#IslamicSocietiesReview: ISIL's cruelty as catalyst for positive social change in Syria and Iraq

#IslamicSocietiesReview: ISIL's cruelty as catalyst for positive social change in Syria and Iraq

    Thursday, May 12, 2016   No comments

They share little more than an enemy and struggle to communicate on the battlefield, but together two relatively obscure groups have opened up a new front against Islamic State militants in a remote corner of Iraq.

The unlikely alliance between an offshoot of a leftist Kurdish organization and an Arab tribal militia in northern Iraq is a measure of the extent to which Islamic State has upended the regional order.

Across Iraq and Syria, new groups have emerged where old powers have waned, competing to claim fragments of territory from Islamic State and complicating the outlook when they win.

"Chaos sometimes produces unexpected things," said the head of the Arab tribal force, Abdulkhaleq al-Jarba. "After Daesh (Islamic State), the political map of the region has changed. There is a new reality and we are part of it."

In Nineveh province, this "new reality" was born in 2014 when official security forces failed to defend the Sinjar area against the Sunni Islamic State militants who purged its Yazidi population.

A Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) came to the rescue, which won the gratitude of Yazidis, and another local franchise called the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) was set up.

The mainly Kurdish secular group, which includes Yazidis, controls a pocket of territory in Sinjar and recently formed an alliance with a Sunni Arab militia drawn from the powerful Shammar tribe.
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#IslamicSocietiesReview: rights NGO says "Syrian refugees beaten, shot by Turkish border guards"

#IslamicSocietiesReview: rights NGO says "Syrian refugees beaten, shot by Turkish border guards"

    Tuesday, May 10, 2016   No comments

Turkish border guards have beaten and shot Syrians trying to reach Turkey, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday, as fighting in the border province of Aleppo intensifies threatening to force more people to flee.

HRW said in a report based on interviews with victims, witnesses and Syrian locals that in March and April 2016, five people, including a child were killed and 14 were seriously injured as a result of border guards' shootings and beatings.

In response to the report, a senior Turkish presidency official said the authenticity of the video could not be verified. Reuters was not able to verify the report.

A video released by HRW purporting to show the victims of the beatings and shootings depicted a bloodied body with bandages around his exposed torso. Another male corpse is shown with red and purple marks all over his back and arms.

A recent surge in fighting in Aleppo, Syria's largest city before the war, wrecked a 10-week-old partial truce sponsored by Washington and Moscow that had allowed U.N.-brokered peace talks to convene in Geneva.


Ankara says it keeps an "open door" policy for those fleeing the five-year conflict. For over a year, only those requiring emergency medical treatment not available on the Syrian side have been able to cross legally while others rely on expensive smugglers to guide them on the dangerous route.

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#IslamicSocietiesReview : Flying while brown in the age of trump

#IslamicSocietiesReview : Flying while brown in the age of trump

    Saturday, May 07, 2016   No comments

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.

She decided to try out some small talk.

Is Syracuse home? She asked.

No, he replied curtly.

He similarly deflected further questions. He appeared laser-focused — perhaps too laser-focused — on the task at hand, those strange scribblings.

Rebuffed, the woman began reading her book. Or pretending to read, anyway. Shortly after boarding had finished, she flagged down a flight attendant and handed that crew-member a note of her own.

Then the passengers waited, and waited, and waited for the flight to take off. After they’d sat on the tarmac for about half an hour, the flight attendant approached the female passenger again and asked if she now felt okay to fly, or if she was “too sick.”

I’m OK to fly, the woman responded.

She must not have sounded convincing, though; American Airlines flight 3950 remained grounded.

Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some other flimsy excuse; the curly-haired passenger could not later recall exactly what it was.

The wait continued.

Finally the pilot came by, and approached the real culprit behind the delay: that darkly-complected foreign man. He was now escorted off the plane, too, and taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn’t entirely sure of the agent’s affiliation, he would later say.

What do know about your seatmate? The agent asked the foreign-sounding man.

Well, she acted a bit funny, he replied, but she didn’t seem visibly ill. Maybe, he thought, they wanted his help in piecing together what was wrong with her.

And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/05/07/ivy-league-economist-interrogated-for-doing-math-on-american-airlines-flight/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-c%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

#IslamicSocietiesReview: Lavrov says U.S. tried to include Nusra controlled areas in "cease fire" deal

#IslamicSocietiesReview: Lavrov says U.S. tried to include Nusra controlled areas in "cease fire" deal

    Wednesday, May 04, 2016   No comments

According to Reuters, the United States tried to include areas captured by al-Nusra Front terrorist group in northern Syria’s Aleppo in a recently established "silent" period during Washington’s talks with Moscow on the issue, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Sputnik in an exlusive interview.

 Lavrov pointed to evidence that linked the Turkish government with al-Nusra Front and Daesh terrorists, which have been excluded from all previous ceasefire deals brokered by Moscow and Washington for Syria.

"During the negotiations, our US partners actually tried to draw the borders of this ‘zone of silence’ to include a significant number of positions occupied by al-Nusra [Front]. We managed to exclude this as it is absolutely unacceptable," Lavrov said.

Lavrov suggested that some party wanted to manipulate the United States into shielding al-Nusra Front militants from government fire.

"This indicates that someone wants to use the Americans. I do not believe that it is in their interest to shield al-Nusra [Front]. But someone wants to use the Americans to shield the al-Nusra [Front] from strikes," Lavrov said.