Category Archives: News

The ‘kill list’: RAF drones have been hunting UK jihadis for months

The Guardian reports: Unmanned RAF aerial drones armed with Hellfire missiles have been patrolling the skies over Syria for months seeking to target British jihadis on a “kill list” drawn up by senior ministers on the UK National Security Council shortly after the election.

As the defence secretary Michael Fallon said ministers would not hesitate to approve further strikes against jihadis who have their own kill list, Jeremy Corbyn led a cross-party group of MPs who raised doubts about the change in strategy.

Corbyn said: “There has to be a legal basis for what’s going on. This is war without parliamentary approval. And in fact parliament specifically said no to this war in September 2013.”

Senior Liberal Democrats suggested that the RAF drone strike, which led to the killing of two British Islamic State members on 21 August, went beyond anything that would have been approved when Nick Clegg sat on the NSC. “The hawks have been let loose and are trying to test the boundaries of what is possible,” one former Lib Dem coalition source said. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi-led offensive in Yemen faces dangerous new phase

Iona Craig writes: When young garage mechanic Aidaroos Saleh heard the familiar ping of his smartphone, he could never have imagined the journey on which the incoming message would take him. In a matter of weeks, Saleh, 22, went from fixing cars in his adopted country of Saudi Arabia to the battle front of his southern Yemen homeland.

The message was an official communication, a call to arms for Yemenis in Saudi Arabia to join a fighting force that would “defend Aden” — the southern Yemeni city that descended into civil war in mid-March. Four months after he responded to the message in April, the young fighter sat cradling an AK-47 assault rifle between his knees in the scorching heat of Aden.

“They promised us salaries and medical care abroad if we got injured in Yemen,” he said, wearing glasses, sandals and a mawaz, which is like a sarong. He and his cohort received neither.

Those who joined up were sent to the Saudi border town of Sharurah — in the Empty Quarter, the world’s largest sand desert — where they should have received military training to prepare them for deployment in Aden.

This desert camp of some 6,000 Yemeni volunteers was the origin of the kingdom’s Operation Golden Arrow, a ground offensive launched in Yemen in July that now looks set to move in on the capital, Sanaa. This latest phase of operations in Yemen follows consecutive aerial campaigns carried out since March as part of the Saudi-led coalition of nations bid to restore Yemen’s President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi after he fled to Riyadh earlier this year.

But in order to bring Hadi back, the coalition has first set itself the task of removing the Houthis and military units loyal to his predecessor Ali Abdullah Saleh, who seized control of the capital almost a year ago. [Continue reading…]

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Cameron justifies the drone strike in Syria: Is this his WMD moment?

Simon Jenkins writes: It sounded good, but did it sound right? David Cameron’s Commons explanation of the execution of three Britons in Syria eerily recalled Tony Blair on the Iraq war, that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” that posed “an imminent threat” to British national security.

Blair killed stone dead the thesis that such assertions by ministers should be taken on trust. The suspicion has to be that British intelligence had a tag on the suspect Britons for some time and got lucky. British planes had been operating over Syria all summer, with orders to disregard parliament’s veto on military action if targets were of sufficient “value”.

As it stands, the visible evidence against them related to events that had already taken place peacefully. The threats appear mere bravado. If not, the more reason for explaining what exactly was the threat, other than “recruitment”.

Cameron’s lawyers were content that action was essential to prevent what international law recognises as an “occurring or imminent” Article-51 threat, notified to the United Nations. That law envisaged an army moving to cross a frontier, not a 21-year-old Cardiff terrorist. [Continue reading…]

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Iran ‘ready’ to talk to U.S. and Saudi Arabia about Syria

Al Jazeera reports: Iran’s president has said his country is ready to hold talks with the United States and Saudi Arabia on ways to resolve the Syrian civil war.

Shia powerhouse Iran is a leading patron of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and accuses Sunni rival Saudi Arabia and the US of siding with anti-Assad rebels and fighters.

President Hassan Rouhani’s remarks came during a press conference on Tuesday in Tehran with visiting Austrian counterpart Heinz Fischer. [Continue reading…]

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Is Turkey’s president dragging his country to war for votes?

The Daily Beast reports: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is betting that increased pressure on Kurdish rebels in southeast Anatolia will be a vote-getter in snap elections less than two months away.

But a flare-up of Kurdish rebel attacks that have inflicted the heaviest losses on Turkish soldiers in years has Turks wondering whether Erdogan is dragging the country to war to suit his own political needs.

So devastating was the shock of the latest attack by rebels from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) near the Turkish border with Iraq on Sunday that the government and the military waited more than 24 hours before revealing that 16 soldiers had died. It was the highest death toll for the Turkish army in a single combat event since 2011.

Fighters from the PKK, a rebel group designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and Europe, attacked a military convoy in the town of Daglica and blew up a number of military vehicles with roadside bombs. The well-connected security analyst Metin Gurcan said on Twitter that 500 to 600 rebels attacked the soldiers, while bad weather prevented Turkish attack helicopters from helping the encircled troops. The PKK said at least 31 soldiers were killed. [Continue reading…]

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Failure of Syria diplomacy exposes enduring divisions over Assad

Reuters reports: While the desperate flight of Syrians from their country’s war was dominating news bulletins this summer, yet another diplomatic push to end the four-year-old conflict was quietly running into the sand.

That largely unnoticed failure has reinforced the view amongst Syria experts that there is no solution in sight, with one of the biggest obstacles a seemingly unbridgeable international divide over President Bashar al-Assad’s future.

As a consequence, Syria looks set for ever greater fragmentation into a patchwork of territories, one of them the diminishing Damascus-based state where Assad appears confident of survival with backing from his Russian and Iranian allies.

While some Western officials say even Assad’s allies now recognize he cannot win back and stabilize Syria, Moscow is setting out its case for supporting him in ever more forthright terms. [Continue reading…]

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The deadly business of human smuggling

Der Spiegel reports: Every day, people are dying because of the policy that refugees must first get to Europe before they can apply for asylum. And because of the fact that they are required to remain in the country where they fill out their application and are not allowed to travel further. It is a situation that human smugglers have found to be extremely profitable and one that enables them to charge €300 ($335) to €400 per head for the trip from Budapest to Vienna in a jam-packed truck even though a train ticket doesn’t even cost €50.

Refugees are dying because Europe is failing. But the drama continues. One week after the catastrophe [in which 71 people died] on the A4 in Austria, a new batch of horrific images has emerged, this time of a Syrian boy lying dead on a beach. He drowned while attempting to cross the water from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. His family, too, had put their fates in the hands of human smugglers.

These tragedies serve to illustrate just how great is the desperation gripping the refugees — and how irrepressible is the greed of those in whom they entrust their fates. There are several indications that the deaths of the 71 people inside the truck were not the result of a planned crime but that it was probably the result of an oversight, of stupidity. But it could happen again at any time; that is the incident’s uncomfortable lesson. At least if nothing changes.

Thousands of people continue to cross into Europe every day. In just the first eight months of this year, almost a quarter of a million people crossed the sea to Greece, including young men, families, pregnant women and children from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan and elsewhere. Many are fleeing from bombs and terrorism — and they are prepared to use the last of their money and to entrust their lives to people they don’t know.

In the end, during recent days at least, they get stuck at Keleti Station in Budapest where Hungarian authorities have prevented them from boarding trains to continue their journeys westward. Some refugees have made signs reading: “We love to go to Germany.” At some point, someone starts chanting the German chancellor’s name, quietly at first before getting louder and louder. “An-ge-la! An-ge-la!” Those who pay particularly close attention to the calls for help are waiting outside, next to taxis and minibuses. They are the true profiteers of Europe’s refugee drama.

The trip from Syria to Germany currently costs at least €2,500 per person, with the human smuggling market likely worth several hundred million euros per year. The organization The Migrant’s Files, a consortium of journalists from over 15 European countries, estimates that migrants have paid smugglers around €16 billion since the year 2000. [Continue reading…]

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French spy who sank Greenpeace ship apologises for lethal bombing

The Guardian reports: A French secret service diver who took part in the operation to sink Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior 30 years ago has spoken publicly for the first time to apologise for his actions.

Jean-Luc Kister, who attached a mine to the ship’s hull, says the guilt of the bombing, which killed a photographer, still weighs heavily on his mind.

“We are not assassins and we have a conscience,” the former agent told investigative website Mediapart. “I have the weight of an innocent man’s death on my conscience … It’s time, I believe, for me to express my profound regret and my apologies,” Kister said.

He said he wanted to apologise to the family of the dead man, Fernando Pereira, “especially his daughter Marelle … for what I call an accidental death but what they consider an assassination”, to the Greenpeace crew aboard the ship and the people of New Zealand where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk. [Continue reading…]

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Europe plans to house an additional 120,000 refugees

Al Jazeera reports: France’s President Francois Hollande has announced his country will take in 24,000 refugees over the next two years, while it is understood Germany will take 31,000 additional people under a European plan which is strongly opposed by Hungary.

The figure revealed by the French leader on Monday represents France’s share of a European proposal to relocate 120,000 refugees.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is due to unveil new proposals on Wednesday.

EU officials have said Juncker will propose adding 120,000 people to be relocated on top of a group of 40,000 the commission previously proposed relocating.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a gathering of foreign ambassadors on Monday, however, that the plan could not be discussed while the EU’s outer borders were not secured. [Continue reading…]

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Israel plans to demolish 17,000 Arab buildings in West Bank, UN says

The Guardian reports: Israel plans to demolish up to 17,000 structures, most of them on privately owned Palestinian land in the part of the illegally occupied West Bank under full Israeli military and civil rule, a UN report has found.

Between 1988 and 2014, Israel’s Civil Administration, the governing body that operates in the West Bank, issued 14,000 demolition orders, of which more than 11,000 are still outstanding and could result in the demolition of up to 17,000 structures owned by Palestinians in Area C, including houses, sheds and animal shelters, according to the report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In Area C, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Israel retains control of security and land management and “views the area as there to serve its own needs”.

Nearly 4,500 of the demolition orders affected Palestinian Bedouins, who human rights groups argue are at the centre of Israeli plans to force them off their land to allow for expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law. [Continue reading…]

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One country that won’t be taking Syrian refugees: Israel

The Los Angeles Times reports: For many Israeli Jews, even the smallest number of additional non-Jews is a potential threat, and the Syrian refugee crisis and the debate about Israel’s role has reawakened the country’s most deep-seated fear — that of losing the Jewish majority and subsequently the character of the Jewish state.

Even those in support of opening the gates to refugees say they mean 10,000 at the most, with some calling for a token action such as that taken by former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who in 1977 took in about 70 refugees from Vietnam.

However, Immigrant Absorption Minister Zeev Elkin accused Herzog of gambling on Israel’s strategic interests for the sake of “one minute of favor” in international media. He also expressed the fear that the refugee crisis could give Palestinians an opening to bring the so-called right of return, which would allow Palestinians to return to land they occupied before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, in “through the back door.” [Continue reading…]

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An American family saved their son from joining ISIS. Now he might go to prison

The Washington Post reports: Asher Abid Khan sat in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and considered his next move — forward to Syria and enlistment in the Islamic State, the militant group that had drawn him to the possibility of dying for Allah, or home to Texas and his bewildered family whose imploring messages were filling his voice mail.

The 19-year-old pulled out his phone and dialed.

“I want to come home,” Khan told his father, Mohammed Abid Khan, who sat huddled in his living room here with his wife and other children.

Hours later, without ever leaving the airport, Khan boarded a plane and flew home to this Houston suburb.

His family had saved him from an uncertain fate in Syria, but not legal jeopardy in the United States. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. revamping rebel force fighting ISIS in Syria

The New York Times reports: In an acknowledgment of severe shortcomings in its effort to create a force of moderate rebels to battle the Islamic State in Syria, the Pentagon is drawing up plans to significantly revamp the program by dropping larger numbers of fighters into safer zones as well as providing better intelligence and improving their combat skills.

The proposed changes come after a Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda attacked, in late July, many of the first 54 Syrian graduates of the military’s training program and the rebel unit they came from. A day before the attack, two leaders of the American-backed group and several of its fighters were captured.

The encounter revealed several glaring deficiencies in the program, according to classified assessments: The rebels were ill-prepared for an enemy attack and were sent back into Syria in too small numbers. They had no local support from the population and had poor intelligence about their foes. They returned to Syria during the Eid holiday, and many were allowed to go on leave to visit relatives, some in refugee camps in Turkey — and these movements likely tipped off adversaries to their mission. Others could not return because border crossings were closed. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS captures last government oilfield in Syria

Al Jazeera reports: The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters have captured the last major oilfield under Syrian government control during deadly clashes over a vast central desert zone, a monitoring group said.

The Jazal field was now shut down and clashes were ongoing east of Homs, with casualties reported on both sides, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, without giving dates or more details.

Syria’s army said it had repulsed an attack in the same area but did not mention Jazal or comment on how much of the country’s battered energy infrastructure remained under its sway. It said it killed 25 fighters, including non-Syrian fighters.

“The regime has lost the last oilfield in Syria,” said the Observatory, which tracks violence through a network of sources on the ground. [Continue reading…]

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Qatar deploys 1,000 ground troops to fight in Yemen

Al Jazeera reports: Around 1,000 soldiers from Qatar’s Armed Forces have been deployed to Yemen, as part of the Arab coalition’s fight against Houthi rebels, Al Jazeera has learned.

An Al Jazeera journalist, reporting from the Saudi-Yemen border, said the troops were backed by more than 200 armoured vehicles and 30 Apache combat helicopters.

The troops are now reportedly heading to Yemen’s Maareb province, to join the Saudi-led coalition already fighting in the area.

Al Jazeera has also learned that more Qatari forces are expected, with the aim of securing the Jawf governorate. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s secret army in Syria

Michael Weiss writes: Russian military officers are now in Damascus and meeting regularly with Iranian and Syrian counterparts, according to a source with close contacts in the Bashar al-Assad regime. “They’re out in restaurants and cafes with other high officials in the Syrian Army,” the source told The Daily Beast, “mainly concentrated in Yaafour and Sabboura, areas that are close to each other, and in west Mezze,” referring to a district in the capital where Assad’s praetorian Fourth Armored Division keeps an important airbase. “The Russians aren’t in uniform, but they’re constantly hanging out with officers from the Syrian Army’s central command.”

Other Syrians claim to have seen Russians in uniform.

One family recently traveled from Aleppo to Damascus by taxi before emigrating by plane to Turkey and says it saw a small contingent of Russian troops embedded with Syrians at a military checkpoint in the capital. “We were near the Shaghour district when we noticed two soldiers who were not Syrian,” a family representative said. “They were tall, blonde and blue-eyed and wore different fatigues from the Syrians and carried weapons. I’m telling you, they were Russian.”

The opposition-linked website All4Syria seems to corroborate such eyewitness accounts. Many residents of Damascus, it claimed, have “observed in the first three days of September a noticeable deployment of Iranian and Russian elements in the neighborhoods of Baramkeh, al-Bahsa, and Tanzim Kfarsouseh.” The Venezia Hotel in al-Bahsa “has been turned into a military barracks for the Iranians.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. warns Russia over military support for Assad

The New York Times reports: Secretary of State John Kerry told his Russian counterpart on Saturday that the United States was deeply concerned by reports that the Kremlin may be planning to vastly expand its military support for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, warning that such a move might even lead to a “confrontation” with the American-led coalition, the State Department said.

Mr. Kerry called Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, “to discuss Syria, including U.S. concerns about reports suggesting an imminent enhanced Russian military buildup there,” the State Department said in an unusually blunt statement.

“The secretary made clear that if such reports were accurate, these actions could further escalate the conflict, lead to greater loss of innocent life, increase refugee flows and risk confrontation with the anti-ISIL Coalition operating in Syria,” the State Department added, using an acronym for the Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

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World Food Programme drops aid to one-third of Syrian refugees

The Associated Press reports: The cash-strapped World Food Programme has had to drop one-third of Syrian refugees from its food voucher program in Middle Eastern host countries this year, including 229,000 in Jordan who stopped receiving food aid in September, a spokeswoman said.

The sharp cutbacks come at a time when growing numbers of Syrians who initially found refuge in neighbouring countries are trying to reach Europe. Since 2011 more than four million Syrians have fled their country’s civil war, most settling in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt.

Abeer Etefa, a WFP regional spokeswoman, said the world must do more to support refugees in the regional host countries or face increasing migration.

“This is a crisis that has been brewing in the region for five years,” she said. “Now it is getting the attention of the world because it moved one step further from the region to Europe. We have to help people where they are or they will move.” [Continue reading…]

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