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The Middle East's Future Looks a Lot Like Iraq: Tom Wilson, Real Clear World, May 29, 2015— Today's Middle East is arguably more volatile and more dangerous than it has been for centuries.
Obama Has Given Up on Iraq: Max Boot, Commentary, May 29, 2015 — White House press secretary Josh Earnest was busy yesterday commenting on the calamitous situation in Iraq—and in the process making it even worse.
ISIL Militants ‘Not Muslims': Millions Fleeing Their Homes as Terrorist Group Takes Over Iraqi Towns: Matthew Fisher, National Post, May 24, 2015 — Noura Mahmoud has been so terrorized by her family’s brushes with ISIL she wanted to be called by a pseudonym rather than reveal even her first name.
Islamic Jizya: Fact and Fiction: Raymond Ibrahim, Frontpage, May 29, 2015— Muslim demands for non-Muslim “infidels” to pay jizya on pain of death are growing, even as the West fluctuates between having no clue what jizya is and thinking that jizya is an example of “tolerance” in Islam.
Implications of the Fall of Key Syrian and Iraqi Cities to ISIS: Col. (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah, JCPA, May 27, 2015
The Ugly Reality is That the Islamic State Could Win: John McLaughlin, National Post, May 28, 2015
ISIS Attacks on the West: Daniel Pipes, Washington Times, May 21, 2015
Is Turkey Still Arming Islamic State?: Burak Bekdil, Middle East Forum, May 25, 2015
THE MIDDLE EAST'S FUTURE LOOKS A LOT LIKE IRAQ
Tom Wilson
Real Clear World, May 29, 2015
Today's Middle East is arguably more volatile and more dangerous than it has been for centuries. The rise of Islamic State and the prospect of a nuclear Iran each represent an unprecedented threat to global security. All the while the West appears increasingly at a loss as to what to do about any of this. Britain and America's influence in the region has weakened, and this newly emerging reality looks set to create some strange and previously inconceivable alliances.
Reports have been emerging from Middle Eastern news agencies of a secret meeting recently held in Jordan. What was particularly intriguing about this previously unpublicized gathering was that it reportedly brought together Israeli diplomats with those from Arab countries that officially have no dealings with the Jewish State; we can assume that figures from the Gulf countries were among those in attendance.
All the more interesting, it is being widely reported that the meeting was essentially convened to plan for a Middle East from which America has more or less retreated. Other reports claim that some of the Sunni states expressed openness to entering into security cooperation with Israel. If true, this indicates just how concerned the Sunni states are about the rise of a nuclear Iran, and just how little faith they have in U.S. President Barack Obama's strategy for negotiating Iran's nuclear program away.
Of course, we don't know that the approach adopted by Obama will outlive his presidency. But the worries of many of America's traditional allies in the region are clear. If America does continue to retreat from the Middle East, the vacuum left behind will quickly be filled by others. That could lead to an entire region that looks much as Iraq does today. Since Obama pulled U.S. forces out of Iraq at the end of 2011, the country has been lost to a tug-of-war between the Iranian-backed, Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and the Sunni Islamists militants who are now largely expressed through the Islamic State.
No one would deny that Iraq went through some dark days during the era of former U.S. President George W. Bush. But following the surge strategy launched in 2008, order was being restored, and it looked like there might be good reason for optimism. Now, as the Obama administration increasingly disengages from the Middle East, the region is slipping into turmoil, hurtling from one crisis to the next. Desperate times indeed call for desperate measures, and if the Gulf states are now reaching out to Israel, we know just how desperate things have become.
The policies pursued by Obama in the Middle East have either simply failed, or worse, they have completely backfired. Take the airstrikes against ISIS that we were told would turn back the advancing jihadist tide. The recent fall of Ramadi makes clear that this approach isn't working. And then there is the administration's strategy on Iran, which was supposed to restrain Iranian ambitions and prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. But the negotiations now look well on their way to achieving the opposite.
At the very time that Washington is pushing for reconciliation, the Iranians have been showing signs of becoming more belligerent, not less. By harassing international shipping along the Strait of Hormuz, as they have been in recent weeks, the Iranians are sending a pretty clear message – just in case the message of "Death to America" that continues to echo out across the public squares of Tehran wasn't clear enough.
Worse, it is not only the Iranians that have read the West's negotiation stance as a sign of weakness. No longer believing that the Obama administration will stop Iran, the Saudis are now threatening to develop their own nuclear capabilities and match those of Iran. The very negotiations that are meant to be preventing nuclear proliferation in the region may now be about to trigger a nuclear arms race in one of the most unstable parts of the world.
As the Gulf countries have dramatically increased their spending on military hardware, it is also worth remembering that back in 2010 it emerged from WikiLeaks that the Saudis were preparing to allow Israel to use their airspace for a strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure. It's always been fashionable to complain about American heavyhandedness in the Middle East. But under president Obama we are beginning to see what the alternative might look like.
Max Boot
Commentary, May 29, 2015
White House press secretary Josh Earnest was busy yesterday commenting on the calamitous situation in Iraq—and in the process making it even worse. He told Fox News: “The United States is not going to be responsible for securing the security situation inside of Iraq.” And then on NPR he rejected calls to send 25,000 or so troops to Iraq, saying:
“We are unwilling to dedicate that kind of blood and treasure to Iraq again. We saw what the result of that previous investment was. And that is not discounting the bravery and courage of our men and women in uniform – they had a substantial impact on the security situation there. But the Iraqi people, and because of the failed leadership of Prime Minister Maliki, was not able to capitalize on it. So our strategy right now is predicated on building up the capacity of those local forces and giving them another opportunity to control the security situation inside their own country and to do so with the support of the United States and our coalition partners. But we’re not going to be able to do it for them.”
This comes only days after Defense Secretary Ash Carter excoriated Iraqi troops for their lack of will to fight. What does it say about the US will to fight when the White House spokesman is saying that Iraq is so unimportant that we will not take any responsibility for the outcome there? That we are not willing to dedicate American “blood and treasure” to defeat ISIS?
The obvious takeaway is that this White House has little will or desire to oppose ISIS — that this president doesn’t see the destruction of ISIS as an important US national security objective even though that is exactly what he pledged to achieve. Once again, there is a major disconnect between the president’s strong rhetoric (“we will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL,” he promised on Sept. 10), and his anemic actions that can only cause a further loss of American credibility.
Another obvious takeaway is that not even the failure of Obama’s present strategy will cause him to rethink his approach. The loss of Ramadi has not shaken him out of his complacency. He’s willing to send 3,000 advisers and some warplanes under very restrictive rules of engagement, but that’s about it. Beyond that, the Iraqis are on their own. The White House just doesn’t care that much.
That’s quite a message to send to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been deployed to Iraq since 2003, and especially to the relatives of the 4,491 who gave their lives there (as well as the tens of thousands wounded, many severely). Obama, via his spokesman, seems to be saying that their sacrifices didn’t matter much because the US has no overriding security interest in Iraq.
That is also the message that Obama is sending, of course, to those US military personnel currently deployed to Iraq. One can only imagine what it does for their morale to hear the chief spokesman of their commander-in-chief — the man who sent them into harm’s way — explaining how unimportant their mission is.
But the worst effect of Josh Earnest’s seeming sangfroid about the future of Iraq is the message that he sends to Iraqis themselves. They are caught between two blood-thirsty ogres: ISIS and Iran. The US is the only outside force that could conceivably bolster a third alternative — a more moderate alternative — that would have wide appeal to Iraqis. That’s what we were doing until 2012, and with considerable success. But Obama was not willing to play that role anymore. He pulled out US troops and not even the consequent rise of ISIS is causing him to making a serious commitment.
So what he is basically signaling to Iraqis is that they need to choose sides among the outside powers that, unlike the U.S., ARE willing to risk blood and treasure in Iraq. Inevitably that means Sunnis will choose to go with ISIS and Shiites with Iran’s Quds Force.
It’s astonishing that even after all these years in power President Obama and his aides still have not grasped the importance of displaying presidential will in warfare. The lack of that will has already undermined the US mission in Afghanistan (remember that 18-month timeline on the surge that Obama ordered in 2009?) and it is now making progress hard to imagine in Iraq, much less in Syria.
ISIL MILITANTS ‘NOT MUSLIMS': MILLIONS FLEEING THEIR HOMES
AS TERRORIST GROUP TAKES OVER IRAQI TOWNS
Matthew Fisher
National Post, May 24, 2015
Noura Mahmoud has been so terrorized by her family’s brushes with ISIL she wanted to be called by a pseudonym rather than reveal even her first name. Noura and her family were uprooted from their hardscrabble but tolerable life in an ISIL-controlled farming village in nearby Hawija earlier this year, swapping that home for another that — except for a few pillows and blankets — is utterly bereft of everything including furniture, electricity or running water in this still peaceful Kurdish-controlled town near Kirkuk.
They fled after ISIL made it plain that Noura’s husband would be killed because he had once been a member of the Iraqi security forces. “It’s horrible. I know they hate us, but for what reason? We are all Iraqis,” the 28-year-old woman said as she held her four-year-old mentally handicapped son, Nozad, in her arms. Noura and Nozad arrived in Dibis during one of the many spasms in the fighting that has been taking place a few kilometres down the road. They have lots of company. Houses on every street in town are sheltering shattered Arab families who largely depend on handouts from their new Kurdish neighbours to survive. There are many other such enclaves of escapees all over the Kurdish Autonomous Region.
This has become a nightmare without end as fresh floods of IDPs, as the UN calls them, are swamping those places in Iraq and Syria which ISIL has not yet conquered, putting further strain on already meagre resources. Iraq’s latest convulsion occurred last week. Tens of thousands of Sunni refugees fled the city of Ramadi after Iraqi security forces again abandoned their posts, their vehicles and their weapons rather than defend the population against ISIL.
A conservative estimate would be that there are more than 10 million Syrians and Iraqis who have been uprooted. However, so many have moved in so many waves from so many places to so many different places that it is almost impossible to get an accurate count of refugees and internally displaced people who are now spread across the historical centre of the Middle East. In Iraq the number of internally displaced is thought by Refugees International to number 3.5 million. At least 300,000 of these IDPs are in or near Kirkuk, which ISIL regards as a bigger prize than Mosul or Ramadi because Kirkuk is the biggest oil- and gas-producing centre in the country.
What separates Noura Mahmoud from many others who have joined this exodus in Kurdistan is that they, like the rest of the IDPs in Dibis, are Sunnis. Many of those who fled earlier from ISIL have been Christian Iraqis or other religious minorities from the Mosul area such as Yazidis whom the Islamic fundamentalists regard as devil-worshipping infidels. Mohammed Amin is an 86-year-old Kurdish elder. He lives with his extended family alongside Sunnis who recently arrived from a nearby town that ISIL seized last year.
With Kurdish and Arabic all-news television channels his constant companions, Amin knows in granular detail what ISIL has been up to. “The difference between Kurds and Daesh (the Arabic acronym for ISIL) turns out to be that we consider the humanitarian aspect more than they do,” Amin said as he squatted in his living room fretting over his black worry beads. “Those Arabs whose homes have been destroyed can be safe here.” Asked about ISIL’s claim that it is acting in the name of God, Amin slowly shook his head in disgust. “They are not Muslims,” the octogenarian said. “True Muslims do not behave as they do. No matter what your differences are, you do not kidnap women or murder Christians including women who are pregnant.”
As for ISIL’s future, without suggesting any way this might happen, Amin predicted that “they will vanish.”
A couple of blocks away, Rabea Abd Awad said he had paid a taxi driver US$800 to take him, his brother and their families on a circuitous 19-hour journey via Baghdad to Dubis that used to take only 30 minutes. After several harrowing inquisitions at checkpoints he reached safety with, literally, only the shirt on his back.
“I tolerated Daesh not allowing me to smoke, showing up unannounced at my home to rob and steal, planting landmines on my property and keeping lists that showed whether we had gone to the mosque five times every day and condemning us as non-believers if we didn’t,” the wheat farmer said. “But I knew we had to escape when they forced us to swear an oath of loyalty and fight alongside them.
“I had an uncle who was kidnapped and has not been heard from since and another uncle who was detained for 22 days for the crime of staring at them. What I feared more than anything was that they would try to touch our women, because if they did that we would have immediately had to fight them to the death. Their behaviour is barbaric.”
While the Kurds continue to slowly take land away from ISIL, the picture in central and western Iraq is growing darker and Noura Mahmoud despairs for the country’s future. As Nozad stares off blankly into space his mother says while she and her immediate family are safe for the moment, her relatives tell her they could be murdered at any time. “There is no solution for this mess because there is no solution for Daesh,” she said.
ISLAMIC JIZYA: FACT AND FICTION
Raymond Ibrahim
Frontpage, May 29, 2015
Muslim demands for non-Muslim “infidels” to pay jizya on pain of death are growing, even as the West fluctuates between having no clue what jizya is and thinking that jizya is an example of “tolerance” in Islam.
In the video where the Islamic State slaughters some 30 Christian Ethiopians in Libya last April, the spokesman repeatedly pointed out that payment of jizya (which the impoverished Ethiopian migrant workers could not render, nor the 21 Copts before them) is the only way for Christians around the world to safeguard their lives:
“But whoever refuses [to pay jizya] will see nothing from us but the edge of a spear. The men will be killed and the children will be enslaved, and their wealth will be taken as booty. This is the judgment of Allah and His Messenger.” When the Islamic State invaded ancient Christian regions around the Ninevah Plain last June, it again declared: “We offer them [Assyrian Christians] three choices: Islam; the dhimma contract—involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword.”
The Islamic State—which most Western politicians ludicrously insist “has nothing to do with Islam”—is not alone in calling for jizya from Christian “infidels.” In 2002, Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Rahman, discussing the Muslim prophet’s prediction that Islam will eventually conquer Rome, said, “We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians . . . will yet pay us the jizya, in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam.”
And in a video recently posted, Sheik ‘Issam Amira appears giving a sermon in Al Aqsa Mosque where he laments that too many Muslims think jihad is only for defense against aggressors, when in fact Muslims are also obligated to wage offensive jihad against non-Muslims: When you face your pagan enemy, call them—either to Islam, jizya, or seek Allah’s help and fight them. Even if they do not fight [or initiate hostilities], fight them!… Fight them! When? When they fight you? No, when they refuse to convert to Islam or refuse to pay jizya…. Whether they like it or not, we will subjugate them to Allah’s authority.”
In short, if the Islamic State is enforcing jizya on “infidels,” demands for its return are on the increase all around the Muslim world. Put differently, if Abu Shadi, an Egyptian Salfi leader, once declared that Egypt’s Christians “must either convert to Islam, pay jizya, or prepare for war,” Dr. Amani Tawfiq, a female professor at Egypt’s Mansoura University, once said that “If Egypt wants to slowly but surely get out of its economic situation and address poverty in the country, the jizya has to be imposed on the Copts.”
So what exactly is jizya? The word jizya appears in Koran 9:29, in an injunction that should be familiar by now: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued (emphasis added).” In the hadith, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad, regularly calls on Muslims to demand jizya of non-Muslims: “If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay jizya, seek Allah’s help and fight them.” The second “righteous caliph,” Omar al-Khattab, reportedly said that any conquered “infidel” who refuses to convert to Islam “must pay the jizya out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.”
This theme of non-Muslim degradation appears regularly in the commentaries of Islam’s authorities. According to the Medieval Islamic Civilization Encyclopedia, Muslim “jurists came to view certain repressive and humiliating aspects of dhimma as de rigueur. Dhimmis [subjugated non-Muslim Christians and Jews] were required to pay the jizya publicly, in broad daylight, with hands turned palm upward, and to receive a smart smack on the forehead or the nape of the neck from the collection officer.”
Some of Islam’s jurists mandated a number of other humiliating rituals at the time of jizya payment, including that the presiding Muslim official slap, choke, and in some cases pull the beard of the paying dhimmi, who might even be required to approach the official on all fours, in bestial fashion. The root meaning of the Arabic word “jizya” is simply to “repay” or “recompense,” basically to “compensate” for something. According to the Hans Wehr Dictionary, the standard Arabic-English dictionary, jizya is something that “takes the place” of something else, or “serves instead.” Simply put, conquered non-Muslims were to purchase their lives, which were otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money. Instead of taking their lives, they took their money. As one medieval jurist succinctly put it, “their lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of jizya.”
Past and increasingly present, Muslims profited immensely by exacting jizya from conquered peoples. For instance, Amr bin al-As, the companion of Muhammad who conquered Christian Egypt in the early 640s, tortured and killed any Christian Copt who tried to conceal his wealth. When a Copt inquired of him, “How much jizya are we to pay?” the Islamic hero replied, “If you give me all that you own—from the ground to the ceiling—I will not tell you how much you owe. Instead, you [the Christian Copts] are our treasure chest, so that, if we are in need, you will be in need, and if things are easy for us, they will be easy for you.”
Yet even that was not enough. Caliph Uthman later chided Amr bin al-As because another governor of Egypt had managed to increase the caliphate’s treasury double what Amr had. In the words of Uthman, the “milk camels [Egypt’s Christians, that is] . . . yielded more milk.” Years later, yet another caliph, Suliman Abdul Malik, wrote to the governor of Egypt advising him “to milk the camel until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood.” Little wonder Egypt went from being almost entirely Christian in the seventh century to today having a mere 10%—and steadily dwindling, thanks to ongoing persecution—Christian minority…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Implications of the Fall of Key Syrian and Iraqi Cities to ISIS: Col. (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah, JCPA, May 27, 2015—With the fall of Palmyra (Tadmur in Arabic) in Syria and Ramadi, east of Baghdad, to the Islamic State (IS), and the fall of the strategic town in the north of Syria – Jisr el Shughur – to the Jabhat el Nusra, the Middle East has entered a new phase in the disintegration of its nation-states.
The Ugly Reality is That the Islamic State Could Win: John McLaughlin, National Post, May 28, 2015—Let’s think the unthinkable: Could the Islamic State win?
ISIS Attacks on the West: Daniel Pipes, Washington Times, May 21, 2015—The May 3 assault on a Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, prompted much discussion about the assailants' connections to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh. Did ISIS run them as agents? Are they part of a new network of terror in the West?
Is Turkey Still Arming Islamic State?: Burak Bekdil, Middle East Forum, May 25, 2015 —Ali Babacan, a world-renowned economist and Turkey's mild-mannered Deputy Prime Minister, put it realistically in a recent speech: "Public trust in the justice system is in steady decline."
