ISIS: an essential reading collection

[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

[AdamG]

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

[AdamG]

Good.

BAGHOUZ, Syria -- The caliphate has crumbled, and the final offensive is over. While the official announcement hasn’t yet been made – Fox News has been told that this village, the last ISIS stronghold, is liberated.

It’s the first time since we’ve been here in Syria for five days that the bombs have stopped dropping and the gunfire has disappeared. We have witnessed the end of the caliphate – the brutal empire that once ruled over 8 million people – is gone.

Troops here are now bringing down the black flags of ISIS. The flags no longer fly over the town, instilling fear.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/isis-h...ws-has-learned

[davidbfpo]

A report from late March 2019 and the summary states:

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

[davidbfpo]

A short commentary by Bruce Hoffman, which ends with:

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