Mideast Blog 31 March, 2016

“My Younger Sister Barely Remembers Me”

After spending three years in Jordan, detached from home and family, Somar was starting to get accustomed to life as a single man with minimum responsibility. “All I worried about in Jordan was my rent, but when I saw my sisters? My God! I realised how far removed from responsibility I was,” he told me. The journey started with reestablishing a connection with his sisters. “My younger sister barely remembers me, only through pictures she tells me”, he said in disbelief. Somar was committed to changing that reality.

The second big change Somar was learning to live with was the overwhelming size of Istanbul. Coming from a village where he used to know every family, he felt so small. He even said he already felt nostalgic to the simplicity of Amman and its cozy coffee houses. As he busily navigated the metro against the minaret-embellished cityscape, acknowledging he is one of the millions using public transportation daily, he trod along the start of what he now understood will be a long path ahead.

The Challenge of Salafi Jihadists

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The pre-emptive security operation against a suspected ISIS-linked cell in the northern Jordanian city of Irbid earlier this month was a rude awakening. That all members of the cell were Jordanians added to public anxiety. While praise of the security forces and Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) came from all sides, starting with King Abdullah himself, a sense of unease permeates throughout the kingdom. This was the first armed confrontation with ISIS, called Daesh locally, within the kingdom’s borders. Until the Irbid incident, Jordan’s efforts to fight the militant group were centered on its participation in the U.S.-led international air campaign in Syria.

Since the GID published a terse statement on March 2 explaining the circumstances of the Irbid operation, a news blackout was imposed by the State Security Court general prosecutor. Those who were arrested in the operation were being interrogated. The little information that was made public indicated that members of the cell had machine guns, explosive vests, and were planning to hit unspecified civilian and military targets. An earlier raid resulting in the arrest of 13 suspects probably led to information about the militant cell. It was not clear if this cell was linked directly to ISIS or was composed of members sympathetic to it.

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Mideast Blog 28 March, 2016

Journey to Jihad: Why teenagers join ISIS?

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In 2009, a fourteen-year-old Belgian named Jejoen Bontinck slipped a sparkly white glove onto his left hand, squeezed into a sequinned black cardigan, and appeared on the reality-television contest “Move Like Michael Jackson.” He had travelled to Ghent from his home, in Antwerp, with his father, Dimitri, who wore a pin-striped suit jacket and oversized sunglasses, and who told the audience that he was Jejoen’s manager, mental coach, and personal assistant. Standing before the judges, Jejoen (pronounced “yeh-yoon”) professed his faith in the American Dream. “Dance yourself dizzy,” a judge said, and Jejoen moonwalked through the preliminary round. “That is performance!” Dimitri told the show’s host, a former Miss Belgium named Véronique de Kock. “You’re gonna hear from him, sweetie.”

Jejoen was soon eliminated, but four years later, when he least wanted the attention, he became the focus of hundreds of articles in the Belgian press. He had participated in a jihadi radicalization program, operated out of a rented room in Antwerp, that inspired dozens of Belgian youths to migrate to Syria and take up arms against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Most of the group’s members ultimately became part of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, joining more than twenty thousand foreign fighters engaged in the conflict in Syria and Iraq. Today, ISIS controls large parts of both countries. With revenue of more than a million dollars a day, mostly from extortion and taxation, the group continues to expand its reach; in mid-May, its forces captured the Iraqi city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, and, last week, they took control of Palmyra, in Syria.