• Averting an ISIS Resurgence in Iraq and Syria

    The Islamic State (ISIS) has not made a comeback in Iraq or Syria – yet. A new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) says that “Conflict between Turkey and the SDF along the Syrian-Turkish border almost certainly will relieve pressure on ISIS, which lost its last territorial foothold in eastern Syria in May 2019 but persists as a deadly insurgency. Since May, the SDF has continued to pursue ISIS remnants across the north east and to hold thousands of ISIS detainees and ISIS-affiliated family members. Yet the SDF has warned that it will be forced to redirect its forces toward Syria’s northern border should Turkey attack. The consequences may be disastrous for areas farther south, where ISIS is most active, and for prisons and camps that hold ISIS militants and were already vulnerable to attack before the latest events.” The ICG notes that “Turkey’s intervention in north-eastern Syria, following President Trump’s 6 October decision, has put ISIS’s near defeat in Syria in question.”

  • Accountability for Islamic State Fighters: What Are the Options?

    President Trump’s precipitous decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria has already had dramatic consequences. One of the questions Trump’s hasty Twitter announcement raises involves the fate of the thousands of ISIS fighters no in detention in Syria. The Kurdish SDF is currently holding more than 10,000 Islamic State fighters—including at least 8,000 Iraqis and Syrians and 2,000 foreign fighters—in overflowing temporary detention centers in northeastern Syria. The biggest camp, al-Hol, houses around 70,000 people related to ISIS fighters, including about 10,000 foreigners and 30,000 Islamic State loyalists. The SDF has already said that it was withdrawing its guards from the Islamic State detention centers and camps in order to deal with the Turkish invasion. On Sunday, nearly 900 ISIS followers have escaped from one of the camps. Emma Broches writes that as Turkey’s offensive continues, it’s useful to review what the future might hold for these prisoners. “If the security surrounding the detainees deteriorates, the Islamic State will likely exploit the situation and create a further opportunity for its ongoing resurgence.”

  • Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.

    Raising teenagers can be terrifying. Squishy little babies become awkward hormonal creatures who question their parents’ authority at every turn. Joanna Schroeder writes that she expected that. “What I didn’t predict was that my sons’ adolescence would include being drawn to the kind of online content that right-wing extremists use to recruit so many young men,” she writes. “Unfortunately, extremists know how to find new recruits in the very place our sons spend so much of their time: online. And too often, they’re more aware than we are of how vulnerable young white men are to radicalization.”

  • Victims of IRA Terror Tell Jeremy Corbyn to Apologize

    Nearly 40 victims of IRA violence have called on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to apologize for his support for Irish republicanism, accusing him of “giving succor” to terrorists. In an open letter to mark the 35th anniversary of the Brighton bombing, the families of the dead demand that he condemn the terrorist campaign waged by the IRA in the 1970s and 1980s. A report from Mainstream, a new campaign group against extremism in politics, also reveals evidence of Corbyn’s closeness to London Labour Briefing, which ran an infamous editorial after the Brighton attack claiming that “the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it.” The 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, during the Conservative Party conference, killed five people and injured thirty-one.

  • German Synagogue Attacker Used Homemade 3D-Printed Plastic Gun

    Experts say that the fact that the neo-Nazi who on Wednesday attacked a synagogue in Germany used a 3D-printed gun should serve as a warning to security services, experts have said. The 27-year old suspect had been experimenting with 3D-printed guns for two years, and along with racist and anti-Semitic tracts, he posted instructions on plastic gun making which, he noted, would take no more than $50 for the materials and one weekend worth of time.

  • 18 Years After 9/11, Why Is Guantánamo Still Open?

    If he wants to upstage his predecessor, Donald Trump should take the necessary steps to close down the detention facility at Guantanamo. In the meantime, as long as the proceedings in the 9/11 case continue under [the newly appointed judge in the case, Air Force Col. Shane] Cohen, it’s clear he takes his responsibilities seriously. He opened the September 11 hearing by stating: “In this particular case, not only have I been asked to [ensure] a fair trial, but to sit in judgment in many instances of my own country and its actions. I get the weight of that decision. I get the weight of the impact of the decision that I’m making. Never underestimate the weight that I feel each and every day with the decisions that I make that impact the lives of people all over the world.”

  • Independent Adviser Calls for Overhaul of U.K. Counter-Extremism Strategy

    The U.K. government’s independent advisor on extremism is calling for a complete overhaul of the government’s strategy – recommending a new taskforce led by the Home Secretary. The U.K. Commission for Countering Extremism on Monday, 7 October, published its findings and recommendations in a new report, Challenging Hateful Extremism.

  • Independent Adviser Calls for Overhaul of U.K. Counter-Extremism Strategy

    The U.K. government’s independent advisor on extremism is calling for a complete overhaul of the government’s strategy – recommending a new taskforce led by the Home Secretary. The U.K. Commission for Countering Extremism on Monday, 7 October, published its findings and recommendations in a new report, Challenging Hateful Extremism.

  • A Hasty Departure Threatens to Help Assad and ISIS

    The hasty decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria “is a disturbing move that threatens to turn Kurdish forces, who have borne the brunt of containing Islamic State, towards the ambit of the despotic regime of President Assad. The U.S. decision will dismay allies, embolden ISIS, and give satisfaction to autocrats, not only Mr. Erdogan but also the regimes in Russia and Iran. Mr. Trump should think again. There is no substitute in foreign policy for giving a clear message to allies and adversaries. Mr. Trump’s precipitate withdrawal demoralizes the first and rewards the second,” says the London Times.

  • The United States Is Done Caring About Syria

    The Syria Study Group (SSG) is a bipartisan commission charged by Congress with “examining and making recommendations on the military and diplomatic strategy of the United States with respect to the conflict in Syria.” It published its report on 24 September. The report details five serious threats the conflict within Syria holds for U.S. national security: First, the self-declared Islamic State remains potent, well resourced, and ideologically committed to achieving its goals despite the pounding it has taken over the last five years. Second, Iran’s presence in Syria threatens a wider regional war, given the shadow war between the Israelis and Iranians in the seams of the conflict. Third, if U.S. foreign policy is destined to be shaped by great-power competition, then Russia is using Syria to build influence at the expense of the United States. Fourth, the violence that Bashar al-Assad and his supporters have unleashed on Syria has had far-reaching effects, including the political destabilization of Europe. The members of the study group recommend that the United States should reverse its plans for a military withdrawal in northeastern Syria and focus on stabilization efforts in that area – but Steven Cook writes that “At a level of abstraction, what the authors recommend is eminently reasonable. But given the political context in which they have been offered, most of them were dead before the report was published.” “America should not stand idly by,” the report’s authors urge, but as “they readily acknowledge, America will almost certainly do just that, perfectly reflecting the transition underway in U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East,” Cook writes.

  • Will Abandoning the Kurds Result in the Mass Release of Islamic State Fighters?

    In a series of tweets Monday morning, President Donald Trump, following a phone call with Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, announced the United States would withdraw its remaining forces from northern Syria, and that he had given a green light to Turkey to enter Syria to deal with Kurdish forces there. These forces had been instrumental in helping the United States defeat the Islamist State in Syria, and are now holding about 11,000 ISIS fighters – about 2,000 of them foreign fighters – in thirty detention centers. The Kurdish forces are regarded as terrorists by Turkey. Robert Chesney writes that the White House statement, issued after Trump’s tweets, “treats [the problem of the ISIS detainees] in a way that is far more alarming than comforting”: “It is possible that all this hand-wringing will prove unwarranted. Perhaps Turkey’s military incursion will be limited, leaving the Kurds capable and willing to continue detaining Islamic State fighters. Perhaps vast numbers of the detainees will be dispatched to Iraq for prosecution after all (a much-touted plan a year ago, about which little has surfaced since). Perhaps Turkey will somehow gain control of and maintain detention operations. Anything is possible. But none of that seems likely. More likely, the biggest beneficiary of all this will be the Islamic State.”

  • The War in Afghanistan Started 18 Years Ago to Fight Terrorism after 9/11. Is the U.S. Safer?

    Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, on Oct. 7, 2001, the course of U.S. military operations changed for years to come when Operation Enduring Freedom officially launched, with then-President George W. Bush announcing the action during an address from the White House Treaty Room. That operation ballooned into a multi-front war on terror that has lasted nearly two decades and sparked criticism for its duration and questions about its mission. Since then, the terrorism threat landscape has evolved, with ISIS and homegrown extremists emerging as dangers. Experts say that in thinking about terrorism and terrorist threats, Americans should be aware of two factors. One factor in fighting the war on terror, on experts says, is that “we’re demanding decisive military victories in situations where decisive military victories are not possible.” The second factor is that while the efforts in Afghanistan have worked, the threat and the source of danger to the U.S. has evolved over time. “Over the last 18 years the U.S. has dramatically improved its ability to prevent attacks by foreign terrorist groups,” another expert said. “Unfortunately, however, those same counter-terrorism capabilities are ill-suited to address the current threat facing the United States” – threats which are mostly posed by domestic violent extremists. Most of whom inspired by White Power ideology.

  • Free Speech Is Killing Us

    There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet, for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. Andrew Marantz writes in the New York Times that in the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” “No one believes that anymore,” Marantz writes. Marantz says that after spending the past few years embedded as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, “I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.” He adds: “The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?”

  • U.K. Government Drive to Tackle Extremism Is “Inadequate”

    The drive to tackle extremism in the United Kingdom is failing because the government’s response is “inadequate” and “unfocused,” according to an official report published Monday. Extremist activity is contributing to a climate of censorship and fear, limiting expression, religion and belief while those countering it receive little support. The report warns that hateful, hostile and supremacist beliefs are increasingly visible in the U.K. today. “The Far Right’s narratives of a racial or cultural threat to “natives” from “aliens” have been making their way into the mainstream. “As are Islamists’ ideas for defending a single politicized and communal Muslim identity against the West’s corrupting influence. And the Far Left’s conflation of anti-imperialist and antisemitism”, it said.

  • Eighteen Years On: The War on Terror Comes of Age

    Later this year, a U.S. service member is likely to be deployed to Afghanistan who was not yet born on September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda terrorists launched the most devastating terrorist attack in history and killed almost 3,000 people, mostly Americans. The years in between have seen wars in Iraq and Syria justified in the name of counterterrorism as well as more limited U.S. interventions against jihadi groups in Libya, Somalia, and other countries. “Hundreds of thousands have died in these conflicts—some from terrorism, but most from combat and the associated ravages of war,” Daniel Byman writes. “Yet even as this body count soared, neither al-Qaeda nor other jihadi groups have proven able to conduct a repeat of 9/11 or even anything close to it.” He notes that judging the threat that jihadi terrorism currently poses to the United States and, more broadly, the success of the U.S.-led struggle against various jihadi groups in the post-9/11 era depends on what interests are prioritized and which perspective one takes. “Before Americans celebrate or despair, however, it is useful to take stock of the problems facing the main jihadi organizations themselves.”