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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Sectarian hatred — the driving force behind ISIS

Those self-obsessed Americans who are convinced that the dream of anyone dubbed a terrorist is that some day they will be able to attack the U.S., are now wondering how soon a new 9/11-like plot might emerge from the territory controlled by ISIS. But the organization that is still being referred to as an al Qaeda affiliate, never regarded as America as its principle enemy.

Back in 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who started Al Qaeda in Iraq (which then became the Islamic State of Iraq and in 2013 the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)) wrote a letter to the al Qaeda leadership in which he said:

The American army has begun to disappear from some cities, and its presence is rare. An Iraqi army has begun to take its place, and this is the real problem that we face, since our combat against the Americans is something easy. The enemy is apparent, his back is exposed, and he does not know the land or the current situation of the mujahidin because his intelligence information is weak. We know for certain that these Crusader forces will disappear tomorrow or the day after. He who looks at the current situation [will] see the enemy’s haste to constitute the army and the police, which have begun to carry out the missions assigned to them. This enemy, made up of the Shi’a filled out with Sunni agents, is the real danger that we face, for it is [made up of] our fellow countrymen, who know us inside and out. They are more cunning than their Crusader masters, and they have begun, as I have said, to try to take control of the security situation in Iraq. They have liquidated many Sunnis and many of their Ba’th Party enemies and others beholden to the Sunnis in an organized, studied way. They began by killing many mujahid brothers, passing to the liquidation of scientists, thinkers, doctors, engineers, and others. I believe, and God knows best, that the worst will not come to pass until most of the American army is in the rear lines and the secret Shi’i army and its military brigades are fighting as its proxy. They are infiltrating like snakes to reign over the army and police apparatus, which is the strike force and iron fist in our Third World, and to take complete control over the economy like their tutors the Jews. As the days pass, their hopes are growing that they will establish a Shi’i state stretching from Iran through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and ending in the Cardboard Kingdom of the Gulf.

Given ISIS’s well-documented roots in Iraq, it’s strange that one currently hears it said that ISIS was created by Turkey.

In a podcast by Aaron Stein, an Associate Fellow at RUSI, he interviews Aaron Zelin from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and they examine the purported links between Turkey and ISIS. I’ve posted the audio below, but the gist of Zelin’s view is that while the growth of ISIS has been supported by Turkey’s open border policy, the Turk’s willingness to allow foreign fighters passage to Syria has always been driven by the desire to topple the Assad regime rather than an interest in supporting ISIS.

ISIS views Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an “apostate” and with 49 staff members captured in a raid on the Turkish consulate in Mosul last week, the columnist Amberin Zaman says that the raid may serve as “a warning to Turkey of the consequences it is likely to face should it tighten the screws on jihadist groups moving across its borders.”

Reporting from Baghdad, Richard Engel says:

If Maliki starts acting like Assad?

On May 11, Al Jazeera reported on the Iraq army’s use of barrel bombs in Fallujah:

Shelling by the Iraqi army in the city of Fallujah has killed more civilians, hospital sources and witnesses have said, amid allegations that government forces were using barrel bombs in an attempt to drive out anti-government fighters from the area,

The use of barrel bombs in civilian areas is banned under international conventions given their indiscriminate nature.

But Mohammed al-Jumaili, a local journalist, told Al Jazeera that the army has dropped many barrel bombs “targeting mosques, houses and markets” in Fallujah.

Local hospital sources said the situation was getting worse for many people who had been trapped in the city since the army cut off a key bridge.

The Iraqi government has denied the use of barrel bombs and asserted that it was fighting in a “humane way”.

Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from the capital Baghdad, said that despite the government’s denial, there was strong evidence that barrel bombs havd been used in Fallujah.

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Truth-telling and plagiarism

“Remember, as journalists, our job is to manipulate facts. I did it for many years. I can take any set of facts and spin you a story anyway you want. And if I’m very cynical, I can spin it in a way that I know is good for my career but is not particularly truthful to my reader.” — Chris Hedges, interviewed on the Real News Network, 2013.

Among those for whom Truth is a pillar of their political lexicon, there is a common tendency to treat it as a thing — a thing that is being revealed by a select few while concealed by many others.

But truth is also a practice and how well it is practiced by each individual cannot be determined by how much they use the word or how much reverence for Truth they might profess.

“The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges,” written by Christopher Ketcham, a contributing editor at Harper’s, says Hedges “has a history of lifting material from other writers that goes back at least to his first book,” and yet this accusation is being dismissed by some of Hedges’ most loyal defenders.

At Firedoglake, Jane Hamsher writes:

The New Republic has published a hit piece on Chris Hedges that accuses him of plagiarism — without ever really documenting any direct plagiarism as far as I can tell. I’ll admit that my eyes started to glaze over as I read the 5700 word piece, so it may have crept in there and I had simply gone catatonic.

In dismissing the Ketcham piece, the thrust of Hamsher’s argument is that the article is too long to be taken seriously. “The only reason you’d publish a 5700 word long screed like this is if you really, really hated the guy and wanted to defame him and tarnish his image.”

Perhaps. But a more obvious explanation for the length of the piece is that since plagiarism is a very serious accusation to throw at any writer, it needs to be documented meticulously.

Yesterday, Hedges published his own response to the Ketcham article which he said contains statements that are “are false and attempt to damage me personally and professionally.” That sounds like he’s accusing Ketcham of defamation, although he makes no explicit threat of legal action.

Hedges’ response is far from convincing.

Ketcham’s article begins:

In early 2010, the editors at Harper’s Magazine began reviewing a lengthy manuscript submitted by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter. In the piece, Hedges had turned his eye to Camden, New Jersey, one of the most downtrodden cities in the nation. Hedges’s editor at Harper’s, Theodore Ross, who left the magazine in 2011 and is now a freelance writer, was excited when he saw the draft. “I thought it was a great story about a topic — poverty — that nobody covers enough,” Ross said.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

Hedge’s responds:

The charge — made without any evidence and without sources about an unpublished manuscript — that passages and quotes were taken from the Inquirer series is simply untrue. The charge that I copied quotes from another reporter is also untrue. These allegations, which are very serious, should not have been made unless accompanied by textual proof. There was none. Indeed, Ketcham admits that he never read the manuscript.

For those who read Hedge’s response without referring back to Ketcham’s article, his first plea of “not guilty” might sound convincing, yet his denial is misleading.

Hedges calls this a charge “without sources,” yet the sources were identified: Theodore Ross, then an editor at Harper’s, and a “fact-checker, who remains an editor at the magazine and asked that his name not be used in this story.”

As for why Ketcham left out the textual proof in this instance (though included lots of textual evidence of plagiarism throughout the rest of his article), he explains: “I asked Harper’s for a copy of Hedges’s original manuscript, for comparison with Katz’s published pieces, but the magazine’s policy is not to share unpublished work of its writers.”

But Ketcham also directly quotes the Harper’s fact-checker saying of Hedges, “He lied to me — lied to his fact-checker.”

Further in his response, Hedges writes:

I changed the Ernest Hemingway passage in my book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning after the first edition several months before Thomas Palaima’s complaint.

How would a reader find a Hemingway passage in a book by Hedges or anyone else?

Unless one had memorized by heart everything that Hemingway had ever written, the only way of finding a Hemingway passage would be by seeing a reference to Hemingway. Right?

Not in this case. What Hedges calls a Hemingway passage, neither in its original or subsequent iterations has ever made reference to Hemingway. Had Palaima, a MacArthur Fellow and classics professor at the University of Texas, not spotted Hedges’ use of Hemingway’s words and ideas, this borrowing might have forever gone unnoticed — Hedges certainly did not welcome it being pointed out when the scholar spoke to the journalist on the phone.

“It was a very strange conversation,” says Palaima. “He kept saying that essentially what he had done was trivial. He was dismissive and belittling.” Palaima replied that as author of more than a hundred scholarly articles, reviews, and op-eds, and as an editor of a scholarly monograph series, a scholarly journal, and several books, he had “never encountered a case where an unattributed use of another intellectual’s ideas and wording was solved by altering the wording in a subsequent printing without attribution.”

According to Palaima, Hedges claimed by way of explanation that he had copied the Hemingway text into his notes and later used it, mistakenly thinking it was his own. As for not crediting Hemingway once the plagiarism had been discovered, Hedges stated that it would have been prohibitively costly for the publisher to add a credit, because the text would have to be repaginated.

Palaima was stunned. “All he had to do was add ‘As Hemingway wrote,’ and the problem would have been addressed,” Palaima told me. “Plutarch said that little details reveal the character of the man. If Hedges was found in a small matter to have further compounded his dishonesty, it makes you wonder about more important matters.”

In reference to his use of work by Ketcham’s wife, Petra Bartosiewicz, Hedges writes:

The Petra Bartosiewicz material in my column “The Terror-Industrial Complex” was sourced to Harpers and to Bartosiewicz three times. There were a few paragraphs following the sourcing that should have been set off in block quotes. Bartosiewicz’s editor at Harper’s, Luke Mitchell, called it to our attention. Mitchell asked us to fix what he described as a “formatting error” in the “much appreciated” Truthdig column that cited her work. The fix was made, in consultation with Mitchell, the next day and ran along with an editor’s not [sic]

Ketcham had written:

When asked about the Bartosiewicz passages, Hedges attributed it to “sloppy sourcing on my part. I feel badly about this, especially as Petra’s article was a first-class piece of reporting.” He wrote that the passages “should have been set off from the main body of the text as a block quote.” But he never addressed why he made so many small changes to the original text: the tweaking of some sentences and lines but not others, the adding of a hyperlink not in the original, the changing of phrases such as “my local reporter” to “a local reporter.”

Even now, Hedges has offered no explanation about the editing of text from which block quoting was supposedly the only omission.

Those who view Ketcham as a tool of the establishment in its efforts to silence a troublesome dissident, are overlooking the fact that Ketcham has several personal interests in this story.

I should note that a possible result of this piece will be the burning of my bridges at the Nation, where I know the editors and have been published; the Nation Institute, from which I have received funding for investigative journalism published in Harper’s and elsewhere; Truthdig, where I have published half-a-dozen columns and have been proud of my work; and Nation Books, Hedges’s current publisher, a house I have always respected and admired.

Ketcham could be an obedient servant of Power, but if one examines his previous work he has done a convincing job of concealing such an agenda. For instance, this is how he views Washington D.C.:

It’s a small-minded town on a hypertrophic scale, a Southern town gone Napoleonic, which is to say it’s backward and inbred and beady-eyed and paranoid while ruling over an empire.

Those who hear about Ketcham’s article and without having read it react in accordance with the dictates of the tribal mind, will likely respond in the way one of Hamsher’s commenters responded: “Thank You Jane for reading something I wouldn’t have.”

In other words, who needs to draw their own conclusions when they can rely on those of one of their favorite bloggers?

This kind of obedience to authority is depressingly commonplace among people who nevertheless identify themselves as belonging to a community of dissent.

Ketcham’s assembly of the evidence is as painstaking as it should be given the gravity of the issue, yet there will be those who nevertheless have the reaction: Hedges has an eloquent and powerful voice that should not be undermined by the distraction of a few trivial lapses in judgement.

To wit, “teddieballgame” who left a comment under Hedge’s response that says: “these are at most piddling misdemeanors that constitute a tiny fraction of one percent of an enormous and important and original body of work.”

I am not unsympathetic with that view and I don’t doubt Hedges’ convictions, yet one of the most pernicious of human frailties is our susceptibility to being swayed by the convictions of others.

The power of righteousness — something Hedges possesses in abundance — is that it propels a wheel upon which with each turn a preacher and his congregation reinforce each other’s faith. This faith is invariably dubbed Truth.

Those who wield Truth as their sword, have little patience for critics, since criticism is perceived as a challenge of their righteousness.

The suggestion that Hedges is a plagiarist can be treated as rejection of his political analysis of our world, but what it really calls into question is his integrity — something that both he and those who admire his work, should want to protect.

Plagiarism is in spirit a kind of theft, but like other forms of theft that might be viewed as petty, the culprit believing he has done little harm, if successful in shaking off his accusers, is all the more likely to continue in this behavior.

In his 2003 op-ed, Tom Palaima wrote:

Historians and journalists, in particular, are like police officers assigned to protect for us the truth about the past and the present.

More than ever, we need honest cops. Plagiarism is one indicator that a cop is less than honest.

Update: Christopher Ketcham and The New Republic have now responded to Chris Hedge’s response.

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Ariel Dorfman: A tale of torture and forgiveness

I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally.  In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year.

One simple fact of the post-9/11 era should make this clear and also boggle the mind, but has had almost no impact here.  But for this you need a little background from the early years of what was once called the Global War on Terror.  In addition to a stream of international kidnappings (euphemistically called “renditions”) of terror suspects, including completely innocent people the CIA snatched off the streets of global cities, as well as from the backlands of the planet and “rendered” into the hands of well-known torturing regimes (with the help of 54 other countries) and the setting up of a network of “black sites” or offshore prisons where anything went, the CIA tortured up a storm.  And it did so at the behest of the top officials of the Bush administration, including the president and vice president who were convinced that it was time for Washington to “take the gloves off.”  In those years, torture techniques were reportedly demonstrated in the White House to some of those officials, including the vice president and national security advisor.  At the time, they went by the euphemistic, administration-approved term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which was quickly picked up and used in the U.S. mainstream media in place of the word “torture” — though only when the enhanced interrogators were American, of course.  The bad guys out there continued to “torture” in the usual fashion.

In the Obama years, torture was (at least officially) tossed out as a useful tactic.  But the torturers themselves were given a pass, every last one of them, by the Justice Department, even two cases in which the CIA’s acts of enhancement had led to death.  No charge was ever brought against anyone, including the Justice Department lawyers who wrote the tortured memos endorsing those techniques and redefining torture as only happening when the torturer meant it to, or the officials who green-lighted them.  Think of the Obama administration then as Amnesty National.  That administration did, however, have the guts to go after one man connected to the torture program, forced a plea deal from him, and sent him to jail for two years.  I’m talking about former CIA agent John Kiriakou, the only person since 9/11 convicted of a torture-related crime.  To be specific, his criminal act was to blow the whistle on his former employer’s torture program to a journalist, revealing in the process the name of a CIA agent.  That was considered such an indefensible act — in effect, an act of torture against the American security state — that justice, American-style, was done.

It’s quite a tortuous record when you think about it, not that anyone here does anymore, which is why we need TomDispatch regular Ariel Dorfman, author most recently of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, to remind us of what’s really at stake when one human being tortures another. Tom Engelhardt

How to forgive your torturer
The River Kwai passes through Latin America and Washington
By Ariel Dorfman

What a way to celebrate Torture Awareness Month!

According to an Amnesty International Poll released in May, 45% of Americans believe that torture is “sometimes necessary and acceptable” in order to “gain information that may protect the public.” Twenty-nine percent of Britons “strongly or somewhat agreed” that torture was justified when asked the same question.

For someone like me, who has been haunted by the daily existence of torture since the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende, such percentages couldn’t be more depressing, but perhaps not that surprising. I now live, after all, in the America where Dick Cheney, instead of being indicted as a war criminal, sneeringly (and falsely) claims to anyone who asks him — and he is trotted out over and over again as the resident expert on the subject — that  “enhanced interrogations” have been and still are absolutely necessary to keep Americans safe.

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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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ISIS a fanatical force — with a weakness

Charles Lister writes: ISIS has substantial roots in Mosul, where it managed to remain a potent force during and after the U.S. troop “surge.” The group has recently been raising $1 million-$2 million per month in Mosul through an intricate extortion network. This reality, plus Mosul’s proximity to ISIS positions in eastern Syria, made the city a natural launching ground for this shock offensive in Iraq, which is ultimately aimed at Baghdad.

But this is not all about ISIS. Many other armed Sunni actors are involved in what has become, in effect, a Sunni uprising — groups such as the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandia, Jaish al-Mujahideen, Jamaat Ansar al-Islam, Al-Jaish al-Islami fil Iraq and various tribal military councils.

ISIS may be the largest force involved (with about 8,000 fighters in Iraq), but it is far from sufficient to take and hold multiple urban centers. It is still totally reliant on an interdependent relationship with what remains a tacitly sympathetic and facilitating Sunni population. But this “relationship” is by no means stable and should not be taken for granted. The militant group has consistently failed to retain popular support, or at minimum, acceptance.

Mosul residents might be praising the current stability and ISIS-subsidized bread and fuel prices, but once the public flogging, amputations and crucifixions begin, this may well change. In fact, it is not surprising that tribal elements are already preparing to force ISIS from captured areas.

The militants’ prospects are also dependent on the government and its supporters continuing to advance sectarianism — something that encourages Sunni actors to accept ISIS. Unfortunately, this apparent sectarianism has been consolidated in recent days with al-Maliki’s call for a “volunteer army” encouraging the further reconstitution of the Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Jaish al-Mahdi and the Badr Brigades (three Shiite militias active during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which appear to be receiving a new boost in recruitment).

Further calls by Muqtada al-Sadr to form “Peace Battalions” and by the Shiite community in Diyala to form “Peace Committees” — as well as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s call for Iraqis to take up arms against ISIS — have increased the perception of sectarianism inside and outside Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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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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ISIS, the slow insurgency

Dr Victoria Fontan is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Duhok University in the Kurdish region of Iraq and is currently working on her second PhD at Kings College, London. She has been in Iraq for over a decade and now writes:

So, this week, al-Qaeda offshoot the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (ISIS) took over Mosul by storm and is on its way to Baghdad. We are told that the group is the next generation of al-Qaeda, a new and improved version of it, and that it will not be taking any prisoners, beheading its way into Iraq’s capital throughout a Mother of All Battles that will make the sacking of Rome look like a picnic. Thank you British Daily Mail for taking the fear mongering to a new extreme. I will remember that next time I meet ISIS over tea and biscuits, just like I did in the summer of 2013. True, they are tough, they were joking then that I would not make it one day in one of their desert hideouts, but is their story that simplistic?

Most media outlets and pundits are missing the most important story behind the recent take-over of Mosul, which is connection between the social movements that had been present in Sunni parts of Iraq, and the popular support that ISIS is presently benefiting from. Should ISIS not benefit from conscious popular support; there is no way that they would have captured so much territory in so little time. More importantly, most experts would rather not incriminate the international community, nor its enabler the United Nations, for their standing idly by as sectarianism crept into Iraqi life since the botched democratization process that was initiated by the 2005 electoral cycle. No one cares to remember for instance that despite being invited repeatedly to visit the Occupy Fallujah demonstration site since December 2012, UN chief in Iraq Nikolai Mladenov preferred to echo Maliki’s terrorism hate narrative against Iraqi Sunnis instead of doing his job and not siding with one party to the detriment of the other. Even as Maliki initiated his disastrous Anbar campaign to curb Occupy Fallujah’s political demands in late December 2013, Mladenov kept using the word “terrorism” when referring to the Fallujah leadership. He now keeps issuing statements of concern for local displaced populations, too little too late.

Once again, it all started in Fallujah, in December 2012. After the arbitrary arrest of several Sunni politicians and prominent figures on terrorism charges, within a context of relative deprivation and perceived government harassment, Occupy Fallujah was born with three simple political demands: an end of all talks of federalism, an enforcement of equal opportunities for Sunnis and Shi’ias, and a resignation of Prime Minister Maliki. In any healthy political system, those demands would have been labeled as political, but in Fallujah, they were called terrorism. As a response, Maliki sent troops to try and take Fallujah, and after many unsuccessful attempts; he sent barrel bombs instead, just like his neighbor Bashar al Assad on Aleppo, clearly committing crimes against humanity in the process. All throughout the process, the Fallujah tribes and military council made a deal with ISIS, upon realization that they needed help to keep the government at bay. Scores of ISIS militants came to the area and kept weakening the resolve and potency of the Iraqi army, whose special forces and regular troops lost a heavy amount of men while trying to enter Fallujah. Amongst desertions en masse came the decoy attack on Samarra last week, paving the way for an overtaking of Mosul. [Continue reading…]

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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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Why did the advance of ISIS catch anyone by surprise?

The New York Times reports: When Islamic militants rampaged through the Iraqi city of Mosul last week, robbing banks of hundreds of millions of dollars, opening the gates of prisons and burning army vehicles, some residents greeted them as if they were liberators and threw rocks at retreating Iraqi soldiers.

It took only two days, though, for the fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to issue edicts laying out the harsh terms of Islamic law under which they would govern, and singling out some police officers and government workers for summary execution.

With just a few thousand fighters, the group’s lightning sweep into Mosul and farther south appeared to catch many Iraqi and American officials by surprise. But the gains were actually the realization of a yearslong strategy of state-building that the group itself promoted publicly. [Continue reading…]

The specter of terrorism invoked by Western political leaders over the last decade has emphasized not only its global reach but also its subterranean nature. We need such a vast counter-terrorism apparatus because the terrorists are so hard to find and their plots so cunning. So when officials say they have been caught by surprise, I imagine they expect the public will be forgiving because terrorists specialize in catching people by surprise.

ISIS, however, like a public corporation, publishes annual reports and those who have taken the trouble to read them say that the group is functioning more like a military organization than a terrorist network.

The Institute for the Study of War says:

The repeated publication of consecutive annual reports indicates that the ISIS military command in Iraq has exercised command and control over a national theater since at least early 2012. ISIS in Iraq is willing and able to organize centralized reporting procedures and to publish the results of its performance to achieve organizational effects… While the contents of the annual report are more significant as a message than as a measurement of actual attacks, it is important to understand what ISIS is reporting about its own performance in order to understand its own narrative about the war in Iraq.

Has anyone in the White House studied ISIS’s reports? Did they even know they exist?

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Peter Van Buren: RIP, the Bill of Rights

Here’s what passes for good news when it comes to a free press these days: two weeks ago, the Supreme Court refused without comment to hear a case involving New York Times reporter James Risen.  It concerned his unwillingness to testify before a grand jury under subpoena and reveal a confidential source of information in his book State of War on the secret U.S. campaign against the Iranian nuclear program.  The case will now go back to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which has already ordered him to testify.  He says he will instead go to jail, if necessary.

That’s the bad news, right?  Really bad news!  The Supremes, the highest court in the land, refused to protect a reporter protecting a source at a moment when the Obama administration is in the midst of a wide-ranging crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers of all sorts (and those in the media considered to be aiding and abetting them).  Actually, in a world in which Congress has not yet managed to pass a federal shield law that would protect reporters, it turns out that that’s actually the good news — or so at least various media commentators say.  Follow the logic here (and it is logic of a sort).  Right now the Richmond, Virginia-based Appeals court decision applies only to courts in states under its jurisdiction.  Had the Supremes agreed to take on the case, given their conservative and generally government-friendly bent on matters of executive power and what passes for national security, they would likely have ruled against Risen and that ruling would have applied nationally.

So, phew!  Their rejection was a “blessing” (in disguise).  The only harm they did, after all, was to confirm the atmospherics of a moment in which the Obama administration has been eager to shut down the leaking of unauthorized government information in a big way — oh yes, and drive another modest nail into the coffin of a free-to-report-what-our-government-actually-does media.  That’s the minimal, not the maximal damage claim; so say various relieved commentators.  As for Risen, he now has to depend on the kindness of strangers, of in fact Attorney General Eric Holder, who may briefly declare a truce in the administration’s “war on the press” and not jail him.

Best news we’ve had in a while!  And should Congress pass that shield law (even if it leaves national security out), uncork the champagne!  And we’ll all toast the Supreme Court and the attorney general and the president and his top officials for their grace under pressure.  Or rather, hold on just a sec there.  Maybe that isn’t quite the classic American way of preserving our freedoms — i.e, allowing our government free rein to preserve them for us, if its officials happen to be in the mood.  In fact, as State Department whistleblower and TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren suggests, we may be entering a grim new era when it comes to our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Tom Engelhardt

What we’ve lost since 9/11
Taking down the First Amendment in post-constitutional America
By Peter Van Buren

America has entered its third great era: the post-constitutional one. In the first, in the colonial years, a unitary executive, the King of England, ruled without checks and balances, allowing no freedom of speech, due process, or privacy when it came to protecting his power.

In the second, the principles of the Enlightenment and an armed rebellion were used to push back the king’s abuses. The result was a new country and a new constitution with a Bill of Rights expressly meant to check the government’s power. Now, we are wading into the shallow waters of a third era, a time when that government is abandoning the basic ideas that saw our nation through centuries of challenges far more daunting than terrorism. Those ideas — enshrined in the Bill of Rights — are disarmingly concise. Think of them as the haiku of a genuine people’s government.

Deeper, darker waters lie ahead and we seem drawn down into them. For here there be monsters.

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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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Iraq doesn’t have to fall apart. It can be reformed

Toby Dodge writes: On 10 June, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), the group whose dramatic advances have startled the world over the past 72 hours, posted a photograph of their fighters demolishing barriers marking the dividing line between Syria and Iraq. They were, they claimed, “smashing the Sykes-Picot border”. This was a reference to the British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot who, in May 1916, concluded secret negotiations to divide the Middle East into French and British zones of imperial influence.

Isis’s symbolic destruction of the border was an attempt to give credence to its claim to be sweeping away the false states created by the nefarious European powers, uniting all Muslims in one pious community. Somewhat more surprisingly, this radical attempt at political engineering has also found sympathy among policy pundits in Europe and the United States who are looking for instant solutions to the long-term problems that are destabilising the countries of the region. Iraq and Syria, they argue, are prefabricated states that have never gained the loyalty of their populations. Popular political legitimacy will only be found in smaller, more religiously and ethnically homogenous units that mirror the provinces used by the Ottoman empire to administer the region before 1914.

This assertion, made by both Isis and western commentators, is historically and sociologically illiterate. This week Isis, an organisation whose active membership is numbered in the low thousands, has not only asserted its control over Mosul, Iraq’s second city, but routed an Iraqi army garrison many times larger, stealing advanced weaponry and Iraqi dinars worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The worrying speed with which it then moved its forces towards Baghdad has been used as evidence of Iraq’s artificiality and the divided nature of its population. The truth, however, is more complex but less pessimistic. [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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