Category Archives: Lands

Putin suspected of investing in Europe’s far-right populist parties

The Independent reports: President Vladimir Putin is widely suspected of being behind an extraordinary Russian cash and charm offensive that is reported to be trying to woo Europe’s far-right populist parties in order to strengthen the Kremlin’s political influence within the European Union.

In recent weeks, the Kremlin’s targets have included France’s xenophobic Front National (FN) party, and politicians from three German parties including the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Social Democrats (SPD).

Marine Le Pen’s Front National was recently granted a €9m (£7m) loan by a small financial institution called the First Czech-Russian Bank. The cash will be used to fund the party’s campaign for next year’s regional elections.

French banks were unwilling to fund the FN. “We cast our the net wide: in Spain, in Italy, in Asia and in Russia,” Ms Le Pen told Le Monde. “We have signed with the first catch and we are very happy.” In the past, Ms Le Pen has made no secret of her support for Mr Putin.

The FN’s bank loan was followed this week by the release of details from a leaked Moscow strategy paper that suggests Mr Putin has been advised to try to influence European politics by such wooing. [Continue reading…]

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The refusal to talk to hostage-takers has sucked the U.S. and U.K. into war

Jonathan Littell writes: A few months ago, the New York Times published a lengthy piece of investigative journalism detailing different countries’ policies on paying ransoms for journalists, aid workers or ordinary citizens taken hostage throughout the world, in particular by Islamist militant groups. The article pressed the case for the US and British policy of never – ever – negotiating for hostages, while presenting the covert European policy of paying ransoms as perverse, self-defeating and possibly even criminal. Its headline made this conclusion clear: “By paying ransoms, Europe bankrolls Qaeda terror.”

The article was, of course, researched and written before James Foley, and after him Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning and Peter Kassig – four other US and British citizens their governments refused to negotiate for – had their heads sawn off in front of a video camera by a masked goon claiming allegiance to the so-called Islamic State (Isis), thereby provoking the US to lead a major military intervention against the group.

France and several other countries who did negotiate on behalf of their hostages, and obtained their safe return home, have now also joined the coalition against Isis. These countries obviously believe, unlike the US and the UK, that they have a moral duty to protect their citizens, and that this principle on occasion can lead to unpleasant compromises (it might be added that Israel, a country no one would even remotely consider weak or soft on terrorism, adheres to a similar principle). However, what might be called their hostage “non-policy” (in most cases, paying ransoms and then denying it) has made it impossible for them to debate the matter constructively. While I would never advocate the systematic paying of ransoms, I feel it might be time to bring some nuance to the discussion: things are not simply black and white. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-led raid rescues eight held in Yemen

The New York Times reports: In a predawn raid on Tuesday, United States Special Operations commandos and Yemeni troops rescued eight hostages being held in a cave in a remote part of eastern Yemen by Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, officials from both countries said.

The freed captives were six Yemeni citizens, a Saudi and an Ethiopian, who were unharmed, Yemeni officials said in a statement. Earlier reports that an American hostage was freed were incorrect, according to Yemeni and American officials.

About two dozen United States commandos, joined by a small number of American-trained Yemeni counterterrorism troops flew secretly by helicopter to a location in Hadhramaut Province near the Saudi border, according to American and Yemeni officials. The commandos then hiked some distance in the dark to a mountainside cave, where they surprised the militants holding the captives.

An ensuing shootout left seven of the Qaeda militants dead, the officials said. The hostages were then evacuated in helicopters.

The rare and risky dash into Qaeda-infested territory was organized fairly quickly, within two weeks of a request from President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi of Yemen to help rescue the captives, one American official said.

The operation appeared to be at least partly an attempt to bolster the stature of Mr. Hadi, a committed but wobbling United States ally whose authority was badly undermined when a rebel group suddenly seized control of Yemen’s capital in September.

In an apparent effort to play down the leading American role in the clandestine operation, the Pentagon referred questions about what had happened to the Yemeni government. [Continue reading…]

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UK inquiry criticizes U.S. tech companies for failing to engage in counter-terrorism surveilance

Wired reports: GCHQ has direct access to “major internet cables” and has systems to monitor communications as they “traverse the internet” an official government report has revealed. The spy agency, which has been heavily criticised in the wake of the Snowden leaks, also admits that it has more data than it can handle. Despite these capabilities the government is being urged to massively expand its surveillance powers.

The details come from the Intelligence Security Committee’s inquiry (PDF) into the murder of the fusilier Lee Rigby by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale in Woolwich, London in 2013. While crucial details have been redacted for security reasons, the report still reveals the scale of the surveillance powers at GCHQ’s disposal.

Detailing GCHQ’s capabilities it notes that the spy agency has access to around “*** percent of global internet traffic and approximately *** percent of internet traffic entering or leaving the UK”. Despite the redactions the report does reveal that GCHQ is currently overwhelmed by the amount of data it has to process:

“The resources required to process the vast quantity of data involved mean that, at any one time, GCHQ can only process approximately *** of what they can access.”

The inquiry, which was set up to investigate what could have prevented Rigby’s murder, clears both M15 and M16 of any fault. It reveals that both Adebolajo and Adebowale were known to British security agencies, but that no action was taken. As both men were seen as low priority targets they were not subject to any specialist surveillance by GCHQ or any other agency.

The committee was far more damning in its assessment of an as-yet-unnamed US internet company. In December 2012 an exchange between Adebowale and an individual overseas revealed his intention to murder a soldier. The exchange was not seen by UK security services until after the attack. The report intimates that all overseas internet companies risk becoming a “safe haven for terrorists”.

“This company does not appear to regard itself as under any obligation to ensure that its systems identify such exchanges, or to take action or notify the authorities when its communications services appear to be used by terrorists.”

The Guardian identifies this company as Facebook.

The Wired report continues: “When the intelligence services are gathering data about everyone of us but failing to act on intelligence about individuals, they need to get back to basics, and look at the way they conduct targeted investigations,” said Jim Killock, executive director of online privacy advocates the Open Rights Group.

“The committee is particularly misleading when it implies that US companies do not cooperate, and it is quite extraordinary to demand that companies pro-actively monitor email content for suspicious material. Internet companies cannot and must not become an arm of the surveillance state.”

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41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: U.S. drone strikes – the facts on the ground

The Guardian reports: The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s supreme leader dismisses Western pressure on nuclear issue

The New York Times reports: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Tuesday that the West had failed to bring Iran “to its knees” over its nuclear program.

Meeting with Muslim clerics in Tehran, the Iranian capital, Mr. Khamenei dismissed the diplomatic and economic pressure that world powers have brought to bear on his country over its nuclear ambitions. He spoke the day after a deadline for concluding an agreement was extended for seven months.

“In the nuclear issue, America and colonial European countries got together and did their best to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees, but they could not do so — and they will not be able to do so,” Mr. Khamenei’s personal website quoted him as saying. [Continue reading…]

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How powerful is Iran’s President Rouhani?

One of the key questions about the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme is how powerful President Hassan Rouhani really is within Iran’s unique political system, and whether he and his colleagues have the ability to implement an international nuclear agreement despite their powerful opponents. As the country’s chief nuclear negotiator in 2003–05, Rouhani agreed to suspend uranium enrichment and open nuclear facilities to International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, but Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, unhappy with the attitude of the Western powers towards Iran, halted the implementation of these arrangements.

Rouhani and his associates emphasize that their objective is the resolution of the economic, administrative and international crises arising from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s two presidential terms. In this context, they regard their highest priority as being the conclusion of an agreement with the international community over the nuclear dossier – which has been, in their view, the major source of Iran’s economic problems in the past few years.
However, the president is faced with opposition within the ranks of some of the most influential state institutions: the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Basij volunteer militias, the intelligence-security apparatus, the judiciary and the parliament.

There is no doubt that Ayatollah Khamenei expects Rouhani to strive to achieve the removal of the sanctions against Iran, but he does not seem interested in sharing responsibility for any retreat from the nuclear programme. If he comes to the conclusion that the political costs of nuclear talks far outweigh the economic benefits they can bring, he will once again put an end to them.

See Hossein Bastani’s research paper: How Powerful is Rouhani in the Islamic Republic?

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It’s impossible to laugh off the appalling sexism of the Turkish president

Alev Scott writes: On Monday, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, made headlines by announcing at a summit on women and justice in Istanbul that women are not equal to men “because it goes against the laws of nature”.

Understandably this caused some outrage around the world but in Turkey it was outflanked by weary cynicism. We’ve heard it all before, you see, most recently in July when the deputy prime minister told Turkish women not to laugh in public. “Don’t rise to the bait, ladies,” said one (female) journalist on Twitter. Another Middle East observer called the story a “waste of news space”.

Here’s why it isn’t: Erdoğan is neither a lone madman in a padded cell, nor a Victorian uncle caught in a time warp. He’s the president of a country of 75 million people where only 28% of women are in legal employment, an estimated 40% of women suffer domestic violence at least once in their lives, and where millions of girls are forced into under-age marriage every year (incidentally, Erdoğan’s predecessor, Abdullah Gül, married his wife when she was 15). Exact figures on domestic abuse and rape are hard to come by because it is socially frowned upon to complain about husbands, and police often tell women and girls who have been threatened with murder by their partners to go home and “talk it over”. [Continue reading…]

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Why some Arabs are rejecting strict interpretations of Sharia

BBC Trending reports: A growing social media conversation in Arabic is calling for the implementation of Sharia, or Islamic law, to be abandoned.

Discussing religious law is a sensitive topic in many Muslim countries. But on Twitter, a hashtag which translates as “why we reject implementing Sharia” has been used 5,000 times in 24 hours. The conversation is mainly taking place in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The debate is about whether religious law is suitable for the needs of Arab countries and modern legal systems.

Dr Alyaa Gad, an Egyptian doctor living in Switzerland, started the hashtag. “I have nothing against religion,” she tells BBC Trending, but says she is against “using it as a political system”. Islamists often call for legal systems to be reformed to be consistent with Sharia principles, and some want harsh interpretations of criminal punishments to be implemented. Dr Gad says she is worried about young people adopting the extremes of this kind of thinking. “You see it everywhere now, Islamic State is spreading mentally as well as physically” she told BBC Trending. [Continue reading…]

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UN: ISIS got up to $45M in ransoms

The Associated Press reports: The Islamic State group which controls a large swath of Syria and Iraq has received between $35 million and $45 million in ransom payments in the past year, a U.N. expert monitoring sanctions against al-Qaida said Monday.

Yotsna Lalji told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee that an estimated $120 million in ransom was paid to terrorist groups between 2004 and 2012.

Kidnapping for ransom “continues to grow,” she said, as demonstrated by the money the extremist group calling itself the Islamic State has collected, between $35 million and $45 million in the past years.

She said in recent years that al-Qaida and its affiliates have made kidnapping “the core al-Qaida tactic for generating revenue.” She pointed to an October 2012 recording in which al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri incites militants worldwide to kidnap Westerners. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Rudaw reports: The Islamic State (ISIS) has taken captive dozens of family members of Iraq’s defense minister in Mosul, a Kurdish official said.

Ismat Rajab, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official for the Mosul area said that on Sunday, ISIS militants arrested 78 family members of Khalid al-Obeidi, Iraq’s defense minister, among them brothers and cousins of the minister.

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OPEC said to consider sparing Iraq, Iran and Libya from oil cuts

Bloomberg reports: OPEC is considering exemptions for three nations from any potential oil-production cuts, two people with knowledge of the proposal said. Saudi Arabia’s oil minister said he doesn’t anticipate a difficult meeting when the group meets on Nov. 27 to decide its response to slumping crude.

Iraq, Iran and Libya wouldn’t have to reduce supplies should the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries agree to cut output at its gathering in Vienna, according to the people, who asked not to be identified in line with their national policies. Ali Al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, told reporters in the Austrian capital yesterday that it’s not the first time the oil market has been oversupplied.

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Will politics kill a deal on Iran?

The deadline for Iran nuclear talks has now been extended by seven months. Yesterday, Joseph Cirincione wrote:

If it were left to the negotiators, we would have a deal already. Those close to the talks say that they have crafted technical solutions that can prevent Iran from using its program to build a bomb and verify any attempt to cheat.

The track record is encouraging. Iran has fully complied with the interim agreement negotiated last November. For the first time in a decade, progress on the program has been halted and even reversed. Iran has stopped enriching uranium over 5 percent and eliminated the stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned 2 years ago could give Iran the core material for a bomb within “weeks.”

Iran is further away from a bomb today than before this interim deal. The nuclear sites are under unprecedented inspections. Some issues of compliance have arisen, but have been resolved. A comprehensive agreement could provide verifiable assurance that Iran’s program remains non-military, and impose intrusive inspections to provide substantial warning of cheating, break-out or “sneak-out.”

The main problems are political. Hardliners in Iran and the United States remain opposed to any deal. [Continue reading…]

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The embargo against Rojava

TATORT Kurdistan: Although Rojava (in northern Syria) is a mosaic of languages and cultures, regional and international powers have isolated it both economically and politically—indeed, it is now entirely on its own. To the north, Turkey has walled the region off. To the east, South Kurdistan has lined its veritable ditch with military checkpoints. To the south, the radical Islamist combat units of ISIS and the Al Nusra Front have cut the region off from the rest of Syria.

This embargo is having severe consequences for the people of Rojava.

Taken by itself, Rojava is economically quite a wealthy place. It produces 60 percent of Syria’s wheat and oil, and it raises cotton for the Syrian market. Vis-à-vis Syria it had the status of a colony, in the sense of being a source of raw materials. Rojava doesn’t have processing industries. Thus it grows and harvests grains, but it doesn’t mill them. It doesn’t refine oil but shipped it at great expense to central Syria. That, at least, was the starting situation for Rojava.

The water supply for agriculture comes partly from deep wells, but after the jihadis took over the power stations in Raqqa, those pumps — and hence farming — were threatened. But Rojavans began to use diesel generators to produce power. First they had to develop the technology to generate diesel at all. Rojava’s first winter was very hard–snow fell for the first time in several years, and there was no heating oil. But today many small generators pollute the cities. Only a few of the large ones are available, and no more can be imported because of the embargo.

Turkey and South Kurdistan (the Kurdish region of Iraq) work closely together to maintain the embargo against Rojava. They recognize that Rojavans are attempting, through a grassroots organization, to go beyond capitalist modernity and Western intervention. If the Rojava project should turn out to function, the political and social consequences will ripple throughout the Middle East. That would interfere with the strategy of the NATO states, so they support the embargo. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. air strikes in Syria driving anti-Assad groups to support ISIS

The Guardian reports: US air strikes in Syria are encouraging anti-regime fighters to forge alliances with or even defect to Islamic State (Isis), according to a series of interviews conducted by the Guardian.

Fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Islamic military groups are joining forces with Isis, which has gained control of swaths of Syria and Iraq and has beheaded six western hostages in the past few months.

Some brigades have transferred their allegiance, while others are forming tactical alliances or truces. Support among civilians also appears to be growing in some areas as a result of resentment over US-led military action.

“Isis now is like a magnet that attracts large numbers of Muslims,” said Abu Talha, who defected from the FSA a few months ago and is now in negotiations with other fighters from groups such as the al-Nusra Front to follow suit.

Assam Murad, a fighter from a 600-strong dissident FSA brigade near Homs said: “There’s no way we would fight Isis after the US military campaign against them.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS threatens last hope of Christians in Iraq

Patrick Cockburn reports: Two years ago Jalal Yako, a Syriac Catholic priest, returned to his home town of Qaraqosh to persuade members of his community to stay in Iraq and not to emigrate because of the violence directed against them.

“I was in Italy for 18 years, and when I came back here my mission was to get Christians to stay here,” he says. “The Pope in Lebanon two years ago had established a mission to get Christians in the East to stay here.”

Father Yako laboured among the Syriac Catholics, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, who had seen the number of Christians in Iraq decline from over one million at the time of the American invasion in 2003 to about 250,000 today. He sought to convince people in Qaraqosh, an overwhelmingly Syriac Catholic town, that they had a future in Iraq and should not emigrate to the US, Australia or anywhere else that would accept them. His task was not easy, because Iraqi Christians have been frequent victims of murder, kidnapping and robbery.

But in the past six months Father Yako has changed his mind, and he now believes that, after 2,000 years of history, Christians must leave Iraq. Speaking at the entrance of a half-built mall in the Kurdish capital Irbil where 1,650 people from Qaraqosh have taken refuge, he said that “everything has changed since the coming of Daesh (the Arabic acronym for Islamic State). We should flee. There is nothing for us here.” When Islamic State (Isis) fighters captured Qaraqosh on 7 August, all the town’s 50,000 or so Syriac Catholics had to run for their lives and lost all their possessions.

Many now huddle in dark little prefabricated rooms provided by the UN High Commission for Refugees amid the raw concrete of the mall, crammed together without heat or electricity. They sound as if what happened to them is a nightmare from which they might awaken at any moment and speak about how, only three-and-a-half months ago, they owned houses, farms and shops, had well-paying jobs, and drove their own cars and tractors. They hope against hope to go back, but they have heard reports that everything in Qaraqosh has been destroyed or stolen by Isis. [Continue reading…]

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Graft hobbles Iraq’s military in fighting ISIS

The New York Times reports: One Iraqi general is known as “chicken guy” because of his reputation for selling his soldiers’ poultry provisions. Another is “arak guy,” for his habit of enjoying that anis-flavored liquor on the job. A third is named after Iraq’s 10,000-dinar bills, “General Deftar,” and is infamous for selling officer commissions.

They are just a few of the faces of the entrenched corruption of the Iraqi security forces, according to Iraqi officers and lawmakers as well as American officials.

The Iraqi military and police forces had been so thoroughly pillaged by their own corrupt leadership that they all but collapsed this spring in the face of the advancing militants of the Islamic State — despite roughly $25 billion worth of American training and equipment over the past 10 years and far more from the Iraqi treasury.

Now the pattern of corruption and patronage in the Iraqi government forces threatens to undermine a new American-led effort to drive out the extremists, even as President Obama is doubling to 3,000 the number of American troops in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Afghanistan quietly lifts ban on nighttime raids

The New York Times reports: The government of the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, has quietly lifted the ban on night raids by special forces troops that his predecessor had imposed.

Afghan National Army Special Forces units are planning to resume the raids in 2015, and in some cases the raids will include members of American Special Operations units in an advisory role, according to Afghan military officials as well as officials with the American-led military coalition.

That news comes after published accounts of an order by President Obama to allow the American military to continue some limited combat operations in 2015. That order allows for the sort of air support necessary for successful night raids. [Continue reading…]

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The well-oiled politics of North Dakota

Deborah Sontag writes: In late June, as black and gold balloons bobbed above black and gold tables with oil-rig centerpieces, the theme song from “Dallas” warmed up the crowd for the “One Million Barrels, One Million Thanks” celebration.

The mood was giddy. Halliburton served barbecued crawfish from Louisiana. A commemorative firearms dealer hawked a “one-million barrel” shotgun emblazoned with the slogan “Oil Can!” Mrs. North Dakota, in banner and crown, posed for pictures. The Texas Flying Legends performed an airshow backlit by a leaping flare of burning gas. And Gov. Jack Dalrymple was the featured guest.

Traveling through the “economically struggling” nation, Mr. Dalrymple told the crowd, he encountered many people who asked, “Jack, what the heck are you doing out there in North Dakota?” to create the fastest-growing economy, lowest unemployment rate and (according to one survey) happiest population.

“And I enjoy explaining to them, ‘Yes, the oil boom is a big, big help,’ ” he said.

Outsiders, he explained, simply need to be educated out of their fear of fracking: “There is a way to explain it that really relaxes people, that makes them understand this is not a dangerous thing that we’re doing out here, that it’s really very well managed and very safe and really the key to the future of not only North Dakota but really our entire nation.”

Tioga, population 3,000, welcomed North Dakota’s first well in 1951, more than a half-century before hydraulic fracturing liberated the “tight oil” trapped in the Bakken shale formation. So it was fitting that Tioga ring in the daily production milestone that had ushered the Bakken into the rarefied company of historic oil fields worldwide.

But Tioga also claims another record: what is considered the largest on-land oil spill in recent American history. And only Brenda Jorgenson, 61, who attended “to hear what does not get said,” mentioned that one, sotto voce.

The million-barrel bash was devoid of protesters save for Ms. Jorgenson, a tall, slender grandmother who has two wells at her driveway’s end and three jars in her refrigerator containing blackened water that she said came from her faucet during the fracking process. She did not, however, utter a contrary word.

“I’m not that brave (or stupid) to protest among that,” she said in an email afterward. “I’ve said it before: we’re outgunned, outnumbered and out-suited.” [Continue reading…]

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