some excellent comments there add to the Gary Brecher article, and one mentioned he had worked with Mark Ames on The eXile .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_eXile .. so to these to link ..
UPDATES: Iraq crisis: Isis planning to attack Britain, says Cameron - live
• Iraq asks US to conduct air strikes on Isis • David Cameron: Isis planning to attack Britain • Iran president Rouhani pledges Iran will protect Iraq's holy sites • Isis attacks Iraq's biggest oil refinery in Baiji with mortars [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103447155 ] • Four top generals sacked by Iraq PM over loss of Mosul • Baghdad residents stockpile food as fighting reaches Baquba
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21.50 General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave no direct reply when asked at a Congressional hearing whether Washington would agree to the request from Iraq for air strikes to support their bid to counter Sunni rebels.
Baghdad said it wanted US air assistance as the insurgents, led by fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), battled their way into the biggest oil refinery in Iraq and the president of neighbouring Iran raised the prospect of intervening in a sectarian war that threatens to sweep across Middle East frontiers.
"We have a request from the Iraqi government for air power,” Dempsey told a Senate hearing in Washington. Asked whether the United States should honour that request, he said: “It is in our national security interest to counter ISIL wherever we find them.”
"The most significant factor behind Iraq’s problems has been the inability of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and its Sunni neighbors to come to terms with a government in which the Shias, by virtue of their considerable majority in Iraq’s population, hold the leading role. This inability was displayed early on, when Iraq’s Sunnis refused to take part in Iraq’s first parliamentary elections, and resorted to insurgency almost immediately after the US invasion and fall of Saddam Hussein. All along, the goal of Iraqi Sunnis has been to prove that the Shias are not capable of governing Iraq. Indeed, Iraq’s Sunni deputy prime minister, Osama al Najafi, recently verbalized this view. The Sunnis see political leadership and governance to be their birthright and resent the Shia interlopers."
.. thinking of the GOP there are slight shades of the US Congress there .. slight shades ..
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this one is ginormous
Wahhabism vs. Wahhabism: Qatar Challenges Saudi Arabia .. the end bit ..
Conclusion
Qatar’s foreign policy and soft power strategy effectively puts it at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia. Whether the Saudi-Qatari rivalry will contribute to spark changes in the kingdom or reinforce monarchial autocracy in the region is likely to be as much decided in Qatar itself as by the political rivalry between the two elsewhere in the region. Saudi-backed Qatari conservatives have questioned the emir’s right to rule by decree, organized online boycotts of state-run companies, and led by the crown prince, forced Qatar University to replace English with Arabic as the main language of instruction.
Qatar’s embrace of the Brotherhood, positioning it at the cutting edge of change across the region in addition to its soft power diplomacy, offers opportunities for Saudi Arabia to counter what it perceives as a dangerous policy that the emirate has exploited in Egypt and Syria. Fault lines in Egypt have deepened with the toppling of President Morsi, weakened Qatar’s regional influence and made its Brotherhood allies in other Arab nations in the throes of change reluctant to assume sole government responsibility.Jordan’s Brotherhood-related Islamic Action Front (IAF) officially boycotted parliamentary elections in January 2013 because of alleged gerrymandering. Privately, the IAF, with an eye on Egypt, is believed to have shied away from getting too big a share of the pie for their taste. Mounting opposition to the Brotherhood’s ruling Tunisian affiliate, Ennahada, and the assassination in 2013 of two prominent opposition politician prompted the Islamists to negotiate their replacement by a government of technocrats.
Similarly, Qatar’s victory of the right to host the World Cup may have opened the Pandora’s Box of demographic change that could reverberate throughout the Gulf, a region populated by states whose nationals often constitute minorities in their own countries. Under increasing pressure from international trade unions which have the clout to make true on a threat to boycott the 2022 World Cup, the status of foreign nationals could become a monkey wrench.
Resolution of the dispute with the unions raises the specter of foreigners gaining greater rights and having a greater stake in countries that have sought to protect national identity and the rights of local nationals by ensuring that foreigners do not sprout roots. That effort, so far, goes as far as soccer clubs opting for near empty stadiums because there are not enough locals to fill them rather than offering the population at large something that even remotely could give them a sense of belonging.
As a result, Qatar’s foreign, sports and culture policy seems forward looking despite Saudi-backed conservative opposition at home and at first glance appears to put the tiny Gulf state in a category of its own. Yet, the challenge it poses to Saudi Arabia is increasingly proving to be a challenge to itself.
"Things were looking bleak for Sunni Islamists all over the Middle East…until the Spring of 2003, when a couple of guys named Bush and Cheney gave them new life by invading Iraq, crushing Saddam’s Sunni-dominated Iraqi state, and pushing millions of Iraqi Sunni into armed insurgency."
the end
"ISIS now controls most of Anbar as well as a huge chunk of eastern and central Syria. It’s a de facto Sunni state, straddling the Syria/Iraq border between Kurdish and Shia territory.
And that’s as far as it will go. ISIS has done well to take back its natural constituency, the Sunni center of Iraq. It will push against the Shia to the south, but they’ll fight much better on their own turf. And if it has any sense, it won’t even try to push against the Persh Merga. I used to see the Pesh Merga every day, and they ain’t nobody to mess with.
So out of all this chaos and blood comes something like a vindication of the laws of physics, as expressed in ethnic turf wars. But with one modification of those laws: Some things really don’t abhor a vacuum, especially transnational ethnic militias. They love a vacuum more than Alice did on the Brady Bunch."
.. some drones, i guess .. the QUDS will have to stay out of the way .. just heard the Iraqi army has regained control of the Baiji oil refinery, guess that would have been some of the Bushed Americans went to as their first mission in Iraq some 11 years ago .. hope the army has ..
"These baby militias popped up, prospered for a while, then vanished like Ethiopian restaurants. And out of the chaos, ISIS was ready to make its move, with a decade of guerrilla knowledge gained the hard way over the border in Iraq. ISI (soon to be ISIS) started well, grabbing the strategic town of ar-Raqqah in central Syria, upriver on the Euphrates from ISI’s home base in Anbar, over the border. ISI(S) now had a safe base of operations, a luxury it had never experienced before."
"ISIS’s Syrian forces were full of loudmouthed young Islamic pedants, all heavily armed, and all eager to tell the locals how to live. It didn’t go over very well. It wasn’t about “extremism” as much as “localism.” ISIS was eventually forced out of Aleppo in favor of Jabhat al Nusra and the Islamic Front—both every bit as extreme as ISIS, but with more local recruits who didn’t rub everybody the wrong way quite as much. Zawahiri chimed in from his hiding place in Pakistan to scold ISIS, saying in typically florid jihadi lingo something that amounted to “You’re gonna screw us up in Syria just like you and Zarqawi did in Iraq!” His verdict was that ISIS should move east to Iraq, and Jabhat al Nusra should be Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria."
By MATTHIEU AIKINSJULY 7, 2014
Credit Mitch Blunt
ALEPPO, Syria — As a rebel fighter shined his flashlight onto a clump of blankets and clothes scattered around the concrete basement floor, I wondered if this was where my friend Sultan had spent the last moments of his life. A goofy, gap-toothed 22-year-old who worked for a local fixer, he was part of a group of Syrian activists, journalists and rebel fighters who had been arrested by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria .. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda_in_mesopotamia/index.html?inline=nyt-org .. and taken to this makeshift prison in the basement of a former hospital.
The building had served as the Sunni extremist group’s headquarters in Aleppo, Syria .. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/syria/index.html?inline=nyt-geo ’s largest city, but now the pitch-dark corridors were deserted. By the stairs, we found a long cable of copper wires taped together. One of the rebels picked it up and mimicked a whipping gesture — former prisoners who were held here reported being tortured. Farther down was a room that served as a cafeteria, with signs in English attesting to the presence of foreign jihadists among ISIS’s ranks. “Fear Allah! Remember that he is watching you so please do not waste food and clean up after you have eaten,” read one. Another advised “brothers who want to receive their families from outside Syria” to coordinate with the “Mujahedeen Services Office.”
ISIS began as the Iraqi affiliate of Al Qaeda but split off at the beginning of this year over its ambitions to expand into Syria and establish itself as a new caliphate. After its stunning takeover of much of western Iraq last month, it now calls itself simply the Islamic State.
But ISIS is gone from Aleppo, having been forced out by local Syrian rebels in January. This military reversal, one of the group’s few, highlights the dilemma facing the West: Its best potential allies against ISIS are other Sunni Islamists.
The fighters who accompanied me during a weeklong visit to Aleppo in mid-June were members of the Islamic Front, a rebel coalition dominant in the city and much of northern Syria. The Islamic Front is a fierce and effective opponent of ISIS but also, in its Islamist platform and indirect connections with Al Qaeda, a far cry from the “appropriately vetted elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition” for whom the Obama administration recently requested $500 million in military training and funding.
ISIS’s abandoned headquarters in Aleppo are just across from another large building that serves as the base for Tawhid Brigade, one of the largest of the seven rebel groups that joined together in November to form the Islamic Front. ISIS had been present in opposition-held Aleppo since the beginning of 2013, but by the end of the year tensions with rebel groups had reached a crisis. Considering itself a sovereign state, ISIS was refusing to accept mediation for any dispute, and it had taken to kidnapping those it considered to be critics or enemies, including people who worked with foreign journalists, like Sultan.
On Jan. 7, ISIS carried out a surprise attack on Tawhid Brigade’s headquarters. It was held off. The next day, Tawhid Brigade forces from around the city counterattacked and surrounded the hospital. “We cut them off and prevented them from bringing any support,” said the commander who led the offensive and who goes by the nom de guerre of Abu Assad. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Around 3 a.m., the ISIS fighters trapped inside the hospital asked to be allowed to leave the city, and Abu Assad, not wanting further bloodshed, agreed. When he and his men searched the hospital at first light, they discovered that ISIS had massacred its captives. “We found a group of bodies every ten meters,” said Abu Assad. Most of them had been shot in the head while bound. “They were real revolutionaries, journalists, doctors. If we had known what ISIS had done, we wouldn’t have let them escape alive.”
Not long after the battle, half a globe away, I watched footage of its aftermath that rebels had recorded and uploaded to YouTube, and recognized Sultan among the corpses.
The battle against ISIS in Aleppo is part of a larger conflict that started at the beginning of this year, as rebel groups across the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo — including the powerful Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra — fought a pitched battle to expel ISIS. The face-off left the Islamic Front pre-eminent. It controls the key border crossing with Turkey at Azaz and, with its estimated 50,000 to 60,000 fighters, is thought to be the largest and most militarily potent rebel alliance in Syria. Continue reading the main story Recent Comments SW 56 minutes ago
We have no allies in Iraq or Syria, period. Nancy 1 hour ago
So, the point is to support wildly violent sectarian insurgents we think we can control and set them off killing wildly violent sectarian... amogin 4 hours ago
There are no Western version of "good guys" in this fight. Once Al Quida was on our side.l The saying about the enemy of my enemy is my...
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The Islamic Front is entirely Syrian in leadership, and its central goal is overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad — good credentials in the eyes of Western governments hoping to roll back ISIS without strengthening the Syrian regime. Many of the group’s most powerful members — including Tawhid Brigade and one of the largest factions fighting in the Damascus suburbs, Jaish al-Islam — are not particularly ideological, and were once allied with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.
But they are far from secular. The Islamic Front draws on support from pre-war Islamist resistance networks, including wealthy, religious donors across the Muslim world and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an exiled Islamist group. More problematic from a Western perspective, one of the coalition’s key members, Ahrar al-Sham, has links to Al Qaeda’s core leadership, and the Islamic Front as a whole closely coordinates operations with Jabhat al-Nusra.
The commanders I spoke to in Aleppo said the Islamic Front has not, as a result, directly received any military aid from Washington or other Western governments. But can the West meaningfully influence the military situation in Syria while continuing to eschew Islamist groups, now that they are dominant among the rebels? “The Free Syrian Army has been weak and divided,” said Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence official. “And so the Islamic Front is really the only game in town if you want to attack ISIS in Syria.”
Rebel commanders in Aleppo were dismissive of the supposedly “secular” Free Syrian Army groups linked to the government in exile, which the West has been backing. “They’re like NGOs. They know how to say what the donor wants to hear,” said Abu Bilal, Tawhid Brigade’s chief of operations. “In reality, they’re diesel smugglers who control a little of the border. They don’t do any serious fighting.”
If Washington and its partners want to push back against both Assad and ISIS at once, they will have to be less squeamish about picking allies in Syria. Otherwise, they may not find any left at all.
Matthieu Aikins is a magazine writer living in Kabul.
Newly unearthed documents shed light on the foundations of the terror group—and the crucial role Baathists played in organizing and directing a strategy for its future “caliphate.”
The infiltration in the winter of 2013 was insidious in the small rural towns circling Aleppo—Tel Rifat, al-Bab, and Marea. The men stood out when you bumped into them on the streets of the towns recently liberated from the forces of President Bashar al-Assad. They were more disciplined than local rebels; they dressed more neatly, their beards were trimmed. But they held themselves apart from the other rebels, and questions from Western reporters about who they were and what they were doing went unanswered.
In the immediate wake of the departure of government forces from the small northern Syrian towns and villages in the winter of 2013, there was considerable chaos. Each town struggled to establish some governance structure. There was scant command and control of the motley rebel militias who were now focused on securing districts that insurgents captured in Aleppo, and there was a lot of corruption and lawlessness, with aid and arms supplies pilfered. Disputes rose over the sharing of weapons and equipment seized from government barracks and bases.
The groundwork for the rise of ISIS was built in the confusion, with careful and meticulous intelligence and surveillance work—as now highlighted in the trove of documents, some handwritten, by one of Saddam Hussein’s former intelligence officers and accessed by Der Spiegel. The 31 pages of lists and schedules and charts drawn up by Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam’s air defense forces who went by the pseudonym Haji Bakr, reveal, says the magazine, the espionage effort behind the establishment of ISIS. The documents also demonstrate the crucial role played in its emergence by former members of Saddam’s military and spy agencies.
The papers, which were found in a house Bakr occupied in Tel Rifat before being killed in a firefight with rebels in January 2014, amount to an organizational blueprint. They detail plans for the establishment of the policing of the caliphate, the chains of command for internal security, and the surveillance priorities for laying the groundwork necessary for infiltration to be transformed into takeover. Bakr wanted his men as they fanned out across Syria to study the tribal power structures of each town and uncover the local leaders’ vices and weaknesses in case the information could be used to blackmail them or force them into subjugation.
That includes shaping parallel intelligence structures, so the spooks and enforcers in the totalitarian caliphate spy on each other to ensure loyalty. Across northern and eastern Syria and western Iraq, the militants of ISIS are able to govern thanks partly to Bakr’s groundwork and his drawing on expertise honed in Saddam’s Republic of Fear. Now the militants, with an iron fist and a sharp eye, purge opponents and brook no opposition, intolerant of any expressions of dissent or behavior diverging from their diktats, no matter how trivial or innocuous.
Outside of ISIS’s reliance on spies and assistance in administering cities under its control, there are other signs of Baathist influence in the group. The blitzkrieg assaults that captured key Iraqi cities last summer showed signs of experienced military planning hard to come by for terrorist and insurgent organizations more versed in ambushes and hit-and-run tactics.
Still, essential questions remain about the relationship between ISIS’s religious leaders and backroom powerbrokers like Bakr: Are there still distinct factions in ISIS’s leadership, with Baathist and religious factions coexisting? If so, who is in control, and does the weaker party understand its position? If these differences are no longer salient, how were they dissolved or by whom?
The influential position of ex-Baathists like Haji Bakr does not mean, ipso facto, that ISIS’s religious rhetoric is only a cynical ruse. Nor does it prove that Baathists are still secretly pulling the strings inside ISIS. Long before the group took its current form and declared a caliphate, it existed in various guises for more than a decade. Throughout those permutations, the religious, jihadist strain has been a constant. The surge of ex-Saddam officials entering ISIS or assisting it may have profoundly transformed the terrorist organization and given it the level of technical sophistication necessary to become a proto-state. But there’s no clear evidence yet that absorption of Baathists changed the fundamental ideology, as opposed to the tactical thinking, that has animated ISIS since its inception in 1999 under the name Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad.
Baathist expertise may provide some of the distinctive features separating ISIS from other jihadist groups. Yet another of ISIS’s qualities is perhaps most unique and less easily attributed to former Saddam officials: its populist appeal. There is something powerful enough in ISIS’s religious message and its approach to spreading that message that terrorist groups and individual supporters all over the world have pledged their loyalty to its self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The texts governing ISIS are not Baathist ones penned by thinkers like the Syrian intellectual Michel Aflaq, who amalgamated Arab nationalism, Arab socialism, and pan-Arabism. Bakr may have provided the blueprint for how to set up the security apparatus for the caliphate and how to police it, but the overall revolutionary strategy comes from jihadist thinkers and from apocalyptic texts like “A Call to a Global Islamic Resistance” by Abu Musab al Suri.
"The marrying of the intelligence and administrative expertise of Saddam’s nationalist Baathists like Bakr with the true-believing jihadists of al-Baghdadi has made ISIS what it is today."
Or the 2004 book The Management of Savagery by Islamist strategist Abu Bakr Naji. That text, posted on the Internet, outlines a populist strategy for jihadists to manipulate and manage religious and nationalist resentment—and to use harsh violence—in order to shape the circumstances allowing a caliphate to rise.
For the Baathists the battle is for Sunni power, a pushback on an American-engineered political settlement that left the Shia with political control in Iraq. For the true believers the fight in the Levant is an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. “The logic of ISIS is heavily influenced by its understanding of prophecy,” argue authors Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger in their new book on ISIS .. http://tinyurl.com/q4q5dgf . For the time being those programs are aligned.
Former Saddam military officers occupy many of the government positions in the caliphate, but a shadowy group of jihadists around al-Baghdadi appears to wield final authority.
The marrying of the intelligence and administrative expertise of Saddam’s nationalist Baathists like Bakr with the true-believing jihadists of al-Baghdadi has made ISIS what it is today—a formidable force that will be hard to dislodge. But that alliance between secularists and jihadists, along with the partnerships with local Sunni tribes the Baathists helped shape, holds the seeds for ISIS’s downfall, too. This isn’t a marriage of love but of cold, hard convenience.
And it isn’t a tension-free one. In recent weeks among the disparate groups of the jihadi-led Sunni Muslim insurgency, signs have increased of disputes and disagreements. Recent jihadi abductions of Iraqi Christians have prompted disapproval among some of ISIS’s Baathist allies, some of whom are Christians themselves. U.S. and Iraqi officials argue that as ISIS suffers military setbacks, inherent contradictions within the alliances will surface more sharply among Baathists, tribes, and jihadist true believers.
The possible death last week in Iraq of former Iraqi general and Saddam adviser Izzat Ibrahim al Douri .. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/17/he-served-saddam-he-served-isis-now-al-douri-may-be-dead.html .. has prompted some Iraqi officials to predict that the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order, Jaysh Rijal a?-?ariqa an-Naqshabandiya (JTRN), a powerful militia he commanded, may now fragment, with some fighters breaking with ISIS.
Yet ISIS has proved more durable than many imagined, despite the tensions and seemingly irreconcilable factions within the group. “After the liberation of Baghdad, the Islamic State will be finished,” an Iraqi ISIS supporter who allied with the group despite not sharing its religious convictions told The Daily Beast last July, less than a month after the capture of Mosul. He was confident then that the caliphate was only the means to an end: namely, restoring Sunni power in Iraq. Nearly a year later the caliphate endures.
Though war threatens to destroy the nascent state, it also provides a powerful force keeping ISIS together. As Shia militias appear to spearhead Iraq’s military campaign and some are accused of war crimes, the sectarian narrative and powerful Sunni chauvinism that led some Iraqis to support ISIS despite reservations about the caliphate’s religious program have been reinforced. War in Syria provided ISIS with the opportunity to expand and implement Haji Bakr’s security strategy. The ongoing war in Iraq conceals internal divisions by focusing efforts on an external enemy.
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