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The New Face of Jewish Terror

21 Viernes Ago 2015

Posted by Francisco Correa Villalobos in CRISIS EN CURSO

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El zionismo tuvo un origen afín a la ideología colonialista europea de fines del siglo XIX que no ha variado y que se resume en dos grandes conceptos: Israel es un baluarte de la civilización occidental ante la amenaza del Islam y la negación, primero, de la existencia de un pueblo palestino y, después, la necesidad de expulsarlo del territorio que reclama como donación de un dios. Golda Meir fue probablemente la última en sostener públicamente que no existía un pueblo palestino precisamente cuando crecía incontenible la OLP. Poco después, Itzhak Rabin pretendió, a costa de su vida,  tímida y muy preeliminarmente salvar la contradicción entre la aceptación de la existencia de un estado palestino y el pretendido papel de bastión civilizatorio de Israel. Desde entonces el país ha descendido a una ultraderecha en todos los niveles de la sociedad que confina a los palestinos a un régimen de separación o apartheid, de violencia, acoso, abuso, represión y discriminación permanentes para forzarlos a salir del país, al tiempo que inventa amenazas externas para desviar la atención mundial de las condiciones de los palestinos. Un ejemplo de la derechización de la población israelí a niveles que, por su influencia política e impunidad real, probablemente no se ven en ningún otro país del mundo, es la que se describe en este artículo y que, más que  constituir una amenaza para el gobierno de Netanyahu, presagia un escalón más en descenso al infierno.

 

The New Face of Jewish Terror

A growing radical fringe is taking aim at Palestinians — and the Israeli government.

  • BY SHIRA RUBIN
  • AUGUST 20, 2015

MITZPE KRAMIM, West Bank — Gilboa Marmerstein says that her life is a “daily struggle.” The 16-year-old is awaiting the day when her family will move out of their trailer, which lacks insulation, much less a connection to cable television, and build a permanent home. When I met Marmerstein recently in her living room, she wore jean shorts and a messy bun. In between discussing what it’s like to live at an outpost above the rolling hills of the Jordan Valley, she spent her time chasing her seven younger siblings. In some ways, she is an average Israeli teenager obsessed with her friends and her phone. But she spoke with gravity born of responsibility, both to family and to mission. Despite the struggle, she said, her life is also geula, salvation.

The 42 families of Mitzpe Kramim, which means “Lookout onto the Vineyards” in Hebrew, say that they wouldn’t give up the tranquil, family-oriented, and righteous lifestyle for anything, especially not a 2011 Israeli Supreme Court evacuation order that declared that the land on which they live is private Palestinian property. Marmerstein mocked the irrelevance of the court decision and said she believes that sooner or later, Jews from across Israel and the world will join her in Judea and Samaria — using the area’s biblical name.

The Israeli government backs most of the 500,000 Jews spread across roughly 100 settlements in the West Bank by providing them military protection and largely allowing them to continue construction without the necessary permits. But another estimated 100 unsanctioned hilltop outposts like Mitzpe Kramim have tested the state’s policy. Even though the Central Bureau of Statistics shows a surge of more than 200 percent in completed sanctioned housing construction in the first quarter of 2015 compared with the same period in 2014, Marmerstein and her neighbors feel betrayed by Israel’s government. Violent demonstrations have erupted in response to the occasional demolitions of illegal structures, neighborhoods, or entire outposts in the West Bank; in these demonstrations, settlers have hurled stones at police officers and soldiers, comparing them to the biblical conquerors who destroyed the sacred Jewish temples in ancient Jerusalem. They say the Israeli government is too shortsighted to recognize the community’s bravery in setting up camp on this patch of land on Israel’s last frontier.

“Israelis see us as house stealers, stone throwers, baby killers, but this is the most Israeli that you can be, really!”

“Israelis see us as house stealers, stone throwers, baby killers, but this is the most Israeli that you can be, really!” Marmerstein said.

In recent weeks, hard-line settlers like Marmerstein and her family have become a flashpoint in Israeli politics and society, leading to political condemnation — and backlash. Following the July 29 demolition of two buildings in the settlement of Beit El, a settlement just north of Ramallah, settler leaders presented the right-wing Jewish Home party, a member of the ruling coalition, with an ultimatum: Either pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approve further construction in the settlement or lose the settlers’ political support. In just a matter of hours, Netanyahu approved the construction of 300 homes in Beit El. But residents there and other hard-liners throughout the West Bank were unimpressed, claiming that the approval was part of a previous deal made in 2012 when the government evacuated another neighborhood in the settlement. “Anyway, we’re tired of these games,” said one Beit El resident. “We see that Bibi [Netanyahu] simply doesn’t have the faith needed to stand up for his ideals.”

Then things got really ugly. On July 31, unidentified attackers firebombed a home in the West Bank Palestinian village of Duma. An 18-month-old baby, Ali Dawabsheh, and his father, Saad, were killed. On the walls of the Dawabsheh family home, arsonists left graffiti that read, “Long Live the Messiah” and “Revenge!” No one has been apprehended for the attack, but Israeli law enforcement officials and politicians blamed “Jewish terrorists.” Netanyahu condemned the act as “heinous” and promised to bring the arsonists to justice. President Reuven Rivlin wrote on his Facebook page that “Flames have engulfed our country. Flames of violence, flames of hatred, flames of false, distorted and twisted beliefs.”

Most believe the attacks were carried out by the radical right. It could have been the “hilltop youth,” the mostly teenagers and young families who, to varying degrees, refuse the authority of the state and live strict Torah-based lifestyles on what they see as a Zionist frontier. Also suspects are “price taggers,” a related group that has vowed to exact a “price” in the form of attacks on Palestinian properties or people every time Israel works to curb Jewish expansion in the West Bank. While the various groups differ on strategy, they share a common desire to cleanse Israel of non-Jews. At the more radical outposts, only “Jewish labor” is permitted, on the notion that only Jews can imbue the vineyards, soil, and the walls of the homes with Jewish character and therefore prepare the land and the people for the arrival of the Jewish Messiah.

While only dozens of hilltop youth are estimated to exist in the depths of the Palestinian-ruled sections of the West Bank, Israeli security forces haveidentified around 100 extremists who they believe have been involved in attacks against Palestinians, both from the West Bank and from Israeli cities. These extremists are distinguished by their knit yarmulkes, long sidelocks, and straggly beards, a look fitting their Jewish-hippy counterculture based on an organic connection with the land of the West Bank rather than the “rotten” materialism of mainstream Israel.

Small communities like Mitzpe Kramim have become breeding grounds for the growing “hilltop youth” movement. Marmerstein told me she doesn’t condone violence like the attack in Duma, but she identifies with the frustration and motives behind fringe militant groups and insists that Jews need to do whatever is necessary to defend their God-given right to the land. “This is our home, of course,” she said. “And, besides, the Arabs have more than 18 countries. What are they doing here at all?”

“Jewish terror” is not new to Israel. In one of the most infamous incidents, the Irgun, a militant Zionist group, set off a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing 91 people. But, says Shlomo Fischer, a sociology professor and expert on Jewish extremism, the modern incarnation is younger and more religious, uniting an eclectic group of fringe outcasts around an identity of “romantic religious nationalism.”

The movement dates back to 1967, when Israel captured and occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in a six-day war that many saw as imbued with messianic promise. Today, the loosely organized movement appeals to many marginalized youth and yeshiva dropouts by offering an “authentic” countercultural experience, says Fischer, who compares the recruitment strategy and sense of identity to extremist Islamist groups like the Islamic State. “You feel like you are able to connect with some sort of purpose, some sort of ideology that you’d never heard of,” an anonymous former hilltop youth activist told Israel’s Channel 2. He said that hilltop activists recruit at information booths throughout Israeli cities and are usually able to attract teenagers as young as 14, some 80 or 90 percent of whom come from broken homes.

The groups also feed on what settlers say is a passionate and widespread disappointment with what is seen as a traitorous government. In 1993, the Israeli government signed the Oslo Accords, in which it officially committed to freezing settlement expansion. (Since then, settlements nonetheless have expanded drastically.) While some settlements, especially those closer to Israel’s recognized borders, are fully established and treated as part of Israel, outposts like Mitzpe Kramim are seen by the state as an obstacle to peace.

Since the collapse of the peace process in 2000, however, Israel has also been divided by a fierce debate over the future of the country’s identity, pitting the country’s status as a Jewish nation-state against its espoused principles of democracy and pluralism. Politicians on the right have increasingly framed events in religious terms, concluding that a solution relies on the state’s ability to elevate its “Jewish” qualities — such as West Bank settlement as a means of reclaiming a biblical promise — over its democratic qualities, such as granting full civil rights to the 1.7 million Palestinians who live within its borders. As the conflict has dragged on, hard-line pro-settler support for “Greater Israel” has gained currency to the extent that Jewish presence in the West Bank has been increasingly understood as critical in terms of both ideology and security. Today, Israel’s Knesset is as conservative and religiously oriented as it has ever been in the country’s history. Anti-Arab,anti-refugee, and homophobic comments are common.

And, yet, the prevailing atmosphere among the settlers is that of persecution.

“We have been exposed to a terror attack on Judaism from the representatives of the state of Israel,” radical right-wing activist Meir Ettingerwrote on his blog this month, describing tensions between the settlers and the state as a “culture war.” A high-profile hilltop youth and yeshiva dropout in his early 20s, he is also the grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose ultranationalist Kach party was banned in Israel on counts of racism and incitement and listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. “As the Shin Bet [Israel’s internal security service] repeats in our ears, ‘Jewish terror, Jewish terror, Jewish terror’ and at the same time ‘contains’ the firebombs or stones thrown daily by Arabs [at Jews], so grow the numbers of Jews who know that the hands of those in charge of their protection are covered with the blood of those murdered,” wrote Ettinger.

Ettinger was arrested on Aug. 3 along with nine other ultranationalist activists and was placed under administrative detention, a controversial policy usually reserved for Palestinians under which suspects are denied the right to a trial or informed of official charges because they are deemed terrorists. Ettinger’s underground organization, known as “The Revolt,” encourages widespread anarchy by way of attacks on Palestinian Muslims and Christians, so that the righteous can pave the way toward reviving the “Jewish kingdom,” according to Ettinger’s blog. The group’s manifesto, released for publication by the Shin Bet, claims that “it is much cheaper and quicker to destroy the state and then rebuild than it would be to fix it” and includes instructions on securing Molotov cocktails and maintaining silence during police interrogations.

The hard-line settler community responded to Ettinger’s arrest with further attacks and escalated hostility toward the state. On Aug. 13, price taggerstorched a tent belonging to a Palestinian Bedouin family, leaving on a nearby rock the phrase “administrative revenge” in reference to the process of administrative detention under which Ettinger had been placed.

Chaya Shmidov, a 28-year-old teacher in a sapphire blue dress and matching hat, told me recently that state discrimination against religious Jews is endemic. She recalled a friend who had demonstrated against government demolitions of a settlement being attacked with tear gas by the army and police responsible for overseeing the operation, and then being jailed for days. “How do I feel about it? How do you want me to feel about it?” she said.

“We hope that one day the state will recognize us properly and say, ‘Wow, these people are truly self-sacrificing.’”

“We hope that one day the state will recognize us properly and say, ‘Wow, these people are truly self-sacrificing.’” Shmidov lives in Ahiya, an illegal outpost some 20 miles north of Ramallah, comprising dozens of wooden homes and caravans.

Shmidov told me that in July her neighbor, Aviya Morris, visited the Temple Mount and in a clash with Muslims screamed at them, “Mohammed is a pig!” — causing the police to immediately intervene and arrest her. “While they were screaming at Aviya, ‘Itbah al-Yahud’ — ‘Slaughter the Jews’ — and ‘Allahu akbar,’ she just got a little annoyed, and she was the one who was arrested!”

Morris’s husband, Raphael, 20, said that since the Duma attack, Israeli security forces have installed a surveillance balloon in the area to watch the settlers and are posted “all throughout the roads of Judea and Samaria all the time, waiting to catch us.” Raphael Morris admitted that he had been involved in “incidents” against Palestinians, though he wouldn’t specify what kind.

A particularly sore subject for Raphael Morris and his fellow ideologues is the 2005 withdrawal of settlers from Gaza. In one of Israel’s most controversial missions, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the unilateral disengagement on the argument that the thousands of Israeli troops needed to guard Gaza’s Jewish settlements posed a security threat that also worked to devalue the democratic value of the state. In emotional scenes that the Israeli media is remembering this month on the 10-year anniversary of the disengagement, the Israeli army evacuated some 8,500 Jewish settlers from the Gush Katif bloc of Gaza, some by force, leaving behind razed homes. Morris and those like him still refer to it as “the expulsion.”

He sees Gush Katif as a cautionary tale that Israel can and will uproot its own people. And he believes that a similar process is now taking place in the West Bank with small-scale demolitions of hilltop settlements, though few expect the government to repeat the “mistake” of complete withdrawal from the territory. Morris said he is more determined than ever to fortify the settlement enterprise and to “find a solution to the conflict by expanding settlements here, slowly, slowly.”

It’s a common theme among settlers in the West Bank that they are a protective buffer between Israel and Palestinian terrorism. But in the end, they see their community’s essential justification as drawing from religion, not security or politics. “It is even written in the Torah that the Jews would be spread throughout the world and then will return back home to Eretz Israel,” Miriam Schwartz, a 40-year-old settler from Uruguay in a long floral skirt who was holding her toddler, told me as we waited under a hot late-summer sun above the Jordan Valley. We were standing at a bus stop that doubles as a pickup point for Israeli hitchhikers. The green station was covered in graffiti reading, “Kahane lives,” “Death to Arabs,” and “Price Tag.”

A woman going Schwartz’s way invited her, her daughter, and three others to pile into her car. The driver promptly requested that one of the passengers read a travel-sized laminated copy of the “Prayer for the Road,” a Jewish prayer asking for a safe journey, typically recited at the start of a flight, boat journey — or long car ride. “This prayer is especially important,” said the driver, booking it full speed along a winding road toward Jerusalem. “These days, we only have God to help us.”

 

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Mediterranean Desperation

20 Jueves Ago 2015

Posted by Francisco Correa Villalobos in CRISIS EN CURSO

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Los conflictos armados en el Medio Oriente  y Asia Central, inducidos desde el exterior en un interminable ajedrez geopolítico que ha causado, según Naciones Unidas, tantos desplazados y refugiados como los de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, y la postración económica en muchos países africanos, han originado un gigantesco flujo migratorio hacia Europa de rasgos trágicos, particularmente desde Libia, un país desestabilizado por la codicia petrolera de Occidente y arrojado a un torbellino de violencia homicida como nunca se vio en los peores momentos de la dictadura de Khadafi y despeñado al caos político y social.  Día a día la prensa mundial nos trae frías cifras de las personas desparecidas en las aguas del Mediterráneo, pero raras veces nos ofrece un cuadro de esos naufragios y menos aún recoge los testimonios de los sobrevivientes y el relato de lo que los ha llevado a  enfrentarse a una muerte casi segura. ¿Qué les ha pasado en sus países que los empuja a arriesgar su vida y la de sus hijos de esa manera? La revista SpiegelonLine ha publicado un artículo que nos acerca a esa catástrofe humana.  México Internacional lo reproduce íntegro.  

 

Mediterranean Desperation: Saving Lives at the World’s Most Dangerous Border

By Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Christian Werner (Photography)

Photo Gallery: Saving Refugees from the Med
Christian Werner/ DER SPIEGEL

Doctors Without Borders is the only major humanitarian organization actively rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean. So far, it has saved more than 10,000 people. But in the world’s biggest crisis region, timing is everything.

The call comes in at 10:15 a.m. on the fourth day at sea, just as the ship’s captain says it looks like it’ll be a quiet day. A refugee boat has been spotted at 33 degrees 05 minutes north latitude and 12 degrees 27 minutes east longitude, 17 nautical miles off the coast of Sabratha, Libya. It could be a rubber dinghy, with space for around 100 people. Or it might be a wooden boat, with up to 800 people on board. The captain hits the throttle, pushing the MY Phoenix to full speed.

 

It’s the law of the sea: With every passing hour, the children on board the refugee boat get weaker, more women faint, the men below decks inhale more toxic gasoline fumes, the inflatable dinghies lose air and the wooden boats take on more water. Every hour increases the danger of the boats springing a leak or simply sinking.And the rescue workers won’t reach the troubled vessel for another three hours.

On board the MY Phoenix, preparations begin. There’s Regina Catrambone, an Italian woman who founded the “Migrant Offshore Aid Station,” or MOAS for short. There’s also the emergency relief coordinator Will Turner from Great Britain and the American nurse Mary Jo Frawley, both of whom work for the aid organization Doctors Without Borders. These three people are the heart of the mission, but of course they are not alone. With them are a captain from Spain, a drone pilot from Austria and a rescue specialist from Malta. Altogether, there are 18 of them, patrollingg the waters between Sicily, Malta and Libya — an area almost the size of Germany. They wait, sometimes for a call from Rome, other times for a dot to appear on the horizon.

The 40-meter-long MY Phoenix was a fishing trawler before it was retro-fitted as a research vessel. Now, in its third life, it sails on behalf of humanity with one simple goal: to save lives where no one else does. It is a floating refugee camp, equipped with an infirmary full of pain medication alongside drugs to combat seasickness and scabies. It also has an ample supply of baby food and oxygen, a cooler with vaccines and 50 body bags in two sizes: one for adults and one for children.

The Mediterranean has become a crisis region, one where more than 2,000 people have died this year already — more than have lost their lives in attacks in Afghanistan. But of course that figure is misleading. It reflects only the number of recorded deaths. Who knows how many people have drowned without a trace?

Nevertheless, no aid agencies are active in the region. They all wait on shore for the survivors to arrive. The business of saving lives is left to those who are the least prepared: navies and merchant vessels. Meanwhile, more and more refugees are embarking on the perilous journey across the Mediterranean — 188,000 so far this year.

It’s hard to believe that a crisis area of this magnitude is empty of aid workers — unthinkable, Doctors Without Borders thought, or, as their founders call them, Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF. It is the biggest, best organized medical relief organization in the world. An army of survival. They are professionals for natural catastrophes and civil wars, and they are engaged in the fight against HIV, Ebola and measles. With a budget of €1.066 billion ($1.16 billion) in 2014, MSF’s 2,769 international employees and 31,000 local helpers undertook some 8.3 million treatments.

The World’s Deadliest Border

They calculate the need for help based on mortality rates — a cold, precise measurement. An emergency situation is considered acute when there is one death per day for every 10,000 people. Last year, at least 3,500 refugees died in the Mediterranean while 219,000 made it to Europe. That’s a mortality rate of around 10 per day, or one in 63.

MSF, until now a land-based operation, has decided to set sail. Never has the organization’s name been more fitting than right now, as it carries out its mission in a vast sea that has developed into the world’s deadliest border.

Three boats have been in action since early summer. The Dignity 1, theBourbon Argos and MY Phoenix, the smallest of the fleet. Together they have room for 1,400 refugees. It is the only real private rescue mission in the Mediterranean, and it is almost entirely funded by donations. Operating costs have already topped €10 million this year. Of that,Phoenix, jointly funded by MOAS, has cost €1.6 million thus far this year. MSF has rescued more than 10,000 people so far. By mid-2015, the mortality rate in the Mediterranean was one in 76. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

An estimated 15 to 20 boats carrying around 3,000 people set sail from Libya’s beaches every day. After a few hours, they call a contact person in Italy or they get in touch with the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome directly. That’s if a navy vessel or a cargo ship doesn’t stumble across them first. Whoever is close by is obligated to come to the rescue. But what if no one is nearby to save them?

Such was the case on Wednesday last week when a fishing boat sank off the coast of Libya with 600, maybe 700 people on board. They were moments away from being rescued by an Irish naval ship when the refugees all pushed to one side of the boat. As they tried to get closer to their saviors, the boat capsized. Only 373 people survived. Everyone who had been below deck when the boat sank was dragged to the depths of the sea. The three MSF boats were there too, but not to save lives. They were there to recover bodies.

But now, the Phoenix is on its next mission. It’s 11:30 a.m. and in a darkened cabin, three employees of the Austrian firm Schiebel are sitting in front of their monitors steering a drone. It offers the first sign of the boat.

A bright fleck in a sea of blue.

It looks stable. Judging by its size, it’s bigger than a dinghy, and it sits low in the water. The fleck is also moving. That’s a good sign. It means the boat is still operable. But it is moving slowly and going in curves rather than a straight line. Maybe it is already taking on water, or maybe the man at the helm has lost his bearings.

Those on board the boat will later explain that they left at 3 a.m. Anyone who complained about the tight quarters was summarily beaten by the smugglers. Some had their money and jewelery confiscated as they embarked. Some paid only $500 for the journey, others $2,000. It didn’t take long for the helmsman to abscond. Before he left, he told the others to head toward a light in the distance. So they did, without realizing that it was a flame from the Bouri oil platform that shone over the sea like a lighthouse. They thought the light was Europe.

‘

Two hundred sixty-seven refugees, 267 stories of loss and displacement,...

 

Welcome On Board’

By daybreak, there was still no sign of land. The water in the boat was rising, and the children had begun screaming. The men took turns steering, always maintaining their due-north course. They drove like this for 10 hours in their open, 15-meter-long wooden boat with the sides painted blue and a tiller that was no more than a piece of iron pipe.

Shortly before 1 p.m., the boat appeared on the horizon, coming ever closer. Some refugees huddled on deck, some hung over the sides. Many of them had towels wrapped around their heads. It’s surprising how quiet 267 people can be. The only sound came from the motor as it rattled and belched smoke.

A direct transfer onto the Phoenix would be far too dangerous. The rescuers therefore use their rubber dinghy and they slowly approach the refugee boat. “You’re safe. Stay calm!” they shout. They toss over life jackets and bring the first refugees back to the ship. The entire rescue operation takes two hours. Once on board the Phoenix, refugees are greeted with a sentence that would seem ridiculous if it weren’t meant so seriously: “Welcome on board.”

Some collapse as soon as they reach the boat plank, exhausted by the hours at sea and by days and weeks of waiting that came before. All the energy with which they had clung to life suddenly vanishes. Some pray, one Syrian blows kisses. Previous missions even saw some take selfies during the rescue operation or ask for the Wi-Fi password as soon as they were safe on board.

Some look like they are on a Sunday outing to Europe. The men sport blazers, the women wear heels and nail polish. Others are barefoot and wrapped in blankets. Most of the refugees have nothing more than a plastic bag with them, although some carry backpacks and there is even one person with a hard-shell suitcase in tow.

By the time everyone has boarded the Phoenix, the count is 267 people, including 27 children and 30 women. All that they left behind on their boat is a few empty bottles, some children’s photos, sandals and a few Libyan coins. Below decks, there is hardly room to sit up straight. It’s hot and sticky and water can be heard sloshing under the planks. Thirty to 40 people were crowded into this space before the Phoenix showed up. A few more hours, and the space would have been full of water.

During the rescue operation, the Italian destroyer Caio Duilio approaches. A masterpiece of military engineering, the 153-meter-long ship has anti-aircraft missiles, torpedoes and artillery on board. It is a floating outpost of Fortress Europe — but it is poorly suited to rescue people. The soldiers climb onto the empty wooden boat, examining and eventually sinking it. Afterwards, the destroyer sails alongside the Phoenix for a time, a gray shadow on the horizon. This is what Phase 1 of EUNAVFOR Med, the military operation against human trafickers, looks like.

Friend and Foe

The army is simultaneously MSF’s adversary and its partner. In order to save lives, the aid workers have to do what they otherwise avoid: cooperate with the military. The Italians determine which boats are to be rescued and where the refugees are to be brought. Only then is MSF informed by the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Rome about boats in distress. Only then are they allowed to bring the refugees ashore. Under the law, the refugees are still considered illegal immigrants. A ship full of refugees not permitted to dock anywhere. It would be a nightmare.

It’s Turner’s 10th rescue mission. The Brit is an emergency coordinator, making him the head of the six MSF members aboard the Phoenix. He’s also the youngest member of the team, a quiet, gentle man who, far from being a romantic, is radically pragmatic. He has worked full-time for MSF for four years on a contract renewed annually that puts him in charge of logistics and planning. His eyebrows are bleached from the sun and he has worn the same pair of sneakers for years through the world’s crisis regions, often having them patched up at whatever cobbler he could find in Africa.

He is only 32 years old and he has already seen a massacre: 13 village elders in Boguila, Central African Republic, whom he called together, were shot and killed by rebels before his eyes. Three local MSF staff were also killed. “A difficult situation,” he calls it. The only visible effect of the shock is a nervous twitch when he talks about it. The MSF clinic in Boguila had 200 beds; it was a factory of survival, but it was closed after the massacre. Ultimately, the death toll of the attack was much higher than 16.

Turner thought no mission could ever top Boguila. Then came Ebola, and he was sent to Sierra Leone to build the second-largest Ebola station in West Africa. MSF treated thousands of patients, with the hopes of the entire world resting on their shoulders. It was as if MSF had become a medical UN of sorts — just without the bureaucracy, scandals and veto powers. The world has aid workers like Turner to thank for the fact that Ebola didn’t claim even more victims.

And now the Mediterranean — “a holiday mission,” Turner calls it. Dolphins jump in the waters around him as giant turtles swim by. It’s the most beautiful workplace in the world. But it can also be the worst, such as when they’re not rescuing survivors but recovering bodies. This time around, however, they aren’t too late.

On board the Phoenix, the helpers are in high gear, handing out water, energy biscuits, socks and coveralls to keep people warm. The most frequently asked questions: Where are we? Where are we headed? Can I call my family?

The refugees will spend 48 hours on the ship before it docks in Reggio Calabria, on Italy’s southernmost tip. As evening falls, some take pictures of the sunset while others pray or lay down, placing their bags under their heads to use as pillows.

Who’s Who

The maelstrom called migration washed them all onto the decks of thePhoenix, a floating refugee camp for 10 nationalities, outfitted with a sun awning and two portable toilets. There are young men and women from Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria and Eritrea. Most of them are from Bangladesh — 131 in all. There are also quite a few from Sudan and Syria. There are even three Pakistanis, two Ghanaians and two Senegalese.

There’s also a family with two babies that fled Boko Haram in Nigeria. Josef, 31, from Darfur, who has lived in one refugee camp after another since his village was destroyed by Janjaweed rebels in 2005. And Eric, 21, from Ghana, who says he lost his entire family during a major fire in Accra.

Then there’s Aminul, 21, from Bangladesh, whose father was a farmer before being crippled by a stroke. His mother sold everything to raise the $5,000 for his journey to Tripoli. For six months, he vacuumed offices and cleaned toilets, but he hardly ever earned any money. He says that when he asked, his boss held a gun to his head and told him: Next time I’ll shoot you.

“I could not go back to Bangladesh,” Aminul says. “It was easier coming to Europe.” His life is an investment, and going back would be a total loss.

There are also the Somali teenagers Asma and Mohammed. She’s 16, he’s 18. Their story is a nightmare, one that mirrors the experiences of many other people onboard the ship. They were kidnapped in Libya, beaten with cables and fed only one piece of bread per day. They had to pay a ransom of $5,200 to free themselves. To come up with the money, their parents in Mogadishu had to take out a loan. Clinging to one another, they say: “We wanted a better life. What could we possibly become in Somalia?” They imagine a better life as him playing soccer and her becoming a doctor. “But had we known how dangerous it would be, we wouldn’t have left,” Mohammed says, showing off the scars on his back. “We had a 50-50 chance of survival. No one knew where we were. We could have simply disappeared.”

Namat, a 35-year-old elementary school teacher from Yarmouk, Syria, says her house was destroyed, so she fled to Damascus. But by this summer, her hope and savings were exhausted. The money they had, $4,000, was only enough for half the family. So she took her 5-year-old son Omar and left. Her husband and daughter stayed behind. Namat shows pictures of her 15-year-old daughter at the mall, on the playground and blowing out the candles of a birthday cake. The pictures show a happy family. It is now up to Namat to put this family back together again. Her plan is to reach Germany and then have her husband and daughter join her.

She laughs as she swipes through the photos on her smartphone. It’s a laugh against fear, a laugh for her son, to whom she has sold their escape as a vacation and whom she promised could ride a bicycle once in Germany. Omar was born shortly before the Syrian civil war. So far, his life has been made up of one exceptional situation after another. Now he stands at the ship’s side and beams at the sea, a cheerful little boy who is enjoying his vacation. His mother says: “This trip is for him, so that he may have a better life.”

A Restricted Impact

Two hundred sixty-seven refugees, 267 reasons to flee: war, oppression, poverty, tragedy and hope for a better life. One thing’s for sure: There’s no flight without plight.

The nurse Mary Jo Frawley, her hair bleached by the sun to a hue somewhere between blond and gray, perches on a camping chair next to a box of medication. The examination begins with a simple question: How are you? This question leaves some of her patients crying, but it prods most of them to talk, those who are pregnant, rape victims, the traumatized and the exhausted.

Frawley was a nurse at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center in California for 20 years. In 1999, she went on her first assignment with MSF and she never went back. Now she is 60 years old and has no plans of retiring. She says she wants to continue until she dies. Is there anything better than helping other people? Always being in a new place, discovering something new? Discovering how to live, time and again, after being so close to death?

When she tells stories, it’s like being on a tour of the crises of the past two decades: Sierra Leone, Haiti, Sudan, Syria, Somalia, Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Chad, Pakistan. These are also countries where many of the Mediterranean refugees come from. They are ambassadors from a world of unresolved conflicts, places into which not even the bravest aid workers rarely dare go anymore. Today, MSF only operates in 63 countries. It had to reduce projects or close them altogether in Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, Mali, Somalia and Burma for security reasons or because the regimes there wouldn’t permit them to work.

Although the need is swelling and the number of conflicts rising, the room to operate for humanitarian organizations is shrinking. MSF’s annual report in 2014 was a unsparing account of instances in which the organization could and could not help. “Some 59 percent of activities were carried out in settings of instability,” it stated.

That’s why Frawley is on the Phoenix in the first place. For her, rescuing refugees is just a final link in a chain of failures. Since they can no longer help these people in their home countries, they would like to at least make their escape a bit more tolerable. There are times when she meets people from Sudan or Somalia who lived in refugee camps where she worked. MSF has even rescued people at sea who were once local MSF workers. The crises have come full circle. Although the aid workers can be deployed anywhere in the world within 24 hours, they have begun more and more projects in the last 15 years in Europe of all places. In addition to the ships, there are a total of 107 full-time helpers in Serbia, Macedonia, Italy and Greece. They have clinics and trauma care services. Sometimes they simply organize buses for the refugees, such as on the Greek island of Lesbos. After all, how can one go and rescue people abroad when there is so much to do at home?

For the newly rescued refugees, the first day aboard the Phoenix is marked by the sheer joy of being alive. It’s not until the second day that they begin to worry about what is in store for them. This is also the most difficult day for the MSF workers, because the refugees’ questions take on a new sense of urgency. Why can’t we travel anywhere we want in Europe? Why don’t you want us in Europe? How come nobody cares what happens in our home countries?

Turner, the team leader from Great Britain, hates questions like these. What’s he supposed to do? Deflate all of their hopes? Should he tell them all about reception camps, the Dublin Regulation and grounds for asylum? Should he tell them who will have a chance of staying in Europe and who will be deported or be forced to go into hiding? In the end, it’s all part of a system that he rejects himself, because he thinks Europe could accommodate many more people. What are a few hundred thousand refugees compared to the millions being taken in by Jordan and Turkey?

Instead, he tells them about Europe. He sketches a map for them of the continent they so long for. It helps them know where they are and where they’re going. He sits down and talks to them, knowing full well that listening is the best medicine he can provide.

The Refugee Business

The day passes and the refugees’ second night on board the Phoenixapproaches. In the boat’s inner quarters, the crew is watching the movie “Castaway,” featuring Tom Hanks trying to escape from a lonely island on a raft. But Turner prefers to watch the waves outside dance in the moonlight. He thinks about a word that the German interior minister is so fond of using: pull factor. It’s a hard word for Turner to stomach because it places blame for Europe’s migrant crisis on the very people who are trying to help.

“But a Syrian fleeing Yarmouk doesn’t consider ahead of time whether he’s going to be rescued at sea or not,” Turner says. Destroying ships only makes the passage across the Mediterranean more expensive — or the boats less seaworthy. The principle of supply and demand also applies to the refugee business. It is, however, one of the bitter ironies of helping that even good intentions can have fatal consequences. The more refugees that are rescued off the coast of Europe, the greater the danger becomes that smugglers will make even less of an effort to use safe boats. The refugee crisis is as much a dilemma for the rescuers as for anyone else.

“But given the many deaths, we had no choice but to do something. If we weren’t here, more refugees would surely drown,” Turner says. “People are dying because we are guarding our borders with increasing ferocity. I can’t accept this.”

For this reason, he wishes MSF would make flight and migration its top priority and that it would urgently formulate a political position. What organization could be more qualified than this one, founded 44 years ago as the younger, wilder sister of the International Committee of the Red Cross? It’s an organization that has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and showered with praise.

But even within MSF, rescues at sea are controversial. The organization’s traditionalists in particular would prefer it to stick to classical medical emergencies. But is that enough in a world in which so many people — almost 60 million last year — are on the run? In a world in which conflicts don’t only leave people wounded and starving, but hopeless too? Many people no longer want to stay in refugee camps, where their only destiny is a perpetual state of vegetation. They don’t want to exist in tents and huts on the periphery of society, looked upon as victims and pitied. No, they want to take put their fates in their own hands. That’s why they set out for a better life.

In the morning, as Italy appears on the horizon, Turner gives a farewell speech: “We’d like to thank you for being such a nice, cooperative group. It was a pleasure having you with us.”

The men sweep the deck, fold the wool blankets and shine their shoes. Namat, the Syrian, powders her face and applies lipstick. Everything she owns is in a toiletry bag from Old Spice. Inside are passports, money, lipstick and makeup. The girls from Ethiopia do their hair and put on earrings. Aminul, the Bangladeshi, shaves and checks his appearance in his smartphone camera.

They’re making themselves look nice for Europe.

On the Lookout for Traffickers

But Europe shows its ugly side: a locked up pier, white tents, immigration officials, police, Health Ministry officials, paramedics, the Red Cross, photographers. People wear masks as if there was a threat of Ebola. Officials board the ship, making their way through the rows of refugees. The looks on their faces are tentative, as if to say: Which one of you is a trafficker?

Shortly thereafter, they escort three Sudanese off the ship. Maybe they steered the refugee boat, but that doesn’t make them human traffickers. The fact is, those who steer the boats are usually the poorest of them all. They pay less, and for that they get a quick briefing and a satellite phone. Italy considers such people traffickers — a charge punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Turner stays back, clenching his jaw in anger. MSF has an agreement with the authorities that they refrain from questioning anyone on board the ship because MSF wants no part of that. But the Italians seem to care less and less about their agreement with the aid workers. They arrest at least one refugee nearly every time. Maybe there always has to be at least one arrest so that Italy can show it is taking action.

Aminul shoulders his black backpack with all his clothes inside and goes ashore. Namat and her son follow suit, smiling all the while, as if they have reached their next vacation destination. Asma, the Somali, is unsteady, trembling, dizzy and sick from all the excitement. As soon as she reaches shore, she collapses.

Turner remains on the ship. He wonders what will become of them all — the guys from Bangladesh, the Syrian war refugees, the kids from Somalia. Their first encounter will be a reception center, where they’ll be registered — or not. Then they’ll head north. No more than a week later, Namat, the Syrian, and her son will arrive at the Patrick-Henry-Village in Heidelberg, Germany, an overflowing emergency shelter already at triple capacity with 2,800 people.Will he stay in touch with any of them? “Actually, never,” Turner says. He wants to keep his work and his private life separate. Plus, he doesn’t want to make any promises he can’t keep. He’s content with being the man who saved their lives.

And with that, the Phoenix heads back out to sea.

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Islamic State arose from US support for al-Qaeda in Irak

15 Sábado Ago 2015

Posted by Francisco Correa Villalobos in CRISIS EN CURSO

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Este artículo ofrece un significativo complemento al publicado hace unos días en México Internacional bajo e título The Mystery Of ISIS. Su autor, Nafeez Ahmed, es un destacado profesor e investigador palestino y su artículo fue publicado en Insurge Intelligence el 14 de agosto de 2015.

por Dr. Nafeez Ahmed

A new memoir by a former senior State Department analyst provides stunning details on how decades of support for Islamist militants linked to Osama bin Laden brought about the emergence of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS).

The book establishes a crucial context for recent admissions by Michael T. Flynn, the retired head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), confirming that White House officials made a “willful decision” to support al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists in Syria — despite being warned by the DIA that doing so would likely create an ‘ISIS’-like entity in the region.

J. Michael Springmann, a retired career US diplomat whose last government post was in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, reveals in his new book that US covert operations in alliance with Middle East states funding anti-Western terrorist groups are nothing new. Such operations, he shows, have been carried out for various short-sighted reasons since the Cold War and after.

In the 1980s, as US support for mujahideen fighters accelerated in Afghanistan to kick out the Soviet Union, Springmann found himself unwittingly at the heart of highly classified operations that allowed Islamist militants linked to Osama bin Laden to establish a foothold within the United States.

After the end of the Cold War, Springmann alleged, similar operations continued in different contexts for different purposes — in the former Yugoslavia, in Libya and elsewhere. The rise of ISIS, he contends, was a predictable outcome of this counterproductive policy.

Pentagon intel chief speaks out

Everyday brings new horror stories about atrocities committed by ISIS fighters. Today, for instance, the New York Times (August 13th, 2015) offered a deeply disturbing report on how ISIS has formally adopted a theology and policy of systematic rape of non-Muslim women and children. The practice has become embedded throughout the territories under ISIS control through a process of organized slavery, sanctioned by the movement’s own religious scholars.

But in a recent interview on Al-Jazeera’s flagship talk-show ‘Head to Head,’former DIA chief Lieutenant General (Lt. Gen.) Michael Flynn told host Mehdi Hasan that the rise of ISIS was a direct consequence of US support for Syrian insurgents whose core fighters were from al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Back in May, INSURGE intelligence undertook an exclusive investigation into a controversial declassified DIA document appearing to show that as early as August 2012, the DIA knew that the US-backed Syrian insurgency was dominated by Islamist militant groups including “the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Iraq.”(Haga click en el enlace arriba para acceder al documento)

Asked about the DIA document by Hasan, who noted that “the US was helping coordinate arms transfers to those same groups,” Flynn confirmed that the intelligence described by the document was entirely accurate.

Telling Hasan that he had read the document himself, Flynn said that it was among a range of intelligence being circulated throughout the US intelligence community that had led him to attempt to dissuade the White House from supporting these groups, albeit without success.

Flynn added that this sort of intelligence was available even before the decision to pull out troops from Iraq:

“My job was to ensure that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as it could be, and I will tell you, it goes before 2012. When we were in Iraq, and we still had decisions to be made before there was a decision to pull out of Iraq in 2011, it was very clear what we were going to face.”

In other words, long before the inception of the armed insurrection in Syria — as early as 2008 (the year in which the final decision was made on full troop withdrawal by the Bush administration) — US intelligence was fully aware of the threat posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) among other Islamist militant groups.

Supporting the enemy

Despite this, Flynn’s account shows that the US commitment to supporting the Syrian insurgency against Bashir al-Assad led the US to deliberately support the very al-Qaeda affiliated forces it had previously fought in Iraq.

Far from simply turning a blind eye, Flynn said that the White House’s decision to support al-Qaeda linked rebels against the Assad regime was not a mistake, but intentional:

Hasan: “You are basically saying that even in government at the time, you knew those groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?”

Flynn: “I think the administration.”

Hasan: “So the administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?”

Flynn: “I don’t know if they turned a blind eye. I think it was a decision, a willful decision.”

Hasan: “A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?”

Flynn: “A willful decision to do what they’re doing… You have to really ask the President what is it that he actually is doing with the policy that is in place, because it is very, very confusing.”

Prior to his stint as DIA chief, Lt. Gen. Flynn was Director of Intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and Commander of the Joint Functional Component Command.

Flynn is the highest ranking former US intelligence official to confirm that the DIA intelligence report dated August 2012, released earlier this year, proves a White House covert strategy to support Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Syria even before 2011.

In June, INSURGE reported exclusively that six former senior US and British intelligence officials agreed with this reading of the declassified DIA report.

Flynn’s account is corroborated by other former senior officials. In an interview on French national television , former French Foreign MinisterRoland Dumas said that the US’ chief ally, Britain, had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009 — after US intelligence had clear information according to Flynn on al-Qaeda’s threat to Syria:

“I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to the movement now known as ‘Islamic State,’ was on the decline due to US and Iraqi counter-terrorism operations from 2008 to 2011 in coordination with local Sunni tribes. In that period, al-Qaeda in Iraq became increasingly isolated, losing the ability to enforce its harsh brand of Islamic Shari’ah law in areas it controlled, and giving up more and more territory.

By late 2011, over 2,000 AQI fighters had been killed, just under 9,000 detained, and the group’s leadership had been largely wiped out.

Right-wing pundits have often claimed due to this background that the decision to withdraw troops from Iraq was the key enabling factor in the resurgence of AQI, and its eventual metamorphosis into ISIS.

But Flynn’s revelations prove the opposite — that far from the rise of ISIS being solely due to a vacuum of power in Iraq due to the withdrawal of US troops, it was the post-2011 covert intervention of the US and its allies, the Gulf states and Turkey, which siphoned arms and funds to AQI as part of their anti-Assad strategy.

Even in Iraq, the surge laid the groundwork for what was to come. Among the hundred thousand odd Sunni tribesmen receiving military and logistical assistance from the US were al-Qaeda sympathisers and anti-Western insurgents who had previously fought alongside al-Qaeda.

In 2008, a US Army-commissioned RAND report confirmed that the US was attempting to “to create divisions in the jihadist camp. Today in Iraq such a strategy is being used at the tactical level.” This included forming “temporary alliances” with al-Qaeda affiliated “nationalist insurgent groups” that have fought the US for four years, now receiving “weapons and cash” from the US.

The idea was, essentially, to bribe former al-Qaeda insurgents to breakaway from AQI and join forces with the Americans. Although these Sunni nationalists “have cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces,” they are now being supported to exploit “the common threat that al-Qaeda now poses to both parties.”

In the same year, former CIA military intelligence officer and counter-terrorism specialist Philip Geraldi, stated that US intelligence analysts “are warning that the United States is now arming and otherwise subsidizing all three major groups in Iraq.” The analysts “believe that the house of cards is likely to fall down as soon as one group feels either strong or frisky enough to assert itself.” Giraldi predicted:

“The winner in the convoluted process has been everyone who wants to see a civil war.”

By Flynn’s account, US intelligence was also aware in 2008 that the empowerment of former al-Qaeda insurgents would eventually backfire and strengthen AQI in the long-run, especially given that the Shi’a dominated US-backed central government continued to discriminate against Sunni populations.

Syriana

Having provided extensive support for former al-Qaeda affiliated Sunni insurgents in Iraq from 2006 to 2008 — in order to counter AQI — US forces did succeed in temporarily routing AQI from its strongholds in the country.

Simultaneously, however, if Roland Dumas’ account is correct, the US and Britain began covert operations in Syria in 2009. From 2011 onwards, US support for the Syrian insurgency in alliance with the Gulf states and Turkey was providing significant arms and cash to AQI fighters.

The porous nature of relations between al-Qaeda factions in Iraq and Syria, and therefore the routine movement of arms and fighters across the border, was well-known to the US intelligence community in 2008.

In October 2008, Major General John Kelly — the US military official responsible for Anbar province where the bulk of US support for Sunni insurgents to counter AQI was going — complained bitterly that AQI fighters had regrouped across the border in Syria, where they had established a “sanctuary.”

The border, he said, was routinely used as an entry point for AQI fighters to enter Iraq and conduct attacks on Iraqi security forces.

Ironically, at this time, AQI fighters in Syria were tolerated by the Assad regime. A July 2008 report by the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point documented AQI’s extensive networks inside Syria across the border with Iraq.

“The Syrian government has willingly ignored, and possibly abetted, foreign fighters headed to Iraq. Concerned about possible military action against the Syrian regime, it opted to support insurgents and terrorists wreaking havoc in Iraq.”

Yet from 2009 onwards according to Dumas, and certainly from 2011 by Flynn’s account, the US and its allies began supporting the very same AQI fighters in Syria to destabilize the Assad regime.

The policy coincided with the covert US strategy revealed by Seymour Hersh in 2007: using Saudi Arabia to funnel support for al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Islamists as a mechanism for isolating Iran and Syria.

Reversing the surge

During this period in which the US, the Gulf states, and Turkey supported Syrian insurgents linked to AQI and the Muslim Brotherhood, AQI experienced an unprecedented resurgence.

US troops finally withdrew fully from Iraq in December 2011, which means by the end of 2012, judging by the DIA’s August 2012 report and Flynn’s description of the state of US intelligence in this period, the US intelligence community knew that US and allied support for AQI in Syria was directly escalating AQI’s violence across the border in Iraq.

Despite this, in Flynn’s words, the White House made a “willful decision” to continue the policy despite the possibility it entailed “of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor)” according to the DIA’s 2012 intelligence report.

The Pentagon document had cautioned that if a “Salafist principality” did appear in eastern Syria under AQI’s dominance, this would have have “dire consequences” for Iraq, providing “the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi,” and a “renewed momentum” for a unified jihad “among Sunni Iraq and Syria.”

Most strikingly, the report warned that AQI, which had then changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI):

“ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.”

As the US-led covert strategy accelerated sponsorship of AQI in Syria, AQI’s operations in Iraq also accelerated, often in tandem with Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhut al-Nusra.

According to Prof. Anthony Celso of the Department of Security Studies at Angelo State University in Texas, “suicide bombings, car bombs, and IED attacks” by AQI in Iraq “doubled a year after the departure of American troops.” Simultaneously, AQI began providing support for al-Nusra by inputting fighters, funds and weapons from Iraq into Syria.

As the Pentagon’s intelligence arm had warned, by April 2013, AQI formally declared itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

In the same month, the European Union voted to ease the embargo on Syria to allow al-Qaeda and ISIS dominated Syrian rebels to sell oil to global markets, including European companies. From this date to the following year when ISIS invaded Mosul, several EU countries were buying ISIS oilexported from the Syrian fields under its control.

The US anti-Assad strategy in Syria, in other words, bolstered the very al-Qaeda factions the US had fought in Iraq, by using the Gulf states and Turkey to finance the same groups in Syria. As a direct consequence, the secular and moderate elements of the Free Syrian Army were increasingly supplanted by virulent Islamist extremists backed by US allies.

A Free Syrian Army fighter rests inside a cave at a rebel camp in Idlib, Syria on 17th September 2013. As of April 2015, moderate FSA rebels in Idlib have been supplanted by a US-backed rebel coalition led by Jabhut al-Nusra, al-Qaeda in Syria

Advanced warning

In February 2014, Lt. Gen. Flynn delivered the annual DIA threat assessment to the Senate Armed Services Committee. His testimony revealed that rather than coming out of the blue, as the Obama administration claimed, US intelligence had anticipated the ISIS attack on Iraq.

In his statement before the committee, which corroborates much of what he told Al-Jazeera, Flynn had warned that “al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) also known as Iraq and Levant (ISIL)… probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah.” He added that “some Sunni tribes and insurgent groups appear willing to work tactically with AQI as they share common anti-government goals.”

Criticizing the central government in Baghdad for its “refusal to address long-standing Sunni grievances,” he pointed out that “heavy-handed approach to counter-terror operations” had led some Sunni tribes in Anbar “to be more permissive of AQI’s presence.” AQI/ISIL has “exploited” this permissive security environment “to increase its operations and presence in many locations” in Iraq, as well as “into Syria and Lebanon,” which is inflaming “tensions throughout the region.”

It should be noted that precisely at this time, the West, the Gulf states and Turkey, according to the DIA’s internal intelligence reports, were supporting AQI and other Islamist factions in Syria to “isolate” the Assad regime. By Flynn’s account, despite his warnings to the White House that an ISIS attack on Iraq was imminent, and could lead to the destabilization of the region, senior Obama officials deliberately continued the covert support to these factions.

US intelligence was also fully cognizant of Iraq’s inability to repel a prospective ISIS attack on Iraq, raising further questions about why the White House did nothing.

The Iraqi army has “been unable to stem rising violence” and would be unable “to suppress AQI or other internal threats” particularly in Sunni areas like Ramadi, Falluja, or mixed areas like Anbar and Ninewa provinces, Flynn told the Senate. As Iraq’s forces “lack cohesion, are undermanned, and are poorly trained, equipped and supplied,” they are “vulnerable to terrorist attack, infiltration and corruption.”

Senior Iraqi government sources told me on condition of anonymity that both Iraqi and American intelligence had anticipated an ISIS attack on Iraq, and specifically on Mosul, as early as August 2013.

Intelligence was not precise on the exact timing of the assault, one source said, but it was known that various regional powers were complicit in the planned ISIS offensive, particularly Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey:

“It was well known at the time that ISIS were beginning serious plans to attack Iraq. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey played a key role in supporting ISIS at this time, but the UAE played a bigger role in financial support than the others, which is not widely recognized.”

When asked whether the Americans had attempted to coordinate with Iraq on preparations for the expected ISIS assault, particularly due to the recognized inability of the Iraqi army to withstand such an attack, the senior Iraqi official said that nothing had happened:

“The Americans allowed ISIS to rise to power because they wanted to get Assad out from Syria. But they didn’t anticipate that the results would be so far beyond their control.”

This was not, then, a US intelligence failure as such. Rather, the US failure to to curtail the rise of ISIS and its likely destabilization of both Iraq and Syria, was not due to a lack of accurate intelligence — which was abundant and precise — but due to an ill-conceived political decision to impose ‘regime change’ on Syria at any cost.

Vicious cycle

This is hardly the first time political decisions in Washington have blocked US intelligence agencies from pursuing investigations of terrorist activity, and scuppered their crackdowns on high-level state benefactors of terrorist groups.

According to Michael Springmann in his new book, Visas for al-Qaeda: CIA Handouts that Rocked the World, the same structural problems explain the impunity with which terrorist groups have compromised Western defense and security measures for the last few decades.

Much of his book is clearly an effort to make sense of his personal experience by researching secondary sources and interviewing other former US government and intelligence officials. While there are many problems with some of this material, the real value of Springmann’s book is in the level of detail he brings to his first-hand accounts of espionage at the US State Department, and its damning implications for understanding the ‘war on terror’ today.

Springmann served in the US government as a diplomat with the Commerce Department and the State Department’s Foreign Service, holding postings in Germany, India, and Saudi Arabia. He began his diplomatic career as a commercial officer at the US embassy in Stuttgart, Germany (1977–1980), before becoming a commercial attaché in New Delhi, India (1980–1982). He was later promoted to head of the Visa Bureau at the US embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1987–1989), and then returned to Stuttgart to become a political/economic officer (1989–1991).

Before he was fired for asking too many questions about illegal practices at the US embassy in Jeddah, Springmann’s last assignment was as a senior economic officer at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (1991), where he had security clearances to access restricted diplomatic cables, along with highly classified intelligence from the National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA.

Springmann says that during his tenure at the US embassy in Jeddah, he was repeatedly asked by his superiors to grant illegal visas to Islamist militants transiting through Jeddah from various Muslim countries. He eventually learned that the visa bureau was heavily penetrated by CIA officers, who used their diplomatic status as cover for all manner of classified operations — including giving visas to the same terrorists who would later execute the 9/11 attacks.

CIA officials operating at the US embassy in Jeddah, according to Springmann, included CIA base chief Eric Qualkenbush, US Consul General Jay Frere, and political officer Henry Ensher.

Thirteen out of the 15 Saudis among the 9/11 hijackers received US visas. Ten of them received visas from the US embassy in Jeddah. All of them were in fact unqualified, and should have been denied entry to the US.

Springmann was fired from the State Department after filing dozens of Freedom of Information requests, formal complaints, and requests for inquiries at multiple levels in the US government and Congress about what he had uncovered. Not only were all his attempts to gain disclosure and accountability systematically stonewalled, in the end his whistleblowing cost him his career.

Springmann’s experiences at Jeddah, though, were not unique. He points out that Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, received his first US visa from a CIA case officer undercover as a consular officer at the US embassy in Khartoum in Sudan.

The ‘Blind Sheikh’ as he was known received six CIA-approved US visas in this way between 1986 and 1990, also from the US embassy in Egypt. But as Springmann writes:

“The ‘blind’ Sheikh had been on a State Department terrorist watch list when he was issued the visa, entering the United States by way of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Sudan in 1990.”

In the US, Abdel Rahman took-over the al-Kifah Refugee Center, a major mujahideen recruitment hub for the Afghan war controlled by Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. He not only played a key role in recruiting mujahideen for Afghanistan, but went on to recruit Islamist fighters for Bosnia after 1992.

Even after the 1993 WTC attack, as Springmann told BBC Newsnight in 2001, “The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department’s faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died.”

The Bosnia connection is highly significant. Springmann reports that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad “had fought in Afghanistan (after studying in the United States) and then went on to the Bosnian war in 1992…

“In addition, two more of the September 11, 2001, hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both Saudis, had gained combat experience in Bosnia. Still more connections came from Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who supposedly helped Mohammed Atta with planning the World Trade Center attacks. He had served with Bosnian army mujahideen units. Ramzi Binalshibh, friends with Atta and Zammar, had also fought in Bosnia.”

US and European intelligence investigations have uncovered disturbing evidence of how the Bosnian mujahideen pipeline, under the tutelage of Saudi Arabia, played a major role in incubating al-Qaeda’s presence in Europe.

According to court papers filed in New York on behalf of the 9/11 families in February, covert Saudi government support for Bosnian arms and training was “especially important to al-Qaeda acquiring the strike capabilities used to launch attacks in the US.”

After 9/11, despite such evidence being widely circulated within the US and European intelligence communities, both the Bush and Obama administrations continued working with the Saudis to mobilize al-Qaeda affiliated extremists in the service of what the DIA described as rolling back “the strategic depth of the Shia expansion” across Iraq, Iran and Syria.

The existence of this policy has been confirmed by former 30-year MI6 Middle East specialist Alastair Crooke. Its outcome — in the form of the empowerment of the most virulent Islamist extremist forces in the region — was predictable, and indeed predicted.

In August 2012 — the same date as the DIA’s controversial intelligence report anticipating the rise of ISIS — I quoted the uncannily prescient remarks of Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, who forecast that US support for Islamist rebels in Syria would likely to lead to “the slaughter of some portion of Syria’s Alawite and Shia communities”; “the triumph of Islamist forces, although they may deign to temporarily disguise themselves in more innocent garb”; “the release of thousands of veteran and hardened Sunni Islamist insurgents”; and even “the looting of the Syrian military’s fully stocked arsenals of conventional arms and chemical weapons.”

I then warned that the “further militarization” of the Syrian conflict would thwart the “respective geostrategic ambitions” of regional powers “by intensifying sectarian conflict, accelerating anti-Western terrorist operations, and potentially destabilizing the whole Levant in a way that could trigger a regional war.”

Parts of these warnings have now transpired in ways that are even more horrifying than anyone ever imagined. The continued self-defeating approach of the US-led coalition may well mean that the worst is yet to come.


Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye.

He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the ‘Alternative Pulitzer Prize’, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was selected in the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1,000’ most globally influential Londoners.

Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University.

Nafeez is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

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El diktado de Alemania

09 Domingo Ago 2015

Posted by Francisco Correa Villalobos in CRISIS EN CURSO

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Ignacio Ramonet, director de Le Monde Diplomatique durante 18 años y profesor de la Universidad Denis-Didedort (Paris VII) y de la Sorbona de París, nombre familiar para los profesionales e interesados en la política internacional, ha escrito este artículo para La Jornada de la ciudad de México el 9 de agosto de 2015 sobre las implicaciones y consecuencias para los países europeos afiliados al euro, y posiblemente de muchos países en desarrollo, como México, del desenlace de la crísis griega.
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El diktado de Alemania
por Ignacio Ramonet
Sólo en las películas de terror se ven escenas tan sádicas como las que vimos el 13 de julio pasado en Bruselas, cuando el primer ministro griego, Alexis Tsipras, herido, derrotado, humillado, tuvo que acatar en público, cabizbajo, el diktado de la canciller de Alemania, Angela Merkel. Y renunciar a su programa de liberación con el que fue elegido, y que su pueblo acababa precisamente de ratificar en referendo.

Exhibido por los vencedores como trofeo ante las cámaras del mundo, el pobre Tsipras tuvo que tragarse su orgullo y también tantos sapos y culebras que el propio semanario alemán Der Spiegel, compadecido, calificó la lista de sacrificios impuestos al pueblo griego decatálogo de horrores…

Cuando la humillación del líder de un país alcanza niveles tan espeluznantes, la imagen se queda en la historia para aleccionamiento de las generaciones venideras, incitadas a nunca más aceptar un trato semejante. Así llegaron hasta nosotros expresiones como pasar por las horcas caudinas o el célebre paseo de Canossa. Lo del 13 de julio fue tan enorme, et tan absolutamente irreal, que quizás se recuerde también en el futuro de Europa como el día del “diktado de Alemania”.

La gran lección de ese escarnio es que, definitivamente, en el marco de la Unión Europea (UE) y, particularmente, en el seno de la zona euro, se ha perdido el control ciudadano sobre decisiones que determinan la vida de la gente. Hasta tal punto que podemos preguntarnos: ¿de qué sirven las elecciones si en lo esencial, o sea las políticas económicas y sociales, los nuevos gobernantes se ven obligados a hacer lo mismo que los precedentes? En este nuevo despotismo europeo la democracia se define menos por el voto o por la posibilidad de escoger que por el imperativo de respetar reglas y tratados (Maastricht, Lisboa, Pacto Fiscal) adoptados hace tiempo, que resultan para los pueblos verdaderas cárceles jurídicas sin posible evasión.

Al presentar a las muchedumbres a un Tsipras con la soga al cuello y coronado de espinas –Ecce homo–, lo que pretendieron demostrar Merkel, Hollande, Rajoy y los otros es que no hay alternativa a la vía neoliberal en Europa. Abandonad toda esperanza, electores de Podemos y de otros frentes de izquierda europeos; estais condenados a elegir gobernantes cuya función consistirá en aplicar las reglas y tratados definidos una vez por todas por Berlín y el Banco Central Europeo.

Lo más perverso es que, como en un juicio estalinista de tipo Proceso de Praga, se le ha exigido a quien más criticó el sistema, Alexis Tsipras, que sea quien se humille ante él, lo elogie y lo suplique.

Los que ignoraban que vivíamos en un sistema despótico lo han descubierto en esta ocasión. Algunos analistas dicen ya que estamos en un momento que podríamos calificar deposdemocrático o pospolítico, porque lo que pasó el 13 de julio en Bruselas demuestra el desgaste del funcionamiento democrático y del funcionamiento político. Demuestra que la política ya no consigue dar las respuestas que los ciudadanos esperan, aunque voten mayoritariamente en favor de ellas.

La ciudadanía observa, desesperanzada, cómo al partido griego Syriza, que ganó las elecciones y un referendo con un discurso contra la austeridad, se le exige que aplique con mayor brutalidad la política de recortes que los electores rechazaron. Consecuentemente, muchos se preguntan: ¿para qué sirve elegir una alternativa, si ésta acaba siendo exactamente una repetición de lo mismo?

Lo que ha querido demostrar Angela Merkel de manera muy clara es que hoy, lo que llamamos la alternativa económica, en el sentido de que representa una opción contraria a política neoliberal de recortes y de austeridad, no existe. Es decir, cuando un equipo político elabora un programa alternativo, lo somete a la ciudadanía para que pueda elegir entre éste y otros programas y cuando ese programa gana las elecciones y un equipo nuevo alcanza legítimamente, democráticamente, la conducción de un país, ese equipo de gobierno, con su proyecto alternativo antineoliberal, descubre que en realidad su margen de maniobra es inexistente. En materia de economía, finanzas y presupuesto no dispone de ningún tipo de margen de maniobra. Porque, además, están los acuerdos internacionales que no se pueden tocar; los mercados financieros que amenazan con sanciones si se toman ciertas decisiones; los lobbys mediáticos que hacen presión; los grupos de influencia oculta, como la Trilateral, Bilderberg, etcétera. No hay espacio.

Todo esto significa sencillamente que el gobierno de un Estado de la zona euro, por mucha legitimidad democrática que posea, aunque haya sido apoyado por 60 por ciento de sus ciudadanos, no no tiene las manos libres. Las tiene si decide realizar reformas legislativas para modificar aspectos importantes de vida societal, por ejemplo, el aborto, el matrimonio homosexual, la procreación asistida, derechos de voto a los extranjeros, eutanasia, etcétera. Pero si desea reformar la economía para liberar a su pueblo de la cárcel neoliberal, eso no lo puede hacer. Sus márgenes de maniobra ahí son prácticamente inexistentes. No sólo por la presión de los mercados financieros internacionales, sino también, sencillamente, porque su pertenencia a la zona euro le obliga a someterse a los imperativos del tratado de Maastricht, el tratado de Lisboa, el Pacto Fiscal (que exige que el presupuesto nacional no puede tener un déficit, respecto del producto interno bruto del país, superior a 0.5 por ciento), el Mecanismo europeo de estabilidad financiera (que endurece las condiciones impuestas a los países que necesitan créditos), etcétera.

En consecuencia, efectivamente, para los Estados que han pedido un rescate, se ha creado hoy, en Europa, el estatuto de nuevo protectorado. Grecia, por ejemplo, es gobernada de manera soberana para todas las cuestiones que tienen que ver con la gestión de la vida societal de sus ciudadanos (los indígenas). Pero lo que tiene que ver con la economía, las finanzas, la deuda, la banca, el presupuesto y, evidentemente, la moneda, todo eso está gestionado por una instancia superior: la tecnocracia euro de la Unión Europea. O sea, Atenas ha perdido parte decisiva de su soberanía. El país ha sido rebajado al grado de protectorado.

Para decirlo de otra manera: lo que está ocurriendo no sólo en Grecia, sino en toda la zona euro, en nombre de la austeridad, la crisis, es sencillamente el paso de un Estado de bienestar hacia un Estado privatizado, en el que la doctrina neoliberal se impone con un dogmatismo feroz, puramente ideológico. Estamos ante un modelo económico que le está arrebatando una serie de derechos a los ciudadanos. Derechos adquiridos después de largas y, a veces, sangrientas luchas.

Algunos dirigentes conservadores tratan de calmar al pueblo diciendo:Bueno, éste es un mal periodo, un mal momento que hay que pasar. Tenemos que apretarnos el cinturón, pero saldremos de este túnel. La pregunta es: ¿qué significa ‘salir del túnel’? ¿Nos van a devolver lo que nos han arrebatado? ¿Nos van a restituir las reducciones de salarios que hemos padecido? ¿Van a restablecer las pensiones al nivel en que estaban? ¿Vamos de nuevo a tener créditos para la salud pública, para la educación?

La respuesta a cada una de estas preguntas es: no. Porque no se trata una ‘crisis pasajera’. Lo que ocurre es que hemos pasado de un modelo a otro peor. Y ahora se trata de convencernos de que lo que hemos perdido es irreversible. “Lasciate ogni speranza”. Ese es el mensaje central de Angela Merkel en Bruselas el 13 de julio pasado. Mientras exhibía, cual teutónica Salomé, la cabeza de Tsipras en una bandeja…

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The Mystery of ISIS

08 Sábado Ago 2015

Posted by Francisco Correa Villalobos in CRISIS EN CURSO

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En su  número  fechado el 13 de agosto de 2015, la revista norteamericana New York Review of Books incluye un análisis del ISIS, basado en la reseña de dos libros publicados recientemente sobre el movimiento conocido como el Estado Islámico, su obscuro origen, su inexplicable crecimiento, su confusa ideología, su errática política, sus siniestras alianzas, contactos y financiamientos provenientes de diferentes países, grupos y personas y sus brutales masacres y asesinatos. Una notable omisión, como se observará, es el análisis de la relevancia de las vastas redes de inteligencia y operatividad de Estados Unidos, Arabia Saudita, Turquía y otros países del Golfo en la resiliencia de ISIS.  El autor. un antiguo fincionario de la OTAN, ha preferido mantener e  anonimato. Por su valor como análisis introductorio a este fenómeno. México Internacional lo reproduce íntegro.

The Mystery of ISIS

Anonymous

AUGUST 13, 2015

ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan
Regan Arts, 270 pp.

ISIS: The State of Terror

by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger
Ecco, 385 pp.

 

The author has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country. We respect the writer’s reasons for anonymity. 

—The Editors of New York Review of Books

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Reuters

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Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.

The rise of Ahmad Fadhil—or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable. The year 2003, in which he began his operations in Iraq, seemed to many part of a mundane and unheroic age of Internet start-ups and a slowly expanding system of global trade. Despite the US-led invasion of Iraq that year, the borders of Syria and Iraq were stable. Secular Arab nationalism appeared to have triumphed over the older forces of tribe and religion. Different religious communities—Yezidis, Shabaks, Christians, Kaka’is, Shias, and Sunnis—continued to live alongside one another, as they had for a millennium or more. Iraqis and Syrians had better incomes, education, health systems, and infrastructure, and an apparently more positive future, than most citizens of the developing world. Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter all these historical institutions, and—defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth—create a mini empire?
The story is relatively easy to narrate, but much more difficult to understand. It begins in 1989, when Zarqawi, inspired by his Islamic self-help class, traveled from Jordan to “do jihad” in Afghanistan. Over the next decade he fought in the Afghan civil war, organized terrorist attacks in Jordan, spent years in a Jordanian jail, and returned—with al-Qaeda help—to set up a training camp in Herat in western Afghanistan. He was driven out of Afghanistan by the US-led invasion of 2001, but helped back onto his feet by the Iranian government. Then, in 2003—with the assistance of Saddam loyalists—he set up an insurgency network in Iraq. By targeting Shias and their most holy sites, he was able to turn an insurgency against US troops into a Shia–Sunni civil war.

Zarqawi was killed by a US air strike in 2006. But his movement improbably survived the full force of the 170,000-strong, $100 billion a year US troop surge. In 2011, after the US withdrawal, the new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, expanded into Syria and reestablished a presence in northwest Iraq. In June 2014 the movement took Mosul—Iraq’s second-largest city—and in May 2015 the Iraqi city of Ramadi and the Syrian city of Palmyra, and its affiliates took the airport in Sirte, Libya. Today, thirty countries, including Nigeria, Libya, and the Philippines, have groups that claim to be part of the movement.

Although the movement has changed its name seven times and has had four leaders, it continues to treat Zarqawi as its founder, and to propagate most of his original beliefs and techniques of terror. The New York Times refers to it as “the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.” Zarqawi also called it “Army of the Levant,” “Monotheism and Jihad,” “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and “Mujihadeen Shura Council.” (A movement known for its marketing has rarely cared about consistent branding.) I will simplify the many changes of name and leadership by referring to it throughout as “ISIS,” although it has of course evolved during its fifteen years of existence.

The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise—the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters—fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.

Emma Sky’s book The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq,1 for example, a deft, nuanced, and often funny account of her years as a civilian official in Iraq between 2003 and 2010, illustrates the mounting Sunni anger in Iraq. She shows how US policies such as de-Baathification in 2003 began the alienation of Sunnis, and how this was exacerbated by the atrocities committed by Shia militias in 2006 (fifty bodies a day were left on the streets of Baghdad, killed by power drills inserted in their skulls). She explains the often imaginative steps that were taken to regain the trust of the Sunni communities during the surge of 2007, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s alienation of those communities again after the US withdrawal in 2011 through his imprisonment of Sunni leaders, his discrimination and brutality, and the disbanding of Sunni militias.

But many other insurgent groups, quite different from ISIS, often seemed to have been in a much stronger position to have become the dominant vehicles of “Sunni anger.” Sunnis in Iraq initially had minimal sympathy with Zarqawi’s death cult and with his movement’s imposition of early medieval social codes. Most were horrified when Zarqawi blew up the UN headquarters in Baghdad; when he released a film in which he personally sawed off the head of an American civilian; when he blew up the great Shia shrine at Samarra and killed hundreds of Iraqi children. After he mounted three simultaneous bomb attacks against Jordanian hotels—killing sixty civilians at a wedding party—the senior leaders of his Jordanian tribe and his own brother signed a public letter disowning him. The Guardian was only echoing the conventional wisdom when it concluded in Zarqawi’s obituary: “Ultimately, his brutality tarnished any aura, offered little but nihilism and repelled Muslims worldwide.”

Other insurgent groups also often seemed more effective. In 2003, for example, secular Baathists were more numerous, better equipped, better organized, and more experienced military commanders; in 2009, the militia of the “Sunni Awakening” had much better resources and its armed movement was more deeply rooted locally. In 2011, the Free Syrian Army, including former officers of the Assad regime, was a much more plausible leader of resistance in Syria; and so in 2013 was the more extremist militia Jabhat-al-Nusra. Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss show in ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, for example, that al-Nusra formed far closer links to tribal groups in East Syria—even marrying its fighters to tribal women.

Such groups have sometimes blamed their collapse and lack of success, and ISIS’s rise, on lack of resources. The Free Syrian Army, for example has long insisted that it would have been able to supplant ISIS if its leaders had received more money and weapons from foreign states. And the Sunni Awakening leaders in Iraq argue that they lost control of their communities only because the Baghdad government ceased to pay their salaries. But there is no evidence that ISIS initially received more cash or guns than these groups; rather the reverse.

Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s account suggests that much of the early support for the ISIS movement was limited because it was inspired by ideologues who themselves despised Zarqawi and his followers. The al-Qaeda cash that launched Zarqawi in 1999, for example, was, in their words, “a pittance compared to what al-Qaeda was financially capable of disbursing.” The fact that it didn’t give him more reflected bin Laden’s horror at Zarqawi’s killing of Shias (bin Laden’s mother was Shia) and his distaste for Zarqawi’s tattoos.

Although the Iranians gave Zarqawi medical aid and safe haven when he was a fugitive in 2002, he soon lost their sympathy by sending his own father-in-law in a suicide vest to kill Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, Iran’s senior political representative in Iraq, and by blowing up one of the most sacred Shia shrines. And although ISIS has relied for more than a decade on the technical skills of the Baathists and the Sufi Iraqi general Izzat al-Douri, who controlled an underground Baathist militia after the fall of Saddam, this relationship has been strained. (The movement makes no secret of its contempt for Sufism, its destruction of Sufi shrines, or its abhorrence of everything that Baathist secular Arab nationalists espouse.)

Nor has the leadership of ISIS been particularly attractive, high-minded, or competent—although some allowance should be made for the understandable revulsion of the biographers. Mary-Anne Weaver, in a 2006 Atlantic article, describes Zarqawi as “barely literate,” “a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp.” Weiss and Hassan call him an “intellectual lightweight.” Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger in ISIS: The State of Terror say this “thug-turned-terrorist” and “mediocre student…arrived in Afghanistan as a zero.” Weaver describes his “botched operation[s]” in Jordan and his use of a “hapless would-be bomber.” Stern and Berger explain that bin Laden and his followers did not like him because they “were mostly members of an intellectual educated elite, while Zarqawi was a barely educated ruffian with an attitude.”

If writers have much less to say about the current leader, al-Baghdadi, this is because his biography, as Weiss and Hassan concede, “still hovers not far above the level of rumor or speculation, some of it driven, in fact, by competing jihadist propagandists.”

Nor is ISIS’s distinctive approach to insurgency—from holding territory to fighting regular armies—an obvious advantage. Lawrence of Arabia advised that insurgents must be like a mist—everywhere and nowhere—never trying to hold ground or wasting lives in battles with regular armies. Chairman Mao insisted that guerrillas should be fish who swam in the sea of the local population. Such views are the logical corollaries of “asymmetric warfare” in which a smaller, apparently weaker group—like ISIS—confronts a powerful adversary such as the US and Iraqi militaries. This is confirmed by US Army studies of more than forty historical insurgencies, which suggest again and again that holding ground, fighting pitched battles, and alienating the cultural and religious sensibilities of the local population are fatal.

But such tactics are exactly part of ISIS’s explicit strategy. Zarqawi lost thousands of fighters trying to hold Fallujah in 2004. He wasted the lives of his suicide bombers in constant small attacks and—by imposing the most draconian punishments and obscurantist social codes—outraged the Sunni communities that he claimed to represent. ISIS fighters are now clearly attracted by the movement’s ability to control territory in such places as Mosul—as an interview in Yalda Hakim’s recent BBC documentary Mosul: Living with Islamic State confirms. But it is not clear that this tactic—although alluring, and at the moment associated with success—has become any less risky.

The movement’s behavior, however, has not become less reckless or tactically bizarre since Zarqawi’s death. One US estimate by Larry Schweikart suggested that 40,000 insurgents had been killed, about 200,000 wounded, and 20,000 captured before the US even launched the surge in 2006. By June 2010, General Ray Odierno claimed that 80 percent of the movement’s top forty-two leaders had been killed or captured, with only eight remaining at large. But after the US left in 2011, instead of rebuilding its networks in Iraq, the battered remnants chose to launch an invasion of Syria, and took on not just the regime, but also the well-established Free Syrian Army. It attacked the movement’s Syrian branch—Jabhat-al-Nusra—when it broke away. It enraged al-Qaeda in 2014 by killing al-Qaeda’s senior emissary in the region. It deliberately provoked tens of thousands of Shia militiamen to join the fight on the side of the Syrian regime, and then challenged the Iranian Quds force by advancing on Baghdad.

Next, already struggling against these new enemies, the movement opened another front in August 2014 by attacking Kurdistan, driving the Kurdish forces—who had hitherto stayed out of the battle—to retaliate. It beheaded the American journalist James Foley and the British aid worker David Haines, thereby bringing in the US and UK. It enraged Japan by demanding hundreds of millions of dollars for a hostage who was already dead. It finished 2014 by mounting a suicidal attack on Kobane in Syria, in the face of over six hundred US air strikes, losing many thousands of ISIS fighters and gaining no ground. When, as recently as April, the movement lost Tikrit and seemed to be declining, the explanation appeared obvious. Analysts were on the verge of concluding that ISIS had lost because it was reckless, abhorrent, over-extended, fighting on too many fronts, with no real local support, unable to translate terrorism into a popular program, inevitably outmatched by regular armies.

Some analysts have, therefore, focused their explanations not on the movement’s often apparently self-defeating military strategy, but on its governance and revenue, its support from the population, and its reliance on tens of thousands of foreign fighters. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow of the Middle East Forum, has explained in recent blog posts how in some occupied cities such as Raqqa in Syria, the movement has created complicated civil service structures, taking control even of municipal waste departments. He describes the revenue it derives from local income and property taxes, and by leasing out former Iraqi and Syrian state offices to businesses. He shows how this has given ISIS a broad and reliable income base, which is only supplemented by the oil smuggling and the antiquity looting so well described by Nicolas Pelham in these pages.2

ISIS’s power is now reinforced by the staggering arsenal that the movement has taken from the fleeing Iraqi and Syrian army—including tanks, Humvees, and major artillery pieces. Reports from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Vice News over the last twelve months have shown that many Sunnis in Iraq and Syria now feel that ISIS is the only plausible guarantor of order and security in the civil war, and their only defense against brutal retribution from the Damascus and Baghdad governments.

But here too the evidence is confusing and contradictory. Yalda Hakim’s BBC documentary on Mosul makes rough brutality the secret of ISIS’s domination. In his book The Digital Caliphate, Abdel Bari Atwan, however, describes (in Malise Ruthven’s words) “a well-run organization that combines bureaucratic efficiency and military expertise with a sophisticated use of information technology.”3 Zaid Al-Ali, in his excellent account of Tikrit, talks about ISIS’s “incapacity to govern” and the total collapse of water supply, electricity, and schools, and ultimately population under its rule.4 “Explanations” that refer to resources and power are ultimately circular. The fact that the movement has been able to attract the apparent support, or acquiescence, of the local population, and control territory, local government revenue, oil, historical sites, and military bases, has been a result of the movement’s success and its monopoly of the insurgency. It is not a cause of it.

In ISIS: The State of Terror, Stern and Berger provide a fascinating analysis of the movement’s use of video and social media. They have tracked individual Twitter accounts, showing how users kept changing their Twitter handles, piggybacked on the World Cup by inserting images of beheadings into the soccer chat, and created new apps and automated bots to boost their numbers. Stern and Berger show that at least 45,000 pro-movement accounts were online in late 2014, and describe how their users attempted to circumvent Twitter administrators by changing their profile pictures from the movement’s flags to kittens. But this simply raises the more fundamental question of why the movement’s ideology and actions—however slickly produced and communicated—have had popular appeal in the first place.

Nor have there been any more satisfying explanations of what draws the 20,000 foreign fighters who have joined the movement. At first, the large number who came from Britain were blamed on the British government having made insufficient effort to assimilate immigrant communities; then France’s were blamed on the government pushing too hard for assimilation. But in truth, these new foreign fighters seemed to sprout from every conceivable political or economic system. They came from very poor countries (Yemen and Afghanistan) and from the wealthiest countries in the world (Norway and Qatar). Analysts who have argued that foreign fighters are created by social exclusion, poverty, or inequality should acknowledge that they emerge as much from the social democracies of Scandinavia as from monarchies (a thousand from Morocco), military states (Egypt), authoritarian democracies (Turkey), and liberal democracies (Canada). It didn’t seem to matter whether a government had freed thousands of Islamists (Iraq), or locked them up (Egypt), whether it refused to allow an Islamist party to win an election (Algeria) or allowed an Islamist party to be elected. Tunisia, which had the most successful transition from the Arab Spring to an elected Islamist government, nevertheless produced more foreign fighters than any other country.

Nor was the surge in foreign fighters driven by some recent change in domestic politics or in Islam. Nothing fundamental had shifted in the background of culture or religious belief between 2012, when there were almost none of these foreign fighters in Iraq, and 2014, when there were 20,000. The only change is that there was suddenly a territory available to attract and house them. If the movement had not seized Raqqa and Mosul, many of these men might well have simply continued to live out their lives with varying degrees of strain—as Normandy dairy farmers or council employees in Cardiff. We are left again with tautology—ISIS exists because it can exist—they are there because they’re there.

Finally, a year ago, it seemed plausible to attach much of the blame for the rise of the movement to former Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki’s disastrous administration of Iraq. No longer. Over the last year, a new, more constructive, moderate, and inclusive leader, Haider al-Abadi, has been appointed prime minister; the Iraqi army has been restructured under a new Sunni minister of defense; the old generals have been removed; and foreign governments have competed to provide equipment and training. Some three thousand US advisers and trainers have appeared in Iraq. Formidable air strikes and detailed surveillance have been provided by the United States, the United Kingdom, and others. The Iranian Quds force, the Gulf states, and the Kurdish Peshmerga have joined the fight on the ground.

For all these reasons the movement was expected to be driven back and lose Mosul in 2015. Instead, in May, it captured Palmyra in Syria and—almost simultaneously—Ramadi, three hundred miles away in Iraq. In Ramadi, three hundred ISIS fighters drove out thousands of trained and heavily equipped Iraqi soldiers. The US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter observed:

The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight.
The movement now controls a “terrorist state” far more extensive and far more developed than anything that George W. Bush evoked at the height of the “Global War on Terror.” Then, the possibility of Sunni extremists taking over the Iraqi province of Anbar was used to justify a surge of 170,000 US troops and the expenditure of over $100 billion a year. Now, years after the surge, ISIS controls not only Anbar, but also Mosul and half of the territory of Syria. Its affiliates control large swaths of northern Nigeria and significant areas of Libya. Hundreds of thousands have now been killed and millions displaced; horrors unimaginable even to the Taliban—among them the reintroduction of forcible rape of minors and slavery—have been legitimized. And this catastrophe has not only dissolved the borders between Syria and Iraq, but provoked the forces that now fight the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen.

The clearest evidence that we do not understand this phenomenon is our consistent inability to predict—still less control—these developments. Who predicted that Zarqawi would grow in strength after the US destroyed his training camps in 2001? It seemed unlikely to almost everyone that the movement would regroup so quickly after his death in 2006, or again after the surge in 2007. We now know more and more facts about the movement and its members, but this did not prevent most analysts from believing as recently as two months ago that the defeats in Kobane and Tikrit had tipped the scales against the movement, and that it was unlikely to take Ramadi. We are missing something.

Part of the problem may be that commentators still prefer to focus on political, financial, and physical explanations, such as anti-Sunni discrimination, corruption, lack of government services in captured territories, and ISIS’s use of violence. Western audiences are, therefore, rarely forced to focus on ISIS’s bewildering ideological appeal. I was surprised when I saw that even a Syrian opponent of ISIS was deeply moved by a video showing how ISIS destroyed the “Sykes-Picot border” between Iraq and Syria, established since 1916, and how it went on to reunite divided tribes. I was intrigued by the condemnation issued by Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar—one of the most revered Sunni clerics in the world: “This group is Satanic—they should have their limbs amputated or they should be crucified.” I was taken aback by bin Laden’s elegy for Zarqawi: his “story will live forever with the stories of the nobles…. Even if we lost one of our greatest knights and princes, we are happy that we have found a symbol….”

But the “ideology” of ISIS is also an insufficient explanation. Al-Qaeda understood better than anyone the peculiar blend of Koranic verses, Arab nationalism, crusader history, poetic reference, sentimentalism, and horror that can animate and sustain such movements. But even its leaders thought that Zarqawi’s particular approach was irrational, culturally inappropriate, and unappealing. In 2005, for example, al-Qaeda leaders sent messages advising Zarqawi to stop publicizing his horrors. They used modern strategy jargon—“more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media”—and told him that the “lesson” of Afghanistan was that the Taliban had lost because they had relied—like Zarqawi—on too narrow a sectarian base. And the al-Qaeda leaders were not the only Salafi jihadists who assumed that their core supporters preferred serious religious teachings to snuff videos (just as al-Tayeb apparently assumed that an Islamist movement would not burn a Sunni Arab pilot alive in a cage).

Much of what ISIS has done clearly contradicts the moral intuitions and principles of many of its supporters. And we sense—through Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s careful interviews—that its supporters are at least partially aware of this contradiction. Again, we can list the different external groups that have provided funding and support to ISIS. But there are no logical connections of ideology, identity, or interests that should link Iran, the Taliban, and the Baathists to one another or to ISIS. Rather, each case suggests that institutions that are starkly divided in theology, politics, and culture perpetually improvise lethal and even self-defeating partnerships of convenience.

The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.

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