Sunday, August 31, 2014

Islamic State: Where does jihadist group get its support?



A militant islamist fighter takes part in an ISIS parade in Syria's eastern city of Raqqa June 30 2014Islamic State outperformed all other militant rebel groups in Syria and continues to claim ground
Many Gulf states have been accused of funding Islamic State (IS) extremists in Iraq and Syria.
But as Michael Stephens, director of the Royal United Services Institute in Qatar, explains, not all is clear-cut in war.
Much has been written about the support Islamic State (IS) has received from donors and sympathisers, particularly in the wealthy Gulf States.
Indeed the accusation I hear most from those fighting IS in Iraq and Syria is that Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are solely responsible for the group's existence.
But the truth is a little more complex and needs some exploring.
It is true that some wealthy individuals from the Gulf have funded extremist groups in Syria, many taking bags of cash to Turkey and simply handing over millions of dollars at a time.
This was an extremely common practice in 2012 and 2013 but has since diminished and is at most only a tiny percentage of the total income that flows into Islamic State coffers in 2014.
It is also true that Saudi Arabia and Qatar, believing that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would soon fall and that Sunni political Islam was a true vehicle for their political goals, funded groups that had strongly Islamist credentials.
Liwa al-Tawhid, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam were just such groups, all holding tenuous links to the "bad guy" of the time - Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's wing in Syria.
Qatar's Tamim bin Hamad al-ThaniThe new emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani with French President Francois Hollande
Saudi King Abdullah, file picSaudi Arabia has been accused of funding Islamists under the banner of IS, an accusation it staunchly denies
Bashar al Assad, date unknown as provided by 3rd partyGulf funds have flowed to opposition groups since the early days of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad
Qatar especially attracted criticism for its cloudy links to the group.
Turkey for its part operated a highly questionable policy of border enforcement in which weapons and money flooded into Syria, with Qatari and Saudi backing.
All had thought that this would facilitate the end of Mr Assad's regime and the reordering of Syria into a Sunni power, breaking Shia Iran's link to the Mediterranean.

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Islamic State's goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate is certainly attractive in some corners of Islamic thinking”
Yet as IS began its seemingly unstoppable rise in 2013, these groups were either swept away by it, or deciding it was better to join the winning team, simply defected bringing their weapons and money with them.
Only Jabhat al-Nusra has really held firm, managing a tenuous alliance with its more radical cousin, but even so it is estimated that at least 3,000 fighters from Nusra swapped their allegiance during this time.
So has Qatar funded Islamic State? Directly the answer is no. Indirectly a combination of shoddy policy and naivety has led to Qatar-funded weapons and money making their way into the hands of IS.
Saudi Arabia likewise is innocent of a direct state policy to fund the group, but as with Qatar its determination to remove Mr Assad has led to serious mistakes in its choice of allies.
Both countries must undertake some soul searching at this point, although it is doubtful that any such introspection will be admitted in public.
Light years ahead
But there are deeper issues here; religious ties and sympathy for a group that both acts explicitly against Shia Iran's interests in the region and has the tacit support of more people in the Gulf than many would care to admit.
The horrific acts committed by IS are difficult for anybody to support, but its goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate is certainly attractive in some corners of Islamic thinking.
Militant Islamist fighters from IS take part in a parade in Raqqa Syria 30 June 2014The goal of IS militants is to create an independent Islamic State stretching from Iraq across to the Levant
Many of those who supported the goal have already found their way to Syria and have fought and died for Islamic State and other groups. Others express support more passively and will continue to do so for many years.
The pull of IS, a group that has outperformed all others in combat and put into place a slick media campaign in dozens of languages to attract young men and women to its cause, has proven highly successful.
In every activity, from fighting, to organisation and hierarchy, to media messaging, IS is light years ahead of the assorted motley crew of opposition factions operating in the region.
'War economy'
Islamic State has put in place what appear to be the beginnings of quasi-state structures, ministries, law courts and even a rudimentary taxation system, which incidentally asks for far less than what was paid by citizens of Mr Assad's Syria.
IS has displayed a consistent pattern since it first began to take territory in early 2013.
Upon taking control of a town it quickly secures the water, flour and hydrocarbon resources of the area, centralising distribution and thereby making the local population dependent on it for survival.
Militant Islamist fighters from IS take part in a parade in Raqqa Syria 30 June 2014Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is accused of doing business with Islamic State in Syria
Dependency and support are not the same thing, and it is impossible to quantify how many of IS's "citizens" are willing partners in its project or simply acquiescing to its rule out of a need for stability or fear of punishment.
To understand how the Islamic State economy functions is to delve into a murky world of middlemen and shady business dealings, in which "loyal ideologues" on differing sides spot business opportunities and pounce upon them.
IS exports about 9,000 barrels of oil per day at prices ranging from about $25-$45 (£15-£27).
Some of this goes to Kurdish middlemen up towards Turkey, some goes for domestic IS consumption and some goes to the Assad regime, which in turn sells weapons back to the group.
"It is a traditional war economy," notes Jamestown analyst Wladimir van Wilgenburg.
Indeed, the dodgy dealings and strange alliances are beginning to look very similar to events that occurred during the Lebanese civil war, when feuding war lords would similarly fight and do business with each other.
The point is that Islamic State is essentially self financing; it cannot be isolated and cut off from the world because it is intimately tied into regional stability in a way that benefits not only itself, but also the people it fights.
The larger question of course is whether such an integral pillar of the region, (albeit shockingly violent and extreme), can be defeated.
Without Western military intervention it is unlikely. Although Sunni tribes in Iraq ponder their allegiances to the group, they don't have the firepower or finances necessary to topple IS and neither does the Iraqi army nor its Syrian counterpart.
Michael Stephens is Director of the Royal United Services Institute, Qatar, and is currently in Irbil

'Wandering stones' of Death Valley explained

from nature.com



Scientists spot ice shoving rocks on Racetrack Playa in California, resolving a longstanding geological enigma.


Ending a half-century of geological speculation, scientists have finally seen the process that causes rocks to move atop Racetrack Playa, a desert lake bed in the mountains above Death Valley, California. Researchers watched a pond freeze atop the playa, then break apart into sheets of ice that — blown by wind — shoved rocks across the lake bed.
Until now, no one has been able to explain why hundreds of rocks scoot unseen across the playa surface, creating trails behind them like children dragging sticks through the mud.
“It’s a delight to be involved in sorting out this kind of public mystery,” says Richard Norris, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, who led the research with his cousin James Norris, an engineer at Interwoof in Santa Barbara, California. The work was published on 27 August in PLoS ONE1.
Geologists previously speculated that some combination of wind, rain and ice would have a role. But few expected that the answer would involve ice as thin as windowpanes, pushed by light breezes rather than strong gales.
Visitors to Death Valley have to go out of their way to visit Racetrack Playa, which sits 1,130 metres above sea level and is a bumpy three-hour drive from the nearest town. The researchers began studying the region in 2011, setting up a weather station and time-lapse cameras and dropping off rocks loaded with Global Positioning System (GPS) trackers. The rocks were designed to start recording their position and speed as soon as something made them move.

Dennis Flaherty/Alamy
Rocks at Racetrack Playa seem to move on their own, leaving mysterious trails behind.
What was not clear was how long the Norrises would have to wait. Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, has been studying the playa since 2007 as an analogy to lake beds on other planets. He had little faith that the GPS-equipped rocks would move in a time frame that anyone would capture. “I thought it was going to be the most boring experiment in the history of science,” he says.
But when the researchers travelled to the playa in December 2013 to check instruments and change batteries, they found a huge ice-encrusted pond covering about one-third of the 4.5-kilometre-long playa. After several days of camping, they decided to sit above the southern end of the playa on the morning of 20 December. “It was a beautiful sunny day, and there began to be rippled melt pools in front of us,” Richard Norris says. “At 11:37 a.m., very abruptly, there was a pop-pop-crackle all over the place in front of us — and I said to my cousin, ‘This is it.’ ”
They watched as the ice began moving past the rocks, mostly breaking apart but also shoving them gently. The rocks began to inch along, but their pace was too slow to spot by eye. “A baby can get going a lot faster than your average rock,” Richard Norris says.
But when the ice melted away that afternoon, they saw freshly formed trails left behind by more than 60 moving rocks. And on 9 January, James Norris returned to the playa with Lorenz and was able to record video of the roving rocks. “This is transformative,” says Lorenz. “It’s not just an anecdotal report, but we have before and after pictures, and meteorological information simultaneous with the event.” By the end of the winter, the farthest-moving rock had travelled 224 metres.
Racetrack Playa rocks move rarely — “maybe a few minutes out of a million,” Lorenz says. And the two events the scientists saw, with thin ice panes shoving the stones across a wet playa, do not necessarily explain every instance of rocks moving there. “But this breaks the back of the problem scientifically,” Lorenz says. “It is ice shove.”
Solving the Racetrack Playa mystery is not exactly a major scientific breakthrough, Lorenz says, but the work does show the rare combination of conditions that allow rocks to move seemingly on their own. And ice shove can have notable effects — in 1952, it uprooted enough telephone poles at a lake in Nevada to break a transcontinental telephone line.
One person who is happy to see the latest results is Dwight Carey. As a university student in the 1970s, he helped with an experiment in which two rocks were placed in a corral on the playa. Over the course of a winter, one stone moved out of the corral, unobserved, and the other did not2
The new explanation “makes sense to me”, says Carey, who is now an environmental regulatory consultant in Brea, California. “Eventually you’re going to get enough force on the pile of ice behind the rocks to be able to move them.”
Nature
 
doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15773



Iraqi Forces Break ISIS Siege After U.S. Air Campaign

from time



A woman and children react in a military helicopter after being evacuated by Iraqi forces from Amerli

U.S. and allied aircraft staged humanitarian drops and targeted air strikes on Sunni militant groups

The Iraqi military announced Sunday it had broken a siege of the town of Amerli by forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, hours after the United States launched an air campaign to assist Iraqi civilians there.
Army spokesman Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi said Iraqi security forces and Shiite militiamen had liberated the Shiite Turkmen town on Sunday, the AP reported, bringing to an end a months-long siege by Sunni militants.
U.S. and allied aircraft conducted humanitarian airdrops to assist thousands of Shiite Turkmen who had been surrounded by ISIS militants for weeks and had been running low on food, water, and medical supplies, Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby said in a statement. American aircraft also launched three airstrikes against ISIS positions near the city.
“At the request of the Government of Iraq, the United States military today airdropped humanitarian aid to the town of Amerli, home to thousands of Shia Turkmen who have been cut off from receiving food, water, and medical supplies for two months by [ISIS],” Kirby said. ‘The United States Air Force delivered this aid alongside aircraft from Australia, France and the United Kingdom who also dropped much needed supplies.”
The U.S. airstrikes, though limited, had been a decisive factor in the breaking of the siege, The Washington Post reported, allowing Iraqi forces and militia to stage a coordinated assault on ISIS-held towns in the area. About 15,000 Shiite Turkmen residents of the town of Amerli had entrenched themselves to resist the march of ISIS forces across northern Iraq.
Saturday’s airdrops were the second U.S. humanitarian effort in Iraq, following deliveries of aid to ethnic Yazidis trapped near Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq in early August. That mission ended after a week of nightly drops and strikes allowed most of the trapped Iraqi refugees to escape to safety. President Barack Obama specifically authorized the effort to assist the people of Amirli, a White House official said Saturday.
“Two U.S. C-17s and two U.S. C-130s airdropped the supplies, delivering approximately 10,500 gallons of fresh drinking water and approximately 7,000 meals ready to eat,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement. The airstrikes destroyed three ISIS Humvees, one ISIS vehicle, one ISIS checkpoint and an ISIS tank, the statement said.
Separately, American forces carried out five airstrikes Saturday near the Mosul Dam, a critical piece of infrastructure recaptured from ISIS hands by Iraqi forces earlier this month, CENTCOM announced, bringing the total number of American strikes in Iraq to 118 since Aug. 8.
Obama is weighing expanding the American campaign against ISIS in Iraq and extending it into Syria following the killing of American journalist James Foley, but the president indicated Thursday a decision was not imminent. Secretary of State John Kerry is traveling to the region this week to build an international coalition to take on extremist group.

U.S. operations in Iraq are costing more than $7.5 million per day, Kirby told reporters Friday.





Saturday, August 30, 2014

The Man Burns Tonight 8-30-2014

from ustream.com




Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream


Ukraine prepares to defend port city; EU leader fears 'point of no return'

from cnn


By Laura Smith-Spark and Tim Lister, CNN
updated 3:58 PM EDT, Sat August 30, 2014







STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Ukrainian forces bolster defenses around southern port city of Mariupol
  • Ukraine's President says thousands of foreign troops are on Ukrainian soil
  • Jose Manuel Barroso: 'Point of no return' can come if escalation continues
  • EU leaders meet in Brussels to consider possible new sanctions against Russia
Mariupol, Ukraine (CNN) -- The Ukrainian military worked to fortify the port city of Mariupol after Russian intelligence groups were observed there, Col. Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian National Defense and Security Council, said Saturday.
A CNN team saw Ukrainian forces strengthening defensive positions on the eastern outskirts of the city, reinforcing checkpoints and digging trenches along roads leading toward the Russian border.
Beyond these checkpoints, the team found a small advance detachment of Ukrainian troops on the main road about halfway between Mariupol and Novoazovsk. The soldiers said it had been quiet Saturday.
Nevertheless, tension between Ukraine and Russia dominated discussions by world leaders following Russian President Vladimir Putin's pointed statement on Friday: "I want to remind you that Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations. This is a reality, not just words."
Russia's actions in eastern Ukraine -- including what Western officials say is the incursion of hundreds of Russian troops as the Ukrainian military battles pro-Russian rebels -- could lead to a "point of no return" if a political solution isn't found, the European Commission's president said Saturday.
Why did Ukrainian forces leave border?
Photos: Crisis in UkrainePhotos: Crisis in Ukraine
Russia denies invasion of Ukraine
"Come back tomorrow"
Back on the ground in eastern Ukraine, the CNN team encountered the first pro-Russian rebel roadblock a short distance outside Novoazovsk, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the Russian border, with concrete blocks across the road and a heavy machine gun among the weaponry.
A 12.7 mm heavy machine gun was among the weapons at the roadblock. The fighters would not allow the CNN team to pass through but said they should "come back tomorrow."
There is a large stretch of territory east of Mariupol, some 15-30 kilometers wide depending on location, that is occupied by neither Ukrainian forces nor pro-Russian fighters.
In the villages between the two "front lines" there are no signs of damage. Some stores are open and there is some civilian traffic on the roads. Long queues have formed at one checkpoint out of Mariupol as people from rural areas try to get in and out of the city.
"Escalation of conflict"
The situation "has worsened considerably," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Brussels, where European leaders were meeting to discuss possible new sanctions against Moscow.
"We may see a situation where we reach the point of no return," Barroso said. "If the escalation of the conflict continues, this point of no return can come."
However, Putin appeared defiant Friday in the face of a chorus of Western condemnation over what NATO says is clear evidence of Russian military aggression in Ukraine.
Moscow doesn't want or intend to wade into any "large-scale conflicts," Putin said at a youth forum, state-run Itar-Tass reported. A few breaths later, he made the point that Russia is "strengthening our nuclear deterrence forces and our armed forces," making them more efficient and modernized.
"I want to remind you that Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations," the President said. "This is a reality, not just words."
'New Russian aggression'
The EU leaders meeting in Brussels may decide what action to take as soon as Saturday evening, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said, speaking after an informal meeting of foreign ministers in Milan, Italy.
Russian troops in Ukraine
Russia's Message on Ukraine
Judah: 'Putin created a monster'
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama agreed in a phone call Thursday that they would have to consider tougher action against Russia.
The European Union and the United States have already slapped economic sanctions on targeted Russian individuals and businesses. The union also has sanctioned certain sectors of the Russian economy, prompting Russia to retaliate with its own measures.
Russia has repeatedly denied either supporting the rebels, or sending its own troops over the border. But its assertions have been roundly rejected by the West.
Denials 'without credibility'
Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in March, following the ouster of pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych the previous month.
Violence broke out in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions in April, as separatist leaders declared independence from the government in Kiev. Since mid-April, the conflict between the pro-Russia rebels and the Ukrainian military has cost more than 2,500 lives, according to the United Nations.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that -- whatever the Kremlin says -- the reality is Russian troops are inside Ukraine and have fired on Ukrainian military positions.
In response, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said NATO had previously used "images from computer games" to -- in his view -- falsely make the case that Russian troops are in Ukraine, and said the "latest accusations are pretty similar."

CNN's Tim Lister reported from Mariupol and Laura Smith-Spark wrote and reported in London. CNN's Lindsay Isaac, Max Foster, Alla Eshchenko, Barbara Starr and Greg Botelho contributed to this report, as did journalist Victoria Butenko in Kiev.