Has the WH or NSC Been Briefed at all on al Suri’s Strategy?

Posted on August 6, 2016August 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri DVD Cover: Image Analysis

The image here is a DVD cover of a recording of Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri, a top jihadi strategist. He is described as “min alma‘ mufakkiri al-qa‘ida tamma rasd khamsat malayin dular min qibali al-hukuma al-amrikiyya lil-qabd ‘alayhi” (“one of al-Qa‘ida’s brightest thinkers for whom the American government has offered a sum of 5 million dollar for his capture”). The cover portrays the recording as “jalsa ma‘a shabab bilad al-haramayn; min akhtar ma qila ‘an al-wad‘ fi bilad al-haramayn wa-mustaqbal al-haraka al-jihadiyya” (“a meeting Saudi youth; one of the most interesting accounts of the situation in Saudi Arabia and the future of the jihadi movement”). CTC

Related reading: 4GW, Fourth Generation Warfare

The Strategist: How Abu Mus’ab al-Suri Inspired ISIS

TerrorismWatch: This paper takes a look into the life and work of Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, jihadist theorist, and argues that he should be considered the architect of the extant Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This is done by way of an examination of his own writings, as well as secondary literature on al-Suri, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. A key point that emerges out of this analysis is that ISIS is likely to continue its two-pronged strategy: of individual attacks offshore, and consolidating territory in Iraq and Syria.

1. Introduction

In 1994 a young man of Syrian origin, who had then recently acquired Spanish citizenship, moved with his wife to Neasden, a dreary suburb of London. Neasden is home to immigrants of many nationalities (it has the largest Hindu temple outside of India), so it was not too strange for this young, cash-strapped family to have decided to relocate there from Madrid. The man’s wife – a Spanish-born Moreno – explained to her family that they were relocating to London as her husband had found a job there as an editor for a small newspaper. The young family’s daily life was not that different from other immigrants’ – it was not unheard of in Neasden to be broke and in debt, with a doting wife doing her best to support her bright, ambitious husband through careful house-holding and not infrequent penny-pinching. The life of the Setmariams could have been out of a Maupassant or a Zola story; except it was not.

Fast-forward to 31 October 2005, when Pakistani security forces stormed an Islamist front in Quetta in Balochistan, and arrested the man from Neasden as he waited for iftar with a colleague. That colleague was killed in the operation. The man – Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar, also known as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri and 47 years old – carried a bounty of five million dollars as announced by the US government. In all likelihood, Pakistan transferred the custody of al-Suri to the US Central Intelligence Agency which, in turn, rendered him to Syria where he remains in prison till date.

Al-Suri impressed almost everyone who met him. Peter Bergen, the first western journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden (a meeting facilitated by al-Suri himself) described al-Suri as “intelligent, intense, and well informed and very very serious.” Bergen went on say that he came to “admire his intellect.”[1] The Norwegian counterterrorism expert Brynjar Lia – whose definitive book on al-Suri remains standard reading for counter-Islamist-terrorism analysts – described al-Suri as an autodidact intellectual in the classic mould:

An avid reader, with an encyclopaedic memory, he impressed acquaintances with his knowledge of literature, classical music, history, politics, and the sciences […][2]

Another journalist had described al-Suri as “possess(ing) of a romantic streak and surprised friends by doting on his Spanish-born spouse.”[3] Physically, wrote an AP reporter, he resembled “an Irish pub patron”.

For counterterrorism experts, al-Suri was notorious: he had been suspected of involvement in a number of terrorist attacks in Europe, including the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings, though these charges were never established mostly because he was not tried for the bombings, in the first place. Whether or not he had a hand in those bombings, what had rattled the Americans and their European counterparts was his role as al-Qaeda’s leading strategist, and the extent to which his guidance had influenced that group in general, and Osama bin Laden, in particular. One gauge of his influence is the consistent reference in many academic and popular writings of him as ‘architect’. Cruickshank and Hage Ali, for example, write: “[…] no other individual has done more to conceptualize al-Qaeda’s new strategy after 9/11.”[4] Lawrence Wright, meanwhile, identifies theorists like al-Suri as tutors to a “third generation of mujahideens” – as Al-Suri himself calls them – who, after having fought in Iraq – will “add their expertise to the new cells springing up in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many European nations.”[5]Jason Burke writes:

If al-Awlaki was the propagandist who did most to shape today’s threat against the West, and al-Zawahiri and al-Baghdadi are currently the most influential commanders, then al-Suri is the strategist of greatest relevance.[6]

As Burke indicates, al-Suri’s reach – and the efficacy of his strategy – far exceeds al-Qaeda, and could be seen as laying the foundations of the strategy that has been adopted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Al-Suri’s book, The Global Islamic Resistance Call – key parts of which are excerpted in Lia’s book, and is available on the SITE intelligence website[7] – shows an eerie similarity with the strategic and tactical thinking of ISIS, going beyond al-Suri’s original concept of ‘individual-terrorism jihad’. Indeed, a close reading of al-Suri as an ISIS strategist has been absent in the discourse around the group – perhaps for the simple reason that in the mental framing of many analysts, al-Suri’s name conjures al-Qaeda more than any other group. (A notable exception is a short article in the Atlanticpublished late June this year.[8])

2. Fathers of Mu’sab

The goal of the present paper is to look at al-Suri’s book itself (as a primary source) as well as academic literature on his work, with ISIS’s ideology and modus operandi in mind. To better appreciate the intellectual influence of al-Suri on ISIS, a trace must first be made of actual links between the man and the group.

The story of the evolution of ISIS is beyond the scope of this paper; there is no dearth of literature on the subject. It suffices to say that the present-day ISIS evolved out of the rubble of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and was largely driven by one man: Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi. Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian criminal-turned-terrorist, was influenced by jihadi ideologue Abdullah Azzam’s sermons enough to travel to Afghanistan for jihad against the Soviets in the early 1980s.[9] By 2005, al-Zarqawi was at his peak, leading his al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers. But by January 2006, he had amalgamated his group with other Islamist outfits to form the Mujahideen Shura Council of Iraq[10] which, after his death in a US air-strike in June 2006, morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq – the direct precursor of ISIS as the world knows the group today.

Al-Suri and al-Zarqawi’s paths first crossed in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule. Both controlled semi-independent camps there — al-Suri in Kabul and al-Zarqawi in Herat.[11] Both disdained bin Laden, and insisted on greater autonomy, something bin Laden resisted.[12] (This fissure would become full-blown much later. By October 2015, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor, was directly challenging ISIS and the legitimacy of its self-proclaimed Caliph.[13]) By 2004, the US Central Command in Dubai suspected that al-Suri had joined al-Zarqawi in Iraq, “acting as deputy and mentor”, something al-Suri himself denied.[14]Nevertheless, the links between the two lasted long after the fall of the Taliban: Ameer Azizi, a protégé of al-Suri’s, is suspected to have travelled to Iraq to work with al-Zarqawi. The ideological link between the two was cemented by Jordanian/Palestinian cleric, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, al-Zarqawi’s “foremost spiritual mentor”[15] and who is considered an influence on al-Suri’s own thinking.[16] Al-Maqdisi’s student Turki al-Bin’ali, in turn, is now reputed to be a prominent authority in the Islamic state.[17] Finally, long after al-Suri was incarcerated, the first issue of ISIS’s flagship publication Dabiq indirectly acknowledged al-Suri’s influence on the organisation, by attributing al-Suri’s strategies to al-Zarqawi.[18]

Yet the affinity between the group and the man who influenced it does not end with ideology. As much as one face of al-Suri was that of a theorist, he was capable of great violence himself. Cruickshank and Hage Ali interviewed a former jihadi who knew al-Suri personally. According to this interviewee, al-Suri “personally tracked down and killed individuals” who had deserted his Kabul camp.[19] His exhortation to indiscriminate violence – “Kill wherever and don’t make a distinction between men, women and children” – and anti-Shia stance would all find resonance in later ISIS behaviour. Incidentally, as Burke notes, al-Qaeda had invested significantly in reducing fitna (discord) between Muslims and non-Muslims.[20] ISIS, al-Zarqawi, as well as al-Suri had no problems with the same – a marked departure from al-Qaeda’s stance. This had significant tactical advantages for al-Zarqawi. By opening up the sectarian Shia-Sunni divide, the group had hoped to capitalise on Sunni support. This was also buttressed by growing Shia influence in the post-war Iraq.

3. A Military Theory of ‘Jihad’

Al-Suri’s strategic thought was presented, as noted earlier, in his 1,600-page opus. Analysts who have had access to videotapes of his lectures in jihadist camps in Afghanistan have also discerned a few more themes related to that book’s overall thrust. When it comes to applicability of his thoughts to ISIS’s grand strategy, two key ideas emerge: “Individual-Terrorism Jihad”, and “Open-Front Jihad.” Al-Suri’s strategic theory also suggests a way to structure a jihadist organisation that meshes the two into one functional unit. But it is also important to situate al-Suri’s programme within the larger context of Islamist resistance.

3.1. Syed Qutb: Precursor theorist

Al-Suri started his career as an Islamist extremist under the umbrella of the Syrian Brotherhood. He would eventually have a falling-out with the Brotherhood, as he blamed it for the brutal crackdown under then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad in 1982. Ideologically – and methodologically – the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was extremely close to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Ikhwan. In fact, al-Suri himself noted that his trainer “pledged allegiance to Sheikh Hassan al Bannah […] He accompanied Sayyid Qutb […].”[21]

Al-Banna and Qutb remain prominent ideological figures for both al-Qaeda and ISIS. Jihadi-salafism (commonly referred to as ‘jihadism’) is a mixture of two strains: the ideology of the Ikhwan, led by al-Banna (whose chief theoretician was Sayyid Qutb), and Wahhabism which promotes a version of Sunni exclusivism.[22] Initially these two strains were separate – the Brotherhood Ikhwan “not implacably hostile” towards Shi’ism[23] – but under the ideological influence of the theoretician Qutb – groups (which would serve as forerunners to al-Qaeda and ISIS) arose in the Arab Middle East that were influence by both.[24] Lia notes:

He studied the writings of Sayyid Qutb and Abdallah Azam, both of whom had significant influence on his subsequent development as a jihadi theorist. [emphasis added][25]

It is therefore important to situate al-Suri’s thinking within that of Qutb’s – a full-length work in itself. But even a cursory reading shows continuity and congruence between the two men’s thinking.

Sayyid Qutb’s formative years, 1919 to 1952, included a stay in the United States that was to prove extremely significant in his subsequent radicalisation in prison for almost a decade. The latter was for opposing Nasser and his conception of the Egyptian state – it was in 1952, the year Nasser assumed office, that Qutb developed the fundamental concept of jahilyya.[26] This concept is expansive is nature. Qutb himself defined it – in his influential work, Milestones, for which he was ultimately executed by Nasser[27] – as:

Jahilyyah […] is one man’s lordship over another, and in this respect it is against the system of the universe and brings the involuntary aspect of human life into conflict with its voluntary aspects.[28]

Jahilyyah can be understood as being in a state of ignorance about the need to surrender to God (the literal meaning of the word “Islam.”) This included the Western political-social order, as well as the pre-Islamic pagan society of which Qutb found Nasser’s Egypt to be an example.[29] Qutb and his followers saw Islam as a “complete and total system” which had no need for influence from the outside.[30]

Qutb’s call was to create a group which would “separate itself from jahili society,” and resist it from the outside.[31] This would be the central purpose of jihad. But jihad was to be, for Qutb and other Islamists after him, more that the “defence of the ‘homeland of Islam’” in a geographical sense of the term.[32] The geographical ‘homeland of Islam’ was merely a nerve-centre for the entire faith; the correct interpretation of the phrase ‘defence of the Islamic homeland’ was the “defence of the Islamic beliefs, the Islamic way of life, and the Islamic community.” Ultimately, it was jihad as resistance to obtain “the freedom of man from the servitude to other men” – one of the characteristic features of jahili societies – that was to influence later jihadi-theorists in a marked way, al-Suri included. Such servitude would, by definition, put some individuals above others. These individuals would include lawmakers and other secular authorities, according to Qutb and other theorists. The goal of the Islamist resistance project would be to oppose these individuals as disbelievers. Al-Suri writes:

There is very clear evidence, in the Qur’an and the Sunna, of the faithlessness of those who have given themselves the right to legislate laws in what is forbidden and permissible, and to change the laws, and to confront the sovereignty of God, to become worshipped gods.[33]

Like Qutb before him, al-Suri saw the fall of the Islamic Caliphate in 1924 as a watershed for political Islam – leading to the “catastrophe”[34] of a splintered Islamic state. Reversing this splintering would prove to be a major cause for him and for ISIS.

3.2. “System Not Organization”

The first, and perhaps most important, element of al-Suri’s thinking is that of jihad through Nizam la Tanzim – “System Not Organization.” In his book, al-Suri described his vision of al-Qaeda:

Al-Qaeda is not an organization, it is not a group, nor do we want it to be […] It is a call, a reference, a methodology.[35]

The etymology of the word ‘al-Qaeda’ helps us understand this statement to some extent. Al-Qaeda-al-sulbah “can also mean a precept, rule, principle, maxim, model, or pattern,”[36] other than the commonly-used meaning of “the base” (interpreted in a physical-geographical sense). To understand the strategic import of the statement is to – like al-Suri himself – appreciate that regional-secret-hierarchical tanzims did not fare well post the end of the Cold War and till right after the fall of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. Al-Suri writes:

Throughout the last decade of the 20th century, programs for fighting terrorism were able to disband those organizations security-wise, militarily defeat them, isolate them from their masses [of followers], damage their reputation, dry out their financial resources, make their elements homeless, and put them in a constant state of fear, starvation, and lack of funds and people.[37]

Not all of this was due to western agencies alone. One other factor was the changing geopolitics of the world following the end of the Cold War. As al-Suri explains, when the world was bipolar, one organisation that was proscribed under one pole could find shelter with another.[38] A case in point is the Afghan jihad of the 1980s which was supported by the United States. But local governments were also to be blamed for the fall of the secret-hierarchical tanzims.

For example, Al-Suri blames Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt for putting “an end to all the jihadi organizations in Egypt, one after the other.”[39] Why – according to al-Suri – was this the case? In a lecture in 2000 at the Al Ghuraba training camp in Afghanistan for new al-Qaeda recruits, al-Suri drew the following diagram depicting the structure of these failed tanzims (modified by this author from a sketch in Cruickshank and Hage Ali[40]).

Figure 1: A Schematic Description of a Hierarchical Centralised Structure

In this structure – as depicted in figure 1 – if any one individual (nodes) is arrested or otherwise compromised, the whole network – which is hierarchical, top-down, and centralised – would be compromised. As al-Suri noted: “In case you are caught, they are all caught.”[41] But beyond this tradecraft consideration laid al-Suri’s deep distrust of centralisation of command – which had manifested in his not-infrequent run-ins with bin Laden. The goal of resistance through individual terrorism is not a struggle of the elite, al-Suri wrote.[42] He explained:

The Call is to convoy the idea in succinct and detailed ways in order to enable the youth, who are determined to fight a jihad, to enter this call and form their own Units independently.[43]

What al-Suri is referring to is not the same as what the press calls “lone wolves,” or “leaderless jihad.” Indeed, according to al-Suri, what connects these decentralised units responding to “the Call” to the larger System is an ideological link comprising of (1) a common aim, (2) common name, (3) common doctrinal jihadi program, and (4) a comprehensive educational program. Al-Suri requires his individual terrorists to commit to nothing “other than to believe in the idea, be absolutely certain in his intention, join the Call, and educate himself and those with him according to the Call’s program […].”[44] Tures – in a debunking of the lore of lone-wolf terrorism – writes:

These “lone wolves,” are therefore anything but “lone.” Though the media, government, and even terrorists like ISIS themselves use the term, these new terror recruits are still connected to the group, even if such people do not have face-to-face contact or fly to the Middle East or some domestic compound for training.[45]

Indeed, consider what happened in San Bernardino on 2 December 2015 where a married couple – self-radicalised (or “self-educated,” as al-Suri would have put it) killed 14 people. These were not “lone wolves”; rather, they were following a path al-Suri laid out for them. In other words, ISIS’s claim – that the couple were soldiers of the Caliphate[46] – is literally true if the organisation has taken a leaf out of al-Suri’s individual terrorism strategy. But for the de-centralised form of individual terrorism to be truly successful, al-Suri recognised the need for mass mobilisation. One way to mobilise Muslims, al-Suri suggested at the Al Ghuraba lecture, was to harangue on the “degeneracy of the Western world” with “its sins, gays and lesbians.”[47] [emphasis added] The attack on an Orlando gay nightclub in June this year – the worst mass-shooting in American history – seems to be right out of al-Suri’s Machiavellian playbook. The shooter, Omar Mateen, had pledged bay’at to ISIS.

The conception of nizam la tanzimand “individual-terrorism jihad” stands out in sharp relief to al-Qaeda. While the network structure of that organisation was known, bin Laden – according to many analysts – was seen as “promoting ‘a worldwide, religiously-inspired, professionally guided Islamist insurgency [emphasis added].”[48]Professional guidance for al-Suri for individuals responding to the ‘Resistance Call’ individually is limited in the sense of “education” being the individual’s initiative. However, al-Suri would advocate the spreading of the requisite “legal, political, military and other sciences and knowledge that the Mujahidun need in order to carry out Resistance operations,” without compromising the decentralised structure of the system.[49]Social media would prove handy for ISIS in implementing this tactic.

3.3. “Open-Front Jihad”

Al-Suri did recognise that the ultimate goal for the Islamic Resistance, as he called this putative global jihadi system, was holding physical territory. His conception of al-Qaeda had three key elements: a physical base (one meaning of Qaeda); a leadership; and a global world-view.[50] The importance of the first cannot be underestimated in al-Suri’s world-view: in fact, the “greatest loss,” from the ensuing US invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, “was not the destruction of the terrorist organization but the downfall of the Taliban, which meant that al-Qaeda no longer had a place to train, organize, and recruit.”[51] Al-Suri was categorical on the importance of seizing territory in the ‘Resistance Call,’ which he called the “strategic goal” of the whole enterprise.[52] (His sub-theory of decentralised jihad, in contrast, was a tactical tool.) This is also something he shared with al-Qaeda’s then ‘Number Two’ Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who wrote:

If the successful operations against Islam’s enemies and the severe damage inflicted on them do not serve the ultimate goal of establishing the Muslim nation in the heart of the Islamic world, they will be nothing more than mere nuisance, regardless of their magnitude, that could be absorbed and endured, even if after some time, and with some losses.[53]

Al-Suri imagined that this physical territory that could be controlled by the Islamic resistance system would also serve as a site for “Open-Front Jihad,” where enemies could be drawn in for asymmetric warfare. In fact, he identifies areas in the greater Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa for such activity – preconditions related to geography, population, and political factors.[54] Geography plays a particularly important role in his analysis – the ideal site for Open-Front jihad was to be “spacious in terms of area,” “varied with long borders,” “difficult to siege,” with inhospitable topography, and yet with sufficient resources for human sustenance.[55] But his analysis was not generic in identifying most of the places in this vast area as suitable for Open-Front jihad. In fact, his analysis showed that the vast majority of the 55 states in this area were unsuitable for this kind of activity in not meeting one or more of the preconditions he listed.[56]

He then goes on to identify the “Levant and Iraq,” as an ideal site for Open-Front jihad. “It has all the preconditions for the Open Fronts,” al-Suri writes.[57] His reading of the situation in that area was striking in his analysis – written long before the so-called Arab Spring, the series of protests and uprisings that erupted in the Arab world as 2010 came to an end. He wrote:

The now emerging American occupation has declared its determination to remain on a long-term basis. They also prepare to extend their aggression to Syria in order to control the whole Levant […][58]

In al-Suri’s strategic theory, such a move by the Americans will draw them into an un-winnable conflict where the ‘defenders’ (the putative Islamic resistance) would have tactical as well as strategic advantage. This seems to also be the guiding principle of ISIS. Victory in this asymmetric conflict would lead to:

[…] victory for the Muslims, that [front] will be the centre of an Islamic Emirate, which should be ruled by God’s sharia. It will be a centre and destination for those around it emigrating to fight jihad in the cause of the country.[59]

The extent of ISIS’s intended-Islamic State was mapped in March 2016 by the Financial Times (FT).[60] That map, along with another one drawn up by the Institute for Study of War in July 2016[61] show how remarkably close ISIS’s territory-control/territory-of-influence strategy has been to al-Suri’s geographical prescriptions. At the time of writing this paper, the core ISIS control zone has a filamentary structure which would make it exceedingly difficult to attempt to seize it using ground troops. The control zone is embedded in a support zone that is vast, geographically speaking, and stretches from Fallujah to Mosul (in Iraq), from Mosul to Ayn al-Arab (in Syria), and all the way to Dera on the border of Jordan. Most of the territory controlled by ISIS is also of relatively low-altitude, which makes manoeuvres, and obtaining supplies, relatively easy.

3.4 Organising the ‘Resistance Call’

Al-Suri conceptualises how both the tactical, de-centralised structure of individual jihad and the strategic structure of open-front/territorial jihad mesh in terms of concentric circles. The innermost circle (around the centre who is the putative Caliph) is that of the “centralized unit,” tasked with “guidance, counselling, and calling to jihad,” as well as maintaining military balance in Open-Front areas.[62]Essentially, this is the leadership circle.

The circle of “centralized unit” lies inside the circle of “de-centralized units” of fighters that are permitted to operate like a traditional secret organisation – trained directly, and to be “spread across the world.”[63] Essentially, one may call these the garden-variety ISIS jihadists who travel to Syria or Iraq for training and return to their homelands to carry out attacks when called to do so.

This circle, in turn, is embedded within the final “Da’wah” circle “who participates in the Resistance without any organizational links with the Centre [i.e. Centralized Unit].”[64]This circle has been responsible for most of the recent attacks in the US and Europe. The important point here is that authority radiates outwards from the centre – the Emir or the Caliph – and is managed through the institution of bay’at – the binding allegiance to the figurehead.

Figure 2 depicts al-Suri’s organisational-structure theory. The centralised unit is circle 1, the circle of de-centralised units is 2, and the Da’wah circle is 3, in that figure. Note that the entire structure is governed by the institution of bay’at (depicted by arrow B). Note, also, that as one moves from circles 1 to 3, individuals and units become more geographically dispersed (as depicted by arrow G). While individuals and units in circles 1 and 2 are allowed to communicate with each other and to their adjacent circles (depicted through connecting arrows), such is not the case with the outer circle 3.

How does al-Suri’s organisational structure match the typologies of attackers being advanced in light of the recent terrorist attacks in Europe? Gartenstein-Ross and Barr – in way of debunking the “myth of lone wolf terrorism,” advanced one such typology.[65] In their analysis, there are four kinds of attackers and attacks. In the first kind, attackers are sent by an outfit from abroad to carry out operations. In al-Suri’s jargon, these would be attackers in circle 2. Then there are attackers – in the Gartenstein-Ross and Barr typology – who are in touch with each other virtually, for purposes of coordination. In al-Suri’s structure, these would also be attackers in circle 2 – or between circles 2 and 3. The third category of attackers are ones “who are in contact with a militant group via online communications but do not receive specific instructions about carrying out an attack.” These would be – according to al-Suri – individuals in the Daw’ahcircle 3. Finally, in the Gartenstein-Ross and Barr typology, there are true lone wolves who act completely independently of the ‘parent’ network. This, too would be, according to al-Suri’s theory, individuals in circle 3 – only if they pledge allegiance to the Caliph or the Emir (who is al-Baghdadi, in case of ISIS). The similarity between the Gartenstein-Ross and Barr typology and al-Suri’s theory is remarkable.

Figure 2: A Schematic Description of Al-Suri’s Organisational Theory

4. Al-Suri’s ISIS: The Way Forward

If ISIS indeed operates out of al-Suri’s playbook, what is in store for that organisation?

One would expect to see the frequency of individual jihadistsattack to continue and keep pace, fuelled by self-radicalisation. Al-Suri, as this paper has explained, placed a premium on this tactic. One would also expect ISIS to continue to hold territory even at significant military costs. After all, as al-Suri explains, the whole point of the enterprise of Islamic Resistance is to control territory and establish an Islamic State. Therefore analysts who expect ISIS to completely morph into a de-centralised structure would be well-advised to rethink their assumptions.

Al-Suri had displayed a great interest in weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). A US government assessment of al-Suri puts him as “an expert in the use of poison.”[66] Individual expertise aside, al-Suri is known to have worked quite closely with al-Qaeda’s leading expert on unconventional weapons Abu Khabab al-Masri.[67] Al-Suri himself is said to have written on biological weapons, and has called for the use of WMDs against the US and allies “to reach a strategic decisive outcome.”[68]ISIS has already used chemical weapons in Syria and Iraq, but the real question is whether it would do so outside its own ‘territory’.[69] It is unlikely if most of the attacks outside Syria and Iraq are carried out by individual jihadists in the Daw’ah circle. Therefore the most likely ISIS WMD-use threat lies against American and allied troops in any possible ground invasion.

The most important point with the al-Suri-and-ISIS story is polemical. Blinded by indiscriminate violence, it is easy to conclude that ISIS is a nihilistic group driven by eschatological motives. It is rather more difficult to accept instinctively that there may be a concrete strategic theory behind their actions. But to strive to understand is not the same as to extend empathy. This paper has argued that the foundation of ISIS strategy was provided by one man – Abu Mus’ab al-Suri. Indeed, in order to dissect ISIS strategy, more research is needed about ideologues and theorists like al-Suri – without empathy, for sure, but not without curiosity.

The author thanks the two individuals who served as referees for their useful remarks which helped improve the quality of this paper. He also thanks Ms. Nisha Verma, ORF Librarian, for arranging research material at short notices.

[1] Paul Cruickshank and Mohannad Hage Ali, “Abu Musab Al-Suri: Architect of the New al-Qaeda,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 30 (2007), 5.

[2] Brynjar Lia, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus’ab al-Suri(London: Hurst & Company, 2007), 2.

[3] Craig Whitlock, “Architect of New War on the West,” Washington Post, May 23, 2006.

[4] Cruickshank and Hage Ali, “Abu Musab Al-Suri,” 1.

[5] Lawrence Wright, “The Master Plan: For the New Theorists of Jihad, al-Qaeda is Just the Beginning,” New Yorker, September 11, 2006.

[6] Jason Burke, The New Threat From Islamic Militancy (London: The Bodley Head, 2015), 164.

[7] Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 347-484; “Abu Musab al-Suri’s Military Theory of Jihad,” SITE Intelligence Group, January 15, 2014, https://news.siteintelgroup.com/Articles-Analysis/suri-a-mili.html. This Paper will use the first source as primary material unless noted otherwise.

[8] Kathy Gilsinan, “ISIS: An Organization – and an Idea,” Atlantic, June 26, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/06/tunisia-kuwait-france-isis/396932/.

[9] Burke, The New Threat From Islamic Militancy, 61.

[10] Burke, The New Threat From Islamic Militancy, 69.

[11] Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 267.

[12] Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 268.

[13] Yaseer Okbi and Maariv Hashavua, “ISIS vs. al-Qaida: Zawahiri Says Baghdadi is Not the Leader of the Muslim World,” Jerusalem Post, June 10, 2015, http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/ISIS-Threat/ISIS-vs-al-Qaida-Zawahiri-says-Baghdadi-is-not-the-leader-of-the-Muslim-world-421090.

[14] Cruickshank and Hage Ali, “Abu Musab Al-Suri,” 2.

[15] Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 269.

[16] Joas Wagemakers, The Quietest Jihadist: The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 177.

[17] Bunzel, From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State, 11.

[18] Michael W.S. Ryan, “Dabiq: What Islamic State’s New Magazine Tells Us about Their Strategic Direction, Recruitment Patterns and Guerrilla Doctrine,” The Jamestown Foundation, August 1, 2014, http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=42702&no_cache=1#.V44aCLh97IU.

[19] Cruickshank and Hage Ali, “Abu Musab Al-Suri,” 7.

[20] Burke, The New Threat From Islamic Militancy, 17.

[21] Cruickshank and Hage Ali, “Abu Musab Al Suri,” 3.

[22] Cole Bunzel, From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State, Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World Analysis Paper No. 19 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2015), 7-8.

[23] Bunzel, From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State, 7.

[24] Bunzel, From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State, 9.

[25] Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 85.

[26] Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 28.

[27] Alastair Crooke, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution (New York: Pluto Press, 2009), 75.

[28] Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, originally published in 1964, 2005 web edition from majalla.org.

[29] Bruce Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2008), 17.

[30] Kepel, Jihad, 27.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Sarah E. Zabel, The Military Strategy of Global Jihad, Carlisle Papers in Security Strategy (Carlisle PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2007), 3.

[34]al-Suri, The Military Theory of the Global Islamic Resistance, pages 1355-1404, in Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 370.

[35] Burke, The New Threat From Islamic Militancy, 164.

[36] Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars(London: Allen Lane, 2011), 154.

[37] al-Suri, The Military Theory of the Global Islamic Resistance, pages 1355-1404, in Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 352.

[38]

[39]al-Suri, The Military Theory of the Global Islamic Resistance, pages 1355-1404, in Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 357.

al-Suri, The Military Theory of the Global Islamic Resistance, pages 1355-1404, in Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 353.

[40] Cruickshank and Hage Ali, “Abu Musab Al-Suri,” 8.

[41] Ibid.

[42] al-Suri, The Military Theory of the Global Islamic Resistance, pages 1405-1413, in Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 353.

[43]al-Suri, The Military Theory of the Global Islamic Resistance, pages 1405-1413, in Lia, Architect of Global Jihad, 444-445.

[44] Ibid.

[45]John A. Tures, “The Myth of the Lone-Wolf Terrorist,” Huffington Post, November 14, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/the-myth-of-the-lone-wolf_b_8563886.

[46] Rukmini Callimachi, “Islamic State Says ‘Soldiers of Caliphate’ Attacked in San Bernardino, New York Times, December 5, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/world/middleeast/islamic-state-san-bernardino-massacre.html?_r=0.

Source http://www.orfonline.org/research/the-strategist-how-abu-musab-al-suri-inspired-isis/

Half of Those Remaining at Gitmo are Cleared for Release

Posted on August 2, 2016August 2, 2016 by Denise Simon

There remains a key question to be asked: If those remaining are not a risk or a threat then why has it taken a more than a decade to form this conclusion? Additional questions include how much are we paying other countries to take a detainee as no agreements or conditions have ever been published.

Is this the right time to be doing this? Not so much as noted here:

Key takeaways in this month’s Terror Threat Snapshot include:

– There have been 24 ISIS-linked plots or attacks against Western targets in the first half of 2015, up from 19 in all of last year.

– The number of homegrown terror plots since 9/11 has reached 116, tripling in just the past five years.

– Foreign fighters continue to flow into Syria and Iraq. There has been an 80 percent increase in fighters traveling to the conflict zone since ISIS declared its “caliphate” one year ago.

– More than 200 Americans are believed to have traveled—or attempted to travel—to fight in Syria, a 33 percent increase overall since the beginning of this year.

The full report is here.

Half of Guantánamo’s uncharged captives are OK’d to go

Musab Omar Ali al Madhwani in a photo from his 2008 prison profile provided to McClatchy by WikiLeaks.

McClatchy: The Guantánamo parole board on Monday said it had cleared a Yemeni captive for release to resettlement outside his homeland, reaching a milestone:

Now, 33 of the last 76 captives at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba can go to nations providing security assurances that satisfy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Ten captives are charged with war crimes. So half of those long-held, uncharged detainees are now approved to go.

The figure could rise. Seventeen captives not currently facing charges await their parole board hearings, or decisions from them.

Musab Omar Ali al Madhwani, 36, “never held extremist views or any desire to harm Americans,” his U.S. military advocate told the Periodic Review Board on June 28. “I am confident Musab is honest in his intentions after Guantánamo” to pursue a career as an accountant, marry and have children.

Pakistani security forces captured him on Sept. 11, 2002, in a day of raids in Karachi, according to his 2008 prison profile, parts of which an updated assessment discredited. He arrived at Guantánamo on Oct. 28, 2002, after 30 or more days in CIA custody, according to a portion of the so-called Senate Torture Report on the spy agency’s secret prison network.

At Guantánamo, U.S. military intelligence dubbed him a member of the “Karachi Six,” calling him part of a six-member “al-Qaida operational cell intended to support a future attack” in the Pakistani port city, the country’s largest and most populous.

The decision released Monday by the board, however, noted that by March he had been “reassessed to be that of a low-level fighter” who was probably trying to get home to Yemen when he was arrested. The board said he should be resettled in a third country with “reintegration support” and security assurances.

His lawyer, Patricia Bronte, told the board that her client had grown at Guantánamo into someone she would welcome into her family home. She and two other no-charge defense lawyers who had represented him vowed to attend his wedding “regardless of where it takes place,” she said.

“Musab is no longer the shy, gullible youth whom two men convinced to run away from home and go to Afghanistan,” she said. Once, she added, he was “afraid of being alone in the dark.” Now, “he reaches out to calm his brothers’ fears and resolve their disputes.”

Madhwani was one of two Yemeni clients for whom Bronte bought socks and shoes last year after she noticed the men’s footwear looked scruffy. She said she didn’t mind the expense, but was disturbed by what appeared to be prison camp cost-cutting. The spokesman at the time called reports of shortages at the Most Expensive Prison on Earth “baseless”

*****

MIAMI (AP) — A review board has decided that a Saudi prisoner at Guantanamo Bay who attended flight school in the U.S. and was trained to make explosives by al-Qaida should continue to be held without charge.

The Periodic Review Board said in a decision released Friday that Ghassan Abdallah al-Sharbi should remain in custody at the U.S. base in Cuba because he remains a security threat.

Factors cited by the board include what it said was his past involvement in terrorism as well as “hostile behavior” while detained, including organizing confrontations between detainees and the guard force at the detention center.

A short statement added that “the board considered the detainee’s prior statements expressing support for attacking the United States, and the detainee’s refusal to discuss his plans for the future.”

The 41-year-old al-Sharbi attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, and later went to a U.S. flight school, where he “associated with” two of the hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, according to a profile released by the Pentagon before his review board hearing in June.

Authorities said he later received training by al-Qaida in the manufacture of improvised explosive devices and was captured in a raid on a terrorist safe house in Pakistan in 2002.

He faced charges that included providing material support for terrorism before the military commission at the base. But U.S. courts have ruled that material support at the time of the alleged offenses did not constitute a war crime that could be prosecuted at Guantanamo and the case was withdrawn. He cannot be tried in civilian court because Congress has prohibited the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. for any reason, including prosecution.

Al-Sharbi is one of 76 prisoners held at Guantanamo, including 32 who have been approved for release and are awaiting transfer.

Refugees Have Temporary Status in U.S. but not under DHS

Posted on August 2, 2016August 2, 2016 by Denise Simon

The United States has been taking in refugees, migrants and asylees from Latin America and several dozen countries for decades. This is supposed to be a temporary condition but the truth is it has never been temporary.

Image result for manbij

Now with 45 million people from just 2015 displaced from their home countries around the world, there is a crisis that is hard to define much less solve. The United Nations is the lead organization that is under pressure to find solutions and world leaders are not in any kind of collective agreement. Meanwhile, there are people, mostly innocent that are suffering. This is a historical time, one that was in fact not only predictable but solvable if civil war, conflicts and terrorism was addressed long before it manifested.

At issue is the total cost of war where there is no end in sight but more, the cost of creating a viable and living long term solution for migrants to include education, healthcare, law enforcement, jobs, entitlements to list a few. No country is monetarily prepared for the future costs many yet to be known, studied or funded.

The United States had every opportunity in 2011 to launch humanitarian action missions to offset refugee conditions especially as Islamic State was born, and predicted to become a global terror operation directly after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. He is the original father of Islamic State…al Qaeda in Iraq.

Image result for zarqawi

As a result of the long war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, the complete damage to cities and towns where normal infrastructure has been destroyed, there is no viable location to go back to. There are no schools, hospitals, roads, buildings and commerce has stopped except for black markets and smuggling. Further, no countries are stepping up with funds to help rebuild or as many call it, nation building.

In summary, refugees are in fact a new permanent status for wherever they are located, including the United States.

Consequently, the United Nations is chartered with drafting a global solution with world leaders.

The first cut a the draft is found here.

In part from the NewYorkTimes: Refugees and migrants will be the biggest issue at the gathering of world leaders at the United Nations next month. President Obama plans to lead a meeting at the General Assembly in an effort to nudge countries to take in more refugees and contribute to countries that have taken them in for years.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, also plans to hold a meeting on the plight of refugees and migrants. The document under negotiation will be the centerpiece of his meeting.

While the draft text has no force of international law, every sentence has been argued and negotiated. The resulting language is sometimes so vague that it is likely to bring little comfort to the millions of men, women and children who are seeking safety and opportunity abroad.

Eritrea, for instance, recently complained that the many references to human rights in the document were “redundant.” (A United Nations committee earlier this year accused Eritrea of atrocities against its own citizens.)

Russia resisted a sentence that called for countries to share in the “burden” of taking in refugees. (Russia takes in very few, except lately, from parts of Ukraine.)

The United States suggested a phrase asserting that detention is “seldom” good for children. Activists for immigrants and refugees found that suggestion so appalling that they fired off a letter on Friday to President Obama. They argued that any international agreement should make clear that detention is “never in the best interests of children” and should commit to ending the practice. (The United States detains children who arrive from Mexico without legal papers.)

Amnesty International said in a statement over the weekend that “with some states trying to dilute the agreement to suit their own political agendas, we may end up with tentative half-measures that merely reinforce the status quo or even weaken existing protection.”

According to the United Nations, 24 million people worldwide left their home countries because of war or persecution in 2015. More than ten times that number — 244 million — were considered migrants, living somewhere other than the country of their birth.

This draft agreement sets out a long list of principles, most already enshrined in existing laws. It says refugees deserve protection and should not be sent back to places where they could face war or persecution. It urges countries to allow refugees to work and to let their children attend school, though it stops short of saying refugees have a right to either jobs or schools.

It asserts that migration can be good for the world, which is wording that migrant-sending countries wanted. It also calls for countries to take back their citizens if they travel illegally and fail to get asylum, which is what migrant-receiving countries, especially in Europe, wanted.

An early draft had proposed a global compact to allocate where refugees could be permanently resettled, but that proposal failed. African and Latin American countries wanted to know why the compact was on refugees alone, according to diplomats involved in the negotiations. Why not also have a compact on the rights of migrants, they asked.

The latest draft sets a 2018 deadline for two compacts — one for refugees, a second for migrants.

The draft text also says nothing about the rights of the 40 million people who are displaced in their own countries, or about those who are leaving their homes because of climate change.

Obama: 16 Years of Progressivism, the Cover for Hillary

Posted on July 29, 2016July 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

Things are never as they seem or as the rumors are told. It was never going to be a Biden Warren ticket according to Barack Obama, and the machinery is working that it wont be Trump Pence either. While there was a real hate and fractured relationship between Obama and Hillary, socialism, justice, rights and progressivism transcends relationships, hence the reason Bernie Sanders moved Hillary more to the left.

Below is quite a read and provides deep in sight into the operatives for which the Republicans may not be fully ready to combat. It is war, but a war that has millions of moving parts and thousands of people. This is actually terrifying and should be for the sake of voters and the future of America.

The summary below explains the FBI/DoJ decision on the email-server investigation, doesn’t it?

Stripes/CNN

Party of Two

Politico: How Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (with help from Elizabeth Warren) are trying to save the Democratic establishment.

Joe Biden wouldn’t take the hint, and Barack Obama wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer.

It was the fall of 2015, Donald Trump was rocketing up in the polls, Hillary Clinton was already wilting, and there was Obama’s vice president, occupying national center stage in an awkward public display of grief and political vacillation. Biden’s son Beau had died at age 46 that May, and the vice president was coping, it seemed, by throwing himself into a very open exploration of running against Clinton.

To Obama, this was a big, unwelcome problem. He had picked Biden for the ticket back in ’08 because he didn’t want him to run for president again, and besides, he honestly believed Biden would be crushed by a defeat he viewed as inevitable.

Still, this wasn’t personal for the president; it was business. Protecting his vulnerable accomplishments from the GOP wrecking ball and safeguarding his legacy have always been top priorities for Obama, and he had told friends as early as late 2014 that Clinton, for all her flaws, was “the only one” fit to succeed him. If Biden had come to him six months earlier—who knows? But it was much too late, and time to push Biden toward a graceful exit.

The choice was long understood by the president’s confidants. “My supposition always was that when the smoke cleared, he would be for Hillary,” David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign message guru and former White House adviser, told me. “It was just in the air, assumed.” Another former top Obama aide added, “After the 2014 midterms, when he could sense the end … it was like, ‘Who gives me the best chance to win?’”

One of the most important if hidden story lines of 2016 has been Obama’s effort to shape a race he’s not running in an anti-establishment environment he can no longer control. Over the past two years, he has worked quietly but inexorably on Clinton’s behalf, never mind the not-so-convincing line that he was waiting for the Democratic electorate to work its will. He has offered his former rival strategic advice, shared his top talent with her, bucked her up with cheery phone chats after her losses, even dispatched his top political adviser to calm the Clintons during their not-infrequent freakouts over the performance of their staff, according to one of the two dozen Democrats I interviewed for this story.

The one thing he wouldn’t do was endorse her before she cleared the field. And once, when things were darkest after Clinton’s devastating defeat to Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, Clinton’s staff urged him to break his pledge and rescue her—but his team refused, a senior Democrat told me.

Clinton’s view of Obama is more conflicted, people close to both politicians told me. She has repeatedly said, “I’m not running for Obama’s third term,” while taking pains to emphasize their differences on issues such as free trade and Syria. And she started the campaign committed to earning the nomination without his overt help.

But Clinton has been pulled closer to the president out of mutual self-interest and circumstance as the long primary season has worn on: Both Sanders’ unexpected success and Obama’s 80 percent-plus approval ratings with registered Democrats have forced the former secretary of state into a tighter embrace than she anticipated. Indeed, her campaign’s internal polling showed that one of the most effective attack lines against the socialist from Vermont was his 2011 remark that Obama’s moderate governing record was “weak” and a “disappointment” to progressives.

Clinton and Obama have something else in common: They both failed to anticipate seriously the rise of Trump. Early on, they were looking out for challenges from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Sanders on the left, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio as the most dangerous Republican in the field. But Trump’s ascent has only increased the urgency of the president’s last White House mission. “Mr. Trump will not be president,” Obama declared flatly back in February.

Obama’s ultimate goal in his final year has been strikingly ambitious, according to those I spoke with: not only blocking from office the birther who questioned his legitimacy as president, but preserving the Democratic Party’s hold over the presidency during an era of anti-establishment turbulence. Obama, always one to embrace a grand goal, talks in terms of creating “a 16-year era of progressive rule” to rival the achievements of Roosevelt-Truman and to reorient the country’s politics as a “Reagan of the left,” as one of his longtime White House advisers put it to me.

Which is why Obama first needed to stop Biden, and without seeming like he was trying to. As much as Obama loved him, Biden didn’t fit into the plan—especially when polls showed he would enter the race against Clinton with 20 percent of the Democratic vote.

So for most of last summer, Obama emphasized Biden’s weaknesses, gently jousting with him at their weekly lunches. He dispatched his de facto political director, Dave Simas, to Biden’s office to deliver a steady diet of polls showing a steep uphill climb, while a former Obama communications adviser presented Biden a plan that showed how tough it would be to attack Clinton, a woman Biden had previously praised in over-the-top terms. The most influential naysayer from the presidential orbit was David Plouffe, the disciplined brand manager and architect of Obama’s two White House campaign victories who remains Obama’s political emissary despite his day job on the board at Uber.

Eventually, Obama toughened his tone, telling Biden in a meeting that it was simply too late to run, a former White House aide told me.

But by the end of September, Biden still hadn’t gotten the message (though my sources insist he already was leaning toward no, at the advice of his still-grieving family), and Obama was getting itchy. Plouffe stepped up the pressure on his fellow Delawarean after months of gingerly trying but not succeeding to get Biden to step aside gently.

“Mr. Vice President, you have had a remarkable career, and it would be wrong to see it end in some hotel room in Iowa with you finishing third behind Bernie Sanders,” he said, according to a senior Democratic official briefed on the effort to ease Biden out of the race.

When Biden finally did tell Obama he wasn’t running, on the morning of October 21, the president comforted his veep—then sprinted into action like a man liberated. Within minutes, Obama ordered up a Rose Garden announcement—that same day. Although Obama saw it as a generous way to give his friend a chance to bow out on his own terms, several former White House staffers told me it also reflected Obama’s jitters; he wanted to lock in the decision before Biden had a chance to change his mind.

And with that, Obama and Clinton, rivals-turned-colleagues who had spent eight years perfecting the art of insider deals, assumed they had cleared their biggest hurdle in the Democratic primaries. But this was the 2016 election. Nothing would be easy.

In hindsight, of course, Biden’s departure didn’t end the threat to Clinton’s candidacy; it opened the way for a more disciplined and dangerous outsider to challenge her, a challenge made all the harder to recognize given that it came in the guise of a comically disheveled Vermont independent.

Biden himself signaled the problem at that awkward Rose Garden ceremony, sounding the very populist refrain that would soon bolster Sanders and rattle the best-laid plans of Obama and Clinton. Reflecting a party whose base has been racing left much faster than either the president or his designated successor had realized, Biden used his improvised speech that day—squinting into a low autumn sun as the boss stood nearby, arms folded—for a blunt discussion of all the progressive goals his boss had not achieved, calling for a reorientation of the party toward a simpler message of economic fairness. “We can’t sustain the current levels of economic inequality,” he said. “The political elite … the next president is going to have to take it on.”

A few blocks away, two unassuming barbarians at the gates were sitting in a bar across from the old Washington Post, after being stood up by a pair of reporters who had been diverted to the Biden announcement. Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver and strategist Tad Devine gnawed their sandwiches and watched Biden on a flat-screen TV above the liquor bottles, astonished as he hit virtually every element of their own insurgent platform: free public college tuition, a nonpartisan pitch to independents and blue-collar Republicans, a call for purging big money from politics.

“Holy shit,” Devine said. “That’s our message. That’s what we’re running on.”

Everyone seemed to get it. Except Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

***

As intuitive as their alliance now seems, there is simply no modern precedent for the 2016 Obama-Clinton political partnership. In the words of one staffer in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, the pairing represents “the historic merger of two historic candidates.”

Americans really don’t like dynastic politics, or the perception that the presidency can be handed off between cronies like a borrowed lawn mower. Just ask Jeb Bush, who learned the hard way that there wasn’t much of a White House market for a third member of his family. The popular perception that the vice presidency (or a top Cabinet position, for that matter) is a steppingstone to the big job is also myth demolished by fact.

Over the past 50 years, two-term presidents have routinely endorsed their vice presidents, and it’s been a mess. Dwight Eisenhower was deeply skeptical of Richard Nixon’s executive judgment and he demurred from issuing a formal endorsement even after Nixon had cleared the field in early 1960. Ike felt no great obligation to rush his decision, and Nixon, a magnet for slights and political side-eye, was bitter, as was his wont, until interred. “If you give me a week, I might think of something,” was the president’s answer when asked to tick off his vice president’s accomplishments. Eisenhower bit his lip and in March 1960 finally offered a stiff endorsement of his party’s nominee.

George H.W. Bush succeeded in winning the White House where other veeps had flopped, and like Clinton, he did so in part by incorporating key elements of his predecessor’s political team. But his relationship with Ronald Reagan was never especially close—Bush had savaged the boss’ tax-cut plan as “voodoo economics” in 1980—and by 1988, the Gipper was diminished politically after the humiliating Iran-Contra scandal and physically fading. Reagan’s endorsement in May, after Bush dispatched televangelist Pat Robertson in a sluggish primary, came almost as an afterthought during a fundraiser for Hill Republicans.

“I’m going to work as hard as I can to make Vice President George Bush the next president of the United States,” Reagan intoned. The Times noted that Reagan had somehow managed to mispronounce his understudy’s name, “as if it rhymed with ‘rush.’”

Bill Clinton, who vanquished Bush after just one term in 1992, was the only recent president emotionally and politically invested in electing his vice president, but Al Gore, fearing a backlash against Clinton’s sex scandals and keen on asserting his independence, famously snubbed the happy warrior’s offer to barnstorm in battleground states on his behalf. Many of the Democratic staffers who worked that campaign (including Tad Devine) believe Gore might have prevailed in the Electoral College had he embraced the boss—whose popularity ratings were a stratospheric 70 percent, post-impeachment.

Clinton, deeply hurt, has never entirely forgiven Gore, and later told his biographer Taylor Branch that Gore was living in “Neverland” to think he’d be a liability. When the two families appeared onstage together during an awkward endorsement event in August 2000, President Clinton had to pull Hillary into the frame with the Gores, the first lady looking less than thrilled amid the blizzard of confetti. She never forgot that moment, and has told people around her, time and again, that she didn’t intend to repeat Gore’s sin of pride. (The ambivalence is apparently mutual. As of mid-July, Gore was perhaps the only major Democratic figure yet to endorse Clinton.)

By comparison, her relationship with Obama has strengthened over the years, sealed by their shared White House experiences, like the tense deliberations over the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and Obama’s 2012 reelection, when Bill Clinton cast aside his resentments to deliver the capstone nomination speech in Charlotte, North Carolina.

They still make an unlikely pair, so friendly today that it’s hard sometimes to remember their 2008 primary campaign was one of the longest and most competitive in Democratic history, and that both sides accused the other of dirty tricks. The tone was set early when a prominent Clinton supporter in New Hampshire questioned whether Obama had really stopped using drugs at the young age he claimed in his memoir. When Clinton approached the then-Illinois senator on the tarmac of a D.C. airport to say she had nothing to do with the attack, Obama angrily accused her of planting stories about him in the press—including the claim that he was secretly a Muslim—and what previously had been a frosty détente devolved into a shouting match.

Clinton’s millions of primary votes, celebrated in her career-defining “Glass Ceiling” speech when she dropped out of the race in 2008, and her canny team-player approach as secretary of state secured her future leverage with Obama. Still, the early going was rough as Clinton pushed to carve out her own empire within the administration. The West Wing even tried to blackball two of her closest aides—communications adviser Philippe Reines and Capricia Marshall, a Clinton confidante tapped as director of protocol—until the secretary’s top aide, Cheryl Mills, personally wrangled a deal with Obama fixer and future White House chief of staff Denis McDonough.

Those battles seem like ancient history now. But Obama’s people still tend to have a Barack-first sense of loyalty. (One high-ranking current Clinton aide keeps a life-sized cardboard cutout of the 44th president in his office as a talisman.) And the old Hillaryland crewmembers (Mills, Marshall, Huma Abedin) remain ferociously pro-Hillary.

Over the years, the two staffs have inevitably melded into something the Republicans envy, though: a core team of 100 or so professionals who form the functioning heart of the national Democratic Party, working mostly in harness—a product of eight years in power and three campaigns’ worth of collaboration. These days, the big worry isn’t about division but excessive togetherness, a blurring of the lines between the presidency and the campaign (duly noted by the White House counsel’s office, which churns out advisories defining legal protocols for communication and coordination in keeping with the Hatch Act).

But it’s hard to police all the checkpoints, especially when friends on both sides are kibitzing in a bar or at a birthday party. And almost all the key players in Clinton’s Brooklyn high command have served time in both camps. John Podesta, the campaign chairman, was Bill Clinton’s last White House chief of staff, informally advised Hillary Clinton in 2008 and headed back to the White House in 2013 as Obama’s senior in-house strategist—with the caveat that he would hop back over to the Clintons the minute they set up the campaign. Campaign communications director Jen Palmieri, a former Podesta deputy, held the same job in the Obama White House. Clinton’s top strategist Joel Benenson was Obama’s pollster—and Clinton ad-maker Jim Margolis was part of Obama’s Chicago mafia.

Sometimes, it seems like family tree software would be useful: Take Brian Fallon, Clinton’s press secretary, who worked as Attorney General Eric Holder’s flack before joining the campaign, is married to Obama’s former legislative affairs director and interacts frequently with his West Wing counterpart Eric Schultz, a Clinton alum who preceded Fallon on Chuck Schumer’s Senate communications staff.

***

Planning for the campaign began in mid-2014, when Cheryl Mills began reaching out to potential Clinton staffers in the West Wing, while Clinton’s State Department aide-de-camp Jake Sullivan began putting together a compendium of policy options for the wonky would-be candidate.

A parallel effort to gear up for 2016 was emerging in the White House. Three years after eliminating his scandal-prone political office, Obama essentially reconstituted it under a new name and tapped a chipper veteran campaign organizer, Simas, to act as his point of contact with the campaigns.

The most important early meeting, in terms of both symbolism and synergy, was in late 2014, when Plouffe, acting with Obama’s blessing (and a mandate to report back), sat down with Clinton in her Washington mansion to map out his vision of her campaign.

Plouffe, a low-key, data-obsessed strategist who made his name as the architect of Obama’s two campaigns, had been one of the last anti-Clinton holdouts in 2008, and he was also the party’s most-respected electoral engineer. He was dispatched with Obama’s explicit intention to help “stand up” Clinton’s effort, according to a person involved in the planning. But he took to the Clinton cause with the zeal of the converted and would emerge over the following 18 months as a surprisingly hands-on campaign operative, coaching Clinton’s young staff during free time.

“Plouffe is everywhere. You can’t see him, but he’s everywhere,” a Clinton aide told me during the Iowa caucuses this winter.

At that first meeting with Clinton, Plouffe laid out a set of imperatives to deal with the shortcomings of her ’08 effort: She needed to assemble a first-rate analytics, targeting and data team; limit the freakouts and impulsive personnel changes; and hire (as well as empower) a steady, technically proficient campaign manager. He threw his support behind the leading candidate, a thirtysomething party stalwart named Robby Mook, who had run Terry McAuliffe’s successful campaign for Virginia governor. Clinton was already sold on a lower-drama campaign (even if she didn’t always practice what she preached).

But if her campaign organization started out on a more solid footing than in 2008, there remained a political problem on Clinton’s left that neither she nor her White House friends fully grasped. They didn’t anticipate the populist uprising that hit both parties, and missed the Sanders revolution until it was nearly too late, in part because they were so focused on eliminating what they saw as a far more dangerous threat on the left, Elizabeth Warren.

The 67-year-old former Harvard professor had long maintained that she wasn’t running, but no one in Brooklyn or the White House quite believed her. That concern spiked to panic in October, when Clinton lavishly praised Warren at a campaign event—“I love watching Elizabeth give it to those who deserve to get it”—only to get a cold shoulder from the senator, who barely acknowledged her presence.

So as Obama’s team was jockeying behind the scenes to maneuver Biden to the sidelines, Clinton’s aides were desperately doing all they could to keep Warren happy and prevent her from joining forces with Sanders.

Luckily for Clinton, Warren resisted Sanders’ entreaties, for months telling the senator and his staff she hadn’t made up her mind about which candidate she would support. For all her credibility on the left, Warren is more interested in influencing the granular Washington decisions of policymaking and presidential personnel—and in power politics. Warren’s favored modus operandi: leveraging her outsider popularity to gain influence on the issues she cares about, namely income inequality and financial services reform.

“Elizabeth is all about leverage, and she used it,” a top Warren ally told me. “The main thing, you know, is that she always thought Hillary was going to be the nominee, so that was where the leverage was.”

Warren, several people in her orbit say, never really came close to endorsing the man many progressives consider to be her ideological soulmate. She made a point of meeting with Sanders to hear his pitch and continued checking in. But she prioritized opening a channel to Clinton on policy. Warren’s personal relationship with Clinton was originally frosty (she was irked by Clinton’s support for a bankruptcy bill more than a decade earlier). And while the pair have never developed an easy rapport, they did develop a working relationship, thanks in part to their mutual friendship with a shared consultant, longtime Clinton hand Mandy Grunwald. In early 2015, Warren sent a major signal that she would ultimately endorse Clinton, telling a senior campaign aide, “I’m getting a lot of pressure to endorse Bernie, but I’m not going to do it.”

Clinton made it clear through those back channels that she planned to move in Warren’s direction on several key issues. Her first step: consulting Warren on a bill she had sponsored jointly with liberal Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin that would prevent private-sector executives from receiving big bonuses before heading into government service. Clinton endorsed the measure months later than Sanders did, but Warren told a friend that she was satisfied with Clinton’s “progress” on the issue and hoped to keep pulling her in the right direction.

Here was a textbook example of Warren’s chess-game approach: The bill, which never had a chance of passing the GOP-controlled Senate, was partly intended to handcuff Clinton if she was elected, weeding out many top finance executives who demanded big payouts before entering the public sector.

Warren made her agenda plain to Clinton when she earned her own tea-and-tactics invitation to Clinton’s Washington home in December 2014—a stilted meeting that left Clinton annoyed and put upon, according to one top Democrat. Warren was in a feisty frame of mind, and had just announced her opposition to the appointment of Lazard banker Antonio Weiss to a top Treasury post. West Wing staffers were infuriated by her decision, but Clinton, differentiating herself from Obama’s team, was more receptive. And when Warren pointedly pressed Clinton not to appoint Wall Street-friendly officials, Clinton didn’t appreciate the full-court press, but she signaled her general agreement, according to a person in Clinton’s inner circle. It was hardly a coincidence that, that spring, she named a key Warren ally, Gary Gensler, a former federal regulator loved by the left for his clashes with Obama’s Treasury Department, as her campaign’s chief financial officer.

None of this was quite enough to push Warren into an early endorsement. Support for that position came from an unexpected quarter: In an early 2015 conversation, Biden counseled the Massachusetts senator to hold off on endorsing Clinton until after the primary, according to a Democrat briefed on the interaction.

Ultimately, it was Donald Trump who brought the two women politicians closer together. Warren (“Pocahontas” in Trump-speak) detests the GOP candidate on a deeply personal level as a racist and sexist. And even though she harbored doubts about Clinton’s ideology, Warren viewed the former secretary of state as a fighter, and opined to friends that Clinton would make a tougher-minded negotiator on all kinds of deals than the comparatively easygoing Obama.

By late spring, Warren and Clinton were talking on the phone from time to time, lamenting the timidity of Democrats still reluctant to bash Trump and agreeing on the gut-punch approach Warren would soon use in a series of Facebook posts that garnered millions of views. (Clinton and her team were especially tickled by Warren’s description of the GOP nominee as “a small, insecure moneygrubber who doesn’t care about anyone or anything that doesn’t have the Trump name splashed all over it,” I was told.)

Warren’s effectiveness as a punch-thrower played a critical role in the Clinton campaign’s late-May pivot away from fighting Sanders to taking on Trump directly. Warren wasn’t initially a serious candidate for a vice-presidential slot, people close to Clinton told me. But her late-in-the-game performance has changed that, and she warmed to the idea after initially viewing it as just another leveraging tool, according to senior Democrats.

Mutual self-interest as much as anything dictated it. Clinton admired Obama’s team, but she was still convinced that in 2008 he had benefited from unfair advantages like a cheerleading press and undemocratic small-state caucus system that slighted her strength among big-state Democrats. “It was important for her to do this on her own,” one top 2008 Clinton adviser told me.

But the president’s team had little doubt on substance—even if timing was an issue. Plouffe, in particular, was determined to preserve the tarnished ’08 hope-and-change brand, and he and Obama shared the opinion that Sanders simply didn’t have the bandwidth or willingness to compromise his job required. (When I asked Obama in January whether the 74-year-old senator reminded him of himself in 2008, the president quickly shot me down: “I don’t think that’s true”).

Still, Sanders’ direct call for a revolution had chastened Obama, and he was intent on keeping to the no-endorsement deal. Clinton’s team had no problem with that—until her lackluster Iowa and New Hampshire performances, which induced a collective anxiety attack among some of her team in Brooklyn.

In mid-February, three officials with direct knowledge told me, Podesta approached Plouffe and McDonough to float an idea: If Clinton somehow managed to lose the upcoming Nevada caucuses, which had been unthinkable weeks earlier, would Obama offer his endorsement to stop Sanders’ momentum? It was clearly an act of desperation—“a break-glass and push-the-panic-button moment,” in the words of a Democrat close to the situation—and Obama’s team quickly vetoed it. Plouffe said the endorsement wouldn’t help—in fact, he said, it would be “counterproductive”—prompting a backlash that would swamp both the president and his chosen successor. Podesta, a four-decade veteran of campaigns and White Houses, wasn’t pleased, but he conceded the point; it’s not clear if Clinton or Obama even knew about the idea at the time, several aides told me.

The question turned out to be moot; Clinton won a 5-point victory in Nevada and established a pattern of solid performances in diverse big states (with Sanders winning in mostly white states, caucuses and open primaries where independents could vote).

The White House did have a counter-offer: Obama would consider making an early announcement if Clinton wrapped things up during the March 15 primaries. But that deal died when Sanders won Michigan unexpectedly on March 8, upending the race.

***

As clear-eyed as Obama has been about Clinton, some campaign-season friction has been inevitable. The arrangement is inherently schizophrenic: Clinton’s team wants Obama’s support when they need it most, while demanding the latitude to break with him whenever they need to get out of a political corner. On some issues, it hasn’t mattered much. Sources told me Obama waved off Clinton’s more hawkish stance on intervention in Syria (she has suggested supporting a no-fly zone, something he has rejected), and that he didn’t much mind when she vowed in Iowa last October to “go beyond President Obama” in pursuing immigration reform.

But he’s been deeply frustrated by her machinations on free trade, an issue he views as the final big-ticket legislative priority of his presidency. And he expressed anger over Clinton’s tortured decision to reverse her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. At the time, he told one visitor to the Oval Office that he viewed it not only as bad policy but “bad politics,” because it would reinforce the impression, pushed by Sanders, that Clinton was an opportunistic flip-flopper.

The flashpoint came in June 2015, when Clinton told Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston that she would have voted against “fast-track” authority for the trade deal—the very procedural tool Obama was hoping to use to hammer through the deal against a growing populist backlash. Obama’s complaint was that Clinton, who was speaking off the cuff, hadn’t given him a heads-up before trumpeting such a major break with him on policy. The president was furious and—as polite principals do when they don’t want to berate other principals directly—he transmitted his displeasure to McDonough for broadcast to Hillaryland. The man tasked with blunting that anger was none other than Podesta, McDonough’s longtime jogging partner, the man who had hired him at the liberal Center for American Progress and McDonough’s tutor in the use of executive power in the West Wing.

Still, Obama and his team kept their eyes on the bigger prize—Clinton’s election—and sweated right alongside her team when she swooned in January and February. Obama, who boasted about not watching the debates to stick with TV hoops, never lost confidence in Clinton. But no one better knew her weaknesses, and he watched Sanders’ rise with alarm and a tinge of admiration for the septuagenarian’s out-of-nowhere challenge to the system. The shocker came in late January, one senior Democrat told me, when Simas offered him a readout of internal Democratic polling showing Clinton in serious trouble. “She could actually lose this thing,” Simas said.

There wasn’t a lot the White House could do at that point. But Plouffe, acting in his dual role as an Obama operative and shadow strategist, developed a close mentoring relationship with Mook, whom he viewed as a clear-headed team builder. During the Iowa caucuses, Plouffe, who had helped implement Obama’s innovative voter targeting there, was talking to Mook several times a day, offering tactical advice and encouragement, according to people close to the campaign. And he counseled his protégé to make what would turn out to be one of the campaign’s best hires: Obama veteran Jeff Berman to quarterback Clinton’s delegate operation.

Plouffe wasn’t the only one working the phones. Obama, according to aides, also dialed through to Clinton on several occasions to offer encouragement and a little heartfelt if obvious advice. “Loosen up and be yourself,” he told her during one long post-New Hampshire call, counseling Clinton to ditch the laundry-list speeches and mix in “some poetry with the prose,” in the words of one aide.

***

If Obama’s early commitment to Clinton had any downside, it was the sense of inevitability, of complacency, that it fostered, the notion that anybody could control a process that was rapidly being taken over by outsiders and insurgents. “We caught them flat-footed,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told me.

And it was true: Both Clintons had initially dismissed Sanders’ candidacy as a long shot. “He’s a socialist!” she had said incredulously when someone in late 2015 suggested that Sanders’ message was taking root. And while Clinton herself would point the finger at her pollsters and consultants for failing to anticipate his rise until last December, the fault ultimately lay with a candidate who later told me she preferred to deliver long, policy-packed speeches to pithier calls to battle.

Sanders, who vaulted from less than 3 percent in national polls in early 2015 to a dead-heat by April 2016, turned out to be Clinton’s equal in debates, exposing all the flaws that had dogged Clinton as a candidate eight years earlier—the wooden delivery, the deliberative poll-tested position papers, the focus on incremental progress—when her opponent was electrifying crowds with promises of seismic (if hard-to-implement) change.

But the key thing both Obama and Clinton missed was that responsible liberal governance connected to economic elites—the essence of their partnership—had simply faded from fashion. In their early, scrupulously civil debates, both Sanders and Clinton repeatedly emphasized how similar their stances on major issues were. But as he caught fire—and Clinton shifted on issues like Social Security, trade and Wall Street regulation to meet his challenge—Sanders shifted to a broader, more incendiary anti-establishment argument that focused on what Clinton represented as opposed to the positions she adopted.

And what really sustained him was his positive message of generational change, liberally borrowed from Obama’s 2008 campaign, and broadcast to his faithful through a series of iPhone-friendly videos. Sanders continued to emphasize policy disagreements, especially on foreign affairs, but what drew the 15,000-student crowds were his shout-himself-hoarse denunciations of Clinton’s connections to financial elites; his repeated attack on her six-figure Goldman Sachs speaking fees was the most effective attack line of the campaign, his advisers say.

“They are a historic pair, and they have a lot of power when they work together,” argues a top Sanders ally. “But if they want to motivate the party, if they want to beat Donald Trump, if they want to excite voters, they need to get into Bernie’s space—and fast.”

Still, it’s possible to over-learn the lessons of Sanders’ success. As senior Clinton advisers rightly point out—except for the February scare and an unexpected loss a month later in Michigan—Clinton won the overall primary season convincingly, with 55 percent of the vote, a bigger lead in pledged delegates than Obama ever enjoyed in ’08 and 3.5 million more votes than Sanders.

Besides, predictions that Sanders voters wouldn’t unite around Clinton haven’t, so far, proven any more accurate than predictions that Clinton voters wouldn’t vote for Obama. Ahead of the Philadelphia convention, only about 8 percent of Sanders supporters said they’d back Trump in the general election, according to a June Washington Post-ABC News poll—compared with 20 percent of Clinton supporters who planned to vote for Republican John McCain in 2008. By contrast, recent surveys have shown 70 percent of Ted Cruz voters have negative views of Trump.

Exit polls for the early 2016 primaries tell an even starker story about the relative health of the parties heading into the fall. A majority of Republicans said they felt “betrayed” by their party—the rage that fueled Trump’s candidacy—compared with less than a quarter of Democrats who shared that sentiment. “The biggest misnomer of the campaign is that everybody’s pissed off,” Clinton strategist Benenson told me in March. “The truth is that Republicans are way, way more angry than Democrats. And Democrats love Obama.”

***

The party does seem to be uniting, as Sanders’ awkward but emphatic enough endorsement of Clinton in early July proved. But the protracted, weeks-long three-way negotiations among Clinton’s, Obama’s and Sanders’ political teams over the Democratic Party’s platform showed something: that the Clinton-Obama table for two may need a new place setting.

Sanders, who took a long time to accept the reality of his primary defeat personally, squandered some of his leverage. But in the end, the Clinton camp was eager to give him almost everything he asked for in the Democratic platform by agreeing to embrace a new proposal to subsidize public college tuition, a public option for Obamacare and a break-up-the-banks plank.

The final hurdle to kumbaya was a deal that embittered, or at least annoyed, all three parties.

Obama, knowing Clinton and Sanders had bucked him on free trade, lobbied hard to shoot down an anti-Trans-Pacific Partnership provision in the platform during a series of party meetings in Orlando in early July. The uncompromising Vermont revolutionary would have to compromise—and he did—by accepting the pro-TPP plank debated during the Orlando meetings. When the deal was done, Sanders called his team from his house in Vermont and declared, in his matter-of-fact, ordering-at-a-diner voice, “Well, we just created the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.” And then he said goodbye and hung up.

Yet until the very last moment, Clinton’s jittery team couldn’t quite believe Sanders was really on board, seizing on a rumor that he was boarding a plane to Florida to blow up the final agreement.

Never mind that everyone on the Sanders campaign laughed it off. The calls from Brooklyn kept coming—“We’re hearing he’s on the plane right now!” —until one close aide to the senator bellowed into his phone, “Godammit, Bernie’s in Burlington, and he’s staying in Burlington!”

The senator was good to his word. The next time Clinton’s team saw Sanders, he was sharing a stage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with his party’s presumptive nominee—and declaring himself a loyal Democrat in Clinton’s anti-Trump crusade.

Euro Arms Pipeline to Middle East

Posted on July 28, 2016July 28, 2016 by Denise Simon

Making a Killing: The 1.2 Billion Euro Arms Pipeline to Middle East

An unprecedented flow of weapons from Central and Eastern Europe is flooding the battlefields of the Middle East.

Lawrence Marzouk, Ivan Angelovski and Miranda Patrucic BIRN Belgrade, London, Sarajevo

BalkanInsight: As Belgrade slept on the night of November 28, 2015, the giant turbofan engines of a Belarusian Ruby Star Ilyushin II-76 cargo plane roared into life, its hull laden with arms destined for faraway conflicts.

Rising from the tarmac of Nikola Tesla airport, the hulking aircraft pierced the Serbian mist to head towards Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

It was one of at least 68 flights that in just 13 months transported weapons and ammunition to Middle Eastern states and Turkey which, in turn, funnelled arms into brutal civil wars in Syria and Yemen, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, has found. The flights form just a small part of €1.2 billion in arms deals between the countries since 2012, when parts of the Arab Spring turned into an armed conflict.

Belgrade Airport | BIRN

Meanwhile, over the past two years, as thousands of tonnes of weapons fly south, hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled north from the conflicts that have killed more than 400,000 people. But while Balkan and European countries have shut down the refugee route, the billion-euro pipeline sending arms by plane and ship to the Middle East remains open – and very lucrative.

It is a trade that is almost certainly illegal, according to arms and human rights experts.

“The evidence points towards systematic diversion of weapons to armed groups accused of committing serious human rights violations. If this is the case, the transfers are illegal under the ATT (United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty) and other international law and should cease immediately,” said Patrick Wilcken, an arms-control researcher at Amnesty International who reviewed the evidence collected by reporters.

But with hundreds of millions of euros at stake and weapons factories working overtime, countries have a strong incentive to let the business flourish. Arms export licences, which are supposed to guarantee the final destination of the goods, have been granted despite ample evidence that weapons are being diverted to Syrian and other armed groups accused of widespread human rights abuses and atrocities.

Robert Stephen Ford, US ambassador to Syria between 2011 and 2014, told BIRN and the OCCRP that the trade is coordinated by the US Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Turkey and Gulf states through centres in Jordan and Turkey, although in practice weapon supplies often bypass this process.

BIRN and the OCCRP examined arms export data, UN reports, flight records, and weapons contracts during a year-long investigation that reveals how thousands of assault rifles, mortar shells, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons, and heavy machine guns are pouring into the troubled region, originating from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia.

Read all the documents used in the investigation at BIRN’s online library BIRN Source.

Since the escalation of the Syrian conflict in 2012, these eight countries have approved the shipment of weapons and ammunition worth at least 1.2 billion euros to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Turkey.

The figure is likely much higher. Data on arms export licences for four out of eight countries were not available for 2015 and seven out of eight countries for 2016. The four recipient countries are key arms suppliers to Syria and Yemen with little or no history of buying from Central and Eastern Europe prior to 2012. And the pace of the transfers is not slowing, with some of the biggest deals approved in 2015.

Eastern and Central European weapons and ammunition, identified in more than 50 videos and photos posted on social media, are now in use by Western-backed Free Syrian Army units, but also in the hands of fighters of Islamist groups such as Ansar al-Sham, Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIS, in Syria, factions fighting for Syrian President Bashar-al Assad and Sunni forces in Yemen.

On April 7, 2016, twitter User @bm27_uragan, who monitors the spread of weapons in the Syrian conflict, posted a video apparently of Free Syrian Army rebel using Serbian made Coyote M02 heavy machine gun in Southern Aleppo in Syria. The Coyote M02 has been independently identified as a Coyote M02.

Markings on some of the weapons identifying the origin and date of production reveal significant quantities have come off production lines as recently as 2015.

Out of the 1.2 billion euros in weapons and ammunition approved for export, about 500 million euros have been delivered, according to UN trade information and national arms export reports.

The frequency and number of cargo flights – BIRN and the OCCRP identified at least 68 in just over one year – reveal a steady flow of weapons from Central and Eastern Europe airports to military bases in Middle East.

The most commonly used aircraft – the Ilyushin II-76 – can carry up to 50 tonnes of cargo or approximately 16,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles or three million bullets. Others, including the Boeing 747, are capable of hauling at least twice that amount.

But arms and ammunitions are not only coming by air. Reporters also have identified at least three shipments made by the US military from Black Sea ports carrying an estimated 4,700 tonnes of weapons and ammunition to the Red Sea and Turkey since December 2015.

One Swedish member of the EU parliament calls the trade shameful.

“Maybe they –[Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia] – do not feel ashamed at all but I think they should,” said Bodil Valero, who also served as the rapporteur for the EU’s last arms report.“Countries selling arms to Saudi Arabia or the Middle East-North Africa region are not carrying out good risk assessments and, as a result, are in breach of EU and national law.”.

OCCRP and BIRN talked to government representatives in Croatia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovakia who all responded similarly saying that they are meeting their international obligations. Some cited that Saudi Arabia is not on any international weapons black lists and other said their countries are not responsible if weapons have been diverted.

A question of legality

The global arms trade is regulated by three layers of interconnected legislation — national, European Union, EU, and international – but there are no formal mechanisms to punish those who break the law.

Beyond the blanket ban on exports to embargoed countries, each licence request is dealt with individually.

In the case of Syria, there are currently no sanctions on supplying weapons to the opposition.

As a result, the lawfulness of the export approval hinges on whether countries have carried out due diligence on a range of issues, including the likelihood of the arms being diverted and the impact the export will have on peace and stability.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia are signatories of the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty, which entered into force in December 2014, and lists measures to prevent the illicit trade and diversion of arms.

Member states of the EU are also governed by the legally-binding 2008 Common Position on arms exports, requiring each country to take into account eight criteria when accessing arms exports licence applications, including whether the country respects international human rights, the preservation of “regional peace, security and stability” and the risk of diversion.

As part of their efforts to join the EU, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro have already accepted the measures and have amended their national law. Serbia is in the process of doing so.

Weapons exports are initially assessed based on an end-user certificate, a key document issued by the government of the importing country which guarantees who will use the weapons and that the arms are not intended for re-export.

Authorities in Central and Eastern Europe told BIRN and the OCCRP that they also inserted a clause which requires the buyer to seek approval if they later want to export the goods.

Beyond these initial checks, countries are required to carry out a range of other risk assessments based on national and EU law and the ATT, although conversations with, and statements from, authorities revealed little evidence of that.

OCCRP and BIRN talked to government representatives in Croatia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovakia who all responded similarly saying that they are meeting their international obligations. Some cited that Saudi Arabia is not on any international weapons black lists and other said their countries are not responsible if weapons have been diverted. The three other countries did not respond to requests for comment.

The Czech Foreign Ministry was the only public body to directly address concerns about human rights abuses and diversions, saying it took into account both when weighing up an export licence and had blocked transfers on that basis.

How legal are these arms sales to the Middle East? Find out more here

Saudi Arabia – The weapons king

The Central and Eastern European weapons supply line can be traced to the winter of 2012, when dozens of cargo planes, loaded with Saudi-purchased Yugoslav-era weapons and ammunition, began leaving Zagreb bound for Jordan. Soon after, the first footage of Croatian weapons in use emerged from the battleground of Syria.

According to a New York Times report from February 2013, a senior Croatian official offered the country’s stockpiles of old weapons for Syria during a visit to Washington in the summer of 2012. Zagreb was later put in touch with the Saudis, who bankrolled the purchases, while the CIA helped with logistics for an airlift that began late that year.

While Croatia’s government has consistently denied any role in shipping weapons to Syria, former US ambassador to Syria Ford confirmed to BIRN and the OCCRP the New York Times account from an anonymous source of how the deal was hatched. He said he was not at liberty to discuss it further.

This was just the beginning of an unprecedented flow of weapons from Central and Eastern Europe into the Middle East, as the pipeline expanded to include stocks from seven other countries. Local arms dealers sourced arms and ammunition from their home countries and brokered the sale of ammunition from Ukraine and Belarus, and even attempted to secure Soviet-made anti-tank systems bought from the UK, as a Europe-wide arms bazaar ensued.

Prior to the Arab Spring in 2011, the arms trade between Eastern Europe and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, UAE, and Turkey – four key supporters of Syria’s fractured opposition – was negligible to non-existent, according to analysis of export data.

But that changed in 2012. Between that year and 2016, eight Eastern European countries approved at least 806 million euros worth of weapons and ammunition exports to Saudi Arabia, according to national and EU arms export reports as well as government sources.

Jordan secured export licences worth 155 million euros starting in 2012, while the UAE netted 135 million euros and Turkey 87 million euros, bringing the total to 1.2 billion euros.

Qatar, another key supplier of equipment to the Syrian opposition, does not show up in export licences from Central and Eastern Europe.

Jeremy Binnie, Middle East arms expert for Jane’s Defence Weekly, a publication widely regarded as the most trusted source of defence and security information, said the bulk of the weapon exports from Eastern Europe would likely be destined for Syria and, to a lesser extent, Yemen and Libya.

“With a few exceptions, the militaries of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE and Turkey use Western infantry weapons and ammunition, rather than Soviet-designed counterparts,” said Binnie. “It consequently seems likely that large shipments of such materiel being acquired by – or sent to – those countries are destined for their allies in Syria, Yemen, and Libya.”

BIRN and the OCCRP obtained confidential documents from Serbia’s Ministry of Defence and minutes from a series of inter-ministerial meetings in 2013. The documents show the ministry raised concerns that deliveries to Saudi Arabia would be diverted to Syria, pointing out that the Saudis do not use Central and Eastern European stock and have a history of supplying the Syrian opposition. The Ministry turned down the Saudi request only to reverse course more than one year later and approve new arms shipments citing national interest. Saudi security forces, while mostly armed by Western producers, are known to use limited amounts of Central and Eastern European equipment. This includes Czech-produced military trucks and some Romanian-made assault rifles. But even arms exports destined for use by Saudi forces are proving controversial, given their involvement in the conflict in Yemen.

The Netherlands became the first EU country to halt arms exports to Saudi Arabia as a result of civilian deaths in Yemen’s civil war, and the European Parliament has called for an EU-wide arms embargo.

Supply Logistics: Cargo flights and airdrops

Weapons from Central and Eastern Europe are delivered to the Middle East by cargo flights and ships. By identifying the planes and ships delivering weapons, reporters were able to track the flow of arms in real time.

Detailed analysis of airport timetables, cargo carrier history, flight tracking data, and air traffic control sources helped pinpoint 68 flights that carried weapons to Middle Eastern conflicts in the past 13 months. Belgrade, Sofia and Bratislava emerged as the main hubs for the airlift.

Most frequent were flights operated from Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. The flights were either confirmed as carrying weapons, were headed to military bases in Saudi Arabia or the UAE or were carried out by regular arms shippers.

The Middle East Airlift

At least 68 cargo flights from Serbia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have carried thousands of tons of munitions in the past 13 months to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan, three key suppliers of the Syrian rebels.

These were identified through detailed analysis of airport timetables, cargo carrier history, flight tracking data, leaked arms contracts, end user certificates, and air traffic control sources.

Cargo flights from Central and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, and particularly military bases, were extremely uncommon before late 2012, when the upsurge in weapons and ammunition purchases began, according to EU flight data and interviews with plane-spotters.

The most commonly used aircraft – the Ilyushin II-76 – can carry up to 50 tonnes of cargo or approximately 16,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles or three million bullets. Others, including the Boeing 747, are capable of hauling at least twice that amount.

Of the 68 flights identified, 50 were officially confirmed to have carried arms and ammunition:

Serbia’s Civil Aviation Directorate confirmed that 49 flights departing or passing through Serbia were carrying arms and ammunition from June 1, 2015 to July 4, 2016. The confirmation came following weeks of refusal to comment on grounds of confidentiality and after BIRN and the OCCRP presented its evidence, including photographs showing military boxes being loaded onto planes at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport on four different occasions.

An official at the Bulgarian National Customs Agency confirmed one flight, operated by Belarussian cargo carrier Ruby Star Airways, was carrying arms from the remote Bulgarian Gorna Oryahovitsa Airport to Brno–Turany Airport, the Czech Republic, and on to Aqaba, Jordan.

An additional 18 flights were identified as very likely to have been carrying arms and ammunition based on one of three variables: the air freight company’s history of weapons supplies; connections to earlier arms flights; or a destination of a military airport:

Ten flights were made to Prince Sultan Air Base in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia and Al Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, indicating the likely presence of weapons or ammunition. Additionally, 14 flights to Prince Sultan and Al Dhafra air bases are confirmed as having carried weapons during the same period by Serbia’s Civil Aviation Directorate.

Seven flights were operated from Slovakia and Bulgaria by Jordan International Air Cargo, part of the Royal Jordanian Air Force, which were revealed to have carried weapons and ammunition from Croatia to Jordan in the winter of 2012. Bulgarian retired colonel and counter-terrorism expert Slavcho Velkov, who maintains extensive contacts with the military, told BIRN and the OCCRP that the Sofia-Amman flights “were transporting weapons to Saudi Arabia, mostly for the Syrian conflict.” Additionally, one other flight operated by this airline is confirmed as having carried weapons during the same period by Serbia’s Civil Aviation Directorate.

One flight was operated by a Belarussian cargo carrier TransAVIAexport Airlines, which has a long history of transporting weapons. In 2014, the airline was hired by Serbian arms dealer Slobodan Tesic to transport Serbian and Belarussian weapons and ammunition to air bases in Libya controlled by various militant groups. The United Nations, UN, Sanctions Committee investigated the case and found potential breaches of UN sanctions, according to a 2015 UN report. Additionally, five flights operated by this airline are confirmed as having carried weapons during the same period by Serbia’s Civil Aviation Directorate.

Many of these flights made an additional stop in Central and Eastern Europe – meaning they were likely picking up more weapons and ammunition – before flying to their final destination.

EU flight statistics provide further evidence of the scale of the operation. They reveal that planes flying from Bulgaria and Slovakia have delivered 2,268 tons of cargo – equal to 44 flights with the most commonly used aircraft – the Ilyushin II-76 – since the summer of 2014 to the same military bases in Saudi Arabia and UAE pinpointed by BIRN and OCCRP.

Distributing the weapons

Arms bought for Syria by the Saudis, Turks, Jordanians and the UAE are then routed through two secret command facilities – called Military Operation Centers (MOC) – in Jordan and Turkey, according to Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria.

These units – staffed by security and military officials from the Gulf, Turkey, Jordan and the US – coordinate the distribution of weapons to vetted Syrian opposition groups, according to information from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a think tank that has a unit monitoring the conflict.

“Each of the countries involved in helping the armed opposition retained final decision-making authority about which groups in Syria received assistance,” Ford said.

A cache of leaked cargo carrier documents provides further clues to how the Saudi military supplies Syrian rebels.

According to the documents obtained by BIRN and the OCCRP, the Moldovan company AeroTransCargo made six flights in the summer of 2015 carrying at least 250 tonnes of ammunition between military bases in Saudi Arabia and Esenboga International Airport in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, reportedly an arrival point for weapons and ammunition for Syrian rebels.

Pieter Wezeman, of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a leading organisation in tracking arms exports, said he suspects the flights are part of the logistical operation to supply ammunition to Syrian rebels.

From the MOCs, weapons are then transported by road to the Syrian border or airdropped by military planes.

A Free Syrian Army commander from Aleppo, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his safety, told BIRN and OCCRP that weapons from Central and Eastern Europe were distributed from centrally controlled headquarters in Syria. “We don’t care about the county of origin, we just know it is from Eastern Europe,” he said.

The Saudis and Turks also provided weapons directly to Islamist groups not supported by the US and who have sometimes ended up fighting MOC-backed factions, Ford added.

The Saudis are also known to have airdropped arms and equipment, including what appeared to be Serbian-made assault rifles to its allies in Yemen.

Ford said that while he was not personally involved in negotiations with Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania over the supply of weapons to Syria, he believes that the CIA is likely to have played a role.

“For operations of this type it would be difficult for me to imagine that there wasn’t some coordination between the intelligence services, but it may have been confined strictly to intelligence channels,” he said.

The US may not have just played a role in the logistics behind delivering Gulf-sponsored weapons from Eastern Europe to the Syrian rebels. Through its Department of Defense’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM), it has also bought and delivered vast quantities of military materiel from Eastern Europe for the Syrian opposition as part of a US$500 million train and equip programme.

Since December 2015, SOCOM has commissioned three cargo ships to transport 4,700 tons of arms and ammunition from ports of Constanta in Romania and Burgas in Bulgaria to the Middle East likely as part of the covert supply of weapons to Syria.

The shipments included heavy machine guns, rocket launchers and anti-tank weapons – as well as bullets, mortars, grenades, rockets and explosives, according to US procurement documents.

The origin of arms shipped by SOCOM is unknown and the material listed in transport documents is available from stockpiles across Central and Eastern Europe.

Not long after one of the deliveries, SOCOM supported Kurdish groups published an image on Twitter and Facebook showing a warehouse piled with US-brokered ammunition boxes in northern Syria SOCOM would not confirm or deny that the shipments were bound for Syria.

US procurement records also reveal that SOCOM secured from 2014 to 2016 at least 25 million euros (27 million dollars) worth of Bulgarian and 11 million euros (12 million dollars) in Serbian weapons and ammunition for covert operations and Syrian rebels..

A Booming Business

Arms control researcher Wilcken said Central and Eastern Europe had been well positioned to cash in on the huge surge in demand for weapons following the Arab Spring.

“Geographical proximity and lax export controls have put some Balkan states in pole position to profit from this trade, in some instances with covert US assistance,” he added. “Eastern Europe is rehabilitating Cold War arms industries which are expanding and becoming profitable again.”

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic boasted recently that his country could produce five times the amount of arms it currently makes and still not meet the demand.

“Unfortunately in some parts of the world they are at war more than ever and everything you produce, on any side of the world you can sell it,” he said.

Arms manufacturers from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia are running at full capacity with some adding extra shifts and others not taking new orders.

Saudi Arabia’s top officials – more used to negotiating multi-billion-dollar fighter-jet deals with Western defence giants – have been forced to deal with a handful of small-time arms brokers operating in Eastern Europe who have access to weapons such as AK-47s and rocket launchers

Middlemen such as Serbia’s CPR Impex and Slovakia’s Eldon have played a critical role in supplying weapons and ammunition to the Middle East

The inventory of each delivery is usually unknown due to the secrecy surrounding arms deals but two end-user certificates and one export licence, obtained by BIRN and the OCCRP, reveal the extraordinary scope of the buy-up for Syrian beneficiaries.

For example, the Saudi Ministry of Defence expressed its interest in buying from Serbian arms dealer CPR Impex a number of weapons including hundreds of aging T-55 and T-72 tanks, millions of rounds of ammunition, multi-launch missile systems and rocket launchers. Weapons and ammunition listed were produced in the former Yugoslavia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic.

An export licence issued to a little-known Slovakian company called Eldon in January 2015 granted the firm the right to transport thousands of Eastern European rocket-propelled grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and almost a million bullets worth nearly 32 million euros to Saudi Arabia.

BIRN and OCCRP’s analysis of social media shows weapons that originated from the former states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria are now present on the battlefields of Syria and Yemen.

While experts believe the countries continue to shirk their responsibility, the weapons pipeline adds more and more fuel to a white hot conflict that leads to more and more misery.

“Proliferation of arms to the region has caused untold human suffering; huge numbers of people have been displaced and parties to the conflict have committed serious human rights violations including abductions, executions, enforced disappearances, torture and rape,” said Amnesty’s Wilcken.

Additional reporting by Atanas Tchobanov, Dusica Tomovic, Jelena Cosic, Jelena Svircic, Lindita Cela, RISE Moldova and Pavla Holcova.

This investigation is produced by BIRN as a part of Paper Trail to Better Governance project.