Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 15

France’s “Merciless” Response to ISIS is Anything But

After last week’s coordinated string of terrorist attacks in Paris that killed more than 100 and wounded more than 300, ISIS says France will remain on “the top of the list” of targets, that this is just “the first of the storm” against “the capital of prostitution and obscenity” and “the carrier of the banner of the Cross in Europe.”

France is promising a “merciless” response, but what we’ve seen so far has been anything but.

With American help, the French air force launched just a handful o...

Why the War in Kurdistan Matters

John Robert Gallagher voluntarily moved from Calgary, Alberta, to Syrian Kurdistan to fight against ISIS alongside the People’s Protection Units.

A suicide bomber killed him last week.

On May 6 of this year he wrote an essay on his Facebook page explaining why he went over there. Canada’s National Post republished it last week with a disclaimer that some may find it objectionable, and I’m republishing also. His mother wants as many people to read it as possible.

Why the War in Kurdistan M...

Iran’s Bogus Posturing on Police Brutality

The Iranian government invited twenty American writers and activists to a conference against police brutality and racism last week. Keynote speaker Ahmad Salek vowed that Israel would be destroyed within 25 years and compared American police officers to ISIS.

The Iranian government hunts down gay people and hangs them from cranes. It sends the Basij militia into the streets to attack peaceful protesters with clubs, chains, knives and axes. It routinely and as a matter of policy tortures liber...

What Just Happened in Syria?

Last week, after the White House announced its support for Syrian rebels was finished, the United States said it dropped 50 tons of ammunition from the air into Syria, ostensibly for unnamed Arab groups fighting ISIS. That, supposedly, was the last assistance those people were going to get.

A few days later, various anti-ISIS Syrian Arabs issued a collective, huh?

What happened to that ammo that supposedly fell out of the sky?

Nobody seemed to get any ammo.

All became clear the next day when...

The Trouble with Turkey: Erdogan, ISIS, and the Kurds

My latest essay for the print edition of World Affairs is now online. Here’s the first half.

Turkey, a key member of NATO, has so far chosen to sit out the war against ISIS. Instead, it is at war with Kurdish militias in Syria, the only ground forces so far that have managed to take on ISIS and win.

Turkey fears and loathes Kurdish independence anywhere in the world more than it fears and loathes anything else. Kurdish independence in Syria, from Ankara’s point of view, could at a minimum es...

Obama Dumps Syria's Rebels

The White House has officially scrapped its policy of training Syrian rebels now that Vladimir Putin is killing them.

Normally we might call this a surrender, but at this point, abandoning the rebel training would be the right call even if Vladimir Putin decided to help us instead of obstruct us.

Three years ago I wrote in this magazine that it was in America’s interests to see Bashar al-Assad overthrown.

The Arab Socialist Baath Party regime, beginning with its founder Hafez al-Assad and co...

Donald Trump Can’t Get the Middle East Right

Over the span of just over a week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has changed his position on Syria twice and even reversed himself once, but he still can’t find the right answer.

On Meet the Press over the weekend, he said he thinks the Middle East would be better off if Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi were still in charge of Iraq and Libya, and that Syria will be better off if Bashar al-Assad remains in power for the same reason.

“You can make the case, if you look at Lib...

The Iraq of Latin America

Mexico is more like Iraq than any other country in the Western Hemisphere with the possible exception of Haiti. A bewilderingly multifaceted armed conflict has been raging since 2007 between more than a dozen militarized drug cartels, the federal government and a smorgasbord of citizen’s militias.

The Mexican mafia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Soviet Proxy during the Cold War that remains on the list of international terrorist organizations, back some of the cartel...

The Clarion Call of ISIS

British Muslims are losing the war against ISIS. So says Sunny Hundal in a new essay in Quartz magazine.

“For the vast majority of Muslims who disdain its ideology,” he writes, “the challenge that [ISIS] presents to them is deadlier and far more difficult because they are caught in a pincer movement: with public and government suspicion on one side, and a seductive and supposedly empowering ideology on the other.”

According to the FBI, around 200 American Muslims have left the United States t...

Russia Moves Into Syria

Russia is shipping massive quantities of offensive weapons, materiel and soldiers to Syria.

The massive Condor flights carrying all kinds of supplies now arrive twice a day through Iran and Iraq into Bassel Al-Assad International Airport outside the port city of Latakia. The cargo is for Russian soldiers, not Syrian government forces, but is seen as a build-up to aid Bashar Assad's embattled regime.

The defense official, briefed on the latest satellite photos of the Syrian coastline, said: "...