Category Archives: News

Hamas talks of ‘real chance’ for Gaza agreement with Israel

The Guardian reports: Hamas believes there is a “real opportunity” to reach an agreement with Israel in Cairo negotiations to end the conflict in Gaza, saying it is “not interested in more bloodshed”.

The positive signals from the Islamist organisation, which has fought a 30-day war with Israel, came after mediators brokered a five-day extension to the current ceasefire shortly before a midnight deadline on Wednesday.

Despite there being some rocket fire from Gaza and air strikes by Israel as efforts to extend the truce went to the wire, the ceasefire held throughout Thursday. It expires at midnight on Monday.

Both the Palestinian and Israeli delegations left Cairo for a break in the talks, which are expected to resume on Sunday.

The Hamas negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, who returned to Gaza to brief the local leadership, told reporters: “There is still a real chance to clinch an agreement, but Israel must stop playing with words.”

He added: “We are not interested in more destruction for our people. We are not interested in more bloodshed.”

But, he said, Hamas would not sign an agreement that did not “meet our people’s demands”, and he warned that the organisation could “renew the battle” with greater strength. [Continue reading…]

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Vatican’s approval of Iraq strikes a rare exception to peace policy

AFP reports: Fearing a genocide of Christians, the Vatican has given its approval to US military air strikes in Iraq — a rare exception to its policy of peaceful conflict resolution.

The Holy See’s ambassador to the United Nations, Silvano Tomasi, this weekend supported US air strikes aimed at halting the advance of Sunni Islamic State (IS) militants, calling for “intervention now, before it is too late”.

“Military action might be necessary,” he said.

While the Vatican vocally disapproved of the US-led campaign in Iraq in 2003 and the 2013 plan for air strikes on Syria — fearing both might make the situations worse for Christians on the ground — fears of ethnic cleansing by Islamists has forced a policy change.

Tomasi’s appeal follows warnings from Church leaders in Iraq that the persecution is becoming a genocide, with urgent help needed to protect Christians and Yezidis in the north of the country, where tens of thousands have been forced to flee for their lives.

Military support was needed “to stop the wolf getting to the flock to kill, eat, destroy”, Rabban al-Qas, the Chaldean bishop of Amadiyah, told Vatican radio.

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How the NSA shut down the internet in Syria — by accident

As I have written here before, as much as we should fear the immense power of intelligence agencies such as the NSA, it’s important to recognize that secrecy does not merely function as an instrument of power — just as importantly it functions to conceal incompetence.

The agencies want to sustain their mystique as the valiant and stealthy defenders of national security. What they dread is being seen as over-funded bunglers.

On November 29, 2012, the internet went down in Syria. The following day, the Washington Post reported:

Though the rebels and the Syrian government blamed each other for the prolonged outage, most technology experts believe Syrian authorities caused the blackout to try to impede the rebels’ interactions and online broadcasts of the fighting.

More honest reporting might have said, it’s anyone’s guess what happened, but for what it’s worth here’s some speculation from some so-called experts.

It turns out, apparently, that the experts were wrong and the cause of the outage was a bungled NSA operation.

James Bamford has just done an extended interview with Edward Snowden which includes this:

By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO — a division of NSA hackers — had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.

Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”

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Syrian forces advance on Aleppo, rebels fear another siege

The Wall Street Journal reports: Syrian government forces have nearly encircled Aleppo, preparing a siege to wrest control of the city from rebels in what would be the biggest blow yet to the three-year uprising.

The fall of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and economic hub before the fighting, could also bolster the ranks of Islamic State militants who continue to make gains across the country, as defeated members of the Western-backed Free Syrian Army switch to their side.

Rebel commanders in Aleppo say they are stockpiling goods as aid groups step up food deliveries—crates of lentils, rice, ketchup and baby formula—seeking to prevent the same kind of mass starvation that forced them to surrender the much smaller city of Homs in May.

Losing Homs, once dubbed the capital of the revolution, was a tremendous blow to the rebels. If they lose the battle for Aleppo as well, it could spell the end of their revolt against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, rebel commanders warn.

Regime forces now surround Aleppo on three sides, having overrun the Sheikh Najjar Industrial City in the east last month, and are trying to seal off the last rebel-controlled corridor, a 4-mile-wide access point to the northeast.

Tuesday, rebels and regime forces clashed in Aziza, on the southern outskirts of Aleppo, while government aircraft stepped up strikes on the old city, activists said.

Simultaneously, extremists with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are encroaching on rebel-held territory north of the city, uprooting the FSA from the countryside.

“We’re about to lose Aleppo and no one cares,” said Hussam Almarie, an FSA spokesman. “We won’t be able to recover the revolution if this happens. And we’ll lose the moderates in Syria.”

Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, agreed. “The net impact of losing Aleppo will be the withering of the mainstream opposition” in six months or a year, he said.

“For the regime, this will be a crushing blow to the opposition as a viable fighting force and to its morale,” he said. “Some rebels may give up and seek a compromise with the regime, or look to join the only viable fighting force left, which is becoming ISIS.” [Continue reading…]

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‘My wife thinks I will come home in a box’ – and three days later Gaza bomb disposal expert was dead

The Guardian reports: Rahed Taysir al’Hom was buried in the sandy soil of the cemetery of Jabaliya, the rough Gaza neighbourhood where he had grown up, at 1pm on the third day of the ceasefire.

His funeral was quick, attended by a hundred or so mourners, and accompanied by a quick sermon from a white-turbaned cleric, a sobbing father and some shots fired from a Kalashnikov by a skinny teenager.

Two breezeblocks and a ripped piece of cardboard with his name scrawled on it now mark the grave of a personable man with an easy smile, hollow eyes and a quiet intensity that was entirely understandable given his job.

The 43-year-old father of seven lies next to his brother – a Hamas fighter killed in an Israeli air strike two weeks ago. But the al’Hom who died on Wednesday was not a warrior. He was head of the sole bomb disposal unit of Gaza’s northern governorate and his job was to protect several hundred thousand people from the unexploded ordnance that now litters the streets, fields and the rubble of many homes.

Al’Hom, who died when a 500kg bomb he was trying to defuse exploded at 10.30am on Wednesday, was an incidental casualty of a month-long war that no one seems able to stop.

Three of his colleagues and two journalists were killed with him. He was well aware of the risks he was taking but believed in his work. One day last week, while the last tenuous ceasefire held in Gaza, al-Hom received 70 calls. In this conflict alone, he had dealt with 400 “objects”. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt: Rab’a killings likely crimes against humanity

Kenneth Roth writes: Some combination of denial and fear led the Egyptian government to refuse my colleague and me entrance to the country on Sunday night. The form wrapped around my colleague’s passport describing why we were being denied entry was checked, “For security reasons.”

It was an unprecedented step. No one from Human Rights Watch had ever been barred from Egypt, even during the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak’s rule. But the reason for my visit was also unprecedented — a massacre that rivals the most notorious of recent times, such as China’s Tiananmen killings in 1989 and Uzbekistan’s Andijan slaughter in 2005.

I went to Cairo to present the results of a detailed investigation that Human Rights Watch had conducted into last year’s massacre by Egyptian security forces of protesters at a large sit-in demonstration in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, which was organized to oppose the military’s ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first elected civilian president. In one day — indeed, in some 12 hours — security forces killed at least 817 people, each of whom has been individually identified by Human Rights Watch, and quite likely more than 1,000. The slaughter was so systematic that it probably amounts to a crime against humanity under international law. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. airstrikes helped, but Kurds from Syria turned tide against #ISIS

McClatchy reports: Victory, they say, has many fathers, and as Kurdish peshmerga militia pushed Islamic State forces from a string of towns near Irbil Sunday and Monday, it was easy to cite two: accurate airstrikes by U.S. aircraft that eliminated artillery positions and convoys and timely deliveries of light arms and ammunition from the CIA.

But a third may have been just as important, though less publicized: the addition of hundreds of fighters from a Turkish group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.

Visits to front-line positions Monday made it clear that an influx of fighters with links to the Kurdish Workers Party, known by its Kurdish initials PKK, had played a major role in driving the Islamic State from key areas within a 30-minute drive of Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. It was Irbil’s possible fall last week that ended weeks of Obama administration inaction on Iraq.

“The PKK took Mahmour,” a peshmerga fighter at a checkpoint outside Mahmour acknowledged, shaking his head in admiration. Then, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, he offered an explanation: “They’re very experienced from fighting Daash in Syria and are true guerrilla fighters from their time in Turkey. They have more experience and training than we do.”

There was plenty of gratitude for the U.S. intervention, which since Friday has included at least seven announced airstrikes on Islamic State targets near Irbil.

“The strikes came at the last second but, thank God, they came,” said one Kurdish defense official at Kalak, where the peshmerga has set up a defense line that, compared with last week’s ragged look, had developed a formidable array of machine guns mounted on pickup trucks with ample supplies of light ammunition. [Continue reading…]

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Senior Iranian official congratulates new Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi

The Guardian reports: A senior Iranian official with close links to the country’s president and supreme leader has offered his congratulations to Iraq’s prime minister-designate, suggesting Tehran has abandoned former ally Nouri al-Maliki amid the current Sunni militant insurgency.

Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency congratulating the Iraqi people and their leaders for choosing Haider al-Abadi as their new prime minister.

Abadi, a veteran of Iraq’s post-Saddam Hussein governments, was appointed on Monday after the country’s president effectively deposed Maliki in an effort to break the political deadlock that has paralysed the government while jihadists sweep through the north of the country.

Shamkhani, a close ally of President Hassan Rouhani and a representative of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the council, said Iran supported “the legal process for choosing the new Iraqi prime minister”.

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Maliki seems to back away from using military force to retain power

The New York Times reports: After two days of defiance and the deployment of special security units around the Iraqi capital that raised the specter of a coup, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on Tuesday appeared to back away from his implied threat of using military force to secure his power by saying the army should stay out of politics.

On Monday, Iraq’s president nominated a candidate to replace Mr. Maliki, who then challenged the decision by saying it was unconstitutional. On Tuesday, Mr. Maliki backed down, at least rhetorically, from his intransigence in the face of growing opposition to his rule. [Continue reading…]

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Anti-Israel boycotts are spreading across Britain and they’re here to stay

BuzzFeed reports: “We’re not planning on stopping our actions, because the siege of Gaza still goes on,” Clare Essex, a spokeswoman for London Palestine Action (LPA), said. “People can’t have medicine. The one power plant in the city has been destroyed. More than ever, we need to keep pushing that into people’s consciousness.”

In the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands of people have been protesting in the streets of London, Manchester, and Edinburgh against the government’s stance on the conflict in Gaza. Alongside larger actions, there have been protests inside supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s, and shopkeepers have claimed to have faced intimidation on the high streets of Manchester.

But despite a short-term end to hostilities in Gaza, the campaign shows no signs of winding down. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s (PSC) chair, Hugh Lanning, said the organisation plans to build on the momentum it has gained. There will be another national day of action next Saturday, when activists will target high street stores that sell the products of SodaStream, a manufacturer of DIY carbonated-drink machines that has its headquarters in an Israeli settlement. [Continue reading…]

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Nouri al-Maliki set to be replaced as Iraq’s prime minister

The Guardian reports: Iraq’s embattled prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, appeared to have lost his job on Monday, after the country’s president appointed a rival Shia candidate to form a new government.

In a major defeat for Maliki, Iraq’s largest coalition of Shia political parties nominated Haider al-Abadi, a member of Maliki’s Shia Islamist Dawa party, to take over as prime minister.

Iraq’s Kurdish president, Fouad Massoum, formally announced Abadi’s appointment soon afterwards. The move is likely to deepen Iraq’s political turmoil and comes just hours after Maliki deployed his elite security troops on the streets of Baghdad.

The international community has repeatedly put pressure on Maliki to step down. It says that his divisive sectarian politics have enabled the rise of Islamic State (Isis) militants, who have captured large swaths of the country over the past three months.

But a defiant Maliki has insisted that he has the right to carry on as prime minister following elections in April because he commands the largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament.

In a TV address on Sunday he accused Massoum of violating the consitution by failing to name a prime minister within 15 days. Pointedly, he also sent Iraq government forces on Sunday evening to the green zone, the home of Iraq’s government, and to the president’s residence.

It was unclear whether Maliki will now accept the president’s decision or resist attempts to replace him. Abadi, the first deputy speaker of Iraq’s parliament, is a member of Maliki’s party, which in recent weeks has turned against the prime minister.

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Antisemitism on rise across Europe ‘in worst times since the Nazis’

The Guardian reports: In the space of just one week last month, according to Crif, the umbrella group for France’s Jewish organisations, eight synagogues were attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd’s chants and banners included “Death to Jews” and “Slit Jews’ throats”. That same weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of the capital, stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: “Israhell”, read one banner.

In Germany last month, molotov cocktails were lobbed into the Bergische synagogue in Wuppertal – previously destroyed on Kristallnacht – and a Berlin imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to “destroy the Zionist Jews … Count them and kill them, to the very last one.” Bottles were thrown through the window of an antisemitism campaigner in Frankfurt; an elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a pro-Israel rally in Hamburg; an Orthodox Jewish teenager punched in the face in Berlin. In several cities, chants at pro-Palestinian protests compared Israel’s actions to the Holocaust; other notable slogans included: “Jew, coward pig, come out and fight alone,” and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”

Across Europe, the conflict in Gaza is breathing new life into some very old, and very ugly, demons. This is not unusual; police and Jewish civil rights organisations have long observed a noticeable spike in antisemitic incidents each time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares. During the three weeks of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009, France recorded 66 antisemitic incidents, including attacks on Jewish-owned restaurants and synagogues and a sharp increase in anti-Jewish graffiti.But according to academics and Jewish leaders, this time it is different. More than simply a reaction to the conflict, they say, the threats, hate speech and violent attacks feel like the expression of a much deeper and more widespread antisemitism, fuelled by a wide range of factors, that has been growing now for more than a decade. [Continue reading…]

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Billionaire’s sketchy Middle East gamble: Meet the man betting on war with Iran

Eli Clifton reports: On the same evening last November that world powers announced an interim deal with Iran, halting its nuclear progress in exchange for a modest easing of sanctions, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) put out a statement complaining that the agreement was a “disappointment” and “provides disproportionate sanctions relief to Iran.” The group’s executive director, former U.S. diplomat Mark Wallace, suggested that no sanctions relief was appropriate as part of an interim deal: “By rolling back sanctions now, the international community is significantly lessening the pressure on Iran’s economy.”

That same group, at the end of July, turned up in a bit of intrigue: the New York Times revealed that the Justice Department had stepped in to a defamation suit against UANI to prevent the disclosure of documents revealing the group’s donors, among other information. UANI serves as a key pressure group for the enforcement of sanctions, frequently issuing reports and press releases about companies doing illicit business with Iran.

The Times reported that lawyers representing Greek shipping magnate Victor Restis, the plaintiff in the suit, accused UANI of receiving foreign funding and shaking down companies for donations. UANI had earlier accused Restis and his company of being “front men for the illicit activities of the Iranian regime.”

But it remains unclear what potential revelations the Justice Department is concerned about.

Among the pieces of heretofore undisclosed information the Justice Department’s shield might prevent from coming to light is the connection between UANI and one of the biggest investors in precious metals, Thomas S. Kaplan. Kaplan has emerged as one of the business world’s most outspoken proponents of investing in gold and other precious metals, investments he says will retain or appreciate in value during periods of political and economic unrest. [Continue reading…]

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The chaos in Baghdad explains why #Obama isn’t trying to destroy #ISIS

Tweet from U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (Iraq and Iran):

Vox: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki threw the country’s political system into crisis on Sunday, when he announced that he would be staying on as Prime Minister after a deadline to form a new government expired without an agreement at 12 am Baghdad time. Maliki announced a plan to sue Iraq’s President, Fuad Masum, for violating the country’s constitution, and it’s now totally unclear when, if ever, Iraq will return to normal democratic procedures.

All of this underscores why, on his Saturday press conference about the US intervention on Iraq, President Obama emphasized the need for Iraqi political reform to solve the ISIS crisis. “Ultimately, there’s not going to be an American military solution to this problem,” President Obama told reporters. “There’s going to have to be an Iraqi solution.” This is the key line to understand if you want to grasp the administration’s approach to Iraq — and why the goals of the US military campaign are more narrow than you might think.

The American objectives for Obama’s airstrikes in Iraq are very clear, and very limited. American airpower will protect Iraqi Kurdistan from the advance of militants from Islamic State (ISIS), and will attempt to break the ISIS siege that’s starving up to 40,000 members of the Yazidi minority on an isolated mountain.

So why is the US stopping there? ISIS controls a huge swath of land about the size of Belgium in Iraq and Syria. The group poses a serious threat to the Iraqi government and possibly even the stability of the entire region. If the United States can beat ISIS back in Kurdistan, why not elsewhere?

That line about an Iraqi solution is the administration’s answer. In fact, the Obama administration has been consistent on this question since June, when ISIS first took control of big chunks of Iraq. They see ISIS as, at its heart, a political problem — one that can’t be solved solely with force. But the march on Kurdistan and the siege on Sinjar are narrow military problems, and thus merit military solutions. This distinction between military and political problems is at the heart of the Obama administration’s thinking on Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Exodus from the mountain: Yazidis flood back into Iraq following U.S. airstrikes

The Washington Post reports: Burned by the sun, blistered with thirst and weak from exhaustion, thousands of Yazidis fled the mountain on which they had been trapped for a week on Sunday, streaming into Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region after a harrowing escape from extremist fighters that some said was aided by U.S. airstrikes.

Hungry, thirsty and tired, they limped across a narrow bridge spanning the Tigris on the Iraqi-Syrian border hauling their few belongings, some of them barefoot, others in sleeping clothes because they ran for their lives at night.

It was the last leg of a nightmarish journey that some have not survived — and many more may not.

Thousands are still stranded on the mountain, either because they are surrounded in their villages by militants with the Islamic State or are simply too weak to walk, according to those arriving in the remote Iraqi border post of Fishkhabour. Others have died trying to reach safety, falling by the wayside on the barren, rocky mountain for lack of food and water. [Continue reading…]

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