Music: Michael Brook & Djivan Gasparyan — ‘Freedom’
Monthly Archives: July 2015
How Saddam Hussein laid the foundations for ISIS’s success
Faisal Al Yafai writes: Four days before US troops invaded Iraq for the first time, on January 13, 1991, Saddam Hussein issued a small but vital law.
It concerned the flag of Iraq, a red, white and black tricolour with three green stars. The new law changed the flag, adding the Arabic words “God is great” between the stars.
A small law issued in the midst of a gathering storm. But 25 years on from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that triggered the first Gulf War, it is apparent that this law, and particularly the political philosophy behind it, began a process that created the conditions for ISIL’s success.
The road map that leads from the centralised Iraqi state of the 1990s to the disintegrating Iraq of today, starts in the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein’s regime began to stutter.
The astonishing development of the 1970s began to slow under pressure from Saddam’s ill-conceived war against Iran.
Saddam was particularly concerned about religious challenges to his rule during this period. Aside from the war against Iran, launched at least in part because of the fear of a new revolutionary Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood was also gaining support in Iraq, as it was in other Arab countries.
Saddam’s response was to seek to co-opt religion for his own political purposes. By engaging with Salafism, a more austere version of Islam, Saddam believed he could find a way to control a revivalist Islam and exploit it for his own aims. [Continue reading…]
Coalition must seek a common goal in Syria
Hassan Hassan writes: For Turkey, defeating ISIL remains a lower priority than preventing Syrian Kurds from establishing the infrastructure for a future state in the north and the downfall of the Assad regime. Ankara is unlikely to change its priorities on ISIL unless there is understanding about these other issues. Also, the West is more interested in fighting ISIL than the Assad regime. But they require the help of Syrian rebels, who have the reverse priorities.
With such a divided coalition, who needs enemies? ISIL will continue to reap the benefits of such confused priorities until all the parties agree to work towards one goal under one strategy. That is possible and it starts in Aleppo.
Over the past few months, a momentum has been building among the Syrian rebels to fight ISIL: for the first time since it was established in early 2014, the usually-quiet Syrian Islamic Council issued a fatwa in June to fight ISIL. In the same month, a large coalition of rebels on the ground met in Antakya and concluded that fighting ISIL was a priority for all the rebels. Even Jabhat Al Nusra’s leader made it clear that ISIL was an enemy in an interview with Al Jazeera. [Continue reading…]
Turkey launches fresh airstrikes on PKK camps
Rudaw reports: Turkish jets launched fresh attacks on military bases of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the Kurdistan Region on Tuesday, a Rudaw reporter on the scene said.
The attacks on Tuesday again targeted the PKK’s Qandil Mountain base in the Kurdistan Region. Turkey carried out airstrikes on the base on Saturday and Sunday, and pounded the positions with artillery on Monay.
The attacks signal a breakdown of peace talks between the Ankara government and the PKK.
The airstrikes coincide with nationwide raids inside Turkey against the PKK, as well as Islamist groups such as the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]
Time reports: Last week, the Turkish government announced it was joining the war against ISIS. Since then it has arrested more than 1,000 people in Turkey and carried out waves of air raids in neighboring Syria and Iraq. But most of those arrests and air strikes, say Kurdish leaders, have hit Kurdish and left wing groups, not ISIS.
They say Turkey is now hindering, rather than helping, the fight against ISIS. “Most of our forces that have been targeted were forces that were preparing themselves to go to fight against ISIS,” says Zagros [Hiwa, a spokesman for the Kurdish PKK forces]. [Continue reading…]
Falling back, fighting on: Assad lays out his strategy
Aron Lund writes: The meat of the speech [Bashar al-Assad gave on Syrian public television on July 26] was neither the attempt to co-opt Western-inspired “antiterrorist” discourse nor the nationalist rah-rah. Far more interesting was Assad’s lengthy discussion of the recent setbacks suffered by his army. After advancing for much of 2014, the government ran out of steam over the winter, as the economy started to sputter and rebels received additional support. This spring, Assad’s fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse.
In March, Assad’s troops were forced to surrender the provincial capital of Idlib to Islamist rebels, as well as the southern city of Bosra al-Sham. In April, the army’s last real foothold in Idlib was lost with Ariha and Jisr al-Shughur. Then the last remaining border crossing into Jordan went the same way, which slashed overland trade. In May, the extremist group known as the Islamic State took Sukhna and the strategic city of Palmyra, isolating the city of Deir Ezzor. It then began to seize or destroy parts of Syria’s energy infrastructure. In June, more moderate rebels took out an important army base in the southern Daraa Governorate, although the ensuing offensive to capture Daraa City then seemed to stall. The Islamic State jihadists have also given Assad’s forces a bad bruising in Hasakah, although the army has so far held out thanks to an alliance of convenience with local Kurdish fighters.
The government has advanced in the Syrian-Lebanese border region of Zabadani, where it is backed by the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, but the situation now looks quite grim for Assad. Much of the official Syrian Arab Army has been supplemented or replaced by militias, but even then, pro-Assad forces are spread dangerously thin on the ground. Iran, now flush with confidence after its nuclear deal, recently signed on to a $ 1 billion credit deal to aid the Syrian economy—but as things stand, Assad simply seems to be trying to hold more territory than he can defend. [Continue reading…]
Blockade and violence in Yemen pushing 25,000 more people into hunger every day
Oxfam: Since the start of the conflict, nearly 25,000 additional people are going hungry each day in Yemen as the blockade and fighting restrict food, fuel and other vital supplies, Oxfam warned today.
One in two people – nearly 13 million people – are now struggling to find enough to eat, and half of them are on the brink of starvation. This is an increase of 2.3 million people since the escalation in fighting and beginning of the blockade imposed by the Saudi-led coalition in March 2015. In a country that has historically faced food shortages, this is the highest ever recorded number of people living in hunger.
Philippe Clerc, Oxfam Country Director in Yemen said: “Since the start of the conflict every day that goes by without a ceasefire and full resumption of imports sees nearly 25,000 additional people going hungry in Yemen. As the warring parties continue to ignore calls for a ceasefire, the average family in Yemen is left wondering when their next meal will be – if they survive the bombs, they’re now running out of food.“ [Continue reading…]
What’s inside the Justice Department’s secret cybersecurity memo?
National Journal reports: Sen. Ron Wyden has many problems with the cybersecurity bill that the Senate may take up before the August recess.
But he can only talk about some of them publicly. Other reservations remain strictly classified.
Wyden, the Democratic privacy hawk from Oregon, claims that a classified Justice Department legal opinion written during the early years of the George W. Bush administration is pertinent to the upper chamber’s consideration of cyberlegislation — a warning that reminds close observers of his allusions to the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers years before they were exposed publicly by Edward Snowden. [Continue reading…]
NSA will not be allowed to keep old phone records
The New York Times reports: Analysts at the National Security Agency will no longer be permitted to search a database holding five years of Americans’ domestic calling records after Nov. 29, the Obama administration said on Monday.
Legislation enacted in June barred the N.S.A. from collecting Americans’ calling records after 180 days, but did not say what would happen to the data already gathered. Under a new system laid out by the USA Freedom Act, the government will not hold the bulk data, which is used to analyze links between callers in search of terrorism suspects.
Earlier this month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to say whether the government would keep using the data collected under the old procedures or would purge it after the new system is in place. [Continue reading…]
Climate change ‘triple threat’ increases severe flooding risk in biggest U.S. cities
The Guardian reports: America’s biggest cities are at far greater risk of serious flooding in the coming decades than was previously thought, because of a “triple threat” produced under climate change, researchers said on Monday.
A combination of sea-level rise, storm surge and heavy rainfall – all functions of climate change – exposes New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego and Boston to a much greater degree, research published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change found.
“Call it a triple threat,” said Steven Meyers, a scientist at the University of South Florida and one of the authors. “What this shows is that there is an increasing risk of compound flooding, from storm surge and rainfall at the same time.” [Continue reading…]
Hunting down the world’s most notorious fish poacher
The New York Times reports: As the Thunder, a trawler considered the world’s most notorious fish poacher, began sliding under the sea a couple of hundred miles south of Nigeria, three men scrambled aboard to gather evidence of its crimes.
In bumpy footage from their helmet cameras, they can be seen grabbing everything they can over the next 37 minutes — the captain’s logbooks, a laptop computer, charts and a slippery 200-pound fish. The video shows the fishing hold about a quarter full with catch and the Thunder’s engine room almost submerged in murky water. “There is no way to stop it sinking,” the men radioed back to the Bob Barker, which was waiting nearby. Soon after they climbed off, the Thunder vanished below.
It was an unexpected end to an extraordinary chase. For 110 days and more than 10,000 nautical miles across two seas and three oceans, the Bob Barker and a companion ship, both operated by the environmental organization Sea Shepherd, had trailed the trawler, with the three captains close enough to watch one another’s cigarette breaks and on-deck workout routines. In an epic game of cat-and-mouse, the ships maneuvered through an obstacle course of giant ice floes, endured a cyclone-like storm, faced clashes between opposing crews and nearly collided in what became the longest pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel in history. [Continue reading…]
Thousands of salmon die in hotter-than-usual Northwest rivers
Reuters reports: Unseasonably hot water has killed nearly half of the sockeye salmon migrating up the Columbia River through Oregon and Washington state, a wildlife official said on Monday.
Only 272,000 out of the more than 507,000 sockeye salmon that have swum between two dams along a stretch of the lower Columbia River have survived the journey, said Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries manager John North.
“We’ve never had mortalities at this scale,” said North.
The die-off comes as U.S. West Coast states grapple with drought conditions and the Columbia is seeing the third-highest count of sockeye returning from the ocean to spawn since 1960, federal figures show. [Continue reading…]
Uber and the lawlessness of ‘sharing economy’ corporates
Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan write: In February, Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky compared his firm’s defiance of local housing ordinances with that of Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule. Meanwhile, a tweeter compared Uber to Rosa Parks, defying unjust laws. Chesky quickly backed down after widespread mockery. Companies acting out of self-interest comparing themselves with the noble heroes of civil rights movements is as absurd as it is insulting.
But there is a better analogy from the US civil rights era for law-flouting firms of the on-demand economy. It’s just not the one corporate leaders claim. They are engaged in what we call “corporate nullification”, following in the footsteps of Southern governors and legislatures in the United States who declared themselves free to “nullify” federal law on the basis of strained and opportunistic constitutional interpretation.
Nullification is a wilful flouting of regulation, based on some nebulous idea of a higher good only scofflaws can deliver. It can be an invitation to escalate a conflict, of course, as Arkansas governor Orville Faubus did in 1957 when he refused to desegregate public schools and president Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the law. But when companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Google engage in a nullification effort, it’s a libertarian-inspired attempt to establish their services as popular well before regulators can get around to confronting them. Then, when officials push back, they can appeal to their consumer-following to push regulators to surrender. [Continue reading…]
A milestone for wind energy: Work underway on first offshore platforms in U.S. waters
The Washington Post reports: With the lowering of giant steel legs to the sea bottom off Rhode Island, construction has officially begun on the country’s first offshore wind farm, starting what U.S. officials hope will be a race to harness a vast energy resource capable of powering millions of homes along the East Coast.
The project developer, Deepwater Wind, marked the “steel-in-the water” milestone for its Block Island Wind Farm on Monday, an event witnessed by federal and state officials who crowded into a boat to view the foundations for two wind-tower platforms jutting above the water.
The farm’s five turbines are expected to begin turning next year, providing electricity for about 17,000 nearby homes while also boosting prospects for planned wind-energy projects from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, or so Obama administration officials hope. [Continue reading…]
Musk, Hawking, and Chomsky warn of impending robot wars fueled by artificial intelligence
The Verge reports: Leading artificial intelligence researchers have warned that an “AI arms race” could be disastrous for humanity, and are urging the UN to consider a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons.” An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) and signed by high-profile figures including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Noam Chomsky, warns that weapons that automatically “select and engage targets without human intervention” could become the “Kalashnikovs of tomorrow,” fueling war, terrorism, and global instability.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades,” states the letter, citing armed quadcopters (a technology that has already been deployed in a very crude fashion) as an example. The letter notes that although it’s possible that the use of autonomous weapons could reduce human casualties on the battlefield, this itself could be a mistake as it would “[lower] the threshold” for going to war. [Continue reading…]
8,000 years ago, the overwhelming majority of men never reproduced
Francie Diep writes: Once upon a time, 4,000 to 8,000 years after humanity invented agriculture, something very strange happened to human reproduction. Across the globe, for every 17 women who were reproducing, passing on genes that are still around today—only one man did the same.
“It wasn’t like there was a mass death of males. They were there, so what were they doing?” asks Melissa Wilson Sayres, a computational biologist at Arizona State University, and a member of a group of scientists who uncovered this moment in prehistory by analyzing modern genes.
Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others. These men could then pass their wealth on to their sons, perpetuating this pattern of elitist reproductive success. Then, as more thousands of years passed, the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again. “Maybe more and more people started being successful,” Wilson Sayres says. In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man. [Continue reading…]
Music: Michael Brook — ‘Midday’
The self-government revolution that’s happening under the radar in Syria
Frederic C. Hof writes: With Iran circling the wagons around an ever-shrinking Syrian statelet nominally headed by Bashar al-Assad, a key question is coming into sharp focus: Who might ultimately replace the ruling clan if Tehran cannot keep its clients afloat? The answer is both complex and hopeful: Self-government at local levels is taking root in Syria and forms the basis for what should come next.
One of the few uplifting experiences to be had in any Syrian context these days is to meet with young Syrian activists, as I recently did in Gaziantep, Turkey. A young lawyer said something striking: “This is not just a revolution against Bashar al-Assad. It is a revolution for self-government. Replacing Bashar with someone else issuing decrees from Damascus — even someone much better than Bashar — is not acceptable.”
From the beginning of the Syrian uprising, unarmed activists have formed, under the worst security conditions imaginable, local councils to provide governmental services to their neighbors. This is revolutionary. For 40 years the Assad family had concentrated in its own hands, in Damascus, the direct governing of all Syrians. Officials assigned to Syria’s outback were, at best, order-taking clerks. At worst they were active members of a clan-dominated police state and terror network. Unless Iran helps its client re-subjugate Syria, the days of Damascus-dominated governance are done.
There are today hundreds of local councils throughout non-Assad parts of Syria. Some operate clandestinely in areas overrun by the so-called Islamic State. Some operate in areas where the Assad regime — with Iran’s full support — unloads helicopter-borne “barrel bombs” onto schools, hospitals and mosques. Some operate in neighborhoods subjected to Iranian-facilitated starvation sieges. These local councils are supported by a vast network of civil society organizations — the kinds of voluntary professional associations that undergird Western democracies. All of this is new to Syria. It is the essence of the Syrian Revolution. [Continue reading…]
Turkey accused of bombing Kurdish fighters in Syria
The Associated Press reports: Turkish troops have shelled a Syrian village near the border, targeting Kurdish fighters who have been battling the Islamic State group with the aid of U.S.-led airstrikes, Syria’s main Kurdish militia and an activist group said Monday.
The Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, said the Sunday night shelling on the border village of Til Findire targeted one of their vehicles. It said Til Findire is east of the border town of Kobani, where the Kurds handed a major defeat to the Islamic State group earlier this year.
In cross-border strikes since Friday, Turkey has targeted both Kurdish fighters as well as the IS group, stepping up its involvement in Syria’s increasingly complex civil war. The Syrian Kurds are among the most effective ground forces battling the IS group, but Turkey fears they could revive an insurgency against Ankara in pursuit of an independent state.
On Monday the YPG and Syrian rebels captured the town of Sareen in northern Syria, which had been held by the Islamic State group, according to The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Aleppo Media Center in Syria, two activist groups that track the civil war. [Continue reading…]
Bloomberg reports: U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria risk coming under attack from Turkey if they don’t align themselves with Turkish interests in the country.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told newspaper editors over the weekend that the Syrian Kurd PYD group battling Islamic State must side with “moderate rebels” supported by Turkey against the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“We want moderate rebels to replace” Islamic State fighters as they’re pushed back from Turkey’s border, Davutoglu said. The PYD will be treated “in the same way” as Islamic State “if they engage in activities that disturb us,” he said. [Continue reading…]