ISIS Fighter Reveals Group’s Plan If Defeated in Syria

Patrick Cockburn

Isis will flourish and survive even if it is defeated in the present battle for Syria and Iraq an Isis militant has told The Independent. In an exclusive interview, Faraj, a 30-year-old veteran fighter from north east Syria, says that “when we say that the Islamic State [Isis] is everlasting and expanding, it is not a mere poetic or propaganda phrase”. He says the group intends to rebuild its strength in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, adding that “Isis has sleeper agents all over the world and their numbers are increasing”.

In his account of his life in Isis, Faraj makes plain that only a year after the caliphate was declared in the wake of the capture of Mosul in 2014, its leaders could foresee that it might be overrun militarily. He reveals hitherto unknown details of the apparent close cooperation between Isis and Turkey and the degree to which foreign fighters who flooded into Syria to fight for Isis alienated local people from the movement by ordering them about and interfering in their lives.

Speaking through WhatsApp from outside Syria and asking for his real name to be concealed, Faraj says that when he first heard “from my emirs [commanders] that Isis would win even if it had been defeated militarily in Iraq and Syria, I thought they were just energising and encouraging us or they were just hiding their defeats.” But he soon found out that Isis leaders were taking practical measures early on to set up bases elsewhere in the world. A Libyan commander told him over a year ago that he was returning to Libya “for a certain mission and would be back in two months.”

It is significant that as early as August 2015, when Isis was close to its maximum territorial expansion, after capturing Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria in May, it was already preparing for defeat. Faraj says that the world powers underestimate its resilience because they do not understand the attractiveness of Isis and its ideology to those who find the status quo unacceptable. He says: “I, like my commanders and comrades, fight in reaction to the tyranny and injustice I had experienced before.”

Faraj comes originally from a Sunni Arab village between the cities of Hasaka and Qomishli in the predominantly Kurdish north east corner of Syria. He is better educated than most Isis members, having graduated from the Faculty of Education at Hasaka University. He joined Jabhat al-Nusra along with his extended family in 2012. Known as the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra recently claimed to have cut any ties with al-Qaeda and rebranded as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. However, when Isis fighters entered Faraj’s village and offered the young men a choice of leaving or joining them, he opted to join Isis.

His eyewitness account of developments within Isis and, in particular, its relationship to Turkey are revealing because they do not come from an embittered former Isis member trying to distance himself from his past. He says he is no longer a fighter, after differences with Isis that he does not explain, but “I am still an Isis supporter because I strongly believe in the wisdom or purpose behind its existence”. Interestingly, he finds Isis attractive not so much because of its extreme religious ideology but as an effective and well-organised vehicle for protest. He says: “Isis is the best solution to correct the wrongdoings of the authoritarian regimes in the region.”

Speaking of the Turkish military intervention in Syria which began on 24 August, Faraj helps explain a mysterious development which took place at the time. As Turkish tanks and anti-Isis rebel Syrian units moved into the border town of Jarabulus on the Euphrates River, Isis appeared to know they were coming and made no attempt to resist them. This was in sharp contrast to the ferocious resistance put up by Isis fighters to defend the Isis-held town of Manbij a little further south from attack by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) whose fighting muscle comes from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Isis may have lost as many as 1,000 dead in ground fighting and US bombardment from the air.

It was reported at the time that Isis fighters had fallen back from Jarabulus towards their other stronghold in the area at al-Bab, but Faraj has another explanation. He says: “When the Turkish army entered Jarabulus, I talked to my friends who were there. Actually, Isis didn’t leave Jarabulus; they just shaved off their beards.”

He has compelling claims about the degree of complicity between Isis and Turkey a year earlier relating to the defence of Tal Abyad, another Isis-held crossing point between Turkey and Syria which was a particularly important supply route for Isis because it is 60 miles north of the Isis Syrian capital Raqqa.

In the summer of 2015, the YPG forces advancing from east and west with strong US air support caught Tal Abyad in a pincer movement, which made it difficult for Isis to defend the town. Faraj was part of a 150-strong Isis force resisting the YPG attack. “Turkey supported Isis a lot,” he recalls. “When I was in Tal Abyad in May, 2015, we received a lot of weapons and ammunition without any obstacles from the border guards.” This has long been an accusation by the Kurds, but this may be the first time that allegations of Turkish complicity with Isis during a battle has been confirmed by an Isis fighter taking part in it.

Turkish government officials have repeatedly denied any accusations of complicity in the actions of Isis, or that weapons are getting into the hands of the group via Turkey.

Faraj, as a Syrian Sunni Arab, is critical of both Turks and Syrian Kurds. He expresses dislike for the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but adds “he is much better than the Arab dictators”. At the same time, he holds Mr Erdogan “responsible for destroying Syria” by pursuing a conflict with the Kurds in Turkey that spread across the border into Syria and by “supporting Isis and pushing them into Syria”.

Defenders of Turkish actions argue that whatever tolerance for Isis by Turkey there may have been previously, the two have been at war over the last year. There have been repeated Isis attacks in Turkey, including one on Istanbul International Airport that left 42 dead and culminating in a suicide bombing of Kurdish wedding in Gaziantep on 20 August that killed 54, of whom 21 were children. But, despite Mr Erdogan’s anti-Isis rhetoric, the restrained reaction by Isis to the Turk invasion, of which it is the nominal target, suggests that the understanding between Isis and Turkey, so blatant in the past, may not be entirely dead.

Paradoxically, although Faraj has enthusiasm for the spread of Isis and its beliefs to foreign countries, he is very critical of the foreigner volunteers who came to Syria to fight for the self-declared Caliphate. He found these foreigners, including British, French and Turkish volunteers, surprisingly ignorant of Islam and local customs, often impelled by unhappy home lives or boredom, and only useful for propaganda and suicide attacks. Worse, their failings alienated Syrians who had previously supported Isis.

He says: “When Isis came, locals were happy and welcomed it. People believed that Isis will be their saviour, but psychologically and socially, they couldn’t accept foreign commanders in charge of their day-to-day lives. For instance, people in Raqqa complained when a Saudi emir used physical force to get a woman to wear a niqab. Any local will be annoyed when a stranger interferes in their life, not as a guest, but as a ruler who tells people to obey his orders. I was angry when a Tunisian man ordered me to go to the mosque and hit me on the back with a stick.”

Faraj finds some consolation in the thought that the behaviour of skilled but tough Turkish Kurd guerrilla commanders brought in by the YPG to give military advice to the Syrian Kurds in 2012-13 caused similar offence among local Syrian Kurds. The Turkish Kurd officers in charge of training had lived all their lives in military camps and “were harsh and had never experienced civilian life”. He suspects that Syrians supporting the government in Damascus react with similar hostility to being ordered about by their Russian and Iranian allies.

The war in northern Syria is very distinct from that in the rest of the country. Its main protagonists are Kurds, Arabs, Isis, the YPG and Turkey with only limited involvement by the government in Damascus. Faraj says that many Arabs in the area have joined Isis simply because they have been persecuted by the YPG. He cites as an example two cousins of his from the town of Tal Hamis on the Khabur river west of Hasakah who were killed fighting the YPG. Their houses in Tal Hamis were then confiscated by the YPG and the widows of the dead fighters were left with nothing “so their children join Isis to get revenge for their parents”.

This is the pattern all over Syria and Iraq. Protagonists may not love the side they are on, but at least it enables them to fight an enemy whom they fear and hate. He cites as an example one of his earlier commanders, a Kurdish emir named Abu Abbas al-Kurdistani, subsequently killed in battle, who had been imprisoned without trial and tortured in Iraqi Kurdistan for four years. Kurdistani said that Isis was ideal for himself because it was “the best option for oppressed people” and gave him “the opportunity to take revenge.” Nowhere in the interview does Faraj acknowledge the role that Isis atrocities have played, not just in Syria and Iraq but across the world, in creating a host of enemies for the movement who now encircle it and are threatening to overwhelm it.

The Value of False Expectations: Islamic State, Lone Wolf Attacks, and Australia

Binoy Kampmark

Australia’s distance from various centres of power has been called a tyranny. But flip that tyranny over, and you have an assortment of benefits for local development, the mighty laboratory that bred a middle class experiment supposedly egalitarian and oiled by principles of social justice.

These days, such distance is said to have been overcome, the effects of instant communication, rapid travel, and transport. People still think Australia might be somewhere in Europe, but that mistake does not get away from assumptions that a wandering finger on a globe would be able to land safely on Sydney or Melbourne.

Those imaginative creatures scribbling for Rumiyah, an Islamic State publication that combines wishful thinking with equally wishful views of the world, decided to shine a spotlight on Australia. Well done indeed. “Light the ground beneath them aflame and scorch them with terror.”

This agitated language had been motivated, in part, by the death of Ezzit Raad, an Australian jailed in connection with the 2005 plot to blow up the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Raad left Australia with brother Majed in 2013, months after his release. Islamic State subsequently announced that Raad was killed in July in the Syrian city of Manbij or, as Rumiyah preferred, when “a piece of shrapnel struck him and tore his chest open.”

Childish exhortations to target “a land cloaked in darkness and corrupted by kufr, fornication and all forms of vice” follow in the heated note. “Kill them on the streets of Brunswick, Broadmeadows, Bankstown and Bondi. Kill them at the MCG, the SCG, the Opera House, and even in their backyards.” Like many ideologues steering the wheel, the authors mistake hyperbolic desperation for substance. “Stab them, shoot them, poison them, and run them down with your vehicles.”

Such a piece might well have been dismissed as the fantastic meanderings of a mind not only addled but lazy. Islamic State is getting a battering in a territorial sense, losing ground in Syria and northern Iraq.

Much of this is pure non sequitur stuff – Islamic State is merely a manifestation of circumstance. Here today, replaced tomorrow by something similar. The entire hot-house of Middle Eastern politics needs to be disassembled before any genuine work can be done.

Incapable of creating and organising military units on a global scale, the frazzled ideologues have opted for recruitment on the cheap: words, words, words. Messages relayed globally to incite, to enrage, to even titillate. Draw them out of the rooms; turn couch potatoes into assault rifle bearing, virgin seeking converts.

In so doing, the security services of various countries are put in a bind. Ignore the rant, or hunker down for the inevitable rise of the crazies? The obvious equation of idiocy is that it takes one to know one, and the State apparatus is always going to supply credence where none should be given. To play the terrorist game, the line between mere reaction and becoming reactionary is a fine one indeed.

Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, deemed the message worthy of extensive public comment. Speaking in Laos, Turnbull’s prognostication was grim. “As Daesh comes under more and more pressure on the battlefield in Syria and in Iraq – as it is rolled back, as its territory is being taken back – it will resort to terrorist activities outside of the Middle East” (ABC News, Sep 7).

The gold dust here lay in the solitary attacker, that convenient confection of security studies. Australians, urged Turnbull, “have to be very alert to the actions of these lone actors – individuals who, as I’ve described in the national security statement last week, for a variety of reasons, may be radicalised.”

Others did not see that same urgency, let alone gravity. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews made little fuss about it, despite taking “every threat… very seriously.” The Victorian Police Chief Commissioner, Graham Ashton, noted that “the only new content is essentially a poem making reference to a number of Australian locations.” It had also been released in other languages (German, French, Indonesian) with threatened targets accordingly adjusted. What to make of it? Propaganda, he calmly, suggested.

Other outlets were similarly lukewarm about any impending calamity. The Sydney Morning Herald did not feel an increased sense of urgency, noting that “there has not been any chatter by counter-terrorism authorities.” Nor did staff at the Sydney Opera House.

The Turnbull government has already demonstrated that speculation is a far better milch cow in the making of security policy than evident threat. It promises police state measures, extensive detention periods for those convicted of terrorist charges (even the flimsier ones).

Assessing intelligence generally demands dull, hallucinatory free sobriety; the reactionary posture, all the hallucinatory visions needed. All it takes these days is a threatening word to change the world, to command attention. Forget the actual value of the evidence, the value, in other words, of action.

Press on the Dole: How Canada Pays to Shape the News

Yves Engler

Last Saturday the Ottawa Citizen published a feature titled “The story of ‘the Canadian vaccine’ that beat back Ebola”. According to the article, staff reporter Elizabeth Payne’s “research was supported by a travel grant from the International Development Research Centre.” The laudatory story concludes with Guinea’s former health minister thanking Canada “for the great service you have rendered to Guinea” and a man who received the Ebola vaccine showing “reporters a map of Canada that he had carved out of wood and displayed in his living room. ‘Because Canada saved my life.’”

A Crown Corporation that reports to Parliament through the foreign minister, the International Development Research Centre’s board is mostly appointed by the federal government. Unsurprisingly, the government-funded institution broadly aligns its positions with Canada’s international objectives.

IDRC funds various journalism initiatives and development journalism prizes. Canada’s aid agency has also doled out tens of millions of dollars on media initiatives over the years. The now defunct Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has funded a slew of journalism fellowships that generate aid-related stories, including a Canadian Newspaper Association fellowship to send journalists to Ecuador, Aga Khan Foundation Canada/Canadian Association of Journalists Fellowships for International Development Reporting, Canadian Association of Journalists/Jack Webster Foundation Fellowship. It also offered eight $6,000 fellowships annually for members of the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec, noted CIDA, “to report to the Canadian public on the realities lived in developing countries benefiting from Canadian public aid.”

Between 2005 and 2008 CIDA spent at least $47.5 million on the “promotion of development awareness.” According to a 2013 J–Source investigation titled “Some journalists and news organizations took government funding to produce work: is that a problem?”, more than $3.5 million went to articles, photos, film and radio reports about CIDA projects. Much of the government-funded reporting appeared in major media outlets. But, a CIDA spokesperson told J-Source, the aid agency “didn’t pay directly for journalists’ salaries” and only “supported media activities that had as goal the promotion of development awareness with the Canadian public.”

One journalist, Kim Brunhuber, received $13, 000 to produce “six television news pieces that highlight the contribution of Canadians to several unique development projects” to be shown on CTV outlets. While failing to say whether Brunhuber’s work appeared on the station, CTV spokesperson Rene Dupuis said another documentary it aired “clearly credited that the program had been produced with the support of the Government of Canada through CIDA.”

During the 2001–14 war in Afghanistan CIDA operated a number of media projects. A number of CIDA-backed NGOs sent journalists to Afghanistan and the aid agency had a contract with Montréal’s Le Devoir to “[remind] readers of the central role that Afghanistan plays in CIDA’s international assistance program.”

The military also paid for journalists to visit Afghanistan. Canadian Press envoy Jonathan Montpetit explained, “my understanding of these junkets is that Ottawa picked up the tab for the flight over as well as costs in-theatre, then basically gave the journos a highlight tour of what Canada was doing in Afghanistan.”

A number of commentators have highlighted the political impact of military sponsored trips, which date back decades. In Turning Around a Supertanker: media-military relations in Canada in the CNN age, Daniel Hurley writes, “correspondents were not likely to ask hard questions of people who were offering them free flights to Germany” to visit Canadian bases there. In his diary of the mid-1990s Somalia Commission of Inquiry, Peter Desbarats made a similar observation. “Some journalists, truly ignorant of military affairs, were happy to trade junkets overseas for glowing reports about Canada’s gallant peacekeepers.”

The various arms of Canadian foreign policy fund media initiatives they expect will portray their operations sympathetically. It’s one reason why Canadians overwhelmingly believe this country is a benevolent international actor even though Ottawa long advanced corporate interests and sided with the British and US empires.

Saudia Arabia: Can’t Pay Its Bills, Yet Funds War on Yemen

Robert Fisk 

Almost exactly a year after Salman bin Albdulaziz Al Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and head of the House of Saud, hurriedly left his millionaire’s mansion near Cannes with his 1,000 servants to continue his vacation in Morocco, the kingdom’s cash is not flowing so smoothly for the tens of thousands of sub-continental expatriates sweating away on his great building sites.

Almost unreported outside the Kingdom, the country’s big construction magnates – including that of the Binladen group – have not been paid by the Saudi government for major construction projects and a portion of the army of Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and other workers have received no wages, some of them for up to seven months.

Indian and Pakistani embassies approached the Saudi government, pleading that their workers should be paid. Economists who adopt the same lickspittle attitude towards the Saudi monarchy as the British Government, constantly point out that the authorities have been overwhelmed by the collapse of oil prices. They usually prefer not to mention something at which the rest of the world remains aghast: deputy crown prince and defence minister Mohamed bin Salman’s wasteful and hopeless war in Yemen. Since the king’s favourite son launched this preposterous campaign against the Houthis last year, supporting the internationally recognized Yemeni president against Shia Muslim rebels, aircraft flown by Saudi and Emirati pilots (aided by British technical “experts” on the ground) have bombed even more hospitals, clinics and medical warehouses than America has destroyed in Serbia and Afghanistan combined since 1999.

The result? A country with 16 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, whose Aramco oil company makes more than $1bn a day and now records a budget deficit of $100bn, cannot pay its bills. At first, the Yemen fiasco was called “Operation Decisive Storm”, which – once it proved the longest and least decisive Arab “storm” in the Middle East’s recent history – was changed to “Operation Restore Hope”. And the bombing went on, just as it did in the pre-“hope” “storm”, along with the help of the UK’s “experts”. No wonder the very same deputy crown prince Mohamed announced this year that state spending on salaries would be lowered, yet individual earnings would rise.

In Pakistan, whose soldiers make up a large number of the “Saudi” armed forces, there has been outrage, parliamentarians are asking why three Saudi companies have not paid salaries for eight months, refusing even to provide food for their employees. In some cases, the Pakistanis have paid their own nationals for food supplies.

In Saudi Arabia itself, the government seems unable to cope with the crisis. The Arab News says that 31,000 Saudi and other foreign workers have lodged complaints with the government’s labour ministry over unpaid wages. On one occasion, the Indian consulate and local Indian expatriates brought food to the workers so that their people should not starve. The overall figure that the government owes the construction companies owed may be billions of dollars.

Overtly xenophobic comments have emerged in the Saudi press. Writing in the Saudi Gazette, Abdulrtahman Saad Al-Araabi said: “Many expats hate us and are angry because we are a rich country. Some of them go so far as to say that we, Saudis, do not deserve these blessings and the money we have. That is the reason why some of them become violent when they do not get paid on time.”

Well, I suppose some people are paying a lot of cash to the Jabhat al-Nusra (recently re-named Jabhat Fateh al-Shamal-Nusrah) or Al-Qaeda or Isis lads out there in the line of fire in Syria.

Embassy staff from the Philippines, France and many countries in the Middle East, have raised the problems with the Saudi government. Typical of their responses has been that of Saudi Oger which said it had been “affected by current circumstances [sic] which resulted in some delays in delays in fulfilling our commitments to our employees”.

The Saudi government insisted the company paid its employees. Many of them, it should be added, are Lebanese whose Sunni Muslims come from the Sunni areas of Lebanon who traditionally vote for the Sunni leader’s son Saad.

An official of the company made the extraordinary statement that “the company’s situation is unstable due to the scrapping [sic] of many of its projects it was to execute,” Meanwhile, workers at United Seemac construction company are complaining they have not been paid for months – or even granted permission to leave the country. Some had apparently not been paid for more than a year and a half. Unlike the big companies such as Binladen and Oger, these men – and they are indeed mostly men – are consumed into the smaller employees. “All the attention is on the big companies – it’s easy to ignore us because we are not so many people.”

All in all, a dodgy scenario in our beloved monarchy-dictatorship, whose war against the Shia Houthis – and the Shia Hezbollah, the Shia/Alawite regime in Damascus and Iran – is unending. Wasn’t there an equally dodgy Al-Yamamah arms deal with the Saudis a few years ago? No cash flow problems then. And what does “yamamah” mean in Arabic? “Dove”? Let us go no further.

9/11 Fifteen Years After: What Might Have Been

Farhang Jahanpour

Fifteen years ago on 9/11, Al Qaeda terrorists changed the course of history, and the consequences of what happened on that day are still very much with us, and are arguably even growing more complex and more dangerous.

On 11 September 2001, 19 young Arab militants affiliated to Al Qaeda who had received rudimentary flying instruction in the United States hijacked and flew two passenger aircraft at the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one at the Pentagon in Washington and another aircraft was allegedly also flying towards the White House or the Capitol but it was brought down before it reached its target.

Nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed as the result of those terrorist outrages. In response, America launched the “War on Terror” that has killed upward of a million people, destroyed many Middle Eastern countries, ruined the lives of tens of millions, killed nearly 7,000 US troops and injured another 50,000, and has cost the United States a staggering six trillion dollars.

This was the first time in US history that the American mainland had been attacked after the British troops had set fire to the White House in 1814 during the war between the United States and England. Even during the Second World War the continental United States did not receive any direct attacks, and the closest that the Japanese got was to attack the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

Of course, during the past few decades there have been numerous terrorist attacks on the US and other targets, the most notable being the attack carried out by Timothy McVeigh on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which claimed 168 lives and left over 800 people injured. McVeigh too had religious motivations for his attacks.

He was a religious fanatic and a follower of David Koresh, and he bombed the federal building on the anniversary of the destruction of the Branch Davidian camp in Waco by federal forces, as the result of which Koresh, 54 other adults and 21 children were burnt alive

One can think of the massacre of close to a million Tutsis and Hutus in Burundi and Rwanda. A Human Rights Watch analysis estimated that 77% of the Tutsi population of Rwanda was slaughtered in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.

Apart from the initial slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of nearly 70% of the Palestinian population in 1948, we had the slaughter of as many as 3,500 Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila Camps in Lebanon by the Christian Phalangists between the 15 and 16 September 1982, under the supervision of the invading Israeli forces led by Ariel Sharon.

However, the 9/11 attacks have assumed a significance far greater than all other terrorist acts in the world.

Most Americans believe that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were unprovoked and came out of the blue. However, a quick glance at the history of American military involvement in the Middle East shows that many Muslims in the Middle East had been on the receiving end of many violent American invasions and attacks.

To name just a few, during the First Persian Gulf War, (2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991), codenamed “Operation Desert Shield”, more than 100,000 sorties were flown dropping 88,500 tons of bombs, many against Iraqi targets not only in Kuwait but in Baghdad. Between 20,000 and 26,000 Iraqi military personnel were killed and 75,000 others were wounded, and there were at least 3,500 civilian fatalities from bombing.

Apart from the attack on a bunker in Amiriyah, causing the deaths of 408 Iraqi civilians who were in the shelter, there was the attack on the fleeing Iraqis between Kuwait and Basra (known as Highway of Death), when between 1,400 and 2,000 vehicles were hit and up to 10,000 soldiers and civilians were killed.

The U.S. soldiers who bombed Iraqi forces even after they had surrendered on the field of battle in Operation Desert Storm laughed about their actions, calling the strafing “a turkey shoot,” and likening it to “shooting fish in a barrel.” As one American officer put it: “It’s the biggest Fourth of July show you’ve ever seen. And to see those tanks just ‘boom,’ and more stuff keeps spewing out of them … it’s wonderful.”

There was an earlier 9/11, namely the US-supported coup in Chile and the bombing of La Moneda on 11 September 1973. President Richard Nixon had ordered economic warfare against the elected Socialist President Salvador Allende, culminating in a military coup led by army chief, Augusto Pinochet. Tens of thousands of people were arrested during the coup, many hundreds were detained, questioned, tortured and in some cases murdered.

It is important to remember that the CIA played a significant role in the creation of the Mujahedin fighters, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. When Soviet forces attacked Afghanistan in December 1979, the United States and her regional allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, created, trained and armed the Mujahedin (Holy Warriors) to fight against Russian forces.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan lasted for ten years with some 14.453 Soviet forces killed and tens of thousands wounded. Between one and a half and two million Afghans were also killed. There were two million internally displaced persons and another five million became refugees in Iran and Pakistan, and the country was devastated.

In addition to the Afghan Mujahedin, a large number of Muslim militants from neighboring Arab countries were also organized and sent to Afghanistan to join the fight against Soviet forces.

Osama bin Laden, a member of a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, became a prominent organizer and financier of those foreign volunteers, with enormous assistance from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and tacit support from the United States. Under the CIA’s “Operation Cyclone”, from 1979 to 1989, the United States and Saudi Arabia provided $40 billion worth of financial aid and weapons to almost 100,000 Mujahidin and “Afghan Arabs” through Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence.

After the defeat and withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden turned his attention to the other superpower, the United States, with the aim of allegedly freeing Muslim lands from Western occupation. In a message issued on 23 February 1998, announcing his intention to fight against what he called “the crusader armies”, bin Laden complained: “…despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded one million… despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.”

Of course, what Osama bin Laden said was morally reprehensible. At the same time, many militant Muslims find some remarks by Western politicians equally worrisome and insensitive. For instance, when the then Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked on camera if the death of half a million Iraqi children as the result of the sanctions had been worth it, her response was an emphatic “it was worth it.”

The aim of referring to other atrocities apart from 9/11 is not to belittle its significance, but merely to point out that it was not the only terrorist or violent act in the course of recent history. It is also to point out that the “War on Terror” was not the best way of dealing with an event, which was merely a criminal act carried out by a few deranged fanatics.

After all, Osama bin Laden had said that one of his main aims was to lure American forces to wars in the Middle East so that they could bleed in the same way that Soviet forces had bled. Unfortunately, President George W. Bush fell into that trap.

Joel Beinin, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Stanford University, was criticized for anti-American remarks when he simply said: “If Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.”

Had Osama bin Laden been treated as a violent criminal, and had he been tried and brought to justice instead of President Bush launching a “War on Terror”, he would have been exposed and condemned in the eyes of his supporters, millions of lives and trillions of dollars would have been saved and the world would not be facing the intensified scourge of terrorism that has been mainly an outcome of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, it is not possible to set the clock back, but we can only contemplate what could have been if a different course had been pursued, and also we can learn a lesson about the fight against terrorism in the future. After all, ideas, even distorted and extremist ideas, cannot be bombed away.

The only way to fight against them is to hold a dialogue, educate and enlighten the fanatics, and above all to hold fast to our principles. And most importantly, to understand why people become terrorists in the first place and do something about the reasons they do, if we can.

What will defeat the terrorists is adherence to law, freedom, democracy and a society that accommodates all the different voices.

As Mike Lofgren stated in his book The Deep State, ”The tangled, millennia-old story of Syria and Iraq or Afghanistan, or the complex ethnic hatreds of the Balkans vanish before a few sonorous phrases like ‘regime change,’ ‘responsibility to protect,’ or ‘humanitarian intervention.’ This mind-set leads to predictable disasters from which the political establishment never learns the appropriate lessons.”

If we wish to avoid further disasters we must learn the appropriate lessons from our mistakes.

Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov dies

David Levine

Uzbekistan President Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov, one of the longest-standing ex-Soviet heads of state, died on Friday, September 2 at the age of 78. Under the constitution, Nigmatilla Yuldashev, head of the upper house of parliament, was to become the acting president until elections are held. However, on Thursday, Yuldashev declined to assume the office, allowing Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev to take over instead.

According to Russian media outlet IA Regnum, Yuldashev explained his decision to step down by saying that he “does not have sufficient experience in managing a state, and it would be better to consider the question of the candidacy of the country’s Prime Minister Mirziyoyev in the interests of the people.” A unanimous vote of both houses of parliament approved Mirziyoyev’s appointment, and members of all parliamentary political parties spoke out in favor of him.

Elections are to be held within three months. A Facebook page on the election campaign indicates three candidates: Mirziyoyev, Yuldashev, and Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Azimov.

Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic, borders on Afghanistan and is located between China and the Caspian Sea. The Central Asia–China gas pipeline, which supplies China from Turkmenistan, passes through it. Because of its geostrategic location, the country also has the potential, if the necessary infrastructure is built, to supply gas to Europe and thereby reduce the region’s dependence on Russian supplies.

On September 2, both US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued statements on Karimov’s death. Obama’s remarks conspicuously lack the word “condolences” or any other vocabulary ordinarily associated with mourning, instead asserting that the “United States reaffirms its support for the people of Uzbekistan.”

United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia Daniel Rosenblum visited Uzbekistan on September 5, but, according to press reports, met only with his counterparts at the Uzbekistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev attended Karimov’s funeral on Saturday. Putin went to Samarkand and laid a bouquet of roses on the dead autocrat’s grave on September 6. While there, he met with Mirziyoyev, prior to the announcement of Mirziyoyev’s appointment as president.

Karimov was an emblematic representative of the corrupt Soviet bureaucracy, which utilized its position during the restoration of capitalism to acquire vast power and privileges in the post-Soviet world. Presiding over an impoverished society in which the World Bank estimated in 2010 that less than half of the working-age population was employed, Karimov maintained his rule with the use of brute force and by maneuvering between the United States and Russia.

Having begun his career as a design engineer, he eventually became an economic policy bureaucrat, serving as the republic’s finance minister in 1983, chairman of the Uzbek state planning agency in 1986, and First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party Central Committee in 1989.

In 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR elected Karimov as its first President. After initially speaking out against the proposed dissolution of the Soviet Union, in August 1991 he declared Uzbek independence. Soon afterwards, the Uzbekistan Communist Party broke away from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and reestablished itself as the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, of which Karimov became chairman.

Shortly thereafter he vastly expanded Uzbekistan’s security services, as part of the consolidation of his political power. Having pardoned a whole number of Uzbek officials convicted of corruption in the 1980s, he was able to solidify his relations with powerful regional clans that function as a sort of unofficial aristocracy in the country.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991 and the holding of national elections three days later, Karimov worked to destroy his political opponents. On January 16, he ordered security forces to fire upon an opposition demonstration called in support of Karimov’s rival in the recent elections, the poet Muhammad Salih. Since then, the Uzbekistan government has prevented the emergence of any lawful challenger, although there remain powerful local clans as well as religious organizations in the country that have a long and complicated history of relations with the government. Over the course of his rule, Karimov was reelected on numerous occasions with super-majorities in elections determined to be undemocratic by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

In 2001, Karimov became a key participant in Washington’s “War on Terror.” His ongoing campaign against Islamic fundamentalism in Uzbekistan was the basis of a budding relationship between his government and the White House. A permanent United States military base, which was used for operations in neighboring Afghanistan, was established in Karshi-Khanabad. It hosted over 1,500 US troops.

In 2005, however, Karimov executed a turn in Uzbekistan’s foreign policy. In May of that year, a protest erupted in the city of Andijan, located in the country’s east. The government squelched the demonstration with violence, resulting in deaths ranging in estimate from 187 to 1,500. Initially blaming the unrest on Islamic fundamentalists, Tashkent identified a relationship between the Andijan protests and the US-sponsored “color revolutions” that had recently brought down governments in Georgia, Ukraine, and neighboring Kyrgyzstan.

Shifting its orientation more towards Moscow, Karimov’s government demanded that the US close its base in Karshi-Khanabad within 180 days. Uzbekistan expanded its participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), established by Russia, China, and four of the Central Asian states in 2001. The country also expanded its economic ties with Russia, including the signing of deals with Russian energy giants Gazprom and Lukoil for the development of oil and gas reserves located on the Ustyurt Plateau.

In January 2006, Uzbekistan became a member of the Eurasian Economic Community (EAEC), a regional organization of ex-Soviet states aimed at economic integration, in which Russia played the leading role. In June of the same year, the country rejoined the Russia-dominated military alliance of post-Soviet states, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which it had left in 1999.

In response, Western governments and their supporters intensified their hypocritical denunciations of human rights violations in Uzbekistan. The European Union (EU) imposed sanctions on the country.

Despite the Uzbekistan government’s efforts to restrict public access to information, reports by Human Rights Watch, the UN Human Rights Council, and other nongovernmental organizations have exposed systematic torture by police and security forces in Uzbekistan, the virtual ban on oppositional political organizations, official and unofficial media censorship, restrictions on religious freedoms, harassment and intimidation of human rights activists, child labor, and compulsory labor. According to the reports, all of this was going on long before 2005—that is, when Tashkent was in alliance with Washington.

With the election of US President Obama and the partial lifting of EU sanctions in autumn 2008, Karimov rebalanced his foreign policy orientation back toward the United States. Uzbekistan left the EAEC and once again became a transit point for NATO materiel into Afghanistan. Karimov refused to ratify the treaty establishing the CSTO’s Collective Rapid Reaction Forces in June 2009, and the country left the CSTO a second time in 2012.

Still, the United States has yet to reestablish a military base in Uzbekistan. Nor did Karimov’s government support the ongoing US-led information and economic war against Russia. As a new leadership takes shape, that government’s attitude toward the US-Russia standoff will attract heightened attention.

Australian government exploits attack by mentally-ill man to whip up terrorism scare

Mike Head

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, the police and the mass media seized upon a knifing in a Sydney suburb on Saturday by a young man suffering from schizophrenia to declare it was a “lone wolf” terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State (ISIS).

Before any of the facts were known, police commanders asserted that the stabbing represented a new wave of Islamic terrorism. The media ran screaming headlines, such as “Terror on our streets” and “Global terrorism strikes on suburban streets.”

Turnbull went further, equating the incident to the 9/11 mass terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, which were used to proclaim an endless “war on terror,” invade Afghanistan and Iraq and impose far-reaching attacks on basic legal and democratic rights.

Ishas Khan, a 22-year-old Australian-born man from a Bangladeshi family, allegedly chased and stabbed Wayne Greenhalgh, 59. The older man was walking his dog on Saturday afternoon in front of Khan’s house in Minto, a working-class suburb. Greenhalgh, who lives several houses away from Khan, suffered multiple stab wounds before being rescued by local residents.

Anonymous police sources admitted to journalists that Khan had no known links to ISIS and had serious mental health problems, including schizophrenia. Residents told the media that Khan, once a high-performing school student, had acted erratically for weeks, especially since his mother died after a long illness two weeks ago. He had paced up and down the street, shouted at passers-by and pushed a car axle up and down the road.

Despite these signs of severe mental illness, New South Wales Deputy Police Commissioner Catherine Burn yesterday declared that although Khan was not on a terror watch list, “we know that this person has strong extremist beliefs inspired by ISIS.”

“Police sources” told the media that a search of Khan’s home discovered an electronic copy of Islamic State’s magazine Dabiq and evidence that he had searched for “extremist” YouTube videos. Apart from these flimsy and unsubstantiated claims being used to vilify Khan, they directly prejudiced any criminal trial. Khan was yesterday charged with committing a terrorist act and attempted murder. He was refused bail.

Media outlets highlighted reports that Khan had shouted Islamic slogans and called out: “You killed my brothers and sisters in Iraq.” These reports suggest that the unstable young man opposed the escalating US war in Iraq and Syria, in which Australia is closely involved and in which thousands of civilians have been killed.

But the corporate media and the government proclaimed that the entire population was now “at war” with Islamic extremism. The first seven pages of Murdoch media’s Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph, today featured lurid headlines like: “White-robed IS radical’s mission to kill ‘Aussie’,” “Wolves at the door” and “Victim of unholy war at home.”

Turnbull, whose fragile government is under intense pressure from the corporate elite to demonstrate its capacity to impose deep budget cuts on the population, seized upon the fact that the attack occurred on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary to insist it signalled a new assault on Australia’s “way of life.”

The prime minister declared: “On one level they seem very different, 15 years apart, very different events. But connecting them both is a ­violent Islamist ideology which perverts the religion of Islam and seeks to destroy and threaten our way of life.”

While the September 11 ­attacks were “elaborate” and planned months in advance by Al Qaeda, Saturday’s stabbing was emblematic of an evolved terror threat, Turnbull said. “What we have seen on Aust­ralian soil and elsewhere in the world is increasingly this type of lone actor attacks,” he said.

Of course, Turnbull made no mention of the fact that Al Qaeda groups have been fighting for several years on Washington’s side in its drive to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, just as they once did in Afghanistan during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the US-led operation to oust the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime.

Turnbull’s comments reportedly followed high-level discussions within the intelligence and police apparatus. He said he received a briefing from Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) director-general Duncan Lewis, Australian Federal Police commissioner Andrew Colvin, Justice Minister Michael Keenan and Counter-Terrorism Co-ordinator Tony Sheehan.

As well as providing the pretext for frontline Australian involvement in the US-led wars in the Middle East, the 9/11 attacks were utilised to introduce more than 60 pieces of so-called terrorism legislation. These vastly expanded the powers and surveillance activities of the security agencies, defined terrorism in sweeping terms and overturned fundamental rights, such as no detention without trial.

While the initial targets of these measures were vulnerable young Islamic men like Khan, they form part of a developing police-state framework that can and will be used to suppress social unrest and political dissent as the drive to war and austerity intensifies.

Since being narrowly returned to office in the July 2 election, Turnbull’s Liberal-National government, with the bipartisan backing of the Labor Party, has brought forward four further measures to bolster the powers of the police, intelligence and military forces.

Attorney-General George Brandis seized on Saturday’s stabbing to proclaim the necessity for two new terrorism laws. One bill will permit control orders—a form of house arrest—to be imposed on teenagers as young as 14. The other will allow for individuals convicted of terrorism-related and other offences, including treason, to be detained indefinitely, even after they have served their prison terms.

The other two measures will effectively give the military the authority to kill civilians in Iraq and Syria, and speed up the procedures for calling out the troops domestically to suppress opposition and unrest.

Today’s editorial in the Daily Telegraph provided a taste of the toxic atmosphere being whipped up by the ruling elite. It declared that the Minto stabbing marked an escalation of the “war” that commenced on 9/11. “Our citizens and suburbs are the frontline of this war,” it stated. “Their country is at war. It is a war unlike any we have ever fought.”

There is a clear connection between this inflammatory rhetoric and the financial elite’s demand for severe cuts to health, education and other social spending. That was illustrated by twin editorials today in the Australian Financial Review. One insisted that Saturday’s “Islamic State-inspired terror attack in Sydney” had “reminded Australians that the threat of global Islamic terrorism still looms large.” The other demanded that, with parliament resuming today, Turnbull “set a strong economic agenda and begin repairing the budget,” starting with the passage of $6.5 billion worth of cuts in an Omnibus Bill.

The ratchetting up of communal and military tensions is both an attempt to derail the widespread public opposition to this austerity offensive, and a means of boosting the repressive powers of the state apparatus to impose the dictates of the corporate establishment.

Zika virus spreads in Puerto Rico and Florida

Julio Patron & David Brown

The Zika virus has continued to spread in the United States and its territories throughout the summer months, leading to a health crisis with long-term impacts. Over 18,000 people have tested positive for the disease, including 1,750 pregnant women. Zika can cause a range of neurological problems and particularly targets fetal brain development, leading to birth defects, most notably microcephaly, the small development of the brain.

On Friday, Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that they “are now essentially out of money,” and that Americans are “about to see a bunch of kids born with microcephaly.” The CDC first requested funding in February, but Congress has yet to pass any funding measure.

The epidemic has steadily unfolded in the US despite constant warnings from health officials that preventive measures were necessary. In May 2015 the Zika epidemic in Brazil that has now spread to the US was first identified. In December 2015 the first case of local Zika transmission in the US territory of Puerto Rico was confirmed. In February 2016 the World Health Organization declared the explosive spread of the virus throughout the Americas a public health emergency of international concern.

The similarity of Zika to other mosquito-borne illnesses, like dengue and chikungunya, led a variety of experts from the National Institutes of Health, the National School of Tropical Medicine, the CDC and others to warn of Zika’s impending spread throughout Puerto Rico and onto the US mainland. Despite these warnings, the US Congress went into recess in July without approving any funding.

On August 12, the US government declared a public health emergency in Puerto Rico due to the rapid spread of the virus, which would allow the access of emergency funds. Close to 50 pregnant women are testing positive for the disease daily, and the CDC estimates that by the end of this year, 20 to 25 percent, or 875,000 of the Puerto Rican population will have contracted the virus.

There are over a thousand new Zika cases being reported each week, and the total reported in Puerto Rico so far is 15,541, according to the CDC. Because most of those infected experience no symptoms, the number of people infected is likely much larger.

Unwilling and unable to address the poor health care, widespread poverty and antiquated infrastructure that forms the social basis of the Zika outbreak, government officials and agencies have focused on posturing over petty squabbles and half-measures.

The governor of Puerto Rica, Alejandro Padilla, filed a federal lawsuit July 21 against the CDC plan to use aerial spraying of the insecticide Naled across the island in order to slow the spread of Zika. The CDC has since backed down from the proposal, but has responded to the lawsuit, saying that Naled has been used in the United States for years and is currently being sprayed in Florida.

At sufficient concentrations, Naled is known to cause a wide range of issues, from nausea to paralysis, and is potentially deadly. It can also lead to neurological disorders in unborn babies. Although the concentrations used in aerial spraying are below those known to cause health problems, it can seriously impact other useful insects like bees. Due to its potential risks, Naled has been banned by the European Union.

Zika is primarily transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. The Aedesmosquito is the most common type in the US and throughout the world and spreads particularly well in poor urban environments. To breed, it only requires small puddles of water like those readily found anywhere without regular trash collection or piped water. Basic infrastructure—such as indoor plumbing, air conditioned buildings, window screens and clean streets—greatly reduces the ability of the mosquito to bite multiple people, spreading the disease.

The Zika virus targets the nervous system and its impact on fetal development can be catastrophic. It is known to cause microcephaly, a rare birth defect that causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and life-threatening brain damage. If the mother contracts the virus at any point during her pregnancy, it can be carried over to the infant. The estimated cost to care for a baby diagnosed with microcephaly ranges from $1 million to $10 million.

It is unknown at what point in pregnancy and childhood the Zika virus affects brain development. Initial research on the Brazilian epidemic shows that affected infants born with a normal-sized head, generally those infected later in the pregnancy, can suffer from a host of difficulties, including abnormal eye development and hearing loss. The full impact of Congenital Zika Syndrome will only be discovered as doctors study those affected as they grow.

Although most adults who contract Zika show no significant symptoms, it can cause Guillain-Barré syndrome, an uncommon disorder that causes the body’s immune system to attack its own nerve cells. It can cause paralysis and death. There is currently no vaccine or cure for Zika.

Brazil is the epicenter of the current Zika epidemic, with 78,421 confirmed cases, and 196,000 suspected of having the virus. Poor access to health care and the lack of a simple test for Zika make the full extent of the epidemic difficult to know, but the number of infants with congenital defects has doubled since the outbreak. The outbreak began in the poverty stricken northeast region of Brazil. Birth malformations were at about 40 per 100,000 until November 2015. The number then jumped to 170 per 100,000 births, four times higher in the area.

The conditions of poverty that led to Zika’s spread through Brazil are increasingly found within the United States. Florida, the only US state with local transmission of the disease, has an official poverty rate of 16.6 percent. Over 10 percent of the state’s children live in deep poverty, defined as less than half of the official poverty rate. In Puerto Rico, 45 percent of the population live below the poverty line, and the territory’s health care system has faced massive cuts due to an ongoing $70 billion debt crisis.

Twenty-year-old Muslim recruit killed by officers at Marine boot camp

Eric London

A 20-year-old Muslim Marine recruit, Raheel Siddiqui, jumped out of a third story window on March 18, 2016 after suffering repeated abuse by officers at the Parris Island base in South Carolina.

Siddiqui’s death is one of dozens of cases of officer abuse that have emerged at Parris Island alone. Across the country, officers of the various branches of the US armed forces systematically abuse young recruits, the overwhelming majority of whom, like Siddiqui, come from working-class families.

An initial investigation revealed that Siddiqui began having mental and physical health problems shortly after arriving at training camp. His requests for help were ignored by officers in his company, known as “Killer Kilo Company,” who evaluated him and forced him to return to training.

Following a week of grueling physical training that traditionally involves heavy verbal and psychological abuse by drill sergeants and other officers, Siddiqui first complained that he was being abused. These complaints were again ignored. Salon reported that officers called Siddiqui a “terrorist” because of his Islamic faith.

On March 18, eleven days after he arrived at camp, Siddiqui told his drill instructor that he had a sore throat and requested medical attention. When the drill instructor refused and began yelling at him, Siddiqui remained silent before falling to the floor in pain. The drill sergeant continued to yell at him, and when Siddiqui again failed to respond, the officer hit him on the face as many as three times. Siddiqui then stood up, began sprinting out of the barracks, and leapt over a railing, falling 40 feet to his death.

Though Siddiqui’s death has been labeled a suicide, it would be more apt to call it a murder. Ultimately the young man and his family are victims of American imperialism.

The young man’s family emigrated from Pakistan in 1990 to live in the Detroit-area town of Taylor, Michigan. Like most military recruits, Siddiqui joined the armed forces largely out of a desire to provide a decent life for his family.

Siddiqui’s sister, Sidra, told the Wall Street Journal: “We struggled as a family when we were little, and he wanted to change that.” Siddiqui’s father is an auto-parts worker who was returning from his night shift when he first heard the news that his son was dead. He recalls seeing an ambulance parked in front of his home. Inside, first responders were tending to Siddiqui’s mother, who had just received the news.

Despite the fact that Siddiqui graduated from Harry S. Truman High School as class valedictorian, the lack of job opportunities for young people forced him to take a minimum-wage job at a nearby Home Depot. He received a scholarship to attend engineering program at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Siddiqui’s family was skeptical of his decision to join the Marines. His mother told the Wall Street Journal that her son told her: “Mom, there are possibilities in the Marines. If life gives me a golden chance, why can I not accept? I’ll get a good job. I’ll give you a good life. I’ll give you a home. I’ll give you everything.”

When he arrived at training camp, he was thrown into the reactionary, jingoistic climate of the armed forces of American imperialism. So vicious and sadistic is this climate that it broke down an innocent, intelligent, and hardworking young man, killing him in a week and a half.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the drill sergeant who beat Siddiqui was already under investigation for placing another Muslim recruit in a clothes-drying machine in 2015. The officer did so after accusing the recruit of being responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Another recruit overheard the officer yelling at the Muslim soldier: “Why are you even here? You’re gonna kill us the first chance you get, aren’t you, you terrorist? What are your plans, are you a terrorist?”

Despite this, the officer was neither demoted nor removed from his position as a drill instructor. In the 3rd Recruit Training Battalion alone, dozens of officers are now under investigation for similar abuse. The battalion proudly refers to itself as the “Thumping Third” for the brutality that its recruits face.

The US Marines issued a perfunctory statement aimed at covering up the fact that officer abuse is a standard operating procedure of all branches of the US military.

“When America’s men and women commit to becoming Marines, we make a promise to them. We pledge to train them with firmness, fairness, dignity and compassion.” said Marine Commandant General Robert B. Neller. But top military brass have not brought charges against a single officer responsible for abusing recruits and are protecting the identities of all officers involved. The ongoing investigation’s purpose is to protect those responsible, present Siddiqui’s death as an isolated incident and ensure that the culture of abuse continues unhindered.

The US armed forces are not trained with “compassion” any more than they are sent to war for “humanitarian” reasons or to protect “democracy.” The brutal, fascistic climate cultivated by the officer corps is a reflection of the military’s class character. The military’s purpose is to advance the interests of Wall Street and the American financial aristocracy, pillaging the world and securing its natural resources, shipping lanes, and cheap labor sources.

Siddiqi’s death reveals the dark shadow that fifteen years of permanent war in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa have cast on American society. The US military has killed over a million people in its ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.

This permanent state of war has left no element of life untouched. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Fallujah, Haditha, extraordinary rendition, disposition matrix, black sites, waterboarding and drone strikes are the places and terms which have come to define the character of the wars. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both pledge to continue the so-called War on Terror with no end in sight.