Category Archives: News

U.S. expands intelligence sharing with Saudis in Yemen operation

Reuters reports: The United States is expanding its intelligence-sharing with Saudi Arabia to provide more information about potential targets in the kingdom’s air campaign against Houthi militias in Yemen, U.S. officials told Reuters.

The stepped-up assistance comes as two weeks of relentless air strikes by the Saudis and other Gulf Arab allies have largely failed to halt advances by the Iran-linked Houthi forces.

The U.S. officials said the expanded assistance includes sensitive intelligence data that will allow the Saudis to better review the kingdom’s targets in fighting that has killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands since March.

“We have opened up the aperture a bit wider with what we are sharing with our Saudi partners,” said one U.S. official.

“We are helping them get a better sense of the battlefield and the state of play with the Houthi forces. We are also helping identify ‘no strike’ areas they should avoid” to minimize any civilian casualties, the official said. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen’s despair on full display in ‘ruined’ city

The New York Times reports from Aden: Rooftop snipers have emptied the streets of this dusty seaside city and swelled its hospitals and morgues.

Weeks of fighting between armed groups have left nearly 200 people dead and the city starved of water, fuel and electricity. Hospitals struggle to obtain anesthetic and dressings. Barefoot, nervous teenagers with matted hair and guns mind checkpoints on the treacherous roads. Gun battles sweep across the city while residents lie low and worry that there is worse suffering to come.

“The war of hunger has not started — yet,” said Ali Bamatraf, a grocer with dwindling stocks, standing among empty food boxes that would not soon be replaced.

As war engulfs Yemen, no place in the beleaguered country has suffered as severely as Aden, a southern port city captive to ferocious street fighting for the better part of a harrowing month. Foreign navies patrol its waters and warplanes circle above, blockading a city that is steadily crumbling under reckless fire from tanks and heavy guns.

“Damaged. Ruined,” said Faris al-Shuaibi, a professor of English literature at Aden University, searching for the words to describe the beaten-up neighborhood around him. “Everything is destroyed.” [Continue reading…]

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Militiamen in Yemen’s Aden say two Iranian officers captured

Reuters reports: Local militiamen in the southern Yemeni city of Aden said they captured two Iranian military officers advising Houthi rebels, during fighting on Friday evening.

Tehran has strongly denied providing any military support for Houthi fighters, whose advances have drawn Saudi-led air strikes in a campaign dubbed “Decisive Storm.”

If confirmed, the presence of two Iranian officers, whom the local militiamen said were from an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, would deepen tensions between Tehran and Riyadh, who are vying for influence in the Middle East.

Three sources in the city’s anti-Houthi local militias said the Iranians, identified as a colonel and a captain, were seized in two different districts rocked by heavy gun battles.

“The initial investigation revealed that they are from the Quds Force and are working as advisors to the Houthi militia,” one of the militia sources told Reuters. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt sentences Muslim Brotherhood leader, others to death

Reuters reports: An Egyptian court sentenced Mohamed Badie, leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, and 13 other senior members of the group to death for inciting chaos and violence, and gave a life term to a U.S.-Egyptian citizen for ties to the Brotherhood.

The men were among thousands of people detained after freely elected Islamist president Mohamed Mursi was toppled in 2013 by the military under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is now president.

Sisi describes the Brotherhood as a major security threat. The group says it is committed to peaceful activism and had nothing to do with Islamist militant violence in Egypt since Mursi’s fall following mass protests against his rule.

Egypt’s mass trials of Brotherhood members and people accused of links to the group, as well as its tough crackdown on Islamist and liberal opposition alike, have drawn international criticism of its judicial system and human rights record.

The sentences, pronounced at a televised court session on Saturday, can be appealed before Egypt’s highest civilian court in a process that could take years to reach a final verdict.

U.S.-Egyptian citizen Mohamed Soltan was sentenced to life in jail for supporting the veteran Islamist movement and transmitting false news. He is the son of Brotherhood preacher Salah Soltan, who was among those sentenced to death. [Continue reading…]

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Kurdish fighter, Viyan Peyman, killed fighting ISIS


(Click “CC” for English subtitles.)

Viyan Peyman, a Kurdish woman fighter with the YPG/YPJ featured in an NBC News report from Kobane in November. This week she was killed in a battle with ISIS near Serekaniye, a town also known as Ras al-Ayn, in northern Syria.

Richard Engel writes: When I saw her lying on her stomach firing through a small hole in a wall in a snipers nest in the town of Kobani in northern Syria, I remember thinking she was one of the strongest and most dynamic women I’d ever met in the Middle East. Sitting among sandbags, the smell of spent rounds hanging in the room, Viyan Peyman told us she was fighting ISIS, but also for women’s rights in the Middle East.

“We stand and fight, especially here in the Middle East where women are treated as inferiors,” Peyman told us. “We stand here as symbols of strength for all the women of the region.”

Peyman wasn’t just a fighter. She was a poet and a singer, a voice of her movement. She sang a song for us about her fallen comrades from the YPG/YPJ, secular Kurdish groups battling ISIS in Syria and demanding greater rights for the Kurdish people.

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Twitter says it suspended 10,000 ISIS-linked accounts in one day

The New York Times reports: Activists and experts who monitor the Twitter traffic of the Islamic State and its supporters noticed something odd last week when many accounts suddenly disappeared.

The activists exchanged messages about the missing accounts, suspecting they had been suspended.

On Thursday, a Twitter representative confirmed what some were saying and put a number on it. The social media network’s violations department suspended approximately 10,000 accounts on April 2 “for tweeting violent threats,” the representative said.

It was impossible to independently verify the assertion because Twitter’s data is not public. But it would be the biggest single mass purge by Twitter of accounts linked to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh, which some experts believe has as many as 90,000 affiliated accounts.

The suspensions came against a backdrop of rising criticism that Twitter has allowed the Islamic State to exploit the social network to spread propaganda, glorify violence and seek recruits.

Twitter previously acknowledged suspending as many as 2,000 ISIS-linked accounts per week in recent months.

On March 31 the New York Times reported: A cybersecurity activist who recently helped publicize 9,200 Twitter accounts that were said to be linked to the Islamic State released a roster of 26,382 accounts on Tuesday, the biggest such list yet.

But the new list distributed by the activist, who goes by the Twitter name XRSone, appeared to be far from flawless.

It misidentified Al Jazeera’s popular Arabic-language Twitter account as suspect, for example. Also erroneously listed, among others, were Zaid Benjamin, a Washington-based journalist with 82,300 followers who works for Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language broadcaster partly funded by the United States, and Yousef Munayyer, a prominent Palestinian rights advocate based in Washington, with 23,400 followers.

Reached late Tuesday by email, XRsone said the erroneously included accounts had been removed. He also said he believed that the list still “has a high accuracy,” and that his intent was to show that more could be done to expunge Islamic State supporters from Twitter, where by some estimates they have registered as many as 90,000 accounts.

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ISIS strikes Iraqi town, exacting deadly toll

The New York Times reports: Islamic State fighters launched a heavy attack on government-held territory in Anbar Province late on Thursday and on Friday, killing 25 Iraqi police officers and soldiers, and then 15 family members of local police officers, according to Iraqi officials.

The attackers overran large parts of Albu Faraj, a town just north of the provincial capital, Ramadi, less than two days after officials in the province declared that they had begun an offensive against the extremists to the east of the capital, police officials in Ramadi said.

A convoy of police reinforcements sent to Albu Faraj was attacked by a suicide bomber, wounding Maj. Gen. Kadhim al-Duleimi, the Anbar Province police commander, the police officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity as a matter of official policy.

The attack continued into Friday afternoon, they said. Officials were still trying to determine how many of those who had been taken to a hospital in Ramadi from the attack in Albu Faraj had died. [Continue reading…]

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As encryption spreads, U.S. grapples with clash between privacy, security

The Washington Post reports: For months, federal law enforcement agencies and industry have been deadlocked on a highly contentious issue: Should tech companies be obliged to guarantee government access to encrypted data on smartphones and other digital devices, and is that even possible without compromising the security of law-abiding customers?

Recently, the head of the National Security Agency provided a rare hint of what some U.S. officials think might be a technical solution. Why not, suggested Adm. Michael S. Rogers, require technology companies to create a digital key that could open any smartphone or other locked device to obtain text messages or photos, but divide the key into pieces so that no one person or agency alone could decide to use it?

“I don’t want a back door,” Rogers, the director of the nation’s top electronic spy agency, said during a speech at Princeton University, using a tech industry term for covert measures to bypass device security. “I want a front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks.”

Law enforcement and intelligence officials have been warning that the growing use of encryption could seriously hinder criminal and national security investigations. But the White House, which is preparing a report for President Obama on the issue, is still weighing a range of options, including whether authorities have other ways to get the data they need rather than compelling companies through regulatory or legislative action.

The task is not easy. Those taking part in the debate have polarized views, with advocates of default commercial encryption finding little common ground with government officials who see increasing peril as the technology becomes widespread on mobile phones and on text messaging apps. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s Supreme Leader says sanctions must lift when nuclear deal is signed

The New York Times reports: Iran’s supreme leader on Thursday challenged two of the United States’ bedrock principles in the nuclear negotiations, declaring that all economic sanctions would have to be lifted on the day any final agreement was signed and that military sites would be strictly off limits to foreign inspectors.

The assertions by the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could be tactical, intended to give both the negotiators and himself some political space to get Iran’s hard-liners accustomed to the framework of the nuclear deal reached a week ago with the United States and other world powers.

But they sharply illustrated the difficult hurdles that lie ahead as Secretary of State John Kerry and a large team of diplomats, energy experts and intelligence officials try to reach a June 30 deadline that would ensure that Iran could not race for a bomb for at least a decade — and would establish a permanent inspection regime to catch any cheating.

In his remarks, Ayatollah Khamenei added several stinging criticisms of Iran’s regional competitor, Saudi Arabia — calling its new leaders “inexperienced youths” — a sign of rising regional tensions that could pose another threat to the negotiations, even as diplomats strive to keep the issues on separate tracks.

King Salman, the country’s newly installed leader, is 79, though many around him are a generation younger. [Continue reading…]

Calling Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud, an inexperienced youth, might be an undiplomatic yet reasonably accurate characterization of the youngest defense minister in the world. After less than three months in the position, the 34-year-old is now overseeing a war in Yemen that’s predicted to become Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam.

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Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia deepen over conflict in Yemen

The New York Times reports: Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia deepened on Thursday as Iranian leaders lashed out with rare vehemence against the continuing Saudi air campaign in Yemen, even hurling personal insults at the young Saudi prince who is leading the fight.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, on Thursday denounced the Saudi airstrikes in Yemen as “a crime” and “a genocide,” while all but taunting Saudi Arabia that its war in Yemen was doomed to fail.

A regional coalition led by Saudi Arabia extended its bombing campaign for a 16th night in its effort to stop the Houthi movement and its allies from dominating Yemen. The Houthis nonetheless continued their advance, and aid groups warned of a compounding humanitarian catastrophe, particularly in the port city of Aden.

Secretary of State John Kerry sharply warned Iran over its backing for the other side of the conflict in Yemen, in the first explicit American accusation that Tehran has been providing military aid to the Houthis.

Washington was “not going to stand by while the region is destabilized,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview with “PBS NewsHour” on Wednesday night. [Continue reading…]

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Americans stuck in Yemen file suit against State, Defense departments

Al Jazeera reports: Hundreds of American citizens trapped in Yemen’s roiling violence have a legal right to be evacuated by the U.S. government, advocacy groups argued in a lawsuit filed Thursday that challenges the State and Defense Department’s perceived inaction on a constitutional basis.

In court documents that name Secretary of State John Kerry and Pentagon chief Ashton Carter as defendants, U.S.-based lawyers acting on behalf of 41 American citizens or permanent U.S. residents stuck in Yemen described Washington’s decision not to provide any flights or ships out of the conflict zone as “arbitrary” and even illegal. The plaintiffs say they are in grave danger from the escalating violence but have received little more from the State Department than emails or calls about possible third-party flights out of the country and recommendations that they take shelter.

Abed Ayoub, national legal policy director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said his group and two others that formed the Stuck in Yemen legal action group decided to file a suit as a last-ditch effort to compel the U.S. to act. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan parliament backs neutrality in Yemen conflict

Al Jazeera reports: Pakistan’s parliament has unanimously passed a resolution affirming the country’s “neutrality” in the Yemen conflict, in a move that indicates the South Asian country will not be joining a Saudi-led military coalition that is currently fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen.

A joint session of parliament has been debating the issue in the capital Islamabad all week, and unanimously passed the resolution, presented by Ishaq Dar, the finance minister, on Friday afternoon.

The resolution expresses the “desire that Pakistan should maintain neutrality in the Yemen conflict”, while reaffirming Pakistan’s “unequivocal support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”.

Members of parliament agreed that Pakistan would “stand shoulder to shoulder” with Saudi Arabia in case of a violation of that country’s territorial integrity, or a threat to Muslim holy sites in Mecca and Medina. [Continue reading…]

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Senior Muslim lawyer says British teenagers see ISIS as ‘pop idols’

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of British teenagers are in danger of being radicalised by Islamic State (Isis) because they see the terrorists as “pop idols”, the country’s leading Muslim prosecutor has said.

Nazir Afzal believes that recent departures to Syria show that “many more children” are at risk of what he terms “jihadimania” than was previously thought.

“The boys want to be like them and the girls want to be with them,” he said. “That’s what they used to say about the Beatles and more recently One Direction and Justin Bieber. The propaganda the terrorists put out is akin to marketing, and too many of our teenagers are falling for the image.

“They see their own lives as poor by comparison, and don’t realise they are being used. The extremists treat them in a similar way to sexual groomers – they manipulate them, distance them from their friends and families, and then take them.” [Continue reading…]

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China is said to use powerful new weapon to censor internet

The New York Times reports: Late last month, China began flooding American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic in an apparent effort to take out services that allow China’s Internet users to view websites otherwise blocked in the country.

Initial security reports suggested that China had crippled the services by exploiting its own Internet filter — known as the Great Firewall — to redirect overwhelming amounts of traffic to its targets. Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto say China did not use the Great Firewall after all, but rather a powerful new weapon that they are calling the Great Cannon.

The Great Cannon, the researchers said in a report published Friday, allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and repurpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit.

The system was used, they said, to intercept web and advertising traffic intended for Baidu — China’s biggest search engine company — and fire it at GitHub, a popular site for programmers, and GreatFire.org, a nonprofit that runs mirror images of sites that are blocked inside China. The attacks against the services continued on Thursday, the researchers said, even though both sites appeared to be operating normally.

But the researchers suggested that the system could have more powerful capabilities. With a few tweaks, the Great Cannon could be used to spy on anyone who happens to fetch content hosted on a Chinese computer, even by visiting a non-Chinese website that contains Chinese advertising content.

“The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control,” the researchers said in their report. It is, they said, “the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship.” [Continue reading…]

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CIA director attacks critics of Iran deal as ‘wholly disingenuous’

Politico reports: CIA Director John Brennan reportedly says the preliminary framework around the nuclear deal with Iran does what had once seemed impossible, calling some critics of the agreement “wholly disingenuous” and expressing surprise at the Iranians’ concessions.

“I must tell you the individuals who say this deal provides a pathway for Iran to a bomb are being wholly disingenuous, in my view, if they know the facts, understand what’s required for a program,” Brennan told an audience at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics on Tuesday night in his first comments since the outline was announced last week in Lausanne, Switzerland, according to Agence France-Presse.

Brennan said that while critics worry that lifting sanctions on Iran will “cause more trouble throughout the area,” the framework is “as solid as you can get” when it comes to blunting the Islamic Republic’s efforts to build nuclear weapons. [Continue reading…]

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Ground forces expected to enter war in Yemen

BuzzFeed reports: A consensus appears to be building in Riyadh, Cairo, and Islamabad toward inserting ground troops into the conflict in Yemen.

One Egyptian military official told BuzzFeed News the decision had already been made. “Ground forces will enter the war,” the official said on condition of anonymity in order to discuss classified military operations.

The timing of such a move, which would be a significant escalation in the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen, is still being discussed. But the Egyptian military source said it could happen as soon as “two or three days.”

There has been no official comment from the Egyptian government on sending troops or the size of any potential operation. Youssef al-Sharqawy, Egypt’s Ambassador to Yemen, however, refused to rule out ground troops in an interview with al-Monitor on Tuesday.

Two weeks of Saudi airstrikes have failed to halt the advances of the Huthis, a Zaydi-Shi’a group that has taken over large parts of the country. Saudi Arabia, which sees itself locked in a battle with Iran for control of the region, is portraying the Huthis as an Iranian proxy. [Continue reading…]

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Why Pakistan is still undecided about sending troops to fight in Yemen

The Washington Post: War-weary Pakistani lawmakers are balking at committing troops to the Saudi-led campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, complicating efforts by Saudi Arabia to build a broad coalition for a possible ground offensive.

On Wednesday, for the third consecutive day, Pakistan’s Parliament debated whether to send troops, and perhaps aircraft and ships, to the Arabian Peninsula in support of one of the country’s closest allies.

Over the past four decades, the 550,000-member Pakistani army has repeatedly dispatched forces to Saudi Arabia to back a strategic alliance between the two Sunni-dominated nations. But the latest request from Saudi Arabia is prompting strong opposition from several major Pakistani political parties, reflecting the country’s fatigue with armed conflict as well as unease over whether events in Yemen could further inflame sectarian tensions in the Muslim world.

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Saudi Shiites worry about backlash from Yemen war

The Washington Post: Rights activist Waleed Sulais keeps close watch on the two-week-old Saudi-led offensive in neighboring Yemen. He is also following what he calls a war within the war.

This one is waged digitally in Saudi Arabia, as hard-line Sunnis sling mud at Shiite Muslims who are seen as sympathetic to the Shiite insurgents in Yemen. Saudi Arabia alleges the rebels are backed by Iran, its rival.

In a country where social media is the main pipeline for public debate, the smears signify more than just an angry cyber-sideshow in the latest Middle East conflict. They have alarmed Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority, which fears harsher crackdowns and pressure from the kingdom’s Sunni authorities as the Yemen fighting drags on.

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