Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

[The present is a consequence of an ongoing past. In order to understand the coming alliances and conflicts, cooptation and containment, grassroots struggles and top-down repression, the old and new market forces and those who pull the strings regionally and internationally, the cultural scene and the new cultural production, the role and position of women in the ‘new Syria’, the adaption and concessions or intransigence and authoritarianism of this or that political group, one needs to map out Syria what has happened.  Who will ‘the Islamist-led regime’ work with, who will provide the capital and the conditions? What condition state like the US and Turkey set? Will the old institutions – or what was left of them – be transformed or reformed? Those who marched from Idlib to Damascus do not have the experience of running big cities like Aleppo or a big and diverse capital like Damascus. Even if the leaders tolerated the cultural and artistic traditions of the past decades, would the...

“A corporation pays an affordable sum in damages. The court issues a stern scolding. Onward to business as usual.” “Criminal prosecutions usually target executives, rather than the companies they run – and even then, accountability is rare. ‘I can only think of three businessmen who’ve been convicted over the last 20 years, for complicity in war crimes or crimes against humanity – and none before that,’  says Mark Taylor, the author of a book titled War Economies and International Law . ‘And I can’t think of a single company that has ever been convicted on either of these charges’.”

I wonder why the comparison of the civilian deaths is focused on the civilian deaths during the US-led campaign against ISIS. Is the implication ‘the collateral damage is worth it’? ISIS attacked civilians in ‘democracies’. Hamas attacked ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Both organisations are ‘terrorists’, according to the ‘free world’. Israel’s war on Palestinians in numbers

Similar to the previous propaganda and disinformation by Western propagandists such the one about ‘Islam’, ‘reforming Islam’, etc., Western propagandists have continued to wage another battle of disinformation – the one against the Palestinian resistance. “ Here are the top 10 propaganda points western media were pushing on behalf of their favourite settler-colony”

James Baldwin   once noted : “Whatever you see in other people is what you see in the mirror … everybody knows, or every writer knows … no matter what I may be describing, I am describing myself.” Israel’s routine depiction of Hamas as barbaric, sadistic torturers brings the searing truth of Baldwin’s words sharply into focus. “Worse than ISIS”

The Apocalypse and the End of History and An interview with the author

I would use the word "Russian imperialism" cautiously, though. The rest stands accurate in my view. Richard Seymour in 2015: An unabashed mobilisation of ancient colonial binaries, with Russian imperialism cast as the guardian of secular, modern, liberal civilization against a barbarian ISIS. Its author has stated the upshot of this perspective quite explicitly : "kill them all". Or, to put it another way, exterminate the brutes. One is reminded of peak Hitchens, and of the traditions of imperialist apologia that he more or less deliberately evoked. And one is impressed by how deep this goes in parts of the left. Of course, Russian imperialism is not defending secular liberalism; that's not how imperialism works. And its targets are demonstrably much broader than ISIS. Of course, the Assad dictatorship is much more steeped in blood than ISIS at this point. The colonial unconscious, even if it has no history, should be placed in historical context. In the afterma...

No accountability

Beginning in 2014 and 2015 respectively,  US and Russian interventions would in time lead to some 75,000 air strikes against Iraq and Syria. However much the coalition’s actions against ISIS (Daesh) and Russia’s support for Assad differ in intent and context, both have been disastrous for people on the ground; the bombing campaigns alone have killed between 20,000 and 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi civilians. The alliance’s figure of 1,417 civilian deaths has been widely contested. In December 2021 a  New York Times  investigation based on a review of 1,300 Pentagon reports concluded that ‘the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The coalition claims it values transparency and is willing ‘to work with anyone making allegations or providing new, credible i...

This  article requires individual or institutional subscription. Here is an excerpt: “ The West’s focus on armed violence gets in the way of understanding the phenomena of radicalisation and the commission of acts in its name. It presupposes a continuum between religious radicalisation, proclamation of jihad and international terrorism, as though going from the first to the third stage were inevitable, and conversely, as though international terrorism   created   local jihadism. Such reasoning leads to any reference to sharia law and any call for holy war being read as a precursor to global attacks. In this view, Islamist movements’ supposed proximity to terrorism is the sole criterion for determining western policy towards them. This proximity is defined on a scale of intensity that measures references to religion as much as — if not more than — actual acts of violence: the more Islamist groups mention sharia and the more they challenge the policies of the great powers,...

The Women of Raqqa Are Building Their Future

 It is a nightmare that Americans easily sleep through Related Birth defects and the toxic legacy of the war on Iraq

 The apparent hoax at the centre of New York Times ‘Caliphate Podcast’

“Analysts have thus far tended to ignore those Arabs who support the political project in north and east Syria. Several observers have amplified the voices of those Arabs who are critical of it, perhaps because that narrative fits more easily into the simple trope of sectarianism.” Arabs Across Syria Join the Kurdish-Led Syrian Democratic Forces

A background to the situation in Iraq today Why Iraqis fear victory

The following is a drivel by me, nothing of it gets closer to an analysis aimed at radical readers or intelligent people. "The coalition task force fighting IS in Iraq and Syria reported on 26 September that it had conducted 34,573 air strikes between August 2014 and August 2019, and that at least 1,335 civilians had been unintentionally killed. But Airwars believes between 8,214 and 13,125 non-combatants are likely to have been killed as a result of coalition actions over the same period." But "the price is worth it." "Collateral damage" is inevitable and necessary. Saving coalition forces' lives is crucial. We are helping you to destroy evil, so you must make some sacrifices. I am sure those who lost their loved ones will understand the situation and the difficulty that faces pilots. We will give them some money.  What about if some of them go and join the "jihadist" groups out of anger and frustration? We strike them... After 9/1...

Portraits of the Kurdish Struggle

Manufacturing consent and views Here is an interesting and a telling comparison one should make: the way the mainstream, corporate media (from the Times to the BBC) have reported about some Westerners killed or kidnapped and the genocide* in Myanmar.  Compare how many articles, number of words and images have been used to report on one British Muslim woman who had joined ISIS and the genocide against Muslims in Myanmar.  *The United Nations and a Havard researcher, for example, have used the word genocide. 

"From the Nazis and the Taliban to Isis’s more recent destruction of Palmyra , there is plenty on the bad guys, but not much space devoted to the more nuanced topic of the damage wrought by the supposed good guys, like the trail of vandalism left by coalition forces in Iraq." The Imperial War Museum [in London] charts a history of destruction

More propaganda against Britain. This time is by Amnesty against the "amazing professionalism of our Royal Air Force." "Precision bombing" Raqqa is in ruins like Dresden