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The first holocaust of the century began April 24, 1915, 100 years ago. The Turks slaughtered the Christians.
In both historical and more publicistic writing, the term “genocide” has been used rather promiscuously to apply to mass repression of political opponents, real or imagined. When the Genocide Convention was being debated at the United Nations in the late 1940s, the Soviet representatives strenuously held out against extending the term to political killings, which would of necessity have included Stalin’s purges, the millions lost in dekulakization, the Ukrainian Holodomor, the deadly settlement of Kazakhs, and the deportations of North Caucasians and other peoples during World War II. The American delegates also resisted any language in the convention that might be turned toward examination of racial segregation and the violence perpetrated against African Americans during the era of Jim Crow. In the interests of unanimity, political, social, and economic groups were not included in the protections of the convention that was adopted by the United Nations on December 9, 1948.
ISTANBUL According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.
In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number – and its Ottoman source – has gone virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television shows have not discussed it.
“Nothing,” said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who compiled the book.
The silence can mean only one thing, he said: “My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren’t ready to talk about it yet.”
For generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the population.
Turkey locked the ugliest parts of its past out of sight, Soviet-style, keeping any mention of the events out of schoolbooks and official narratives in an aggressive campaign of forgetting.
At the hands of Talaat Pasha, orders were delivered to massacre entire villages. Much later when it came to surviving children, a translated and digitized cable reads as such:
January 15th, 1916
To the Government of Aleppo:
We are informed that certain orphanages which have opened also admitted the children of the Armenians.
Should this be done through ignorance of our real purpose, or because of contempt of it, the Government will view the feeding of such children or any effort to prolong their lives as an act completely opposite to its purpose, since it regards the survival of these children as detrimental.
I recommend the orphanages not to receive such children; and no attempts are to be made to establish special orphanages for them.
Minister of the Interior,
TALAAT.
(Undated.)
From the Ministry of the Interior to the Governor of Aleppo:
Only those orphans who cannot remember the terrors to which their parents have been subjected must be collected and kept.
Send the rest away with the caravans.
Minister of the Interior,
TALAAT.
On eve of anniversary, Ottoman massacres of Armenians ‘not genocide,’ says Erdogan
Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as genocide. Turkey, however, has insisted that the toll has been inflated, and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest, not genocide.
*** Obama agrees, as the historical slaughter of a Christian sect he ignores.
That’s prompting anger and disappointment from people who have been urging him to fulfill a campaign promise and use that politically significant word on the 100th anniversary of the massacre this week.
“President Obama’s surrender to Turkey represents a national disgrace. It is, very simply, a betrayal of truth, a betrayal of trust,” Ken Hachikian, the chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America, said.
Officials decided against calling the massacre a genocide after some opposition from the State Department and Pentagon.
An American and an Italian held hostage by Al Qaeda were accidentally killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation earlier this year, the White House said Thursday, in a stunning and tragic admission.
The White House also revealed that two American terror operatives were killed, but the revelation that hostages died — in an apparent drone strike — is leading to what President Obama called a “full review.”
Obama, speaking from the White House, expressed “grief and condolences” for the deaths of the hostages, American development expert Warren Weinstein and Italian national Giovanni Lo Porto.
“As president and commander-in-chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations — including the one that inadvertently took the lives of Warren and Giovanni,” Obama said. “”I profoundly regret what happened. On behalf of the United States government offer our deepest apologies to the families.”
The White House said both men were “accidentally killed” in the operation in January. A senior defense official told Fox News the hostages were killed in a drone strike.
“No words can fully express our regret over this terrible tragedy,” the White House said in a statement.
“The operation targeted an Al Qaeda-associated compound, where we had no reason to believe either hostage was present, located in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the White House said.
The White House revealed that two Americans working with Al Qaeda were killed, as well. Ahmed Farouq, an American Al Qaeda leader, was killed in the same operation in which the hostages died. American-born Al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn was killed in January in a separate incident, according to the White House.
The White House says Farouq and Gadahn were not targeted in the operations, and the U.S. did not have specific information indicating their presence at the sites.
Weinstein, 73, was an American contractor working in Lahore, Pakistan, when he was snatched outside his home on Aug. 13, 2011, by Al Qaeda operatives. The Maryland resident and professor at State University of New York at Oswego was later seen in four “proof-of-life” videos, the most recent of which was released in December 2013. In that video, Weinstein appeared in a tan track suit with a wool cap and pleaded with the U.S. to come to his aid.
“And now, when I need my government, it seems that I have been totally abandoned and forgotten,” Weinstein says, apparently reading from a script. “I again appeal to you … to negotiate my release,” he said on the tape.
In a written statement, Weinstein’s wife, Elaine Weinstein, said “there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through.”
“We do not yet fully understand all of the facts surrounding Warren’s death, but we do understand that the U.S. government will be conducting an independent investigation of the circumstances. We look forward to the results of that investigation,” she said. “But those who took Warren captive over three years ago bear ultimate responsibility. I can assure you that he would still be alive and well if they had allowed him to return home after his time abroad working to help the people of Pakistan.”
Gadahn, 36, the first widely known American to join Al Qaeda, grew up in Orange County, Calif., in a family with Christian and Jewish roots. He converted to Islam at age 17, and began studying Islam at the Islamic Society of Orange County. Gadahn reportedly moved to Pakistan in 1998, where he married an Afghan refugee and later joined Al Qaeda.
In 2001, he cut off contact with his family in California, and in the years following the 9/11 attacks, became a prominent spokesman for the terrorist group, appearing under the name “Azzam Al-Amriki” with Al Qaeda founder and 9/11 mastermind Usama bin Laden in videos justifying and threatening further attacks.
In 2006, Gadahn was placed on the Bureau of Diplomatic Security Rewards for Justice Program list of wanted criminals and indicted by a California federal grand jury on charges of treason.
In a 2007 Internet video called “Al Qaeda Video Warning to U.S. by American Adam Gadahn,” the homegrown radical imposed a list of demands on America, including an end to all support for the “bastard state of Israel.”
“Your failure to heed our demands and the demands of reason means that you and your people will – Allah willing – experience things which will make you forget all about the horrors of September 11, Afghanistan and Iraq.”
It was before dawn the morning of Aug. 13, 2011, when a group of men armed with assault rifles knocked on Warren Weinstein’s front gate in the Lahore suburb of Model Town, an upscale neighborhood where Benazir Bhutto is said to have had a house. Weinstein was working as country director for J.E. Austin Associates, a consulting firm based in Arlington, Va., that contracts with the Pakistani government. The 70-year-old was helping to create small businesses in tumultuous regions in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
It was the beginning of more than two years in captivity for Weinstein, who was accidently killed by a U.S. drone strike in January, the Obama administration announced Thursday.
Shortly after he was taken captive, Weinstein appeared in a video and directly addressed President Obama.
“My life is in your hands,” he told Obama. “If you accept the demands, I live; if you don’t accept the demands, I die,” Weinstein said, referring to a list of demands made by al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri last year that included an end to American strikes in Pakistan and the release of al Qaeda and Taliban militants detained at Guantánamo Bay.
The day he was captured, three men arrived at the front of Weinstein’s house in Pakistan and offered his security guards gifts of food, a common practice among Muslims during Ramadan. At the same time, five men forced their way into the house from the back, overpowering Weinstein’s guards and gagging them. The assailants then made their way to Weinstein’s room, where they pistol-whipped him before taking him to a getaway car.
Weinstein was reportedly in the final hours of his time in Lahore and had packed his bags to leave Pakistan for good.
Weinstein had a house in Rockville, Maryland where he had lived with his wife and daughter for 35 years. Over the course of the five or six years he was working in Pakistan, Weinstein is said to have traveled back and forth to Maryland from time to time.
“We are devastated by this news and the knowledge that my husband will never safely return home,” Elaine Weinstein, his wife said in a statement. “We were so hopeful that those in the U.S. and Pakistani governments with the power to take action and secure his release would have done everything possible to do so and there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through.”
Mrs. Weinstein criticized the administration that ended up killing her husband.
“Unfortunately, the assistance we received from other elements of the U.S. government was inconsistent and disappointing over the course of three and a half years. We hope that my husband’s death and the others who have faced similar tragedies in recent months will finally prompt the U.S. government to take its responsibilities seriously and establish a coordinated and consistent approach to supporting hostages and their families.”
Nevertheless, Mrs. Weinstein put the blame for her husband’s death on Al Qaeda.
“But those who took Warren captive over three years ago bear ultimate responsibility. I can assure you that he would still be alive and well if they had allowed him to return home after his time abroad working to help the people of Pakistan. The cowardly actions of those who took Warren captive and ultimately to the place and time of his death are not in keeping with Islam and they will have to face their God to answer for their actions.”
After Weinstein’s abductors made their escape from Lahore, they are thought to have transported their captive from safe house to safe house across Pakistan over a period of months. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the kidnapping after Weinstein’s August disappearance, and Pakistani officials found themselves without a real lead for months.
In late August, Lahore police chief Malik Ahmed Raza Tahir made a hasty announcement that Pakistani police had found and freed Weinstein in the city of Khushab, but only hours later said that his statement had been incorrect. Responding to Tahir’s mistake, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad tweeted at the time that “we have no information that would confirm recovery of Warren Weinstein, but we are hoping for a positive outcome.”
Al Qaeda finally declared itself responsible for the attack on Weinstein, and sources within the Taliban told reporters that over the intervening months the Pakistani branch of Al Qaeda had cooperated with Al Qaeda to secret Weinstein away to a tribal area of the country near the Afghan border. The Taliban commanders told reporters that they had kept quiet to improve their hand, a strategy that warded off pressure from Pakistani authorities and kept American officials at bay.
“Al Qaeda won’t kill Weinstein,” Mohammed Imran, a Pakistani security analyst said several years ago based on updates from militants. “It will keep him as healthy as possible in the circumstances.”
In the video, Weinstein assured his wife that he was in good health. “I’m getting all my medications, I’m being taken care of.”
Sheesh, almost by the hour news breaks on the Clinton Foundations(s) where fraud and collusion are bubbling to the surface.
Last week Newsweek broke a story about InterPipe owned by Victor Pinchuk of Ukraine whose financial worth is estimated at $4.2 billion. He is quite close to the Clintons and generous with his money to their Foundations in exchange for policy decisions at the State Department. As an aside, Pinchuk is tied to Tony Blair, Paul Krugman, Shimon Perez, Dominique Strauss Khan, Larry Summers and well yes, even Elton John.
When it comes to Hillary’s run for the Oval Office, these actions may be coming out too soon given election day in November of 2016, but this could all be a good thing as money going into her campaign may slow to a crawl. It should also be noted that the Gowdy Benghazi Commission reports are not slated to be published either until the height of the election season in 2016.
State Department sat on panel that approved sale of mine involving contributor to foundation
Hillary Clinton’s State Department was part of a panel that approved the sale of one of America’s largest uranium mines at the same time a foundation controlled by the seller’s chairman was making donations to a Clinton family charity, records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.
The $610 million sale of 51% of Uranium One to a unit of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear agency, was approved in 2010 by a U.S. federal committee that assesses the security implications of foreign investments. The State Department, which Mrs. Clinton then ran, is one of its members.
Between 2008 and 2012, the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation, received $2.35 million from the Fernwood Foundation, a family charity run by Ian Telfer, chairman of Uranium One before its sale, according to Canada Revenue Agency records.
The donations were first reported in “Clinton Cash,” a new book by Peter Schweizer, an editor-at-large at a conservative news website, about the financial dealings of Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. A copy of the book, set to be released next month, was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The book is to be published by HarperCollins, a division of News Corp.NWSA0.23%, which also publishes the Journal.
The book adds fresh details to previous reporting by the Journal and others about potential conflicts between Mrs. Clinton’s private charitable work and her public activities as secretary of state. The Journal reported in February that at least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Josh Schwerin, a campaign spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for Democratic presidential nomination, said the Uranium One sale “went through the usual process, and the official responsible for managing CFIUS reviews has stated that the secretary did not intervene with him. This book is twisting previously known facts into absurd conspiracy theories.”
The campaign on Wednesday also provided a comment from Jose Fernandez, a former assistant secretary of state who served as the department’s principal representative on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which reviewed the sale. “Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter,” Mr. Fernandez said.
In response to past questions about possible conflicts, Mrs. Clinton has said she is proud of the foundation’s work. Earlier this week, she called the book a distraction from real campaign issues.
Mr. Telfer, in an interview Wednesday, said he made the contributions not for the sake of the Clintons, but to support his longtime business partner, Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining executive and longtime Clinton friend who co-founded the program to spur development in poor countries.
“The donations started before there was any idea of this takeover,” Mr. Telfer said. “And I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton would have been aware of this donation to this growth initiative,” he added.
The Fernwood contributions don’t appear on the Clinton Foundation website, as was required under an agreement between the foundation and the Obama administration. A Clinton Foundation spokesman referred questions to the Clinton-Giustra program spokeswoman in Canada, who didn’t respond.
Under the terms of the sale, the company said it wouldn’t seek an export license to send uranium out of the country, and that executives at the U.S.-based unit would control the mine, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report. Uranium One, now a fully owned subsidiary of the Russian nuclear agency, owns a 300,000-acre mine in Wyoming and could produce up to half of the U.S. output of uranium this year. Some members of Congress at the time wrote to the committee calling on it to block the sale.
The Journal confirmed some other instances detailed in the book about Mrs. Clinton’s official activities and her family charity.
In June 2009, the Clinton Giustra initiative received two million shares in Polo Resources,POL1.33% a mining investment company headed by Stephen Dattels, a Canadian businessman, according to a Polo Resources news release. About two months later, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh pushed the energy adviser to that nation’s prime minister to allow “open pit mining,” including in Phulbari Mines, where Polo Resources has a stake, according to a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. The company seeking to develop the mine is still waiting for government approval, according to the firm’s website.
It isn’t known whether the Clinton-Giustra program still owns the shares. Neither Mr. Dattels nor his foundation nor Polo Resources are listed as donors by the Clinton Foundation website. Mr. Dattels, who retired in 2013, and representatives for Polo Resources couldn’t be reached for comment.
Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, who heads a mobile-phone network provider called Digicel, won a $2.5 million award in 2011 from a program run by the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development to offer mobile money services in post-earthquake Haiti. The firm won subsequent awards. Funds for the awards were provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while USAID administered the program, with a top Clinton aide directly overseeing earthquake aid.
Mr. O’Brien has given between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation since its launch. It is unclear whether Mr. O’Brien gave while Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department because of the way the foundation discloses its donations.
A USAID spokesman said the company met the criteria laid out in the Haiti Mobile Money Initiative. A spokesman for Mr. O’Brien said he couldn’t be reached and declined to comment. The Clinton campaign didn’t respond to request for comment on Polo Resources or Mr. O’Brien.
A partial list of where Iran has their proxies: Venezuela, Argentina, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan…..there is more. Armed tribes and there is no dispute, Iran has a financial network in the United States giving validation to the notion that Iran is the country where the global terror banking system resides.
The White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the U.S. Treasury, the FBI and ODNI as well as the CIA all have tangible proof of the machinations of Iran, yet still the diplomatic process continues with impunity.
Although protests by Ahwazi Arabs are fairly routine, the participation of sympathisers from other Arab states indicates the potential for ethnic and religiously motivated unrest and insurgency to evolve.
Ahwazi Arab militants in Khuzestan and Jaish al-Adl militants in Sistan-Baluchistan province have increasingly positioned their separatist narratives in the context of the regional Iran-Saudi conflict, indicating their receptiveness to external support, potentially from Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia.
Although IHS has no evidence of current Saudi involvement, Saudi support for these groups is a likely retaliatory option, in the event of perceived Iranian dominance in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, but this would likely be limited to funding and non-attributable low-capability weaponry. A sustained and high capability insurgency is unlikely in the one-year outlook.
EVENT
Hundreds of Ahwazi Arabs, along with Syrian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni sympathisers, gathered on 17 April outside the European Parliament in Brussels to protest Iran’s “occupation of al-Ahwaz” in the country’s Khuzestan province.
Iran’s perceived successes in the Sunni-Shia regional conflict make it more likely that Iranian-backed groups will challenge Saudi Arabia’s regional authority, and increase the pressure on the Kingdom to confront Iran more directly. However, regardless of whether Saudi Arabia is backing insurgent groups in Iran, any such attack or protest by regional-based groups are likely to be attributed by Iran’s government to Saudi Arabia, not least as a way of deflecting relevance from domestic opposition.
Ahwazi Arabs
Iran has accused Saudi Arabia of supporting Ahwazi Arab militants based in the oil-rich Khuzestan province, southwest Iran, although this claim has not been substantiated, and nor has Iran specified the extent of such support. The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA) has carried out a series of successful attacks on Iran’s oil and gas pipelines using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Khuzestan, with the most recent wave of such attacks occurring in 2012 and 2013. Although the long remote stretches of pipelines are potential targets for further IEDs, Iran has since enhanced pipeline security and there have been no successful attacks reported since 2013. The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) foiled a bomb plot on the Abadan-Mahashahr oil pipeline in November 2013, which the IRGC later claimed was by the ASMLA.
The ASMLA is likely to be receptive to external support from Iran’s opponents, principally Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the presence of Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Yemeni sympathisers at the 17 April Ahwazi protest rally held in Brussels indicates the group’s increasing alignment with those disaffected by Iran’s influence in those countries’ internal conflicts. Although Ahwazi Arabs are overwhelmingly Shia, the ASMLA dedicated the August 2013 attack on a gas pipeline to their Syrian ‘brothers-in-arms’, positioning the group’s agenda against Iran as part of the larger regional conflict. Moreover, the head of the ASMLA met with Mohammad Riad al-Shaqfeh, head of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, in September 2012, indicating their potential co-operation. Nevertheless, the extent of Ahwazi Arab support for the ASMLA and militancy is unclear. Despite having economic grievances, Ahwazi Arabs sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988).
Jaish al-Adl
IHS monitoring of Jaish al-Adl’s social media accounts shows that the group is increasingly reaching out to an Arabic-speaking audience, probably to secure funding from Gulf donors. It released a video purportedly showing the 6 April attack in Negur, Sistan-Baluchistan province, in which eight Iranian border guards were killed. The video included Arabic subtitles. Publishing videos of successful attacks is used by some Syrian militant groups to secure donor funding. Jaish al-Adl’s social media accounts also increasingly report on regional conflicts, particularly Yemen, marking a shift in its rhetoric from an exclusively Baluchi nationalist one to one that positions itself within the regional Sunni-Shia conflict.
Although there is no evidence to prove existing Saudi support for Jaish al-Adl, if this did occur it would most likely be through Pakistan, where the group’s core leadership is based and which has a history of support for the group. The Iran-Pakistan border is porous and the group can move across the border with relative ease. For its part, Pakistan’s unwillingness or inability to supply weaponry or forces to the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen might well create pressure on Pakistan to facilitate Saudi support for Jaish al-Adl in Iran, however even this might well prove problematic, given Pakistan’s interest in securing gas from Iran via a planned pipeline.
Kurds
Kurdish separatists have traditionally been active in their homeland of Iran’s northwestern provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan, but there has been little recent activity by its main group, Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (Partiya Jiyana Azada Kurdistane: PJAK). However, at least one faction of PJAK is likely to have been radicalised after Iran ignored the group’s call for negotiations in May 2014. A possible indication of such radicalisation was an alleged plot by ‘Islamist extremists’ to blow up a mosque in January 2015 in Mahabad, West Azerbaijan province, which Iranian authorities claimed to have foiled. The Iranian deputy interior minister Hossein Zolfaqari also claimed in March 2015 that Iran’s security forces have also dismantled several Islamic State-affiliated cells in the past year. The Islamic State has separately claimed to have Iranian Kurds among its recruits, although IHS has no evidence to substantiate this claim. Even if there is an appeal for Islamic State-inspired militancy in these provinces, Iran’s pervasive intelligence network is likely to mitigate risks of successful attacks. Meanwhile, as with Jaish al-Adl, it is quite probable that Iran will attribute alleged Islamist militancy amongst Iranian Kurds to external, principally Saudi, involvement, particularly in the event of fatalities amongst Iranian security forces or civilians.
FORECAST
Although Saudi Arabia has some incentive to provide limited support to opposition or insurgent/militant groups in Iran in the context of its regional proxy war with Iran, such support is likely to be confined to funding and non-attributable light weaponry. Even if this option were adopted, Iran’s transit routes are heavily guarded by the IRGC, and arms shipments through the Iraqi border or the Gulf coast would very likely be intercepted. Transfers of weaponry would be easier across the porous Pakistan border, but even then, Jaish al-Adl has not demonstrated the capability to move beyond the border area, much less transfer weaponry to Khuzestan. However, regardless of whether Saudi support is forthcoming, Iran would probably attribute blame to Saudi or other Gulf actors in the event of an increase in the frequency or capability of attacks in its peripheral provinces, which would also exacerbate the state of hostility between the two countries.
Islamic State is in Libya, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Militias standing with Islamic State have infested all of North Africa and Yemen. Analyzing the threat matrix takes a fleet of analysts, lawyers, policy and intelligence people to make any quality estimates however, it is dynamic, changing each week.
One other detail, while it was a few months ago that several Gulf States including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia listed the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror organization, the Kingdom has twisted that definition and is working with the Brotherhood in Yemen….stay tuned.
The U.S. military presented evidence that it was beating back the so-called Islamic State but it doesn’t even count coalition setbacks.
The Defense Department released a map last week showing territory where it is has pushed ISIS back, claiming that the terrorist group is “no longer able to operate freely in roughly 25 to 30 percent of populated areas of Iraqi territory where it once could.” This was touted as evidence of success by numerous news outlets.
Pushing ISIS back is clearly a good step. But the information from the Pentagon is, at best, misleading and incomplete, experts in the region and people on the ground tell The Daily Beast. They said the map misinforms the public about how effective the U.S.-led effort to beat back ISIS has actually been. The map released by the Pentagon excludes inconvenient facts in some parts, and obscures them in others.
The Pentagon’s map assessing the so-called Islamic State’s strength has only two categories: territory held by ISIS currently, and territory lost by ISIS since coalition airstrikes began in August 2014. The category that would illustrate American setbacks—where ISIS has actually gained territory since the coalition effort began—is not included….
The map also shows areas where ISIS is “dominant,” as opposed to the terrorist group’s operational reach—the areas where it can inflict violence….
“ISIL’s own doctrine says it must gain and hold territory. This map shows they are not achieving their stated goals,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told The Daily Beast, using the government’s preferred acronym for the terror group.
But Warren seemed to acknowledge that the map isn’t entirely accurate.
The document “was not meant to be a detailed tactical map—it is simply a graphic used to explain the overall situation,” he said.
The entire battlefield of the ISIS war isn’t depicted, however. For some reason, the Pentagon’s ISIS map excludes the entire western side of Syria—which, coincidentally or not, is an area where ISIS has gained a significant foothold since the U.S.-led bombing effort began last year.
Western Syria is also an area dominated by the Syrian regime, led by President Bashar al-Assad. The United States has insisted that Assad must leave office, but has not elucidated a clear strategy for how to compel this to occur.
Jennifer Cafarella, a fellow specializing in Syria at the Institute for the Study of War, said that while the map, as presented, looked accurate, she would “highlight that the map doesn’t extend to include western Syria, where there is growing ISIS presence… the map cuts off, essentially ignoring ISIS in the Syrian-Lebanese border region and Damascus.”
ISIS gains in the area excluded from the Pentagon’s map should be noted, Cafarella continued, because “they are a forward investment for ISIS that will create long-term opportunities for further expansion into zones in which coalition airstrikes are unlikely, at least in the near term, to penetrate..”
Since airstrikes began in August, ISIS has also shown its force on the northeastern suburbs of Damascus, near Qabun. More recently, ISIS made international news through a violent takeover of the area surrounding a Palestinian refugee camp called Yarmouk, which U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has described as “the deepest circle of hell.”…
