Episode 8: WEEKLY WAR ROOM: CASES + CRISES + NUGGETS TO KNOW

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.”

-Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense

9 August 2021

RAQQA STILL IN RUINS

Almost four years since the Syrian city of Raqqa, once deemed the “Caliphate Capital” was liberated from ISIS, the lives of survivors and returnees remains in rubble.

According to a new report by humanitarian aid organization Save the Children, which estimates that between 270,000 and 330,000 people are living in the beleaguered city, most exist in squalid ruins with dwellings on the verge of collapse, without proper access to water and electricity. The report points out that at the height of the U.S coalition-led campaign to defeat ISIS, the city endured an average of 150 airstrikes per day, and yet little has progressed in the way of rebuilding and reconstruction.

Moreover, the education sector is also in tatters, with some 80 percent of the school’s still damaged. Scores of teachers are said to have fled the heavy fighting in 2017, and most have not returned.

As for ISIS itself, the outfit may have been territorially ousted from major strongholds, yet the group is still a threat more than seven years since it stormed through swaths of Syria and Iraq. In its most recent quarterly report to Congress, U.S. Central Command surmised that ISIS is “operating as a ‘low-level’ and ‘well-entrenched’ insurgency in rural areas of Iraq and Syria,” and that the members can likely “operate indefinitely in the Syrian desert.”

On an almost daily basis, ISIS continues to carry out bombings and targeted attacks, and recruits children from the sprawling al-Hol displacement camp in Syria, raising concerns over radicalization and the support given to them by women at the camp.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) considers radicalization to be the “most significant” threat when it comes to ISIS and U.S. national security.

GOLD STAR FAMILIES SUE BANKS FOR “AIDING TERRORISTS”

Almost five hundred gold star families, soldiers and civilians who have been severely injured in Afghanistan, last week filed a landmark lawsuit against several of the largest financial institutions in the world with accusations of terrorist support.

The defendants include Deutsche Bank, Standard Charted and Danske Bank, with plaintiffs accusing them of doing business with several factories in Pakistan which supplied a neighboring Taliban explosive-manufacturing wing. Bombs from those factories went on to kill and wound scores of Americans.

The suit is expected to be a major evaluation of the scope of the 2016 antiterrorism legislation – which essentially makes it easier for victims and families to seek relief from entities and countries implicated in “direct or indirect material support.”

If triumphant, the floodgates could not only swing open to a deluge of similar suits but force even the most powerful of the world’s banks out-of-business.

FEMICIDE SURGING AMID ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

While the protracted pandemic comes with a slew of ripple effects on the economy and mental health, perhaps one of the most jarring is its impact on abuses against women.

In the early weeks of the lockdown last year, authorities worldwide and in the U.S. documented a significant spike in domestic violence and cases of femicide, which is defined by the World Bank as the “intentional murder of women because they are women.” According to the UN, roughly 87,000 women die at the behest of intimate partners and family members each year, mainly through domestic abuse or “honor killings.” The protracted isolation and financial hardship induced by the pandemic has amplified the trend.

The UN logged a 30 percent uptick in femicide throughout 2020.

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