By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 6 April 2020
The first quarter of 2020 saw a serious escalation of combat in Syria, albeit without much alteration in the political trends, and the arrival of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has exacerbated a fraught situation. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 February 2020
The Mujahideen Battalion (El-Mudžahid) in Bosnia in the early 1990s [image source]
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 23 January 2020
Abror Azimov in detention // Source: Alexey Kudenko
In July 2019, I co-wrote an article for Haaretz about the Russian legal case relating to the alleged suicide bombing of the St. Petersburg metro on 3 April 2017 as it then stood. To make a long story short: none of the “facts” derived from the Federal Security Service (FSB) investigation could be taken at face value—literally none. A key assertion from the Kremlin was that the Petersburg attack was directed from outside by an Al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria, for which no evidence was provided, but the issues with the case went much deeper. As fundamental a fact as the identity of the alleged suicide bomber was in question. Indeed, it was worse than that: the Russian state refused, when questioned, to say whether this “suicide bomber” was dead, raising a question about whether the Petersburg atrocity was a suicide-attack at all. Last month, the Russian government in effect closed the book on this case by sentencing eleven people it claims were implicated in it; none of the questions raised during the trial have been answered, and nor are they ever likely to be now. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 January 2020
This article was originally published at European Eye on Radicalization
At 1 AM on 3 January, an American drone strike killed the head of Iran’s Quds Force, the division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) charged with exporting the Islamic revolution, and his Iraqi deputy, Jamal al-Ibrahimi (Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis). Sulaymani was the strategic driver of Iran’s expansionist policy in the Middle East, as well as the orchestrator of its terrorism and assassinations further afield. Unlike with the killing of Al-Qaeda’s Usama bin Laden in 2011 or the Islamic State’s Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) in October, where the dynamics shifted little, Sulaymani’s death opens up questions about the direction in which the Middle East will now move. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 December 2019
In a long article last week, I looked at why the U.S. ran a formal occupation of Iraq for fourteen months after the fall of Saddam Husayn in April 2003, given that there had been an explicit pre-invasion decision not to have an occupation government. The short answer is that the occupation was installed through deception by the State Department, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). State and CIA had argued for a protracted occupation in the Situation Room debates in 2002, but President George W. Bush had sided with the Pentagon, which advocated a rapid transfer of power to Iraqis. Having lost in the formal inter-agency process, the State Department succeeded by subversion in getting its way on the ground in Iraq. The disaster this caused in the mismanagement of post-Saddam Iraq was, as the article explained in detail, only the most serious impact of the toxic schism between State/CIA and the Pentagon, a factor whose import is difficult to overstate when examining how the Bush administration functioned. (This feud also at times drew in the Vice President’s Office, which tended to support the Pentagon.)
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 December 2019
Douglas Feith was the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, one of the most senior positions at the Pentagon during one of the most consequential periods in recent history, covering the 11 September 2001 atrocities and early phase of the U.S.-led response. Feith later wrote a highly illuminating memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, which tried to drain some of the hysteria out of the public “debate” about the Iraq dimension of the U.S. policy in particular by explaining the internal arguments in the Bush administration leading up to the decision to finish with Saddam Husayn in 2003, and trying to set those arguments in their proper historical context, both in relation to Iraq—where “the war” had begun twelve years earlier—and the altered American threat perceptions in the shadow of 9/11. Unlike a lot of the gossipy tomes that emerged from former officials, Feith’s book is notably light on opinion and contains reams of declassified documents so readers can check his analysis against the source material. One of Feith’s key judgments is that “the chief mistake was maintaining an occupation government in Iraq for over a year”.[1] As Feith explains in great detail in the book, this was never supposed to happen. So how did it?
A version of this article was published in The Arab Weekly
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 November 2019
Solider from the Syrian regime holds up a portrait of Bashar al-Asad and a Syrian national flag, another stands by the Kurdish YPG/PKK flag, in Kobani, 18 October 2019. (AFP)
Mustafa Bali, head of the press office for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the coalition partner against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria, sent a tweet on November 14 showing Turkey’s Arab proxies engaged in “ISIS chants.” By this, he meant the takbir, “God is Great,” an expression used by Muslims every day. When criticised, Bali doubled down and blocked many critics. This was a microcosm of one of the darker threads in an SDF messaging strategy that is among the most effective propaganda campaigns on record. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 19 November 2019
President Barack Obama meeting President-elect Donald Trump, 10 November 2016 [image source]
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 10 November 2019
The 207th edition of Al-Naba, the weekly newsletter of the Islamic State (IS), published on 7 November 2019, devotes its main editorial to Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), the first “Caliph” when the “Caliphate” was declared in June 2014, who was killed on 27 October 2019.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 November 2019
This article was originally published at European Eye on Radicalization under the headline, “Who is the New Leader of the Islamic State?”
The destroyed compound where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was found in Syria // Drone footage taken by Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency
The so-called caliph of the Islamic State (ISIS), Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), was killed in an American raid in Syria on 27 October, and the spokesman, Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, was killed the next day in an airstrike. ISIS acknowledged the losses and appointed new leaders on Halloween.
Abu Hamza al-Qurayshi introduced himself in a nearly-eight-minute audio statement as the new spokesman and named Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi as Al-Baghdadi’s replacement. Little information was given about either man.
The U.S. government has said it knows “almost nothing” about the new caliph, Abu Ibrahim, leaving us no closer, for now, to knowing his identity. But some options present themselves. Continue reading
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