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Or, The Great Game in the One-N-Twenty, as the Shade of Sykes-Picot Rears Its Ugly Head

rev·e·nant
‘rev??näN,-n?nt/
noun
noun: revenant; plural noun: revenants

    a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.

Origin
early 19th century: French, literally ‘coming back,’ present participle (used as a noun) of revenir .

[Source – Google]

A walk down Memory Lane, because even with all eyes focused on Ukraine, China and the multiple, deepening scandals in the United States, there are other enemies who are still out there, enemies thought dead…but who are very much alive.

In the week preceding January 10, 2016, the conflict in war-torn Iraq and Syria entered a new, and extremely dangerous phase. To understand why, we need to dial back, and quickly review the last few years of the regional conflict.

In 2003, the United States invaded the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The why’s and wherefores of the US invasion and conquest of Iraq aside, this seminal event is what sparked the state of affairs.

The origins of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are shrouded in confusion and rumor, but it is generally agreed that it accreted from several sources, including the Jordanian-born Salafist radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, survivors of US detention camps, including their nominal leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at the time, and a group of surviving officers of the disbanded Iraqi Army and the Iraqi Republican Guard Corps, with at least some funding, advice and moral support from the remnants of the Al-Qaeda organization.

However, it is vital to remember that ISIL’s initial wave of success, riding on the back of the confusion caused by the fallout of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, petered out in early 2013, and was only revived by under-the-table assistance from Turkey:

This allowed ISIL to operate from its territory, under the guise of supporting the anti-Assad “Free Syrian Army”. In looking over the date-progression in the animated map, above, it is absolutely clear that ISIL was using base areas in southern Turkey, unfettered by Turkish security forces.

Then, as Russian and Syrian government forces closed in on the FSA- and ISIL-controlled city of Aleppo, in the north of Syria, Turkey doubled down, intervening directly in the conflict, while chastising the US over its refusal to designate various factions of Kurdish ground forces as “terrorist organizations” – primarily because even the Presidential administration of Barack Obama had finally accepted that the Kurds were the one group that it could fully rely upon in the area, within their limits. As well, several Gulf Arab States, led by a Saudi Arabia currently eye-deep in a vicious ground war on its own southern border with Yemen, hinted that they, too, might attempt to intervene to prevent the total collapse of anti-Assad resistance.

For Turkey’s part, this is easy to understand. Turkey desires a much greater role in directing regional affairs, as was demonstrated in their active support for pro-Palestinian activists in the “Freedom Flotilla’s” of 2010 and 2014. Where Turkey erred was in assuming that it could secure its southern borders, as well as play ‘kingmaker’ in both Iraq and Syria, by supporting – however tacitly – groups such as the FSA, ISIL and the Al-Nusra Front, while ignoring its own Kurdish problem.

This, more than anything, is what undermined Turkey’s position: ethnic Kurdish areas comprise the southeastern one-third of Turkey’s territory, as Kurdish forces have coalesced over the last twenty-five or so years, and become far more professional militarily. Turkey’s adamant refusal to even consider negotiation with the Kurds brought it to the brink of war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as the Russian colossus ground away at the groups Turkey was supporting, and the US and Russia no longer simply provided aid to the Kurds, but are coordinating operations with them at some level.

The danger for Turkey, at this point, was abundantly clear: acknowledgement of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq or Syria would put pressure on Ankara to do likewise, and end its ongoing internal campaign against the Kurdish PKK in its southern region…in effect, this would severely weaken Turkey and ultimately result in its partition.

In threatening to intervene significantly in Syria – an intervention that, although left unspoken, would certainly bring Turkish and Russian military forces into direct conflict with each other – Turkey banked on its membership in NATO to deter Russia from taking any substantive military action against Turkey directly.

This was whistling past the graveyard, as Russia had already invested far too much to simply back away. That, in turn, left NATO, and the US, with the stark choice of abandoning a member-state, which risked destroying the alliance wholesale, or in actively aiding Turkey militarily, an action which would certainly lead to a general war — in other words, with no hyperbole, World War III.

This was headed off by cooler heads in NATO, who told Turkey flatly that Article V did not apply if Turkey was the original aggressor, which it most certainly was.

But what of the other players involved in this? Why are they rattling their sabres?

Saudi Arabia is divided. Internally, there are certainly factions within the Saudi power structure who actively support ISIL, as much as there are others who are adamantly opposed to the terrorist regime. However, Saudi Arabia is tasting, for the first time in a very long time, the addictive drug of military power with its intervention in Yemen. Appearing as a strong and powerful champion of Sunni Islam is seen as a vital necessity, due to the internal divisions within Saudi Arabia.

In the case of Iran, they have been at the “war thing” for several thousand years, and are quite competent, militarily speaking, when its ‘government du jour’ gives its military the chance to actually do the tasks that they are armed and uniformed to carry out. This is clear in Iran’s response to the threat to their fellow Shiites in Iraq.

In the map video above, ISIL’s strategic intent in Iraq can be discerned by watching the area around Baghdad: ISIL wisely did not attempt to actually storm the mega-city [1], but neither did they attempt to cut its road access. That it could have done so at any time should be painfully clear, but yet that did no act to do so. The reason for this seemingly-puzzling action – or lack of it – as the Iraqi Army was collapsing before the ISIL juggernaut.

[1] — Megacities In Future Operations

Iran saw that one of ISIL’s primary strategic goals was to goad them into sending in the Iranian army, the “Artesh”, to save Shia Iraq from ISIL. This would have resulted in ISIL calling on the wider Sunni world to wage its version of “jihad” against a group it hates worse than any other, as it views Shia Islam as a terrible heresy to its own beliefs, a heresy far more terrible and threatening to itself than other nations or religious faiths.

Instead, Iran sent the Quds Force, Iran’s “special operations” force. Sending in this very capable unit demonstrated Iran’s resolve, bolstered the flagging Iraqi Army, and required only a very tiny “footprint” on the ground.

This caught ISIL flat-footed, and at the end of its initial supply chain. At this point, ISIL fatally turned inward, trying to organize its rear areas, while getting as much equipment as possible from its suppliers, including Turkey.

This was an inevitably fatal move, because ISIL could not create the necessary internal infrastructure to support a modern military force in the absence of massive external aid – neither Iraq nor Syria were ever very heavily industrialized, and ISIL combat forces destroyed much of what heavy industries were present. Similarly, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIL’s religious dogma severely limits its ability to create the vibrant defense industrial base without which it cannot win, in the absence of massive supply from a friendly foreign government.

Thus, the minute Russia injected itself into the conflict, essentially replicating what the US did in the early phases of its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, ISIL and its allies – “moderate” and otherwise – appeared doomed, as there was no way that they could respond to precision Russian airstrikes.

Unless Turkey tried to intervene to aid them directly – and that was “a bridge too far” for Ankara.

The days of ISIL and its allies seemed to be numbered, as late as 2018…but, the Islamic State – like a poorly-treated cancerous growth – did not die out. Frayed nerves, along with poor decision-making and thought processes have allowed this regional conflict to metastasize into a world-spanning war, as happened almost exactly one hundred years ago.

Or, Professionals Are Predictable, But The World Is Full Of Amateurs

Any reader of this publication is almost certainly familiar with any number of terrorist and/or guerilla groups. Indeed, we see their depredations on an almost daily basis — depending on where the reader lives in the world, terror group news may be the only news available.

But, from a purely psychological point, knowledge of the various terror groups around the world is comforting: with relative ease, the inquisitive person can find out the basics on virtually any group with perhaps an hour or two of research online. “Google Fu” is a working verb, now. In that sense, groups like the so-called “Islamic State“, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and any other “dead-enders” around the world are not really all that scary — when you learn about your enemy, you steal some of their power, and make them that much less, in your mind.

But — what about the group you’ve never heard of?

What I mean, here, is that unknown group — the group on no one’s radar. The group that sits quietly, like a spider at the center of its web, waiting for a hapless fly to get stuck. The group that explodes (sometimes, literally) onto the world scene: Who are these people? What do they want? How many of them are there? And so on…

The cold facts of life are that, for all the uncountable billions of dollars spent on the kaleidoscope of intelligence disciplines by various countries, there are well in excess of seven billion people in the world, currently. No matter how much intelligence agencies may desire it to be otherwise, there is simply no way to monitor every individual in a meaningful, timely manner.

Case in point – David Coleman Headley.

Headley (a committed member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group) was that group’s principle reconnaissance operative that they used to scout the city of Mumbai, prior to the group’s bloody attack on the city in 2008. Headley might have been many things…James Bond, he was not. He made mistake after mistake, “bush-league” errors in tradecraft that no operator with the slightest pretense to competence would have made.

And he still got away with it.

Although he did not actually take part in the attacks in India, Headley continued his career as the “perfect” terror scout (a consequence of his United States citizenship, and his West European features – inherited from his American mother, a daughter of the Philadelphia Society) Headley was able to move freely around the world, scouting multiple potential attack locations for the LeT. It was not until he turned up on the United States’ Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) radar (when he attempted to scout out an attack location in Denmark for Al Qaeda) that the DHS agents who intercepted him in Chicago, Illinois in 2009, began seriously questioning him. Headley, assuming that DHS knew all about his Mumbai scouting work as well, confessed without prompting.

Intelligence agencies throughout the West had absolutely no inkling of the scale of Headley’s connection with terror groups prior to his “on loan” work for Al Qaeda.

But Headley was, indeed, ultimately working for well-known terrorist groups, most of whom were under some level of surveillance; Headly was not an “independent operator”. The same rules applying to Headley, applied equally to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Britain’s MI6 and the old Soviet KGB, as well as its replacement, the Russian Federal Security Bureau (FSB).

What follows is a cautionary tale, one that explains why eternal vigilance at the individual level is the price we all pay for the benefits of globalization and a much smaller world than existed a hundred years ago.

When examining the structure of any group, whatever its aim, the following five archetypal people must exist to make the organization work:

1. The People Person. This is the person who recruits people to whatever the group’s stated cause is. How public that statement of purpose is, directly affects how quickly a group can expand its numbers with “spear carriers”.
2. The Banker. This is the fund-raiser, the person who obtains money for the Cause, whoever that is. The Banker is the person who finds the money necessary to make the group function externally — it’s one thing to gripe in private. To act outside the status of a discussion group, money – a lot of money – is required.
3. The Support Person. This is the person who makes the drudgery work: they take the money provided by the Banker, and use it to purchase all the “stuff” that the Cause needs, whether that is buildings, office supplies, advertising space, food, medical supplies, etc. They might use the people recruited by the People Person, but this is not strictly necessary.
4. The Idea Person. This is the person who can form and articulate the Big Idea, both to the core group and the recruits, but also to the outside world. This person is sometimes the Leader, but not always.
5. The Leader. The Leader is the “front man”. They may also be the Idea Person, but not always. This is the person who can be held up as the prime example of the goals of the organization; this can, obviously assume messianic proportions.

Aside from the possible overlap between the Idea Person and the Leader, these people are mutually exclusive of each other — it is virtually impossible for a single person to perform even two of these functions, far less, all five. This is a very good thing, as it becomes increasingly more difficult to assemble more or less complete strangers into a functioning group.

However, if three of these archetypal people do assemble, with some form of malicious intent, the potential scale of destruction becomes terrifying. Below we’ll look at a “near-miss”…a near miss incidentally, that led – in a peripheral way – to this author joining The Freedomist.

(NB: This specific incident ultimately led to the author’s joining the old MilitaryGazette blog, because while I had joked for years that I could equip an army out of an Army-Navy store, I had never actually tried to price it out…but that’s another story, entirely.)

Many years ago, this author was contacted by a friend on Facebook, who sent a link to a story at Cracked! magazine. The story was exactly the kind of thing I love to read. But it was just one entry in an article full of similar entries. So, I read on. That led me to the first part of this cautionary tale: the story of David Deng.

David Deng (real name: Yupeng Deng), a Chinese national, walked into an Army-Navy surplus store in Southern California in 2008, bought a used uniform, and put together enough patches to look believable (to those with no experience to speak of) as a colonel in the US Army Special Forces, styling himself as something that translates into English as the “Supreme Commander, U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve“.

He then opened what he termed an “Army recruiting office” in Temple City…but he only recruited people just arriving in the United States from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), people who did not speak very good English, and had very little real knowledge of the United States, or of its military. Deng presented the US Army as if it were a ‘tong‘, in which a person had to pay a fee to join, along with monthly dues, and would have their citizenship “fast-tracked”. Additionally, they would receive uniforms and military identification cards that would give them some level of immunity for minor offenses, like traffic tickets. Of course, the uniforms came from Army-Navy surplus stores, and the identification cards came off of Deng’s printer…but his “recruits” didn’t know that.

Deng managed to get his private “army” into various parades and celebrations in Los Angeles County’s Chinese community, including photo-ops with local political figures. Although people thought this “unit” to be rather strange, and somewhat sloppy (Deng, not being military himself, had no real idea of what or “how” to teach his “troops”), no serious questions were raised…

…For nearly four years.

It was not until 2011 that Deng’s scam was blown, when some of his recruits tried to pay their monthly dues at real Army recruiting offices, that David Deng’s army appeared on the radar of the real US Army…and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI then swiftly moved in, and rounded up Deng and his hapless recruits. The FBI quickly determined that his recruits actually thought that they really were in the US Army, and that they really had “enlisted” to serve the United States, and earn their citizenship. US courts declined to prosecute Deng’s recruits, as a result – no wrongdoing on their part, just falling for a vicious, narcissistic crook.

What was shocking, however, were the numbers involved.

The FBI knows for certain that Deng had recruited about one-hundred and fifty people…but they believe the actual numbers could be far higher — on the order of eight hundred individuals. For anyone who knows anything about armies, that’s enough people for anything from an infantry company (the number the FBI knows about for certain), up to a battalion (for the larger number).

To give you an idea of what eight hundred armed men can do, eight hundred ISIL fighters, riding in Toyota pickup trucks, captured the city of Mosul, Iraq in 2014.

It is a good thing that Deng never had weapons to hand out to his army, along with any sort of real training and/or lethal intent for them…

…Which brings us to our next person: Jeffery Alan Lash.

Pacific Palisades is a quiet, upscale suburb of Los Angeles, California. One sunny day, someone walking along the street became curious about an SUV that had been parked in the same spot for almost two weeks. Peering in, they saw a figure that appeared to be dead, and immediately called police…who were already en route to the scene, summoned by another phone call.

When the police arrived, they knew they had an unusual scene: the vehicle and the identification on the remains identified a local man, who lived just a few doors down the street. When they received no answer to a knock at the door, the police obtained a warrant to enter…and just as quickly backed out, and called in the police department’s EOD unit.

It took hours to empty the residence. Within, police found over 1,200 firearms of various types, piles of miscellaneous gear and equipment..and so much ammunition that they stopped counting it early on, and simply weighed it for the evidence locker — ultimately, between five and six tons of ammunition, in various calibers, were recovered.

While the specific details of the story – strange as they are – make for an interesting read, the takeaway for this article is that this one man had managed to somehow put the money together to assemble a large enough quantity of small arms to outfit a battalions-worth of people, of eight hundred to one-thousand troops…and did it without appearing on anyone’s radar, until he apparently died of natural causes.

Now, I want to be clear, here: there is absolutely no evidence that has come to light, to indicate that David Deng and Jeffery Alan Lash ever knew each other, or were in any way insipired by one or the other. However, in these two stories, we have two of the five archetypes: the People Person (Deng) and the Banker (Lash) who tried to be the Support Person.

Lash’s arms buying – whatever he was buying weapons for – could have equipped some kind of military force. Not very well, but those hypothetical troops would have been armed with real weapons, and would have been capable of executing some level of military mission…again, not very well, but far better than most guerilla armies are capable of doing, especially when they start out.

Likewise, Deng’s recruits were never given any kind of real training that would have allowed them to carry out any kind of realistic mission…but they could have been given that training.

Aside from them not knowing each other, what Deng and Lash lacked was an Idea Person and a Leader. In effect, the two were, hypothetically speaking, just two steps away from creating a real, functional military unit: they needed to have known each other, and needed someone to give them direction on what to do. Speaking as someone who has managed battalion-scale Issue Points and Warehousing operations in a military context, the author is left somewhat breathless at the potential these two men represent — although the days of Bannerman’s are long gone, and while these men – primarily Lash, in this instance – didn’t assemble the kind of gear or carry out the training for Deng’s recruits that I would have, they did far better than they had any right to.

At the end of the day, though, what does the foregoing actually mean?

In a word (okay, three words), globalization and mass production – whatever their very real benefits might be – have also brought into sharp focus the fact it is relatively easy to assemble a force that can function as a military unit, in a relatively short period of time…given more money, it is equally possible to assemble and train that force to some level of competence above that of a street gang, using materials freely available online.

You, the Reader of this piece, need to remain vigilant — there are plenty of David Deng’s and Jeffery Alan Lash’s out there in the world. Do not assume that because it looks complicated, it can’t be done.

Find a way to get inside the enemy’s OODA Loop.

Forewarned, is forearmed.