Aung San Suu Kyi's party prepares to govern Myanmar: 5 questions

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Democracy vs. a military legacy The euphoria after electing 'The Lady' and her party is over. On Feb. 1 a parliament of pro-democracy politicians will be seated. Five questions about their task, the ongoing civil war, the old secret police, and the fight against corruption.

By Delphine Schrank, Correspondent January 28, 2016

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  Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters

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Hundreds of new politicians in Myanmar are moving their belongings into scruffy government dormitories in Naypyitaw, the capital. These are the winners in last fall's historic elections that saw pro-democracy parties roundly oust the military-led government. Now, on Feb. 1, they will don silk longyis and Shan turbans and inaugurate arguably the most important and delicate phase yet in a long- delayed but hopeful transition out of authoritarian rule.
Last November, the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won 77 percent of the available seats and routed the proxy party of the generals. It was the most open elections in 25 years, and that night, thousands of people poured into the streets of Rangoon, singing, dancing, and waving red balloons.
Now comes the hard work of governing.

Recommended: How much do you know about Myanmar? Take this quiz and find out.

“We have been trying [to gain a foothold] for more than three decades,” said U Win Htein, spokesman of the NLD and a former political prisoner, to the Monitor. “We are living the history now.”

Here are five questions that bear on the transition ahead:
1) People often think Myanmar, formerly Burma, is now a full democracy. But isn’t it still a military-civilian system undergoing transition? What is important to watch now?
Yes, under the 2008 constitution, the military retains much power, including a 25 percent block of seats. This gives it a virtual veto over constitutional changes, which require more than a 75 percent vote in parliament. The military also retains critical cabinet posts: the ministries of home affairs, border security, and defense.
Moreover, Aung San Suu Kyi, the NLD chairman who is widely seen as the country’s legitimate popular leader, is constitutionally barred from the presidency. In defiance, she has said she will stand above any president. According to Win Htein, the NLD will announce its nominee for the presidency and the vice-presidency within a week of the inaugural session of parliament.
The official handover of the executive branch, including the presidency and the cabinet, will not happen until late March, following an election in the parliament of the NLD's nominee. One of the legislative body's first tasks will be to vote on a speaker and deputy speaker for the upper and lower houses. On Monday, Aung San Suu Kyi and her aides met for nearly two hours with arguably the most powerful man in the country, the Army commander-in-chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. The discussion, according to Win Htein who was at the meeting, was a net positive. The “overall impression was that we can work together for the development of the future of our country,” he said.
But the subtext of the meeting was that whatever happens now will require a delicate ongoing dialogue between the NLD and the military.
2) Isn’t there an ongoing civil war in Myanmar?   
Conflict has intensified between the Army and a number of armed ethnic-minority militias that want autonomy, mostly along the borders. The key question is whether the NLD can control the military in those conflict areas and initiate a real peace process.
The outgoing government of President Thein Sein signed a hasty cease-fire agreement on Oct. 15 with eight armed groups. But as analyst Bertil Lintner has pointed out, this was a “face-saving” gesture, since it included none of the most serious fighting forces. Those groups, including the the Kachin Independence Army and the Shan State Army, have been lately under attack from Burmese military units.
For years, the NLD in opposition had called for “national reconciliation” between the civilian population, the military, and ethnic minority nationalities. Now, with a sufficient majority in parliament to make senior government appointments, the NLD can finally set the conditions, not just for dialogue but for a ruling coalition.
Spokesman Win Htein confirmed that appointments by the NLD in coming days will include members of other parties. NLD executives recently confirmed that the party's nominees for parliamentary speaker and deputies include a member of the outgoing military-backed party as well as figures from the ethnic Kachin and Rakhine communities.
3) Up to and during the election campaigning, there were many reports about rising Buddhist extremism and anti-Muslim bias, especially against the Muslim Rohingya.
The main force behind the anti-Muslim virulence, a Buddhist-monk led movement called Ma Ba Tha, has been surprisingly quiet since the elections. The group seemed chastened by the victory of the NLD, which the Ma Ba Tha had begun to target as an enemy of Myanmar’s Buddhist character and legacy. But watch for noise from them again.
Meanwhile, about 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims face deep hatred and ongoing exclusion from legal membership in the county’s multi-ethnic makeup. Aung San Suu Kyi has been much criticized abroad for a failure to speak out explicitly on the Rohingya’s behalf. But now they must live up to their long-stated ideals of human rights for all, starting with the Rohingyas’ forced segregation in camps in western Rakhine state.
4) Myanmar for years was an authoritarian regime led by a military junta. What has happened to the internal security and spy services?
This is a tricky one. With the “home affairs” portfolio in the hands of the military, it remains difficult to assess if special branch police and related military intelligence units have been dismantled, or if there has been a reform of the sinister monitoring system under the “General Services Administration” that was long used to centralize information and make enemies of the population. The Army itself remains a black box.
Inevitably, though, the security agencies will face scrutiny from an increasingly vibrant media. Myanmar had among the heaviest censorship laws in the world, but they have largely been lifted. There is also a newly flourishing civil society, though people still face intimidation and restrictions on the flow of information.
And public and private fear – the greatest tool of the junta’s control – has for now vanished. Feeling less fear, as Aung San Suu Kyi once famously suggested, is the first step to freedom.
5) Can the new ruling NLD party root out rampant corruption and cronyism, and to begin to address the country’s poverty?
The NLD has made rooting out corruption a priority, along with improving the “rule of law” and raising living standards in a country that remains among the poorest in the world. The World Bank ranks it 178 out of 213 countries in per capita income in 2014. The Berlin-based Transparency International recently landed Myanmar in 144^th  place out of 168 countries in its perceived corruption.
In recent years, efforts for reforms under President Thein Sein, and the lifting of sanctions, meant an influx of foreign investment and loosening up of banking. But implementation has been unclear. The operations of military-linked conglomerates has been opaque. They, together with a handful of business moguls, have held a monopoly over key natural resources including oil and jade. That means the NLD economic team will have to tread carefully, according to members of its economic team. To really address an entrenched system of bribery, or “tea money” in the local parlance, will take a generational change, said tycoon Serge Pun.

The leper that saved a reef

Despite living in utter isolation on a desert island for 40 years, one inspirational couple has overcome disability and blindness to make a difference.

• By Theodora Sutcliffe

28 January 2016

For a man who’s spent more than 40 years on a deserted island, Daeng Abu fizzes with a surprisingly exuberant love of life.

As he welcomed us to Pulau Cengkeh (Clove Island), a white-sand islet off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia, Abu’s toothless gums gaped in a joyous cackle. His blind, white eyes disappeared in ripples of laughter lines and his leprous hands reached out in a warm embrace. He and his wife Daeng Maida have lived alone on Pulau Cengkeh since 1972. 

Pulau Cengkeh is the white-sand islet off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia (Credit: Theodora Sutcliffe)

Neither knows how old they were when they entered their arranged marriage on nearby Pulau Pala (Nutmeg Island) – they currently believe they're in their 80s – but Abu thinks he was older than 20 and Maida remembers it was the dry season. Her uncle fired three shots in the air; she walked over to his family's home; Abu built a shack from bamboo and palm leaf; and married life began.

Little did they know at the time – the couple was bound to become a rather unlikely pair of environmental activists, spending their days raising sea turtles and speaking against the cyanide and dynamite fishing that is devastating Indonesia's reef. But first, life had other plans.

Soon after their marriage, Daeng Abu and Daeng Maida became a rather unlikely pair of environmental activists (Credit: Theodora Sutcliffe)

As the couple settled into marriage, Abu free-dove to depths of 25m or more for giant clams and abalone, embarking on weeklong fishing trips around the islands. Maida kept their house, cooked and wove. Wet season turned to dry season, and dry to wet. Sometimes they ate fish, sometimes only rice. And Maida bore six children; five died of shaking sickness before the age of one.

Sakká, their only surviving child, was already grown when Abu realised something was terribly wrong. “I was diving for abalone,” he recalled. “I felt my body was getting bigger, that it was packed tight like a sack of cement.”

In the dark of night, Abu set out for the city, Makassar, paddling and sailing for 12 long hours. Many times, over many years, he made this journey. The family always prioritised medicine over food.

While speaking with me, Abu scraped his long, black thumbnail down his forearm, then again across a thigh, recalling the day the “big doctor” tested him for feeling and found he'd lost sensation in his limbs. When Abu told Maida he had kusta, the local term for leprosy, she wept. If Abu couldn't dive, or at least catch fish, the couple would not eat.

Soon after, in 1972, the head of their district asked for volunteers to live and raise turtles on Cengkeh, about an hour by sailboat from Pala. Nobody wanted to go. But Abu felt a desert island would be the perfect spot to escape both social stigma and the risk of infecting others as his disease followed its disfiguring course. A turtle hatchery was work the pair of them could do, and the government stipend would keep them when he became too sick to fish.

In 1972, Daeng Abu answered the call for volunteers to live and raise turtles on Pulau Cengkeh (Credit: Manfred Bail/Alamy)

He disassembled their house, loaded it and their few possessions onto a boat and sailed it to Cengkeh. “Everyone was crying,” he recalled. “They were saying: 'Why are you going to the island? It's like you're a bad guy.'”

And, alone on Cengkeh that first evening, as the sun set, they cried, too.

Many Buginese islanders bury their dead on uninhabited islands for fear of ghosts and walking corpses. Cengkeh was once one of these islands of the dead, and even today the pair still say they hear the spirits and feel their grasping hands.

But when they arrived, Cengkeh was just a barren teardrop of sand, offering no shelter from blazing sun or bitter storms. Abu planted seeds, which grew into shady trees enmeshed with tangled vines, and generation after generation of baby turtles emerged, flippers flailing, from their nests in the soft sand.

Daeng Abu cultivated Pulau Cengkeh so that generation after generation of turtles could breed there (Credit: Raquel Mogado/Alamy)

In the early days, the pair raised them for sale in Makassar, perhaps for aquariums, more likely for meat. But as government priorities changed, so did their role, and now they raise turtles for release.

Indonesia's 17,000-or-so islands sprawl over 5,000km across the equator amid one of the world's most biodiverse and extensive coral reefs – more than 80% of it under threat. Turtles are essential to this fragile ecosystem: by feeding on destructive algae and sponges, they keep the coral healthy.

Yet there's a larger threat to the coral than turtle loss. Cyanide and dynamite fishing emerged in the 1990s as a labour-saving technology that helped local fishermen catch fish for export. By throwing a handful of pesticide or a water-bottle bomb onto the reef, a bounty that might have taken weeks to catch would float to the surface as if by magic.

Daeng Abu and his wife teach local people about the importance of coral preservation (Credit: Brandon Cole Marine Photography/Alamy)

Abu ­– who believes he is now cured of leprosy – is a voice of age and wisdom in this cluster of islands. Cengkeh is much less isolated than is used to be, and Abu teaches passing fishermen and visiting islanders that killing coral kills the catch. Sometimes he reports “fish bombers” to the police; more often he enlists friends or family members to talk to them.

In an area where literacy levels are low and some islands have already annihilated their fringing reef, this micro-activism is vital: his message spreads from islet to islet, and even to the mainland. And Cengkeh's reef remains as pristine as it was when he first started diving more than 60 years ago.

Even though he is blind, Daeng Abu still lights up at the memory of the reef (Credit: Theodora Sutcliffe)

Life can be hard on Cengkeh: a few years ago, the couple almost died of thirst after a delivery of fresh water did not arrive. Yet Abu's sightless eyes glistened as he remembered the reef. “It's unbelievably wonderful and perfect,” he enthused. “There's black, blue, yellow, green, red.... so many colours!”

I watched their loving, patient teamwork, the steady routine of a long marriage, as Maida guided her husband down the well-trodden paths to their solid wooden house. An Indonesian NGO, Dompet Dhuafa, built it for them a few years ago in honour of Abu's environmental work.

Despite hardships, Daeng Abu can often be seen in a joyous, toothless smile (Credit: Theodora Sutcliffe)

The wind was getting up and the mirror-flat sea was starting to chop. It was almost time to leave.

“I would change nothing about what God has given me,” Abu emphasised. “I'm happy. It's very peaceful. Everything – even disease, is a gift from God.”

PracticalitiesTo visit Cengkeh, take a taxi from the town of Pangkep, north of Makassar, to the port of Maccini Baji. From here you can catch a fishing boat to Cengkeh.

The image shows the same reef before, during and after a devastating coral bleaching event in American Samoa (Credit: XL Catlin Seaview Survey)

The effects of coral bleachingThe image above shows the same reef before, during and after a devastating coral bleaching event in American Samoa.

Like in Indonesia, coral reefs around the world face similar threats. As underwater ecosystems change and water temperatures increase, marine life deteriorates rapidly. “Coral bleaching”, for example, refers to the whitening – an indication of stress – and impending destruction of these fragile organisms.

The man who created Paris

In the 19th Century George-Eugène Haussmann completely redesigned and rebuilt the French capital. Jonathan Glancey describes how the city of today was born.

• By Jonathan Glancey

26 January 2016

Paris remains one of the world’s most visited cities, and of those tens of millions drawn to its remarkably compact centre each year, the Marais district exerts a magnetic pull. Fashionable among aristocrats before Louis XIV – the “Sun King” – moved his court from Versailles, this pungent quarter of narrow streets and jumble of historic houses and courtyards sank into near-squalor in succeeding centuries before its renaissance in recent decades as a charming labyrinth of fashion boutiques, cafés, restaurants, museums and galleries.

Napoleon III and Haussmann had their sights on areas like the Marais, a jumble of streets and houses that is now a major draw for tourists (Credit: Alamy)

Walking through these lively and endearing medieval streets, it seems almost incredible that they were once considered the enemy, to be demolished in haste – and not, it has to be added, by the German military, who had less than healthy designs on Paris at various times between 1870 and 1945. No, it was none other than the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, and his Prefect for the Seine, George-Eugène Haussmann – who died 125 years ago – who had districts like the Marais in their sights.

Haussmann turned Paris into a titanic building site for 20 years

Like much of Paris, however, the Marais stank to high heaven in 1853 when the emperor instructed Haussmann to rebuild the odorous city along grand and salubrious lines. Entire medieval quarters of the city were to be razed with modern avenues taking their place. “It was the gutting of Paris,” wrote Haussmann proudly in his Memoires.
Demolition man
A public administrator with no training in architecture or urban planning, Haussmann turned Paris into a titanic building site for 20 years. Even though he was forced to resign in 1870 as the emperor faced growing criticism for excessive expenditure, work on Haussmann’s plan continued until the late 1920s.

Haussmann engineered grand squares, a sewage system and city parks like the Bois de Boulogne (Credit: Age fotostock / Alamy Stock Photo)

Conceived and executed in three phases, the plan involved the demolition of 19,730 historic buildings and the construction of 34,000 new ones. Old streets gave way to long, wide avenues characterised by rows of regularly aligned and generously proportioned neo-classical apartment blocks faced in creamy stone.
Along with imperious avenues, Haussmann engineered grand squares, city parks modelled on London’s Hyde Park, a comprehensive sewage system, a new aqueduct giving wide access to fresh water, a network of underground gas pipes for lighting streets and buildings, elaborate fountains, grandiloquent public lavatories and rows of newly planted trees.
This urban infrastructure was matched by bold new railway stations – Gare du Nord and Gare de L’Est – the opulent Paris Opéra, new schools, churches, two dozen city squares, a brace of ambitious theatres at Place du Châtelet, the giant, iron-framed Les Halles food market, (Èmile Zola’s “Belly of Paris”), and the sensational network of a dozen avenues radiating from the Arc de Triomphe at the core of Haussmann’s Place de l’Ètoile.

A dozen avenues radiate from the Arc de Triomphe at the core of Haussmann’s Place de l’Ètoile – renamed Place Charles de Gaulle (Credit: Alamy)

Since renamed Place Charles de Gaulle, l’Ètoile is every foreign driver’s nightmare experience: well, you try heading into fast and furious traffic coming at you from 12 directions simultaneously while attempting to negotiate, or fight, your way around Napoleon Bonaparte’s monumental victory arch.
Rip it up and start again
No other major city, before or since, has been transformed so radically during peacetime. It employed huge numbers of skilled and unskilled workers along with architects, engineers and landscape gardeners. It restored the city to health after long decades of cholera and typhus. It gave Parisians of all classes parks to play and relax in.
Theoretically, its broad avenues allowed government troops free movement to maintain public order at times of barricades, riots and other disturbances. And, at a time when the city doubled in size and its population trebled, it gave Paris a sense of unity together with an air of bourgeois prosperity.

No other city has been transformed so radically during peacetime

What still seems astonishing is that so much of the city was demolished and reordered on what seems like the whim of an emperor and his Prefect of the Seine, Haussmann. Napoleon III, however, was following in the footsteps of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had equally grand designs on Paris. “If only the heavens had given me twenty more years of rule and a little leisure”, he wrote in exile on Saint Helena after the Battle of Waterloo, “one would search vainly for the old Paris; nothing of it would remain but vestiges.”
In 1925, the visionary Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, published his Plan Voisin for Paris, a project sponsored by Gabriel Voisin, the French aviation pioneer and luxury car maker. Famously, Le Corbusier’s iconoclastic scheme envisaged the demolition of much of the city centre north of the Seine. This would be superseded by parkland sprouting a generously planted forest of high- rise concrete residential towers. Cars would speed across the city on elevated concrete roads free of pedestrians.

Speaking perhaps of his transformation of the Île de la Cité, de Villefosse said “the old ship of Paris was torpedoed by Baron Haussmann and sunk during his reign” (Credit: Alamy)

If Le Corbusier’s unrealised plan was considered too extreme, Haussmann’s before him was criticised, too. The renowned statesman Jules Ferry (1832-93) wrote, “We weep with our eyes full of tears for the old Paris, the Paris of Voltaire… the Paris of 1830 and 1848, when we see the grand and intolerable new buildings, the costly confusion, the triumphant vulgarity, the awful materialism that we are going to pass on to our descendants.”

His work caused more damage than 100 bombings - Réné Héron de Villefosse

Or, as the 20th-Century historian Réné Héron de Villefosse put it, thinking in particular of Haussmann’s transformation of the Île de la Cité, “the old ship of Paris was torpedoed by Baron Haussmann and sunk during his reign. It was perhaps the greatest crime of the megalomaniac prefect and also his biggest mistake… His work caused more damage than a hundred bombings.”
We’ll always have Paris
When in 1944, as Allied forces marched to liberate the city and Adolf Hitler gave orders for the wholesale demolition of Paris, the German military governor Major General Dietrich von Choltitz refused to obey. Paris was simply too beautiful to violate. Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann and Le Corbusier had not shared such precious German sentimentality.

Haussmann’s monumental plan remains impressive – his vision lives on in the typical building facades seen all over Paris (Credit: Hemis / Alamy Stock Photo)

Although bombastic, Haussmann’s monumental plan remains impressive, not least because he achieved so much so quickly to such a high, uniform standard. A public administrator by training, Haussmann was a commanding figure who, although a talented musician, was no sentimentalist. He even demolished the house he was born in – 55 rue de Faubourg-du-Roule – despite fond memories of childhood.

Haussmann was no sentimentalist – he even demolished the house he was born in

Of his first meeting with Haussmann in 1853, Napoleon III noted, “I had in front of me one of the most extraordinary men of our time; big, strong, vigorous, energetic, and at the same time clever and devious, with a spirit full of resources.” The partnership between the ambitious French emperor and his vigorous prefect was a truly remarkable one. Within a year of Haussmann’s dismissal for overspending, however, Napoleon III had fallen after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Released from a newly unified Germany, he went into exile at Chiselhurst, Kent where he died in 1873.
After his dismissal, Haussmann was elected Bonapartist deputy for Ajaccio, Corsica, birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte. He found time to write three volumes of self-serving memoirs. These might be largely unread today, yet his memory lives on powerfully today in the new Paris he shaped – and in cities like Barcelona that followed his lead – if not in the narrow, but much-loved streets of the Marais.

Welcome to Islamic State 101: What Makes ISIS Tick

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has become akin in the western imagination to the sociopathic murderers that you would typically see in Homeland—those who would think nothing of rounding up other human beings, torturing them over days or weeks for the masochistic pleasure of inflicting pain and then killing them in front of a video camera. The organization that swept into Fallujah in January 2014 and into Mosul in June 2014—that has been running its own personal fiefdom across vast sections of western Iraq and eastern Syria for over a year—represents the type of indiscriminate and wholesale slaughter that would make Abu Musab al-Zarqawi proud.
The Islamic State, however, is unique from any other Islamist terrorist group on the planet. It has demonstrated an unparalleled capacity to hold and administer territory despite the constant danger of U.S. airstrikes, as well as an ability to create and maintain an extensive system of taxation, extortion and oil production to finance its operations and compensate its fighters. It has demonstrated talent in the social media space, where battlefield successes are broadcasted to young, disillusioned recruits all over the world. ISIL’s massacre on the streets of Paris, as shocking as the attacks were, is just the latest escalation in violence that the group has exhibited every day in Syria and Iraq.

ISIL’s Money Making Machine
The Islamic State’s capture of crude oil fields in Deir ez-Zor and its ability to produce and transport the oil to middlemen and smugglers along the Syria-Turkey border is the most graphic illustration of how the organization makes its money. Before the United States increased the pace and scope of its air campaign, the U.S. Treasury Department estimated that the Islamic State made roughly $1 million per day in profit  from oil sales (that estimate now stands at $500 million per year , according to the Treasury Department)—a cash flow that any terrorist organization could only dream of. Operation Tidal Wave II, launched  by the counter-ISIL coalition in late October, is designed to degrade that revenue stream significantly; as of November 24, 2015, U.S. and French aircraft have destroyed or damaged hundreds of trucks that ISIL has come to rely upon to transport its oil to the border.
Oil, however, is not ISIL’s most profitable enterprise. Taxes on local businesses, on truckers who drive through ISIL-controlled territory, on bank transactions and deposits, as well as extortion of the local population are the preferred means to pay the salaries, overhead costs, service delivery and administration of the Islamic State’s caliphate. Taxes on a single truck of goods can range as low as $200 to as high as $1,000 depending on the load. Pharmacies in Mosul are taxed on every prescription drug that is sold to customers. Business owners get shaken down for money if they want electricity or plumbing services.  And if the Islamic State is fortunate enough to take a city with historical antiquities, those artifacts are horded and eventually sold for hefty profits—another windfall that has generated tens of millions of dollars for the organization.

Recruitment capacity
Obama administration officials insistently remind the American people and U.S. allies that the Islamic State is not “ten-feet tall.”  With the right combination of air power, professional boots on the ground that are from the local community and a worldwide attempt to stifle their finances, the group’s territory will eventually shrink to the point where the caliphate is no longer a large patch of territory but rather a scattershot, temporary occurrence.
Deliberately downplaying ISIL’s military and financial prowess may be good public relations from a political point of view, but it has done nothing to significantly block the journey of thousands of recruits from the Middle East, the Caucasus and Europe into Syria and Iraq to sign up with the organization. Indeed, the strength of the organization depends on its large collection of foreign fighters who have chosen to make the journey to Syria and Iraq. In one of the most extensive studies into the Syrian civil war’s foreign fighter phenomenon, Richard Barrett of the Soufan Group estimated in June 2014 that approximately 12,000 foreigners  from 81 countries are either fighting with the Islamic State or some other radical extremist faction on the ground. ISIL’s bankroll and slick propaganda in jihadist media circles have allowed the organization to attract many of those recruits.
Washington’s claim that roughly 10,000 ISIL fighters have been killed  over the first twelve months of the counter-ISIL operation is of little solace given the fact that the CIA’s assessment of ISIL manpower (20,000 to 32,000) is roughly the same  as it was when the war began. To put it bluntly: ISIL’s attraction to young Muslims in Europe, Russia, the Central Asian republics and the Middle East is so powerful that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been able to sustain his overall force level despite thousands of coalition airstrikes and billions of dollars spent by the United States, Europe and other members of the sixty-plus member coalition.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Past
ISIL’s proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is not some mysterious figure that popped up in jihadist circles recently. The man has been fighting in the name of jihad for the past decade, first as a religious emir in ISIL’s predecessor organization Al Qaeda in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom and then as the overall commander of the Islamic State of Iraq (another ISIL predecessor group) after U.S. Joint Special Operations Command raided and took out two of Baghdadi’s superiors in 2010. Since that date, Baghdadi has been on the list of specially designated global terrorists, the UN Security Council’s Al-Qaeda sanctions committee, and a prime target for the U.S. counterterrorism community. The United States wants Baghdadi out of action so badly that Washington has offered a $10 million reward [11] for any information that assists in the discovery of his location.
Baghdadi landed himself in a U.S. military prison at Camp Bucca in February 2004 when U.S. forces picked him up in Fallujah while traveling to the home of a Sunni insurgent commander.  After spending ten months in U.S. custody, Baghdadi was released and eventually made his way to Damascus  in order to complete his doctoral in Islamic studies, which would come in handy in the future as he climbed up the AQI latter. A stint as the Islamic State of Iraq’s Sharia Committee supervisor would help propel him to the very top of the organization when Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Umar al-Baghdadi were killed by U.S. Special Forces.
Since being the emir and caliph of the Islamic State, the organization has regenerated itself from a backwater Sunni militant group ensconced in Mosul by U.S. and Iraqi forces into a worldwide jihadist menace sitting on hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of dollars, ruling an area of Iraq and Syria the size of Indiana.

The Saddam-ISIL connection 
Less than a month after U.S. forces drove the rest of Saddam Hussein’s army from Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority that was set up to temporarily administer Iraqi affairs in preparation for elections signed two orders that would, in hindsight, prove to be an accelerant to an anti-American insurgency.  Mid- and senior-level members of the Ba’ath Party, regardless of whether they were in the upper echelons of Saddam’s regime, were stripped of their jobs and prevented from holding political office in the new Iraq. The defeated Iraqi army, meanwhile, was disbanded by provisional order—a decision that threw thousands of men out of work, but with their firearms still very much intact.
In hindsight, those CPA orders would have a far more lasting effect. Twelve years later, the Islamic State has tapped into the military talent of Saddam’s former officer corps and in many instances has placed these very same men in key roles of responsibility. ISIL’s campaign to weed out potential informants or troublemakers within its territory has been implemented by former Iraqi army officers—the same officers who were fired from their positions when the United States rolled into Baghdad. An extensive report from Liz Sly of the Washington Post, which includes interviews with several ISIL defectors, captures a scene where mysterious Iraqi men with their faces covered sentence one of their fighters to house arrest. “All of the decision makers are Iraqi,” the defector recounts, “and most of them are former Iraqi officers. The Iraqi officers are in command, and they make the tactics and battle plans.”
Indeed, this account is bolstered by documents that have been picked up by Iraqi forces on the battlefield. One of them—a 31-page study  that laid out in intricate military detail how the Islamic State could resurrect itself in Iraq and bolster its strength in Syria—was written by a former Iraqi intelligence officer from Saddam Hussein’s time. ISIL’s recruitment of former Iraqi officers may seem strange given the fact that Saddam Hussein’s regime was commonly considered secular. But for Baghdadi, men who have longstanding military backgrounds are valuable assets that the organization could exploit against a Shia-dominated Iraqi army that is despised by much of Iraq’s Sunni population.

A new way to inspire jihad 
Although it is widely documented that tens of thousands of foreign fighters have crossed the Turkey-Syria border in search of the group, Muslims in the West don’t need to travel thousands of miles to become a part of the Islamic State. By opening up its arms to any disenchanted or troubled individual who is willing to sacrifice himself in the name of the caliphate, ISIL has changed the way that future Islamist terrorist works will fight jihad.
For those who are either unable or unwilling to hop on a plane to Turkey and drive to its southern border, young men and women in Europe or the United States can still attract ISIL’s support through acts of individualized violence. In other words, you can be a part of the caliphate without traveling to the caliphate at all.
Lone-wolf terrorism, where a self-radicalized individual who is not a formal member of a terrorist group decides to conduct an attack on his or her own, has become one of the top concerns of the FBI. The Islamic State, however has only made the lone-wolf phenomenon worse by trading respect and membership in the caliphate for an attempted attack on a western target. Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, ISIL’s top spokesman and day-to-day manager, has incited young Muslim men in the West who may be tired of their circumstances to take matters into their own hands. No religious justification is necessary, Adnani argues, because the justification is always there. “Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. . . . Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling.”
To boil it down: the Islamic State is open for business to anyone who is able to kill a westerner. If the old Al Qaeda under Osama bin Laden was guarded and insular (cherry-picking the most dedicated and elite recruits for admission), the Islamic State under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is adopting a far less discriminatory tactic. Those who are willing to pick up a gun or a knife and kill an American, French or Brit are granted the entry into the organization. A recruit doesn’t need to possess special military training or advanced religious knowledge to become a servant of the caliphate; all that needs to be done is to show the fortitude to kill an infidel.
Daniel R. DePetris is an analyst at Wikistrat, Inc., a geostrategic consulting firm, and a freelance researcher. He has also written for CNN.com, Small Wars Journal and The Diplomat.

The whales that speak in code

• By Melissa Hogenboom

23 January 2016

Near the Caribbean island of Dominica, there is one group of sperm whales that has interested researchers for over a decade.
Like others in their species, they have complex social lives. But what makes this particular group special is that they live in small family units, allowing researchers to quickly identify individual whales.
The ability to do this has offered us unprecedented insights into their world. For instance, we know that sperm whales remember their friends and family units for many years.
Researchers have now tried to establish exactly how the whales keep track of each other.

Calves take over two years to learn to make the coda (click) types accurately (Credit: Amanda Cotton/acottonphoto.com)

In the depths of the murky ocean, recognising a mate by sight alone would be difficult.

This one call is variable enough amongst individuals in a family that we can tell them apart

It has now become apparent that each individual whale makes unique calls. These are similar to two kinds of markers that humans use to identify ourselves: our names and voices.
Each whale produces short bursts of clicks called "codas". They are so distinct, researchers can identify the whales from sound alone.
"Traditionally we identify sperm whales with pictures of their tails, but once they're chatting it's hard to say who's doing what [using their tails alone]," says lead author Shane Gero of Aarhus University in Denmark. "This one call is variable enough amongst individuals in a family that we can tell them apart."
You can listen to an individual call in the audio clip below.
The whales' language abilities go further. As well as the close-knit families that they live in for their entire lives, they also belong to larger "clans": with specific dialects to match.

Male sperm whales can be up to a third larger than adult females (Credit: Marina Milligan/ Dominica Sperm Whale Project)

The Caribbean clan members do not meet often, but when they do they use specific codas. You can hear an example of this in the clip below. All clan members produce these codas in a specific way, which researchers cannot tell apart.
These clans can consist of several hundred individuals. They all "speak" in the same patterns of clicks even if they live thousands of miles apart.
The results have been published in the Royal Society Open Science journal.
They are the first evidence of the "social complexity hypothesis" in a marine species. The idea here is that if an animal has a complex social world, it has a greater need for diverse ways to communicate.
"I show that whales have all the necessary calls to identify individuals, their social unit (think families), and their cultural clans (think ethnic group)," says Gero.
Whales that make different coda repertoires do not spend any time together.

Sperm whales are often identified by their tail fins (Credit: Dominica Sperm Whale Project)

The team established these unique patterns across nine different families from the Dominican whale clan. They eavesdropped on the whales' clicks over 324 days of observation, spread over six years.

Sperm whales have long-lasting preferences for the individuals they spend most time with 

They made acoustic recordings when the whales were both diving and socialising.
It makes sense that sperm whales communicate in this way, says Gero. They need to be able to differentiate between their family and clan members even when submerged, and we know that they have long-lasting preferences for the individuals they spend most time with.

Mothers like this one here, will nurse their calves for several years (Credit: Marina Milligan/Dominica Sperm Whale Project)

"We've shown here that they have calls that could function to mediate all of these different social relationships that we've known have existed for a while," says Gero.

They are "the largest cultural and cooperative groups outside of humans"

"How [else] would you figure out what family member is coming towards you unless you recognise them acoustically?"
While the Caribbean clan is small, consisting of a few hundred whales living across about 1,000km (620 miles), the clan in the Pacific Ocean is much larger and lives further apart. There could be over 1,000 individuals. The dialects from one clan can therefore range over several thousand kilometres.

A sperm whales produce vocalisations using its nose (Credit: Whitehead lab/Dominica Sperm Whale Project)

That implies something rather dramatic. If all the ocean's sperm whales use these vocal markers to define cultural groups, then they are "the largest cultural and cooperative groups outside of humans", Gero says.
Now that these individual and clan codas have been established, the researchers hope to play them back to the whales to see how they react. Doing so will tell them more about how language abilities are shared by whales and just how and when certain clicks are used.
For example, the clip below features several whales "talking" at once, but distinct individual calls can still be clearly made out.
The work once again establishes that each sperm whale plays an integral part in its family. Like ours, their complex relationships are based on shared experiences and culture.
The findings push our understanding of the cultural complexity of whales to another level, says Lori Marino, a neuroscientist by training who now advocates animal rights at the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, and was not involved with the study.
Just like us, the whales have cultural cues that exist on many levels, she says: the individual, the social unit and the clan.
"Whereas years ago the question of whether whales and other animals possess cultural traditions was still considered somewhat fanciful, we now know that many other animals, including sperm whales, have very complex traditions.
"Cultural patterns in sperm whales really can be defined as traditions in the true sense of the word."

Groups of calves are often left alone at the surface while the females in the unit hunt for squid at depth (Credit: Amanda Cotton/acottonphoto.com)

Desert Storm through the eyes of an Iraqi reporter

As Iraq braced for war with the US, Iraqi AP reporter Salah Nasrawi was torn between journalistic duty and patriotism.

[Photo By US Army/Getty]

On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, I was working as a correspondent for the American news agency, the Associated Press (AP), in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. My job was not only demoralising, exhausting and hazardous, it was virtually suicidal.

War was looming, and I was pulled between my sense of duty and my sense of patriotism - the dilemma of a native journalist reporting on a conflict for a news organisation that, in theory, belonged to the other side - to the enemy.
I had already spent more than six years reporting for the BBC and AP on the Iraq-Iran war, which ended in August 1988. For much of that time, I was in the trenches along the 1,200km-long frontline or investigating the war's human cost and its political and social impact.
I had my own war to fight, too, as I battled to maintain neutrality between the two sides' narratives and positions. Complying with global journalistic standards often meant employing "tricks" to avoid Saddam's censors.

An Iraqi covering the war under Saddam

I no longer questioned whether Iraq would be bombed, just what would become of the 'cradle of civilisation'. Salah Nasrawi, Gulf War reporter

Sometimes it worked. But sometimes it didn't.

There were occasions when I faced the wrath of Iraq's Ministry of Information or its ruthless intelligence service, the Mukhabarat - often for stories they considered negative or insufficiently patriotic.
But if covering the Iraq-Iran war for foreign media was daunting, it was nothing compared to reporting on the US's Operation Desert Storm for a major American news agency.
Under Saddam's authoritarian rule, there were strict limitations on what could be reported. The cost of breaching those could be grave. An Iraqi reporter might face death for gathering information considered to be confidential or for writing an article deemed to be harmful to the state.
Really, I should have quit. But that would have meant losing both my job and the opportunity to be on top of the biggest story in the world at the time.

When I contemplated resigning from AP during a heated discussion with then Minister of Information Latif Nussayif Jassim al-Dulaymi about a report I had written on Iraq's war preparations, I was surprised that he rejected the idea.
"I will shoot you with my own gun and hang your body over the bridge," he thundered.
He had his reasons.
We were, after all, showing the world horrific scenes of death and destruction inflicted by the Americans, images that he knew could prompt the world to demand that the US stop its bombardments.

American reporters fled before the bombs fell 

Many news organisations kept their teams away from the front lines, arguing that it would be too dangerous for their reporters to stay in Baghdad.
Then US President George Bush senior personally rang the heads of US media networks to ask them to ensure that their employees left.
Few foreign journalists were willing to remain. As they left and the doors to Iraq closed, I felt acutely aware of being stuck with my own destiny - for better or for worse.
The countdown to war had started as Saddam refused to comply with the UN's January 15 deadline to withdraw from Kuwait, and I found myself deeply immersed in covering the crisis.
My fears gave way to my journalistic instinct.

Pictures that arose from the Gulf War only captured the surface of the conflict, like this one of recovery efforts at a crash site in Anbar province on January 17, 1991 [Photo by US Marine Corps & US Navy/Getty]

On January 8, 1991, I made my fifth trip to Kuwait under Saddam's occupation. It was a trip organised by the Ministry of Information to show Iraqi reporters the trenches and fortifications built by Iraqi soldiers across the country.

There was no doubt, war was imminent

On my return to Baghdad, I met the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat, whom I had known for years.

I had been at Arafat's office less than two months before, when, on November 29, 1990, he had met the former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. Nakasone had previously met Saddam in an effort to convince him to defuse the crisis.

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Go and tell Saddam that Iraq will be sent back to the pre-industrial age if he does not withdraw from Kuwait, Nakasone had basically told Arafat.

Now, I told Arafat that war was unavoidable.
To my surprise, he called an urgent press conference at his residence in an Iraqi government guesthouse, telling journalists: "There will be no war. There will be no war. I promise."
Once the press conference was over, Arafat was whisked along the 1,000km-long highway to neighbouring Jordan in a Mercedes. When the war began two days later, US warplanes bombed that same road.

There was one last-chance bid for a peaceful resolution from the then-UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar. He arrived in Baghdad on January 12, 1991, to tell Saddam to pull out of Kuwait.
I was the only reporter on that historic day to have access to De Cuellar's spokesman, Francois Giuliani, at a secret guesthouse. Giuliani, a former Reuters journalist, told me that De Cuellar's encounter with Saddam was scheduled for after the Iraqi leader's afternoon nap the next day. From that, I immediately understood that the UN chief's mission was doomed.

Baghdad, the ghost town

I no longer questioned whether Iraq would be bombed, just what would become of the "cradle of civilisation".
The moment we would find out came on Wednesday, January 16, 1991, the day after the deadline set by the UN.

The Gulf War: 25 years on

Government offices and shops were shuttered. Windows were taped. Tens of thousands of Iraqis crammed into buses and cars and fled the capital.

As dusk approached, the streets were dark and quiet. Troops manned roadblocks at the main junctions, but Saddam's henchmen seemed to have given up altogether.
The city that history books called Madinat al-Salam, or the City of Peace, was bracing for war.
My headline that night was: Saddam defiant, Iraq bracing for military showdown, Baghdadis leaving or cowering at home.
At 2:30am, the first bombs fell. Explosion after explosion rattled the city. Iraqi soldiers fired back from anti-aircraft batteries positioned on rooftops.

By morning, Baghdad was a ghost city. Its main government buildings and communication centres either disabled or heavily damaged.
There was no electricity or running water.

The city of "A Thousand and One Nights" seemed to be on its way back to the Middle Ages.
Today, I am retired from active reporting. Yet, I am still stuck with Iraq as much as it is stuck with me.

The 1991 Gulf War, as I have repeatedly argued in all my writing, including my memoirs, A Life of Paper, was an eruption that has left Iraq forever shaken, and with it, my own life too.
Salah Nasrawi is a veteran Iraqi journalist who worked for international media, including the Associated Press and the BBC in the Middle East. He wrote for leading Arab newspapers and periodicals.