Racist graffiti in Ashrafieh: "The Syrian is your enemy"

[Originally posted at NOW, with photo slideshow]

“Leave, leave, O Syrian.” “Beware your enemy, the Syrian is your enemy.” These were some of the slogans disfiguring the walls of Beirut’s Ashrafieh neighborhood this morning, sprayed on last night by a group calling itself “The Soldiers of Christ.” In what they presumably imagined was a witty play on the Islamist “takbeer” cry (meaning “Say ‘Allahu akbar’”), they also stenciled crucifixes with the caption “tasleeb,” the word for the act of crossing oneself.

After a series of weeks in which Syrian civilians in Lebanon have been shot at and stabbed, tied up and publicly beaten, harassed by armed ‘patrolmen’, and abused by soldiers (by the army’s own admission), this kind of ethno-sectarian bigotry is, sadly, nothing new. Still, it’s a depressing omen for Ashrafieh, ostensibly one of the freest and most enlightened parts of Beirut, home to the likes of Elias Khoury and the late Samir Kassir, where artists, journalists and students congregate nightly over food and drink.

It’s also an alarming one, and not only for Syrians. Are these “soldiers of Christ” not content with sitting out the Sunni-Shiite war presently turning city after city across the region to rubble? Do they really want to pull themselves and their remaining co-religionists into the furnace? Or haven’t they seen the recent increase in attention paid by jihadists to Lebanon’s Christians, and their repeated promises of retribution for any attacks on Syrian innocents? Rarely does a single sentence of graffiti combine so much loathsome fanaticism with such irresponsible stupidity.

ISIS vs Hezbollah in numbers

[Originally posted at NOW, with infographic]

The jihadist paramilitary group Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which declared itself ruler of its own state in June after expanding its eastern Syrian stronghold into western Iraq, was described in August by US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel as "beyond just a terrorist group […] beyond anything that we've seen." Below, NOW puts this judgment in context by comparing ISIS's vital statistics to those of another formidable Islamist militia; Lebanon's Hezbollah.

As the data show, ISIS is believed to have more fighters than Hezbollah, and to enjoy more abundant finances. This is in part a result of the vast territory it controls – perhaps 10 times as much as Hezbollah does – in which over half a dozen lucrative oil fields are at its disposal.

On the other hand, Hezbollah has a much wider geographical reach, believed to be operating – whether militarily or financially – in over 45 countries. It is also more battle-hardened, having fought up to seven conventional armies in its three decades of existence. Moreover, while it controls less territory than ISIS, it is nonetheless "important to remember," said analyst Phillip Smyth, that the areas it does hold are of great "strategic" significance.

Stop the outrageous Saddam nostalgia

[Originally posted at NOW]

The man was responsible for more deaths than the Syrian and Lebanese civil wars put together.

It’s a curious fact that criticism of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein quite often gets coupled with the claim that his reign in Iraq was not as unpleasant as has generally been made out. This has been true more or less since day one of the intervention; no one yet has topped the breathtaking shamelessness and crudity of Michael Moore’s 2004 depiction in Fahrenheit 9/11 of Saddam’s Iraq as literally a garden of children and kites.

But similar, if occasionally better-dressed variants of the theme have long been making their way into respectable publications, and increasingly so as prospects of Western intervention in the region have revived since Bashar al-Assad’s crossing last summer of Obama’s red-line-that-wasn’t. In June, the Independent disgraced itself with a piece saying “life wasn’t so bad at all” for Iraqis in the 1980s. Later the same month, Anne-Marie Slaughter got away with saying in the New York Times that Saddam was “far less brutal” than Assad. And this week, the Washington Post published an op-ed by the son of a Saddam-era Iraqi Air Force member fondly remembering the pre-1990 “Iraq I loved and was proud of,” which was a “modern, Westernized and secular” marvel that only turned sour after the Americans prevented the natural progression of Baathist enlightenment into Kuwait.

What were some of the highlights of this golden age? A book written in 1993 called Cruelty and Silence by the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya recalls a few. Here are excerpts from a conversation Makiya had with a Kurdish Iraqi boy, describing one memorable encounter with Saddam’s Westernized modernity in 1988:

Makiya: When they opened the door of the lorry, what was the first thing you saw?

Taimour Abdallah: The first thing I saw was the pits, dug and ready.

[…]

M: They pushed you directly off the truck into the pit?

A: Yes.

[…]

M: How many people were put inside?

A: One pit to every truck.

M: And how many people were in a truck?

A: About one hundred people.

[…]

M: Soldiers were surrounding the whole grave?

A: Yes. […] There were two soldiers […] We sat in the pit and they fired bullets at us.

[…]

M: The soldier who pushed you back into the hole, was he the one who shot you the second time?

A: Yes. This soldier shot me again after he received the order from the officer who was standing beside the pit.

[…]

M: What about the rest of the people, were they all dead?

A: They didn’t make noises.

Abdallah is the only known survivor of Saddam’s systematic extermination of Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s – a campaign officially described in government documents as “the heroic operations of the Anfal,” a Quranic term for war booty (Saddam’s “secularism” often took such strange forms, like when he introduced amputation and branding with hot irons as punishments for theft, citing the Islamic shari`a as justification). Along with every member not just of his family but of his entire village, Abdallah had been rounded up by the army and transported to the desert near the Saudi border, where firing squads and mass graves awaited. By extraordinary chance, the two bullets he received failed to kill him, and he managed to flee under the cover of dark to a nearby Bedouin camp, where he was sheltered and eventually reunited with Kurdish relatives. He was 12 years old.

What happened to Abdallah’s village happened to over 1,200 villages in Iraqi Kurdistan throughout 1988. We’ll never know the total number of Kurds thus extirpated with certainty, but the regime’s own “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majeed (whose nickname came from his enthusiastic use of the weapons of mass destruction Iraq is supposed never to have had) himself admitted to a figure of 100,000. The more likely number of 180,000, based on Kurdish sources, is now generally accepted (Patrick Cockburn, for example, whose decades of reporting from Iraq have been consistently critical of Western policy, considers it reliable). As a rule of thumb, when it comes to Saddam, the facts are usually far worse than initially believed.

Of course, 1988 was only one of 24 years of Saddam’s rule, which also featured the killing of some 150,000 Shiites in 1991, and well over 100,000 Iranians from 1980-88, and over 1,000 Kuwaitis in 1990, and untold thousands of Iraqis of every sect and ethnicity for any number of reasons at one point or another. How bad was Saddam? Add the death toll of the current Syrian war to that of the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war, and throw in Hafez al-Assad’s massacre at Hama in 1982, and you’re still nowhere close to how many he killed.

Not that statistics can begin to do justice to the complete, unique gruesomeness of this regime: the state-employed rapists (“violation of women’s honor” was the exact job description used in the government paperwork, according to documents seen by Makiya), who would often carry out their work in the presence of their victims’ relatives, sometimes in designated ‘rape rooms’ of prisons; the burning alive of children in front of parents as interrogation technique; the imprisonment and torture of total innocents as deliberate policy; the ‘Victory Arch’ Saddam had built in Baghdad using fifty-foot replicas of his own forearms, carrying 24-ton stainless steel swords above 5,000 genuine bullet-ridden and blood-stained Iranian helmets. Quite a legacy to “love” and be “proud of,” and quite a state of affairs to be remembered with nostalgia in the finest newspapers of the ‘free world’.

The dangerous absurdity of Lebanon's refugee camp decision

[Originally posted at NOW]

See if you can follow the logic: the Lebanese government is now concerned that its 1.2m Syrian refugee population has become vulnerable to infiltration – or has indeed already been infiltrated – by extremist Islamist groups. At the back of its and everyone else’s mind is the battle last month between Islamic State (IS) jihadists and the Lebanese army in the border town of Arsal, where gunmen were reported to have emerged from the makeshift camps housing thousands of refugees in the adjacent and otherwise barren Wadi Hmayyed region, beyond the final Lebanese army checkpoint but before the first Syrian one.

To mitigate this worry, the government now plans to move refugees currently scattered across the developed areas of the country, where their activities are closely monitored by security and intelligence forces, to precisely the same jihadist safe haven from which IS launched its August attack.

Citing “social and security concerns,” Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas told Annahar today a decision has been made to “establish experimental camps on Lebanese state territories [in areas] between the [Lebanese-Syrian] border.” This is essentially the same proposal that’s already been mulled several times in the past, and has been thoroughly criticized by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). It’s worth revisiting what they had to say about it in May:

“In our experience camps that are built on border areas can be transformed into places where armed activities take place […] The border has witnessed a good number of security incidents over the past three years and the Lebanese government does not have a permanent presence [there] to oversee the security situation.”

In other words, moving the people you suspect of harboring jihadist sympathies to a lawless no-man’s-land crawling with jihadists might not be a surefire formula for stability. And who, incidentally, is to protect the refugees, 80% of whom are women and children, from the gunmen? For months, Lebanon was unable to provide security for thousands of its own citizens in the border town of Tfeil. How far will it be willing to go to protect Syrians, who it now regards as IS fifth columnists? Will it enlist the help of the Syrian army? Hezbollah? Anyone who has spent five minutes with a Syrian refugee knows how they’d react to that notion.

On a more pedestrian note, as UNHCR also pointed out, who will provide the infrastructure? Lebanese citizens themselves in the east Beqaa are lucky to get 3 hours a day of electricity. Water is a similar lottery. Derbas told Annahar the money would come from “Arab and international” sources. Now might be the time to mention that UNHCR, three years into the Syrian refugee crisis, has only managed to raise 36% of its pledged funding. And, again, we’re talking about a territory contiguous with the most violent war zone on earth today. What happens if the security situation doesn’t permit aid workers access?

That the Syrian refugee crisis, like the wider Syrian conflict itself, has had profound repercussions on Lebanon is beyond doubt. Sadly, this plan seems less an earnest effort to resolve them than an ill-conceived capitulation to the irrational, and increasingly xenophobic, passions of the street.

Anti-Syrian pogroms point to darker future in Lebanon

[Originally posted at NOW]

With refugees now fearing for their lives, Lebanon is edging closer to breakdown.

Abu Gaby’s life hasn’t been the same since Saturday evening. He’s not sleeping properly. He’s changed his daily routine – no longer using taxis after dark; “taking precautions,” as he puts it, “that I never thought about before.” His work as a filmmaker has ground to a halt. “I’m unable to focus on anything,” he says. “I’m thinking only about how I can stay safe in this situation.”

As NOW’s Rayan Majed reported Tuesday, Abu Gaby (a pseudonym) was one of dozens of Syrian refugees physically assaulted across Lebanon Saturday after news broke of the execution of a second Lebanese Army captive by Islamic State (ISIS) militants. Hearing his Syrian accent in a shared Beirut taxi, a passenger beside him asked him his name. He replied with a fake Armenian one, hoping it would spare him. Brandishing a knife, the passenger then grabbed him by the collar and shook him, saying, “I’m letting you go [only] because you’re Armenian.”

Under the circumstances, Abu Gaby was fortunate: many Syrians suffered far worse in the ethno-sectarian pogroms that ensued from Beirut to the south coast to the eastern Beqaa Valley. Pictures soon surfaced of Syrian refugees and laborers lying on the streets being kicked and beaten by mobs. In one case, residents in Baalbek tied up two men and left them as human roadblocks facing the traffic at the town’s entrance. Meanwhile, gunmen set up flying checkpoints on several Beqaa roads, checking motorists’ IDs and detaining Sunni Muslim passengers, leading one columnist to dub it another “Black Saturday,” in reference to an infamous 1975 massacre of motorists at militia checkpoints based on sectarian identity. Notices appeared on walls in numerous neighborhoods demanding the departure of all Syrians within hours, with one in Beirut’s Zoqaq al-Blat threatening those not complying with “slaughter or torture until death.” Tents in makeshift refugee camps were torched, prompting hundreds of families in Shiite-majority areas of the Beqaa to pack up their tents and flee to Sunni regions.

A sign of how frightened those doubly-displaced refugees are is the lengths they’ve gone to conceal themselves. In Al-Rahma Camp, the largest Syrian refugee settlement in the central Beqaa’s Bar Elias, a representative of the charity running the camp told NOW Tuesday there were no new arrivals as a result of Saturday’s attacks. “I heard they went to Jeb Jenin,” he said. A half-hour drive later, a camp official in Jeb Jenin assured NOW they weren’t there, either. “I have no information on their whereabouts,” he said, echoing what the UNHCR, the Ministry of Social Affairs, the municipalities of three major refugee-hosting towns in the Beqaa, and Human Rights Watch had all said as well. “You have to understand, they’re terrified,” said Nabil al-Halabi, a lawyer and activist who runs a local human rights NGO, LIFE, working with Syrian refugees. “They’re not willing to work with the authorities. They’re not even telling us where they are.”

Indeed, with reports Wednesday that the Lebanese Army itself has begun dismantling camps in the southern Tyre region, refugees’ distrust of Lebanese state institutions may yet grow more pronounced. “I never thought this could happen to me in Lebanon,” Abu Gaby told NOW of his Saturday evening experience. “I had the same feeling as when I was arrested by Syrian intelligence in Damascus. In Lebanon, I now have the same level of fear and worry as I had in Syria.”

Should these events lead to further and long-lasting deteriorations in relations between Syrian refugees and their Lebanese hosts, there could be grave social and political repercussions, analysts told NOW.

“What happened on Saturday is a first sign potentially heralding the breakdown of Lebanese society,” said Hussam Itani, columnist at Al-Hayat newspaper. “It’s very dangerous. We’re in a situation of total disconnection between the government, civil society, and all the middle grounds that could unite the Lebanese people.”

The underlying cause of this crisis, argued Itani, was repeated sectarian and political incitement against Syrian refugees by Lebanese political parties, particularly within the Hezbollah-led March 8 bloc.

“These incidents were not spontaneous. They are the result of three-and-a-half years of a discourse opposing the Syrian uprising and the Syrian people’s right to decide their fate, and categorizing the Syrian people as supporters of the Islamic State and opponents of the so-called ‘resistance.’ This created a tense atmosphere that only needed one reason to explode.”

An especial concern for the longer run is the potential future militarization of some Syrian refugees, emulating the history of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees in the 1960s. To be sure, 80% of Syrian refugees in Lebanon are women and children. But the worse the situation becomes, the greater is the chance of a fringe minority developing a desire to take up arms, says Itani.

“This is an important question that very few are thinking of,” he told NOW. “If things get worse, the refugees’ reaction could turn dangerous, and it could turn uncontrollable. The lack of organization of the refugees makes them vulnerable to political manipulation.”

“They might today be occupied with their daily life problems, but this doesn’t mean they might not one day join the political battlefield and defend their interests.”

Myra Abdallah contributed reporting.

Israel makes largest West Bank land grab in 30 years

[Originally posted at NOW]

Sometimes it takes the placid, sterile dispassion of the BBC to fully ram home the amazing arrogance and malevolence of the Israeli government.

Describing Tel Aviv’s declared seizure of – sorry, “decision to appropriate” – more West Bank territory than it’s snatched in one go for three decades, the BBC staff writer says with serene insouciance that, “The military-run local administration said it was a response to the kidnapping and killing of three Jewish teenagers in the area in June.”

More or less everything one needs to know about Israel today is contained in that sentence. In case the full implications aren’t immediately clear: by way of response to the murder of three teens from families already settled on the West Bank (“in the area”), Israel will add five entire Palestinian villages, along with their farmland, to its already vast takings from what remains of non-Israeli land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. (Having taken them, of course, it will then raze them to make way for more theocratic settler-colonies; in this case an extension to the Gevaot settlement.) It’s as if Mexico, in response to the killing of Mexicans living illegally in the USA, were to permanently award itself a portion of Texas.

What, for that matter, did the United States, the honest broker of the peace process, have to say about it? Surely, after all, there would be outrage were the Palestinian Authority, following the murder of 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir in occupied East Jerusalem, to react by annexing five West Jerusalem neighborhoods. Condemnation, if that’s the word, came from the State Department in the form of a description of the move as “counterproductive” to the two-state solution – a statement of the obvious on par with saying fire is counterproductive to the treatment of burns. Evidently missed by the State Department was Netanyahu’s statement in July that he had “always” opposed the two-state solution; that “to pull out of Judea and Samaria [Bible-speak for the West Bank]” was something that “cannot” be contemplated “under any agreement.” Far from giving the Israeli government pause, in other words, the idea that the two-state solution has been further derailed will have been received in Tel Aviv with warm gratification.

Brits Abroad

[Originally posted at NOW]

What drove an affluent British rapper to behead civilians in Syria?

On July1 , 2013, the 21-year-old British rapper Abd al-Majid Abd al-Bari, better known to his small but growing fan base as “L Jinny,” declared on Facebook that he had produced his final track. “I have left everything,” he said, “for the sake of Allah.”

Thirteen months later, he was posting photos on Twitter of himself holding severed heads in Syria, breezily captioned, “Chillin’ with my homie or what’s left of him.”

And, earlier this week, he made international headlines when he was reportedly identified by British intelligence as the London-accented Islamic State jihadist speaking in the videotaped beheading of American journalist James Foley.

How the evidently talented resident of an estimated £1m ($1.7m) home in London’s elegant Maida Vale district, whose songs had been aired on BBC radio, came to be a member of what US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently described as “a terrorist group […] beyond anything that we’ve seen [before]” appears to be a mystery even to what were formerly his closest friends.

“Can’t believe the dude I lived with for 26 months is now the worlds [sic] most wanted man. What the fuck,” said fellow rapper Proverbz, who had been a member of a three-man group with Bari known as Black Triangle. “People get lost so quickly. So easily. Violence only begets more violence. But still the blood flows and the world never learns. What happened to peace and love. The world needs to smoke more weed and take less notice of old books,” he added.

Asked by NOW why he thought Bari gave up his London life to fight in Syria, the rapper Tabanacle – who was Black Triangle’s third member, and Bari’s collaborator on his final song – would say no more than, “The only man who could help you understand that would be the man L Jinny himself.” NOW contacted more than 10 other artists who had performed alongside Bari, all of whom either declined to comment or did not respond.

Analysts familiar with Bari’s progression from rapper to jihadist described an ambitious but insecure character deeply affected by the figure of his father, Adel Abd al-Bari, an Egyptian arrested in 1998 on suspicion of involvement in the al-Qaeda bombings of American embassies in east Africa the same year. In his song, ‘The Beginning,’ Bari says, “Give me the pride and the honor like my father. I swear the day they came and took my dad, I could have killed a cop or two and I wouldn’t look back. Imagine back then I was only six, picture what I’d do now with a loaded stick.” His father lost his final court appeal in late 2012 and was extradited from London to New York, an event that likely added to Bari’s agitated state of mind.

“I think his father being the figure he was, undoubtedly he had more exposure to those ideas and maybe a clearer understanding of them than others,” said Raffaelo Pantucci, a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute who has followed Bari’s social media activities for over a year.

Aside from references to his father, his lyrics in general often suggested someone wrestling with anger and thoughts of violence. “I got a voice in my head and it’s telling me ‘kill,’ make the choice or you dead, ‘cause your enemies will. Lord, I don’t wanna retaliate, but […] now my feelings are itching to let the ‘matic spray […] Nah, I won’t give in to that, now I’m older and wiser,” he says in one track. In another: “I can’t differentiate the angels from the demons, my heart’s disintegrating, ain’t got normal feelings.”

Bari also made repeated references to “Allah” and his belief, as he phrased it, that “the deen [“religion” in Arabic] is crucial,” even at the same time as he sang of frequent drug and alcohol use. As Pantucci told NOW, though, the above themes are commonplace in rap lyrics, and there was never any explicit reference to events in Syria in Bari’s songs. (He did once write “Long Live Palestine” shortly after the November 2012 Gaza conflict.)

Ultimately, says Pantucci, Bari is only one of perhaps as many as 300 Britons fighting for extremist factions in Syria, and identifying the common factors motivating them to do so is not straightforward.

“[Bari] would undoubtedly say he had a sort of religious moment and saw that there were people suffering and he wanted to help them,” he told NOW. “But the motivations for people to go and do these things are as varied as the people who are going over. There are as many reasons for going as there are people, basically.”

One likely reason the UK is second only to France among European nations in terms of citizens fighting in Syria, says Pantucci, is its granting of political asylum to precisely the sort of militant Islamists Bari’s father stands accused of being.

Going back to the 1960s, Pantucci says, Britain witnessed “a flood of dissidents from the Arab world who set up shop in London. These were everything from political dissidents to Islamists. And among the Islamists, some were Muslim Brotherhood types, and others were affiliated with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. So from that community you started to see the concepts of jihad taking root in the UK, as well as the personal connections” needed to translate the ideology into practice.

The problem, he is quick to add, is by no means limited to Britain. In recent months, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Spaniards, Austrians and Belgians are among some of the nationals discovered to be waging jihad in Syria. “For God’s sake, there’s been a Luxembourger who died fighting in Syria,” he told NOW.

“So it really is a pan-European problem.”

NB: Six months after this article was written, it emerged that the so-called 'Jihadi John' figure from ISIS' videos was in fact not Bari but a Kuwaiti-born Briton named Muhammad Emwazi.