Category Archives: News

Russian war propaganda in Syria much like America’s in Iraq

Aron Lund writes: When the United States was occupying Iraq, senior Bush administration officials like Washington Don kept blaming “terrorists” of the “Baathist dead-ender” or “al-Qaeda” variety for everything new setback. To be sure, Baathists and al-Qaeda loyalists were a prominent part of the mix, and they would later become dominant. But in the early days, Iraq’s insurgency seems to have been considerably more diverse than what we now see in Syria. In 2003-2004, it consisted of innumerable little local groups that spanned the full range of ideologies from secular nationalism to jihadism; they would even on occasion bridge the Sunni-Shia divide. And yet, U.S. President George W. Bush could get away with telling his people that the Iraqi resistance was all “al-Qaeda types, Ansar al-Islam types, terrorist groups” and conclude that it was better to “fight them there than here.”

A decade later in Syria, the roles are reversed. Russian politicians will contemptuously label any Syrian who has taken up arms to stop the depredations of Bashar al-Assad’s army a “jihadi terrorist” and in lieu of a political strategy, they smirk and puff their chests and say “bring ‘em on.” Their American counterparts sound like the anti-Iraq War tankie left in 2003-2004, eyes darting nervously around the room as they try to explain that there are good salafi insurgents and bad salafi insurgents. Give it a year more, and they’ll be complaining about Russia’s “cowboy attitude.”

Not that their respective supporters seem to notice, or care. But if you’re not a die-hard partisan of either Vladimir Putin or of the late and unlamented presidency of George W. Bush, you will by now have noticed that the Kremlin’s “anti-terrorist” discourse is essentially indistinguishable from the bullshit shoveled into the media by the American White House ten years ago, and equally self-serving, misleading, and destructive. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Saudi support to rebels slows Assad advance, say pro-Damascus sources

Reuters reports: Offensives by the Syrian army and its allies backed by Russian air strikes are going more slowly than expected due to increased Saudi support to rebels, senior sources close to the Syrian government said, as the insurgents pressed a counter attack on Friday.

Rebels captured the village of Atshan in Hama province, the second setback for the government and its allies in that area in as many days, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and rebels said. The nearby town of Morek fell to rebels on Thursday.

Backed by Russian air strikes, the Syrian army and allies including the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have launched several offensives in areas vital to President Bashar al-Assad’s control of western Syria.

But analysts say the government gains have been at best modest, one saying earlier this week the only breakthrough thus far was a minimal advance south of Aleppo.

U.S. officials have voiced a similar view, while rebels have said the Russian-backed attacks are failing and they expect more gains for their side.

In a frank assessment of the situation facing the government side, the two senior sources – neither of them Syrian – said the course of battle had been slowed by more military support to the rebels from Saudi Arabia, which is vying for influence with Iran across the Middle East and wants Assad gone from power.

They cited increased supplies of anti-tank TOW missiles to the rebels as a big factor. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Assad regime airstrikes level ‘economic powerhouse’ in Aleppo

Syria Direct reports: A series of regime airstrikes on Saturday destroyed Syria’s largest textile factory, the “largest source of work from the Aleppo countryside to Idlib,” a local reporter told Syria Direct.

“The Dayri factory was an economic powerhouse,” said Bashar al-Halabi, the director of the news website Aleppo and Its Countryside Today, on Sunday. The plant, located near the Aleppo-Damascus international highway in the western Aleppo countryside, manufactured polyester and employed over 600 workers.

Many of the factory’s workers were trapped inside while fires burned the building down around them. Rescue workers from the Civil Defense managed to save the majority of those trapped inside. 13 workers were reported injured and it is not yet known if anyone was killed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Refugees helping refugees: How a Palestinian camp in Lebanon is welcoming Syrians

By Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, UCL

Established in 1955, northern Lebanon’s Baddawi refugee camp is home to between 25,000 and 40,000 “established” Palestinian refugees. Like other Palestinian camps across Lebanon, it has long been violent and lawless. This summer, I conducted fieldwork there.

Such camps are outside Lebanese jurisdiction, and have commonly been referred to as “islands of insecurity”. Nonetheless, the established residents of Baddawi camp have offered protection and assistance to tens of thousands of new arrivals from Syria since 2011.

These recent arrivals include Syrian nationals who have fled violence and persecution in their country, but also displaced Syrian-Palestinians and Iraqis. While they are new to Lebanon and Jordan when compared with “established” refugee communities, refugees from Syria are now officially categorised as “protracted” refugees. And for many hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees, this is the second, third or fourth time that they have been displaced by conflict.

Baddawi is a stark reminder of the urgent reality of this crisis. We’ve been saturated with stories and images about the refugee crisis (really a protection crisis) in Europe – and yet the vast majority of refugees from Syria are still hosted by Syria’s neighbouring countries. At the end of August 2015, there were 1,114,000 in Lebanon, 630,000 in Jordan and 1,939,000 in Turkey.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Rouhani accuses Iranian media of ‘acting like secret police’

EA Worldview reports: President Rouhani renewed his battle against Iran’s hardliners on Sunday, accused their media outlets of persecuting people and supporting crackdowns by the security services.

Rouhani told an audience at a Tehran press fair that the media benefits from “a permanent security margin…so that not only can they say whatever they want, but they also sometimes act like the secret police”.

“You learn from some publications who will be arrested tomorrow, what is going to be closed down tomorrow, which individual’s reputation should be damaged,” the President said.

Rouhani’s speech was the latest volley in a growing fight within the regime ahead of February elections for Parliament and the Assembly of Experts. The President’s opponents — fearing a bloc including supporters of Rouhani, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, and reformists — have used the Supreme Leader’s warnings of US “infiltration” to claim that a “fourth seditions” is being abetted by Government officials. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

America has built the equivalent of 10 Keystone pipelines since 2010 — and nobody said anything

National Post reports: While TransCanada Corp. has been cooling its heels on its Keystone XL proposal for the past six years, the oil pipeline business has been booming in the United States.

Crude oil pipeline mileage rose 9.1 per cent last year alone to reach 66,649 miles, according to data from the Washington, D.C.-based Association of Oil Pipe Lines (AOPL) set to be released soon.

Between 2009 and 2013, more than 8,000 miles of oil transmission pipelines have been built in the past five years in the U.S., AOPL spokesperson John Stoody said, compared to the 875 miles TransCanada wants to lay in the states of Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska for its 830,000-bpd project. By last year, the U.S. had built 12,000 miles of pipe since 2010. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Our web history reveals what we think and do. Shouldn’t that remain private?

By Paul Bernal, University of East Anglia

An overlooked aspect of the draft Investigatory Powers Bill is the significance of demanding that service providers store 12 months’ internet connection records. A record of every website visited and internet service connected to, the government presents this as the online equivalent of an itemised phone bill. But this is a false analogy: internet connection records carry far more detail than a phone book, and the government’s move to claim them represents an unprecedented intrusion into our lives.

Supporters of the bill suggest that this data provides a way of checking that someone accessed Facebook at a particular time, just as phone records can reveal that a user called a particular number at a certain time. But while this is true, it misunderstands the role the internet has in our lives, and consequently underplays how much it can reveal.

The phone is a communications tool, but we have complex online lives and use the internet for many things other than “communication”. We do almost everything online: we bank online, we shop, find relationships, listen to music, watch television and films, plan our holidays, read about and indulge our interests.

Access to the websites we visit, for an entire year, is not at all comparable to having an itemised telephone bill. It’s more equivalent to tailing someone as they visit the shops, the pub, the cinema, listen to the radio, go to the park and on holiday, read books and magazines and newspapers, and much more.

It’s not just the data that’s revealing, it’s the sort of direct, logical inferences that can be made given a web browsing history. For example, from the fact that someone visits sites connected with a particular religion, one can infer that they follow that religion. If they visit sites regarding a particular health condition, it’s possible to infer that they may suffer from that condition, or are worried about their health.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

The extremists who now speak for Israel

The Daily Beast reports: A West Bank settler who insults American and Israeli leaders might not seem a likely candidate for a job promoting Israel’s image to the world, but Ron Baratz is, indeed, tapped to be Israel’s next communications director.

The controversy over his appointment marks a new era of Israeli politics that has seen what used to be considered the fringe right take center stage while Israel’s international isolation intensifies.

“Allow me to be blunt,” wrote Baratz on his Facebook wall last Tuesday. “Obama’s reference to Netanyahu’s speech—this is what modern anti-Semitism looks like in liberal Western countries. It comes, of course, with much tolerance and understanding for Islamic anti-Semitism; so much tolerance and understanding that they’d be willing to give them a nuke.”

Baratz seemed to go out of his way to make this point. It refers to a remark by Obama way back in March when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress in a bid to kill the Iran nuclear deal.

Obama called the speech “theater” which “didn’t offer any viable alternatives” for preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Last year, Baratz targeted Secretary of State John Kerry, comparing his mental age to that of a 12-year-old child and joking on Facebook that Kerry could have a “lucrative career as a stand-up comedian.”

As communications director, Baratz would lead public relations efforts to disseminate positive information about Israel and its actions. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why Aung San Suu Kyi’s ‘Mandela moment’ is a victory for Myanmar’s generals

Maung Zarni writes: Though in exile 6,000 miles away from Myanmar, I can almost taste the euphoria of my fellow dissidents. Aung San Suu Kyi’s wildly popular opposition – the National League for Democracy – has won a landslide in the multiparty elections, and 31 million voters, most apparently backing the NLD, are savouring a long-awaited moment of jubilation. The NLD leader, whom they call Amay or mother, appeared on TV, her eyes shining with tears of joy.

Even foreign journalists covering the country in the 25 years since Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest have scarcely been able to conceal their excitement at the prospect of a new era of freedom and democracy, ushered in through her non-violent, pragmatic leadership.

Myanmar’s Mandela moment has arrived. Or has it?

A sober analysis may be in order. Aside from the fact that Myanmar’s military leaders have, constitutionally, blocked any possibility of “the Woman” with her two “impure-blooded sons” and “foreign privileges” assuming the presidency, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party faces huge barriers to turn a resounding electoral mandate into a real step towards a genuinely representative government.

And this is not the first time the public has felt euphoric about the power of its votes. In May 1990 Aung San Suu Kyi and her then fledgling opposition party won a decisive mandate taking 82% of the parliamentary seats and 62% of the total votes. That landslide came despite the fact that the generals placed her and her senior colleagues under house arrest on the eve of the elections, in effect barring them from the electoral process. So the opposition knows how it feels to fail to convert this mandate a quarter-century ago into a real political gain or put the country on the path of democracy. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Aung San Suu Kyi victory will test commitment to human rights in Myanmar

By Andrew Fagan, University of Essex

Myanmar has taken a potentially momentous step away from dictatorship and towards democracy. More than 6,000 candidates from 91 political parties competed for the votes of 33m registered voters on November 8 in the country’s first credible elections since 1960.

The precise outcome won’t be known for days, but Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) is claiming to have gained at least 70% of the votes cast. Senior figures in the ruling party are conceding defeat.

No one should underestimate the significance of power changing hands in Myanmar via the ballot box. However, this will only finally occur in March 2016, when the newly-elected MPs vote for a new president and a new government will be formed.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Anti-ISIS airstrikes are killing more civilians than ISIS fighters

Hassan Hassan writes: Last Thursday, Russian fighter jets carried out devastating raids in the ISIL-held Syrian city of Albukamal, near the Iraqi border. At least 30 civilians were killed in the twin attacks in the city centre. Many more were seriously injured. According to activists who document atrocities, not a single ISIL member was killed in the raids.

Leaflets dropped by the regime also warned this was only the start: “The intensity of the attacks is increasing. The worst is coming. Crushing attacks will be directed to this area.”

The leaflets suggest the raids were not intended to attack ISIL specifically but were part of a systematic campaign against the local population. Also, even before the current intensity of the air strikes increases in Deir Ezzor, the government still kills more than three times the number of those killed by ISIL. According to DeirEzzor24, an organisation whose members inside the province risk their lives to document ISIL’s daily atrocities, 77 people were killed by the regime last month, compared with 25 civilians killed by the terrorist group.

The level of devastation committed by the regime in ISIL-held areas often goes unnoticed. No condemnation was issued from the US-led coalition of the massacre of civilians, which reinforces the feeling often expressed by locals that the regime, Russia and the international coalition seem to be taking turns in attacking residential areas, especially as ISIL has adjusted to the air attacks and evacuated its bases.

If the international coalition believes that ISIL does not command the support of the local population living under it, as officials often claim, then silence over such atrocities cannot be justified. Locals living under ISIL are the international coalition’s safety net against the group and its attempts to ensconce itself in areas under its control, especially in border areas where locals still view it with suspicion.

Silence over such atrocities and failure to distance the anti-ISIL coalition from them only bolsters the group’s claims that there is a global war on those communities. The attacks in those areas, in particular, have no apparent tactical purpose other than to punish the local population. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S.-led air war on ISIS in Syria has little allied support

The New York Times reports: As the United States prepares to intensify airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria, the Arab allies who with great fanfare sent warplanes on the initial missions there a year ago have largely vanished from the campaign.

The Obama administration heralded the Arab air forces flying side by side with American fighter jets in the campaign’s early days as an important show of solidarity against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or Daesh. Top commanders like Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who oversees operations in Syria and Iraq, still laud the Arab countries’ contributions to the fight. But as the United States enters a critical phase of the war in Syria, ordering Special Operations troops to support rebel forces and sending two dozen attack planes to Turkey, the air campaign has evolved into a largely American effort.

Administration officials had sought to avoid the appearance of another American-dominated war, even as most leaders in the Persian Gulf seem more preoccupied with supporting rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Now, some of those officials note with resignation, the Arab partners have quietly left the United States to run the bulk of the air war in Syria — not the first time Washington has found allies wanting.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have shifted most of their aircraft to their fight against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Jordan, reacting to the grisly execution of one of its pilots by the Islamic State, and in a show of solidarity with the Saudis, has also diverted combat flights to Yemen. Jets from Bahrain last struck targets in Syria in February, coalition officials said. Qatar is flying patrols over Syria, but its role has been modest. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran tensions grow ahead of key elections

The Financial Times reports: When Iran’s centrist president Hassan Rouhani last month entered the Hosseinieh, the hall in central Tehran where Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei holds his public meetings, for a religious ceremony, he was greeted by jeers.

At the gathering to mark the start of the mourning month of Moharram and, crucially, in the presence of the supreme leader, hardliners chanted “death to hypocrites” as Mr Rouhani and others behind the flagship nuclear deal between Iran and world powers arrived.

The fact that hardliners felt free to criticise the president in the presence of the supreme leader is seen as highly symbolic. With two key elections due in February, moderate politicians believe the shouts were choreographed to demonstrate the supreme leader’s approval of hardliner tactics to undermine the president ahead of these polls. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Exxon, Keystone, and the turn against fossil fuels

Bill McKibben writes: The fossil-fuel industry — which, for two centuries, underwrote our civilization and then became its greatest threat — has started to take serious hits. At noon today, President Obama rejected the Keystone Pipeline, becoming the first world leader to turn down a major project on climate grounds. Eighteen hours earlier, New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that he’d issued subpoenas to Exxon, the richest and most profitable energy company in history, after substantial evidence emerged that it had deceived the world about climate change.

These moves don’t come out of the blue. They result from three things.

The first is a global movement that has multiplied many times in the past six years. Battling Keystone seemed utterly quixotic at first — when activists first launched a civil-disobedience campaign against the project, in the summer of 2011, more than ninety per cent of “energy insiders” in D.C. told a National Journal survey that they believed that President Obama would grant Transcanada a permit for the construction. But the conventional wisdom was upended by a relentless campaign carried on by hundreds of groups and millions of individual people (including 350.org, the international climate-advocacy group I founded). It seemed that the President didn’t give a speech in those years without at least a small group waiting outside the hall to greet him with banners demanding that he reject the pipeline. And the Keystone rallying cry quickly spread to protests against other fossil-fuel projects. One industry executive summed it up nicely this spring, when he told a conference of his peers that they had to figure out how to stop the “Keystone-ization” of all their plans. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Sharm el-Sheikh airport officials reveal porous security

The Associated Press reports: All bags are put through a scanner as passengers enter Sharm airport, and carry-on bags go through a second machine at the gate before boarding.

But a scanner in the sorting area for checked-in bags often is not working, all the airport officials speaking to AP said.

One of the officials said the breakdowns in the 10-year-old CTX scanner were because operators didn’t use it properly — “human stupidity,” he said — rather than technical faults.

He said he has seen people unplugging the machine to save power, or because they think they are “giving it a break,” which contributes to the breakdowns.

Another of the officials said the staff made sure the scanner was operating well enough whenever international experts came to review measures at the airport.

“We only care about appearances,” he said. “Once they (higher-ups) hear something is coming, suddenly everything gets fixed. … We wish we had visits every day.”

Several of the officials argued that it was “not that important” that the machine broke down because when it was working, it is only used to scan a sample of the bags, not all of them. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

FBI to help Russia investigate plane crash in Egypt

The New York Times reports: The F.B.I. has agreed to help the Russian government with its investigation into the deadly crash of a Russian charter plane in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, senior American officials said on Saturday.

Some American officials said that the Russians want help doing a forensic analysis to determine what brought down the Airbus A321-200, while other officials said that the request from the Russians was more general. Although most of the debris is scattered over nearly eight square miles in the desert, some parts of the plane were taken to Russia for analysis.

It is rare for the Russians to make such a request, which was first reported on Friday by CBS News, and some American officials interpreted it as a sign of the challenges facing investigators. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Russian officials said Saturday that more than 70,000 of their citizens were in Egypt awaiting the arrival of jets being sent to carry them home. British officials said on Saturday that there were about 19,000 Britons at Sharm el Sheikh and that it would take 10 days to get them all home.

The exodus from Sharm el Sheikh has dealt a devastating blow to Egypt’s already sputtering tourism industry. The loss of foreign currency from tourists is likely to greatly increase downward pressure on the value of the Egyptian pound, compounding the damage to the broader economy.

Only a small number of Western European airlines operated direct flights to Sharm el Sheikh before the crash, flying from Britain, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Airlines from some countries, including France and the Netherlands, stopped offering direct service in recent years, in part out of security concerns, European officials said. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Six days after the crash of a Russian charter flight from the Egyptian resort area of Sharm el Sheikh, the government of Egypt is finding itself increasingly isolated in its resistance to the possibility that a terrorist’s bomb brought down the plane.

Britain has concluded the cause was most likely a bomb. President Obama has said pointedly that he takes the possibility “very seriously.” After standing arm in arm with Egypt for six days in discouraging any such discussion of terrorism, even President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday suspended Russia’s flights to Egypt for fear of another attack, stranding tens of thousands of tourists at the resort.

But the government of Egypt, critically dependent on the money tourists bring to Sharm el Sheikh’s resorts, has dismissed any suggestion that a bombing killed the 224 people aboard as “premature,” “surprising” and “unwarranted.”

The widening chasm between Egypt and the world, some say, recalls an earlier crash, in 1999, when EgyptAir Flight 990 plunged into the ocean off the coast of Nantucket Island. Although American investigators said flight records pointed to the decisions of an Egyptian pilot, the Egyptian government blamed a malfunction in the Boeing airplane, and 17 years later the Egyptian-American dispute over the cause is still unresolved.

In that case, the Egyptian investigation was cloaked in mystery and, critics say, politicized from that start.

“I don’t anticipate the Egyptian investigation here to be any more transparent than their work on EgyptAir 990,” James E. Hall, the former head of the National Transportation Safety Board who oversaw that investigation, said in an interview. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Sharm el-Sheikh flight from UK dodged missile last August

The Guardian reports: A plane carrying British holidaymakers to Sharm el-Sheikh came within 300 metres (1,000ft) of a missile as it neared the Egyptian airport in August, the government has confirmed.

A Thomson Airways flight from London Stansted to the Red Sea resort, carrying 189 passengers, took evasive action after the missile was spotted in its trajectory by the pilot. The crew of flight TOM 476 landed the plane safely and passengers were not advised of the incident, which occurred on 23 August.

The incident is not thought to be directly linked to Britain’s decision to curtail flights to Sharm el-Sheikh in the wake of the crash of the Russian Metrojet airliner, killing 224 people, last Saturday. However, it will underline fears that regional instability could threaten flights, as more countries joined Britain in restricting air travel and imposing tougher security measures. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail