Tag Archives: Islamism

Islamist Clerics Give Permission to Work with Turkey Against ISIS and PKK

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on August 4, 2015

Just over a week ago, a new clerical body was formed, al-Majlis Shura Ahl al-ilm fil-Sham (Advisory Council of the People of Knowledge in Syria), which includes Islamists from within Syria and from outside. Among the notable foreigners are Umar al-Hadouchi, a Moroccan jihadi-salafist, and Muhammad Ould al-Dedew, a Mauritanian who is more in line with the Sururis. There is also Abdallah al-Muhaysini, the Saudi jihadi cleric who is very close to al-Qaeda’s leadership inside Syria. From among Syrians, there are two Ahrar al-Sham notables, Dr. Ayman al-Harush and Mohamed Ayman Aboul-Tout (Abu Abbas al-Shami); Sa’ad al-Uthman, the son of Abd al-Karim, a major figure in the Hama wing of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and Ahmad al-Salum, a Sururi (an activist/political Salafi).

The Council’s first statement condemned the 25 July assassination of the Faylaq al-Sham commander Mazin al-Qassum by Islamic State (IS) operatives with Jund al-Aqsa, and demanded that all groups clarify their stance on IS and cleanse their ranks of IS agents and sympathizers. Today’s fatwa, “Concerning cooperation and coordination with the Turks in repelling Daesh and the PKK,” licensed Muslims to work with the Turkish government against IS and the PKK. The fatwa is reproduced below. Continue reading →

A Myth Revisited: “Saddam Hussein Had No Connection To Al-Qaeda”

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Book Review: The Connection: How al-Qaeda’s Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America (2004) by Stephen Hayes

By Kyle Orton(@KyleWOrton) on June 21, 2015

 

More than twelve years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is that Saddam’s regime had no connection with al-Qaeda, and such “evidence” as was adduced was tortured out of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in the Bush administration’s desperation to cobble together a casus belli. But if one puts ideology on hold, and considers the evidence of Stephen Hayes’ The Connection, a rather different picture emerges. Continue reading →

Does Iran Support The Islamic State?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on May 26, 2015

Qassem Suleimani, Iran's spymaster, believed in some MidEast conspiracy theories to control ISIS

Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s spymaster, believed in some Mid-East conspiracy theories to control ISIS

In 2010, Farzad Farhangian, an Iranian diplomat based in Belgium, defected to Norway. Farhangian has now emerged with the extraordinary accusation that the Islamic Republic of Iran is controlling the Islamic State (ISIS) and using it as part of Tehran’s war against the Gulf States, especially Saudi Arabia. Farhangian’s accusations are lurid and (literally) incredible, but the question of Iran’s role in ISIS’ creation and growth, and Iran’s manipulation of ISIS to further its own ends, is one well worth asking. Continue reading →

How Saddam Hussein Islamized Iraq

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 20, 2015

Umm al-Qura (Mother of All Cities) Mosque, built by Saddam to commemorate his

Umm al-Qura (Mother of All Cities) Mosque, built by Saddam to commemorate his “victory” in the 1991 Gulf War

In December, I wrote a post, “Iraq Is Still Suffering The Effects Of Saddam Hussein’s Islamist Regime,” which was a review/analysis of an academic paper by Samuel Helfont that pointed out that the Saddam Hussein regime had, since the 1980s, used Islamists, including al-Qaeda, as part of its foreign policy. I critiqued the paper a little for having said it would not comment on Saddam’s internal policy with the Islamists, while in fact the paper hinted that Saddam remained hostile to mixing religion and politics. I noted that the evidence does not support this: Saddam’s regime adopted overt theocratic trappings before the end.

There were two kinds of pushback to the idea that Saddam’s regime was Islamist. Predictably, one critique was related to the controversy over the way the Gulf War that Saddam started in 1990 was ended; opponents of the 2003 invasion of Iraq are heavily invested in the Saddam-as-secularist narrative, often coupled with the “Bush lied” hysteria—in this case about a connection between the Saddam regime and al-Qaeda—to say that the invasion empowered a previously, officially-repressed Islamism in Iraq. This simply is not borne out by the evidence. There was also pushback from some Iraqis. But this too was predictable: as I outlined in that post, drawing on Ali Allawi’s book on post-Saddam Iraq, one of the reasons so many people with no agenda get the Islamist aspect of the Saddam regime wrong is that when they turn to what they believe is the best primary source—namely the Iraqis in the West—they encounter a source that for various reasons is actually several decades out-of-date.

Buttressing my initial argument is a 2011 paper, “From Militant Secularism to Islamism: The Iraqi Ba’th Regime 1968-2003,” in which Amatzia Baram provides evidence from Iraqi internal documents and tapes of Cabinet meetings captured after the fall of Baghdad to show that Saddam’s regime had formed an alliance with Islamists in the mid-1980s for use in its foreign policy, and from a bit later in the 1980s had begun steps toward Islamizing Iraq internally. Continue reading →

An Update On The Anti-Assad Imam Killed In London

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on April 13, 2015

Abdul Hadi Arwani

Abdul Hadi Arwani

In Brent, northwest London, in the evening of April 12, a 46-year-old man was arrested as part of the ongoing investigation into the April 7 murder of the Syrian-born imam, Abdul Hadi Arwani, a long-time opponent of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Writing about the murder of Arwani last week, I noted that the available evidence suggested the motivations of the murderer(s) could be:

  • Financial: related to Arwani’s business dealings as the owner of his construction company
  • Other local or personal
  • Far-Right anti-Muslim
  • Intra-Islamist: Arwani had been the director at the Salafist An-Noor Mosque and was himself clearly an Islamist, but Arwani was against the Islamic State (ISIS), for example, which might have made him enemies among some congregants
  • Agents of the Assad regime, conceivably with the complicity of Iran and Russia

Those options still stand, but some important updates over the weekend have helped alter the relative likelihood of each. Continue reading →

Further Evidence of Mohammed Emwazi’s Radical Ties—And CAGE’s Meltdown

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on March 7, 2015

Asim Qureshi; Mohammed Emwazi (

Asim Qureshi; Mohammed Emwazi (“Jihadi John”)

Earlier this week I wrote of the unmasking of “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State’s (ISIS) video-beheader, as 26-year-old British citizen Mohammed Emwazi. I had two purposes. One was to gloat over the implosion of CAGE (formerly Cageprisoners), an Islamist terrorist-advocacy group that had gotten itself called a “human rights organisation”. And the second was to point out that the narrative peddled by CAGE and other apologists, that Emwazi had been radicalised by heavy-handed British security methods, was plainly absurd.

Emwazi had been associating with al-Qaeda agents and sympathisers and was part of a London-based network that dispatched fighters to al-Qaeda’s Somali branch al-Shabab years before he came into contact with the security services—indeed the security services had only taken an interest in Emwazi because he was already radicalised. In the last few days both of these trends have continued: CAGE’s total collapse moves closer and Emwazi’s known nefarious associations are multiplying. Continue reading →

From Kessab to Cannibals: Syria’s Media War

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on January 5, 2015

Mother Agnes Mariam on RT. An agent of the regime, she dismissed Syria's rebels as a foreign conspiracy.

Mother Agnes Mariam on RT. An agent of the regime, she dismissed Syria’s rebels as a foreign conspiracy.

Fouad Ajami once said Syria was the “first YouTube war“. An academic study called Syria “the most socially mediated civil conflict in history“. From the start of the Syrian war, the media and propaganda dimension has been of immense importance, impacting the course of the war on the ground and affecting the policy of foreign States who could make a decisive difference in the conflict. Continue reading →

Iraq Is Still Suffering The Effects Of Saddam Hussein’s Islamist Regime

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 17, 2014

Throughout his entire trial, Saddam Hussein was never without a Qur'an

Throughout his entire trial, Saddam Hussein was never without a Qur’an

In June, Samuel Helfont published a paper for the Middle East Institute entitled, ‘Saddam and the Islamists: The Ba’thist Regime’s Instrumentalization of Religion in Foreign Affairs’. Relying on “newly released Iraqi state and Ba’th Party archives,” Helfont’s central argument is:

“Saddam maintained deep reservations about Islamism until the end. However, this did not prevent his regime from working extensively with Islamists and Islamic activists outside Iraq. Indeed, religion played a leading role in the country’s foreign policy throughout the 1990s.”

Continue reading →

Has Hillary Clinton Become A Hawk?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on September 21, 2014

The next American President?

The next American President?

Last month, Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic published an interview with Hillary Clinton. At 8,000 words it can be off-putting to plough through, but I have now finally got around to it, and it is rather interesting. The interview focusses on the three areas where President Obama’s foreign policy has so conspicuously failed—Syria, Iran, and Israel—and also includes sections on Egypt and Libya, where the administration’s failure has been somewhat less in the news. Continue reading →

Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory

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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 →