Vice News reports: As the train packed with refugees left Budapest’s Keleti station in the direction of Austria, only one family remained on the platform. “We couldn’t buy tickets because we don’t have any money, armed thieves took everything from us,” said Tarek al-Hajj Khalil, a Palestinian from the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus, Syria.
The 19-year-old refugee sat flanked by his five sisters: Nour, 18, Reem, 17, Rama, 16, Raneem, 15, Bayan, 4, and her twin brother Aamer. The group arrived the night before after being released from a Hungarian detention facility, and looked to continue onward to Germany, where they hope to receive asylum.
“Everything is broken from the trip,” Tarek said as he banged away at a Samsung phone with a cracked screen and missing battery cover.
He tried desperately to reach his brother Mustafa, who had crossed into Austria three days earlier with their mother. The family became separated after they were robbed on the Serbia-Hungary border. Thieves took nearly $5,000 in cash, and now the family had only $1,000 left hidden on one of Tarek’s sisters. A smuggler demanded exactly that much to drive his mother and brother Mustafa to Budapest after they crossed into Hungary. [Continue reading…]
Christian Science Monitor reports: President Obama appears to have the votes to ensure congressional approval of the landmark nuclear deal with Iran, a key plank of which is an easing of economic sanctions. And one of the beneficiaries will be Iran’s primary tool for projecting power – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and especially its elite Qods Force, which handles operations abroad.
But are Iran’s wizened generals, who mostly cut their military teeth in the 1980s as teenage volunteers during the brutal Iran-Iraq War, already in danger of overreach?
For decades, American military planners aimed to be capable of simultaneously fighting – and winning – two full-blown wars in different regions. It was a challenge, even for a superpower. Today, on a much smaller scale and with a sliver of the military means, Iran is attempting the same thing in the Middle East: It is deeply engaged in Syria and Iraq; waving the flag in Yemen; and very influential in Lebanon. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: Russia is using an air corridor over Iraq and Iran to fly military equipment and personnel to a new air hub in Syria, openly defying American efforts to block the shipments and significantly increasing tensions with Washington.
American officials disclosed Sunday that at least seven giant Russian Condor transport planes had taken off from a base in southern Russia during the past week to ferry equipment to Syria, all passing through Iranian and Iraqi airspace.
Their destination was an airfield south of Latakia, Syria, which could become the most significant new Russian military foothold in the Middle East in decades, American officials said. [Continue reading…]
The Daily Beast reports: In April, a 16-year-old in South Carolina was charged with illegal weapons possession in family court, but this was no routine gun case. Prosecutors claimed the Syrian-American teen planned to shoot up a U.S. Army base for ISIS. He and an older man allegedly planned to move to Syria and continue fighting for ISIS there.
Police said they found an ISIS flag in the teen’s room during a search. Because South Carolina doesn’t have its own terrorism statute, the state charged him with possession of a firearm by a minor. He pleaded out and is in juvenile detention, where he might remain until age 21.
This overlooked case is one of more than 66 against Americans for making common cause with ISIS since the beginning of 2014. For all the talk of al Qaeda “sleeper cells” after the 9/11 attacks, the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS has drawn far more people to its cause inside the U.S. and from a broad swath of the Muslim population.
“The typical American recruit is anything but typical,” Seamus Hughes of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism told The Daily Beast. “They run a spectrum between loners online to hardened fighters.”
The majority of the ISIS cases, involving several dozen people, allege they planned to join the caliphate in the Middle East. Half of the total cases involved FBI informants and agents, which has opened the U.S. government to criticism of inflating the ISIS threat through entrapment. [Continue reading…]
Charles Lister writes: Al-Qa`ida’s role in Syria has evolved considerably since its humble beginnings as a wing of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) in mid-to-late 2011. Formally established by seven prominent Islamists in October 2011 after four months of secret meetings, Jabhat al-Nusra did not publicly emerge until January 23, 2012. In its first six months of publicly acknowledged operations, Jabhat al-Nusra was deeply unpopular within Syria’s rapidly expanding insurgency. Although it had not admitted its links to the ISI or al-Qa`ida, its rhetoric, imagery, and tactics made its international jihadist links clear. A revolutionary opposition, still clinging to nationalist ideals, feared what appeared to be ISI-like terrorist cells emerging within its midst.
By fall 2012, however, Jabhat al-Nusra had evolved from a terrorist organization into an expanding insurgent movement. Its forces had begun integrating into the broader armed opposition, especially in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo. By December 11, 2012, when the U.S. government designated it an alias of al-Qa`ida in Iraq, and a terrorist organization, Jabhat al-Nusra was operating as a fully fledged, de facto opposition actor, albeit on an extreme end of the ideological spectrum.
Two-and-a-half years later, aided in particular by the protracted Syrian conflict and the brutal rise of the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra is one of the most powerful armed groups in Syria. Its consistent balancing of ideologically driven jihadist objectives with local sensitivities and revolutionary ideals has placed Jabhat al-Nusra in an advantageous position. Rarely will any Syrian opposition group commit genuinely to both denouncing the role of Jabhat al-Nusra in the conflict and permanently ceasing battlefield cooperation with it.
Jabhat al-Nusra remains an al-Qa`ida affiliate, however, and it has occasionally displayed the fundamentalist behavior one would ordinarily expect. From sectarian killings to harsh legal restrictions and executions, the true and extremist nature of Jabhat al-Nusra has periodically been revealed.
Throughout its existence, Jabhat al-Nusra and its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, have generally maintained the group’s jihadist credibility while making its stance within the complex conflict as accommodating as possible. In so doing, al-Qa`ida has played a strategic long game in Syria, which has allowed it to establish a new stronghold on Israel’s border and in sight of Europe. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: The airstrike slammed into Al-Sham water-bottling plant at the end of the night shift, killing 13 workers who were minutes away from heading home.
Standing among the strewn bottles, smoldering boxes and pulverized machines a few days after the airstrike here, the owner, Ibrahim al-Razoom, searched in vain for any possible reason that warplanes from a Saudi-led military coalition would have attacked the place.
Nothing in the ruins suggested the factory was used for making bombs, as a coalition spokesman had claimed. And it was far from any military facility that would explain the strike as a tragic mistake: For miles around, there was nothing but desert scrub.
“It never occurred to me that this would be hit,” Mr. Razoom said.
Of the many perils Yemen’s civilians have faced during the last six months of war, with starvation looming and their cities crumbling under heavy weapons, none have been as deadly as the coalition airstrikes. What began as a Saudi-led aerial campaign against the Houthis, the rebel militia movement that forced Yemen’s government from power, has become so broad and vicious that critics accuse the coalition of collectively punishing people living in areas under Houthi control. [Continue reading…]
The Washington Post reports: There was a time when the arrival of Alexander Borodai and his posse of camouflaged gunmen could clear out a restaurant in just minutes.
But that was in Donetsk, Ukraine, in 2014, where Borodai was prime minister of a proRussian separatist government. Now, he is back in his native Moscow and, as he tells it, back to his old day job as a public relations consultant.
“When you are not on television, people start to forget what you look like,” he said, sinking into a creamcolored sofa in a tony Moscow restaurant for an interview. “And thank God for that. It was hard to go out on the street at first.”
It is an unlikely, perhaps unbelievable, transformation for the most prominent Russian citizen in the war in Ukraine and the possible target of a Dutch investigation into the missile attack on a Malaysian airliner in July last year that killed 298 people. [Continue reading…]
From at least the time of Hippocrates in ancient Greece, physicians were taught to use their intuition, based on their experience.
“For it is by the same symptoms in all cases that you will know the diseases,” he wrote. “He who would make accurate forecasts as to those who will recover, and those who will die … must understand all the symptoms thoroughly.”
In other words, doctors drew general conclusions from experience to forecast the course of disease in particular patients.
But Hippocratic medicine also incorporated “scientific” theory — the idea that four “humors” (blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm) controlled the body’s health. Excess or deficiency of any of the humors made you sick, so treating patients consisted of trying to put the humors back in balance. Bloodletting, used for centuries to treat everything from fevers to seizures, serves as an example of theory-based medicine in action.
Nowadays medical practice is supposedly (more) scientific. But actually, medical theory seems to have taken a backseat to the lessons-from-experience approach. Today’s catch phrase is “evidence-based medicine,” and that “evidence” typically takes the form of results from clinical trials, in which potential treatments are tested on large groups of people. It’s basically just a more systematic approach to Hippocrates’ advice that doctors base diagnosis, treatments and prognosis on experience with previous patients. But instead of doctors applying their own personal clinical experience, they rely on generalizing the results of large trials to their particular patients.
You should call this approach the “Risk Generalization-Particularization” model of medical prediction, Jonathan Fuller and Luis Flores write in a paper to be published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. (It’s OK to call it ‘Risk GP’ for short, they say.) “Risk GP” they note, is “the model that many practitioners implicitly rely upon when making evidence-based decisions.”
Risk GP as a model for making medical judgments is the outgrowth of demands for evidence-based medicine, write Fuller, on the medicine faculty at the University of Toronto in Canada, and Flores, a philosopher at King’s College London in England. It “advocates applying the results of population studies over mechanistic reasoning … in diagnosis, prognosis and therapy.” Evidence-based medicine has set a new standard for clinical reasoning, Fuller and Flores declare; it “has become dominant in medical research and education, accepted by leading medical schools and all of the major medical journals.”
So it seems like a good idea to ask whether the “evidence” actually justifies this evidence-based approach. In fact, it doesn’t. [Continue reading…]
Hisham Melhem writes: Former President George W. Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama a precarious and partially broken Arab World. A spectacularly ambitious imperial attempt at remaking the region, beginning in Mesopotamia, crumbled mightily in the inhospitable desert of Iraq.
The dream of planting a Jeffersonian democracy in the land of the two rivers, metamorphosed into an unprecedented sectarian bloodletting. Bush’s freedom agenda, coming after he admitted – correctly – that for more than fifty years U.S. administrations neglected human rights in the Middle East in the name of maintaining stability, the free flow of oil, and striking alliances against the Soviet Union, was ill-conceived, naively pursued, and badly executed.
Bush’s ‘War on Terrorism’ was equally flawed; Al-Qaeda was cut to pieces, but like the mythical Hydra it metastasized and produced the monstrous ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS). But hard as it is to conceive, President Obama will bequeath to his successor a breathtakingly pulverized – figuratively and, yes, physically – region, where in some states like Syria and Iraq whole communities have been uprooted and once great ancient cities have been ransacked, and precious cultural and religious jewels have been destroyed.
There are no more streets in some Syrian cities; The Assad regime turned them into shallow valleys of broken concrete, twisted metal and shattered personal artifacts indicating that they were once full of life. If hell has streets, they will surely look like the streets of Syria’s cities today. It shall be written, that the words of a sitting American President in the second decade of the 21st century justifying his inaction and his inane silence in the face of the staggering savagery of the Syrian regime – which repeatedly used chemical weapons, barrel bombs, medieval sieges and starvation against his own people – were stunning in their moral vacuity. The President of the United States will be judged as an accomplice in the historic betrayal of the Syrian people – and, to a lesser extent, the Iraqi and Libyan peoples – and in the creation of the worst refugee problem in the Middle East in a century.
Surely, the primary responsibility for the agonies of the peoples of the Middle East lies in the hands of the political and cultural classes that inherited the new political structures erected in modern times by the colonial powers over the remnants of old civilizations.
True, European powers drew artificial boundaries – most countries have such borders – not taking into consideration the wishes of the affected peoples, whose promises were rarely honored. This left behind wounds that have yet to heal. But in subsequent years, the ideologues of Arab Nationalism and Political Islam, the military strongmen who perfected military coups along with some atavistic hereditary rulers maintained the ossified status quo or destroyed nascent and relatively open, diverse societies and representative forms of governance in countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Tunisia.
However, Western meddling and military intervention contributed to the rise of Arab autocracy and despotism. The American invasion of Iraq did not cause sectarianism in that tortured land; that dormant scourge was awakened by years of Ba’athist despotism and Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Iran in 1980.
But the way the American invasion was conceived and executed accelerated Iraq’s descent into the abyss. Hence America’s partial political and moral responsibility for Iraq’s current torment. President Obama’s eagerness to disengage himself and his administration from Bush’s Iraq burden explains his reticence to push for a residual force after 2011, or to seriously and personally continue to engage Iraqis and help those forces willing to live in a unitary civil state, his deafness to repeated warnings that former Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s sectarian policies were deepening the sectarian fissures, makes him a partial owner of Iraq’s chaos. [Continue reading…]
Koert Debeuf writes: The anti-forces of the liberal order, authoritarian nationalism and religious extremism are back with a vengeance. The most obvious example of the return of authoritarian nationalism is Russia. The same trend is also clear in most member-states of supra-national Europe, not the least in Hungary and Greece. Religious extremism is on a scary height in the Arab world, but also in parts of Africa, India and Myanmar.
The US and Europe seem to be too tired and powerless to halt this decline. Even though both liberal powers know what they want, both are deeply divided. It looks like both powers are facing a global system failure and have no idea how to deal with it. Both know that their influence and power is not what it used to be, but they haven’t found a new role yet. It’s not an exclusive Western problem. The entire world is plunging into an identity crisis.
What is an identity crisis?
An identity crisis or existential crisis is a psychological state of mind of — mostly high-achieving individuals who feel depressed, angry and lost and question the very foundations of their lives. It usually occurs after a traumatic experience such as an extreme disappointment, a broken relationship, the death of a loved one or a sudden loss of status. These traumas result in a loss of confidence and self-esteem.
In trying to find a way out of this depressive disorder people tend to take four different paths: anchoring, isolation, distraction and sublimation. Isolation is an attempt to keep all negative feelings outside. Distraction is trying to prevent the mind from turning on itself. Sublimation on the other hand is refocusing on positive energy in order to keep the negative away. However, the path that most people with an identity crisis are taking is the one of anchoring: finding a well-known fixation point such as religion, closed social groups or one particular idea or ideology. People are looking for the security and warmth of a group, or what I call a tribe. In Arabic there is a word for this: qabaleya, or tribalization. It is the choice to go back to the tribe, its warmth and clear-cut identity. What’s interesting is that psychologists have found that in looking for a way out of an identity crisis people often prefer a negative identity rather than a weak identity.
What counts for individuals counts for groups as well. It makes sense to say that societies can suffer from an identity crisis too. The first study of the psychology of the masses was written in 1895, by Gustav Le Bon in his book ‘Psychologie des foules’. Since then many Social Psychology studies have drawn similarities between the psychology of individuals and that of groups. Psychiatrists too have been researching how groups can suffer from a kind of equivalent of the mental disorders usually only attributed to individuals. Psychiatrist and politician John Lord Alderdice even suggested psychologically informed strategies to address such crises in the psychology of large groups including the regressive pattern I am calling tribalization and other phenomena such a fundamentalism, radicalization and the cycle of terrorism.
Societies –just like individuals –can suffer traumatic experiences too. The anthropological study of René Girard shows how traumatic experiences make tribes focus on their core identity, returning to a stronger emphasis on law, culture and the sacred, and how they deal with their fear and aggression by turning against ‘the Other’ — — the scapegoat mechanism. Just like individuals societies often respond to traumatic experiences with an identity crisis by regressing back into what they know best from the past — what I am describing as tribalization. They go back to the tribal (old) ideas and tribal (old) behavior. These tribal ideas are mostly based on myths of a great past as the only way towards a great future. Tribalization is a process that almost always includes the creation of enemies. [Continue reading…]
Mark Boothroyd writes: The Syrian revolt against the Assad regime is now in its fifth year, the death toll from the conflict has surpassed 330,000 with over 1 million wounded, 215,000 are still detained in regime prisons, 200,000 are missing, and between 650,000 and 1,000,000 people are under starvation siege by the regime in rebel towns and cities. Bombings of civilian areas by the regime are a daily occurrence, 4.5 million Syrians are refugees, and 8 million, almost half the remaining population, are internally displaced.
In all this time there was no direct western intervention in Syria against Assad. No bombs were dropped on Syria by Western powers until mid-2014, the fourth year of the revolution, and these were targeted at ISIS, not the regime. Not a single bomb has been dropped on regime military installations by the Coalition air force.
All the hype and warnings notwithstanding, Western aid to the rebels has been very limited. By mid-2013 the Free Syrian Army had received only $12 million of a promised $60 million of aid from the US , and been denied access to weaponry by the EU. The aid they did receive was only non-lethal aid consisting of food, medicine and vehicles. From 2012 onwards the CIA was involved in monitoring weapons shipments to Syria; its role was to stop them receiving the anti-air missiles and heavy weaponry that could have neutralised Assad’s airforce and armour and hastened the downfall of the regime.
When the US did finally begin to arm and train rebels in 2014, it was tightly controlled to a ridiculous extent. In contrast the regime has $3.5 billion worth of contracts for arms from Russia, and loans to pay for it. With Syria’s domestic weapons industry too small to produce enough arms to sustain a protracted conflict, the imperialist intervention which has kept the conflict going and maintains it to this day is from Russia.
The revolutions exposed that for many in the anti-war movement, opposition to imperialist intervention only extended to opposition to imperialist intervention by the UK, US, EU, and their allies. There was no opposition to the imperialist actions of the Russian government, or the crucial support given by the Iranian government to the Assad regime. [Continue reading…]
Two things are especially striking about the massive movement of refugees into Europe: running for their lives from the fear and famine, rape and killing of the wider region, people seeking sanctuary are being greeted by the stinginess of states (“open door” Germany is the exception) and the warm hospitality of European citizens.
People crossing the border from Greece into Macedonia, en route to Hungary through Serbia. AFP
People with children on their backs and bottles of water and lumps of bread in their hands are facing untold episodes of state harassment, and state inaction. At Keleti train station in Budapest, the Hungarian government, lovers of barbed wire, “relocation camps” and border checks, in effect tried to impose martial law on several thousand stateless people hurt by torture, rape and barrel-bombing. That’s an obscenity. “Every state has the right to protect its borders,” tweeted the ill-named Justice Minister of the Orban government. Its spokesman, Zoltan Kovacs, said coldly that Budapest isn’t planning to send any more buses to Austria. Janos Lazar, government chief of staff, weighed in by emphasising that Hungary had to work to complete its new border fence, to stop further “illegal” entry of refugees. Otherwise, he added, many more such people would be encouraged to come the way of the motherland.
The shameless behaviour of governments extends well beyond the front lines from where desperate peoples are fleeing for their lives. Throughout the European Union, most governments are hiding behind the so-called Dublin Regulation, which places the burden of settlement and hospitality on the state in which refugees first arrive. Signed 25 years ago, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Dublin Regulation is now a broken arrangement, even though you wouldn’t think so from the miserly statements and inaction of many heads of government. Saturday’s meeting of European foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg produced no agreement. The group’s foreign policy boss, Federica Mogherini, said the talks were “difficult” and Europe’s refugee crisis is “here to stay”. In Britain, where the government is deeply implicated in the state failure, violence, social chaos and human tragedy in the Middle East region, Prime Minister David Cameron has prevaricated. At first, he suggested Britain should not take refugees currently making their way through Balkan states or across the Mediterranean to Europe because this would help prevent others making the “hazardous journey”. Now he says Britain has a “moral responsibility” to accept up to 20,000 refugees from Syria – but over the next five years.
For several years, on the margins of Europe, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and other local states have been shouldering the massive refugee burden. You would think that richer states well beyond the region, especially those deeply implicated in Middle East dynamics, would be pitching in, especially given the scale of the developing catastrophe. Think twice. So far, the uncivil war in Syria alone has produced more than four million refugees. Many more people are coming. Yet how many Syrian citizens have so far been accepted as refugees by the United States and its allies at war with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq? The figures are shocking, and shameful: 4,980 in the United Kingdom; 1,500 in the United States; 1,074 in Stephen Harper’s Canada; and 2,200 in Tony Abbott’s Australia. Up until last year, Australia was still trying to return asylum seekers to Syria. Now the Abbott government, under mounting public pressure, says it “will step up to the plate”. The fine words are fabulations: its talk of an increased intake of Syrians is contradicted by plans to reduce refugees from other parts of the world, to ensure Australia’s overall refugee intake would remain unchanged.
In striking contrast to this hypocrisy and pusillanimity (invade Iraq and Afghanistan, bomb Syria, refuse entry to its fleeing victims), European citizens on the ground have taken the lead in welcoming the homeless. Rising xenophobia throughout Europe has for some time been the only mainstream media story considered newsworthy by journalists. Now we’re seeing a different and more charitable side of Europe: churches, trade unions, mosques, community groups and families are springing into action. Citizens hold welcome signs in English, German and Arabic at train stations. Bystanders clap. There are handshakes, flowers, smiles. Citizen volunteers offer food, hot drinks, toys for children. More than a few are offering their homes to the homeless. Petitions call upon the EU and its member states to act decisively, for instance by setting up a special ferry service from the Turkish cities on the Aegean Sea to Greece and a direct special train service from Thessaloniki to northern Europe. A week ago, 20,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Vienna in support of refugees now on the move; a few days before, a similar march took place in Dresden. And six days ago, a petition directed at the Westminster website hit 100,000 signatures, enough to require a parliamentary debate on increasing the number of people granted refuge in the UK. A few hours later, the number of petitioners had doubled, to nearly 200,000.
The hospitality, the big-hearted openness to the world, the cosmopolitanism of these citizens of the world is remarkable. It’s a reaffirmation of the principle of citizenship famously outlined just over two centuries ago by the English political writer Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), in an exchange with his friend Benjamin Franklin. “Where liberty is, there is my country,” Franklin reportedly said. “Where liberty is not, there is my country,” Paine quipped in reply. Citizenship of any country implied for him the duty of citizens to take an interest in the fate of others. Continue reading →
The Washington Post reports: Europe is now struggling with the most severe refugee crisis in decades, as millions of people flee violence in Syria and Iraq. Even as German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel outlined a proposal this week to place 160,000 refugees in nearly two dozen countries, he acknowledged that the plan was merely “a drop in the ocean.” Germany alone expects to receive 800,000 applications from asylum seekers this year. The U.S. government announced Thursday it would take in 10,000.
Refugees areoftendescribedasa“burden” for the countries they settle in. The usual thinking is that they are drain on limited government coffers and a weight on sluggish economies, but that countries ought to take them in for moral and legal reasons. Even those in favor of expanding help for refugees, like the former British foreign secretary David Miliband and the executive director of Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa, have referred to sharing the “burden” of refugees.
However, research that has looked at the effect of refugees around the world suggests that, in the longer run, this view is often wrong. From Denmark to Uganda to Cleveland, studies have found that welcoming refugees has a positive or at least a neutral effect on a host community’s economy and wages. [Continue reading…]
AFP reports: Muslim radicals in Germany are trying to recruit some of the growing numbers of asylum seekers reaching the country, according to intelligence services quoted by the German news agency DPA.
The Islamic extremists “are trying to approach the young unaccompanied refugees, who arrive in our country without their families and are particularly looking for contacts and support,” a spokesman for the intelligence service in the southern state of Bavaria told DPA.
He said many of the youths are approached around reception centres but also at Munich railway station where many of the asylum seekers have arrived from Hungary and Austria in recent days.
The Islamic extremists “want to take advantage of the insecurity and distress of the refugees,” he said. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Turkey’s ruling AK Party re-elected Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as its chairman at a congress on Saturday where the longest shadow was cast by a politician who, officially at least, is no longer a member: President Tayyip Erdogan.
Although Erdogan did not appear in person – as president he is supposed to refrain from party politics – many of his loyalists were named to executive committees, something Davutoglu had hoped to avoid, according to some party officials.
Turkey’s most popular and divisive politician in recent memory, Erdogan faces budding discontent from inside the movement he founded, officials say. His drive to secure an absolute majority for the AKP has pushed it toward a November snap election that could again leave the party in stalemate. [Continue reading…]
AFP reports: Turkish warplanes struck 64 outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) targets in overnight raids on northern Iraq, dropping 80 bombs, according to reports on Sept. 11.
At least 60 PKK militants were killed in the strikes, carried out by 21 Turkish F-16 and F-4 warplanes, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported, quoting security sources.
The toll could not be verified independently. The strikes, which ran from late Sept. 10 to dawn Sept. 11, are the latest in a relentless air campaign aimed at crippling the PKK, which has staged a string of attacks in Turkey in recent weeks. [Continue reading…]
The National reports: As the sun drops in this town on Turkey’s border with Syria, young Kurdish men pull black balaclavas over their faces, load their Kalashnikovs with a click and leave the courtyards and homes they were resting in for the streets.
At the entrances of residential neighbourhoods here, roads are cut with sandbagged barricades and trenches filled with dirty, stagnant water. Sheets, blankets and tarps are strung up overhead to protect against Turkish government snipers.
On quiet days, children play on the barricades with simple toy guns fashioned out of plastic pipes. But at night, these barriers become the domain of the young fighters of the YDG-H, a local militia affiliated with Turkey’s main Kurdish nationalist guerrilla group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Towns like Cizre, Silopi and Sirnak in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority south-east are in open revolt today, with militants fighting against a government they say has oppressed the country’s Kurds for too long. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Barack Obama’s intelligence chief is said to be in frequent and unusual contact with a military intelligence officer at the center of a growing scandal over rosy portrayals of the war against the Islamic State, the Guardian has learned.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is said to talk nearly every day with the head of US Central Command’s intelligence wing, Army Major General Steven Grove – “which is highly, highly unusual”, according to a former intelligence official.
Grove is said to be implicated in a Pentagon inquiry into manipulated war intelligence. [Continue reading…]
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