Strife

The Academic Blog of the Department of War Studies, King's College London

You are here: Home / Archives for ISIS

ISIS

The Funding of Terrorism (Part IV) – A Trust Deficit is Undermining the Investigation of Terrorist Financing across MENA

by

by Jack Watling

Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei (Image credit: Ayatollah.ir/Wikimedia)

 

The Kingdom of Bahrain sentenced 139 people to prison in April 2019, alleging they were part of a terrorist cell, which the authorities refer to as ‘Bahraini Hezbollah’. The charges in the mass trial ranged from plotting to conduct attacks and the smuggling of arms, to terrorist financing. Specifics however were not revealed, and point to a damaging trend: the use of ‘terrorism’ as a politically acceptable charge with which to implement repression. The consequences of this policy are not just unjust, but in pushing communities to avoid cooperation with the authorities sustains avenues for actual terrorists to finance and carry out their operations.

There are armed groups active in Bahrain, just as there are non-state armed actors, many of which have carried out terrorist attacks, in Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. Many of these groups are directly supported by Iran in these activities. While sanctions on Iran can be effective in reducing the country’s available resources for financing clandestine activities, limited progress has been made in restricting the routes by which money reaches armed groups. To understand why, it is necessary to appreciate how the Shia community manages its tithes. Although a minority of Shia Muslims are followers of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s religious leadership has ties across the Shia community, and the Iranian government is consequently able to leverage these networks.

Each Twelver Shia Muslim selects an Ayatollah – or religious jurist – as their spiritual guide. They are obligated to follow the scholar who they believe to be most theologically knowledgeable. A follower must pay a fifth of their profits each year to their Ayatollah. The khums is supposed to support the Ayatollah in his research, and to provide subsistence for the Howza: the seminary he oversees. Many Shia give more than the required khums and, in discussion with the cleric or their representatives, make additional donations for him to spend in support of an agreed cause.

The Shia financial system was developed in small communities. Between the collapse of distance brought about by international finance, and a rapidly expanding global population, it now sees donations made by a community of around 220 million people. The volume of money is therefore vast, and far exceeds the immediate needs of the Ayatollahs and the Howza. A far higher proportion of the money is therefore used to support charitable ventures, and to help Shia communities.

What constitutes ‘help’ is contextual. It may mean educational scholarships to students in Mali, or aid to flood victims in Pakistan. It could also mean supporting military activity. When Islamic State seized Mosul in 2014 Grand Ayatollah Sistani declared the fight to defend Iraq a ‘sacred defense’ and large amounts of money from the Marjaiy’ah – the Shia clerical authority – went to the Popular Mobilization Forces, and their families, to support the war effort. The use of religious funds to support the war effort was understandable. It also highlighted how the Shia financial system can support a wide range of political causes, and military efforts.

The capacity for Shia clerics to inject political and financial capital into causes was lamented by the British in the early twentieth century.[1] It has been viewed with hostility by Arab governments since, especially in the wake of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Following the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 for instance Grand Ayatollah Sistani decided that Bahraini Shia should use their khums locally.[2] Done for humanitarian reasons, this act gave the protest movement both a large amount of money, and the infrastructure for managing it.

Much of that infrastructure is entirely opaque, with local religious representatives receiving cash, and conveying or dispersing it as a matter of trust. The Shia community has a good reason for keeping their finances away from the banking system. In 1991 for instance Saddam Hussein looted the Shrines of Karbala, and actively attempted to seize khums revenues.  The fear that opening the process to scrutiny will see predatory seizures by hostile governments is both persistent within the Marjai’yah, and understandable.

From the point of view of Arab governments like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia however this architecture provides a highly suspicious and invisible flow of funds that goes to both legitimate charity, and to subversive political activities. It is exploited by Iran. The problem is that because it is opaque, finding the evidence trail of the small amount of terrorist financing in the large flow of legitimate funding is hard, especially when those conducting legitimate charity have no incentive to cooperate with the authorities.

Bahraini officials have repeatedly sought to have US counterterrorism investigators endorse their actions against what they see as Iranian subversion in their country. The problem, as a former senior US Treasury official noted in interview, is that ‘they present us with suspicious unknowns – and the opacity of Shia finance certainly represents a threat vector – but they claim it is evidence of terrorist financing. It is not.’[3]

If Bahrain – and other Gulf monarchies – intend to clamp down on the financing of terrorism they need to avoid mass trials and vague charges. They must conduct diligent investigative work, and present detailed cases. Charging five people with specific, evidenced crimes, would be infinitely more credible. It would require a shift from attempting to rule by law, to supporting the rule of law. But until governments across the region are able to build trust with the Shia community, they can expect Shia finance to remain opaque, and so long as it is opaque, it will remain a vector for the financing of subversion from Iran.

Jack Watling is Research Fellow for Land Warfare in the Department of Military Sciences at RUSI. He holds a PhD in history examining the evolution of UK policy responses to civil war. Jack has worked in Iraq, Mali, Rwanda and further afield and has contributed to the RUSI Journal, RUSI Defence Systems, Reuters, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Haaretz and others. He was shortlisted for the European Press Prize in 2016, and won the Breakaway Award at the International Media Awards in 2017. This report was supported with funding from the Pulitzer Centre.

[1] TNA, FO 800/70: Cecil Spring Rice to Edward Grey, 18 July 1907.

[2] Author interviews with officials from Iraq’s clerical establishment, held in October 2017 in Najaf.

[3] Author interview, a former senior treasury official, Washington DC, April 2019.

The Funding of Terrorism (Part I) – Hookahs and Honey: Funding Terrorism through ‘Benign’ Activities

by

by Ian Ralby

4 August 2019

Shisha pipes across the Middle East are being filled with charcoal smuggled from Somalia. This seemingly benign but criminal activity nets the terrorist group Al-Shabaab millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars each year. (Image credit: Flickr)

 

Terrorism catches people’s attention, charcoal does not. It is a certitude much like the fact that a bomb blowing up a building will make international news and a fishing boat laden with jerry cans of diesel will not. Over the last decade, terrorist groups have increasingly sought to fund their operations using activities that many consider ‘benign’ and thus undeserving of serious scrutiny. While the trafficking of arms, drugs or humans draws significant law enforcement attention around the world, goods including fuel, charcoal, honey, sugar, fish and antiquities do not occupy prominent positions on most of these agencies’ priority lists – if they feature at all.  Noting how high-profile crimes tend to attract the close watch of national and international authorities, terrorist organisations around the world have found relative ease in recent years by funding themselves through profitable ‘benign’ operations. It is imperative for law enforcement agencies and counterterrorism authorities to increase their coordination on these matters and scrutinise such often overlooked activities as critical sources of terrorist financing.

Perhaps the best-known instance, at least in counterterrorism circles, of seemingly benign economic activity that actually finances terrorist organisations is the trading of Somali charcoal to the Middle East. Acacia charcoal, excellent for use in shisha pipes, has been exported from Somalia for decades. As Al-Shabaab, a terrorist group established in 2006, took over parts of Somalia, it sought to benefit from the lucrative trade in various ways, including through informal taxes and port revenues.  In response, the Transitional Federal Government banned the export of charcoal from Somalia and later the international community imposed an embargo on it. The result has been an extensive smuggling operation in an effort to maintain the income stream. Publicly disclosed estimates from the British Royal Navy suggest that this operation currently yields $7 million per year for Al-Shabaab. Prior to substantial interdiction efforts, that figure was once estimated to be in the tens, or even hundreds, of millions.  Unlike issues like piracy or wildlife trafficking, charcoal has not captured public attention in the same way, and thus has not garnered the same political interest, though recent exposés have sought to change that. While the counterterrorism community is heavily focused on charcoal, many politicians still view it as a low priority, since compared to other goods it still seems relatively benign.  And even if charcoal does gain further visibility, the situation with Al-Shabaab is only one example of a larger phenomenon.

The same apathy towards smuggling of a benign commodity has been a major factor in illicit oil and fuel activities becoming a substantial source of terrorist financing.  The majority of people around the world rely on fuel in their daily lives. Consequently, it is perhaps the most ubiquitous commodity and one which people are most interested in obtaining at a discount.  Too often, widespread and seemingly harmless shopping for discounts equates to a willingness on the part of law enforcement and the political establishment to overlook the sources of cheaper-than-market-price fuel. They disregard what seem to be low-scale illicit operations as not meriting the attention of law enforcement. This salutary neglect of black market fuel trading has become a major point of manipulation for terrorist groups looking for under-the-radar income streams.

Furthermore, the success of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has inspired groups around the world to adopt a Jihadi-Salafist philosophy and seek to ‘restore’ the early Islamic caliphate.  ISIS-inspired groups, however, are inspired not only by ISIS ideology but also by ISIS methods and it is well-known that ISIS’ principle source of income has been proceeds from illicit oil and fuel activities. It is therefore not surprising that affiliated groups in other regions of the world have turned to fuel smuggling as their primary source of income. In the Philippines for example, Abu Sayyaf used fuel smuggling both to fund itself and to reinforce smuggling routes that supported its movement of weapons and ammunition in the lead-up to and throughout the year-long siege of Marawi.  In Trinidad and Tobago, a similar co-location of ISIS ideology and rampant fuel smuggling has given rise to significant international concern. As with charcoal, a prevalent perception of the commodity itself as being benign has created a blind spot that allows terrorist groups to earn substantial profits with little interference or even interest.

Beyond charcoal and fuel, other goods such as fish, livestock, honey, sugar, minerals and antiquities, depending on their availability, profitability, and relative visibility by law enforcement, have all become sources of income for terrorist groups. Osama Bin Laden used honey trading both to make profits and for money laundering.  Few goods could seem less sinister than honey, and that provided the perfect cover and income stream for one of history’s most ominous terrorists.  Whether the trade is initially illegal, as with fuel smuggling, or technically legal, as with honey or charcoal trading, the very fact that it is being used to fund terrorist organisations makes it illegal.

The point is that terrorist groups are relying on economic activities perceived as benign in order to make, maintain and move their wealth. And wealth is extremely important for terrorism, as evidenced by the direct correlation between the number of attacks perpetrated by a group and its relative financial stature.  In a 2016 interview, Maj. Gen. Amos Gilad, former Director of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Political-Military Bureau, stated, ‘The financial component of terror organizations is critical, and its indispensability for terror attacks is like fuel for the car’. As true as this statement is, the irony is that the financial component of terror organisations may literally be fuel for the car.

To change this dynamic, law enforcement agencies and counterterrorism units need to become more proactive in identifying their own blind spots and false perceptions.  This means consciously reexamining those matters they have overlooked in the past.  That, however, is not easy to do.  Terrorist groups will continue to seek, find and exploit economic opportunities that occupy lower positions on the priority lists of the authoritaries. Inevitably, as law enforcement approaches change, so, too, will terrorist activities. But, it is imperative that the crimes and trading activities that have been relegated to benign status be reconsidered not just in their own right but for their malignant implications.  The profits accruing from such overlooked criminal goods as shisha charcoal, farm diesel or artisanal honey, may actually be funding deadly bombings, hijackings, or militant offensives.

Dr. Ian Ralby is a leading expert in international law, maritime security and countering transnational organized crime.  He and his team at I.R. Consilium, LLC have world leading expertise in oil and fuel crimes, and the nexus between maritime crimes and both criminal and terrorist activities.  Among other degrees, he holds a J.D. from William & Mary and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge where he was a Gates Scholar. 

Where Evil met its End

by

by Miles Vining

7 June 2019

(Miles Vining)

Our relief group provided humanitarian assistance to people fleeing the last stronghold of ISIS in Baghouz, Syria. In Feburary and March 2019 we fed over 25,000 and treated over 4,000 wounded. These were mostly ISIS families, a number of which were in critical condition from the fighting and air strikes in the city. Our positions were from the frontline on the bluffs above the Euphrates River east of the city back to the IDP collection points in the desert. While at these forward positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), there were numerous SDF casualties incurred from ISIS positions in the valley.

A month after ISIS was defeated, we entered the city of Baghouz. Our first venture was down the bluffs where we had previously taken cover. Underneath them we found the dugouts and cut-outs that numerous fighters had occupied during the battle. Evidence of airstrikes against them was clearly visible with the busted Kalashnikov rifles and twisted hulks in the craters that spanned the walking path next to the Euphrates. Civilians flooded through this path as did ISIS fighters. We found improvised ISIS claymores (complete with cloth carrying handles), and satchel charges held together by transparent tape strewn haphazardly on the ground, as if their former owners decided to ditch them in a hurry. Pointed out by some SDF fighters were the skeletal remains of a dead fighter, his now sun-bleached spine poking through the collar of his camouflage caliphate-issued fatigues. His skull was several feet from him, between the severed body lay the “black standard”, a nylon square of a flag with the caliphate’s slogans stencil-painted on it.

After our walk, we drove to the centre of the town of Baghouz, now completely empty of any life apart from the SDF forces that were stationed in it. During the battle, the area was filled with vehicles of all conceivable types, multiplying the size of the tiny hamlet of Baghouz by at least a factor of ten. Baghouz was a tiny town that become surrounded by a huge tent city during the battle. But in reality, we were only seeing a tiny city centre that had what was essentially a Syrian version of an enormous trailer park that developed around it. Everything and everyone that could be loaded onto a moving vehicle and driven from Raqqa to this little obscure corner of Syria was there, forming the likes of a tent and vehicle city that easily rivalled most music festival campouts in the United States and Europe.

Although we could not walk through the largest of the tent cities due to ongoing clearing operations, we were able to visit that small centre of Baghouz itself. Many of the bodies had been buried, but you could still smell them. And if you happened to have a stuffy nose, the swarms of flies left no doubt in anyone’s mind as to the amount of death and destruction that had occurred here. As we carefully picked our way through buildings and grass spaces once crawling with the remnants of the so-called Islamic state, we did not get the impression of a sort of deathly zombie land or ghost town. If anything, it seemed more like a town that might have had a hurricane come through and everyone simply left in a hurry, waiting somewhere else to come back and restart. There was not a feeling of sinister evil that one might have expected to be omnipresent in the very air molecules.

Then came the suicide belts and vests. We found them in refrigerators, tucked between bushes, strewn across dirt dugouts where families had lived. Poking out from beneath discarded clothes in the empty houses, there was even one sitting in the corner of a rooftop where we paused to eat lunch. One rough estimate we had was that we came across some component of a suicide vest every twenty meters or so. One surprise discovery was an IED manufacturing tent in an open field, components and raw materials still waiting to be stuffed into vests or satchel charges. As if the operator had suddenly realised a late-night soccer game was already twenty minutes into the broadcast and he needed to catch the play, never to return. Upon geospatial analysis of the coordinates of the site, we found out that the tent had been erected in late January. Another discovery was that of a clinic tent complete with sheet metal shelving units still stacked with unopened medicine boxes and vials. This location had apparently caught fire as evidenced by the charred remains of equipment and the burnt down canvas covering. Eerily and straight out of a horror movie was a medical reclining chair, bent upwards at an angle among the black ash of what was left of the tent.

We found so much ordinance among the various sites that at times it was comical. RPG warheads had been shattered to pieces and were laying in puddles as if a part of some olive drab toy kit that had bounced out of a toddler’s hands. Spent shell casings lay strewn among numerous houses, while more PG7 warheads were even completely intact. The SDF had been collecting discarded ordnance since the battle’s conclusion, with piles and piles of captured materiel in the courtyard of one of the houses, but there was still so much more to be picked up. There are many metrics for determining the evil that ISIS became during its reign of terror. Numbers of civilians killed or enslaved, prisoners tortured or beheaded. One of our post-caliphate metrics in Baghouz was stumbling upon suicide belts. Just like how fleeing passengers on a ship are handed life preservers, so did the last of the caliphate’s residents got handed suicide belts. But unfortunately to many in the West, the so-called Islamic State is already becoming a fading memory of a terrorist organization that tried and ultimately failed in its attempt at Islamic utopia. Hopefully what we found on the ground in Baghouz can be a reminder to those that this monster of a creation was tangible evidence of the evil that can still manifest itself among us today.

Miles Vining is a volunteer relief worker behind SDF lines in Baghouz.

Widows and Children of the Caliphate’s Last Stand

by

By Miles Vining

9 April 2019

“They came in mostly as Burkha-clad widows with their screaming, crying, and confused children.” (Miles Vining)

“She soaked a big rag with bright red blood. We put a new one on and it soaked up a whole rag again within two minutes, bleeding a lot. Does that anti… Elliah, what do we do?….”. Our Chief Medic Elliah responds over the radio sets with, “Okay, is it a complete miscarry or not?”. “Stand by, it’s hard to tell but it looks like arterial bleeding to me,” Jason replied back. The two field medics were describing a pregnant woman who had just suffered a miscarriage. She was with what was left of her family at a temporary IDP (Internally Displaced Person) site behind Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) forward positions that faced the last remnants of the failed caliphate in the small Syrian town of Baghouz. Joining her before this day and afterwards would be over 29,000 IDPs who had fled from the fighting.

Some days they trickled in on foot across wide open spaces of No Man’s Land between the lines; other days they came in caravans of small trucks, pickups, sedans, even motorcycles. They came in mostly as Burkha-clad widows with their screaming, crying, and confused children. Many of their husbands had been killed while fighting for the so-called Islamic State; others vehemently claimed their husbands had no involvement with the group. One such wife even stated that, “I left my husband to die in that damned town!”. Another said, “Mine went into the desert,” while making a crawling motion with her hands. ISIS infiltrators were being killed within sight of SDF positions on many occasions. Sometimes you could hear the ordnance dropping all night from coalition aircraft, along with the illumination flares, mixed in with the Dushka and PKM machine gun fire.

(Miles Vining)

To some of them this would be the first time they had slept outside in the freezing plains of southeastern Syria. As one young Canadian widowed put it, “We didn’t know how to make a fire so we just ordered takeout for every meal”. Indeed, these  were not your covered-wagon, pioneering types but instead the urban middle-class that had been wooed by many a recruiter or suitor to find a way into Syria through Turkey or Iraq. So many widows that our team members interviewed had stories about being drawn to the caliphate during its early years, but still more of these stories had themes of trickery running through them. “He said that before we get married, we’d need to go meet his family in Raqqa”, or “I went to meet him in Turkey and he said we could get medicine for my children in Syria”. Again and again we would hear variations of the same tale, very badly wanting to ask if they had read a single news report about Syria before the trip. Even so, the Canadian lamented, “I mean, it was alright when the Caliphate was doing well,” and in the words of one Tunisian, “This is the land of Allah”.

They came from all corners of the world. Russians, Turks, Malaysians, Canadians, French, Germans, Azeris, Tajiks, Sudanese, Moldovans. The list would go on and on if we were able to conduct a complete census of them all. The flowing robes of the black abayas might have concealed the complexions of the mothers, but the children told a different tale. Different skin tones and hair styles spanned the breadth of humanity. Unfortunately, the youngest of these children had known nothing but the caliphate’s vicious education system, one that used IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) as symbolic counters to teach basic arithmetic. Yet we saw them, daily, in such horrible conditions that many of our team members would have to step aside for a second to squeeze out tears before going back to tending to a bloody gash from shrapnel or a fractured limb.

(Miles Vining)

Casualties came from all over the spectrum as well. Some were from Inherent Resolve airstrikes or the artillery batteries that were pounding the caliphate lines on the outskirts of Baghouz. Some were from the caliphate’s gunfire as fleeing IDPs were trying to get away from the fighting, while others were even from SDF fire as militiamen in forward positions mistook vehicles packed with refugees for potential car bombs racing towards them in one final suicide attack. Indeed, at the beginning of February 2019, several SDF fighters were killed when fake “babies” that women were bringing in as IDPs exploded. On top of the wartime wounds were skin diseases, live births, miscarriages, kidney stones, and even old age conditions that all had to be attended to medically among the squalor of the temporary IDP site.

Men, however, were a different story. None of them were willing to admit it, but you could almost feel their hatred simmer in the chilly air. Much of it was directed towards us, the foreigner aid workers, but it was also towards the SDF fighters as well. Some of their responses to our greetings were short, showing minimal eye contact if it could not be avoided. Men would refuse outright medical care for injured women in their families, not wanting for a blood relative to be touched by our “Kaffir” medical staff.

Despite the horror and miserable conditions that the IDPs faced, the frightening realization for many on our team was that these people still had a formidable conviction in their failed caliphate. Indeed, towards the end, during the SDF-ISIS negotiations for terms of surrender, the families that were coming out of Baghouz were not  “fleeing” or were “Internally Displaced” in the real sense of the word. These were widows and husbands that had clung on until the bitter end, only now being forced to leave through political negotiation. In the words of one such widow, “Al-Baghdadi and Dyala went off the track. I’m still on the track and ready to die. This is a test from God to see if I just came to Syria for adventure”.

Many want that black flag to fly again.

Miles Vining is a volunteer relief worker behind SDF lines in Baghouz.

Just Who Are the YPG?

by

By Ed Nash

22 October 2018

 

A Manbij Military Council tank, part of the SDF, engages ISIS positions (Credit Image: Ed Nash)

 

Donald Trump recently praised what he described as the sacrifice of Kurds in the fight against ISIS across Iraq and Syria to the international press. His declaration was made shortly after the State Department removed the previous rather limited reference to the Syrian Kurdish militias known as the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (Peoples Protection Units – YPG) from its ‘Country Reports on Terrorism 2017’. As a consequence, President Erdogan of Turkey accused the US of breaking its word in agreements reached between the two countries whereby the YPG were to withdraw from the town of Manbij in northern Syria.

A dangerously volatile nexus — composed of a range of disparate groups including the YPG — now exists in Manbij. These disparate groups operate in the same space as Turkish troops, who seek to advance their own, opposing agenda in the region.

If we read into America’s intention[1] to take a more steadfast position on backing the Syrian Kurds, then the US is very much antagonising a long time NATO ally and critical regional partner with whom relations are already at an unparalleled low.

The reasons for these tensions are multiple, and thus can hardly be summarised in a few sentences. The focus of this piece is elsewhere. Indeed, it is perhaps wise to understand a bit more about the YPG, what they stand for and why the Turks are so concerned about them, as they form such a thorny part of the disagreement.

The YPG and Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (Women’s Protection Units – YPJ) are predominantly Kurdish militias which represent the armed wing of the PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat or Democratic Union Party). The latter organisation subscribes to the ideological, philosophical and historical writings of Abdullah Öcalan, a Kurdish political theorist and guerrilla leader who originally founded the infamous PKK, who have fought a bitter war against the Turkish military on and off for almost forty years.

This connection arguably explains the Turks’ antipathy. For them, the PYD/YPG are simply the same as the PKK and thus represent an intolerable threat to their security (for an interesting refutation of this, see Hurriyet Daily News and Foreign Policy). As the SDF – which the YPG forms the major component of – controls the whole of the north-east of Syria as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (generally known as Rojava), the Turk’s concerns are understandable.

Öcalan originally founded the PKK as a Soviet/Stalinist style communist party seeking a socialist Kurdish state but, inspired by the writings of American social theorist Murray Bookchin, has since become focused upon promoting  Democratic Confederalism, a political theory that mixes Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, anarchism, and libertarian ideals. Broadly, it espouses the idea that the authority of a central government should be kept to a minimum, that power should be highly decentralised, and local issues should be addressed at a local level; that regional, racial, and religious customs should be respected; and greater attention is need to espouse gender equality and ecological issues. The theory also advocates for a fairer redistribution of wealth along similar lines to European social democracy.

Such a mix of political theories would seem to create a rather schizophrenic ideology that, depending on your personal stance, could be interpreted in any way one deems fit. And there are definite, radical contrasts in how the PYD/YPG conducts itself that demonstrate this. On the one hand, areas under their control have brought women’s rights into fact. On the other hand, however, they have been accused of recruiting child soldiers and criticised for their human rights record, as well as persecution of other political parties in the region.

It is in their reaction to these external criticisms that we see the key to the world’s relationship with the PYD/YPG. Complaints against them by external actors are generally addressed and openly rectified, which stands in stark contrast to just about every other faction involved in the Syrian Civil War, the Assad government included.

What motivates this willingness is the wish to be seen to be a better, more democratic society that can engage with the international community, something the council currently running northern Syria understands it needs desperately. Without a powerful backer, the fledgling experiment in local democracy will be mercilessly crushed by either Assad or the Turks, as what took place with the Kurdish canton of Afrin.

And it seems that the sudden interest in America for sponsoring the YPG beyond the defeat of ISIS could be inspired by the realisation that, if it won’t commit to backing the Kurds and their assorted allies in Syria, then others will. Recently the YPG has made overtures to Assad and the Iranians, seeking their support. With , the sudden renewed interest in the Kurds as a local ally makes sense.

There is no denying that continued support for the YPG/PYD is beset with political complexities, including a number of concerns with the movement’s ideology, that will need to be addressed if it is to continue to receive said support. At this time, however, it is probably the best chance for more reasoned, democratic, and ultimately law-abiding governance in the region.

 

Ed Nash has spent years travelling around the world and, on occasion, interfering as he sees fit. Between June 2015 and July 2016 he volunteered with the Kurdish YPG in its battle against ISIS in Syria. His book Desert Sniper: How One Ordinary Brit Went to War Against ISIS was published in September 2018. 

 

Notes:

[1] Which, when concerning Syria, may be best accomplished with a crystal ball.

Image Source: the picture was provided by the author