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Assyrian Christians crowdfund an army to reclaim homeland from ISIL

At a covert training camp just north of Mosul, ten miles from the front lines with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the first wave of Assyrian Christian volunteers for the Nineveh Protection Unit (NPU) have just completed boot camp. Funded mainly by an Assyrian-American telethon campaign and trained by a handful of freelance U.S. military veterans, around 500 men are set to deploy next week as part of an unorthodox — and unproven — project.

But as ISIL pillages what’s left of their ancestral homeland, and Iraqi government forces prove incapable of stopping them, some among the region's dwindling Assyrian Christian minority have placed their hopes for self-preservation in the NPU, which plans to grow by the thousands in the coming months.

“Their morale and capabilities are higher than almost anything I’ve seen,” said Matthew VanDyke, an American filmmaker and former rebel fighter in Libya who organized training sessions over the past two months to whip the NPU into fighting shape. “The kidnapping of their people, the loss of their homeland, the use of their women as sex slaves — it’s really put a fire in them.”

The idea for a professionalized Assyrian army was first conceived last summer, when ISIL mounted its infamous surge across northwestern Iraq’s Nineveh plains, slaughtering or enslaving hundreds of Assyrians and other religious minorities who stood in its path. Their supposed protectors, the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, wilted before the onslaught, with many soldiers reportedly abandoning their posts and stripping off their uniforms to avoid detection.

The lesson, said Kaldo Oghana, an Iraqi Assyrian official and NPU spokesman, was that “no one protected minorities then, and no one ever will.”

So in early December, political leaders for the 400,000-member Assyrian community in Iraq, working alonside an Assyrian-American political action group, the American Mesopotamian Organization (AMO), vetted and enlisted the first tranche of displaced volunteers from among 2,500 applicants to compose the NPU’s inaugural battalion. As part of the AMO's Restore Nineveh Now campaign, the goal is to build a force from the ground up that will earn the respect of the Iraqi government and perhaps the anti-ISIL coalition led by Washington. Ultimately, the NPU says, they hope to prove themselves worthy of Iraqi or Western arms.

Though it has not seen action yet, the NPU has already attracted considerable attention in the West, in part due to VanDyke’s involvement. Through a project he calls Sons of Liberty International, VanDyke has crowdfunded online and tapped $12,000 of his savings to train local Christian forces against ISIL — starting with the NPU. At the NPU camp last month, VanDyke recruited five U.S. combat veterans to run a training course — involving simulated battles and physical training — at an Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga facility.

"The world has been slow to act," against ISIL, said VanDyke, who spoke from the Kurdish city of Erbil. "We don't have to seek approval from Congress. We just step in and help."

The urgency of their mission was underlined in tragic fashion this week, when ISIL stormed over 30 Assyrian villages along the Khabour River in Syria. In a pattern that has become all too familiar, ISIL quickly overpowered a smattering of local Assyrian and other militia fighters, burning homes to the ground, abducting up to 300 men, women and children, and scattering thousands more from their now mostly overrun homeland.

“We refuse to be just another militia,” said Oghana. “We are working to build security and defense systems for our homeland, the Nineveh plains.”

npu camp
Recruits of the Nineveh Protection Unit march at a training camp run by the Sons of Liberty between January to February.Matthew VanDyke
At the heart of the NPU, and the Restore Nineveh Now campaign more generally, is a nationalist ambition for a semi-autonomous subdivision of Iraq’s Nineveh province, where threatened religious minorities like the Assyrians, who have lived in the region for nearly 7,000 years, as well as Yazidis and Shabaks can take shelter. Assyrians in Iraq — backed by a vocal diaspora centered in the U.S. and Sweden — have argued that their country's constitution provides for the creation of such an entity.

Jeff Gardner, the AMO’s U.S.-based spokesman, said Baghdad's Council of Ministers provisionally voted in favor of the plan back in 2014, though it has been in discussion among Assyrian circles for decades. “Everybody recognizes this need, but unfortunately ISIS is sitting right on top of this area,” Gardner said.

Funding has come from near and far for the Assyrians' various political, military, and humanitarian efforts in Iraq. Around $250,000 has been raised, mainly through two telethons organized by the Southern California-based Assyrian Broadcasting Network, a 24-hour Assyrian language news channel that reaches the diaspora in the U.S. and Canada. The AMO is also lobbying the U.S. Congress for a wider intervention in Iraq, beyond the current coalition airstrikes.

The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for comment on the legality of fundraising for a foreign army, though the Assyrian community says its efforts to "support" their troops are completely legal so long as the money does not go to weapons.

VanDyke has said he has even met with State Department officials about his efforts. In an email to Al Jazeera, the State Department said it could not comment on such a meeting, saying that any American civilians who "may have traveled to Iraq to take part in military activities are not part of the United States government effort in Iraq."

Regardless, AMO said this week that the NPU was not currently working with VanDyke. It said the fighting force was graduating to a second phase, which involves creating an officer corps and specialty training. For that, it has reached out to another private U.S. contractor, who it would not name.

"But our biggest struggle is gaining the acceptance of the Iraqi government," Oghana said. Acknowledgement could open the door to heavier equipment and munitions — machine-guns and shoulder-mounted rocket launchers — needed to roll back ISIL and defend more villages from falling.

The NPU has its skeptics, however. The Restore Nineveh Project, and particularly VanDyke’s involvement, have drawn criticism that adding another sectarian militia to the Iraqi battlefield will only serve to further splinter the anti-ISIL movement, which includes the Western-backed Iraqi government, independence-minded Kurds, and hardline Shia militias. ISIL propaganda has already seized upon Christian efforts at self-defense to brand the conflict a new "crusade."

All involved with the NPU, including its American backers, dismissed those concerns. “To say this is a religious war is to say ISIS represents Islam,” said VanDyke, using another acronym for ISIL. “There are no crosses or religious markings on their insignia, nobody’s marching behind a cross. This is a nationalist cause.”

“Christianity is our creed, but there’s something more important than that,” said Oghana. “For us, this is our historical land, not a matter of faith.” In fact, he said, anybody is free to join, especially Yazidis and Shabaks.

From a constitutional perspective, experts said there was cause to doubt the viability of an independent Nineveh Plains Province, however dire Assyrians' plight. “The problem is that the Iraqi constitution works on a system of governorates, but what they’re asking for is the subdivision of an existing governorate," said Djene Rhys Bajalan, a lecturer at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani.

Still, the Assyrian Democratic Movement, an Iraqi political body that oversees the NPU, says it is not interested in compromising. The NPU, notably, turned down an offer to be absorbed into the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga, a Western-backed force that has proven effective on the ground against ISIL.

“We will work with everyone to cleanse Nineveh of ISIL, but we refuse to be loyal to anyone else,” Oghana said. After years of political marginalization and massacre, “our people lack confidence in the whole process, in both the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga.”

Not all Assyrians agree with that assessment. Their people have a tumultuous history of bad blood with the Kurds — most infamously, Kurdish involvement in the 1915 Armenian genocide in Turkey that saw almost 300,000 Assyrians slaughtered. But many point out that the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq is secular and largely welcoming of ethnic minorities.

According to Bajalan, “The Assyrian diaspora in the West, in some ways, is still living in the 1920s,” when a mass exodus of Assyrians fleeing the genocide settled in places like California and Sweden. “They have a negative image of the Kurds, and for good reason, but the realities on the ground are more complicated.”

And Iraq's Assyrian community, which has shrunk from about 1.4 million in 1987 to just 400,000 at last count, represents just two percent of the population. Even taken together with the Yazidis and Shabaks, religious minorities in Iraq have extremely limited political clout. “I don’t know how far banding together is going to get them, unfortunately,” Bajalan said. “These small minorities are in a tough position, squeezed not just physically and culturally, but politically, too.”[/quote
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8ball said:
Were these the plaster replicas?

Regardless, someone on C4 news talked about them 'destroying their identity'.
It was a bit pseudy but I couldn't disagree.
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Were they plaster replicas? That's the second time I've seen it suggested but does anyone know if it's possibly true: whether, for instance, the exhibits were actually plaster replicas?
 
bluescreen said:
Were they plaster replicas? That's the second time I've seen it suggested but does anyone know if it's possibly true: whether, for instance, the exhibits were actually plaster replicas?
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According to the historian guy on C4 news, but I can't vouch myself (he was talking to Jon Snow as they watched footage of them being smashed).
And the subtitles were iffy (I was at the gym), but I'm reasonably sure that's what he said.

I also got the impression ISIS didn't know they were replicas until they started with the sledgehammers.
 
Interesting blog listing IS propaganda billboards in their occupied territories. Tweeter drew attention to it as relevant to the statue smashing, citing this billboard -
"And it is not allowed to preserve for one day a site of polytheism and idols after the decision to destroy and do away with them for they are the religious rites of disbelief and polytheism..."

And this seemed noteworthy - and more gangster than pious messenger -
"If you want to liberate a land, place in your gun ten bullets: nine for the traitors and one for the enemy."
 
8ball said:
According to the historian guy on C4 news, but I can't vouch myself (he was talking to Jon Snow as they watched footage of them being smashed).
And the subtitles were iffy (I was at the gym), but I'm reasonably sure that's what he said.

I also got the impression ISIS didn't know they were replicas until they started with the sledgehammers.
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Yeah, I saw that too. I claim no expertise at all, but it looked like they may have been destroying a mix of replica (reinforced plaster) and genuine artefacts.
 
brogdale said:
Yeah, I saw that too. I claim no expertise at all, but it looked like they may have been destroying a mix of replica (reinforced plaster) and genuine artefacts.
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Fair enough - I was doing my allotted portion of cross-trainer hell and may well have been paying less attention than you. Also, was watching Sky News on other screen...
 
Thanks. Not that it's OK to smash up plaster replicas - sometimes old ones in museums have stood the test of weather and pollution better than originals out in the wild. These men have so much zeal and hate they must be feeling really good about themselves, what with all the idol smashing, book burning, aid worker and journalist beheading, to say nothing of the mass graves.
 
brogdale said:
Yeah, I saw that too. I claim no expertise at all, but it looked like they may have been destroying a mix of replica (reinforced plaster) and genuine artefacts.
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Lindsay Hilsum of Channel 4 was saying on her twitter that one of the winged bulls was an original, from one of the gates of Nineveh.
 
TheHoodedClaw said:
Lindsay Hilsum of Channel 4 was saying on her twitter that one of the winged bulls was an original, from one of the gates of Nineveh.
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It was; they had footage of that being destroyed with the power tool. The only surprise being that it hadn't already been taken apart and removed to the Pergamon/British.
 
TBH, this was my first thought when I saw them smashing stuff - that this is just for show and they will be selling the real deal to mad plutocrats.
 
Patteran said:
Kurdish commentators on twitter suggesting that YPG need FSA support to take/occupy Arab-majority Tel Abyad, because it's not a Kurdish majority town, and is just across the (porous) border from a strong AKP/MHP town.

Edited to add - 'occupy' in a military sense, not a colonial sense (it still sounds dodgy when qualified)
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Good tactical/ political/thinking on the YPGs side of things.
 
The mail get there first:

B-zeFuyW0AALlCZ.jpg:large


I'll go back to proper stuff shortly.
 
brogdale said:
Considering they've had some notice of this news breaking, the CAGE spokesman on C4 news did himself no favours whatsoever. Asked whether or not he condemned Emwazi's alleged actions, Asim Qureshi tried the old 'you're only asking me that because I'm Muslim' line. Well, no Asim...you're being asked that because you're being interviewed as a representative of an advocacy organisation and offering up theories about Emwazi's radicalisation.
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To be fair I can understand the process whereby a normal person from an ordinary background with a good education falls in with the wrong crowd, becomes radicalised, and turns into a complete and utter cock.

But enough about John Rees.
 
Last edited:
CAGE seems to be in the papers again today, including a relatively sympathetic piece in the Graunid

This is a good article

Parts of the liberal left should be honest with the British people about their alliance with CAGE and Moazzam Begg. Now more than ever we must turn to Meredith Tax’s book ‘Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights’ for reference and moral clarity

It is entirely correct that the rule of law should be upheld for Moazzam Begg. It is entirely correct that the ethical abomination of Guantanamo Bay be campaigned against. The left should oppose and be sceptical about further misguided laws to combat extremism, as suggested by Theresa May.

But sections of the left must also be honest about their support for groups like CAGE and all other Salafi/Islamist/Jihadi activists. They should tell the British people that support for them is on the same basis as supporting the rights of, for example, nationalist fascists, and on the basis of the principle that our laws apply even to extremists and fundamentalists.

What the left should never do is whitewash the ideas and beliefs of people like CAGE and Moazzam Begg. Their agenda is to be an advocacy group for Islamic fundamentalism in British society, and to use the left as the soap powder for that washing.

Now more than ever the pamphlet written by Meredith Tax in 2013 called ‘Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights’ needs to be read.

It outlines a deeper problem we face, of moral relativism, and of how too many sacrifice secular principles to an unquestioning deference towards Islamists. The left, says Tax, is caught in a ‘double bind’, of speaking out against prejudice towards Muslims, the excesses of the state in the ‘war on terror’, and the need to oppose the ideas, beliefs and actions of religious reactionaries, Islamists and jihadi apologists.

This issue came to the fore in relation to CAGE in 2010 when Gita Sahgal, the head of Amnesty International’s gender unit, was sacked after speaking out about the organisation’s partnering with Moazzam Begg.

Sahgal pointed out that allying with a jihadi advocacy group and supporter of the Taliban undermined the fight against misogyny, and that pro-actively allying with Begg and CAGE, whose remit is to apologise for and advance the ideology of Salafi Jihad and hate preachers, compromised the left ethically.

Sahgal said the issue was not about Moazzam Begg’s “freedom of opinion, nor about his right to propound his views: he already exercises these rights fully as he should. The issue is…the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights.”

It is self evident that human rights organisations, and the left in general, should support the rights of members of the BNP, for example, without partnering with them or actively campaigning for them. Even at the heights of the troubles in Northern Ireland, Amnesty International strongly condemned human rights abuses by the British state, without partnering with Sinn Fein or any other paramilitary apologetic organisations. The regression is remarkable.

The result of this is that parts of the left become accomplices to the advancement of reactionary ideology. Their latest opportunistic strategy is to push Begg as a peacemaker and intermediary towards Islamic State jihadis

This is part of a pivoting that the Islamist far-right perform regularly, in which they present themselves as ‘moderate’ in the face of more ‘immoderate’ extremists. The distinction is like that between violent, beheading nationalist fascists and ‘non violent’ nationalist fascists who share the underlying beliefs of the beheaders but see utility in presenting themselves as useful to ‘making peace’ with beheaders.

They wish to be empowered, their ideology to be normalised. Asim Qureshi of CAGE states in an interview with Julian Assange that he agrees with the ‘Islamic concepts’ of stoning women to death, for example. Qureshi has been welcomed and promoted as a human rights activist by some ‘critical’ academics yet actively supports the most inhumane of sharia hudood ordinances.

Even though CAGE say they knew Britons were being held hostage in Syria, at a time the wider public did not, they argued that the UK had nothing to fear from Muslims travelling to Syria to fight. As the crimes of Britons in ISIS and the Al-Nusra front became clear, this analysis was quietly dropped, replaced by the claim that British Muslims were being criminalised collectively, or that particular excesses of the Islamic State’s actions were incompatible with sharia.

CAGE have learned that it is fairly easy to get sections of the relativist left onside through their sophistry, and by suggesting that their reactionary far-right beliefs are contingent on and mitigated by various factors. Attacking the Conservative prime minister helps to make some misguided people on the left rally to their cause too.

But herein is a route to self destruction. A left that becomes a vessel for Salafi apologia and ideology will be consumed by this movement. It will become an accomplice to hateful sectarianism, alienate the wider British public who are full of revulsion for the ethical squalor of this partnering, and become morally compromised to the point of destitution.

Does the left stand for secularism, universal human rights, women’s rights, and against far-right Salafi-Jihadism? Or does it believe in relativism and normalising the Islamist far-right? The road down which certain left-wing apologists for Moazzam Begg and CAGE are travelling is a tragic one, because there is little sign of self awareness of these issues, and it will end in tears. Far-right Salafi Jihadism and Islamism will, like a parasite, consume its carrier and co-travellers.

This subject may look like complex terrain to travel across, but actually it is very straightforward. We should demand that the issues are made plain. Islamists facing prosecution for suspected jihadi activity should be supported on the same basis that Sir Thomas More says even the Devil should be given due process in Robert Bolt’s play ‘A Man For All Seasons’:

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”
We should support all people when due process is violated because the rule of law is what we stand for. Defending Islamists when their rights are violated ultimately means we are defending our own rights and universal rights.

But becoming allied with purveyors of a theocratic far-right ideology that stands in contradiction to the secular, liberal, progressive, feminist values of the left will lead to a tragic spectacle of a movement ultimately destroying itself.

The left must be honest about the issues here, and guard against the abomination of moral relativism and useful idiocy.
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