ISIS working hand-in-hand with Syrian government, says defector with list of ‘22,000’ foreign recruits

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

The New York Times reports: German authorities have obtained a list of the names of some 22,000 foreigners who have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State, a trove of documents that officials say will help them to prosecute fighters who return home, and improve their efforts to prevent other Germans from joining the organization.

The Interior Ministry confirmed on Thursday that officials believed the list was authentic, but they declined to give any details about where it came from or the identities of the people on the list. It was also not immediately clear whether the German authorities were sharing the list with intelligence agencies of their allies, including the United States and Britain.

The news of the list’s discovery was reported Monday by a team of investigative reporters from the Munich daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the public broadcasters NDR and WDR, but the story only received widespread attention when Sky News, a British broadcaster, said it too had obtained some of the documents. [Continue reading…]

Sky News reports: The files were passed to Sky News on a memory stick stolen from the head of Islamic State’s internal security police, an organisation described by insiders as the group’s SS.

He had been entrusted to protect the organisation’s core secrets and he rarely parted with the drive.

The man who stole it was a former Free Syrian Army convert to Islamic State who calls himself Abu Hamed.

Disillusioned with the Islamic State leadership, he says it has now been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Baath party of Saddam Hussein.

He claims the Islamic rules he believed have totally collapsed inside the organisation, prompting him to quit.

I met him in a secret location in Turkey, and he said IS was giving up on its headquarters in Raqqa and moving into the central deserts of Syria and ultimately Iraq, the group’s birthplace.

He also claimed that in reality Islamic State, the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, are working together against the moderate Syrian opposition. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: Analysts on Thursday cast doubt on the authenticity of thousands of documents reportedly leaked from the Islamic State jihadist group, pointing out mistakes and uncharacteristic language.

The trove of documents, which includes the names, addresses, phone numbers and family contacts of IS jihadists, was handed over to Britain’s Sky News by a disillusioned former member, the broadcaster said Wednesday.

Syrian opposition news website Zaman al-Wasl said there were thousands of repetitions in the leaked documents and the names of only 1,700 people could be identified in the 22,000 documents.

The files include forms that IS recruits reportedly had to fill out in order to join the organisation and contain information on nationals from 51 countries.

There were several inconsistencies in the language of the forms that raised concerns, experts said. [Continue reading…]

Zaman Al Wasl reports: Zaman Al Wasl has exclusively obtained the personal data of 1736 ISIS fighters from over 40 countries, including their backgrounds, nationalities and hometown addresses.

The document that branded by ISIS as confidential is shedding the light on the inner circle of the de facto a state which has its own institutions and official documents as well data bank.

Two thirds of ISIS manpower are from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. 25% of ISIS fighters are Saudis, the data disclosed. [Continue reading…]

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The Obama doctrine: The Middle East doesn’t matter but even if it did, there’s nothing the U.S. can do to fix it

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Inside the West Wing, officials say that Obama, as a president who inherited a financial crisis and two active wars from his predecessor, is keen to leave “a clean barn” to whoever succeeds him. This is why the fight against isis, a group he considers to be a direct, though not existential, threat to the U.S., is his most urgent priority for the remainder of his presidency; killing the so-called caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is one of the top goals of the American national-security apparatus in Obama’s last year.

Of course, isis was midwifed into existence, in part, by the Assad regime. Yet by Obama’s stringent standards, Assad’s continued rule for the moment still doesn’t rise to the level of direct challenge to America’s national security.

This is what is so controversial about the president’s approach, and what will be controversial for years to come—the standard he has used to define what, exactly, constitutes a direct threat.

Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America’s role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power. Just as the leaders of several American allies have found Obama’s leadership inadequate to the tasks before him, he himself has found world leadership wanting: global partners who often lack the vision and the will to spend political capital in pursuit of broad, progressive goals, and adversaries who are not, in his mind, as rational as he is. Obama believes that history has sides, and that America’s adversaries — and some of its putative allies — have situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism still flourish. What they don’t understand is that history is bending in his direction.

“The central argument is that by keeping America from immersing itself in the crises of the Middle East, the foreign-policy establishment believes that the president is precipitating our decline,” Ben Rhodes told me. “But the president himself takes the opposite view, which is that overextension in the Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons that are not in the direct American national-security interest.”

If you are a supporter of the president, his strategy makes eminent sense: Double down in those parts of the world where success is plausible, and limit America’s exposure to the rest. His critics believe, however, that problems like those presented by the Middle East don’t solve themselves — that, without American intervention, they metastasize.

At the moment, Syria, where history appears to be bending toward greater chaos, poses the most direct challenge to the president’s worldview. [Continue reading…]

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The Syrian revolution is not a holy war

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

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Hind Kabawat writes: The church bells in Daraya, a Damascus suburb that has seen some of the worst fighting in the war, no longer ring. To understand the tragic trajectory of Syria today one must look at how this town, doggedly held by rebels for the past four years, a mere half-hour drive to Bashar al-Assad’s palace, has transformed over the years.

Before the uprising, Daraya was a sleepy middle-class suburb for Damascus residents. By 2011, it had become an epicenter of peaceful protests, as thousands marched in the streets calling for Assad to step down from power. As a member of the Syrian Christian community, I was overwhelmed with excitement to join this grassroots people’s movement that called for democracy, freedom and rights for all Syrians, no matter our differences.

Syrians were united then. The church bells rang in Daraya in solidarity with the protesters. From their balconies in the narrow streets, Syrian Christians showered protesters below with rice and flowers. They marched hand in hand.

A holy war, this was not.

By 2012, the Assad regime intensified its armed crackdown against the unarmed protesters in Daraya. A terrible massacre occurred there on Aug. 24, 2012, as Assad’s regime sent troops, secret police, and members of the elite 4th Division to prevent residents from fleeing the city by any means necessary. Families were executed in their homes, whole buildings of women and children were machine-gunned in the streets, and residents were even decapitated — long before the so-called Islamic State even existed.

The state-run media launched an aggressive propaganda campaign claiming Muslims were massacring Christians, aiming to stoke fear of the opposition in the Christian community. As regime soldiers went door to door, searching for people to murder, it was the Christian community of Daraya that opened theirs to protect those fleeing the atrocities. One Catholic church treated the injured and prepared food for them.

Assad attempted to break Daraya with chemical weapons in 2013, launching a horrific sarin gas attack that killed over 1,000 across the Damascus suburbs — many were children still in their pajamas when the nighttime attack happened. Images of asphyxiated children lined up on the ground are etched in our memories of that night. The international community was on the verge of holding Assad accountable for that atrocity, but the Russians intervened at the eleventh hour with a negotiated settlement. Before the ink was dry, Assad instituted a brutal starvation siege upon Daraya and neighboring Moadamiya. [Continue reading…]

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Lost in the world: The young people shunted around a global asylum system

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

By Elaine Chase, UCL and Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham

Immigration control is a global phenomenon. Young people seeking safety and security are subjected to the vagaries of all kinds of “solutions” at various national borders. Sometimes they are taken in and sometimes they are turned away. Sometimes, as we have found in our research, they are offered help but then deported as soon as they become legal adults. These people end up drifting between states and detained in immigration centres without understanding the system that put them there.

Each year many young people arrive in a Western country as unaccompanied children. They may be granted time-limited leave to remain and spend their teenage years there. Then they are told to leave. This can happen when a young person becomes a legal “adult” (institutionally and politically at the age of 18) and is no longer eligible for the same protections and rights that they enjoyed as children.

Once appeal rights have been exhausted, they can be forcibly returned to their countries of origin. From here, finding life unsustainable and unsafe, many re-migrate. Rejected in one region of the globe, they seek security in another, searching for the ever elusive better life.

[Read more…]

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Trump’s is the ugly face of a political insurgency that spans the Atlantic

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

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Philip Stephens writes: The terms of politics in many of the world’s advanced democracies had changed well before [Donald Trump] joined the Republican primary contest. If the party of Lincoln now risks being devoured by its own terrible creation, the European model of consensual centrism has been under threat for some time. Mr Trump’s flair, if you can call it that, has been in riding the wave.

Populists in Europe fume against the same supposed conspiracy of the elites that Mr Trump claims is doing down America’s middle classes. The binding threads of the shared populism are angry nationalism and state intervention. Europeans used to call it national socialism. Mr Trump wants to expel Mexicans and bar Muslims. In France, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen is bidding for the presidency on a platform of Islamophobia and state capitalism. Both are unabashed admirers of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The other day a proudly neo-Nazi party — complete with sinister black uniforms and lightning flashes — won seats in the Slovakian parliament. In neighbouring Hungary, prime minister Viktor Orban presides over an authoritarian regime that is hostile to Muslims, permissive of anti-Semitism and blames foreign capital for the country’s economic ills. Poland’s politics have swung towards the xenophobic right. Nationalists are on the march in Scandinavia and Italy. And while populists on the far right rail against migrants, their cousins on the extreme left join them in blaming globalisation for economic ills.

Germany, hitherto a linchpin of the continent’s political stability, faces the beginnings of its own insurgency in the rise of the Eurosceptic and anti-migrant Alternative für Deutschland party. In Britain, the movement to take Britain out of the EU has its own populist hue. Mr Trump promises to make America great again by throwing up the barricades. Boris Johnson, the ambitious mayor of London, pledges that Brexit would see Britons “take back control” of the nation’s borders. [Continue reading…]

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Third Republic: Germany enters a dangerous new political era

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

Dirk Kurbjuweit writes: Seven or eight months ago, Germany was a different country than it is today. There were no controversial political issues demanding immediate action and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership was uncontested. It was quiet and comfortable. But then the refugees began streaming into Europe and the country’s sleepy tranquility came to a sudden end. Since then, disgusting eruptions of xenophobia have come in quick succession, a right-wing populist party is on its way to holding seats in several state parliaments, Merkel has gained approval from the center-left Social Democrats and from the Greens, some conservatives want to throw her out and the state is overwhelmed. Does anyone know what is happening? What is wrong with this country?

For Germany, this is the second democratic republic, if one leaves out East Germany, since it was only a faux democracy. First came the Weimar Republic, from 1918 to 1933, and then, since 1949, the Federal Republic, which simply continued following the momentous events of 1989. But now, it looks as though the refugee crisis has brought a significant rupture. To be sure, the German constitution and the country’s institutions won’t be called into question any time soon. But the conventions governing Germany’s political interactions are changing with incredible speed.

A crisis of representation is necessarily accompanied by jolts to the political party system. Some of those jolts have been a long time in the making, but they are now becoming apparent as the refugee crisis takes hold. It could be that our country is currently experiencing lasting change. The contours of a Third Republic are becoming apparent. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. attacks ISIS chemical weapons program

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

The Daily Beast reports: The Iraqi man being held and interrogated by U.S. officials is a suspected mid-level Islamic State operative whose knowledge of the group’s chemical weapons program allowed coalition strikes to destroy at least two related facilities, two defense officials said.

The man has been detained for roughly a month, according to the officials. And in that time, they said, he has given the U.S. the most in-depth understanding of ISIS’s chemical attack capabilities and aspirations.
“They have gotten a lot of information from this guy,” a third defense official explained. “A lot.”

It was based on his information that the coalition conducted at least two strikes this week in Iraq, which targeted ISIS’s chemical program, according to one defense official.

According to a March 5 press release from Operation Inherent Resolve, the American-led coalition struck “an [ISIS] weapons production facility” near Mosul, which was suspected to be part of ISIS’s chemical weapons program. And in a March 7 press statement, the coalition said it struck an ISIS “tactical unit” near Mosul, which also was believed to be related to the program. [Continue reading…]

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Oil revenue collapse may mean ISIS reliant on Gulf funds, UK inquiry is told

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

The Guardian reports: A collapse in oil revenues available to Islamic State is likely to have made it increasingly dependent on donations from wealthy Gulf states and profits from foreign exchange markets, the first UK inquiry into the terror group’s funding has heard.

Attacks by the US-led coalition on Isis’s oil installations and convoys are believed to have reduced its oil revenues by more than a third as the funding of the group becomes one of the central fronts in the battle to defeat it in Syria and Iraq.

The government is reluctant to cooperate with the Commons foreign affairs select committee inquiry and has barred the key Ministry of Defence official overseeing efforts to undermine Isis’s funding from giving evidence.

But the Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood said progress was being made, even though knowledge of the group’s opaque finances was sketchy and dependent on intelligence finds.

He asserted that the regime’s oil revenue was collapsing and even suggested the group’s Syrian headquarters in Raqqa could implode if and when the Iraqi army retakes Mosul.

But experts have told the committee the UK government may be vastly over-estimating the importance of oil revenue, and underestimating the extent to which Isis is reliant on foreign donors in the Gulf or its manipulation of the Iraqi banking system.

Luay al-Khatteeb from the Iraq Energy Institute claimed the cost of waging war for Isis must be so high, and its oil revenues now so limited, that it must be accessing large-scale donations. [Continue reading…]

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Russian hostility ‘partly caused by West’, claims former U.S. defence head

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

The Guardian reports: The current level of hostility in US-Russian relations was caused in part by Washington’s contemptuous treatment of Moscow’s security concerns in the aftermath of the cold war, a former US defence secretary has said.

William Perry, who was defence secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration from 1994 to 1997, emphasised that in the past five years it has been Vladimir Putin’s military interventions in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere that have driven the downward spiral in east-west relations.

But Perry added that during his term in office, cooperation between the two countries’ militaries had improved rapidly just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union and that these gains were initially squandered more as a result of US than Russian actions. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia back-tracks on Yemen

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

By Brian Whitaker, March 10, 2016

After waging war in Yemen for almost a year, Saudi Arabia is gradually beginning to realise what many said at the outset: that military victory is impossible.

A few days ago the Saudis took the previously unthinkable step of engaging in direct talks with the Houthis, their principal foe in Yemen. Yesterday, reinforcing this shift, Saudi foreign minister Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir spoke of the kingdom’s “commitment to finding a political solution”.

Even so, an end to the conflict is probably still a long way off and the scope of the Saudi-Houthi talks so far seems to be limited to a few specific issues: cross-border conflict, prisoner exchanges and supplies of humanitarian aid to Yemen. 

[Read more…]

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Iran prepared to send advisers to ‘support’ Yemen’s Houthis

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

Middle East Eye reports: Iran is prepared to send a team of “military advisers” to support Houthi rebels in Yemen, a senior military commander has said, amid suggestions that forces fighting on the ground could be moving towards a peace deal.

Massoud Jazayiri, deputy head of Iran’s armed forces, told Iran’s Tasnim news agency on Tuesday that the country would consider repeating its actions in Syria, where it is supporting President Bashar al-Assad.

“The Islamic Republic [of Iran] feels very deeply its obligation to help the Syrian government and its people. It also feels very deeply its obligation to help the Yemeni people in any way possible.”

Iran has sent large numbers of military advisers to fight alongside the Syrian army and Hezbollah, as well as footsoldiers thought to include Afghan migrants to Iran who are promised high rates of pay and Iranian citizenship in exchange for fighting.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who overran much of the country in September 2014, are already known to have received financial and military support from Iran. [Continue reading…]

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EU demands investigation into Italian student ‘assassination’ in Egypt

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

Middle East Eye reports: The European Parliament on Thursday passed a resolution condemning “the torture and assassination” of Italian student Giulio Regeni in Egypt, describing the killing as not being isolated but taking place in a “context of torture, death in custody and enforced disappearances”.

The resolution called for a joint and transparent investigation into Regeni’s death by both Egyptian and Italian authorities and passed with a huge majority – 588 MEPs voted for it, just 10 voted against, and 59 abstained.

Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake, who supported the resolution, told Middle East Eye that Regeni’s killing has served as a “wake-up call” to European politicians about the seriousness of the human rights situation in Egypt.

“It is sad that it took the torturing to death of a European student to act as a wake-up call for some that still needed one,” she said. “This case, along with the structural repression of Egyptians, including through torture, imprisonment and disappearances, should much more strongly guide EU policies towards Egypt.”

Regeni, 28, was a doctoral candidate at the UK’s Cambridge University, and was in Egypt researching the development of Egyptian trade unions when he disappeared on 25 January – the same day as the fifth anniversary of Egypt’s uprising that overthrew long-time leader Hosni Mubarak.

On 3 February Regeni’s body was found on a road on the outskirts of Cairo bearing the hallmarks of severe beating and torture. There has been widespread speculation that Egyptian security services – known for their torture of detainees – were involved in the killing but the government of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has denied this. [Continue reading…]

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UK setting bad example on surveillance, says UN privacy chief

By News Sources, March 10, 2016

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The Guardian reports: The UK is setting a bad example to the rest of the world with proposed changes to the law on surveillance, the United Nations special rapporteur on privacy has said.

The criticism by rapporteur Joseph Cannataci is made in a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council. The report deals with privacy concerns worldwide but Cannataci, concerned about developments in the UK, has devoted a section to the British bill.

He says the British government has failed to recognise the consequences of legitimising bulk data collection or mass surveillance. Instead of legitimising it, the government should be outlawing it, he says. [Continue reading…]

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The secret of our evolutionary success is faith

By Attention to the Unseen, March 10, 2016

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Brian Gallagher writes: The staunch atheist and essayist Christopher Hitchens once said that “the most overrated of the virtues is faith.” It’s a reasonable conclusion if you believe, as the astrophysicist Carl Sagan did, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” To believe something without evidence — or have faith — is, in their view, something to avoid (and, when called for, to mock).

Yet it was arguably faith — rather than reason — that had been instrumental to our ancestors’ survival. That’s just one of the many intriguing and paradoxical claims that Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University, defends in his new book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. His central thesis, reiterated confidently, is that natural selection — the mechanism of biological evolution — is not the “only process capable of creating complex adaptations.” Cultural evolution, he says, is quite capable of generating “complex adaptive products” essential to our survival, which no one designed or understood “before they emerged.”

Consider, for example, the art of hunting, a complex adaptive product that Henrich unpacks in a section titled “Divination and Game Theory.” To decide where to go looking for caribou, the hunters of the Naskapi tribe, in Labrador, Canada, would not do something most would consider common sense: Go to the spot where you last killed some. That tactic would be ineffective because the caribou know to avoid places where their comrades were last slayed. Of course, the Naskapi don’t realize this; the reason they don’t go to the spot of their last kill is because they rely on the result of a ritual to point the way instead. [Continue reading…]

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Music: Vinicius Cantuária — ‘Conversa Fiada’

By Attention to the Unseen, March 10, 2016
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