The Atlantic: The Fight Against White Nationalism Is Different

Against ISIS, America deployed drones, proxy armies, and hundreds upon hundreds of air strikes. The extremist protostate that once controlled millions of people is dead. The ideology that inspired ISIS, however, remains alive. U.S.-led efforts known as “countering violent extremism,” mainly aimed at ISIS and al-Qaeda sympathizers online, were of debatable utility. U.S. air strikes took out ISIS propagandists, just as an Obama-administration-authorized drone strike years earlier in Yemen killed one of al-Qaeda’s most effective messengers, the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Yet his videos remained on YouTube until 2017, and the same basic ideas have continued to fuel terrorist attacks throughout America’s two-decade War on Terror. I remember the earnest passion one al-Qaeda member displayed, at his home in southern Turkey, as he played me a speech from someone he reverentially called “The Sheikh.” Osama bin Laden had been dead for almost three years, but the man was sure that if I just heard the logic of his words, it would open my eyes. [...]

Experts who have focused on both types of extremism—Islamist and white nationalist—tell me that a fundamental change in the way America views the latter would indeed help combat it, freeing up law-enforcement resources to address the growing problem. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last month that the bureau made about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in the past nine months, putting it on pace to surpass the total from the previous year, and that the majority of the suspects were motivated by white supremacism. Since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people on American soil than Islamist terrorists have. [...]

The El Paso attack shows the ways in which white-nationalist terror has become an international movement—while also remaining a distinctly American one. Just minutes beforehand, a manifesto that authorities believe was authored by the suspected shooter was posted online. The 2,300-word racist and anti-immigrant diatribe expressed the fear that white Americans are being replaced by foreigners. As my colleague Adam Serwer has documented, the idea of white replacement, like the tenets of white nationalism more generally, has American roots. And these ideas are central to white-nationalist extremists in other countries. The manifesto cited inspiration from the March massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a white supremacist shot and killed 51 people after posting his own rambling warnings about white replacement. Many attacks by white supremacists target the groups demonized in this propaganda: the black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; the Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable,” the manifesto read. [...]

At the moment, there is a significant disparity in the amount of funds, personnel, and law-enforcement tools that America devotes to combatting Islamist versus white-nationalist terrorism. Finding a way to add white nationalists to the list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations could help address that, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me. It would lower the bar for law enforcement to be able to charge a person for providing material support to white-nationalist terrorists. It would allow investigators to get warrants to monitor their international communications. The Treasury Department could look into their finances and perhaps issue sanctions. U.S. investigators would have more leeway to explore whether individual attacks and plots were part of a larger network. (Alternatively, as the former FBI agent Ali Soufan has proposed, laws surrounding domestic terrorism could be changed to provide authorities with similar powers.)

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Commune: Syria from Revolution to Civil War

I grew up in Syria. In state-run schools, we were reminded daily that we received free education thanks to the Ba’ath party’s revolution in 1963. We should be grateful, our teachers told us. In the fourth grade, like millions of students across Syria, I memorized songs praising the Ba’ath Party and its leader, Hafez al-Assad: We shine like the morning, we carry the gun / Our blood will water the soil. A loyal Syrian must recite quotes by the party leader, quotes memorized from a 150-page book entitled Nationality. In exams, one could be penalized for misremembering a single word.  [...]

I grew up believing that all other ethnic groups might kill us if they had the chance. And then, one day in eighth grade, it seemed that nightmare was coming true. In 2004, the Kurdish uprising in Qamishli happened. Following the requisite flag salute, the principal announced that our school trip was canceled because “there is trouble in the country.” Later, I overheard someone in the yard exclaim, “The Kurds are coming to kill us!” We were told that the Kurds were planning to target Alawite women. The teacher described an Alawite commander who the Kurds had tied to the back of a car and dragged through the streets of Qamishli until his flesh came off. [...]

Many observers and participants, myself included, argued behind closed doors and on social media platforms that the uprisings would have lost momentum had the president replaced the governor of Daraa and held the murdering police officers accountable. But Assad the Younger followed the dictum established by Assad the Older: just kill them all. This approach poured gasoline on the fire, the brutality of the police swelling the ever-larger and ever-angrier protests. Each day, there was a funeral for a protestor killed the day before. The funeral would turn into a protest, and the pallbearers would find themselves inside the casket the next day, surrounded by an even angrier crowd. People would attend funerals without knowing who had been killed—their main aim became the protest itself.  [...]

You might be forgiven for thinking that, after all this horror, the entire country would be against the government and sympathetic to those calling for justice, reform, and dignity. But, in fact, the majority of the country did not join the uprising. This silent majority comprised three rough categories: the hardliners, the bourgeoisie, and the undecided. Hardliners knew exactly what was happening and supported it unequivocally. Without Assad, they believed, there was no country. The bourgeoisie, unlike the hardliners, cared only about the security of their own families and businesses. They refused to pick a side. People in this category were the first to flee the country. And the undecided, finally, could not figure out what was happening. However, many members of this group made up their minds rather quickly and joined the hardliners. Their conversion to opponents of the uprising was mainly achieved by the media narrative propagated on state television, as well as by the militarization of the conflict. [...]

This was just one take on who had killed the soldiers. Some suggested that the soldiers were killed by fellow soldiers who refused to watch innocent people massacred. It’s important to note here that weapons are abundant in cities on the border. Every house has a gun. Whatever the true story, this incident opened a new chapter in the uprising, with two important consequences. First, many Syrians saw the names of the dead soldiers as confirmation of the government narrative, which aligned undecided Syrians with the regime. Second, these events created a split within activist circles, as parts of the movement took positions for and against the use of arms. 

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VisualPolitik EN: Why do many ARAB COUNTRIES ban AL JAZEERA?

Beyond any doubt, what made Qatar famous can be summarized in just two words: AL JAZEERA. It is the most influential TV network in the Arab World and one of the most important news networks on the entire planet.

Then you might wonder… isn’t Al Jazeera just a state propaganda channel? I mean to what extent should we really trust their information? What’s their ideology? Well, today in VisualPolitik we are going to answer all these questions!

Vox: How Islamist militant groups are gaining strength in Africa

Islamist terrorist groups have found a new home and it's not in the Middle East -- it's in Africa. Specifically, the Sahel, a band of territory in West Africa between the Sahara desert and the savannah.

Since the early 2000s, Islamist extremist groups have increasingly strengthened their base here -- training fighters, raising money, and launching a massive number of attacks.

Some are linked to al-Qaeda and other Islamic State. This is throwing these already weak countries into crises and making the region one of the most dangerous in the world. 

Al Jazeera: Invasion of Iraq: The original sin of the 21st century

Al-Qaeda was perceived to be an existential threat in Ba'athist Iraq and was hunted down, but the group found fertile recruitment ground in the country following the invasion. It used George Bush's characterisation of the so-called "war on terror" as a "crusade" as a rallying cry, inviting fighters across to world to join their fight. Al-Qaeda was almost non-existent in Iraq prior to 2003, but it became a powerful force following the invasion and increased its global recruitment rate substantially. It was the power vacuum created by the invasion that allowed people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to become powerful warlords almost overnight.  [...]

The Lancet published a study that showed that, up until 2006, approximately 655,000 Iraqis had been killed as a direct result of the invasion. The British defence ministry's then-chief scientific adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, praised the study as "robust", lending even further credibility to the findings demonstrating the catastrophic loss of life suffered by Iraqis in the first three years following the invasion.  [...]

All of these developments have a common ancestor - the Iraq war. The Middle East is more violent and unstable than it has ever been in living memory. Iran and Saudi Arabia are now engaged in a proxy war of grave regional implications that seems to have no end in sight. The United States is in retreat, as Russia and China assert themselves on the global stage and issue open challenges to the world's former unipolar power. And Europe is struggling with xenophobia born of a refugee crisis that primarily resulted from violence in the Middle East. The entire world has felt the effects of the Iraq war and, after a decade and a half of global chaos and instability, it is hard to characterise the invasion of Iraq as anything but the original sin of the 21st century.

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The Atlantic: The War in Yemen and the Making of a Chaos State

Two-thirds of Yemenis were already what the UN called “food insecure” before the Houthis advanced south, but in the nearly three years since then, Yemen and the wider Middle East have plunged into dangerous instability. Never known as an international tourist draw, the country has recently made headlines for outbreaks of cholera and diphtheria—and ballistic missiles that travel hundreds of miles toward the Saudi capital of Riyadh. With the war on isis slowing down in Syria and Iraq, Yemen is now the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. [...]

“Yemen more closely resembles a region of mini-states at varying degrees of war with one another, and beset by a complex range of internal politics and conflicts, than a single state engaged in a binary conflict,” wrote Peter Salisbury, a researcher with the London-based Chatham House policy institute, in a December report on the country. [...]

Alliances with al-Qaeda and other shady actors are everyday business inside Yemen, but the war has only complicated things, said Elisabeth Kendall, a senior research fellow in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford University’s Pembroke College. She’s made multiple trips to Yemen over the years, most recently in August. “Al-Qaeda now don’t hold territory, but they have made strong alliances with tribes,” she said, particularly in the al-Bayda highlands north of Aden, near Houthi forces. “They’re fighting the same mutual enemy—the Houthis—and they’re feeling embattled on various fronts in the home territories against the Houthis. Why would you not hook up with a bunch of guys with guns just because they’re waving black flags?”  [...]

Nearly a third of the Saudi-led coalition airstrikes have hit what local observers at the Yemen Data Project, an independent group that collects information on the war, call “non-military” targets. That category includes marketplaces, water and electricity sites, food storage, hospitals, medical centers, mosques and all those kind of things, Craig said. “Less than 45 percent of Yemen’s medical facilities are now operating because of the conflict. People can’t, a lot of the time, afford to get there.” Since the war began in March 2015, Saudi aircraft have bombed water and electrical infrastructure more than 100 times. Beyond that, “there have been 68 air raids that have targeted medical facilities; 183 that have targeted marketplaces,” Craig said.

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The Atlantic: The 'Underground Railroad' To Save Atheists

But in many countries across the globe, the danger of expressing non-belief comes directly from the state. According to a comprehensive report by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, a U.K.-based non-profit that aims to promote the rights of non-religious people, there are currently 12 nations in which apostasy (including atheism) can be punished by death: Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Pakistan, meanwhile, threatens the death penalty for blasphemy, which may include expressions of atheism. [...]

When faced with these threats, many people are understandably reluctant to admit their religious doubts even to their closest confidants, making it difficult to gauge how widespread atheism actually is around the world. But there are signs that the numbers of atheists are sizable. A 2012 Win/Gallup International Poll, for instance, found that 19 percent of people in Saudi Arabia claimed not to be religious, with 5 percent identifying as convinced atheists—roughly the same proportion as in the U.S. That’s a surprisingly high number given the difficulties of exploring non-religious thought in this country, and the true figure may be greater; even if their responses remain anonymous, many non-believers may still have been reluctant to declare their religious doubts openly. [...]

In one early study from 2011, he found that people assume that atheists are more likely to commit immoral acts such as stealing money from a wallet left on the sidewalk, or failing to give the correct insurance information after a road accident. Indeed, of all the groups he measured—including Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, and homosexuals—only rapists were considered to be similarly untrustworthy. He has since shown that people are also more likely to implicitly associate atheism with incest, bestiality, animal torture, even murder and mutilation. Opinion polls, meanwhile, reveal that nearly 50 percent of people would rather that their children did not marry an atheist (compared to 34 percent who declared that they would be disappointed if their child married a Muslim).

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openDemocracy: The Trump wars era

The total figure alone is much higher than previous numbers. But by itself it is misleading in that the United States defense department normally excludes two further categories of troops: those rotating for short periods and, of far greater significance, many of the special forces. These are waging much of the combat in all three theatres – Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That means the true number is probably close to, or even over, 30,000. To this could be added troops involved in operations across the Sahel, Somalia or Yemen.  

Such indicators give only part of the picture. Another is a Pentagon request for $143 million to expand its operations at the Azraq base in the Jordanian desert, the largest single overseas financial commitment now being considered. This base has been key to operations in Syria and Iraq, and been used by other states including the Netherlands and Belgium. So just as the wars in Iraq and Syria are supposed to be winding down after ISIS's much-vaunted defeat, the Pentagon wants to go the other way and prepare for yet more conflict in the region. A growth in overseas bases, such as a huge one for surveillance drones costing $100 million in Niger, fits the trend.

All this must be seen in the perspective of the sixteeen years of "war on terror". Again, troop numbers are a signal if not the whole story. In 2007-08, at the height of George W Bush’s campaigns, close to 200,000 US troops were in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even as Barack Obama started to withdraw troops from Iraq, he was "surging" them in Afghanistan: an extra 30,000 troops by 2011 took the US total in that country to around 100,000. [...]

Now, the Trump wars era brings a reconfiguration: plenty of remote warfare and far more military personnel abroad. Bush was all about crushing al-Qaida and similar groups, as well as regime termination; Obama moved more towards "shadow wars" at a much lower intensity, if still controversial. Trump, in combining these, is going back to the future.

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The Atlantic: Al-Qaeda Has Rebuilt Itself—With Iran's Help

Our research reveals that al-Qaeda and covert agents acting for the Iranian deep state first attempted to broker an unlikely agreement more than two decades back, after Saddam Hussein flat-out rejected al-Qaeda’s request for military assistance. The pact then flourished under the George W. Bush administration, when a back-channel from the White House to Tehran, running from 2001 to 2003, discussed it frequently. Former State Department and White House officials in on these talks maintain that the vice president’s office suggested the White House do nothing, worrying that the administration would undermine the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq—which was being underwritten by claims he sponsored al-Qaeda and concealed weapons of mass destruction. Finally, according to these same sources, the vice president’s office also told U.S. envoys to Iran and Afghanistan that once regime change had succeeded in Iraq, Tehran was next. [...]

There is no evidence that this 1995 pact came to anything. But a door was opened, and on December 20, 2001 when Mahfouz reached the Taftan border crossing and made a dash into Iran, he was greeted on the Iranian side by agents from the Ansar ul-Mahdi Corps, an elite cell within the Quds Force; he eventually won an audience in Tehran with its commander, General Qassem Soleimani. However, Iran was not yet fully committed to cooperating. According to senior U.S officials then working on South Asia and Afghanistan for the State Department and the White House, Iran’s Foreign Ministry, fearful that the U.S. would turn its military attentions to Iran after it finished the invasion of Iraq for which it was then building international support, reached out to the Americans. [...]

Hamza would remain with his father for a little over 12 hours. Bin Laden, spooked, forced him to leave, only for the SEAL team to arrive shortly afterward. A contingent of al-Qaeda’s clerical and military leaders remained in Iran until April 2012, when Mahfouz also slipped away from his Quds Force guard, and eventually flew home to Mauritania. Most of the outfit’s military council, a core group of five led by the Egyptian Saif al Adel, remained in Iran until 2015. Then the Quds Force transported some to Syria to join the fight against the Islamic State. Leading this cell was Abu al-Khayr al-Masri and Abu Mohammed al-Masri—the latter Hamza’s father-in-law, described by the U.S. intelligence community as the “most experienced and capable operational planner not in U.S. or allied custody.” With them came Jordanian fighters with connections to Zarqar, including one of Zarqawi’s most important deputies—the plan being for this group to contact ISIS fighters and leaders, encouraging a split.

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The New York Review of Books: War of All Against All

In Arab mythology, the al-Sada bird, or death owl, emerges from the body of a murdered man and shrieks until someone takes revenge. “Today there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of al-Sada birds crying out for revenge all over Syrian skies,” writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh in “The Destiny of the Syrian Revolution,” one of ten essays in his collection The Impossible Revolution. Extreme violence, including the incarceration and torture of teenagers, characterized the Syrian regime’s response to the street protests that erupted in 2011. As the uprising morphed into civil war, rebels also jailed their enemies, adopting methods of abuse and killing they had learned in the regime’s prisons. Malevolent spirits, or jinn, hover. Nearly half a million Syrians are believed to have lost their lives in six years of conflict. [...]

The sentence bears rereading: so terrible is the situation in Syria that one of the regime’s most long-standing and fervent critics, a man who has dedicated his whole life to fighting the Assads, father and son, is forced to wonder if it would have been better not to rebel at all. The author’s head may have remained clear while his heart was breaking, but the carefully modulated prose of these essays does not provide the whole story. How can we understand the Syrian revolution unless we hear the shriek of the al-Sada bird and consider in more depth how it feels to blame yourself for your wife’s disappearance and probable death? [...]

Syria was not the cradle of the Islamic State, but the revolution created a vacuum into which the militants stepped to impose their experiment in living. Their propaganda films show the glory of martyrdom for Allah, set to a soundtrack of heroic Koranic chanting, but reality is more banal: last year, a few days after Syrian government forces drove ISIS out of Qaryatayn, a largely Christian village near Homs, in the ruins of a desecrated monastery I found a notebook detailing payments to fighters, including a record of who had been on leave, extra money allocated to those with disabled relatives, a log of loan repayments, and a note about a fighter who had missed his wedding because he was with the tank division at the time.

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Vox: We're becoming numb to terrorism. That might be a good thing.

Their argument is that terror attacks, particularly since 9/11, have become both more frequent and less organized. Instead of big, spectacular events, we’ve seen a string of attacks across the West that were carried out by lone individuals with few resources, little training, and hardly any planning. The attack in New York City this week is a prime example: A 29-year-old man drives a rented truck into a crowded bike path, killing eight people, and then flees with pellet and paintball guns in hand.

According to Amarasingam and Clarke, these sorts of low-level attacks have become so common that people are growing numb to them. As a result, the “once-shocking violence becomes normalized” and citizens stop responding with the panic and outrage that were once their reactions. [...]

Exactly. And I’ll add that this is actually a good thing in some ways. If terrorism is normalized for people, both jihadist and far-right violence, they are less likely, maybe, to support crazy laws that impact their civil liberties and the rights of others. It’s only when you introduce a sudden sense of fear, one that people don’t understand, that they become kind of irrationally protectionist. So in a way normalizing terrorism is good. [...]

I think the victims of terrorism never really forget. The families of those killed and those who are injured will have to deal with the aftermath of any attack for a long time. And I think for some terrorist groups, the mere act of revenge is maybe enough. They know they will never fully defeat a country like the United States, but as long as they show that there is a push back, that they aren’t just taking American foreign policy decisions lying down, then that is enough. They also communicate that internally to members.  

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The Guardian: Rise and fall of Isis: its dream of a caliphate is over, so what now?

“Once purported as fierce, now pathetic and a lost cause,” Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy for coalition forces tweeted. Such triumphant claims have become familiar since the 9/11 attacks. I heard them in Afghanistan in 2002, but US troops are still engaged in the fight against the Taliban. I heard them in Iraq in 2003, 2004, and then year after year until the US pulled out in 2011.

The scepticism with which any talk of “victory” is greeted by analysts and reporters is familiar, too. Many expert observers counselled prudence rather than celebration last week: Raqqa may have fallen, but if Isis is down, it is far from out. [...]

If the defeat of Isis did not come easily, three inherent weaknesses of its project always made it likely in the long term. First, Isis needed continual conquest to succeed: victory was a clear sign that the group was doing God’s work. Expansion also meant new recruits to replace combat casualties, arms and ammunition to acquire, archaeological treasures to sell, property to loot, food to distribute and new communities and resources, such as oil wells and refineries, to exploit. [...]

Second, the violent intolerance of dissent and brutality by Isis towards the communities under its authority sapped support. One reason for the rapid expansion of Isis was that Sunni tribal leaders and other power brokers in Iraq and Syria could see significant advantages in accepting the group’s authority. Its rule brought relative security, a rude form of justice, and defence against perceived Shia and regime oppression. And assent to Isis takeover also ensured, or at least made more likely, their own survival.

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Vox: Photos: al-Qaeda-linked militants kill more than 320 in Somalia truck bomb attack

The carnage came Saturday, when a massive truck bomb killed over 320 people and wounded 300 more at a busy intersection in the capital, Mogadishu. The blast destroyed nearby hotels, restaurants, and government offices. Just a few hours later, a second explosion rocked the suburb of Medina, setting dozens of vehicles on fire.

The government has accused al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group that has been waging a bloody insurgency in the country for more than a decade, of carrying out the attacks. Al-Shabaab militants have carried out dozens of high-profile attacks in Somalia and neighboring Kenya in recent years, including the April 2015 massacre at Kenya’s Garissa University in which militants targeted mainly Christian students, killing 148, and the siege of a popular pizza restaurant in Mogadishu just four months ago that left 31 people dead. [...]

The sheer scale of the devastation of Saturday’s attacks is hard to comprehend. Witnesses speaking to the UK’s Guardian newspaper described an area of destruction the size of “two or three football fields” in downtown Mogadishu.

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Vox: White American men are a bigger domestic terrorist threat than Muslim foreigners

Radical Islamic terrorists inspired or directed by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda do pose a clear threat to the US. There is no question about that. Before last night’s deadly shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history occurred in June 2016 when an ISIS-inspired man opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and wounding 53.

And ISIS-linked militants have killed or injured dozens of people in countries like England, France, and Canada so far this year, including two women killed in a stabbing attack in Marseille, France, and several people injured in a car-ramming attack in Edmonton, Canada, just this weekend. [...]

n fact, between 2001 and 2015, more Americans were killed by homegrown right-wing extremists than by Islamist terrorists, according to a study by New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. [...]

And as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has written, the average likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in which an immigrant participated in any given year is one in 3.6 million — even including the 9/11 deaths. The average American is more likely to die from their own clothing or a toddler with a gun than an immigrant terrorist. But we’re not banning guns and T-shirts from coming into the country.  

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The Atlantic: Why Was Chad Included in the New Travel Ban?

Chad’s inclusion on the list of countries deemed security risks to the U.S. is additionally difficult to explain given its role over the past 15 years as a key counterterrorism ally. In April, U.S. forces participated in annual counterterrorism exercises with their counterparts from around the world in Chad. Chad’s inclusion in the list was met with astonishment in the country, and not only because this close counterterrorism partnership: The country has mostly managed to avoid the kinds of terrorist attacks that have afflicted its immediate neighbors like Nigeria and Mali.

“Chad sits in a very tough neighborhood,” Lauren P. Blanchard, a specialist in African affairs at the Congressional Research Service, told me. The country is a relative oasis of stability. It hosts French and U.S. forces, is engaged in fighting al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, was critical in pushing back Boko Haram in Nigeria, and plays host to the Multinational Joint Task Force, the regional military effort to fight Boko Haram. [...]

The U.S. State Department, in its most recent country terrorism report from 2016, acknowledged Chad’s financial challenges in providing “external counterterrorism assistance in Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria,” but noted that Chad “engaged in major external military operations in … neighboring countries,” as part of the Lake Chad Basin Multinational Joint Task Force, which includes Benin, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria. Chad, the State Department reported added, was also contributing to the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali. Additionally, the report pointed out that terrorist incidents in the country had fallen due both to “proactive security force presence” and a split within Boko Haram. [...]

Terrorism aside, Chad certainly has its problems. These include an authoritarian government under President Idris Déby, politicization of the armed forces, and widespread poverty despite the country’s oil wealth. But the country—and the wider region—remains a key focus of Western counterterrorism efforts. Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who until recently was commander of American Special Operations Forces in Africa, called the Lake Chad Basin, which encompasses Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, “ground zero” of the war on extremism in Africa. Blanchard told me “Chad is very important in figuring out movement between ISIS elements in Libya and Nigeria—they have to go through Chad or Niger.”

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Al Jazeera: Is the 'war on terror' failing?

The topic of terrorism has been at the forefront of world politics for many years. Attacks on Western soil dominate the news for weeks after they happen, and the Iraq and Syria wars against ISIL are regularly centre stage on TV screens.

The subject was on the agenda at the recent BRICS conference in China, and will debated at the upcoming UN General Assembly.

This week it has catapulted back into the spotlight for an obvious reason, the 16th anniversary of 9/11.

The September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States have largely defined US foreign policy since, and affected lives throughout the world.Almost 3,000 people were killed when hijackers flew airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. The attacks triggered a series of events - including new wars, immigration policies, and prejudices.

What will it take to defeat terror?

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Haaretz: On 9/11, Terror Was Al-Qaida's Goal. For ISIS, It's the Apocalypse

Many of the group's recruits may indeed be young losers who seek some kind of absurd meaning in war and death, as pointed out by French scholar Olivier Roy. But it is a mistake to see ISIS itself as divorced from religion. An important element in the groups' violent world view is a fringe, apocalyptic theology, fueled by the instability and change that are convulsing the Middle East. [...]

An important element in this worldview, then, is an eschatology (i.e. a teaching about the end of the world and the destiny of mankind) which is apocalyptic. This worldview is presented in the 2015 book "The ISIS Apocalypse" by William McCants.

In our view, it is not really possible to understand these Islamic visions of the end of time and of the destiny of mankind without placing them in the wider context of Jewish and Christian eschatology. Throughout history the three Abrahamic religions have shared concepts about God and time. For instance, the Prophet Jesus is a key figure in the apocalyptic tradition of Islam. [...]

ISIS' answer is that a good Muslim sacrifices his or her life to the Caliphate not simply because it is an ideal religious state, but because the world needs to be prepared for the last days. The establishment of the Caliphate is an element in the sequence of events leading to Judgment Day. The Caliphate, in its unrelenting strictness, is a mechanism that prepares the world for Judgment. Under the Caliphate, the "hypocrisy" of human power is proven to be false, as the Caliphate exercises only the word of God. [...]

The French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu claimed in 2008 ("Apocalypse in Islam") that new forms of apocalypticism are spreading in the Middle East in response to violent political upheavals. Filiu points to Muslim kitsch literature in Arabic where Christian fantasies about the end of the world are woven together with contemporary political events. The 9/11 attacks were often discussed in such terms while the breakdown of Iraq and Syria, with unfathomable human suffering, has created fertile ground for theological fantasies about the end of times.

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Slate: What Works in Afghanistan

The first is America’s legendary sponsorship of the Afghan mujahedeen who beat back the Soviet invasion between 1979 and 1988. This covert effort began with small amounts of support funneled through various middlemen (including Pakistan’s shadowy security apparatus) and grew into billions of dollars of money, sophisticated weapons (like Stinger missiles capable of shooting down Russian helicopters), and technical assistance. What made this effort so successful was its narrow goal—inflicting Soviet casualties in the context of the Cold War—and the simple truth that it’s easier to support an insurgency than a counterinsurgency, especially when that insurgency is playing on its home turf. However, after this insurgency pushed out the Soviets, the U.S. washed its hands of this support. Over time, parts of this rebel movement would evolve into al-Qaida and the Taliban, with major long-term repercussions for the U.S. [...]

This reflects a broader theory of counterinsurgency that it’s best done by indigenous security forces. To the extent that much of the current U.S.–Afghanistan strategy relies on supporting Afghan forces as they fight the Taliban and al-Qaida, this holds some promise. However, foreign forces cannot fight our wars; eventually interests diverge, or conflict emerges between client and patron. This may soon happen in Afghanistan, particularly if the Afghan government decides to reach a political settlement with the Taliban, and possibly with al-Qaida elements, even as the U.S. wants to continue fighting. [...]

Today, the Joint Special Operations Command machine continues its work across Afghanistan and Pakistan—doing the hard, bloody, dangerous work of counterterrorism with elite special operations troops or drones. This counterterrorism effort most closely aligns with our primary interest (as articulated by President George W. Bush, and President Barack Obama, as well as President Trump) of preventing another attack on the U.S. emanating from Afghanistan. Although this machine is small, it is costly; elite troops cost more, and are in shorter supply, than their conventional counterparts in the U.S. military. However, it is conceivable that the U.S. could continue to operate this counterterrorism machine indefinitely in Afghanistan, whether led by the military’s special operations command or an analogous agency within the U.S. intelligence community. This plan is not without risk though: Counterterrorism raids often risk alienating civilians, or inflicting civilian casualties, in ways that can create enemies or undermine local government partners, as has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen during the past 16 years. Counterterrorism operations must be carefully calibrated and overseen in order to be effective—something that runs counter to Trump’s promise to take the gloves off and end White House micromanagement of warfighting.

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The New York Review of Books: What Makes a Terrorist?

Instead, it is better to think of radicalization as a phenomenon in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Multiple factors interact in complex ways that cause radicalization to emerge in individual people and groups. As with other complex systems, such as ecosystems, removing one factor does not cause the system to collapse but instead to evolve in ways that may be positive or negative. In the jihadist movement there have been many small tipping points, including the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and the Syrian civil war of 2011—each of which mobilized a new generation of fighters.

Profiles of jihadists have evolved over the years. Generally, revolutionary movements attract different kinds of recruits at different stages in their development. Many of the founders and leaders of the modern jihadist movement were educated members of the upper-middle or upper classes. Even many early foot soldiers were of above-average socio-economic status. Research on recruits to jihadist groups using data from the 1970s to 2010 found that members of these groups were six times more likely than the general population to have a bachelor’s degree. In the Middle East, engineering schools are often the most competitive programs and only take the best and brightest students; jihadists were seventeen times more likely to have an engineering degree. [...]

But as ISIS’s goals continued to evolve so too did their recruits. Few women from Europe ventured to Syria in the early days of the conflict, but by 2014 one in seven European foreign fighters were women, and by 2016 that number had jumped to one in three. Women didn’t become more vulnerable to radicalization over that period—instead, they were targeted for radicalization. Until 2014, ISIS’s local insurgency demanded mostly young men of fighting capacity and thus had little need for women. In June 2014, ISIS declared its so-called Caliphate and shifted its focus to state-building. In order to legitimize that state, the immigration of women, children, and families was explicitly sought after. Once the women arrived they began recruiting female friends, family members, and strangers over the Internet to pull in more “lionesses,” as they were often called, leading to the jump seen in 2016.

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Foreign Affairs: Anbar's Illusions

One of the United States’ greatest successes in the Iraq war was in Anbar, where U.S. military forces and a remarkable tribal uprising inflicted a stunning defeat upon al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the forerunner of today’s Islamic State (or ISIS). From shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 until 2006, Anbar, the country’s westernmost province and a Sunni stronghold, was the center of an entrenched insurgency, which by early 2006 was threatening Baghdad. Then in the fall of 2006, just as U.S. leaders were considering the prospect of defeat, Sunni tribes in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, formed a movement to partner with the Americans against AQI. This movement came to be known as the Anbar Awakening. Over the course of seven months of heavy fighting, the tribes, together with U.S. forces, overcame AQI in Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar. The awakening spread to the rest of the province and then to elsewhere in Iraq. AQI was pushed back, violence dropped, and the country witnessed a period of uneasy stability. [...]

Yet from today’s perspective, the victories of Anbar look fleeting. In January 2014, after years of preparation and growth, AQI’s successor, ISIS, conquered most of the province. The tribes that had formed the awakening movement were too divided and isolated to mount an effective resistance. From Anbar, ISIS went on to take Mosul and the rest of Sunni Iraq. Almost everything the United States had fought for from 2003 to 2007 was lost. And with Baghdad in danger, U.S. troops found themselves back in Anbar trying to help the Iraqi government recapture the province. Why did an apparent success turn out to be so fragile? [...]

What made these leaders decide to stand up against the insurgency? Publicly, they spoke of the need to bring peace to Ramadi and said they were tired of AQI’s violence. Sattar, for instance, said in a September 2006 interview that the “terrorists claimed that they were fighters working on liberating Iraq, but they turned out to be killers. Now all the people are fed up and have turned against them.” But the reality was less idealistic. AQI was brutal, but it had real support in Anbar, and the resistance to it began before it had committed its worst atrocities. The problem for the tribal leaders was that AQI was threatening their position in society—it had begun to push them aside, edging in on their territory and cutting into their smuggling business. A willingness to believe that Anbar rejected AQI for its violence, moreover, partly explains why Western observers were so surprised by the organization’s return in the guise of ISIS. [...]

After the U.S. departure, the Iraqi government became progressively more anti-Sunni. Although sectarianism had been evident throughout the time of the awakening, Maliki and the Anbar tribal leaders had reached a modus vivendi that shielded the province from its full force. Once the Americans were gone, however, Maliki began arresting Sunni politicians. In December 2012, government forces raided the home in Baghdad of the Iraqi finance minister, Rafi al-Issawi, an Anbar native and Sunni hero who had treated wounded Iraqis at the Fallujah hospital during the worst days of 2004. The raid sparked protests throughout the province, which persisted over the next year and sometimes led to clashes with the army. Most of Anbar’s tribal leaders backed the protests, yet in doing so they weakened their own control. They depended on the government for money, salaries, and privileges, but the protests forced them to choose between abandoning these perks or being discredited in the eyes of their tribesmen. And by accepting the legitimacy of mass political activity, the tribal leaders implicitly undermined their own authority. This enabled AQI supporters who had formerly been under the tribal thumb to come out, rally the people, and implicitly challenge the leaders who were now bereft of government support. 

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