Category Archives: Lands

The consequences of Durand’s border blunder continue to shape world politics

Rafia Zakaria writes: By the year 1871, British officials stationed in India had learned to ride elephants. This was in fact exactly what Sir Henry Durand, Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, was doing when he fell to his death. In the sad record of the event, Sir Henry is described riding in a howdah atop an elephant while traveling through the North-West Frontier Province, ‘which was in his charge’. The elephant, which belonged to an Indian chief, was led through a covered gateway that was ‘too low for it to pass through’. As a result, Durand the younger writes: ‘My father, a man of great height, was forced backward and thrown out across a low wall, which so injured his spine that he died the same day.’

The unceremonious death of Durand the elder, the ‘man of great height’, can well be a study of the British in India at the time. They had quashed a mutiny in 1857, and conquered both the fertile province of Punjab and the southern province of Sindh. Yet they remained curiously vulnerable to surprises on the wild edge of the northwestern corner of their empire. Mortimer Durand, then in his 20s, would attempt to tame the frontier which had taken his father. It was Mortimer, and not the elephant-riding Sir Henry, who would be the architect, and namesake, of a border that remains a frontline for battles between superpowers to this day.

Durand the son arrived in India not long after his father’s death. He was searching not simply for accolades as a diplomat and colonial administrator, but also for a connection with his much adored but distant, and now late, father. Durand left his mark on the land, literally carving a border where there was none. [Continue reading…]

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Erdogan gathers top security chiefs as detentions, firings reach 60,000 across Turkey

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Bloomberg reports: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with top security officials for the first time since Friday night’s thwarted coup amid a widening purge of state institutions, and has vowed to make an “important” announcement afterward.

Following a National Security Council meeting in Ankara that began at about 1 p.m., Erdogan will also gather with ruling AK Party government ministers as well as the full cabinet in a series of meetings that could last several hours.

Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli told BloombergHT television in an interview Tuesday that measures to be announced will include a “new framework in line with the constitution” for the prosecution of the coup plotters. Erdogan’s chief adviser Cemil Ertem told Anadolu news agency there’s no plan to impose capital controls, and Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said on Twitter that policy steps taken will be “market friendly.”

The government’s crackdown in reprisal for the coup attempt has been swift and severe. Turkey has detained, suspended, fired or stripped the professional accreditation of around 60,000 people, according to Bloomberg calculations. Erdogan has blamed the foiled military intervention on supporters of U.S.-based religious leader Fethullah Gulen. As that purge extended to the country’s academic institutions on Tuesday evening, the lira weakened to within 1 percent of a record low. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey bans all academics from travel in latest post-coup measure

The Washington Post reports: Turkey issued a blanket travel ban on all academics and opened top-to-bottom investigations into military courts Wednesday as security chiefs planned the next steps in sweeping crackdowns after last week’s failed coup.

Already, the purges and probes have touched tens of thousands of people — judges, civil servants, military, police and others — as Turkey’s leaders seek to root out opponents and perceived internal dissident.

The latest moves underscored the expanding reach of the fallout.

At least 262 military judges and prosecutors were suspended as part of a full-scale investigation by the Defense Ministry into all personnel in its judiciary, the private NTV broadcaster reported without giving additional details.

The travel restrictions on educators, reported the state broadcaster TRT, came after more than 15,000 education workers were suspended and resignations were demanded for all university deans. [Continue reading…]

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Erdogan’s purge of the Gulenists is like ‘the hunt for Trotskyists under Stalin’

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David Gardner writes: The size of the cull suggests the putschists precipitated a showdown they knew was coming anyway, above all at the annual meeting of the Supreme Military Council at the beginning of August. President Erdogan was then expected to purge the army of anyone suspected of supporting Fethullah Gulen, a US-based imam who, though once his ally, has become a bitter rival in an intra-Islamist struggle.

The Gulen network, most visible through its international franchise of schools, had spent decades building up invisible clusters of power in Turkey’s police, judiciary, army and security services.

It was invaluable to Mr Erdogan in defanging the military, by fair means or foul, but once the Kemalist generals were out of the picture the former allies turned on each other with a ferocity that buckled Turkey’s institutions. One erstwhile ruling party supporter likens the witch-hunt against the Gulenists to “the hunt for Trotskyists under Stalin”. [Continue reading…]

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How can the U.S. count on a key NATO ally at war with itself?

Michael Weiss writes: Four days after Turkey’s failed coup, which left 300 dead and more than 1,400 injured, new details have emerged to suggest the putsch came closer to a successful overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan than many observers thought—and the operation could have a major impact on U.S.-Turkish military cooperation in the war against the so-called Islamic State just across Turkey’s borders in Syria and Iraq.

Aaron Stein at the Atlantic Council nails the core problem when he asks, “How can we credibly go to war with a NATO ally in coalition operations when that ally’s army is at war with itself?”

Turkey, remember, has the second biggest army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, after the United States. In the Cold War years, its borders with the Soviet Union were vital to Western strategy. In the age of jihad, the fact that its territory abuts not only ISIS-land, but Iran, gives it enormous geopolitical importance.

The putschists, it now appears, relied heavily on a key NATO installation to carry out the aerial component of their daring plot, which was spearheaded by officers in the Turkish air force. And the enormous post-coup dragnet of suspected traitors already has snared high-ranking military officials who had been responsible for securing Turkey’s frontiers and carrying out coalition policy in Syria.

Had the coup not been detected in advance by Turkish intelligence, forcing the conspiracy to be moved up in the calendar, it might well have succeeded.

According to Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkey specialist at the European Council on Foreign Relations, the head of the National Intelligence Organization, or MIT, Hakan Fidan uncovered “‘unusual activity’ within army ranks on Friday afternoon and [visited] the Chief of Staff around 5 p.m. This led to precautions and an inquiry at the senior level, forcing the coup plot to be executed at an earlier time.” CNNTurk corroborated this story.

A Sikorsky attack helicopter and putschist commandos apparently were mobilized to attack MIT headquarters in Ankara and try to kidnap Fidan.

“I think these guys missed decapitating the government by about 30 minutes and we’d have woken up on Saturday with a dead president, a surrounded parliament, and a chief of general staff in custody,” said Stein, my colleague at the Atlantic Council. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Turkey aren’t safe anymore

Jeffrey Lewis writes: Among the candidates for most iconic image of this past weekend’s attempted coup in Turkey has to be the many videos of Turkish F-16s, hijacked by the mutineers, flying low over Istanbul and Ankara. Eventually, those planes seem to have bombed the parliament. There were rumors that they considered shooting down the plane of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

What’s clear is that mutineers managed to keep the F-16s in the air only because they were able to refuel them mid-flight using at least one tanker aircraft operated out of Incirlik Air Base. Eventually Turkish authorities closed the airspace over Incirlik and cut power to it. The next day, the security forces loyal to the government arrested the Turkish commander at the base. (The images of him being escorted away in handcuffs are in the contest to qualify as the weekend’s most iconic.)

In retrospect, it is understandable why the Turkish government closed the airspace over Incirlik, even if it did temporarily disrupt air operations against the Islamic State in Syria. But that is in retrospect. In the moment, it raised a disquieting thought. There are a few dozen U.S. B61 nuclear gravity bombs stored at Incirlik. Does it seem like a good idea to station American nuclear weapons at an air base commanded by someone who may have just helped bomb his own country’s parliament? [Continue reading…]

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Erdogan’s people and the Syrians

Suzy Hansen writes: In an old part of Istanbul, in a district named Fatih for the Muslim conqueror, tucked inside ancient Byzantine walls in a neighborhood known as Karagumruk, there is a narrow barbershop with pistachio green and glittery countertops called Golden Scissors. When I visited one evening in late June, during Ramadan, every chair was occupied. The religious holiday this year required 17 straight hours of daily abstinence from eating, drinking, smoking or having sex, so just before breaking fast, at the sunset hour, a happy madness set in. Out on the street, women rushed by laden with bags; spaghetti-limbed boys, delirious with hunger and hormones, threw balls against the wall, sometimes at people’s heads. Inside Golden Scissors, men visited for a trim or a cut, given by an excitable man of 40 named Murat, who wore the long, straight beard, full-bodied pants and fez-shaped cap often seen on the devout. He was talking about the events of the previous night when Istanbul’s main airport was bombed.

“We’re very sad,” Murat said. “There’s not much else to feel. The terrorists hit the international terminal. It’s not against us.”

One of the barbershop’s windows, painted with a transliteration of the Quran’s opening words — bismillahirrahmanirrahim, “In the name of God, the most Merciful, the most Compassionate” — looked out on to the neighborhood’s main drag, Professor Naci Sensoy Street. It was like all of Karagumruk’s streets: so narrow and intimate that the pastel-colored apartments, ramshackle buildings and storefronts seemed poised to embrace. Fruit and vegetable stands spilled onto the sidewalk with their piles of strawberries, cucumbers and bananas. Men sat in groups outside on footstools, and everyone walked down the middle of the street, where the weight of a thousand eyes produces a strange feeling of both protection and surveillance. Yet Karagumruk is also known as a rough-and-tumble place of nationalistic attitudes, small-time mafias, jittery drug addicts and gunfire in the night.

Karagumruk lies within the larger district of Fatih, an AK Party stronghold, intensely loyal to its leader and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. During the recent coup attempt against Erdogan’s government, after the Ministry of Religious Affairs sent texts to imams to issue a special call to prayer, all of Fatih exploded out onto the wide-laned Vatan Avenue, a couple blocks from Karagumruk. Murat put down his newborn child to join the crowd, which included men of all ages, even little boys. When a helicopter began to hover near the AK Party headquarters in Fatih, 10 minutes from Karagumruk, the protesters rushed it, preventing it from landing. As it pulled away, it fired into the crowd, killing at least one protester and injuring others. When I asked Murat why he and his neighbors took to the streets — for Islam? for Erdogan? — he replied, “Erdogan is Islam, and Islam is Erdogan.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran supports Erdogan in effort to sway Turkey’s approach to Syria

Ali Hashem writes: Within hours after the coup attempt began late July 15, the SNSC [Iran’s Supreme National Security Council] convened to discuss developments in Turkey. Following the meeting, which was chaired by President Hassan Rouhani, Shamkhani publicly condemned the coup attempt, telling local media outlets, “We support Turkey’s legal government and oppose any type of coup — either [initiated] domestically or supported by foreign sides.” Shamkhani said, “What determined the fate of developments in Turkey were the will and presence of the [Turkish] nation and the vigilance of political parties, whose contribution thwarted this coup. Shamkhani concluded, “Our stance is not exclusive to Turkey either. We have pursued the same stance in Syria too. Our position toward all regional countries is that we always prefer people’s votes [to decide governments] rather than tribal, sectarian and hereditary governments, and this means democracy.”

“A coup in Turkey isn’t something Iran can tolerate,” another Iranian politician told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “It’s true that there are differences over Syria, and sometimes in Iraq. Yet the fact is that there is no direct problem between Iran and Turkey; on the contrary, [bilateral] relations are always advancing for the better. Besides, Iran is opposed to any kind of change by force, and especially when the government [in question] is democratically elected.” The Iranian politician added, “The most important thing is that this experience [the coup attempt] might be an opportunity for Mr. Erdogan to understand the situation in neighboring Syria.”

Indeed, multiple Iranian officials, including Ali Akbar Velayati — foreign policy adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — brought up Syria in their condemnation of the coup attempt in Turkey. While condemning the coup, Velayati — a former foreign minister — said he hopes “the Turkish government will respect the views and votes of the Syrian people and allow them to decide their own government.” It was a clear message from Iran to Turkey regarding Syria and the future of the struggle in the region. For five years now, Iranian officials have on repeated occasions stated that they have been trying to engage the Turks on a path to address the situation in Syria, and while unsuccessful, have never given up on this approach. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey sends U.S. evidence of coup plot

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration’s receipt on Tuesday of a cache of documents from Turkey as part of Ankara’s demand for the extradition of a U.S.-based cleric resident it blames for instigating last week’s failed coup formally kick-starts a lengthy process that holds far-reaching implications for the U.S.-led fight against Islamic State and for relations between two key allies.

Turkish officials said the material, sent by email, contains evidence that would prove Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in Pennsylvania for nearly two decades, was behind the attempted coup.

Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told reporters that government evidence shows that “a clique” of Mr. Gulen’s followers serving in the Turkish army carried out the failed coup.

In response, Mr. Gulen called Turkey’s extradition demand “ridiculous, irresponsible and false” and said he had nothing to do with the “horrific” failed coup.

“Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today once again demonstrated he will go to any length necessary to solidify his power and persecute his critics,” Mr. Gulen said. “I urge the U.S. government to reject any effort to abuse the extradition process to carry out political vendettas.”

The White House said the Justice Department had begun to review the documents as part of a process that ultimately would require U.S. federal court action for approval of an extradition, while distancing President Barack Obama from the final decision. [Continue reading…]

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Jihad and the French exception

Farhad Khosrokhavar writes: Whether Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who killed more than 80 people during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, was an agent of the Islamic State or an unhinged loner who borrowed the group’s jihadist symbols, the slaughter raises the same fundamental question: Why do so many more attacks of this magnitude occur in France than in other European countries?

Belgium has also been hit recently, but less often. In Britain and Spain no terrorist attack has killed more than 10 people in over a decade. In Germany, there hasn’t been a major attack at all.

Failures in the French security and intelligence services cannot account for the difference, because communication problems afflict such services throughout Europe. The answer lies elsewhere: When it comes to jihad, too, there is a French exception.

France’s distinctiveness arises in part from the ideological strength of the idea the nation has had of itself since the French Revolution, including an assertive form of republicanism and an open distrust of all religions, beginning, historically, with Catholicism. This model has been knocked around over the years, first by decolonization, then by decades of economic hardship, the growing stigmatization of cultural differences, the fervent individualism of new generations and globalization, which has narrowed the state’s room for maneuver.

Above all, France hasn’t been able to solve the problem of economic and social exclusion. Its system, which is too protective of those people who have jobs and not open enough to those who don’t, breeds angst all around. Young people in the banlieues, marginalized and with few prospects, feel like victims. They become prime targets for jihadist propaganda, often after a stint in prison for petty crimes. [Continue reading…]

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These Brexiters will grind our environment into the dust

George Monbiot writes: The more urgent the environmental crisis becomes, the less we hear about it. It exposes the economic policies of all major parties – whether neoliberal or Keynesian – as incompatible with the times in which we live. To remark on what we are doing to the living planet is to fall into cognitive dissonance. It is easier to ignore it.

This is the spirit in which our new prime minister has engaged with our greatest predicament. Climate change clashes with the economic model, so let’s scrub it from the departmental register. Wildlife is collapsing and, at current rates of soil erosion, Britain has just 100 harvests left. So let’s appoint an extreme neoliberal fiercely opposed to constraints on industry as secretary of state for the environment. When the model is wrong, adjust the real world to make it fit.

I do not see the European Union as a lost Avalon. It brought us much that is good, such as directives that enable us to hold our governments to account for their environmental failures. But the good things it has done for the living world are counteracted – perhaps much more than counteracted – by a few astonishing idiocies. They arise from remote, unresponsive authority that is accessible to corporate lobby groups but not to mere mortals. In some respects the Brexit campaigners were right – though generally for the wrong reasons. [Continue reading…]

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Turkish government expands massive purge of opponents following coup attempt

The Associated Press reports: The Turkish government on Tuesday escalated its wide-ranging crackdown against people it claims have ties to the alleged coup plotters, firing nearly 24,000 teachers and Interior Ministry employees across the country and demanding the resignations of another 1,577 university deans.

The dismissals touched every aspect of government life.

Turkish media, in rapid-fire reports, said the Ministry of Education fired 15,200 people across the country, the Interior Ministry fired 8,777 employees and Turkey’s Board of Higher Education requested the deans’ resignations. In addition, 257 people working at the office of the prime minister were dismissed and the Directorate of Religious Affairs announced it had sacked 492 staff including clerics, preachers and religious teachers.

Tuesday’s firings come on top of the roughly 9,000 people who have been detained by the government, including security personnel, judges, prosecutors, religious figures and others. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency says courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in the coup attempt. Dozens of others were still being questioned. [Continue reading…]

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‘What is FaceTime? Why don’t I have it?’ asked one of Erdoğan’s ministers

The Guardian recounts the events during the coup attempt in Turkey: President Erdoğan himself was at the resort of Marmaris, but had left the residence where he was staying some 20 minutes before coup plotters attacked it. Around 25 soldiers in helicopters descended on a hotel there on ropes, shooting, in an apparent attempt to seize him just after Erdoğan had left, broadcaster CNN Turk said.

But as he flew from Marmaris on a business jet, two F-16 fighter jets locked their radar targeting system on the president’s plane, according to an account first reported by Reuters and later confirmed to the Guardian.

The jets didn’t fire after the presidential plane’s pilot told the fighter jet pilots over the radio that it was a Turkish Airlines flight, a senior counter-terrorism official told the Guardian.

But that came later. At around 9pm, General Mehmet Dişli, the brother of a long-serving MP with the ruling AK party, allegedly gave the order that set the coup in motion, sending army special forces officers to arrest the military’s senior command. Tanks began rolling out into the streets of Ankara, and an hour later they had closed down Istanbul’s Bosphorus and Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridges.

Cemalettin Haşimi, a senior adviser of prime minister Binali Yıldırım, watched it all with a sense of foreboding. At 10.24pm, after surveying besieged Ankara, he walked into the office of the prime ministry’s undersecretary.

“Is it real?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s real,” came the reply. “But we are not sure if it’s within the chain of command or just a group in the army.”

By 10.37pm they had conferred with Yıldırım, who was in Istanbul, deciding to declare it an attempted coup on national television. They called TRT, but 10 minutes later the channel was overrun. So Haşimi called the private channel NTV, and minutes later Yıldırım was denouncing the plot.

Meanwhile, there were chaotic scenes in Ankara and Istanbul. A statement appeared on the military’s website and was circulated by email declaring it had taken control to restore democracy, feeding into the fears of government officials who worried the military chain of command had endorsed the takeover. Haşimi claimed that judges aligned with the coup had begun calling on associates to adhere to the military’s demands.

The national intelligence building and the police headquarters were attacked from the air. In the latter, helicopters had targeted the intelligence department in the top three floors of the facility, unleashing a hail of shattered glass and concrete that still scars the building.

“It was a nightmare,” said Murat Karakullukcu, a police official who spent the night at the headquarters through the attack and had served at UN peacekeeping missions in Kosovo. “Our first thought was how to survive, and then we started shooting at the helicopters with small arms.”

Back at the prime ministry, despair was setting in. They had resolved to make a final stand in the parliament, when Erdoğan appeared on a live broadcast at 12.37am on a reporter’s iPhone, exhorting the people to defend democracy.

“What is FaceTime? Why don’t I have it?” asked one of the ministers in attendance.

“That was the moment when the psychology were reversed and we thought we were going to win,” said Haşimi. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. holds split view of cleric Erdogan blames for Turkish coup

The Wall Street Journal reports: [Fethullah] Gulen’s championing of Turkish democracy and nonviolence discredits to many the idea that the spiritual leader could have played a role in the coup, even if followers within the military did.

Still, supporters of Mr. Gulen have directly challenged Mr. Erdogan in recent years.

Their break was sealed in 2013, said Turkey watchers, when Gulenist media and supporters in the judiciary and police force made public tapes implicating Mr. Erdogan and other members of his government in an alleged kickback scheme. Mr. Erdogan’s government has responded by purging the ranks of both institutions in recent years.

Mr. Gulen, in the past, hasn’t made secret his hope that his supporters, who promote Turkish nationalism and Islamic values, would gradually dominate the ranks of the country’s bureaucracy.

“You must move into the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers,” Mr. Gulen said in a famous 1999 sermon to his supporters that was broadcast on Turkish television. “You must wait until such time as you have got all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institution in Turkey.”

Mr. Erdogan said Monday that his government is days away from compiling evidence to submit to the U.S. for Mr. Gulen’s extradition, and once more demanded Washington hand him over. While toning down previous statements by his government—his prime minister said over the weekend that any country refusing to hand over Mr. Gulen would be in a “war” with Turkey—Mr. Erdogan nonetheless was insistent.

“We are strategic partners, we are model partners,” Mr. Erdogan said in a CNN interview. “And the U.S. has to extradite that individual to Turkey. I do hope that the U.S. will do that.” [Continue reading…]

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Afghan teenager who attacked passengers on German train ‘wanted revenge’ for friend’s death

BBC News reports: Prosecutors in Germany say a teenager who attacked train passengers with an axe in Wuerzburg had learnt that a friend had been killed in Afghanistan, and wanted to get revenge.

The 17 year-old, who arrived in Germany a year ago as an unaccompanied refugee, injured four people, two critically, in the attack on Monday evening.

He was shot dead by police as he fled. [Continue reading…]

Deutsche Welle reports: The Afghan teenager, who travelled to Germany unaccompanied to seek asylum, had been staying with a foster family in the town of Ochsenfurt. The assault sparked concerns among other Afghan asylum seekers in Germany who now fear it could further delay their asylum application process.

“I condemn the incident in the strongest of words. I also want to stress that it is an act of an individual and it should be treated as such,” said 19-year-old Abdullah, who has been living in Germany for six months.

Abdullah is worried that the situation for Afghan asylum seekers could deteriorate even further following a series of attacks by radicalized Muslims across the world.

“It is becoming worse for Afghan asylum seekers, especially after what happened recently in the US and France. People in Europe will now have a more skeptical view of the refugees,” said 27-year-old Jawid, another asylum seeker.

Jawid, who like many other Afghans has only one name, was referring to the recent terrorist attacks in these countries – the Orlando shooting in the US which killed 49 people, and the truck attack in the French city of Nice that claimed 84 lives. The Orlando shooter was also of Afghan origin.

But these incidents are isolated cases and should not be attributed to all Afghan migrants, said Zargar Haroon, a refugee. “The German people should understand that it is the same violence that made us flee our own country,” he added. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Germany’s “welcoming culture” that defined 2015 has largely disappeared, and Monday’s attack could mark another significant new development in the country’s public debate about refugees.

Skepticism had particularly risen after the sexual assaults of about 1,200 women on New Year’s Eve, which put the country into a shock mode for weeks and sparked a backlash against refugees after authorities said that many of the suspects were asylum seekers from North Africa.

So far, concerns focused primarily on young male refugees who had come to the country alone. Monday’s axe-attack has raised new questions over whether German authorities are too overwhelmed to provide adequate support for those refugees, and particularly for unaccompanied minors.

Authorities in Bavaria, the southern German region where the attack occurred, said on Tuesday that they had put a particular focus on Salafist recruitment efforts of unaccompanied minors for months. It was unclear whether those efforts had been taken based on specific information indicating that recruiters were targeting minors, or whether they were part of more general precautions.

“Maybe we need to take care of unaccompanied minors even more so that they can overcome their trauma,” said Friedhelm Hofmann, the bishop of Würzburg, which is located in the proximity of where the attacker lived. Hofmann was quoted by local German newspapers as saying that it would be wrong to put all asylum seekers under general suspicion, following the attack. [Continue reading…]

At a time when there is a global refugee crisis — a crisis that has been exacerbated in the Middle East by Western interventionism and anti-interventionism — the Western attitude towards refugees fleeing conflict has ranged from compassionate, to charitable, to fearful.

There is a prevailing sentiment that to the extent that the needs of refugees are met, refugees themselves are expected to be grateful for whatever help they receive. No doubt, most are.

But suppose the Trump mentality — xenophobic, fearful, and mean-spirited — was applied to all people in need: to children with behavioral problems, teenagers in foster care, the homeless, drug addicts, victims of domestic violence, and so forth.

Suppose that whenever an individual from such a segment of the population committed an act of violence or other crime, the public and political response was to declare that we can’t help these people. There would be no social services. There would be no philosophy of care. The guiding principle upon which society would function would be that those in need should be shunned and cast aside. There would in effect be no such thing as society.

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Nice attacker had fascination with extreme violence

The Wall Street Journal reports: The man who killed 84 people in Nice was a violent drinker and drug taker with an “unbridled sex life” who developed a fascination with Islamic State and other terrorist propaganda, prosecutors said as they deepened their probe into whether a broader network fostered his radicalization.

François Molins, the chief Paris prosecutor overseeing the investigation into the Bastille Day attack, said Monday that police haven’t found any evidence that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel explicitly pledged allegiance to Islamic State or had links to any people associated with the Sunni Muslim militant group.

However, the prosecutor painted a picture of a man who underwent a rapid transformation in the weeks leading up the massacre and became suddenly enthralled with extremist messages and ultra-violent images.

Data recovered from Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s computer included pictures of militants draped in Islamic State flags and corpses as well as photos of Osama bin Laden and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the head of an al Qaeda-aligned group called Murabitun. His computer also turned up searches for “horrible car accidents” and “shock videos,” Mr. Molins said. [Continue reading…]

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Boris Johnson says Assad must go if Syrians’ suffering is to end

The Guardian reports: Boris Johnson has said Bashar al-Assad cannot remain in power in Syria as he prepares for his first talks as the British foreign secretary on Tuesday with his US counterpart, John Kerry.

Johnson, who had previously argued Assad could help defeat the Islamic State (Isis) in Syria, made the statement within days of being appointed the UK’s top diplomat by its new prime minister, Theresa May.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph in December, Johnson, then mayor of London, said the west could not afford to be picky in its choice of allies since Isis in Syria could not be defeated without terrestrial forces.

“We need someone to provide the boots on the ground; and given that we are not going to be providing British ground forces – and the French and the Americans are just as reluctant – we cannot afford to be picky about our allies,” he wrote.

“We have the estimated 70,000 of the Free Syrian Army (and many other groups and grouplets); but those numbers may be exaggerated, and they may include some jihadists who are not ideologically very different from al-Qaida.

“Who else is there? The answer is obvious. There is Assad, and his army; and the recent signs are that they are making some progress. Thanks at least partly to Russian airstrikes, it looks as if the regime is taking back large parts of Homs. Al-Qaida-affiliated militants are withdrawing from some districts of the city. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so.”

In a statement before Tuesday’s talks, Johnson said: “I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this.”

The official Foreign Office view is that Assad can stay only for a short period as part of a transitional government. [Continue reading…]

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