Anonymous Criticised For Declaring 'Full Scale Cyber War' Against Isis

By David Gilbert

September 1, 2014

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A fighter of the Islamic State (formerly known as Isis) holds an Isis flag and a weapon on a street in the city of Mosul(Reuters)

An Anonymous-affiliated Twitter account has declared a "full-scale cyber war" against the Islamic State (formerly known as Isis) with the aim of tracking down members of the group throughout the world who "continue to use Twitter for propaganda".

The new Operation Ice ISIS campaign was launched over the weekend with a Twitter account declaring: "Welcome to Operation Ice #ISIS, where #Anonymous will do it's part in combating #ISIS's influence in social media and shut them down."

However as soon as the campaign was launched other members of the Anonymous collective voiced concerns that starting such a campaign could put members of Anonymous based in Syria and Iraq in danger.

Another influential Anonymous account - @YourAnonCentral - was among those strongly criticising the account, claiming that "people who have been friendly in the past or supportive of Anon can be targeted for it."

While the account has retweeted a picture of what looks like an IS Twitter account being hacked by Anonymous, the account in question is in fact a parody account.

Commander X?

The account also posted a video claiming to show a member of IS taking part in the Ice Bucket Challenge, but this has also been showed to be a fake.

It is unclear who is behind the account though some suspected that it was Commander X (aka Christopher Doyon), a well-known member of the online movement who last year claimed to have quit Anonymous.

However this link has been denied by other accounts previously associated with Doyon.

Just as some parts of Anonymous begin a social media campaign against IS it is also reported that the US government is beginning a similar campaign to "win the war of ideas by ridiculing the militants with a mixture of blunt language and sarcasm."

Expose the facts

Speaking to AFP, a senior US State Department official described the strategy as a "cyber guerrilla campaign".

The source said: "It is not a panacea, it is not a silver bullet. People exaggerate, people think this is worthless or they think it a magic thing that will make the extremists surrender. It is neither one of those. It is slow, steady, daily engagement pushing back on a daily basis.

"It is a war of thousands of skirmishes, but no big battles. America likes big battles but it is not - it is like guerrilla warfare."

The US government has been engaging in this type of campaign for some time, but last week established a new Facebook page with a mission to "expose the facts about terrorists and their propaganda. Don't be misled by those who break up families and destroy their true heritage."

Why Washington’s War on Terror Failed

Patrick Cockburn

Le Monde Diplomatique

This essay is excerpted from the first chapter of Patrick Cockburn’s new book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising, with special thanks to his publisher, OR Books. The first section is a new introduction written for TomDispatch.

21 August -- There are extraordinary elements in the present U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the U.S. is carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and trainers to help beat back the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. 

The U.S. would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington’s policy is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds in their northern enclaves. Both are under attack from ISIS, which has taken about a third of the country, including most of its oil and gas production facilities.

But U.S., Western European, Saudi, and Arab Gulf policy is to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, which happens to be the policy of ISIS and other jihadis in Syria. If Assad goes, then ISIS will be the beneficiary, since it is either defeating or absorbing the rest of the Syrian armed opposition. There is a pretense in Washington and elsewhere that there exists a “moderate” Syrian opposition being helped by the U.S., Qatar, Turkey, and the Saudis. It is, however, weak and getting more so by the day.Soon the new caliphate may stretch from the Iranian border to the Mediterranean and the only force that can possibly stop this from happening is the Syrian army.

The reality of U.S. policy is to support the government of Iraq, but not Syria, against ISIS. But one reason that group has been able to grow so strong in Iraq is that it can draw on its resources and fighters in Syria. Not everything that went wrong in Iraq was the fault of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has now become the political and media consensus in the West. Iraqi politicians have been telling me for the last two years that foreign backing for the Sunni revolt in Syria would inevitably destabilize their country as well. This has now happened.

By continuing these contradictory policies in two countries, the U.S. has ensured that ISIS can reinforce its fighters in Iraq from Syria and vice versa. So far, Washington has been successful in escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.

Using the Al-Qa’ida Label

The sharp increase in the strength and reach of jihadist organizations in Syria and Iraq has generally been unacknowledged until recently by politicians and media in the West. A primary reason for this is that Western governments and their security forces narrowly define the jihadist threat as those forces directly controlled by al-Qa‘ida central or “core” al-Qa‘ida.This enables them to present a much more cheerful picture of their successes in the so-called war on terror than the situation on the ground warrants.

In fact, the idea that the only jihadis to be worried about are those with the official blessing of al-Qa‘ida is naïve and self-deceiving. It ignores the fact, for instance, that ISIS has been criticized by the al-Qa‘ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for its excessive violence and sectarianism. After talking to a range of Syrian jihadi rebels not directly affiliated with al-Qa‘ida in southeast Turkey earlier this year, a source told me that “without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the U.S.”

Jihadi groups ideologically close to al-Qa‘ida have been relabeled as moderate if their actions are deemed supportive of U.S. policy aims. In Syria, the Americans backed a plan by Saudi Arabia to build up a “Southern Front” based in Jordan that would be hostile to the Assad government in Damascus, and simultaneously hostile to al-Qa‘ida-type rebels in the north and east. The powerful but supposedly moderate Yarmouk Brigade, reportedly the planned recipient of anti-aircraft missiles from Saudi Arabia, was intended to be the leading element in this new formation. But numerous videos show that the Yarmouk Brigade has frequently fought in collaboration with JAN, the official al-Qa‘ida affiliate. Since it was likely that, in the midst of battle, these two groups would share their munitions, Washington was effectively allowing advanced weaponry to be handed over to its deadliest enemy. Iraqi officials confirm that they have captured sophisticated arms from ISIS fighters in Iraq that were originally supplied by outside powers to forces considered to be anti-al-Qa‘ida in Syria.

You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia

Alastair Crooke

The Huffington Post

28 August 2014 

The dramatic arrival of Da'ish (ISIS) on the stage of Iraq has shocked many in the West. Many have been perplexed -- and horrified -- by its violence and its evident magnetism for Sunni youth. But more than this, they find Saudi Arabia's ambivalence in the face of this manifestation both troubling and inexplicable, wondering, "Don't the Saudis understand that ISIS threatens them, too?"

It appears -- even now -- that Saudi Arabia's ruling elite is divided. Some applaud that ISIS is fighting Iranian Shiite "fire" with Sunni "fire"; that a new Sunni state is taking shape at the very heart of what they regard as a historical Sunni patrimony; and they are drawn by Da'ish's strict Salafist ideology.

Other Saudis are more fearful, and recall the history of the revolt against Abd-al Aziz by the Wahhabist Ikhwan (Disclaimer: this Ikhwan has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan -- please note, all further references hereafter are to the Wahhabist Ikhwan, and not to the Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan), but which nearly imploded Wahhabism and the al-Saud in the late 1920s.

Many Saudis are deeply disturbed by the radical doctrines of Da'ish (ISIS) -- and are beginning to question some aspects of Saudi Arabia's direction and discourse.

The Saudi Duality

Saudi Arabia's internal discord and tensions over ISIS can only be understood by grasping the inherent (and persisting) duality that lies at the core of the Kingdom's doctrinal makeup and its historical origins.

One dominant strand to the Saudi identity pertains directly to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism), and the use to which his radical, exclusionist puritanism was put by Ibn Saud. (The latter was then no more than a minor leader -- amongst many -- of continually sparring and raiding Bedouin tribes in the baking and desperately poor deserts of the Nejd.)

The second strand to this perplexing duality, relates precisely to King Abd-al Aziz's subsequent shift towards statehood in the 1920s: his curbing of Ikhwani violence (in order to have diplomatic standing as a nation-state with Britain and America); his institutionalization of the original Wahhabist impulse -- and the subsequent seizing of the opportunely surging petrodollar spigot in the 1970s, to channel the volatile Ikhwani current away from home towards export -- by diffusing a cultural revolution, rather than violent revolution throughout the Muslim world.

But this "cultural revolution" was no docile reformism. It was a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab's Jacobin-like hatred for the putrescence and deviationism that he perceived all about him -- hence his call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.

Muslim Impostors

ISIS: Having Spent Billions, the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia and Qatar Find They Have Created a Monster

By Paul Vallely

Aug 25, 2014

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Thanks to the immediacy of television, innocent civilians in Syria were writhing from gas attacks before our eyes, with the blame laid on their own government.

Yet despite a red line having been crossed by this use of chemical weapons, the international community decided against air strikes on the Assad regime.

Instead we encouraged two oil-rich Arab states, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to continue arming rebel groups to oust the ruthless dictator in Damascus. Now, thanks to those weapons, one of the groups has grown into the Frankenstein's monster of the so-called Islamic State whose brutal fighters have swept through Syria and Iraq, crucifying and beheading like a deadly inhuman tide.

Saudi Arabia has been a major source of financing to rebel and terrorist organisations since the 1970s, thanks to the amount it has spent on spreading its puritan version of Islam, developed by Mohammed Abdul Wahhab in the 18th century.

The US State Department has estimated that over the past four decades Riyadh has invested more than $10bn (£6bn) into charitable foundations in an attempt to replace mainstream Sunni Islam with the harsh intolerance of its Wahhabism. EU intelligence experts estimate that 15 to 20 per cent of this has been diverted to al-Qa'ida and other violent jihadists.

The only other official Wahhabi country is Saudi's Gulf neighbour Qatar, which is, per capita, the richest country in the world. It likes to paint itself as a more liberal and open version of the Muslim sect. Its newest and biggest mosque is named after Wahhab, but this is the fun, football-loving version.

The Qataris are Barcelona's shirt sponsors, the owners of Paris St-Germain and, albeit amid allegations of dodgy financial footwork, will host the 2022 World Cup – to which, to the horror of their Saudi neighbours, women will be admitted. In Qatar, unlike Saudi, women are allowed to drive and travel alone. Westerners can eat pork and drink alcohol.

There is no religious police force or powerful class of clerics to enforce morality. Qatar's Al Jazeera television network stands in contrast with the region's state-controlled media, and the Qataris are investing in the West, including the Shard, Harrods and big chunks of Sainsbury's and the London Stock Exchange.

An ISIS Spillover Into Jordan Report Released

by wikistrat

August 4, 2014

An attempt by Sunni Islamist militants to infiltrate Jordan would pose a significant challenge to the embattled kingdom. But there are opportunities for the country as well, Wikistrat’s analysts say.

Recent conquests by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) — which now calls itself the “Islamic State” — have put the country of Jordan at risk. The group has proclaimed a caliphate that aspires to consolidate political and religious control over the entire region.

Jordan already finds itself under great pressure, hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrian, Iraqi and Palestinian refugees — some affiliated with the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and other Salafist groups. Originating from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, the country’s diverse population makes it vulnerable to the influence of radical forces. A serious infiltration by ISIS into Jordan would not only pose a threat to the stability of the Hashemite Kingdom but could also drag Israel and the United States into the conflict.

Earlier this month, Wikistrat conducted a two-day crowdsourced simulation in which its analysts were asked to identify the ways in which the Islamic State could seek to penetrate Jordan.

In the summary report released today, Wikistrat Senior Analyst Jeffrey Itell highlights four paths the Islamist organization could take to infiltrate Jordan. While none of the scenarios seem promising for the Islamic State, Jordan is under significant pressure from unprecedented numbers of refugees, chaotic civil wars on two borders, turbulent politics and an overall weak economy. Any major misstep could provide the Islamic State with an opening that is not readily apparent. At the same time, recent events may present Jordan with opportunities to improve its security as well.

Click here or on the report’s cover image to download the PDF file.

A summary of the report was also published this week in The World Post, The Huffington Post‘s international edition.

For more information about Wikistrat and for access to the full simulation archive, contact info@wikistrat.com.

This entry was posted in Simulation Summaries and tagged An ISIS Spillover Into Jordan.

Will Shia Divisions Hamstring Iraq?

Mohammed Aly Sergie, Senior Online Writer/Editor

August 29, 2014

Iraq's next prime minister Haider al-Abadi must maintain the support of the country's powerful Shia factions while he builds a new administration and attempts to reverse the sectarian policies of his predecessor, says expert Mohamad Bazzi, who covered the 2003 Iraq war and its aftermath. At the same time, Abadi will have to retain the confidence of Iran, which views Shia-led Iraq as a vital strategic counterweight to Sunni Arab rivals in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, explains Bazzi. 

Iraq's prime minister-designate Haider al-Abadi. (Photo: Hadi Mizban/Courtesy Reuters) 

How can Abadi, a Shia Islamist, convince Sunnis to abandon their revolt while simultaneously responding to the threat posed by the extremist Sunni militants of theIslamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)? 

Abadi needs to assure Sunnis that he will be able to reverse the legacy of his divisive predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Sunni political factions have several interconnected demands: amnesty for tens of thousands of Sunnis imprisoned—in many cases without judicial review—by the Maliki government in the name of fighting terrorism; greater power in the new government, especially by securing one of what are known as the "sovereign ministries" (defense, interior, foreign affairs, oil, and finance); and a more significant role in the Iraqi security forces, which Maliki cleansed of many senior Sunni officers.While some Shia factions are willing to give Sunnis these demands, others are adamantly opposed. 

Already, Abadi is being hampered by a new wave of sectarian bloodletting. On August 22, masked gunmen barraged a Sunni mosque with gunfire in Diyala Province, killing dozens of worshippers during Friday prayers. Sunni leaders blamed Shia militias for the massacre, and within hours they withdrew from negotiations with Abadi to form a new government. 

Even if Abadi is able to meet all Sunni demands, he will routinely face sectarian violence and rifts beyond his control. Iraq is at the center of several regional proxy battles: Iran is heavily involved in shaping Iraqi policy, while ISIS represents spillover from the Syrian civil war next door; the militant group is also a byproduct of the Gulf Arab states that support Sunni jihadists in both Syria and Iraq. 

After eight years in power, Nouri al-Maliki alienated not only Iraq's Sunnis and Kurds, but also many Shias in his coalition. Does Abadi enjoy broader support from Shias in Iraq? Is he capable of unifying Iraq's Shias? 

For now, Abadi appears to enjoy broader support from various Shia factions, partly because many parties reached the point where they were willing to accept any Shia leader other than Maliki. But as the jockeying over government ministries unfolds, Abadi risks alienating some of these Shia factions if he is perceived as favoring his own Dawa Party—and the larger State of Law Coalition, which won the most seats (92 out of a total of 328) in April's parliamentary elections—during the distribution of cabinet portfolios. 

In 2010, Maliki ultimately secured a second term after Iran strong-armed two fellow Shia leaders, Ammar al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr, into supporting him. The two clerics control about sixty-three seats in the new parliament, and they will both want influential ministries. Abadi will also need to appease several other Shia parties and militias largely beholden to Iran, including Asaib Ahl al-Haq (the League of the Righteous) which is led by Qais al-Khazali. 

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shia cleric, emerged as kingmaker this summer, reversing a lifetime of quietism. Does this foray into politics portend a more activist role for Iraq's Shia clerics? 

Dependent on Russian Oil and Natural Gas, Europe Reluctantly Struggling to Find a Way to Respond to Russian Aggression in the Ukraine

U.S. and Europe Are Struggling With Response to a Bold Russia

Peter Baker and Steven Erlanger

New York Times, September 3, 2014

Pieces of a Ukrainian tank littered a road after recent clashes in the strategic town of Ilovaysk, a transportation hub about 28 miles east of Donetsk, Ukraine. CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — American and European officials are struggling to devise a response as Russia bears down on Ukraine, searching for new measures that will have more impact than the economic sanctions imposed so far, without risking major damage to their own industries or a military escalation that could spiral out of control.

The officials are meeting this week to assemble a new package of sanctions targeting Russia’s banking, energy and defense sectors, but expressed skepticism that the measures would force Moscow to reverse course. President Obama faced rising calls from advisers and from Congress to move beyond economic actions to provide arms and more intelligence to Ukraine’s beleaguered military.

The frustration at the inability to deter Moscow follows a shift on the battlefield, where Russian troops have turned the tide in favor of Ukrainian separatists. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who last week suggested “statehood” for parts of eastern Ukraine, ratcheted up his statements again by telling the president of the European Commission that Russia could “take Kiev in two weeks” if it wanted to.

The challenge by Mr. Putin came as Mr. Obama left Washington for Estonia on Tuesday to reassure Eastern European allies of American support, after which he planned to attend a NATO summit meeting in Wales to discuss Russian aggression. But while NATO plans to form a rapid-response force to protect its eastern borders, it became ever clearer that the United States and Europe do not view Ukraine in the same light as they do alliance members like Estonia.

The NATO meeting “is about drawing a line west of Ukraine,” said Shashank Joshi, a senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “No one will quite abandon Ukraine, but there is a recognition that there will be no confrontation with Russia on Ukrainian soil. The focus will be on NATO’s boundaries, on reassurance for Poland and the Baltic nations, and drawing a sharp distinction between those in and out of NATO.”

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress urged Mr. Obama to step up direct assistance to Ukraine’s armed forces, reinforcing private advice he has been getting from some officials inside his own government. The lawmakers and administration officials argue that economic sanctions have not been effective so far and that the Kremlin respects only strength.

“This is a watershed moment,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who just returned from a visit to Kiev. Mr. Menendez proposed sending antitank missiles and radar systems to Ukraine.

“Thousands of Russian troops have crossed into Ukraine,” he told NPR. “They’ve come in with columns of tanks and armored vehicles and surface-to-surface missiles. This is no longer the premise that, oh, separatists are fighting.”

Administration officials are considering such moves. “People are looking at all those options,” said one official, who like others declined to be identified discussing internal deliberations. But Mr. Obama has so far been reluctant to take such steps out of concern that they would worsen the fighting and encourage escalation with a nuclear-armed Russia.

Despite anger at Russian actions, there are few signs that Europe has the stomach for a more confrontational policy if the White House does not. In the end, European leaders whose economies are dependent on Russian energy are reluctant to widen the conflict beyond additional sanctions. Instead, they may seek an outcome that makes some concessions to the Kremlin.

Graphic

HOW MUCH EUROPE DEPENDS ON RUSSIAN ENERGY

Map of European energy imports that come from Russia.

OPEN Graphic

“The center of gravity in Europe will be to recognize that Ukraine lives in the shadow of the bear,” said Nick Witney, former chief executive of the European Defense Agency and a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “We want to stabilize the situation in Ukraine and the Russians want to destabilize it, which is always much easier.”

Dozens of Ukrainian Soldiers Killed in Rebel Ambush Near Village of Novokaterynivka

Ukraine Military Routed as Russia Talks Tough

Associated Press, September 2, 2014

NOVOKATERYNIVKA, Ukraine — The Ukrainian solders were an easy target as they launched a desperate run to safety. Pounded by a gauntlet of rocket shells, blown up in their vehicles, they died by the dozens.

In fields around the eastern Ukrainian village of Novokaterynivka, more than thirty army vehicles lay charred and pulverized into twisted piles of metal Tuesday — the result of a devastating weekend ambush by separatist forces.

The rout marked a major intensification in the separatists’ offensive in eastern Ukraine — one that the government in Kiev, NATO and the United States say has been sustained by Russia’s direct military support.

Moscow’s aggressive stance toward Ukraine has come in both words and deeds of late, fueled by attacks like those in Novokaterynivka as well as a leaked report that EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Vladimir Putin told him that Russia could take over Kiev “in two weeks” if it wished.

The separatists, after having a month of setbacks in which government troops regained territory, have been inordinately successful in the last 10 days just as columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles have been seen crossing the border. President Barack Obama and other NATO leaders will be attending a summit in Wales on Thursday to create a rapid-response military team to counter the Russian threat.

Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, told reporters that the Russian leader’s statement on Kiev was “taken out of context and carried a completely different meaning.”

Yet on the ground, the results of much deadlier weapons of war could not be denied.

Why the U.S. Army Is Stuck in the 19th Century

Bill Sweetman

09.02.14

It’s unlikely that the U.S. Air Force will be abolished in anyone’s lifetime, whatever University of Kentucky professor Robert Farley, author of Grounded—The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force, may think.

A few commentators have already raised the obvious issues: that the USAF already provides essential enablers to the Army and Navy, rather than being obsessed with bombers and independent airpower; that neither the Army nor the Navy would be well suited to take over things like space launch and operations, or airlift; and that not much money would actually be saved without eliminating entire missions.

But Farley’s book makes a bigger argument: that the case for an independent air force is based on the false assertion that airpower can win wars on its own. In doing so, the book exemplifies a toxic, and irrational skepticism towards airpower, and only airpower, which pervades some military thinking.

The founding philosophers of independent airpower—Britain’s Lord Trenchard, America’s Billy Mitchell and Italy’s Giulio Douhet—shared a gut-level desire to avoid a repeat of World War 1. Their heirs, World War 2’s bomber generals, promised to defeat Germany and Japan from the air, almost unaided. This did not happen. So what? At best, it is a classic strawman argument to challenge 90-year-old claims that nobody asserts today.

But let’s dig a little deeper. Farley’s criterion for “winning” is whether airpower succeeds at “disarming the enemy”—a goal borrowed, with full and frequent credit, from the early 19th-century Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz.

It would be easy to conclude from contemporary American military writing that Clausewitz has been the go-to guy on strategy since the appearance of his classic book, On War,in 1832. But that’s not the case. The U.S. Army’s zealots of what I call “boot-centric warfare” zealots rediscovered him after Vietnam, when the Army needed to explain its defeat. Clausewitz’s definition of military strength—the product of fighting capacity and the national will—was an academically respectable way of saying that Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara had stabbed the troops in the back.

Clausewitz’s view that warfare inevitably increases in intensity, to the maximum capacity of the belligerents, sits well with advocates of a large army. “Go big or go home” is not in Clausewitz, but it’s unlikely that he would d have greatly objected to that sentiment.

But Clausewitz’s acolytes forget what the Prussian sage’s world looked like. Clausewitz was more a man of the 18th century than the 19th, dying two years after the Rainhill Trials in England demonstrated the first practical steam locomotive. Napoleonic land warfare, like the wars of Greece and Rome, moved at walking pace, from the raising of forces to the day of battle. Troops lived off the land and often died on it (not until World War I did combat kill more soldiers than disease).

Once you raised it, a massed army was wasting away, whether it fought or not, or whether it advanced, retreated, or stood still. It was the least flexible weapon of the pre-nuclear age—as was demonstrated in 1914 when the use-it-or-lose-it logic of mobilization converted Bismarck’s “damned foolish thing in the Balkans” into catastrophe.

ISIS Displaying a Deft Command of Varied Media

By SCOTT SHANE and BEN HUBBARD

AUG. 30, 2014 

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A scene from a recent hourlong ISIS documentary opening with footage shot from a drone over the Iraqi city of Falluja.

The extremists who have seized large parts ofSyria and Iraq have riveted the world’s attention with their military prowess and unrestrained brutality. But Western intelligence services are also worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos, ground images shot from drones and multilingual Twitter messages.

ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is using every contemporary mode of messaging to recruit fighters, intimidate enemies and promote its claim to have established a caliphate, a unified Muslim state run according to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. If its bigotry and beheadings seem to come from a distant century, its use of media is up to the moment.

A review of its prodigious output in print and online reveals a number of surprises. ISIS propaganda, for instance, has strikingly few calls for attacks on the West, even though its most notorious video, among Americans, released 12 days ago, showed the beheading of the American journalist James Foley, threatened another American hostage, and said that American attacks on ISIS “would result in the bloodshed” of Americans. This diverged from nearly all of ISIS’s varied output, which promotes its paramount goal: to secure and expand the Islamic state. Experts say that could change overnight, but for now it sharply distinguishes ISIS from Al Qaeda, which has long made attacks on the West its top priority.

An image posted Friday by ISIS on its Twitter account shows a suicide bomb attack.

And while ISIS may be built on bloodshed, it seems intent on demonstrating the bureaucratic acumen of the state that it claims to be building. Its two annual reports so far are replete with a sort of jihadist-style bookkeeping, tracking statistics on everything from “cities taken over” and “knife murders” committed by ISIS forces to “checkpoints set up” and even “apostates repented.”

ISIS media frames its campaign in epochal terms, mounting a frontal assault on the national divisions and boundaries in the Middle East drawn by Western powers after World War I. These “Crusader partitions” and their modern Arab leaders, ISIS argues in its English-language magazine, were a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to prevent Muslims from unifying “under one imam carrying the banner of truth.”

Cyberwarfare ethics, or how Facebook could accidentally make its engineers into targets

Patrick Lin

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/lin20140831

Without clear rules for cyberwarfare, technology workers could find themselves fair game in enemy attacks and counterattacks. If they participate in military cyberoperations—intentionally or not—employees at Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Sprint, AT&T, Vodaphone, and many other companies may find themselves considered “civilians directly participating in hostilities” and therefore legitimate targets of war, according to the legal definitions of the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols.

It may all seem a minor issue of semantics, but definitions matter a lot. Depending on how you think the old laws of war fit with the new realities of cyberconflict, it may be legally possible that enemy rockets could one day rain down on the Googleplex, or even Mark Zuckerberg’s private home, because Gmail or Facebook servers were used in a cyberattack.

Intelligence agencies worldwide have already infiltrated popular technologies to spy on users, and the line between defense and industry has become increasingly blurred. In fact, the Pentagon announced its recent airstrikes in Iraq in a tweet. (A fuller version was posted on the Facebook page of the Department of Defense.) So it’s not absurd to think that governments could make even greater use of the same technologies and online services that everyday people use, but for a wide range of military purposes—not just for public relations. And once something is used for military purposes, where does it stop? When does it become a military target?

​Cyberwar experts in Geneva. These were some of the many new puzzles discussed in a two-day expert workshop recently hosted at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The gathering was organized by researchers from California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo), Naval Postgraduate School, Western Michigan University, and the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (Australia). It explored the ethics of cyberwarfare and grappled with how cyberattacks could be responsibly conducted, given existing laws of war and ethical norms.

Workshop participants included about 30 philosophers, political scientists, technologists, activists, policy wonks, military officers, and other experts. They came from China, Australia, Finland, Norway, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other nations. To promote honest discussion and the sharing of information, the meeting was held under the “Chatham House Rule”—meaning that no statement or position could be attributed to a particular person.

In our meeting, we wanted to know: Is there something actually new going on in cyberwar that is different from the traditional wars fought purely in the physical realm? If not, then how can society apply existing ethical discussions about war to cyberwar? If there is something new, then how should we respond to that in law and ethics?

But the answers aren’t easy. Cyberwar is both new and old, and that poses unique challenges to ethics and law.

NATO Set to Ratify Pledge on Joint Defense in Case of Major Cyberattack

By DAVID E. SANGER

AUG, 2014

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BRUSSELS — When President Obama meets with other NATO leaders later this week, they are expected to ratify what seems, at first glance, a far-reaching change in the organization’s mission of collective defense: For the first time, a cyberattack on any of the 28 NATO nations could be declared an attack on all of them, much like a ground invasion or an airborne bombing.

The most obvious target of the new policy is Russia, which was believed behind computer attacks that disrupted financial and telecommunications systems in Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008, and is believed to have used them in the early days of the Ukraine crisis as well.

But in interviews, NATO officials concede that so far their cyberskills are limited at best.

While NATO has built a gleaming new computer security center, and now routinely runs computer exercises, it possesses no cyberweapons of its own — and, apparently, no strategy for how it might use the weapons of member states to strike back in a computer conflict. In fact, its most powerful members, led by the United States and Britain, have spent billions of dollars on secret computer offensive programs — but they have declined so far to tell NATO leaders what kind of weapons they might contribute in a NATO-led computer conflict.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary general, said the pact was a start, “but I cannot tell you it is a complete strategy. Credit Yves Herman/Reuters 

“Our mandate is pure cyberdefense,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the departing NATO secretary general, said during a visit to Washington over the summer. “Our declaration is a start,” he said, “but I cannot tell you it is a complete strategy.”

NATO’s tentative steps into the realm of computer conflict, at a moment when Russian, Chinese and Iranian “patriotic hackers” have run increasingly sophisticated campaigns, show the alliance’s troubles in innovating to keep up with modern warfare, at a moment when it is also facing one of its greatest political challenges since the end of the Cold War.

The change in NATO’s definition of an “armed attack” will leave deliberately unclear what would constitute a cyberattack so large that the alliance might declare that the action against one of its members could lead to response by the entire alliance under Article V of its charter. “The judgment will lay with the impact,” said Douglas E. Lute, the American ambassador to NATO, when he spoke in late July at the Aspen Security Forum. “Does it look like it will rise to the level of an armed attack?”

Deterrence is all about ambiguity, and the implicit threat that NATO would enter a computer conflict in defense of one of its members is full of those ambiguities. “They fail to get to the heart of the quintessential question about NATO’s cybersecurity obligations,” Julianne Smith, a former Pentagon official, now at the Center for a New American Security, wrote earlier this year for Chatham House, the British foreign policy center. “What constitutes an ‘attack’ and what capabilities might be provided to a member experiencing an attack?”

Here at NATO headquarters, where top officials who were focusing on computer issues for the summit meeting are now preoccupied by Russia’s next moves, the mere declaration itself is considered significant progress. It was only after the Estonia attacks that the alliance paid real attention to the threat. Today Estonia, which President Obama will visit starting Tuesday night, has become the crown jewel in NATO’s computer defense efforts, the place where cyberstrategy is developed and the site of annual NATO computer security exercises, called “Locked Shields.”

DEVELOPING A STRATEGIC CADRE IN THE INFORMATION DOMINANCE CORPS

-Admiral Jonathan W. Greenert

Chief of Naval Operations

AUGUST 29, 2014 

http://cimsec.org/developing-strategic-cadre-information-dominance-corps/12742 

“The EM-cyber environment is now so fundamental to military operations and so critical to our national interests that we must start treating it as a warfighting domain on par with – or perhaps even more important than – land, sea, air, and space.”

The U.S. Navy has embraced the electromagnetic (EM)-cyber domain as a core warfighting domain, combining critical Navy communities in Information Warfare, Intelligence, Information Professional, Meteorology, Oceanography and Space Operations into an “Information Dominance” Corps. A series of policy statements and guiding documents have been recently published governing how the Navy will approach this domain, including the Information Dominance Roadmap (2013-2028), the Navy Information Dominance Corps Human Capital Strategy (2012-2017), and the Navy Strategy for Achieving Information Dominance (2013-2017). [1] These have been followed by the CNO’s Navigation Plan (2015-2019) [2], which identifies combat maneuver capabilities in the EM-cyber domain as critical to the operating tenants of warfighting first, forward operating and readiness.

These all represent important steps in addressing the critical challenges we face globally as a Navy, especially from state and non-state actors who can complicate the ability of naval forces to move into a theater (anti-access) and maneuver within the theater (area-denial). We no longer occupy the “information high ground” in the EM-cyber domain, and our most advanced forces and weapons systems are held at risk not only by technologically advanced anti-ship missiles but also by inexpensive and readily available A2/AD strategies.

What is missing, however, from this plan of action is the development of a “strategic cadre” within the Information Dominance Corps, who can meet the CNO’s vision. The Human Capital Strategy identifies as its fourth goal “Create a Warfighting Culture,” which is certainly admirable and necessary. This goal is supported by two objectives: orient the “total Navy workforce to the IDC mission” and “leverage kill chain concepts (integrated fires) to depict and communicate the process through which the ID discipline contributes to the delivery of warfighting effects.” This implies an ID corps which is tactically proficient and the need for the Navy to recognize how it fits within warfighting. But it seems to skirt too close to suggesting the ID corps – and EM-cyber –enables the delivery of warfighting effects rather than delivering those effects itself. Weaponized cyber code is no different than a Tomahawk fired from a ship or submarine or a JDAM dropped from an F/A-18.

Jordan: Between Stability and Spillover

August 2014

Andrew Spath is a Fellow in FPRI’s Program on the Middle East. He is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Rutgers University where he teaches courses on authoritarianism, Middle East politics and society, and Model United Nations. He is writing his dissertation on political activism during periods of leadership change in authoritarian regimes focusing on Jordan and Syria. From 2012-2014, as a David L. Boren Fellow and two-time Fulbright Fellow, he lived and conducted research in Jordan as an associate researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. He has professional fluency in Modern Standard Arabic and Levantine dialect.

The swiftness with which the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, now the Islamic State) assaulted and overran northern Iraq brings a new level of concern to policymakers. The offensive blew a hole in Washington’s desire to maintain “a ring of Syrian containment” that favored a political solution with limited measures to support rebels against the Assad regime. As the organization expands in number and territory, and ambitiously declaring the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate, anxiety is growing among leaders and citizens in the neighborhood. Jordan, the key U.S. ally bordering territories held by the Islamic State and comprising a central part of its desired Sunni empire, is precariously situated on the frontline of the ISIL’s violent campaign.

Jordan is regularly perceived in strategic terms as a “buffer state” between Israel and its regional adversaries, between the Sunni Gulf States and the “Shi’a Crescent,” and as a receptive host to waves of refugees amid regional turmoil. But while the small kingdom is practiced in its role as regional shock absorber, the civil wars and associated state weakness in two of its immediate neighbors long dominated by strongmen (Syria and Iraq) presents a new challenge. Moreover, turmoil and tenuous status quo conditions in other proximate areas (Egypt, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine) present a geographic “ring of fire,” unsettling citizens and officials alike.

President Obama warned last month that the security vacuum from ISIL’s expansion raises the prospect that destabilization will “spill over into some of our allies like Jordan.” How vulnerable is Jordan to conflict diffusion from neighboring violence? What factors create immediate security risks for the country? What options are available to mitigate the risks facing this crucial U.S. ally?

LOOKING TO JORDAN? THE ISLAMIC STATE BEYOND SYRIA AND IRAQ

There is some debate over the threat of ISIL outside of Syria and Iraq, includingwhetheror not it is seriously targeting neighboring Jordan. Making enemies of nearly every political and military organization not pledging bay’ah (allegiance) to the Islamic State and its leader, self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the militant jihadist organization is preoccupied with taking and controlling territory in northern and eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq. Some analysts are predicting short-lived success for the group and its Caliphate before it buckles under its maximalist governing strategy and unwillingness to mediate disputes with other insurgent groups. They argue that the brutality and extremism that turned Sunni tribes against al Qaeda in Iraq during the Sahwa (Awakening) Movement circa 2007 will likewise distance local populations from the Islamic State today.

But others urge seriousness about the Islamic State’s expansionist abilities and staying power. The surprise incursion into Iraq, starting in Mosul and proceeding systematically down the Tigris, proved the Islamic State’s objectives and capabilities were not confined to Syria. In retrospect, the Islamic State’s origins in the Iraq War and the despotic governing style of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki make the Eastward move less surprising. In an attempt to consolidate its gains and defend against a multilateral response to its progress, ISIL may have limited ability to continue its march outside of Iraq and Syria.

However, the organization’s transnational aims are apparent and worrying. Local sources close to jihadist circles reported recently that al-Baghdadi discussed with senior leaders “the possibility of expansion and creating a safe haven in a third country in the event of being overpowered in Syria or Iraq,” particularly Jordan, the Sinai, or the Gaza Strip. Statements from ISIL single out Jordan as a target of their attention and aspirations. Numerous videos show militants denouncing the monarchy as a “criminal and apostate” regime. In viral videos from the spring, a boy fighter in Syria is celebrated by older militants as he rips and burns his Jordanian passport and threatens Jordan with car bombs; another fighter wearing an explosive belt threatens to slaughter King Abdullah II.

Is America’s Second Contractors’ War Drawing Near?

Ann Hagedorn

Aug. 29, 2014

Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced Our Security Courtesy Simon & Schuster

Four years ago this Sunday, President Barack Obama declared the end of the Iraq war. So much of that fight and our current involvement in the Middle East is carried out by a privatized military. Here's why that matters

 

Last year, on the tenth anniversary of the 2003 Iraq invasion, there was the predictable commentary about why we went to war and what the consequences were. And there was some attention given to the fact that this had been the most privatized military engagement in U.S. history, with private contractors actually outnumbering traditional troops — the “First Contractors’ War,” as Middlebury College scholar Allison Stanger called it in 2009. No one, however, talked about the possibility of a second contractors’ war, a topic that may surface sooner than we anticipated and one that yields a multitude of questions. This time, for example, will we be told about the extent of the role of military and security contractors? Will we know which companies are making millions, even billions, from providing armed and unarmed services in the name of American defense? Will we know how many layers of subcontractors there are, from what countries they were hired, and who trained them? When the U.S. government announces casualty totals, will the stats include the contractors who were wounded and killed? And what about the soldiers missing in action? In Iraq by the spring of 2011 there were eight MIAs, seven of which were private contractors.

The First Contractors’ War was “a remarkably unprecedented experiment” in the privatization of America’s defense forces, as California’s U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D) told Congress in 2007– one that clearly succeeded. And out of such success arose a bold new industry of private military and security companies, some of which had already existed and grew substantially during the bonanza of contracts that defined the Iraq war, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new ones worldwide. Their broad range of services may include police training, intelligence analysis, logistics support, air transport, border patrol, weapons procurement, and drone operations. They assist U.S. forces in contingency operations and remain long after the military withdraws from combat zones; they guard our diplomats; and they play key roles in U.S. counterterrorism strategies. They work for the United Nations, for AFRICOM ( the U.S. unified command in Africa) and for multinational corporations working in hostile environments; they provide armed security to the shipping industry. Their markets exist wherever instability threatens development; wherever military commitments exceed the capabilities of nations; wherever governments are viewed as incapable of supplying defense and security fast enough.

They are the latest incarnation of the solutions that President Eisenhower referred to in the often-overlooked part of his famed 1961 “military-industrial complex” address: “Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” Now, wherever our geopolitical missions take us, these companies will be part of the plan. As former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, who served as co-chair for Congress’s Commission on Wartime Contracting, said recently, “The one thing that’s a given now: We can’t go to war without contractors and we can’t go to peace without contractors.”

Putin’s Chilling Kazakhstan Comments

By Casey MIchel

September 03, 2014

The Russian president fires a rhetorical warning shot across the bow of another neighbor.

There are few places more dangerous these days than to be a friend to the Kremlin. Those in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner sanctum have seen their purse-strings snipped and their passports blocked. Those most integrated with the Russian economy – either through trade or gastarbeiter programs – have watched their economic potential tumble alongside Moscow’s. Over the past six months, the Kremlin’s embrace has morphed into a suffocating squeeze, draining the region’s commercial appeal and gutting any weight the Eurasian Union (EEU) could have boasted.

To the Kremlin, friendship is a four-letter word. And it seems that Kazakhstan, which has continuously and publicly supported Russia’s geopolitical flailings, knows this better than anyone. Not only has Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev watched his country’s economic surge stumble through the Kremlin’s actions, but he’s witnessed Putin mangle Nazarbayev’s original EEU dream beyond recognition.

But if Kazakhstan wasn’t already aware of the potential daggers lining their relationship to the north – for those in the country still believing Russia provided some beacon of righteousness and prosperity – Putin’s comments at the recent Seliger Youth Forum should give them pause.

A few days after Minsk’s EEU summit, which saw a palpably tired Nazarbayev attempt to broker some kind of mediation, Putin fielded a question from a young woman at Seliger about the role of nationalism in Kazakhstan, and the potential impact the putative jingoism could have on relations with Russia.

Putin answered at relative length, but before getting into the exegesis of his thoughts, it’s worth circling back to the girl’s question. Not only did the woman, an obvious plant, cite Nazarbayev as the most important “restraining factor” in tamping the alleged Kazakh nationalism, she also made a point of Kazakhs not “correctly understanding Russian political rhetoric,” and asked if there was any reason to expect “a Ukrainian scenario upon Nazarbayev’s departure.”

As to her observation of some “growth” of Kazakh nationalism, this is, technically, true. Pushback to the Eurasian Union, with concomitant concerns about a loss of Kazakhstani sovereignty to an overbearing Russia, has found a public presence in Kazakhstan in 2014. And this was new, especially among the handful of protestersdiscussing the “virus” of Russian imperialism. But not only is the concept of a saber-rattling Kazakh nationalism laughable, it pales in comparison to, say, the “Russia for Russians!” crowd. There isn’t a reason for any level-headed person to believe Kazakh chauvinism presents any credible threat to non-Kazakh citizens – all the more against Russians.

Balancing act: Strategic ties with both Japan, China possible

Kamwal Sibal

September 02, 2014
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Much has been achieved during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s just-concluded visit to Japan. He wanted some solid results to emerge from his postponed journey. Pragmatic thinking on his part won over the symbolism of which country he would first visit bilaterally. The time gained has produced more results, compensating for any earlier disappointment.

The Japan-China rivalry over who should receive the first handshake from Modi has also got deftly side-stepped by the prime minister receiving the Chinese foreign minister before any other foreign dignitary on Indian soil and preceding his Japan visit by meeting Chinese President Xi Jingping on foreign soil in a multilateral setting. The Japanese were very keen that Modi’s first bilateral visit abroad should be to Japan. That bid has succeeded in spirit, in that the prime minister’s first bilateral visit outside the neighbourhood is to Japan.

These are not mere diplomatic games of temporary importance. The sharp deterioration of China-Japan relations has given India cards to play in the triangular strategic geometry now increasingly defining the relationships between these three Asian powers. Japan, allied to the US, has the protective shield of American power, but the intensity of US-China financial and economic ties and the US’ reluctance to openly confront China, makes Japan less confident about relying on a single country, however powerful, to manage the emerging China threat. It is logical for it to work with India strategically to build political and security firewalls against an assertive China, with which India too has concerns that parallel those of Japan.

Modi’s several overtures to China, including the early invitation to the Chinese President to visit India earlier than initially planned, is another instance of his pragmatic approach to foreign policy that seeks to shift the focus away from bilateral political differences to economic cooperation so that gains for India and its partners can be maximised through increased trade, investment and technology transfers.