Islamist Wave 2013 - Overview & Updates

Niccolo and Donkey Tuesday 23 Jul 2013

Angocachi Longface

Embers of Syria reignite a vulnerable Iraq

A decade on from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, Iraqis, many of them civilians from the majority Shi'ite sect - though Sunnis are being killed as well - are perishing in droves. Scores of people are reported killed in violence spanning much of the width and breadth of the country barring the comparatively secured Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan-controlled Kurdistan Regional Government semi-autonomous enclave in the north. Agence France-Presse is reporting that 2,600 people have been reported killed in renewed sectarian warfare since early April while the Associated Press says some 2,800 have lost their lives in that time.

When the words Iraq and "surge" are coupled together in reportage in 2013, it is more associated with the surge in religio-political violence than the surge of US troops in 2007 that was meant to overwhelm the insurgency with sheer numbers. Iraq has become neither an efficient federal political space nor become coherently recentralized since the overthrow and execution of its bellicose president, Saddam Hussein.

Instead it has only become increasingly fissiparous as the two principal Islamic denominations of Sunni and Shi'ite have retreated further while the deep principal ethnic division among Arabs and Kurds appears unlikely to ever be healed.

As the spotlight on Syria has gradually intensified since the start of the uprising there on March 15, 2011, media attention on Iraq has faded. CNN, the last of the American television news channels to maintain a bureau in Iraq, closed its Baghdad bureau this spring. A source told Asia Times Online that as Iraq became a less central story in the American media landscape, keeping the office there was no longer considered a worthwhile asset to network decision makers. Talk in Washington of arming the discordant Free Syrian Army while somehow keeping arms away from Salafi-jihadi groups has gone from fanciful Beltway gossip replete with 1980s Afghanistan or Nicaragua analogies to a very real policy debate.

Despite desperate attempts by US politicos to pass off Iraq as even the most modest success story, the country is still in flames well after US troops exited the country in mid-December 2011. Major news outlets ran misleading headlines like "Iraq war ends" when describing the final MRAP convoy driving over the Kuwaiti frontier at the time. Rather than simplistically ending, the war in Iraq merely entered a new phase. For US troops left just as the Syrian civil conflict was rapidly escalating from uprising to full-scale war.

Officialdom from successive US administrations have been relentlessly inept at gaming various Middle Eastern domino theories with theoretical pendulums swinging from the ignorant to the outright absurd. In his seminal 2005 work The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq , author George Packer describes the "curious subtext" of neoconservative American Jews' concepts of toppling Saddam and freeing the oppressed Iraqi Shi'ite masses, a numerical majority in Iraq but a minority in the wider Middle East remotely akin to the Jews, in order to redirect "the Arab world toward America and Israel".

The Shi'ite seminaries of Najaf in southern Iraq, known collectively as the Hawza, have existed in a much different societal context than their closest equivalent in the Iranian city of Qom southwest of Tehran. Arab Iraq was a complex patchwork where adherents on either side of Islam's great schism had to live side by side or in adjacent communities. Najaf is greatly venerated by mainstream Shi'ite as the final resting place of Ali ibn Abi Talib, known commonly as Imam Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammed who ranks in Shi'ism as first of the twelve imams and is the fourth and final of the Rashidun - the four original "rightly guided" caliphs - to the Sunni.

In contrast to Qom at the heart of Iran's unchallenged Persian Shi'ite core, the Shi'ite clerical hierarchy in Najaf and environs had no choice but to exist in land ruled by authoritarians of mostly Sunni backgrounds. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in trying to get out from under Shah Reza Pahlavi and his notorious SAVAK intelligence service, lived in exile in Najaf from 1965-1978. Khomeini's presence in Iraq also served as a useful irritant between the Ba'athists in Baghdad and the pro-Western monarchists in Tehran. For while Iraqi ayatollahs in Najaf had to contend with secular Sunni militarists, that did not mean that radical thought did not emanate from Iraq's Shi'ite heartland among Iranian, Lebanese and other Shi'ite intellectual theologians.

Click the link above to read the rest.

Mike Tuesday 23 Jul 2013

The ATimes article was worth a full reading.

These numbers are comparable to the peak of sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007 ( source ). Yet this bad craziness is getting little to no press in the US media, certainly nothing like the Boston bombing incident, as indicated here:

There is a sketch of intra-Shiite politics in Iraq and Iran from the Shah days when Khomeini was in exile in Iraq to the modern day, but this LOL part is the most striking to me as an American:

The author misspeaks slightly. The cost was not billions, but trillions. Trillions of America dollars were wasted so a clique of Jews could try out their "creative destruction" tactics on perceived enemies, so that the spergocrat Rumsfeld could work out his Napoleon complex behind a podium, and so armament and construction corporations could quietly make tidy fortunes.

A couple of paragraphs on the Baathist movement, which is the team I'd pull for if I were transplanted to the area:

The virulent animosity between the minoritarian governments in Damascus and Baghdad representing the two branches of the Hizb-ul Ba'ath (the Baath Party) which split bitterly in 19966 and entrenched the violent identity politics that are very much playing out today. Since the ascent of Hafez al-Assad in 1970, Syria has been ruled by an Alawite inner circle with acceptable Sunni and Christian elites often from the mercantile classes who kept a lid on politicized Sunni religiosity for decades. Baghdad has a somewhat similar, if inverse ethno-sectarian power arrangement. On July 12, 1979, Saddam Hussein became head of the Ba'ath Party's Revolutionary Command Council and was officially declared president of the Republic of Iraq.

Like Assad in Syria, the Arab Socialist regime in Iraq officially eschewed ethnic and sect-based politics in the name of pan-Arab nationalism and the anti-Zionism pervasive throughout the Levant region. In doing so though, the turbaned clerics in the Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf, Kufa, Samarra, Kadhimiya and Karbala - including those from Iran, Lebanon and Bahrain - were persecuted or made persona non grata. Shi'ism with its millenarian dogma and sub-state hierarchical nature was viewed as a threat to Ba'athist power. In Syria, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood movement was perceived with like suspicion by the Alawite-dominated regime and crushed accordingly during the period of 1976-1982 when the infamous "Hama solution" sent many of the Brothers into exile.

fratty Thursday 25 Jul 2013

Fitz Friday 26 Jul 2013

Al-Qaeda hosts a family fair in Syria, complete with ice cream and jihad

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By Max Fisher, Updated: July 25, 2013

Nothing says wholesome family fun like al-Qaeda, which is why the group’s Syrian and Iraqi branches held a festival in a rebel-held neighborhood of Aleppo. The bizarre event, captured on video, is part of a broader effort to show Syrian civilians a softer, cuddlier side to the militant jihadist movement, which has been seizing territory in Syria.

The event was hosted by two al-Qaeda-allied groups: Jabhat al-Nusra, an extremist Syrian rebel group, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is based in Iraq and claimed responsibility for a recent jailbreak that freed hundreds of insurgents there. The groups have earned a reputation for fearsome fighting against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, but also for their severe rule over areas under their control. According to Syrian rights groups, Jabhat al-Nusra recently executed a 14-year-old boy in Aleppo for referencing the prophet Muhammad in a manner they deemed disrespectful.

The groups appear to be hoping that they can clean up their image and make friends with regular Syrians by, for example, hosting this Ramadan family fair. It’s a way to build support — regular Syrians are suffering terribly in the fighting, with food scarce and work virtually nonexistent — and to show that the groups can do things with young people other than shoot them. According to the Independent’s story on the Aleppo fair , here a few of the very creepy-sounding events:

• An ice-cream-eating contest for boys. A video of the contest, since deleted, showed Islamic State jihadist flags hanging in the background.

• A Koran recitation contest for girls.

• A tug of war between Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State members, video of which has also since been removed from YouTube

• Distribution of pamphlets, flags and “other propaganda-type products” meant to promote jihadism, according to a terrorism analyst who spoke to the Independent.

• Distribution of food, most importantly bread.

And you can bet there was some preaching as well.

The videos clearly shoedw a crowd gathered, although it’s not clear if there are hundreds of people or just a few dozen, with lots of kids crowded up front. It’s a strange turn for a group accustomed to operating in the shadows and speaking primarily to fellow ideological extremists.

© The Washington Post Company

Mike Friday 26 Jul 2013

^You know what they say, a family that plays together jihad s together. I'm going to ask for jihad sprinkles on my cone next time I go to an ice cream parlor.

Seriously though, contrary to what this probable-Jew tries to insinuate, there is nothing particularly "creepy-sounding" or "bizarre" about rebels trying to get the support of the people. That's just basic politics. By the way, as merchant-subservient patriots, aren't we supposed to be on the side of rebels such as these trying to remove Assad? Oh right, it's just the crumbling faction of secular rebels that we're supposed to be siding with. It's a good thing I have bloggers like Max Fisher to help me understand the issues. Where would we be without our truly greatest ally.

Fitz Tuesday 30 Jul 2013

Surging violence in Iraq

A spate of car bombings and simultaneous attacks on two Iraqi prisons, which freed 500 prisoners, could end the vestiges of restraint preventing political tensions from exploding.

By Dan Murphy , Staff writer / July 29, 2013

In the early morning hours of July 22, Al Qaeda in Iraq won its greatest victory in years with simultaneous attacks on the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Taji , freeing some 500 prisoners and killing more than 50 people. The attacks' precision and targets – heavily militarized facilities on the outskirts of Baghdad – show that Iraq 's toughest insurgent group is still very much in the fight.

Q: What happened?

Mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, suicide bombers, and light arms were used to attack the prisons at Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, and Taji, just north of the capital, after midnight on July 22. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State in Iraq's self-styled emir, was delivering on a promise he made a year to the day before the attack: that the release of detained members of his movement was a top priority. He vowed a "breaking the walls" campaign, and his ability to deliver on his promise is evidence of the extent to which the Sunni movement has regrouped in the past few years. The Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at first played down the attacks, later admitting that hundreds of insurgents had escaped. Mr. Maliki said guards at the prisons colluded with the attackers.

Q: Why did it happen?

The sectarian civil war that raged in Iraq from 2004 to 2008, claiming more than 100,000 lives, finally cooled, but it never died out. Since taking power, Maliki has consistently marginalized even Sunnis who fought against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Now the group has not only drawn fresh recruits to the movement, but it also has dissuaded Sunnis from informing on friends and neighbors.

The raging sectarian civil war in Syria , where the Sunni population forms the bulk of the rebellion against a government backed by Shiite Iran and the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, has also battle-hardened a new generation of jihadis, and Iraqi insurgents have played a key role in the fighting across the border. After the Syrian civil war began, Iraq's Al Qaeda affiliate renamed itself "The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" to reflect its merger with jihadis fighting against the regime in Syria.

Q: Could Iraq become destabilized?

Iraq has grown more violent over the past year. This May was the most violent month in Iraq (judging by the number of deaths) since June 2008, and May's death toll of 614 was surpassed on July 22.

Sectarian bomb attacks on markets and mosques that were hallmarks of Al Qaeda at the height of Iraq's civil war have increased in frequency and intensity.

On July 25, for example, just outside Baghdad, 14 Shiite truck drivers were hauled from their vehicles and executed by insurgents. And just today, car bombings across the country killed at least 46 people. Iraq's security services failed completely at Abu Ghraib and Taji, heavily militarized facilities that were known to be attractive targets for Al Qaeda.

Q: What are the political implications of the attacks for Iraq?

Maliki doesn't even lead a unified Shiite bloc in government. The political movement of the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr frequently opposes Maliki's initiatives, and Maliki appeared to blame the Sadrists for assisting the Al Qaeda jailbreak in a television address. He said the guards who collaborated with the attackers were directed to do so by a militia linked to Mr. Sadr.

That claim is evidence of deep political tensions inside Iraq that have been threatening to boil over for months.

Q: What are the regional effects of the attacks?

Growing sectarian violence in Iraq has been fed by the war in Syria. Sunni fighters flow across the border in both directions, and access to weapons and bombmaking material has improved for insurgents.

Meanwhile, Iraq's government has allowed Iranian weapons shipments to pass through its territory and airspace to aid Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and there have been persistent claims of Iraqi Shiite militants fighting alongside government forces there. Regional jihadis view the civil war in Syria as a great opportunity, one on par with the war launched after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. If militant Sunnis manage to succeed in Syria, they plan to turn more fiercely upon the Maliki government.

Mike Tuesday 30 Jul 2013

I can't believe this is happening. In Jan 2003, Pres Bush had promised something different:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ql1NNj7LGE4

Fast forward to 15 sec or click here .

Fitz Wednesday 7 Aug 2013

Taliban leader dismisses Afghan elections as 'waste of time'

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KABUL: Taliban leader Mullah Omar on Tuesday dismissed key elections due in Afghanistan next year as "a waste of time", posing a major challenge to international efforts to ensure a credible poll.

"As to the deceiving drama under the name of elections 2014, our pious people will not tire themselves out, nor will they participate in it," Omar said in a statement. "Participation in such elections is only a waste of time,nothing more.

Niccolo and Donkey Wednesday 14 Aug 2013

Longface Angocachi

Echoes of Egypt: Secular-Islamist Tensions Rise in Tunisia

Mount Chaambi, 1,544 meters (5,066 feet) high, rises at the edge of Kasserine, a city in western Tunisia. It is close to the border with Algeria and a four hours' drive from the capital of Tunis. Kasserine is one of the places where the revolution began in December 2010, the revolution that would topple dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and set the Arab Spring in motion.

Now this has become a place where the Tunisian army is fighting Islamist terrorists. Although their backgrounds and identities remain unknown, these fighters have reportedly retreated to the mountains here. After they killed eight soldiers, the army has been striking back with all its might.

For Dalhoumi, the columns of smoke rising over Kasserine are a sign that something has gone fundamentally wrong with Tunisia's Arab Spring. "The revolution has gotten on the wrong track," he says.

The ones he holds responsible for this are the Islamists of the Ennahda party, which has governed the country in a coalition with two secular parties since elections were held two years ago. Dalhoumi believes that Ennahda and its leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, have no interest in taking action against extremists. "Before, it was: Ben Ali does whatever he wants, and no one can say anything about it," he says. "Now it's: The Islamists do whatever they want, and the others can say whatever they want about it."

For Dalhoumi, it's all interconnected -- the anger and hopelessness felt by people in Kasserine and throughout the country, the terrorists on the mountain, the unsolved murders of two opposition politicians and, of course, the military coup in Egypt. The result of all this has been that, within a short period of time, Tunisia's complicated but hopeful transition to democracy has come to a standstill, and the country has plunged into a serious crisis. Last week, work on the country's new constitution was suspended, even though this is the gridlocked parliament's main task.

The Islamist government's largely secular opponents are calling for the immediately dissolution of the country's elected Constituent Assembly. Most would rather see a government made up of independent technocrats. Ennahda may not have actually hired the individuals who killed the two opposition politicians, the party's opponents say, but they still hold the government at least politically responsible for the murders because, they say, it was too hesitant in dealing with the extremists. Opponents also accuse the Constituent Assembly of far exceeding its one-year mandate.

The opposition parties have also taken up at least parts of the demonstrators' demands, with around a third of their representatives boycotting the assembly. The situation resembles the one in Egypt: The country is divided, with Islamists on one side, their opponents on the other and a deep chasm between them. And here, too, a democratically elected government led by Islamists now faces mass demonstrations calling for them to resign.

Unlike in Egypt, however, Tunisia's army has no political ambitions. But here there is the powerful UGTT trade union, which played a decisive role during the revolution and is exerting pressure on the Islamists in the current conflict, as well.

Longface Monday 26 Aug 2013

Burma: Buddhist mobs burn down Muslim homes and shops

Fresh sectarian violence broke out in north-western Burma late on Saturday when Buddhist mobs burned down dozens of homes and shops following rumours that a young woman had been sexually assaulted by a Muslim man. There were no reports of injuries.
Myanmar's radical monk Wirathu, whose anti-Muslim rhetoric has placed him at the centre of rising religious violence, said on his Facebook page that hundreds of people took part in the riot on the outskirts of Kantbalu.
A crowd surrounded the police station demanding that the suspect be handed over, said a police officer from the area, who asked not to be named because he did not have authority to speak to the media.
When police refused, they started setting buildings on fire, he said.
About 35 houses and 12 shops, most belonging to Muslims, were destroyed before calm was restored, he said.
Predominantly Buddhist Burma has been grappling with sectarian violence since the country's military rulers handed over power to a nominally civilian government in 2011.
More than 250 people have been killed, most of them Muslims, and 140,000 others forced to flee their homes.
The unrest began last year in the western state of Rakhine, where Buddhists accuse Rohingya Muslims of illegally entering the country and encroaching on their land. The violence, on a smaller scale but still deadly, spread earlier this year to other parts of the country.

Islamist Wave 2013 - Overview & Updates

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