Is Putin trying to pressure Assad to negotiate?

Commenting on an article by Russia analyst Morteza Makki appearing in an Iranian daily, Arash Karami writes: Makki wrote that despite [Foreign Minister] Zarif’s positive statement on the withdrawal, “this quick and surprising decision by Russia shows that Iran and Russia’s partnership in Syria was not a strategic partnership. The Russians make decisions based on their own calculations and interests, and the partnership was not such that Iran and Syria would be able to push forward with their views and positions by leaning on the Russians.”

Makki continued that it is possible Russia’s decision was made to force President Bashar al-Assad’s government to show flexibility in the Geneva negotiations, saying that in their recent statements, the Syrians have been very optimistic and have presented red lines regarding Assad’s departure. Even conservative media outlets have suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin was angered by Syrian officials’ comments ahead of the negotiations in Geneva.

When it comes to Syria, the Iranian media has typically been keen to conform to the statements of officials. To see an article suggest that the official version presented by authorities is hiding key points is rare indeed. Most Iranian media outlets have parroted official positions on the Russian withdrawal, but they, too, have struggled to explain it. Even Iran Newspaper, which operates under the administration’s direction, called the withdrawal “surprising.” [Continue reading…]

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Kurds hope to establish a federal region in northern Syria

The New York Times reports: Syrian Kurdish parties are working on a plan to declare a federal region across much of northern Syria, several of their representatives said on Wednesday. They said their aim was to formalize the semiautonomous zone they have established during five years of war and to create a model for decentralized government throughout the country.

If they move ahead with the plan, they will be dipping a toe into the roiling waters of debate over two proposals to redraw the Middle East, each with major implications for Syria and its neighbors.

One is the longstanding aspiration of Kurds across the region to a state of their own or, failing that, greater autonomy in the countries where they are concentrated: Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, all of which view such prospects with varying degrees of horror.

The other is the idea of settling the Syrian civil war by carving up the country, whether into rump states or, more likely, into some kind of federal system. The proposal for a federal system has lately been floated by former Obama administration officials and publicly considered by Secretary of State John Kerry, but rejected not only by the Syrian government but by much of the opposition as well. [Continue reading…]

Middle East Eye reports: Syrian Kurds have declared a “Federation of Northern Syria” that unites three Kurdish majority areas into one entity, an announcement swiftly denounced by the Syrian government, opposistion and regional powers.

According to Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) official Idris Nassan, the plan will involve “areas of democratic self-administration” under the federal banner, encompassing all ethnic and religious groups living in the area.

Two officials at talks involving Kurdish, Arab, and other parties in the town of Rmeilan told the AFP news agency that delegates had agreed a “federal system” unifying the three mainly Kurdish cantons in northern Syria.

According to the pro-Kurdish Firat News Agency (ANF), the “Rojava and Northern Syria Unied Democratic System Document Text” was approved after a vote from 200 delegates, which included Arab, Kurdish, Armenian, Turkmen, Chechen, Syriac and other ethnic groups.

The boundaries of the federalised region have yet to be established, according to a delegate to the talks on Twitter. [Continue reading…]

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Kurd turns on Kurd as Turkey and U.S. back new faction in Syria

Middle East Eye reports: Turkey is backing a new Kurdish faction within the Free Syrian Army to take back territory from the Islamic State (IS) group and stop the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) from seizing further ground along the Turkish border.

The group, known as the Grandsons of Salahadin after the famed 12th-century Muslim Kurdish leader, has already captured several villages in the IS-controlled border region between Jarabulus and Azaz following Turkish artillery attacks and missile strikes. In response, IS hit the Turkish town of Kilis earlier this month, killing two civilians.

But threats to attack the YPG unless it withdraws from territory seized from opposition rebels during an advance by pro-government forces in northern Syria last month have stoked concerns of a possible “Kurdish civil war”.

Mahmoud Abu Hamza, a Grandsons of Salahadin commander based in Turkey, told Middle East Eye that the group was backed by both the US and Turkey and considered itself part of the international coalition fighting IS.

“Turkey doesn’t support us with arms. Our arms are American,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Strength in weakness: The Syrian army’s accidental resilience

Kheder Khaddour writes: The Syrian army was not combat ready when the country’s current conflict erupted in spring 2011. Decades of corruption had stripped the Syrian Arab Army of its combat and operational professionalism. And yet five years on, it has withstood a mass public revolt, a multifront war, and tens of thousands of defections.

The army’s ability to hold territory vital to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is the result of an unexpected paradox: the factors that had eviscerated its fighting ability in peacetime have become its main strength during the war. In particular, the army’s networks of patronage and nepotism, which predate the war, have morphed into a parallel chain of command that strengthens the regime. By withdrawing the army from select front lines, the regime has managed to bolster its social, political, and local community base after outsourcing its infantry needs to ad hoc militias. The parallel chain of command has enabled the regime to adapt its strategy to reflect the conflict’s quickly changing dynamics, secure its authority over loyalist paramilitary forces, and entrench itself in key territories.

The army is not simply an instrument of the regime’s strategy; the two operate as distinct but interdependent agencies that need each other to survive. The army divisions’ entrenchment across wide swaths of Syrian territory has helped the regime maintain control over key population centers. The army also serves as the logistical backbone for regime-sponsored militias and as a crucial aid channel for the regime’s backers, Russia and Iran. While the militias have supplied much of the regime’s infantry needs, the army has maintained control over the air force and the use of heavy weapons. As a result, the number of casualties and defections has dropped, with the Assad regime’s image as a symbol of national unity bolstered. The Syrian army’s evolution and resilience since 2011 has thus far allowed the regime to withstand the conflict and position itself as an integral part of any negotiated political settlement that may be reached. [Continue reading…]

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How Saudi Arabia turned its greatest weapon on itself

Andrew Scott Cooper writes: For the past half-century, the world economy has been held hostage by just one country: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Vast petroleum reserves and untapped production allowed the kingdom to play an outsize role as swing producer, filling or draining the global system at will.

The 1973-74 oil embargo was the first demonstration that the House of Saud was willing to weaponize the oil markets. In October 1973, a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia abruptly halted oil shipments in retaliation for America’s support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The price of a barrel of oil quickly quadrupled; the resulting shock to the oil-dependent economies of the West led to a sharp rise in the cost of living, mass unemployment and growing social discontent.

“If I was the president,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger fumed to his deputy Brent Scowcroft, “I would tell the Arabs to shove their oil.” But the president, Richard M. Nixon, was in no position to dictate to the Saudis.

In the West, we have largely forgotten the lessons of 1974, partly because our economies have changed and are less vulnerable, but mainly because we are not the Saudis’ principal target. Predictions that global oil production would eventually peak, ensuring prices stayed permanently high, never materialized. Today’s oil crises are determined less by the floating price of crude than by crude regional politics. The oil wars of the 21st century are underway. [Continue reading…]

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Kenya’s security forces say they’re targeting terrorists, but it’s young people who keep dying

Nanjala Nyabola writes: One day in 2014, university students Felix Nyangena and Dennis Magomere, 21 and 22 years old respectively, were walking from the Globe Cinema roundabout in Nairobi’s central business district to the nearby offices of the Higher Education Loans Board, a government agency that oversees financial disbursements to students. The Globe Cinema roundabout is one of the Kenyan capital’s busiest bus terminals, and during the day it can be among the most densely populated parts of the city. There, in the gentle light of the still-rising sun, Nyangena and Magomere were gunned down by two plainclothes police officers attached to the city’s anti-mugging unit. Nyangena did not die immediately. So the officer stood over his body and fired twice more, killing the young man in broad daylight. The officer then calmly wiped his fingerprints off the gun, planted it on the young man’s body, and made a call — presumably to report a robbery.

We know all of this because unlike many other extrajudicial killings by police and security officials in Kenya, Nyangena and Magomere’s murder was captured on video. The crisp, high-quality footage of the crime, taken on a witness’s mobile phone, is the centerpiece of a recent documentary by noted Kenyan journalist Mohammed Ali on the epidemic of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances by security services. And perhaps as a result of both the video and the documentary, Kenya’s public prosecutor has announced that for the first time in recent memory, his office will charge a police officer for the unlawful killing of a civilian.

Unfortunately, the only unusual thing about this horrific story is the judicial outcome. Through a conspiracy of public apathy and sinister cover-ups, Kenyan security forces have essentially acquired carte blanche to kill and disappear citizens, particularly young ones, on the pretext of fighting crime and terrorism. The scourge of killings and disappearances has accelerated in recent years as the Somali militant group al-Shabab has trained its sights on Kenya, but abuse and impunity long have been the calling cards of the Kenyan security services. And while the discriminatory religious contours of the “War on Terror” would suggest that the problem is confined to northeastern and coastal Kenya, regions that are predominantly Muslim and have a high proportion of ethnic Somalis, the truth is that Kenyan authorities routinely commit violent crimes against young people all over the country. [Continue reading…]

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How the world has changed since Paris climate pact

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Climate Central reports: The relatively good news overall is new data showing that annual rates of emissions of the world’s main greenhouse gas may be stabilizing, though not yet falling. One of the goals of the Paris Agreement is to pursue “rapid reductions” to yearly pollution output following a plateau.

Preliminary International Energy Agency figures published Wednesday showed 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide pollution was released in 2015 — about the same amount that was released in 2014, which was similar to the amount from 2013.

“In the more than 40 years in which the IEA has been providing information on CO2 emissions, there have been only four periods in which emissions stood still or fell compared to the previous year,” the agency said. “Three of those – the early 1980s, 1992 and 2009 – were associated with global economic weakness. But the recent stall in emissions comes amid economic expansion.”

The bad news since December has been record-smashing global temperatures. Not only was 2015 the hottest on record, boosted by greenhouse gas pollution and warm phases in ocean cycles, but the first month of 2016 was the warmest January on record. A month after that, February was the most unusually warm month in 135 years of NASA records. [Continue reading…]

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Computer’s Go victory reminds us that we need to question our reliance on AI

By Nello Cristianini, University of Bristol

The victory of a computer over one of the world’s strongest players of the game Go has been hailed by many as a landmark event in artificial intelligence. But why? After all, computers have beaten us at games before, most notably in 1997 when the computer Deep Blue triumphed over chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov.

We can get a hint of why the Go victory is important, however, by looking at the difference between the companies behind these game-playing computers. Deep Blue was the product of IBM, which was back then largely a hardware company. But the software – AlphaGo – that beat Go player Lee Sedol was created by DeepMind, a branch of Google based in the UK specialising in machine learning.

AlphaGo’s success wasn’t because of so-called “Moore’s law”, which states that computer processor speed doubles roughly every two years. Computers haven’t yet become powerful enough to calculate all the possible moves in Go – which is much harder to do than in chess. Instead, DeepMind’s work was based on carefully deploying new machine-learning methods and integrating them within more standard game-playing algorithms. Using vast amounts of data, AlphaGo has learnt how to focus its resources where they are most needed, and how to do a better job with those resources.

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Russian airstrikes in Syria killed 2,000 civilians in six months

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The Guardian reports: Russian airstrikes in Syria have killed about 2,000 civilians in six months of attacks on markets, hospitals, schools and homes, rights groups and observers say, warning that plans for a military drawdown may not mean an end to the deaths.

Moscow has insisted it carried out only surgical strikes on “terrorists”, but victims and fighters say bombers strayed well behind frontlines in areas far from strongholds of Islamic State or al-Qaida fighters.

Jets appear to have intentionally bombed civilian areas, in a campaign to spread fear and clear areas where government ground troops were planning to advance. Coalition airstrikes led by the US have also killed civilians, but have stricter rules of engagement. [Continue reading…]

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Interpreting the Russian withdrawal from Syria

Aron Lund writes: The Russian intervention has achieved quite a lot. It has undercut the Syrian opposition, stabilized Assad’s government, and produced a peace process on more favorable terms for Assad than was previously possible. Perhaps Putin was always planning for an intervention of limited duration and kept Assad informed about this. With a truce in place, now is a good time to start scaling it down.

Meanwhile, other forms of support to the Syrian government are likely to continue and, if the peace process collapses, Putin could easily reverse his decision. Remember, the Hmeymim and Tartus bases will remain operational, which leaves Russia with all the infrastructure it needs to resume airstrikes on short notice.

Putin may be bluffing. The Russian government is not above a bit of wartime subterfuge and Putin saying something is not the same as Moscow actually doing it. The Kremlin has very consistently lied about its troop presence in eastern Ukraine and about what insurgent factions are being targeted in Syria. It is possible that the Russian president is simply telling his enemies what they want to hear, in order to mollify critics in the White House and gain time, without any intention of stopping the attacks.

The announcement on Monday was vaguely phrased. At no point did Putin say that he would end military operations in Syria. Parse his words and you will notice that he only commits to “begin withdrawing the main part of our military group,” while leaving some troops to guard the Russian bases, monitor the ceasefire, and engage in “creating conditions for the peace process.”

Putin may be banking on the failure of the peace talks. He knows he will be able to find plenty of excuses to delay, alter, or reverse his decision later. Even if a significant number of aircraft and pilots were to be pulled back to Russia, they can return to Hmeymim in a matter of days. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s exit from Syria highlights Assad’s limitations

Hassan Hassan writes: Five years after the uprising in Syria began, a renewed chance to steer the conflict in a less violent trajectory presents itself. Tensions have mounted between moderate rebels and Jabhat al-Nusra in northern Syria, and residents demonstrated in support of the rebels against the al-Qaeda affiliate; the Free Syrian Army has recently launched an offensive against the Islamic State in southern Syria; and Russia has announced that it will start withdrawing its main forces from the country. In the wake of positive sentiments following a semi-successful cessation of hostilities deal, the United States should capitalize on the current environment to de-escalate the conflict and shift its focus toward extremists. The Russian air campaign that began in September, while substantially improving the government’s ability to launch offensives and repulse attacks, has serious limitations and has not been the overwhelming victory that the regime would like to portray. In this context, the U.S. now has a compelling opportunity to act as counterbalance.

In a speech on July 26, 2015, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made three uncharacteristic remarks that underscored the toll that four years of armed conflict had had on the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and foreshadowed the dramatic entry of the Russian military into the theater some two months later. The first confession was that the SAA was suffering from “fatigue,” “demoralization,” and a “shortage in manpower.” Secondly, he spoke of the necessity for the army to cede control of certain areas, even if that territory appears significant to the regime’s support base. “In some cases, we have to abandon certain areas to move forces to an area we want to hold.” Finally, Assad highlighted the central role of foreign Shi’a militias in the war. He thanked Hezbollah and other foreign militias fighting on the side of the regime. He said that Hezbollah had the experience and skills needed to battle opposition fighters, and proclaimed, “A homeland is not for those who live in it or hold its passport, but those who defend it and protect it.” [Continue reading…]

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How Iran views the Russian withdrawal from Syria

Arash Karami reports: Iranian officials and analysts are speculating about why Russian President Vladimir Putin suddenly decided to begin withdrawing troops from Syria. Some wonder whether Russia won concessions from the United States and the Syrian opposition, but most seem to think that Russia’s action is a positive sign, or at the least nothing to worry about.

Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign policy adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke to Iranian reporters March 15 after holding a press conference with Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad in Iran. According to the media, Velayati said that during his meeting with Mekdad, they discussed “defending the territorial integrity” of Syria and its April 13 parliamentary elections. When asked if Iranian troops would replace the Russian forces leaving Syria, Velayati said that Russia’s action “will not change the overall cooperation between Iran, Russia, Syria and allied forces such as Hezbollah.”

Velayati noted that Russia still has an air base in Syria and, if necessary, would again up its effort against terrorists. Velayati added that at the moment, the Syrian government has the upper hand given recent gains by its allies, the cease-fires and the Geneva negotiations. In addition to its air base, Russia will also reportedly keep its maritime base in Syria operable, and nearly 1,000 military personnel will remain in the country. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s mafia state

Masha Gessen writes: The term “mafia state” was pioneered by Bálint Magyar, a sociologist in Hungary, Russia’s closest ally in Europe. Magyar and his colleagues have elaborated on the concept in the last decade, as Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán has amassed power, eliminated political and economic rivals, and turned the institutions of his state into instruments of personal power. So important is this concept to Hungarian intellectuals’ understanding of what has happened to their society that an edited collection of twenty sociological articles on the topic sold 15,000 copies there — an almost unheard-of figure for an academic volume anywhere, especially in a country of 9.8 million people. The concept is little-known outside of Hungary, though Magyar believes it describes the regimes in three other post-Communist states: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. (Magyar’s own book, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary, has just been translated into English.)

Here is what a mafia state is not, according to Magyar, whom I interviewed in Budapest last year. It is not a kleptocracy or “crony capitalism,” because both of these terms suggest voluntary association among participants and appear to imbue all of them with agency. But in Russia, for example, the men who used to be known as the oligarchs have long since forfeited all political power and much personal autonomy in exchange for a share of the spoils. It is not “neoliberal” or “illiberal” because it is neither a development of liberalism nor a deviation from it — it has little to do with liberalism at all. Sure, it has so-called elections as well as courts and laws, but these have become entirely instrumentalized: they serve to help regulate relationships within the clan and to apportion favors, mostly because these were the tools most immediately available when the mafia came to power. It is not an oligarchy, because political power has been monopolized, as has corruption. It is not a dictatorship, because, unlike a dictatorship, the mafia state has some legitimacy — precisely the sham democratic rituals that lead some to call them “hybrid regimes.”

Much of the analysis of post-Soviet regimes focuses on what they lack: fair and open elections, for example, or free media. That, says Magyar, is like trying to describe an elephant by what it is not: “The elephant has no wings — OK. It cannot swim in water — OK. But that doesn’t tell us what an elephant is! ”To understand what a mafia state is, we need to imagine a state run by, and resembling, organized crime. At its center is a family, and at the center of the family is a patriarch. “He doesn’t govern,” says Magyar. “He disposes — of positions, wealth, statuses, persons.” In Putin’s Russia, the “family” includes, among others, long-time secret-police colleagues Igor Sechin and Sergei Ivanov, but also ostensible liberals from Putin’s St. Petersburg days, like prime minister Dmitry Medvedev and former finance minister Aleksei Kudrin. A somewhat more recent addition to the family is defense minister Sergei Shoigu, who had served as emergencies minister under Yeltsin. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. Violence and ideology — the pillars of a totalitarian state — become, in the hands of a mafia state, mere instruments. The distinction is particularly meaningful because all the states the model describes are post-Communist. Where the state used to own the entire economy, now it seeks simply to control the most lucrative businesses and skim off the top of the rest—and eliminate those who refuse to pay.

Mafia states murder people, just like the Mafia does—but they murder only the people who are immune to coercion and blackmail: journalists, for example, or defiantly independent actors like the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, shot dead a year ago in Moscow. “But these murders, and even imprisonments, are on a much smaller scale than in traditional dictatorship because they are not necessary,” says Magyar. Most of the time, coercion will do the job — and mafia states, unlike some others, are pragmatic and do not murder for the sake of it. [Continue reading…]

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The Madison Valleywood Project: A media-tech alliance formed to fight ISIS

Kaveh Waddell writes: On January 8, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the directors of the FBI and the NSA, the director of national intelligence, and other officials traveled to San Jose, California, to meet in secret with tech-company executives. The officials asked for the executives’ advice for how to launch counter-messaging campaigns on social media, according to reports. And a few weeks later, Secretary of State John Kerry made his way to Universal Studios, where he met with a dozen Hollywood studio executives to discuss how film and storytelling could be used to counter extremist narratives, reports said.

The culmination of the government’s efforts came just last month, when officials packed a room to capacity for a closed-door meeting at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. There, the three elements of the government’s push came together both in person and in name: The agenda that was distributed to participants bore the title “Madison Valleywood Project,” in honor of the three main industries in attendance.

The meeting, which was scheduled to take three hours, was a chance to connect attendees whose worlds don’t usually intersect. After Carlin gave opening remarks, a New York-based branding consultant presented an overview of ISIS media strategies and recruiting tactics. Then, participants broke into eight-person teams and had an hour to storyboard a messaging plan.

The government played host and incubator, but left the creative work to the guests, who also included documentary filmmakers, political consultants, NGO representatives, and even a video-game developer. “We tried to cast a wide net,” said the administration official with knowledge of the meeting. “A lot of effort went into ensuring that each table had a person from each community.” Each table also included someone from the government.

Sitting next to Carlin, Jeffrey connected with another of his tablemates, a D.C.-based political consultant who staffed Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. The two began to talk about one of the main hurdles that the anti-extremist project faces: how to fund it.

They’re considering setting up a 501(c)(3) non-profit or a foundation, which would allow American companies to donate toward the cause. It’s important the money come from the private sector and individuals, Jeffrey said. “It can’t look like anything political or part of the U.S. government.”

One reason the government wants to stay out of the equation is to preserve the credibility of whatever the participants produce. For a would-be terrorist, the U.S. government probably isn’t the most trusted source for information. Officials are bringing people together, and giving them advice and information, but they appear to want the final product to be free of the baggage of being connected to the feds. [Continue reading…]

That’s right: ISIS recruits aren’t big fans of Uncle Sam, but they use social media, seem impressed by Hollywood blockbuster-style violence, and are responsive to slick advertising.

The logic of bringing together Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and Silicon Valley to fight ISIS, makes sense, kind of — except it really doesn’t.

The masters of form in this arena seem about as clueless as anyone else when it comes to content. There’s a consensus, apparently, that they need to come up with a “positive message.”

ISIS is appealing to people who want to bring about a radical change in the world and participate in the fulfillment of what they regard as a utopian vision. A plausible alternative would need to go some distance in appealing to such grandiose ambitions.

Whatever this as-yet unfunded project ends of producing, seems likely to be as half-baked as its conception.

If they are really intent on countering the propaganda coming from ISIS, then at the outset they surely need to be as focused and serious about their own undertaking as is ISIS’s own propaganda machine.

There’s no point coming up with a brand if you don’t have a product.

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ISIS lost 22% of territory in Iraq and Syria over last 14 months

BBC News reports: A new analysis suggests so-called Islamic State (IS) militants have lost 22% of the territory they held in Syria and Iraq over the past 14 months.

The data was compiled by research company IHS.

It also estimates that IS has lost 40% of its revenue – much of it from oil – after losing control of much of the Turkish-Syrian border.

Security sources have told BBC Newsnight that the flow of UK jihadists going to fight in Syria is also down. [Continue reading…]

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Trump: I consult myself on foreign policy

Politico reports: Donald Trump finally shared the name of someone he consults on foreign policy: himself.

Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” who he talks with consistently about foreign policy, Trump responded, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

“I know what I’m doing and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are,” Trump said. “But my primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff.” [Continue reading…]

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