The ISIS threat to Europe

[Chindie]

3 minutes ago, TrentVilla said:

 loan wolfs.

More likely to work in packs than sharks?

More seriously, we do have exceptionally good intelligence services. That they do such a good job should ask questions about how much more power they truly need, the people that are catching out aren't masterminds.

Of course theres an element of luck as well, we could be blindsided by a truly lone wolf unknown to us at any moment, but there's little anyone can do about that.

[markavfc40]

Just reading the news about 82 civilians being shot on the spot in Aleppo including 13 children by pro-government forces and the UN has said there has been a complete meltdown of humanity. That meltdown happened a long time ago.

How is this being allowed to happen. It is almost as if we have become immune to it now and detached from the fact these are human beings.

[peterms]

1 hour ago, markavfc40 said:

Just reading the news about 82 civilians being shot on the spot in Aleppo including 13 children by pro-government forces and the UN has said there has been a complete meltdown of humanity. That meltdown happened a long time ago.

How is this being allowed to happen. It is almost as if we have become immune to it now and detached from the fact these are human beings.

It's impossible at the moment to know what is going on.  Our former ambassador has just been on R5, saying these reports are unverified, casting a lot of doubt on them.

One thing that is clear is that our media are reporting in terms of "rebels" rather than acknowledging that they are al Qaeda and affiliates.  We've also seen accounts from escaping civilians that the "rebels" had threatened them with death if they tried to get away, and so they had been unable to flee earlier.

So are the bodies in the street civilians, or al Qaeda?  And if they are civilians, who killed them?  There's certainly a lot of conflicting stories doing the rounds, but the dominant media line seems to be anti-government (sorry, we must call it "regime") and pro-al Qaeda.  I find that odd.  Also odd that they are not keen to acknowledge that it's AQ and its affiliates.

[Awol]

9 hours ago, peterms said:

Isn't it just that the US let them, possibly to draw some units away from attacking AQ in Aleppo?

Hopefully not, that would be very depressing. 

[chrisp65]

It's almost as though we've tried to have a dabble on a budget without really understanding what was going on.

Which would be very out of character for us.

[peterms]

Just now, Awol said:

Hopefully not, that would be very depressing. 

Well they've done it before.  Remember the early days of ISIS, driving long convoys of brand new Hummers for hundreds of miles, unmolested, on their way to invade village after village, town after town?  The US tolerated it because it saw they bigger goal as being to remove Assad, and that ISIS would help with that.  A bit like when they trained and equipped bin Laden and friends all those years ago, in Afghanistan.

[peterms]

Fisk in the Indy

Quote

Western politicians, “experts” and journalists are going to have to reboot their stories over the next few days now that Bashar al-Assad’s army has retaken control of eastern Aleppo. We’re going to find out if the 250,000 civilians “trapped” in the city were indeed that numerous. We’re going to hear far more about why they were not able to leave when the Syrian government and Russian air force staged their ferocious bombardment of the eastern part of the city. 

And we’re going to learn a lot more about the “rebels” whom we in the West – the US, Britain and our head-chopping mates in the Gulf – have been supporting.

They did, after all, include al-Qaeda (alias Jabhat al-Nusra, alias Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), the “folk” – as George W Bush called them – who committed the crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. Remember the War on Terror? Remember the “pure evil” of al-Qaeda. Remember all the warnings from our beloved security services in the UK about how al-Qaeda can still strike terror in London?

Not when the rebels, including al-Qaeda, were bravely defending east Aleppo, we didn’t – because a powerful tale of heroism, democracy and suffering was being woven for us, a narrative of good guys versus bad guys as explosive and as dishonest as “weapons of mass destruction”.

Back in the days of Saddam Hussein – when a few of us argued that the illegal invasion of Iraq would lead to catastrophe and untold suffering, and that Tony Blair and George Bush were taking us down the path to perdition – it was incumbent upon us, always, to profess our repugnance of Saddam and his regime. We had to remind readers, constantly, that Saddam was one of the Triple Pillars of the Axis of Evil. 

So here goes the usual mantra again, which we must repeat ad nauseam to avoid the usual hate mail and abuse that will today be cast at anyone veering away from the approved and deeply flawed version of the Syrian tragedy. 

Yes, Bashar al-Assad has brutally destroyed vast tracts of his cities in his battle against those who wish to overthrow his regime. Yes, that regime has a multitude of sins to its name: torture, executions, secret prisons, the killing of civilians, and – if we include the Syrian militia thugs under nominal control of the regime – a frightening version of ethnic cleansing. 

Yes, we should fear for the lives of the courageous doctors of eastern Aleppo and the people for whom they have been caring. Anyone who saw the footage of the young man taken out of the line of refugees fleeing Aleppo last week by the regime’s intelligence men should fear for all those who have not been permitted to cross the government lines. And let’s remember how the UN grimly reported it had been told of 82 civilians "massacred" in their homes in the last 24 hours.

But it’s time to tell the other truth: that many of the “rebels” whom we in the West have been supporting – and which our preposterous Prime Minister Therese May indirectly blessed when she grovelled to the Gulf head-choppers last week – are among the cruellest and most ruthless of fighters in the Middle East. And while we have been tut-tutting at the frightfulness of Isis during the siege of Mosul (an event all too similar to Aleppo, although you wouldn’t think so from reading our narrative of the story), we have been wilfully ignoring the behaviour of the rebels of Aleppo.

Only a few weeks ago, I interviewed one of the very first Muslim families to flee eastern Aleppo during a ceasefire. The father had just been told that his brother was to be executed by the rebels because he crossed the frontline with his wife and son. He condemned the rebels for closing the schools and putting weapons close to hospitals. And he was no pro-regime stooge; he even admired Isis for their good behaviour in the early days of the siege.

Around the same time, Syrian soldiers were privately expressing their belief to me that the Americans would allow Isis to leave Mosul to again attack the regime in Syria. An American general had actually expressed his fear that Iraqi Shiite militiamen might prevent Isis from fleeing across the Iraqi border to Syria.

Well, so it came to pass. In three vast columns of suicide trucks and thousands of armed supporters, Isis has just swarmed across the desert from Mosul in Iraq, and from Raqqa and Deir ez-Zour in eastern Syria to seize the beautiful city of Palmyra all over again. 

It is highly instructive to look at our reporting of these two parallel events. Almost every headline today speaks of the “fall” of Aleppo to the Syrian army – when in any other circumstances, we would have surely said that the army had “recaptured” it from the “rebels” – while Isis was reported to have “recaptured” Palmyra when (given their own murderous behaviour) we should surely have announced that the Roman city had “fallen” once more under their grotesque rule.

Words matter. These are the men – our “chaps”, I suppose, if we keep to the current jihadi narrative – who after their first occupation of the city last year beheaded the 82-year-old scholar who tried to protect the Roman treasures and then placed his spectacles back on his decapitated head.

By their own admission, the Russians flew 64 bombing sorties against the Isis attackers outside Palmyra. But given the huge columns of dust thrown up by the Isis convoys, why didn’t the American air force join in the bombardment of their greatest enemy? But no: for some reason, the US satellites and drones and intelligence just didn’t spot them – any more than they did when Isis drove identical convoys of suicide trucks to seize Palmyra when they first took the city in May 2015.

There’s no doubting what a setback Palmyra represents for both the Syrian army and the Russians – however symbolic rather than military. Syrian officers told me in Palmyra earlier this year that Isis would never be allowed to return. There was a Russian military base in the city. Russian aircraft flew overhead. A Russian orchestra had just played in the Roman ruins to celebrate Palmyra’s liberation.

So what happened? Most likely is that the Syrian military simply didn’t have the manpower to defend Palmyra while closing in on eastern Aleppo. 

They will have to take Palmyra back – quickly. But for Bashar al-Assad, the end of the Aleppo siege means that Isis, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda and all the other Salafist groups and their allies can no longer claim a base, or create a capital, in the long line of great cities that form the spine of Syria: Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.

Back to Aleppo. The familiar and now tired political-journalistic narrative is in need of refreshing. The evidence has been clear for some days. After months of condemning the iniquities of the Syrian regime while obscuring the identity and brutality of its opponents in Aleppo, the human rights organisations – sniffing defeat for the rebels – began only a few days ago to spread their criticism to include the defenders of eastern Aleppo. 

Take the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. After last week running through its usual – and perfectly understandable – fears for the civilian population of eastern Aleppo and their medical workers, and for civilians subject to government reprisals and for “hundreds of men” who may have gone missing after crossing the frontlines, the UN suddenly expressed other concerns. 

“During the last two weeks, Fatah al-Sham Front [in other words, al-Qaeda] and the Abu Amara Battalion are alleged to have abducted and killed an unknown number of civilians who requested the armed groups to leave their neighbourhoods, to spare the lives of civilians...,” it stated.

“We have also received reports that between 30 November and 1 December, armed opposition groups fired on civilians attempting to leave...” Furthermore, “indiscriminate attacks” had been conducted on heavily civilian areas of government-held western as well as ‘rebel’ eastern Aleppo.

I suspect we shall be hearing more of this in the coming days. Next month, we shall also be reading a frightening new book, Merchants of Men, by Italian journalist Loretta Napoleoni, on the funding of the war in Syria. She catalogues kidnapping-for-cash by both government and rebel forces in Syria, but also has harsh words for our own profession of journalism. 

Reporters who were kidnapped by armed guard in eastern Syria, she writes, “fell victim to a sort of Hemingway syndrome: war correspondents supporting the insurgency trust the rebels and place their lives in their hands because they are in league with them.” But, “the insurgency is just a variation of criminal jihadism, a modern phenomenon that has only one loyalty: money.”

Is this too harsh on my profession? Are we really “in league” with the rebels?

Certainly our political masters are – and for the same reason as the rebels kidnap their victims: money. Hence the disgrace of Brexit May and her buffoonerie of ministers who last week prostrated themselves to the Sunni autocrats who fund the jihadis of Syria in the hope of winning billions of pounds in post-Brexit arms sales to the Gulf. 

In a few hours, the British parliament is to debate the plight of the doctors, nurses, wounded children and civilians of Aleppo and other areas of Syria. The grotesque behaviour of the UK Government has ensured that neither the Syrians nor the Russians will pay the slightest attention to our pitiful wails. That, too, must become part of the story.

 

[Awol]

27 minutes ago, peterms said:

Well they've done it before.  Remember the early days of ISIS, driving long convoys of brand new Hummers for hundreds of miles, unmolested, on their way to invade village after village, town after town?  The US tolerated it because it saw they bigger goal as being to remove Assad, and that ISIS would help with that.  A bit like when they trained and equipped bin Laden and friends all those years ago, in Afghanistan.

I agree that Assad was the US priority for a long time, but during the initial ISIS blitzkreig back into Iraq from Syria th coalition had neither the aircraft in place or any agreement to use them with the Maliki Government in Baghdad - before  he was pushed out. 

His sectarian policies were the single biggest factor in creating the conditions for ISIS to reappear in force in Iraq, from pushing Sunnis out of power to massacring peaceful demonstrators on live TV. 

As we now know US intelligence foresaw the Caliphate and (entirely out of character) totally misjudged it. The now National Security Advisor Gen Flynn was effectively retired by Obama for raging against this idiocy and the manipulation intelligence product to fit the Administration's agenda - hence Trump's line about Obama creating ISIS. Crude and not strictly true, but not entirely without merit either.

[TrentVilla]

2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

It's almost as though we've tried to have a dabble on a budget without really understanding what was going on.

Which would be very out of character for us.

It is almost as though we lost the political will to adequately deal with the situation fully at its onset because of mistakes made in the past that in turn contributed to the issue.

I still think the stronger and swifter action could and should have been taken at the onset of ISIS. 

 

[OutByEaster?]

13 minutes ago, TrentVilla said:

I still think the stronger and swifter action could and should have been taken at the onset of ISIS. 

Militarily I think you're right - if we'd supported ISIS a bit more, Assad might have fallen. 

Morally, I'm not so sure that would have been the right thing to do.

 

[TrentVilla]

3 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

Militarily I think you're right - if we'd supported ISIS a bit more, Assad might have fallen. 

That isn't what I was saying, my point was in relation to ISIS not Syria. 

[OutByEaster?]

7 minutes ago, TrentVilla said:

That isn't what I was saying, my point was in relation to ISIS not Syria. 

I had a feeling it was. I guess you could make a claim that if we'd taken no action there wouldn't have been an onset of ISIS who were ultimately born from the mess we left Iraq in. If Saddam had toed the party line back in 1991, I wonder how different the world would have been? 

We're still paying the price for the feeling that came out of the deaths of the one and a half million people that died as a result of the sanctions we imposed after that war. 

Of course, none of that matters right now - and unfortunately, I think right now what we will need to do is wait until Syria settles back down under Assad, continue to build (delicate) bridges with Iran and hope the whole mess settles down a bit - which means sitting on our hands while some people die today in the hope that it prevents more dying later while keeping that oil and money flowing our way.

The problem with the middle east is that there aren't any good guys.

 

[TrentVilla]

If we are honest, really it all goes back to the mess we left behind after WWII, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Israel all of it. That's not to say there wouldn't be issues had we not taken out crayons to the map but most modern conflicts owe much of their origins to those post war policies.

Personally I think it is far too simplistic to say ISIS was the result of our actions of removing Saddam, it was a factor but so too was the sectarianism of the regime that followed.

Irrespective of all that though, personally I advocated at the time taking swift and full action against ISIS and I still think that would have been the best course of action.

As for Syria, I wouldn't have advocated military involvement but would have been support of humanitarian and peace keeping action from the UN under the threat of military action if necessary, preferably in a way that included the support of Russia rather than their further alienation with global politics.

Idealistic perhaps but I think 'the west' has once again fundamentally failed to try and uphold its own values, protect innocent lives and act against evil.

[Awol]

6 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

I had a feeling it was. I guess you could make a claim that if we'd taken no action there wouldn't have been an onset of ISIS who were ultimately born from the mess we left Iraq in. If Saddam had toed the party line back in 1991, I wonder how different the world would have been? 

We're still paying the price for the feeling that came out of the deaths of the one and a half million people that died as a result of the sanctions we imposed after that war. 

Of course, none of that matters right now - and unfortunately, I think right now what we will need to do is wait until Syria settles back down under Assad, continue to build (delicate) bridges with Iran and hope the whole mess settles down a bit - which means sitting on our hands while some people die today in the hope that it prevents more dying later while keeping that oil and money flowing our way.

The problem with the middle east is that there aren't any good guys.

 

Sadly there won't be a settling down under Assad. Even if he clears the organised brigades of Jihadis from western Syria they will drop back down to guerilla and terrorist operations and make the country ungovernable. The same thing will happen with ISIS in Iraq. 

This mess has years left to run. 

[villakram]

1 hour ago, TrentVilla said:

As for Syria, I wouldn't have advocated military involvement but would have been support of humanitarian and peace keeping action from the UN under the threat of military action if necessary, preferably in a way that included the support of Russia rather than their further alienation with global politics.

Idealistic perhaps but I think 'the west' has once again fundamentally failed to try and uphold its own values, protect innocent lives and act against evil.

Have you considered working for the CIA?

step 1: Inspire insurgency against sovereign government that you don't like anymore.

step 2: Arm suitably duped "rebels".

step 3: March in with the UN to save rebels when the sovereign government decides to enforce the rule of law in their own country. 

step 4: Whiskey & beer as reward for yet another successful soft coup. 

Edited December 13, 2016 by villakram

[TrentVilla]

Just now, villakram said:

Have you considered working for the CIA?

step 1: Inspire insurgency against sovereign government that you don't like anymore.

step 2: Arm suitably duped "rebels".

step 3: March in with the UN to save rebels when the sovereign government decides to enforce the rule of law in their own country. 

step 4: Whiskey & beer as reward for yet another successful soft coup.

No too busy setting up a smuggling operation to get people back into Syria, people are desperate to get back and grab a nice block of abandoned rubble.

[villakram]

16 hours ago, TrentVilla said:

 

I'm not sure that you can really compare what the Russian's are facilitating in Aleppo with what happened in Kobani.

I also don't think you can compare what is happening in Aleppo with what is happening in Mosul.

Frankly to do so... is... well a little absurd and akin to I don't know.... suggesting people will be keen to return to Aleppo.

I am genuinely interested in why you think people will not return? For example, why would they not return when Kobani, Ramallah, Fallujah, Beirut... along with a few more infamous German/Russian and Japanese examples are all currently populated? 

Sure, there are a group of people who backed the wrong horse and should be tried and prosecuted if they return (I realize this will be more like executed in reality), but isn't that what is expected to happen when you decide to pick up a gun? However, the vast majority would have been perfectly happy if none of this nonsense had ever occurred. There's also the small matter of rebuilding being quite the profitable enterprise... Krugman must be positively giddy at all those broken windows.

[Awol]

14 minutes ago, villakram said:

I am genuinely interested in why you think people will not return? For example, why would they not return when Kobani, Ramallah, Fallujah, Beirut... along with a few more infamous German/Russian and Japanese examples are all currently populated? 

Sure, there are a group of people who backed the wrong horse and should be tried and prosecuted if they return (I realize this will be more like executed in reality), but isn't that what is expected to happen when you decide to pick up a gun? However, the vast majority would have been perfectly happy if none of this nonsense had ever occurred. There's also the small matter of rebuilding being quite the profitable enterprise... Krugman must be positively giddy at all those broken windows.

There are many reasons why Syrians won't return in the near to medium term, but the biggest is that the war isn't going to end for years. 

Best case at the moment is Syria  in a few years resembling Iraq circa 2006/7, but with a baseline of exponentially greater urban destruction, zero security, public services or economic opportunity, and with the majority Sunni population (those who haven't fled) continuing to live under a reign of terror from the minority led Assad regime.

Keep in mind the overwhelming majority of the 400,000 people killed in Syria died at regime hands. When that regime is still in control what possible incentive do people have to go back? 

Yes Germany and Japan were rebuilt but the regimes were defeated and gone, there was no insurgency and a major part of their populations hadn't decamped to safe third countries and started new lives. Even a refugee camp may be considered a better bet for the displaced. 

[villakram]

1 hour ago, Awol said:

There are many reasons why Syrians won't return in the near to medium term, but the biggest is that the war isn't going to end for years. 

Best case at the moment is Syria  in a few years resembling Iraq circa 2006/7, but with a baseline of exponentially greater urban destruction, zero security, public services or economic opportunity, and with the majority Sunni population (those who haven't fled) continuing to live under a reign of terror from the minority led Assad regime.

Keep in mind the overwhelming majority of the 400,000 people killed in Syria died at regime hands. When that regime is still in control what possible incentive do people have to go back? 

Yes Germany and Japan were rebuilt but the regimes were defeated and gone, there was no insurgency and a major part of their populations hadn't decamped to safe third countries and started new lives. Even a refugee camp may be considered a better bet for the displaced. 

Citation please, as that sounds an awful lot like it originated from the Syrian Observatory for Human rights, a well known propaganda machine. Yes by multiple accounts of order 400k appear to have been murdered but blaming the government for > 350k of them seems baseless (my interpretation of overwhelming, but let's not nit pick).

Assad and his butcher dad were able to create an approx. european standard of living in Syria before where all those groups could live together and they'll figure out how to do it again. Syria can start rebuilding pretty much straight away as  long as the "rebels" aka rebranded AQ et al. stop being funded and armed by us and our allies. Open season in Idlib province would be a start. 

[peterms]

3 hours ago, villakram said:

...the Syrian Observatory for Human rights, a well known propaganda machine.

 

Isn't that one bloke, blogging from an address in Coventry, who somehow gets quoted by the media as though he's on fhe ground in a war zone?