Tag Archives: Syria

News Flash–It’s a Global Jihad

Wondering whether we confront a global jihad, consider what nearly happened in Australia last week: Authorities there say that fifteen Islamic State operatives planned to kidnap and behead random Australians. Others were preparing to do the same to lawmakers and officials in Canberra.

Incredibly, at about that time, bipartisan majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate were authorizing President Obama to arm and train so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria. It’s as if the threat is just one jihadist franchise – albeit a particularly nasty one, namely the Islamic State back in the Levant.

If we are ever to succeed in defeating this enemy – and protect Americans and their friends from jihadists – we need to acknowledge the Free World is under assault globally. Pretending otherwise will just get more of us killed.

A Formula for Disaster

On their way out the door this week to hit the campaign trail full-time, lawmakers made a short detour: They approved President Obama’s plan to wage war in Syria.

Majorities in both houses of Congress bought the administration’s line that it can tell who are the “moderate” rebels there. We are assured that, if armed and trained by us, they can provide the “boots on the ground” in the fight against the Islamic State, so we won’t have to.

Unfortunately, virtually all such rebels are Islamists fighting alongside al Qaeda. Most have pledged loyalty to assorted global jihadists. They often lose, or surrender, weapons we give them. And training any actual “moderates” in immoderate Saudi Arabia is a formula for their radicalization and disaster.

And so is President Obama’s “strategy” more generally.

Senior Fellow Fred Fleitz: Syrian Rebels ‘Thoroughly Infiltrated by Islamists’

(Video can be viewed at Breitbart TV)

Former CIA analyst and current Lignet.com Chief Analyst, Fred Fleitz argued that reports that Steven Sotloff was sold to ISIS by Syrian rebels “[reflect] the reality that the Syrian rebels have been thoroughly infiltrated by Islamists” on Wednesday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on the Fox News Channel.

Fleitz said that while he hoped the reports were untrue, there are problems with the Syrian rebels, reporting “some of them recently had collaborated with ISIS to attack against the Syrian government. They’re really a mixed lot and it’s very dangerous for us to get too close to them until we know who we’re dealing with.”

He further stated “he [Obama] is trying to sugar-coat his conclusion that we cannot defeat ISIS without helping Assad. In my opinion, the president wrote off the Syrian rebels, and conceded the civil war to Assad years ago. Now I think trying to prop up the Syrian rebels is a worthy endeavor, but this will take a long time, but the president’s decision in Syria against ISIS has nothing to do with the rebels. He is simply trying to cover himself for an unfortunate consequence…I also think the president is trying to side-step the reality that there will have to be special forces, American and British, probably, to go into Syria. The Syrian rebels are not going to actually do that job.”

Originally published at Breitbart News

Think Tank Close to Obama Misses Mark on ISIS Strategy

The Center for American Progress, a think tank close to the Obama Administration, recently released a strategy proposal on how to defeat ISIS which contains numerous flaws that make it unworkable and ineffective in combating the threat from, and spread of, the Islamist terrorist organization. Not surprisingly, many of the themes addressed in the proposal meet the broad guidelines sketched out by President Obama in his ISIS policy speech yesterday.

The CAP strategy repeatedly emphasizes the goal being to “contain and degrade” ISIS. This is a rather ambiguous formulation that in the end frankly means nothing.

How can you “contain” an entity that is able to cull ideologically committed recruits from all parts of the world via the Internet? These recruits, after doing their “tours of duty” in either Iraq or Syria – having entered those countries through third-party states which sometimes leaves their trail untraceable – will also return to their home countries, having undergone further ideological indoctrination and military training.

They are capable of forming sleeper cells in their home countries and striking at strategically opportune times. This is not a problem that can be “contained.” Degrade is also a very ambiguous term. Does it mean to wear down ISIS until it is back at its former strength when it was only Al-Qaeda in Iraq?

The second flawed assumption is that U.S. military might alone could not defeat ISIS. ISIS is not a conventional terrorist organization any more. It has crossed the threshold from an elusive terrorist group that can successfully wage a guerilla war against the United States into having a standing, visible and recognizable force and institutions of state. As an aside, this emphatically does not mean that ISIS is a legitimate state or that it is no longer a terrorist organization. But it is a terrorist organization that has adopted the vestiges of statehood. Unlike Hezbollah, which has created a “state within a state” in Lebanon, making them harder to defeat at the hands of conventional military forces, ISIS is not secretive about its membership, and it does not coexist along with another state entity as Hezbollah does. Where ISIS rules, it is the State and the State is ISIS. States can be destroyed. Given that ISIS is engaging in conventional warfare tactics, it has made itself more vulnerable to far-superior U.S. military might.

The third flaw is the series of alliances this strategy proposes in defeating ISIS. It advocates cooperation with Turkey on defeating ISIS, yet Turkey has shifted its interests to align with Islamist terrorist groups. Turkey’s support for Hamas has drawn attention from the U.S. Congress. Turkey has even credibly been accused of facilitating, or at least permitting, the flow of ISIS fighters into Syria. Even if, viewed from Washington, Turkey’s security interests would be served by an alliance to eliminate ISIS, Turkey’s Islamist President Erdogan appears to have judged differently.

Moreover, the strategy proposes aiding and funding “Third-way Syrian opposition” groups like Harakat Hazzm and the Syrian Revolutionaries’ Front (SRF). The problem is that these “third-way” opposition groups, like Harakat Hazzm and the SRF, are Islamist groups themselves, or are at minimum, willing to ally with Islamist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra.

Another flaw the proposal makes is to advocate militarily supporting the Kurds via the Iraqi government. Supporting the Pesh Merga militarily and financially is sound policy which would go a long way to stopping ISIS in their tracks and rolling them back, and would obviate the need for U.S. ground troops to be deployed in Iraq.

However, if the assistance is made via the Iraqi government, it is unlikely that any of the assistance would be transferred to the Kurds. The Iraqi government, in coordination with Iran, continues to rely on Shi’a militias to fight ISIS. These militias maintain their own animosity towards Sunni and Kurdish forces.

Also importantly, the strategy does not consider to whom ISIS will lose ground once it is “contained and degraded,” and makes no contingencies for ensuring that such ground is not lost to state actors or non-state actors that are harmful to U.S. regional interests, like Iran and its Shi’a proxies operating in Iraq and Syria who are actually far more harmful to U.S. regional interests than ISIS, in the long run.

Attack ISIS in Syria Even If It Helps Assad

Three questions are being raised by pundits and politicians about how Iran and Syria’s Assad regime should figure into possible military action by the United States and its allies against ISIS — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIL and the Islamic State.

  • Is it a mistake to attack ISIS in Syria since ISIS is also an enemy of the Assad regime and such attacks may ensure Assad holds on to power?
  • Should the U.S. team up with the Assad regime to attack ISIS in Syria?
  • Should the U.S. work with Iran to destroy ISIS?

Some are arguing we should not bomb ISIS in Syria because that would strengthen Assad. Others argue since the ISIS threat is so dire, we should work with Assad to destroy it.

A few believe we should work with Iran against ISIS.

These difficult questions reflect how messy the situations in Iraq and Syria have become as a result of numerous policy mistakes by the United States and Europe over the last few years.

Doing anything to prop up the brutal Assad dictatorship is obviously an unpalatable course of action. Some experts have proposed clever ways to prevent the Syrian army from benefiting from U.S. airstrikes against ISIS in Syria by also bombing Syrian airfields and attacking the Syrian army and Iranian-backed militias to buy time to train and arm the moderate Syrian rebels of the Free Syrian Army — FSA.

Such proposals are fantasies. Attacking the Syrian army would get the United States into a war with Syria and put U.S. planes at risk of being shot down by Syrian air defenses. Moreover, the Free Syrian Army is badly outmatched by ISIS and the Syrian army. After withholding arms since 2011 from the FSA, attempting to arm and train these rebels now to make them a force capable of taking on ISIS and the Syrian army would take many months, assuming this is even possible.

The truth is the United States and Europe effectively conceded the Syrian civil war to Assad years ago. If the West had attacked Syrian forces in 2011 when they began their bloody crackdown against anti-government protesters or created humanitarian safe zones in Syria in 2011 or 2012, the Syrian rebels may have defeated the Assad regime before it was shored up by Iran and Russia.

Given the seriousness of the ISIS threat and the likelihood that Assad is not going to be defeated, attacking ISIS in Syria even though this may benefit the Assad government is the right move. However, the U.S. should not do anything to further legitimize Assad by allying with him to defeat ISIS. We should instead warn Damascus that we will retaliate against any Syrian government attacks on Western aircraft. I believe the Assad government probably would go along with this.

There is a temptation to team up with Iran to combat ISIS.

I suspect senior Obama officials are already exploring this idea with Iranian diplomats on the margins of ongoing talks on Iran’s nuclear program. This would be a serious mistake. Iran bears significant responsibility for the outbreak of sectarian tensions in Iraq since 2011 due to its strong support for the Maliki government and by its training of Shiite militias that have massacred Iraqi Sunnis. America’s policy should be reduce Iran’s influence in Iraq and Syria and do nothing to increase its influence.

To defeat the ISIS terrorist army, the United States will need to make some difficult decisions that will have significant downsides. Boosting Assad by attacking ISIS in Syria is a price the U.S. and its allies should be prepared to pay given the situation on the ground in Syria and American and regional security interests.

That is as far as we should go.

The U.S. and its allies should not cooperate with the Syrian or Iranian government to defeat ISIS because of the destabilizing impact of such actions and to avoid legitimizing these regimes.

Why the Yazidis?

There are those in the policy community who seem a little out of sorts because the President has (after great delay, but with positive public support) intervened in a limited way on behalf of the Yazidis in Iraq, when a more robust intervention has been denied in Syria. One piece expressed a belief that the West “would not lift a finger” to help mainstream Muslim, either Sunni or Shia, suffering.

This is particularly ironic, since it ignores the intervention in Libya, where we assisted rebels- including those with ties to Al Qaeda- with overthrowing Qaddafi.  Further it ignores the lesson which large swathes of the American public took away from the Libyan intervention, which was that the present American leadership remains pathologically incapable of making a distinction between Islamist groups with ties to terrorism and secular rebels worthy of support. And this failing ultimately results in a slide into chaos which gets Americans killed (Exhibit A: Benghazi).

Of course, It’s worth pointing out that had the supporters of President Obama’s request to intervene in Syria not placed all of their eggs in the basket of a certain young Syrian analyst with a tendency to inflate both the level of moderation among the Syrian rebels and her own credentials, we’d almost certainly have intervened in that civil war as well, to the advantage of Sunni Islamist groups who have far more in common with ISIS then they do with the desperate Yazidis.

It is the false hope of the perpetually “Free Syrian Army”, a hypothetically moderate secular force which does not exist outside the minds of journalists and a few Syrian interventionists, that has kept any consideration of a third option, such as helping the Kurds in Syria carve out an autonomous area where they, and other minorities might be safe, from being discussed by any but a tiny minority of analysts (Dr. Walid Phares comes to mind.)

It is not surprising that a long history of dealing with the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq- all the way back to the original Gulf War- has left American military veterans impressed with both the nationalism, and fighting ability of the Kurds, and that the broader American public takes it cues from this support.

To say that we have failed to support Sunni or Shia in Syria or Iraq because we can’t distinguish “whose who” is flippant.  The reality is that the pro-interventionist crowd has egregiously  squandered the good nature of the American people by repeatedly invoking moderation on behalf of ultimately bad actors. Because of this it was only in a case as cut and dried as the Yazidis, and on behalf of a group as historically respected by Americans as the Kurds, that the public demanded an intervention, forcing the same administration which was so eager to support the Al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Fighting Group, or the Syrian Islamic Front, to act.

The Land of Coup d’Etat

Iraq is not a country that was made through history or by the unification of a group of peoples.

The facts are that the Middle East of today was mapped out and subdivided by the British intelligence office after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The subdivision was made on behalf of the Arabs who had proven loyal to the British Empire. Iraq was made of bits and pieces of the lands that the British could cut away to make a country for the Sunni Hashemite tribal leader Ibn Ghazi who became the first king of Iraq.

Kurdistan was a piece of Iran, as the Kurds, the ancient Medes of Iranian origin, had for thousands of years been occupied by the Ottoman Turks. The Sunni part was a section of ancient Syria and the eastern part was taken from embattled Iran as Iran’s western border was the Tigris River. All this subdivision was done for the benefit of the British Empire, disregarding the interests of the people that they threw into one border.

Iraq was created in November of 1920. It was under  British control until 1932, but as soon as it became independent the government of King Ghazi suffered an attempted coup d’ etat by one of his own military officers in 1933. The instability of the country brought about the reoccupation of Iraq by the British government in 1941 to secure their interests in the oil fields. The British ended the occupation at the request of the new king in 1947.

In 1958, another Sunni general, Abd Al Ghasem, carried out a bloody coup against the young King Faisal and took over as the president of the new Republic of Iraq but lost his life in a third coup carried out by the Baathist Hassan Al Bakr in 1968, who in turn lost his presidency and his head in 1979 to Saddam Hussein, a younger and more ruthless leader of the brutal sect of the Baath party.

Knowing the history of Iraq’s Sunnis and the coups after coups against their own during the 83 years of their rule, how can anyone, let alone Maliki, be blamed for purging the military of Sunnis and the influence of the Baath Party that continues to be a threat?

The Sunnis have been in charge of Iraq from its inception, with a wealth of oil and gas and a small population that should have had the best of everything. But they have been corrupt plunderers of the wealth in absolute dictatorships who have not even gotten along with each other, let alone with the Shias, Kurds, and or the United States.

The Baath Party founders were Pan Arabists seeking unification of Syria and Iraq. The goal is to establish the Arab Empire or Khalifat of Shaam — their name in Arabic, the Islamic government of Iraq and Shaam, the name of the region after the Islamic military took over the lands in the seventh century.

Iraqis are a mismatched nation and do not have the patriotism that a nation should have. The Kurds have been Kurds for thousands of years but Iraq has existed for only nine decades.

The Sunnis have more loyalty to their, tribes, religion, and Arabism than to a country that was created recently by the imperialists who forced them to live with people they don’t like. Unless they are the ruling power, they will refuse to cooperate.

The Shi’ites have the city of Najaf, the center of Shiaism and are connected to the Iranian Shia power. They will only die for their corner of the country and only when the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who is Iranian, not Arab, issues the fatwa. The backing of the Iranian ruling clerics gives them enough confidence to stand on their own.

For centuries, the hierarchy of the Islamic world has been telling the people that Islam is where their loyalty should lie. Patriotism for the homeland among the Moslems, especially Arabs, is a sin. In the countries that the British intelligence created, there is no love of the homeland and therefore it is no surprise that the Iraqi soldiers fled from the scene.

It is unfortunate that the American foreign policy makers and media analysts have no knowledge of the history and culture of non-Western countries. Secretary Kerry should know the history of the land of the coup d’etat. He should know that there is no possibility of democratic coexistence in Iraq.

The responsibility for what is going on in Iraq can be traced directly back to the British government, not the United States.

ISIS-Not “Mafia Tactics”- Jihad

An article in yesterday’s Foreign Policy discusses the self-funding tactics of the ISIS, as it continues to wage its brutal assault in Iraq. Author Yochi Dreazen begins his piece by stating:

When fighters from the Islamic State of Syria and al-Sham (ISIS) stole tens of millions of dollars from a bank in Mosul earlier this year, it wasn’t simply a startling symbol of the collapse of Baghdad’s control over Iraq’s second-largest city. The brazen theft was instead a stark illustration of one of the most alarming aspects of ISIS’s rise: the group’s growing ability to fund its own operations through bank heists, extortion, kidnappings, and other tactics more commonly associated with the mob than with violent Islamist extremists.

Unfortunately, far from being unassociated with “Islamic extremists”, the “mafia” practices of ISIS can be construed as in line with Shariah adherent practices regarding Jihad.

There is ample jurisprudence regarding the disposition of the spoils of war. For example, Reliance of the Traveller by Ahmad ibn Naqib Al-Misri, which includes legal rulings for both the personal booty of fighters who have slain an enemy and may take what he possessed for themselves (Book O. Justice, O.10.2) and for the collective use of spoils of war in order to pay for items of importance for the cause of the Islamic state such as, “fortify[ing] defense on the frontiers, salaries for Islamic judges, muezzins, and the like:” (Book 0. Justice 0.10.3)

Likewise, the apparent surprise shown by some experts of “violent extremism” when ISIS does indeed spend substantial money and manpower on just these sorts of governance projects is a result of the general failure to comprehend how jihadist groups abide by Shariah obligations.

Returning to “Mafia” tactics, is kidnapping for ransom is absolutely permitted under the Shariah during jihad. Al-Misri notes (Book 0 Justice O.9.14),

“When an adult male is taken captive, the caliph considers the interests and decides between the prisoner’s death, slavery, release without paying anything or ransoming himself in exchange for money or for a Muslim captive held by the enemy.” (Emphasis added.)

There are likewise legal rulings that would support what could be viewed as the extortion of money, especially from Non-Muslims in the form of the mandatory jizya tax. Even extortion of funds from Muslims may be justified by ISIS, since money to support fighters of Jihad is a legitimate allocation for Zakat (mandatory tithing). Given that ISIS purports to be the legitimate Islamic rulers of the territory they hold, their collecting these funds would reasonably be expected. Obviously, for those who do not uphold ISIS’s status as a legitimate Islamic state, these demands would be seen as little more then theft.

Nor is extortion from other Muslims  to fund terrorist activities rare, or limited solely to Sunni Islamists. Hezbollah is well known for engaging in extortion of Lebanese Shia abroad in order to finance its efforts.

Far from being divorced from the belief system which ISIS seeks to impose, such acts as bank robbery, kidnapping and extortion can be legal justified in the furtherance of their jihad.