Home » Posts tagged 'islamic state' (Page 12)

Tag Archives: islamic state

In the 1980s, President Reagan funded and armed Islamic fundamentalists to defeat a Soviet-backed secular regime in Afghanistan. Now, one of those ex-U.S. clients is throwing his support behind the brutal Islamic State, a lesson about geopolitical expediency, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

In a blast from the past in Afghanistan, a warlord who became a model for combining ruthless ambition and destructive methods with radical ideology, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has advised his followers to support the so-called Islamic State or ISIS in fighting against the Afghan Taliban.

While some in the West might see this as one more indication of ISIS spreading its tentacles with an ever-widening reach, a better lesson flows from observing that this is another instance of ISIS being invoked by a protagonist in a local conflict with local objectives. Hekmatyar’s game has always been about seeking power in Afghanistan and bashing opponents of his efforts to do so.

A further lesson comes from noting that it is the Taliban that Hekmatyar finds to be either too moderate or too inconvenient for him right now. It probably is not coincidental that this statement by Hekmatyar comes just as the Afghan government and representatives of the Taliban have concluded what may be the most promising peace negotiations so far that are aimed at resolution of the long-running conflict in Afghanistan.

All of these players — the government, the Taliban, and Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami — are focused on struggles for power in their own country and not on transnational causes. Afghanistan is a nation in which politics and policy largely rest on ad hoc deals among various local power-holders, which are struck in ways that do not correspond to what might make sense to Westerners in terms of recognizable left-right, radical-moderate, or religious-secular dimensions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russia, Ukraine and U.S. Hegemony

July 9, 2015

Russia, Ukraine and U.S. Hegemony

The following is an edited version of a talk by the author as part of a panel at a public forum in Toronto on June 12, 2015. The forum was sponsored by the Centre for Social Justice and Socialist Project. You can view the talk here on ‘Left Streamed’.

The Ukraine/Russia conflict is particularly ominous because tensions with the United States could escalate into a nuclear war. For this reason, it is necessary to understand NATO’s role, patterns of U.S. domination and the nuclear arms race. The political world is dangerously in flux, with entangled military and economic alliances and a robust weapons trade. This is similar to the prelude to World War I when it took one trigger to unleash cascading inter-state violence.

The demonization of Russia and Putin leaves out the role of the United States and NATO. Seumas Milne, writes in The Guardian, March 4, 2015, “A quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, the ‘Russian threat’ is unmistakably back. Vladimir Putin, Britain’s defence secretary Michael Fallon declares, is as great a danger to Europe as ‘Islamic State’…

“Putin’s authoritarian conservatism may offer little for Russia’s future, but this anti-Russian incitement is dangerous folly. There certainly has been military expansionism. But it has overwhelmingly come from NATO, not Moscow.”

James Bissett is a former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. He wrote in the Ottawa Citizen last year, “The current crisis in Ukraine threatens global security and at worst has the potential for nuclear catastrophe. At best, it signals a continuation of the Cold War. Sadly, the crisis is completely unnecessary and the responsibility lies entirely in the hands of the United States-led NATO powers. The almost virulent propaganda onslaught blaming Russia for the instability and violence in Ukraine simply ignores reality and the facts.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You’ve Been Warned – Calls for Mandatory “National Service” for Americans Aged 18-28 Has Begun

June 18, 2015

You’ve Been Warned – Calls for Mandatory “National Service” for Americans Aged 18-28 Has Begun

Screen Shot 2015-06-17 at 12.07.27 PM

CHAPTER ONE

War is a Racket

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

– From Major General Smedley Butler’s War is a Rackett

This is one of the most important articles I will write all year. The statists are coming for your kids, and the conditioning has already begun.

Last night, I came across one of the most horrifying articles I have ever read, which is saying a lot. Before I get into it, take a look at the title and the tagline:

If you think the title is bad, wait until you read the article. What becomes evident is that this grotesque concept of forced “national service” is being actively discussed at the highest levels of government. What Ron Fournier is doing in his National Journal article is conditioning the public to accept something that is completely unacceptable.

Before we get to that, who is Ron Fournier? National Journal provides a bio:

Ron Fournier is the Senior Political Columnist and Editorial Director of National Journal. Prior to joining NJ, he worked at the Associated Press for 20 years, most recently as Washington Bureau Chief. A Detroit native, Fournier began his career in Arkansas, first with the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record and then with the Arkansas Democrat and the AP, where he covered the state legislature and Gov. Bill Clinton.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The American far-right’s trojan horse in Westminster

June 17, 2015

The American far-right’s trojan horse in Westminster

Elites are using the Henry Jackson Society to sell surveillance, war, white supremacism, banks, and misogyny

There is a violent extremist fifth column operating at the heart of power in Britain, and they stand against everything we hold dear in Western democracies: civil liberties, equality, peace, diplomacy and the rule of law.

You wouldn’t think so at first glance. In fact, you might be taken in by their innocuous-looking spokespeople, railing against the threat of Muslim extremists, defending the rights of beleaguered Muslim women, championing the principle of free speech — regularly courted by national TV and the press as informed experts on global policy issues.

But peer beneath the surface, and an entirely different picture emerges: a web of self-serving trans-Atlantic elites who are attempting to warp public discourse on key issues that pose a threat not to the public interest, but to their own vested interests.

One key organisation at the centre of this web is the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), an influential British think-tank founded a decade ago, ostensibly to promote noble ideals like freedom, human rights and democracy. But its staff spend most of their energies advancing the very opposite.

More recently, HJS has turned to demonising Edward Snowden supportersand privacy advocates as accomplices with al-Qaeda and the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) — as is also being done by Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, with its hole-ridden story claiming Snowden’s revelations’ had allowed Russia and China to identify active MI6 agents.

Robin Simcox, author of the new HJS report, Surveillance after Snowden

Journalists who have reviewed the Snowden files say that there was nothing in them that would permit MI6 operatives to be identified.

Former senior CIA official Robert Steele, whose books have received endorsements from the past and then serving Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said:

“I can state categorically that there could not have been names of either intelligence officers or agents in the Snowden materials. The system simply does not work that way.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Geopolitical Risks Are Climbing: Interstate Conflict Is Highest Risk In 2015

June 13, 2015

Geopolitical Risks Are Climbing: Interstate Conflict Is Highest Risk In 2015

Every year, the World Economic Forum publishes an annual report on global risks that covers the factors and underlying drivers that could most likely disrupt global economic activity. Most of the time over the last decade, the survey of 900 global experts finds the top risks to revolve between potential economic events such as collapsing asset prices and underemployment, or potential environmental challenges such as flooding or water supply crises.

However, this year geopolitical risks have made a staggering jump to the forefront, reflecting the instability in the Middle East and North Africa, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the rise of terrorist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram, and even tension in the South China Sea.

The above graph shows the change over the course of the last year. Risks such as state collapse or crisis, interstate conflict, terrorist attacks, and weapons of mass destruction have all soared. In fact, within the overall scope of all potential risks, interstate conflict is now ranked as the #1 risk in terms of likelihood, and #4 in terms of impact.

“Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world again faces the risk of major conflict between states,” said Margareta Drzeniek-Hanouz, lead economist at the World Economic Forum.

“However, today the means to wage such conflict, whether through cyberattack, competition for resources or sanctions and other economic tools, is broader than ever. Addressing all these possible triggers and seeking to return the world to a path of partnership, rather than competition, should be a priority for leaders as we enter 2015.”

Source: VisualCapitalist.com

Iraq War Propaganda Redux: U.S. Claims Syrian Government Supporting ISIS

June 4, 2015

Iraq War Propaganda Redux: U.S. Claims Syrian Government Supporting ISIS

West Busted Supporting ISIS … Tries Instead to Point Finger At Syrian Government

America’s closest allies have been busted supporting ISIS in order to topple Syria’s government. Mainstream U.S. writers are calling for open support of ISIS and Al Qaeda to enact regime change in Syria.

And a newly-declassified government document hints that the West supported the creation of ISIS.

This may sound far-fectched and wild-eyed … But the following former high-level US and UK intelligence officials and whistleblowers confirm that the document implicates the West in the birth of ISIS:

Military analyst – and famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower – Daniel Ellsberg

High-level NSA official Thomas Drake

Well-known FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley

Senior MI6 officer Alastair Crooke

MI5 counter-terrorism officer Annie Machon

British counter-terrorism officer Charles Shoebridge

In any event, whether or not you believe the West created ISIS, the U.S. is now trying to blame thesingle most unlikely entity imaginable for ISIS … the Syrian government.

Specifically, the U.S. Embassy in Syria just accused the Syrian government of supporting ISIS:

U.S. Embassy Syria

✔@USEmbassySyria

Reports indicate that the regime is making air-strikes in support of #ISIL‘s advance on #Aleppo, aiding extremists against Syrian population

This is all kinds of silly … and is Iraq War propaganda redux.

Specifically, the Syrian government and ISIS are mortal enemies.

The Syrian government – which is allied with Shia Muslims – has been battling Sunni jihadis for many years. ISIS are Sunnis … the arch-enemy of Shias and the Syrian government. The Syrian government isruled by a sect of Shias called Alawites.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Superpower in Distress

May 31, 2015

Superpower in Distress

Think of this as a little imperial folly update — and here’s the backstory. In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein’s military, the U.S. sunk about $25 billion into “standing up” a new Iraqi army. By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least 50,000 “ghost soldiers,” was only standing in the imaginations of its generals and perhaps Washington. When relatively small numbers of Islamic State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed, abandoning four cities — including Mosul, the country’s second largest — and leaving behind enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from tanks and Humvees to artillery and rifles. In essence, the U.S. was now standing up its future enemy in a style to which it was unaccustomed and, unlike the imploded Iraqi military, the forces of the Islamic State proved quite capable of using that weaponry without a foreign trainer or adviser in sight.

In response, the Obama administration dispatched thousands of new advisers and trainers and began shipping in piles of new weaponry to re-equip the Iraqi army. It also filled Iraqi skies with U.S. planes armed with their own munitions to destroy, among other things, some of that captured U.S. weaponry. Then it set to work standing up a smaller version of the Iraqi army. Now, skip nearly a year ahead and on a somewhat lesser scale the whole process has just happened again. Less than two weeks ago, Islamic State militants took Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. Iraqi army units, including the elite American-trained Golden Division, broke and fled, leaving behind — you’ll undoubtedly be shocked to hear — yet another huge cache of weaponry and equipment, including tanks, more than 100 Humvees and other vehicles, artillery, and so on.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pentagon report says West, Gulf states and Turkey foresaw emergence of ‘IS’

May 31, 2015

Pentagon report says West, Gulf states and Turkey foresaw emergence of ‘IS’

A US intelligence report reveals that Western support for Syria’s rebels aided and abetted the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ – and the Pentagon won’t deny it

A newly declassified Pentagon report provides startling high-level confirmation that the US-led strategy in Syria contributed directly to the rise of the Islamic State (IS).

The secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document, obtained by Washington DC law firm Judicial Watch, reveals that the emergence of an “Islamic State” across Iraq and Syria was foreseen by the Pentagon, as early as three years ago.

According to the internal report, which was distributed throughout the US intelligence community, this was seen as a likely consequence of the West’s efforts to destabilise Bashir al-Assad’s regime in Syria.

Despite that, Western governments continued to coordinate financial, military and logistical support to largely Islamist militant rebel groups in Syria, through allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Jordan and Turkey, among others.

A sectarian insurgency

Dated August 2012, the report states that the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” comprise “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq].”

Immediately after, the document states that these forces are being supported by a Western-led coalition: “The West, Gulf countries and Turkey support the opposition.”

Throughout, the document does not suggest a distinction between “moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and Islamist militant groups, nor between the insurgency and the opposition.

Rather, the document shows that opposition forces engaged in fighting the Assad regime consisted of a combination of overlapping Islamist forces. Singling out al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the document says the terror group “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning” due to its belief that Assad was “targeting Sunnis”.

The report further describes the insurgency as a “sectarian uprising,” whose increasingly sectarian character attracts “volunteers” from across the region to “support the Sunnis in Syria”.

– See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/pentagon-confirms-west-gulf-states-and-turkey-created-islamic-state-608321312#sthash.acNMhXkJ.dpuf

Al Qaeda Syria Boss Says That His ‘So-called Khorasan Group Doesn’t Exist’

May 29, 2015

Al Qaeda Syria Boss Says That His ‘So-called Khorasan Group Doesn’t Exist’

In early September 2014, an Associated Press story quoted unnamed U.S. officials discussing an imminent threat from a previously unknown, Syria-based terror outfit called the “Khorasan Group.” U.S. officials told the AP that the jihadist group was stocked with al Qaeda veterans and was plotting imminent attacks against U.S.-bound airline flights. Officials also suggested that the level of danger posed by the group exceeded that of ISIS, the militant group which now controls much of Iraq and Syria.

Weeks later, after similarly breathless coverage of the so-called Khorasan Group from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, CBS News and others, American airstrikes against Syria commenced, including strikes that were said to have specifically targeted this shadowy new organization.

In the immediate aftermath of the strikes, something remarkable happened. American officials almost immediately began retracting their claims about the level of danger posed by the Khorasan Group. FBI Director James Comey, addressing previous assertions that the group posed an imminent threat to American interests, said, “I don’t know exactly what that word means … ‘imminent.’”

After the airstrikes had commenced, reports began to surface that no identifiable Syrian activists within the country had ever heard of such an organization. Days after the U.S. initiated military operations within Syria, it became increasingly unclear whether the “Khorasan Group” itself actually existed.

Yesterday, the head of al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria gave the clearest indication yet that the group is a fabrication. In an interview conducted with Al Jazeera Arabic, Abu Muhammad al Jolani, the head of Jabhat al Nusra, said the following:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

ISIS Planning US Nuclear Attack In Next 12 Months: Report

May 25, 2015

ISIS Planning US Nuclear Attack In Next 12 Months: Report

Three weeks after the first supposed attack by Islamic State supporters in the US, in which two ISIS “soldiers” wounded a security guard before they were killed in Garland, Texas, the time has come to raise the fear stakes.

In an article posted in the terrorist group’s English-language online magazine Dabiq (which as can be see below seems to have gotten its design cues straight from Madison Avenue and is just missing glossy pages filled with ‘scratch and sniff’ perfume ads ) ISIS claimed that it has enough money to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and “carry out an attack inside the United States next year.”

In the article, the ISIS columnist said the weapon could be smuggled into the United States via its southern border with Mexico.

Curiously, the author of the piece is John Cantlie, a British photojournalist who was abducted by ISIS in 2012 and has been held hostage by the organization ever since; he has appeared in several videos since his kidnapping and criticized Western powers.

John Cantlie

As the Telegraph notes, “Mr Cantlie, whose fellow journalist hostages have all either been released or beheaded, has appeared in the group’s propaganda videos and written previous pieces. In his latest work, presumed to be written under pressure but in his hall-mark style combining hyperbole, metaphor and sarcasm, he says that President Obama’s policies for containing Isil have demonstrably failed and increased the risk to America.”

Cantlie describes the following “hypothetical” scenario in Dabiq :

Let me throw a hypothetical operation onto the table. The Islamic State has billions of dollars in the bank, so they call on their wil?yah in Pakistan to purchase a nuclear device through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials in the region.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US-Assisted Wahhabi Bombings of Yemen are “Devastating”: UN

May 2, 2015

US-Assisted Wahhabi Bombings of Yemen are “Devastating”: UN

The UN Secretary General stated Thursday that Saudi bombings of Yemen, which are assisted and coordinated by the US, “are having a devastating impact on humanitarian aid efforts and are in violation of the laws of war.”

While noting that fighters within Yemen are also committing war-crimes – ISIS, for example, has been able to establish a presence in the country thanks to the Saudi campaign – the UN has “been particularly critical of the Saudi air strikes”, for which the “United States is providing aerial refueling and intelligence” from within and outside the Saudi-Wahhabi dictatorship’s territory, as well asrescuing Saudi pilots: “U.S. military assets ha[ve] been used to rescue two Saudi pilots” – McClatchy. (The US also evacuated its own government staff.)

While 8 countries, including India, China, and Russia, have carried out missions to rescue thousands of their civilian nationals, as well as foreign nationals and some Americans from the Yemen war zone, the Obama regime, recalling Bush’s treatment of hurricane Katrina refugees, refuses to evacuate any of the3 to 4,000 US civilians trapped in Yemen, despite US-lawsuits calling on Obama to do so.

The UN said that “more than 1,200 people have been killed in the past six weeks of fighting and that 300,000 have fled their homes.”

Antiwar.com reports that US-backed Saudi aggression “has provided an opportunity for AQAP [al Qaeda] and ISIS to gain ground”, as the Houthis, a domestic Yemeni movement opposed to al Qaeda, had previously prevented the Saudi-supported groups from gaining a foothold.

Islamic State is the cancer of modern capitalism

March 31, 2015

Islamic State is the cancer of modern capitalism

Debate about the origins of the Islamic State (IS) has largely oscillated between two extreme perspectives. One blames the West. IS is nothing more than a predictable reaction to the occupation of Iraq, yet another result of Western foreign policy blowback. The other attributes IS’s emergence purely to the historic or cultural barbarism of the Muslim world, whose backward medieval beliefs and values are a natural incubator for such violent extremism.

The biggest elephant in the room as this banal debate drones on is material infrastructure. Anyone can have bad, horrific, disgusting ideas. But they can only be fantasies unless we find a way to manifest them materially in the world around us.

So to understand how the ideology that animates IS has managed to garner the material resources to conquer an area bigger than the United Kingdom, we need to inspect its material context more closely.

Follow the money

The foundations for al-Qaeda’s ideology were born in the 1970s. Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden‘s Palestinian mentor, formulated a new theory justifying continuous, low-intensity war by dispersed mujahideen cells for a pan-Islamist state. Azzam’s violent Islamist doctrines were popularised in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

As is well-known, the Afghan mujahideen networks were trained and financed under the supervision of the CIA, MI6 and the Pentagon. The Gulf states provided huge sums of money, while Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) liaised on the ground with the militant networks being coordinated by Azzam, bin Laden, and others.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Accusations Emerge That the U.S. Is Aiding ISIS – The Latest “Conspiracy Theory” Circulating in Iraq

March 30, 2015

Accusations Emerge That the U.S. Is Aiding ISIS – The Latest “Conspiracy Theory” Circulating in Iraq

My belief is, we will, in fact be greeted as liberators.

– Dick Cheney on NBC’s Meet the Press, March 16, 2003

But that enmity for the United States circulates beyond the militias that once fought U.S. soldiers, surfacing also in parliamentary debates and Iraqi media reports and even at the highest ranks of the national armed forces that the United States is aiding.

“Everybody knows that the Americans are dropping supplies to Daesh,” said Brig. Gen. Abed al-Maliki, a senior Iraqi army commander based in the city of Samarra, about 80 miles north of Baghdad, using another term for the Islamic State.

What’s more, he said, during some of the fiercest fighting around Samarra last year, U.S. Special Operations forces dropped behind enemy lines to assist Islamic State militants.

“They came in with parachutes, and they were helping to bomb the city,” he said.

U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State, he contended, are probably just a cover for efforts to support the group.

“It’s just a show,” he said, sitting in the city’s army command headquarters. “If the Americans want to finish something, they will finish it. If they wanted to liberate Iraq, they could.”

– From the Washington Post article, In Fight for Tikrit, U.S. Finds Enemies on Both Sides of the Battle Lines, March 27, 2015

How do you know your foreign policy is a complete and total destructive nightmare? When the country you supposedly “liberated” not only turns into a horrific war zone, but all sides fighting accuse you of helping the enemy. This seems to be precisely what is happening in Iraq at the moment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Before Canada goes too far into Iraq, remember Libya, Afghanistan

March 13, 2015

Before Canada goes too far into Iraq, remember Libya, Afghanistan

Ottawa was warned, before the Libya mission, that that country would descend into civil war

It is sobering to reflect that before our current mission in Iraq, the last two military operations undertaken abroad by Canada have been followed by the violent rise of the black flag of ISIS jihadism in these same conflict zones.

That’s in both Libya and now, even, Afghanistan. Not an encouraging record.

It’s another sign these days that Canada rarely seems to anticipate the depths of chaos that it’s wading into when it unleashes our CF-18s and other combat units on far-flung wars and insurgencies we know very little about.

We plunge in, it seems, even when our own military warns of dire consequences.

Just last week it was revealed by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper that Canada’s military intelligence had warned the Harper government in March 2011 that Libya would descend into a lengthy civil war if our planes and other Western bombers helped crush dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.

And that was precisely what happened. Following a sage warning that was not made public at the time and was obviously not absorbed by cabinet, the government chose to bomb, and bomb big.

As our government had few diplomatic eyes in Libya back then, and without our own foreign intelligence service, Ottawa depended on the best guesses of British and American intelligence to make its call.

Sometimes, alas, these best bets don’t work out.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

ISIS Burn Iraqi Oil Fields To Hold Off Iraqi Offensive

March 6, 2015

ISIS Burn Iraqi Oil Fields To Hold Off Iraqi Offensive

Thick black smoke billowing from oil wells northeast of the city of Tikrit is obstructing Shi’ite militiamen and Iraqi soldiers attempts to drive ISIS from the Sunni Muslim city after militants set them on fire. Reuters reports a witness and a military source said Islamic State fighters ignited the fire at the Ajil oil field to shield themselves from attack by Iraqi military helicopters. As we noted previously, the battle for Tikrit is key as it will determine whether and how fast the Iraqi forces can advance further north and attempt to win back Mosul, the biggest city under Islamic State rule.

IraqiOilFields

As Reuters reports,

Islamic State militants have set fire to oil wells northeast of the city of Tikrit to obstruct an assault by Shi’ite militiamen and Iraqi soldiers trying to drive them from the Sunni Muslim city and surrounding towns, a witness said.

The witness and a military source said Islamic State fighters ignited the fire at the Ajil oil field to shield themselves from attack by Iraqi military helicopters.

The offensive is the biggest Iraqi forces have yet mounted against IS, which has declared an Islamic caliphate on captured territory in Iraq and Syria and spread fear across the region by slaughtering Arab and Western hostages and killing or kidnapping members of religious minorities like Yazidis and Christians.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: islamic state

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

A sectarian insurgency

Follow the money

Post navigation

Latest Posts