Why Iran’s Bellicose Foreign Policy Is Unlikely to Change

Sven-Eric Fikenscher

October 1, 2015

Source Link

As the deadline for Congressional action against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran has passed on September 17, the agreement is finally about to be implemented. Some supporters of the deal have argued that in the absence of a stalemate over Tehran’s nuclear activities, the West can now engage Iran to stabilize the Middle East, most notably with regards to rolling back the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). John Kerry fueled these hopes when he said that Iranian foreign minister Zarif had told him that thanks to the deal he would be “empowered to work with and talk to you about regional issues.” Federica Mogherini, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, even voiced hope that time might be ripe for an entirely new “regional framework […] based on cooperation rather than confrontation.”

This optimism, however, underestimates the anti-American agenda and the influence of Iran’s self-declared guardians of the revolution. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the key figure in the Iranian political system, is a case in point. While President Hassan Rouhani has been very committed to concluding the nuclear deal, Khamenei was the one who has always expressed reservations about engaging the United States. He once compared his attitude to the negotiations to the behavior of a wrestler who sometimes “shows flexibility [for] technical reasons,” but “should not forget who his opponent and enemy is.” From his perspective, the compromise on the nuclear issue was a tacit concession to get much-needed sanctions relief and by no means a blueprint for reconciliation. After Rouhani cautiously expressed his interest in expanding Iran’s cooperation with “various countries,” the Supreme Leader immediately pushed back and told his fellow citizens to “prepare for the continuation of the fight against America.”

Some analysts have dismissed such statements as empty words to appease radical groups within Iran. Unlike the Supreme Leader’s red lines regarding the nuclear negotiations, this kind of rhetoric is, however, backed up by action. Iran’s Qods Force––the wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is running the IRGC’s external operations and was instrumental in supporting radical Shiite militias during the insurgency in Iraq––has reportedly plotted terrorist acts against targets from Israel and the Gulf states, the key U.S. allies in the Middle East. Most notably, the Qods Force was behind the attempt to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil in 2011. Apart from plotting its own attacks, the Qods Force has also encouraged and supported Hezbollah in its endeavor to follow suit.

The Qods Force––and not the comparatively moderate forces that negotiated the nuclear deal––is also in charge of coordinating Iran’s current military and diplomatic engagement with respect to the region’s hot spots, such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen. In its capacity as primary Iranian stakeholder in regional affairs, the Qods Force has dramatically stepped up its activities and undermined regional stability in recent years. When the Assad regime was under increasing pressure from the Syrian insurgents, the Qods Force teamed up with its long-standing proxy Hezbollah to keep the regime from falling. To this day, Hezbollah militants and IRGC forces fight alongside Assad’s army. As a result, the Syrian regime has continued its brutal attempts to suppress the popular revolt and thousands of foreign fighters have flocked to Syria to join Sunni insurgents, including terrorist groups. In addition, the Qods Force has doubled down on its support for the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who drove American forces out of the country a couple of months ago.

It is particularly noteworthy that the Qods Force increased its involvement in Syria and Yemen, although the United States and Iran simultaneously narrowed their differences on the nuclear issue. In other words, the idea that a compromise on the nuclear file can undo the severe conflicts between the United States and Iran on other issues has so far been powerfully disproven. The odds that Iran is going to change its behavior in the future are quite low. Things are rather likely to get even worse. In a recent speech, the Supreme Leader vowed to keep up the support for the “oppressed people” of Yemen and––mentioning another potential trouble spot––Bahrain. The continuation of the alliance between Iran and its only governmental partner in the region, the Assad regime, is also pretty much a given.

It is true that Iran and the United States have demonstrated that they can find common ground, if both countries deem collaboration to be in their interests. Supporters of deeper engagement with Iran are right to point out that efforts to roll back ISIL fall into that category, but that should not overshadow the strikingly discrepant goals, values and interests both sides have. The United States should not act under the assumption that a long-standing foe, who has turned out to pursue an extremely aggressive agenda that runs counter to its own, can be flipped into a friend. Instead, it should now focus its efforts on containing Iran’s regional ambitions and preventing Iranian-inspired terrorist attacks. In both cases, it will be crucial to seek new international allies to isolate and weaken the Qods Force.

Sven-Eric Fikenscher is an Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Read More

5 ISIS Weapons of War Russia Should Fear in Syria

Robert Farley

October 1, 2015

Source Link

Reports out of Syria indicate that Russian fighter-bombers have begun airstrikes on rebel positions. However, the extent of Russian commitment remains unclear. At the very least, we can expect that the troops and aircraft will forcefully protect Russian installations in the region. At the maximum, Russia may fight to preserve the Assad regime, and restore its control over parts of Syria.

Either way, Moscow will see pushback. While ISIS hasn’t focused its rhetoric on Moscow, we can expect that the presence of Russian troops in Syria will concentrate the group’s attention. Here are five weapons that ISIS can use against Russia:

Infiltrators:

In September 2012, a group of insurgents penetrated Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, and destroyed eight Marine Corps AV-8B Harriers. The attack gave the U.S. Marine Corps a huge black eye, and represented the greatest operational loss of U.S. aircraft since the Vietnam War. Ironically, if the F-35B had been close to on schedule, the attack could have cost over a billion dollars.

We can expect that the Russians will manage security at the Latakia airbase. Nevertheless, the dozens of combat aircraft at the base will prove a tempting target for ISIS infiltrators, potentially working with base personnel. Damaging or destroying Russian aircraft on the ground would provide the same kind of propaganda coup for ISIS as attacking Camp Bastion provided the Taliban.

Rockets:

ISIS has not yet demonstrated much capability for hitting targets at long range. A Sinai group affiliated with ISIS claimed to have fired a pair of rockets at Israel, but beyond short-range mortars, indirect fire weapons have not played a very large role in ISIS offensives.

Some other opposition groups in Syria have, however, seized control of medium and long range rockets, and used them in combat. Some of these rockets (many built to Syrian design) can hit the Russian positions in Latakia. Russia hasn’t yet indicated much concern about these systems, but if ISIS manages to capture (or manufacture, or transfer) similar equipment to the vicinity of Latakia, it could give parked Russian aircraft a very bad day.

SAMs:

ISIS has not yet developed much in the way of surface-to-air capability, despite the efforts of the Syrian Arab Air Force and of the Coalition carrying out attacks across Syria and Iraq. Moreover, rugged Russian aircraft can sustain damage from the light anti-aircraft weapons that ISIS has managed to acquire.

Nevertheless, ISIS has some weapons that can damage Russian helicopters, and potentially slow-moving Russian attack aircraft. If Russian air attacks prove particularly effective, ISIS may have more incentive to put into service some of the SAMs it has seized along the way. Given that the Russians will operate with better equipment and training than the Syrians, and presumably with looser rules of engagement than the Americans, ISIS may well feel a need to improve its air defenses.

Chechens:

Rumors abound as to the number of Russians serving in the ranks of the Islamic State, but government sources suggest between 1,800 and 5,000, with most hailing from Chechnya. These fighters can hurt Russia in two ways. First, they likely have greater familiarity with Russian military tactics and procedures than anyone else in Syria (even the Syrian Arab Army). If they can apply lessons learned from the Chechen Wars, they could provide a serious threat to the Russian deployment.

More seriously, these Chechens could, if they return to Russia, re-spark the devastating war that occupied Moscow’s attention for much of the past two decades. Indeed, returning fighters could spark conflict along much of Russia’s southern regions, and in the Central Asian countries that Russia regards as within its sphere of influence. Western European countries are afraid of returning fighters, but Russia has much more cause for concern.

Propaganda:

The threat of ISIS has loomed large because of its effective propaganda machine. The organizations has displayed an unusual degree of aptitude on social media, generating attention that has, consequently, generated flows of new fighters and recruits. Much of the group’s efforts have thus far concentrated on Western countries, as well as on the Assad regime.

ISIS began stepping up its anti-Russian propaganda efforts in late spring of 2015. The deployment of significant Russian forces to Syria make it all the more likely that ISIS will concentrate on these efforts in the future. The ISIS propaganda machine has the potential not only to increase the number of recruits coming from Russia and Central Asia, but also for encouraging “independent” terrorist activity within Russia itself.

Parting Thoughts:

Russia is in an extremely tenuous position in Syria. If it wins, it gets a permanent alliance with the most hated man in the Middle East, the leader of a broken country. If ISIS or the other rebels win, Russia loses its foothold in the region, not to mention suffering the humiliation of defeat. Indeed, the risks either way seem so large, and the benefits so small, that many have wondered about the quality of Russia’s strategic decision-making.

Either way, Moscow will earn ever greater enmity from Islamic radicals around the world. One of the key insights of the U.S. strategic community in the late Cold War was that, however problematic Islamic radicalism might prove to the West, it could hurt the Soviets much more. Much has changed, but this remains true; ISIS has the potential to hurt Russia in a way that it can never hurt the United States.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as an Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs atLawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat.

Read More

Moscow's War in the Air: Russia Sends a Message in Syria

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

October 1, 2015

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/moscows-war-the-air-russia-sends-message-syria-13983

The start of Russian airstrikes in Syria—two days after Vladimir Putin listened to Barack Obama's UN General Assembly speech, which warned against Russian action in defense of the Bashar al-Assad regime (and then had such warnings reinforced in their one-on-one meeting)—is the Kremlin's answer to the questions that have been posed about Moscow's true intentions and interests.

First, the choice of targets in the first wave—with reports that the strikes hit non-ISIS Syrian opposition groups, including some affiliated with the Free Syrian Army and those who have been deemed credible to receive Western aid—is a message to the region as a whole that while Russia is prepared to use deadly force to defend its interests and to defend its clients, those who have accepted Western patronage will not enjoy such support. The fact that some Russian outlets have also begun to take the line that there is no such thing as a "moderate opposition"—only groups that have varying degrees of support for and affinity to the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS)—suggests the promulgation of a narrative that the conflict in Syria is now binary and one is either with Assad or "with the terrorists" and groups that continue to fight against Assad are de facto allied to ISIS. (On a separate note, it will be quite interesting to watch how the Russians deal with the Syrian Kurds, who have fought ISIS, but have often reached an apparent modus vivendi with the Assad regime to be left alone to enjoy a de facto autonomy).

Second, the speed at which the strikes have started is meant to convey to other countries in the region as well as to the Europeans that Russia can move quickly and with determination, in contrast to the Hamlet-like indecision exhibited by the United States. Having identified its interests, Moscow is willing to act and to take risks. Just as Russia intervened in Ukraine last summer to prevent the eastern rebels from being overwhelmed—and created "new facts" on the ground leading to the Minsk-II agreements—the gamble here may be that Russian action could stabilize the Assad regime and force other players in the region, starting with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, to negotiate with Moscow over Syria's future.

The image of Russian decisiveness stands in contrast to the takeaway from the anti-extremism summit convened by Obama in New York on Tuesday—where,as Margaret Warner noted, leaders of the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition “couldn’t say they have achieved much...almost none could point to a real accomplishment. Then they didn’t have any frank discussion about the fault with their own strategy and what they should do.”

Finally, the timing of the strikes—within hours of Putin's return from New York—is meant as a slap in the face to President Obama and to the United States as a whole. U.S. presidential candidates may outdo each other in calling Putin a thug, a gangster, a criminal or a dictator; they may give long eloquent speeches about how Russia is on the wrong side of history—but Putin believes he can create facts on the ground that challenge the U.S. narrative. The implications of the Iraqis joining with Iran, Syria and Russia to form an intelligence coordination unit and Iraq's decision to allow Russian overflights of its territory—after all the funds spent to train and equip Iraqis—suggests that Putin believes that things are breaking his way.

Of course, it is early days yet. Russia may be risking being sucked into a Middle Eastern quagmire by its actions in Syria, and further straining a weakened economy. But there is no question that right now, the Kremlin has taken control of the narrative.

Nikolas Gvosdev is a contributing editor at The National Interest and co-author of Russian Foreign Policy: Vectors, Sectors and Interests (CQ Press, 2013). The views expressed here are his own.

Read More

ISIS Has Become Sprawling Global Terror and Finance Network

September 30, 2015

New US sanctions illustrate sprawling Islamic State network 

WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. government announced sanctions Tuesday against 25 people and five groups connected to the Islamic State, disclosing intelligence that depicts a sprawling international organization with tentacles across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

The moves by the Treasury and State departments are aimed at disrupting the activities of Islamic State financial, logistical and recruiting operatives who may not be suitable targets of American bombs or drone strikes. Many of them reside outside the theaters of war in Iraq and Syria.

The sanctions, the largest such effort against the Islamic State, also serve to demonstrate how far and wide the group’s ideology has spread.

The State Department designated as foreign terrorist organizations Islamic State regional spin-offs in Russia’s Caucasus region, Algeria, Indonesia and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Among the individuals designated as terrorists was Sally Jones, a British native and the widow of an operative killed recently in an American drone strike.

The State Department also designated as terrorists three French nationals and a Russian. Russia, France and other countries cooperated with the U.S. in supplying information that contributed to the sanctions, officials said.

Also Tuesday, the State Department announced a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the significant disruption of commerce in oil and antiquities by, for, on behalf of, or to benefit the Islamic State. It was a first for the Rewards for Justice Program, which typically offers rewards for information leading to wanted individuals.

The Treasury Department, meanwhile, slapped financial sanctions on Islamic State officials who operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. Among the individuals it sanctioned in Syria was British national Aqsa Mahmood, who is accused of recruiting three British schoolgirls in February to flee the United Kingdom to become wives of Islamic State fighters. She is believed to be in Syria.

Previously, Treasury had sanctioned just four Islamic State officials, one of whom was killed in a U.S. drone strike in June.

Some of those sanctioned by Treasury are also expected to be placed Tuesday on the United Nations’ al-Qaida Sanctions List, officials said in a news release.

The announcement came before a meeting between President Barack Obama and other world leaders on countering the Islamic State on the margins of the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York.

The financial sanctions are designed to make it harder for the Islamic State to use its immense wealth, Daniel Glaser, Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing, said in an interview.

“These sanctions will prevent them from engaging in financial transactions and make it harder for them to travel,” he said.

Financial institutions around the world tend to honor U.S. sanctions, he said. The State Department designations mean that anyone who supports the individuals or groups can be prosecuted under U.S. law.

Much of the Islamic State’s income is generated internally, Glaser said, from oil sales, taxation and extortion, so sanctions can’t cut that off. Instead, they are meant “so that they can’t get supplies, parts, things that you need to run a state, things that you need to engage in a war,” he said.

Given the extensive smuggling networks across the region, it’s unclear how effective the sanctions will be in doing that.

In July, Glaser said the Islamic State is clearing as much as $500 million per year from oil sales, more than enough to meet a payroll he estimated at a high of $360 million a year.

The public announcement of sanctions, which draws on intelligence gathered by the CIA and other agencies, offers a window into insights the U.S. has garnered about the Islamic State.

Notably, the U.S. believes al-Qaida and the Islamic State have been working together on a tactical level, despite official hostility to one another.

Yemeni national Mu'tassim Yahya `Ali al-Rumaysh, for example, is described by Treasury as “a financial and foreign fighter facilitator” for the Islamic State “who also has held membership in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).”

He helped an Islamic State member procure funds for the travel of foreign fighters from Yemen to Syria transiting Turkey, Treasury said in a news release, coordinating AQAP and the Syrian al-Qaida affiliate, the Nusra Front, to facilitate the travel of Islamic State members.

In November 2013, al-Rumaysh sent a group of Yemeni extremists to Turkey, Treasury said, and they made their way to an AQAP facilitator in Syria.

Read More

Backgrounder on Who’s Who Amongst the Combatants in Syria’s Civil War

September 30, 2015

The forces fighting Syria’s war

Sparked by anti-government protests in March 2011, Syria’s conflict has evolved into a bloody and complex war increasingly dominated by jihadists.

A number of fighting groups, Syrian and foreign, have carved out zones of influence across the country.

- Regime and its allies -

- The Syrian army’s 300,000-strong pre-war force has been halved by deaths, defections, and frequent draft-dodging. It now controls about a third of Syrian territory, with the rest divided among Islamic State jihadists, Al-Qaeda-linked groups, mainstream rebels and Kurdish forces.

But the regime remains in control of areas where 50 percent of Syria’s remaining population live as well as the strategic provinces of Damascus, Latakia and Tartus along the Mediterranean coast, and parts of central Hama and Homs provinces, and Aleppo in the north.

- Some 150,000 to 200,000 men belong to pro-regime militias, mostly the 90,000-strong National Defence Forces, set up in 2012.

A number of militias from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan have also bolstered the regime’s beleaguered forces. The most powerful of these is Lebanon’s Shiite movement Hezbollah, which experts say has sent between 5,000 and 8,000 fighters to Syria.

- Russia, a decades-long backer of Syria’s regime, has increased its military involvement by building up an airbase in Latakia and sending fighter jets, drones and advanced aerial defence equipment, some of which has been transferred to Syrian troops.

Russia has also dispatched at least 1,700 soldiers to Syria, according to Russian media.

- Iran has remained a staunch ally of President Bashar al-Assad, sending at least 7,000 Revolutionary Guard forces, as well as military advisers and financial aid.

- Rebels and Al-Qaeda -

- Ahrar al-Sham is among the most powerful Islamist rebel groups in Syria. Founded in 2011 and financed by Turkey and Gulf states, according to experts, It has a key presence in Idlib, Aleppo and Damascus provinces.

- Al-Nusra Front is Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate and the most important jihadist group in the country after its rival, the Islamic State group. Led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, it has formed alliances with other rebel groups in Idlib and Aleppo, and is also present in the south and Damascus province. It is listed by Washington as a terrorist group.

Together, Al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham lead a key rebel alliance called the Army of Conquest. Since it was founded in 2015, the Army of Conquest has pushed the regime out of Idlib province.

- Jaish al-Islam is the most important rebel group in Damascus province. Led by a Syrian Islamist, Zahran Alloush, the group is based in the Eastern Ghouta region, east of the capital.

- The Southern Front is a coalition of rebel groups in Syria’s southern province of Daraa and receives support from the West.

- Islamic State group -

The Islamic State group is the most well-organised, resources-rich and brutally violent non-regime force in Syria. Since 2013, it has seized half of Syria’s territory, and it announced a self-styled “caliphate” across Syria and Iraq last year.

Headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, IS militants are fighting on several fronts: against rival rebels, Al-Nusra, Kurdish groups and the regime.

It has attracted nearly 30,000 foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria since 2011, according to US intelligence estimates.

- The Kurds -

The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) have controlled parts of Syria’s north and northeast since the regime unilaterally withdrew its forces from the region in 2012.

The YPG has scored major victories against IS in Kobane, Tal Abyad and Hasakeh province with aerial support from the US-led international coalition fighting the jihadists.

- International coalition -

Since 2014, the United States and Arab nations in a US-led coalition have been carrying out air strikes against IS targets in Syria. It has been unable to eliminate the jihadist group. This year, Turkey, the UK and France have joined the strikes in Syria.

Read More

Senate Committee Begins Investigation Into U.S. Intelligence Assessments of ISIS in Iraq and Syria

September 30, 2015

Republican-led Senate panel opens review of Syria intelligence

A U.S. Senate committee said on Wednesday it has begun a review of Obama administration intelligence assessments related to the fight against Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria, citing news reports that those assessments were skewed to be too optimistic.

Republican Senators Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Joni Ernst, a committee member, sent letters to James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, and Jon Rymer, the Department of Defense Inspector General, expressing concerns about the assessments.

A U.S.-led coalition is conducting air strikes in Syria and Iraq targeting the Islamic State. The United States first started attacking the Islamist militant group inside Syria about a year ago, but has been unable to wrest its control from major cities there or in Iraq.

Russia launched air strikes against targets in Syria on Wednesday.

The Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General has opened an investigation to address the allegations. The head of the Pentagon’s Central Command told a separate Senate committee earlier this month he never asked for intelligence reports to be skewed.

“The possibility that the administration is pressuring intelligence analysts to conform those assessments to the president’s narrative, that we are winning the war against ISIS, when we are not, is unacceptable,” Johnson said in a statement.

President Barack Obama’s fellow Democrats are deeply skeptical about repeated investigations by Republican-led Senate and House of Representatives committees into the administration, such as the House Select Committee formed to probe events surrounding the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.

Read More

U.S. Bombs Somehow Keep Falling in the Places Where Obama “Ended Two Wars”

Glenn Greenwald

Sep. 30 2015

Source Link

“We’ve ended two wars.” — Barack Obama, July 21, 2015, at a DSCC fundraiser held at a “private residence”

“Now that we have ended two wars responsibly, and brought home hundreds of American troops, we salute this new generation of veterans.” — National Security Adviser Susan Rice, May 20, 2015

“His presidency makes a potentially great story: the first African-American in the White House, who helped the country recover from recession and ended two wars.” — Dominic Tierney, The Atlantic, January 15, 2015, “America Will Miss Obama When He’s Gone”

Report from Airwars, August 2, 2015, detailing civilian deaths from continuous U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria:

New York Times, today, headlined: “U.S. Planes Strike Near Kunduz Airport as Fight Rages On”

American warplanes bombarded Taliban-held territory around the Kunduz airport overnight, and Afghan officials said American Special Forces were rushed toward the fighting. … The situation for the Afghan forces improved somewhat toward midnight: American warplanes conducted airstrikes at 11:30 p.m. and again at 1 a.m. on Taliban positions near the airport, an American military spokesman said. … Around the same time, soldiers with the American Special Forces headed out toward the city with Afghan commandos, according to Afghan government officials.

How do you know when you’re an out-of-control empire? When you keep bombing and deploying soldiers in places where you boast that you’ve ended wars. How do you know you have a hackish propagandist for a president? When you celebrate him for “ending two wars” in the very same places that he keeps bombing.

All of this, just by the way, is being done without any Congressional approval, at least with regard to Iraq and Syria. As my colleague Cora Currier noted when reporting on the Airwars report in August, these civilian deaths are “a reminder of the extent to which the United States’ air war in Syria and Iraq has rolled ahead with little public debate over its effectiveness. Congress has still not passed a specific legal authorization for the war.”

Russia today announced that its upper Parliament approved its own imperialistic intervention and bombing campaign inside Syria, and that legislative body was widely (and not inaccurately) derided by U.S. commentators for being what the New York Times called a “rubber stamp.” The Obama administration, by contrast, does not even bother with the empty ritual of Congressional approval for its bombing campaigns; the president proved he is even willing to bomb a country after Congress rejected his authorization to do so, as happened in Libya. Indeed, the one and only time Obama venerated the need for Congressional approval for bombing was when he was pressured to bomb the Assad regime for crossing his “red line” but did not actually want to do so; as Charles Davis put it today, “Obama only seeks Congress’ authorization when he doesn’t actually want to do something, as when Assad crossed his ‘red line.'”

Whatever else one wants to say about Iraq and Afghanistan, one cannot honestly say that Obama ended the wars in those countries. The U.S. continues to drop bombs on both, deploys soldiers in both, kills civilians in both, and engages in a wide range of overt and covert force, all without a shred of Congressional approval.

Photo: U.S. soldiers inspect the site of a suicide attack in the heart of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, Aug. 22, 2015. The suicide car bomber attacked a NATO convoy traveling through a crowded neighborhood in Afghanistan’s capital Saturday, killing at least 10 people, including three NATO contractors, authorities said.

Read More

Chuck Spinney: Saudi Arabian Collapse — Bad Rulers, No Water? A Case Study…

Chuck Spinney

Source Link

I want to flag and discuss two articles. The first, Saudi Royal calls for regime change in Riyadh, is a report in the Guardian by Hugh Miles. He describes the four immediate factors that have stimulated the now famous letters by the anonymous 3rd generation prince calling for the replacement of King Salman and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: (1) the double tragedy at Mecca that killed 800 people, (2) the collapse of oil prices, (3) the war in Yemen which, according to Miles, few Saudis support, and (4) King Salman’s elevation of his young son, the inexperienced and impetuous Mohammed bin Salman to the peculiar but powerful post of Deputy Crown Prince, making him second in the line of succession.

The second is an op-ed analysis entitled The collapse of Saudi Arabia is Inevitable by Nafeez Ahmed. He takes a somewhat longer view, summarizing deep-seated long-term problems that threaten to destabilize and possibly destroy Saudi Arabia. While I think his discussion suffers from two weaknesses, it is nevertheless a very sobering analysis and well worth careful reading, although the conclusion implicit in his title is far from certain.

The first weakness is that Ahmed understates the long-term man-made problem of water depletion in Saudi Arabia’s deep aquifers, caused by the irrigation of water intensive crops for export — a problem persuasively described in this essay and analyzed in greater detail in this report. Even energy rich Saudi Arabia cannot desalinate its way out of this problem. In combination with Saudia Arabia’s rapidly growing population and severe income inequality, water depletion makes the country much more vulnerable to the destabilizing effects of the inevitable droughts that will occur from time to time. The only solution for the long term is to restructure its agriculture into one more in harmony with its supporting environment and its rapidly growing population.

The second weakness is connected indirectly to the first and derives from the author’s casual and repeated invocation of the emotionally charged term “climate change.” These two words are a highly politicized re-branding of the theory of man-made or anthropogenic global warming, and they now suggest subliminally and erroneously thatall changes in climate are substantially manmade. A more neutral descriptor would beclimate variability, which more clearly accounts for natural variability as well as the effects produced by the emission of manmade greenhouse gases. Natural variability is a fact of life: Human history and paleo-records are replete with indications of quasi periodic occurrences of climate change, including the occurrences of severe long lasting droughts in the Middle East (and all arid areas, including the southwestern US). The causes of these droughts and the differing patterns of multi-decadal climate variations in general are not well understood. Isolating the man made signal from the welter of natural signals is a signal-to-noise problem fraught with uncertainty, as explained elegantly (and soberly) — in a building block fashion that is accessible to the educated layman — in the free ebook Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science, written by biological oceanographer/ecologist Alan Longhurst.*

However, if one substitutes the term climate variability for each occurrence of climate change into the text of Attachment 2, nothing in Ahmed’s argument would be weakened.** Moreover, by neutrally suggesting natural as well as manmade implications, it would be a technically more accurate description of the growing mismatch between Saudi Arabia’s cultural evolution and the tightening constraints of its supporting environment, particularly its extraction of water from that environment. This more balanced view would be a better guide for evolving policies to cope with the interaction of Saudi Arabia’s growing population with its tightening environmental constraints.

To date, the Saudi regime — i.e., the royal family — has proven to be remarkably resilient, notwithstanding the growing complexity in the patterns of cooperation and competition within its geometrically increasing number*** of members. Whether or not that regime can survive the mounting challenges of a rapidly growing population, increasing environmental overload, resource depletion, and worsening income inequality over the long term will remain an open question for the foreseeable future

Read More

AHRAR AL-SHAM’S REVISIONIST JIHADISM

SAM HELLER

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

http://warontherocks.com/2015/09/ahrar-al-shams-revisionist-jihadism/

Amid the bloodshed of Syria, one group, Ahrar al-Sham, has begun to challenge the premises of the Salafi-jihadist ideology that underwrites the actions of groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. What does it mean for the unceasing war?

War-torn Syria has become a battleground for competing ideologies as much as rival militias. The ultra-extremist Salafi-jihadism of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has been the loudest and most visible of these ideological contenders, but Syria has also seen the birth of a revisionist trend within Islamist militancy. This trend has emerged as a reaction to the worst excesses of Salafi-jihadism and has been championed by the rebels in Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyyah (the Islamic Movement of the Freemen of al-Sham, usually just called Ahrar al-Sham). Ahrar al-Sham has by now emerged as not just a populist revolutionary force and the most powerful non-ISIL rebel faction in Syria, but also the vanguard of a revisionist school that is contesting the nature of the jihadist movement.January 2012 announcement of Kataib Ahrar al-Sham (Ahrar al-Sham Battalions)

In interviews conducted in September 2015 over social media and messaging apps, several Ahrar al-Sham leaders and observers familiar with the group said Ahrar was originally something close to “Salafi-jihadist.” Many of its founders were alumni of the Islamist wing of Syria’s notorious Seidnaya Prison, jailed for joining or abetting international jihadist organizations that included ISIL’s precursor, the Islamic State in Iraq. Interviewees said the initial character of the group was a product of both biography and circumstance — like others taking up arms against the Syrian regime early in the revolution, they seem to have been reactivating old networks of fighters and financiers.

And yet Ahrar al-Sham’s founders and the group as a whole subsequently diverged from “Salafi-jihadism,” the extreme, exclusivist subset of militant Islamism that has given the world al-Qaeda and ISIL. The Salafi-jihadist movement has splintered as al-Qaeda and ISIL have turned on one another, but the movement’s various parts still draw heavily on a common intellectual legacy shaped by and concentrated in the persons of Jordanian-Palestinian theorists Abu Qatadah al-Filistini and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. Al-Qaeda branches like Jabhat al-Nusrah make no secret of their admiration of and intellectual debt to Abu Qatadah and, especially, al-Maqdisi. And though Abu Qatadah and al-Maqdisi have fallen out with ISIL — ISIL representatives negotiating with al-Maqdisi notoriously called him a “pimp” — many still argue that ISIL is essentially an outgrowth of al-Maqdisi’s merciless purism andnarrow conception of the community of believing Muslims. Al-Maqdisi tutored ISIL’s top religious theorist and hashimself said, “I am their [ISIL’s] sheikh, the one who taught them about the oneness of God.” Salafi-jihadism is still defined in terms of a single “manhaj,” the programmatic blueprint for applying religious doctrine that al-Qaeda and ISIL technically share.Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (left) and Abu Qatadah al-Filistini (right)

This was the milieu from which Ahrar al-Sham’s founders emerged. Nonetheless, Ahrar later diverged in increasingly public ways from Salafi-jihadism, and recent interviewees were emphatic that Ahrar al-Sham is no longer Salafi-jihadist. Today it is not uncommon to see Ahrar leaders ranging from hardliners like Ahrar’s chief ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Sadeq (Nidal Hassan) to relative doves like Abu Azzam al-Ansari push back against al-Maqdisi and against Salafi-jihadist orthodoxy more broadly. And when political official Abu ‘Izz al-Din (Labib al-Nahhas) recently eulogized Ahrar’s founding leadership, he saluted them in part for “shatter[ing] the idol of the ‘manhaj.’”

Still, I would argue that it makes sense to think of Ahrar as part of a jihadist movement that is bigger than a specifically Salafi-jihadist subculture. Ahrar al-Sham is not “Salafi-jihadist” in the limited meaning the term has taken on. Yet at least in Arabic, it seems mostly uncontroversial to say that Ahrar al-Sham is part of a global Sunni “jihadist movement,” defined roughly as the constellation of Islamist groups and movements who have taken up armed action as their primary means of achieving political change. The “jihadist movement” in this sense includes Salafi-jihadists like al-Qaeda, but also non-Salafist but fundamentally militant groups like Hamas. In a recent treatise, for example, Ahrar ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Sadeq argued that an open, inclusivist program like Ahrar al-Sham’s is the way forward for the “jihadist movement” and how it can realize a “resurgence.” In a recent promotional video, Ahrar framed itself as part of a mostly militant Islamist continuum that includes Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and renowned Syrian Islamic scholar Ali al-Tantawi, but also radical theorist Sayyid Qutb, famed Arab Chechen foreign fighter Khattab, Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin, and father of modern jihadism Abdullah Azzam (more on whom below).

Some interviewees were leery at describing Ahrar al-Sham as “jihadist” or part of “the jihadist movement,” but perhaps for the sake of optics more than a substantive disagreement. Ahrar seems to be aware of the term’s problematic connotations, particularly for a Western readership that might treat “jihad” as a synonym for terrorism. There is also concern that the term is too reductive. One respondent acknowledged Ahrar was part of a broader jihadism but was reluctant to pigeonhole Ahrar in terms of armed jihad, emphasizing Ahrar’s parallel political efforts. Ahrar al-Sham’s founding leader Abu Abdullah al-Hamawi (Hassan Abboud) himself emphasized that the movement was a “mujahid” (religious warrior) movement rather than a “jihadist” one, as he thought the “jihadist” label would too narrowly define the movement and its members in terms of war and violence.Ahrar al-Sham leader Hassan Abboud

Within this broader jihadist movement, though, Ahrar has come to represent a countervailing trend we could term “revisionist jihadism.” (I’ve also seen it called post-Salafi-jihadism, which likewise seems apt.) It draws on some of the same historical experience that shaped groups like ISIL, but it serves as a critique of Salafi-jihadism from within the jihadist movement.

Take, for example, the initial defeat of the Iraqi jihad at the hands of the Sunni “Awakening,” which played a major role in shaping the off-the-rails jihadist trend now represented by ISIL. ISIL entered Syria in 2011 and 2012 with the working assumption that another Awakening was inevitable and that it therefore had to prepare for it and crush it. To that end, ISIL and its adherents embraced what William McCants characterizes as a toxic mix of apocalypticism and terrifying ultraviolence. It’s an approach that is brutal and deliberately elite-focused, aimed at energizing a hardcore vanguard that can, if need be, drag an ambivalent Muslim public along with them. It aims at subverting or demolishing all of society’s institutions so they might be rebuilt in ISIL’s image.

Ahrar al-Sham’s more critical take on the Iraqi experience, on the other hand, can be seen in a November 2013 treatiseon Iraq’s Awakening written by Abu Abdulmalek al-Shar’i (Mahmoud Teibah). Abu Abdulmalek was one of Ahrar’s original leading ideologues and was himself reportedly imprisoned in Seidnaya for his activism on behalf of the Iraqi jihad. Yet rather than embracing ISIL’s “destroy all enemies” paranoia and the inevitability of some traitorous local uprising, Abu Abdulmalek argued that Syria’s Islamist rebels could preemptively defuse and avoid a Syrian Awakening through restraint and political savvy.Ahrar al-Sham ideologue Abu Abdulmalek al-Shar’i

He laid out a set of reasons for the Awakening that ranged from the (American) enemy’s machinations to quirks of the local Iraqi community, but, significantly, he also included the mujahideen’s extremism and other unforced errors. Looking forward, he argued the mujahideen should elevate locals among their ranks, cultivate relationships with community leaders, attend to civilians’ living conditions and service needs, and be maximally collaborative with other rebels. He acknowledged that there are factions that are “polluted,” but advocated for the mujahideen “working gradually to contain or neutralize them.” Abu Abdulmalek’s 2013 argument came before Ahrar al-Sham’s leadership had renounced “Salafi-jihadism” per se, and it sprung from a perspective closer to Salafi-jihadism — for example, he unsympathetically called the Awakening a “malignant disease.” Even then, however, Abu Abdulmalek and Ahrar’s thinking was clearly apart from and critical of ISIL.

More than the Iraqi jihad, however, it was the experience of the Syrian revolution and the 2014 break with ISIL that interviewees said had the most formative impact on Ahrar al-Sham and its political-religious thought. In particular, the eruption of war with ISIL seems to have prompted a more comprehensive ideological reckoning among Ahrar al-Sham’s leadership, including Abu Abdulmalek, Abboud, and fellow theorist Abu Yazen al-Shami (Muhammad al-Shami). Before they and the rest of Ahrar’s original first-tier leadership was killed in a mysterious explosion on September 9, 2014, they had gone a long way towards formulating the revisionist program that has survived them. “The thinking of Ahrar’s [original] leadership was the main reason for the development of Ahrar’s thought,” said one Ahrar al-Sham commander interviewed. “It remains a beacon that lights our way.”

Abu Abdulmalek had derided the “Awakening” in November 2013, but by August 2014 he had to grapple with extremists inside and outside ISIL who were characterizing the Syrian rebels fighting ISIL — even Ahrar — as a new apostate “Awakening.” “I don’t know of a single apostate faction on the Syrian battlefield,” he tweeted in August 2014, “except in cross-border fatwas that are disconnected from reality.” Abboud threw his credibility behind a unifying “Revolutionary Covenant” and fended off criticisms from hardliners in Jabhat al-Nusrah. Abu Yazen, meanwhile,angrily reproached Salafi-jihadism as a whole and, in the days before his death, dramatically apologized to God and the Syrian people for confining himself to the “intellectual prison” of Salafi-jihadism.Ahrar al-Sham ideologue Abu Yazen al-Shami

The revisionist or corrective trend that coalesced among Ahrar al-Sham’s founders was premised on the idea that an ISIL-style “elite” or “vanguard” jihad was doomed, particularly if that elite opened an omnidirectional war on all of Sunni society’s traditional leaders and institutions. Instead, this trend has aimed to create a jihad that balances between the ideological leadership of an elite vanguard and populist energy. (It does not seem to have been informed by what Khalil al-Anani earlier termed the anti-violence “jihadi revisionism” of Egypt’s al-Gama’ah al-Islamiyyah and figures like Sayyed al-Sharif.) A central idea of this school of thought is “al-hadinah al-sha’biyyah,” which translates literally to something like “popular incubator” but is roughly equivalent to our idea of “hearts and minds.” As an Ahrar leader said in an interview, the most important element of this revisionist thought is “cohering with our popular base, taking up the people’s concerns, and making [the people] one of our priorities.” Ahrar al-Sham is working to cultivate popular support and build a jihad that is effectively a mass movement, a front that is so broad it becomes immortal. And in practice, it looks a lot like the lessons Abu Abdulmalek drew from Iraq.

Much of the recent coverage of Ahrar al-Sham, including discussion of its September 12 election of “Abu Yehya al-Hamawi” (Muhannad al-Masri) as its new leader, has revolved around what observers describe as a split between the movement’s “dovish” and “hawkish” wings. The former reportedly support robust diplomatic outreach to regional states and the West; the latter are pushing for closer ties to unreconstructed jihadists such as those in Syrian al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusrah. Ahrar members themselves emphasize the movement’s internal diversity. They say it includes members who lean towards less orthodox Sufi Islam or the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that most of its foot soldiers are religious but not particularly ideological.Ahrar al-Sham chief ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Sadeq

Still, in interviews, Ahrar al-Sham leaders said that most of its membership are in agreement on the shared religious-political program that is the legacy of their “martyred” founders. On this key balance of vanguardism and inclusive populism, there is little apparent daylight between Ahrar al-Sham’s hawks and doves. In his recent treatise, chief ideologue al-Sadeq argued that the jihad’s vanguard must join the people’s revolution, adopting the people’s concerns as their own while simultaneously working to popularize their own ideological program. “Victory is the people’s adoption and embrace of the elite’s message,” he wrote. “At that point, neither the East nor the West will be able to extinguish the Islamic character of the revolution, and both the elite and the people will be victorious, God willing.” At the opposite end of Ahrar’s political spectrum, al-Nahhas recently eulogized Ahrar’s leadership as having “balanced between the elitism of their leadership and the populism of their project.” “They were leaders of the revolution,” he wrote, “not just their faction.”

Ahrar al-Sham’s revisionism seems in some ways to be less a wholly developed intellectual trend than a return to the less-defined pan-Islamist jihadism that prevailed in the late 1980s and 1990s. It is a sort of Salafist reformation within jihadism itself, casting off some of the accumulated mythology of Salafi-jihadism. In that sense, some have compared it to the big-tent, pre-Salafi-jihadist militancy of Abdullah Azzam — albeit filtered through the region’s newly charged sectarianism — a comparison with which interviewees agreed. In particular, they appreciated how Azzam had joined disparate Islamist trends when he had formed his mujahideen International Brigades, waging a pan-Islamist jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.Hudheifah Azzam (left) and his father Abdullah Azzam (right)

Azzam’s son Hudheifah himself argued recently that Ahrar al-Sham is the Syrian faction that best exemplifies his father’s thinking. Hudheifah highlighted the group’s original leadership (including Abboud, Abu Yazen, and Abu Abdulmalek), as well as other figures in Syria who sit somewhat to Ahrar al-Sham’s right but occupy a similar space in jihadist discourse, including dissident voices inside Jabhat al-Nusrah like Abu Mariya al-Qahtani (Maysar al-Jabbouri) and Saleh al-Hamawi. Ahrar al-Sham recently promoted eulogies of its founders by, among others, many of the heterodox Nusrah leaders Azzam named, including al-Qahtani and al-Hamawi. All the figures highlighted by Azzam have argued against what they see as the ultra-extremism and narrow partisanship that have grown out of al-Maqdisi-led Salafi-jihadism and have pushed instead for a more open and collaborative approach. (And of course, there is also a sort of symmetry in the fact that the modern standard-bearers of Azzamism will now likely have the chance to do terrible things to invading Russians.)

The extent to which Ahrar al-Sham’s revisionism is resonating with the Islamist and jihadist community outside Syria — and the extent to which the group is deliberately promoting its thinking abroad — remains unclear. It seems inevitable that Ahrar al-Sham and its reformist platform will have an impact beyond Syria’s borders, particularly as some Islamists who previously committed to electoral politics are suppressed so relentlessly that they begin shopping for a program of armed jihad. “There’s no doubt that the revisions of Ahrar al-Sham’s leaders and the movement’s intellectual evolution have cast a shadow on Islamic trends around the world,” an Ahrar leader said. “Everyone is watching the Syrian battlefield.”

With the U.S. government now debating if and when to engage Ahrar al-Sham, it seems possible that the group may be among the most hardcore Islamist militant groups to ever sit opposite American diplomats. Even as Ahrar al-Sham has taken its revisionist turn and increasingly adopted a Syrian revolutionary character, it remains more politically and philosophically embedded inside pan-Islamist jihadism than most other American interlocutors in recent memory. Ahrar al-Sham will not be the malleable new “Awakening” for which U.S. policymakers are forever hoping. Still, as the United States is working to contain ISIL and to engineer some stabilizing end state for Syria, it is impossible to envision any possible settlement that does not involve Ahrar al-Sham. At the same time, the group has its own diplomatic priorities: “By playing a political role, we’re working to lessen the pressure [on our people] and arrive at our goal,” an Ahrar leader stated. “Only through politics can the jihad proceed straight.” Now we have to see if the United States and Ahrar al-Sham’s brand of reformists can arrive at some common ground.

Sam Heller is a Washington-based writer and analyst focused on Syria. He would like to thank Noah Bonsey, Aron Lund, Cole Bunzel,“North Caucasus Caucus” and others for their generous input on this article. Follow Sam on Twitter: @AbuJamajem.

Read More

Anti-ISIS Coalition: Testing Russia’s Intentions in Syria

James P. FarwellGeorge Beebe

September 30, 2015

Source Link

Decades of Cold War–era Soviet expansionism have conditioned Washington to recoil reflexively when Russia’s military strays outside its borders. Amid reports that Russia is expanding its military and intelligence role in Syria, President Obama had little choice but to meet with Russian president Putin on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York, but he made clear that the United States harbors deep reservations about Putin’s call for an “international coalition” to fight against ISIS. Before rejecting this call altogether, however, we should consider three important realities.

First, air power alone cannot defeat ISIS. Success requires ground operations. Who will supply the troops to destroy ISIS in Syria? The American public would rightly block sending U.S. ground forces, worried that we have already spent too much blood and treasure in the region. Plus, our entry would likely prove a rallying point for ISIS, which would relish the opportunity to fight Americans in Syria or Iraq.

The options look just as bleak within the region. Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s focus has been to topple Assad and hold Kurds at bay. His policy has failed. Support from Iran and Hezbollah has done little more than help Assad hang on to power. Kurds have proven effective in fighting ISIS, but Syrian Arabs are wary of Kurdish intrusion into their traditional turf. Iraqi forces have their hands full combatting ISIS inside Iraq. Other Arab nations have provided weapons and money, not troops.

The second reality is that ISIS poses at least as great a threat to Russian interests as to our own. The group’s proclamation of a caliphate aiming to rule Muslims across the world resonates strongly with Russia’s decades-long battle against jihadist separatism in its volatile North Caucasus. An estimated 1,700 of ISIS’ foreign fighters are Russian citizens, some of whom have reportedly returned to Russia to carry on the fight.

Moscow can ill afford to sit idly as ISIS captures territory in Syria, Iraq and beyond, assisting and inspiring Russia’s own jihadists. Russian foreign minister Lavrov has called ISIS the main threat to Russia today. Putin has shown that he will act decisively to defend Russia’s self-interests with or without U.S. consent. Would we prefer that he do this inside an international coalition or outside?

The third reality is that, even if we manage to defeat ISIS on the ground, Syria’s broader civil war—and the extremism it spawns—will continue absent a political settlement. Russia’s support for Assad and his fellow Alawites provides a means to nudge him toward compromise, as in the case of Putin’s success orchestrating a deal to remove Syria’s chemical weapons in 2013. The heart-wrenching refugee flow coming out of Syria makes harnessing that Russian leverage both a humanitarian and a strategic imperative.

Until 2011, neither the United States nor Israel felt that Assad posed a sufficient threat to warrant ousting him. What changed? Those demanding Assad’s removal point out his regime’s atrocities, which are indeed horrific. But moralizing about leaders we find distasteful is easy. Make no mistake: should Assad fall, it will be ISIS or the Al Qaeda–affiliated Al Nusra Front that seizes control in Damascus, not Jeffersonian moderates. The fact is, violent extremist seizure of power in Syria would threaten the security of both the United States and Russia more than some form of continued Alawite rule. Putin is prepared to prevent that outcome and he has the power to do so.

Would cooperation with Russia against ISIS undermine our ability to resist Moscow’s encroachments in Ukraine? That need not be true. Putin may believe that cooperation against ISIS would divert our attention and blunt our criticisms over Ukraine. But the United States is capable of competing in one area while cooperating in another. Aligning against ISIS would also send a strong message that we will work with Putin where it serves common interests yet strongly oppose his policies that undercut our own.

Putin’s long record of dealings with Washington make clear that he won’t do the United States any favors. But in advancing his country’s interests, he has shown that he will do whatever he thinks it takes. In combating ISIS, those interests in many ways parallel our own. We should not allow our ambivalence about Russia and its support for what we recognize as Assad’s murderous, thuggish regime in Syria to overshadow our urgent need to defeat a common enemy in ISIS. 

James P. Farwell is a national security expert who has advised the U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND. He is the author of Persuasion & Power(Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2012). George Beebe is a former chief of CIA’s Russia analysis who served on Vice President Cheney’s staff from 2002-2004. The views expressed are those of the individuals and do not represent those of the U.S. Government, its departments, agencies or COCOM.

Read More