Case 1 for Oh Dearism: ISIS and Izzat al- Douri

If Adam Curtis' expose was too abstract, let me give you two concrete examples involving this humble soapbox.

ISIS and Izzat al-Douri

On June 10 2014, ISIS forces invaded Mosul a city of 2 million inhabitants in one day. It was so easy that the following day they were moving on the Tikrit, which they also took in one day.

The news was  reported breathlessly in corporate media outlets. There were just 800 ISIS fighters and they were so terrifying that when they confronted the Iraqi army, some 30,000 troops simply ran away. The narrative was closer to the tone of Game of Thrones: black-clad hashishin were unstoppable barbarians.

I am no Anthony Cordesman or any kind of military expert but at the time I remember scratching my head and asking the obvious question: How can 800 idiots from the suburbs or Paris, Istanbul, London or Cairo can invade a city of 2 million?

If you click the links I provided to established news outlets, including the BBC, you will see that they all credited ISIS for this extraordinary exploit.

So I began looking around the Web. Within days I knew that the victory belonged to Saddam's elite army units commanded by Saddam's number two, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the infamous King of Clubs.

ISIS boys were there in their black uniforms to appear in their slick video clips and to tweet scary messages. But the heavy lifting was done by the Naqshibandi Army.

In early July, I posted my findings along with al-Douri's picture. It is one of my most widely-read posts.

In the following months, I kept asking how ISIS militants could wage war on several fronts, execute complicated tank maneuvers in complete darkness and use all kinds of weaponry with exceptional skill.

No mainstream media outlet seemed interested in those questions. The narrative of "the monstrous and terrifying other" remained firmly in place.

Fast forward to last week.

Apparently Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri was killed in action at the ripe old age of 72. When the BBC reported the news this is what they said:

Douri's Naqshbandi Order is the main Baathist insurgent group. Despite its secular roots, it is believed to have played a key role in a major offensive by Islamic State last year. 

IS seized swathes of territory in eastern Syria and across northern and western Iraq, in an effort to establish an Islamic "caliphate".

No kidding, was my reaction.

I understood what that short paragraph meant because I knew the background. But if you were someone who was fed the scary and confusing media narrative about ISIS, how could you make sense of this? What exactly is "a key role in a major offensive."

What role and what offensive? Can you be more obtuse?

Moreover, why didn't the BBC try to explain this clearly contradictory statement? Why would a secular Baathist help a terrorist Jihadi organization win major military victories? It makes absolutely no sense.

As far as I know, no mainstream media outlet ever tried to answer that question.

This is what Adam Curtis was referring to.

The news media simply report often contradictory items without ever attempting to link them causally or to provide a causal framework.

And we feel fear and upset but have no understanding.

This is what Michael Moore was talking about in Bowling for Columbine.

-------------------------------
UPDATE:

Just a day after I posted this here is what got published.

Alongside or within IS’ aim to devise a "pure" Islamic society is a Baathist plan to run a meticulously calculating state able to monopolize power, control territory and eradicate potential threats through brutality and terror. Baathist influences are evident in the nature of IS terror operations — extensive security and spy networks, hierarchical bureaucracies, battlefield tactics and elaborate financial and logistical networks — similar to those used by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his Baathist circles for 35 years in Iraq.

While the presence and strength of former Baathist officers in IS appears contradictory it reflects the influence of the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshbandi (JRTN), a group of Saddam’s former officers and Sunni Arab tribes that formed in reaction to the post-2003 Iraqi order.

Moreover,

Baathist influence continued in ISIS and IS, even if the group's character changed over time. By late 2014, 18 of 19 members of the IS cabinet were Sunni Arab Iraqis with one Iraqi Turcoman, and included former Baathist military officers, former Baathist security officers or Sunni Arab tribes from western Iraq. High-level IS commanders also represent former high-ranking Baathist officers in Iraq as well as Syria. Confiscated documents of former Iraqi Baathist officer "Haji Bakr," an IS leader recently killed in Aleppo, indicate his detailed plans to create a caliphate based on meticulously calculated spy and security networks (although no Quran could be found in the house).

Please tell me that ISIS is a genuine Salafist organization and has nothing to do with intelligence agencies and simply aims to re-create the conditions of Rashidun Caliphs.

Please.

How Not to Inform: Oh Dear!

Adam Curtis is a British documentary maker.

At the end of 2014, he produced an 11 minute segment for the British humorist and commentator Charlie Brooker's program Newswipe.

Here is that clip. Go ahead and watch it. I will wait for you.


If you do not have 11 minutes (or if you are like me and prefer words to images) here is what Adam Curtis says.

So much of the news this year has been hopeless, depressing, and above all, confusing. To which the only response is to say, "oh dear."

What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control.

He introduces Putin's adviser Stanislav Surkov, a post-modern artist, whose goal is to confuse people's perception of reality to ensure that they do not understand what is happening.

Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin.

But the key thing was, that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake. As one journalist put it: "It is a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused."

Curtis then questions whether something similar is taking place in British news media. There are so many issues without a clear outcome or even a causal framework.

British troops have come home from Afghanistan, but nobody seems to know whether it was a victory or whether it was a defeat. 

Aging disk jockeys are prosecuted for crimes they committed decades ago, while practically no one in the City of London is prosecuted for the endless financial crimes that have been revealed there. 

In Syria, we are told that President Assad is the evil enemy, but then his enemies turn out to be even more evil than him, so we bomb them, and by doing that, we help keep Assad in power. 

[George Osborne] tells us proudly that the economy is growing, but at the same time, wages are going down. 

He says he is reducing the deficit, but then it is revealed that the deficit is going up.

He then turns to Quantitative Easing and how it was used to siphon off billions from low income people to be transferred to the 1 percenters.

The government is insisting on taking billions of Pounds out of the economy through its austerity program, yet at the very same time it is pumping billion of Pounds into the economy through Quantitative Easing, the equivalent of 24,000 Pounds for every family in Britain.

But it gets even more confusing, because the Bank of England has admitted that those billions of Pounds are not going where they are supposed to. A vast majority of that money has actually found its way into the hands of the wealthiest five percent in Britain. It has been described as the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in recent documented history.

It could be a huge scandal, comparable to the greedy oligarchs in Russia. A ruthless elite, siphoning off billions in public money. But nobody seems to know.

In short, news is designed to make it impossible for us to understand anything.

It sums up the strange mood of our time, where nothing really makes any coherent sense. We live with a constant vaudeville of contradictory stories that makes it impossible for any real opposition to emerge, because they can't counter it with any coherent narrative of their own.

And it means that we as individuals become ever more powerless, unable to challenge anything, because we live a state of confusion and uncertainty. To which the response is: Oh dear. But that is what they want you to say.

Why Is No One Using the Kurds to Defeat ISIS?

(This is the second part of this post)

A commentator recently asked the same question: "the Kurds have an army, and they’re willing to fight and die. So why isn't the United States sending them the weapons they need?"

He elaborated further:

Over the past few weeks, it’s the Kurds who have been responsible for the world’s only victories on the ground against IS. In January, Kurdish forces in Syria, after weeks of brutal house-to-house combat, finally pushed Islamic State out of the key border town of Kobani. And within just the past few days, Peshmerga fighters who answer to the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq appear to have regained the upper hand against IS forces who staged a surprise offensive against the key city of Kirkuk.

As my long time readers know, my answer has been the same since before ISIS showed up on the scene and the initial Islamist groups like the Nusra Front began implementing an early version of the now familiar "broadcasting operatic violence" strategy: Support the Kurds.

It is a no-brainer: using mostly light arms, they defeated ISIS in Kobani. They took back large areas from ISIS and stopped its encroachment. And most observers agree that, with proper equipment, they could liberate Mosul.

Moreover, arming the Kurds has no downside.

They are overwhelmingly secular and they are not about to pass on the arms they receive to Islamist groups (the Kurdish Salafis are a tiny group and they hate ISIS).

And you have a bonus: If they, as a secular force with a large contingent of female fighters, won one or more battles against ISIS, they could expose the new Caliph as a phony.

You see, if the emergence of a new and righteous Caliph was Allah's will, as claimed by ISIS and the editors of Atlantic magazine, Allah would never allow His Caliph to be defeated by a secular army and its female fighters. If it were to happen that could only mean that Baghdadi was not the Chosen One.

Nothing would break the path to redemption for ISIS fighters faster than the knowledge that the Caliph is a phony. And nothing would stop the rush to join ISIS faster than this realization.

Then why is nobody arming the Kurds?

Remember the Sherlock Holmes quote "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

In this instance, the improbable truth is that nobody wants the Kurds to defeat ISIS.

And when you take a closer look you notice that this truth is not as improbable as it appears from a distance.

Sunni - Shia Animosity

As we all gathered by now, the primary source of conflict in the Middle East is the Sunni-Shia chasm.

On the Shia side you have Iran, Iraq's ruling Shia minority, Syria's ruling Alewite minority, Hezbollah of Lebanon, Houthis of Yemen and the sizable Shia minorities in Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia.

On the Sunni side you have everybody else, Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, Gulf Council Countries, Saudi Arabia, and Sunni encaves in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Besides Iraq, Syria and Yemen, which are open war zones, you see simmering civil unrest in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and most other Gulf countries.

In my contrarian opinion, this deep and passionate Sunni-Shia hatred is overdetermined (in the Althusserian sense of the term) by a massive economic incentive to modify the Middle East map and to create a new Sunni entity that I call Pipelineistan, a term I borrowed from Pepe Escobar (who uses it to refer to Eurasia).

As I argued in 2013, the Syrian civil war, the Iraqi unrest and the rise of radical Islamist fighters could all be traced to Syrian President Assad's refusal to let a huge pipeline go through his territory. I suspect that his decision was strongly encouraged by Russia.

It is a simple equation, really: Qatar is at one end of South Pars natural gas fields and Iran is at the other end. Qatar is already siphoning off 25 times more gas than Iran. The proposed pipeline would have allowed Qatar to increase its production and its energy exports exponentially and would have given Europe a solid alternative to Russian natural gas.

It would also turn Turkey into an energy hub.

When Assad said no, within days, the then Turkish Prime Minister R.T. Erdogan, who was his BFF previously, became his most implacable enemy. And the Syrian civil war was launched. As you know, Turkey has provided all kinds of logistic and material support and allowed its border to be freely used by Islamist rebels, including and especially ISIS.

Reinforcing my hypothesis is Qatar's massive funding of al Nusra Front and ISIS. Despite its non-denial denials, we know that Qatar has been  the financial powerhouse behind these radical fighting machines. When you think about it, it makes no sense for a tiny country like Qatar to spend billions of dollars to finance a bloody civil war far away from its borders unless it has something to gain from it.

Other Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and Gulf Emirates has had no issues with Qatar creating a Sunni monster since the Shia Muslims, i.e Iran and Shia minorities in the region, would be on the losing end of this effort.

More specifically, reducing Iran's ability to benefit from the South Pars field would weaken it financially. In Iraq, the Shia minority that reclaimed central power after Saddam's departure would be pushed back. In Syria, Bashar al Assad, who is Alewite, (an offshoot of Shia Islam) would be toppled.

That is what I mean by Sunni-Shia chasm being overdetermined by Pipelineistan.

And this is also why nobody wants ISIS defeated. Not only has ISIS created a vast Sunni country covering both Iraq and Syria but it positioned itself as a ferocious bulwark that keeps Shia expansionism in check and as the Sword of Sunni Islam against Shia forces.

Unfortunately, Kurds complicate this picture quite a bit.

First, their country is in the way of Pipelineistan.

Look at the map.

While it is certain that the Turkish and Iranian sides of the map are wildly overdrawn, the Syrian pocket is likely to be too modest. But even with that caveat you can see that the proposed Kurdish state is solidly positioned between Turkey and Pipelineistan.

And therein lies the problem.

This was why ISIS was so desperate to take a non-strategic town like Kobani.

And this was why Turkey did not lift a finger to save Kobani.

Secondly, Kurdistan straddles four countries which are at the core of the Sunni-Shia divide: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. The first two are regional super powers for the Sunni and Shia camps and the other two are the actual theaters where a Sunni-Shia war of proxy is taking place.

The presence of Kurds and their victories and defeats have significant repercussions for the warring parties.

Of these four countries, Iraq and Syria are helpless to stop the Kurds. Iran has other worries at this point in time (not to mention serious financial difficulties).

The fourth one, that is, Turkey is on a position to affect the outcome of the Kurdish struggle and it is implementing a fairly cynical strategy in that respect.

What does Turkey Want?

Contrary to what most pundits claim, Turkey is not fundamentally opposed to Kurdish independence. They certainly were at some point but the current government is fully aware that it is too late to suppress that possibility.

When they initiated the Kurdish peace process some three years ago, what they wanted was to be able to control the process that leads to independence and to push for the creation of a weak and dependent entity.

And where do I get that idea? Well, from the blueprint that is already in place.

As you might be aware, Turkey actively assisted the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) of Northern Iraq to achieve a large degree of autonomy from Baghdad. Turkish companies have been investing there heavily and 70 percent of KRG's international trade is with Turkey. They enable KRG to sell its oil and natural gas through a Turkish pipeline and help them ignore the loud protests coming from Iraq's central government.

Thus, through its dealings with KRG, Turkey created what some analysts call an undeclared economic commonwealth or others deem, perhaps more accurately, a client state. And this is what they want for the Greater Kurdistan.

The problem is that the Kurds in the other three countries that make up Kurdistan (Turkey, Syria and Iran) are all controlled by the same group, the PKK (the Syrian chapter is PYD and the Iranian chapter is PJAK). And after a long civil war that took tens of thousands of human lives, the PKK is likely to push for something more than a client state.

In that sense, the current stalemate mirrors the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Just like Netanyahu, Erdogan wants a battered, weakened and helpless interlocutor. And just like him, he would like to be able to pick and choose who will lead the other side: You know, "I won't deal with terrorists" dictum to avoid talking to Hamas and PKK.

Interestingly, the Netanyahu analogy also holds for Erdogan's electoral calculus.

On June 15, general elections will take place in Turkey. For the first time in recent history, the opposition votes outstrip AKP supporters and there is a good chance that the party may not be able to form a government without a coalition partner. Even worse, Erdogan, who got himself elected President last year, needs a super majority of 400 MPs to amend the Constitution and to establish a Presidential system. Otherwise, he will be relegated to figurehead status.

If the pro-Kurdish HDP jumps over the 10 percent electoral threshold, such a super majority is an arithmetic impossibility. If, on top of that, the ultra-nationalist MHP wins close to 18 percent of the vote, which is a distinct possibility, the new government will very likely be a coalition government. It might even be formed by the opposition parties. And that would be Erdogan's nightmare scenario.

So Erdogan took a page from Netanyahu's playbook and made a major shift to the right to woo MHP supporters. A couple of weeks ago, he declared that "there was no Kurdish problem" in Turkey and criticized the government for its Kurdish peace policy.

This was so unexpected that it earned him an unprecedented rebuke from the Deputy Prime Minister and one of the co-founders of AKP, Bulent Arinc, who told him publicly to know his place and mind his business. Within days, the jailed leader of PKK, Ocalan made a cessation of hostilities announcement to bolster the government's position.

But Erdogan's signal was already intercepted by the Turkish military.

The military, after a long period of silence, and interestingly only two days after Ocalan’s statement and the criticism of Arinc about Erdogan’s meddling in the government’s commitments to the Kurdish side, strongly rejected any speculation of its cooperation with the PKK and its Syrian affiliate, the Democratic Union Party (PYD). Alluding to Ocalan, the military said the armed forces will never see him as a counterpart in the quest for the resolution of the problem and underlined the determination of the military for confronting and fighting the “terrorist organization” — in Turkish official parlance, the PKK.

And on March 24, again after a long interval, a military communique announced that the armed forces had begun an operation against PKK elements in the Mazidag countryside, in Turkey’s southeast, presumably in a stronghold of the Kurdish movement.

Just like Netanyahu using settlers and ultra-orthodox parties to keep himself in power and to give himself cover to sabotage the peace process, Erdogan's new approach seems be to ally himself to the ultra-nationalistic MHP and make it impossible for him to pursue a peace policy towards Turkey's Kurdish minority.

In that context, ISIS is invaluable as it keeps Kurds on the defensive and and preoccupied in Syria and Iraq.

As one of Erdogan's MPs put it, ISIS is preferable to PKK.

You cannot be clearer.

Discrimination and Backlash: Two Different Cases

When I wrote recently that "women are the only minority on the planet that are universally discriminated against without any serious repercussions" I got some flack from people who perceive any pro-feminist statement as a misguided Political Correctness discourse.

I was not going to bother responding but then I stumbled upon a perfect illustration.

Discriminating Against Women

In February, the new Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs Margot Wallstroem told her Parliament that Saudi Arabia " was a "dictatorship" that violated women's rights and whipped bloggers."

Wallstroem had previously been invited to address the Arab League after her government recognized Palestine last October. When she made those remarks, Saudi Arabia promptly moved to block her speech.

It also stopped issuing visas to Swedish citizens and recalled its ambassador.

The Kingdom also accused Wallstroem of "flagrant interference" into Saudi Arabia's internal affairs. And of course, the top Wahhabi ulema claimed she was disrespecting Islam.

A backlash ensued. Can you guess against whom?

There is speculation that Sweden may lose its ability to gain a seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2017, because of the Wallstrom Affair.  Swedish businessmen sent a letter stating that breaking the arms trade agreement with Saudi Arabia would thwart Sweden’s reputation as a trade and strategic partner.  Even Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf asked Wallstrom to compromise.  In the face of such severe criticism, Wallstron, a left-wing politician who took office promising that she would implement a feminist foreign policy, may have to capitulate and compromise.  

As the Guardian put it: "Sweden’s whole industrial establishment was ranged against Ms Wallström."

To put the claimed economic damage in context, Sweden's total exports to the Kingdom were $1.3 billion last year.

That represents just 1 percent of their exports.

The clincher is this:

Strangely, the western media has paid very little attention to this affair, and most western states have failed to indicate their support of Wallstrom.

Je suis Margot, indeed.

Discriminating Against Gays

Recently, the Republican Governor of Indiana Mike Pence passed a religious freedom act. He claimed that this was a legislation that mirrored a federal bill that was signed into law by Bill Clinton, the Federal Religion Restoration Act or FRF.

The Indiana law allows individuals, companies, churches and all kinds of legal persons to refuse a service to anyone if their religious beliefs directs them not to provide that service. (The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act or RFR was designed to protect individuals from government interference in their religious practices).

Gay and Lesbian organizations quickly saw the potential for companies and churches and other parties refusing to serve gay couples. They asked the Governor Mike Pence to either add language to the bill to eliminate that possibility or pass an anti-discrimination legislation for gay, lesbian and transgender people.

He refused to do either.

A backlash ensued. Can you guess against whom?

Within days, businesses like Apple or Angie's List took a firm stand against the law. NCAA, which holds College basketball finals in Indiana issued a thinly veiled threat, as did the NFL. Other states like Connecticut banned state-paid trips to Indiana.

Within a week Mike Pence, despite many prominent conservatives coming to his defense, caved in and added new language to the bill.

I admire gay, lesbian and transgender association for what they did and how they stood up to discrimination. More power to them.

What is interesting and very instructive for me is the fact that when it is about women, the backlash is against the person who points out the discrimination.

But when it is against any other minority, the backlash is against the perpetrator of the discrimination.

Talk about Political Correctness.

Dubious Strategies to Stop ISIS

Possibly due my morbid fascination with ISIS, my friends ask me with some regularity why no one is doing anything to stop this ugly band of beheaders.

I tell them that that is because, despite all the horrifying acts committed by ISIS and the bleak lives of people in the regions they occupied, we are not serious about stopping them.

As I sense them to doubt my seemingly cavalier statement, I present to them the currently entertained solutions.

In this post I will enumerate these dubious strategies.

In a subsequent post, I will explain why ISIS is still useful for regional Sunni powers and why no one is arming and supporting the one group that is capable of defeating ISIS.

The following is in no particular order of effectiveness.

Cyber-trolling ISIS

The State Department has decided to fight ISIS through a newly established Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC). They have been attacking sites that are frequented by ISIS sympathizers and by blocking social media messaging and re-tweeting activities of ISIS fanboys called "the knights of the uploading."

Yes, that is the name they gave themselves.

If, as I suggested, people join ISIS because the newly-minted Caliphate provides a solid identity and a path to redemption to people whose artificial national identities were too weak to withstand the radicalizing onslaught of Wahhabi imams and the alienating sense of rejection that came after 9/11, then, online trolling will have no dissuading effect on them.

The lure is much stronger and its roots are elsewhere. This is why hundreds or perhaps thousands of new recruits flock to Syria every month. (And apparently helped by intelligence agencies to complete the journey)

This is also why all sorts of former al Qaeda affiliates are pledging allegiance to al Baghdadi.

In that context, providing disapproving or sarcasting links to ISIS carnage videos would not be a deterrent because blood and gore is not repulsive to these people. In fact, their new cult identity is such that, they enjoy both the graphic violence and the expression of horror it creates in other people. In a recent piece on women joining ISIS, the Economist noted that "one [woman] describe[d] repeatedly watching a video of a beheading, and demand[ed] more such films."

And this is one of the reasons why ISIS always comes up with more outrageous acts of violence.

Besides being ineffective, cyber warfare is also risky business. Just a couple of months ago, ISIS trolls hacked Centcom's official Twitter account and left messages like this.

That's US Central Command.

And on 22 March, Pentagon announced that ISIS stole the personal details of 100 US military personnel and released them online.

Cyber-trolling a technologically sophisticated adversary makes no sense.

Out-Salafisting ISIS

Another strategy is to provide support to rival Salafi groups to undermine ISIS and its alleged hold over true-Islam.

Accordingly, a recent article in the Atlantic magazine extensively quotes a Princeton lecturer of Lebanese descent to establish the notion that ISIS has the most literal and therefore the best interpretation of Islam.

It turns out that ISIS was sincere about going back to the 7th century and to recreate the conditions of the Rashidun Caliphs.

Then the article intones that, once a Caliphate is declared, it becomes the duty of all Muslims to emigrate there and to give their allegiances to the new Caliph. Anything less is apostasy.

This is, of course, inane rubbish.

First of all, there is no such thing as a literal interpretation of Islam. Or of any other religion for that matter.

From a general sociological perspective, even if you stipulate that the messages were conveyed by God - and I have no problem stipulating that - it is clear that their meaning would be limited by the understanding of the recipient. In that sense, there is no way anyone can claim to know what God really intended by reading a text that was necessarily understood and reproduced within the confines of the historical, social, linguistic and cultural context in which it was received.

To put it in everyday terms, if I were able to go back in time and met my paternal grandfather before his death in 1928, there would be no way for me to explain to him what Twitter is. Even though he was an intelligent man by all accounts, he simply would not have had the vocabulary and knowledge structures to grasp the concept as it currently exist. Since he had never experienced computers, Internet, smartphones and related technologies, he might have gotten a vague idea about communicating in short sentences. But not much beyond that.

If this is too modernist for you and you are a believer, you can make the same argument from an Islamic perspective.

Determining what texts “plainly” say is not as easy as spotting some words on a page. Islam’s interpretative tradition exists because the differences between plain and hidden, elliptical and direct, absolute and qualified, are not always obvious. The Quran speaks of itself as a book containing passages that are muḥkam, or clear in meaning, and mutashābih, or symbolic, allegorical, or ambiguous (even the significance of this word is debated among Muslims).

Secondly, the Sunnah, that is the teachings of the Prophet and his sayings (Hadith) were recorded several generations after his death. Sunnis believe in one set of Hadith and Shia in another. There is also third group of Muslims who dismiss the Hadith completely as they argue that only the Koran should be guiding Muslims: God's word should have primacy over what his earthly messenger said and did in his lifetime.

By the time the Abbasid Caliphs proceeded to write the Hadith down they had hundreds of thousands of statements many of which were contradictory or mutually exclusive. So, they picked and choose what to include. This is what we have and this is the basis of Sunnah and more importantly, the foundation of Sharia.

Given this background, how can one claim ISIS or any other entity has the most literal interpretation of Islam?

Finally, even if ISIS was the most scholarly pure source of Koranic interpretation (and they most certainly are not), they can never claim to be Salafi. You see, the Salafi movement was based on a Hadith where the Prophet said "The people of my own generation are the best, then those who come after them, and then those of the next generation."

Remember Karen Armstrong's notion of orthopraxy? The emphasis placed on purity of practice? Accordingly, Salafis try to emulate exactly what the Muslims of these first three generations did. They eat with three fingers, have their beard trimmed in a certain way, their clothing are of a certain length and all their daily actions are carefully regimented.

To live your life exactly the way the first three generations of Muslims lived was the argument used by the House of Wahhab to ban movies in Saudi Arabia and the Taliban to ban music in Afghanistan.

Do you think as-Salaf as Saleh (Pious Predecessors) used their smartphones to tweet in between daily prayers?

ISIS has movie studios that rival Sony's. Its members use Twitter better than Jack Dorsey. Its leadership pushes the boundaries of social media technologies and has an extraordinary grasp of modern marketing techniques.

They are so far more removed from the 7th century that, your average secular Muslim can out-Salafist them with a glass of wine in his hand.

Besides, if you could somehow out-Salafist them, that is, if you could find another Salafi group and support their claim that their interpretation of Islam is superior, what would that achieve?

According to the article, other Salafis are more inward looking:

Quietist Salafis believe that Muslims should direct their energies toward perfecting their personal life, including prayer, ritual, and hygiene. Much in the same way ultra-Orthodox Jews debate whether it’s kosher to tear off squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that count as “rending cloth”?), they spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that their trousers are not too long, that their beards are trimmed in some areas and shaggy in others.

But what is the point of these efforts ultimately?

Through this fastidious observance, they believe, God will favor them with strength and numbers, and perhaps a caliphate will arise. At that moment, Muslims will take vengeance and, yes, achieve glorious victory at Dabiq. 

In other words, they will turn into ISIS at a later date.

Great plan, if you ask me.

Count me in.

Bolstering Syrian and Iraqi Governments

This is another rubbish pseudo solution that pops up sporadically.

Let's face it, both Syria and Iraq are failed states at this point. It's just that no one has given them the news yet.

Right now, they are functioning and fighting with the help of Iran. In Syria's case, there is also help from Russia to ensure that the creation of Pipelineistan is delayed.

The news items about Iraqi army taking over Tikrit do not mean much as they refer to Iranian generals providing logistical and tactical support and the Shia militia doing the fighting.

The Iraqi military has been a joke since Paul Bremer's incredibly stupid idea to disband Saddam's army. The Naqshibandi Army, acting on behalf of ISIS, invaded a city of 2 million in no time. There was no resistance and no fighting back from Iraqi troops. Even with all this foreign assistance to take Tikrit back from ISIS, the Iraqi army eventually required US air strikes.

Even if you could miraculously turn the military into a fighting force, there is no way you can govern the country. Iraq has de facto been divided into Kurdish, Sunni and Shia regions. After countless atrocities from both sides, the Sunnis and Shia will never accept to live in the same country.

As for Kurds, they have already achieved independence and they are not about to give it up.

You have the same exact picture in Syria. The Nusra Front was first at the scene and just like ISIS, they were fighting other anti-Assad forces and fellow Islamists and using horrifying video clips to achieve ethnic cleansing. ISIS took over from where they left off and made the whole think more effective, more graphic and more technologically advanced.

Once again, we have a country where Alewites -a branch of Shia Islam- and Sunnis could never, ever cohabitate. And, once again we have the Kurds who, especially after Kobani, are unlikely to mingle with anyone else.

In that sense, we have two Sykes-Picot countries that are already dissolved into smaller and more numerous entities: Sunni, Shia and Kurdish.

If you were a decision maker looking at this picture armed with the knowledge that that there was no way to keep these three groups in a unitary nation state and if, while you were pondering, a very effective fighting machine was slaughtering civilian populations, what would you do?

If you supported moderate Sunni groups (as the US and Turkey did) you would know by now that the majority of Sunnis sympathize with ISIS and similar groups and any arms given to moderate Islamist factions end up in the hands of more radical Jihadis.

If you supported the Shia, you would know that, while they are slightly less crazy than the Sunnis, bolstering them could tilt the regional balance of power in Iran's favor.

That leaves one group.

And one question: Why is no one supporting and arming the Kurds?

The answer is the subject of my next post.

UN Women: Men Know Better

The original idea behind UN Women was to create an agency that would promote Gender Equality. 

If UNDP is United Nations Development Programme, this was supposed to be something like UNGEP.  

In his infinite wisdom,  UN's Secretary General Ban Ki Moon decided to name the new organization, UN Women.

And therein lies a serious problem. 

Empowering Women Without Addressing Gender Equality

Gender is a social construct and as such includes a large number of identities beyond the biological male and female categories. (Actually, biology is not that clear cut either but that is a whole other discussion). 

Naming it UN Women meant that the agency was not there to address gender equality issues but was conceived as an advocate for women. 

Clearly there is nothing wrong with having a UN agency promoting the empowerment of women. In fact, it is a very good thing. The problem is that you cannot do that without addressing gender equality.  

You see, women are the only minority on the planet that are universally discriminated against without any serious repercussions. They are beaten up and murdered everywhere. They are raped in peace time as in war time. They earn less than men everywhere. They are underrepresented in political institutions or in companies. They own a tiny 2 percent of global assets. 

And they live as objectified "things" everywhere, the objectification varying according to culture, country and context.

If you remove the focus from gender equality, which would be very challenging for many cultures, countries and contexts, you make the new agency, a pleading entity that begs member states to do a bit more to improve women's lives. And this, despite the certainty that no member state would actually lift a finger to improve women's lives and status.

Without gender equality at its core, the new entity was DOA.

A Distinguished Executive Council

Ban Ki Moon did not stop there. He made sure that the new entity would be a failure by saddling it with an extraordinarily bad governing body.

The 41 member Executive Board of UN Women is composed of

- 10 countries from Africa

- 10 countries from Asia

- 4 countries from Eastern Europe

- 6 from Latin America and the Caribbean

- 5 countries from Western Europe, North America and others group

- 6 from major donor countries.

In other words, most of the Executive Board members are poor countries which would be unable to contribute to the work of the agency financially. And  empowerment of women is not even on their list of priorities.

So where do you get money?

When the first Executive Director Michelle Bachelet left after two years to run for president in her native Chile, as her replacement, the Board and Ban Ki Moon selected an unknown South African politician, Phumzile Mlambo Ngcuka. Whereas Bachelet was a charismatic and well-known politician who could get countries to pledge money and support to the new agency, her successor was such a marginal figure that she could not get any world leader on the phone. 

Incidentally, do you know who the donor countries are in the Executive Board?

Mexico, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States of America and Saudi Arabia.

Yes, Saudi Arabia is a member of the privileged club of "contributing countries" in the Executive Board.

Ban Ki Moon did one more thing that I consider astonishingly patronizing for women's movement.

Only Men Can Empower Women

The head of the UN Women is supported by two Assistant Secretary Generals (ASG). 

One looks after intergovernmental support and strategic partnerships. It is currently occupied by Lakshmi Puri. She has no gender expertise or experience either. But one could argue that for this work a gender background might not a strict necessity..(Her CV states that she has always promoted women's rights and sadly, such ex post facto assertions and being a woman are typically the only qualifications needed for these posts). 

The other ASG position was given the Policy and Programme portfolio. Basically, anything of substance the new entity was supposed to undertake was going to be decided by this person. 

And they gave the job to a man. 

On 11 March 2011, three days after the International Women's Day, Ban Ki Moon appointed a man, John Hendra to that position, a regular UNDP officer with zero gender experience and expertise. He was the man to devise and design the policies and programs that would empower women.

Now if I were a woman I would be somewhat miffed that the only UN agency with a mandate to empower women left its policy and programming work to a man. One without even a passing acquaintance with that field.

But I would be really upset if history repeated itself: When John Hendra went back to UNDP, his successor was also a man. A Frenchman no less.

Yannick Glemarec, another UNDP officer with no gender experience and expertise, is now in charge of determining all the policies and programming options of UN Women. 

Apparently, he knows about climate change and fund management but absolutely nothing about the field of gender equality.

And this time he was appointed just a day before the International Women's Day.

The message is as clear as the glass ceiling. 

There are no qualified women for these senior jobs. 

Even men with no expertise and proper qualifications are better than women.

What About Gender Parity?

I heard someone making the argument that since this is about gender and there are two ASG positions, it is perfectly reasonable that one should go to a man. 

There are two problems with that argument. One, why should the policy job go to a man? Right? This is about women after all.

Two, achieving parity at UN Women would be desirable if parity existed elsewhere within the UN system. Women occupy roughly 30 percent of all senior UN jobs and for the top of the echelon their numbers went down by 2.9 percent between 2011 and 2013 (to 27.1 percent). 

In case you are wondering, UN Women jobs were overwhelmingly held by women at the outset. Since then, in every category except for the most junior positions there has been a decline in the number of women officers. 

That is to say, they replaced most departing or retiring personnel with men.

And the signature achievement of UN Women in the last two years has been to start a new movement called He for She. 

The idea behind it is for men to achieve gender equality for women.

Can the message be any clearer?

ISIS, Intelligence Agencies, Missing Women and Jihadi John

I have been writing about how ISIS was an artificial monster which was created for the specific task of establishing a Sunni state out of the ashes of Syria and Iraq.

To highlight the economic incentives behind ISIS, I borrowed Pepe Escobar's term and nicknamed that country Pipelineistan.

Even though ISIS popped up out of nowhere with $4 billion in its pockets, amazing production and post-production studios, software development units and an extraordinary social networking presence, people were reluctant to see them for what they were. Instead, they preferred "them Muslims, the beheading barbarians" discourse.

As I am not a moralist, I have no issue with such dubious generalizations other than the fact that they are no help to me in my quest to understand what ISIS is and what they are doing.

To me, their collaboration with Georgian and Turkish intelligence services to smuggle Jihadis, like Tarkan Batirashvili to Iraq and Syria is more telling.

Or the help they get from Turkish Intelligence Agency (MIT) to allow ISIS fighters crisscrossing the border between Turkey and Syria.

Or the arms and ammunition trucks destined for ISIS and actually driven by (MIT) officers.

Or the ISIS munitions manufactured by MKE, a Turkish company owned by the state.

Or the training camp set up in Jordan by American officers to train fighters who eventually ended up as ISIS foot soldiers.

Or the recent documents leaked by the Turkish army about MIT shipping arms to ISIS and al Qaeda, which were made public by a Dutch Parliamentarian.

I can now add two more pieces to this picture.

Last month, I stumbled upon the story of a remarkable Kurdish woman in Northern Iraq who has been trying to liberate and re-integrate missing women taken by ISIS.

Her name is Tavga Omer Rashid. She is Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG)  Human Rights Commissioner and a Member of Parliament.

When she found out that ISIS was selling missing women in slave markets, she came up with idea to buy as many women as she could.

So far she "bought"- to use the unfortunate Nicolas Kristof terminology- 500 out of 2,800 officially missing women (some estimates put the actual number in the 4,000-5,000 range).

She also tried to find local men (mostly from Yazidi tribes) to accept them as brides. She set up workshops to explain their ordeal and their victim status. And she tried to find workarounds for the abortion issue for unwanted pregnancies.

Interestingly, she tried to contact ISIS through humanitarian agencies and nobody could help. Then someone explained to her that every regional and global intelligence agency was active inside ISIS. So she asked for their help. They obliged and that is how she got access to these women.

The other piece was the revelation of the identity of Jihadi John as Mohammed Emwazi. Besides informing us that he was a Kuwait-born idiot with anger issues, the reports included this tantalizing bit.

It's believed both Britain and the US have informers inside the Islamic State "capital" of Raqqa. Yet this seems to have been little help in stopping the actions of Mohammed Emwazi, or bringing him to justice. 

ISIS is certainly a monster but focusing on the horrific nature of its action will not help us understand what they are doing. Actually, what they really want is for you to be mesmerized by their savagery. That is the whole point of those production facilities and professionally shot and edited video clips. And that is why they come up with more and more horrific executions.

If you want to understand what ISIS is doing, ignore Jihadi John and focus on Pipelineistan.

Cui bono?

Or as Deep Throat said "follow the money."