The New Yorker

Is ISIS Conceding Defeat? 

By Robin Wright 

Three years ago, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi chose the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, in Mosul, as the site to proclaim his new Islamic State. The mosque, known as al-Hadba, or the “hunchback,” for its leaning minaret, is a fabled landmark in the Middle East. It dates back to the twelfth century. The creation of a modern caliphate was symbolized when the black isis flag was hoisted atop the minaret, on July 4, 2014. It was Baghdadi’s first, and still only, public appearance.

“I do not promise you, as the kings and rulers promise their followers and congregations, luxury, security, and relaxation,” he saidfrom the mosque’s pulpit. “Instead, I promise you what Allah promised his faithful worshipers”—a jihad to consume all other territory and people in the world. “This is a Duty on Muslims that has been lost for centuries.”

The Iraqi Army had set its sights on the al-Nuri Mosque as the ultimate prize in the campaign to oust isis from Mosul, which was launched eight months ago. Ferocious urban battles around the Old City have been fought within fifty yards of the mosque over the past few days. Iraqis hoped that their beloved mosque would be liberated by Eid al-Fitr, the joyful celebration that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Instead, on Wednesday night, isispreëmpted the Army by blowing up the Great Mosque.  Ironically, it acted during the period of Ramadan known as Laylat al-Qadr, when Muslims believe that the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed.

Once again, the Great Mosque of al-Nuri reflects the fate of the world’s most notorious terrorist group; this time, its demise. The black flag no longer flies from the tipping minaret.

“Blowing up the al-Hadba minaret and the al-Nuri Mosque amounts to an official acknowledgement of defeat,” Iraq’s Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, said on Thursday. “It’s a matter of a few days and we will announce the total liberation of Mosul.”

Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-isis-conceding-defeat

The New Yorker

Saudi Arabia's Game of Thrones
By Robin Wright

In the fractious world of Middle Eastern politics, Mohammed bin Salman is seen either as a long-awaited young reformer shaking up the world’s most autocratic society, or as an impetuous and inexperienced princeling whose rapid rise to power could destabilize Saudi Arabia, the preëminent sheikhdom on the energy-rich Arabian Peninsula. Either way, the thirty-one-year-old is now set to be the kingdom’s next ruler—potentially for the next half century—following an abrupt shakeup in the royal family.

On Wednesday, King Salman, who is eighty-one and frail, ousted his more seasoned heir—a fifty-seven-year-old nephew who crushed Al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia during decades as the counterterrorism tsar—in favor of Prince Mohammed, the monarch’s seventh and favorite son. The sprawling royal family has traditionally shared power among the first generation of sons of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the founding father of modern Saudi Arabia. When he died in 1953, he had fathered forty-three sons and even more daughters. Since then, an artful balancing act has distributed politics, privilege, and financial perks among the royal family’s many branches. The arrangement preëmpted serious dissent.

Now, in a royal decree, the king’s move has bypassed his own brothers, hundreds of royals in the second generation who thought that they had a shot at the kingship, and even his own older sons. Prince Mohammed is the youngest heir apparent in Saudi history—by decades. In a country long ruled by men who grew up without air-conditioning or direct-dial phones, the new crown prince talks of growing up playing video games, carries an iPhone, and talks openly about idolizing Steve Jobs.

Not everyone is happy.
Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/saudi-arabias-game-of-thrones

The New Yorker

My Last Conversation with My Father
By Robin Wright 

As my sister, Jana, tells it, my father and I had one long conversation that spanned thirty-four years. “From the time I remember, you and dad were always talking—about the world, about sports, about everything,” she told me recently. My dad often told us that he assumed that he would have sons, but he ended up with girls. He eventually adjusted. I was his firstborn; I became his mission.

My father, L. Hart Wright, was the son of conservative Baptists in Oklahoma—his father was a bank president and his mother a snob who boasted of having descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He became an agnostic, a liberal, and a law professor at the University of Michigan who ironed his own clothes. He wore bow ties most of his life. My mother made them. He ended up with four hundred, kept in boxes marked “Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Fall.”

He taught his children and his students with ferocious passion. My mother was an actress and my father could be a stage-door Johnny, doting on her performances. But he rivalled her for theatric flare. “For him, a class was a dramatic piece,” his colleague Douglas Kahn once told a campus publication. He made his classes into morality plays, full of flawed characters and human drama and life lessons—often a bit of mischievous humor as well. Sally Katzen, one of his students, wrote about being perpetually late for his 8 a.m. classes—until the day Dad greeted her with a tray of eggs, bacon, toast, juice, and coffee.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-last-conversation-with-my-father

The New Yorker

The Library Without Any Books in Mosul
By Robin Wright

I could smell the acrid soot a block away. The library at the University of Mosul, among the finest in the Middle East, once had a million books, historic maps, and old manuscripts. Some dated back centuries, even a millennium, Mohammed Jasim, the library’s director, told me. Among its prize acquisitions was a Quran from the ninth century, although the library also housed thousands of twenty-first-century volumes on science, philosophy, law, world history, literature, and the arts. During the thirty-two months that the Islamic State ruled the city, the university campus, on tree-lined grounds near the Tigris River, was gradually closed down and then torched. Quite intentionally, the library was hardest hit. ISIS sought to kill the ideas within its walls—or at least the access to them.

On a rainy day this spring, I walked the muddy and eerily deserted university grounds. I turned a corner and saw the library, a block-long building, charred black and its shell strewn, inside and out, with splintered glass, burnt beams, heat-warped furniture, toppled shelves, and mounds of ashes. In December, as the Iraqi Army pushed into Mosul, ISIS fighters had set the library alight. The books had served as kindling. 

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mosuls-library-without-books

The New Yorker

Terror Strikes Tehran

By Robin Wright 

Terrorists attacked two of the most important symbols of Iran’s Islamic government—its well-guarded parliament building and the lavish shrine where the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is buried. The basic facts on Wednesday, as reported by Iranian media, followed a familiar pattern: mid-morning, four gunmen penetrated security in the parliament’s Hall of Visitors and opened fire, sparking a dramatic standoff with security forces, which spanned four hours. Government snipers took up positions around the imposing Majlis building and helicopters hovered overhead as people inside tried to drop out of windows to safety. At least one attacker detonated a suicide vest. At Khomeini’s tomb, two people—one a woman—opened fire on pilgrims and then detonated a bomb at the entrance. In the twin attacks, the deadliest in Iran in at least a decade, thirteen people were killed, plus six assailants, and forty-three were injured.

Accounts then quickly diverged over just who was responsible for the terrorist rampage. The Islamic State claimed credit for its first-ever attack in Iran. Soon after the attacks, ISIS released a twenty-four-second video through its Amaq news agency, which showed a rifle-toting gunman in parliament, standing over a bloodied body. The attacker invoked terms used in ISIS propaganda about the group’s ability to survive in the Middle East even as it loses its caliphate in neighboring Iraq and Syria. Amid gunshots, the gunman said, “Oh God, thank you. Do you think we will leave? No! We will remain, God willing.” A member of Iran’s parliament later confirmed that the shooting took place in his office and that the dead man was a member of his staff.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps had a different version, however. It charged that Saudi Arabia and the United States were ultimately to blame, even as it acknowledged the claim by isis. The I.R.G.C. said, in a statement, “Public opinion in the world, especially in Iran, recognizes this terrorist attack—which took place a week after a joint meeting of the U.S. President and the head of one of the region’s backward governments, which constantly supports fundamentalist terrorists—as very significant.” It charged that the ISISclaim of responsibility “reveals (Saudi Arabia’s) hand in this barbaric action.” Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/terror-strikes-tehran

The New Yorker

Trump Sabotages His Own Mideast Coalition
By Robin Wright

Less than three weeks ago, on his first trip abroad as President, Donald Trump greeted the young Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who was swathed in white robes and headdress, with effusive warmth. “We’ve been friends now for a long time, haven’t we?” Trump said. “Our relationship is extremely good.” The President announced that the two leaders would discuss “the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment, because nobody makes it like the United States. First, that means jobs,” he said, adding, “It also means, frankly, great security back here” in the Gulf. The same day, at the summit in Riyadh, Trump warmly welcomed Qatar into his new coalition of conservative Sunni regimes, designed to confront Islamic extremism and contain Iran.

On Tuesday, in a series of startling and undiplomatic tweets, Trump threw the leader of oil-rich Qatar under the diplomatic bus. Trump’s stunning flip-flop came a day after a toxic split in the Arab world—the biggest in years—as Saudi Arabia led six countries to sever diplomatic and commercial relations with neighboring Qatar. 

“During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!” the President tweeted after the Saudi announcement. He not only took sides in an intra-Arab dispute; he sabotaged the cohesion of his own new Sunni coalition—which he touted just last month as an unprecedented foreign-policy success. Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-sabotages-his-new-middle-east-alliance

The New Yorker

How Different--and Dangerous--Is Terrorism Today?
By Robin Wright

On Sunday, just hours after the assault on London Bridge, British Prime Minister Theresa May stepped in front of 10 Downing Street and told the world, “We believe we are experiencing a new trend in the threat we face.”

In many ways, the attack in the British capital, as well as others over the past two years in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and Manchester, actually weren’t all that unique in terms of tactics, targets, or even motive. A century ago, a battered horse-drawn wagon loaded with a hundred pounds of dynamite—attached to five hundred pounds of cast-iron weights—rolled onto Wall Street during lunch hour. The wagon stopped at the busiest corner in front of J. P. Morgan’s bank. At 12:01 p.m., it exploded, splaying lethal shrapnel and bits of horse as high as the thirty-fourth floor of the Equitable Building on Broadway. A streetcar was derailed a block away. Thirty-eight people were killed; many were messengers, stenographers, clerks, and brokers simply on the street at the wrong time—what are today known as “soft targets.” Another hundred and forty-three people were injured.

The attack on September 16, 1920, was, at the time, the deadliest act of terrorism in American history. Few surpassed it for the next seventy-five years, until the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, and then the September 11th attacks, in 2001. The Wall Street case was never solved, although the investigation strongly pointed to followers of a charismatic Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani. Like isis and its extremist cohorts today, they advocated violence and insurrection against Western democracies and justified innocent deaths to achieve it.

Europe has also faced periods of more frequent terrorism than in the recent attacks. Between 1970 and 2015, more than ten thousand people were killed in over eighteen thousand attacks, according to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. The deadliest decades were, by far, the nineteen-seventies and eighties—during the era of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades, Spain’s E.T.A., Britain’s Irish Republican Army, and others. The frequency of attacks across Europe reached as high as ten a week. In 1980, I covered what was then the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe since the Second World War when a bomb, planted in a suitcase, blew up in the waiting room of Bologna’s train station. Eighty-five people were killed; body parts were everywhere. A neo-fascist group, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, claimed credit.

 Yet May is correct: modern terrorism is still evolving. Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-different-and-dangerous-is-terrorism-today