Category Archives: Lands

Why China celebrates Christmas

Robert Foyle Hunwick writes: There’s a joke going around: “Santa Claus was descending into China from the sky. Due to the heavy smog, he fell to the ground, but no one dared help him up. While he was still lying in the snow, his bag was ransacked for presents, and his reindeer and sleigh taken away by the chengguan. Therefore, no Christmas this year.”

While some of the humor needs context—there are digs at China’s notorious bystander effect and much-despised urban-management officials, chengguan — the larger meaning is clear. Ironic jokes about Santa’s routine being disrupted with uniquely Chinese characteristics are a sure sign that, yes, they do know it’s Christmas time in communist China.

Retailers lead the way here: An annual spending season that once focused on Chinese New Year in the winter is now bloated and elongated, stretching from the invented Singles’ Day on November 11 through February, with Christmas as a kind of hump day. Even before December, shops, streets, and hotels begin filling with slightly off-kilter Yuletide scenes: performers in elf suits play traditional cymbals while a grinning plastic Santa Claus toots a saxophone outside his gingerbread cabin. Why the sax? Theorists point to everything from the instrument’s romantic associations with the avuncular Bill Clinton jamming on one in the 1990s, to the smooth alto-sax muzak that’s the preferred soundtrack of Santa’s typical dwelling, the shopping mall.

There’s no sign of Jesus, but in many big cities, you’re still more likely to see Father Christmas’s face than that of “Uncle” Xi Jinping, as state media has characterized the country’s president, presenting a homely, familial image that’s quite at odds with the repressive manner in which he’s coldly eliminated opponents. But Xi is not above the fray himself, visiting Santa’s official cabin in Rovaniemi, Finland in 2010.

The Western religious festival is so trendy, in fact, that it may be the second-most-celebrated festival in China after the Spring Festival among young Chinese, according to research conducted by the China Social Survey Institute (CSSI), which found that 15- to 45-year-olds are the most likely to observe it. [Continue reading…]

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Escape from hell — torture, sexual slavery in ISIS captivity in Iraq

Amnesty International: Torture, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, suffered by women and girls from Iraq’s Yezidi minority who were abducted by the armed group calling itself the Islamic State (IS), highlights the savagery of IS rule.

Escape from Hell – Torture, Sexual Slavery in Islamic State Captivity in Iraq provides an insight into the horrifying abuse suffered by hundreds and possibly thousands of Yezidi women and girls who have been forcibly married, “sold” or given as “gifts” to IS fighters or their supporters. Often, captives were forced to convert to Islam.

The women and girls are among thousands of Yezidis from the Sinjar region in north-west Iraq who have been targeted since August in a wave of ethnic cleansing by IS fighters bent on wiping out ethnic and religious minorities in the area.

The horrors endured in IS captivity have left these women and girls so severely traumatized that some have been driven to end their own lives. Nineteen-year-old Jilan committed suicide while being held captive in Mosul because she feared she would be raped, her brother told Amnesty International.

One of the girls who was held in the same room as Jilan and 20 others, including two girls aged 10 and 12, told Amnesty International: “One day we were given clothes that looked like dance costumes and were told to bathe and wear those clothes. Jilan killed herself in the bathroom. She cut her wrists and hanged herself. She was very beautiful; I think she knew she was going to be taken away by a man and that is why she killed herself.” The girl was among those who later escaped.

Wafa, 27, another former captive, told Amnesty International how she and her sister attempted to end their lives one night after their captor threatened them with forced marriage. They tried to strangle themselves with scarves but two girls sleeping in the same room awoke and stopped them.

“We tied the scarves around our necks and pulled away from each other as hard as we could, until I fainted…I could not speak for several days after that,” she said.

The majority of the perpetrators are Iraqi and Syrian men; many of them are IS fighters but others are believed to be supporters of the group. Several former captives said they had been held in family homes where they lived with their captors’ wives and children. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS female bloggers draw European women to Syria

Brenda Stoter reports: On Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, young Muslim women who live in the so-called Islamic State portray their lives as a sort of Disneyland for Muslims. IS’ recruitment campaign is mostly conducted online, and female jihadists have proved to be some of the best propagandists. They share pictures of their dinners, write blogs about their husbands and encourage others to join them by posting sentimental status updates about the advantages of living in an Islamic state. They even offer to help plan the trips of those interested in joining them.

Photographs of cozy dinners, jars of Nutella and romantic updates about their husbands are not the only things Western women share on social media, however. Those who join IS also learn how to handle an AK-47 (“women here don’t ask for jewelry, they go for a kalash”), excitedly show off such items as suicide belts (“a gift from my husband”) and glorify the murder of opponents by decapitation (“I can watch those video’s over and over again”).

Although most of the women fulfill such traditional roles as taking care of the household and giving birth and raising children, they are also allowed to work. An English-speaking woman who runs the Diary of a Muhajirah wrote on her Facebook page that women can work as teachers, doctors and nurses. “The Islamic State is planning more programs which sisters can benefit from. And if you are single and you don’t want to get married, no one will force you. You can stay in an all-sisters hostel and get a monthly allowance,” she wrote. [Continue reading…]

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Inside ISIS-controlled Mosul

BBC News reports: Juergen Todenhoefer spent six days in the IS city of Mosul in Iraq, travelling there via Raqqa, in Syria.

Mr Todenhoefer said he found IS followers highly motivated and supportive of the group’s brutality.

He said the spread of fighters meant they were hard targets for air strikes.

A former German politician, Juergen Todenhoefer is the only outsider to have travelled deep into IS territory and back. And, considering that several Westerners have recently been beheaded, he did so at terrifying risk.

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ISIS captures Jordanian pilot after warplane downed in Syria

Reuters reports: Islamic State fighters took a Jordanian pilot captive after his warplane was downed in northeastern Syria on Wednesday, the first captive taken from the U.S.-led coalition battling the jihadi group.

Jordan’s armed forces said one of its pilots had been captured after his plane fell during an air raid over the northeastern Syrian province of Raqqa on Wednesday.

“Jordan holds the group (IS) and its supporters responsible for the safety of the pilot and his life,” an army statement read on state television said. It did not say whether the plane was shot down.

Islamic State social media accounts published pictures purportedly of the warplane’s pilot being held by the group’s fighters as well as images of what they said was his Jordanian military ID card. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. strikes in Syria ease ISIS pressure on moderate rebels

McClatchy reports: Assisted by intelligence from moderate rebel fighters on the ground, the U.S. carried out remarkably accurate airstrikes against Islamic State targets north of Aleppo over the weekend that destroyed bases hidden in farm buildings and killed dozens of militants, rebel officials and local activists said Tuesday.

But because the airstrikes were not coordinated with the U.S.-backed rebels and caught them by surprise, the rebels were unable to advance on the ground, the officials and activists said.

“The rebels didn’t advance,” said one rebel official. “Each party remains where it is.”

“Had there been coordination, there could have been an advance,” a second rebel official told McClatchy. He added: “We’re still wondering what is U.S. strategy against the Islamic State in Syria. They seem in no rush to solve the problem.”

These and other rebel officials insisted on anonymity so as not to jeopardize their relationship with the U.S. government.

There was no question, however, that the airstrikes – the U.S. Central Command said three airstrikes were carried out against 10 targets – also benefited rebel forces. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian rebels prepare to defend ruined Aleppo as troops and militias close in

The Guardian reports: The last road into rebel-held east Aleppo carves though a mile-wide paddock between an abandoned village and a looming ridgeline. Behind each of them Syrian troops advance slowly, hidden from view.

Trucks, cars and motorbikes bump through the green field, gouging deep muddy holes that are starting to resemble trenches, before joining a gravel path along a sand berm that shelters the final passage into what is left of the city.

After two-and-a-half years of war, the Aleppo at the end of the makeshift road is a wasteland where only gunmen, soldiers and a few desperate civilians now tread. Those who dare do so tentatively, knowing that the defining fight for one of the cradles of civilisation is now imminent.

Whoever wins the coming battle for northern Syria will go a long way towards victory in the war that has levelled much of the country and set the neighbourhood ablaze, threatening borders drawn a century ago and shattering several millennia of co-existence from the Mediterranean coast to Iraq’s Ninevah plains. [Continue reading…]

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Cyberwar on North Korea could be illegal

Shane Harris reports: North Korea’s limited connection to the Internet was temporarily severed Monday, just three days after President Barack Obama promised a “proportional” response for what he said was Pyongyang’s brazen hacking of Sony.

It’s too soon to say whether the United States knocked the Hermit Kingdom offline, or persuaded China to do it, or whether the North Koreans did it to themselves. One hacktivist group appears to be taking responsibility for the denial-of-service strike that targeted mostly North Korean government-operated sites.

But the outage has raised the question of what that proportional response would look like, and whether it would be legal. [Continue reading…]

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Yazidi women tell of being used as sex slaves by ISIS

Paul Wood reports: The Yazidi religious minority community in Iraq says 3,500 of its women and girls are still being held by the so-called Islamic State (IS), many being used as sex slaves. A few have managed to escape and here tell their harrowing stories.

One day in August, Hannan woke to find her family frantically packing. She was taken aback: she had not realised the jihadists calling themselves “the Islamic State” were so close.

Outside, the main street in her hometown of Sinjar was choked. Her family joined other Yazidis “running and crying”, bullets flying overhead, she says.

Rain drums on the tent as she tells me her story, nervously twisting her fingers.

“Hannan” is not her real name. None of the former captives I spoke to could bear to be identified. Hannan is 18 and wants to be a nurse, a future almost snatched away by IS. [Continue reading…]

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Erdogan calls birth control ‘treason’ and says role of women is to be mothers

AFP reports: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described efforts to promote birth control as “treason”, saying contraception risked causing a whole generation to “dry up”, reports said Monday.

Erdogan made the comments on Sunday, directly addressing the bride and groom at the Istanbul wedding ceremony of the son of businessman Mustafa Kefeli, who is one of his close allies.

He told the newly-weds that using birth control was a betrayal of Turkey’s ambition to make itself a flourishing nation with an expanding young population.

“One or two (children) is not enough. To make our nation stronger, we need a more dynamic and younger population. We need this to take Turkey above the level of modern civilisations,” Erdogan said.

“In this country, they (opponents) have been engaged in the treason of birth control for years and sought to dry up our generation,” Erdogan said. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s threat to the Kurds in Syria and northern Iraq

Jamestown Terrorism Monitor: The Kurds in both Iraq and Syria have managed to attain significant degrees of autonomy in the last two decades. With the advances of the Islamic State organization, the Kurds have also become one of the West’s most prominent allies against the militant Salafist group. This has made them a target of the Islamic State, whose attacks on the Kurds have led to increased pan-Kurdish cooperation and more Western support for the Kurds despite opposition from Turkey.

There are many ideological differences between Kurdish nationalist groups and the Islamic State organization, however, the Islamic State have said that they are not against Kurdish Muslims per se. As Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s spokesman, explained in September: “We do not fight Kurds because they are Kurds. Rather we fight the disbelievers amongst them, the allies of the crusaders and Jews in their war against the Muslims” (Reuters, September 22). The Islamic State organization, like other jihadist groups, has also recruited some Kurds, largely from Iraq, to fight against the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga and the Syrian Kurdish Yekiniyen Parastina Gel (YPG – People’s Protections Units), a Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

In Islamic State operations in both Iraq and Syria, Kurdish jihadists have been used as suicide bombers and foot soldiers and have led operations in Kurdish territories. Reportedly, Abu Khattab al-Kurdi (i.e. the Kurd) was the top commander of the Islamic State’s attack on Kobane. An Islamic State Kurdish bomber, Abd al-Rahman al-Kurdi, also blew himself up in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, on November 19 (AP, November 5). Most of these Kurds have been recruited in the Kurdish Islamist stronghold of Halabja in Iraq, where Kurdish and American forces uprooted Islamist militants in 2003. Recent regional instability has resulted in Kurdish Islamists again posing a threat to the KRG and YPG, now by joining the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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Islamophobia on the rise across Germany

Der Spiegel reports: Felix Menzel is sitting in his study in an elegant villa in Dresden’s Striesen neighborhood on a dark afternoon in early December. He’s thinking about Europe. A portrait of Ernst Jünger, a favorite author of many German archconservatives is hung on the wall.

Menzel, 29, is a polite, unimposing man wearing corduroys and rimless glasses. He takes pains to come across as intellectual, and avoids virulent rhetoric like “Foreigners out!” He prefers to talk about “Europe’s Western soul,” which, as he believes, includes Christianity and the legacy of antiquity, but not Islam. “I see serious threats coming our way from outside Europe. I feel especially pessimistic about the overpopulation of Africa and Asia,” says Menzel, looking serious. “And I believe that what is unfolding in Iraq and Syria at the moment is a clear harbinger of the first global civil war.”

Menzel, a media scholar, has been running the Blaue Narzisse (Blue Narcissus), a conservative right-wing magazine for high school and university students, for the last 10 years. His small magazine had attracted little interest until now. But that is about to change, at least if Menzel has his way. “The uprising of the masses that we have long yearned for is slowly getting underway,” he writes on his magazine’s website. “And this movement is moving toward the right.”

In Dresden, at least, the sentiments expressed in the Blaue Narzisse have become more palpable in recent weeks. Protests staged each week on Mondays initially attracted only a few dozen to a few hundred people, but more recently the number of citizens taking to the streets has reached 10,000. The group, which calls itself Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (and goes by the German acronym PEGIDA), demonstrates against economic migrants and a supposed “cultural foreign domination of our country” — whatever is meant by that.

What is going on in Germany, the world’s second most popular destination for immigrants? Has the open-mindedness for which Germans had long been praised now ended? Are we seeing a return of the vague fear of being overwhelmed by immigrants that Germany experienced in the 1990s, when a hostel for asylum seekers was burned down? How large is the new right-wing movement, and will it remain limited to Dresden, or is it spreading nationwide?

So far, protests held under the PEGIDA label in under cities — like Kassel and Würzburg — have attracted only a few hundred people at a time. In fact, some of the protests attracted significantly larger numbers of counter-demonstrators. And while thousands of “patriotic Europeans” aim to take to the streets in Dresden again in the coming days, their counterparts in Germany’s western states are taking a Christmas break. PEGIDA supporters are waiting until after the holidays to return to the streets in cities like Cologne, Düsseldorf and Unna.

Still, many Germans share the protestors’ views, according to a current SPIEGEL poll. Some 34 percent of citizens agreed with the PEGIDA protestors that Germany is becoming increasingly Islamicized. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. to accept thousands of Syrian refugees for resettlement

Barbara Slavin reports: US Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration Anne Richard says the United States will dramatically increase the number of Syrian refugees allowed to resettle permanently in the United States from about 350 this year to close to 10,000 annually as the crisis grinds on into its fifth year.

While the number is minuscule given a total Syrian refugee population of 3.3 million, it reflects US recognition that the civil war in Syria is not about to end anytime soon and that, even when it does, Syria will need years for reconstruction and reconciliation.

In an interview with Al-Monitor Dec. 22, Richard said, “People are surprised we haven’t taken more.” She said the initial low numbers reflect the reality that “resettling refugees is never the first thing you do when people are fleeing an emerging crisis” and that other countries — in particular Germany and Sweden — have “stepped forward and offered to take a lot” of Syrian refugees. [Continue reading…]

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Libya’s descent into chaos: Warring clans and its impact on regional stability

Jamestown Terrorism Monitor: Since the outbreak of the Libyan revolution in 2011 and the collapse of Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s Jamahiriya (Republic of the Masses), Libya has fallen into a process of constant and ever deeper chaos, which has lately reached a new climax. This conflict, however, has its roots in some specific features characterizing Libya as a “nation-state”: while Libya may be a nation-state on paper, it has yet to become a proper and unified national society. Indeed, the very roots of the revolution in Libya lie in the significant structural, regional and territorial imbalances that have characterized Libya since its establishment and the dominance of parochial and narrow interests.

Indeed, regional and political imbalances – the neglected east and south against the stronger and richer west – were key in setting the landscape in which the Libyan revolution took place. Revolts started in Benghazi and moved east to west, with a long military stalemate occurring in Ras Lanuf, historically a sort of informal cultural border dividing Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Geographically, this was similar to what happened with the 1969 revolution. That revolution was a reaction against the dominance of the east, Benghazi and the royal circle. Among the 12 members of the Revolutionary Command Council, which led the revolution and then acted as the supreme authority in Libya between 1969 and 1975, only four were from the east.

Moreover, another factor explaining the complete collapse of order in post-Qaddafi Libya is the complete lack of any reliable state institution. Despite being the “Republic of the Masses”, Qaddafi’s Jamahiriya was essentially based on his sole, complete personal rule: 42 years under this system left Libya as a sort of institutional desert following the collapse of the regime. The regime overlapped the state and as a result the boundaries, both conceptual and organizational, between the two became soon nonexistent. That explains why, in Libya, the fall of the regime caused the fall of the state, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt where the regimes, not the state, collapsed. However, this lack of institutional capacity must be seen in a longer-term perspective: that was a structural feature of Libya as a nation-state since its foundation. Libya at independence did not have a stable state apparatus and oil and external revenue allowed the rulers to avoid building a bureaucratic state, moving from the rentier patronage of King Idris and the Senussi monarchy to the distributive republic led by Qaddafi. [Continue reading…]

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In 2008 Mumbai attacks, piles of spy data, but an uncompleted puzzle

Sebastian Rotella, James Glanz and David E. Sanger report: In the fall of 2008, a 30-year-old computer expert named Zarrar Shah roamed from outposts in the northern mountains of Pakistan to safe houses near the Arabian Sea, plotting mayhem in Mumbai, India’s commercial gem.

Mr. Shah, the technology chief of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terror group, and fellow conspirators used Google Earth to show militants the routes to their targets in the city. He set up an Internet phone system to disguise his location by routing his calls through New Jersey. Shortly before an assault that would kill 166 people, including six Americans, Mr. Shah searched online for a Jewish hostel and two luxury hotels, all sites of the eventual carnage.

But he did not know that by September, the British were spying on many of his online activities, tracking his Internet searches and messages, according to former American and Indian officials and classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

They were not the only spies watching. Mr. Shah drew similar scrutiny from an Indian intelligence agency, according to a former official who was briefed on the operation. The United States was unaware of the two agencies’ efforts, American officials say, but had picked up signs of a plot through other electronic and human sources, and warned Indian security officials several times in the months before the attack.

What happened next may rank among the most devastating near-misses in the history of spycraft. The intelligence agencies of the three nations did not pull together all the strands gathered by their high-tech surveillance and other tools, which might have allowed them to disrupt a terror strike so scarring that it is often called India’s 9/11.

“No one put together the whole picture,” said Shivshankar Menon, who was India’s foreign secretary at the time of the attacks and later became the national security adviser. “Not the Americans, not the Brits, not the Indians.” [Continue reading…]

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Stuxnet-like cyberattack on German steel factory causes ‘massive damage’

IDG News Service reports: A German steel factory suffered massive damage after hackers managed to access production networks, allowing them to tamper with the controls of a blast furnace, the government said in its annual IT security report.

The report, published Wednesday by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), revealed one of the rare instances in which a digital attack actually caused physical damage.

The attack used spear phishing and sophisticated social engineering techniques to gain access to the factory’s office networks, from which access to production networks was gained. Spear phishing involves the use of email that appears to come from within an organization. After the system was compromised, individual components or even entire systems started to fail frequently.

Due to these failures, one of the plant’s blast furnaces could not be shut down in a controlled manner, which resulted in “massive damage to plant,” the BSI said, describing the technical skills of the attacker as “very advanced.” [Continue reading…]

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Did North Korea really attack Sony?

Bruce Schneier writes: I am deeply skeptical of the FBI’s announcement on Friday that North Korea was behind last month’s Sony hack. The agency’s evidence is tenuous, and I have a hard time believing it. But I also have trouble believing that the U.S. government would make the accusation this formally if officials didn’t believe it.

Clues in the hackers’ attack code seem to point in all directions at once. The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks. Korean language in the code also suggests a Korean origin, though not necessarily a North Korean one since North Koreans use a unique dialect. However you read it, this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It’s easy to fake, and it’s even easier to interpret it wrong. In general, it’s a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the “evidence” to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.

In reality, there are several possibilities to consider: [Continue reading…]

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ISIS morale falls as momentum slows and casualties mount

The Financial Times reports: An activist opposed to both the Syrian regime and Isis, and well known to the Financial Times, said he had verified 100 executions of foreign Isis fighters trying to flee the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, Isis’s de facto capital. Like most people interviewed or described in this article, he asked for his name to be withheld for security reasons.

“After the fall of Mosul in June, Isis was presenting itself as unstoppable and it was selling a sense of adventure,” a US official said. He added that the dynamics have changed since the US launched air strikes in August and helped break the momentum of the Isis advance, which has helped stem the flow of foreign recruits — though he warned that the change of mood “doesn’t affect the hardcore people of Isis”.

Analyst Torbjorn Soltvedt, of Verisk Maplecroft, a UK-based risk analysis group, said morale may be taking a hit as militants grapple with the shift from mobile army to governing force.

“Before they were seizing territory, forcing armies in Iraq and Syria to retreat,” he said. “Now they’re basically an occupying force trying to govern.”

After flocking to Syria and Iraq during Isis’s heady days of quick victories, some foreigners may also be questioning the long, gruelling fight ahead.

Mr Solvedt said his organisation has had many reports of foreign fighters, including Britons, contacting family members and state authorities seeking ways to return home.

Isis members in Raqqa said the organisation has created a military police to crack down on fighters who fail to report for duty. According to activists, dozens of fighters’ homes have been raided and many have been arrested. [Continue reading…]

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