By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 14 March 2023
What To Make of China “Brokering” the Saudi-Iran Deal
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Tag Archives: IRGC
Islamic State Attacks Iran and Many Iranians Ask: Did it Really?
Western Self-Hatred and the Iranian Revolution
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 1 November 2022
The late Bernard Lewis recorded in his memoir, Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian (2012), meeting the Shah of Iran “a year before” the Islamic Revolution that felled him, thus, some time in early 1978:
The Shah’s Perspective on the Islamic Revolution That Toppled Him
The Contents of Islamic State’s Weekly Newsletter ‘Al-Naba’ in August 2022
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 September 2022
Christian homes burned by the Islamic State in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo || Al-Naba 352, p. 5
Saddam Relative Arrested in Lebanon, Accused of Islamic State Crimes
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 24 August 2022
Area on the banks of the Tigris where the cadets of Camp Speicher were massacred by the Islamic State || Scott Peterson/The Christian Science Monitor
The Haqqani Network, Al-Qaeda, and Pakistan’s Jihad in Afghanistan
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 September 2021
Anti-Taliban fighters watch U.S. airstrikes at Tora Bora, 16 December 2001 || REUTERS/Erik de Castro
The State Department spokesman Ned Price said, on 27 August, “The Taliban and the Haqqani Network are separate entities”. The next day, the Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby slightly modulated this, having first tried to dismiss the question, by conceding there was “a certain amount of … commingling … there’s a marbling … of Taliban and Haqqani”, before saying he was “pushing back … [on] the relevance of that discussion”.
What these officials were trying to do was two-fold: (1) to refute press reports that U.S. officials in Kabul had shared “a list of names of American citizens, green card holders, and Afghan allies” with the Taliban, amounting to having “put all those Afghans on a kill list”, as one “defense official” put it; and (2) to deny that the U.S. coordination with the Taliban to evacuate people the jihadists wanted to kill—a surreal enough situation—had involved the additional political and legal problems of coordinating with a formally registered Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), as the Haqqani Network is. Continue reading
Pakistan and the Taliban
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 17 August 2021
Afghan government forces guarding Taloqan, Takhar province, Afghanistan // July 2021 // AFP photo
Kabul fell to the Taliban on 15 August. There is so much more to be said about the disastrous decisions the United States that precipitated this calamity, not least the so-called peace process whose only concrete effects were to weaken and demoralise the Afghan government, while bolstering the ranks of the Taliban by forcing the release of thousands of jihadists. The chaotic Saigon scenes have testified to the incompetence of Joe Biden’s administration, even at administrative tasks, and the horrors are only just beginning.
This post has a slightly different focus, namely the role of Pakistan, specifically its military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), as the author and operator of the Taliban and allied jihadists. This factor—absolutely fundamental to the conflict—has been, for twenty years, bizarrely absent in much of the coverage, and suggestions recur to this day that the Taliban is actually a problem for Pakistan. When the Pakistan dimension does come up, it will either be to note that Pakistan has some kind of role in funding or otherwise “supporting” the Taliban, and at its strongest the Taliban will be called a “proxy” of the ISI.
Even the word “proxy”, however, underplays the extent to which the Taliban is Pakistan, a wing of its (deep) state power. Continue reading
Spywar and Strategy: The Israel-Iran Contest in the Middle East
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 June 2021
Members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, at a memorial in Gaza, 31 January 2017. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib, Flash90.
The May 2021 round of fighting in Gaza brought with it the upending of the unspoken understanding between Israel and Hamas and a level of intercommunal violence within Israel that has not been seen in quite some time. The scale of the rocket attacks on the Jewish state must also be counted among the unusual elements of this latest flare-up, with Iran clearly identifiable as the enabling state behind Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the two primary factions behind these attacks. Continue reading
Just What Is Iran Capable Of?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 June 2021
Massive explosion at Khojir in eastern Tehran lights up the night sky, 25 June 2021 [image source]
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