First Ramadi, then Palmyra: Isis shows it can storm bastions of Syria and Iraq

Terror group faced little resistance from local forces, prompting re-evaluations across a region that had sensed it might be in retreat

Martin Chulov
The Guardian

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Islamic State fighters are celebrating their second major conquest in a week in Syria and Iraq as they pick through the ruins of the historic city of Palmyra.

The sudden advance of the militants into the UN heritage site in central Syria resulted in the rout of a national army, the exodus of refugees and a fresh pulse of regional alarm at the resilience of the self-styled caliphate force.

The UN said one-third of Palmyra’s 200,000-strong population had fled. And Isis militants used social media to show themselves posing amid ancient columns in Palmyra on Thursday. Other images displayed a more familiar theme: the summary slaughter of local men whose blood drenched the road.

Isis 'controls 50% of Syria' after seizing historic city of Palmyra

 

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Isis’s latest advance has prompted a re-evaluation across the region, which had earlier sensed it might be in retreat. From Beirut to Baghdad and as far away as Riyadh, regional actors are coming to terms with an organisation that can win most of its battles and successfully storm Syria and Iraq’s best-defended bastions.

The seizure of Palmyra followed the equally startling conquest of Ramadi in Iraq’s Anbar province last weekend. Both operations, around 600 miles apart, have become emblematic of a terror group that can have its way across two crumbling countries despite embattled state forces being propped up by global powers.

In Syria, forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad had committed to defend gas fields to the north of Palmyra that are essential to the nation’s electricity supply. The ruins themselves, as well as being enduring testaments to the country’s diverse past, are central to the pluralistic image conveyed by the modern state. Both sites are strategic, yet they fell in less than four days – with elite army units unwilling and unable to defend them.

Ramadi in Iraq, meanwhile, had been a holdout in the heart of the country’s most hostile province – a place where local Sunni leaders allied with the Shia-led government and its militia proxies to keep Isis at bay.

That too changed in less than 72 hours of clashes, where top-tier troops and tribes posed little resistance. In both cases, once the battles started going badly, state forces surrendered the cities to their fate, leaving large amounts of ammunition behind.

“They wanted to defend this area,” said a government official who fled Palmyra for Damascus on Thursday. “They even tried to. But if that’s the best that they can do when they try, then the country is lost.”

Officials who had fled Palmyra said jets from the US-led coalition that had bombed Isis targets elsewhere in the country had not joined the fight. US jets were instrumental in expelling the terror group from the two cities it has lost so far, Kobani, in Syria’s north, and Tikrit, in central Iraq.

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 Refugees from the Isis-controlled city of Ramadi. Photograph: Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media

The fall of Ramadi stirred ghosts of a painful past: jihadis had used the city as a launch pad to spread nationwide chaos from 2004-07. That could never happen again, Iraqi officials claimed. The fact that it has – yielding Isis its most spectacular triumph this year – has shattered already brittle confidence in the ability of Iraq to hold the country together.

Gains against the Syrian regime, they said, had been made by groups who previously fought Isis and included an amalgam of mainstream fighters and jihadis, among them the ascendant al-Nusra front, which like Isis has been prescribed by the US and much of Europe as a terrorist group.In both countries, residents said the Isis victories said perhaps more about the weakness of the states than about the potency of the jihadis. And while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the fall of Palmyra meant Isis now controls more than 50% of the country, opposition groups countered by saying that battle lines elsewhere in Syria had not shifted in Isis’s favour since 2013.

The anti-Assad opposition played no role in the Palmyra clashes. Regime troops had been the area’s primary defenders.

In Ramadi, despair was endemic. “There are no police left,” said the police chief, Colonel Jabbar al-Assif, himself a recent exile. “Everyone left was killed or is injured. Whoever didn’t make it out was killed later on by Isis. They have a list of all the policemen and the soldiers, with addresses, and they were going to their homes to kill them. So all of the police families fled too.

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 A car is engulfed by flames during clashes in the city of Ramadi. Photograph: Reuters

“Most people in Ramadi want to fight but they don’t have weapons. The government hasn’t helped us. The police ask the government for weapons and the government tells them: ‘Go and buy weapons and we will reimburse you.’ When did that ever happen in any country?”

Analysis Seizure of Palmyra and Ramadi by Isis reveal gaping holes in US jihadi strategy

Far from being on the defensive, Islamic State has shown that the arms-length approach of the US to Iraq is failing and Washington is ‘playing this day to day’

 

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The Isis advances mark a sharp turnaround from events earlier this year when it lost Kobani and Tikrit and was forced to retreat from around 7,700 sq miles (20,000 sqkm) of land in northern Iraq. That had led to claims that it could not hold its gains, and that after a year in which sociopolitics of the Middle East had been overturned, Isis could no longer secure its objectives.

“If the state was strong, then that would be the case,” said an army officer who ordered his men to flee Ramadi. “They are not winning because they are powerful. They are winning because we are weak. I’m not sure about Syria, but I think it’s the same there.”

Thirty miles closer to Baghdad, in the city of Falluja, which is also under Isis control, some residents say they have become used to the jihadis in their midst and have come to prefer them to the vagaries of central government rule.

“We don’t have much electricity and fuel and we have been bombed a lot by the air strikes, but apart from that we are in a better condition than we were under the army,” said a doctor to whom Isis had offered security and a platform that Iraq’s government could not match.

“We in Falluja prefer to stay here in our homes than become refugees begging to enter Baghdad or left to rot in refugee camps which aren’t even suitable for animals. We prefer to live with our dignity in our city. We are all viewed by the government as Isis, this is our identity.”

Seizure of Palmyra and Ramadi by Isis reveal gaping holes in US jihadi strategy

Far from being on the defensive, Islamic State has shown that the arms-length approach of the US to Iraq is failing and Washington is operating ‘day by day’

Ian Black 

Middle East editor

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Islamic State’s victories in Palmyra and Ramadi have been painful blows for the US-led coalition in both Syria and Iraq respectively, underlining the flaws in a strategy that has been widely criticised as both wrong-headed and half-hearted.

Until the last few weeks the conventional wisdom in Washington, London and Arab capitals was that Isis had been forced on to the back foot, suffering from shortages of cash, weapons and problems of resupply, even if its morale was sustained by a slick propaganda machine that kept attracting recruits.

Now events may be forcing a rethink. The Obama administration is taking “an extremely hard look” at its approach, in the words of an unnamed official who declared in the wake of the fall of Ramadi: “You’d have to be delusional not to take something like this and say ‘what went wrong, how do you fix it and how do we correct course to go from here?’”

Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, put it even more bluntly: “We don’t really have a strategy at all. We’re basically playing this day by day.” The urgent delivery of new anti-tank missiles for the Iraqi army has been one short-term response. But larger military and political questions are still unanswered.

Iraq remains the priority. Air attacks launched last September have been carried out by the US, Britain and half a dozen other countries, while operations in Syria are limited to the US and the largely symbolic presence of Saudi Arabia and theUnited Arab Emirates. Coalition aircraft have carried out 2,200 air strikes in Iraq and 1,400 in Syria.

The recapture of Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border has been the headline achievement for the air campaign. Last week the US highlighted a special forces raid that killed a Isis financier. Britain made great play of the imposition of EU sanctions on the Syrian purchasing oil from the group on behalf of Bashar al-Assad. Squeezing Isis cash is an important element of the overall strategy, officials say. So is domestic counter-terrorism work.

By contrast, the US programme to “train and equip” a Syrian force to fight Isis – though not Assad – is moving agonisingly slowly after its launch in Jordan a few weeks ago. Britain backs that effort as well as maintaining financial and political support for the opposition Syrian National Coalition. But the SNC’s unceasing demands for a no-fly zone or a safety zone to protect civilians from the regime’s barrel bombs and chlorine gas are getting nowhere slowly.In recent weeks a significant novelty in the regional mix has been the greater effectiveness of Saudi Arabia, which is now working with its old rivals Qatar and Turkey to build a more potent coalition of non-Isis Syrian rebel groups fighting Assad on the ground, not just from 30,000ft.

On the Iraqi front, analysts say the US has to decide how many more victories by Isis it can sustain before increasing support to the underperforming Baghdad government forces on the ground. It and its allies must also do more to back “acceptable” insurgent groups in Syria, argues Charles Lister of the Brookings Institution.

But Obama’s credibility is extremely low. “Next time you read some grand statement by US officials on [the] campaign against Isis or see a Centcom [US Central Command] map about Isis reversals, just bin it,” commented Emile Hokayem, a respected Middle East expert with the International Institute of Strategic Studies.

The fundamental problem is that Isis is waging war across two countries in a single interconnected crisis that is sustained by Sunni anger and the perception that the US and the west are content to look on as a confident Iran backs Shia groups in Iraq and beyond for its own strategic and sectarian reasons.

In the Middle East the conventional wisdom remains that Islamic State will not be defeated until Assad is. But while there is no doubt that the Syrian president’s position has weakened in recent weeks, his regime’s demise is not in sight.

IN THE SAME WEEK, THE U.S. AND U.K. HIDE THEIR WAR CRIMES BY INVOKING “NATIONAL SECURITY”

By Glenn Greenwald

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Colonel Ian Henderson was a British official dubbed “the Butcher of Bahrain” because of atrocities he repeatedly committed during the 30 years he served as chief security official of that Middle Eastern country. His reign of terror began in 1966 when Bahrain was a British “protectorate” and continued when the post-“independence” Bahraini King retained him in the same position. In 1996, The Independent described him as “the most feared of all secret policemen” in Bahrain, and cited “consistent and compelling evidence that severe beatings and even sexual assaults have been carried out against prisoners under Henderson’s responsibility for well over a decade.”

A 2002 Guardian article reported that “during this time his men allegedly detained and tortured thousands of anti-government activists”; his official acts “included the ransacking of villages, sadistic sexual abuse and using power drills to maim prisoners”; and “on many occasions they are said to have detained children without informing their parents, only to return them months later in body bags.” Needless to say, Col. Henderson was never punished in any way: “although Scotland Yard launched an inquiry into the allegations in 2000, the investigation was dropped the following year.” He was showered with high honors from the U.K.-supported tyrants who ran Bahrain.

Prior to the massacres and rapes over which he presided in Bahrain, Henderson played a leading role in brutally suppressing the Mau Mau insurgency in another British colony, Kenya. In the wake of his Kenya atrocities, he twice won the George Medal, “the 2nd highest, to the George Cross, gallantry medal that a civilian can win.” His brutality against Kenyan insurgents fighting for independence is what led the U.K. government to put him in charge of internal security in Bahrain.

For years, human rights groups have fought to obtain old documents, particularly a 37-year-old diplomatic cable, relating to British responsibility for Henderson’s brutality in Bahrain. Ordinarily, documents more than 30 years old are disclosable, but the British government has fought every step of the way to conceal this cable.

But now, a governmental tribunal ruled largely in favor of the governmentand held that most of the diplomatic cable shall remain suppressed. The tribunal’s ruling was at least partially based on “secret evidence for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from a senior diplomat, Edward Oakden, who argued that Britain’s defence interests in Bahrain were of paramount importance”; specifically, “Mr Oakden implied that the release of such information could jeopardise Britain’s new military base in the country.”

The U.K. government loves to demonize others for supporting tyrants even as it snuggles up to virtually every despot in that region. Her Majesty’s Government has a particularly close relationship with Bahrain, where it isconstructing a new naval base. The Kingdom is already home to the United States’ Fifth Fleet.

The tribunal’s rationale is that “full disclosure of the document would have ‘an adverse effect on relations’ with Bahrain, where the U.K. is keen to build further economic and defence ties.” In other words, disclosing these facts would make the British and/or the Bahrainis look bad, cause them embarrassment, and could make their close friendship more difficult to sustain. Therefore, the British and Bahraini populations must be denied access to the evidence of what their governments did.

This is the core mindset now prevalent in both the U.S. and U.K. for hiding their crimes from their own populations and then rest of the world:disclosure of what we did will embarrass and shame us, cause anger toward us, and thus harm our “national security.” As these governments endlessly highlight the bad acts of those who are adverse to them, they vigorously hide their own, thus propagandizing their publics into believing that only They — the Other Tribe Over There — commit such acts.

This is exactly the same mentality driving the Obama administration’s years-long effort to suppress photographs showing torture of detainees by the U.S. In 2009, Obama said he would comply with a court ruling that ordered those torture photos disclosed, but weeks after his announcement,reversed himself. Adopting the argument made by a group run by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney against disclosure of the photos, Obama insisted that to release the photos “would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.” Obama went further and announced his support for a bill sponsored by Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman to amend the Freedom of Information Act — a legislative accomplishment which Rep. Louise Slaughter told me at the time had long been “sacred” to Democrats — for no reason other than to exempt those torture photos from disclosure.

In March of this year, a U.S. judge who had long sided with the Obama DOJ in this matter reversed course. In a lawsuit brought in 2004 by the ACLU, the judge ordered the release of thousands of photos showing detainee abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib. He ruled that the Obama DOJ could no longer show any national security harm that would justify ongoing suppression.

Rather than accepting the ruling and releasing the photos after hiding them for more than a decade, the U.S. Justice Department last week filed an emergency request for a stay of that ruling with the appeals court. The argument from The Most Transparent Administration Ever™:
No healthy democracy can possibly function where this warped mindset prevails: we are entitled to hide anything we do that makes us look bad because making us look bad harms “national security,” and we are the ones who make that decision without challenge. As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer said:

To allow the government to suppress any image that might provoke someone, somewhere, to violence would be to give the government sweeping power to suppress evidence of its own agents’ misconduct. Giving the government that kind of censorial power would have implications far beyond this specific context.

But even more threatening than the menace to democracy is the propagandzied public this mentality guarantees. A government that is able to hide its own atrocities on “national security” grounds will be one whose public endlessly focuses on the crimes of others while remaining blissfully unaware of one’s own nation. That is an excellent description of much of the American and British public, and as good an explanation as any why much of their public discourse consists of little more than proclamations that Our Side is Better despite the decades of brutality, aggression and militarism their own side has perpetrated.

ISIS Overruns Iraqi Defenses East of Ramadi

Fighters Say They Need Reinforcements to Stall Advance

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Though much of the story around the fall of the Anbar Province capital of Ramadi in recent days has been predictions of Iraq retaking the city, the reality is ISIS is continuing its eastward advance.

Early in the day, Iraqi forces reported they were exchanging mortar fire with ISIS forces east of the city, and had held them off, but by evening police commanders confirmed they’d been overrun entirely by ISIS.

Iraq had tried to set up a defensive line in Husaiba, just six miles east of the city, and have fallen back even further since then, with police commanders saying they need reinforcements to even hold them off.

To put the mounting losses in perspective, Anbar is just 70 miles west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad itself, and ISIS is making gains along a highway that threatens to put them within firing distance of western Baghdad.

The Syrian regime is slowly being liquidated

By: Salameh Kaileh


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Comment: Is there a reason for the slow elimination of leading figures in the Syrian regime, asks Salameh Kaileh.

A number of elite members of the Syrian regime have met untimely ends in suspicious or violent circumstances in recent months - Rustom Ghazaleh, a regime spymaster, died last month after being severely beaten during an argument with another regime intelligence chief.

In 2012, the regime's "crisis control room" - a cabal of senior spies and military men - were eliminated when a bomb destroyed their Damascus meeting place. Despite segments within the revolution claiming the operation, it appears the attack was a regime attempt to prevent the group planning a coup.

During the revolution, many officers who were connected to the assassination of Rafik al-Hariri in Lebanon were themselves killed, such as General Jamea Jamea.

In the past few days, the mysterious death of a number of senior officers has been announced.

But it is in recent weeks that this attrition has accellerated. In the last few days, the deaths of several senior officers was announced. The list included the commanders of the Fourth Armoured Division, the Belli military airbase, the army's special forces and of the First Armoured Division.

Thereafter, three senior officers were reportedly killed by mistake when their location in Palmyra was hit by a regime air raid, with reports suggesting two of the officers were related to Assad.

Previously, Hafez Makhlouf, Assad's cousin and senior figure in the General Security Directorate, was removed from his position and left Syria. Rafiq Shahada was also removed as the head of military intelligence.

All of these figures are considered to be the front line in the regime's security and military structure, which indicates a calculated process of elimination.

This raises the question of why and who is carrying out the killings?

We have witnessed the collapse of what remains of the regular Syrian army and the chaos it now suffers, which has become very obvious since the fall of the 82nd Armoured Brigade in the south a few months ago.

The regime accused a number of the brigade's officers of treason, and Iranian officers reportedly executed them, as has happened in other brigades.

The regime accused a number of the brigade's officers of treason, and Iranian officers reportedly executed them.

The collapse of other army units also took place in the north after the creation of Jaish al-Fath, when regime troops retreated from bases in Idlib, and similarly retreated from the confrontation with the Islamic State group in Palmyra.

The tide has turned

The recent battles demonstrate that the forces sent by Iran are incapable of stopping the collapse or the regime's military apparatus, as those forces are themselves in a difficult position. They have suffered heavy losses in various battlefields including Qalamoun, despite their efforts.

Therefore, as the regime's army and its supporting forces are heading toward collapse, we should closely examine the process of elimination of its senior officers.

It seems that all those who have committed atrocities against the revolution are being liquidated, but who is carrying this out? Perhaps that will become clear once a solution is reached or once there is a change in the structure of the regime.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of al-Araby al-Jadeed, its editorial board or staff.
This is an edited translation from our Arabic website.

Bashar al-Assad: The beginning of the end?

The more important question to ask now is what - not who - will replace Assad.

By Marwan Bishara

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It was fashionable during the early phase of the Syrian revolution to predict Bashar al-Assad's demise. But when the Syrian president defied all expectations and hung on to power at all cost, including hundreds of thousands of casualties, his detractors stopped forecasting.

With some hesitation, I shall throw my hat in the ring and ask whether we've finally entered a new phase in Syria: is it truly the beginning of the end for Assad and his decades' old regime?

And once again, perhaps the more important questions to ask and answer are what - not who - will replace Assad, and how - not if or when.

The latest defeat and retreat of Assad's forces from two key cities is a sign of more to come. The triumph of a new coalition of opposition parties in Idlib as well as the success of ISIL in Palmyra is a major blow to the regime.

Weakened ISIL narrative shattered by advances

More importantly, the regime's incapacity to regroup, redeploy and recuperate its loses, whether geographic, civilian or military, have further demoralised its army over recent weeks and months.

Changing momentum

That's the nature of asymmetrical warfare; the longer the stronger fights the weak, the weaker it becomes. And so after four years, the fighting has finally taken its toll on the regime's military. It's exhausted, it's dispirited and it's poorly equipped.

From a strategic perspective, Assad has lost much of his power when he failed to deter or scare people into submission in the first few months of the uprising.

And once he used force and failed to defeat his enemies, and then failed again when using terrible and illegal violence against civilians and fighters alike, it all signaled that his time was up, and the countdown had started for his demise.

If he survives at all, Assad will be a tidbit militia leader for a bit longer.

Sacrificing Assad, saving Syria

Like all dictators, Assad has relied primarily on force. And when force becomes ineffective, there's little else to rely on in the absence of national or popular legitimacy. Except perhaps for his immediate loyalists.

Like all dictators, Assad has relied primarily on force. And when force becomes ineffective, there's little else to rely on in the absence of national or popular legitimacy.

But even those loyalists in the capital Damascus or from among the Alawite sect, who've become dependent on the regime, will soon conclude that it's wiser to sacrifice Assad in order to save the capital, the community and the country, than sacrifice them all in a desperate attempt to save a dictatorship.

The same applies to Assad's regional and international supporters notably, Iran and Russia. They will conclude that only by sacrificing Assad and his immediate clique of war criminals, could they save face and salvage their regional role and influence.

US secretary of State John Kerry carried a similar message to Putin last week. He reportedly interrupted the Russian president's vacation in Sochi to push for the revival of the principles of the Geneva-1 talks on Syria in order to avoid the collapse of the state along with the regime.

These principles focus on negotiations between elements of the regime (minus Assad & co.) and the coalition of the opposition parties (minus ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusra) over power sharing and national reconciliation.

It's far from ideal, but under the circumstances, it's the only way to salvage what's left of the country.

Cynicism bordering on criminality

The US and Russia agree on the need to maintain the Syrian state structure at any cost in order to avoid total uncontrollable chaos with a spillover effect on the rest of the region.  

But they disagree on when or how Assad goes. The Obama administration wants him out at the beginning of the reconciliation process, while Russia insists that he goes out at the end of the process, if at all.

Meanwhile, ISIL is growing and countless more Syrians are dying in vain.

And as usual, Russia is playing chess with the US. Before it compromises on Syria, it wants something in return on Ukraine, including lifting the sanctions. And that doesn't seem to be forthcoming unless Russia makes a similar goodwill gesture.

Assad meets with Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Damascus [AP]

But there might still be some change in Russia's position because of the festering disagreement with Iran. While Moscow and Tehran have long supported Assad, Russia suspects Iran cares less about the survival of Syria than the survival of its Syrian allies.

But Iran has a strategic calculation of its own, and it's not very different from those of Russia. Tehran considers Iraq its Ukraine and could eventually sacrifice Assad for greater US concessions there. 

Last week's US green light for the Iranian supported Popular Mobilisation militias to fight ISIL in Ramadi reflects this new reality. It's the type of US-Iran coordination that could pave the way for strategic bartering wherein Iran sacrifices Damascus to gain more influence in Baghdad.

After Assad

Having said all this, there's only one sane way forward for Syria: negotiations and reconciliation to end the old Assad dictatorship and the building of a new inclusive Syria.

My guess, most Syrians have come to this conclusion but they need the push to set aside their hatred and distrust and begin to talk.

The guiding humane and democratic principles for the Syrian uprising might have been obscured by the violence of sectarian and criminal militias, but they remain alive and well.

They cannot grow in time of war; they could only flourish in the shadow of peace and stability.

That's why it's high time the US and Russia put aside their differences and use their clout to bring their regional and Syrian allies to agree on the road map ahead. 

Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.

Ali Farzat's Cartoon: An Arab Conference, but with no Room for the Arab!

مؤتمر عربي لم يبق محلات

ما وراء الخبر| دلالات التطورات الميدانية بإدلب

الصندوق الأسود| الطريق إلى صنعاء

AN IMPORTANT VIDEO



تعرض السلسلة الاستقصائية "الصندوق الأسود" فلما بعنوان "الطريق إلى صنعاء" يتابع كيف لم يستغرق دخول جماعة الحوثي للعاصمة صنعاء أكثر من يوم واحد، لكن قصة سقوطها الحقيقية كانت في غير زمان ومكان، فإلى الشمال من صنعاء كانت محافظة عمران والتي حاربت لمنع التمدد الحوثي مدة ستة أشهر شاهدا على بداية سقوط العاصمة قبل أن يشكل سقوطها الغامض مدخلا للسيطرة على صنعاء خلال ساعات.
وكانت جماعة الحوثي تخوض خلال أعوام طويلة صراعا ضد الدولة اليمنية لأسباب تتداخل فيها عوامل طائفية وقبلية وسياسية، ورغم خوضها ست جولات من المعارك ضد الدولة على مدار السنين العشر الأخيرة فإن الجولة الأخيرة كانت مفاجئة وصادمة.