Originally published at The Henry Jackson Society
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 3 September 2017
The U.S. State Department on 17 August sanctioned two Islamic State (IS) operatives, Ahmad al-Khald (or Ahmad Alkhald), who was involved in the November 2015 terrorist atrocities in France and the March 2016 bombings in Belgium, and Iyad Hamid Mahl al-Jumayli (Abu Yahya al-Iraqi), IS’s internal security chief. Continue reading
Originally published at The Henry Jackson Society
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 September 2017
The most recent issue of Perspectives on Terrorism had a paper by Ronen Zeidel entitled, ‘The Dawa’ish: A Collective Profile of IS Commanders’, which was “the first attempt to provide a comprehensive collective profile of commanders and leaders of the Islamic State (IS)”. Based on “an inventory of over 600 names”, the paper assessed the nationality, ethnicity, and tribal origins not just of the very senior IS commanders, but those lower down, a novel and much-needed line of investigation. Zeidel found that these commanders of the IS movement are or were overwhelmingly Iraqi and Sunni Arab, with an important Turkoman contingent.
Zeidel’s findings are important for drawing attention again to the local-revolutionary character of an organisation that gets a great deal of attention for its foreign fighters and external attacks, especially in the West, but which only a recently acquired global reach—and, indeed, only recently needed to: until 2011, the West was easily reachable since it had troops on the ground in Iraq, so the incentive to invest resources in creating a foreign terrorist apparatus was minimal.
One small part of Zeidel’s work has created something of a storm, however. Zeidel gives the occupation held by these commanders and, for those where this was known, 72% of them were former regime elements (FREs) from the dictatorship of Saddam Husayn. This reignited the argument over how important the FREs have been to IS. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 August 2017
SDF/PKK fighter at a temporary refugee camp in the village of Ayn Issa, 10 Nov. 2016 / AFP PHOTO / DELIL SOULEIMAN
The local reporters at Raqqa 24 published a video yesterday containing interviews with some of the estimated 70,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) who have been trapped at the camps run by the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the vehicle by through which the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) operates to neutralize the political and legal obstacles to receiving Western assistance as it displaces the Islamic State (IS) across large tracts of land in eastern Syria. This has become yet another flashpoint, political and ethnic, as the SDF/PKK advances on the IS “capital” in Raqqa city. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 August 2017
The Asad family regime in Syria has long been known to have had a key role in the formation and sustenance of the Islamic State (IS) and its predecessors. Without the Asad regime’s assistance, the IS movement could not have hoped to pose such a challenge to the Iraqi government, regional states, and Western interests and citizens. This has been underlined in a series of Federal Court rulings in the United States that have brought together evidence on this matter. In April, another such ruling found the Asad regime liable in the murder of three more Americans. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 23 August 2017
United States Federal Courts have issued a series of rulings related to the support the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has given to the Islamic State (IS) movement. The rulings relate to the murder of Americans by IS, which could only be accomplished because of the Assad regime’s assistance. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 18 August 2017
Al-Naba 93, page 9
The Islamic State (IS) is clearly struggling to hold its ground in eastern Syria and has now, for the first time in its history, compelled men into its ranks to try to stem this tide. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 17 August 2017
I released a report today, published by the Henry Jackson Society, The Forgotten Foreign Fighters: The PKK in Syria. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 16 August 2017
Recep Tayyip Erdogan (image source)
The Turkish government has gotten more and more deeply involved in Syria since the uprising began in 2011. But Turkey now finds its original aim, namely the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, unattainable, creating tensions with the Syrian armed opposition, its primary lever inside Syria, and there are considerable problems stabilizing the zone of Syria that came under Turkish occupation after Ankara’s direct intervention in 2016. The defeat of Turkey’s primary objective has been accompanied by the rise of further problems, notably the exacerbation of its longest-standing internal security threat, that posed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan – PKK), and the generation of new internal threats, from the Islamic State (IS) and potentially from al-Qaeda-linked groups. The options for solving these problems are constrained and unpalatable. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 15 August 2017
A statement from Issam al-Barqawi, far better known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the Jordan-based Palestinian jihadi-salafist cleric, was released in English on Telegram on 15 August 2017. The statement dealt with his view of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), highlighting again the questions around this Syrian-based jihadi group and its relations with al-Qaeda. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 6 August 2017
A year ago, I wrote a report documenting the biographies of Islamic State (IS) leaders and something of the structure of the organisation. Since then, the intricacies of the structure have been further revealed, even as it has somewhat crumbled in practice. The caliphate—the statelet built by IS—has been significantly degraded: the Iraqi “capital”, Mosul, has fallen, and operation to clear the Syrian “capital”, Raqqa, is underway. More significantly, upwards of 40% of those profiled have been killed, so it seemed an opportune moment for an update on who currently leads the world’s most infamous terrorist movement.
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