What’s Behind the Rise of the Islamic State?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 5, 2015

Published at NOW Lebanon.

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William McCants’ The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State is an immensely readable addition to the literature on the most powerful terrorist-insurgent group in the world. McCants covers the Islamic State, often referred to as ISIS, from its inception in Taliban Afghanistan in 1999 to its migration to Iraq in 2002, and through its various stages before its blitzkrieg from Syria across central Iraq in June 2014, which brought ISIS to global attention. McCants shows that ISIS’s evolution is not just a religio-socio-political and military phenomenon, but an intellectual one. ISIS has built the foundations of its statelet on the lessons learned by Salafi-jihadists from their previous battlefronts, such as Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Algeria, and their various mistakes, many of them ISIS’s own. Continue reading →

The Islamic State Can’t Be Defeated Without Fighting it in Syria

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 3, 2015

Published at Left Foot Forward.

An RAF Tornado fighter jet in Cyprus

An RAF Tornado fighter jet in Cyprus

This morning the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee published a report recommending that the British government should not extend its airstrikes campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS) from Iraq to Syria.

The report makes little legal or military sense, but its political objection—that the government’s attempt to defeat ISIS independently of a resolution to the Syrian war is untenable—is exactly right. Unfortunately the report, while very vague, hints that a resolution involves cooperation with the Bashar al-Assad regime and Iran, which cannot work, and actually helps ISIS. Continue reading →

Kamel Sachet and Islamism in Saddam’s Security Forces

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1Book Review: The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Life of an Iraqi Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny (2009) by Wendell Steavenson

By Kyle Orton
(@KyleWOrton) on October 24, 2015

Wendell Steavenson’s The Weight of a Mustard Seed—the title drawn from a verse of the Qur’an about the difference between attaining heaven and hell—comprises five years of research about Kamel Sachet Aziz al-Janabi, one of Saddam Hussein’s favourite and most senior generals.

Born in 1947, Kamel Sachet joined the Iraqi police straight from school in the mid-1960s and joined the army in 1975. Sachet was soon in the Special Forces, training in mountain warfare in Germany in 1978, taking part in joint exercises with Iranian Special Forces during the time of the Shah—learning Farsi along the way—and then being part of the Iraqi Special Forces advanced party sent to invade Iran after Ruhollah Khomeini’s takeover. Sachet would later be part of the elite forces sent to secure Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. After Saddam was evicted from Kuwait, Sachet, who had been slipping deeper and deeper into religious zeal from the early 1980s, was made governor of Maysan where he ran a de facto Salafi commune. Sachet was eventually removed from this post by regime internal intrigue, and was moved to a job in the office of the president. For reasons never definitively established, Sachet was murdered on Saddam Hussein’s orders on the first day of Operation DESERT FOX in December 1998.

Kamel Sachet’s story is an interesting one for what it says about the Saddam regime’s changing attitude toward Islamism as it ran its course, reversing the hard-secular outlook that prevailed at varying degrees of intensity from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and transforming into an Islamist State in the last fifteen years of the regime. Continue reading →

Why NATO Was Right To Intervene In Libya

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 21, 2015

Published at Left Foot Forward.

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Periodically, since the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, there appears a series of articles, couched in tones from tentative to vehement, suggesting that if NATO had stayed out and allowed Qaddafi to retake the rebellious city of Benghazi in March 2011 then Libya would now be stable and would not be haemorrhaging refugees.

With the onset of the refugee crisis in Europe earlier this year, and Libya providing a major transit point for those trying to get to Europe, it was inevitable that this would happen again. But it is still mistaken: instability was coming to Libya no matter what the West did, and the main problem with the intervention was that it wasn’t early enough, forceful enough, or protracted enough. Continue reading →

Why Solely Backing the PYD Against the Islamic State is a Mistake

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 20, 2015

Published at NOW Lebanon.

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The Pentagon-run train-and-equip (T&E) program had intended to take Syrian rebels, stop them from being rebels by preventing them from fighting the Assad regime, and repurpose them into an American-directed strike force against the Islamic State (ISIS). Unsurprisingly, there were few takers and the program ended in disaster and humiliation. In the wake of this failure, President Barack Obama has turned away from the Arab rebels and looked to the Syrian Kurds to fight ISIS. This is a strategy that is not only doomed to fail—since Sunni Arabs taking responsibility for their local security is the only way to sustainably defeat ISIS—but would, if implemented, make the ISIS problem worse. A report from Amnesty International this week documenting crimes, including ethnic cleansing, by the armed Kurdish forces against Arabs and Turkmens in northern Syria also provides an occasion to look more closely at a force with a history of regime collaboration, political extremism, and terrorism. Continue reading →

Saddam, Sanctions, and Religious Solace in Iraq

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 18, 2015

Mural of Saddam Hussein at prayer on Al-Kadhimiya Mosque

Mural of Saddam Hussein at prayer on Al-Kadhimiya Mosque

In the 1990s, the combination of the sanctions and Saddam Hussein’s predatory regime debauched Iraq, ushering in a period of chaos, scarcity, and corruption as the regime gradually broke down. With a religious revival already underway, the population turned to faith for succour, and the regime encouraged this in a way that—in the wake of the brutal repression of the Shi’a rebellion after the first part of the Gulf War—hardened sectarian identities. The security services were deeply affected by the Saddam regime’s Islamization and the Salafists exploited their newfound freedom, and the regime’s increasing lack of capacity, to plot a future after Saddam. By 2003, these various organized Islamist strains, part in and part out of the regime, stood ready to succeed Saddam and had a more zealous and sectarian population to draw on. Saddam had set the stage for the emergence of something like the Islamic State long before Coalition troops invaded Iraq. Continue reading →

Islamic State Spokesman Admits Caliph’s Deputy is Dead, Invites Armageddon

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 14, 2015

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The Islamic State’s spokesman, Taha Subhi Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani) gave a speech on 13 October 2015 entitled, “Say to Those Who Disbelieve, ‘You Will Be Overcome’.”

Falaha’s speech contained an important piece of news, or rather confirmation of news: the caliph’s deputy, Fadel al-Hiyali, was in fact killed on 18 August 2015.[4]

The themes in Falaha’s speech were largely familiar: the jihadists were facing a global conspiracy of America, its allies, Russia, Iran, and apostate Muslims in Syria and Iraq; Muslims should therefore unite around the Islamic State’s banner in order to repel this aggression aimed at all (Sunni) Muslims; but the Islamic State remains strong—the killing of leaders and the loss of some areas was more than made up for by other advances—and able to murder those Muslims who remain opposed to it and shatter the Americans. Continue reading →

The Horrors for Women of Islamic State Rule

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 12, 2015

Published at Verily 

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I have always been interested in the Middle East, specifically the Syrian conflict. In early summer 2014, as part of my master’s dissertation, I went to Lebanon to work with the United Nations. I was still there when the Islamic State group, commonly known as ISIS, struck Iraq.  Continue reading →

Russia Teams Up With Islamic State Against Syria’s Rebels

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 11, 2015

Devastation of the Ibrahim al-Khalil mosque in Tareeq al Bab after Assad's barrel bombs, Aleppo, April 2015 (source)

Devastation of the Ibrahim al-Khalil mosque in Tareeq al Bab after Assad’s barrel bombs, Aleppo, April 2015 (source)

The main intention of Russia’s intervention in Syria is to prop up the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and to do that Russia is seeking to ensure that the Islamic State (I.S.) is the only alternative to Assad’s regime. If the conflict becomes binary—Assad or I.S.—nobody can support I.S., and by default it will be accepted that Assad has to stay; even if international help is not given to put down the insurgency at that point, tacit support and political legitimacy will be extended to Russia’s effort to keep its client regime alive. In service of this mission, Moscow has consistently targeted the moderate rebels and even some non-moderate rebels, while avoiding I.S., in the conscious hope that the rebel positions it destroys will be replaced by I.S. fighters. In northern Syria in the last few days, Russia got its wish in a major way. Continue reading →

What Russia Wants in Syria

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 4, 2015

US President Barack Obama (R) listens to Russian President Vladimir Putin after their bilateral meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico on June 18, 2012 on the sidelines of the G20 summit. Obama and President Vladimir Putin met Monday, for the first time since the Russian leader's return to the presidency, for talks overshadowed by a row over Syria. The closely watched meeting opened half-an-hour late on the sidelines of the G20 summit of developed and developing nations, as the US leader sought to preserve his

In the last few days I’ve written about Russia’s initial military action in Syria, which is intended to prop up the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, and explained (with my friend James Snell) how U.S. policy has enabled this, both by effectively outsourcing Middle East policy to Vladimir Putin over the chemical weapons “red line” debacle, and by the pro-Iran tilt that is implicit in President Obama’s nuclear deal-facilitated move toward détente with the Islamic Republic: Obama is effectively supporting Iran’s assets in Syria, and Putin is now using those same pieces to prosecute his own war in the Levant. With this in the background, this post will focus on what Putin wants in Syria.

Putin’s aims in Syria can be boiled down to two: (1) Ensure the Assad tyranny survives, which includes the building of a permanent military-colonial outpost on the Mediterranean coast and destroying all the moderate rebels so that Syria can be presented as a choice of Assad or the Islamic State (I.S.), legitimizing Russia’s support for Assad; and (2) humiliating the West on the way to constructing an alternate world order to American hegemony. Continue reading →