Tag: Iraq

Abducted By ISIS

A harrowing account from a 14-year-old Kurd in northern Syria:

They would be taken to the torture room downstairs, one by one. When it was Lawand’s turn, he was first put in a car tire and beaten. Then he was hung from the ceiling by his hands, and beaten again. He could take this punishment for only half an hour before admitting that the list of his YPG relatives was accurate. He was taken back to the cell upstairs, where his time in detention would span 20 days. The kids were allowed to spend an hour each day in the yard; older prisoners got only five minutes. …

When the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, in late June, Lawand was allowed to leave the prison. He rejoined the other students at a nearby school. The kids were forced to observe the holiday’s daily fast in the July heat. When one was caught taking a sip of water, the militants tied him to the goalposts of a soccer field, making his body into a cross. Then they scalded him with hot water and beat him with sticks.

Some kids tried to escape. One was successful. When the rest were caught, they were put through mock executions, and more torture. Some had knives pressed against their throats for what seemed like an hour.

ISIS Gains Ground In Northern Iraq

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The Islamic State has taken over the town of Sinjar in the country’s northwest, near the Syrian border. Sinjar is the homeland of the Yazidis, a religious minority that Joshua Landis warns is now in grave danger of persecution:

One of the few remaining non-Abrahamic religions of the Middle-East, the Yazidis are a particularly vulnerable group lacking advocacy in the region. Not belonging to the small set of religions carrying the Islamic label “People of the Book,” Yazidis are branded mushrikiin (polytheists) by Salafis/jihadists and became targets of high levels of terrorist attacks and mass killing orchestrated by al-Qaida-affiliated jihadists, following the instability brought about by the War in Iraq.

Today’s IS assault is already bringing about devastating consequences for Yazidis, who make up about 340,000 of Sinjar’s 400,000 inhabitants (this is a high estimate). Many have fled on foot through the desert, without food or water. Others fleeing in cars for Dohuk have been unable to make a clean escape, due to the inability of the roads to accommodate such a large flux of people. Thousands of cars are currently stranded west of the Tigris River.

Andrew Slater also fears for Sinjar’s religious minorities:

By the afternoon of Sunday, August 4, with ISIS in full control of Sinjar, terrified families from the area began their dangerous exodus. The speed with which ISIS engulfed the entire mountain range attests to the large numbers of fighters they brought to bear for this major offensive. Villagers in the Sinjar area gave accounts of girls and young women from their families being abducted by ISIS fighters and carried away. Countless families fled to the mountains above their villages where they are currently surrounded by ISIS controlled areas and are desperately calling friends and family members who escaped, pleading for help. Pictures of families hiding in the mountains have circulated widely on Iraqi social media.

Besides the Sayyida Zainab mosque, ISIS forces were reported to have blown up the Sharif Al-Deen shrine on the Sinjar mountainside, a holy place for Yezidis. The ISIS flag was also raised over the only remaining church in the Sinjar area. Within 24 hours, Sinjar has been transformed from a bustling community into a string of ghost towns.

In its rampage through northern Iraq, ISIS may also have captured Iraq’s largest dam:

Capture of the electricity-generating Mosul Dam, which was reported by Iraqi state television, could give the forces of the Islamic State (Isis) the ability to flood Iraqi cities or withhold water from farms, raising the stakes in their bid to topple prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shia-led government. “The terrorist gangs of the Islamic State have taken control of Mosul dam after the withdrawal of Kurdish forces without a fight,” said Iraqi state television of the claimed 24 hour offensive. Kurdish officials conceded losses to Isis but denied the dam had been surrendered. A Kurdish official in Washington told Reuters the dam was still under the control of Kurdish “peshmerga” troops, although he said towns around the dam had fallen to Isis.

Meanwhile, jihadists affiliated with ISIS and the Syrian jihadist rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra have taken over the Lebanese border town of Arsal, but Zack Beauchamp assures us that this isn’t as scary as it seems:

ISIS’s actions in Arsal aren’t part of a deliberate expansion of the caliphate into Lebanon. Rather, Lebanese forces picked a fight with ISIS fighters who’d been pushed out of Syria. In purely geographic terms, this interpretation of the fighting makes more sense. … Lebanon, down near Damascus in the west, is really far from ISIS’ bases in north-central Iraq and northern Syria. It would be very, very hard for ISIS control territory far away in Lebanon in the same way it controls the caliphate proper.

That said, ISIS’ presence in Lebanon really could be destabilizing all the same. The Arsal fighting alone has already displaced 3,000 people and killed at least 11 Lebanese soldiers. And while ISIS is not trying to seize territory in Lebanon outright (not yet, anyway), the group is ramping up terrorist attacks there. “They’ve been bombing things, trying to get cells in Tripoli [and] Damascus,” Smyth says. “They’ve tried to use these different cells to bomb Iranian and Hezbollah targets there.”

In any case, Keating remarks that these developments are changing the calculus regarding ISIS’s staying power:

A few weeks ago, it seemed unlikely that ISIS could hold out for that long given the sheer number of regional actors it had picked fights with. But it seems like it’s not only holding out, it’s expanding its activities into new areas and taking on new rivals. It’s hard to imagine how it will be contained unless the various forces fighting it can somehow find a way to coordinate. For now, the center of the conflict seems to be the Mosul Dam. Will the prospect of power cuts or catastrophic flooding be enough to get Maliki’s government to work with his Kurdish rivals?

Siddhartha Mahanta notices that ISIS’s recent gains have prompted the Baghdad government to start cooperating with the Kurds:

That massive setback — which the peshmerga claim is a strategic retreat — reportedly led Maliki to back up the peshmerga with air support, as Reuters reported on Monday. “We will attack them until they are completely destroyed; we will never show any mercy,” a Kurdish colonel told the news agency. “We have given them enough chances and we will even take Mosul back. I believe within the next 48-72 hours it will be over.” So while Maliki is making good on his threat to use legal power to seize Kurd-claimed oil, he’s also sending in the planes to back the Kurds just as the myth of their apparent invincibility takes a potentially serious hit. It’s either a shrewd political move or a truly desperate cry for help. Baghdad and Erbil. These days, theirs is a tale of two frenemies.

And Dexter Filkins argues that we should be helping the peshmerga, too:

The militants in ISIS have swept across much of northern and western Iraq, and there is no sign that they have any intention of slowing down. In a surprising—and encouraging—turn, Maliki has apparently ordered the Iraqi Air Force to carry out air strikes to help the Kurds. That said, the Iraqi Army has proved itself utterly ineffectual in combating ISIS. If the U.S. decided to help the Kurds, there would be no guarantee that the Kurds wouldn’t later use those weapons to further their own interests. But what other choice is there? If anyone is likely to slow down ISIS, it’s going to be the Kurds—regardless of whatever they’re planning to do later on.

Kurdistan’s Petro-Politics

The US has been pressuring governments and private companies not to buy Kurdish oil, out of fear that oil sales will make it easier for the Kurdistan Regional Government to declare independence from Iraq. But this strategy, Dov Friedman posits, is actually having the opposite of its intended effect:

The U.S.’s logic is clear. KRG oil sales provide the Kurds a financial base with which to stabilize a potential fledging independent state. If the Kurds are unable to sell oil, they will have to parlay with Baghdad to solve the budgetary dispute. However, the U.S. misjudges the Kurds—both their likely steps after independent oil sales and their response to interference with oil revenues. Distinct Kurdish oil sales have always been more likely to bring the KRG to the Iraqi bargaining table. They seek concessions from the central government, and the threat posed by independent revenue streams may be more valuable than the ability to declare national independence.

First, Kurdistan benefits greatly from its access to the greater Iraqi market.

Kurdish businesses of all sizes are bolstered by a market size of 30 million people, and these businesses would suffer from an independence bid that—at least in the near term—slashed the market size by five-sixths. A fledgling independent Kurdistan with a hobbled private sector would rely even more heavily on oil revenues—intensifying the oil-fueled Dutch disease and jeopardizing the nascent country’s economic health.

Second, the Kurds have historically—and to this day—looked for opportunities to strike bargains with their Arab co-nationalists to the south. … Once in control of Kirkuk’s oil establishments, the KRG initially demanded an increase in its share of the national budget from 17 to 25 percent, to account for increases in the population served—and energy resources controlled—by the KRG. Having just taken control of one of the largest, highest quality oil fields in the world, the Kurds spoke not of an independence bid but of renegotiating terms with Baghdad.

Previous Dish on the prospects for Kurdish independence here.

A Well-Oiled Caliphate

In Charlie Cooper’s estimation, ISIS is handling governance surprisingly well. Part of that is down to its control of strategic resources:

Currently, it controls many of Iraq’s northern oilfields and is in a strong position to take its largest refinery at Baiji. On top of this, three weeks ago, IS took over Syria’s largest oilfield in al-Omar. Once a field is secured, IS has been quick to make a profit, reportedly earning millions of dollars selling oil to the Assad regime and, allegedly, to Iraqi businessmen.

In terms of water, IS has long controlled the Tabqa Dam and, hence, Lake Assad, in Syria, as well as the Fallujah and Mosul dams in Iraq. It thus falls to IS to provide drinking water and irrigation to massive areas of farmland. In a sense, IS has become a de facto state provider that enjoys a complex economic and infrastructural interdependence with the populations that live within its territories, something that further insulates it from outside attack.

But Keith Johnson finds reason to believe that the shady oil deals that fund the group’s activities aren’t sustainable:

With the Islamic State at the helm, that oil boom certainly won’t last forever.

The old oil fields in Syria and Iraq need lots of care, such as injections to keep the pressure up and output reliable; the lack of trained technicians and the frequent turnover have been a nightmare for proper reservoir management and will ultimately lower future output at those fields, [Chatham House oil expert Valérie] Marcel said. Still, all else being equal, that kind of control over oil fields, oil revenues, and petroleum products would be a financial shot in the arm for any terrorist outfit. Control of oil products, from gas canisters needed for cooking to fuel needed for transport, gives the group additional local leverage. And the revenue bolsters the Islamic State’s ability to recruit and pay fighters and to buy weapons.

However, that money is also desperately needed to cover the salaries of public workers in places the militants now occupy. Providing basic public services to show that they can do more than conquer and crucify, but can govern to a limited extent, also costs money. Serving as an unelected proxy for ousted or absent governments has long been a way for Islamist groups, from Hezbollah to Hamas, to broaden popular support.

The latest Dish on ISIS’s oil here, and on the water issue here.

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.

All Wars Are Important, But Some Wars …

Goldblog wonders why the press is paying so much attention to Gaza and so little to Syria, when the implications of the latter conflict are, in his view, much broader (and the death toll much higher):

[T]he Arab Spring (or Awakening, or whatever word you choose) has given lie to the idea—shorthanded as “linkage”—that the key to American success in the broader Middle East is dependent on finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This idea, that all roads run through  Jerusalem, has traditionally motivated a great deal of journalistic and foreign policy expert interest in this conflict. Finding a solution to this conflict is very important to the future of Israelis and Palestinians, of course, but not nearly so much to Americans. A peaceful resolution to this conflict would do little to bring about good governance in Arab states, or an end to Islamist extremism in the greater Middle East. Which brings me back to Syria. The war in Syria (and Iraq, since it is more or less a single war now) is of greater national security importance to the United States than the war in Gaza, and it should be covered in a way that reflects this reality.

It’s a familiar, ancient device for Israel apologists: there are worse massacres elsewhere; solving Israel-Palestine won’t help us much in foreign policy anyway; so let’s move right along, shall we? And don’t mention the settlements, except in asides that are designed to credentialize the writer as someone who naturally opposes them – even as he also opposes any serious pressure on Israel to stop the provocations. He attributes the discrepancy to the Western world’s weird obsession with criticizing Israel, which is subtler version of the accusation of anti-Semitism.

One reason, of course, which Goldblog mentions, is that the US is partly paying for the slaughter in Gaza and for the clean-up afterwards. More to the point, condemnation of Assad is universal in the US (while Netanyahu is lionized and egged on by one political party), and the conflict there is an evenly matched civil war, rather than one more relentless pounding of a weak mini-state under Israeli control with casualties massively lop-sided in one direction. This is not to say that what is going on in Syria isn’t unbelievably awful and worse in many ways than what’s occurring in Gaza. We noted the massacre here that Goldblog says the NYT ignored. It is simply to say that we would be far more involved if we were supplying the weapons that were killing Syrians en masse.

Keating, on the other hand, agrees that the world is paying attention to the wrong events, but thinks the reason has more to do with how we react to short-term vs. long-term conflicts:

One big problem with the now prevalent “arc of global instability” narrative is that it lumps together short-lived flare-ups of long-running local conflicts with much larger and more transformative events. Sooner or later, the violence in Gaza will be resolved by a cease-fire, though the question is how many more people will die before it happens. The violence in eastern Ukraine flares up and dies down, but despite the understandable wariness in Eastern Europe, it seems unlikely to spread beyond its immediate region.

The twin civil wars in Iraq and Syria are another story: a long-running and increasingly chaotic situation without an obvious political solution, even a short term one. The violence challenges long-standing borders in the region and could increase the risk of international terrorism, and the refugee crisis it has created will continue to place strain on surrounding countries. Given the Iraq war and the deepening U.S. involvement in Syria, I would also argue that it’s the crisis the U.S. bears the most direct responsibility for. This week’s most discussed tragedies will eventually come to an end. But the chaos in Iraq and Syria isn’t going anywhere.

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.

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.