Category Archives: Lands

In shake-up, Iraqi premier replaces 36 commanders

The New York Times reports: The recently installed Iraqi prime minister removed 36 military commanders in a sweeping shake-up on Wednesday, in his first public attempt to put his mark on the Iraqi security forces battling to retake territory from Islamic State militants.

Despite receiving more than $25 billion in American training and equipment over the past 10 years, the Iraqi military buckled, and thousands of troops fled, in the face of the Islamic State’s rapid advance across Iraq this summer. Only half the remaining units are considered fit to fight, according to American officials.

But even as Iraqi and American officials are racing to expand the security forces and turn their losses around, they are having to struggle with a widespread perception of the Iraqi Army as a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent institution. [Continue reading…]

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Anders Behring Breivik and the demagogic ‘critics of Islam’

Adam Shatz writes: Before he went on his mass killing spree in 2011, Anders Behring Breivik was a regular at the Palace Grill in Oslo West. He looked harmless: another blond man trying to chat up women at the bar. ‘He came across as someone with a business degree,’ one woman recalled, ‘one of those West End boys in very conservative clothes.’ Indeed he had tried his hand at business, though he’d never completed a degree, or much of anything else. And he was a West End boy, a diplomat’s son. Yet there was the book he said he was writing, a ‘masterwork’ in a ‘genre the world has never seen before’. He refused to say what it was about, only that it was inspired by ‘novels about knights from the Middle Ages’. He did little to hide his obsessions. One night in late 2010, he was at the Palace Grill when a local TV celebrity walked in. Breivik launched into a speech about the Muslim plot against Norway, and about the Knights Templar. The bouncers threw him out. On the street, he said to the celebrity: ‘In one year’s time, I’ll be three times as famous as you.’

This story appears in Aage Borchgrevink’s superb book, and it plays like a scene from a horror film because we know the barfly will make good on his promise. Breivik was hard at work on 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, a 1518-page screed exposing the Muslim plot to conquer Christendom. In large part a compendium of extracts from counter-jihadist websites, 2083 was posted online on the day of the attacks under the name ‘Andrew Berwick’, one of Breivik’s several aliases. The signs of Europe’s creeping Islamisation were everywhere, he argued, from Bosnian independence to the spread of mosques in Oslo. Muslim men were having their way with European women, while declaring their own women off-limits to European men. Breivik and his fellow white Norwegians were ‘first-generation dhimmis’ – a term for non-Muslim minorities under Ottoman rule which, like most of his ideas, he’d found online – in what was fast becoming ‘Eurabia’. Worst of all, Europe’s ‘cultural Marxist’ elites had caved in, like a woman who would rather ‘be raped than … risk serious injuries while resisting’. Even the Lutheran Church – ‘priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres’ – had surrendered. Fortunately, there were ‘knights’ like Breivik who had the courage to defend Europe’s honour.

2083 isn’t just a manifesto: it’s also the would-be inspirational memoir of a man who has rejected the ‘Sex and the City lifestyle’ in favour of his sacred duty. The leap from empty hedonism to murderous heroism is also a recurring theme in the biographies of the young men who leave Bradford, Hamburg, Paris and Oslo for Syria. As Borchgrevink writes, Breivik’s hatred of Islam didn’t prevent him from proposing a tactical alliance with al-Qaida against the liberal state he hated even more. The desires that motivated him scarcely differed from those of his jihadist enemies: revenge, adventure and fame. [Continue reading…]

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China, U.S. agree limits on emissions, but experts see little new

Reuters reports: China and the United States agreed on Wednesday to new limits on carbon emissions starting in 2025, but the pledge by the world’s two biggest polluters appears to be more politically significant than substantive.

As China’s President Xi Jinping agreed to a date for peak CO2 emissions for the first time and also promised to raise the share of zero-carbon energy to 20 percent of the country’s total, President Barack Obama said the United States would cut its own emissions by more than a quarter by 2025.

At its best, the announcement threw the political weight of the world’s two biggest economies behind a new global climate pact to be negotiated in Paris next year.

But the United States has already pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and it’s not clear if the new proposals will pass a Republican-dominated Congress. [Continue reading…]

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The effectiveness of Israel’s iron fist

Larry Derfner writes: Those who oppose Israel’s iron fist tactics against violent Palestinian resistance argue, as a rule, that it’s impractical, it won’t work, you can’t repress a nation forever, and the only solution is to end the injustice that provokes the violence. But this is a sentimental view that comes, I think, from a need to believe that justice always wins in the end. The fact is that Israeli iron fist tactics have worked pretty damn well in keeping the Palestinians down over the last decade, and there’s a very strong chance that the tactics Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out Tuesday night – overwhelming armed force, house demolitions, draconian punishments for rioters and their parents, and more – will work again this time.

The iron fist put down the Second Intifada in 2004/5, and Israel has enjoyed remarkable quiet from the West Bank since then, also from East Jerusalem until this summer. A crucial difference between the first two intifadas and the current violence is that those earlier upheavals were organized; this one isn’t, which makes it much easier for Israel to overcome.

The iron fist has also worked in Gaza since Operation Cast Lead nearly six years ago. Israel has had to “mow the lawn” twice more since then, most recently over the summer, but otherwise the Palestinians in the Strip have been largely harmless in their cage.

What are the chances that this time around, Palestinian resistance will force Israel to begin reversing course, with an eye toward ending the occupation? I think they’re extremely slim. Even though it’s true that the First Intifada led to the Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada led to the disengagement from Gaza, those were different times in a different Israel. [Continue reading…]

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The new American Jewish struggle over Israel: Hawks versus ultra-hawks

Peter Beinart writes: The most important trend in American Jewish politics today is the collapse of the center. The American Jewish establishment isn’t only being challenged by left-leaning groups like J Street. It also faces a less widely recognized, but equally powerful, challenge from the right.

Consider this week’s spat between Sheldon Adelson and Abraham Foxman. At an event last Sunday, Adelson’s fellow oligarch, Chaim Saban, said Israel needed to support a Palestinian state if it wanted to remain a Jewish democracy. To which Adelson replied, “I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy. I think God didn’t say anything about democracy. God talked about all the good things in life. He didn’t talk about Israel remaining as a democratic state, otherwise Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state — so what?”

So what? With that question, Adelson lobbed a grenade at the American Jewish establishment. When the American Jewish establishment defends Israel, it doesn’t talk much about God. That’s because while theological language plays well among conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, it tends to alienate secular liberals. Indeed, it alienates some of the secular liberals who populate American Jewish organizations. As a result, America’s mainstream Jewish groups generally justify Israeli policy not via religion but via America’s civil religion — democracy — a creed that enjoys unquestioned reverence across the political spectrum. By claiming democracy doesn’t matter, Adelson was sabotaging the case for Israel that the American Jewish establishment has been making for decades. Which is why one of that establishment’s senior members, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, called Adelson’s remarks “disturbing on many levels.” Foxman added that, “the founders of Israel got it exactly right when they emphasized the country being both a Jewish and democratic state. Any initiatives that move Israel away from either value would ill-serve the state and people of Israel.”

The problem is that Israel has been pursuing just such an initiative for almost a half-century now. Since 1967, it has established dominion over millions of West Bank Palestinians who lack citizenship or the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.

Far from apologizing for that control, or seeking to undo it, Israel’s current government is making it permanent. And the Israeli leaders most committed to the settlement project freely acknowledge that for them, democracy is not the highest value. In the words of Moshe Feiglin, deputy speaker of the Knesset, “The State of Israel was created for the Jewish people, and its democracy is supposed to serve the Jewish people. If this state acts against the interests of the Jewish people, there is no longer any point in its existence, be it democratic or not.” [Continue reading…]

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Palestinian rift reopens as Abbas blames Hamas for bombings

Reuters reports: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday accused his Islamist Hamas rivals of carrying out a series of bombings against officials loyal to him in Gaza last week, in a move sure to harm already floundering unity efforts.

A series of small explosions targeted the homes and vehicles of officials from Abbas’s Fatah movement on Friday, causing minor damage but no injuries.

A bomb also demolished a stage erected to commemorate the 10th anniversary of former president and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat’s death, leading to the event being canceled.

“Who committed this crime? The leadership of the Hamas movement did, and it’s responsible!” Abbas roared to applause at a Fatah rally for Arafat in Ramallah, his seat of government in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. [Continue reading…]

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Kurdish fighters recapture strategic hill in Kobane and cut off key supply route for ISIS

Middle East Eye reports: Kurdish and Syrian fighters in Kobane have recaptured a strategic landmark and cut off a key supply route on Wednesday after more than 50 days of fighting against Islamic State fighters, a Kobane official told MEE.

After fierce fighting that started on Monday, the fighters – which include soldiers from the People’s Protection Units (YPG), Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga and the Free Syrian Army – have taken back a strategic part of Mashta al-Nur, a hill which overlooks Kobane.

From this hill, the fighters will be able to bomb IS fighters around the city and also on the other side of the hill, said Idris Nassan, deputy foreign affairs minister for the Kobane, who said he was holed up in a safe location about 1km from Mashta al-Nur.

Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party called the capture a ‘game changer’ on its official Twitter account.


“ISIS is defeated mostly,” Nassan told MEE. “ISIS is still in Kobane, but with Mashta al-Nur, ISIS will be in a very small part of Kobane. Defeating ISIS will be more easy.”

In addition to regaining control of most of Mashta al-Nur, the fighters have also cut off the Halanj-Ain al-Arab road south of the town, a key supply route that IS has been using during the battle. Sixteen IS members were reportedly killed in the advance. [Continue reading…]

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The fighters of Iraq who answer to Iran

Reuters reports: Among the thousands of militia fighters who flocked to northern Iraq to battle militant group Islamic State over the summer was Qais al-Khazali.

Like the fighters, Khazali wore green camouflage. But he also sported a shoulder-strapped pistol and sunglasses and was flanked by armed bodyguards. When he was not on the battlefield, the 40-year-old Iraqi donned the robes and white turban of a cleric.

Khazali is the head of a militia called Asaib Ahl al-Haq that is backed by Iran. Thanks to his position he is one of the most feared and respected militia leaders in Iraq, and one of Iran’s most important representatives in the country.

His militia is one of three small Iraqi Shi’ite armies, all backed by Iran, which together have become the most powerful military force in Iraq since the collapse of the national army in June.

Alongside Asaib Ahl al-Haq, there are the Badr Brigades, formed in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, and the younger and more secretive Kataib Hezbollah. The three militias have been instrumental in battling Islamic State (IS), the extremist movement from Islam’s rival Sunni sect.

The militias, and the men who run them, are key to Iran’s power and influence inside neighboring Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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The battle for Kobane offers a glimpse of Kurds’ new model democracy

By Karthick Manoharan, University of Essex

As the battle against Islamic State fighters draws in viewers across the world, there has been some attention given to the men and women resisting them in northern Syria. The Syrian part of Kurdistan, or Rojava, as the Kurds would like to call it, has been fighting Islamists for well over two years now but only recently has the battle for the border town of Kobane brought them to light.

And while it’s easy to portray the Kurdish people as pitted against this new terrorist threat, they are actually involved in something far more profound. Kobane is symbolic and the conflict there carries a universal significance. Not only are the Kurds battling the Islamists, but they are also attempting to create a model of democracy that might actually bring stability to a war-torn region.

The Kurdish political vision is not founded on any particular racial, ethnic, regional or religious belief but rather on an idea, or a set of ideas, that should resonate with people everywhere.

Fighters in Kobane claim to be standing up for the freedom of everyone in the region, be they Kurds, Turks, Arabs or anyone else. The way the fighters in Kobane have challenged stereotypical gender roles is just one example.

As far as religious difference goes, Kobane disproves both Islamophobes who believe the Middle East to be incapable of progress and politically correct Islamophiles who push the patronising idea that religious identity is a top priority for Muslims the world over. In their readiness to defend the Yazidi minority against persecution from IS, the Kurds have essentially been promoting a radical secularism and a vision of tolerance in a region torn by religious strife.

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Syria Kurds ‘recapture’ areas of Kobane from ISIS

AFP reports: Kurds battling the Islamic State jihadist group in Kobane reportedly made advances Tuesday in the south of the flashpoint Syrian town on the border with Turkey.

Top Kurdish officials told AFP their fighters were advancing “street by street”, voicing confidence that the IS would soon be ejected.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights backed up the report.

“The (Kurdish) People’s Protection Units (YPG) recaptured streets and buildings in the south of Kobane, after a fierce battle against the IS that began yesterday (Monday) evening,” said the Britain-based Observatory. [Continue reading…]

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Jabhat al-Nusra blows up Armenian church in Deir el-Zour: A savage blow that echoes through Armenian history

Robert Fisk reports: In the most savage act of vandalism against Syria’s Christians, Islamists have blown up the great Armenian church in Deir el-Zour, built in dedication to the one and a half million Armenians slaughtered by the Turks during the 1915 genocide. All of the church archives, dating back to 1841 and containing thousands of documents on the Armenian holocaust, were burned to ashes, while the bones of hundreds of genocide victims, packed into the church’s crypt in memory of the mass killings 99 years ago, were thrown into the street beside the ruins.

This act of sacrilege will cause huge pain among the Armenians scattered across the world – as well as in the rump state of Armenia which emerged after the 1914-1918 war, not least because many hundreds of thousands of victims died in death camps around the very same city of Deir el-Zour. Jabhat al-Nusra rebels appear to have been the culprits this time, but since many Syrians believe that the group has received arms from Turkey, the destruction will be regarded by many Armenians as a further stage in their historical annihilation by the descendants of those who perpetrated the genocide 99 years ago.

Turkey, of course, miserably claims there was no genocide – the equivalent of modern day Germany denying the Jewish Holocaust – but hundreds of historians, including one prominent Turkish academic, have proved beyond any doubt that the Armenians were deliberately massacred on the orders of the Ottoman Turkish government across all of modern-day Turkey and inside the desert of what is now northern Syria – the very region where Isis and its kindred ideological armed groups now hold. Even Israelis refer to the Armenian genocide with the same Hebrew word they use for their own destruction by Nazi Germany: “Shoah”, which means “holocaust”. [Continue reading…]

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Militant group in Egypt vows loyalty to ISIS

The New York Times reports: They have slaughtered hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and police officers, recruited experienced fighters and staged increasingly sophisticated raids from the Western desert to the Sinai Peninsula. They have beheaded informants and killed an American in a carjacking, say Western officials familiar with intelligence reports.

On Monday, Egypt’s most dangerous militant group, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, also pledged obedience to the organization that calls itself the Islamic State, becoming its first significant international affiliate in the bet that the link will provide new money, weapons and recruits to battle the government in Cairo.

The affiliation could pull the militant group away from its current, almost exclusive focus on attacking Egyptian military and security forces toward the Islamic State’s indiscriminate mass killings of civilians. The pledge alone could undermine the government’s efforts to win the trust of Western tourists, a vital source of hard currency.

The decision injects the Islamic State into the most populous and historically most influential Arab nation, a milestone weeks into an American-led bombing campaign against its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. The endorsement is a major victory for the Islamic State in its rivalry with Al Qaeda — a group with deep Egyptian roots — and could now help recruit fighters and affiliates far beyond Egypt. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s Khamenei: No cure for barbaric Israel but annihilation

Slate: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei took to Twitter to call for the destruction of Israel over the weekend. He first started with a string of vitriolic anti-Israel tweets that called for the destruction of the “barbaric, wolflike & infanticidal regime of Israel.”


He then culminated by posting a “neat table,” as Haaretz puts it, that lays out nine key questions on why—and how—his plan to destroy Israel should be implemented. The post begins with the basic: Why? Because throughout its existence “the fake Zionist regime has tried to realize its goals by means of infanticide, homicide, violence & iron fist.” But rest easy, Iran definitely does not want “the massacre of the Jewish people” but rather Iran has proposed “a practical & logical mechanism” to eliminate Israel through a referendum involving “all the original people of Palestine, including Muslims, Chrsitians and Jews” anywhere in the world.


The referendum would then give rise to a new government that would then have to decide whether Jews who have relocated to Israel can stay there or “should return to their home countries.” Khamenei is confident that the plan “can enjoy the supports of the independent nations and governments.”

Until the day when Khamenei’s plan can be realized, “powerful confrontation and resolute and armed resistance” is the only way to deal with “this ruinous regime.” And what should be the first step? Arming the West Bank. [Continue reading…]

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Violence spreads across Israel after shooting in Galilee

The Guardian reports: Months of simmering violence between Israelis and Palestinians in East Jerusalem spread to Israeli Arab towns this weekend after police shot and killed a 22-year-old man in the Galilee town of Kufr Kana, apparently as he was running away.

In their original statements about the death on Friday night police said Kheir Hamdan was shot when he tried to stab an officer during an attempt to arrest him for allegedly throwing a stun grenade in the town, near Nazareth.

However, CCTV footage of the shooting shows Hamdan tried to strike a police car several times with an object in his hand – allegedly the knife – but officers were inside, with Hamdan posing no immediate threat to them. When a police officer opens the door, Hamdan is seen retreating. It is at this point he is shot.

Police can then be seen dragging the severely injured Hamdan along the ground and bundling him into their car without offering first aid or calling for assistance. He died several hours later. [Continue reading…]

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Israel moves to extend law to West Bank settlers

Al Jazeera reports: An Israeli ministerial committee has approved a proposed bill that would ensure the wholesale application of Israeli law to Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank, a move sponsored by politicians who want Israel to annex part of the territory

The bill needs to be submitted to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, for voting and must pass three readings before becoming law.

However, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator in peace talks with the Palestinians that collapsed in April, said she would appeal against the decision, effectively putting parliamentary ratification on indefinite hold, the Reuters news agency reported on Sunday.

Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank are currently formally subject to military rule.

However, the area’s 350,000 settlers are effectively under the jurisdiction of civilian courts in Israel because parliament has already applied a clutch of laws, primarily criminal and tax laws and military conscription, to them.

At present, to ensure that other Israeli laws are binding on settlers in the West Bank, the military commander there has to transpose them, at his discretion, into military regulations.

The new draft bill would make it mandatory for the commander to issue, within 45 days of a law’s passage in parliament, an identically-phrased military order, effectively ensuring that all ratified legislation also applies to settlers.

According to the new bill, Israelis living in the occupied West Bank will be under Israeli law, while Palestinians who live in the same areas would remain under military rule. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian Kurds give women equal rights, snubbing jihadists

AFP reports: The local government in a majority Kurdish area of Syria has passed a decree granting women equal rights in what a monitoring group called “an affront” to discriminatory jihadist moves.

Published on the local government’s official Facebook page on Wednesday, the decree states that women and men should enjoy “equality… in all walks of public and private life.”

Last year, Syria’s Kurds created autonomous governments in the three regions where they are a majority, establishing self-proclaimed rule.

Arabs also hold office, and the decrees apply to all ethnicities living in the self-governing areas.

The decree, passed by the leaders of the Al-Jazira canton — officially Hasakeh province — stipulates that women have the right to equal labour rights, including pay.

Women must be 18 years old to marry, and they are cannot be married off without their consent.

“Polygamy is forbidden,” the decree states, adding that women have the same right to bear witness in court as men, and that they have full inheritance rights. [Continue reading…]

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The Kurds can’t afford to leave Iraq

Luay Al Khatteeb and Ahmed Mehdi write: The federal government in Baghdad believes the Kurds have been playing a double game by demanding their share of federal oil revenues while also signing a string of independent contracts with international oil companies and midsize wildcatters and then pocketing the oil export profits after bypassing Baghdad.

In the past, Iraq and the Kurds have always come back to the negotiating table. This time could be different.

Despite Mr. Barzani’s calls for an independence referendum, K.R.G. officials are still counting on Baghdad to send them money. However, this double strategy is precarious — and the threat doesn’t come from Baghdad, but from Basra in the south.

There is a real risk that Iraq’s southern Shiite provinces — which produce over 90 percent of Iraq’s oil — could copy the Kurds in their call for autonomy. Basra’s political elites do not see why a share of their oil profits should go to the K.R.G. government in Erbil if those funds are only helping to subsidize Kurdish independence ambitions.

The Kurds face a hard choice: either they become part of a viable federal oil revenue sharing system or go their own way. And for the K.R.G., losing revenues from the central government would be irreversible and disastrous. That’s because an independent Kurdistan would make less than $7 billion per year — almost a third less than they received when given just 12 percent of Iraq’s total oil revenues. [Continue reading…]

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