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ISIS Displaying a Deft Command of Varied Mediaby By SCOTT SHANE and BEN HUBBARD
ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is using every contemporary mode of messaging to recruit fighters, intimidate enemies and promote its claim to have established a caliphate.
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Назарбаев: Казахстан может выйти из Евразийского союза, если его интересы нарушатся
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The extremists who have seized large parts of Syria and Iraq have riveted the world’s attention with their military prowess and unrestrained brutality. But Western intelligence services are also worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos, ground images shot from drones and multilingual Twitter messages.
ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is using every contemporary mode of messaging to recruit fighters, intimidate enemies and promote its claim to have established a caliphate, a unified Muslim state run according to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. If its bigotry and beheadings seem to come from a distant century, its use of media is up to the moment.
A review of its prodigious output in print and online reveals a number of surprises. ISIS propaganda, for instance, has strikingly few calls for attacks on the West, even though its most notorious video, among Americans, released 12 days ago, showed the beheading of the American journalist James Foley, threatened another American hostage, and said that American attacks on ISIS “would result in the bloodshed” of Americans. This diverged from nearly all of ISIS’s varied output, which promotes its paramount goal: the fight to secure and expand the Islamic state. Experts say that could change overnight, but for now it sharply distinguishes ISIS from Al Qaeda, which has long made attacks on the West its top priority.
And while ISIS may be built on bloodshed, it seems intent on demonstrating the bureaucratic acumen of the state that it claims to be building. Its two annual reports so far are replete with a sort of jihadist-style bookkeeping, tracking statistics on everything from “cities taken over” and “knife murders” committed by ISIS forces to “checkpoints set up” and even “apostates repented.”
ISIS media frames its campaign in epochal terms, mounting a frontal assault on the national divisions and boundaries in the Middle East drawn by Western powers after World War I. These “Crusader partitions” and their modern Arab leaders, ISIS argues in its English-language magazine, were a divide-and-conquer strategy intended to prevent Muslims from unifying “under one imam carrying the banner of truth.”
That sense of historical grievance is an old theme for Al Qaeda and more moderate Islamist groups. The difference is that by capturing expansive territory and heavy weaponry, and flush with wealth from kidnappings, oil piracy, bank robbery and extortion, ISIS claims to have taken a major first step toward righting what it sees as this ancient wrong, creating a unified Muslim state that will subsume existing nations.
ISIS carefully tailors its recruiting pitch, sending starkly different messages to Muslims in the West and to those closer to home. But the image of unstoppable, implacable power animates all of its messaging.
The pitch is effective. The militant rebellion in Syria and Iraq has drawn as many as 2,000 Westerners, including perhaps 100 Americans, and many thousands more from the Middle East and elsewhere, though some have returned home. Experts believe most of those remaining today are fighting with ISIS.
“The overriding point is that success breeds success,” said Emile Nakhleh, a former C.I.A. analyst. “The perception of quick victories and territory and weapons and bases means they don’t need to try hard to recruit.”
For two decades, Mr. Nakhleh said, Osama bin Laden talked about re-establishing the caliphate, but he never claimed to have done it. “Young people look at ISIS and say, ‘By gosh, they’re doing it!’ They see the videos with fighters riding on big tanks. They see that ISIS has money,” he said.
Before ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in June, other factions fighting in Syria were attracting European recruits, said Thomas Schmidinger, a political scientist from Vienna University. “But since the fall of Mosul, nearly everyone is going to” ISIS, he said.
In the evolution of modern jihadist propaganda, Bin Laden, addressing a single static camera with long-winded rhetoric in highly formal Arabic, represented the first generation. (His videos had to be smuggled to Al Jazeera or another television network to be aired.) The most prominent figure of the second generation was the YouTube star Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011, who addressed Westerners in colloquial English, had a blog and Facebook page and helped produce a full-color, English-language magazine called Inspire.
ISIS is online jihad 3.0. Dozens of Twitter accounts spread its message, and it has posted some major speeches in seven languages. Its videos borrow from Madison Avenue and Hollywood, from combat video games and cable television dramas, and its sensational dispatches are echoed and amplified on social media. When its accounts are blocked, new ones appear immediately. It also uses services likeJustPaste to publish battle summaries, SoundCloud to release audio reports, Instagram to share images and WhatsApp to spread graphics and videos.
“They are very adept at targeting a young audience,” said John G. Horgan, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who has long studied terrorism. “There’s an urgency: ‘Be part of something that’s bigger than yourself and be part of it now.’ ” Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and the author of “The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global,” said ISIS had so far consistently focused on what militants call “the near enemy” — leaders of Muslim countries like Bashar al-Assad of Syria — and not “the far enemy” of the United States and Europe.
“The struggle against the Americans and the Israelis is distant, not a priority,” he said. “It has to await liberation at home.”
Al Qaeda has often stressed the advantage to the terrorist network of supporters who hold Western passports and can attack in their countries. But a common public rite of passage for new recruits to ISIS is tearing up or burning their passports, signifying a no-going-back commitment to the Islamic state.
One polished ISIS video features a Canadian recruit named Andre Poulin urging North American Muslims to follow him — and even to bring their families. “You’d be very well taken care of here,” he said in the video. “Your families would live here in safety, just like how it is back home. You know we have expanses of territory here in Syria.”
In another English-language video pitch, a British fighter identified as Brother Abu Bara al-Hindi poses the call to jihad as a test for comfortable Westerners. “Are you willing to sacrifice the fat job you’ve got, the big car, the family?” he asks. Despite such luxuries, he says, “Living in the West, I know how you feel — in the heart you feel depressed.” The Prophet Muhammad, he declares, said, “The cure for depression is jihad.”
Such appeals provoke curiosity, and British fighters have answered hundreds of questions about joining ISIS on Ask.fm, a website, including what type of shoes to bring and whether toothbrushes are available. When asked what to do upon arriving in Turkey or Syria, the fighters often casually reply, “Kik me,” referring to the instant messenger for smartphones, and continue the discussion in private.
The English-language videos do not soft-pedal the dangers of the fight; the video of Mr. Poulin, for instance, shows and celebrates his death in battle. But the message to English speakers is nonetheless far softer than the Arabic-language videos, which linger on enemy corpses and show handcuffed prisoners casually machine-gunned.
The message, said Mr. Gerges, is blunt: “Get out of the way or you will be crushed; join our caravan and make history.”
Instead of emphasizing jihad as a means of personal fulfillment, the Arabic media production portrays it as duty for all Muslims. It flaunts violence toward its foes, especially Shiites and the Iraqi and Syrian security services, while portraying the killing as just vengeance.
A recent hourlong ISIS documentary opens with video shot from a drone over Falluja in Iraq and then over a convoy of ISIS gun trucks heading off to battle. A voice-over says that the Islamic state is expanding and that Jerusalem’s Aqsa mosque is “only a stone’s throw away.”
In a later scene, a fighter holding a rifle and his passport mocks his home country, Bahrain, for threatening to withdraw citizenship from those who fight jihad abroad.
“Don’t you know that you, your citizenship, your laws, your constitutions and your threats are under our feet?” the fighter says. “Don’t you know that we are the soldiers of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and that our state will expand until it removes the thrones that you sold your religion for?”
Nowhere in the hourlong production — full of threats, drive-by shootings, explosions and gunfights — does an ISIS fighter mention the United States or directly mention or threaten Israel, apart from the allusion to the Aqsa mosque.
Hassan Hassan, a Syrian analyst with the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi, said that ISIS portrays itself as restoring idealized eras of earlier Islamic history in a way that resonates with many of the region’s Muslims.
“ISIS tries to reflect an image of being the continuation of the system of the caliphate,” he said. “In people’s minds, the caliphate is about victory and dignity of Muslims. A caliph is a defender of Muslims against the enemies from within and without.”
ISIS’ emphasis on strict implementation of Islamic law also draws support, he said, as does its portrayal of its battle in staunchly sectarian terms.
Many of the region’s Sunnis have deep sympathy for any force that can challenge the Iraqi or Syrian governments, which they feel have oppressed Sunnis.
ISIS “is the group that is capable of hitting these governments’ security forces and loyalists,” and that has “massive appeal,” Mr. Hassan said.
The State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications has stepped up its efforts to counter ISIS propaganda, publishing a steady stream of ISIS horror tales on Facebook andTwitter, using the hashtag #ThinkAgainTurnAway.
For now, it seems an uphill climb. Last week, an ISIS fighter calling himself Abu Turaab wrote on Twitter, “For those who want to come but are facing obstacles, be patient and keep the desire for Jihad alive within you always.”
The State Department account replied, “ISIS recruits’ 2 choices: commit atrocities & die as criminals, get nabbed and waste lives in prison.” As of Friday, Abu Turaab’s comment had been named as a “favorite” 32 times. The count for the State Department’s response: Zero.
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BRUSSELS — Warning that Russia was pushing the conflict in Ukraine toward “the point of no return,” the president of the European Union’s executive arm said on Saturday that European leaders meeting in Brussels would probably endorse new and tougher sanctions in an effort to make Moscow “come to reason.”
After morning talks with the visiting president of Ukraine, Petro O. Poroshenko, the head of theEuropean Commission, José Manuel Barroso, voiced Europe’s growing alarm and exasperation at Russian actions in Ukraine and the risks of a wider war.
Mr. Poroshenko, speaking at a joint news conference with Mr. Barroso, said Ukraine still hoped for a political settlement with Russian-backed rebels in the east of his country but said a flow of Russian troops and armored vehicles into Ukraine in recent days in support of rebels were stoking the fires of a broader conflict.
“We are too close to a border where there will be no return to the peace plan,” Mr. Poroshenko said, asserting that, since Wednesday, “thousands of foreign troops and hundreds of foreign tanks are now on the territory of Ukraine, with a very high risk not only for the peace and stability of Ukraine but for the peace and stability of the whole of Europe.”
The latest updates to the current visual survey of the continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and military movement.
Russia has repeatedly denied sending troops or military hardware into Ukraine, but after the Ukrainian authorities released videos on Tuesday of captured Russian troops, Moscow conceded that some of its soldiers had crossed into Ukraine “by accident.”
Rebel leaders say Russian servicemen are fighting in Ukraine, but are doing so during their holiday leave from the Russian Army. Alexander Zakharchenko, a separatist leader in Donetsk, said these soldiers “would rather take their vacation not on a beach but with us, among brothers, who are fighting for their freedom.”
Russia’s evasions and denials in response to mounting evidence of its direct involvement in supporting pro-Russian separatists has left even Europe’s more cautious leaders, notably Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, ready to endorse further sanctions. Ms. Merkel said Thursday that Germany still favored a diplomatic solution.
However, she said, “we have to note that the situation in the last few days has become more difficult, and worsened.” Since March, she added, European Union leaders had said sanctions would be considered if there was an escalation. Her spokesman, Steffan Seisbert, said that Germany would support an extension of economic sanctions because there was no longer any real doubt of what he called a Russian “military intervention.”
Ms. Merkel has spoken regularly with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, by telephone during the crisis but has had no success in curbing Russia’s support for the rebels, who had been losing ground in face of a Ukrainian offensive. Now, reinvigorated by new arms and fighters from Russia, the rebels are expanding territory under their control.
Mr. Barroso said Saturday that he, too, had spoken by telephone with Mr. Putin and “urged him to change course” during a conversation on Friday.
While not directly accusing Russia of sending soldiers into Ukraine, as Mr. Poroshenko and NATO have done, Mr. Barroso said Russian moves to feed fighting in eastern Ukraine were “simply not the way responsible, proud nations should behave in the 21st century.” Further sanctions, Mr. Barroso said, would “show to Russia’s leadership that the current situation is not acceptable and we urge them to come to reason.” European leaders, he added, had long stated that any further escalation of the conflict would set off additional sanctions, and they would “be ready to take some more measures” at a summit meeting in Brussels that began Saturday afternoon.
Saturday’s meeting of European leaders was originally called to discuss appointments to senior jobs within the European Commission. Among jobs up for discussion is the new foreign policy chief to replace Catherine Ashton of Britain. The front-runner for the foreign affairs job is the Italian foreign minister, Federica Mogherini, who has little foreign experience and a reputation for being sympathetic to Russia’s arguments.
But the crisis in Ukraine has complicated the elaborate horse trading for jobs among the union’s 28 member states and turned the focus of Saturday’s meeting toward discussions of new sanctions against Russia.
Fighting in eastern Ukraine has been going on for months, mostly around the rebel-held cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. But the conflict expanded last week after the rebels — backed by Russian forces, according to NATO — opened a front along a coastal road leading to the industrial port city of Mariupol.
In Mariupol on Saturday, both Ukrainian military units and the civilian population were preparing to defend the city against any assault by the Russian-backed militias, Ukraine’s military spokesman, Col. Andriy Lysenko, said during a briefing in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.
“We are very grateful to the Mariupol residents, who have also helped in the fortification of the city against the armored vehicles of the enemy,” Colonel Lysenko said. The city fell briefly under the control of pro-Russian fighters earlier this year, but after they were driven out it had been firmly in the hands of Ukraine. The governor of the Donetsk region, forced from his headquarters in the city of Donetsk, decamped there to maintain a formal, if largely impotent, government presence.
Colonel Lysenko said that local residents were volunteering to join the armed forces, but that the military had enough men there “to repel the Russian military and its mercenaries.”
He repeated accusations that the Russians were sending arms and men across the border to support rebel fighters, who have declared independent states in Donetsk and Luhansk. “The direct military aggression of the Russian Federation in the east of Ukraine continues,” he said.
Ukraine also accused Russia on Saturday of helping to shoot down one of its combat aircraft during fighting with the separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.
A statement by the Ukrainian government on the Facebook page for its military operations in the southeast said the Su-25 fighter was shot down on Friday, with the pilot ejecting safely. A missile from a Russian launcher struck the plane, it said, without providing any more details. Colonel Lysenko, the military, spokesman also described low-level skirmishes scattered around the areas controlled by the separatists in southeastern Ukraine.
In Moscow, the deputy defense minister, Anatoly Antonov, was quoted as repeating Russian denials that it was supplying men or arms to the fight in Ukraine. Any Russian arms in the hands of the militias came from Ukrainian army stocks captured in the fighting, he was quoted as saying by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
Mr. Antonov also raised questions about the international investigation into Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which crashed in southeastern Ukraine in July, killing all 298 civilians on board. Ukraine and its Western allies have said that an antiaircraft missile supplied by Russia downed the plane, likely in error. But Moscow, without providing any evidence, blamed Ukraine.
The Russian official questioned why the data recovered from the black box recorders had yet to be released publicly. “The problem should not be abandoned,” the agency quoted Mr. Antonov as saying. “We should find out what happened in the sky over Ukraine.”
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Russia Pushing Ukraine Conflict to ‘Point of No Return,’ E.U. Leader Says by By ANDREW HIGGINS and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
As evidence of Russia’s direct intervention in Ukraine mounted, the president of the European Commission said European leaders meeting in Brussels were likely to endorse new, tougher sanctions.
Window on Eurasia: Putin Needs ‘Not Victory but War Itself,’ Kruglyakovsky Says by paul goble (noreply@blogger.com)
Paul Goble
Staunton, August 30 – Vladimir Putin’s decision to move toward a full-scale invasion of Ukraine shows that he “has no other levers and resources” to achieve his will than to send in his soldiers, but it also reflects the fact that what the Kremlin leader needs is “not victory but war itself,” according to Kyiv political analyst Pavel Kruglyakovsky.
That allows him to keep the situation unstable and others off balance and to give him the kind of freedom of action that he desires, although he has passed the point not only where he can maintain that situation but also where he must face the fact that this is “the beginning of the end” of his regime (nr2.com.ua/News/politics_and_society/Putin-topit-pechi-kremlevskoy-propagandy-telami-pskovskih-desantnikov-ekspert-78890.html).
“By entering into a direct military conflict with Ukraine,” the analyst says, “Putin is committing a fatal mistake” because he will not be able to escape from the current situation “without losing face,” something that he will do everything he can to avoid but that the strength of Ukrainian forces will make impossible.
“The Russian army is far from as powerful as the majority of people in Russia itself think,” Kruglyakovsky argues. “Russia today is a colossus with feet of clay … the level of corruption in Kremlin offices is an order higher than in Ukrainian ones … And when generals steal, the men in the ranks suffer.”
“Today everything shows that the Russian army is not so terrible and undefeatable as [Kremlin propagandist] Dmitry Kiselyev suggests in his programs. This fact is beginning to be recognized in Kyiv; soon they will understand it in Moscow as well. The zinc caskets are already beginning to arrive in the depths of Russia.”
Kryuglyakovsky is certain, Novy region says, that Putin cannot win a military victory in Ukraine because “a fatherland war [which is what Ukraine is fighting] is by its internal energy always stronger than the need ‘to fulfill one’s international duty’” especially in the case of a 40-million-strong nation that is prepared to sacrifice itself for its freedom.
“How many military capable units can Putin send against the army of Ukrainians?” the analyst asks. “Even today [the Kremlin leader] is having to deceive his troops by saying that he sending them on ‘manuevers.’” And that raises an even more fundamental question: “does the Russian president need a victory in the classical sense?”
“What would he do with the Donbas where all the infrastructure has already been destroyed by the hands of [his own] terrorists? Putin does not need ‘Novorossiya.’ Rather he needs” something else: “unstable Luhansk and Donets oblasts” within the borders of Ukraine not of Russia.
In short, “Putin needs not victory but war itself,” Kryuglyakovsky concludes, and one that he will pursue by constantly changing the slogans and stated goals in the hopes that he can intimidate some and keep others off-balance as he searches for a way out for himself from the disaster he has caused.
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Минобороны Украины создает свой собственный СМЕРШ
Радиостанция ЭХО МОСКВЫ Это служба внутренней безопасности, которая будет заниматься обезвреживанием вражеской агентуры и выявлением фактов невыполнения боевых приказов. Это сообщил министр обороны Валерий Гелетей. В своем Фейсбуке он написал, что эта служба будет несколько похожей на ... В армии Украины появится свой СМЕРШПравда.Ру Гелетей запретил разглашать информацию по ИловайскуПодробности В целях безопасности в Минобороны решили не предоставлять "публичную информацию" о ситуации в ИловайскеУНИАН Газета.Ru -MIGnews.com.ua Все похожие статьи: 102 » |
Tension high in Ukrainian border towns menaced by Russian forces by Shaun Walker in Mariupol and Alec Luhn in Novoazovsk
Russian soldiers are nowhere to be seen in city captured by rebels, but locals insist that the Kremlin's troops led the advance
As Ukraine's president told an EU summit in Brussels that there were now "thousands" of Russian troops operating in his country, they had all but disappeared from view in the eastern town that has been the flashpoint for invasion claims.
Novoazovsk, not far from the border with Russia and miles away from other areas controlled by separatists, was captured by an armoured column on Wednesday evening that appeared to cross from Russia, and there were several reported sightings of similar "little green men" to those who appeared prior to the annexation of Crimea: well-equipped troops without insignia who appeared to be from elite Russian units immediately stood out from the ragtag fighters of the separatist militias.
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Window on Eurasia: Putin Accepts Only ‘Imperial-Militarist’ Component of Soviet Inheritance, Shtepa Saysby paul goble (noreply@blogger.com)
Paul Goble
Staunton, August 30 – Vladimir Putin is often accused of wanting to restore the Soviet system or at least its core values, but in fact, the Kremlin leader is interested in promoting the its “imperial-militarist” element and not its “revolutionary” component, a pattern that has the effect of limiting Russia’s ability to deal with the rest of the world, according to Vadim Shtepa
In a new comentary, the Petrozavodsk-based federalist thinker notes that as a result of this, Putin is even more interested in promoting “the cult of ‘the Great Victory’” in World War II than was Brezhnev, even though “it would seem” that that event is “ever further receding into history” (spektr.delfi.lv/novosti/rimejk-imperii.d?id=44908252).
Putin’s use of this “cult,” the commentator says, reflects the Kremlin’s understanding that it is “an extraordinarily useful technology for political repressions and territorial expansions” because “any opponent can with ease be designated ‘a fascist’” and thus deserving of destruction.
“And so,” he continues, “the post-Soviet evolution [of Russia] has led to a strange ideological remake from the Soviet inheritance and the pre-Soviet imperial tradition,” a combination that despite its obvious logical problems as “a post-modern mix” has nonetheless “proven quite popular.”
Shtepa traces the emergence of this particular approach to the past back to 1991. At that time, he writes, Russia was committed to democracy and integration in the international community and explicitly rejected the imperial, militarist and revolutionary characteristics of its Soviet predecessor. As a result, the August 1991 coup failed.
But if the coup failed, many of its values remained terribly widespread in Russia, and as a result, Shtepa says, “democratic Russia suddenly began to reproduce the archaic stereotypes of the Soviet empire,” one viewed by the world “not as one of the new states arising after the disintegration of the USSR but as a direct continuation of that same USSR only a little reduced in size as a result of the loss of formal control over the territories of the former union republics.
As a result, if 23 years ago, “Russia and the USSR were viewed as political antipodes,” in the years since, they have increasingly come to be viewed as closely linked and remarkably similar in key respects. And that shift has taken place not only among outsiders but also among members of the Russian elite.
That put Russia at odds with the other former republics of the USSR because “if they began a new and real history of their own, then Russia, the political center of which remained the Kremlin began an extension of Soviet history. And if at first this ‘succession’ involved narrowly legal issues such as membership in the UN, then later it became a matter of worldview as well.”
And because “no historical border between the USSR and the Russian Federation” was drawn, the two “began to be considered one and the same country,” even though it was Russia’s Boris Yeltsin who precipitated the demise of the Soviet Union by his actions at Beloveshchaya rather than any actions by non-Russian leaders or nations.
Many Russians today believe just the reverse and that shift in understanding “has led to a situation in which ‘the near abroad’ in contemporary Russia is conceived not as consisting of independent states but ever more as some kind of ‘separatist provinces.’” And that has been particularly true with regard to Ukraine.
According to Shtepa, ”the worldview sources of this conflict are rooted in the reborth imperial myth of ‘a triune people’ (the Great Russians, the Little Russians, and the Belorussians),” a myth that Shtepa argues is „incompatible with contemporary state-legal principles.”
Many in both Russia and the West imagined that Russia could make „a real historical breakthrough” with de-communization, Shtepa says, but that was clearly „insufficient.” Also needed was the full-scale development of federalism. „But even the most democratic and progressive Russian politicians traditionally did not view that as a priority.”
In Shtepa’s telling, „the first major political event of independent Russia was the signing in March 1992 of the Federal Treaty.” But even this document contained within itself „fatal imperial aspects:” It was not concluded by equal subjects but between „’the center’ and ‘the provinces.’”
And 18 months later, this document was superceded by a new Constitution which „gave the president almost tsar-like authority and significantly reduced the important of parliament.” And that bow to the past in turn in „a logical way” restarted „the endless Caucasian colonial wars.”
Putin’s power vertical „also completely logically arose from this restorationist trend,” Shtepa says. The Kremlin leader only had to eliminate the elections of governors and restart „great power propganda that presented Russia as ‘a beseiged fortress.’” Unlike Yeltsin who despite everythign „distanced hmself from the Soviet heritage,” Putin took to it, but only its „imperial and militarist” portions.
Among the contradictory products of this „imperial remake,” Shtepa says, is „imperial federalism,” which is „not a principle of the internal development of one’s own country but an instrument for the destruction of neighbors.” Indeed, while any Russian can call for it abroad, it has become dangerous to call for federalism at home.
But Russians in the age of Putin seem untroubled by this or by another contradiction, Shtepa says. „For a long time already no one sees any contradiction” in the fact that the tricolor, the flag of the democratic Russia of August 1991 is raised with bands playing the melody of the anything but democratic Soviet Union.
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Outgoing European commission president José Manuel Barroso says the EU is willing to listen to Russia's concerns if the conflict in eastern Ukraine does not go past 'the point of no return'. As Russia prepares to send a second aid convoy and shelling continues in the east, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is in Brussels for talks on the crisis Continue reading...
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