Iraq and Syria are ‘finishing schools’ for foreign extremists, says UN report

The Associated Press reports: Iraq and Syria have become “international finishing schools” for extremists according to a UN report which says the number of foreign fighters joining terrorist groups has spiked to more than 25,000 from more than 100 countries.

The panel of experts monitoring UN sanctions against al-Qaida estimates the number of overseas terrorist fighters worldwide increased by 71% between mid-2014 and March 2015.

It said the scale of the problem had increased over the past three years and the flow of foreign fighters was “higher than it has ever been historically”.

The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has “risen sharply from a few thousand … a decade ago to more than 25,000 today,” the panel said in its report to the UN security council, which was obtained by Associated Press.

The report said just two countries had drawn more than 20,000 foreign fighters: Syria and Iraq. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State group but also the al-Nusra Front.

Looking ahead, the panel said the thousands of foreign fighters who travelled to Syria and Iraq were living and working in “a veritable ‘international finishing school’ for extremists”, as was the case in Afghanistan in the 1990s. [Continue reading…]

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In Tikrit, a celebratory mood but lingering concerns

The Washington Post reports: On Wednesday, there were no signs of civilians in the city center. An elderly woman and her daughter found there had been “taken to somewhere secure,” one militiaman said. Houses were largely intact, indicating that the city fell with relatively little combat. Iraqi forces had outnumbered the militants by at least 10 to 1, according to estimates by Iraqi officials. In addition, the U.S.-led strikes had killed several of the Islamic State’s leaders in the city.

But the scene is likely to be different in neighborhoods to the north, where some militants have dug in. The United Nations released images in February that showed that at least 536 buildings in the city have been damaged by the fighting.

Security forces had begun the painstaking task of defusing hundreds of roadside bombs and booby traps left by the retreating militants, with explosions ringing through the streets as they went about their task.

About 185 booby-trapped houses have been identified in the city, in addition to about 900 improvised explosive devices, Interior Minister Mohammed al-Ghaban said as he visited one of Hussein’s former palaces on the banks of the Tigris.

The largest palace had suffered significant damage, seemingly from airstrikes, with an entire wing sagging. Iraqi military officials have said that the strikes helped significantly in softening the way for ground operations after the offensive stalled — although the Shiite militiamen among the pro-government forces are reluctant to acknowledge that the air raids played a role.

Ghaban spoke a few feet from the site of one of the Islamic State’s worst atrocities, the slaughter of what the government estimates to have been as many as 1,700 soldiers from Camp Speicher, a military base just outside Tikrit.

Trails of dried blood could seen on the walls along the river, where soldiers were summarily executed and thrown in the water.

“Innocent blood has been spilled here,” Ghaban said. “We don’t want revenge. We want to liberate people and the land.”

The emotionally charged nature of the Tikrit fight had raised concerns about the potential for abuses by the plethora of armed groups taking part.

In a televised speech on Tuesday, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi insisted that only Iraqi blood was being spilled in the battle. But the Farsi graffiti scrawled next to an Islamic State flag painted on a wall outside the city’s presidential palace seemed to suggest otherwise. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s been two years away from a nuclear weapon for three decades

Micah Zenko writes: The April 24, 1984, edition of the British defense publication Jane’s Defence Weekly informed its readers: “Iran is engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years, according to press reports in the Persian Gulf last week.” Subsequent warnings from U.S. and foreign sources about Iran’s imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon have been offered over the past four decades. These false guesses are worth bearing in mind as news from the nuclear negotiations in Lausanne, Switzerland emerges.

More technical “breakout” estimates — the time it would take Iran to compile enough highly-enriched uranium (HEU) to fuel one nuclear weapon — continue to be published, with slightly varying timelines. Setting aside logic, wisdom, and a huge range of assumptions, if you average these five estimates, Iran would require 89.8 days, or three months, if it made a hypothetical rush for one bombs-worth of HEU.

• 1.9-2.2 months (Institute for Science and International Security, October 24, 2013)

• 6 months (Arms Control, September 29, 2014)

• 1.7 months (Iran Watch, February 24, 2015)

• 45-87 days (Bipartisan Policy Center February 23, 2015)

• 3 months (Washington Institute, March 28, 2015)

It is essential to recognize that Iran does not currently have a nuclear-weapons program, nor does it possess a nuclear weapon. On February 26, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, ended his country’s nuclear weapons program in 2003 and “as far as we know, he’s not made the decision to go for a nuclear weapon.” This repeats the “high-confidence” judgment of the U.S. intelligence community (IC) that was first made in November 2007. Clapper added that Iran “wants to preserve options across the capabilities it would take to build [a nuclear weapon], but right now they don’t have one, and have not made that decision.”

To repeat: Iran does not currently have a nuclear-weapons program, nor does it possess a nuclear weapon. So when a politician, analyst, or pundit mentions an Iranian “nuclear-weapons program,” they are referring to a program that the intelligence community is not aware of. If possible, tell that person to contact the Central Intelligence Agency through its “report threats” website to let the agency’s nonproliferation analysts know about whatever secret information he or she is basing his or her judgment upon. [Continue reading…]

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Steve Fraser: Mongrel firebugs and men of property

“The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there.” So wrote British playwright Harold Pinter.  How apt that seems when one compares life in our own “second Gilded Age” to the way things were done in the original Gilded Age of a century ago.  True, there are some striking similarities between the two moments, including the rise to power of crony capitalism, the staggering growth of inequality, the exiling of democracy, and the spread of Darwinian rationales to justify and camouflage the embedding of plutocracy at the heights of our world.

What is strikingly different, however, is the way Americans of the nineteenth century reacted to all of this.  They managed to mount a kind of sustained economic, political, and cultural resistance to plutocratic rule that is simply unimaginable today.  Masses of our ancestors refused to accept that tooth-and-claw capitalism was their fate and that they should submit to it without a whimper of protest.  Instead, they imagined new, more civilized ways of living together and then took to the streets in staggering numbers and with remarkable persistence, even in the face of the armed power of corporations and the state, to make their points felt.  We can hardly say the same about our more recent past.

How did they manage that? Novelist William Faulkner viewed the past differently than Pinter. As he famously observed, “The past is not dead; it is not even past.” Those confronted by the iniquities and inequities that ran rampant in the first Gilded Age stood up to exploitation and oppression by reaching into their varied pasts. There they were able to find the moral, intellectual, and even organizational wherewithal to defy the prevailing capitalist order of things. At the same time, with a creativity that would amaze us, they looked far into alternative futures to imagine ways of escaping a fate their overlords insisted was both right and inevitable, envisioning worlds that seemed far more inviting to everyone but the plutocrats.

Today, we are faced with a double dilemma: How do we once again make Pinter’s “foreign country,” that rich world of resistance to capitalism that now seems lost in the mists of time, a familiar part of our lives? And how, in doing so, do we make what now seems, in Faulkner’s terms, so undead — all the brutishness, mayhem, inequality, and injustice that so disfigures the present — finally die? While you’re considering that, here’s a glimpse (from my new book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power) of the two worlds of the first Gilded Age and the chasm that lay between them. Steve Fraser

Plutocracy the first time around
Revisiting the great upheaval and the first Gilded Age
By Steve Fraser

[The following passages are excerpted and slightly adapted from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown and Company).]

Part 1: The Great Upheaval

What came to be known as the Great Upheaval, the movement for the eight-hour day, elicited what one historian has called “a strange enthusiasm.” The normal trade union strike is a finite event joining two parties contesting over limited, if sometimes intractable, issues. The mass strike in 1886 or before that in 1877 — all the many localized mass strikes that erupted in towns and small industrial cities after the Civil War and into the new century — was open-ended and ecumenical in reach.

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Harvard’s intransigence on fossil fuel divestment

Bill McKibben writes: Thirty-five years ago, students began demanding that Harvard sell its stock in companies that supported South Africa’s racist regime. The university said no; it was only after years and years of organizing—everything from building a mock shantytown in Harvard Yard to electing Desmond Tutu (and Al Gore) to the Harvard Board of Overseers on a divestment platform—that the university began selling off its apartheid-tainted stock. When the issue was tobacco, it was years after the American Medical Association recommended that medical schools divest their shares that Harvard sold its holdings—and only after a medical student, Philip Huang, ran a clever radio campaign pointing out that then-President Derek Bok was supporting an industry “that markets death and disease to blacks, women, the poor, and Third World countries.”

Now the issue is merely the fate of the planet’s climate system. With it is the future of our civilizations. At the moment, we’re on track to raise the planet’s temperature 4 degrees Celsius by century’s end, which is the biggest thing we’ve ever done. Ask the folks already abandoning islands in the Pacific, or twiddling the faucet handle in drought-stricken São Paulo.

Climate change threatens not only humans but a huge percentage of the Earth’s other species—the plants and animals carefully cataloged in the endless file cabinets at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology or the Harvard University Herbaria. But as usual, Harvard is sticking by its time-honored playbook. Despite huge majorities of students demanding fossil fuel divestment, despite powerful letters from the faculty, and despite the example of institutions from Stanford to the Rockefeller family beginning to divest, the Corporation has said no. President Drew Gilpin Faust, in fact, has issued a letter explaining that the university should be “very wary of steps intended to instrumentalize our endowment in ways that would appear to position the university as a political actor rather than an academic institution.” Just as it was very wary of letting women take classes or taking a stand against tobacco or apartheid. [Continue reading…]

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Why do memes go viral, and should we care?

Abby Rabinowitz writes: On April 11, 2012, Zeddie Little appeared on Good Morning America, wearing the radiant, slightly perplexed smile of one enjoying instant fame. About a week earlier, Little had been a normal, if handsome, 25-year-old trying to make it in public relations. Then on March 31, he was photographed amid a crowd of runners in a South Carolina race by a stranger, Will King, who posted the image to a social networking website, Reddit. Dubbed “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy,” Little’s picture circulated on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, accruing likes, comments, and captions (“Picture gets put up as employee of the month/for a company he doesn’t work for”). It spawned spinoffs (Ridiculously Photogenic Dog, Prisoner, and Syrian Rebel) and leapt to the mainstream media. At a high point, ABC Morning News reported that a Google search for “Zeddie Little” yielded 59 million hits.

Why the sudden fame? The truth is that Little hadn’t become famous: His meme had. According to website Know Your Meme, which documents viral Internet phenomena, a meme is “a piece of content or an idea that’s passed from person to person, changing and evolving along the way.” Ridiculously Photogenic Guy is a kind of Internet meme represented by LOL cats: that is, a photograph, video, or cartoon, often overlaid with a snarky message, perfect for incubating in the bored, fertile minds of cubicle workers and college students. In an age where politicians campaign through social media and viral marketers ponder the appeal of sneezing baby pandas, memes are more important than ever—however trivial they may seem.

But trawling the Internet, I found a strange paradox: While memes were everywhere, serious meme theory was almost nowhere. Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term. The peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics folded in 2005. “The term has moved away from its theoretical beginnings, and a lot of people don’t know or care about its theoretical use,” philosopher and meme theorist Daniel Dennett told me. What has happened to the idea of the meme, and what does that evolution reveal about its usefulness as a concept? [Continue reading…]

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Yemenis turn against Saudi-led bombing as civilian casualties rise

The Wall Street Journal reports: Yemenis once supportive of the Saudi-led bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in their country are turning against the operation as civilian casualties mount and vital economic infrastructure is destroyed by airstrikes, including one on Wednesday that killed 29 employees at a dairy factory far from rebel-held areas.

At least 164 civilians have been killed since the airstrikes started last week, according to Yemen’s health ministry, while the United Nations put the figure at 93 dead and 364 wounded. Aid agencies say their ability to provide Yemen with urgent medical and food supplies has been restricted by both ground fighting between local factions and the Saudi airstrikes.

Even those who cheered the Saudi intervention against Houthi rebels are now appealing for its end. Last week, Riyadh assembled a coalition of 10 regional countries to counter the Iran-linked Houthi militants as they expanded across the country and forced Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to flee last week to Saudi Arabia.

The Houthis have admitted to receiving some arms and training from Iran, but maintain that their continuing military campaign is an independent decision to rid the country of an inept and corrupt government. U.S. officials say the Houthis are a national movement with limited ties to Iran, although they share a similar religious faith. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS seizes most of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus

AFP reports: Militants from ISIS seized control of most of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus Wednesday, a local Palestinian official told AFP.

“Fighters from ISIS launched an assault this morning on Yarmouk and they took over the majority of the camp,” said Anwar Abdel Hadi, director of political affairs for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Damascus.

Fighting was continuing inside the camp, he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based activist group, said ISIS was in control of a “large part” of the camp after fighting with Palestinian groups also opposed to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

Yarmouk was once a thriving neighborhood home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees and Syrians but has been caught up in the country’s fighting and besieged by regime forces for more than a year.

Only about 18,000 residents are estimated to remain in the camp after many fled the fighting. [Continue reading…]

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Palestine formally joins International Criminal Court

Al Jazeera reports: Palestine has formally attained membership of the International Criminal Court, a move that could open the door to possible war crime indictments against Israeli officials despite uncertainty over its wider ramifications.

The accession on Wednesday is another landmark in the Palestinian diplomatic and legal international campaign, which gained steam in 2014.

The Palestinians moved to join The Hague-based court on January 2, in a process that was finalised on Wednesday, setting the scene for potential legal action.

“Palestine has and will continue to use all legitimate tools within its means in order to defend itself against Israeli colonisation and other violations of international law,” said senior Palestinian official Saeb Erakat. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen: The rise of the Houthis

The Rise of the Houthis was filmed in late 2014 and aired on the BBC last month.

Safa Al Ahmad, the freelance Saudi journalist who made this documentary, talks about her work in the short video below. On March 18, she won the 2015 Freedom of Expression Award for journalism, from the Index on Censorship.

Her 30-minute documentary, Saudi’s Secret Uprising, was broadcast by the BBC in May 2014:

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The popular committee phenomenon in Yemen: fueling war and conflict

Farea Al-Muslimi writes: The situation in Yemen has reached new heights of complexity with a Saudi-led military intervention against the Ansar Allah movement, a Zaidi Shia Islamist group more widely known as the Houthis. A Libyan scenario has emerged with two rival governments in Yemen: one led by President Abd-Rabu Mansour Hadi (now in Saudi Arabia), which is based in the southern port city of Aden and enjoys a higher degree of local and international legitimacy but more limited authority, and another by the Houthis, who are establishing their own governing structures in the capital Sanaa and in large swaths of northern and western Yemen in a tacit alliance with forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Both sides have formed so-called popular committees, with some emerging in Aden under the command of President Hadi and others forming in Sanaa under the command of the Houthis. Though the international debate about Yemen focuses on who will head the country, one of the most important features of the crisis domestically is this phenomenon of popular committees. By mobilizing local forces outside of formal political configurations, both sides are attempting to rally armed support and to overpower their rivals, while simultaneously undermining the structure of the state and releasing centrifugal forces that could prove impossible to contain in the future.

On the Houthi side, the committees have been called by various names, including popular committees, people’s committees, and revolutionary committees. Regardless of the name, they are armed militias seeking to control public life, including in the capital. [Continue reading…]

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Iran says Saudi ‘attack’ on Yemen endangers region

AFP reports: Iran warned Tuesday that the Saudi “attack” on Yemen endangered the whole region, calling for an immediate halt to the military operation against Shiite rebels.

“The fire of war in the region from any side… will drag the whole region to play with fire. This is not in the interest of the nations in the region,” Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said.

“We strongly object to the military solution in Yemen. We believe that the Saudi military attack against Yemen is a strategic mistake,” Abdollahian told reporters on the sidelines of a Syria donors conference in Kuwait.

“Military operations must stop immediately” to open the way to a “political solution,” he said.

A Saudi-led Arab coalition has been pounding rebel positions in Yemen since Thursday. Riyadh accuses Tehran of backing the Huthi Shiite rebels.

Abdollahian said Iran sees the intervention in Yemen as “external aggression” that will foment extremism in the region.

But Tehran and Riyadh are “capable of cooperating to strike a compromise in Yemen,” and the same can apply to a solution in Syria, he added. [Continue reading…]

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The deal with Iran: Five arguments to watch out for

Gary Sick writes: As the nuclear talks with Iran enter the final stretch, and as the media coverage reaches the point of hysteria, it is useful to step back a bit and offer a few observations about how to approach the kinds of revelations and arguments that we might expect in the coming days or weeks.

Here are five things to watch out for.

First, pay attention to definitions. People in a hurry–or people with an agenda–tend to speak in shorthand. If you don’t pay attention, that can be misleading.

For example, what is “breakout?” Put simply, for purposes of this agreement, “breakout” exists when Iran masses enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) needed for one nuclear device. Note that “breakout” does not mean Iran will have a nuclear device. It is the starting point to build a nuclear device, which most experts agree would require roughly a year for Iran to do–and probably another two or more years to create a device that could be fit into a workable missile warhead. Plus every other country that has ever built a nuclear weapon considered it essential to run a test before actually using their design. There goes bomb No. 1.

So when officials, pundits, and interested parties talk about a one-year breakout time for Iran, what they are really saying is that if Iran decides to break its word and go for a bomb, it will take approximately one year to accumulate 27 kilograms of HEU. The hard part follows. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda in Syria signals sharia law for Idlib

Reuters: The al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front indicated on Wednesday that a Syrian city captured from the government in recent days would be ruled according to Islamic sharia law but the group would not seek to monopolize power there.

Nusra Front’s leader, Abu Mohamad al-Golani, also said residents of the northwestern city of Idlib would be treated well by his fighters and other Islamist factions that captured it on Saturday.

“We salute the people of Idlib and their stand with their sons, the Mujahideen, … and God willing they will enjoy the justice of sharia, which will preserve their religion and their blood,” Golani said in an audio recording posted on Nusra Front-affiliated online media.

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ISIS targets Africa in new issue of recruitment magazine

Newsweek reports: ISIS have released a new issue of its recruitment magazine which is focused solely on expanding its presence across Africa, as the terror group’s propaganda strategy continues to develop.

The release, titled Shariah Alone Will Rule Africa, speaks of the ‘Libyan Arena’, Tunisia, Algeria, the Sinai Peninsula and West Africa. The cover of the magazine shows a large picture of Tunisia’s Great Mosque of Kairouan, seen as one of the holiest sites in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

The magazine, which includes another interview from British hostage and photojournalist John Cantlie, sees spokesman for ISIS, Muhammad al-Adnani, congratulate Nigerian radical Islamist group Boko Haram for “joining the caravan” of jihad, saying that they would “now guard yet another frontier of the Khilafah [caliphate]”. [Continue reading…]

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Russia launches next deadly phase of hybrid war on Ukraine

Newsweek reports: Pushing his baby daughter in a pram in front of him, 37-year-old Dmitriy Komyakov paused as marchers ahead adjusted their positions around a huge Ukrainian flag. It was a bright day in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. A good day for the hundreds in attendance to celebrate one year since Euromaidan demonstrators ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.

Just as the march moved off again, an explosion ripped into the crowd. Komyakov was close enough to feel the heat of the blast wave. As bloodied victims slumped to the floor, he searched for his wife and 12-year-old daughter among the panicked crowd. “I could see pieces of metal flying and people starting to fall,” he says. “First I checked the baby to see if she was injured, then myself, looked around and that’s when my wife and daughter ran to me.” Miraculously, the whole family had escaped unscathed. But four people, including two teenage boys, were killed in that blast and another nine seriously wounded.

Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, says Russia has entered into a new phase of its campaign to destabilise Ukraine, with the 22 February attack in Kharkiv just one of a series of bombings orchestrated by Russian spy services, the FSB and the GRU. “It starts with the FSB’s security centres 16 and 18, operating out of Skolkovo, Russia,” says Vitaliy Naida, head of the SBU department responsible for intercepting online traffic. “These centres are in charge of information warfare. They send out propaganda, false information via social media. Re-captioned images from Syria, war crimes from Serbia – they’re used to radicalise and then recruit Ukrainians.”

He takes a suspected three-man terror cell from Dnipropretovsk who are currently on trial as an example and walks Newsweek through the evidence, including photographs and video of weapons with Russian serial numbers and intercepted communications. Passed instructions and weapons via dead-drops, the cell never met their handlers.

“They were recruited by the FSB. Instructions were initially given in private messages via internet and in some cases Vkontakte [a Russian social network],” Naida says. “When they were detained and arrested, in their houses we found explosives, grenades, means of communications and printed messages – where to set explosives, where they should be placed to create panic.” Naida’s unit monitors roughly 600 “anti-Ukrainian” social network groups with hundreds of thousands of members. So far it has intercepted communications between 29 prolific group administrators and individuals using accounts linked to the Russian security services. [Continue reading…]

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