Category Archives: News

Iraqi civilian death toll passes 5,500 in wake of ISIS offensive

The Associated Press reports: The violence in Iraq has killed more than 5,500 civilians over the first six months of the year, according to a report by the United Nations that documents the massive humanitarian toll of the Sunni militant offensive.

The Islamic State (Isis) and other Sunni insurgents seized control of the city of Falluja, as well as part of nearby Ramadi in Anbar province in early January. The militants then launched an offensive in June that has brought a huge swath of northern and western Iraq under their control.

In its report, the UN mission to Iraq says at least 5,576 civilians were killed and another 11,665 wounded from 1 January until the end of June. Another 1.2 million have been driven from their homes by the violence, it adds.

The pace of civilian deaths over the first six months marked a sharp increase over the previous year. In all of 2013, the UN reported just over 7,800 civilians killed, which was the highest annual death toll in years. [Continue reading…]

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Christians flee jihadist ultimatum in Iraq’s Mosul

AFP reports: Hundreds of Christian families fled their homes in Mosul Saturday as a jihadist ultimatum threatening their community’s centuries-old presence in the northern Iraqi city expired.

President Jalal Talabani flew home after 18 months abroad for medical treatment but restricted access at the airport in his Kurdish fiefdom of Sulaimaniyah offered no clue as to his health.

There was little hope in any case that the 80-year-old’s return could buck Iraq’s downward spiral as bickering politicians prepared to pick his successor and the country’s worst crisis in years reaped its daily harvest of dead and wounded.

An AFP correspondent in Mosul, the main Iraqi hub of the Islamic State (IS) group’s proclaimed “caliphate”, said Christians squeezed into private cars and taxis to beat the noon deadline.

“Some families have had all their money and jewellery taken from them at an insurgent checkpoint as they fled the city,” said Abu Rayan, a Mosul Christian who had just driven out with his family.

The jihadists, who have run the city since a sweeping military offensive that began six weeks ago, had told the thousands of Christians in Mosul they could convert, pay a special tax or leave. [Continue reading…]

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RT correspondent: ‘Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.’

BuzzFeed: Sara Firth, a longstanding London-based correspondent for Russia Today, resigned on Friday in protest at the channel’s coverage of the Malaysia Airlines crash.

Firth, who joined the channel in 2009, told BuzzFeed that she decided to resign from the Kremlin-funded news channel because she felt it was “disrespectfully” attempting to pin the blame for Thursday’s Malaysia Airlines disaster on the Ukrainian government.

“When this story broke I ran back into the newsroom and saw how we were covering it already and I just knew I had to go,” she said.

“It was the total disregard to the facts. We threw up eyewitness accounts from someone on the ground openly accusing the Ukrainian government [of involvement in the disaster], and a correspondent in the studio pulled up a plane crash before that the Ukrainian government had been involved in and said it was ‘worth mentioning’.

“It’s not worth mentioning. It’s Russia Today all over, it’s flirting with that border of overtly lying. You’re not telling a lie, you’re just bringing something up. I didn’t want to watch a story like that, where people have lost loved ones and we’re handling it like that.

“I couldn’t do it any more. Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.”

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U.S. media execs prefer biased reporting on Gaza

Michael Calderone reports: CNN has removed correspondent Diana Magnay from covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after she tweeted that Israelis who were cheering the bombing of Gaza, and who had allegedly threatened her, were “scum.”

“After being threatened and harassed before and during a liveshot, Diana reacted angrily on Twitter,” a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement to The Huffington Post.

“She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew,” the spokeswoman continued. “She certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.”

The spokeswoman said Magnay has been assigned to Moscow.

Magnay appeared on CNN Thursday from a hill overlooking the Israel-Gaza border. While she reported, Israelis could be heard near her cheering as missiles were fired at Gaza.

After the liveshot, Magnay tweeted: “Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #gaza; threaten to ‘destroy our car if I say a word wrong’. Scum.” The tweet was quickly removed, but not before it had been retweeted more than 200 times.

If Magnay’s use of the word “scum” was so regrettable, what would have been a more appropriate way of describing this group of Israelis?

Bloodthirsty. Savage. Callous. Inhumane. Hateful. Vengeful. Sadistic.

Any of those terms could have been accurately used by Magnay and yet there’s no doubt that CNN would have been just as apologetic.

The only way she could have reported what she was witnessing right next to her and avoided criticism, would have been to say nothing at all.

This is what American media too often now demands from its reporters who cover Israel: silence or unabashed bias in favor of the Jewish state.

Might Magnay’s removal — preceded by NBC removing Ayman Mohyeldin from Gaza — prompt a rebellion among mainstream American journalists?

If only… Unfortunately, having been duly warned, it’s much more likely that nearly everyone will decide it’s not worth taking the risk of stepping out of line.

The exceptions will remain a few curmudgeons like AP’s Matt Lee who is afforded some latitude precisely because he is an exception. (Unfortunately, Lee’s acts of rebellion are confined to briefing rooms in Washington where they get less attention than they deserve.)

But having said that, what are we to make of the vile behavior of Israelis who celebrate carnage?

Do they reveal something about the nature of Israel and the meaning of Zionism?

To some extent, yes.

Palestinians, the enemy, the other, have been reduced to a sub-human status. Their lives are viewed as worthless.

Is this not an inevitable consequence of founding a state on the idea that the rights of one group of people, of one religious identity, have the exclusive authority to run that state?

And yet, should we not also acknowledge that there are base instincts that make people everywhere capable of acting with the same callousness displayed by the “scum” in Sderot?

If you think it couldn’t happen here — wherever that might be — you’re probably wrong.

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Some of Israel’s top supporters say it’s time to end U.S. military aid

Eli Lake reports: Elliott Abrams — a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush and a leading pro-Israel writer and policy analyst — told The Daily Beast, “My view is over time it would be healthy for the relationship if the aid diminished. Israel should be less dependent on American financial assistance and should become the kind of ally that we have in Australia, Canada, or the United Kingdom: an intimate military relationship and alliance, but no military aid.”

That is also the view expressed by leading Israeli politicians. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister of economics and the leader of the right-wing Israel Home party, said in 2013, “Today, U.S. military aid is roughly 1 percent of Israel’s economy. I think, generally, we need to free ourselves from it. We have to do it responsibly, since I’m not aware of all the aspects of the budget. I don’t want to say, ‘Let’s just give it up,’ but our situation today is very different from what it was 20 and 30 years ago.”

Today Israel is prosperous. In 2000, the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $124.9 billion. In 2013, the Israeli GDP was $291.3 billion. And that is before Israel has seen any real revenue from the fields of natural gas it recently discovered. The country has become so prosperous that legislation is now before the country’s Knesset to create a sovereign wealth fund, a state-owned investment vehicle designed to invest the surplus revenue Israel collects from selling its natural gas.

“I have heard discussions of a sovereign wealth fund, by which the Israelis mean they want to handle the revenues carefully the way Norway does and not waste them,” Abrams said. “But I do not believe a country that has a sovereign wealth fund can be an aid recipient.”

Abrams was careful to say he did not favor cutting the military aid while Obama was still president. “Were there a reduction now, it would be attributed to administration hostility to Israel and be seen as a weakening of U.S. support,” he said. “It should be done only in a context of robust American political support and close relations between American and Israeli leaders.” [Continue reading…]

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While Iraq burns, ISIS takes advantage in Syria

Michael Stephens and Sofia Barbarani write: The Islamic State (Isis) may be many things, but foolish is not one of them.

While international attention has been fixated on the disintegration of Iraq and the expansion of the so-called caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Sunni insurgents have moved their offensive back into Syria with a newly acquired haul of US-made weapons and cash.

Cushioned by the impunity offered them by a largely unresponsive international community, and the inability of the Syrian and Iraqi armies to defeat them in battle, Isis’ latest advances in Syria have further destabilised the already frail dynamics in the region.

As Bashar al-Assad attended his de-facto self-coronation affording him another seven years in power, Isis was making a mockery of the president’s pledge to “not stop fighting terrorism and striking it wherever it is until we restore security to every spot of Syria”.

In addition to Isis, Syria’s Kurds have also been busy establishing their own cantons of self-governance, backed by their militia force, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). But as their control over Kurdish areas of Syria has strengthened, it has brought them into fierce conflict with Isis.

While in neighbouring Iraq the Kurdistan Region remains largely insulated from Isis’ violent land-grabbing operations, Syria’s approximately two million Kurds have borne the brunt of the expanding “caliphate” declared at the end of June. [Continue reading…]

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Document shows it was the FBI, not the NSA, that monitored 5 Americans

electrospaces.net: [O]n July 9, 2014, Glenn Greenwald published an article which he earlier announced as being the grand finale of the Snowden-revelations. It would demonstrate that NSA is also spying on ordinary American citizens, something that would clearly be illegal.

The report is titled “Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On” and it tells the story of Faisal Gill, Asim Ghafoor, Hooshang Amirahmadi, Agha Saeed and Nihad Awad whose e-mail addresses were found in an NSA file from the Snowden-trove. Although the article confusingly mentions both FBI and NSA, many people and media got the impression that this was the long-awaited major NSA abuse scandal.

But as we will show here, the document that was published contains no evidence of any involvement of the NSA in this particular case. Everything indicates that it was actually an FBI operation, so it seems not justified to have NSA mentioned in the article. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas leader says Israel must ‘lift siege’ of Gaza before any ceasefire

The Telegraph reports: Hamas has ruled out a ceasefire deal unless Israel “lifts the siege” on Gaza, the organisation’s political chief has told The Telegraph.

In his first interview since the recent conflict in Gaza, Khaled Meshaal has said his organisation will not accept a simple cessation of fire by both sides, and that the deal must include long term commitments to improve the “rights of the Palestinian people”.

With mediators gathered in Cairo in an effort find a solution to a conflict that has already seen more than two hundred Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes, Mr Meshaal, for the first time, laid out the demands of his organisation.

He said that Israel must “stop the aggression” of air strikes against targets in Gaza, release the dozens of Palestinians detained in response to last month’s kidnapping of three Israeli students in the West Bank, and “end the siege on Gaza permanently”.

“These are our clear demands,” said Mr Meshaal. “We won’t accept an agreement that prolongs the suffering of our people anymore. In Gaza, for the past seven years of siege, its 1.8 million people have been living in a prison.”

The demands go much further than a return to the truce brokered in Cairo in 2012, to put an end to eight days of fighting in the Gaza strip.

That truce included a pledge to open a border crossing, intending to ease the blockade of the coastal enclave.

On Thursday, Mr Meshaal said that an easing of the restrictions was no longer acceptable and that Hamas would stop at nothing short of a “full and permanent” lifting of the blockade that, as well as regulating the traffic of people and goods at the border crossing, forbids trade from Gaza’s port.

Since General Abdul Fatah Sisi, who considers Hamas a terrorist organisation, became president of Egypt earlier this year, Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt has also remained mostly closed. [Continue reading…]

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Israel launches Gaza ground invasion

Al Jazeera reports: Israeli tanks entered Gaza on Thursday night after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a ground invasion, a major escalation in a ten-day offensive that has already killed more than 230 Palestinians.

Witnesses in Gaza reported heavy bombing from jets, warships and artillery stationed along the border, with much of the firing was directed at northern Gaza. The electricity was cut off across a large swathe of the strip, though it was unclear why.

A statement from Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon described the invasion as focused on destroying tunnels connecting Gaza to Israel.

A group of gunmen tried to enter southern Israel through a tunnel from Gaza on Thursday morning; the army said eight of the 13 attackers were killed, and Hamas claimed responsibility for the operation. It was the second such incident in the past ten days. [Continue reading…]

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NBC News pulls Mohyeldin from Gaza after witnessing Israelis kill four children

Glenn Greenwald writes: Despite this powerful first-hand reporting [on Israeli attacks which killed four boys on a Gaza beach yesterday] – or perhaps because of it – [NBC News correspondent Ayman] Mohyeldin was nowhere to be seen on last night’s NBC Nightly News broadcast with Brian Williams. Instead, as Media Bistro’s Jordan Charlton noted, NBC curiously had Richard Engel – who was in Tel Aviv, and had just arrived there an hour or so earlier – “report” on the attack. Charlton wrote that “the decision to have Engel report the story for ‘Nightly’ instead of Mohyeldin angered some NBC News staffers.”

Indeed, numerous NBC employees, including some of the network’s highest-profile stars, were at first confused and then indignant over the use of Engel rather than Mohyeldin to report the story. But what they did not know, and what has not been reported until now, is that Mohyeldin was removed completely from reporting on Gaza by a top NBC executive, David Verdi, who ordered Mohyeldin to leave Gaza immediately.

Over the last two weeks, Mohyeldin’s reporting has been far more balanced and even-handed than the standard pro-Israel coverage that dominates establishment American press coverage; his reports have provided context to the conflict that is missing from most American reports and he avoids adopting Israeli government talking points as truth. As a result, neocon and “pro-Israel” websites have repeatedly attacked him as a “Hamas spokesman” and spouting “pro-Hamas rants.” [Continue reading…]

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Malaysia Airlines plane disappears over Ukraine, feared shot down by missile

The Washington Post reports: Malaysia Airlines said Thursday that it lost contact with an airliner that was flying in Ukrainian airspace, raising fears that the plane may have been shot down over eastern Ukraine.

“We lost contact with Flight MH17 in Ukraine,” said Najmuddin Abdullah, who works in Malaysia Airlines’ press office.

An adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister wrote on Facebook that a Buk antiaircraft missile system shot down the plane over the village of Torez, about 25 miles east of the city of Donetsk and within territory held by pro-Russian separatist rebels.

The plane was carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members, Anton Herashchenko, the Interior Ministry adviser, wrote on his Facebook page, without revealing how he knew the information. He blamed the rebels for the attack.

Julia Ioffe writes: Russian state media reported in late June indicate the rebels got a hold of a Buk missile system, a Russian/Soviet surface to air system. Rebels are now denying that they shot down the plane, but there are now screenshots floating around the Russian-language internet from what seems to be the Facebook page of Igor Strelkov, a rebel leader in eastern Ukraine, showing plumes of smoke and bragging about shooting down a Ukrainian military Antonov plane shortly before MaH 17 fell. “Don’t fly in our skies,” he reportedly wrote. If that’s true, it would seem rebels downed the jetliner, having mistaken it for a Ukrainian military jet.

This all has to be confirmed, though the separatists did issue statements saying they downed an Antonov this morning and took five of its crew members hostage. There is also an off-chance that the Ukrainian miliatry did it, having also declared a no-fly zone in the area recently. The rebels are, of course, busily blaming the Ukrainian military.

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UNRWA strongly condemns placement of rockets in school

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East: Yesterday, in the course of the regular inspection of its premises, UNRWA discovered approximately 20 rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip. UNRWA strongly condemns the group or groups responsible for placing the weapons in one of its installations. This is a flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law. This incident, which is the first of its kind in Gaza, endangered civilians including staff and put at risk UNRWA’s vital mission to assist and protect Palestine refugees in Gaza.

Immediately after discovery, the Agency informed the relevant parties and successfully took all necessary measures for the removal of the objects in order to preserve the safety and security of the school. UNRWA has launched a comprehensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding this incident.

UNRWA has strong, established procedures to maintain the neutrality of all its premises, including a strict no-weapons policy and routine inspections of its installations, to ensure they are only used for humanitarian purposes. UNRWA will uphold and further reinforce its procedures.

Palestinian civilians in Gaza rely on UNRWA to provide humanitarian assistance and shelter. At all times, and especially during escalations of violence, the sanctity and integrity of UN installations must be respected.

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Life and death in Aleppo: ‘You don’t get used to fear’

As Israel has once again been brutally collectively punishing the population of Gaza, the misery not far away in Syria has continued while attracting a small fraction of the world’s attention. This year, in Aleppo alone, 2,000 people have been killed with 560 of them children. The principle instrument of death has been barrel bombs dropped by the Assad air force.

A Syrian correspondent for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting writes: “Three barrel bombs, two missiles, five mortars… No, no the last explosion is caused by a barrel not a mortar.” This is the first discussion I have with my half-asleep self while turning off my morning alarm. I still use an alarm even though one is provided by the noise of missiles landing nearby.

It takes a couple of minutes to recognise where I am. Had I been told three years ago that I would be living in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, in the middle of war, an expert in distinguishing explosives by their noise, I would have laughed. Before the war, I was living in Damascus. Before the war, the regime had for many years been quietly imprisoning those who opposed it, but I didn’t know about the political prisoners until I went to university. Then I discovered that many of my relatives were killed in the 1980s when, in response to an uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood, the regime massacred thousands, including civilians, in the city of Hama.

Bringing myself back to today, I make my coffee while reading Facebook to see what damage last night’s bombings caused. I am lucky to have the money to pay for a satellite internet connection. This is the only way to get online here in the rebel-held areas of Syria because for almost two years all means of communication have been cut — landlines, the mobile network and the internet — as collective punishment for areas that rebelled against the regime. Fighters and activists use walkie-talkies but as a woman I am not allowed to use one. This area of the city has long been very conservative and women don’t participate in public life; now it is also a frontline in a warzone, even more of a male-only domain. [Continue reading…]

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Weeks of combat in Iraq show Shiite militias have few offensive capabilities

McClatchy reports: The sectarian Shiite militias that the government in Baghdad has dispatched to fill the void created by the collapse of the Iraqi army are proving ill-equipped for offensive operations intended to reverse gains by the radical Islamic State, Iraqi soldiers and military experts studying the current military situation have concluded.

The inadequacy of the militias to turn the tide was demonstrated again on Wednesday six miles south of Tikrit, the central Iraqi city that Islamic State fighters seized June 11 and that Iraqi forces and Shiite fighters have been trying to reclaim for more than two weeks.

Local residents and Iraqi media reported that the Iraqi military backed by militias attempted to push through the town of Awja toward Tikrit but were beaten back by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire from Islamic State positions.

“It was a big battle and the Iraqi army and the Iranian militias have gone,” said one local resident, whose reference to the Shiite militias as Iranians is common, if inaccurate, in heavily Sunni regions of Iraq. “They withdrew to a base south of Awja.” The resident declined to be identified for security reasons.

A Twitter account associated with the Islamic State posted photographs of what it said was the aftermath of the fighting, including images of burning armored vehicles and at least one destroyed pickup truck emblazoned with the logo of SWAT, a highly trained Iraqi army special forces unit. The photographs were consistent with descriptions of the fighting, the units present and the location of the battle, though their authenticity could not be confirmed.

The apparent defeat underscored a growing sense that the Iraqi security forces have misplaced their hopes that the Shiite militias would prove decisive in the fight against the Islamic State. While the militias are given credit for stopping the Islamic State’s advance on cities such as Samarra, home of a major Shiite religious shrine, and Baghdad, they’ve proved ineffective in retaking ground. Their casualties apparently have been high. [Continue reading…]

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UN ends border ban to bring food to millions of desperate Syrians

AFP reports: Aid agencies said Tuesday they were ready to truck desperately-needed supplies to 2.9 million more Syrians after the UN Security Council finally passed a resolution backing cross-border convoys.

“UN agencies have supplies ready to go to all of those hard to reach areas. They had those in place for some time,” Amanda Pitt, spokesperson for the UN’s humanitarian aid coordination arm, told reporters.

The United Nations estimates that 10.8 million people — or half the pre-war population — need aid in Syria, many in areas cut off by fighting.

Reuters adds: The U.N. World Food Programme rushed on Wednesday to put monitors at Syrian border posts, and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF had aid ready for the first convoys to cross into rebel-held areas under the authorization of the U.N. Security Council.

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New study shows how existing cropland could feed billions more

Phys.org: Feeding a growing human population without increasing stresses on Earth’s strained land and water resources may seem like an impossible challenge. But according to a new report by researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, focusing efforts to improve food systems on a few specific regions, crops and actions could make it possible to both meet the basic needs of 3 billion more people and decrease agriculture’s environmental footprint.

The report, published today in Science, focuses on 17 key crops that produce 86 percent of the world’s crop calories and account for most irrigation and fertilizer consumption on a global scale. It proposes a set of key actions in three broad areas that that have the greatest potential for reducing the adverse environmental impacts of agriculture and boosting our ability meet global food needs. For each, it identifies specific “leverage points” where nongovernmental organizations, foundations, governments, businesses and citizens can target food-security efforts for the greatest impact. The biggest opportunities cluster in six countries—China, India, U.S., Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan—along with Europe.

“This paper represents an important next step beyond previous studies that have broadly outlined strategies for sustainably feeding people,” said lead author Paul West, co-director of the Institute on the Environment’s Global Landscapes Initiative. “By pointing out specifically what we can do and where, it gives funders and policy makers the information they need to target their activities for the greatest good.” [Continue reading…]

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Syrian opposition plan to oust ISIS awaits U.S. hearing

McClatchy reports: Syria’s pro-western opposition has developed a plan to oust extremists of the self-styled “Islamic State” from their base in Syria and protect Syrian civilians living in rebel-held areas, but it is waiting for the Obama administration to give it a hearing, the acting defense minister says.

Nour Kholouf, a defected Syrian army general, said Islamic extremists who last month seized more than one third of neighboring oil-rich Iraq had become a greater threat to Syrian rebels than the regime itself, because they have moved into territory rebel forces have seized from the Assad regime and routinely cut off the rebels’ supply routes.

But he said rebel forces could force the extremists on the defensive and expel them from a part of the territory they now control in just three weeks of fighting, if the United States provides the necessary backing.

In a second stage, he said rebel forces could oust the extremists from the Raqqa region up to the border region between Syria and Iraq.

“I need weapons. I need money. I need a no fly zone or anti-aircraft weapons. I need intelligence data,” Kholouf, who’s held the post since May in the Syrian interim government, told McClatchy.

“We could kick them out of the Aleppo region in 20 days and force them back to the borders of the Raqqa region,” he said in the interview Friday. At that stage, the rebels must “take account of what weapons they’re deploying, and respond,” he said.

“But I can say confidently that if the American side makes the decision to end the Syrian crisis, we will have sufficient fighters.” In six months, he said, “we can bring security to 80 per cent of Syria.” There was one condition, he said: “that we are not left alone.”

Kholouf said he could deploy at least 100,000 rebel fighters if he could provide the weapons, ammunition and provisions to sustain them. Only about half are currently armed. [Continue reading…]

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