Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

I know these dudes are like Michael Myers but this is ridiculous.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-27533169

Apparently not!

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tribal-coalition-egypts-sinai-puts-bounty-head-militant-leader-1244577872

this is hardly a revelation but I'm always struck by how young and stupid these guys look.

or old + psychotic

i think this is the dynamic of all extremists groups

yeah like middle aged shmoes w kids aren't gonna be so into this - you either gotta be young and stupid or totally decrepit and cynical

US military spin...

The United States has been eliminating a mid- to high-level Islamic State figure every two days, on average, contributing to President Obama’s decision to send a new Special Operations force to Iraq to intensify efforts to locate and kill militant leaders there and in Syria, a senior administration official said Thursday.

The official described the mission of the force as self-
expanding — more raids on Islamic State sites will garner more intelligence leading to more sites. “The more intelligence we get, the closer we’ll get to these guys,” said the official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity set by the White House.

In testimony earlier this week, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said that key militant figures “removed from the battlefield” in recent months included the Islamic State’s second in command in Iraq, Haji Mutazz; and British-born militants Junaid Hussain and the executioner known as Jihadi John, both reportedly killed in airstrikes in Syria.

The template for the new ground operations, officials have said, was the raid inside Syria in May in which Abu Sayyaf, a key Islamic State commander, was killed and voluminous intelligence was seized on the militant group’s economic structure.

The briefing was part of an administration effort to project coherence and a sense of momentum on a strategy that is often criticized as lacking both.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-eliminates-a-mid--to-high-level-isis-figure-every-2-days-official-says/2015/12/03/6b43ae3c-99ea-11e5-b499-76cbec161973_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_daily202

http://pmo.iq/pme/press2015en/5-12-20151en.htm

Dec 3 2015

It has been confirmed to us that Turkish troops numbering around one regiment armoured with tanks and artillery entered the Iraqi territory, and specifically the province of Nineveh claim that they are training Iraqi groups without the request or authorization from the Iraqi federal authorities and this is considered a serious breach of Iraqi sovereignty and does not conform with the good neighbourly relations between Iraq and Turkey.

The Iraqi authorities call on Turkey to respect good neighbourly relations and to withdraw immediately from the Iraqi territory.
Prime Minister's Media Office

5 December 2015

1200 Turkish soldiers there either to train the Peshmerga or to provide extra security to Barzani, depending on who you read.

interesting note in otherwise unexceptional piece from Krisoff:

So what should I tell this 16-year-old boy who risked his life to flee extremism? That many Americans are now afraid of him? That the San Bernardino murders may only add to the suspicion of Syrian refugees? That in an election year, politicians pander and magnify voter fears?

Here in Lesbos, the fears seem way overdrawn. Some of the first aid workers Syrian refugees meet when they land on the beach are Israeli doctors, working for an Israeli medical organization called IsraAID. The refugees say they are surprised, but also kind of delighted.

“We were happy to see them,” said Tamara, a 20-year-old Syrian woman in jeans with makeup and uncovered hair. The presence of Jews, Muslims and Christians side by side fit with the tolerance and moderation that she craved.

Iris Adler, an Israeli doctor volunteering with IsraAID, said the refugees were often excited to receive assistance from Israelis. “We are still in close touch with many of them,” she said, including a mother whose baby she delivered on the beach after landing. Hostility to Israeli aid workers, she said, came not from refugees but, rather, from some European volunteers.

What “local forces” is Obama talking about? If he means Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria, yes, they’ve performed admirably. In Kurdish areas. They don’t want to clear and hold the Sunni heartland of the Islamic State, nor should they. If Obama is talking about the Shiite-led Iraqi military, their performance is still just barely adequate, even backed by American air power, and they’re disdained and mistrusted by the Sunnis of Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul. If he’s talking about the Islamist brigades in Syria armed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, it’s still not entirely clear whether they’re friend or foe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-big-hole-in-obamas-islamic-state-strategy/2015/12/07/04ce2d16-9d01-11e5-bce4-708fe33e3288_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

NY Times re the same thing--

Last month, the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar, which had been under the brutal rule of the Islamic State for more than 15 months, fell to Kurdish forces in less than 48 hours, after a sustained assault by American A-10 attack jets. As Kurdish forces advanced, the Islamic State fighters, having booby-trapped roads and houses, chose to run rather than fight for the city, burning hundreds of tires so the smoke would obscure their departure.

Yet a month since then, the Kurdish forces have advanced little beyond the city of Sinjar, and their commanders have been clear about why: The rest of the area is predominantly Sunni Arab rather than Kurdish.

The same pattern has been repeated in neighboring Syria, where the Syrian Kurdish forces reached the village of Ein Eissa earlier this year — just 30 miles north of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the terrorist group’s self-declared state. But they have stayed put.

“It would not be appropriate for us to go further south,” Redur Xelil, the main Syrian Kurdish force’s spokesman, said in an interview this summer, summing up the unease that many of his soldiers expressed at the thought of Kurdish rebels invading and trying to hold an Arab area.

To date, the United States and its partners have failed to find a Sunni Arab partner force. In October, the Obama administration acknowledged that a $500 million program to train thousands of local troops — many of them Sunni Arab — had failed. And a new United States-backed entity intended to claw back Arab land from the Islamic State seems to exist in name only.

Proponents of a ground assault argue that an even bigger recruiting drive than the militants’ end-of-times prophecy is their promise of an Islamic state.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/world/middleeast/us-strategy-seeks-to-avoid-isis-prophecy.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_daily202&_r=0

TBH I had kind of felt like all this talk of a "moderate sunni force to fight ISIS" smacked of a peculiarly American fantasy that we can just conjure up an army of the reasonable in whatever place we're interested in at the moment. This fantasy gets repeated again and again by both Democratic and Republican presidents.

... and UK Prime Ministers when they are trying to persuade to support the bombing of Syria.

In Iraq, the US once had to do this...

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/us-government-paying-former-insurgents/

https://www.emptywheel.net/2014/01/02/after-petraeus-paid-them-for-peace-are-sunnis-of-anbar-now-paid-by-bandar-for-killing/

Controversially, he even started putting some Sunni groups – including some that had previously fought the U.S. – on the American payroll. The “Anbar Awakening” of Sunni groups willing to cooperate with the Americans had begun in 2005, but at a smaller scale. Petraeus recognized that the groups had real community influence and ability to bring security, whether he liked them or not, and brought them on board. At the program’s peak in 2008, the U.S. had “contracted” 103,000 fighters who were now ostensibly paid to assist an American-dominated peace rather than the disrupt it. That same year, according to Ricks, the U.S. signed ceasefire deals with 779 separate Iraqi militias.

This, of course, was responsible for the success of the "surge".

The same Sunni Iraqis, now off the U.S. payroll are at least complicit with ISIS so long as they place pressure on the Kurds and Baghdad.

Now the Washington Post editorial board is sure there are anti-Assad rebels who the US can strengthen who will then take Assad down and subsequently take down Isis (I think)

Unfortunately, he still is not doing what is needed to “destroy” the Islamic State, as the president defined the goal on Sunday. That destruction would require a Sunni ground force, made up of Syrians, Iraqis and perhaps foreign troops from the Persian Gulf and Turkey, with substantial U.S. support.

But no such force will go after the Islamic State as long as Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian and Russian allies are waging their barbaric war on Sunnis in Syria. Though Secretary of State John F. Kerry is pushing a diplomatic process that he hopes could lead to a cease-fire, he’s unlikely to succeed until anti-Assad rebels are substantially strengthened on the ground. That remains the missing piece of Mr. Obama’s strategy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-missing-piece-of-mr-obamas-strategy/2015/12/07/76f88cf8-9d04-11e5-bce4-708fe33e3288_story.html

It does seem clear that large swaths of Iraq and Syria are going to need to be put under Sunni authority unless anyone believes that the Shia govt in Baghdad is about to become multicultural + inclusive and the Alawite govt in Damascus is going to regain its appeal for the Sunnis living under its rule. And if there is going to be a Sunni authority inevitably we probably should get started on empowering them? Obv there's a lot of risk but what's the alternative?

that seems like what we've already been doing by supporting the free syrian army and other 'moderate' islamist groups in syria

we could hold our nose, cut a deal with assad to keep him around (or some remnant of the regime) and let the extant syrian government reassert itself over the rest of syria again

unless we're prepared to give assad significant amount of support that's just a recipe for another fracture

we could hold our nose, cut a deal with assad to keep him around (or some remnant of the regime) and let the extant syrian government reassert itself over the rest of syria again

Pretty sure it's headed this way.

ew: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/child-marriages-make-up-one-third-in-turkey.aspx?PageID=238&NID=92170&NewsCatID=339

Interesting stats from the Turkish army saying that of the 909 foreign nationals they arrested trying to cross into Syria this year, over a third were from China:

http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/suriye-sinirinda-en-cok-cinli-yakalandi-1489153/

Also suggests they didn't stop anyone from Tunisia, Morocco, the Balkans or Saudi so either they're getting in another way or they're slick enough not to get stopped.

Whaddya know:
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/09/isis-recruiting-in-china.html

it seems like there has been muslim unrest in china for quite a while but state media has kept a lid on it

it's uighur unrest rather than muslim unrest surely, in the same way you'd say tibetan rather than buddhist

I thought it was mostly a local/separatist-nationalist thing though. I mean so are a lot of the conflicts from whence ISIS recruits, tbf -- that seems like part of their strategy, to try to create a sense of "global jihad" out of unrelated struggles that happen to involve muslims.

xp yes that's what i mean. i got lazy about looking up the correct spelling of 'uighur' which gives me problem. i only learnt this year that you pronounce 'uighur' as something like 'wigger' which made me lol when i first heard it from the BBC: "Wigger unrest in Xinjiang."

on today's pronunciation theme I say/have heard 'weegur'

"to try to create a sense of "global jihad" out of unrelated struggles that happen to involve muslims." i'm not 100% sure about this. from what i understood ETIM has had ties to Al-Qaeda - i was looking to confirm that this was true and apparently it's a somewhat controversial (tho often asserted) claim.

That's probably because Al Qaeda had/has a similar strategy.

well this could become terrifying:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/muslims-outraged-trump-considers-visiting-temple-mount-article-1.2460251

btw: last year we didn't do a rolling MENA 2015 bc Hurting complained about the nomenclature and i got pissy and decided not to do one. i do think we could use a new thread for 2016. here are some options i've been mulling: 1. rolling MENA 2016 - easy, geographically somewhat coherent, obv sequel. 2. rolling WANA 2016 - less eurocentric, easier to talk about north african and west asian countries that don't precisely fit the MENA rubric. 3. rolling GEOPOLITICS 2016 - ooo, no longer MENA now we can talk about Crimea, China, Congo, etc. pros: catchall for a certain kind of discussion, cons: too overly broad, might steal comments from other more region/country specific threads? anyway i don't care whichever we chose. thoughts?

do we actually have other more region specific threads? Like I don't recall there being any heavily trafficked threads about Asia, Africa, etc. (I may just be overlooking them).

This thread, by contrast, is always hoppin

there are chinese, russian threads. there's a congo thread, zimbabwe thread, and a nigeria thread. i think anglo countries for the most part have their own rolling threads. i don't think there are other catchalls like no Rolling Balkans or Rolling Sub-Saharan Africa.

well let's just list every country then. The rolling Israel-Jordan-Egypt-Syria-Turkey-Lebanon-UAE-Saudi Arabia-Tunisia-Libya-Morrocco-Iraq-Iran-Yemen-Kuwait-Oman-Bahrain thread

oops sorry Qatar sucks to be you!

Most people into geopolitics follow several of these threads. I say just roll everything that isn't US or UK domestic oriented, or an emerging issue (as needed), into one rolling geopolitics thread.

There's Rolling European Politics I think (too lazy to search).

Rolling Global (Dirty) South 2016

MENA seems good for me. What does WANA stand for?

Though thinking about it, seems slightly suspicious that the Middle East should always be first. So the right name is obviously 'NAME 2016'!!!

west asia north africa

I like that but, as with MENA, why even go for the acronym?

If you want an obscure thread title, just go for some obscure reference or quote like the rap writers do. "Rolling Thank God We Are Efficient Thread 2015" or some such. Something more recent would be better, obvs, but uyou get the gist.

Wouldn't West Asia include Russia and Caucasus and such? I get that 'Middle East' is obviously eurocentric, but if we acknowledge that, and go on?

Something something maghreb?

I've grown accustomed to MENA. It's ok with me.

NAME NAME NAME NAME

Rolling "We are not Orientalists, okay?" thread, 2016

this sounds promising: http://www.sfgate.com/news/nation-world/article/El-Chapo-threatens-war-on-ISIS-after-drug-6689840.php

Awesome.

"Are We not MENA, We are the rolling Israel-Jordan-Egypt-Syria-Turkey-Lebanon-UAE-Saudi Arabia-Tunisia-Libya-Morrocco-Iraq-Iran-Yemen-Kuwait-Oman-Bahrain & North Africa thread"