Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. February 3, 2022 Who was Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi? And what has become of ISIS since allied forces destroyed its territorial "caliphate" nearly three years ago?
Those questions are front of mind today, after the US military said Qurayshi, ISIS' leader and successor to the better-known (and also deceased) Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed himself in an explosion during a US commando raid in northwest Syria.
The world has lately been reminded that ISIS persists: As The New York Times' Jane Arraf wrote, ISIS' siege on a Syrian prison last month proved the group can still coordinate attacks.
As for Qurayshi himself, he had overseen a recent "resurgence of ISIS in various parts of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon," Tim Lister and Tamara Qiblawi report for CNN. According to radicalization scholar Shiraz Maher, one of the most complete biographies of Qurayshi was penned by BBC correspondent Feras Kilani last April.
Published in Arabic by the BBC and in English by New Lines Magazine, Kilani's reporting has not been confirmed by CNN and rests in large part on obtained documents and unnamed sources. Nonetheless, one draws from it a well-defined image of post-"caliphate" ISIS: a group that has reverted to a decentralized model and has faced internecine disputes—all while dominating spotty patches of territory, posing an active if diminished threat, and remaining poised to exploit Sunni grievances.
Qurayshi "inherited a tired, dilapidated organization" after al-Baghdadi's death, Kilani wrote. "Tens of thousands of its leaders and fighters had been killed, and many of those who survived were languishing in prisons across Iraq and Syria."
But Iraqi and Syrian jails "are overflowing" with jihadi prisoners, Kilani wrote, and experts describe them "as a 'ticking bomb' that could explode at any moment if they ever manage to escape. … Under [Qurayshi's] leadership, the organization currently finds itself in a revisionary and preparatory state that could last for years, but with nearly 10,000 fighters in its ranks and the completion of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Syria in September bringing an end to anti-ISIS operations by the Global Coalition [that defeated ISIS in 2019], it is only a matter of time before [Iraq and Syria] witness yet another round of religious violence that one fears might spare nothing and no one." China Sticks to the Zero-Covid Plan As renowned health-policy expert and bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel told Fareed on Sunday's GPS, China's stringent, lockdown-centric "zero-Covid" strategy could be a disaster in the making, now that Omicron has arrived: Given the low relative efficacy of Chinese vaccines against Omicron, and the stunning paucity of Covid-19 cases in China to this point, the variant could rip through a low-antibody population with devastating results.
At the Financial Times, an essay by Edward White and Eleanor Olcott notes China is sticking to its strategy, with good reason: The country has relatively few ICU beds per capita, and its hospitals could be overwhelmed if anti-Covid-19 controls are lifted. At the same time, China has yet to approve BioNTech's shot and could be waiting for a Chinese-made mRNA vaccine to come online.
But some see ulterior motives, White and Olcott write, noting arguments "that Beijing's propaganda, surveillance and censorship machines have benefited from the pandemic. And for [President] Xi [Jinping], the state's ability to limit dissent is essential this year as he seeks to extend his leadership at a twice-a-decade party congress in November, laying the ground for years more of unchallenged rule." 'Putin's Gamble Has Failed' That's the conclusion of a recent New York Times opinion essay by Yulia Latynina, who writes that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely doesn't want an expanded conflict with Ukraine. Rather, Latynina posits, Putin has massed troops near its border as a low-cost "bluff," in hopes of prompting the West to give up on bringing Ukraine further into its fold.
"Instead of trapping the United States, Mr. Putin has trapped himself," Latynina writes. "Caught between armed conflict and a humiliating retreat, he is now seeing his room for maneuver dwindling to nothing." In another Times opinion essay, Ivan Krastev writes that Europe and Ukraine are less convinced than the US that Putin would launch a new invasion—and that they see a sustained, hybridized Russian threat as more suitable to Putin's suspected aim of applying stress to Western cohesion. Get Ready for a Nuclear-Powered Space Race It's not often that the phrase "ion thrusters" makes it into widely circulated print, but The Economist writes that given recent Russian and Indian tests to shoot down satellites, the Pentagon is interested in developing nuclear-powered ones that could evade missile attacks.
Potential nuclear satellite-propulsion mechanisms include firing ionized gas out of a propeller nozzle and a nuclear battery of sorts, which would generate energy via decaying isotopes. Concerns, on the other hand, include what might happen if a nuclear-powered satellite crashed out of orbit. China and Russia, the magazine writes, have expressed similar interest as the US.
"By the end of this decade, NASA also wants a nuclear plant to power a base on the Moon," The Economist concludes. "Proposals for a 10kW 'fission surface power' facility are due in to the space agency by the middle of February. All this means that one way or another, space is entering its nuclear age." |
