“Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elites Slept,” a new book by U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding (Ret.), confirms this assessment. Spalding served as the chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as senior U.S. Defense official and defense attaché to China in Beijing, and later in the Trump National Security Council (NSC), where he was the chief architect of the NSS’s framework for national competition.
According to Spalding, even organizations that would seem to have a vested interest in exposing China’s malign behavior remain mum. Spalding writes that upon his arrival at NSC:
I made it a personal mission to meet with many leading think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, and law, auditing, and public relations firms that dealt with China. I was eager to seek their help in exposing the Beijing government’s influencing operations and sanctioning of illegal behavior. Additionally, I hoped they would help me explore policy options to counter China’s economic malfeasance.
Time after time, I was rebuffed.
People at these organizations would talk with me, and many of them even said they agreed with my concerns, but they claimed they couldn’t help. Doing so, some of the more forthright people said, might anger their Chinese funders or business accounts. The list of organizations that refused to engage with me publicly in my official capacity was stunning. Top white-shoe New York law firms. Organizations with mandates to promote democracy, freedom, and human rights would refuse to support my mission.
…They were, in essence, being manipulated by a foreign power that is America’s greatest enemy.
The willingness of American organizations to remain silent about Chinese Communist tyranny can be seen against a correlative backdrop of our burgeoning cancel culture, the censorship of Big Tech, and general decline of devotion to First Amendment principles alongside the Long March of political correctness through our institutions.
China is not the cause of the general erosion of American fidelity to free speech, but it is a contributor and one of its chief beneficiaries. As China poses arguably the greatest threat of any foreign actor to our liberties of all, the corruption resulting from our commercial ties is particularly acute.
For President Xi to start a dynasty, his only daughter has to get married. At 27, she is of the age when she should get married. But it can’t be to someone of peasant stock. It has to be to one of China’s princelings — or “Revolutionary Successors,” as they prefer to be known. President Xi has stressed the need for “red genes” in China’s rulers. The problem is that all the princelings are all already very wealthy, so marrying into the Xi family wealth would be of no consequence. China’s princesses do well, too. The Huawei executive arrested in Canada, Meng Wanzhou, has a stepsister, Annabel Yeo, who had her debut into high society at Le Bal des Débutantes in Paris in November 2018.
For a princeling, if you married Xi’s daughter, you would become consort to the empress, but there would be a downside: you would be killed in any palace coup.
If Xi Mingze is at Harvard, that suggests that the project to get her married off has had pushback and that President Xi isn’t having things going all his way. Another problem with Xi establishing a dynasty is that all the other families living in the gated community in Beijing for China’s elite, Zhongnanhai, would become less than equal, something that would stick in their craw more than the president-for-life thing.
The communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe lasted about 70 years before they burned out, and it has been wondered if the 70-year rule will also apply to China. The communist party in China recently celebrated 70 years since its founding, and it looks as if burnout is happening on cue. The princelings are jealous of the fortunes made by China’s entrepreneurial class and have started to take their fortunes from them, starting with the likes of Jack Ma, who had founded Alibaba. Another Chinese billionaire, Miles Kwok, has predicted that Jack Ma will be either in prison or dead within a year. Once started, expropriation will work its way down through the economy, and it will be a profound productivity-killer.
A lot of China’s managerial class now has at least part of its fortune offshore and has sent its children, often only one child, to foreign universities. Some of those children have been told, “Never come back to China.”
Xi Mingze at Harvard means that a coup is possible in China.
Built at a cost of $2.2 billion, the Salesforce Transit Center and Park formed the cornerstone of the Bay Area’s ambitious regional transportation plan: a vast, clean, efficient web of trains, buses, and streetcars, running through a hub acclaimed as the Grand Central Station of the West.
Snip.
Earlier that day, workers installing panels in the STC’s ceiling beneath the rooftop park uncovered a jagged crack in a steel beam supporting the park and bus deck. “Out of an abundance of caution,” officials said, they closed the transit center, rerouting buses to a temporary terminal. Inspectors were summoned. They found a similar fracture in a second beam.
Structural steel is exceptionally strong, but given certain conditions—low temperatures, defects incurred during fabrication, heavy-load stress—it remains vulnerable to cracking. Two types of cracks occur in steel: ductile fractures, which occur after the steel has yielded and deformed, and brittle fractures, which generally happen before the steel yields. Ductile fractures develop over time, as the steel stretches during use, explains Michael Engelhardt, Ph.D., a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the peer-review committee overseeing the STC’s response to the cracked-beam crisis.
Engineers can predict ductile fracture and make adjustments during design, such as redistributing the load among various parts of the structure,” Engelhardt says. “Brittle fractures, by contrast, happen suddenly and release a great deal of energy. They’re concerning. They aren’t supposed to happen.”
Entire world: Good riddance!@AndrewFeinberg: We can’t celebrate the death of a genocidal jihadist deathcult’s leader because it might reflect well on Trump.
Enjoy this roundup of links on the Islamic State in specific, and Syria, Turkey and the Kurds more generally, after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s timely demise:
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the hirsute rapist whom hundreds of thousands of Islamic State supporters considered their absolute leader, died yesterday during a U.S. military raid in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province, President Donald Trump announced on Sunday morning. Baghdadi became the head of ISIS in 2010 but was not seen in public until 2014, when the group designated him caliph and he addressed the world in a florid speech from the pulpit of the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq. Since then he has shown himself only once, on a dull video filmed in a windowless room and released in April.
As with Osama bin Laden, the most intriguing fact about Baghdadi’s assassination was its location, deep in what was considered enemy territory. The dominant force in Idlib is not ISIS—which is no longer dominant anywhere—but Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an affiliate of al-Qaeda. Recall that ISIS broke from al-Qaeda in 2013, and since al-Qaeda’s leaders rebuffed Baghdadi’s invitation to bow before him, the groups have traded nonstop insults and their members have tried to kill one another. Some of these insults do not strike me as the type that either side could easily take back: accusations of apostasy, disloyalty, cowardice, and idiocy. For Baghdadi to seek refuge among people who want to kill him probably means that the places where he had more support, such as within his home country of Iraq or near its border with Syria, could no longer provide him with any measure of safety. Finding him in HTS territory is like finding Derek Jeter hiding out in South Boston, or Martin Bormann living quietly by a synagogue on the Upper East Side.
Snip.
Baghdadi was special. By calling for the allegiance of all Muslims—and actually being taken seriously by a large number of them—he accomplished something no previous terrorist leader had done. He channeled, for the masses, a collective sense of connection to a glorious fantasy of an Islamic past. Bin Laden had asked Muslims to rise up in defense of Islam. But his concerns were distinctly 20th-century: overthrowing Arab despotisms, snuffing out the Jewish state, knocking over skyscrapers.
Baghdadi possessed a dramatic vision, one that any Muslim could partake in, that placed himself and anyone brave enough to join him in a line of warriors that extended back to the Prophet Muhammad himself. He noted, ostentatiously, that he hailed from the tribe of Quraish, the Prophet’s own. Historically, Muslims have counted membership in that tribe as one of about half a dozen criteria required of a valid caliph. That criterion had lapsed in importance for literally centuries, with numerous caliphs having no plausible claim to Quraishi ancestry. But Baghdadi claimed that he was a caliph, sensu stricto, in the classical tradition going back to the Abbasids. Furthermore, he would bring back a version of classical Islamic law, including legalized sex slavery and other abominations, in which he partook personally.
And now, like the Abbasids, he is dead—smashed to bits, according to Trump, by a self-detonated suicide vest. (His death was less tidy than that of his immediate Abbasid predecessor, al-Musta’sim Billah, 1213–58. The Mongols who deposed him believed that splattering his blood on the streets of Baghdad would bring bad luck, so they wrapped him in a carpet and stampeded their horses over it until his corpse was nicely tenderized.) Killing al-Musta’sim ended a dynasty. The Islamic State will likely name a successor to continue Baghdadi’s line. But the second caliph of the modern Islamic State will begin his reign in an even more impotent and pathetic state than Baghdadi left it.
When I began speaking with ISIS supporters five years ago, they parroted all the points of propaganda that the group has since made famous. But they included one point that the Islamic State has since de-emphasized. To be a valid caliph, they said, one must have control over territory and implement Islamic law within it. A pledge of allegiance to a caliph (called bay’ah, both classically and by ISIS), they stressed, is a contract, an agreement between parties in which each offers something to the other. The caliph offers an Islamic state; his subject offers obedience. The contract evaporates when the caliph stops providing a state.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has not provided a state for quite a while. Within the Islamic State, members have grumbled that he has been an absentee caliph, gone for months at a time, and not even clear in his instructions about whom to follow in his absence. The group long since stopped promising a paradise, and downgraded its territorial offering to a hellscape soon to be overrun by its enemies. It became ideologically split, with hard-liners accusing others of being softies, and both the softies and the hard-liners trying to kill one another. Baghdadi, it seems, was gone for much of this debate, and provided only vague guidance and little in the way of security or leadership. Some former supporters have felt abandoned, and have voiced their disgust.
His death will therefore definitively end an era that had already, in a sense, ended, if not with a whimper then with an inglorious bleating of complaints from his own flock. For years now, the hardest thing for outsiders to understand about the Islamic State has been its ability to inspire—to get some Muslims to leave comfortable circumstances to fight and die. For the past year, even as the world has diverted its attention from ISIS, the group’s ability to inspire has been severely diminished, and almost no one is leaving home to die for ISIS, or choosing to die in suicide attacks for ISIS at home. The inspiration is gone, and the party is over, for now. And although Baghdadi has obtained the martyrdom he sought, he got it in the end not as a caliph but as just another bloody hairball in a pile of rubble.
Legacy media outlets responded to President Trump’s announcement of the U.S. military’s successful mission against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi with their trademark hostility and anger. That’s because the inarguably good news threatens corporate media goals for shaping foreign policy, impeaching the president, and defeating Trump in 2020.
Snip.
Corporate media have moved from at least projecting concern for reporting the actual news into unembarrassed political actors. That enables them to flamboyantly spin — as opposed to their previous method of subtly spinning — even major news with indisputable facts.
The 2016 campaign was a humiliating defeat for Hillary Clinton, but also for political media. Media outlets never understood the electorate they were paid big dollars to write and broadcast news about. They confidently asserted Trump had no chance to win, and convinced themselves that casting off journalistic standards was defensible because of the certain ruin Trump would bring.
Instead, President Trump’s administration has been marked by success in the domestic and foreign spheres. The economy is humming, including job and wage growth the media had previously said was unlikely to impossible to achieve. This is due to tax cuts, tax reform, and unprecedented deregulation. No new wars have been launched, much less the apocalyptic nuclear wars the media predicted. A long overdue recalibration with China is taking place.
What is good news for the country is bad news for the media and their political allies.
One of the tools they can utilize in their war on the president is to deny him honest media coverage of his successes, making it more difficult to clip news of them discussing those successes in an honest fashion. It’s not a conspiracy so much as a shared mindset that kicked into action this weekend.
Snip.
Trump Foreign Policy Successes Undermine Media Impeachment Drive
The biggest champions of impeachment are the media, seeking to save face after their 2016 and Russia collusion hoax failures. They have all but forced the Democrats to launch the proceedings even though their path is fraught with difficulties.
Yesterday’s Sunday Morning shows — no matter the outlet or the particular host — were all scheduled to throw more fuel on the impeachment fire. Instead, they were forced to cover a major success in the battle to defeat the Islamic State.
Impeaching the president who oversaw the operation looks even worse than just impeaching the president who has survived a non-stop, years-long campaign from the media, Democrats, and other Resistance members. For impeachment to have any chance of survival, the media need to both downplay and move quickly from the story back to their uncritical repetition of Democratic Party talking points.
Elsewhere, Syrian and Turkish forces are reportedly slugging it out with one another near Ras al-Ayn on the Turkish-Syrian border. Evidently that’s actual Syrian regulars engaged against actual Turkish regulars, not just their respective proxy forces (which are also involved), though I’m not sure that’s been verified. I fail to see how having a small contingent of U.S. troops there in harm’s way would improve the situation. (See here for my previous update.)
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died in a U.S. raid in northwestern Syria, President Donald Trump announced Sunday, describing in detail a daring mission by Army Delta Force commandos that he said had been planned for five months.
Baghdadi, whose self-declared caliphate once covered large swaths of Syria and Iraq, detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and three children after he was cornered in a tunnel.
“The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him,” Trump said from the White House. “Baghdadi’s demise demonstrates America’s relentless pursuit of terrorist leaders and our commitment to the enduring and total defeat of ISIS and other terrorist organizations.”
More details of Baghdadi’s death:
“He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming,” Trump said. “The compound had been cleared by this time, with people either surrendering or being shot and killed. Eleven young children were moved out of the house un-injured. The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, who had dragged three children with him to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast, but test results gave certain and positive identification.”
He was a sick and depraved man, and now he’s gone,” Trump said, adding at one point that he would support making public Baghdadi’s final moments.
Trump, using language also said that Baghdadi “died like a dog. He died like a coward.” The reference particular could anger Islamist extremists because they view the animals as unclean.
Well, we wouldn’t want to offend Islamic extremists, now would we?
No U.S. personnel were lost in the raid.
Here’s President Trump’s complete speech:
Some reactions from around the Twitterverse. The Washington Post took an early lead in the “worst take headline” derby:
They had it right the first time.
The Washington Post changed the headline on its Al-Baghdadi obituary from “Islamic State’s terrorist-in-Chief” to “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State.” pic.twitter.com/cs243EVz7W
U.S. special forces killing Baghdadi at the direction of @realDonaldTrump is a warning to all who seek to harm the United States. It may not be today or tomorrow but if you seek to spread terror like ISIS, the very best we have will find you and you will die for what you’ve done.
Trump's reference to Baghdadi as a "coward" who "died like a dog" is much stronger in tone when translated into Arabic, especially due to the cultural connotations of dogs being haram in Islam.
It’s actually quite amazing that the Media and Democrats are actually openly furious that Trump just knocked off ISIS’ leader, Baghdadi. It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome taken to a whole new level.
Entire world: Good riddance!@AndrewFeinberg: We can’t celebrate the death of a genocidal jihadist deathcult’s leader because it might reflect well on Trump.
The United States military has conducted a special operations raid targeting one of its most high-value targets, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), Newsweek has learned. President Donald Trump approved the mission nearly a week before it took place.
Amid reports Saturday of U.S. military helicopters over Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, a senior Pentagon official familiar with the operation and Army official briefed on the matter told Newsweek that Baghdadi was the target of the top-secret operation in the last bastion of the country’s Islamist-dominated opposition, a faction that has clashed with ISIS in recent years. A U.S. Army official briefed on the results of the operation told Newsweek that Baghdadi was killed in the raid. And the Defense Department told the White House they have “high confidence” that the high-value target killed was Baghdadi, but further verification is pending.
Members of a team from the Joint Special Operations Command carried out Saturday’s high-level operation after receiving actionable intelligence, according to sources familiar with the operation. The location raided by special operations troops had been under surveillance for some time.
On Saturday night, after the operation had concluded, President Trump tweeted: “Something very big has just happened!” The White House announced later that the president will make a “major statement” Sunday morning at 9:00 a.m.
May Baghdadi rot in hell. Syria, Iraq, Kurds, Shiites, the Middle East, the United States, and the entire world are better for his death.
Idlib is in northeast Syria, in territory that’s never been controlled by the U.S. allied, Kurdish-lead Syrian Democratic Forces, in territory currently held by Turkish-allied forces.
I’m guessing permission to operate there may have been part of Trump’s accord with Turkey to give them a buffer zone in northeast Syria.
Do you think we’ll see the MSM lavish praise on President Trump for al-Baghdadi’s death the way the praised Obama for weeks after Osama bin Laden’s death? I rather doubt it. Instead, I suspect their main story Monday will be more leaks from Adam Schiff’s star chamber impeachment farce.
The last stronghold of the Islamic State, the former Hajin pocket along the Euphrates, has fallen:
The general commander of the operation by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to eliminate the Islamic State in eastern Syria on Saturday confirmed the fall of the extremist group in the East Euphrates and said victory would be announced in a few days.
“Da’esh [ISIS] has fallen militarily and their militants are under fire from our fighters in a small space of about 600 square meters,” Chiya Firat, the general commander of the operation launched to defeat the Islamic State in the East Euphrates, told reporters at the Omar Field SDF military base in Deir al-Zor governorate.
Livemap shows no Islamic State territory remaining there, with the Syrian Democratic Forces occupying Baghuz and surrounding territory.
Closeup:
This is what the pocket looked like January 6:
This is what it looked like back on December 20:
Hundreds of Islamic State fighters have surrendered, but expect ongoing mop-up operations where jihadists continue to be be pulled from tunnels and spider holes for several days, as was the case in Mosul.
Back when President Donald Trump declared an end to the Islamic State on December 20, I said he was premature, but only by about 4-8 weeks, and the eight week estimate proved right.
There are other areas of Syria and Iraq that Livemap shows as still under Islamic State control, but I get the impression these are largely desolate areas with no significant population that Syrian and Iraqi authorities have simply failed sweep and declare cleared.
The media, which seemed to avoid reporting success after hard-won success in the war against the Islamic State, not only ignored the final destruction of the Hajin pocket, is now writing articles about how the Islamic State continues as a transnational terrorist organization. This is both true and largely irrelevant. There are plenty of Islamist terrorist groups to worry about, but the Islamic State’s primary claim to legitimacy, the thing that drew foreign fighters from around the world, was it’s presumed legitimacy as an Islamic caliphate:
To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or authority. This last criterion, Cerantonio said, is the hardest to fulfill, and requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State achieved that long before June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert within the group’s ranks—Cerantonio described him as “something of a leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a caliphate.
In late 2014, the Islamic State controlled some 40,000 square miles of territory. Now it controls nothing. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is no longer a credible caliph, capable of claiming the allegiance of all Sunnis worldwide, but a loser and a failure, assuming he’s even still alive. Ambitious worldwide jihadists no longer have any incentive to pledge bayʿah to al-Baghdadi, and it’s entirely possible that the ones who previously had will drift away or declare their support to another transnational Islamic terrorist group like al Qaeda.
For this we can thank cost-effective strategy by the U.S.-led coalition to arm and support the Syrian Democratic Forces against the Islamic State, greatly aided by the Trump Administration’s decision to loosen the rules of engagement from what they were under Obama.
The Islamic State wasn’t completely destroyed today, but the last shred of it’s claim to a caliphate was.
But then a funny thing happened. That theater of the war seemed to go into a sort of hibernation as other theaters in Syria (the Turkish incursion, the continued war in western Syria, and recently Israel bombing Iranian positions) heated up. That left several disjointed enclvaes of Islamic State control. Here’s what things looked like in at the end of 2017:
Notice that little Islamic State pocket along the Euphrates southeast of Deir ez-Zor running from Hajin to Abu Kamal on the Iraqi border. One of the great mysteries of the war is why that enclave wasn’t crushed following the fall of Deir Ez-Zor. Instead, it remained there, largely unchanged, for half a year.
The #JazeeraStorm operation aims at clearing the ISIS pocket in the northeast of Syria near Deir Ezzor. Syrian Democratic Forces are leading the charge under the cover of Coalition and Iraqi jets. The fight will be hard, but all struggles against tyranny are. Map via @Gargaristanpic.twitter.com/ZehICEla70
— Anthony Avice Du Buisson ♔ (@StoicViper) May 9, 2018
Today the village of Baqhous, directly on the Iraqi border, was captured, meaning the SDF have successfully pushed to the Euphrates there and are cooperating with Iraqi army troops to secure the border.
It’s possible that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi may be hiding in the Euphrates pocket. Given how elusive al-Baghdadi has been in previous phases of the war, I’ll believe it when we announce his capture.
Right now isis.livemap shows the Islamic State disjointed into five enclaves, two in sparsely populated desert areas in Syria, one similar area in Iraq, and two small enclaves along the Euphrates in Syria southeast of Deir ez-Zor, both of which are being systematically crushed by the forces of Assad’s Syrian government of the Kurdish-led and U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
Once those small pockets are crushed, the military war against the Islamic State is effectively won, though expect it to linger on as yet another international jihadist terrorist organization, a tiny shadow of its former self, until the last of it’s many affiliates are either crushed or pledge allegiance to another leader.
This Los Angeles Times editorial by Max Abrahms and John Glaser points out that many critics (from John Bolton to John McCain and Lindsey Graham) were wrong when they stated that Assad’s ouster was a precondition for the defeat of the Islamic State.
“Meet Mosul Eye, the secret chronicler of Islamic State ‘killing machine.'” Omar Mohammed spent years under Islamic State occupation documenting their brutality. Including this nugget of atrocity: “IS is forcing abortions and tubal ligation surgeries on Yazidi women,” he wrote in unpublished notes from January 2015. A doctor told him there had been between 50 and 60 forced abortions and a dozen Yazidi girls younger than 15 died of injuries from repeated rapes.”
“Why Did Islamic State Kill So Many Sufis in Sinai?” “Since declaring itself a caliphate in June 2014, the self-proclaimed ‘State’ has conducted or inspired over 140 terrorist attacks in 29 countries in addition to Iraq and Syria, where its carnage has taken a much deadlier toll. Those attacks have killed and wounded thousands of people.” Also how Sufism was the predominant mode of Islamic thought in Egypt before the rise of Salafism and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In early March [Imran’s] wife, Hina Alvi, suddenly left the country for Lahore, by way of Doha, Qatar. Notwithstanding the return flight she booked for a date in September 2017, the FBI believes that she actually has no intention to return to the U.S. She had abruptly pulled the couple’s three daughters out of school without alerting the school’s staff, and brought them with her — along with lots of luggage and household goods — to Pakistan.
Mark Steyn on Tucker Carlson: Everything Democrats have looked for and not found in the Russia wild goose chase is actually, demonstrably present in the Imran Awan case:
Steyn also notes: Why worry whether Vladimir Putin gave the DNC emails to Wikileaks when Debbie Wasserman Schultz just gave Imran Awan her DNC iPad password? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“The mainstream media are doing their best to ignore a bizarre, serious, and colorful story, but it’s not going to work.” Also: “Occam’s Razor suggests that DWS and the Dems were being blackmailed. For what? And what secrets, if any, were compromised by the members of the House Intelligence Committee who employed the Awan ring?” Note that both Steyn and American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson invoke Occam’s Razor to conclude that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was being blackmailed. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
This eye-opening Lee Smith piece in Tablet mag not only details how Fusion GPS came to gun up the Trump Russian fantasy (and how it’s plating both sides of the fence on Russia), but how deep research is now outsourced to opposition research firms:
Donald Trump, Jr. appears to be the latest figure in President Donald Trump’s inner circle to be caught in the giant web of the Great Kremlin Conspiracy. Trump the younger said he was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, but that all he got in his June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer was an earful about dropping the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russian officials involved in the death of a Russian lawyer who was killed in detention.
If the Trump, Jr. meeting is just another chapter in the Beltway telenovela about Trump selling out America to the Russians through an ever-changing cast of supposed intermediaries—come back, Mike Flynn and Carter Page, we hardly knew ye—it sheds valuable light on the ways and means by which the news that fills our iPhone screens and Facebook feeds is now produced. You see, the Russian lawyer—often carelessly presented as a “Russian government lawyer” with “close ties to Putin”—Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump, also worked recently with a Washington, D.C. “commercial research and strategic intelligence firm” that is also believed to have lobbied against the Magnitsky Act. That firm, which also doubles as an opposition research shop, is called Fusion GPS—famous for producing the Russia dossier distributed under the byline of Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent for hire.
Steele’s report, a collection of anonymously-sourced allegations, many of which were said to come from “high-ranking former Russian government officials”—i.e. not exactly the kinds of people who seem likely to randomly shoot the shit with ex-British spooks—detailed Trump’s ties to Russian officials and strange sexual obsessions. Originally ordered up by one of Trump’s Republican challengers, the dossier circulated widely in D.C. in the months before the 2016 election, pushed by the Clinton campaign, but no credible press organization was able to verify its claims. After Clinton’s surprise loss, the dossier became public, and it’s claims—while still unverified—have shaped the American public sphere ever since.
Yet at the same time that Fusion GPS was fueling a campaign warning against a vast Russia-Trump conspiracy to destroy the integrity of American elections, the company was also working with Russia to influence American policy—by removing the same sanctions that Trump was supposedly going to remove as his quid pro quo for Putin’s help in defeating Hillary. Many observers, including the press, can’t quite figure out how the firm wound up on both sides of the fence. Sen. Chuck Grassley wants to know if Fusion GPS has violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
As the founders of Fusion GPS surely understand, flexibility is a key recipe for success—and the more room you can occupy in the news cycle, the bigger the brand. After all, they’re former journalists—and good ones. Fusion GPS is the story of a few journalists who decided to stop being suckers. They’re not buyers of information, they’re sellers.
Snip.
For the past seven years, I’ve reported on and written about American foreign policy and what I saw as troubling trends in how we describe and debate our relationship to the rest of the world. What I’ve concluded during that period is that the fractious nature of those arguments—over the Iran Deal, for instance, or the war in Syria, or Russia’s growing role in the Middle East and elsewhere—is a symptom of a problem here at home. The issue is not about this or that foreign policy. Rather, the problem is that the mediating institutions that enabled Americans to debate and decide our politics and policies, here and abroad, are deeply damaged, likely beyond repair.
The shape of the debate over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action illustrated this most clearly. The Obama White House turned the press into an instrument used not only to promote its initiatives, but also to drown out and threaten and shame critics and potential opponents, even within the president’s own party. Given the financial exigencies of a media whose business model had been broken by the internet, mismanagement, and the rise of social media as the dominant information platform, the prestige press sacrificed its independence for access to power. If for instance, your beat was national security, it was difficult at best to cross the very few sources of power in Washington that controlled access to information. Your job depended on it. And there are increasingly fewer jobs in the press.
Another day, another failed ObamaCare repeal vote in the Senate, although the “skinny repeal” was nothing to write home about, Republicans John McCain, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against it.
The Afghan Taliban has overrun three districts previously held by the Afghan government in the provinces of Paktia, Faryab and Ghor over the past several days. The Taliban is demonstrating that it can sustain operations in all theaters of Afghanistan. The three districts are located in three different regions of the country.
The district of Jani Khel in Paktia, a known stronghold of the Haqqani Network – the powerful Taliban subgroup that is based in eastern Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal areas – fell to the Taliban earlier today after several days of heavy fighting, according to Afghan officials and the Taliban. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that the district headquarters buildings, the police headquarters and all security checkpoints are under his group’s control. Fighting is underway at a nearby military base.
Jani Khel was effectively under Taliban control. At the end of March, the group claimed that all but six percent of the district, including the district center, was under Afghan government control.
The districts of Taywara in Ghor in central Afghanistan, and Kohistan (or Lolash) in Faryab in the northwest fell to the Taliban on July 23 after several days of fighting. TOLONews confirmed that the two districts are now Taliban controlled and “government forces have not yet launched military operations to re-capture these districts.”
The Taliban has also claimed it seized control of Pusht Koh in Farah province and Guzargah in Baghlan, however the reports cannot be independently confirmed. However Taliban reports on the takeover of districts have proven accurate in the pasts.
The loss of the three districts shows that the Taliban is capable of conducting operations in all regions of the country. Even as the three districts fell, the Taliban is on the offensive in all of the other regions. Afghan security forces, which are sustaining record highs in casualties and desertions, is largely on the defensive in most areas of the country.
Texas special session update. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick has gotten the Senate to consider and pass 18 bills in just the first week. Meanwhile, Speaker Joe Straus’ House hasn’t even considered most in committee yet.
Convicted felon Brett Kimberlin loses in court yet again. “Nearly four years after Brett Kimberlin sued Patrick Frey, myself and numerous other defendants (including Michelle Malkin, Breitbart.com and Red State) in a bogus federal RICO suit, the case has finally concluded with Judge George Hazel granting Frey summary judgment.”
Because the District’s good-reason law merits invalidation under Heller regardless of its precise benefits, we would be wasting judicial resources if we remanded for the [lower] court to develop the records in these cases. … We vacate both orders below and remand with instructions to render permanent injunctions against enforcement of the District’s good-reason law.
NSA expert hacks “smart gun” with $1.5 million supercomputer. And by “NSA expert” I mean a random hacker and by $1.5 million supercomputer I mean $15 worth of magnets. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Swarthmore commies disband after realizing they were all middle upper class white people. Also, “Swarthmore Commies” would make a good name for a rock band.
My piece on ISIS-pledged terrorist groups made it to Zero Hedge. Which I’m happy about. But the comments do seem to be much more Israeli/Jewish conspiracy theory-heavy than I’ve seen there in the past…
“A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper…an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes.”
“Nice house, lots of room. The decoration scheme is a little…wait a minute…”
According to this Intel Center list, there are currently 43 worldwide terrorist groups which have pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State. I started wondering how many of those were active, how many weren’t covered by that list, and what was the most recent documented activity of each. Hence this list.
I started with the Intel Center list, found the most recent activity (if any) for the group listed, added a few groups I knew they were missing, and alphabetized the whole thing (it was originally grouped by country). I don’t speak Arabic, so this list is not alphabetized the way an Arab scholar might alphabetize it. I’ve given alternate names and spellings where known, but this information is almost certainly not complete. I’ve tried to distinguish between similarly named groups, but it’s still entirely possibly I’ve gotten something wrong. Terrorist groups form, splinter and die-off all the time.
File all this under “first cut,” “incomplete” and “work in progress.”
Abu Sayyaf Group [Philippines]: Attempts to arrest Abu Sayyaf head Isnilon Hapilon are what evidently set off the fighting in Marawi City.
al-Ansar Battalion [Algeria]: Defectors from al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), supposedly less than 10 fighters, and I see no evidence of recent activity. Not to be confused with other jihadist al-Ansar Battalions, such as those in the Syrian Free Army or the Ma’arakat al-Ansar Battalion in the Sulu archipelago of the Philippines.
al-Ghurabaa [Algeria]: No recent news. Not to be confused with the UK radical islamic group of the same name.
al-Huda Battalion in Maghreb of Islam [Algeria]: May have been absorbed into Soldiers of the Caliphate in Algeria (see below).
al-Shabaab Jubba Region Cell Bashir Abu Numan [Somalia]: Bashir Abu Numan was a commander for al Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab commander who defected to the Islamic State with some 20 fighters late in 2015, and who was later killed by al-Shabaab’s Amniyat death squads. Possibly moribund.
al-I’tisam of the Koran and Sunnah [Sudan]: Apparently no activity since January 2016, when some of its supporters were released from prison.
Ansar al-Islam [Iraq]: Appears to have merged with the Islamic State proper. Not to be confused with other groups named Ansar al-Islam, including a Bangladeshi group of that name affiliated with al Qaeda.
Bangsmoro Justice Movement (BJM) [Phillippines]: BJM is a breakaway splinter from BIFF, and does not seem to have any notable activity since pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.
Boko Haram (AKA the Islamic State in West Africa, AKA Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad) [Nigeria]: Still very active, and participated in a running gun battle with police in Kano Sunday. Estimates of Boko Haram’s size range from 4,000 to 20,000 fighters.
Central Sector of Kabardino-Balakria of the Caucasus Emirate [Russia]: Can’t find any recent information. Presumably defectors from the crumbling Caucasus Emirate.
Djamaat Houmat ad-Da’wa as-Salafiya (DHDS) [Algeria]: Another Algerian terrorist group that does not seem to have done much of anything.
Faction of Katibat al-Imam Bukhari [Syria]: All the reports I can find on Katibat al-Imam Bukhari seem to refer to them as an Uzbek Islamist group, some of which seem to be fighting in Syria under Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, AKA the Al-Nusra Front, which split off from the Islamic State, was at one time affiliated with al Qaeda, and now is theoretically independent of both.
Heroes of Islam Brigade in Khorasan [Afghanistan]: See al-Tawheed Brigade in Khorasan.
Jemaah Islamiyah [Philippines/Indonesia]: Very active in various bombing campaigns in Indonesia, but have evidently been relatively quiet since 2015.
Jemaah Anshorut (or Jamaah Ansharut) Tauhid (JAT) [Indonesia]: Evidently the successor to several other jihadist groups in Indonesia, Stratfor describes it as “sputtering,” and the pledge of allegiance to al-Baghdadi caused several members to split into still another terrorist group.
Jund al-Khilafah in Egypt [Egypt]: No recent news, probably merged into the Sinai Province of the Islamic State. See Jamaat Ansar Bait al-Maqdis.
Jundullah [Pakistan]: Jundullah carried out several attacks in Pakistan between 2012 and 2015, and is thought to be a member of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan umbrella jihadi group, not all of which have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. There’s a seperate Jundallah in Iran that has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda.
Khalid ibn al-Walid Army [Syria]. Not on Intel Center list. Syrian jihad group that merged with Martyrs of al-Yarmouk Brigade, also pledged loyalty to the Islamic State and reportedly controls territory in southern Syria along the Golan Heights.
Leaders of the Mujahid in Khorasan (ten former TTP commanders) [Pakistan]: Not finding any recent information on this splinter group.
Liwa Ahrar al-Sunna in Baalbek [Lebanon]: Claimed credit for a car bomb attacked that killed a Hezbollah leader in 2014. (Remember, as a Shi’a militia/terrorist group, members of Hezbollah are automatically on the Islamic State’s “kill on sight” list.)
Martyrs of al-Yarmouk Brigade [Syria]: Evidently merged with other groups into the Khalid ibn al-Walid Army, which has also pledged loyalty to the Islamic State and reportedly controls territory in southern Syria.
Maute (AKA Islamic State in Lanao) [Philippines]: Not in the Intel Center list. The primary group responsible for the fighting in Marawi City. Reportedly led by brothers Omarkhayam and Abdullah Maute.
Mujahideen Indonesia Timor (MIT) (AKA East Indonesia Mujahideen EIM) [Indonesia]: Do not seem to have been active after their leader, Abu Wardah Santoso, was killed in 2016.
Mujahideen of Tunisia of Kairouan [Tunisia]: Not seeing any notable news since 2015, when they carried out a deadly beach attack.
Mujahideen of Yemen [Yemen]: Possibly absorbed into the Islamic State in Yemen (AKA Wilayat Sana) proper.
Mujahideen Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem (MSCJ) [Egypt/Gaza]: Intel Center says Egypt, other sources say they’re active only in Gaza. Since Hamas has not pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, they seem to have been pretty thoroughly suppressed there.
The Nokhchico Wilayat of the Caucasus Emirate [Russia]: Can’t find any recent information. Presumably defectors from the crumbling Caucasus Emirate.
Okba Ibn Nafaa Battalion [Tunisia]: Two members were killed in a raid by Tunisian forces, but they were described as “an al-Qaeda-linked group.”
Shura Council of Shabab al-Islam Darnah [Libya]: No news since significant defeats in 2014.
The Soldiers of the Caliphate in Algeria (AKA Jund al-Khilafah fi Ard al-Jazair, AKA Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – Algeria Province) [Algeria]: It’s possible that the June 6 Paris hammer attacker may have been a member. If not, they seem to have been largely ineffective. “For the past two years, the Algerian military has stopped 44 members of a local armed group called ‘Soldiers of the Caliphate’ that swore allegiance to the leader of Daesh, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.”
Supporters for the Islamic State in Yemen [Yemen]: Like Mujahideen of Yemen, not a lot of news.
Supporters of the Islamic State in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques [Saudi Arabia]: Nothing since they shot a Danish national back in 2014.
Tehreek-e-Khilafat [Pakistan]: Though it has roots in a movement advocating resistance to British rule during World War I, evidently Tehreek-e-Khilafat has been amalgamated into Wilayat Khorasan, the South and Central Asian “chapter” of the Islamic State, along with “Khilafat Afghan (former Afghan Taliban), the Tehreek-e-Khilafat Pakistan (former TTP), Tehreek-e-Khilafat Khorasan (former TTP), the Omar Ghazi group, the Muslimdost group, the Azizullah Haqqani group (former Afghan Taliban), the Shamali Khilafat, the Jaish-ul-Islam, the Harakat Khilafat Baluch, the Mullah Bakhtwar group (former TTP), the Jaish-ul-Islam and the China-oriented Gansu Hui group created by WK members themselves.” Together they are thought to number some 1,000-3,000 fighters.
Islamic State forces are completely surrounded in Raqqa, as coalition aircraft pound militant positions in the capital of the crumbling caliphate and the Syrian Democratic Forces continue to grind them down in street-to-street urban warfare. Here’s the livemap snapshot:
There are consistent but unconfirmed reports from a number of sources that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead. As in past cases of jihadis reported dead long before they actually reached room temperature, a large dollop of caution is in order. Though this quote from a coalition spokesman (relayed via Stephen Green at Instapundit) is pretty glorious: “We strongly advise ISIS to implement a strong line of succession, it will be needed.”
Given the investment of Raqqa, there are conflicting reports as to where the Islamic State’s defacto capital is now: Some say Deir ez-Zor, others say Al Mayadin, AKA Mayadeen, which is all of 44km southeast of Deir ez-Zor, both in Syria on the Euphrates near what used to be the Iraqi border.
Under President Obama, U.S. Army Special Forces assigned to Syrian Democratic Forces needed special approval from Washington for virtually all tactical moves amid the politically complex theater of Americans, Arabs, Kurds, Turks and Syrians.
In Tabqa, where the city, its dam and its airfield were the objectives, the Green Berets decided they needed an airlift. Suddenly minus red tape, Arabs, Kurds and Americans were helicoptering into battle, and they quickly seized territory.
Under Mr. Obama, Islamic State terrorists could at times retreat from towns, immune from airstrikes if they used civilians as cover. The battle for Manbij in August became infamous when the SDF let 200 Islamic State fighters turn in their weapons and escape because they had threatened to kill town residents if they were not allowed to run away.
The new Trump strategy calls for surrounding towns, as opposed to pushing from one end or one side to another, in order to isolate Islamic State fighters and annihilate them.
Brett H. McGurk, special U.S. envoy to the coalition against the Islamic State who performed the same role for Mr. Obama, talked of “the delegations of authority which has made a difference in terms of the speed of execution. I think Tabqa was an example of that.”
“Our military people on the ground saw an opportunity to kind of surprise ISIS with a helicopter, moving them by helicopter, surprise them from behind and seize the airport, the dam and the town,” Mr. McGurk later told reporters at the Pentagon.
After Tabqa’s liberation, Mr. McGurk spoke to the city’s mayor, who gave a brief description of the war of annihilation.
“He also said he believes that most of these foreign fighters are now dead,” the diplomat said.
Mr. Mattis said: “No longer will we have slowed decision cycles because Washington, D.C., has to authorize tactical movements. I’ll leave that to the generals who know how to do those kind of things. We don’t direct that from here. They know our intent is the foreign fighters do not get out. I leave it to their skill, their cunning, to carry that out.”
Some videos:
House-by-house clearing in Raqqa:
The ruins of the Al Nuri Mosque in Mosul, from which al-Baghdadi declared his short-lived caliphate:
The Islamic State is by no means destroyed, but they’re definitely on the ropes. The defeat of the Islamic State won’t end transnational Islamic fundamentalism, but it will certainly take the wind out of their sails.
Not included in this roundup: Groups outside Islamic State territory that pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. I hope to have a separate roundup on them Real Soon Now.
Note: Post updated to remove embedded video on improvised weapons of the Battle for Mosul, as it’s been taken down for “violating YouTube’s Terms of Service,” possibly because it included Islamic State propaganda videos of weapon-making among the footage.
