Category Archives: News

Greece resists role as European Union’s gatekeeper

The New York Times reports: On a recent weekday, 40 buses jammed into the parking lot of a gas station near the Macedonian border, carrying thousands of refugees who had survived a perilous crossing on wintry seas from Turkey.

Now they were approaching ground zero in the intensifying debate over how to curb the unceasing stream of men, women and children from war-ravaged and poor nations in the Middle East and Africa heading to the safety and prosperity of Europe.

After trying and largely failing to persuade Turkey to stem the flow, Europe has reached a critical point in the migrant crisis. With few options left, short of halting the war in Syria, much of the Continent is coalescing around proposals that would harden the border with Macedonia and effectively turn Greece into a giant processing center for migrants.

At the border crossing here — one of the busiest gateways for migrants on the path north and the site of occasional violence between the authorities and frustrated migrants — Greece has played that filtering role to some degree for months. In theory, Greece is allowing only Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans to continue toward their preferred destinations in Germany and Austria. [Continue reading…]

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We are Syria’s moderate opposition — and we’re fighting on two fronts

Asaad Hanna writes: Last October the UN special envoy for Syria, Steffan de Mistura, invited Syrian military factions to engage in dialogue with the regime through the so-called Four Committees Initiative. The initiative was rejected by the factions out of mistrust, but it did reveal the elevated number of opposition fighters that were active in Syria: 74 military factions signed the rejection statement, the smallest of which numbered 1,000, while others totalled more than 10,000.

Crucially, none of these 74 are internationally classified as extremists. The moderate opposition is not a myth. Syrians do not need foreign fighters to help them fight Isis; they have indigenous fighters, better acquainted with the land and able to confront any aggressor, particularly where there is firm international will to support them to do so.

The Syrian armed opposition is fighting a war on two fronts: against Assad and against Daesh. Assad’s barbarity has driven Syrians from their homes and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians over the past five years.

On the other side, we are facing Daesh, a terrorist group whose creation Assad must take some of the responsibility for. Daesh is helping the Assad regime by fighting us, the armed moderate opposition. The relationship between the two should not be in doubt.

Whenever we have made advances and secured victories, Daesh has defended the Assad regime. For example, we have seen Daesh launch offensives in order to draw Free Syrian Army forces away from battle, to ease pressure on the regime. During a battle near Qardaha – the birthplace of Bashar al-Assad – the armed opposition was achieving great victories until Daesh suddenly launched an attack on a key military position in the nearby city of Aleppo, killing a number of Free Syrian Army commanders. Just three days later they withdrew, at which point they handed the area over to regime forces. [Continue reading…]

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Russia is exploiting Syria’s Kurds and U.S. frustrations to complicate the fight against ISIS

Huffington Post reports: As Syria peace talks begin in Geneva, America’s key partners on the ground feel neglected, excluded and increasingly receptive to a man who says the U.S has the war-torn country all wrong — Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s government this week used the process of deciding who would attend the negotiations to endear Russia to the Syrian Kurds, whose militia has chalked up high-profile victories against the self-described Islamic State group with U.S. air support.

Moscow repeatedly demanded that the talks should include the most powerful Kurdish political organization, the radically leftist PYD. Its co-president Salih Muslim said this week that the party — controversial among Western and Muslim-backed Syrian Arab nationalist groups — did not receive an invitation. The Middle East Eye reported Friday that he stopped by Geneva and then promptly left.

Conversely, Washington stayed relatively silent.

The Kurds now feel that though they have become close enough to the United States to host America’s Special Operations troops, receive U.S. weapons through a Pentagon-vetted program for an Arab-Kurdish rebel force and share Islamic State targets with American intelligence, the Obama administration abandoned them in the run-up to the high-profile talks, according to analysts close with Kurdish leaders.

“These talks started in a very troublesome manner with the Kurds not being there,” said Mutlu Civiroglu, a Washington-based analyst who monitors the Syrian Kurds. “Kurds being the pioneers of the fight against ISIS, having lost more than 4,000 fighters, were sure they were going to be invited.”

Michael Werz, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who just returned from a major Kurdish conference in Brussels, told The Huffington Post the current view among some in the PYD is, “we know that the Russians are going to betray us, but they’re the only ones actually lobbying for us to be part of the Geneva talks.”

“‘We are the only secular fighting force, we are the only movement giving freedom to women, and the United States doesn’t even stand up to the Turks when it comes to participating in the peace negotiations,” Werz added in his summing up of Kurdish sentiment. “‘Nobody is publicly supporting us, so what are we supposed to do?'”

The popularity of that thinking is a problem for Washington because it could bolster distrust among Syrian Kurds already nervous about their fledgling relationship with the U.S. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq: Possible war crimes by Shia militia

Human Rights Watch: Members of Shia militias, who the Iraqi government has included among its state forces, abducted and killed scores of Sunni residents in a central Iraq town and demolished Sunni homes, stores, and mosques following January 11, 2016 bombings claimed by the extremist group Islamic State, also known as ISIS. None of those responsible have been brought to justice.

Two consecutive bombings at a café in the town of Muqdadiya, in Diyala province, some 130 kilometers north of Baghdad, on January 11, killed at least 26 people, many of them Sunnis, according to a teacher who lives near the café. ISIS claimed the attacks, saying it had targeted local Shia militias, collectively known as Popular Mobilization Forces, which are formally under the command of the prime minister. Members of two of the dominant militias in Muqdadiya, the Badr Brigades and the League of Righteous forces, responded by attacking Sunnis as well as their homes and mosques, killing at least a dozen people and perhaps many more, according to local residents.

“Again civilians are paying the price for Iraq’s failure to rein in the out-of-control militias,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Countries that support Iraqi security forces and the Popular Mobilization Forces should insist that Baghdad bring an end to this deadly abuse.” [Continue reading…]

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‘I have never seen such destruction’ as in Yemen, says aid worker

PBS Newshour reports: Fighting in Yemen after rebels overthrew the government in early 2015 has created a dire humanitarian situation unparalleled even in places as battle-scarred as Syria, according to a Doctors Without Borders worker.

“I’ve worked in war zones for the past 11 to 12 years, in some of the worst conflicts like Syria, but I have never seen such destruction conducted in such a short period as in Yemen,” wrote Michael Seawright from Auckland, New Zealand.

Seawright served as project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in the Middle Eastern region. “I was based in Saada, in the north, in a Houthi-controlled area that was experiencing almost daily attacks from coalition air forces. These airstrikes were often close to our facilities and we clearly felt their effects,” he wrote. [Continue reading…]

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Boko Haram burns children alive in northeast Nigeria

The Associated Press reports: A survivor hidden in a tree says he watched Boko Haram extremists firebomb huts and heard the screams of children among people burned to death in the latest attack by Nigeria’s homegrown Islamic extremists.

Scores of charred corpses and bodies with bullet wounds littered the streets from Saturday night’s attack on Dalori village just 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram and the biggest city in the northeast, according to survivors and soldiers.

The shooting and burning continued for four hours, survivor Alamin Bakura said, weeping on a telephone call to The Associated Press. He said several of his family members were killed or wounded. [Continue reading…]

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What you need to know about the Zika virus and climate change

Climate Central reports: The rapid rise of the Zika virus is turning into a full-on public health crisis. The virus, transferred via specific types of mosquitoes, “is now spreading explosively” across Latin America, according to Margaret Chan, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO).

There could be up to 4 million cases right now, just eight months after the first case was reported in Brazil. There are 23 countries where the virus is active.

A number of factors have had to line up for the Zika virus — a disease that’s been associated with birth defects — to spread so far and wide so quickly, but chief among them is heavy rain and heat. Climate change could play a future role in this virus’ — as well as other mosquito-borne illnesses — spread as it creates conditions more favorable to the mosquitoes that transmit it. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian peace talks — fake diplomacy is no diplomacy

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An editorial in The Guardian says: There can be no more urgent matter than putting an end to the terrible human tragedy and the lethal regional destabilisation produced by the Syrian conflict. This is a war in which 300,000 people have died, which has internally displaced half the country’s population and which has caused more than 4 million to flee the country altogether. Syria has become the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our time. The plight of its people is also dangerously destabilising Europe and exposing weaknesses in its institutions. If the humanitarian crisis were not enough on its own, then the need to resolve Europe’s refugee crisis at its source would be reason enough to pay close attention to the peace talks that are scheduled to begin on Friday in Geneva. Yet even getting everyone round the table is looking fraught.

In the current climate, the stated aim of the talks appears breathtakingly ambitious. Mandated by a UN resolution passed in December, their purpose is to organise a gathering of representatives of both the Assad regime and opposition groups, in the hope that it could eventually lead to the formation of a new government, and later, elections. At this stage of a devastating war, it is tempting to see the very possibility of talks as an achievement in itself. Yet for several reasons there is a danger that they amount to nothing more than fake diplomacy.

First, the question of protecting Syrian civilians has all but fallen off the agenda. There can be no progress without attention to their plight. Second, western powers seem to have made key political concessions to Russia and Iran, the main enablers of the Assad regime. As as result, the Syrian dictator will feel even more empowered to pursue the mass targeting of his own countrymen and to continue a war of attrition in the belief that he will ultimately come out the winner. [Continue reading…]

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Mayors across the U.S. see Donald Trump as a threat to national security

Politico Magazine’s fourth national Mayors Survey (which had 73 participants) found that: mayors of varying constituencies and political stripes agreed on one key priority: diversity training and outreach, with a focus on tolerance and inclusion. Sixty-two percent of mayors said their police forces had a program to engage the Muslim community, and over a quarter of respondents cited “community relations and distrust of law enforcement” as a key challenge to counter-terrorism efforts.

“It’s prudent for us to establish real and sustainable relationships with immigrant and Muslim communities,” wrote Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. “It is equally important to address those that are marginalized and secluded of all groups, particularly youth, to stabilize communities and lower the opportunities for recruitment and propaganda.”

Wrote one mayor anonymously: “Communities are still very much segregated. And public education needs to be intentional about teaching respect in a diverse society.” One mayor cited as a key accomplishment “strengthening our relationships with the many ethnic groups who live [here]. 1 of 4 residents were not born in the US and 1 of 3 are a person of color.”

National politicians, the mayors charged, are harming counter-terrorism efforts through anti-Muslim rhetoric. “Islamophobia is a huge threat to the well-being of my constituents,” wrote a mayor of a major Midwest city. “The president gets that, congress doesn’t.” Added another: “Some candidates for President and Congressional leaders don’t understand that good relations, tolerant policies, and community outreach is critical to getting tips and leads on terrorist activity and keeping our cities safe.”

Asked which presidential contender would be the worst for security, 51 percent named a certain billionaire real estate mogul.

“Donald Trump will be the worst,” wrote Mayor Marilyn Strickland of Tacoma, Washington, population 203,000. “Peddling hate, fear and xenophobia will not make us more safe.”

“Trump would be a disaster,” concurred Mary Salas, of Chula Vista, California, whose city has a population of about a quarter of a million.“He’d create terrible foreign relations — a dangerous climate.”

Still, some mayors took a contrarian view on where the real terrorist threat is emanating from.

“Austin’s experience with terrorism, whether it’s someone flying his plane into the IRS building or shooting at the police station and the Mexican Consulate, has been exclusively domestic in origin,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler. Said Kitty Piercy, of Eugene, Oregon: “I think having a national wildlife refuge taken over by out of state militia is pretty frightening. We may need to think of American terrorism in whole new ways.” [Continue reading…]

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The GOP candidates are shockingly uninformed about foreign policy

Fred Kaplan writes: hursday night’s Trump-less debate was less blustery than the Republicans’ previous spectacles, but on foreign policy issues, the Donald’s absence didn’t make it less slight, cynical, or shruggingly uninformed.

Earlier in the week, Robert Gates — a lifelong Republican who has served as secretary of defense and CIA director — said the GOP candidates’ discussion of national security issues “would embarrass a middle schooler.” If Gates tuned in Thursday night, he would have had no cause to revise his assessment.

Sen. Marco Rubio started off by promising that, if — or, rather, when — he’s elected president, “We are going to rebuild our intelligence capabilities, and they’re going to tell us where the terrorists are.” Rubio seems unaware that President Obama has vastly boosted spending on intelligence and that the spy agencies’ No. 1 priority is to find terrorists. But Rubio went further: Under his administration, he said, “If we capture terrorists, they’re going to Guantánamo, and we will find out everything they know.” I think this means that he would bring back torture — a technique that George W. Bush ended in 2006. None of the other candidates, or the questioners, seemed to mind. [Continue reading…]

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Desperation on the Greek border as Europe threatens to shut its doors

Vice News reports: “How many countries from here until Germany?” asked Mahfuz Jalili, 16, collecting information to relay to the group of 17 friends and family members who left suburbs of Kabul a month ago only to become temporarily stranded on the Greek-Macedonian border.

“Five?! How much will that cost?!” Mahfuz looks worried. Out of just over $3,000 that his father gave him to make the mammoth voyage from Afghanistan, he has only $50 left, and after more than a day waiting at a gas station on a highway leading to Macedonia, he is getting anxious that Europe may be about to close.

“I don’t really even want to go to Germany, there are too many refugees there,” he told VICE News. “I thought about trying to get to Ireland so I can study engineering. Afghanistan is abnormal, I had to leave.”

As Muhfaz spoke, yet more buses from the Greek capital of Athens swept into the car park and the air become thick with smoke as refugees begun to light bonfires with plastic and kindling foraged from nearby woods. [Continue reading…]

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Finland expects to expel 20,000 failed asylum seekers

AFP reports: Finland expects to expel around 20,000 of the 32,000 asylum seekers it received in 2015, the country’s interior ministry said on Thursday.

“In principle we speak of about two-thirds, meaning approximately 65 percent of the 32,000 will get a negative decision (to their asylum application),” Paivi Nerg, the ministry’s administrative director told AFP.

More than 20,000 of the asylum seekers Finland welcomed in 2015 came from Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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UN launches Syria peace talks despite opposition boycott — updated

Update below — Reuters reports: The first Syria peace talks for two years were a “complete failure” before they started on Friday, a Western diplomat said, after the United Nations announced it would press ahead with them despite an opposition boycott.

Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad said they were far more concerned with fending off a Russian-backed military onslaught, with hundreds of civilians reported to be fleeing as the Syrian army and allied militia tried to capture a suburb of Damascus and finish off rebels defending it.

U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura has invited the Syrian government and an opposition umbrella group to Geneva for “proximity talks”, in which they would meet in separate rooms.

But so far the main opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) has refused to attend, insisting it wanted an end to air strikes and sieges of towns before talks can start. The boycott defies Washington, which has urged the opposition to take up the “historic opportunity” for the talks, without preconditions. [Continue reading…]

UPDATE — Reuters reports: The main Syrian opposition grouping agreed to attend United Nations-sponsored peace talks which began in Geneva on Friday, reversing a boycott that had threatened to wreck the first attempt to find a diplomatic solution to the war in two years. [Continue reading…]

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Joint statement regarding the main principles of any negotiation process in Syria

Over 200 Syrian organisations and more than 790 individuals, including civil society organisations, local councils, NGOs and refugee groups, have laid out their expectations of the Geneva III peace process, and demanded the immediate implementation of confidence building measures, in a new declaration released this week.

The Syrian cause is at a pivotal moment following recent political and field developments coupled with regional and international agreements – including the Vienna Declaration and Security Council Resolution 2254 – that have called for the launch of a negotiated political process between the Syrian opposition and regime.

In preparation for a political process, international envoys and diplomats tasked with the Syrian file have continuously engaged representatives of Syrian civil society on the political process and issued multiple proposals calling for the participation of civil society in any discussions or negotiations between the Syrian regime and opposition.

The signatories of this declaration – both organizations and individuals – hereby affirm that Syrian civil society would not have emerged but for the March 2011 revolution; a revolution that resisted all tyrannical restrictions of a regime that consistently suppressed calls for basic freedom and the formation of civil society since 2000 through the sacrifices of its people, the suffering of its detainees and the souls of its martyrs.

The signatories also affirm that the main conflict in Syria remains with the leadership of the ruling regime based in Damascus and its repressive policies that have led the country down a catastrophic path.
The signatories of this declaration further affirm that in order for Syria to be put on the road to salvation, the Syrian people and what remains of Syrian state institutions must be liberated from this brute force and that civil society, in its many manifestations, must play a key role in furthering the March 2011 revolution and its values. Only then can Syrians realize peace through justice and thereby transition to a democratic pluralistic system where equal rights and responsibilities are granted to all Syrians. And if indeed civil society is to participate in the political process, it must be those members of civil society who emerged from the womb of the struggle for freedom and dignity and sided with the people’s just demands who should participate. [Read the complete declaration with list of signatories.]

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Freed U.S. student: Now is not the time to go to Iran

Reuters reports: An American student detained in Iran who was freed this month under a prisoner swap said on Thursday he was accused of trying to overthrow the Iranian government and held for nearly a month in solitary confinement.

Matthew Trevithick, who had traveled to Iran to study Farsi, told CNN that interrogators at Iran’s Evin Prison also accused him of having access to millions of dollars and knowledge of secret weapons caches.

In his first television interview since his Jan. 16 release, he described his 41-day ordeal, including how he was captured and his treatment and conditions at the prison. [Continue reading…]

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Iran forcing Afghan refugees to fight in Syria

Human Rights Watch: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has recruited thousands of undocumented Afghans living there to fight in Syria since at least November 2013, Human Rights Watch said today, and a few have reported that Iranian authorities coerced them. Iran has urged the Afghans to defend Shia sacred sites and offered financial incentives and legal residence in Iran to encourage them to join pro-Syrian government militias.

Human Rights Watch in late 2015 interviewed more than two dozen Afghans who had lived in Iran about recruitment by Iranian officials of Afghans to fight in Syria. Some said they or their relatives had been coerced to fight in Syria and either had later fled and reached Greece, or had been deported to Afghanistan for refusing. One 17-year-old said he had been forced to fight without being given the opportunity to refuse. Others said they had volunteered to fight in Syria in Iranian-organized militias, either out of religious conviction or to regularize their residence status in Iran.

“Iran has not just offered Afghan refugees and migrants incentives to fight in Syria, but several said they were threatened with deportation back to Afghanistan unless they did,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. “Faced with this bleak choice, some of these Afghan men and boys fled Iran for Europe.” [Continue reading…]

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Iraqis freed from ISIS’s rule now threatened by ethnic and sectarian ‘cleansing’

Aida al-Khatib reports: Thanks to the security crisis caused by the extremist group known as the Islamic State, the demographics of the province of Diyala are changing. The extremist group has been driven out of certain parts of the province and some of these are now controlled by Iraq’s sometimes-controversial Shiite Muslim volunteer militias while others are run by the Iraqi Kurdish military.

“Demographic changes have become a reality here,” says Raad al-Dahlaki, a Sunni Muslim MP and head of the Iraqi Parliament’s Committee on Immigration and Displacement. “There are many areas where security is extremely lax and there are violations of the law that should not be tolerated. For example certain areas have been shelled deliberately and it’s causing the mass displacement of [mostly Sunni] families.”

Al-Dahlaki believes the perpetrators of these acts are “militant gangs that pretend to be part of the volunteer militias but who are actually carrying out agendas set by foreigners”. And by this he means neighbouring Iran – many of the Shiite militias are funded or otherwise supported by the Iranian military.

“These gangs want to sow discord and change the demography of the province,” al-Dakhali argues.

Al-Dakhali believes the federal government should be doing more to stop the targeting of civilians by military groups, including the Shiite Muslim volunteers and Iraqi Kurdish troops. [Continue reading…]

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France to recognise Palestinian state if deadlock with Israel not broken

Reuters reports: France will recognise a Palestinian state if its efforts in coming weeks to try to break the deadlock between Israelis and Palestinians fail, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Friday.

“France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the solution of two states,” he said.

Fabius said that as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, France had a responsibility to try to keep up efforts to find a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

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