By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 March 2021
A year ago, U.S. President Donald Trump gave the order to kill Qassem Soleimani, the de facto deputy leader of Iran. Arash Azizi’s The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran’s Global Ambitions is an effort to explain who Soleimani was, how he rose to controlling the lives of millions of people well outside the borders of Iran, and how in the end he was brought down. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 January 2021
Last week, as one of his last acts in office, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech about Iran’s collaboration with Al-Qaeda. It was unfortunate that Pompeo did this at this time and in this way, with such blatant political intent, because the factual content of Pompeo’s speech was unassailable: the Islamic Republic’s long relationship with Al-Qaeda does stretch back about three decades, the killing of Al-Qaeda’s deputy Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah (Abu Muhammad al-Masri) in Tehran in August 2020 is demonstrative of a shift in the strategic positioning of the organisation away from Pakistan to Iran, and even the part of Pompeo’s speech that got the most pushback—about Tehran’s contact with the 9/11 killers—is not controversial and is not new.
Unmentioned in Pompeo’s speech was one of the crucibles that forged this relationship, and forged Al-Qaeda into something more than a regional menace, namely the Bosnian war of 1992-5. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 23, 2020
A chapter about Islamism in Syria I wrote for the American Foreign Policy Council’s (AFPC) ‘World Almanac of Islamism’ was published today. Do check it out, and the broader site, which is a great, accessible resource. The format of the website necessitated that the chapter as I submitted it was edited, condensed, and split up to fill out the various categories. In case it is of any interest, the original version of the chapter is reproduced below.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on October 4, 2020
A chapter about Al-Qaeda I wrote for the American Foreign Policy Council’s (AFPC) ‘World Almanac of Islamism’ was published today. Do check it out, and the broader site, which is a great, accessible resource. The format of the website necessitated that the chapter as I submitted it was edited, condensed, and split up to fill out the various categories. In case it is of any interest, the original version of the chapter is reproduced below.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 June 2020
Ismail Nazlikul (Kasim Engin) [image source]
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 January 2020
This article was originally published at European Eye on Radicalization
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
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 December 2019
In a long article last week, I looked at why the U.S. ran a formal occupation of Iraq for fourteen months after the fall of Saddam Husayn in April 2003, given that there had been an explicit pre-invasion decision not to have an occupation government. The short answer is that the occupation was installed through deception by the State Department, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). State and CIA had argued for a protracted occupation in the Situation Room debates in 2002, but President George W. Bush had sided with the Pentagon, which advocated a rapid transfer of power to Iraqis. Having lost in the formal inter-agency process, the State Department succeeded by subversion in getting its way on the ground in Iraq. The disaster this caused in the mismanagement of post-Saddam Iraq was, as the article explained in detail, only the most serious impact of the toxic schism between State/CIA and the Pentagon, a factor whose import is difficult to overstate when examining how the Bush administration functioned. (This feud also at times drew in the Vice President’s Office, which tended to support the Pentagon.)
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 December 2019
The Iraqi National Congress (INC), the umbrella group for the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Husayn from the 1990s up to 2003, has been immensely controversial, mostly because of its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, against whom the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department waged a bitter bureaucratic war, a lot of it in the press, getting into circulation stories of INC trickery—possibly on behalf of Iran—being behind the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 December 2019
Douglas Feith was the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, one of the most senior positions at the Pentagon during one of the most consequential periods in recent history, covering the 11 September 2001 atrocities and early phase of the U.S.-led response. Feith later wrote a highly illuminating memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, which tried to drain some of the hysteria out of the public “debate” about the Iraq dimension of the U.S. policy in particular by explaining the internal arguments in the Bush administration leading up to the decision to finish with Saddam Husayn in 2003, and trying to set those arguments in their proper historical context, both in relation to Iraq—where “the war” had begun twelve years earlier—and the altered American threat perceptions in the shadow of 9/11. Unlike a lot of the gossipy tomes that emerged from former officials, Feith’s book is notably light on opinion and contains reams of declassified documents so readers can check his analysis against the source material. One of Feith’s key judgments is that “the chief mistake was maintaining an occupation government in Iraq for over a year”.[1] As Feith explains in great detail in the book, this was never supposed to happen. So how did it?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 10 November 2019
The 207th edition of Al-Naba, the weekly newsletter of the Islamic State (IS), published on 7 November 2019, devotes its main editorial to Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), the first “Caliph” when the “Caliphate” was declared in June 2014, who was killed on 27 October 2019.
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