The Los Angeles Times reports: A populist far-right German party that has fiercely attacked the government for letting in more than a million refugees in the last year is expected to be the big winner in three important state elections Sunday that will serve as a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s controversial open-door policies.
The party has aimed its appeal to German voters with a shrill anti-foreigner bent that has some similarities to Donald Trump’s bid to win the Republican nomination for U.S. president.
The Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, has campaigned hard against refugees streaming into the country, mostly from Syria and Iraq, and it has surged in public opinion polls from about 3% last summer to as high as 20% ahead of elections in three of Germany’s 16 states. That is far above the 4.7% the AfD won in the 2013 federal election just half a year after it was formed mainly to oppose Europe’s single currency, the euro, and the expensive European Union financial bailouts to Greece. [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: The Islamic State launched two chemical attacks this week near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, killing a toddler, wounding some 600 people and causing hundreds more to flee, Iraqi officials said Saturday.
Security and hospital officials say the latest attack took place early Saturday in the small town of Taza, which was also struck by a barrage of rockets carrying chemicals three days earlier.
Sameer Wais, whose 3-year-old daughter Fatima was killed in the attack, is a member of a Shiite militia fighting ISIS in the province of Kirkuk. He said he was on duty at the frontline when the attack occurred early in the morning, quickly ran home and said he could still smell the chemicals in the rocket.
“We took her to the clinic and they said that she needed to go to a hospital in Kirkuk. And that’s what we did, we brought her here to the hospital in Kirkuk,” he said.
Wais said his daughter appeared to be doing better the next day so they took her home. “But by midnight she started to get worse. Her face puffed up and her eyes bulged. Then she turned black and pieces of her skin started to come off,” he said.
By the next morning, Fatima had died, Wais said. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Major powers close to U.N.-brokered peace talks on Syria are discussing the possibility of a federal division of the war-torn country that would maintain its unity as a single state while granting broad autonomy to regional authorities, diplomats said.
The resumption of Geneva peace talks is coinciding with the fifth anniversary of a conflict that began with protests against President Bashar al-Assad before descending into a multi-sided civil war that has drawn in foreign governments and allowed the growth of Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.
Fighting in Syria has slowed considerably since a fragile “cessation of hostilities agreement” brokered by the United States and Russia came into force almost two weeks ago. But an actual peace deal and proper ceasefire remain elusive.
As the United Nations’ peace mediator Staffan de Mistura prepares to meet with delegations from the Syrian government and opposition, one of the ideas receiving serious attention at the moment is a possible federal division of Syria. [Continue reading…]
The Daily Beast reports: A trove of documents alleged to contain the names of thousands of ISIS fighters has caught the attention of U.S. intelligence officials, but they’re skeptical that the files will contain many new revelations about the terror group, three U.S. officials told The Daily Beast.
The files were obtained by Sky News and a Syrian newspaper, Zaman al-Wasl, and purport to detail the inner workings of ISIS’ recruitment operations. The U.S. officials said that they hadn’t yet obtained copies of the documents, but cautioned that doesn’t mean that similar documents haven’t been obtained and studied previously.
The documents also appear to be as much as three years old, which may make them less useful for planning military strikes than information about ISIS’s current status and operations.
U.S. military officials got their first look at the documents when they appeared online this week, two defense officials told The Daily Beast, and there were mixed assessments of their usefulness.
Within the military’s intelligence sector, officials scoured the names to determine who may still be alive and what the list tells them about the flow of foreign fighters to Syria.
So far, officials have concluded “a significant number” are dead, one of the defense officials explained to The Daily Beast.
Another U.S. official said the documents appeared to be old and that some of the information in them may have already been available from other public sources. That raised the question of whether the source of the documents, who has been identified in news reports as an ISIS defector, was peddling old, non-exclusive information. [Continue reading…]
Akbar Ganji writes: Hassan Rouhani was elected Iran’s president in June 2013 based on his promise of reaching a nuclear agreement and improving the relations with the West. He delivered on his promise, and in the process a close working relationship developed between Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Secretary of State John Kerry. The two diplomats have been discussing various issues, including the cease-fire in Syria. On March 6, President Rouhani said, “We can authorize our negotiation team to discuss other issues [with the West] in the world [that are of mutual interest]. We are sure that we will reach agreement similar to the nuclear negotiations.”
The Iranian people support these efforts and wish for improved relations with the United States. Under the leadership of former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as well as Rouhani, Iran’s reformists and moderates want to pursue such goals. Leaders of the Green Movement who are under house arrest, namely former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, his wife Zahra Rahnavard and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi also support the policy of détente with the West.
Since the nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 was signed in July 2015, the main problem in Iran has been national reconciliation. In other words, just as Iran and the P5+1 resolved their long-held and difficult differences diplomatically, Iranians from all walks of life also want to resolve the issues that are dividing their nation. Iranians call the nuclear agreement Barjam, the Farsi acronym for Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The reformists and moderates are now talking about the second Barjam, or Barjam 2, which they hope will lead to the release of all political prisoners, an end to the house arrest of the Green Movement’s leaders, freedom for political parties, independence for the universities and colleges and the resolution of other important issues.
These were also Rouhani’s promises during his campaign for the presidency, which have been opposed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who favors controlling cultural affairs as well as the universities. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Iran executed nearly 1,000 prisoners last year, the highest number in two decades, and hundreds of journalists, activists and opposition figures languish in custody, a United Nations investigator said on Thursday.
Ahmed Shaheed, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, voiced particular concern about executions for crimes committed by children under 18. This was “strictly and unequivocally prohibited under international law”.
There had been a “staggering surge in the execution of at least 966 prisoners last year – the highest rate in over two decades”, Shaheed told a news briefing. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: “Your exellency: you are not working,” television presenter Azza al-Henawy said, looking into the camera but addressing the Egyptian president. “Not one single issue has been solved since you took over.”
After years of hearing little but enthusiastic applause for Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and vilification of his enemies, the tens of millions of Egyptians who watch the country’s pugnacious talk shows are suddenly being presented with the president’s faults.
The former military chief who overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood to take power in 2013 is facing the first sustained public criticism of his rule.
State television, known for being fiercely loyal, launched an internal investigation on Wednesday into Henawy for her remarks. But her comments were hardly isolated.
After years of publicly lionizing Sisi as the savior of the nation, many of the country’s most influential figures have emerged to blame the president for an economy in crisis, an Islamist insurgency raging in the Sinai peninsula and the brutality of an unreformed police force. [Continue reading…]
The Independent reports: Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “exploded” last year to reach a new record high not seen for thousands of years, scientists have announced.
The last time there was such a sustained increase in carbon dioxide concentrations was at the end of the last Ice Age, between 17,000 and 11,000 years ago. But the current increase is now about 200 times faster than then, they said.
A combination of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and the effects of the El Nino phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean have both contributed to the rapid rise at a time when the world is trying to curb emissions of the greenhouse gas, the researchers said.
Instruments monitoring CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded a jump of 3.05 parts per million (ppm) during 2015, which is the largest year-on-year increase in 56 years of research at the site, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: China strongly rejected U.S.-led criticism of its human rights record at the U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday, saying the United States was hypocritical and guilty of crimes including the rape and murder of civilians.
“The U.S. is notorious for prison abuse at Guantanamo prison, its gun violence is rampant, racism is its deep-rooted malaise,” Chinese diplomat Fu Cong told the Council, using unusually blunt language.
“The United States conducts large-scale extra-territorial eavesdropping, uses drones to attack other countries’ innocent civilians, its troops on foreign soil commit rape and murder of local people. It conducts kidnapping overseas and uses black prisons.”
Fu was responding to a joint statement by the United States and 11 other countries, who criticised China’s crackdown on human rights and its detentions of lawyers and activists. [Continue reading…]
Jason Leopold reports: The Obama administration has long called itself the most transparent administration in history. But newly released Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show that the White House has actually worked aggressively behind the scenes to scuttle congressional reforms designed to give the public better access to information possessed by the federal government.
The documents were obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports journalism in the public interest, which in turn shared them exclusively with VICE News. They were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — the same law Congress was attempting to reform. The group sued the DOJ last December after its FOIA requests went unanswered for more than a year.
The documents confirm longstanding suspicions about the administration’s meddling, and lay bare for the first time how it worked to undermine FOIA reform bills that received overwhelming bipartisan support and were unanimously passed by both the House and Senate in 2014 — yet were never put up for a final vote. [Continue reading…]
RFE/RL reports: On November 3, 2015, hundreds of guests gathered at the swanky Ritz-Carlton hotel in the U.S. capital for a dinner honoring Russian billionaire and philanthropist Pyotr Aven and Susan Lehrman, a Washington socialite, investor, and patron of the arts.
On the guest list that evening, RFE/RL has confirmed, was Mikhail Lesin, a former Russian press minister, Kremlin adviser, and central player in President Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of state control over the media.
Lesin never showed up. And less than 48 hours later, on November 5, his battered body was discovered in his 9th-floor suite at Washington’s Dupont Circle Hotel.
His death sparked months of fervent speculation about what — or who — might have killed the former Kremlin insider, what he was doing in Washington, and the wall of silence that both city and federal authorities had erected around the matter.
Exactly who invited Lesin to the dinner, organized by the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, could not be immediately established. The research center, which focuses on the study of Russia and the former Soviet Union, said he was slated to sit at the table of one of the event’s sponsors but declined to say which.
Lesin’s empty seat at the dinner is among a scant handful of details about his final days that have emerged in the four months since his death, which has spawned theories that he was killed for spilling Kremlin secrets to the U.S. government — or even that he entered witness protection.
The New York Times adds: One law enforcement official said there were no obvious signs of forced entry or foul play in his hotel room. Mr. Lesin did, however, appear disheveled when he returned to the hotel, according to the video surveillance cameras, the official said. [Continue reading…]
Pippa Norris writes: Many American commentators have had trouble understanding the rise of Donald Trump. How could such a figure surge to become the most likely standard-bearer for the GOP – much less have any chance of entering the White House?
But Trump is far from unique. As many commentators have noted, he fits the wave of authoritarian populists whose support has swelled in many Western democracies.
The graph below from ParlGov data illustrates the surge in the share of the vote for populist authoritarian parliamentary parties (defined as rated 8.0 or above by experts on left-right scales) across 34 OECD countries. [Continue reading…]
David A Graham reports: Since his campaign manager was accused of assaulting a Breitbart reporter, Donald Trump has taken his case to the court of public opinion. Now, Corey Lewandowski, the accused staffer, may have to take his case to criminal court as well. Michelle Fields has filed a police report about the incident in Jupiter, Florida, the town’s police department confirmed in a statement. The news was first reported by the Independent Journal Review.
Fields says she was grabbed and yanked out of Trump’s way Tuesday night as she tried to ask him a question at a post-election press conference. Washington Post reporter Ben Terris witnessed the incident. But the Trump campaign suggested Fields was lying and had fabricated in the incident. The Brietbart reporter, upset by the denials, then tweeted a picture of her bruises.
Trump again escalated his game of brinksmanship Thursday night after the Republican debate. “Perhaps she made the story up. I think that’s what happened,” he said. Lewandowski, meanwhile, tweeted, “You are totally delusional. I never touched you. As a matter of fact, I have never even met you.”
Lewandowski’s alleged rough handling of Fields is one of two disturbing incidents of violence at Trump events in the last week. On Wednesday in Fayetteville, N.C., an attendee sucker-punched a protestor who was being removed by police and later toldInside Edition, “Next time, we might have to kill him.” There was near-violence outside that rally as well, as I reported. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: German authorities have obtained a list of the names of some 22,000 foreigners who have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State, a trove of documents that officials say will help them to prosecute fighters who return home, and improve their efforts to prevent other Germans from joining the organization.
The Interior Ministry confirmed on Thursday that officials believed the list was authentic, but they declined to give any details about where it came from or the identities of the people on the list. It was also not immediately clear whether the German authorities were sharing the list with intelligence agencies of their allies, including the United States and Britain.
Sky News reports: The files were passed to Sky News on a memory stick stolen from the head of Islamic State’s internal security police, an organisation described by insiders as the group’s SS.
He had been entrusted to protect the organisation’s core secrets and he rarely parted with the drive.
The man who stole it was a former Free Syrian Army convert to Islamic State who calls himself Abu Hamed.
Disillusioned with the Islamic State leadership, he says it has now been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Baath party of Saddam Hussein.
He claims the Islamic rules he believed have totally collapsed inside the organisation, prompting him to quit.
I met him in a secret location in Turkey, and he said IS was giving up on its headquarters in Raqqa and moving into the central deserts of Syria and ultimately Iraq, the group’s birthplace.
He also claimed that in reality Islamic State, the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, are working together against the moderate Syrian opposition. [Continue reading…]
AFP reports: Analysts on Thursday cast doubt on the authenticity of thousands of documents reportedly leaked from the Islamic State jihadist group, pointing out mistakes and uncharacteristic language.
The trove of documents, which includes the names, addresses, phone numbers and family contacts of IS jihadists, was handed over to Britain’s Sky News by a disillusioned former member, the broadcaster said Wednesday.
Syrian opposition news website Zaman al-Wasl said there were thousands of repetitions in the leaked documents and the names of only 1,700 people could be identified in the 22,000 documents.
The files include forms that IS recruits reportedly had to fill out in order to join the organisation and contain information on nationals from 51 countries.
There were several inconsistencies in the language of the forms that raised concerns, experts said. [Continue reading…]
Zaman Al Wasl reports: Zaman Al Wasl has exclusively obtained the personal data of 1736 ISIS fighters from over 40 countries, including their backgrounds, nationalities and hometown addresses.
The document that branded by ISIS as confidential is shedding the light on the inner circle of the de facto a state which has its own institutions and official documents as well data bank.
Two thirds of ISIS manpower are from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. 25% of ISIS fighters are Saudis, the data disclosed. [Continue reading…]
ISIS docs: Having seen the ones relating to Germans (which I assume were part of the same batch), I am confident that they are authentic.
The Daily Beast reports: The Iraqi man being held and interrogated by U.S. officials is a suspected mid-level Islamic State operative whose knowledge of the group’s chemical weapons program allowed coalition strikes to destroy at least two related facilities, two defense officials said.
The man has been detained for roughly a month, according to the officials. And in that time, they said, he has given the U.S. the most in-depth understanding of ISIS’s chemical attack capabilities and aspirations.
“They have gotten a lot of information from this guy,” a third defense official explained. “A lot.”
It was based on his information that the coalition conducted at least two strikes this week in Iraq, which targeted ISIS’s chemical program, according to one defense official.
According to a March 5 press release from Operation Inherent Resolve, the American-led coalition struck “an [ISIS] weapons production facility” near Mosul, which was suspected to be part of ISIS’s chemical weapons program. And in a March 7 press statement, the coalition said it struck an ISIS “tactical unit” near Mosul, which also was believed to be related to the program. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: A collapse in oil revenues available to Islamic State is likely to have made it increasingly dependent on donations from wealthy Gulf states and profits from foreign exchange markets, the first UK inquiry into the terror group’s funding has heard.
Attacks by the US-led coalition on Isis’s oil installations and convoys are believed to have reduced its oil revenues by more than a third as the funding of the group becomes one of the central fronts in the battle to defeat it in Syria and Iraq.
The government is reluctant to cooperate with the Commons foreign affairs select committee inquiry and has barred the key Ministry of Defence official overseeing efforts to undermine Isis’s funding from giving evidence.
But the Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood said progress was being made, even though knowledge of the group’s opaque finances was sketchy and dependent on intelligence finds.
He asserted that the regime’s oil revenue was collapsing and even suggested the group’s Syrian headquarters in Raqqa could implode if and when the Iraqi army retakes Mosul.
But experts have told the committee the UK government may be vastly over-estimating the importance of oil revenue, and underestimating the extent to which Isis is reliant on foreign donors in the Gulf or its manipulation of the Iraqi banking system.
Luay al-Khatteeb from the Iraq Energy Institute claimed the cost of waging war for Isis must be so high, and its oil revenues now so limited, that it must be accessing large-scale donations. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: The current level of hostility in US-Russian relations was caused in part by Washington’s contemptuous treatment of Moscow’s security concerns in the aftermath of the cold war, a former US defence secretary has said.
William Perry, who was defence secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration from 1994 to 1997, emphasised that in the past five years it has been Vladimir Putin’s military interventions in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere that have driven the downward spiral in east-west relations.
But Perry added that during his term in office, cooperation between the two countries’ militaries had improved rapidly just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union and that these gains were initially squandered more as a result of US than Russian actions. [Continue reading…]
After waging war in Yemen for almost a year, Saudi Arabia is gradually beginning to realise what many said at the outset: that military victory is impossible.
A few days ago the Saudis took the previously unthinkable step of engaging in direct talks with the Houthis, their principal foe in Yemen. Yesterday, reinforcing this shift, Saudi foreign minister Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir spoke of the kingdom’s “commitment to finding a political solution”.
Even so, an end to the conflict is probably still a long way off and the scope of the Saudi-Houthi talks so far seems to be limited to a few specific issues: cross-border conflict, prisoner exchanges and supplies of humanitarian aid to Yemen.
