How far Russia will go to support one man?

The Daily Beast reports: U.S. intelligence officials have previously assessed that the Assad regime is getting significant backing from Iranian ground forces, and that the support continues to grow, but that it’s not necessarily translating into victories. They think that while some tactical swings along the frontline might favor Assad’s regime in the near term, many provincial capitals occupied by his army remain under threat.

That may help explain Assad’s decision to be seen publicly aligning with Putin, who has supplied essential air cover to forces on the ground. The official characterized Assad’s Moscow visit as a publicity stunt that doesn’t bode well for the dictator’s future. “It only reinforces the notion that Assad has lost control of his country, and is now firmly under Putin’s thumb,” the official said.

“Should the regime’s offensive fail to dislodge opposition elements or suffer major setbacks, the blame will land on Assad’s shoulders,” the official added. “Putin is not one to bet on a losing horse, and Assad’s track record in Syria suggests the regime faces long odds of a military victory. At some point, Putin will have to decide on how far Russia will go to support one man.” [Continue reading…]

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Seven airstrikes on hospitals across Syria following Russian intervention, says human rights group

The New York Times reports: At least seven hospitals or medical facilities in Syria have been hit by airstrikes since Russia entered the civil war there, killing at least four people, according to an international human rights group and Syrian relief workers.

The latest strikes occurred Tuesday, when warplanes struck the town of Sarmin, in Idlib Province, killing a physiotherapist and a guard at the local field hospital administered by the Syrian American Medical Society, the society said in a statement.

It was impossible to independently confirm who had carried out that attack and earlier attacks on medical facilities in Hama, Latakia and Aleppo Provinces. Physicians for Human Rights, the group that documented the seven attacks, said Russian warplanes were responsible, citing evidence including information released by the Russian Defense Ministry that indicated its warplanes were flying missions near the medical facilities. [Continue reading…]

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The end of the Abbas era

Nathan Thrall writes: The stabbings, shootings, protests and clashes now spreading across Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel present one of the greatest challenges yet posed to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and his strategy of bilateral negotiations, diplomacy and security co-operation with Israel. The unrest – its proximate cause was increased restrictions on Palestinian access to al-Aqsa Mosque – reflects a sense among Palestinians that their leadership has failed, that national rights must be defended in defiance of their leaders if necessary, and that the Abbas era is coming to an end.

Abbas came to power with a limited window to achieve political results. More a drab functionary than a charismatic revolutionary leader like Yasser Arafat, he was seen as a bridge to recovery from the ruinous years of the Second Intifada. At the time of his election, in January 2005, Palestinians were battered, exhausted and in need of an internationally accepted, violence-abhorring figure who could secure the political and financial support necessary to rebuild a shattered society. The Fatah movement was divided and discredited by the failure of Oslo, corruption scandals and the abandonment of its liberation strategy before independence had been achieved. Abbas, who had led outreach to the Israelis since the 1970s, seemed a sufficiently unthreatening transitional figure. He had few serious challengers: Hamas abstained from the presidential election; Fatah’s founding leaders had been assassinated many years earlier; Marwan Barghouti, in Israeli prison since 2002, withdrew from the race. And the Bush administration, newly re-elected, favoured Abbas.

No one expected these conditions to last. Palestinian fatigue from fighting Israel would wear off. The West Bank and Gaza would be rebuilt. Hamas wouldn’t stay out of politics forever. Continuing occupation would foment resistance. Leaders who suppressed that resistance would be discredited. And a new generation of Palestinians would grow up with no memory of the costs of intifada and no understanding of why their parents had agreed not only to refrain from fighting the Israeli army but to co-operate with it, under agreements that Abbas had negotiated. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu, the Grand Mufti and the Holocaust: why it is important to get the historical facts right

By Rainer Schulze, University of Essex

In a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 20, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Haj Amin al-Husseini, former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, of “inspiring the Holocaust” and urging Hitler to exterminate the Jewish people.

Netanyahu then explained that he wanted “to show that the father of the Palestinian nation wanted to destroy Jews even without occupation.” These comments led to widespread condemnation and outrage. But who was al-Husseini, and what was his role and involvement in the Holocaust? Rainer Schulze sets the record straight.

Who was the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini?

Born in the mid-1890s, and appointed Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 (Grand Mufti in 1922), Haj Amin al-Husseini was one of the most prominent nationalist Arab figures in Palestine during the time of the British Mandate. He opposed both British rule in Palestine, and the Jewish-Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland in the region, aiming instead to establish a pan-Arab federation or state with himself as the spiritual leader.

His political activism led him to organise and support protests against Jewish immigration and Jewish settlements, which peaked in the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine. In 1937, in order to evade arrest, he fled Palestine and took up residence first in the French Mandate of Lebanon and then in Iraq. In October 1941, he escaped to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

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Leftists who think politics is more important than people

In response to Jeremy Corbyn’s appointment of Seumas Milne as the UK Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications, Oliver Bullough writes: For Milne, geopolitics is more important than people. Whatever crisis strikes the world, the West’s to blame. Why did a group of psychopaths attack a magazine and a supermarket in Paris? “Without the war waged by western powers, including France, to bring to heel and reoccupy the Arab and Muslim world, last week’s attacks clearly couldn’t have taken place”.

Why did Anders Breivik slaughter 77 people? “What is most striking is how closely he mirrors the ideas and fixations of transatlantic conservatives.”

Why did two maniacs in London decapitate an off-duty soldier? “They are the predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the US, Britain and others.”

Milne’s geopolitics spared us having to read how the children of Beslan or the theatregoers of Moscow only had themselves to blame, but office workers in New York had no such luck. “Recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent.”

And this rampant victim blaming is not an approach confined to current affairs. His geopolitical preferences extend into history too, where he fiercely opposes any suggestion that Stalin’s Soviet Union was as bad as Hitler’s Germany. He has been caricatured as a Stalinist as a result, something that appears to irritate some of his once-and-future Guardian colleagues (he is on leave from the paper). I got into a Twitter debate with Zoe Williams yesterday, in which she pointed out: “he’s written reams about the crimes of Stalin”.

He has indeed, but he has written about them in the manner of a Brit acknowledging the Amritsar massacre, before pointing out how much worse off India would be without trains. [Continue reading…]

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Climate change is a reverse Robin Hood: stealing from the poor countries and giving to the rich ones

Quartz reports: Just when you thought the news about climate change couldn’t get any worse, consider this.

Not only will global warming put a massive dent in the world’s GDP over the coming decades, but it “is essentially a massive transfer of value from the hot parts of the world to the cooler parts of the world,” according to a new study in Nature. “This is like taking from the poor and giving to the rich.”

Researchers Stanford University analyzed 166 countries over a 50-year period (from 1960 to 2010) and compared economic output when country’s experienced normal temperature to abnormally cold or warm temperatures. Controlling for factors such as geography, economic changes, and global trade shifts, they found the optimum temperature where humans are good at producing stuff: 55ºF (13ºC).

Applying this finding to climate change forecasts, they found that 77% of countries will experience a decline in per capita incomes by 2099, with the average person’s income shrinking by 23%. Unusually high temperatures will hurt agriculture, economic production, and overall health, researchers say. [Continue reading…]

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What jihadis do when they are not fighting

In a lecture he delivered earlier this year, Thomas Hegghammer said: My starting point is the truism that military life is about much more than fighting. Look inside any militant group – or conventional army for that matter – and you will see lots of artistic products and social practices that serve no obvious military purpose. Think of the cadence calls of the U.S. Marines, the songs of leftist revolutionaries, or the tattoos of neo-nazis. Look inside jihadi groups and you’ll see bearded men with kalashnikovs reciting poetry, discussing dreams, and weeping on a regular basis.

It took me a long time to even notice these things. I’ve studied jihadi groups for almost fifteen years, and for the first ten, I was addressing standard questions, like, how did group A evolve, what has ideologue B written, who joins movement C, etc. The thing is, when you study one type of group for a while, you take certain things for granted. I knew that these groups were weeping and reading poetry, but it didn’t really register – it was background noise to me, stuff I needed to shove aside to get to the hard information about people and events.

Then it occurred to me one day that these practices are not obvious at all; in fact, they are really quite strange. For one, there is the incongruence of hard men doing soft things. It is curious, for example, that Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi should be known simultaneously as “al-dhabbah” (the slaughterer) and “al-baki” (he who weeps a lot). Second and more important, these “soft” activities pose a big social science puzzle, in that they defy expectations of utility-maximising behaviour. Terrorists are hunted men with limited resources; they should be spending all their time on “useful” things like training, raising funds, or studying the enemy. Yet they “waste” time – quite a lot of time actually – on activities like the ones I’ve mentioned. So I started paying attention to these things, and the more I looked, the more I saw.

But when I turned to the academic literature for help to make sense of it, I didn’t find much to read. Studies of terrorist groups tend to focus on the hard stuff of rebellion or “the great men and events” of terrorist history. We’ve devoted much more attention to attack histories, organizational structures, and financing sources than to the softer side of rebel life. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s online recruitment strategy

J.M. Berger writes: Observers have focused, rightly, on the quality and quantity of Islamic State propaganda as a factor in its success, but passive material can only take the typical radicalization so far. Therefore, the organization deploys a wide variety of tailored online interventions to bring their targets into the fold.

Sometimes referred to as “grooming,” these interventions are conducted by small teams of prolific social media users who lavish attention on potential recruits in order to shape their worldview and encourage direct action in support of the Islamic State, ranging from lone wolf–style terrorist attacks to migration to Islamic State territories. Some interveners are more formally affiliated with the Islamic State while others appear to be informal volunteers.

Online interventions are more prevalent in countries where the social climate offers few opportunities to safely discuss an interest in the Islamic State in a face-to-face setting, but even in such environments, many cases incorporate activity that crosses over from online to real-world interactions. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen is shattered and peace seems a long way off. The world can’t just watch on

Farea Al-Muslimi and Rafat Al-Akhali write: “For us, the future is lost. There is no hope.” That’s what Ali Ahmad told BBC interviewers who were trying to find out what life was like under the current war in Yemen. Ali comes from Taiz, a governorate that has for months been under siege by the militias of former president of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh, and those of the Houthi rebel movement.

Taiz epitomises the suffering of people across Yemen: as the city suffers not only from the shelling and siege of militias, but also from the airstrikes of the Saudi-led coalition (such as the airstrike targeting a wedding in September and killing more than 130 civilians, according to the UN high commissioner for human rights) and the wider blockade that the coalition is enforcing on commercialand humanitarian shipments to the country.

As the poorest country in the Arab world is collapsing in front of the world’s eyes, a whole generation of Yemeni youth and children are losing their future. The military campaign led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen is nearing its seven-month mark, with arms and wide-ranging logistical, technical, and intelligence support from the United Kingdom and the United States and otherwestern allies. This war has resulted in an “nearly incomprehensible” scale of human suffering, according to the UN humanitarian chief. [Continue reading…]

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Sino-Tibetan populations shed light on human cooperation

By Ruth Mace, UCL

One of the big questions in anthropology is why humans, unlike most animals, cooperate with those we are not closely related to. Exactly what has driven this behaviour is not well understood. Anthropologists suspect it could be down to the fact that women have usually left their homes after marriage to go and live with their husband’s family. This creates links between distant families, which may explain our tendency to cooperate beyond our own households.

Now our study on the Tibetan borderlands of China, published in Nature Communications, shows that it is indeed the case that cooperation is greater in populations where females disperse for marriage.

A natural experiment in social structure

There are a lot of different theories about the link between dispersal, kinship and cooperation, which is what we wanted to test. Anthropologists believe that dispersal leads to cooperation through links between families, and some evolutionary models predict that when nobody moves this leads to residents competing for the same resources and greater conflict between kin. But there are also models that suggest the opposite is true – that if nobody moves, neighbours are more likely to be related, leading to more cooperation in the neighbourhood.

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Russia’s intervention in Syria: Protracting an already endless conflict

Charles Lister writes: While the adversity and civilian casualties from the first two weeks of Russia’s intervention may have emboldened a Syrian revolutionary spirit, the medium-to-long term outlook is concerning for four principal reasons.

– Firstly, the fact that moderate FSA factions have been hit so hard in Russian strikes — and that these same groups have been so effective in using their TOW missiles — has closed the gap between them and some of the most conservative Syrian Islamists. While they were somewhat distrustful of each other earlier this year, they have been celebrating each other’s battlefield successes since Russia started its strikes.

– Secondly, some diplomatic statements notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and other Gulf states are furious at Russia’s actions. They have and will continue to encourage closer military coordination between the FSA and Syrian Islamists, which provides transnationally-minded groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and other al-Qaida-linked factions with space to further integrate into broader opposition dynamics. Already, a number of multi-group operations rooms have been established in areas targeted by Russian strikes in which ‘vetted’ FSA groups, Syrian Islamists and sometimes Jabhat al-Nusra have openly flaunted their cooperation. This was a rare occurrence even one month ago.

– Thirdly — after nearly two years of serious internal and external engagement with the subject of a ‘political solution — Syria’s armed opposition now sees itself in an existential battle which can have no outcome other than the total defeat of Assad, Iran, and Russia. “There is little time for politics right now,” said one mainstream Islamist. The same fighters used to see Russia as a potential party at the negotiating table. “Russia is a major power with a UN veto and before its aggression, it could have helped sponsor an acceptable political solution,” said 101st Division leader Captain Hassan al-Hamadeh, a former regime MiG-21 jet pilot who famously defected with his jet to Jordan in June 2012. “But after Russia’s aggression, Putin has become a clear partner of Assad in shedding Syrian blood, which hinders any hope of a political solution,” he insisted.

– Lastly, Russia’s military intervention will undoubtedly further consolidate jihadist militancy in Syria. Al-Qaida will likely benefit directly from this, by presenting itself as fighting a second “jihad” against Russia. “The most important consequence is the psychological situation now hitting the Syrian people,” Hassan Haj Ali, the leader of the CIA-backed Tajamu Suqor al-Ghab told me. “As far as many people see it, the only friends left of the Syrian people are the car bomb and the gun and those who say there is no solution but to die in battle,” he exclaimed. [Continue reading…]

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The Putin-Assad approach to diplomacy: Win the war, then talk

The New York Times reports: In brief remarks in Moscow, released on Wednesday after Mr. Assad’s departure, the two leaders promised to pursue “a long-term settlement, based on a political process that involves all political forces,” as Mr. Putin put it.

At the same time, they emphasized their united front against terrorists, which is how both characterize not just the Islamic State but all armed opponents of Mr. Assad’s government. And they said that a political solution was only possible after success on the battlefield, which neither defined, leaving the timing of any negotiations entirely unclear.

The question now is whether Mr. Putin can press Mr. Assad to accept a negotiated end to his rule. “Putin’s influence over Assad is like Obama’s over Netanyahu,” a diplomat based in Syria told a group of colleagues several months ago, before the Russian military intervention began, referring to the often truculent relationship between the American and Israeli leaders.

Mr. Assad has, in fact, proved at times to be a reluctant partner in Russia’s efforts to end the conflict. He has stood up on many occasions to the Kremlin, to the extent that diplomats and analysts say it has irritated Mr. Putin.

“I think they know how confused the Assad regime is, and they’re frustrated by it,” said Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has followed the conflict closely, referring to the Russians.

He and others noted Russia’s efforts in January and April to broker talks in Moscow between Mr. Assad’s government and some of the armed groups rebelling against it. Those were coordinated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and headed by Vitaly V. Naumkin, director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Mr. Assad’s representative, Bashar al-Jaafari, showed little flexibility in those talks, refusing to agree to confidence-building measures Moscow wanted, such as releasing political prisoners who might take part in a political solution.

The talks suggested the limits of Russia’s influence — even Mr. Putin’s. In 2012, Abdelaziz al-Khayer, a Syrian dissident, disappeared immediately upon returning to the country from China to participate in talks that were endorsed by Moscow. Diplomats and opposition figures have long said he was arrested by Mr. Assad’s security forces.

A Western diplomat recalled approaching his Russian counterpart to ask if Russia could pressure the Syrians to release him. “What do you think I’ve been doing?” the Russian diplomat responded.

Last year, another dissident, Louay Hussein, was arrested just before he was preparing to attend talks the Russians had organized in Moscow. He remained in prison for months, and came out declaring that he would no longer remain inside Syria trying to change the system from within. He had learned, he said, that Russia was unable, and Iran unwilling, to push Mr. Assad to any meaningful negotiations. [Continue reading…]

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Despite Russian air support, pro-Assad forces only make small advances on the ground

Charles Lister writes: Thus far, after two weeks of operations, pro-regime forces have made small territorial gains north of Homs, south of Aleppo, and in Hama’s Sahl al-Ghab region. But despite Russia’s efforts, ground forces — composed of the Syrian Army, the paramilitary National Defense Force, Hezbollah, Shia militias and increasing numbers of Iranian military personnel — aren’t achieving the victories one might have expected.

One pro-Assad source recently lamented the loss of “24 tanks and 250 men” in Hama, all for “50cm.” While Iran’s infamous Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani has now arrived openly in Syria, Russia has shown no sign of deploying its own ground forces. Its new military facility in Latakia, however, contains the necessary infrastructure for at least 2,000 personnel, leaving the potential for a Russian ground component open to question.

One key reason for the minimal territorial shifts so far is the use of American BGM-71 TOW anti-tank guided missiles by CIA-backed Free Syrian Army rebels. The missiles, which first appeared in rebel hands in April 2014, have been used far more (a nearly 850% rise) since the Russian intervention: there were 82 recorded uses from October 1 to 20, compared to only 13 in all of September. With each missile valued at least $50,000, that equates to over $4.1 million of expenditure in three weeks.

Having initially had an effective, but strategically subdued effect on the conflict, the CIA coordinated provision of TOW missiles has suddenly shown its true potential. Combatants on the ground — including 13th Division leader Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Saoud and the leaders of three other CIA-backed FSA groups — all told me that they have received more TOWs than normal recently and stressed how useful they have been. “TOWs will destroy the Russians and their objectives, and we’ve received many more recently,” Saoud said. [Continue reading…]

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We Syrians are losing our faith in the international community

A letter to The Guardian: We, a group of Syrian civil society organisations and actors, both men and women, from multiple sects and ethnic and minority backgrounds, write this following Russia’s recent airstrikes (Russia sends in bombers and raises stakes in Syria, 1 October). It has become eminently clear that the international community has little political will to stop the bloodshed in Syria. Indeed, the international community’s collective failure to help end the conflict created the vacuum for the de facto occupation of our country by Iran and now Russia. While the United Nations has repeatedly expressed “deep concern” and “regret” at the tremendous loss of life and the mass displacement of Syrians, the international community has done next to nothing to deter the main perpetrator of the conflict in Syria: the Assad regime.

The dire situation in Syria is no mystery. After four years of conflict, half the country has been killed, displaced or exiled. Indeed, airstrikes by the Syrian regime are the foremost driver of the Syrian refugee crisis and the leading cause of death in Syria (66% of civilian deaths by May 2015); 95% of all deaths caused by regime airstrikes are civilians – not members of Isis or armed opposition groups. While UN resolution after resolution has condemned the use of indiscriminate weapons against civilians, there has been no international action to stop regime aerial attacks. And now Russia has joined in the slaughter of Syrians with nothing more than feigned concern by the international community. [Continue reading…]

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Three Syrian hospitals bombed since Russian airstrikes began, doctors say

The Guardian reports: At least three hospitals have been bombed by fighter jets in north-western Syria since Russia’s intervention in the war began in late September, doctors and international observers claim.

The latest attack, on Tuesday, killed at least 12 people at Sarmin hospital in Idlib province. At least three of the victims were believed to be medical staff. Survivors and witnesses said the hospital was hit by two airstrikes at about 1pm.

Dr Mohamed Tennari, director of Sarmin hospital, said the facility appeared to have been directly targeted and could no longer serve patients on one of the fiercest frontlines in the war.

He said the hospital had been the target of at least 10 other airstrikes earlier in the conflict. Throughout the war, international medical organisations have repeatedly claimed that medical facilities in opposition areas have been systematically targeted.

Physicians for Human Rights said it had documented 307 attacks on medical facilities and the deaths of 670 medical personnel in Syria since protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011 until the end of August 2015. “Syrian government forces have been responsible for more than 90% of these attacks,” the organisation said. “Each of which constitutes a war crime.” [Continue reading…]

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Four-fifths of Russia’s Syria strikes don’t target ISIS

Reuters reports: Almost 80 percent of Russia’s declared targets in Syria have been in areas not held by Islamic State, a Reuters analysis of Russian Defence Ministry data shows, undermining Moscow’s assertions that its aim is to defeat the group.

The majority of strikes, according to the analysis, have instead been in areas held by other groups opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which include al Qaeda offshoots but also fighters backed by Washington and its allies.

Defence ministry statements of targets hit by the Russian Air Force and an online archive of Russian military maps show Russia has hit 64 named locations since President Vladimir Putin ordered the first round of air strikes three weeks ago.

Of those targets, a maximum of 15 were in areas held by Islamic State, according to a survey of locations of the rival forces in Syria compiled by the Institute for the Study of War.

“If you look at the map, you can easily understand that they are not fighting Islamic State but other opposition groups,” said Alexander Golts, a Moscow-based defense columnist and deputy editor of online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal. [Continue reading…]

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