Book Review: Carter Malkasian, ‘Illusions of Victory’, Oxford University Press, 2017. pp. 280.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 July 2018
Carter Malkasian sets out in Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State to upend the conventional understanding of the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) movement, known at the time as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), in Anbar province of western Iraq. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 November 2017
Abdul Munim al-Badawi (Abu Hamza al-Muhajir), the “war minister” of the Islamic State of Iraq, the predecessor to ISIS, made a brief five-minute speech on 30 April 2007, entitled “Nada ila Ulema al-Umma” (نِدَاءٌ إِلَى عُلَمَاءِ الأُمَّةِ). “Ulema” refers to Islamic scholars, sometimes translated as “clerics”, a slightly misleading comparison with Christianity, and “umma” refers to the worldwide community of Muslims, so the title of the speech translates as, “An Appeal to the Community’s Scholars”. Al-Badawi’s basic point—made at a time when the Islamic State movement was beginning to suffer under the pressure of the Surge and Sahwa—was to condemn the regional ulema for not supporting, and not having supported, the jihadists in Iraq against the Americans and the Shi’is. Implicitly, Al-Badawi is criticising the ulema for holding back Muslims in regional States who might otherwise have joined the Iraqi jihad as foreign fighters and suicide bombers, potentially making a difference to the Islamic State’s military fortunes. A rough translation of the speech is reproduced below.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 November 2017
The forty-fifth edition of the Islamic State’s “Distinguished Martyrs” series, published by al-Furqan Media in Rajab 1431 (June/July 2010), profiled Abu Zahra al-Issawi, the media emir or information minister of the organization between some point after July 2007, when Khalid al-Mashadani (Abu Zayd al-Mashadani) was arrested, and some point before September 2009, when Ahmad al-Ta’i was announced as holding the position. [UPDATE: Al-Ta’i turned out to be Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, and his real name was Wael al-Ta’i.] Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 1 October 2017
Manaf al-Rawi
The Islamic State and its supporters release short biographies of their slain leaders. One such profile was released by Manaf Abdul Rahim al-Rawi and is reproduced below. (A fuller profile of al-Rawi is available here.) Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 14 September 2017
By recent reports, one could easily come away with the impression that war and instability across the Fertile Crescent are winding down. Predictions about what comes next, always a risky enterprise in the Middle East, are at a point of unique vulnerability. Chaos and violence for some considerable time to come look like a safe bet, though the timing and scale look more uncertain. Nonetheless, certain trendlines are visible, most clearly the emergence of a regional order, abetted by the international coalition’s campaign against the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS), dominated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Continue reading
This article was published at BICOM
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 16 May 2017
Within the next month, the Islamic State (IS) will likely lose its grip on its Iraqi capital, Mosul, and the operation to drive it from its Syrian capital, Raqqa, will begin. The destruction of IS’s caliphate, however, is not even close to the end of the road for the movement, not least because of the manner in which it is being accomplished.
At its core the IS movement is waging a revolutionary war, and as Craig Whiteside, a fellow with The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism has explained, this means that the focus is on legitimacy. Military victories come and go but if IS is, over the long-term, gaining acceptance—whether from support, resignation, or fear—among the population it hopes to govern (the Sunni Arabs), then it is winning. It is for this reason that IS tries to embed political victories within its military defeats. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 15 April 2017
Boubaker al-Hakim (Abu Muqatil al-Tunisi) in Dabiq
Earlier today, an Iraqi military statement made public that the Iraqi government had provided coordinates to Bashar al-Assad’s air force, via the intelligence-sharing cell set up in Baghdad with Russia and Iran, for targets in Raqqa and al-Bukamal. One of the targets was Boubaker al-Hakim (Abu Muqatil al-Tunisi), a French-Tunisian Islamic State (IS) operative. Whether the Syrian regime’s strikes against al-Hakim were successful was not made clear. The interest here is that the U.S. announced on 10 December 2016 that it had killed al-Hakim in an airstrike near Raqqa on 26 November 2016, meaning that either the U.S. was mistaken or the Iraqis are. Al-Hakim is a very interesting figure in his own right with an extensive history in the jihadist movement and also highlights some broader trends, notably the assistance the Assad regime has provided to the IS movement. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on February 7, 2017
Satellite picture of Sednaya prison, Syria (source)
Amnesty International released a report today, “Human Slaughterhouse,” documenting the conditions in Sednaya prison, run by the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which amount to extermination as a crime against humanity. In addition to the deliberately insanitary conditions, routinized torture and maltreatment, there has been—and continues to be—a systematic campaign of extra-judicial massacre in which perhaps 13,000 people have perished. These findings buttress previous findings, and come with some political implications as the new American administration seeks to chart its way forward in Syria. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 31, 2017
Adnan al-Suwaydawi (source)
A video from the Islamic State yesterday listed a series of prominent past leaders of the organization. One was Adnan al-Suwaydawi,[1] whose full name is Adnan Latif Hamid al-Suwaydawi al-Dulaymi, and who is known most commonly either as Abu Muhannad al-Suwaydawi or Haji Dawud. For a long time, al-Suwaydawi was also mistakenly assigned the kunya “Abu Ayman al-Iraqi”, who was in fact a different IS commander. Al-Suwaydawi was killed on 15 May 2015 by a Coalition airstrike in Anbar Province, western Iraq, but he is credited by the Islamic State with their overrunning Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, the next day. A biography of al-Suwaydawi was circulated by IS supporters on or around 21 May 2015; it is reproduced below.
Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 30, 2017
![Umar Hadid [right] (source)](https://kyleorton.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/umar-hadid-1-right.jpg)
Umar Hadid [right] (source)
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