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COVID-19 restrictions unexpectedly reduced Islamic State violence – political science experts explain why

While some world leaders and foreign policy experts expected IS to increase its attacks during COVID-19’s early days, travel bans and curfews helped…

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A woman walks in Raqa, the former Syrian capital of the Islamic State, in December 2020. Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images

World leaders and policy experts at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic feared that the health crisis might make the world more dangerous. They worried specifically that terrorist organizations like the Islamic State group would capitalize on the pandemic to increase attacks on civilians and recruit new sympathizers.

In some ways, the pandemic presented an opportunity to groups like the Islamic State group, known by the initials IS, because the sudden increase in health spending strained many countries’ budgets and diverted attention away from extremism. Governments’ COVID-19 responses also called on police and armies to deliver health care services in some cases.

But the feared increase in IS violence largely did not materialize.

We are scholars who study the causes of violence within countries, often between armed groups and governments, and what works to prevent it. Along with our colleague Qutaiba Idlbi, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, we wanted to understand how COVID-19 lockdowns affected the ability of groups like IS to operate.

As our new research shows, 2020 COVID-19 lockdown measures such as curfews and travel bans – which governments have mostly since lifted – made it difficult for IS to operate and, as an indirect result, helped reduce violence in Egypt, Iraq and Syria.

A soldier in camouflage steps into a destroyed vehicle that appears charred from the inside.
An Iraqi fighter inspects the site of an Islamic State group attack north of Baghdad in May 2020. Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP via Getty Images

Understanding the Islamic State group

Islamic State group – also known as IS, ISIS and ISIL – emerged as an offshoot of the Islamic militant terrorist group al-Qaida in Iraq around 2004.

In its rise, Islamic State group used unusually brutal and sadistic tactics against government officials, as well as civilians, including intense torture and beheadings.

But IS still cultivated genuine support from some locals in Iraq and Syria by exploiting their grievances over weak, corrupt governance – while sometimes providing better public services, like routine street cleanings and power line repairs, than the government did in the areas it controlled.

Omar, a local journalist and civil society activist from Deir Ezzor, Syria, recalled in 2022 to our co-author Qutaiba how for many in his province, “When ISIS took over Deir Ezzor province, the poor and those unable to flee were glad that the province did not fall back to the Assad regime. For them, ISIS was the better devil.”

Throughout 2013 and 2014, the Islamic State group began to take over territory in Syria and Iraq. At the time, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was engaged in a civil war, which began in 2011 when Assad attempted to quash a popular uprising against his family’s 40-year-long rule.

The Assad regime shot at peaceful demonstrators, detained and tortured activists, and retaliated against communities that challenged his authority. In 2013, the Assad regime attacked its own people with sarin gas, killing more than 1,400 people – many of them children – in Eastern Ghouta.

Political instability was not limited to Syria at the time.

In Iraq, for example, then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responded to 2011 protests against corruption with violence, kidnapping, torture and assassinations of activists and protesters.

The Islamic State group grew during the civil conflicts and public uprisings, and tried to establish control over territory in parts of Iraq and Syria.

At its height in 2014, IS controlled 34,000 square miles – or 88,000 square kilometers – across Syria and Iraq, home to about 10 million people. The group also changed its name from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham to the Islamic State, reflecting its plans to expand control over more territory.

The U.S. launched an international military intervention to defeat the Islamic State group in 2014.

This military coalition brought IS to its knees by the beginning of 2018 and ended its control over the large territory it once controlled in Syria and Iraq.

The U.S. announced it would pull out its troops from Syria in 2018 and declared victory over IS. The Islamic State group lost control over its last bit of territory in Syria in 2019.

A group of men, one with crutches and an amputated leg, walk, followed by some men with cameras photographing them.
Men suspected of having collaborated with the Islamic State group are released from a Syrian prison in October 2020. Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images

Islamic State group under lockdown

But despite the group’s setbacks – including tens of thousands of fighters killed since its rise – IS remained active in early 2020.

In March 2020, the Syrian government enforced a two-month lockdown that closed most businesses and imposed a partial curfew. Iraq and Egypt also implemented widespread closures and curfews to prevent COVID-19 from spreading.

We analyzed data on more than 1,500 attacks initiated by IS over an 18-month period in these places during 2019 and 2020. Our research, published in January 2023, shows that travel bans and curfews helped reduce IS attacks substantially.

These findings highlight that COVID-19 lockdown measures affected the Islamic State’s ability to operate. The curfews made it difficult for IS to generate revenue and hide its movements by closing public and private institutions and restricting travel between provinces.

Our analysis showed that while in effect, curfews and travel bans helped to significantly reduce IS violence, especially in highly populated areas.

In Iraq, violence declined around 30% because of lockdowns. In Syria, there was an approximate 15% overall reduction in violence during this period.

But in Egypt, the government had already instituted curfews in some areas because of the Islamic State group’s presence and violence there. This made it difficult to analyze COVID-specific lockdowns.

Unlike many other militant groups, IS had large financial reserves to sustain itself during the lockdown. It also operates in largely rural areas and, therefore, was not especially vulnerable to the effects of lockdown measures in urban areas.

Broader implications

Our research comes at a critical time as policymakers and counterterrorism experts debate a long-term strategy to eliminate the Islamic State group.

In 2022, the U.S. and local military forces in Syria and Iraq conducted 313 operations in Iraq and Syria, killing 700 IS fighters.

The U.S. and its partners in the region have also killed several prominent IS leaders over the past few years, including Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, who died in February 2022.

But we think the United States’ current strategy, which focuses heavily on military alliances with local partners, is not sustainable – in part because it does not pay heed to the reasons some people in Syria and Iraq still support IS.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Hyro secures $20M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform

Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare…

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Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare sector. Specifically, they sought to automate the routine messages and calls that often lead to administrative burnout, like calls about scheduling, prescription refills and searching through physician directories.

Several years after graduating, Krush and Cohen productized their ideas with Hyro, which uses AI to facilitate text and voice conversations across the web, call centers and apps between healthcare organizations and their clients. Hyro today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Liberty Mutual, Macquarie Capital and Black Opal, bringing the startup’s total raised to $35 million.

Krush says that the new cash will be put toward expanding Hyro’s go-to-market teams and R&D.

“When we searched for a domain that would benefit from transforming these technologies most, we discovered and validated that healthcare, with staffing shortages and antiquated processes, had the greatest need and pain points, and have continued to focus on this particular vertical,” Krush told TechCrunch in an email interview.

To Krush’s point, the healthcare industry faces a major staffing shortfall, exacerbated by the logistical complications that arose during the pandemic. In a recent interview with Keona Health, Halee Fischer-Wright, CEO of Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), said that MGMA’s heard that 88% of medical practices have had difficulties recruiting front-of-office staff over the last year. By another estimates, the healthcare field has lost 20% of its workforce.

Hyro doesn’t attempt to replace staffers. But it does inject automation into the equation. The platform is essentially a drop-in replacement for traditional IVR systems, handling calls and texts automatically using conversational AI.

Hyro can answer common questions and handle tasks like booking or rescheduling an appointment, providing engagement and conversion metrics on the backend as it does so.

Plenty of platforms do — or at least claim to. See RedRoute, a voice-based conversational AI startup that delivers an “Alexa-like” customer service experience over the phone. Elsewhere, there’s Omilia, which provides a conversational solution that works on all platforms (e.g. phone, web chat, social networks, SMS and more) and integrates with existing customer support systems.

But Krush claims that Hyro is differentiated. For one, he says, it offers an AI-powered search feature that scrapes up-to-date information from a customer’s website — ostensibly preventing wrong answers to questions (a notorious problem with text-generating AI). Hyro also boasts “smart routing,” which enables it to “intelligently” decide whether to complete a task automatically, send a link to self-serve via SMS or route a request to the right department.

A bot created using Hyro’s development tools. Image Credits: Hyro

“Our AI assistants have been used by tens of millions of patients, automating conversations on various channels,” Krush said. “Hyro creates a feedback loop by identifying missing knowledge gaps, basically mimicking the operations of a call center agent. It also shows within a conversation exactly how the AI assistant deduced the correct response to a patient or customer query, meaning that if incorrect answers were given, an enterprise can understand exactly which piece of content or dataset is labeled incorrectly and fix accordingly.”

Of course, no technology’s perfect, and Hyro’s likely isn’t an exception to the rule. But the startup’s sales pitch was enough to win over dozens of healthcare networks, providers and hospitals as clients, including Weill Cornell Medicine. Annual recurring revenue has doubled since Hyro went to market in 2019, Krush claims.

Hyro’s future plans entail expanding to industries adjacent to healthcare, including real estate and the public sector, as well as rounding out the platform with more customization options, business optimization recommendations and “variety” in the AI skills that Hyro supports.

“The pandemic expedited digital transformation for healthcare and made the problems we’re solving very clear and obvious (e.g. the spike in calls surrounding information, access to testing, etc.),” Krush said. “We were one of the first to offer a COVID-19 virtual assistant that deployed in under 48 hours based on trusted information from the health system and trusted resources such as the CDC and World Health Organization …. Hyro is well funded, with good growth and momentum, and we’ve always managed a responsible budget, so we’re actually looking to expand and gather more market share while competitors are slowing down.”

Hyro secures $20M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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How to hone your leadership skills, and what your company can do to help

In the rapidly changing, ambiguous and unpredictable world of work, future leaders must be able to learn fast.

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Leadership potential. GaudiLab/Shutterstock

The UK labour market has finally started to see a fall in vacancies following a post-COVID spike in open positions. But there are still more than a million job vacancies, which are “damaging the economy by preventing firms from fulfilling order books and taking on new work”, according to the British Chambers of Commerce.

A recent survey by this business lobby group found four-fifths of firms can’t recruit the people they need. Companies often look outside for external candidates to fill senior roles, but this overlooks current employees who may have the potential to move up within an organisation – even if they do not know it yet.

Overlooking employees often happens when management plays it safe, rather than risking giving “one of their own” an important new assignment. The resulting untapped employee potential can leave people feeling underused and frustrated. You need to be given opportunities to stretch, learn and develop to fulfil your potential at work.


Quarter life, a series by The Conversation

This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life. You may be interested in:

Expert advice for budding UK entrepreneurs during a cost of living crisis

Trust is important if you want to succeed at work - here’s how to build it

Why menstrual leave could be bad for women


Human resource managers use potential – and in particular, leadership potential – to identify the employees that could be their organisation’s future leaders. In the business world (and often in academic research too), the term “high potential” typically means you are able to develop further and faster than others in a similar situation.

Someone with leadership potential has the capacity to be an effective leader in the future, but may need support to develop the right skills and experience to succeed. So, how can you work out your own leadership potential? Research highlights three main traits you need:

1. Growth: learning and motivation

Many studies identify the ability to learn as key to predicting future leadership effectiveness. This incorporates keenness to learn, the ability to extract as many lessons as possible from different experiences, and to adapt by applying these to enhance your future performance.

This explains why some people learn more from their experiences (and develop faster) than others. There is also a motivational component that includes drive and perseverance to achieve results, and the ambition to lead.

2. Foundational: cognitive and personality characteristics

Research shows that people who are more emotionally balanced, sociable, ambitious, conscientious and curious are more likely to become leaders.

Also, because it’s important to be able to make decisions effectively in any senior role, cognitive capabilities are key. These typically include strong judgment skills in complex and ambiguous situations, and being able to collect and evaluate information from diverse sources to reach solid decisions.

3. Career: qualities specific to the future role

Some models of potential also include “career dimensions”, which are specific skills relevant to a future role. For leadership potential, these might include qualities such as strategic thinking or collaboration.

New technology and workplace trends are among the factors that are changing how we work. This means the demands of future roles – and the career-specific qualities required to excel in them – may be quite different to those of your current job. In fact, research shows that more than 70% of today’s top performers still lack the key qualities that will help them to be successful in their future roles.

How can you develop these qualities?

As rapid change renders knowledge and skills out of date at an astonishing rate, the ability to learn is increasingly crucial to future leaders. Rather than “having all the answers”, you need to be able to find or figure the answers out. This means that leaders need the humility to know they don’t know it all, and the interpersonal skills to listen openly and learn from a diverse network of people.

At the height of the COVID pandemic, for example, New Zealand’s then prime minister Jacinda Ardern didn’t have all the answers. But she used her platform to quite literally ask for information. Ardern did a series of video interviews with different experts to get some key answers, speaking to a psychologist about coping with the stresses of the pandemic, and an experienced business mentor about supporting small businesses.

Having asked, listened and sought varied insights, leaders must then apply strong judgment and problem-solving skills to decide on the best way forward – even if there is no obvious path. This draws upon cognitive ability, but it also involves skills that can be learnt.

Man in shirt at laptop, looking forward and sitting between two other people, raising hand.
People with leadership potential ask questions and learn from their experiences. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

Problems identifying potential

Unfortunately, organisations often rely upon current (or past) performance as a barometer of potential, which is far from ideal – not just because only a small proportion of current high performers also have high potential, but because people with strong potential may not currently be performing at their best. Perhaps they aren’t in the right role, or aren’t being sufficiently stretched or supported.

Either way, your employer shouldn’t conflate your current performance with your potential. This could also perpetuate the lack of diversity that persists at leadership level in many firms. Past performance is limited by opportunity. Some people, due to biases and stereotypes, may not have been offered the chance to show what they are capable of yet.

To avoid these problems, organisations need to assess their employees objectively to find those with leadership potential. This could include doing psychometric tests of their personality and cognitive and learning abilities. Simulations of typical tasks or problems could also replicate the likely cognitive demands of future leadership roles, helping to identify people who can best cope and learn from the experience.

Supporting future leaders

It’s important to remember that potential does not automatically unfold once it’s identified. Indeed, some studies claim that 40% of high-potential promotions end in failure.

However, if you’re good at learning from experiences and applying this to improve how you do things, and are motivated to progress and grow, you have a good chance of developing the career dimension qualities needed to be a future leader – and to do this faster than your peers.

But organisations must help by finding ways to stretch employees, while also building the scaffolding to support their learning and development. They should balance challenge with support through coaching, to help employees learn as much as they can from their experiences. If you want to be a future leader, you can then use these experiences to enhance your job performance and reach your full potential.

Zara Whysall also works for Kiddy & Partners, part of Gateley Plc.

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Hyro secures $30M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform

Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare…

Published

on

Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare sector. Specifically, they sought to automate the routine messages and calls that often lead to administrative burnout, like calls about scheduling, prescription refills and searching through physician directories.

Several years after graduating, Krush and Cohen productized their ideas with Hyro, which uses AI to facilitate text and voice conversations across the web, call centers and apps between healthcare organizations and their clients. Hyro today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Liberty Mutual, Macquarie Capital and Black Opal, bringing the startup’s total raised to $35 million.

Krush says that the new cash will be put toward expanding Hyro’s go-to-market teams and R&D.

“When we searched for a domain that would benefit from transforming these technologies most, we discovered and validated that healthcare, with staffing shortages and antiquated processes, had the greatest need and pain points, and have continued to focus on this particular vertical,” Krush told TechCrunch in an email interview.

To Krush’s point, the healthcare industry faces a major staffing shortfall, exacerbated by the logistical complications that arose during the pandemic. In a recent interview with Keona Health, Halee Fischer-Wright, CEO of Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), said that MGMA’s heard that 88% of medical practices have had difficulties recruiting front-of-office staff over the last year. By another estimates, the healthcare field has lost 20% of its workforce.

Hyro doesn’t attempt to replace staffers. But it does inject automation into the equation. The platform is essentially a drop-in replacement for traditional IVR systems, handling calls and texts automatically using conversational AI.

Hyro can answer common questions and handle tasks like booking or rescheduling an appointment, providing engagement and conversion metrics on the backend as it does so.

Plenty of platforms do — or at least claim to. See RedRoute, a voice-based conversational AI startup that delivers an “Alexa-like” customer service experience over the phone. Elsewhere, there’s Omilia, which provides a conversational solution that works on all platforms (e.g. phone, web chat, social networks, SMS and more) and integrates with existing customer support systems.

But Krush claims that Hyro is differentiated. For one, he says, it offers an AI-powered search feature that scrapes up-to-date information from a customer’s website — ostensibly preventing wrong answers to questions (a notorious problem with text-generating AI). Hyro also boasts “smart routing,” which enables it to “intelligently” decide whether to complete a task automatically, send a link to self-serve via SMS or route a request to the right department.

A bot created using Hyro’s development tools. Image Credits: Hyro

“Our AI assistants have been used by tens of millions of patients, automating conversations on various channels,” Krush said. “Hyro creates a feedback loop by identifying missing knowledge gaps, basically mimicking the operations of a call center agent. It also shows within a conversation exactly how the AI assistant deduced the correct response to a patient or customer query, meaning that if incorrect answers were given, an enterprise can understand exactly which piece of content or dataset is labeled incorrectly and fix accordingly.”

Of course, no technology’s perfect, and Hyro’s likely isn’t an exception to the rule. But the startup’s sales pitch was enough to win over dozens of healthcare networks, providers and hospitals as clients, including Weill Cornell Medicine. Annual recurring revenue has doubled since Hyro went to market in 2019, Krush claims.

Hyro’s future plans entail expanding to industries adjacent to healthcare, including real estate and the public sector, as well as rounding out the platform with more customization options, business optimization recommendations and “variety” in the AI skills that Hyro supports.

“The pandemic expedited digital transformation for healthcare and made the problems we’re solving very clear and obvious (e.g. the spike in calls surrounding information, access to testing, etc.),” Krush said. “We were one of the first to offer a COVID-19 virtual assistant that deployed in under 48 hours based on trusted information from the health system and trusted resources such as the CDC and World Health Organization …. Hyro is well funded, with good growth and momentum, and we’ve always managed a responsible budget, so we’re actually looking to expand and gather more market share while competitors are slowing down.”

Hyro secures $30M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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