I'm still surprised people thought retaking Mosul would be a simple task.
ISIS in Iraq and Syria
- Thread starter Suli
- Start date
Yeah, I know. Pretty disheartening.
Some ISIS pre-history:
Mosul.
Mosul...
toddler walking amongst dead family/relatives
more images
https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2017/7/6/mosul-endgame-in-images-caught-by-airstrikes-islamic-state
brutality and savagery of war - Iraqi troops + irregulars and war crimes
NWS!!!
http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/exclusive-footage-reveals-brutal-war-crimes-in-battle-against-isis/
That is fecking heartbreaking.To undercut Iran, Russians pressure Assad to cut Syria’s longtime ties to Hezbollah.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/17/russia-pressures-bashar-assad-to-cut-syrias-hezbol/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/17/russia-pressures-bashar-assad-to-cut-syrias-hezbol/
Have to say I find this quite unlikely. Unless the Russians have an agreement with Israel.
Even if it's true, very hard to see Assad downgrading ties with Iran in any way.
The massacre of Mosul: 40,000 feared dead in battle to take back city from Isis as scale of civilian casualties revealed.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...s-fighting-forces-islamic-state-a7848781.html
So where's the outrage?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...s-fighting-forces-islamic-state-a7848781.html
So where's the outrage?
Brilliant piece on the media coverage of the conflict.
Mass Media Siege: Comparing Coverage Of Mosul and Aleppo.
http://medialens.org/index.php/aler...e-comparing-coverage-of-mosul-and-aleppo.html
Mass Media Siege: Comparing Coverage Of Mosul and Aleppo.
http://medialens.org/index.php/aler...e-comparing-coverage-of-mosul-and-aleppo.html
Nice article here on Syria's Isma'ili minority, and why they've been ignored or forgotten throughout this conflict:
Why playing for pity in the face of Islamic State’s atrocities is counter-productive
In the Syrian town of Salamiyah the Ismailis are suffering—but are determined to keep control of their story
It often seems as if the extraordinary pluralism of Middle Eastern societies, religious as much as ethnic, tends to be brought to the world’s attention only once it has been destroyed. The civil war in Syria, for example, has made communities like the Yazidis, Alawites, Druze, Assyrians and Kurds newly familiar to a global audience. The sudden prominence of their desperate plight serves only to confirm the stereotype it should dispel—that of a monotonously Islamic society. Because they have been rendered into mere victims, such groups tend to be written out of a story, whose only permanent diversity is exhibited as the supposedly age-old enmity between Islam’s two major sects, Sunni and Shia.
It is undeniable that the war in Syria and Iraq has resulted in the targeting of smaller ethnic and religious communities. Yet by focusing so obsessively on war victims, we ignore these ethnic, religious and sectarian complexities, in the process giving too much credit to the transformative power of violence. Taking the Middle East’s pluralism to be dead encourages us in the west to match the Middle East’s violence with our own visions for the region’s forcible transformation.
The problem with taking on the identity of a victim is that it ends up supporting violence, though more by default than design. Tales of horror push us towards a zero-sum conception both of the Middle East’s present and its future, stripping victims of all will and volition. We can either descend into pessimism and indifference, or adopt a kind of counter-violence. One reason why the Kurds battling Islamic State (IS) have been invested with such fervent hopes, for instance, is because they appear to have thrown off their identity as victims—in their case by fighting back.
But there are other ways of refusing such an identity than taking up arms. In the Syrian town of Salamiyah and its environs in mid-May, IS fighters killed dozens of civilians, beheading women and dismembering children after smashing their heads in with bricks, as they sought to push into government-controlled territory. This is an area dominated by the Ismailis, a small Shia sub-sect which has desperately been trying to stay out of the war, but who are regarded by militants as apostates deserving of death. Surely no better victims can be imagined than these horrifically murdered innocents. And yet one would be hard-pressed to find evidence of Ismailis bewailing their condition, and throwing itself on the mercy of the international community.
The Syrian Ismailis are part of a small but multi-ethnic religious minority scattered across the globe, in places like India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and as immigrants in Europe and North America. It includes wealthy populations entirely capable of broadcasting the plight of their Syrian brethren. And yet they make no attempt to do so, even as Ismaili leaders are assiduous in providing relief to Syrian refugees in countries like Germany and Sweden, and are working behind the scenes to ensure the security of those still in Salamiyah. Long considered heretics by many if not most of their Muslim co-religionists, Ismailis remain suspicious of attracting too much attention, or at least of inviting publicity they cannot control.
The Ismailis have not been short of opportunities to be identified as victims. But through their bitter experience, they have always grasped that to be identified as such aggravates the problem. Not only does giving the impression of vulnerability result in the rise of opportunistic attacks, but self-identifying with this role also imposes an enormous psychic burden. Even those victims who occasionally become the subjects of global concern inevitably lose control of their own causes, and find themselves suddenly abandoned for newer arrivals. This is today true not only of Syrians, but also Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bosnians, Tibetans or Vietnamese in the past, to say nothing of Rwandans or South Sudanese. In all these cases the uncertain benefits of global attention stand in contrast to the victim’s loss of moral and political autonomy.
This realisation first came to the Ismailis in 1972, when the dictator Idi Amin expelled all people of Indian origin from Uganda. Unable to rely on the assistance of western countries, whose governments had to manage anti-immigrant feeling, the Ismailis’ spiritual leader the Aga Khan made arrangements with Canada to guarantee the financial security of Ismaili refugees. He chartered all the aircraft available in east and central Africa to fly out Ismailis and other Asians, most ending up in Britain and Canada, and went on to found a relief agency of the community’s own. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, similar arrangements were made. Then there was Tajikistan’s civil war in the 1990s and now the crisis in Syria.
Through all this, the violence and trauma they have to deal with is carefully sequestered from the community’s identity, which they understand must remain unsullied by violence if it is not to become a site of paranoia and visions of revenge. Even today, when the circulation of gory videos on social media are used to fire up indignation on all sides of the Syrian conflict, most Ismailis ignore them. And if they possess certain advantages, such as a wealthy diaspora and influential leader, vulnerable Ismaili populations have generally been poor and unarmed minorities in rural areas.
By denying the logic of victimisation, Ismailis refuse to acknowledge one of the modern world’s most important identities. This doesn’t make their efforts to deal with violence ideal: there is much that could be improved on. Crucial, however, is their recognition that victimisation is a language shared by the bitterest foes, one that allows neither to escape this brutal intimacy. If anything, IS fighters possess a more intense idea than their enemies of the Muslim victim’s suffering, and so the need for violence to avenge it. Victimisation and violence are thus interlinked, and if the history of a small sectarian minority can tell us anything, it is that we must abandon one to reject the other.
Upturning the accounts of sectarian loyalty that define the Syrian conflict, Salamiyah was the second town in the country to rise against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Its Free Army, however, was soon disbanded as none of the other groups in the opposition would have anything to do with people they considered heretics. Subsequently pro-Assad factions have arisen among Ismailis, though the sect’s leadership has refused to resort to arms in support of the regime, whose protection of them thus remains both casual and cruel. Instead aid dispatched by the Aga Khan’s development network supports the town, which has become a magnet for Sunni refugees from elsewhere in Syria. Clearly identities are far more complex than most imagine, and a pluralist society is still possible, even in the middle of what is seen as a sectarian war.
Why playing for pity in the face of Islamic State’s atrocities is counter-productive
In the Syrian town of Salamiyah the Ismailis are suffering—but are determined to keep control of their story
It often seems as if the extraordinary pluralism of Middle Eastern societies, religious as much as ethnic, tends to be brought to the world’s attention only once it has been destroyed. The civil war in Syria, for example, has made communities like the Yazidis, Alawites, Druze, Assyrians and Kurds newly familiar to a global audience. The sudden prominence of their desperate plight serves only to confirm the stereotype it should dispel—that of a monotonously Islamic society. Because they have been rendered into mere victims, such groups tend to be written out of a story, whose only permanent diversity is exhibited as the supposedly age-old enmity between Islam’s two major sects, Sunni and Shia.
It is undeniable that the war in Syria and Iraq has resulted in the targeting of smaller ethnic and religious communities. Yet by focusing so obsessively on war victims, we ignore these ethnic, religious and sectarian complexities, in the process giving too much credit to the transformative power of violence. Taking the Middle East’s pluralism to be dead encourages us in the west to match the Middle East’s violence with our own visions for the region’s forcible transformation.
The problem with taking on the identity of a victim is that it ends up supporting violence, though more by default than design. Tales of horror push us towards a zero-sum conception both of the Middle East’s present and its future, stripping victims of all will and volition. We can either descend into pessimism and indifference, or adopt a kind of counter-violence. One reason why the Kurds battling Islamic State (IS) have been invested with such fervent hopes, for instance, is because they appear to have thrown off their identity as victims—in their case by fighting back.
But there are other ways of refusing such an identity than taking up arms. In the Syrian town of Salamiyah and its environs in mid-May, IS fighters killed dozens of civilians, beheading women and dismembering children after smashing their heads in with bricks, as they sought to push into government-controlled territory. This is an area dominated by the Ismailis, a small Shia sub-sect which has desperately been trying to stay out of the war, but who are regarded by militants as apostates deserving of death. Surely no better victims can be imagined than these horrifically murdered innocents. And yet one would be hard-pressed to find evidence of Ismailis bewailing their condition, and throwing itself on the mercy of the international community.
The Syrian Ismailis are part of a small but multi-ethnic religious minority scattered across the globe, in places like India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and as immigrants in Europe and North America. It includes wealthy populations entirely capable of broadcasting the plight of their Syrian brethren. And yet they make no attempt to do so, even as Ismaili leaders are assiduous in providing relief to Syrian refugees in countries like Germany and Sweden, and are working behind the scenes to ensure the security of those still in Salamiyah. Long considered heretics by many if not most of their Muslim co-religionists, Ismailis remain suspicious of attracting too much attention, or at least of inviting publicity they cannot control.
The Ismailis have not been short of opportunities to be identified as victims. But through their bitter experience, they have always grasped that to be identified as such aggravates the problem. Not only does giving the impression of vulnerability result in the rise of opportunistic attacks, but self-identifying with this role also imposes an enormous psychic burden. Even those victims who occasionally become the subjects of global concern inevitably lose control of their own causes, and find themselves suddenly abandoned for newer arrivals. This is today true not only of Syrians, but also Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bosnians, Tibetans or Vietnamese in the past, to say nothing of Rwandans or South Sudanese. In all these cases the uncertain benefits of global attention stand in contrast to the victim’s loss of moral and political autonomy.
This realisation first came to the Ismailis in 1972, when the dictator Idi Amin expelled all people of Indian origin from Uganda. Unable to rely on the assistance of western countries, whose governments had to manage anti-immigrant feeling, the Ismailis’ spiritual leader the Aga Khan made arrangements with Canada to guarantee the financial security of Ismaili refugees. He chartered all the aircraft available in east and central Africa to fly out Ismailis and other Asians, most ending up in Britain and Canada, and went on to found a relief agency of the community’s own. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, similar arrangements were made. Then there was Tajikistan’s civil war in the 1990s and now the crisis in Syria.
Through all this, the violence and trauma they have to deal with is carefully sequestered from the community’s identity, which they understand must remain unsullied by violence if it is not to become a site of paranoia and visions of revenge. Even today, when the circulation of gory videos on social media are used to fire up indignation on all sides of the Syrian conflict, most Ismailis ignore them. And if they possess certain advantages, such as a wealthy diaspora and influential leader, vulnerable Ismaili populations have generally been poor and unarmed minorities in rural areas.
By denying the logic of victimisation, Ismailis refuse to acknowledge one of the modern world’s most important identities. This doesn’t make their efforts to deal with violence ideal: there is much that could be improved on. Crucial, however, is their recognition that victimisation is a language shared by the bitterest foes, one that allows neither to escape this brutal intimacy. If anything, IS fighters possess a more intense idea than their enemies of the Muslim victim’s suffering, and so the need for violence to avenge it. Victimisation and violence are thus interlinked, and if the history of a small sectarian minority can tell us anything, it is that we must abandon one to reject the other.
Upturning the accounts of sectarian loyalty that define the Syrian conflict, Salamiyah was the second town in the country to rise against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Its Free Army, however, was soon disbanded as none of the other groups in the opposition would have anything to do with people they considered heretics. Subsequently pro-Assad factions have arisen among Ismailis, though the sect’s leadership has refused to resort to arms in support of the regime, whose protection of them thus remains both casual and cruel. Instead aid dispatched by the Aga Khan’s development network supports the town, which has become a magnet for Sunni refugees from elsewhere in Syria. Clearly identities are far more complex than most imagine, and a pluralist society is still possible, even in the middle of what is seen as a sectarian war.
Oops...
Following up what I posted earlier, Idlib is now completely (and publicly) under Al-Nusra control.
Jihadists take control of major Syrian city
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/jihadists-control-syrias-idlib-rebel-pull-monitor-174640341.html
Oops x 2.
Has the Middle East media not reported on this? Al Jazeera and those others?
I meant the Western media and politicians that were crying non stop about the plight of the people of eastern Aleppo when Russian airforce and SAA were fighting the rebels there. Mosul siege is on a different scale altogether yet you barely hear about it.
I call it a selective grief. Americans and their European allies only bring up these issues when it suits their agenda. That's the worst kind of hypocricy, because it involves life and death of thousands of innocent people.
Welcome to every media outlet on the planet. I really don't get the outrage when the West selectively reports things on its agenda. Every country does it and always will.
Like night follows day, disaster follows small gains
Turkish army enters Kobanê Canton - UPDATE
The invading Turkish army has entered and deployed military forces in Rojava’s Kobanê Canton
https://anfenglish.com/rojava/turkish-army-enters-kobane-canton-21277
Not sure how reliable it is though.
It calls their credibility into question. When they label one side (Russia, Syria) war criminals for doing exactly the same thing their own governments are doing in Mosul, it's kind of ah, face meet palm, moment.
As long as you're aware of it it's fine. There is no such thing as impartial media and there never has been.
The problem is that, how many don't question it? Or don't have a higher education that has taught them to search out primary source material of different accounts?
It's rabble rousing. It's fecking dangerous to boot.
Do you think it the Turks we just leave them alone ? Can't see it myself.
Not sure where to put this, but it concerns Iraq. Saddam probably falsified the reports about child mortality in the 90s. The whole narrative about "sanctions killing 100.000+ children" seems to be a fabrication.
http://gh.bmj.com/content/2/2/e000311#sec-7
http://gh.bmj.com/content/2/2/e000311#sec-7
This is something I've argued on here before. The way people talk about the so-called 'artificial borders', the only implication to be drawn is that they'd rather see purified ethnic/sectarian states in their place, which given the history of the region would be the most 'artificial' arrangement of them all. And that's setting aside the fact that most of the states in the region actually have some pre-colonial historical precedent which lends them legitimacy, and were created with a lot of input from local elites (this is something an increasing number of scholars are teasing out right now, especially in regards to Iraq, which is the classic case often given). These people can never outline what a 'natural' Middle East would look like.
3 years since this:
Jenan Moussa again with a thread here on the ISIS wives' attitudes towards the Yazidi slaves:
Jenan Moussa again with a thread here on the ISIS wives' attitudes towards the Yazidi slaves:
I've now come across a good number of articles stating the alleged chief part of the Sykes-Picot agreement in determining the current state of the ME is actually a myth.
To me, all this is part of a huge general tendency to explain social conflict on ethnic and cultural terms. Something goes wrong somewhere? Not enough homogeneity! Most of the time it isn't even supposed to need any further proof, as many people think it's self-explanatory. It's really frustrating.
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The ironic thing is that those who are so quick to bemoan the 'artificial borders' and advocate more ethnic/sectarian homogeneity are often the most vocal critics of the two states in the region which were founded partly (and explicitly) based on that ideal, Israel and Lebanon.
As for Sykes-Picot, it's more a symbol than anything else. It was never actually implemented. Funny thing is when ISIS bull-dozed the Syrian-Iraqi border three years ago and claimed they were breaking Sykes-Picot, they were actually bringing the borders more in line with what the Sykes-Picot map envisaged.
Overall I agree with your sentiment.
One thing I strongly suspect is that modern (nationalistic) liberal western democracies aren't anywhere near as good at multiculturalism as we often pretend; especially if they are on a trajectory towards institutionalising more progressivism (instead of affirming a classical liberal tradition). That would imply that exporting/fostering/promoting "our" model of governance into a multi-cultural/-ethnical/-religious states is a pretty bad idea. If that sentiment is true, what's often portrayed as solution would be in fact part of the problem. Copy-pasting western politics would turn into a driver of ethnic tension.
I have to add that this doesn't imply that these states can't/shouldn't become democratic/liberal. Just that they need to find their own arrangements and some of them might not be exactly the same as in Europe. We should be open-minded about that. Considering European history, it is save to say that we haven't found all the answers yet.
With perfect timing:
@antihenry brings up some valid points regarding hypocrisy here. Imo the destruction in both Aleppo and Mosul are deplorable.
Is anything left of Mosul?
Is anything left of Mosul?
No shock sadly. 9 months of fighting inside a city really only has one outcome for the city and it's people. Always best avoided if possible but if the defenders won't leave and the other side is not willing to concede letting them keep the city. Well that city and it's people are well and truly fecked.
Raqqa still enduring the misery of a Mosul-like siege. Still no clear end-game...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41041825
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41041825
Syrian Army is rapidly advancing in eastern Syria - less than 10 km from Deir ez-Zor
Something on tonight about undercover reporters being groomed by them. I find it amazing there are still manuals online for them to use. I know they can't always get everything, but come on? More and more, I don't believe that the government a) wants a real route out of this, and b) actually wants the safety of our people. With resources there are very real options for alleviating the problem...but they do very little.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-eng...-tried-to-groom-a-reporter-for-london-attacks
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-eng...-tried-to-groom-a-reporter-for-london-attacks