Category Archives: Russia

Putin signs law allowing Russia to overturn rulings of international rights courts

Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin has signed a law allowing Russia’s Constitutional Court to decide whether or not to implement rulings of international human rights courts.

The law, published on Tuesday on the government website, enables the Russian court to overturn decisions of the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) if it deems them unconstitutional.

Human Rights Watch has said the law is designed to thwart the ability of victims of human rights violations in Russia to find justice through international bodies.

The law comes after the ECHR ruled in 2014 that Russia must pay a 1.9 billion euro ($2.09 billion) award to shareholders of the defunct Yukos oil company, a verdict that added to financial pressure on Moscow as it struggles with shrinking revenues due to tumbling oil prices and Western sanctions.

The ECHR said it had received 218 complaints against Russia in 2014 and that it had found 122 cases in which Moscow had violated the European Convention on Human Rights, including the deportation of Georgian citizens in 2006 and the incarceration of defendants in metal cages during Russian court hearings. [Continue reading…]

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What many fear Trump could do, Putin has already done

Garry Kasparov writes: Putin has spent years actually DOING things that the Western media worry American politicians are even thinking about, and yet Putin still has an endless supply of apologists at every level in the West. Putin has destroyed democracy and civil society in Russia, invaded two neighboring countries, annexed two million Ukrainians in Crimea, and launched a coordinated assault against the institutions that make up much of the modern world order. His global propaganda network constantly smears American and European leaders and society.

And yet even today Putin is still treated as a potential partner in Syria, courted by John Kerry (headed to Moscow again next week) and politicians in Germany and France despite blatantly and repeatedly lying to them and openly acting against their nations’ stated interests of containing ISIS and ending the slaughter in Syria. Even during my book tour over this past month I’ve been told by so-called experts and pundits that, for example, Russia is a “poorly functioning democracy”. You can read this week on CNN.com that the Russian middle class is “happy” with Putin. How would you know after 15 years of his decimating all opposition and turning the media into a propaganda machine? If you’re actually popular you can have a free media and free elections. Putin knows very well he cannot permit either.

I was taunted and criticized for a decade for pointing out the trends of Putin’s Russia toward dictatorship. Now only the most pitiful Putin bootlickers deny what he has done. Only when he invaded neighboring Ukraine on the darkly familiar pretexts of racial unity and national pride, right on the heels of Olympic glory in Sochi, did my comparisons to Germany in the 1930s become too obvious to roll eyes at. Soon they were being echoed widely (even by Hillary Clinton) and now the “H-word” is again in the mainstream thanks to Trump’s call for religious discrimination on a global scale.

Donald Trump gets more attention and condemnation for sounding like Hitler than Vladimir Putin gets for acting like Hitler. But there is a reason for this paradoxical behavior. Trump has no power, Putin does. [Continue reading…]

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Putin says he ‘hopes’ nuclear warheads will never be needed against ISIS… or anyone else

The Independent reports: Vladimir Putin has said he hopes nuclear warheads will not be needed to deal with terrorists or anyone else, after Russia launched cruise missiles from its submarine at Syria.

During a meeting in the Kremlin, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told the President that Kalibr cruise missiles had been fired by the submerged Rostov-on-Don submarine from the Mediterranean Sea for the first time.

He said TU-22 bombers also took part in the latest raids and that “significant damage” had been done to a munitions depot, a factory manufacturing mortar rounds and oil facilities. Two major targets in Raqqa, the defacto capital of Isis, had been hit, said Mr Shoigu. [Continue reading…]

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Why Assad is uninterested in defeating ISIS

Christoph Reuter writes: Assad’s official army is now just one of many fighting forces on the side of the regime — and is also suffering from poor morale and a lack of soldiers. For many young Syrians from areas under government control, forced conscription has become the most significant motivator for embarking on the refugee trail to Europe.

This is also one reason why Russia’s initial strategy for Syria is not finding success. Moscow had been hoping that massive air strikes would force rebel fighters in opposition-held areas to abandon the fight. That would then pave the way for Assad’s ground forces to advance and take back those regions. But in October, when Assad’s tank units rolled into those areas that Russian jets had previously bombed, they didn’t get very far. Instead of fleeing, rebels there had dug in instead.

Using TOW anti-tank missiles supplied by the US, in addition to Russian anti-tank weapons that had been captured or acquired from corrupt officers, the rebels struck some 20 tanks before the others turned back. The army’s ground offensive south of Aleppo likewise quickly ground to a halt. Meanwhile, rebels near Hama were able to finally take control of a long-contested city.

Assad’s army isn’t just vulnerable, it also isn’t strictly a Syrian force anymore. For the last two years, the forces on his side have increasingly been made up of foreigners, including Revolutionary Guards from Iran, members of Iraqi militias and Hezbollah units from Lebanon. They are joined at the front by Shiite Afghans from the Hazara people, up to 2 million of whom live in Iran, mostly as illegal immigrants. They are forcibly conscripted in Iranian prisons and sent to Syria — according to internal Iranian estimates, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 of them fighting in the country. The situation leads to absurd scenes: In the southern Syrian town of Daraa, rebels began desperately searching for Persian interpreters after an offensive of 2,500 Afghans suddenly began approaching.

It is the first international Shiite jihad in history, one which has been compensating for the demographic inferiority of Assad’s troops since 2012. The alliance has prevented Assad’s defeat, but it hasn’t been enough for victory either. Furthermore, the orders are no longer coming exclusively from the Syrian officer corps. Iranian officers control their own troops in addition to the Afghan units, and they plan offensives that also involve Syrian soldiers. Hezbollah commanders coordinate small elite units under their control. Iraqis give orders to Iraqi and Pakistani militia groups. And the Russians don’t let anyone tell them what to do. [Continue reading…]

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Assad buys oil from ISIS

Matthew M. Reed writes: Russia’s claim that ISIS smuggles 200,000 barrels a day assumes of course that the group produces that much. In reality, ISIS has never been credited with pumping so much oil. The group’s own internal assessment, retrieved by U.S. commandos during the May raid that killed ISIS oil emir Abu Sayyaf, pegged production at 55,000 barrels a day earlier this year. More recent estimates point to daily output of 40,000 barrels at most. That’s still a lot for a cult that fancies itself a state. But supply is only half the story. More than 5 million people are trapped in ISIS territory, and they could easily consume that amount every day. ISIS is also at war. If it retains any refining capacity for itself, or takes a cut from local refiners, that’s one more customer at home who gets priority.

We know ISIS has a discreet arrangement with a neighbor, but it’s not Turkey. The Syrian regime has done business with ISIS from day one, just as it did with al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and other rebels who took over energy assets early in the war. President Bashar al-Assad’s point man for ISIS deals, George Haswani, was first designated by the European Union in March. The U.S. Treasury went a step further with its designation on Nov. 25. In addition to the oil deals, Treasury fingered Haswani’s engineering and construction company (HESCO) for servicing active ISIS fields. Leading up to the most recent wave of airstrikes against ISIS oil targets, U.S. officials admitted the network was more resilient and resourceful than expected. Another Treasury designation in late September hinted that ISIS actually increased oil production this year. They may have had some help from Assad’s man.

We don’t know how much oil ISIS has delivered to Assad, but there’s no doubt he needs it. For the first half of 2015, the regime’s oil output was less than 10,000 barrels a day. That was before pro-Assad forces retreated from even more oil-rich territory. All those eyes in the sky over Syria can’t tell how much ISIS oil passes through pipelines to regime-held refineries in the west. There are, however, curious gaps in official data. In April, for instance, Syria’s oil ministry said it refined 106,000 barrels a day, yet trade press could only explain where 85,000 barrels of that oil came from. Data has been increasingly hard to come by since.

Besides oil, ISIS delivers natural gas to the regime. These deals are durable because ISIS can’t use it or sell it to anyone else: It must be captured at the source and moved by pipeline. The only users connected to the gas fields are power plants, refineries, and industries, which are concentrated in Assad’s strongholds. In exchange for gas, the regime provides utilities like electricity, which ISIS taxes accordingly. At natural gas fields like those around Palmyra, which produce lighter liquid hydrocarbons in addition to gas, ISIS takes whatever it can turn into fuel. The gas goes west to Assad. [Continue reading…]

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Syrians accuse Russia of targeting civilian areas

The Guardian reports: Syrians say Russians are not only reckless about choosing targets, but also appear to be intentionally bombing some civilian areas.

Survivors, doctors treating the injured, and local commanders believe the Sukhoi jets, flying from a new airbase in the coastal Latakia province, are hitting homes in a deliberate campaign to break fighters’ morale and depopulate swaths of the countryside.

“They are targeting the civilians at night, and mostly frontlines during the day,” says Abu Hussain, a Turkmen rebel commander, a high-rank defector from the Syrian army. “It’s because they don’t want anyone to film the jets bombing at night, so you can’t prove their identity.”

That matches images and accounts of the airstrike on Raghat’s house [the home of a five-year-old girl described earlier in this report], which her uncle Ali says began moments after 9pm on 1 October. In one of her last photographs, she holds a lit torch, and video her uncle says was shot soon after the bombing shows flames raging through the house against a dark sky.

Russian airstrikes killed at least 295 Syrian civilians in October alone, according to monitoring group Airwars, which keeps an extensive database of images, videos, reports and biographies of the dead.

“Based on all field reporting, the number of alleged civilian casualties attributed to Russia is many times what we see being claimed against the US-led coalition,” says Chris Woods, who runs the Airwars project.

“We think the primary reason here that the casualties are so high is the type of munitions that Russia is using, mostly ‘dumb bombs’ which almost always mean more civilian deaths. That is closely followed by where and how Russia is bombing. There is no doubt that Russia is bombing civilian neighbourhoods.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey sticks its neck out again, this time in Iraq

Metin Gurcan writes: In its second incredibly controversial move in as many weeks, Turkey drew Baghdad’s wrath over the weekend by dispatching uninvited reinforcement troops to Iraq. While Turkey said the move was merely routine, Baghdad called it a “violation of sovereignty” and told Ankara it had 48 hours to get those troops out.

Turkey has since said it will send no more troops but has not withdrawn any soldiers.

Ankara deployed the troops to the Bashiqa area of Iraq, just north of Mosul, the night of Dec. 4 — less than two weeks after Turkey downed a Russian warplane Nov. 24 near the Turkish-Syrian border. [Continue reading…]

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Russian bombs halt relief work in northern Syria, as hundreds of thousands of civilians flee and ISIS advances

McClatchy reports: In the days since Turkey downed a Russian warplane that flew into its airspace, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a bombing campaign that’s destroyed bakeries and relief convoys in northern Syria, cutting the flow of food to more than half a million civilians.

The result has been a complete halt in relief operations by major humanitarian aid groups, all of which operate out of Turkey. It’s also brought the region to the brink of further catastrophe as hundreds of thousands of residents are caught in the crossfire and are unable to flee their homes.

Since Russia began bombing Sept. 30, “there’s been a huge wave of internally displaced,” said Karl Schembri, regional coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council. The situation has grown worse since the shoot-down Nov. 24. “People cannot move at all, and there is nowhere for them to flee to,” he told McClatchy.

All of Syria’s neighbors, including Turkey, have now shut their borders to fleeing refugees, and informal camps for displaced persons just inside the Syrian border are reported to be packed.

The stepped-up Russian bombing campaign has had another effect, rebels and aid workers say, allowing the Islamic State to move into areas that it previously had not controlled close to the Turkish border. [Continue reading…]

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If Assad is not forced out, ISIS never will be

Kyle Orton writes: it is now of primary importance that the British Government and the U.S.-led anti-Isis coalition as a whole make Assad’s ouster a central feature of their stated political objectives. The defeat of Isis requires the enlistment of Sunni Arab forces, and that can only happen if they are confident that Isis will not be replaced by radical sectarian forces of the Assad regime or Iran, which is in control of the Assad regime and which has deployed tens of thousands of Shi’a jihadists into Syria.

Limiting Iran’s power more broadly in Syria is crucial to defeating Isis. Iran and Isis are symbiotic, feeding off one-another by committing atrocities against the other’s political constituency against which they can claim to be the only protectors. The appearance of the coalition siding with Assad/Iran by only bombing Sunni radicals, while doing nothing as Iran moves tens of thousands of European- and U.S.-designated Shi’ite terrorists into Syria, is deeply damaging, helping Isis to present itself as the guardian of the Sunnis.

Sunni Arab forces are needed to defeat Isis because it is in Sunni Arab areas that Isis has its caliphate. Much propaganda has been spread by Assad, Iran, and Russia that there are no moderate Syrian rebels left, but this is simply untrue. The entire rebellion is at war with Isis and there are about 75,000 moderate rebels whom the coalition could work with, plus a further 25,000 not-so-moderate rebels who are also fighting Isis. (Al-Qaeda and pro-al-Qaeda forces amount to 15,000 at the most.) While the Pentagon’s train-and-equip program failed, as it was bound to do since it was only directed against Isis, and gets a lot of media attention, this ignores the more than 40,000 moderate rebels who have been vetted by the CIA and supplied with lethal weaponry, virtually none of which has gone astray. If the moderate rebels forces had something to fight for — namely the promise of self-rule, protected from Isis and Iran — and were given the appropriate resources they could be mobilized to defeat these two Western enemies. The Sunni Arab tribes also remain astonishingly unengaged, though when the West defeated Isis’s predecessor in Iraq it was exactly by aligning with these tribes to help them provide local security.

Finally, it is necessary not to over-rely on Kurdish forces. The Kurds have proven very adept at protecting Kurdish-majority zones from Isis, but many commentators have extended this fact to declare that the Kurds are our only reliable ally in Syria. Leaving aside the political authoritarianism and ethnic engineering of the PYD, the party in control of the Syrian Kurdish armed units, the PYD has been able to clear Isis from less than one province in a year with the backing of Coalition airstrikes. In early 2014, the rebellion, without any air support, expelled Isis from positions in seven provinces, two of which Isis remains wholly absent from and two of which Isis is still largely absent from. Organically rooted, local forces are needed to sustainably hold territory from which Isis is removed. If Kurds stayed in occupation of Arab territory it would produce a backlash similar to Iran’s militias that would redound to Isis’s benefit, as Sunni Arabs fear sectarian domination more than Isis. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday he believes that if an agreement can be reached to ease President Bashar al-Assad of Syria from power, a coalition of Americans, Russians and Syrian forces could wipe out the Islamic State “in a matter of literally months.”

Mr. Kerry’s comments, in a speech to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Belgrade, Serbia, on Thursday morning, were the first in which he publicly offered an estimate of how quickly a well-organized effort might be able to defeat the radical Sunni group. He also said that “without the ability to find some ground forces that are prepared to take on Daesh,” using an Arabic acronym for the group, “this will not be won completely from the air, and we know that.” But he was not specific about where those ground troops would come from. His aides later said they would have to be indigenous. [Continue reading…]

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Helped by Russian airstrikes, ISIS advances in northern Aleppo

NOW reports: ISIS has swept into a village outside a key rebel supply line in northern Aleppo, with activists blaming the setback on Russian airstrikes against rebel factions which are also battling a Kurdish-affiliated coalition further to the west.

The new ISIS advance is the latest battlefield development to rock the flashpoint northern Aleppo front adjacent to a swathe of territory Turkey wants to turn into a “safe zone” free of both the extremist group and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YGP).

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Wednesday morning that “fierce clashes are raging in the area around the village of Kafrah and other nearby areas, between ISIS on one side and rebel factions on the other.” [Continue reading…]

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Russia said to plan new Syria airbase

NOW reports: Russia plans to expand its military force in Syria and deploy jets to a second airbase near Homs, according to a Kuwaiti daily with close access to Moscow’s military intervention in Syria.

Al-Rai reported Monday morning that a Russian intelligence brigade would deploy near the Al-Shayrat Airbase located approximately 35 kilometers southeast of Homs.

“The Al-Shayrat airbase houses around 45 airplane hangars, each of which is fortified in a way that prevents any damage if it is shelled or targeted,” sources in the Damascus joint operations room of the “4+1” military coalition of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah told the newspaper’s chief international correspondent, Elijah J. Magnier.

“It also has a main runway and a 3 kilometer backup runway that engineering teams are working to prepare,” the sources added.

Russia currently conducts its air sorties from the Hmeimim airbase adjacent to Latakia’s International Airport, where it has deployed a force of approximately 50 aircraft since the late summer.

The report added that Moscow wants Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Iraqi militias fighting on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime to seize the ISIS-held towns of Qaryatayn and Palmyra, both of which are located near the Al-Shayrat base, in order to “prevent any shelling that might affect the Russian air forces inside it.” [Continue reading…]

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Russian airstrikes killing Syrian civilians 10 times faster than the coalition

Time reports: In rebel-held Aleppo — once Syria’s largest city, now devastated after more than five years of rebellion — war-weary residents appear to regard the Russian airstrikes as simply one more source of horror. “We see 10 to 15, sometimes 20 airstrikes a day,” says Rami Jarrah, Syrian media activist currently in Aleppo producing a series of video reports documenting the airstrikes. “There’s an atmosphere of despair. The people in general here have gotten used to the war. They don’t believe that a solution is coming.”

In fact, Jarrah says that the Russian airstrikes have picked up some of the slack from the government’s air force, which is in tatters after years of fighting. That means there are now more conventional airstrikes and fewer improvised barrel bombs, which kill indiscriminately when they fall. Regardless, he sees the Russian campaign as a cynical continuation of the regime’s offensive against anti-ISIS rebels. Neither Russia nor Assad “is preventing ISIS from coming to Aleppo, in terms of Russia or Assad,” he says.

Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst on Syria at International Crisis Group, says that part of the reason the Russian campaign has so far failed to deliver a decisive blow against the rebels is that rebel groups have been able to effectively use U.S.-supplied TOW missiles, a potent weapon that brought down a Russian helicopter last week. “The foreign and local dynamics are all meshed together,” he says. “We’ve seen marginal regime gains in some places, and marginal rebel gains in others.”

The Russian military is far from the only force that is killing civilian in Syria. Raids by the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS, have killed between 682 and 977 civilians over the length of the entire campaign since August 2014, according to Airwars.

By comparison, the group reports that Russian strikes are killing civilians at a rate roughly 10 times faster than the coalition. Airwars project director Chris Woods says that video footage of airstrikes released by the Russian government indicate that Russian warplanes are using more primitive, unguided munitions. One video shows a Russian long-range bomber dropping “sticks” of unguided bombs from above the clouds.

“That was a very worrying image for us. There is no control of those munitions. Just dropping a stick like that means its going to cause significant damage on the ground over a wide area,” he says. “We’re very used to seeing those images going back to Vietnam or even the Iraq war in the early 1990s, but we don’t tend to see those kind of images anymore, simply because western militaries have changed the way, generally speaking, they fight.”

In addition, Woods said that the number of civilian deaths resulted from where the Russians are choosing to bomb. “There is no doubt whatsoever that Russia is heavily targeting civilian areas.” [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s toxic role in the fight against ISIS

Hassan Hassan writes: Nearly two months into the Russian military intervention in Syria, it should be already clear this involvement has been toxic on multiple levels. So far, the move has caused at least two high points of polarisation not only inside Syria but also in the region at large, with little to show in terms of reversing the rebels’ gains on the ground.

Moscow’s decision to intervene on the side of Syrian president Bashar Al Assad had a unifying and galvanising effect for the ­anti-government forces. In a rare show of support for the Free Syrian Army, for example, individuals affiliated to extremist forces praised western-backed groups for destroying around 20 regime tanks during the first ground offensive assisted by Russian air cover. Armed factions seem to have increasingly adjusted to the merciless Russian bombardments and managed to make a number of significant gains against the regime, primarily in southern and northern Aleppo.

Meanwhile, the only major achievement for the regime forces has been to break the siege of the Kweiris airbase between Aleppo and Raqqa, although the base was not completely secured and ISIL returned to carry out suicide attacks outside it.

In the background of this meagre performance, the Turkish military downed a Russian jet last Tuesday. Some of the responses coming out of Russia about the incident are adding ­fuel to the fire raging in the region. For example, Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan was “Islamising” Turkey – suggesting that Moscow is either unaware of the landscape in the region or arrogantly ignoring it. For its part, the Russian embassy in the UK released poster art from 1915 mocking Ottoman soldiers.

These responses only help Mr Erdogan, who has long sought to present himself as a voice for Sunni Islam in the neighbourhood and beyond. While these statements may resonate positively within Russia, they are driving more people in the region to view the Russian intervention in Syria as part of a greater effort, not just an attempt to save a desperate ally. [Continue reading…]

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The world’s failure to help Syria change for the better, means Syria is now changing the world for the worse

At yesterday’s Stop the War rally in London, Tariq Ali challenged the Cameron government by saying: “If the aim is to destroy ISIS, … then you should be fighting side by side with Assad and the Russians.”

The contradiction between this proposition and the rally’s slogan — “Don’t bomb Syria” — seemed to elude much of Ali’s audience.

Yesterday, on just one city — Darayya — the regime dropped 50 barrel bombs.

For the last four years, barrel bombs have been the principle tools of destruction used in a bloody campaign to crush opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s rule, the leading cause of death of a quarter of a million Syrians, and the driving force resulting in the exodus of half the population from their homes.

Since Russia started bombing Syria, an estimated 1,300 people have been killed, a third of them civilians.

Today, airstrikes, believed to have been carried out by Russian jets, killed 44 people and wounded scores of others in a marketplace in Idlib province.

There are legitimate reasons for doubting the efficacy or wisdom in Britain joining the U.S.-led air campaign against ISIS in Syria, but those currently shouting “don’t bomb Syria” seem to be more concerned about who is dropping the bombs than who is being killed by them.

The Syria Solidarity Movement UK issued a statement yesterday explaining why they did not support the Stop the War demonstration.

Syria Solidarity UK and Stop the War have very different concerns regarding Syria: Syria Solidarity is concerned with ending the suffering of Syrians under the Assad dictatorship; Stop the War with opposing any UK military involvement regardless of consequences for Syrians.

We oppose the British government’s proposal to merely mimic the American ISIS-only counter-terrorism war; not only do we believe it is immoral to fly missions in Syria against ISIS while leaving the even greater killer, Assad, free to bomb civilians en masse, we also believe that any war against ISIS that doesn’t put the needs of the Syrian people first will be a failure that can only prolong their suffering.

The Syrian writer and leftwing political dissident, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, points out that our collective failure to act in the interests of the Syrian people has now turned Syria into a global issue.

“[B]ecause the world did not help Syria change for better, I think that Syria is changing the whole world for worse.”

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Putin signs sweeping economic sanctions against Turkey

The Washington Post reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday signed into law sweeping economic sanctions against Turkey as relations between the two countries plummet after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane over the Syrian border this past week.

The sanctions bill, posted on the Kremlin’s Web site, targets Turkey’s tourism industry, cancels visa-free travel between the two countries, bans many Russian companies from hiring Turkish citizens and blocks imports of some Turkish goods. Russian government agencies are expected to submit lists of banned goods and exclusions from the new sanctions on Monday.

The fallout will be particularly painful for Turkish tourism. More than 3 million Russian tourists visit Turkey each year, many of them traveling on all-inclusive, week-long resort vacations starting at $1,000, for a couple, including airfare. Putin on Saturday banned charter flights to Turkey, and travel companies were ordered not to sell tours to the country. [Continue reading…]

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Russian raids repeatedly hit Syrian Turkmen areas, Moscow’s data shows

Reuters reports: Russian air strikes in northwest Syria have heavily targeted ethnic Turkmen areas, according to a Reuters data analysis that helps explain rising tensions between Moscow and Ankara in the weeks before Turkey shot down a Russian warplane.

Tuesday’s incident marked the biggest clash between a NATO member and Russia in half a century, and has drawn threats of economic retaliation from the Kremlin. Turkey says the plane strayed into its airspace, which Moscow denies.

Long before that, Turkey had condemned Russia’s bombing of towns and villages in the north of Syria’s western Latakia province, areas it says belong to Syrian Turkmen, who are Syrians of Turkish descent. [Continue reading…]

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Europe’s many-headed security crisis – a challenge to rival the Cold War

By Umut Korkut, Glasgow Caledonian University

The downing of a Russian jet on November 24 over Turkey’s border with Syria is indicative of the security challenges that Europe faces. To deal with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and the refugee crisis, Europe needs to neutralise Islamic State and stabilise Syria to stop the flow of refugees. That means that the EU, Turkey and Russia need to respond coherently to Syria.

The stakes are unimaginably high – with the EU already divided internally over its policy on refugees, failure in Syria risks making things worse. That could undermine the EU at a time when the terrorist threat needs the union to be as tight-knit as possible.

First, the EU’s internal situation. Since the surge of refugees over the summer, the new position of Europe’s increasingly strident right – particularly in eastern Europe and Russia – is that people’s skin colour determines their inclination to terrorism. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently said that “all terrorists are immigrants”. Led also by Poland – which is taking an increasingly hard line on migrants – the conservative right in the region wants to draw a boundary that is white, native and Christian on one side and non-white, non-Christian and immigrant on the other.

The sad fact is that the most homogenous countries have been the least able and willing to cope with the influx of refugees – and this has had substantial knock-on effects. When Croatia shipped newcomers to the Hungarian and Slovenian borders within hours of arrival in October, Hungary responded by extending its notorious fence to close the border between these two EU members. Meanwhile, Slovenia transported all its new arrivals to the Austrian border, which increased the disproportionate burden that Austria and Germany had assumed on behalf of the newer EU members.

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