The re-Judaizing of Israel

Uri Avnery writes: Of all revolutionary movements of the 20th century, Zionism was the most successful and enduring. Communism. Fascism and dozens of others came and went. Zionism endures.

But is Israeli society really Zionist, as it claims loudly and repeatedly?

Zionism was basically a rebellion against the Jewish existence in the Diaspora. In the religious sphere, it was a reformation more profound than that of Martin Luther.

All prominent Jewish Rabbis, both Hasidic as anti-Hasidic, condemned Zionism as a heresy. The People of Israel were united by their absolute obedience to God’s 613 commandments, not by any “national” bonds. God had strictly forbidden any mass return to the Land of Israel, since He had exiled the Jews for their sinful behavior. The Jewish Diaspora was thus decreed by God and had to remain, until He changes His mind.

And here came the Zionists, mostly atheists, and wanted to bring the Jews to the Land of Israel without God’s permission, indeed abolishing God altogether. They built a secular society. They held abysmal contempt for the Diaspora, especially for the Orthodox “ghetto Jews”. Their founding father, Theodor Herzl, held that after the foundation of the Jewish State, no one outside it would be considered a Jew anymore. Other Zionists were not quite so radical, but certainly thought along these lines.

When I was young, many of us went even further. We disclaimed the idea of a Jewish State, and spoke instead of a Hebrew State, connected only loosely with Diaspora Jewry, creating a new Hebrew civilization closely connected with the Arab world around us. An Asian nation, not identified with Europe and the West.

So where are we now?

Israel is re-Judaizing itself at a rapid pace. The Jewish religion is making a huge comeback. Very soon, religious children of various communities will be the majority in Israeli Jewish schools. [Continue reading…]

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A new theory about the origin of life

origin-life

Evolution explains how life changes, but it doesn’t explain how it came into existence. A young physicist at MIT has now come up with a mathematical formula which suggests that given the right set of conditions, the emergence of living forms is not merely possible; it almost seems inevitable.

Let there be light, shining on atoms, and there will eventually be life.

Quanta magazine: Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab. [Continue reading…]

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West’s 30-year vendetta with Iran is finally buried in Davos

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes: The Iranian nuclear deal is on. Hassan Rouhani’s charm offensive in Davos has been a tour de force, the moment of rehabilitation for the Islamic Republic. His words were emollient.

“The world hasn’t seen a speech like that from an Iranian leader since the Revolution,” tweeted Ian Bremmer from the Eurasia Group.

Anybody betting on oil futures in the belief that Iran’s nuclear deal with great powers is a negotiating ploy – to gain time – should be careful. There is a very high likelihood that the sanctions against Iran will be lifted in stages, leading to an extra 1.2 barrels a day on the global market just as Libya, Iraq, and the US all crank up output.

“One of the theoretical and practical pillars of my government is constructive engagement with the world. Without international engagement, objectives such as growth, creativity and quality are unattainable,” said Rouhani.

“I strongly and clearly state that nuclear weapons have no place in our security strategy,” he said.

Behind closed doors in Davos, the Iranian leaders made a sweet sales pitch to oil executives. BP said it is eyeing the “potential”. Chevron and ConocoPhillips have been approached, assured by Iran’s leader that there are “no limitations for U.S. companies.” Total’s Christophe de Margerie hopes to restart work at the South Pars field. [Continue reading…]

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New York Times: End the phone data sweeps

In an editorial, the New York Times says: Once again, a thorough and independent analysis of the government’s dragnet surveillance of Americans’ phone records has found the bulk data collection to be illegal and probably unconstitutional. Just as troubling, the program was found to be virtually useless at stopping terrorism, raising the obvious question: Why does President Obama insist on continuing a costly, legally dubious program when his own appointees repeatedly find that it doesn’t work?

In a 238-page report issued Thursday afternoon, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a five-member independent agency, called on the White House to end the phone-data collection program, for both constitutional and practical reasons. The board’s report follows a Dec. 16 ruling by Federal District Judge Richard Leon that the program was “almost certainly” unconstitutional and that the government had not identified “a single instance” in which it “actually stopped an imminent attack.”

Two days later, a panel of legal and intelligence experts convened by Mr. Obama after the disclosures by Edward Snowden echoed those conclusions in its own comprehensive report, which said the data sweep “was not essential to preventing attacks” and called for its end.

The growing agreement among those who have studied the program closely makes it imperative that the administration, along with the program’s defenders in Congress, explain why such intrusive mass surveillance is necessary at all. If Mr. Obama knows something that contradicts what he has now been told by two panels, a federal judge and multiple members of Congress, he should tell the American people now. Otherwise, he is in essence asking for their blind faith, which is precisely what he warned against during his speech last week on the future of government surveillance.

“Given the unique power of the state,” Mr. Obama said, “it is not enough for leaders to say: trust us, we won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached.”

The more likely reality is that the multiple analyses of recent weeks are correct, and that the phone-data sweeps have simply been ineffective. If they had assisted in the prevention of any terrorist attacks, it is safe to assume that we would know by now. Instead, despite repeated claims that the bulk-data collection programs had a hand in thwarting 54 terrorist plots, the privacy board members write, “we have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”

That reiterates the findings of Judge Leon — who noted that even behind closed doors, the government provided “no proof” of the program’s efficacy — as well as the conclusion of a report released this month by the New America Foundation that the metadata program “had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity.”

No one disputes that the threat of terrorism is real and unrelenting, or that our intelligence techniques must adapt to a rapidly changing world. It is equally clear that the dragnet collection of Americans’ phone calls is not the answer.

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Britain’s police state extends its powers

Henry Porter writes: There are two striking images of modern Britain in this week’s news. The first is the story that crime in Britain is at a 32-year low, which confirms evidence in statistical trends that, like most western countries, we are becoming a more orderly and law-abiding society.

The second is provided by the police, which, while suffering a thoroughly deserved collapse in their own reputation, seeks to draw a picture of chaos and misrule that demands ever harsher and more invasive policing techniques. Five years after the financial crash, the police are making the case for deploying water cannon to deal with expected “austerity riots”, when it is blindingly obvious that Britain has passed through a very difficult period without widespread disorder (the riots that began in Tottenham two years ago were mostly a failure of policing, not a response to economic conditions) and, moreover, the economy and employment have both picked up.

But the far more worrying development is the unscrutinised rollout of the police automated numberplate recognition system (ANPR) for tracking vehicles, which, according to Nick Hopkins’ report, currently stores 17bn images in its archive and is set to increase its capacity by 2018 to read and store 50-75 million separate vehicle sightings a day.

This is a very powerful surveillance system and the important thing to remember is that the decision to cover Britain’s motorways and town centres with cameras that track the movements of innocent citizens is that it was never debated by parliament. [Continue reading…]

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What about Palestinian security?

Matthew Duss writes: The American approach to peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians has tended to prioritize different concerns for either side. For the Israelis, the focus is usually on security, for the Palestinians, sovereignty. But a recent episode in the West Bank highlights the need for greater attention to Palestinian security needs in the context of continuing Israeli occupation.

On January 7, a group of Israeli settlers from the outpost of Esh Kodesh approached the nearby village of Qusra, allegedly for the purpose of carrying out a “price tag” attack. “Price tag” is the term for acts of settler vandalism and violence against Palestinian persons and property carried out specifically in response to Israeli government acts against settlement expansion, with the goal being to raise the political price of moving against settlements. (In this case, the offending action was the Israeli army’s destruction of an agricultural plot near the Esh Kodesh outpost.)

According to an eyewitness report, the settlers began attacking Palestinian villagers and attempting to uproot olive trees in the fields lying between their village and the settlement. A smaller group of settlers proceeded into the village, where they fought with villagers, and were chased and cornered in the upper floor of an unfinished house. Local elders prevented further violence until the Israeli army arrived to take the settlers away. [Continue reading…]

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In Egypt as in Syria, al Qaeda seems to serve the interests of secular authoritarianism

BBC News reports: Militants have stepped up their campaign against security forces in Egypt with a series of explosions in the Egyptian capital, Cairo.

Six people were killed and some 100 others wounded, with the biggest blast outside Cairo’s police headquarters.

The attacks come on the eve of the third anniversary of the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.

Meanwhile, seven were reported killed in clashes between security forces and Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

The explosion outside Cairo’s police headquarters left four people dead and wounded at least 76.

Hours later, there were three more blasts elsewhere in the city, killing two people and injuring several more.

Local media report that an al-Qaeda-inspired militant group, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Champions of Jerusalem), has said it carried out the attack on the police headquarters.

The group previously claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack on a security building in the northern city of Mansoura in December that killed 16 people and injured more than 100 others.

The authorities blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for that attack – something the group strongly denied – and declared it a terrorist group shortly afterwards. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s Assad accused of boosting al-Qaeda with secret oil deals

The Telegraph reports: The Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad has funded and co-operated with al-Qaeda in a complex double game even as the terrorists fight Damascus, according to new allegations by Western intelligence agencies, rebels and al-Qaeda defectors.

Jabhat al-Nusra, and the even more extreme Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS), the two al-Qaeda affiliates operating in Syria, have both been financed by selling oil and gas from wells under their control to and through the regime, intelligence sources have told The Daily Telegraph.

Rebels and defectors say the regime also deliberately released militant prisoners to strengthen jihadist ranks at the expense of moderate rebel forces. The aim was to persuade the West that the uprising was sponsored by Islamist militants including al-Qaeda as a way of stopping Western support for it.

The allegations by Western intelligence sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, are in part a public response to demands by Assad that the focus of peace talks due to begin in Switzerland tomorrow be switched from replacing his government to co-operating against al-Qaeda in the “war on terrorism”.

“Assad’s vow to strike terrorism with an iron fist is nothing more than bare-faced hypocrisy,” an intelligence source said. “At the same time as peddling a triumphant narrative about the fight against terrorism, his regime has made deals to serve its own interests and ensure its survival.”

Intelligence gathered by Western secret services suggested the regime began collaborating actively with these groups again in the spring of 2013. When Jabhat al-Nusra seized control of Syria’s most lucrative oil fields in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, it began funding its operations in Syria by selling crude oil, with sums raised in the millions of dollars.

“The regime is paying al-Nusra to protect oil and gas pipelines under al-Nusra’s control in the north and east of the country, and is also allowing the transport of oil to regime-held areas,” the source said. “We are also now starting to see evidence of oil and gas facilities under ISIS control.”

The source accepted that the regime and the al-Qaeda affiliates were still hostile to each other and the relationship was opportunistic, but added that the deals confirmed that “despite Assad’s finger-pointing” his regime was to blame for the rise of al-Qaeda in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Syria peace talks near collapse before they begin

Reuters reports: Syria’s first peace talks came close to collapsing before they began on Friday, with the opposition refusing to meet President Bashar al-Assad’s delegation and the government threatening to bring its team home.

Still, figures on both sides later seemed to moderate their positions, expressing a willingness to meet their enemies.

The opposition said early on Friday that it would not meet Assad’s delegation unless it first agreed to sign up to a protocol calling for a transitional administration. The government rejected the demand outright and said its negotiators would return home unless serious talks began within a day.

“If no serious work sessions are held by (Saturday), the official Syrian delegation will leave Geneva due to the other side’s lack of seriousness or preparedness,” Syrian state television quoted Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem as saying.

Friday was meant to be the first time in three years of war that Assad’s government and foes would negotiate face to face.

But plans were ditched at the last minute after the opposition said the government delegation must first sign up to a 2012 protocol, known as Geneva 1, that calls for an interim government to oversee a transition to a new political order.

“We have explicitly demanded a written commitment from the regime delegation to accept Geneva 1. Otherwise there will be no direct negotiations,” opposition delegate Haitham al-Maleh told Reuters. [Continue reading…]

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Assad negotiates from a position of strength

Joshua Landis writes: President Bashar al-Assad comes to the negotiating table in Switzerland apparently stronger today than at any time in the last two years. Thus his cavalier tone ahead of the talks, dismissing opposition representatives as a “joke” and brushing off U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s and the opposition’s demand that he relinquish power and accept a “transitional governing body.” Instead, Assad maintains, Syria will hold elections this year, and “I see no reason why I shouldn’t stand.”

Understanding why Assad’s regime survives more than two years after then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it a “dead man walking” is critical for gauging the outcome of the Geneva II talks.

The regime’s resilience is based, first and foremost, on the Syrian army. Without its loyalty, Assad would likely have fallen as quickly as Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak did in 2011. But while many soldiers and officers did join the rebellion, most did so as individuals; few entire units defected, and no entire divisions did. Structurally, the military held together, and it was able to replenish its ranks through intensive recruitment among the Alawite minority, where many are loyal to the regime and still more live in mortal fear of sectarian retribution at the hands of the Sunni-led armed rebellion. The same factors allowed the military to expand its capabilities through the paramilitary Popular Committees, often called shabiha. And it has also been able to enlist the support in critical battles of units of the Shia Hezbollah militia from neighboring Lebanon, whose leaders recognize that their own military fortunes depend on maintaining the resupply lines that the Assad regime has long provided.

Just as important as the military’s loyalty to the regime have been its superior armaments. Even if rebel fighters, who number well in excess of 100,000 by most estimates, outnumber the Syrian army, in any battle for territory they are often little match for the army’s dramatic technological and organizational advantage. Rebel militias have no answer for the artillery, armor and airpower of the Syrian military. Perhaps even more important, the rebels have no central command. And it is difficult to imagine, today, how the rebels could plausibly overcome these disadvantages.

The fragmentation and radicalization of rebel fighting forces has been the opposition’s greatest weakness. Had a unified political-military command emerged among the rebels in the first year of the uprising, at the height of optimism over the Arab Spring, the United States and Europeans might well have been persuaded to give direct military backing to the uprising. Today, such hopes have been dashed.

Infighting among rival militias battling for control over rebel-held areas has, in recent weeks, cost over 1,000 lives. The prospect of militia chaos combined with widespread human rights abuses, the radicalization of the militias and an estimated 10,000 foreigners fighting on the rebel side have spooked Western leaders, even amid the anguish caused by images depicting gruesome torture and murder in the dungeons of the regime.

Few policymakers talk about “good guys” in Syria anymore; some — most notably former CIA Director Michael Hayden last December — even argue that a rebel victory would be worse than an Assad win. Not even the recent emergence of a larger militia coalition, the Islamic Front, to organize rebel fighting and challenge forces aligned with Al-Qaeda has been able to end rebel chaos.

Foreign involvement in the Syrian civil war has also worked strongly to the advantage of the regime. Iran and Russia have proved to be far more reliable as allies to Assad than the U.S. and Gulf Arab states have been to the rebels. From day one of the revolt, Assad’s top worry has been that the U.S. would invade. He and his generals were convinced that they could survive as long as F-16s did not appear over the Damascus horizon. So far, their assumption has proved to be correct. [Continue reading…]

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The speech that changed Syria

Mike Giglio reports: On March 30, 2011, around 3 p.m. in Damascus, Lawand Kiki took a seat in front of the TV in a friend’s living room and waited for Syria’s president to appear on the screen.

Bashar al-Assad had been silent for more than a week.

Dictatorships had just been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia, and NATO jets were pounding Libya. Now unrest had reared its head in Syria. Earlier that month, protests erupted the small city of Daraa, south of Damascus, after police arrested and tortured some kids who’d been caught spray-painting anti-Assad graffiti. Crackdowns on the protests there inspired more around the country. Security forces had reportedly killed dozens of protesters by the time Assad decided to speak.

Syrians across the country tuned in. Many of them saw Assad as their savior. Kiki thought the speech would be historic: Assad would show himself as the reformer he’d long claimed to be, apologizing for the bloodshed and calming the anxious nation’s nerves. This is a crisis, and he’s gonna fix it, he thought. Don’t worry. Everything’s gonna be fine.

Kiki was far from the hardened sectarian stereotype that defines Assad’s supporters today. He spent half his life in the United States, moving there at 14 when his father, a Kurdish dissident, won asylum. For the next 15 years he lived with his family in Fairview, N.J., developing a thick Jersey accent and a deep love for the U.S. But he overstayed his visa and was deported back to Syria in 2007.

The return was a shock for a guy who did a mean DeNiro impression and recited lines from Analyze This. He was arrested upon landing at the airport, by authorities suspicious of his time in the U.S. They whipped him with electric cables and beat him until his teeth cracked. Then they set him free, and he settled in Damascus, where he was jarred by the poverty and isolation — the overcrowded homes, the fact that most people couldn’t afford to own a car or even to buy meat. He quickly learned not to talk politics in a country blanketed by Soviet-style secret police. “The walls have ears,” said his family and friends.

Over time, he fell in love with the ancient city, finding peace in things like the jasmine flowers that grew from its old stone walls. He sometimes thought he felt the city breathing. In Assad — the young, Western-educated president who dined with John Kerry and mingled with people in the street — Kiki saw hope, believing the president would roll back the repressive regime handed down by his father, Hafez. Things like corruption and police abuse were the mistakes of individual people, not reflections on Assad. It has nothing to do with the president himself, Kiki would think.

Kiki also feared the demons that a push to oust Assad might unearth, as the bloody histories of Syria’s neighbors in Lebanon and Iraq cast a long shadow over its own sectarian balancing act. I don’t want this mess in my country, he thought as Assad prepared to take the stage.

In the U.S., Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, had told reporters three days earlier that members of Congress from both sides of the aisle saw Assad as “a reformer.” His biographer, the author and historian David W. Lesch, said the jury was still out: “[I]t’s not yet clear what sort of leader Mr. Assad is going to be,” Lesch wrote in an op-ed titled “The Syrian President I Know” published in the New York Times the day before the speech. “Mr. Assad’s background suggests he could go either way.”

Frederic C. Hof, then a senior U.S. official tasked with negotiating peace between Syria and Israel, didn’t buy into Assad’s reformist image, but thought: “This is Bashar’s opportunity. He’s been talking about reform and a new Syria for nearly 11 years.”

CNN and the BBC broadcast the speech live.

As Assad approached the podium, the regime-sanctioned parliament broke into thundering applause.

“I speak to you at this exceptional moment when events and developments pose a great test to our unity,” he said. “It is a test which is repeated every now and then because of the continued conspiracy against this country.”

Assad said he was responsible for all Syrians but didn’t apologize for the violence. He spoke vaguely of reform but mentioned nothing specific. And he warned of conspiracy, again and again. “I am sure you all know that Syria is facing a great conspiracy whose tentacles extend to some nearby countries and faraway countries, with some inside the country,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Live Q&A with Edward Snowden

Free Snowden: @mrbass21 Recently several threats have been made on your life by the intelligence community. Are you afraid for your life? Thoughts? #AskSnowden

It’s concerning, to me, but primarily for reasons you might not expect.

That current, serving officials of our government are so comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell reporters on the record that they think the due process protections of the 5th Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts. These are the same officials telling us to trust that they’ll honor the 4th and 1st Amendments. This should bother all of us.

The fact that it’s also a direct threat to my life is something I am aware of, but I’m not going to be intimidated. Doing the right thing means having no regrets. [Continue reading…]

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Watchdog report says NSA program is illegal and should end

The New York Times reports: An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.

The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.

The report is likely to inject a significant new voice into the debate over surveillance, underscoring that the issue was not settled by a high-profile speech President Obama gave last week. Mr. Obama consulted with the board, along with a separate review group that last month delivered its own report about surveillance policies. But while he said in his speech that he was tightening access to the data and declared his intention to find a way to end government collection of the bulk records, he said the program’s capabilities should be preserved. [Continue reading…]

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Al-Qaeda slaughters on Syria’s killing fields

Al Jazeera reports: Al-Qaeda fighters have struck a bloody blow in scenes of medieval violence in Syria’s northern border-town of Jarabulus. Fighting came to a head on January 17, between rebel groups Liwa al-Tawhid Brigade and the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the town, when reinforcements arrived from Raqqa and reclaimed the city in a brutal four-hour battle.

By nightfall, at least 10 men had been beheaded, their heads mounted on spikes, and more than 1,000 refugees fled the 3kms across the border to Turkey.

It’s a shocking turn of events for residents and Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters alike, who just a week ago believed they were hours away from expelling the al-Qaeda group from their city altogether after surrounding the last 40 fighters in the city’s cultural centre.

But when an ISIL car bomb killed 33 people – all women and children – the FSA brigade called for backup. Instead, what arrived was a 70-car ISIL convoy from Raqqa, an ISIL stronghold 160kms to the south-east. Fighters say half of the militants wore their usual black uniform and half wore camouflage like the FSA, and were uncharacteristically clean-shaven. The disguised fighters tied white bands around their arms to distinguish themselves from the real FSA. [Continue reading…]

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Where is Al Qaeda holding its Western hostages in Syria?

The Daily Beast reports: Fears for the safety of dozens of Western captives—among them journalists and aid workers—kidnapped in northern Syria by al Qaeda factions are mounting amid signs they are being moved deeper into territory firmly under jihadist sway. Private security experts and Western intelligence sources say the captives are in the process of being transported closer to the Iraqi border in an operation directed by a Chechen commander.

The movement of the captives appears to be a precaution against them being freed as a consequence of furious rebel infighting that has plunged insurgent-held areas in northern Syria into chaos in the past two weeks.

Speaking on the condition they would not be identified, private security experts working on several abduction cases say a commander called Abu Omar al Chechen, a former Georgian soldier who has sworn allegiance to the emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is overseeing the movement of the captives amid heavy security.

“The Westerners are being moved in groups and individually in armored vehicles,” one of the security advisers told the Daily Beast. Foreign fighters, including Saudis, are guarding them, he says. [Continue reading…]

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