What Captured ISIS Jihadists Tell Us About the Group
A blogger, Kyle Orton, whose output I rarely capture and this article in a away supplements that by Hassan Hassan.
Link:https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/...out-the-group/
A Saudi ISIS leader talks to the BBC
A curious item, originally on the BBC World Service (Arabic) and recirculated on YouTube:
Quote:
It’s roughly a year since the so-called Islamic State was defeated in its major cities in Iraq and Syria, and the group’s territory has now been shrunk to just a few small pockets of land. Yet with every new defeat IS suffers, it becomes clearer that it will take years to defeat the ideology that inspired the group. Prisons were one place IS ideology thrived before 2014, and thousands of former IS members are currently in jails across the region. Many of them are foreigners with the same ideology that first pushed them to join IS, and whose governments are refusing to take them back. BBC Arabic’s Special Correspondent, Feras Kilani, met one Saudi prisoner currently detained by the Syrian Democratic Forces.
It is just under ten minutes long, with English sub-titles.
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o99uWPDp1TE
'I only saw America killing": an IS widow's view of Syria's war
Quote:
NEAR BAGHOUZ, Syria (Reuters) - Emerging from Islamic State's last enclave in eastern Syria, a widow of one of the group's fighters made no effort to hide her enmity toward the United States as she handed herself over to U.S.-backed Syrian forces besieging the area.
"This is not war. I did not see fighters, people taking up arms and waging jihad against America. No I only saw America killing - a lot," French national Um Walaa's told Reuters TV after being evacuated from Baghouz near the Iraqi border.
"...They used to say we (Islamic State) made the world scared, honestly I did not see this. I did not see that we terrorized the world."
Her words offer a snapshot of the feelings harbored by the followers and fighters of the hardline group who have poured out of the enclave by the thousand over the past month.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/only-saw-...145336790.html
After Baghouz: A Jihadi Archipelago
A report from late March 2019 and the summary states:
Quote:
March saw the eradication of the last scrap of the Islamic State movement’s Caliphate in Syria and Iraq after a five-year struggle. It did not witness the destruction of the movement, which new data shows remains highly active in Iraq, Syria and two dozen other countries. This briefing assesses the evolution of IS in Iraq and Syria and its re-emergence in Africa and Asia.
Link:https://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org....di-archipelago
ISIS’ Shifting Focus by Bruce Hoffman
A short commentary by Bruce Hoffman, which ends with:
Quote:
The bottom line is that the recent succession of triumphalist statements that have attended the defeat of the caliphate in Syria and Iraq does not mean that the threat to international security from ISIS has abated. The assumption that, with the fall of the caliphate that, the lingering ISIS threat was narrowly one mainly from lone actors has thus been seriously undermined by the tragic events of the past few days.
Link:https://www.thecipherbrief.com/colum...shifting-focus