The order was based on plainly dubious claims about national security, targeting for scrutiny some of the most heavily vetted visitors to the United States. But the tangible purpose it did serve, before being at least temporarily frozen by the courts, was to divide Americans from millions of people in the Muslim world by sending the latter a message of gratuitous insult and contempt — and emboldening the very extremist movements the order was ostensibly directed against.

That kind of polarization may be exactly what some members of the White House want. High-ranking members of the current administration — most notably its chief strategist, Steve Bannon — have publicly espoused apocalyptic theories of history that center on a forthcoming clash between Western countries and the Muslim world, a conflict that many of them seem to perceive as both inevitable and desirable.

There are striking parallels between Bannon’s worldview and the perspective of terrorist groups like the Islamic State, which see the world divided in similarly binary terms — hence their reported enthusiasm for the executive order that Bannon helped author.

A proponent of pseudoscientific theories of history like the “Fourth Turning,” Bannon has predicted the coming of another major U.S. war in the Middle East and a military conflict with what he calls an “expansionist China.” In interviews during the election campaign, Bannon openly described Trump as a “blunt instrument” for his ideological goals.

A 2014 speech that Bannon delivered to an audience at the Vatican provides a hint of what kind of program he might want to use Trump to achieve. In that address, delivered via teleconference, Bannon called for a revival of the tradition of the “church militant,” describing a vague yet apocalyptic threat he claims that Western countries face from both “Islamic jihadist fascism” and their own loss of religious faith.

We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict … to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.

Now consider how Bannon’s hysterical view of history was echoed that same year in a speech by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who issued a similarly vague, yet no less frenzied call to arms:

So let the world know that we are living today in a new era. Whoever was heedless must now be alert. Whoever was sleeping must now awaken. … You will face tribulation and fierce battle. … So prepare your arms, and supply yourselves with piety.

Nowhere are these types of ideas particularly popular. While the Islamic State is held up by anti-Muslim activists in the United States as the quintessential expression of Muslim beliefs, in reality the group is deeply loathed in Muslim-majority countries. In the United States, though Trump won the election, his voter base comprised a distinct minority of the electorate. Even among those who did vote for him, few appear to have done so in enthusiasm for the apocalyptic theories of history held by advisers like Bannon. Huge numbers of people have also taken to the streets in opposition to Trump’s executive orders, which has helped to counteract the administration’s anti-Muslim message to the world, showing that it does not represent the views of all Americans.

But it doesn’t take much for a highly motivated minority to spark a broader conflict.

President Donald Trump pauses as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House, on Feb. 3, 2017, in Washington.

Photo: Aude Guerrucci/Press Pool/Getty Images

ISIS attacks have been deliberately calibrated to shock and offend the sensibilities of Western publics, a strategy that the group openly refers to as “eliminating the grayzone” of coexistence between societies. Many 19th- and 20th-century revolutionary movements were also led by small, militant vanguards that used violence and provocation to help advance their political programs. In their time, these movements achieved real tactical successes. And even today, despite widespread public war-weariness in the United States, ISIS has accomplished its goal of dragging American troops back into armed conflicts in Iraq and Syria that show little sign of abating.

After a series of improbable successes, the radical right-wing vanguard of U.S. politics has now taken control of the government, along with the most powerful military on the planet. In its enthusiasm for civilizational war, it is just the enemy that a group like the Islamic State needs to help validate its desperate and fanatical narrative.

An early example of the kind of harm that the Trump administration can do came in the form of the first special operations forces raid authorized by Trump after his inauguration. In that operation — reportedly promoted to him over dinner with his advisers — a total of 25 civilians were reportedly killed, including nine children under the age of 13. Among those killed was an 8-year-old U.S. citizen, Nawar al-Awlaki, the daughter of deceased al Qaeda proselytizer Anwar al-Awlaki. Images of Awlaki’s daughter and other victims of the raid were broadcast around the world, fueling widespread outrage.

Days later, the Yemeni branch of al Qaeda publicly denounced Trump for carrying out a “massacre” of civilians. The group promised vengeance, saying that global outrage over the deaths meant that “the flame of jihad has ignited and reached all over the world.”

While that may be an overstatement, it is not hard to see how a cycle of tit-for-tat violence, already tacitly established since the start of the war on terror, could accelerate dramatically under an administration that actively seeks to escalate conflict. Where President Obama sought to calm public fears in the aftermath of ISIS attacks, Trump and his administration will undoubtedly seek to inflame them for political gain. It’s only a matter of time before such an attack occurs, and Trump’s reaction could have consequences that quickly spiral out of control.

In his memoirs, published after his suicide in 1942, the exiled Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig described his feelings of despair upon realizing that a “tiny but loud-mouthed party of German Nationalists” had succeeded in seizing power and dragging humanity into a global conflict it had neither wanted or expected. “The personal cause to which I had lent the force of my convictions, the peaceful union of Europe, had been wrecked,” Zweig lamented. “What I feared more than my own death, war waged by everyone against everyone else, had been unleashed for the second time.”

Seven decades after Zweig penned these words, small, well-organized groups of right-wing radicals are once again ascendant across the world. The best hope to stop them may be the popular opposition movements that have begun to stir in the United States. But most importantly, it will take a rejection of the logic of revenge and collective blame on both sides to prevent the apocalyptic visions of extremists from becoming reality.

Top photo: Senior counselor to the president, Steve Bannon, arrives at the presidential inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017.

The post As Tensions Rise, Steve Bannon and ISIS Get Closer to Their Common Goal: Civilizational War appeared first on The Intercept.

Never popular in the first place, domestic counterextremism programs are now likely to become much more aggressive and bellicose. President Trump reportedly plans to redirect counterextremism programs to focus exclusively on Muslim Americans to the exclusion of other groups.

While in practice most CVE programs in the United States already target Muslim communities, President Barack Obama did his best to portray these policies as a form self-empowerment, describing them in a 2015 speech as an effort to help “communities to protect [from violent] ideologies and recruitment.” Under the Obama administration, the federal government rolled out CVE pilot programs in Boston, Los Angeles, and Minnesota. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security authorized $10 million in grants to local NGOs working to “counter violent extremism in the homeland.”

Despite their controversial nature, CVE programs did receive some level of interest from communities in the United States during the Obama administration. Counterterrorism experts say that the new administration — which engages in rhetoric and behavior overtly discriminatory toward Muslim Americans — will likely destroy many existing partnerships while generating opposition to new programs.

“There were some people who saw CVE as the ‘good’ or ‘liberal’ version of the war on terror, and they are likely going to feel uncomfortable about [Trump],” said Arun Kundnani, a professor at New York University. “You will see more resistance from some individuals and groups — including Muslim community organizations that had signed up for CVE under Obama.”

Some of that resistance is already starting to materialize.

Last week, the Minnesota-based Somali-American community group Ka Joog announced that it was declining a $500,000 Department of Homeland Security CVE grant, citing concerns about the new administration. The Somali community in Minnesota has been a frequent target of CVE initiatives in the past, including some “community outreach programs” that were covertly used to conduct surveillance. Nonetheless, during the Obama administration there had been a diversity of opinion among Somali-American groups about the merit of working with the federal government. Under Trump, those mixed feelings are turning into outright opposition.

“We work with refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and this administration is against everything we stand for,” Mohamed Farah, executive director of Ka Joog, told The Intercept. “Half a million dollars is a lot of money — we could’ve done a lot of work with youth in our community — but ultimately it comes down to principles. We have relationships of trust and we can’t be associated with this administration.”

Trump’s reported modifications to government-led CVE programs would fulfill his campaign pledge to target “radical Islam” more forcefully. During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly promised that he would take a combative stance against Islamic extremism, in both rhetoric and action. But experts on counterextremism say that Trump’s heavy-handed approach risks antagonizing potential partners, while doing nothing to address the actual causes of extremist violence. It also shifts resources and attention away from the threat of right-wing extremism, despite a number of deadly attacks in North America over the past several years.

“The Trump administration has indicated that they’re going to reframe CVE purely around jihadism and in the process tear down all the relationships that the Obama administration built,” said Mubin Shaikh, a counterterrorism specialist and an academic researcher on radicalization. “But this whole notion of making CVE only about Islamic extremism when you have white supremacists shooting up mosques, Sikh temples, and churches is completely misguided.”

Nonprofit groups focused on right-wing extremism fear a loss of funding as the new administration shifts priorities. Shaikh says that he expects more CVE money to be redirected to Muslim American groups in the future, but only those that align ideologically with the Trump administration’s views on Islamic extremism. Such groups are unlikely to be representative of their communities, and may even encounter a backlash for cooperating with a widely loathed administration.

“The Trump administration is going to give CVE money to people they support, but these people are unlikely to have any connections with communities or individuals who are actually at risk of extremism,” Shaikh says. “If you really want to counter Islamic extremism, you’re not going to accomplish that by trashing Muslims and insulting them.”

Many academic experts on counterextremism have begun making the same point in recent years. A 2016 study by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University cited past failures in approaches to CVE that alienated communities by treating them as targets for surveillance and counterterrorism operations. The study’s authors called on the federal government to abandon this security-centric approach and work to build genuine partnerships with Muslim American communities. As a prerequisite to this, the study also said that government agencies must “redouble efforts to prevent discriminatory treatment, profiling, and harassment of law-abiding citizens at airports and immigration checkpoints.”

Instead of following this guidance and fighting discrimination against Muslims, the Trump administration has been working to institutionalize it. Executive orders targeting immigration from Muslim-majority countries and a pending bill to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group — a measure that many fear is intended to provide cover for a witch hunt against Muslim American organizations — are just a few examples of this inflammatory approach. Experts say that hostile rhetoric and discriminatory policies are likely to backfire, even if they satisfy Trump’s political goals in the short term.

“The people that you’re dealing with in implementing these programs want to be perceived as partners, and they want to build trust with governmental organizations,” said David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center and co-author of its 2016 study on counterextremism. “But it’s not possible to develop relationships of trust between the federal government and Muslim Americans when you’re going to overtly discriminate against them.”

Schanzer cites the recent example of Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries as an example of institutionalized discrimination that will likely stop Muslim Americans from cooperating with government-led programs. As the administration ramps up its hostility, relationships that were already troubled are likely to deteriorate further.

“The rhetoric and actions that have come out of this administration have shown that they view essentially all Muslims as potential terrorists,” he adds. “I see much of the progress made in recent years being lost in the environment that we’re now entering.”

Top photo: Women in Minneapolis listen to the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Jaylani Hussein, speak about the Somali community’s concerns about a government-initiated countering violent extremism program in 2015.

The post Trump’s Rhetoric on “Radical Islam” Undermines Counterextremism Programs in U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

According to an internal memo issued Thursday by Lori Scialabba, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the portion of Trump’s controversial ban pertaining to the issuance of visas and other benefits to immigrants from the targeted countries “does not affect USCIS adjudication of applications and petitions filed for or on behalf of individuals in the United States regardless of their country or nationality.”

The new memo, obtained by The Intercept, stands in direct contradiction to the earlier DHS guidance, which effectively blocked U.S. immigration officials from issuing decisions in any adjustment of status cases for nationals of the banned countries — including applications for permanent residency and naturalization by individuals already in the United States.

Last weekend, as DHS personnel scrambled to figure out what the executive order meant for their work, a directive from Daniel M. Renaud, associate director of field operations for USCIS, informed senior officials that “Effectively [sic] immediately and until additional guidance is received, you may not take final action on any petition or application where the applicant is a citizen or national of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya.”

A number of rank-and-file DHS staffers were horrified to learn of the directive when they returned to work on Monday.

Thursday’s memo essentially walked back the previous memo — a sign of the chaos that continues to dominate the agency and an indication that policies related to the ban remain uncertain, fluid, and subject to public as well as internal pressure.

In the more recent memo, Scialabba noted that the portion of the executive order dealing with visas and immigration benefits for individuals from the listed countries “does not affect applications and petitions by lawful permanent residents outside the United States, or applications and petitions for individuals outside the United States whose approval does not directly confer travel authorization (including any immigrant or nonimmigrant visa petition).”

The acting director added that USCIS “may continue to adjudicate” permanent resident and status change applications for individuals from the countries targeted by Trump’s order and that the office will continue to adjudicate refugee and asylum petitions for individuals from any country who are already in the United States. “USCIS will continue refugee interviews when the person is a religious minority in his or her country of nationality facing religious persecution,” she wrote.

“Additionally, USCIS will continue refugee interviews in jurisdictions where there is a preexisting international agreement related to refugee processing. USCIS will not approve a refugee application for an individual who we determine would pose a risk to the security or welfare of the United States,” Scialabba wrote, adding that her office will also “continue adjudicating all affirmative asylum cases according to existing policies and procedures.”

The new memo was met with some relief — if ongoing confusion — by immigration officials who had essentially seen their jobs transformed overnight by the original directive.

“This memo completely reverses the hold imposed Monday,” a senior U.S. immigration official told The Intercept, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There is now no additional processing requirements for all immigration petitions for nationals of affected countries. It is essentially a return to the status quo.”

“The speed of the volte-face is surprising,” the official added, noting that a reversal of directive in less than a week was “light speed in government.”

As The Intercept reported earlier this week, the inspector general of DHS opened an investigation into the chaotic rollout of the executive order as well as reports of noncompliance with court orders and “allegations of individual misconduct on the part of DHS personnel.” The probe came in response to “congressional request and whistleblower and hotline complaints,” the office said in a statement confirming the investigation.

Both the internal review and rapid changes in the directives issued to DHS staff are a result of an executive order that was drafted without the input of the agency’s career officials.

This haphazard implementation of Trump’s plan to remake America’s immigration system has resulted in widespread fear and confusion. In addition to an indeterminate number of deportations that have occurred since last week, reports have surfaced of individuals being pressured to sign documents forfeiting their green cards and legal U.S. residents being stranded abroad while traveling.

A State Department memo released last week as part of a lawsuit challenging the travel ban authorized the government to “provisionally revoke all valid nonimmigrant and immigrant visas of nationals” of the seven countries affected. A U.S. government lawyer in Virginia on Friday said that more than 100,000 visas have now been revoked, while the State Department itself has claimed that the figure is closer to 60,000. Both figures contradict Trump administration claims that just 109 travelers were adversely impacted by the ban.

Many of the changes triggered by Trump’s ban have affected international students and other legal permanent residents of the United States, leading to fears of a wave of deportations in the future.

The sweeping, abrupt shifts in U.S. immigration policy triggered by Trump’s executive order have generated widespread protests, with activists descending on major U.S. airports to demand the release of travelers held in detention by border officials. Internal pressure also appears to be building, with immigration officials pushing back against some of the most callous aspects of their new mandate.

The directive DHS officials received earlier this week caused shock and confusion within the department itself — but also spread anxiety among those whose status and immigration prospects were suddenly in limbo, and frustration among the lawyers representing them.

“I think they’re walking themselves back,” said Claudia Cubas, an attorney at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, who works with immigrants at risk of detention and deportation in the D.C. area.

The early memo, Cubas said, was “very broadly worded” — applying not only to adjustment of status cases, but also to more routine applications that have a significant impact on people, like renewing their green card application or renewing their employment authorization. “That meant people would be placed in legal limbo but also in financial limbo,” she said, noting that many immigrants rely on the processing of these applications to continue to work legally.

The new memo suggests the impact would be more limited, she added, but not insignificant. “If there’s still some type of impediment for people to file applications, I think the repercussions will be less than with the previous guidance, but there are still repercussions.”

Most importantly, she noted, the lack of clarity and consistency remains a problem for the thousands of people affected by the executive order. “The importance that government bureaucracies provide, especially such large ones as DHS and USCIS, is consistency in the application of the laws and clear guidance,” Cubas said. “And that has been ultimately the concern since the executive order was issued by the president — that it wasn’t clearly applied, it’s been affecting people very, very differently. And these are not just numbers, these are people’s lives.”

Top photo: Yemeni-led protest outside Brooklyn Borough Hall on Feb. 2, 2017.

The post DHS Walks Back Immigration Directives as Muslim Ban Chaos Continues appeared first on The Intercept.

In an agency-wide directive sent to DHS staff early Wednesday afternoon, the IG’s office wrote, “All agency personnel must preserve any document that contains information that is potentially relevant to OIG’s investigation, or that might reasonably lead to the discovery of relevant information relating to the implementation of this Executive Order. For the duration of this hold, any relevant information that is within your possession or control must be preserved in the exact form as it currently exists.”

The department’s IG office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the investigation.

The launch of the probe, headed by DHS Inspector General John Roth, follows calls from Illinois Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin earlier this week for a “comprehensive investigation” into the “chaotic execution” of the administration’s order, which separated families around the world and led to mass protests at multiple U.S. airports.

In a letter sent to Roth on Sunday, the lawmakers asked the IG’s office to investigate a number of issues related to the rollout of the order, including what guidance DHS and Customs and Border Protection personnel provided to the White House in developing the order and what directions were provided to CBP officers in implementing it.

The lawmakers also asked the IG to investigate whether CBP officers complied with subsequent court orders, and whether DHS and CBP officers kept a list of individuals that they detained at ports of entry.

Despite a Saturday night federal court order blocking all ban-related removals, and a series of subsequent legal challenges in a number of states, including one in Virginia mandating that lawyers be granted access to individuals arriving from affected countries, reports of noncompliance with the orders continued to spread in the following days.

Over the weekend, The Intercept reported on an Iranian citizen at Los Angeles International Airport forced by CBP officials to board a flight to Copenhagen, despite the nationwide stay. In New York, another Iranian woman was forced onto a flight to Ukraine despite the judge’s order. In a phone call with reporters Sunday, Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, said “high-level intervention” was required to prevent the woman from being deported.

“They literally turned the plane around while it was taxiing on the tarmac and allowed her to leave,” Heller said.

In the following days, reports have also emerged of immigration officials making people sign forms renouncing their valid immigration status, sometimes through threats and manipulation.

On Sunday, DHS said in a statement that the department would continue to implement the executive order while also complying with court orders.

“We continue to face [CBP]’s noncompliance and chaos frankly at every airport across the country,” Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, told reporters on Sunday. “The last 48 hours have been really full of chaos, the sense of the federal government completely deciding to not comply with the Constitution and on top of that, to not provide guidance to its field with respect to arriving immigrants and refugees.”

“We are grappling with their all-out rejection — on the one hand saying that they started to comply but on the ground seeing something very, very different,” she added. “The truth is that DHS’s messaging since this nationwide order continues to instill fear in communities and arriving immigrants and refugees.”

The ban was implemented inconsistently in airports across the country — with lawyers and Congress members unable to get answers from immigration officers on the ground.

“Every time we talked to [CBP] about one of these instances, they just told us they were awaiting a call from D.C. and finally stopped talking to us altogether and told us to call President Trump,” said Heller.

“It’s really clear that there’s really no method to this madness and that the fate of all these people is sort of up to the whim of how bold is the [CBP] port director for that airport willing to be,” she said. “Or it begs the question, are there directives coming from D.C. to target certain airports but not others?”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Thomas Homan and DHS Secretary John Kelly listen to questions during a press conference related to President Donald Trump’s executive order concerning travel and refugees, Jan. 31, 2017, in Washington.

Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The nation’s top homeland security and immigration officials defended the execution of Trump’s order in a press conference Tuesday, with DHS Secretary John Kelly saying that Trump’s executive order was “not a ban on Muslims,” adding that “religious liberty is one of our most fundamental and treasured values.”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer also denied that the executive order constituted a ban on Muslims in the United States, also describing it yesterday as “a vetting system to keep America safe.”

But high-level advisers to the Trump administration, as well as Trump himself, have periodically characterized the policy as one intended to ban Muslim travelers from entering the United States. Trump initially rolled out his proposal in 2015 as a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Over time Trump’s public position on the issue shifted between “extreme vetting” and an “expansion” of the initial policy.

But former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a senior adviser to Trump, said in an interview on Fox News last week that Trump had asked him for advice on how to legally impose a Muslim ban. “I’ll tell you the whole history of it: When he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,’” Giuliani told Fox News. “He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’”

Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said last Sunday that the executive order could soon expand to include more countries than the seven currently listed.

Rank and file employees at DHS, who for days have described an atmosphere of chaos and frustration at the agency, learned of the probe with some surprise, according to an official who spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity. “I think the OIG probe will demonstrate that there was a real sense of confusion over the weekend at DHS,” the official said. “I don’t think it will demonstrate any attempt to circumvent the circuit court rulings. There were, of course, numerous instances of individuals, including legal permanent residents being removed after the stay. But any orders to do this would have been given verbally either in person or over telephone. It is highly unlikely that any record of this would exist in written form.”

The inspector general’s investigation comes amid mounting tensions between the White House and career U.S. officials who oppose the Trump administration’s hard-line, anti-immigrant policies. On Monday, acting Attorney General Sally Yates was promptly removed from her position and accused of betraying the Department of Justice just hours after announcing that she would not defend Trump’s executive order on the grounds that it was illegal. Earlier in the day Spicer also lashed out at State Department officials working on a dissent channel memo registering their concerns over the administration’s order — the memo has since garnered 1,000 signatures.

Whether the increasing hostility will impact Roth’s investigation into Trump’s order remains to be seen. The senior immigration official expressed doubts, saying, “Standby for the sacking of the OIG.”

Top photo: A woman of Iranian descent, right, cries as she waits for a family member at Los Angeles International Airport following the immigration ban imposed by President Donald Trump, Jan. 30, 2017, in Calif.

The post Homeland Security Inspector General Opens Investigation of Muslim Ban, Orders Document Preservation appeared first on The Intercept.

Even before the order was signed last week, reports had begun to surface of students at major U.S. universities having their student visas revoked and being barred from re-entry to the country after traveling abroad. The Intercept was able to contact and independently confirm the identities of several people who had these experiences. The individuals affected asked that their identities be withheld because they are attempting to appeal the government’s decision.

Many are now asking what U.S. colleges and universities are willing to do to protect their students from an increasingly predatory administration.

Speakers at a rally at the University of Georgia voice concerns about President Trump’s potentially discriminatory policies on Jan. 20, 2017. Mae Eldahshoury, center, of the Muslim Student Alliance, came to the rally to show support for others concerned about Trump’s “rhetoric to ban Muslims.”

Photo: John Roark/Athens Banner-Herald via AP

The University of Michigan issued a statement that it would not voluntarily share any information about its students’ immigration status with the federal government. A number of other major universities with large foreign student populations contacted by The Intercept also said that it was their policy not to voluntarily share information with the federal government about immigration status without subpoenas.

But many students say that institutions urgently need to do more. “A lot of the institutions are in the same place and are really struggling to cope with the new executive orders. They didn’t expect this to happen, but they need to start taking it seriously,” says Hazami Barada, a student activist at Harvard University. Barada says that school administrators can help students by making immigration attorneys available to them, distributing Know Your Rights information and conducting educational seminars, and providing transparency on what steps they are taking to assist individual students who are now at risk.

“The level of anxiety and fear among students is extremely high,” she says. “This needs to be a priority for all schools, right now.”

Cal Poly students march through campus to protest Trump administration polices on Jan. 31, 2017, in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Photo: Joe Johnston/The Tribune (of San Luis Obispo) via AP

Contacted by The Intercept, a spokesperson for the American Association of Universities, an organizing body representing 60 major U.S. universities, said that it has “not provided advice to [member] universities on how to deal with the impact of the executive order,” but added that it is working “with these universities and other associations to end this order.” The AAU also issued a statement calling on the Trump administration to lift the executive order as soon as possible.

As the impact of new immigration restrictions builds, there are signs that the government may be moving to pressure schools to provide more information on their students. A bill in the New York State Senate introduced by Republican senators last week would require schools to compile reports on their foreign students, including information about countries of origin.

This is where, educators say, schools need to resist pressure.

“One of things we are advocating is that schools resist providing information about their students from the federal government,” says Shirin Vossoughi, an assistant professor at Northwestern University. “It’s possible that in the future the Trump administration may attempt to withhold funding from publicly funded schools if they refuse to share information, but it’s important for them to stand strong on this issue.”

The Student and Exchange Visitor Program, or SEVP, is a program maintained by the Department of Homeland Security to track foreign students in the United States. Legal activists who spoke to The Intercept said that they are working with a number of schools around the country to find legal ways to help them protect some student information from the federal government. After the detention of a number of University of Massachusetts faculty last week, the president of the school joined Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey at a press conference announcing a legal challenge to the executive order.

But even if schools can take steps to protect their international students and staff, the long-term impact of the executive order on higher education in the United States will still be significant.

A 2015 State Department report estimated that there are roughly 1 million international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities. In addition to the research and educational benefits these students bring to American schools, their presence contributed over $30 billion to the U.S. economy last year alone. The abrupt nature of Trump’s recent executive order — stranding many students abroad and barring them from re-entry — shows that the Trump administration is willing to make sudden, drastic changes to immigration policies with complete disregard for their impact on international students and faculty.

Even if students already in the United States can be protected — something that is far from certain at the moment — it’s likely that fewer will choose to take the risk of studying here in the future.

“In the long run, this will be very damaging to the competitiveness of academic institutions in the United States,” says Michael Horn, an associate professor at Northwestern University. A number of Horn’s own students have been impacted by the recent orders, putting their ability to finish their education into question. Horn says the callous disregard for students exhibited by the new administration will have long-term effects on the ability of U.S. schools to attract foreign students, who are particularly well represented in the science and engineering fields.

Says Horn, “If I were a student from any country that might happen to end up on the administration’s list, and executive orders can be sprung without warning on any random Friday, why would I risk coming to the U.S.?”

Top photo: A sign welcomes visitors to the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Nov. 3, 2014.

The post Trump Executive Order Threatens Foreign Students. How Will Their Universities Respond? appeared first on The Intercept.

Almost immediately, various news outlets and political figures depicted the shooter as Muslim. Right-wing nationalist tabloids in the U.K. instantly linked it to Islamic violence. Fox News claimed that “witnesses said at least one gunman shouted ‘Allahu akbar!’” and then added this about the shooter’s national origin:

Suspect in Quebec mosque terror attack was of Moroccan origin, reports show https://t.co/oRzxGHEXDm pic.twitter.com/aEsEtccMvi

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 30, 2017

White House press secretary Sean Spicer exploited the attack to justify President Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the president is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” Spicer said at this afternoon’s briefing when speaking of the Quebec City attack.

But these assertions are utterly false. The suspect is neither Moroccan nor Muslim. The Moroccan individual, Mohamed Belkhadir, was actually one of the worshippers at the mosque and called 911 to summon the police, playing no role whatsoever in the shooting.

The actual shooting suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a white French Canadian who is, by all appearances, a rabid anti-immigrant nationalist. A leader of a local immigration rights group, François Deschamps, told a local paper he recognized his photo as an anti-immigrant far-right “troll” who has been hostile to the group online.

The Globe and Mail added that he “was known in the city’s activist circles as a right-wing troll who frequently took anti-foreigner and anti-feminist positions and stood up for U.S. President Donald Trump.” And Bissonnette’s Facebook page — now taken down but still archived — lists among its “likes” the far-right French nationalist Marine Le Pen, Islam critics Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Donald J. Trump (he also “likes” the liberal Canadian Party NDP along with more neutral “likes” such as Tom Hanks, the Sopranos, and Katy Perry).

It is usually the case that there is significant confusion in the wake of attacks of this sort. And local police did apparently arrest two suspects at first: Bissonnette along with Belkhadir. And until the investigation is complete, one cannot know for certain what the motives here were. One should be careful about trying to infer too much from a hodgepodge of Facebook “likes” and, this early, even anecdotal claims about Bissonnette’s political views. As for reports that someone yelled “Allahu akbar,” it is perfectly natural that someone in a mosque would say that upon seeing a homicidal killer randomly shooting people, or it’s possible that the shooter said it mockingly.

But this is exactly why no responsible news organization, let alone the White House, should rush to depict the shooter as Muslim and of Moroccan descent when so little is known about what happened. Yet not only did Fox and the Trump White House do exactly that, but worse, neither has retracted or corrected their claims long after it became clear that they were false:

Hour & a half after tweeting out false info on #QuebecMosqueAttack Fox News has still not corrected or retracted. @ggreenwald https://t.co/IppNZrXxHH

— Derrick O'Keefe (@derrickokeefe) January 30, 2017

The inflammatory effect of this sort of reckless, biased “reporting” is as predictable as it is toxic. All day long, people around the world cited these reports to justify Trump’s ban as well as their own ugly views of Muslims:

Quebec gunman 'is Muslim Moroccan' https://t.co/UxI42LAY1X via @MailOnline

— TRUMP MOVEMENT (@TRUMPMOVEMENTUS) January 30, 2017

I fully condemn the shooting in Quebec City. But remember the shooters weren't yelling "Trump" they were yelling "Allahu akbar"
#MsuslimBan

— Seven (@StocksAlotTEMP) January 30, 2017

The only part of any of this that’s true is that it was an act of terrorism: terrorism aimed, yet again, at Muslims by someone who has apparently been indoctrinated with a great deal of hate toward them. Media outlets and the White House led people all over the world today to believe exactly the opposite.

Top photo: Police survey the scene after a deadly shooting at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, Jan. 29, 2017.

The post Suspect in Quebec Mosque Attack Quickly Depicted as a Moroccan Muslim. He’s a White Nationalist. appeared first on The Intercept.

But now, thanks to President Trump’s executive order restricting the travel rights of Iranian nationals and others, those plans have been cancelled. Not only will she be unable to meet her mother, her future in the United States is being called into question by the major policy changes being enacted by the Trump administration.

Although Avestaei has a green card, she is now unable to travel outside the United States for fear of being barred from reentry. “I thought I was going to see my mom soon, but now it can’t happen,” Avestaei told me. “I really wish would not wish this feeling on anyone. To lose a family member while you are abroad and can’t come home. You feel guilty, as though you abandoned your family.”

Avestaei is just one of countless ordinary people whose lives have been upended by Trump’s recent actions. Despite widespread public outcry, more changes may be one the way. Trump’s executive order specifically targets nationals of Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. But in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said that the order could expand in the near future, hinting that countries like Egypt and Pakistan may be targeted as well.

Priebus gave conflicting information in his interview about the impact on green card holders currently residing in the United States. A Department of Homeland Security statement earlier this weekend said that the measures would apply to green cards. But a statement issued later in the day by DHS Secretary John Kelley said that all lawful permanent residents should be granted the ability to enter the country, absent “significant derogatory information.” Amid widespread fear and confusion, many immigration attorneys have been advising clients who are not U.S. citizens to avoid traveling outside the country.

Iranian nationals in the United States — due to their precarious political situation and large diaspora — are among the groups most impacted by these new measures. The Iranian diaspora in the United States numbers in the hundreds of thousands, many of whom arrived after the 1979 revolution in that country. Partly as a consequence of geopolitical tensions, the U.S. has long been a haven for Iranian dissidents and activists fleeing their government.

But following Trump’s exclusion order, the position of vulnerable Iranians living in the U.S. has rapidly deteriorated. Unable to travel outside the country and facing the possibility of having their green cards annulled in the future, people like Avestaei have suddenly been trapped in a dangerous legal gray zone.

Part of the problem has been the chaos and confusion with which the executive orders have been issued. Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) criticized the administration for repeatedly changing its messaging on the facts surrounding the executive order. “This is really banana-republic style,” Parsi said. “It was already extremely difficult for Iranians to get into the United States.”

Trump’s executive order also extends to dual-nationals of other countries, with the result that even prominent Western political figures with roots in Iran and other targeted countries have now found themselves barred from entry.

Due to the huge number of Iranians resident in the United States and their often difficult political relationship with their home country, Parsi said that, “Iranian Americans are affected more than anyone else [by the executive order], almost more than everyone else combined.”

On its website, NIAC issued a statement calling on the Trump administration to permit a grace period in the executive order to “enable all lawful permanent residents, dual nationals and visa holders from Iran and the other targeted countries to return to the United States to reunite with their families and return to their daily lives.”

But despite massive protests and legal challenges, the administration has signaled that it will fight efforts to halt the ban, while working to expand it.

For Anahita Avestaei, Trump’s executive order has called into question the new life she has been trying to build in the United States upon receiving asylum here. After originally arriving here to complete her legal studies, she was unexpectedly banished from returning to Iran after running afoul of the government by volunteering with a human rights group in the United States. Now she faces a future where she is both endangered in Iran and unwelcome in the U.S.

“Its not easy to leave your home, to leave your family, your neighbors, your cat. I never expected that I would have to leave them and make a new life here, but I have been trying,” she told me. “But now to have the country that you’re wishing to be your new home do everything it can to tell you that you are not welcome, that you’re not wanted here, it is too emotionally draining.”

“I can never feel safe anymore and it feels terrible. It is the worst feeling ever.”

The post Iranians in U.S. “Can Never Feel Safe Anymore” After Muslim Ban appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s order triggered waves of outrage and condemnation at home and abroad, prompting thousands of protesters to flood several American airports and ultimately culminating in a stay issued by a federal district judge in New York City on the deportation of people who were being detained by immigration officials. Similar stays were issued by judges in Washington state, Massachusetts, and Virginia.

The administration’s assault on civil liberties explicitly targeted the world’s most vulnerable populations — refugees and asylum seekers fleeing devastating wars — as well as young people with student visas pursuing an education in the United States, green card holders with deep roots in the country, and a number of citizens of countries not included in the ban. It also impacted American children traveling with, or waiting to meet, their non-citizen parents.

With an estimated 500,000 people in the crosshairs, Trump’s order was carried out swiftly and sowed confusion among the nation’s immigration and homeland security agencies — which were excluded from the drafting process and were scrambling to understand how to implement it, according to media reports and two government officials who spoke to The Intercept.

“We are violating international law.”

Days before the executive order was signed, reports began to emerge that valid visa holders were suddenly being prevented from re-entering the country after taking trips abroad. A senior U.S. immigration official, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed to The Intercept that the rash of unusual student visa revocations began roughly a week before the official order was signed.

Many of the stories the official heard about were anecdotal. Others, however, the official was able to review via internal Department of Homeland Security monitoring systems. While visas are revoked every day with little explanation afforded to those affected, the backgrounds of the individuals in these cases raised no red flags, the official said. On the contrary, the impacted individuals whose files the official reviewed included a young mother of a U.S. citizen child and students at some of the nation’s top universities who had been publicly recognized for their outstanding achievement. These students had already undergone rigorous U.S. government vetting before being admitted to the country, and had only traveled abroad briefly over their winter break.

The Intercept has independently verified two of these stories by speaking to those denied entry, who asked that their names not be used because they are attempting to appeal the decisions.

“The visa terminations struck me as unusual given that in the cases that I observed, nearly all of them had significant presence in the United States before the ban,” the official told The Intercept. “More disturbing, in some cases the individuals were allowed to board flights for the United States not knowing their visas had been terminated. They were only informed when they attempted to use their visas to seek admission and were denied. Even though they were ignorant of the termination, they were still charged with violating U.S. immigration law and given a five-year ban to future admission.”

By the time Trump traveled to the Department of Homeland Security to trumpet the signing of his first anti-immigrant executive order Wednesday, the immigration official had personally reviewed four visa revocation cases that seemed to be out of the ordinary. In addition to young people with passports belonging to countries later targeted in Trump’s executive order, at least two were traveling on Jordanian passports. All were denied entry to the United States. In one case, the visa of an Ivy League medical student was revoked by Customs and Border Protection while he was in the air from a European layover to the U.S.

It’s unclear whether the visa revocations last week were related to the subsequent ban. “But the timing of the revocations indicates that CBP supervisors felt sufficiently empowered to use their discretion to deny admission and cancel the visas in these cases,” the immigration official said.

The students repatriated earlier this week were also charged with violating U.S. immigration law — despite their valid visas — much in the same manner as some of those who were denied entry on Saturday, after the ban kicked in.

In another case the immigration official reviewed, a Syrian woman traveling to the U.S. from a third country on Saturday was denied entry and told she had to return to her port of origin. After consulting immigration attorneys volunteering at the airport, the woman — along with several other students, tourists, and business visitors — formally requested “humanitarian parole,” which allows temporary entry in emergency situations. When they were all denied that, she requested asylum, explaining that she did not have residency in the third country she had flown from and feared returning to Syria.

She was told she was not eligible to request asylum and that she had no choice but to return to her airport of origin, and then was walked to her gate. A lawyer she had briefly been able to communicate with told the immigration official that the woman was later made to sign a paper stating that she understood she had violated immigration law.

“A bedrock of refugee and asylum law is the concept of non-refoulement — not returning an individual to a place where they will be harmed,” the immigration official told The Intercept. Under international law, the United States is required to screen applicants to ensure they will not face persecution if returned to their countries, a process known as “credible fear screening.”

“Asylum law requires CBP officers to affirmatively ask if an applicant fears return when placing them into expedited removal,” the immigration official said. “By pressuring them to simply get on a plane without going into formal removal proceedings, they are violating our obligations under the refugee convention.”

“We are violating international law.”

“We really are still learning the impact of the order.”

Questions, fear, and confusion ran deep on Saturday — not only among those directly impacted by the ban but also by those trying to help them. “We are in the same boat as everyone else trying to determine and understand the meaning of the provisions in the executive order,” said Steve Letourneau, CEO of the Catholic Charities Maine Refugee and Immigration Services, the primary provider of refugee resettlement services in the state. “We really are still learning the impact of the order.”

Refugee and immigrant advocates were not the only ones scrambling to cope with the impact of the order — many immigration officials tasked with enforcing it were also at a loss. On Saturday, reports emerged that the Trump administration denied the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice input on the drafting of the order. While the visa revocations described by the immigration official we interviewed suggest that some CBP officials had indications of what was coming, there were also reports that even among career immigration and State Department officials, “nobody has any idea what is going on,” NBC News reported.

A State Department official confirmed this account to The Intercept. “De facto, we were not consulted, not how we’d normally be consulted. We had less than a day to review vague details,” said the official, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. “This normally takes weeks of conversation. This EO took hours, and we never, never saw the final draft.”

“The ban took everyone by surprise,” the official added. “We’ve known things were in the works all week, but have basically been in the dark.”

“We honestly don’t know what is going to happen,” said the immigration official. “The EOs are extremely vague and some of our talk is based upon worst case scenarios. We have heard rumors coming from upper DHS echelons, but nothing concrete.”

The enormity of the executive order — slated to affect hundreds of thousands of people as well as severely impact the United States’ relationships with several countries — seemed to indicate it was written with little appreciation of the workings of the system it sought to undo.

“I think the government hasn’t had a full chance to think about this,” said Judge Ann Donnelly, who issued an emergency stay in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other organizations and ordered the government to provide a list of names of the people affected. That stay — the first win in what will inevitably be many legal battles to come — only applies to people currently in the United States or in transit to the country.

“She has her visa, she has everything. We even paid for her green card to come here.”

While reports multiplied of airport detentions and forced repatriations, so too did stories of panic and heartbreak among families who found themselves suddenly separated and desperate for information on when they’d be able to see their loved ones again.

Anfal Hussain was among the worried and the waiting pacing the terminals at JFK airport in New York City as the implications of Trump’s order became increasingly clear. “It’s my mom,” Hussain told The Intercept, explaining that her mother had flown from Iraq to join her daughters in the U.S. that morning. “She was in the air when Trump was like, ‘No one is allowed to visit the United States,’” Hussain said. “She has her visa, she has everything. We even paid for her green card to come here. And we’re both citizens, me and my sister.”

Hussain said her sister was able to speak to their mother briefly after she landed Saturday morning. She was crying and scared, Hussain said. “She doesn’t really speak English,” she added, and it was her first time traveling to the U.S. Hussain explained that her mother’s husband had passed away recently and she had no one left in Baghdad, a city increasingly riven by violence nearly a decade and a half after the U.S. invasion.

“She wanted to be with us,” Hussain said. “She wanted to be with her daughters.”

As the wide-ranging scope of the executive order became clear, immigration attorneys and advocates, as well as universities, issued warnings to citizens of the banned countries not to leave the United States. CLEAR, a New York-based group that is offering free legal advice to those impacted by the ban, circulated a fact sheet explaining how people in the country on different immigration statuses would be impacted if they left. It also warned green card holders denied entry not to sign any forms at the border abandoning their permanent residency.

But even as protesters in airports across the country broke into jubilation at the news of the stay, some people at those airports continued to be denied entry and, in some cases, were still threatened with forcible removal.

Our video report from Los Angeles International Airport.

Although DHS issued a statement saying it would comply with the court orders, at Los Angeles International Airport, Sara Yarjani, an Iranian citizen, was told by CBP officials she had to board a flight to Copenhagen, despite the nationwide stay and against the protests of lawyers and two U.S. congresswomen who were present. The representatives, Rep. Judy Chu and Rep. Nanette Barragan, asked over the phone to meet with CBP officials, who refused. When asked who they were reporting to, the officials said “Donald J. Trump,” then hung up on them.

The Intercept was not able to confirm whether Yarjani was on the flight when it took off or whether she remained detained at the airport.

While nationals of seven countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — have been targeted for exclusion so far, lawyers say that number could soon increase. Trump’s order calls for a 30-day review period in which the secretary of state and the director of national intelligence will compile “information needed for adjudications and a list of countries that do not provide adequate information.”

“The executive order is drafted in a manner that anticipates the extension of the ban. It’s clear that the White House expects that this is going to affect more people and more countries going forward,” Gadeir Abbas, a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights attorney, told The Intercept. “There is a lot of ambiguity in the language used in the order — and executive power thrives on ambiguity.”

A section of the order also calls for the suspension of visas and “other immigration benefits” to nationals of targeted countries. Abbas said this reference to non-visa immigration benefits indicates a likely intention on the part of the Trump administration to target green card holders already in the United States.

“The changes in this order are not limited to border crossings. The text indicates that restrictions can also apply to immigration benefits such as green card renewal for those who are already inside the country,” Abbas said. “You could be a green card holder for 20 years and be prevented from renewing your documents — this is something that would impact a huge number of people.”

On Saturday, the State Department also confirmed that dual nationals of other countries would be subject to the ban on entry. A number of dual Iranian-Canadian citizens have already been prevented from boarding flights into the United States or were sent back after landing there, The Intercept has learned.

But while there are no official accounts on the number of people impacted who were traveling when the ban took effect, the impact on those temporarily outside the country is likely exponentially larger. The stay does not apply to them, and it’s unclear how many people were stranded outside the country after their visas and green cards were suddenly revoked.

A Texas resident named Stephanie Felten who contacted The Intercept said that her sister-in-law, an Iranian green card holder who has lived in Chicago for over a decade, was stranded in Iran after traveling there last week to visit family. With her in Iran is her 3-year-old daughter, an American citizen, who now has no way to return to the United States with her mother. Iran has promised a reciprocal ban on American citizens traveling there, effectively making it impossible for the child to see her father or the rest of her family.

“Nobody is providing any answers right now,” said Felten. “We’re just trying to confirm what we’re hearing. You can read the executive order and try to make determinations, but then news breaks that even people that are dual citizens are being turned away. Everyone is unsure where to turn.”

“My family have become refugees from my country.”

Have you been affected by President Trump’s travel ban? Do you know someone who has been turned away while attempting to return to the United States? The Intercept wants to hear your story. Please write to our reporters.

Lynn Dombek, Spencer Woodman, and Leighton Woodhouse contributed reporting to this article.

Top photo: A woman greets her mother after she arrived from Dubai on Emirates Flight 203 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, on Jan. 28, 2017.

The post Trump’s Muslim Ban Triggers Chaos, Heartbreak, and Resistance appeared first on The Intercept.

A leaked copy of the draft order indicates that Trump will halt all refugee resettlement to the United States for the next four months, while indefinitely banning the resettlement of Syrians. The proposal will also halt immigration entirely for 30 days from a list of Muslim-majority countries.

The order comes at a time of rising anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, as well as an international refugee crisis that the United Nations says is the largest since World War II. Millions of refugees are fleeing countries like Iraq and Syria — where the United States has ongoing military operations. While the U.S. has resettled tens of thousands of people from these countries over the past decade, that slightly-ajar door now appears to be slamming shut.

Trump has argued that new restrictions on refugees and immigrants are required to combat the threat of terrorism in the United States. But his proposal is a drastic change for U.S. policy. Since 1975 the United States has accepted over 3 million refugees, including many from war-torn countries, thanks in large part to legislation like the 1980 Refugee Act. Even under Republican administrations like that of Ronald Reagan, the United States maintained relatively generous immigration and refugee policies. During Reagan’s presidency, the United States welcomed hundreds of thousands of southeast Asian refugees fleeing war and oppression.

“Our nation is a nation of immigrants,” Reagan said in a 1981 speech. “More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands. No free and prosperous nation can by itself accommodate all those who seek a better life or flee persecution. We must share this responsibility with other countries.”

In what appears to be a recognition of the drastic changes at hand, the National Association of Evangelicals issued a statement today calling on Trump to continue accepting refugees fleeing wars in the Middle East. “News reports that the Trump administration plans to make severe cuts to the admission of refugees based on their religion or national origin are alarming,” the NAE said. “We call on President Trump to declare his support for the continuation of the U.S. refugee resettlement program, which is critical at a time when the world faces a significant refugee crisis.”

There is little indication that Trump plans to heed these calls. In addition to his public reiteration today of a promise to build a southern border wall and ramp up deportations, there have been a number of reports in the past several days of individuals from Muslim-majority countries, including students, having their visas abruptly cancelled while abroad.

“Under Trump’s direction, the Department of Homeland Security and State Department will likely work together to create a list of countries from which visitors should be banned,” says Matthew La Corte an immigration policy analyst at Niskanen Center, a public policy think tank. “We also expect this list to grow over time and be larger than the initial list of countries that has been reported in the media.”

The text of the executive order indicates that visas would be blocked for individuals visiting the United States from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, all countries with Muslim-majority populations. Trump made a campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the United States, and the draft text of the executive order calls for the U.S. to ban “those who would place violent religious edicts over American law.”

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a legal advocacy organization, said that the proposed executive order would, “elevate the most bigoted stereotypes of Muslims and Islam perpetuated by anti-Muslim hate groups to the level of U.S. government policy.”

Khera added, “Based on what we’ve seen, we are deeply concerned that this order will erode our fundamental values as a country. The United States was founded as a haven for people fleeing persecution. Trump’s proposal undermines that principle while making good on his outrageous promise to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. entirely.”

While full details of the order are not yet clear, its impact on refugees fleeing wars in the Middle East will be immediate and devastating. Last year President Obama reached his target of resettling 10,000 Syrian refugees, and more were expected to arrive in the coming year. This process is now expected to come to a complete halt, even for Syrians who have already been vetted and cleared for arrival.

“This is going to be devastating for refugees around the world. Pulling the U.S. out of its traditional leadership role in resettlement makes it harder to justify refugee resettlement as a good policy for other countries as well,” said La Corte. He added that banning refugees on national security grounds is a misguided policy, as refugees are already the heavily vetted and are themselves fleeing violence.

“At the end of the day refugees are not the perpetrators of violence, they’re the victims of it,” he said. “They’re the ones fleeing oppressive governments and terrorist groups, and they now face violence at home and bans on their presence abroad. What Trump is doing is not just un-American, its inhumane.”

Top photo: A woman cries as she and others wait for hours inside a police cordon, hoping to cross the border into Macedonia on March 6, 2016.

The post Trump Prepares to Shut Door on Refugees, Ending Long U.S. Tradition appeared first on The Intercept.

While President-elect Donald Trump and Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader, have both publicly flirted with the idea of partnering in the future, any normalization of U.S. relations with Syria should occur only if major reforms and a transition of power are carried out, according to many experts on the region. Any other outcome would not end the country’s instability, only postpone it.

“The attitude of the United States toward the upcoming talks is very important,” says Gilbert Achcar, professor of development studies and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. “Donald Trump has said he prefers Bashar al-Assad over any alternatives, but the reality is that any outcome that doesn’t result in guaranteed political transition and reform in Syria will not end the conflict there.”

At the heart of the problem is the Assad regime itself. While the Assad family has managed to hold onto power in the country for over four decades, it has done so in a brutal manner that repeatedly generated major crises between itself and its own population. The most recent conflict has only been the largest, and has taken on regional and even global dimensions. Among these are a massive refugee crisis and the emergence of transnational terrorist groups that have launched attacks across the world.

The actions of the Syrian government and foreign powers have corrupted the country’s original 2011 democratic uprising and led to a situation where Syria is occupied by foreign armies and militia volunteers, as well as international jihadists who have migrated to areas outside of government control. After these calamities, many Syrians say that a return to the pre-uprising status quo is no longer possible.

“The Syrian regime knows that it is no longer strong enough to maintain control over the entire country on its own, and it is dependent on foreign ground forces to do so, including Iranian, Lebanese, Afghan, and Iraqi groups,” says Leila Shami, co-author of “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War.” “But ultimately peace can’t be enforced through foreign occupation. Although people may be subdued for some time through terror and exhaustion, in the end there will always be resistance. We can’t go back to a time before 2011, because the regime, as it was, has collapsed.”

A Syrian man walks past posters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on a shop front in the capital, Damascus, on Jan. 3, 2017.

Photo: Louai Beshara/AFP/Getty Images

The unsustainable nature of the Assad regime’s rule, and the folly of continuing to prop it up into the future, can only be understood in the context of modern Syrian history. The current cataclysm of violence is only the most recent, bloodiest chapter in a long battle by the ruling family and its allies to maintain absolute political power. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a previous attempt by a diverse group of opposition factions to challenge the Assad regime was met with brutal violence and repression, culminating in a major military assault by the regime on Muslim Brotherhood factions based in the city of Hama in 1982.

The attack on Hama is estimated to have killed between 10,000 and 40,000 people. It also leveled much of the city itself, making it the first of many ancient Syrian cities that would be destroyed by the Assad regime. But the brutality of that “victory” by the regime against segments of its own population planted the seeds for the even bloodier confrontations in the future. Raphael Lefevre, in his 2013 book about the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, “Ashes of Hama,” points out that much of today’s conflict has been animated by a desire to avenge abuses committed by the regime in those years. Citing in particular the memory of the Hama massacre, he writes:

Analysts were right to point out the memory of the massacre in the hearts and minds of the Syrian people. What they failed to see, however, was that this collective scar would not restrain Syrians from defying the regime that rules over them. Instead, it would fuel such a degree of resentment and anger that the uprisings which started in March 2011 [soon] spread throughout the country.

In the Aleppo countryside, a flashpoint in the current violence, Lefevre notes that “men in every village [can] recite the the names of men who were killed or disappeared” during the conflicts of the late 1970s and early 1980s. When protests broke out around the country in 2011, demonstrators took to the streets chanting that they will “not let the massacres of 1982 be repeated” and “forgive us Hama, we apologize.”

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed in the latest conflict, while millions more have been driven into exile as refugees. The ancient cities of Aleppo and Homs, inhabited for thousands of years, have followed Hama into violent oblivion. In 1982, then-Syrian ruler Hafiz al-Assad (the father of the current president) said that “what has happened in Hama has happened, and it is all over.” But the conflict had only paused, to emerge again with greater force.

Experts on the region say it is unrealistic to expect that most Syrians will resign themselves to being passively ruled by the government after this latest episode of bloodletting.

“When you have had years of such terrible, unprecedented, and mostly one-sided massacres perpetrated by the regime, it’s not possible to imagine that there could be any lasting end to the war in Syria, as long as that same regime remains in power,” says Achcar. “Even if the regime and its allies succeed in forcing the opposition to agree to some kind of settlement where Assad stays, the situation will remain completely unstable, because his regime is at its core very weak and survives only due to Iranian and Russian support.”

Achcar says that the upcoming talks in the capital of Kazakhstan offer an opportunity to bring an end to the conflict, but only if Russia and the United States can pressure the Syrian regime to agree to power-sharing and a genuine transition of power in the country. That will also require continued pressure to ensure that the regime plays by the rules.

“Unless there are guarantees of political freedoms at the end of a transitional process within Syria, no part of the opposition will agree, and the fighting will inevitably continue,” Achcar says. “The key point is to what extent Russia, the United States and other parties are willing to impose such outcomes. If there is no plausible political settlement and there is just a big bluff to keep the regime as it is, it will not stop the war.”

The United States has increasingly taken a back seat in the diplomatic fight over Syria. But there are still meaningful steps that the U.S. can take to help the country return to stability, while providing some measure of accountability on human rights and other important issues. The lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria and other steps towards normalization of relations can be predicated on political change, guarantees to human rights groups on the safety of any returning refugees, and accountability for tens of thousands of political prisoners who have disappeared into government custody, say Syrian activists.

But all of this would require exchanging Trump’s Assad-friendly rhetoric for an approach that rebuilds relations based on changes in how Syria is governed. The regime’s narrative that the only choices in Syria are dictatorship or extremist rule remains false, and ignores a long record of generating crises through us-or-them brutality.

Given Syria’s history, any conclusion to the most recent conflict that doesn’t guarantee democratic change will almost certainly give rise to another round of violence in the future.

“People from the outside are only looking at the geopolitical dimensions of this conflict, but for Syrians this is very personal,” says Leila Shami. “Many of them have had their sons and fathers killed by the regime, or witnessed their daughters and wives raped by the Syrian Army. Millions more have been forced out of their homes and land and have lost everything. The idea that these people will just give up and decide that being ruled by Assad is the best option is never going to happen.”

Top photo: Members of the Syrian Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets, evacuate a child during a training session in the rebel-held eastern Ghouta area, east of the capital, Damascus, on Nov. 22, 2016.

The post Why Donald Trump’s Pro-Assad Stance Won’t End Syria’s Turmoil appeared first on The Intercept.

In one case, a 23-year old American citizen alleges that he was choked by a CBP agent after declining to hand over his phone for inspection while crossing the border back from Canada.

The complaints deal with the cases of nine people who have been stopped at various U.S. border crossings, eight of whom are American citizens, and one Canadian. They were filed to the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Justice.

The allegations come in the wake of The Intercept’s report that CBP agents have been working with the FBI to pressure Muslims entering the U.S. to become informants. Reports of racial profiling at the border have been endemic in recent years. In 2015, The Intercept also reported on portions of a questionnaire used by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents that included invasive questions about religious practices and beliefs.

In recent years a number of lawsuits have been filed over alleged incidents of discrimination and racial profiling at border crossings. In 2014, the U.S. Attorney General’s office announced rules intended to prevent racial profiling by federal law enforcement agents. Those measures excluded Department of Homeland Security agencies like CBP, however, leaving the door open to continued abuses. And while warrants are normally required for federal authorities to search cellphones, this requirement does not apply at border crossings.

The complaints filed by CAIR allege that CBP agents have been asking travelers questions including, “are you a devout Muslim”, “what do you think of the United States”, and “what are your views about jihad?” The complaints also say that people have reported being asked whether they attend a mosque and what their opinions are about various terrorist groups.

The complaints also allege that border agents have asked American citizens to provide their social media information at the border. A report in Politico last December indicated that some foreign travelers would soon be asked for social media information, but did not mention possible implications for American citizens.

One of the cases in the complaints involved Akram Shibly, a 23-year-old American citizen from Buffalo. He told The Intercept that he had been detained at the border during two separate incidents in early January, including one where he says agents physically assaulted him when he declined to give them his cellphone.

During the first incident, while driving back to the United States from Canada on New Year’s Day, he and his fiancée were pulled aside, searched and interrogated by border agents. Shibly said that he and his fiancée’s cellphones were confiscated and taken into a back room out of view. They were given forms to fill out that asked for passwords to unlock their devices, as well as for their email addresses and information about their family backgrounds — requests that they complied with.

“They told us that if you don’t have anything to hide, give us your phones and give us your passwords,” Shibly said.

During his interrogation, agents asked Shibly about his travel history and some religious practices, as well as his work as a filmmaker. (Shibly operates a YouTube channel where he posts recorded discussions on a variety of subjects.)

After being detained for roughly an hour and a half, Shibly and his fiancée were given their phones back and let go. 

A few days later however, driving back from Canada on another trip, they were stopped again. After being taken aside for questioning and asked for his cellphone once more, this time Shibly declined.

“I had already regretted letting them go through my personal information a few days earlier, and this time I told them I do not feel comfortable giving you my phone,” Shibly said.

At that point, three CBP agents physically accosted him as he sat in a chair next to his fiancée, with one grabbing him from behind by the neck, another pinning his legs down, and a third agent reaching into his pocket to grab his phone, he said.

“I was sitting down, I wasn’t violent, I wasn’t yelling or charging at them, but they treated me like I was a violent criminal,” Shibly said. “I told them I’m an American citizen and was born and raised here, and one of the agents told me: ‘We don’t know if you’re really an American citizen, we’ll let you know when our investigation is complete.’ ”

After being detained for about 45 minutes, Shibly and his fiancée were let go. He said that before they left, another CBP officer apologized for his harsh treatment.

But Shibly fears more harassment in the future.  “I honestly feel very traumatized. I love to travel, but now I feel like every time I come home I’m going be harassed and treated like a criminal for no reason,” he said.

When reached for comment, a spokesman for CBP said that the agency is, “aware of the allegations made by Mr. Shibly and they are currently being investigated by another agency.” The spokesman added that they could not comment further due to the ongoing investigation.

Warrantless confiscation and search of personal electronics at the border has become a major civil liberties issue, due to the wealth of personal data stored on such devices. According to DHS guidelines on border searches, CBP agents not only have the power to seize electronics, but can also “copy the contents of [an] electronic device for a more in-depth border search at a later time.”

A 2010 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to stop such practices was dismissed in 2013, allowing the CBP to continue what the group criticizes as “intrusive searches of Americans’ laptops and other electronics” at ports of entry. These searches remain a “contested legal issue” today according to the ACLU. But the group also notes that, although they may suffer delays, “U.S. citizens cannot be denied entry to the United States for refusing to provide passwords or unlock devices.”

Civil liberties groups fear that harassment at the border will intensify during the Trump administration. Trump has suggested that Muslim immigrants may be subject to “extreme vetting” at the border or even outright bans from entry, depending on their immigration status. Any directives that encourage racial profiling are likely to have adverse effects for communities that are already facing racial profiling issues under President Obama.

Shibly says that despite being physically accosted by CBP agents, he would not have given them access to his phone if he had known that they could not bar him from entry for refusing.

“They are taking advantage of people’s ignorance of their rights at the border and are using that to pry into our personal life,” he says. “But now there is a real risk for us, because officers are not only demanding our personal information but are getting violent if we don’t provide it.”

The post Complaints Describe Border Agents Interrogating Muslim Americans, Asking for Social Media Accounts appeared first on The Intercept.

Earlier this year, a jury convicted Georgescu in this same courtroom on terrorism charges. Federal prosecutors accused Georgescu of helping organize a complex weapons deal involving DEA informants posing as members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a designated terrorist organization.

Since his arrest, Georgescu has maintained his innocence, claiming that he had been working undercover for the CIA and pointing to phone calls he had made to the agency as proof of his cooperation.

Georgescu faced a possible life sentence.

“While we’re disappointed in the sentencing decision, Mr. Georgescu will be pursuing an appeal on various grounds and looks forward to vindicating himself at a new trial,” his lawyer, Steven Witzel, said following the hearing.

In their arguments at the sentencing hearing, federal prosecutors called for Georgescu to receive a lengthy prison term, alleging that he had “worked tirelessly” to engineer an arms deal with the FARC that, if real, would have resulted in the deaths of U.S. citizens.

But the deal Georgescu tried to arrange was in fact part of a sting operation. Georgescu had never been in touch with actual FARC members at any point during the investigation. His interlocutors in the deal were undercover DEA operatives with decades of experience conducting stings. While the government conceded that Georgescu had not initiated the deal himself, and that no one had been harmed in the case, prosecutors argued that “sting or no sting, this was a very serious offense.”

In 2012, Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was sentenced to 25 years in prison following a DEA sting that also involved undercover agents posing as FARC members. Unlike Bout, however, Georgescu is not alleged to have engaged in arms deals in the past, and he does not have a history of criminal activity. As Judge Abrams noted at the hearing, Georgescu has had a history of voluntary cooperation with the government, including serving several years as an FBI informant in Nevada.

The judge further noted that the government, through the solicitation of its informants, initiated the arms deal. However, Judge Abrams dismissed Georgescu’s claim that he was himself working as an undercover CIA operative, attempting to gather information for the government.

The sentence was far less than the possible life imprisonment Georgescu could have received, but still constitutes a significant prison term.

Despite his conviction, Georgescu continues to insist that his attempts to report the arms deal to the CIA are proof that he had been working on behalf the government, or at least proof that he believed he was. “My actions were to help the United States government and the citizens of the United States,” Georgescu told the court in a brief statement at the hearing.

“I have always maintained my innocence,” he said.

Top photo: Some of the 9,517 weapons seized from FARC and ELN guerrillas are seen before being melted in National Steel Factory furnaces in Colombia.

The post Man Who Claimed to Be CIA Asset Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison in Arms Deal Sting appeared first on The Intercept.

Flaviu Georgescu, an American citizen from Romania, had been in the DEA’s sights for years. A tall, heavyset man in his mid-40s with close-cropped hair, Flaviu worked as a private security contractor in Bucharest.

Over the past several months, Flaviu had been meeting with a Colombian man who claimed to be a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. This man had sought Flaviu’s help setting up a multimillion-dollar arms deal to help rearm FARC in Colombia. Arrested with Flaviu in the hotel that night was another man, Cristian Vintila, then a high-ranking government minister in Romania and another participant in the alleged arms deal. It seemed like a high-profile nab for the DEA.

Robert J. Scott was among the DEA agents who came to the hotel room that night in Montenegro. Flaviu immediately motioned with his head that he wanted to talk to the DEA agent.

“I’m with the CIA,” he told Scott.

He was working undercover to provide more information, he told Scott that night. Scott wasn’t interested. He’d heard excuses before. A 17-year veteran of the DEA, he knew handcuffed criminals would say just about anything to escape punishment.

Over the next several hours, Flaviu told agents in detail about the proposed deal — how a Southern California man introduced him to the Colombians seeking weapons. He told the agents how he connected with Vintila, as well as with a flamboyant former member of the Italian parliament named Massimo Romagnoli, to piece together the supply chain for the arms deal.

That night, Flaviu helped DEA agents lure Massimo to Montenegro to be detained. As a former member of parliament facing unrelated charges in Italy, Massimo would have been cumbersome for the United States to extradite from that country. But Flaviu, in a DEA-controlled call, coaxed him into the trap.

Flaviu didn’t ask for a cooperating agreement or any other guarantee for his help, insisting to DEA agents that he was working for the CIA and had been gathering information all along. According to him, this was all part of the job.

Flaviu spent several weeks in detention at a local prison. In February 2015, the three men — Flaviu, Cristian, and Massimo — were extradited to the United States to face trial on charges of material support for terrorists. In a statement announcing their extradition, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara described them as “ready and willing merchants of death.”

The reality, it turned out, was far more complicated. Flaviu contends he had been running his own sting operation — using skills he developed a decade earlier while working undercover for the FBI. He never considered that another man involved in the transaction would be running a sting of his own. If this is true, Flaviu and his informant adversary were playing opposites sides of a mysterious spy game.

Flaviu says he was not trying to complete an arms deal, but was quietly collecting evidence about the arms network for the CIA.

And he had the phone calls he said would prove it.

A soldier handles one of 9,517 weapons seized from FARC and ELN guerrillas on Nov. 25, 2014, in Sogamoso, Boyaca department, Colombia.

Photo: Guillermo Legaria/AFP/Getty Images

Born in Romania, Flaviu Georgescu first came to the United States in 1996, settling in Las Vegas after finding work at a gym owned by his cousin that catered to the Romanian community in Nevada.

Flaviu eventually started working as an all-around fixer for wealthy Romanians and other Eastern Europeans visiting Las Vegas. Whatever they wanted, Flaviu could procure: Bugatti sports cars, Gulfstream jets, bodyguards, drivers, exclusive shopping experiences.

In 2000, while serving a wealthy client, Flaviu needed to ship a car to Switzerland. A friend told him of a Romanian in Los Angeles with the same last name as his. “He has really great prices,” the friend told Flaviu. That Romanian was Andi Georgescu, an international wheeler-dealer who runs a shipping company based in Southern California. (Despite their shared last name, Flaviu and Andi are not related.)

Flaviu Georgescu in an undated picture released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York.

One week later, Flaviu called. “I put everything together, how they work, how they organize, how they move the money,” Flaviu recounted. He continued to provide intelligence to the FBI, never asking for money or favors. At one point, the FBI insisted on paying Flaviu and gave him a $500 check. “I was so proud about that check, I put it in frame and I hold it,” he said. “I never cash that check because it was the only thing which, for myself, it was like I did something, and I’m on this side.”

He was, in his view, one of the good guys.

In 2003, Flaviu’s secret work was revealed when the FBI arrested a man and seized money; Flaviu was the only witness to his crime. “He was not stupid. I was the only one over there,” Flaviu said.

According to Flaviu, a hit was put out on him. So he disappeared. By 2006, Flaviu, now a U.S. citizen, had moved back to Romania, where he scratched out a living selling GPS ankle monitoring devices for use by Romanian law enforcement.

“Let me work for you,” Flaviu told the CIA.

In 2011, out of nowhere, Flaviu received a call from a friend with a familiar name: Andi Georgescu.

Andi said he knew a Colombian looking to purchase weapons. “It’s a lot of money we can make,” Flaviu remembered Andi telling him. Flaviu and Andi spoke several more times. Flaviu decided the situation represented a “direct threat” to the United States, and he recalled the U.S. government’s counterterrorism motto: If you see something, say something. “I was thinking I make a, you know, a difference,” Flaviu said.

So he called the CIA.

“Someone contacted me from Miami,” Flaviu told the CIA employee who answered the tip line, according to a recording of the call. “They have some clients from Colombia, and they are interested to buy some equipment — anything, like, from grenades, ammunition, everything.”

In two phone calls, each with a different CIA employee, Flaviu went into detail about the weapons deal. He said Andi had introduced him to the Colombians, who wanted grenades and ammunition. He suspected the men might be criminals and that they should investigate.

“Let me work for you,” Flaviu told the CIA, adding: “I’ll provide you all the information, because in my opinion, you don’t have to stop anything right now.”

“I appreciate you bringing this information to our attention, and I’ll certainly tread carefully, as we say, as far as how we discuss this issue here at the agency,” the CIA agent, whose name is redacted, said to Flaviu.

What neither Flaviu nor possibly the CIA knew was that the Colombians were undercover informants working for another U.S. government agency.

Panama’s anti-narcotics personnel prepare to burn over 10 tons of cocaine and marijuana near Panama City on Oct. 16, 2015.

Photo: Rodrigo Arangua/AFP/Getty Images

It was the mid-1980s, and Miami was the capital of the cocaine boom. “I figured out a way to transport the drugs from Colombia to the United States,” Juan later explained in court testimony.

Over a seven-year period, Juan helped move 3,000 kilos of marijuana and 4,000 kilos of cocaine into the United States. But it didn’t last. The DEA arrested Juan, and he rolled over. “I cooperated immediately with the authorities,” Juan said. He pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking and was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. In exchange for his cooperation with the DEA, Juan served only three years and, upon his release, just three months of probation.

“It was reduced at the request of the DEA so that I could continue collaborating with them,” Juan recalled. The caterer-turned-drug trafficker suddenly had a new career: government informant.

Juan has worked hundreds of cases with the DEA, IRS, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and with local police agencies. He’s been on the government payroll for cases that took him to Panama, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Spain, England, the Cayman Islands, Denmark, Montenegro, Romania, and Greece.

He became a veteran undercover informant who in more than 20 years of working with the DEA had earned $4.9 million in compensation and expense reimbursements.

Working with the DEA in 2011, Juan started down a trail that would lead him to Flaviu. Through another government informant, Juan was introduced to Andi. Soon, the two met up in Fort Lauderdale. According to Juan, they discussed a contact Andi had in Hong Kong who could launder money. The DEA was intrigued with Andi and his extensive international social network. Agents assigned Juan to get closer so they could learn more about Andi’s connections.

Juan eventually asked Andi if he knew anyone who sold weapons. It wasn’t a simple arms deal. Working off DEA instructions, Juan told Andi that he represented FARC, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Juan wanted anti-aircraft missiles, AK-47s, and just about anything else that could kill or maim U.S. military personnel operating in Colombia. In March 2012, the DEA sent Andi a list of weapons FARC purportedly wanted to purchase.

This wasn’t the first time the DEA had posed as FARC members in the market for arms. In fact, for a decade now, the DEA has exploited a 2006 change to the Patriot Act that established narcoterrorism as a crime, giving the DEA broad authority to investigate criminals anywhere in the world who allegedly operate at the nexus between drugs and terrorism. The change was part of a larger effort by President George W. Bush’s administration to fold the drug war into the newest war — the war on terror. In 2002, the Bush administration began airing public-service announcements that linked drugs to terrorism. One proclaimed: “Drug money supports terror. If you buy drugs, you might too.”

“Drugs undermine the health of our citizens; they destroy the souls of our children. And the drug trade supports terrorist networks,” Bush said in a speech five months after the 9/11 attacks. “When people purchase drugs, they put money in the hands of those who want to hurt America, hurt our allies. Drugs attack everything that is the best about this country, and I intend to do something about them.”

For the DEA and its longtime rivalry with the FBI, the shift was ironic. In the 1980s, as the drug war reached its apex, the FBI received concurrent jurisdiction over narcotics with the DEA, and the FBI became a big player in the drug war. Two decades later, with the drug war declining as the hunt for terrorists reached a fever pitch, the DEA muscled into the FBI’s expanded counterterrorism enterprise.

Narcoterrorism has meant more money for the DEA. For 2017, Congress allocated $472 million in the DEA budget to international enforcement — up from $287 million in 2006, just as the DEA received authorization to investigate narcoterrorism.

FARC members rest at a camp in the Magdalena Medio region, Antioquia department, Colombia, on Feb. 18, 2016.

Photo: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images

An example is the case of Jamal Yousef. “This is about capitalism inside the bureaucracy,” Joshua L. Dratel, a lawyer for Yousef, said of the DEA’s move into narcoterrorism stings. “The war on drugs in the United States is waning, so you have to find new markets. Terrorism is the big thing.” A former Syrian military officer, Yousef was a fraud artist who lived in Mexico and was purportedly trying to start a retail business in Honduras. He took out a $200,000 loan from an individual and offered to repay the loan with weapons from Lebanon. He traveled to Lebanon, inspected weapons, but then never delivered, despite keeping the money. When Yousef returned to Mexico, he went to the U.S. Embassy and became an informant, telling the FBI’s legal attaché office about U.S. weapons being stolen by U.S. military personnel in Iraq and sold to Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to court documents, Yousef became an informant in the hopes of making money from his FBI relationship. About two year later, while living in Honduras, Yousef was approached by DEA informants posing as FARC representatives. Yousef claimed he had weapons in a storage facility in Mexico, which was a lie, and agreed to exchange the supposed weapons for over a ton of cocaine. Despite his dubious ability to obtain weapons, and the only connection to terrorism being undercover DEA informants, Yousef was extradited to New York, where he pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorists and received 12 years in prison.

“These cases are a lot like FBI terrorism stings here in the United States,” Dratel said. “Without the DEA, there is no connection to terrorism or the United States.”

While DEA narcoterrorism stings have netted serious arms traffickers — such as Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian arms dealer linked to the Contras, the Palestinian Liberation Front, the Iraqi insurgency, and others; and Viktor Bout, a Russian arms trafficker known for funneling weapons to conflict zones around the world — many of the DEA targets over the last decade appear to be like Flaviu Georgescu and Jamal Yousef, more hustler than weapons dealer.

The DEA’s sting targets have claimed associations with FARC, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Taliban — but their connections to terrorists are often questionable. In late 2009, for example, federal prosecutors indicted three Malians — Harouna Touré, Oumar Issa, and Idriss Abdelrahman — following a DEA narcoterrorism sting in which the three allegedly conspired to transport cocaine through Africa to support FARC and al Qaeda. Touré, Issa, and Abdelrahman pleaded guilty to material support for terrorists, but received light sentences — Touré and Issa five years and Abdelrahman less than four. U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones said Touré was not an al Qaeda supporter but rather was “motivated primarily, if not entirely, by money.” All three Malians have since been released from prison.

While the DEA declined to discuss specific cases, Russ Baer, a spokesman for the agency, defended narcoterrorism stings as a valuable law enforcement tool. “We go after folks that are drug traffickers, arms traffickers, whatever the case may be,” Baer said. “They are predisposed to criminal acts. All we do is allow the means, to give them opportunity to commit these crimes they would otherwise commit without us. … If you look at these cases, it’s not just one meeting that culminates in an arrest. It’s several meetings, in various countries, with defendants committing overt acts in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy. These defendants have every opportunity to walk away.”

Map: The Intercept

“First we gonna fly to Italy to finalize it, and then we gonna get the stuff and wait for it in Montenegro. That’s all we do. Couple of days,” Andi told Juan on March 19, 2014.

For several weeks, Andi led Juan on, suggesting that all they needed to do was travel to Italy and meet the arms supplier. The deal is solid, he said, but offered few details.

“Andi, buddy, you think everything is pretty good with this guy?” Juan asked on April 4, 2014.

“Yeah, yeah,” Andi replied. “I wouldn’t go otherwise.”

In May 2014, Juan, along with a complement of DEA agents, flew to Rome expecting to meet Andi and his arms supplier. But no one showed up. Juan reached Andi by phone on May 12, and Andi offered an excuse about being stuck in Abu Dhabi and his arms connection being detained somewhere.

“Andi, I made it all the way here from freakin’ Miami to here. From Colombia, actually. Don’t let me down, because it’s going to be stupid,” Juan said.

Andi asked Juan if he was in Rome or Miami.

“What are you talking about? I’m here in fucking Rome, brother,” he said, annoyed. “You need to come to Rome. Come over here, c’mon.”

“Well, you mentioned Miami.”

“Bullshit, I’ve been talking to you the last two days about being in Rome on the 12th,” Juan said.

The next day, following promises to Juan that he’d get someone to meet him in Italy, Andi gave Juan a new name — Flaviu Georgescu — and said Flaviu could meet him in Italy. Juan left several messages with Flaviu. No response. “If no one is coming, tell me … Just be honest with me,” a frustrated Juan said to Andi by phone on May 14, 2014.

On May 16, just hours before Juan was scheduled to leave Rome, he talked to Flaviu on Skype.

“Where are you now?” Juan asked Flaviu.

“Right now I’m in London,” Flaviu said. “And finally I got a guy. He wants to talk to you. He’s from Romania.”

The Marriott in Bucharest, Romania.

Source: Google Maps

“You’re saying that you have the person now … who could take care of the [weapons] list I gave you, right?” Juan asked Flaviu.

“Yeah, he’s the person connected to it. He’s not the middleman. He’s the direct person. It’s his business,” Flaviu said.

Juan wanted to coordinate a meeting between Flaviu’s contact and his FARC people. But given that they’d just been stood up in Italy, they wouldn’t travel again on promises, Juan told Flaviu. “We will not travel until I know you are sitting in either Rome or Montenegro, OK?” Juan said. “It’s very important because of the time and money these people wasted going there.”

For the next six months, Flaviu and Juan spoke by phone, with Flaviu constantly changing the plans. First they were to meet in Eastern Europe. Then Flaviu asked if they could meet in Liverpool. Juan grew increasingly frustrated. “This is — excuse the Spanish word — this is bullshit,” he said angrily in English. Later that day, in a separate call, Juan added: “You guys are not serious. You change every five minutes.”

Flaviu eventually lined up a potential contact for Juan, a Russian who went by the name Gintas. But after talking to Juan, the Russian quickly backed out, apparently suspicious of the deal. Flaviu then told Juan he found another seller, a Romanian.

“Can you come to Romania?” he asked Juan.

On September 24, 2014, Juan met Flaviu for the first time in person, at a Marriott hotel in Bucharest. Flaviu brought Cristian Vintila, an imposing 45-year-old Romanian government official with deep connections to the country’s defense industry.

Flaviu gave Juan a gift at the meeting, a Romanian flag.

Juan looked to Cristian, who sported a buzz cut. “You know, you make me nervous,” he said.

“Don’t be nervous,” Cristian assured him.

“OK, this is for you,” Juan said, handing a package to Flaviu. He then turned to Cristian. “I didn’t know you were coming,” he said, explaining why he didn’t have a gift for him.

“Thank you very much,” Flaviu said, accepting his gift.

“Colombian coffee,” Juan said. “Juan Valdez.”

The three men talked in the hotel bar. Cristian showed Juan catalogues from the Romanian weapons industry. Juan was impressed, but had one problem: They needed an end-user certificate — something stipulating who the recipient of the arms would be.

A few days later, back in the United States, Juan spoke with Flaviu on the phone.

“You have to come to Montenegro to discuss with your friend, because I have everything in my hand,” Flaviu told Juan, suggesting he had found a way to get an end-user certificate.

“You guys are not serious. You change every five minutes.”

“With who? The same guy? The last guy or the first guy?” Juan asked, referring to whether the arms transaction would happen through the Russian named Gintas, or through Cristian Vintila, the Romanian.

“No, no, no. Come over there. I have everything ready to go. I have the papers. I have everything. If you want to do it, come over there at least to set up the necessary everything, to discuss everything.”

“How about transportation?” Juan asked.

“Everything. You have to come over there.”

Indeed, Flaviu had everything arranged. Cristian connected them to a Serbian weapons manufacturer, and Flaviu now brought in one more person — Massimo Romagnoli, the former member of the Italian parliament. Massimo had a friend in the Ethiopian Embassy in France who could provide an end-user certificate showing a final sale to Ethiopia. From there, the weapons could be surreptitiously shipped to Colombia, into the hands of the FARC.

Juan agreed to meet Flaviu, Cristian, and Massimo in Montenegro on October 8, 2014. Juan came with two other informants — Diego and Jorge — who were also pretending to be FARC members.

Juan recorded the meeting with a camera disguised as a wristwatch.

Diego asked Flaviu and his colleagues if they could get a Russian-designed surface-to-air missile system known as a “Strela.”

“You can get it, but Strela is — ” Flaviu said, then offered a chuckle. “Yeah, Strela is expensive,” he said. “I know, we shoot that one.”

“How many?” Cristian asked Diego.

“Ten, twenty,” Diego responded.

“That one is an expensive item,” Flaviu added.

“It’s OK,” said Jorge, the third undercover informant. “I think we can afford it.”

Two months later, Juan met them again in Montenegro. Flaviu and Cristian were there for the meeting.

At this point, the DEA decided it had enough evidence to move in for the arrest. Local police descended on the hotel in Podgorica, with DEA agents arriving soon after to interrogate the men they’d been tracking for months. The “arms deal” had been foiled.

Arms dealer Viktor Bout arrives at the Bangkok Supreme Court on July 28, 2008, in Bangkok, Thailand.

Photo: Chumsak Kanoknan/Getty Images

Flaviu, Cristian, and Massimo were extradited to the United States in February 2015 to face charges of attempting to provide material support to a terrorist group and conspiring to kill U.S. government officials. (Andi Georgescu never faced any charges.)

The three defendants were held at New York City’s Manhattan Detention Complex to await trial. Cristian and Massimo were placed together in the same cell. Massimo often sat in the cell and cried. Soon, he and Cristian realized that their best chance for freedom was to turn against Flaviu. They signed a cooperation agreement with the government. “We decided together, while we were staying together in the same cell, to tell the truth,” Cristian later testified.

Both men agreed to plead guilty to the charges against them in exchange for lighter sentences. In return, they agreed to testify at trial that Flaviu was the main player in the arms deal. Flaviu found himself the sole defendant on trial for the arms deal he had years earlier reported to the CIA.

In his opening statements, Flaviu’s lawyer argued that his client was an “American hero” who had volunteered to investigate an arms-trafficking ring out of a sense of patriotic duty.

Central to this argument were the CIA calls Flaviu made. Those calls, his lawyer argued, gave the case “built-in reasonable doubt.” Flaviu also had a history of cooperating with law enforcement without compensation. His contacts with the CIA, in which he said the agency had indirectly given him permission to gather more information about the arms traffickers, led to his decision to meet with them and connect them to the plot, his lawyer argued. The CIA declined to comment on Georgescu’s calls to the agency.

He told the CIA official: “If you want to find more, you have to allow me to continue the deal.”

Juan, the DEA informant, conceded at trial that Flaviu never solicited money. There was never an explicit arrangement for Flaviu to be paid anything as part of the deal, an odd move for an international arms dealer. In fact, Flaviu repeatedly declined offers of money. In recorded phone conversations, Andi told Flaviu to ask Juan to reimburse his expenses, something Juan later testified that Flaviu never did.

Juan, on the other hand, was paid $276,000 for his work on the bogus arms deal.

The prosecution in turn argued that Flaviu was “a deal maker, a broker in it for the influence, the connections, the money.” They played for the jury audio clips of Flaviu’s conversations with the informants, including one in which Flaviu described the United States as being “built on bullshit.”

Flaviu took the stand in his trial, repeating his claim that he had been working on behalf of the government and had told the CIA precisely what he would do to help gather information. In a recording of his CIA call played by his lawyer, Flaviu told the CIA official: “If you want to find more, you have to allow me to continue the deal to see the end-user certification, the middlemen, the everything, and I can provide you with more, more, and more information, because in this moment we get stuck, you know, it’s just a small deal.”

Explaining this statement in his testimony, Flaviu said he intended to give “a framework about what kind of intel I can get” to the CIA.

In their arguments, prosecutors dismissed Flaviu’s CIA calls as an attempted cover for the arms transaction, claiming that he had cynically manipulated the government using knowledge from his past work with the FBI. Flaviu’s claims to have been working for the government were implausible, they argued, since he did not attempt to contact them again after his initial phone calls.

On May 26, after a two-week trial, Flaviu was convicted on charges of conspiring to kill officers and employees of the United States and providing material support to a terrorist organization. Flaviu remained silent as the verdict came down, his eyes cast to the courtroom floor.

A request by The Intercept to interview Flaviu was declined by the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Another attempt, after Flaviu was moved to a new facility, was stymied when the prison refused to notarize a form granting his permission for the interview. Later, he expressed concern, through his wife, that giving an interview prior to sentencing might result in a harsher punishment.

He will be sentenced this week, on December 2. He faces the possibility of life imprisonment.

The post Did the DEA Nab an International Weapons Dealer, or a CIA Asset Hung Out to Dry? appeared first on The Intercept.

The Assad dynasty had ruled Syria unopposed for decades. But the regime, along with a nexus of political and economic elites, was shaken. Uprisings had recently deposed longstanding dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt. In a region suddenly electrified by the prospect of political change, many began to speculate that Syria’s ruling elite might be next.

In the interview, Makhlouf issued a grim warning to Syria’s opposition and its sympathizers.

“Nobody can guarantee what will happen after, God forbid, anything happens to this regime,” he told Shadid. “Don’t put a lot of pressure on the president, don’t push Syria to do anything it is not happy to do.”

“They should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone.”

Five years later, against the predictions of many, the Assad regime has maintained its grip on power. And, as Makhlouf promised, many have suffered to make this possible. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed and maimed, while the fighting has reduced ancient cities like Homs and Aleppo to rubble.

Syria’s tragedy also has a global dimension, and that is the exodus of an estimated 5 million people from their homes in Syria over the last five years. The refugees have left on foot, packed into ships, and entrusted their lives to smugglers in an effort to escape their ravaged country. Hundreds of thousands of them have landed on the increasingly unwelcoming shores of Europe. Nearly 3 million now live in Turkey alone.

Unlike its citizens, however, Syria’s regime shows no sign of departing. In a recent interview, Assad vowed to rule Syria at least until 2021, while his government has pledged to take back “every inch” of Syrian territory from opposition control.

Outside powers may be tempted to accept this state of affairs, and to accept Assad as a partner in stabilizing Syria. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested that his administration could work with Assad, even tacitly praising him in a debate for being “much tougher and much smarter” than U.S. leaders.

Trump’s own rise has been aided, in part, by the global nationalist backlash Syria’s refugee exodus has triggered. But if his administration decides to partner with the Assad regime to “stabilize” Syria for the long term, it is more likely to make the refugee crisis permanent than to solve it.

Millions of Syrians have already chosen to flee their country entirely, rather than continue to be ruled by the Assad regime. They have done so out of fear of barrel bombs, indefinite detention, torture, chemical weapons attacks, and other well-documented, systematic war crimes. If Syria’s conflict ends with a return to the pre-2011 political status quo — the same regime ruling the entire country indefinitely — many of those who fled will probably never return.

Ali Bahr, 29, is one of them. Before the war came to his hometown of Raqqa, he was a teacher of Arabic literature. “We lived in a village outside the city and didn’t want to give up our home,” he told me when we met in a gritty industrial area of the Turkish capital of Ankara. “But my wife and I decided to leave when the bombings became too close and too frightening.”

Today, Ali is a manual laborer. When we spoke, he was on a break from his job, where he worked 12 hours a day helping assemble thermal heating systems in a warehouse. Ali has a slim build, neatly cut brown hair, and sharp features. Though his hands and clothing were stained with soot, he still carried himself with the genteel demeanor of the literature teacher he was not long ago. Since he fled to Turkey, his village in Syria has fallen under the control of Islamic State militants. “If [ISIS] was gone from our homes, we would go back immediately,” he told me, before adding: “But only if the regime is gone from there, too. They terrorized people and created this catastrophe.”

All over the world, the outflux of Syrians is regarded as a mounting crisis. It’s one that has stymied political leaders in receiving countries, most of whom have balked at absorbing large numbers of refugees. To the extent that outside powers have contemplated military intervention against the Assad regime, they have rightly concluded it would likely generate still more misery rather than less. But the refugee problem is inevitably bound up with the political future of Syria. In order for its citizens to return, Syria needs to be not only stable, but also safe.

“Syrians want to go back to their hometowns and cities. They want the chance to rebuild their lives. They want to live in a Syria that is free of fear, torture, and oppression,” said Lina Sergie Attar, the founder of the Karam Foundation, a charity serving Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. “Every Syrian refugee I know is miserable to be living outside their homes and country, but government attacks against civilians are emptying the country of its people,” Attar said.

But, she added, most refugees will never go home as long as the Assad regime continues to rule the country.

“Syria will never have a true future as a peaceful and prosperous country with Assad in power.”

A member of the Syrian pro-government forces stands amid heavily damaged buildings in Aleppo’s 1070 district on Nov. 8, 2016, after troops seized the district from rebel fighters.

Photo: Georges Ourfalian/AFP/Getty Images

That view is largely a myth, however. After five years of upheaval, state services exist only notionally in much of Syria. Maintenance of basic services is both limited and dependent on international support, while “the majority of Syrians, whether under the control of the government or the opposition [have] plunged into the informal economy,” according to an economic analysis of the war’s impact published by the Carnegie Middle East Center. Broad economic sanctions targeting the Syrian economy have exacerbated this decline.

Many of the Assad regime’s national institutions have also been reduced to shells of what they once were, with waves of defections, desertions, and deaths leaving major organizations like the military in an advanced state of decay. The government now relies in large part on a combination of local paramilitaries and foreign armed forces — Russians, Iranians, and foreign sectarian militias — to maintain a pretense of sovereignty over the country. An ongoing offensive to retake the city of Aleppo is now continuing largely due to the support of Shia militia volunteers from Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Russian air support.

Much of Syria is now governed as a network of small fiefdoms, often loosely tied to the central government. A significant number of Syrians still fighting for the regime are compelled to do so out of economic need or simple coercion. Thus, when the Assad regime boldly announces its intentions to take back all territory under opposition control, it is functionally declaring that foreigners will be “taking back” Syrian territory, because, simply put, there aren’t enough Syrians left willing to undertake such a task.

Meanwhile, many of those who made up Syria’s major pre-war national institutions have themselves become part of the country’s vast refugee diaspora. Yassin Shammous, a tall, heavily built 31-year-old with thinning hair, was a military police officer who chose to leave rather than continue serving in an institution that had been ordered to attack protestors. Originally from Aleppo, he defected in 2012 and crossed the border into Turkey later that year. He once dreamed of going to university. Now he makes a basic living driving an unlicensed taxi catering to other Syrian refugees in Ankara.

“Most of the major officers in the police force were Alawite,” he told me when we met, in a small Syrian-run restaurant in the Ankara suburb of Onder, which has become one of many hubs for refugees living in the city. Shammous, who is Sunni, wore a gray tracksuit and white running shoes. On the street outside, storefront signs in Arabic and Turkish advertised Syrian food, as well as services to help people stay in touch with fellow Syrians now scattered around the world.

Like many others, Shammous felt pressured by a governing bureaucracy that maintained its power by manipulating sectarian divisions. “When the revolution started, they took away the Sunni officers’ guns because they didn’t trust us. I left my job and went into hiding in 2012 because I didn’t want to be part of an army that shoots at civilians — that shoots at students and young people for protesting,” he told me.

Because he decided to defect from his job in the security apparatus, Shammous became a wanted man in Syria. Like many other refugees, he faces the prospect of exile from his homeland — forever, or for as long as the Assad government remains in power. He is increasingly losing hope for a solution to the conflict that would allow him to return to Aleppo.

“What we were afraid of — the outcome that we were trying to avoid when this all started — it’s already happened,” he told me.

Syrian refugees walk through a refugee camp on Oct. 7, 2016, in Nizip, Turkey.

Photo: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek/Getty Images

In the glaring sunlight, with nothing but barren desert hills surrounding the camp, young children play between the converted storage units that now serve as their family homes. In makeshift classrooms, they draw pictures from memory of their former houses, mosques, and neighborhoods in Syria. Many decorate their pictures with the three-star flag of the Syrian revolution. Like the children of the Palestinian diaspora, they are raised with nostalgia for a homeland to which they may never return.

In the Muslim tradition, a saying ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad describes Syria as “the quintessence of the lands of God,” adding that “whoever departs from Syro-Palestine earns [God’s] wrath, and whoever enters it from somewhere earns His mercy.”

Millions have made the agonizing choice to leave Syria and seek shelter in refugee camps, poor suburbs of Turkish cities, or increasingly unwelcoming Western states. But the yearning of Syrians to return to their home country should not be underestimated. According to aid workers at the Nizip refugee camp, when a Turkish-backed military offensive freed the nearby Syrian town of Jarablus from Islamic State control, several families from that town left the camp and returned there.

Despite the seeming hopelessness of the situation inside Syria, the broad outlines of a solution are visible. Jarablus is one example: Formalizing a de facto safe area in the northern region of the country — free from both government and Islamic State control — could allow more people to go back to the towns and cities they left behind, or even into new housing developments that some have suggested building in reconstructed areas for Syrians now living in Turkey. For such areas to exist, however, outside powers would have to insist on a political solution that prevents the Assad regime from making good on its pledge to retake the remaining opposition-held areas of the country. It would also mean pressing Assad to leave power and making normalization of U.S. relations with Syria dependent on genuine political change.

Most importantly, it would mean discarding the shortsighted idea of accepting the Assad regime — institutionally decayed, stained by its crimes, and dependent on foreign backers — as any kind of long-term partner. In a recent interview, Assad suggested that President-elect Donald Trump could be a “natural ally” to his regime. Assad’s backers in Russia have also said that they hope to join forces with Trump to fight against “terrorism and extremism,” despite warnings from the United Nations that a total military victory for Assad would feed a resurgence of global terrorism.

It remains unclear how the Trump administration will respond to these entreaties. But if Trump accepts Assad’s terms for ending the war, and the regime reasserts power over all of Syria, the tragedy of those who have fled, as well as the global political crisis triggered in part by their exodus, is likely to continue.

Decades ago, Zaher Sahloul was a medical school classmate and acquaintance of Bashar al-Assad. More recently, the Syrian-American physician has put his life on hold to offer emergency medical care to the hundreds of thousands who have been maimed and wounded by his former classmate’s regime. Sahloul, an adviser to the Syrian-American Medical Society, says that his experience on the front lines has convinced him that the crisis will not end until Assad agrees to loosen his grip over the country.

“If Western governments think that striking a deal that keeps Assad in power will end the refugee crisis,” he told me, “they are living in a dream. This is a regime that has committed war crime after war crime in the last five years and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its citizens. It is not trusted by any Syrian.”

“With Assad ruling over them, no one will go back.”

Top photo: In this Sunday, Oct. 4, 2015 file photo, a Syrian refugee child sleeps in his father’s arms while waiting at a resting point to board a bus, after arriving on a dinghy from the Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos.

The post Trump’s Support for Assad Will Make the Global Refugee Crisis Permanent appeared first on The Intercept.

“That truck would make a beautiful target,” one of the operators says. The crew analyzes the convoy, debating whether children are present. “I really doubt that child call, man. I really fucking hate that shit.”

Under the watchful gaze of the drone crew, the families disembark from the convoy, stopping to pray at the side of the road. After a brief pause, they get back in their cars and continue their journey, still unaware that they are being stalked from above.

Members of the drone crew, satisfied they have a legitimate target in their sights, make the necessary preparations to use force.

As the cars trundle down the road, they open fire.

“And … oh … there it goes!” one of the pilots exclaims. The first car in the convoy, struck by a missile, disappears in a giant cloud of dust. Moments later, a second car explodes. People run out of the remaining vehicle, waving at the aircraft above to stop firing. They brandish pieces of cloth at the sky to try and indicate they are non-combatants. A woman can be seen holding a child.

“I don’t know about this,” one of the operators says. “This is weird.”

The Uruzgan drone strike and the events surrounding it form much of the basis of “National Bird,” an extraordinary new documentary about the U.S. drone program. The film, which opened Friday in Los Angeles, profiles the lives of former drone operators, as well as victims of the program, including the survivors of the Uruzgan attack. In doing so, it provides a rare glimpse into the lives of those affected by the U.S. military’s covert global assassination program, as well as the consequences facing those who speak out about it.

“I wanted to make a film on the drone war and the people directly impacted: those operating the program and those impacted in countries where drone strikes are being carried out,” said Sonia Kennebeck, the producer and director of “National Bird.” “We took many risks to make this film, because we felt there is a real need for transparency in these programs.”

The film profiles three Americans who took part in the drone program but later experienced a crisis of conscience.

“This is not just one person sitting there with a joystick moving around a plane that’s around the world, its like borders don’t matter anymore. There’s a huge system that is around the world and that can suck up endless data,” says Lisa, a former technical sergeant on drone surveillance systems, who, like all the subjects in “National Bird,” is identified only by her first name.

In the film, Lisa shows a commendation she received for helping identify over 121,000 “insurgent targets” over a two-year period, as part of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “That is 121,000 lives affected by technology that we control. How many years have we been at war now?”

The film, beautifully constructed, intersperses scenes from the lives of drone operators living in small American towns with scenes from Afghanistan showing those who have been targeted by strikes.

The subjects in the film are cautious in their descriptions of their activities, citing a pervasive fear that they will be charged under the Espionage Act for their whistleblowing. And during the making of the film, a drone operator named Daniel, a former NSA operative at Fort Meade, has his house raided by the FBI and is informed that he is under investigation for speaking out about the program.

The Obama administration has been notorious for using that law to prosecute individuals speaking out about the covert warfare programs. Indeed, more individuals have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act by Obama than under all previous administrations combined. This crackdown makes the acts of whistleblowing documented in “National Bird” even more courageous.

“I can say the drone program is wrong because I don’t know how many people I’ve killed,” Heather, a drone operator now suffering from PTSD, says in the film. Having lost several friends in the program to suicide, she says she is tormented by her role in drone strikes that she believes killed and maimed civilians. She is also consumed with fear that she will soon be targeted for speaking out. “If someone comes to my house and puts a bag over my head and hauls me away, what was the point in anything I did?”

Some of the most moving scenes in the film are shot in Afghanistan, where the filmmakers traveled to meet victims of the program. “When your body is intact, your mind is different. You are content,” says one man who was wounded in the Uruzgan attack. “But the moment you are wounded, your soul gets damaged. When your leg is torn off, and your gait slows, it also burdens your spirit.”

“Sometimes I am so sad, my heart wants to explode,” the man says, before breaking down silently in tears.

As the Obama administration prepares to hand off its vast, opaque institutions of surveillance and covert warfare to Donald Trump, many have begun to worry anew about these powers. The new president-elect and his cabinet will have unprecedented power to conduct secret wars and assassinations around the globe, thanks in part to programs bequeathed to him by his liberal predecessor. The aggressive posture that Obama took toward whistleblowers also sets a precedent for Trump to step up attacks against those inside the government who dare to shed light on such programs.

“I made this film in part to highlight the repercussions of future governments holding these powers, but I don’t think many people realize how bad things already are under Obama,” says Kennebeck. “The whistleblowers in the film took great risks, because they felt that people need to know what is happening inside the drone program.”

“But, over the course of our shooting, the film ended up being as much about the consequences of whistleblowing as it did about the drone program itself.”

Top photo: Lisa, a whistleblower and former technical sergeant on drone surveillance systems, travels to Afghanistan in Sonia Kennbeck’s “National Bird.”

The post A New Documentary Explores the Devastating Effects of Drone Warfare on Victims and Whistleblowers appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s proposals, however vile, at one time seemed almost too outlandish to be accepted by the American electorate. But now, the inconceivable has happened. Donald Trump, the former reality-TV host and real estate mogul, has gone from dark-horse GOP primary candidate to the president-elect of the United States. With Republicans retaining control of Congress, the future President Trump has a mandate to turn many of his proposals into reality.

While many communities have good reason to fear a Trump presidency, for Muslim Americans the fears are particularly immediate. Not only is Trump openly hostile to them, roughly half of American voters have either accepted his message of hatred and xenophobia, or otherwise helped abet it. During the primaries, strong majorities in many states expressed direct support for Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from the country.

The revelation that there is such widespread, demonstrable popular support in the United States for drumming Muslims out of society has been chilling for many.

“I grew up in New England, in a community that was worldly, educated, and prosperous — but the last time I was there, I saw more Trump signs than I could believe. That wasn’t about economics. It was about tribe, race, and privilege,” says Haroon Moghul, a Muslim activist and fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. “I’m afraid for my family and for Muslim Americans generally. To use a cultural reference we can all understand: We feel like we just got voted off the island. Now all we’re doing is waiting for when, and how, they’ll show us out.”

“Will it happen gradually, or all at once? Will it be late at night when no one is watching, or in the middle of the day, to chants of ‘USA, USA’?”

Faiza Ali, a community organizer in Brooklyn, says she was “shocked and terrified” by the results of the election. Like many others, she fears that Trump’s anti-Muslim political platform will lead to the mainstreaming of Islamophobia within American society. “An unabashed bigot who has called for the banning of Muslims and the shutting down of mosques was elected president. When he was running his campaign, there was no place for Muslims in Trump’s America. What does this mean for us now?”

Since Trump’s election, a number of hate crimes targeting visibly Muslim women have been investigated across the country. Many fear that such incidents are only a harbinger of future discrimination, now legitimized by the bigotry of the president-elect himself.

“I fear for communities of color and Muslims, especially women who wear hijab,” Ali says. “Trump ran a campaign based on fear and hate, and without a doubt, fear and hate is exactly what won on Tuesday.”

While the shock of Trump’s election is still reverberating, some Muslim American activists say that Trump’s presidency may offer a small silver lining: the opportunity to forge alliances with other communities to defend civil liberties in the United States. After 15 years of being at the forefront of surveillance and harassment by the FBI, NSA, and other federal government agencies, Muslim Americans are hopeful that the widespread shock over Trump’s election will offer an opportunity to build new alliances with other civil society groups, while turning more Americans against Islamophobia.

“Americans have to understand that when Muslims were depicted as a national security threat to legislate against, with measures like the Patriot Act and NDAA being passed as a result, everyone lost their civil liberties, not just us,” says Maytha Alhassen, a PhD researcher in American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. “By painting us as an unrelatable community, disconnected from American values, the government made it easy for Americans to vote against their own interests.”

Back in the early post-9/11 period, the Bush administration expanded government powers, including domestic surveillance and watchlisting. The Obama administration has continued and entrenched these measures, which have been accepted by many on the basis of national security. In general, the targets of the most draconian security policies have been Muslims. An NYPD surveillance program that conducted blanket surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey and a national program that permitted the surveillance of Muslim American civil society leaders are among the many examples.

The fact that such programs were revealed largely during a relatively popular Democratic administration blunted much popular criticism. But under a GOP president as divisive, threatening, and bellicose as Trump, there may be an opportunity for a coordinated push against such policies.

“We had a lot of work to do no matter who won the presidency. Many policies were already in place that were targeting our community, but now the landscape has fundamentally changed,” says Mohammad Khan, campaign manager at MPower Change, a Muslim grassroots advocacy organization.

Khan says that his organization is bracing for the worst after Trump’s election. He describes the atmosphere of fear among Muslim Americans today as similar to the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001.

“I think we’re going to have to operate in a manner similar to opposition parties living under authoritarian regimes. We expect organizations and leaders to be targeted for harassment and legal measures in the coming years, as well as wider crackdowns on public assembly and dissent,” Khan says. “A crackdown is coming to civil society in general, and on Muslims in particular, whether they engage in activism or not.”

The sweep of this crackdown may help Muslim Americans gain more public support on issues affecting their community. “In a crisis moment like this, other communities may realize how Islamophobia has been used as a justification to expand the coercive power of the government,” Khan says. “That can bring a sense of unity between different groups who share a fear of being targeted by this administration.”

Over the course of a long, divisive campaign, Trump has succeeded in alienating vast swaths of American society. His attacks against the press and the judiciary have strongly suggested that his administration will seek to govern in a bullying, authoritarian fashion. With the vastly expanded executive powers bequeathed to him by the Obama administration, Trump stands ready to inherit a presidential office of unprecedented historical power.

“For years we have been warning of the sheer magnitude of a government that has militarized the police, dramatically expanded secrecy, and normalized suspicionless surveillance,” says Naureen Shah, director of national security and human rights at Amnesty International. “We’re now seeing growing consciousness of how we’re all affected by these aggressive and abusive security measures.”

Top photo: Children from Al-Rahmah school wait for President Barack Obama during his visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Feb. 3, 2016, in Baltimore, Maryland.

The post Muslims in Trump’s America: Fearful but Defiant appeared first on The Intercept.

“I have a degree in medicine, but I am a graduate of prison, and I am indebted to this experience,” Saleh said, sitting with us in a restaurant near Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Now in his 50s, with white hair and a dignified, somewhat world-weary demeanor, Saleh, called Syria’s “voice of conscience” by many, has the appearance and bearing of a university professor. But he speaks with passionate indignation about what he calls the Assad dynasty’s “enslavement” of the Syrian people.

Saleh was living in Damascus in 2011 when Syrian civilians rose up to demand political reform. That protest movement soon turned into open revolution after government forces met the protestors with gunfire, bombardment, mass arrests, and torture.

From painful firsthand experience, Saleh knew the cost of challenging the Assad regime. But when the uprising started, he did not hesitate to join it. He left home and spent the next two years in hiding, helping Syrian activists organize their struggle.

By late 2013, Syria had descended into anarchy. The conflict between the government and a range of opposition forces had become increasingly militarized. Like many other activists for the revolution, Saleh was forced to flee across the border to Turkey. That same year, armed groups in the Damascus suburbs kidnapped his wife, along with three other activists. ISIS kidnapped his brother in 2013. Neither has been heard from since.

Saleh is now among the millions of Syrians living in Turkey as refugees. He travels the country helping to train Syrian writers and activists in exile, while writing and speaking about his country’s plight. As a leftist, he has also been a vociferous critic of a growing international consensus that has come to see the Syrian conflict in Bashar al-Assad’s terms — as a fight against terrorism.

Our interview with Saleh is presented below, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Please tell us briefly about your own background in Syria.

As a university student in the late 1970s, I was a member of one of two Communist Party organizations actively opposing the regime. At that time, there was an uprising in Syria that involved students, trade unionists, lawyers, and members of other professions who were fighting against the Assad government, as well as a separate conflict between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood. There were regular worker strikes in Aleppo, where I was living, and I saw with my own eyes security forces breaking down the doors of homes and businesses.

To be arrested in Assad’s Syria, you didn’t need reasons. But in 1980, hundreds of my comrades and I were detained as part of a campaign by the government to break Syrian society.

I was young, and the early years in jail were very difficult. We suffered harsh treatment. In later years, our conditions were not so bad and we were allowed books and dictionaries. I learned English inside prison, and for 13 years, I read maybe 100 books or more per year. In the last year of my imprisonment, I was transferred to Tadmor prison, which is one of the most vicious places on the planet — a concentration camp for torture, humiliation, hunger, and fear. I was then released in 1996.

The experience of prison transformed me and my ideas about the world. In many ways, it was an emancipatory experience. I developed the belief that to protect our fundamental values of justice, freedom, human dignity, and equality, we had to change our concepts and theories. The Soviet Union had fallen and many changes were occurring in the world. My comrades who refused to change, those who adhered to their old methods and tools, found themselves in a position of leaving their values behind. This is one reason why many leftists today are against the Syrian revolution — because they adhere to the dead letter of their beliefs, rather than the living struggle of the people for justice.

What did you expect from the left in its response to the Syrian revolution?

It came to me as a shock, actually, that most of them have sided with Bashar al-Assad. I don’t expect much out of the international left, but I thought they would understand our situation and see us as a people who were struggling against a very despotic, very corrupt, and very sectarian regime. I thought they would see us and side with us. What I found, unfortunately, is that most people on the left know absolutely nothing about Syria. They know nothing of its history, political economy, or contemporary circumstances, and they don’t see us.

In America, the leftists are against the establishment in their own country. In a way, they thought that the U.S. establishment was siding with the Syrian revolution — something that is completely false and an utter lie — and for this reason they have stood against us. And this applies to leftists almost everywhere in the world. They are obsessed with the White House and the establishment powers of their own countries. The majority are also still obsessed with the old Cold War-era struggles against imperialism and capitalism.

Recently, an event in Rome that displayed images of those tortured and killed by Assad was attacked by fascists. Just days before, it had also been attacked in a local communist newspaper for promoting “imperialism.” There is a growing convergence between the views of fascists and the far-left about Syria and other issues. The reason for this is that perspectives on the left are outdated. They are interested in high-politics, not grassroots struggles. They are dealing with grand ideologies and historical narratives, but they don’t see people — the Syrian people aren’t represented. They are holding on to depopulated discourses that don’t represent human struggle, life, and death.

What should people on the left who have misconceptions know about Syria?

The Assad regime, the junta that rules Syria today, has transformed the country from a republic into a monarchy. As you are aware, Bashar al-Assad inherited the post of president from his father in 2000. I am not aware of a statement from one Western leftist protesting against this transformation of a republic into a monarchy. The state has become the private property of the regime, while the economy has been restructured according to the neoliberal agenda.

In the genes of this regime, it is inscribed that there must be no rights for the Syrian people. We are not citizens. We cannot say “no” to our rulers. We cannot organize, we cannot own the politics of our country, let alone organize in the public space or take part in it actively. They force us to suppress ourselves. We are, under their rule, politically speaking, enslaved.

Many on the left look at Syria and know nothing about the relationship between the Assad regime and the Western powers. The Assad regime was never a power against imperialism in the Middle East. In fact, it always sought a role for itself in the imperial game in the region. But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Assad was against imperialism. Even if that were the case, the Syrian people would still be a part of the deal! We as a people are not merely a tool for the narratives of the Western left. This is our country. We are not guests.

Over the past several years, there has been, in effect, a “Palestinization” of the Syrian people. We are being dealt with by the regime, and the world, as a people who will be annihilated politically. Maybe they won’t kill all of us. Many of us are still living. After all, only around half a million or so have been killed so far. But politically, they are annihilating us the same way that the Palestinians are being annihilated.

At the same time, there is a corresponding “Israelization” of the Syrian regime. The same way that Israel relies on the United States for United Nations Security Council vetoes to protect it internationally, the Syrian regime now relies on vetoes from Russia. In Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, only one side — Israel’s — has air power. The same is true in the conflict between Assad and the opposition.

The Assad regime has become a representative of the internal First World in Syria, the Syrian whites. I think the elites in the West find Bashar al-Assad more palatable than other potential interlocutors. He wears expensive suits and has a necktie, and, ultimately, these elites prefer a fascist with a necktie to a fascist with a beard. Meanwhile, they don’t see us, the Syrian people. Those who are trying to own the politics of their own country have been rendered invisible.

What is your position on the Islamist parties?

Under the umbrella of Islam we have many things. There is the religion of Muslims, which should be respected. Then there is political Islam, which includes parties and groups with which one should negotiate and find compromises — groups such as Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Then we have what I call nihilist groups like ISIS, which must be fought. But to be successful in fighting against these groups you must give a chance to politics. You cannot isolate nihilists like al Qaeda and ISIS without giving something to other parties with whom you can negotiate.

I am a secularist and a nonbeliever, an atheist. But I don’t find it democratic to fight against ISIS while being Islamophobic, while hating Muslims and expressing suspicion toward them, and at the same time stating that you don’t want any political role at all for Islamists! This is extremism, it is an extremist position, and it is what reactionary Islamic extremism is built on. When you refuse to accept the moderate groups, practically speaking you are supporting the extremists.

How do you respond to the perception in the West that the Assad regime is a bulwark of secularism in Syria?

I think there is something Islamophobic about this position. The Assad regime is not secular. It is a sectarian regime. You don’t need anything related to progress or the enlightenment to be loyal to one sect and fight against other sects. They employ sectarianism as a strategy of control, as a means to seize power forever. In their own slogans they openly say, “Assad or we burn the country,” and “forever, forever,” in reference to holding absolute power over the country.

In secularism, there is inherently the idea of not discriminating between people on the basis of their religion or confessional community. Is this the case in Syria now? No, it is not. If you are an Alawite, your chances of getting a job or having real power in society are greater than if you are a Sunni or a member of another group.

After the revolution began, I was in Eastern Ghouta [near Damascus]. My travels also led me to the eastern parts of Homs and Raqqa. When the Salafists came, I never once saw people celebrating. I am not saying that people were angry, but these groups didn’t have real popularity. People are against the regime, and these groups are against the regime. Their presence filled a gap.

What was it that allowed the Salafists and other groups to gain prominence after the revolution?

For 30 years, the Baath Party has made a project of crushing all political life in Syria. So when the uprising came, we had no real political organizations, only individuals here and there. Islam, in our society, is the limit of political poverty. When you don’t have any political life, people will mobilize according to the lowest stratum of an imaginary community. This deeper identity is religion. When you have political and cultural life, you can have trade unions, leftist groups, and people are able to organize along any number of identities. But when you crush politics, when there is no political life, religious identity will prosper.

Let me give you as an example the Syrian Kurds. Over the years of Baath Party rule, they were manipulated, divided, and even denied their very existence as Kurdish people in what was called the “Syrian Arab Republic.” Despite this, Kurds were still allowed to organize politically. Not one of their political parties was exterminated. When I was in prison, many of my friends were from Kurdish political organizations. They would only ever spend a year or two in prison at a time, never 15 or 20 years.

The Baath Party crushed all political life for Syrian Arabs, including the Muslim Brotherhood parties. When they were confronted by the Syrian revolution, they strove to crush that as well, and this has now resulted in ISIS. ISIS is not an expression of the Syrian revolution. It is an expression of the destruction of Syrian society, and of Iraqi society before it.

Bashar al-Assad has begun to portray himself as a partner to the West in fighting terrorism. What are the implications of accepting such a claim?

The war on terror narrative that Assad has adopted is one that is based on empowering states and empowering the powerful against the weak. That narrative weakens those who are already weak, which is why he has used it to present himself to the world as a partner in the campaign against terrorism.

I don’t think that there is anything democratic or progressive about this narrative, or about the practices and institutions related to this war on terror framing. The reason the world is now in a crisis is that the major global narrative now is not democracy, justice, socialism, or even liberalism — it is all about security and immigration. This means that Trump is better than Clinton, Marine Le Pen is better than Hollande. It means that a fascist is always better than a democrat, which means that Bashar Assad is better than the opposition.

Accepting this terrorism narrative makes people like us, those who were active in the revolution, in its peaceful stage, and then in the armed struggle, effectively invisible. All those opposing the regime are ISIS — as Bashar al-Assad is always saying — and the only other choice is him. Accepting this war on terror narrative weakens and disempowers people like us. It disempowers leftist, democratic, and feminist Syrian organizations and activists, while empowering the regime and the extremists.

Now that many people have become alienated from Islamists after witnessing their terrible practices in many areas, is there a chance for secular forces to win people back?

Yes, we have a chance. But only provided that Bashar al-Assad is not there. For us to be a real alternative in the country, Bashar and this junta regime that has killed hundreds and thousands of our people cannot be there. I am a leftist and I am an atheist, but I will not fight against ISIS if, behind my back, you put your hand in the hand of Bashar al-Assad.

If the proposal is, “Let’s focus on defeating ISIS and then afterward, maybe he will still be around,” I will not do it. The one who tortured, humiliated, killed, and despised my people — Bashar al-Assad — is a criminal who must be held accountable. This accountability will furnish a basis for secularists, nationalists, and democrats to compete against mainstream Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood, and to fight against nihilist groups like ISIS. Both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad are the extremist powers that must be eradicated in order to build an inclusive Syria.

I am not saying that things will be OK when these groups are gone. There will be huge problems to deal with in Syrian society. But right now, we don’t have problems in Syria. We have tragedies, we have massacres, we have a horrific human condition. We have a destroyed country and a destroyed society. When Bashar is gone and ISIS is gone, we can hope for a dynamic of rebuilding and reconciliation, in which Syrians can start to put their country back together. But as long as he remains, this will never be possible.

What do you say to those who concede that Bashar al-Assad is a tyrant but argue that he is a lesser evil than ISIS and should be kept in power to preserve stability?

For us, as Syrians, let me be frank: ISIS is the lesser evil. They have killed maybe 10,000 people, whereas Bashar al-Assad has killed hundreds of thousands. Ask yourself how anyone could tolerate such a situation. Could you imagine that in 10 or 15 years, after crushing all opposition, perhaps the son of Bashar al-Assad will proceed to rule the country after him? How horrible. How criminal. If Bashar al-Assad survives, after killing hundreds of thousands of people, expatriating 5 million more, displacing 6 million within the country, inviting the Iranians and the Russians and Shia militias from around the world to invade Syria, if such an abhorrent criminal survives and maintains his political power, the world will be a much worse place for everyone.

What is your opinion on the possibility of Western intervention in Syria?

First, it is a fable that Western countries did not intervene in Syria. The reality is that they intervened in a very specific way that prevented Assad from falling but guaranteed that the country would be destroyed. The United States pressured Turkey and other countries very early on to prevent them from providing decisive assistance to the Syrian opposition. In doing so, these countries vetoed Assad’s being toppled by the Syrian people by force. Meanwhile, as we can see, they have no problem watching the Syrian revolution be crushed by force.

The United States also negotiated the sordid chemical weapons deal with Russia in 2013 — a deal that solved a big problem for America, Russia, Israel, and for the Assad regime, but did nothing for the Syrian people. The United States also led the “Friends of the Syrian People” group, which it then sidelined and destroyed. Leftists in the West should know this: In many important ways, the Americans have been supporting Bashar al-Assad. The United States helped create a situation in which Syria would be plunged into chaos, but the regime would remain in power.

So if there were a military intervention to depose Assad today, would you support that?

I want Assad to be hanged now, not tomorrow. But there needs to be a vision, the cornerstone of which is to change the political environment of Syria substantially — to build a new Syria on an inclusive basis, with a new majority in the country. For such a majority to be built, you must both overthrow Bashar al-Assad and fight ISIS. This will help Alawites to be independent from the Assad regime and will isolate the extremists among the Sunnis. It will be good for the Christians and Druze and other minorities and will help unite them around issues that transcend sectarian divisions. We have people who are Sunnis who still refuse to be identified by their sect. There are many people like me and others who want real change and want to be part of this new Syrian majority. Only such a solution could be sustainable, and it will be the beginning of solving this crisis that is aggravating the entire world now.

Ultimately, it is not a matter of intervention against Assad. It is a matter of helping Syrians to regain ownership of their country and to hold the criminals accountable. ISIS is not that big of a monster. It can be easily defeated. Many of us are people from Raqqa [ISIS’s capital], scattered around the world, and we are all ready to go and fight them. But we are not ready to go back to slavery under Bashar al-Assad. This is a clique and junta that killed and tortured on an industrial scale. Under international law, it is meant to be held accountable. This is not something that we are inventing. We don’t ask Obama or Hollande to come solve our problems. International law was breached several times, and those who did this should be held accountable. We have a special tribunal at The Hague and Bashar al-Assad should be referred there.

Do you have hope for the future of Syria?

We are resilient people. We still believe in human dignity and in a better future for ourselves and others. We have a cause, and it is a just cause. I think that the Syrian revolution liberated us from an inferiority complex we had toward the other people of the world. We don’t wait for others to solve our problems now, or to define for us what is just and what is fair. We are struggling for our emancipation, without illusions. We are hopeful that more people will join us in this struggle. It is not just about Syria any longer. It is about the world.

Top photo: Syrian writer and political dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh poses for a portrait in Paris, France, on May 8, 2016.

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Jerf, 38, was a Syrian filmmaker and journalist who had become a popular activist during the revolution. A fierce critic of both the Assad regime and the Islamic State, he had received numerous death threats in the months before he was killed. Shortly after his murder, the Islamic State issued a statement claiming responsibility and Turkish authorities arrested three men in connection with the shooting.

Jerf is only one of the innumerable Syrian revolutionary activists who have lost their lives over the past five years. An editor and documentarian, he helped train a generation of young Syrians to continue the fight for democracy in their country. But his story, and the stories of those like him who continue the spirit of the 2011 uprising, rarely register in broader narratives of the conflict. For all they have sacrificed, their struggles have gone largely ignored, in a framing of the conflict that has been convenient for the Assad government.

Leila Shami, co-author of the book “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War,” told me, “The Syrian government has taken huge efforts to frame the conflict as one solely between themselves and extremist groups. People are not aware that there is a third option in Syria, that there are many Syrians from a wide range of backgrounds who are still fighting for the original goals of the revolution.”

Shami added, “Syria has had so many heroes, but people often don’t know who they are.”

Khalifa al-Khadr was one of those whose lives Naji Jerf had touched. A student at Aleppo University when the war began, he now belongs to a new generation of writers and journalists committed to carrying on the goals of the revolution. Last week in Gaziantep, on the Turkish-Syrian border, Khadr sat drinking tea at a bustling outdoor restaurant, occasionally rising to greet other young Syrians who now also call this Turkish city home.

“When all this started, we were mostly too young to have any kind of ideology,” Khadr told me. “The reason we rose up was to just kill fear. To kill this fear that we had all been living under as a society.”

Khadr looked younger than his 23 years. He wore glasses, an orange jacket, and a beige scarf wrapped around his neck. The revolution had begun when he was only 17. It came to consume every aspect of his life and worldview. Despite his youthful appearance, he spoke with the serious intensity of someone who had come of age during war. On his cellphone, the background photo was a picture of a young Syrian girl killed in a government bombardment of the city of Idlib.

Khalifa al-Khadr in a photo taken on May 30, 2015.

Photo: Khalifa al-Khadr/Facebook

When the government met those protests with brutal violence, Khadr saw sentiments harden among his fellow students. Now they realized that the government would choose force over incremental reform, and they began calling for bringing down the regime. Some spoke of taking up arms in self-defense.

As it turned out, they wouldn’t have to. In the summer of 2012, rebel fighters from surrounding villages swept into Aleppo and captured several key districts from government control. The people of Aleppo were divided in their response to the rebels’ arrival. Some wealthy residents were uneasy with the influx of poor, rural fighters. Even among those who had supported the uprising, there were divisions and concerns. Khadr didn’t share them. “I was excited,” he told me. “I felt like we were about to be part of something that was going to free the country.”

But as the war ground into a stalemate, many people fled Aleppo, and then Syria itself. Khadr was among the activists who stayed. He was continuing the revolution by other means: building an archive of photos and videos to document developments in opposition-held areas, and writing about his own experiences and observations of the uprising. In one passage of a longer reminiscence, he wrote about a childhood friend who took part in the revolution only to later turn away from it by joining the militant group the Islamic State:

A choke comes between memory and the bitter reality. The choke kills me and forbids me from mourning him. If I were an armed fighter, I would have killed him the minute I saw him on the battlefield, to save his soul. To prevent him from infecting others, to prevent his soul from sinking into others’ blood.

I won’t mourn your deeds, even if the one you killed was my own father. As you have loyalties of your own, I have loyalty to our revolution, more sacred than yours.

It was through social media that he first met Naji Jerf three years ago. Khadr was engaged in a debate with other young Syrian activists on Facebook when Jerf, known to many of them as the editor of the Syrian revolutionary news outlet Hentah, “liked” his status, part of a Facebook conversation that had begun around the quote “Man does not live on bread alone.” The two began messaging and Jerf invited Khadr to take part in a media workshop he had arranged for young activists in southern Turkey, where Jerf was then based.

Jerf became a mentor and adviser to Khadr, encouraging him to develop his writing and publishing his articles periodically on Hentah. While Khadr lived between relatives’ and friends’ homes in different areas of opposition-held Syria, he would occasionally cross the border to Gaziantep to meet with Jerf and other activists. In the relative calm of Turkey, they would spend days talking and reflecting on the future of their country — discussions that helped shape the nascent worldviews of Khadr and the other young activists.

“Syrians have tried secularism, nationalism, Islamism, and they have all failed in various ways,” Khadr told me. “The reality is that it doesn’t matter what the orientation of the government is per se. What matters is that the ruling system respects the rights of citizens and protects them from injustice.”

Under the Assad regime, Syria had become a police state whose prisons were notorious for torture, murder, and indefinite detention. Many activists, including Ghiath Matar, known as “Syria’s Gandhi,” and the Syrian anarchist philosopher Omar Aziz, had lost their lives in Syria’s torturous detention facilities.

“Even before the revolution, we all grew up hearing stories of people who disappeared, we knew the fear this created,” Khadr reflected. He told me that now he dreams of a country with “no prisons” — a country where the all-encompassing fear that characterized Baathist rule is finally removed.

Khadr’s life, like the lives of many other Syrians of his generation, has been irreversibly transformed by the events of the revolution. Though he is still young, he exudes a brash confidence and poise. “All my old friends from before, when I was just a student, we lost touch and don’t talk anymore,” he said, fingering a string of beads wrapped around his fingers. “Everyone who is a friend to me today, they are people I shared experiences with during the revolution.”

Khadr was back in Syria last December when he received the message informing him that Naji Jerf had been murdered. In a Facebook post that day, Syrian journalist Rami Jarrah lamented that people like Jerf — Syrian civil revolutionaries who had given their lives for the freedom of the country — had been effectively airbrushed out of history.

“Syrians who have dedicated so much for principle and stood against tyranny and extremism [receive] no real recognition,” Jarrah wrote. “This mess of misinformation says that there are two sides fighting (Assad and ISIS) with little mention of those that oppose both wrongs. Those like Naji.”

In Muslim societies, funerals are typically held within a few days of death. Despite Khadr’s wishes, he could not cross the border back to Turkey in time to attend his friend’s farewell.

“Death has a different meaning in different cultures. At the beginning you mourn, but then, when so many begin to die, you have to find a way to stop mourning them and just keep going,” he told me, emotion slowly creeping into his voice.

“When I think of Naji now, I remember the things he taught me and I say: Your memory is my path.”

Top photo: Demonstrators chant slogans and hold Syrian flags during a protest against the Assad regime in the opposition-controlled Kafr Hamrah village of Aleppo, Syria, on March 25, 2016.

The post How Syria’s Forgotten Revolutionaries Rose Up “To Kill This Fear” appeared first on The Intercept.

The study, reviewed by The Intercept, was conducted in 2012 by a unit in the FBI’s counterterrorism division and surveyed intelligence analysts and FBI special agents across the United States who were responsible for nearly 200 cases, both open and closed, involving “homegrown violent extremists.” The survey responses reinforced the FBI’s conclusion that such individuals “frequently believe the U.S. military is committing atrocities in Muslim countries, thereby justifying their violent aspirations.”

Online relationships and exposure to English-language militant propaganda and “ideologues” like Anwar al-Awlaki are also cited as “key factors” driving extremism. But grievances over U.S. military action ranked far above any other factor, turning up in 18 percent of all cases, with additional cases citing a “perceived war against Islam,” “perceived discrimination,” or other more specific incidents. The report notes that between 2009 and 2012, 10 out of 16 attempted or successful terrorist attacks in the United States targeted military facilities or personnel.

Overall, the survey confirmed the “highly individualized nature of the radicalization process,” a finding consistent with outside scholarship on the subject.

“Numerous individuals, activities, or experiences can contribute to an extremist’s radicalization,” the report says. “It can be difficult, if not impossible, to predict for any given individual what factor or combination of factors will prompt that individual’s radicalization or mobilization to violence.”

The report is titled “Homegrown Violent Extremists: Survey Confirms Key Assessments, Reveals New Insights about Radicalization.” It is dated December 20, 2012. An FBI unit called the “Americas Fusion Cell” surveyed agents responsible for 198 “current and disrupted [homegrown violent extremists],” which the report says represented a fraction of all “pending, U.S.-based Sunni extremist cases” at the time. The survey seems designed to look only at Muslim violent extremism. (The FBI declined to comment.)

Agents were asked over 100 questions about their subjects in order to “identify what role, if any,” particular factors played in their radicalization — listed as “known radicalizers,” extremist propaganda, participation in web forums, family members, “affiliation with religious, student, or social organization(s) where extremist views are expressed,” overseas travel, prison or military experience, and “significant life events and/or grievances.”

Among the factors that did not “significantly contribute” to radicalization, the study found, were prison time, military service, and international travel. Although, the report notes, “the FBI historically has been concerned about the potential for prison radicalization,” in fact, “survey results indicate incarceration was rarely influential.” The report ends with recommendations that agents focus their attention on web forums, social media, and other online interactions, and step up surveillance of “known radicalizers” and those who contact them.

The study echoes previous findings, including a 2011 FBI intelligence assessment, recently released to MuckRock through a public records request, which concluded that “a broadening U.S. military presence overseas” was a motivating factor for a rise in plotted attacks, specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That study also found “no demographic patterns” among the plotters.

“Insofar as there is an identifiable motivation in most of these cases it has to do with outrage over what is happening overseas,” says John Mueller, a senior research scientist with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University and co-author of “Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism.”

“People read news reports about atrocities and become angry,” Mueller said, adding that such reports are often perceived as an attack on one’s own in-group, religion, or cultural heritage. “It doesn’t have to be information from a jihadist website that angers someone, it could be a New York Times report about a drone strike that kills a bunch of civilians in Afghanistan.”

Perpetrators of more recent attacks have latched onto U.S. foreign policy to justify violence. The journals of Ahmad Rahami, accused of bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey last month, cited wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. In a 911 call, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub earlier this year, claimed he acted in retaliation for a U.S. airstrike on an ISIS fighter. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated his and his brother’s attack on the Boston Marathon.

In many of these cases, pundits and politicians focus on the role of religion, something Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and author of “Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century,” describes as a “red herring,” citing a history of shifting ideologies used to justify terrorist acts.

“Politicians try very hard not to talk about foreign policy or military action being a major contributor to homegrown terrorism,” Sageman says, adding that government reticence to share raw data from terrorism cases with academia has hindered analysis of the subject.

The limits of the CVE focus on community involvement are clear in cases of individuals like Rahami, whose behavior did raise red flags for those around them; Rahami’s own father referred him to the FBI. In his case, authorities did not find enough concerning evidence ahead of the attack to arrest him, underscoring the difficulty of interdicting individuals who may be inspired by organized terror groups despite having no obvious actual connection to them.

Sageman says that the shortcomings of CVE models reflect a misapprehension of what drives political violence.

“Terrorism is very much a product of individuals identifying themselves with a group that appears to be the target of aggression and reacting violently to that,” he says. “Continued U.S. military action will inevitably drive terrorist activities in this country, because some local people here will identify themselves with the victims of those actions abroad.”

Correction, October 15: This article originally misstated the name of the brother who spoke with investigators about his motivations for the Boston bombing; it was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, not Tamerlan.

Top photo: A member of the U.S. Air Force looks over flight paperwork inside a KC-135 Stratotanker flying over Iraq on March 17, 2016, in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.

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Saleh spends most of his time between Turkey and opposition-held areas of northern Syria, but he is currently visiting the United States to promote the Civil Defense’s work as well as a new Netflix documentary about the group. Soft-spoken and reserved, Saleh expresses deep frustration over the civil war that upended his quiet life, thrusting him almost by accident into an extremely dangerous occupation. “Starting from 2011, after the government’s crackdown began, I started helping with humanitarian relief and the evacuation of wounded people in our area following attacks,” he told The Intercept during an interview in New York this week. “We got experience from this practical work and later received some training from a Turkish NGO. By 2013, we started to do search-and-rescue work after airstrikes, and that year created the Civil Defense.”

But the attention the group has received has also made it a target of the Syrian government and the Russian forces that support it. In recent days, Russian airstrikes reportedly struck three Civil Defense headquarters in Aleppo, destroying one of the few lifelines available to civilians in the besieged city. “They are not happy that there is a success story in Syria that is receiving attention from the world,” says Saleh. “They are targeting us because we have become a critical source of information about what is happening in Aleppo. We document the attacks against civilian neighborhoods, and we pass the messages from the ground to the world.”

Civil Defense is one of the only aid organizations still operating in these bleak circumstances. For supporters of the Syrian government, the group, which has received funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, has become the subject of lurid conspiracy theories, including accusations that it is part of a Western-orchestrated plot for regime change. Saleh is weary of these claims, saying that they are divorced from the reality of events in Syria. Civil Defense’s code of conduct includes a pledge of political neutrality, and the group rescues victims of bombings regardless of political persuasion.

“We are not asking for anything, except the implementation of the resolutions and agreements asking for an end to the indiscriminate bombings, besiegement, torture, and use of chemical weapons by the regime,” Saleh says. “We know that the resolutions to stop these things are not being implemented in Syria because there is no respect for them. There needs to be a political will to stop this catastrophe.”

The Syrian government has recently reiterated its intention to retake opposition-held areas of Aleppo by force. Too weak to accomplish this goal on its own, it has relied on Russian air support as well as ground forces supplied by regional allies. In the last few weeks, hundreds of civilians have reportedly been killed by strikes conducted by Russian and Syrian warplanes, which have been accused of indiscriminately targeting civilian areas of the city. An airstrike last week destroyed a humanitarian convoy organized by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, killing at least 20 people in an attack that has been widely blamed on the Russian government. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has decried the attacks as likely war crimes, saying that the situation in Aleppo resembled a “slaughterhouse.”

Saleh says that the work of the Civil Defense in Aleppo and elsewhere will continue despite the intensifying onslaught. Over 130 Civil Defense members have been killed in the line of duty since the organization was founded in 2013, including many who were killed in “double-tap” airstrikes intended to target rescuers. Though the civil war and his role in it have changed his life irrevocably, Saleh says that he and other Civil Defense members are driven to continue their work by religious conviction. The Civil Defense’s motto, “to save one life is to save all of humanity,” is adapted from a verse in the Quran.

“There are hundreds of thousands of people living in Aleppo under daily bombings,” Saleh says. “They do not have anyone else to call on for support, so we are willing to take any risk to provide it.”

Top photo: A member of the White Helmets carries a child to safety.

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