Category Archives: News

Yemen Houthis take over U.S.-trained special forces base in Sanaa

Reuters: Armed men from Yemen’s newly dominant Houthi group took over a special forces army base in the capital Sanaa early on Wednesday, soldiers there said.

The clashes, which lasted around six hours, started late on Tuesday when Houthis shelled the camp with heavy weapons, soldiers from the camp said. At least 10 people were killed.

The troops had been trained and equipped by the United States as an elite counterterrorism unit during the rule of ex-president Ali Abullah Saleh, who was ousted by Arab Spring protests in 2011, military sources told Reuters.

Houthi militiamen seized Sanaa in September, eventually leading President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to flee to Aden this week where he seeks to set up a rival center of power.

For more than a decade the United States has watched with alarm as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – the most powerful arm of the global militant group – has grown in Yemen as the political chaos has mounted.

The U.S. military trained and kitted out Yemeni soldiers under Saleh, and under Hadi the CIA has stepped up drone strikes aimed at killing suspected militants.

U.S. officials have expressed concern that the rule of the resolutely anti-American Shi’ite Muslim Houthis will harm their counterterrorism efforts in a country that shares a long border with Saudi Arabia, the world’s [largest] oil exporter.

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Israeli settlement building tenders hit record high

Reuters: Israel set a 10-year record last year for the number of tenders it issued for construction in settlements on occupied land in the Palestinian territories, the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now said on Monday.

In a report published as Benjamin Netanyahu is running a close race for re-election on March 17, Peace Now blamed Israel’s settlement housing plans for scuttling U.S.-brokered peace talks that collapsed in April.

The report said the invitations to bid for building contracts in the settlements had tripled since 2013 on average compared to the 2009-2013 period of Netanyahu’s previous administration.

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ISIS in Syria abducts at least 150 Christians

Reuters: Islamic State militants have abducted at least 150 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria they had raided, Christian Syrian activists said on Tuesday.

A Syrian Christian group representing several NGO’s inside and outside the country said it had verified at least 150 people missing, including women and elderly, who had been kidnapped by the militants.

“We have verified at least 150 people who have been abducted from sources on the ground,” Bassam Ishak, President of the Syriac National Council of Syria, whose family itself is from Hasaka, told Reuters from Amman.

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Libya militias said to capture chemical weapons

Asharq Al-Awsat reports: Militias in Libya have seized chemical weapons from arsenals located in the southern and central provinces of the country that used to belong to former leader Muammar Gaddafi, military sources told Asharq Al-Awsat.

A Libyan military official who spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat on the condition of anonymity said: “Unfortunately [chemical weapons] exist in locations known to the militias, who have seized large amounts of them to use in their war against the [Libyan] army.”

The military official warned that the caches, which contain deadly chemicals such as mustard gas and the nerve agent Sarin, may fall into the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The quantity of chemical weapons taken is not known. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS may soon declare Islamic emirate in Lebanon

Daily Star: ISIS is preparing military plans to declare an Islamic emirate in Lebanon very soon to serve as a geographical extension of the so-called “Islamic State” announced by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq last year, security sources said.

ISIS fighters have demanded support from the militant group in northern Syria to achieve this goal, the sources said.

They added that the ISIS command has begun preparations to set up a military organizational committee tasked with running Lebanese affairs and considering Lebanon as part of its state.

However, ISIS is facing difficulties in choosing a Lebanese commander for this mission. The reported appointment of the fugitive preacher Ahmad al-Assir for this post was merely a trial balloon, the sources said.

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Leaked cables show Netanyahu’s Iran bomb claim was contradicted by Mossad

The Guardian reports: Binyamin Netanyahu’s dramatic declaration to world leaders in 2012 that Iran was about a year away from making a nuclear bomb was contradicted by his own secret service, according to a top-secret Mossad document.

It is part of a cache of hundreds of dossiers, files and cables from the world’s major intelligence services – one of the biggest spy leaks in recent times.

Brandishing a cartoon of a bomb with a red line to illustrate his point, the Israeli prime minister warned the UN in New York that Iran would be able to build nuclear weapons the following year and called for action to halt the process.

But in a secret report shared with South Africa a few weeks later, Israel’s intelligence agency concluded that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. The report highlights the gulf between the public claims and rhetoric of top Israeli politicians and the assessments of Israel’s military and intelligence establishment. [Continue reading…]

A leak of hundreds of secret intelligence papers from agencies all over the world, offering a glimpse into the murky world of espionage.

Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, in collaboration with The Guardian newspaper, is publishing an array of articles, analyses exploring the stories contained within the documents.

The Spy Cables include papers written by intelligence agencies the world over, including: Israel’s Mossad, Britain’s MI6, Russia’s FSB, Australia’s ASIO and South Africa’s SSA.

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At Kurdish front-line outpost, skepticism abounds about assault on Mosul

McClatchy reports: Major Deliar Shouki, the commander of a string of Kurdish fire bases less than 20 miles from Mosul, admitted he was skeptical when he’d heard the news last week that a U.S. official had told Pentagon reporters that 25,000 Iraqi troops would attack the Islamic State-held city perhaps as soon as April.

“There really is no Iraqi army, so I don’t know where they get the idea that they can train 25,000 soldiers in two months to fight house to house in Mosul,” he said on Friday as he gave a visiting journalist a tour of his men’s positions on the outskirts of the tiny hamlet of Sultan Abdullah, which lies about midway between Mosul and the Kurdish capital of Irbil.

Only a few hundred yards of open ground separates his troops from the Islamic State positions, with Shouki’s men dug in deeply on the tops of hills and the Islamic State fighters occupying the tiny village below. Nearly every night, the area is the scene World War I-style battles as the extremists attempt to storm the Kurdish trenches, only to be thrown back, with heavy casualties.

“It just seems to me like the Iraqi [Arabs] lack a certain morale to be soldiers, and I don’t want to directly accuse them of anything, but every time they fight Daash, they lose ground and equipment that ends up being used against us,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It’s very suspicious and I don’t think they want to fight them.” [Continue reading…]

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The implications of Turkey’s withdrawal from Suleyman Shah in Syria

Aaron Stein and Michael Stephens write: Just days after finalizing an agreement to train a new rebel force inside Turkey to attack the Islamic State, Turkish forces moved into Syria to evacuate some 40 soldiers protecting the Suleyman Shah Tomb: a small Turkish enclave on the eastern bank of the Euphrates river, 30 kilometers from the Turkish border town of Karkamis. The operation included 39 tanks, 57 armored vehicles, and an estimated 572 military personnel. The soldiers removed the body of Suleyman Shah and transported his remains to an area just opposite the Turkish town of Esmeler.

In their analysis of the operation, Stein and Stephens come to these conclusions:

It is important to put this operation into perspective: Ankara launched a limited incursion to evacuate a tomb that had come under threat. The coalition, the Kurds, and the FSA did much of the heavy lifting. Turkey, however, has proven yet again that its role in the Syrian conflict must not be overlooked. It has links to all the main actors operating in northern Syria and is able to generally get its way with most of them, albeit with the occasional disagreement.

The biggest change appears to be Ankara’s approach to ISIS. Since 2013, Turkey had treated ISIS as an irritant, rather than a major security threat, but the Suleyman Shah operation is the clearest sign to date that this approach is changing. However, it is far too early to determine whether this will result in Turkey changing its approach to the coalition’s military operations. All signs indicate that Turkey will not agree to increase its role in the coalition by opening up Incirlik Air Force base for armed strikes, or by allowing its planes to bomb ISIS directly.

Turkey’s role will remain limited to the train and equip, intelligence sharing, and border enforcement, rather than engaging ISIS from the air. In fact one must consider that now that the potential embarrassment of an ISIS takeover of the Tomb has been avoided, Turkey will take a more relaxed stance to events south of its border, and it is unlikely that another Turkish military incursion will be repeated. It is more likely that Turkey will continue with the policy it has pursued thus far: border defense at airports, increased military deployments along certain areas of the border, and the training of the new rebel brigade with US assistance. This signals one key change: Turkey is now attacking ISIS through the use of proxies, which Ankara had previously rejected, in favor of focusing on Assad.

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How ISIS is draining the blood of the people subjected to its rule

The Guardian reports: When Isis took over Raqqa, a wave of black swept over the city. The group’s dark flags were raised where its members lived or worked, women were required to shroud themselves in black, and black paint was daubed on buildings and in public spaces.

When US air strikes started, though, activists warned families not to dry dark clothes outside or on their roofs, in case they were mistaken for Isis flags. Perhaps Isis was worried, too, as it has started repainting everything. One central square, where crucifixion and other gruesome punishments are carried out in public, has been decked out in candy colours – pink, green and white. Another is golden.

Apparently, the pressures of publicity and the mundane and expensive business of ruling a city have pushed even Isis to make some compromises.

Last summer, crimes like smoking or failing to shutter a shop during prayer time would have earned transgressors several dozen lashes, but some religious police have started to accept fines in place of punishment from those who can afford it. There are even reports that they have been forcing traders to stay open through prayers, so that they can collect more money from them – around 1,500 Syrian pounds (around £5) each time.

It is not just money that they are short of. They lack blood for fighters injured in air strikes or on the frontline. People don’t want to donate, so they compel them. Anyone with business at the Islamic court is told first to go to a certain hospital, donate a pint of blood, then return with the receipt. Only then will the case be processed. [Continue reading…]

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In the war against ISIS, Kurds feel they’re doing the dirty work for the West

Mike Giglio reports: The soldier pressed a handkerchief to his face to fight the smell of corpses at his feet. Then he crossed the street, sat on a curb, put his head between his knees, and spit. He lit a cigarette. “I’d rather smell the smoke,” he said, “because the stench is rotten, it’s gross.”

The soldier gazed warily at three young ISIS fighters who lay dead at the foot of a crumbled wall. One was charred from a rocket-propelled grenade. Another had a hole in his head. The jihadis wore thick socks but no shoes, to muffle their steps along the pockmarked streets during the battle that raged there the day before.

The soldier was part of an ethnic Kurdish force called the peshmerga that has spent more than six months battling ISIS in northern Iraq. He and his colleagues won this town south of the Mosul Dam, called Wana, the previous afternoon. They spoke as if they’d been dispatching demons. “They are like animals,” a 30-year-old lieutenant said, “and they don’t have brains to think.”

It was ISIS’s push into Iraq’s Kurdish region that prompted the U.S. to begin airstrikes against the group in August, paving the way for the Obama administration to launch a new war. Two months after taking over the Iraqi city of Mosul, the extremists were threatening genocide against the Yazidi religious minority around Mt. Sinjar and advancing toward the regional capital of Erbil.

The peshmerga have since become the main partner on the ground for the U.S. and its coalition of allies, shouldering the grunt work of combat. More than half of the airstrikes the U.S. has carried out in Iraq, according to the U.S. military command overseeing operations against ISIS, have hit along Kurdish lines. The extent of U.S. cooperation with the Kurds suggests the true percentage is far higher, said Christopher Harmer, an analyst tracking the conflict at the Institute for the Study of War.

Six months into the offensive, soldiers along the peshmerga’s 650-mile front with ISIS show the strain of a grueling war. They fight to protect their land — but also feel they’re doing the dirty work for Western countries that keep far from the smell of death. A major in Sinjar called the peshmerga “the only ones on the front fighting” as soldiers fired over stacks of sandbags; a colonel barricaded across from ISIS in Kirkuk said, “It’s not supposed to be this way.” At a western outpost overlooking ISIS-held Syria, an officer said the Kurds hold the line “for every single country fighting ISIS,” while in Wana, the weary soldiers prepared to clear the three corpses as feral cats began to pick at their flesh. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS in danger of losing its main supply route

The Washington Post reports: For weeks, U.S.-backed forces have been fighting to oust the Islamic State from key areas of northern Iraq in a series of small-scale battles that could have an enormous impact on the group’s “caliphate.”

A major prize in the clashes is a highway that serves as a lifeline for the Islamic State. It runs from the group’s Iraq stronghold in Mosul to its enclaves in northeastern Syria, including its self-styled capital, Raqqa, 300 miles away.

The battles are occurring as Islamic State is causing growing alarm internationally over its brutal actions, which have included the murder of a captured Jordanian pilot and the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians by Libya-based adherents of the extremist group.

In late January, however, Islamic State fighters suffered a setback as Iraqi Kurdish forces seized a stretch of the key highway at the town of Kiske, west of Mosul.

The Islamic State is still using the highway, detouring onto back roads to get around Kiske. But if the Iraqi Kurdish fighters can maintain and expand their hold on the road, the Islamist extremists “will be under a kind of siege in the area. It will be very hard for them” logistically, said Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi researcher who is an expert on the radical group. [Continue reading…]

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Norway’s Muslims form protective human ring around synagogue

Reuters reports: More than 1000 Muslims formed a human shield around Oslo’s synagogue on Saturday, offering symbolic protection for the city’s Jewish community and condemning an attack on a synagogue in neighboring Denmark last weekend.

Chanting “No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia,” Norway’s Muslims formed what they called a ring of peace a week after Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, a Danish-born son of Palestinian immigrants, killed two people at a synagogue and an event promoting free speech in Copenhagen last weekend.

“Humanity is one and we are here to demonstrate that,” Zeeshan Abdullah, one of the protest’s organizers told a crowd of Muslim immigrants and ethnic Norwegians who filled the small street around Oslo’s only functioning synagogue.

“There are many more peace mongers than warmongers,” Abdullah said as organizers and Jewish community leaders stood side by side. “There’s still hope for humanity, for peace and love, across religious differences and backgrounds.”

Norway’s Jewish community is one of Europe’s smallest, numbering around 1000, and the Muslim population, which has been growing steadily through immigration, is 150,000 to 200,000. Norway has a population of about 5.2 million. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. warns it is ready to walk away from Iran nuclear talks

The Associated Press reports: With only weeks left to the deadline to reach a first-stage nuclear deal with Iran, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that “significant gaps” remained and warned that America was ready to walk away from the talks if Tehran doesn’t agree to terms demonstrating that it doesn’t want atomic arms.

Kerry spoke after the Iranian Atomic Energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi and U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz added their muscle to the talks for the first time to help resolve technical disputes standing in the way of an agreement meant to curb Iran’s nuclear programs in exchange for sanctions relief for the Islamic Republic.

But Kerry warned against undue optimism. Salehi’s and Moniz’s presence is no “indication whatsoever that something is about to be decided,” he said. “There are still significant gaps.”

World powers and Iran have set an end of March deadline for a framework agreement, with four further months for the technical work to be ironed out. The talks have missed two previous deadlines, and President Barack Obama has said a further extension would make little sense without a basis for continuing discussions. [Continue reading…]

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Russian news report: Putin approved Ukraine invasion before Kiev government collapsed

McClatchy reports: A Russian newspaper claims to have an official government strategy document outlining the invasion of Ukraine that was prepared weeks before the Ukrainian government collapsed last year.

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitri Muratov, reported the document during an interview with Echo of Moscow, a radio station. In the interview, which was reported by news outlets Saturday, he did not reveal how the newspaper came into possession of the document in the media unfriendly Russian world, but said he had confidence it was authentic.

Novaya Gazeta is considered a rarity in Russia these days, an independent investigative newspaper that’s known to anger the Kremlin on a regular basis. The editor said the paper’s plan is to publish the full details of the strategy document next week.

Muratov said the document characterized then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as “a person without morals and willpower whose downfall must be expected at any moment.” Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia on Feb. 22, 2014. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon doubts its own ISIS war plan

Nancy A. Youssef reports: Skepticism about the U.S. and Iraqi military plans for the next phase of the ISIS war begins inside the Pentagon.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. military officials publicly detailed their plans for a spring offensive on ISIS-held Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, many within the Pentagon privately questioned whether that timetable was plausible. They said that they were dubious that their partners in the Iraqi military — the troops supposed to lead the offensive — would be capable of conducting such a campaign by then.

“I really doubt it is going to happen that soon,” said one military officer who, like several others, served in Iraq between 2003-2011 and spoke on condition of anonymity. “And if it does, it will take months.”

The largely Shiite troops of the Iraqi army are unlikely to risk their lives to win back a Sunni dominated city, several U.S. military officers told The Daily Beast on Friday. Indeed, when ISIS stormed the city last June, Iraqi forces walked away, leading the U.S. and 60 other nations to form a coalition against the terror group.

Even if the Iraqi troops do stand up and fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State, having a Shiite force move in and potentially ravage a major Sunni city in a bid to save it could have adverse affects on the Sunnis in Iraq and broader Sunni Arab world. Sectarian tensions, particularly in Iraq, run that deep.

“I cannot believe that Shiites would fight for Mosul,” one officer who served in the restive Sunni province of Anbar during the Iraq War told The Daily Beast.

So far, there is no evidence of a strong Sunni-majority Iraqi Army brigade, and U.S. Central Command has said it will take at least eight brigades to win back the city. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen rebels use increasingly brutal tactics against demonstrators

The Washington Post reports: The Houthi rebels who have seized control of northern Yemen are systematically targeting peaceful protesters in the capital with death threats, abductions and severe beatings, according to activists and human rights groups.

The increasingly brutal tactics, they say, are meant to halt demonstrations that erupted ­after the Houthis toppled Yemen’s pro-American government in Sanaa last month and then dissolved parliament. But the knifings and other violent measures appear to be having the opposite effect. Rallies against the Houthis have increased in frequency and size, heightening concerns that the country is heading for all-out civil war.

Several Yemenis said in interviews that they or their friends had been unlawfully detained and abused by Houthis. At least one protester, identified as Salah al-Bashri, died as a result of what appeared to be beatings he suffered while in Houthi custody, according to an ­Amnesty International report released Monday. [Continue reading…]

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Boko Haram’s latest video mirrors ISIS propaganda

Mashable: The latest video posted by West African Islamist extremists Boko Haram marks a change in tactics for the militant group.

The footage, featuring a man believed to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, depicts the reclusive leader delivering a 12-minute “message” to leaders in the Nigerian government and western democracies, condemning their rule of law and urging their leaders to turn to Allah.

But perhaps most interesting is the way in which the video was shared, the iconography used throughout, its higher resolution and the cues the group seems to be taking from its colleagues in the Islamic State (ISIS), militants thousands of miles away.

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U.S. officials say Israel is distorting reality of Iran talks

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration on Wednesday accused the Israeli government of misleading the public over the Iran nuclear negotiations, using unusually blunt and terse language that once again highlighted the rift between the two sides.

In briefings with reporters, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki and White House spokesman Josh Earnest suggested Israeli officials were not being truthful about how the United States is handling the secretive talks.

“I think it is safe to say not everything you are hearing from the Israeli government is an accurate reflection of the details of the talks,” said Psaki, who acknowledged that the State Department is withholding some details from the Israelis out of concern they will share them more broadly.

Earnest said U.S. officials routinely speak with their Israeli counterparts. But, he added, the administration “is not going to be in a position of negotiating this agreement in public, particularly when we see that there is a continued practice of cherry-picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the negotiating position of the United States.” [Continue reading…]

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