Non-State Actors

By Péter MARTON Because I need to speak at an event about the situation in Iraq/Syria tomorrow, here are some of the recent trends and developments related to ISIS -- my digest of these. These are research notes, effectively. For starters: Aaron Zelin notes how much the ISIS media presence diminished since the fall of Mosul: "In particular, after the fall of Mosul in July 2017, the IS distribution of governance-related media dropped precipitously (by 66 percent) until the complete end of such media activity (on September 12 in Syria; September 16 in Iraq). For reference, at its apex, between June and August 2015, IS released 3,762 pictures related to governance activities in Syria and 3,305 in Iraq. When Mosul fell, between May and July 2017, IS only released 315 pictures related to governance in Syria and 171 in Iraq. And the most recent count prior to the mid-September 2017 rupture was 142 in Syria and 113 in Iraq, between July and September 2017." And yet......

By Péter MARTON 1. " What Facebook did to American democracy " -- and not only to American democracy of course. A few days old but worth your time, at The Atlantic . 2. The BBC's summary (by Middle East correspondent Jim Muir) of the Islamic State's story so far, a timely a look back, but with a future to ponder. It may also be interesting to explore the connections between the two subjects as there may be many. If social media facilitates the coming to power of populists, if it rewards socially polarising media and communication strategies and policies, if it helps the spread of "fake news" as well as semi-informed and biased opinions, it can provide opportunities to various actors, and it can also contribute to creating and sustaining reservoirs of hatred that can feed violent movements. On the other hand, it is ironic that whereas back in the 1970s developing countries were demanding "information sovereignty" as part of a "New Wo...

By Péter MARTON Times journalist Dipesh Gadher recounts Twitter-based conversations with Sally Jones, a British convert (and mother of two) who joined ISIS and was killed in a drone strike in June in the environs of Raqqa, in Syria, as reported last week (see photo ). Sally Jones' influences included punk rock, modelling, and drugs, followed by the strong sentiment of being pissed off about politics in that predictably US-foreign-policy-centric, pseudo-intellectual sense of the term, subsequently encountering Islam, and beginning to radicalise, heeding the call of ISIS recruiters. I will react to one statement attributed by Gadher to Jones in the article referred above. “I can’t help but be militant when all they do is kill us for being Muslim :( . . . You know they killed 1,220,550 innocent Muslims in the illegal Iraq war . . . the US and UK government it’s that wot did it for me. It’s them that’s the terrorists, not us.” As noted by Gadher too, that figure...