Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 17-66-The Deep Battle against the West

C de Waart; CdW Intelligence to Rent [email protected] In Confidence

Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 17-66-The Deep Battle against the West

“We were too dumb. We didn’t understand who we had there at that moment. When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, ‘Where did those bastards come from? Let’s go kill them. Let’s go get them,’” “Instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from. Then we strategically marched in the wrong direction.” 09 Dec “15 -General Flynn.

New analysis from the British Council, based on British intelligence dossiers and academic research, finds that college degrees in technical areas like engineering create the perfect Islamic terrorist, “intelligent and curious, but unquestioning of authority” since they require “precisely the passive acceptance of right and wrong, and the faithful reproduction of knowledge learned by rote that jihadism seems also to require,” versus the critical examination and debate liberal arts degrees that could stop the creation of future jihadis.

Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents.

“Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.

What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly.

From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

Seventeen percent of Israeli Arabs support Islamic State, according to a recent poll conducted by the University of Haifa released Monday, Dec 6. The poll was included in a larger study by professor Sammy Smooha from May to July of this year and claims that 17 percent of respondents disagree that ISIS is an extremist organization and that they are ashamed of it. The 17 percent includes Arab-Israelis who are Christian, Druze and Muslim. When polling only Muslim Arab-Israelis, the number increases to 18 percent who disagree that ISIS is extremist. However, the most shocking number comes from those Israeli Arab Muslims who have completed higher education, with 20 percent of respondents disagreeing. Radical Islam has a history of not being exclusive to the uneducated.

The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.–Winston Churchill

CdW Intelligence to Rent of 12 03/05/2023

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Former al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden had a degree in civil engineering, while his former deputy and the current head of al-Qaida Ayman al-Zawahiri studied medicine and is a trained surgeon

“Many Islamic radicals are not economically dispossessed, are often better educated than their peers, and quite a few went to university,” Oxford says.

There are currently 1.4 million Israeli Arabs living in Israel, making up 18 percent of Israeli citizenry. Based on the poll, this means approximately 238,000 Israeli Arabs do not see ISIS as extremist, nor are they ashamed of the group as Muslims. Israel already faces a significant ISIS threat on its southern border with Egypt from Wilayat al-Sinai, an ISIS affiliate in Egypt’s Sinai desert. In addition, a separate poll conducted among Palestinians by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies shows that 53 percent of those surveyed do not see ISIS as a threat to their home, while 47 percent are opposed to the current objectives of the anti-ISIS campaign.Analysis from Oxford University 1also shows a large number of Islamic terrorists are highly educated professionals, and do not come from the ranks of the uneducated poor, as analysts and Administration officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have asserted. “Many Islamic radicals are not economically dispossessed, are often better educated than their peers, and quite a few went to university,” Oxford says.Terrorist leaders recruit from the educated ranks of their local populations, recruits who had gravitated towards technical subjects, like engineering degrees, versus religious or political courses, according to the British Council, Oxford University and the University of Durham in the U.K.The new study from the British Council by Martin Rose, a senior consultant on the Middle 1 http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2015/12/09/study-shows-technical-college-degrees-make-ideal-terrorists/





East and North Africa, is supported by a 2007 study published by Oxford University. It looked at a sample of 326 Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and North Africa, and found that nearly half, 48.5%, had graduated from a university. About 44% of these individuals had earned engineering degrees, the largest cohort overall.The Oxford study, co-authored by Diego Gambetta of Nuffield College at Oxford and Steffen Herton of the University of Durham, found about 57% of the terrorists analyzed had “what we may call ‘elite degrees’–engineering, medicine, and science.”

The co-authors said: “Even more surprising, many of them are engineers – a profession that we would not naturally associate with a religiously inspired movement.” That echoes the appeal in September 2014 by the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for “judges, doctors, engineers and people with military and administrative experience” to join the ISIS caliphate.

The Islamic terrorists responsible for the San Bernardino massacre, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, were educated at universities. Farook had graduated from California State University, San Bernardino with a degree in environmental health in 2010. His wife had studied pharmacy at Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, southern Punjab. The mastermind of 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, along with his lieutenants Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were engineering graduates. So was Seifeddine Rezgui, the terrorist responsible for massacring tourists on a Tunisian beach. Al-Qaeda’s top leadership included other professionals. Ayman al-Zawahiri had a degree in medicine. Zawahiri at one point proudly “boasted that the Islamist movement had found its greatest recruiting success in the university's two most élite faculties—the medical and engineering schools,” the Oxford University study noted, adding that professionals have been counted among the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood dating back to the 1940s.The terrorists responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had attended universities, with 42% earning engineering degrees, the Oxford study noted. Of the 25 terrorists and conspirators connected to the 2011 World Trade Center bombing, 17 had university degrees, and eight of them had engineering degrees, the Oxford study said.Curiously, countries in the Middle East and North Africa historically spend about a fifth of their budgets on education, higher than the world average. But their students don’t graduate equipped with the creative and critical, analytical skills that can challenge ideologies like radical Islam, Rose says.

Specifically, Rose suggests that the education philosophy in the Middle East and North Africa is one of rote learning and exam-passing, as opposed to critical thinking.

Students in the Mideast and North Africa are applauded for taking up technical studies like engineering degrees that don’t allow for ambiguity or questioning the status quo, making them susceptible to radicalization, Rose says. Technical degrees in this region are “traditionally viewed as superior, with the arts and social sciences relatively neglected,” Rose notes.In turn, “graduates are not equipped with soft skills to increase their employability,” and as a result, “the educated middle classes” in these countries “experience high graduate unemployment and frustrated upward mobility,” he says, cautioning that lack of critical thinking is found in universities in developed countries as well. Similarly, in 2003 a UN human development report indicated that education in the Middle East fostered obedience, subordination and compliance versus critical thinking.Technical college degrees are found in other radicalized Islamic networks. About 52 of the 81 top leaders of Hamas, or 64%, had higher education degrees as of the time of the





Oxford study, with 19 of them graduating as engineers.Two of the three men who founded Lashkar e-Toiba in 1987, a Sunni fundamentalist Pakistani group combating India's sovereignty over the State of Jammu and Kashmir, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technology of Lahore. The three leading suspects in the September 2004 bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, had an engineering background. Engineers also have been prominent in the radical, Iranian cabinet, including the former Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had trained as a civil engineer, the Oxford study noted. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite group, has a very strong link with engineers. Soon after it was founded in 1982, Hezbollah established Jihad al-Binaa, an organizational branch devoted to the reconstruction of civil infrastructure and private housing. Elizabeth MacDonald joined FOX Business Network (FBN) as stocks editor in September 2007 and is the author of Skirting Heresy

In the wake of the shooting at the Inland Regional Center last week, many media outlets reported each new development with a familiar sense of hyperventilated horror. Terrorism expert Caleb Carr explains why that is a danger in itself.BY CALEB CARRYou had to witness it from the very start to comprehend the fervor of it: televised reports of a mass shooting at a center for the disabled in San Bernardino, California, by two “figures” in “black combat gear and masks,” which had ultimately left 14 innocent people dead. Ominous statements soon screamed from television-news outlets: law enforcement had “no idea” where the shooters had “vanished” to in their “dark SUV”; and, just as ominously, there were reports of “AK-47-style weapons” having been used.This last bit of intel contained the first of the grossly irresponsible and unconfirmed media buzzwords: the Avtomat Kalashnikov 47 automatic rifle is the global weapon of choice for insurgents, revolutionaries, and, yes, terrorists, both because of its durability and because Russia has for decades flooded the developing world with fantastic quantities of the 7.62 x 39 mm assault rifle. Thus if AK-47s were used in San Bernardino, it seemed a dead giveaway that foreign or foreign-supplied terrorists, likely Islamists, had been at work.

Then the contradictions began to come in. The guns had not been AKs at all, but Armalite 15s, firing .223-caliber Remington ammunition. Hardly anything could be more American. The basis of the army’s M-16, the AR-15 is the favorite gun of everyone from average gun nuts to survivalists to domestic terrorists in this country. Certain media channels, now unable to raise a panic through firearms, quickly wheeled to another topic. The shooters had left an improvised explosive device, what some called an “I.E.D.” (buzzword), behind at the scene, intending to detonate it after they left. But here, again, the “I.E.D.” turned out to be only a black-powder pipe bomb, one easily made (far more easily than the already primitive chemical devices brewed by the Paris terrorists), which, critically, had failed to detonate.

Events soon overcame such nagging details. Law enforcement, it turned out, knew where that “dark SUV” had disappeared to, and a wild shoot-out took place that left the two presumed “terrorists” dead. Then came word that the shooters were Muslims. The first was Syed Rizwan Farook, a young, American-born employee of the San Bernardino County health department, and the other was his wife, Tashfeen Malik, a woman from (buzzword) Pakistan whom he’d met online. Farook had traveled to (buzzword) Saudi Arabia to fetch Malik and bring her into the United States on the appropriate visa, where her background had (buzz-phrase) “raised no flags” among authorities (though it turned out there was no reason why it should have). They had married, had a child, seemed like





“polite” and “normal” people to their neighbors—yet eventually embarked on their suicidal killing spree. Not only that, but a “cache of arms” had been found in their apartment.

Up to this point, cable news had ginned up enough mayhem to make the American people fretfully wonder: Is this it? Is this the moment that ISIS, or perhaps our old nemesis al-Qaeda, brings their jihad back to American shores? As in the case of the Paris attacks, al-Qaeda could be quickly ruled out, if one knew its history. Well before his death, Osama bin Laden decreed that he did not want his martyrs to go after any more civilian targets in the Muslim world, and to date there has been no sign that this does not apply to Western targets, as well, (as the bombing of the C.I.A. station at Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009 indicated), and certainly not to so bizarrely counterproductive a target as a center for the disabled. This policy has been continued by bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri; and while there are, of course, infamous al-Qaeda splinter groups, they are carefully watched—and no official connection to Farook and Malik could be established.

That left ISIS: surely, if this strange attack in San Bernardino had been the work of fighters “radicalized” by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s monstrous organization, that group would quickly come out with a claim of credit and congratulations, on the same media platform that they have used to take responsibility for other actions, most recently the Paris attacks and the downing of a Soviet jetliner over Egypt. And yet, for the first few days, there was only silence from Raqqa, Syria, ISIS’s capital, and on its preferred media channel of triumph, Telegram.

Then, further problems at the sensationalism mills. The claim that Syed Farook had been “radicalized” had initially been based simply on the use of a remote-control toy car to detonate his primitive pipe bomb, since instructions on how to use such innocent gadgets can be found in the pages of al-Qaeda’s instructional magazine, Inspire. Yet similar instructions for creating such detonation systems can be found in any of dozens of terrorist and anarchist handbooks, domestic and foreign, dating back decades. And, yes, he had had some contact with potentially minor characters on the Terrorist Watch List (who had not been charged), but these interactions were tracked and apparently dismissed. No matter. There was still that nagging point about Farook’s having been to Saudi Arabia. Yet, there Farook had only taken part in the ritual Muslim pilgrimage to the Black Stone in the Grand Mosque, in Mecca; and ISIS fighters are “radicalized” in Syria, not in ISIS’s Muslim nemesis Saudi Arabia. That left only Farook’s peculiar relationship to his Internet bride from Pakistan, and the cache of arms at their apartment. On the subject of Tashfeen Malik, not only cable-news networks but far less sensationalist publications began to get in on the panic act: “San Bernardino Gunwoman Pledged Allegiance to ISIS, Officials Say,” cried The New York Times, before changing its headline. Yet if one read past the headline, Malik’s “pledge” was made on a Facebook page that, so far as anyone other than unnamed government sources are willing to say, did not include any oath of loyalty to al-Baghdadi himself: an error of omission that, for a terrorist as committed as Malik was increasingly painted as being, represented a glaring oversight.

As contradiction piled upon misinterpretation, one nagging fact inconsistent with other ISIS attacks kept resurfacing. Mr. Farook had not only been employed by the health department, which was celebrating its holiday party at the disability center, but had had an argument with his co-workers shortly before the shootings. The idea of a disgruntled-employee shooting spree had been circulated, but it had not generated much in the way of emotional response from the public, and had been discarded by the media; and indeed, the





detail of the “cache of arms” at Farook’s apartment seemed to contradict it flatly. Yet that cache, it turned out, was soon revealed to be thousands of rounds of ammunition and 12 pipe bombs: again, an arresting number to most people, including the media, but small beer to law enforcement and counterterrorism officials—especially as the couple had not even been able to make the first pipe bomb go off.

Any official connection to international terrorism remained both unproven and inadequate. The F.B.I.—which, over the last 20 years, has largely abandoned many of its primary law-enforcement functions, especially criminal profiling, in favor of a focus on terrorist-hunting—finally declared that it was investigating the shooting as a “terrorist incident,” but also went on to say that there was “no indication” the couple were linked to any international terrorist group or even cell. The supposed connection to international terrorism propagated by news outlets was based only on circumstantial, desperately sought-for clues that led, in the end, very close to nowhere.

Despite all these frustrations, there continued to be no publicly discussed, adequate psychological profile of the guilty couple. Why, for instance, did they so blithely leave their young child with unsuspecting relatives before undertaking their spree? Is it even possible to determine a mental-health history for Tashfeen Malik? Was she unhappy in her Internet-arranged marriage? Was her husband? And what about reports that Farook grew up under a violently abusive father? The decision of most media outlets not to pursue such investigations was based on one simple fact: they are based in reason, not fear—and it is fear that sells. It sells for an equally simple reason: the essential nature of paranoia—and make no mistake, when it comes to the idea of terrorists again striking this country, the great majority of American citizens have reached a level of pervasive dread, amply demonstrated in poll after poll, that amounts to paranoia—is to seek the very condition that embodies the imagined threat, and thereby relieve the unbearable tension of living in constant anxiety. The American media was thus sinking to the exploitation of public psychological weakness; and getting a lot of advertising dollars in the process.

It did not seem that the experience could get any more irrational or exploitative. But then, on Friday evening, came a particularly tragicomic chapter: a circus inside the apartment of the “terrorist couple,” during which reporters, following the building’s crowbar-wielding landlord into the scene, sifted through important, uncollected evidence, utterly contaminating the site. The F.B.I.—which had, in a move that shocked even many law-enforcement experts, already returned control of the apartment to the landlord—responded to the invasion by saying that it was “finished” searching the place; yet had they believed this to be an investigation of a truly international terrorist incident with national-security implications, does anyone believe they would have permitted such criminal buffoonery?

Finally, on Saturday morning, the paranoiac’s delight seemed to arrive: ISIS was claiming credit for the San Bernardino attack, Internet headlines cried. Yet even here, if one paused to listen to sane voices, there were discrepancies with other ISIS claims that were significant. Not only was the “claim” made, at least initially, through a low-level Twitter hashtag, but it made no reference to ISIS or al-Baghdadi having ordered or even sanctioned the attack. Nor did ISIS declare Farook and Malik “knights” or “warriors,” as it had done with all the other attackers it had radicalized and dispatched abroad. Meaning, in short, that ISIS was simply cashing in on what seemed a fait accompli, and trying to reap its greatest potential: that a terrified America would now go into an anti-Muslim backlash that would only encourage other American Muslims to follow the San Bernardino couple’s example.





And therein lies the rub. People generally remember the first part of Franklin Roosevelt’s stirring admonition in his first inaugural address—that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—but few recall how he qualified that fear: “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” Yet if we now wish to avoid the kind of knee-jerk response to an obscure incident toward which the American media—which should be deeply ashamed of itself—has been herding us, those words would be a very good place to start. In the end, this may well have been an example of “self-radicalized terrorism”: but qualify that phrase psychologically for a moment and what you are left with are the unexplained individual actions of two badly misshapen minds, whose “self-radicalization”—which the F.B.I. is now trying to assert took place over a long period, so long, indeed, that it allegedly and paradoxically predates the rise of the Islamic State to which Tashfeen Malik pledged her allegiance. It appears to have consisted mainly, if not exclusively, of visits to extremist Web sites and private (so private that the F.B.I. cannot or will not provide actual proof of them) conversations while they were “dating” on the Internet. Yet when a legal gun owner (and the parallel to Gilberto Valle, the infamous “cannibal cop” in New York City, is of use here) watches violent videos, has fantasy-driven conversations on the Internet with similarly bizarre characters, then begins to stalk victims (as in Valle’s case) or even to kill people, we don’t say that he was a “self-traumatized murderer.” There is always a deeper answer; there is always a psychological motivation that sets the entire process in motion in the first place.

Farook and Malik, the “committed Islamists,” ultimately decided to end their young lives in a very American way: by going down in a gun-fueled blaze of supposed glory. And just at the end, Tashfeen Malik may indeed have decided to drape the couple’s shared dementia with the black flag of Islamist jihadism, but that does not explain their behavior. Nor does it change the fact that the recent near-jihadist, fear-mongering fervor of the American media should concern us as much, if not more. That is unless—or until—a plot that represents a clear and present danger to U.S. national security is uncovered. Because one day, just such a broader and more vital threat is going to materialize.

If the public, led by a frantic news media, has cried wolf every time a mass shooter has screamed “Allahu akbar!”—just as some have cried “baby killers!” at abortion-clinic killings, or irrational utterances at other shootings, without it implying that the nation is under attack—we are not going to be ready for it.Some may ask if all of this does not represent mere rationalization and semantics.

Far from it. In the battle against ISIS, we currently have two assets that other nations of the West do not. We are an assimilative society, one that has integrated rather than ghettoized or demonized our Muslim population. Those citizens have been an enormous resource in fighting Islamist terrorism, but if Americans whipped into a fervor by an irresponsible media now begin to look askance at every Muslim, or at every person that might ethnically resemble a Muslim, and begin to call police with spurious allegations by the thousands, we can count on losing that advantage.

The second asset is the actual military campaign we are fighting against the Islamic State throughout the Middle East and North Africa. This is not a large-scale invasion, nor can it be. Our ground forces are still trying to recover from the foolish attempts to occupy rather than seek and kill our particular enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter is a campaign that is still draining us badly, and so our efforts against ISIS are what they should always have been in the Middle East: cunning, low profile, and effective.

In open or tacit conjunction with the few groups in the region we know we can rely on—most notably the Kurds, but, increasingly, Shi’ite militias with whom we should have





been working in conjunction since the invasion of Iraq—comparatively small units of American Special Forces are successfully guiding American air power to effective, and not just emotionally satisfying, targets, while at the same time shrinking and strangling the Islamic State on the ground. If frightened Americans now begin to shriek for “Boots on the ground!,” as many conservative congressmen and media outlets would like them to do, we will walk into ISIS’s trap as surely as we will by marginalizing our American Muslim population.

The twin goals of the Islamic State—panic in the U.S. and a new American army to fight in the open in Syria—must be resisted, and the media must form part of the leadership that guides us to resist them, rather than herding us into their maw. On Sunday night, President Barack Obama told the nation that he wishes us to

adopt and/or maintain these steady postures. If he is serious—and he has always been far better at calling for action than fighting to see it realized—his first steps will be to withdraw American ground forces from Afghanistan; severely restrict the Predator drone program that has caused so many civilian casualties in the Muslim world; overhaul the visa system that still allows too many psychologically as well as politically questionable people—Muslim and non-Muslim—into this country; actively campaign for (rather than merely preach) tightened restrictions on the sale of assault weapons; and finally exhort American law enforcement to turn away from reactive paramilitary tactics and get back to the kind of basic community patrolling that can detect ripples of trouble before they must be answered by hails of rifle fire. The president mentioned at least a few such moves in his unusually detailed address; he cannot succeed if he does not undertake them all. In the end, however, there can be no complete “defense” against the nebulous creature called “self-radicalized terror,” any more than there can be against mass shootings by white Christian fundamentalists or simple madmen. And simple madmen Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik may have been, for all their “self-radicalization.” But the steady, calm openness of our society has always been our greatest defense against such characters, by repudiating the secrecy and oppression upon which extremism and madness feed. As F.D.R. said of “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror,” it “paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” If, now, we can stop listening to media corporations that profit off of such paralysis, “this great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. Caleb Carr, author of The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians, is a military historian who frequently writes and lectures on matters of national security, including terrorism.

The West Can Defeat ISIS – but What Comes Next?by Pete Hoekstra and Clare LopezFiscal TimesDecember 8, 2015French President François Hollande is making the rounds of the world's capitals, jet setting between London, Washington and Moscow with several meetings in-between.He is engaged in a full-throttle effort to convince leaders of a plain and simple plan. Immediately eliminate the Islamic State that's claimed responsibility for the massacre of 130 innocent men, women and children in Paris. That the jihadist state needs to go is not in dispute. It is creating chaos and mayhem throughout the Middle East, parts of Africa and beyond. ISIS is an aggressively metastasizing cancer that threatens Europe and North America.

Before a global coalition follows the French headfirst into this Indiana-sized caliphate located in the former Iraq and Syria, however, we need to answer questions related to competing political and territorial concerns.

The last time the U.S. led from behind the French, the message was also seemingly plain The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

–Winston ChurchillCdW Intelligence to Rent of 12 03/05/2023



and simple. Remove Muammar Gaddafi by aiding, abetting and arming Libya's al-Qaeda militias and the country will take care of itself as the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood assumes power.

History proved them disastrously wrong. Libya quickly collapsed into a failed state with Gaddafi's massive munitions stockpiles – and very likely some of the weapons and training that NATO gave to the Libyan jihadis opposed to Gaddafi – finding their way into Syria to form the early core of ISIS.

Indeed, arguments could be made that none of the interventions by the West in the Middle East and northern Africa turned out well. The common lesson learned in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya is that nothing is as simple as it looks. Every situation is difficult with many different considerations that all carry grave ramifications.Let's examine all of the intended outcomes as well as the possible unintended consequences of current decisions.

Whether we like it or not, ISIS currently plays a role in the balancing act between Shia and Sunni in the Middle East. What happens to the equilibrium once it is removed from the equation?

Do the U.S. and Europe propose to formalize the Shia crescent of dominance from Tehran, through Baghdad to Damascus, ending in Beirut? Russia is the coalition's primary benefactor, so the axis now also includes Moscow. Is this how the West envisions that part of the world coalescing? Or does the West see some other as-yet undefined coalition of Sunni forces filling the void? How would U.S. allies such as Israel, Jordan and Turkey respond to a Shia crescent? Have the leaders responsible thought about possible contingencies, and how to achieve better outcomes?Have we considered that the very rise of ISIS, with broad support from local Sunni states, was itself a reaction to the removal of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army as the only credible counterweight to the Shiite rulers in Tehran? These states, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, will and must have a say in what happens next. They will not allow a nuclear-armed Iranian hegemony to expand unchallenged. They recognize that the U.S. has been an unreliable ally at best, as it facilitated the overthrow of Sunni regimes in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and allowed for the advancement of Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities.Further, the Middle East battleground is crowded with competing ethnic, sectarian and tribal interests, most of which harbor jihadist sympathies. So, with which should the U.S. ally itself against ISIS: the al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra? The Turkish-backed Ahrar al-Sham? Are we helping Bashar al-Assad cling to power by fighting side-by-side with Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp? What about our relationship with Vladimir Putin's Russia? The Obama administration has already demonstrated its proclivity to side with the wrong party – al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood – in Libya and Egypt. We should not allow ourselves to become drawn into such mistakes again, especially when the ability of the West, Russia and Iran to fully destroy ISIS – or its jihadist ideology – is not entirely clear right now.

We need to think of this as a game of chess in which leaders strategize three to four steps ahead into a future without ISIS. Current decisions will have a domino effect on subsequent outcomes.

More often than not, we are playing soccer of the worst kind, the bunch ball sort in which we watched our children all at once chase the ball and try to kick it downfield at the same time with little success. It is such a sad but true comparison, but how else do you explain losing the war after more than 14 years of endless battles since 9/11? Pete Hoekstra is the Shillman Senior Fellow at the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Clare M. Lopez is the





Vice President for Research & Analysis at the Center for Security Policy.

Regards Cees ***

Here’s What a Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ MotivesMore than anything, the terrorist group’s outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory. By Joshua Holland, Dec 02Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there’s a gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and what many experts believe to be true.Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents.

“Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.

According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly: What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.ISIS emerged from the insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq just as the Al Qaeda network traces its origins to the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.This view differs from that of Hillary Clinton and others who believe that ISIS “has nothing whatsoever to do” with Islam, as well as the more common belief, articulated by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, that ISIS can be reduced to “a religious group with carefully considered beliefs.” It’s a group whose outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory. Virtually all of the group’s leaders were once high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate,” she recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”





But how does the notion that terrorists are intent on getting powers to withdraw from their territory square with the view that the group’s shift to terrorist attacks in the West is designed to draw France and its allies into a ground war in Syria? Writing at the Harvard Business Review, Northeastern University political scientist Max Abrahms argues that these analyses are contradictory. But Pape says that it’s important to distinguish between ISIS’s long-term goals and its shorter-term strategies to achieve them:

It’s about the timing. How are you going to get the United States, France and other major powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf when they have such a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to do it. Bin Laden did 9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground army into Afghanistan, which would help recruit a large number of suicide attackers to punish America for intervening. We didn’t do that – we used very limited military force in Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on was that we would send a large ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out. And that turned out to be the most potent recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so than Bin Laden had ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.

So if your goal is to create military costs on these states and get them to withdraw, you’ve got to figure out a way to really up the ante. And the way that you really up the ante is to get them to overreact. You try to get them to send a large ground army in so that you can truly drive up the costs. That’s what ISIS is trying to sucker us into doing.

Another theory holds that ISIS—and Al Qaeda—set their sights on France in order to polarize mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “The problem for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam.” In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic fundamentalists “can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”Pape says this analysis is also consistent with his research:

If ISIS is going to end the military intervention by France, one attack is not likely to do it. In the statement that ISIS released, they say that they want a storm of similar attacks against Paris and other French targets because their goal is to knock France out of the military coalition. To do that, to achieve that goal, they’re going to need to recruit many more attackers to do suicide attacks like the ones that occurred in Paris. In the short-term it makes perfect sense to want an environment that stirs up hostility towards Muslims in France, because that will make them much easier to recruit for their longer-term object of kicking France of the coalition.

Pape also argues that ISIS’ shift in strategy to attacks overseas is a sign not of its strength, but of its weakness on the ground in Syria and Iraq. He points out that over the past year, the amount of territory ISIS controls has shrunk by 10 percent:

The U.S. strategy against ISIS is working and it’s putting enormous pressure on ISIS. It’s a strategy of air and ground power, with the ground power coming from local allies—the Kurds and the Shia in the region, and even some Sunnis who are opposed to ISIS. They’re increasingly working with us on the ground while we’re fighting from the air. The problem here is not that we don’t have enough ground forces.

It’s because the strategy is working that ISIS is now desperate, and is shifting its The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

–Winston ChurchillCdW Intelligence to Rent of 12 03/05/2023



pattern of behavior. In October, ISIS launched only eight suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria, when they normally do 30 to 35 per month, and that’s the same month that they shifted to suicide attacks in Ankara, Turkey, on October 10. Then they downed the Russian plane on October 31st, and now the Paris attacks on November 13th. As ISIS’ territory has shrunk in Iraq and Syria, it is now clearly shifting its suicide attack resources out of Iraq and Syria, and into Turkey, into killing Russian civilians, and now also into Paris.

In Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want to achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of the West’s response to terrorism.




Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2015 Part 17-66-The Deep Battle against the West

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