RUTHFULLY YOURS

A video circulating on pro-ISIS message boards purports to show the expansion of ISIS into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, though the Islamic State has not yet pushed on their official media channels the call to join fighters in the African country.

The DRC is only about 10 percent Muslim, with about 80 percent of residents following some form of Christianity.

The two-minute video shows several men dressed in camouflage and wielding weapons in a nondescript rainforest area, as a few young boys mingle around. The video quality is rough compared to highly produced films from ISIS’ official and affiliated media arms, but also resembles some rough-cut video statements delivered by Boko Haram in Nigeria.

With a logo including ISIS’ insignia and a rifle, the group calls itself “The City of Monotheism and Monotheists,” or MTM.

The jihadist delivering the statement is the only one in the group who does not look Congolese; he speaks Arabic and declares that those in the lands of “kuffar,” or disbelievers, should migrate to the DRC for jihad. “I swear to God that this is Dar al Islam of the Islamic State in Central Africa,” he said, swearing again that the group is “in the jihad.”

None of the fighters who appear to be Congolese speak in the video; the official language in the DRC is French, with other local dialects spoken as well.

The declaration of an ISIS chapter is a first for this part of Africa; the closest affiliations are Boko Haram to the northwest and, to the west, some Al-Shabaab members in Somalia who pledged allegiance to ISIS over al-Qaeda (the latter still being the terror group’s official patron). ISIS doesn’t always recognize groups of adherents as provinces, though caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has urged followers to expand their reach as ever-increasing amounts of ISIS’ original turf have been reclaimed by local forces in Iraq and Syria.

In an audio message last November, al-Baghdadi addressed ISIS adherents in far-flung regions, including Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Indonesia, Philippines, Sinai, Bangladesh, West Africa and North Africa, as the “base of the caliphate,” and warned that “kuffar will try to split you.”

Four U.S. soldiers were killed in an ambush while on a routine counterterrorism patrol with local forces in Niger at the beginning of the month. Both al-Qaeda and ISIS operate in the region.

In a Pentagon briefing last week, Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. noted it’s “easier to actually stop resources than it is people” going from Syria, where ISIS’ caliphate is crumbling, to Africa, and “I think we’re having significant success doing that; probably not perfect, because perfection is probably not an attainable goal.”

The Kurds are the largest stateless people in the world. Their population exists in a contiguous territory spanning across present-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Historically, the Kurds have been an oppressed people. Iran, Iraq, Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, and what’s left of ISIS in Syria and Iraq are all deeply and viscerally opposed to the idea of a Kurdish state. An independent Kurdistan would remove large swathes of territory from each of those countries.

For the most part, the Kurds—particularly those living in northern Iraq—are stridently pro-American. The fear among the other regional powers is that if Kurdish Iraq were to become an independent state, other Kurdish populations would demand independence, and would seek to be folded into that Kurdish state.

Further, the Iraqi Kurds,with their fearsome Peshmerga forces, as well as the Kurds in Syria and southern Turkey, are all well-trained and heavily armed. In fact, the recent fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has compelled the armed Kurdish factions to sally forth and take territories, such as the Iraqi city of Kirkuk (which the Peshmerga recently liberated from ISIS). Of course, the Iraqi government wants Kirkuk back, and are warring with the Kurds in order to regain control of that strategic city.

The tragedy in all of this is, aside from the Israelis, the Kurds have been America’s most steadfast ally in the region. Throughout history, the Kurds—notoriously and gruesomely—have been oppressed by the region’s powers. They were the constant targets of Saddam’s tyranny in Iraq; they waged a brutal war for their freedom in Turkey; in Syria they are the targets of ISIS and other Syrian “rebels” as well.

During Desert Storm, they answered former President George H.W. Bush’s calls to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Then, the elder Bush undercut their uprising by signing an armistice with Iraq, and abandoning the Kurds to their fate. They were slaughtered. And yet the Kurds never once blamed Bush for abandoning them.

During President Bill Clinton’s administration, the United States led a multinational force to maintain a no-fly zone that prevented Hussein from committing any further acts of genocide against the Iraqi Kurdish population. As a result, the Kurds established something like a quasi-independent state.

When George W. Bush in 2003 led the United States into a quixotic campaign to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, the Kurds joined the cause even though they understood the grave risks. After Saddam was out of power and the U.S.-led occupation struggled to prevent Iraq from splitting into three states——one for the Sunnis, one for the Shiites, and the other for the Kurds—it was the Kurds who respected Iraq’s national integrity.

What did they get for their troubles?

An Iranian-dominated government in Baghdad that took out its frustration on the Kurds!

“We do not know what they are preaching as [it is] all in Arabic.” — A petitioner against the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham mosque, in the middle of one of London’s two largely Jewish areas.

“[Ayatollah Syed Mohammed Al-Shirazi]… would constantly encourage the establishment of Hussaini centers across the world, especially in non-Islamic countries… so we can propagate the teachings of the Ahlulbayt.” — Leading members of the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham mosque describing its 30-year history and why it was established.

The Ayatollah Sayed Sadiq Hussaini Al-Shirazi, a leading Iranian cleric who resides in the city of Qom, has a list of religious centers and mosques with which he appears to be involved. Among them is the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham in London.

A new Shia Muslim mega mosque and Islamic center – measuring over 3,500 square meters and with room for 3,000 people — has opened in Golders Green, one of only two largely Jewish areas in London. The Shia Muslim religious center, Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham, owns the mosque.

The mosque is situated in the Hippodrome, a prominent building centrally located in North London. The Hippodrome was built in 1913 as a 3,000-seat music hall and for more than 30 years housed the BBC Concert Orchestra. Two episodes of the first series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were recorded there in 1969. After the BBC left the building in 2005, a Jewish group wanted to convert the building into a place of worship but was rejected, because the planning applications stipulated that the building should be used for entertainment. In March 2007, it was purchased by an evangelical Christian center. After the church center closed, the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham center acquired it.

Because the building is a so-called grade II building, special permission is needed to change the purpose of the building. The Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham has applied to the local city council for permission to use the building as a ‘place of worship’. The application is still pending– and worship there is therefore, strictly speaking, illegal — but the mosque is operating nevertheless. It apparently officially opened on September 8, and has been in frequent use since, as is evident from the many photos shared on the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham Facebook page.

A partial screenshot of a post from the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham Facebook page, advertising the opening of the new mega mosque.

“This is a great move for us and we are very pleased and excited to be in Golders Green in such a diverse area. We can’t wait to get to know our neighbours and plan to welcome them at an open day sometime in December… We will be reaching out to the local churches and synagogues so we can build strong ties with the community,” Ahmed Al-Kazemi, the spokesperson for the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham mosque told the Jewish chronicle in September. It appears unlikely that forging ties with neighbors will be a high priority, as one young member of the mosque explained in a recent fundraising video for the new mega mosque:

“Growing up in this country, same as any other Western country, it is very difficult for the youth to stay on the straight path… it is very easy to stray yourself away from the straight path because of the friends you make at school or at work or anywhere, which is not mixed with your own people. So the Hussainiyah [the Shia mosque] was there as a backbone to us… where if they saw any of us doing anything wrong there would always be a person to advise you and put you in the right path…”

A Freedom of Information request revealed that Sammy Woodhouse, a woman sexually abused as a child by a grooming gang, was told by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA), a government body, that she was not entitled to compensation because she “consented” to the sexual abuse. Woodhouse appealed the decision: “If an adult can privately think that it’s a child’s fault for being abused, beaten, raped, abducted, I think you’re in the wrong job.”

Online jihadist propaganda attracts more clicks in Britain than in any other European country and the main internet companies are failing to curb it, according to Policy Exchange, a think tank. The report, “The New Netwar,” said that the Islamic State is still producing, at a conservative estimate, about 100 items of new content each week, including execution videos and bomb-making instructions, reaching an audience of, at minimum, tens of thousands, including large numbers of users in the UK.

British universities hosted 110 events featuring extremist speakers in the last academic year, 2016/17, with the highest proportion taking place in London institutions. The extremist events listed were overwhelmingly organized by Islamic societies, and groups and speakers included former Guantanamo Bay detainees and Islamists. The findings suggest that despite Prime Minister Theresa May’s claim that “enough is enough,” British universities continue to be a target for extremists promoting their messages.

September 1. Britain is home to up to 35,000 “Islamist fanatics,” more than any other country in Europe, according to European Union’s counter-terrorism coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove.

September 1. Mike Adamson, Chief Executive of the British Red Cross, wrote: “There is a risk that…an organization with the words ‘British’ and ‘Cross’ in its title is confused with a Christian, establishment organization.” He added: “We are nowhere near as diverse as we need to be in our volunteer base, our staffing or our leadership… that is why, as CEO, I am personally leading our inclusion and diversity strategy.”

September 1. Mohiussunnath Chowdhury, 26, was charged with a terror offense after he attacked police outside Buckingham Palace with a sword and “ranted” that the “Queen and her soldiers will all be in hellfire.” The British-born suspect, who is of Bangladeshi heritage, was accused of one charge of preparing terrorist acts, which carries a maximum charge of a life sentence.

A central tenet of the Trump foreign policy, a work in progress, has been that the U.S. would rebuild its relationship with America’s allies. That commitment is being put to the test in northern Iraq.

On Monday Iraq’s army, assisted by Iranian forces, launched a major assault on the Kurds in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Across the length of America’s recent history with Iraq, we have had no more reliable ally than Iraq’s Kurds and their fighting force, the Peshmerga.

So far the Trump Administration has said little about the attack on the Kurds. “We’re not taking sides, but we don’t like the fact that they’re clashing,” President Trump told reporters at the White House Monday. “We’ve had, for many years, a very good relationship with the Kurds, as you know. And we’ve also been on the side of Iraq, even though we should have never been in there in the first place. But we’re not taking sides in that battle.”

But if the U.S. allows one of its most visible allies to be defeated in the Middle East, make no mistake: Other allies in the region will notice and start to recalculate their relationship with the Trump Administration.

The Iraqi Kurds, to be sure, have contributed to their current plight. Kurdish President Masoud Barzani went forward with a needless independence referendum last month, despite pressure from the U.S. not to hold the vote. The pro-forma vote gave the Baghdad government a pretext to play the nationalist card and retake Kirkuk.

Kirkuk is a multi-ethnic city that lies just south of Iraq’s Kurdistan, an autonomous region whose borders abut Iran and Turkey. The Kirkuk region is also rich in oil. The Kurds gained control of Kirkuk in 2014 after Iraq’s army famously fled under attack from Islamic State, which seized control of Mosul in June that year.

After the Iraqi forces abandoned the region, the Peshmerga became the primary reason that Islamic State was never able to consolidate its control of northern Iraq. Arguably, the Kurds, backed by U.S. air power, saved Iraq by giving Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi time to reconstitute his nation’s army into a fighting force capable of driving Islamic State out of Iraq’s major cities, with the help of the Peshmerga.

Possibly the phrase “no good deed goes unpunished” originated in the Middle East. Having taken back Mosul from Islamic State, Mr. Abadi now wants to drive the Kurds back into their northern Iraqi homeland. But the strategic details of this attack on the Kurds are important. Iraq’s offensive includes Iran. According to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, Iranian-backed militias and the 9th Iraqi Armored Division moved toward Kirkuk last week to support the Iraqi army.

The Abadi government in Baghdad is under constant pressure from Shiite Iran to align itself against the interest of Iraq’s Sunni populations in the north and west. It follows that after Iraq’s progress on the battlefield against Islamic State, Iran would encourage the Iraqis to drive the Kurds out of Kirkuk.

Notice this is all happening within days of President Trump decertifying the Iran nuclear deal, based in part on the assumption that Europe will support U.S. efforts to resist Iran’s ballistic-missile program and its penetrations across the Middle East. But what will the Europeans or our allies in the Middle East conclude if we abandon one of our oldest regional allies, the Iraqi Kurds?

The U.S. no doubt has lost much of the political leverage it had before the Obama Administration pulled out of Iraq in 2011. But abandoning the Kurds to an Iraq-Iran Shiite alliance would only deepen U.S. losses.

Before Iraq and the Kurds go to war, the U.S. could insist that Iraq reaffirm the autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan and also that it work out an agreement to share revenue from the region’s oil reserves. The alternative to such a modus vivendi for Prime Minister Abadi is a capable Kurdish fighting force in a state of permanent insurrection.

The U.S. owes a debt to the Kurds. Abandoning them now would damage America’s credibility, and not least Mr. Trump’s ability to enlist allies against Iran’s expansion across the Middle East. The assault on Kirkuk matters.

One day Europe will be able to hold an election without a freak-out over a feared return of the far right. That day isn’t here. So Austria’s election on Sunday, in which voters rejected a center-left governing cartel in favor of a resurgent center-right, has the Continent rushing for the smelling salts.

Sebastian Kurz of the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) placed first in the parliamentary vote, with early results pegging him at 32%. The 31-year-old has served as foreign minister in a coalition government led by the center-left Social Democrats. Mr. Kurz abandoned that centrist coalition and positioned his party further to the right, especially on immigration after the surge of Middle Eastern and African migrants into Europe.

His strategy worked, especially in pulling voters from the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), the outfit that really gives Europeans palpitations. Leader Heinz-Christian Strache has tried hard but not always credibly to shed the FPÖ’s reputation as a political haven for xenophobes and Nazi sympathizers. At the start of the year it polled at 35%, after its candidate for the ceremonial presidency won 47% last year. But on Sunday its share fell to about 20%

Mr. Kurz reversed the far-right’s march by co-opting some of its main policies. Those include tighter bars on asylum-seekers and intra-European Union migrants claiming social benefits, and a push to shut off the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean by returning most to refugee camps in North Africa. He added an economic platform of tax-rate cuts, especially on individual income to below 40% and a new focus on business-friendliness.

Some of our media friends present this as a resurgence of an ugly far-right party, and Mr. Kurz is likely to form a coalition with the FPÖ. But the FPÖ already has done a turn in a governing coalition, from 2000-2005, and it ended badly amid divisions about economic policy and leadership. The lesson was that voters care about results, and an electorate supporting a fringe party out of frustration won’t blithely follow that party into an abyss.

Sunday’s result confirms that conclusion, as voters came home to a centrist party that now aims to compete for votes rather than taking them for granted as part of an ideologically neutered left-right coalition. That should be good news for worried European politicians. Voters will give mainstream parties plenty of opportunity to reform themselves, but the parties have to listen to the voters.

Moscow’s sale of a better defense system to the Saudis than to its “ally” Iran is consistent with the pattern of its attempts to influence outcomes in the region.

Remarkably little comment attended the strangest outcome of Saudi King Salman’s four-day visit to Moscow in early October, namely Russia’s sale of its top-of-the-line S-400 air defense system to a country whose relations with Russia have been hostile until recently. It was strange because Iran, habitually characterized as Russia’s “ally” in Western media, was permitted to purchase a much older and inferior Russian system, the S-300.

Not only the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but also Russia’s Cold War adversary Turkey will buy the far more advanced S-400, a “game-changer,” as former Pentagon official Stephen Bryen described it in an October 13 analysis for Asia Times. The S-400 is highly effective against the sort of cruise and ballistic missiles that Iran will be able to field during the next several years.

Russia’s carefully-calibrated weapons sales to the opposing Persian Gulf powers follows a pattern established by China over the past decade. China sells missiles to Iran as well as to the KSA, but it sells more advanced missiles to the Saudis, because the Saudis are the weaker of the two adversaries, and China wants to maintain the balance of power. Russia has been called a “spoiler” in the Middle East so often that the term clings like a Homeric epithet. In recent weeks, Russian policy has shifted to classic balance-of-power politics.

“Peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power,” Henry Kissinger likes to say. Powers that cannot exercise hegemony, in other words, attempt to maintain a balance that contains the ambitions of prospective rivals. The classic example is Britain, which allied with Prussia against France through the Napoleonic Wars, and then allied with France against Germany at the turn of the last century. Britain could not aspire to be a hegemon on the European continent, so it sought to prevent either France or Germany from dominating. Russia does not have the wherewithal to replace the United States as a regional hegemon, but it does have considerable means to affect the balance of power.

On October 12, Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bodanov offered to mediate between Iran and the KSA, but talk is cheap. Installation of top-of-the-line weapons systems is not. The United States belatedly offered the Saudis its THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system, probably as a rushed response to the Russian offer. In Dr. Bryen’s analysis, the S-400 is simply a better system, and gives the Saudis an important edge in any prospective conflict with Iran.