Islamic "Califate" ISIS is loosing its people in Raqqa

“Anyone against them (ISIS) is an infidel. For IS, beheading someone is as simple and easy as saying hello.”

ISIS might be successful recruiting fighters, but the people they're terrorizing, many of them faithful to Islam, are finding ways to escape.When possible, they're learving as fast as possible.  

Obviously, it's extremely dangerous for independent journalism to verify what's going on behind the dark robes and propaganda inside the self declared Islamic State (aka ISIS). Nevertheless, from refugee reports out of Syria, the ISIS hold over certain territories is terrifying people, who are escaping. Reports tell about life being unbearable and getting worse. Why? Because the people are in a dangerous political vice. Bombings against ISIS have terrorized the people while the self declared "califate" continues to preach draconian rhetoric. In my opinion, the resulting humanitarian crisis won't be resolved in our lifetime, because generations of people are traumatized causing millions of them to live as refugees.

Imagine the plight! Terrified people are fleeing Syria and ISIS. They're leaving their homeland, where their ancestors lived for thousands of years, because of turmoil caused by religious extremism and the horrorible reign of terror led by Syria's President al-Assad. Worse, when allies, who were supposed to protect this horror from worsening, suddenly got "cold feet", rather than respond to the crisis, the humanitarian disaster quickly caused the suffocation of resources of nearly every refugee assistance program available to offer international aid. Now, European nations are being stressed to meet the needs of the desperate refugees, because so many of them are seeking asylum in Germany and Scandanavia.

By the way, what is a "caliphate"?

A caliphate is the traditional Islamic form of government, presided over by a caliph, either appointed or elected, who is considered the political leader of all. ISIS is a self declared "caliphate".

One particular caliphate flag designed in 1939
Ahmadiyya Caliphate (1908-present)

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

By Dominique Soguel, Correspondent

Islamic State: Why family fled capital of the caliphate for 'land of infidels'

ISTANBUL, TURKEY — The sermon’s thundering reproach hit on what residents of Raqqa, Syria, capital of the Islamic State’s self-described caliphate, say is a recurring theme at Friday prayers: “migration.”

“Don’t you know the dangers endured and the price our holy warriors pay to come here, the heart of the caliphate? And you? You want to go the land of infidels,” the IS preacher said, according to six Syrian siblings who fled in January.

It was the last sermon they heard, say the siblings, who made their way to Turkey with the help of a complex chain of smugglers.

“IS picks up on the chatter on the street so they know people want to leave the ‘land of Islam’ for the ‘land of infidels,’” says the eldest, Hamza.

Leaving Raqqa is increasingly difficult and expensive, but many Syrians are still making the journey to Turkey. They're tired of the jihadists’ draconian decrees, but also of rising prices and a life under constant bombing, which has made life difficult even for those who have preferred IS rule to that of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Of course, they know people are leaving IS areas,” says Hamza, a 28-year-old construction worker now working as a tailor in the outskirts of Istanbul. “They are lining their pockets with commissions from the smugglers.”

But Qayss, his brother, who still sports a longish beard in line with the dictates of the terrorist group, interjects, furious at the hint of IS corruption.

“As long as you respect their boundaries, their presence is better than the alternative, definitely better than the regime,” he says, sullenly. “Most IS members wouldn’t dare steal or take bribes, if not out of fear of God, out of fear of their commanders.”
The bottom line

The brothers – who requested to use pseudonyms for their safety – run the spectrum of views when it comes to IS. Hamza is the most critical of the group. Adnan says he started to hate them after a foreign jihadi fighter pulled a gun on him to get ahead in a ridiculously short bakery line.

Like a meticulous accountant, Amer weighs the perceived positives, which includes the closure of brothels and the reintroduction of Islamic dress and prayer, against all the negatives. The youngest, Qayss and Omar, still view them kindly.

But they all concur, that life in Al-Raqqah was untenable. In the end, they say, the arbitrary airstrikes of Syrian and Russian forces, coupled with inflation and lack of jobs, spurred them to leave.

“When IS first came, 80 percent of the population was happy, 20 percent was not,” says Amer. “Now it is the opposite because of the excessive pressure they put on the population.
For their sister, a reprieve

“In the beginning everyone could go anywhere, even women as long as they had a male escort,” he says. “Today even men aren’t allowed to leave IS territory except under very special circumstances, such as seeking medical treatment.”

The brothers say they stayed in Raqqa as long as they did largely because their father was sick with lymphoma and wanted to die in his land, which he did in December. He received treatment in regime-controlled areas, but all the back and forth, coupled with medical care for Qayss after he got into a serious car accident, dried up their savings.

They spent the last of their money on smugglers and are now trying to work to save up and make the journey to Europe, although it would mean being further away from their mother and another brother who decided to stay put in Raqqa.

Their sister, Hanan, is the happiest in Turkey. Failure to observe proper attire in Raqqa earned her a fine of 4,000 Syrian pounds as well as 30 lashes for the brother who came to collect her. Going to the market to get fruits and vegetables is once again a pleasure, as is again being able to access Internet and watch satellite TV.

“As a fully veiled woman in Raqqa, you can’t even see where you are going,” she says, relaxing at home in leopard pajamas. “IS will pick on you for anything, plus you are in a state of constant fear of being bombed.”

Skyrocketing inflation
The prices of fruit and vegetables, the family says, witnessed a five-fold increase because prices are pegged to the dollar and IS insists certain fines be paid in gold. When they left, a gallon of cooking gas was selling to IS members for 1,100 Syrian pounds, or $3, whereas Syrians were paying at least six times as much on the black market.

By late January, gasoline cost 650 Syrian pounds per liter; diesel fuel costs 150 pounds per liter, while a gallon of cooking gas had reached 10,000 Syrian pounds, according to a resident still living there.

Leaving Raqqa has also become prohibitively expensive. The journey to Turkey used to cost 15,000 Syrian pounds, including the fee for the cross-border smuggler. Now, a minimum of six smugglers might be involved in the journey from IS areas to Syrian regions controlled by Arab or Kurdish rebels and onward to Turkey.

In the siblings’ case, the journey added up to 125,000 Syrian pounds per person – $325 or the equivalent of at least three months of construction work.

To reach Turkey the family first journeyed to Manbij, an IS-controlled town in the northern province of Aleppo, hid in a chicken coop overnight, and then hiked seven kilometers to the nearest checkpoints held by rebels linked to the opposition Free Syrian Army.

Can Raqqa be liberated?

“The first person in the smuggling chain doesn’t know the last,” explains Adnan. “At every stage the smuggler is a local who advises you where to say you are going at checkpoints to sound credible.”

For others the journey can drag out longer. For the family of Abu Zahra, natives of a small village in Raqqa Province, the journey to Turkey took 16 days. Abu Zahra says he decided to leave IS-controlled territory because two militants had set eyes on his 20- and 18 year-old daughters and he worried that his son would be conscripted to fight with the group, which some of his own relatives have joined already.

“When my cousin gave birth in Raqqa, IS fighters were thrilled because they had a new “mujahid,” or holy warrior, he recalls. “The Syrian people are caught between two fires: the regime and IS. If the regime of Bashar al-Assad fell, I am certain people would have the courage to kick them out.”

That’s a scenario that Hamza and his brothers simply rule out. The fall of the IS-controlled city of Ramadi in Iraq coupled with the proximity of Kurdish factions to the self-styled capital of the caliphate may have raised hopes that the “liberation of Raqqa” is feasible, but people there are too terrified and oppressed to revolt.

“If conditions continue to worsen there is a small chance that people will rise up, but it is truly tiny because everyone is terrified,” says Adnan. “Anyone against them is an infidel. For IS, beheading someone is as simple and easy as saying hello.”

Correspondant Dominique Soguel deserves high marks in journalism for this refugee report. Unfortunately, the ISIS caliphate makes independent reporting too dangerous to verify the horror he described in The Christian Science Monitor article.

Commentary - Steve Coll ISIS after Paris (and now San Bernadino)

Obviously, Steve Coll, the columnist for The New Yorker, couldn't have anticipated the San Bernadino CA killings and the harm done to innocent people in a community center for people with disabilities, when he wrote "ISIS after Paris" in the November 30, 2015, issue. Yet, just put the addendum "...and San Bernadino" into Coll's narrative and his commentary becomes even more timely than when the article was written.

US Marines can win against ISIS but, "then what"? 

Coll's doesn't provide a hopeful analysis-  in other words......living under the threat of terrorism is not likely to change anytime soon.

He writes:

In the week since the attacks on Paris (addendum...San Bernadino), there has been a great deal of talk about waging war on the Islamic State, but scant clarity about how such a war might succeed.  

In a season when the improvisations of Russia's Vladimir Putin shape geopolitics, and those of Donald Trump shape American politics (Trump has even remarked that Putin is "getting an A" for leadership) it is perhaps unsurprising that public discourse about what comes next has been informed by opportunism and incoherence. Yet, even the sober, often stirring rhetoric of the French President, Francoise Hollande, has often eluded the main problem, which  involves aligning aims with realistic means. 

"France is at war," Hollande told his parliment last week, as French jets struck Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic Stsate's self-declared capital.  He vowed to "eradicate" the organization. But how, and how long will it take?

In 2004, James D. Fearonn, a political scientist at Stanford University, Published a study, "Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much  Longer Than Others?", in which he and a colleague analyzed courses of civil wars fought between 1945 and 1999. Some of the findings were intuitive: civil wars end quickly when one side has a decisive military advantage over the other; poor countries with natural resources to expeort often have long internal wars, because whoever controls the resources also controls the national treasury. Other findings were novel, such as the fact that wars following coups d'etat tend to be short.  In another study, "Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War," Fearon and the political scientist David D. Laitin, discovered that, even though the nations with exceptional ethnic pluralism, like Syria and Iraq, lines of conflict may be defined by ethnic identity, pluralism, itself is not a notable predictor of civil war; (rather) poverty is a much more significant factor.  

Rereading these works in light of the infuriating problem of the Islamic State, two discouraging findings stand out In 1945, many civil wars were concluded after about two years.  By 1999, they lasted on average, about sixteen years. And conflicts in which a guerrilla group could finance itselt, by selling contaband drug crops or by smuggling oil, might go on for thirty or forty years. The Revolutioary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC, has been around since 1964, sustained in no small part by American cocaine consumption.

The Islamic State is an oil-funded descendant of Al Qaeda in Iraq, a branch of the original Al Qaeda whcih was formed in 1988. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), (evil) ISIS has at least twenty thousand armed fighters; some estimates put the number much higher. It controls large swaths of terriroty, including major cities, such as Mosul. It is unusualy barbarous, and good at Twitter. Its millenarian ideologyof hatred and extermination poses a threat across borders. Yet, its army and its sanctuary in Iraq and Syria, are not, in a structural sense, exceptional. 

From the American intervention in Somalia, in 1992, through the French intvention in Mali, in 2013, industrialized countries have been able to deploy ground forces to take guerilla-held teritory in about sixty days or less.

The problem is that if they don't then leave, to be replaced by more locally credible yet militarily able forces, they invite frustration, and risk unsustainable casualties and political if not military defeat.

This has been true, even when the guerrilla forces were weak: the Taliban possesses neither planes nor significant anti-aircraft missiles, yet it has fought the United States to a stalemate and the advantage is now shifting in its favor.

If President Obama ordered the Marines into urgent action, they could be waving flags of liberation in Raqqa by New Year's.  But, after taking the region, killing scores of ISIS commanders as well as Syrian civilians, and flushing surviving fighters and international recruits into the broken, ungovened cities of Syria and Iraq's Sunni heartland, then what?  

Without political cooperation from Bashar al_Assad, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shite militias, Turkey, the Al Queda ally Al Nusra, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and others, the Marines (and the French or NATO allies that might assist them) would soon become targets for a mind-bogglingly diverse array of opponents. 

Syrian rebels overhwelmingly regard President Assad's regime as their main enemy, and for good reason: his forces have killed more Syrians than anyone else has.  In the absence of a political agreement with Assad or his removal from ofice, it is impossible to conceive of a Muslim-majority occupation force that would be able and willing to keep the peace after the Marines departed.  

Some may argue that it would be worthwhile, nonetheless, to wipe out the Islamic State on the ground and deal with the fallout later. After Paris, such  an approach may hold emotional appeal. After Afghanistan and Iraq, however, it is not a responible course of action.

Analyses like James Fearon's suggest that there are perhaps two ways to end, or at least to contain, long wars. One is to accept that success will be a long time coming, and to adopt a posture of military and diplomatic patience and persistence. That may yet led to the FARC's disarmament. The other is to negotiate agressively to form international alliances, which will allow for a rapid, decisive use of force on the ground. The European Union activated a mutual defense compactafter the Paris attacks; NATO could broaden the alliance by invoking Article 5 of its treaty, as it did after 9/11. Such coalitions can be switly effective  When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, George H.W. Bush and James Baker pulled together an unexpected miltiary alliance to force his reterat.  In Afghanastan, George W, Bush overthew the Taliban with worldwide support. Both actions elimiated the immedate threat, but neither resolved the targeted country's underlying instability or assured durable international security.  (As a matter of fact, Islamist terorists staged a  murderous raid on a hotel in Mali's capital Bamako, almost three years after the French-led intervention in that conntry.)

Barack Obama has all but ruled out a ground intervention in Syria or Iraq. Instead, last week he promised "an intensificication" of the strategy he is already pursuing.  

Special Forces raids, air strikes, and diplomatic conferences to try to resolve the Syrian war, perhaps by declaring ceasefires or insuring Putin's cooperation.  "A political solution is the only way to end the war in Syria and unite the Syrian peple and the world" aginst the Islamic State, the Pesident said.  Unfortunately, right now, that looks no more realistic than a prolonged Aemrican occupation of Raqqa.  Obama's caution in the Midle East since the ARab Spring is a reminder that there are perhaps as many risks attendant upon inaction as upon action. The dilemmas suggested by Fearson's research won't evaporate, they will be on the deck of Obama's successor.  - Steve Coll.

(One dire possibility not addressed by Steve Coll is, during the process of daunting negotiations, the evil ISIS finds access to more dangerous weapons including whatever Iran might be hiding in their centrifuges. What then?)