By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 3 July 2022
An IRA parade in Belfast || Image source
Britain Won the Spy War with the Irish Republican Army
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Tag Archives: Black September
Qassem Sulaymani and the Future of Iran’s Imperial Project
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 January 2020
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
The Foreign Dimension to the Irish Republican Army
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 January 2019
CCTV footage of the Londonderry bombing, 19 January 2019 [source]
The Russian Relationship with Israel: A History
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 December 2018
© AP Photo / Jim Hollander, Pool
Essay: “Zionism is Making Us Stupid”: The Russian Relationship with Israel from the Soviets to Putin Continue reading
What Are the Options in Idlib?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 6 December 2018
The sun setting over Deraa, in southern Syria, 28 May 2018 (image source)
The Turkey-Russia Sochi Agreement in September won Idlib a reprieve from what had seemed to be an imminent and catastrophic offensive by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces and his Russian and Iranian patrons against the last insurgent-held province.
The ceasefire was meant to provide space for Turkey to dismantle the radical insurgents. Instead, those radicals consolidated their dominance in Idlib and the ceasefire has been visibly fraying. How to proceed is a matter of domestic security for the West. Continue reading
The Assad Regime Admits to Manipulating the Islamic State
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 6, 2017
Khaled Abboud
From the beginning of the uprising in Syria in 2011, there have been accusations that Bashar al-Assad’s regime was in a de facto partnership with the Islamic State (IS) against the mainstream opposition. These accusations have a considerable basis in fact: during the entirety of the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, Assad collaborated with IS jihadists in the destabilization of Iraq, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of American and British troops. Once the Syrian uprising was underway, the regime undertook various measures to bolster extremists in the insurgency. Assad and IS worked in tandem to leave Syria as a binary choice between themselves: Assad was sure this would rehabilitate him in the eyes of the world and transform his criminal regime into a partner of the international community in suppressing a terrorist insurgency, and IS wanted to rally Sunnis to its banner. The Secretary of the Syrian Parliament has now come forward to underline this. Continue reading
Black September: the PLO’s Deniable Terrorism Wing
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 19, 2015
A Black September terrorist appears on the balcony in the Olympic Village in Munich, September 1972 (photo via AP)
The Black September group was formed in September 1971, ostensibly as a splinter from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but in reality the PLO retained control of Black September and used it to carry out terrorist operations that raised the Palestinian organisations’ profile, without staining the PLO with these atrocities. Continue reading