Category Archives: Issues

The secret casualties of Iraq’s abandoned chemical weapons

C.J. Chivers reports: The soldiers at the blast crater sensed something was wrong.

It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.

Two technicians assigned to dispose of munitions stepped into the hole. Lake water seeped in. One of them, Specialist Andrew T. Goldman, noticed a pungent odor, something, he said, he had never smelled before.

He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling.

The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.

All three men recall an awkward pause. Then Sergeant Duling gave an order: “Get the hell out.”

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS recruits young Syrians from Turkish refugee camps

Mike Giglio reports: For one 15-year-old Syrian boy who lives in a refugee camp near the Turkish border, the calls to become an extremist fighter came from all around. He heard one on an afternoon this summer, while he and his friends played soccer around the tents. Taking a break from the game, the boys were approached by a man they knew as a sheikh, a term Syrians use to describe a learned religious man.

The sheikh was a supporter of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a group of militants rampaging across the border as they try to establish a fanatical version of a modern-day caliphate. He told the boys they should cross over and help. “You are playing soccer at a time like this?” the sheikh scolded them. “It is better to go and fight for ISIS than to stay in the camp and play.”

The boy already had his heart set on joining ISIS, in fact. After three years of living with his family in the camp, he was enthralled by the idea of helping to create what ISIS billed as a new Islamic state. Some of his friends had already joined the group, and in chats via Facebook they urged him to follow suit. So did other ISIS supporters whom the boy knew only online. Like-minded boys and young men, meanwhile, were leaving the camp for ISIS regularly.

But the boy had a problem: His father was vehemently opposed to ISIS and would try to stop his only son from joining if he caught wind of the plan.

One day last month, the boy linked up with a friend in the camp even younger than himself, who had an older brother fighting with ISIS in Syria. At the older brother’s instruction, they snuck past the Turkish border guards and into the ISIS-controlled town of al-Bab. From there the boys joined a group of some 50 recruits for what they were told would be a three-week course on ISIS’s brand of religious law. Their military training would come next. The boys were told that during their instruction they should have no contact with the outside world.

More than 20 camps like the boy’s — whose location, like his name, is being withheld for his safety — sit in Turkey, mostly along its 565-mile border with Syria. They hold more than 200,000 refugees, many of them young men and boys approaching fighting age. The conditions in the camps are relatively good, but they’re still heavy with the bleakness of waiting out a war without end. Together with ISIS’s recent surge in publicity, this is fueling what some residents describe as a rising tide of young recruits. [Continue reading…]

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Hollande urges Turkey to open up its border to help Kobane

AFP reports: France’s president Tuesday urged Turkey to open its border to allow reinforcements to reach the besieged city of Kobani and called for more help to those fighting the advance of ISIS.

Francois Hollande stressed that “all countries concerned,” including those not in the coalition fighting the ISIS, should provide weapons to those battling the jihadists.

“I think about what is happening today in Kobani, a martyred town, a symbolic town. If we have to intervene, as we decided for France in Iraq, we also have to give the moderate Syrian opposition … all the support, all the help necessary,” he said.

“I am launching an appeal here, beyond the coalition, to all countries concerned to give this opposition the support they expect from us, the means they need to fight against terrorism,” Hollande said. [Continue reading…]

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Anger as wounded Kurdish fighters die stranded at Turkish border

Reuters reports: With medical supplies depleted in the war-ravaged north Syrian town of Kobani, Kurdish activist Blesa Omar rushed three comrades wounded in battle against Islamic State fighters straight to the border to dispatch them to a Turkish hospital.

He said he spent the next four hours watching them die, one by one, from what he thinks were treatable shrapnel wounds as Turkish border guards refused to let them through the frontier.

“To me it is clear they died because they waited so long. If they had received help, even up to one hour before their deaths, they could have lived,” said Omar, 34, an ethnic Kurd originally from Iraq who holds Swedish nationality.

“Once the soldiers realized they were dead, they said, ‘Now you can cross with the bodies.’ I cannot forget that. It was total chaos, it was a catastrophe,” he said, choking back tears. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq: Evidence of war crimes by government-backed Shi’a militias

Amnesty: Shi’a militias, supported and armed by the government of Iraq, have abducted and killed scores of Sunni civilians in recent months and enjoy total impunity for these war crimes, said Amnesty International in a new briefing published today.

Absolute Impunity: Militia Rule in Iraq provides harrowing details of sectarian attacks carried out by increasingly powerful Shi’a militias in Baghdad, Samarra and Kirkuk, apparently in revenge for attacks by the armed group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). Scores of unidentified bodies have been discovered across the country handcuffed and with gunshot wounds to the head, indicating a pattern of deliberate execution-style killings.

“By granting its blessing to militias who routinely commit such abhorrent abuses, the Iraqi government is sanctioning war crimes and fuelling a dangerous cycle of sectarian violence that is tearing the country apart. Iraqi government support for militia rule must end now,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Response Adviser.

The fate of many of those abducted by Shi’a militias weeks and months ago remains unknown. Some captives were killed even after their families had paid ransoms of $80,000 and more to secure their release. [Continue reading…]

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Major increase in airstrikes around Kobane slows ISIS advance

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Kobane: A victim of selective outrage

Nervana Mahmoud writes: The city of Kobani is falling in front of our eyes. The black flags of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have been slowly spreading above the buildings of this unfortunate Kurdish town in northern Syria. Sooner or later the resistance of the Kurdish fighters that are currently heroically trying to defend Kobani will crumble against an avalanche of medieval barbarism from ISIS, which is doubly fortified with modern weaponry. The tragedy of Kobani may seem irrelevant in the wider context of the turbulent Middle East, however, it highlights clearly the flawed thinking process of many in the Arab world, and alarmingly also in Turkey.

Compare the muted response to the beheading of female Kurdish fighters, or the rape and forced marriages of Yazidi women by ISIS fighters to the loud, angry responses that have — rightly — erupted following the recent Israeli aggression in Gaza. The baffling silence is even more problematic when both Muslim regimes and the public, unanimously agree that ISIS does not represent Islam and that its sick actions are non-Islamic. Imagine if Israel beheaded three female Palestinian suicide bombers? The reactions would probably exceed any expectations, from flooding the streets of Western cities with thousands of protestors to even violent attacks against Israeli targets around the globe. Understandable? Yes the innocent loss of lives and siege of Gaza are despicable, but why not the same depth of anger for Kurds? The answers lies within our selfish duplicity, we care only about fellow Arabs, but we rail against others when they do not care about us.

The reasons behind our selectivity and bias lies deep in the post-colonial nationalism and Islamism that has spread throughout the Middle East since the mid part of the twentieth century. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Bashar Assad’s torture chambers

Yahoo News reports: The State Department has obtained 27,000 photographs showing the emaciated, bruised and burned bodies of Syrian torture victims — gruesome images that a top official told Yahoo News constitute “smoking gun” evidence that can be used to bring war-crimes charges against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The photos are “horrific — some of them put you in visceral pain,” said Stephen J. Rapp, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, in an interview. “This is some of the strongest evidence we’ve seen in the area of proof of the commission of mass atrocities.”

The photos — a small number of which will be put on public display for the first time on Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Museum — were smuggled out of Syria by an official regime photographer who has since defected and is known only by his code name, Caesar.

They were shown at a closed-door session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in July where Caesar, wearing a hood, testified. They are now being analyzed at Rapp’s request by the FBI in part as an effort to determine whether any U.S. citizens may have been among the victims — a finding that could be the basis to bring criminal charges in the U.S. against officials of the Assad regime. [Continue reading…]

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In a symbolic vote, Britain recognizes a Palestinian state

The New York Times reports: Against a backdrop of growing impatience across Europe with Israeli policy, Britain’s Parliament overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding resolution Monday night to give diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state. The vote was a symbolic but potent indication of how public opinion has shifted since the breakdown of American-sponsored peace negotiations and the conflict in Gaza this summer.

Though the outcome of the 274-to-12 parliamentary vote was not binding on the British government, the debate was the latest evidence of how support for Israeli policies, even among staunch allies of Israel, is giving way to more calibrated positions and in some cases frustrated expressions of opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stance toward the Palestinians.

Opening the debate, Grahame Morris, the Labour Party lawmaker who promoted it, said Britain had a “historic opportunity” to take “this small but symbolically important step” of recognition.

“To make our recognition of Palestine dependent on Israel’s agreement would be to grant Israel a veto over Palestinian self-determination,” said Mr. Morris, who leads a group called Labour Friends of Palestine.

Richard Ottaway, a Conservative lawmaker and chairman of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said that he had “stood by Israel through thick and thin, through the good years and the bad,” but now realized “in truth, looking back over the past 20 years, that Israel has been slowly drifting away from world public opinion.”

“Under normal circumstances,” he said, “I would oppose the motion tonight; but such is my anger over Israel’s behavior in recent months that I will not oppose the motion. I have to say to the government of Israel that if they are losing people like me, they will be losing a lot of people.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS may have used chemical weapons against Kurds in Kobane canton in July

Huffington Post reports: The Islamic State militant group may possess chemical weapons that it has already used to extend its self-proclaimed caliphate, according to photos taken by Kurdish activists and examined by Israeli researchers.

The group, making gains in Iraq and Syria, may have captured chemical agents in Iraq in June and used them in July to kill three Kurdish fighters in the strategically important region of Kobani in northwest Syria, according to suggests a report released Sunday by the Global Research in International Affairs Center, a branch of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.

If verified, Islamic State’s possession of unconventional weapons could make international efforts against it more urgent, and bolster claims that the world has not responded quickly or powerfully enough to the threat. The group, also known as ISIS, has intensified its effort to conquer Kobani over the past month, and battles there have attracted global attention as the region’s defenders — both Kurds and U.S.-backed rebels — have urged international help.

Jonathan Spyer, author of the report, uses photographic evidence provided by Kurds in Kobani and a 2007 CIA report about the Iraqi chemical weapons production facility captured by ISIS in July to suggest that “on at least one occasion, Islamic State forces did employ some form of chemical agent, acquired from somewhere, against the [Syrian Kurdish forces] in Kobani.” He said Israeli chemical weapons experts examined the Kurds’ photographs. In response to questions from The Huffington Post, he declined to give their names.

“The probable possession by the Islamic State of a [chemical weapons] capability is for obvious reasons a matter of the gravest concern, and should be the urgent subject of further attention and investigation,” Spyer says.

The report accuses the Islamic State of using chemical weapons in a July 12 battle in an eastern part of Kobani during a previous offensive into the Kurdish enclave. The site of the battle is now controlled by ISIS. Spyer cites signs of a chemical weapons attack mentioned by the health minister of Kobani to the Lebanese online news outlet Al-Modon four days after the attack. In Spyer’s telling, the minister said that the corpses of three Kurdish fighters exhibited “burns and white spots … [that] indicated the use of chemicals, which led to deaths without any visible wounds or external bleeding.” The bodies had not been hit by bullets, the minister added.

Spyer’s report includes gruesome photographs of the bodies now circulating on social media alongside appeals for more help for the Syrian Kurds in Kobani.

In emails to The Huffington Post, Spyer said he had been given the pictures by Kurds in Kobani, whose identities he could not reveal. He said he takes them seriously because they were provided to him weeks ago — not to boost the case for international help to Kobani, but to spur an investigation by international authorities. [Continue reading…]

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The struggle for ‘democratic autonomy’ led by Kurds in Kobane

Carl Drott writes: Despite extraordinarily difficult circumstances, the Syrian Kurds in the autonomous “Kobani canton” have managed to build a well-functioning civilian administration over the past two years. The Kurdish police force, the Asayish, has kept the streets safe, and a sense of normality has prevailed despite the siege and constant attacks. A constitution drafted last year guarantees gender equality, human rights and secularism, while a sprawling civil society has given rise to organizations for women, youth, language, music and theater. The Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) has largely been calling the shots, but some former rivals have recently joined the administration as well. Hoping to resolve bitter disputes over power sharing, the canton’s “prime minister,” Anwar Muslim, has promised elections for later this year.

These would all seem positive developments. However, one clear reason international players have kept the PYD at arms length is its affiliation with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, an armed movement striving for Kurdish rights listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Turkey. Although the PYD itself claims to have only ideological links with the PKK, the latter’s leadership is undoubtedly influential across the border in Syrian Kurdish enclaves. However, Turkish fears of Kurdish militants coming down from “the mountains” to establish a base in Kobani for cross-border operations into Turkey has precious little to do with reality. Instead, the demonstrated priority for the PYD has been to build a decentralized secular democracy, while the armed forces of YPG have tried to protect the area and its people from outside attacks. Although the political experiment in Kobani is being watched carefully by the Kurdish movement in Turkey, the PYD’s agenda appears to be highly local.

Another reason for the absence of international support is that YPG has been reluctant to take on the remaining Assad regime enclaves in the Jazira region in Syria’s extreme northeast. While local Kurdish politicians claim they simply want to avoid regime retaliation – the regime has dropped deadly “barrel bombs” in attacks on other civilian areas – the de facto ceasefire has raised suspicions of a secret alliance between the Syrian Kurds and the regime. In fact, there have been numerous clashes between YPG and Syrian regime forces in Aleppo, Qamishli and Hasakah. The historical record gives strong support for the PYD’s insistence that it has tried to forge a “third way” in the prolonged Syrian civil war. In its contacts with both FSA and regime forces, the PYD has built truces when and where it’s been able to, and fought when and where it’s had to. Meanwhile, while the stated policy has been to only take over and defend its “own” regions, ethnically mixed areas have presented complications.

From the very start, the project for “democratic autonomy” was met with strong criticism from some rival Kurdish parties, which demanded that the PYD and YPG accept the authority of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), which is the main body of the “moderate” Syrian opposition and related to FSA. Turkey and the United States have made similar demands. Why are PYD and YPG then so unwilling to comply? Could they not simply join the “moderate” rebels in exchange for international support against the Islamic State and Assad? A closer look at the “moderates” might explain their reluctance.

Since the beginning of the conflict, the SNC has refused to recognize minority rights for the Kurds and other non-Arab minorities in a future state, which the SNC insists should continue to be called the Syrian Arab Republic. The SNC has also actively supported FSA factions fighting against the YPG on the side of jihadists. As recently as January, the SNC called for a “closing of ranks” against the YPG in Tel Hamis – at a time when the main groups in the area were IS, the al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra and the salafist group Ahrar al-Sham. The fight against the YPG has often taken priority even over the fight against the Syrian regime. Additionally, the SNC has referred to PYD as an “extremist” group that is “anti-revolution.”

Among local Kurds, FSA fighters are often more feared and hated even than the Syrian regime. “Their crimes are uncountable,” a 50-year old car dealer, Juma Chawish, told me. He fled to Kobani last summer after a vicious ethnic cleansing campaign was initiated in Tel Abyad, his hometown, by Jabhat al-Nusra, IS and various rebel groups affiliated with the FSA. Civilian Kurds like Juma were forced out without their belongings, while hundreds of others were taken hostage and threatened with execution. Several were killed or went missing, including Juma’s brother, who was unable to flee because of a recent surgery. Stories like this are rampant throughout northern Syria. [Continue reading…]

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Stateless democracy: How the Kurdish women’s movement liberated democracy from the state

Dilar Dirik is an activist of the Kurdish Women’s Movement and a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department of the University of Cambridge. She delivered her lecture at the 4th New World Summit in Brussels, September 19-21.

(Viewing tip: Vimeo often has insufficient bandwidth. If the video keeps stopping, hit pause, and come back later when the gray bar has advanced all the way to the right, then hit play. It can take quite a while!)

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ISIS officially admits to enslaving Yazidi women

Matthew Barber writes: I first began tweeting about the Islamic State’s campaign to kidnap and enslave Yazidi women when I was in Iraq this past August. Though analysts were skeptical and online jihadists who defend IS vehemently denied my claims, I was communicating with the families of the kidnapped women and with those engaged in rescue efforts. I have even spoken by phone directly with kidnapped Yazidi women in captivity. One month ago, I sounded the alarm regarding the plight of the kidnapped Yazidi women for whom time is running out, detailing how an effective rescue operation would be possible. A number of journalists had written amazing stories, directly interviewing survivors — girls that had been kidnapped and placed into the homes of IS jihadists as slaves. These stories continue to emerge, TV interviews have taken place, and the UN issued a report on the kidnapping issue.

Despite the widespread doubt, I and the team I work with have been able to collect the names of thousands of kidnapped Yazidis — mostly women and girls, but also a number of kidnapped and imprisoned men that have been forced to convert to Islam. A month ago, our estimate of kidnapped Yazidis was below 4,000 individuals, but as we continue to gather data, our number now stands at almost 7,000.

Ongoing efforts to shed light on this crisis notwithstanding, the media hasn’t lingered on the issue. Evidence in the form of firsthand accounts of survivors gathered by credible journalists and academics wasn’t enough; skepticism seemed to reign in the absence of photographic evidence — something nearly-impossible to obtain. How would one snap photos of women distributed through private IS networks and placed into the homes of individual IS jihadists? Even a photograph of a Yazidi woman in an Arab home wouldn’t indicate that she was in fact enslaved as a “concubine.”

But today this controversy can be laid to rest. IS has just released the fourth installment of Dabiq, an official publication that they began to produce in July. This issue, called “The Failed Crusade,” contains an article entitled “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” which details how IS fighters kidnapped and distributed Yazidi women as slave concubines. The article also provides their rationale for reviving slavery, which they root in their interpretation of the practice of the earliest Islamic communities. The Islamic State has now officially disclosed that it engages in the sexual enslavement of women from communities determined to be of “pagan” or “polytheistic” origin. [Continue reading…]

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If Turkey fails to help Kurdish forces in Kobane, PKK will resume guerrilla war

The New York Times reports: As jihadist fighters of the Islamic State lay siege to the Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria, the implications of the battle have resonated deeply among residents in this part of the Qandil Mountains in northeastern Iraq, hundreds of miles and a country away.

In this region, beneath craggy peaks near the Iranian border, is the headquarters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has been fighting a guerrilla war against the Turkish state for three decades, a fight that has claimed more than 30,000 lives. Members of the group, along with fighters from an offshoot rebel army in Syria, have been at the heart of the Kurdish resistance in Kobani.

P.K.K. commanders say their halting, nine-year-old peace process with the Turkish government and, indeed, the future of the region, will turn on the battle for Kobani and on Turkey’s response. If Turkey does not help the embattled Kurdish forces in Kobani, the commanders say, they will break off peace talks and resume their guerrilla war within Turkey, plunging yet another country in the region into armed conflict.

“Negotiations cannot go on in an environment where they want to create a massacre in Kobani,” Cemil Bayik, a founder and leader of the P.K.K., said in a recent interview in a secret location in this area of the Qandil range. “We cannot bargain for settlement on the blood of Kobani.”

“We will mobilize the guerrillas,” he vowed.

Despite increased pressure from the United States and pleas from outgunned Kurdish fighters in Kobani, Turkey has refused to deploy its military against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or to open the border to allow reinforcements, weapons and supplies to reach the town.

In a shift, though, Turkey will allow American and coalition troops to use its bases, including a key installation within 100 miles of the Syrian border, for operations against the Islamic State, Defense Department officials said Sunday. On Sunday, Kurdish officials said their fighters in Kobani had been able to fend off a two-day assault by Islamic State fighters on the center of town. Coalition airstrikes had destroyed a convoy on its way to support the jihadist fighters, according to Idris Nassan, a spokesman for the Kobani resistance, who said the Kurds had been able to “manage” the latest assault. But without more extensive airstrikes and supplies of weapons and ammunition, he added, “Maybe tomorrow the situation will change again.” [Continue reading…]

Today’s Zaman reports in contradiction: Turkey and the US have no new agreement on the use of İncirlik airbase in southern Turkey, Turkish officials said on Monday, a day after US officials revealed that Ankara will let US and coalition forces use its bases, including İncirlik, for operations against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants in Syria and Iraq.

Existing arrangements concerning the use of İncirlik are still in force between Turkey and the US and there is no new understanding in addition to them, Prime Ministry sources were quoted as saying by state news agency Anadolu.

Turkey and the US did reach a new agreement on the training of Syrian opposition forces, the same unnamed sources told the agency.

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Laura Gottesdiener: Adrift in oil country

Think of it as a Walrusgram written on the sand of a northwest Alaskan beach and sent to the planet.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic marine mammal aerial survey noticed them first, those 35,000 walruses that had come ashore in unheard of numbers because their usual sea ice has simply melted away.  The photos are dramatic.  You couldn’t ask for a clearer message from a species that normally doesn’t write out its thoughts on the subject of our changing, warming planet.

For those who prefer their science not from the walrus’s mouth (so to speak), there has been equally relevant news on the same subject lately from another species.  Think of them as scientists clambering ashore from a wounded world.  Only weeks ago, it was reported that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere had reached record levels in 2013 and, perhaps even more unsettlingly, that oceans and terrestrial plant life, both major “carbon sinks,” were absorbing less CO2 than in the past.  Now, we have news that the oceans have actually been warming significantly faster than anyone previously imagined.  The latest figures indicate that “the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought… [and that] the upper levels of the planet’s oceans — those of the northern and southern hemispheres combined — had been warming during several decades prior to 2005 at rates that were 24 to 58 percent faster than had previously been realized.”

None of this is good news, of course, not if you have any sort of investment in future generations living on a planet anywhere near as hospitable as the one we’ve been on for so long.  But talk about dissociation.  While those walruses were climbing out of the water and the scientists were reporting their latest grim numbers, in the American heartland thousands of workers shaken loose from other worlds have been heading for boom times in North Dakota and elsewhere in our fracklands.  There, the exploitation of previously unrecoverable oil shale and natural gas deposits via hydro-fracking has pundits bragging about this country as “Saudi America” and the president aggressively planning to make “the oil weapon” a central feature in American foreign policy.

Between the two worlds, the one producing ever more fossil fuels amid a let-the-good-times-roll spirit of triumphalism and the one slowly melting down under the impact of what those fossil fuels release into the atmosphere, there sometimes seems no connection at all.  Clear as the link may be, each of these worlds often might as well be located on a different planet.

TomDispatch’s Laura Gottesdiener had the rare urge to land on that other planet, the one most of us never experience that produces fossil fuels with such exuberance, and see just what we’re all missing.  Here’s her vivid report from the front lines of American fossil-fuel extraction. Tom Engelhardt

A trip to Kuwait (on the prairie)
Life inside the boom
By Laura Gottesdiener

At 9 p.m. on that August night, when I arrived for my first shift as a cocktail waitress at Whispers, one of the two strip clubs in downtown Williston, I didn’t expect a 25-year-old man to get beaten to death outside the joint. Then again, I didn’t really expect most of the things I encountered reporting on the oil boom in western North Dakota this past summer.

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Egypt’s resurgent authoritarianism: It’s a way of life

Nathan J. Brown and Katie Bentivoglio write: Since assuming office in June 2014, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been making a series of slow but deliberate legal moves to restore and strengthen the authority of state institutions. In the absence of parliament, he has taken advantage of a constitutional vacuum to lay the groundwork for authorities to act with wide discretion and little public oversight. After the 2011 revolution, outside social and political actors were optimistic that they could build a more responsive state; today, however, they are poorly placed to counter Sisi’s efforts. His approach will also likely survive the election of a parliament when that long-promised step is finally taken—perhaps by the end of 2014.

Given Egypt’s long authoritarian tradition, many state institutions are already capable of evading the rule of law. But Sisi’s legislative agenda may give official bodies such extensive license as to make it less necessary in the future to resort to extraordinary measures (such as the much despised state of emergency) in order to exercise sweeping powers. The ultimate result may not govern Egypt well, and it is likely to be challenged from below and perhaps even from inside. However, the foundations being laid now may allow state institutions to weather such threats through normal institutional channels, enabling senior officials to act legally and unaccountably at the same time. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey torn between ISIS and the PKK

Mustafa Akyol writes: This has been a terrible week for Turkey. Riots hit dozens of cities, mostly in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, leading to more than 30 deaths. Most protestors were Kurdish nationalists mobilized by the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a political party that acts as the unofficial arm of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey considers a terrorist group.

They were angry at the government for not helping their brethren in the northern Syrian city of Kobane, who have been hopelessly resisting the ongoing onslaught of the so-called “Islamic State” of Iraq and Syria (ISIL). But the protesters’ anger, and their wanton violence, didn’t help much in convincing the Turkish public that Kurdish fighters in Kobane must indeed be supported.

For most Western observers, the stance of the Turkish government in all this mess is incomprehensible. Why, they wonder, is Turkey doing nothing to help the heroic defenders of Kobane against the brutal jihadist hordes. The answer often comes by concluding that the Turkish government must have some sympathy for ISIL, due to its Islamist sentiments and anti-Kurdish biases.

The reality, however, is a bit more complicated. There is plenty of evidence to conclude that Ankara does see ISIL as a threat, and does not want to see its dominance extend beyond its southern borders. However, Ankara has two other preoccupations that are not shared by Western capitals: First, the armed Kurds in Syria, which are ultimately an extension of the PKK. Second, the Bashar al-Assad regime, which Ankara still sees as the mother of all evil in Syria.

But are these considerations right? Well, yes and no. As for the Kurds, Turkey’s decades-old concern with the PKK cannot be trashed out overnight, especially in the face of a public which still sees the group as Turkey’s main enemy. Yet still, this is the same PKK with which the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has been carrying out a much-hailed “peace process.” So, for the sake of both the process and Turkey’s domestic peace and stability, Ankara must be more amenable to the pro-PKK faction in Syria, which is now fighting for its survival.

As for al-Assad, it is true that his regime is evil, and deserves all sorts of condemnation, but Ankara must realize that now ISIL is an independent threat, with its own mania and bloodlust. Therefore the we-will-not-fight-ISIL-unless-al-Assad-is-also-fought mantra should be left aside, and ISIL must be confronted as a threat of its own, not as a mere “symptom” of the al-Assad disease. [Continue reading…]

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