Special Analysises

CEP – KAS: Sahel Monitoring October 2023

The eleventh monthly report monitoring the activities of al-Qaeda and Islamic State branches throughout the Sahel will focus on the propaganda output of these groups in October 2023. This October, the propaganda outlets linked to these terror groups published the highest number of claims since the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) began monitoring them in December 2022. During October, 87 incidents in total have been claimed by the Islamic State’s affiliates ISGS and ISWAP and by az-Zallaqa Media, which publishes all claims by al-Qaeda’s branch JNIM. This steep increase of claims came unexpectedly, especially as the number of incidents claimed by these groups had remained stable in the previous months. With this sudden surge, October constitutes the deadliest month in the wider region since CEP started monitoring.

Zionist Rulers of Arabia

Jewish Roots of the Saudi Ruling Family

Translated from Arabic

Book Cover

RESEARCH AND PRESENTATION OF MOHAMMAD SAKHER who was ordered killed by the Saudi Regime for the following findings:

  1. Are the Saudi Family members belonging to the Tribe of ANZA BEN WA’EL as they allege to be?
  2. Is Islam their actual religion?
  3. Are they of an ARAB ORIGIN at all?

THE SAUDI DYNASTY: IT’S ORIGIN AND WHO IS THE REAL ANCESTOR OF THIS ‘ROYAL’ FAMILY?

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How Global Jihad Relocalises and Where it Leads. The Case of HTS, the Former AQ Franchise in Syria

Abstract

The territories ruled by the Syrian opposition are being reorganised. The leaderless revolution has given way to a seizure of power by vanguardist and ideological organisations, be it the PYD in the northeast or HTS, the former local branch of AQ, in Idlib. However, these organisations cannot resist the regime’s military threat to reconquer the territories or the Turkish intervention by themselves. They need to manage the internationalisation of the conflict to protect themselves and find space in the broader strategic game around Syria. This is the strategy of HTS. After emerging from the matrix of AQ’s global jihad, since 2017 HTS has sought to ‘institutionalise’ the revolution by imposing its military hegemony and full control of the institutions of local governance. The group has thus marginalised the revolutionary milieu, other Islamists and the threat posed by AQ supporters and IS cells in Idlib. HTS’s domination was followed by a policy of gradual opening and mainstreamisation. The group has had to open up to local communities and make concessions, especially in the religious sphere. HTS is seeking international acceptance with the development of a strategic partnership with Turkey and desires to open dialogue with Western countries. Overall, HTS has transformed from formerly being a salafi jihadi organisation into having a new mainstream approach to political Islam.

Introduction: Undesired Winners in Search of ‘Truce Politics’

“The revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children,” said Georg Büchner.1 The Syrian scenarioconfirms this formula. After an early phase of leaderless revolution, the most structured avant-gardeorganisations stemming from internationalist movements classified as ‘terrorist’ and consideredinternational pariahs have ultimately prevailed: the PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat) in the northeastand Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the northwest.

Each group has imposed its control and institutionalised the insurrectionary dynamic according to itsideological and organisational leanings. However, their consolidation of power is ambivalent. It iscertainly based on a “confiscation of the revolution,” as their detractors claim.2 But it would be wrongto think only in terms of revolution hijacking. These groups’ interactions with their local revolutionarycontexts and geostrategic environments – regional and international – have profoundly transformedthem too. An analysis of power politics in Idlib therefore necessitates a new understanding of how HTS’shegemonic project has benefited from its local and global contexts, as much as the constraints that thesecontexts have imposed on the group and transformed it in return. Far from being a mere academicexercise, an analysis of these interactions is rich in lessons for policymaking.

Turkey’s Idlib Incursion and the HTS Question: Understanding the Long Game in Syria

After several days of speculation surrounding a possible Turkish intervention, on Oct. 8 Turkish reconnaissance troops crossed into Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib to scope out a first phase “de-escalation” deployment. Turkey’s move came within the broader context of a Russian-led initiative to de-escalate the conflict in Syria by focusing on specific geographic zones, of which Idlib was the fourth. In the days that followed the Oct. 8 deployment, limited numbers of Turkish troops used small country roads to establish thin lines of control spanning between the Idlib border town of Atmeh, east through Darat Izza and into Anadan in Aleppo’s western countryside. Two much larger convoys of at least 50-100 armored vehicles crossed at night on Oct. 23 and late on Oct. 24, effectively completing Turkey’s initial objectives.

The loose buffer zone that resulted serves primarily to place Turkish troops in a prime position to monitor and contain the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in their stronghold of Afrin, 30km north of Darat Izza. It was from Afrin that YPG militiamen and women had launched repeated attacks on Syrian opposition positions in northern Idlib, indicating the Kurdish group’s likely intent to expand aggressively southward. The YPG’s stronghold in Afrin also gave it the means to defend against any future attempt by Turkish-backed opposition forces to retake YPG-occupied towns like Tel Rifaat. Turkey saw these strategic realities as security threats, given the YPG’s structural and ideological affinity with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a designated terrorist organization that has fought a deadly insurgency against the Turkish state for more than 30 years.

Notwithstanding the significance of a Turkish intervention in Idlib, the development raised eyebrows for another reason: Turkey’s soldiers had been provided an armed escort into Idlib by none other than the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Therein followed a flurry of accusations of Turkish collusion with al-Qaeda that although understandable, largely missed the potential significance of developments up to that point. I was in Turkey in the days leading up to the operation and was near the border as it began, meeting with a broad range of Syrian opposition groups and figures.

Twenty Years After 9/11: The Fight for Supremacy in Northwest Syria and the Implications for Global Jihad

Syrian fighters attend a mock battle in anticipation of an attack by the regime on Idlib province and the surrounding countryside, during a graduation of new Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) members at a camp in the countryside of the northern Idlib province on August 14, 2018.

Abstract: Over the past decade, nowhere in the world has exerted as profound and transformative an impact on the global jihadi landscape as Syria. For al-Qaida, Syria had once been the source of its greatest hope, where dozens of its most experienced leading operatives were dispatched to enhance prospects of building a jihadi state. But in recent years, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate distanced itself and then broke away altogether, establishing a new locally oriented movement: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). In pursuit of local dominance and ultimately survival, HTS has broken one jihadi taboo after another, including turning against al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State and dealing crippling defeats to both in Syria’s northwest. The implications and consequences of these developments are manifold. On the one hand, not only does HTS no longer represent the international terrorism threat that its predecessor once had, it has also almost entirely squashed the global threat posed by its more extreme rivals and played a role in maintaining the longest ceasefire in a decade of war in Syria. On the other hand, however, HTS’ de facto rule of northwestern Syria threatens to ‘mainstream’ a local jihadi model that looks set to experience a substantial boost by the Taliban’s surge to power in Afghanistan. Should conditions dramatically change, it could also come to represent a strategically significant terrorist safe haven once again—on Europe’s doorstep.

Over the past decade, nowhere in the world has exerted as profound and transformative an impact on the global jihadi landscape as Syria. It was on Syrian soil that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) first emerged in 2013 and where its behavior then sparked its expulsion from al-Qaida. That break-up and the Islamic State’s mid-2014 unilateral declaration of a caliphate caused shockwaves worldwide, catalyzing a split of the jihadi community into two rival and later globally hostile movements. As the world collectively mobilized against the Islamic State, al-Qaida was left reeling when faced by the Islamic State’s unprecedented challenge to its authority.

In response to the Islamic State’s transnational challenge, al-Qaida chose Syria as the focal point for its push back, dispatching many of its most senior and experienced operatives there to reinforce al-Qaida’s standing, through its affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. While the arrival of the so-called “Khorasan Group” drew U.S. counterterrorism strikes, it also catalyzed internal tensions and an erratic process of introspection within Jabhat al-Nusra that eventually led to its departure from al-Qa`ida in 2017 and the advent of a third model of salafi-jihadi activity: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its nationally oriented effort.

Iraq’s Kurdish regional leader Barzani defends Turkey’s Syria operation

Nechirvan Barzani, a powerful Kurdish leader in northern Iraq, argues that Turkey is targeting terrorists, not ‘the Kurds’.

The international outcry against the Turkish operation, which aimed to eradicate YPG presence from border areas in northern Syria, was based on one false premise: that the operation is targeting ‘the Kurds’, not terrorists. Now, Nechirvan Barzani, a powerful Kurdish leader, in Iraq has said that the Turkish military action has nothing to do with the Kurds, but is aimed at the PKK.

“Turkey’s problem, in the beginning, was not Kurds in Syria, it was the PKK. They were clear in saying one thing: ‘We cannot bear seeing the flag of the PKK on our borders with Syria,’” Barzani said, during a panel organised by the Erbil-based Middle East Research Center (MERI).

The YPG is the Syrian wing of the PKK, which has waged a decades-long terror campaign against the Turkish state, leading to tens of thousands of deaths across the country.

“Turkey had one demand, for Kurds to distinguish themselves from the PKK. Unfortunately, the PKK wanted to get legitimacy through Syrian Kurds,” Barzani said.

Barzani believes that the Turkish operation eventually happened “because of this wrong policy” conducted by the YPG in northern Syria.

The YPG has claimed large territories across northern Syria, manipulating the Syrian civil war as a pretext to form so-called ‘cantons’ in mostly Kurdish-populated areas.

The terror group took advantage of its longstanding relationship with the Assad regime to rule over Syrian Kurds, whom Damascus trusted to limit Kurdish opposition to the regime after reaching a deal with PKK leadership, located in northern Iraq’s Qandil mountains.

An extraordinary tale: The YPG/PYD rises

This section outlines broad contextual factors that help to explain the YPG/PYD’s rise to power during the early years of the Syrian conflict. It seeks to understand what circumstances enabled the organisation to achieve remarkable gains and autonomy in the space of just a few years after decades of repression by the Syrian regime of most domestic Kurdish political activity. As a PYD representative put it: ‘Let us go back to before 2011. The PYD was forbidden in Syria and Turkey. You can say that the majority of the PYD was locked up in regime prisons. In Damascus? In all provinces!’[11] Our analysis suggests that at least five storylines must be woven together to explain the rise of the YPG/PYD in the early years of the Syrian civil war, regardless of the specific strategies the group has pursued since then (these are analysed in Section 2).

A first element of the story are the policies of marginalisation, Arabisation and repression that Gamal Abdel Nasr applied to the Kurdish population of Syria after 1958 (during the United Arab Republic) and Syria’s various Ba’ath regimes after 1963. Lasting for decades, such policies broke up many communities in Syria’s Kurdish areas through a mix of symbolic and material measures, ranging from re-naming cities and villages.[12] keeping tens of thousands of Kurds stateless, enacting demographic changes, purposeful underdevelopment, and the incarceration of political dissidents.[13] It should be noted that the autocratic nature of the various Ba’ath regimes, especially under the Assads, created a generic level of repression across Syrian society in which Kurdish-specific repression was nested.[14] Moreover, Syrian Kurds could be part of the state apparatus and army as long as they fully embraced the regime and relegated their Kurdishness to the background.[15] Nevertheless, the regime did single Syrian Kurdish communities out for particularly intense and targeted repressive treatment out of concern that the country’s most substantial non-ruling minority might threaten its hold on power. Since the regime perceived the Kurds as not fitting the Arab nature of the Syrian state, the loyalty of this group was in doubt and its ‘othering’ facilitated a prism of repression to take hold.[16] For the purpose of this report, the relevance of these policies is that they created a climate of fear and distrust among Syrian Kurdish communities and political leaders. This climate was maintained by the presence of widespread regime intelligence informant networks.[17]

A visual display of YPG-PKK linkages at the Samalka border crossing between Iraq and Syria

A Syrian activist described the climate this engendered in the following manner: ‘Back in 1977, when Hafez al-Assad was in power, […] if you spoke Kurdish, or if they saw a Kurdish book with you, that was enough to arrest you: then you were a threat to state security. More than 250,000 Syrian Kurds did not have passports, let alone civil rights. My father is a Syrian national, but his sister and her children are not. Moreover, the regime removed Kurds to bring about demographic changes. They brought Arabs from Aleppo and Raqqa to our territory, took land from Kurds and gave it to the Arabs. Under Hafez al-Assad, no fewer than 68 leaders of the Kurdish democratic parties have been detained without trial.’[18]

Confronting the caliphate? Explaining civil resistance in jihadist proto-states

Abstract

Research has shown the potential of nonviolent civil resistance in challenging autocratic state regimes (e.g. Sharp, 1973; Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011). Yet, little is known about its applicability in jihadist proto-states, that is, territories governed by militant jihadist groups. We argue that civil resistance is more likely to occur when jihadists impose a rule that local populations perceive as alien and when organizational structures capable of collective nonviolent mobilization are activated. We develop this argument through a comparative analysis of three jihadist proto-states: one in which manifest and organized civil resistance occurred (Islamic Emirate of Azawad in Mali in 2012), and two in which it did not: the Islamic State of Iraq (2006–2008) and the Islamic Principality of al-Mukalla in Yemen (2015–2016). Whereas the former was met with mainly armed resistance (the Sunni Awakening campaign), the latter saw neither armed nor unarmed organized and collective resistance by locals under its rule. We demonstrate how variation in the jihadists’ governing strategies (especially the degree of adaptation to local conditions) as well as in the social structures for mobilization (i.e. whether opposition was channeled through civil society networks or tribal networks) created different conditions for civil resistance. This study adds to a growing research discussion on civil resistance against rebel governance (e.g. Arjona, 2015; Kaplan, 2017). More broadly, our study is an innovative first attempt to bridge research on terrorism, rebel governance, and civil resistance, three fields that have been siloed in previous research.

The Real Estate State?

Real Estate is the world’s largest asset class. The numbers are staggering- globally, real estate in aggregate is worth approximately $230 trillion. Of this, residential real estate is the majority player, worth approximately $180 trillion. This far exceeds the value of all stocks and is on the order of 25 times the value of all the gold ever mined. Again, the numbers defy imagination.

Problems With Capitalism

One of the problems with capitalism is that it is driving us towards disaster.

Greed is good?

Adam Smith (1723-1790) maintained that individual self-interest can and should be the principle guiding our economic behavior . He told the readers of his book “The Wealth of Nations”, that, as if guided by an invisible hand, individual self-interest leads to the general good. To put is in fewer words, Smith maintained that greed is good. However, during England’s industrial revolution the contrast between the lives of factory owners and those of slave-like workers, who had been driven off the land by the Enclosure Acts.