Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and Syria on 'unprecedented scale' – UN
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| An image grab taken from a video released by Islamic State group's official Al-Raqqa site via YouTube. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images |
Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and
Syria on 'unprecedented scale' – UN
UN report suggests decline of al-Qaida has
yielded an explosion of jihadist enthusiasm for its even mightier successor
organisations, chiefly Isis
·
The United Nations has
warned that foreign jihadists are swarming into the twin conflicts in Iraq and
Syria on “an unprecedented scale” and from countries that had not previously
contributed combatants to global terrorism.
A report by the UN security council, obtained
by the Guardian, finds that 15,000 people have travelled to Syria and Iraq to
fight alongside the Islamic State (Isis) and similar extremist groups. They
come from more than 80 countries, the report states, “including a tail of
countries that have not previously faced challenges relating to al-Qaida”.
The UN said it was uncertain whether al-Qaida
would benefit from the surge. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida who
booted Isis out of his organisation, “appears to be maneuvering for relevance”,
the report says.
The UN’s numbers
bolster recent estimates from US intelligence about the scope of the foreign fighter
problem, which the UN report finds to have spread despite the Obama
administration’s aggressive counter-terrorism strikes and global surveillance
dragnets.
“Numbers since 2010 are now many times the
size of the cumulative numbers of foreign terrorist fighters between 1990 and
2010 – and are growing,” says the report, produced by a security council
committee that monitors al-Qaida.
The UN report did not
list the 80-plus countries that it said were the source of fighters flowing
fighters into Iraq and Syria. But in recent months, Isis supporters have
appeared in places as unlikely as the Maldives, and its videos proudly display jihadists with Chilean-Norwegianand other diverse backgrounds.
“There are instances of foreign terrorist
fighters from France, the Russian Federation and and the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland operating together,” it states. More than
500 British citizens are believed to have travelled to the region since 2011.
The UN report, an
update on the spread of transnational terrorism and efforts to staunch it,
validates the Obama administration’s claim that “core al-Qaida remains weak”.
But it suggests that the decline of al-Qaida has yielded an explosion of
jihadist enthusiasm for its even mightier successor organizations, chiefly
Isis.
Those organisations are less interested in
assaults outside their frontiers: “Truly cross-border attacks – or attacks
against international targets – remain a minority,” the report assesses. But
the report indicates that more nations than ever will face the challenge of experienced
fighters returning home from the Syria-Iraq conflict.
Wading into a debate
with legal implications for Barack Obama’s new war against Isis,
the UN considers Isis “a splinter group” from al-Qaida. It considers an
ideological congruence between the two groups sufficient to categorise them as
part a broader movement, notwithstanding al-Qaida’s formal excommunication of
Isis last February.
“Al-Qaida core and Isil pursue similar
strategic goals, albeit with tactical differences regarding sequencing and
substantive differences about personal leadership,” the UN writes, using a
different acronym for Isis.
Leadership disputes between the organisations
are reflected in the shape of their propaganda, the UN finds. A “cosmopolitan”
embrace of social media platforms andinternet culture by Isis (“as when
extremists post kitten photographs”) has displaced the “long and turgid
messaging” from al-Qaida. Zawahiri’s most recent video lasted 55 minutes, while
Isis members incessantly use Twitter, Snapchat, Kik, Ask.fm, a communications
apparatus “unhindered by organisational structures”.
A “lack of social media message discipline” in
Isis points to a leadership “that recognizes the terror and recruitment value
of multichannel, multi-language social and other media messaging,” reflecting a
younger and “more international” membership than al-Qaida’s various affiliates.
With revenues just from its oil smuggling
operations now estimated at $1m daily, Isis controls territory in Iraq and
Syria home to between five and six million people, a population the size of
Finland’s. Bolstering Isis’s treasury is up to $45m in money from kidnapping
for ransom, the UN report finds. Family members of Isis victim James Foley, an
American journalist, have questioned the policy of refusing to pay ransoms,
which US officials argue would encourage more kidnappings.
Two months of outright US-led war against Isis
has suffered from a lack of proxy ground forces to take territory from Isis, as
Obama has formally ruled out direct US ground combat. On Thursday at the
Pentagon, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
said that the US has yet to even begin vetting Syrian rebels for potential
inclusion in an anti-Isis army it seeks to muster in Syria. Dempsey encouraged
the Iraqi government to directly arm Sunni tribes to withstand Isis’s advances
through the western Anbar Province.
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| Iraqi security forces guard a checkpoint in Ramadi, Anbar province. Photograph: Reuters |
Isis kills hundreds of Iraqi Sunnis from
Albu Nimr tribe in Anbar province
Tribal militia had
played prominent role in fighting al-Qaida and offshoots since 2007
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The bodies of more than 150 men killed by
Islamic state (Isis) militants were recovered from a ditch in the city of
Ramadi, west of Baghdad, on Thursday in the latest of a series of mass
executions of tribal figures who oppose the group.
Iraqi officials said the men had been captured
in the town of Heet, west of Ramadi, over the last week. All were members of
the Sunni Albu Nimr tribe, which had faced off against Isis and had played a
prominent role in fighting al-Qaida and its offshoots in Anbar province since
2007.
At least 60 more tribal members were killed in
Heet earlier this week, in an execution videotaped and uploaded to the internet
by the executioners.
Mass killings have become synonymous with the
jihadists’ rampage through western Iraq and eastern Syria, in which large
numbers of captured soldiers and civilians on both sides of the border have
been murdered and their bodies gruesomely displayed.
Human Rights Watch reported that up to 600
prisoners, all Shia, were executed when the group overran Iraq’s second city,
Mosul, in June. The Shias were separated from Sunni prisoners and a small
number of Christians, all of whom were spared. The NGO said it had spoken to 15
Shia prisoners who survived the massacre and said that those killed had been
forced to kneel next to a ravine before being shot.
Since then up to 800 captured Syrian troops
have been murdered after their bases were overrun in eastern Syria. And at
least 1,000 Iraqi troops – all Shia – remain missing after they were captured
in Tikrit.
Interior ministry intelligence chief General
Ali al-Saede said Isis felt gravely threatened by a tribal revolt, which is
seen as perhaps the only way to force it from large parts of the country it has
conquered.
“They are trying to consolidate in the desert
areas and in Falluja and Ramadi,” he said in an interview. “They know that the
tribes are allying with us and that will be their downfall.”
Iraqi officials are trying to raise a national
guard that would be led by Sunni tribal leaders and partnered with the beleaguered
national army. However, tribal leaders say they have yet to be formally
approached about the idea and that their fight against Isis is largely
piecemeal. “Nobody has talked to me about a new awakening, of forming a
national guard,” said Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, the leader of a tribal revolt in
Anbar in 2007 that forced an earlier incarnation of Isis to leave the province.
“If they did, they would know that we need a
lot more than we have now to fight them properly.”
More than four months into the insurgency that
has seen large parts of Iraq fall out of government hands, much of Anbar
remains dominated by Isis. Falluja and Ramadi, the two largest cities in the
province, are mostly in insurgent hands, as are towns and villages in the
desert that sprawls to the Syrian border.
Heet was one of the last towns to fall to the
group. A large Iraqi military base near the town was abandoned as the jihadists
advanced, yielding a haul of US-supplied advanced weapons, such as seven M-1
Abrams tanks, which have now become targets of US air force jets.
Meanwhile, in north-eastern Syria around 100
Kurdish peshmerga have assembled near Kobani, on the border with Turkey, to
reinforce Kurdish fighters who have been battling Isis for more than a month.
Kobani, which is known as Ain al-Arab in Arabic, has been a key battleground in
Syria’s civil war.
US-led air strikes have regularly beaten back
Isis, but it still controls at least half the town – the third largest urban
centre for Syrian Kurds. The fall of Kobani would be a huge boost for Isis and
a serious blow for the Kurds, the US and its allies, who have focused much of
their air campaign on saving it.
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