The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant Megathread

[jimmy olsen]

Getting really close to Baghdad

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/06/17/322890590/isis-rebels-drive-closer-to-baghdad-u-s-considers-options

The extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is tightening control of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, attacking the strategic city of Baqouba, less than 40 miles from Baghdad.

...On Monday, it took Tal Afar, west of Mosul.

..."Government sources say Baquba — capital of Diyala province on the northern approaches to Baghdad — saw rebels take control of several districts on the western outskirts of the city before these were regained by government troops and allied Shia militia."

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like ISIS is going to get even richer

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/18/isis-fighters-iraq-oil-refinery-baiji

Isis fighters attack Iraq's biggest oil refinery
Islamist militants launch assault in Baiji as Iran raises prospect of military intervention

    Mark Tran   
    theguardian.com, Wednesday 18 June 2014 11.19 BST   

Isis fighters attack Iraq's biggest oil refinery
Islamist militants launch assault in Baiji as Iran raises prospect of military intervention

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    Mark Tran   
    theguardian.com, Wednesday 18 June 2014 11.19 BST   

Baiji oil refinery
The Baiji oil refinery, 155 miles north of Baghdad, is under attack by Isis. Photograph: Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters

Islamist militants have attacked Iraq's largest oil refinery in the city of Baiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, as Iran raised the prospect of direct military intervention to protect Shia holy sites.

A top security official told the Associated Press that fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) had begun their attack on the refinery late on Tuesday night. The attack continued into Wednesday morning, with militants targeting it with mortar shells, starting a small fire on the periphery.

The refinery accounts for more than a quarter of the country's entire refining capacity, all of which goes toward domestic consumption – petrol, cooking oil and fuel for power stations. At the height of the insurgency from 2004 to late 2007, the Baiji refinery was under the control of Sunni militants who used to siphon off crude and petroleum products to finance their operations. Isis has used its control of oilfields in Syria to boost its coffers.

Any lengthy disruption at Baiji risks long lines at the petrol pump and electricity shortages, putting further pressure on the Shia-led government of the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Iraq's beleaguered prime minister has fired several top security commanders after Iraqi troops melted away before Isis militants as they captured the Mosul in the north, Iraq's second largest city.

Jihadi rebel forces have reached Baquba, less than 40 miles north of Baghdad, while fighting continues to rage further north in the city of Tal Afar. State television late on Tuesday aired footage of army troops and armed volunteers disembarking from a transport C-130 aircraft at an airstrip near the city.

Isis and disaffected Sunnis have threatened to march to Baghdad, the capital, and the Shia holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf in the worst threat to Iraq's stability since US troops left. The three cities are home to some of the most revered Shia sites. Isis has tried to capture Samarra, north of Baghdad, home to another major Shia shrine.

Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, warned that Iran would do whatever it took to protect the shrines.

"Dear Kerbala, Dear Najaf, Dear Kadhimiya and Dear Samarra, we warn the great powers and their lackeys and the terrorists, the great Iranian people will do everything to protect them," he said, in a speech on Wednesday in Khoramabad, near the Iraqi border.

On Tuesday Rouhani mentioned petitions signed by Iranians who said they were willing to fight in Iraq "to destroy the terrorists and protect the holy sites", which are visited by hundreds of thousands of Iranian pilgrims annually.

"Thank God there are enough volunteer Shias, Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq to fight the terrorists," he added.

Thousands of Iranians have volunteered to defend the shrines. Iran is 90% Shia, a group considered to be apostates by Isis and Sunni extremists. Rouhani said on Saturday that Iran had never dispatched any forces to Iraq and it was very unlikely it ever would, but Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was in Baghdad last week to give advice to Maliki.

Amid the fighting, the plight of foreign oil workers has become a concern. The Turkish embassy in Baghdad is investigating reports that a group of Turkish construction workers were among 60 people abducted by militants near Kirkuk. Isis seized 15 Turks who were building a hospital near the town of Dour, in Salahuddin province near Kirkuk.

The reported abduction came a week after 80 other Turkish nationals were seized by insurgents in Mosul, 49 of them from the Turkish consulate, including special forces soldiers, diplomats and children.

The Indian government has not been able to make contact with 40 Indian construction workers in Mosul, with the Times of India reporting that they have been kidnapped.

The foreign ministry spokesman, Syed Akbaruddin, said dozens of Indian workers were living in areas overrun by Isis and India was in contact with many of them, including 46 nurses. The nurses are stranded in Tikrit, which is under militant control, with many of them holed up in the hospital where they work. Nurses who spoke to the Indian media said they had been treating people injured in fierce street fighting.

The White House has indicated that it may be some days away from a decision on any US military intervention as senior Democrats expressed growing caution about the risks of being sucked back in to conflict in the country.

Amid signs that Barack Obama is treading warily over calls for air strikes, the administration spokesman, Jay Carney, said the president would "continue to consult with his national security team in the days to come", and there would also be further consultations with members of Congress, including some closed briefings later this week.

[jimmy olsen]

Guerrilla marketing takes on a new meaning.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isis-iraq-twitter-social-media-strategy/372856/

How ISIS Games Twitter
The militant group that conquered northern Iraq is deploying a sophisticated social-media strategy.
J.M. Berger Jun 16 2014, 2:00 PM ET

The advance of an army used to be marked by war drums. Now it's marked by volleys of tweets.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni militant group that seized Iraq's second-largest city last week and is now pledging to take Baghdad, has honed this new technique—most recently posting photos on Twitter of an alleged mass killing of Iraqi soldiers. But what's often overlooked in press coverage is that ISIS doesn't just have strong, organic support online. It also employs social-media strategies that inflate and control its message. Extremists of all stripes are increasingly using social media to recruit, radicalize and raise funds, and ISIS is one of the most adept practitioners of this approach.

One of ISIS's more successful ventures is an Arabic-language Twitter app called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, or just Dawn. The app, an official ISIS product promoted by its top users, is advertised as a way to keep up on the latest news about the jihadi group.

Hundreds of users have signed up for the app on the web or on their Android phones through the Google Play store. When you download the app, ISIS asks for a fair amount of personal data:

Once you sign up, the app will post tweets to your account—the content of which is decided by someone in ISIS's social-media operation. The tweets include links, hashtags, and images, and the same content is also tweeted by the accounts of everyone else who has signed up for the app, spaced out to avoid triggering Twitter's spam-detection algorithms. Your Twitter account functions normally the rest of the time, allowing you to go about your business.

The app first went into wide use in April 2014, but its posting activity has ramped up during the group's latest offensive, reaching an all-time high of almost 40,000 tweets in one day as ISIS marched into the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last week. On Sunday, as the media reported on the group's advance toward Baghdad, hundreds of Dawn app users began sending thousands of tweets featuring an image of an armed jihadist gazing at the ISIS flag flying over the city, with the text, "We are coming, Baghdad" (see below).

The volume of these tweets was enough to make any search for "Baghdad" on Twitter generate the image among its first results, which is certainly one means of intimidating the city's residents.

.The app is just one way ISIS games Twitter to magnify its message. Another is the use of organized hashtag campaigns, in which the group enlists hundreds and sometimes thousands of activists to repetitively tweet hashtags at certain times of day so that they trend on the social network. This approach also skews the results of a popular Arabic Twitter account called @ActiveHashtags that tweets each day's top trending tags. When ISIS gets its hashtag into the @ActiveHashtags stream, it results in an average of 72 retweets per tweet, which only makes the hashtag trend more. As it gains traction, more users are exposed to ISIS's messaging. The group's supporters also run accounts similar to @ActiveHashtags that exclusively feature jihadi content and can produce hundreds of retweets per tweet.

As a result of these strategies, and others, ISIS is able to project strength and promote engagement online. For instance, the ISIS hashtag consistently outperforms that of the group's main competitor in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, even though the two groups have a similar number of supporters online. In data I analyzed in February, ISIS often registered more than 10,000 mentions of its hashtag per day, while the number of al-Nusra mentions generally ranged between 2,500 and 5,000.

ISIS also uses hashtags to focus-group messaging and branding concepts, much like a Western corporation might. Earlier this year, ISIS hinted, without being specific, that it was planning to change the name of its organization. Activists then carefully promoted a hashtag crafted to look like a grassroots initiative, demanding that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declare not an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq, but the rebirth of an Islamic caliphate. The question of when and how to declare a new caliphate is highly controversial in jihadi circles, and the hashtag produced a great deal of angry and divisive discussion, which ISIS very likely tracked and measured. It never announced a name change.

Media attention has focused, not unreasonably, on ISIS's use of social media to spread pictures of graphic violence, attract new fighters, and incite lone wolves. But it's important to recognize that these activities are supported by sophisticated online machinery. ISIS does have legitimate support online—but less than it might seem. And it owes a lot of that support to a calculated campaign that would put American social-media-marketing gurus to shame.

[Legbiter]

Well, it's official.

"We have a request from the Iraqi government for air power," confirmed top US military commander Gen Martin Dempsey in front of US senators.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27905849

[DGuller]

I'd say we should eat the -25 prestige hit.  Our war exhaustion is too high, and it's not like we're going to get a lot of diplomatic power points with Kerry in the cabinet.

[Legbiter]

I'd say we should eat the -25 prestige hit.  Our war exhaustion is too high, and it's not like we're going to get a lot of diplomatic power points with Kerry in the cabinet.

Still, if anyone needs killing, it's these fucks. Worth a JDAM or three.

[derspiess]

and it's not like we're going to get a lot of diplomatic power points with Kerry in the cabinet.

As bad as he is, it could be worse...

[Sheilbh]

I don't see the need to do anything.

They asked. They also chose not to negotiate and sign more formal deals with the US.

So the US should demand what they'll get in return from Iraq, or if it's Iran running the war, from them.

[Phillip V]

Obama Says U.S. to Send Iraq Up to 300 Military "Advisers"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/us/obama-to-address-nation-on-iraq-crisis.html

[The Brain]

I got a good feeling about this intervention in Iraq.

[crazy canuck]

I got a good feeling about this intervention in Iraq.

Third time is the charm?

[The Brain]

I got a good feeling about this intervention in Iraq.

Third time is the charm?

If the US sends advisers to prop up a corrupt regime in South Iraq while bombing the fanatics in North Iraq who themselves infiltrate the South I don't see what could go wrong.

[jimmy olsen]

I got a good feeling about this intervention in Iraq.

Third time is the charm?

If the US sends advisers to prop up a corrupt regime in South Iraq while bombing the fanatics in North Iraq who themselves infiltrate the South I don't see what could go wrong.

Unlike Vietnam, the population of the South actively hates that of the North.

[Sheilbh]

I didn't think anyone could fuck up the Middle East more than Sykes and Picot.

Then I saw Paul Bremer giving his opinion on what we need to do in Iraq.

[Tonitrus]

While the idea of splitting Iraq into thirds may seem sexy...it would likely just end up as three states at near perpetual war with each other.