The harm before the storm: Army battles to expel resurgent al-Qa’ida from Iraq

Salaam

Another perspective.

Statement regarding UK military action in Iraq 2014

London, UK, September 26th 2014 – The UK parliament has today voted to join US led air strikes in Iraq. In light of this we would say the following:

Taji Mustafa, media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, made the following points:

1. Western intervention will only cause more problems

The only confirmed fact about Western intervention in the Muslim world is that is has caused chaos and destruction for decades.

Britain and France drew the fault lines and schisms – that they called borders – almost a century ago. They, along with the United States have installed and sustained most of the despots who have ruled the region since then.

The first Gulf War in 1991 and subsequent sanctions led to the death of hundreds of thousands of children and a humanitarian crisis, only to be followed by war that is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands more.

The US/UK led Iraq war in 2003 led to the current violence, ethnic and sectarian strife in Iraq, and its break up in all but name.

We believe the prospect of another Iraq war – the third in two decades – will only act as a catalyst to sending the Muslim world into further free fall.

2. More Western bombing is the not the solution to the problems of the Middle East

The addiction of the US/UK to bombing the Muslim world – whether with Tornado aircraft or unmanned drones – is clear for all to see. The numbers of innocent men, women and children killed by their interventions is too many to count.

It is clear that as Western powers see Sykes-Picot borders breaking down, they have looked for an excuse to reshape the Middle East in an image that maintains their interference.

Yet they created the condition for chaos and have no place in providing a solution.

3. The Rulers in the Muslim world are shameless hypocrites who care nothing for the Ummah

Whilst the Gulf States have run to fulfil the West’s interests in bombing Iraq, they remained mute over the massacre of Muslims in Gaza. They did nothing to intervene effectively when Assad was massacring his population over the last three years.

This episode merely exposes their shamelessness, their true loyalties and their inability to act independent of their paymasters and puppet masters.

4. ISIS has much to answer for

ISIS has much to answer for its false declaration of Khilafah (Caliphate) and its rampage through Ash-Shaam causing more conflict with other Muslim groups than against the Assad regime.

It is clearly not a threat to the integrity of any Western state, yet its indiscriminate killings and creation of chaos give an excuse for military intervention and allows Islam to be demonised across the globe.

5. A Message to Muslims

The idea that Muslims are either with ISIS or with the West is absurd. A Muslim, wherever he or she is, should understand what is right and wrong from an Islamic perspective and be steadfast on the true position – not choosing sides as if this were a football match!

We must not be blind to the colonial agenda at play here and become sheep who side with the West just because this week they decided ISIS is the most important issue in the world.

Moreover, it is sad that some Muslims fuel the war propaganda by coming out shouting louder about ISIS’s crimes now than they did when there was in-fighting between ISIS and the other Islamic brigades, or than they did about Assad’s larger crimes or those of the Zionist occupiers of Palestine.

At the same time it is clearly not our place to make excuses for ISIS when they have done wrong and should realize it is a symptom of a wider destabilization of the Middle East over decades.

Muslims should be principled against Western military intervention and we should be principled in calling for the Islamic alternative that would end the decades of chaos and insecurity – that is a real Khilafah Rashidah that would be a beacon of justice not persecution, and to reject the false claims of those who have usurped its name.

http://www.hizb.org.uk/press-releases/statement-regarding-uk-military-action-in-iraq-2014
 
Salaam

Another comment piece.

Why stop at Isis when we could bomb the whole Muslim world?

Humanitarian arguments, if consistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East

Let’s bomb the Muslim world – all of it – to save the lives of its people. Surely this is the only consistent moral course? Why stop at Islamic State (Isis), when the Syrian government has murdered and tortured so many? This, after all, was last year’s moral imperative. What’s changed?

How about blasting the Shia militias in Iraq? One of them selected 40 people from the streets of Baghdad in June and murdered them for being Sunnis. Another massacred 68 people at a mosque in August. They now talk openly of “cleansing” and “erasure” once Isis has been defeated. As a senior Shia politician warns, “we are in the process of creating Shia al-Qaida radical groups equal in their radicalisation to the Sunni Qaida”.

What humanitarian principle instructs you to stop there? In Gaza this year, 2,100 Palestinians were massacred: including people taking shelter in schools and hospitals. Surely these atrocities demand an air war against Israel? And what’s the moral basis for refusing to liquidate Iran? Mohsen Amir-Aslani was hanged there last week for making “innovations in the religion” (suggesting that the story of Jonah in the Qur’an was symbolic rather than literal). Surely that should inspire humanitarian action from above? Pakistan is crying out for friendly bombs: an elderly British man, Mohammed Asghar, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, is, like other blasphemers, awaiting execution there after claiming to be a holy prophet. One of his prison guards has already shot him in the back.

Is there not an urgent duty to blow up Saudi Arabia? It has beheaded 59 people so far this year, for offences that include adultery, sorcery and witchcraft. It has long presented a far greater threat to the west than Isis now poses. In 2009 Hillary Clinton warned in a secret memo that “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban … and other terrorist groups”. In July, the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, revealed that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, until recently the head of Saudi intelligence, told him: “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally ‘God help the Shia’. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.” Saudi support for extreme Sunni militias in Syria during Bandar’s tenure is widely blamed for the rapid rise of Isis. Why take out the subsidiary and spare the headquarters?

The humanitarian arguments aired in parliament last week, if consistently applied, could be used to flatten the entire Middle East and west Asia. By this means you could end all human suffering, liberating the people of these regions from the vale of tears in which they live.

Perhaps this is the plan: Barack Obama has now bombed seven largely Muslim countries, in each case citing a moral imperative. The result, as you can see in Libya, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan,Yemen, Somalia and Syria, has been the eradication of jihadi groups, of conflict, chaos, murder, oppression and torture. Evil has been driven from the face of the Earth by the destroying angels of the west.

Now we have a new target, and a new reason to dispense mercy from the sky, with similar prospects of success. Yes, the agenda and practices of Isis are disgusting. It murders and tortures, terrorises and threatens. As Obama says, it is a “network of death”. But it’s one of many networks of death. Worse still, a western crusade appears to be exactly what Isis wants.

Already Obama’s bombings have brought Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, a rival militia affiliated to al-Qaida, together. More than 6,000 fighters have joined Isis since the bombardment began. They dangled the heads of their victims in front of the cameras as bait for war planes. And our governments were stupid enough to take it.

And if the bombing succeeds? If – and it’s a big if – it manages to tilt the balance against Isis, what then? Then we’ll start hearing once more about Shia death squads and the moral imperative to destroy them too – and any civilians who happen to get in the way. The targets change; the policy doesn’t. Never mind the question, the answer is bombs. In the name of peace and the preservation of life, our governments wage perpetual war.

While the bombs fall, our states befriend and defend other networks of death. The US government still refuses – despite Obama’s promise – to release the 28 redacted pages from the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11, which document Saudi Arabian complicity in the US attack. In the UK, in 2004 the Serious Fraud Office began investigating allegations of massive bribes paid by the British weapons company BAE to Saudi ministers and middlemen. Just as crucial evidence was about to be released, Tony Blair intervened to stop the investigation. The biggest alleged beneficiary was Prince Bandar. The SFO was investigating a claim that, with the approval of the British government, he received £1bn in secret payments from BAE.

And still it is said to go on. Last week’s Private Eye, drawing on a dossier of recordings and emails, alleges that a British company has paid £300m in bribes to facilitate weapons sales to the Saudi national guard. When a whistleblower in the company reported these payments to the British Ministry of Defence, instead of taking action it alerted his bosses. He had to flee the country to avoid being thrown into a Saudi jail.

There are no good solutions that military intervention by the UK or the US can engineer. There are political solutions in which our governments could play a minor role: supporting the development of effective states that don’t rely on murder and militias, building civic institutions that don’t depend on terror, helping to create safe passage and aid for people at risk. Oh, and ceasing to protect, sponsor and arm selected networks of death. Whenever our armed forces have bombed or invaded Muslim nations, they have made life worse for those who live there. The regions in which our governments have intervened most are those that suffer most from terrorism and war. That is neither coincidental nor surprising.

Yet our politicians affect to learn nothing. Insisting that more killing will magically resolve deep-rooted conflicts, they scatter bombs like fairy dust.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/30/isis-bomb-muslim-world-air-strikes-saudi-arabia
 
Salaam

Another comment piece.

Is There a Plan B?

The Futility of Bombing ISIS

Is there a “Plan B” in Barack Obama’s brain? Or in David Cameron’s, for that matter? I mean, we’re vaguely told that air strikes against the ferocious “Islamic State” may go on for “a long time”. But how long is “long”? Are we just going to go on killing Arabs and bombing and bombing and bombing until, well, until we go on bombing? What happens if our Kurdish and non-existent “moderate” Syrian fighters – described by Vice-President Joe Biden last week as largely “shopkeepers” – don’t overthrow the monstrous “Islamic State”? Then I suppose we are going to bomb and bomb and bomb again. As a Lebanese colleague of mine asked in an article last week, what is Obama going to do next? Has he thought of that?

After Alan Henning’s beheading, the gorge rises at the thought of even discussing such things. But distance sometimes creates distorting mirrors, none so more than when it involves the distance between the Middle East and Washington, London, Paris and, I suppose, Canberra. In Beirut, I’ve been surveying the Arab television and press – and it’s interesting to see the gulf that divides what the Arabs see and hear, and what the West sees and hears. The gruesome detail is essential here to understand how Arabs have already grown used to jihadi barbarity. They have seen full video clips of the execution of Iraqis – if shot in the back of the head, they have come to realise, a victim’s blood pours from the front of his face – and they have seen video clips of Syrian soldiers not only beheaded but their heads then barbecued and carried through villages on sticks.

Understandably, Alan Henning’s murder didn’t get much coverage in the Middle East, although television did show his murder video – which Western television did not. But it didn’t make many front pages. Mostly the fighting between jihadis and Kurds at Ein al-Arab (Kobane) and the festival for the Muslim Eid – and the Haj in Saudi Arabia – dominated news coverage. In general, the Arab world was as uninterested in Henning’s murder as we have been, for example, in the car bomb that killed 50 Syrian children in Homs last week. Had they been British children, of course…

But I’m struck by friends who’ve asked me why we are really carrying out air strikes when we won’t put soldiers on the ground. They have noted how the families of American hostages – fruitlessly seeking mercy for their loved ones – keep repeating that they cannot make Obama do what they want him to do. Yet, don’t we claim that our democratic governments can be influenced by individuals, that they do what we want?

And watching David Cameron on my Beirut television last week, I asked myself why it was really necessary for the RAF to bomb the “Islamic State”. He knows very well that our four – or is it two? – clapped-out Tornadoes are not going to make the slightest difference to any assault on jihadi forces. Indeed, he was prepared to delay RAF strikes until the Scottish referendum was over. If so, why did he not defer them altogether to save British lives?

But it was obvious at the Tory party conference that Cameron’s greatest threat came not from a man in Mosul called Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, but from a man in Bromley called Nigel Farage. Thus he waffled on about how Britain would “hunt down and bring to justice” Henning’s killers and do “everything we can to defeat this organisation in the region and at home”, using “all the assets we have to find these [remaining] hostages”. By “all the assets”, he must mean ground troops – because the RAF is already being used – and this we are not, I think, going to do. “British troops held hostage by Islamic State” is not a headline he wants to read. Thus I fear we are going to do nothing except bomb. And bomb. And bomb. Farage can’t beat that.

Like all Western leaders faced with a crisis in the Middle East, Cameron does not want to deal with it – or explore why it happened. He wants to know how to respond to it politically or, preferably, militarily. Our refusal to broadcast the “Islamic State” beheading videos is understandable – absolutely in the case of the actual murders – but by preventing Brits from actually seeing these horrors, the Government avoids having to respond to the public’s reaction: either a call for more air strikes or to demand their annulment.

This secrecy means the hostages do not exist in our imagination; they only emerge from the mist into the horrible desert sunlight when that grisly video arrives. In the region itself, hostages become public property at once, relatives giving interviews and demanding action from their governments. As I write, the families of 21 captured Lebanese soldiers faced with beheading are blocking the main Damascus- Beirut highway. A Qatari envoy has arrived to help (presumably with lots of cash).

Perhaps we need to reframe our understanding of the “Islamic State”. British Muslim leaders have said, quite rightly, that Muslims show mercy, and that the “Islamic State” is a perversion of Islam. I suspect and fear that they are wrong. Not because Islam is not merciful, but because the “Islamic State” has nothing at all to do with Islam. It is more a cult of nihilism. Their fighters have been brutalised – remember that they have endured, many of them, Saddam’s cruelty, our sanctions, Western invasion and occupation and air strikes under Saddam and now air strikes again. These people just don’t believe in justice any more. They have erased it from their minds.

If we had not supported so many brutal men in the Middle East, would things have turned out differently? Probably. If we had supported justice – I hesitate to suggest putting a certain man on trial for war crimes – would there have been a different reaction in the Middle East? In the Syrian war, they say that 200,000 have died; in Gaza more than 2,000. But in Iraq, we suspect half a million died. And whose fault was that?

The “Islamic State” are the real or spiritual children of all this. Now we face an exclusive form of nihilism, a cult as merciless as it is morbid. And we bomb and we bomb and we bomb. And then?

http://normanfinkelstein.com/2014/the-islamic-state-has-nothing-at-all-to-do-with-islam-it-is-more-a-cult-of-nihilism-their-fighters-have-been-brutalised-remember-that-they-have-endured-many-of-them-sad/
 
Salaam

Another update

Isis fighters capture Jordanian pilot after plane came down over Syria

Jordanian authorities confirm capture of pilot after first coalition warplane lost since air strikes began in Syria three months ago

Fighters of the Islamic State (Isis) in Syria have scored a major propaganda coup by capturing a Jordanian air force pilot whose plane came down on Wednesday during an air raid by the international coalition near the northern city of Raqqa, the de facto jihadi capital.

Images posted on social media showed jubilant Isis gunmen, some of them masked, with a clearly frightened man, naked from the waist down and being dragged out of a lake. He was identified as the downed pilot and named on Twitter, which displayed his military ID card, as First Lieutenant Muadh al-Kasasbeh, 26. The Jordanian military immediately described him as a “hostage”.

The F-16 was the first warplane lost since the US-led coalition began air strikes against Isis in Syria three months ago. Both the jihadists and activists reporting to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the plane had been hit by an anti-aircraft missile.

But the US military dismissed the claim, saying “evidence clearly suggests that Isil [Islamic State] did not down the aircraft”. Another image on social media showing the plane’s intact cockpit canopy suggested that the pilot might have ejected.

Hundreds of coalition air attacks have helped stem Isis advances – though more successfully in Iraq than in Syria, where they have been criticised for weakening more moderate rebel groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

The Jordanian military issued a statement confirming the capture by Isis and saying it “holds the group and its supporters responsible for the safety of the pilot and his life”. It did not name him. “During a mission on Wednesday morning conducted by several Jordanian air force planes against hideouts of the IS terrorist organisation in the Raqqa region, one of the planes went down and the pilot was taken hostage,”, the Petra news agency quoted a source from the military’s general staff as saying. The Jordanian government went into emergency session to discuss its response.

The pilot’s father, Yousef al-Kasasbeh, appealed to Isis in an interview with a Jordanian website, Saraya, saying: “May Allah plant mercy in your hearts and may you release my son.” He also urged King Abdullah to bring him home.

Jordan is one of four Arab countries – the others are Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates – which have been taking part in coalition attacks. Qatar is providing logistical support. But Jordan is in an especially vulnerable position: it is the only one of what the US calls the Arab “partner nations” which borders on both Syria and Iraq. It has taken in hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and there is sympathy and even support among Jordanian extremists for what is seen as an Isis fightback against Assad, Iran and Shia sectarianism.

An estimated 2,000-2,500 Jordanians are known to be fighting with Isis – the third largest foreign Arab contingent after Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

King Abdullah has been an enthusiastic participant in the coalition, describing an elemental struggle between Muslim moderation and jihadi extremism. Jordan’s much-vaunted intelligence service is thought to be playing an important clandestine role in the anti-Isis campaign. But the Jordanian government has not advertised its military involvement, perhaps fearing revenge attacks by Isis or a domestic backlash. The capture of the pilot and his obvious propaganda value to the jihadis may well now highlight the risks involved.

Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and UK have joined the US in conducting air strikes on Isis in Iraq. The US and its four Arab allies, flying sorties in Syria, will all be concerned about any new Isis capability to bring down their planes.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/24/islamic-state-shot-down-coalition-warplane-syria
 
Salaam

Another update

Pilot’s murder may weaken Jordanian support for role in anti-Isis campaign

It is hard to see Jordan withdrawing from the US-led coalition, but King Abdullah may now become more cautious despite public’s calls to avenge Muadh al-Kasasbeh’s death

The brutal murder of Muadh al-Kasasbeh, the pilot who was captured by the Islamic State (Isis), is likely to have a devastating impact on Jordan and may in the long term undermine its role in the US-led coalition attacking jihadi targets in Syria.

The Jordanian government and its citizens will be horrified by this exceptionally cruel killing. King Abdullah will be concerned that it will weaken the already lukewarm support for the country’s military participation in the fight against Isis. That was without doubt the intention of the group, which often singles out the Hashemite monarch in its venomous rhetoric, calling him the “Jordanian tyrant”.

Even before the shock of Kasasbeh’s death, opposition to Jordan’s anti-Isis role was on the rise. It is hard to see Jordan suddenly withdrawing from the coalition, but the king may become more cautious, while appealing to his people’s sense of patriotism and injured national pride.

Calls for revenge were quickly voiced by those who had been chanting the slogan “We are all Muadh” in recent weeks.

Jordan is one of four Arab countries – the others are Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates – that have been taking part in anti-Isis attacks in Syria since they began last September.

But the western-backed kingdom is in an especially vulnerable position: it is the only one of what the US calls its Arab “partner nations” that shares borders with both Syria and Iraq. It has taken in hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and there is sympathy and even support among Jordanian Sunni extremists for what is seen as an Isis fightback against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

About 200,000 people, the majority of them Sunnis, have been killed since the uprising erupted nearly four years ago. Assad is also bracketed with his close ally Iran and Shia sectarianism more generally. According to a poll last September by the Centre for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, only 62% of Jordanians consider Isis to be a terrorist organisation.

Jordan was the homeland of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, a direct forerunner of Isis. The 2005 hotel bombings the group carried out in Amman, killing 60 people in what is often called Jordan’s 9/11, are a terrible reminder of the risks of homegrown fanaticism.

An estimated 2,000-2,500 Jordanians are known to be fighting with Isis – the third largest foreign Arab contingent after Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. Many come from impoverished no-hope towns on the East Bank, a world away from the sophistication of Amman.

King Abdullah, who was informed of the grim news about Kasasbeh while on a visit to Washington, has been a keen participant in the anti-Isis effort. He has emphasised the need to fight the group’s extremism and brutality and its claim to be Islamic.

A government information campaign echoes the king’s message about the values of moderate Islam and the rejection of the takfiri school that Isis uses to sanction the often sectarian killing of so-called apostates. But the campaign generated mixed feelings at home from the start. A popular Twitter hashtag #thiswarisnotourwar makes the point succinctly.

“Isis sympathisers feel injustice and anger at America and Israel and always felt that Islam was under attack by Crusaders,” Muin Khoury, a leading Jordanian pollster, told the Guardian recently. “And now they don’t agree with Jordan being involved in the coalition.”

Adnan Abu Odeh, a former minister, said the government was “walking a tightrope”. Other critics suggested that Jordan had been somehow blackmailed by Washington into taking part.

Discontent became more voluble after Kasasbeh’s capture when his F16 came down near Raqqa on Christmas Eve, especially among his powerful tribe, one of several which form the loyal backbone of the Jordanian armed forces and security services. In his home town of Kerak, dozens of people protested, chanting anti-coalition slogans and calling on the king to pull out of the campaign against Isis.

Abdullah moved quickly to reassure the pilot’s family that everything was being done to secure his release. But even as he comforted Kasasbeh’s parents and wife in the royal palace in the capital, demonstrations took place outside without the police intervening – something that would be unthinkable in normal times.

Kasasbeh’s capture, one MP complained to the BBC, was “making it harder to convince Jordanians that we should be in this war in the first place”.

Official nervousness has been evident from the beginning. The Jordanian government did not advertise its military involvement, perhaps fearing revenge attacks by Isis or a domestic backlash. It had been assumed before the campaign began that Jordan would offer to use its highly regarded intelligence services rather than get involved in armed action.

Abdullah, like his father, King Hussein, is close to the US and has maintained Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel in the face of domestic opposition. But the present monarch’s critics sometimes describe him as impetuous. Observers have made the comparison between the anti-Isis campaign and King Hussein’s decision to stay out of the US-led coalition that came together to eject Iraq forces from Kuwait in 1991.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/03/pilot-murder-jordan-anti-isis-campaign
 
So terrorism and intimidation and murder works in Jordan. That's what I got from the above. This only serves to encourage more barbarism. At least this time it was a pilot (solider?) instead of a reporter (civilian).
 
Although his takfiri "hi-ness" of jordan seems to want to portray himself as being in a position of defensible grievance, in love with his "subjects", the facts say otherwise. He hasn't been getting popular support in jordan for his illegal aggression and now the pilot incident seems to be causing a stronger galvanization on both plains.

A sifting of hearts either way,
a yawm-al-furqan.
You're either with God or you're with the Satan.

Musa (Moses) said: "Lord of the east and the west, and all that is between them, if you did but understand!"
Fir'aun (Pharaoh) said: "If you choose an*ilah*(god) other than me, I will certainly put you among the prisoners."
Quran 26:28-29

Courts kept busy as Jordan works to crush support for Isis

Thursday 27 November 2014*
13.24*GMT

“We are with the Islamic State and you are with Obama and the infidels,”
Ahmed Abu Ghalous a big, angry-looking man in blue prison overalls, shouts after being sentenced to five years in jail for “promoting the views of a terrorist group” on the internet. The outburst earns him a further 50 dinar (£45) fine for contempt of court....

It is a sunny morning in Amman and the three uniformed judges in Jordan’s state security court are briskly working their way through a pile of slim grey folders on the bench before them.....

....Arrests and prosecutions intensified after Isis captured Mosul in June,
but the groundwork had been laid by an earlier amendment to Jordan’s anti-terrorism law. It is estimated that 2,000 Jordanians have fought and 250 of them have died in Syria – making them the third largest Arab contingent in Isis after Saudi Arabians and Tunisians.

.......“Jordan has made a mistake entering into an international coalition,”
he argues. “The US put huge pressure on Jordan because they don’t want Isis to reach the borders of Israel.”

Muin Khoury, a professional pollster, has reached a similar conclusion about motives.
“Isis sympathisers feel injustice and anger at America and Israel and always felt that Islam was under attack by Crusaders, and now they don’t agree with Jordan being involved in the coalition.”

Adnan Abu Odeh, a respected former minister, describes the government as “walking a tightrope”....

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/27/-sp-courts-jordan-crush-support-isis
Click to expand...

DESPITE ALL THE PROPAGANDA:

Oct 20 2014

....not everyone in Jordan supports membership in the coalition.
According to a poll*published*last month by the Center for Strategic Studies at University of Jordan, only 62 percent of Jordanians consider IS—and a mere 31 percent the Syria-based Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra—to be terrorist organizations.
Even more stunning, just 44 percent of Jordanians surveyed say that Al Qaeda is a terrorist group.*

But King Abdullah’s considerations extend beyond Jordan’s borders. In addition to the threat posed by IS and its ilk in Iraq and Syria, Washington—the Kingdom’s leading benefactor—has undoubtedly made clear that participation in the coalition is a necessity.
*Given the stakes, Jordan is unlikely to reverse course anytime soon. But should air operations persist in the coming years, Jordan’s coalition activities could eventually join the economy and Syrian refugees as a locus of popular frustration and discontent in the Kingdom.
*Regardless of how continued coalition participation plays out on the streets of Amman, the Center for Strategic Studies poll suggests that the war in Syria—in which a nominally Shiite regime has slaughtered nearly 200,000 mostly Sunni Muslims—remains an emotionally evocative issue for Jordanians and a font of sympathy for IS and Jabhat Al Nusra.

Of course, should these organizations perpetrate attacks in Jordan—like the 2005 Al Qaeda hotel bombings in Amman—local support for these groups could plummet.*

In the meantime, as the Palace dispatches bombing sorties and mitigates immediate threats posed by IS, the ongoing dynamic in Syria guarantees a growing and potentially destabilizing reservoir of popular support for terrorists in the Kingdom..

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119909/islamic-state-isis-support-jordan-worrying-poll
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How can you dare to call it terrorism when you know about the farce the american infidels created in iraq, and which his hi-ness of jordan supported and backed - against the will of his people. And probably against his own will- just shows his impotence.

The shepherd of jordan along with every other shepherd in the region needs to understand that they will only betray themselves if they continue to support satanic infidel capitalist racist colonialism while brutalising their own people, they already know after the "arab springs" that the americans wouldn't blink twice in dropping them like hot coals if they found them to be lacking credibility amongst their populations, the best thing would be for all to submit to a united Islamic State where sovereignty is acknowledged as belonging to Almighty God.
In the current age of information, subjugating masses as slaves to the will of imperfect men, and pretending to represent democracy which never existed in reality doesn't work.

The mantra “No taxation without representation” was begun and the Stamp Act was repealed.
Two years after the Stamp Act, Charles Townshend submitted a series of acts to Parliament known as the Townshend Acts.
Once again the colonists rebelled in the form of the*Boston Massacre*and the Townshend Acts were repealed.*

After the Boston Tea Party, the British passed a series of acts known as the Intolerable Acts. These acts would push the colonists further into rebellion and create the Continental Congress

...Men were led by their own commanders and were not familiar with falling in line with a commander-in-chief of the entire army.
These are just some of the problems that Washington faced and certainly not a comprehensive list.

As the British retreated back to Boston, thousands of militiamen attacked them along the roads, inflicting heavy casualties before timely British reinforcements prevented a total disaster.
With the*Battles of Lexington and Concord, the war had begun. The militia converged on Boston, bottling up the British in the city. About 4,500 more British soldiers arrived by sea, and on June 17, 1775, British forces commanded by*General William Howe*overtook the Charlestown peninsula at the*Battle of Bunker Hill. The provincials, under William Prescott fell back, but British losses were so heavy that the attack was not followed up.

Gage was replaced and General Howe had a new respect for the provincials.

Cornwallis was running out of options.
He tried to evacuate his troops and mach to New York, but that attempt failed.

On October 17, 1781 Cornwallis prepared for surrender.

Cornwallis refused to meet formally with Washington and did not attend the surrender ceremony. Instead he sent his Brigadier General Charles O’Hara.

O’Hara offered the sword of surrender to Rochambeau who refused and pointed to Washington. O’Hara then offered the sword to Washington who refused and pointed to Benjamin Lincoln. Benjamin Lincoln accepted.
Click to expand...

Of a certainty you'll offer the right to representation of surrender to God's judgement to Adam, who'll refuse and point at Noah, who'll point at Abraham, through Moses, and when you reach Jesus, he'll point at Muhammad pbuh, and once you've accepted Muhammad pbuh, you'll receive representation before God.
 
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By*William Booth*and Taylor Luck*

June 27, 2014*

MAAN, Jordan —*Demonstrators angry with Jordan’s government have unfurled in this desert city the black battle flags of the al-Qaeda-inspired extremists now in control of large swaths of Iraq, stirring fears that support for the group is growing in Jordan.

At two rallies in Maan this week, scores of young men, some in black masks, raised their fists, waved home-made banners bearing the logo and inscriptions of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and shouted, “Down, down with Abdullah,” the king of Jordan.

Abdullah II, a close U.S. ally, is widely viewed as a moderate in a country considered an*oasis of stability*in the Middle East.The demonstrations have been the first public displays of support for ISIS in Jordan.Abdullah’s government has put the country’s border guard*on alert, reinforced troops along its 125-mile frontier with Iraq and added tanks and armor to thwart any move into Jordan by the*ISIS militants, who, along with Sunni insurgents, have seized a string of cities from northern Syria to western Iraq.

But more troubling to the Amman government than the possibility of*an ISIS invasion*are signs that support for the group may be expanding here and that homegrown recruits could take action in Jordan, according to former military officers, security analysts and members of Jordan’s jihadist movement.Shiite Iraqis prepare to fight Sunni militants


“We no longer trust or respect the government and have been searching for an alternative that ensures our basic rights,” said Mohammed Kreishan, one of the marchers. “In the Islamic State, we have found our alternative.”

On Wednesday, anti-government demonstrators gathered at the mosque in central Maan and marched toward the courthouse with gasoline bombs, but they were deterred by the presence of Jordanian riot police in armored personnel carriers.

A symbol of Jordan’s monarchy and central government, the charred and bullet-riddled courthouse has been the scene of near-nightly gunfire in recent weeks.

ISIS banners were briefly raised on the mosque’s roof and still fly from flagpoles at traffic circles.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...34a4ee-f48a-492a-99b3-b6cd3ffe9e41_story.html
Click to expand...

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I don't pretend to know for sure if anyone in I.S is acting as an atheist false flag in order to cause mischief by appearing between iraq and shaam, regardless of the pretences, the plain facts are that people are sick and tired of being abused by secular systems and want Islam.
even if it were the case that I.S is being used as a tool to cause confusion, it would give relevance to the hadith of jassassah, who points towards dajjal, who points towards Muhammad pbuh.

The truth marches on.
 
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Salaam

Another update

ISIS has no patent on burning people alive, as US and Israeli history shows

Denunciations of ISIS are worse than worthless, says Glenn Greenwald, when they are used to make us forget or further obscure our own governments’ brutality.

The latest ISIS atrocity – releasing a video of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive – prompted substantial discussion yesterday about this particular form of savagery. It is thus worth noting that deliberately burning people to death is achievable – and deliberately achieved – in all sorts of other ways:

Burnt alive by US drones in Pakistan

The most immediate consequence of drone strikes is, of course, death and injury to those targeted or near a strike. The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs. Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss. . . .

In addition, because the Hellfire missiles fired from drones often incinerate the victims’ bodies, and leave them in pieces and unidentifiable, traditional burial processes are rendered impossible. As Firoz Ali Khan, a shopkeeper whose father-in-law’s home was struck, graphically described, “These missiles are very powerful. They destroy human beings . . .There is nobody left and small pieces left behind. Pieces. Whatever is left is just little pieces of bodies and cloth.” A doctor who has treated drone victims described how “kin is burned so that you can’t tell cattle from human.”

Burnt alive by US drones in Yemen

Mousid al-Taysi was travelling in a wedding convoy celebrating a cousin’s marriage when a missile slammed down from the sky. All he remembers are bright red-and-orange colours, then the grisly sight of a dozen burned bodies and the cries of others wounded around him.

Mousid survived the December 12 attack in Yemen’s central al-Baydah province, apparently launched by an American drone, but his physical and psychological recovery process is just beginning. If confirmed, it would be the deadliest drone attack in the country in more than a year. . . .

After talking with victims and family members in the area, it was clear a majority of civilians were among the carnage of the targeted wedding convoy. . . .

Civilians living under drones said they live in constant fear of being hit again. “Many people in our village have expressed terror at the thought of another strike,” Sulaimani said. “When the kids hear a plane they no longer climb the trees searching for where that noise came from. They each immediately run to their houses.”

Burnt alive by US phosphorus shells in Iraq

Ever since last November, when US forces battled to clear Fallujah of insurgents, there have been repeated claims that troops used “unusual” weapons in the assault that all but flattened the Iraqi city. Specifically, controversy has focussed on white phosphorus shells (WP) – an incendiary weapon usually used to obscure troop movements but which can equally be deployed as an offensive weapon against an enemy. The use of such incendiary weapons against civilian targets is banned by international treaty. . . .

The debate was reignited last week when an Italian documentary claimed Iraqi civilians – including women and children – had been killed by terrible burns caused by WP. The documentary, Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, by the state broadcaster RAI, cited one Fallujah human-rights campaigner who reported how residents told how “a rain of fire fell on the city”. . . . The claims contained in the RAI documentary have met with a strident official response from the US . . . .

While military experts have supported some of these criticisms, an examination by The Independent of the available evidence suggests the following: that WP shells were fired at insurgents, that reports from the battleground suggest troops firing these WP shells did not always know who they were hitting and that there remain widespread reports of civilians suffering extensive burn injuries. While US commanders insist they always strive to avoid civilian casualties, the story of the battle of Fallujah highlights the intrinsic difficulty of such an endeavour.

It is also clear that elements within the US government have been putting out incorrect information about the battle of Fallujah, making it harder to assesses the truth. Some within the US government have previously issued disingenuous statements about the use in Iraq of another controversial incendiary weapon – napalm. . . .

Another report, published in the Washington Post, gave an idea of the sorts of injuries that WP causes. It said insurgents “reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns”. A physician at a local hospital said the corpses of insurgents “were burned, and some corpses were melted”. . . .

Yet there are other, independent reports of civilians from Fallujah suffering burn injuries. For instance, Dahr Jamail, an unembedded reporter who collected the testimony of refugees from the city spoke to a doctor who had remained in the city to help people, encountered numerous reports of civilians suffering unusual burns.

One resident told him the US used “weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud” and that he watched “pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns.” The doctor said he “treated people who had their skin melted.”

Jeff Englehart, a former marine who spent two days in Fallujah during the battle, said he heard the order go out over military communication that WP was to be dropped. In the RAI film, Mr Englehart, now an outspoken critic of the war, says: “I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it’s known as Willy Pete … Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone … I saw the burned bodies of women and children” . . . .

Napalm was used in several instances during the initial invasion. Colonel Randolph Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11, remarked during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003: “The generals love napalm – it has a big psychological effect.”

Burnt alive by Israeli phosphorus bombs in Lebanon

Israel has acknowledged for the first time that it attacked Hezbollah targets during the second Lebanon war with phosphorus shells. White phosphorus causes very painful and often lethal chemical burns to those hit by it, and until recently Israel maintained that it only uses such bombs to mark targets or territory. . . .

During the war several foreign media outlets reported that Lebanese civilians carried injuries characteristic of attacks with phosphorus, a substance that burns when it comes to contact with air. In one CNN report, a casualty with serious burns was seen lying in a South Lebanon hospital.

In another case, Dr. Hussein Hamud al-Shel, who works at Dar al-Amal hospital in Ba’albek, said that he had received three corpses “entirely shriveled with black-green skin,” a phenomenon characteristic of phosphorus injuries.

Lebanon’s President Emile Lahoud also claimed that the IDF made use of phosphorus munitions against civilians in Lebanon.

Burnt alive by US napalm in Vietnam

The girl in the photo — naked, crying, burned, running, with other children, away from the smoke — became emblematic of human suffering during the Vietnam War. Kim Phuc was 9 then, a child who would spend the next 14 months in the hospital and the rest of her life in skin blistered from the napalm that hit her body and burned off her clothes. She ran until she no longer could, and then she fainted. . . .

Phuc went outside and saw the plane getting closer, and then heard the sound of four bombs hitting the ground. She couldn’t run. She didn’t know until later, but the bombs carried napalm, a gel-like incendiary that clings to its victims as it burns.

“Suddenly I saw the fire everywhere around me,” she remembers. “At that moment, I didn’t see anyone, just the fire. Suddenly, I saw my left arm burning. I used my right hand to try to take it off.”

Her left hand was damaged, too. Her clothes burned off. Later, she would be thankful that her feet weren’t damaged because she could run away, run until she was outside the fire. She saw her brothers, her cousins, and some soldiers running, too. She ran until she couldn’t run any more. . . . Two of her cousins, ages 9 months and 3 years, died in the bombing. Phuc had burns over two-thirds of her body and was not expected to live.

Main article

Unlike ISIS, the US usually (though not always) tries to suppress (rather than gleefully publish) evidence showing the victims of its violence.

Indeed, concealing stories about the victims of American militarism is a critical part of the US government’s strategy for maintaining support for its sustained aggression. That is why, in general, the U.S. media has a policy of systematically excluding and ignoring such victims (although disappearing them this way does not actually render them nonexistent).

One could plausibly maintain that there is a different moral calculus involved in (a) burning a helpless captive to death as opposed to (b) recklessly or even deliberately burning civilians to death in areas that one is bombing with weapons purposely designed to incinerate human beings, often with the maximum possible pain.

That’s the moral principle that makes torture specially heinous: sadistically inflicting pain and suffering on a helpless detainee is a unique form of barbarity.

But there is nonetheless something quite obfuscating about this beloved ritual of denouncing the unique barbarism of ISIS. It is true that ISIS seems to have embraced a goal – a strategy – of being incomparably savage, inhumane and morally repugnant. That the group is indescribably nihilistic and morally grotesque is beyond debate.

That’s exactly what makes the intensity of these repeated denunciation rituals somewhat confounding. Everyone decent, by definition, fully understands that ISIS is repellent and savage.

While it’s understandable that being forced to watch the savagery on video prompts strong emotions (although, again, hiding savagery does not in fact make it less savage), it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the ritualistic expressed revulsion has a definitive utility.

The constant orgy of condemnation aimed at this group seems to have little purpose other than tribal self-affirmation: no matter how many awful acts our government engages in, at least we don’t do something like that, at least we’re not as bad as them.

In some instances, that may be true, but even when it is, the differences are usually much more a matter of degree than category (much the way that angry denunciations over the Taliban for suicide-bombing a funeral of one of its victims hides the fact that the U.S. engages in its own “double tap” practice of bombing rescuers and funeral mourners for its drone victims).

To the extent that these denunciation rituals make us forget or further obscure our own governments’ brutality – and that seems to be the overriding effect if not the purpose of these rituals – they are worse than worthless; they are actively harmful.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/isis-has-no-patent-on-burning-people-alive-as-us-and-israeli-history-shows
 
Salaam

Another update

Private donors from Gulf oil states helping to bankroll salaries of up to 100,000 Isis fighters

Islamic State is still receiving significant financial support from Arab sympathisers outside Iraq and Syria, enabling it to expand its war effort, says a senior Kurdish official.

The US has being trying to stop such private donors in the Gulf oil states sending to Islamic State (Isis) funds that help pay the salaries of fighters who may number well over 100,000.

Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish President, Massoud Barzani, told The Independent on Sunday: “There is sympathy for Da’esh [the Arabic acronym for IS, also known as Isis] in many Arab countries and this has translated into money – and that is a disaster.” He pointed out that until recently financial aid was being given more or less openly by Gulf states to the opposition in Syria – but by now most of these rebel groups have been absorbed into IS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, so it is they “who now have the money and the weapons”.

Mr Hussein would not identify the states from which the funding for IS comes today, but implied that they were the same Gulf oil states that financed Sunni Arab rebels in Iraq and Syria in the past.

Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran member of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership who recently retired from the Iraqi parliament, said there was a misunderstanding as to why Gulf countries paid off IS. It is not only that donors are supporters of IS, but that the movement “gets money from the Arab countries because they are afraid of it”, he says. “Gulf countries give money to Da’esh so that it promises not to carry out operations on their territory.”

Iraqi leaders in Baghdad privately express similar suspicions that IS – with a territory the size of Great Britain and a population of six million fighting a war on multiple fronts, from Aleppo to the Iranian border – could not be financially self-sufficient, given the calls on its limited resources.

Islamic State is doing everything it can to expand its military capacity, as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, and the US Central Command (CentCom) threaten an offensive later this year to recapture Mosul. Regardless of the feasibility of this operation, IS forces are fighting in widely different locations across northern and central Iraq.

On Tuesday night they made a surprise attack with between 300 and 400 fighters, many of them North Africans from Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, on Kurdish forces 40 miles west of the Kurdish capital, Irbil. The Kurds say that 34 IS fighters were killed in fighting and by US air strikes. At the same time, IS was battling for control of the town of al-Baghdadi, several hundred miles away in Anbar province. Despite forecasts by a CentCom spokesman last week that the tide has turned and that IS is on the retreat there is little sign of this on the ground.

On the contrary, IS appears to have the human and financial resources to fight a long war, though both are under strain. According to interviews by The Independent with people living in Mosul reached by phone, or with recent refugees from the city, IS officials are conscripting at least one young man from every family in Mosul, which has a population of 1.5 million. It has drafted a list of draconian punishments for those not willing to fight, starting with 80 lashes and ending with execution.

All these new recruits receive pay, as well as their keep, which until recently was $500 (£324) a month but has now been cut to about $350. Officers and commanders receive much more. A local source, who did not want to be named, says that foreign fighters, of whom there are an estimated 20,000 in IS, get a much higher salary – starting at $800 a month.

“I know three foreign fighters,” said Ahmad, a 45-year-old shopkeeper still working in Mosul. “I usually see them at checkpoints in our neighbourhood: one is Turkish and the others are Europeans. Some of them speak a little Arabic. I know them well because they buy soft drinks from the shops in our neighbourhood. The Turkish one is my customer. He says he talks to his family using the satellite internet service that is available for the foreigners, who have excellent privileges in terms of salaries, spoils and even captives.”

Ahmad added: “Isis fighters have arrested four high-school teachers for telling their students not to join Isis.” Islamic State fighters have entered the schools and demanded that students in their final year join them. Isis has also lowered the conscription age below 18 years of age, leading some families to leave the city. Military bases for the training and arming of children have also been established.

Given this degree of mobilisation by Islamic State, statements from Mr Abadi and CentCom about recapturing Mosul this spring, using between 20,000 and 25,000 Baghdad government and Kurdish forces, sound like an effort to boost morale on the anti-Isis side.

The CentCom spokesman claimed there were only between 1,000 and 2,000 Isis fighters in Mosul, which is out of keeping with what local observers report. Ominously, Iraqi and foreign governments have an impressive record of underestimating Isis as a military and political force over the past two years.

Mr Hussein said at the end of last year that Isis had “hundreds of thousands of fighters”, at a time when the CIA was claiming they numbered between 20,000 and 31,500. He does not wholly rule out an offensive to take Mosul but, as he outlines the conditions for a successful attack, it becomes clear that he does not expect the city to be recaptured any time soon. For the Kurdish Peshmerga forces to storm Mosul they would need far better equipment “in order to wage a decisive war against Isis and defeat them”, he says. “So far we are only defeating them in various places in Kurdistan by giving our blood. We have had 1,011 Peshmerga killed and about 5,000 wounded.”

The Kurds want heavy weapons including Humvees, tanks to surround but not to enter Mosul, snipers’ rifles, because Isis has many highly accurate snipers, as well as equipment to deal with improvised explosive devices and booby traps, both of which Isis uses profusely.

Above all, Kurdish participation in an offensive would require a military partner in the shape of an effective Iraqi army and local Sunni allies. Without the latter, a battle for Mosul conducted by Shia and Kurds alone would provoke Sunni Arab resistance. Mr Hussein is dubious about the effectiveness of the Iraqi army, which disintegrated last June when, though nominally it had 350,000 soldiers, it was defeated by a few thousand Isis fighters.

“The Iraqi army has two divisions to protect Baghdad, but is it possible for the Iraqi government to release them?” asks Mr Hussein. “And how will they get to Mosul? If they have to come through Tikrit and Baiji, they will have to fight hard along the way even before they get to Mosul.”

Of course, an anti-Isis offensive has advantages not available last year, such as US air strikes, but these might be difficult to use in a city. The US air force carried out at least 600 air strikes on the Isis-held part of the small Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani before Isis finally retreated after a siege of 134 days. In the most optimistic scenarios Isis splits or there is a popular uprising against it, but so far there is no sign of this and Isis has proved that it exacts merciless vengeance against any individual or community opposed to it.

Mr Hussein makes another important point: difficult and dangerous though it may be for the Kurds and the Baghdad government to recapture Mosul, they cannot afford to leave it alone. It was here that Isis won its first great victory and Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi declared the caliphate on 29 June last year.

“Mosul is important politically and militarily,” he says. “Without defeating Isis in Mosul, it will be very difficult to talk about the defeat of Isis in the rest of Iraq.”

At the moment, Peshmerga forces are only eight miles from Mosul. But Isis fighters are likewise not much further from the Kurdish-held oil city of Kirkuk, which Isis assaulted last month. Given the size of Iraq and the small size of the armies deployed, each side can inflict tactical surprises on the other by punching through scantily held frontlines.

There are two further developments to the advantage of Islamic State. Even in the face of the common threat, the leaders in Baghdad and Erbil remain deeply divided. When Mosul fell last year, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claimed that the Iraqi army had been stabbed in the back by a conspiracy between Kurds and Isis. The two sides remain deeply suspicious of each other and, at the start of last week, a delegation led by the Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani failed to reach an agreement in Baghdad on how much of Iraq’s oil revenues should go to the Kurds in exchange for a previously agreed quantity of oil from Kurdish-held northern oilfields.

“Unbelievably, the divisions now are as great as under Maliki,” says Dr Othman. Islamic State has made many enemies, but it may be saved by their inability to unite.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/private-donors-from-gulf-oil-states-helping-to-bankroll-salaries-of-up-to-100000-isis-fighters/
 
Salaam

Another update

War with Isis: Iraq's Government Fights to Win Back Tikrit from Militants - But Then What?

Some 60 miles from his office in the capital of Iraq’s oil-rich province of Kirkuk, a battle is raging for control of Tikrit. It might seem a hopeful sign that Baghdad is finally attempting to win back a key city from the control of Isis, the jihadist group that swept into a great swathe of Iraq last year. But Kirkuk’s governor, Najmaldin Karim, is not optimistic about the long-term outcome.

It is not the military but the political consequences of the fighting that worry him. “What are you going to do after you liberate these areas… are the people who fled from there going to be able to go back?” In other words, is the war in Iraq now so pervasively sectarian that Sunnis can no longer accept rule by a Shia Muslim-dominated central government?

Before the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as Isis) captured Tikrit on 11 June last year, the city had a population of about 260,000, almost all of them Sunni. The offensive to drive out Isis that is now under way is very much a Shia affair with 30,000 soldiers, half from the regular army and half Shia militias. Significantly, it is taking place with the support of Iran and without the backing of US air strikes. Iran and the US may have a common enemy in Isis, but in Iraq they are fighting two very different wars.

Dr Karim says there is no alternative for the Baghdad government but to rely on the Shia militiamen. “The army is pretty well incapable of taking on major operations, while the militias are better equipped and probably have better fighters,” he told The Independent in an interview at his Kirkuk office.

He said the largely Shia army that disintegrated last year when it lost northern and western Iraq to Isis “wasn’t a real army, but a corrupt bunch of guys at checkpoints who had no training”. Nor does he think the situation is much better today. Kirkuk is relatively safe because it is defended by Kurdish Peshmerga, he says, but even they suffered heavy losses when Isis broke through the nearby frontline on 30 January. “It was a rainy, foggy night and our people were too lax,” he admitted.

Dr Karim’s career is a blend of professional success and Kurdish nationalist commitment. Born 65 years ago in Kirkuk, he trained as a doctor then became a Peshmerga, or fighter, in 1973, a couple of years before a Kurdish rebellion against Baghdad collapsed after the US and Iran cynically withdrew support.

After that defeat, Dr Karim accompanied the exiled Kurdish leader, Mulla Mustafa, to Washington, and remained there for 30 years as both a highly regarded neurosurgeon and a lobbyist for the Kurdish cause. He recalls giving evidence to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 1990 about Saddam Hussein’s genocide against Kurds. But the administration of the day, six weeks before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, asserted that Saddam was “a force for moderation”.

When I last saw Dr Karim two years ago, he was realistically sceptical and even contemptuous of the capacity of Baghdad to fight the growing threat from Isis and other jihadist groups. But he was also confident and enthusiastic about his achievement in developing Kirkuk city and the surrounding province.

These days, he looks worn down and is gloomy about the future. Kirkuk may be safe from Isis attack, but it is filled with signs of calamity. In the past year some 350,000 displaced people, almost all Sunni Arabs running for their lives, have swamped the city which previously had a population of 950,000.

And the money has run out. The violence has been accompanied by a collapse in the price of oil – which Kirkuk is now unable to export. Before Isis swept in, Kirkuk used to send 150,000 barrels a day of crude to the Baiji refinery north of Tikrit; but that complex has been at the centre of a battle for months. Now, in the heart of the great Kirkuk oilfields, shops are reduced to selling plastic containers filled with black market petrol.

“It has been terrible,” said Dr Karim. “It is not just a matter of expelling Daesh [the Arabic acronym for Isis] from Tikrit and Mosul. We are not receiving any funding from Baghdad – nothing for reconstruction or the IDPs (internally displaced persons) using our schools, water and electricity.”

Iraq’s central government is so detached from Kurdish-controlled Kirkuk that Baghdad officials in charge of these services no longer visit the city. Asked if Kirkuk could be described as running on “empty”, Dr Karim replied simply: “And on flat tyres.”

Is there any solution to the convulsive violence in a country as divided as Iraq is, both by ethnicity and by religion? Dr Karim says that the replacement of Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister – notorious for his confrontational policies towards Sunnis and Kurds – with Haider al-Abadi last year had made only a superficial difference. “Abadi may have more support internationally, but on Shia-Sunni issues and Kurdish-Baghdad issues nothing much has changed,” he said.

In his view, the only solution is to divide Iraq into regions, with geographic power sharing, granting separate Sunni and Shia regions the same autonomy already enjoyed by the Kurds. It seems a long shot, but Dr Karim is conscious that no single Iraqi community has the strength in the long term to dominate the others by force. “You must resolve things politically,” he said. “You can’t resolve them militarily by just killing people.”

He is scornful of US-backed plans to raise yet more security forces, such as a new National Guard, that would be more inclusive of Sunni Arabs “Soon we are going to have 1.5 million people under arms which will impose a tremendous strain on the economy,” he said.

Since the breakdown in Baghdad’s control, Iraq is already effectively divided into regions which not only behave like independent statelets, but like independent statelets at war. Iraq’s Sunnis – a fifth of its population – have no leadership other than Isis, which Dr Karim says has absorbed Saddam’s old Baathist leaders.

Sunni members of the Baghdad government have no popular support, he says. They are the same old faces playing musical chairs as they vie for jobs. “Among the Sunni, there is a sense that whoever cooperates with the government in Baghdad automatically ceases to represent them,” he said.

As for Isis, he sees it as strong, not necessarily in numbers but in the faith of its fighters, as well as in their training. Isis leaders successfully conscript recruits where they are in control: their fighters who died after killing two senior Peshmerga officers in recent fighting near Kirkuk appeared to be locally recruited Iraqis. “When you look at the corpses of their dead you can see they are very young – in their late teens or early twenties,” he said. “They suffer huge losses, but they don’t seem to care.”

No single Iraqi community has ever succeeded in permanently forcing its rule on the other two. Saddam failed against the Kurds before he was ousted in 2003 and the Shia have failed against the Sunni since then.

Dr Karim’s vision of Iraq divided into regions may be inevitable, but those regions may well be at war with each other, not at peace.

http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/war-with-isis-iraqs-government-fights-to-win-back-tikrit-from-militants-but-then-what/

 
Salaam

Another update

‘Islamic State’ as a Western Phenomenon?

No matter how one attempts to wrangle with the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (IS) rise in Iraq and Syria, desperately seeking any political or other context that would validate the movement as an explainable historical circumstance, things refuse to add up.

Not only is IS to a degree an alien movement in the larger body politic of the Middle East, it also seems to be a partly western phenomenon, a hideous offspring resulting from western neocolonial adventures in the region, coupled with alienation and demonization of Muslim communities in western societies.

By “western phenomenon,” I refrain from suggesting that IS is largely a creation of western intelligence as many conspiracy theories have persistently advocated. Of course, one is justified to raise questions regarding funds, armaments, black market oil trade, and the ease through which thousands of western and Arab fighters managed to reach Syria and Iraq in recent years. The crimes carried out by the Assad regime, his army and allies during the four-year long Syria civil war, and the unquenchable appetite to orchestrate a regime change in Damascus as a paramount priority made nourishing the anti-Assad forces with wannabe ‘jihadists’ justified, if not encouraged.

The latest announcement by Turkey’s foreign minister Meylut Cavusoglu of the arrest of a spy “working for the intelligence service of a country participating in the coalition against ISIS” – presumably Canada – allegedly for helping three young British girls join IS, was revealing. The accusation feeds into a growing discourse that locates IS within a western, not Middle Eastern discourse.

Still, it is not the conspiracy per se that I find intriguing, if not puzzling, but the ongoing, albeit indirect conversation between IS and the West, involving French, British and Australian so-called “Jihadists,” their sympathizers and supporters on one hand, and various western governments, intelligence services, rightwing media pundits, etc on the other.

Much of the discourse – once upon a time located within a narrative consumed by the “Arab Spring,” sectarian divisions and counter revolutions – has now been transferred into another sphere that seems of little relevance to the Middle East. Regardless of where one stands on how Mohammad Emwazi morphed into a “Jihadi John,” the conversation is oddly largely removed from its geopolitical context. In this instance, it is an essentially British issue concerning alienation, racism, economic and cultural marginalization, perhaps as much as the issue of the “born, raised and radicalized” attackers of Charlie Hebdo is principally a French question, pertaining to the same socioeconomic fault lines.

The conventional analysis on the rise of IS no longer suffices. Tracing the movement to Oct 2006 when the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), uniting various groups including al-Qaeda was established, simply suggests a starting point to the discussion, whose roots go back to the dismantling of the Iraqi state and army by the US military occupation authority. Just the idea that the Arab republic of Iraq was lead from 11 May, 2003 until 28 June, 2004 by a Lewis Paul Bremer III, is enough to delineate the unredeemable rupture in the country’s identity. Bremer and US military chiefs’ manipulation of Iraq’s sectarian vulnerabilities, in addition to the massive security vacuum created by sending an entire army home, ushered in the rise of numerous groups, some homegrown resistance movements, and other alien bodies who sought in Iraq a refugee, or a rally cry.

Also conveniently missing in the rise of “jihadism” context is the staggering brutality of Shia-dominated governments in Baghdad and militias throughout Iraq, with full backing by the US and Iran. If the US war (1990-1), blockade (1991-2003), invasion (2003) and subsequent occupation of Iraq were not enough to radicalize a whole generation, then brutality, marginalization and constant targeting of Iraqi Sunnis in post-invasion Iraq have certainly done the job.

The conventional media narrative on IS focuses mostly on the politicking, division and unity that happened between various groups, but ignores the reasons behind the existence of these groups in the first place.

The Syria civil war was another opportunity at expansion sought successfully by ISI, whose capital until then was Baquba, Iraq. ISI was headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a key player in the establishment of Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra Front). The highly cited breakup between al-Baghdadi and al-Nusra leader Mohammed al-Golani is referenced as the final stage of IS’s brutal rise to power and ISI becoming ISIL or ISIS, before settling finally at the current designation of simply “Islamic State,” or IS.

Following the division, “some estimates suggest that about 65% of Jabhat al-Nusra elements quickly declared their allegiance to ISIS. Most of those were non-Syrian jihadists,” reported Lebanon’s al-Safir.

Militants’ politicking aside, such massively destructive and highly organized occurrences are not born in a vacuum and don’t operate independently from many existing platforms that help spawn, arm, fund and sustain them. For example, IS’ access to oil refineries says nothing about its access to wealth. To obtain funds from existing economic modes, IS needed to tap into a complex economic apparatus that would involve other countries, regional and international markets. In other words, IS exists because there are those who are invested in their existence, and the highly touted anti-IS coalition has evidently done little to confront this reality.

Particularly interesting is the rapidly changing focal point of the debate, from that pertaining to Syria and Iraq, to a western-centric discussion about western-styled jihadists that seem removed from the Middle East region and its political conflicts and priorities.

In a letter signed by over a hundred Muslim scholars that was published last September, the theologians and clergymen from around the Muslim word rightly disowned IS and its bloodthirsty ambitions as un-Islamic. Indeed, IS’ war tactics, are the reverse of the rules of war in Islam, and have been a God-send to those who made successful careers by simply bashing Islam, and advocating foreign policies that are predicated on an irrational fear of Muslims. But particularly interesting was the Arabic version of the letter’s emphasis on IS’s lack of command over the Arabic language, efficiency which is a requirement for making legal Islamic rulings and fatwas.

The letter confronts the intellectual arrogance of IS, which is based mostly on a misguided knowledge of Islam that is rarely spawned in the region itself. But that intellectual arrogance that has led to the murders of many innocent people, and other hideous crimes such as the legalization of slavery – to the satisfaction of the numerous Islamophobes dotting western intellectual landscapes – is largely situated in a different cultural and political context outside of the Middle East.

In post-September 11 attacks, a debate concerning Islam has been raging, partly because the attacks were blamed on Muslims, thus allowing politicians to create distractions, and reduce the discussion into one concerning religion and a purported “clash of civilizations.” Despite various assurances by western leaders that the US-led wars in Muslim countries is not a war on Islam, Islam remains the crux of the intellectual discourse that has adjoined the military “crusade” declared by George W. Bush, starting with the first bomb dropped on Afghanistan in 2001.

That discourse is too involved for a transitory mention, for it is an essential one to the IS story. It is one that has involved various schools of thought, including a breed of Muslim “liberals,” used conveniently to juxtapose them with an “extremist” bunch. Yet between the apologists and the so-called Jihadists, a genuine, Muslim-led discussion about Islam by non-coopted Muslim scholars remains missing.

The intellectual vacuum is more dangerous than it may seem. There is no question that while the battle is raging on in the Middle East region, the discourse itself is growingly being manipulated and is becoming a western one. This is why IS is speaking English, for its language complete with authentic western accents, methods, messages and even the orange hostage jumpsuits, is centered in some other sociopolitical and cultural context.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/islamic-state-as-a-western-phenomenon/
 
Salaam

Another viewpoint

How Saddam Hussein's former military officers and spies are controlling Isis

When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join Isis, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.

Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an "Islamic State" meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organisation more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

They have brought to the organisation the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading.

In Syria, local “emirs” are typically shadowed by a deputy who is Iraqi and makes the real decisions, said Abu Hamza, who fled to Turkey last summer after growing disillusioned with the group. He uses a pseudonym because he fears for his safety.

“All the decision makers are Iraqi, and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and the battle plans,” he said. “But the Iraqis themselves don’t fight. They put the foreign fighters on the front lines.”

The public profile of the foreign jihadists frequently obscures the Islamic State’s roots in the bloody recent history of Iraq, its brutal excesses as much a symptom as a cause of the country’s woes.

The raw cruelty of Hussein’s Baathist regime, the disbandment of the Iraqi army after the US-led invasion in 2003, the subsequent insurgency and the marginalization of Sunni Iraqis by the Shia-dominated government all are intertwined with the Islamic State’s ascent, said Hassan Hassan, a Dubai-based analyst and co-author of the book Isis: Inside the Army of Terror.

“A lot of people think of the Islamic State as a terrorist group, and it’s not useful,” Hassan said. “It is a terrorist group, but it is more than that. It is a homegrown Iraqi insurgency, and it is organic to Iraq.”

The de-Baathification law promulgated by L.* Paul Bremer, Iraq’s American ruler in 2003, has long been identified as one of the contributors to the original insurgency. At a stroke, 400,000 members of the defeated Iraqi army were barred from government employment, denied pensions — and also allowed to keep their guns.

The US military failed in the early years to recognise the role the disbanded Baathist officers would eventually come to play in the extremist group, eclipsing the foreign fighters whom American officials preferred to blame, said Colonel Joel Rayburn, a senior fellow at the National Defense University who served as an adviser to top generals in Iraq and describes the links between Baathists and the Islamic State in his book, Iraq After America.

The US military always knew that the former Baathist officers had joined other insurgent groups and were giving tactical support to the Al Qaeda in Iraq affiliate, the precursor to the Islamic State, he said. But American officials didn't anticipate that they would become not only adjuncts to al-Qaeda, but core members of the jihadist group.

“We might have been able to come up with ways to head off the fusion, the completion of the Iraqisation process,” he said. The former officers were probably not reconcilable, “but it was the labeling of them as irrelevant that was the mistake.”

Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph, the former officers became more than relevant. They were instrumental in the group’s rebirth from the defeats inflicted on insurgents by the US military, which is now back in Iraq bombing many of the same men it had already fought twice before.

At first glance, the secularist dogma of Hussein’s tyrannical Baath Party seems at odds with the Islamic State’s harsh interpretation of the Islamic laws it purports to uphold.

But the two creeds broadly overlap in several regards, especially their reliance on fear to secure the submission of the people under the group’s rule. Two decades ago, the elaborate and cruel forms of torture perpetrated by Hussein dominated the discourse about Iraq, much as the Islamic State’s harsh punishments do today.

Like the Islamic State, Hussein’s Baath Party also regarded itself as a transnational movement, forming branches in countries across the Middle East and running training camps for foreign volunteers from across the Arab world.

By the time US troops invaded in 2003, Hussein had begun to tilt toward a more religious approach to governance, making the transition from Baathist to Islamist ideology less improbable for some of the disenfranchised Iraqi officers, said Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor who is researching the ties at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

With the launch of the Iraqi dictator’s Faith Campaign in 1994, strict Islamic precepts were introduced. The words “God is Great” were inscribed on the Iraqi flag. Amputations were decreed for theft. Former Baathist officers recall friends who suddenly stopped drinking, started praying and embraced the deeply conservative form of Islam known as Salafism in the years preceding the US invasion.

In the last two years of Hussein’s rule, a campaign of beheadings, mainly targeting women suspected of prostitution and carried out by his elite Fedayeen unit, killed more than 200 people, human rights groups reported at the time.

The brutality deployed by the Islamic State today recalls the bloodthirstiness of some of those Fedayeen, said Hassan. Promotional videos from the Hussein era include scenes resembling those broadcast today by the Islamic State, showing the Fedayeen training, marching in black masks, practicing the art of decapitation and in one instance eating a live dog.

Some of those Baathists became early recruits to the al-Qaeda affiliate established by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Palestinian Jordanian fighter who is regarded as the progenitor of the current Islamic State, said Hisham al Hashemi, an Iraqi analyst who advises the Iraqi government and has relatives who served in the Iraqi military under Hussein. Other Iraqis were radicalised at Camp Bucca, the American prison in southern Iraq where thousands of ordinary citizens were detained and intermingled with jihadists.

Zarqawi kept the former Baathists at a distance, because he distrusted their secular outlook, according to Hashim, the professor.

It was under the watch of the current Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that the recruitment of former Baathist officers became a deliberate strategy, according to analysts and former officers.

Tasked with rebuilding the greatly weakened insurgent organization after 2010, Baghdadi embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the former officers, drawing on the vast pool of men who had either remained unemployed or had joined other, less extremist insurgent groups.

Some of them had fought against al-Qaeda after changing sides and aligning with the American-backed Awakening movement during the surge of troops in 2007. When US troops withdrew and the Iraqi government abandoned the Awakening fighters, the Islamic State was the only surviving option for those who felt betrayed and wanted to change sides again, said Brian Fishman, who researched the group in Iraq for West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center and is now a fellow with the New America Foundation.

Baghdadi’s effort was further aided by a new round of de-Baathification launched after US troops left in 2011 by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who set about firing even those officers who had been rehabilitated by the American military.

Among them was Brigadier General Hassan Dulaimi, a former intelligence officer in the old Iraqi army who was recruited back into service by US troops in 2006, as a police commander in Ramadi, the capital of the long restive province of Anbar.

Within months of the American departure, he was dismissed, he said, losing his salary and his pension, along with 124 other officers who had served alongside the Americans.

“The crisis of Isis didn't happen by chance,” Dulaimi said in an interview in Baghdad, using an acronym for the Islamic State. “It was the result of an accumulation of problems created by the Americans and the [Iraqi] government.”

He cited the case of a close friend, a former intelligence officer in Baghdad who was fired in 2003 and struggled for many years to make a living. He now serves as the Islamic State’s wali, or leader, in the Anbar town of Hit, Dulaimi said.

“I last saw him in 2009. He complained that he was very poor. He is an old friend, so I gave him some money,” he recalled. “He was fixable. If someone had given him a job and a salary, he wouldn't have joined the Islamic State.

“There are hundreds, thousands like him,” he added. “The people in charge of military operations in the Islamic State were the best officers in the former Iraqi army, and that is why the Islamic State beats us in intelligence and on the battlefield.”

The Islamic State’s seizure of territory was also smoothed by the Maliki government’s broader persecution of the Sunni minority, which intensified after US troops withdrew and left many ordinary Sunnis willing to welcome the extremists as an alternative to the often brutal Iraqi security forces.

But it was the influx of Baathist officers into the ranks of the Islamic State itself that propelled its fresh military victories, said Hashem. By 2013, Baghdadi had surrounded himself with former officers, who oversaw the Islamic State’s expansion in Syria and drove the offensives in Iraq.

Some of Baghdadi’s closest aides, including Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, his deputy in Iraq, and Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, one of his top military commanders in Syria, both of them former Iraqi officers, have since reportedly been killed — though Dulaimi suspects that many feign their own deaths in order to evade detection, making its current leadership difficult to discern.

Any gaps however are filled by former officers, sustaining the Iraqi influence at the group’s core, even as its ranks are swelled by arriving foreigners, said Hassan.

Fearing infiltration and spies, the leadership insulates itself from the foreign fighters and the regular Syrian and Iraqi fighters through elaborate networks of intermediaries frequently drawn from the old Iraqi intelligence agencies, he said.

“They introduced the Baathist mind-set of secrecy as well as its skills,” he said.

The masked man who ordered the detention of Abu Hamza was one of a group of feared security officers who circulate within the Islamic State, monitoring its members for signs of dissent, the Syrian recalled.

“They are the eyes and ears of Daesh’s security, and they are very powerful,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

Abu Hamza was released from jail after agreeing to fall into line with the other commanders, he said. But the experience contributed to his disillusionment with the group.

The foreign fighters he served alongside were “good Muslims,” he said. But he is less sure about the Iraqi leaders.

“They pray and they fast and you can’t be an emir without praying, but inside I don’t think they believe it much,” he said. “The Baathists are using Daesh. They don’t care about Baathism or even Saddam.

“They just want power. They are used to being in power, and they want it back.”

Whether the former Baathists adhere to the Islamic State’s ideology is a matter of debate. Hashim suspects many of them do not.

“One could still argue that it’s a tactical alliance,” he said. “A lot of these Baathists are not interested in ISIS running Iraq. They want to run Iraq. A lot of them view the jihadists with this Leninist mind-set that they’re useful idiots who we can use to rise to power.”

Rayburn questions whether even some of the foreign volunteers realise the extent to which they are being drawn into Iraq’s morass. Some of the fiercest battles being waged today in Iraq are for control of communities and neighborhoods that have been hotly contested among Iraqis for years, before the extremists appeared.

“You have fighters coming from across the globe to fight these local political battles that the global jihad can’t possibly have a stake in.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/how-saddam-husseins-former-military-officers-and-spies-are-controlling-isis-10156610.html
 
Salaam

Another update

Isis seizes Ramadi: After Iraq’s worst defeat in the war with the Islamic militants, battle is on to defend the road to Baghdad

Shia militiamen will now attempt to block the road to Baghdad after Isis fighters defeated elite units of the Iraqi armed forces and captured the city of Ramadi, 70 miles west of the capital.

The fall of Ramadi is the worst military disaster suffered by the Iraqi government since it lost the north of Iraq to an Isis offensive almost a year ago. One local councillor in Ramadi described the situation as “total collapse”.

Burnt bodies litter the streets and there are reports of massacres of policemen and tribesmen opposed to the self-proclaimed “Islamic State”.

Armoured vehicles belonging to the Iraqi army’s so-called “Golden Division”, considered its best unit, could be seen streaming out of Ramadi in a retreat that looked, at times, as if it had turned into a rout. Heavy equipment, including armoured Humvees and artillery, was abandoned.

Some 500 soldiers and civilians have been killed in fighting in Ramadi over the past few days as Isis closed in on the remaining government outposts, suicide bombers destroying fortifications by ramming them with vehicles packed with explosives.

Around 25,000 people who lived in Ramadi have fled, though they have had difficulty getting past army and militia checkpoints in Baghdad where displaced Sunni are suspected of being Isis sympathisers. Omar, a journalist from Ramadi, told The Independent that Isis fighters regard the majority of people in Ramadi as hostile to them and were telling them: “Get out! We don’t need you!”

He blamed the fall of his city on the failure of Baghdad to send military aid. “For a year-and-a-half we have been calling for help from Baghdad,” he said.

The fall of Ramadi may turn out to be a decisive event, changing the political and military landscape of Iraq and Syria. In some respects, it is a worst defeat for the Iraqi government than the capture of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in a surprise Isis attack last year.

The Isis pressure on Ramadi has been ongoing since April and a further assault was fully expected. Moreover, the garrison of the city consisted of some of the best troops in the Iraqi army and they were supported by US air strikes.

US generals have been downplaying the extent of the calamity, but the US policy of rebuilding the Iraqi army and aiding it with US air power is in ruins.

The Baghdad government now has little choice but to deploy the Hashd Shaabi, the Shia paramilitaries which the US sees as being under Iranian influence and has not wanted to see in the frontline fighting in Sunni areas like Ramadi, the capital of the giant Anbar province.

The latest victory of Isis, which had been portrayed inside and outside Iraq as having lost momentum since a run of victories between June and October last year, will strengthen its appeal to Sunni people as a winner.

It is already causing dismay among the opponents of the Sunni jihadists who had hoped that the military situation had stabilised and Isis was on the retreat.

Isis lost Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein, earlier this year and failed to take the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani in a 134-day siege despite suffering heavy losses.

Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to President Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, said he was concerned at what the fall of Ramadi meant for the Kurdish region and the rest of Iraq. He was particularly worried that Isis would follow up its latest victory by attacks on the vast Iraqi army base at al-Assad, which is full of weapons, as well as the Haditha Dam that controls the water level of the Euphrates.

Isis has been fighting for Ramadi since early 2014 when it took over much of Anbar province, including the city of Fallujah. Five Iraqi army divisions were unable regain the province, but government forces still held on to the central administrative complex in Ramadi. After a carefully planned assault that began on Thursday, the last pockets of government resistance were eliminated on Sunday with an attack on the Malaab district of south Ramadi.

Four suicide bombers killed at least 10 police and wounded 15, including Colonel Muthana al-Jabri, the chief of the Malaab police station. Later in the day, three suicide bombers drove cars packed with explosives into the gate of the Anbar Operation Command, the military headquarters for Anbar province, killing a further five soldiers and wounding 12.

A police officer who was stationed at the headquarters said retreating troops left behind about 30 army vehicles and weapons that included artillery and assault rifles. The best Iraqi military units such as the Golden Division and Swat forces number perhaps 5,000 men and have been rushed from crisis point to crisis point over the past year and are reported to be suffering from desertions.

Iran has offered to aid the Baghdad government in its hour of need. A senior Iranian official said his country would provide any help necessary.

The US has conducted 19 air strikes in the vicinity of Ramadi in the last 72 hours. But the most crucial development could be comments from Ali al-Sarai, a spokesman for the Shia militia, Hashid Shaabi.

He told Reuters in Baghdad that “the Hashid has received the order to march forward, they will definitely take part. They were waiting for this order and now they have it”. However, it is doubtful if the Hashid have the strength to recapture Ramadi.

Among senior Shia leaders in Baghdad there is a growing feeling that they have no choice but to look to Shia militias for their salvation, even if this angers the Americans and alienates the Sunnis.

One former minister said: “I think there is growing pressure to throw away the straitjacket that the US has imposed on the government’s relationship with the Hashid. It is pretty clear that they are the only fighting force that can confront Isis.”

The US has said that Iranian-backed militias will be denied air support and intelligence.

After a series of setbacks, success at Ramadi will be welcome to Isis because it has portrayed its victories as proof of divine support.

It is in triumphant mood, saying that in Ramadi it has seized tanks and killed “dozens of apostates”, while other police and soldiers are being urged via loudspeaker to throw away their weapons if they want to be shown mercy.

The defeat at Ramadi is likely to prove an important staging post in the break-up of Iraq because the Shia majority may decide they are getting very little from the Kurds or the anti-Isis Sunni politicians.

The former minister said that there is a perception among Shia at all levels that the Kurds should go their own way, but in that case should leave the central government.

The Sunni leaders should “stand up and be counted” as active supporters of the government or be seen as covert enemies and supporters of Isis. Many Shia feel that the Sunni in the government have been having it both ways as theoretical opponents of Isis, but without giving real backing to the government and hampering its efforts to defend itself.

Three key battles in the war with Isis

Mosul

Isis seized Iraq’s second city, Mosul, in June last year. The city of 1.4 million people, garrisoned by a large Iraqi security force, was captured with as few as 1,300 jihadists. A joint Iraqi-Kurdish military force of up to 25,000 fighters was reportedly being prepared to retake the Iraqi city this month before the defeat at Ramadi.

Kobani

Kurdish fighters drove Isis militants out of Kobani, in Syria near Turkey’s border, in January, ending a four-month fight for the town. Kobani was seen as a major test of the US-led coalition’s strategy to combat Isis in Syria with air strikes. The fighting forced thousands to flee across the border.

Tikrit

In late March, aided by Shia militia and US air strikes, Iraqi security forces retook Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit after it fell to Isis last year. Tikrit, 90 miles north of Baghdad, was captured by Isis in June as they swept south from Mosul.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-seizes-ramadi-after-iraqs-worst-defeat-in-the-war-with-the-islamic-militants-battle-now-is-to-defend-the-road-to-baghdad-10259457.html
 
Salaam

Isis seizes Ramadi: Iraqi government deploys Shia militiamen to assist in counter-offensive to retake city from jihadists

Shia militiamen and Iraqi government forces are preparing to launch a counter-offensive to recapture Ramadi as Isis fighters tighten their control of the city after seizing it in a three-day battle.

The loss of Ramadi has discredited the Baghdad government and US policy of relying on the regular army backed by US air strikes to hold back and ultimately defeat Isis.

The first contingents of Shia paramilitaries from the al-Hashd al-Shaabi (“Popular Mobilisation”) are assembling at Habbaniyah military base 20 miles east of Ramadi. In total the paramilitaries are reported to number between 100,000 and 120,000 men, though only a small number of these are in Anbar province – of which Ramadi is the capital – while the regular army has only a maximum of five brigades or 15,000 soldiers who are effective in combat.

Several of its best units are exhausted or suffered heavy losses in fighting over the last 18 months with many desertions. An Iraqi government statement said that “severe punishment will be done on those who failed to carry out their duties during the Ramadi battle”. Other units are scattered and 28 soldiers were rescued by government helicopters, the men hugging and kissing each other afterwards in their joy at having survived and in the knowledge that Isis seldom takes prisoners.

Left with no option but to deploy the militiamen, the government and the US would like a swift counter-attack to retake Ramadi. But their first priority may be to defend Baghdad and cities like Samara and Kerbala. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government’s notoriously corrupt and incompetent military administration will struggle to feed and supply with ammunition a large number of men in the front line. On the other hand, it will prove difficult for Isis to advance further in the face of sustained American air attack.

Isis has moved swiftly to secure control and win popularity among the minority of people who have not fled Ramadi by bulldozing concrete blast walls or using cranes to remove them and other fortifications erected by the Iraqi army. These were unpopular because they made it difficult to move around the city.

Isis also released some 70 men and 31 women from Ramadi prison who had been shot in the feet to prevent them escaping by their jailers before they fled. Sunni Arabs in the city had long complained that local police arrested people arbitrarily, tortured them and would only release them after payment of a bribe. Using loudspeakers, Isis told relatives to come to the main mosque to pick up the prisoners.

The militant jihadis have raised their black flag over all public buildings and promised that food, doctors and medicine will be available. But they have also reportedly killed hundreds of members of the local security forces and tribesmen who fought against them.

They have promised to introduce sharia and are already enforcing their extreme conservative social mores. Jasim Mohammed, 49, who owns a women’s clothing shop, told Reuters that an Isis member had told him he must now sell only traditional Islamic garments. “I had to remove the mannequins and replace them with other means of displaying the clothes,” he said. “He told me that I shouldn’t sell underwear because it’s forbidden.”

Even so, the majority of people in Ramadi, which once had a population of 600,000, are fleeing or fled months ago when the struggle for the city started early in 2014. But they are finding it difficult to secure a safe refuge because the security forces in Baghdad 70 miles to the west suspect refugees of being secret members of Isis. They are kept waiting in cars or on foot in daytime temperatures expected to reach 44C. Four people are reported to have died of heat stroke.

The Isis offensives of 2014 and 2015, which either brought Sunnis under the control of the jihadi militants or displaced them from their homes, may turn out to be a long-term disaster for the six million Sunni Arabs of Iraq.

Annas, a journalist from Ramadi whose family has fled, told The Independent: “We Sunni in Iraq are going to end up being forced out of our homes like the Palestinians.” He said it was difficult for a Sunni like him to live in Baghdad which “had become a city of militias”.

There is fear among refugees that Ramadi and the highway linking it to Baghdad will soon be engulfed by fighting. The leaders of the Shia militias such as the Badr Organisation, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and the Hezbollah Brigades (different from the Lebanese movement of the same name) will be eager to show that they can succeed where the state security services failed.

Ever since the mass mobilisation of Shia, heeding the call of the immensely influential Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on 13 June last year after Isis took Iraq’s second city, Mosul, there has been rivalry between Shia militias and central government over control of security. Some, but not all, of the militias are under the influence of Iran.

The Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, has sought to bring the militiamen, who receive a monthly stipend of $750 (£484) from the government, under his authority. Backed by the US, he was seeking to build up the regular security services and had some success at Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein captured by Isis, which had first been attacked by the militias but which they were unable to take. It eventually fell to an assault backed by US air strikes, led by the regular army’s “Golden Division”, and on 1 April Mr Abadi visited Tikrit and claimed the victory as his own. But he then overplayed his hand, saying that government forces were going to reconquer Anbar and announcing grandly that “we turn to the west”.

In reality, it was Isis, which calls itself Islamic State, which took the initiative and opened its own offensive in Anbar that concluded with the capture of Ramadi and the ruin of Mr Abadi’s plans.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-seizes-ramadi-iraqi-government-deploys-shia-militiamen-to-assist-in-counteroffensive-to-retake-city-from-jihadists-10262055.html
 
Salaam

Another update

Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq

Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, says Seumas Milne.

THE WAR on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead withthe trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.

That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much. But it’s only the latest of a string of such cases. Less fortunate was a London cab driver Anis Sardar, who was given a life sentence a fortnight earlier for taking part in 2007 in resistance to the occupation of Iraq by US and British forces. Armed opposition to illegal invasion and occupation clearly doesn’t constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva convention.

But terrorism is now squarely in the eye of the beholder. And nowhere is that more so than in the Middle East, where today’s terrorists are tomorrow’s fighters against tyranny – and allies are enemies – often at the bewildering whim of a western policymaker’s conference call.

For the past year, US, British and other western forces have been back in Iraq, supposedly in the cause of destroying the hyper-sectarian terror group Islamic State (formerly known as al-Qaida in Iraq). This was after Isis overran huge chunks of Iraqi and Syrian territory and proclaimed a self-styled Islamic caliphate.

The campaign isn’t going well. Last month, Isis rolled into the Iraqi city of Ramadi, while on the other side of the now nonexistent border its forces conquered the Syrian town of Palmyra. Al-Qaida’s official franchise, the Nusra Front, has also been making gains in Syria.

Some Iraqis complain that the US sat on its hands while all this was going on. The Americans insist they are trying to avoid civilian casualties, and claim significant successes. Privately, officials say they don’t want to be seen hammering Sunni strongholds in a sectarian war and risk upsetting their Sunni allies in the Gulf.

A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.

Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”.

American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria

Which is pretty well exactly what happened two years later. The report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted and there are ambiguities in the language. But the implications are clear enough. A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.

That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. But there was no al-Qaida in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.

The calculus changed when Isis started beheading westerners and posting atrocities online, and the Gulf states are now backing other groups in the Syrian war, such as the Nusra Front. But this US and western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them, goes back at least to the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which fostered the original al-Qaida under CIA tutelage.

It was recalibrated during the occupation of Iraq, when US forces led by General Petraeus sponsored an El Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads to weaken the Iraqi resistance. And it was reprised in 2011 in the Nato-orchestrated war in Libya, where Isis last week took control of Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte.

In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule. American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against Isis in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen. However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly.

What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/now-the-truth-emerges-how-the-us-fuelled-the-rise-of-isis-in-syria-and-iraq
 
Salaam

Another update

Dude, where's my Humvee? Iraq losing US equipment to ISIS at staggering rate

You couldn't make it up: US weaponry is being sent into Iraq to destroy US weaponry previously sent into Iraq.

Iraqi security forces lost 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles when Islamic State overran the northern city of Mosul in June 2014, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday in an interview with Iraqiya state television.

Coupled with previous losses of American weapons, the conclusion is simple: The United States is effectively supplying Islamic State with tools of war the militant group cannot otherwise hope to acquire from its patrons.

In addition to the Humvees, Iraqi forces previously abandoned significant types and numbers of heavy weapons to Islamic State. For example, losses to Islamic State include at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, as well as small arms and ammunition, including 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems.

“We lost a lot of weapons,” Abadi admitted.

To help replenish Iraq’s motor pool, the U.S. State Department last year approved a sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees, along with their armor upgrades, machine guns and grenade launchers. The United States previously donated 250 Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carriers (MRAPs) to Iraq, plus unaccountable amounts of material left behind when American forces departed in 2011.

The United States is currently in the process of moving to Iraq 175 M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, 55,000 rounds of main tank-gun ammunition, $600 million in howitzers and trucks, $700 million worth of Hellfire missiles and 2,000 AT-4 rockets.

The Hellfires and AT-4′s, anti-tank weapons, are presumably going to be used to help destroy the American armor in the hands of Islamic State. The United States is also conducting air strikes to destroy weapons seized by Islamic State.

It’s a surreal state of affairs in which American weaponry is being sent into Iraq to destroy American weaponry previously sent into Iraq. If a new sequel to Catch-22 were to be written, this would be the plot line.

The United States also continues to spend money on training the Iraqi military. Some 3,000 American soldiers are currently in Iraq preparing Iraqi soldiers to perhaps someday fight Islamic State; many of the Americans are conducting the training on former military bases abandoned by the United States following Gulf War 2.0.

In addition, some $1.2 billion in training funds for Iraq were tucked into an omnibus spending bill that Congress passed earlier this year. This is in spite of the sad reality that from 2003 to 2011, the United States spent $25 billion training Iraqi security forces.

The return on these training investments? The Iraqi army had 30,000 soldiers in Mosul, who ran away in the face of about 1,000 Islamic State fighters. The same thing happened just a few weeks ago in Ramadi, where 10,000 Iraqi soldiers, collapsing faster than a cardboard box in the rain, fled ahead of only 400 Islamic State fighters. The Iraqis left behind more weapons.

In an interview with me a year ago, Chris Coyne, professor of economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, predicted this exact scenario well before the United States sent troops back into Iraq:

“The United States government provided significant amounts of military hardware to the Iraqi government with the intention that it would be used for good. However, during the Islamic State offensive, many of the Iraqis turned and ran, leaving behind the United States-supplied hardware. This weapons windfall may further alter the dynamics in Syria.

“Now the United States government wants to provide more military supplies to the Iraqi government to combat Islamic State. But I haven’t heard many people recognizing, let alone discussing, the potential negative unintended consequences of doing so. How do we know the weapons and supplies will be used as desired? Why should we have any confidence that supplying more military hardware to a country with a dysfunctional and ineffective government will lead to a good outcome either in Iraq or in the broader region?”

The impact of all these heavy weapons falling into Islamic State hands is significant for American foreign policy goals in the Middle East. A report prepared for the United Nations Security Council warns that Islamic State possesses sufficient reserves of small arms, ammunition and vehicles to wage its war in Syria and Iraq for two more years.

And that presumes the United States won’t be losing more tools of war to Islamic State, thanks to the Iraqi army.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/dude-where-s-my-humvee-iraq-losing-us-equipment-to-isis-at-staggering-rate
 
Salaam

Another comment piece

Even though we no longer have an Army worth the name, since David Cameron slashed the defence budget to pay for the scandal known as ‘Foreign Aid’, voices are being raised to suggest that we intervene again in Iraq.

This is clueless in the extreme. If we send soldiers there, RAF Brize Norton will soon be welcoming planes loaded with flag-wrapped coffins – and in the end we will leave, beaten, yet again. The rise of Islamic State is the direct result of two disastrous foreign policy mistakes, both so obviously doomed that even I could see it at the time.

The 2003 overthrow of Saddam and the 2011 Western-backed undermining of the Assad government in Syria were both based on the idea that if you get rid of a tyrant, something better will automatically follow.

This isn’t true. In fact both these adventures released forces we barely understand and cannot control. There is no sign that anyone in London or Washington has learned anything as a result.

Our pious horror at the intolerant and repressive behaviour of Islamic State is bitterly funny, given that it is really not that different from the policies of our close ally, Saudi Arabia.

You may remember that flags flew at half-mast in London recently to mark the death of the Saudi king, and that British Royalty and politicians are frequent honoured guests in the Saudi capital. I am not against our having good relations with Riyadh. It is a sound principle of wise foreign policy to deal with whatever government is firmly in control of the territory.

We recognise many horrible governments all over the world, and have learned to live happily with grisly Sinn Fein right next door. In which case we may soon have to consider dealing with Islamic State too. Don’t rule it out. It may be better than the alternative.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
 
Salaam

Another comment piece

The Dark Saudi-Israeli Plot to Tip the Scales in Syria

A quiet meeting this past March in Saudi Arabia, and a recent anonymous leak from the Israeli military, set the stage for what may be a new and wider war in the Middle East.

Gathering in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh were Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly crowned Saudi King Salman, and the organizer of the get-together, the emir of Qatar. The meeting was an opportunity for Turkey and Saudi Arabia to bury a hatchet over Ankara’s support — which Riyadh’s opposes — to the Muslim Brotherhood, and to agree to cooperate in overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

Taking Aim at Assad

The pact prioritized the defeat of the Damascus regime over the threat posed by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and aims to checkmate Iranian influence in the region. However, the Turks and the Saudis are not quite on the same page when it comes to Iran: Turkey sees future business opportunities when the sanctions against Tehran end, while Riyadh sees Iran as nothing but a major regional rival.

The Turkish-Saudi axis means that Turkish weapons, bomb making supplies, and intelligence — accompanied by lots of Saudi money — are openly flowing to extremist groups like the al-Qaeda associated Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham, both now united in the so-called “Army of Conquest.”

The new alliance has created a certain amount of friction with the United States, which would also like to overthrow Assad but for the time being is focused on attacking the Islamic State and on inking a nuclear agreement with Iran.

This could change, however, because the Obama administration is divided on how deeply it wants to get entangled in Syria. If Washington decides to supply anti-aircraft weapons to the Army of Conquest, it will mean the United States has thrown in its lot with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — and that the “war on terror” is taking a backseat to regime change in Syria.

Not that the Americans are overly concerned about aiding and abetting Islamic extremists. While the U.S. is bombing the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Obama administration is also training Syrians to overthrow Assad, which objectively puts them in the extremist camp vis-à-vis the Damascus regime. Washington is also aiding the Saudis’ war on the Houthis in Yemen. Yet the Houthis are the most effective Yemeni opponents of the Islamic State and the group called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, against which the United States is waging a drone war.

The Turkish-Saudi alliance seems to have already made a difference in the Syrian civil war. After some initial successes last year against divided opponents, the Syrian government has suffered some sharp defeats in the past few months and appears to be regrouping to defend its base of support in the coastal regions and the cities of Homs, Hama, and Damascus. While the Syrian government has lost over half of the country to the insurgents, it still controls up to 60 percent of the population.

Turkey has long been a major conduit for weapons, supplies, and fighters for the anti-Assad forces, and Saudi Arabia and most of its allies in the Gulf Coordination Council, representing the monarchies of the Middle East, have funneled money to the insurgents. But Saudi Arabia has always viewed the Muslim Brotherhood — which has a significant presence in Syria and in countries throughout the region — as a threat to its own monarchy.

The fact that Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party is an offshoot of the Brotherhood has caused friction with the Saudis. For instance, while Turkey denounced the military coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, Saudi Arabia essentially bankrolled the takeover and continues to bail Cairo out of economic trouble.

But all that was water under the bridge when it came to getting rid of Assad. The Turks and the Saudis have established a joint command center in the newly conquered Syrian province of Idlib and have begun pulling the kaleidoscope of Assad opponents into a cohesive force.

A War on Hezbollah?

Three years of civil war has whittled the Syrian Army from 250,000 in 2011 to around 125,000 today, but Damascus is bolstered by Lebanon’s Hezbollah fighters. The Lebanese Shiite organization that fought Israel to a draw in 2006 is among the Assad regime’s most competent forces.

Which is where the Israeli leak comes in.

The timing of the story — published on May 12 in The New York Times — was certainly odd, as was the prominence given a story based entirely on unnamed “senior Israeli officials.” If the source was obscured, the message was clear: “We will hit Hezbollah hard, while making every effort to limit civilian casualties as much as we can,” the official said. But “we do not intend to stand by helplessly in the face of rocket attacks.”

The essence of the article was that Hezbollah is using civilians as shields in southern Lebanon, and the Israelis intended to blast the group regardless of whether civilians are present or not.

This is hardly breaking news. The Israeli military made exactly the same claim in its 2008-09 “Cast Lead” attack on Gaza and again in last year’s “Protective Edge” assault on the same embattled strip. It is currently under investigation by the United Nations for possible war crimes involving the targeting of civilians.

Nor is it the first time Israel has said the same thing about Hezbollah in Lebanon. In his Salon article entitled “The ‘hiding among civilians’ myth,” Beirut-based writer and photographer Mitch Prothero found that “This claim [of hiding among civilians] is almost always false.” Indeed, says Prothero, Hezbollah fighters avoid mingling with civilians because they know “they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so many Palestinian militants have been.”

But why is the Israeli military talking about a war with Lebanon? The border is quiet. There have been a few incidents, but nothing major. Hezbollah has made it clear that it has no intention of starting a war, though it warns Tel Aviv that it’s quite capable of fighting one. The most likely answer is that the Israelis are coordinating their actions with Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Tel Aviv has essentially formed a de facto alliance with Riyadh to block a nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany. Israel is also supporting Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen and has an informal agreement with Riyadh and Ankara to back the anti-Assad forces in Syria.

Israel is taking wounded Nusra Front fighters across the southern Syrian border for medical treatment. It’s also bombed Syrian forces in the Golan Heights. In one incident, it killed several Hezbollah members and an Iranian general advising the Syrian government.

The Realm of Uncertainty

The Saudis have pushed the argument that Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are really about Iranian expansionism and the age-old clash between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Hezbollah is indeed a Shiite organization, and the majority of Iraqis are also members of the sect. Assad’s regime is closely associated with the Alawites, an offshoot of Shiism, and the Houthis in Yemen follow a variety of the sect as well.

However, the wars in the Middle East are about secular power, not divine authority — although sectarian division is a useful recruiting device. As for “Iranian aggression,” it was the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and supported by the United States, that started the modern round of Sunni-Shiite bloodletting when Iraq invaded Iran in 1981.

If the Israeli Army attacks southern Lebanon, Hezbollah will be forced to bring some of its troops home from Syria, thus weakening the Syrian Army at a time when it’s already hard pressed by newly united rebel forces. In short, it would be a two-front war that would tie down Hezbollah, smash up southern Lebanon, and lead to the possible collapse of the Assad regime.

As Karl von Clausewitz once noted, however, war is the realm of uncertainty. All that one can really determine is who fires the first shot.

That the Israelis can pulverize scores of villages in southern Lebanon and kill lots of Shiites, there is no question. They’ve done it before. But a ground invasion may be very expensive, and the idea that they could “defeat” Hezbollah is a pipe dream. Shiites make up 40 percent of Lebanon’s sectarian mélange and dominate the country’s south. Hezbollah has support among other communities as well, in part because it successfully resisted the 1982-2000 Israeli occupation and bloodied Tel Aviv in the 2006 invasion.

An Israeli attack on Hezbollah, however, would almost certainly re-ignite Lebanon’s civil war, while bolstering the power of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The Turks might think that al-Qaeda is no threat to them, but recent history should give them pause.

Creating something like the mujahedeen in Afghanistan and the anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya is not terribly difficult. Controlling them is altogether another matter.

“It Always Seems to Blow Back”

“Every power in the Middle East has tried to harness the power of the Islamists to their own end,” says Joshua Landis, director of Middle Eastern Studies at Oklahoma University. But “it always seems to blow back.”

The Afghan mujahedeen created the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the U.S. invasion of Iraq spawned the Islamic State, and Libya has collapsed into a safe haven for radical Islamist groups of all stripes. Erdogan may think the Justice and Development Party’s Islamic credentials will shield Turkey from a Syrian ricochet, but many of these groups consider Erdogan an apostate for playing democratic politics in secular institutions.

Indeed, up to 5,000 Turkish young people have volunteered to fight in Syria and Iraq. Eventually they will take the skills and ideology they learned on the battlefield back to Turkey, and Erdogan may come to regret his fixation with overthrowing Assad.

While it hard to imagine a Middle East more chaotic than it is today, if the Army of Conquest succeeds in overthrowing the Assad government, and Israel attacks Lebanon, “chaos” will be an understatement.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-dark-saudi-israeli-plot-to-tip-the-scales-in-syria/
 

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