Category Archives: News

How Russia hides its dead soldiers killed in Ukraine

Anna Nemtsova reports: Violence in eastern Ukraine is boiling over. The entire front line in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions known as Donbas is on fire with both enemies, Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed army, blaming one another for shelling populated areas with Grad rocket launch systems, killing civilians on both sides. Kiev, Moscow, and the Donetsk leaders are warning each other of even worse escalations, even more violence, despite the ceasefire agreement reached at Minsk last February.

But as the Ukrainian people learned of the casualties on their side, the Russians are kept in the dark about the dead among their forces.

We know that at least nine people were killed, both military and civilians, and over a dozen wounded on Sunday and Monday nights.

In the past, such escalations resulted in new ceasefire agreements in Minsk with European Union leaders and Russian President Vladimir Putin drawing new “lines of separation,” but this time Moscow does not seem to believe in peace talks. [Continue reading…]

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Islamic leaders issue bold call for rapid phase out of fossil fuels

The Guardian reports: Islamic leaders have issued a powerful call to 1.6bn Muslims around the world to work towards phasing out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and a 100% renewable energy strategy.

The grand mufti’s of Lebanon and Uganda endorsed the Islamic declaration on climate change, along with prominent Islamic scholars and teachers from 20 countries, at a meeting in Istanbul.

Their collective statement makes several detailed political demands likely to increase pressure on Gulf states ahead of the Paris climate summit in December.

It calls for oil-producing countries and rich nations to lead by example in phasing out fossil fuels “as early as possible and no later than the middle of the century”. [Continue reading…]

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Humanitarian conditions worsen in Syria as more civilians killed

The Washington Post reports: The top United Nations humanitarian official, making his first trip to Syria, said in Damascus on Monday that he was “absolutely horrified” at conditions there and “by the total disregard for civilian life by all parties.”

While Stephen O’Brien, the ­undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, did not single out specific combatant groups for blame, he was particularly critical of airstrikes that killed as many as 100 civilians Sunday in the central market area of Douma, a Damascus suburb.

The remark appeared to be aimed at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose military is the only force based in Syria with access to air power.

Beyond the human toll, O’Brien said the civil war also has destroyed historic sites in Syria on a massive scale. He said that during his three-day trip he had visited the city of Homs, “where almost every home” in the Old City “had been completely destroyed.”

O’Brien’s visit was designed not only to call attention to the crisis in Syria, but also to put new pressure on U.N. members to close shortfalls in the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Contributions so far this year amount to less than a third of the funds needed to provide for victims, said O’Brien, who described the ongoing attacks on civilian areas as “appalling.”

“We cannot scale up our operations to reach more people if we do not have adequate resources,” said O’Brien, who took over the job from longtime U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos in June.

More than half of Syria’s 22 million people have either fled the country or been internally displaced from their homes in the still-expanding war, according to U.N. figures. O’Brien said that at least a quarter-million people had been killed, with more than a million injured. [Continue reading…]

Reporting on Syrian state media’s coverage of O’Brien’s remarks, Robert Mackey notes: While his criticism was evenhanded — he also condemned the conduct of rebel groups — and made headlines around the world, Syrians who rely on state television for their news heard none of his harsh words about their government’s conduct of the war. Edited video of Mr. O’Brien’s remarks posted on YouTube by the official Syrian Arab News Agency, or Sana, simply faded to black just before he described the attack on Douma.

A look at a transcript of his remarks released by the United Nations shows that Mr. O’Brien’s description of the devastation he witnessed in the Old City of Homs, a former rebel stronghold, was also omitted by the Syrian state broadcaster. [Continue reading…]

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The Saudi-Syrian back channel to end the war

Andrew Bowen and J. Matthew McInnis write: In the aftermath of the nuclear agreement struck between Iran and six world powers, a number of the countries with a stake in Syria’s gridlocked civil war have pushed forward initiatives to end the conflict. While the negotiations involving Turkey, Russia, Iran, the United States, and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries have been undertaken in secret for months, Moscow and Tehran’s recent willingness to engage on this issue has made President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus more attentive to the proposals on the table.

Ali Mamlouk, Assad’s national security advisor, made quiet visits at the end of July to both the Saudi city of Jeddah and to Muscat, Oman, according to both Saudi-based sources and sources close to the Assad regime. Mamlouk’s visit represents the first time Saudi Arabia and Oman have invited a senior Syrian official to the Gulf to discuss a political settlement. Following Mamlouk’s visit, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made an official visit in early August to Muscat to meet with the Omani foreign minister where they discussed, according to Syrian state media, “efforts to put an end to the crisis in Syria … which preserves the sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity” of the country.

In conversations with those who were engaged in his visits, Mamlouk arrived in Jeddah and Muscat to continue discussing his proposals for ending the civil war. These previously secret discussions have been taking place for at least the past few months. Despite pressure from Moscow, neither Riyadh nor Tehran have fully bought into these proposals at this stage and are presently biding their time in the hopes that events on the ground will allow them to reach a better settlement.[Continue reading…]

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U.S., Turkey aim to create buffer zone on Syrian border. Nobody knows how

The Washington Post reports: Mohamed Jlelati is not sure whether a de facto “safe zone” along the Turkey-Syria border will include his home town. But he is preparing for it anyway.

Jlelati is a member of the Syrian opposition’s local government in Aleppo, about 40 miles from the Turkish border. And he has plans for his city.

“If people have water and electricity, they will feel stable,” he said, sketching out Aleppo’s water and power grids on a piece of paper. “Then you can provide food. And then start cleaning up the rubble.”

U.S. and Turkish officials last month announced a landmark deal to fight the Islamic State, the militant group that has seized large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.

The agreement allows the United States to launch aircraft from inside Turkey for swifter strikes against militants. It also envisions an area along the border that is free of extremists and protected by U.S. air power. Turkey hopes the zone will be a haven for the millions of Syrians who have fled across the border into its territory.

But while news of the deal has spurred hope among Syrians, neither the United States nor Turkey has offered details on how such a zone would be established and enforced. In the past two weeks, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, have launched attacks in the area where the United States and Turkey hope to establish the zone. Analysts say that any plans for a buffer zone will fail unless there is a will to organize, administer and police the region.

“I don’t think we will see anything approaching what even resembles a safe zone” in Syria, said Yezid Sayigh, a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

“If you’re going to have significant numbers of people sheltering in the zone, you’ll need various things — like electricity, fuel, water tanks, piping, clinics,” Sayigh said. But instead of planning for large humanitarian or reconstruction operations, Turkey and the United States are “mostly trying to do PR” for an unworkable plan, he said. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt widens government power with new anti-terrorism law

The New York Times reports: President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt has issued a counterterrorism law that gives state security officers wider immunity from prosecution, expands the government’s surveillance powers and penalizes journalists for contradicting official accounts of militant attacks.

Egyptian officials say the law is a response to militants’ stepped-up campaign of violence against Mr. Sisi’s government. The attacks have shaken the country’s stability and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of police officers and soldiers.

But legal analysts and human rights advocates said Monday that the government was already well equipped to combat and punish terrorism with existing laws. They said the new law, which Mr. Sisi signed on Sunday night, legally protected repressive practices that have been used regularly in cracking down on most kinds of dissent over the last two years.

The counterterrorism law also shows how power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of Mr. Sisi, who has effectively ruled the country by decree since July 2013, when he led the military ouster of Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s secret elite interrogation squad may not be so elite — and might be doomed

The Huffington Post reports: When President Barack Obama took office, he promised to overhaul the nation’s process for interrogating terror suspects. His solution: the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, a small interagency outfit that would use non-coercive methods and the latest psychological research to interrogate America’s most-wanted terrorists — all behind a veil of secrecy.

Today, the HIG often gets the first jab at America’s most-wanted terror suspects. Since its creation in August 2009, HIG teams have questioned a bevy of top detainees, including Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Umm Sayyaf, the wife of a high-profile Islamic State leader killed in a drone strike.

But six years on, the Obama administration’s elite interrogation force is on shaky ground. U.S. officials and outside critics question the effectiveness of its interrogators, whether they’re following their own training, and whether they can continue to rely on psychological research to help break suspects. Congress and the White House, which once saw the group as a key to reinventing the nation’s counterterrorism strategy, aren’t paying attention. And those struggles illuminate a broader reality: Obama’s limited reforms to how American detains, interrogates and prosecutes suspected terrorists are ad-hoc and fragile. His successor could scrap most of them — the HIG included — with the stroke of a pen. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS leader used American hostage as sexual slave

The Washington Post reports: The leader of the Islamic State personally kept a 26-year-old American woman as a hostage and raped her repeatedly, according to U.S. officials and her family.

The family of Kayla Mueller said in an interview Friday that the FBI had informed them that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, had sexually abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.

Mueller’s parents said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in late June and provided more details two weeks ago. The bureau pieced together what happened to the American from interviews with other hostages and the captured wife of a senior Islamic State figure. [Continue reading…]

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AT&T helped U.S. spy on internet on a vast scale

The New York Times reports: The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T. [Continue reading…]

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The Pentagon ignores Obama’s order to release Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo

Clive Stafford Smith writes: Recent history demonstrates that if President Barack Obama, arguably the most powerful person on planet Earth, wants to prioritize almost anything – from pardoning 46 convicted drug felons to bombing a foreign country without the consent of Congress – little can stand in his way. Why, then, is Shaker Aamer not home in London with his wife and four children?

Aamer is the last British resident to be detained without trial in Guantánamo Bay and he has never been charged with a single offense. In 2007, he was cleared for release by the Bush Administration; in 2009, six US intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that Shaker should be released. In January 2015, British Prime Minster David Cameron personally raised Shaker’s plight with President Obama, who promised that he would “prioritize” the case.

On Thursday, we came a little closer to understanding the reason that Aamer’s youngest child, Faris – who was born on Valentine’s Day 2002, the day that Aamer was rendered to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay – has never even met his father. The Guardian revealed that “the Pentagon [is] blocking Guantánamo deals to return Shaker Aamer and other cleared detainees.” President Obama, it seems, has personally ordered Aamer’s release, and his subordinates have ignored and thwarted his order. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-funded power plant in Afghanistan at risk of ‘catastrophic failure’

McClatchy reports: A U.S.-funded power plant in Afghanistan is in danger of catastrophic failure, according to a letter released Thursday by a government watchdog.

The $335 million Tarakhil power plant, near Kabul, was built as a joint venture by engineering firm Black & Veatch of Overland Park, Kan., and its then-partner Louis Berger Group, under a contract awarded by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2007.

Nicknamed “The White Elephant of Kabul,” Tarakhil has long been plagued by cost overruns, delays and operational problems.

Now the plant is “severely underutilized,” according to a letter from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction to USAID.

The letter, dated Aug. 7, is part of an ongoing inquiry by the special inspector general, which has been monitoring developments at the Tarakhil plant for years to see whether Afghans can better utilize the U.S. taxpayer-funded facility.

The letter notes that Tarakhil’s power production between February 2014 and April 2015 was less than one percent of its production capacity, a further drop from July 2010 to December 2013, when the plant’s output was 2.2 percent of its capacity.

Contributing to the problem is the fact that Tarakhil can only run on diesel fuel, which is expensive and and dangerous to transport in Afghanistan. [Continue reading…]

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Trouble in Assad’s Alawite heartland as bombs hit Latakia and anti-government protests break out

The Telegraph reports: Rebels launched a deadly rocket attack on Latakia, the coastal heartland of President Bashar al-Assad, on Thursday as part of a milestone attempt to overrun the government’s most precious territories.

Islamist fighters have forced government troops to the very edge of Sahl al-Ghab, a fertile plain sitting at the base of the mountains where Mr Assad’s ancestral village of Qardaha is located.

Two people were killed and 14 injured in Thursday’s rocket attack, which hit Latakia’s city centre and waterfront. State television ran footage of smoke billowing out of charred vehicles, apparently from the site of the explosions.

The area is home to Syria’s Alawites, an esoteric Muslim minority sect from which a disproportionate chunk of the state apparatus, including the Assad family, hails.

Rebel fighters from the Army of Conquest, an umbrella group of Islamist factions including the dominant Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, are now eyeing the nearby town of Joreen as an entrance point to Latakia’s mountains. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS suspected of using chemical weapon, U.S. says

The Wall Street Journal reports: Islamic State militants likely used mustard agent against Kurdish forces in Iraq this week, senior U.S. officials said Thursday, in the first indication the militant group has obtained banned chemicals.

The officials said Islamic State could have obtained the mustard agent in Syria, whose government admitted to having large quantities in 2013 when it agreed to give up its chemical-weapons arsenal.

The use of mustard agent would mark an upgrade in Islamic State’s battlefield capabilities, and a worrisome one given U.S. intelligence fears about hidden caches of chemical weapons in Syria, where Islamic State controls wide swaths of territory.

It raises new questions about the evolving threat posed by Islamic State and the ability of U.S. allies on the ground to combat it. Frontline Kurdish, Iraqi and moderate Syrian forces say they aren’t getting enough U.S. support now to counter Islamic State’s conventional capabilities. [Continue reading…]

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Jeb Bush leaves door open for use of torture by government

The Associated Press reports: Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Thursday declined to rule out resuming the use of torture under some circumstances by the U.S. government.

The former Florida governor said that in general, he believes torture is inappropriate, and that he was glad his brother, former President George W. Bush, largely ended the CIA’s use of the techniques before he left office. The CIA used waterboarding, slapping, nudity, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other methods to coerce al-Qaida detainees — methods the military would be prohibited from using on prisoners of war.

“I don’t want to make a definitive, blanket kind of statement,” Bush told an audience of Iowa Republicans, when asked whether he would keep in place or repeal President Barack Obama’s executive order banning so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the CIA. [Continue reading…]

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Chelsea Manning ‘could face indefinite solitary confinement’

BBC News reports: US Army whistleblower Pte Chelsea Manning may face solitary confinement for allegedly violating prison rules by having a copy of Vanity Fair and expired toothpaste, her lawyers say.

The transgender soldier is due to face a closed hearing on Tuesday to determine her fate, they add.

The military has not yet commented.

The soldier, formerly known as Bradley Manning, was convicted in 2013 for leaking thousands of secret US files to the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

She is currently serving a 35-year jail sentence at a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Manning’s lawyers revealed the possible disciplinary action on Wednesday.

“Frankly it looks to me like harassment,” one of her lawyers, Nancy Hollander, told the Associated Press news agency.

She said the ex-intelligence analyst has been accused of possession of prohibited property while in military prison, including books and magazines.

A Vanity Fair issue with transgender Caitlyn Jenner (formerly known as Bruce) on the cover and Malala Yousafzai’s memoir were among the items allegedly discovered in her prison cell.

Misuse of medicine – namely an expired tube of toothpaste, sweeping food onto the floor and disrespect – were some of the other charges cited. [Continue reading…]

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Report: Turkish intel delivers 60 foreign fighters to ISIS in Syria

Today’s Zaman reports: Turkey’s intelligence agency has been involved in escorting over 60 Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) extremist militants over the Turkish border into Syria, according to a report by the Nokta weekly.

The report, published on Aug. 3, claims that the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) escorted over 60 militants to Syria who wanted to join ISIL. It states that the applicants had previously been incarcerated after being apprehended by the Turkish police for suspected involvement in criminal activities pertaining to terrorism. It is alleged that MİT then collected the applicants from prison and brought them to ISIL handlers in Syria via the Akçakale border gate.

Nokta claims that after their apprehension by Turkish law enforcement agencies between April and September 2014, the prisoners should have been deported but were not. The weekly claims that the prisoners were delivered to MİT agents with the knowledge and authorization of Şanlıurfa Police Chief Eyüp Pınarbaşı.

The report also claims that on the day and hour of the delivery of the future ISIL fighters to their handlers, the CCTV cameras were turned off and border personnel were ushered away from the meeting spot.

Nokta’s report provides all 60 of the ISIL militants’ names, nationalities and ages, with some fighters even as young as 12 years old. Two members of the group were female, while many members of the 60-strong group were determined to be of Russian or Turkic ethnicity. The group also included American, Swedish, German, French, Turkmen, Chechen, Ingush and East Turkistan fighters. [Continue reading…]

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Early election now only option for Turkey, Davutoglu says

Bloomberg reports: Turkey is headed for early elections after coalition negotiations with the opposition CHP party failed, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Thursday. His comments sent the lira to a record low.

Davutoglu, who’s also head of the governing AK Party, told a televised news conference in Ankara that there were deep divisions on education and foreign policy with the opposition party. The AK Party offered to establish a coalition government that would rule only until new elections are held, a proposal that the CHP rejected, Davutoglu said.

The AK Party, co-founded by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, lost its parliamentary majority in June’s inconclusive election for the first time in more than a decade. Coalition talks with the nationalist MHP party broke down partly due to disagreements over Erdogan’s role in governing the country.

“An early election is the only option ahead,” Davutoglu said after meeting with CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu in Ankara. “It would be better if the parliament decides on early elections through dialogue.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey, Iran help broker rare truce in Syria

Reuters reports: Syria’s warring parties declared a 48-hour ceasefire in two frontline areas on Wednesday after unprecedented mediation from Turkey and Iran, signaling a new approach by some of the main regional backers of the opposing sides.

The ceasefire halted fighting between insurgents on the one hand, and the army and its Lebanese militant Hezbollah allies on the other, in the rebel-held town of Zabadani and in a pair of Shi’ite Muslim villages in Idlib province.

The two areas are strongholds of each side under ferocious attack by the other. Sources familiar with the talks, which have been under way for weeks, said the truce could be extended to give time for ongoing negotiations aimed at evacuating civilians and combatants.

Three officials close to Damascus described the truce as a result of mediation by Turkey, which backs rebels fighting against President Bashar al-Assad, and Iran, whose support has been vital to his survival. [Continue reading…]

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