Video: Death by polonium?
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Manaf Tlas: Syrian regime ‘taking country to Hell’
BBC News reports: Sources close to Brigadier General Manaf Tlas, who met him days before he deserted, told the BBC he was very angry about what was happening in Syria and accused the regime of “taking the country to Hell”.
“If I were him, I would have done an [former Turkish leader and political reformer Kamal] Ataturk or resigned the second month the uprising began,” the sources quoted him saying of Bashar al-Assad, before he left for Turkey.
A commander in the elite Republican Guard, Gen Tlas is the highest ranking official – and the first from President Assad’s inner circle – to desert since the uprising began in March 2011.
Gen Tlas had been under partial house arrest since May 2011 because he opposed the regime’s response to the uprising.
He was the first government official to meet the opposition, back in March 2011, seeking to open a dialogue and find a political solution to the crisis.
He was also involved in reconciliation efforts in rural Damascus – mainly in Douma and Daraya and Tal – as well as in Homs and his home town Rastan.
Brig Gen Tlas met residents of several towns and helped obtain the release of many of their prisoners, even taking families from Douma to meet President Assad, who promised them a peaceful solution.
But Rastan was the turning-point for Manaf Tlas.
In May 2011, power and mobile networks were cut off in Rastan in preparation for an attack on the city by the official forces. Manaf Tlas ordered the services to be restored and promised the protesters they had the right to demonstrate peacefully.
Celebrating this, protesters chanted his name, which was enough to anger Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and head of the Republican Guard, who ordered Manaf Tlas to stay at home.
Gen Tlas continued going to his base but no longer with any power to issue orders.
Hours after his desertion was announced, his house was ransacked by a mob, under the watch of the army, eyewitnesses said.
The BBC has spoken to members of Gen Tlas’ family, but they refused to comment.
His wife, Thala Khair, and other family members, are in Paris.
Many people within the opposition see Manaf Tlas as someone who has not been involved in bloodshed and believe he could play an important role in a transitional phase in rebuilding the military establishment.
Members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) who defected from the military, are said to hold hopes for Gen Tlas as a reputed army figure.
Leading Syrian general has ‘defected and is on his way to Paris’
The New York Times reports: Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria met with their international sponsors here on Friday to intensify pressure for his removal, buoyed by word that Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, a commander in the elite Republican Guard, close friend of the president and a member of the Damascus aristocracy, had defected and fled the country.Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told the meeting that a “senior official” and commander of the Republican Guard had “defected and is on his way to Paris.” Ministry officials confirmed that Mr. Fabius was referring to General Tlass but did not say whether the Syrian general would join the talks.
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Much attention at the meeting on Friday seemed certain to be devoted to General Tlass’s intentions.Within the Damascus leadership, “Manaf is one of the regime’s main figures,” said Bashar al-Heraki, a member of the Syrian National Council, the umbrella political group in exile. “It is a negative sign for this regime,” Mr. Heraki said. “It has started to lose control.”
As one of the government’s most prominent Sunni Muslims, the elder General Tlass helped to disguise the fact that Hafez al-Assad relied on an inner circle composed mostly of his own minority Alawite sect.
The elder General Tlass was also said to have played a key role in the anointment of Bashar al-Assad as his father’s heir after his firstborn son, Basil, died at the wheel of his Mercedes in 1994.
At the official memorial service for Basil, the elder General Tlass was quoted as saying that he could see the light of Basil’s eyes shining from Bashar’s. Bashar soon became the heir apparent, ending his medical career and enrolling for military training, where the elder General Tlass promoted him and where his elevation into the officer corps coincided with that of Manaf’s.
In the second generation of the elite, families with two sons often divided their roles, with one going into business and the other joining the armed forces. It was true of Bashar’s first cousins, the Makhloufs, and it was true for the Tlass family.
Firas Tlass became a business tycoon, while Manaf — a charismatic figure — was promoted to a one-star general in the Republican Guards, one of the core units used in attempts to crush the current uprising. Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother, heads the praetorian force where Manaf served.
The president and Manaf were sometimes seen eating out together in Damascus.
“He’s a close friend to Bashar,” Mr. Heraki said. “So it is not only a strong strike against the regime, but the strongest message yet to Bashar that he is no longer safe, and a message to other officers thinking about defecting.”
Other opposition figures were less charitable, suggesting that General Tlass fled only to try to save the family’s substantial fortune as the government collapses.
The Tlass family came from Rastan, a predominantly Sunni Muslim city near Homs that has been under assault as a center for defecting officers. As the siege intensified, the Tlass family gradually left the country. Mustafa Tlass was said to have left for Paris in March, citing the need to seek medical treatment, while Firas was believed to be pursuing his business interests from the United Arab Emirates. He has kept a low profile, declining interview requests.
Manaf was believed to have at least one son enrolled at the American University of Beirut, where his wife also lived, and the reported defection came after the school year had ended.
For one top Syrian defector, a path less traveled
The Wall Street Journal reports: On his final day at Syria’s oil ministry in Damascus, Abdo Husameddin tried to avoid raising suspicions: He stayed to sign off on some paperwork, he said, chatted with the oil minister and left at 5 p.m.
That March evening, the deputy oil minister started a three-day covert journey to Turkey, hosted at safehouses across the country and guarded by fighters opposed to President Bashar al-Assad. A year into the country’s uprising, he became the highest-ranking official to defect from the Syrian government.
In the weeks that followed, all of Mr. Husameddin’s assets and bank accounts in Syria were frozen, he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. Months later, Turkish security agents still sometimes escort him around his new host country, warning him that even abroad, he faces a threat from Syrian intelligence agencies, he said.
Syria’s conflict has left up to 15,000 people dead, and has in recent months devolved into what some international diplomats have characterized as a civil war. Soldiers have defected at an increasing pace, including a Syrian air force pilot who flew his jet to Jordan last week. The government typically doesn’t comment on defections but called the air-force pilot who defected to Jordan a “traitor.”
On Thursday, Syrian media said a brigadier general from a family with close ties to President Assad had fled to Turkey in what would be the conflict’s highest-level military defection.
But far fewer of the regime’s high civilian officials have abandoned the regime. That fact has complicated efforts by the Syrian opposition to persuade world powers that it has legitimate leaders in line should President Assad fall. By contrast, in Libya’s recent conflict, a procession of high-profile ministry and diplomatic defectors provided the foundation of the opposition to Moammar Gadhafi and later of Libya’s transitional government.
President Assad’s top security, ministry and military officials have proven fiercely loyal, and many come from the president’s Alawite minority. But the 1.2 million civil servants in Syria’s state institutions are, like broader society, polarized between pro- and anti-regime Syrians, according to Mr. Husameddin and current and former Syrian officials who corroborated much of his account of the dynamics at the country’s state offices.
Mr. Husameddin attributes the lack of high-level defections largely to stepped-up security measures, a characterization echoed by other, lower-level state employees who have turned against the Assad regime. Safe passage out of the country is becoming increasingly tricky, Mr. Husameddin said, and there are few incentives to risk uprooting families and livelihoods to join a fragmented opposition.
Many state employees in Syria have turned against the regime but are staying in their jobs, he added, saying they are “defecting silently.”
“When the regime falls, we need these people,” he said. “We don’t want the state to collapse. In fact, they will be beneficial in the next phase.”
Regime officials say the lack of high-profile civilian defections reflects the loyalty of government workers and their determination to defeat what they see as a terrorist insurgency. The government hasn’t commented on Mr. Husameddin’s defection. The oil ministry didn’t return requests to comment.
Regional powers have even raised the prospect of offering tens of millions of dollars to woo potential defectors from government, said two people familiar with such offers. “A lot of money is being paid to ply people away,” said one of these people. “But there’s also the thinking that some people should be kept in place for the day after.” [Continue reading…]
America’s war on Iran: the plan revealed
At Open Democracy, Paul Rogers writes: The United States is more seriously preparing for military action against Iran than is widely realised. An attack – obviating the need for one by Israel – may not be immediate and is not yet certain, but it is being intensively planned.
The third round of talks between Iran and the “P5+1” group, held in Moscow on 18-19 June 2012, ended in stalemate. A formal process will continue at a lower level, but amid an atmosphere of continuing mutual suspicion and in a situation where United States electoral politics work against compromise. Iran believes that most of the P5+1 is bargaining that sanctions increase their impact until Tehran bends to its will, whereas Washington holds that it is the Iranians who are happy to prolong matters while they accelerate uranium enrichment (see “Syria and Iran: a diplomatic tunnel“, 25 June 2012).
Alongside these calculations, at least some European (especially German) politicians recognise that any substantial delay in negotiations could well create the space for a unilateral Israeli military strike on Iran, an act that would inaugurate a lengthy period of deep instability and perhaps an intensely destructive war.
The high European commitment to diplomacy over Iran has in part been motivated by the risk of Israel attacking Iran. There is little doubt that Israel would be prepared to make such a move at a time of its choosing. It is of even greater concern to the Europeans, then, that indications have emerged in recent weeks of the Pentagon’s own serious engagement in comprehensive multi-option war-planning.
The belief underpinning this hawkish approach seems to be that a short, sharp military action directed very precisely at Iran’s nuclear and missile facilities is the only way to force a weakened Iran to “come in from the cold” and – once and for all – abandon its nuclear ambitions.
There is no settled consensus in elite US circles about to handle the Iran problem. Several powerful voices, including within the Pentagon, argue that the best option is to continue the mix of sanctions and sustained cyber-warfare (the latter in collaboration with Israel). Others, however, argue that there is a need to plan for war, with the question of optimum timing a central issue (see David Fulghum, “Bombing Iran: U.S. military planners ponder when a kinetic attack might make sense“, Aviation Week, 25 June 2012).
The Pentagon advocates of a strike on Iran believe that the early part of 2013 might be the best moment. In their eyes, this offers three advantages. First, the presidential and congressional elections of November 2012 would be out of the way, with nearly two years to the next mid-sessional elections; thus any political controversy would have plenty of time to diminish. Second, the months between now and the point of decision would make clear whether there was any possibility of a political compromise. Third, keeping the war option open – and informing the Israelis well in advance – would make a lone Israeli attack less likely. The most hardline of the US planners hold the view that it is much better that the US “does the job properly” than lets Israel, with its much smaller forces, take the lead. [Continue reading…]
Israel threatens to carpet bomb Southern Lebanon
Haaretz reports: No less than four times in the past ten days, senior officials in the IDF’s Northern Command briefed representatives of the Israeli and foreign press.
The IDF’s Northern Command gave its fourth press briefing in ten days on Thursday. The many meetings, as well as the identical messages that emerge from them, do not appear to be coincidental.
The commander of the IDF’s 91st Division, Brigardier-General Hertzi Halevy, who met Thursday with reporters near the border, had some of the harshest words.
Should another Lebanon war break out, Halevy told the reporters, a week before the sixth anniversary of the second Lebanon war, it would require the IDF to enter Lebanese territory with a mighty force, and bring about the destruction of many villages.
“Lebanon will sustain greater damage than that done during the second Lebanon war,” he said.
“The response will need to be sharper, harder, and in some ways very violent. After the Goldstone Report, people in the international community and in Israel thought that battle in a densely populated area could be carried out in a nicer way.It cannot be nice. Without the use of great force, we will find it difficult to achieve our aim, and the enemy should also know that. ”
Halevy’s threats are nothing new. For four years now, Israel is threatening to torch Lebanon should Hezbollah create a cross-border provocation. In October 2008, the Northern Command chief at the time, Gadi Eizenkot, presented what he called the “Dahiya doctrine.”
In the next confrontation, Eizenkot said at the time, Israel will expand the destruction capability it showed when it bombed Dahiya, the Shiite quarter in Beirut.
“In every village from which shots were fired toward Israel, we will impose disproportional force and cause great damage and destruction. As far as we’re concerned, these are military bases,” Eizenkot said in 2008.
The significance of Halevy’s comments, then, lies not in their content but in their timing. Given the assessments that Israel is likely to attack Iranian nuclear facilities in the coming months ¬ and the possibility that the ramifications of the civil war underway in Syria (for instance, the possible transfer of chemical weapons from the Assad regime to Hezbollah) could lead to an escalation in Lebanon, Israel is sending a clear signal to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The message is this: Sit quietly, this issue is too big for you to get involved in. If you dare harm us, in the name of defending the honor of Syria or Iran, you will pay a steep price that Lebanon will not be able to withstand.
Since Lebanon has only recently finished recovering from the damages it sustained in the Second Lebanon War, this threat seems to be significant. The Dahiya doctrine, the 2012 version: The coming weeks will tell if Israel’s threatening statements were received on the Lebanese side of the border.
Israel’s control of access to water
Israel controls the access to water from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Its disproportionate allocation of water, the settlements’ takeover of natural springs, and the prohibition against maintaining and constructing water cisterns in the West Bank without Israeli permits make water a sparse commodity for Palestinians. The image below is a detail from an illustration in a series of infographics on Palestinian civilian life under occupation. See the complete infographic: Visualizing Occupation — Distribution of Water.
Islamophobia: A bipartisan project
Deepa Kumar writes: When the New York Times ran its story on Obama’s “kill list,” showing the president poring over names of people to potentially assassinate in drone strikes, it sparked a controversy. The content of that controversy was not over this extraordinary revelation about Obama’s use of power but rather over the leaking of state secrets, which Republicans accused him of doing to bolster his re-election campaign. Some liberal commentators (at Salon, The Nation etc.) were rightfully horrified and condemned such activity. But the Democrats – and much of the liberal establishment — remained silent.
Deep in the Times article, another shocking revelation that hasn’t received as much attention as the “kill list” is the Obama administration’s effort to erase the deaths of some innocent victims by categorizing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” This excludes them from the civilian casualties count, allowing the administration to claim that civilian casualties have been minimal. All Muslim men in “combat zones” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen have been presumed to be terrorists, and therefore worthy of death, simply for being of “military age.”
How did we get to a place where innocent Muslim men can be killed with impunity around the world with little public outcry? The short answer is that Muslims have been long been constructed as “terrorists” upon whom righteous terror can be rained. The image of the Muslim enemy in the US is not new. While Hollywood and television play a key role in conveying that image to the public, they did not create it. The “Muslim enemy” is inextricably tied to a long history of US imperialism. [Continue reading…]
Judge helped Egypt’s military to cement power
The New York Times reports: Even as they promised to hand authority to elected leaders, Egypt’s ruling generals were planning with one of the nation’s top judges to preserve their political power and block the rise of the Islamists, the judge said.
Tahani el-Gebali, deputy president of the Supreme Constitutional Court, said she advised the generals not to cede authority to civilians until a Constitution was written. The Supreme Court then issued a decision that allowed the military to dissolve the first fairly elected Parliament in Egypt’s history and assure that the generals could oversee drafting of a Constitution.
The behind-the-scenes discussions, never publicly disclosed, shed new light on what some have called a judicial coup. From the moment the military seized control from President Hosni Mubarak, the generals “certainly” never intended to relinquish authority before supervising a new Constitution, Judge Gebali said.
The military council’s plan to cede authority was premised on first establishing the Constitution, the judge said, so the generals “knew who they were handing power to and on what basis. That was the point.”
When the military first seized power, it positioned itself as a guardian of the peaceful revolution, a force that was aimed at helping achieve the goals of a democratic Egypt. Demonstrators in Tahrir Square chanted that the people and the military were one, and there were promises of a quick transition to civilian control.
But the evidence since then has piled up demonstrating that the military had never intended to fully submit to democratically elected authority.
Now as Egypt’s new, popularly elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, tries to fashion a role for himself as head of state, he is facing a military council that retains virtually all executive and legislative authority. The generals have again pledged to transfer power after a new Parliament is elected and a Constitution drafted. [Continue reading…]
Egyptian apathy on human rights
Tim Sebastian writes: I doubt very much if Mohamed Morsi knows the name Natasha Smith — still less what happened to her in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as tens of thousands of his supporters cheered his victory last week as president.
A 21-year-old student journalist from Britain, she had gone into the square to document the celebrations. She was modestly dressed and with a male companion.
Confronted by a jeering mob, the two became separated. She was attacked, subjected to repeated sexual abuse and stripped naked in front of hundreds of people. Eventually a group of Egyptians came to her aid — but the damage had already been done.
At almost exactly the same time, across the Nile, a 42-year-old Egyptian woman left a hotel — again modestly dressed in long-sleeved shirt and trousers — and headed through the hooting, drum-thumping streets to her car. She had not gone far before a middle-aged man appeared out of the darkness and spoke to her.
“You will not be allowed to dress like that in the New Egypt,” he warned. “Times have changed.”
I mention these incidents not because abuse and harassment are rare in Egypt, but because they now — for the first time — fall under the purview of an Islamist president, committed to ruling with a moral and religious compass.
The extent, therefore, to which the Morsi administration is ready to protect the rights of individuals, will go a long way toward determining what kind of Egypt emerges under his aegis over the months and, maybe, years to come. [Continue reading…]
Sebastian’s op-ed ends with these comments from an Egyptian election observer: “I do not fear the Muslim Brotherhood,” she says softly. “I do not fear the army. I fear my own people — their mentality. They will not defend my rights.”
As much as this might present a bleak image of Egypt, I have to wonder whether or not the same concern might be expressed about any population around the world. Universally, the defense of human rights seems to be a minority concern.
Syrian regime’s top Sunni defects — General Manaf Mustafa Tlass flees to Turkey
Joshua Landis writes: General Manaf Tlass, one of Syria’s top Sunni military figures from the inner-circle of Bashar al-Assad, has defected.
For 16 months the opposition has been complaining that elite Sunnis have not defected. That complaint can now, officially, be put to rest if the stories of Manaf’s flight prove to be true. In March it was rumored that he had led with his father and brother, but those stories were false.
Manaf Tlass, the son of ex-Defense Minister (1972 – 12 May 2004), Mustafa Tlass, has fled the country. Mustafa Tlass was instrumental in smoothing the way for Bashar to assume power after the death of his father.Manaf Tlass with cigar and with Hafez al-Assad
When Hafez al-Assad died in June 2000, his son Bashar was immediately promoted in military rank by Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass. He was also made secretary-general of the Baath Party whereas Manaf became a member of the Party’s Central Committee and an officer in the Republican Guard.
On Tuesday, all of Syria was buzzing that Manaf had defected but there was no confirmation. His Honda had supposedly turned up in the Rukn ad-Din neighborhood of Damascus, but he was no where to be found. Rumors of his possible defection were wide-spread on Twitter.
أكد مصدر أمني رفيع المستوى “لسيرياستيبس” فرار العميد مناف مصطفى طلاس إلى تركيا..
“A highly placed source in intelligence has confirmed that General Manaf Mustafa Tlass has fled to Turkey.”Manaf Tlass’s father and brother, Firas who is a leading businessman, are believed to be out of the country. The father had gone to Paris on the pretext of getting medical attention. Firas is said to be in Dubai. It is not clear where the women and children of his family are.
Manaf Tlass was a close confidant of Bashar from his earliest days and part of his inner circle or “shille”, which included people, such as his cousins Rami and Hafiz Makhlouf, Mudar al-Assad (son of Rifaat), Nader Qala’i (ex-CEO of Syriatel and business partner to Rami) Yazan Aslan (son of Ali Aslan, Chief of Staff)
Manaf is as handsome as a movie star and carried a lot of authority. He was a true military guy and had spent his entire life in the military, unlike Bashar. People close to him say that when he walked into a room, all eyes turned to him. Not only did women find him attractive, but men did as well. He carried himself with an air of self-confidence and authority. He is smart, dashing and cunning.
The word is that Manaf had been told to solve the Harasta and Duma problems (the growing uprising on the outskirts of Damascus). He did a good job by negotiating with the opposition leaders in both suburbs, agreeing that both government forces and opposition would pull back. The Alawi leadership said “no, that is not how we are going to do this.” They pushed him aside and came down like a ton of bricks on the opposition in both neighborhoods, in an effort to assert state authority and crush the uprising through military means.
Manaf supported a policy of negotiation, flexibility and compromise. He was overruled by the military leadership and has since looked for a way out. [Continue reading…]
Meanwhile, today Wikileaks released 25 emails from Syria (more to come).
Palestinian leader seeks more information from Swiss lab before ruling on Arafat autopsy
The Associated Press reports: An aide says the Palestinian leader wants more information from a Swiss lab before deciding whether to dig up the remains of his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.
Doctors at the lab say they found elevated levels of the radioactive agent polonium-210 on clothing reportedly worn by Arafat before his death in November 2004.
The lab says the findings don’t prove Arafat was poisoned. Experts are divided over whether an autopsy, sought by Arafat’s widow, could clear up a lingering mystery surrounding the cause of Arafat’s death.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said he’s willing to exhume the body. However, Abbas aide Nimr Hamad said Thursday the Palestinian leader first wants to send experts to Europe to learn more from the Swiss lab and to the French military hospital where Arafat died.
Reuters reports: Tunisia has called for Arab ministers to meet to discuss the death of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat after new suspicions that he was murdered, a senior official in the Arab League said on Thursday.
The Palestinian Authority agreed on Wednesday to exhume Arafat’s body after new allegations that he was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210 in 2004, the same substance found to have killed a former Russian spy in London in 2006.
“The general secretariat received a request today from the Tunisian representative to convene a ministerial meeting to study the circumstances of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat,” League Deputy Secretary-General Ahmed Ben Helli told a news conference.
Ben Helli said a request had been passed to Arab member states for a meeting and to determine how they wished to deal with the issue in coordination with the Palestinians.
BBC News reports: Hamas Deputy Foreign Minister Ghazi Hamad has called for a full independent scientific investigation into the death of the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat following claims he had been poisoned.
[…]
Hamad told HARDtalk’s Zeinab Badawi that he believed Israel was responsible. Israel has denied any involvement in Arafat’s death. His medical records say he had a stroke resulting from a blood disorder.
Turkish firefighters battle blazes ‘deliberately started’ on Syria border
The Associated Press reports: Turkish firefighters are battling blazes along the border with Syria in areas where thousands of Syrians have crossed to flee the fighting in their country.
Mehmet Harbi, a forestry official, claimed the fires were “deliberately started” at four different points on the Syrian side of the border and spread to Turkey because of strong winds. Turkey’s state-run TRT television said Syrian forces were believed to have started the fires to deny shelter to rebels along the border area. Harbi and TRT provided no evidence to substantiate their claims.
More than 35,000 Syrians are living in refugee camps on the Turkish side of the border that were opened to care for the many people fleeing Syria’s unrest. Sporadic clashes between Syrian forces and activists also have occurred on the Syrian side of the border.
Libya beset by ethnic tension as elections loom
Luke Harding reports: In a villa on Libya’s stunning sea coast, a sculptor finishes off a war memorial. It commemorates the 50 men from the western town of Zuwara who perished last year in the battle against Muammar Gaddafi.
The slab, which is destined for Zuwara’s small concrete roundabout, is engraved in two languages: one is Arabic, the other is Tifinagh, the ancient script of North Africa’s Berbers, or Imazighen (the Berbers prefer to be called Imazighen, noting that Berber originally meant “barbarian”). Before last year’s uprising, anyone who spoke Berber in public could be arrested.
During his 42 years in power, Gaddafi persecuted the country’s minority Berber or Amazigh community, arresting its leaders, banishing its language from schools, and having protesters beaten. His vision for Libya was as a mono-Arab state. Gaddafi insisted the “traitorous” Imazighen were an ethnolinguistic fiction, even though they make up about 600,000 of Libya’s 6 million population.
Nearly a year after Gaddafi was turfed out of power, and days before the country’s first democratic election this Saturday, Amazigh culture is enjoying a revival. Zuwara’s secret police headquarters has been transformed into an Amazigh radio station. A beach mansion belonging to a Gaddafi loyalist is home to an artists’ workshop and a recording studio where banned Tifinagh songs and poems are heard again. Amazigh activists are busy relearning their forgotten, 2,000-year-old Punic alphabet.
But there are darker rumblings too. In March, 17 people were killed after fighting erupted between Amazigh Zuwara and the neighbouring Arab towns of Riqdaleen and Al-Jamail. The two sides lobbed mortars at each other. The ethnic clashes were triggered by fresh tensions over who did what during last year’s revolution – with Zuwara accusing its neighbours of siding with Gaddafi – as well as smouldering disputes over land and smuggling routes.
This isn’t post-revolutionary Libya’s only conflict. In the absence of a strong central authority, ethnic quarrels have broken out in several parts of the country, most notably in the south-eastern desert town of Kufra. Here, more than 150 people have been killed in fighting between black Toubou tribesmen and their Arab Zuwayy neighbours, leading some to wonder whether the country is already beginning to fall apart. [Continue reading…]
Iran ‘ready to fire missiles at U.S. bases’
The Guardian reports: Iran is prepared to launch missiles at US bases throughout the Gulf within minutes of an attack on the Islamic Republic, according to a commander of the country’s Revolutionary Guards.
In an apparent response to reports that the US has increased its military presence in the Gulf, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ air force said on Wednesdaythat missiles had been aimed at 35 US military bases in the Gulf as well as targets in Israel, ready to be launched in case of an attack.
The semi-official Fars news agency reported Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh as saying: “We have thought of measures to set up bases and deploy missiles to destroy all these bases in the early minutes after an attack.”
Hajizadeh’s remarks were made on the sidelines of a three-day war game called Great Prophet Seven, which Iranian officials claimed was a show of defiance against western pressure, including the US and EU embargo against imports of Iranian oil that came into effect on 1 July.
“These [US] bases are all in range of our missiles, and the occupied lands [a reference to Israel] are also good targets for us,” Hajizadeh said.
Turkey finds bodies of pilots shot down by Syria
The Wall Street Journal reports: Turkey on Wednesday found the bodies of two pilots shot down by Syria last month during a contested flight that pushed the neighbors’ relations to a new low almost a year after Ankara threw its weight behind the opposition to oust President Bashar al-Assad from power.
The military General Staff in Ankara said on Wednesday that it was working to remove the bodies of Captain Gokhan Ertan and Lieutenant Hasan Hüseyin Aksoy from the Mediterranean. Turkey didn’t identify the location of the dead pilots or provide any additional details. The armed forces weren’t immediately able to provide comment.
Gadhafi-era spy tactics quietly restarted in Libya
The Wall Street Journal reports: Libya’s caretaker government has quietly reactivated some of the interception equipment that fallen dictator Moammar Gadhafi once used to spy on his opponents.
The surveillance equipment has been used in recent months to track the phone calls and online communications of Gadhafi loyalists, according to two government officials and a security official. Two officials say they have seen dozens of phone or Internet-chat transcripts detailing conversations between Gadhafi supporters. One person said he reviewed the transcript of at least one phone call between Saadi Gadhafi, the exiled son of the former dictator, and one of his followers inside Libya. Saadi Gadhafi, who is in Niger, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Libya is among the post-Arab Spring nations grappling with a difficult question as they move toward democracy: Whether or not to use the security tools left behind by former dictators. Libya plans elections this Saturday.
Palestinian Authority agrees to exhume Arafat, form international probe
Ma’an News Agency reports: The Palestinian Authority has agreed to set up an international investigation into the death of President Yasser Arafat, and has no problem exhuming his body from a Ramallah grave, officials said Wednesday.
Arafat’s widow Suha called on Tuesday for the Palestinian leader’s body to be examined after Al Jazeera reported that a Swiss institute found his personal belongings contained abnormal levels of a rare and radioactive element called polonium.
Arafat, who fell ill while besieged in his compound in Ramallah during the second intifada, eventually passed away in a Paris hospital in 2004. Mystery surrounded his cause of death.
“There is no religious or political reason that prevents further investigation into this matter, including exhuming his body by a specialized and trusted party at the request and approval of his family,” presidency spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh told official media Wafa.
PLO official Saeb Erekat said the PA intends to form an international committee to investigate Arafat’s death, along the lines of the UN tribunal into the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Al-Hariri.
Erekat said two committees, one formed of government ministers and another from Fatah’s central committee, have already been investigating Arafat’s death since 2004.
But Erekat expressed appreciation for the new revelations in the Al Jazeera report, saying “After finishing with the family and religious procedures, there is no doubt that an international committee will be formed to investigate reasons of Arafat’s death and sides involved.”
Abu Rudeineh told Wafa President Mahmoud Abbas had ordered one of the existent committees to follow up on the new reports and seek assistance from Arab and international experts in order to establish the cause of death.
“I want the world to know the truth about the assassination of Yasser Arafat,” Suha Arafat told the Qatar-based satellite TV channel, without making any direct accusations but noting that Israel and the United States saw him as an obstacle to peace.
The findings stirred up old Palestinian suspicions Israel was behind the death of the 75-year-old ex-guerrilla it had shunned after peace talks collapsed into bloodshed in 2000.
Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, who report for Haaretz, conducted their own investigation into the cause of Arafat’s death and were unable to reach any firm conclusions. “But with Al-Jazeera, we have now real evidence leading to a sensational conclusion, and we must admit, in this case, it makes us more than just a little bit jealous.”
Toxicity tests conducted on Arafat in Paris brought up nothing. The report itself shows the results of blood tests taken from Etienne Louvet, sent to the toxicity lab of the Paris Police and the military hospital. Etienne Louvet was the code name that the doctors used whenever they send Arafat’s blood tests, in order to keep the results of the tests secret.
The report mentions the names of the different poisons they tried to pinpoint (in order to find poison, it’s necessary to look for it specifically) – but Polonium 210, the poison discovered in the Al-Jazeera investigation, wasn’t on the list at the French lab.
Nevertheless, Arafat’s relatives and associates claimed over and over again that he was poisoned, and that Israel had not hidden its intention of getting to him. And again – until today, eight years after his death – we had not succeeded in finding any evidence to back up that claim.
And then along comes the Al-Jazeera investigation presenting new evidence that the Polonium 210 poison was indeed found on Arafat’s personal belongings from his last days alive.
Even the Swiss investigators admitted that in order to get to the incisive truth that Arafat died of radioactive poisoning, it would be necessary to carry outs tests on his body or on the earth covering him (Arafat is buried in Ramallah).
Suha Arafat has already demanded that the Palestinian Authority dig up the body – and the PA agreed on Wednesday to the request.