ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

An analysis of the dangers posed when Western governments and the Muslim establishment limit Muslim political activism. Muslims gather in Paris in September 2014 to pay a tribute to Herve Goudel, a mountain guide beheaded by fighters affiliated to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [YOAN VALAT/EPA] Less than 2 percent of all politically motivated acts of violence committed in Europe are carried out by Muslims . Yet, the media narrative of a crisis with "radical Islam" and "radicalised Muslims" reaches new heights after each major attack in a Western country. Meanwhile, rational analysis of what constitutes Muslim "radicalism" fails to inform public discourse, which is instead driven largely by sloppy presuppositions connecting religiosity or conservatism to a propensity for violence - despite any credible evidence linking the two. Promoted by networks of well-funded Islamophobic hate groups , the hazy logic underlying this understanding of extremis

Some 20,000 Afghan Shia fighters said to be fighting alongside Iran to help save government of Syrian President Assad. Iranian media says at least 200 Afghan Shia fighters have died in the Syrian war since 2013 [Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters] Iran is recruiting Afghan Shia fighters in their tens of thousands to step up the Islamic Republic's efforts in the Syrian war, offering them salaries to join the fight to save the government of President Bashar al-Assad. As the conflict enters its fifth year, Iranian media has said that there are some 20,000 fighters in the Fatemiyon division, which is made up of both naturalised Afghans who lived in Iran and those who have travelled from Afghanistan. "Five days ago, four Afghan Shia fighters were captured in southern rural Aleppo. In addition to Iranian fighters, there are also militia fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, and recently China," Anas al-Abdah, the secretary of the opposition Syrian Coalition's political committee, t

In this episode of UpFront, Mehdi Hasan speaks to the renowned American academic Noam Chomsky about his public spat with the Turkish president, the war against ISIL and Russia's annexation of Crimea. We also look at the ramifications of the Saudi Arabia-Iran feud, and debate the state of Egypt five years after the Arab Spring. Headliner: Noam Chomsky on ISIL, Turkey and Ukraine Noam Chomsky has been described as "arguably the most important intellectual alive". And as one of the world's most celebrated academics, he has published more than 100 books and is a leading critic on United States foreign policy. In the first of a special two-part interview, Chomsky sits down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, Ukraine and Turkey. Chomsky and other "so-called intellectuals" were recently criticised by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for supporting Kurdish separatists. The author and activist, who has accused the Turkish

By Andrew Tilghman U.S. special operations troops have reportedly taken over an airfield in northeastern Syria, potentially clearing the way to flow more American military support to friendly militias fighting the Islamic State group. A small team of U.S. troops is setting up a base camp at Rmeilan Air Base in the Syrian Kurdish region near Syria's Iraqi and Turkish borders, according to local reports. American helicopters operated at the base over the past couple of weeks as local workers expanded the runway, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights . The airfield was until recently under control of the Syrian Kurdish forces, known as the YPG, but was turned over to the U.S. to help expand American support for the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the loose-knit coalition of American-backed militants fighting the Islamic State group. "Under a deal with the YPG, the U.S. was given control of the airport. The purpose of this deal is to back up the SDF, by

ISIS committed a massacre in Eastern Syrian city of Deir el-Zour on Sunday leaving as many as 280 people dead. News agencies reported different death tolls with state news agencies reporting a number as high as 300 people and opposition groups and news agencies reporting between 85 and 135 deaths including combatants. Where the London-based activist group said that at least 42 ISIS fighters had died. In the onslaughts ISIS committed killings of whole families for their cooperation with Syrian Army troops, according to Reuters, with some of those killed being beheaded. The residents in the area of the massacre called al-Bagilya, had received Russian humanitarian aid earlier. Sputnik news quoted a local in the area as saying: “The horrific massacre carried out today by ISIL militants in al-Bagilya in Deir ez-Zor. 280 victims, including women, children and old people. Reason – cooperation with the Syrian army,” The massacre is considered as one of the worst mass killings committed in S

Back in 2013 Fanar Haddad, a Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute (National University of Singapore) raised the issue of radical sectarianism in Wahhabism, (Riyadh’s very own dystopian interpretation of Islam) when he warned that latent anti-Shiism in the Middle East had already metastasized into a full doctrinal ostracization movement - thus positioning Shia Islam, and all Shiites outside the Islamic realm. He wrote for Foreign Policy: “The recent wave of anti-Shiite rhetoric and sectarian polarization has caused profound concerns across the Middle East. Sectarian tensions are not new, of course, but the vocabulary of anti-Shiism in the Middle East has changed dramatically over the last 10. Shiites who used to be accused of ethnic otherness are now being cast as outside the Muslim community itself. Exclusion on doctrinal grounds was a mostly Saudi exception in the framing of Shiism. It is now increasingly becoming the regional rule.” This “vocabulary” Haddad refers to is c

By Finian Cunningham There was an underwhelming sense when Pentagon boss Ashton Carter met this week in Paris with other members of the US-led military coalition supposedly fighting the ISIL terror group. The US-led coalition was set up at the end of 2014 and in theory comprises 60 nations. The main military operation of the alliance is an aerial bombing campaign against terrorist units of IS (also known as ISIL, ISIS or Daesh). At the Paris meeting this week, Secretary of Defense Carter was joined by counterparts from just six countries: France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Australia. Where were the other 54 nations of the coalition? Carter and French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian patted themselves on the back about “momentum”in their campaign against the terrorist network. However, platitudes aside, there was a noticeable crestfallen atmosphere at the meeting of the shrunken US-led coalition. One telling point was Carter exhorting Arab countries to contribute more.

By Andrey Fomin Last September we published an outline of the analysis produced by the Russian investigator Vladimir Shalak on the hidden aspects of the Twitter-based campaign to lure the Middle Eastern refugees into Germany. Having studied 19000 refugee-related original tweets Shalak claimed that the great exodus to continental Europe was artificially arranged by non-European actors. The latest wave of migrant-caused violence in the number of European cities on New Year’s Eve sparked another intense anti-Merkel campaign in German and European social media, and yielded additional data for Shalak’s in-depth research . Below we will share its preliminary results. But before we do let’s have a glance at two pictures demonstrating drastic change in public narrative in Germany regarding the refugees in just 4 months:   January 2016 Was it a tragic but spontaneous development or a deliberate psy operation by an external agent? To come closer to an i