Category Archives: Counter-insurgency war

The GWOT if Israel was in charge.

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What if Israel ran the Global War on Terror (GWOT)?

On the wall of his office Meir Dagan had an old black-and-white photograph of his grandfather about to be shot by a German in Russia during the Second World War. Must be some German soldier’s snap-shot, something he could keep as a trophy or send home to his girlfriend. I don’t know where Dagan got it. Probably did a lot of looking through the picture collection at Yad Vashem. This may not be psychologically healthy. Perhaps he should have considered grief counseling. On the other hand, Dagan was the head of the Israeli foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. He could look at it anytime he wanted during the day while he tried to figure out how to deal with Israel’s enemies.

One of the units under Dagan’s command was called “Kidon.” That’s the Hebrew word for bayonet. (Actually, it probably means “dagger” or “six inches of honed bronze” because Hebrew is a language from the many days ago before Bayonne even existed.) You go to Barnes and Noble, you’ll find a bunch of books about American snipers with 500 “kills” or sumshit like that. Kind of FPSy if you ask me. I don’t think I’ve run across books about sticking a blade in somebody, feeling it grate on a rib, inhaling the coppery smell of blood, hearing the guy gasping for breath like it’s sex. Nothing FPS about that. Kidon typifies Israel’s response to terrorism.

After the 1972 Munich Olympics, Kidon launched “Operation Wrath of God.” (See: “Munich.”) The Israelis killed eleven PLO terrorists believed to have been involved in the attack. It took seven years. Apparently, they’re tenacious and patient.

At least once, in Lillehamer, Norway, they killed a complete innocent. In front of his pregnant wife. Apparently, they don’t get thrown off-track by remorse over errors.

After Hamas rose to power in the Gaza Strip in 1993, it sent many suicide bombers into Israel. The Israelis didn’t take this lying down. In 1996 they palmed off a “burner” filled with explosives on Yahya Ayyash, the really talented chief bomb maker for Hamas; in 1997 they tried to kill Khaled Meshal, a Hamas leader, by injecting poison into his ear; in 2004 they killed the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, with an Apache gunship; in 2008 they put a bomb in the headrest of a Hamas leader’s car in Damascus. In January 2010 they suffocated the chief contact between Hamas and Iran in his luxury hotel room in Dubai. Apparently, they focus on the enemy leadership. Just keep mowing the lawn.

When Hamas took full control of Gaza in 2007, it fired thousands of rockets into Israel. Israel responded by blockading Gaza: it will not allow in cement, steel, cars, computers, and lots of ordinary food; its navy will not let fishing boats proceed more than three miles from shore; it will not allow any Palestinians out of Gaza. From December 2008 to January 2009 Israeli forces bombarded the Gaza Strip. Anything big (police stations, factories, government buildings, schools, hospitals) got blown up; 1,300 people got killed; tens of thousands got “dishoused”—as the RAF used to describe the result of the area bombing of German cities. Apparently, they don’t care much about making a bad impression on world opinion.

At the same time, Israeli leaders began to talk about doing a deal with Syria for the return of the Golan Heights. Syria is the chief supporter of Hamas. Probably, the price of the Golan for Syria would include helping eliminate the ability of Hamas to engage in attacks on Israel—before the Syrians get back the Golan. (See: “Michael Collins.”) Apparently, they adapt to changing circumstances and will talk to their enemies.

So, tenacity, patience, focus, a thick hide to criticism, and adaptability are keys traits. The enemy hasn’t gone away, but neither have the Israelis. They live with a long struggle.

Islamism as a story.

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The current theater of operations for ISIS lies in the midst of ancient and modern historical places. On the one hand, Tel Megiddo, in northern Israel, is the place identified with Armageddon in the Bible’s Book of Revelations. Farther north, in Syria, Dabiq appears in the Hadith as the name of a village where a final confrontation between the armies of Islam and Christendom will fight to a decision. Dabiq is near the Syrian-Turkish border. In Summer 2014 it fell to the ISIS forces. In July 2014, during its own “surge” in Iraq, ISIS began publishing an on-line magazine called “Dabiq.”

On the other hand, it is commonplace for people in the Arab states to explain the decline from earlier Muslim power and prosperity by blaming Western intervention and exploitation.[1] Islamists extend this narrative. Islamists celebrate the breaking of the grip of the Byzantine Empire on Syria and Palestine, and the conquest of “al-Andalus” in the in the 7th and 8th Centuries. The Abbasid and Umayyad caliphates are held up as the ideal for what the Islamists hope to create. Similarly, the Medieval Crusaders are analogized to contemporary Western states.

The American invasions of Afghanistan in 2011 and of Iraq in 2003 certainly gave the proponents of this view a lot of material with which to work. Young Islamists have mastered modern social media just as well as have young non-Islamists, along with young everyone else. Al Qaeda led the way by launching a media campaign: audio cassettes, DVDs, and Internet forums preached the Islamist interpretation.

Recognizing that people like Anwar al-Awlaki[2] had played a role in fomenting and recruiting for terrorism, in 2011 the United States Department of State created a Center for Strategic Counter-Terrorism Communications (CSCC). One chief function of the CSCC is to engage in on-line debate with Islamists. The goal here is to dissuade young people from supporting or joining Islamist groups.[3] The CSCC has a Digital Outreach Team with members working in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, Somali, and English.

The means to the goal is to propose a different narrative of history than the one upheld by many Muslims. The CSCC’s counter-narrative focuses on recent history, rather than on a more remote past. It emphasizes the tolerance of pre-Islamist Muslim society. This view clashes with both the restriction imposed under the Islamists’ version of sharia and the brutality with which it is enforced.

The question–not much addressed by Western scholars or journalists or counter-propagandists–is why the messages of either an “End of Days” or a revival of the Caliphate appeals so strongly to thousands of young Muslims. What are they missing about motivation?

 

Shatha Almutawa, “Historical Narrative in American Counterterrorism Operations,” American Historical Association, Perspectives, September 2014, pp. 12-13.

Noor Malas, “Ancient Prophecies Motivate Islamic State,” WSJ, 19 November 2014.

[1] This explanation ignores the pervasive weaknesses of Medieval Arab society that exposed the region to conquest by successive waves of Muslim Turkish tribesmen, followed by the long decline caused by the decay of the Ottoman Empire. Western imperialism had a much briefer period of influence. Not all of those influences were negative. However, the performance of the post-independence Arab states contrasts badly with those of other “developing” societies.

[2] See: “Just like imam used to make.”

[3] One might be forgiven for believing that another purpose is to draw them out so that their other communications can be tracked by the NSA. I’m all for it, but it could lead to “getting flamed” for some hasty remark—by a drone.

What We Learned From the Report of the 911 Commission IX.

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In February 1999, there seems to have been no confusion among the NSC and CIA people about what they wanted to accomplish: they prepared to use intelligence about Bin Laden visiting a desert hunting camp favored by some important people from the United Arab Emirates to launch another cruise missile strike (and tough luck for any Emiratis who happened to be present). The report seems to me to suggest that Clarke first blocked this strike because he saw the UAE as America’s ally in the fight against terrorism, then in March 1999 basically exposed to the Emiratis the CIA’s knowledge that the campers welcomed Bin Laden. The camp immediately folded up and Bin Laden never passed through there again. (p. 202.)

In February 1999 Tenet persuaded President Clinton to allow the CIA to try to recruit the Northern Alliance to capture or kill Bin Laden. The Northern Alliance leader showed little enthusiasm for capturing an enemy and, besides, the Northern Alliance had no ready access to the areas where Bin Laden was located. (pp. 203-204.)

In May 1999 the CIA thought it had a 50-50 chance of nailing Bin Laden in Kandahar, but they had just botched the targeting of a “smart bomb” in Belgrade and had hit the Chinese embassy. Naturally a little touchy about accuracy, Tenet seems to have backed away when it looked like everyone was getting ready to John-the-Baptist him if the attack did not succeed. (pp. 205-206.)

The rest of 1999 got frittered away trying to come up with a plan to get Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Nothing emerged. However, in 1999, and again in 2000, a group of Americans from different agencies traveled to Saudi Arabia in an effort to sort out the source of al Qaeda’s money. To their surprise they discovered that Bin Laden was not financing operations out of a vast private fortune—as had long been the assumption. Belatedly, they discovered that Bin Laden had rebuilt the “Golden Chain” of donations. How to penetrate, let alone destroy, that network remained a mystery to the CIA. (p. 268.)

These developments really left the US with no option but to try to disrupt any offensive operations outside of Afghanistan. What were they doing on this front during 1998-2001? For one thing, the National Security Agency kept watch on the communications of known terrorists.

Real trouble was at hand. In 1994 a group of Algerian terrorists had hijacked a jet, possibly with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower. Later in 1994, Ramzi Yousef, then based in the Philippines, plotted to bomb twelve US airliners flying over the Pacific. (p. 90.) This plot was broken up. In early 1995, Ramzi Yousef’s accomplice in the Manila airlines plot told interrogators that the two men had discussed crashing a plane into CIA HQ. Khalid Sheik Mohammed had adopted this plan.

In mid-1996 KSM had pitched OBL on a plan to crash airliners into American buildings. (pp. 214-215.) OBL did not commit and KSM seems to have doubted that OBL was serious about attacking the Americans.

Then the embassy bombings persuaded KSM that OBL was serious about attacking the United States. He renewed his proposal for al Qaeda support for the “planes operation.” In March or April 1999, OBL agreed to support the plan. (pp. 216, 223.)

Thus, during 1999 both the Americans and al Qaeda were searching for ways to get at one another to deadly effect. Of the two, al Qaeda operated with fewer restraints and more imagination.

Week End Update I.

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In Western Civilization there is a deeply ingrained dread of human inventiveness. Witness the stories of Prometheus (fire) and Icarus (flight). Former reporter and novelist Dan Fesperman applies this lesson to contemporary drone warfare in a novel grounded in facts. The plot centers on a drone attack gone-awry in Afghanistan. A dozen civilians are killed and others are gravely wounded. Darwin Cole, the controller who fired the “Hellfire” missile on orders from some mysterious above, comes apart at the seams after the attack. Booted from the Air Force, abandoned by his wife and children, and seeking solace in the proverbial bottle, Cole is approached by a team of journalists. They’re snuffling after a war-crimes story wrapped in a war-profiteering story hidden inside a corporations-own-America story. Having escaped the proverbial bottle, Darwin Cole soon encounters the proverbial scientist-tortured-by-guilt. This scientist, Nelson Sharpe, provides the means to voice Fesperson’s research into drone technology: it isn’t that complicated, it’s readily available to whoever wants to use it, and governments can’t control it any better than they control firearms or drugs. Islamist fanatics, Mexican drug lords, Montana militias, and private military companies all can—and will–seize this terrible technology. Then they’ll hire a bunch of pimply gamers to fly the things—probably from Arkansas trailer parks converted from meth labs, instead of from “secret” command posts in Nevada.[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhnAZFR1po

Well, probably. However, the next story to consider is that of likely counter-measures. On the one hand, one can envision hordes of little fighter-drones circling in constant Combat Air Patrol over sensitive sites, unnoticed by the people below until there is a sudden flash of light in the sky as some approaching danger—or flock of seagulls—is eliminated. On the other hand, one can envision a further expansion of the “requirements” lists submitted to the NSA. Anyone who expresses an interest in unmanned aerial vehicles on-line should expect to have his or her name added to a watch list. So, you might look at Dan Fesperman, Unmanned (Knopf, 2014).

 

For good and ill, the United States military isn’t what it once was. The end of the Cold War led to big cuts in forces. Contractors took over many support functions, then spread into providing security services. For budget reasons, they’re here to stay. However, their mis-steps attract a lot of bad press. So the question becomes how to harness the contractors for the benefits they provide while limiting the damage they can do. One approach has been to try to create international norms for the use and behavior of private military contractors. In September 2008 the United States and sixteen other countries signed a pledge to require companies to “comply with international humanitarian or human rights law.” A 2010 document asked private military contractors to follow well-defined standards of behavior, to maintain transparency, and to be held accountable for their actions. The number of companies that have “taken the pledge”—as my Welsh grandmother used to say of temperance oaths—is a good measure of the spread of private military contractors as a form of business. Seven hundred as of 2013. Most are small companies that sub-contract work from the big boys: Xe (the re-labeled Blackwater), DynCorp, and Aegis.

If private military contractors are a business, will “regulation” prove successful? In any event, Ann Hagedorn, The Invisible Soldiers (Simon and Schuster, 2014), provides a lot of interesting information on the private contractors.

[1] This is probably bad news for any out-of-work airlines pilots who sign on the fly drug shipments into the United States. One more career avenue closed off.

What God abandoned these defended

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Soldiers who fight for pay, rather than for a cause, are generally seen as disreputable. For example, American Patriots hated Hessian “mercenaries.” In contrast, idealists who go to war eventually command a degree of respect. One recent estimate has been that 16,000 Islamist enthusiasts have flocked to the black banner of ISIS. Clearly, ISIS represents a cause worth fighting for in the minds of many young Muslims, just as did the Spanish Republic in the 1930s for many young leftists.

In 1992 the American military began spinning-off many of its logistical and support functions to private contractors. (See: Cry of the Halliburton.) The recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq led to a huge increase in the number of contractors in the combat areas: at their peak 155,000 in Iraq and 207,000 in Afghanistan. These numbers equaled or exceeded the number of US troops present. About as many contractors have been killed in the two wars (6,800) as have US military personnel (6,838). The use of the contractors has raised several concerns.[1]

On the one hand, there is the venerable anxiety over “waste, fraud, and abuse” (WFA).  The US paid out $200 billion for “contractors.” In 2008 Congress created a Commission on Wartime Contracting to search out WFA. Inevitably, it found many instances of over-billing and under-performance. Its estimates of spending lost to waste or fraud range between one-seventh and almost one-third of money spent, depending on what they were looking at.[2]

On the other hand, there have been concerns over unjustified violence visited on civilian populations by armed contractors. The case of Blackwater guards who shot-up Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, killing 17 Iraqi civilians, has led to the conviction of one guard for murder and three others for manslaughter.

Still, contractors may be used in the current unpleasantness in Iraq and Syria. President Obama has pledged that there aren’t going to be American combat troops in Iraq. However, no one in the American government wants to totally cede the ground to Iranian advisors either. Using security contractors might offer a way to square this circle. Many of them are veterans of the US or other military forces. They could train Syrian “moderates” (to the extent that anyone can find some) and Kurdish immoderates. They could even be grouped into small combat units to directly engage ISIS forces. Backed up by US air strikes, they might make a useful contribution to the war without a name.

Contractors offer an attractive solution to several sorts of problems. First, having contractors handle logistics, maintenance, and other support functions allows the US military to concentrate its troops on war-fighting. The number of contractors can be expanded and contracted rapidly to meet the circumstance. The alternative would be to maintain a permanent large force of regular troops to handle these missions in both wartime and in peace time.

Second, nobody but their families care if they get killed. Their wounded don’t go to Walter Reed Hospital. They don’t get veterans benefits. The names of their dead don’t get printed in agate type at the bottom of an inside column in the New York Times and their faces don’t get broadcast in respectful silence on the PBS NewsHour. There isn’t going to be a Monument to the Fallen Contractor on the Washington Mall anytime soon.

[1] “Paid boots on the ground,” The Week, 14 November 2014, p. 11.

[2] The Iraq War cost at least $1.1 trillion and the long-term price may run as high as $3 trillion. Since the war itself offers an example of WFA, I’m not sure that getting nickel-and-dimed by private contractors should be our first area of concern.  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

 

What We Learned From the Report of the 9/11 Commission VII.

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What was more important in 1998, fending off a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent or working out on Pakistan to get it to pressure the religious fanatics running Afghanistan to evict a co-religionist who hated Americans? After Pakistan had tested a nuclear weapon in May 1998, the Congress had slapped heavy sanctions on the impoverished, unstable country. This left American diplomacy with little leverage in the effort to apply pressure on the Taliban. Now Pakistan’s relations with India were at an apparent breaking point because of the struggle over Kashmir. Most American diplomats involved in South Asia policy-making preferred to downplay the terrorism issue until the possibility of nuclear war had been contained. Diplomacy got nowhere by the end of 1999. (pp. 177-185.)

 

Covert Action.

After the August 1998 embassy bombings, President Clinton signed a Memorandum of Notification that instructed the CIA to attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden, but authorized the use of deadly force only for self-defense. (pp. 185, 192.) By Christmas 1998 Berger, Tenet, and Clinton purportedly had all come around to favor killing Bin Laden if he could not be captured; Clinton approved a new Memorandum of Notification to this effect. (p. 193.) However, this memo referred only to the tribal fighters in touch with the CIA, it was circulated only to a handful of people at the highest level of government, Clinton greatly diluted a similar proposed agreement with the Northern Alliance, and no CIA officials ever got the idea that Clinton seriously desired to kill—rather than capture for trial—Osama Bin Laden.

While the “sissies in striped pants” at State were doing their thing to no visible effect, the CIA and the FBI were busy busting up Al Qaeda operations overseas. During August and September 1998 al Qaeda people were arrested in Britain, Italy, Germany, and Azerbaijan.

The Afghan tribal fighters seemed to provide valuable intelligence on the location of Bin Laden, although no one in Langley thought that their purported efforts to kill Bin Laden were very credible. [NB: Reading between the lines, it appears that the tribals were milking the CIA for money and were not going to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs by killing or capturing OBL.]

In October, November, and December 1998 concern that al Qaeda meant to launch a terrorist attack within the United States led to various alerts and to discussion of an attempt to hit Bin Laden in Kandahar, but the decision-makers choked on the latter option—much to the annoyance of lower level officials.[1] Lieutenant General William Boykin, a snake-eater from way back and subsequently the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, later said of this time that “opportunities were missed because of an unwillingness to take risks and a lack of vision and understanding.” (quoted, p. 199.)

[1] This lower-ranks frustration with the caution of the upper-ranks is similar to the later improvisation of a response to the 9/11 hijackings. This emerges as one of the key factors in understanding American vulnerability to attack. The Federal government appears to recruit and promote cautious, consensus-oriented CYA people.

What We Learned form the Report of the 9/11 Commission VI.

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“The modest national effort exerted to contain Serbia and its depredations in the Balkans between 1995 and 1999, for example, was orders of magnitude larger than that devoted to al Qaeda.” (p. 487.) Neither the American public nor American leaders seemed to even notice terrorism as a problem in the post-Cold War environment.

 

Crisis: August 1998.

Immediately after the embassy bombings CIA Director George Tenet knew that there would be a big gathering of terrorist leaders at Khowst in Afghanistan on 20 August 1998, and CentCOM commander Tony Zinni had his cruise missile plan already to go. The responsible decision-makers talked over the issues until 20 May and sent the Vice-Chairman of the JCS to warn the Pakistanis that the cruise missiles flying through their air space were not an Indian attack. Nobody wanted a nuclear war on the sub-continent as an unintended by-product of the strike at Bin Laden, but this probably constituted a serious breach of security. The missiles missed Bin Laden by a few hours and some people think that he was warned off by Pakistan’s intelligence service. (pp. 169-171.)

Clarke wanted the cruise missiles strikes of 20 August 1998 to be the opening act for continuous efforts to kill Bin Laden. It was not to be. (pp. 175-176.)

Although JCS Chairman Hugh Shelton ordered CENTCOM to plan for additional measures, he “did not recommend any of them.” “Shelton felt that the August 1998 attacks had been a waste of good ordnance and thereafter consistently opposed firing expensive Tomahawk missiles merely at ‘jungle gym’ terrorist training infrastructure. In this view, he had complete support from Defense Secretary William Cohen. Shelton was prepared to plan other options, but he was also prepared to make perfectly clear his own strong doubts about the wisdom of any military action that risked U.S. lives unless the intelligence was ‘actionable.’”(pp. 502, 503.)

CENTCOM commander Tony Zinni, who actually had to come up with a possible scheme, believed that a long-term development of relationships with neighboring countries made the most sense. Covert action of any kind would require some kind of local base. Zinni got the feeling that Washington was picky about doing business with dictators merely because they could help out the United States. (p. 197.)

Already haunted by memories of “Desert One” and “Black Hawk Down,” decision-makers probably became even more cautious about using force to solve the Bin Laden problem in the wake of the failed cruise missile strikes of 20 August 1998. (pp. 172-173.)

In addition to missing Bin Laden, there were serious downsides to this attack: international opinion heaped abuse on the US for being “bomb-happy”; the Republicans ridiculed Clinton for “pinpricks.” (pp. 172-173.)

Soon afterward, American diplomatic and military power was being applied in the Balkans against Serbia (October 1998-March 1999) and in the Middle East against Iraq (December 1998). This distracted most of the key people from problem of terrorism.

At the same time it is important to note that people working for Allen Holmes, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, produced a paper calling on the Defense Department to assume the lead in the global fight against terrorism. (pp. 176-177.) This paper did not get very far up the chain of approval during the Clinton Administration, but it may have lain dormant until Rumsfeld came to the Pentagon.

Zarqawi.

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Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (30 October 1966-7 June 2006) was born in Zarqa, Jordan. He sprang from a Bedouin family which had settled down in Jordan’s one factory town. Something went wrong early in life. He drank a lot and had a great deal of “contact” with the police. At some point, he got religion and shaped up his life. A passport photo shows him clean-shaven, with a white shirt and tie—and a sad, mean look. At some point, he took the alias “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” which means “the father of Musab” and “From Zarka.”

In 1989 he followed the well-worn Young Islamist pathway to Afghanistan. Here he met Osama bin Laden, may have received basic military training in one of the numerous camps, and wrote some stuff for an Islamist newsletter. By 1992 he was back in Jordan conspiring to overthrow the monarchy, for which he did five years in prison (1994-1999). In prison he came under the influence of the Jordanian Islamist writer Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. No sooner did he get out than he tried to blow up a tourist hotel in Amman (1999). This didn’t work out any better than his earlier plot. From 1999 to 2002 he moved to Afghanistan (where OBL fronted him $200,000 to start a Jordanian franchise of Al Qaeda and the Americans almost killed him in a bombing), then went to Iraq by way of Iran. He may have been recovering from an injury in Baghdad for a while. In summer 2002 he moved into northern Iraq, where he joined an Islamist group that was waging jihad by cutting pictures of women off ads.

More serious work tugged at him. He helped plot the assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan (October 2002); organized the bombing of the UN’s HQ in Baghdad (August 2003); organized attacks on Shi’ite shrines in Karbala and Baghdad (March 2004); planned a huge abortive chemical weapons attack on the offices of the prime minister and the intelligence service of Jordan and on the American embassy (April 2004); beheaded a captured American civilian (May 2004), then posted the film on the internet; sent terrorists on an abortive attack on a NATO meeting in Turkey (June 2004); beheaded another captured American civilian (September 2004), then posted the film on the internet; organized the bombing of three hotels in Amman (November 2005); and organized the attack on the Al Askari mosque in Samarra (February 2006). These attacks are only the most spectacular of his operations.

Having been organizing in Iraq from before the Second Gulf War, he had the weapons and explosive, the local contacts, the hideouts, and the local knowledge for insurgent war. What he needed were fighters. These began to flow to him in the form of the many Islamist foreign fighters who entered the country from 2003 on. The newcomers lacked local contacts, so Zarqawi became their controller. He probably organized many of the hundreds of suicide bombings that battered Iraq from 2003 to 2006.

Zarqawi had been on American and Jordanian “Most Wanted” lists since early 2002. In January 2003, the CIA had proposed killing Zarqawi at a camp they had identified in Kurdistan. The proposal was rejected, possibly out of fear that an attack would release toxic clouds from chemicals stored in the camp. Once the US invaded Iraq, Special Forces groups hunted Zarqawi with mounting intensity. Several of these raids came close to capturing him, but always fell short. (One time they found eggs cooking, but not yet burning, on the stove of his empty hide-out.) However, the raids did capture some of his associates. One of these was interrogated—humanely—by an Air Force interrogator who uses the pseudonym “Matthew Alexander.” Zarqawi had a great many hiding places, but “Alexander” learned the location of one in a village near Baqubah. It took six weeks of watching before he came in sight. On the night of 7 June 2006, two precision guided bombs destroyed the house, Zarqawi, and his wife and child–Musab.

Ammo.

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            C.J. Chivers came to reporting for the New York Times by an unusual rout. He graduated from Cornell in 1987, then went in the Marines as an officer. He served in the First Gulf War, then in peace-keeping operations in Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots. He left the Marines as a captain in 1994. Graduate school in journalism at Columbia followed. His first reporting job came with the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. He worked there from 1995 to 1999. In 1999 he moved to the Times, where he had the police beat until 2001. Thereafter he became a foreign correspondent covering the wars with radical Islam. He’s covered the Americans war in Afghanistan, the Russian war with Chechnya, and the American war in Iraq. Lately, he’s been covering the wars in Ukraine and Syria.

As a former Marine, Chivers knows more than does the usual reporter about military weapons. As a war correspondent in the Greater Islamic Area, he’s run into a lot of AK-47s. These qualifications give his reporting a certain cast. He can make firearms themselves tell an interesting story about the conflicts in which they are used. For example, he wrote The Gun (2010), a history of the AK-47. (See: The Gun That Made the Nineties Roar; The Arms Barometer).

Recently, he published a story about the ammunition that has been recovered on the battlefields where troops have engaged ISIS. It turns out that ISIS captures much of its ammunition from defeated foes. Indeed, it appears to select target for attack to some degree or in some cases by the prospect of capturing important stocks of weapons. It isn’t hard to do because a lot of the opponents of ISIS don’t put up much of a fight. Sometimes, anti-Assad groups of Syrians rebels or the Syrian troops they are supposed to be fighting just sell to ISIS the arms that they have been given by foreign patrons.

About 80 percent of the ammunition examined came from the Soviet Union before its collapse, post-Soviet Russia, the United States, China, or from Serbia (the perpetual bad-boy of international morality). A lot of the ISIS ammo came out of captured Syrian warehouses—or off dead Syrian troops. The Soviet Union/Putinia were long-terms sponsors of Syria, so about 18-19 percent of the ammo was manufactured in some version of whatever we’re calling Russia this week. Most of this was produced between 1970 and 1990. So, did the Russkies stop selling to the Syrians from 1990 on? Or was more recently supplied ammo stored in warehouses closer to the center of power? Or was this AK-47 ammunition purchased by the US government from an American re-seller of ammo to fit the AK-47 and other Russian weapons and then given to either Iraqi security forces before they were supplied with American M-16s or to Syrian “moderates”? About 26 percent was manufactured in China during the 1980s, but it is impossible to tell when it was shipped to Syria. About 18 percent of it was manufactured in the United States during the 2000s, so this is ammo supplied to the Iraq security forces after the American invasion of Iraq. Probably, most of this ammo came into the possession of ISIS after the collapse of the Iraqi army in Spring-Summer 2014.[1]

The story by Chivers complicates the Obama administration’s idea of building up “moderate” alternatives to ISIS. For one thing, why is it necessary to train and arm “moderate” fighters when the solution that occurred to ISIS was to go get the weapons that they needed by brute force? Why didn’t “moderates” seize the arms they needed from Syrian forces? Fpr another thing, “moderates” appear to have sold some of the weapons that they have received to ISIS to avoid trouble. Won’t they do that with any new weapons that they receive?

[1] C.J. Chivers, “ISIS’ Ammunition Is Shown to Have Origins in U.S. and China,” NYT, 6 October 2014.

Shi’a pets.

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The Prophet Muhammad died in 632 AD. Who should succeed him as “caliph,” the leader of the Faithful? Should the succession be “elective” in the sense of someone chosen from among Muhammad’s chief followers? If so, then the leading candidate was Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law and a powerful prop of Islam. Or should the succession be “hereditary” in the sense of someone chosen from among Muhammad’s sons-in-law so that the blood of the Prophet would run in the veins of future caliphs? If so, the leading candidate was Ali, the favored son-in-law. The majority supported the “elective” solution: Abu Bakr became the caliph. Ali and his followers sulked and schemed. Eventually Ali seized power as the fourth caliph, only to be assassinated. Since the debate over the succession, Islam has been split between a majority which sprang out of the supporters of Abu Bakr, the Sunni, and a minority that sprang from the “party of Ali,” the Shi’a[t Ali].[1] Eventually, the caliphate passed to the Ottoman sultan. The majority of Ottoman subjects were Sunni Muslims, with Shi’ites a minority located in what would become Syria and what would become Iraq. The great majority of Shi’ites were found in Persia/Iran.

Events in the 1980s turned up the flame under this conflict. The Iranian Revolution led to the creation of a revolutionary theocratic republic. Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran led to a long war in which other Sunni states supported Iraq. Iran largely created the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon.

At the start of the Twenty-First Century, Syria under the Assad dictatorship offered a mirror-image to Iraq under the Hussein dictatorship. In the former, a Shi’a minority ruled a Sunni majority in the latter, a Sunni minority ruled s Shi’a majority.[2] The overthrow of these regimes then opened the door for the oppressed minorities to seek revenge.[3] Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, the Assad government has seen half the country secede from its control. In Iraq, the Maliki government got right to business as soon as they had waved good-bye to the all-too-willing Americans in 2011.

Both sides in the Syrian civil war have found supporters among their co-religionists abroad. Shi’ite Iran and the Shi’ite government of Iraq have aided the Shi’ite Assad government. Sunni Qatar, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Sunni foreign fighters have supported the Sunni Islamists who are doing most of the heavy lifting against the Assad government in Syria and who have attacked the Shi’ite government in Iraq.[4] (See: “A Dog in This Fight?”)

“The Sunni-Shi’ite War,” The Week, 1 November 2013, p. 9.

[1] Wait. They’re fighting a gory war over something that happened 1400 years ago? Well, not exactly. During the 1400 years the two sects developed different religious practices which divide them. They also developed a history of conflict, oppression, and resistance linked to these two different faith traditions. So, they’re fighting a gory war over stuff that began 1400 years ago and continued—in widely varying degrees of intensity—down to the present. It probably isn’t helpful to try to analogize it to history-based conflicts in Western culture, like Protestant versus Catholic in Northern Ireland or the struggle for African-American civil rights.

[2] Do minorities create dictatorships as a defensive response to past or potential threats from the majority? That’s a political science question, rather than a historical question.

[3] While effete Italians assert that “revenge is a dish best tasted cold,” Arabs appear to prefer take-out.

[4] Is it possible to compare the Syrian Civil War to the Spanish Civil War? Or aren’t young Muslims entitled to a romantic commitment to an idealistic cause that subsequently turns out to be soiled by Great Power scheming?