Kidnapping, Spats on Docket of Syria Rebel Boss

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Kidnapping, Spats on Docket of Syria Rebel Boss
By CHARLES LEVINSON, August 17, 2012, The Wall Street Journal

QOBTAN JEBEL, Syria—One morning this week, Sheik Tawfeeq Shehab Eddin replaced his AK-47 with a Bic pen and took up his post behind a metal desk.

Mr. Shehab Eddin is one of the four rural commanders of the Tawheed Division, an Islamist-dominated umbrella force that is leading Syrian rebels’ fight around the country’s largest city, Aleppo, against forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. Their division has driven pro-Assad forces from much of the Aleppan countryside and some of Aleppo. On Friday, division fighters fought regime tanks near the city’s airport.

The regime’s pullout from much of the countryside last month has left the Tawheed Division as the area’s army, government and police. That is why on Wednesday, Mr. Shehab Eddin and his aides spent some 14 hours hashing out questions about their next deployment to the front line in Aleppo, scrambling to defuse a flare-up with a neighboring Kurdish village and mediating petty disputes between villagers.

“We commanders have been forced to take on all the problems confronting our villages,” he said, adding that elected leaders should eventually take that over. “The role I am playing now is bigger than myself.”

Similar makeshift governments are springing up in villages across Aleppo province’s countryside, providing interim courts, keeping basic services running, managing finances and distributing aid shipments.

Many of the rebel courts have taken on an Islamic bent. Tawheed Division commanders forbid the torture of detainees. But that ban doesn’t include whipping the soles of detainees’ feet, Tawheed commander Abdel Aziz Salama told several people, including a Human Rights Watch team.

Another group of Tawheed fighters executed four members of an Aleppan family accused of funding and running a hated pro-Assad militia accused of keeping iron-fisted control over restive areas. The division’s field commander, Abdel Qader Saleh, told The Wall Street Journal that the four men were given a battlefield trial before they were killed.

Here in Qobtan Jebel, a pinprick village of century-old stone walled homes in the hills west of Aleppo, Mr. Shehab Eddin’s word is law, at least for now. Before the uprising, the self-taught sheik—also known by his nom du guerre, Abu Soleiman—preached covertly to a small following in an adjacent village about the Syrian regime’s ills.

The sheik’s morning began when two of his fighters brought in a young man they had stopped at a checkpoint with seven jerry cans of gasoline in his car. The commodity is in short supply. The fighters suspected the man might be a smuggler. A couple quick questions satisfied the sheik, who ordered him freed with his fuel.

The next visitor pleaded for the release of a detainee accused of working as a regime informant in the village. The sheik was unmoved. “We have two witnesses and evidence against him,” he said, drawing X’s, O’s and spiral doodles on a blank sheet of paper as he listened.

Next came a stringy youth who said he had just defected from the Syrian army. He was brusquely questioned by the sheik’s aide, Ali al-Haji, a 28-year-old former tank commander with a degree in Islamic law.

The fidgety defector, 20-year-old Ahmed al-Latouf, said he had served as an army mortar man. “There’s no mobiles phones, no television,” he said. “No one knows anything and they believe what their officers tell them—that we are fighting criminal gangs and terrorists.”

The sheik concurred. “We know our brothers in the army have been lied to and brainwashed,” he said, admitting the youth into the ranks of rebel fighters, who elsewhere could be seen doing calisthenics and training with rocket-propelled grenades.

A fighter rushed in. A resident of Qobtan Jebel, he said, had that morning kidnapped a resident of a nearby Kurdish village and was demanding ransom. In retaliation, the Kurds kidnapped four village men.

Kurdish villages dot the local countryside, and relations have cooled since Syria’s civil war took a sectarian turn. With police gone, crime is a growing concern. Rebel commanders say a flare-up now in Kurd relations would play into regime hands. “We’ll call the Kurdish leaders, set up a meeting and solve the problem,” said Mr. Haji.

Next in line was a man from Aleppo who had raised funds for Mr. Shehab Eddin’s brigade, which fought in Aleppo’s Salaheddin neighborhood for 14 days but withdrew last week after supplies wore thin. The fundraiser demanded an explanation for the withdrawal. “We couldn’t stand it anymore. We weren’t getting enough help,” the aide, Mr. Haji, explained, eager not to alienate a supporter.

A group of villagers stormed in waving handguns and assault rifles. A fighter had commandeered their car to ferry supplies to the front, but sold it instead. They vowed revenge.

“Don’t do a thing until I have a chance to look into this,” Mr. Haji said. “Are you really going to kill someone over a car?”

“We spend a lot of time dealing with petty issues while fighting a war at the same time,” Mr. Haji said after they left. “But if you don’t listen to everyone, we’ll lose the people and then the revolution.”

As the sun set, Mr. Haji retired to his commander’s walled residence where he lives with his three wives and 15 children. They broke the Ramadan fast, silently using flatbread to scoop lentil soup, hummus and tuna fish out of metal bowls.

“We’ll set an ambush for the guy who kidnapped the Kurd, and we’ll turn him over to the Kurds, in exchange for our men back,” he said, reclining on a pillow on the cement floor, scrubbing his teeth with a twig. He dispatched a patrol to find the suspected kidnapper. “The regime wants us to fight among ourselves. We can’t allow this to happen,” he said.

A village elder with a long graying beard and a handgun strapped to his side dropped by to pay his respects. He said he was arrested in 1977 as part of the regime’s crackdown on suspected Muslim Brothers and served 15 years in prison. In Aleppo’s countryside, the rebellion is fueled by memories of that crackdown. Men every village, it seems, can recite the names of men who were killed, or disappeared into regime prisons or were forced into exile during that crackdown.

Before midnight, a messenger arrived to say the kidnapped Kurd had been released. The captor—who said he was on orders from a different rebel leader—panicked when he realized he was being hunted down by both Kurdish and rebel militias. Mr. Haji characterized the other rebel commander as a rogue—”a criminal with a gang posing as a brigade in the name of the Free Army,” he said with a sigh.

“We have enough problems,” the sheik told the messenger. “We don’t need problems with the Kurds. This is not in our interests. This is something that can never happen again.”

Reliant event for Muslims will have lots of security

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Reliant event for Muslims will have lots of security

By Anita Hassan, Friday, August 17, 2012, chron.com

On Sunday at Reliant Arena, there will be undercover police roaming the crowds, officers on horseback, even some in a helicopter circling the premises. Not to mention scores of uniformed officers walking the property. The scene sounds something more like the kind of security measures for a presidential convoy.

But they are actually safety measures being taken at the Islamic Society of Greater Houston‘s Eid Al-Fitr prayer, a celebration for a holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting.

“When these incidents happen, of course it’s wise to take precautions rather than feel sorry later on,” said Aziz Siddiqi, ISGH president, whose organization hosts the largest Eid prayer in the city, usually drawing between 30,000 and 50,000 people and held this year at the arena.

Advisory distributed

Siddiqi is referring to at least eight acts of violence or vandalism that have occurred at mosques around the country in recent weeks and have put Muslims throughout the nation on edge.

While many local mosques generally employ off-duty police at large events, this year, some Houston Muslim community leaders say they are beefing up security efforts at locations where the morning Eid prayers will be held.

The Houston chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations sent out a safety advisory this week, encouraging spiritual and community leaders to take extra precautions during the last days of Ramadan and Eid.

“We don’t want to make people deathly afraid, but we want people to be aware of what’s going on in society,” said Mustafaa Carroll, president of the Houston CAIR chapter.

The most recent incident occurred Thursday at a Chicago-area cemetery where hate graffiti was scrawled on several Muslim headstones. Other incidents in Illinois included a shooting at a mosque where several people were praying at the time and an “acid” bomb thrown at an Islamic school.

Other incidents around the country included a mosque burned to the ground in Missouri; an Oklahoma mosque sprayed with paintballs; pigs legs thrown at a mosque site in California; and a firebomb hurled at a Muslim family’s home in Panama City, Fla.

Houston has not seen any attacks recently. The last known incident was an arson fire in May at Madrasah Islamiah, a southwest Houston mosque. It is still unknown if the fire was a hate crime. However, Carroll said it is still a good idea for Muslim community leaders to be on alert.

Early inspection

CAIR officials recommended community leaders take security measures, such as reaching out to local law enforcement to request stepped-up patrols near mosques and installing surveillance cameras, alarms and perimeter lighting.

At the Clear Lake Islamic Center, which has a congregation of about 600 to 700 people, mosque officials have decided to take just a few extra precautions on the morning of Eid. Along with securing a police presence – normal at most large events – some officials will come in early to scope out the premises, said Gehad Olabi, 27, a board member at the center.

Olabi, who works in safety and quality for an oil and gas company, said that for nearly a year, mosque officials have been implementing an emergency action plan that not only includes safety guidelines in case of natural disaster or fire, but also what steps to take in instances of vandalism or a shooting incident.

No special plans

Some local Muslim leaders do not feel the need to take extra security measures.

Imam El-Sayed Mohamed, who leads the congregation at El-Farouk, a west Houston mosque, said they will have a police presence during the Eid celebration, but not any more than normal.

“We believe that we have no problems with anybody,” he said. “We believe the majority of the society we live in believes in freedom of religion.”

Iran Accuses Arab Royalty of Hypocrisy over Syria

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Iran Accuses Arab Royalty of Hypocrisy over Syria

August 16, 2012, The Hindu

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has rapped the Gulf Arab monarchies for seeking reforms in Syria without applying the same standards of openness for themselves.

Iran’s Press TV quoted Mr. Ahmadinejad as saying in Makkah on the sidelines of a summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that he “was surprised in this summit [to see] that the kings of some countries were speaking against Syria while the majority of their own people do not want them [to rule].”

The Iranian President made the comment on Wednesday during a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul. Rejecting double standards, Mr. Ahmadinejad said that he was “of course waiting to see when these reforms will reach the other countries in the region”.

During the conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad warned fellow Muslim countries in the 57-nation OIC not to fall in the trap that had been laid out for them by the region’s “enemies”.

“Today, all of us have entered into a plan without realising it; a plan that has been devised by the enemy. We are showing hostility toward each other without any clear reason and perhaps based on false information and under various personal, ethnic, historical, and even religious pretexts.”

He added that “media warfare has reached its climax” with the aim of sowing divisions among the countries of the region.

RADICAL COURSE

Mr. Ahmadinejad warned that without a self-conscious and radical course correction, the domination of Israel and its allies would swamp the entire region.

The Iranian side also slammed the summit’s decision to suspend Syria from the OIC. “Before making any decisions, Syria should have been invited to the summit to discuss and defend its position,” observed Ali Akbar Salehi, Iranian Foreign Minister.

Zuhdi Jasser: America in ‘Cold War 2.0 with an Islamic flavor’

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Zuhdi Jasser: America in ‘Cold War 2.0 with an Islamic flavor’

By , The Daily Caller,  9/17/12

During Saturday’s broadcast of “The Big Show” on ABC Radio’s Washington, D.C. affiliate WMAL, American Muslim activist and media contributor Dr. Zuhdi Jasser blasted the lack of leadership from President Obama, Washington and the West since the Arab Spring.

“What we’re seeing now I would basically look upon as Cold War 2.0 with an Islamic flavor,” said Jasser, the founding president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. ”We have let them define who we are. We have let their media define that America is the enemy and everything is to blame on the West and that has allowed them to avoid fixing their own condition.”

“And yet, when they do try to fix their own condition, like the Syrians and the Egyptians and the Tunisians have, we have gone and helped the wrong people — the [Muslim] Brotherhood, the Islamists.”

Jasser, the author of “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith,” criticized President Obama for recognizing the Muslim Brotherhood during a 2009 speech in Cairo as “legitimate.” Most Muslims, Jasser insisted, do not recognize the brotherhood as legitimate political leaders, but as theocrats.

“One of the biggest reasons we do not have credibility in the Middle East is they see us as allying with their enemies, with the dictators and with the theocrats. We have not been allying with the people on the ground,” said Jasser.

He also said President Barack Obama missed an important opportunity to address the Muslim Brotherhood’s dishonesty.

“The brotherhood was saying one thing in Arabic, cheering on the crowds; and on their English website, saying how they condemned it. And I would love to have seen President Obama call them on that. He didn’t.”

Jasser also characterized the anti-Islam video allegedly responsible for the violent Middle East uprisings as a “complete distraction.” Egyptian state-run media, he said, deliberately broadcast the trailer in an attempt to “consolidate their base by using a common theme: demonizing the West.”

“The Middle East has been torn between two fascisms: one of secular fascism of Mubarak, Gaddafi and the Assad’s of the world, and the other is theocratic fascism of radical Islam,” said Jasser. “This relationship between two heads of the same snake we are now seeing continue.”

We need a “Zero Tolerance” Policy on Honor Violence

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Abid Hussain is a 56 year old cleric who runs a mosque in Manchester, UK. When his sixteen-year old daughter, Rabiyah, refused to marry the boy he chose for her- a cousin living in Pakistan – he beat and attempted to strangle her in the family home just above the mosque. Hussain made it clear that should Rabiyah refuse the marriage, he would kill her. Rabiyah’s brothers, Nawab and Bahaud, assisted their father in brutalizing Rabiyah.

There is no question that Abid Hussain committed unthinkable brutality against his daughter, and there is no doubt that his actions were criminal. What we also know, however, is that what happened to Rabiyah is a clear case of honor-based violence. Honor-based violence punishes a member of the family, usually a female, for actions perceived to bring “shame” or “dishonor” to the family. These “offenses” can include wearing short sleeves,  talking to a member of the opposite sex, refusing an arranged marriage, becoming pregnant outside of marriage, or even being raped. While honor-based violence is not condoned by Islam, it is unfortunately prevalent in many Muslim communities.

Over 5,000 girls and women lose their lives in honor killings every year. Honor killings are the final step in a pattern of abuse that begins with threats and often beatings like the one Rabiyah experienced.

Despite the clear danger Rabiyah Hussain’s father still poses to her safety, Judge Michael Leeming spared him an immediate and serious jail sentence. In a ruling that troubles us deeply, Judge Leeming postponed sentences for Rabiyah’s father and two brothers, referring to her father as a man of “obvious standing,” (as a cleric in the local community), and referring to the brutalization of Rabiyah as an attempt to “coerce” her in to the father’s beliefs.

In taking such a lighthanded approach, Judge Leeming effectively let an attempted murderer, Abid Hussain, and his two accomplices (Rabiyah’s brothers Nawab and Bahaud) off with a warning, on what seem like cultural grounds. What will happen to Rabiyah in the coming days, weeks, and months? Would the judge have treated a case involving non-Muslims differently – and, if so, do the lives of Muslim women and girls matter less in the eyes of this British judge?

Honor-based violence is a problem we in the United States still have yet to address effectively. Earlier this year, the honor beating and near murder of Aiya Al-Tamimi did receive modest media coverage. However, Aiya’s mother, who tied Aiya down, beat her and cut her throat – was also spared a jail sentence. We wrote about Aiya’s case here, and the threat moral relativism poses to the lives of Muslim girls and women. (See television commentary by Dr. Jasser on Aiya’s case here, here, here and here.)

 

Noor Al-Maleki, murdered by her father in 2009 (Arizona, USA)

Noor Al-Maleki was murdered by her father in Phoenix, Arizona in 2009. Noor’s father, Faleh Al-Maleki, subjected his daughter to long-term torment, ultimately running her over with his Jeep Cherokee for her “western” behavior. Noor had lived in fear of her father for years, even running away from home. Her father, however, was charged with second degree murder rather than first degree (premeditated) murder. At the sentencing, judge Roland Steinle took the opportunity to claim, at great length, that Noor was not murdered for honor – despite Faleh Al-Maleki’s repeated admission that “honor” was absolutely his motivation. (See Dr. Jasser’s comments on this case here.)

The murder of Muslim girls and women is no more understandable or acceptable because of any tribal code of “honor.” Warnings, pleas to assimilate, and passive hope that at some point, Muslim girls and women will be freed from the misogyny of “honor” are not enough. We must work to effectively identify signs of honor-based violence and prevent their brutal and horrifying outcomes.

Resources:

International Honour Based Violence Resource Centre & Honour-Based Violence Awareness Network 

MEMINI: a memorial site to remember the victims of honor-based violence.

The International Campaign Against Honor Killings

Deadly embassy attacks were days in the making

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Deadly embassy attacks were days in the making

by Sara Lynch and Oren Dorell, USA TODAY, 9/12/12

CAIRO — Days of planning and online promotion by hard-line Islamist leaders helped whip up the mobs that stormed the U.S. Embassy in Egypt and launched a deadly attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that killed an ambassador and three others.

As the U.S. tightened security worldwide at embassies and Libya’s president apologized for the attack, details emerged of how the violence began, according to experts who monitor Egyptian media.

Christopher Stevens, 52, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was killed, along with three other Americans, on Tuesday night when a mob of protesters and gunmen stormed the embassy in the eastern city of Benghazi.

The killings there followed demonstrations in front of Cairo’s U.S. Embassy, where protesters tore down the U.S. flag and scaled the embassy’s wall.

The protest was planned by Salafists well before news circulated of an objectionable video ridiculing Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, said Eric Trager, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa Islamiya, a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman. He is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

When the video started circulating, Nader Bakkar, the spokesman for the Egyptian Salafist Noor party, which holds about 25% of the seats in parliament, called on people to go to the embassy. He also called on non-Islamist soccer hooligans, known as Ultras, to join the protest.

On Monday, the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, Mohamed al Zawahiri, tweeted that people should go to the embassy and “defend the prophet,” Trager said.

Zawahiri justified al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in an interview with Al Jazeera last month.

“If America attacks the Arab peoples and their regimes do not defend them, somebody who does defend the Arab and Muslim peoples should not be considered a criminal,” Zawahiri told the television network, according to a translation by MEMRI. “We have done nothing wrong.”

A U.S. official, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly, said the Obama administration is investigating whether the assault on the U.S. consulate in Libya was planned to mark the anniversary of 9/11.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose political arm holds 47% of seats in parliament and is led by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, announced new protests against the film to take place Friday at Tahrir Square, Trager said.

“They’ve made no statements in Arabic against violence over this video,” he said. “They’ve also pinned this video incorrectly on the Coptic (Christian) diaspora. They’ve used this video to advance sectarian tensions in Egypt.”

The Muslim Brotherhood on Wednesday condemned the violence.