The Unraveling of Government by a former House member tells about some of the policies that cause polarization. One fragment: On the House floor, Republicans and Democrats must speak from separate lecterns and when they step off the floor to use their phones, drink coffee or read newspapers, they do so in separate cloakrooms. That well-known center aisle is like the mighty Mississippi, a wide divide that extends through everything the Congress does. That is why on almost every major issue, from spending and taxes to Supreme Court nominations, almost all Republicans are on one side and almost all Democrats are on the other side.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
US still using "double taps" - killing helpers
One of the often repeated complaints about the NATO bombing in Libya was the use of "double taps". After NATO had bombed a place a couple of minutes later it would come back to bomb again - and hit all those who had rushed out to help the victims.
Now it appears the US is using the same tactic in its drone attacks on Pakistan.
The UN is investigating the issue (UN team to investigate civilian drone deaths).
Now it appears the US is using the same tactic in its drone attacks on Pakistan.
The UN is investigating the issue (UN team to investigate civilian drone deaths).
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Mob rule
As I have mentioned before I consider the "non-violent" protests inspired by the color revolutions and the Arab Spring as classical examples at mob rule. The protesters do not represent the majority of the population but they just behave that way and then are accepted as such by the Western press. All the behavior like occupying the most important square of a town is supposed to transfer message of entitlement.
This climate of mob rule has continued after the fall of the regimes in Northern Africa. Reports from Tunisia tell about militia's imposing Islamic rules in the villages and towns. Most alcohol shops have been destroyed or disappeared. Many women feel now forced to walk veiled. To a lesser extend the same process is at work in Egypt.
In Libya the mob rule has gone one step further with its steady growing militias. Recently Islamic militias destroyed Sufi shrines. They were busy for days and it took place in the center of Tripoli but the government did not interfere. The interior minister defended it as that he didn't want to endanger government troops. Only after the killing of the US ambassador was he forced to resign.
The recent eviction of several militias from Benghazi may sound as an improvement but it is once again "mob rule" instead of the government resuming the monopoly of power.
According to the NYT another reason for not abolishing the militias is that there are too few authorized police to do the job. But that is nonsense. One could absorb some militia members in the police with the explicit requirement that they follow studies. This would place them at least under government control. According to the article Libya's government has now ordered the breakup of the militia's. But the article is skeptical whether that will work.
This climate of mob rule has continued after the fall of the regimes in Northern Africa. Reports from Tunisia tell about militia's imposing Islamic rules in the villages and towns. Most alcohol shops have been destroyed or disappeared. Many women feel now forced to walk veiled. To a lesser extend the same process is at work in Egypt.
In Libya the mob rule has gone one step further with its steady growing militias. Recently Islamic militias destroyed Sufi shrines. They were busy for days and it took place in the center of Tripoli but the government did not interfere. The interior minister defended it as that he didn't want to endanger government troops. Only after the killing of the US ambassador was he forced to resign.
The recent eviction of several militias from Benghazi may sound as an improvement but it is once again "mob rule" instead of the government resuming the monopoly of power.
According to the NYT another reason for not abolishing the militias is that there are too few authorized police to do the job. But that is nonsense. One could absorb some militia members in the police with the explicit requirement that they follow studies. This would place them at least under government control. According to the article Libya's government has now ordered the breakup of the militia's. But the article is skeptical whether that will work.
Friday, September 21, 2012
The impossible science of international relations
It is well known that World War I happened completely unexpected. Everyone thought only in terms of short victorious military operations. And then suddenly they were in a swamp.
This is no coincidence. When people know here is a danger for large war they tend to take precautions not to let minor conflicts get out of hand. But when they feel safe to prevail arrogance often gets the upperhand.
We see this arrogance in Syria too. We keep hearing that just a little bit more support for the FSA will help the rebels win. In fact the only thing that changes with more support for the FSA is that the daily death toll rises. As I have written before a Libya-style victory in the Syrian context could easily cost the lives of 200,000 people. (In Libya 30,000 people were killed. Syria has a population that is three times as large, better defendable terrain and sharper ethnic divisions.) If our leaders would be open about this risk they would feel pressured to seek some compromise. But as long as everyone keeps hiding behind the idea of a speedy victory the conflict is doomed to go on.
This is no coincidence. When people know here is a danger for large war they tend to take precautions not to let minor conflicts get out of hand. But when they feel safe to prevail arrogance often gets the upperhand.
We see this arrogance in Syria too. We keep hearing that just a little bit more support for the FSA will help the rebels win. In fact the only thing that changes with more support for the FSA is that the daily death toll rises. As I have written before a Libya-style victory in the Syrian context could easily cost the lives of 200,000 people. (In Libya 30,000 people were killed. Syria has a population that is three times as large, better defendable terrain and sharper ethnic divisions.) If our leaders would be open about this risk they would feel pressured to seek some compromise. But as long as everyone keeps hiding behind the idea of a speedy victory the conflict is doomed to go on.
Syrian Jihadism
Here some quotes from the report Syrian Jihadism by the Swedish Institute for International Affairs. The report is 46 pages, so this is just an impression.
As Fabrice Balanche has documented, major military conflict is limited to Sunni Arab areas only, while territories inhabited by religious minorities (such as Alawites, Druze or Christians) have by and large remained passively or actively supportive of the regime (Balanche 2011). [page 7]
The following fragment discusses the fact that more deaths are registered in Sunni areas. It is interesting because this is the province where the rebels claim to just have conquered a border post and are trying to infiltrate: The only real outlier in terms of religious demography and casualty numbers is the Raqqa Governorate in north-central Syria. Its more than 800,000 inhabitants are mostly Sunni Arabs, but the number VDC-counted deaths stood at only 73 on August 7, 2012. Different hypotheses may be advanced for this, including the tribal nature of the area, the low population density in the countryside, pro-government attitudes in some recently constructed communities (in conjunction with the Tabqa Dam project on the Euphrates), etc, but the Raqqa case clearly merits further study. [note page 7/8]
The non-armed opposition both inside and outside Syria retains some high-profile activists from a religious minority background, many of them formerly leading figures within the secular, pre-revolutionary dissident movement (including Alawites like Abdelaziz el-Khayyer or Aref Dalila, and Christians like Georges Sabra or Michel Kilo). However, this “political” opposition is by now marginalized by the military confrontation.
Virtually all members of the armed insurgent groups, regardless of their ideological inclination, are Sunni Arabs. They hail mostly from agricultural regions and provincial towns, which have suffered economically from Bashar el-Assad’s reform program. Major cities and middle-class areas have mostly remained quiet, but the insurgency now has a firm foothold in the ”poverty belt” of ramshackle suburbs ringing both Aleppo and Damascus, after decades of in-migration from deteriorating conditions in the countryside. [page 9]
The insurgent movement comprises some tens of thousands of fighters. It is organizationally split among hundreds of autonomous units, generally called ”brigades” (katiba, pl. kataeb), regardless of their actual size. [..] They are generally ”gathered along village or extended family lines, with little ideological content”. Fighters tend to be ”conservative and practicing Muslims” but organized and ideologically conscious Islamists form only a small minority (Jaulmes 2012).4 Even so, most fighters are acutely aware of their Sunni Muslim identity, and over time, the insurgent movement has taken on a Sunni sectarian hue. [page 9]
Nir Rosen, an American journalist who has travelled extensively among the Syrian rebels, points out that many insurgents ”were not religious before the uprising, but now pray and are inspired by Islam, which gives them a creed and a discourse.”(Rosen 2012a).[page 10]
A 1979-1982 uprising against Hafez el-Assad also began in a wave of broad civil protest against tyranny and a faltering economy, but was quickly sidetracked into violent sectarian conflict. [page 11]
The opposing side is not only a secular tyranny, but also identified with a ”heretical” religious group, the Alawites – or ”Noseiris”, as jihadis prefer to call them, using an older, denigrating term. Most Sunni theologians agree that Alawites cannot be accepted as Muslims, and the stricter salafi interpretations, which rely on old fatwas by the medieval scholar Ibn Taimiya, call for their expulsion or even extermination. Last but not least, el-Sham (a word which can mean both Damascus and the Levant or Greater Syria) plays an important role in Muslim eschatology, as a battlefield near the end of days.[page 11]
There are also a number of FSA Military Councils (Majalis Askariya) inside the country, currently nine. The councils generally represent the single strongest coalition of insurgent groups in their home areas, but this varies considerably from province to province. According to a source sympathetic to the Military Councils, they collectively gather some 50-60 percent of the total number of fighters identifying as “FSA” (excluding a significant minority of rebels who do not use the FSA label at all). [page 12]
“If you ask any of the nine Military Council commanders, they will tell you they have no general commander”, explains Brian Sayers, director of government relations for the Syrian Support Group, an American organization which provides funds and training to the FSA Military Councils.
In March 2012, five Military Councils jointly announced the creation of a new “internal” FSA leadership, appointing the Homs Military Council commander Col. Qasem Saadeddine as their top commander. Many viewed this as a move intended to displace Col. Asaad’s ineffectual exile leadership. Months later, the joint command does not appear to function well, if at all. Col. Saadeddine continues to appear in the media under this title, but his influence does not seem to extend beyond his own Homs Military Council. [page 13]
While attempting to build up the SNC-FSA alliance as the centrepiece of the Syrian opposition, these same states have also tried to hamper the development of rival, non-state Islamic donor channels. In May 2012, a number of Saudi religious scholars were ordered to stop collecting funds privately, and instead direct their followers to officially sanctioned aid agencies. A salafi-led aid group known as the Ulema Committee to Support Syria was forced to shut down its activity. [page 17/18]
High-ranking members of the Saudi religious establishment have since decreed that it is unlawful for Saudis to finance or fight in the Syrian jihad on their own initiative. According to Ali bin Abbas al-Hakami and Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Mutlaq of the Senior Ulema Commission, ”the FSA is responsible for the fighting and jihad in Syria, and should be supported”, but only through official channels set up by the Saudi government. Other states have issued similar rulings via the mosques, to stem the flow of volunteers and money to Syrian extremist groups ('Tunisian spokesman calls on preachers to stop pushing jihad in Syria among the youth'.)
However, private donations keep trickling into Syria, and the insurgents remain heavily reliant on informal methods of transfer. For example, a financing network run on behalf of the Syrian salafi theologian Mohammed Surour Zeinelabidin (funded mainly by Gulf donors) appears to be active in supporting both humanitarian and paramilitary Islamist groups, primarily in southern Syria. Islamic organizations and expat Syrian financiers continue to be a favored source of support even for non-ideological rebel commanders, due to the minimal red tape and corruption, and their proven track record of getting money into Syria. [page 18]
In an interview with Time Magazine, a member of the jihadi Ahrar el-Sham Brigades noted the inefficiency of the FSA’s state support in contrast to their own privately funded religious channels, saying that FSA members “get more support than we do, but our support is delivered to us, theirs doesn’t make it to them. [...] Their support stays in Turkey, it doesn’t make it to the revolutionaries here. If our supporters send us 100 lira, we get 100 lira.” [page 20]
Two groups in particular have been identified with the foreign fighter phenomenon: Jabhat el-Nosra and the Ahrar el-Sham Brigades. Both are among the most extreme salafi groups in the Syrian rebel movement, and Jabhat el-Nosra in particular is closely tied to the transnational jihadi environment. When asked by an el-Hayat reporter, an FSA commander in the Hama countryside singled out these two groups for using foreign fighters, claiming however that they comprise less than 20 percent of the manpower in Jabhat el-Nosra and less than 5 percent in Ahrar el-Sham. [page 21]
About the Jabhat el-Nosra group (believed to be closest to Al Qaeda): The same source adds that Jabhat el-Nosra freely receives non-Syrian volunteers, and that although the foreigners rarely participate in battles, they carry out the majority of suicide operations and conduct training for local members. However, the source also claims that some members of Jabhat el-Nosra are known to him for collaborating with the Assad regime during the Iraq war, and states that he believes that the group is “indirectly” manipulated by the regime. [page 26]
The second half of the report discusses a number of rebel organizations with some jihadist sympathies.
As Fabrice Balanche has documented, major military conflict is limited to Sunni Arab areas only, while territories inhabited by religious minorities (such as Alawites, Druze or Christians) have by and large remained passively or actively supportive of the regime (Balanche 2011). [page 7]
The following fragment discusses the fact that more deaths are registered in Sunni areas. It is interesting because this is the province where the rebels claim to just have conquered a border post and are trying to infiltrate: The only real outlier in terms of religious demography and casualty numbers is the Raqqa Governorate in north-central Syria. Its more than 800,000 inhabitants are mostly Sunni Arabs, but the number VDC-counted deaths stood at only 73 on August 7, 2012. Different hypotheses may be advanced for this, including the tribal nature of the area, the low population density in the countryside, pro-government attitudes in some recently constructed communities (in conjunction with the Tabqa Dam project on the Euphrates), etc, but the Raqqa case clearly merits further study. [note page 7/8]
The non-armed opposition both inside and outside Syria retains some high-profile activists from a religious minority background, many of them formerly leading figures within the secular, pre-revolutionary dissident movement (including Alawites like Abdelaziz el-Khayyer or Aref Dalila, and Christians like Georges Sabra or Michel Kilo). However, this “political” opposition is by now marginalized by the military confrontation.
Virtually all members of the armed insurgent groups, regardless of their ideological inclination, are Sunni Arabs. They hail mostly from agricultural regions and provincial towns, which have suffered economically from Bashar el-Assad’s reform program. Major cities and middle-class areas have mostly remained quiet, but the insurgency now has a firm foothold in the ”poverty belt” of ramshackle suburbs ringing both Aleppo and Damascus, after decades of in-migration from deteriorating conditions in the countryside. [page 9]
The insurgent movement comprises some tens of thousands of fighters. It is organizationally split among hundreds of autonomous units, generally called ”brigades” (katiba, pl. kataeb), regardless of their actual size. [..] They are generally ”gathered along village or extended family lines, with little ideological content”. Fighters tend to be ”conservative and practicing Muslims” but organized and ideologically conscious Islamists form only a small minority (Jaulmes 2012).4 Even so, most fighters are acutely aware of their Sunni Muslim identity, and over time, the insurgent movement has taken on a Sunni sectarian hue. [page 9]
Nir Rosen, an American journalist who has travelled extensively among the Syrian rebels, points out that many insurgents ”were not religious before the uprising, but now pray and are inspired by Islam, which gives them a creed and a discourse.”(Rosen 2012a).[page 10]
A 1979-1982 uprising against Hafez el-Assad also began in a wave of broad civil protest against tyranny and a faltering economy, but was quickly sidetracked into violent sectarian conflict. [page 11]
The opposing side is not only a secular tyranny, but also identified with a ”heretical” religious group, the Alawites – or ”Noseiris”, as jihadis prefer to call them, using an older, denigrating term. Most Sunni theologians agree that Alawites cannot be accepted as Muslims, and the stricter salafi interpretations, which rely on old fatwas by the medieval scholar Ibn Taimiya, call for their expulsion or even extermination. Last but not least, el-Sham (a word which can mean both Damascus and the Levant or Greater Syria) plays an important role in Muslim eschatology, as a battlefield near the end of days.[page 11]
There are also a number of FSA Military Councils (Majalis Askariya) inside the country, currently nine. The councils generally represent the single strongest coalition of insurgent groups in their home areas, but this varies considerably from province to province. According to a source sympathetic to the Military Councils, they collectively gather some 50-60 percent of the total number of fighters identifying as “FSA” (excluding a significant minority of rebels who do not use the FSA label at all). [page 12]
“If you ask any of the nine Military Council commanders, they will tell you they have no general commander”, explains Brian Sayers, director of government relations for the Syrian Support Group, an American organization which provides funds and training to the FSA Military Councils.
In March 2012, five Military Councils jointly announced the creation of a new “internal” FSA leadership, appointing the Homs Military Council commander Col. Qasem Saadeddine as their top commander. Many viewed this as a move intended to displace Col. Asaad’s ineffectual exile leadership. Months later, the joint command does not appear to function well, if at all. Col. Saadeddine continues to appear in the media under this title, but his influence does not seem to extend beyond his own Homs Military Council. [page 13]
While attempting to build up the SNC-FSA alliance as the centrepiece of the Syrian opposition, these same states have also tried to hamper the development of rival, non-state Islamic donor channels. In May 2012, a number of Saudi religious scholars were ordered to stop collecting funds privately, and instead direct their followers to officially sanctioned aid agencies. A salafi-led aid group known as the Ulema Committee to Support Syria was forced to shut down its activity. [page 17/18]
High-ranking members of the Saudi religious establishment have since decreed that it is unlawful for Saudis to finance or fight in the Syrian jihad on their own initiative. According to Ali bin Abbas al-Hakami and Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Mutlaq of the Senior Ulema Commission, ”the FSA is responsible for the fighting and jihad in Syria, and should be supported”, but only through official channels set up by the Saudi government. Other states have issued similar rulings via the mosques, to stem the flow of volunteers and money to Syrian extremist groups ('Tunisian spokesman calls on preachers to stop pushing jihad in Syria among the youth'.)
However, private donations keep trickling into Syria, and the insurgents remain heavily reliant on informal methods of transfer. For example, a financing network run on behalf of the Syrian salafi theologian Mohammed Surour Zeinelabidin (funded mainly by Gulf donors) appears to be active in supporting both humanitarian and paramilitary Islamist groups, primarily in southern Syria. Islamic organizations and expat Syrian financiers continue to be a favored source of support even for non-ideological rebel commanders, due to the minimal red tape and corruption, and their proven track record of getting money into Syria. [page 18]
In an interview with Time Magazine, a member of the jihadi Ahrar el-Sham Brigades noted the inefficiency of the FSA’s state support in contrast to their own privately funded religious channels, saying that FSA members “get more support than we do, but our support is delivered to us, theirs doesn’t make it to them. [...] Their support stays in Turkey, it doesn’t make it to the revolutionaries here. If our supporters send us 100 lira, we get 100 lira.” [page 20]
Two groups in particular have been identified with the foreign fighter phenomenon: Jabhat el-Nosra and the Ahrar el-Sham Brigades. Both are among the most extreme salafi groups in the Syrian rebel movement, and Jabhat el-Nosra in particular is closely tied to the transnational jihadi environment. When asked by an el-Hayat reporter, an FSA commander in the Hama countryside singled out these two groups for using foreign fighters, claiming however that they comprise less than 20 percent of the manpower in Jabhat el-Nosra and less than 5 percent in Ahrar el-Sham. [page 21]
About the Jabhat el-Nosra group (believed to be closest to Al Qaeda): The same source adds that Jabhat el-Nosra freely receives non-Syrian volunteers, and that although the foreigners rarely participate in battles, they carry out the majority of suicide operations and conduct training for local members. However, the source also claims that some members of Jabhat el-Nosra are known to him for collaborating with the Assad regime during the Iraq war, and states that he believes that the group is “indirectly” manipulated by the regime. [page 26]
The second half of the report discusses a number of rebel organizations with some jihadist sympathies.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Radicals among the Syrian rebels
In this post I want to collect links about the role of Muslim radicals among the rebels. As some other posts in this blog it is a post that will be updated regularly with new information.
Syria Rebel: Sunni Jihadists After Shiite Hostages: A Syrian rebel commander holding 10 Lebanese Shiites hostage said Thursday he is willing to release the men but fears doing so could set off a wave of reprisal attacks by Sunni extremists. [..] He said the kidnappings were aimed at persuading Hezbollah, a strident backer of President Bashar Assad, to reconsider its commitment to the Syrian regime. Instead it set off a string of revenge kidnappings by Shiite clansmen inside Lebanon, with two Turks and some 20 Syrians being snatched by gunmen. [..] "After (Omar's) release, the Northern Storm brigade began to receive threats from Sunni extremist groups in Lebanon, Iraq and some in Syria," Abu Ibrahim told The Associated Press in an interview at a customs house in this Syrian border town: "They told us, the hostages are members of Hezbollah and should be killed."
Holy Warriors:
A field guide to Syria's jihadi groups by Aron Lund provides a description of the main fighting groups in Syria.
Syria Rebel: Sunni Jihadists After Shiite Hostages: A Syrian rebel commander holding 10 Lebanese Shiites hostage said Thursday he is willing to release the men but fears doing so could set off a wave of reprisal attacks by Sunni extremists. [..] He said the kidnappings were aimed at persuading Hezbollah, a strident backer of President Bashar Assad, to reconsider its commitment to the Syrian regime. Instead it set off a string of revenge kidnappings by Shiite clansmen inside Lebanon, with two Turks and some 20 Syrians being snatched by gunmen. [..] "After (Omar's) release, the Northern Storm brigade began to receive threats from Sunni extremist groups in Lebanon, Iraq and some in Syria," Abu Ibrahim told The Associated Press in an interview at a customs house in this Syrian border town: "They told us, the hostages are members of Hezbollah and should be killed."
Holy Warriors:
A field guide to Syria's jihadi groups by Aron Lund provides a description of the main fighting groups in Syria.
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
Whose fault is Syria's ethnic polarization?
Nowadays one can find many newspaper articles that claim that Assad is playing the ethnic card. Others think that Syria's ethnic polarization is no one's fault but the inevitable consequence of the circumstances. Unfortunately I have yet to see the first article that blames the rebels. Yet that seems to me the most logical explanation.
The uprising in Syria is at its core an uprising by fundamentalist Sunni's connected with the local Muslim Brotherhood. As they form only a small fraction of the Syrian population (maybe 10-15%) they have tried to broaden their base. One way to do that was the "democratization" card. But the Westernized liberals are an even smaller group and the credibility of the fundamentalists as democrats is not that great. So they took the obvious step to try to reformulate the situation as a conflict between Sunni and Alawites.
Before the conflict started Assad was quite popular among Sunni's too. So it was not even in Assad's interest to polarize. On the other hand the efforts by the insurgents to polarize are well known. I have mentioned in a prior post how television preachers from Saudi Arabia foment hatred against Alawites.
As we could see in Aleppo even now the FSA has far from succeeded in its hate mongering: there are still lots of Sunni who when are not enthusiastic about the FSA and aren't bothered about living with Assad as president.
Of course there was some discrimination and there were some economic problems. But which country is without problems and without faulty politicians? But when FSA fighters now describe those as so serious that they justify armed struggle they are rewriting history.
The uprising in Syria is at its core an uprising by fundamentalist Sunni's connected with the local Muslim Brotherhood. As they form only a small fraction of the Syrian population (maybe 10-15%) they have tried to broaden their base. One way to do that was the "democratization" card. But the Westernized liberals are an even smaller group and the credibility of the fundamentalists as democrats is not that great. So they took the obvious step to try to reformulate the situation as a conflict between Sunni and Alawites.
Before the conflict started Assad was quite popular among Sunni's too. So it was not even in Assad's interest to polarize. On the other hand the efforts by the insurgents to polarize are well known. I have mentioned in a prior post how television preachers from Saudi Arabia foment hatred against Alawites.
As we could see in Aleppo even now the FSA has far from succeeded in its hate mongering: there are still lots of Sunni who when are not enthusiastic about the FSA and aren't bothered about living with Assad as president.
Of course there was some discrimination and there were some economic problems. But which country is without problems and without faulty politicians? But when FSA fighters now describe those as so serious that they justify armed struggle they are rewriting history.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)