Category Archives: Lands

Obama’s passing shot at Netanyahu is a futile gesture

Simon Tisdall writes: In a way, Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama deserve each other. Both promised great things. Both proved themselves masters of their respective political spheres. And yet both have contributed, since 2009, to a chronic deterioration in US-Israel relations and the wider Middle East meltdown. This process of polarisation and mutual alienation culminated last Friday with Obama’s active connivance in the passing of a landmark UN security council resolution. The resolution condemned all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory as a “flagrant violation” of international law that imperilled a future two-state peace.

Amid talk of betrayal, the Israeli response, personally orchestrated by Prime Minister Netanyahu, has been swift and furious. Ambassadors from the 14 countries that backed resolution 2334 were carpeted at the foreign ministry on Christmas Day. Israel has withdrawn its ambassadors from two of the countries concerned, New Zealand and Senegal, and cut aid assistance to the latter. Planned diplomatic exchanges have been cancelled, future Israeli cooperation with UN agencies placed under urgent review, and civilian coordination with the Palestinian Authority suspended. “We will do all it takes so Israel emerges unscathed from this shameful decision,” Netanyahu said.

If he really believes settlements undermine peace, why abstain? Why not go the whole hog and condemn them?
In a sense, these are symbolic actions in response to a symbolic vote. Resolution 2334 is unenforceable. Nobody, least of all the Americans, will attempt to evict the 430,000 Jewish settlers currently living in the West Bank or the 200,000 in east Jerusalem. Nobody can force Israel to embrace John Kerry’s recycled ideas about a two-state solution, although the US secretary of state is expected to spell them out one more time before he leaves office next month. Resolution 2334 joins UN resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) in the theoretical, consistently bypassed legal canon of the Israel-Palestine issue. It says what should happen. It does not say how.

Yet for all that, the US abstention and UN vote are not lacking in significance. Netanyahu’s smug suggestion that he need only wait for the advent of a Donald Trump presidency is misleading. It is likely Trump will give him a more sympathetic hearing. He may well move the US embassy to Jerusalem – a gratuitously inflammatory gesture.

The personal chemistry between Trump and Netanyahu will be vastly different; insecurity, aggression and paranoia are their shared characteristics. But Trump’s vain, vague boast that he could be the one to “solve” the Israel-Palestine conflict is as insubstantial as his many other foreign policy pledges. And a Trump administration cannot simply reverse the stated will of the UN security council – backed in this case by permanent members China, Russia, France and Britain – any more than it can unilaterally scrap last year’s multinational nuclear deal with Iran. [Continue reading…]

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Criticizing Russian airstrikes in Syria lands blogger in jail

Human Rights Watch reports: A court in Russia has sentenced Alexei Kungurov, a 38-year-old blogger from Tyumen, Western Siberia, to two-and-a-half years in prison for “justification of terrorism.” His crime? A blog post he wrote in October 2015, after Russian warplanes conducted their first airstrikes in Syria.

In the post, Kungurov offered his analysis of the Syria conflict and vehemently criticized Russia’s intervention. In the opening paragraph, he wrote that the post set out to “debunk” several “myths” created by “Putin’s regime” and delivered to the public through “zombie-boxes” by pro-Kremlin media. He strongly disagreed with the official argument that Russia’s involvement in Syria was preventive and aimed at fighting terrorists to stop them from eventually coming to Russia. Rather than fighting terrorists in Syria, Kungurov argued, Russia was “helping them.”

During pretrial investigation, the regional department of the Federal Security Service (FSB) sent requests to journalists and media outlets in Tyumen asking for information on any other “defamatory” or “extremist” materials published by Kungurov. This fall, his family received anonymous threats and his LiveJournal account was hacked. At Kungurov’s trial, the prosecution failed to adequately explain which specific phrases or expressions were “justifying” terrorism.

Under Russian law, the maximum punishment for this offense is five years in prison, but the court took into consideration that Kungurov has two small children and no criminal record.

One can agree or disagree with Kungurov’s opinion. His post, however, contains no calls for violence but is a criticism of Russia’s Syria policy. It is a case of officials attempting to shut down public debate on an important foreign policy issue under the pretext of “combating terrorism.” It is also part and parcel of Russia’s ongoing crackdown on free speech, especially online. [Continue reading…]

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Why many young Russians see a hero in Putin

Julia Ioffe writes: He doesn’t know where to take me when I meet him at the hotel by the train station, so we just start to walk down the dusty summer streets of Nizhniy Tagil, a sputtering industrial city on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains. His name is Sasha Makarevich, a 24-year-old cement worker, a blond ponytail falling down his back, a Confederate flag stitched onto his cutoff denim vest. “I thought it just meant independence,” he explains when I ask about it.

We walk past a small, one-story cube of a building covered with images of red Soviet stars and the orange-and-black St. George’s ribbon that holds imperial, Soviet, and Russian military medals. “We could go in here,” Sasha shrugs. “But it’s full of people who survived the Nineties.”

Sasha survived the Nineties too. In December 1991, just months before he was born, the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin and the Russian tricolor went up, ushering in the decade that hangs like a bad omen in the contemporary Russian psyche. The expectation that Russians would start living like their prosperous Western counterparts gave way to a painful reality: It would be a hard slog to turn a command economy into a market one, to make a democracy out of a society that had lived under absolute monarchy and totalitarianism for centuries.

I never got to see those Nineties. My family left Moscow in April 1990. When I first returned, in 2002, the era of President Vladimir Putin, the antidote to the turbulent Nineties, was in full swing. Since then I’ve been back to Russia many times and lived there for several years as a reporter.

Most of the Russians I know have, to some extent, been shaped by the 74-year Soviet experiment. We know in a deep, personal way our families’ small histories and tragedies within the larger tragedy of that history. But this generation coming up knows only a Russia traumatized by the Nineties and then tightly ruled by Putin. This year—25 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse—I went back again, to meet these young people like Sasha. Who are they? What do they want from their lives? What do they want for Russia? [Continue reading…]

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Arabic translators did far more than just preserve Greek philosophy

By Peter Adamson, Aeon, November 4, 2016

In European antiquity, philosophers largely wrote in Greek. Even after the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean and the demise of paganism, philosophy was strongly associated with Hellenic culture. The leading thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek literature; Cicero even went to Athens to pay homage to the home of his philosophical heroes. Tellingly, the emperor Marcus Aurelius went so far as to write his Meditations in Greek. Cicero, and later Boethius, did attempt to initiate a philosophical tradition in Latin. But during the early Middle Ages, most of Greek thought was accessible in Latin only partially and indirectly.

Elsewhere, the situation was better. In the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Greek-speaking Byzantines could continue to read Plato and Aristotle in the original. And philosophers in the Islamic world enjoyed an extraordinary degree of access to the Hellenic intellectual heritage. In 10th-century Baghdad, readers of Arabic had about the same degree of access to Aristotle that readers of English do today.

This was thanks to a well-funded translation movement that unfolded during the Abbasid caliphate, beginning in the second half of the eighth century. Sponsored at the highest levels, even by the caliph and his family, this movement sought to import Greek philosophy and science into Islamic culture. Their empire had the resources to do so, not just financially but also culturally. From late antiquity to the rise of Islam, Greek had survived as a language of intellectual activity among Christians, especially in Syria. So when Muslim aristocrats decided to have Greek science and philosophy translated into Arabic, it was to Christians that they turned. Sometimes, a Greek work might even be translated first into Syriac, and only then into Arabic. It was an immense challenge. Greek is not a semitic language, so they were moving from one language group to another: more like translating Finnish into English than Latin into English. And there was, at first, no established terminology for expressing philosophical ideas in Arabic.

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Jerusalem’s status won’t be as easy to settle as other real estate deals. Here’s why

Brent E. Sasley writes: President-elect Donald Trump has set the foreign policymaking world on edge with his and his team’s repeated insistence that as president he will move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The goal: support Israel’s claim to the city as its “undivided, eternal capital.” By nominating David Friedman — who agrees with that position — to be ambassador to Israel, Trump apparently emphasizes this commitment.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has resisted resolution for decades. But Trump has insisted that “a deal is a deal” and that because he is “a negotiator,” he will be successful where others were not. In this case, presumably Trump plans to offer the Palestinians compensation to accept Israel’s claims to Jerusalem.

But it is not that simple.

The “let’s make a deal” approach assumes that each negotiating party has a series of material things that can be traded off. In this approach, both sides understand they will be better off with more than they currently have.

But that doesn’t apply to a place like Jerusalem, or to conflicts like it. Over time, territorial conflicts between ethno-national communities have become more about ideological and emotional attachments than about material interests. Recent research shows that groups can’t trade off material gain against territory that they consider to be part of its national homeland — territory that’s important to everyone who identifies with that ancestral homeland, wherever they actually live. Jerusalem is a prime example: Its existence is loaded with cultural, spiritual, religious and national meaning.

Jerusalem’s layered history is so important to both Jewish and Muslim religious practice as immovable “sacred spaces” that even when Israeli and Palestinian leaders hold similar attachments, they can’t decide its disposition alone. They must account for the emotional commitments of publics outside the Middle East. [Continue reading…]

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Israel: Humbled Netanyahu places hopes in Trump

The Associated Press reports: The Israeli government’s furious reaction to the U.N. Security Council’s adoption of a resolution opposing Jewish settlements in occupied territory underscores its fundamental and bitter dispute with the international community about the future of the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that there is nothing wrong with his controversial policy of building Jewish towns in occupied areas that the Palestinians, with overwhelming world support, claim for their state. But Friday’s U.N. rebuke was a stark reminder that the rest of the world considers it a crime. The embattled leader is now placing his hopes in the incoming administration of Donald Trump, which is shaping up as the first major player to embrace Israel’s nationalist right and its West Bank settlements.

In a series of statements, Netanyahu has criticized the Obama Administration for letting Resolution 2334 pass Friday by abstaining, using unprecedented language that has turned a policy disagreement into a personal vendetta.

“From the information that we have, we have no doubt that the Obama Administration initiated it, stood behind it, coordinated on the wording and demanded that it be passed,” Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday.

In turning his anger toward Israel’s closest and most important ally, Netanyahu has underplayed the embarrassment that all 14 other nations on the Security Council voted in favor of the measure. Those votes came from countries that Netanyahu loves to boast of cultivating relations with, including Russia and China and nations across the developing world. [Continue reading…]

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Russia is drawing a weak and unstable Turkey into its orbit

Cengiz Candar writes: When a Turkish police officer assassinated Andrey G. Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, on Monday, it felt for a moment as if the whole world shook. The killing took place at a time of global uncertainty and reminded some observers of the start of World War I.

The truth, however, is that despite shaky relations between Russia and Turkey in recent years, the assassination is unlikely to lead to more tension between the countries. Indeed, it will probably push them even closer together, as Moscow realizes that this is a perfect opportunity to draw a weak and unstable Turkey into the Russian orbit.

Mr. Karlov’s assassination is not the first test for the Turkish-Russian relationship. The war in Syria, where Russia backs the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and Turkey has supported rebel groups, has also threatened to suck the two historical powers into confrontation.

In November 2015, the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian plane near the Syrian border, the first time a member of NATO is believed to have fired on a Russian plane in some 50 years. For weeks afterward, the two countries engaged in a war of words.

It never escalated, though, and in June, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey apologized to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, for the incident. Mr. Erdogan was rewarded the next month when, at least according to the story put forward by both governments, Mr. Putin was the first head of state to come to his defense after a failed coup attempt.

Since then, relations between the two countries have improved considerably. Turkey’s stability, on the other hand, has only deteriorated. [Continue reading…]

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The most defining moments in America, as ranked by each generation

Quartz reports: Historic events come to define our national identity. But do we all agree on what’s important?

Pew asked 2,025 Americans from each generation to name the 10 events in their lifetime with “the greatest impact” on the country. The answers reveal a world newly redefined by the rise of domestic and foreign terrorism, and the transformative role of technology and civil rights.

Everyone agreed on one thing. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, stood out as the most important event, cutting across age, race, and political party. Roughly three-quarters (76%) of all respondents included the terror attacks in their top 10, and the events of that day were seen as the most defining overall for each generation, even ranking ahead of World War II for the Silent Generation (born between 1901 and 1927). The next closest contender was Barack Obama’s election to the White House, which 40% of the public named as one of their top events. (It shared the top spot among the survey’s black respondents.) [Continue reading…]

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In reaction to fake news, Pakistani minister directs nuclear threat at Israel

The New York Times reports: A fake news article led to gunfire at a Washington pizzeria three weeks ago. Now it seems that another fake news story has prompted the defense minister of Pakistan to threaten to go nuclear.

The defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, wrote a saber-rattling Twitter post directed at Israel on Friday after a false report — which the minister apparently believed — that Israel had threatened Pakistan with nuclear weapons. Both countries have nuclear arsenals.

“Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh,” the minister wrote on his official Twitter account, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too.”


Mr. Asif appeared to be reacting to a fake news article published on awdnews.com.

That story, with the typo-laden headline “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack,” appeared on the website on Dec. 20, alongside articles with headlines like “Clinton is staging a military coup against Trump.” [Continue reading…]

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Aung San Suu Kyi fails to calm Myanmar’s ethnic violence

The Economist reports: Syed, a 33-year-old Muslim religious teacher, feared the worst. On October 9th Rohingya militants attacked border posts near Maungdaw, a township in the north of Rakhine state in western Myanmar, killing nine Burmese border guards. Syed, himself a Rohingya from Rakhine, was sure that a vicious crackdown by Myanmar’s army would follow. So he put on non-religious clothes and shaved his beard. Along with 16 others he left his home village. For days the group hid in a forest. Eventually they crossed the Naf River, which separates Myanmar from Bangladesh, and found their way to the sprawling, ramshackle Kutupalong camp near the coastal town of Cox’s Bazar.

Syed’s fears were justified. Myanmar’s army has blocked access to much of Maungdaw, keeping away journalists, aid workers and international monitors (troops claim to be searching for stolen guns and ammunition). But reports have emerged of mass arrests, torture, the burning of villages, killings of civilians and the systematic rape of Rohingya women by Burmese soldiers. At least 86 people have been killed. Satellite imagery analysed by Human Rights Watch suggests that soldiers have burned at least 1,500 buildings — including homes, food shops, markets and mosques (one devastated area is pictured). The organisation says this could be a conservative estimate; it includes only buildings not obscured by trees. Amnesty International says the army’s “callous and systematic campaign of violence” may be a crime against humanity. Myanmar’s government denies all such allegations, dismissing many of them as fabrications.

Around 27,000 Rohingyas — members of a Muslim ethnic group native to Rakhine — have recently, like Syed, fled to Bangladesh. But about 1m of them remain. Before the recent turmoil, tens of thousands of Rohingyas in northern Rakhine relied on aid for food, water and health care. The blockade has severed that lifeline.

Such brutality does not reflect well on Aung San Suu Kyi, a winner of the Nobel peace prize who has led Myanmar since her party’s resounding electoral victory in 2015. Neither does ethnic conflict, which has been intensifying on the other side of the country, speak well of her skills as a peacemaker. She entered office saying her priority was to resolve Myanmar’s decades-long civil wars. [Continue reading…]

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Drugs and terror: Berlin truck-attack suspect followed familiar pattern

The Wall Street Journal reports: The 24-year-old Tunisian migrant suspected of killing 12 people in an attack in Berlin this week typified a new wave of young jihadists in Europe who mix drug dealing and other illegal activities with Islamist terror.

Anis Amri, who was killed in a shootout with Italian police in Milan on Friday after days on the run, peddled cocaine in a hip neighborhood of the German capital, while becoming increasingly radicalized and declaring his allegiance to Islamic State.

It is a pattern that has become increasingly common. Two brothers involved in the November 2015 attacks in Paris sold hashish from a bar in the Belgian capital, Brussels. One — Salah Abdeslam, the main surviving suspect in that assault — served time in prison for breaking into a garage. The other had repeated brushes with the law for theft, drugs and weapons possession.

“You have a crossover between criminals and extremists,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a counterterrorism expert at the Swedish Defence University. “They are just as at ease with selling drugs, petty crime and dabbling in extremism.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s Syria conundrum

Kim Ghattas writes: President-elect Donald Trump’s position on the conflict in Syria has been a confusing assortment of positions, the latest of which – his call for a safe zone in Syria – seems informed by his most recent conversations with candidates he interviewed for the position of secretary of state.

But all of his statements carry within them an inherent conundrum, two contradictory perspectives that will be hard to reconcile in Syria: his stated desire to work with Russia, or at least please Vladimir Putin, and his expected efforts to contain Iran.
Beyond the question of whether Trump will try to rip up the nuclear deal there is also the issue of Iran’s ascendant power in the region.

Trump made no secret of his admiration for Russia’s president during the US presidential campaign, and his willingness to deal with Vladimir Putin.

But Trump’s appointments of Lt Gen Michael Flynn as national security advisor, James Mattis as secretary of defence and Mike Pompeo as CIA chief, form a trio that looks geared for a fight with Iran. Tehran has played a pivotal role in Syria to keep Bashar al-Assad in power and crush the rebels in Aleppo. [Continue reading…]

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UN again allowing Assad regime to edit Syria aid document

The Daily Beast reports: The Syrian government is once again trying to manipulate the United Nations Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) to fit its own narrative of the conflict within the country.

In comments that seem removed from the reality of the years-long war in the country, the government has requested the word “conflict” be removed from the document, and replaced with “crisis.” It has also requested the removal of the word “besieged.”

The U.N. itself reports that 974,080 people are besieged in 16 locations across Syria, with 4.5 million classed as hard-to-reach, a number that is considered low by other NGOs and advocacy organizations working in the country. With the evacuation of east Aleppo, that number will fall to around 700,000 in 15 areas. The majority are besieged by government forces and their allies.

The HRP plan is the overarching planning document that ties together the aid response across the country, including the billions of dollars per year in funding, including in areas outside the government’s control.

Last year the U.N. faced extensive criticism for failing to adequately consult U.N. hubs and NGOs operating outside Damascus, and for allowing the government of Syria to edit the document before its release. In editing, it included comments similar to those of this year — removing any mention of “besieged areas” and watering down references to violence against civilians. The U.N. allowed the changes. [Continue reading…]

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World War Three, by mistake

Eric Schlosser writes: On June 3, 1980, at about two-thirty in the morning, computers at the National Military Command Center, beneath the Pentagon, at the headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), deep within Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and at Site R, the Pentagon’s alternate command post center hidden inside Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania, issued an urgent warning: the Soviet Union had just launched a nuclear attack on the United States. The Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan, and the animosity between the two superpowers was greater than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

U.S. Air Force ballistic-missile crews removed their launch keys from the safes, bomber crews ran to their planes, fighter planes took off to search the skies, and the Federal Aviation Administration prepared to order every airborne commercial airliner to land.

President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.

Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized — it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at NORAD headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.

A similar false alarm had occurred the previous year, when someone mistakenly inserted a training tape, featuring a highly realistic simulation of an all-out Soviet attack, into one of NORAD’s computers. During the Cold War, false alarms were also triggered by the moon rising over Norway, the launch of a weather rocket from Norway, a solar storm, sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds, and a faulty A.T. & T. telephone switch in Black Forest, Colorado. [Continue reading…]

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After Berlin attack, Germans reject talk of ‘war’

AFP reports: The Berlin attack may have rattled nerves but, mindful of their own dark history, Germans are resisting calls for a security overhaul and reject any talk of being at war — setting the country apart from other jihadist-hit nations.

Long-held fears of a major attack on German soil became reality on Monday when an extremist rammed a truck into a crowded Christmas market, killing 12 people and injuring dozens. The suspected attacker, 24-year-old Tunisian Anis Amri, was shot dead by police in Italy early Friday.

The attack, claimed by the Islamic State group, horrified Germany, which had until now escaped the type of jihadist carnage seen in neighbouring France and Belgium.

But while the shock and grief are the same, there are no cries for a state of emergency and there is no question of flooding the streets with armed soldiers.

Chancellor Angela Merkel herself on Thursday said she was “very proud of how calmly most people reacted to the situation”.

Experts attribute the sang-froid in part to Germany’s past as an instigator of two world wars, making its citizens today deeply suspicious of any kind of heavy-handed security response. [Continue reading…]

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Aleppo exiles describe how life continued through years of bombing

The Guardian reports: The Aleppo Thaer al-Halabi left behind was a ghost town filled with the shadows of friends lost to war and the shattered dreams of a different Syria.

Still, the parting resembled physical pain. He was born in Aleppo, in a house in the old town with a courtyard shaded by vines, where his family had lived for over a century. He raised a family and built a career there, and then, for four years, gambled everything he had on the possibility of taking down Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

“When we were forced to leave Aleppo it had already been destroyed completely. You didn’t see a city, only ghosts, in a ghost city,” said the 57-year-old engineer turned opposition politician.

“I am very sad I have left our city, it’s at the centre of our hearts, part of our bodies. But because we need freedom we cannot live there.”

Halabi said he was jailed three times by the government before the war, so when the uprising against Assad first turned into armed rebellion and rebels took half of Aleppo, he didn’t think twice about joining them. “We had freedom for four years,” he said.

Aleppo, which was Syria’s cultural and economic hub before the conflict, became a byword for devastation far beyond the country’s borders, after years of brutal air raids to try to oust rebels.

In the early years of the fighting, life in rebel-held areas was not all horror and violence. There was a local council set up to govern, schools still operated. People went to work when they were not severed from their offices by the frontline, or set up new businesses and tried to ignore the war.

“Life went on amid the bombing,” said Sara, a 47-year-old teacher who also stayed in Aleppo until the enclave’s final days. “There were schools, businesses, shops, there were goods and people, entertainment, everything.”

For the young in particular, rebel-held Aleppo offered the wild liberties of an unfiltered web. “On the other side of the city was regular Syrian government that block everything they don’t want,” said Halabi’s son, the activist and journalist Rami Zein.

“On our side of the city it felt like you are in a place open to the world. Before the siege it was a great city, you had everything you need, could bring everything you need from the border [with Turkey], all kinds of trade, everything was there.”

As the war intensified though, death and destruction touched growing numbers of families. Aleppo became notorious for the horror of barrel bombs, dropped from helicopters on civilian areas to spread death and fear. [Continue reading…]

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Blaming terrorist attacks on refugees isn’t going to make Europe safer

Alexander Görlach writes: It didn’t take long for Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany to exploit the Berlin terrorist attack for political gain. “These are Merkel’s dead,” tweeted AfD leader Marcus Pretzell on Monday.

However, Germany has been on the radar of Islamist terrorists for quite some time. So have Christmas markets: in 2000, four Algerians plotted to blow up the Christmas market in Strasbourg in France. In 2007, three terrorists were arrested in Germany for planned simultaneous car bomb attacks ― “the world will burn,” one reportedly said.

Terror arrived in Germany long before the Berlin incident. But it was the first in recent times that caused such significant casualties. This is very tragic, but to exclusively blame it on Syrian refugees defeats the purpose of trying to understand how to combat terrorism and prevent future attacks from happening. The suspect, Anis Amri, who was killed in a shootout with police near Milan today, was a Tunisian who came to Europe in 2011, entering through the Italian island of Lampedusa. This was back before the Syrian civil war had become the regional conflagration that it is today; it was also during the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when order in some countries in northern Africa was on the verge of collapsing. How many asylum seekers came to Europe then with bad intentions? How many of them were already eager and keen to become terrorists? The honest answer is: we don’t know.

But the right wing’s take on the Berlin attack is shortsighted. As a matter of fact, when southern Europe groaned under the pressure of refugees, the rest of the continent was indifferent about it. Europe’s refugee policy is flawed. The continent needs to get its act together: the regions around it may most likely remain in upheaval and turmoil for quite some time. Not having done so yet has nurtured the rise of anti-establishment activism, right-wing parties and xenophobic violence across the continent. [Continue reading…]

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Suspect in Berlin market attack was radicalized in an Italian jail

The Washington Post reports: He was the man nobody wanted.

When Anis Amri washed up on European shores in a migrant boat in April 2011, he landed on the windswept Italian island of Lampedusa already a fugitive. Sought in his native Tunisia for hijacking a van with a gang of thieves, the frustrated Italians would jail him for arson and violent assault at his migrant reception center for minors on the isle of Sicily.

There, his family noted, the boy who once drank alcohol — and never went to mosque — suddenly got religion.

He began to pray, asking his family to send him religious books. The Italian Bureau of Prisons submitted a report to a government ­anti-terrorism commission on Amri’s rapid radicalization, warning that he was embracing dangerous ideas of Islamist ­extremism and had threatened Christian inmates, according to an Italian government official with knowledge of the situation. The dossier was first reported by ANSA, the Italian news service.

The Italians tried to deport Amri but couldn’t. They sent his fingerprints and photo to the Tunisian consulate, but the authorities there refused to recognize Amri as a citizen. The Italians, officials there say, could not even establish his true identity. Italy’s solution: After four years in jail, they released him anyway — giving him seven days to leave the country. [Continue reading…]

Der Spiegel reports: When Amri submitted an application for asylum with the [German] Federal Office of Migration and Refugees (BAMF) in April 2016, he claimed he was an Egyptian and that he was being persecuted in Egypt. When asked follow-up questions by the agency, however, he demonstrated almost no knowledge of the country.

Research into BAMF’s database showed that he had been registered in Germany using multiple identities and dates of birth. Within a matter of only weeks, officials rejected Amri’s asylum application, saying it was “obviously unfounded.” However, they were unable to deport him because he lacked the necessary identification papers. [Continue reading…]

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