Ayman al-Zawahiri was from a prominent, elite Egyptian family. His relatives were Arab nationalists in that most nationalist of eras, the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Egypt 1954-1970 after a young officers coup in 1952. Some teenagers act out by becoming delinquents. Al-Zawahiri defied the rest of his relatively secular family by becoming a devotee of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood theorist of Islamic revolution. Qutb and the Brotherhood had been involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Col. Abdel Nasser in Alexandria in 1954. A thousand or so members were rounded up and tried, some of them tortured. Qutb was jailed as a conspirator. Qutb argued that the secular, nationalist Egyptian government was full of people who only looked and spoke like Muslims but that they had actually gone over to the evil Pharaoh. They were no longer really Muslims, but godless tyrants, apostates. And, he implied, apostates deserve to be killed. Qutb was accused of conspiring again to assassinate Abdul Nasser from prison in 1965 and was executed in 1966. Al-Zawahiri, age 15, was crushed.

In 1967 when Abdel Nasser lost the 6-Day War with Israel, al-Zawahiri rejoiced. He was maybe the only Egyptian not in mourning. He was glad to see Pharaoh taken down a notch.

Al-Zawahiri yielded to his family demands that he go to medical school. By the late 1970s he had a fancy practice in the shishy Ma’adi district of Cairo. I was at the American University in Cairo then, and some of my professors lived in Ma’adi, and invited us over for pot luck. We were around the corner from al-Zawahiri’s clinic. Who knows, maybe I saw him on the street. He had taken the Hippocratic Oath to protect human life, but would become one of history’s most notorious mass murderers.

Behind the scenes, al-Zawahiri formed one of the two branches of the youth terrorist organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). They had no use for the Muslim Brotherhood, the leadership of which made a pact with President Anwar El Sadat to give up political violence if he would let them organize. Sadat was a rightwinger who took over Abdel Nasser’s leftwing government, and he thought he needed a counterweight to the leftists, so he did a deal with the right wing Muslim Brotherhood. They disapproved of land reform and nationalization of industries, so they were perfect for Sadat’s purposes even if they were a little nutty about religion. Sadat encouraged the young Muslim Brotherhood types on college campuses to organize into “Islamic Groupings” to offset the Nasserists and Communists. The Islamic Grouping formed a national organization, advised by Sheikh Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh.

I remember in 1978 when a gaggle of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members were arrested by the Egyptian police, having been caught with bomb-making materials and bombs. It was the headline of the government-owned newspaper, al-Ahram [The Pyramids] . Al-Zawahiri still had the cover of practicing medicine in Ma’adi, but the Egyptian secret police were beginning to realize that he was dangerous.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran gave hope to religious radicals in Egypt that they could overthrow Sadat and make a Sunni version of that revolution in Egypt.

The EIJ found ways of getting in touch with cadets at the most prominent Egyptian military academy, and some secretly joined them, including one Lt. Khalid al-Islambouli. In 1981, both branches of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad made a 12-man council with the Islamic Grouping, and the ensemble decided to take out Sadat. It was decided that al-Islambouli and other recruits in the military would jump out of their troop transport vehicle during a military parade while Sadat was in the reviewing stand.

They pulled it off, and in 1981 Sadat was assassinated. However, the Egyptian masses weren’t interested in being ruled by religious zealots, and Sadat’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, an air force officer who planned out Egypt’s campaign in the 1973 war, became president-for-life.

Egyptian religious radicals were at that point rounded up, including al-Zawahiri. In the meantime, Ronald Reagan had come to power in the US, and he and some congressional Cold Warriors wanted to respond to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by backing Afghan jihadis. Some of the seven main such groups were tribal and relatively secular. Several were religious extremists, such as the Hizb-i Islami of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar. Hikmatyar became the CIA favorite and got the lion’s share of the billions the US sent in via the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Egyptian government wanted to get the radicals off its hands. Instead of executing those implicated in Sadat’s killing or keeping them in prison, both steps sure to make further trouble, they offered them a deal. Leave Egypt and go do your jihad against the Soviets, or else. Most of them took the deal, including al-Zawahiri. It may be that the Reagan administration pressured Mubarak to send them off. We may never know. Al-Zawahiri set up a clinic on the Pakistan side, in Peshawar, to treat the jihadis wounded in firefights with the Red Army.

Meantime, I went off to Pakistan for my Ph.D. research and studied Urdu in Lahore. It was in late 1981 that I went up with a friend to Peshawar. Al-Zawahiri wasn’t there yet– he didn’t get out of prison until 1984– but the place was like Berlin in the Cold War, a hotbed of plotting, with many Afghan refugees around. I spoke Dari Persian with them and heard about their ordeals. My time in South Asia in the 80s and early 90s gave me insights into religious politics in Pakistan and Afghanistan that would later help me interpret al-Qaeda.

In 1989, the Soviets completely withdrew from Afghanistan. Usama Bin Laden, who had been a fundraiser for the Mojahedin, based in Peshawar and Saudi Arabia, went back to Jedda. He immediately gave a sermon in Jedda about the need to take down the other superpower, the US, (with which he had been implicitly allied only a few months before). He complained bitterly about US backing for Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians during the first Intifada.

By 1996, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had gathered again in Afghanistan, as the Taliban were taking over the country. They merged their two organizations, EIJ and al-Qaeda, and became Qaedat al-Jihad. They declared holy war on the US and al-Zawahiri developed a new approach. He came to believe that he hadn’t been successful in overthrowing Arab governments because the US propped them up. So, first, he’d have to find a way to get them out of the Middle East and make it clear that dominating it came with a high price. After the US withdrew, then its puppets in the region (as he thought of them) would be easily overthrown.

Hence the attacks on the East Africa US embassies, the attack on the USS Cole, and the 9/11 attacks.

Those attacks failed, despite their gut-wrenching death toll and all the noise they made. They did encourage copy-cat attacks on a much smaller scale– Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2003-2006. Because I knew that terrain, I got called to Washington by think tanks a lot in the first decade of the last century, giving talks and presentations to the US government personnel who got time off to come to the panels, on what al-Qaeda was and how it operated and how I thought it could be defeated. I hope I helped.

The Bush administration took cynical advantage of 9/11 to launch a war of conquest in Iraq and to begin a 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan. Neither of the latter were useful for counter-terrorism, and indeed, were always likely to proliferate terrorism. The US was not dissuaded from playing its superpower role in the region and propping up governments it found useful. Indeed, Washington doubled down on that role, most unwisely. The Bush administration made an opening for al-Qaeda and its offshoot, ISIL in Iraq, and the US government over two decades failed to convince rural Afghans, whom they bombed assiduously all that time, to choose it over the Taliban.

The US squandered 20 years of sole superpower status and some $7 trillion on its fruitless “war on terror,” which had no benefit at all for the United States. If counter-terrorism were desirable, it could have been done with a light, rapid-response force, not with massive land campaigns in Central and West Asia.

Al-Zawahiri gradually lost any relevance. He was viewed as a joke in Egypt, and he opposed the 2011 youth revolts because they were primarily secular in character. He was backed for a while by some of the Syrian Jihadis who from 2011 tried to overthrow the Syrian government with a guerrilla war. But they faced pressure from Gulf patrons to dissociate themselves from al-Zawahiri. A section of them split off into ISIL, who thought that al-Zawahiri was old hat.

Ironically, during the Syrian civil war, until Russian and Iranian intervention ended it, the US CIA was supporting religious radical groups trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad who at least were battlefield allies of al-Qaeda. We were back to the 1980s in some ways.

As al-Zawahiri died, the Egyptian military was still ruling Egypt and the Saudi, Jordanian and other royal families al-Qaeda saw as Quislings were all still in power and benefiting from high oil prices. The US was still the predominant superpower, and a rising China likes Muslim radicalism even less than Washington does.

Al-Zawahiri goes down in the forgotten annals of failed, minor revolutionaries, distinctive only for the number of innocent civilians he murdered. His was a dead end for the Muslim world, and the vast majority of Muslims saw al-Qaeda for what it was.

An unprecedented 18% of Arab youth now are “not religious,” and many youth and others in the Arab world give as a reason for their cooling to religion the long decades of religious radicalism that have roiled the region. Al-Zawahiri dreamed of an Islamic state — though the rigidity and harshness of his vision was more a nightmare — but his crude, Nazi-like methods undermined the very basis for any such thing.

As for the US, almost no one will care that al-Zawahiri was finally brought to justice. People younger than 33 probably mostly don’t know who he was. Americans had moved on, turning inward. This generation faces the climate emergency, economic challenges, a rising American far right that threatens the foundations of democracy in a way al-Zawahiri never did, and renewed Washington-Moscow tensions. Most Americans regret that they allowed Washington to spend trillions on its murky and self-contradictory “war on terror.” Al-Qaeda can now be seen for what it was — a small, opportunistic and destructive terrorist organization that leaves virtually no legacy, and certainly no positive one.

Prior to his November 2 shooting rampage in Vienna, Kujtim Fejzullai’s affinity for ISIS was known to Austrian police, given his earlier unsuccessful attempt to cross Turkey’s border to join the ‘caliphate.’ But as far as is known, Fejzullai never actually made contact with ISIS before he swore his allegiance and took out his guns. Rather, he was inspired to violence by the ISIS ideal of global jihad. In other words, he fit the same pattern as Omar Mateen (Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando), Syed Rizwan Farook (San Bernadino shooting), Sayfullo Habibullaevich (Lower Manhatten truck attack) and a host of other jihadi militants: attacks inspired by but with no logistical coordination from ISIS or other global jihadi groups.

Fejzullai’s terror attack epitomizes the fourth wave of global jihad, the idea of nizam, la tanzim (system, not organization) and jihad fardi (personal acts of violence), in the phrasing of ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri. Suri, a committed global jihadi who was arrested in 2005 in Pakistan and handed over to the Americans, had constructed an ideology for 21^st century global jihad, making full use of modern information technologies.

Glenn E. Robinson, Global Jihad: A Brief History , (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020).[Click]

Modern jihad, he argued, could not rely on old-fashioned organizations, which could so easily be defeated by police, security, and military forces. Rather, it must depend on small scale acts of violence – or irhab, terror, as Suri embraced the word – that rely on modern media to amplify their impacts. Put into contemporary discourse, fourth wave global jihad needed an ever-evolving wiki-narrative constructed by hundreds, even thousands, of jihadi ideologues to weave together many small acts of violence into a fabric of broad, violent, and ultimately effective jihadi resistance.

Violence that is inspired by ISIS (or similar group) but without any logistical or financial connection, is global jihad’s contribution to stochastic terrorism. Ironically, one of the founders of the idea of inspired but logistically unconnected lone wolf attacks, Tom Metzger, died in Southern California two days after Fejzullai’s bloody rampage.

Metzger, Grand Dragon of the KKK and head of the White Aryan Resistance, was one of the first militants to recognize the power of the nascent information revolution to get a message of violence out to millions of followers without ever knowing which of the followers would actually act on that message at any particular point in time. In probabilistic terms, some followers would take up arms, making it a form of stochastic terror (and since such violence almost always targets civilians, it clearly qualifies as terrorism).

Even today, decades after Metzger first envisioned the idea of stochastic terror, followers of white nationalism have perpetrated the most lethal acts of such violence in the west. Recent white nationalist attacks include those by Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo (killed 77) and Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, New Zealand (killed 51), both of whom claimed inspiration from various Islamophobic authors and, in the case of Tarrant, from Donald Trump as well. The 2017 neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was similarly inspired by Trump, but he had no known logistical connection to the organizers of the deeply anti-Semitic march. All are examples of stochastic terror.

Indeed, in my recent book Global Jihad: A Brief History (Stanford University Press), I argue that global jihadis share much in common with other extreme movements, both religious and secular, over the past century. Global jihadis, white nationalists, Khmer Rouge, Red Guards, Nazi Brownshirts and a handful of other “movements of rage” share the twin characteristics of nihilistic violence and apocalyptic ideologies. These linked characteristics make movements of rage a unique form of violent socio-political movement.

Nihilistic violence is not meaningless violence (in the philosophical sense of nihilism), but rather root-and-branch system-destroying violence (as adopted by 19^th century Russian anarchists). It is violence that represents the apocalyptic ideologies espoused by adherents of movements of rage, and is fundamentally anti-Enlightenment. While movements of rage are by necessity generally weak and almost never come to power, such groups can be particularly deadly. Among the groups movements of rage frequently attack are the modern educated classes, a trait I refer to as gnosicide – the killing of knowledge or those who possess it, who represent a form of “cultural contamination.”

Global Jihad: A Brief History details all four waves of global jihad in an interpretive history, from the ‘Jihadi International’ first wave seeking to liberate occupied lands, to the “America First” second wave seeking to drive the Americans out of the Middle East and pave the way to overthrowing local ‘apostate’ regimes, to the state-building third wave seeking to eliminate apostasy itself in a puritanical state ruled by sharia. ISIS’s extensive use of “jihadi cool” recruitment techniques is likewise explored. The current fourth wave noted above is also examined, as is the broader comparative framework that links global jihad with similar violent groups over the past century.

Glenn E. Robinson, Global Jihad: A Brief History , (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020).[Click]

While there are parts of the report I agree with, some of the argument seems to me flawed. Let me explain why that is, below.

First of all, lead author David Vine and his colleagues are speaking of US “Post-9/11 Wars,” which is not exactly the same as the “War on Terror.”

The War on Terror is a stupid phrase that I have much criticized. I’m not alone– a Marine general once made fun of it to me when we were taking a walk in the woods together. But surely if it has any meaning at all, it means the fight against al-Qaeda and allied movements. The Congressional Authorization for the Use of military Force of 2002 specifically speaks of movements that planned out the September 11 attacks.

So even if the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have invoked the AUMF in their various police actions, analytically speaking it does not apply to anti-al-Qaeda movements such as the Houthis in Yemen or the Baathist government in Syria (which in 2002-2003 tortured al-Qaeda operatives for the United States).

So the “War on Terror” would comprise US military actions mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I am all on board with Vine and his colleagues in criticizing the Bush administration war on Iraq. Iraq was not involved in 9/11, and there was no al-Qaeda to speak of in Iraq in 2002. What little there was was being hunted by the Baath secret police. Iraq was not making weapons of mass destruction and delivered to the UN documentation of its destruction of such programs in the late 1990s.

There was no reason for the United States to launch an aggressive war on Iraq, occupy it for 8.5 years, and destroy its main institutions, including the army. These actions led to the rise of ISIL and yet another US intervention.

The study estimates 9.2 million displaced in Iraq by these wars. OK, I can live with that estimate. And I agree that the proximate cause was the US war of aggression on Iraq. That is, many of those displaced were not displaced by the US military, but by Sunni or Shiite militias or the reconstituted Iraqi Army. But, if Bush hadn’t invaded in the first place, none of that would have happened.

So blaming the US for the 9.2 million Iraqi displaced is fair.

Likewise, the US involvement in the Saudi-led war on Yemen is shameful, and the US bears a large share of blame for the 4.4 million displaced there. Although the US is not fighting there, it has refueled Saudi and other bombers, it sold sophisticated military equipment to the belligerents, it has provided strategic advice, and anything anyone says bad about Washington in this regard is richly deserved. Even the Congress has denounced US support for this war, which is like bank robbers denouncing greed, and tells you how awful and fruitless this war is.

Afghanistan is more complicated. The Soviet occupation from very late 1978 to 1988 killed about one million, wounded 3 million, displaced 2 million internally, displaced 2 million to Iran, and displaced 3 million to Pakistan. This is out of a population of some 16 million at the time!

As for the US and NATO after 2001, they in my view made an error in trying to stay in Afghanistan after they helped the Northern Alliance overthrow the Taliban in 2001-2002. But that initial campaign does not appear to have resulted in high levels of casualties or displacement. The attempt of Donald Rumsfeld and his successors to stay in Afghanistan helped alienate some of the population and led to a resurgence of the Taliban, which now hold 5-10% of the country and have a presence in half of provinces. This renewed war between the Kabul government and the Taliban has produced thousands of casualties a year, and has displaced millions.

The Brown report estimates “2.1 million Afghans fled the country with another 3.2 million” displaced internally.

I have no reason to doubt these figures. But it is also true that after the fall of the Taliban and the return of relative peace in some provinces, about half of the 3 million Afghans in Pakistan have been repatriated. So you’d have to say that the US and NATO partially reversed that emigration flow that had been caused by the Soviets. That is, the US permitted 1.5 million Afghans to return home, so if 2.1 million left during the past 19 years, the net outflow is more like 600,000.

Very little US war-fighting in Afghanistan was in Persian-speaking provinces, which were relatively calm. It was mostly in the Pushtun regions where the Taliban were strong. So I just am not convinced that enormous numbers of Tajiks and Hazaras went to Iran because of the ongoing fighting with the Taliban. In fact, many Shiite Hazaras were able to come back home because the Taliban were overthrown (the Taliban had massacred them).

We must remember that Iran is an oil state, which means it has a need for foreign guest workers, and there are now 3 million Afghans in Iran. They are largely Persian-speaking and from provinces that were relatively secure after the Tajik-Hazara-Uzbek alliance came to dominate the country. Many are therefore economic migrants like the Pakistanis who go to the Gulf. There may be advantages to claiming to be refugees as opposed to economic migrants. There is also a tendency toward refugee inflation on the part of governments seeking UN help.

So I’m not sure you could nail down a net foreign displacement at all.

Internally displaced persons of 3.2 million is plausible. But remember that the Taliban and more recently ISIL are responsible for some proportion of them. Unlike in Iraq, where there was nothing much going on before Bush invaded it, the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and were already widely displacing people, so you can’t blame the US for their continuing to do so. Taliban ideology is hard line Deobandi and they hate Shiites, Sufis, Sunni mainstream traditionalists, and Uzbek secularists, and have not scrupled to shoot them or blow them up at will.

I just think that the picture in Afghanistan is much more mixed, both with regard to responsibility and with regard to movements on the ground, than is true of Iraq.

I can’t understand the report’s allegations about Libya. They are reporting 1.2 million displacements. Are they counting everyone who was displaced since the Libyan Revolution of 2011, including those who then went home?

So the United Nations High Commission on Refugees says as of 2020 of Libya: “217,002 people displaced inside the country (IDPs) and 278,559 people who have returned home (returnees).”

There are also some 40,000 refugees in Libya from other countries, many of them trying to make their way by sea to Europe.

Anyway, I just think this part of the report is deeply flawed. The no-fly zone in Libya was not part of any war on terror, it was ordered by the United Nations Security Council. The International Criminal Court found the Gaddafis guilty of massive crimes against humanity. If there had been no no-fly zone, Gaddafi’s armor would have crush Misrata, Benghazi, Bayda and other cities, and would have also produced hundreds of thousands of displaced. We saw in Syria what an entrenched one-party state did to a rebelling population. The same thing would have happened in Libya.

The US role in 2011 was mainly to take out Gaddafi’s anti-aircraft batteries. The sorties flown to stop Gaddafi’s armor from advancing on revolutionaries were by various NATO states. I was in Libya in 2012 and it was fragile but not anything like Syria. Bad things happened from 2014, when militias started controlling politics, but I can’t for the life of me see what the US had to do with that.

As for Syria, that is a really complex situation that I can’t go into here at the length it deserves. But, again, if the US had not intervened against ISIL, then a lot more people would have been displaced by ISIL, and, indeed, ISIL did chase 600,000 Syrian Kurds into Turkey.

Millions were displaced in western Syria by the civil war. It isn’t clear to me that the US was a major player in all that. In fact, people complained about Obama’s reluctance to get involved.

Surely with regard to Syria, the millions displaced must be blamed on the al-Assad regime, on extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, on Hizbullah and Iraqi militias, and most of all on Russia, the fighter jets of which have bombed the bejesus out of Syria. Nobody has done a report on all the people displaced by Russia.

In the end, I think the numbers arrived at and attributed to the US in this report are exaggerated. But even if the actual number of displaced caused by the US is probably closer to 13 million, that is more than the population of my state, Michigan, and is pretty damning in itself.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs: “Costs and Consequences of US Post-9/11 Wars: Focus on Climate Change”

The U.S. Defense Department claimed the ISIS presence has doubled in Yemen.

For the first time, U.S. Pentagon has admitted to carrying out “multiple ground missions” in Yemen.

“U.S. forces have conducted multiple ground operations and more than 120 strikes in 2017,” U.S. Central Command, Centcom, in Tampa, Florida, said in a statement, with the aim to “disrupt the ability of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS-Yemen to use ungoverned spaces in Yemen as a hub for terrorist recruiting, training and base of operations to export terror worldwide.”

The U.S. Defense Department claimed the ISIS presence has doubled in Yemen.

“U.S. forces have enabled regional counterterrorism partners to regain territory from these terrorists — forcing them to spend more time on survival,” Centcom spokesman Lt. Col. Earl Brown said in a statement. “These operations have helped to illuminate terrorist networks, making intelligence-gathering, subsequent targeting and follow-on operations increasingly productive and effective.”

The situation in Yemen is extremely volatile. The widespread destruction from the U.S-backed Saudi airstrikes has displaced over a million people in the region. A severe cholera outbreak in the area has also claimed lives of at least 2,119 people, according to the Red Cross. Another eight million are on the verge of starvation.

“Every day, parents are carrying their malnourished children to hospital because they haven’t eaten in days, and families are watching as loved ones die needlessly from treatable illnesses because they do not have access to medical care,” International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt said in a statement.

Earlier this week, the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition shot down a missile fired by the rebels and aimed at the heart of the Saudi kingdom. The news also came at a time amid escalating tensions and U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition airstrikes which have killed at least 136 civilians in just the past two weeks, also including seven airstrikes on a prison that killed 45 people and an assault on a farmhouse that killed 14 children and six adults.

A November report by a U.S. based think tank, “Costs of War,” disclosed the U.S. spent a staggering US$4.3 trillion on the war in Asia and the Middle East since 9/11 attacks. An average U.S. taxpayer has spent nearly US$23,386 on the wars since 2001.

“The U.S. wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and the increased spending on homeland security and the departments of defense, state and veterans affairs since the 9/11 attacks have cost more than $4.3 trillion in current dollars through the fiscal year 2017,” the report stated.

And “given that the current administration has announced more years of war in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this total will only grow,” Catherine Lutz, a professor of international studies and anthropology at Brown University, linked with the Cost of War report stated.

The report also stressed the opaqueness and lack of accountability of the information the Pentagon disseminates.

“The Pentagon’s areas of global war on terror operations have enlarged significantly but are not always clearly enumerated in its public summaries of their activities,” Neta Crawford, Costs of War co-director and a professor of political science at Boston University, noted.

“Future interest costs for overseas contingency operations spending alone are projected to add more than $1 trillion to the national debt by 2023,” she added.

In September, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018, NDAA, the new defense bill will pump nearly US$634 billion in the fiscal year 2018 for key Pentagon operations, with about US$66 billion alone for the war operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other countries.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

WION: “Drone kills Al-Qaeda top leader in Yemen”

Security officials say that the attacks are an attempt by the terrorist group to project strength after losing their strongholds in Iraq.

The so-called Islamic State group carried out a terrorist attack on Thursday in Iraq that took the lives of at least 83 people, and wounded at least 93 others, the news agency EFE reported the General Director of Health in Diqar, Yasem al Jaldi as confirming.

The attack took place around noon, near Nasiriyah, in the Zi Qar province of southern Iraq, which has been less affected by Islamic State group violence in recent years than many other regions of the country, relatively speaking.

Gunmen opened fire into two restaurants, detonated a suicide vest, and blew up a car at a police checkpoint. Assailants were disguised as members of a local Shi’ite paramilitary force called Hashed al-Shaabi that is active in fights against the Islamic State.

The so-called Islamic State group later claimed responsibility on its news agency, claiming in a statement that it had killed “dozens of Shi’ites.”

According to hospital sources speaking to Reuters, at least 10 Iranians who were visiting sacred sites on pilgrimage were killed.

Security and police officials in Iraq are saying that the attacks are a return to older-style tactics for the terrorist group, which moved away from suicide tactics as it grew stronger. The deadly attacks are perhaps a reflection of the weakening of the Islamic State in both Iraq and in Syria.

“After losing the war in Iraq and the shrinking of its power, Daesh (Islamic State in Arabic) returned back to its old style of an insurgency, by carrying out suicide attacks, which is a clear sign that the terrorist group is retreating,” police colonel Murtatha al-Yassiri said.

“We expect more alike terrorist operations in the future. Daesh is trying to desperately pretend among followers that it’s still strong,” al-Yassiri continued.

The intelligence chief of the province has been fired following the attacks by Interior Minister Qasim al-Araji, and brought to interrogation, Xinhua reported from an Interior Ministry source.

The attacks have drawn international condemnation and messages of support to the Iraqi people. The United Nations Iraq mission shortly after released a statement condemning the “cowardly” attacks, and saying it is “deeply saddened.”

Venezuela also issued a statement expressing “pain in the face of the human losses, and sharing pain with the Iraqi government and people.” The Bolivarian government said it is giving a “message of solidarity to the victim’s familes.”

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

WION: “ISIS claims responsibility for multiple attacks in Iraq”

While fighting against the Islamic State group drags on in Mosul, tribal and military forces in Anbar are preparing for what will likely be the final battle against the extremists. But this fight will take many months.

Many Iraqis and international observers are continuing to watch the fighting in Mosul, where pro-government forces are slowly driving out the last vestiges of the extremist group known as the Islamic State. But even as this happens and the troops continue their painstaking and expensive advance toward victory, the extremists are re-grouping elsewhere in Iraq.

It seems that all those involved are coming to the conclusion that, in order to truly expel the extremist Islamic State, or IS, group from Iraq, the final campaign must take place in the deserts of Anbar province, around the borders of Iraq and Syria.

They are going to fight very, very hard here. They know that this – not in Mosul or Raqqa – is where they are going to end.

“Ending the IS group in Mosul will make the extremist group sick,” a senior Iraqi army officer told NIQASH, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to media. “But ending the organisation in Anbar will kill them. That is why fighting in Anbar will be the next main campaign in Iraq and also the most dangerous yet. It is different there because the battle will take place around international borders.”

A plan for this is already taking shape, the officer noted.

“The plan includes the mobilization of large numbers of pro-government forces from both the Iraqi army and from the anti-terrorism corps, that are currently in Mosul, as well as tribal brigades, along with US forces to provide air and artillery support,” he added.

It has been clear for some time already that fighters from the brutal extremist group are regrouping in this area. The fighters are obviously trying to destabilize the cities in the area. There have been a number of extremist attacks in Rutba, Haditha and Ramadi over the past week or so.

After months of stability and relative security, a car bomb exploded in Haditha, killing at least five people. Extremists also attacked border guards on the road between Iraq and Jordan near Rutba and some got as far as the outskirts of Ramadi where they tried to destroy the homes of locals who are in the military or members of tribal militias.

The aim of these attacks is to try and terrorize the people in Anbar, and make them frightened that the IS group is returning to their areas, Rajeh al-Issawi, a local politician and member of Anbar’s provincial security committee, told NIQASH.

“We expected these recent terrorist attacks because the IS group can move freely across the desert and easily threaten the outskirts of cities like Ramadi and Rutba, which they no longer control,” al-Issawi says.

Al-Issawi was also critical of the Iraqi government, saying that instead of heading to Mosul they should have cleaned up the rest of Anbar beforehand.

This has meant that for the first time in the months since extremists were pushed out of the major cities in Anbar, the Iraqi government has been forced to send reinforcements to the province. Although the IS group were pushed out of major cities, smaller towns and cities like Qaem, Ana and Rawa, near the Syrian border, were left because the Iraqi government decided that it needed to push the fight onto Mosul before tackling these places.

That desert border area – which the IS group describes as its Euphrates wilayat, or province – stretches from Qaem down to the Syrian border town of Albu Kamal. The area is vast and will make for a dangerous battlefield, in a fight that could last for many months. That is why, analysts say, the government has chosen to leave it for last.

The senior military officer says the campaign will begin with forces clearing the desert areas of Anbar, starting from the Jazeera area and the Rutba area, that borders with Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They will try to push the extremists to escape toward the borders.

Then forces would fight in Ana and Rawa before a final and more difficult battle in Qaem. The extremists who flee over the borders should then be chased by Syrian military, according to an apparent agreement with that country’s government.

This agreement with the Syrian government, headed by Bashar al-Assad, appears to complement one between the two governments last month that allowed each country’s air force to make strikes just over the other’s border, in pursuit of IS fighters.

No matter what happens, the campaign to remove the IS group and allies from Anbar is going to be exceedingly difficult. Anbar is one of Iraq’s largest provinces, around 138,500 square kilometres, and makes up about a third of the whole country. Much of it is isolated desert and there are huge distances between the province’s cities, connected by a limited network of roads. For example, the armed forces in Ramadi are 300 kilometres away from Rutba and 130 kilometres away from Qaem – a long distance, on often-single lane highways, deep into the Iraqi desert.

This allows the extremists to launch attacks on troops as they move slowly through the landscape, something that was not a problem in places like Mosul, Ramadi or Fallujah.

The biggest problem though is what happens to the extremist fighters once they are pushed toward the border of Iraq and Syria.

Retired Iraqi major general, Abdul Karim Khalaf, a military analyst and former government spokesperson, told NIQASH that the Syrian military are not ready to cooperate on this job. “The Iraqi forces are ready to clean out the valleys and plains of the Anbar desert that have become safe havens for the extremists,” Khalaf told NIQASH. “But the Syrian side is not.”

Fighting on the long borders, stretching around 600 kilometres, between Iraq and Syria would be useless if there is no plan to control the extremist fighters as they cross them. If there’s no way to stop them, the Iraqi security forces will simply continue to be attacked as the extremists make forays back and forth across the borders, Khalaf argues. This happened recently on the border of Jordan, he says.

There had been attempts to try and clean up the borders in this area recently. But this has proved difficult and there has been a recognition that a lot of manpower will be needed to make a success of this kind of operation.

At the same time, the IS group too realizes the strategic significant of this area. Thousands of fighters who escaped from other areas the extremist group used to control, such as Mosul, Salahaddin and others parts of Anbar, are stationed here now. Analysts say that this is also where the IS group has established factories for manufacturing improvised explosive devices and other bombs and it is now where it receives volunteer fighters.

Ahmad al-Mahlawi is a tribal leader from the Qaem district currently living in Haditha where he leads a brigade of tribal fighters supported by the Iraqi government and US forces; his group work from out of the Ain al-Asad military base In Anbar.

“The extremists have started to plant mines in the desert, between Qaem and Albu Kamal and they are preparing hiding places along that road too, so that they can stop the Iraqi army when it launches the attack on them that everybody expects,” al-Mahlawi says. “They are going to fight very, very hard here,” he notes. “They know that this – not in Mosul or Raqqa – is where they are going to end.”

Via Niqash.org

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

France 24 English: Mosul Offensive: Correspondent Matthieu Reports on Situation on the Ground

More drone and airstrikes have rained on Yemen in the past week than in any year of Barack Obama’s administration, with dozens of U.S. coalition airstrikes hitting schools, hospitals, markets and private homes.

The strikes have reportedly targeted Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, yet also killed civilians, including at least two children. U.S. operations in Yemen, where it has not yet declared a war, have killed at least 1,700 people, many of them civilians, since 2009.

Almost 50,000 people have been displaced in the past six weeks, and the country teeters on famine with hundreds of thousands of children suffering from malnutrition.

Donald Trump’s administration has marked a notable shift in how it executes attacks, reported Foreign Policy, no longer relying on the deliberation and debates of Obama’s Pentagon.

Decisions, instead, are made quickly and mostly under the judgment of military personnel, which has thinned following his mass firing of Obama-appointed officials.

Still, Trump’s policy is largely inherited from his predecessor, who mapped out how to escalate operations in Yemen when he left office. While the previous administration spoke more of humanitarian aid, failed peace talks, and suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia due to human rights concerns, it also acknowledged in December that it had made “limited use” of British-made cluster bombs and became notorious for its deadly drone operations.

The State Department has already approved the sale of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. partner in Yemen and contributor to AQAP’s rapid rise in the region as it took advantage of wartime vacuums and grievances, reported Foreign Policy.

Trump has escalated U.S. presence throughout the Middle East, from deploying troops in Syria to suggesting operations ahead in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

RT: “Millions displaced by humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, more than 80% relying on aid– HRW to RT”

The the Arab press, reports that that government has withdrawn blanket permission from the Trump administration to conduct raids and drone strikes on al-Qaeda and other targets. It is sourcing one of the two Yemeni governments (that of Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi). Mansour Hadi’s diplomat expressed to the US “reservations about the way in which the raid on in Bayda province was carried out.” The US action targeted a base of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in the town of Yakla.

The raid, in late January, appears to have killed at least 10 civilians, including an 8-year-old American girl, along with 14 al-Qaeda operatives; an American Navy Seal lost his life in the operation, as well, and three other Americans were wounded. Some observers with ties to the Seals suggest that the operation was poorly planned and turned into a fiasco.

It is now being reported that Trump was told that Obama would never have actually carried out the operation, the planning for which began last fall, and that this assertion was influential in Trump’s decision to go forward. (If it is true that Obama was reluctant, it was obviously because of the extreme difficulty of this sort of operation and the high likelihood something will go wrong).

Other reports suggest that the point of the operation was to kill or capture AQAP leader Qassim al-Rimi. If he was the target, the mission failed, since he escaped and went on to ridicule Trump in an audio as “stupid.”

When Trump banned Yemenis from coming to the US, he alienated many of them; one Arab newspaper said the ban left Yemenis “disgusted.” The US-Saudi war effort in Yemen has created thousands of refugees, who Trump now says he will not help. If I were looking for a military ally, I wouldn’t treat them that way.

Yemen is a basket case, beset by a civil war in which outsiders have taken sides. If even it does not want Trump running around freely in its country, despite the promise his administration holds out, of a final destruction of the Houthis and their (alleged) Iranian patrons, then the US is in real trouble. Mansour Hadi is backed by Saudi Arabia and its allies. He now holds some of largely Sunni Muslim south Yemen and the southern port of Aden. Much of northern (actually northwestern) Yemen is in the hands of the Houthi (Zaydi Shiite) militia and its ally, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, along with troops loyal to him.

#Yemen Map: #AQAP launched new offensive in #Abyan province and captured some areas at the southern coast https://t.co/GIaaCr0p6r pic.twitter.com/Nv3bXpXzy9

— Risk Intelligence (@riskstaff) February 7, 2017

AQAP has been the most active branch of the al-Qaeda franchise in trying to find ways to hit the United States, and was responsible for the 2009 underwear bomber attempted attack over Detroit. AQAP has a special interest in non-metallic explosives, which is why TSA airport authorities often insist we be scanned for pouches of PETN; it doesn’t set off the metal detectors.

Yemen is extremely hostile territory for US military action. Many Yemenis, even those who dislike the Houthis, are angry about indiscriminate Saudi bombing of civilians and infrastructure. They have held large demonstrations in the capital, Sanaa, against the Saudi bombing raids. The Saudis bomb them during the demonstrations. The US has been closely associated with this Saudi war, providing refueling facilities, help with strategy, and even help with choosing specific targets for Saudi bombing runs. Many Yemenis see the US as complicit in their misery.

The Zaydis in the north resent decades of Saudi hegemony, and feel that the hard line Wahhabis in Riyadh are trying to convert them from their moderate Shiism.

AQAP has taken advantage of the disarray into which the country has fallen to expand the areas where it is active, in the south of the country. It is yet a third force. Zaydi militiamen and soldiers in the Yemeni military were, years ago before the civil war, among the more effective fighters against al-Qaeda.

Trump on the campaign trail talked a good game against groups like AQAP. He is now encountering reality, which, whether he likes it or not, will make itself felt. The reality is that Yemen is extremely rugged, and that it is clannish, and outsiders without intimate knowledge of the people and terrain will find the country hard going. Moreover, if you were looking for Yemeni allies you might have wanted to avoid alienating the whole country by locking them out of the US.

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Related video:

CBS This Morning: ” Pentagon says civilians likely killed in Yemen raid”

The US government has never understood insurgency for the most part. Smart USG officials with whom I’ve interacted have had a firm belief that leadership is a rare quality and that you can attrite an organization by killing its leaders. This theory is patently false. It moreover gives false hope to counter-insurgency officials and fools them into thinking simple tactical steps will be effective.

When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on whom the Pentagon rather ridiculously blamed 80% of the violence in Iraq in 2005, was killed from the air in spring of 2006, many observers thought that al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, his guerrilla group, was doomed. But his successor, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, renamed it the Islamic State of Iraq and decided to experiment with holding territory in Diyala and other provinces under the noses of the US military.

Then in 2011 President Obama appears to have had Usama Bin Laden assassinated (there is nothing in the public record to suggest that at any point there was any order to capture him alive). Al-Qaeda was fading at that point. But Ayman al-Zawahiri, the no. 2 man, just took over the operation. Al-Qaeda and its local ally, the Haqqani group, continued to hit the US in Afghanistan, sometimes quite hard, and sought to destabilize Pakistan. The Yemeni affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, remained vigorous.

The Iraqi affiliate had run into some roadblocks. When Abu Omar was killed in Iraq 2010, again some thought that the group was over with.

But Ibrahim Samarrai took over, called himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and took the fight so Syria, renaming the group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or in Arabic Daesh). It went on to conquer most of al-Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces in Eastern Syria. In 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi came into an internal conflict with ally Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and this al-Qaeda branch in Syria split into the Nusra Front (al-Qaeda proper, reporting to Ayman al-Zawahiri), and Daesh.

The Nusra Front or al-Qaeda in Syria became the best rebel fighting group against the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad. Since the US backs remnants of the Free Syrian Army (mostly de fact Muslim Brotherhood factions) who have tactical alliances with al-Qaeda on the battlefield, the US became allied with the allies of al-Qaeda, repeating all the mistakes of the Reagan administration in Afghanistan in the 1980s. US weapons given to the rebels often end up in al-Qaeda’s hands, and the few victories the rebels have had, as in Idlib, were spearheaded by al-Qaeda, so that the US-backed rebels can’t be convinced to abandon the alliance of convenience.

As for Daesh, in 2014, al-Baghdadi’s group took over 40% of the land area of Iraq. It could not have done that if the Sunni Arab population of Iraq were not outraged at the sectarian, Shiite fundamentalist government that the Bush administration installed in Baghdad, and which Washington continues to back to the hilt. (There’s nothing wrong with the Shiite majority coming to power at the ballot box; but democracy involves avoiding a tyranny of the majority, which Iraq’s Shiite parties have not avoided).

In 2015 Saudi Arabia launched a war on Yemen to beat back the victorious Houthi Zaidi militia. It ignored al-Qaeda in the south, which promptly took the major port of Mukala and also several other cities. Only in the past month have Saudi Arabia and its allies bothered to try to deal with AQAP, the most deadly of the al-Qaeda affiliates aside from Daesh). Al-Qaeda has withdrawan from Mukala, but there are rumors that it was allowed simply to walk away (the Saudis claim to have killed 800 in fierce fighting but this allegation cannot be substantiated). Saudi Arabia has virtually ignored Daesh in Iraq and some think it is happy enough to see a champion arise for Iraqi Sunnis that ties down the Shiite government in Baghdad, which the current government in Riyadh despises.

So I think we may conclude that the decapitation strategy of dealing with al-Qaeda does not work and has never worked.

Moreover, al-Qaeda has meant different things to different people, and its appeal has changed over time. Zawahiri was hoping it would become the reining ideology in Egypt and Saudi Arabi, the heartlands of Islam. Instead, Egyptians have gone in for a nationalism that despises Muslim fundamentalism. And Saudis have largely remained loyal to the royal family, and opinion polling suggests that if they could have a change, it wouldn’t be in the direction of even greater puritanism.

Instead, al-Qaeda and its affiliates and offshoots have become what Maoism was to peasant revolutionaries of the 1950s and 1960s– an ideological franchise you could pick up and beat the Establishment with where the Establishment was intolerably overbearing. Al-Qaeda is modular, in the sense of offering a model and tool kit. Thus, the al-Qaeda-allied Taliban Movement of Pakistan represented the poorer villagers in places like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Swat Valley, places either neglected or bossed around by the authorities in Islamabad. The Sunnis of Iraqi experimented with the Daesh version of al-Qaeda when they felt oppressed by the Shiite fundamentalist government in Baghdad. Syrian rural and small-town Sunnis experimented with Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria) and Daesh when they felt oppressed by the one-party Baath socialist state and its high officials (many of them Alawi Shiites). Some of the appeal of AQAP seems to map onto Sunni discontents in south Yemen; there is no al-Qaeda in the north of the country. In Sinai, neglected and discriminated-against rural clans are fighting the Egyptian army.

But these disparate, largely rural insurgencies also face extreme challenges. They depend on government being weak. Even a slight assertion of Saudi power against AQAP in Mukalla caused it to be rolled up there almost immediately. Daesh has lost enormous territory to Shiite militias and Kurdish guerrillas where those two stood and fought. The Russian intervention in Syria has pushed back al-Qaeda in Syra/ Nusra on several fronts, virtually wiping it out in Idlib and along the Lebanese border.

AQAP and Daesh have attempted to recruit Europeans by pulling off the attacks last year in Paris. But their terrorism focuses on soft targets and has little obvious benefit to them, and has made NATO and Russia de facto allies again, in Syria. The strategy of holding territory and yet engaging in long-distance terrorism against a powerful foe is epically stupid. The only advantage of a terrorist group is that it doesn’t have an obvious return address. The current al-Qaeda affiliates all defied Bin Laden’s advice not to give the enemy a clear target. So they are all in the process of being rolled up.

Al-Qaeda in its various permutations can’t be defeated on the battleground. It can’t be defeated by decapitating leaders (leadership, contrary to what the Pentagon thinks, isn’t that unusual or special).

That is, insurgencies are not mindless nihilism that can be wiped out with some drone strikes or aerial bombardment, some assassinations or “regime change.” They are manifestations of forms of class struggle (though the class may be inflected by sectarian or ethnic identity). Where there is great inequality and injustice, and where the state is weak, there will be spaces for insurgency, and often such uprisings see a benefit in franchising, signing on to the discourse, techniques and prestige of an umbrella rebellion.

Obama’s killing of Usama wasn’t the end of anything precisely because the US has not known how to, or has not always even wanted to, promote social justice in the Middle East. The bizarre and embarrassing commitment of the US government to helping the Israelis keep 4.5 million Palestinians stateless and without rights is an example of this blindness. But so too was Ronald Reagan’s alliance with Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party against the Shiites of Iraq and Iran (the latter having rebelled against decades of heavy-handed US hegemony and a coup that put a megalomaniacal monarch back in power in Tehran). George W. Bush reversed Reagan’s policy, siding with Iraqi Shiites against Saddam and the Baath, which only created new inequities and led to the rise of Daesh. The Obama administration’s acquiescence in the praetorian brutality of the current Egyptian government (in the Sinai and elsewhere) has also not been helpful.

Rather, just as Maoist peasant insurgencies were often best forestalled or foiled by land reform, which turned the peasants into rural middle classes and gave them a stake in the status quo, so rural al-Qaeda insurgencies would be best addressed by fostering social justice policies. Pakistan and Afghanistan never had land reform (pre-modern landholding patterns are typically extremely unequal). FATA in Pakistan needs to receive more investment from the center and should be made a province, with a provincial legislature and prerogatives.

In Iraq and Syria the land is not perhaps as important as government services and government investment in communities, which has often been done on a sectarian basis and very unequally. Egyptian policies in the Sinai are so opaque it is even difficult to know exactly what drove so many there into insurgency, but that someone is making a lot of money with Sinai resources and locals are being kept down and excluded is almost certainly part of it.

The US does not always have good levers to push reform (though it did militarily occupy Iraq for 8.5 years, so you’d think they could have accomplished something). It also has leverage with Pakistan and Egypt. Where it does not, Washington shouldn’t fool itself that “taking X out” is an equally good option, or that targeted assassinations will do more than call forth more resistance to an unbearable and unjust status quo.

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