Raqqa, Syria. [AP/Press Association Images] All rights reserved. This series of openDemocracy articles started very soon after 9/11. Its many hundreds of contributions since then have focused mainly on international security, with an emphasis on the 'war on terror', the Middle East and the numerous efforts by western states to maintain control. There have also been attempts to see the world from radically different perspectives.
The longest-lasting of these is the twenty-five or so reports from a fictitious consultancy, the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics (SWISH), based in Wana in northwest Pakistan. The SWISH reports have mainly been for the “al-Qaida Strategic Planning Cell”, but SWISH has also reported to the United States and United Kingdom governments – making money from both sides being quite common in matters of war.
More recently, and much more specifically (and sometimes controversially) have been the ten “letters from Raqqa” which purport to be from an intelligent, well-educated and utterly committed analyst working for the ISIS leadership. The letters are to an old friend in Baghdad who is far from sympathetic to ISIS but who shares a history with the author that has so far survived the bitter divisions in Syria and Iraq.
