Western women joining ISIS militants are ‘cheerleaders, not victims’

AFP reports: Western women who join Islamic State militants are driven by the same ideological passion as many male recruits and should be seen as potentially dangerous cheerleaders, not victims, experts said Wednesday.

A new study from the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) said the estimated 550 women who have travelled to Iraq and Syria are expected to marry, keep house and bear children.

But despite being banned from fighting, many are active propagandists for the cause on social media, celebrating the brutal violence of IS militants, acting as recruiting sergeants and even encouraging attacks abroad.

“The violent language and dedication to the cause is as strong as we find in some of the men,” said co-author Ross Frenett, an extremism expert.

“The worry is that as ISIS (the IS group) loses ground, as everyone hopes it does, that more and more of these women will transfer from the domestic world they’re in now to a more violent one,” he told AFP. [Continue reading…]

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Boko Haram rampage in NE Nigeria where there are no government troops

The Associated Press reports: Islamic extremists are rampaging through villages in northeastern Nigeria, killing, burning and looting with no troops protecting civilians, fleeing villagers said Wednesday.

More than 40 people have been killed in seven villages in Adamawa state this week, according to resident Emmanuel Kwache.

“They slaughtered people like rams and they burned down our houses after looting food,” Kwache said. “There’s no presence of troops, some residents are hiding on top of hills, while those that could not run were abducted, particularly youths and women.”

State legislator Adamu Kamale said he has appealed in vain for troops since the attacks began on Friday. On Monday the militants moved into Michika town, he said. [Continue reading…]

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Reining in Argentina’s spymasters

Horacio Verbitsky writes: On Jan. 14, a prosecutor named Alberto Nisman accused Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, of covering up Iran’s alleged role in a 1994 terrorist attack.

Mr. Nisman was found dead four days later, just hours before he was scheduled to present his findings to Argentina’s Congress. Newspaper headlines around the world suggest that the government is somehow responsible for one of these tragedies or both. I don’t buy it.

Before he was found with a bullet in his head, Mr. Nisman had spent almost a decade investigating the worst terrorist attack in Argentina’s history — the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people in July 1994. His death shocked the country and deflected attention from his 290-page accusatory affidavit. The opposition saw the congressional hearing as a weapon against the government; the ruling party, meanwhile, was preparing to poke holes in the affidavit.

The media is now leaking fragments of 5,000 hours of intelligence wiretaps, in which neither the president nor the foreign minister make an appearance. Also, rumors abound about whether Mr. Nisman was murdered or killed himself.

Mrs. Kirchner has flip-flopped between assuming it was a suicide and, later, suggesting it was not. It is an election year and although she cannot run for another term, her vacillating has not helped her party.

Speculation aside, it is important to question the accuracy of the charges made in the affidavit itself, which points a finger at Iran. The document, which has been published online in Spanish, is self-contradictory. [Continue reading…]

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Senator slams CIA panel conclusions on Hill spying

McClatchy reports: The former chair of the Senate Intelligence committee excoriated a report on the CIA’s searches of computers used by her staff as riddled with “mistakes and omissions.”

In a statement Tuesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein rejected the CIA accountability board’s conclusions that five agency personnel shouldn’t be penalized for searching computers used by her staff to compile a scathing report on the torture of detainees.

“The bottom line is that the CIA accessed a Senate Intelligence Committee computer network without authorization, in clear violation of a signed agreement…,” said Feinstein, reiterating an assertion that the searches violated “the constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch.”

The California Democrat added: “Someone should be held accountable.”

The Dec. 14 findings by the accountability board appeared to draw to a close without a final resolution the most damaging battle ever fought between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the powers of the spy agency’s congressional overseers. [Continue reading…]

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Who can become a head of state?

A new Pew Research analysis finds that 30 of the world’s countries (15%) belong to a unique group of nations that call for their heads of state to have a particular religious affiliation. From monarchies to republics, candidates (including descendants of royal monarchies) in these countries must belong to a specific religious group.

This list includes Lebanon, which requires its president to be a member of the Maronite Christian Church. On Wednesday, Lebanon’s parliament will make a ninth attempt since May at filling the office.

More than half of the countries with religion-related restrictions on their heads of state (17) maintain that the office must be held by a Muslim. In Jordan, for example, the heir to the throne must be a Muslim child of Muslim parents. In Tunisia, any Muslim male or female voter born in the country may qualify as a candidate for president. Malaysia, Pakistan and Mauritania also restrict their heads of state to Muslim citizens.

Two countries, Lebanon and Andorra, require their heads of state to have a Christian affiliation. Lebanon also has a religious requirement of its prime minister, who must be a Sunni Muslim.

Two other countries require the heads of their monarchies be Buddhist: Bhutan and Thailand. And one country, Indonesia, requires the official state belief in Pancasila to be upheld by its head of state. Indonesia is a Muslim-majority country; Pancasila is a summation of “common cultural elements” of Indonesia, including belief in God.

A handful of countries do not require a particular religious affiliation for heads of state, but do limit candidates for the office to laypersons. Eight countries, including Bolivia, Mexico and El Salvador, specifically prohibit clergy from running in presidential elections. In Burma (Myanmar), the president is prohibited from being a member of a religious order.

Countries where the head of state is a ceremonial monarch.In addition to the 30 countries in this analysis, another 19 nations have religious requirements for ceremonial monarchs who serve as their heads of state. Sixteen of these, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, are members of the Commonwealth of Nations with Queen Elizabeth II – also known as the Defender of the Faith – as their head of state. The other countries in this category are Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Before Americans start feeling too smug about the secular traditions of this country, it’s worth being reminded about one of the most irony-laden clauses of the U.S. Constitution: the natural-born-citizen clause.

Only a “natural born” American can become president — a native American, one might say, so long as it was understood this didn’t actually mean a native American.

Only a nation of immigrants invested deeply in an a relentless denial of its own history could fabricate such a contrived definition of what it means to be a real American. “Natural born” is really just another name for xenophobia.

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Ancient planets are almost as old as the universe

New Scientist reports: The Old Ones were already ancient when the Earth was born. Five small planets orbit an 11.2 billion-year-old star, making them about 80 per cent as old as the universe itself. That means our galaxy started building rocky planets earlier than we thought.

“Now that we know that these planets can be twice as old as Earth, this opens the possibility for the existence of ancient life in the galaxy,” says Tiago Campante at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope spotted the planets around an orange dwarf star called Kepler 444, which is 117 light years away and about 25 per cent smaller than the sun.

Orange dwarfs are considered good candidates for hosting alien life because they can stay stable for up to 30 billion years, compared to the sun’s 10 billion years, the time it takes these stars to consume all their hydrogen. For context, the universe is currently 13.8 billion years old.

Since, as far as we know, life begins by chance, older planets would have had more time to allow life to get going and evolve. But it was unclear whether planets around such an old star could be rocky – life would have a harder time on gassy planets without a solid surface. [Continue reading…]

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Kurds celebrate liberation of Kobane as ISIS calls for new Paris-style attacks

Vice News reports: On Monday, the same day Kurdish fighters in Syria decisively broke the Islamic State’s bloody and sustained siege of Kobane, a senior leader of the extremist group called for jihadists to carry out fresh Paris-style attacks across Europe.

Fireworks lit up the dark night in Turkish and Syrian towns and refugee camps across the border from the embattled Syrian town of Kobane Monday night, while elated Kurdish residents bearing flame torches flooded the streets, celebrating the liberation of their friends, family, and neighbors, who until earlier that morning had been under militant control since September. In the distance, the Kurdish flag flapped silently on a hill east of Kobane — a declaration of the resilience of peshmerga fighters and rebel brigades who had fought deadly battles to drive out the extremists for four months. [Continue reading…]

David L. Phillips writes: The battle for Kobani is significant for several reasons:

  • It’s a major setback for Daesh’s propaganda campaign. Daesh uses its aura of invincibility to gain recruits. In Kobani, Daesh was bloodied and beaten.
  • It has brought global attention to the Kurds of Syria and their social revolution, which is based on grass-roots democracy, women’s empowerment, and environmental sustainability.
  • It was a public-relations disaster for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey sealed its border to cut off Kobani’s defenders. Erdogan demanded that the U.S. impose a no-fly-zone and a security buffer in exchange for Turkey’s cooperation with the U.S.-led multinational coalition fighting Daesh. Many observers (including this author) allege Turkey is providing military, logistical, financial and medical support for Daesh and other jihadists.
  • It did what no Kurdish leader could do: Kurds from Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran found common cause in forming a united front against terrorism and the Islamic State’s fascist nihilism.

The Islamic State’s defeat in Syria followed a victory for the Peshmerga in Sinjar, where they defeated Daesh and saved thousands of Yazidis. The Iraqi armed forces is also rolling up Daesh in Iraq’s Diyala province.

Despite these battlefield gains, challenges remain. Thousands of displaced persons need assistance resettling to their ruined homes in Kobani. Villages around Kobani are still under control of Daesh. Cooperation between Washington and the Democratic Union Party, which represents Syrian Kurds, is shallow and should expand.

Today Kurds rejoice. The world applauds their heroism — and joins their celebration.

When Daesh’s obituary is written, Kobani will be enshrined as the turning point in the struggle to destroy the Islamic State.

Reuters adds: Turkish police fired tear gas on Tuesday to stop people trying to cross back into Kobani to celebrate its retaking, a Kurdish politician and a journalist said. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey won’t accept Iraq-style Kurdish rule in Syria, says Erdoğan

Today’s Zaman reports: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ruled out any possibility of accepting an autonomous Kurdish government in northern Syria similar to the one in northern Iraq, saying a government like this would cause major problems in the future.

In his remarks to reporters on his way back to Turkey after an African tour, Erdoğan criticized the United States’ policy on Syria, which doesn’t involve toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“[The US] doesn’t want to make moves that target the [Syrian] regime. It says [toppling the government] is not among its targets. If it doesn’t take place, there won’t be any solution. What would happen? The same thing that happened in Iraq will happen. We don’t want a new Iraq. What is this? Northern Iraq… [We don’t want] a northern Syria to appear! It is not possible for us to accept this,” Erdoğan said.

“I know the burden on Turkey is heavy. We have to keep our stance [firm] on this issue. Otherwise, after a northern Iraq, there would be a northern Syria. These formations will cause big problems in the future,” he concluded.

Erdoğan also pointed to the three Kurdish autonomous administrations formed by Syrian Kurds in January 2014, and once more scolded the US for only placing importance on Kobani. [Continue reading…]

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Yanis Varoufakis — Greece’s new finance minister

The New York Times reports: The leftist-led coalition that won Greece’s elections unveiled its government on Tuesday, with the crucial post of finance minister going to an economist who has called the eurozone’s austerity policies “fiscal waterboarding.”

The new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, a professor and avid blogger, will confront Greece’s international creditors in tough talks over the austerity policies, widely despised by the Greeks. Those talks could have profound consequences for Greece, the future of the euro currency and the financial integration of the European Union.

Twenty-two ministries have been streamlined to 10 in the new cabinet, all but one held by members of Syriza, the radical-left party that won the most votes in the Sunday elections and that has vowed to renegotiate the country’s onerous debts.

The Defense Ministry post went to Panos Kammenos, the leader of Syriza’s coalition partner, the right-wing Independent Greeks, and a handful of deputy posts went to his colleagues.

But the most important post filled by the new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, the 40-year-old leader of Syriza, was his choice of finance minister: Mr. Varoufakis, 53, who left a teaching post at the University of Texas to join Syriza’s election campaign. [Continue reading…]

Yanis Varoufakis interviewed by Johanna Jaufer: You have been a politician for only three weeks now…

Two weeks.

Have you had to think it over very much? In your blog you wrote that you were frightened, too.

It was a major decision. Primarily, because I entered politics in order to do a job that I always thought should be done and I was offered the opportunity to do it. It has to do with the negotiations between Greece and the European Union if Syriza wins, which is an extremely scary project and prospect. At the same time I am an academic, I am a citizen, an active citizen, so I am used to dialogue where the point of the conversation really should be that I learn from you and you learn from me – we are going to have disagreements, but through these disagreements we enrich each other’s points of view.

It’s not about winning the other one over…

That’s right – actually in politics, it is worse: each side tries to destroy the other side – in the eyes of the public – and that is something that is completely alien to me and something that I didn’t want to get used to.

What about your university job? Have you put it on hold?

Yes, indeed. I have resigned from University of Texas. I still retain my chair at the University of Athens – without pay – and hopefully it won’t be too long before I return to it.

Wouldn’t you be ready to stay in a government for a longer time?

No, I don’t want to make a career out of politics. Ideally, I would like somebody else to do it, and to do it better than I. It’s just that this was a window of opportunity, because Syriza rising to power is a precedence. So, it was a small window of opportunity to get something done that would not have been done otherwise. I’m not a prophet, so I can’t tell you where I will be in two, three, five, ten years. But if you’re asking me now, my ideal outcome would be that our government succeeds in renegotiating a deal with Europe that renders Greece sustainable, and then other people, you know… power should be rotated, no one should grow particularly fond of it. [Continue reading…]

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Greece has voted for a new politics, not just a new party

Yiannis Baboulias writes: Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, anyone familiar with the Greek nation and its politics would have been surprised by the events of Sunday night. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras addressed a crowd of thousands who had gathered in central Athens to celebrate his party’s general election victory. The new Greek Prime Minister—state educated, young and not related to previous prime ministers—is unlike any of his predecessors. His party is a coalition of the radical left, that was born as a fringe party six years ago.

“The Greek people gave us a clear, indisputable mandate to end austerity,” said Tsipras. But despite the fact Syriza is the outright winner, it didn’t quite manage to get the seats it needed to form a majority government (increasing its share of the vote from 4.6 per cent in 2009, to more than 36 per cent now.) Yesterday we learned that it would form a coalition with the populist right, anti-austerity party Independent Greeks.

Analysts rightly point out that the parties will be uneasy bedfellows. Syriza comes from a breakaway faction of the traditional communist party, and is itself a coalition of smaller entities that range from the centre-left to anarchism. The Independent Greeks on the other hand broke away from the centre-right party New Democracy when it signed up to austerity after its election in 2012. [Continue reading…]

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The news website that’s keeping press freedom alive in Egypt

Leslie T Chang reports: On the afternoon of 17 June 2013, a group of friends gathered in a fourth-floor apartment in downtown Cairo. They sat on the floor because there were no chairs; there were also no desks, no shelves, and no ashtrays. A sign on the door, written in black marker, read “Office of the Artists Formerly Known as Egypt Independent”. What they had was a name – Mada, which means “span” or “range” in Arabic, had been chosen after much debate and many emails between 24 people – and a plan to set up an independent news outlet. Most of them had not seen each other since their former employer, a newspaper called Egypt Independent, closed two months before.

Lina Attalah, the venture’s founder and editor-in-chief, called the meeting to order. Designers were rushing to finish the website; a team was drafting a business plan; half a dozen grant applications were pending. “The update is: there’s no money,” she said, to laughter, “but we have a lot of promises. I’m working on the faith that the money will be there.” She signed off on 17 articles to be delivered over the next week. Lina is dark-eyed and fine-boned, with long black hair; she speaks in lengthy and well-wrought sentences that suggest a professor teaching a graduate seminar. Nothing in her demeanour betrayed the pressures she felt. The company had no cash to pay its writers. She was covering the rent and furnishing the office out of her own pocket. This would be, by her count, her seventh news venture; many of the previous ones had folded owing to the hostility of successive governments towards independent-minded journalists (“I have a history of setting up places that close”). Although she was only 30 and didn’t have a husband or children, Lina was accustomed to taking care of other people.

The website had to launch by 30 June, the day that a mass demonstration calling for the resignation of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s president, was planned. Lina was determined about that – “I want everyone to be a journalist on that day” – but otherwise her timing could not have been worse. In the previous two and a half years, investment in Egypt had dried up; many foreign companies had evacuated their staff during the 2011 revolution and not returned. Morsi’s year in office had seen decreasing stability and a stagnant economy. Whatever came next – people were calling for the army to step in – could be more repressive.

“I think it could just be slow-motion state failure,” Lina said.

“Not state failure,” objected Dina Hussein, a close friend from college and the new website’s opinion editor. “Of course, the infrastructure is shit, there’s no electricity …”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Lina interrupted. “Not complete collapse.”

“Lebanon, not Somalia,” Dina said.

“It could be state failure for the next 10 years,” Lina said.

Everything about the project belied this pessimism. Mada Masr would be an independent online newspaper, owned by employees whose average age was 25, in a country where news production was controlled by the government or large conglomerates. It would produce stories, in English and Arabic, and make money from online advertising and side businesses in research, editing and translation. The company would be run as a democracy – in a country that had never seen such a system, by employees who, by and large, had not experienced it in practice. Egypt was ostensibly on a parallel course of building a democratic and sustainable state; both ventures were perilous, fraught with uncertainty, and short of money. In the year and a half to come, Mada’s goals would prove more daunting than its founders imagined. A military coup, set into motion three days after the website launched, would lead to the ruthless suppression of dissenting voices. Mada would emerge as one of the very few independent news sources in the country. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS said to execute 10 doctors in Mosul for refusing to treat wounded fighters

Rudaw reports: The Islamic State (ISIS) executed 10 physicians in Mosul for refusing to treat the group’s wounded fighters, well-placed sources in Mosul said.

They reported Monday that ISIS had shot the physicians over their refusal to treat jihadi fighters wounded in clashes or shelling.

“Because of extensive attacks and shelling on ISIS, the hospitals of the city (Mosul) are filled with ISIS wounded fighters,” said a source in Mosul. “ISIS has evacuated all other patients in the hospitals in order to treat its own wounded fighters,” he added. “Medical equipment is only being used to treat ISIS fighters.” [Continue reading…]

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The Holocaust’s forgotten victims: The 5 million non-Jewish people killed by the Nazis

The Huffington Post reports: Six million Jewish people were murdered during the genocide in Europe in the years leading up to 1945, and the Jews are rightly remembered as the group that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party most savagely persecuted during the Holocaust.

But the Nazis targeted many other groups: for their race, beliefs or what they did.

Historians estimate the total number of deaths to be 11 million, with the victims encompassing gay people, priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s failed mission to arm Syrian rebels

The Wall Street Journal reports: It didn’t take long for rebel commanders in Syria who lined up to join a Central Intelligence Agency weapons and training program to start scratching their heads.

After the program was launched in mid-2013, CIA officers secretly analyzed cellphone calls and email messages of commanders to make sure they were really in charge of the men they claimed to lead. Commanders were then interviewed, sometimes for days.

Those who made the cut, earning the label “trusted commanders,” signed written agreements, submitted payroll information about their fighters and detailed their battlefield strategy. Only then did they get help, and it was far less than they were counting on.

Some weapons shipments were so small that commanders had to ration ammunition. One of the U.S.’s favorite trusted commanders got the equivalent of 16 bullets a month per fighter. Rebel leaders were told they had to hand over old antitank missile launchers to get new ones—and couldn’t get shells for captured tanks. When they appealed last summer for ammo to battle fighters linked to al Qaeda, the U.S. said no.

All sides now agree that the U.S.’s effort to aid moderate fighters battling the Assad regime has gone badly. The CIA program was the riskiest foray into Syria since civil war erupted in 2011.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is clinging to power after more than 200,000 deaths blamed on the war. Moderate fighters control only a fraction of northern Syria, while Islamic State and al Qaeda’s official affiliate, the Nusra Front, have gained ground. Last fall, Nusra overran one trusted commander and seized another’s equipment.

Entire CIA-backed rebel units, including fighters numbering in the “low hundreds” who went through the training program, have changed sides by joining forces with Islamist brigades, quit the fight or gone missing.

“We walk around Syria with a huge American flag planted on our backs, but we don’t have enough AK-47s in our hands to protect ourselves,” a leader of the Hazzm Movement, among the most trusted of the trusted commanders, told U.S. lawmakers in a meeting after Nusra’s advances.

The CIA recently stopped offering help to all but a few trusted commanders in Syria. Much of the U.S.’s focus is shifting to southern Syria, where rebels seem more unified but say they get just 5% to 20% of the arms requested from the CIA. [Continue reading…]

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Obama cuts off Syrian rebels’ cash

The Daily Beast reports: In the past several months, many of the Syrian rebel groups previously favored by the CIA have had their money and supplies cut off or substantially reduced, even as President Obama touted the strategic importance of American support for the rebels in his State of the Union address.

The once-favored fighters are operating under a pall of confusion. In some cases, they were not even informed that money would stop flowing. In others, aid was reduced due to poor battlefield performance, compounding already miserable morale on the ground.

From afar, the U.S.-approved and partially American-armed Syrian “opposition” seems to be a single large, if rather amorphous, organization. But in fact it’s a collection of “brigades” of varying sizes and potentially shifting loyalties that have grown up around local leaders, or, if you will, local warlords. And while Washington talks about the Syrian “opposition” in general terms, the critical question for the fighters in the field and those supporting them is, “opposition to whom?” To Syrian President Assad? To the so-called Islamic State, widely known as ISIS or ISIL? To the al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra?

That lack of clarity is crippling the whole effort, not least because of profound suspicions among rebel groups that Washington is ready to cut some sort of deal with Assad in the short or medium term if, indeed, it has not done so already. [Continue reading…]

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