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What Is the Islamic State Trying to Accomplish?

February 7, 2015

What Is the Islamic State Trying to Accomplish? National Review on line, Andrew C. McCarthy, February 7, 2015

(As soon as Obama defeats climate change, he may begin to focus on other less important problems.  — DM)

pic_giant_020715_SM_ISIS-Fighter(Image: ISIS video)

The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are our problem.

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The Islamic State’s barbaric murder of Lieutenant Mouath al-Kasaebeh, the Jordanian air-force pilot the jihadists captured late last year, has naturally given rise to questions about the group’s objectives. Charles Krauthammer argues (here and here) that the Islamic State is trying to draw Jordan into a land war in Syria. It is no doubt correct that the terrorist group would like to destabilize Jordan — indeed, it is destabilizing Jordan. Its immediate aim, however, is more modest and attainable. The Islamic State wants to break up President Obama’s much trumpeted Islamic-American coalition.

As the administration proudly announced back in September, Jordan joined the U.S. coalition, along with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. The only potential value of the coalition is symbolic: It has enabled the president to claim that Muslim countries were lining up with us against the Islamic State. Militarily, the coalition is of little use. These countries cannot defeat the Islamic State.

Moreover, even the symbolism is insignificant. Symbolism, after all, cuts both ways. As I pointed out when the administration breathlessly announced the coalition, our five Islamic partners have only been willing to conduct (extremely limited) aerial operations against the Islamic State. They would not attack al-Qaeda targets — i.e., the strongholds of al-Nusra (the local al-Qaeda franchise) and “Khorasan” (an al-Qaeda advisory council that operates within al-Nusra in Syria).

Obviously, if the relevance of the five Islamic countries’ willingness to fight the Islamic State is the implication that the Islamic State is not really Islamic, then their unwillingness to fight al-Qaeda equally implies their assessment that al-Qaeda is representative of Islam. The latter implication no doubt explains why the Saudis, Qatar, and the UAE have given so much funding over the years to al-Qaeda . . . the terror network from which the Islamic State originates and with which the Islamic State shares its sharia-supremacist ideology.

I’ll give the Saudis this: They don’t burn their prisoners alive in a cage. As previously recounted here, though, they routinely behead their prisoners. In fact, here’s another report from the British press just three weeks ago:

Authorities in Saudi Arabia have publicly beheaded a woman in Islam’s holy city of Mecca. . . . Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, a Burmese woman who resided in Saudi Arabia, was executed by sword on Monday after being dragged through the street and held down by four police officers.

She was convicted of the sexual abuse and murder of her seven-year-old step-daughter.

A video showed how it took three blows to complete the execution, while the woman screamed “I did not kill. I did not kill.” It has now been removed by YouTube as part of its policy on “shocking and disgusting content”.

There are two ways to behead people according to Mohammed al-Saeedi, a human rights activist: “One way is to inject the prisoner with painkillers to numb the pain and the other is without the painkiller. . . . This woman was beheaded without painkillers — they wanted to make the pain more powerful for her.”

The Saudi Ministry of the Interior said in a statement that it believed the sentence was warranted due to the severity of the crime.

The beheading is part of an alarming trend, which has seen the kingdom execute seven people in the first two weeks of this year. In 2014 the number of executions rose to 87, from 78 in 2013.

Would that the president of the United States were more worried about the security of the United States than about how people in such repulsive countries perceive the United States.

In any event, the Islamic State is simply trying to blow up the coalition, which would be a useful propaganda victory. And the strategy is working. It appears at this point that only Jordan is participating in the airstrikes. While all eyes were on Jordan this week for a reaction to Lieutenant al-Kasaebeh’s immolation, the administration has quietly conceded that the UAEsuspended its participation in bombing missions when the pilot was captured in December.

The explanation for this is obvious: The Islamic countries in the coalition know they can’t stop the Islamic State unless the United States joins the fight in earnest, and they know this president is not serious. The White House says the coalition has carried out a total of about 1,000 airstrikes in the last five months. In Desert Storm, we did 1,100 a day.

Seven strikes a day is not going to accomplish anything, especially with no troops on the ground, and thus no search-and-rescue capability in the event planes go down, as Lieutenant al-Kasaebeh’s did. With no prospect of winning, and with a high potential of losing pilots and agitating the rambunctious Islamists in their own populations, why would these countries continue to participate?

The Islamic State knows there is intense opposition to King Abdullah’s decision to join in the coalition. While the Islamic State’s sadistic method of killing the pilot has the king and his supporters talking tough about retaliation, millions of Jordanians are Islamist in orientation and thousands have crossed into Syria and Iraq to fight for the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. There will continue to be pressure on Jordan to withdraw. Without a real American commitment to the fight, this pressure will get harder for Abdullah to resist.

Jordan has no intention of getting into a land war the king knows he cannot win without U.S. forces leading the way. But the Islamic State does not need to lure Jordan into a land war in order to destabilize the country — it is already doing plenty of that by intensifying the Syrian refugee crisis, sending Jordanians back home from Syria as trained jihadists, and trying to assassinate Abdullah.

I will close by repeating the larger point I’ve argued several times before. We know from experience that when jihadists have safe havens, they attack the United States. They now have more safe havens than they’ve ever had before — not just because of what the Islamic State has accomplished in what used to be Syria and Iraq (the map of the Middle East needs updating) but because of what al-Qaeda has done there and in North Africa, what the Taliban and al-Qaeda are doing in Afghanistan, and so on.

If we understand, as we by now should, what these safe havens portend, then we must grasp that the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and the global jihad constitute a threat to American national security. That they also (and more immediately) threaten Arab Islamic countries is true, but it is not close to being our top concern. Ensuring our security is a concern that could not be responsibly delegated to other countries even if they had formidable armed forces — which the “coalition” countries do not.

The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are our problem.

Categories: Air strikes, Al Qaeda, Caliphate, Coalition, Combat troops, Foreign policy, Hostages, Human rights, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Jordan, Middle East, Obama, Syria, Terrorists
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ISIS in full swing under ex-Iraqi general: 70 deaths in a month, on the march in 10 countries

February 1, 2015

ISIS in full swing under ex-Iraqi general: 70 deaths in a month, on the march in 10 countries, DEBKAfile, February 1, 2015

Kenji-Goto_31.1.15Kenji Goto in ISIS hands

ISIS strategists, not content with these “successes,” are still in full thrust and believed to be planning to expand their operations and hit Israel – whether from the south or the north.

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Saturday night, January 31, the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant capped a month of atrocities by beheading its second Japanese hostage, Kenjo Goto, a 47-year old journalist. Jordan vows to do everything its power to save the Jordanian pilot Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, but it may be too late.

In March alone, the Islamists are known to have killed at least 70 people in 10 targeted European and Middle East countries. This is a modest estimate since exact figures are not available everywhere – like in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. ISIS terrorists trailed their horror that month through France, Spain, Belgium, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Libya.

US President Barack Obama, who heads a 20-state coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq, strongly condemned the Goto murder. Secretary of State John Kerry, trying to sound positive, commended the recovery of the Syrian town of Kobani by Kurdish forces as “a big deal.”

ISIS was indeed forced to concede defeat in battle under US air strikes. But Kerry forgot to mention that the battle is far from over:  the Islamists pulled back from Kobani’s districts, but are still pressing hard on the walls of the town and heavy fighting for its control continues.

If Kobani is the only military gain achieved by US-backed forces in months of coalition effort, who will be able to stop the brutal ISIS offensive going forward in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East?

The British government keeps on warning that an Islamist attack is coming soon. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Sunday that this was a “generational struggle that must be fought in other parts of the world in addition to the Middle East.”

It was obvious from these lame comments that the West is totally at a loss for ways to pre-empt the thrusting danger.

Some Western intelligence agencies have sought cold comfort by pointing to the Islamists’ willingness to negotiate the release of the Jordanian pilot held hostage since his capture in Syria in December as a symptom of weakness, signaling its readiness to part with its murderous image. Others judged the latest video clips unprofessional and a sign that ISIS leadership was in disarray.

Neither of these judgments is supported by the facts.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terrorism and intelligence sources report that the high command of the Islamic State functions at present with machinelike efficiency in pursuit of its goals. The name of Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi has been circulated widely as ruler of the Islamic “caliphate” he founded in parts of Syria and Iraq. But behind the scenes, he is assisted by a tight inner group of 12-15 former high officers from the Baath army which served the Saddam Hussein up until the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Members of this group ranged in rank from lieutenant-colonel to general.

Ex-Maj. Gen. Abu Ali al-Anbari, its outstanding figure, acts as Al Baghdadi senior lieutenant.

He also appears to be the brain that has charted ISIS’s current military strategy which, our sources learn, focuses on three major thrusts: the activation of sleeper cells in Europe for coordinated terrorist operations: multiple, synchronized attacks in the Middle East along a line running from Tripoli, Libya, through Egyptian Suez Canal cities and encompassing the Sinai Peninsula; and the full-dress Iraqi-Syrian warfront, with the accent currently on the major offensive launched Thursday, March 29, to capture the big Iraq oil town of Kirkuk.

DEBKAfile was first to report the arrival in Sinai during the first week of December of a group of ISIS officers from Iraq to take command of their latest convert, Ansar Beit Al-Miqdas.

Another former Iraqi army officer was entrusted with coordinating ISIS operations between the East Libyan Islamist contingent and the Sinai movement. Their mission is to topple the rule of President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi.

The imported Iraqi command made its presence felt in Libya Tuesday, Jan. 27 with the seizure of the luxury Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli and execution of the foreigners taken there, including an American and a British man. Two days later, ISIS terrorists fanned out across Sinai for their most devastating attack ever on Egyptian military and security forces. They launched simultaneous attacks in five towns, Rafah on the border of the Gaza Strip, El Arish and Sheikh Suweid in the north and  the Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez to the west – killing some 50 Egyptian personnel and injuring more than double that figure.

ISIS strategists, not content with these “successes,” are still in full thrust and believed to be planning to expand their operations and hit Israel – whether from the south or the north.

Categories: Combat troops, Europe, Foreign policy, Hamas, Hezbollah, IDF, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Kerry, Obama, Syria, Terrorism, Terrorists
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Exclusive: Obama Cuts Funds for the Syrian Rebels He Claims to Support

January 27, 2015

Exclusive: Obama Cuts Funds for the Syrian Rebels He Claims to Support, Daily Beast, January 27, 2015

1422366030311.cachedFadi al-Halabi/AFP/Getty

LOST CAUSE?

Even the favored secular militias groomed to fight ISIS have seen their funding cut in half.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — In the past several months many of the Syrian rebel groups previously favored by the CIA have had their money and supplies cut off or substantially reduced, even as President Obama touted the strategic importance of American support for the rebels in his State of the Union address.

The once-favored fighters are operating under a pall of confusion. In some cases, they were not even informed that money would stop flowing. In others, aid was reduced due to poor battlefield performance, compounding already miserable morale on the ground.

From afar, the U.S.-approved and partially American-armed Syrian “opposition” seems to be a single large, if rather amorphous, organization. But in fact it’s a collection of “brigades” of varying sizes and potentially shifting loyalties which have grown up around local leaders, or, if you will, local warlords. And while Washington talks about the Syrian “opposition” in general terms, the critical question for the fighters in the field and those supporting them is, “opposition to whom?” To Syrian President Assad? To the so-called Islamic State, widely known as ISIS or ISIL? To the al Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al Nusra?

That lack of clarity is crippling the whole effort, not least because of profound suspicions among rebel groups that Washington is ready to cut some sort of deal with Assad in the short or medium term if, indeed, it has not done so already. For Washington, the concern is that the forces it supports are ineffectual, or corrupt, or will defect to ISIS or Nusra—or all of the above.

Republican lawmakers in D.C. are at their boiling point over the Obama administration’s anti-ISIS strategy, whether it is a failure to establish a no-fly zone in Syria, or unreliability with the issue of aid, or the Pentagon’s promised train and equip plan for the Syrian rebels.

“This strategy makes Pickett’s Charge appear well thought out,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, referring to the poorly-planned and futile Confederate assault at Gettysburg. “We’re about to train people for certain death.”

In late October, al Qaeda’s Jabhat al Nusra routed American-backed militias in the northwest Syrian province of Idlib.

As a direct result, four of the 16 U.S.-approved brigades operating in the northern part of the country had their funding cut off and have been dropped from the list of “ratified” militias, say a State Department official and opposition sources. Since December, the remaining 12 brigades in the region have seen shortfalls or cuts in promised American assistance.

Syrian rebel sources who spoke on condition of anonymity say the 7thDivision, which is affiliated with the Syria Revolutionaries Front and aligned to the Free Syrian Army, has not received salaries from the CIA in months, although the State Department has maintained food shipments to the unit.

The secular Harakat al-Hazm, the most favored of the U.S.-backed brigades and one of the very few to be supplied with TOW anti-tank missiles, has seen a severe cutback in the monthly subsidy for its nearly 4,000 fighters. It is now receiving roughly 50 percent of the salaries it was receiving before. Weapon shipments arrived recently but commanders are nervous about whether future ones will come through. And the Farouq Brigade, a militia formed originally by moderate Islamist fighters based in the city of Homs, is getting no money for salaries at the moment.

CIA officials tell rebel commanders that unspecified “other funders” have ordered the cuts, or that Langley just doesn’t have the resources any longer. “What are the fighters meant to do?” complains one rebel commander. “They have families to feed.” Another says, “The idea that they don’t have the money is insulting. I don’t believe this—it is a political decision.”

Syrian rebel groups and their Washington, D.C. allies argue that CIA funding cuts —explained and unexplained—create relative advantages for extremist groups like al Nusra and ISIS, even as the president heralds the rebels as America’s on-the-ground-partners in the campaign to defeat the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

“It’s not just that the administration is failing to deliver on committed resources, it’s that they aren’t even communicating with formerly affiliated battalions regarding the cutoff,” says Evan Barrett, a political advisor to the Coalition for a Democratic Syria, a Syrian-American opposition umbrella group. “This puts our former allies in an incredibly vulnerable position, and ensures that groups like al Nusra will be able to take advantage of their sudden vulnerability in the field.”

The Obama administration says publicly that its support of moderate rebel brigades is not waning: the State Department continues to dispense non-lethal aid, the Pentagon supplies weapons, and the CIA pays salaries to brigades affiliated with the umbrella organization known as the Free Syrian Army. A CIA spokesman declined to comment for this story.

Privately, U.S. officials concede there have been funding changes. But American intelligence sources insist this is not a reflection of any shift in CIA strategy. They talk about “individual case-by-case shut offs” that are the consequences of brigades collapsing or failing to perform. And these sources dispute suggestions there’s an overall decrease in CIA subsidies, saying they are not giving up on the Syrian rebels—even though the Syrian rebels in the north of the country in the vicinity of the Turkish border increasingly believe this to be true. (Those in the south, near the Jordanian border and Damascus, may fare better.)

A State Department official told The Daily Beast that “the CIA has more money now than before and the State Department pie has not shrunk,” but confirms there has been some cutting off and cutting down. The official cited the “poor performance” of rebel brigades in Idlib last October as a primary reason.

When they were up against al Nusra, this official said, “they didn’t fight hard enough.” Several moderate brigades failed to come to the assistance of the Syria Revolutionaries Front, in particular, because they disapproved of its leader, who has been widely accused of corruption. The ease with which al Nusra was able to pull off its offensive angered U.S. officials—as did American-supplied equipment falling into jihadist hands.

That anger was compounded when the members of some U.S.-backed rebel groups actually defected to al Nusra during the offensive. One senior U.S. official admitted that some brigades have been “getting too close for our liking to al Nusra or other extremists.”

On Christmas Day armed groups formed an alliance for the defense of besieged rebel-held areas in Aleppo, where Assad had launched a major offensive to encircle them. Al-Jabha al-Shamiyya (Shamiyya Front), as the operational alliance is called, includes not only hardline Salafist factions from the groups known as the Islamic Front but more moderate brigades like the Muslim-Brotherhood-linked Mujahideen Army and Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, which also has received TOW anti-tank missiles from Washington in the past.

Although al Nusra was not invited to join formally, it coordinates with the Shamiyya Front via the so-called Aleppo Operations Room, a joint headquarters for armed factions. It’s an arrangement that Washington does not like at all.

Aleppo-based rebels say they have no choice but to work with al Nusra and the Islamic-Front-aligned factions that are among the strongest armed groups in the war-torn city. Without them Assad’s forces would overwhelm the rebels.

“What do the Americans expect us to do?” asks a commander in the operations room. “Al Nusra is popular here. It is a perilous time for us—Assad is pushing hard.”

Syrian rebel sources who spoke on condition of anonymity say the 7th Division, which is affiliated with the Syria Revolutionaries Front and aligned to the Free Syrian Army, has not received salaries from the CIA in months, although the State Department has maintained food shipments to the unit.

The secular Harakat al-Hazm, the most favored of the U.S.-backed brigades and one of the very few to be supplied with TOW anti-tank missiles, has seen a severe cutback in the monthly subsidy for its nearly 4,000 fighters. It is now receiving roughly 50 percent of the salaries it was receiving before. Weapon shipments arrived recently but commanders are nervous about whether future ones will come through. And the Farouq Brigade, a militia formed originally by moderate Islamist fighters based in the city of Homs, is getting no money for salaries at the moment.

CIA officials tell rebel commanders that unspecified “other funders” have ordered the cuts, or that Langley just doesn’t have the resources any longer. “What are the fighters meant to do?” complains one rebel commander. “They have families to feed.” Another says, “The idea that they don’t have the money is insulting. I don’t believe this—it is a political decision.

For the Syrian rebels, uncertainties over funding changes by the CIA add doubt to already high skepticism over American policy toward the war in Syria. That skyrocketed when the Obama administration failed to enforce in 2013 its “red line” against Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons, and the skepticism has merely grown since.

On the ground, the combatants say they suffer from the Obama administration’s inconsistency and argue that all too often they are being left out to dry, like some Syrian version of the Bay of Pigs, but much, much bloodier.

In the coffee shops of the Turkish border town Gaziantep last week, Syrians gathered on the safer side of the frontier listened incredulously as State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki insisted, “We maintain our belief that al Assad has lost all legitimacy and must go.” It was the first such inflexible anti-Assad statement for weeks from a senior U.S. official.

But that wasn’t what they’d heard from President Obama in his State of the Union address a few days before. Gone was the rhetoric of 2013 when he said he had “no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change cannot be reversed, and that human dignity cannot be denied.” Instead, last Tuesday Obama spoke about the administration’s so-called train-and-equip plan to build a force that will target ISIS, and he made vague noises about helping Syria’s moderate opposition.

Those moderates are precisely the men and women on the ground who feel that bit by bit they are being abandoned.

Already, nearly four months after Secretary of State John Kerry announced the plan to train and equip Free Syrian Army units, Kurdish Peshmerga, and Iraqi Shia militiamen as anti-ISIS forces, the project appears to be facing major hurdles.

U.S. Senators emerged grim-faced last week from a classified briefing on the train-and-equip mission, with some of them predicting disaster from a Pentagon program that will train too few fighters and too slowly to make a difference.

At its best, Republican senators argue, it’s not going to work. At its worst, it will lead to the mass slaughter of the trained rebels.

“This strategy makes Pickett’s Charge appear well thought out,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, referring to the brave but futile Confederate assault at Gettysburg. “We’re about to train people for certain death.”

The number of recruits required for a “strategic change in momentum is years away,” said Graham. “The concept of training an army that will be subject to slaughter by two enemies, not one, is militarily unsound,” and “if the first recruits you train get wiped out, it’s going to make it hard to recruit.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat who emerged from the same classified briefing, was tight-lipped: “I think we have a lot to do, and a lot of questions to answer.”

In Syria, few rebel fighters want to join a force focused only on ISIS. They argue that Assad is responsible for considerably more deaths among them and their extended families than ISIS, which is able to draw defectors from their ranks because it pays much higher salaries to its fighters and because it is able to exploit distrust of American intentions towards the Syrian revolution.

U.S. officials now acknowledge difficulties recruiting from insurgent ranks, conceding it is a serious challenge finding enough recruits willing to put off fighting the Assad regime.

So American officials recruiting for the train and equip mission are now hoping to fish in the pool of rebel fighters from eastern Syria who disbanded, quit the war and fled to Turkey when ISIS established control of the cities of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. The U.S. officials say the anti-ISIS force in Syria will have to be smaller than envisaged initially, but they are hoping early victories on the ground will convince more people to enlist.

Categories: Al Qaeda, Assad, Combat troops, Foreign policy, Iran, Islamic State, Moderate rebels, Obama, Obama administration, Syria, Terrorism
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The West Bank Army of the “State of Palestine,” Thanks to the United States

January 21, 2015

The West Bank Army of the “State of Palestine,” Thanks to the United States, The Gatestone Institute, Shoshana Bryen, January 21, 2015

(????????????? — DM)

The U.S. Consulate’s determination to provide the trappings of Palestinian statehood to the Palestinian Authority outside the negotiating process should come under scrutiny.

What plan do we have if the Palestinian army attacks the IDF in the future — instead of its presumed enemy, Hamas?

It is revealing that the U.S. appears determined to provide the Palestinian Authority with an army while it is still at war with our ally, Israel.

Last week, officials from the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem attended a Palestinian protest over Israel’s removal of olive trees illegally planted in the West Bank. Coordinated with the Palestinian Authority [PA] but not Israel, the Consulate personnel ended up clashing with Israelis living nearby. It was, perhaps, the quietest international almost-incident you never heard of.

This week, with the focus off Paris, the Middle East Quartet (the U.S., EU, Russia & the UN) plans to meet. The U.S. Consulate’s determination to provide the trappings of Palestinian statehood to the PA outside the negotiating process should come under scrutiny.

The olive tree incident prompted an article in the Israeli press about the Consulate, including the use of Palestinian security, rather than IDF combat veterans as required by a 2011 agreement. Some IDF guards were fired, according to the article. Others resigned, blaming the appointment of a new consulate security officer, who they said, established a Palestinian armed militia. “He is training them with weapons, combat and tactical exercises. There is a lack of responsibility here – who ensures that such weapons, once given over to Palestinian guards, won’t make their way to terror groups?”

The change in personnel from IDF veterans to a Palestinian Security Force [PSF] is part of a long series of steps to transform the Palestinian body politic into a state. If the U.S. Consulate becomes the U.S. Embassy to Palestine — a function it already observes — it is understandable that the PA would not want “occupying Israeli soldiers” to guard the symbol of America from Palestinian citizens in “its capital, Jerusalem.” The Consulate, with its mission to the PA, would agree.

Palestinian security forces have been in existence since 1994 and have steadily changed mandates. They have gone from a “police force” under the Oslo formulation of “dismantling the terrorist infrastructure” so Israel could have confidence in security after withdrawing from territory, to a protection force for Mahmoud Abbas so he would continue negotiations under U.S. auspices — but now to an army for the nascent state.

The Clinton Administration signed on to the police phase, but asked how Arafat could be expected to defeat “terrorists” without weapons. Unmentioned were a) Arafat was the prime funder and organizer of the terrorist organizations in question, and b) the PLO had already proven perfectly capable of killing its enemies.

The first funds for equipment and training came in 1994 from international donors including the U.S. Arafat, having a reasonable sized arsenal of his own, wanted arms, but settled for nonlethal items.

In 1996, Western trained Palestinian “police” attacked IDF personnel with weapons, killing 15 soldiers and border guards, after the opening of an exit from an ancient Hasmonean tunnel in Jerusalem, near the Western Wall in the Old City.

Despite these attacks, according to Jeffrey Boutwell, Director
 of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the 1997 Hebron Protocol “provided for a Palestinian police force of some 30,000 personnel, equipped with 15,000 automatic rifles and pistols, 240 heavy machine guns, 45 armored vehicles, lightly armed shore patrol vessels, and associated communications and transportation equipment.” An Israeli-Palestinian Joint Security Coordination and Cooperation Committee [JSC] was formed to oversee “arrangements for entry of the Palestinian Police and the introduction of police arms, ammunition, and equipment.”

Between the onset of Western arms deliveries and a thriving black market, the PA “police” had all the lethal equipment they could handle.

Training stopped during the 2001-2004 so-called “second intifada” with the (unsurprising) revelation that the PA “police” found their Western assets invaluable in attacking Israelis. In 2005, however, history began again and the U.S. decided that the Palestinians should have a new security service. LTG William Ward USA (Deputy Commanding General, U.S. Army Europe, and Chief of Staff, U.S. Seventh Army) was the point man. In the words of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, his mission was:

  • “To make sure the parties understand each other and we understand what the parties are doing, so we can raise it at the appropriate level” if action is required.
  • “To provide a focal point for training, equipping, helping the Palestinians to build their security forces and also for monitoring, and if necessary, to help the parties on security matters.”

The missions were incompatible and inappropriate. The first involved “translating for the parties” with an eye toward U.S. intervention, a political job that should not have been done by a military officer. Further, having part of the mission directed toward a Palestinian force gave the General a stake in the success of the Palestinians over the concerns of Israel.

And so it happened. The Ward mission, the sole conduit for U.S. aid to the new Palestinian Security Force, resulted only in better-trained terrorists.

LTG Keith Dayton (Director of Strategy, Plans and Policy, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-3, U.S. Army), well respected and liked by Israel and the IDF, succeeded LTG Ward. His job, however, was complicated by the deterioration relations Hamas-Fatah in Gaza. According to acontemporaneous Ha’aretz story, Dayton was to arm and train “the Presidential Guard of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to prepare it for a potential violent confrontation with Hamas forces in Gaza. Palestinian sources say the training of 400 Force 17 troops… started [in November 2006] in Jericho under the guidance of an American military instructor.” Force 17 had been Arafat’s Praetorian Guard, attacking recalcitrant Palestinians as well as Israelis. Abbas had inherited it.

Throwing American support to one Palestinian faction over another was a political decision to side with what our government assumed was “better” or more “moderate” Palestinians, hoping it would use our help to put down Hamas rather than using it to kill ever more Israelis.

What it did was legitimize the creeping movement of the Palestinians toward a full-fledged army.

This new mission needed IDF participation — which Israel approved in part because of its relations with LTG Dayton, and because it allowed Israel to operate in West Bank territory with a relatively free hand to arrest both Hamas operatives and Fatah bad guys. It also made Abbas beholden to Israel for his personal security and that of his kleptocracy. That part worked, and even now, PA figures have admitted publicly that without IDF cooperation, the PA would fall.

Dayton’s successors, LTG Michael Moeller, USAF and ADM Paul Bushong, USN, have quietly continued and upgraded both training and weapons.

893Hundreds of troops from the Palestinian Security Force line a street in Ramallah, in order to block anti-American protestors, during President Obama’s 2013 visit to the city.

The question always was twofold: What constitutes “appropriate” weapons for the PSF, and how does the U.S. justify training security forces the ultimate loyalty of whom will be a government that we cannot foresee and may become something — or already is something — we don’t like? The corollary is: What plan do we have if the Palestinian Army attacks IDF forces in the future — instead of its presumed enemy, Hamas?

To raise the questions is to understand that there are no sound answers from either the Consulate or the State Department. In their absence, concern over the choice of security guards by the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem is appropriate, but insufficient. It is revealing that the U.S. appears determined to provide the PA with an army while it is still at war with our ally, Israel.

Categories: Abbas, Combat troops, Fatah, Foreign policy, Hamas, Islam, Israel, Kerry, Moral equivalence, Obama administration, Peace process, Two state solution, U.S. Consulate
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Free Fire Zone- A Strategy to defeat Global Jihad

January 15, 2015

Free Fire Zone- A Strategy to defeat Global Jihad, Blackfive, January 15, 2015

(I look forward to learning the substance of their proposal. — DM)

The Islamists are attacking all over the world. They are enslaving and killing innocents and the best the free world can come up with is more hashtags. I am glad to see some organizations standing up for freedom of speech and liberty, but it is maddening to watch the United States of America unwilling to even name the enemy facing us all. It is Islamist Extremists and they are proud to let us know.

President Obama has no strategy and is anything has shown a complete unwillingness and inability to deal with the reality we face. The Center for Security Policy has taken the ball and in the absence of leadership from the Commander in Chief, written a comprehensive strategy for dealing with and defeating the Global Jihad. We will release the document tomorrow Friday, January 16 at 12 Noon at the National Press Club in DC.

 

Categories: Combat troops, Foreign policy, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamism, Obama, Obama administration, Rules of war, Terrorism
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Inside the CIA’s Syrian Rebels Vetting Machine

November 11, 2014

Inside the CIA’s Syrian Rebels Vetting Machine, Newsweek, , November 10, 2014

(The Obama administration’s vetting of “moderate” terrorists is consistent with its vetting of Iranian nuke intentions and progress. Both would be funny were the consequences not so dangerous. — DM)

syrian-rebels-fsaA Free Syrian Army fighter in Aleppo. Hosam Katan/Reuters

Nothing has come in for more mockery during the Obama administration’s halting steps into the Syrian civil war than its employment of “moderate” to describe the kind of rebels it is willing to back. In one of the more widely cited japes, The New Yorker’s resident humorist, Andy Borowitz, presented a “Moderate Syrian Application Form,” in which applicants were asked to describe themselves as either “A) Moderate, B) Very moderate, C) Crazy moderate or D) Other.”

After Senator John McCain unwittingly posed with Syrians “on our side” who turned out to be kidnappers, Jon Stewart cracked, “Not everyone is going to be wearing their ‘HELLO I’M A TERRORIST’ name badge.”

Behind the jokes, however, is the deadly serious responsibility of the CIA and Defense Department to vet Syrians before they receive covert American training, aid and arms. But according to U.S. counterterrorism veterans, a system that worked pretty well during four decades of the Cold War has been no match for the linguistic, cultural, tribal and political complexities of the Middle East, especially now in Syria. “We’re completely out of our league,” one former CIA vetting expert declared on condition of anonymity, reflecting the consensus of intelligence professionals with firsthand knowledge of the Syrian situation. “To be really honest, very few people know how to vet well. It’s a very specialized skill. It’s extremely difficult to do well” in the best of circumstances, the former operative said. And in Syria it has proved impossible.

Daunted by the task of fielding a 5,000-strong force virtually overnight, the Defense Department and CIA field operatives, known as case officers, have largely fallen back on the system used in Afghanistan, first during the covert campaign to rout the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s and then again after the 2001 U.S. invasion to expel Al-Qaeda: Pick a tribal leader who in turn recruits a fighting force. But these warlords have had their own agendas, including drug-running, and shifting alliances, sometimes collaborating with terrorist enemies of the United States, sometimes not.

“Vetting is a word we throw a lot around a lot, but actually very few people know what it really means,” said the former CIA operative, who had several postings in the Middle East for a decade after the 9/11 attacks. “It’s not like you’ve got a booth set up at a camp somewhere. What normally happens is that a case officer will identify a source who is a leader in one of the Free Syrian Army groups. And he’ll say, ‘Hey…can you come up with 200 [guys] you can trust?’ And of course they say yes—they always say yes. So Ahmed brings you a list and the details you need to do the traces,” the CIA’s word for background checks. “So you’re taking that guy’s word on the people he’s recruited. So we rely on a source whom we’ve done traces on to do the recruiting. Does that make sense?”

No, says former CIA operative Patrick Skinner, who still travels the region for the Soufan Group, a private intelligence organization headed by FBI, CIA and MI6 veterans. “Syria is a vetting nightmare,” he told Newsweek, “with no way to discern the loyalties of not only those being vetted but also of those bringing the people to our attention.”

A particularly vivid example was provided recently by Peter Theo Curtis, an American held hostage in Syria for two years. A U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) unit that briefly held him hostage casually revealed how it collaborated with Al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra Front, even after being “vetted” and trained by the CIA in Jordan, he wrote in The New York Times Magazine.

“About this business of fighting Jabhat al-Nusra?” Curtis said he asked his FSA captors.

“Oh, that,” one said. “We lied to the Americans about that.”

Concerns about the CIA’s vetting system arose long before the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, several CIA veterans told Newsweek. In Baghdad, one said, agency operatives had such thin faith in the system that they often had sweaty palms as they awaited a meeting with a newly recruited Iraqi spy—even though he had been cleared by CIA vetters—because they knew he might show up with a suicide vest under his jacket. That happened in Afghanistan on December 30, 2009, when a Jordanian physician recruited by the CIA on his claim to have access to Osama bin Laden turned out to be working for Al-Qaeda. He blew himself up at a CIA base, taking out seven agency operatives as well.

That double agent had been served up by Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate, a longtime partner of the CIA in clandestine operations. Relying on close liaisons to vet spies might’ve worked well enough during the Cold War, when the CIA’s name files were meticulously updated by its small corps of Ivy-educated spies, but in the swirling chaos of the post-9/11 Middle East or South Asia, where Arabic (or Urdu, Farsi or Pashtun) names can be transliterated to English and back in endless varieties and where political allegiances are as blurry as the centuries-old colonial boundaries drawn up by bureaucrats in London and Paris, the CIA’s vetters are just not up to the task, say spy agency veterans with long experience in the region.

“For two years I managed a lot of those folks,” said one person not authorized to discuss the inner workings of the system. “A lot of them are contractors just coming out of college and don’t have a lot of experience under their belts—not in the Middle East, or the region or in Arabic.”

(The CIA declined comment on the vetting process. Navy commander Elissa Smith, speaking for the Defense Department, said in a statement that “the U.S. military has decades of experience screening foreign military forces for training. We also know the Syrian opposition better now than we did two years ago. While we cannot disclose the details of our sources and methods, we will screen thoroughly and conduct continuous monitoring.”)

American embassies around the world are open to just about anybody who wants to sign up for the FSA. “They fill out a form. You get their four-part name, their date of birth, and then their tribe and where they’re from and all that,” the former operative explained. “Their work history, if there is any. Then you take that and run your traces through all your databases—your HUMINT and SIGINT [agency acronyms for information from human spies and National Security Agency intercepts, called signals intelligence]. And then you take certain aspects of that information, and you sanitize it, and you send it by cable to your station in whatever country, and you ask for their traces on this individual, to see if anything comes up.

“The problem with that process,” the former operative continued, “is when you have a person sitting at a computer who doesn’t know how to standardize Arabic names.… They may translate it correctly, but the person typing it in may or may not know how to look for it with all the name variances that might already be in the system.”

When it came time to start vetting Syrian rebels, the CIA faced even more hurdles. When the Obama administration shuttered the American Embassy in Damascus in 2011, just as the civil war was exploding, the covert CIA station inside the building there was rolled up, too. The agency had to “make do,” as one former operative put it.

“The main problem with plans that arm and train the ‘moderates’—who ominously are moderate only in their fighting abilities,” said Skinner, “is that it assumes perfect knowledge, or ‘good enough’ knowledge, about the people being armed. When in fact there is nothing close to that.… The background info on these fighters is next to nothing and misleading, especially in Syria, where we don’t have a liaison relationship, and so the vast majority of even check-the-box vetting is by third parties [who are] out-of-the-country players with a stake in the game.

“As in Afghanistan, we can get scammed and misled at every stage with tragic results,” Skinner added. “One can’t simply build a loyal effective army thirdhand. It’s like running a want-ad that says, ‘Only Moderates Show Up for Free Weapons and Paid Training,’ and believing that is effective screening.”

“It’s one thing if you’re talking about a few dozen, or even a few hundred, individuals to run name checks or traces on,” agrees Martin Reardon, a former high-ranking FBI counterterrorism official. “But the first group of [Syrian] rebels to be trained [by the U.S.] is supposed to number upwards of 5,000. Assuming the administration can identify that many ‘moderate’ rebels to begin with, it would be virtually impossible to accomplish even minimal background checks with any degree of reliability.”

Another troubling lesson from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria is that today’s moderate can become tomorrow’s extremist. “Just because that guy may be moderate today—who may really and truly be a moderate and despise Al-Qaeda or whatever—what if that guy is seen walking into the Green Zone by his friend so-and-so at the checkpoint?” the former CIA vetting expert said. “And everybody knows those guys coming into the Green Zone are there to see the CIA, or at least that’s the assumption. So they grab his father, his son or his brother, and they take him captive. What’s to stop them from forcing him to strap a bomb to his body and walking back into the next meeting with an [improvised explosive device] on his chest?”

Or this: “What if you’re in Afghanistan and maybe you’re friends [with a contact], but tomorrow you drop a bomb on his cousin? You think he’s going to be your friend tomorrow? These things can change overnight. So this vetting idea—‘once vetted, things are all right, we’re good to go’—is crazy.”

Given such accounts, the odds of keeping loyal troops seems like panning for gold—or worse, an exercise in self-delusion. But the former CIA operative, who served in a variety of Middle Eastern posts as well as headquarters, said Obama administration officials aren’t fibbing about their faith in the system. They just may not realize it’s shot through with holes. “Most of them think they’re doing it pretty good, but they’re also not our best and brightest in terms of knowing how to vet,” this person said. “So I don’t think it’s a charade, I think it’s misguided. They don’t know how poor it actually is.”

So what? responds former senior CIA operations officer Charles Faddis, who led a covert team into Kurdistan in advance of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He says it’s time to act, no matter how shaky the foundations of the CIA’s Syrian army. “You can’t run covert action without getting your hands dirty. We can’t sit on the sidelines and have discreet, antiseptic contacts with these guys and accomplish anything,” Faddis said. “If we’re going to do this, we need to wade in.”

Caution be damned. Hold our noses and pass the ammunition.

“We need to have people on the ground. We need to give them serious money and weaponry,” Faddis said. “Unless we do that, we are never really going to have any control over what’s going on, or any real idea who we should be in bed with.”

Categories: Combat troops, Free Syrian Army, Intelligence, Islamic State, Moderate rebels, Obama, Syria, Terrorism
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Obama deploys 1,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq

November 8, 2014

Obama deploys 1,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq, Washington Times, Dave Boyer and Maggie Ybarra, November 7, 2014

(Will they be permitted to wear combat boots? — DM)

united-states-iraq-advisersjpeg-05ad1_c0-176-4256-2656_s561x327A group of selected Marines representing Camp Pendleton listen as Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel answers their questions during his short visit to the base Tuesday Aug. 12, 2014. Hagel announced the deployment of another 130 U.S. troops to Iraq in remarks to Marines at this Southern California base on the final stop of a weeklong, around-the-world trip that also took him to India, Germany and Australia. (AP Photo/The Orange County Register, Paul Rodriguez)

“The president also authorized U.S. personnel to conduct these integral missions at Iraqi military facilities located outside Baghdad and Erbil,” the statement said. “U.S. troops will not be in combat, but they will be better positioned to support Iraqi Security Forces as they take the fight to ISIL.”

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President Obama is sending up to 1,500 more U.S. military personnel to Iraq to serve as non-combat advisers in the fight against Islamic State terrorists, the White House said Friday.

The troops will “train, advise, and assist Iraqi Security Forces, including Kurdish forces,” the White House said.

“The president also authorized U.S. personnel to conduct these integral missions at Iraqi military facilities located outside Baghdad and Erbil,” the statement said. “U.S. troops will not be in combat, but they will be better positioned to support Iraqi Security Forces as they take the fight to ISIL.”

It’s the latest escalation of U.S. military personnel in Mr. Obama’s fight to rescue the besieged government in Baghdad, where the president withdrew all U.S. forces in 2011. Since August, the U.S. has been conducting hundreds of airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq, and more recently in Syria.

The surge in military advisers will more than double the number of U.S. personnel in Iraq, which currently totals about 1,400.

U.S. troops will be asked to train nine Iraqi brigades and three Kurdish fighter brigades, said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby.

“These sites will be located in northern, western, and southern Iraq,” Adm. Kirby said. “Coalition partners will join U.S. personnel at these locations to help build Iraqi capacity and capability. The training will be funded through the request for an Iraq train-and-equip fund that the administration will submit to Congress as well as from the government of Iraq.”

The White House said the Iraqi government requested the additional forces, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel agreed.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the Islamic State “has suffered a series of defeats in Iraq against the Iraqi Security Forces and Peshmerga, with the support of U.S. and coalition airstrikes and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, and as well as U.S. military advice.”

“The United States and its coalition partners will continue to confront the threat of [the Islamic State] with strength and resolve as we seek to degrade and ultimately defeat” the terrorist group,” he said.

Shaun Donovan, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the administration is sending a request to Congress for $5.6 billion to pay for the military operations.

The request includes $1.6 billion to establish the Iraq train-and-equip fund to develop and support Iraqi security forces, including Kurdish forces.

“This funding will help reconstitute the Iraqi army and strengthen the capability and capacity of our Iraqi partners to go on the offensive against” the Islamic State, Mr. Donovan said.

 

Categories: Combat troops, Iraq, Irqui military, Islamic State, Obama, U.S. Military
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U.S. strategy against Islamic State hits major hurdles

October 31, 2014

U.S. strategy against Islamic State hits major hurdles, LA Times, David S. Cloud, W.J. Hennigan, Raja Abdulrahim, October 30, 2014

(Happy Halloween from the Obama Administration. — DM)

la-epa-epaselect-syria-homs-car-bomb-jpg-20141030Syrian police and residents inspect the site of a car bombing in Homs on Oct. 29. The U.S. plan to raise a rebel army in Syria to fight Islamic State has run into steep political and military obstacles. (European Pressphoto Agency)

The Obama administration’s plan to raise a 15,000-strong rebel army in Syria has run into steep political and military obstacles, raising doubts about a key element of the White House strategy for defeating Islamic State militants in the midst of a civil war.

Pentagon concerns have grown so sharp that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sent a two-page memo to the White House last week warning that the overall plan could collapse because U.S. intentions toward Syrian President Bashar Assad are unclear, according to a senior defense official who read the memo but was not authorized to speak publicly.

President Obama has called on Assad to step down, but he has not authorized using military force, including the proposed proxy army, to remove the Syrian leader.

At a news conference Thursday, Hagel declined to discuss his memo to national security advisor Susan Rice, but he acknowledged that Assad has inadvertently benefited from more than five weeks of U.S.-led airstrikes against the Islamic State, one of the most powerful antigovernment forces in Syria’s bitter conflict.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry sought to paper over the problem Thursday, telling a forum in Washington that the proposed proxy army “can have an impact on Assad’s decision-making so we can get back to a table where we could negotiate a political outcome, because we all know there is no military resolution of Syria.”

Rebel leaders in Syria say they would reject joining a U.S.-backed force that is not aimed at defeating Assad, their main enemy.

Senior U.S. military officers also privately warn that the so-called Syrian moderates that U.S. planners hope to recruit — opposition fighters without ties to the Islamic radicals — have been degraded by other factions and forces, including Assad’s army, during the war.

It will take years to train and field a new force capable of launching an offensive against the heavily armed and well-funded Islamic State fighters, who appear well-entrenched in northern Syria, the officers say.

“We’re not going to be able to build that kind of credible force in enough time to make a difference,” said a senior U.S. officer who is involved in military operations against the militants and who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “We’ve watched the moderate opposition dwindle and dwindle and now there’s very little left.”

The Pentagon plan calls for putting 5,000 rebel fighters into Syria in a year, and 15,000 over the next three years.

It is the least developed and most controversial part of the multi-pronged U.S. strategy, which also includes near-daily airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, deployment of U.S. military advisors and other support to assist Iraqi government and Kurdish forces, along with attempts to choke off the militants’ financing from oil sales and foreign donors.

When officers involved in high-level Pentagon deliberations in the summer raised concerns about building a rebel army from scratch, they were overruled by senior commanders, who warned that airstrikes alone would not defeat the militants, one of the officers said.

But Pentagon unease has intensified in recent weeks as Jordan and Turkey, two allies that the Obama administration is counting on to help train the proposed proxy force, made it clear that they are lukewarm to the plan, two U.S. officials said.

Washington and its allies are chiefly split over whether the proposed force should focus on reclaiming Syrian territory now held by the Islamic State militants, which is the U.S. priority, or should also battle troops loyal to Assad, the allies’ main concern.

Turkey said this month that it would train a portion of the Syrian force, joining Saudi Arabia in training on its territory. U.S. officials don’t expect to assemble the first group of “moderate” rebels, drawing them from inside Syria or from crowded refugee camps in nearby countries, until early next year at the earliest.

But Turkish officials have signaled that the rebels it trains would concentrate on battling Assad’s forces, not Islamic State, once they return to Syria.

Jordan has not joined the training effort, although it hosts a separate, smaller, CIA-run operation for Syrian insurgents.

U.S. officials say greater involvement by Turkey and Jordan would allow them to increase the number who can be trained, and provide easier conduits for support and resupply when they return to Syria.

The dispute reflects the complex calibrations now in play as the Islamic State militants shake long-established political and military fault lines in the Middle East.

Most dramatically, perhaps, U.S. forces are now in at least tacit alignment with traditional enemies such as Iran and Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant and political group, against a common threat.

Syrian rebel leaders and Arab allies complain that the U.S.-led airstrikes have helped Assad by weakening one of his most powerful foes and enabling his army to step up attacks on other rebel factions.

A spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, an umbrella organization claiming to represent largely autonomous rebels in Syria, said fighters were incensed by the U.S. insistence on focusing entirely on Islamic State.

“They have forgotten that tens of thousands of civilians are suffering because of the regime,” said the spokesman, who did not want his name published because it could endanger his family. “Our main cause is the regime, and that will remain our main cause.”

A rebel commander, a defector from the Syrian army who also asked for anonymity, agreed. The U.S. plan “doesn’t work for us,” he said.

“They are concerned with ISIS … but we are concerned with the regime more than ISIS,” he said, using one of several acronyms for Islamic State.

U.S. Central Command, which is overseeing the effort to build a Syrian force, says questions about its direction will be resolved once the fledgling program is underway.

“We are early on in this and there’s much to be figured out,” said Maj. Curtis J. Kellogg, a spokesman for Central Command.

Frederic C. Hof, a former special advisor to President Obama for Syria, said the U.S. plan “is going to be a tough sell” in Syria.

“You can always get people by providing weapons, ammo and pay, but your appeal to a large number of Syrians will increase dramatically if it is a force whose goal is eventually to govern all of Syria,” not just beat one faction, he added.

The caution reflects, in part, a U.S. desire to reassure Iran, one of Assad’s closest backers, that it is not seeking to oust him by force. If the U.S. backtracked on that promise, Iran might step up military support for Assad.

Tehran also could respond by using local Shiite militias to attack U.S. personnel or facilities in Iraq. The Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq have coordinated their attacks on Islamic State with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

“If we really focus on Assad, the Iranian piece of this coalition [against Islamic State] will fracture, and we will have Shia militants trying to target us,” said the senior U.S. military officer.

The U.S. experience with proxy military forces is laced with disappointment.

The Kennedy administration backed a failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961 after training a counterrevolutionary brigade. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration bankrolled the Contras in Nicaragua, who were unsuccessful against the Sandinistas’ socialist revolution.

“We’ve helped arm insurgencies before,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst who now is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Nearly all of them have been complete failures or marginal to the final outcome. But there was one spectacular success.”

The CIA, working with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, covertly poured $4 billion into arming a rebel force in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, helping them drive out Soviet forces. Riedel, who wrote a book about the undertaking, said the CIA operation hastened the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

The Syrian rebel forces, with their fractured leadership and rival sponsors, bear similarities to the competing Afghan mujahedin factions during that war, Riedel said. If the U.S. can secure tight-knit partnerships with neighboring countries on training the rebels, it could also see success against Islamic State.

“There’s no reason we can’t do it again,” he said. “But it doesn’t happen overnight.”

Categories: Air strikes, Combat troops, Free Syrian Army, Generals, Iran, Iraq, Islamic State, Kerry, Obama, Syria
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The US War Against ISIS Is Barely Degrading, Certainly Not Destroying The Militants

October 25, 2014

The US War Against ISIS Is Barely Degrading, Certainly Not Destroying The Militants, International Business Times,  , October 24, 2014

kobaneSmoke rises over Syrian town of Kobani after an airstrike, as seen from the Mursitpinar crossing on the Turkish border, Oct. 21, 2014. Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach

The U.S.-led air campaign in Syria has killed 521 Islamic State fighters in the past month, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group monitoring the civil war. But the heavy death toll does not mean the United States is winning its fight to “degrade and destroy” the Sunni extremist group. Experts say that won’t happen until the group also known as ISIS loses support and its fighters begin defecting. 

“Until that happens, we will not see a quantum shift in the war in Iraq and Syria,” said Wayne White, a former deputy director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia.

Since June, ISIS has gained control of large swaths of land that stretch from Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border to the outskirts of Baghdad. The group is currently waging campaigns in several different areas of both countries, but has focused its forces in recent weeks on capturing the Kurdish city of Kobani. As a result, the U.S.-led air campaign has targeted several ISIS convoys and strongholds in Kobani and is air-dropping weapons and other resources to the Syrian Kurds fighting there.

“Like many aerial campaigns you can cite from history, it is a gradual process,” White said. “ISIS has a finite number of heavy weapons, and they are being picked off. And ISIS is losing a lot of combatants that are not easily replaced. ISIS is driven to expand its domain, and every time it tries to expand it is putting its fighters out in the open where they can be taken out. The question is: How long will the degrading take until you get to the destruction … a long time.”

Witnesses on the ground in Kobani told International Business Times that ISIS had been pushed back from the center of the city, but that the fighting was still raging on the outskirts. Meanwhile, ISIS is making gains in other parts of Syria and in Baghdad. According to the Syrian Observatory, ISIS fighters seized Tal Shaer, a town just west of Kobani, this week. And in Baghdad, the Sunni militant group has claimed responsibility for several car and suicide bomb attacks that have killed dozens of people in the last two weeks.

The uptick in ISIS attacks since June in Iraq has not only caused hundreds of civilian deaths, but has also infiltrated the psyche of the Iraqi people, especially those living in the capital, Noof Assi, a woman from Baghdad, told the International Business Times.

At the beginning of the ISIS campaign, “Baghdad looked like a ghost city,” Assi said. “People were staying at home or fleeing, saving food and fuel.”

Now, she said, people in Baghdad are used to the ISIS insurgency. Discussions in shops, cafes and restaurants have shifted. No longer are Iraqis talking about the destruction that ISIS is inflicting on the country. Now, people are talking about how many people are beginning to support the militant group.

“There are people talking about people of Mosul,” she said of the big northern city. “Some people are saying that they betrayed Iraq and welcomed ISIS.”

The State Department and White House have both confirmed that part of the U.S. strategy to fight ISIS is to undercut its propaganda and recruitment, especially on social media. So far, though, the U.S. has not launched a successful countercampaign.

In September, the State Department produced and distributed a graphic mock Islamic State propaganda video via social media. The video, “Welcome to ISIS Land,” was published by the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications.

The mock video showed graphic images of the militant group committing war crimes that have been widely reported over the past two months and that are now being investigated by the United Nations. The video looks similar to those ISIS promotes on social media like Twitter and YouTube. Despite the counterpropaganda drive, ISIS continues to expand on social media, and more and more Western fighters, as well as Iraqi and Syrian civilians, are joining up.

While some experts say the only way the U.S. will defeat ISIS is by sending in ground troops, others say more credit should be given to the Syrian Kurdish fighters — who now seems to be only force on the ground in Iraq and Syria that is regaining territory ISIS took over in prior months.

“They are the only boots on the ground in the entire Iraqi-Syrian theater capable of standing up to ISIS,” White said. “They are absolutely fierce fighters. The Iraqi Kurds are not.”

Categories: Air strikes, Baghdad, Combat troops, Iraq, Islamic State, Kobani, Kurdish fighters, Obama, Syria
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The War on ISIS: More Than One Battle

October 23, 2014

The War on ISIS: More Than One Battle, Wall Street Journal,  Max Boot, October 22, 2014

Kobani no longer looks to be in imminent danger of falling. It is even possible that ISIS will give up the fight and pull out. If this happens, it will certainly be good news. The remaining residents of Kobani would be saved from slaughter and their relief would give a moral boost to anti-ISIS efforts. But any celebration should be muted. Winning at Kobani will be no more devastating to ISIS than was the American victory at Khe Sanh to North Vietnam.

The problem is that ISIS can readily replace the fighters it loses in Kobani, and heavy weapons are not essential to its guerrilla style of warfare. Even as ISIS is losing a little ground at Kobani, it is gaining strength elsewhere.

Only 12 U.S. advisory teams have been deployed and only at the brigade level. The other 14 Iraqi brigades identified by the U.S. as “reliable partners” have no advisers at all. None of these advisers, moreover, is allowed to accompany Iraqi troops into combat, where they can be most effective. The U.S. also is not stepping in to offer direct assistance and training to the Sunnis of Anbar Province to allow them to fight back against ISIS, as they did against al Qaeda in Iraq in 2007-08.

Through the limited application of air power—a mere handful of daily strikes—the U.S. may achieve tactical progress to blunt ISIS’s momentum. But Khe Sanh showed the limits of tactical military victories if they are not married to larger strategic gains—and those are elusive in Iraq and Syria today

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On Jan. 21, 1968, North Vietnamese troops attacked the U.S. Marine garrison at Khe Sanh in South Vietnam near the border with Laos. A 77-day siege ensued, with the U.S. pouring in ever more firepower. The U.S. would drop 100,000 tons of bombs because Gen. William Westmoreland was determined that Khe Sanh not become another defeat like Dien Bien Phu, which had effectively ended France’s colonial presence in Vietnam 14 years earlier.

And it didn’t. Eventually the siege was relieved and the attacking forces melted away, having suffered more than 5,000 fatalities (while the defenders lost about 350 men).

Today, no one except some veterans and military historians remembers Khe Sanh because in the end it had scant strategic significance: Even though the U.S. won the battle, it lost the war. Not long after having “liberated” Khe Sanh, the U.S. dismantled the base because it served little purpose.

This history is worth mentioning because of the parallels, limited and inexact to be sure, between Khe Sanh and Kobani, a Kurdish town in northern Syria. Jihadist forces of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have been besieging Kobani for weeks, and the U.S. has been ramping up efforts to prevent the town from falling. U.S. airstrikes have apparently taken a heavy toll, eliminating ISIS fighters, artillery, armored vehicles and other heavy weapons. Airstrikes have now been joined by airdrops of weapons and ammunition to the Kurdish defenders. Turkey, which had hitherto not lifted a finger to save Kobani, announced Monday that it would allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters to traverse Turkish territory to join in defending the town.

Kobani no longer looks to be in imminent danger of falling. It is even possible that ISIS will give up the fight and pull out. If this happens, it will certainly be good news. The remaining residents of Kobani would be saved from slaughter and their relief would give a moral boost to anti-ISIS efforts. But any celebration should be muted. Winning at Kobani will be no more devastating to ISIS than was the American victory at Khe Sanh to North Vietnam.

The problem is that ISIS can readily replace the fighters it loses in Kobani, and heavy weapons are not essential to its guerrilla style of warfare. Even as ISIS is losing a little ground at Kobani, it is gaining strength elsewhere.

Its fighters are advancing in Anbar Province with little resistance. They are poised on the outskirts of Baghdad; soon they may be within mortar range of Baghdad International Airport, whose closure would be a disaster. On Monday alone, its car bombs and suicide bombers in Baghdad and Karbala claimed at least 33 lives, a day after a suicide bomber in Baghdad killed at least 28 people in a Shiite mosque. The pattern is reminiscent of the terrorist atrocities perpetrated in 2006 by al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s predecessor, aimed at rallying Sunnis to the terrorists’ side by provoking a civil war with Shiites.

As in those dark days, Sunni extremism is provoking an equally extreme response from Iranian-backed Shiites. The replacement of Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister with Haidar al-Abadi, an apparently less sectarian Shiite, was a small step in the right direction for which the Obama administration deserves credit. But there is little reason to think the Iranian hold over a substantial portion of the Iraqi state has been broken.

The Iraqi Parliament has approved ministers to run the two security ministries—Interior and Defense. While the Defense pick is Sunni technocrat Khalid al-Obedi, the Interior pick is far more worrisome: Mohammed Salem al-Ghabban is a member of the Badr Organization, one of the chief Iranian-backed Shiite militias that is further destabilizing Iraq with attacks on Sunni neighborhoods. The likelihood is that Mr. Ghabban will take orders from his ultimate sponsor, Gen. Qasem Suleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force.

This means that the Interior Ministry, in charge of Iraq’s police forces, will become, if it is not already, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Shiite militias and their Iranian string-pullers. This happened in 2006 when the Iraqi police became notorious for kidnapping and torturing Sunnis. This helped bring Iraq to the brink of all-out civil war and will do so again if not checked.

The only way to counteract the Iranian capture of the Interior Ministry is to bolster the Iraqi army as an independent fighting force, but there is little sign of this occurring. Shiite sectarians have also deeply penetrated the army and the U.S. has little ability to counteract this insidious development because President Obama will not send a large number of “embedded” advisers to work alongside army units that remain more professional and less politicized.

Only 12 U.S. advisory teams have been deployed and only at the brigade level. The other 14 Iraqi brigades identified by the U.S. as “reliable partners” have no advisers at all. None of these advisers, moreover, is allowed to accompany Iraqi troops into combat, where they can be most effective. The U.S. also is not stepping in to offer direct assistance and training to the Sunnis of Anbar Province to allow them to fight back against ISIS, as they did against al Qaeda in Iraq in 2007-08.

In Syria the U.S. is also doing little to oppose the Assad dictatorship, leaving it free to continue attacks on areas held by moderate militias affiliated with the Free Syrian Army. This, too, is feeding the radicalization of Syria and Iraq by convincing many Sunnis, rightly or wrongly, that the U.S. is acquiescing to Iranian regional domination—and that ISIS is the only reliable defender that Sunnis have. That impression will be strengthened if the Obama administration reaches a deal with Iran next month that will allow Tehran to maintain its capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.

Through the limited application of air power—a mere handful of daily strikes—the U.S. may achieve tactical progress to blunt ISIS’s momentum. But Khe Sanh showed the limits of tactical military victories if they are not married to larger strategic gains—and those are elusive in Iraq and Syria today.

Categories: Air strikes, Baghdad, Combat troops, Intelligence, Iraq, Iraqi military, Islamic State, Obama, Syria
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