The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant Megathread

[Syt]

The other night I saw a bunch of Kurds staying in a Catholic Church sleeping on the pews.  I was wondering what the Muslims were thinking when they came in.

"Hey, these guys have seats in their place, sweet!  Don't know what all these things near your feet are for though".

There was a story about a Jewish community in Germany giving shelter to a Somali Muslim asylum seeker in a Synagogue to prevent his getting sent back home (places of worship still count as sanctuary, it would seem). The rabbi even drove him to the local mosque so that he could pray with fellow Muslims.

[alfred russel]

German foreign minister showing solidarity with the Yazidis:

I imagine what they are thinking:

"Holy shit, we are getting overrun by madmen who want to kill us all, you have one of the strongest militaries in the world, with some of the most advanced weaponry, and you send us an old guy in a suit without shoes."

[Darth Wagtaros]

German foreign minister showing solidarity with the Yazidis:

I imagine what they are thinking:

"Holy shit, we are getting overrun by madmen who want to kill us all, you have one of the strongest militaries in the world, with some of the most advanced weaponry, and you send us an old guy in a suit without shoes."

No shit.

[Grinning_Colossus]

The Kurds have retaken the dam.

Kurdish forces in northern Iraq are in near complete control of Iraq's largest dam after ousting Islamic State (IS) militants, Kurdish officials say.

Ground forces supported by US air strikes launched the operation to take Mosul dam on Sunday morning.

Kurdish sources said they were still trying to clear mines and booby traps from the area round the dam, a process which could take several hours.

The strategically important facility was seized by IS militants on 7 August.

It supplies water and electricity to northern Iraq and there had been fears the IS militants could use it to flood areas downstream.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28826349

[Admiral Yi]

Haven't those barbarians signed the mine ban treaty? 

[Viking]

Haven't those barbarians signed the mine ban treaty? 

Probably best not to tell them about it, since they will go all "hamdilullah,  the Kaffirs fear this terrific weapons, we must place it in all childrens schools!"

[alfred russel]

Kurdish sources said they were still trying to clear mines and booby traps from the area round the dam, a process which could take several hours.

This is one of those sentences that makes you wonder how it actually looks on the ground, even though you know it isn't pretty.

[jimmy olsen]

ISIS has beheaded 700 members of a tribe that rebelled against them in Syria 

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/islamic-state-group-executes-700-syria-2014816123945662121.html

[CountDeMoney]

I caught a news blip somewhere that they were mounting heads on the hoods of their technicals.  Now you just can't buy that kind of raw, in-your-face medievalism these days.

[The Brain]

LBJ mounted a head.

[CountDeMoney]

Yeah, but in her defense, she wasn't looking.

[Viking]

ISIS has beheaded 700 members of a tribe that rebelled against them in Syria 

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/islamic-state-group-executes-700-syria-2014816123945662121.html

Well they were following the example of Mohammeds own personal beheading of hundreds of members of the Qurayza tribe.

[garbon]

I only just saw that apparently media outlets in Egypt/Lebanon are reporting that my girl helped start up ISIS.

[Valmy]

I only just saw that apparently media outlets in Egypt/Lebanon are reporting that my girl helped start up ISIS.

Look it may not be the best Temptations song but starting a murderous Jihad seems a little undeserved.

[Sheilbh]

Well they were following the example of Mohammeds own personal beheading of hundreds of members of the Qurayza tribe.

No doubt that's part of it. But I can't help but feel we're playing into their own game if we just focus on the religious aspect rather than the possible strategic purpose. There was an interesting piece in the Telegraph precisely on the use of beheading:

Where does the Islamic State's fetish with beheading people come from?
By Shashank Joshi World Last updated: August 14th, 2014
1277 Comments Comment on this article

Twitter is a true entrepôt of ideas. It is a forum where jihadists can eulogise Robin Williams and the merits of Jumanji, the US Secretary of State can spar with his Iranian counterpart, and the Prime Minister can live-stream his cabinet reshuffle – all within digital touching distance of each other.

Among the downsides of this eclecticism is that, more than once in the past months, I have been greeted on my Twitter feed with photographs of severed heads that have slipped through the website's notional filter, often Instagrammed into copper hues or moody sepia. A 23-year-old British rapper from Maida Vale is the latest participant in this craze, tweeting a photograph of himself, clutching a head, with the caption "chillin' with my homie or what's left of him". Such are the times we live in.

What, though, is the purpose of such brutality? The jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) are not, after all, nihilists. They may have their share of wet-eared amateurs – "some fat guy from Luton", as the academic Peter Neumann memorably put it – but they are a highly professional military force, more similar to an army than insurgents, and seek a well-administered Islamic state. So why engage in beheadings and crucifixions?

We might identify three parts to this. First, psychological warfare is a key part of IS's military strategy. As Lawrence Freedman writes in his most recent book, strategy "is about getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest". Even where outnumbered, as they were in Mosul in June, IS have used their reputation for terror to dissuade Iraqi forces from ever seeking battle. Which poorly paid soldier wishes to risk decapitation, impalement, or amputation for the sake of a distant, crumbling government? Fear is a uniquely effective weapon.

Second, IS understands that Western governments are, to some extent, dissuaded by the prospect of a British or American soldier meeting with a similar fate. It would mean not just political ruin, but also an unimaginable propaganda boost for the jihadist cause. Two days before declaring their caliphate, IS threatened to attack the US if they were targeted militarily. Their rhetoric presently outstrips their capabilities, as former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove has argued, but the track record of massacre and torture gives these threats, to Western audiences, added menace. Brutality is therefore also a form of deterrence.

Third, terrorism is a form of propaganda by the deed. And the more chilling the deed, the more impactful the propaganda. The graphic nature of beheading, the focus on the individual, and the act of bodily desecration involved all render this far more chilling than the explosion of a bomb, even where the latter's death toll is greater. The killing of Lee Rigby was uniquely horrific because of the targeted, mechanical quality of the murder.

There's little new in this approach, particularly the massacre of captives and the method of beheading for the purposes of terrorisation. The American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002, the American businessman Nick Berg in Iraq in 2004, and several others thereafter. 14 Yemeni soldiers were beheaded only last week. And there are worse examples still. In the 1980s, the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah captured the CIA station chief in Beirut and, later, a US marine; accounts of their torture – "a significant number of people in this room would become physically ill" – are blood curdling.

But does all this actually work? There are two ways in which a strategy of brutality can backfire.

The first is that it can induce your enemies to fight even harder, because surrendering is such an awful option. One academic study shows that "the Wehrmacht's policy of treating Soviet POWs brutally undercut German military effectiveness on the Eastern front". Moreover, the Soviets' own relative brutality to Germans meant that German soldiers fought harder in Russia than in Normandy. The lesson? IS can make its enemies flee, but it would be a foolish Iraqi unit that surrendered – and the net effect is that IS has to fight all the harder.

The second problem is that IS is in the state-building game. It is out to conquer, not merely to annihilate. But it was precisely such excessive and indiscriminate violence that proved the downfall of IS' precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq. Sunni groups, armed and protected by a surge of US forces, turned on the group in the so-called Awakening, expelling it from the same Sunni-majority areas in which it's now encamped. Although IS initially sought to restrain itself in the places it seized over the first half of this year, its record has been patchy, to put it mildly. Iraqis may be accustomed to being ruled by terror, but it doesn't mean they like it.

This is one of the reasons – in addition to IS's megalomania – that the group was expelled from al-Qaeda earlier this year. As Osama bin Laden wrote in a letter four years ago, pursuing jihad "without exercising caution ... would lead us to winning several battles while losing the war". Thus the modern jihadist's dilemma: when does a strategy of calibrated terror turn into a self-defeating orgy of violence?

I think that last bolded section is the key to any policy here. We should probably take the early Afghanistan campaign as a model. Special forces on the ground, air strikes and support for groups like the Kurds or any turncoat Sunni we can find and use them against ISIS.

Of course the problem is it's tough to have a policy when I think the most fundamental questions are still unanswered. Can Syria and Iraq survive as states? Do we even want them to? How much are we willing to spend to do it?

I only just saw that apparently media outlets in Egypt/Lebanon are reporting that my girl helped start up ISIS.

Yeah. Based on some wildly, absurdly fabricated lines from her autobiography. I thought this piece was pot on about it:
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2014/08/16/Enough-lies-the-Arab-body-politic-created-the-ISIS-cancer.html