Monthly Archives: December 2015

A year of Taliban gains shows that ‘we haven’t delivered,’ top Afghan official says

The Washington Post reports: As the Afghan convoy entered the battered village, Taliban fighters opened fire. U.S.-trained Afghan policemen poured out of their Humvees and began wildly shooting their AK-47 rifles in every direction.

“The enemy is firing one bullet, and you are responding with dozens!” their commander, Col. Khalil Jawad, screamed into his radio in frustration. “Aim, then fire!”

A minute later, the militants melted away. On this day in early December in the southern province of Helmand, they had delivered their message: The Taliban is back, its fighters showing a battle discipline and initiative far superior to the Afghan security forces trained and equipped by the United States.

In private, top Afghan and American officials have begun to voice increasingly grim assessments of the resurgent Taliban threat, most notably in a previously undisclosed transcript of a late-October meeting of the Afghan National Security Council. [Continue reading…]

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NSA’s targeting of Israeli leaders also caught private conversations between U.S. lawmakers and Israel lobby

The Wall Street Journal reports: President Barack Obama announced two years ago he would curtail eavesdropping on friendly heads of state after the world learned the reach of long-secret U.S. surveillance programs.

But behind the scenes, the White House decided to keep certain allies under close watch, current and former U.S. officials said. Topping the list was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The U.S., pursuing a nuclear arms agreement with Iran at the time, captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that inflamed mistrust between the two countries and planted a political minefield at home when Mr. Netanyahu later took his campaign against the deal to Capitol Hill.

The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears — an “Oh-shit moment,” one senior U.S. official said — that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.

White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

Stepped-up NSA eavesdropping revealed to the White House how Mr. Netanyahu and his advisers had leaked details of the U.S.-Iran negotiations — learned through Israeli spying operations — to undermine the talks; coordinated talking points with Jewish-American groups against the deal; and asked undecided lawmakers what it would take to win their votes, according to current and former officials familiar with the intercepts. [Continue reading…]

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Could an end to Syria’s civil war be in sight?

By James L Gelvin, University of California, Los Angeles

If, as cliché has it, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, isn’t the recent flurry of diplomatic activity aimed at bringing about a negotiated settlement to the Syrian civil war insane?

None of the previous attempts to resolve the conflict among the warring parties through negotiations, such as the Geneva II talks in the beginning of 2014, has had a happy ending. And, in retrospect most observers would go so far as to say that they were doomed to failure.

But if, until now, there was zero chance for all principals, both external and internal, to work out a settlement, there currently exists a slender – a very slender – chance for success.

This is the straw at which Secretary of State John Kerry is grasping on the eve of talks in New York.

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New Jaish al-Islam chief says group will not pull out of peace talks

Middle East Eye reports: The new head of a key rebel group in Syria has denied that it is pulling out of peace talks after its previous leader was killed in an airstrike last week.

Zahran Alloush was head of Jaish al-Islam, and was killed in a strike east of Damascus that was launched on Friday by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, with conflicting reports indicating that the plane might have been Russian or Syrian.

Immediately after the killing the group announced that it would be pulling out of a negotiations council formed during an opposition conference in Riyadh earlier this month.

However, in his first public statements since taking over leadership of the group, Abu Hammam al-Buyedhani said Jaish al-Islam’s stance on negotiations “has not changed”.

“We will not adopt a position on our own without discussing it with our partners.”

The United Nations has set 25 January as a target date to begin peace talks on Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey may finally be ‘accepting the inevitable’ in Syria

Business Insider reports: A Kurdish militia with ties to an organization waging an insurgency in Turkey’s southeast region violated Turkey’s “red line” in Syria over the weekend by crossing the Euphrates River during an anti-ISIS operation.

The operation to take back Tishrin Dam from ISIS was staged by the Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and spearheaded by the Kurdish YPG — the military arm of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).

It served as a huge blow to ISIS, which had relied on the dam to move weapons and fighters between its de-facto capital of Raqqa in Syria and the cities of Manbij and Jarablous it controls in the northern countryside of Aleppo Province.

But ISIS was not the only loser. The operation was also a major affront to Turkey, which declared the Euphrates a “red line” for Kurdish territorial expansion over the summer. Indeed, Turkey struck the YPG twice in October after it defied Ankara’s warning not to cross the river. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS leaders fall, ISIS remains

Kyle Orton writes: Last night, Steve Warren, the American colonel who is the spokesman for the international campaign against the Islamic State (IS), the U.S.-led Operation INHERENT RESOLVE, announced that between December 7 and December 27, ten IS “leaders” had been killed. Col. Warren adumbrated the positions of the IS leaders, allowing the conclusion that five had been part of IS’s external operations wing, which conducts international terrorism, and five were part of IS’s internal operations, i.e. part of the military operations and security infrastructure that helps IS maintain and expand its statelet in Syria and Iraq. Col. Warren presented this as an important blow to IS that had assisted in the recent loss of territorial losses for IS. There is reason for scepticism on these points. [Continue reading…]

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What Twitter really means for ISIS supporters

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Amarnath Amarasingam writes: Abu Ahmad, one of Islamic State’s most active supporters online says he has had over 90 Twitter accounts suspended, but is not planning to slow down. He is a trusted member of what has come to be called the Baqiya family, a loose network of Islamic State supporters from around the world who share news, develop close friendships, and help each other when members get arrested or come under law enforcement surveillance. Abu Ahmad, as with all Baqiya members, agreed to talk to me on the condition that his real name and location not be published.

While Islamic State social media accounts used to flourish, Twitter has now been suspending the accounts of fighters and supporters alike. Scholars and analysts continue to debate whether this is effective and worthwhile.

For over two years now, I have co-directed a study of Western foreign fighters based at the University of Waterloo and have been interviewing — on Skype and various text messaging platforms — several dozen fighters and members of this Baqiya family. A few things are clear: First, while Twitter suspensions certainly disrupt their ability to seamlessly spread information, they have developed innovative and effective ways of coming back online. Second, these youth receive an enormous amount of emotional and social benefits from participating in their online “family.”

This online network is important for spreading the new Twitter accounts of individuals coming back from suspension. Watching Abu Ahmad’s accounts, for instance, I have been amazed at how quickly he is able to re-acquire his followers. At times, his new accounts are only active for a day or two before getting suspended again, but he manages to get most of his 1,000-plus followers back every time. “I follow people, and they follow me back. We do shout outs,” he told me during an interview last month; “we also have secret groups online which don’t get suspended, and we share our new accounts on there.” [Continue reading…]

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Suspects arrested after plotting New Year’s Eve attacks in Ankara and Brussels

The New York Times reports: Two Islamic State militants who were plotting a suicide attack on the Turkish capital, Ankara, on New Year’s Eve have been detained, Turkish officials said on Wednesday.

The two men were held after an early morning counterterrorism operation at a house in the Yakupabdal neighborhood of Ankara, according to the semiofficial Anadolu News Agency. Their identities and nationalities were not disclosed, but the Turkish news media reported that the men were of Turkish origin and had traveled to Syria.

They were planning attacks on the central Kizilay Square in Ankara, where large crowds gather annually to usher in the new year, a senior government official said. [Continue reading…]

CNN reports: Belgian authorities have arrested two people on suspicion of being involved in a plot to attack “emblematic sites” in Belgium’s capital during New Year’s celebrations, the country’s federal prosecutor’s office said Tuesday.

The men are members of a Muslim biker gang called the Kamikaze Riders and are suspected to have discussed attacking Brussels’ Grand Place square and other places where crowds gather as well as police and military facilities, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN on condition of anonymity. [Continue reading…]

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The new face of racism in Germany

Anna Sauerbrey writes: Germany is not lacking in right-wing sentiment these days, but most people are careful about how they deploy their anti-immigrant rhetoric. And then there’s Björn Höcke.

Last month Mr. Höcke, a leading figure of the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland, gave an openly racist speech on the “differing reproductive strategies” of Africans and Europeans. It was not the first time he had drawn on National Socialist themes, but this time he caused uproar, even in his own party, which has asked him to resign his membership.

Whatever happens to Mr. Höcke, though, his willingness to use overtly racist language has revived an age-old fear in Germany. He is, by all accounts, a typical German, an upright middle-class citizen — what we call a “Biedermann.” They are the core of our national self-perception. If they turn to the dark side, what does that say about Germany?

For years, racism and hate in Germany mostly came with clear social markers. In the minds of most, racists wore their heads shaved, feet heavily booted and arms rune-tattooed. They lived on the fringes of society, often in public housing, and made their living illicitly.

Not so Mr. Höcke. As a young man, he was a member of “Junge Union,” the youth organization of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats. He’s a high school history teacher on leave and a married father of four. He lives in the countryside and is invariably well dressed, though never in a showy way.

Is this the new face of hate in Germany? [Continue reading…]

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How Sunni-Shia sectarianism is poisoning Yemen

Farea al-Muslimi writes: In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, Hamoud al-Mikhlafi, leader of a Taiz-based group fighting against Houthi militias and forces loyal to Yemen’s former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, described his opponents as “Persians” in reference to their Shia religious affiliation and support from Iran. In fact, both Saleh and the leaders of the Houthi militia belong to the Zaydi school of Islam, an indigenous Yemeni branch of Shia Islam that is distinct from the Twelver Shiism practiced in Iran. But Mikhlafi’s assertion fits with a growing sectarian polarization in Yemen that relies on language borrowed from the Sunni-Shia conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Iran, rather than drawing on Yemeni religious culture.

This is a rapidly growing phenomenon. Even Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi has on occasion described the Houthis, who expelled him from Yemen in March 2015, as “Twelver Shia.” “And two years prior, the anti-Houthi tribal leader Hussein al-Ahmar called himself “the powerful lion of the Sunnis,” thus portraying himself as a defender of Yemen’s Sunni majorityagainst the other sect. [Continue reading…]

Saeed Al-Batati writes: Three years after they were kicked out of several cities in south Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has come back and overrun two cities in the province of Abyan, local government officials and residents told Middle East Eye. But people who lived through al-Qaeda’s reign of Abyan in 2011 now talk about new “tolerant and friendly” militants.

In Zinjibar, the capital of Abyan province, a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said that early this month al-Qaeda militants quietly stormed military camps and police stations in the city without even drawing the attention of students in schools or public servants in their offices.

“Zinjibar is quiet. People are busy with their daily life,” the government officials said.

Many provinces in southern Yemen have been in a state of anarchy since the Saudi-backed forces supporting President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and local tribesmen drove out rebel Houthis. Then separatists and Islamists aligned with the Saudi-backed forces failed to fill the vacuum left by Yemeni soldiers who headed north to fight the Houthis. So al-Qaeda came in and took the place of the former government-run security agencies. [Continue reading…]

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Will we ever understand the beginning of the universe?

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Ross Andersen writes: One crisp day last March, Harvard professor John Kovac walked out of his office and into a taxicab that whisked him across town, to a building on the edge of the MIT campus. People were paying attention to Kovac’s comings and goings that week. He was the subject of a fast-spreading rumour. Kovac is an experimental cosmologist midway through the prime of a charmed career. He did his doctoral work at the University of Chicago and a postdoc at Caltech before landing a professorship at Harvard. He is a blue chip. And since 2009, he has been principal investigator of BICEP2, an ingenious scientific experiment at the South Pole.

Kovac had come to MIT to visit Alan Guth, a world-renowned theoretical cosmologist, who made his name more than 30 years ago when he devised the theory of inflation. Guth told Kovac to take the back steps up to his office, to avoid being seen. If Guth’s colleagues caught a glimpse of the two men talking, the whispers swirling around Kovac would have swelled to a roar.

The science of cosmology has achieved wonders in recent centuries. It has enlarged the world we can see and think about by ontological orders of magnitude. Cosmology wrenched the Earth from the centre of the Universe, and heaved it, like a discus, into its whirling orbit around one unremarkable star among the billions that speed around the black-hole centre of our galaxy, a galaxy that floats in deep space with billions of others, all of them colliding and combining, before they fly apart from each other for all eternity. Art, literature, religion and philosophy ignore cosmology at their peril.

But cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know if the world we see around us is spatially infinite, or if there are other kinds of worlds beyond our horizon, or in other dimensions. And then the big mystery, the one that keeps the priests and the physicists up at night: no cosmologist has a clue why there is something rather than nothing. [Continue reading…]

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War by other means in the shadow of globalization

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Peter Pomerantsev writes: perhaps this year’s most spectacular propagandists are those of ISIS, with its aggressive use of social media to recruit new combatants and slick, gruesome execution videos to provoke and frighten opponents. Though ISIS has killed roughly seven times fewer people in Syria than the Assad regime, the group has used social media (some 46,000 accounts on Twitter alone) to make itself look even more menacing than it is. Every social-media user who retweets or posts ISIS material, whether in support or censure, ultimately helps strengthen ISIS’s narrative of history-making stature and millenarian significance. The Islamic State’s terrorist attacks in Paris left 130 people dead in a spate of horrific violence, but the operation was executed in a manner that made it seem as if the organization had killed orders of magnitude more.

There is, of course, nothing new about using information as a vital instrument of war. But in the past information tended to be a handmaiden to action. Now the informational element appears to be as important as, if not more important than, the physical dimension. Take Russia’s air strikes in Syria. The Kremlin’s official rationale for the military campaign was to combat the Islamic State. But very few of its operations have actually been aimed at ISIS, with many more directed at U.S.-supported rebels fighting Syrian President, and Russian client, Bashar al-Assad. The Kremlin clearly has more in mind than defeating ISIS militarily. Russia has entered the Syrian stage in such a way as to surprise the West and ensure it will play a starring role in any narrative going forward — whether that narrative involves keeping Assad in power or a “global fight against terror.” The Russian military might be small compared to America’s, and the Russian economy may be a mess, but Vladimir Putin has cleverly undermined America’s reputation as a “global policeman” and boosted his stature as the man who is restoring Russia as a Great Global Power.

This is not “soft power” in the classic sense of projecting a positive national image through culture and public relations, but rather a case of using strategic narrative to keep your opponent intimidated, confused, and dismayed — of exploiting ubiquitous information to appear bigger, scarier, and more indispensable than reality would suggest. Russia’s bombing raids in Syria also have the positive side effects (for Moscow) of distracting from the conflict in Ukraine and helping maintain a steady torrent of refugees to Europe, which in turn strengthens right-wing parties in countries such as France and Hungary that peddle anti-refugee fears, are supported by the Kremlin, and advocate dropping Western sanctions against Russia. What matters in the information age is not so much “military escalation dominance” — the Cold War doctrine emphasizing the ability to introduce more arms than the enemy into a conflict. Rather, it’s “narrative escalation dominance” — being able to introduce more startling storylines than your opponent. [Continue reading…]

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Kurdish leaders call for autonomy; Erdogan accuses them of treason

Reuters reports: Kurdish groups meeting in southeastern Turkey called for self-rule on Sunday amid heavy fighting in the region as the army pushed ahead with a security operation in which it says more than 200 Kurdish militants have been killed.

The Democratic People’s Congress (DTK), made up of Kurdish non-governmental organizations, made the call after a two-day meeting in Diyarbakir.

“The rightful resistance mounted by our people against the policies that degrade the Kurdish problem, is essentially a demand and struggle for local self-governance and local democracy,” said the final resolution of the meeting, titled “declaration of political resolution regarding self-rule”.

The declaration called for the formation of autonomous regions including several neighboring provinces of Diyarbakir to take account of cultural, economic and geographic affinities. [Continue reading…]

Al Jazeera reports: Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said autonomy demands from a Kurdish leader were a “clear provocation” and his political party will be “taught a lesson”.

A Turkish prosecutor opened an investigation into Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) chief Selahattin Demirtas after he made recent calls for greater Kurdish self-governance in the country’s southeast.

Erdogan’s remarks targeting Demirtas on Tuesday could further widen the gulf between the government and the Kurdish opposition as violence increases in the region.

“A certain leader … talked nonsense and what he did is a clear provocation and treason,” Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul before departing on a trip to Saudi Arabia, adding the HDP would be “taught a lesson by our citizens and the law”. [Continue reading…]

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I revealed the truth about President Erdogan and Syria. For that, he had me jailed

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Can Dündar writes: In Turkey, a debate as old as government itself is on the agenda again. This time, it is the Turkish government’s secret arms transfer to Syria that has revitalised the subject.

Early in 2014, a truck understood to belong to the Turkish intelligence service (MIT) was stopped near the Syrian border. The gendarmerie and the intelligence officials in control of the convoy pulled guns on each other. This was the moment the two blocks vying to rule the state came face to face. The truck was searched. Beneath the camouflage composed of medicines boxes, weapons and ammunition were found. The truck was held for a while, but following the intervention of government officials a safe passage into Syria was granted.

The government immediately discharged the prosecutor and gendarmerie who stopped the convoy and had them arrested. It was declared that the trucks contained humanitarian aid. This incident, which fuelled allegations that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government was intervening in the Syrian civil war, was rapidly covered up.

In May 2015, however, Cumhuriyet Daily, the newspaper I serve as the editor-in-chief, acquired the footage of this incident. It was clearly visible that the truck was loaded with arms. It was thus documented that the intelligence service was illegally carrying arms into the civil war raging in a neighbouring country. This was big news. We published details of the operation with photos, and uploaded the video to our website. [Continue reading…]

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Strike that killed Syrian rebel chief complicates peace talks push, says U.S.

Reuters reports: Russian air strikes like the one that killed a top Syrian rebel leader last week send the wrong message to groups engaged in a political dialogue to end the conflict and complicate efforts to begin negotiations, the U.S. State Department said on Monday.

Syrian rebel chief Zahran Alloush, the leader of Jaysh al Islam who commanded thousands of fighters in the Damascus suburbs, was killed on Friday in an air strike that rebel sources said was carried out by Russian warplanes.

Jaysh al Islam was a participant in the Riyadh conference where Syrian opposition groups agreed on common aims for proposed political negotiations to end the country’s civil war and chose a former Syrian prime minister to represent them in the dialogue.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the United States did not provide support to Alloush’s group and had concerns about its “behavior on the battlefield,” but noted that Jaysh al Islam had fought Islamic State rebels and was participating in the political dialogue to end Syria’s civil war. [Continue reading…]

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Out of touch: U.S. diplomacy shackled by security concerns

Peter Schwartzstein writes: The U.S. embassy in Cairo is a forbidding-looking fortress. Its imposing concrete blast walls are visible for miles, and cast an ugly shadow over a cluster of surrounding villas. Flanked on all sides by edgy soldiers in body armor and camouflage uniforms, the atmosphere can scarcely be called welcoming.

For diplomatic personnel posted across the Middle East, the security protocols are often no less daunting. Many are shuttled from their offices to their homes in armored vans with tinted windows. When the U.S. ambassador to Cairo’s car emerges onto one of the capital’s main drags, city police block lanes and back up traffic as they hustle to facilitate the convoy’s passage.

Given recent events, the U.S. instinct to wrap its foreign representatives in cotton wool is somewhat understandable. The mission in Cairo — considered relatively safe by regional standards — was attacked by a mob and the site of the stabbing of a U.S. citizen in the last four years alone. The list of assaults on State Department posts around the world runs long and lethal.

But to those who puzzle over Washington’s erratic foreign policy in these parts, this safety-centric tack has much to answer for. [Continue reading…]

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State Dept ‘pivotal foreign policy moments of 2015’: Bringing peace to Syria?

The Christmas Eve post on the U.S. State Department’s official blog, DipNote, includes this improbable accomplishment: “Bringing Peace, Security to Syria.”

Is this supposed to be an expression of the Christmas spirit — peace on Earth and all that?

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