Shabbiha: Paramilitary groups, mass violence and social polarization in Homs

Since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, tens of thousands of foreign fighters from different parts of the world have joined various armed groups in Syria and Iraq. There are three main groups of foreign fighters: Firstly, pro-ISIS foreign fighters who are associated with jihadist groups like Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS); secondly, pro-regime Shiite foreign fighters who are affiliated with the Assad government; and finally, anti-ISIS Western foreign fighters, fighting with Kurdish and Christian groups against ISIS and other jihadist groups. This study aims at assessing the potential threats that anti-ISIS Western foreign fighters may pose to international security and to their home countries. In line with this purpose, this study contributes to our recognition of anti-ISIS Western foreign fighters, conducts a threat assessment based on capabilities and intents of anti-ISIS Western foreign fighters and presents recommendations on how international organizations and Western governments should manage the issue of anti-ISIS Western foreign fighters.

Intervention in Syria: A Lawmaking Moment?

ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has been a key political and military actor in the Middle East and in North Africa. Although it is currently in retreat, it has conquered, controlled, and ruled areas of Syria, Iraq, and Libya. This essay outlines threats posed by ISIS in Libya and in North Africa. The analysis is divided into three sections. The first section takes into account the hybrid military nature of ISIS. The notion of hybrid warfare describes the way in which non-state actors fight: a mix of traditional infantry tactics using modern weapons; guerrilla operations; and terrorism. The second section focuses on Libya. Over the summer of 2014, Libya collapsed into civil war between duelling governments. This turmoil offered ISIS an opening to set up a bridgehead along the Libyan coast. The role of ISIS is analysed in the context of Libyan political and security chaos, underlining both ISIS’s role in the conflict and ISIS’s operations in Sirte. The third section takes into account ISIS’s operations in the North Africa between 2015 and 2016. The group has proved to be resilient; although the loss of its North African capital was a strategic blow, this has not removed ISIS’s ability to execute small-unit raids, and bombings. In conclusion, the paper aims to demonstrate both the hybrid nature of ISIS, which affects various military and political approaches and allows ISIS to withstand classic counterterrorism operations. It also considers ISIS’s ability to operate across borders and to exploit local instability.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) was declared in Syria in 2014 and then spread to Indonesia. ISIS in Indonesia then spread the understanding of violence and terrorism so then with that understanding ISIS in Indonesia committed many acts of terrorism against the government and the people of Indonesia. This research aims to find out the cause of the birth of terrorism groups, related to the terrorism movement in Indonesia and the movement of groups affiliated with ISIS in Indonesia from 2014-2018 since ISIS was declared in Syria in 2014, both those who committed acts of terrorism and only supported ISIS. This method of research is Kualitatif the method of providing more directed to descriptive. Qualitative research in this paper research takes two methods, namely document analysis taken from written material and the results of the discussion by making a conversation with various parties who know information related to the ISIS terrorism movement from 2014-2018. ISIS groups in Indonesia carried out acts of terror throughout 2014-2018 as many as 48 acts of terrorism. 22 acts of terror were committed against members and police stations because they were considered as enemies. In addition, the attack was aimed at houses of worship in the form of blasting churches and attacking public places and facilities with an explosion in Thamrin and the Malay bus station. This research serves as material for researchers who examine the terrorism movement of the ISIS group in Indonesia, researchers in the social field who study the ISIS social movement and its impact in Indonesia as well as researchers in the field of Islamic studies and Islamic thought which examines various kinds of Islamic thought. This research reveals new facts related to the ISIS organization in Indonesia, the ISIS organization movement in Indonesia and the acts of terrorism committed. changes in terrorist organizations and new patterns related to terrorist attacks and targets by ISIS Indonesia.
 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4032974

<p><strong>Abstract:</strong></p> <p>The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) was declared in Syria in 2014 and then spread to Indonesia. ISIS in Indonesia then spread the understanding of violence and terrorism so then with that understanding ISIS in Indonesia committed many acts of terrorism against the government and the people of Indonesia. This research aims to find out the cause of the birth of terrorism groups, related to the terrorism movement in Indonesia and the movement of groups affiliated with ISIS in Indonesia from 2014-2018 since ISIS was declared in Syria in 2014, both those who committed acts of terrorism and only supported ISIS. This method of research is Kualitatif the method of providing more directed to descriptive. Qualitative research in this paper research takes two methods, namely document analysis taken from written material and the results of the discussion by making a conversation with various parties who know information related to the ISIS terrorism movement from 2014-2018. ISIS groups in Indonesia carried out acts of terror throughout 2014-2018 as many as 48 acts of terrorism. 22 acts of terror were committed against members and police stations because they were considered as enemies. In addition, the attack was aimed at houses of worship in the form of blasting churches and attacking public places and facilities with an explosion in Thamrin and the Malay bus station. This research serves as material for researchers who examine the terrorism movement of the ISIS group in Indonesia, researchers in the social field who study the ISIS social movement and its impact in Indonesia as well as researchers in the field of Islamic studies and Islamic thought which examines various kinds of Islamic thought. This research reveals new facts related to the ISIS organization in Indonesia, the ISIS organization movement in Indonesia and the acts of terrorism committed. changes in terrorist organizations and new patterns related to terrorist attacks and targets by ISIS Indonesia .  </p> <p><em><strong>Source</strong>: </em></p> <p><a href="https://ejournal.cyberdakwah.com/index.php/Islam-Universalia/article/view/137">https://ejournal.cyberdakwah.com/index.php/Islam-Universalia/issue/view/4</a></p>

The focal points of foreign interests within the Middle East are crude oil resources, prevention of nuclear proliferation, the fight against terrorism, and promoting democratization. International actors have specific interests they seek in the region. Among these, the US interests are the protection and free flow of oil, and the control of nuclear weapons to prevent threats against the security of crude oil, Russia’s interests are arms sales, energy and investment while China’s interest is to have a continued access to energy resources. The scramble for these interests among these international actors brought about the crisis that weakened the security of the states in the Middle East. The weak security caused many ethnic and religious nationalities to begin engaging in conflicts which eventually escalated into civil war. This war led to confrontations between regional states thus, providing Hezbollah and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) the opportunity to rise up to fill the security vacuum in the region. The study therefore investigated the roles and consequences of Hezbollah and ISIS on foreign interests in the Middle East. The study adopted qualitative method. The population of the study was the violent organizations in the Middle East. Hezbollah and ISIS were purposively selected because they constituted the major security threats in an already volatile region between 2010 and 2017. Data were collected through documentary review (of publications and audiovisual recordings by Hezbollah and ISIS as well as journals and materials from Internet). Data from interviews of five Syrians and four American citizens complemented the major sources. Data were analyzed thematically. The study found that the interference in the Middle East crisis by foreign interests led to the rise of violent groups in the region. In addition, the support of some groups by Russia, China, Japan and USA on the pretext of humanitarian intervention fuelled the Hezbollah and ISIS violent activities. ISIS denied Russia access to their oil pipeline route and that affected Russia’s federal fund and foreign earnings, causing a decimation of profits for the Russian government. Furthermore, the trade route owned and managed by the Chinese construction company was destroyed by Hezbollah. This made China to lose trade route access from the Middle East to the rest of the world. In addition, the US military base in Syria was attacked by the ISIS and it resulted into casualties of some Americans. The study concluded that the foreign economic and military interests in the Middle East had been decimated by Hezbollah and ISIS. The study recommended that the various governments of the Middle East in dealing with the foreign interests should take cognizance of the internal demands of their citizens. Keywords: Foreign interests, Hezbollah, ISIS, Middle East DOI : 10.7176/IAGS/73-04 Publication date :June 30 th 2019

ABSTRACT: Through oil smuggling, kidnapping, human trafficking and extortion, ISIL is one best funded militant groups United States has Avoiding a protracted conflict with ISIS requires a more integrated financial and military strategy to undermine group's territorial control and reach. ********** Overshadowed by debate over whether Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) constitutes a state, Islamic or otherwise, and discussion of strategy to degrade and destroy is pivotal role criminality plays in its rise to power. ISIL includes criminals in its ranks and participates in a range of criminal activities to maintain and expand its territory. ISIL's ranks are swollen with criminals released by Syrian President Bashar Assad; its membership includes Sunni ex-convicts freed from prisons when ISIL captured Iraqi towns and cities. (1) In addition, ISIL participates in a number of criminal activities to generate illicit profit. Rather than relying solely on support from wealthy donors in Gulf countries, ISIL generates bulk of its money from criminal activities such as extortion, robbery, kidnapping, trafficking and smuggling. (2) According to one report, it netted $8 million in extortion rackets even prior to group's capture of Mosul. (3) Meanwhile, group generated between $1 million to $2 million per day in profit from oil fields it captured. (4) With massing of such wealth, US Treasury Department believes, but for the important exception of some state-sponsored terrorist organizations, ISIL is probably best-funded terrorist organization we have confronted. (5) By relying on criminal enterprises, ISIL has made itself into a highly adaptable and resilient organization not easily swept from battlefield. By perpetrating criminal acts, ISIL easily earns money for weapons, training, and recruitment and does not depend on significant sponsorship by an external state. It is not reliant on moving illicit money across international borders through established financial institutions, thus insulating itself from many traditional financial countermeasures such as economic sanctions, asset seizures, and clamping down on sympathetic charities. Such insulation means ISIL can use illicit schemes to fund its current operations and potentially extend its fight into other regions. (6) Due to significant role that crime plays in ISIL's power, Unites States requires a more integrated financial and military strategy to undermine group's territorial control and reach. ISIL and Crime Management Like other insurgent and terrorist organizations, ISIL has had to determine its relationship to crime in territory it controls. Crime management is essential to remain both a viable fighting force and a plausible alternative authority structure. Other insurgent groups such as FARC, Sendero Luminoso, Taliban and United Wa State Army that have gained territory have managed their relationship with crime through a mixture of confrontation, cooptation and cooperation. ISIL is proving no different. In its expansion, ISIL has followed a number of steps to confront criminality in territory it has acquired. First, it removed local police force and judiciary by killing some of them while forcing any remaining Sunni to swear obedience to group. Second, ISIL announced harshest form of sharia law is enshrined code of conduct. After completion of these steps, ISIL's final move has been to demonstrate its authority by having newly vetted police and courts mete out lashings, amputations and executions depending on severity of crime.' Other militant groups like IRA and FLN have sought to confront crime by assassinating police and establishing underground legal codes in areas where they operated, while other groups like FARC and Taliban have sought to impose new institutional frameworks for law enforcement and judiciary directly. …

This essay studies the rise, decline, and rebirth of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its transformation into the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). It first examines AQI’s distinctive vision and its defiance of al Qaeda central. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s anti-Shiite jihadist perspective, dramatized by AQI’s use of social media, attracted thousands of foreign fighters to Iraq. The Jordanian’s struggle against Shiite apostates and 2006 martyrdom in a US airstrike continues to dazzle young militants. Second, the essay analyzes AQI’s regeneration and metamorphosis into ISIS and its challenge to al Qaeda’s central command. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s refusal to recognize the authority of al Qaeda’s Ayman al Zawahiri and Baghdadi’s violent resistance to reconciliation measures has sparked destabilizing intrajihadist warfare. Third, the essay examines ISIS’s position as it resists attacks by Iraqi regime forces, rebel groups, Kurdish militants, and US-led coalition air strikes. The essay’s concluding observations analyze the parallels and differences between the Armed Islamic Group’s campaign in Algeria in the 1990s and ISIS’s position in Iraq and Syria in 2015.

Chapter 6 features Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s announcement on 8 April 2013 that the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) had changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS). Emerging as leader in May 2010, Baghdadi was pivotal in continuing the group’s revival in Iraq. However, when the Arab Spring reached neighboring Syria in early 2011, within months war had broken out and, in January 2012, Baghdadi sent ISI members to join the war effort. Under the title of Jabhat al-Nusra (JN) and the leadership of Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, they quickly built a reputation for their military prowess and outreach strategies but their link to ISI was publicly unknown. When Baghdadi declared that JN was an extension of his group in his 2013 announcement, it had seismic effects for the global jihad triggering a bitter conflict between ISIS and al-Qaida.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the practices of rape, sexual enslavement, and forced marriage used by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Most research see wartime sexual violence as solutions to battlefields challenges. Studies of civil war and competitive state building during civil wars have largely overlooked the implications of such violence for rebel governance. This article explores how efforts to regulate sexuality figure within processes of violent state formation. ISIS’s practices of sexual violence mirror previous efforts by the Iraqi and Syrian state to substantiate ethno-sectarian domination through violence. But ISIS creates new gendered and ethno-sectarian hierarchies. Repertoires of sexual and gender-based violence can help to sustain and create structures of state control and are thus integral to competitive state building.

On April 6, 2017, the United States launched air strikes against a Syrian government airfield, marking a new development in Syria's long-running civil war. U.S. involvement in the conflict had previously been limited to the provision of indirect support for some rebels and the use of direct force against certain nonstate actors, particularly Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This changed in the wake of April 4, however, when a rebel-held town was hit by a nerve gas attack that killed more than eighty people—including at least thirty children—and injured hundreds more. The attack used Sarin or a Sarin-like substance, which causes death by asphyxiation, often accompanied by blue facial skin and foaming at the mouth. The United States concluded, along with many other states and the NGO Human Rights Watch, that the attack was perpetrated by Syria's Assad regime.

This essay analyzes how female participation may affect the perpetration of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) by rebel groups. I look at leftist, Islamist, Christian, and Buddhist rebel groups, examining how these ideologies interact with the factor of female participation. I hypothesize that while female participation in leftist and Buddhist rebel groups may reduce CRSV, it may have relatively little impact in Islamist and Christian rebel groups. I test these theories individually through the case studies of the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front (FMLN), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), and the United People's Democratic Front (UPDF). Due to the lack of data on Christian and Buddhist rebel groups, I only statistically corroborate my hypotheses on leftist and Islamist rebel groups.

In the past, women in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) were known to serve as homemakers (i.e., wives, mothers). However, in recent times there has been a shift in their roles, as more women are starting to emerge on the front lines as suicide bombers, recruiters, or a part of ISIS's official women police brigade. This article investigates this phenomenon by performing a thematic analysis on open-source material, namely research reports, media reports, and propaganda material produced by ISIS. In doing so, it presents the evolution of the roles of women in ISIS from past to present and highlights key reasons that motivate women to join ISIS, which include ideology, alienation, romance, peer influence, and a sense of security. Implications for research on women in terrorism have also been identified.

The spread of terrorism is often associated with radical network groups, such as Al Qaeda and The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).Unlike other radical groups in various countries, ISIS is known as a group that uses women and children as perpetrators of terrorism.In Indonesia, acts of terrorism committed by women are also linked to ISIS.This paper will analyze how the spread of terrorist acts carried out by ISIS, the role of women in ISIS terrorism acts, and the pattern of terrorist acts of women ISIS sympathizers in Indonesia.This study uses a qualitative approach.Data is collected from searching for information on the internet and library sources from mass media, books, and scientific journals.The data are analyzed in a qualitative descriptive manner.The results show that the influence of ISIS has spread to various countries.There is a shift in women's role from sympathizers to perpetrators of acts of terrorism.In Indonesia, acts of women's terrorism are not concentrated in certain areas but spread in various cities.The movement pattern has shifted from joint or group action to action alone.

Combating terrorism is one of the foreign policy of the United States (US). The Islamic State of Iraq and The Levant (ISIL) or The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is one of the movement deemed terrorists and has disturbed world peace. Ultimately the US decided to intervene to deal with the frequent acts of terror by ISIS which resulted in gross human rights violations. This article aims to find out how the US intervention to combat human rights abuses and acts of terror that have been done by ISIS. The research method which was used in this research is library research method, such as books, articles, journals, and various media which were relevant to this research. It has been found that the form of settlement efforts to reduce human rights violations, the US made preventive and repressive efforts. In preventive efforts, the US created an international coalition to gain support to counter terror committed by ISIS. Then the repressive effort is humanitarian intervention in the form of military aid and humanitarian aid. The US donates $ 1.2 billion annually and 350 million dollars as a form of military and humanitarian aid to combat ISIS.