Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-138-Caliphate-The State of al-Qaida-45-Seven Phases-9

CdW Intelligence to Rent -2016- In Confidence [email protected]

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-138-Caliphate-The State of al-Qaida-45-Seven Phases-9

It’s war. And it’s global. “We will continue to fight you as long as we have weapons in our hands.” -Osama Bin Laden, 2003 Reclaiming the Title ‘King of Jihad’ Means Al-Qaeda Will Target the West. The Islamic State has stolen the spotlight from its forefather, al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda-linked groups have escalated the fight to take it back. We shall unite to liberate Jerusalem'; ISIS, al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood may converge. The fact that ISIL prioritized the war against local foes did not mean that the far enemy would never become a target.

C Comment: From whomever the threat be it as many say the Islamic State, Al Qaida who’s plan it is, and or affiliates or inspired groups, individuals: The dar al-Harb, the West is in the Cross Hair. The Sixth Phase of the AQ 2020 plan foresees from 2016 onwards there will be a period of “total confrontation.” As soon as the caliphate has been declared the “Islamic army” it will instigate the “fight between the believers and the non-believers” which has so often been predicted by Osama bin Laden.

Western democracies and their military instruments of power are struggling with what seems to be the novel and dangerous apparition of radical global extremism. This headline-grabbing new threat, whether called the Islamic State, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Boku Haram or something else, captivates both our military’s and the public’s attention. - US, Allies Must ‘Stop Fixating’ On ISIL & Friends; ‘Frankly, We Are Losing’

Jan 15, 'Get Rid of This Rotten Regime': Al Qaeda Calls for Revenge Over Saudi Executions, urged Saudis to overthrow the al Saud ruling dynasty and the movement's followers elsewhere to damage the kingdom by attacking its Western allies.

Jan 14, 2016. Al-Qaeda threatens Italy 'You will regret it,' says AQMI chief Dec 27 2015. “The al-Qaeda model is enduring, and I think a lot of people

underestimate it,” he said. “The issue here is that because of the rise of the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, in turn, could become seen as more palatable to local populations and even governments in comparison.”

Dec 24, 2015. AQIM “promised” to wage guerrilla warfare against French and Malian forces after the French “invaded the land of Mali

Dec 4, 2015. “The time has come to battle the French and the Dutch, to retaliate for your Prophet

Nov 2015, "The first matter is striking the West and specifically America in its own home, and attacking their interests that are spread everywhere," Zawahiri said, according to SITE. "The supporters of Israel must pay with their blood and their economy.

Sep 2015, Al Qaeda has released the second installment in its “Islamic Spring” series, “I call on all Muslims who can harm the countries of the crusader coalition not to hesitate. We must now focus on moving the war to the heart of the homes and cities of the crusader West and specifically America,” Zawahiri saysHe also repeated an appeal first launched in September for jihadists to unite from Turkey to North Africa, despite his rejection of the caliphate proclaimed by the Islamic State group, which controls large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria

In a statement dated January 10, Al-Qaida's Yemeni branch and its North African wing “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of WarCdW Intelligence to Rent Page 1 of 15 02/05/2023

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said Riyadh had gone ahead with the executions despite a warning not to do so. "But they (Riyadh) insisted on offering the blood of the good Mujahideen

as a sacrifice for the Crusaders on their holiday, in the New Year," the two groups said in the statement posted on social media.

"Let them wait for the day when God will heal the chests of the families of the martyrs, their brothers and those who love them from the arrogant infidel," it added.

Al-Qaida's Yemen branch threatened in December to "shed the blood of the soldiers of Al Saud" if its members were executed. Last week, ISIS, a Sunni rival of Al-Qaida, threatened to destroy Saudi Arabian prisons holding jihadists after the executions.

October 11, 2013, Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri,1) "I urge the brothers, the jihad fighters in blessed Syria [Al-Sham], to unite and

come together and agree that soon, in Greater Syria [Al-Sham], if Allah so wishes , an Islamic state will arise that will be governed by the Sharia [Islamic religious law]."

2) "Lions of Al-Sham [Syria], unite for the sake of this noble cause, rise above the divisions between the various organizations and splintered groups and with mutual agreement, good will and desire in your souls, establish a strong Islamic state."

At fundamental organizational levels, our entire defense community (our Anglo-Saxon allies, NATO, and others) downplays what emergent rivals such as the Islamic State do in conflict environments, and often we intentionally shoehorn them into our conventional structures so that our entire analysis and explanation apparatus continues to churn out reliable metrics.

It is not that we are over-estimating what the Islamic State is capable of, but that we are misapplying our traditional way of viewing conflict and reality upon groups like ISIL and expecting our misplaced strategies to somehow work.

The western defense apparatus and subordinate military organizations are largely fixated on single linear approaches to military strategy and foreign policy objectives. Any adjustment at a fundamental level would cause a catastrophic “tipping of apple carts” across all levels of the towering centralized hierarchies.

US warns ISIS will speed up pace of global attacks. Jan 15, Top CENTCOM general says as ISIS is losing ground in Syria and Iraq, it is relying more heavily on attacks abroad. Even as Islamic State (ISIS) is suffering greater losses in Syria and Iraq it is increasing the pace of its attacks worldwide in a troubling trend, according to a top US general.

General Lloyd Austin, head of the Central Command (CENTCOM) overseeing Middle East operations, claimed ISIS attacks this week in Istanbul and Jakarta are signs the group is weakening, reports AFP on Friday.

“ISIL has assumed a defensive posture in Iraq and Syria,” Austin said at a news conference in Florida, using an alternate acronym for the jihadist group. “

Going forward, we can expect to see him rely increasingly on acts of terrorism such as we saw this week in Baghdad and in Turkey, and most recently in Jakarta,” he said.

ISIS recently has lost portions of the large swathes of Iraq and Syria that it conquered and established a "caliphate" on, with the key city of Ramadi in Iraq being recently recaptured by US-supported local forces. It has also been expanding its reach at the same time,

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

CdW Intelligence to Rent Page 2 of 15 02/05/2023



striking a Russian commercial plane in the Sinai and launching a massive attack on Paris late last year, and likewise building an ever larger stronghold

in Africa. The US-led coalition which has been launching airstrikes on the group has been focusing on ISIS's lucrative black-market oil infrastructure. This week the coalition also bombed a financial facility in Iraq's Mosul, which US officials say held millions of dollars. Russia has also been engaged in its own airstrike campaign targeting ISIS and propping up Bashar al-Assad's regime. Defense officials revealed Wednesday that China will likely join the war against ISIS as well.

ISIS' global ambitions and plans for Southeast AsiaThis war goes beyond armies, police and security forces. It demands greater transparency and cooperation between communities at a global scale. On Monday, November 16, when 17 world leaders began to arrive for the APEC Summit in Manila, a video of men in masks with ISIS’ black flag behind them is posted on Facebook, claiming "ISIS in Mindanao" will attack the summit.Authorities dismissed it, but by evening, it had reached nearly 2 million views.Col Resty Padilla, spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Philippines, asked the public to ignore it and avoid sharing it.

“There’s no threat,” he told journalists. “So far, the monitoring indicates that there are no serious threats that will hamper the conduct – successful, peaceful and secure conduct of this summit.”

Still, authorities are on high alert, and intelligence sources say they are investigating the video, released just a little more than 2 days after 3 teams of suicide bombers and gunmen across 6 locations in Paris killed at least 129 people and injured at least 329 more. The near simultaneous attacks, reminiscent of Mumbai in 2008 when 10 armed gunmen attacked 7 different locations, shocked the world. Much like 9/11, it seems to signal an escalation in jihadist terrorism that has its roots in the virulent ideology that powers al-Qaeda and its latest incarnation, ISIS.An al-Qaeda offshoot that has overtaken its parent, ISIS, also known as the Islamic State or IS, ISIL, and Da’esch, a loose Arabic acronym, seems bent on taking the world back to the 12th century. It has a fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran that includes savage beheadings, rapes, and public executions designed to eliminate “unbelievers” in a process it calls takfir, or excommunication.

Key to its power is something al-Qaeda was never able to do: it captured and governs land roughly the size of Great Britain. That is the capital of the global caliphate it says it is creating – acting like a beacon and bringing in at least 30,000 foreign fighters in a little more than 3-and-a-half years, according to latest US and UN estimates.Despite its economic focus, terrorism and security issues are among the main topics to be tackled at APEC this week in Manila.

There are 4 lessons Paris teaches us, which Philippine authorities should keep in mind as it hosts 17 world leaders this week.

1. It’s war. And it’s global.Within hours of the Friday attacks, France’s President Francois Hollande called them “an act of war waged by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, by Da’esch, against France.”Except war began decades ago. And it’s escalating. The US, leading a coalition of 65 countries, jumped in more than a year ago to try to defeat ISIS and its offshoots. On the sidelines of APEC, US Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken told me ISIS now controls





"30-35% less territory than a year ago" but that action comes with risks. (Watch the Blinken interview here)

"We saw that if this problem was not arrested as quickly as possible, it was likely to spread," said Blinken. "And indeed ISIL had ambitions to attack not just in the region but in Europe and the United States and places beyond. We understood from the beginning that it was part of their larger objective."

Paris brings the war to coalition countries where they live, a logical extension of an ideology that matured in the conflict in Afghanistan in the late 80s.That gave rise to al-Qaeda, and ISIS is its latest incarnation.“Al-Qaeda is a kindergarten group compared to ISIS,” Rohan Gunaratna, the author of Inside Al-Qaeda and the head of Singapore’s International Centre for Political Violence & Terrorism, told Rappler. “ISIS presents an unprecedented global threat. ISIS is a hyper-powered organization. We have not seen a group of the scale and magnitude of ISIS.” ISIS began its march to capture Baghdad on June 9, 2014, and it has grown tremendously since then: capturing oil fields for resources; creating and implementing laws it implements for the land under its control; and harnessing affiliates for global attacks.Shortly after the Paris attacks, former FBI agent and author Ali Soufan summarized the escalating death toll and pace. He tweeted that in the last 36 hours, there were 18 victims in Baghdad, 43 dead in Beirut, and 153 in Paris – “all murdered by the same narrative of takfir and terror.” (Takfir, which sanctions violence against Muslim leaders who are kafir or are unbelievers). On November 13, a suicide bomber killed himself and at least 17 others at a Baghdad memorial service for a Shiite militia member who died fighting ISIS.In Beirut, Lebanon, two suicide bombers killed at least 43 people during rush hour at a busy shopping district in a mostly Shiite residential area. The body of a third suicide bomber was found near one of the blast sites with a largely intact explosives belt. ISIS claimed responsibility for that fiery attack. This is the second time in two weeks that ISIS claimed attacks against civilians, its effort to get back at the countries fighting it in Syria and Iraq.

ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate said it was responsible for the Oct. 31 destruction of a plane full of Russians coming home from vacation at the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Why Russians? Because Moscow intervened in Syria. On Tuesday, Nov. 17, Russia announced for the first time that a bomb destroyed the plane.Now add Paris.France is one of the founding members of the US-led coalition that began airstrikes against ISIS. These attacks come after the brutal Charlie Hebdo murders early this year carried out by gunmen claiming allegiance to ISIS and an al-Qaeda affiliate.Still, it isn’t just ISIS attacking. This war is in full swing and escalating.Last week, the United States and its allies announced it had sharply increased airstrikes against ISIS’ oil fields in Syria, making it perhaps the wealthiest terrorist organization globally. The US Treasury Department estimates the oil fields ISIS controls generates about $40 million a month or nearly $500,000,000 a year. A day before the Paris attacks, Kurdish and Yazidi forces, backed by US special forces and airstrikes, liberated the strategic Iraqi city of Sinjar - cutting a supply route between its Iraqi stronghold in Mosul and its capital, Raqqa, Syria. At nearly the same time, the US announced a drone strike seemed to have killed one of ISIS’ best-known militants, Mohammed Emwazi, the British executioner better known as Jihadi John.

That same Friday, President Barack Obama told ABC News that “we have contained them” referring to ISIS. That symbolic victory lasted only a few hours.Yet as the Paris attacks were happening, the US was broadening its fight against ISIS in





Libya, targeting and allegedly killing its senior leader Abu Nabil. He was an Iraqi national who led al-Qaeda operations from 2004 to 2010. By Tuesday,

France and Russia had intensified bombing operations against ISIS.

2. Southeast Asia is a key recruitment center for ISIS.As of mid-2015, more than 500 Indonesians, including women & children, and more than 50 from Malaysia have joined ISIS, according to regional intelligence officials. There are enough Indonesian and Malaysian fighters that they are in an ISIS unit by themselves, the Katibah Nusantara (Malay Archipelago Combat Unity).“ISIS posted a propaganda and recruitment video showing Malay-speaking children training with weapons in ISIS-held territory,” Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said mid-year. “Two Malaysians, including a 20 year old, were identified in another ISIS video of a beheading of a Syrian man. The Malaysian police have arrested more people who were planning to go, including armed forces personnel, plus groups which were plotting attacks in Malaysia,” added Lee. These individuals were going to Syria and Iraq not just to fight, but to bring their families there, including young children, to live in what they imagine, delusionally, is an ideal Islamic state under a caliph of the faithful.”Indonesian Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, which in the late 90’s to mid-2000s acted as al-Qaeda’s arm in Southeast Asia, pledged allegiance to ISIS last year. ISIS said it wants to establish a wilayat – a province under its caliphate – in Southeast Asia. While some will dismiss it as far-fetched, that’s its stated goal. (READ: Q&A: ISIS in Southeast Asia)

3. ISIS' ideology is in the Philippines.Be careful of names. Follow the ideology.

Follow the virus. Because like a virus, the ideology creeps in beneath the surface and takes over the system until it hits a tipping point. Lessons from epidemiology give us a paradigm for ISIS’ strategy: infect until it takes over the system.

Filipino and US security forces and authorities say ISIS doesn’t exist in the Philippines because they look for direct operational links to Syria and Iraq. Still, as early as 2011 al-Qaeda’s black flag, appeared in the Philippines behind a Filipino speaking fluent Arabic asking to bring the jihad to Mindanao. That flag has become ISIS’ banner, originally brought to Syria and Iraq by foreign fighters, but over the last year and a half, it has become a rallying symbol. (READ: 14 years after 9/11 in Southeast Asia)

As early as 2012, I reported that authorities found the black flag in an Abu Sayyaf camp in Zamboanga. Interestingly, the man arrested then, Khair Mundos, who links the Abu Sayyaf to a global network, was sentenced to prison Monday, November 16, 2015.The flag is only a symbol of groups of Filipinos who believe in the ideology that powers al-Qaeda and ISIS. In my latest book published at the 10th anniversary of the Bali bombings, I talked about a jihadi virus that uses religion as a vehicle for political power. That goal of setting up a caliphate hasn’t changed, and based on their own statements, they want to expand it beyond Syria and Iraq. Last year, a senior leader of the Abu Sayyaf as well as another charismatic leader of an offshoot, the Rajah Solaiman Movement (RSM), pledged an oath to ISIS, something dismissed by most Filipino security officers.

US and western authorities have long talked about attacks by lone wolves, where all it takes is one man to turn his gun on a crowd. These attacks have happened in the US, Europe and other parts of the world.

Now Paris brings the spectre of potential central coordination from ISIS. While the attacks “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”




were still playing out in Paris, President Hollande said, “This act of war was prepared and planned from the outside, with accomplices inside.” It’s a new

development that shouldn’t have been unexpected, turning what analysts called “lone wolves” into satellite forces capable of being synchronized for larger attacks. “The emphasis on lone wolves was all part of the wishful thinking that ISIS was purely a local phenomena that could be contained to Syria and Iraq,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown. That threat of small yet effective terror cells loosely directed by ISIS blasts through many existing counter-terrorism measures.With this, we can look at the Facebook video released in the Philippines Monday, November 17, as intent. The next question is do they have the capability? Security forces say no, but what exactly does capability mean now in the age of ISIS?

4. ISIS is a master at social media.ISIS posts more than 200,000 pieces of content on social media every day, and it’s been successful in radicalizing marginalized and disenfranchised youth around the world."Social media is a critical front in this because the narrative that ISIL projects, it uses social media to project that narrative," Blinken told Rappler. A study released early this year said there are a minimum of 46,000 Twitter accounts used by ISIS, according to Intelwire’s J.M. Berger, who did the study commissioned by Google and published by the Bookings Institute. ISIS aims to disrupt, carve out young minds and voices and offer a paradise that doesn’t exist. It has enticed young women, some as young as 15 years old, to join the jihad in Syria. (READ: How to fight ISIS on social media)

One of ISIS’ key supporters and propagandists, Melbourne-born Musa Cerantonio, lived in Manila, Cebu and Zamboanga for more than a year and was tweeting incitement and





support to help ISIS.A study mid-year said Cerantonio was one of the two most influential voices

giving ‘inspiration and guidance” to foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq. It added that one in 4 foreign fighters followed Cerantonio’s Twitter, account and that more than 92% of his tweets involved interaction. His Facebook page was the 3rd most popular among foreign jihadists. To fight the pull of the ideology amplified and given wider reach by social media, countries and civic society must work together. (READ: How to fight ISIS? Build communities)This war, as it always has, goes beyond armies, police and security forces. This war demands greater transparency and cooperation between communities at a global scale with these key goals: to reject sectarian strife; separate terrorists from Islam; address grievances, including political and economic ones, that lead to marginalization; give the youth opportunities; and, avoid “us” and “them” by building inclusive communities.

ISIS is steadily gaining strength in another Middle Eastern country while everyone looks the other wayPAMELA ENGEL DEC 18 2015, Militants affiliating themselves with the terrorist group ISIS are taking advantage of a power vacuum in Yemen to establish an increasingly strong foothold there as the government focuses on fighting other rebels, experts say. ISIS-linked terrorists have launched deadly attacks on mosques, carried out car bombings, and exploited sectarian tensions to lure new recruits, using extreme brutality and violence to bring in new blood and distinguish themselves from the powerful al Qaeda branch in Yemen, The New York Times reported earlier this week.

“A video released recently by the branch underscored its determination to showcase its brutality,” The Times reported. “In one section, the video shows masked gunmen leading prisoners to a small boat that was set out to sea and then blown up. Another vignette showed four captives made to wear what appeared to be mortar shells, draped around their necks, then pose for the camera before the shells were detonated.”ISIS (also known as the Islamic State, ISIL, and Daesh) has also been able to kill some Yemeni officials without meeting much resistance from authorities who are more concerned with fighting rebels who have an established presence in the country.

Yemen has been in a state of chaos since a civil war started there in March. A Saudi-led coalition, backed by the US, is fighting to defeat the Houthi rebels, who support Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The coalition backs the government of current President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The civil war has created a power vacuum in some areas of Yemen where the Saudi-led coalition has driven Houthi rebels out.

Enter ISIS, which saw an opportunity to step in. And no one seems to be targeting ISIS with enough strength to prevent the group from expanding, since the coalition is laser-focused on fighting Houthis.

“To some extent, Yemen was always on the radar screen of ISIS as eventually part of their caliphate, but at first they were preoccupied with Syria and Iraq and had no time to invest elsewhere,” Nabeel Khoury, a former State Department official in Yemen and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Business Insider.

“But with the power vacuum, with the chaos … that presented both an opportunity and an incentive” for ISIS, Khoury added.

The opportunity comes from the chaos in Yemen — the government’s preoccupation with the civil war and focus on fighting the rebels means their counterterrorism efforts are lacking. Right now, ISIS seems to be focusing on establishing a solid foothold in parts of





southern Yemen. (The Houthi rebels are from the north.) ISIS will “start with Aden, other parts of the south,” Khoury said.

“As a combination of forces, this is driving the Houthis out of these areas. They don’t have the Yemeni government and military ready to take over. So as you drive the Houthis out, you leave a relatively weak state structure. … That makes it very easy for [al Qaeda] and ISIS to take over.”

ISIS’ incentive in Yemen comes from the Houthis, which Khoury referred to as “second cousins” of Shiites. ISIS and al Qaeda are both Sunni extremist groups, and ISIS in particular has targeted Shiites in attacks. The Houthi takeover of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, presented ISIS with a new target, Khoury said.

“The No. 1 target for ISIS from the beginning has been Shia governments, Shia authorities, Shia communities,” Khoury said. “Houthis … are closer to Shia Islam than they are to Sunnis. Having [Shia rebels] take over another country was a challenge that ISIS had to invest in fighting.”

Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni activist and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, echoed this assessment.

“What [the war] has done is created a sectarian narrative for ISIS and al Qaeda to build on,” he told Business Insider.

ISIS has been known to pit Sunnis and Shiites against each other in other countries like Syria and Iraq, where the group has gained large swathes of territory.

And if the civil war in Yemen continues to drag on, young people might be persuaded to join jihadist groups, seeing few other viable alternatives for survival. Al-Muslimi wrote in The Guardian earlier this year said “as the poorest country in the Arab world is collapsing in front of the world’s eyes, a whole generation of Yemeni youth and children are losing their future.”

“The loss of hope among the younger generation is going to create more space and more opportunity for ISIS,” al-Muslimi told Business Insider. Khoury said the ISIS affiliate in Yemen seems to be made up of “mostly locals” at this point. It’s hard to determine how closely the ISIS militants in Yemen are coordinating with the group’s central leadership in Iraq and Syria, but analysts told The Times that there are signs that the Yemeni militants are in touch with ISIS leaders abroad. “They have been recruiting locally,” Khoury said. “Bringing in foreign fighters from outside is very difficult these days in Yemen because of the war going on.”

ISIS isn’t the only Sunni extremist group with a presence in Yemen. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) remains the dominant jihadist force in the country, analysts say. But ISIS is growing in strength while AQAP remains flat.

“I think probably AQAP still has the edge for now, although that’s probably changing,” Khoury said. “It’s kind of like a see-saw with the other side rising. … AQAP is more or less stagnant.”

And as al Qaeda’s leadership in Yemen has taken hits, ISIS is trying to take advantage of another potential vacuum among jihadists in the region. AQAP is reportedly “closely watching” ISIS’ efforts in Yemen as ISIS tries to “peel off defectors” from the group, according to The Times.Al-Muslimi noted that ISIS’ emergence in Yemen is fairly recent. “With the war going on and with the Houthis increasing and moving to the south, [ISIS] started slowly emerging,” al-Muslimi said. Khoury pointed out that ISIS and AQAP appear to be staying out of each other’s way in Yemen, but they still compete for recruits.“They’re fighting for the same space: Sunni radical recruitment,” al-Muslimi said. “[Al Qaeda] looks to ISIS as something taking space and, more importantly, warriors. The level





of brutality of ISIS has recruited a lot of people that didn’t find the absolute violence in al Qaeda.”

Analysts told The Times that though AQAP is still stronger than ISIS in Yemen, ISIS might be just as pressing of a long-term concern for counterterrorism officials.

“For ISIS, it’s sort of the same strategy which they have done elsewhere … you go in where you can and you expand and you, if you can, take over central power. That would be the ultimate goal,” Khoury said.

“ISIS is about institution building … so they will set up an infrastructure similar to what they have in Syria and Iraq and hope that eventually they can link up” any territory they’re able to seize in Yemen with other parts of the “caliphate,” the swath of territory ISIS controls in Iraq and Syria and seeks to expand.Khoury added: “The ultimate goal is to have one caliphate that has continuous territory.”ISIS’ Yemen expansion also comes at a time when the group (also known as the Islamic State, ISIL, and Daesh) is reported to be preparing a “back-up capital” of sorts in Libya, in case its central base of operations in Raqqa, Syria falls. But the “ultimate goal” is a long way from being realised. “In Yemen it’s going to be a bit of a challenge because you have the whole Saudi expanse and they are nowhere near challenging the Saudis …. so they will not be able to use Yemen to link what they have in Iraq and Syria,” Khoury said.

For us, the future is lost. There is no hope.” That’s what Ali Ahmad told BBC interviewers who were trying to find out what life was like under the current war in Yemen. Ali comes from Taiz, a governorate that has for months been under siege by the militias of former president of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh, and those of the Houthi rebel movement.

Regards Cees***US, Allies Must ‘Stop Fixating’ On ISIL & Friends; ‘Frankly, We Are Losing’By BEN ZWEIBELSONJanuary 12, 2016 Western democracies and their military instruments of power are struggling with what seems to be the novel and dangerous apparition of radical global extremism. This headline-grabbing new threat, whether called the Islamic State, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Boku Haram or something else, captivates both our military’s and the public’s attention.Yet for all the emphasis on dissecting and describing our latest adversarial form as if they were new butterflies to be cataloged for our collection, there is little critical inquiry into the much larger problem. Despite the massive economic, informational, technological and professional military advantages in the United States and our allies, we continue to stumble and fail in accomplishing any of our major foreign policy objectives. Our coalitions have racked up impressive kill and capture statistics while hardly stemming the tide of fresh suffering and conflict.

Frankly, we are losing, and we may continue to lose as we pursue the new rising star of radical Islam, the Islamic State through our own imposed state of confusion.The United States is not alone, with Canadians, the UK, Australians and other military apparatuses and intelligence agencies targeting both the terrorist threats as well as our traditional nation-state rivals. But we’re looking at the US military and its political oversight in this piece.Americans are technical rationalists, and our devotion to this philosophical outlook is part of the reason why we continue to move towards military failure and not success.

There are many political, organizational, and cultural layers that obscure and “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”




confuse why we have seen military failure in Iraq, the pending failure in Afghanistan, and general failure across the Middle East and Africa.

As ‘technical rationalists’, we think that reality can be objectively and analytically measured and controlled within universal principles and techniques. We use the increasing power of technological development to sweep away the fog and confusion of complexity, always with the implication that today’s problems can be solved by tomorrow’s innovation. Carl von Clausewitz is held in high regard in American military doctrine, yet as technical rationalists we also philosophically expect that the technological advances of today should have easily dispatched the fog and friction from prior wars. Paradoxically, today’s fog and friction will be eliminated once we steer technological investment towards gaining tomorrow’s advantage. It begets a vicious cycle.Our belief in scientific progress and linear relationships makes complexity a wild beast that we continue to learn more about, leading to the illusion of greater control day by day. General Westmoreland, Army Chief of Staff in 1969, foresaw this: “I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we locate through instant communications and the almost instantaneous application of highly lethal firepower.”In a recent Army War College speech, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work echoed this: “Since World War II, American military strategy and our entire national defense strategy has been built upon an assumption of technological superiority.” He prefaced this with the acknowledgement that, “I am often accused of being too technologically oriented.” The United States and the larger NATO community is largely guilty here too. We have all become technical rationalists, and view warfare in a singular, limited manner.We develop greater technological processes, tighten our military methodologies and rapidly cultivate any tactical success into mass-manufactured applications for all war theaters.

We ignore our organizational form and how it might be our own worst barrier for accomplishing our strategic foreign policy goals. Western military institutions, nested within governmental structures, are entirely shackled to the centralized hierarchy. Improvements in technology and information such as metadata, near-instantaneous analysis and transmission of information around the planet has caused our centralized hierarchical organization not to soften or become flexible. Instead, it is increasingly rigid and incapable of adapting to the emergent directions that modern 21st century human conflict is moving towards.The latest Army capstone document on development through 2030, “Win in a Complex World,” myopically believes the Army’s advantage over all possible future enemies will “depend in large measure on advanced technology”, and innovation merely “drives the development of new tools or methods…to stay ahead of determined enemies”. Or, as Robert McNamara once précised: “Where is your data? Give me something I can put in the computer. Don’t give me your poetry.”Within our US defense spending, training and doctrine, we continue to see the institutional preference for near-peer conflict preparations against conventional rivals such as Russia or China. In other words, our centralized hierarchical structure seeks out compatible centralized hierarchy structured adversaries that we can fight in a more predictable and thus seemingly less complex environment. Our Division and Corps-level warfighter simulations and training scenarios fixate longingly on surrogate “near peer threats” that happen to have a couple of the irregular terror group bells and whistles thrown in.

At fundamental organizational levels, our entire defense community (our Anglo-Saxon allies, NATO, and others) downplays what emergent rivals such as the





Islamic State do in conflict environments, and often we intentionally shoehorn them into our conventional structures so that our entire

analysis and explanation apparatus continues to churn out reliable metrics. It is not that we are over-estimating what the Islamic State is capable of, but that

we are misapplying our traditional way of viewing conflict and reality upon groups like ISIL and expecting our misplaced strategies to somehow work.

So, we expect targeted strikes and network analysis to work as well upon the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq as they should against a Russian threat in the Ukraine or a Chinese one off the coast of Taiwan. Our inability to acknowledge non-centralized hierarchies or hybrids is one part of the problem. Our refusal to deviate from our own strict centralized hierarchical structure is the other.Like the military hierarchy, our political and governmental one is a tangled bureaucracy of power, influence, and control. Postmodernist philosophers Deleuze and Guattari likened these rigid structures to how trees form branches and root systems that are strict hierarchies, regardless of how intricate the system becomes. Unlike the rigid trees, a contrasting decentralized structure looks more like potato roots, and are rhizome-like in how they lack this centralization. The Islamic State is not a potato, but they are not the tree forms that our defense community demands that they be either.Emergent rivals such as the Islamic State are hybrid institutions where parts of them contain familiar aspects of a centralized hierarchy, such as when we see formal command structures and efforts to police and tax occupied Islamic State areas. Much of what gives the Islamic State great advantage comes precisely from the decentralized and nonlinear structures freely operating across the global social media commons.

Just as social networks and decentralized processes build things from online encyclopedias to tailored navigation systems and novel media constructs, the decentralized content and form for the greater Islamic State movement (perhaps a movement even beyond the control of any single group) resists playing by the rules set by centralized hierarchies. The problem about a rival that works more like a potato root is that all the technology, money, weapons, and training that a military pours into fighting tree forms will not translate into destroying potato roots. They require different ways of thinking and organizing, with dissimilar strategies that make rigid hierarchies uncomfortable.

The western defense apparatus and subordinate military organizations are largely fixated on single linear approaches to military strategy and foreign policy objectives. Any adjustment at a fundamental level would cause a catastrophic “tipping of apple carts” across all levels of the towering centralized hierarchies.

We are speaking of dramatic transformation and innovation, which will not occur quietly or in an orderly fashion. In order to defeat unexpected and confusingly new rivals such as the Islamic State, our defense apparatuses need to transition into hybrids where the centralized hierarchical form is tempered.In the command processes and professional structures that create generation after generation of warriors that tacitly reinforce and defend the centralized hierarchy, this sort of change will be near impossible. It requires the awakening of a senior level of defense leadership at the right moment, with the strength and agility to purge what will inevitably be multiple generations of those still shackled to the centralized hierarchical form. Those that prosper under the traditional form will find it most hard to abandon, as change ushers in uncertainty and the greater potential for loss of power and prosperity for those expecting it under the current form.

Traditional rationalists and those proclaiming an entirely objective world that might be analyzed enough to control even in war will declare the postmodern





deconstruction movement irrelevant. Postmodernists similarly decry the folly of functionalists — yet a hybrid approach both to content and to form would

shift our defense apparatus philosophically towards a blending of the centralized and decentralized hierarchical structures.

When our strategies, actions, and entire professions gain truly nonlinear and innovative content and form, we will be able to decide and out-think, out-act, and out-adapt our rivals. To accomplish this requires the wholesale development of novel and often untested defense organizational formats and methodologies. The untested nature will sour those that demand an entirely objective process complete with analytics and testable data. Yet the same processes about to be used against the Islamic State have not worked very well in Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa and elsewhere. The current system broke down years ago, yet we continue to lurch it forward through traditions, socially constructed methodologies, and the illusion of progress.More resources, and more importantly, human lives are about to be committed in order to halt the advancement of the current significant threat known as the Islamic State. While the processes, technology, and professional military methodologies have produced prior tactical successes, they have not produced any strategic ones in at least a decade of continuous war.What might it take to transform an institution from a linear and traditional form into something it not only will resist, but that possesses the very institutionalisms to blind the current crop of leaders so they do not realize options that exist beyond their own gates? To create a hybrid defense apparatus that truly embraces nonlinearity, multiple paradigms, innovation, and emergence in war, our leaders must awaken.

We must stop fixating on threats like the Islamic State. They are not the same sort of rival that Russia, China and others have the potential to be. We also must cease treating groups like the Islamic State as if our centralized hierarchical tools and processes will work just fine against them. We must transform the way we think, the way we form strategies, and the way our US military educates and trains. We cannot see a world only of trees, nor fixate upon fields of threatening potatoes. We must become agile farmers, able to work with hybrid forms of tree-potatoes, and deal with ever-more complex adaptations around the corner.Ben Zweibelson, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, recently retired from the US Army. He is pursuing his doctorate at the Australian National University and is course director of the Design Program at US Special Operations Command’s Joint Special Operations University.

The Islamic State (IS) will pose the single biggest terrorist threat to the world in 2016.The new year is likely to bring five significant developments in that area:

First, IS will expand its territories beyond Syria and Iraq and into parts of Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Asia.

The extremist group, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is actively recruiting in the western Balkans, including Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro, where it intends to mount attacks. Similarly, the group is actively recruiting in Southeast Asia with the intention of declaring a Wilayat (province) in Eastern Indonesia or the southern Philippines next year. This past year, a Syrian-based commander of Katibah Nusantara (Archipelagic Battalion), IS’s Malay-speaking combat unit made up of recruits from Indonesia and Malaysia, instructed groups back home in Southeast Asia to attack both domestic and international targets in 2015-2016. With IS recruiting Chinese





Muslims in northeast Asia, the group is likely to declare a Wilayat in Western China as well, where nearly 1,000 Uyghur recruits and their families from

Xinjiang have joined both IS and its rival Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria.Expect more external attacks

Second, IS will strike against anti-IS coalition targets, using its newly constituted external operations wing staffed by foreign fighters.

As shown in last month’s attacks in Paris, an external IS operations wing now complements its internal operations wing. The Paris attacks demonstrated an IS capability to collaborate with locals to strike overseas. Wearing explosives-laden suicide belts and armed with assault weapons, the terrorists aimed to kill and die. They hit a variety of mostly unprotected targets. After trying to assassinate the French president, IS aimed to kill a maximum number and arouse fear.The Paris template, a copycat of the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, is likely to be repeated. Like al-Qaeda's 9/11, the IS external operations wing is likely to stage spectacular and synchronized attacks against its enemies in 2016.Other factors

Third, refugees and asylum seekers fleeing conflict zones are susceptible to the IS message. The group is likely to exploit such vulnerable people in targeting its enemies abroad. If refugees from Iraq and Syria are not integrated into their host cultures, they may pose an immediate, mid- and long-term strategic threat.

Fourth, IS online messaging platforms will recruit, radicalize and militarize vulnerable segments of Muslims, both in Muslim and non-Muslim countries.

Among territorial, migrant and diaspora communities, the IS ideology of hate seeks to replace mainstream Islam. U.S. and European servers, in fact, host about 80 to 90 percent of social media sites that transmit IS propaganda. The threat will persist due to a lack of leadership, political will, and strategy among governments and partners tasked with counter messaging, taking down IS platforms and degrading IS strategic communication.The threat will proliferate as long as IS social media sites stay intact.

Fifth, the respective U.S.-led, Saudi-led and Russian-led coalitions fighting IS will not unite to fight their common threat. However, they will exchange intelligence, sharpen existing capabilities and develop new ones needed to contain, isolate and eliminate IS on all fronts.

Territories under IS influenceThis is the outlook for 2016, but IS already has grown territorially where states have failed to govern their populations effectively.

In Afghanistan, after Ashraf Ghani became the country’s leader in September 2014, the Taliban attacked multiple districts in close to 13 provinces and occupied 15 districts of northern Afghanistan's Kunduz province. Once the Taliban were dislodged from Kunduz, they launched a military offensive and annexed Sangin district, in the southern province of Helmand. While the Afghan Taliban split into factions after their founder Mullah Omar's death, a local branch of IS was created in this vacuum, calling itself Wilayat Khorasan. Multiple provinces remain under the Taliban’s influence, but IS occupies Nangarhar province, which is adjacent to the tribal areas of Pakistan. The group operates from more than eight districts in the province, and is now expanding its influence.With the draw-down of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in the immediate term, IS is likely to emerge as a dominant force that will threaten the Taliban over the mid to long term.

In Libya, after Western-backed opposition forces killed strongman Muammar Gaddafi in August 2011, extremist and terrorist groups took root in the North African nation. Majlis Shura Shabab al-Islam (the Islamic Youth Consultative Council) and a





faction of Ansar al-Sharia in Libya pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and IS, by creating Willayat al-Barqah, Willayat Fizzan and

Willayat al-Tarabulus. In addition to consolidating control in the declared provinces, IS likely will expand farther afield in Libya and destroy iconic historical sites. A backup capital for IS, Sirte serves as a base today for operations, logistics and training.

In northern Nigeria, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to al-Baghdadi by creating IS West Africa (also known as Wilayat Gharb Afriqiya). In Algeria, IS created Wilayat al-Jazair; in Yemen, Wilayat Sanaa; and in Saudi Arabia, Wilayat al-Haramayn.

Apart from mounting attacks in Algeria, IS conducted and claimed attacks against the Houthis in several provinces in Yemen. On March 20, 2015, IS targeted two Zaydi mosques in Sana’a and a government facility in Sa’ada, killing 137 and injuring 345.IS has designs on neighboring Saudi Arabia too. The group would like to seize Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, before attacking Israel and taking control of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. Calling for the overthrow of the House of Saud, IS has carried out attacks in Saudi Arabia's Najd Province and Hejaz Province. After deepening its influence in the kingdom and in neighboring Yemen, IS cells are likely to attack both Saudi rulers and coalition targets in 2016.

In June, in another corner of the globe, IS proclaimed Wilayat Qawqas in the northern Caucasus under the leadership of Rustam Asildarov (alias Abu Muhammad al-Qadari). The terrorist groups in the four republics under al-Qaeda's Islamic Emirates of the Caucasus work with IS.

In Egypt, after the country’s most violent group, Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, pledged allegiance to al Baghdadi by creating IS Sinai, it carried out some devastating attacks on Egyptian security forces. In retaliation for Russian support for the Assad regime in Syria, IS Sinai on Oct. 31 bombed a chartered Russian passenger plane, killing 224 on board.In 2016, the Islamic State and its various branches and associate groups likely will hit Western, Russian and Shia targets.

The response. IS today presents a multi-faceted threat for most governments, through its core operations in Syria-Iraq, its branches and affiliates in other regions and its online operations. To counter this threat, new capabilities are needed that cut across military forces, law enforcement authorities, and national security agencies.These would range from expanding elite counter terrorism tactical units; increasing the numerical strength of national security services; developing a robust legal framework on preventative detentions; raising units dedicated to mounting cyber attacks; and integrating capabilities through collaboration in counter-terrorist efforts. An increase in intelligence-led military capabilities for killing or capturing IS leaders, dismantling their support bases, and disrupting their operations will be at the heart of dismantling the IS core in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere. An air campaign alone will not achieve the desired outcome. Both special and general-purpose ground forces, supported by an air campaign, will be essential to degrading and destroying IS.But in order to engage IS in a ground war, political will is key.Without another mass fatality, mass casualty attack reminiscent of 9/11, it is unlikely that there will be public support to deploy ground forces. Without containing, isolating and eliminating IS in the physical space, counter radicalization and de-radicalization initiatives will have limited impact.The key to preventing IS from making inroads and declaring areas as its provinces is for governments to take legislative and executive action. After proscribing entities and personalities that advocate, support or participate in IS activities, these should be





investigated, charged, and prosecuted. To preempt IS from declaring any given area as a province, the strategy should be to target the group’s core as

well as its satellite and intermediary links. The tempo of IS attacks in Iraq and Syria has created momentum for spawning and sustaining groups associated with it outside the theatre of war. To prevent this threat from growing bigger, it is paramount to focus on the core area and satellite provinces, and disrupt the nexus between them.

Both a real and virtual threatThe IS operational threat manifests itself in physical as well as cyberspace.In parallel to an anti-IS ground campaign, governments should work toward preventing the group from influencing Muslims in the virtual space, by firmly regulating the internet through a robust legal and governance framework in order to prevent its misuse.To counter IS’s pull through social media messaging, government should also build partnerships with the business firms, civil society and community groups. To the end of fighting IS’s sophisticated exploitation of technology, governments should build trusted networks with academia and technology companies.In addition, governments should pursue a twin track of countering radicalization both online and offline, and implement de-radicalization programs aimed at rehabilitating those people who have already been radicalized.Failure to craft a multi-pronged response will lead to the disruption of relations between religious and ethnic communities. In turn, this will affect global, regional and national harmony that are essential for prosperity.Rohan Gunaratna heads the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and not of BenarNews.




Documents

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-138-Caliphate-The State of al-Qaida-45-Seven Phases-9