A former Israeli soldier’s story — Eran Efrati
Kurds move to retake Mosul dam as U.S. bombing weakens ISIS
The New York Times reports: Seizing on the momentum of focused American airstrikes in recent days, Kurdish forces moved to retake the strategic Mosul Dam on Sunday night, in their most significant challenge yet to the Sunni militants’ advance in northern Iraq.
The American assaults hit 10 armed vehicles, seven Humvees, two armored personnel carriers and one checkpoint belonging to fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the United States Central Command said Sunday.
In the past two days, United States forces have conducted 30 airstrikes across Iraq, officials said, with many of them focused around the dam, which militants captured after routing the Kurdish forces 10 days ago. A statement from the National Security Council in Washington on Sunday said that the bombings were ordered by President Obama to help the Iraqi forces “retake and establish control over the Mosul Dam.”
Mr. Obama, the statement added, also officially informed Congress that he had authorized the American airstrikes in Iraq, consistent with the War Powers Resolution.
As of late Sunday, Kurdish government officials said fighting around the dam complex, Iraq’s largest, was continuing, despite early reports that the site had been retaken.
“We do not control the entire dam yet,” said Fuad Hussein, a spokesman for Massoud Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish president, in a televised statement.
The air campaign has seemed to check the militants’ move against the semiautonomous Kurdish region, an offensive that sent tens of thousands of refugees fleeing and at one point threatened the Kurdish capital, Erbil.
By hammering the militants with warplanes and drones, the Americans have severely curtailed the freedom of movement enjoyed by the ISIS fighters.
It remains to be seen how the Kurdish forces, known as the pesh merga, may fare if the air support is halted, despite Mr. Obama’s suggestion that it could last for months. Having lost significant ground during the ISIS fighters’ sudden advance this month, Kurdish forces have shown that they may not be able to go it alone. The forces pushing into the Mosul Dam area are believed to include the Iraqi Special Forces, making the operation a hybrid of American, Kurdish and Iraqi commands.
Kurdish officials acknowledge that the airstrikes have been vital to recent success in halting the militants’ onslaught. For their part, pesh merga officials have complained bitterly about inferior arms compared with those used by the militants, who have claimed powerful American munitions abandoned on the battlefield by the Iraqi military. [Continue reading…]
Music: Pat Metheny & The Metropole Orkest — ‘First Circle’
The Metropole Orkest (or Metropole Orchestra), a jazz and pop orchestra based in the Netherlands, is the largest full-time ensemble of its kind in the world.
Eduardo Galeano: A lost and found history of lives and dreams (some broken)
Who isn’t a fan of something — or someone? So consider this my fan’s note. To my mind, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano is among the greats of our time. His writing has “it” — that indefinable quality you can’t describe but know as soon as you read it. He’s created a style that combines the best of journalism, history, and fiction and a form for his books that, as far as I know, has no name but involves short bursts of almost lyrical reportage, often about events long past. As it turns out, he also carries “it” with him. I was his English-language book editor years ago and can testify to that, even though on meeting him you might not initially think so. He has nothing of the showboat about him. In person, he’s almost self-effacing and yet somehow he brings out in others the urge to tell stories as they’ve never told them before.
Call it charisma if you want (though I still remember a professor of mine pointing out, in reference to Chinese leader Mao Zedong, that what’s charisma to one is zilch to another). Explain it as you will, from Memory of Fire, his three-volume history of the Americas, to his recent Children of the Days, a kind of prayer book for our time, he’s never stopped telling us our own stories in ways we haven’t heard them before.
At some point in Galeano’s life as a collector of stories, history decided to trust him and spilled its secrets to him. In 2009, he returned the favor by writing one of the great books of this century, Mirrors, a history of humanity in 366 episodes, from our first myths to late last night. Thanks to his publisher, Nation Books, and his devoted literary agent, Susan Bergholz, I’ve chosen 12 of my own favorites from that work for your summer pleasure. Think of this post as a Galeano-esque mini-history of our last century of turmoil through a kaleidoscope of “characters,” human and inanimate — and then get your hands on Mirrors and read the whole thing for yourself. Tom Engelhardt
Century of disaster
Riddles, lies, and lives — from Fidel Castro and Muhammad Ali to Albert Einstein and Barbie
By Eduardo Galeano[The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s history of humanity, Mirrors (Nation Books).]
Stalin
He learned to write in the language of Georgia, his homeland, but in the seminary the monks made him speak Russian.
Years later in Moscow, his south Caucasus accent still gave him away.
So he decided to become more Russian than the Russians. Was not Napoleon, who hailed from Corsica, more French than the French? And was not Catherine the Great, who was German, more Russian than the Russians?
The Georgian, Iosif Dzhugashvili, chose a Russian name. He called himself Stalin, which means “steel.”
The man of steel expected his son to be made of steel too: from childhood, Stalin’s son Yakov was tempered in fire and ice and shaped by hammer blows.
It did not work. He was his mother’s child. At the age of 19, Yakov wanted no more of it, could bear no more.
He pulled the trigger.
The gunshot did not kill him.
He awoke in the hospital. At the foot of the bed, his father commented:
“You can’t even get that right.”
Do police need grenade launchers, other military weapons? Officers say yes
Detroit Free Press: Michigan police departments have armed themselves with grenade launchers, armored vehicles, automatic rifles and other equipment — 128,000 items in all, worth an estimated $43 million — under a federal program that allows police to obtain surplus gear free from the U.S. military.
A Free Press review of items transferred from the military since 2006 shows Michigan law enforcement agencies have received 17 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles or MRAPs, built to counter roadside bombs; 1,795 M16 rifles, the U.S. military’s combat weapon of choice; 696 M14 rifles; 530 bayonet and scabbards; 165 utility trucks; 32 12-gauge, riot-type shotguns; nine grenade launchers; and three observation helicopters.
Federal officials won’t say which agencies got equipment, but the Free Press inquiry shows it went not just to large counties with high crime, but some of the state’s smallest counties and towns. [Continue reading…]
Haider al-Abadi’s choices will determine Iraq’s viability as a state
Ali Khedery assesses Iraq’s newly designated prime minister, Haider al-Abadi: Like Mr. Maliki, Mr. Abadi is a Shiite Islamist Arab and a longtime leader in the Dawa Party, an entity that was founded to combat Iraq’s pre-2003 secular state and create a Shiite theocracy. Fueled by generous support from Iran’s intelligence services, Dawa was motivated to bring about change by any means necessary in the 1980s. Its members staged terrorist attacks across Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East in a bid to weaken Hussein and his Western backers. The American and French embassies in Kuwait were bombed; a housing compound of the defense contractor Raytheon was overrun; and there were countless assassination attempts against Hussein and his senior deputies. Sensing an existential threat, the regime declared membership in Dawa to be a capital offense and thousands of suspected members were rounded up, tortured and executed.
Those events still resonate in every Iraqi leader’s mind — on both sides of the sectarian divide. The secular Sunnis and Shiites who were sympathetic to Hussein’s Baath Party rule view Dawa members and other Shiite Islamists as puppets of Iran. Likewise, they see Sunni Islamist parties like Speaker Salim al-Jubouri’s Iraqi Islamic Party as mere extensions of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamists see the secularists as drinking, smoking, whoring agents of Western intelligence services on an unholy crusade to separate mosque and state. Their visions of life, religion and politics are fundamentally incompatible, and that’s the heart of Iraqis’ violent struggle to define themselves and their future.
Increasing Iranian influence has only made matters worse. America sat back and watched in 2010 as Mr. Maliki’s cabinet was formed by Iranian generals in Tehran, thereby assuring its strategic defeat in Iraq. ISIS is a direct outgrowth of that defeat. Sensing an American vacuum, both Mr. Maliki and his Iranian patrons sought to consolidate their gains by economically, politically and physically crushing their Sunni and Kurdish rivals. Consequently, today’s “Iraqi security forces” are almost exclusively Shiite, reinforced by militias financed, trained, armed and directed by Iran. Given Mr. Maliki’s blatant sectarianism and his complicity in Bashar al-Assad’s campaign of genocide against Syria’s Sunnis, Sunni radicalization and the spread of ISIS across the region were predictable.
But if anyone has the potential to unite Iraq and hold it together in the face of ISIS terrorism and Iranian meddling, it is Mr. Abadi. In a society where name and upbringing count for a lot, he comes from a respected Baghdad family and was raised in an upscale neighborhood. He studied at one of the capital’s best high schools, earned a degree from one of its top universities and later received a doctorate in engineering in Britain.
While Mr. Maliki spent his years in exile in Iran and Syria and earned degrees in Islamic studies and Arabic literature, Mr. Abadi, a fluent English speaker, worked his own way through his long and costly studies abroad. In meetings over the past decade, Mr. Abadi always impressed me and other American diplomats with his self-effacing humor, humility, willingness to listen and ability to compromise — extremely rare traits among Iraq’s political elite, and precisely the characteristics that are needed to help heal the wounds Iraqis sustained under Hussein and Mr. Maliki. [Continue reading…]
Syrian airstrikes target ISIS
The Associated Press reports: Syrian government warplanes pounded an Islamic State group stronghold as well as other towns controlled by the jihadis Sunday, conducting more than a dozen airstrikes and killing at least 11 people, activists said.
For more than a year, President Bashar Assad’s air force rarely targeted territory controlled by the Islamic State group in northern Syria, instead focusing on mainstream rebel groups. But government jets have begun hitting the extremists more regularly since the jihadis overran much of neighboring northern and western Iraq in June.
Even in that context, the intensity of Sunday’s air raids appeared unusually high, with at least 19 strikes hitting the group’s stronghold of Raqqa in northeastern Syria, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Observatory directory Rami Abdurrahman said six of those raids targeted a military court.
He said at least 16 Islamic State members were killed in Raqqa, and around 40 wounded. He said there were an additional 22 civilian casualties, but he didn’t have an exact breakdown of dead and wounded. [Continue reading…]
ISIS: A portrait of the menace that is sweeping my homeland
Hassan Hassan writes: Abu al-Mutasim, 18, from a Syrian border town in the province of Deir Ezzor, joined the rebellion against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in early 2012. He left his family home in Bahrain, where his parents worked, and fought for the Free Syrian Army for a few months before joining the hardline group Ahrar al-Sham. Around the end of the year, disillusioned, he went to visit his family. His parents banned him from travelling back to Syria. But last summer he returned to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis), now renamed the Islamic State.
I asked him what he would do if his father were a member of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s official franchise in Syria, and the two met in a battle. “I would kill him,” he replied firmly. “Abu Ubaida [a prophet’s companion] killed his father in battle.” What drives people such as al-Mutasim? I faced this question directly recently, as I saw Deir Ezzor, the province where I too come from, overrun by Isis, and as the group carried out some of the Syrian conflict’s grisliest atrocities. [Continue reading…]
Kurdish forces take parts of Mosul dam from ISIS fighters
The Guardian reports: An Iraqi security official said on Sunday Kurdish forces have taken over parts of the country’s largest dam, which was captured by the Islamic State (Isis) extremist group earlier this month.
General Tawfik Desty told the Associated Press that peshmerga forces backed by Iraqi and US warplanes started the operation to retake Mosul Dam early on Sunday.
Desty, a commander with the Kurdish forces at the dam, which was seized on 7 August, said they now control the eastern part of the dam and that fighting is still underway.
The occupation is a political problem needing a political solution — not a humanitarian band-aid
Taghreed al-Khodary, former Gaza correspondent for the New York Times, said in an interview: Ending the siege is not a “Hamas demand.” It is the people’s demand. Gaza is still under occupation — it is an open jail. Israel always says, “We withdrew, we gave them land to control…” I am always shocked when I hear this line repeated by someone on CNN. The borders are completely controlled by Israel, the sea is completely controlled by Israel. The airspace is completely controlled by Israel. The crossings are completely controlled by Israel, aside from one crossing, controlled by Egypt—and this is now closed as well.
My father had cancer. Because he knew people, he managed to go to Israel to get treatment, but most others cannot. When he died two months ago while getting his cancer treatment in Israel, only my mother was allowed by Israel to join him. None of his daughters or brothers were permitted to join him. Imagine dying far away from your loved ones…the occupation is cruel.
What is happening in Gaza and throughout the occupied territories is not primarily a humanitarian issue, although there are devastating humanitarian side effects: It is a political issue. Focusing only on the humanitarian issues is a pretext not to have to come up with a long-term political solution.
U.S. firm helped the spyware industry build a potent digital weapon for sale overseas
Barton Gellman reports: CloudShield Technologies, a California defense contractor, dispatched a senior engineer to Munich in the early fall of 2009. His instructions were unusually opaque.
As he boarded the flight, the engineer told confidants later, he knew only that he should visit a German national who awaited him with an off-the-books assignment. There would be no written contract, and on no account was the engineer to send reports back to CloudShield headquarters.
His contact, Martin J. Muench, turned out to be a former developer of computer security tools who had long since turned to the darkest side of their profession. Gamma Group, the British conglomerate for which Muench was a managing director, built and sold systems to break into computers, seize control clandestinely, and then copy files, listen to Skype calls, record every keystroke and switch on Web cameras and microphones at will.
According to accounts the engineer gave later and contemporary records obtained by The Washington Post, he soon fell into a shadowy world of lucrative spyware tools for sale to foreign security services, some of them with records of human rights abuse.
Over several months, the engineer adapted Gamma’s digital weapons to run on his company’s specialized, high-speed network hardware. Until then CloudShield had sold its CS-2000 device, a multipurpose network and content processing product, primarily to the Air Force and other Pentagon customers, who used it to manage and defend their networks, not to attack others.
CloudShield’s central role in Gamma’s controversial work — fraught with legal risk under U.S. export restrictions — was first uncovered by Morgan Marquis-Boire, author of a new report released Friday by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. He shared advance drafts with The Post, which conducted its own month-long investigation. [Continue reading…]
Why Latin American leaders are standing up to Israel
Laura Carlsen writes: Since the Israeli offensive against Gaza began, images of Palestinian children murdered in their homes and schools and bombs exploding in neighborhoods have outraged people around the globe. Many governments have followed the United States, making empty declarations against the violence, as if the death dealing were equal and not overwhelmingly of Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli bombs and bullets.
But as the U.S. government backpedals to reconcile its unconditional support of Israel with basic principles of human rights and Europe waffles, one region stands out in its opposition to the siege of Gaza: Latin America. Leaders from across the region have condemned the Israel Defense Forces’ attacks on Gaza as excessive and unfair.
“I think what’s happening in the Gaza Strip is dangerous,” Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff told the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. “I don’t think it’s genocide, but I think it’s a massacre.”
Chile, currently a member of the U.N. Security Council, stated that the Israeli government “does not respect the fundamental norms of international humanitarian law.”
Uruguayan President José Mujica condemned the attacks in a weekly radio show. “The loss of perspective in the response is undermining Israel’s prestige and, I think, sullies the marvelous history of the Jewish people. Hatred and revenge do not work to build civilization,” he said. Bolivia’s Evo Morales went further, saying, “Israel does not guarantee the principle of respect for life and the basic right to live in harmony and peace in the international community,” adding that Israel was “passing onto the list of terrorist states.” [Continue reading…]
Dutch man saved Jewish boy from the Nazis. Israel killed six of his relatives in Gaza
The New York Times reports: In 1943, Henk Zanoli took a dangerous train trip, slipping past Nazi guards and checkpoints to smuggle a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the Dutch village of Eemnes. There, the Zanoli family, already under suspicion for resisting the Nazi occupation, hid the boy in their home for two years. The boy would be the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.
Seventy-one years later, on July 20, an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing six of Mr. Zanoli’s relatives by marriage. His grandniece, a Dutch diplomat, is married to a Palestinian economist, Ismail Ziadah, who lost three brothers, a sister-in-law, a nephew and his father’s first wife in the attack.
On Thursday, Mr. Zanoli, 91, whose father died in a Nazi camp, went to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague and returned a medal he received honoring him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations — non-Jews honored by Israel for saving Jews during the Holocaust. In an anguished letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, he described the terrible price his family had paid for opposing Nazi tyranny.
“My sister lost her husband, who was executed in the dunes of The Hague for his involvement in the resistance,” he wrote. “My brother lost his Jewish fiancée who was deported, never to return.”
Mr. Zanoli continued, “Against this background, it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel.” [Continue reading…]
U.S. ‘told Syria rebels’ to seek intervention
Al Jazeera reports: US officials have asked the Syrian opposition to call on the international community to hit positions belonging to the Islamic State group and help rebels eliminate the self-declared jihadists, Al Jazeera has learned from sources inside the opposition.
The Syrian National Coalition, the main political opposition bloc, and the leadership of the Free Syrian Army, a loose conglomeration of armed rebel, are expected to make the appeal from Turkey on Saturday, the sources said. [Continue reading…]
Syrian Coalition Calls for Targeted Airstrikes in Syria and a Comprehensive Approach to Defeating ISIS http://t.co/SfjTVANd8h
— Syrian Coalition (@SyrCoalition) August 15, 2014
Iraqi Sunnis say could join new government, fight ISIS
Reuters reports: Tribal leaders and clerics from Iraq’s Sunni heartland offered their conditional backing on Friday for a new government that hopes to contain sectarian bloodshed and an offensive by Islamic State militants that threatens to tear the country apart.
One of the most influential tribal leaders said he was willing to work with Shi’ite prime minister-designate Haider al-Abadi provided a new administration respected the rights of the Sunni Muslim minority that dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
Ali Hatem Suleiman left open a possibility that Sunnis would take up arms against the Islamic State fighters in the same way as he and others joined U.S. and Shi’ite-led government forces to thwart an al Qaeda insurgency in Iraq between 2006 and 2009.
The Washington Post reports: Extremist fighters have killed more than 80 men and detained hundreds of women in a Yazidi village, Yazidis and Kurdish officials said Saturday, offering a reminder that the ancient minority sect is still at risk despite President Obama’s conclusion that the threat had passed for those stranded on Mount Sinjar.
Islamic State militants drove into the village of Kocho, about 15 miles southwest of the town of Sinjar, on Friday, following a week-long siege in which the al-Qaeda inspired group demanded that residents convert to Islam or face death, said the reports, which could not be independently verified.
The men were rounded up and executed, while the women were taken to an undisclosed location, according to Ziad Sinjar, a pesh merga commander based on the edge of Mount Sinjar, citing the accounts of villagers nearby. Six men were injured but survived, and managed to escape to a nearby village where they are being sheltered by sympathetic local Sunni Iraqis, he said. One of them told him that 84 Yazidi men were lined up and shot and that more than 300 women were taken away.
On the road with Syrian refugees walking to Europe
Newsweek reports: In a grim government compound 40 km from Vienna, five young Syrian men are huddled together examining the screen of a battered mobile phone. Beside them is a rickety plastic chair with a glass of sweet, amber-coloured tea perched on top, a vestige of Arab domesticity. This day is like any other: the young men pore over family photographs and talk incessantly of home as they wait for the residence permits that will allow them to start their lives here in Austria.
“Internet and talk,” says one of them, gesturing around the bare dormitory. “There is nothing else.” This compound could be anywhere; as it happens, it borders a quiet village with manicured gardens, picket fences and residents who keep to themselves – a far cry from the war-ravaged Syrian towns these men have abandoned. For the past few weeks, the village of Muthmannsdorf has been a place of surreal limbo, where they wait for the life of freedom they believe Europe holds. It has been hard won.
Murat is an ethnic Turkmen from Damascus, a 28-year-old with striking green eyes and prematurely white-flecked hair. The photo everyone is admiring is of his daughter, three-year-old Aya. Murat fled from Syria with his parents, wife and daughter in August 2012, when Bashar al-Assad’s army started dropping barrel bombs around their home in the southern suburbs of Damascus. Murat knew that even if they survived, he would be forced to join the army and might never see his family again. They drove to Tripoli in Lebanon, where they boarded a boat to the port of Mersin on the southeastern coast of Turkey, and then travelled on to Istanbul. There, with no official refugee status, no passport and no right to work, Murat left his pregnant wife and child in the care of his elder brother and set out for the more promising cities of Europe. Crossing to Greece one night in a rubber dinghy, he began a seven month odyssey during which he entrusted himself to a mafia of people smugglers, risked clandestine border crossings and Balkan police patrols and now, finally, confronts the stony face of Austrian bureaucracy. After weeks on the road, it’s time to wait.
Around 2.8 million Syrians have fled their homeland since conflict broke out in their country three years ago, and, while most are living in camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, those who can afford the journey are headed to Europe. I am in Austria to meet Murat and his friends, who made their way here overland from Greece, having traced their route, with the luxury of an EU passport, from the Turkish-Syrian border to Istanbul, then Athens and finally Vienna. At every stop I have encountered young Syrian men armed with their families’ savings and a few contacts in their mobile phones, relatively undaunted by the dangers of capsizing boats, impenetrable asylum procedures and the lack of any common language with the officials and smugglers who control their fate. Many of these men left Syria to avoid joining either the Islamic State rebels or Assad’s army, escaping without the passports that they could only claim by alerting the authorities to their presence – and subsequent absence. Many of them have left families behind. “The journey is too difficult for women and children,” says Khaled, a small, hoarse man in his late thirties. “We barely made it ourselves.” [Continue reading…]
Humanity at the crossroads: Sheldon Solomon on the work of Ernest Becker
The war photo no one would publish
Torie Rose DeGhett writes: The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes.
On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. At one point, before he died this dramatic mid-retreat death, the soldier had had a name. He’d fought in Saddam Hussein’s army and had a rank and an assignment and a unit. He might have been devoted to the dictator who sent him to occupy Kuwait and fight the Americans. Or he might have been an unlucky young man with no prospects, recruited off the streets of Baghdad.
Jarecke took the picture just before a ceasefire officially ended Operation Desert Storm — the U.S.-led military action that drove Saddam Hussein and his troops out of Kuwait, which they had annexed and occupied the previous August. The image and its anonymous subject might have come to symbolize the Gulf War. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices.
It’s hard to calculate the consequences of a photograph’s absence. But sanitized images of warfare, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf argues, make it “easier … to accept bloodless language” such as 1991 references to “surgical strikes” or modern-day terminology like “kinetic warfare.” The Vietnam War, in contrast, was notable for its catalog of chilling and iconic war photography. Some images, like Ron Haeberle’s pictures of the My Lai massacre, were initially kept from the public, but other violent images — Nick Ut’s scene of child napalm victims and Eddie Adams’s photo of a Vietcong man’s execution — won Pulitzer Prizes and had a tremendous impact on the outcome of the war. [Continue reading…]
