Tópico: Analisando o "Perigo Islâmico"

[Pasteur]

Fora a tentativa de desqualificar a produção por associação com alguém que fez upload dela no youtube, você tem alguma evidência de que a entrevista seja uma farsa?

O jornalista parece ter uma boa reputação:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itai_Anghel

"In 2010, Anghel received a Cutting Edge prize from the International Council for Press and Broadcasting at the sixth annual International Media Awards in London."

"The International Council for Press and Broadcasting is a subsidiary body of the Next Century Foundation, an organisation which deals primarily with conflict resolution issues and holds an annual International Media Awards in London. It also takes press delegations to the Middle East and South Asia as well as running an annual conferences on subjects such as Xenophobia and Disinformation."

O Social-Justice-Warriorton Post tem uma matéria comentando a "brecha legal" para perder o paraíso, mencionada na entrevista, citando a entrevista como fonte:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/em-and-lo/the-loophole-that-denies-fighters-their-72-virgins_b_6534356.html

... Itai Anghel, an Isreali Jewish news correspondent and filmmaker with the balls the size of pumpkins, recently wandered into Syria and Iraq with a camera, and not much else, (no helmet, no bullet proof vest) to capture the front lines of the Kurdish fight against ISIS. No Free Steps to Heaven is an eye-opening, stomach-turning, bone-chilling account of the horrors currently taking place in the Middle East in the name of terrorism. ...

Você não disse o que achou dos outros vídeos do canal. Tem alguns bem ridículos.

Esse jornalista pode ser sério, porém ser enganado pelo entrevistante.

[Pasteur]

Vai Trump, cumpre logo o que você prometeu e acaba de uma vez com o ISIS, forte fonte de propaganda contra muçulmanos.

Vai logo Trump, acaba com essa palhaçada!

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Eu não fui ver os outros vídeos do canal, simplesmente não me interessa, são coisas completamente independentes.

Então entramos novamente na conspiração de ou os próprios terroristas apenas fingirem ser muçulmanos, ou uma conspiração ainda maior onde MSM/PiG cria grupos terroristas muçulmanos fictícios. Talvez tudo ainda se encaixando com o atentado de 11 de setembro de 2001 ter sido um trabalho interno. Um false flag, como não podemos esquecer.

[Pasteur]

Um grupo "muçulmano" que mata mais muçulmanos...

Tá tá... 

[Pasteur]

Em todo caso, outra entrevista de teor bastante similar, já postada antes:

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/j8TLu514EgU" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/j8TLu514EgU</a>

Alguns comentários de internautas:

He's not a Muslim, he was just a jobless lazy prick with a chip on his shoulder. If it wasn't Isis, it would have been another gang.

Am laughing at this somaily fool that don't even know his religions what u guys don't know people like him and alll his type are starting "fatwas" meaning marking up story's and there own believes were in the quran it says Oh if u die when fighting for isis u go to heaven. Them people don't know who Allah is nor they know islam, there a disgrace to all muslims out there

Do you really fucking think that Muslims want to attack you? Fuck no. ISIS are radicals who dont obey the quran and are doing the opposite of what quran says, quran prohibits killing innocents eg. Even Christians are more Muslim in moral and principles compared to Isis.

You know what I really like? His ignorance when they say they are going to heaven, that God wants them to fight. When they say that all non-muslims are Kafirs. When he says he read the Quran. The Quran never says that all non-muslims are Kafirs. And It never said that we should kill Kafirs. The Quran says to focus on ourselves and our relationship with God and calmly TRY to show Kafirs what they are doing wrong. That God does not like violence. For example, when Prophet Muhammed finally got hold of the Jews that have been tormenting and torturing the Muslims day and night, what did he do? He forgave them and set them free. And really, this ignorant guy wants to go to Heaven. Now how does this affect innocent Muslims. Well, first of all, it gives a really bad impression about the rest of us to the foriegn world. Now, an innocent Muslim gets accepted to a good college in foreign land, she might settle for a worse college just to avoid harassment because of her Hijab. ISIS is not only affecting themslves, but the whole of the Muslims worldwide, and this is the greatest sin



[Pasteur]

Eu não fui ver os outros vídeos do canal, simplesmente não me interessa, são coisas completamente independentes.

Decepcionante...

Então entramos novamente na conspiração de ou os próprios terroristas apenas fingirem ser muçulmanos, ou uma conspiração ainda maior onde MSM/PiG cria grupos terroristas muçulmanos fictícios. Talvez tudo ainda se encaixando com o atentado de 11 de setembro de 2001 ter sido um trabalho interno. Um false flag, como não podemos esquecer.

Óbvio que Israel não fez nada disso, nunca disse, mas que ele está gostando, ah está sim!

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Um grupo "muçulmano" que mata mais muçulmanos...

Tá tá... 

É, sim. Para eles os muçulmanos mortos são infiéis ou pecadores.

Matar muçulmanos faz parte do islã, como por coisas como uso de drogas. É parte da xaria no Estado Islâmico, mas, estarrecedoramente, é também algo citado como se não fosse nada demais naquele site mais "mainstream" que eu citei, que corroborava a xaria talebã cuja islamicidade você questionava. Incidentalmente, um site pŕo islã moderado afirma que aquele outro site é catarense, de alguém ligado ao governo. (Aquele site é denunciado só como radical)

Esse documentário mostra um pouco disso, é simplesmente deprimente. Não só por haver tal insanidade bárbara em pleno século XXI, como por essa versão mais virulenta não ser tão distante do vírus mais comum,  mais inócuo. Assistindo isso, parece são muitos próximas as chances dessa variante ter tanto de ter efeito de vacina, como de propiciar a receptividade à versão destrutiva.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/AUjHb4C7b94" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/AUjHb4C7b94</a>

Deprimente.

[DDV]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

[Pasteur]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

[DDV]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

Essa visão delirante é decorrente de...?

[Gauss]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

Essa visão delirante é decorrente de...?

Secularismo, claro.

[Pasteur]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

Essa visão delirante é decorrente de...?

Secularismo, claro.

Why not?

[Gauss]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

Essa visão delirante é decorrente de...?

Secularismo, claro.

Why not?

Argumente.

[Pasteur]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

Essa visão delirante é decorrente de...?

Secularismo, claro.

Why not?

Argumente.

Um invasor americano em sua terra natal e não um invasor cristão. Por isso praticou terrorismo contra os EUA. Queria forçá-lo a sair de seu país. Se fosse a Turquia com bases militares na Arabia daria na mesma, teria atacado os "falsos muçulmanos".

[Muad'Dib]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

Essa visão delirante é decorrente de...?

Secularismo, claro.

Why not?

Argumente.

Um invasor americano em sua terra natal e não um invasor cristão. Por isso praticou terrorismo contra os EUA. Queria forçá-lo a sair de seu país. Se fosse a Turquia com bases militares na Arabia daria na mesma, teria atacado os "falsos muçulmanos".

Se fosse a URSS na Arábia Saudita provavelmente a Al qEDA iria estar combatendo os comunistas infiéis. E o ocidente os iria ver como freedom fighters.

[Gauss]

Um invasor americano em sua terra natal e não um invasor cristão. Por isso praticou terrorismo contra os EUA. Queria forçá-lo a sair de seu país. Se fosse a Turquia com bases militares na Arabia daria na mesma, teria atacado os "falsos muçulmanos".

Também penso que foi isso. Mas é inegável que esse terrorista usava o Corão, a Sunna e outros livros sagrados para justificar suas ações*.


*E é curioso que sejam justamente grupos que usam a religião como pretexto para suas ações, como a al-Qaeda, que surjam para combater o "imperialismo americano", e não grupos terroristas marxistas como a OLP foi no passado. Acho que faria mais sentido se fossem terroristas de esquerda do que religiosos(não que marxistas não sejam um grupo religioso).

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Alguns comentários de internautas:

Não sei se é o caso desse vídeo em si, mas também se encontra comentários pró-ISIS além de pró radicalismo islâmico em geral. Sempre algo meio lei de Poe, mas no caso de islamismo são sempre altas as chances de ser algo real e não paródia/trolagem-bogus, próximas de 50%, se não maiores.

[DDV]

Vai Trump, cumpre logo o que você prometeu e acaba de uma vez com o ISIS, forte fonte de propaganda contra muçulmanos.

Vai logo Trump, acaba com essa palhaçada!

Quem tem que acabar com o EI são os muçulmanos, se estão realmente incomodados.

Dinheiro e exércitos eles tem.

[DDV]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

Essa visão delirante é decorrente de...?

Secularismo, claro.

Why not?

Argumente.

Um invasor americano em sua terra natal e não um invasor cristão. Por isso praticou terrorismo contra os EUA. Queria forçá-lo a sair de seu país. Se fosse a Turquia com bases militares na Arabia daria na mesma, teria atacado os "falsos muçulmanos".

Então você considera os americanos 'invasores' da Arábia Saudita, igual Bin Laden?

Sendo rigoroso com os fatos, Bin Laden não considerava os americanos invasores (no sentido de invadirem o local contra a vontade do estado saudita), mas tão somente como "profanadores" do solo sagrado. É uma visão 100% religiosa da coisa.

[Pasteur]

Bin Laden queria os americanos fora de sua terra natal, a Arábia Saudita.

Está afirmando que os EUA ocupavam a Arábia Saudita?

Na visão do Bin Laden, sim.

Essa visão delirante é decorrente de...?

Secularismo, claro.

Why not?

Argumente.

Um invasor americano em sua terra natal e não um invasor cristão. Por isso praticou terrorismo contra os EUA. Queria forçá-lo a sair de seu país. Se fosse a Turquia com bases militares na Arabia daria na mesma, teria atacado os "falsos muçulmanos".

Então você considera os americanos 'invasores' da Arábia Saudita, igual Bin Laden?

Não, invasor na visão dele.

Sendo rigoroso com os fatos, Bin Laden não considerava os americanos invasores (no sentido de invadirem o local contra a vontade do estado saudita), mas tão somente como "profanadores" do solo sagrado. É uma visão 100% religiosa da coisa.

Bem que parece, mas não é:

Here’s What a Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ Motives

More than anything, the terrorist group’s outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory.

Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there’s a gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and what many experts believe to be true.


 
Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.

He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist nationalist group in Sri Lanka.

According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly:


What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

ISIS emerged from the insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq just as the Al Qaeda network traces its origins to the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

This view differs from that of Hillary Clinton and others who believe that ISIS “has nothing whatsoever to do” with Islam, as well as the more common belief, articulated by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, that ISIS can be reduced to “a religious group with carefully considered beliefs.” It’s a group whose outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory. Virtually all of the group’s leaders were once high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.

Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate,” she recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”

But how does the notion that terrorists are intent on getting powers to withdraw from their territory square with the view that the group’s shift to terrorist attacks in the West is designed to draw France and its allies into a ground war in Syria? Writing at the Harvard Business Review, Northeastern University political scientist Max Abrahms argues that these analyses are contradictory. But Pape says that it’s important to distinguish between ISIS’s long-term goals and its shorter-term strategies to achieve them:


It’s about the timing. How are you going to get the United States, France and other major powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf when they have such a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to do it. Bin Laden did 9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground army into Afghanistan, which would help recruit a large number of suicide attackers to punish America for intervening. We didn’t do that – we used very limited military force in Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on was that we would send a large ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out. And that turned out to be the most potent recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so than Bin Laden had ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.

So if your goal is to create military costs on these states and get them to withdraw, you’ve got to figure out a way to really up the ante. And the way that you really up the ante is to get them to overreact. You try to get them to send a large ground army in so that you can truly drive up the costs. That’s what ISIS is trying to sucker us into doing.

Another theory holds that ISIS—and Al Qaeda—set their sights on France in order to polarize mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “The problem for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam.” In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic fundamentalists “can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”

Pape says this analysis is also consistent with his research:


If ISIS is going to end the military intervention by France, one attack is not likely to do it. In the statement that ISIS released, they say that they want a storm of similar attacks against Paris and other French targets because their goal is to knock France out of the military coalition. To do that, to achieve that goal, they’re going to need to recruit many more attackers to do suicide attacks like the ones that occurred in Paris. In the short-term it makes perfect sense to want an environment that stirs up hostility towards Muslims in France, because that will make them much easier to recruit for their longer-term object of kicking France of the coalition.

Pape also argues that ISIS’ shift in strategy to attacks overseas is a sign not of its strength, but of its weakness on the ground in Syria and Iraq. He points out that over the past year, the amount of territory ISIS controls has shrunk by 10 percent:


The U.S. strategy against ISIS is working and it’s putting enormous pressure on ISIS. It’s a strategy of air and ground power, with the ground power coming from local allies—the Kurds and the Shia in the region, and even some Sunnis who are opposed to ISIS. They’re increasingly working with us on the ground while we’re fighting from the air. The problem here is not that we don’t have enough ground forces.

It’s because the strategy is working that ISIS is now desperate, and is shifting its pattern of behavior. In October, ISIS launched only eight suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria, when they normally do 30 to 35 per month, and that’s the same month that they shifted to suicide attacks in Ankara, Turkey, on October 10. Then they downed the Russian plane on October 31st, and now the Paris attacks on November 13th. As ISIS’ territory has shrunk in Iraq and Syria, it is now clearly shifting its suicide attack resources out of Iraq and Syria, and into Turkey, into killing Russian civilians, and now also into Paris.

In Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want to achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of the West’s response to terrorism.

https://www.thenation.com/article/heres-what-a-man-who-studied-every-suicide-attack-in-the-world-says-about-isiss-motives/

[Pasteur]

Vai Trump, cumpre logo o que você prometeu e acaba de uma vez com o ISIS, forte fonte de propaganda contra muçulmanos.

Vai logo Trump, acaba com essa palhaçada!

Quem tem que acabar com o EI são os muçulmanos, se estão realmente incomodados.

Dinheiro e exércitos eles tem.

Quem tem que acabar com o EI é quem derrubou Sadam Hussein e deixou um governo manco no lugar.

A Arábia, Jordânia, Emirados, etc não tem nada a ver com isso.

[Buckaroo Banzai]

As imagens e entrevistas dos territórios dominados pelo Estado Islâmico minam seriamente a credibilidade desse texto. Pasteur, você viu o documentário do canal Vice?

[Pasteur]

As imagens e entrevistas dos territórios dominados pelo Estado Islâmico minam seriamente a credibilidade desse texto. Pasteur, você viu o documentário do canal Vice?

Vi 15 minutos e deu um ódio de ver aqueles terroristas ensinando porcaria para a criançada. Depois vou ver o resto.

Mas isto tem a ver com o assunto:

What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters

They’re drawn to the movement for reasons that have little to do with belief in extremist Islam.

No sooner am I settled in an interviewing room in the police station of Kirkuk, Iraq, than the first prisoner I am there to see is brought in, flanked by two policemen and in handcuffs. I awkwardly rise, unsure of the etiquette involved in interviewing an ISIS fighter who is facing the death penalty. He is small, much smaller than I, on first appearances just a boy in trouble with the police, his eyes fixed on the floor, his face a mask. We all sit on armchairs lined up against facing walls, in a room cloudy with cigarette smoke and lit by fluorescent strip lighting, a room so small that my knees almost touch the prisoner’s—but he still doesn’t look up. I have interviewed plenty of soldiers on the other side of this fight, mostly from the Kurdish forces (known as pesh merga) but also fighters in the Iraqi army (known as the Iraqi Security Forces or ISF), both Arab and Kurdish. ISIS fighters, of course, are far more elusive, unless you are traveling to the Islamic State itself, but I prefer to keep my head on my shoulders.

Another source told us of the futility of holding prisoners for their bargaining power: “With ISIS, there’s no compromise, no negotiation…they’re not interested in prisoner exchange because they believe that they’re better off dead.” Whatever the truth of the behavior of the military and security services, the fact remains: ISIS prisoners are hard to find.

One evening we watch a documentary on BBC Arabic profiling Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir, the head of police in the Iraqi governorate of Kirkuk. He is shown policing the town of Kirkuk, personally patrolling the streets and houses, arresting people suspected of fighting for ISIS. Kirkuk, then, seems like a good place to start: At least there are prisoners there, shown by the BBC, no less.

And so my colleagues and I drive to Kirkuk from the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, Erbil, to meet Qadir. Despite the workload of maintaining security in this uneasy city of mixed ethnicity (mostly Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen), rife with ISIS sleeper cells, he is welcoming, sending armed guards to bring us in from the highway to the city. We are served tea in his office, and he sits with us for half an hour before we are taken to the interview room with two colonels. (The week after I left the country he and other officers would be caught in a huge car bomb; Qadir was wounded for the fourteenth time in the service of Kurdistan.)

Once the first prisoner is there, and with no possibility of small talk, we launch straight into the research questions I am there to ask, the same questions asked of fighters and non-fighters all over the country, questions I’ve asked in Lebanon too, and which have been replicated in other parts of the world by my colleagues at Artis International, a consortium for the scientific study in the service of conflict resolution. The research is based on cognitive and moral psychology, exploring when and why humans commit the most extreme sacrifices—including their lives and the lives of their families—for abstract causes, for so-called “sacred values.” Our research tries to determine why people will change their minds about these sacred values, and whether and how they will change their behavior in defending them. We hope to find out how to persuade people to abandon violent pathways, though I am fast losing faith in that possibility in this part of the world.

For this trip I am accompanied by senior colleagues; by Scott Atran, an academic based in France; and by Doug Stone, a retired American general who spent over two years in Iraq during the US occupation, interviewing prisoners on a daily basis. This, of course, changes the interview experience fundamentally, crowding the room and giving the event more importance, more formality, but also bringing entirely different questions, emphases, and expertise to bear and so drawing out many different angles on the interviewees. In any case, informality is never going to be achieved with prisoners on death row.

First are questions probing perceptions of the strength of various groups—some of which the interviewee might have sympathy with (although he might not express this). Other groups he would quite clearly consider to be the Other, the Enemy. I bring out a flashcard with pictures of half-naked men on it, ranging from the fairly puny to the biggest bodybuilder—each head replaced by a flag of the Islamic State. Whatever this youngster was expecting, whatever he’s been asked before—this was neither. He looks up, startled, at my colleague Hoshang Waziri—his first human reaction—who begins to explain.

“This is the Islamic State—look, this is the flag here,” Hoshang says, pointing at the bodybuilder and flexing his biceps. “This picture shows the Islamic State as the strongest it could be. Here, they are very, very weak; and here are all the things in the middle. How strong do you think they are?” The boy timidly points at the weakest—to be expected, as he doesn’t want to seem to be a fan—and we move to a similar picture, but with the Kurdish flag rather than the Islamic State flag superimposed on the bodies. “Now the peshmerga: How strong are they?”

The prisoner got the hang of the question, and points to the second-strongest picture. In other pictures, he decides that the Iraqi army is in the middle, Iran a little weaker than that, and America the strongest. (He hasn’t heard of the PKK, despite their repeated victories over ISIS.) We ask him to rank all the forces, using the cards, and then I realize that he is still handcuffed and I ask for them to be taken off. In the ensuing hiatus, with policemen fetching keys and walking to and fro, I try to chat more informally, and finally he looks at me, answering questions in one-word answers as to his age, background, education, family. Slowly, with snippets emerging from the rest of the interview, I piece together a picture that is to be repeated, with only minor differences, with other prisoners we talk to that day, stories familiar to General Stone from during the allied occupation, and to journalists and researchers I’ve spoken to since.

This man is 26, the eldest of 17 children from two mothers (that is, his father had two wives at the same time), from Kirkuk. He completed sixth grade, meaning that at least he was literate, unlike others we were to interview. He is married, with two children, a boy named “Rasuul,” meaning Prophet, and a girl named “Rusil,” the plural of Prophet—indicating the centrality of Islam to his life. He was working as a laborer to support his huge family when he hurt his back and lost his job. It was then, his story goes, that a friend, from the same tribe but only distantly related, approached him with the offer to work for ISIS. The story has been honed through repeated interrogation and the trial, and comes out pat. Life under the Islamic State was just terror, he says; he only fought because he was terrorized. Others may have done it from belief, but he did not. His family needed the money, and this was the only opportunity to provide for them.

Later in the interview we find out just how committed he is to his family, first with flashcards that we use to test the degree of fusion of the individual with various groups. We ask about Iraq, Islam, family, friends, and the Islamic State. The choices are again made pictorially: We use a set of two increasingly overlapping circles (at one end of the spectrum the circles are not even touching, at the other they are fully overlapping, with four circles of varying degrees of overlap in between), and again, they are unexpected and confusing to the prisoner—there is not an obvious “right” answer for most of them. The man is drawn out of his shell in spite of himself, losing his self-consciousness in his concentration and his questions to Hoshang. Eventually he decides that he is almost, but not entirely, fused with Iraq and with Islam, completely separate from the Islamic State (again, to be expected), barely connected to friends (“I have no friends”), and fully fused with his family. In fact, his family is the only group he was fully fused with, a decision that took no time at all. During more informal questioning about his family and tribe comes this telling statement: “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war…. all I want is to be with my family, my children.”

When he has been taken away we have the chance to find out just what he was found guilty of, how they found him, and what the evidence was. He was a master of the car bomb, detonating at least four of them in Kirkuk itself and also one scooter bomb, which exploded in a crowded souq selling weapons, killing many scores of people and also weakening the ability of local residents to fight ISIS. He was found through the capture of one of the financers of the sleeper cells in Kirkuk, who had on him a list of pseudonyms along with phone numbers and amounts of money. The police had this man call each person on the list, a cell of six, and set up meetings, where the police captured them—all of them swept up in one day. When the ISIS bomber saw that they were there “he collapsed; he gave us 5 pages of confession.” He stuck to his confession in court, where he was tried under Article 40, the Iraqi law on terrorism, which carries the death penalty.

Why did he do all these things? Many assume that these fighters are motivated by a belief in the Islamic State, a caliphate ruled by a caliph with the traditional title Emir al-Muminiin, “Commander of the faithful,” a role currently held by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; that fighters all over the world are flocking to the area for a chance to fight for this dream. But this just doesn’t hold for the prisoners we are interviewing. They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate. But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.


In fact, Erin Saltman, senior counter-extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, says that there is now less emphasis on knowledge of Islam in the recruitment phase. “We are seeing a movement away from strict religious ideological training as a requirement for recruitment,” she told me. “If we were looking at foreign fighter recruits to Afghanistan 10 or 20 years ago, there was intensive religious and theological training attached to recruitment. Nowadays, we see that recruitment strategy has branched out to a much broader audience with many different pull factors.”

There is no question that these prisoners I am interviewing are committed to Islam; it is just their own brand of Islam, only distantly related to that of the Islamic State. Similarly, Western fighters traveling to the Islamic State are also deeply committed, but it’s to their own idea of jihad rather than one based on sound theological arguments or even evidence from the Qur’an. As Saltman said, “Recruitment [of ISIS] plays upon desires of adventure, activism, romance, power, belonging, along with spiritual fulfillment.” That is, Islam plays a part, but not necessarily in the rigid, Salafi form demanded by the leadership of the Islamic State.

More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

An illustration of the less-than-total commitment to the cause of the Islamic State by Iraqis came from the Kurdish peshmerga Gen. Aziz Waysi, commander of the elite Zerevani (“Golden”) forces. He relates an overheard conversation between an ISIS fighter on the battleground and his leader, via a walkie-talkie previously confiscated from an ISIS corpse. “My brother is with me, but he is dead, and we are surrounded, we need help at least to take away my brother’s body,” General Waysi heard, and then the reply: “What else could you want? Your brother is in heaven and you are about to be.” This answer wasn’t what the poor surrounded young man was hoping for. “Please come and rescue me,” he said. “That heaven, I don’t want it.” But they didn’t, leaving him to whatever paradise awaited.

Rumors abound as to summary executions of ISIS prisoners without due process, but of course no one will go on the record to report such abuses of human rights. Anecdotally, we were told about a prisoner who was interrogated for 30 days but only said “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) for the entire month. “Wouldn’t you shoot him?” they asked. One peshmerga gave an eyewitness report about five prisoners captured, questioned, and shot in the head. We spoke to various military leaders who said they didn’t want to take prisoners, since injured bodies are often booby-trapped and kill approaching soldiers; for this reason the PKK has a take-no-prisoners policy. (The PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, is the Kurdish separatist group based in Turkey and northern Iraq that is on the international terrorism list; in proving themselves indispensable in the fight against ISIS, they have caused a dilemma for Western governments. They are seemingly not so indispensable that those governments have felt compelled to oppose Turkey’s recent bombing campaign against them.)

https://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/

[Shadow]

As imagens e entrevistas dos territórios dominados pelo Estado Islâmico minam seriamente a credibilidade desse texto. Pasteur, você viu o documentário do canal Vice?

Vi 15 minutos e deu um ódio de ver aqueles terroristas ensinando porcaria para a criançada. Depois vou ver o resto.

Mas isto tem a ver com o assunto:

What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters

They’re drawn to the movement for reasons that have little to do with belief in extremist Islam.

No sooner am I settled in an interviewing room in the police station of Kirkuk, Iraq, than the first prisoner I am there to see is brought in, flanked by two policemen and in handcuffs. I awkwardly rise, unsure of the etiquette involved in interviewing an ISIS fighter who is facing the death penalty. He is small, much smaller than I, on first appearances just a boy in trouble with the police, his eyes fixed on the floor, his face a mask. We all sit on armchairs lined up against facing walls, in a room cloudy with cigarette smoke and lit by fluorescent strip lighting, a room so small that my knees almost touch the prisoner’s—but he still doesn’t look up. I have interviewed plenty of soldiers on the other side of this fight, mostly from the Kurdish forces (known as pesh merga) but also fighters in the Iraqi army (known as the Iraqi Security Forces or ISF), both Arab and Kurdish. ISIS fighters, of course, are far more elusive, unless you are traveling to the Islamic State itself, but I prefer to keep my head on my shoulders.

Another source told us of the futility of holding prisoners for their bargaining power: “With ISIS, there’s no compromise, no negotiation…they’re not interested in prisoner exchange because they believe that they’re better off dead.” Whatever the truth of the behavior of the military and security services, the fact remains: ISIS prisoners are hard to find.

One evening we watch a documentary on BBC Arabic profiling Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadir, the head of police in the Iraqi governorate of Kirkuk. He is shown policing the town of Kirkuk, personally patrolling the streets and houses, arresting people suspected of fighting for ISIS. Kirkuk, then, seems like a good place to start: At least there are prisoners there, shown by the BBC, no less.

And so my colleagues and I drive to Kirkuk from the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, Erbil, to meet Qadir. Despite the workload of maintaining security in this uneasy city of mixed ethnicity (mostly Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen), rife with ISIS sleeper cells, he is welcoming, sending armed guards to bring us in from the highway to the city. We are served tea in his office, and he sits with us for half an hour before we are taken to the interview room with two colonels. (The week after I left the country he and other officers would be caught in a huge car bomb; Qadir was wounded for the fourteenth time in the service of Kurdistan.)

Once the first prisoner is there, and with no possibility of small talk, we launch straight into the research questions I am there to ask, the same questions asked of fighters and non-fighters all over the country, questions I’ve asked in Lebanon too, and which have been replicated in other parts of the world by my colleagues at Artis International, a consortium for the scientific study in the service of conflict resolution. The research is based on cognitive and moral psychology, exploring when and why humans commit the most extreme sacrifices—including their lives and the lives of their families—for abstract causes, for so-called “sacred values.” Our research tries to determine why people will change their minds about these sacred values, and whether and how they will change their behavior in defending them. We hope to find out how to persuade people to abandon violent pathways, though I am fast losing faith in that possibility in this part of the world.

For this trip I am accompanied by senior colleagues; by Scott Atran, an academic based in France; and by Doug Stone, a retired American general who spent over two years in Iraq during the US occupation, interviewing prisoners on a daily basis. This, of course, changes the interview experience fundamentally, crowding the room and giving the event more importance, more formality, but also bringing entirely different questions, emphases, and expertise to bear and so drawing out many different angles on the interviewees. In any case, informality is never going to be achieved with prisoners on death row.

First are questions probing perceptions of the strength of various groups—some of which the interviewee might have sympathy with (although he might not express this). Other groups he would quite clearly consider to be the Other, the Enemy. I bring out a flashcard with pictures of half-naked men on it, ranging from the fairly puny to the biggest bodybuilder—each head replaced by a flag of the Islamic State. Whatever this youngster was expecting, whatever he’s been asked before—this was neither. He looks up, startled, at my colleague Hoshang Waziri—his first human reaction—who begins to explain.

“This is the Islamic State—look, this is the flag here,” Hoshang says, pointing at the bodybuilder and flexing his biceps. “This picture shows the Islamic State as the strongest it could be. Here, they are very, very weak; and here are all the things in the middle. How strong do you think they are?” The boy timidly points at the weakest—to be expected, as he doesn’t want to seem to be a fan—and we move to a similar picture, but with the Kurdish flag rather than the Islamic State flag superimposed on the bodies. “Now the peshmerga: How strong are they?”

The prisoner got the hang of the question, and points to the second-strongest picture. In other pictures, he decides that the Iraqi army is in the middle, Iran a little weaker than that, and America the strongest. (He hasn’t heard of the PKK, despite their repeated victories over ISIS.) We ask him to rank all the forces, using the cards, and then I realize that he is still handcuffed and I ask for them to be taken off. In the ensuing hiatus, with policemen fetching keys and walking to and fro, I try to chat more informally, and finally he looks at me, answering questions in one-word answers as to his age, background, education, family. Slowly, with snippets emerging from the rest of the interview, I piece together a picture that is to be repeated, with only minor differences, with other prisoners we talk to that day, stories familiar to General Stone from during the allied occupation, and to journalists and researchers I’ve spoken to since.

This man is 26, the eldest of 17 children from two mothers (that is, his father had two wives at the same time), from Kirkuk. He completed sixth grade, meaning that at least he was literate, unlike others we were to interview. He is married, with two children, a boy named “Rasuul,” meaning Prophet, and a girl named “Rusil,” the plural of Prophet—indicating the centrality of Islam to his life. He was working as a laborer to support his huge family when he hurt his back and lost his job. It was then, his story goes, that a friend, from the same tribe but only distantly related, approached him with the offer to work for ISIS. The story has been honed through repeated interrogation and the trial, and comes out pat. Life under the Islamic State was just terror, he says; he only fought because he was terrorized. Others may have done it from belief, but he did not. His family needed the money, and this was the only opportunity to provide for them.

Later in the interview we find out just how committed he is to his family, first with flashcards that we use to test the degree of fusion of the individual with various groups. We ask about Iraq, Islam, family, friends, and the Islamic State. The choices are again made pictorially: We use a set of two increasingly overlapping circles (at one end of the spectrum the circles are not even touching, at the other they are fully overlapping, with four circles of varying degrees of overlap in between), and again, they are unexpected and confusing to the prisoner—there is not an obvious “right” answer for most of them. The man is drawn out of his shell in spite of himself, losing his self-consciousness in his concentration and his questions to Hoshang. Eventually he decides that he is almost, but not entirely, fused with Iraq and with Islam, completely separate from the Islamic State (again, to be expected), barely connected to friends (“I have no friends”), and fully fused with his family. In fact, his family is the only group he was fully fused with, a decision that took no time at all. During more informal questioning about his family and tribe comes this telling statement: “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war…. all I want is to be with my family, my children.”

When he has been taken away we have the chance to find out just what he was found guilty of, how they found him, and what the evidence was. He was a master of the car bomb, detonating at least four of them in Kirkuk itself and also one scooter bomb, which exploded in a crowded souq selling weapons, killing many scores of people and also weakening the ability of local residents to fight ISIS. He was found through the capture of one of the financers of the sleeper cells in Kirkuk, who had on him a list of pseudonyms along with phone numbers and amounts of money. The police had this man call each person on the list, a cell of six, and set up meetings, where the police captured them—all of them swept up in one day. When the ISIS bomber saw that they were there “he collapsed; he gave us 5 pages of confession.” He stuck to his confession in court, where he was tried under Article 40, the Iraqi law on terrorism, which carries the death penalty.

Why did he do all these things? Many assume that these fighters are motivated by a belief in the Islamic State, a caliphate ruled by a caliph with the traditional title Emir al-Muminiin, “Commander of the faithful,” a role currently held by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; that fighters all over the world are flocking to the area for a chance to fight for this dream. But this just doesn’t hold for the prisoners we are interviewing. They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate. But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.


In fact, Erin Saltman, senior counter-extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, says that there is now less emphasis on knowledge of Islam in the recruitment phase. “We are seeing a movement away from strict religious ideological training as a requirement for recruitment,” she told me. “If we were looking at foreign fighter recruits to Afghanistan 10 or 20 years ago, there was intensive religious and theological training attached to recruitment. Nowadays, we see that recruitment strategy has branched out to a much broader audience with many different pull factors.”

There is no question that these prisoners I am interviewing are committed to Islam; it is just their own brand of Islam, only distantly related to that of the Islamic State. Similarly, Western fighters traveling to the Islamic State are also deeply committed, but it’s to their own idea of jihad rather than one based on sound theological arguments or even evidence from the Qur’an. As Saltman said, “Recruitment [of ISIS] plays upon desires of adventure, activism, romance, power, belonging, along with spiritual fulfillment.” That is, Islam plays a part, but not necessarily in the rigid, Salafi form demanded by the leadership of the Islamic State.

More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

An illustration of the less-than-total commitment to the cause of the Islamic State by Iraqis came from the Kurdish peshmerga Gen. Aziz Waysi, commander of the elite Zerevani (“Golden”) forces. He relates an overheard conversation between an ISIS fighter on the battleground and his leader, via a walkie-talkie previously confiscated from an ISIS corpse. “My brother is with me, but he is dead, and we are surrounded, we need help at least to take away my brother’s body,” General Waysi heard, and then the reply: “What else could you want? Your brother is in heaven and you are about to be.” This answer wasn’t what the poor surrounded young man was hoping for. “Please come and rescue me,” he said. “That heaven, I don’t want it.” But they didn’t, leaving him to whatever paradise awaited.

Rumors abound as to summary executions of ISIS prisoners without due process, but of course no one will go on the record to report such abuses of human rights. Anecdotally, we were told about a prisoner who was interrogated for 30 days but only said “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) for the entire month. “Wouldn’t you shoot him?” they asked. One peshmerga gave an eyewitness report about five prisoners captured, questioned, and shot in the head. We spoke to various military leaders who said they didn’t want to take prisoners, since injured bodies are often booby-trapped and kill approaching soldiers; for this reason the PKK has a take-no-prisoners policy. (The PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, is the Kurdish separatist group based in Turkey and northern Iraq that is on the international terrorism list; in proving themselves indispensable in the fight against ISIS, they have caused a dilemma for Western governments. They are seemingly not so indispensable that those governments have felt compelled to oppose Turkey’s recent bombing campaign against them.)

https://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/

http://www.bonde.com.br/diversao/livros/livros-de-paulo-coelho-sao-confiscados-na-libia-432605.html

Tá certo que não chega a ser má ideia queimar os livros do Pau No Coelho, mas quando vamos começar a queimar os do Gibran Khalil Gibran?

[Gauss]

Sorte dos líbios.