A major offensive has seen rebel groups in Syria retake the country’s second city, Aleppo – and demonstrated the growing prominence of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the 13-year-long civil war.

The surprise advance was led by members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, fighting alongside Turkish-backed groups opposing the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

While the offensive – the most significant fighting in recent years – may be the first time that many outside of Syria have heard of the Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has been growing in reputation and capabilities over a number of years. As an expert on the behavior of Islamist militant groups in the region, I have watched Hayat Tahrir al-Sham evolve from an offshoot of al-Qaida in Syria into a formidable player in the ongoing conflict. It followed a significant shift in the group’s strategic operations that has seen it become less concerned with global jihad and more focused on attaining power in Syria.

Origins and ideology

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has its roots in the early stages of the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011 as a popular uprising against the autocratic government of Assad.

The group originated as an offshoot of the Nusra Front, the official al-Qaida affiliate in Syria. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was initially recognized for its combat effectiveness and its commitment to global jihadist ideology, or the establishment of strict Islamic rule across the Muslim world.

In a pivotal shift in 2016 under the leadership of Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, the Nusra Front publicly cut ties with al-Qaida and adopted the new name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, which means “Front for the Conquest of the Levant.”

The following year, it merged with several other factions in the Syrian war to become Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or the “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.”

Idlib, Syria. Photo by Ahmed Akacha via Pexels.

This rebranding aimed to move away from al-Qaida’s global jihadist agenda, which had limited the group’s appeal within Syria. It allowed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to focus on issues specific to Syrians, such as local governance, economic issues and humanitarian aid.

Despite these changes, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s core ideology continues to be rooted in jihadism, with the primary objective of overthrowing the Assad government and establishing Islamic rule in Syria.

This strategic shift was partly born of pragmatism. To keep power over the territories it controlled, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leaders concluded the group needed to minimize international opposition and effectively integrate into the broader Syrian revolutionary movement.

In other words, it needed to balance its radical Islamist origins with the demands of local governance and political engagement.

Strategic shifts and recent activities

Since 2017, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has been the prevailing force in Idlib, the final significant rebel stronghold in Syria.

Over the years, the group has solidified its control in the region by functioning as a quasi-governmental entity, providing civil services and overseeing local affairs, despite reports of human rights abuses.

In recent years, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s propaganda has emphasized protecting Syrian territory and its people from the Assad government.

This has helped the group enhance its position among local communities and other rebel groups.

In an effort to further burnish its image, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has ramped up its public relations efforts, both at home and abroad. For example, it has engaged with international media and humanitarian organizations to negotiate – and film – aid deliveries to the areas it governs.

These initiatives showcase a commitment to civilian welfare and distance the group from the violence typically associated with jihadist movements.

On the offensive again

The recent military offensive, during which Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led rebels swiftly captured significant parts of Aleppo and pushed toward the city of Hama, marks another significant strategic pivot. It signals a revitalization of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s military objectives and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s thinking in launching an advance now has likely been influenced by a blend of regional and local dynamics. The Assad government’s increasing vulnerability has become evident of late, marked by economic deterioration and corruption.

Many areas in Syria remain only nominally under state control, and the central government is heavily reliant on support from allies such as Russia and Iran.

These allies, however, have been preoccupied by their respective conflicts against Ukraine and Israel, potentially diluting their support for Syria.

Compounding Assad’s weakness are the diminishing capacities of Hezbollah and Iranian forces. Both have been crucial in propping up Assad throughout the civil war. But Israeli strikes in Lebanon, Syria and Iran have potentially weakened Hezbollah and Iran’s ability to support Syria. And this reduction in support may have tipped the military balance in the civil war toward opposition groups.

Moreover, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other rebel groups are facing a Syrian military hit by low morale, high desertion rates and inadequate military equipment. Disarray among government forces has made it difficult for Assad to respond effectively to the renewed assault by opposition forces.

In contrast, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has bolstered its military capabilities. Having survived various military campaigns, the group has consolidated power and professionalized its forces. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has established a military academy, reorganized its units into a more conventional military structure, and created specialized forces adept at executing coordinated and strategic attacks – as evidenced by the recent advance in Aleppo.

Moreover, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has managed to gain some local support by positioning itself as a defender of Sunni Muslim interests. The inability to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis has only fueled local resentment to the Assad government, creating a supportive base for any force that actively opposes the regime.

With growing support on the ground, a more professional military and a political wing focused on governance, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has evolved from a jihadist offshoot into a major player in Syria – a development that has huge implications for the internal dynamics of the war-torn country.

Sara Harmouch, Ph.D. candidate in Public Affairs, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an international norm for states to prevent genocide, mass atrocities, and war crimes, in response to the failure to do so in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The US airdropped food to trapped refugees on nearby Mount Sinjar, but sat on the sidelines as the massacre ensued in this village. Ten years later, the international community still has a Responsibility to Remember (R2R) to the Yazidis who died, to those dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to the more than 2,000 who are still missing, and to the other victims of war who are only increasing in number in the 21st century – from the north of Iraq to Ukraine to Gaza. The United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) was a dedicated R2R body. Yet, its mandate will soon be terminated.

Murad was able to escape and arrived in Germany in 2015. She was one of the fortunate also appointed as a UN goodwill ambassador, the first to represent “Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.” Murad was eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Iraqi to ever receive it.

In 2016 she met the Beirut-born British barrister Amal Alamuddin Clooney, who agreed to represent Murad. Both addressed the United Nations, advocating that the ISIS campaign be designated as a genocide. Their work was essential to the Security Council agreeing to establish UNITAD in 2017.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

In the lobby of the United Nations General Assembly, a replica of Picasso’s Guernica mural hangs above the podium where international figures field questions from the media, a form of R2R for the multilateral body, as the failure of the world community to act after Guernica eventually led to World War Two. By bearing witness to Guernica, UN diplomats would work to ensure it would not happen again. Yet, Guernica did happen again: in Halabja at the end of the 20th century, and Kocho was the Guernica of the 21st century. 

UNITAD was an attempt to prevent future Guernicas. The Iraqi judicial system lacked the infrastructure to investigate and try all the members of ISIS responsible for these crimes; hence, Baghdad requested the aid of the UN in the form of UNITAD, which has been collecting evidence since 2017.

Yet, the Iraqi government sought to terminate this body’s mandate in 2024 due to conflicts with the UN team investigating the crimes. This denies justice to the survivors of ISIS atrocities. Closing such a body is not only a loss for the female survivors of gender-based violence, the Yazidis, as well as the Iraqi nation in general, it sets a tragic global precedent;  a dedicated UN body is imperative to document genocidal and gendercidal violence, and victims of war.

The genocidal rampage that ensued in Kocho in August 2014 continued for the women in captivity.  To forge homogeneity within their “Islamic” state, ISIS sought the erasure of a pre-Islamic past by destroying pre-Islamic antiquities and what it deemed as “pre-Islamic peoples,” expelling Christians from Mosul, or enslaving Yazidi women to ensure that they could not give birth to future Yazidi children, a form of genocide specifically targeted against one gender, in what can be more specifically called a gendercide. Their captivity not only led to their estrangement from other Yazidis, but any future children born out of this slavery would not be considered part of the endogenous community.

The work of lawyers or human rights investigators is like a historian, trying to collect material from the past from primary sources to construct a narrative in the present. Primary sources, in this case, include the videos and documents produced by ISIS itself documenting their genocide, as well as the testimonies of the victims.

R2R is a reminder, as well, to the damage done to the spiritual heritage of Yazidi temples and Christian churches by ISIS, in addition to forced expulsion. Both physical reconstruction and investment in mental healthcare infrastructure, which Iraq lacks, are still needed.
UNITAD sought to deliver justice. It is a body that needs to be replicated for those who suffer due to decisions made by terrorists, warlords or politicians who will never be held accountable for their actions all the way from Kocho to the fighting in Ukraine and Gaza.
 
As a historian, these deaths and victims inspired me to advocate for R2R for the victims of war. Life is one episode in this greater history of soldiers and civilians from the north of Iraq and Syria under ISIS, to Ukraine to Gaza, who have died or endured trauma and PTSD, internally displaced peoples and refugees, child soldiers, the victims of gender-based violence during conflict, the kidnapped and tortured, those maimed by landmines or IEDs and amputees, many reliant on prosthetics, landscapes poisoned by depleted uranium, to animals and domesticated pets caught up in conflicts that they had no role in creating.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Rudaw.net

After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn’t worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.

As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another “enemy” has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35% — 883 troops — took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.

Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.

Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000 — 57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans — an estimated 30,177 of them — had killed themselves.

“High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts,” wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. “The U.S. government’s inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences.”

Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides

In June, a New York Times front-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them — a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.

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The Navy claimed that it hadn’t been informed of the lab’s findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. “That’s the problem,” said that anonymous officer. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”

None of it should, however, have been surprising.

After all, while writing for the Times in 2020, I revealed the existence of an unpublished internal study, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), on the suicides of Special Operations forces (SOF). Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report put together the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies,” including detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who had killed themselves between 2012 and 2015.

That study told the military to better track and monitor data on the suicides of its elite troops. “Further research and an improved data surveillance system are needed in order to better understand the risk and protective factors for suicide among SOF members. Further research and a comprehensive data system is needed to monitor the demographics and characteristics of SOF members who die by suicide,” the researchers advised. “Additionally, the data emerging from this study has highlighted the need for research to better understand the factors associated with SOF suicides.”

Quite obviously, it never happened.

The brain trauma suffered by SEALs and the suicides that followed should not have been a shock. A 2022 study in Military Medicine found Special Operations forces were at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI), when compared with conventional troops. The 2023 JAMA Neurology study similarly found that veterans with TBI had suicide rates 56% higher than veterans without it and three times higher than the U.S. adult population. And a Harvard study, funded by SOCOM and published in April, discovered an association between blast exposure and compromised brain function in active-duty commandos. The greater the exposure, the researchers found, the more health problems were reported.

Studies on the Shelf

Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has, in fact, spent millions of dollars on suicide prevention research. According to the recent Pentagon study of soldiers’ deaths at their own hands, the “Army implements various initiatives that evaluate, identify, and track high-risk individuals for suicidal behavior and other adverse outcomes.” Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.

While the Navy, for example, officially mandated that a suicide hotline for veterans must be accessible from the homepage of every Navy website, an internal audit found that most of the pages reviewed were not in compliance. In fact, according to a 2022 investigation by The Intercept, the audit showed that 62% of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.

The New York Times recently investigated the death of Army Specialist Austin Valley and discovered gross suicide prevention deficiencies. Having just arrived at an Army base in Poland from Fort Riley, Kansas, Valley texted his parents, “Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault,” before taking his own life. The Times found that “mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.” There are, for example, only about 20 mental-health counselors available to care for the more than 12,000 soldiers at Fort Riley, according to the Times. As a result, soldiers like Valley can wait weeks or even months for care.

The Army claims it’s working to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health support, but the Times found that “unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols.” This is a long-running issue in the military. The study of Special Operations suicides that I revealed in the Times found that suicide prevention training was seen as a “check in the box.” Special operators believed their careers would be negatively impacted if they sought treatment.

Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Memphis, told to the Times that the Pentagon report echoed many other analyses produced since 2008. “My expectation,” he concluded, “is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented.”

Bin Laden’s Triumph

On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked a residential compound in Pakistan and gunned down Osama bin Laden. “For us to be able to definitively say, ‘We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of,” President Barack Obama commented afterward. In reality, the deaths “here in the United States” have never ended. And the war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001 — a global conflict that still grinds on today — ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.

The suicides of U.S. military personnel have been blamed on a panoply of reasons, including military culture, ready access to firearms, high exposure to trauma, excessive stress, the rise of improvised explosive devices, repeated head trauma, an increase in traumatic brain injuries, the Global War on Terror’s protracted length, and even the American public’s disinterest in their country’s post-9/11 wars.

During 20-plus years of armed interventions by the country that still prides itself on being the Earth’s sole superpower, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the peoples of those countries have suffered the most, U.S. troops have also been caught in that maelstrom of America’s making.

Bin Laden’s dream of luring American troops into a meat-grinder war on “Muslim soil” never quite came to pass. Compared to previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korean, and Vietnam wars, U.S. battlefield casualties in the Greater Middle East and Africa have been relatively modest. But bin Laden’s prediction of “wooden boxes and coffins” filled with the “bodies of American troops” nonetheless came true in its own fashion.

“This Department’s most precious resource is our people. Therefore, we must spare no effort in working to eliminate suicide within our ranks,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a public memo released last year. “One loss to suicide is too many.” But as with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short. And like the losses, stalemates, and fiascos of that grim war on terror, the fallout has been more suffering and death. Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues. The unanticipated toll of suicides by troops and veterans — four times the number of war-on-terror battlefield deaths — has become another Pentagon failure and bin Laden’s enduring triumph.

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Via Tomdispatch.com

Mind you, I’ve been covering Guantánamo since President George W. Bush and his team, having responded to the 9/11 attacks by launching their disastrous “Global War on Terror,” set up that offshore prison to house people American forces had captured. Previewing Diaz’s movie, I was surprised at how it unnerved me. After so many years of exposure to the grim realities of that prison, somehow his film touched me anew. There were moments that made me sob, moments when I turned down the sound so as not to hear more anguished cries of pain from detainees being tortured, and moments that made me curious about the identities of the people in the film. Although the names of certain officials are mentioned, the central characters are the detainees and individual interrogators, as well as defense attorneys and guards, all of whom interacted at Guantánamo’s prison camp over the course of its two-plus decades of existence.

While viewing it, I was reminded of a question that Tom Engelhardt, founder and editor of TomDispatch, has frequently asked me: “What is it about Guantánamo that’s so captivated you over the years?” Why is it, he wanted to know, that year after year, as its story of injustice unfolded in a never-ending cycle of trials that failed to start, prisoners cleared for release but still held in captivity, and successive administrations whose officials simply shrugged in defeat when it came to closing the nightmarish institution, it continues to haunt me so? “Would you be willing,” he asked, “to reflect on that for TomDispatch?” As it turned out, the death of my dad somehow helped me grasp a way to answer that question with previously unattainable clarity.

The Missing Outrage

As a start, in response to his question, let me say that, despite my own continued immersion in news about the prison camp, I’m struck that, in the American mainstream, there hasn’t been more headline-making outrage over the never-ending reality of what came to be known as Gitmo. From the moment it began in January 2002 and a photo appeared of shackled men bent over in the dirt beside the open-air cages that would hold them, wearing distinctive orange jumpsuits, its horrid destiny should have been apparent. The Pentagon Public Affairs Office published that immediately iconic image with the hope, according to spokesperson Torie Clarke, that it would “allay some of our critics” (who were already accusing the U.S. of operating outside of the Geneva Conventions).

Rather than allay them, it caught the path of cruelty and lawlessness on which the United States would continue for so many endless years. In April 2004, the world would see images of prisoners in American custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, naked, hooded, cuffed, sexually humiliated, and abused. Later reports would reveal the existence of what came to be known as “black sites,” operated by the CIA, in countries around the world, where detainees were tortured using what officials of the Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

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For 22 years now, through four different administrations, that prison camp in Cuba, distinctly offshore of any conception of American justice, has held individuals captured in the war on terror in a way that defies any imaginable principles of due process, human rights, or the rule of law. Of the nearly 780 prisoners kept there, only 18 were ever actually charged with a crime and of the eight military court convictions, four were overturned while two remain on appeal.

A large number of those captured were originally sold to the Americans for bounty or simply picked up randomly in places in countries like Afghanistan known to be inhabited by terrorists and so assumed, with little or no hard evidence, to be terrorists themselves. They were then, of course, denied access to lawyers. And as I was reminded recently on a trip to England where I met with a couple of released detainees, those who survived Gitmo still suffer, physically and psychologically, from their treatment at American hands. Nor have they found justice or any remedy for the lasting harms caused by their captivity. And while the post-9/11 war on terror moment has largely faded into the past (though the American military is still fighting it in distant lands), that prison camp has yet to be shut down. 

A Generation Comes of Age

A second and more timely answer right now to Tom Engelhardt’s question is that my unwavering revulsion to the existence of Guantánamo has stemmed from a worldview that distinctly marked my father and many in his generation — men and women who came of age in the 1940s and early 1950s, whose first moments of adulthood coincided with the postwar emergence of the United States as a global superpower that touted itself as a guardian of civil rights, human rights, and justice. The opposition to fascism in World War II, the support for international covenants protecting civilians, a growing commitment at home to civil liberties and civil rights – those were their ideological guideposts. And despite the contradictions, the hypocrisy, and the failure that lurked just behind the foundational tenets of that belief system, many like my father continued to have faith in the honorable destiny of the United States whose institutions were robust and its motives honorable.

To be sure, there was deep denial involved in his generation’s sugar-coated version of the American experience. The revelation of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam; decisions to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, Iran, and elsewhere; the profound and systemic domestic racism of the country as described in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow; even the dirty dealings of the Nixon White House during Watergate; and, in this century, the official lying that set the stage for the disastrous Iraq War all should have dampened their rose-colored assessment of American democracy. Still, in so many ways he and many of his compatriots held fast to their belief in the power of this country to eternally return to its best self.

True to his belief in the American dream, my father took me to see movies and plays at our local college that amplified a worldview that he, like so many of his generation, embodied. I was often the youngest attendee at those films with stars like Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, an ode to free speech; Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, with its portrayal of the evils of racism; and Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men, whose message doubled down on the tenet that the accused are always innocent until proven guilty. And let’s not forget Judgement at Nuremberg, the dramatization of the post-World War Two war crimes tribunals, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, a series of trials in which Nazi leaders were convicted of committing genocide.

Those films, crying out for fairness, equality, and an end to racism, gave voice to champions of democracy, and energy to my father’s generation’s firm embrace of American possibilities.

Memory and Forgetting

A third answer, also underscored by my recent personal encounter with life’s fleetingness, is my growing fear, as an historian, that Guantánamo will simply be forgotten. In a sense, in the world of Donald Trump, collapsing bridges, and blazing wars in distant lands, it already seems largely forgotten. Although 22 years later it’s still home to 30 detainees from the war on terror, Guantánamo attracts little attention these days. If it weren’t for the invaluable work of Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, who has reported on Gitmo since Day One in January 2002, as well as a handful of other dedicated reporters including John Ryan at Lawdragon, few could know anything about what’s going on there now. As sociology professor Lisa Hajjar points out, “Media coverage at Guantánamo has become a rarity.” While the press pool for the hearings of the military commissions that are still ongoing there averaged about 30 reporters until perhaps 2013, it’s now been whittled down to, at most, “about four per trip,” according to Hajjar.

Gitmo media coverage (and so public attention) has essentially disappeared — hardly a surprise given the current globally crushing issues of war and deprivation, injustice and extralegal policies, not to speak of the mad discomfort of election 2024 here in America. Guantánamo, whose last inmate arrived in 2008 and whose viable path to closure has remained blocked year after year (no matter that three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — each declared his desire to shut it down), persists, its deviations from the law unresolved.

As it happens, flagging interest in Guantánamo has coincided with an eerie larger cultural phenomenon — a turn away from history and memory.

In the world of social media and the immediate moment, a malady of forgetfulness about past events should be a cause of concern. In fact, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn recently published a striking piece on the phenomena. Citing an Atlantic article by psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman, Corn noted that, while forgetting can help people get on with their lives after a traumatic experience, it can also prevent trauma survivors from learning the lessons of the past. Rather than confront the impact of what’s occurred, it’s become all too common to simply brush it all under the rug, which, of course, has its own grim consequences. “As clinical psychiatrists,” they write, “we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger — exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.”  In other words, events like the 9/11 attacks and what followed from them, the Covid pandemic, or even the events of January 6, 2021, as Corn’s psychiatrists point out, can bring such pain that forgetting becomes “useful,” even at times seemingly “healthful.”

Not surprisingly, an increasing forgetfulness about traumatic events is echoed on an even broader scale in a contemporary trend toward the abandonment of history, presumably in favor of the present and its megaphone, the social media universe. As historian Daniel Bessner has pointed out, this country is now undergoing a profound reconsideration of the very purpose and importance of the historical record. Across the country, universities are reducing the size of their history faculties, while the number of undergraduates majoring in history and related fields in 2018-2019 had already declined by more than a third since 2012.  

No wonder Guantánamo has been relegated to the past, a distant chapter in the ever-diminishing war on terror and no matter that it continues to function in the present moment. For example, two death penalty cases are currently in pretrial hearings there. One involves the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, which resulted in the deaths of 17 American sailors. As the intrepid Carol Rosenberg points out, the case has been in pretrial hearings since 2011. The other involves four defendants accused of conspiring in the attacks of September 11th. A fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al Shibh, was recently removed from the case, having been found incompetent to stand trial due to the post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from his torture at American hands. As for the remaining defendants, originally charged in 2008 and then again in 2011, no trial date has yet been set. The ever-elusive timetable for those prosecutions tells you everything. Evidence tainted by torture has made such a trial impossible.

The Cycles of American History

It’s hard to fathom how my father’s generation, stubbornly rose-colored in their vision of the country, swallowed the blatant failures of the post-9/11 years. My sense is that many of them, like my dad, just shook their heads, certain that the true spirit of American democracy would ultimately prevail and the wrongs of indefinite detention, torture, and judicial incapacity would be righted. Still, as the country spiraled into January 6th and its aftermath, the reality of America’s lost grip on its own promises of justice, morality, lawfulness, and accountability actually began to sink in. At least it did with my dad, who expressed clear and present fears of a country succumbing to the specter of his childhood, fascism, the very antithesis of the America he aspired to.

Philippe Diaz’s film about Gitmo (which I encourage readers to catch when it premieres at the end of April) should remind at least a few of us of the importance of living up to the image of the country my father and others in his generation embraced. Isn’t it finally time to highlight the grave mistake of Guantánamo? Isn’t it finally time to close that shameful prison, distinctly offshore of American justice, and reckon with its wrongs, rather than letting it disappear into the haze of forgotten history, its momentous violations unresolved. 

In 2005, in his confirmation hearings for attorney general, George W. Bush’s longtime legal counsel Alberto Gonzales maintained that the ideals and laws codified in the Geneva Conventions were “quaint and obsolete.” That phrase, consigning notions of justice and accountability to the dustbin of history, encapsulated this country’s post-9/11 strategy of evading the law in the name of “security.” And as long as Guantánamo remains open, that strategy remains in place.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, rather than letting Gonzalez etch in stone an epitaph for the ideals my father and his generation so revered, we could find hope in a future where their trust in the rule of law and in a government of responsible citizens who put country above personal fortune, law above fear, and peace above war might prevail? As we lay my dad’s generation to rest, shouldn’t we take some consolation in the possibility that their spirit may still help us find our way out of today’s distinctly disturbing and unnerving times?

Copyright 2024 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: “The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer.”

The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger’s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington’s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region. In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.

Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America’s Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America’s “forever wars.”

President Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future — possibly forever — “to protect the people and interests of the United States.” The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.   

“Reducing Terrorism” Leads to a 50,000% Increase in… Yes!… Terrorism

Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as “Base Americaine,” that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America’s military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone.

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Washington has been focused on Niger and its neighbors since the opening days of the Global War on Terror, pouring military aid into the nations of West Africa through dozens of “security cooperation” efforts, among them the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program designed to “counter and prevent violent extremism” in the region. Training and assistance to local militaries offered through that partnership has alone cost America more than $1 billion.

Just prior to his recent visit to Niger, AFRICOM’s General Langley went before the Senate Armed Services Committee to rebuke America’s longtime West African partners. “During the past three years, national defense forces turned their guns against their own elected governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, and Niger,” he said. “These juntas avoid accountability to the peoples they claim to serve.”

Langley did not mention, however, that at least 15 officers who benefited from American security cooperation have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the Global War on Terror. They include the very nations he named: Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); and Niger (2023). In fact, at least five leaders of a July coup in Niger received U.S. assistance, according to an American official. When they overthrew that country’s democratically elected president, they, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as governors.

Langley went on to lament that, while coup leaders invariably promise to defeat terrorist threats, they fail to do so and then “turn to partners who lack restrictions in dealing with coup governments… particularly Russia.” But he also failed to lay out America’s direct responsibility for the security freefall in the Sahel, despite more than a decade of expensive efforts to remedy the situation.

“We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked after a U.S.-led NATO air campaign helped overthrow Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, in 2011. President Barack Obama hailed the intervention as a success, even as Libya began to slip into near-failed-state status. Obama would later admit that “failing to plan for the day after” Qaddafi’s defeat was the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

As the Libyan leader fell, Tuareg fighters in his service looted his regime’s weapons caches, returned to their native Mali, and began to take over the northern part of that nation. Anger in Mali’s armed forces over the government’s ineffective response resulted in a 2012 military coup led by Amadou Sanogo, an officer who learned English in Texas, and underwent infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, military-intelligence instruction in Arizona, and mentorship by Marines in Virginia.

Having overthrown Mali’s democratic government, Sanogo proved hapless in battling local militants who had also benefitted from the arms flowing out of Libya. With Mali in chaos, those Tuareg fighters declared their own independent state, only to be pushed aside by heavily armed Islamist militants who instituted a harsh brand of Shariah law, causing a humanitarian crisis. A joint French, American, and African mission prevented Mali’s complete collapse but pushed the Islamists to the borders of both Burkina Faso and Niger, spreading terror and chaos to those countries.

Since then, the nations of the West African Sahel have been plagued by terrorist groups that have evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles armed with Kalashnikov rifles regularly roar into villages to impose zakat (an Islamic tax) and terrorize and kill civilians. Relentless attacks by such armed groups have not only destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, prompting coups and political instability, but have spread south to countries along the Gulf of Guinea. Violence has, for example, spiked in Togo (633%) and Benin (718%), according to Pentagon statistics.

American officials have often turned a blind eye to the carnage. Asked about the devolving situation in Niger, for instance, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel recently insisted that security partnerships in West Africa “are mutually beneficial and are intended to achieve what we believe to be shared goals of detecting, deterring, and reducing terrorist violence.”  His pronouncement is either an outright lie or a total fantasy.

After 20 years, it’s clear that America’s Sahelian partnerships aren’t “reducing terrorist violence” at all. Even the Pentagon tacitly admits this. Despite U.S. troop strength in Niger growing by more than 900% in the last decade and American commandos training local counterparts, while fighting and even dying there; despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into Burkina Faso in the form of training as well as equipment like armored personnel carriers, body armor, communications gear, machine guns, night-vision equipment, and rifles; and despite U.S. security assistance pouring into Mali and its military officers receiving training from the United States, terrorist violence in the Sahel has in no way been reduced. In 2002 and 2003, according to State Department statistics, terrorists caused 23 casualties in all of Africa. Last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, attacks by Islamist militants in the Sahel alone resulted in 11,643 deaths – an increase of more than 50,000%.

Pack Up Your War

In January 2021, President Biden entered the White House promising to end his country’s forever wars.  He quickly claimed to have kept his pledge. “I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,” Biden announced months later. “We’ve turned the page.” 

Late last year, however, in one of his periodic “war powers” missives to Congress, detailing publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations around the world, Biden said just the opposite. In fact, he left open the possibility that America’s forever wars might, indeed, go on forever. “It is not possible,” he wrote, “to know at this time the precise scope or the duration of the deployments of United States Armed Forces that are or will be necessary to counter terrorist threats to the United States.”

Niger’s U.S.-trained junta has made it clear that it wants America’s forever war there to end. That would assumedly mean the closing of Air Base 201 and the withdrawal of about 1,000 American military personnel and contractors. So far, however, Washington shows no signs of acceding to their wishes. “We are aware of the March 16th statement… announcing an end to the status of forces agreement between Niger and the United States,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh. “We are working through diplomatic channels to seek clarification… I don’t have a timeframe of any withdrawal of forces.”

“The U.S. military is in Niger at the request of the Government of Niger,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan last year. Now that the junta has told AFRICOM to leave, the command has little to say. Email return receipts show that TomDispatch’s questions about developments in Niger sent to AFRICOM’s press office were read by a raft of personnel including Cahalan, Zack Frank, Joshua Frey, Yvonne Levardi, Rebekah Clark Mattes, Christopher Meade, Takisha Miller, Alvin Phillips, Robert Dixon, Lennea Montandon, and Courtney Dock, AFRICOM’s deputy director of public affairs, but none of them answered any of the questions posed. Cahalan instead referred TomDispatch to the State Department. The State Department, in turn, directed TomDispatch to the transcript of a press conference dealing primarily with U.S. diplomatic efforts in the Philippines.

“USAFRICOM needs to stay in West Africa… to limit the spread of terrorism across the region and beyond,” General Langley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.  But Niger’s junta insists that AFRICOM needs to go and U.S. failures to “limit the spread of terrorism” in Niger and beyond are a key reason why.  “This security cooperation did not live up to the expectations of Nigeriens — all the massacres committed by the jihadists were carried out while the Americans were here,” said a Nigerien security analyst who has worked with U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

America’s forever wars, including the battle for the Sahel, have ground on through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden with failure the defining storyline and catastrophic results the norm. From the Islamic State routing the U.S.-trained Iraqi army in 2014 to the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan in 2021, from the forever stalemate in Somalia to the 2011 destabilization of Libya that plunged the Sahel into chaos and now threatens the littoral states along the Gulf of Guinea, the Global War on Terror has been responsible for the deaths, wounding, or displacement of tens of millions of people.

Carnage, stalemate, and failure seem to have had remarkably little effect on Washington’s desire to continue funding and fighting such wars, but facts on the ground like the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan have sometimes forced Washington’s hand. Niger’s junta is pursuing another such path, attempting to end an American forever war in one small corner of the world — doing what President Biden pledged but failed to do. Still, the question remains: Will the Biden administration reverse a course that the U.S. has been on since the early 2000s?  Will it agree to set a date for withdrawal? Will Washington finally pack up its disastrous war and go home?

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Tomdispatch.com

Does their nationality have anything to do with their alleged terrorism? Many Russians probably think so.

Tajikistan, a landlocked country of 10 million sandwiched between Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and China, is the most impoverished of the former Soviet republics. Known for its corruption and political repression, it has chafed under the iron-fisted rule of President Emomali Rahmon since 1994.

There are estimated to be well over three million Tajiks living in Russia, about one-third of the total Tajik population. Most of them hold the precarious status of “guest workers,” holding low-paying jobs in construction, produce markets or even cleaning public toilets.

While Russia’s declining population has led to increasing reliance on foreign workers to fill such needs within its labour force, the attitude of Russians towards natives of Central Asia and the Caucasus region is generally negative.

It’s similar to the American stereotype about Mexicans so infamously expressed by Donald Trump in 2015: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

CBC News Video: “Why would ISIS-K attack Russia? | Front Burner

Non-Slavs are systematically discriminated against in Russia, and since 2022 they have been disproportionately conscripted and sent to Ukraine to serve as cannon fodder at the front.

Tajik exclusion

As I have described in a recent book, few nations in history have seen their standing so dramatically reduced as the Tajiks have over the past 100 years.

For more than a millennium, the Tajiks — Persian-speaking descendants of the ancient Sogdians who dominated the Silk Road — were Central Asia’s cultural elite.

Beginning with what’s known as the New Persian Renaissance of the 10th century when their capital, Bukhara, came to rival Baghdad as a centre of Islamic learning and high culture, Tajiks were the principal scholars and bureaucrats of Central Asia’s major cities right up to the time of the Russian Revolution.

The famous medieval polymath Avicenna was an ethnic Tajik, as were the hadith collector Bukhari, the Sufi poet Rumi, and many others.

But as the most significant purveyors of Central Asia’s Islamic civilization, Tajiks were seen by the Bolsheviks as representing an obsolete legacy that socialism aimed to overcome.

The Tajiks were virtually excluded from the massive social and political restructuring imposed on Central Asia during the early years of the Soviet Union, with most of their historical territory, including the fabled cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, being awarded to the Turkic-speaking Uzbeks who were seen as being more malleable.

Only as late as 1929 were the Tajiks given their own republic, consisting mostly of marginal, mountainous territory and deprived of any major urban centres.

Impoverished

Throughout the 20th century, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was the most impoverished and underdeveloped region of the former Soviet Union, and it has retained that unfortunate status since independence in 1991.

From 1992-1997, the country was plunged into a devastating civil war that destroyed what infrastructure remained from the Soviet period. Since that time, Rahmon has used the threat of renewed civil conflict to vindicate his absolute rule.

The spectre of radical Islam emanating from neighbouring Afghanistan — where the Tajik population considerably outnumbers that of Tajikistan — has provided additional justification for Rahmon’s repressive policies.

In today’s Tajikistan even those with a university education find it almost impossible to earn a salary that would enable them to build a normal family life.

Disempowered and humiliated by the system, they are easy prey for radical Islamic preachers who give them a sense of value and purpose.

The added backdrop of financial desperation makes for an explosive cocktail: one of the suspects in the recent Moscow attacks reportedly told his Russian interrogators that he was promised a cash reward of half a million Russian rubles (about US$5,300) to carry out his alleged atrocities..

Terrorism as desperation?

Normal, sane human beings everywhere are horrified by terrorist acts regardless of how they are justified by their perpetrators, and the long-suffering people of Tajikistan are no exception.

But unfortunately, the conditions under which a small number of extremists can perceive the psychopathic murder of innocent civilians for cash or ideology as an attractive option show no signs of abating.

Russia’s laughable attempt to somehow link the Moscow attacks to Ukraine is a clumsy diversion from the consequences of its relations with Central Asia.

Richard Foltz, Professor of Religions and Cultures, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Russia is reeling from the worst terror strike on its soil in a generation following an attack on March 22, 2024, that killed at least 137 concertgoers in Moscow.

The attack has been claimed by the Islamic State group. And despite Russian authorities expressing doubt over the claim, U.S. officials told The Associated Press that they believed ISIL-K, a South and Central Asian affiliate of the terrorist organization, was behind the assault.

It comes amid heightened concern over the scope of ISIL-K activities following recent terrorist operations in countries including Iran and Pakistan. The Conversation turned to Clemson University’s Amira Jadoon and Sara Harmouch of American University – terrorism experts who have tracked the activities of ISIL-K – to explain what this latest deadly attack tells us about the organization’s strengths and agenda.

What is ISIL-K?

ISIL-K, short for Islamic State Khorasan Province, is a regional affiliate of the larger Islamic State group.

The affiliate group operates primarily in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, although it has presence throughout the historical “Khorasan” – a region that includes parts of the modern-day nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, along with other Central Asian countries.

Established in 2015, ISIL-K aims to establish a physical “caliphate” – a system of governing a society under strict Islamic Sharia law and under religious leadership – in the South and Central Asian region.

What to know about ISIS-K, the group that claimed the Moscow attack • FRANCE 24 English Video

ISIL-K’s beliefs follow the ideology of its parent organization, the Islamic State group, which promotes an extreme interpretation of Islam and sees secular government actors, as well as non-Muslim and Muslim minority civilian populations, as legitimate targets.

The group is known for its extreme brutality and for targeting both government institutions and civilians, including mosques, educational institutions and public spaces.

Following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, ISIL-K’s key objectives have been to diminish the now-ruling Taliban’s legitimacy in the war-ravaged nation, assert itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim community and emerge as the principal regional adversary to regimes it deems oppressive.

Moreover, the Taliban’s transition from an insurgency group to a governing entity left numerous militant factions in Afghanistan without a unifying force – a gap that ISIL-K has aimed to fill.

Why was Russia targeted by ISIL-K?

ISIL-K has long framed Russia as one of its main adversaries. It has heavily featured anti-Russian rhetoric in its propaganda and has attacked Russia’s presence within Afghanistan. This includes a suicide attack on Russia’s embassy in Kabul in 2022 that left two Russian Embassy staff and six Afghans dead.

The broader Islamic State group has targeted Russia for several reasons.

They include long-standing grievances relating to Moscow’s historical interventions in Muslim-majority regions like Chechnya and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Russia’s partnerships with regimes opposed by the Islamic State group, notably Syria and Iran, have positioned Russia as a primary adversary in the eyes of the terrorist organization and its affiliates.

In particular, Russia has been a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since the beginning of Syria’s civil war in 2011, providing military support to the Assad regime against various opposition groups, including the Islamic State group.

This direct opposition to the terrorist group and its caliphate ambitions has rendered Russia as a prime target for retaliation.

Moreover, Russia’s cooperation with the Taliban – ISIL-K’s key nemesis in Afghanistan – adds another layer of animosity. The Islamic State group views countries and groups that oppose its ideology or military objectives as enemies of Islam, including actors who seek to establish relations with the Taliban.

By attacking Russian targets, ISIL-K in part seeks to deter further Russian involvement in the Middle East. But also, such attacks provide high publicity for its cause and aim to inspire its supporters worldwide.

As such, for the Islamic State brand, the Moscow attack serves as retribution for perceived grievances held against Russia, while also projecting global reach. This approach can provide significant dividends, especially for its South and Central Asian affiliate, in the form of increased recruitment, funding and influence across the jihadist spectrum.

What does the attack tell us about ISIL-K capabilities?

The mere association of ISIL-K with this attack, whether it was directly or indirectly involved, bolsters the group’s reputation.

Overall, the attack signals ISIL-K’s growing influence and its determination to make its presence felt on the global stage.

Being linked to a high-profile attack in a major city far from its base in Afghanistan indicates that ISIL-K can extend its operational reach either directly or through collaboration with like-minded militant factions.

The scale and sophistication of the attack reflect advanced planning, coordination and execution capabilities. This only reaffirms unequivocally ISIL-K’s intent, adaptability and determination to internationalize its agenda.

Similar to ISIL-K’s attack in Iran in January 2024 that left over 100 dead, this latest atrocity serves to reinforce ISIL-K’s stated commitment to the broader global jihadist agenda of the Islamic State group, and helps broaden the appeal of its ideology and recruitment campaign.

How does this fit ISIL-K’s strategy?

The attack in Moscow serves as a powerful recruitment and propaganda tool by attracting international media attention to the group. This allows it to remain politically relevant to its audiences across South and Central Asia, and beyond.

But it also helps divert attention from local setbacks for ISIL-K. Like its parent organization Islamic State group, ISIL-K has been confronted with military defeats, loss of territory and leadership and diminishing resources.

In the face of such challenges, ISIL-K’s potential links to the attack in Moscow remind observers of its persistent threat and adaptability.

By targeting a major power like Russia, ISIL-K aims to project a broader message of intimidation aimed at other states involved in anti-Islamic State group operations and undermine the public’s sense of security.

Additionally, operations such as the Moscow attack seek to solidify ISIL-K’s position within the broader Islamic State group network, potentially securing more support and resources.

More broadly, the strategy follows a process of “internationalizing” ISIL-K’s agenda – something it has pursued with renewed vigor since 2021 by targeting the countries with a presence in Afghanistan, including Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China and Russia, marking a deliberate expansion of its operational focus beyond local borders.

The Moscow attack, following the January assault in Iran, suggests that ISIL-K is intensifying efforts to export its ideological fight directly to the territories of sovereign nations.

It is a calculated strategy and, as the Moscow attack has exemplified, one that has the potential to strike fear in capitals far beyond ISIL-K’s traditional base.

Sara Harmouch, PhD Candidate, School of Public Affairs, American University and Amira Jadoon, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Clemson University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Terrorism is inexcusable and horrific. It does not, however, occur in a vacuum. The attack likely came in revenge for two of Vladimir Putin’s most important projects. The first was the crushing of separatist Chechens in 1999-2009 and after. In recent years Putin’s government has continued to fight a low-intensity counter-insurgency in south Caucasian territories such as Ingushetia. CNN reports that earlier this month Russian forces killed 6 ISIL guerrillas in the city of Karabulak in Ingushetia, an almost entirely Muslim republic within the Russian Federation.

Al Jazeera English: “ISIL claims responsibility for Moscow concert attack”

The second relevant Putin project is his intervention in the Syrian Civil War to flatten the opposition to the dynasty of Bashar al-Assad. Although the civil war began with demands from a range of Syrian opposition forces for more civil liberties, that initial movement was repressed by the regime using military force on civilians. Many in the opposition turned to the Gulf for funding, and the price of admission was growing beards and adopting Muslim fundamentalist rhetoric. They could not get funding from most liberal democracies. Putin was alarmed that Muslim fundamentalists might sweep into Damascus and take the capital. Syria isn’t that far from Chechnya, and some Russian Muslims from Chechnya and Ingushetia had volunteered to go off to Syria and fight the al-Assad regime.

The Syrian army was unable to defeat the rebels, having shrunk through desertion. In 2015 Putin started flying fighter jets against the rebels, giving air support to the Syrian Arab Army and to the Shiite militias from Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Iraq that were fighting the Sunni rebels. The latter were defeated in much of the country and their remnants were bottled up on the northern province of Idlib. With the effective end of the insurgency, some of the Chechens and Muslims from Ingushetia began returning home. Unless they were known to and could be proved to have committed war crimes, these returnees were allowed to reintegrate into Caucasian society according to the Central Asia- Caucasus Analyst.

The exact identity of the ISIL operatives who committed the atrocity on Friday is not clear. But it is likely that this act of terror is blowback from the Russian leveling of Grozny, Chechnya, in the early years of this century and the Russian leveling of East Aleppo. It isn’t right, and it isn’t fair to the innocent concert-goers who lost their lives or those of their friends and family. It is cowardly to attack soft targets and noncombatants. And like most ISIL operations, it is terminally stupid, since it won’t cause Russia to back off any policies in the Caucasus or Syria and has the potential to make life miserable for the 9% of the Russian population that consists of Muslims. But it did not happen with no context.

Ironically, Russian officials initially intimated that Ukraine was behind the attack. That shows a bad conscience over their indiscriminate bombing of civilians in that country, which is also terrorism.

I recall rooting for the Israelis, advertised then as crucial American allies, against Egypt, Syria, and other regional enemies at least ostensibly allied with the Soviet Union in that Cold War era. I bought the prevailing narrative of a David-versus-Goliath struggle. I even got a book on the Yom Kippur War that captivated me by displaying all the weaponry the U.S. military had rushed to Israel to turn the tide there, including F-4 Phantom jets and M-60 main battle tanks. (David’s high-tech slingshots, if you will.) Little did I know that, in the next 50 years of my life, I would witness increasingly destructive U.S. military attacks in the Middle East, especially after the oil cartel OPEC (largely Middle Eastern then) hit back hard with an embargo in 1973 that sent our petroleum-based economy into a tailspin.

As one jokester quipped: Who put America’s oil under the sands of all those ungrateful Muslim countries in the Middle East? With declarations like the Carter Doctrine in 1980, the U.S. was obviously ready to show the world just how eagerly it would defend its “vital interests” (meaning fossil fuels, of course) in that region. And even today, as we watch the latest round in this country’s painfully consistent record of attempting to pound various countries and entities there into submission, mainly via repetitive air strikes, we should never forget the importance of oil, and lots of it, to keep the engines of industry and war churning along in a devastating fashion.

Right now, of course, the world is witnessing yet another U.S. bombing campaign, the latest in a series that seems all too predictable (and futile), meant to teach the restless rebels of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and possibly even Iran a lesson when it comes to messing with the United States of America. As the recently deceased country singer Toby Keith put it: Mess with this country and “We’ll put a boot (think: bomb) in your ass.” You kill three soldiers of ours and we’ll kill scores, if not hundreds, if not thousands of yours (and it doesn’t really matter if they’re soldiers or not), because… well, because we damn well can!

America’s leaders, possessing a peerless Air Force, regularly exhibit a visceral willingness to use it to bomb and missile perceived enemies into submission or, if need be, nothingness. And don’t for a second think that they’re going to be stopped by international law, humanitarian concerns, well-meaning protesters, or indeed any force on this planet. America bombs because it can, because it believes in the efficacy of violence, and because it’s run by appeasers.

Yes, America’s presidents, its bombers-in-chief, are indeed appeasers. Of course, they think they’re being strong when they’re blowing distant people to bits, but their actions invariably showcase a distinctive kind of weakness. They eternally seek to appease the military-industrial-congressional complex, aka the national (in)security state, a complex state-within-a-state with an unappeasable hunger for power, profit, and ever more destruction. They fail and fail and fail again in the Middle East, yet they’re incapable of not ordering more bombing, more droning, more killing there. Think of them as being possessed by a monomania for war akin to my urge to play with toy soldiers. The key difference? When I played at war, I was a wet-behind-the-ears 10 year old.

The Rockets’ Red Glare, the Bombs Bursting in Air

No technology may be more all-American than bombs and bombers and no military doctrine more American than the urge to attain “peace” through massive firepower. In World War II and subsequent wars, the essential U.S. approach could be summarized in five words: mass production enabling mass destruction.

No other country in the world has dedicated such vast resources as mine has to mass destruction through air power. Think of the full-scale bombing of cities in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, ending in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Think of the flattening of North Korea during the Korean War of the early 1950s or the staggering bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s. Or consider the massive use of air power in Desert Shield against Iraq in the early 1990s followed by the air campaigns that accompanied the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003 (and never quite seemed to stop thereafter). The butcher’s bill for such bombing has indeed been high, quite literally millions of non-combatants killed by America’s self-styled “arsenal of democracy.”

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And indeed, as you read this, another country is now faithfully following America’s example. Israel is systematically destroying Gaza, rendering it essentially uninhabitable for those Palestinians who survive the ongoing rampage. In fact, early in its war of annihilation, Israeli leaders cited the Allied destruction of the German city of Dresden in 1945 in support of their own atrocious air and ground campaign against the Palestinians.

Looking at this dispassionately as a military historian, the Dresden reference makes a certain twisted sense. In World War II, the Americans and their British allies in their “combined bomber offensive” destroyed German cities indiscriminately, seeing all Germans as essentially Nazis, complicit in the crimes of their government, and so legitimate targets. Something similar is true of the right-wing Israeli government today. It sees all Palestinians as essentially members of Hamas and thus complicit in last year’s brutal October 7th attacks on Israel, making them legitimate targets of war, Israeli- (and American-) style. Just like the United States, Israel claims to be “defending democracy” whatever it does. Little wonder, then, that Washington has been so willing to send bombs and bullets to its protégé as it seeks “peace” through massive firepower and genocidal destruction.

Indeed, of late, there has been considerable debate about whether Israel is engaged in acts of genocide, with the International Court of Justice ruling that the present government should strive to prevent just such acts in Gaza. Putting that issue aside, it’s undeniable that Israel has been using indiscriminate bombing attacks and a devastating invasion in a near-total war against Palestinians living on that 25-mile-long strip of land, an approach that calls to mind the harrowing catchphrase “Exterminate all the brutes!” from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.

In a sense, there’s nothing new under the sun. Certainly, the Old Testament itself provides examples of exterminatory campaigns (cited by Bibi Netanyahu as Israel first moved against the Palestinians in Gaza). He might as well have cited a catchphrase heard during America’s war in Vietnam, but rooted in the medieval crusades: “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

America’s Unrelenting Crusade in the Middle East

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush got into trouble almost instantly when he referred to the “war on terror” he had launched as a “crusade.” Yet, as impolitic as that word might have seemed, how better to explain U.S. actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan? Just consider our faith in the goodness and efficacy of “our” military and that all-American urge to bring “democracy” to the world, despite the destruction visited upon Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen over the last several decades. Or go back to 1953 and the role the CIA played in the overthrow of Iran’s legitimate democratic ruler and his replacement by the brutally repressive regime of the Shah.

Try to imagine such events from the perspective of a historian writing in the year 2200. Might that future scribe not refer to repeated U.S. invasions of, incursions into, and bombing campaigns across the Middle East as a bloody crusade, launched under the (false) banner of democracy with righteous vengeance, if not godly purpose, in mind? Might that historian not suggest that such a “crusade” was ultimately more about power and profit, domination and control than (as advertised) “freedom”? And might that historian not be impressed (if not depressed) by the remarkable way the U.S. brought seemingly unending chaos and death to the region over such a broad span of time?

Consider these facts. More than 22 years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. still has at least 30,000 troops scattered across the Middle East. At least one Navy carrier strike group, and often two, dominate the regional waters, while striking numbers of military bases (“Little Americas”) are still sprinkled across countries ranging from Kuwait to Bahrain, from Qatar to the United Arab Emirates and beyond. So many years later, about 900 U.S. troops still illegally occupy part of Syria (not coincidentally, where that country produces most of its oil) and 2,500 more remain in Iraq, even though the government there would like them to depart.

Yankee Go Home? Apparently Not in My Lifetime

Meanwhile, American military aid, mostly in the form of deadly weaponry, flows not only to Israel but to other countries in the region like Egypt and Jordan. Direct U.S. military support facilitated Saudi Arabia’s long, destructive, and unsuccessful war against the Houthis in Yemen, a conflict Washington is now conducting on its own with repeated air strikes. And of course, the entire region has, for more than two decades now, been under constant U.S. military pressure in that war on terror, which all too quickly became a war of terror (and of torture).

Recall that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the death of roughly a million Iraqis and the displacement of millions more as refugees. How could that not be considered part of a “crusade,” even if a fitful and failing one? Yet, here’s the rub: just as those Catholic crusades of the Middle Ages weren’t entirely or even primarily about religion, so today’s American version isn’t motivated primarily by an anti-Muslim animus. Of course, there is indeed an inescapably religious aspect to such never-ending American war-making, but what drives those wars is largely naked greed, vengeance, and an all-American urge both to appease and amplify the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Of course, as was true in the years after 9/11 and is still true today, Americans are generally encouraged to see their country’s imperial and crusading acts as purely defensive in nature, the righteous responses of freedom-bringers. Admittedly, it’s a strange kind of freedom this country brings at the tip of a sword — or on the nosecone of a Hellfire missile. Even so, in such an otherwise thoroughly contentious Congress, it should be striking how few members have challenged the latest bombing version of this country’s enduring war in the Middle East.

Forget the Constitution. No Congressional declaration of war is believed necessary for any of this, nor has it mattered much (so far) that the American public has grown increasingly skeptical of those wars and the acts of destruction that go with them. As it happens, however, the crusade, such as it is, has proven remarkably sustainable without much public crusading zeal. For most Americans, those acts remain distinctly off-stage and largely out of mind, except at moments like the present one where the deaths of three American soldiers give the administration all the excuse it needs for repetitive acts of retaliation.

No, we the people exercise remarkably little control over the war-making that the military-industrial-congressional complex has engaged in for decades or the costs that go with them. Indeed, the dollar costs are largely deferred to future generations as America’s national debt climbs even faster than the Pentagon war budget.

America, so we were told by President George W. Bush, is hated for its freedoms.  Yet the “freedoms” we’re allegedly hated for aren’t those delineated in the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.  Rather, it’s America’s “freedom” to build military bases across the globe and bomb everywhere, a “freedom” to sell such bellicose activity as lawful and even admirable, a “freedom” to engage in a hyperviolent style of play, treating “our” troops and so many foreigners as toy soldiers and expendable props for Washington’s games.  

It’s something I captured unintentionally five decades ago with those toy soldiers of mine from an imagined glorious military past.  But after a time (too long, perhaps) I learned to recognize them as the childish things they were and put them away.  They’re now long gone, lost to time and maturity, as is the illusion that my country pursues freedom and democracy in the Middle East through ceaseless acts of extreme violence, which just seem to drone on and on and on.

Copyright 2024 William J. Astore

Tomdispatch.com