Category Archives: Syria

Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, United States

Book Review – Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism & Defeating ISIS

BOOK REVIEW

Intro: In his new book Liam Byrne MP argues that the British government is making critical mistakes in its methods of combating home-grown extremism. Defeating Islamic State will probably mean taking on the digital caliphate.

THE WORLD was caught by surprise in June 2014 when the infamous terrorist group Islamic State (IS) declared a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. Within the space of just a few short months, like a rapidly spreading avenging fire, it had scorched across Syria and much of Iraq. In so doing, the group carved out an empire stretching more than 400 miles from Aleppo to the Iraqi town of Sulaiman Bek, a town just 60 miles from the Iranian border.

IS, also known as Isis, or Da’esh, seemed unstoppable at first, but it has now been pushed back, possibly decisively. Since the group inaugurated, it has lost an estimated 45,000 jihadists, as well as a slew of key towns and resources it previously controlled. Its most direct enemies – Kurds, Iraqi troops and Shia militias – are largely contained in Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and are advancing on the group’s de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa.

In this timely book, the Labour MP Liam Byrne, points out that the fight against Isis and its brutal ideology has many fronts. Isis is obsessed with controlling territory, as well as having higher aspirations by creating a global caliphate. For many years, though, the group existed without any territory. With its war on the world going badly, its digital caliphate is becoming ever more important.

Byrne offers up a wide-ranging and discursive study. In his book, he elicits and concentrates on what is arguably the most significant fight of all: the ‘battle of ideas’. Whilst his journey has taken him to northern Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, his most interesting discoveries are found and reported upon within in his own parliamentary constituency of Birmingham Hodge Hill. Here, Muslims boast the highest share of the population of any area in the UK.

Byrne is assertive that Isis and other jihadi groups such as Boko Haram and al-Qaeda are fundamentally heretical by nature. Essentially, he says, they are death cults, with as much relevance to most Muslims as David Koresh has had on mainstream Christianity. Ironically, however, Isis claims to espouse the purest form of Islam, the creed and doctrine pursued in the 7th century by the Prophet Muhammad. It believes that it has the power to repudiate and excommunicate apostates, an act known as takfir. But as the world has come to witness, this has metastasised into exterminations and genocide, as Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, and Muslims in the Middle East can attest.

In the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the group, notoriously known to the world as al-Qaeda, morphed with Saddam Hussein’s avowedly secular Ba’ath Party. What emerged was something yet even more ferocious as the terrorist group had a firm apparatus in which to operate from.

The objective of Isis was to trigger conflict between Iraq’s Shia majority, which came to power after the invasion, and the Sunni minority, which hitherto had the reins of power. The group’s global aim was to foment division between Muslims and everyone else.

Mr Byrne is of the firm believe that the British government is making a critical mistake in its methods of combating home-grown radicalism and extremism. He says its doctrine is symptomatic of a ‘clash of civilisations’ which makes Islam the problem. Counter-extremism programmes which operate in the UK such as Prevent are based on a ‘conveyer belt’ theory that specifically highlights religious conservatism as the trigger for radicalisation. But the author, citing security and academic sources, argues that anger and resentment, often engendered by a sense of marginalisation, are more powerful factors.

We should – at the very least – recognise the true nature of the extremist threat we face. The U.S. president-elect’s declared solution to dealing with Isis including heavy bombing and barring all Muslims from entering his country are, though, the very antithesis of proper reason and rationality which seems to be in such short supply these days. For clear insight, we could do worse than reach for Liam Byrne’s excellent and revealing narrative.

–     Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating Isis and Winning the Battle of Ideas by Liam Byrne is published by Biteback at £12.99

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Government, Politics, Russia, Syria, United Nations, United States

The tragic fate of Aleppo and the many lessons

WAR IN SYRIA

aleppo

Syrians walk through the former rebel-held Zebdiye district in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on December 23, 2016.

Intro: The real victory, however, belongs to Russia, which has become another force to be reckoned with in the Middle East

SOME CITIES have made history by being destroyed. Grozny, Dresden and Guernica, for instance, were reduced to rubble in the face of a massive onslaught. Aleppo, once Syria’s largest metropolis, will soon join their ranks. The city is on the verge of annihilation. Its 1,000-year-old Muslim heritage has turned to dust; Russian aircraft have targeted its hospitals and schools; its citizens have been under constant bombardment ever since Mr Putin lent his weight to Bashar al-Assad’s cause, many of whom have been starved and gassed. Nobody knows for sure how many of the tens of thousands who remain in the last Sunni Arab enclave will perish inside the ruins where they are sheltering. But even if they receive the safe passage they have been promised from the United Nations, their four-year deal in Aleppo has blown apart the principle that innocent people should be spared the ravages of war. Rather, a noxious and fiercely unpleasant and brutish reality has taken hold – and it threatens a more dangerous and unstable world.

To be insightful or to gauge the depth of Aleppo’s tragedy, we should return first to the initial protests in 2011 against Syria’s president. Many Sunnis marched cheerfully alongside Shias, Christians and Kurds. From the start, with extensive help from Iran, Assad set out to destroy the scope for peaceful resistance by using violence and intimidation to radicalise his people. Early on, his iniquitous claim that all rebels were “terrorists” was brazen.

There were turning points in this war when the West might have stepped in. It could have established a no-fly-zone, say, or provided a haven by which civilians could shelter. It might even have offered a full-scale programme of arming the rebels. But, paralysed by the legacy of military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West held back. As the fighting escalated into entrenched internecine warfare, the need for Western intervention grew, month by bloody month. The West may offer reasons as to why it refrained from becoming involved, such as how the risk and complexity of intervening grew faster by the week. As Syria’s tyrant was about to topple, Russia joined the fray, acting without conscience and to devastating effect. Mr Putin’s deliberate and timely act of helping with military force strengthened and recalibrated Assad’s hand once more. Aleppo’s fall is proof that Assad has prevailed and of Iran’s influence. The real victory, however, belongs to Russia, which has become another force to be reckoned with in the Middle East.

Similarly, the defeat is not just a striking blow to Assad’s opponents, but also to the Western conviction, particularly in foreign affairs, that values matter as well as interests. After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when Tutsis were slaughtered as the world turned its back, countries recognised that they have a duty to constrain brute force. When the UN accepted responsibility to protect the victims of war crimes, wherever they might be, conventions against the use of chemical weapons and the reckless killing of civilians took on a new relevance. The desire to then promote freedom and democracy was not far behind.

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This notion of liberal intervention has suffered grievously. The U.S.-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq has clearly demonstrated that not even the powerfullest country in history can impose democracy by force alone. The tragedy of Aleppo maybe less conspicuous, but the battle there is just as significant. Directly confronted with the Syrian president’s atrocities, the West has done no more than offering rephrased diplomatic utterances. By failing to stand up for what it is supposed to believe in, it has shown that its values are just words, and ones that can be ignored with impunity.

Plenty of others are culpable of blame. After Assad drenched his people in nerve gas, crossing an ‘American red line’, Britain’s parliament voted against taking even limited military action. As millions of displaced people fled to the borders that Syria shares with its neighbours – including Lebanon and Jordan – most European countries looked the other way. Barriers were put up by many EU countries to stem the tide of refugees.

Blame might also be attributed to Barack Obama. America has treated Syria as a trap to be avoided. The self-satisfied and priggish prediction by Washington that Russia would be bogged down in a ‘quagmire’ there has proved a historic misjudgement. It has been noticeable that, throughout Mr Obama’s presidency, the U.S. has sought to move the world from a system where America often acted alone to defend its values, with a few countries like Britain acting in concert, to one where the job of protecting international norms fell to all countries – because everyone benefited from the rules. Aleppo is a measure of how that policy has failed. Yet, as America has stepped back, the vacuum has been filled not by responsible countries that support the status quo, but by the likes of Russia and Iran which perceives the promotion of Western values as an insidious plot to bring about regime change in Moscow and Tehran.

The next American president could seek to reverse this. The difficulty, though, is that liberal intervention is not a stance likely to be supported by Donald Trump. Mr Trump’s appointment of Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, as his secretary of state, reinforces the point of his campaign message that will dishearten many – of notching up deals, not shoring up values.

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Striking deals is an essential part of diplomacy, especially with adversaries like Russia and Iran and competitors like China. Any foreign policy that lurches from deal to deal without a coherent strategy or of being anchored in values poses grave risks. Allies might become bargaining chips. Mr Trump has already stoked the flames by offering his support for democratic Taiwan as something to be traded in exchange for helping to cut America’s trade deficit with China. Beijing has declared Taiwan as a renegade province. Any grand bargain, too, that Mr Tillerson brokers with his friends in Russia which might result in American troops being pulled back from NATO’s front-line states in exchange for concerted diplomatic action against Iran or China would leave the Baltic States exposed to Russian aggression. One of America’s great strengths is its unparalleled network of alliances. Mr Trump must treat his allies with care, not freely trade them away.

Any emerging new order that is based purely on deals also risks being unpredictable and unstable. If Mr Trump fails to strike his much-anticipated deal with Russia, the two countries could rapidly fall out. In such an eventuality, never would Mr Obama’s cool and rational head be more missed. When might is right, small countries tend to be locked out or are forced to accept poor and meagre terms while the great powers of the world strut their stuff. Without a proper framework to bind them in, deals require frequent renegotiation, with uncertain outcomes. Complex, trans-border issues such as climate change become even harder to solve.

The world is witnessing what happens when values cannot hold back the chaos and anarchy of geopolitics. Aleppo has been abandoned in tragic circumstances amid the fighting which has been merciless. The people who have suffered the most at the hands of Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are the poor and the innocent.

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Government, Middle East, Russia, Syria, United Nations, United States

Aleppo and the silence of the West…

SYRIA

Intro: There have already been unconfirmed but credible reports of civilians being executed on an industrial scale. There can be no doubt about the appalling and inhumane conditions that exist in the ruins of the city

IMAGES from Aleppo have revealed the truly post-apocalyptic nature of its horror. Hundreds if not thousands of its buildings have been reduced to empty shells or confined to mere rubble on the ground. It is hard to believe that Aleppo was once Syria’s largest city, with a population of 2.3million. It was also the country’s industrial and financial centre.

Four years of brutal and savage fighting in eastern Aleppo have left thousands dead, millions more displaced, hospitals destroyed and food supplies completely wiped out.

Thinking more esoterically about these pictures will realise that within that destruction there are tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children, who are trapped. They are not getting out.

The ceasefire that had begun to see them helped and transported out of this war-torn place has broken down. Inevitably, there is some confusion around exactly what has happened. There are reports that the rebels were attempting to take heavy weapons and captives out with them, actions which are contrary to the agreement. There is also a suspicion that the militias backing the government of Bashar al-Assad are not sticking to the ceasefire agreement either, or that they are simply unaware of what the agreement is. The militias include a cocktail of fighters from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Pakistan.

Syria’s government and its proxy ally, Iran, had insisted the evacuation from eastern Aleppo could only happen with the simultaneous evacuation of two other towns, Foua and Kefraya, which have also been heavily besieged by rebels since September 2015. It is possible that condition has not been met.

Workers on the ground from the World Health Organisation said that the Russian military had halted the evacuation, but had not said why they had done so.

More troubling, still, is the official statement from Russia – which backs and supports the Syrian government – which said the operation to remove fighters and families from the area is ‘complete’. The Russian defence ministry said all militants and their families have left and all women and children have also been removed from the districts, making a total of around 9,500 evacuees.

But by any reasonable estimate there are many more people still in need of evacuation. In the past few days, the United Nations estimated there were 100,000 people trapped in the small number of eastern Aleppo districts not under the control of government forces.

As of now, the best estimate is that there are at least 50,000 still trapped. There have already been unconfirmed but credible reports of civilians being executed on an industrial scale. There can be no doubt about the appalling and inhumane conditions that exist in the ruins of the city.

We are in danger of standing by and letting this tragedy and humanitarian disaster deepen. Russia’s direct involvement and the victories of Assad over the forces backed by the UK and the US seems to have left us feeling powerless to intervene or by doing anything that will help to relieve the terrible toll that we can see happening.

It must surely now be time to bring all diplomatic and international pressure to bear to halt the killing and by bringing relief. Governments should be urged to do that.

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