Category Archives: Lands

The forces besieging Aleppo are counting on our indifference

Natalie Nougayrède writes: As Europe reels from terrorist attacks, Aleppo, once Syria’s second city, is suffering its own nightmare. The connection between these two developments is more than coincidence. As bombs, guns and knives were being wielded in France and Germany, a massive military operation was under way to besiege, and perhaps empty or starve, the eastern districts of Aleppo that since 2012 have been controlled by the anti-Assad rebellion.

When responding to the latest terror in Europe, few if any western officials draw parallels with the plight of Aleppo. That is understandable. Public opinion is naturally more focused on the domestic fallout from traumatic events. When security fears take over and political passions are aroused, it is hard to look beyond what lies in your immediate vicinity. Yet Aleppo will have consequences for Europe and for its citizens, and there is little cause to think they will be positive.

This is why: Islamic State cannot be defeated just through military action in Iraq and Syria, or police operations in Europe. It can be defeated only if the attraction that the militant group exerts on young, confused Sunni Muslims, in the Middle East and elsewhere, is somehow neutralised. The massacres carried out by the Assad regime in Syria over the past five years, and the failure of the international community to put an end to them – or even to hold his power accountable – have provided no small reason for the radicalisation now making Europe bleed.

The summer of 2015 went down in history as a time when the chaos of the Middle East suddenly became a vivid reality for Europeans because of the refugee crisis. The summer of 2016 may go down as the tipping point when all hope of a negotiated settlement in Syria’s civil war, one that would deprive Isis of much of its ability to recruit and sow terror, entirely faded. [Continue reading…]

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Doctors tell of ‘horrifying’ conditions in Aleppo as medical supplies run out

ITV News reports: American doctor Dr Samer Attar, who is now back in Chicago, worked in an underground field hospital in Aleppo.

He said the conditions he witnessed there were “brutal and horrifying” and that they would only worsen with the closure of Castello Road – now the only aid route into Aleppo.

“Right now that road has been cut off by the Syrian government, that was the last remaining humanitarian supply route into eastern Aleppo.

“The doctors I’ve been speaking to says they have no food, no fuel, no medicines to last them the next month.

“A neurosurgeon I know texted me to he hasn’t eaten anything for the past few days other than dried dates whilst working around the clock.

“He has to perform massive brain operations on patients and he is trapped. No one is coming to relieve him.” [Continue reading…]

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French politicians are using terrorism to score points ahead of election

By Jocelyn Evans, University of Leeds and Gilles Ivaldi, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis

Until recently, France’s politicians had largely presented a united front against terrorist attacks. Rarely did they use tragedy to score points off each other. But that has started to change over the past year. Now a political controversy has erupted in the wake of the massacre in Nice on Bastille Day 2016. It will no doubt be further fuelled by the killing of a Catholic priest near Rouen.

Within hours of the incident at a fireworks display in Nice, opposition politicians were rounding on the government. How was it that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was able to kill 84 people and wound hundreds by driving a truck into a festive crowd, even as the country lived under a state of emergency?

One was Christian Estrosi, the former mayor of Nice and a Republican right winger who supports former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Estrosi is currently leading the offensive against the government. “Lies are fuelling the controversy,” he said, referencing the contested number of national police and soldiers in Nice on the night of the attack. “If the state stops lying, there will no longer be a controversy.”

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Muslims mourn in solidarity with Catholics across France after priest’s murder

BBC News reports: Muslims across France have attended Catholic Mass in a gesture of solidarity after the murder of a priest on Tuesday.

Fr Jacques Hamel was killed in his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray near Rouen by two men who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

France’s Muslim council, the CFCM, urged Muslims to show “solidarity and compassion” over the murder.

“We are all Catholics of France,” said Anouar Kbibech, the head of the CFCM. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s development as a proto-fascist state

Vladislav Inozemtsev writes: Western policymakers in recent years have struggled to categorize the Russian political system, often resorting to vague phrases such as “illiberal democracy” or “authoritarianism.”

If anything, the Russian system should be characterized as proto-fascist – tamer than European fascist states during the 1920s and 1930s, but still featuring key elements of those regimes. These include the structure of Russia’s political economy; the idealization of the state as a source of moral authority; and Russia’s particular brand of international relations.

In The Anatomy of Fascism, Columbia University historian Robert O. Paxton writes that:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

In a 1995 essay for The New York Review of Books, the novelist Umberto Eco, who was born during Italian fascism in 1932, defines fascism expansively as a “cult of tradition” based in “selective populism.” And as early as 1939, Peter Drucker claimed in The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, that “fascism is the stage reached after communism has proven an illusion.”
Judging by these definitions, it would be difficult today to find any trend in Russian political society that could not be labeled fascist. [Continue reading…]

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How to counter the Putin playbook

Michael A. McFaul writes: A quarter-century ago, at the end of the Cold War, it seemed that only democracies promoted their values abroad. Today, autocracies have entered the arena again, exporting their ideas and methods — even to the United States.

Everywhere, autocrats are pushing back against democrats, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is the de facto leader of this global movement.

Since returning to the Kremlin in 2012, Mr. Putin has consolidated his hold on power in Russia. With renewed vigor, he’s weakened civil society, undermined independent media, suppressed any opposition and scared off big business from supporting government critics. And he made the United States and its senior officials unwitting elements of his malign strategy.

While I was the United States ambassador to Russia, Mr. Putin accused President Obama’s administration of seeking to foment revolution against him — as, allegedly, we had done in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring. Russia’s state-controlled media portrayed Russian protesters as traitors, puppets of the United States, who took money and orders from Washington. Mr. Putin took special offense to Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, claiming her criticism of the fairness of the 2011 Russian parliamentary election was a “signal” to Russian demonstrators.

While chastising us for supposedly meddling in his internal affairs, Mr. Putin expanded his campaign to weaken democracy abroad. Kremlin-aligned media like the TV station RT have championed his policies internationally, while challenging the legitimacy of democratic leaders, including our own president. Around the world, but especially in Europe, the Russian government supports — by both rhetorical and financial means — political parties and organizations with illiberal, nationalist agendas. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its intervention in eastern Ukraine in support of separatists, as well as the invasion of Georgia in 2008, were violent efforts to destabilize new democracies. [Continue reading…]

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The Saudi bombardment of Yemen — worse than Russia’s assault on Syria — has been lucrative for the West

The Economist: Ninety years ago Britain’s planes bombed unruly tribes in the Arabian peninsula to firm up the rule of Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi state. Times have changed but little since then. Together with America and France, Britain is now supplying, arming and servicing hundreds of Saudi planes engaged in the aerial bombardment of Yemen.

Though it has attracted little public attention or parliamentary oversight, the scale of the campaign currently surpasses Russia’s in Syria, analysts monitoring both conflicts note. With their governments’ approval, Western arms companies provide the intelligence, logistical support and air-to-air refuelling to fly far more daily sorties than Russia can muster.

There are differences. Russian pilots fly combat missions in Syria; Western pilots do not fly combat missions on behalf of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Nor are their governments formal members of the battling coalition. Their presence, including in Riyadh’s operations room, and their precision-guided weaponry, should ensure that the rules of war that protect civilians are upheld, insist Western officials. But several field studies question this. Air strikes were responsible for more than half the thousands of civilian deaths in the 16-month campaign, Amnesty International reported in May. It found evidence that British cluster bombs had been used. Together with other watchdogs, including the UN Human Rights Council, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam, it has documented the use of Western weaponry to hit scores of Yemeni markets, medical centres, warehouses, factories and mosques. One analyst alleges that the use of its weapons amounts to Western complicity in war crimes.

The war in Yemen has certainly been lucrative. Since the bombardment began in March 2015, Saudi Arabia has spent £2.8 billion ($3.8 billion) on British arms, making it Britain’s largest arms market, according to government figures analysed by Campaign Against Arms Trade, a watchdog. America supplies even more. [Continue reading…]

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As the Saudis covered up abuses in Yemen, America stood by

Samuel Oakford writes: The United Nations has long been bullied by its most powerful members, and U.N. secretaries-general have usually been forced to grit their teeth and take it quietly. But few nations have been more publicly brazen in this practice than Saudi Arabia, and earlier this summer, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon managed to get in a dig at the Kingdom over its blackmail-style tactics. Ban openly admitted that it was only after Riyadh threatened to cut off funding to the U.N. that he bowed to its demand to remove the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, where it has launched a harsh military intervention, from a list of violators of children’s rights contained in the annex of his annual Children and Armed Conflict report. “The report describes horrors no child should have to face,” Ban told reporters. “At the same time, I also had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would defund many U.N. programs.”

But the secretary-general wasn’t done. “It is unacceptable for U.N. member states to exert undue pressure,” Ban added. The removal of the Saudis from the list was also, he claimed, “pending review.”

For the United States, it was another reminder of what an uncomfortable ally the Saudi kingdom can be (as was the July release of a hitherto classified section of a 2002 report into the 9/11 attacks that suggested, among other things, that the wife of then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan gave money to the wife of a suspected 9/11 co-conspirator). No one has become more familiar with this awkwardness than the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, the erstwhile human-rights icon (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell) who has been forced to look the other way as a powerful U.S. ally does as it pleases in Yemen with political, logistical and military cover from Washington. Since news broke of Ban’s decision, I have asked Power’s office for a direct response to Saudi funding threats. Neither she nor her staff has ever replied. [Continue reading…]

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‘Young, old, conservative, liberal’: Turkey in shock over journalists’ arrest

The Observer reports: Turkish media are in a state of shock this weekend after the government arrested 17 journalists in recent days on terror charges and issued arrest warrants for dozens more, in what a press freedom group has warned is a “sweeping purge” of the sector.

Turkey had already ordered the closure of more than 100 papers, broadcasters and publishing houses as part of a crackdown after the failed 15 July coup attempt, before sending police to round up reporters, columnists, a novelist and social commentators.

The impact of those arrests was documented by US-based journalist and government critic Mahir Zeynalov, who was expelled from Turkey for his work two years ago and who took to Twitter to commemorate the work and reputations of the journalists arrested.

“Everybody was highlighting numbers and statistics, but nobody really explained who these people are,” he told the Observer. Some are personal friends, others celebrated within the profession and several are nationally famous. [Continue reading…]

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How Benjamin Netanyahu is crushing Israel’s free press

Ruth Margalit writes: In its annual report released this spring, Freedom House, an American democracy advocacy organization, downgraded Israel’s freedom of the press ranking from “free” to “partly free.” To anyone following Israeli news media over the past year and a half, this was hardly surprising. Freedom House focused primarily on the “unchecked expansion” of paid content in editorial pages, as well as on the outsize influence of Israel Hayom (“Israel Today”), a free daily newspaper owned by the American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and widely believed to promote the views of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel Hayom’s bias is well documented. A 2013 investigative report on Israeli television revealed drafts of several articles written by the paper’s journalists that had been systematically changed by the editor in chief to remove criticism of the prime minister. For a newspaper to have a political agenda is, of course, nothing new. But Israel Hayom isn’t conservative or right wing in the broad sense. Rather, the paper megaphones whatever is in the interest of the prime minister. Naftali Bennett, a far-right government minister, has said “Israel Hayom is Pravda — the mouthpiece of one man.”

In many ways, the Freedom House report missed the real worrying shifts. Mr. Netanyahu’s attempts to control the country’s pages and airwaves go much further than Israel Hayom. For the past 18 months, in addition to his prime ministerial duties, he has served as Israel’s communications minister (as well as its foreign minister, economy minister and minister of regional cooperation). In this role, he and his aides have brazenly leveraged his power to seek favorable coverage from outlets that he once routinely described as “radically biased.” [Continue reading…]

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Clinton campaign said to be hacked, apparently by Russians

The New York Times reports: Computer systems used by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked in an attack that appears to have come from Russia’s intelligence services, a federal law enforcement official said on Friday.

The apparent breach, coming after the disclosure last month that the Democratic National Committee’s computer system had been compromised, escalates an international episode in which Clinton campaign officials have suggested that Russia might be trying to sway the outcome of the election.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said in a statement that intruders had gained access to an analytics program used by the campaign and maintained by the national committee, but it said that it did not believe that the campaign’s own internal computer systems had been compromised.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the fund-raising arm for House Democrats, also said on Friday that its systems had been hacked. Together, the databases of the national committee and the House organization contain some of the party’s most sensitive communications and voter and financial data.

Meredith Kelly, a spokeswoman for the congressional committee, said that after it discovered the breach, “we immediately took action and engaged with CrowdStrike, a leading forensic investigator, to assist us in addressing this incident.”

The attack on the congressional committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as “Fancy Bear,” which is connected to the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to an official involved in the forensic investigation. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Several U.S. officials said the Obama administration has avoided publicly attributing the attacks to Russia as that might undermine Secretary of State John Kerry’s effort to win Russian cooperation in the war on Islamic State in Syria.

The officials said the administration fears Russian President Vladimir Putin might respond to a public move by escalating cyber attacks on U.S. targets, increasing military harassment of U.S. and allied aircraft and warships in the Baltic and Black Seas, and making more aggressive moves in Eastern Europe.

Some officials question the approach, arguing that responding more forcefully to Russia would be more effective than remaining silent.

The Obama administration announced in an April 2015 executive order that it could apply economic sanctions in response to cyber attacks. [Continue reading…]

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How the U.S. can retaliate if Kremlin hackers tried to influence the presidential election

Vice News reports: The US intelligence community and private cybersecurity firms say Russia almost certainly hacked the Democratic National Committee and leaked documents that enraged Bernie Sanders supporters, embarrassed Democratic donors and senior party officials, and led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The US government hasn’t publicly accused Russia of responsibility for the leak, but President Barack Obama noted on Tuesday that Russia has a history of interfering in other countries’ elections.

Now the question is whether the US government is going to do something about it.

If confirmed, Kremlin responsibility for the DNC hack and leak would mark the first time a foreign government has interfered in a US election on this grand a scale.

“If Russian involvement is true, it shows how far they will go to get involved in our internal affairs,” said former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. “That’s something new. I don’t think anything remotely close to that happened during the Cold War.”

“We all do espionage,” he said, “but it’s one thing to practice intelligence gathering, and another to use those means to affect an electoral outcome.”

McFaul says all the evidence points to Russia deliberately seeking to interfere in a US election on behalf of Donald Trump, a candidate it believes would be more friendly to its interests. [Continue reading…]

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Russian cyberattacks likely to increase if they continue to provoke little U.S. response

Defense One reports: In 2015, there were over one million cyber attacks on individuals and companies every day — and that is why even the strongest U.S. response to the theft of the Democratic National Committee emails will do little to deter future state-sponsored attacks, cybersecurity experts say.

The sheer volume and increasing sophistication of network attacks provide plausible deniability to state-sponsored groups, like the APT 28 and APT 29 thought to be behind the DNC hack, says Christopher Porter, of cybersecurity company FireEye.

“One of the key factors that makes these Russian operations doable is that sophisticated criminal groups have APT-like capabilities and go after similar targets,” said Porter, whose company first documented APT 29’s ties to the Kremlin in 2014.“The best criminals use some of the same tools that lower-end states might use.”

Recognizing the valuable cover this provides, the “Russian government has been intentionally blurring the lines between cyber activists, criminals and state-paid hackers,” said Jarno Limnell, vice president for cybersecurity at Insta Group Oy.

This makes it hard to conclusively attribute an attack to a particular government, and all but impossible to respond firmly. So Western countries have thus far remained “fairly quiet” in the face of various Russian provocations, and that has only emboldened Moscow, Limnell said. [Continue reading…]

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FBI probes hacking of another Democratic Party group

Reuters reports: The FBI is investigating a cyber attack against another U.S. Democratic Party group, which may be related to an earlier hack against the Democratic National Committee, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The previously unreported incident at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, and its potential ties to Russian hackers are likely to heighten accusations, so far unproven, that Moscow is trying to meddle in the U.S. presidential election campaign to help Republican nominee Donald Trump.

The Kremlin denied involvement in the DCCC cyber-attack. Hacking of the party’s emails caused discord among Democrats at the party’s convention in Philadelphia to nominate Hillary Clinton as its presidential candidate.

The newly disclosed breach at the DCCC may have been intended to gather information about donors, rather than to steal money, the sources said on Thursday.

It was not clear what data was exposed, although donors typically submit a variety of personal information including names, email addresses and credit card details when making a contribution. It was also unclear if stolen information was used to hack into other systems.

The DCCC raises money for Democrats running for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The intrusion at the group could have begun as recently as June, two of the sources told Reuters. [Continue reading…]

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Angela Merkel defends Germany’s refugee policy after attacks

The Guardian reports: Angela Merkel has delivered a staunch defence of her open door policy towards refugees, insisting she feels no guilt over a series of violent attacks in Germany and was right to allow hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees to arrive last summer.

“A rejection of the humanitarian stance we took could have led to even worse consequences,” the German chancellor said, adding that the assailants “wanted to undermine our sense of community, our openness and our willingness to help people in need. We firmly reject this.”

Repeating her infamous “wir schaffen das” – we can manage it – mantra, delivered last summer at the peak of the refugee crisis, Merkel said: “I didn’t say it would be easy.”

“I said back then, and I’ll say it again, Germany is a strong country. I called it a task for the whole nation. But just as we’ve managed so much already, we’ll manage this.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military opens formal investigation into deadly July airstrike in Syria

The Guardian reports: The US military has opened a formal investigation into a 19 July airstrike in northern Syria that local and outside observers consider the deadliest coalition attack on civilians in its two-year war against the Islamic State militant group.

The strike, in the village of Tokkhar, took place during a grueling battle for Manbij, a strategically critical Syrian city, that is now in its third month.

Army Col Christopher Garver, chief spokesman for the Baghdad-based US military command, said on Wednesday that the allegations surrounding the fateful strike are “credible enough” to warrant a formal investigation. Word of the investigation comes approximately a week before an internal deadline to launch an inquiry.

The civilian casualty death toll from the strike, remains under dispute.

The UK-based monitoring group Airwars has concluded that at least 74 civilians – now that a 14-year old girl has died of her wounds – have died, but Chris Woods, the group’s lead researcher, said the total could be as many as 203.

In contrast, Garver, the US military spokesman, said he had seen figures suggesting 10-15 civilians died in the attack. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration remains silent on Russian war crimes in Syria

The Daily Beast reports: As evidence mounts that Russia is deliberately targeting civilians in Syria with cluster bombs and other anti-personnel weapons, what has long been a nagging question about Washington’s policy has now taken on real urgency: Why is there no comment from the U.S. government is to confirm or refute the allegations of war crimes?

A Human Rights Watch report out Thursday documents how Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs on an informal fuel market outside Termanin, a village in Idlib province, on July 11, killing 10 and wounding more than 30 people. The victims were all civilians and included two who were first responders.

According to HRW, three fighter aircraft, two of them SU-34s flown only by Russia, and an SU-24 that’s in both the Russian and Syrian air force, launched eight attacks: the first two of them using cluster bombs — large canisters containing dozens of tiny bomblets that scatter through the air and across the ground. Many do not explode — at first, but may kill and maim days, months, even years later.

HRW noted that cluster bombs are “inherently indiscriminate, and repeated strikes on the target even after first responders arrived make the attack unlawful.”

Russia is not a party to the international accord banning cluster munitions, but it is party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which list indiscriminate attacks as a grave breach. So are the U.S. and Syria. The conventions not only require their signers to uphold the stated rules, but to see to it that they are upheld by others. [Continue reading…]

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Syria outlines plans for conquest of Aleppo, backed by Russian power

The New York Times reports: The Syrian government and its powerful Russian allies laid out a road map on Thursday for subduing the rebel-held districts of the city of Aleppo by opening corridors for civilians to flee and offering amnesty to insurgents who lay down their arms.

But residents and rebel fighters remained deeply skeptical of those offers, while aid groups warned of a tightening siege that could increase the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.

Control of Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city before the civil war began five years ago, has been a main objective of the conflicts’ combatants. The city has been divided since 2012, with government forces controlling the western half and rebels holding districts in the east.

But Russia’s military intervention has provided an edge to the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, allowing them to cut off access to the city’s rebel-held areas, while also making life inside them worse through shelling and airstrikes against markets, bakeries and medical facilities — leaving entire neighborhoods in ruins.

Four hospitals have been struck and scores of civilians killed in the last week, according to monitoring groups. Rebel forces also use these neighborhoods to stage attacks that have killed civilians in government-held territory. [Continue reading…]

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