Category Archives: Lands

Killing of Jordanian pilot unites the Arab world in anger

The New York Times reports: There was one sentiment that many of the Middle East’s competing clerics, fractious ethnic groups and warring sects could agree on Wednesday: a shared sense of revulsion at the Islamic State’s latest atrocity, burning alive a Jordanian pilot inside a cage.

In Syria, the government denounced the group that has been fighting it for months, but so did Qaeda fighters who oppose both the government and the Islamic State. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government for once agreed on something, the barbarity of the militant group for the way it murdered the Jordanian, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh. And in Cairo, Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of the 1,000-year-old Al Azhar institute, was so angered that he called for the Islamic State’s extremists to be “killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs cut off.”

That leading Sunni scholar’s denunciation was even harsher than similar outbursts from the region’s Shiite leaders, theologically the more traditional foes of the Islamic State.

In a way that recent beheadings of hostages had not, the immolation of Lieutenant Kasasbeh set off a regionwide explosion of anger and disgust at the extremists, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or to most Arabs by the word “Daesh.” Even more significant, in a chronically embattled region that bequeathed to the world the expression, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the Islamic State suddenly found itself friendless in the extreme.

Name almost any outrage in the Mideast in decades of them — the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the Achille Lauro hijacking, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the gassing of the Halabja Kurds, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole — and the protagonists would readily find both apologists and detractors. But with one breathtakingly vicious murder, the Islamic State changed that dynamic, uniting most of the region against it.

Martin Chulov adds: The day after the horrific images of the caged pilot being burned alive were released, the streets of the capital Amman were subdued, except for the crowds that lined the road from the airport to the royal palace to welcome home their monarch King Abdullah from his shortened visit to Washington.

Privately though, inside tea houses, universities, shopping malls and restaurants, people seethed. Radio and television stations played patriotic hymns on high rotation and all 23 minutes of the gruesome images were being widely circulated on social media. Occasionally, passions flared.

“I swear to God we will kill all those pigs,” said Musab Ibrahim, from inside a cafe in Amman’s Old City. “Whatever it takes to finish them is what we will do.”

On a nearby table, four men interrupted a card game to condemn the executioners and eulogise Kasasbeh. “He is our son, he is a hero. All of Jordan is with him and with our king,” said Yousef Barghouti, a primary school principal.

“We are all Hashemites and we are following the government with no reservations in this fight against these godless terrorists,” said another man, Yousf Majid al-Zarbi. “Have you seen that video? I mean really, how in humanity could this be a just punishment for any person?”

At intersections in the heart of Amman, street vendors sold flags and funeral bouquets prepared for Kasasbeh. There were few takers, though. A society that had been gripped for almost a month by the plight of Kasasbeh, and the pleas for mercy from his desperate parents, had seen the raw horror of his death eclipse their worst fears. Ghader Shathra, a nurse, said she had been numbed by the news and the reality that it would likely lead the country to war.

“We have watched as the region has disintegrated. We have taken in almost 2 million refugees and we have hoped it wouldn’t come our way. But sometimes you have to stand and fight. We have no option.”

Sophia Jones reports: despite the king’s vow to wage a “relentless war” against the Islamic State group — a declaration backed by many Jordanians who are demanding revenge for the pilot’s murder — there is an undeniable sense of doubt among other citizens. They question Jordan’s role in the U.S.-led air campaign desperately trying to reel in the group that has claimed large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

“I support this crisis to be solved, not Jordan fighting ISIS,” explained Souheil, a 23-year-old shopkeeper in Amman who referred to the late pilot as Jordan’s “martyr.”

Atef Kawar, a member of the Jordanian parliament representing the kingdom’s Christian minority, also expressed concerns over the United States and other Arab countries invested in combating the Islamic State group.

“I think that we should all unite as one hand to fight terrorism,” he told The WorldPost over the phone. “It’s to our country’s benefit [to be part of the coalition]. But clearly, the coalition doesn’t have a plan.”

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports: The United Arab Emirates has suspended its air attacks against the Islamic State in Syria since the capture of a Jordanian pilot who was burned alive by the jihadi group, it has emerged.

US officials confirmed that the UAE, one of the four Arab states in the anti-Isis coalition, had ceased its participation because of concerns over a lack of contingency plans to rescue downed aircrew.

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Jordan’s foreign fighter problem

Huffington Post reports: As Jordan reels from the horrific killing of one of its fighter pilots by Islamic State militants, the death also highlights how inextricably involved the country has become in the conflict in Syria.

Jordan shares an extensive border with Syria, and the proximity has made it one of the main recipients of refugees from the country, as well as a host for covert U.S.-led training of Syrian rebels. While this flow of Syrians into Jordan has raised concerns over security and strain on resources, there’s also worry over the significant number of Jordanians who have become foreign fighters in Syria.

Out of the countries adding to the militants in Syria and Iraq, few are in the same league as Jordan. According to the most recent figures by The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, Jordan has an estimated 1,500 citizens fighting in Syria and Iraq. Only Saudi Arabia and Tunisia are believed to have contributed higher numbers of militants, with high-end estimates of 2,500 and 3,000, respectively.

Both of these countries have millions more citizens to draw from as well, giving Saudi Arabia a fighters per capita ratio of 107 per million and Tunisia 280 per million, Radio Free Europe reports. Jordan’s ratio is reported as 315 per million, putting them as the top contributor of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria per capita. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS advances in Libya

Josh Rogin writes: The U.S. war against Islamic State has not yet extended to Libya. But the terror group is rapidly expanding its presence and activities there, and the embattled government is asking for Washington to include Libya in its international fight against the Islamic extremists.

Top U.S. intelligence officials have publicly stated their concerns about IS expansion in North Africa, following the group’s ramping up of its public acts of mayhem. It has taken credit for the brazen attack on the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli, which resulted in the death of 12 people including one American contractor. Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee this week that “with affiliates in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, the group is beginning to assemble a growing international footprint that includes ungoverned and under-governed areas.”

That’s no surprise to the internationally recognized Libyan government in Tobruk, which has been battling IS in several Libyan cities, including Benghazi. (It is also in a civil war against a rival government in Tripoli, the capital, under Prime Minister Omar al-Hassi.) A top Tobruk government representative told U.S. officials during a visit to Washington this week that IS expansion in Libya is much worse than what is publicly understood.

“We are seeing an exponential growth of ISIS in Libya,” Aref Ali Nayed, Libya’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates told me in an interview. “Libya, because of its resources, has become the ATM machine, the gas station, and the airport for ISIS. There is an unfortunate state of denial about all of this, and that is the most dangerous thing.” [Continue reading…]

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4,000-strong Christian militia formed to fight ISIS in Northern Iraq

Jack Moore reports: Thousands of Iraqi Christians have established their own militia and are training to fight the Islamic State (ISIS) in the Nineveh Plains of northern Iraq.

The Nineveh Plains Protection Units (NPU) has 3,000 Christian men registered to be trained, while another 500 are already training for combat. The militia was founded by the Iraqi political party, the Assyrian Democratic Movement.

Another 500 volunteers from the group are already situated in Assyrian villages in northern Iraq, the majority of which were captured by ISIS when they marched across the country last summer. Approximately 30,000 Christians have since fled the Nineveh Plains for fear of falling into the hands of the radical Islamists. [Continue reading…]

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Obama doesn’t want to upset Khamenei

Frederic C. Hof writes: When Syria’s Bashar al-Assad decided, in March 2011, that peaceful protest should be put down with lethal violence, he signed death warrants for over 200,000 Syrians. He set in motion a process that would stampede 3.5 million people out of the country, drive another 7 million from their homes within Syria, and incarcerate tens of thousands under conditions featuring torture, starvation, and sexual abuse. His over-the-top repression, replete with strong sectarian overtones, helped to resurrect al-Qaeda in Iraq from the dead and brought it to Syria in the forms of the so-called Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) and the Nusra Front. In all of this, Assad has had the unflinching and regime-saving support of Iran, which views him as an irreplaceable asset fully in the service of Hezbollah: Iran’s Lebanese missile and rocket pressure point on Israel.

Yes, Iran’s support of Assad has been “disruptive.” Tehran has helped to create the signature humanitarian abomination of the twenty-first century. The costs to the people of Syria have been unspeakable. The prices being paid by Syria’s neighbors — all friends of the United States — are dangerously out of control. Iran’s supporting role in this travesty has also burdened a humane and thoughtful US president with the prospect of a legacy tarnished forever with a Levantine Rwanda: in this case a multi-year program of mass murder whose Iranian facet may account in large measure for the failure of that president to stop or at least mitigate the slaughter.

Evidently, the Obama administration believes that “calling out” Iran and counseling it on the merits of “constructive engagement in the region” are all that can reasonably be expected of the United States so long as nuclear discussions are ongoing. Presumably, the throwing of a spanner into the Assad regime’s ability to unload barrel bombs and chlorine canisters onto residential neighborhoods with absolute impunity would upset Iran, perhaps inspiring the Supreme Leader to abandon the nuclear talks and opt instead for a new wave of economic sanctions while oil prices plunge. Seen from this don’t-rock-the-boat-with-Tehran point of view, the suffering of Syrians merits a “call out” and nothing more. [Continue reading…]

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Claims against Saudis cast new light on secret pages of 9/11 report

The New York Times reports: A still-classified section of the investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has taken on an almost mythic quality over the past 13 years — 28 pages that examine crucial support given the hijackers and that by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism.

Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify.

“I think it is the right thing to do,” said Representative Stephen F. Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts and an author of a bipartisan resolution encouraging President Obama to declassify the section. “Let’s put it out there.”

White House officials say the administration has undertaken a review on whether to release the pages but has no timetable for when they might be made public. [Continue reading…]

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Pre-9/11 ties haunt Saudis as new accusations surface

The New York Times reports: During the 1980s and ’90s, the historic alliance between the wealthy monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the country’s powerful clerics emerged as the major financier of international jihad, channeling tens of millions of dollars to Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere. Among the project’s major patrons was Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who last month became Saudi Arabia’s king.

Some of those fighters later formed Al Qaeda, which declared war on the United States and later mounted major attacks inside Saudi Arabia as well. In the past decade, according to officials of both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Saudi government has become a valuable partner against terrorism, battling Al Qaeda at home and last year joining the American-led coalition against the extremists of the Islamic State.

Yet Saudi Arabia continues to be haunted by what some suspect was a tacit alliance with Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Those suspicions burst out in the open again this week with the disclosure of a prison deposition of a former Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, who claimed that more than a dozen prominent Saudi figures were donors to the terror group and that a Saudi diplomat in Washington discussed with him a plot to shoot down Air Force One. [Continue reading…]

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As Greece rebels, the notion of debt forgiveness returns

Peter Eavis reports: Europe’s most powerful policy makers dismiss the idea, investors fear it, and it would almost certainly face fierce resistance from within the Continent’s richer countries.

Yet talk of slashing the government debt loads of European countries, starting with Greece, is back. For all the opposition, the idea has resurfaced with a vengeance in recent days as the new government in Athens, facing a cash squeeze and aiming to make life easier for its citizens, looks for immediate ways to reduce what it owes. The pressure on Greece increased on Wednesday when the European Central Bank cut off direct funding to Greek banks, forcing them to rely instead on emergency loans from the country’s own central bank. The move followed a meeting in Frankfurt between Mario Draghi, the central bank’s president, and Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s new finance minister, and appeared to signal a hard line in negotiations over debt. The E.C.B.’s announcement roiled markets in the United States late in the trading day.

At the heart of Greece’s problems is its eye-popping government debt load, equivalent to 175 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Now, as Greece’s nightmare grinds on, some economists fear that high debt levels could hamper recoveries in other countries. That is why they are pressing for policies that would alleviate the debts of other European nations, to help get the region out of its rut.

“Greece is more acute, but it is not as completely different as it is portrayed,” said Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard. The economies of Spain, Portugal and Ireland, he added, might benefit from such “haircuts” to their obligations. Podemos, a Spanish political party that has surged in popularity in recent months, wants to restructure the country’s government debt to make it less of a burden. [Continue reading…]

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Patience is better than revenge

With the burning alive of Lt. Moaz al Kasasbeh — a Jordanian fighter pilot whose gruesome death was videotaped and celebrated by ISIS and its supporters — followed by the swift execution of two prisoners in Jordan, the Middle East’s proverbial cycle of violence keeps on revolving.

Just as swiftly, Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Liberman, praised Jordan for this act of vengeance, expressing the hope that “soon other imprisoned terrorists in the kingdom will be executed as well.”

Revenge is always popular in that it briefly satisfies a visceral desire that scores can be settled — it offers the vain hope that order can be reestablished just as quickly as it was lost.

And it applies a theory of justice that has proved demonstrably ineffective throughout history.

Mitchell Prothero reports:

Jordan state television said Tuesday night that Jordanian authorities believe Kasasbeh’s killing was filmed nearly a month ago, and that that was why the Islamic State refused to provide proof that Kasasbeh was still alive during recent negotiations. That belief was consistent with tweets from rebel activists opposed to the Syrian government who posted on Jan. 8 that the pilot had been executed.

Jordan’s King Abdullah and Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh were in Washington meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry just moments before the video was made public. There was no hint that any of the men knew of the death as they exchanged pleasantries during a signing ceremony marking increased U.S. assistance – from $660 million to $1 billion – to help Jordan cope with the Syrian refugee crisis and rising energy costs.

Immediately after the ceremony, however, the video hit the Internet, and statements of condemnation and condolences began flowing from the Obama administration to Jordan. The president called it “one more indication of the viciousness and barbarity of this organization.”

Islamist groups often behead captives who’ve been convicted, fairly or not, of dire crimes in an Islamic court, and beheading is a common form of execution in Saudi Arabia, which claims the Quran as its legal code and constitution. But burning alive is a rarity, and its religious foundation was uncertain.

Jihadist supporters on social media said the justification for burning comes from a Quranic verse that authorizes Muslims to “punish with an equivalent of that with which you were harmed,” according to several postings on Twitter and other forums.

Zaid Benjamin, a Radio Sawa journalist who monitors extremists online, noted that the same scripture was invoked after a mob set fire to the bodies of four American security contractors and strung up their charred corpses on a bridge in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004. Today, Fallujah is part of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate.

At the time, mainstream Muslim scholars condemned the act, saying that Islam does not allow for the desecration of corpses. The clerics also pointed out that the second part of the verse jihadists use as justification suggests that revenge isn’t the preferred reaction: “It is better for those who are patient,” the verse states.

Here’s the complete verse from the Quran:

And if you punish [an enemy, O believers], punish with an equivalent of that with which you were harmed. But if you are patient – it is better for those who are patient.

Contrary to the widespread assumption in the West that the Middle East is governed by a philosophy of vengeance, this verse seems more than anything to be a counsel on restraint.

It says if you punish — not when you punish. And to say that the punishment should be equivalent to the harm, while also saying that patience is better, sounds much less like a call for vengeance than a call for restraint.

But if patience is better than punishment, does that mean there should be no war against ISIS? Not in my opinion.

Unopposed, ISIS will continue to advance. Even so, thus far if success can be determined by numbers, ISIS appears to be winning as its losses are more than replenished by new recruits.

That said, raw numbers might be a misleading metric upon which success can be measured.

Obviously it would be preferable if ISIS was visibly losing its appeal, but whereas last year it was ISIS’s unopposed success and its ability to create some kind of caliphate that drove its increasing popularity, those who are now flocking to its ranks are surely being drawn by their desire to die for their chosen cause. In other words, as ISIS becomes increasingly nihilistic, it appeals above all to those who see almost no value in life.

A group that terrorizes the people it wants to govern — that does things like executing children for watching soccer on TV — is demonstrating its own lack of faith in its ability to win popular support.

No doubt ISIS can continue drawing on an unfortunately abundant supply of death-hungry fanatics, but no one can construct a caliphate or any other kind of state with hands whose only skills are destructive.

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Escaped ISIS child soldier warns others not to join

Sophia Jones reports from Sanliurfa, Turkey: At age 14, Khaled held his first gun. Fifteen days later, one of the world’s most feared extremist groups sent him into battle.

Khaled remembers how heavy the Kalashnikov rifle felt, how the noise hurt his ears. He recalls the terror of waking up in the hospital after a bullet grazed the back of his neck.

Now, this quiet teenager from Syria’s eastern city of Deir al-Zour is speaking out against the jihadist group that has violently seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria. His message is simple: Don’t join the Islamic State.

Khaled is just one of scores of child soldiers in Syria. While nearly all parties in the Syrian conflict — U.S.-backed moderates, Kurdish fighters, extremist groups and regime forces alike — have been accused of recruiting and using children in combat and support roles, the Islamic State is the most infamous in this regard.

Khaled says he had no idea what was in store for him when he joined ISIS last winter.

When anti-government protests broke out across Syria in the spring of 2011, the 11-year-old wanted nothing more than to take to the streets. He watched with envy as his older brothers and cousins joined the calls for freedom, but his family forbid him from going to demonstrations — it was too dangerous for a child, they said.

They were right. Soon, the Syrian regime brutally cracked down on dissent. His family could only shield him for so long. Protest soon turned to war.

That winter, Khaled’s school shut down, and regime shelling and clashes with rebel forces made it impossible for him to play outside. So Khaled spent his days indoors, tending to housework and dreaming of life outside of the confines of his war-ravaged home.

Death and destruction was inescapable. Khaled’s world was falling apart. The conflict began killing off acquaintances, and then, his own family. A regime attack on Deir al-Zour killed his aunt and cousin, leaving other family members injured, according to Khaled. His brother and some of his cousins decided they had to take up arms, joining rebel groups aligned with the Free Syrian Army.

Months passed, and Khaled began hearing about a new rebel group. It would later become known as the Islamic State.

“I heard ISIS were kind — that they were with the revolution,” he said, his dark, sad eyes focused on the table in front of him. In a hotel lobby in this Turkish city just a short drive from ISIS territory in Syria, he recounted how he had been gravely mistaken. [Continue reading…]

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Draft of arrest warrant for Argentine president found at dead prosecutor’s home

The New York Times reports: Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor whose mysterious death has gripped Argentina, had drafted a request for the arrest of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, accusing her of trying to shield Iranian officials from responsibility in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center here, the lead investigator into his death said Tuesday.

The 26-page document, which was found in the garbage at Mr. Nisman’s apartment, also sought the arrest of Héctor Timerman, Argentina’s foreign minister. Both Mrs. Kirchner and Mr. Timerman have repeatedly denied Mr. Nisman’s accusation that they tried to reach a secret deal with Iran to lift international arrest warrants for Iranian officials wanted in connection with the bombing.

The new revelation that Mr. Nisman had drafted documents seeking the arrest of the president and the foreign minister illustrates the heightened tensions between the prosecutor and the government before he was found dead on Jan. 18 at his apartment with a gunshot wound to his head. He had been scheduled the next day to provide details before Congress about his accusations against Mrs. Kirchner. [Continue reading…]

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Gaza suffers in growing isolation

Zvi Bar’el reports: “What do they give us here? Three pitas and a little food; it’s not enough even for a small child,” Alaa Kullab complained to the Palestinian news agency Safa. He said his eight-person family, which has been living in a school in Rafah ever since this summer’s war in the Gaza Strip, received only five beds.

“We have no heaters, and we’re forbidden to use hotplates,” added Kullab, who began a hunger strike along with another resident of the school a few days ago.

More than 20,000 of the 450,000 people displaced by the war still live in schools or other shelters arranged by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Last month, UNRWA announced that it would no longer pay displaced families’ rent or fund reconstruction of their houses, because it was out of money, having received only $135 million of the $725 million it needs.

“People come to our offices crying and threatening, but we have no way to help them,” an UNRWA employee told Haaretz. “Children are freezing cold, they suffer from malnutrition and even the little food they get is unsuitable.”

Next week, cleaning workers at Gaza’s hospitals are expected to strike again, since the Palestinian government hasn’t produced the back pay it promised to persuade them to end the last 16-day strike. Some 45,000 government employees in Gaza have yet to receive their January salaries, and they may get only 60 percent, as they did last month, because Israel has frozen tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority. The PA says the transfers amount to over half the costs of these salaries.

In October, a donor conference netted pledges of $5.4 billion for Gaza’s reconstruction, but only about 2 percent of this amount has arrived. Both the reconstruction and the reopening of the border crossings, especially with Egypt, depend on implementing a reconciliation deal between Fatah and Hamas, but due to disputes between the rival organizations, this still has not happened. [Continue reading…]

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Threat of violence silences Palestinian journalists

Asmaa al-Ghoul writes: How loud is the voice you hear when you sit down to write a press report? How small is the prison cell you imagine yourself ending up in once you publish your article? The man you imagine pointing a gun at your head, is he wearing a mask? These are thoughts that lead one to delete the most important and powerful piece of information from an article. Some thoughts even lead you to delete the article entirely.

A late 2014 study by the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms found that 80% of Palestinian journalists in the West Bank and Gaza practice self-censorship of their writing.

Journalist Ghazi Bani Odeh, who conducted the survey, “The Official Media and Freedom of Expression,” told Al-Monitor that attacks and harassment, and thus fear of them, are the main causes leading journalists to censor themselves. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon loses track of weaponry sent to Yemen in recent years

The Guardian reports: Chaos in Yemen has left the US military unable to monitor the vast arsenal it has spent years providing to its Yemeni counterpart.

Yemen is now functionally leaderless after Houthi rebels took over the capital of Sana’a last month, prompting the resignation of President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The rebels are said to control the Yemeni military’s arms depots and bases, giving them effective control of US-provided and other heavy weaponry, including tanks and artillery.

The unrest has “limited our ability to conduct routine end-use monitoring checks and inspections we would normally perform”, a US defense official told the Guardian.

US military officials would not specify which military equipment it could no longer track, but in recent years the US has sold or leased equipment including helicopters, night-vision gear, surveillance equipment, military radios and transport aircraft to Yemen.

Since 2006, the US military has provided more than $400m to Yemen, according to research estimates prepared for Congress. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt turns to France for weapons with U.S. still wary of delivering military aid

Vice News: Speaking at a political conference Sunday in Cairo, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi unveiled a $1.31 billion budget for counterterrorism efforts in the eastern Sinai Peninsula, an area that has repeatedly been hit by militant attacks. Addressing politicians in the Egyptian capital, Sisi announced he is looking to France to supply Egypt with much-needed modern military equipment.

The US halted the delivery of 20 F-16 fighter jets, 125 M1-A1 battle tank kits, and 20 Harpoon cruise missiles to Egypt following the 2013 coup that ousted former President Mohammed Morsi, but 10 Apache helicopters included in the original deal were reportedly delivered last month. The US also suspended a portion of the $1.3 billion worth economic and military aid delivered annually to Egypt, though the withheld funds were released last June after Congress passed a law that requires the Egyptian government to take steps to improve human rights conditions in order to receive the aid.

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Moussaoui calls Saudi princes patrons of al Qaeda

The New York Times reports: In highly unusual testimony inside the federal supermax prison, a former operative for Al Qaeda has described prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family as major donors to the terrorist network in the late 1990s and claimed that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

The Qaeda member, Zacarias Moussaoui, wrote last year to Judge George B. Daniels of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is presiding over a lawsuit filed against Saudi Arabia by relatives of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said he wanted to testify in the case, and after lengthy negotiations with Justice Department officials and the federal Bureau of Prisons, a team of lawyers was permitted to enter the prison and question him for two days last October.

In a statement Monday night, the Saudi Embassy said that the national Sept. 11 commission had rejected allegations that the Saudi government or Saudi officials had funded Al Qaeda. [Continue reading…]

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With global attention on ISIS, Assad’s barrel bombs slaughter Syrian civilians

Syria Deeply interviews Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch: You’ve tracked the use of barrel bombs, and prior to that the use of missiles on civilian areas. What’s the state of play now?

Roth: The barrel bombs are continuing and indeed they are the principal reason why civilians are dying in Syria today. Everybody is focused on ISIS. ISIS is terrible, civilians are suffering under ISIS, but if you stand back and say, what is the principal tool being used to slaughter civilians? It’s the barrel bomb. Initially, governments don’t really want to talk about this, because they are so focused on ISIS and don’t want to do anything that would undermine the Assad government’s ability to hang on and theoretically fight back against ISIS. People don’t seem to recognize that the barrel bomb is not a military weapon. It is so imprecise that the Syrian air force doesn’t dare drop it near the front line for fear of hitting its own troops.

Barrel bombs, for those who don’t know, are typically an oil drum or some large canister filled with explosives and metal fragments that serve as shrapnel. It is dumped from a helicopter hovering at a very high altitude to avoid anti-aircraft fire. From that altitude, it can’t be aimed with any precision whatsoever – it can simply be dumped into a neighborhood, and it is neighborhoods that barrel bombs are dumped on because of the need to stay away from the front line. If you ask what is enabling the pro-regime forces to hold on, it’s now the barrel bomb.

It is a terror and an anti-civilian tool. Part of Assad’s strategy is to make life as miserable as possible for the civilians living in opposition-held areas. It’s designed to kill many and terrify the rest so they will flee and gradually depopulate the area, to make it harder for the rebels to hang on.

Syria Deeply: What’s the size and scope of the problem? [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu’s invitation to address Congress raises eyebrows among some U.S. generals

Mark Perry writes: The uniformed leaders of the U.S. military have had a testy relationship with President Barack Obama since he took office in 2009, with a number of relatively public spats revealing discord over how his administration has approached the use of military force. So it might be assumed that when a politician confronts Obama, portraying his policies on threats overseas as naive, many in the senior uniformed ranks would nod in silent affirmation. But that’s not what has happened since House Speaker John Boehner invited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Obama’s Iran policy in Congress. Instead the speech, planned for next month, has rallied senior military figures behind the president, with some warning that there’s a limit to what U.S. military officers consider acceptable criticism of the commander in chief.

Obama and his generals have clashed privately and publicly since 2009 over his plans to draw down troops and exit from Afghanistan, and a number of respected recently retired top commanders told Congress that what they called the administration’s piecemeal strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria is destined to fail. Some have also publicly recorded misgivings about Obama’s Iran strategy. Still, Netanyahu’s planned speech has prompted a number of senior military men to rally around the office of a president whose policies they regularly, if privately, question.

Serving uniformed officers are loath to comment on an inflammatory political question — “You’re inviting me to end my career,” one senior Pentagon officer told me when asked to comment on Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu, “but, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not.” But a senior Joint Chiefs of Staff officer who regularly briefs the U.S. high command was willing to speak bluntly in exchange for anonymity. “There’s always been a lot of support for Israel in the military,” the officer said, “but that’s significantly eroded over the last few years. This caps it. It’s one thing for Americans to criticize their president and another entirely for a foreign leader to do it. Netanyahu doesn’t get it. We’re not going to side with him against the commander in chief. Not ever.” [Continue reading…]

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