“With its actions and way of thinking, the ISIL proved to all Arabs and Muslims that it is just a collection of sick individuals who love murder and blood without thought or specific identity,” said political analyst Zuhair Abbas al-Anzi, professor at the University of Anbar in Ramadi.
Today’s notice in al-Shorfa leaves much to be desired even if “clear, accurate, and complete”: it’s a little ahead of the story, perhaps as cocky as it may be encouraging.
That last citation goes on to this contemporary sentiment:
The group’s statements distort Islam and alienate people from the religion, she said.
“With statements like these, ISIL is killing the revolution, for Islam is a religion of forgiveness, tolerance, amity, acceptance of others and respect for all religions,” Nawfal said. “It was never a religion of killing, intimidation or restriction of worshipers’ livelihoods and freedom, nor is it a religion of slaughter, hate or deception.
“It is a religion for all mankind, not a particular group,” she added.
The way one feels about a religion, especially one’s own, may differ from the expression in history of it, but the contemporary personal interpretation nonetheless would seem to express the attitude and beliefs possessed today and put to the test by Muslim security forces throughout the range of the Islamic Small Wars, essentially confirming the presence and strength of modern views.
Alternatively stated: the various flavors and strains of Islamic legacy have their sway if not in scripture and tradition as promoted or enforced by zealots then in the actual preferences in behavior and tastes embraced by greater Muslim societies according to other cultural legacies (like the Pashtunwali) or aesthetic or sentimental values (e.g., Sufism and the poetry of Persian theologian Rumi).
On this blog, I continue to endorse “shimmer“, the idea that the conflict table — the basis for moral entrepreneurship — may loom large, but the assembly developed on top of it is actually small, by comparison, and largely rejected, or most Muslim-majority states would be strict sharia states instead of confused amalgams of autocratic and archaic practices and contemporary make-do laws. While the personifications of excessive pride and vanity in malignant leaders and their followers attempt to leverage the Qur’anic script (see this blogs comment on programming and scripting) for themselves, or, more accurately, use the template to deal themselves their own self-aggrandizing and glorious role in lives, those caught unluckily in their path struggle mightily to repulse or contain them.
Not the first time have I used this metaphor: as a grain of sand may be to an oyster, so “the terrorists”, so hard to define at times, so painfully present at times, may inspire their own worlds to work around them, envelope them, and vanish them in another more formidable, more beautiful, more radiant peace.
When the Iraqi Army withdrew from the major cities of Anbar in December in the wake of continued protests against their heavy-handed tactics, ISIS insurgents predictably poured down their familiar rat lines from Syria to join local insurgents in capturing the strategic cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. The horror that al-Qaeda has thrived on in Syria now constitutes its vision for Iraq.
Analysts say that after a year-long crackdown by Maliki’s forces, tribal leaders in overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province have set aside deep-rooted grievances with the Shiite-dominated regime to help Maliki crush the jihadists, possibly because he has promised some political concessions.
Given the increasingly autocratic Maliki’s track record of refusing to give the minority Sunnis a stake in running the country, imprisoning their political leaders or driving them into exile, he’s now asking them to help him to sort out a crisis for which he is at least partly to blame himself.
It appears that while Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki may have the reflexes of a dictator, and so expressed those through his manner of using force in the past year, he may not have the want of power, callous and self-aggrandizing, as a dictator would have it. He has perhaps found the weakness in the role of elected official but also discovered the opportunity for greater strength in meaningful and committed coalition.
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(CNN) — At least 25 people were killed and 30 others injured in three bombings that hit the Iraqi capital on Wednesday morning, Baghdad police officials said.
“While CNN is departing its current brick-and-mortar location in Baghdad, the network continues to maintain an editorial presence in Iraq through a dedicated team of CNN stringers and correspondent assignments as news warrants,” a CNN spokesperson confirms in a statement.
While I / we — or perhaps just me, it’s hard to tell — wait for news of an Iraqi military assault on ISIS fighters inside Fallujah, one might ask what happened to the “big media” news
CNN pulled it bureau out of Iraq in this still tense sector of the Islamic Small Wars.
That American troops have returned from the war zone might well demote the relevance of coverage to Americans, who in any case may be wondering what’s next now that the Superbowl is over and it’s still a long way to springtime, but the war persists and remains relevant to the world and a now worldwide readership for whom state boundaries may mean a lot less than the ethical, moral, religious, and political fissures that cross-cross our “small blue dot” of a planet.
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In his weekly speech on Wednesday, Maliki said “We do not want to harm the civilians and wish them to come back home soon where the battle with terrorism will end soon” . . . .
Which is not to say that the al-Maliki’s comforting words need to presage conventional fighting or that the same needs to be seen: arrests may take place quietly; fighters may refuse the fight offered; in fact, the mafia processes — “God mob” tactics — on which such as ISIS rely do “the battle” in minds, not fields, consigning so much state-owned firepower and manpower to at least temporary irrelevance.
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(Baghdad) – The execution-style killing of four members of Iraq’s SWAT forces, apparently by the ISIS armed group, is the latest atrocity in a campaign of widespread and systematic murder that amounts to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said today.
The story dates back to a January 20, 2014 incident near Ramadi. The breaking story appears to be about what Human Rights Watch has to say about it.
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As noted the last time I blogged, as a casual web-based observer, “Fallujah is dark” — not the spy novelist’s phrase for destroyed (e.g., ominously, “Moscow is dark”) but rather a comment about information: we know from common online news coverage that Fallujah has been ringed by state military, that some 35,000 families have been displaced, probably temporarily for once, that war machinery and materiel have been delivered to Iraqi forces, and that some kind of invasion of Fallujah is imminent but, perhaps, also difficult in design and navigation: any irregular at any time may cache his weapons, exchange his costume, and swim as Mao Zedong advised, moving among the people “as a fish swims in the sea.”
The most violent blast today took place across the street from the Iraqi foreign ministry, on the edge of the international Green Zone. Soon after, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt at a nearby falafel restaurant, the Associated Press reports. Another car bomb was detonated in Khilani Square in the city’s commercial center. Authorities managed to diffuse the fifth bomb near the oil ministry before it went off, according to the Agence France-Presse. At least 24 people died.
FALLUJAH, Iraq, Feb. 4 (UPI) — Amid sustained shelling, Iraq’s military is getting ready to mount major assaults against al-Qaida forces who seized large areas of the western cities of Fallujah and Ramadi Dec. 30.
Problem: First page up on YouTube for “Fallujah” and all I see comes by way of RT or PressTV.
Propaganda.
Plus video game “footage”.
And old footage.
Fallujah is dark.
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The Iraqi armed forces, working with tribal fighters in Anbar province killed 40 fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), destroyed weapons and seized four ISIS headquarters in the city of Fallujah this week.
Last weeks, last month’s, last year’s, years ago — that’s a problem.
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The Iraqi defense ministry has announced that 50 members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) were killed in Saturday’s and Sunday’s aerial bombardment and artillery assaults as government forces and local militias targeted ISIL fighters in the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah.
Government forces are reportedly stationed 15 minutes from Fallujah, awaiting a final go-ahead from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to launch their invasion. For several weeks the city has been subjected to indiscriminate artillery fire and aerial strikes that have killed an unknown number of civilians, and a blockade that has restricted access to food, medicine and water.
Attacks in and around Baghdad killed seven people on Tuesday as Iraqi forces made steady progress against militants in conflict-hit Anbar province where the government lost key territory weeks ago.
The bloodshed comes after more than 1,000 people were killed in January, the worst monthly death toll in nearly six years . . . .
All of that above seems thin even for an aggregation-and-comment blog.
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(Reuters) – Rockets hit Baghdad’s heavily fortified “Green Zone”, home to the prime minister’s office and several Western embassies, on Tuesday and car bombs elsewhere in the capital killed 10 people, police and medical sources said.
“By turning a blind eye to hateful homophobic rhetoric and violence, Russian authorities are sending a dangerous message as the world is about to arrive on its doorstep for the Olympics that there is nothing wrong with attacks on gay people,” Tanya Cooper, a Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times.
Probably, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy with the $50 billion investment in Sochi and hopes for a glamorous Winter Olympics is to play to global business and profit motive while hoping that the demons and ghouls attending the Syrian Civil War stay away.
The other blindside involves an eastern European-type drift into resurgent nationalism, which is nothing new for Putin’s Russia; in fact, it could be leading the pack.
(Is there a Russia –> Syria –> Iran –> Hungarian Jobbik relationship in place)?
The gay thing, rather like the Jew thing, signals other things that are never good.
The Russian President’s decision to sign a law prohibiting ‘the propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors’ last summer probably made sense to him at the time. This measure, along with one that bans the adoption of Russian children not just by homosexuals but also by heterosexuals residing in countries that have gay marriage on the books, is reportedly supported by 74 per cent of Russians. And Putin has for years been able to get away with much worse: invading (and still occupying) Georgia, fuelling Assad’s murder machine, rigging elections, jailing journalists and opposition activists. Other than the odd bleat of protest from the European Union or US State Department, all that has had few serious consequences.
But Putin can’t have anticipated the magnitude of worldwide outrage that would pour forth in response to his gay propaganda law.
For the vast expanse of research available as regards homosexuality in nature and in humanity, all may be bypassed by way of a simple binary: is mankind to pursue exclusivity amid infinite possibilities for discrimination or is the world — or perhaps the intellectual leadership of it — to pursue a course in inclusion with appreciate and tolerance for as much differentiation as may be possible with peace?
I’ve added to the sidebar of this blog four of the values and virtues I feel most relevant to developing a more peaceful global village — compassion, humility, inclusion, integrity — but I’ve added a wildcard: “empathy”.
The possession of empathy in human affairs would seem not only not given but more likely absent than present around the world.
In the west, actors, artists, and writers encounter the concept early, and those who may favor color, engineering, mathematics, and pattern over social drivers in their arts may dispense with this imaginative element potential in their own humanity and go on to make things that have presence in a language absent of a great part and potential in humanity.
Others, especially actors and writers, have always before them the challenge of inhabiting someone else’s perspective. If they haven’t that ability — or ability to cultivate empathy and live a few moments in other shoes — they will not be actors or writers or even, really, very good humans . . . which might bring us back to Putin, Sochi, Syria, and gay bashing in Russia.
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I had not intended to write about the gay community at all this morning, but in the way of the web and social networks, some set of items and opportunities always appears in material streaming across the desktop, and it happens that some things come together and one works with the themes.
Had the suspect in a Seattle nightclub fire chosen a straight bar for a target, the post about it on a conflict-analyzing blog would not have had the cast it took.
The same applies here with Sochi. The news turns up this facet of Russian nationalism — Islamic Jihad compulsively persecutes gays and, whaddayaknow, Russian nationalists do too! — and one merely makes note of the observation.
“I feel that the streets are a little bit safer tonight,” said Neighbours Spokesman Shaun Knittel. “Why do 750 people have to potentially pay for your ideals, your beliefs, your anger?”
A Muslim charged with and videotaped pouring gasoline on a gay club and setting it on fire was an “Arab Cultural Ambassador” for the State Department when it hosted visiting Iraqi “journalists” in Seattle.
Masmari was scheduled to appear in court Monday for a hearing following his conviction and jail sentence on an assault charge stemming from an incident last summer. Municipal court officials told CHS the hearing was planned to discuss the probation office’s monitoring of Masmari while he received court-ordered mental health treatment.
It appears the suspect now associated with a Seattle gay nightclub fire had a presence in the business district and a record with the courts pointing to aggressive and unstable behavior.
Contempt for the infidel?
Mental illness?
A little bit of both?
Seattle resident Musab Masmari, a Libyan/US citizen, was also in attendance to act as a cultural ambassador on behalf of 911 Media Arts Center for the Arabic speaking visitors.
How off the wall could Masmari, who evidently participated in civic activities (or, say, played nice with other) in 2001, have been?
Still, this combination of apparent psychological trouble, attempted or successful mass murder, and motives associated with Islamic Jihad would seem to form a motif for investigators and watchers.
* * *
Muhammad’s lawyers had argued he was “innocent by reason of mental disease or defect”. But on Monday afternoon, Muhammad, who faced capital punishment for Pvt. Long’s slaying, stood before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Hubert Wright and pled guilty to more than a dozen charges in connection with shootings.
“Put it this way,” says one official familiar with the conversations that took place. “Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole.”
The intimation may be of mental illness, but the machinery would seem to run deliberately and logically enough. “Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid’s story has that Twilight Zone aspect to it no less than the stories of others who have latched themselves to a now familiar motivation — and in the name of God too — for committing horrendous crimes.
We’ll see what comes out in court for alleged arsonist Musab Mohamed Masmari, but if experience now has a track record, we may expect some combination of the appearance of nuttiness — not to be too formal on this blog that may have well cited DSM-V (probably second-hand from the web too) — along with a chilling recounting concerning the purchase of a gasoline can, filling it, securing matches, walking the assembly to the top of a staircase, pouring out the gasoline, walking back down, and striking a match.
The United States has picked up where it left off more than a month ago and started shipping nonlethal aid to Syria in hopes that al Qaeda won’t seize it and keep it from reaching its intended rebel fighting recipients.
Officials may have strengthened the chain of custody by winnowing down the trustworthy to “Free Syrian Army Supreme Military Council members”.
Last night’s State of the Union Address by President Obama emphasized domestic economic progress and de-emphasized foreign policy, and that to the extent that American involvement in the Islamic Small Wars appears to have been pared back to the 12-year-presence in Afghanistan and the diminishing of Islamist strength in that theater with but a nod to the whack-a-mole games played with drones and special forces and familiar to Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
* * *
The number of al-Qaeda linked fighters active in Syria has mushroomed from 2,000 to more than 30,000 in just two years, a senior Israeli intelligence official has warned . . . .
Syrians, ordinary Syrians, Syrians who bake bread or lay brick, Syrians who were hungry three years ago at the hands of their kleptocrat government and sought a better deal for themselves, have been suffering mightily between the malignancies of their regime and a now strong portion of the regime’s challengers.
Where’s Putin now?
Not a word.
Web search “Syria Putin al-Qaeda” and the top page list comes back with the mud slung in early September: it’s the Americans that have backed al-Qaeda.
We know it’s not true.
Americans have backed the above mentioned “Free Syrian Army” led, nominally, at least, by General Salim Idris. That army has found itself forked between the brutal dictator — this is one who flew jets against large noncombatant populations — and the equally unconstrained primitives of the al-Qaeda affiliates.
President Obama turned up the populist card last night with brags about progress in the American system within its borders, from energy independence to health care, and while he proffered continued support for nascent democracies in war torn space, he made clear that American troops were staying at home.
* * *
“Dozens of Antonov 124s (Russian transport planes) have been bringing in armored vehicles, surveillance equipment, radars, electronic warfare systems, spare parts for helicopters, and various weapons including guided bombs for planes,” a Middle East security source said.
“Russian advisers and intelligence experts have been running observation UAVs around the clock to help Syrian forces track rebel positions, analyze their capabilities, and carry out precision artillery and air force strikes against them,” said the source, who declined to be identified.
Perhaps in Putin’s cold political calculus, Syria will be held in The Bear’s paw at any price to Syria’s humanity.
President Bashar Assad’s military and the Free Syrian Army may wake up to realize that their enmity may be misdirected, for the true axis is not, has never been, Assad vs al-Qaeda but rather The People vs Assad. Forget about that old rusty post-Soviet chain: Russia – Syria – Iran | Saudi Arabia – NATO – America.
Syria is.
Syria exists for Syrians.
Syrians internally displaced or made refugee by war — about nine million souls (6.5 million IDPs; 2.1 million refugees) — need peace and home for themselves, and all they have for getting that are two armies, in body, and their differential in leaderships, that should be the last to be at their own throats.
As much hell comes from misguidance and propaganda helped along by a surrounding sea of greed.
Obama’s America with NATO returned to a defensive posture would seem to have zero interest in intervention in Syria apart from keep General Idris’s enterprise in sufficient weaponry for maintaining the three-way stalemate while talk-talk-talk fills time.
Putin’s Russia, which well may view Syria as part of its post-Soviet inheritance, seems immune to humanitarian overtures apart from bending, twisting, and spinning it some around Bashar al-Assad, who in state propaganda and RT has been made to look like a blameless angel.
So far as may be gleaned from the news online, Putin’s in it for the money and to maintain an anti-western post in a client buffer.
Compared to Putin’s glory — and how glorious that glory will be at the $50 billion Winter Olympics in Sochi — the depth and expanse of civilian Syrian suffering, in state and splayed out in the refugee camps of hosting neighbors, would seem by comparison invisible.
Disclaimer: I confess I now write with a “nice pen”, acknowledged as such by an expert. It’s best feature is its 21 karat gold medium-fine nib, so I know a little bit about fine things too! But my fine things would seem fit to living in a cabin, which is more or less how I live (but I can dream).
* * *
I have seen the face of suffering and hate online in many faces. Someone has been lied to or manipulated; someone has a mind confined to state media or a wallet meagerly fattened by the patronage of a despot, a shameful situation where conscience and ethics have not been entirely extinguished. What may be done to repair that person? Or, collectively, such people captive to closed information (remember: mouth – ear – mind – heart) systems?
I don’t know.
I do know the world online is larger than the space in which I live and the freedom to speak has its complement in the freedom to read, listen, or watch widely with great curiosity and with some ambition and discipline as regards discerning the nature of things.
Score one for the political freedom that is freedom of speech:
With Ukraine’s political crisis deepening, protesters left the ministry after Justice Minister Olena Lukash warned that she would call for a state of emergency. But at the end of the day, Lukash said the anti-protest laws that went into effect on January 16 would be repealed and the protesters who occupied her ministry would receive amnesty — as long as they cleared out of “all seized premises and roads.”
“This is not a ‘business as usual’ summit,” said one EU ambassador. “It is time to take stock of where we are in relations with Russia. We will not be discussing any of the nuts-and-bolts issues.”
Kiev may represent the edge of Putin’s reinvigorating of the Russian state as an entity made larger than itself with a ring of buffering client states.
At 5:19 in the above clip, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt notes, “We have European values, we have European principles, we have European rights, that we must uphold in each and every European country.”
President Putin’s sumo wrestling on behalf of the future of resurgent Russian empire runs into numerous modern issues, starting with the neglect of the Russians themselves outside of the circles of immediate cooperation, influence, and power, which, of course, is part of what makes an autocracy what it is. In earlier days — the good old days! — tanks may have handily quelled the rioting in Kiev; today, those tanks may turn against the imposition of a new Ukrainian-Russian cooperative in the absence of a genuinely transformed Moscow.
However, as one friend has reminded me several times this winter, Russia (Putin) owns the cash and gas supplies and has used them for political leverage. Kiev’s own heavy-handed laws (who taught them how to be so tough and stupid?) have mightily encouraged the hard line in the state’s opposition:
“Everyone here’s looking at a 10-year jail sentence — the laws are in place,” said Vladimir, a 53-year-old entrepreneur from Kiev who’s been at the camp from the start and declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal. “We’ll be here until we win, otherwise our fate is sealed. There’s no third option.”
The conversion of Ukraine’s discomfort into stark black-and-white terms devolves directly to the government, which by imposing draconian measures eliminated the Ukrainian people’s post-Soviet customary sense of freedom of speech.
The new law, which bans all forms of protests, was published in the official Golos Ukrainy, or Voice of Ukraine, newspaper, raising fears that the government would use excessive force to quell dissent.
The opposition and the West have condemned the bill, demanding that it be reversed, but the Interior Ministry said at least 32 protesters had been arrested in the most recent round of demonstrations.
As he has with Syria, Putin has handily kept himself out of the spotlight. Of course, RT’s in no position to pursue this line of analysis, and then too . . . what’s he done but helped Ukraine with money and kept the gas supply moving?
In an open letter to President Obama, the two featured in the video, Fiona Hill and Steven Pifer, stated the following:
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine look to the United States, not just the European Union, for support. A joint U.S.-EU stance has the greatest prospect of countering Russian actions. We recommend that you instruct the State Department to coordinate policy steps with the European Union and key members, including France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, to bolster the “targeted” states and assist them as Russia increases its economic and political pressures.
Batkivshchyna – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “The party wants to prosecute “Law enforcement involved in political repression”[79] and to impeach current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his “anti-people regime” to “return Ukraine to the path of European integration”.
There’s a mighty page ahead of the statement quoted.
My impression is that the Soviet Era really is just ending and it has brought Ukraine — as it has Syria — to a crossroads. Ukraine’s position is much easier than Syria’s, of course, but The Bear isn’t going away either although by way of Putin the leadership has taken a detour (the big one step backwards) into the 19th Century, God bless him, and that leaves Russia’s future — the two steps forward! — quite open as regards its becoming a responsible state genuinely devoted to internal pan-Slavic interests.
According to party leader Oleh Tyahnybok, Svoboda is not an ‘extremist’ party; he said that “depicting nationalism as extremism is a cliché rooted in Soviet and modern globalist propaganda”.[46] He also stated that “countries like” Japan and Israel are fully nationalistic states, “but nobody accuses the Japanese of being extremists”.[46] According to Tyahnybok, the party’s view of nationalism “shouldn’t be mixed with chauvinism or fascism, which means superiority of one nation over another”, and that its platform is called “Our Own Authorities, Our Own Property, Our Own Dignity, on Our Own God-Given Land”.
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When I sat down post on BackChannels this morning, I thought I would wrap up global turmoil in a page, starting with Ukraine but moving swiftly to Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and so on, and one might do that from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, which is the World Wide Web, but in depth and expanse, even the smallest conflict in the world turns out incredibly rich, and what the reader-writer is going to get is a snapshot, a glimpse along the surface of political reality.
In schematic, to say Putin –> Ukraine : Ukraine <–> Europe might prove out and be all one needs, but oh the devils in the details! Nonetheless, I believe it has fallen to Vladimir Putin to return Russia to Russian glory in a Russian manner — and we’re going to see that extraordinary effort and expense in some Bond movie glamour at Winter Olympics in Sochi very soon (not “hot off the press” these days, but one-hour cool on the web: Welcome to Sochi, the security Games – CNN.com – 1/27/2014) — and to question the democratic socialist values of the west with an assertion about feudal power and aristocracy.
BackChannels 