Syria: Assad regime kills so many detainees it amounts to ‘extermination’ of civilian population, UN says

The Independent reports: The Assad regime is killing so many detainees in Syria that it now amounts to the crime against humanity of “extermination”, a UN report has found.

In a document published by the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, investigators found the Syrian government responsible for “massive and systematised violence”.

The crimes against humanity committed by the Assad regime, according to the UN, far outnumber those of Isis militants and other jihadist groups. [Continue reading…]

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Anger mounts in Italy over torture and murder of student, seen as victim of Egypt’s ‘death squads’

The Local reports: Italy on Monday warned Egypt it would not allow the fate of Giulio Regeni to be brushed under the carpet as anger mounted over the Cambridge University student’s torture and killing in Cairo.

With the media publishing gruesome details of Regeni’s treatment and pointing the finger at Egyptian security services, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was under pressure to authorize a state funeral for the slain 28-year-old.

Regeni disappeared on January 25th and was found dead on February 3rd. An Italian autopsy carried out following his corpse’s repatriation at the weekend concluded that he was killed by a violent blow to the base of his skull having already suffered multiple fractures all over his body.

Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said that Egypt appeared to be collaborating with a team of Italian detective and forensic investigators dispatched to Cairo.

But he warned: “We will not settle for alleged truths.”

Gentiloni, in an interview with daily La Repubblica, added: “We want those really responsible identified and punished on the basis of law.”

La Repubblica reported that, as well as being systematically beaten, Regeni had his finger and toe nails pulled out in a pattern of torture which the daily said suggested that his “death squad” killers believed him to be a spy. [Continue reading…]

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The offline allure of ISIS

ISIS-instructor

TSG IntelBrief: Two recent announcements highlight the difference between the so-called Islamic State’s reach on social media and its real-world appeal. On February 5, 2016, Twitter announced it had suspended more than 125,000 accounts for supporting terrorism since mid-2015. On the same day, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that 34 militant groups worldwide had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as of last December, with more likely in 2016. The Islamic State’s social media efforts have always received disproportionate attention. Less attention has been paid to the offline power of the group in terms of radicalization and recruitment. Social networks matter more than social media when it comes to proliferating the ideology of bin-Ladinism espoused by both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

From pamphlets to audio cassette tapes—and now videos and mobile messaging apps—terrorists have always sought to broadcast their ideology to motivate and rally people to their cause. But the real propagation of terrorism requires salesmen and saleswomen—people who understand that the principles of persuasion begin with a deep understanding of the prospective customer. Graphic tweets may produce headlines, but persuasive individuals produce recruits, often in clusters.

The eight young men who left the Lisleby district of Fredrikstad, Norway, to join the Islamic State in Syria did not join because of social media, even if it did help spread the group’s message. All were reportedly motivated to join the Islamic State by the example of Abdullah Chaib, a charismatic local soccer player who traveled to Syria in 2012. The small group of friends created a feedback loop of motivation and encouragement that did not depend on Twitter or Facebook. Likewise, the terror recruit cluster in Molenbeek, Belgium thrived on networks built around friendship and familial ties, not Telegram or Kik. This same dynamic of peer-to-peer recruitment and consistent face-to-face interaction produced the cluster in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region of Minnesota. Long-time foreign fighter hotbeds such as Derna, Libya, and Bizerte and Ben Gardane in Tunisia rely on decidedly offline networks to export extremism. [Continue reading…]

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Shia village simmers amid Saudi crackdown

Financial Times reports: A month after Saudi Arabia executed firebrand Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, his home town of Awamiya remains strewn with black flags commemorating his death.

The authorities have dubbed the dilapidated village in the oil-rich eastern province the most dangerous place in the conservative Sunni kingdom, and it bears the scars of confronting the state. Shia slogans are ubiquitous and some buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes. Two armoured personnel carriers stand sentry outside the local security post but the jittery police rarely patrol the streets.

“The people and the government are both waiting, ready to pounce,” said Mohammed al-Nimr, Sheikh Nimr’s brother. “There is only pessimism here now.”

The execution of Sheikh Nimr caused an uproar in Shia Iran and has prompted concerns that unrest within Saudi Arabia’s minority Shia, which claim to be the victim of decades of discrimination by the ruling al-Saud family, could become another front in the worsening regional cold war between Riyadh and Tehran. [Continue reading…]

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Anywhere but home: An Afghan child labourer in Iran dreams of life in Sweden

The Guardian reports: Mohammad, 14, is an Afghan immigrant who recently joined the flow of refugees arriving in the holding centre for unaccompanied minors on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Leaving his parents behind in Iran, he crossed the Aegean Sea on an overcrowded rubber dinghy with 38 other passengers. Mohammad describes the nighttime crossing as the scariest moment in his life. But he would not allow himself to cry. Unlike the other children on the boat, his parents were not there to comfort him. He “needed to be brave” and “be a man,” he says. His family’s decision to send their eldest son on an uncertain journey to Europe was a difficult one – but it was the most promising option compared to returning to his homeland or staying in Iran.

Afghans account for the largest proportion of unaccompanied minors arriving in Lesvos. Over one-third of the 2,248 minors that passed through Lesvos last year hail from Afghanistan, according the Greek NGO Metadrasi.

Most Afghans fleeing war and economic strife in their homeland have spent time in Iran, which has hosted the second-largest population of Afghan refugees for over 30 years. But worsening living conditions in Iran are forcing young migrants like Mohammad to leave even their temporary homeland in search of yet another one.

An estimated 2.3-3 million Afghans now live inside Iran, of whom 800,000 are children. The first wave of Afghan refugees arrived in Iran following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent civil war. They had access to public education and opportunities to work. Some 97% of Afghans lived outside refugee camps, and were integrated into urban communities.

Since the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban, Iran began instituting increasingly restrictive laws on Afghans, including bureaucratic hurdles, limitations on movement, deportation of minors and separation of families, and reduced access to education. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s Erdogan reported to have threatened to flood Europe with migrants

Reuters reports: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan threatened in November to flood Europe with migrants if European Union leaders did not offer him a better deal to help manage the Middle East refugee crisis, a Greek news website said on Monday.

Publishing what it said were minutes of a tense meeting last November, the euro2day.gr financial news website revealed deep mutual irritation and distrust in talks between Erdogan and the EU’s two top officials, Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk.

The EU officials were trying to enlist Ankara’s help in stemming an influx of Syrian refugees and migrants into Europe. Over a million arrived last year, most crossing the narrow sea gap between Turkey and islands belonging to EU member Greece.

Tusk’s European Council and Juncker’s European Commission declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the document, and Erdogan’s office in Ankara had no immediate comment.

The account of the meeting, in English, was produced in facsimile on the website. It does not state when or where the meeting took place, but it appears to have been on Nov. 16 in Antalya, Turkey, where the three met after a G20 summit there. [Continue reading…]

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Will Germany give up on European integration?

Ivan Krastev writes: The millions of people storming the borders of the European Union today are right to believe that migration is the best revolution. It is a revolution of the individual, not the masses. The European Union is more attractive than any 20th-century utopia, for the simple reason that it exists. But as it looks today, the migrants’ revolution could easily inspire a counterrevolution in Europe.

The myriad acts of solidarity toward refugees fleeing war and persecution that we saw months ago are today overshadowed by their inverse: a raging anxiety that these same foreigners will compromise Europe’s welfare model and historic culture. Cellphone images of foreign-looking men attacking and abusing German women during New Year’s in Cologne crystallized the fear that liberal governments are too weak and confused to defend Europe, and that the situation with migration is spiraling out of control.

Even before Cologne, a majority of Germans had started to doubt that their country could integrate those hundreds of thousands of Syrians, Afghans and others who have arrived in the last year. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who until recently was the symbol of the European Union’s self-confidence and resilience, is now portrayed as a Gorbachev-like figure, noble but naïve, somebody whose “Wir shaffen es” — “We can do it” — policy has put Europe at risk.

But it is not only the refugees who have arrived, and those on the way, that keep Berlin’s government on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Germany has a second, less discussed but no less disturbing integration problem: European integration itself. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. suffering from shortage of immigrants

Financial Times reports: US builders do not suffer from too many Mexican workers, but too few; they stand to gain from immigration reform, not lose. The joke in Texas is that if Mr Trump really wants to put up a wall between the US and Mexico, he will have to open the border first to find enough workers to finish the job.

Across the US, the construction sector — which contributes 4 per cent to US gross domestic product — is suffering from chronic shortages of workers that are pushing up wages and slowing down activity. Of the 1,358 companies surveyed last year by the Associated General Contractors of America, 86 per cent had trouble filling positions, up three percentage points from 2014. More than seven out of 10 contractors reported difficulty finding carpenters, 60 per cent for electricians and 56 per cent for roofers. In 2014, a builder called Camden Property Trust installed security guards at sites in Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas, to prevent competitors from poaching workers.

“I could be twice the size in terms of revenue if we had the flow of labour that we could be training,” says Chad Collins, owner of Bone Dry Roofing in Athens, Georgia. “We are handcuffed by the lack of a willing and skilled work force.”

The impact is particularly dramatic in Dallas. Even as US recession fears grow, the city and its suburbs are thriving as companies such as Toyota, Facebook and JPMorgan Chase build facilities. “There is a workforce issue,” says Keith Post, KPost chief executive. “People are stealing and overpaying [workers].” Steve Little, the company’s president, says labour costs have risen 15 per cent in the past two years.

Homebuilder Bruno Pasquinelli, president and founder of CB JENI Homes in Dallas, says delays are mounting. “It’s very difficult to predict when a house is going to get finished,” he says. “Houses that we used to build in 22 weeks are now taking upwards of 30 and bad ones could be 40.”

The labour shortages are counterintuitive. US construction employment fell from 7.7m to 5.4m during the downturn, and it was assumed there would be plenty of workers once business recovered. But some industry veterans retired. Others headed to the oilfields as the shale boom gathered pace. And many went home to Mexico — creating a problem, given the sector’s dependence on immigrants. [Continue reading…]

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New report shows oil getting dirtier, alternatives cleaner

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Union of Concerned Scientists: American motorists are driving more efficient cars than ever, but when they fill up their tanks, the gas they pump into their cars and trucks is 30 percent dirtier to extract and refine than it was just ten years ago, according to an analysis released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

“Even as increased vehicle efficiency has cut global warming tailpipe emissions per mile, the search for tougher-to-extract sources of oil has increased the emissions that come from producing a gallon of gasoline by nearly a third over the past decade,” said Jeremy Martin, senior scientist for the UCS Clean Vehicles Program and lead author of the report.

The UCS report, “Fueling a Clean Transportation Future: Smart Fuel Choices for a Warming World,” is a comprehensive look at the global warming impact of how we fuel our cars and trucks. The report compares oil, biofuels and electricity, and finds a significant and growing gap between oil and other ways to fuel transportation. With more oil coming from depleted wells, tight oil and tar sands the climate impact of oil is rising—emissions from extracting and refining different sources of oil range by a factor of more than five. Electricity and biofuels, in contrast, are already cleaner than oil and have the potential to get even cleaner in years to come. [Continue reading…]

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Putin, Assad, and the nexus of torture and terror

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Last October, Patrick Cockburn welcomed the arrival of Russian forces in Syria, suggesting that the “intervention of Russia could be positive in de-escalating the war”. He wrote:

Overall, it is better to have Russia fully involved in Syria than on the sidelines so it has the opportunity to help regain control over a situation that long ago spun out of control. It can keep Assad in power in Damascus, but the power to do so means that it can also modify his behaviour and force movement towards reducing violence, local ceasefires and sharing power regionally.

Posturing as a neutral observer, Cockburn no doubt preferred the language of “de-escalation” rather than military solutions, yet having noted that “Russia is at least a heavy hitter, capable of shaping events by its own actions,” he could hardly have been surprised by the massive onslaught on Aleppo over the last few days.

After Obama’s hollow demands for Assad’s departure, Washington has now moved towards what almost amounts to a quiet alliance with the regime by shutting down what was left of a meager weapons supply to rebel groups.

As Emile Hokayem writes:

Just as Russia escalates politically and militarily, the Obama administration is cynically de-escalating, and asking its allies to do so as well. This is weakening rebel groups that rely on supply networks that the U.S. oversees: In the south, the United States has demanded a decrease in weapons deliveries to the Southern Front, while in the north, the Turkey-based operations room is reportedly dormant.

The result is a widespread and understandable feeling of betrayal in the rebellion, whose U.S.-friendly elements are increasingly losing face within opposition circles. This could have the ironic effect of fragmenting the rebellion — after years of Western governments bemoaning the divisions between these very same groups.

Assad is far from being able to declare he has won the war, but he is close to winning the argument about how it gets framed.

He always claimed that he was fighting terrorism — deploying the rhetorical gift which neoconservatism freely bestowed on authoritarian rulers around the globe after 9/11 — and before long, it looks like this is how the war in Syria will neatly be defined: the regime vs ISIS and al Qaeda. And that’s a fight Assad has no interest in winning.

Nevertheless, it’s worth being reminded why the continuation of Assad’s rule should not be mistaken as a harbinger of peace. If a year or two from now, violence no longer rains down from the sky in the form of barrel bombs and Russian airstrikes, it will most likely continue without restraint in the domain where this regime has always exercised its ruthless power: by imprisoning, torturing, and murdering its opponents.

In “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention in the Syrian Arab Republic,” a newly released report for the UN Human Rights Council, we learn:

Interrogators and guards employed gruesome methods of torture to kill detainees. In 2014, a detainee held in a centre under the control of the 4th Division of the Syrian army had his genitals mutilated during torture. Bleeding severely and left without treatment, he died three days later. A detainee of a Military Security branch in Homs witnessed an elderly man being severely beaten, and then hung by his wrists from the ceiling. The guards burned his eyes with a cigarette, and pierced his body with a heated, sharp metal object. After hanging in the same position for three hours, the man died.

Other detainees died as a result of injuries and wounds sustained during torture. Victims received little or no medical care to treat the wounds and developed severe infections that eventually led to their demise. In the Air Force Intelligence Branch in Aleppo, a detainee suffered severely from an infected wound in his leg sustained during torture. Unable to stand up, he was eventually placed in the corridor outside the cell, receiving no medical care. After a few days, fellow detainees observed that he was dead. His family was later able to obtain the body through unofficial channels. Due to marks of torture and the severe emaciation of his corpse, his family could first only recognise him by an identifying tag. A 15-year-old boy detained in 2013 by the 4th Division in a detention facility near Yafour (Rif Damascus) reported seeing several male detainees dying due to torture and inhuman prison conditions and denial of medical assistance.

A large number of deaths were caused by the squalid conditions in which detainees were kept. Prison conditions were similar across detention facilities. They included severely overcrowded cells where prisoners were often forced to stand and sleep in shifts, stripped to their underwear. Lack of clean drinking water, sanitation, lice infestations and other unhygienic conditions caused the spread of disease and infections. Many prisoners were forced to use their toilet as a source of drinking water.

Anyone who believes this is “the lesser of two evils” or the kind of toughness required for “stability,” is delusional.

On the contrary, this type of institutionalized violence has long had an instrumental role in fostering terrorism.

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Syria: Putin policy has become Obama policy because the U.S. has offered no serious alternative

Roger Cohen writes: the Obama administration still pays lip service to the notion that Assad is part of the problem and not the solution, and that if the Syrian leader may survive through some political transition period he cannot remain beyond that. But these are words. It is President Vladimir Putin and Russia who are “making the weather” in Syria absent any corresponding commitment or articulable policy from President Obama.

Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, is now virtually encircled by the Syrian Army. A war that has already produced a quarter of a million dead, more than 4.5 million refugees, some 6.5 million internally displaced, and the destabilization of Europe through a massive influx of terrorized people, is about to see further abominations as Aleppo agonizes.

Aleppo may prove to be the Sarajevo of Syria. It is already the Munich.

By which I mean that the city’s plight today, its exposure to Putin’s whims and a revived Assad’s pitiless designs, is a result of the fecklessness and purposelessness over almost five years of the Obama administration. The president and his aides have hidden at various times behind the notions that Syria is marginal to core American national interests; that they have thought through the downsides of intervention better than others; that the diverse actors on the ground are incomprehensible or untrustworthy; that there is no domestic or congressional support for taking action to stop the war or shape its outcome; that there is no legal basis for establishing “safe areas” or taking out Assad’s air power; that Afghanistan and Iraq are lessons in the futility of projecting American power in the 21st century; that Syria will prove Russia’s Afghanistan as it faces the ire of the Sunni world; and that the only imperative, whatever the scale of the suffering or the complete evisceration of American credibility, must be avoidance of another war in the Middle East.

Where such feeble evasions masquerading as strategy lead is to United States policy becoming Putin’s policy in Syria, to awkward acquiescence to Moscow’s end game, and to embarrassed shrugs encapsulating the wish that — perhaps, somehow, with a little luck — Putin may crush ISIS. [Continue reading…]

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Kerry ‘blames opposition’ for continued Syria bombing

Middle East Eye reports: US Secretary of State John Kerry told Syrian aid workers, hours after the Geneva peace talks fell apart, that the country should expect another three months of bombing that would “decimate” the opposition.

During a conversation on the sidelines of this week’s Syria donor conference in London, sources say Kerry blamed the Syrian opposition for leaving the talks and paving the way for a joint offensive by the Syrian government and Russia on Aleppo.

“‘He said, ‘Don’t blame me – go and blame your opposition,’” one of the aid workers, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her organisation, told Middle East Eye.

Kerry told reporters on Friday, as tens of thousands fled the Syrian government and Russian bombardment of Aleppo, that both Russia and Iran, another of Syria’s allies, have told him that they are prepared for a ceasefire in Syria.

He said he would know “whether or not these parties are serious” after a meeting of the International Syria Support Group – 17 nations including the US and Russia – scheduled to be held in Munich next week.

But Kerry left the aid workers with the distinct impression that the US is abandoning efforts to support rebel fighters. [Continue reading…]

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Financial despair, addiction and the rise of suicide in white America

The Guardian reports: Kevin Lowney lies awake some nights wondering if he should kill himself.

“I am in such pain every night, suicide has on a regular basis crossed my mind just simply to ease the pain. If I did not have responsibilities, especially for my youngest daughter who has problems,” he said.

The 56-year-old former salesman’s struggle with chronic pain is bound up with an array of other issues – medical debts, impoverishment and the prospect of a bleak retirement – contributing to growing numbers of suicides in the US and helping drive a sharp and unusual increase in the mortality rate for middle-aged white Americans in recent years alongside premature deaths from alcohol and drugs.

A study released late last year by two Princeton academics, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who won the 2014 Nobel prize for economics, revealed that the death rate for white Americans aged 45 to 54 has risen sharply since 1999 after declining for decades. The increase, by 20% over the 14 years to 2013, represents about half a million lives cut short.

The uptick in the mortality rate is unique to that age and racial group. Death rates for African Americans of a similar age remain notably higher but continue to fall.

Neither was the increase seen in other developed countries. In the UK, the mortality rate for middle-aged people dropped by one third over the same period.

“This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround,” the study said.

Deaths from poisonings by drugs or alcohol have risen dramatically to push lung cancer into second place as the major killer with a sharp increase in suicides now a close third. [Continue reading…]

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Trump to Syrian refugee children: ‘You can’t come here’

The Hill reports: Donald Trump said he’d be able to look into the eyes of Syrian refugee children to tell them they cannot come to schools in America in light of concerns about safely vetting refugees.

“We don’t know where their parents come from, they have no documentation whatsoever,” Trump said Monday during a town hall in New Hampshire.

“I’ve talked to the greatest legal people, spoken to the greatest security people. There’s absolutely no way of saying where these people come from. They may be from Syria, they may be ISIS, they may be ISIS related.”

During the event, a man who said he was from Connecticut told Trump about plans to relocate Syrian families into the community and let their children come to schools. When asked whether he’d be able to “look at these children” to tell them they couldn’t go to school, Trump said: “I can look in their faces and say, ‘You can’t come here.’”

The crowd applauded his answer. [Continue reading…]

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Under Sanders, income and jobs would soar, economist says

CNN reports: Median income would soar by more than $22,000. Nearly 26 million jobs would be created. The unemployment rate would fall to 3.8%.

Those are just a few of the things that would happen if Bernie Sanders became president and his ambitious economic program were put into effect, according to an analysis given exclusively to CNNMoney. The first comprehensive look at the impact of all of Sanders’ spending and tax proposals on the economy was done by Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor.

Friedman found that if Sanders became president — and was able to push his plan through Congress — median household income would be $82,200 by 2026, far higher than the $59,300 projected by the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition, poverty would plummet to a record low 6%, as opposed to the CBO’s forecast of 13.9%. The U.S. economy would grow by 5.3% per year, instead of 2.1%, and the nation’s $1.3 trillion deficit would turn into a large surplus by Sanders’ second term [Continue reading…]

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Russian aggression drives Swedish defense spending

Defense News reports: Sweden’s discomfort over Russia’s long-term political and military ambitions in the Baltic Sea and High North has risen further after a senior military chief stated the Nordic state could find itself under attack “within a few years.”

The warning, made by Swedish Armed Forces’ Maj. Gen. Anders Brännström, came the same week that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed, in the organization’s Annual Report, that Russian Tupolev Tu-22M3 bombers accompanied by Sukhoi Su-27 jets conducted a simulated “training” nuclear strike targeting key Swedish defense installations in March 2013.

Brännström stated, in an internal military document forwarded to officers and soldiers attending the armed forces’ Markstrids’ (Land Combat) conference in the sub-Arctic town of Boden, that the changed post-Cold War security landscape will require Sweden to downgrade international missions and prioritize reinforcing national defense readiness and capabilities. [Continue reading…]

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