Category Archives: Lands

Amerli: Iraqi town besieged by ISIS starving to death

BBC News reports: With each new dawn, the people of Amerli wake up to the same nightmare.

Surrounded by towns and villages taken by the Sunni jihadist militants of Islamic State (IS), the residents of this small Shia Turkmen community about 180km (110 miles) north of Baghdad have been living under siege for two months.

There is no electricity, little medicine and food supplies are dwindling. Unlike recent US intervention to help save members of the Yazidi religious minority trapped on Mount Sinjar in north-western Iraq, there is no dramatic plan to rescue people here.

In the eyes of those in Amerli, the world has turned its back on them.

“After the attack of Mosul, all the Shia Turkmen villages around Amerli were captured by Islamic State,” explains Dr Ali Albayati, a local resident. “They killed the people and displayed their bodies outside the village.”

The majority of the residents of Amerli are part of the Turkmen ethnic group, who make up roughly 4% of Iraq’s population. As Shia, they are directly targeted by Islamic State, who consider them apostates.

“We have been trying to fight them off for 70 days,” says Dr Albayati. “We have no electricity, no drinking water.” [Continue reading…]

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Britain ‘will not work with Assad’ to combat ISIS

AFP reports: Britain will not work with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to combat Islamic State (IS) fighters in the country and his permission would not be needed for any military intervention, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said Friday.

Hammond also said Britain had no plans to arm moderate fighters in Syria’s civil war, and insisted that Western troops on the ground in Iraq would only make the situation worse.

Responding to comments made by former army chief Richard Dannatt, who argued that Britain should consider some kind of alliance with Assad, Hammond warned that it would deepen sectarian rifts in the region.

“We may very well find that we are fighting, on some occasions, the same people that he is but that doesn’t make us his ally,” Hammond told BBC radio.

“One of the first things you learn in the Middle East is that my enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend.

“It would poison what we are trying to achieve in separating moderate Sunni opinion from the poisonous ideology of IS,” he added. [Continue reading…]

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Ferguson and Gaza: The definitive study of how they are and are not similar

David Palumbo-Liu writes: As photographs and videoclips from Ferguson overwhelmed our mediascapes, they created a strange double-optic. They seemed overlaid upon representations of events that had previously dominated our public consciousness: Images of the massive and on-going destruction of Gaza by the Israeli military. This stereoscopic image immediately drew bloggers, pundits and op-ed writers to rush to draw parallels. Indeed, in graphic terms alone the image of tear gas canisters filling the air with toxic smoke and of protesters hurling them back defiantly seemed exactly the same. And when tweets offering advice to demonstrators in Ferguson emerged from Palestinians, and reports of Ferguson police having been trained by Israelis surfaced, all that only seemed to complete the equation: Ferguson is Gaza.

There are many parallels and resonances to be sure, and below I will get to some key ones. But I have delayed responding because, as a comparatist, and also as someone concerned about racism in the U.S. and the racist policies of Israel, it is important to weigh things in as dispassionate a way as possible, to do justice to both sides.

Many years ago, the eminent British Marxist historian Raymond Williams reflected on conversations he was having with Palestinian literary critic and activist Edward Said. Williams was particularly interested in seeing just how much of his work on British working class culture, history, and society could be understood as having to do in any way with Said’s concerns regarding Israel-Palestine, most especially with regard to what was going on then: the brutal Israeli bombing and invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Regarding that catastrophe, Hadas Thier writes, “During the course of Israel’s bombardment of the country, civilians and civilian infrastructure were systematically attacked, refugee camps and Lebanese towns were leveled, Beirut was battered for seventy-five days, and after all military objectives were met, the affair concluded with a grotesque massacre of women, children, and the elderly at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.” Williams’ conclusion is instructive:

The analysis of history is not a subject separate from history, but the representations are part of the history, contribute to the history, are active elements in the way that history continues; in the way forces are distributed; in the way people perceive situations, both from inside their own pressing realities and from outside them; if we are saying this is a real method, then the empirical test it’s being put to here is that comparable methods of analysis are being applied to situations which are very far apart in space, have many differences of texture, and have very different consequences in the contemporary world. There is an obvious distance from what is happening in the English countryside, or in the English inner cities, to the chaos in Lebanon. Yet nevertheless I think it is true that the method, the underlying method, found a congruity.

This discretion, this caution to pay attention to how history is represented and to get the historical record straight despite surface similarities, is found as well in the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel on Biafra, “Half of a Yellow Sun.” At one point she tells of a journalist’s hesitation at making comparisons between Biafra and other historical events: “After he writes this, he mentions the German women who fled Hamburg with the charred bodies of their children stuffed in suitcases, the Rwandan women who pocketed tiny parts of their mauled babies. But he is careful not to draw parallels.”

How then can we strike a balance between on the one hand reacting viscerally to the images from Ferguson, which point to the long and constantly replenished history of police assaults on black bodies, and the images of Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza, an assault continuous with Israel’s history of oppression and persecution of an entire people, while on the other hand resisting drawing too quickly an immediate, provocative, but inexact parallel?

It is in the median space between declaring an equivalence and withdrawing into discreet silence that we should concentrate our energies. Comparisons may be “odious,” to quote Shakespeare, but they can also be instructive. They help us tease out the specifics while coming to understand basic and important similarities. To do this one needs to employ a “congruent” method.

Here are five ways we can see congruence in what is happening in Ferguson and in Gaza. [Continue reading…]

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How a fake ‘anti-semitic’ commenter smeared Common Dreams to support Israel

For Common Dreams, Lance Tapley reports: Like many other news websites, Common Dreams has been plagued by inflammatory anti-Semitic comments following its stories. But on Common Dreams these posts have been so frequent and intense they have driven away donors from a nonprofit dependent on reader generosity.

A Common Dreams investigation has discovered that more than a thousand of these damaging comments over the past two years were written with a deceptive purpose by a Jewish Harvard graduate in his thirties who was irritated by the website’s discussion of issues involving Israel.

His intricate campaign, which he has admitted to Common Dreams, included posting comments by a screen name, “JewishProgressive,” whose purpose was to draw attention to and denounce the anti-Semitic comments that he had written under many other screen names.

The deception was many-layered. At one point he had one of his characters charge that the anti-Semitic comments and the criticism of the anti-Semitic comments must be written by “internet trolls who have been known to impersonate anti-Semites in order to then double-back and accuse others of supporting anti-Semitism” — exactly what he was doing. (Trolls are posters who foment discord.)

The impersonation, this character wrote, must be part of an “elaborate Hasbara setup,” referring to an Israeli international public-relations campaign. When Common Dreams finally confronted the man behind the deceptive posting, he denied that he himself was involved with Hasbara.

His posting on Common Dreams illustrates the susceptibility of website comment threads to massive manipulation. [Continue reading…]

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Why Obama and Assad prefer to see ISIS contained but not defeated

Ever since the Obama administration started back-peddling on its desire to see the Assad regime fall, the rationale for that reversal and for an unstated but obvious willingness to see Assad remain in power has been the fear that the collapse of the Syrian government would allow ISIS to gain control of most of the Syria. The U.S. and most Western governments have implicitly come to accept the argument that Bashar deployed from day one: it’s me or the terrorists.

But suppose ISIS came under attack from all sides — by the U.S., the Iraqis (including tribal Sunnis), the Kurds, Iran, Turkey, Syria’s rebels, and Assad’s air force — are we to imagine that it would fend off all its opponents?

U.S. Defense Secretary Hagel might describe ISIS as “beyond anything that we’ve seen,” but having constituted itself as an army controlling territory, ISIS is just as susceptible as any other army to facing defeat. Moreover, its success in establishing a de facto Islamic state might ironically become its undoing.

However Russia and others might want to argue against international intervention in Syria, the argument that Syria’s sovereignty must be respected no longer holds any water. Indeed, this would be an intervention one of whose principal goals would be the restoration of the territorial sovereignty of both Syria and Iraq.

The real interventionists are ISIS — they are the ones who decided to erase national boundaries and like the neoconservatives of yesteryear, attempt to redraw the map of the Middle East.

But here’s the problem: If ISIS is defeated and not just contained, Assad loses the one thing that can justify his continuation in power.

Likewise, Obama’s fear of deeper involvement in Syria is predicated on the fear of ISIS’s growing power. Paradoxically, it appears he views a contained ISIS serves as a greater source of stability than a defeated ISIS, if ISIS’s defeat is then a prelude to Assad’s defeat.

In other words, Obama might believe that a contained Islamic state is currently preferable to another Libya.

Or to put in another way: better the living hell of Syria that the world has got used to and can thus ignore, than a new form of chaos that becomes the closing chapter of Obama’s presidency.

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UN raises estimate of dead in Syrian conflict to 191,000

The New York Times reports: The number of dead in Syria’s civil war more than doubled in the past year to at least 191,000, the United Nations human rights office said Friday. The agency’s chief, Navi Pillay, bluntly criticized Western nations, saying their inaction in the face of the slaughter had “empowered and emboldened” the killers.

In its third report on Syria commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict in March 2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in their last report, which covered the first two years of the conflict.

“Tragically, it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict,” Ms. Pillay said in a statement that accompanied the report, which observed that many killings in Syria were undocumented.

The report was confined to counting individuals who had been identified by name, along with the date and location of their death, using data from five organizations that was screened to avoid duplication. It did not include nearly 52,000 deaths that were recorded but lacked sufficient detail. [Continue reading…]

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Syria sees ISIS threat bringing detente with West, but not soon

Reuters reports: Syria is wagering that Islamic State’s push to reshape the Middle East will eventually force a hostile West to deal with President Bashar al-Assad as the only way to tackle the threat.

While Assad’s forces escalate their fight with Islamic State militants in the Syrian civil war, the United States is staging air strikes on the same group across the frontier in Iraq.

This, along with United Nations sanctions targeting the Sunni Muslim militants in both Syria and Iraq, has strengthened Assad’s belief that the United States and Europe are coming around to his way of viewing the conflict, according to sources familiar with Syrian government thinking.

Officials in the Western governments which have backed the uprising against Assad dismiss the idea of rapprochement.

Syria is not Iraq, they say.

But growing Western concern about Islamic State is stirring debate about Syria policy. More than three years into the civil war, the moderate Syrian opposition that the West hoped would prevail has been eclipsed by radical Islamists.

The Damascus government, already heartened by visits from European intelligence agencies reported by Syrian officials earlier this year, sees the war on Islamic State as opening up new possibilities for engagement. [Continue reading…]

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The end of liberal Zionism

Antony Lerman writes: Liberal Zionists are at a crossroads. The original tradition of combining Zionism and liberalism — which meant ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, supporting a Palestinian state as well as a Jewish state with a permanent Jewish majority, and standing behind Israel when it was threatened — was well intentioned. But everything liberal Zionists stand for is now in doubt.

The decision of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to launch a military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has cost the lives, to date, of 64 soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side, and nearly 2,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians.

“Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war,” wrote Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian’s opinion editor and a leading British liberal Zionist, for The New York Review of Books last month. He’s not alone. Columnists like Jonathan Chait, Roger Cohen and Thomas L. Friedman have all riffed in recent weeks on the theme that what Israel is doing can’t be reconciled with their humanism.

But it’s not just Gaza, and the latest episode of “shock and awe” militarism. The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals — and I was one, once — subscribed for so many decades, has been tarnished by the reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and a powerful, intolerant religious right — this mixture has pushed liberal Zionism to the brink. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq militants kill 46 in attack on Sunni mosque

The Associated Press reports: Militants targeted a Sunni mosque in a province next to the Iraqi capital during weekly prayers on Friday, killing at least 46 people and wounding over 50 as members of the Islamic State group continue to push through the area, officials said.

An army officer and a police officer said a suicide bomber first broke into the Musab bin Omair Mosque in Imam Wais village in Diyala province, some 120 kilometers (75 miles) northeast of Baghdad, detonating his explosives before gunmen rushed in and opened fire on worshippers.

The officials said that fighters with the Islamic State group have been trying to convince members of two prominent local Sunni tribes — the Oal-Waisi and al-Jabour — to join them but they have thus far refused.

Two medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to brief the media. The towns of Jalula and al-Saadiyah have recently fallen to militants with the Islamic State group but Imam Wais is thus far in government control. [Continue reading…]

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Iran denies report linking Iraq cooperation to nuclear talks

Reuters reports: Iran denied a report that it is ready to help counter Islamic State insurgents in return for progress in negotiations with world powers over its nuclear program.

France, one of the six nations in nuclear talks with Tehran, said on Wednesday it wanted Arab states, Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to coordinate a comprehensive response against Islamic State, whose militant forces control large parts of Syria and Iraq.

The Sunni Islamist insurgency threatening to tear apart Iraq has alarmed both Shi’ite Muslim Iran and the United States, which have had no diplomatic relations since soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Tehran.

On Thursday a story from the official Iranian News Agency (IRNA) cited by several news organizations including Reuters reported Foreign Minister Javad Zarif as saying that if Iran agreed to “do something in Iraq, the other side in the negotiations will need to do something in return”.

“All the sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear activities should be lifted in return for its help in Iraq,” it quoted him as saying.

But later on Thursday IRNA reported foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham as dismissing “reports by some news agencies about Iran and U.S. cooperation in Iraq”.

“These reports are a misinterpretation of the foreign ministerˈs remarks and are ‘totally baseless’,” IRNA reported her as saying.

IRNA did not elaborate. On Friday, the story on IRNA’s website still showed remarks attributed to Zarif but the word Iraq had been omitted. A similar report by the semi-official Mehr news agency about Zarif’s comments continued to cite him mentioning Iraq.

Iran has offered to cooperate with the United States on stabilizing Iraq, which like Iran has a majority Shi’ite population, but Washington has responded cautiously.

Western officials have repeatedly said they do not want to mix the nuclear dossier with events elsewhere in the region.

In Washington, State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said she understood that Zarif’s comments did not refer to Iraq and instead referred to Arak, the site of a facility that is one of the topics under discussion in nuclear negotiations between Tehran and six world powers. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon: ISIS is an ‘apocalyptic’ threat that can be ‘contained’ — but not indefinitely

The Guardian reports: Senior Pentagon officials described the Islamic State (Isis) militant group as an “apocalyptic” organisation that posed an “imminent threat” on Thursday, yet the highest ranking officer in the US military said that in the short term, it was sufficient for the United States to “contain” the group that has reshaped the map of Iraq and Syria.

Army general Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters in a Pentagon briefing that while Isis would eventually have to be defeated, the US should concentrate on building allies in the region to oppose the group that murdered an American journalist, James Foley.

“It is possible to contain them,” Dempsey said, in a Pentagon press conference alongside the defense secretary, Chuck Hagel. “They can be contained, but not in perpetuity. This is an organisation that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated.”

Dempsey’s comments came a day after secretary of state John Kerry said Isis “must be destroyed” following the killing of Foley, the first American known to have died at the hands of Isis. President Obama had referred to the organisation as a “cancer”. Their remarks raised expectations that the administration was preparing for a wider war aimed at wiping out Isis, rather than stopping its advances in Iraq.

Internal administration deliberations over a response to Isis continue, and US officials predicted that there would be little departure from the strategy of limited airstrikes launched since 8 August. One said the military plan “may ultimately evolve”.

Hours after a senior White House foreign-policy official, Ben Rhodes, said the US would not be limited in its response by “geographic boundaries”, Dempsey assessed that cross-border action was necessary to defeat the group. At the same time, he tamped down speculation that US warplanes would strike Isis in Syria as well as Iraq.

Isis “will have to be addressed on both sides of what is at this point essentially a non-existent border”, Dempsey said, which would require “a variety of instruments, only one small part of which is air strikes. I’m not predicting those will occur in Syria, at least not by the United States of America.”[Continue reading…]

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James Foley and fellow freelancers: exploited by pared-back media outlets

Martin Chulov writes: For more than three years now, much of what the world has seen, read and learned about the Middle East has been produced by journalism’s newest hands. They are not recruits, in the true sense of the word: few have the endorsement of established media outlets. Even fewer have been sent to the region with budgets, backing, or even basic training.

But from Tunisia to Syria and all stops in between, freelance reporters and photojournalists have reported history with a determination that old media could rarely match, even during the halcyon days when media organisations could afford to maintain correspondents and bureaux around the world.

Libya was a magnet for many freelancers when insurrection broke out in February 2011. Some had covered the tumult next door in Egypt, others were drawn to journalism, wanting to witness the end of Gaddafi’s cult-like state.

As the battle for east Libya ebbed and flowed around the town of Ajdabiya, the freelancers at times outnumbered the anti-Gaddafi rebels on the frontline. Both groups – with a fair few staff reporters among them – would often surge forward together or scamper for safety when regime forces advanced. James Foley was among them. [Continue reading…]

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Former hostages pay tribute to James Foley

Didier Francois, a 53-year-old reporter with radio station Europe 1, described the American he came to know during the period in which both he and James Foley were being held hostage.

For two-and-a-half months, Mr Francois was chained to fellow French hostages, Nicolas Henin, Edouard Elias, and Pierre Torres. They were released in April after France paid a ransom.

Mr Henin said today that Mr Foley was beaten more than any other hostage because he was an American and ISIS knew his brother was in the U.S. Air Force, and in one incident he was ‘crucified against a wall’, it has emerged.

The killer spoke in a distinctive English accent and his eyes and build are clearly visible in a propaganda video in which he cuts Mr Foley’s head off.

Mr Francois spent eight months with Mr Foley as a captive in Syria, enduring most of that time in underground cells with no natural light.

Mr Francois said he had never spoken publicly about James Foley or the remaining American hostage, Steven Sotloff, before because of threats of reprisals.

Mr Francois said he was told by his captors: ‘If you make public the fact they are being held or that you were together, reprisals will follow against them. Their exact words were: “They’ll be punished”’.

Mr Foley had been singled out for beatings, said Mr Francois, after his captors found pictures on his computer of his brother, who works for the US Air Force.

He said that Mr Foley was subjected to mock executions, including one in which he was ‘crucified against a wall’.

Paying tribute to the American, Mr Francois said: ‘He was an extraordinary guy – a companion in imprisonment who was very agreeable, very solid.’

Mr Henin became tearful said the murdered journalist shared his food and blanket.

He said: ‘We spent seven months in a very extreme situation together, including for one week we were handcuffed one to the other day and night.

‘In circumstances where you are held captive you develop some kind of survival instincts, meaning that, for instance, you try to grab everything that you can find.

‘James was the total opposite. He was so truly generous. Basically everything he could share, he would share it. If we were cold, and we were missing blankets, he would share his blanket.

‘If we were starving and missing food, he would share his ration.’ [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu criticized for exploiting James Foley’s death for Israeli propaganda

Huffington Post: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced widespread criticism on Thursday for using an image from the video of the killing of a U.S. reporter in a tweet that aimed to criticize Palestinian militants.

The message, posted on the official Twitter account of the prime minister’s office, compared the Palestinian militant group Hamas to the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq and included a still from the video showing the beheading of American reporter James Foley. The tweet later appeared to be deleted.

Several Twitter users perceived the tweet as insensitive and accused the prime minister’s office of trying to exploit Foley’s tragic death for propaganda purposes.

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People are blocking cargo ships to protest Israel

Vice News: The Israeli Zim Piraeus cargo ship arrived at the port in Oakland, California for its usual weekly offloading last Saturday—but it was unable to unload any of its cargo. The ship’s crew had to wait four days at sea before faking a departure and then sneaking back into a new terminal to evade hundreds of activists who had created a picket line the longshoremen’s union wouldn’t cross. Even when the ship finally left, many believe it still had most of its cargo.

The ship’s acrobatics were induced by a coalition of Palestine solidarity activists and organized labor, with activists originally intending to delay it for just a day as a way to send a message that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians should make it an international pariah.

The Zim Integrated Shipping Services is Israel’s largest shipping company, but its appeal as a target for the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement goes beyond its mere financial value. With Israel’s ability to drop thousands of tons of explosives on the captivated and densely packed population of Gaza and then sail into international ports without consequence, Zim vessels embody Israel’s enduring impunity. [Continue reading…]

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The West should take note: there is no avoiding ISIS

Shiraz Maher writes: For those of who have followed the conflict in Syria and Iraq closely, it came as no surprise – shocking though it was – to discover that a seemingly British jihadist had beheaded the American journalist James Foley. Over the past year jihadists from this country have participated in suicide bombings, tortured detainees in their care, and executed prisoners of war.

It is true that not every British fighter who has travelled to Syria engages in these types of acts. Indeed, many of the early fighters who went did so for humanitarian reasons. Through numerous interviews it is clear to me that their motivations and ambitions were materially different from those who followed them.

Over time, however, it is also clear that attitudes have hardened. Romantic notions of saving oppressed civilians from a government intent on killing them has given way to a culture of casual brutality and callousness.

That nonchalance was epitomised by a British fighter I used to speak with regularly. When he was first in Syria he complained about the brutality of the Islamic State (Isis) and condemned its strategy of kidnapping journalists and aid workers. Months later he published a picture of three captured men with the caption: “Will be killed tomorrow, can’t wait for that feeling when you just killed someone.” Days later he posted a picture of his bloodied hand. “My first time,” he said. What is perhaps more disturbing is that he is an intelligent man who attended Queen Mary University.

A long list of similar incidents could be reproduced here. Indeed, a number of British fighters have celebrated Foley’s murder, often joking in macabre fashion about wanting to “play football”. A man from Manchester using the pseudonym Abu Qaqa tweeted: “Beheaded by a British brother! What an honour! What a beautiful message to America.” Qaqa has himself posted pictures of beheaded opponents on his Twitter account.

Messages like that are ones that Isis seems increasingly keen to direct towards the west. Another British fighter warned of terrorist attacks back home. “To the people of the UK, because of the actions of your government, it will be you who pay the price. Blame them & not us,” he wrote. The most recent Briton to have been killed in Syria, Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, also spoke of his desire to see a repeat of the 9/11 attacks shortly before his death.

It has repeatedly been suggested that foreign fighters today are no different to those who participated in the Spanish civil war. Proponents of such a view argue that George Orwell and Laurie Lee would now be treated as terrorists. To persist in this belief is to allow the owl of Minerva to spread its wings at dusk, because it ignores the changed and changing nature of both our society and the global jihad movement. [Continue reading…]

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Iran will join fight against ISIS if West lifts sanctions

AFP reports: Iran is ready to join international action against jihadists in Iraq provided the West lifts crippling sanctions, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Thursday.

His comments followed a call by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Wednesday for all countries in the region, including Iran, to join the fight against Islamic State (IS) fighters who have seized swathes of Iraq as well as neighbouring Syria.

“If we agree to do something in Iraq, the other side of the negotiations should do something in return,” the official IRNA news agency quoted Zarif as saying.

“All the sanctions that are related to Iran’s nuclear programme should be lifted,” he said.

It is the first time that Iran has explicitly linked its readiness to work with the West in Iraq with a lifting of the crippling EU and US sanctions imposed over its nuclear programme. [Continue reading…]

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