The Guardian reports: Danish intelligence services have suggested the fatal Copenhagen shooting of a film-maker at a freedom-of-speech debate and a Jewish security guard at a synagogue may have been a copycat of last month’s Paris attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. If that was the case, Hussein would have had to have followed those Paris attacks from a Danish prison, where he was serving a two-year sentence for stabbing a 19-year-old man on Copenhagen’s inner-city train system. He had been released from prison only two weeks before the attacks in Copenhagen at the weekend.
It is not yet clear whether he became radicalised in prison like the men behind the Paris attacks. But Michael Gjorup, head of the country’s prison and probation service, told Danish media that authorities had noticed changes in his behaviour in prison and had alerted the intelligence services.
Details on Hussein’s upbringing in Copenhagen remain sketchy. A court psychiatric assessment of him carried out during the stabbing case, and obtained by Danish TV2, showed him telling psychologists he had a happy childhood and good relations with his parents and a younger brother. However, he did not graduate from school, was unable to get into a university and later was homeless.
Although it was not clear where he had lived after leaving prison, he was well-known on the low-rise, red-brick Mjølnerparken estate in north-west Copenhagen, where police had raided an apartment at the weekend searching for weapons. Behind the peeling paint of the front door, the stairwell was graffitied with black pen and strewn with litter. Past the children’s play areas of the estate, Emilie Hansson, 26, who is half Swedish, said she knew Hussein and had seen him at the estate last week. She said: “For me he’s not a terrorist. He’s someone who felt finished with life and decided to go out with a big bang.” An 18-year-old at school nearby said he thought those who knew Hussein had been shocked he could have carried out the attacks. [Continue reading…]
Netanyahu suspected of leaking details of U.S.-Iran negotiations
David Ignatius writes: Mistrust between the Obama administration and Benjamin Netanyahu has widened even further in recent days because of U.S. suspicion that the Israeli prime minister has authorized leaks of details about the U.S. nuclear talks with Iran.
The decision to reduce the exchange of sensitive information about the Iran talks was prompted by concerns that Netanyahu’s office had given Israeli journalists sensitive details of the U.S. position, including a U.S. offer to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal.
Obama administration officials believed these reports were misleading because the centrifuge numbers are part of a package that includes the size of the Iranian nuclear stockpile and the type of centrifuges that are allowed to operate. A deal that allowed 500 advanced centrifuges and a large stockpile of enriched uranium might put Iran closer to making a bomb than one that permitted 10,000 older machines and a small stockpile, the administration argues.
An initial report Sunday by Israel’s Channel 2 news that the administration had cut all communications with Israel about the Iran talks was denied by White House spokesman Alistair Baskey. Sources here said that Philip Gordon, the Middle East director for President Obama’s National Security Council, would see Israeli national security adviser Yossi Cohen and other senior officials on Monday. The discussion would include Iran policy, but U.S. officials aren’t likely to share the latest information about U.S. strategy in the talks. [Continue reading…]
The CIA asked me about controlling the climate — this is why we should worry
Alan Robock writes: On January 19, 2011, I got a phone call from two men who told me they were consultants for the CIA. Roger Lueken and Michael Canes, analysts for the Logistics Management Institute, asked, among other things, “If another country were trying to control our climate, would we be able to detect it?”
I told them that I thought we could, because if a cloud in the stratosphere were created (the most commonly proposed method of control) that was thick enough, large enough, and long-lasting enough to change the amount of energy reaching Earth, we could certainly see it with the same ground-based and satellite instruments we use to measure stratospheric clouds from volcanic eruptions. If, on the other hand, low clouds were being brightened over the ocean (another suggested means of cooling the climate), we could see telltale patterns in the tops of the clouds with satellite photos. And it would also be easy to observe aeroplanes or ships injecting gases or particles into the atmosphere.
At the same time, I wondered whether they also wanted to know if others would know about it, if the CIA was controlling the world’s climate. Given that the CIA is a major sponsor of the recently released US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reports on geoengineering (which they have renamed “climate intervention”), the question arises as to the possible interest of the CIA in global climate control.
Let me be clear. I completely agree with all the NAS findings. Global warming is real and is being caused by humans, mainly by burning coal, oil, petrol and natural gas, which puts carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Global warming will result in major harm to humanity if left unchecked. The solution is to stop using fossil fuels for our energy supply and switch to solar and wind power, and to adapt to some of the coming climate change.
Geoengineering by blocking sunlight should not be implemented now, as its risks and benefits are too uncertain, but we need more research on the various proposed scenarios. Taking carbon dioxide out of the air is a good thing, but currently extremely expensive, and we need research on that, too. [Continue reading…]
Too many worlds
Philip Ball writes: In July 2011, participants at a conference on the placid shore of Lake Traunsee in Austria were polled on what they thought the meeting was about. You might imagine that this question would have been settled in advance, but since the broad theme was quantum theory, perhaps a degree of uncertainty was to be expected. The title of the conference was ‘Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality’. The poll, completed by 33 of the participating physicists, mathematicians and philosophers, posed a range of unresolved questions about the relationship between those two things, one of which was: ‘What is your favourite interpretation of quantum mechanics?’
The word ‘favourite’ speaks volumes. Isn’t science supposed to be decided by experiment and observation, free from personal preferences? But experiments in quantum physics have been obstinately silent on what it means. All we can do is develop hunches, intuitions and, yes, cherished ideas. Of these, the survey offered no fewer than 11 to choose from (as well as ‘other’ and ‘none’).
The most popular (supported by 42 per cent of the very small sample) was basically the view put forward by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and their colleagues in the early days of quantum theory. Today it is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. More on that below. You might not recognise most of the other alternatives, such as Quantum Bayesianism, Relational Quantum Mechanics, and Objective Collapse (which is not, as you might suppose, just saying ‘what the hell’). Maybe you haven’t heard of the Copenhagen Interpretation either. But in third place (18 per cent) was the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI), and I suspect you do know something about that, since the MWI is the one with all the glamour and publicity. It tells us that we have multiple selves, living other lives in other universes, quite possibly doing all the things that we dream of but will never achieve (or never dare). Who could resist such an idea?
Yet resist we should. We should resist not just because MWI is unlikely to be true, or even because, since no one knows how to test it, the idea is perhaps not truly scientific at all. Those are valid criticisms, but the main reason we should hold out is that it is incoherent, both philosophically and logically. There could be no better contender for Wolfgang Pauli’s famous put-down: it is not even wrong. [Continue reading…]
Music: Mahsa Vahdat & SKRUK — ‘Dialog Med Den Elskede’
The unraveling of Libya
Jon Lee Anderson writes: Early last year, General Khalifa Haftar left his home in northern Virginia — where he had spent most of the previous two decades, at least some of that time working with the Central Intelligence Agency — and returned to Tripoli to fight his latest war for control of Libya. Haftar, who is a mild-looking man in his early seventies, has fought with and against nearly every significant faction in the country’s conflicts, leading to a reputation for unrivalled military experience and for a highly flexible sense of personal allegiance. In the Green Mountains, the country’s traditional hideout for rebels and insurgents, he established a military headquarters, inside an old airbase surrounded by red-earth farmland and groves of hazelnut and olive trees. Haftar’s force, which he calls the Libyan National Army, has taken much of the eastern half of the country, in an offensive known as Operation Dignity. Most of the remainder, including the capital city of Tripoli, is held by Libya Dawn, a loose coalition of militias, many of them working in a tactical alliance with Islamist extremists. Much as General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has boasted of doing in Egypt, General Haftar proposes to destroy the Islamist forces and bring peace and stability—enforced by his own army.
When I visited Haftar’s base, earlier this winter, I passed a Russian-made helicopter gunship and was greeted by a group of fighters unloading ammo. The base was in a state of constant alert. Haftar is a top-priority assassination target for Libya Dawn’s militias. Last June, a suicide bomber exploded a Jeep outside his home near Benghazi, killing four guards but missing the primary target. Now there is heavy security around Haftar at all times. At his base, soldiers frisk visitors and confiscate weapons. A few months ago, someone reportedly attempted to kill him with an explosive device concealed in a phone, and so his men collect phones, too.
Haftar greeted me in a spotless office with a set of beige sofas and a matching carpet. Wearing an old-fashioned regimental mustache and a crisp khaki uniform, he looks more like a retired schoolteacher than like the American-backed tyrant his enemies describe. In a deliberate voice, he told me why he had gone back to war. After participating in the 2011 uprising against Muammar Qaddafi, he tried to find a place for himself in Libya’s new politics. When he didn’t succeed, he said, he went home to Virginia for a time, “to enjoy my grandchildren.” All the while, he watched as Libya floundered under a succession of weak governments, and the country’s militias grew more powerful. Last summer, Islamist extremists moved to seize Benghazi; in a merciless campaign aimed at the remains of civil society, assassins killed some two hundred and seventy lawyers, judges, activists, military officers, and policemen — including some of Haftar’s old friends and military colleagues. “There was no justice and no protection,” he said. “People no longer left their houses at night. All of this upset me greatly. We had no sooner left behind Qaddafi’s rule than we had this?”
Haftar reached out to contacts in what remained of Libya’s armed forces, in civil society, in tribal groups, and, finally, in Tripoli. “Everyone told me the same thing,” he said. “ ‘We are looking for a savior. Where are you?’ I told them, ‘If I have the approval of the people, I will act.’ After popular demonstrations took place all over Libya asking me to step in, I knew I was being pushed toward death, but I willingly accepted.”
Like many self-appointed saviors, Haftar spoke with a certain self-admiring fatalism. But his history is much more complex than he cares to acknowledge. [Continue reading…]
Libya: To intervene, or not to intervene, that is not the question
The New York Times: Largely overshadowed by the crises in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, Libya’s unraveling has received comparatively little attention over the past few months. As this oil-rich nation veers toward complete chaos, world leaders would be wise to redouble efforts led by the United Nations to broker a power-sharing deal among warring factions.
A few of the Islamist groups vying for control in Libya have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and carried out the type of barbaric executions that have galvanized international support for the military campaign against the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria. The growth and radicalization of Islamist groups raise the possibility that large parts of Libya could become a satellite of the Islamic State.
“Libya has the same features of potentially becoming as bad as what we’re seeing in Iraq and Syria,” Bernardino León, the United Nations envoy to Libya, said in an interview. “The difference is that Libya is just a few miles away from Europe.” [Continue reading…]
Jenan Moussa sardonically observes:
What does #Libya teach us? With intervention, you get ISIS. What does #Syria teach us? Without intervention, you get ISIS. #sigh
— Jenan Moussa (@jenanmoussa) February 15, 2015
Now as always, those who reflexively argue against all forms of intervention will maintain the conceit that to do nothing is to do no harm. The unspoken assumption is: if we do nothing, we will suffer no harm. It’s not so much a mind your own business, live and let live, philosophy. More like, live and let die.
But as Richard Haass points out, intervention does not simply involve a binary choice:
real #Libya scandal is not Benghazi but rather decisions to intervene & then walk away. result is 3 failed states http://t.co/LF44DGDOqE
— Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) February 15, 2015
When Barack Obama reluctantly led from behind in 2011, joining in the NATO intervention which toppled Gaddafi, his attention was much more keenly focused on domestic politics and an upcoming election, than it was on the fate of Libya. He placed higher value on the intervention ending than on what might follow. That Libyan oil quickly started flowing again looked like a success — from a Western and myopic vantage point.
But even though Libyans understandably did not want to see international powers controlling what essentially amounted to the construction of a new state, it seems like the international community missed an opportunity to use oil revenues as a political tool. If revenues had been paid into a UN-controlled account instead of directly to the National Oil Company, their release to the central bank and government could have been made contingent on a set of political milestones being passed such as disarming the militias.
The Libyan economy is totally dependent on oil and the desire to continue selling oil is the one common interest that unites all political factions. Left to their own devises, each will vie for control of the oil supply and revenues. But the power to determine whether oil is a source of division or unity could rest in the hands of the buyers. The world can manage without Libyan oil but Libya can’t survive without selling oil.
No one — apart from ISIS — has an interest in Libya becoming an irretrievably failed state.
Copenhagen gunman probably not part of organised cell, PM says
The Irish Times reports: Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said the gunman who attacked a free-speech event and a synagogue in Copenhagen over the weekend probably wasn‘t part of an organised cell.
“There is no indication“ of that, Ms Thorning-Schmidt said at a press conference on Monday, at which she identified as a Danish citizen the man thought to be behind what she described as acts of terror.
Police killed a 22-year-old suspect during a gunfight on Sunday, ending a shooting rampage that left dead a 55-year-old film maker and a 37-year-old Jewish man guarding a synagogue.
Police have since arrested two men under suspicion of having assisted the suspect. Security services are continuing their investigation as they try to piece together the events that led to the killings.
“We would very much like to get in contact with more witnesses that have seen the perpetrator,” police said in a statement. They have so far declined to name the suspect.
According to Danish media, the killer was Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein. His parents are from Palestine and also lived in Jordan before coming to Denmark, broadcaster TV2 reported.
Mr El-Hussein was described by classmates as a loner with a hot temper and anger toward Israel and Jews, according to newspaper Politiken.
In November 2013, he knifed a 19-year-old on a commuter train and was sentenced to two years in jail for aggravated assault, TV2 said. He was released just two weeks before the weekend shootings, local media said.
While in jail, he expressed sympathy with Islamic State and said he was interested in going to Syria to fight, Berlingske reported. According to a pre-trial assessment, El-Hussein wasn’t found to be insane, TV2 said. [Continue reading…]
Ukraine ceasefire in tatters as fighting escalates in east
The Guardian: Fighting has escalated in eastern Ukraine as government and pro-Russia forces struggle for control of the besieged town of Debaltseve, leaving the new ceasefire in tatters on its second day.
The Ukrainian military said on Monday that rebels had fired on its troops 112 times in the past 24 hours. At least five Ukrainian fighters have been killed and 25 wounded since the ceasefire began on Sunday, a military spokesman, Vladislav Seleznyov, told the Guardian.
Most of the fighting was concentrated around Debaltseve, where thousands of soldiers have been cut off from the main Ukrainian lines near Artemivsk by rebel artillery. Pro-Russia forces have been trying for weeks to take the town, which holds a rail junction connecting the main rebel centres of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Why does Putin want Ukraine’s rust-belt?
The Economist: Many Westerners find Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine mystifying. It has brought Russia economic woe (sanctions and a shattered credit rating) and international isolation. Why fight so hard for a slice of another country’s rust-belt? Is it part of a sinister strategy to divide and weaken the West, an irrational outbreak of paranoia about an imagined outside threat to Russia, or a desperate attempt to distract domestic opinion from the regime’s political and economic failure?
The Kremlin has annexed the Crimean peninsula (the site of an important Russian naval base) and stoked a separatist rebellion in two of Ukraine’s easternmost provinces, Lugansk and Donetsk. The rebels, with strong Russian military and intelligence backing, have proclaimed “people’s republics” there and have continued to advance into the rest of Ukraine, in defiance of a ceasefire agreed in Minsk in September. Ukraine is losing the war and is desperate for financial and military help from the West. America is mulling arms deliveries, but holding back to see if a last-ditch Franco-German diplomatic deal can bring a truce. Few outside Russia believe the Kremlin’s justification for the war. Russians in Ukraine were not being persecuted. The government in Kiev is not “fascist” (extreme-right parties fare worse in Ukraine than they do in Western Europe). Far from menacing Russia, NATO countries have slashed defence spending, just as Russia is rearming. The three main theories about Vladimir Putin’s motivations could be summed up as “bad”, “mad” or “sad”.
How to make $70 billion look much bigger than $265 billion
The Economist has ingeniously created a way of making Russian defense spending look much greater than European NATO defense spending, even though the latter is almost four times as much as the former:
"How do we make 265 seem smaller than 70?" asked the editors… @AmyJaffeenergy http://t.co/CZ4XYL68a0 pic.twitter.com/1wvBg6YKiy
— Robert Farley (@drfarls) February 16, 2015
Will big data allow China to create the perfect surveillance state?
James Palmer writes: On 5 July 2009, residents of Xinjiang, China’s far western province, found the internet wasn’t working. It’s a regular frustration in remote areas, but it rapidly became apparent that this time it wasn’t coming back. The government had hit the kill switch on the entire province when a protest in the capital Ürümqi by young Uighur men (of the area’s indigenous Turkic population) turned into a riot against the Han Chinese, in which at least 197 people were killed.
The shutdown was intended to prevent similar uprisings by the Uighur, long subjected to religious and cultural repression, and to halt revenge attacks by Han. In that respect, it might have worked; officially, there was no fatal retaliation, but in retrospect the move came to be seen as an error.
Speaking anonymously, a Chinese security advisor described the blackout as ‘a serious mistake… now we are years behind where we could have been in tracking terrorists’. Young Uighur learnt to see the internet as hostile territory – a lesson reinforced by the arrest of Ilham Tohti, a popular professor of economics, on trumped-up charges of extremism linked to an Uighur-language website he administered. ‘We turn off our phones before we talk politics’, a tech-savvy Uighur acquaintance remarked.
The Uighur continued to consume digital media, but increasingly in off-line form, whether viewing discs full of Turkish TV series or jihadist propaganda passed on memory sticks. Where once Chinese media reports claimed that arrested Uighur had been visiting ‘separatist’ websites, now they noted drawers full of burnt DVDs and flash drives.
A series of brutal terrorist attacks early in 2014 reinforced the lesson for the Chinese authorities; by driving Uighur off-line they had thrown away valuable data. Last summer, the Public Security University in Beijing began recruiting overseas experts in data analysis, including, I’m told, former members of the Israeli security forces.
In Xinjiang, tightened control means less information, and the Chinese government has always had a fraught relationship with information – private and public. Today, an explosion in available data promises to open up sources of knowledge previously tightly locked away. To some, this seems a shift toward democracy. But technocrats within the government also see it as a way to create a more efficient form of authoritarianism. [Continue reading…]
The worst droughts in a thousand years are still to come
Pacific Standard: When it comes to water shortage, it seems the worst is yet to come. A new climate analysis indicates that by the end of the century, the United States Southwest and Central Plains regions are likely to experience drought conditions worse than any in the last millennium. These impending conditions could pose “a major adaptation challenge” for humans in a rapidly changing climate.
“We’re talking about megadrought risk,” says co-author of the study and Columbia University professor Toby Ault — an 80 percent chance or more of decades-long droughts before the end of the century.
Though it’s well established that droughts and other extreme climate events are likely to become more intense over the next century, Ault, along with climatologists Benjamin Cook and Jason Smerdon note that the Americas are no stranger to massive droughts, like the Medieval “megadrought” between roughly 1,100 and 1,300 C.E. and the Little Ice Age that followed several centuries later. This raises a vital question: Compared to those events, how bad will the coming droughts be? [Continue reading…]
Music: SKRUK & Mahsa Vahdat — ‘Med Blomster I Fang’
Egyptian and Libyan warplanes bomb ISIS targets
Reuters: Egypt’s air force bombed Islamic State targets inside Libya on Monday, a day after the group released a video showed the beheading of 21 Egyptians there, marking an escalation in Cairo’s battle against militants.
It was the first time Egypt confirmed launching air strikes against the group in neighbouring Libya, showing President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is ready to expand his fight against Islamist militancy beyond Egypt’s borders.
Egypt said the dawn strike, in which Libya’s air force also participated, hit Islamic State camps, training sites and weapons storage areas in Libya, where civil conflict has plunged the country into near anarchy and created havens for militia.
A Libyan air force commander said between 40 to 50 militants were killed in the attack. “There are casualties among individuals, ammunition and the (Islamic State) communication centres,” Saqer al-Joroushi told Egyptian state television.
“More air strikes will be carried out today and tomorrow in coordination with Egypt,” he said.
Reuters also reports Egypt has once again called for the formation of an international coalition to fight ISIS in Libya. Meanwhile, Libya’s Tripoli-based parliament strongly condemned Monday’s airstrikes.
Anti-ISIS forces advance towards Raqqa stronghold
Reuters: Kurdish forces backed by Syrian insurgent groups took control of a hill inside the provincial stronghold of the militant Islamic State group on Sunday after deadly clashes, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Kurdish forces, supported by U.S.-led air strikes, drove Islamic State fighters from the town of Kobani last month near the Turkish border and have pushed them back from surrounding villages in northern Syria. Islamic State still holds tracts of land across northern and eastern Syria and into Iraq.
Now the Kurds and other local fighters who oppose Islamic State have taken a hill south of Kobani which lies within Raqqa province – the stronghold of the al Qaeda offshoot in Syria, said the Observatory, which tracks the conflict through sources on the ground.
“It is the first time they get into Raqqa,” the Observatory’s founder Rami Abdulrahman said. He added that at least 35 Islamic State fighters and four members of the Kurdish forces had been killed on Sunday in battles near Kobani, which were the heaviest since the Kurds took back the town.
Copenhagen attacks: Danish police charge two men
The Guardian: Two men detained on Sunday have been charged with aiding the suspect in the Copenhagen terror attacks.
A 22-year-old Danish-born gunman killed a film director and a young Jewish man at the weekend in Denmark’s most lethal terror attack in decades.
The defence lawyer for one of the detained men said they were accused of helping the gunman evade authorities and get rid of a weapon during the manhunt that ended early on Sunday when the attacker was killed in a shootout with police.
The suspects, arraigned at a closed hearing on Monday, were accused of “having helped the perpetrator in connection with the shooting attacks”, Copenhagen police said.
Michael Juul Eriksen, defence attorney for one of the men, told reporters they deny the allegations. A judge at the hearing will rule on whether to keep the men in custody.
The suspected gunman has been named in local media as Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein. He was reportedly released from prison a few weeks ago after serving a sentence for knife crime. Police did not confirm the name.
ISIS beheads 21 Egyptian Copts in Libya. How will Sisi respond?
Ian Black writes: The latest video horror apparently released by the Islamic State (Isis) shows the mass beheading of 21 Egyptian Copts in Libya and underlines the alarming spread of the jihadi group far from the familiar killing fields of Syria and Iraq.
The gruesome film – the victims again kneeling in orange jumpsuits – confirms what had been signalled a few days ago by Isis propagandists. The language directed at these Arab Christians is as hateful and sectarian as that employed against Shia Muslims and the western journalists and aid workers whose murder by Isis has so far attracted most attention internationally.
Like the recent immolation of Jordanian pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh captured by the extremists in Syria, this mass killing will horrify Egyptian and wider Arab and Muslim opinion. The authorities in Cairo and their conservative allies in the Gulf are deeply alarmed by the growing chaos in Libya. Egypt and the UAE have already intervened against Islamist forces and may do so again now more forcefully. [Continue reading…]
In January, The Telegraph reported on the circumstances of the abductions: It was the early hours phone call that would save his life. As militants went from house to house, pulling Christians from their rooms, Youssef Zekry was woken suddenly.
Don’t open the door, said a voice on the line. It was his friend, Atef, who was also cowering from the gang outside.
As footsteps approached, Mr Zekry sat waiting for the knock. It never came.
“We could hear they were about to break down the door,” he said. “But then a voice said, ‘We have enough, let’s go…’ Then the footsteps retreated.”
That was January 4. Mr Zekry had just witnessed – and narrowly escaped – one of the most targeted acts of violence against Christians since the start of the Arab Spring, and the worst to befall them in Libya since it was liberated from the dictatorship of Col Muammar Gaddafi.
That liberation came thanks to an alliance including secular activists, Islamist fighters, and the air forces of the western world. It is an alliance that has now fractured, a breach that is plunging the country into chaos.
The victims are ordinary Libyan people, who have been assassinated, shelled, and killed in the cross-fire of the Arab world’s latest civil war. But on this occasion, it was Egyptians, Coptic Christians trying to escape poverty back home and find work in their supposedly oil-rich neighbour, who were targeted.
“They knew who they wanted, and they asked for them by name,” said Mr Zekry, now back in his home village of Al-Our in central Egypt. “They had a list with all our names on it.”
He was lucky. Eyewitnesses saw fourteen other men led away in handcuffs. Their masked captors carried the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The group had only announced its existence in Libya a few weeks before – a nadir in the country’s descent into post-Gaddafi chaos.
Reuters: Islamic State released a video on Sunday that appeared to show the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warned that his country would respond to the deaths as it saw fit.
Speaking on national television hours after the release of the video, Sisi said Cairo would choose the “necessary means and timing to avenge the criminal killings”.
However Egypt responds, it’s worth remembering the slaughter of Copts by the Egyptian Army in October 2011 in Maspiro.
Believe it or not, three years ago the Egyptian military ran over more Copts in Egypt than Da'ish killed in Libya, and nothing happened.
— Wael Eskandar (@weskandar) February 15, 2015
Warning: This video contains disturbing images.