The Arab Spring and "the War on Terror"

[maqroll]

I heard Jihadi John is an uphill gardener

[TrentVilla]

 

So Jihadi John is on the run, I hope the SAS are the ones that find him.

Sounds like there is more to this story? What you got?

 

 

Well there is this guy called Jihadi John, he has seemingly gone on the run from ISIS and I hope the SAS find him

 

Its fairly safe to assume we've special forces on the ground over there and I'd imagine he is a target given his profile and crimes.

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

Interesting (and long!) read on Isis in the New Statesman

 

 

...

 

In Abu Dhabi a few weeks ago, I sat late at night with my old friend Dr Rafi ­al-Issawi, the Sunni former finance minister of Iraq. He was one of the very few senior figures – Sunni or Shia – in Iraq during my time there who was prepared to reach out across sectarian boundaries and think creatively about political solutions to essentially political problems. He still does. Perhaps that is how a medical director who kept his hospital open during the savage battles for Fallujah in 2004, one of the most effective of all the Sunni politicians in Iraq and a man of integrity, is bound to think. His reward? Attempted assassination and then exile on trumped-up charges of supporting terrorism.

 

We talked of ways to bring the Sunnis back into a political process – as they had been brought back, often by themselves, between 2005 and 2008. I had the same conversation a few days later in Amman, and have done so again in the past week in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, with other Iraqi friends and politicians. Others have identical aspirations. But the Sunni leadership in Iraq, never cohesive, is now even more fragmented than it was in 2011. And the divisions along the lines of identity in Iraq, a country that the distinguished late Iraqi sociologist Ali al-Wardi once characterised as defined by multiple parallel identities, are deeper than ever before.

 

This represents the triumph of those who have sought to instrumentalise sectarian identities in the pursuit of power: to demonise Sunnis as closet Ba’athists who want revenge, to terrify the Shias with the prospect of renewed oppression, and to claim that security in a state such as Iraq (and by implication the wider region) is assured only through the communal protection afforded by the political expression of essentialist identities. And Da’esh is the flipside. Its appeal in Iraq and elsewhere is powerful. It claims to see through the broken promises and conspiracies of the past decade – ­indeed, the past century, and sometimes the past millennium. It offers a new, sacred, transnational and at the same time territorial model of righteousness. More importantly, it offers a framework within which to construe the pain of dispossession, the loss of power, the rise of others less devout, less deserving, less human. Not only does it claim to answer the question of why sinners’ ways prosper, but by framing the entire issue as one of godliness, it provides a divine dispensation for anything and everything that advances the practical goal of recapturing power and wreaking revenge on an infidel and hostile world. It combines an appeal to faith, tribalism (more precisely to asabiyya, the group solidarity that the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun identified 600 years ago as the driver of cohesion but also of cyclical conflict in the societies he knew), resentment and the promise of glory.

 

The mobilisation of identity in the service of combatant politics is hardly exclusive to Da’esh. We see it elsewhere: nationalist identity in China, nationalist-Buddhist in the case of Burma, ethno-religious in Malaysia, sectarian and religious in the case of Islamist movements and some states across the Muslim world. We saw it in the Balkans in the 1990s. We also see a wide use of modern communications techniques to create and then exploit allegedly ancient passions and fears; the mobilisation of grievances; the deliberate destruction of individual and social solidarity; and the construction of radically simplified, harshly communal but powerful forms of connectivity.

 

The use of purposeful and often sacralised narratives to shape the approach to secular political goals may not be new. They were as much a feature of early-17th-century Europe as of Baghdad in 2010 or Cairo in 2013: think Anabaptist Münster or the English Fifth Monarchists.

 

But, it seems to me, what is new in the case of Da’esh is the striking combination of a number of features: the clarity of its transnationalism; the speed, professionalism and discipline with which its global religio-identity narratives are produced and flexed; the way these are backed by an encompassing Islamist jurisprudence (look, say, at Turki Binali’s Muqarrar fi al-Tawhid – Da’esh’s basic coursebook); the skill with which they are harnessed to its political goals. There is also the subtlety with which it tracks and shapes opinion (the first message was “we stop genocide in Syria”; then “we champion Sunnis in Iraq”; then “we build a service state”; then “we are a righteous caliphate”); and the effectiveness (so far) of its hybrid military operations in the Syria/Iraq theatre and its stripped-back crowdsourcing model. All these features are linked by a complex thread – the studied marketing of a constructed identity, or performativity, as the theorists say: this is designed to reinforce Da’esh’s self-image as a rightly guided eschatological and millenarian movement, to convey what one analyst calls “a sense of apocalyptic time”, but also to proclaim the temporal success of such an enterprise and communicate purpose while the world watches.

 

When in July 2014 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stood up in his black robes and turban at the great mosque of Nur ad-Din Zengi in Mosul to proclaim the caliphate, he was implicitly claiming to be the heir of the Abbasids (scourges of Ummayad decadence) and of Nur ad-Din’s celebrated military commander, Salah ad-Din (scourge of the Crusaders) – a righteous religious and secular leader and a conqueror. That resonates in a region where history happened yesterday. This is a movement that wants to seem not just blessed and rooted in a mythical past but also profanely effective in a present that holds a mirror to the past.

 

...

 

[Ikantcpell]

Watching dead children floating around in the mediterranian, you have to ask yourself, where is the compassion and where is the heart of all these people who have created this mess.

 

They must have known how much the people would suffer when starting these wars, do they not care ? are they not humans ?

[dont_do_it_doug.]

Interesting (and long!) read on Isis in the New Statesman

...

In Abu Dhabi a few weeks ago, I sat late at night with my old friend Dr Rafi ­al-Issawi, the Sunni former finance minister of Iraq. He was one of the very few senior figures – Sunni or Shia – in Iraq during my time there who was prepared to reach out across sectarian boundaries and think creatively about political solutions to essentially political problems. He still does. Perhaps that is how a medical director who kept his hospital open during the savage battles for Fallujah in 2004, one of the most effective of all the Sunni politicians in Iraq and a man of integrity, is bound to think. His reward? Attempted assassination and then exile on trumped-up charges of supporting terrorism.

We talked of ways to bring the Sunnis back into a political process – as they had been brought back, often by themselves, between 2005 and 2008. I had the same conversation a few days later in Amman, and have done so again in the past week in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, with other Iraqi friends and politicians. Others have identical aspirations. But the Sunni leadership in Iraq, never cohesive, is now even more fragmented than it was in 2011. And the divisions along the lines of identity in Iraq, a country that the distinguished late Iraqi sociologist Ali al-Wardi once characterised as defined by multiple parallel identities, are deeper than ever before.

This represents the triumph of those who have sought to instrumentalise sectarian identities in the pursuit of power: to demonise Sunnis as closet Ba’athists who want revenge, to terrify the Shias with the prospect of renewed oppression, and to claim that security in a state such as Iraq (and by implication the wider region) is assured only through the communal protection afforded by the political expression of essentialist identities. And Da’esh is the flipside. Its appeal in Iraq and elsewhere is powerful. It claims to see through the broken promises and conspiracies of the past decade – ­indeed, the past century, and sometimes the past millennium. It offers a new, sacred, transnational and at the same time territorial model of righteousness. More importantly, it offers a framework within which to construe the pain of dispossession, the loss of power, the rise of others less devout, less deserving, less human. Not only does it claim to answer the question of why sinners’ ways prosper, but by framing the entire issue as one of godliness, it provides a divine dispensation for anything and everything that advances the practical goal of recapturing power and wreaking revenge on an infidel and hostile world. It combines an appeal to faith, tribalism (more precisely to asabiyya, the group solidarity that the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun identified 600 years ago as the driver of cohesion but also of cyclical conflict in the societies he knew), resentment and the promise of glory.

The mobilisation of identity in the service of combatant politics is hardly exclusive to Da’esh. We see it elsewhere: nationalist identity in China, nationalist-Buddhist in the case of Burma, ethno-religious in Malaysia, sectarian and religious in the case of Islamist movements and some states across the Muslim world. We saw it in the Balkans in the 1990s. We also see a wide use of modern communications techniques to create and then exploit allegedly ancient passions and fears; the mobilisation of grievances; the deliberate destruction of individual and social solidarity; and the construction of radically simplified, harshly communal but powerful forms of connectivity.

The use of purposeful and often sacralised narratives to shape the approach to secular political goals may not be new. They were as much a feature of early-17th-century Europe as of Baghdad in 2010 or Cairo in 2013: think Anabaptist Münster or the English Fifth Monarchists.

But, it seems to me, what is new in the case of Da’esh is the striking combination of a number of features: the clarity of its transnationalism; the speed, professionalism and discipline with which its global religio-identity narratives are produced and flexed; the way these are backed by an encompassing Islamist jurisprudence (look, say, at Turki Binali’s Muqarrar fi al-Tawhid – Da’esh’s basic coursebook); the skill with which they are harnessed to its political goals. There is also the subtlety with which it tracks and shapes opinion (the first message was “we stop genocide in Syria”; then “we champion Sunnis in Iraq”; then “we build a service state”; then “we are a righteous caliphate”); and the effectiveness (so far) of its hybrid military operations in the Syria/Iraq theatre and its stripped-back crowdsourcing model. All these features are linked by a complex thread – the studied marketing of a constructed identity, or performativity, as the theorists say: this is designed to reinforce Da’esh’s self-image as a rightly guided eschatological and millenarian movement, to convey what one analyst calls “a sense of apocalyptic time”, but also to proclaim the temporal success of such an enterprise and communicate purpose while the world watches.

When in July 2014 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stood up in his black robes and turban at the great mosque of Nur ad-Din Zengi in Mosul to proclaim the caliphate, he was implicitly claiming to be the heir of the Abbasids (scourges of Ummayad decadence) and of Nur ad-Din’s celebrated military commander, Salah ad-Din (scourge of the Crusaders) – a righteous religious and secular leader and a conqueror. That resonates in a region where history happened yesterday. This is a movement that wants to seem not just blessed and rooted in a mythical past but also profanely effective in a present that holds a mirror to the past.

...

[Awol]

Tsk... This ain't Twitter you know!

[Awol]

Watching dead children floating around in the mediterranian, you have to ask yourself, where is the compassion and where is the heart of all these people who have created this mess.

 

They must have known how much the people would suffer when starting these wars, do they not care ? are they not humans ?

 

Islamic State fighters and their ilk are barely human beasts. Same goes for their sponsors - who we aren't really supposed to talk about.  Obviously the picture of that poor little boy drowned on a Turkish beach is gut wrenching, but there are plenty of deserving people to take the blame for that before the media and talking heads start riding a wave of emotional indignation and finger pointing at the UK.  

 

First in line are the boy's parents who put their 3 yr old son on a shitty, overloaded inflatable boat and left their safe haven in Turkey to try and chance their arm at getting into Europe. They risked and lost the lives of their children for the chance to marginally improve their circumstances - a very poor cost/benefit and risk analysis on their part.

 

Second in line are the Turks themselves. Why is a first world country and NATO member allowing these people smugglers to operate from their territory?  Are we supposed to believe they do not control their maritime border, that they have no more control than the failed state of Libya?  Just to make things worse, Turkey continues to bomb the bejesus out of the only fighting force in Syria that is effective in the conflict with IS, namely the Kurds.

 

Third in line for a roasting is the EU and particularly Germany. The common asylum policy of the EU and statements around it have explicitly stated that any Syrian refugee that makes it Europe is entitled to stay. Syria now has 10 million internally and externally displaced refugees and these statements encourage them to risk making extremely dangerous journeys with people traffickers, instead of staying put with their families in safe locations. In effect it's moral grand standing by the EU and Merkel leading directly to loss of life in the Med' and the Aegean. What of other countries in conflict? Once the precedent is set is the EU then morally obliged in principle to take in their entire population, and if not then why not? 

 

There are really only two viable ways to help these people that I can see (short of relocating 10 million people from Syria to the EU), the first is to keep doing what we are doing by funding and supporting good quality refugee camps in countries adjacent to their own (UK is the second largest financial contributor in the world to this relief effort). The second is to try and fix the problem at source by directly intervening militarily in Syria. That would cost us in blood and treasure with no guarantees of success, but if people are arguing that we have a responsibility to resettle the Syrian population in the EU then we are already entertaining extreme solutions.      

Edited September 3, 2015 by Awol

[PongRiddims]

Who does sponsor ISIS Awol?

[dont_do_it_doug.]

Tsk... This ain't Twitter you know!

When somebody starts a post with "here is a really long post", they know what's coming

[omariqy]

 

Watching dead children floating around in the mediterranian, you have to ask yourself, where is the compassion and where is the heart of all these people who have created this mess.

 

They must have known how much the people would suffer when starting these wars, do they not care ? are they not humans ?

 

Islamic State fighters and their ilk are barely human beasts. Same goes for their sponsors - who we aren't really supposed to talk about.  Obviously the picture of that poor little boy drowned on a Turkish beach is gut wrenching, but there are plenty of deserving people to take the blame for that before the media and talking heads start riding a wave of emotional indignation and finger pointing at the UK.  

 

First in line are the boy's parents who put their 3 yr old son on a shitty, overloaded inflatable boat and left their safe haven in Turkey to try and chance their arm at getting into Europe. They risked and lost the lives of their children for the chance to marginally improve their circumstances - a very poor cost/benefit and risk analysis on their part.

 

Second in line are the Turks themselves. Why is a first world country and NATO member allowing these people smugglers to operate from their territory?  Are we supposed to believe they do not control their maritime border, that they have no more control than the failed state of Libya?  Just to make things worse, Turkey continues to bomb the bejesus out of the only fighting force in Syria that is effective in the conflict with IS, namely the Kurds.

 

Third in line for a roasting is the EU and particularly Germany. The common asylum policy of the EU and statements around it have explicitly stated that any Syrian refugee that makes it Europe is entitled to stay. Syria now has 10 million internally and externally displaced refugees and these statements encourage them to risk making extremely dangerous journeys with people traffickers, instead of staying put with their families in safe locations. In effect it's moral grand standing by the EU and Merkel leading directly to loss of life in the Med' and the Aegean. What of other countries in conflict? Once the precedent is set is the EU then morally obliged in principle to take in their entire population, and if not then why not? 

 

There are really only two viable ways to help these people that I can see (short of relocating 10 million people from Syria to the EU), the first is to keep doing what we are doing by funding and supporting good quality refugee camps in countries adjacent to their own (UK is the second largest financial contributor in the world to this relief effort). The second is to try and fix the problem at source by directly intervening militarily in Syria. That would cost us in blood and treasure with no guarantees of success, but if people are arguing that we have a responsibility to resettle the Syrian population in the EU then we are already entertaining extreme solutions.      

 

First to blame is Assad and his army.

[Awol]

First to blame is Assad and his army.

 

Four years ago, sure. Now they are all that stands between the non-Sunni Muslim population and a mass grave. 

 

We had the chance to get behind the secular (or at least non-Islamist) Free Syrian Army when it all kicked off but no one wanted to intervene decisively on their behalf. Instead the Gulfies filled the vacuum with their cash, weapons and Wahhabi ideology, changing a democratic uprising into a sectarian slaughterhouse. 

[Awol]

Who does sponsor ISIS Awol?

 

Now they are pretty much self sufficient financially, but originally a mix of Turkey and the great and the good from Saudi, Kuwait and other Arab states. Knocking off Assad was seen as a way to strike at the Iranians indirectly, not a great deal of thought was given to what Frankenstein's monster might do if they lost control of it.   Now it's threatening to eat the lot of them but they don't have a plausible counter narrative because IS' ideology is so closely aligned to what you would hear coming from a Saudi mosque any given Friday lunchtime - kill the Shia, kill the gays, kill the Jews etc etc. 

[PongRiddims]

Interesting, thanks Awol

[snowychap]

are they not humans ?

Very much so - all too human, sadly.

[choffer]

Not sure this is quite the right place to post this. Could just as easily have gone in the cheer you up thread.

 

Munich, 3 September 2015: Germany is currently experiencing its greatest influx of refugees for many decades. This presents a special challenge to the state and society. FC Bayern München will play an active part in meeting the challenge and, working closely with the city of Munich and state of Bavaria, contribute financial, material and practical help.

FC Bayern via its youth section plans to establish a “Training camp” for refugees over the coming weeks. Municipal authorities will assume essential organisational tasks. Kids and youths will train at FC Bayern at intervals to be determined later, take German classes, and be provided with meals and football kit.

FC Bayern München AG will additionally donate €1 million from a friendly match to refugee support projects. The projects will be selected after liaison with Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann and Mayor of Munich Dieter Reiter.

At the club’s next match against FC Augsburg on 12 September, our players will be escorted onto the Allianz Arena pitch hand-in-hand with a German child and a refugee child as a mark of support for the integration of refugees.

FC Bayern president Karl-Hopfner also announced measures to be taken by the club’s charity foundation FC Bayern Hilfe eV. The foundation is especially keen to raise the spirits of children from refugee families by providing activities and events in the period before Christmas.

“We at FC Bayern consider it our socio-political responsibility to help displaced and needy children, women and men, supporting and assisting them in Germany,” commented FC Bayern München chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge.

Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) welcomed FC Bayern’s plans to help refugees: “This is a wonderful and exemplary programme which I fully welcome and support – another magnificent example of the willingness to help and welcoming culture in our country.”

Mayor of Munich Dieter Reiter (SPD) commented: “FC Bayern is laying down an important marker and I am delighted with the club’s significant commitment. I have consequently also gladly pledged the support of the city of Munich.”

[StefanAVFC]

Humanity before nationalism.

[choffer]

RAF drone strike killed two British terrorists in Syria. I'd love to know how an unmanned drone acts in "self-defence".

[Awol]

RAF drone strike killed two British terrorists in Syria. I'd love to know how an unmanned drone acts in "self-defence".

Protecting the British public from domestic terrorists would probably be the rationale behind that statement, but having starred in their own IS recruitment video the real statement is to those considering going out there to do evil deeds; "this is what happens if you join these murderous animals, we will come for you and even in Syria you can't hide from us".

Bloody brilliant news, I hope all their colleagues (British or otherwise) meet similar fates. Filthy scum.

[choffer]

Interesting though how the story has always been that drones over Syria were never armed and only there for reconnaissance. Not that we'll ever know the details of what happened here but it does appear to be a change in policy.

[snowychap]

Interesting though how the story has always been that drones over Syria were never armed and only there for reconnaissance. Not that we'll ever know the details of what happened here but it does appear to be a change in policy.

Mr Cameron said, after the coalition government lost the vote in 2013, " ...I also believe in respecting the will of this House of Commons. It is very clear tonight that, while the House has not passed a motion, it is clear to me that the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the government will act accordingly."