic woman named Thorlaug Agustsdottir discovered a Facebook group called “Men are better than women.” One image she found there, Thorlaug wrote to us this summer in an email, “was of a young woman naked chained to pipes or an oven in what looked like a concrete basement, all bruised and bloody. She looked with a horrible broken look at whoever was taking the pic of her curled up naked.” Thorlaug wrote an outraged post about it on her own Facebook page.

Before long, a user at “Men are better than women” posted an image of Thorlaug’s face, altered to appear bloody and bruised. Under the image, someone commented, “Women are like grass, they need to be beaten/cut regularly.” Another wrote: “You just need to be raped.” Thorlaug reported the image and comments to Facebook and requested that the site remove them.

“We reviewed the photo you reported,” came Facebook’s auto reply, “but found it does not violate Facebook’s Community Standards on hate speech, which includes posts or photos that attack a person based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or medical condition.”

Instead, the Facebook screeners labeled the content “Controversial Humor.” Thorlaug saw nothing funny about it. She worried the threats were real.

Some 50 other users sent their own requests on her behalf. All received the same reply. Eventually, on New Year’s Eve, Thorlaug called the local press, and the story spread from there. Only then was the image removed.

In January 2013, Wired published a critical account of Facebook’s response to these complaints. A company spokesman contacted the publication immediately to explain that Facebook screeners had mishandled the case, conceding that Thorlaug’s photo “should have been taken down when it was reported to us.” According to the spokesman, the company tries to address complaints about images on a case-by-case basis within 72 hours, but with millions of reports to review every day, “it’s not easy to keep up with requests.” The spokesman, anonymous to Wired readers, added, “We apologize for the mistake.”

If, as the communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, television brought the brutality of war into people’s living rooms, the Internet today is bringing violence against women out of it. Once largely hidden from view, this brutality is now being exposed in unprecedented ways. In the words of Anne Collier, co-director of ConnectSafely.org and co-chair of the Obama administration’s Online Safety and Technology Working Group, “We are in the middle of a global free speech experiment.” On the one hand, these online images and words are bringing awareness to a longstanding problem. On the other hand, the amplification of these ideas over social media networks is validating and spreading pathology. [Continue reading…]

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UK police spied on reporters for years, documents show

The Associated Press reports: In January, freelance video journalist Jason Parkinson returned home from vacation to find a brown paper envelope in his mailbox. He opened it to find nine years of his life laid out in shocking detail.

Twelve pages of police intelligence logs noted which protests he covered, who he spoke to and what he wore — all the way down to the color of his boots. It was, he said, proof of something he’d long suspected: The police were watching him.

“Finally,” he thought as he leafed through documents over a strong black coffee, “we’ve got them.”

Parkinson’s documents, obtained through a public records request, are the basis of a lawsuit being filed by the National Union of Journalists against London’s Metropolitan Police and Britain’s Home Office. The lawsuit, announced late Thursday, along with a recent series of revelations about the seizure of reporters’ phone records, is pulling back the curtain on how British police have spent years tracking the movements of the country’s news media.

“This is another extremely worrying example of the police monitoring journalists who are undertaking their proper duties,” said Paul Lashmar, who heads the journalism department at Britain’s Brunel University. [Continue reading…]

Jason Parkinson writes: Now the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and our lawyers at Bhatt Murphy are bringing a judicial review in the high court. Our group of six NUJ members will challenge the collection and retention of this data. We want our files erased and we want a policy to protect all journalists and trade union activists from future state surveillance.

Around 2007, police interest in journalists increased. In those days, it was the infamous forward intelligence teams, or FIT squads. Many journalists faced stop-and-search, often under the Terrorism Act. Just trying to get to a protest we had been hired to cover was a job in itself.

After several years of complaints and launching campaign group I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist, the NUJ launched an investigation into surveillance of its members, in particular police surveillance at the Kingsnorth climate camp and gave evidence to the joint committee on human rights on the scale of the problem. NUJ-funded films Collateral Damage and Hostile Reconnaissance exposed what was happening on the ground, including increased violence towards the press. [Continue reading…]

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Is Britain ready for an activist king?

Robert Booth writes: On 15 September, while President Obama was meeting with his advisers in the White House and deciding how to unleash the world’s most powerful military machine on the Islamic State in Iraq, his ambassador to Britain, Matthew Barzun, was spending the day in a field in Gloucestershire, learning about nitrogen-fixing plants and the dangers of sub-clinical mastitis in cows’ udders. The reason was simple: Barzun was visiting Prince Charles’s organic Home Farm. Wearing boxfresh Hunter wellies, Barzun picked his way around some cowpats to take a close look at a field of organic red clover. He snapped a photo on his smartphone.

For the past 34 years, the farm has been one of Charles’s chief passions. It has become the agricultural embodiment of his beliefs about everything from the natural world to the globalised economy. On winter weekends, he can be found – wearing his patched-up tweed farm coat – laying some of the farm’s hedges to keep alive one of his beloved traditional farming techniques. (Charles is such an enthusiast that he hosted the National Hedgelaying Championships here in 2005.) The farm closely reflects Charles’s likes and dislikes. In one field, there is a herd of Ayrshire cattle. Charles bought them after he declared that he didn’t want yet more common “black and whites”.

That morning, the ambassador was not the only influential figure invited for a private tour of the royal farm. Alongside Barzun was Professor Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), George Ferguson, the elected mayor of Bristol, and Sir Alan Parker, the chairman of Brunswick, the public relations company that advises Tesco. They were accompanied by civil servants from Defra and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and shown round by the Prince’s friend, Patrick Holden, an organic agriculture campaigner, and Charles’s farm manager, David Wilson.

The day was organised by Holden’s Sustainable Food Trust, but the talking points faithfully echoed Charles’s view that industrialised agriculture is a big, dangerous experiment with our environment and a threat to the livelihoods of small farmers. Here was a branch of Prince Charles’s power network in action. Away from the public glare, issues that matter intensely to him were being discussed in front of some of the most powerful people in Britain. In an echo of his famous comment of 1986 that he talks to his plants – he joked more recently he actually “instructs them” – there was even a brief exchange on whether oak trees communicate with their relatives through the soil. Holden and Wilson raised a few eyebrows with some of their scientific claims, not least about the danger of antibiotics in meat. On the whole, though, the guests seemed receptive.

Over the past four decades, Charles has carved out a unique position for himself as an elite activist, tirelessly lobbying and campaigning to promote his concerns. From farming to architecture, medicine to the environment, his opinions, warnings and grumbles are always heard. He spreads his ideas through his writings and speeches, his charities and allies and, behind the scenes, in private meetings and correspondence with government ministers. His interventions matter. Peter Hain, the former cabinet minister who lobbied with Charles for NHS trials of complementary medicine, summed up his influence in this way: “He could get a hearing where all the noble, diligent lobbying of the various different associations in the complementary medicine field found it hard.” [Continue reading…]

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In Israel, only Jewish blood shocks anyone

Gideon Levy writes: There was a massacre in Jerusalem on Tuesday in which five Israelis were killed. There was a war in Gaza over the summer in which 2,200 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. A massacre shocks us; a war, less so. Massacres have culprits; wars don’t. Murder by ax is more appalling than murder by rifle, and far more horrendous than bombing helpless people trying to take shelter.

Terror is always Palestinian, even when hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed. The name and face of Daniel Tragerman, the Israeli boy killed by mortar fire during Operation Protective Edge, were known throughout the world; even U.S. President Barack Obama knew his name. Can anyone name one child from Gaza among the hundreds killed?

A few hours after the attack in Jerusalem, journalist Emily Amrousi said at a conference in Eilat that the life of a single Jewish child was more important to her than the lives of thousands of Palestinian children. The audience’s response was clearly favorable; I think there was even some applause.

Afterward Amrousi tried to explain that she was referring to the way the Israeli media should cover events, which is only slightly less serious. This was during a discussion on the ridiculous question: “Is the Israeli media leftist?” Almost no one protested Amrousi’s remarks and the session continued as if nothing had happened. Amrousi’s words reflect Israel’s mood in 2014: Only Jewish blood elicits shock.

Israeli deaths touch Israeli hearts more than the deaths of others. That’s natural human solidarity. The bloody images from Jerusalem stunned every Israeli, probably every person.

But this is a society that sanctifies its dead to the point of death-worship, that wears thin the stories of the victims’ lives and deaths, whether it be in a synagogue attack or a Nepal avalanche. It’s a society preoccupied with endless commemorations in the land of monuments, services and anniversary ceremonies; a society that demands shock and condemnation after every attack, when it blames the entire world. [Continue reading…]

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Anger over Israel mayor’s ban on Israeli-Arab workers

Al Jazeera reports: An Israeli mayor’s decision to bar Israeli-Arab construction workers from jobs in local preschools over security concerns has triggered widespread condemnation with a rights group calling it racist.

Itamar Shimoni, the mayor of the southern city of Ashkelon, announced on Thursday that Israeli-Arab labourers renovating bomb shelters in local kindergartens would be barred from their jobs. He also ordered security stepped up at construction sites where Arab labourers are employed.

His decision came days after a spate of attacks by Palestinians, including a deadly attack on a Jerusalem synagogue that left five Israelis dead.

“Anyone who thinks this is illegal can take me to court,” Shimoni said. “At this time, I prefer to be taken to court and not, God forbid, to attend the funeral of one of the children from kindergartens,” Shimoni said.

The workers in Ashkelon are Arab citizens of Israel, in contrast to the Palestinian attackers from the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Israel’s Justice Minister Tzipi Livni called the ban illegal and ordered the attorney general to take action.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also criticised the mayor’s decision. “We must not generalise about an entire public due to a small and violent minority. The vast majority of Israel’s Arab citizens are law abiding and whoever breaks the law – we will take determined and vigorous action against him.”

Shimoni’s decision highlighted the distrust sweeping the region in the aftermath of rising tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq, Turkey vow to work together against ISIS

The Associated Press reports: Iraq’s prime minister said on Thursday that his country and neighboring Turkey have agreed on closer security and intelligence cooperation in the face of the threat posed by the Islamic State group.

“We have a key agreement to exchange information and have full security cooperation,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told a news conference after talks with his visiting Turkish counterpart, Ahmet Davutoglu. “The Turkish prime minister also wants us to have military cooperation in the face of terrorism and Daesh and we welcome that,” said al-Abadi, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

Davutoglu confirmed the two sides’ agreement on closer security cooperation.

“I can say that Daesh threatens both Iraq and Turkey, but we will cooperate and do everything we can to stand up to terrorism,” he said. “There is a new page in relations between Turkey and Iraq and that is why I hope that there will be close cooperation between our security and intelligence agencies to defeat terrorism.”

The Turkish prime minister also rejected charges that his country facilitated the transit of militants through its territory to Syria. [Continue reading…]

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The regional conditions that are helping ISIS survive and grow

The Soufan Group’s 66-page Special Report on ISIS makes the following observations: From late 2011 The Islamic State has shown itself both tactically and strategically adept. After years of surviving as a persistently violent criminal/terrorist gang able to mount multiple synchronized attacks in-built up areas in Iraq but little more, it managed to break into the big time when the collapse of government in northern and eastern Syria allowed it to expand across the border. At the same time, the sectarian approach of the then Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki had made the Sunni minority in Iraq ready to support any group that appeared to have the potential to reverse its increasing marginalization. Sunni tribal support continues to be essential to the viability of The Islamic State.

The rapid expansion of The Islamic State on both sides of the Iraq/Syria border after 2011 pushed it along the continuum from terrorism to insurgency. Its underground cells became military divisions and its hit-and-run tactics became campaigns to conquer and hold territory. These changes required leaders with different skills, and it was fortunate for The Islamic State that many in its top echelons were ex-Ba’athists who had held senior positions under Saddam Hussein. Nonetheless, military leaders do not necessarily make good civilian administrators, and the challenge of governing territory is likely to prove the State’s undoing, unless it can temper the ruthless totalitarianism that appears to motivate its core fighters with a degree of tolerance and pragmatism that might reassure its unwilling subjects.

Despite the original secularism of its Ba’athist leaders, The Islamic State claims religious legitimacy for its actions. This is based on an extreme salafist/takfiri interpretation of Islam that essentially means that anyone who opposes its rule is by definition either an apostate (murtad) or an infidel (kafir). Although much of the Muslim Middle East is salafist, takfirism is widely considered a step too far, and the absolutism of The Islamic State has already attracted criticism, even from ideologues who support al Qaeda. Nonetheless, although The Islamic State is not exactly winning friends, various factors help it to survive, and will continue to do so for so long as they exist.

The first is the deep sectarian fault line that has been a major determinant of Middle East politics since the Iranian revolution of 1979, but of particular importance since the growth of Iranian regional influence following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Despite the menace of The Islamic State to the stability of the whole region, states on either side of the sectarian divide continue to see it as a lesser danger than the regional dominance of their rivals. Until this calculation changes, The Islamic State will not face major regional opposition.

The second is the complete lack of confidence in the Arab world of the ruled in the capacity of their rulers to treat them fairly. This extends beyond Iraq and Syria to the many countries of the Middle East and North Africa where the idea of government according to the teachings of the Quran is hugely appealing – at least until it comes up against the reality of The Islamic State. For so long as governance in so many countries fails to meet the expectations of the people, there will be a steady flow of hopeful recruits to the ranks of The Islamic State; and many others who lack the means or opportunity to travel may be tempted to follow its directives within their own countries. The consequent fear of terrorism, whether domestic or imported, is likely to lead to further repression and other
deficiencies in governance in all but the most confident and forward looking states.

The third is that the international coalition led by the United States of over 60 partners and nations who oppose the practices and objectives of The Islamic State, provides further evidence for many Muslims around the world that there is a Western-led onslaught on their religion and independence. The Islamic State itself is incandescent with rage that the West will not just leave it alone to establish the Utopia that it believes within its reach. It is hard at work persuading potential supporters that the non-Muslim world will do whatever it can to protect local rulers and so ensure that their discriminatory and irreligious polices remain in force. Not enough is being done on the ground to counter this narrative.

The fourth is that the little being done to counter the narrative of The Islamic State does not penetrate the information bubble created by its actual or potential supporters. The State devotes a great deal of time and effort to propagating a positive image of itself, reinforced by a strong ideology. Despite the many weaknesses of the literal approach to religious texts adopted by The Islamic State, including its apocalyptic vision of the imminent end of times, its message is stronger, clearer and more consistent than that of its opponents. It offers a complete break with what has gone before as opposed to its enemies who just offer more of the same. For all its violence, The Islamic State promises its recruits adventure and intense engagement with an exciting new venture. There are no competing voices offering anything comparable.

The fifth, also connected with the narrative promoted by The Islamic State, is the lack of attractive alternatives for local and foreign fighters who decide to join The Islamic State as a way to find identity, purpose, belonging or spiritual fulfillment. Thus both the pull and push factors that motivate foreign fighters remain unaddressed. Furthermore, the lack of a positive counter narrative that also exploits the negative aspects of the propaganda of The Islamic State, leaves those who are attracted by its message – but concerned about its activities – without a clear understanding that it is just not possible to engage with the State without also signing up to its worst aspects.

The sixth is that despite the international opposition to the discriminatory and repressive practices of the Syrian and, to a lesser extent, the Iraqi Governments, nothing convincing is being done to force a change. In this respect, The Islamic State appears more effective and better motivated than any actor on the other side. Unless political reform is able to draw away this soft support, The Islamic State will over time bring it closer by entwining the fortunes of the local population and tribal leaders with its own.

Finally, the cultural, educational and religious stagnation evident in so much of the Middle East and North Africa does not encourage any new way of thinking about the future beyond a desire to return to the past and start again.

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ISIS: The downside of foreign fighters

The Soufan Group IntelBrief: Last week, in the northeast Syrian city of Raqqa — the capital of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate — internal violence served as an example of the problems the group faces in managing the unmanageable. A group of Uzbek fighters, who had set up residence in several luxury houses along a lake outside of Raqqa, had gone to fight for the Islamic State in Iraq. Upon their return, they found that the houses they thought they had claimed as spoils of war were now occupied by Chechen and Arab foreign fighters. Uzbek and Chechen fighters are highly regarded for their fighting prowess, as seen most recently in Afghanistan and Pakistan; however, this does not translate into an equally effective ability to negotiate or mediate conflict. The situation escalated and after snipers and assault rifles entered the fray, at least six Islamic State fighters were dead. Leadership became involved, through both the group’s sharia courts and direct intervention.

This incident is significant because it illustrates the downside of Islamic State recruiting efforts. The idea of a global collection of individually-motivated fighters is far from the reality of handling such a diverse group. Twitter helps the Islamic State attract international recruits but it doesn’t keep them from fighting with each other and everyone else. It is difficult enough to manage a fighting group bound by local ties and goals — as seen in the failure of the Free Syrian Army. It is nearly impossible to do so with a group whose goals vary from martyrdom to marriage, in 20 different languages. The same difficulties that beset the anti-Islamic State coalition — competing goals, petty rivalries, language barriers—also beset the Islamic State, which has less of an ability to mitigate those problems as it also deals with airstrikes and ground attacks. [Continue reading…]

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