Author Archives: News Sources

For Muslims in the U.S. military, a different U.S. than the one they swore to defend

The Washington Post reports: U.S. Marine Gunnery Sgt. Emir Hadzic was a Muslim refugee.

“The way Americans welcomed us made such a huge impression on me that I felt like I owed something back,” said Hadzic, a Bosnian-Muslim who fled Sarajevo in 1995. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Hadzic joined the Marine Corps as an infantryman — hoping to help peacekeepers deploying to his homeland.

“I thought I would sign up and pay my debt and on behalf of my family,” he added.

Eight deployments later and still in the Marine Corps, Hadzic has become disturbed by the rising anti-Muslim sentiment in this country after the recent Islamic State attacks in Paris and last week’s San Bernardino shootings. GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, a candidate Hadzic used to support, has called for barring Muslims from entering the United States.

“We used to be a balanced people. We used to be true to our values, but now we’re willing to betray our values because of a sense of fear? That’s not American,” said Hadzic. “What the hell happened to that America I immigrated to?” [Continue reading…]

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Understanding ISIS through the insights of Eric Hoffer

David Brooks writes: After the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, some people’s minds flew to the materialistic element of the atrocity — the guns that were used in the killing. But the crucial issue, it seems to me, is what you might call the technology of persuasion — how is it that the Islamic State is able to radicalize a couple living in Redlands, Calif.? What psychological tools does it possess that enable it to wield this far-flung influence?

The best source of wisdom on this general subject is still “The True Believer,” by Eric Hoffer, which he wrote back in 1951. Hoffer distinguished between practical organizations and mass movements. The former, like a company or a school, offer opportunities for self-advancement. The central preoccupation of a mass movement, on the other hand, is self-sacrifice. The purpose of an organization like ISIS is to get people to negate themselves for a larger cause.

Mass movements, he argues, only arise in certain conditions, when a once sturdy social structure is in a state of decay or disintegration. This is a pretty good description of parts of the Arab world. To a lesser degree it is a good description of isolated pockets of our own segmenting, individualized society, where some people find themselves totally cut off.

The people who serve mass movements are not revolting against oppression. They are driven primarily by frustration. Their personal ambitions are unfulfilled. They have lost faith in their own abilities to realize their dreams. They sometimes live with an unrelieved boredom. Freedom aggravates their sense of frustration because they have no one to blame but themselves for their perceived mediocrity. Fanatics, the French philosopher Ernest Renan argued, fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

The successful mass movement tells such people that the cause of their frustration is outside themselves, and that the only way to alter their personal situation is to transform the world in some radical way. [Continue reading…]

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Top Shi’ite cleric says government should not tolerate Turkish infringement of Iraq’s sovereignty

Reuters reports: Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called on the government on Friday to show “no tolerance” of any infringement of the country’s sovereignty, after Turkey deployed heavily armed troops to northern Iraq.

Sistani’s spokesman, Sheikh Abdul Mehdi Karbala’i, did not explicitly name Turkey, but a row over the deployment has badly soured relations between Ankara and Baghdad, which denies having agreed to it.

Sistani also said Iraq’s neighbours should not send any troops to Iraq “under the pretext of fighting terrorism”, except with the approval of the Baghdad government.

“The Iraqi government is responsible for protecting Iraq’s sovereignty and must not tolerate any side that infringes upon on it, whatever the justifications and necessities,” Karbalai’i said in a weekly sermon.

Ankara says the troops were sent as part of an international mission to train and equip Iraqi forces to fight Islamic State. Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday a withdrawal was “out of the question for the moment”. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistani Shi’ites fighting for Iran in Syria

Reuters reports: For years, websites linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have posted articles eulogizing Shi’ite fighters who die in Syria. But two men heralded last month for dying to defend a shrine near Damascus were different from most martyrs given such treatment in the past: they were Pakistanis.

The men were part of the Zeinabiyoun, a unit of Pakistani fighters named for a granddaughter of the prophet Mohammad buried in the shrine, the latest contingent in an Iranian drive to recruit Shi’ites from the region to fight in Syria.

The increase in the number of “martyrdom” notices of fighters from the group this year indicates they are taking a more active role in the conflict. A posting in mid-November on a Twitter account bearing the group’s name displayed the pictures of 53 men, described as fighters killed in battle.

While there has been no official announcement of their total numbers, a regional source familiar with the issue said there were hundreds of Pakistanis fighting in Syria, many stationed around the shrine of Mohammad’s granddaughter Zeinab.

Iran’s recruitment of the Pakistani fighters adds yet another international dimension to Syria’s 4-year-old civil war, which has deepened sectarian divisions across the Muslim world and drawn in most regional and global powers. [Continue reading…]

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This is what will happen to the climate in the next 100 years

By Katja Frieler, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

At the Paris climate summit, delegates are deciding on a global goal for temperature rise. At the time of publication, the latest draft text calls for the world to “hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5℃”.

But the climate action pledges made by 185 countries ahead of the summit don’t add up to 1.5℃ or warming or even 2℃. Taken together, they add up to a 2.7℃ world.

As the negotiations go on, 2015 is about to set a new global temperature record, and is likely to have reached 1℃ warming already.

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The Arctic as we know it is at stake at the Paris climate talks

By Ilona Mettiäinen, University of Lapland

Type “Arctic climate change” into a Google image search and you’ll see how the issue is largely perceived by the public: stranded polar bears, melting sea ice, icebergs and glaciers.

The anticipated melting of Arctic sea ice has also sparked global interest in the oil and gas resources that could be made available as the ice retreats, raising the prospect of a new Northern sea route between Europe and Asia.

Entirely missing from the results of the image search – and to large extent also the discussion – are the people of the Arctic, both indigenous and non-indigenous.

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ISIS aims to provoke backlash against Muslims in West

Yaroslav Trofimov writes: Before dawn in February 2006, militants sent by the precursor of today’s Islamic State sneaked into the golden-domed Shiite shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra, disarmed the guards and rigged the building with explosives.

By most accounts, nobody died in the explosion itself, which blew off the dome and reduced the venerated mosque to rubble. But the bombing achieved its goal of baiting Iraq’s Shiite majority into a spree of retaliation against the country’s Sunnis. Thousands died in the wave of sectarian killings that began hours later, and the social fabric of Iraq was torn forever.

In this environment of sectarian strife, many Iraqi Sunnis eventually came to view Islamic State as their only, however unpalatable, protector.

That is why just a few hundred of the group’s militants were able to seize Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, home to 1.5 million people, in June 2014.

This lesson of Samarra now looms over the West. Islamic State is using the same playbook in its attacks on Western targets this year — be it the ones directly organized by the group, such as the Nov. 13 massacre in Paris, or ones apparently only inspired, such as the shooting in San Bernardino.

The group’s objective is clear: to try to bait Western societies into an indiscriminate backlash against millions of Muslims living in Europe and the U.S. It is a backlash that, if successfully provoked, would disrupt these Muslims’ bonds with their countries of citizenship and residence and — as is it happened with Iraq’s Sunnis — validate Islamic State’s claim to be their only protector.

“ISIS thrives on polarization,” said Hassan Hassan, an expert on the group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “They want people to say — they hate us, and so we hate them. This is the foundation of their success.” [Continue reading…]

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Putin says he ‘hopes’ nuclear warheads will never be needed against ISIS… or anyone else

The Independent reports: Vladimir Putin has said he hopes nuclear warheads will not be needed to deal with terrorists or anyone else, after Russia launched cruise missiles from its submarine at Syria.

During a meeting in the Kremlin, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told the President that Kalibr cruise missiles had been fired by the submerged Rostov-on-Don submarine from the Mediterranean Sea for the first time.

He said TU-22 bombers also took part in the latest raids and that “significant damage” had been done to a munitions depot, a factory manufacturing mortar rounds and oil facilities. Two major targets in Raqqa, the defacto capital of Isis, had been hit, said Mr Shoigu. [Continue reading…]

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Why Assad is uninterested in defeating ISIS

Christoph Reuter writes: Assad’s official army is now just one of many fighting forces on the side of the regime — and is also suffering from poor morale and a lack of soldiers. For many young Syrians from areas under government control, forced conscription has become the most significant motivator for embarking on the refugee trail to Europe.

This is also one reason why Russia’s initial strategy for Syria is not finding success. Moscow had been hoping that massive air strikes would force rebel fighters in opposition-held areas to abandon the fight. That would then pave the way for Assad’s ground forces to advance and take back those regions. But in October, when Assad’s tank units rolled into those areas that Russian jets had previously bombed, they didn’t get very far. Instead of fleeing, rebels there had dug in instead.

Using TOW anti-tank missiles supplied by the US, in addition to Russian anti-tank weapons that had been captured or acquired from corrupt officers, the rebels struck some 20 tanks before the others turned back. The army’s ground offensive south of Aleppo likewise quickly ground to a halt. Meanwhile, rebels near Hama were able to finally take control of a long-contested city.

Assad’s army isn’t just vulnerable, it also isn’t strictly a Syrian force anymore. For the last two years, the forces on his side have increasingly been made up of foreigners, including Revolutionary Guards from Iran, members of Iraqi militias and Hezbollah units from Lebanon. They are joined at the front by Shiite Afghans from the Hazara people, up to 2 million of whom live in Iran, mostly as illegal immigrants. They are forcibly conscripted in Iranian prisons and sent to Syria — according to internal Iranian estimates, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 of them fighting in the country. The situation leads to absurd scenes: In the southern Syrian town of Daraa, rebels began desperately searching for Persian interpreters after an offensive of 2,500 Afghans suddenly began approaching.

It is the first international Shiite jihad in history, one which has been compensating for the demographic inferiority of Assad’s troops since 2012. The alliance has prevented Assad’s defeat, but it hasn’t been enough for victory either. Furthermore, the orders are no longer coming exclusively from the Syrian officer corps. Iranian officers control their own troops in addition to the Afghan units, and they plan offensives that also involve Syrian soldiers. Hezbollah commanders coordinate small elite units under their control. Iraqis give orders to Iraqi and Pakistani militia groups. And the Russians don’t let anyone tell them what to do. [Continue reading…]

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Assad buys oil from ISIS

Matthew M. Reed writes: Russia’s claim that ISIS smuggles 200,000 barrels a day assumes of course that the group produces that much. In reality, ISIS has never been credited with pumping so much oil. The group’s own internal assessment, retrieved by U.S. commandos during the May raid that killed ISIS oil emir Abu Sayyaf, pegged production at 55,000 barrels a day earlier this year. More recent estimates point to daily output of 40,000 barrels at most. That’s still a lot for a cult that fancies itself a state. But supply is only half the story. More than 5 million people are trapped in ISIS territory, and they could easily consume that amount every day. ISIS is also at war. If it retains any refining capacity for itself, or takes a cut from local refiners, that’s one more customer at home who gets priority.

We know ISIS has a discreet arrangement with a neighbor, but it’s not Turkey. The Syrian regime has done business with ISIS from day one, just as it did with al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other rebels who took over energy assets early in the war. President Bashar al-Assad’s point man for ISIS deals, George Haswani, was first designated by the European Union in March. The U.S. Treasury went a step further with its designation on Nov. 25. In addition to the oil deals, Treasury fingered Haswani’s engineering and construction company (HESCO) for servicing active ISIS fields. Leading up to the most recent wave of airstrikes against ISIS oil targets, U.S. officials admitted the network was more resilient and resourceful than expected. Another Treasury designation in late September hinted that ISIS actually increased oil production this year. They may have had some help from Assad’s man.

We don’t know how much oil ISIS has delivered to Assad, but there’s no doubt he needs it. For the first half of 2015, the regime’s oil output was less than 10,000 barrels a day. That was before pro-Assad forces retreated from even more oil-rich territory. All those eyes in the sky over Syria can’t tell how much ISIS oil passes through pipelines to regime-held refineries in the west. There are, however, curious gaps in official data. In April, for instance, Syria’s oil ministry said it refined 106,000 barrels a day, yet trade press could only explain where 85,000 barrels of that oil came from. Data has been increasingly hard to come by since.

Besides oil, ISIS delivers natural gas to the regime. These deals are durable because ISIS can’t use it or sell it to anyone else: It must be captured at the source and moved by pipeline. The only users connected to the gas fields are power plants, refineries, and industries, which are concentrated in Assad’s strongholds. In exchange for gas, the regime provides utilities like electricity, which ISIS taxes accordingly. At natural gas fields like those around Palmyra, which produce lighter liquid hydrocarbons in addition to gas, ISIS takes whatever it can turn into fuel. The gas goes west to Assad. [Continue reading…]

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Key Syria rebel group quits opposition talks?

AFP reports: One of Syria’s main rebel groups, Ahrar al-Sham, on Thursday pulled out of opposition talks aimed at forging a united front ahead of potential discussions with President Bashar Assad’s government.

It said it took the decision because of “the fundamental role… given to personalities linked to the regime” at the conference in Riyadh.

It named the Syria-based National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, which is generally tolerated by the government and participated in talks organized by Moscow on the conflict in 2014 and 2015.

Allied with the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham said it “rejects the outcomes” of the meeting which “did not affirm the identity of our Muslim people” in Syria.

The Riyadh conference which opened Wednesday and its outcomes were not “truly” representative of the Syrian “revolutionary factions”, the group said.

Ahrar al-Sham had agreed to attend the Riyadh talks despite the “lack of representation of jihadi factions at a level matching their… role” on the ground in Syria.

But the Islamist group had warned it “will not accept the results of this conference” unless they include “cleansing Syrian territories of the Russian-Iranian occupation and sectarian militia supporting them.” [Continue reading…]

Earlier, Aron Lund wrote: If the conference fails, through high-profile defections or a failure to reach agreement, the opposition will have stumbled on the threshold of the new peace process. Assad, Iran, and Russia will be overjoyed and current trends in the West, where countries are fast losing the last of their faith in Syria’s opposition, will be reinforced. But if the conference succeeds in producing a joint platform and keeps all the major groups on board, particularly the armed ones, it will have been a step toward a real political process—a necessary step, but not in itself sufficient.

Many problems remain, including the difficulty of accommodating hardline Islamist demands in a process geared to produce a political compromise, while also not alienating the rebel fighters that need to be involved for the process to have any meaning. Ahrar al-Sham opened the talks demanding “the complete cleansing of the Russian-Iranian occupation of Syrian land, and the sectarian militias which support it,” also calling for the “overthrow of the Assad regime with all its pillars and symbols, and handing them over for fair trial.” The United States, for its part, is imploring the opposition to come up with “creative language” on the issue of whether Bashar al-Assad should stay or go, seeing a measure of intentional ambiguity as the only realistic way to move forward. [Continue reading…]

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From a severed pig’s head to a bullet-riddled Koran, attacks on Muslims are rising

The Los Angeles Times reports: Attacks on mosques appear to have become more frequent and threats against Muslims more menacing since the terrorist attacks in Paris and the shooting in San Bernardino.

“A pigs head at a mosque in Philadelphia, a girl harassed at a school in New York, hate mail sent to a New Jersey mosque … I can’t event count the amount of hate mail and threats we have received,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Hooper said he witnessed a similar upswing in Islamophobia after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January, but nothing close to the litany of attacks, vandalism and racially-charged threats in recent weeks: [Continue reading…]

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Why India’s plan to fight climate change doesn’t hold water

By Steffen Böhm, University of Essex; Sanjay Lanka, University of Essex, and Zareen Pervez Bharucha, University of Essex

As the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally, the pressure is on India to offer something meaningful at the Paris climate talks. Yet the country demands the right to develop and lift its population out of poverty.

In its official submission to the summit, the so-called INDC (Intended Nationally Determined Contributions) which every country had to provide before negotiations began, India pledges to reduce the emissions intensity of GDP by 33 to 35% by 2030 based on 2005 levels. It proposes to achieve this by investing significantly in low-carbon technologies. But do these numbers stack up?

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi addresses the Paris talks.
Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

It may have the third highest greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, but India’s emissions per person are much lower than those of all so-called developed countries. This is why stakeholders insist on India’s right to develop.

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On climate, developing countries need more than betting billions on clean energy breakthroughs

By Ambuj D Sagar, The Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

When the heads of state gathered in Paris at the beginning of the climate talks last week, there was much excitement over the launch of Mission Innovation, a program to “reinvigorate and accelerate public and private global clean energy innovation with the objective to make clean energy widely affordable.”

This was a welcome step and, frankly, long overdue – total public energy R&D expenditures of the major industrialized countries are still lower than the peaks reached after the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Yet at the same time, it is symptomatic of the flawed global approach to address climate change. We move forward in some ways but sidestep the key issues – in this case, the provision of adequate and suitable support to developing countries to quickly begin a transition to low-carbon energy. The result is that we leave large gaps in our attempts to avoid dangerous climate change.

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Positive Paris talks not like cynical Copenhagen – but how will media cope?

By James Painter, University of Oxford

It has become a mantra here that Paris 2015 is not Copenhagen 2009. This time, the US and China are on board; the price of renewables has dropped by more than half; the vast majority of countries here have already pledged emission cuts and Paris is seen as a “staging post” not a final destination.

But how different is Paris 2015 for the 3,700 media representatives accredited here?

Like Copenhagen, where there were 4,000 from nearly 120 countries, the sheer volume of journalists makes the summits two of the most media-covered political events ever.

So it’s a daunting task for anyone analysing the bewildering array of content the journalists are producing.

A preliminary look at some of the hundreds of articles already published by the mainstream media suggests that, as in Copenhagen, the main angles are the process of the negotiations, and the political wrangling behind the sticking points.

So in Paris, much has already been published about the position of India, whereas in Copenhagen there was more about China.

More interesting are the other aspects of the climate change “mega-story” that journalists choose to cover beyond the negotiations. One strong impression is that since Copenhagen, as one veteran agency reporter put it to me recently, “climate change has moved from being just an environment story to a business and energy story”.

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Peru’s untold stories of forced sterilisation are being heard at last

By Matthew Brown, University of Bristol and Karen Tucker, University of Bristol

During the 1990s, thousands of Peru’s citzens were sterilised without their consent as part of a National Population Programme. Brought in by President Alberto Fujimori, this programme was supposed to offer all Peruvians access to a range of contraception options. But it also extended to mass forcible sterilisations. At least 17 people subjected to sterilisation died as a result of botched operations carried out with indifference or without adequate care.

For the last 15 years these abuses have been known only to a small group of people, even as Peru has taken pains to face up to the violence of its recent history.

The Peruvian state spent the 1990s waging a merciless war against guerrilla groups that sought to destroy it – among them the radical Marxist group Shining Path – and hundreds of thousands of civilians were caught in the crossfire or deliberately targeted.

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To defeat ISIS, embrace refugees

Musa al-Gharbi writes: In the aftermath of the series of attacks in Paris, attributed to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), French President François Hollande has declared a three-month state of emergency. This measure enables the military and law enforcement to monitor, arrest, detain and interrogate persons, with little or no due process. These powers will be exercised primarily against France’s besieged Arab, Muslim, immigrant and refugee populations.

Meanwhile, France has closed its borders and is calling for an indefinite suspension of the EU’s open-border (“Schengen”) system. Other EU states are calling for reducing the Schengen zone to exclude those countries most effected by the refugee crisis. Throughout the EU there is growing resistance to admitting or resettling refugees from the greater Middle East.

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly voted to halt the already stringent and meager U.S. program to resettle refugees from Iraq and Syria. Thirty-one governors have warned that would-be migrants from the Middle East are not welcome in their states, and a majority of the American public has turned against accepting more refugees. One of the frontrunner candidates for president of the United States, Donald Trump, has even called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” All of these maneuvers are playing into the hands of ISIS.

ISIS has strongly condemned refugees’ seeking asylum in Western nations, repeatedly warned would-be expatriates that Muslims will never be truly accepted in the United States and the EU (hence the importance of an “Islamic State”). In order to render this a self-fulfilling prophecy, ISIS ensured that one of the attackers carried a fraudulent Syrian passport, which was left to be discovered at the scene of the crime before its owner detonated his suicide vest.

ISIS is counting on Western nations to turn would-be refugees back towards their “caliphate,” because this massive outpouring of asylum seekers poses a severe threat to the legitimacy and long-term viability of ISIS. Accordingly, if Western nations were truly committed to undermining ISIS, they should embrace and integrate refugees from ISIS-occupied lands. [Continue reading…]

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What the world is witnessing is the liquidation of Syria

Leila Hudson writes: By the end of September 2015, 8,000 refugees and migrants, most of them Syrian, were arriving in Europe every day. By November, even with the onset of winter, that number had risen to an average of 8,700, with as many as 10,000 arriving on Greek shores on one October day. As of November 2015, the UNHCR counted 744,000 arrivals for the year, nearly triple the 219,000 who came in 2014. The millions displaced by Syria’s civil war and hundreds of thousands making their way by foot, boat, train, bus, car and truck across Eastern Europe are people hoping to live and work in peace and dignity somewhere on the planet. They are not a swarm or an invasion or a metastasis. As the aftermath of the November 13 Paris massacres showed, refugees do not seem to be a vector for terrorism, which is more easily incubated domestically and through communications networks. They are girls, boys, men and women, and every one of them has a full complement of ordinary hopes, fears and dreams. Most have experienced trauma and mustered tremendous willpower and determination. How the world treats them will have consequences for all.

What might one day be remembered as the Great Syrian Migration for its scale, or the Syrian Exodus for its epic and tragic character, is currently referred to as the European migration crisis. The proto-genocidal war in Syria, and even the pressures of four million refugees on Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey are by any measure more critical than the challenges to Europe’s immigration and integration policies. However, these problems were easier for the global north to dismiss as part of a chronically benighted and distant Middle East. There has been some media controversy over this Eurocentric framing of the issue and how to refer to these asylum seekers. Al-Jazeera announced a policy decision to avoid the word “migrant” and exclusively use the word “refugee,” as flight from war zones creates de facto refugees. Under the spirit of the 1951 Geneva Convention, the fact of displacement generates refugee status until proven otherwise. Most North American and European mainstream media outlets continue to use the term “migrant,” assuming that it is neutral and descriptive, and that legal refugee status will be confirmed, de jure, by an asylum court or other formal national or international process. There are important legal implications depending on the word and assumptions used; those judged to be refugees have a path to asylum and legal status, while economic migrants are subject to deportation. The displaced people themselves often prefer not to be labeled and categorized.

As this subject is discussed in the English-language media, the core of Syrian refugees is joined each week by people fleeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Pakistan, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Bangladesh and recently even Iran and Lebanon. Refugees and migrants from other zones of war and poverty are joining the caravan to Europe, sometimes even claiming to be Syrian to gain an edge in the quest for asylum. Falsified Syrian papers are available for purchase from the same smugglers selling rubber dinghies on the Turkish coast. These non-Syrian refugees and migrants are pushed from their homes by inequality, fear and insecurity and lured by promises of freedom, tolerance and prosperity. [Continue reading…]

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