ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

While most of the fighting over Tel Abyad, an important border town between Syria and Turkey, was wrapped up yesterday, several groups today confirmed that the town has entirely fallen under the control of Kurdish YPG forces, and are calling it the “ biggest setback ” ISIS has faced so far. Obviously, when we say “biggest setback” we’re only referring to losses since the group renamed itself ISIS, because al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) had several setbacks during the US occupation, and was getting downright puny and irrelevant in the period after the US left and before the Syria Civil War broke out. But Tel Abyad is important as the primary supply route from Turkey into the ISIS capital city of Raqqa. The YPG are presenting the ease of taking Tel Abyad as a shift in momentum, and are promising to move on and take Raqqa, but the sheer lack of resistance in Tel Abyad is surprising everyone, and might suggest the town isn’t nearly as important to ISIS as everyone seems to think. At any rate, t...

By Robert Fisk No apologies for returning today to the strange case of the “moderate” Jabhat al-Nusra rebels, the throat-cutters and executioners who are playing the anti-Isis card to woo the US. Their leader, you may recall, told Qatar’s Al Jazeera channel that his al-Qaeda affiliated warriors will oppose both Isis and Bashar al-Assad – and even protect Syria’s Christian and Alawite minorities. The usual American nomenklatura are telling the world this is tosh. It’s the “conspiracy theorists” who are to blame, they say, for suggesting that the US might send barrel-loads of new weapons to such men. No. The US would never deal with those who are on its infamous, though pointless, “terrorist list”. Besides, Qatar would never promote these killers as moderates – would they? Well, first, let’s take another look at all these conspiracy theorists. By chance, that inestimable French journal Le Monde Diplomatique this month carries a wodge of articles under the title “Did you say conspiracy?”...

By Roya Arab Daily the depth and breadth of conflict increases, people are killed and displaced, refugee camps expand as does an expressly archaic and yet perversely modern construct of Islam that the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) could surely have never foreseen. ISIS (known in the region as Da’ ish) sweeps its bloody cloak across the Syrian and Iraqi landscapes with swords and hammers obliterating people and artefacts that fall short of their exacting demands. ISIS is yet another child of Wahhabi based teachings, from an ultra-conservative Sunni school of Islam, nurtured in Saudi Arabia in the late 1800s, with children and cousins emerging all over the modern world, their ideas flying on wings of the world-wide-web, engaging and radicalising disenfranchised souls from all classes and creeds. East, West, North and South extremists proliferate, born out of corrupted unjust political structures that stumble from one lie to the next. Looking at Syria today, international military...