By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 13, 2014
On Wednesday night, President Obama gave a speech, the purport of which was to be a war plan to defeat the Islamic State (I.S.). Indeed in the speech the President committed to a “roll back” of the territory the I.S. had conquered, and to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Takfiri Caliphate. But as to how he was going to do that, the details were few. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 6, 2014
Notification from Ibn Taymiyya Media Center’s Facebook page on the “martyrdom” of Gazan Muhammad Ahmed Qanitah (March 2013)
On August 11, Jamaat Ansar ad-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Bayt al-Maqdis (The Group of the Supporters of the Islamic State in Jerusalem), released a “martyrdom” notice for “the mujahid brother” Mahmoud Nayef al-Qayrnawi (Abu al-Bara) of Gaza, who was killed by the regime on July 26 while fighting for the Islamic State (I.S.) at the Sha’ar gas field in Homs.
This is not the first Gazan jihadist killed in Syria. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 3, 2014
An opposition poster showing Assad and the Islamic State as two sides of the same coin
On August 25, Bashar al-Assad’s Foreign Minister, Walid al-Muallem, said: “Syria is ready for co-operation … to fight terrorism.” The week before Assad’s PR guru, Bouthaina Shaaban, told CNN that an “international coalition,” including Russia, China, America, and Europe, should intervene to defeat the “terrorists,” whom she says make up the rebellion in Syria.
Back in March I wrote a long post laying out the evidence that the Assad regime was deliberately empowering then-ISIS, now the Islamic State (IS), helping it destroy moderate rebels and even Salafist and Salafi-jihadist forces, with the intention of making-good on its propaganda line that the only opposition to the regime came from takfiris, which would frighten the population into taking shelter behind the State, seeing this madness as the only alternative, and would at the very least keep the West from intervening to support the uprising and might even draw the West in to help defeat the insurgency. These statements represent the culmination of that strategy. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 1, 2014
Pro-ISIS demonstration in Indonesia, March 16, 2014
Early last month, Indonesia announced:
“The government rejects and bans the teachings of [the Islamic State] from growing in Indonesia. It is not in line with State ideology, Pancasila, or the philosophy of kebhinekaan [diversity] under the unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia.”
This was a welcome change of tune. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 27, 2014
Devastated International Airport in Tripoli, Aug. 23, 2014
With the Arabian Revolt sweeping the Middle East in early 2011, Libya’s turn came on February 17. Throwing off decades of fear, and not bothering with peaceful demonstrations as Tunisia and Egypt had to free themselves of tyranny, nor the Syrians who tried peaceful demonstrations for six entire months, the Libyans went straight to armed rebellion, and soon the city of Benghazi had been pried from the regime’s grip and become the de facto capital of the revolution. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 25, 2014
Abu Mosa, the Islamic State’s press officer
This is an extraordinary piece of work from Vice News. Earlier this month they released a five-part film after one of their journalists, Medyan Dairieh, embedded with the Islamic State (I.S.), formerly ISIS, in Raqqa City, the de facto headquarters of I.S. in north-eastern Syrian. It’s an extraordinarily brave thing to do given the number of journalists I.S. has kidnapped, the number of journalists killed in Syria (at least sixty), and of course the penchant of the Zarqawi’ites for beheading Westerners on video, as gruesomely underlined again with the murder of James Foley. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 20, 2014
James Foley
Last night the Islamic State released a revolting video in which they beheaded the American journalist James Foley, who has been missing since Thanksgiving Day (November 22) 2012. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 9, 2014
Released on December 21, 2007, twenty-eight years to the month after the Soviet Union launched Operation STORM 333, decapitating the Afghan government and plunging the country into a decade-long war, Charlie Wilson’s War tells a story centred on Representative Charles Wilson of Texas (Tom Hanks), a conservative Democrat, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), a Right-wing Christian socialite in Houston who has taken the Afghans to her bosom because of her hatred for communism, and Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a blue-collar case officer at the CIA who is the epitome of the adage that one can get anything done in Washington so long as one does not care who gets the credit. Between them they cajole Congress into moving its appropriations from $5 million to $500 million, which will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the Saudis, to help the Afghan resistance combat the Red Army’s occupation of their country. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 22, 2014
In April, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation produced a report, ‘Measuring Importance and Influence in Syrian Foreign Fighter Networks,’ which examined the use of social media in recruiting people to the jihadist groups, referring almost solely to Syria at that time, but which applies equally to Iraq. I have now gotten around to reading it and its findings are extremely interesting. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 13, 2014
The only official picture of Jabhat an-Nusra’s Emir, Abu Muhammad al-Golani, given out by the Iraqi government.
Syria’s rebellion was already fighting for its life, squeezed between the regime and the Islamic State (I.S.) in Aleppo, and on Friday night a new front appeared to open. Jabhat an-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, announced that it was forming an Islamic Emirate. According to a translation by Hassan Hassan, Nusra’s commander, Abu Muhammad al-Golani, said that they would now start implementing the shari’a “in the full sense of the word,” and “without compromise, leniency, ambiguity, or politeness.” Golani specifically says that Nusra will begin implementing the hudud, the harsh punishments like amputation for theft, which Nusra has very deliberately not done so far, saying war conditions suspended such punishments according to the Holy Law. At a more material level, it avoided garnering them bad press for savagery against the civilian population. Golani dismissed with contempt the secular rebels as “grovelling” to the West, and declared I.S.’s Caliphate “void” and its members ghulat (extremists).
Kyle Orton's Blog 