Why Islamic State’s Jailbreak Matters

Located in the area of Syria held by U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, the al-Sinaa prison, as of last week, housed some 3,500 Islamic State (IS) fighters. But in what appears to be a well-coordinated operation, the jihadist group has managed to free an as-yet-unknown number of them. Kyle Orton writes:

In the evening of January 20, Islamic State carried out its largest attack in Syria since the remnants of its statelet were swept away at Baghuz in March 2019, and early the next morning there were follow-on attacks in Iraq. The attack in Syria . . . is important because it is an attack on a prison with the most, and the most battle-hardened, IS jihadists anywhere in the world, those who stayed right to the end. As best as can be told from the conflicted and confused reports, dozens of these men are now free. Prison-breaks were a crucial way that IS, [then known as al-Qaeda in Iraq], rebuilt itself after [its setbacks] of 2007-08 to the point that it could seize a territory larger than Britain and proclaim the caliphate restored in 2014.

For IS, attacks on prisons are “low cost, high reward” operations. Such attacks provide the group with powerful propaganda material, increasing the morale of their own forces by demonstrating that they “leave no man behind,” while discrediting and demoralizing the government that is attacked by exposing its weaknesses, not only to the population that the government rules over but the world beyond. In more strictly practical terms, prison breaks restore to IS its charismatic commanders and specialists like bomb-makers—people with the skills to make IS a more effective war machine—plus, of course, the foot-soldiers.

The immediate propaganda victory for IS is against the [the Syrian Kurdish government], which has been shown to be unable to prevent IS infiltrating one of its most well-defended areas, . . . and by extension the U.S., which subordinated everything in Syria to the anti-IS campaign, and is now clearly failing even at that. This has not come from nowhere; there have been warning signs in eastern Syria for months, if not years. A serious rethink about what the U.S. mission is in Syria is rather urgent.

The United Nations estimates that IS still has 10,000 active operatives spread between Iraq and Syria; that is probably an underestimate, but as is so often the case, the statistics do not really capture reality. Even if the numbers were correct, they would not reflect IS’s effective reach through its mechanisms of social and economic coercion over populations, which do not require people to be card-carrying members of the organization.

Read more at It Can Always Get Worse

More about: ISIS, Kurds, Syria, U.S. Foreign policy

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society