Tag: ISIS

The Lady Cops Of The Islamic State

As ISIS commands all women in its domains to veil their faces or face unspecified punishment, Kathy Gilsinan explores the role Iraqi Syrian women themselves are playing in enforcing the group’s fanatical dictates:

The al-Khansaa Brigade is ISIS’s all-female moral police, established in Raqqa soon after ISIS took over the city a few months ago. “We have established the brigade to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law,” Abu Ahmad, an ISIS official in Raqqa, told Syria Deeply’s Ahmad al-Bahri. Ahmad emphasized that the brigade has its own facilities to avoid mingling among men and women. “Jihad,” he told al-Bahri, “is not a man-only duty. Women must do their part as well.”

The institution of female enforcers for female morality makes a certain kind of sense if you take the prohibition against sexes mingling to its logical extreme. Still, ISIS in Raqqa may be the only jihadi group employing this kind of logic. In other jihadi groups, “it is men who enforce modesty in public,” explains Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on Islamist militancy affiliated with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, via email. Nor has the practice spread elsewhere in the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate. The al-Khansaa Brigade may be what Hegghammer calls a “short-lived stunt in a single city.”

Indeed, regional news sources suggest the brigade was designed to solve a specific problem: male anti-ISIS fighters disguising themselves in all-concealing feminine garb to pass through checkpoints. With male ISIS members reluctant to inspect under garments to verify the womanhood of the wearers, they got some women to do it.

You Can’t Believe Everything You Read About Iraq

A UN official who claimed that ISIS had ordered genital mutilation for all women and girls in Mosul appears to have been the victim of a hoax:

The story quickly began to go viral, racking up hundreds of shares on social media. Soon thereafter, however, journalists with contacts in Iraq began reporting that the story didn’t hold up. “My contacts in #Mosul have NOT heard that ‘Islamic State’ ordered FGM for all females in their city,” Jenan Moussa, a reporter with Al Anan TV tweet out. “Iraqi contacts say #Mosul story is fake,” echoed freelance writer Shaista Aziz, adding: “Iraqi contact on #FGM story: “ISIS are responsible for many horrors, this story is fake and plays to western audience emotions.’”

NPR’s Cairo bureau chief also claimed that the story was false, tweeting “#UN statement that #ISIS issued fatwa calling 4 FGM 4 girls is false residents of Mosul say including a doctor, journalist and tribal leader.” Not long after a version of a document in Arabic, bearing the black logo that ISIS has adopted, began circulating on Twitter. The document, those who shared it said, is a hoax and the basis for the United Nations’ claim.

That wasn’t the only inaccurate story to come out of the Islamic State. David Kenner highlights some others:

Last week — as the jihadist group’s very real campaign to force Christians to pay a tax levied on non-Muslims, convert to Islam, or face death reached fever pitch — multiple news outlets reported that the Islamic State had burned down the St. Ephrem’s Cathedral. There was just one problem:

The pictures published by news outlets and shared on social media of the supposed burning of the Syriac Catholic cathedral were from church burnings in Egypt or Syria. To this day, there has been no confirmation from anyone in Mosul that a cathedral was burned.

But the most spectacular story about the Islamic State relates to what would have been one of history’s most spectacular bank heists. Shortly after the group stormed Mosul, the provincial governor in the region told reporters that it had raided the city’s central bank, making off with more than $400 million, in addition to a “large quantity of gold bullion.” … There’s only one problem: The heist doesn’t appear to have happened.

The news that ISIS militants destroyed the tomb of the prophet Jonah, on the other hand, appears depressingly credible:

Residents said on Thursday that the militants first ordered everyone out of the Mosque of the Prophet Younis, or Jonah, then blew it up. … Several nearby houses were also damaged by the blast, said the residents, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared for their own safety. The residents told AP that the militants claimed the mosque had become a place for apostasy, not prayer. The extremists also blew up another place of worship nearby on Thursday, the Imam Aoun Bin al-Hassan mosque, they said.

Violence Triumphs Over Pluralism

That’s the essence of Shadi Hamid’s take on the aftermath of the Arab uprisings and the rise of armed Islamist groups throughout the Middle East:

The July 3, 2013 coup in Egypt has had a chilling effect beyond the country’s borders, strengthening one particular narrative among both regimes and their opposition: that the only currency worth caring about is force. With the relative decline (for now) of the Muslim Brotherhood and other mainstream Islamist groups that had made their peace with parliamentary politics, radicals and extremists have quickly moved to fill the vacuum. They do not counsel patience. They tell followers and fence-sitters that there is little need to wait 20, 30, or 80 years for the Islamic State, or something like it. The Islamic State can be realized now through brute, unyielding violence. Within the varied, often fractious world of political Islam, the radicals remain a minority, but their numbers belie an outsized influence.

We might not like to admit it, but violence can, and often does, “work” in today’s Middle East. This is not just a reference to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but also to less extreme militant groups that control territory throughout Syria, providing security and social services to local populations. From Libya to Palestine to parts of the Egyptian Sinai, armed—and increasingly hard-line—Islamist groups are making significant inroads.

William Dalrymple argues that the rise of ISIS and its persecution of Christians bode ill for secularism in the Arab world:

Certainly since the 19th century Christian Arabs have played a vital role in defining a secular Arab cultural identity. It is no coincidence that most of the founders of secular Arab nationalism were men like Michel Aflaq – the Greek Orthodox Christian from Damascus who, with other Syrian students freshly returned from the Sorbonne, founded the Ba’ath party in the 1940s – or Faris al-Khoury, Syria’s only Christian prime minister. Then there were intellectuals like the Palestinian George Antonius, who in 1938 wrote in The Arab Awakening of the crucial role Christians played in reviving Arab literature and the arts after their long slumber under Ottoman rule.

If the Islamic state proclaimed by Isis turns into a permanent, Christian-free zone, it could signal the demise not just of an important part of the Arab Christian realm but also of the secular Arab nationalism Christians helped create.

Relatedly, noting the unusually cold shoulder Hamas has gotten from some Arab states during the Gaza war, Juan Cole attributes this to the region’s recent political realignment around the struggle between states and Islamist non-state actors:

[Y]ou have a bloc of nationalist states– Egypt, Jordan, and Syria — facing off against movements of political Islam, and Hamas has to be counted among the latter. (Iraq, ruled by parties of Shiite political Islam, is trying to join the nationalists in the region in alliance against the “Islamic State”). It is therefore difficult for these states to intervene on behalf of Hamas, since they want the organization, and the whole tendency to political Islam, to drop dead. …

Even the so-called “Islamic State” turns out to be useless to Hamas. Its leadership says that it has to tackle the “hypocrites” among the Muslims before turning to “the Jews.” This is a reference to early Islam. When the Prophet Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina, most people in the latter city came to embrace Islam, even if only pro forma. City notables who outwardly had become Muslims but inwardly resented and tried to undermine the Prophet, were termed “hypocrites” or “those in whose hearts there is a sickness”. The so-called Islamic State views all other Muslims this way. So the struggle between nationalism and political Islam has neutralized most of the Middle East if it hasn’t made them de facto allies of Israel.

The Islamic State In Iraq And Only Iraq

Jacob Siegel casts doubt on ISIS’s ability to extend the reach of its “caliphate” beyond Iraq, given that its Sunni rebel allies there don’t share its objective of world conquest:

There is a paradox to ISIS’s power. The caliphate has grown to rival al Qaeda for prestige in the global jihad movement but it becomes clearer with every day that, within Iraq, the Islamic State doesn’t extend very far outside of Mosul. As an attacking force, ISIS might be the most powerful army in Iraq, able to ambush the army in lightning assaults that have either scattered or slaughtered government and militia soldiers. But the skills and composition that have led to ISIS successes on the battlefield haven’t set them up to rule in any more than a handful of cities. They are too small to impose their authority over extended territory. For that they rely on their allies, using them until the day they are no longer needed, just as they, in turn, are being used.

ISIS’s victories and social media theatrics have won it a flock of Internet supporters and death-seeking recruits, but most of its potential followers in Iraq aren’t looking online to choose a cause, they take orders from tribal leaders or other local authorities.

Likewise, Yezid Sayigh contends that “in fact ISIS is following a well-worn path for taking power and consolidating it in the limited geographical space of a single nation-state where its true social base lies”:

To legitimize itself ideologically and acquire leverage over its partners and competitors, ISIS calls Muslims to jihad, labels western governments “crusaders,” and pledges to free Palestine. This again mimics Saddam, who appealed to pan-Arabism and the Gulf monarchies to support his war against revolutionary Islamist Iran in 1980, and in 1990 linked his invasion of Kuwait to the liberation of Palestine and evoked Islamic solidarity by having “Allahu Akbar” inscribed on the national flag.

But Saddam remained an Iraqi leader in the Iraqi setting, benefitting from the country’s oil wealth to cement his rule internally but remaining bound by its limitations, especially its deep social cleavages and weak national identity. ISIS is even more dependent than he was on its societal balances and alliances within the narrower domestic demographic base of the Arab Sunnis of Iraq, a vulnerability that is not seriously compensated by its partial extension into Syria.

Strategic Countertrolling

The State Department is hip to the fact that jihadists are using social media to propagandize and recruit supporters, and its $5 million Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications is devoted to fighting back. The trouble, as Jacob Silverman reveals, is that they’re not very good at it:

The way the program works is fairly simple: The State Department’s analysts follow online chatter about the latest ISIL victory or news of a recent al-Shabaab massacre in Kenya, and then they try to insert themselves into the conversation. The idea is less to sway committed terrorists than to persuade fence-sitters not to join up or provide material support.

But State’s messages usually arrive with all the grace of someone’s dad showing up at a college party. The posts tend to be blunt, adversarial, and plagued by poor Photoshop work.

Typically, “Think Again Turn Away,” as the CSCC’s English-language Twitter account calls itself, delivers hectoring messages written in the schoolmarmish tone of Reagan-era “Just Say No” commercials – only this time it is terrorism, not drugs, they’re trying to scare everyone away from. And because the government’s tweeting is so flat and self-serious, few people—even those most sympathetic to its messaging—are motivated to share the CSCC’s posts. As anyone bidding for attention on social media knows, that’s a serious problem.

ISIL supporters, by contrast, can be playful and droll, though sometimes the humor is exceedingly macabre and only appeals to a certain sensibility. Many of the photos being circulated — such as one of a dead Shiite man floating in a body of water, alongside a joke about him being taught to scuba dive — are horrific, but they also make for popular jihadist memes. (That particular picture was retweeted nine times and favorited 15.) The plain fact is that, for now, groups like ISIL are far more sophisticated than the State Department in their messaging.

Previous Dish on ISIS’s social media campaigns here, here, and here.

Convert, Submit, Or Die, Ctd

In light of the persecution of Iraqi Christians by ISIS, Dougherty argues that the US has a serious moral obligation to help:

[T]he U.S. should look for ways to provide direct monetary and diplomatic assistance to neighboring states in the region where persecuted Iraqis are seeking refuge, perhaps even going so far as to directly assist in the emerging centers of authority in Kurdistan, where some refugees have sought protection from ISIS, and which continues to prove itself capable of maintaining some order and security. Although I’m generally inclined toward a more restrictive position on immigration, the U.S. should, as a matter of practice, be especially generous in granting refugee status to the collateral victims of the war we started in Iraq. It should even offer some refugees of ISIS persecution the material resources to emigrate to America if they so desire.

The dream of transforming Iraq into an incubator of Arab liberalism has turned into a nightmare for religious minorities. America’s intervention in Iraq, and its support of Syrian and Libyan rebels, have created a disastrous disorder in which Islamist threats thrive. Mosul was a home for Christians for as long as Christianity existed. Not anymore. Now, the U.S. cannot restore these people to their homes, nor reverse the desecration of Christian shrines. But our diplomatic, financial, and moral energies should be used to protect them from any further harm.

Meanwhile, a few readers consider why Americans are relatively quiet over the plight of Iraqi Christians:

Why the silence? It could be, as Tim Stanley said, that the West is embarrassed about the idea of Christians being a persecuted minority. Or fear of another invasion. Personally, I think it’s because large numbers of Christians in the West, primarily of the Evangelical variety, harbor bigoted attitudes towards Arabs in general and Catholics (Roman, Orthodox, Anglican, Coptic, etc.) in particular. Having spent time in Israel and the West Bank, I continually find people at home surprised to hear of the plight of Palestinian Christians there. They are surprised to hear that one could be an Arab, a Palestinian, and a Christian. Most people are simply ignorant of the fact that there is a Christian Arab presence in the Middle East at all. It should seem obvious, but it’s not. The assumption is that all Palestinians are Muslims, and all Muslims are jihadists. (I live in the South; what can I say).

Another takes a different approach:

I do not think, as Stanley does, that it has anything to do with feeling embarrassed about Christians as a persecuted minority.  Rather it has to do with stories like this one:

In a joint statement, the chairmen of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty and Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth decried the decision [by Obama banning discrimination against transgender employees]. “Today’s executive order is unprecedented and extreme and should be opposed,” said Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore and Bishop Richard Malone of Buffalo. “In the name of forbidding discrimination, this order implements discrimination.” “With the stroke of a pen, it lends the economic power of the federal government to a deeply flawed understanding of human sexuality, to which faithful Catholics and many other people of faith will not assent,” they continued. “As a result, the order will exclude federal contractors precisely on the basis of their religious beliefs.”

American Christians have cried wolf too many times over superfluous issues like this one and the HHS mandate positioning both not as misguided government overreach, but as persecution.  After repeated self-indulgence, will anyone listen to them when there is real and life-threatening persecution of Christians in other parts of the world?  This case illustrates the real harm that many American Christians have committed focusing on their first world problems rather than on the worldwide body of Christ.

Baghdad’s Bullies Back In Business

Jacob Siegel is in the Iraqi capital, monitoring the revival of hardline Shiite militias whose ideologies aren’t much friendlier than that of ISIS. In his latest dispatch, he reports on the threats faced by a local NGO that protects abused women and gay Iraqis:

It was the police who phoned the organization Sunday morning, [Dalal] Jumaa [who heads the office of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq] said. They told her they had heard she harbored gay men and runaway girls. But the threat, which the police were relaying, came from Asaib Ahl al Haq, a powerful and notoriously brutal Shia militia in Baghdad. “I cannot stop Asaib Ahl al Haq,” the policeman told her, “they received this information and will kill you if you don’t leave.”

The Organization, as everyone calls it, stood accused of pimping out the young women in its shelters, which Jumaa said is a lie commonly used to slander Iraqi groups advocating for women’s rights. She convinced the policeman of her innocence but the militia wouldn’t be waiting to hear her out. Asaib Ahl al Haq is the group believed to have slaughtered 29 women alleged to be prostitutes last week in the upscale neighborhood of Zayouna.