SHIFTING SANDS IN THE MIDDLE EAST: A CLOSER LOOK AT DAESH

The recent Mediterranean migrant boat disasters, which highlighted the dimensions of the people-smuggling originating from war-torn Libya and aiming to Europe, as well as the savage killings’ video released at the same time by DAESH[1], also in Libya, shed a new light over the new activities of this terrorist group.
The estimated toll of the ship that capsized on 19 April 2015 while smuggling migrants from Libya to Europe has risen to as many as 900 deaths, making it the deadliest migrant ship disaster to ever occur in the Mediterranean.
Such activities were outlined in a document released not long before the tragic incidents, written by a DAESH operative in Libya, which mentioned that the group plans to flood Libya with fighters from Iraq and Syria and have them sail across the Mediterranean pretending to be refugees on human trafficking vessels.
For DAESH, Libya is the “strategic gateway for the Islamic State” and “has a long coastline and looks upon the southern Crusader states, which can be reached with ease by even a rudimentary boat”. The document notes that the number of ‘illegal immigration’ trips from this coast is massive, estimated to be as high as 500 people a day, as a low estimate and stresses that “if this was even partially exploited and developed strategically, pandemonium could be wrought in the southern Europe. It is even possible that there could be a closure of shipping lines because of the targeting of Crusader ships and tankers.”
The DAESH essay considers Libya as “the key to Egypt, the key to Tunisia, Sudan, Mali, Algeria and Niger too… the anchor from which can be reached Africa and the Islamic Maghreb”.
While keeping in mind that such documents are mainly intended for internal propaganda, when looking at the recent activities of DAESH and the consequent shifts in the geopolitical regional environment, more and more analysts take a closer look to this organization, whose main victims are, at least for now, Arab and Muslim states and peoples, pan-Islamic interests, rather than the “great Satans”.
Among the “victories” DAESH greatly helped to achieve, one can already see the dissolution of the Levant states (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon), the beginning of a process aiming to redesign the borders in order to create a Kurdish state, the continuing civil war in Libya and the growing terrorist problem in Egypt.
Even more significant is the transformation of the conflict into a religious one that pits the Sunni against the Shiite Muslims, each driven by its leading regional actor, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
In this context, analysts warn that it is too early to interpret the conquest of parts of Tikrit as the beginning of the end for DAESH. The jihadists remain a formidable enemy and their temporary retreat from the city could just be a clever tactical move designed to spare fighters and military hardware and to inflame the bloody conflict between Shiites and Sunnis.
On the other hand, the liberation of Tikrit was led not by the Iraqi army, but by Shiite militias, ultimately armed and commanded by Iranian General Qassem Suleimani.Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are extending their influence in Iraq by way of the militias and their fight against DAESH is creating a vicious cycle. The bigger a threat the jihadists become, the more wanton the retaliation by Shiite troops, which in turn drives even more supporters into the arms of DAESH.
The rise of DAESH has reinvigorated Iranian power, since it has mobilized the Shiite community in Iraq to resist it, allowing Iranian advisers to effectively manage the Shiite militias in Iraq and (to some extent) the Iraqi army, and to force the United States to use its airpower in tandem with Iranian-led ground forces.
 
1. Helping DAESH: secular forces and intelligence services
 
The popular image of DAESH is one of a modern jihadi group, a metamorphosis of al-Qaeda, fighting against the state[2]. However, there are important and powerful insurgent forces behind the radical Islamic DAESH ‘branding’, among which the former members of Saddam’s army and security services, the Syrian regime, as well as Western and (inevitably) Israeli intelligence services are most frequently evoked.
Secular Iraqi former intelligence forces
According to many analysts, the reason for DAESH’s military success in both Iraq and Syria is that the group is a cover for former high-ranking elements of Saddam Hussein’s dismantled Sunni-dominated security forces, determined to regain their former position, at least in Sunni-majority areas of Iraq. There is limited support for official Iraqi forces among Iraqi Sunnis after what they see as relentless persecution by the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
Former members of Saddam’s military and intelligence services reportedly helped to set up and run the DAESH Security and Intelligence Council, which provides personal protection to al-Baghdadi, oversees communication between the central authorities and the regions, executes judicial decisions including punishments and runs a kidnapping and assassination squad. It is said to be headed by known former members of Saddam’s security services.
Some have suggested that the former Baathists may be playing a double game similar to that ascribed to the Syrian government: the Baathists may have helped create DAESH to frighten the West and other regional powers and to subsequently present themselves as the ‘moderate’ and effective solution.
In this context, the General Military Council for Iraqi Revolutionaries (GMCIR), the main grouping for Baathist former army officers, which has reportedly received support from the Syrian regime, declared recently that the organization of former Baathist military men was ‘stronger than DAESH’ and that DAESH could not have taken Mosul on its own.
The Naqshbandis
An important Iraqi force behind DAESH is said to be the Naqshbandi order, a little-known Sufi grouping with powerful connections in the region, including with influential figures in the ruling Turkish AKP of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The “Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order” was formed in 2007 by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, former Vice-President of Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council, who was said to be the ‘hidden sheikh’ of the Naqshbandis, as well as a leading figure among the Sunni tribes. The group is important for former Baathists and fighters favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and has much deeper roots in Iraqi Sunni communities than DAESH. Despite its secular roots, the group is believed to have played a key role in a major offensive by DAESH in 2014.
Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the closest collaborator of Saddam Hussein, was regarded as the most high-profile official of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party to successfully evade capture after the invasion, and had a large bounty on his head for years. He was the “King of Clubs” in the famous pack of cards the US issued of wanted members of Saddam Hussein’s regime after its defeat.
On 17 April 2015 Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri was killed during the operations that led to the recapturing of Tikrit from DAESH by Iraqi soldiers and Shiite militiamen.
DAESH’s takeover of Syria: a complex Iraqi-led intelligence operation
Secret documents recently published by the German magazine Der Spiegel revealed that DAESH’s takeover of Syria was in fact planned by a small group of Iraqi intelligence officers led by Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi (Haji Bakr), a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defense force who was killed in the town of Tal Rifaat in January 2014.
The so-called Haji Bakr documents (containing a multilayered composition and directives for action, some already tested and others newly devised for the anarchical situation in Syria’s rebel-held territories) offered an explanation for the group’s meteoric rise to prominence. They show how the takeover in northern Syria was planned, making the group’s later advances into Iraq possible in the first place.
Haji Bakr traveled to Syria as part of a tiny advance party in late 2012, with a plan to develop an organization that would capture as much territory as possible in Syria and, using Syria as a beachhead, to invade Iraq. Haji Bakr sketched out the structure of the Islamic State, all the way down to the local level, compiled lists relating to the gradual infiltration of villages and determined who would oversee whom.  It was not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an “Islamic Intelligence State” a caliphate run by an organization that – according to Der Spiegel that had exclusive access to the Haji Bakr documents – resembled East Germany’s notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency.
The plan would always begin with the same detail: the group recruited followers under the pretense of opening a Da’wa office, an Islamic missionary center. Of those who came to listen to lectures and attend courses on Islamic life, one or two men were selected and instructed to spy on their village and obtain a wide range of information. At the core of all the missions was the same theme, which is addressed in organizational charts and lists of responsibilities and reporting requirements: surveillance, espionage, murder and kidnapping.
For each provincial council, Bakr had planned for an emir, or commander, to be in charge of murders, abductions, snipers, communication and encryption, as well as an emir to supervise the other emirs (“in case they don’t do their jobs well”).
From the very beginning, the plan was to have the intelligence services operate in parallel, even at the provincial level. A general intelligence department reported to the “security emir” for a region, who was in charge of deputy-emirs for individual districts. A head of secret spy cells and an “intelligence service and information manager” for the district reported to each of these deputy-emirs. The spy cells at the local level reported to the district emir’s deputy. The goal was to have everyone keeping an eye on everyone else.
The expansion of DAESH began so inconspicuously that, a year later, many Syrians had to think for a moment about when the jihadists had appeared in their midst. The Da’wa offices that were opened in many towns in northern Syria in the spring of 2013 were innocent-looking missionary offices, not unlike the ones that Islamic charities have opened worldwide. As soon as it had identified enough “students” who could be recruited as spies, DAESH expanded its presence.
The fighters themselves also remained inconspicuous at first. Bakr and the advance guard had not brought them along from Iraq, and they also chose not to recruit very many Syrians. The DAESH leaders decided to gather together the foreign radicals who had been coming to the region since the summer of 2012. Students from Saudi Arabia, office workers from Tunisia and school dropouts from Europe with no military experience were to form an army with battle-tested Chechens and Uzbeks. It would be located in Syria under Iraqi command.
An examination of the hundreds of pages of documents reveals a highly complex system involving the infiltration and surveillance of all groups, including DAESH’s own people. The jihad archivists maintained long lists noting which informants they had installed in which rebel brigades and government militias. It was even noted who among the rebels was a spy for Assad’s intelligence service.
Within DAESH, there are state structures, bureaucracy and authorities. But there is also a parallel command structure: elite units next to normal troops; additional commanders alongside nominal military head Omar al-Shishani; power brokers who transfer or demote provincial and town emirs or even make them disappear at will. Furthermore, decisions are not, as a rule, made in Shura Councils, nominally the highest decision-making body. Instead, they are being made by the “people who loosen and bind” (ahl al-hall wa-l-aqd), a clandestine circle whose name is taken from the Islam of medieval times.
The strong influence of the ‘secular’ Baathists inside DAESH appears to be in contradiction to its objectives: to bring down illegitimate, secular Arab regimes and to replace them with a caliphate. However, it should not be too much of a surprise; the common thread is that they are Sunnis who want to gain control.
The Syrian regime
When the uprising against the government in Syria began in 2011, the Assad regime labeled its opponents as terrorists, hoping to discredit them in the eyes of moderate Syrians and Western governments.
The uprising in early 2011 was largely secular, even if its roots were in the Syrian Sunni majority. Many commentators, including rebels in Syria, have argued that this did not suit the Assad regime, so it developed a policy of fomenting the jihadi elements in the rebellion to fit its own narrative.
At the same time as suiting the Assads’ narrative that its opponents were terrorists, the rise of DAESH also had the advantage, from the point of view of Damascus, of distracting more secular rebels from their fight against the government. The DAESH ideology is firmly opposed to secularists and it has shown that it is prepared to fight other jihadi groups such as the al-Nusra Front for the allegiance of Syrian Sunnis. These trends meant that the various anti-government forces in Syria were distracted fighting each other, while the West, and particularly the US, became increasingly interested in fighting DAESH, perhaps downgrading the removal of Bashar al-Assad.
There are indications that the Syrian government was still treating DAESH gently in 2014. Jane’s calculated that in that year, only 6% of 982 Syrian counter-terrorism operations targeted DAESH and only 13% of DAESH’s attacks were against Syrian government targets. DAESH aims to monopolize the Sunnis’ rebellion against Damascus, and this appears to be a more urgent priority than bringing the government down. If the government were to fall to a myriad of opposition groups, DAESH would not control the setting up of a new state. If DAESH can absorb other rebel groups and end up as the sole opposition to Assad, the group would be in complete control of the new Syria if the Assads’ fell.
Western Intelligence’s role
According to several intelligence experts, DAESH’s development was also helped by Western foreign policy and intelligence services, mainly after the overthrowing of the Gaddafi regime in Libya.
U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh recently exposed a secret agreement between the CIA, Turkey and the Syrian rebels to create a covert network used to channel weapons and ammunition from Libya, through southern Turkey and across the Syrian border. Funding was provided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
According to Seymour Hersh, the full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorized in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Hersh revealed that the January 2013 report of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee – on the assault in September 2012 on the American consulate and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens – also included a highly classified annex, not made public, describing a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line.
By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping. The operation had not been disclosed at the time, as required by law, since the involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to classify the mission as a liaison operation.
Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the “rat line” kept going and, according to the former intelligence official who talked to Seymour Hersh, the United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists. In spring 2013, U.S. intelligence learned that the Turkish government – through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarized law-enforcement organization – was working directly with Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies to develop a chemical warfare capability. The MIT was running the political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training.
Although there was evidence that American support against the Assad regime ended in the hands of the extremists, that didn’t stop the US from insisting that its support was only being given to ‘moderate rebel forces’.
From mid-August 2014 to mid-January 2015, the US Air Force and its 19 coalition allies have flown more than 16,000 air strikes over Iraq and Syria ostensibly to “root out” DAESH. The records show that all those air strikes are purposely not hitting DAESH forces, but the infrastructure inside Syria.
According to Iraqi intelligence sources, US planes have also engaged in air drops of food and weapons to DAESH. These began to be observed after one load supposedly meant to go to the Kurdish fighters was “accidentally” dropped in October 2014 into so-called enemy hands.
Israel: helper and beneficiary
The main accusations mentioning the Israeli intelligence’s role in developing DAESH came from Iran, but other analysts stressed not only the Israeli involvement but also its benefits from the regional developments generated by DAESH.
General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO, told CNN in February 2015 that DAESH had been “created by our friends and allies to defeat Hezbollah”, pointing to the responsibility of Israel. General Clark is well known for his opposition to Israeli influence on the foreign policy of the United States and the remodeling of the “Greater Middle East”. He also had opposed the deployment of troops in Iraq, and wars against Libya and Syria.
For Clark, radical Islam is not the issue per se, but exploited for strategic ends: “The United States used radical Islam to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. We begged the Saudis to put the money in; they did”.
Also in February 2015, a report from the UN was quoted according to which the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) maintained contact with members of DAESH since May 2013. The UN identified contact with IDF forces and DAESH soldiers. Initial reports from the IDF stated that this was only for medical care for civilians, but the UN observers identified direct contact between IDF forces and DAESH soldiers, including giving them medical care. The UN report strengthens the claims by the Syrian regime that Israel is heavily involved in operations within the nation.
Iranian conspiracy theories
The Iranian-generated conspiracy theories about Israel intelligence creating DAESH included a July 2014 report by the Iranian news agency IRNA, which cited NSA documents released by whistle-blower Edward Snowden as purportedly saying that the U.S. and Israel hatched a joint plan to create a “terrorist organization capable of centralizing all extremist actions across the world”, using a strategy called “the hornet’s nest”. NSA documents referred to recent implementation of the hornet’s nest to protect Israel by creating religious and Islamic slogans. According to the documents released by Snowden, the only solution for the protection of the Jewish state “is to create an enemy near its borders”.
While no evidence could be found in Snowden’s leaked intelligence files to confirm these accusations[3], Iranian officials and analysts have cited the interview as definite proof of Israeli and U.S. complicity in the creation of DAESH.
In November 2014, Iran’s deputy foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian accused the Israeli intelligence service Mossad of creating DAESH. His statements came after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, declared that DAESH was actually created by the U.S. and Britain in order to sow dissent between Sunnis and Shiites. In October, former Iranian Minister of Intelligence Heydar Moslehi also said the group was created by a “triangle of Mossad, MI6, and the CIA”.
The same “Edward Snowden” leaks were also cited when several magazines and websites mentioned that DAESH leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is an Israeli actor, named Elliot Shimon, and a Mossad-trained operative in espionage and psychological warfare Islamic societies. The “discovery” was attributed to Iranian intelligence which mentioned that the DAESH leader’s mission was to get into the military and civilian heart of the countries that are declared as a threat to Israel in order to facilitate the creation of the “Greater Israel” or “Eretz Israel”.
Israel’s benefits: closer to implementing the “Yinon Plan”
Notwithstanding the Iranian accusations, according to many analysts, Israel takes advantage of the regions’ instability helped by DAESH, this being the reason for which, when the United States began operations against DAESH, the Israeli high command seemed reluctant to give any support and called the move a mistake.
The Israeli gains after almost a decade of DAESH activity are evident: the Iraqi and Syrian armies (long regarded as a threat to Israel) have been destroyed after the two big Arab countries turned into failed states.
There has been abundant evidence of Israeli support for the rebels in Syria and it has been noted that neither DAESH nor Jabhat al-Nusra have launched attacks against Israel, even though the latter, in particular, seems to be active in the Golan Heights very close to Israel’s border.
In this context, some analysts evoked the so-called “Yinon Plan”^[4] aimed to ensure Israeli regional superiority and to establish the “Greater Israel”. The plan stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.
Since Iraq was considered the biggest strategic challenge, it was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. The first stage was to weaken both Iran and Iraq through war against each other. Based on the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one Shiite and the other Sunni. The American invasion in 2003 was to lead to the division of Iraq into three smaller, ethno-religious states operated by Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the middle and south, and a new Kurdistan in the north.
Although ostensibly Israel’s enemy, in this context DAESH is seen as a means by which Israel nearly succeeded in the partition. In this context, a declaration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was mentioned, according to which the Kurds “deserve” their own country for being “brave fighters” against DAESH.
He was also quoted as saying “When your enemies are fighting each other, don’t strengthen either one of them; weaken both”.[5] Aside from a divided Iraq, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts it as starting from Egypt and spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.
“Fringe” benefits
Another theory also points to Israel being the main beneficiary of DAESH’s destructions and looting of Iraqi and Syrian ancient heritage and history (ancient statues, cuneiform tablets and artifacts).
According to these theories, DAESH’s smuggling of the Assyrian and Babylonian Cuneiform tablets may be aimed to prevent the development of an archeological and anthropological trend that doubts the mainstream narrative about the origin of the Israelites and questions the Biblical interpretation of the ancient myths. The new researches would lead to the conclusion that the origin land of the Israelite tribe was not in Palestine, but in ancient Arabia and North Yemen and Judaism is one of ancient Arabia’s tribal cults. One of their findings is that Jerusalem is originally called Dar Salam (safe house) and it is located near mountain Zion in Northern Yemen.
Researchers also note that the rise of DAESH does not seem to trouble Israeli archaeologists, aiming to recover artifacts dating back to the King David era. Finds of this nature would, by some views at any rate, help validate Israel’s “3000-year-old land claim”, as it’s been called.
To confirm this theory, an example was evoked, when, after the fall of Baghdad in May 2003 and the looting of Iraq’s national museum, a large trove of Jewish communal documents including old Torah fragments, were discovered in a flooded basement and taken to the United States for restoration and safeguarding. The summer of 2014 was set as the target date for when the restored documents would be handed back to Iraq, but in the summer of 2014, DAESH took over large parts of the country, including the city of Mosul. In September it was announced that highlights of the archive, rather than going back to Iraq, would be taken upon a tour of US cities. The plot thickened further in January 2015 when it was reported that one of the artifacts, a 200-year-old Torah scroll, had not actually been taken to the US at all, but rather instead had been deposited at the Israeli Embassy in Jordan – and from there it made its way into Israel.
 
2. DAESH and the Abu Nidal Organization: similar patterns
 
The fact that DAESH’s actions are mainly directed against Muslim states and interests presents, for many analysts, a similar pattern with those of the famous Fatah Revolutionary Council, or Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), which is still considered to be the most prolific transnational terrorist group in recorded history. The organization is believed to have ordered attacks in 20 countries[6], killing over 300 and injuring over 650.
The Abu Nidal Organization’s official ideological objective was to liberate Palestine via a pan-Arab revolution aimed at destroying Israel. This perception seems to be the one Abu Nidal wanted the world to believe. In reality, Abu Nidal demonstrated the ease with which he could change ideological colors to suit the paying patron of his services.
Historians point out that Abu Nidal’s attacks were focused on Israeli targets abroad but could not be considered significant in moving toward the political objective of destroying Israel, never once conducting an attack within the borders of this country.
Moreover, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) eventually became Abu Nidal’s arch enemy even though ANO continued to strive verbally for the return of a Palestinian state. The PLO adopted new tactics as the situation warranted, ceasing its use of terrorism and opting for political negotiation. Abu Nidal became a free agent, willing to subvert his own apparent ideology with the one imposed by the state sponsor.
Origins and split from the PLO
Abu Nidal’s terrorist activity began in Saudi Arabia, where he helped found a small group of young Palestinians who called themselves the Palestine Secret Organization. For this, he was imprisoned and then expelled by the Saudi government. He returned to Nablus and joined Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO and moved to Amman, Jordan, setting up a trading company called Impex. Fatah asked him to choose a nom de guerre, and he chose Abu Nidal (“father of struggle”) after his son, Nidal. Impex became a front for Fatah, serving as a meeting place and conduit for funds.
Shortly after Black September, Abu Nidal began accusing the PLO of cowardice over his Voice of Palestine radio station in Iraq for having agreed to a ceasefire with Hussein. A failed attempt against King Hussein’s life in February 1973 led to Abu Nidal’s first operation, using the name Al-Iqab (“the Punishment”), when on 5 September 1973 five gunmen entered the Saudi embassy in Paris, took 15 hostages and threatened to blow up the building if the author, Abu Daoud, (leader of the Black September Organization responsible for the 1972 Munich Massacre), was not released.
The gunmen flew two days later to Kuwait on a Syrian Airways flight, still holding five hostages, then to Riyadh, threatening to throw the hostages out of the aircraft. They surrendered and released the hostages on 8 September. Abu Daoud was released two weeks later, and it was said that the Kuwaiti government paid King Hussein $12 million for his release.
Abu Nidal had carried out the operation without the permission of Fatah. Abu Iyad (Arafat’s deputy) and Mahmoud Abbas (later President of the State of Palestine), flew to Iraq to reason with Abu Nidal that hostage-taking harmed the movement. They were told that the operation was ordered by Iraq, and after that, the PLO regarded Abu Nidal as under the control of Iraq.
Two months later, in November 1973 (just after the Yom Kippur War in October), the Abu Nidal Organization hijacked KLM Flight 861, this time using the name Arab Nationalist Youth Organization. Fatah had been discussing convening a peace conference in Geneva and the hijacking was intended to warn them not to go ahead with it. In response, in July 1974, Arafat expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah, and in October 1974 Abu Nidal formed the ANO, calling it “Fatah: The Revolutionary Council”. After the split from Fatah, the Iraqis gave Abu Nidal Fatah’s assets in Iraq, including a training camp, farm, newspaper, radio station, passports, overseas scholarships and $15 million worth of Chinese weapons. He also received Iraq’s regular aid to the PLO: around $150,000 a month and a lump sum of $3–5 million.
Beside Fatah: The Revolutionary Council, the Abu Nidal Organization used several names, including the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Black June (for actions against Syria), Black September (for actions against Jordan), the Revolutionary Arab Brigades, the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims, the Egyptian Revolution, Revolutionary Egypt, Al-Asifa (“the Storm”, a name also used by Fatah), Al-Iqab (“the Punishment”), and the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization.
The group had up to 500 members, chosen from young men in the Palestinian refugee camps and in Lebanon, who were promised good pay and help looking after their families. They would be sent to training camps in whichever country was hosting the ANO at the time (Syria, Iraq or Libya), then organized into small cells. Once in, they were not allowed to leave again. The group assumed complete control over the membership.
Specific features
A distinctive feature of Abu Nidal is the fact that political violence was conducted not in support of its own ideology but the ideology of the highest bidder. Abu Nidal and his organization began as bent on destroying Israel and returning Palestinian lands to their rightful owners, but then metamorphosed into a group focused on destroying the PLO where money directed its actions.
Another interesting aspect, which makes ANO similar to the current-day so-called “takfiri” groups, including DAESH, was disclosed by a former member who declared that he was told, before being sent overseas: “If we say, ‘Drink alcohol’”, do so. If we say, ‘Get married’, find a woman and marry her. If we say, ‘Don’t have children’, you must obey. If we say, ‘Go and kill King Hussein’, you must be ready to sacrifice yourself!”
From the study of the ANO coups, one may easily see that Abu Nidal targeted mainly Arab and Palestinian politicians and activists who were considered “soft” on the Israeli issue. Most of these coups were distinguished from the other Middle Eastern actors by the fact that none of Abu Nidal’s attacks seemed to be in the Palestinian cause.
More than once, the coups favored a strong reaction from Israel, the most relevant being the shooting, on 3 June 1982, of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, by an ANO team formed by Hussein Ghassan Said, Nawaf al-Rosan, an Iraqi intelligence officer, and Marwan al-Banna, Abu Nidal’s cousin. This attempt was followed only three days later by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, where the PLO – which had denied the coup – was based. At that point it was speculated that the Israeli government had been preparing to invade and Abu Nidal provided a pretext, thus appearing to be working for the Israelis, in the view of Yasser Arafat.
Similarly, Abu Nidal’s most infamous operation – the 1985 attack on the Rome and Vienna airports – was, in fact, directed against the PLO.
On 27 December 1985, at 08:15 GMT, four gunmen opened fire on the El Al ticket counter at the Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport in Rome, killing 16 and wounding 99. A few minutes later, in Vienna International Airport, three men threw hand grenades at passengers waiting to check into a flight to Tel Aviv, killing four and wounding 39.
Since Austria and Italy had both been involved in trying to arrange peace talks, the damage to the PLO was enormous, according to Abu Iyad, Arafat’s deputy. Most people in the West and even many Arabs could not distinguish between the ANO and Fatah, he said. “When such horrible things take place, ordinary people are left thinking that all Palestinians are criminals.”
Another coup against the PLO was done on 14 January 1991 in Tunis, the ANO assassinated Abu Iyad, head of PLO intelligence, along with Abu al-Hol, Fatah’s chief of security, and Fakhri al-Umari, another Fatah aide; all three men were shot in Abu Iyad’s home. It was speculated then that one reason of the coup was Abu Nidal’s hatred of Abu Iyad, based on the fact that he had protected Abu Nidal in his early years within the movement. Given his personality, Abu Nidal could not acknowledge that debt.
In the final analysis of all that occurred during approximately thirty years of terror wrought by Abu Nidal, he had very little to show for his efforts. The PLO has been decimated and is currently ineffective, Israel continues to remain in control of its destiny, and Palestine remains weaker than the time when Abu Nidal was forced to immigrate to the West Bank.
Abu Nidal’s end
Abu Nidal died after a shooting in his Baghdad apartment in August 2002. Palestinian sources believed he was killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein, but Iraqi officials insisted he had committed suicide during an interrogation.
According to Iraqi intelligence documents dated September 2002, that described Abu Nidal’s death circumstances and were published in 2008 by the British newspaper The Independent, Iraqi secret police believed that Abu Nidal was working for the Americans, as well as Egypt and Kuwait, when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
The documents mentioned that Abu Nidal had been “colluding” with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qaeda. The documents state that Egyptian and Kuwaiti intelligence officers had asked Abu Nidal to spy for them “with the knowledge of their American counterparts”. The papers also name a Kuwaiti major, a member of the ruling Kuwaiti al-Sabbah family, as his “handler” and state that he was also tasked to “perform terrorist acts inside and outside Iraq” and that his presence in the country “would provide the Americans with the pretext that Iraq was harboring terrorist organizations”.
President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qaeda as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Western reports were to dismiss Iraq’s claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam’s own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the “treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country”. Five days after his death, Iraq’s head of intelligence, Taher Jalil Habbush, told a press conference in Baghdad that Abu Nidal had committed suicide after Iraqi agents arrived at the apartment where he was hiding in the city, but the secret reports make it clear that the notorious Palestinian had undergone a long series of interrogations prior to his violent demise.
The ANO implosion: a possible “way out” for DAESH
The Abu Nidal Organization’s internal executions (the mass executions of members of the Abu Nidal Organization and their families by Abu Nidal and key associates) took place during 1987–1988 at a number of locations in Syria, Lebanon and Libya. The number of people executed, mostly Palestinians, is estimated at 600, between a third and a half of the membership of the ANO. The purge took place following internal disputes encouraged by the intelligence services of the U.S., the U.K. and Jordan.
In a long-term deception operation, members of the terrorist group were fed information that led them to suspect colleagues of stealing their money, their girlfriends and their power. Abu Nidal himself was led to believe that his group was swarming with spies and traitors and killed off his own organization. Instead of finding the (mostly mythical) moles, Abu Nidal decided to kill everyone. Over a few months in 1987-88, he unleashed his fearsome security force against his own people, murdering about 600 ANO members. With half the group dead and the other half terrified and demoralized, Abu Nidal fled to Baghdad with the remnants of the ANO, under Saddam Hussein’s protection, where they remained until the Americans arrived in the spring of 2003.
The Abu Nidal operation was evoked as an example of a more efficient and less costly way to crush DAESH, as part of a so-called special war tailored for counterterrorism, combining offensive counterintelligence, denial and deception, and long-term manipulation of the jihadists leading to their collapse and self-immolation. Through careful application of offensive counterintelligence coupled with denial and deception, in a patient and holistic manner, Western states together can undo the Salafi jihad movement in the West before it grows unmanageably dangerous.
An indication that such measures might be efficient is a Twitter post launched at the end of 2014 displaying a DAESH leaflet offering a $5,000 reward for information about “crusaders’ agents” in the ranks.
Several suggestions were made about how unconventional warfare might be useful against DAESH, including putting a wedge between DAESH’s Iraqi-dominated leadership and its foreign fighter troops, since there is information from the field about friction between foreigners and locals among the jihadis in Mosul, along with tension between Turkmen and Sunni Arab members of the group. It was also suggested to encourage rivalry between the criminal thugs gravitating toward DAESH and the group’s core of religious zealots, as well as to send infiltrators (or reports of infiltrators) to make the extremists “paranoid about spies” in their ranks.
 
 
3. DAESH’s objectives: power over Islam
 
Although DAESH claims that it wants a caliphate across the whole region of the Levant, the group is focused on holding territory where this is feasible. Although Palestinian lands might be considered a prime target, it has not diverted its energies towards supporting the Palestinians or attacking Israeli interests; there have also been comments from DAESH ideologues criticizing Hamas’s alleged closeness to Iran and its participation in democracy, which DAESH considers illegitimate.
Since 1999, DAESH and its antecedents have consistently worked toward creating the necessary conditions for establishing an Islamic state, not by conquering other religions’ territories, but by attacking Muslim countries and populations.
The strategy of controlling territory is different from that of the al-Qaeda network, which is a transnational organization and has focused on attacks on Western interests. DAESH is concentrating on controlling territory, holding the allegiance of the Sunni Muslims in that territory and ending the rule of governments which it sees as non-Muslim, such as those in Baghdad and Damascus.
Some have argued that the ‘maximalist’ objectives for DAESH to establish a caliphate including the whole of the Levant area are not the whole story. One senior former Baathist leader gave a different picture: “These groups were unified by the same goal, which is getting rid of this sectarian government, ending this corrupt army and negotiating to form the Sunni Region.”
Wahhabism against the Saudis
According to British analyst and former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke[7], DAESH is a time bomb inserted into the heart of the Middle East, since it may lead to the implosion of Saudi Arabia as a foundation stone of the modern Middle East, because of DAESH’s deliberate and intentional use in its doctrine of the language of Abd-al Wahhab, the 18^th century founder, together with Ibn Saud, of Wahhabism and the Saudi project.
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the first “prince of the faithful” in the Islamic State of Iraq, who formulated in 2006 the principles of his prospective state, used a language that replicates exactly Abd-al Wahhab’s. Also, al Wahhab’s writings and Wahhabi commentaries on his works are widely distributed in the areas under DAESH’ control and are made the subject of study sessions.
The doctrine
In Abd al-Wahhab’s doctrine, called by DAESH “the forgotten” tradition of “loyalty and disavowal”, a Muslim is no true believer, unless additionally, he or she actively denied (and destroyed) any other subject of worship. The list of such potential subjects of idolatrous worship, which al-Wahhab condemned as idolatry, was so extensive that almost all Muslims were at risk of falling under his definition of “unbelievers.” They therefore faced a choice: either convert to al-Wahhab’s vision of Islam or be killed, and their wives, their children and physical property taken as the spoils of jihad. Even to express doubts about this doctrine, al-Wahhab said, should occasion execution.
A disciple of the 14^th century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, Abd al-Wahhab, despised the Egyptian and Ottoman nobility who travelled across Arabia to pray at Mecca. In his view, these were not Muslims; they were imposters masquerading as Muslims. Like Taymiyyah before him, Abd al-Wahhab believed that the period of the Prophet Muhammad’s stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the “best of times”), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate (this, essentially, is Salafism). Taymiyyah had declared war on Shi’ism, Sufism and Greek philosophy. He spoke out, too, against visiting the grave of the prophet and the celebration of his birthday, declaring that all such behavior represented mere imitation of the Christian worship of Jesus as God (i.e. idolatry). Abd al-Wahhab assimilated all this earlier teaching, stating that “any doubt or hesitation” on the part of a believer in respect to his or her acknowledging this particular interpretation of Islam should “deprive a man of immunity of his property and his life.”
One of the main tenets of Abd al-Wahhab’s doctrine has become the idea of takfir. Under the takfiri doctrine, Abd al-Wahhab and his followers could deem fellow Muslims infidels should they engage in activities that in any way could be said to encroach on the sovereignty of the absolute Authority (that is, the King). Abd al-Wahhab argued that all Muslims must individually pledge their allegiance to a single Muslim leader (a Caliph). Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated and their possessions confiscated. The list of apostates meriting death included the Shiite, Sufis and other Muslim denominations, whom Abd al-Wahhab did not consider to be Muslim at all.
The Saudi project: “cultural revolution” and export of violence
This idealistic, puritan, proselytizing formulation by al-Wahhab was at the origin of the Saudi “project” that was violently suppressed by the Ottomans in 1818, but resurrected in the 1920s, to become the Saudi Kingdom.
Paradoxically, it was a maverick British official, who helped embed the gene into the new state. The British official attached to Aziz, was Harry St. John Philby (the father of the MI6 officer who spied for the Soviet KGB, Kim Philby). He was to become King Abd al-Aziz’s close adviser, having resigned as a British official, and was until his death, a key member of the Ruler’s Court. He was an Arabist, like Lawrence of Arabia and a convert to Wahhabi Islam known as Sheikh Abdullah.
Abd al-Aziz was well aware that Britain had pledged that the defeat of the Ottomans would produce an Arab state. It is not clear exactly what passed between Philby and the Ruler, but it would appear that Philby’s vision was rather one of transforming the wider Islamic ummah (or community of believers) into a Wahhabist instrument that would entrench the al-Saud as Arabia’s leaders. In a sense, Philby may be said to be the “godfather” of the pact by which the Saudi leadership would use its clout to “manage” Sunni Islam on behalf of western objectives (containing socialism, Ba’athism, Nasserism, Soviet influence, Iran, etc.). In return, the West would acquiesce to Saudi Arabia’s soft-power Wahhabisation of the Islamic ummah.
Wahhabism was to become a dominant strand to Saudi identity, while the second strand relates to King Abd-al Aziz’s subsequent shift towards statehood in the 1920s: his curbing of Wahhabi violence (in order to have diplomatic standing as a nation-state with Britain and America); his institutionalization of the original Wahhabist impulse – and the subsequent seizing of the petrodollar boom in the 1970s, to channel the volatile violent Wahhabi current away from home.
However, his “cultural revolution” was and remained a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab’s Jacobin-like call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.
Wahhabism was forcefully changed from a movement of revolutionary jihad and theological takfiri purification, to a movement of conservative social, political, theological, and religious da’wa (Islamic call) aimed to justify the institution that upholds loyalty to the royal Saudi family and the King’s absolute power. With the advent of the oil bonanza, Saudi goals were to spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world, in a creed which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were invested in this manifestation of soft power.
It was this heady mix of billion dollar soft power projection that brought into being a western policy dependency on Saudi Arabia, a dependency that has endured since Abd-al Aziz’s meeting with Roosevelt on a U.S. warship (returning the president from the Yalta Conference) until today. As a result, British and American policy has been bound to Saudi aims and has been heavily dependent on Saudi Arabia for direction in pursuing its course in the Middle East.
In political and financial terms, the Saud-Philby strategy has been an astonishing success (if taken on its own, cynical, self-serving terms). But it was always rooted in British and American refusal to see the dangerous “gene” within the Wahhabist project, its latent potential to mutate at any time. In fact, since its renaissance in the 1920s, the Saudi project has always carried within it the seeds of its own self-destruction.
Wahhabism and DAESH
Ideologically, there is nothing that separates Saudi Wahhabism from DAESH. The rift emerges from the institutionalization of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s doctrine of “One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque” – these three pillars being taken respectively to refer to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of official Wahhabism, and its control of “the word” (i.e. the mosque).
DAESH’s denial of these three pillars on which the whole of Sunni authority presently rests makes it a deep threat to Saudi Arabia.
The new Dabiq magazine, designed and published in English, has also incorporated subtle mechanisms that show DAESH’s real objectives. For example, a focus on Millah Ibrahim (the Path of Ibrahim, or Abraham) in Dabiq’s first edition was likely intended to remind readers of a well-known paper attacking the Saudi royal family’s legitimacy by Abu Muhammad al- Maqdisi.
On the one hand, DAESH is deeply Wahhabist. On the other hand, it is ultra radical and could be seen as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism. As the Saudi monarchy blossomed in the oil age into an ever more inflated institution, the appeal of the traditional (Ikhwan) Wahhabi message gained ground and enjoyed (and still enjoys) the support of many prominent men and women and sheikhs. DAESH’s undermining of the legitimacy of the King’s legitimacy is seen to be a return to the true origins of the Saudi-Wahhab project.
While the Saudi monarchy was able to annihilate the radical Wahhabi movements in the country, DAESH is the first of such kind that is taking place outside the kingdom and is sharply criticizing the al-Saud ruling family. As such, it generated a deep schism in Saudi Arabia, between the modernizing current of which King Abdullah is a part, and the traditional orientation of which bin Laden, and the Saudi supporters of DAESH and the Saudi religious establishment are another part. It is also a schism that exists within the Saudi royal family itself.
According to the Saudi-owned Al Hayat newspaper, in July 2014, an opinion poll on Saudis released on social networking sites claimed that 92 percent of the target group believed that DAESH was conforming to the values of Islam and Islamic law, and the Saudi commentator Jamal Khashoggi, also warned of Saudi DAESH supporters who “watch from the shadows”.
With 3,000-4,000 Saudi fighters in the DAESH, Khashoggi advises of the need to “look inward” to explain DAESH’s rise and even to “correct the mistakes of our predecessors.” The key political question is whether DAESH’s successes and the full manifestation of the archetypal impulse will stimulate and activate the dissenter ‘gene’ within the Saudi kingdom. If it does, and Saudi Arabia is engulfed by the DAESH fervor, the Gulf will never be the same again. Saudi Arabia will deconstruct and the Middle East will be unrecognizable.
As Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab made it such in the 18^th century; and as the Saudi Ikhwan made it such in the 20^th century, DAESH’s real target must be the Hijaz (the seizure of Mecca and Medina) and the legitimacy that this will confer on DAESH as the new Emirs of Arabia.
 
 
 
4. Possible “results”: Kurdistan, Libya, Egypt
 
Beside the deep threat represented by DAESH to the Saudi project – that entails a threat to other Saudi-led entities, such as the Arab League and OPEC, the group contributed significantly to other processes that lead to a new configuration of the Middle East and North Africa geopolitical region. Among the already visible ones there are the dissolution of the Levant states Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as the ground-laying for the creation of a Kurdish state entity and, through DAESH’s expansion in Libya and Egypt, the premises for further destabilization and new threats for Europe
The Kurds: closer to statehood
The fighting between DAESH and the Kurds stretches along a six-hundred-and-fifty-mile front in northeastern Iraq that roughly traces one border of Iraqi Kurdistan, the territory that the Kurds have been fighting for decades to establish as an independent state.
With about thirty million people, the Kurds claim to be the world’s largest ethnic group without a country. Iraqi Kurdistan, which contains about a quarter of that population, is a landlocked region surrounded almost entirely by neighbors – Turkey, Iran, and the government in Baghdad – that oppose its bid for statehood.
The DAESH factor presents the Kurds with both opportunity and risk. Taking advantage of the chaos, the Kurds seized huge tracts of territory that had been claimed by both Kurdistan and the government in Baghdad. With the newly acquired land, the political climate for independence seemed promising. The region was also finding new economic strength; vast reserves of oil have been discovered there in the past decade.
The role of the Kurds in Iraq and Syria is central to the conflict. Kurdish forces are local, Muslim forces with some proven effectiveness and a broadly pro-Western and anti-fundamentalist orientation, at least as they are perceived in the West.
Since 2003, when the U.S. began spending billions of dollars trying to build a new Iraq, the Kurds have been their most steadfast ally and became a pro-Western, largely democratic, largely secular, and economically prosperous entity. However, the Administration sticks to its policy called “One Iraq” and if the long-sought country of Kurdistan becomes real, America’s twelve-year project of nation building in Iraq will be sundered. So the Administration wants the Kurds to do two potentially incompatible things. The first is to serve as a crucial ally in the campaign to destroy DAESH, with all the military funding and equipment that such a role entails. The second is to resist seceding from the Iraqi state.
Kurdish leaders acknowledge that the emergence of DAESH and the implosion of Syria are changing the region in unpredictable ways. But the Kurds’ history with the state of Iraq is one of persistent enmity and bloodshed, and they see little benefit in joining up with their old antagonists. Kurdish leadership would accept a federated Iraqi state if given autonomy in political, economic and security matters. If America does not, Iraqi Kurdistan will most likely declare itself an independent state, which Turkey, Iran and Syria will move forcefully to stop, for fear that their own Kurdish populations will try to join it.
A “little” help from Israel
In June 2014, high Israeli representatives mentioned to the United States that Kurdish independence in northern Iraq was a “foregone conclusion” and Israeli experts predicted the Jewish state would be quick to recognize a Kurdish state, should it emerge.
During discussions with State Secretary John Kerry in Paris on 26 June 2014, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that “the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion”, and a day earlier, Israeli President Shimon Peres had a similar message for U.S. President Barack Obama, saying that he did not see unifying Iraq as possible without “massive” foreign military intervention and that this underscored Kurdish separation from the Shiite Muslim majority and Sunni Arab minority.
Such remarks mark the results of Israel’s decades-long, if discreet, military, intelligence and business ties with the Kurds since the 1960s, as it sees in the minority ethnic group a buffer against shared Arab adversaries. According to historians, Kurds assisted in the migration of Jews to Israel during the establishment of Israel and after the 1967 war. These traditionally close ties, plus the presence of 150,000 Jewish Kurds in Israel contribute to the ties. The Barzani family, uncle and nephew, have close ties with Jewish Kurds of Barzan and Acre.
When the Kurds rebelled against Iraqi Baath Party’s Arabization policy, Molla Barzani, father of Massoud Barzani, had his first contact with Israel in 1963, arranged by the Iranian intelligence service SAVAK. After Mossad’s David Kimche’s talk with Barzani’s father, Mossad provided arms, money and intelligence support to Kurds. According to Eliezer Tsafrir, the former Mossad station chief in Kurdistan, Israeli advisers trained Kurdish fighters between 1963 and 1975. The relations, which were kept under wraps to protect the Kurds, were revealed in 1980 by former Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
In 2012, reports were circulated according to which the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq allowed the Israeli intelligence service to set up a military base in the area in order to conduct operations against Iranian nuclear scientists. Regional media also reported previously that Mansour Barzani, Massoud’s son and head of Kurdistani intelligence, had received two Tel Aviv officials, the Israeli chief of special operations and the coordinator for Israeli-Kurdish relations, in the Kurdistan region. During their one-and-a-half-hour meeting, the two sides reportedly explored all avenues for increasing bilateral military relations and the ensuing trade with Israel.
Turkish reaction: support for DAESH
On the other part, several open-source reports revealed a consistent support given to DAESH by Turkey in the second half of 2014. Already in June 2014, the Turkish newspaper Radikal revealed the existence of a deal with the Jihadists against the Kurdish rebels of PKK and YPG.
The Turkish support supposedly includes weapons’ and fighters’ transit, as well as treatment facilities in hospitals. Also, Turkey was accused that it allows the export of the looted crude oil and antiquities by DAESH.
Several Turkish opposition party leaders stated that state trucks supposedly carrying aid to Syria, were in fact carrying weapons for DAESH. Such trucks were loaded in the Ankara international airport, under the control of the Turkish intelligence service (MIT), with rockets, explosives and small weaponry. It was also revealed that Turkish airports were used by the Saudis to send to DAESH in Syria weapons from the European black market.
Also, leaked conversations by high Turkish officials, including President Erdoğan and the head of MIT Hakan Fidan, revealed preparations for an invasion in Syria that would be provoked by DAESH acting as “agent provocateur” on behalf of Ankara. The Turkish intelligence service was also accused by the Egyptian military of providing tactical information to DAESH, and by the Jordanian intelligence service of training DAESH commandos on Turkish territory. At the end of 2014, the Iraqi authorities informed their partners with the details of Turkish involvement on behalf of DAESH in Iraq.
Turkey also appears to have stopped supporting the jihadists since February 2015 and the resignation of Hakan Fidan.[8] However, when on February 21-22, the Turkish army entered thirty kilometres on Syrian territory, to remove the ashes of Suleiman Shah, the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire – a reliquary it holds by virtue of the Treaty of Ankara (1921) – the Turkish army did not fight DAESH which controls the area. The remains of Suleiman Shah were not repatriated but deposited a little further, still in Syrian territory. For some analysts, in this way, Turkey showed that it does not intend to take action against DAESH and retains its anti-Syrian ambitions.
Libya: occupying the chaos
DAESH-affiliated militants’ recent attacks on oil fields in Libya, as well as the murder of Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians by terrorists there, confirm that the terror group is expanding its operations in a new theater, far from Iraq and Syria. After its rapid gains of the 2014 summer, DAESH has been on the defensive following months of allied bombardment, and needs to expand to new theaters to sustain its momentum.
In November 2014, DAESH fighters were in complete control of the city of Derna (population of about 100,000), not far from the Egyptian border and just about 200 miles from the southern shores of the European Union. The fighters took advantage of political chaos to rapidly expand their presence westwards along the coast. The Derna branch of DAESH counts 800 fighters and operates half a dozen camps on the outskirts of the town, as well as larger facilities in the nearby Green Mountains, where fighters from across North Africa are being trained.
It has been bolstered by the return to Libya from Syria and Iraq of up to 300 Libyan jihadists who were part of DAESH’s al Battar Brigade, deployed at first in Deir Ezzor in Syria and then Mosul in Iraq. These fighters supported the Shura Council for the Youth of Islam in Derna, a pro-DAESH faction in its fight for superiority with another militant group, the Abu Salem Brigade, some of whose fighters’ loyalties lay with al-Qaeda. The new DAESH wing in Derna calls itself the “Barqa” provincial division of the Islamic State, the name given to the eastern region of Libya when Islamic rule replaced the Roman Empire. The Libyan branch of DAESH has a tight grip on the city, controlling the courts, all aspects of administration, education, and the local radio.
Also in November 2014, a new pan-Libyan group calling itself “Mujahideen of Libya” declared allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claiming it was sub-divided into three provinces: Barqa, Tripoli, and Fezzan (southwest Libya). The DAESH leader responded by calling all supporters in Libya to join what he called the newest administrative region of the Islamic caliphate. Libyan fighters loyal to DAESH have expanded their presence westwards along the coast, forming chapters in al Bayda, Benghazi (where the Islamist umbrella group Ansar al Shariah already holds sway), Sirte, al-Khums and even Tripoli.
From Libya to Syria … and back
The Libya anti-Gaddafi intervention fatally linked the destinies of both Libya and Iraq when some of the massive flow of arms sent by Qatar (and others), as well as North African jihadists, were channeled from Libya, with the blessings of certain Western governments, on to the new war in Syria against the Assad government..
The personnel flow from North Africa to Syria has meant that the original one-way channel has become a two-way one with the arrival of DAESH in Libya, with firm communications and logistics established. Further, the all-encompassing ideology of DAESH means that the idea of foreign fighters in leadership roles has been re-imported to Libya as a guiding concept. On 3 March 2015, Newsweek cited Libyan government sources in claiming that over 5,000 foreign fighters have come to Libya amidst ongoing public calls from DAESH for new recruits. The magazine also reported that DAESH have allegedly appointed two emirs, both foreign nationals, to oversee both sides of the country. “The ‘Emir of Tripoli’, a Tunisian known as Abu Talha, controls the group’s operations in the west and a Yemeni national, Abu al-Baraa el-Azdi is based in the town of Derna.
Opportunities for expansion in a failed state
While DAESH’s current territorial holdings are limited, conflict-racked Libya undeniably offers the group many opportunities for expansion. The country suffers from a weak government, deep internal divisions, a significant presence of jihadi factions that could be receptive to cooperating with or perhaps even joining DAESH, and an abundance of weaponry. Libya’s geography also makes it a desirable target for DAESH, as the country stands at the crossroads between North Africa and the Sahel, thus providing the group with the opportunity to coordinate with, or to try to co-opt, other regional jihadi movements. Moreover, Libya’s proximity to Europe provides DAESH a potential staging ground for attacks on Western soil.
A major and existential concern regarding DAESH in Libya is the group’s ability to disrupt energy production and supply which, if fully realized, could lead to a total state collapse within three months.
The situation is being complicated by the existence of two rival governments: the internationally-recognized authority, exiled to the far eastern city of Tobruk, and the Islamic-backed ‘Libya Dawn’ outfit that took over Tripoli last year. Both are increasingly accusing each other for Libya’s problems and continue to attack each other – a state of affairs that has helped to create a vacuum that DAESH fighters are happy to fill.
Despite the relatively small territorial area under its control, DAESH has succeeded in carrying out suicide bombings, such as January’s deadly attack on a Tripoli luxury hotel popular with foreigners. And the eastern town of Qubba was the scene of another suicide bombing that killed 40 people in late February. This indicates again that destabilization of the state – and, indeed both rival governments – through energy control and scattered terrorist attacks may indeed be DAESH’s strategic goal in Libya, as a means to other ends.
A new front line
Much remains unknown about DAESH’s strategic intentions in Libya, with analysts estimating that the group’s intentions and relative strength will be tested over the next 3-6 months. It is most likely that DAESH’s strategic goal is to destabilize Libya so much that neighboring states have to intervene more heavily than they have already. The terror group will thus use increased fighting with the neighboring Arab states as a means for attracting recruits to its cause, while trying to destabilize those countries (especially Egypt). This will be done partly to sustain jihad momentum, since DAESH faces eventual losses in Tikrit and Mosul as Iran becomes more seriously involved.
The ultimate goal of DAESH may be to provoke destabilization in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, and eventually hook up via the Sahel with Boko Haram and other jihadist groups, creating a wide arc of instability spanning the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Red Seas.
DAESH’s escalating operations in Libya and the propaganda efforts surrounding these attacks are a telling sign that the group sees Libya as a new front line. The real antidote against it is a resolution to the country’s destructive internal political divide: As long as the Libyan civil war continues, violent nonstate actors such as DAESH will be able to find a foothold.
Egypt: a future target?
After operating loosely in Egypt’s northern Sinai Peninsula, for the past six months, DAESH recently released video and other documents that suggest it is getting more organized in the Sinai, setting up military checkpoints on the main road between the major cities of Al-Arish and Rafah. In the video, militants explain that they chose that location, close to the Gaza Strip and the Israeli border, because it will allow them to “catch spies from the Egyptian army and spies for the Jews.”
The new Egyptian arm of DAESH – which the group has named “Sinai Province” – is a reconstituted version of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, which pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2014 and was embraced officially by DAESH leader Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis emerged after the 2011 uprising that overthrew Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. In recent months, it has staged devastating attacks on Egypt’s police forces and claimed responsibility for a series of suicide attacks on military facilities in Cairo and the Sinai Peninsula. After the events in July 2013 that led to Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s coming to power, the group moved into Egypt’s heartland and started targeting government officials and security facilities. Now, according to a recent report, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis’ attacks on greater Cairo have become as frequent as its assaults in Sinai. Analysts now fear that the group may have sympathizers in the Egyptian military’s ranks.
According to some estimates, DAESH has roughly 5,000 Egyptian fighters. Many are veteran jihadists who fought previously in Afghanistan and Bosnia during the 1980s and 1990s. And according to Egyptian officials, a number of them have already returned to lead operations against the current regime.
Long-term value
Egypt, in fact, is a target of similar value to DAESH in the long term. Even if DAESH is defeated in Iraq and Syria, a foothold in Egypt could provide access to safe havens in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in the Arab Peninsula. With supporters and sympathizers in Algeria, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, and Tunisia, DAESH is poised to transform this massive area, drawing support from alienated citizens fed up with autocratic regimes. In addition, the new alliance could inspire other networks in these countries to join DAESH. Jihadist militias, such as Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and Boko Haram in Nigeria, are already appropriating DAESH’s ideology and tactics to expand their own spheres of control.
Aside from ransacking the country’s great museums and churches, there could be no more epic propaganda video for fundamentalist Islam than the destruction of the pyramids. In recent propaganda videos, DAESH has made allusions to President al-Sisi and the ancient “pharaoh.” The implication seems to be that the legacy of ancient Egypt and a modern secular democracy are indistinguishably evil, in that both are non-Islamic. While an attack on the pyramids is very unlikely to ever happen, DAESH’s past behavior and present rhetoric indicate clearly that a whole wider range of very vulnerable sites in the world may come under threat from DAESH or from individuals radicalized by it over the Internet.
The U.S. may have acknowledged this long-term danger recently, when it restored the military aid to Egypt that was suspended after the 2013 overthrow of Egypt’s first elected president, citing a need to combat DAESH. Egypt will receive $1.3bn in annual military funding.
The decision was announced after a telephone call between U.S. President Barack Obama and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in which they also discussed the turmoil that is gripping the region.
 
5. Medium-term assessment
 
DAESH maintains ambitious objectives in Syria and Iraq, and an expansion of its operations into other Middle Eastern states, including Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia should not be discounted.
The principal threat is posed by the increasing instability within the Middle East, which jihadi groups have exploited for their own benefit. Today, this instability plagues the heart of the Middle East, stretching across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon and encompassing the border regions of southern Turkey and northern Jordan.
As the West’s attention is primarily focused on the possibility of terrorist attacks, a different scenario begins to unfold: the intra-Muslim war between Shiites and Sunnis. Such a conflict would allow DAESH to graduate from being a hated terror organization to a central power.
Already today, the frontlines in Syria, Iraq and Yemen follow this confessional line, with Shiite Afghans fighting against Sunni Afghans in Syria and DAESH profiting in Iraq from the barbarism of brutal Shiite militias. Should this ancient Islam conflict continue to escalate, it could spill over into confessional mixed states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Lebanon.
So far, the Shiite world has scored some successes: Iran has established itself as a country the West cannot avoid dealing with and has ambitions to play an ever greater role in the Arab world; Hezbollah is calling the shots in Lebanon and there is an ever-stronger Shiite axis linking Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran. This has created a new and troubling phenomenon: a Sunni majority with a minority complex — a powerful though confused feeling of marginalization, dispossession and humiliation. More and more Sunnis throughout the region experience and express the feeling that they have been deprived of their fundamental rights and are suffering persecution.
In this context, efforts to ease Sunni/Shiite hostilities look like crucial. The West may not be in a good position to help with this. A stronger commitment to the fight against DAESH from regional Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as Shiite Iran, would be better. These countries also have far more to lose from the spread of DAESH than Western states do. Some argue that it is indeed better for the US and NATO to stand back, forcing regional powers to assume more responsibility for maintaining order in the region.
The complexity of the conflicts means that a coherent response from the coalition of forces arrayed against DAESH is very difficult to craft. If and when DAESH is ‘degraded and ultimately defeated’ as a force in the Levant, the boundaries established may not be exactly as set out in 1916 by Sykes and Picot.
DAESH’s successes are throwing the region’s existing alliances into disarray and even calling into question national borders. A new Middle East is emerging that already differs from the old order in two ways: an enhanced role for the Kurds and Iran, and diminished influence for the region’s Sunni powers. What is also becoming apparent is the collapse of the region’s old order and with it, the decline of the region’s traditional stabilizing powers.
The political weakness of those powers – whether global actors like the United States or regional players like Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia – has led to a remarkable role reversal in the region’s power dynamic.
The Kurdish question entails a potential for much wider conflict, because statehood would also threaten the territorial integrity of Syria, Iraq, and probably Iran.
Iran could prove to be the regional winner, since Iranian cooperation is essential to stable solutions in Iraq and Syria, and the country plays an important role in the Israel-Palestine conflict and in Lebanon. If a realistic prospect for a final accord on the nuclear issue is achieved, Iran’s broader regional role will become both stronger and more constructive. The nuclear issue implicates another important hidden question, namely Iran’s relationship with Israel, at whose northern border in Lebanon stands Hezbollah, Iran’s closest partner in the region. Hezbollah remains committed to Israel’s destruction, and Iran supplies it with powerful weapons.
This makes a new Middle East, more Shiite and Iranian and more Kurdish, but it will remain the powder keg of world politics in the twenty-first century.
 
oooOOOooo
 
 
Annex
 
A short history of Daesh
 
Over the years, Daesh fighters have frequently been heard proclaiming “baqiya wa tatamadad” (“lasting and expanding”), a slogan which represents its fundamental modus operandi as an organization.
Daesh’s origin date back to 1999, when its father figure, Ahmad Fadl al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) was released from prison in Jordan, after serving 5 years of a 15-year sentence for weapons possession and being a member of the Bayat al-Imam (a militant organization founded in 1992 by the Jordanian jihadi ideologue Issam Muhammad Tahir al-Barqawi/Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi). Zarqawi then moved to Afghanistan, arriving in Kandahar province with a letter of tazkiyya (a personal recommendation or reference) from then- London-based Abu Qatada al-Filistini. He made contact with al-Qaeda’s leadership, acquiring permission and a $200,000 loan to establish a training camp, that he used for building his own group, Jund al-Sham, renamed Jama‘at al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad (JTWJ).
Consisting mainly of Palestinians and Jordanians, JTWJ attracted international attention in December 1999, with its plot to attack Amman’s Radisson Hotel and at least two other popular tourist sites. The foiling of the so-called  “Millennium Plot” by Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate forced JTWJ underground. It fought alongside al-Qaeda and Taliban forces before eventually fleeing to Iran in December 2001.
JTWJ revealed its strategic intent in August 2003, with three significant attacks. On August 7, JTWJ detonated a car bomb outside Jordan’s embassy in Baghdad, killing 17 people. Then, on the 19^th, a suicide car bombing outside the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq killed 22 people, including the UN Special Representative in Iraq. On August 29, the group targeted the Shiite Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf with another suicide car bomb, killing 95 people, including Ayatol­lah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
JTWJ’s attacks demonstrated its main targets: Jordan, the international community, and the Shiites, which Zarqawi viewed as the chief threat to Sunni power in Iraq and the wider region. This three-pronged targeting strategy represented Zarqawi’s ultimate objective: to undermine occupying forces while simultaneously sparking a sectarian conflict. Zarqawi believed his organization could take advantage of the resulting chaos to cast itself as the defender of the Sunni community and to usher in the establishment of an Islamic state.
The sectarian element of this strategy held a particular personal importance for Zarqawi. His writings were consistently riddled with anti-Shiite rhetoric. He frequently quoted Ibn Taymiyya’s warning: “They are the enemy. Beware of them. Fight them. By God, they lie.” In his final public address before his death on June 7, 2006, Zarqawi declared that “the Muslims will have no victory or superiority over the aggressive infidels such as the Jews and the Christians until there is a total annihilation of those under them, such as the apostate agents headed by the rafida”.
In September 2004, after eight months of negotiations, Zarqawi pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, and JTWJ became known as Tanzim Qa‘idat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, often simplified to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). However, Zarqawi’s relationship with al-Qaeda was fraught with tension, particularly because of AQI’s brutality and mass targeting of Shiite civilians. This represented a fundamental difference of opinion between Zarqawi and his masters in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nonetheless, Zawahiri encouraged AQI to prepare to establish an Islamic state in Iraq.
On January 15, 2006, AQI announced its merger with five other groups, to form Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen (MSM), a coalition whose aim was to unite and better coordinate Iraq’s jihadi insurgency. Zarqawi’s death in Baqubah on June 7, 2006 catalyzed a strengthening of the organization. Within five days, AQI appointed Abu Hamza al-Muhajir (Abu Ayyub al-Masri) as its new leader, and four months later the MSM announced the establishment of al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq, or the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), with a fully structured cabinet.
On November 10, Masri pledged bay‘a (allegiance) to ISI leader Hamid Dawud Muhammad Khalil al-Zawi (Abu Omar al-Baghdadi). Masri’s pledge of allegiance to ISI combined with the lack of any formal ISI pledge of al­legiance to al-Qaeda catalyzed a gradual divorce between the two entities.
Having operated as a model insurgent force in the mid-2000s, AQI, MSM, and ISI had initially been moderately successful, seizing territory and establishing localized governance structures. Such structures, however, were popularly rejected, thus presenting an opening for a traditional counterinsurgency strategy. Targeted, intelligence-led strikes against ISI’s leadership structure were complemented by a broader bottom-up fight, led by the Sahwa councils and backed by the U.S.-led coalition. Consequently, ISI suffered significantly during 2007-2009. It decided to shift its headquarters to the northern city of Mo­sul, where existing Arab-Kurdish tensions could be exploited. Initially, everyday ISI management in Mosul was led by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi’s deputy, Abu Qaswarah al-Maghribi. Following his death in October 2008, Maghribi was likely succeeded by Abu Muhammad al-Jowlani, the current leader of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria.
ISI continued to exploit existing political and social divisions. By mid-2010, ISI was offering larger salaries than the government.
ISI also adopted a strategic shift, initiating an information campaign aimed at re-emphasizing the legitimacy of their Islamic state project. One facet of this strategy was to stress Abu Omar al-Baghdadi’s alleged membership of the Quraysh tribe, which according to Islamic tradition will produce the next caliph. Although Baghdadi was killed along with AQI leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri on April 18, 2010, his replacement as ISI leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is also allegedly a Qurayshi. Similarly, ISI at times compared its political and territorial influence with that of the Prophet Muhammad during his time in Medina, thereby claiming religious legitimacy.
While the eruption of the civil war in Syria and ISI’s expansion of operations into that country undoubtedly energized the organization’s base, its recovery and expansion was clearly well underway prior to 2011. In early 2011, with the Arab Spring in full flow, ISI continued the process of expansion and professionalization that it had begun in late 2009. Most significantly, ISI has expanded into Syria, exploiting that country’s revolution and civil war.
ISI and its antecedents had maintained links in Syria since 2003, when recruitment networks, facilitated by Syrian intelligence, funneled fighters from the Arab world into Iraq through Syria. By 2007, the U.S. government claimed that “85-90%” of foreign fighters in Iraq had come via Syria. Therefore, the emergence of a popular revolution in Syria in early 2011 attracted the attention of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who sent his Ninawa operations chief, Abu Muhammad al-Jowlani, to Syria to establish an ISI front. Jowlani arrived in Syria’s northeastern Hasakah governorate in August 2011 and began connecting with local jihadi cells across the country in order to establish what would become Jabhat al-Nusra, which emerged publicly on January 23, 2012, claiming a December 23, 2011 suicide bombing in Damascus that killed at least 40 people.
In the following months, Jabhat al-Nusra operated similarly to ISI, but insisted it had no links to ISI or al-Qaeda. By 2012, Jabhat al-Nusra transformed itself into an insurgent force, especially in the north.  This remarkable rise prompted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to attempt to reign in his increasingly independent Syrian subordinate. On April 9, 2013, Baghdadi confirmed in an audio statement that Jabhat al- Nusra was an offshoot of ISI and would be included into the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS/Daesh). Jowlani promptly rejected this edict and Jabhat al-Nusra maintained its independence.
In January 2014, a coalition of moderate groups launched operations against Daesh across northern Syria. In the same period, Daesh’s refusal to submit to al-Qaeda-appointed mediators pushed Zawahiri to announce that “Daesh is not a branch of the al-Qaeda group, we have no organizational relationship with it, and the group is not responsible for its actions.”
After a first attempt at state building in Iraq in the mid-2000s, followed by further efforts across northern Syria in 2013, Daesh appeared closer to achieving its ultimate objective in 2014. Currently, Daesh is not merely a terrorist group, but a qualitative evolution of the al-Qaeda model. Its military strategy is professionally designed and implemented, and it also incorporates a practical model for social governance which has proven effective within unstable environments.
The central element of Daesh’ military strategy aims to spark or sustain sectarian conflict, to “provoke the Shiites to radicalize, join Iranian-sponsored militias and commit similar atrocities against Sunnis. With both the Shiite-led government in Iraq and the Alawi-led one in Syria perceived as repressive by many ordinary Sunnis, Daesh aims to present itself as the protector of true and pure Sunni ideals.
Independent of specific local dynamics, Daesh has proven capable of designing and implementing a multi-stage strategy aimed at engendering a chaotic power vacuum into which it can enter.
Throughout this 15-year period, Daesh and its various predecessors have undergone a significant process of operational and organizational learning. While a first attempt at Islamic state building in 2006-2008 proved overzealous and alienating, a second attempt from 2013 onwards has proven more sustainable, although concerted international intervention that began in 2014 increasingly challenges its success.
 
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Annex
 
 
Terrorist Attacks Attributed to Fatah – Revolutionary Council
(Abu Nidal Organization – ANO) 1972 – 1997*
 
 

 
* Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/AbuNidalListofAttacks.html
 
 
[1] In this work the “Islamic State” group is referred to as DAESH, which is the transliteration of the Arabic acronym formed of the words ‘لدولةالإسلاميةفيالعراقوالشام’ (‘al-dowla al-islaamiyya fii-il-i’raaq wa-ash-shaam’) – Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The word shaam is variously used in Arabic to denote Damascus (in Syrian dialect), ‘Greater Syria’ (the Levant), or Syria.
 
[2] A short history of DAESH is presented in an annex to this work. More details can be found in our previous analysis “Jihad: From Religion to Terrorism”
[3] The episode was described and analyzed as a hoax, see The Snowden Hoax: How a Lie Traveled Around the World Before the Truth Could Get Its Boots On, by Alan Kurtz, 9.08.2014, on http://snowdenhoax.blogspot.ro/
[4] Called after its author, Oded Yinon, Israeli former diplomat and journalist, author of A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, in KIVUNIM (Directions), A Journal for Judaism and Zionism; Issue No, 14/Winter, 5742, February 1982, published by the Department of Publicity/The World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem
[5]NBC’s Meet the Press on June 22, 2014.
 
[6] A list of the ANO terrorist attempts is presented in an annex to this work
[7] Also former Middle East advisor to Javier Solana, High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union (CFSP) from 1997 to 2003. Crooke is the founder and director of the “Conflicts Forum”, an organization that advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West
[8] On February 7, 2015, he resigned from his position to run for the Turkish Grand National Assembly from the AKP. One month later, on 9 March 2015, he withdrew his candidacy and hours later he was reappointed to his former job.