Minimizing Unintended Deaths Enhanced the Effectiveness of Targeted Killing in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Targeted killing has become a primary counterterrorism measure used by a number of countries in their confrontation with lethal threats. This article focuses on the impact of unintended deaths on the effectiveness of targeted killing. The article evaluates the effectiveness of targeted killings carried out in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict theater that resulted in unintended deaths, compared to the effectiveness of targeted killings where the intended target is the sole person killed. Using multivariate analysis, we demonstrate that targeted killings with unintended deaths were followed by a greater number of suicide bombings and associated casualties compared with targeted killings with no unintended deaths. Based on these findings, nations involved in such conflicts should strive to inflict as few unintended deaths as possible, not only because it is morally right, but also because it is more effective in mitigating terrorism.     

Ghost Martyrs in Iraq: An Assessment of the Applicability of Rationalist Models to Explain Suicide Attacks in Iraq

Scholars have developed several rationalist explanations for the use of suicide attacks by terrorist organizations. Using evidence from Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, and Turkey, these authors have created plausible and rational models for attacks, which many consider to be “irrational.” Although the conflict in Iraq has, by most accounts, experienced more suicide bombings than any other struggle, its contemporary nature has made research and analysis on the subject difficult. This article analyzes four of these models and their implications with respect to the events in Iraq. Although the evidence is not conclusive, the data suggests that organizations are not using suicide attacks to (1) gain nationalist objectives, (2) signal strength to a foreign government, or (3)“outbid” rival organizations, as many scholars suggest. Instead, the evidence suggests that these attacks are used for (1) tactical advantages and (2) to aid the global recruiting effort of Al Qaeda–linked organizations.     

Repression and the Spread of Ethnic Conflict in Kurdistan

Why do ethnic conflicts spread to neighboring states? This article examines the effect of transborder ethnic groups on the spread of ethnic conflict. It argues that when a transborder ethnic group is in conflict in one state, neighboring states perceive a threat from members of that ethnic group residing in their own territory, leading the state to take preemptive repressive action. This repression in turn changes the ethnic group's security situation within the state and can result in violence and thus ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflict spread is not determined by the actions of either the ethnic group or the state alone, but is a product of threat perception and interaction between the two groups. This argument is tested in a set of cases in a region where an ethnic conflict seems to have spread—the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey from 1961–2003.     

The Western Muhajirat of ISIS

An unprecedented number of Western women have recently joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The group has envisaged strictly non-combat roles for them, but violence is an essential part of their embraced ideology and several signs suggest that they could claim a more militant role. Their marginalization, however, is essential for the preservation of ISIS's power system and it is consequently unlikely that it would accommodate such aspiration, at least in the areas of the proclaimed caliphate. It could be different in the West, where women returning from conflict areas or those, even more numerous, anxious to join but unable to travel, could engage in violent acts.     

Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq

The United States has long been frustrated in fighting insurgencies. An almost unbroken string of mostly ill-fated experiences in effectively prosecuting this unique blend of political-military operations can be traced backward over nearly half a century from the situation in Iraq today to the early 1960s when the U.S. became heavily engaged in Indochina's wars. Vietnam and Iraq thus form two legs of a historically fraught triangle—with America's experiences in El Salvador in the 1980s providing the connecting leg. The aim of this article is not to rake over old coals or rehash now familiar criticism. Rather, its purpose is to use the present as prologue in order to understand in counterinsurgency terms where we have gone wrong in Iraq; what unique challenges the current conflict in Iraq presents to the U.S. and other coalition military forces deployed there; and what light both shed on future counterinsurgency planning, operations and requirements.     

‘Social Distancing’ and Hierarchies of Belonging: The Case of Displaced Population from Donbas and Crimea

Abstract

Following the 2013–2014 protests against then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the armed conflict in Donbas, one of the major challenges for Ukrainian society has been the displacement of over two million of its inhabitants. In 2015, at the peak of the displacement, Ukraine found itself among the five countries in the world, after Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Nigeria, with the highest number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) associated with conflict and violence, and it continues to rank highest in Europe. Very little research has been done to provide a detailed analysis of how internally displaced persons living in Ukraine and outside the country claim and negotiate their belonging in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity and the ensuing war. Feeling of belonging is constructed through a relational process of self- and external categorisation and depends on acknowledgement by other members of the chosen group, therefore this essay also examines the strength and regional specificity of the social distancing towards different groups of Ukrainian IDPs.     

The pre-war reconstruction of post-war Iraq

The period before the March-April 2003 war on Iraq witnessed unprecedented preparation for post-war reconstruction. This 'pre-war reconstruction' or 'pre-emptive reconstruction' confronts those involved in humanitarian activity with urgent practical and ethical questions. This article begins with an outline of the development of post-war reconstruction as a specific area of focus for humanitarian organisations and academia, before examining the pre-war plans for the reconstruction of post-war Iraq. It argues that it is not enough to be cynical about possible US motivations for planning for the post-war reconstruction of Iraq. Instead, pre-war reconstruction offers a number of opportunities for a critique of developments in humanitarianism and US foreign policy. But pre-war reconstruction also carries with it a number of pitfalls, not least the reframing of warfare as a non-destructive activity.     

Understanding Perspectives on WMD and Why They Are Important

Although contemporary jihadist terrorists are most well known for perpetrating operations that generate mass casualties, they also conduct violent acts that yield fewer victims, such as beheading hostages. Examining the religious and cultural contexts that surround jihadist beheadings, developments in new media, and drawing on examples from the Chechen Wars and the Iraq War, this article argues that jihadists have employed this tactic for a range of reasons, including obtaining ransom payments, hampering foreign investment, discrediting transitional states, and recruiting supporters. It also suggests that jihadists' beheading of their captives corresponds with aspects of cosmic war, particularly on how religious terrorists' desires to please a deity and secure a place of honor in the hereafter has devalued the lives of both captor and prisoner. Consequently, contemporary jihadist beheading is an outgrowth of the practice of terrorist hostage taking. As this article goes to press (February 2007) UK authorities disrupted a terrorist cell allegedly plotting to behead British Muslim soldiers who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to broadcast the filmed executions through jihadist websites. Journalists have described the intended beheadings and their dissemination as “Iraq-style.” There is no doubt that jihadist beheading became more widely known as a result of the Iraq conflict. However, the beheadings in Iraq were largely used to recruit future jihadists and to demonstrate jihadists' strength to their potential support base, the global Muslim community. In contrast, the alleged UK beheading plot was aimed at striking terror into Muslims living in the UK so that they would not support or serve their government. Indeed the Iraq beheadings were intended to persuade, and the UK plot was intended to dissuade. These alleged activities suggest that contemporary jihadist beheading is not only an extension of hostage-taking, it is also an independently evolving terrorist tactic.     

Higher education and peacebuilding – a bridge between communities?

As the Syrian civil war enters its fifth year, with over four million refugees and no solution in the near future, the international community must better consider long-term planning in regards to the plight of refugees and services to support them, not just short-term emergency responses. Critically, higher education is all too often ignored when addressing refugee crises, pushed aside in favor of primary education, and effectively disempowering those best suited to eventually rebuild and reconstruct after war’s end. This paper examines the often less considered aspect of refugee access to higher education, using Duhok, located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as a case study, and hypothesizing that refugees’ inclusion in Duhok’s local higher education system can serve as an invaluable peacebuilding tool, bridging host and refugee communities, while empowering refugees to promote peacebuilding and development. We chose to focus on higher education because we agree with the idea espoused by Watenpaugh, Fricke, and Siegel that ‘university graduates … include Syria’s brightest and most ambitious young people … the human capital that will be critical to the rebuilding of Syrian society after the conflict has ended’. This study investigates Duhok area residents’ perceptions of the Syrian refugee crisis and the refugee population, refugees’ attitudes toward the host community and higher education, and personal views regarding intergroup relationships and the role of higher education, drawing primarily on field research conducted in 2013. Approached as a qualitative study, field research was conducted by a two-person team, with members representing the University of Duhok and New York University, and with the aim of actively working with research participants in the hopes of generating policy-related and practical recommendations.     

Commentary: The Logistics of Actionable Intelligence Leading to 9/11

Uncertainty is a hallmark of conflict behavior, and other forms of violence that accompany civil and international war—such as low-intensity warfare, guerrilla, insurgency, and asymmetric conflict—are no exception. This study applied the theory of political uncertainty and complexity theory to the analysis of conflict events during the first three years of the second Iraq war, 2003–2006, limited to the Diyala province. Findings show that neither the time between attacks T or the severity of attacks S (fatalities) have the “normal” (bell-shaped) or lognormal distribution that is characteristic of equilibrium systems. Instead, both variables showed heavy tails, symptomatic of non-equilibrium dynamics, in some cases approximating a power law with critical or near critical exponent value of 2. The empirical hazard force analysis in both cases showed that the intensity was high for the first epoch in both variables (March 2003 to June 2004) but even higher in the latter period from July 2004 to March 2006. Selected policy implications are discussed, including the possibility that real-time or near real-time analysis of the data analyzed through the uncertainty-complexity computational methods would have revealed the gathering momentum of adversarial attacks perhaps in time to have prevented the insurgency.     

The Psychology of Foreign Fighters

The recent influx of foreign fighters into Syria, particularly those aligning with the Islamic State, has brought renewed attention to the security threat posed by people who cross borders to participate in armed conflict. Although foreign fighters have rarely, if ever, constituted the majority of combatants in a war or insurgency, understanding their role is critical for conflict analysis and prevention. This review focuses on behavioral aspects of the foreign fighter phenomenon. Although other books and articles have focused wholly, or in part, on historical dimensions, the behavioral and social science literature on foreign fighters is much more limited. This review first explores the definitions of “foreign fighter” terminology, then analyzes what is known about their motivations and their pathways toward engaging in armed conflict on foreign soil. It examines recruitment strategies and the role of “radicalization” in feeding the transnational insurgent supply, and finally describes more specifically, the nature of foreign fighter involvement in more recent armed conflicts (e.g., Syria, Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan), and speculates about the prospects for their future involvement.     

Iraqi Refugees in Syria: causing a spillover of the Iraqi conflict?

This article explores the implications of the Iraqi refugee crisis for Syria, which is believed to host up to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees. Many policy makers, activists and analysts, sometimes inspired by the conflict repercussions of refugee crises witnessed elsewhere, have warned against the regional security impact of the Iraqi exodus and consequently speculated about a possible spillover of the armed conflicts in Iraq to its neighbours. The article presents an analysis of the characteristics and composition of the Iraqi refugee population and provides an assessment of responses to the refugee crisis in Syria. Its main finding is that fears for a spillover of Iraq's violence cannot be corroborated. The relative absence of refugee violence can be explained in reference to Iraqi refugees themselves. Given their specific demographic and social traits (including age composition, educational levels and professions, and to some extent religious affiliation), in addition to refugees' sectarian segregation, an overwhelming majority of Iraqi refugees are and remain victims of the violence in Iraq; they are unlikely to become its perpetrators abroad. In this sense the Iraqi refugee crisis constitutes a strong reminder that, in order to assess the propensity of violence among refugees and their purportedly contagious impact on their places of refuge, an understanding of the causes of their flight and their roles in the conflict they are fleeing is essential. It is finally argued that security challenges are likely to come from a different source. Socioeconomic destitution among refugees and the failure to provide adequate humanitarian assistance and protection are and will be causing tensions between them and the host state and host communities.     

Managerial capacity in conflict environments: Management effects of private military and security companies in Iraq

An enduring challenge of public administration research is examining whether public management affects the delivery of public policy results. This study extends managerial influence to include public policy delivery in an active conflict environment. Individual manager training is critical in conflict environments because limited bureaucratic capacity and general environmental confusion are common. Organizations under stress use substitute managers. We argue that substitute managers' effectiveness is conditioned by two factors: managerial capability and networking capability. We examine substitute managers in a unique context, the US–Iraq War. Managers coordinated private military and security companies (PMSCs) to provide coalition forces and the civilian population with multiple services. We argue that managers with prior management experience and network capability are more effective substitute managers. The results suggest that managers with prior experience and networking capability are associated with decreases in civilian casualties. The results provide important policy insights into public management and defence policy.     

It's Easier to Decapitate a Snake than It Is a Hydra: An Analysis of Colombia's Targeted Killing Program

While the use of targeted killings by the United States and Israel has received the most press coverage, Colombia has also utilized targeted killings in its conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Utilizing an original dataset, this study quantitatively gauges the effectiveness of Colombia's targeted killing program, by examining the influence of FARC leadership deaths upon the number and severity of FARC attacks during the years 2004 to 2011. The results suggest that the Colombian government's killing of FARC leaders has been effective in decreasing the number of attacks, but not the severity of attacks     

Violence on Iraqi bodies: decolonising economic sanctions in security studies

Abstract

United Nations agencies report that by 1998, Iraqi infant mortality had risen from the pre-Gulf War rate of 3.7% to 12%. Insufficient food and medical supplies and deterioration of sewage and sanitation systems and electrical power systems reportedly caused an increase of 40,000 deaths annually of children under the age of 5 and of 50,000 deaths annually of older Iraqis. Why is this violence on Iraqis absent from analyses of sanctions in international relations and security studies? This paper is concerned with, first, situating sanctions against the Global South as violence by challenging the conventional theorisation of violence inflicted by the hegemon as a mechanism of ‘national security’. Second, we offer a decolonial reading of the sanctions imposed on Iraq by shifting the locus of enunciation from the state to Iraqi people’s suffering.     

Ethnicity and conflict severity: accounting for the effect of co-ethnic and non-ethnic militias on battlefield lethality

How does the presence of armed pro-regime groups affect conflict lethality? This study examines the relationship between ethnicity, militia violence and conflict lethality in civil wars. We emphasise that differences in whether pro-regime militias were recruited in accordance with their ethnicity or not are critical in their influence upon conflict lethality, which we estimate in battlefield deaths. To that end, we categorise militias into groups recruited on their ethnic basis (co-ethnic militias) and those recruited regardless of their ethnicity (non-ethnic militias). We hypothesise that conflicts are more lethal when non-ethnic militias are involved. We link higher number of battle-deaths in conflicts with non-ethnic militias with the militia use of one-sided violence against civilians. Co-ethnic militias – that is militias recruited from the same ethnicity as rebels – are deployed amongst their co-ethnics and therefore tend to target civilians less than non-ethnic militias. This militia–civilian relationship has direct impact on conflict severity. To test our hypotheses we conduct global statistical analysis of 84 intrastate conflicts from 1989 to 2014.     

ISIS as an Existential Threat to the Druze: The Struggle for Survival

Faced with an existential threat by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria on one hand, and the repressive regime of Bashar Al-Assad on the other, the Druze community in Syria is faced with a dilemma of what political and military position to take. This study examines a variety of internal and external factors that affect the Druze's political and military choices in Syria, and finds that their best choice is to remain neutral in the conflict. I argue that any political and military choice by the Druze in Syria besides neutrality risks endangering the survival of the entire community. This article examines how internal organizational factors and the international community's divided position play important roles in understanding the Druze's decision to maintain a position of neutrality.     

Conflict resolution classrooms to careers: an emergent theory of change with implications for a strategy in peace education

Peace education provides for the development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions appropriate to effective peacebuilding. Therefore, the development of curriculum in degree programs which builds bridges by which students in conflict resolution/peace studies classrooms may cross over to the field of conflict transformation and peacebuilding may properly be thought of as within the sphere of peace education. This paper describes an emerging theory of change in the context of the peace education offered by a graduate and undergraduate program of conflict resolution. It is argued that employability exists at the nexus of student skills and attributes, and the demands of a labor market which a partnership between experienced practitioners and academics has a responsibility to inform and shape through outreach, education, practice, evaluation, research, and publication.     

From resistance to military institutionalisation: the case of the peshmerga versus the Islamic State

This study explores differing strategies and tactics employed by the peshmerga forces against the Islamic State (IS). This experience highlights a number of issues which are relevant to contemporary security debates. Firstly, the struggle highlights important aspects of the development of the peshmerga and their strategies as an organised non-state military force (defending as it does the Kurdistan Region in Iraq). Secondly, the peshmerga–IS conflict is an important case study of small wars. The strategy and tactics used here are therefore useful empirical references about the effectiveness of military force in counter-insurgency. Finally, the war against IS united the peshmerga forces, possibly for the first time, and effected a radical change in the Kurdish use of military tactics, including the shift from defensive to offensive strategies. The article examines the methods employed by the peshmerga forces against IS, explains why the cases of Makhmour and Shingal stand out as tipping points, and discusses the evolution of Kurdish defence capacity.     

Improvised Explosive Devices in Southern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, 2002–2009

Homemade bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are staple weapons of conflicts in South Asia and especially Southern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, where the Taliban, their affiliates, and other armed groups use them to undermine recognized governments and policies. This study establishes IED trends in the Afghanistan provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, and Nimroz and the Pakistani province of Balochistan between 2002 and mid-2009, using geo-referenced open source IED event information and statistical or geospatial analysis techniques. This study also furnishes assessments of specific IED technologies, techniques, and procedures (TTPs; like explosively formed projectiles or radio-controlled “spider devices”) as well as discussions of their potential causes and observable effects. There are several major trends observed: a continuous increase in volume and lethality of attacks, more expansive geographic distribution of attacks, and multiple bombing campaigns overlapping in Quetta, Balochistan province, that are perpetrated by groups with different means, tactics, and objectives. The most IED-related violence occurred in Kandahar province from 2002–2008; however, Helmand province was the leading location of bomb events by early 2009. Although large population centers—such as the cities of Kandahar, Quetta, and Lashkar Gah in Helmand province—commonly experienced effective bombings, the trans-border routes through Zaranj in Nimroz province and Spin Boldak in Kandahar province were also prone to many lethal attacks. In particular, this study both confirms and scrutinizes the so-called Iraq effect, the phenomenon of knowledge-sharing between fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even though fighters who gained experience in the Iraq insurgency provided assistance and training to Taliban fighters, the evidence indicates that some developments in IEDs predated the Iraq conflict or were original to South Asia or other conflicts in history. This evidence provides support for a more generalized and global phenomenon here called “TTP acceleration,” whereby insurgent and terrorist advances in IED capabilities take progressively shorter periods of time to develop and transfer among groups, usually as a result of increased information-sharing opportunities and coincidental alignment of group objectives.