Author Archives: News Sources

As Yemenis flee, State Department tells U.S. citizens to ‘shelter in place’

BBC News reports: Dozens of Yemenis have crossed the Gulf of Aden in small boats to get to Somalia, Djibouti and Somaliland to escape fighting and Saudi air strikes, the UN refugee agency has said.

The UNHCR said it was looking for a possible site for the refugees in Djibouti in case the fighting worsens.

At the same time Somali refugees are still continuing to arrive in Yemen to escape violence and poverty at home.

Yemen hosts more than 238,000 Somali refugees, the UNHCR says.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department has expressed its concern but offered no tangible assistance to U.S. citizens in Yemen: The level of instability and ongoing threats in Yemen remain extremely concerning. There are no plans for a U.S. government-coordinated evacuation of U.S. citizens at this time. To avoid placing themselves in greater danger, U.S. citizens are encouraged to shelter in place until the situation stabilizes. If you feel that your current location is no longer safe, you should carefully assess the potential risks involved in moving to a different location.

Reuters reports: Houthi fighters and allied army units clashed with local militias in the southern Yemeni city of Aden on Sunday, and eyewitnesses said gun battles and heavy shelling ripped through a downtown district near the city’s port.

The Houthi forces have been battling to take Aden, a last foothold of fighters loyal to Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, advancing to the city center despite 11 days of air strikes by a Saudi-led coalition of mainly Gulf air forces.

Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia launched the air strikes on March 26 in an attempt to turn back the Iran-allied Shi’ite Houthis, who already control Yemen’s capital Sanaa, and restore some of Hadi’s crumbling authority.

The air and sea campaign has targeted Houthi convoys, missiles and weapons stores and cut off any possible outside reinforcements – although the Houthis deny Saudi accusations that they are armed by Tehran.

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ISIS atrocities feared at Palestinian camp in Syria

The Los Angeles Times reports: The Yarmouk refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus was already an emblem of the enormous suffering unleashed by Syria’s civil war — and that was before the militants of the Islamic State moved in.

Besieged, starved and bombarded over the past two years, the camp is the scene of fresh calamity, with reports beginning to filter out of beheadings and other atrocities that have become Islamic State hallmarks.

Over the past few days, the Sunni militants have seized most of Yarmouk, officials and residents say, giving the group its most significant foothold to date in Damascus. Most Islamic State-held territory is in eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq, where the group has been the target of a months-long campaign of U.S.-led airstrikes.

Aside from the strategic location of the camp, on the Syrian capital’s southern flank and only a few miles from President Bashar Assad’s palace, U.N. and Palestinian officials say Yarmouk is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

About 1,800 people remain trapped in the camp, which had a prewar population of about a quarter-million, many of them the descendants of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes upon Israel’s creation in 1948. Before the civil war began in 2011, the camp was among the largest concentrations of Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The crisis has struck a nerve with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, who feel a sense of kinship, and among Israeli Arabs still living in the northern Galilee region, where many of the camp’s Palestinian residents have family roots. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq, U.S. are divided on what’s next in battle against ISIS

The Wall Street Journal reports: Neither Iraq’s government nor the militias have released a comprehensive assessment of the casualties they suffered in Tikrit. But U.S. officials say thousands of Iraqis were killed and that the bulk of the suffering could have been avoided had the Iraqis coordinated with the U.S. in advance.

After two weeks of fighting that inflicted heavy casualties on the militias, Baghdad asked the U.S. to launch airstrikes. Iran’s militia allies withdrew partly in anger, and partly at the U.S. insistence that they step aside. But smaller Shiite militias more closely aligned with Baghdad’s government played a central role in seizing central Tikrit.

U.S. military officials recognize that they will have to work with the irregular militia forces, even if they do not want to, military officials in Washington said.

Iraqi militia leaders agree that the confusion of Tikrit should have been avoided.

“The government is trying to avoid the problem that happened in Tikrit,” said Mr. Hussaini. The militias, Sunni tribal fighters and Iraqi military have established a joint operations command so that Iraq’s sundry anti-Islamic State forces can communicate their needs to the U.S. with a unified voice.

Yet Iraqi Shiite militias still appear determined to fight alone without U.S. support. Their focus on Tikrit appears in part to be aimed at securing a morale-boosting victory without the help of foreign airstrikes.

It’s a question of pride that U.S. officials worry is interfering with tactical considerations.

“Of course, everything depends on the nature of the battle,” said Mr. Hussaini. “But the leadership, they prefer the fight to be purely Iraqi because it tastes better, it has a better impact for the future. It’s a national thing for Iraqis.” [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Sunnis forced to abandon homes and identity in battle for survival

The Guardian reports: Last November, with his home in flames and his father missing, 21-year-old Omar Mazen abandoned his home town of Baquba and fled to the Iraqi capital, 60 miles south.

But his home was not the only thing he left behind. He also decided to abandon his name.

The journey was perilous. At every checkpoint, Shia militiamen or Iraqi soldiers read his papers and stared suspiciously at his identifiably Sunni name. “I didn’t want to show them,” he said. “I was terrified every time. So many Sunnis had disappeared at checkpoints and my father was one of them.”

Somehow, he made it through the heart of the fight against Islamic State that was raging all along the highway. But afterwards he faced a constant dilemma of how to stay safe in a city and society in which Sunni Iraqis – the core of the ruling class under Saddam Hussein – were often viewed by the new Shia-led establishment as either enablers or agents of the extremist insurgency.

Mazen decided to change his name to a more neutral Ammar, and seek refuge among the Shias. In February, he went to the residency office and started the process. “They were helpful,” he said of the government officials he dealt with – not an observation often made about Iraq’s turgid bureaucracy. “They said it would take about a month.”

Mazen’s dilemma reflects the latest upheaval in Iraq, as its existential fight against Isis approaches a second year. In the past 10 months, huge numbers of people – perhaps a quarter of the population – have again been displaced, and Iraq’s social fabric, badly frayed through the years of civil war, is once more being tested. [Continue reading…]

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Kenya says government official’s son was among gunmen in Garissa attack

Reuters reports: The son of a Kenyan government official was one of the masked gunmen who killed nearly 150 people at a university last week, the interior ministry said on Sunday, as Kenyan churches hired armed guards to protect their Easter congregations.

Pope Francis decried Thursday’s attack in his Easter Sunday service, praying for those killed by Islamist gunmen who hunted down Christians while sparing Muslims.

At one church in the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa, worshippers were evacuated and a bomb disposal unit deployed due to a suspicious vehicle parked outside the church. Police took it away for further examination.

Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said Abdirahim Abdullahi was one of four gunmen who stormed the college campus in Garissa, some 200km (120 miles) from the Somali border.

An ethnic Somali with Kenyan nationality, his father is a government official in the northern Mandera county bordering Somalia, he said.

“The father had reported to security agents that his son had disappeared from home… and was helping the police try to trace his son by the time the Garissa terror attack happened,” Njoka told Reuters in a text message.

President Uhuru Kenyatta on Saturday said the planners and financiers of Islamist attacks were “deeply embedded” within Kenyan communities and urged Muslims to do more to fight radicalisation. [Continue reading…]

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Warren Buffett’s mobile home empire preys on the poor

The Center for Public Integrity and the Seattle Times report: Denise Pitts walked into the pawn shop not far from where she bought her mobile home in Knoxville, Tennessee, and offered up her wedding rings for $100. Her marriage wasn’t over, but her husband was battling cancer and, Pitts said, her mortgage company told her the only way to keep a roof over his head would be to sell everything else.

Across the country in Ephrata, Washington, Kirk and Patricia Ackley sat down to close on a new mobile home, only to learn that the annual interest on their loan would be 12.5 percent rather than the 7 percent they said they had been promised. They went ahead because they had spent $11,000, most of their savings, to dig a foundation.

And near Bug Tussle, Alabama, Carol Carroll has been paying down her home for more than a decade but still owes nearly 90 percent of the sale price — and more than twice what the home is worth.

The families’ dealers and lenders went by different names — Luv Homes, Clayton Homes, Vanderbilt, 21st Mortgage. Yet the disastrous loans that threaten them with homelessness or the loss of family land stem from a single company: Clayton Homes, the nation’s biggest homebuilder, which is controlled by its second-richest man — Warren Buffett.

Buffett’s mobile home empire promises low-income Americans the dream of homeownership. But Clayton relies on predatory sales practices, exorbitant fees, and interest rates that can exceed 15 percent, trapping many buyers in loans they can’t afford and in homes that are almost impossible to sell or refinance, an investigation by The Center for Public Integrity and The Seattle Times has found. [Continue reading…]

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One of Libya’s rival governments moves to control oil revenue

The New York Times reports: One of the two factions battling for control of Libya took steps on Sunday to divert incoming oil revenue away from the central bank and into its own new account, a steep escalation in the contest over the country’s vast wealth.

Libya’s oil and money are the prizes that have driven much of the competition among militias and factions in the nearly four years since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and as the fighting on the ground has slashed oil revenues, the legal and political battle for control of Libya’s assets has become overt and intense.

Over the past nine months, the many local militias that sprang up around Colonel Qaddafi have now broken into two warring coalitions, each with its own provisional government. Officials of the Central Bank of Libya, which holds the country’s roughly $90 billion in foreign reserves and receives the income of the National Oil Corporation, say they have tried to stay neutral, continuing to pay government salaries and consumer subsidies in the territory controlled by the rival governments.

But the faction that is recognized internationally as Libya’s legitimate government, now based in the eastern cities of Tobruk and Bayda, has repeatedly sought without success to exert control over those assets. On Sunday it fired the latest salvo in that battle.

That government’s prime minister, Abdullah al-Thinni, issued a directive for the National Oil Company to stop passing incoming revenue to the central bank and instead to direct those funds to its own bank account in the United Arab Emirates, a major backer of Mr. Thinni’s government and its faction.

The move could now set off a host of sweeping consequences, potentially including a breakup of the bank, a drastic rebalancing of what has appeared to be a stalemate in the day-to-day battle between the two factions or a Western intervention to seize and manage the bank’s foreign reserves.

But how the situation might play out is difficult to predict, in part because the prime minister’s directive appeared to contradict the position of the Western powers toward the status of the bank and the larger Libyan conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Pope Francis uses Easter message to focus on Kenya, Syria and Iraq

The Guardian reports: Pope Francis used his Easter message on Sunday to pray for the nearly 150 victims of the Kenya university massacre, while also highlighting the suffering of people across the Middle East and elsewhere.

“May constant prayer rise up from all people of goodwill for those who lost their lives – I think in particular of the young people who were killed last Thursday at Garissa University College in Kenya,” the pontiff told crowds of believers cowering under umbrellas amid heavy rain in St Peter’s Square.

The pope’s comments came after Islamist militants stormed the Kenyan university on Thursday, killing 148 people. While the al-Shabaab gunmen initially killed students indiscriminately, survivors said Christians were later identified and shot.

The pope put persecuted Christian minorities and those suffering from conflicts at the centre of his Easter address in Rome, known as the Urbi et Orbi (to the city and the world) address, with particular emphasis on the Middle East.

“We ask for peace, above all, for Syria and Iraq: that the roar of arms may cease and that peaceful relations be restored among the various groups which make up those beloved countries,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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If hardliners kill the Iran nuclear program deal, it will be in Washington, not Tehran

Ariane Tabatabai writes: The scenes in Tehran in the hours following the announcement of the nuclear deal were a testament to how important Iranians felt it was to their lives. In different cities, people took to the streets on Thursday, honking horns, waving flags, cheering. It had been a long time coming. In the months leading up to the deadline, whenever I visited or called friends and family in Iran, the first questions I heard were typically, “What’s going on in the talks? Will we get a deal?” A day after the agreement was made public in Lausanne, when Friday prayers were held across Iran, prayer leaders welcomed a “success” for the Islamic Republic, and upon his arrival at the airport, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s return to the country was celebrated as if he’d led Iran to the next World Cup.

With the technical issues on the table in Lausanne now virtually all addressed, many eyes are turning toward Washington and Tehran to see what will happen next. As the parties draft a final deal ahead of the June 30 deadline, the key challenges won’t be in the international arena, but in the domestic politics of both capitals. There are, to be sure, a number of skeptics in Iran, some of them in positions of power: Hossein Shariatmadari, the managing editor of the influential hardline newspaper Kayhan, for instance, said Iran had “given up a horse with a saddle for a broken harness.” Esmail Kowsari, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, claimed that the Iranian negotiating team “has only killed time” in the past year, and that “the nation and country’s time has been wasted.”

But despite these protests, it is Washington, not Tehran, where domestic politics are most likely to become a stumbling point. The three months between the announcement of the agreement and when the final deal will be made public are a crucial phase that could make or break its success. Interim deals have been brought home to skeptical audiences before. But this time — at least in Tehran — a combination of factors, from the savvy salesmanship of the negotiating team to the implicit backing of some of the country’s most important stakeholders seem primed to ensure, if not smooth sailing, then at least enough buy-in keep the accord viable. [Continue reading…]

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California is pumping water that fell to Earth 20,000 years ago

Tom Knudson writes: By now, the impacts of California’s unchecked groundwater pumping are well-known: the dropping water levels, dried-up wells and slowly sinking farmland in parts of the Central Valley.

But another consequence gets less attention, one measured not by acre-feet or gallons-per-minute but the long march of time.

As California farms and cities drill deeper for groundwater in an era of drought and climate change, they no longer are tapping reserves that percolated into the soil over recent centuries. They are pumping water that fell to Earth during a much wetter climatic regime – the ice age.

Such water is not just old. It’s prehistoric. It is older than the earliest pyramids on the Nile, older than the world’s oldest tree, the bristlecone pine. It was swirling down rivers and streams 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans were crossing the Bering Strait from Asia.

Tapping such water is more than a scientific curiosity. It is one more sign that some parts of California are living beyond nature’s means, with implications that could ripple into the next century and beyond as climate change turns the region warmer and robs moisture from the sky. [Continue reading…]

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The Iraqi former Baathist army officers at the core of ISIS

The Washington Post reports: When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.

Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes.

Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islamic State’s own shadowy security service, he said.

His account, and those of others who have lived with or fought against the Islamic State over the past two years, underscore the pervasive role played by members of Iraq’s former Baathist army in an organization more typically associated with flamboyant foreign jihadists and the gruesome videos in which they star.

Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group.

They have brought to the organization the military expertise and some of the agendas of the former Baathists, as well as the smuggling networks developed to avoid sanctions in the 1990s and which now facilitate the Islamic State’s illicit oil trading. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi PM: Armies have no chance against ISIS if it keeps recruiting foreigners

Reuters reports: Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi told a German magazine that armies in the region around Iraq had no chance of defeating Islamic State (IS) if the militants continued to recruit ideologically indoctrinated foreign fighters.

In an interview with Der Spiegel published on Saturday, Abadi said that around 57 percent of IS fighters were Iraqis but they did not cause any problems as they simply ran away when Iraqi troops entered towns.

“It is the 43 percent who are foreign fighters who have been indoctrinated ideologically who have their backs up against the wall. If Daesh continues to recruit so many from other countries, then no army in our region can stand up to it.” [Continue reading…]

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A Norway town and its pipeline to jihad in Syria

The New York Times reports: The real trouble started when they stopped causing trouble. Torleif Sanchez Hammer and his friends — all residents of the same small cluster of clapboard houses in southern Norway — had been having run-ins with the police for years but then suddenly halted their marijuana-fueled gatherings in the basement apartment of Mr. Hammer’s widowed mother.

Police officers in this placid Norwegian town had busted their marijuana parties so regularly that “we knew them all on a first-name basis,” recalled Ragnar Foss, head of a local police unit responsible for youth crime. But, two years ago, they cleaned up their act. “We wondered what had happened but were glad when they dropped off our radar,” Mr. Foss said.

One by one over the following months, Mr. Hammer and at least seven other young men who lived on or around just one street, Lislebyveien, made their way to Syria to wage jihad alongside the Islamic State and other militant groups.

As Europe tries to fathom such journeys by its young Muslims, politicians and scholars have variously blamed the influence of the Internet and radical mosques, or sources of despair like discrimination and unemployment. [Continue reading…]

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Shiite militias are the real winners of the battle of Tikrit

Nancy A. Youssef reports: The self-proclaimed Islamic State’s loss of the Iraqi city of Tikrit this week would not have been possible without thousands of rogue Iraqi Shiite militiamen, U.S. defense officials conceded.

And that could complicate coming battles, officials said.

With the first major victory over ISIS in Iraq, those militias, many of whom are backed by neighboring Iran, will now have a greater say in how aggressively and effectively Iraq goes after the ISIS threat. They could determine which cities to attack, how much to lean on the U.S.-led coalition and when to strike. And such a varied group of fighters will likely have differing opinions from the Iraqi government, the U.S.-led coalition, Iran and even among themselves, about what needs to happen next in the battle against ISIS.

Such growing influence by such varied non-state actors will only complicate future efforts against ISIS in Iraq, defense officials and experts agreed. [Continue reading…]

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Lessons from the last time Cairo waded into war in Yemen

Jesse Ferris writes: In the spring of 1967, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, lamented to the U.S. ambassador in Cairo that the war in Yemen had become his “Vietnam.” He subsequently explained to an Egyptian historian how the conflict spiraled out of control: “I sent a company to Yemen and ended up reinforcing it with 70,000 troops.”

Over the course of the five-year war, from 1962 to 1967, Nasser lost more than 10,000 men, squandered billions of dollars, and painted himself into a diplomatic corner from which the only way out was through war with Israel. As Nasser himself would realize by the war’s end, Yemen was to Egypt what Vietnam was to the United States — and what Afghanistan was to the Soviet Union, what Algeria is to France, and what Lebanon is to Israel.

Not surprisingly, the predominant takeaway for Egyptians was “never again.” Never again would they send their boys to fight for a dubious cause on a remote battlefield.

Never again would they waste their modern army to build a nation where there was none. Never again would they set foot in Yemen. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen’s Houthis ready for talks if air strikes stop: senior member

Reuters: Yemen’s Houthis are ready to sit down for peace talks as long as a Saudi-led air campaign is halted and the negotiations are overseen by “non-aggressive” parties, a senior Houthi member said.

Saleh al-Sammad, who was an adviser to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, also told Reuters in emailed answers that Yemenis reject the return of Hadi, who escaped to Saudi Arabia after Shi’ite Houthi fighters edged closer to his southern base of Aden last month.

Warplanes and ships from a Saudi-led coalition have been bombing the Iran-allied Houthi forces for 11 days, saying they are trying drive back the Houthis and restore Hadi. U.N. brokered peace talks in the preceding weeks between Hadi and the Houthis had failed.

“We still stand by our position on dialogue and we demand its continuation despite everything that has happened, on the basis of respect and acknowledging the other,” Sammad said.

“We have no conditions except a halt to the aggression and sitting on the dialogue table within a specific time period … and any international or regional parties that have no aggressive positions towards the Yemeni people can oversee the dialogue,” Sammad said, without specifying who they might be.

Reuters: Yemen’s Houthi militiamen, supported by army units, gained ground in the southern city of Aden on Sunday, pushing back loyalists of the Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Residents took refuge in their homes and reported hearing sporadic gunfire and blasts of rocket-propelled grenades, and one witness saw a Houthi tank in the downtown Mualla district, which sits astride Aden’s main commercial port.

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How Barack Obama has undermined freedom of the press

Joel Simon writes: President Obama took office in 2009 promising to make his administration the most transparent in American history. New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger, for one, says he’s failed.

“This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said Sanger in a 2013 CPJ report, “The Obama Administration and the Press.” The report’s author, former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie, Jr., declared, “The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.” As journalists often note, the Obama administration has prosecuted more leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all former presidents combined.

With less than two years remaining in his administration, there are still actions the president can take to strengthen transparency at home and increase US influence abroad, particularly advocacy on behalf of journalists facing persecution and violence as a result of their reporting.

According to the CPJ report, the Obama administration’s policies have undermined the role of the press in three fundamental ways. [Continue reading…]

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