Category Archives: Lands

Russian airstrikes leave ‘thousands facing starvation’ in rebel-held Aleppo

The Observer reports: The most senior civic leader in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo has condemned the west for failing to stop Russian airstrikes cutting off the city and warned of a disastrous humanitarian crisis within weeks.

A fortnight after President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, with Russian air support, cut the only road into rebel-held Aleppo, it is claimed a water shortage is affecting hospitals. Brita Haji Hasan, leader of the Aleppo city council, said that the situation was deteriorating rapidly and that he believed the rebel-held areas could only hold out for “two to three months” before people started to die in their thousands.

“We have reserves, stores, but Aleppo is home to 326,000 people who are besieged,” Haji Hasan said. “It is not a small city, it is an industrial city. We can keep going for two to three months, but then people will starve in large numbers. We are facing a major humanitarian crisis and nobody is helping us. Everyone is just watching. Most of the civilians already dying now are women and children.”

The head of delegation for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Syria, Marianne Gasser, told the Observer that the effects of the siege were already beginning to show in Aleppo’s remaining hospitals. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The folly of Obama’s disengagement doctrine

Thanassis Cambanis writes: A generational war has engulfed the Levant. The ruination of Iraq and Syria is akin to a core meltdown within the Arab state system, with consequences that already have rocked the world: new wars flaring across the Middle East, political ferment in Turkey, a global refugee crisis, and the rise of the Islamic State group, to name just a few.

Today we can begin the sad work of taking inventory of an American presidency that aspired to a humane and humble foreign policy. President Barack Obama didn’t start the Levantine conflagration — that ignoble credit belongs to his predecessor — but he has kept America fighting in Iraq and deployed forces in Syria to support a vast, billion-dollar covert proxy effort. All to little effect.

The long, horrific war that President George W. Bush launched in March 2003, with his illegal invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, has shattered the cradle of civilization beyond all recognition. During the subsequent occupation, U.S. officials dismantled the pillars of the Iraqi state, including its military and bureaucracy, and then stood by as newly empowered sectarian warlords and mob bosses tore apart the country. Many wars flared simultaneously in Iraq, some of which spread to neighboring Syria after the popular uprising sparked there in 2011.

President Obama’s signal intellectual and policy contribution was his minimalist response towards the chaos left behind by Bush. American policy at turns sought to contain the implosion of Syria and the ongoing fighting in Iraq, and at others accelerated or tried to steer the conflict, often by trying to balance ethnic or sectarian militias in a manner that, perhaps inadvertently, deepened the hold of sectarian warlords.

The president’s lackluster attitude has poisoned much of the serious policy conversation in Washington. His policies have spread the spurious conviction that whatever happens in the Middle East is not a core U.S. or international interest, but rather a sad and regional affair. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Munich killer was troubled, but had no terrorist ties, Germany says

The New York Times reports: He had been bullied at more than one school. He played violent video games, and developed a fascination with mass shootings. He kept a copy of the German edition of “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters,” a study by an American academic psychologist, and he was treated for psychiatric problems.

Somewhere along the way, Ali Sonboly got his hands on a 9-millimeter Glock handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition for it. And at 5:52 p.m. on Friday, at a McDonald’s in Munich a few miles from where he lived with his mother, father and brother, he started shooting.

Mr. Sonboly, 18, moved on to a shopping mall across the street, then to the top level of an adjacent parking garage. By the time his rampage was done, he had killed eight other young people and one middle-aged person. Then, in front of two police officers, he killed himself with his own gun, the police said. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: A copy of a German translation of the 2009 work, by the American academic Peter Langman, was found by police in the bedroom of the gunman, identified as Ali Sonbaly.

The book examines the factors that combine to turn young people into mass murderers. It classifies 10 school killers into three groups: psychopathic, psychotic, and traumatised.

The 10 include the Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot dead 12 students and one teacher in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999; and the Virginia Tech gunman, Cho Seung-hui, who killed 32 people at the university in April 2007.

Katherine Newman, a professor of sociology at Princeton University and senior author of the book Rampage: the Social Roots of School Shootings, described Why Kids Kill as a dispassionate but clinically powerful analysis.

“It provides an interior view of the mind of rampage school-shooters that helps us understand the origins of the narcissism, paranoia, sadism, and thwarted rage that appears to motivate them … We come to understand the differences between shooters who are psychopaths and those who are schizophrenics, and why these distinctions matter,” she said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

NATO allies respond to Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. might not protect them from Russia

The Washington Post reports: Donald Trump has long suggested that he takes a skeptical view of the United States’ alliances. However, in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday evening, the Republican presidential nominee went further than before, appearing to suggest that the United States should not be required to automatically defend NATO allies if they are attacked.

Trump specifically pointed to the Baltic states that sit near Russia’s borders and often complain of belligerence from Moscow. He said they would be helped only if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us.” For some in those in the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — the American businessman’s comments provoked confusion and surprise.

“Estonia is of 5 NATO allies in Europe to meet its 2% def expenditures commitment,” Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves wrote on Twitter, referring to the percentage of gross domestic product that NATO members are expected to spend on defense.

The Estonian president also pointed to his country’s role in the war in Afghanistan as proof of the country’s commitment, retweeting a message that said Estonia had one of the highest casualty rates per capita in that conflict. “Estonia’s commitment to our NATO obligations is beyond doubt and so should be the commitments by others,” the Estonian Foreign Ministry added in an emailed statement.

“We take our commitments seriously,” Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said in Washington, where he was attending meetings to coordinate military action against the Islamic State. “We hope and expect that all our allies, big and small, take their commitments the same.”

“There is no reason to doubt NATO’s commitment to the core function of the Alliance — collective defense,” Latvian Defense Minister Raimonds Bergmanis wrote on Twitter.

A more pointed tone was taken by Ojars Eriks Kalnins, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Latvia’s Parliament, who called Trump’s remarks “dangerous” in comments also reported by Diena newspaper. Kalnins noted that it was unclear whether Trump was talking about the spending commitments or about generally being helpful to the United States.

“Too bad the NY Times didn’t ask Trump if he would defend NATO member Slovenia if attacked,” the U.S.-raised Latvian politician wrote on Twitter, referring to the Eastern European state where the Republican nominee’s wife, Melania Trump, was born and has family. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Politicians to blame for rise of ‘respectable racism’ in Britain, says Lady Warsi

The Guardian reports: Politicians have allowed xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism to enter the mainstream as a result of their toxic and divisive campaigning, according to Lady Warsi.

The Conservative peer and former party co-chair told the Guardian she was deeply worried about the current political climate, claiming a surge in “respectable racism” was feeding the far right.

“I was still disgusted but more comfortable with the racism of the 70s and 80s that was overt and thuggish, than this new form of respectable xenophobia where it is done in political circles, journalism and academia,” she said.

Warsi argued that the EU referendum and London mayoralty campaigns had helped create a climate in which people feel it is acceptable to tell long-established British communities “it’s time for you to leave”. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Turkey’s president is destroying the democracy that Turks risked their lives to defend

erdogan

The Economist: Much is unknown about the attempted military coup in Turkey on the night of July 15th. Why was it botched so badly? How far up the ranks did the conspiracy reach? Were the putschists old-style secularists, as their initial communiqué suggested; or were they followers of an exiled Islamist cleric, Fethullah Gulen, as the government claims?

But two things are clear. First, the people of Turkey showed great bravery in coming out onto the streets to confront the soldiers; hundreds died (see article here and here). Opposition parties, no matter how much they may despise President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, united to denounce the assault on democracy. Better the flawed, Islamist-tinged strongman than the return of the generals for the fifth time since the 1960s.

The second, more alarming conclusion is that Mr Erdogan is fast destroying the very democracy that the people defended with their lives. He has declared a state of emergency that will last at least three months. About 6,000 soldiers have been arrested; thousands more policemen, prosecutors and judges have been sacked or suspended. So have academics, teachers and civil servants, though there is little sign they had anything to do with the coup. Secularists, Kurds and other minorities feel intimidated by Mr Erdogan’s loyalists on the streets.

The purge is so deep and so wide — affecting at least 60,000 people — that some compare it to America’s disastrous de-Baathification of Iraq. It goes far beyond the need to preserve the security of the state. Mr Erdogan conflates dissent with treachery; he is staging his own coup against Turkish pluralism. Unrestrained, he will lead his country to more conflict and chaos. And that, in turn, poses a serious danger to Turkey’s neighbours, to Europe and to the West.

The failed putsch may well become the third shock to Europe’s post-1989 order. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 destroyed the idea that Europe’s borders were fixed and that the cold war was over. The Brexit referendum last month shattered the notion of ineluctable integration in the European Union. Now the coup attempt in Turkey, and the reaction to it, raise troubling questions about the reversibility of democracy within the Western world — which Turkey, though on its fringe, once seemed destined to join. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How Erdogan’s erstwhile allies turned into an existential threat

Mustafa Akyol writes: When Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., came to power in 2002, they felt threatened by the hard-core secularists who have dominated Turkey’s military since the days of Ataturk, the father of the Turkish republic. Mr. Erdogan viewed the Gulenist cadres in the state as an asset, and an alliance was born. The Erdogan government supported Gulenist police officers, prosecutors and judges as they went after secularists. Starting in 2007, hundreds of secularist officers and their civilian allies were jailed.

This witch hunt was driven by Mr. Erdogan’s political agenda, but the Gulenists were even more aggressive than the A.K.P. More worrying: Some of the evidence turned out to be overblown. Two secular journalists and a police chief who exposed the fake evidence, and blamed the “The Imam’s Army,” were soon themselves imprisoned on bogus charges.

“How can they justify using fake evidence to blame innocent people?” I once asked my disillusioned Gulenist friend. “Since their end goal is so great,” he said, referring to the movement’s global, apocalyptic ambition, “they think all means are justified.”

It eventually became clear why the Gulenists had been so fervent in their persecution of the secularists: They wanted to replace them. Many of the officers who reportedly took part in last week’s coup attempt had been promoted thanks to a major purge of the military in 2009 that supposedly saved Mr. Erdogan from a coup.

By 2012, the old secularist guard had been quelled and the Gulenists and the A.K.P. were left more or less alone to run Turkey. It took less than two years before the two Islamist groups developed distrust and, ultimately, enmity. This tension came to a head in December 2013, when Gulenist police officers and prosecutors arrested dozens of government officials in a corruption investigation, most likely in the hope of toppling Mr. Erdogan, who condemned the inquiry as a “coup attempt.” At the time, this sounded like a self-serving exaggeration.

But the bloody plot of July 15 is far more destructive than anything Turkey has seen in recent years. Notably, the plot came as Mr. Erdogan was supposed to be planning a major purge of suspected Gulenists from the military. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Inside a failed coup and Turkey’s fragmented military

Aaron Stein writes: The recent coup attempt in Turkey revealed profound political cleavages in the Turkish armed forces. The coup pitted a minority — but nevertheless significant — faction of the Turkish military against the majority of the country’s armed forces, which remained loyal to their commander in chief, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The coup nearly succeeded in achieving what, in retrospect, appears to have been its primary objective: the killing or capture of Erdogan, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, and Hakan Fidan, the chief of the country’s intelligence agency, MIT. The plotters, using a number of well-placed insiders, did manage to take the chief of the general staff, Hulusi Akar, hostage. The clashes resulted in 240 deaths. Turkish government officials allege that the plot was hatched by followers of Fetullah Gulen, a self-exiled Turkish cleric, currently living in Pennsylvania.

The following account remains incomplete and relies on a Whatsapp conversation between some of the coup plotters, open source data, compiled by blogs like The Aviationist, as well as discussions I have had with Turkey based journalists and colleagues, all whom prefer to remain anonymous. I relied on pro-government sources, including state-owned and government aligned media outlets, but sought to compensate for their biases in my analysis. The complete story has yet to be told and all of the details have yet to be released publicly.

The story of the coup suggests a relatively large plot that drew support from numerous parts of the Turkish Armed Forces, spanning various commands around Turkey. The number of senior officers involved, including the commander of Incirlik air force base where U.S. aircraft are now based for the fight against the Islamic State, suggest that the Turkish military is divided. The narrative following the coup is that this was a small, ill-conceived group of plotters who failed to overthrow the elected government, but this narrative is at odds with information coming out about the extent of the plot. This was a larger and far more credible attempt than has thus far been reported.

The fact that this was relatively well planned — if hastily implemented — coup attempt has several implications — namely that the Turkish military’s senior leadership is deeply factionalized, with one sizeable minority of officers willing to use force, even though their decision risked civil war. This suggests that Turkey is unstable and faces serious challenges in the near term in ways that will surely impact American and Western security interests in the Middle East and Europe. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘I was an ISIS jihadist — until they arrested and tortured me’

Michael Weiss writes: Now in exile in Mersin, on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey, the 31-year-old Abu Omar laid out a story that was equal parts Midnight Express and Darkness at Noon.

It purports to be a first-hand account of an ISIS prison system, which is every bit as gruesome as you’d imagine it to be. His account is also a useful documentary insight into how an organization that once thrived on its shrewd guerrilla intelligence and counterintelligence tradecraft, able to spot informants, spies, and sleepers, and find agents with whom to infiltrate and vitiate rival factions, has come to resemble all totalitarianisms by devouring its own.

Originally from Kafr Zita in Hama province, which, among other things, would later be the site of a deadly chlorine and ammonia gas attack by the Assad regime, Abu Omar was a house painter by trade before the revolution began — a revolution that was supposed to be gloriously concluded by now.

Instead, the uprising is entering its sixth year as an endless series of slow-burning civil wars.

Abu Omar became a protestor in 2011 after the Syrian security services and military opened fire on others carrying banners calling for economic and social reforms in the spring of 2011. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Erdoğan may be divisive, but a coup in Turkey would have been devastating

Fawaz A Gerges writes: Of all the coverage of the attempted military coup against the Erdoğan government, the many “what if” have received hardly any scrutiny. For instance, if the coup had succeeded, the fallout would have been seismic for Turkey, the Middle East and the western security architecture, particularly Nato.

Even die-hard opponents of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, including secularists and the Kurds, were vehemently opposed to the coup for fear of the unrest and instability it would have undoubtedly caused at home and in the region. The Turkish people do not have fond memories of four military interventions in Turkish politics in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, which exacted a heavy toll on state and society.

If the uprising had succeeded, it would have been likely that the military would have suspended the democratic process in Turkey and brutally persecuted Erdoğan and his allies, plunging the country into civil strife. The deep historical tensions that exist between Turkey’s military, which views its role as the guardian of the secular state, and Erdoğan, whose AKP party has its roots in moderate Islam, would have escalated into all-out war. Entrenched in both Syria and Iraq, Islamic State and al-Qaida would have found a fertile breeding ground in another conflict zone. Political instability in Turkey would have been a godsend to Isis jihadis. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How Turkey’s military coup failed

The Associated Press reports: Around 4 p.m. [on Friday afternoon] Turkish national intelligence flagged to the chief of staff that they had intercepted communications among a number of military personnel indicating that a coup was planned. With many of the military’s senior officers attending a wedding and the president vacationing at a seaside resort, and while a military shake-up was imminent, the coup plotters felt it was an opportune time to strike.

A former Turkish military officer, now a security analyst, Metin Gurcan, wrote that the top brass decided to move to avert a coup by closing airspace and forbidding military units from leaving their barracks. Sensing that their moves were detected and getting wind of the meeting of loyal officers, the coup plotters moved up their plans from later that evening. Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s spokesman, said the plotters kidnapped Gen. Hulusi Akar, the chief of military staff, after he learned of the suspicious activities.

Gurcan said the soldiers leading the coup relied on WhatsApp to communicate commands and coordinate moves. Family members of soldiers detained after the coup attempt told reporters the soldiers thought they were being sent to training. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘We feared the worst’: Turkey’s failed coup a relief for Syrian refugees

The Guardian reports: When tanks rolled across Istanbul and Ankara on Friday night, at the start of Turkey’s botched coup, many in the country were frightened. But few in Turkey had more reason to be afraid than its 2.7 million Syrians, the largest Syrian diaspora community in the world.

“When we first heard about the coup attempt, we felt an unprecedented fear,” remembers Hussein Qassoum, a 30-year-old logistics manager living in Istanbul. “Most of my friends started asking: ‘Which other country should we go to now?’”

Like many Turks, Syrians feared the violence that broke out in the early hours of Saturday might spiral into something more sustained. But Syrians also had more specific concerns about what might happen to them if the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was toppled.

Life is hard for Syrians in Erdoğan’s Turkey, where they do not have full rights. Despite recent legislative changes, the vast majority are not allowed to work. Hundreds of thousands of Syrian children are not in school, with many working in sweatshops instead. Syrians are denied official refugee status, since Turkey does not recognise key parts of the UN refugee convention.

But Erdoğan’s government has at least given about 2.7 million Syrians a basic level of sanctuary. None of his political opponents has promised to be as accommodating and there is a fear that without Erdoğan, life could get even tougher for Syrians in Turkey. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Civilian deaths from U.S. airstrikes in Syria now ‘nearing Russian levels’

Charles Davies writes: somehow, someway, the news from Syria invariably manages to get worse, for those not yet fatigued by the routine of atrocity.

“It’s the worst week we’ve ever tracked,” Chris Woods, director of the monitoring group Airwars, told The Daily Beast. He was referring to a threat that emerged nearly two years ago: U.S. airstrikes, aimed at the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, but exacting a deadly toll on those stuck between ostensibly religious and ostensibly secular extremists.

Ahmad Mohammad, a 24-year-old Syrian activist, described it as a “massacre”: On July 19, over 90 civilians in the northern Syria village of Tokhar, just outside the town Manbij, were killed by suspected U.S. airstrikes as a U.S.-backed coalition, the Syrian Democratic Forces, is fighting to reclaim the area along the Turkish border from the Islamic State.

When the uprising in Syria began in 2011, Mohammad said his goal was to spread “news of the revolution”; in 2016 his activism takes the form of “documenting abuses” — in this case, he sent along photos of women and children being buried in a mass grave, “human beings like all of us,” he said, whose only offense was living in a town occupied by terrorists from abroad.

In a statement, U.S. Central Command confirmed it carried out airstrikes in the area. “We are aware of reports alleging civilian casualties in the area,” it said. “If the information supporting the allegation is determined to be credible, we will then determine the next appropriate step.”

The CENTCOM-supported SDF, meanwhile, has dismissed reports of mass casualties in Manbij as “fabricated news” circulated by groups who “support terrorism,” according to a statement obtained by the Kurdish media network Rudaw.

Independent monitors and anti-ISIS activists on the ground, by contrast, insist that air support for the SDF has killed hundreds of innocents.

According to Airwars, the human beings dumped in that hole, along with corpses on streets and under rubble in and around Manbij that could not be afforded even a mass burial, bring the civilian death count from U.S.-led airstrikes in the area up to at least 190 since May 31.

Local activists claim the number is at least 368, and an activist with the Free Manbij Media Center told The Daily Beast the death toll on July 19 alone was “more than 150 people, mostly women and children” who were “killed while in their homes.”

The latest airstrikes have grabbed international headlines, but they are nothing new for Syrians. Since the U.S.-led coalition began bombing Syria, Airwars states there are credible reports of between 682 and 942 civilian deaths, meaning that nearly a third of what the military terms “collateral damage” has occurred in the last two months. It has gotten “so bad,” Woods said, “that we’re nearing Russian levels” (between 1,098 and 1,450 “likely” dead civilians since September 2015). The U.S. has thus far confirmed just 24 civilian deaths from its campaign in Syria. Like Russia, none of its partners — Australia, Bahrain, France, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, among others — has admitted to any. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Attacker in Nice had support of several people, French prosecutors say

The Wall Street Journal reports: The man who killed 84 people in Nice on Bastille Day had the support of several people and appeared to have been plotting his attack since last year, French prosecutors said Thursday.

Paris prosecutor François Molins said he asked a judge to place five people under investigation on preliminary terrorism charges. The five are in police custody.

“The investigation has not only provided more confirmation of the premeditation of the murderous attack of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, but also establish that he had support and complicity in preparation of his criminal act,” Mr. Molins said.

Meanwhile, antiterror police conducted raids in a Paris suburb on Thursday, police officers said, as France attempts to sweep up weapons and people suspected of links to terrorism networks after the July 14 attack in Nice.

Police locked down a neighborhood in Argenteuil, a suburb 7 miles northwest of Paris, as they raided three sites, searching for weapons and explosives, one police officer said. Around 20 people were detained in the raids, another said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Turkish aid flows into besieged Gaza Strip

Al Jazeera reports: The night before Eid, Basem Abu Attia received a call from a local official with some good news: His food package was ready for pick-up.

“I was very surprised,” Abu Attia told Al Jazeera. “I wasn’t expecting anything … I had nothing to give my family, so when the aid came I was overjoyed.”

More aid from Turkey has started flowing into Gaza this week under the terms of the recent Turkey-Israel deal, after the Social Affairs Ministry spent weeks organising the material. Distribution to about 75,000 families dependent on government subsidies began on Tuesday, although delivery was previously expedited to some of the neediest families, including Abu Attia’s.

The aid package included rice, oil, olives, dates and flour – basic items that Abu Attia, who lives in the Nuseirat refugee camp, cannot afford himself. His 10 children, the youngest of whom is three, were elated, he said – “especially with the chocolates”. He hopes that later deliveries will include toys for his children.

Just a week into receiving the package, however, all that remained was a bag of rice and a can of olives.

“We need a long-term programme, and we’re hoping the Turks will help us with this,” said Talla Abu Jomaa, the Social Affairs Ministry representative in Nuseirat camp, who delivered the aid package to Abu Attia.

Uncertainty was cast over the Turkey-Israel deal after a failed coup attempt by members of the Turkish military last week. But as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerged in control, Turkish officials confirmed that the agreement remains on course. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail