Friday, July 22, 2016

Sunday, July 17, 2016

ISIS: The Durability of Chaos

Scott Atran NY Review of Books

Empty beach chairs on the Promenade des Anglais, a day after the Bastille Day attack, Nice, France, July 15
David Ramos/Getty Images
Empty beach chairs on the Promenade des Anglais, a day after the Bastille Day attack, Nice, France, July 15
Mass murder has again been visited upon France and shaken the world. Again ISIS has claimed credit, though this time the link to the group seems confusingly ambiguous, feeding new fears in the West about random violence by alienated or radicalized Muslims anywhere. It raises the urgent questions: What does the attack tell us about the changing face of jihadist violence today? And how might our own response, in turn, be contributing to it?

The local driver of the truck that mowed down at least eighty-four people, including ten children, and wounded more than two hundred, on the Nice waterfront Thursday was a Tunisian citizen residing in France. He had a police record for road rage and wife beating, but was not on a terrorism watch list and had no known jihadi affiliations. Yet supporters of the Islamic State immediately celebrated his actions on social media, and French President François Hollande directly linked the attack to France’s war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

And on Saturday, the ISIS media outlet Amaq formally claimed the Nice truck driver as “one of its soldiers” who answered the call to kill anyone from a country in the coalition against it. Such formal claims have, until now, never been merely opportunistic but refer to those who have either sworn allegiance to ISIS (like the Orlando shooter) or have actually been involved in an ISIS plot (like the Paris and Brussels attackers).

All of this suggests that trying to pin down a direct ISIS connection—while ramping up operations against ISIS in Syria and Iraq—may be missing the point. In Western political circles as with the Islamic State, and in the minds of their publics, the connection already is real, whatever actual facts may emerge. As a result, suspicion that any disgruntled Muslim is a possible terrorist-in-the-making will continue to make headway among non-Muslims while further disgruntling Muslims, just as ISIS wants. As my and my colleagues’ field research in Europe has shown, the growing stigmatization of European Muslims, who are in fact overwhelmingly peaceful, has effects of its own; even as Western leaders talk of unity and resolve in the face of such an attack, they risk undermining the authority and legitimacy of their own governments in the eyes of those who are most vulnerable to radicalization.

Others, noting that the recent attacks in France and around the world have coincided with large territorial losses for ISIS in Iraq and Syria, suggest that, as Secretary of State John Kerry put it at the end of June, the group is “desperate” because “they know they are losing.” Indeed, in the last eighteen months ISIS has lost more than one-fourth of the territory it seized, while the Pentagon estimates that the group’s foreign forces have decreased by about one-third, to 20,000 fighters, since coalition bombing began in August 2014. But this too misses some larger truths about ISIS and its long-term ability to inspire followers in Europe and the West.

Another frequently heard view is that such attacks are nihilist actions by detached individuals who simply want to wreck society because they feel society has wrecked their own lives. This assumption ignores growing evidence that attacks like what occurred in Nice are almost always perceived by those who carry them out and who admire them as acts of personal redemption and collective salvation in the service of a world revolution. Again and again, we heard, among those who have been susceptible to ISIS’s message, that realizing something close to true justice on Earth, and a right to enter Paradise in the effort to achieve that, can only come “by the sword” and “under the sword.”

To begin with, that such a horrific, large-scale mass killing was carried out by one person, with little apparent direct support—unlike the previous Paris attacks—may not be as anomalous as it appears. Nor is it necessarily of recent derivation. As long ago as September 2014, at a time when ISIS was still gaining territory, ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani urged supporters around the world to “kill in any manner,” including “running him over with your vehicle,” any “disbelieving American or European—especially the spiteful and filthy French, or… the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State.”

Such statements, in turn, reflect ISIS’s longtime aim of creating chaos among the civilian populations of its enemies, as outlined in the 2004 jihadi tract “The Management of Savagery/Chaos,” Idarat at-Tawahoush, a crucial source of ISIS ideology. According to this manual, acts of daring sacrificial violence—whether by individuals or small groups—can be used to undermine faith in the ability of governments in the West and the Middle East to provide security for their peoples, and to polarize Muslim and non-Muslims, or what ISIS regards as true believers and infidels. Amplified through the media, these attacks become an effective way to publicize, and possibly propagate, revolutionary change of the political, social, and moral order.

Rather than reflecting a movement in decline, then, the Nice attack might be better understood as a recalibration of long-endorsed tactics in the service of a constant, overriding strategy of world revolution. Even if ISIS loses all of its territory in Syria and Iraq, the global jihadi archipelago could continue to expand if the social and political conditions that have led to its emergence continue to persist.

Among the social conditions that have contributed to ISIS’s relative strength in France, in particular, has been its ability to connect with young men from lower socio-economic immigrant backgrounds, who have been marginalized in French society (whereas female recruits tend to be even younger but from higher socio-economic strata). France’s large Muslim underclass, from which ISIS has recruited so effectively, has long been overrepresented in French prisons (only 7 to 8 percent of France’s population is Muslim, whereas 60 to 70 percent of France’s prison population is Muslim); while the increasingly aggressive profiling and policing of the Muslim population at large by the French government has enhanced a sense of rejection and exclusion within the Muslim community, where discontent can develop into something more radical, slowly or quickly. With his background in low-level crime, the French-Tunisian attacker in Nice, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, fits the French public perception of an ISIS sympathizer whether or not actually true.

Serious jihadi involvement with petty criminal networks began after the September 11 attacks as an unintended consequence of the ability of the United States and allies to cut off the flow of funding to suspect groups, especially through Islamic charities. So al-Qaeda and others began looking for funding and arms in criminal networks instead. And in these networks there were large numbers of marginalized immigrant youth, especially in France. Many of them really didn’t want to be criminals and then the jihadists came along and said to them: “look what this sick, nihilist society has done to you, but you can turn the tables be following God, redeem yourselves, save others and you can do this best by using the skills and knowledge of the underworld against the society that forced you to suffer there.”  

Meanwhile, as we continue to fight ISIS on the battlefield, we may overlook the extent to which it has been able to attract recruits amid military defeat in the past and already appears to be conditioning its supporters for such an outcome in Iraq and Syria. In May of this year, al-Adnani said in an audio message: “Were we defeated when we lost the cities in Iraq and were in the desert without any city or land [during the US-led Iraqi war surge of 2007–2008]? And would we be defeated if you were to take Mosul, Sirte, or Raqqa [primary ISIS strongholds in Iraq, Libya and Syria]? Certainly not! Defeat is the loss of will and desire to fight.” Adnani went on to call again for acts by lone individuals in Europe and the US: “the smallest action you do in their heartland is better and more enduring for us than what you would if you were with us [in Syria and Iraq]… we wish we were in your place to punish the Crusaders day and night.”

In fact, during the 2007–2008 Iraqi surge, before it became a self-declared Caliphate, ISIS lost nearly all the territory it had held, up to three-fourths of its foot soldiers, and about a dozen “high-value” members of its leadership each month for fifteen consecutive months. Nonetheless, its diffuse religious, political, military, and economic organization (including payoffs to martyrs’ families) continued to function in fairly orderly fashion. Then, at the end of 2011, the US withdrew, leaving the fate of Iraq’s Arab Sunni to a corrupt, rapacious, and oppressive Shia government while doing nothing to stop the Assad’s Shia-allied Alawite regime from massacring Arab Sunni in Syria. Thus, as Syria descended into civil war in 2011–2013, ISIS’s highly adaptable and resilient consortium of local jihadi leaders and ex-Baathist military and intelligence officials (many of whom had formed strong links in US military detention centers in Iraq) was well-prepared to take advantage of the chaos there. When the group stormed back into Iraq, it was initially welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Arab Sunni as “The Revolution” (Al-Thawra).

What seems increasingly clear, both in its earlier rise and in its current response to the coalition offensive, is that ISIS has created a surprisingly durable and seductive ideology. The mainly young people who volunteer to fight for ISIS unto death often express a joy that comes from binding with comrades in a glorious cause—involving great shared risk and shedding of blood, which has always been the strongest glue in war—as well as a joy that comes from the satiation of anger and the gratification of revenge (whose sweetness, says science, can be experienced by brain and body much like other forms of happiness). At least for hardcore ISIS adherents, the more the coalition squeezes the more determined the resistance.

We witnessed this in our recent work on the frontlines in Iraq, where we interviewed combatants near the village of Kudilah, site of the very first battle in the ongoing offensive to ultimately retake Mosul. At Kudilah, some ninety ISIS fighters with no heavy weaponry managed to prevent a sustained advance by more than five hundred coalition forces of Arab Sunni militia, Iraqi army, and Kurdish Peshmerga, aided by US and German advisers and repeated air strikes. This, despite the fact (according to Peshmerga leaders) that more than fifty ISIS fighters were killed in the battle, including a score of inghamasi (“those who dive in deep,” suicide attackers trained for piercing enemy positions and for covering retreat). Many who fought in the battle, including some who had been fighting in various wars since the 1960s, told us this was the fiercest combat of their lives.

According to both the ISIS media outlet Amaq and to leaders of the coalition forces, there has been a notable increase in ISIS suicide attacks in recent battles, the most feared attacks of all, which many in ISIS (especially among the foreign fighters) long to do: not out of desperation but in hope of contributing by their sacrifice to eventual victory. The inghamasi war cry on the battlefield is: “The Islamic State is enduring and expanding!” (Ad-Dawla al-Islamiyah baqiyah wa tatamaddad!). In our experiments, coalition combatants considered ISIS fighters to have decidedly inferior physical means, but vastly superior fighting spirit to that of US, French, Arab Sunni militia, or Iraqi army forces.

In his recent comments, Secretary Kerry was echoing a view by leaders and the press around the world that ISIS has been “running scared.” Such assertions are not new. Ever since 9/11 we have been told that mass attacks on civilians—or “soft targets” as officials like to refer to them, as opposed to “hard” military targets—are sure signs that those behind the attacks are running scared.

Are we again dangerously underestimating ISIS’s will to fight, and its ability to endure and expand? Although military defeat in Iraq, Syria, and Libya could help make it more difficult for the group to recruit, we will not be able to defeat ISIS itself until we find a way to reconnect the neighborhoods, online communities, and other particularly susceptible social and political settings where attacks like what occurred in Nice continue to find inspiration and support.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016


Polling gives a dark forecast for Iranian president Hassan Rouhani


Rouhani is losing ground as his fundamentalists opponents push slogans oddly similar to those of Donald Trump and the Brexiteers 

The latest poll from IranPoll, the Canadian outfit linked to Maryland University, is bad news for president Hassan Rouhani. Just under three quarters – 74% - of Iranians surveyed on 17-27 June say there has been no improvement in the economy as a result of last year’s nuclear agreement with world powers. With a presidential election looming next year, probably in June, Rouhani’s lead over possible challenger Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former ‘principle-ist’ (or fundamentalist) president, has narrowed to eight percentage points from 27 points in May 2015.

Economic growth in the Iranian year ending in March was far smaller than expected. A leading Iranian business journalist told me he thought it had been 0.9% at best. The government anticipates 3.9% growth in the current year. This improvement will come from a doubling of oil exports since sanctions eased in February, but it also reflects the government loosening monetary and fiscal discipline, stimulating economic activity at the risk of higher inflation.

But how widely will any benefits of growth be distributed? Back in March the state’s statistical centre reported poverty and inequality had increased in the previous 12 months.

And poorer Iranians are the target group for Rouhani’s principle-ist opponents. The recent ‘pay cheque scandal’ played into their hands to such an extent that many in Tehran believe principle-ists not only publicised the details of lucrative pay and bonuses enjoyed by leading executives but unearthed them in the first place.

The government’s sacking at the end of June of four bosses of state banks was unprecedented. It followed a cabinet meeting where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, told ministers that that “astronomical salaries” were “an attack on our values” and demanded the matter be “seriously followed up and the people informed of the results”.

Among those sacked was the head of Refah Bank, whose leaked pay cheque had revealed a monthly income in salary and bonuses of 240 million tomans [$78,000], far above the basic level for workers of 850,000 [$276] per month.

Principle-ists have been showing nostalgia not just for the egalitarianism of the 1979 Revolution and the noble sacrifices of the 1980-88 war with Iraq but for the landslide election victory won by Ahmadinejad in 2005 on the slogan of ‘putting the oil money on the sofreh’ (the dining mat used by poorer Iranians). Hence the value of exposing rewards enjoyed by technocrats often associated in the public mind with Rouhani and his ally, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Memories can be short. “While corruption always existed,” the business journalist told me, “it probably worsened under Ahmadinejad as he made an attempt to centralise power and reduced oversight of the government by the majles [parliament] and other bodies.” Ahmadinejad’s spending policies – including cheap loans – also left the banking sector with a massive burden of non-performing loans.

Khamenei has a sharp memory, however, and would be reluctant to see the return of Ahmadinejad, who in his second term, after 2009, challenged the leader’s authority several times. Ahmadinejad’s deputy, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, was barred from the 2013 presidential poll by the watchdog Guardian Council, six of whose 12 members are appointed by Khamenei, and council might well also bar Ahmadinejad next year.

A possible alternative to Ahmadinejad might be Qassem Soleimani, commander of al-Quds brigade, the overseas arm of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), who has enjoyed a strong public profile since 2014, especially in organising the military campaign against Daesh, the so-called Islamic State group, in neighbouring Iraq.

But Saeid Golkar, lecturer at Northwestern University in the United States and senior fellow at Chicago Council on Global Affairs, believes the ‘pay cheque scandal’ may have indirectly revealed another potential ‘principle-ist’ contender in Parviz Fattah, head of the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee.

“There are strong [popular] feelings against what is seen as corruption,” Golkar told me. “That’s why Fattah put his pay cheque online, to show he was the people’s man and receiving a monthly net income of 7.34 million tomans [$2380], far less than many senior managers. Like Ahmadinejad, he has a simple life.”

Fattah also enjoys good links to the IRGC as former director of Bonyad Taavon Sepah, the IRGC charitable foundation, and as a former deputy head of Khatam-ol Anbia, the Guards’ construction arm. He has a ready-made constituency among the 5 million families supported by the Imam Khomeini committee.

Golkar points out that principle-ist publications are putting pictures of Fattah alongside those of Ebrahim Raeisi, whom Khamenei appointed in March as chairman of Astan Quds Razavi, the foundation that manages the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad.

“Recently, in Mashhad, in the shrine and in the seminary, they are calling Raeisi an ayatollah,” Golkar said. “Ayatollah Khamenei has been reshuffling the guard, also in late June appointing Major-General Mohammad Baghari [an IRGC stalwart] as head of the general military command instead of [Hassan] Firouzabadi. If you put these signs together, Ayatollah Khamenei is thinking seriously about the future.”

Rouhani’s close relationship with Khamenei was crucial to the acceptance of the nuclear agreement in the face of strong criticisms. But the lack of progress in easing sanctions, reinforced by the recent House of Representatives vote for legislation that would block sales by Boeing and Airbus aircraft to Iran, are reinforcing the principle-ists narrative that the US is endemically hostile.

While Khamanei has said Tehran won’t renege as long as Washington doesn’t, both those who accepted the deal as a positive step and those who did so reluctantly as a ‘poisoned chalice’ are losing enthusiasm. The political factions in Iran may be shifting again, making Rouhani vulnerable.

The president moved quickly after Khamenei’s intervention in the pay cheque scandal, but Golkar is not convinced the president understands the size of the challenge he faces: “His focus is on the middle class and big cities. Poorer people, and those in rural areas, are saying, ‘Why should I vote for Rouhani, he’s a technocrat? These people are getting 240 million tomans a month and I’m on just 850,000’.”

The populism of the Iranian principle-ists shows striking similarities with populism elsewhere. It is critical of bankers, often anti-intellectual, and pushes a notion of national control against an international, or even global, elite. Its idea of nation is not just nostalgic but hostile to diversity, and extols the values of supposed ‘simplicity’ against the wicked ways of the big city – praising the morality police acting against ‘bad hijab’ is a topical example.

Such politics is hardly new, nor peculiar to Iran. Philip Mansel, the British historian, has long drawn attention to the fragility of cosmopolitan cities, which he has again illustrated in his compelling recent book on Aleppo, “Syria’s great merchant city”, now largely reduced to rubble after centuries of diversity and success based on trade.

Mansel recently told me that the destruction of Aleppo resulted from “40 years of dictatorship”, international intrigue and “the conflicts devastating the entire Muslim world from Morocco to Malaya”. But he said it also had roots in increasing poverty in the countryside due in part to climate change and desertification.

Mansel argues a hostility to urban sophistication goes back to antiquity. “In the Old Testament, there were denunciations of Babylon,” he told me. “In French history it was the provincials devastating Paris in 1848 or 1871. More generally, poorer people dependent on agriculture have been jealous of the capital city although it had often benefited them. It happened in the Lebanese civil war, people from the mountains from poorer areas thinking they’d been snubbed by Beirut.”

Mansel believes the demise of Smyrna, Alexandria and partly Beirut as multicultural centres – which he charted in his 2010 book, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe in the Mediterranean – could be repeated elsewhere. “Look what’s happening to London now with Brexit. The great dynamic, energetic, cosmopolitan London of the last few years might change. There are parallels with [Donald] Trump - one’s always been told there are two Americas, the coast and the hinterland.”

The Iranian principle-ists’ use of social media is probably still less important than networks based on work, mosque and the Basij. But they are well aware of the Internet’s potential – IranPoll found 42.8% of Iranians go online at least once a week “to become informed about the news”, up from 33.6% in May 2015 – and their style of operation clear shows parallels with the Brexit campaign. As Dhruva Jaishankar of Brookings India recently wrote, social media “rather than creating connections with people who possess differing views and ideologies, tends to reinforce prejudices … greater information has, rather counterintuitively, contributed to a ‘post-fact’ information environment ... populists are willing to cross the lines that mainstream parties have flirted with, becoming forces that the centre cannot hold.”

Such a perspective subverts common analysis of Iran and its politics.

“Categories of ‘reformist’ and ‘hardliner’ don’t work, this isn’t about democratisation,” says Golkar. “There are those who want to interact in foreign relations – Rouhani has spoken of the nuclear deal as a model for regional problems – and against them are ‘confrontationists’. They have different discourses on both the economy and international relations. The competition for the next presidential election and the next supreme leader will be between ‘interactionists’ and ‘confrontationists’.”

In the 2005 presidential election, Ahmadinejad not only promised to put oil revenue on the sofreh, he scorned the middle classes and intellectuals. After his election, better-off Tehranis made jokes about the president scorning his origins: there were problems with the quality of drinking water because Ahmadinejad had washed his socks in the reservoir.

Whereas his reformist predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, spoke in universities and international bodies of a “dialogue among civilisations”, Ahmadinejad made repeated provincial trips around Iran addressing huge crowds of people who felt neglected by central government. Those feelings of neglect are just as strong today – and president Rouhani has little time to address them.

Philip Mansel, Aleppo: the Rise and Fall of Syria’s Great Merchant City, IB Tauris 2016. The Tehran Bureau is an independent media organisation, hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau

Sunday, July 10, 2016

A FIRE BELL IN THE NIGHT 2016
 
 
When Black men or women are no longer afraid of the white man, the first response of the white man is to immediately kill them as in Louisiana and Minnesota. Fear of a slave revolt is now fear of the black race holding a gun. "Black Lives Matter" is a serious threat to White Supremacy and like it or not the Police are hired guns to control the black race. Either WE ALL take a step back and be reasonable or we will all end up hiding in a cold wet basement starving and waiting to die! Think not? Look at Syria, Iraq, and Sudan.

Monday, July 04, 2016

MOSCOW — Wassyl Slipak, a baritone at the Paris Opera who became a folk hero in his native Ukraine for returning home to fight in his country’s war in the east, was killed by sniper fire on Wednesday near the town of Debaltseve. He was 41.
Mr. Slipak died around 6 a.m. after his position came under a surprise attack, said Artyom Skoropadsky, a spokesman for Right Sector, a nationalist paramilitary organization.
Mr. Slipak was born in the western city of Lviv on Dec. 20, 1974. A musical prodigy as a child, he rose quickly to fame performing in France in the late 1990s. By 2011, he was at the top of his field, winning the prize for best male performer at the Armel Opera Competition and Festival in Szeged, Hungary, for his rendering of the Toreador Song from the opera Carmen.
But after the war with Russian-backed separatists broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, he traded the stage for the trenches, carrying a belt-fed machine gun with other right-wing volunteers in Right Sector.
He adopted a traditional Ukrainian hairstyle, similar to a Mohawk, and served at various positions along the front line — a maze of trenches and minefields that surrounds separatist territory.
Mr. Slipak, who had won fame in France for his renditions of the aria of Mephistopheles from the opera “Faust,” adopted the nom de guerre Meph.
In an interview with Hromadske TV, a Ukrainian station, Mr. Slipak had said he was inspired to serve his country by the popular uprising on Maidan Square in Kiev, though he had been living in France since 1996.
“Ukraine can become a successful country and a major player on the political stage if we start heeding the voices of the people,” he said in the interview.
Right Sector, originally an umbrella organization of far-right groups, including some with neo-Nazi leanings, is vilified in Russia as a fascist organization. Right Sector denies it is neo-Nazi.
Euromaidan Press, a Ukrainian news website, quoting a field commander, said Mr. Slipak’s survivors included his parents and an older brother. A city spokesman in Lviv said Mr. Slipak would be buried at the historic Lychakiv Cemetery, which is reserved for notable local figures.
Mr. Skoropadsky said: “Ukraine this year celebrated 25 years of independence, but it was real independence only after the Maidan, when a real state started to form. Here we have an example of a person who left his career to fight. New heroes of the new Ukraine are being born.”
Mr. Slipak would sometimes sing for his fellow soldiers at the front, Mr. Skoropadsky said.
In the public television interview, Mr. Slipak is shown singing the Ukrainian folk song “Moon in the Sky” as he loads his gun, snapping bullets into the magazine in time with the music.

Rosewood