ISIS: an essential reading collection

[AdamG]

The first known private military contracting and consulting firm catering just to jihadists issued a new online fundraising appeal for help in arming fighters while also noting this week that donors came through to build a training camp for jihadists in Syria.

"We have finished our project about the building new training camp for brothers and I am so glad. And we are going to start the new lessons after a few days, inshallah, special courses for shooters of PKM and RPG," Malhama Tactical leader Abu Salman Belarus said in an English-language video posted to his Twitter account Wednesday, thanking those who "supported our project."

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-securit...th-donor-help/

Malhama Tactical, referred to as Blackwater for jihadists, offers trainers who hail from Russia's Caucasus region and the former Soviet states. Excerpts of training videos are frequently posted online.

Their contracting clients have included Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, the umbrella group known as al-Qaeda in Syria that includes the former al-Nusra Front. Then-leader Abu Rofiq, an Uzbek who said he was a veteran of the Russian military, told Foreign Policy magazine last year that territorial setbacks for jihadist groups didn't dampen their business demand, yet they were also considering new regions to branch out their business.

Malhama Tactical launched in May 2016 and by the end of that year was advertising on Facebook for trainers to come join their “fun and friendly team” with vacation allowance and a day off per week. The group also manufactures and supplies certain equipment to jihadist groups.

[AdamG]

Reminder: OSINT sources can be fallible.

[davidbfpo]

An Anglo-Dutch report 'The Cost of Crying Victory: Policy Implications of the Islamic State’s Territorial Collapse' by ICSR and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT).

The Summary opens with:

In light of the territorial demise of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, this report analyses the continued risks posed by IS. Given that IS is playing a long game, the report calls upon policymakers to keep up the counter-terrorism pressure, to sidestep policy fatigue at all costs to avoid undoing years of progress, and to continue fostering the emergence of resilient and inclusive societies.

Link:https://icct.nl/publication/the-cost...rial-collapse/

I have not read it, but Charlie Winter & Shiraz Maher (ICSR) are experts on IS.

[AdamG]

The new leader of the United Kingdom’s army said that Russia is a bigger security threat than the Islamic State group (ISIS) in his first interview since becoming chief in June.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4695735/u...eat-than-isis/

[davidbfpo]

Originally posted by Joel Wing in the Iraq 2018 thread. It is an article by Hassan Hassan in 'The Atlantic' and hopefully the link works. The sub-title:

A secret biography suggests that Abu Ali al-Anbari defined the group’s radical approach more than any other person.

The article is based upon:

A month ago, I obtained a 93-page document that chronicles Anbari’s life, as well as the extremist landscape around him in 1990s Iraq. Anbari’s son, Abdullah, wrote the biography for the internal use of the Islamic State, which published parts of it in its weekly Arabic magazine, Al-Naba, in 2016, shortly after Anbari’s killing. Dissidents within ISIS recently spread the full document on social media, which is how I came across it. Abdullah has stated that the biography was based on 16 years of working closely with his father, a diary that Anbari kept, and firsthand accounts of Anbari from fellow ISIS members.

Link:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...arqawi/577030/

[davidbfpo]

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/

[davidbfpo]

A curious item, originally on the BBC World Service (Arabic) and recirculated on YouTube:

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